It may be accepted as an axiom that the strong are always audacious, and so when we hear of any man in literature who is shocking and rumpling all the susceptibilities of nice, quiet, drowsy people we may be sure that his capital crime is independence of thought and opinion. He is looking at life for himself, instead of through the refracted lenses of old class habit or antiquated religious dogma. And it is a thousand to one he has the criminal audacity to be young; for the vision of youth is clearer and more sure, and more pitying than the old green or crimson goggles of selfish age, that would paint the world as popes and kings and classes and governments, with rewards and honors to give, would have it. All men whose life and work make for the uplifting of human conditions and thought are set in the way of truth before reaching thirty. If a man is timorous before thirty, he will be an unmitigable coward, perhaps knave, for the rest of his days. And today the only profession which demands any active spirit of heroism is the calling of literature, that has become the Deus ex machina of all modern civilized life.
Every truly ambitious writer, or for that matter, every manly writer, be he a genius or a mediocrity, has certain large ideal aims to serve in all his literature. It is not enough for a manly man to simply evoke applause. A nude nymph from the gutter of Paris dancing a can-can on a cafe table, also lives by popular suffrage, and wins such popular approbation as is never given to literature—the incoherent cries in which the whole body emits its tingling void of aching, sensuous delight, the deep, whole-hearted greed of the flaming instincts and soul of the race.
There are a thousand arts and tricks that gain applause and good pay, and have the world’s countenance (and ours, for we are not such rigid moralists as to try to upset nature); but it is the business of the artist to gain respect, not for himself as an individual, for in that capacity we can allow much to temptation, but for his precious art, which is the voice of all the dumb ones of our kind. Surely, if there is any thing that Almighty God could forbear in tenderness to destroy, of all man’s sad attempts to win a home in this inhospitable world, it is the written pages that hold the highest aspirations of the human soul—some pages that we, in our overweening pride in the glory of our fellows, think hold a beauty and breadth that must partake of Divinity itself. But the wind of deathless Time is rushing even now, and we know that nothing can escape its touch.
It is the final business of literature to quicken the spirit of humanity and stir those noblest impulses that make us despise the mere grovelling life of those who have not learned the irony of things. We hide ourselves like guilty creatures among our dusty, dusty possessions, afraid to waste time for living and thought, and so the days and nights that should be ours pass and we enjoy them not. Only a few poets possess the days and nights, and even they know the sweetness of life mostly in sorrow.
All literature is trivial that lacks this large relevance to human life, and so, in looking over the bulk of contemporary American literature, it is to be feared that neither charity nor policy can make it out to be very important. It is destitute of any of the spirit of genius, and it is for the most part merely a travesty of the small talk of the surface life of so-called “good society.” It nowhere touches upon the reality of human passion, existent under every mask of custom and artificial seeming of refinement, and its inspiration is evident in every hasty line—money and advertising.
To be quite candid, could any other country boast such an utterly mediocre, uninspired group of literary artisans as is represented by the Scratchback Club of New York, which in its membership really furnishes all that passes for contemporary “American” literature in our periodicals? They show the intellectual and imaginative poverty of a people merely pushing and ingenious. They reveal the shallowness of the prevailing idea that mere education furnishes those deep forces of personality which have made all true literature, and all true cultivation, with or without education. There is none of the audacity of real spontaneous thought in these men and women’s work; it is all written to order, as mechanically as an auctioneer’s catalogue.
But it is well to have a definite aim in literature, and the pens concerned in the production of the Fly Leaf are at least inspired by a sense of the fluidity of this excellent medium of prose, and though they may fail in the haste of periodical writing to achieve the perfect ends of art, at least they will not wantonly strive to debase the public judgment and taste by pandering to the narrow minds of ignorant prudes, after the fashion of the popular periodical literature of the day.