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diff --git a/19355.txt b/19355.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c22c1bf --- /dev/null +++ b/19355.txt @@ -0,0 +1,6442 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Book of Prefaces, by H. L. Mencken + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: A Book of Prefaces + +Author: H. L. Mencken + +Release Date: September 22, 2006 [EBook #19355] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A BOOK OF PREFACES *** + + + + +Produced by Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net + + + + + + +A BOOK OF PREFACES + +By H. L. MENCKEN + +PUBLISHED AT THE BORZOI . NEW YORK . BY + +ALFRED . A . KNOPF + + +COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. + + +_Published September, 1917_ +_Second edition, 1918_ +_Third edition, August, 1920_ +_Reprinted, January, 1922_ + + +_Set up, electrotyped and printed by Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y. +Paper (Warren's) furnished by Henry Lindenmeyr & Sons, New York, N. Y. +Bound by the Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass._ + +MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA + + + + +_BY H. L. MENCKEN_ + + +VENTURES INTO VERSE +GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: HIS PLAYS +MEN VERSUS THE MAN + _With R. R. La Monte_ +A LITTLE BOOK IN C MAJOR +A BOOK OF CALUMNY + [_The above books are out of print_] +THE PHILOSOPHY OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE +A BOOK OF BURLESQUES +IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN +A BOOK OF PREFACES +PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES +PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES +THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE + + +_New York: Alfred A Knopf_ + + + + +PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION + + +This fourth printing of "A Book of Prefaces" offers me temptation, as +the third did, to revise the whole book, and particularly the chapters +on Conrad, Dreiser and Huneker, all of whom have printed important new +books since the text was completed. In addition, Huneker has died. But +the changes that I'd make, after all, would be very slight, and so it +seems better not to make them at all. From Conrad have come "The Arrow +of Gold" and "The Rescue," not to mention a large number of sumptuous +reprints of old magazine articles, evidently put between covers for the +sole purpose of entertaining collectors. From Dreiser have come "Free," +"Twelve Men," "Hey, Rub-a-Dub-Dub" and some chapters of autobiography. +From Huneker, before and after his death, have come "Unicorns," +"Bedouins," "Steeple-Jack," "Painted Veils" and "Variations." But not +one of these books materially modifies the position of its author. "The +Arrow of Gold," I suppose, has puzzled a good many of Conrad's admirers, +but certainly "The Rescue" has offered ample proof that his old powers +are not diminished. The Dreiser books, like their predecessors that I +discuss here, reveal the curious unevenness of the author. Parts of +"Free" are hollow and irritating, and nearly all of "Hey, Rub-a-Dub-Dub" +is feeble, but in "Twelve Men" there are some chapters that rank with +the very best of "The Titan" and "Jennie Gerhardt." The place of Dreiser +in our literature is frequently challenged, and often violently, but +never successfully. As the years pass his solid dignity as an artist +becomes more and more evident. Huneker's last five works changed his +position very little. "Bedouins," "Unicorns" and "Variations" belong +mainly to his journalism, but into "Steeple-Jack," and above all into +"Painted Veils" he put his genuine self. I have discussed all of these +books in other places, and paid my small tribute to the man himself, a +light burning brightly through a dark night, and snuffed out only at the +dawn. + +I should add that the prices of Conrad first editions given on page 56 +have been greatly exceeded during the past year or two. I should add +also that the Comstockian imbecilities described in Chapter IV are still +going on, and that the general trend of American legislation and +jurisprudence is toward their indefinite continuance. + + H. L. M. + Baltimore, January 1, 1922. + + + + +CONTENTS + + + I. Joseph Conrad 11 + + II. Theodore Dreiser 67 + +III. James Huneker 151 + + IV. Puritanism as a Literary Force 197 + + Index 285 + + + + +A BOOK OF PREFACES + + + + +I + +JOSEPH CONRAD + + +Sec. 1 + +"Under all his stories there ebbs and flows a kind of tempered +melancholy, a sense of seeking and not finding...." I take the words +from a little book on Joseph Conrad by Wilson Follett, privately +printed, and now, I believe, out of print.[1] They define both the mood +of the stories as works of art and their burden and direction as +criticisms of life. Like Dreiser, Conrad is forever fascinated by the +"immense indifference of things," the tragic vanity of the blind groping +that we call aspiration, the profound meaninglessness of +life--fascinated, and left wondering. One looks in vain for an attempt +at a solution of the riddle in the whole canon of his work. Dreiser, +more than once, seems ready to take refuge behind an indeterminate sort +of mysticism, even a facile supernaturalism, but Conrad, from first to +last, faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact. His stories are +not chronicles of men who conquer fate, nor of men who are unbent and +undaunted by fate, but of men who are conquered and undone. Each +protagonist is a new Prometheus, with a sardonic ignominy piled upon his +helplessness. Each goes down a Greek route to defeat and disaster, +leaving nothing behind him save an unanswered question. I can scarcely +recall an exception. Kurtz, Lord Jim, Razumov, Nostromo, Captain +Whalley, Yanko Goorall, Verloc, Heyst, Gaspar Ruiz, Almayer: one and all +they are destroyed and made a mock of by the blind, incomprehensible +forces that beset them. + +Even in "Youth," "Typhoon," and "The Shadow Line," superficially stories +of the indomitable, that same consuming melancholy, that same pressing +sense of the irresistible and inexplicable, is always just beneath the +surface. Captain Mac Whirr gets the _Nan-Shan_ to port at last, but it +is a victory that stands quite outside the man himself; he is no more +than a marker in the unfathomable game; the elemental forces, fighting +one another, almost disregard him; the view of him that we get is one +of disdain, almost one of contempt. So, too, in "Youth." A tale of the +spirit's triumph, of youth besting destiny? I do not see it so. To me +its significance, like that of "The Shadow Line," is all subjective; it +is an aging man's elegy upon the hope and high resolution that the years +have blown away, a sentimental reminiscence of what the enigmatical gods +have had their jest with, leaving only its gallant memory behind. The +whole Conradean system sums itself up in the title of "Victory," an +incomparable piece of irony. Imagine a better label for that tragic +record of heroic and yet bootless effort, that matchless picture, in +microcosm, of the relentlessly cruel revolutions in the macrocosm! + +Mr. Follett, perhaps with too much critical facility, finds the cause of +Conrad's unyielding pessimism in the circumstances of his own life--his +double exile, first from Poland, and then from the sea. But this is +surely stretching the facts to fit an hypothesis. Neither exile, it must +be plain, was enforced, nor is either irrevocable. Conrad has been back +to Poland, and he is free to return to the ships whenever the spirit +moves him. I see no reason for looking in such directions for his view +of the world, nor even in the direction of his nationality. We detect +certain curious qualities in every Slav simply because he is more given +than we are to revealing the qualities that are in all of us. +Introspection and self-revelation are his habit; he carries the study of +man and fate to a point that seems morbid to westerners; he is forever +gabbling about what he finds in his own soul. But in the last analysis +his verdicts are the immemorial and almost universal ones. Surely his +resignationism is not a Slavic copyright; all human philosophies and +religions seem doomed to come to it at last. Once it takes shape as the +concept of Nirvana, the desire for nothingness, the will to not-will. +Again, it is fatalism in this form or that--Mohammedanism, Agnosticism +... Calvinism! Yet again, it is the "Out, out, brief candle!" of +Shakespeare, the "_Eheu fugaces_" of Horace, the "_Vanitas vanitatum; +omnia vanitas!_" of the Preacher. Or, to make an end, it is +millenarianism, the theory that the world is going to blow up tomorrow, +or the day after, or two weeks hence, and that all sweating and striving +are thus useless. Search where you will, near or far, in ancient or +modern times, and you will never find a first-rate race or an +enlightened age, in its moments of highest reflection, that ever gave +more than a passing bow to optimism. Even Christianity, starting out as +"glad tidings," has had to take on protective coloration to survive, and +today its chief professors moan and blubber like Johann in Herod's +rain-barrel. The sanctified are few and far between. The vast majority +of us must suffer in hell, just as we suffer on earth. The divine grace, +so omnipotent to save, is withheld from us. Why? There, alas, is your +insoluble mystery, your riddle of the universe!... + +This conviction that human life is a seeking without a finding, that its +purpose is impenetrable, that joy and sorrow are alike meaningless, you +will see written largely in the work of most great creative artists. It +is obviously the final message, if any message is genuinely to be found +there, of the nine symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven, or, at any rate, +of the three which show any intellectual content at all. Mark Twain, +superficially a humourist and hence an optimist, was haunted by it in +secret, as Nietzsche was by the idea of eternal recurrence: it forced +itself through his guard in "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What is Man?" +In Shakespeare, as Shaw has demonstrated, it amounts to a veritable +obsession. And what else is there in Balzac, Goethe, Swift, Moliere, +Turgenev, Ibsen, Dostoyevsky, Romain Rolland, Anatole France? Or in the +Zola of "L'Assomoir," "Germinal," "La Debacle," the whole +Rougon-Macquart series? (The Zola of "Les Quatres Evangiles," and +particularly of "Fecondite," turned meliorist and idealist, and became +ludicrous.) Or in the Hauptmann of "Fuhrmann Henschel," or in Hardy, or +in Sudermann? (I mean, of course, Sudermann the novelist. Sudermann the +dramatist is a mere mechanician.)... The younger men in all countries, +in so far as they challenge the current sentimentality at all, seem to +move irresistibly toward the same disdainful skepticism. Consider the +last words of "Riders to the Sea." Or Gorky's "Nachtasyl." Or Frank +Norris' "McTeague." Or Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel." Or the ironical +fables of Dunsany. Or Dreiser's "Jennie Gerhardt." Or George Moore's +"Sister Teresa." + +Conrad, more than any of the other men I have mentioned, grounds his +work firmly upon this sense of cosmic implacability, this confession of +unintelligibility. The exact point of the story of Kurtz, in "Heart of +Darkness," is that it is pointless, that Kurtz's death is as meaningless +as his life, that the moral of such a sordid tragedy is a wholesale +negation of all morals. And this, no less, is the point of the story of +Falk, and of that of Almayer, and of that of Jim. Mr. Follett (he must +be a forward-looker in his heart!) finds himself, in the end, unable to +accept so profound a determinism unadulterated, and so he injects a +gratuitous and mythical romanticism into it, and hymns Conrad "as a +comrade, one of a company gathered under the ensign of hope for common +war on despair." With even greater error, William Lyon Phelps argues +that his books "are based on the axiom of the moral law."[2] The one +notion is as unsound as the other. Conrad makes war on nothing; he is +pre-eminently _not_ a moralist. He swings, indeed, as far from revolt +and moralizing as is possible, for he does not even criticize God. His +undoubted comradeship, his plain kindliness toward the soul he +vivisects, is not the fruit of moral certainty, but of moral +agnosticism. He neither protests nor punishes; he merely smiles and +pities. Like Mark Twain he might well say: "The more I see of men, the +more they amuse me--and the more I pity them." He is _simpatico_ +precisely because of this ironical commiseration, this infinite +disillusionment, this sharp understanding of the narrow limits of human +volition and responsibility.... I have said that he does not criticize +God. One may even imagine him pitying God.... + + +Sec. 2 + +But in this pity, I need not add, there is no touch of sentimentality. +No man could be less the romantic, blubbering over the sorrows of his +own Werthers. No novelist could have smaller likeness to the brummagem +emotion-squeezers of the Kipling type, with their playhouse fustian and +their naive ethical cocksureness. The thing that sets off Conrad from +these facile fellows, and from the shallow pseudo-realists who so often +coalesce with them and become indistinguishable from them, is precisely +his quality of irony, and that irony is no more than a proof of the +greater maturity of his personal culture, his essential superiority as a +civilized man. It is the old difference between a Huxley and a +Gladstone, a philosophy that is profound and a philosophy that is merely +comfortable, "_Quid est veritas?_" and "Thus saith the Lord!" He brings +into the English fiction of the day, not only an artistry that is vastly +more fluent and delicate than the general, but also a highly unusual +sophistication, a quite extraordinary detachment from all petty rages +and puerile certainties. The winds of doctrine, howling all about him, +leave him absolutely unmoved. He belongs to no party and has nothing to +teach, save only a mystery as old as man. In the midst of the hysterical +splutterings and battle-cries of the Kiplings and Chestertons, the +booming pedagogics of the Wellses and Shaws, and the smirking at +key-holes of the Bennetts and de Morgans, he stands apart and almost +alone, observing the sardonic comedy of man with an eye that sees every +point and significance of it, but vouchsafing none of that sophomoric +indignation, that Hyde Park wisdom, that flabby moralizing which freight +and swamp the modern English novel. "At the centre of his web," says +Arthur Symons, "sits an elemental sarcasm discussing human affairs with +a calm and cynical ferocity.... He calls up all the dreams and illusions +by which men have been destroyed and saved, and lays them mockingly +naked.... He shows the bare side of every virtue, the hidden heroism of +every vice and crime. He summons before him all the injustices that have +come to birth out of ignorance and self-love.... And in all this there +is no judgment, only an implacable comprehension, as of one outside +nature, to whom joy and sorrow, right and wrong, savagery and +civilization, are equal and indifferent...."[3] + +Obviously, no Englishman! No need to explain (with something akin to +apology) that his name is really not Joseph Conrad at all, but Teodor +Josef Konrad Karzeniowski, and that he is a Pole of noble lineage, with +a vague touch of the Asiatic in him. The Anglo-Saxon mind, in these +later days, becomes increasingly incapable of his whole point of view. +Put into plain language, his doctrine can only fill it with wonder and +fury. That mind is essentially moral in cut; it is believing, certain, +indignant; it is as incapable of skepticism, save as a passing coryza of +the spirit, as it is of wit, which is skepticism's daughter. Time was +when this was not true, as Congreve, Pope, Wycherley and even Thackeray +show, but that time was before the Reform Bill of 1832, the great +intellectual levelling, the emancipation of the _chandala_. In these our +days the Englishman is an incurable foe of distinction, and being so he +must needs take in with his mother's milk the delusions which go with +that enmity, and particularly the master delusion that all human +problems, in the last analysis, are readily soluble, and that all that +is required for their solution is to take counsel freely, to listen to +wizards, to count votes, to agree upon legislation. This is the prime +and immovable doctrine of the _mobile vulgus_ set free; it is the +loveliest of all the fruits of its defective powers of observation and +reasoning, and above all, of its defective knowledge of demonstrated +facts, especially in history. Take away this notion that there is some +mysterious infallibility in the sense of the majority, this theory that +the consensus of opinion is inspired, and the idea of equality begins to +wither; in fact, it ceases to have any intelligibility at all. But the +notion is not taken away; it is nourished; it flourishes on its own +effluvia. And out of it spring the two rules which give direction to all +popular thinking, the first being that no concept in politics or conduct +is valid (or more accurately respectable), which rises above the +comprehension of the great masses of men, or which violates any of their +inherent prejudices or superstitions, and the second being that the +articulate individual in the mob takes on some of the authority and +inspiration of the mob itself, and that he is thus free to set himself +up as a soothsayer, so long as he does not venture beyond the aforesaid +bounds--in brief, that one man's opinion, provided it observe the +current decorum, is as good as any other man's. + +Practically, of course, this is simply an invitation to quackery. The +man of genuine ideas is hedged in by taboos; the quack finds an audience +already agape. The reply to the invitation, in the domain of applied +ethics, is the revived and reinforced _Sklavenmoral_ that besets all of +us of English speech--the huggermugger morality of timorous, whining, +unintelligent and unimaginative men--envy turned into law, cowardice +sanctified, stupidity made noble, Puritanism. And in the theoretical +field there is an even more luxuriant crop of bosh. Mountebanks almost +innumerable tell us what we should believe and practice, in politics, +religion, philosophy and the arts. England and the United States, +between them, house more creeds than all the rest of the world together, +and they are more absurd. They rise, they flame, they fall and go out, +but always there are new ones, always the latest is worse than the last. +What modern civilization save this of ours could have produced Christian +Science, or the New Thought, or Billy Sundayism? What other could have +yielded up the mawkish bumptiousness of the Uplift? What other could +accept gravely the astounding imbecilities of English philanthropy and +American law? The native output of fallacy and sentimentality, in fact, +is not enough to satisfy the stupendous craving of the mob unleashed; +there must needs be a constant importation of the aberrant fancies of +other peoples. Let a new messiah leap up with a new message in any part +of the world, and at once there is a response from the two great free +nations. Once it was Tolstoi with a mouldy asceticism made of catacomb +Christianity and senile soul-sickness; again it was Bergson, with a +perfumed quasi-philosophy for the boudoirs of the faubourgs; yet again +came Rudolf Eucken and Pastor Wagner, with their middle-class beeriness +and banality. The list need go no further. It begins with preposterous +Indian swamis and yoghis (most of them, to do them justice, diligent +Jews from Grand street or the bagnios of Constantinople), and it ends +with the fabulous Ibsen of the symbols (no more the real Ibsen than +Christ was a prohibitionist), the Ellen Key of the new gyneolatry and +the Signorina Montessori of the magical Method. It was a sure instinct +that brought Eusapia Palladino to New York. It was the same sure +instinct that brought Hall Caine. + +I have mentioned Ibsen. A glance at the literature he has spawned in the +vulgate is enough to show how much his falser aspects have intrigued the +American mind and how little it has reacted to his shining skill as a +dramatic craftsman--his one authentic claim upon fame. Read Jennette +Lee's "The Ibsen Secret,"[4] perhaps the most successful of all the +Ibsen gemaras in English, if you would know the virulence of the +national appetite for bogus revelation. And so in all the arts. +Whatever is profound and penetrating we stand off from; whatever is +facile and shallow, particularly if it reveal a moral or mystical color, +we embrace. Ibsen the first-rate dramatist was rejected with indignation +precisely because of his merits--his sharp observation, his sardonic +realism, his unsentimental logic. But the moment a meretricious and +platitudinous ethical purpose began to be read into him--how he +protested against it!--he was straightway adopted into our flabby +culture. Compare Hauptmann and Brieux, the one a great artist, the other +no more than a raucous journalist. Brieux's elaborate proofs that two +and two are four have been hailed as epoch-making; one of his worst +plays, indeed, has been presented with all the solemn hocus-pocus of a +religious rite. But Hauptmann remains almost unknown; even the Nobel +Prize did not give him a vogue. Run the roll: Maeterlinck and his +languishing supernaturalism, Tagore and his Asiatic wind music, Selma +Lagerloef and her old maid's mooniness, Bernstein, Molnar and company and +their out-worn tricks--but I pile up no more names. Consider one fact: +the civilization that kissed Maeterlinck on both cheeks, and Tagore +perhaps even more intimately, has yet to shake hands with Anatole +France.... + +This bemusement by superficial ideas, this neck-bending to quacks, this +endless appetite for sesames and apocalypses, is depressingly visible in +our native literature, as it is in our native theology, philosophy and +politics. "The British and American mind," says W. L. George,[5] "has +been long honey-combed with moral impulse, at any rate since the +Reformation; it is very much what the German mind was up to the middle +of the Nineteenth Century." The artist, facing an audience which seems +incapable of differentiating between aesthetic and ethical values, tends +to become a preacher of sonorous nothings, and the actual +moralist-propagandist finds his way into art well greased. No other +people in Christendom produces so vast a crop of tin-horn haruspices. We +have so many Orison Swett Mardens, Martin Tuppers, Edwin Markhams, +Gerald Stanley Lees, Dr. Frank Cranes and Dr. Sylvanus Stalls that their +output is enough to supply the whole planet. We see, too, constantly, +how thin is the barrier separating the chief Anglo-Saxon novelists and +playwrights from the pasture of the platitudinarian. Jones and Pinero +both made their first strikes, not as the artists they undoubtedly are, +but as pinchbeck moralists, moaning over the sad fact that girls are +seduced. Shaw, a highly dexterous dramaturgist, smothers his dramaturgy +in a pifflish iconoclasm that is no more than a disguise for Puritanism. +Bennett and Wells, competent novelists, turn easily from the novel to +the volume of shoddy philosophizing. Kipling, with "Kim" behind him, +becomes a vociferous leader-writer of the _Daily Mail_ school, whooping +a pothouse patriotism, hurling hysterical objurgations at the foe. Even +W. L. George, potentially a novelist of sound consideration, drops his +craft for the jehad of the suffragettes. Doyle, Barrie, Caine, Locke, +Barker, Mrs. Ward, Beresford, Hewlett, Watson, Quiller-Couch--one and +all, high and low, they are tempted by the public demand for sophistry, +the ready market for pills. A Henry Bordeaux, in France, is an +exception; in England he is the rule. The endless thirst to be soothed +with cocksure asseverations, the great mob yearning to be dosed and +comforted, is the undoing, over there, of three imaginative talents out +of five. + +And, in America, of nearly five out of five. Winston Churchill may serve +as an example. He is a literary workman of very decent skill; the native +critics speak of him with invariable respect; his standing within the +craft was shown when he was unanimously chosen first president of the +Authors' League of America. Examine his books in order. They proceed +steadily from studies of human character and destiny, the proper +business of the novelist, to mere outpourings of social and economic +panaceas, the proper business of leader writers, chautauquas +rabble-rousers and hedge politicians. "The Celebrity" and "Richard +Carvel," within their limits, are works of art; "The Inside of the Cup" +is no more than a compendium of paralogy, as silly and smattering as a +speech by William Jennings Bryan or a shocker by Jane Addams. Churchill, +with the late Jack London to bear him company, may stand for a large +class; in its lower ranks are such men as Reginald Wright Kauffman and +Will Levington Comfort. Still more typical of the national taste for +moral purpose and quack philosophy are the professional optimists and +eye-dimmers, with their two grand divisions, the boarding-school +romantics and the Christian Endeavor Society sentimentalists. Of the +former I give you George Barr McCutcheon, Owen Wister, the late Richard +Harding Davis, and a horde of women--most of them now humanely +translated to the moving pictures. Of the latter I give you the fair +authors of the "glad" books, so gigantically popular, so lavishly +praised in the newspapers--with the wraith of the later Howells, the +virtuous, kittenish Howells, floating about in the air above them. No +other country can parallel this literature, either in its copiousness or +in its banality. It is native and peculiar to a civilization which +erects the unshakable certainties of the misinformed and quack-ridden +into a national way of life.... + + +Sec. 3 + +My business, however, is not with the culture of Anglo-Saxondom, but +only with Conrad's place therein. That place is isolated and remote; he +is neither of it nor quite in it. In the midst of a futile meliorism +which deceives the more, the more it soothes, he stands out like some +sinister skeleton at the feast, regarding the festivities with a +flickering and impenetrable grin. "To read him," says Arthur Symons, "is +to shudder on the edge of a gulf, in a silent darkness." There is no +need to be told that he is there almost by accident, that he came in a +chance passerby, a bit uncertain of the door. It was not an artistic +choice that made him write English instead of French; it was a choice +with its roots in considerations far afield. But once made, it concerned +him no further. In his first book he was plainly a stranger, and all +himself; in his last he is a stranger still--strange in his manner of +speech, strange in his view of life, strange, above all, in his glowing +and gorgeous artistry, his enthusiasm for beauty _per se_, his absolute +detachment from that heresy which would make it no more than a servant +to some bald and depressing theory of conduct, some axiom of the +uncomprehending. He is, like Dunsany, a pure artist. His work, as he +once explained, is not to edify, to console, to improve or to encourage, +but simply to get upon paper some shadow of his own eager sense of the +wonder and prodigality of life as men live it in the world, and of its +unfathomable romance and mystery. "My task," he went on, "is, by the +power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, +before all, to make you _see_. That--and no more, and it is +everything."...