Mr. Galsworthy adds: “And I did seem to notice in America that there was a good deal of space and not much time; and that without too much danger of becoming ‘Yogis,’ people might perhaps sit down a little longer in front of things than they seemed to do.”
What native observer of American writing will not welcome the justice of this comment? Surely the contemporary American poems, novels, tales, and critiques which express an individual and attentively-considered impression of any subject from our own life here are few: and these not, it would appear, greatly in vogue. Why? Everyone will have his own answer.
In replying to the first part of the question—why closely-considered individual impressions of our life are few—I think it should be said that the habit of respect for close attention of any kind is not among the American virtues. The visitor of our political conventions, the reader of our “literary criticism” must have noted a prevailing, shuffling, and perfunctory mood of casual disregard for the matter in hand. Many American people are indeed reared to suppose that if they appear to bestow an interested attention on the matter before them, some misunderstanding will ensue as to their own social importance. Nearly everyone must have noted with a sinking of the heart this attitude towards the public among library attendants, hotel-clerks, and plumbers. This abstraction is not, however, confined to the pursuers of any occupation, but to some degree affects us all. In the consciousness of our nation there appears to exist a mysterious though deep-seated awe for the prestige of the casual and the off-hand.
Especially we think it an unworthiness in an author that he should, as the phrase is, “take himself seriously.” We consider the attitude we have described as characterizing library attendants and hotel-clerks as the only correct one for writers—the attitude of a person doing something as it were unconsciously, a matter he pooh-poohs and scarcely cares to expend his energy and time upon in the grand course of his personal existence. You may hear plenty of American authors talk of “not taking themselves seriously” who, if they spoke with accuracy, should say that they regarded themselves as too important and precious to exhaust themselves by doing their work with conscience.
This dull self-importance insidiously saps in our country the respect for thoroughness and application characteristic of Germany; insidiously blunts in American penetrative powers the English faculty of being “keen” on a subject, recently presented to us with such grace in the young hero’s eager pursuits in Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street; and disparages lightly but often completely the growth of the fresh and varied spirit of production described in the passage of de Maupassant to which Mr. Galsworthy refers. This passage expresses the clear fire of attention our American habits lack, with a sympathy it is a pleasure to quote here in its entirety. De Maupassant says in the preface of Pierre et Jean:
For seven years I wrote verses, I wrote stories, I wrote novels. I even wrote a detestable play. Of these nothing survives. The master (Flaubert) read them all, and on the following Sunday at luncheon he would give me his criticism, and inculcate little by little two or three principles that sum up his long and patient lesson. “If one has any originality, the first thing requisite is to bring it out: if one has none, the first thing to be done is to acquire it.”
Talent is long patience. Everything which one desires to express must be considered with sufficient attention and during a sufficiently long time to discover in it some aspect which no one has yet seen or described. In everything there is still some spot unexplored, because we are accustomed to look at things only with the recollection of what others before us have thought of the subject we are contemplating. The smallest object contains something unknown. Let us find it. In order to describe a fire that flames and a tree on the plain, we must keep looking at that flame and that tree until to our eyes they no longer resemble any other tree, or any other fire.
This is the way to become original.
Having besides laid down this truth that there are not in the whole world two grains of sand, two specks, two hands, or two noses alike, Flaubert compelled me to describe in a few phrases a being or an object in such a manner as to clearly particularize it, and distinguish it from all the other beings or all the other objects of the same race, or the same species. “When you pass,” he would say, “a grocer seated at his shop door, a janitor smoking his pipe, a stand of hackney coaches, show me that grocer and that janitor, their attitude, their whole physical appearance, including also by a skilful description their whole moral nature so that I cannot confound them with any other grocer or any other janitor: make me see, in one word, that a certain cab-horse does not resemble the fifty others that follow or precede it.”
One underlying reason why American writers so seldom pursue such studies and methods as these is the prevailing disesteem for clearly-focussed attention we have described. Another reason is that the American writer of fiction who loves the pursuit of precise expression will indubitably have to face a number of difficulties which may perhaps not be readily apparent to the writers of other countries.