LITERATURE
IN THE MAKING

BY

SOME OF ITS MAKERS

PRESENTED BY

JOYCE KILMER

HARPER & BROTHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

Literature in the Making

Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published April, 1917

TO

LOUIS BEVIER, PH.D., LITT.D.

AND

LOUIS BEVIER, JR.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

This book is an effort to bridge the gulf between literary theory and literary practice. In these days of specialization it is more than ever true that the man who lectures and writes about the craft of writing seldom has the time or the inclination to show, by actual work, that he can apply his principles. On the other hand, the successful novelist, poet, or playwright devotes himself to his craft and seldom attempts to analyze and display the methods by which he obtains his effect, or even to state his opinion on matters intellectual and æsthetic.

Now, the professor of English and the literary critic are valuable members of society, and the development of literature owes much to their counsel and guardianship. But there is a special significance in the opinion which the writer holds concerning his own trade, in the advice which he bases upon his own experience, in the theory of life and art which he has formulated for himself.

Therefore I have spent considerable time in talking with some of the most widely read authors of our day, and in obtaining from them frank and informal statements of their points of view. I have purposely refrained from confining myself to writers of any one school or type of mind—the dean of American letters and the most advanced of our newest poetical anarchists alike are represented in these pages. The authors have talked freely, realizing that this was an opportunity to set forth their views definitely and comprehensively. They have not the time to write or lecture about their art, but they are willing to talk about it.

They knew that through me they spoke, in the first place, to the great army of readers of their books who have a natural and pleasing curiosity concerning the personality of the men and women who devote their lives to providing them with entertainment, and, in some cases, instruction. They knew that through me they spoke, in the second place, to all the literary apprentices of the country, who look eagerly for precept and example to those who have won fame by the delightful labor of writing. They knew that through me they spoke, in the third place, to critics and students of literature of our own generation and, perhaps, of those that shall come after us. How eagerly would we read, for instance, an interview with Francis Bacon on the question of the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, or an interview with Oliver Goldsmith in which he gave his real opinion of Dr. Johnson, Garrick, and Boswell! A century or so from now, some of the writers who in this book talk to the world may be the objects of curiosity as great.

The writers who have talked with me received me with courtesy, gave me freely of their time and thought, and showed a sincere desire for the furtherance of the purpose of this book. To them, accordingly, I tender my gratitude for anything in these pages which the reader may find of interest or of value. Their explanations of their literary creeds and practices were furnished in the first instance for the New York Times, to which I desire to express my acknowledgments.

Joyce Kilmer.

LITERATURE
IN THE MAKING

WAR STOPS LITERATURE

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

War stops literature. This is the belief of a man who for more than a quarter of a century has been in the front rank of the world's novelists, who wrote The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Modern Instance and nearly a hundred other sympathetic interpretations of American life.

Mr. William Dean Howells was the third writer to whom was put the question, "What effect will the Great War have on literature?" And he was the first to give a direct answer.

A famous French dramatist replied: "I am not a prophet. I have enough to do to understand the present and the past; I cannot concern myself with the future." A famous English short-story writer said, "The war has already inspired some splendid poetry; it may also inspire great plays and novels, but, of course, we cannot tell as yet."

But Mr. Howells said, quite simply, "War stops literature." He said it as unemotionally as if he were stating a familiar axiom.

He does not consider it an axiom, however, for he supplied proof.

"I have never believed," he said, "that great events produced great literature. They seldom call forth the great creative powers of man. In poetry it is not the poems of occasion that endure, but the poems that have come into being independently, not as the result of momentous happenings.

"This war does not furnish the poet, the novelist, and the dramatist with the material of literature. For instance, the Germans, as every one will admit, have shown extraordinary valor. But we do not think of celebrating that valor in poetry; it does not thrill the modern writers as such valor thrilled the writers of bygone centuries. When we think of the valor of the Germans, our emotion is not admiration but pity.

"And the reason for this is that fighting is no longer our ideal. Fighting was not a great ideal, and therefore it is no longer our ideal. All that old material of literature—the clashing of swords, the thunder of shot and shell, the great clouds of smoke, the blood and fury—all this has gone out from literature. It is an anachronism."

"But the American Civil War produced literature, did it not?" I asked.

"What great literature did it produce?" asked Mr. Howells in turn. "As I look back over my life and recall to mind the great number of books that the Civil War inspired I find that I am thinking of things that the American people have forgotten. They did not become literature, these poems and stories that came in such quantities and seemed so important in the sixties.

"There were the novels of J. W. De Forest, for instance. They were well written, they were interesting, they described some phases of the Civil War truthfully and vividly. We read them when they were written—but you probably have never heard of them. No one reads them now. They were literature, but that about which they were written has ceased to be of literary interest.

"Of course, the Civil War, because of its peculiar nature, was followed by an expansion, intellectual as well as social and economic. And this expansion undoubtedly had its beneficial effect on literature. But the Civil War itself did not have, could not have, literary expression.

"Of all the writings which the Civil War directly inspired I can think of only one that has endured to be called literature. That is Lowell's 'Commemoration Ode.'

"War stops literature. It is an upheaval of civilization, a return to barbarism; it means death to all the arts. Even the preparation for war stops literature. It stopped it in Germany years ago. A little anecdote is significant.

"I was in Florence about 1883, long after the Franco-Prussian War, and there I met the editor of a great German literary weekly—I will not tell you its name or his. He was a man of refinement and education, and I have not forgotten his great kindness to my own fiction. One day I asked him about the German novelists of the day.

"He said: 'There are no longer any German novelists worthy of the name. Our new ideal has stopped all that. Militarism is our new ideal—the ideal of Duty—and it has killed our imagination. So the German novel is dead.'"

"Why is it, then," I asked, "that Russia, a nation of militaristic ideals, has produced so many great novels during the past century?"

"Russia is not Germany," answered the man who taught Americans to read Turgenieff. "The people of Russia are not militaristic as the people of Germany are militaristic. In Germany war has for a generation been the chief idea of every one. The nation has had a militaristic obsession. And this, naturally, has stifled the imagination.

"But in Russia nothing of the sort has happened. Whatever the designs of the ruling classes may be, the people of Russia keep their simplicity, their large intellectuality and spirituality. And, therefore, their imagination and other great intellectual and spiritual gifts find expression in their great novels and plays.

"I well remember how the Russian novelists impressed me when I was a young man. They opened to me what seemed to be a new world—and it was only the real world. There is Tcheckoff—have you read his Orchard? What life, what color, what beauty of truth are in that book!

"Then there is Turgenieff—how grateful I am for his books! It must be thirty years since I first read him. Thomas Sargent Perry, of Boston, a man of the greatest culture, was almost the first American to read Turgenieff. Stedman read Turgenieff in those days, too. Soon all of the younger writers were reading him.

"I remember very well a dinner at Whitelaw Reid's house in Lexington Avenue, when some of us young men were enthusiastic over the Russian novel, and the author we mentioned most frequently was Turgenieff.

"Dr. J. G. Holland, the poet who edited The Century, lived across the street from Mr. Reid, and during the evening he came over and joined us. He listened to us for a long time in silence, hardly speaking a word. When he rose to go, he said: 'I have been listening to the conversation of these young men for over an hour. They have been talking about books. And I have never before heard the names of any of the authors they have mentioned.'"

"Were those the days," I asked, "in which you first read Tolstoy?"