[6] + +This detachment from all infra-and-ultra-artistic purpose, this +repudiation of the role of propagandist, this avowal of what Nietzsche +was fond of calling innocence, explains the failure of Conrad to fit +into the pigeon-holes so laboriously prepared for him by critics who +must shelve and label or be damned. He is too big for any of them, and +of a shape too strange. He stands clear, not only of all the schools and +factions that obtain in latter-day English fiction, but also of the +whole stream of English literature since the Restoration. He is as +isolated a figure as George Moore, and for much the same reason. Both +are exotics, and both, in a very real sense, are public enemies, for +both war upon the philosophies that caress the herd. Is Conrad the +beyond-Kipling, as the early criticism of him sought to make him? +Nonsense! As well speak of Mark Twain as the beyond-Petroleum V. Nasby +(as, indeed, was actually done). He is not only a finer artist than +Kipling; he is a quite different kind of artist. Kipling, within his +limits, shows a talent of a very high order. He is a craftsman of the +utmost deftness. He gets his effects with almost perfect assurance. +Moreover, there is a poet in him; he knows how to reach the emotions. +But once his stories are stripped down to the bare carcass their +emptiness becomes immediately apparent. The ideas in them are not the +ideas of a reflective and perspicacious man, but simply the ideas of a +mob-orator, a mouther of inanities, a bugler, a school-girl. Reduce any +of them to a simple proposition, and that proposition, in so far as it +is intelligible at all, will be ridiculous. It is precisely here that +Conrad leaps immeasurably ahead. His ideas are not only sound; they are +acute and unusual. They plough down into the sub-strata of human motive +and act. They unearth conditions and considerations that lie concealed +from the superficial glance. They get at the primary reactions. In +particular and above all, they combat the conception of man as a pet and +privy councillor of the gods, working out his own destiny in a sort of +vacuum and constantly illumined by infallible revelations of his duty, +and expose him as he is in fact: an organism infinitely more sensitive +and responsive than other organisms, but still a mere organism in the +end, a brother to the wild things and the protozoa, swayed by the same +inscrutable fortunes, condemned to the same inchoate errors and +irresolutions, and surrounded by the same terror and darkness.... + +But is the Conrad I here describe simply a new variety of moralist, +differing from the general only in the drift of the doctrine he +preaches? Surely not. He is no more a moralist than an atheist is a +theologian. His attitude toward all moral systems and axioms is that of +a skeptic who rejects them unanimously, even including, and perhaps +especially including, those to which, in moments of aesthetic detachment, +he seems to give a formal and resigned sort of assent. It is this +constant falling back upon "I do not know," this incessant conversion of +the easy logic of romance into the harsh and dismaying logic of fact, +that explains his failure to succeed as a popular novelist, despite his +skill at evoking emotion, his towering artistic passion, his power to +tell a thumping tale. He is talked of, he brings forth a mass of +punditic criticism, he becomes in a sense the fashion; but it would be +absurd to say that he has made the same profound impression upon the +great class of normal novel-readers that Arnold Bennett once made, or H. +G. Wells, or William de Morgan in his brief day, or even such +cheap-jacks as Anthony Hope Hawkins and William J. Locke. His show +fascinates, but his philosophy, in the last analysis, is unbearable. And +in particular it is unbearable to women. One rarely meets a woman who, +stripped of affection, shows any genuine enthusiasm for a Conrad book, +or, indeed, any genuine comprehension of it. The feminine mind, which +rules in English fiction, both as producer and as consumer, craves +inevitably a more confident and comforting view of the world than Conrad +has to offer. It seeks, not disillusion, but illusion. It protects +itself against the disquieting questioning of life by pretending that +all the riddles have been solved, that each new sage answers them +afresh, that a few simple principles suffice to dispose of them. Women, +one may say, have to subscribe to absurdities in order to account for +themselves at all; it is the instinct of self-preservation which sends +them to priests, as to other quacks. This is not because they are +unintelligent, but rather because they have that sharp and sure sort of +intelligence which is instinctive, and which passes under the name of +intuition. It teaches them that the taboos which surround them, however +absurd at bottom, nevertheless penalize their courage and curiosity with +unescapable dudgeon, and so they become partisans of the existing order, +and, per corollary, of the existing ethic. They may be menaced by +phantoms, but at all events these phantoms really menace them. A woman +who reacted otherwise than with distrust to such a book as "Victory" +would be as abnormal as a woman who embraced "Jenseits von Gut und Boese" +or "The Inestimable Life of the Great Gargantua." + +As for Conrad, he retaliates by approaching the sex somewhat gingerly. +His women, in the main, are no more than soiled and tattered cards in a +game played by the gods. The effort to erect them into the customary +"sympathetic" heroines of fiction always breaks down under the drum fire +of the plain facts. He sees quite accurately, it seems to me, how +vastly the role of women has been exaggerated, how little they amount to +in the authentic struggle of man. His heroes are moved by avarice, by +ambition, by rebellion, by fear, by that "obscure inner necessity" which +passes for nobility or the sense of duty--never by that puerile passion +which is the mainspring of all masculine acts and aspirations in popular +novels and on the stage. If they yield to amour at all, it is only at +the urging of some more powerful and characteristic impulse, _e.g._, a +fantastic notion of chivalry, as in the case of Heyst, or the thirst for +dominion, as in the case of Kurtz. The one exception is offered by +Razumov--and Razumov is Conrad's picture of a flabby fool, of a +sentimentalist destroyed by his sentimentality. Dreiser has shown much +the same process in Witla and Cowperwood, but he is less free from the +conventional obsession than Conrad; he takes a love affair far more +naively, and hence far more seriously. + +I used to wonder why Conrad never tackled a straight-out story of +adultery under Christianity, the standard matter of all our more +pretentious fiction and drama. I was curious to see what his ethical +agnosticism would make of it. The conclusion I came to at first was that +his failure marked the limitations of his courage--in brief, that he +hesitated to go against the orthodox axioms and assumptions in the +department where they were most powerfully maintained. But it seems to +me now that his abstinence has not been the fruit of timidity, but of +disdain. He has shied at the hypothesis, not at its implications. His +whole work, in truth, is a destructive criticism of the prevailing +notion that such a story is momentous and worth telling. The current +gyneolatry is as far outside his scheme of things as the current program +of rewards and punishments, sins and virtues, causes and effects. He not +only sees clearly that the destiny and soul of man are not moulded by +petty jousts of sex, as the prophets of romantic love would have us +believe; he is so impatient of the fallacy that he puts it as far behind +him as possible, and sets his conflicts amid scenes that it cannot +penetrate, save as a palpable absurdity. Love, in his stories, is either +a feeble phosphorescence or a gigantic grotesquerie. In "Heart of +Darkness," perhaps, we get his typical view of it. Over all the frenzy +and horror of the tale itself floats the irony of the trusting heart +back in Brussels. Here we have his measure of the master sentimentality +of them all.... + + +Sec. 4 + +As for Conrad the literary craftsman, opposing him for the moment to +Conrad the showman of the human comedy, the quality that all who write +about him seem chiefly to mark in him is his scorn of conventional form, +his tendency to approach his story from two directions at once, his +frequent involvement in apparently inextricable snarls of narrative, +sub-narrative and sub-sub-narrative. "Lord Jim," for example, starts out +in the third person, presently swings into an exhaustive psychological +discussion by the mythical Marlow, then goes into a brisk narrative at +second (and sometimes at third) hand, and finally comes to a halt upon +an unresolved dissonance, a half-heard chord of the ninth: "And that's +the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, +unforgiven, and excessively romantic." "Falk" is also a story within a +story; this time the narrator is "one who had not spoken before, a man +over fifty." In "Amy Foster" romance is filtered through the prosaic +soul of a country doctor; it is almost as if a statistician told the +tale of Horatius at the bridge. In "Under Western Eyes" the obfuscation +is achieved by "a teacher of languages," endlessly lamenting his lack of +the "high gifts of imagination and expression." In "Youth" and "Heart +of Darkness" the chronicler and speculator is the shadowy Marlow, a +"cloak to goe inbisabell" for Conrad himself. In "Chance" there are two +separate stories, imperfectly welded together. Elsewhere there are +hesitations, goings back, interpolations, interludes in the Socratic +manner. And almost always there is heaviness in the getting under weigh. +In "Heart of Darkness" we are on the twentieth page before we see the +mouth of the great river, and in "Falk" we are on the twenty-fourth +before we get a glimpse of Falk. "Chance" is nearly half done before the +drift of the action is clearly apparent. In "Almayer's Folly" we are +thrown into the middle of a story, and do not discover its beginning +until we come to "An Outcast of the Islands," a later book. As in +structure, so in detail. Conrad pauses to explain, to speculate, to look +about. Whole chapters concern themselves with detailed discussions of +motives, with exchanges of views, with generalizations abandoned as soon +as they are made. Even the author's own story, "A Personal Record" (in +the English edition, "Some Reminiscences") starts near the end, and then +goes back, halting tortuously, to the beginning. + +In the eyes of orthodox criticism, of course, this is a grave fault. +The Kipling-Wells style of swift, shouldering, button-holing writing has +accustomed readers and critics alike to a straight course and a rapid +tempo. Moreover, it has accustomed them to a forthright certainty and +directness of statement; they expect an author to account for his +characters at once, and on grounds instantly comprehensible. This +omniscience is a part of the prodigality of moral theory that I have +been discussing. An author who knows just what is the matter with the +world may be quite reasonably expected to know just what is the matter +with his hero. Neither sort of assurance, I need not say, is to be found +in Conrad. He is an inquirer, not a law-giver; an experimentalist, not a +doctor. One constantly derives from his stories the notion that he is as +much puzzled by his characters as the reader is--that he, too, is +feeling his way among shadowy evidences. The discoveries that we make, +about Lord Jim, about Nostromo or about Kurtz, come as fortuitously and +as unexpectedly as the discoveries we make about the real figures of our +world. The picture is built up bit by bit; it is never flashed suddenly +and completely as by best-seller calciums; it remains a bit dim at the +end. But in that very dimness, so tantalizing and yet so revealing, lies +two-thirds of Conrad's art, or his craft, or his trick, or whatever you +choose to call it. What he shows us is blurred at the edges, but so is +life itself blurred at the edges. We see least clearly precisely what is +nearest to us, and is hence most real to us. A man may profess to +understand the President of the United States, but he seldom alleges, +even to himself, that he understands his own wife. + +In the character and in its reactions, in the act and in the motive: +always that tremulousness, that groping, that confession of final +bewilderment. "He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart...." +And the cloud enshrouds the inner man as well as the outer, the secret +springs of his being as well as the overt events of his life. "His +meanest creatures," says Arthur Symons, "have in them a touch of honour, +of honesty, or of heroism; his heroes have always some error, weakness, +or mistake, some sin or crime, to redeem." What is Lord Jim, scoundrel +and poltroon or gallant knight? What is Captain MacWhirr, hero or simply +ass? What is Falk, beast or idealist? One leaves "Heart of Darkness" in +that palpitating confusion which is shot through with intense curiosity. +Kurtz is at once the most abominable of rogues and the most fantastic of +dreamers. It is impossible to differentiate between his vision and his +crimes, though all that we look upon as order in the universe stands +between them. In Dreiser's novels there is the same anarchy of +valuations, and it is chiefly responsible for the rage he excites in the +unintelligent. The essential thing about Cowperwood is that he is two +diverse beings at once; a puerile chaser of women and a great artist, a +guinea pig and half a god. The essential thing about Carrie Meeber is +that she remains innocent in the midst of her contaminations, that the +virgin lives on in the kept woman. This is not the art of fiction as it +is conventionally practised and understood. It is not explanation, +labelling, assurance, moralizing. In the cant of newspaper criticism, it +does not "satisfy." But the great artist is never one who satisfies in +that feeble sense; he leaves the business to mountebanks who do it +better. "My purpose," said Ibsen, "is not to answer questions; it is to +ask them." The spectator must bring something with him beyond the mere +faculty of attention. If, coming to Conrad, he cannot, he is at the +wrong door. + + +Sec. 5 + +Conrad's predilection for barbarous scenes and the more bald and +shocking sort of drama has an obviously autobiographical basis. His own +road ran into strange places in the days of his youth. He moved among +men who were menaced by all the terrestrial cruelties, and by the almost +unchecked rivalry and rapacity of their fellow men, without any +appreciable barriers, whether of law, of convention or of +sentimentality, to shield them. The struggle for existence, as he saw +it, was well nigh as purely physical among human beings as among the +carnivora of the jungle. Some of his stories, and among them his very +best, are plainly little more than transcripts of his own experience. He +himself is the enchanted boy of "Youth"; he is the ship-master of "Heart +of Darkness"; he hovers in the background of all the island books and is +visibly present in most of the tales of the sea. + +And what he got out of that early experience was more than a mere body +of reminiscence; it was a scheme of valuations. He came to his writing +years with a sailor's disdain for the trifling hazards and emprises of +market places and drawing rooms, and it shows itself whenever he sets +pen to paper. A conflict, it would seem, can make no impression upon him +save it be colossal. When his men combat, not nature, but other men, +they carry over into the business the gigantic method of sailors +battling with a tempest. "The Secret Agent" and "Under Western Eyes" +fill the dull back streets of London and Geneva with pursuits, homicides +and dynamitings. "Nostromo" is a long record of treacheries, butcheries +and carnalities. "A Point of Honor" is coloured by the senseless, +insatiable ferocity of Gobineau's "Renaissance." "Victory" ends with a +massacre of all the chief personages, a veritable catastrophe of blood. +Whenever he turns from the starker lusts to the pale passions of man +under civilization, Conrad fails. "The Return" is a thoroughly infirm +piece of writing--a second rate magazine story. One concludes at once +that the author himself does not believe in it. "The Inheritors" is +worse; it becomes, after the first few pages, a flaccid artificiality, a +bore. It is impossible to imagine the chief characters of the Conrad +gallery in such scenes. Think of Captain MacWhirr reacting to social +tradition, Lord Jim immersed in the class war, Lena Hermann seduced by +the fashions, Almayer a candidate for office! As well think of +Huckleberry Finn at Harvard, or Tom Jones practising law. + +These things do not interest Conrad, chiefly, I suppose, because he does +not understand them. His concern, one may say, is with the gross anatomy +of passion, not with its histology. He seeks to depict emotion, not in +its ultimate attenuation, but in its fundamental innocence and fury. +Inevitably, his materials are those of what we call melodrama; he is at +one, in the bare substance of his tales, with the manufacturers of the +baldest shockers. But with a difference!--a difference, to wit, of +approach and comprehension, a difference abysmal and revolutionary. He +lifts melodrama to the dignity of an important business, and makes it a +means to an end that the mere shock-monger never dreams of. In itself, +remember, all this up-roar and blood-letting is not incredible, nor even +improbable. The world, for all the pressure of order, is still full of +savage and stupendous conflicts, of murders and debaucheries, of crimes +indescribable and adventures almost unimaginable. One cannot reasonably +ask a novelist to deny them or to gloss over them; all one may demand of +him is that, if he make artistic use of them, he render them +understandable--that he logically account for them, that he give them +plausibility by showing their genesis in intelligible motives and +colourable events. + +The objection to the conventional melodramatist is that he fails to do +this. It is not that his efforts are too florid, but that his causes are +too puny. For all his exuberance of fancy, he seldom shows us a +downright impossible event; what he does constantly show us is an +inadequate and hence unconvincing motive. In a cheap theatre we see a +bad actor, imperfectly disguised as a viscount, bind a shrieking young +woman to the railroad tracks, with an express train approaching. Why +does he do it? The melodramatist offers a double-headed reason, the +first part being that the viscount is an amalgam of Satan and Don Juan +and the second being that the young woman prefers death to dishonour. +Both parts are absurd. Our eyes show us at once that the fellow is far +more the floorwalker, the head barber, the Knight of Pythias than either +the Satan or the Don Juan, and our experience of life tells us that +young women in yellow wigs do not actually rate their virginity so +dearly. But women are undoubtedly done to death in this way--not every +day, perhaps, but now and then. Men bind them, trains run over them, the +newspapers discuss the crime, the pursuit of the felon, the ensuing +jousting of the jurisconsults. Why, then? The true answer, when it is +forthcoming at all, is always much more complex than the melodramatist's +answer. It may be so enormously complex, indeed, as to transcend all the +normal laws of cause and effect. It may be an answer made up largely, or +even wholly, of the fantastic, the astounding, the unearthly reasons of +lunacy. That is the chief, if not the only difference between melodrama +and reality. The events of the two may be, and often are identical. It +is only in their underlying network of causes that they are dissimilar +and incommensurate. + +Here, in brief, you have the point of essential distinction between the +stories of Conrad, a supreme artist in fiction, and the trashy +confections of the literary artisans--_e.g._, Sienkiewicz, Dumas, Lew +Wallace, and their kind. Conrad's materials, at bottom, are almost +identical with those of the artisans. He, too, has his chariot races, +his castaways, his carnivals of blood in the arena. He, too, takes us +through shipwrecks, revolutions, assassinations, gaudy heroisms, +abominable treacheries. But always he illuminates the nude and amazing +event with shafts of light which reveal not only the last detail of its +workings, but also the complex of origins and inducements behind it. +Always, he throws about it a probability which, in the end, becomes +almost inevitability. His "Nostromo," for example, in its externals, is +a mere tale of South American turmoil; its materials are those of +"Soldiers of Fortune." But what a difference in method, in point of +approach, in inner content! Davis was content to show the overt act, +scarcely accounting for it at all, and then only in terms of +conventional romance. Conrad penetrates to the motive concealed in it, +the psychological spring and basis of it, the whole fabric of weakness, +habit and aberration underlying it. The one achieved an agreeable +romance, and an agreeable romance only. The other achieves an +extraordinarily brilliant and incisive study of the Latin-American +temperament--a full length exposure of the perverse passions and +incomprehensible ideals which provoke presumably sane men to pursue one +another like wolves, and of the reactions of that incessant pursuit upon +the men themselves, and upon their primary ideas, and upon the +institutions under which they live. I do not say that Conrad is always +exhaustive in his explanations, or that he is accurate. In the first +case I know that he often is not, in the second case I do not know +whether he is or he isn't. But I do say that, within the scope of his +vision, he is wholly convincing; that the men and women he sets into his +scene show ineluctably vivid and persuasive personality; that the +theories he brings forward to account for their acts are intelligible; +that the effects of those acts, upon actors and immediate spectators +alike, are such as might be reasonably expected to issue; that the final +impression is one of searching and indubitable veracity. One leaves +"Nostromo" with a memory as intense and lucid as that of a real +experience. The thing is not mere photography. It is interpretative +painting at its highest. + +In all his stories you will find this same concern with the inextricable +movement of phenomena and noumena between event and event, this same +curiosity as to first causes and ultimate effects. Sometimes, as in "The +Point of Honor" and "The End of the Tether," he attempts to work out the +obscure genesis, in some chance emotion or experience, of an +extraordinary series of transactions. At other times, as in "Typhoon," +"Youth," "Falk" and "The Shadow Line," his endeavour is to determine the +effect of some gigantic and fortuitous event upon the mind and soul of a +given man. At yet other times, as in "Almayer's Folly," "Lord Jim" and +"Under Western Eyes," it is his aim to show how cause and effect are +intricately commingled, so that it is difficult to separate motive from +consequence, and consequence from motive. But always it is the process +of mind rather than the actual act that interests him. Always he is +trying to penetrate the actor's mask and interpret the actor's frenzy. +It is this concern with the profounder aspects of human nature, this +bold grappling with the deeper and more recondite problems of his art, +that gives him consideration as a first-rate artist. He differs from +the common novelists of his time as a Beethoven differs from a +Mendelssohn. Some of them are quite his equals in technical skill, and a +few of them, notably Bennett and Wells, often show an actual +superiority, but when it comes to that graver business which underlies +all mere virtuosity, he is unmistakably the superior of the whole corps +of them. + +This superiority is only the more vividly revealed by the shop-worn +shoddiness of most of his materials. He takes whatever is nearest to +hand, out of his own rich experience or out of the common store of +romance. He seems to disdain the petty advantages which go with the +invention of novel plots, extravagant characters and unprecedented +snarls of circumstance. All the classical doings of anarchists are to be +found in "The Secret Agent"; one has heard them copiously credited, of +late, to so-called Reds. "Youth," as a story, is no more than an +orthodox sea story, and W. Clark Russell contrived better ones. In +"Chance" we have a stern father at his immemorial tricks. In "Victory" +there are villains worthy of Jack B. Yeats' melodramas of the Spanish +Main. In "Nostromo" we encounter the whole stock company of Richard +Harding Davis and O. Henry. And in "Under Western Eyes" the protagonist +is one who finds his love among the women of his enemies--a situation +at the heart of all the military melodramas ever written. + +But what Conrad makes of that ancient and fly-blown stuff, that rubbish +from the lumber room of the imagination! Consider, for example, "Under +Western Eyes," by no means the best of his stories. The plot is that of +"Shenandoah" and "Held by the Enemy"--but how brilliantly it is endowed +with a new significance, how penetratingly its remotest currents are +followed out, how magnificently it is made to fit into that colossal +panorama of Holy Russia! It is always this background, this complex of +obscure and baffling influences, this drama under the drama, that Conrad +spends his skill upon, and not the obvious commerce of the actual stage. +It is not the special effect that he seeks, but the general effect. It +is not so much man the individual that interests him, as the shadowy +accumulation of traditions, instincts and blind chances which shapes the +individual's destiny. Here, true enough, we have a full-length portrait +of Razumov, glowing with life. But here, far more importantly, we also +have an amazingly meticulous and illuminating study of the Russian +character, with all its confused mingling of Western realism and +Oriental fogginess, its crazy tendency to go shooting off into the +spaces of an incomprehensible metaphysic, its general transcendence of +all that we Celts and Saxons and Latins hold to be true of human motive +and human act. Russia is a world apart: that is the sum and substance of +the tale. In the island stories we have the same elaborate projection of +the East, of its fantastic barbarism, of brooding Asia. And in the sea +stories we have, perhaps for the first time in English fiction, a vast +and adequate picture of the sea, the symbol at once of man's eternal +striving and of his eternal impotence. Here, at last, the colossus has +found its interpreter. There is in "Typhoon" and "The Nigger of the +Narcissus," and, above all, in "The Mirror of the Sea," a poetic +evocation of the sea's stupendous majesty that is unparalleled outside +the ancient sagas. Conrad describes it with a degree of graphic skill +that is superb and incomparable. He challenges at once the pictorial +vigour of Hugo and the aesthetic sensitiveness of Lafcadio Hearn, and +surpasses them both. And beyond this mere dazzling visualization, he +gets into his pictures an overwhelming sense of that vast drama of which +they are no more than the flat, lifeless representation--of that +inexorable and uncompassionate struggle which is life itself. The sea to +him is a living thing, an omnipotent and unfathomable thing, almost a +god. He sees it as the Eternal Enemy, deceitful in its caresses, sudden +in its rages, relentless in its enmities, and forever a mystery. + + +Sec. 6 + +Conrad's first novel, "Almayer's Folly," was printed in 1895. He tells +us in "A Personal Record" that it took him seven years to write +it--seven years of pertinacious effort, of trial and error, of learning +how to write. He was, at this time thirty-eight years old. Seventeen +years before, landing in England to fit himself for the British merchant +service, he had made his first acquaintance with the English language. +The interval had been spent almost continuously at sea--in the Eastern +islands, along the China coast, on the Congo and in the South Atlantic. +That he hesitated between French and English is a story often told, but +he himself is authority for the statement that it is more symbolical +than true. Flaubert, in those days, was his idol, as we know, but the +speech of his daily business won, and English literature reaped the +greatest of all its usufructs from English sea power. To this day there +are marks of his origins in his style. His periods, more than once, have +an inept and foreign smack. In fishing for the right phrase one +sometimes feels that he finds a French phrase, or even a Polish phrase, +and that it loses something by being done into English. + +The credit for discovering "Almayer's Folly," as the publishers say, +belongs to Edward Garnett, then a reader for T. Fisher Unwin. The book +was brought out modestly and seems to have received little attention. +The first edition, it would appear, ran to no more than a thousand +copies; at all events, specimens of it are now very hard to find, and +collectors pay high prices for them. When "An Outcast of the Islands" +followed, a year later, a few alert readers began to take notice of the +author, and one of them was Sir (then Mr.) Hugh Clifford, a former +Governor of the Federated Malay States and himself the author of several +excellent books upon the Malay. Clifford gave Conrad encouragement +privately and talked him up in literary circles, but the majority of +English critics remained unaware of him. After an interval of two years, +during which he struggled between his desire to write and the temptation +to return to the sea, he published "The Nigger of the Narcissus."[7] It +made a fair success of esteem, but still there was no recognition of the +author's true stature. Then followed "Tales of Unrest" and "Lord Jim," +and after them the feeblest of all the Conrad books, "The Inheritors," +written in collaboration with Ford Madox Hueffer. It is easy to see in +this collaboration, and no less in the character of the book, an +indication of irresolution, and perhaps even of downright loss of hope. +But success, in fact, was just around the corner. In 1902 came "Youth," +and straightway Conrad was the lion of literary London. The chorus of +approval that greeted it was almost a roar; all sorts of critics and +reviewers, from H. G. Wells to W. L. Courtney, and from John Galsworthy +to W. Robertson Nicoll, took a hand. Writing home to the _New York +Times_, W. L. Alden reported that he had "not heard one dissenting voice +in regard to the book," but that the praise it received "was unanimous," +and that the newspapers and literary weeklies rivalled one another "in +their efforts to express their admiration for it." + +This benign whooping, however, failed to awaken the enthusiasm of the +mass of novel-readers and brought but meagre orders from the circulating +libraries. "Typhoon" came upon the heels of "Youth," but still the sales +of the Conrad books continued small and the author remained in very +uncomfortable circumstances. Even after four or five years he was still +so poor that he was glad to accept a modest pension from the British +Civil List. This official recognition of his genius, when it came at +last, seems to have impressed the public, characteristically enough, far +more than his books themselves had done, and the foundations were thus +laid for that wider recognition of his genius which now prevails. But +getting him on his legs was slow work, and such friends as Hueffer, +Clifford and Galsworthy had to do a lot of arduous log-rolling. Even +after the splash made by "Youth" his publishing arrangements seem to +have remained somewhat insecure. His first eleven books show six +different imprints; it was not until his twelfth that he settled down to +a publisher. His American editions tell an even stranger story. The +first six of them were brought out by six different publishers; the +first eight by no less than seven. But today he has a regular American +publisher at last, and in England a complete edition of his works is in +progress. + +Thanks to the indefatigable efforts of that American publisher (who +labours for Gene Stratton-Porter and Gerald Stanley Lee in the same +manner) Conrad has been forced upon the public notice in the United +States, and it is the fashion among all who pretend to aesthetic +consciousness to read him, or, at all events, to talk about him. His +books have been brought together in a uniform edition for the newly +intellectual, bound in blue leather, like the "complete library sets" of +Kipling, O. Henry, Guy de Maupassant and Paul de Kock. The more literary +newspapers print his praises; he is hymned by professorial critics as a +prophet of virtue; his genius is certificated by such diverse +authorities as Hildegarde Hawthorne and Louis Joseph Vance; I myself +lately sat on a Conrad Committee, along with Booth Tarkington, David +Belasco, Irvin Cobb, Walter Pritchard Eaton and Hamlin Garland--surely +an astounding posse of _literati_! Moreover, Conrad himself shows a +disposition to reach out for a wider audience. His "Victory," first +published in _Munsey's Magazine_, revealed obvious efforts to be +intelligible to the general. A few more turns of the screw and it might +have gone into the _Saturday Evening Post_, between serials by Harris +Dickson and Rex Beach. + +Meanwhile, in the shadow of this painfully growing celebrity as a +novelist, Conrad takes on consideration as a bibelot, and the dealers in +first editions probably make more profit out of some of his books than +ever he has made himself. His manuscripts are cornered, I believe, by an +eminent collector of literary curiosities in New York, who seems to have +a contract with the novelist to take them as fast as they are +produced--perhaps the only arrangement of the sort in literary history. +His first editions begin to bring higher premiums than those of any +other living author. Considering the fact that the oldest of them is +less than twenty-five years old, they probably set new records for the +trade. Even the latest in date are eagerly sought, and it is not +uncommon to see an English edition of a Conrad book sold at an advance +in New York within a month of its publication.