Naturally enough, in his more newly-settled, or rather his settling, nation, made up of many nationalities, the American writer who desires to “particularize” a subject from his country’s contemporary history, and “to distinguish this from all the other beings and all the other objects of the same race,” will have many more heretofore unexpressed conditions and basic circumstances to evoke in his reader’s mind than the German or French or English writer must summon.
For instance, the young French writer of de Maupassant’s narrative who was to call up out of the deep of European life the individuality of one single French grocer, would himself have and would address an audience who had—whether for better or worse (to my way of thinking, as it chances, for worse)—a fairly fixed social conception of the class of this retail merchant. The American writer who knows very well that General Grant once kept an unsuccessful shoe store, and that some of the most distinguished paintings the country possesses have been selected by the admirably-educated taste and knowledge of one or two public-spirited retail dry-goods merchants; and who also has seen gaunt and poverty-stricken Russian store-keepers standing among stalls of rotten strawberries in Jefferson Street market, in Chicago—that writer will neither speak from nor address this definite social conception according to mere character of occupation which I have indicated as a part of the French author’s means of exactitude in expression.
Nothing in our own random civilization, as it seems to me, is quite so fixed as that French grocer seated in his doorway, that de Maupassant and Flaubert mention with such charm. Nothing here is so neat as that. To convey social truth, the American writer interested in giving his own impression of a grocer in America, whether rich or poor or moderately prospering, will have to individualize him and all his surrounding condition more, and to classify him and all his surrounding condition less, than de Maupassant does, to convey the social truth his own inimitable sketches impart.
Again, ours is a very changing population. Its movement of life through one of our cities is attended with various and choppy and many-toned sounds communicating a varied rhythm of its own. To return to our figure of the retail tradesman—if this tradesman be in Chicago, for instance, he may neither be expressed clearly by typical classifications, nor shown without a genuine error in historical perspective against a static street background and trade life. This background must have change and motion, unless the writer is to copy into his own picture some foreign author’s rendition of a totally different place and state of human existence. The tune of the story’s text, too, should repeat for the reader’s inward ear the special experience of truth the author has perceived, the special ragged sound and rhythm of the motion of life he has heard telling the tale of that special place.
May one add what is only too obvious, and said because I think it may serve to explain in some degree why individual impressions of American life are not greatly encouraged in this country? It will be quite plain that such a limpid, clear-spaced, reverent style and stilled background as speaks in one of Mr. Galsworthy’s stories the tragedy of a London shoe-maker’s commercial ruin, would be false to all these values. It will be quite plain that such a bright, hard, definite manner as that which states with perfection the life of the circles of the petty government-official and his wife in The Necklace would be powerless to convey some of the elements we have selected as characterizing the American subject we have tried to suggest.
But many American reviewers and professional readers and publishers, who suppose themselves to be devoted to “realism” and to writing of “radical” tendency, believe not at all that the realistic writer should adopt de Maupassant’s method and incarnate for us his own American vision of the life he sees here, but simply that he should imitate the manner of de Maupassant. Many such American reviewers and professional readers and publishers believe not at all that the radical writer should find and represent for us some unseen branching root of certain American social phenomena which he himself has detected, but simply that he should copy some excellent drawing of English roots by Mr. Galsworthy, or of Russian roots by Gorky.
The craze for imitation in American writing is almost unbelievably pervasive. The author here, who is devoted to the attempt to speak his own truth—and the more devoted he is the more reverently, I believe, will he regard all other authors’ truth as theirs and derived exactly from their own point of view—will find opposed to him not only the great body of conventional romanticists and conservatives who will think he ought to stereotype and conventionalize his work into a poor, dulled contemporary imitation of the delightful narratives of Sir Walter Scott. He will also find opposed to him the great body of conventional “realists” and “radicals” who will think he ought to stereotype and conventionalize his work into a poor, blurred imitation of the keen narratives of Mr. H. G. Wells.
Sometimes these counsellors, not content with commending a copied manner, seriously urge—one might think at the risk of advising plagiarism—that the American author simply transplant the social ideas of some admirable foreign artist to one of our own local scenes. Thus, a year or two ago, in one of our critical journals, I saw the writer of a novel about Indiana state politicians severely blamed for not making the same observations on the subject that Mr. Wells had made about English national parliamentary life in The New Machiavelli. Not long since another American reviewer of “radical” tendency harshly censured the author of a novel about American under-graduate life in a New York college, because the daughter of the college president uttered views of sex and marriage unlike those expressed in Ann Veronica.
This sort of criticism—equally unflattering and obtuse, it appears to me, in its perception of the special characterizations of Mr. Wells’s thoughtful pages, and in its counsel to the artist depicting an alien topic to insert extraneous and unrelated views in his landscape—proceeds from a certain strange and ridiculous conception of truth peculiar to many persons engaged in the great fields of our literary criticism and of our publishing and political activities.
This is a conception of truth not at all as something capable of irradiating any scene on the globe, like light; but as some very definite and limited force, driving a band-wagon. People who possess this conception of truth seem to argue very reasonably that if Mr. Wells is “in” it, so to speak, with truth, and is saying “the thing” to say about sex or about the liberal party, then the intelligent author anywhere who desires to be “in” it with truth will surely get into this band-wagon of Mr. Wells’s and stand on the very planks he has placed in the platform of its particular wagonbed. It is an ironical, if tragic, comment on the intelligence of American reading that the driver I have chanced to see most frequently urged for authors here should be Mr. H. G. Wells, who has done probably more than any other living writer of English to encourage varied specialistic and non-partisan expression.