"That was long before the time," answered Mr. Howells. "Tolstoy afterward meant everything to me—his philosophy as well as his art—far more than Turgenieff. Tolstoy did not love all his writing. He loved the thing that he wrote about, the thing that he lived and taught—equality. And equality is the best thing in the world. It is the thing for which the Best of Men lived and died.

"I never met Tolstoy," said Mr. Howells. "But I once sent him a message of appreciation after he had sent a message to me. Tolstoy was great in the way he wrote as well as in what he wrote. Tolstoy's force is a moral force. His great art is as simple as nature."

"Do you think that the Russian novelists have influenced your work?" I asked.

"I think," Mr. Howells replied, "that I had determined what I was to do before I read any Russian novels. I first thought that it was necessary to write only about things that I knew had already been written about. Certain things had already been in books; therefore, I thought, they legitimately were literary subjects and I might write about them.

"But soon I knew that this idea was wrong, that I must get my material, not out of books, but out of life. And I also knew that it was not necessary for me to look at life through English spectacles. Most of our writers had been looking at life through English spectacles; they had been closely following in the footsteps of English novelists. I saw that around me were the materials for my work. I saw around me life—wholesome, natural, human.

"I saw a young, free, energetic society. I saw a society in which love—the greatest and most beautiful thing in the world—was innocent; a society in which the relation between man and woman was simple and pure. Here, I thought, are the materials for novels. Why should I go back to the people of bygone ages and of lands not my own?"

"Do you think," I asked, "that romanticism has lost its hold on the novelists?"

Mr. Howells smiled. "When realism," he said, "is once in a novelist's blood he never can degenerate into romanticism. Romanticism is no longer a literary force among English-speaking authors. Romanticism belongs to the days in which war was an aim, an ideal, instead of a tragic accident. It is something foreign to us. And literature must be native to the soil, affected, of course, by the culture of other lands and ages, but essentially of the people of the land and time in which it is produced. Realism is the material of democracy. And no great literature or art can arise outside of the democracy."

Tolstoy was mentioned again, and Mr. Howells was asked if he did not think that the Russian novelist's custom of devoting a part of every day to work that was not literary showed that all writers would be better off if they were obliged to make a living in some other way than by writing. Mr. Howells gave his answer with considerable vigor. His calm, blue eyes lost something of their kindliness, and his lips were compressed into a straight, thin line before he said:

"I certainly do not think so. The artist in letters or in lines should have leisure in which to perform his valuable service to society. The history of literature is full of heartbreaking instances of writers whose productive careers were retarded by their inability to earn a living at their chosen profession. The belief that poverty helps a writer is stupid and wrong. Necessity is not and never has been an incentive. Poverty is not and never has been an incentive. Writers and other creative artists are hindered, not helped, by lack of leisure.

"I remember my own early experiences, and I know that my writing suffered very much because I could not devote all my time to it. I had to spend ten hours in drudgery for every two that I spent on my real work. The fact that authors who have given the world things that it treasures are forced to live in a state of anxiety over their finances is lamentable. This anxiety cannot but have a restrictive influence on literature. It is not want, but the fear of want, that kills."

"Still, in spite of their precarious financial condition, modern authors are doing good work, are they not?" I asked.

"Certainly they are," answered Mr. Howells, "the novelists especially. There is Robert Herrick, for example. His novels are interesting stories, and they also are faithful reflections of American life. Will Harben's work is admirable. It has splendid realism and fine humor. Perhaps one thing that has kept it, so far, from an appreciation so general as it will one day receive, is the fact that it deals, for the most part, with one special locality, a certain part of Georgia.

"And in Spain—what excellent novelists they have there and have had for a long time! The realistic movement reached Spain long before it reached England and the United States. In fact, English-speaking countries were the last to accept it. I have taken great pleasure in the works of Armando Valdés. Then there are Pérez Galdós and Emilia Pardo Bazián, and that priest who wrote a realistic novel about Madrid society. All these novelists are realists, and realists of power.

"Then there are the great Scandinavians. I hope that I may some time attempt to express a little of my gratitude for the pleasure that Björnson's works have given me."

I asked, "What do you think of contemporary poetry?"

"I admired chiefly that of Thomas Hardy," said Mr. Howells. "His poems have force and actuality and music and charm. Masefield I like, with reservations. Three modern poets who give me great pleasure are Thomas Hardy, William Watson, and Charles Hanson Towne. The first one of Mr. Towne's poems that I read was "Manhattan." I have not forgotten the truth of that poetic interpretation of New York. His poems are beautiful and they are full of humanity. In his latest book there is a poem called 'A Ballad of Shame and Dread' that moved me deeply. It is a slight thing, but it is wonderfully powerful. Like all of Towne's poetry, it is warm with human sympathy."

"Do you think," I asked, "that the great social problems of the day, the feminine unrest, for instance, are finding their expression in literature?"

"No," said Mr. Howells, "I cannot call to mind any adequate literary expression of the woman movement. Perhaps this is because the women who know most about it and feel it most strongly are not writers. The best things that have been said about woman suffrage in our time have been said by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She has written the noblest satire since Lowell. What wit she has, and what courage! Once I heard her address a meeting of Single-Taxers. Now, the Single-Taxers are all right so far as they go, but they don't go far enough. The Single-Taxers heckled her, but she had a retort ready for every interruption. She stood there with her brave smile and talked them all down."

"Do you think that Ibsen expressed the modern feminine unrest in The Doll's House?" Mr. Howells was asked.

"Ibsen seldom expressed things," was his reply. "He suggested them, mooted them, but he did not express them. The Doll's House does not express the meaning of unrest, it suggests it. Ibsen told you where you stood, not where to go."

Mr. Howells had recently presided at a meeting which was addressed by M. Brieux, and he expressed great admiration for the work of the French dramatist.

"He is a great dramatist," he said. "He has given faithful reports of life, and faithful reports of life are necessarily criticisms of life. All great novels are criticisms of life. And I think that the poets will concern themselves more and more with the life around them. It is possible that soon we may have an epic in which the poet deals with the events of contemporary life."

Mr. Howells is keenly awake to the effect which the war is having on conditions in New York. And in his sympathy for the society which inevitably must suffer for a war in which it is not directly concerned, the active interest of the novelist was evident. "If all this only could be reflected in a book!" he said. "If some novelist could interpret it!"

THE JOYS OF THE POOR

KATHLEEN NORRIS

Any young woman who desires to become a famous novelist and short-story writer like Kathleen Norris will do well to take the following steps: In the first place, come to New York. In the second place, marry some one like Charles Gilman Norris.

Of course, every one who read Mother and The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne and Saturday's Child knew that the author was a married woman—and also a married woman with plenty of personal experience with babies and stoves and servants and other important domestic items. But not until I visited Kathleen Norris at her very genuine home in Port Washington did I appreciate the part which that domestic item called a husband has played in Kathleen Norris's communications to the world.

I made this discovery after Charles Gilman Norris—accompanied by little Frank, who bears the name of the illustrious novelist who was his uncle—had motored me through Port Washington's pleasant avenues to the Norris house. Before a fire of crackling hickory logs, Kathleen Norris (clad in something very charming, which I will not attempt to describe) was talking about the qualities necessary to a writer's success. And one of these, she said, was a business sense.