[8] + +As I hint, however, there is not much reason to believe that this +somewhat extravagant fashion is based upon any genuine liking, or any +very widespread understanding. The truth is that, for all the adept +tub-thumping of publishers, Conrad's sales still fall a good deal behind +those of even the most modest of best-seller manufacturers, and that the +respect with which his successive volumes are received is accompanied by +enthusiasm in a relatively narrow circle only. A clan of Conrad fanatics +exists, and surrounding it there is a body of readers who read him +because it is the intellectual thing to do, and who talk of him because +talking of him is expected. But beyond that he seems to make little +impression. When "Victory" was printed in _Munsey's Magazine_ it was a +failure; no other single novel, indeed, contributed more toward the +abandonment of the policy of printing a complete novel in each issue. +The other popular magazines show but small inclination for Conrad +manuscripts. Some time ago his account of a visit to Poland in war-time +was offered on the American market by an English author's agent. At the +start a price of $2,500 was put upon it, but after vainly inviting +buyers for a couple of months it was finally disposed of to a literary +newspaper which seldom spends so much as $2,500, I daresay, for a whole +month's supply of copy. + +In the United States, at least, novelists are made and unmade, not by +critical majorities, but by women, male and female. The art of fiction +among us, as Henry James once said, "is almost exclusively feminine." In +the books of such a man as William Dean Howells it is difficult to find +a single line that is typically and exclusively masculine. One could +easily imagine Edith Wharton, or Mrs. Watts, or even Agnes Repplier, +writing all of them. When a first-rate novelist emerges from obscurity +it is almost always by some fortuitous plucking of the dexter string. +"Sister Carrie," for example, has made a belated commercial success, not +because its dignity as a human document is understood, but because it is +mistaken for a sad tale of amour, not unrelated to "The Woman Thou +Gavest Me" and "Dora Thorne." In Conrad there is no such sweet bait for +the fair and sentimental. The sedentary multipara, curled up in her +boudoir on a rainy afternoon, finds nothing to her taste in his grim +tales. The Conrad philosophy is harsh, unyielding, repellent. The Conrad +heroes are nearly all boors and ruffians. Their very love-making has +something sinister and abhorrent in it; one cannot imagine them in the +moving pictures, played by tailored beauties with long eye-lashes. More, +I venture that the censors would object to them, even disguised as +floor-walkers. Surely that would be a besotted board which would pass +the irregular amours of Lord Jim, the domestic brawls of Almayer, the +revolting devil's mass of Kurtz, Falk's disgusting feeding in the +Southern Ocean, or the butchery on Heyst's island. Stevenson's "Treasure +Island" has been put upon the stage, but "An Outcast of the Islands" +would be as impossible there as "Barry Lyndon" or "La Terre." The world +fails to breed actors for such roles, or stage managers to penetrate +such travails of the spirit, or audiences for the revelation thereof. + +With the Conrad cult, so discreetly nurtured out of a Barabbasian silo, +there arises a considerable Conrad literature, most of it quite +valueless. Huneker's essay, in "Ivory, Apes and Peacocks,"[9] gets +little beyond the obvious; William Lyon Phelps, in "The Advance of the +English Novel," achieves only a meagre judgment;[10] Frederic Taber +Cooper tries to estimate such things as "The Secret Agent" and "Under +Western Eyes" in terms of the Harvard enlightenment;[11] John Galsworthy +wastes himself upon futile comparisons;[12] even Sir Hugh Clifford, for +all his quick insight, makes irrelevant objections to Conrad's +principles of Malay psychology.[13] Who cares? Conrad is his own God, +and creates his own Malay! The best of the existing studies of Conrad, +despite certain sentimentalities arising out of youth and schooling, is +in the book of Wilson Follett, before mentioned. The worst is in the +official biography by Richard Curle,[14] for which Conrad himself +obtained a publisher and upon which his _imprimatur_ may be thus assumed +to lie. If it does, then its absurdities are nothing new, for we all +know what a botch Ibsen made of accounting for himself. But, even so, +the assumption stretches the probabilities more than once. Surely it is +hard to think of Conrad putting "Lord Jim" below "Chance" and "The +Secret Agent" on the ground that it "raises a fierce moral issue." +Nothing, indeed, could be worse nonsense--save it be an American +critic's doctrine that "Conrad denounces pessimism." "Lord Jim" no more +raises a moral issue than "The Titan." It is, if anything, a devastating +exposure of a moral issue. Its villain is almost heroic; its hero, +judged by his peers, is a scoundrel.... + +Hugh Walpole, himself a competent novelist, does far better in his +little volume, "Joseph Conrad."[15] In its brief space he is unable to +examine all of the books in detail, but he at least manages to get +through a careful study of Conrad's method, and his professional skill +and interest make it valuable. + + +Sec. 7 + +There is a notion that judgments of living artists are impossible. They +are bound to be corrupted, we are told, by prejudice, false perspective, +mob emotion, error. The question whether this or that man is great or +small is one which only posterity can answer. A silly begging of the +question, for doesn't posterity also make mistakes? Shakespeare's ghost +has seen two or three posterities, beautifully at odds. Even today, it +must notice a difference in flitting from London to Berlin. The shade of +Milton has been tricked in the same way. So, also, has Johann Sebastian +Bach's. It needed a Mendelssohn to rescue it from Coventry--and now +Mendelssohn himself, once so shining a light, is condemned to the +shadows in his turn. We are not dead yet; we are here, and it is now. +Therefore, let us at least venture, guess, opine. + +My own conviction, sweeping all those reaches of living fiction that I +know, is that Conrad's figure stands out from the field like the Alps +from the Piedmont plain. He not only has no masters in the novel; he has +scarcely a colourable peer. Perhaps Thomas Hardy and Anatole France--old +men both, their work behind them. But who else? James is dead. Meredith +is dead. So is George Moore, though he lingers on. So are all the +Russians of the first rank; Andrieff, Gorki and their like are light +cavalry. In Sudermann, Germany has a writer of short stories of very +high calibre, but where is the German novelist to match Conrad? Clara +Viebig? Thomas Mann? Gustav Frenssen? Arthur Schnitzler? Surely not! As +for the Italians, they are either absurd tear-squeezers or more absurd +harlequins. As for the Spaniards and the Scandinavians, they would pass +for geniuses only in Suburbia. In America, setting aside an odd volume +here and there, one can discern only Dreiser--and of Dreiser's +limitations I shall discourse anon. There remains England. England has +the best second-raters in the world; nowhere else is the general level +of novel writing so high; nowhere else is there a corps of journeyman +novelists comparable to Wells, Bennett, Benson, Walpole, Beresford, +George, Galsworthy, Hichens, De Morgan, Miss Sinclair, Hewlett and +company. They have a prodigious facility; they know how to write; even +the least of them is, at all events, a more competent artisan than, say, +Dickens, or Bulwer-Lytton, or Sienkiewicz, or Zola. But the literary +_grande passion_ is simply not in them. They get nowhere with their +suave and interminable volumes. Their view of the world and its wonders +is narrow and superficial. They are, at bottom, no more than clever +mechanicians. + +As Galsworthy has said, Conrad lifts himself immeasurably above them +all. One might well call him, if the term had not been cheapened into +cant, a cosmic artist. His mind works upon a colossal scale; he conjures +up the general out of the particular. What he sees and describes in his +books is not merely this man's aspiration or that woman's destiny, but +the overwhelming sweep and devastation of universal forces, the great +central drama that is at the heart of all other dramas, the tragic +struggles of the soul of man under the gross stupidity and obscene +joking of the gods. "In the novels of Conrad," says Galsworthy, "nature +is first, man is second." But not a mute, a docile second! He may think, +as Walpole argues, that "life is too strong, too clever and too +remorseless for the sons of men," but he does not think that they are +too weak and poor in spirit to challenge it. It is the challenging that +engrosses him, and enchants him, and raises up the magic of his wonder. +It is as futile, in the end, as Hamlet's or Faust's--but still a gallant +and a gorgeous adventure, a game uproariously worth the playing, an +enterprise "inscrutable ... and excessively romantic."... + +If you want to get his measure, read "Youth" or "Falk" or "Heart of +Darkness," and then try to read the best of Kipling. I think you will +come to some understanding, by that simple experiment, of the difference +between an adroit artisan's bag of tricks and the lofty sincerity and +passion of a first-rate artist. + +FOOTNOTES: + +[1] Joseph Conrad: A short study of his intellectual and emotional +attitude toward his work and of the chief characteristics of his novels, +by Wilson Follett; New York, Doubleday, Page & Co. (1915). + +[2] The Advance of the English Novel. New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1916, +p. 215. + +[3] Conrad, in the _Forum_, May, 1915. + +[4] New York and London. G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1907. + +[5] The Intelligence of Woman. Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1916, p. +6-7. + +[6] In _The New Review_, Dec., 1897. + +[7] Printed in the United States as Children of the Sea, but now +restored to its original title. + +[8] Here are some actual prices from booksellers' catalogues: + + 1914 1916 1920 + +Almayer's Folly (1895) $12. $24. $40. +An Outcast of the Islands (1896) 11.50 20. 35. +The Nigger of the Narcissus (1898) 7.50 20. 35. +Tales of Unrest (1898) 12.50 20. 35. +Lord Jim (1900) 7.50 22.50 25. +The Inheritors (1901) 12. 20. 30. +Youth (1902) 5. 7.50 25. +Typhoon (1903) 4. 5.50 16. +Romance (1903) 5. 7.50 9. +Nostromo (1904) 2.50 4.50 7.50 +The Mirror of the Sea (1906) 5. 11. 15. +A Set of Six (1908) 3. 7.50 10. +Under Western Eyes (1911) 4.50 4.50 6. +Some Reminiscences (1912) 4.50 9. 15. +Chance (1913) 2. 5. 15. +Victory (1915) 2. 2.50 4.25 + +[9] New York, Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1915, pp. 1-21. + +[10] New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1916, pp. 192-217. + +[11] Some English Story Tellers: A Book of the Younger Novelists; New +York, Henry Holt & Co., 1912, pp. 1-30. + +[12] A Disquisition on Conrad, _Fortnightly Review_, April, 1908. + +[13] The Genius of Mr. Joseph Conrad, _North American Review_, June, +1904. + +[14] Joseph Conrad: A Study; New York, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1914. + +[15] Joseph Conrad; London, Nisbet & Co. (1916). + + + + +II + +THEODORE DREISER + + +Sec. 1 + +Out of the desert of American fictioneering, so populous and yet so +dreary, Dreiser stands up--a phenomenon unescapably visible, but +disconcertingly hard to explain. What forces combined to produce him in +the first place, and how has he managed to hold out so long against the +prevailing blasts--of disheartening misunderstanding and +misrepresentation, of Puritan suspicion and opposition, of artistic +isolation, of commercial seduction? There is something downright heroic +in the way the man has held his narrow and perilous ground, disdaining +all compromise, unmoved by the cheap success that lies so inviting +around the corner. He has faced, in his day, almost every form of attack +that a serious artist can conceivably encounter, and yet all of them +together have scarcely budged him an inch. He still plods along in the +laborious, cheerless way he first marked out for himself; he is quite as +undaunted by baited praise as by bludgeoning, malignant abuse; his later +novels are, if anything, more unyieldingly dreiserian than his +earliest. As one who has long sought to entice him in this direction or +that, fatuously presuming to instruct him in what would improve him and +profit him, I may well bear a reluctant and resigned sort of testimony +to his gigantic steadfastness. It is almost as if any change in his +manner, any concession to what is usual and esteemed, any amelioration +of his blind, relentless exercises of _force majeure_, were a physical +impossibility. One feels him at last to be authentically no more than a +helpless instrument (or victim) of that inchoate flow of forces which he +himself is so fond of depicting as at once the answer to the riddle of +life, and a riddle ten times more vexing and accursed. + +And his origins, as I say, are quite as mysterious as his motive power. +To fit him into the unrolling chart of American, or even of English +fiction is extremely difficult. Save one thinks of H. B. Fuller (whose +"With the Procession" and "The Cliff-Dwellers" are still remembered by +Huneker, but by whom else?[16]), he seems to have had no fore-runner +among us, and for all the discussion of him that goes on, he has few +avowed disciples, and none of them gets within miles of him. One catches +echoes of him, perhaps, in Willa Sibert Cather, in Mary S. Watts, in +David Graham Phillips, in Sherwood Anderson and in Joseph Medill +Patterson, but, after all, they are no more than echoes. In Robert +Herrick the thing descends to a feeble parody; in imitators further +removed to sheer burlesque. All the latter-day American novelists of +consideration are vastly more facile than Dreiser in their philosophy, +as they are in their style. In the fact, perhaps, lies the measure of +their difference. What they lack, great and small, is the gesture of +pity, the note of awe, the profound sense of wonder--in a phrase, that +"soberness of mind" which William Lyon Phelps sees as the hallmark of +Conrad and Hardy, and which even the most stupid cannot escape in +Dreiser. The normal American novel, even in its most serious forms, +takes colour from the national cocksureness and superficiality. It runs +monotonously to ready explanations, a somewhat infantile smugness and +hopefulness, a habit of reducing the unknowable to terms of the not +worth knowing. What it cannot explain away with ready formulae, as in +the later Winston Churchill, it snickers over as scarcely worth +explaining at all, as in the later Howells. Such a brave and tragic +book as "Ethan Frome" is so rare as to be almost singular, even with +Mrs. Wharton. There is, I daresay, not much market for that sort of +thing. In the arts, as in the concerns of everyday, the American seeks +escape from the insoluble by pretending that it is solved. A comfortable +phrase is what he craves beyond all things--and comfortable phrases are +surely not to be sought in Dreiser's stock. + +I have heard argument that he is a follower of Frank Norris, and two or +three facts lend it a specious probability. "McTeague" was printed in +1899; "Sister Carrie" a year later. Moreover, Norris was the first to +see the merit of the latter book, and he fought a gallant fight, as +literary advisor to Doubleday, Page & Co., against its suppression after +it was in type. But this theory runs aground upon two circumstances, the +first being that Dreiser did not actually read "McTeague," nor, indeed, +grow aware of Norris, until after "Sister Carrie" was completed, and the +other being that his development, once he began to write other books, +was along paths far distant from those pursued by Norris himself. +Dreiser, in truth, was a bigger man than Norris from the start; it is to +the latter's unending honour that he recognized the fact instanter, and +yet did all he could to help his rival. It is imaginable, of course, +that Norris, living fifteen years longer, might have overtaken Dreiser, +and even surpassed him; one finds an arrow pointing that way in +"Vandover and the Brute" (not printed until 1914). But it swings sharply +around in "The Epic of the Wheat." In the second volume of that +incomplete trilogy, "The Pit," there is an obvious concession to the +popular taste in romance; the thing is so frankly written down, indeed, +that a play has been made of it, and Broadway has applauded it. And in +"The Octopus," despite some excellent writing, there is a descent to a +mysticism so fantastic and preposterous that it quickly passes beyond +serious consideration. Norris, in his day, swung even lower--for +example, in "A Man's Woman" and in some of his short stories. He was a +pioneer, perhaps only half sure of the way he wanted to go, and the evil +lures of popular success lay all about him. It is no wonder that he +sometimes seemed to lose his direction. + +Emile Zola is another literary father whose paternity grows dubious on +examination. I once printed an article exposing what seemed to me to be +a Zolaesque attitude of mind, and even some trace of the actual Zola +manner, in "Jennie Gerhardt"; there came from Dreiser the news that he +had never read a line of Zola, and knew nothing about his novels. Not a +complete answer, of course; the influence might have been exerted at +second hand. But through whom? I confess that I am unable to name a +likely medium. The effects of Zola upon Anglo-Saxon fiction have been +almost _nil_; his only avowed disciple, George Moore, has long since +recanted and reformed; he has scarcely rippled the prevailing +romanticism.... Thomas Hardy? Here, I daresay, we strike a better scent. +There are many obvious likenesses between "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" +and "Jennie Gerhardt" and again between "Jude the Obscure" and "Sister +Carrie." All four stories deal penetratingly and poignantly with the +essential tragedy of women; all disdain the petty, specious explanations +of popular fiction; in each one finds a poetical and melancholy beauty. +Moreover, Dreiser himself confesses to an enchanted discovery of Hardy +in 1896, three years before "Sister Carrie" was begun. But it is easy to +push such a fact too hard, and to search for likenesses and parallels +that are really not there. The truth is that Dreiser's points of contact +with Hardy might be easily matched by many striking points of +difference, and that the fundamental ideas in their novels, despite a +common sympathy, are anything but identical. Nor does one apprehend any +ponderable result of Dreiser's youthful enthusiasm for Balzac, which +antedated his discovery of Hardy by two years. He got from both men a +sense of the scope and dignity of the novel; they taught him that a +story might be a good one, and yet considerably more than a story; they +showed him the essential drama of the commonplace. But that they had +more influence in forming his point of view, or even in shaping his +technique, than any one of half a dozen other gods of those young +days--this I scarcely find. In the structure of his novels, and in their +manner of approach to life no less, they call up the work of Dostoyevsky +and Turgenev far more than the work of either of these men--but of all +the Russians save Tolstoi (as of Flaubert) Dreiser himself tells us that +he was ignorant until ten years after "Sister Carrie." In his days of +preparation, indeed, his reading was so copious and so disorderly that +antagonistic influences must have well-nigh neutralized one another, and +so left the curious youngster to work out his own method and his own +philosophy. Stevenson went down with Balzac, Poe with Hardy, Dumas +_fils_ with Tolstoi. There were even months of delight in Sienkiewicz, +Lew Wallace and E. P. Roe! The whole repertory of the pedagogues had +been fought through in school and college: Dickens, Thackeray, +Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Kingsley, Scott. Only Irving and +Hawthorne seem to have made deep impressions. "I used to lie under a +tree," says Dreiser, "and read 'Twice Told Tales' by the hour. I thought +'The Alhambra' was a perfect creation, and I still have a lingering +affection for it." Add Bret Harte, George Ebers, William Dean Howells, +Oliver Wendell Holmes, and you have a literary stew indeed!... But for +all its bubbling I see a far more potent influence in the chance +discovery of Spencer and Huxley at twenty-three--the year of choosing! +Who, indeed, will ever measure the effect of those two giants upon the +young men of that era--Spencer with his inordinate meticulousness, his +relentless pursuit of facts, his overpowering syllogisms, and Huxley +with his devastating agnosticism, his insatiable questionings of the old +axioms, above all, his brilliant style? Huxley, it would appear, has +been condemned to the scientific hulks, along with bores innumerable and +unspeakable; one looks in vain for any appreciation of him in treatises +on beautiful letters.[17] And yet the man was a superb artist in works, +a master-writer even more than a master-biologist, one of the few truly +great stylists that England has produced since the time of Anne. One can +easily imagine the effect of two such vigorous and intriguing minds upon +a youth groping about for self-understanding and self-expression. They +swept him clean, he tells us, of the lingering faith of his boyhood--a +mediaeval, Rhenish Catholicism;--more, they filled him with a new and +eager curiosity, an intense interest in the life that lay about him, a +desire to seek out its hidden workings and underlying causes. A young +man set afire by Huxley might perhaps make a very bad novelist, but it +is a certainty that he could never make a sentimental and superficial +one. There is no need to go further than this single moving adventure to +find the genesis of Dreiser's disdain of the current platitudes, his +sense of life as a complex biological phenomenon, only dimly +comprehended, and his tenacious way of thinking things out, and of +holding to what he finds good. Ah, that he had learned from Huxley, not +only how to inquire, but also how to report! That he had picked up a +talent for that dazzling style, so sweet to the ear, so damnably +persuasive, so crystal-clear! + +But the more one examines Dreiser, either as writer or as theorist of +man, the more his essential isolation becomes apparent. He got a habit +of mind from Huxley, but he completely missed Huxley's habit of writing. +He got a view of woman from Hardy, but he soon changed it out of all +resemblance. He got a certain fine ambition and gusto out of Balzac, but +all that was French and characteristic he left behind. So with Zola, +Howells, Tolstoi and the rest. The tracing of likenesses quickly becomes +rabbinism, almost cabalism. The differences are huge and sprout up in +all directions. Nor do I see anything save a flaming up of colonial +passion in the current efforts to fit him into a German frame, and make +him an agent of Prussian frightfulness in letters. Such childish gabble +one looks for in the New York _Times_, and there is where one actually +finds it. Even the literary monthlies have stood clear of it; it is +important only as material for that treatise upon the patrioteer and his +bawling which remains to be written. The name of the man, true enough, +is obviously Germanic, and he has told us himself, in "A Traveler at +Forty," how he sought out and found the tombs of his ancestors in some +little town of the Rhine country. There are more of these genealogical +revelations in "A Hoosier Holiday," but they show a Rhenish strain that +was already running thin in boyhood. No one, indeed, who reads a +Dreiser novel can fail to see the gap separating the author from these +half-forgotten forbears. He shows even less of German influence than of +English influence. + +There is, as a matter of fact, little in modern German fiction that is +intelligibly comparable to "Jennie Gerhardt" and "The Titan," either as +a study of man or as a work of art. The naturalistic movement of the +eighties was launched by men whose eyes were upon the theatre, and it is +in that field that nine-tenths of its force has been spent. "German +naturalism," says George Madison Priest, quoting Gotthold Klee's +"Grunzuege der deutschen Literaturgeschichte" "created a new type only in +the drama."[18] True enough, it has also produced occasional novels, and +some of them are respectable. Gustav Frenssen's "Joern Uhl" is a +specimen: it has been done into English. Another is Clara Viebig's "Das +taegliche Brot," which Ludwig Lewisohn compares to George Moore's "Esther +Waters." Yet another is Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks." But it would be +absurd to cite these works as evidences of a national quality, and +doubly absurd to think of them as inspiring such books as "Jennie +Gerhardt" and "The Titan," which excel them in everything save +workmanship. The case of Mann reveals a tendency that is visible in +nearly all of his contemporaries. Starting out as an agnostic realist +not unlike the Arnold Bennett of "The Old Wives' Tale," he has gradually +taken on a hesitating sort of romanticism, and in one of his later +books, "Koenigliche Hoheit" (in English, "Royal Highness") he ends upon a +note of sentimentalism borrowed from Wagner's "Ring." Fraeulein Viebig +has also succumbed to banal and extra-artistic purposes. Her "Die Wacht +am Rhein," for all its merits in detail, is, at bottom, no more than an +eloquent hymn to patriotism--a theme which almost always baffles +novelists. As for Frenssen, he is a parson by trade, and carries over +into the novel a good deal of the windy moralizing of the pulpit. All of +these German naturalists--and they are the only German novelists worth +considering--share the weakness of Zola, their _Stammvater_. They, too, +fall into the morass that engulfed "Fecondite," and make sentimental +propaganda. + +I go into this matter in detail, not because it is intrinsically of any +moment, but because the effort to depict Dreiser as a secret agent of +the Wilhelmstrasse, told off to inject subtle doses of _Kultur_ into a +naive and pious people, has taken on the proportions of an organized +movement. The same critical imbecility which detects naught save a Tom +cat in Frank Cowperwood can find naught save an abhorrent foreigner in +Cowperwood's creator. The truth is that the trembling patriots of +letters, male and female, are simply at their old game of seeing a man +under the bed. Dreiser, in fact, is densely ignorant of German +literature, as he is of the better part of French literature, and of +much of English literature. He did not even read Hauptmann until after +"Jennie Gerhardt" had been written, and such typical German moderns as +Ludwig Thoma, Otto Julius Bierbaum and Richard Dehmel remain as strange +to him as Heliogabalus. + + +Sec. 2 + +In his manner, as opposed to his matter, he is more the Teuton, for he +shows all of the racial patience and pertinacity and all of the racial +lack of humour. Writing a novel is as solemn a business to him as +trimming a beard is to a German barber. He blasts his way through his +interminable stories by something not unlike main strength; his writing, +one feels, often takes on the character of an actual siege operation, +with tunnellings, drum fire, assaults in close order and hand-to-hand +fighting. Once, seeking an analogy, I called him the Hindenburg of the +novel. If it holds, then "The 'Genius'" is his Poland. The field of +action bears the aspect, at the end, of a hostile province meticulously +brought under the yoke, with every road and lane explored to its +beginning, and every crossroads village laboriously taken, inventoried +and policed. Here is the very negation of Gallic lightness and +intuition, and of all other forms of impressionism as well. Here is no +series of illuminating flashes, but a gradual bathing of the whole scene +with white light, so that every detail stands out. + +And many of those details, of course, are trivial; even irritating. They +do not help the picture; they muddle and obscure it; one wonders +impatiently what their meaning is, and what the purpose may be of +revealing them with such a precise, portentous air.... Turn to page 703 +of "The 'Genius.'" By the time one gets there, one has hewn and hacked +one's way through 702 large pages of fine print--97 long chapters, more +than 250,000 words. And yet, at this hurried and impatient point, with +the _coda_ already begun, Dreiser halts the whole narrative to explain +the origin, nature and inner meaning of Christian Science, and to make +us privy to a lot of chatty stuff about Mrs. Althea Jones, a +professional healer, and to supply us with detailed plans and +specifications of the apartment house in which she lives, works her +tawdry miracles, and has her being. Here, in sober summary, are the +particulars: + + + 1. That the house is "of conventional design." + + 2. That there is "a spacious areaway" between its two wings. + + 3. That these wings are "of cream-coloured pressed brick." + + 4. That the entrance between them is "protected by a handsome + wrought-iron door." + + 5. That to either side of this door is "an electric lamp support of + handsome design." + + 6. That in each of these lamp supports there are "lovely + cream-coloured globes, shedding a soft lustre." + + 7. That inside is "the usual lobby." + + 8. That in the lobby is "the usual elevator." + + 9. That in the elevator is the usual "uniformed negro elevator + man." + + 10. That this negro elevator man (name not given) is "indifferent + and impertinent." + + 11. That a telephone switchboard is also in the lobby. + + 12. That the building is seven stories in height. + + +In "The Financier" there is the same exasperating rolling up of +irrelevant facts. The court proceedings in the trial of Cowperwood are +given with all the exactness of a parliamentary report in the London +_Times_. The speeches of the opposing counsel are set down nearly in +full, and with them the remarks of the judge, and after that the opinion +of the Appellate Court on appeal, with the dissenting opinions as a sort +of appendix. In "Sister Carrie" the thing is less savagely carried out, +but that is not Dreiser's fault, for the manuscript was revised by some +anonymous hand, and the printed version is but little more than half the +length of the original. In "The Titan" and "Jennie Gerhardt" no such +brake upon exuberance is visible; both books are crammed with details +that serve no purpose, and are as flat as ditch-water. Even in the two +volumes of personal record, "A Traveler at Forty" and "A Hoosier +Holiday," there is the same furious accumulation of trivialities. +Consider the former. It is without structure, without selection, without +reticence. One arises from it as from a great babbling, half drunken. On +the one hand the author fills a long and gloomy chapter with the story +of the Borgias, apparently under the impression that it is news, and on +the other hand he enters into intimate and inconsequential confidences +about all the persons he meets en route, sparing neither the innocent +nor the obscure. The children of his English host at Bridgely Level +strike him as fantastic little creatures, even as a bit uncanny--and he +duly sets it down. He meets an Englishman on a French train who pleases +him much, and the two become good friends and see Rome together, but the +fellow's wife is "obstreperous" and "haughty in her manner" and so +"loud-spoken in her opinions" that she is "really offensive"--and down +it goes. He makes an impression on a Mlle. Marcelle in Paris, and she +accompanies him from Monte Carlo to Ventimiglia, and there gives him a +parting kiss and whispers, "_Avril-Fontainebleau_"--and lo, this sweet +one is duly spread upon the minutes. He permits himself to be arrested +by a fair privateer in Piccadilly, and goes with her to one of the dens +of sin that suffragettes see in their nightmares, and cross-examines her +at length regarding her ancestry, her professional ethics and ideals, +and her earnings at her dismal craft--and into the book goes a full +report of the proceedings. He is entertained by an eminent Dutch jurist +in Amsterdam--and upon the pages of the chronicle it appears that the +gentleman is "waxy" and "a little pedantic," and that he is probably the +sort of "thin, delicate, well barbered" professor that Ibsen had in mind +when he cast about for a husband for the daughter of General Gabler. + +Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practises +it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down +of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it +all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by +his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers. A Dreiser novel, +at least of the later canon, cannot be read as other novels are read--on +a winter evening or summer afternoon, between meal and meal, travelling +from New York to Boston. It demands the attention for almost a week, and +uses up the faculties for a month. If, reading "The 'Genius,'" one were +to become engrossed in the fabulous manner described in the publishers' +advertisements, and so find oneself unable to put it down and go to bed +before the end, one would get no sleep for three days and three nights. + +Worse, there are no charms of style to mitigate the rigours of these +vast steppes and pampas of narration. Joseph Joubert's saying that +"words should stand out well from the paper" is quite incomprehensible +to Dreiser; he never imitates Flaubert by writing for "_la respiration +et l'oreille_." There is no painful groping for the inevitable word, or +for what Walter Pater called "the gipsy phrase"; the common, even the +commonplace, coin of speech is good enough. On the first page of "Jennie +Gerhardt" one encounters "frank, open countenance," "diffident manner," +"helpless poor," "untutored mind," "honest necessity," and half a dozen +other stand-bys of the second-rate newspaper reporter. In "Sister +Carrie" one finds "high noon," "hurrying throng," "unassuming +restaurant," "dainty slippers," "high-strung nature," and "cool, +calculating world"--all on a few pages. Carrie's sister, Minnie Hanson, +"gets" the supper. Hanson himself is "wrapped up" in his child. Carrie +decides to enter Storm and King's office, "no matter what." In "The +Titan" the word "trig" is worked to death; it takes on, toward the end, +the character of a banal and preposterous refrain. In the other books +one encounters mates for it--words made to do duty in as many senses as +the American verb "to fix" or the journalistic "to secure."