It is hardly necessary to dwell upon the literary labours of William Jennings Bryan, ex-Secretary of State, except to wonder that they did not alone suffice to disqualify him for such an office. They belong to the same category as those volumes of popular American philosophy whose titles are: “Character the Grandest Thing in the World,” “Cheerfulness as a Life Power,” and “The Miracle of Right Thought.” If those quoted are to be laid to the charge of Mr. Orison Swett Marden, every department of American life contains prominent men who might say: There, but for the grace of God, speak I. The sanctimonious breath of the uplifter tarnishes the currency of ideas in almost every circle of society. Irrespective of party, Republicans, Democrats, and Socialists help to build up this monument of platitude which may one day mark the resting place of the American brain. Books, reviews, magazines, and newspapers are largely conceived in the evangelical spirit. The average contributor, when not a foreigner, suggests a Sunday-school superintendent who has (perhaps) missed his vocation. Where the subject excludes the pedantry of the professors, the tone is intensely moral, and the more it is so the surer one may be that the writer is a colonel, a rear-admiral, or a civil officer of the State or Federal government. Imagination refuses to conceive these functionaries as fulfilling their duties efficiently in any service, other than that of the Salvation Army or a revivalist campaign.
The stage of culture which these phenomena presuppose cannot but be hostile to artistic development in such as escape contamination. It has already been postulated that the just claims of ethics and æsthetics are hopelessly confounded in America, to the evident detriment of art in all its branches. To the poor quality of the current political and social philosophy corresponds an equally mediocre body of literary criticism. A recent historian of American literature accords a high place amongst contemporary critics, to the author of “Shelburne Essays,” and other works. These volumes are dignified as “our nearest approach to those ‘Causeries du Lundi’ of an earlier age,” and may well be taken as representative. Typical of the cold inhumanity which a certain type of “cultured person” deems essential is the circumstance related, by Mr. Paul Elmer More himself, in explanation of the genesis of these essays. “In a secluded spot,” he writes, “in the peaceful valley of the Androscoggin I took upon myself to live two years as a hermit,” and “Shelburne Essays” was the fruit of his solitary mediations. The historian is mightily impressed by this evidence of superiority. “In another and far more unusual way he qualified himself for his high office of critic,” says Professor Pattee, “he immured himself for two years in solitude.”... “The period gave him time to read leisurely, thoughtfully, with no nervous subconsciousness that the product of that reading was to be marketable.”
What a revelation of combined timidity and intellectual snobbishness there is in this attitude so fatuously endorsed by a writer for the schools! We can imagine what the effect of such a pose must be upon the minds of the students whom the professor would constrain to respect. Only a young prig could pretend to be favourably impressed by this pseudo-Thoreau in the literary backwoods. The impulse of most healthy young men would be to turn in contempt from an art so unnatural as this conception of criticism implies. How are they to know that the Taines, Sainte-Beuves, Brunetières, and Arnolds of the world are not produced by expedients so primitive as to suggest the mise en scène of some latter-day Messiah, a Dowie, or a Mrs. Baker Eddy? The heralds of new theologies may find the paraphernalia of asceticism and aloofness a useful part of their stock in trade—neither is associated with the great criticism of literature. The causeries of Sainte-Beuve were not written in an ivory tower, yet they show no traces of that “nervous subconsciousness” which our professor finds inseparable from reading that is “marketable.”
The suspicion of insincerity in this craving for the wilderness will be strengthened by reference to the first of Mr. More’s volumes. Whatever may have been the case of its successors, this work was certainly the product of his retirement. What, then, are the subjects of such a delicate nature that they could not be discussed within the sound of “the noisy jargon of the market-place”? Of the eleven essays, only four deal with writers whose proximity to the critic’s own age might justify a retreat, in order that they be judged impartially, and without reference to popular enthusiasm and the prevalent fashion of the moment. The seven most substantial studies in the book are devoted to flogging horses so dead that no fear of their kicking existed. “A Hermit’s Notes on Thoreau,” “The Solitude of Nathaniel Hawthorne,” “The Origins of Hawthorne and Poe,” “The Influence of Emerson,” “The Spirit of Carlyle”—these are a few of the startling topics which Mr. More could discuss only with fasting and prayer! Any European schoolmaster could have written these essays in the leisure moments of his Sunday afternoons or Easter vacation.
No more remarkable profundity or originality will be found in the critic’s essays in contemporary literature. His strictures upon Lady Gregory’s versions of the Irish epic, and his comments upon the Celtic Renaissance in general are the commonplaces of all hostile English criticism. “The shimmering hues of decadence rather than the strong colours of life” is the phrase in which he attempts to estimate the poetry of the Literary Revival in Ireland. In fact, for all his isolation Mr. More was obsessed by the critical cant of the hour, as witness his readiness to apply the term “decadent” to all and sundry. The work of Arthur Symons is illuminated by this appellation, as is also that of W. B. Yeats. The jargon of the literary market-place, to vary Mr. More’s own cliché, is all that he seems to have found in that “peaceful valley of the Androscoggin.” Even poor Tolstoy is branded as “a decadent with the humanitarian superimposed,” an application of the word which renders its previous employment meaningless. As a crowning example of incomprehension may be cited Mr. More’s opinion that the English poet, Lionel Johnson, is “the one great ... and genuinely significant poet of the present Gaelic movement.” In the circumstances, it is not surprising that he should pronounce Irishmen incapable of exploiting adequately the themes of Celtic literature. For this task he considers the Saxon genius more qualified.