Now, Mrs. Norris did not look exactly business-like. Nor is "a business sense" the quality which most readers would immediately hit upon as the characteristic which made the author of Gayley the Troubadour different from the writers of other stories. I ventured to suggest this to Mrs. Norris.

"I don't claim to possess a business sense," she said. "But my husband has a business sense. He has taken charge of selling my stories to the magazines and dealing with publishers and all of that. I do think that literally thousands of writers are hindered from ever reaching the public by the lack of business sense. And I know that my husband has been responsible for getting most of my work published. My stories have appeared since my marriage, you know. I don't need to have a business sense, all I have to do is to write the stories. My husband does all the rest—I don't need even to have any of the author's complacency, or the author's pride!"

Mrs. Norris's fame is only about five years old—about as old as her son. I asked her about her life before she was known as a writer, expecting to hear picturesque tales of literary tribulations among the hills of California. But her description of her journey to success was not the conventional one; her journey was not for years paved with rejection slips and illumined with midnight oil.

"It was New York that did it," she said. "When we first came to New York from California the editor of a magazine with which Mr. Norris was connected gave us a tea. Most of the people who were present were short-story writers and novelists. It was pleasant for me to meet them, and I enjoyed the afternoon. But my chief sensation was one of shock—it was a real shock to me to find that writers were people!

"I felt as if I had met Joan of Arc, Cæsar, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, and all the great figures of history, and found them to be human beings like myself. 'These writers are not supermen and superwomen,' I said to myself, 'they are human beings like me. Why can't I do what they're doing?'

"I thought this over after we went home that evening. And I made a resolve. I resolved that before the next tea that I attended I would tell a story. And when I next went to a tea I had sold a story."

"To what publication had you sold it?" I asked.

"To an evening paper," said Mrs. Norris; "but I had written and sold a story. That was something; it meant a great deal to me. My first stories were all sold to this evening paper, for twelve dollars each. This paper printed a story every day, paying twelve dollars for each of them, and giving a prize of fifty dollars for the best story published each week. I won one of the fifty-dollar prizes."

Any one who to-day could buy a Kathleen Norris story for fifty dollars would be not an editor, but a magician. Yet the memory of that early triumph seemed to give Mrs. Norris real pleasure.

"I wrote What Happened to Alanna two years before the Fire," she said. ("The Fire" means only one thing when a Californian says it.) "But most of my stories have been written since I came to New York."

I asked Mrs. Norris for the history of one of her earliest stories, a story of California life which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. She said: "That story went to twenty-six magazines before it was printed. My husband had an alphabetical list of magazines. He sent the story first to the Atlantic Monthly and then to twenty-five other magazines. They all returned it. Then he started at the top of the list again, and this time the Atlantic Monthly accepted it."

The mention of Mr. Norris's activities in selling this story brought our conversation back to the subject of the "business sense."

"A writer needs the ability to sell a story as well as the ability to write it," said Mrs. Norris, "unless there is some one else to do the writing. Many a woman writes a really good story, sends it hopefully to an editor, gets it back with a printed notice of its rejection, and puts it away in a desk drawer. Then years later she tells her grandchildren that she once wanted to be an author, but found that she couldn't do it.

"Now, that is no way for a writer to gain success. The writer must be persevering, not only in writing, but in trying to get his work before the public. Unless, as I said, there is some one else to supply the perseverance in getting the work before the public.

"I think that the desire to write generally indicates the possession of the power to write. But young writers are too easily discouraged. But I have no right to blame a writer for being discouraged. I had frightful discouragement—until I was married."

It is easy to see that Kathleen Norris does not hesitate to find in her own home life material for her industrious pen. Little Frank has undoubtedly served his mother as a model many times—which is not meant to indicate that he is that monstrosity, a model child. Indeed, Mrs. Norris believes that a novelist should use the material which lies ready at hand, instead of seeking for exotic and unusual topics. She sees that people want to read about the things with which they are already familiar, that they are not (as many young writers seem to think) eager for novelties.

"I cannot understand," she said, "how it is that writers will clamor for recognition, and abuse the public for not welcoming them with enthusiasm, and yet will not give the public what they know that the public wants. So many people seem to want just their own sort of art, but to want money, too. Now, I wouldn't write for a million dollars some of those things that are called 'best sellers.' But I cannot see why a writer who is avowedly writing for the public should think it beneath him to treat the themes in which the public is interested. The greatest tragedy of literature is the writer who persists in trying to give the public what it does not want. Think of poor Gissing, for instance, dying embittered because he couldn't sell his work!"

Mrs. Norris's conviction that a writer should use the material around him is so strong that she seems actually to be pained by the thought of all the excellent things for stories that are going to waste. I asked her if literature ever could come from apartment-houses. She said:

"Of course it can! There is no reason why there shouldn't be good stories and novels of apartment-house life. One reason why we are not writing more and better stories of the life around us is because we are living that life so intensely—too intensely. We live in this country so close to our income that the problem of earning money makes us lose sight of the essentials of life. It would be a fine thing for us, mentally and spiritually, if we should live on less than we do. If, for example, a family that found it was in receipt of a few hundred dollars more a year than before should decide, therefore, to live under a simpler scale than before, to do away with some really worthless luxuries, what a fine thing that would be!"

Of course many young writers come to Mrs. Norris for advice. And some of them excellently illustrate the tendency which she deprecates, the tendency to write about the unknown instead of the familiar.

"I was talking the other day to a young girl of my acquaintance who is a costume model," she said. "She has literary aspirations. Now, her life itself has been an interesting story—her rise from a shopgirl to her present position. And every now and then she will say something to me that is a most interesting revelation—something that indicates the rich store of experience that she might, if she would, draw upon in her stories. On one occasion she said to me, 'I went home and put my shoe-drawer in order.'

"'What do you mean?' I asked. 'What is your shoe-drawer?'

"'Why, my shoe-drawer!' she answered. 'You see, we costume models have to have a drawer full of shoes, because we must change our shoes to match every costume.'

"Why is it," asked Mrs. Norris, "that a girl like that cannot see the value of such an incident as that? That shoe-drawer is a picturesque and interesting thing, unknown to most people. And this girl, who knows all about it, and wants to write, cannot see its literary value! And yet what more interesting subject is there for her to write about than that shoe-drawer? I do not see why writers will not appreciate the importance of writing about the things that are around them."

Mrs. Norris gave a somewhat embarrassed laugh. "I really shouldn't attempt to lay down the law in this way," she said. "I can speak only for myself—I must write of the people and things that I know best, but I ought not to attempt to prescribe what other people shall write about."

Mrs. Norris's chief literary enthusiasm seems to be Charles Dickens. "When we were all infants out in the backwoods of California," she said, "we battened on Dickens. Dickens and a writer whom I don't suppose anybody reads nowadays—Henry Kingsley. The boys read Sir Walter Scott's novels, and left Dickens to me. I read Dickens with delight, and I still read him with delight. I have found passages in Dickens of which I honestly believe there are no equal in all English literature except in Shakespeare. I do not think that there is ever a year in which I do not read some of Dickens's novels over again. Of course, any one can find Dickens's faults—but I do not see how any one can fail to find his excellences."

"What is it in Dickens that especially attracts you?" I asked.

Mrs. Norris was silent for a moment. Then she said: "I think I like him chiefly because he saw so clearly the joys of the poor. He did not give his poor people nothing but disease and oppression and despair. He gave them roast goose and plum pudding for their Christmas dinner—he gave them faith and hope and love. He knew that often the rich suffer and the poor are happy.