... + +I often wonder if Dreiser gets anything properly describable as pleasure +out of this dogged accumulation of threadbare, undistinguished, +uninspiring nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, participles and +conjunctions. To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies--the man who +searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a +thing above the thing said--there is in writing the constant joy of +sudden discovery, of happy accident. A phrase springs up full blown, +sweet and caressing. But what joy can there be in rolling up sentences +that have no more life and beauty in them, intrinsically, than so many +election bulletins? Where is the thrill in the manufacture of such a +paragraph as that in which Mrs. Althea Jones' sordid habitat is +described with such inexorable particularity? Or in the laborious +confection of such stuff as this, from Book I, Chapter IV, of "The +'Genius'"?: + + + The city of Chicago--who shall portray it! This vast ruck of life + that had sprung suddenly into existence upon the dank marshes of a + lake shore! + + +Or this from the epilogue to "The Financier": + + + There is a certain fish whose scientific name is _Mycteroperca + Bonaci_, and whose common name is Black Grouper, which is of + considerable value as an afterthought in this connection, and which + deserves much to be better known. It is a healthy creature, growing + quite regularly to a weight of two hundred and fifty pounds, and + living a comfortable, lengthy existence because of its very + remarkable ability to adapt itself to conditions.... + + +Or this from his pamphlet, "Life, Art and America":[19] + + + Alas, alas! for art in America. It has a hard stubby row to hoe. + + +But I offer no more examples. Every reader of the Dreiser novels must +cherish astounding specimens--of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of +whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many +lumps of sodium hyposulphite. Here and there, as in parts of "The Titan" +and again in parts of "A Hoosier Holiday," an evil conscience seems to +haunt him and he gives hard striving to his manner, and more than once +there emerges something that is almost graceful. But a backsliding +always follows this phosphorescence of reform. "The 'Genius,'" coming +after "The Titan," marks the high tide of his bad writing. There are +passages in it so clumsy, so inept, so irritating that they seem almost +unbelievable; nothing worse is to be found in the newspapers. Nor is +there any compensatory deftness in structure, or solidity of design, to +make up for this carelessness in detail. The well-made novel, of course, +can be as hollow as the well-made play of Scribe--but let us at least +have a beginning, a middle and an end! Such a story as "The 'Genius'" is +as gross and shapeless as Bruennhilde. It billows and bulges out like a +cloud of smoke, and its internal organization is almost as vague. There +are episodes that, with a few chapters added, would make very +respectable novels. There are chapters that need but a touch or two to +be excellent short stories. The thing rambles, staggers, trips, heaves, +pitches, struggles, totters, wavers, halts, turns aside, trembles on the +edge of collapse. More than once it seems to be foundering, both in the +equine and in the maritime senses. The tale has been heard of a tree so +tall that it took two men to see to the top of it. Here is a novel so +brobdingnagian that a single reader can scarcely read his way through +it.... + + +Sec. 3 + +Of the general ideas which lie at the bottom of all of Dreiser's work it +is impossible to be in ignorance, for he has exposed them at length in +"A Hoosier Holiday" and summarized them in "Life, Art and America." In +their main outlines they are not unlike the fundamental assumptions of +Joseph Conrad. Both novelists see human existence as a seeking without a +finding; both reject the prevailing interpretations of its meaning and +mechanism; both take refuge in "I do not know." Put "A Hoosier Holiday" +beside Conrad's "A Personal Record," and you will come upon parallels +from end to end. Or better still, put it beside Hugh Walpole's "Joseph +Conrad," in which the Conradean metaphysic is condensed from the novels +even better than Conrad has done it himself: at once you will see how +the two novelists, each a worker in the elemental emotions, each a rebel +against the current assurance and superficiality, each an alien to his +place and time, touch each other in a hundred ways. + +"Conrad," says Walpole, "is of the firm and resolute conviction that +life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of +men." And then, in amplification: "It is as though, from some high +window, looking down, he were able to watch some shore, from whose +security men were forever launching little cockleshell boats upon a +limitless and angry sea.... From his height he can follow their +fortunes, their brave struggles, their fortitude to the very end. He +admires their courage, the simplicity of their faith, but his irony +springs from his knowledge of the inevitable end."... + +Substitute the name of Dreiser for that of Conrad, and you will have to +change scarcely a word. Perhaps one, to wit, "clever." I suspect that +Dreiser, writing so of his own creed, would be tempted to make it +"stupid," or, at all events, "unintelligible." The struggle of man, as +he sees it, is more than impotent; it is gratuitous and purposeless. +There is, to his eye, no grand ingenuity, no skilful adaptation of means +to end, no moral (or even dramatic) plan in the order of the universe. +He can get out of it only a sense of profound and inexplicable disorder. +The waves which batter the cockleshells change their direction at every +instant. Their navigation is a vast adventure, but intolerably +fortuitous and inept--a voyage without chart, compass, sun or stars.... + +So at bottom. But to look into the blackness steadily, of course, is +almost beyond the endurance of man. In the very moment that its +impenetrability is grasped the imagination begins attacking it with pale +beams of false light. All religions, I daresay, are thus projected from +the questioning soul of man, and not only all religious, but also all +great agnosticisms. Nietzsche, shrinking from the horror of that abyss +of negation, revived the Pythagorean concept of _der ewigen +Wiederkunft_--a vain and blood-curdling sort of comfort. To it, after a +while, he added explanations almost Christian--a whole repertoire of +whys and wherefores, aims and goals, aspirations and significances. The +late Mark Twain, in an unpublished work, toyed with an equally daring +idea: that men are to some unimaginably vast and incomprehensible Being +what the unicellular organisms of his body are to man, and so on _ad +infinitum_. Dreiser occasionally inclines to much the same hypothesis; +he likens the endless reactions going on in the world we know, the +myriadal creation, collision and destruction of entities, to the slow +accumulation and organization of cells _in utero_. He would make us +specks in the insentient embryo of some gigantic Presence whose form is +still unimaginable and whose birth must wait for Eons and Eons. Again, +he turns to something not easily distinguishable from philosophical +idealism, whether out of Berkeley or Fichte it is hard to make out--that +is, he would interpret the whole phenomenon of life as no more than an +appearance, a nightmare of some unseen sleeper or of men themselves, an +"uncanny blur of nothingness"--in Euripides' phrase, "a song sung by an +idiot, dancing down the wind." Yet again, he talks vaguely of the +intricate polyphony of a cosmic orchestra, cacophonous to our dull ears. +Finally, he puts the observed into the ordered, reading a purpose in the +displayed event: "life was intended to sting and hurt".... But these are +only gropings, and not to be read too critically. From speculations and +explanations he always returns, Conrad-like, to the bald fact: to "the +spectacle and stress of life." All he can make out clearly is "a vast +compulsion which has nothing to do with the individual desires or tastes +or impulses of individuals." That compulsion springs "from the settling +processes of forces which we do not in the least understand, over which +we have no control, and in whose grip we are as grains of dust or sand, +blown hither and thither, for what purpose we cannot even suspect."[20] +Man is not only doomed to defeat, but denied any glimpse or +understanding of his antagonist. Here we come upon an agnosticism that +has almost got beyond curiosity. What good would it do us, asks Dreiser, +to know? In our ignorance and helplessness, we may at least get a +slave's consolation out of cursing the unknown gods. Suppose we saw them +striving blindly, too, and pitied them?... + +But, as I say, this scepticism is often tempered by guesses at a +possibly hidden truth, and the confession that this truth may exist +reveals the practical unworkableness of the unconditioned system, at +least for Dreiser. Conrad is far more resolute, and it is easy to see +why. He is, by birth and training, an aristocrat. He has the gift of +emotional detachment. The lures of facile doctrine do not move him. In +his irony there is a disdain which plays about even the ironist himself. +Dreiser is a product of far different forces and traditions, and is +capable of no such escapement. Struggle as he may, and fume and protest +as he may, he can no more shake off the chains of his intellectual and +cultural heritage than he can change the shape of his nose. What that +heritage is you may find out in detail by reading "A Hoosier Holiday," +or in summary by glancing at the first few pages of "Life, Art and +America." Briefly described, it is the burden of a believing mind, a +moral attitude, a lingering superstition. One-half of the man's brain, +so to speak, wars with the other half. He is intelligent, he is +thoughtful, he is a sound artist--but there come moments when a dead +hand falls upon him, and he is once more the Indiana peasant, snuffing +absurdly over imbecile sentimentalities, giving a grave ear to +quackeries, snorting and eye-rolling with the best of them. One +generation spans too short a time to free the soul of man. Nietzsche, to +the end of his days, remained a Prussian pastor's son, and hence +two-thirds a Puritan; he erected his war upon holiness, toward the end, +into a sort of holy war. Kipling, the grandson of a Methodist preacher, +reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and its +ribaldries pass away and he falls back upon his fundamentals. And that +other English novelist who springs from the servants' hall--let us not +be surprised or blame him if he sometimes writes like a bounder. + +The truth about Dreiser is that he is still in the transition stage +between Christian Endeavour and civilization, between Warsaw, Indiana +and the Socratic grove, between being a good American and being a free +man, and so he sometimes vacillates perilously between a moral +sentimentalism and a somewhat extravagant revolt. "The 'Genius,'" on +the one hand, is almost a tract for rectitude, a Warning to the Young; +its motto might be _Scheut die Dirnen_! And on the other hand, it is +full of a laborious truculence that can only be explained by imagining +the author as heroically determined to prove that he is a plain-spoken +fellow and his own man, let the chips fall where they may. So, in spots, +in "The Financier" and "The Titan," both of them far better books. There +is an almost moral frenzy to expose and riddle what passes for morality +among the stupid. The isolation of irony is never reached; the man is +still evangelical; his ideas are still novelties to him; he is as +solemnly absurd in some of his floutings of the Code Americain as he is +in his respect for Bouguereau, or in his flirtings with the New Thought, +or in his naive belief in the importance of novel-writing. Somewhere or +other I have called all this the Greenwich Village complex. It is not +genuine artists, serving beauty reverently and proudly, who herd in +those cockroached cellars and bawl for art; it is a mob of half-educated +yokels and cockneys to whom the very idea of art is still novel, and +intoxicating--and more than a little bawdy. + +Not that Dreiser actually belongs to this ragamuffin company. Far from +it, indeed. There is in him, hidden deep-down, a great instinctive +artist, and hence the makings of an aristocrat. In his muddled way, +held back by the manacles of his race and time, and his steps made +uncertain by a guiding theory which too often eludes his own +comprehension, he yet manages to produce works of art of unquestionable +beauty and authority, and to interpret life in a manner that is poignant +and illuminating. There is vastly more intuition in him than +intellectualism; his talent is essentially feminine, as Conrad's is +masculine; his ideas always seem to be deduced from his feelings. The +view of life that got into "Sister Carrie," his first book, was not the +product of a conscious thinking out of Carrie's problems. It simply got +itself there by the force of the artistic passion behind it; its +coherent statement had to wait for other and more reflective days. The +thing began as a vision, not as a syllogism. Here the name of Franz +Schubert inevitably comes up. Schubert was an ignoramus, even in music; +he knew less about polyphony, which is the mother of harmony, which is +the mother of music, than the average conservatory professor. But +nevertheless he had such a vast instinctive sensitiveness to musical +values, such a profound and accurate feeling for beauty in tone, that he +not only arrived at the truth in tonal relations, but even went beyond +what, in his day, was known to be the truth, and so led an advance. +Likewise, Giorgione da Castelfranco and Masaccio come to mind: painters +of the first rank, but untutored, unsophisticated, uncouth. Dreiser, +within his limits, belongs to this sabot-shod company of the elect. One +thinks of Conrad, not as artist first, but as savant. There is something +of the icy aloofness of the laboratory in him, even when the images he +conjures up pulsate with the very glow of life. He is almost as +self-conscious as the Beethoven of the last quartets. In Dreiser the +thing is more intimate, more disorderly, more a matter of pure feeling. +He gets his effects, one might almost say, not by designing them, but by +living them. + +But whatever the process, the power of the image evoked is not to be +gainsaid. It is not only brilliant on the surface, but mysterious and +appealing in its depths. One swiftly forgets his intolerable writing, +his mirthless, sedulous, repellent manner, in the face of the Athenian +tragedy he instils into his seduced and soul-sick servant girls, his +barbaric pirates of finances, his conquered and hamstrung supermen, his +wives who sit and wait. He has, like Conrad, a sure talent for depicting +the spirit in disintegration. Old Gerhardt, in "Jennie Gerhardt," is +alone worth all the _dramatis personae_ of popular American fiction +since the days of "Rob o' the Bowl"; Howells could no more have created +him, in his Rodinesque impudence of outline, than he could have created +Tartuffe or Gargantua. Such a novel as "Sister Carrie" stands quite +outside the brief traffic of the customary stage. It leaves behind it an +unescapable impression of bigness, of epic sweep and dignity. It is not +a mere story, not a novel in the customary American meaning of the word; +it is at once a psalm of life and a criticism of life--and that +criticism loses nothing by the fact that its burden is despair. Here, +precisely, is the point of Dreiser's departure from his fellows. He puts +into his novels a touch of the eternal _Weltschmerz_. They get below the +drama that is of the moment and reveal the greater drama that is without +end. They arouse those deep and lasting emotions which grow out of the +recognition of elemental and universal tragedy. His aim is not merely to +tell a tale; his aim is to show the vast ebb and flow of forces which +sway and condition human destiny. One cannot imagine him consenting to +Conan Doyle's statement of the purpose of fiction, quoted with +characteristic approval by the New York _Times_: "to amuse mankind, to +help the sick and the dull and the weary." Nor is his purpose to +instruct; if he is a pedagogue it is only incidentally and as a +weakness. The thing he seeks to do is to stir, to awaken, to move. One +does not arise from such a book as "Sister Carrie" with a smirk of +satisfaction; one leaves it infinitely touched. + + +Sec. 4 + +It is, indeed, a truly amazing first book, and one marvels to hear that +it was begun lightly. Dreiser in those days (_circa_ 1899), had seven or +eight years of newspaper work behind him, in Chicago, St. Louis, Toledo, +Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh and New York, and was beginning to feel +that reaction of disgust which attacks all newspaper men when the +enthusiasm of youth wears out. He had been successful, but he saw how +hollow that success was, and how little surety it held out for the +future. The theatre was what chiefly lured him; he had written plays in +his nonage, and he now proposed to do them on a large scale, and so get +some of the easy dollars of Broadway. It was an old friend from Toledo, +Arthur Henry, who turned him toward story-writing. The two had met while +Henry was city editor of the _Blade_, and Dreiser a reporter looking for +a job.[21] A firm friendship sprang up, and Henry conceived a high +opinion of Dreiser's ability, and urged him to try a short story. +Dreiser was distrustful of his own skill, but Henry kept at him, and +finally, during a holiday the two spent together at Maumee, Ohio, he +made the attempt. Henry had the manuscript typewritten and sent it to +_Ainslee's Magazine_. A week or so later there came a cheque for $75. + +This was in 1898. Dreiser wrote four more stories during the year +following, and sold them all. Henry now urged him to attempt a novel, +but again his distrust of himself held him back. Henry finally tried a +rather unusual argument: he had a novel of his own on the stocks,[22] +and he represented that he was in difficulties with it and in need of +company. One day, in September, 1899, Dreiser took a sheet of yellow +paper and wrote a title at random. That title was "Sister Carrie," and +with no more definite plan than the mere name offered the book began. It +went ahead steadily enough until the middle of October, and had come by +then to the place where Carrie meets Hurstwood. At that point Dreiser +left it in disgust. It seemed pitifully dull and inconsequential, and +for two months he put the manuscript away. Then, under renewed urgings +by Henry, he resumed the writing, and kept on to the place where +Hurstwood steals the money. Here he went aground upon a comparatively +simple problem; he couldn't devise a way to manage the robbery. Late in +January he gave it up. But the faithful Henry kept urging him, and in +March he resumed work, and soon had the story finished. The latter part, +despite many distractions, went quickly. Once the manuscript was +complete, Henry suggested various cuts, and in all about 40,000 words +came out. The fair copy went to the Harpers. They refused it without +ceremony and soon afterward Dreiser carried the manuscript to Doubleday, +Page & Co. He left it with Frank Doubleday, and before long there came +notice of its acceptance, and, what is more, a contract. But after the +story was in type it fell into the hands of the wife of one of the +members of the firm, and she conceived so strong a notion of its +immorality that she soon convinced her husband and his associates. There +followed a series of acrimonious negotiations, with Dreiser holding +resolutely to the letter of his contract. It was at this point that +Frank Norris entered the combat--bravely but in vain. The pious +Barabbases, confronted by their signature, found it impossible to throw +up the book entirely, but there was no nomination in the bond regarding +either the style of binding or the number of copies to be issued, and +so they evaded further dispute by bringing out the book in a very small +edition and with modest unstamped covers. Copies of this edition are now +eagerly sought by book-collectors, and one in good condition fetches $25 +or more in the auction rooms. Even the second edition (1907), bearing +the imprint of B. W. Dodge & Co., carries an increasing premium. + +The passing years work strange farces. The Harpers, who had refused +"Sister Carrie" with a spirit bordering upon indignation in 1900, took +over the rights of publication from B. W. Dodge & Co., in 1912, and +reissued the book in a new (and extremely hideous) format, with a +publisher's note containing smug quotations from the encomiums of the +_Fortnightly Review_, the _Athenaeum_, the _Spectator_, the _Academy_ +and other London critical journals. More, they contrived humorously to +push the date of their copyright back to 1900. But this new enthusiasm +for artistic freedom did not last long. They had published "Jennie +Gerhardt" in 1911 and they did "The Financier" in 1912, but when "The +Titan" followed, in 1914, they were seized with qualms, and suppressed +the book after it had got into type. In this emergency the English firm +of John Lane came to the rescue, only to seek cover itself when the +Comstocks attacked "The 'Genius,'" two years later.... For his high +services to American letters, Walter H. Page, of Doubleday, Page & Co., +was made ambassador to England, where "Sister Carrie" is regarded +(according to the Harpers), as "the best story, on the whole, that has +yet come out of America." A curious series of episodes. Another proof, +perhaps, of that cosmic imbecility upon which Dreiser is so fond of +discoursing.... + +But of all this I shall say more later on, when I come to discuss the +critical reception of the Dreiser novels, and the efforts made by the +New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to stop their sale. The +thing to notice here is that the author's difficulties with "Sister +Carrie" came within an ace of turning him from novel-writing completely. +Stray copies of the suppressed first edition, true enough, fell into the +hands of critics who saw the story's value, and during the first year or +two of the century it enjoyed a sort of esoteric vogue, and +encouragement came from unexpected sources. Moreover, a somewhat +bowdlerized English edition, published by William Heinemann in 1901, +made a fair success, and even provoked a certain mild controversy. But +the author's income from the book remained almost _nil_, and so he was +forced to seek a livelihood in other directions. His history during the +next ten years belongs to the tragicomedy of letters. For five of them +he was a Grub Street hack, turning his hand to any literary job that +offered. He wrote short stories for the popular magazines, or special +articles, or poems, according as their needs varied. He concocted +fabulous tales for the illustrated supplements of the Sunday newspapers. +He rewrote the bad stuff of other men. He returned to reporting. He did +odd pieces of editing. He tried his hand at one-act plays. He even +ventured upon advertisement writing. And all the while, the best that he +could get out of his industry was a meagre living. + +In 1905, tiring of the uncertainties of this life, he accepted a post on +the staff of Street & Smith, the millionaire publishers of cheap +magazines, servant-girl romances and dime-novels, and here, in the very +slums of letters, he laboured with tongue in cheek until the next year. +The tale of his duties will fill, I daresay, a volume or two in the +autobiography on which he is said to be working; it is a chronicle full +of achieved impossibilities. One of his jobs, for example, was to reduce +a whole series of dime-novels, each 60,000 words in length, to 30,000 +words apiece. He accomplished it by cutting each one into halves, and +writing a new ending for the first half and a new beginning for the +second, with new titles for both. This doubling of their property +aroused the admiration of his employers; they promised him an assured +and easy future in the dime-novel business. But he tired of it, despite +this revelation of a gift for it, and in 1906 he became managing editor +of the _Broadway Magazine_, then struggling into public notice. A year +later he transferred his flag to the Butterick Building, and became +chief editor of the _Delineator_, the _Designer_ and other such gospels +for the fair. Here, of course, he was as much out of water as in the +dime-novel foundry of Street & Smith, but at all events the pay was +good, and there was a certain leisure at the end of the day's work. In +1907, as part of his duties, he organized the National Child Rescue +Campaign, which still rages as the _Delineator's_ contribution to the +Uplift. At about the same time he began "Jennie Gerhardt." It is curious +to note that, during these same years, Arnold Bennett was slaving in +London as the editor of _Woman_. + +Dreiser left the _Delineator_ in 1910, and for the next half year or so +endeavoured to pump vitality into the _Bohemian Magazine_, in which he +had acquired a proprietary interest. But the _Bohemian_ soon departed +this life, carrying some of his savings with it, and he gave over his +enforced leisure to "Jennie Gerhardt," completing the book in 1911. Its +publication by the Harpers during the same year worked his final +emancipation from the editorial desk. It was praised, and what is more, +it sold, and royalties began to come in. A new edition of "Sister +Carrie" followed in 1912, with "The Financier" hard upon its heels. +Since then Dreiser has devoted himself wholly to serious work. "The +Financier" was put forth as the first volume of "a trilogy of desire"; +the second volume, "The Titan," was published in 1914; the third is yet +to come. "The 'Genius'" appeared in 1915; "The Bulwark" is just +announced. In 1912, accompanied by Grant Richards, the London publisher, +Dreiser made his first trip abroad, visiting England, France, Italy and +Germany. His impressions were recorded in "A Traveler at Forty," +published in 1913. In the summer of 1915, accompanied by Franklin Booth, +the illustrator, he made an automobile journey to his old haunts in +Indiana, and the record is in "A Hoosier Holiday," published in 1916. +His other writings include a volume of "Plays of the Natural and the +Supernatural" (1916); "Life, Art and America," a pamphlet against +Puritanism in letters (1917); a dozen or more short stories and +novelettes, a few poems, and a three-act drama, "The Hand of the +Potter." + +Dreiser was born at Terre Haute, Indiana, on August 27, 1871, and, like +most of us, is of mongrel blood, with the German, perhaps, +predominating. He is a tall man, awkward in movement and nervous in +habit; the boon of beauty has been denied him. The history of his youth +is set forth in full in "A Hoosier Holiday." It is curious to note that +he is a brother to the late Paul Dresser, author of "The Banks of the +Wabash" and other popular songs, and that he himself, helping Paul over +a hard place, wrote the affecting chorus: + + + Oh, the moon is fair tonight along the Wabash, + From the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay; + Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming ... + + +But no doubt you know it. + + +Sec. 5 + +The work of Dreiser, considered as craftsmanship pure and simple, is +extremely uneven, and the distance separating his best from his worst is +almost