History has its curious ironies, and this would be one—if it should turn out that Howells, in refusing to be quoted in “The Cry for Justice,” had lost his best chance of being read in the future. And lest this remark be taken for megalomania, let me add that I am not the author of the anthology, merely its editor, and others could have done the job as well, perhaps better. The point is that this is the kind of literature which the future will read. The whirlwinds of social revolution are gathering to sweep the world; and when they have passed, there will be a new generation of clear-eyed young workers, who will look upon the fiction-characters of William Dean Howells with puzzled dismay. Characters so mild and gentle, so tolerant in the presence of intolerable wrong! Characters so very respectable in the getting and spending of their incomes, so anxious in their conformity to pecuniary conventions! The young workers will not be able to imagine themselves in the place of such characters; but will study them as one studies relics in a museum, or queer-shaped insects under a microscope.
CHAPTER CII
THE EMINENT TANKARD-MAN
Through the latter part of the nineteenth century there existed in the United States a peculiar literary phenomenon, the underground reputation of Ambrose Bierce. The fiction reading public did not know this man; the readers of “yellow” journalism knew him as a Hearst writer, even more brilliant and cynical than the average. But now and then you would come upon an expert in the literary craft, who would tell you that Ambrose Bierce was a short-story writer and satirist without equal in America, the greatest genius our literature had produced. You would set out to look for these obscure writings, and could not find them in the libraries or the book-stores. At last you might get someone to lend you a copy, and then you would join the campaign of whispering.
Now Bierce is coming into his own. The public is hearing about him. He is of especial interest to us here, because he spent his energy in attacking, with the utmost possible fury, the thesis of this book; while at the same time, both in his life and his writings, he vindicated that thesis to the last syllable.
Ambrose Bierce was bom in 1842, the son of a poor farmer in Ohio. At the age of nineteen he enlisted and fought through the Civil war, being twice wounded and brevetted major. Then he became a journalist, first in San Francisco, then in London, finally in Washington and New York.
He was one of the most ethical men that ever lived, a born preacher, as vehement and persistent as Carlyle. He fought for his beliefs, and shrank from no sacrifice in their behalf. He was no man’s man, but said what he thought, no matter how bitter and fierce it might be. He paid the penalty in a host of enemies and a lifetime of struggle.
That such a man should have taken up with art-for-art’s-sake theories is assuredly a quaint incongruity in the history of literature. But so it happened. He looked out upon America, and saw the grafters thriving, he saw corruption enthroned as a political system, and he gave up the human race in despair: “a world of fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions—frothing mad.” These phrases occur in an article, “To Train a Writer”; and you can see what sort of writer it would train! A writer who renounces solidarity, and seeks refuge in his own talent, the one place where a man is master, where he can make beauty, order and dignity. So let us live in the world of art, let us consecrate ourselves to its service, and waste no love upon “the irreclaimable mass of brutality that we know as ‘mankind.’”
This conviction Bierce holds in the fashion of a religious zealot. He has reached the stage of knowing that the rest of the world doubts his faith; therefore he asserts it the more vehemently, and flies into a rage with all who question it. His letters have been published; and in the first one, addressed to a young girl who aspires to write, he storms at the viciousness of those who would use the writer’s craft in the service of human progress. “Such ends are a prostitution of art.” And later on in the letters this champion of the art-for-art’s-sake theory reveals the terror that gnaws at his soul. “If poets saw things as they are they would write no more poetry.”
Some twenty years ago Jack London sent me the first book of a San Francisco poet, and in an inscription he described the author: “I have a friend, the dearest in this world.” The book was “The Testimony of the Suns,” by George Sterling; and friendship being an unlimited thing, I also took over a share of it. For twenty years I have been puzzled at finding in this gracious companion and maker of exquisite verses certain qualities of bitterness and aching despair. When I read these letters of Ambrose Bierce I discovered a plausible explanation; for here is the young poet, submitting his first efforts; and here is the savage misanthropist using his power as a preacher and an elder, in an effort to set the poet’s feet in the paths of futility and waste.
Ambrose Bierce, among his host of antagonisms, had one which amounted to an insanity—his dislike of Socialists; and he saw both London and Sterling lending their influence to the hellish cult. Bierce was one of those subtle opponents who say that they have a certain amount of sympathy with the Socialist ideal, were it not for the fact that the partisans of the cause make themselves so objectionable. Yes; they would truly be willing to see mankind delivered from poverty, crime, prostitution and war, were it not for creatures of the lunatic fringe, who wear their hair long and tie their neck-ties into a bow!