"Many of the modern realists seem ignorant of the fact that the poor may be happy. They think that the cotter's Saturday night must always be squalid and sordid and dismal, and that the millionaire's Saturday night must be splendid and joyful. As a matter of fact, the poor family may be, and often is, healthier and happier in every way than the rich family. But these extreme realists are not like Dickens, they have not his intimate knowledge of the life of the poor. They have the outsider's viewpoint.

"Too many writers are telling us about the sorrows of the poor. We need writers who will tell us about the joys of the poor. We need writers who will be aware of the pleasures to be derived from a good dinner of corned beef and cabbage and a visit to a moving-picture theater. Often when I pass a row of mean houses, as they would be called, I think gratefully of the good times that I have had in just such places."

The thought of that little Celtic Californian reading Dickens among the redwood-trees appealed to me. So I asked Mrs. Norris to tell more about her childhood.

"Well," she said, "we hear a great deal about the misery, the bleak and barren lives of the children who live in the tenements of New York's lower East Side. But I think that an East Side tenement child would die of ennui if it should be brought up as we were brought up. We had none of the amusing and exciting experiences of the East Side child—we had no white stockings, no ice-cream cones, no Coney Island, nothing of the sort.

"We never even went to school. We would study French for a while with some French neighbor who had sufficient leisure to teach us, and then we'd study Spanish for a while with some Spaniard. That was the extent of our schooling.

"My parents died when I was eighteen years old. I went to the city and tried my hand at different sorts of work. For one thing, I tried to get up children's parties, but in eighteen months I managed only one. Then I did settlement work, was a librarian, a companion, and society reporter on a newspaper. Then I got married—and wrote stories."

Mrs. Norris was at one time opposed to woman suffrage. Now, however, she is a suffragist, but she refuses to say that she has been "converted" to suffragism.

"I can't say that I have been converted to suffragism," she said, "any more than I can say that I have been converted to warm baths and tooth-brushes. And it does not seem to me that any women should need to defend her right to vote any more than she should need to defend her right to love her children. There is a theme for a novel—a big suffrage novel will be written one of these days."

It may be that the author of Mother will be the author of this "big suffrage novel." But at present she disclaims any such intention. But she admits that there is a purpose in all her portrayals of normal, wholesome American home life.

"I don't think that I believe in 'art for art's sake,' as it is generally interpreted," she said. "Of course, I don't believe in what is called the commercial point of view—I have never written anything just to have it printed. But I do not believe that there is any one standard of art. I think that any book which the people ought to read must have back of it something besides the mere desire of the writer to create something. I never could write without a moral intention."

NATIONAL PROSPERITY AND ART

BOOTH TARKINGTON

Mr. Booth Tarkington never will be called the George M. Cohan of fiction. His novel, The Turmoil, is surely an indictment of modern American urban civilization; of its materialism, its braggadocio, its contempt for the things of the soul.

It was with the purpose of making this indictment a little clearer than it could be when it is surrounded by a story, that I asked Mr. Tarkington a few questions. And his answers are not likely to increase our national complacencies.

In the first place, I asked Mr. Tarkington if the atmosphere of a young and energetic nation might not reasonably be expected to be favorable to literary and artistic expression.

"Yes, it might," said Mr. Tarkington. "There may be spiritual progress in America as phenomenal as her material progress.

"There is and has been extraordinary progress in the arts. But the people as a whole are naturally preoccupied with their material progress. They are much more interested in Mr. Rockefeller than in Mr. Sargent."

The last two sentences of Mr. Tarkington's reply made me eager for something a little more specific on that subject.

"What are the forces in America to-day," I asked, "that hinder the development of art and letters?"

Mr. Tarkington replied: "There are no forces in America to-day that hinder the development of individuals in art and letters, save in unimportant cases here and there. But there is a spirit that hinders general personal decency, knows and cares nothing for beauty, and is glad to have its body dirty for the sake of what it calls 'prosperity.'

"It 'wouldn't give a nickel' for any kind of art. But it can't and doesn't hinder artists from producing works of art, though it makes them swear."

"But do not these conditions in many instances seriously hinder individual artists?"

Mr. Tarkington smiled. "Nothing stops an artist if he is one," he said. "But many things may prevent a people or a community from knowing or caring for art.

"The climate may be unfavorable; we need not expect the Eskimos to be interested in architecture. In the United States politicians have usually controlled the public purchase of works of art and the erection of public buildings. This is bad for the public, naturally."

"I suppose," I said, "that the conditions you describe are distinctively modern, are they not? At what time in the history of America have conditions been most favorable to literary expression?"

Mr. Tarkington's reply was not what I expected. "At all times," he said. "Literary expression does not depend on the times, though the appreciation of it does, somewhat."

I asked Mr. Tarkington if he agreed with Mr. Gouverneur Morris in considering the short story a modern development. He did not.

"There are short stories in the Bible," he said, "and in every mythology; 'folk stories' of all races and tribes. Probably Mr. Morris's definition of the short story would exclude these. I agree with him that short stories are better written nowadays."

"But you do not believe," I said, "that American literature in general is better than it used to be, do you? Why is it that there is now no group of American writers like the New England group which included Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Emerson, and Thoreau?"

"Why is there," Mr. Tarkington asked in turn, "no group like Homer (wasn't he a group?) in Greece? There may be, but if there is just such a modern group it would tend only to repeat the work of the Homeric group, which wouldn't be interesting to the rest of us.

"The important thing is to find a group unlike Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Emerson, and Thoreau. That is, if one accepts the idea that it is important to find a group."

Mr. Tarkington's criticisms of the modern American city have been so severe that I expected him to tell me that all writers should live in the country. But again he surprised me. In reply to my question as to which environment was more favorable to the production of literature, the city or the country, he said:

"It depends upon the nerves of the writer. A writer can be born anywhere, and he can grow up anywhere."

There has recently been considerable discussion—Professor Edward Garnet and Gertrude Atherton have taken a considerable share in it—on the relative merits of contemporary English and American fiction. I asked Mr. Tarkington if in his opinion the United States had at the present time novelists equal to those of England.

"That is unanswerable!" he answered. "Writers aren't like baseball teams. What's the value of my opinion that The Undiscovered Country is a 'greater' novel than A Pair of Blue Eyes? These questions remind me of school debating societies. Nothing is demonstrated, but everybody has his own verdict."

Until I asked Mr. Tarkington about it I had heard only two opinions as to the probable effect on literature of the war. One was that which William Dean Howells tersely expressed by saying: "War stops literature," and the other was that the war is purifying and strengthening all forms of literary expression.

But Mr. Tarkington had something new to say about it. "What effect," I asked, "is the war likely to have on American literature?"

"None of consequence," he answered. "The poet will find the subject, war or no war. The sculptor doesn't depend upon epaulets."

Mr. Tarkington is so inveterate a writer of serials, and his work is so familiar to the readers of the American magazines, that I desired to get his expert opinion as to whether or not the American magazines, with their remarkably high prices, had harmed or benefited fiction. His reply was somewhat non-committal.

"They have induced many people to look upon the production of fiction as a profitable business," he said. "But those people would merely not have 'tried fiction' at all otherwise. Prices have nothing to do with art."