infinite. It is difficult to believe that the novelist who wrote +certain extraordinarily vivid chapters in "Jennie Gerhardt," and "A +Hoosier Holiday," and, above all, in "The Titan," is the same who +achieved the unescapable dulness of parts of "The Financier" and the +general stupidity and stodginess of "The 'Genius.'" Moreover, the tide +of his writing does not rise or fall with any regularity; he neither +improves steadily nor grows worse steadily. Only half an eye is needed +to see the superiority of "Jennie Gerhardt," as a sheer piece of +writing, to "Sister Carrie," but on turning to "The Financier," which +followed "Jennie Gerhardt" by an interval of but one year, one observes +a falling off which, at its greatest, is almost indistinguishable from a +collapse. "Jennie Gerhardt" is suave, persuasive, well-ordered, solid in +structure, instinct with life. "The Financier," for all its merits in +detail, is loose, tedious, vapid, exasperating. But had any critic, in +the autumn of 1912, argued thereby that Dreiser was finished, that he +had shot his bolt, his discomfiture would have come swiftly, for "The +Titan," which followed in 1914, was almost as well done as "The +Financier" had been ill done, and there are parts of it which remain, to +this day, the very best writing that Dreiser has ever achieved. But "The +'Genius'"? Ay, in "The 'Genius'" the pendulum swings back again! It is +flaccid, elephantine, doltish, coarse, dismal, flatulent, sophomoric, +ignorant, unconvincing, wearisome. One pities the jurisconsult who is +condemned, by Comstockian clamour, to plough through such a novel. In it +there is a sort of humourless _reductio ad absurdum_, not only of the +Dreiser manner, but even of certain salient tenets of the Dreiser +philosophy. At its best it has a moral flavour. At its worst it is +almost maudlin.... + +The most successful of the Dreiser novels, judged by sales, is "Sister +Carrie," and the causes thereof are not far to seek. On the one hand, +its suppression in 1900 gave it a whispered fame that was converted into +a public celebrity when it was republished in 1907, and on the other +hand it shares with "Jennie Gerhardt" the capital advantage of having a +young and appealing woman for its chief figure. The sentimentalists thus +have a heroine to cry over, and to put into a familiar pigeon-hole; +Carrie becomes a sort of Pollyanna. More, it is, at bottom, a tale of +love--the one theme of permanent interest to the average American +novel-reader, the chief stuffing of all our best-selling romances. True +enough, it is vastly more than this--there is in it, for example, the +astounding portrait of Hurstwood--, but it seems to me plain that its +relative popularity is by no means a test of its relative merit, and +that the causes of that popularity must be sought in other directions. +Its defect, as a work of art, is a defect of structure. Like Norris' +"McTeague" it has a broken back. In the midst of the story of Carrie, +Dreiser pauses to tell the story of Hurstwood--a memorably vivid and +tragic story, to be sure, but still one that, considering artistic form +and organization, does damage to the main business of the book. Its +outstanding merit is its simplicity, its unaffected seriousness and +fervour, the spirit of youth that is in it. One feels that it was +written, not by a novelist conscious of his tricks, but by a novice +carried away by his own flaming eagerness, his own high sense of the +interest of what he was doing. In this aspect, it is perhaps more +typically Dreiserian than any of its successors. And maybe we may seek +here for a good deal of its popular appeal, for there is a contagion in +naivete as in enthusiasm, and the simple novel-reader may recognize the +kinship of a simple mind in the novelist. + +But it is in "Jennie Gerhardt" that Dreiser first shows his true +mettle.... "The power to tell the same story in two forms," said George +Moore, "is the sign of the true artist." Here Dreiser sets himself that +difficult task, and here he carries it off with almost complete success. +Reduce the story to a hundred words, and the same words would also +describe "Sister Carrie." Jennie, like Carrie, is a rose grown from +turnip-seed. Over each, at the start, hangs poverty, ignorance, the dumb +helplessness of the Shudra, and yet in each there is that indescribable +something, that element of essential gentleness, that innate inward +beauty which levels all barriers of caste, and makes Esther a fit queen +for Ahasuerus. Some Frenchman has put it into a phrase: "_Une ame grande +dans un petit destin_"--a great soul in a small destiny. Jennie has some +touch of that greatness; Dreiser is forever calling her "a big woman"; +it is a refrain almost as irritating as the "trig" of "The Titan." +Carrie, one feels, is of baser metal; her dignity never rises to +anything approaching nobility. But the history of each is the history of +the other. Jennie, like Carrie, escapes from the physical miseries of +the struggle for existence only to taste the worse miseries of the +struggle for happiness. Don't mistake me; we have here no maudlin tales +of seduced maidens. Seduction, in truth, is far from tragedy for either +Jennie or Carrie. The gain of each, until the actual event has been left +behind and obliterated by experiences more salient and poignant, is +greater than her loss, and that gain is to the soul as well as to the +creature. With the rise from want to security, from fear to ease, comes +an awakening of the finer perceptions, a widening of the sympathies, a +gradual unfolding of the delicate flower called personality, an +increased capacity for loving and living. But with all this, and as a +part of it, there comes, too, an increased capacity for suffering--and +so in the end, when love slips away and the empty years stretch before, +it is the awakened and supersentient woman that pays for the folly of +the groping, bewildered girl. The tragedy of Carrie and Jennie, in +brief, is not that they are degraded, but that they are lifted up, not +that they go to the gutter, but that they escape the gutter and glimpse +the stars. + +But if the two stories are thus variations upon the same sombre theme, +if each starts from the same place and arrives at the same dark goal, if +each shows a woman heartened by the same hopes and tortured by the same +agonies, there is still a vast difference between them, and that +difference is the measure of the author's progress in his craft during +the eleven years between 1900 and 1911. "Sister Carrie," at bottom, is +no more than a first sketch, a rough piling up of observations and +ideas, disordered and often incoherent. In the midst of the story, as I +have said, the author forgets it, and starts off upon another. In +"Jennie Gerhardt" there is no such flaccidity of structure, no such +vacillation in aim, no such proliferation of episode. Considering that +it is by Dreiser, it is extraordinarily adept and intelligent in design; +only in "The Titan" has he ever done so well. From beginning to end the +narrative flows logically, steadily, congruously. Episodes there are, of +course, but they keep their proper place and bulk. It is always Jennie +that stands at the centre of the traffic; it is in Jennie's soul that +every scene is ultimately played out. Her father and mother; Senator +Brander, the god of her first worship; her daughter Vesta, and Lester +Kane, the man who makes and mars her--all these are drawn with infinite +painstaking, and in every one of them there is the blood of life. But it +is Jennie that dominates the drama from curtain to curtain. Not an event +is unrelated to her; not a climax fails to make clearer the struggles +going on in her mind and heart. + +It is in "Jennie Gerhardt" that Dreiser's view of life begins to take on +coherence and to show a general tendency. In "Sister Carrie" the thing +is still chiefly representation and no more; the image is undoubtedly +vivid, but its significance, in the main, is left undisplayed. In +"Jennie Gerhardt" this pictorial achievement is reinforced by +interpretation; one carries away an impression that something has been +said; it is not so much a visual image of Jennie that remains as a sense +of the implacable tragedy that engulfs her. The book is full of artistic +passion. It lives and glows. It awakens recognition and feeling. Its +lucid ideational structure, even more than the artless gusto of "Sister +Carrie," produces a penetrating and powerful effect. Jennie is no mere +individual; she is a type of the national character, almost the +archetype of the muddled, aspiring, tragic, fate-flogged mass. And the +scene in which she is set is brilliantly national too. The Chicago of +those great days of feverish money-grabbing and crazy aspiration may +well stand as the epitome of America, and it is made clearer here than +in any other American novel--clearer than in "The Pit" or "The +Cliff-Dwellers"--clearer than in any book by an Easterner--almost as +clear as the Paris of Balzac and Zola. Finally, the style of the story +is indissolubly wedded to its matter. The narrative, in places, has an +almost scriptural solemnity; in its very harshness and baldness there is +something subtly meet and fitting. One cannot imagine such a history +done in the strained phrases of Meredith or the fugal manner of Henry +James. One cannot imagine that stark, stenographic dialogue adorned with +the tinsel of pretty words. The thing, to reach the heights it touches, +could have been done only in the way it has been done. As it stands, I +would not take anything away from it, not even its journalistic +banalities, its lack of humour, its incessant returns to C major. A +primitive and touching poetry is in it. It is a novel, I am convinced, +of the first consideration.... + +In "The Financier" this poetry is almost absent, and that fact is +largely to blame for the book's lack of charm. By the time we see him in +"The Titan" Frank Cowperwood has taken on heroic proportions and the +romance of great adventure is in him, but in "The Financier" he is still +little more than an extra-pertinacious money-grubber, and not unrelated +to the average stock broker or corner grocer. True enough, Dreiser says +specifically that he is more, that the thing he craves is not money but +power--power to force lesser men to execute his commands, power to +surround himself with beautiful and splendid things, power to amuse +himself with women, power to defy and nullify the laws made for the +timorous and unimaginative. But the intent of the author never really +gets into his picture. His Cowperwood in this first stage is hard, +commonplace, unimaginative. In "The Titan" he flowers out as a blend of +revolutionist and voluptuary, a highly civilized Lorenzo the +Magnificent, an immoralist who would not hesitate two minutes about +seducing a saint, but would turn sick at the thought of harming a child. +But in "The Financier" he is still in the larval state, and a repellent +sordidness hangs about him. + +Moreover, the story of his rise is burdened by two defects which still +further corrupt its effect. One lies in the fact that Dreiser is quite +unable to get the feel, so to speak, of Philadelphia, just as he is +unable to get the feel of New York in "The 'Genius.'" The other is that +the style of the writing in the book reduces the dreiserian manner to +absurdity, and almost to impossibility. The incredibly lazy, involved +and unintelligent description of the trial of Cowperwood I have already +mentioned. We get, in this lumbering chronicle, not a cohesive and +luminous picture, but a dull, photographic representation of the whole +tedious process, beginning with an account of the political obligations +of the judge and district attorney, proceeding to a consideration of the +habits of mind of each of the twelve jurymen, and ending with a summary +of the majority and minority opinions of the court of appeals, and a +discussion of the motives, ideals, traditions, prejudices, sympathies +and chicaneries behind them, each and severally. When Cowperwood goes +into the market, his operations are set forth in their last detail; we +are told how many shares he buys, how much he pays for them, what the +commission is, what his profit comes to. When he comes into chance +contact with a politician, we hear all about that politician, including +his family affairs. When he builds and furnishes a house, the chief +rooms in it are inventoried with such care that not a chair or a rug or +a picture on the wall is overlooked. The endless piling up of such +non-essentials cripples and incommodes the story; its drama is too +copiously swathed in words to achieve a sting; the Dreiser manner +devours and defeats itself. + +But none the less the book has compensatory merits. Its character +sketches, for all the cloud of words, are lucid and vigorous. Out of +that enormous complex of crooked politics and crookeder finance, +Cowperwood himself stands out in the round, comprehensible and alive. +And all the others, in their lesser measures, are done almost as +well--Cowperwood's pale wife, whimpering in her empty house; Aileen +Butler, his mistress; his doddering and eternally amazed old father; his +old-fashioned, stupid, sentimental mother; Stener, the City Treasurer, a +dish-rag in the face of danger; old Edward Malia Butler, that barbarian +in a boiled shirt, with his Homeric hatred and his broken heart. +Particularly old Butler. The years pass and he must be killed and put +away, but not many readers of the book, I take it, will soon forget +him. Dreiser is at his best, indeed, when he deals with old men. In +their tragic helplessness they stand as symbols of that unfathomable +cosmic cruelty which he sees as the motive power of life itself. More, +even, than his women, he makes them poignant, vivid, memorable. The +picture of old Gerhardt is full of a subtle brightness, though he is +always in the background, as cautious and penny-wise as an ancient crow, +trotting to his Lutheran church, pathetically ill-used by the world he +never understands. Butler is another such, different in externals, but +at bottom the same dismayed, questioning, pathetic old man.... + +In "The Titan" there is a tightening of the screws, a clarifying of the +action, an infinite improvement in the manner. The book, in truth, has +the air of a new and clearer thinking out of "The Financier," as "Jennie +Gerhardt" is a new thinking out of "Sister Carrie." With almost the same +materials, the thing is given a new harmony and unity, a new +plausibility, a new passion and purpose. In "The Financier" the artistic +voluptuary is almost completely overshadowed by the dollar-chaser; in +"The Titan" we begin to see clearly that grand battle between artist and +man of money, idealist and materialist, spirit and flesh, which is the +informing theme of the whole trilogy. The conflict that makes the drama, +once chiefly external, now becomes more and more internal; it is played +out within the soul of the man himself. The result is a character sketch +of the highest colour and brilliance, a superb portrait of a complex and +extremely fascinating man. Of all the personages in the Dreiser books, +the Cowperwood of "The Titan" is perhaps the most radiantly real. He is +accounted for in every detail, and yet, in the end, he is not accounted +for at all; there hangs about him, to the last, that baffling +mysteriousness which hangs about those we know most intimately. There is +in him a complete and indubitable masculinity, as the eternal feminine +is in Jennie. His struggle with the inexorable forces that urge him on +as with whips, and lure him with false lights, and bring him to +disillusion and dismay, is as typical as hers is, and as tragic. In his +ultimate disaster, so plainly foreshadowed at the close, there is the +clearest of all projections of the ideas that lie at the bottom of all +Dreiser's work. Cowperwood, above any of them, is his protagonist. + +The story, in its plan, is as transparent as in its burden. It has an +austere simplicity in the telling that fits the directness of the thing +told. Dreiser, as if to clear decks, throws over all the immemorial +baggage of the novelist, making short shrift of "heart interest," +conventional "sympathy," and even what ordinarily passes for romance. In +"Sister Carrie," as I have pointed out, there is still a sweet dish for +the sentimentalists; if they don't like the history of Carrie as a work +of art they may still wallow in it as a sad, sad love story. Carrie is +appealing, melting; she moves, like Marguerite Gautier, in an atmosphere +of romantic depression. And Jennie Gerhardt, in this aspect, is merely +Carrie done over--a Carrie more carefully and objectively drawn, +perhaps, but still conceivably to be mistaken for a "sympathetic" +heroine in a best-seller. A lady eating chocolates might jump from +"Laddie" to "Jennie Gerhardt" without knowing that she was jumping ten +thousand miles. The tear jugs are there to cry into. Even in "The +Financier" there is still a hint of familiar things. The first Mrs. +Cowperwood is sorely put upon; old Butler has the markings of an irate +father; Cowperwood himself suffers the orthodox injustice and languishes +in a cell. But no one, I venture, will ever fall into any such mistake +in identity in approaching "The Titan." Not a single appeal to facile +sentiment is in it. It proceeds from beginning to end in a forthright, +uncompromising, confident manner. It is an almost purely objective +account, as devoid of cheap heroics as a death certificate, of a strong +man's contest with incontestable powers without and no less +incontestable powers within. There is nothing of the conventional outlaw +about him; he does not wear a red sash and bellow for liberty; fate +wrings from him no melodramatic defiances. In the midst of the battle he +views it with a sort of ironical detachment, as if lifted above himself +by the sheer aesthetic spectacle. Even in disaster he asks for no +quarter, no generosity, no compassion. Up or down, he keeps his zest for +the game that is being played, and is sufficient unto himself. + +Such a man as this Cowperwood of the Chicago days, described +romantically, would be indistinguishable from the wicked earls and +seven-foot guardsmen of Ouida, Robert W. Chambers and The Duchess. But +described realistically and coldbloodedly, with all that wealth of +minute and apparently inconsequential detail which Dreiser piles up so +amazingly, he becomes a figure astonishingly vivid, lifelike and +engrossing. He fits into no _a priori_ theory of conduct or scheme of +rewards and punishments; he proves nothing and teaches nothing; the +forces which move him are never obvious and frequently unintelligible. +But in the end he seems genuinely a man--a man of the sort we see about +us in the real world--not a patent and automatic fellow, reacting +docilely and according to a formula, but a bundle of complexities and +contradictions, a creature oscillating between the light and the +shadow--at bottom, for all his typical representation of a race and a +civilization, a unique and inexplicable personality. More, he is a man +of the first class, an Achilles of his world; and here the achievement +of Dreiser is most striking, for he succeeds where all fore-runners +failed. It is easy enough to explain how John Smith courted his wife, +and even how William Brown fought and died for his country, but it is +inordinately difficult to give plausibility to the motives, feelings and +processes of mind of a man whose salient character is that they +transcend all ordinary experience. Too often, even when made by the +highest creative and interpretative talent, the effort has resolved +itself into a begging of the question. Shakespeare made Hamlet +comprehensible to the groundlings by diluting that half of him which was +Shakespeare with a half which was a college sophomore. In the same way +he saved Lear by making him, in large part, a tedious and obscene old +donkey--the blood brother of any average ancient of any average English +tap-room. Tackling Caesar, he was rescued by Brutus' knife. George +Bernard Shaw, facing the same difficulty, resolved it by drawing a +composite portrait of two or three London actor-managers and half a +dozen English politicians. But Dreiser makes no such compromise. He +bangs into the difficulties of his problem head on, and if he does not +solve it absolutely, he at least makes an extraordinarily close approach +to a solution. In "The Financier" a certain incredulity still hangs +about Cowperwood; in "The Titan" he suddenly comes unquestionably real. +If you want to get the true measure of this feat, put it beside the +failure of Frank Norris with Curtis Jadwin in "The Pit."... + +"The 'Genius,'" which interrupted the "trilogy of desire," marks the +nadir of Dreiser's accomplishment, as "The Titan" marks its apogee. The +plan of it, of course, is simple enough, and it is one that Dreiser, at +his best, might have carried out with undoubted success. What he is +trying to show, in brief, is the battle that goes on in the soul of +every man of active mind between the desire for self-expression and the +desire for safety, for public respect, for emotional equanimity. It is, +in a sense, the story of Cowperwood told over again, but with an +important difference, for Eugene Witla is a much less self-reliant and +powerful fellow than Cowperwood, and so he is unable to muster up the +vast resolution of spirits that he needs to attain happiness. "The +Titan" is the history of a strong man. "The 'Genius'" is the history of +a man essentially weak. Eugene Witla can never quite choose his route in +life. He goes on sacrificing ease to aspiration and aspiration to ease +to the end of the chapter. He vacillates abominably and forever between +two irreconcilable desires. Even when, at the close, he sinks into a +whining sort of resignation, the proud courage of Cowperwood is not in +him; he is always a bit despicable in his pathos. + +As I say, a story of simple outlines, and well adapted to the dreiserian +pen. But it is spoiled and made a mock of by a donkeyish solemnity of +attack which leaves it, on the one hand, diffuse, spineless and +shapeless, and on the other hand, a compendium of platitudes. It is as +if Dreiser, suddenly discovering himself a sage, put off the high +passion of the artist and took to pounding a pulpit. It is almost as if +he deliberately essayed upon a burlesque of himself. The book is an +endless emission of the obvious, with touches of the scandalous to light +up its killing monotony. It runs to 736 pages of small type; its reading +is an unbearable weariness to the flesh; in the midst of it one has +forgotten the beginning and is unconcerned about the end. Mingled with +all the folderol, of course, there is stuff of nobler quality. Certain +chapters stick in the memory; whole episodes lift themselves to the +fervid luminosity of "Jennie Gerhardt"; there are character sketches +that deserve all praise; one often pulls up with a reminder that the +thing is the work of a proficient craftsman. But in the main it lumbers +and jolts, wabbles and bores. A sort of ponderous imbecility gets into +it. Both in its elaborate devices to shake up the pious and its imposing +demonstrations of what every one knows, it somehow suggests the advanced +thinking of Greenwich Village. I suspect, indeed, that the _vin rouge_ +was in Dreiser's arteries as he concocted it. He was at the intellectual +menopause, and looking back somewhat wistfully and attitudinizingly +toward the goatish days that were no more. + +But let it go! A novelist capable of "Jennie Gerhardt" has rights, +privileges, prerogatives. He may, if he will, go on a spiritual drunk +now and then, and empty the stale bilges of his soul. Thackeray, having +finished "Vanity Fair" and "Pendennis," bathed himself in the sheep's +milk of "The Newcomes," and after "The Virginians" he did "The +Adventures of Philip." Zola, with "Germinal," "La Debacle" and "La +Terre" behind him, recreated himself horribly with "Fecondite." Tolstoi, +after "Anna Karenina," wrote "What Is Art?" Ibsen, after "Et Dukkehjem" +and "Gengangere," wrote "Vildanden." The good God himself, after all +the magnificence of Kings and Chronicles, turned Dr. Frank Crane and so +botched his Writ with Proverbs.... A weakness that we must allow for. +Whenever Dreiser, abandoning his fundamental scepticism, yields to the +irrepressible human (and perhaps also divine) itch to label, to +moralize, to teach, he becomes a bit absurd. Observe "The 'Genius,'" and +parts of "A Hoosier Holiday" and of "A Traveler at Forty," and of "Plays +of the Natural and the Supernatural." But in this very absurdity, it +seems to me, there is a subtle proof that his fundamental scepticism is +sound.... + +I mention the "Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural." They are +ingenious and sometimes extremely effective, but their significance is +not great. The two that are "of the natural" are "The Girl in the +Coffin" and "Old Ragpicker," the first a laborious evocation of the +gruesome, too long by half, and the other an experiment in photographic +realism, with a pair of policemen as its protagonists. All five plays +"of the supernatural" follow a single plan. In the foreground, as it +were, we see a sordid drama played out on the human plane, and in the +background (or in the empyrean above, as you choose) we see the +operation of the god-like imbecilities which sway and flay us all. The +technical trick is well managed. It would be easy for such +four-dimensional pieces to fall into burlesque, but in at least two +cases, to wit, in "The Blue Sphere" and "In the Dark," they go off with +an air. Superficially, these plays "of the supernatural" seem to show an +abandonment to the wheezy, black bombazine mysticism which crops up +toward the end of "The 'Genius.'" But that mysticism, at bottom, is no +more than the dreiserian scepticism made visible. "For myself," says +Dreiser somewhere, "I do not know what truth is, what beauty is, what +love is, what hope is." And in another place: "I admit a vast compulsion +which has nothing to do with the individual desires or tastes or +impulses." The jokers behind the arras pull the strings. It is pretty, +but what is it all about?... The criticism which deals only with +externals sees "Sister Carrie" as no more than a deft adventure into +realism. Dreiser is praised, when he is praised at all, for making +Carrie so clear, for understanding her so well. But the truth is, of +course, that his achievement consists precisely in making patent the +impenetrable mystery of her, and of the tangled complex of striving and +aspiration of which she is so helplessly a part. It is in this sense +that "Sister Carrie" is a profound work. It is not a book of glib +explanations, of ready formulae; it is, above all else, a book of +wonder.... + +Of "A Traveler at Forty" I have spoken briefly. It is heavy with the +obvious; the most interesting thing in it is the fact that Dreiser had +never seen St. Peter's or Piccadilly Circus until he was too old for +either reverence or romance. "A Hoosier Holiday" is far more +illuminating, despite its platitudinizing. Slow in tempo, discursive, +reflective, intimate, the book covers a vast territory, and lingers in +pleasant fields. One finds in it an almost complete confession of faith, +artistic, religious, even political. And not infrequently that +confession takes the form of ingenuous confidences--about the fortunes +of the house of Dreiser, the dispersed Dreiser clan, the old neighbours +in Indiana, new friends made along the way. In "A Traveler at Forty" +Dreiser is surely frank enough in his vivisections; he seldom forgets a +vanity or a wart. In "A Hoosier Holiday" he goes even further; he +speculates heavily about all his _dramatis personae_, prodding into the +motives behind their acts, wondering what they would do in this or that +situation, forcing them painfully into laboratory jars. They become, in +the end, not unlike characters in a novel; one misses only the neatness +of a plot. Strangely enough, the one personage of the chronicle who +remains dim throughout is the artist, Franklin Booth, Dreiser's host +and companion on the long motor ride from New York to Indiana, and the +maker of the book's excellent pictures. One gets a brilliant etching of +Booth's father, and scarcely less vivid portraits of Speed, the +chauffeur; of various persons encountered on the way, and of friends and +relatives dredged up out of the abyss of the past. But of Booth one +learns little save that he is a Christian Scientist and a fine figure of +a man. There must have been much talk during those two weeks of +careening along the high-road, and Booth must have borne some part in +it, but what he said is very meagrely reported, and so he is still +somewhat vague at the end--a personality sensed but scarcely +apprehended. + +However, it is Dreiser himself who is the chief character of the story, +and who stands out from it most brilliantly. One sees in the man all the +special marks of the novelist: his capacity for photographic and +relentless observation, his insatiable curiosity, his keen zest in life +as a spectacle, his comprehension of and sympathy for the poor striving +of humble folks, his endless mulling of insoluble problems, his +recurrent Philistinism, his impatience of restraints, his fascinated +suspicion of messiahs, his passion for physical beauty, his relish for +the gaudy drama of big cities; his incurable Americanism. The panorama +that he enrols runs the whole scale of the colours; it is a series of +extraordinarily vivid pictures. The sombre gloom of the Pennsylvania +hills, with Wilkes-Barre lying among them like a gem; the procession of +little country towns, sleepy and a bit hoggish; the flash of Buffalo, +Cleveland, Indianapolis; the gargantuan coal-pockets and ore-docks along +the Erie shore; the tinsel summer resorts; the lush Indiana farmlands, +with their stodgy, bovine people--all of these things are sketched in +simply, and yet almost magnificently. I know, indeed, of no book which +better describes the American hinterland. Here we have no idle spying by +a stranger, but a full-length representation by one who knows the thing +he describes intimately, and is himself a part of it. Almost every mile +of the road travelled has been Dreiser's own road in life. He knew those +unkempt Indiana towns in boyhood; he wandered in the Indiana woods; he +came to Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo as a young man; all the roots of his +existence are out there. And so he does his chronicle _con amore_, with +many a sentimental dredging up of old memories, old hopes and old +dreams. + +Save for passages in "The Titan," "A Hoosier Holiday" marks the high +tide of Dreiser's writing--that is, as sheer writing. His old faults +are in it, and plentifully. There are empty, brackish phrases enough, +God knows--"high noon" among them. But for all that, there is an +undeniable glow in it; it shows, in more than one place, an approach to +style; the mere wholesaler of words has become, in some sense a +connoisseur, even a voluptuary. The picture of Wilkes-Barre girt in by +her hills is simply done, and yet there is imagination in it, and +touches of brilliance. The sombre beauty of the Pennsylvania mountains +is vividly transferred to the page. The towns by the wayside are +differentiated, swiftly drawn, made to live. There are excellent +sketches of people--a courtly hotelkeeper in some God-forsaken hamlet, +his self-respect triumphing over his wallow; a group of babbling Civil +War veterans, endlessly mouthing incomprehensible jests; the half-grown +beaux and belles of the summer resorts, enchanted and yet a bit +staggered by the awakening of sex; Booth _pere_ and his sinister +politics; broken and forgotten men in the Indiana towns; policemen, +waitresses, farmers, country characters; Dreiser's own people--the boys +and girls of his youth; his brother Paul, the Indiana Schneckenburger +and Francis Scott Key; his sisters and brothers; his beaten, hopeless, +pious father; his brave and noble mother. The book is dedicated to this +mother, now long dead, and in a way it is a memorial to her, a monument +to affection. Life bore upon her cruelly; she knew poverty at its lowest +ebb and despair at its bitterest; and yet there was in her a touch of +fineness that never yielded, a gallant spirit that faced and fought +things through. One thinks, somehow, of the mother of Gounod.... Her son +has not forgotten her. His book is her epitaph. He enters into her +presence with love and with reverence and with something not far from +awe.... + +As for the rest of the Dreiser compositions, I leave them to your +curiosity. + + +Sec. 6 + +Dr. William Lyon Phelps, the Lampson professor of English language and +literature at Yale, opens his chapter on Mark Twain in his "Essays on +Modern Novelists" with a humorous account of the critical imbecility +which pursued Mark in his own country down to his last years. The +favourite national critics of that era (and it extended to 1895, at the +least) were wholly blind to the fact that he was a great artist. They +admitted him, somewhat grudgingly, a certain low dexterity as a clown, +but that he was an imaginative writer of the first rank, or even of the +fifth rank, was something that, in their insanest moments, never so much +as occurred to them. Phelps cites, in particular, an ass named Professor +Richardson, whose "American Literature," it appears, "is still a +standard work" and "a deservedly high authority"--apparently in +colleges. In the 1892 edition of this _magnum opus_, Mark is dismissed +with less than four lines, and ranked below Irving, Holmes and +Lowell--nay, actually below Artemus Ward, Josh Billings and Petroleum V. +Nasby! The thing is fabulous, fantastic, _unglaublich_--but nevertheless +true. Lacking the "higher artistic or moral purpose of the greater +humourists" (_exempli gratia_, Rabelais, Moliere, Aristophanes!!), Mark +is dismissed by this Professor Balderdash as a hollow buffoon.... But +stay! Do not laugh yet! Phelps himself, indignant at the stupidity, now +proceeds to credit Mark with a moral purpose!... Turn to "The Mysterious +Stranger," or "What is Man?"