With these examples before us it is unnecessary to examine the remaining volumes of “Shelburne Essays.” Having started with a distorted conception of the critical office, the author naturally contributed nothing helpful to the literature of American criticism. His laborious platitudes do not help us to a better appreciation of the dead, his dogmatic hostility nullifies his judgments upon the living. Not once has he a word of discerning censure or encouragement for any rising talent. Like most of his colleagues, Mr. More prefers to exercise his faculties at the expense of reputations already established, save when he condescends to repeat the commonplaces of complaint against certain of the better known modern writers. He is so busy with Mrs. Gaskell, Charles Lamb, Milton, Plato, and Dickens that he can find time to mention only some fifteen Americans, not one of them living.
Such is the critic whom Professor Pattee salutes as “consistent” and “courageous,” having “standards of criticism” which make him comparable to Sainte-Beuve. As editor of “the leading critical review of America,” we are assured that Mr. More had “a dominating clientèle and a leader’s authority.” Alas! There can be no doubt as to this, though it is very doubtful if the fact can be regarded as “one of the most promising signs for that new literary era which already is overdue.” That era will long continue overdue while criticism remains absorbed in the past, aloof from life and implacably hostile to every manifestation of originality. If the new literary generation were merely ignored its lot would be comparatively happy. But the mandarins come down periodically from their Olympic communings with George Eliot and Socrates, to fill the reviews with verbose denunciations of whatever is being written independently of their idols. The oracles having spoken, the newcomers are left with an additional obstacle in the way of their reaching the indifferent ear of the crowd. The crowd wallows in each season’s literary novelties, satisfied that whatever is well advertised is good. Rather than face the subjects endorsed by the frigid enthusiasm of Mr. Paul Elmer More or Stuart Sherman, Mr. W. C. Brownell and Professor Brander Matthews, it takes refuge in fields where the writ of pedantry does not run. Meanwhile, the task of welcoming new talent is left to amiable journalists, whose casual recommendations, usually without any background of critical experience, are accepted as the judgments of competent experts. The “colyumist” has to perform the true function of the critic.
Although anæmia is the dominant characteristic of intellectual life in the United States, the reaction against that condition is none the less worthy of notice. When we remember that the fervour of righteousness is the very breath of current philosophy, we are also reminded that crudeness, sensationalism, and novelty are commonly held by Europeans to be the quintessence of America. It might be replied, in answer to this objection, that Hearst newspapers, and the vaudeville theology of Billy Sunday, are the only alternatives to the prim conventionality of authoritative journalism, and the sanctimoniousness of popular leaders. The man in the street obtains the illusion of strenuous cerebral activity when he contrasts the homely qualities of those prophets of democracy with the spinster-like propriety and beatific purity of prominent publicists and statesmen. He likes to hear his master’s voice, it is true, but he likes even more to hear his own, especially where his personal interests are at issue. The æsthetic obiter dicta of the professors, like the language of diplomacy, are concerned with questions sufficiently remote to make sonority an acceptable substitute for thought.
In the realm of ideas, nevertheless, there is a more or less articulate expression of reaction, mainly concentrated in the larger cities of the East. There the professional supermen and their female counterparts have come together by tacit agreement, and have attempted to shake off the incubus of respectability. The extremists impress one as being overpowered by a sense of their own sinful identity. In a wild burst of hysterical revolt they are plunged into a debauch of ideas from which they are emerging in a very shaken and parlous condition. For the most part their adventures, mental and otherwise, have been in the domain of sex, with a resultant flooding of the “radical” market by varied tomes upon the subject. What the bookstores naïvely catalogue as the literature of advanced thought is a truly wonderful salade russe, in which Krafft-Ebbing and Forel compete with Freud and Eugene Debs. Karl Marx, and Signora Montessori, Professor Scott Nearing, and Havelock Ellis engage the same attention as the neo-Malthusian pamphleteers, and the young ladies whose novels tell of what Flaubert called “les souillures du mariage et les platitudes de l’adultère.”
The natural morbidity of the Puritan mind is exasperated in advanced circles, whose interest is nothing if not catholic. Let Brieux discourse of venereal disease, or Strindberg expound his tragedies of prurience, their success is assured amongst those who would believe them geniuses, rather than risk the ignominy of agreement with the champions of orthodoxy. So long as our European pornographers are serious and inartistic, they need have no fear of America. Unbalanced by prolonged contemplation of the tedious virtues of New England, a generation has arisen whose great illusion is that the transvaluation of all values may be effected by promiscuity. Lest they should ever incur the suspicion of conservatism the emancipated have a permanent welcome for everything that is strange or new. The blush on the cheek of the vice-crusader is their criterion of excellence.