Mr. Tarkington had some interesting things to say about that venerable mirage, the Great American Novel. I asked him if that longed-for work would ever be written; if, for example, there would ever be a work of fiction reflecting American life as Vanity Fair reflects English life. He replied:

"If Thackeray had been an American he would not have written a novel reflecting American life as Vanity Fair reflected the English life of its time. He would have written of New York; his young men would have come there after Harvard. The only safe thing to say of the Great American Novel is that the author will never know he wrote it."

Mr. Charles Belmont Davis had told me that a writer who had some means of making a living other than writing would do better work than one who devoted himself exclusively to literature. I asked Mr. Tarkington what he thought about this.

"I think," he said, "that it would be very well for a writer to have some means of making a living other than writing. There are likely to be times in his career when it would give him a sense of security concerning food. But I doubt if it would much affect his writing, unless he considered writing to be a business."

Mr. Tarkington's answer to my next question is hereby commended to the attention of all those feminine revolutionists who believe that they are engaged in the pleasant task of changing the whole current of modern thought.

"How has literature been affected," I asked, "by the suffrage movement and feminism?"

Mr. Tarkington looked up in some surprise. "I haven't heard of any change," he said.

The author of The Turmoil could never be accused of jingoism. But he is far from agreeing with those critics who believe that American literature is merely "a phase of English literature." I asked him if he believed that there was such a thing as a distinctively American literature.

"Certainly," he replied. "Is Huckleberry Finn a phase? It's a monument; not an English one. English happens to be the language largely used."

The allusion in Mr. Tarkington's last reply suggested—what every reader of Penrod must know—that this novelist is an enthusiastic admirer of Mark Twain. So I told him that Mr. T. A. Daly had classed Mark Twain with Artemus Ward and Q. K. Philander Doesticks, P.B., and had said that these men wrote nothing of real merit and were "the Charlie Chaplins of their time."

Mr. Tarkington smiled. "Get Mr. T. A. Daly to talk some more," he said. "We'd like to hear something about Voltaire and Flo Ziegfeld. Second thoughts indicate that 'T. A. Daly' is the pen name of Mr. Charlie Chaplin. Of course! And that makes it all right and natural. I thought at first that it was a joke."

ROMANTICISM AND AMERICAN HUMOR

MONTAGUE GLASS

Once upon a time William Dean Howells leveled the keen lance of his satire against what he called "the monstrous rag baby of romanticism." In those simple days, literary labels were easily applied. A man who wrote about Rome, Italy, was a romanticist; a man who wrote about Rome, New York, was a Realist.

Now, however, a writer who finds his themes in the wholesale business district of New York City does not disavow the title formerly given exclusively to makers of drawn-sword-and-prancing-steed fiction. Montague Glass is a romanticist.

The laureate of the cloak-and-suit trade and biographer of Mr. Abe Potash and Mr. Mawruss Perlmutter does not believe that romance is a matter of time and place. A realistic novel, he believes, may be written about the Young Pretender or Alexander the Great, and a romance about—well, about Elkan Lubliner, American.

Of course, I asked him to defend his claim to the name of romanticist. He did so, but in general terms, without special reference to his own work. For this widely read author has the amazing virtue of modesty.

"I do not think," he said, "that the so-called historical novelists are the only romanticists. The difference between the two schools of writers is in method, rather than in subject.

"A romanticist is a writer who creates an atmosphere of his own about the things with which he deals. He is the poet, the constructive artist. He calls into being that which has not hitherto existed.

"A realist, however, is a writer who faithfully reproduces an atmosphere that already exists. He reports, records; one of his distinguishing characteristics must be his attention to detail. The romanticist is as truthful as the realist, but he deals with a few large truths rather than with many small facts."

"And you," I said, determined to make the conversation more personal, "prefer the romantic method?"

"Yes," said Mr. Glass, "I do. I prefer to use the romantic method, and to read the works of the writers who use it. I believe that there is more value in suggestion than in detailed description. For instance, I do not think that my stories would gain vividness if I should put all the dialogue—I tell my stories chiefly by means of dialogues, you know—into dialect. So I do not put down the dialogue phonetically. I spell the words correctly, not in accordance with the pronunciation of my characters.

"This is not an invariable rule. When, for instance, Abe or Mawruss has learned a new long word which he uses frequently to show it off, he generally mispronounces it. He may say 'quincidence' for 'coincidence.' Such a mispronunciation as this I reproduce, for it has its significance as a revelation of character. But I do not attempt to put down all mispronunciations; I let the dialect be imagined.

"The romanticist, you see, uses his own imagination and expects imagination in his readers. His method might be called impressionistic; he outlines and suggests, instead of describing exhaustively. The romanticist really is more economical than the realist, and he has more restraint."

"Who are the leading romanticists of the day?" I asked.

"Well," Mr. Glass replied, "my favorite among contemporary romanticists is Joseph Conrad. There is a man who is certainly no swashbuckling novelist of the Wardour Street school. He writes of modern life, and yet he is a romanticist through and through.

"I think that I may justly claim to be one of the first admirers of Conrad in America. I used to read him when apparently the only other man in this part of the world to appreciate him was William L. Alden, who praised him in the columns of the New York Times Review of Books.

"I well remember my discovery of Conrad. I went to Brooklyn to hear 'Tosca' sung at the Academy of Music. I had bought my ticket, and I had about an hour to spend before it would be time for the curtain to rise. So I went across the street to the Brooklyn Public Library.

"While I was idly looking over the novels on the shelves I came upon Conrad's Typhoon. I sat down and began to read it.

"When I arose, I had finished the book. Also, I had missed the first two acts of the opera—and I had been eager to hear them. But Conrad more than compensated for the loss of those two acts.

"Many of the modern English writers are romanticists. Galsworthy surely is no realist. And William de Morgan, although he writes at great length and has abundance of detail, is a romanticist. He does not use detail for its own sake, as the realists use it; he uses it only when it has some definite value in unfolding the plot or revealing character. He uses it significantly; he is particularly successful in using it humorously, as Daudet and Dickens used it. Arnold Bennett is a realist, and I think that one of the reasons why he is so widely read in the United States is because the life which he describes so minutely is a life much like that of his American readers. People like to read about the sort of life they already know. The average reader wants to have a sense of familiarity with the characters in his novels."

Mr. Glass is a contrary person. It is contrary for the only novelist who knows anything about New York's cloak-and-suit trade to be of English birth and to look like a poet. It is contrary of him to have that distinctively American play, "Potash and Perlmutter," start its London run two years ago and be "still going strong." And it was contrary of him not to say, as he might reasonably be expected to say in view of his own success, that the encounters and adventures of business must be the theme of the American novelists of the future.

"No," he said, in answer to my question, "I do not see any reason for the novelist to confine himself to business life. Themes for fiction are universal. A novelist should write of the life he knows best, whatever it may be.

"I do not mean that the novelist should write about his own business. I mean that he should write about the psychology that he understands. A man who spends years in the cloak-and-suit business is not, therefore, qualified to write novels about that business, even if he is qualified to write novels at all.

"I had no real knowledge of the cloak-and-suit trade when I began to write about it. I made many technical blunders. For instance, I had Potash and Perlmutter buying goods by the gross instead of by the piece. And I received many indignant letters pointing out my mistake.

"I had never been in the cloak-and-suit trade. But my work as a lawyer had brought me into contact with many people who were in that business, and I had intimate knowledge of the psychology of the Jew, his religion, his humor, his tragedy, his whole attitude toward life.