... + +College professors, alas, never learn anything. The identical gentleman +who achieved this discovery about old Mark in 1910, now seeks to dispose +of Dreiser in the exact manner of Richardson. That is to say, he essays +to finish him by putting him into Coventry, by loftily passing over +him. "Do not speak of him," said Kingsley of Heine; "he was a wicked +man!" Search the latest volume of the Phelps revelation, "The Advance of +the English Novel," and you will find that Dreiser is not once mentioned +in it. The late O. Henry is hailed as a genius who will have "abiding +fame"; Henry Sydnor Harrison is hymned as "more than a clever novelist," +nay, "a valuable ally of the angels" (the right-thinker complex! art as +a form of snuffling!), and an obscure Pagliaccio named Charles D. +Stewart is brought forward as "the American novelist most worthy to fill +the particular vacancy caused by the death of Mark Twain"--but Dreiser +is not even listed in the index. And where Phelps leads with his baton +of birch most of the other drovers of rah-rah boys follow. I turn, for +example, to "An Introduction to American Literature," by Henry S. +Pancoast, A.M., L.H.D., dated 1912. There are kind words for Richard +Harding Davis, for Amelie Rives, and even for Will N. Harben, but not a +syllable for Dreiser. Again, there is a "A History of American +Literature," by Reuben Post Halleck, A.M., LL.D., dated 1911. Lew +Wallace, Marietta Holley, Owen Wister and Augusta Evans Wilson have +their hearings, but not Dreiser. Yet again, there is "A History of +American Literature Since 1870," by Prof. Fred Lewis Pattee,[23] +instructor in "the English language and literature" somewhere in +Pennsylvania. Pattee has praises for Marion Crawford, Margaret Deland +and F. Hopkinson Smith, and polite bows for Richard Harding Davis and +Robert W. Chambers, but from end to end of his fat tome I am unable to +find the slightest mention of Dreiser. + +So much for one group of heroes of the new Dunciad. That it includes +most of the acknowledged heavyweights of the craft--the Babbitts, Mores, +Brownells and so on--goes without saying; as Van Wyck Brooks has pointed +out,[24] these magnificoes are austerely above any consideration of the +literature that is in being. The other group, more courageous and more +honest, proceeds by direct attack; Dreiser is to be disposed of by a +moral _attentat_. Its leaders are two more professors, Stuart P. Sherman +and H. W. Boynton, and in its ranks march the lady critics of the +newspapers, with much shrill, falsetto clamour. Sherman is the only one +of them who shows any intelligible reasoning. Boynton, as always, is a +mere parroter of conventional phrases, and the objections of the ladies +fade imperceptibly into a pious indignation which is indistinguishable +from that of the professional suppressors of vice. + +What, then, is Sherman's complaint? In brief, that Dreiser is a liar +when he calls himself a realist; that he is actually a naturalist, and +hence accursed. That "he has evaded the enterprise of representing human +conduct, and confined himself to a representation of animal behaviour." +That he "imposes his own naturalistic philosophy" upon his characters, +making them do what they ought not to do, and think what they ought not +to think. That "he has just two things to tell us about Frank +Cowperwood: that he has a rapacious appetite for money, and a rapacious +appetite for women." That this alleged "theory of animal behaviour" is +not only incorrect but downright immoral, and that "when one-half the +world attempts to assert it, the other half rises in battle."[25] + +Only a glance is needed to show the vacuity of all this _brutum fulmen_. +Dreiser, in point of fact, is scarcely more the realist or the +naturalist, in any true sense, than H. G. Wells or the later George +Moore, nor has he ever announced himself in either the one character or +the other--if there be, in fact, any difference between them that any +one save a pigeon-holding pedagogue can discern. He is really something +quite different, and, in his moments, something far more stately. His +aim is not merely to record, but to translate and understand; the thing +he exposes is not the empty event and act, but the endless mystery out +of which it springs; his pictures have a passionate compassion in them +that it is hard to separate from poetry. If this sense of the universal +and inexplicable tragedy, if this vision of life as a seeking without a +finding, if this adept summoning up of moving images, is mistaken by +college professors for the empty, meticulous nastiness of Zola in +"Pot-Bouille"--in Nietzsche's phrase, for "the delight to stink"--then +surely the folly of college professors, as vast as it seems, has been +underestimated. What is the fact? The fact is that Dreiser's attitude of +mind, his manner of reaction to the phenomena he represents, the whole +of his alleged "naturalistic philosophy," stems directly, not from Zola, +Flaubert, Augier and the younger Dumas, but from the Greeks. In the +midst of democratic cocksureness and Christian sentimentalism, of +doctrinaire shallowness and professorial smugness, he stands for a point +of view which at least has something honest and courageous about it; +here, at all events, he is a realist. Let him put a motto to his books, +and it might be: + +[Greek: + +_Io geneai broton, +Hos umas isa chai to meden +Zosas enarithmo._ + +] + +If you protest against that as too harsh for Christians and college +professors, right-thinkers and forward-lookers, then you protest against +"Oedipus Rex."[26] + +As for the animal behaviour prattle of the learned head-master, it +reveals, on the one hand, only the academic fondness for seizing upon +high-sounding but empty phrases and using them to alarm the populace, +and on the other hand, only the academic incapacity for observing facts +correctly and reporting them honestly. The truth is, of course, that the +behaviour of such men as Cowperwood and Witla and of such women as +Carrie and Jennie, as Dreiser describes it, is no more merely animal +than the behaviour of such acknowledged and undoubted human beings as +Woodrow Wilson and Jane Addams. The whole point of the story of Witla, +to take the example which seems to concern the horrified watchmen most, +is this: that his life is a bitter conflict between the animal in him +and the aspiring soul, between the flesh and the spirit, between what +is weak in him and what is strong, between what is base and what is +noble. Moreover, the good, in the end, gets its hooks into the bad: as +we part from Witla he is actually bathed in the tears of remorse, and +resolved to be a correct and godfearing man. And what have we in "The +Financier" and "The Titan"? A conflict, in the ego of Cowperwood, +between aspiration and ambition, between the passion for beauty and the +passion for power. Is either passion animal? To ask the question is to +answer it. + +I single out Dr. Sherman, not because his pompous syllogisms have any +plausibility in fact or logic, but simply because he may well stand as +archetype of the booming, indignant corrupter of criteria, the moralist +turned critic. A glance at his paean to Arnold Bennett[27] at once +reveals the true gravamen of his objection to Dreiser. What offends him +is not actually Dreiser's shortcoming as an artist, but Dreiser's +shortcoming as a Christian and an American. In Bennett's volumes of +pseudo-philosophy--_e.g._, "The Plain Man and His Wife" and "The Feast +of St. Friend"--he finds the intellectual victuals that are to his +taste. Here we have a sweet commingling of virtuous conformity and +complacent optimism, of sonorous platitude and easy certainty--here, in +brief, we have the philosophy of the English middle classes--and here, +by the same token, we have the sort of guff that the half-educated of +our own country can understand. It is the calm, superior num-skullery +that was Victorian; it is by Samuel Smiles out of Hannah More. The +offence of Dreiser is that he has disdained this revelation and gone +back to the Greeks. Lo, he reads poetry into "the appetite for +women"--he rejects the Pauline doctrine that all love is below the +diaphragm! He thinks of Ulysses, not as a mere heretic and criminal, but +as a great artist. He sees the life of man, not as a simple theorem in +Calvinism, but as a vast adventure, an enchantment, a mystery. It is no +wonder that respectable school-teachers are against him.... + +The comstockian attack upon "The 'Genius'" seems to have sprung out of +the same muddled sense of Dreiser's essential hostility to all that is +safe and regular--of the danger in him to that mellowed Methodism which +has become the national ethic. The book, in a way, was a direct +challenge, for though it came to an end upon a note which even a +Methodist might hear as sweet, there were undoubted provocations in +detail. Dreiser, in fact, allowed his scorn to make off with his +taste--and _es ist nichts fuerchterlicher als Einbildungskraft ohne +Geschmack_. The Comstocks arose to the bait a bit slowly, but none the +less surely. Going through the volume with the terrible industry of a +Sunday-school boy dredging up pearls of smut from the Old Testament, +they achieved a list of no less than 89 alleged floutings of the +code--75 described as lewd and 14 as profane. An inspection of these +specifications affords mirth of a rare and lofty variety; nothing could +more cruelly expose the inner chambers of the moral mind. When young +Witla, fastening his best girl's skate, is so overcome by the carnality +of youth that he hugs her, it is set down as lewd. On page 51, having +become an art student, he is fired by "a great, warm-tinted nude of +Bouguereau"--lewd again. On page 70 he begins to draw from the figure, +and his instructor cautions him that the female breast is round, not +square--more lewdness. On page 151 he kisses a girl on mouth and neck +and she cautions him: "Be careful! Mamma may come in"--still more. On +page 161, having got rid of mamma, she yields "herself to him gladly, +joyously" and he is greatly shocked when she argues that an artist (she +is by way of being a singer) had better not marry--lewdness doubly +damned. On page 245 he and his bride, being ignorant, neglect the +principles laid down by Dr. Sylvanus Stall in his great works on sex +hygiene--lewdness most horrible! But there is no need to proceed +further. Every kiss, hug and tickle of the chin in the chronicle is +laboriously snouted out, empanelled, exhibited. Every hint that Witla is +no vestal, that he indulges his unchristian fleshliness, that he burns +in the manner of I Corinthians, VII, 9, is uncovered to the moral +inquisition. + +On the side of profanity there is a less ardent pursuit of evidences, +chiefly, I daresay, because their unearthing is less stimulating. +(Beside, there is no law prohibiting profanity in books: the whole +inquiry here is but so much _lagniappe_.) On page 408, in describing a +character called Daniel C. Summerfield, Dreiser says that the fellow is +"very much given to swearing, more as a matter of habit than of foul +intention," and then goes on to explain somewhat lamely that "no picture +of him would be complete without the interpolation of his various +expressions." They turn out to be _God damn_ and _Jesus Christ_--three +of the latter and five or six of the former. All go down; the pure in +heart must be shielded from the knowledge of them. (But what of the +immoral French? They call the English _Goddams_.) Also, three plain +_damns_, eight _hells_, one _my God_, five _by Gods_, one _go to the +devil_, one _God Almighty_ and one plain _God_. Altogether, 31 specimens +are listed. "The 'Genius'" runs to 350,000 words. The profanity thus +works out to somewhat less than one word in 10,000.... Alas, the +comstockian proboscis, feeling for such offendings, is not as alert as +when uncovering more savoury delicacies. On page 191 I find an +overlooked _by God_. On page 372 there are _Oh God, God curse her_, and +_God strike her dead_. On page 373 there are _Ah God, Oh God_ and three +other invocations of God. On page 617 there is _God help me_. On page +720 there is _as God is my judge_. On page 723 there is _I'm no damned +good_.... But I begin to blush. + +When the Comstock Society began proceedings against "The 'Genius,'" a +group of English novelists, including Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, W. L. +George and Hugh Walpole, cabled an indignant caveat. This bestirred the +Author's League of America to activity, and its executive committee +issued a minute denouncing the business. Later on a protest of American +_literati_ was circulated, and more than 400 signed, including such +highly respectable authors as Winston Churchill, Percy MacKaye, Booth +Tarkington and James Lane Allen, and such critics as Lawrence Gilman, +Clayton Hamilton and James Huneker, and the editors of such journals as +the _Century_, the _Atlantic Monthly_ and the _New Republic_. Among my +literary lumber is all the correspondence relating to this protest, not +forgetting the letters of those who refused to sign, and some day I hope +to publish it, that posterity may not lose the joy of an extremely +diverting episode. The case attracted wide attention and was the theme +of an extraordinarily violent discussion, but the resultant benefits to +Dreiser were more than counterbalanced, I daresay, by the withdrawal of +"The 'Genius'" itself.[28] + + +Sec. 7 + +Dreiser, like Mark Twain and Emerson before him, has been far more +hospitably greeted in his first stage, now drawing to a close, in +England than in his own country. The cause of this, I daresay, lies +partly in the fact that "Sister Carrie" was in general circulation over +there during the seven years that it remained suppressed on this side. +It was during these years that such men as Arnold Bennett, Theodore +Watts-Dunton, Frank Harris and H. G. Wells, and such critical journals +as the _Spectator_, the _Saturday Review_ and the _Athenaeum_ became +aware of him, and so laid the foundations of a sound appreciation of his +subsequent work. Since the beginning of the war, certain English +newspapers have echoed the alarmed American discovery that he is a +literary agent of the Wilhelmstrasse, but it is to the honour of the +English that this imbecility has got no countenance from reputable +authority and has not injured his position. + +At home, as I have shown, he is less fortunate. When criticism is not +merely an absurd effort to chase him out of court because his ideas are +not orthodox, as the Victorians tried to chase out Darwin and Swinburne, +and their predecessors pursued Shelley and Byron, it is too often +designed to identify him with some branch or other of "radical" +poppycock, and so credit him with purposes he has never imagined. Thus +Chautauqua pulls and Greenwich Village pushes. In the middle ground +there proceeds the pedantic effort to dispose of him by labelling him. +One faction maintains that he is a realist; another calls him a +naturalist; a third argues that he is really a disguised romanticist. +This debate is all sound and fury, signifying nothing, but out of it has +come a valuation by Lawrence Gilman[29] which perhaps strikes very close +to the truth. He is, says Mr. Gilman, "a sentimental mystic who employs +the mimetic gestures of the realist." This judgment is apt in particular +and sound in general. No such thing as a pure method is possible in the +novel. Plain realism, as in Gorky's "Nachtasyl" and the war stories of +Ambrose Bierce, simply wearies us by its vacuity; plain romance, if we +ever get beyond our nonage, makes us laugh. It is their artistic +combination, as in life itself, that fetches us--the subtle projection +of the concrete muddle that is living against the ideal orderliness that +we reach out for--the eternal war of experience and aspiration--the +contrast between the world as it is and the world as it might be or +ought to be. Dreiser describes the thing that he sees, laboriously and +relentlessly, but he never forgets the dream that is behind it. "He +gives you," continues Mr. Gilman, "a sense of actuality; but he gives +you more than that: out of the vast welter and surge, the plethoric +irrelevancies, ... emerges a sense of the infinite sadness and mystery +of human life."...[30] + +"To see truly," said Renan, "is to see dimly." Dimness or mystery, call +it what you will: it is in all these overgrown and formless, but +profoundly moving books. Just what do they mean? Just what is Dreiser +driving at? That such questions should be asked is only a proof of the +straits to which pedagogy has brought criticism. The answer is simple: +he is driving at nothing, he is merely trying to represent what he sees +and feels. His moving impulse is no flabby yearning to teach, to +expound, to make simple; it is that "obscure inner necessity" of which +Conrad tells us, the irresistible creative passion of a genuine artist, +standing spell-bound before the impenetrable enigma that is life, +enamoured by the strange beauty that plays over its sordidness, +challenged to a wondering and half-terrified sort of representation of +what passes understanding. And _jenseits von Gut und Boese_. "For +myself," says Dreiser, "I do not know what truth is, what beauty is, +what love is, what hope is. I do not believe any one absolutely and I do +not doubt any one absolutely. I think people are both evil and +well-intentioned." The hatching of the Dreiser bugaboo is here; it is +the flat rejection of the rubber-stamp formulae that outrages petty +minds; not being "good," he must be "evil"--as William Blake said of +Milton, a true poet is always "of the devil's party." But in that very +groping toward a light but dimly seen there is a measure, it seems to +me, of Dreiser's rank and consideration as an artist. "Now comes the +public," says Hermann Bahr, "and demands that we explain what the poet +is trying to say. The answer is this: If we knew exactly he would not be +a poet...." + +FOOTNOTES: + +[16] Fuller's comparative obscurity is one of the strangest phenomena of +American letters. Despite his high achievement, he is seldom discussed, +or even mentioned. Back in 1899 he was already so far forgotten that +William Archer mistook his name, calling him Henry Y. Puller. _Vide_ +Archer's pamphlet, The American Language; New York, 1899. + +[17] For example, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, which +runs to fourteen large volumes and a total of nearly 10,000 pages, +Huxley receives but a page and a quarter of notice, and his remarkable +mastery of English is barely mentioned in passing. His two debates with +Gladstone, in which he did some of the best writing of the century, are +not noticed at all. + +[18] A Brief History of German Literature; New York, Chas. Scribner's +Sons, 1909. + +[19] New York, 1917; reprinted from _The Seven Arts_ for Feb., 1917. + +[20] Life, Art and America, p. 5. + +[21] The episode is related in A Hoosier Holiday. + +[22] A Princess of Arcady, published in 1900. + +[23] New York, The Century Co., 1916. + +[24] In _The Seven Arts_, May, 1917. + +[25] The _Nation_, Dec. 2, 1915. + +[26] 1186-1189. So translated by Floyd Dell: "O ye deathward-going +tribes of man, what do your lives mean except that they go to +nothingness?" + +[27] The New York _Evening Post_, Dec. 31, 1915. + +[28] Despite the comstockian attack, Dreiser is still fairly well +represented on the shelves of American public libraries. A canvas of the +libraries of the 25 principal cities gives the following result, an X +indicating that the corresponding book is catalogued, and a - that is +not: + + Sister Carrie + | Jennie Gerhardt + | | The Financier + | | | The Titan + | | | | A Traveler at Forty + | | | | | The "Genius" + | | | | | | Plays of the Natural + | | | | | | | A Hoosier Holiday + | | | | | | | | +New York X - - X X X X X +Boston - - - - X - X - +Chicago X X X X X X X X +Philadelphia X X X X X X X X +Washington - - - - X - X - +Baltimore - - - - X - - - +Pittsburgh - - X X X X - X +New Orleans - - - - - - - - +Denver X X X X X X X X +San Francisco X X X X X - - X +St. Louis X X X X X - X - +Cleveland X X X X - X X - +Providence - - - - - - - - +Los Angeles X X X X X X X X +Indianapolis X X X - X - X X +Louisville X X - X X X X X +St. Paul X X - - X - X X +Minneapolis X X X - X - X - +Cincinnati X X X - X - X X +Kansas City X X X X X X X X +Milwaukee - - - - X - X X +Newark X X X X X X X X +Detroit X X X - X X X X +Seattle X X - - X - X X +Hartford - - - - - - - X + +This table shows that but two libraries, those of Providence and New +Orleans, bar Dreiser altogether. The effect of alarms from newspaper +reviewers is indicated by the scant distribution of The "Genius," +which is barred by 14 of the 25. It should be noted that some of these +libraries issue certain of the books only under restrictions. This I +know to be the case in Louisville, Los Angeles, Newark and Cleveland. +The Newark librarian informs me that Jennie Gerhardt is to be removed +altogether, presumably in response to some protest from local Comstocks. +In Chicago The "Genius" has been stolen, and on account of the +withdrawal of the book the Public Library has been unable to get another +copy. + +[29] The _North American Review_, Feb., 1916. + +[30] Another competent valuation, by Randolph Bourne, is in _The Dial_, +June 14, 1917. + + + + +III + +JAMES HUNEKER + + +Sec. 1 + +Edgar Allan Poe, I am fond of believing, earned as a critic a good deal +of the excess of praise that he gets as a romancer and a poet, and +another over-estimated American dithyrambist, Sidney Lanier, wrote the +best textbook of prosody in English;[31] but in general the critical +writing done in the United States has been of a low order, and most +American writers of any genuine distinction, like most American painters +and musicians, have had to wait for understanding until it appeared +abroad. The case of Emerson is typical. At thirty, he was known in New +England as a heretical young clergyman and no more, and his fame +threatened to halt at the tea-tables of the Boston Brahmins. It remained +for Landor and Carlyle, in a strange land, to discern his higher +potentialities, and to encourage him to his real life-work. Mark Twain, +as I have hitherto shown, suffered from the same lack of critical +perception at home. He was quickly recognized as a funny fellow, true +enough, but his actual stature was not even faintly apprehended, and +even after "Huckleberry Finn" he was still bracketed with such laborious +farceurs as Artemus Ward. It was Sir Walter Besant, an Englishman, who +first ventured to put him on his right shelf, along with Swift, +Cervantes and Moliere. As for Poe and Whitman, the native recognition of +their genius was so greatly conditioned by a characteristic horror of +their immorality that it would be absurd to say that their own country +understood them. Both were better and more quickly apprehended in +France, and it was in France, not in America, that each founded a +school. What they had to teach we have since got back at second +hand--the tale of mystery, which was Poe's contribution, through +Gaboriau and Boisgobey; and _vers libre_, which was Whitman's, through +the French _imagistes_. + +The cause of this profound and almost unbroken lack of critical insight +and enterprise, this puerile Philistinism and distrust of ideas among +us, is partly to be found, it seems to me, in the fact that the typical +American critic is quite without any adequate cultural equipment for the +office he presumes to fill. Dr. John Dewey, in some late remarks upon +the American universities, has perhaps shown the cause thereof. The +trouble with our educational method, he argues, is that it falls between +the two stools of English humanism and German relentlessness--that it +produces neither a man who intelligently feels nor a man who thoroughly +knows. Criticism, in America, is a function of this half-educated and +conceited class; it is not a popular art, but an esoteric one; even in +its crassest journalistic manifestations it presumes to a certain +academic remoteness from the concerns and carnalities of everyday. In +every aspect it shows the defects of its practitioners. The American +critic of beautiful letters, in his common incarnation, is no more than +a talented sophomore, or, at best, a somewhat absurd professor. He +suffers from a palpable lack of solid preparation; he has no background +of moving and illuminating experience behind him; his soul has not +sufficiently adventured among masterpieces, nor among men. Imagine a +Taine or a Sainte-Beuve or a Macaulay--man of the world, veteran of +philosophies, "lord of life"--and you imagine his complete antithesis. +Even on the side of mere professional knowledge, the primary material of +his craft, he always appears incompletely outfitted. The grand sweep and +direction of the literary currents elude him; he is eternally on the +surface, chasing bits of driftwood. The literature he knows is the +fossil literature taught in colleges--worse, in high schools. It must be +dead before he is aware of it. And in particular he appears ignorant of +what is going forward in other lands. An exotic idea, to penetrate his +consciousness, must first become stale, and even then he is apt to purge +it of all its remaining validity and significance before adopting it. + +This has been true since the earliest days. Emerson himself, though a +man of unusual discernment and a diligent drinker from German spigots, +nevertheless remained a _dilettante_ in both aesthetics and metaphysics +to the end of his days, and the incompleteness of his equipment never +showed more plainly than in his criticism of books. Lowell, if anything, +was even worse; his aesthetic theory, first and last, was nebulous and +superficial, and all that remains of his pleasant essays today is their +somewhat smoky pleasantness. He was a Charles Dudley Warner in nobler +trappings, but still, at bottom, a Charles Dudley Warner. As for Poe, +though he was by nature a far more original and penetrating critic than +either Emerson or Lowell, he was enormously ignorant of good books, and +moreover, he could never quite throw off a congenital vulgarity of +taste, so painfully visible in the strutting of his style. The man, for +all his grand dreams, had a shoddy soul; he belonged authentically to +the era of cuspidors, "females" and Sons of Temperance. His occasional +affectation of scholarship has deceived no one. It was no more than +Yankee bluster; he constantly referred to books that he had never read. +Beside, the typical American critic of those days was not Poe, but his +arch-enemy, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, that almost fabulous ass--a Baptist +preacher turned taster of the beautiful. Imagine a Baptist valuing +Balzac, or Moliere, or Shakespeare, or Goethe--or Rabelais! + +Coming down to our own time, one finds the same endless amateurishness, +so characteristic of everything American, from politics to cookery--the +same astounding lack of training and vocation. Consider the solemn +ponderosities of the pious old maids, male and female, who write book +reviews for the newspapers. Here we have a heavy pretension to culture, +a campus cocksureness, a laborious righteousness--but of sound aesthetic +understanding, of alertness and hospitality to ideas, not a trace. The +normal American book reviewer, indeed, is an elderly virgin, a +superstitious bluestocking, an apostle of Vassar _Kultur_; and her +customary attitude of mind is one of fascinated horror. (The Hamilton +Wright Mabie complex! The "white list" of novels!) William Dean +Howells, despite a certain jauntiness and even kittenishness of manner, +was spiritually of that company. For all his phosphorescent heresies, he +was what the up-lifters call a right-thinker at heart, and soaked in the +national tradition. He was easiest intrigued, not by force and +originality, but by a sickly, _Ladies' Home Journal_ sort of piquancy; +it was this that made him see a genius in the Philadelphia Zola, W. B. +Trites, and that led him to hymn an abusive business