In a doctor's office in Canada, I saw the picture of a bull-dog standing large against the background of the accepted flag, and beneath was this line:
"What we have, we'll hold."
I found that the picture had a national popularity. Yet a child stopping to think would have seen breakers ahead for a nation so lost in material things, as thus to challenge the Fates.... There is a fairy-tale of a man building a great boat for the air. It looked to win, and in the effrontery of achievement, he set forth to conquer God. Just then a hornet stung him.
It is a conviction held here that the darkest period of American materialism came to its end with the beginning of the war. The generation of literary producers in manifestation at that time was responsible for the bleakest products which America will ever have the shame of showing to future generations.
It was not so devoid of genius as would appear; the first cause was the difficulty in getting the best work "through." This again was not because the public was not ready for the good, but because the public taste was brutalised by men who stood between the public and the producers. These middlemen insisted, by the right of more direct contact, that the public should have what they fancied the public desire to be.
I sat in Union Square recently with a beggar who studied me, because it appeared to be my whim to help him with a coin. Back of his temples was a great story—sumptuous drama and throbbing with the first importance of life. He did not tell me that story, and I could not draw it from him. Rather he told me the story that he fancied I would want. There was a whine in it. He chose to act, and he was not a good actor. His offering hurt, not because he was filthy and a failure, but because he lied to himself and to me, because he did not dare to be himself, though the facts were upon him, eye and brow and mouth. So I did not get his story, but I got a thrilling picture of the recent generation in American letters—I, being the public; the truth of his story representing the producer, and the miserable thing he fancied I was ready for, being the middleman's part.
All workmen of the last generation—all who would listen—were taught to bring forth their products with an intervening lie between the truth and their expression—the age of advertising heavy in all production.
I recall from those days what was to me a significant talk with an American novelist who wanted sales, who was willing to sacrifice all but the core of his character to get sales, and who found himself at that time in a challenging situation. As he expressed it:
"Along about page two hundred in the copy of the novel I am on, the woman's soul wakes up."