"The trouble with many young writers," said Mr. Glass, "is that they don't know what they are writing about. They are attempting to describe psychological states of which they have only third-hand knowledge. Their ideas have no semblance of truth, and therefore their work is absolutely unconvincing."

"At any rate," I said, "you will admit that American writers are more and more inclined to make the United States the scene of their stories. Do you think that O. Henry's influence is responsible for this?"

"No," said Mr. Glass, "I do not think that this is due to O. Henry's influence. It was a natural development. You see, O. Henry's literary life lasted for only about four years, and while he has had many imitators, I do not think that he can be given credit for directing the attention of American writers to the life of their own country.

"Probably William Dean Howells should be called the founder of the modern school of American fiction. He was the first writer to achieve distinguished success for tales of modern American life. There were several other authors who began to write about Americans soon after Mr. Howells began—Thomas Janvier, H. C. Bunner, and Brander Matthews were among them.

"Kipling's popularity gave a great impetus to the writing of short stories of modern life. It is interesting to trace the course of the short story from Kipling to O. Henry.

"Did you ever notice," asked Mr. Glass, "that the best stories on New York life are written by people who have been born and brought up outside of the city? The writer who has always lived in New York seems thereby to be disqualified from writing about it, just as the man in the cloak-and-suit trade is too close to his subject to reproduce it in fiction. The writer who comes to New York after spending his youth elsewhere gets the full romantic effect of New York; he gets a perspective on it which the native New-Yorker seldom attains. The viewpoint of the writer who has always lived in New York is subjective, whereas one must have the objective viewpoint to write about the city successfully.

"I have been surprised by the caricatures of American life which come from the pen of writers American by birth and ancestry. Recently I read a novel by an American who has—and deserves, for he is a writer of talent and reputation—a large following. This was a story of life in a manufacturing town with which the novelist is thoroughly familiar. It, however, appears to have been written to satisfy a grudge and consequently one could mistake it for the work of an Englishman who had once made a brief tour of America. For the big manufacturer who was the principal character in the story was vulgar enough to satisfy the prejudice of any reader of the London Daily Mail. Certainly the descriptions of the gaudy and offensive furniture in the rich manufacturer's house and the dialogue of the members of his family and the servants could provide splendid ammunition for the Saturday Review or The Academy. The book appears to be a caricature, and yet that novelist had lived most of his life among the sort of people about whom he was writing!

"And how absolutely ignorant most New-Yorkers are of New York. Irvin Cobb comes here from Louisville, Kentucky, and gets an intimate knowledge of the city, and puts that knowledge into his short stories. But a man brought up here makes the most ridiculous mistakes when he writes about New York.

"I read a story of New York life recently that absolutely disgusted me, its author was so ignorant of his subject. Yet he was a born New-Yorker. Let me tell you what he wrote. He said that a man went into an arm-chair lunch-room and bought a meal. His check amounted to sixty-five cents! Now any one who knows anything about arm-chair lunch-rooms beyond the mere fact of their existence knows that the cashier of such an institution would drop dead if a customer paid him sixty-five cents at one time. Then, the hero of this story had as a part of his meal in this arm-chair lunch-room a baked potato, for which he paid fifteen cents! Imagine a baked potato in such a place, and a fifteen-cent baked potato at that!"

Mr. Glass did not, like most successful humorists, begin as a writer of tragedy. His first story to be printed was "Aloysius of the Docks," a humorous story of an East Side Irish boy, which appeared in 1900. The lower East Side was for many years the scene of most of his stories. But he does resemble most other writers in this respect, that he wrote verse before he wrote fiction. I asked him to show me some of his poetry, and he demurred somewhat violently. But, after all, a poet is a poet, and at last I succeeded in persuading him to produce this exhibit. Here it is—a poem by the author of "Potash and Perlmutter":

FERRYBOATS

There sounds aloft a warning scream,
The jingling bell gives tongue below,
She breasts again the busy stream,
And cleaves its murky tide to snow.
Bereft of burnished glittering brass,
Ungainly bulging fore and aft,
Slowly from shore to shore they pass—
The matrons of the river craft.

Mr. Glass believes that humorous writing in America has changed more than any other sort. But he does not, as I thought he would, attribute this change to the increased cosmopolitanism of the country, to the influx of people from other lands.

"Certainly our ideas of what is funny have changed," he said. "Humor is an ephemeral thing. A generation ago we laughed at what to-day would merely make us ill. The subjects and the methods of the humorists are different. Who nowadays can find a laugh in the pages of Artemus Ward, Philander Q. Doesticks, or Petroleum V. Nasby? Yet in their time these men set the whole continent in a roar.

"Contrast two humorists typical of their respective periods—Bill Nye and Abe Martin. I remember many years ago reading a story by Bill Nye which every one then considered tremendously funny. He told how he went downtown and got a shave and put on a clean collar and as he said, 'otherwise disguised himself.' When he got home his little dog refused to recognize him, and several pages were devoted to his efforts to persuade the dog of his identity. Then, failing to convince the dog that he was really the same Bill Nye in spite of his shave and clean collar, he impaled it on a pitchfork and buried it, putting over it the epitaph, 'Not dead, but jerked hence by request.'

"Now contrast with that a good example of modern American humor—a joke by Abe Martin which I recently saw. There was a picture of two or three men looking at a tattered tramp, and one of them was represented as saying: 'You wouldn't think to look at him that that man played an elegant game of billiards ten years ago!'

"It is an entirely different form of humor, you see. Bill Nye and the writers of his school got their effects by grotesque misspelling, fantastic ideas, and by the liberal use of shock and surprise. The modern humor is subtler, more delicate, and more likely to endure.

"I do not think that the fact that America has become more cosmopolitan has anything to do with this altered sense of humor. The American humorists do not select cosmopolitan themes; the best of them are distinctively American in their subject. Irvin Cobb, George Fitch, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Edna Ferber Stewart, who wrote The Fugitive Blacksmith—all these people draw their inspiration from purely American phases of the life around them."

"What is it, then," I asked, "that has changed American humor?"

"Leisure," answered Mr. Glass. "Philander Q. Doesticks and other humorists of his time wrote to amuse pioneers, people rough and elemental in their tastes. Their audience consisted of men who worked hard most of the time, and therefore had to be hit hard by any joke that was to entertain them at all. But as Americans grew more leisurely, and therefore had time to read, see plays, and look at pictures, they lost their taste for crude and violent horseplay, and the new sort of humor came in. Undoubtedly the same thing occurs in every newly settled country—Australia, for example. It is unlikely that the Australian of one hundred years from now will be amused by the things that amuse Australians to-day.

"But the humor that entertains the citizens of a country of which the civilization is well established is likely to retain its charm through the years. Mark Twain's stories do not lose their flavor. But Mark Twain was not exclusively a humorist; he was a student of life and he reflected the tragedy of existence as well as its comedy. So does Irvin Cobb, who is the nearest approach to Mark Twain now living.

"One source of Mark Twain's strength is his occasional vulgarity. That surely is something that we should have in greater abundance in American humor. I do not mean that our humorists should be pornographic and obscene; I mean merely that they should be allowed great freedom in their choice of themes. There is no humor without vulgarity. Our humorists have been so limited and restrained that we have no paper fit to be compared with Simplicissimus or Le Rire.