letter by Frank A. +Munsey, author of "The Boy Broker" and "Afloat in a Great City," as a +significant human document. Moreover Howells ran true to type in another +way, for he long reigned as the leading Anglo-Saxon authority on the +Russian novelists without knowing, so far as I can make out, more than +ten words of Russian. In the same manner, we have had enthusiasts for +D'Annunzio and Mathilde Serao who knew no Italian, and celebrants of +Maeterlinck and Verhaeren whose French was of the finishing school, and +Ibsen authorities without a single word of Dano-Norwegian--I met one +once who failed to recognize "Et Dukkehjem" as the original title of "A +Doll's House,"--and performers upon Hauptmann who could no more read +"Die Weber" than they could decipher a tablet of Tiglath-Pileser III. + +Here and there, of course, a more competent critic of beautiful letters +flings out his banner--for example, John Macy, Ludwig Lewisohn, Andre +Tridon, Francis Hackett, Van Wyck Brooks, Burton Rascoe, E. A. Boyd, +Llewellyn Jones, Otto Heller, J. E. Spingarn, Lawrence Gilman, the late +J. Percival Pollard. Well-informed, intelligent, wide-eyed men--but only +four of them even Americans, and not one of them with a wide audience, +or any appreciable influence upon the main stream of American criticism. +Pollard's best work is buried in the perfumed pages of _Town Topics_; +his book on the Munich wits and dramatists[32] is almost unknown. Heller +and Lewisohn make their way slowly; a patriotic wariness, I daresay, +mixes itself up with their acceptance. Gilman disperses his talents; he +is quite as much musician as critic of the arts. As for Macy, I recently +found his "The Spirit of American Literature,"[33] by long odds the +soundest, wisest book on its subject, selling for fifty cents on a Fifth +avenue remainder counter. + +How many remain? A few competent reviewers who are primarily something +else--Harvey, Aikin, Untermeyer and company. A few youngsters on the +newspapers, struggling against the business office. And then a leap to +the Victorians, the crepe-clad pundits, the bombastic word-mongers of +the campus school--H. W. Boynton, W. C. Brownell, Paul Elmer More, +William Lyon Phelps, Frederick Taber Cooper _et al._ Here, undoubtedly, +we have learning of a sort. More, it appears, once taught Sanskrit to +the adolescent suffragettes of Bryn Mawr--an enterprise as stimulating +(and as intelligible) as that of setting off fire-works in a blind +asylum. Phelps sits in a chair at Yale. Boynton is a master of arts in +English literature, whatever that may mean. Brownell is both L.H.D. and +Litt.D., thus surpassing Samuel Johnson by one point, and Hazlitt, +Coleridge and Malone by two. But the learning of these august +_umbilicarii_, for all its pretensions, is precisely the sterile, +foppish sort one looks for in second-rate college professors. The +appearance is there, but not the substance. One ingests a horse-doctor's +dose of words, but fails to acquire any illumination. Read More on +Nietzsche[34] if you want to find out just how stupid criticism can be, +and yet show the outward forms of sense. Read Phelps' "The Advance of +the English Novel"[35] if you would see a fine art treated as a moral +matter, and great works tested by the criteria of a small-town +Sunday-school, and all sorts of childish sentimentality whooped up. And +plough through Brownell's "Standards,"[36] if you have the patience, and +then try to reduce its sonorous platitudes to straight-forward and +defensible propositions. + + +Sec. 2 + +Now for the exception. He is, of course, James Gibbons Huneker, the +solitary Iokanaan in this tragic aesthetic wilderness, the only critic +among us whose vision sweeps the whole field of beauty, and whose +reports of what he sees there show any genuine gusto. That gusto of his, +I fancy, is two-thirds of his story. It is unquenchable, contagious, +inflammatory; he is the only performer in the commissioned troupe who +knows how to arouse his audience to anything approaching enthusiasm. The +rest, even including Howells, are pedants lecturing to the pure in +heart, but Huneker makes a joyous story of it; his exposition, +transcending the merely expository, takes on the quality of an +adventure hospitably shared. One feels, reading him, that he is charmed +by the men and women he writes about, and that their ideas, even when he +rejects them, give him an agreeable stimulation. And to the charm that +he thus finds and exhibits in others, he adds the very positive charm of +his own personality. He seems a man who has found the world fascinating, +if perhaps not perfect; a friendly and good-humoured fellow; no frigid +scholiast, but something of an epicure; in brief, the reverse of the +customary maker of books about books. Compare his two essays on Ibsen, +in "Egoists" and "Iconoclasts," to the general body of American writing +upon the great Norwegian. The difference is that between a portrait and +a Bertillon photograph, Richard Strauss and Czerny, a wedding and an +autopsy. Huneker displays Ibsen, not as a petty mystifier of the women's +clubs, but as a literary artist of large skill and exalted passion, and +withal a quite human and understandable man. These essays were written +at the height of the symbolism madness; in their own way, they even show +some reflection of it; but taking them in their entirety, how clearly +they stand above the ignorant obscurantism of the prevailing criticism +of the time--how immeasurably superior they are, for example, to that +favourite hymn-book of the Ibsenites, "The Ibsen Secret" by Jennette +Lee! For the causes of this difference one need not seek far. They are +to be found in the difference between the bombastic half-knowledge of a +school teacher and the discreet and complete knowledge of a man of +culture. Huneker is that man of culture. He has reported more of +interest and value than any other American critic, living or dead, but +the essence of his criticism does not lie so much in what he +specifically reports as in the civilized point of view from which he +reports it. He is a true cosmopolitan, not only in the actual range of +his adventurings, but also and more especially in his attitude of mind. +His world is not America, nor Europe, nor Christendom, but the whole +universe of beauty. As Jules Simon said of Taine: "_Aucun ecrivain de +nos jours n'a ... decouvert plus d'horizons varies et immenses_." + +Need anything else be said in praise of a critic? And does an +extravagance or an error here and there lie validly against the saying +of it? I think not. I could be a professor if I would and show you slips +enough--certain ponderous nothings in the Ibsen essays, already +mentioned; a too easy bemusement at the hands of Shaw; a vacillating +over Wagner; a habit of yielding to the hocus-pocus of the mystics, +particularly Maeterlinck. On the side of painting, I am told, there are +even worse aberrations; I know too little about painting to judge for +myself. But the list, made complete, would still not be over-long, and +few of its items would be important. Huneker, like the rest of us, has +sinned his sins, but his judgments, in the overwhelming main, hold +water. He has resisted the lure of all the wild movements of the +generation; the tornadoes of doctrine have never knocked him over. Nine +times out of ten, in estimating a new man in music or letters, he has +come curiously close to the truth at the first attempt. And he has +always announced it in good time; his solo has always preceded the +chorus. He was, I believe, the first American (not forgetting William +Morton Payne and Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, the pioneers) to write about +Ibsen with any understanding of the artist behind the prophet's mask; he +was the first to see the rising star of Nietzsche (this was back in +1888); he was beating a drum for Shaw the critic before ever Shaw the +dramatist and mob philosopher was born (_circa_ 1886-1890); he was +writing about Hauptmann and Maeterlinck before they had got well set on +their legs in their own countries; his estimate of Sudermann, bearing +date of 1905, may stand with scarcely the change of a word today; he did +a lot of valiant pioneering for Strindberg, Hervieu, Stirner and Gorki, +and later on helped in the pioneering for Conrad; he was in the van of +the MacDowell enthusiasts; he fought for the ideas of such painters as +Davies, Lawson, Luks, Sloan and Prendergest (Americans all, by the way: +an answer to the hollow charge of exotic obsession) at a time when even +Manet, Monet and Degas were laughed at; he was among the first to give a +hand to Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane and H. B. Fuller. +In sum, he gave some semblance of reality in the United States, after +other men had tried and failed, to that great but ill-starred revolt +against Victorian pedantry, formalism and sentimentality which began in +the early 90's. It would be difficult, indeed, to overestimate the +practical value to all the arts in America of his intellectual +alertness, his catholic hospitality to ideas, his artistic courage, and +above all, his powers of persuasion. It was not alone that he saw +clearly what was sound and significant; it was that he managed, by the +sheer charm of his writings, to make a few others see and understand it. +If the United States is in any sort of contact today, however remotely, +with what is aesthetically going on in the more civilized countries--if +the Puritan tradition, for all its firm entrenchment, has eager and +resourceful enemies besetting it--if the pall of Harvard quasiculture, +by the Oxford manner out of Calvinism, has been lifted ever so +little--there is surely no man who can claim a larger share of credit +for preparing the way.... + + +Sec. 3 + +Huneker comes out of Philadelphia, that depressing intellectual slum, +and his first writing was for the Philadelphia _Evening Bulletin_. He is +purely Irish in blood, and is of very respectable ancestry, his maternal +grandfather and godfather having been James Gibbons, the Irish poet and +patriot, and president of the Fenian Brotherhood in America. Once, in a +review of "The Pathos of Distance," I ventured the guess that there was +a German strain in him somewhere, and based it upon the beery melancholy +visible in parts of that book. Who but a German sheds tears over the +empty bottles of day before yesterday, the Adelaide Neilson of 1877? Who +but a German goes into woollen undershirts at 45, and makes his will, +and begins to call his wife "Mamma"? The green-sickness of youth is +endemic from pole to pole, as much so as measles; but what race save the +wicked one is floored by a blue distemper in middle age, with +sentimental burblings _a cappella_, hallucinations of lost loves, and +an unquenchable lacrymorrhea?... I made out a good case, but I was +wrong, and the penalty came swiftly and doubly, for on the one hand the +Boston _Transcript_ sounded an alarm against both Huneker and me as +German spies, and on the other hand Huneker himself proclaimed that, +even spiritually, he was less German than Magyar, less "Hun" than Hun. +"I am," he said, "a Celto-Magyar: Pilsner at Donneybrook Fair. Even the +German beer and cuisine are not in it with the Austro-Hungarian." Here, +I suspect, he meant to say Czech instead of Magyar, for isn't Pilsen in +Bohemia? Moreover, turn to the chapter on Prague in "New Cosmopolis," +and you will find out in what highland his heart really is. In this +book, indeed, is a vast hymn to all things Czechic--the Pilsen +_Urquell_, the muffins stuffed with poppy-seed jam, the spiced chicken +liver _en casserole_, the pretty Bohemian girls, the rose and golden +glory of Hradschin Hill.... One thinks of other strange infatuations: +the Polish Conrad's for England, the Scotch Mackay's for Germany, the +Low German Brahms' for Italy. Huneker, I daresay, is the first +Celto-Czech--or Celto-Magyar, as you choose. (Maybe the name suggests +something. It is not to be debased to _Hoon_-eker, remember, but kept at +_Hun_-eker, rhyming initially with _nun_ and _gun_.) An unearthly +marriage of elements, by all the gods! but there are pretty children of +it.... + +Philadelphia humanely disgorged Huneker in 1878. His father designed him +for the law, and he studied the institutes at the Philadelphia Law +Academy, but like Schumann, he was spoiled for briefs by the stronger +pull of music and the _cacoethes scribendi_. (Grandpa John Huneker had +been a composer of church music, and organist at St. Mary's.) In the +year mentioned he set out for Paris to see Liszt; his aim was to make +himself a piano virtuoso. His name does not appear on his own exhaustive +list of Liszt pupils, but he managed to quaff of the Pierian spring at +second-hand, for he had lessons from Theodore Ritter (_ne_ Bennet), a +genuine pupil of the old walrus, and he was also taught by the venerable +Georges Mathias, a pupil of Chopin. These days laid the foundations for +two subsequent books, the "Chopin: the Man and His Music" of 1900, and +the "Franz Liszt" of 1911. More, they prepared the excavations for all +of the others, for Huneker began sending home letters to the +Philadelphia _Bulletin_ on the pictures that he saw, the books that he +read and the music that he heard in Paris, and out of them gradually +grew a body of doctrine that was to be developed into full-length +criticism on his return to the United States. He stayed in Paris until +the middle 80's, and then settled in New York. + +All the while his piano studies continued, and in New York he became a +pupil of Rafael Joseffy. He even became a teacher himself and was for +ten years on the staff of the National Conservatory, and showed himself +at all the annual meetings of the Music Teachers' Association. But bit +by bit criticism elbowed out music-making, as music-making had elbowed +out criticism with Schumann and Berlioz. In 1886 or thereabout he joined +the _Musical Courier_; then he went, in succession, to the old +_Recorder_, to the _Morning Advertiser_, to the _Sun_, to the _Times_, +and finally to the Philadelphia _Press_ and the New York _World_. +Various weeklies and monthlies have also enlisted him: _Mlle. New York_, +the _Atlantic Monthly_, the _Smart Set_, the _North American Review_ and +_Scribner's_. He has even stooped to _Puck_, vainly trying to make an +American _Simplicissimus_ of that dull offspring of synagogue and +barbershop. He has been, in brief, an extremely busy and not too +fastidious journalist, writing first about one of the arts, and then +about another, and then about all seven together. But music has been the +steadiest of all his loves; his first three books dealt almost wholly +with it; of his complete canon more than half have to do with it. + + +Sec. 4 + +His first book, "Mezzotints in Modern Music," published in 1899, +revealed his predilections clearly, and what is more, his critical +insight and sagacity. One reads it today without the slightest feeling +that it is an old story; some of the chapters, obviously reworkings of +articles for the papers, must go back to the middle 90's, and yet the +judgments they proclaim scarcely call for the change of a word. The +single noticeable weakness is a too easy acquiescence in the empty +showiness of Saint-Saens, a tendency to bow to the celebrated French +parlour magician too often. Here, I daresay, is an echo of old Paris +days, for Camille was a hero on the Seine in 1880, and there was even +talk of pitting him against Wagner. The estimates of other men are +judiciously arrived at and persuasively stated. Tschaikowsky is +correctly put down as a highly talented but essentially shallow +fellow--a blubberer in the regalia of a philosopher. Brahms, then still +under attack by Henry T. Finck, of the _Evening Post_ (the press-agent +of Massenet: ye gods, what Harvard can do, even to a Wuertemberger!) is +subjected to a long, an intelligent and an extremely friendly analysis; +no better has got into English since, despite too much stress on the +piano music. And Richard Strauss, yet a nine days' wonder, is described +clearly and accurately, and his true stature indicated. The rest of the +book is less noteworthy; Huneker says the proper things about Chopin, +Liszt and Wagner, and adds a chapter on piano methods, the plain fruit +of his late pedagogy. But the three chapters I have mentioned are +enough; they fell, in their time, into a desert of stupidity; they set a +standard in musical criticism in America that only Huneker himself has +ever exceeded. + +The most popular of his music books, of course, is the "Chopin" (1900). +Next to "Iconoclasts," it is the best seller of them all. More, it has +been done into German, French and Italian, and is chiefly responsible +for Huneker's celebrity abroad as the only critic of music that America +has ever produced. Superficially, it seems to be a monument of pedantry, +a meticulous piling up of learning, but a study of it shows that it is +very much more than that. Compare it to Sir George Grove's staggering +tome on the Beethoven symphonies if you want to understand the +difference between mere scholastic diligence and authentic criticism. +The one is simply a top-heavy mass of disorderly facts and worshipping +enthusiasm; the other is an analysis that searches out every nook and +corner of the subject, and brings it into coherence and intelligibility. +The Chopin rhapsodist is always held in check by the sound musician; +there is a snouting into dark places as well as a touching up of high +lights. I myself am surely no disciple of the Polish tuberose--his +sweetness, in fact, gags me, and I turn even to Moszkowski for +relief--but I have read and re-read this volume with endless interest, +and I find it more bethumbed than any other Huneker book in my library, +saving only "Iconoclasts" and "Old Fogy." Here, indeed, Huneker is on +his own ground. One often feels, in his discussions of orchestral music, +that he only thinks orchestrally, like Schumann, with an effort--that +all music, in his mind, gets itself translated into terms of piano +music. In dealing with Chopin no such transvaluation of values is +necessary; the raw materials are ready for his uses without preparation; +he is wholly at home among the black keys and white. + +His "Liszt" is a far less noteworthy book. It is, in truth, scarcely a +book at all, but merely a collection of notes for a book, some of them +considerably elaborated, but others set down in the altogether. One +reads it because it is about Liszt, the most fantastic figure that ever +came out of Hungary, half devil and half clown; not because there is any +conflagration of ideas in it. The chapter that reveals most of Huneker +is the appendix on latter-day piano virtuosi, with its estimates of such +men as de Pachmann, Rosenthal, Paderewski and Hofmann. Much better stuff +is to be found in "Overtones," "The Pathos of Distance" and "Ivory, Apes +and Peacocks"--brilliant, if not always profound studies of Strauss, +Wagner, Schoenberg, Moussorgsky, and even Verdi. But if I had my choice +of the whole shelf, it would rest, barring the "Chopin," on "Old +Fogy"--the _scherzo_ of the Hunekeran symphony, the critic taking a +holiday, the Devil's Mass in the tonal sanctuary. In it Huneker is at +his very choicest, making high-jinks with his Davidsbund of one, +rattling the skeletons in all the musical closets of the world. Here, +throwing off his critic's black gown, his lays about him right and left, +knocking the reigning idols off their perches; resurrecting the old, old +dead and trying to pump the breath into them; lambasting on one page and +lauding on the next; lampooning his fellow critics and burlesquing their +rubber stamp fustian; extolling Dussek and damning Wagner; swearing +mighty oaths by Mozart, and after him, Strauss--not Richard, but Johann! +The Old Fogy, of course, is the thinnest of disguises, a mere veil of +gossamer for "Editor" Huneker. That Huneker in false whiskers is +inimitable, incomparable, almost indescribable. On the one hand, he is a +prodigy of learning, a veritable warehouse of musical information, true, +half-true and apocryphal; on the other hand, he is a jester who delights +in reducing all learning to absurdity. Reading him somehow suggests +hearing a Bach mass rescored for two fifes, a tambourine in B, a wind +machine, two tenor harps, a contrabass oboe, two banjos, eight tubas and +the usual clergy and strings. The substance is there; every note is +struck exactly in the middle--but what outlandish tone colours, what +strange, unearthly sounds! It is not Bach, however, who first comes to +mind when Huneker is at his tricks, but Papa Haydn--the Haydn of the +Surprise symphony and the Farewell. There is the same gargantuan gaiety, +the same magnificent irreverence. Haydn did more for the symphony than +any other man, but he also got more fun out of it than any other man. + +"Old Fogy," of course, is not to be taken seriously: it is frankly a +piece of fooling. But all the same a serious idea runs through the book +from end to end, and that is the idea that music is getting too +subjective to be comfortable. The makers of symphonies tend to forget +beauty altogether; their one effort is to put all their own petty trials +and tribulations, their empty theories and speculations into cacophony. +Even so far back as Beethoven's day that autobiographical habit had +begun. "Beethoven," says Old Fogy, is "dramatic, powerful, a maker of +storms, a subduer of tempests; but his speech is the speech of a +self-centred egotist. He is the father of all the modern melomaniacs, +who, looking into their own souls, write what they see therein--misery, +corruption, slighting selfishness and ugliness." Old Ludwig's groans, of +course, we can stand. He was not only a great musician, but also a great +man. It is just as interesting to hear him sigh and complain as it would +be to hear the private prayers of Julius Caesar. But what of +Tschaikowsky, with his childish Slavic whining? What of Liszt, with his +cheap playacting, his incurable lasciviousness, his plebeian warts? What +of Wagner, with his delight in imbecile fables, his popinjay vanity, his +soul of a _Schnorrer_? What of Richard Strauss, with his warmed-over +Nietzscheism, his flair for the merely horrible? Old Fogy sweeps them +all into his ragbag. If art is to be defined as beauty seen through a +temperament, then give us more beauty and cleaner temperaments! Back to +the old gods, Mozart and Bach, with a polite bow to Brahms and a +sentimental tear for Chopin! Beethoven tried to tell his troubles in his +music; Mozart was content to ravish the angels of their harps. And as +for Johann Sebastian, "there was more real musical feeling, uplifting +and sincerity in the old Thomas-kirche in Leipzig ... than in all your +modern symphony and oratorio machine-made concerts put together." + +All this is argued, to be sure, in extravagant terms. Wagner is a mere +ghoul and impostor: "The Flying Dutchman" is no more than a parody on +Weber, and "Parsifal" is "an outrage against religion, morals and +music." Daddy Liszt is "the inventor of the Liszt pupil, a bad piano +player, a venerable man with a purple nose--a Cyrano de Cognac nose." +Tschaikowsky is the Slav gone crazy on vodka. He transformed Hamlet into +"a yelling man" and Romeo and Juliet into "two monstrous Cossacks, who +gibber and squeak at each other while reading some obscene volume." "His +Manfred is a libel on Byron, who was a libel on God." And even Schumann +is a vanishing star, a literary man turned composer, a pathological +case. But, as I have said, a serious idea runs through all this +concerto for slapstick and seltzer siphon, and to me, at least, that +idea has a plentiful reasonableness. We are getting too much melodrama, +too much vivisection, too much rebellion--and too little music. Turn +from Tschaikowsky's Pathetique or from any of his wailing tone-poems to +Schubert's C major, or to Mozart's Jupiter, or to Beethoven's _kleine +Sinfonie in F dur_: it is like coming out of a _Kaffeeklatsch_ into the +open air, almost like escaping from a lunatic asylum. The one +unmistakable emotion that much of this modern music from the steppes and +morgues and _Biertische_ engenders is a longing for form, clarity, +coherence, a self-respecting tune. The snorts and moans of the pothouse +Werthers are as irritating, in the long run, as the bawling of a child, +the squeak of a pig under a gate. One yearns unspeakably for a composer +who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them with +both ears open, and then recapitulates them unashamed, and then hangs a +brisk coda to them, and then shuts up. + + +Sec. 5 + +So much for "Old Fogy" and the musical books. They constitute, not only +the best body of work that Huneker himself has done, but the best body +of musical criticism that any American has done. Musical criticism, in +our great Calvinist republic, confines itself almost entirely to +transient reviewing, and even when it gets between covers, it keeps its +trivial quality. Consider, for example, the published work of Henry +Edward Krehbiel, for long the _doyen_ of the New York critics. I pick up +his latest book, "A Second Book of Operas,"[37] open it at random, and +find this: + + + On January 31, 1893, the Philadelphia singers, aided by the New + York Symphony Society, gave a performance of the opera, under the + auspices of the Young Men's Hebrew Association, for the benefit of + its charities, at the Carnegie Music Hall, New York. Mr. Walter + Damrosch was to have conducted, but was detained in Washington by + the funeral of Mr. Blaine, and Mr. Hinrichs took his place. + + +O Doctor _admirabilis, acutus et illuminatissimus_! Needless to say the +universities have not overlooked this geyser of buttermilk: he is an +honourary A.M. of Yale. His most respectable volume, that on negro +folksong, impresses one principally by its incompleteness. It may be +praised as a sketch, but surely not as a book. The trouble with +Krehbiel, of course, is that he mistakes a newspaper morgue for +Parnassus. He has all of the third-rate German's capacity for +unearthing facts, but he doesn't know how either to think or to write, +and so his criticism is mere pretence and pishposh. W. J. Henderson, of +the _Sun_, doesn't carry that handicap. He is as full of learning as +Krehbiel, as his books on singing and on the early Italian opera show, +but he also wields a slippery and intriguing pen, and he could be hugely +entertaining if he would. Instead, he devotes himself to manufacturing +primers for the newly intellectual. I can find little of the charm of +his _Sun_ articles in his books. Lawrence Gilman? A sound musician but +one who of late years has often neglected music for the other arts. +Philip H. Goepp? His three volumes on the symphonic repertoire leave +twice as much to be said as they say. Carl Van Vechten? A very promising +novice, but not yet at full growth. Philip Hale? His gigantic +annotations scarcely belong to criticism at all; they are musical +talmudism. Beside, they are buried in the program books of the Boston +Symphony Orchestra, and might as well be inscribed on the temple walls +of Baalbec. As for Upton and other such fellows, they are merely musical +chautauquans, and their tedious commentaries have little more value than +the literary criticisms in the religious weeklies. One of them, a +Harvard _maestro_, has published a book on the orchestra in which, on +separate pages, the reader is solemnly presented with pictures of first +and second violins! + +It seems to me that Huneker stands on a higher level than any of these +industrious gentlemen, and that his writings on music are of much more +value, despite his divided allegiance among the _beaux arts_. Whatever +may be said against him, it must at least be admitted that he knows +Chopin, and that he has written the best volumes upon the tuberculous +Pole in English. Vladimir de Pachmann, that king of all Chopin players, +once bore characteristic testimony to the fact--I think it was in +London. The program was heavy with the etudes and ballades, and Huneker +sat in the front row of fanatics. After a storm of applause de Pachmann +rose from the piano stool, levelled a bony claw at Huneker, and +pronounced his dictum: "_He_ knows more than _all_ of you." Joseffy +seems to have had the same opinion, for he sought the aid of his old +pupil in preparing his new edition of Chopin, the first volume of which +is all he lived to see in print.... And, beyond all the others, Huneker +disdains writing for the kindergarten. There is no stooping in his +discourse; he frankly addresses himself to an audience that has gone +through the forms, and so he avoids the tediousness of the A B C +expositors. He is the only American musical critic, save Van Vechten, +who thus assumes invariably that a musical audience exists, and the only +one who constantly measures up to its probable interests, supposing it +to be there. Such a book as "Old Fogy," for all its buffoonery, is +conceivable only as the work of a sound musician. Its background is one +of the utmost sophistication; in the midst of its wildest extravagances +there is always a profound knowledge of music on tap, and a profound +love of it to boot. Here, perhaps, more than anywhere else, Huneker's +delight in the things he deals with is obvious. It is not a seminary +that he keeps, but a sort of club of tone enthusiasts, and membership in +it is infinitely charming. + + +Sec. 6 + +This capacity for making the thing described seem important and +delightful, this quality of infectious gusto, this father-talent of all +the talents that a critic needs, sets off his literary criticism no less +than his discourse on music and musicians. Such a book as "Iconoclasts" +or "Egoists" is full of useful information, but it is even more full of +agreeable adventure. The style is the book, as it is the man. It is +arch, staccato, ironical, witty, galloping, playful, polyglot, +allusive--sometimes, alas, so allusive as to reduce the Drama Leaguer +and women's clubber to wonderment and ire. In writing of plays or of +books, as in writing of cities, tone-poems or philosophies, Huneker +always assumes that the elements are already well-grounded, that he is +dealing with the initiated, that a pause to explain would be an affront. +Sad work for the Philistines--but a joy to the elect! All this +polyphonic allusiveness, this intricate fuguing of ideas, is not to be +confused, remember, with the hollow showiness of the academic +soothsayer. It is as natural to the man, as much a part of him as the +clanging Latin of Johnson, or, to leap from art to art Huneker-wise, the +damnable cross-rhythms of Brahms. He could no more write without his +stock company of heretic sages than he could write without his ration of +malt. And, on examination, all of them turned out to be real. They are +far up dark alleys, but they are there!... And one finds them, at last, +to be as pleasant company as the multilingual puns of Nietzsche or +Debussy's chords of the second. + +As for the origin of that style, it seems to have a complex ancestry. +Huneker's first love was Poe, and even today he still casts affectionate +glances in that direction, but there is surely nothing of Poe's +elephantine labouring in his skipping, _pizzicato_ sentences. Then came +Carlyle--the Carlyle of "Sartor Resartus"--a god long forgotten. +Huneker's mother was a woman of taste; on reading his first scribblings, +she gave him Cardinal Newman, and bade him consider the Queen's English. +Newman achieved a useful purging; the style that remained was ready for +Flaubert. From the author of "L'Education Sentimentale," I daresay, came +the deciding influence, with Nietzsche's staggering brilliance offering +suggestions later on. Thus Huneker, as stylist, owes nearly all to +France, for Nietzsche, too, learned how to write there, and to the end +of his days he always wrote more like a Frenchman than a German. His +greatest service to his own country, indeed, was not as anarch, but as +teacher of writing. He taught the Germans that their language had a snap +in it as well as sighs and gargles--that it was possible to write German +and yet not wander in a wood. There are whole pages of Nietzsche that +suggest such things, say, as the essay on Maurice Barres in "Egoists," +with its bold tropes, its rapid gait, its sharp _sforzandos_. And you +will find old Friedrich at his tricks from end to end of "Old Fogy." + +Of the actual contents of such books as "Egoists" and "Iconoclasts" it +is unnecessary to say anything. One no longer reads them for their +matter, but for their manner. Every flapper now knows all that is worth +knowing about Ibsen, Strindberg, Maeterlinck and Shaw, and a great deal +that is not worth knowing. We have disentangled Hauptmann from +Sudermann, and, thanks to Dr. Lewisohn, may read all his plays in +English. Even Henry Becque has got into the vulgate and is familiar to +the Drama League. As for Anatole France, his "Revolt of the Angels" is +on the shelves of the Carnegie Libraries, and the Comstocks have let it +pass. New gods whoop and rage in Valhalla: Verhaeren, Artzibashef, +Przybyszewski. Huneker, alas, seems to drop behind the procession. He +writes nothing about these second-hand third-raters. He has come to +Wedekind, Schnitzler, Schoenberg, Korngold and Moussorgsky, and he has +discharged a few rounds of shrapnel at the Gallo-Asiatic petti-coat +philosopher, Henri Bergson, but here he has stopped, as he has stopped +at Matisse, Picasso, Epstein and Augustus John in painting. As he says +himself, "one must get off somewhere."