"You see, a vulgar thing is not offensive if it is funny. Fun for fun's sake is a much more important maxim than art for art's sake. The humorists have a greater need for freedom in choice of themes than the serious writers, especially the realistic writers, who are always demanding greater freedom."

Mr. Glass returned to the subject of the failure of cosmopolitanism to influence American literature by calling attention to the fact that very few American writers find their themes among their foreign-born fellow-citizens. "Where," he asked, "are the German-Americans and the Italian-Americans? No writer knows these foreign-born citizens well enough to write about them. The best American stories are about native Americans. I admit that my stories are not about people peculiar to New York—you can find counterparts of 'Potash and Perlmutter' in Berlin, Paris, and London. But mine are not among the best stories of American character. The best story of American character is 'Daisy Miller.'"

Mr. Glass believes that the technique of the short story has improved greatly during the last score of years, but he is not so favorable in his view of the modern novel, especially of the "cross-section of life" type of work. He believes that the war will produce a great revival of literary excellence in Europe, just as the Franco-Prussian War did; and he called attention to something which has apparently been neglected by most people who have discussed the subject—the tremendous inspiration which Guy de Maupassant found in the Franco-Prussian War. But he said, in conclusion:

"But any man who sits down to judge American literature in the course of a few minutes' talk is an ass for his pains. Literary snap judgments are foolish things. Nothing that I have said to you has any value at all."

THE "MOVIES" BENEFIT LITERATURE

REX BEACH

Even the most prejudiced opponent of the moving pictures will admit that they are becoming more intellectually respectable. Crude farce and melodrama are being replaced by versions of classic plays and novels; literature is elevating the motion picture. And Mr. Rex Beach believes that the motion picture is benefiting literature.

This author of widely read novels had been talking to me about the departments of literature—the novel, the short story, and the rest—and among them he named the moving picture. I asked him if he believed that moving pictures were dangerous for novelists, leading them to fill their books with action, with a view to the profits of cinematographic reproduction. He said:

"Well, authors are human beings, of course. They like to make money and to have their work reach as large an audience as possible. I suppose that the great majority of them keep their eyes on the screen, because they know how profitable the moving picture is and because they want their work seen by more people than would read their novels."

"Do you think that this harms their work?" I asked.

"It might if the novelists overdid it," he answered. "It would harm their work if they became nothing but scenario writers. But so far the result has been good.

"The tendency of the moving picture has been to make authors visualize more clearly than ever before their characters and scenes that they are writing about. Their work has become more realistic. I do not mean realistic in the sense in which this word is used of some French writers; I do not mean erotic or morbid. I mean actual, convincing, clearly visualized.

"Literature has elevated the moving picture, keeping it out, to a great extent, of melodrama and slap-stick comedy. And in return, the moving picture has done a service to fiction, making the authors give more attention to exact visualization."

"Has American fiction been lacking in visualization?" I asked.

"No," said Mr. Beach. "American novelists visualize more clearly to-day than they did four or five years ago, before the moving picture had become so important, but they always were strong in visualization. This sort of realism is America's chief contribution to fiction."

"Then you believe that there is a distinctively American literature?" I asked. "You do not agree with the critic who said that American literature was 'a condition of English literature'?"

"I do not agree with him," Mr. Beach replied. "American writers use the English language, so I suppose that what they write belongs to English literature. But there is a distinctively American literature; Americans talk in their own manner, think in their own manner, and handle business propositions in their own manner, and naturally they write in their own manner. American literature is different from other kinds of literature just as American business methods are different from those of Europe.

"Fiction written in America must necessarily be tinged with American thought and American action. I have no patience with people who say that America has no literature. They say that nothing we are writing to-day will live. Well, what if that is true? It's true not only of literature, but of everything else.

"Our roads won't last forever; they're built in a hurry to be used in a hurry. But they're better roads to drive and motor over than those old Roman roads of Europe. Our office-buildings won't last as long as the Pyramids, but they're better for business purposes.

"Personally, I've never been enthusiastic over things that have no virtues but age and ugliness. I'd rather have a good, strong, serviceable piece of Grand Rapids furniture than any ramshackle, moth-eaten antique."

"But don't you think," I asked, "that the permanence of a book's appeal is a proof of its greatness?"

"I don't see how we can tell anything definite about the permanence of the appeal of books written in our time. And I don't mean by literature writings that necessarily endure through the ages. I believe that literature is the expression of the mind, the sentiment, the intellectual attitude of the people who live at the time it is written. I admit that our literature is ephemeral—like everything else about us—but I believe that it is good."

Mr. Rex Beach was not pacing his floor nervously; he was crossing the room with the practical intention of procuring a cigarette. Nevertheless, his firm tread lent emphasis to his remarks.

"There is a sort of literary snobbery," he said, "noticeable among people who condemn contemporaneous literature just because it is contemporaneous. The strongest proof that there is something good in the literature of the day is that it reaches a great audience. There must be something in it or people wouldn't read it.

"The people are the final judges; it is to them that authors must appeal. Take any big question of public importance—after it has been discussed by politicians and newspapers, it is the people who at last decide it.

"A man may have devoted his life to some tremendous achievement, and have left it as a monument to his fame. But it is to public opinion that we must look for the verdict on the value of his life's work.

"Take Carnegie, for example; when he dies, you bet people will have his number! His ideas are a tremendous menace, and the people who believe as he does about peace will find themselves generally execrated one of these days.

"It may seem to you that this has nothing to do with literature. But it has a good deal to do with it. I know that many things have been said about the effect on literature of the war. But I want to say that the war will have, I hope, one admirable effect on American writers—it will make them stir up the American conscience to a sense of the necessity for national defensive preparation. The writers must educate the people in world politics and show them the necessity for defensive action. Americans have a sort of mental inertia in regard to public questions, and the writers must overcome this inertia.

"The writers must stir up the politicians and the people. There's been a whole lot of mush written about peace. There always will be war. We can't reform the world.

"The pacifists say that it is useless to arm because war cannot be prevented by armaments. The obvious answer to that is that neither can the failure to arm prevent war. And the verdict after the war will be better if we are prepared for it. The writers must call our attention to the folly of leaving ourselves open to attack.

"It's hard to reach the conscience of the American people on any big issue. We are too independent, too indifferent, too ready to slump back. That's one of the penalties of democracy, I suppose; the national sense of patriotism becomes atrophied. It needs some whaling-big jolt to wake it up. Every American writer can help to do this.

"The trouble is that we have too many men with feminine minds, too many of these delicate fellows with handkerchiefs up their sleeves. I can't imagine any women with ideas more feminine than those of Bryan—could any woman evolve anything more feminine than his peace-at-any-price idea?"

Mr. Beach smiled. "I suppose I should not be talking about world politics," he said. "There are so many men who have specialized in that subject and are therefore competent to talk about it. I am only a specialist in writing."

"Do you think," I asked, "that writers should be specialists in writing? Some people believe that the best fiction, for example, is produced by men who do some other work for a living."

"I certainly believe that a writer should devote himself to writing," said Mr. Beach. "This is an age of specialization, and literature is no exception to the general rule. Literature is like everything else—you must specialize in it to be successful."

"This has not always been the case, has it?" I asked. "Has literature been produced by people who made writing only an avocation?"

"Surely," said Mr. Beach. "It is only within the last few years that writers have been able to write for a living and make enough to keep the fringe off their cuffs."

I asked what had caused this change.

"It has been caused chiefly by the magazines. The modern magazines have done two important things for fiction—they have brought it within every one's reach, and they have increased the prices paid to the authors, thus enabling them to make a living by devoting themselves exclusively to writing."

"But it has been said," I ventured, "that a writer, no matter how talented he may be, cannot make a comfortable living out of writing fiction unless he is most extraordinarily gifted with ideas, and that, therefore, a writer takes a tremendous risk if he throws himself upon literature for support."

"How is a writer going to get ideas for stories," asked Mr. Beach, in turn, "unless he uses ideas? The more ideas a man uses, the more ideas will come to him.

"The imaginative quality in a man is like any other quality; the more it is functioned the better it is functioned. If you fail to use any organ of your body, nature will in time let that organ go out of commission.

"It is just the same with imagination as with any organ of the body. If a writer waits for ideas to come to him and ceases to exercise his imagination, his imagination will become atrophied. But if he uses his imagination it will grow stronger and ideas will come to him with increasing frequency."

Mr. Beach is an enthusiastic advocate of the moving picture. In the course of his discussion of it he advanced an interesting theory as to the next stage of its development.

"The next use of the moving picture," he said, "will be the editorial use. We have had the moving picture used as a comic device, as a device to spread news, and as an interpreter of fiction. But as yet no one has endeavored to use it as a means to mold public opinion in great vital issues of the day.

"Of course, it has been used educationally, and as part of various propaganda schemes. But it will be used in connection with great political problems. It will become the most powerful of all influences for directing public opinion in politics and in everything else.

"It will play a mighty part in the thought of the country and of the world.

"I have seen men and women coming from a great moving-picture show almost hysterical with emotion. I have heard them shout and stamp and whistle at what they saw flashed before them on a white sheet as they never did in any theater.

"What a strong argument 'The Birth of a Nation' presents! Now, suppose that same art and that same equipment were used to present arguments about some political issue of our own time, instead of one of our fathers' time. What a force that would be!"

WHAT IS GENIUS?

ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

Sentimental Tommy's great predecessor in the relentless pursuit of the "right word" was, teachers of literature tell us, the unsentimental Gustave Flaubert. But these academic gentlemen, who insist that the writer shall spend hours, even days, if necessary, in perfecting a single sentence, seldom produce any literature. I asked Robert W. Chambers, who has written more "best sellers" than any other living writer, what he thought of Flaubert's method of work.

He looked at me rather quizzically. "I think," he said, with a smile, "that Flaubert was slow. What else is there to think? Of course he was a matchless workman. But if he spent half a day in hunting for one word, he was slow, that's all. He might have gone on writing and then have come back later for that inevitable word."

"But what do you think of Flaubert's method, as a method?" I asked. "Do you think that a writer who works with such laborious care is right?"

"It's not a question of right or wrong," said Mr. Chambers, "it's a question of the individual writer's ability and tendency. If a man can produce novels like those of Flaubert, by writing slowly and laboriously, by all means let him write that way. But it would not be fair to establish that as the only legitimate method of writing.

"Some authors always write slowly. With some of them it's like pulling teeth for them to get their ideas out on paper. It's the same way in painting. You may see half a dozen men drawing from the same model. One will make his sketch premier coup; another will devote an hour to his; another will work all day. They may be artists of equal ability. It is the result that counts, not the method or the time."

"And what is it that makes a man an artist, in pigments or in words?" I asked. "Do you believe in the old saying that the poet—the creative artist—is born and not made?"

"No," said Mr. Chambers, "I do not think that that is the truth. I think that with regard to the writer it is true to this extent, that there must exist, in the first place, the inclination to write, to express ideas in written words. Then the writer must have something to express really worthy of expression, and he must learn how to express it. These three things make the writer—the inclination to say something, the possession of something worth saying, and the knowledge of how to say it."

"And where does genius come in?" I asked.

"What is genius?" asked Mr. Chambers, in turn. "I don't know. Perhaps genius is the combination of these three qualities in the highest degree.

"Of course," he added, with a laugh, "I know that all this is contrary to the opinion of the public. People like to believe that writers depend entirely upon an inspiration. They like to think that we are a hazy lot, sitting around and posing and waiting for some sort of divine afflatus. They think that writers sit around like a Quaker meeting, waiting for the spirit to move them."

"But have there not been writers," I asked, "who seem to prove that there is some truth in the inspiration theory? There is William de Morgan, for example, beginning to write novels in his old age. He spent most of his life in working in ceramics, not with words."

"On the contrary," said Mr. Chambers, "I think that William de Morgan proves my theory. He really spent all his life in learning to write—he was in training for being a novelist all the while. The novelist's training may be unconscious. He must have—as William de Morgan surely always has had—keen interest in the world. That is the main thing for the writer to have—a vivid interest in life. If we are to devote ourselves to the production of pictures of humanity according to our own temperaments, we must have this vivid interest in life; we must have intense curiosity. The men who have counted in literature have had this intense, never-satiated curiosity about life.

"This is true for the romanticists as well as the realists. The most imaginative and fantastic romances must have their basis in real life.

"I know of no better examples of this truth than the gargoyles which one sees in Gothic architecture in Europe. These extraordinary creatures that thrust their heads from the sides of cathedrals, misshapen and grotesque, are nevertheless thoroughly logical. That is, no matter how fantastic they may be, they have backbones and ribs and tails, and these backbones and ribs and tails are logical—that is, they could do what backbones and ribs and tails are supposed to do.

"In real life there are no creatures like the gargoyles, but the important thing is that the gargoyles really could exist. This is a good example of the true method of construction. The base of the construction must rest on real knowledge. The medieval sculptors knew the formation of existing animals; therefore they knew how to make gargoyles."

"How does this theory apply to poets?" I asked.

"I don't know," answered Mr. Chambers, "but it seems to me to apply to all creative work. The artist must know life before he can build even a travesty on life."

I called Mr. Chambers's attention to the work of certain ultra-modern poets who deliberately exclude life from their work. He was not inclined to take them seriously.

"There always have been aberrations," he said, "and there always will be. They're bound to exist. And there is bound to be, from time to time, attitudinizing and straining after effect on the part of prose writers as well as poets. And it is all based on one thing—self-consciousness. It is self-consciousness that spoils the work of some modern writers."

I asked Mr. Chambers to be more specific in his allusions. "I cannot mention names," he said, "but there are certain writers who are always conscious of the style in which they are writing. Sometimes they consciously write in the style of some other men. They are thinking all the while of their technique and equipment, and the result is that their work loses its effect. A writer should not be convinced all the while that he is a realist or a romanticist; he should not subject himself deliberately to some special school of writing, and certainly he should not be conscious of his own style. The less a writer thinks of his technique the sooner he arrives at self-expression.

"It's just like ordinary conversation. A man is known by the way in which he talks—that is his 'style.' But he is not all the while acutely conscious of his manner of talking—unless he has an impediment in his speech. So the writer should be known by his untrammeled and unembarrassed expression."

I asked Mr. Chambers what he thought of the idea that the popularity of magazines has vitiated the public taste and lowered the standard of fiction.

"I do not think that this is the case," he said. "I do not see that the custom of serial publication has harmed the novel. It is not a modern innovation, you know. The novels of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot had serial publication. But I do believe that the American public reads less fiction than it did a generation ago, and that its taste is not so good as it was."

This was a surprising statement to come from an author whom the public has received with such enthusiasm, so I asked Mr. Chambers to explain.