... + +Particularly if one grows weary of criticism--and in Huneker, of late, I +detect more than one sign of weariness. Youth is behind him, and with it +some of its zest for exploration and combat. "The pathos of distance" is +a phrase that haunts him as poignantly as it haunted Nietzsche, its +maker. Not so long ago I tried to induce him to write some new Old Fogy +sketches, nominating Puccini, Strawinsky, Schoenberg, Korngold, Elgar. +He protested that the mood was gone from him forever, that he could not +turn the clock back twenty years. His late work in _Puck_, the _Times_ +and the _Sun_, shows an unaccustomed acquiescence in current valuations. +He praises such one-day masterpieces as McFee's "Casuals of the Sea"; he +is polite to the gaudy heroines of the opera-house; he gags a bit at +Wright's "Modern Painting"; he actually makes a gingery curtsy to Frank +Jewett Mather, a Princeton professor.... The pressure in the gauges +can't keep up to 250 pounds forever. Man must tire of fighting after +awhile, and seek his ease in his inn.... + +Perhaps the post-bellum transvaluation of all values will bring Huneker +to his feet again, and with something of the old glow and gusto in him. +And if the new men do not stir up, then assuredly the wrecks of the +ancient cities will: the Paris of his youth; Munich, Dresden, Vienna, +Brussels, London; above all, Prague. Go to "New Cosmopolis" and you will +find where his heart lies, or, if not his heart, then at all events his +oesophagus and pylorus.... Here, indeed, the thread of his meditations +is a thread of nutriment. However diverted by the fragrance of the Dutch +woods, the church bells of Belgium, the music of Stuttgart, the bad +pictures of Dublin, the plays of Paris, the musty romance of old Wien, +he always comes back anon to such ease as a man may find in his inn. +"The stomach of Vienna," he says, "first interested me, not its soul." +And so, after a dutiful genuflexion to St. Stephen's ("Old Steffel," as +the Viennese call it), he proceeds to investigate the paprika-chicken, +the _Gulyas_, the _Risi-bisi_, the _Apfelstrudel_, the _Kaiserschmarrn_ +and the native and authentic _Wienerschnitzel_. And from food to +drink--specifically, to the haunts of Pilsner, to "certain semi-sacred +houses where the ritual of beer-drinking is observed," to the shrines at +which beer maniacs meet, to "a little old house near a Greek church" +where "the best-kept Pilsner in Vienna may be found." + +The best-kept Pilsner in Vienna! The phrase enchants like an entrance of +the horns. The best caviare in Russia, the worst actor on Broadway, the +most virtuous angel in Heaven! Such superlatives are transcendental. And +yet,--so rare is perfection in this world!--the news swiftly follows, +unexpected, disconcerting, that the best Pilsner in Vienna is far short +of the ideal. For some undetermined reason--the influence of the +American tourist? the decay of the Austrian national character?--the +Vienna _Bierwirte_ freeze and paralyze it with too much ice, so that it +chills the nerves it should caress, and fills the heart below with +heaviness and repining. Avoid Vienna, says Huneker, if you are one who +understands and venerates the great Bohemian brew! And if, deluded, you +find yourself there, take the first _D-zug_ for Prague, that lovely +city, for in it you will find the Pilsen _Urquell_, and in the Pilsen +_Urquell_ you will find the best Pilsner in Christendom--its colour a +phosphorescent, translucent, golden yellow, its foam like whipped cream, +its temperature exactly and invariably right. Not even at Pilsen itself +(which the Bohemians call Plezen) is the emperor of malt liquors more +stupendously grateful to the palate. Write it down before you forget: +the Pilsen _Urquell_, Prague, Bohemia, 120 miles S. S. E. of Dresden, on +the river Moldau (which the natives call the Vitava). Ask for Fraeulein +Ottilie. Mention the name of Herr Huneker, the American +_Schriftsteller_. + +Of all the eminent and noble cities between the Alleghenies and the +Balkans, Prague seems to be Huneker's favourite. He calls it poetic, +precious, delectable, original, dramatic--a long string of adjectives, +each argued for with eloquence that is unmistakably sincere. He stands +fascinated before the towers and pinnacles of the Hradschin, "a miracle +of tender rose and marble white with golden spots of sunshine that would +have made Claude Monet envious." He pays his devotions to the Chapel of +St. Wenceslaus, "crammed with the bones of buried kings," or, at any +rate, to the shrine of St. John Nepomucane, "composed of nearly two tons +of silver." He is charmed by the beauty of the stout, black-haired, +red-cheeked Bohemian girls, and hopes that enough of them will emigrate +to the United States to improve the fading pulchritude of our own +houris. But most of all, he has praises for the Bohemian cuisine, with +its incomparable apple tarts, and its dumplings of cream cheese, and for +the magnificent, the overpowering, the ineffable Pilsner of Prague. This +Pilsner motive runs through the book from cover to cover. In the midst +of Dutch tulip-beds, Dublin cobblestones, Madrid sunlight and Atlantic +City leg-shows, one hears it insistently, deep down in the orchestra. +The cellos weave it into the polyphony, sometimes clearly, sometimes in +scarcely recognizable augmentation. It is heard again in the wood-wind; +the bassoons grunt it thirstily; it slides around in the violas; it +rises to a stately choral in the brass. And chiefly it is in minor. +Chiefly it is sounded by one who longs for the Pilsen _Urquell_ in a far +land, and among a barbarous and teetotaling people, and in an atmosphere +as hostile to the recreations of the palate as it is to the recreations +of the intellect. + +As I say, this Huneker is a foreigner and hence accursed. There is +something about him as exotic as a samovar, as essentially un-American +as a bashi-bazouk, a nose-ring or a fugue. He is filled to the throttle +with strange and unnational heresies. He ranks Beethoven miles above the +native gods, and not only Beethoven, but also Bach and Brahms, and not +only Bach and Brahms, but also Berlioz, Bizet, Bruch and Buelow and +perhaps even Balakirew, Bellini, Balfe, Borodin and Boieldieu. He +regards Budapest as a more civilized city than his native Philadelphia, +Stendhal as a greater literary artist than Washington Irving, "Kuenstler +Leben" as better music than "There is Sunlight in My Soul." Irish? I +still doubt it, despite the _Stammbaum_. Who ever heard of an Irish +epicure, an Irish _flaneur_, or, for that matter, an Irish +contrapuntist? The arts of the voluptuous category are unknown west of +Cherbourg; one leaves them behind with the French pilot. Even the +Czech-Irish hypothesis (or is it Magyar-Irish?) has a smell of the +lamp. Perhaps it should be Irish-Czech.... + + +Sec. 7 + +There remain the books of stories, "Visionaries" and "Melomaniacs." It +is not surprising to hear that both are better liked in France and +Germany than in England and the United States. ("Visionaries" has even +appeared in Bohemian.) Both are made up of what the Germans call +_Kultur-Novellen_--that is, stories dealing, not with the emotions +common to all men, but with the clash of ideas among the civilized and +godless minority. In some of them, _e.g._, "Rebels of the Moon," what +one finds is really not a story at all, but a static discussion, half +aesthetic and half lunatic. In others, _e.g._, "Isolde's Mother," the +whole action revolves around an assumption incomprehensible to the +general. One can scarcely imagine most of these tales in the magazines. +They would puzzle and outrage the readers of Gouverneur Morris and +Gertrude Atherton, and the readers of Howells and Mrs. Wharton no less. +Their point of view is essentially the aesthetic one; the overwhelming +importance of beauty is never in any doubt. And the beauty thus +vivisected and fashioned into new designs is never the simple +Wordsworthian article, of fleecy clouds and primroses all compact; on +the contrary, it is the highly artificial beauty of pigments and +tone-colours, of Cezanne landscapes and the second act of "Tristan and +Isolde," of Dunsanyan dragons and Paracelsian mysteries. Here, indeed, +Huneker riots in the aesthetic occultism that he loves. Music slides +over into diabolism; the Pobloff symphony rends the firmament of Heaven; +the ghost of Chopin drives Mychowski to drink; a single drum-beat +finishes the estimable consort of the composer of the Tympani symphony. +In "The Eighth Deadly Sin" we have a paean to perfume--the only one, so +far as I know, in English. In "The Hall of the Missing Footsteps" we +behold the reaction of hasheesh upon Chopin's ballade in F major.... +Strangely-flavoured, unearthly, perhaps unhealthy stuff. I doubt that it +will ever be studied for its style in our new Schools of Literature; a +devilish cunning if often there, but it leaves a smack of the +pharmacopoeia. However, as George Gissing used to say, "the artist +should be free from everything like moral prepossession." This lets in +the Antichrist.... + +Huneker himself seems to esteem these fantastic tales above all his +other work. Story-writing, indeed, was his first love, and his Opus 1 a +bad imitation of Poe, by name "The Comet," was done in Philadelphia so +long ago as July 4, 1876. (Temperature, 105 degrees Fahrenheit.) One +rather marvels that he has never attempted a novel. It would have been +as bad, perhaps, as "Love Among the Artists," but certainly no bore. He +might have given George Moore useful help with "Evelyn Innes" and +"Sister Teresa": they are about music, but not by a musician. As for me, +I see no great talent for fiction _qua_ fiction in these two volumes of +exotic tales. They are interesting simply because Huneker the story +teller so often yields place to Huneker the playboy of the arts. Such +things as "Antichrist" and "The Woman Who Loved Chopin" are no more, at +bottom, than second-rate anecdotes; it is the filling, the sauce, the +embroidery that counts. But what filling! What sauce! What +embroidery!... One never sees more of Huneker.... + + +Sec. 8 + +He must stand or fall, however, as critic. It is what he has written +about other men, not what he has concocted himself, that makes a figure +of him, and gives him his unique place in the sterile literature of the +republic's second century. He stands for a _Weltanschauung_ that is not +only un-national, but anti-national; he is the chief of all the curbers +and correctors of the American Philistine; in praising the arts he has +also criticized a civilization. In the large sense, of course, he has +had but small influence. After twenty years of earnest labour, he finds +himself almost as alone as a Methodist in Bavaria. The body of native +criticism remains as I have described it; an endless piling up of +platitudes, an homeric mass of false assumptions and jejune conclusions, +an insane madness to reduce beauty to terms of a petty and pornographic +morality. One might throw a thousand bricks in any American city without +striking a single man who could give an intelligible account of either +Hauptmann or Cezanne, or of the reasons for holding Schumann to have +been a better composer than Mendelssohn. The boys in our colleges are +still taught that Whittier was a great poet and Fennimore Cooper a great +novelist. Nine-tenths of our people--perhaps ninety-nine hundredths of +our native-born--have yet to see their first good picture, or to hear +their first symphony. Our Chamberses and Richard Harding Davises are +national figures; our Norrises and Dreisers are scarcely tolerated. Of +the two undoubted world figures that we have contributed to letters, one +was allowed to die like a stray cat up an alley and the other was +mistaken for a cheap buffoon. Criticism, as the average American +"intellectual" understands it, is what a Frenchman, a German or a +Russian would call donkeyism. In all the arts we still cling to the +ideals of the dissenting pulpit, the public cemetery, the electric sign, +the bordello parlour. + +But for all that, I hang to a somewhat battered optimism, and one of the +chief causes of that optimism is the fact that Huneker, after all these +years, yet remains unhanged. A picturesque and rakish fellow, a believer +in joy and beauty, a disdainer of petty bombast and moralizing, a sworn +friend of all honest purpose and earnest striving, he has given his life +to a work that must needs bear fruit hereafter. While the college +pedagogues of the Brander Matthews type still worshipped the dead bones +of Scribe and Sardou, Robertson and Bulwer-Lytton, he preached the new +and revolutionary gospel of Ibsen. In the golden age of Rosa Bonheur's +"The Horse Fair," he was expounding the principles of the +post-impressionists. In the midst of the Sousa marches he whooped for +Richard Strauss. Before the rev. professors had come to Schopenhauer, or +even to Spencer, he was hauling ashore the devil-fish, Nietzsche. No +stranger poisons have ever passed through the customs than those he has +brought in his baggage. No man among us has ever urged more ardently, or +with sounder knowledge or greater persuasiveness, that catholicity of +taste and sympathy which stands in such direct opposition to the booming +certainty and snarling narrowness of Little Bethel. + +If he bears a simple label, indeed, it is that of anti-Philistine. And +the Philistine he attacks is not so much the vacant and harmless fellow +who belongs to the Odd Fellows and recreates himself with _Life_ and +_Leslie's Weekly_ in the barber shop, as that more belligerent and +pretentious donkey who presumes to do battle for "honest" thought and a +"sound" ethic--the "forward looking" man, the university ignoramus, the +conservator of orthodoxy, the rattler of ancient phrases--what Nietzsche +called "the Philistine of culture." It is against this fat milch cow of +wisdom that Huneker has brandished a spear since first there was a +Huneker. He is a sworn foe to "the traps that snare the attention from +poor or mediocre workmanship--the traps of sentimentalism, of false +feeling, of cheap pathos, of the cheap moral." He is on the trail of +those pious mountebanks who "clutter the marketplaces with their booths, +mischievous half-art and tubs of tripe and soft soap." Superficially, as +I say, he seems to have made little progress in this benign _pogrom_. +But under the surface, concealed from a first glance, he has undoubtedly +left a mark--faint, perhaps, but still a mark. To be a civilized man in +America is measurably less difficult, despite the war, than it used to +be, say, in 1890. One may at least speak of "Die Walkuere" without being +laughed at as a half-wit, and read Stirner without being confused with +Castro and Raisuli, and argue that Huxley got the better of Gladstone +without being challenged at the polls. I know of no man who pushed in +that direction harder than James Huneker. + +FOOTNOTES: + +[31] The Science of English Verse; New York, Scribner, 1880. + +[32] Masks and Minstrels of New Germany; Boston, John W. Luce & Co., +1911. + +[33] New York, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1913. + +[34] The Drift of Romanticism; Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1913. + +[35] New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1916. + +[36] New York, Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1917. + +[37] New York, The Macmillan Co., 1917. + + + + +IV + +PURITANISM AS A LITERARY FORCE + + +Sec. 1 + +"Calvinism," says Dr. Leon Kellner, in his excellent little history of +American literature,[38] "is the natural theology of the disinherited; +it never flourished, therefore, anywhere as it did in the barren hills +of Scotland and in the wilds of North America." The learned doctor is +here speaking of theology in what may be called its narrow technical +sense--that is, as a theory of God. Under Calvinism, in the New World as +well as in the Old, it became no more than a luxuriant demonology; even +God himself was transformed into a superior sort of devil, ever wary and +wholly merciless. That primitive demonology still survives in the +barbaric doctrines of the Methodists and Baptists, particularly in the +South; but it has been ameliorated, even there, by a growing sense of +the divine grace, and so the old God of Plymouth Rock, as practically +conceived, is now scarcely worse than the average jail warden or +Italian padrone. On the ethical side, however, Calvinism is dying a much +harder death, and we are still a long way from the enlightenment. Save +where Continental influences have measurably corrupted the Puritan +idea--_e.g._, in such cities as New York, San Francisco and New +Orleans,--the prevailing American view of the world and its mysteries is +still a moral one, and no other human concern gets half the attention +that is endlessly lavished upon the problem of conduct, particularly of +the other fellow. It needed no official announcement to define the +function and office of the republic as that of an international expert +in morals, and the mentor and exemplar of the more backward nations. +Within, as well as without, the eternal rapping of knuckles and +proclaiming of new austerities goes on. The American, save in moments of +conscious and swiftly lamented deviltry, casts up all ponderable values, +including even the values of beauty, in terms of right and wrong. He is +beyond all things else, a judge and a policeman; he believes firmly that +there is a mysterious power in law; he supports and embellishes its +operation with a fanatical vigilance. + +Naturally enough, this moral obsession has given a strong colour to +American literature. In truth, it has coloured it so brilliantly that +American literature is set off sharply from all other literatures. In +none other will you find so wholesale and ecstatic a sacrifice of +aesthetic ideas, of all the fine gusto of passion and beauty, to notions +of what is meet, proper and nice. From the books of grisly sermons that +were the first American contribution to letters down to that amazing +literature of "inspiration" which now flowers so prodigiously, with two +literary ex-Presidents among its chief virtuosi, one observes no +relaxation of the moral pressure. In the history of every other +literature there have been periods of what might be called moral +innocence--periods in which a naif _joie de vivre_ has broken through +all concepts of duty and responsibility, and the wonder and glory of the +universe have been hymned with unashamed zest. The age of Shakespeare +comes to mind at once: the violence of the Puritan reaction offers a +measure of the pendulum's wild swing. But in America no such general +rising of the blood has ever been seen. The literature of the nation, +even the literature of the enlightened minority, has been under harsh +Puritan restraints from the beginning, and despite a few stealthy +efforts at revolt--usually quite without artistic value or even common +honesty, as in the case of the cheap fiction magazines and that of +smutty plays on Broadway, and always very short-lived--it shows not the +slightest sign of emancipating itself today. The American, try as he +will, can never imagine any work of the imagination as wholly devoid of +moral content. It must either tend toward the promotion of virtue, or be +suspect and abominable. + +If any doubt of this is in your mind, turn to the critical articles in +the newspapers and literary weeklies; you will encounter enough proofs +in a month's explorations to convince you forever. A novel or a play is +judged among us, not by its dignity of conception, its artistic honesty, +its perfection of workmanship, but almost entirely by its orthodoxy of +doctrine, its platitudinousness, its usefulness as a moral tract. A +digest of the reviews of such a book as David Graham Phillips' "Susan +Lenox" or of such a play as Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler" would make astounding +reading for a Continental European. Not only the childish incompetents +who write for the daily press, but also most of our critics of +experience and reputation, seem quite unable to estimate a piece of +writing as a piece of writing, a work of art as a work of art; they +almost inevitably drag in irrelevant gabble as to whether this or that +personage in it is respectable, or this or that situation in accordance +with the national notions of what is edifying and nice. Fully +nine-tenths of the reviews of Dreiser's "The Titan," without question +the best American novel of its year, were devoted chiefly to indignant +denunciations of the morals of Frank Cowperwood, its central character. +That the man was superbly imagined and magnificently depicted, that he +stood out from the book in all the flashing vigour of life, that his +creation was an artistic achievement of a very high and difficult +order--these facts seem to have made no impression upon the reviewers +whatever. They were Puritans writing for Puritans, and all they could +see in Cowperwood was an anti-Puritan, and in his creator another. It +will remain for Europeans, I daresay, to discover the true stature of +"The Titan," as it remained for Europeans to discover the true stature +of "Sister Carrie." + +Just how deeply this corrective knife has cut you may find plainly +displayed in Dr. Kellner's little book. He sees the throttling influence +of an ever alert and bellicose Puritanism, not only in our grand +literature, but also in our petit literature, our minor poetry, even in +our humour. The Puritan's utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of +all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his +unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage +cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous +persecution--these things have put an almost unbearable burden upon the +exchange of ideas in the United States, and particularly upon that form +of it which involves playing with them for the mere game's sake. On the +one hand, the writer who would deal seriously and honestly with the +larger problems of life, particularly in the rigidly-partitioned ethical +field, is restrained by laws that would have kept a Balzac or a Zola in +prison from year's end to year's end; and on the other hand the writer +who would proceed against the reigning superstitions by mockery has been +silenced by taboos that are quite as stringent, and by an indifference +that is even worse. For all our professed delight in and capacity for +jocosity, we have produced so far but one genuine wit--Ambrose +Bierce--and, save to a small circle, he remains unknown today. Our great +humourists, including even Mark Twain, have had to take protective +colouration, whether willingly or unwillingly, from the prevailing +ethical foliage, and so one finds them levelling their darts, not at the +stupidities of the Puritan majority, but at the evidences of lessening +stupidity in the anti-Puritan minority. In other words, they have done +battle, not against, but _for_ Philistinism--and Philistinism is no +more than another name for Puritanism. Both wage a ceaseless warfare +upon beauty in its every form, from painting to religious ritual, and +from the drama to the dance--the first because it holds beauty to be a +mean and stupid thing, and the second because it holds beauty to be +distracting and corrupting. + +Mark Twain, without question, was a great artist; there was in him +something of that prodigality of imagination, that aloof engrossment in +the human comedy, that penetrating cynicism, which one associates with +the great artists of the Renaissance. But his nationality hung around +his neck like a millstone; he could never throw off his native +Philistinism. One ploughs through "The Innocents Abroad" and through +parts of "A Tramp Abroad" with incredulous amazement. Is such coarse and +ignorant clowning to be accepted as humour, as great humour, as the best +humour that the most humorous of peoples has produced? Is it really the +mark of a smart fellow to lift a peasant's cackle over "Lohengrin"? Is +Titian's chromo of Moses in the bullrushes seriously to be regarded as +the noblest picture in Europe? Is there nothing in Latin Christianity, +after all, save petty grafting, monastic scandals and the worship of the +knuckles and shin-bones of dubious saints? May not a civilized man, +disbelieving in it, still find himself profoundly moved by its dazzling +history, the lingering remnants of its old magnificence, the charm of +its gorgeous and melancholy loveliness? In the presence of all beauty of +man's creation--in brief, of what we roughly call art, whatever its +form--the voice of Mark Twain was the voice of the Philistine. A +literary artist of very high rank himself, with instinctive gifts that +lifted him, in "Huckleberry Finn" to kinship with Cervantes and +Aristophanes, he was yet so far the victim of his nationality that he +seems to have had no capacity for distinguishing between the good and +the bad in the work of other men of his own craft. The literary +criticism that one occasionally finds in his writings is chiefly trivial +and ignorant; his private inclination appears to have been toward such +romantic sentimentality as entrances school-boys; the thing that +interested him in Shakespeare was not the man's colossal genius, but the +absurd theory that Bacon wrote his plays. Had he been born in France +(the country of his chief abomination!) instead of in a Puritan village +of the American hinterland, I venture that he would have conquered the +world. But try as he would, being what he was, he could not get rid of +the Puritan smugness and cocksureness, the Puritan distrust of new +ideas, the Puritan incapacity for seeing beauty as a thing in itself, +and the full peer of the true and the good. + +It is, indeed, precisely in the works of such men as Mark Twain that one +finds the best proofs of the Puritan influence in American letters, for +it is there that it is least expected and hence most significant. Our +native critics, unanimously Puritans themselves, are anaesthetic to the +flavour, but to Dr. Kellner, with his half-European, half-Oriental +culture, it is always distinctly perceptible. He senses it, not only in +the harsh Calvinistic fables of Hawthorne and the pious gurglings of +Longfellow, but also in the poetry of Bryant, the tea-party niceness of +Howells, the "maiden-like reserve" of James Lane Allen, and even in the +work of Joel Chandler Harris. What! A Southern Puritan? Well, why not? +What could be more erroneous than the common assumption that Puritanism +is exclusively a Northern, a New England, madness? The truth is that it +is as thoroughly national as the kindred belief in the devil, and runs +almost unobstructed from Portland to Portland and from the Lakes to the +Gulf. It is in the South, indeed, and not in the North, that it takes on +its most bellicose and extravagant forms. Between the upper tier of New +England and the Potomac river there was not a single prohibition +state--but thereafter, alas, they came in huge blocks! And behind that +infinitely prosperous Puritanism there is a long and unbroken tradition. +Berkeley, the last of the Cavaliers, was kicked out of power in Virginia +so long ago as 1650. Lord Baltimore, the Proprietor of Maryland, was +brought to terms by the Puritans of the Severn in 1657. The Scotch +Covenanter, the most uncompromising and unenlightened of all Puritans, +flourished in the Carolinas from the start, and in 1698, or thereabout, +he was reinforced from New England. In 1757 a band of Puritans invaded +what is now Georgia--and Georgia has been a Puritan barbarism ever +since. Even while the early (and half-mythical) Cavaliers were still in +nominal control of all these Southern plantations, they clung to the +sea-coast. The population that moved down the chain of the Appalachians +during the latter part of the eighteenth century, and then swept over +them into the Mississippi valley, was composed almost entirely of +Puritans--chiefly intransigeants from New England (where Unitarianism +was getting on its legs), kirk-crazy Scotch, and that plupious +beauty-hating folk, the Scotch-Irish. "In the South today," said John +Fiske a generation ago, "there is more Puritanism surviving than in New +England." In that whole region, an area three times as large as France +or Germany, there is not a single orchestra capable of playing +Beethoven's C minor symphony, or a single painting worth looking at, or +a single public building or monument of any genuine distinction, or a +single factory devoted to the making of beautiful things, or a single +poet, novelist, historian, musician, painter or sculptor whose +reputation extends beyond his own country. Between the Mason and Dixon +line and the mouth of the Mississippi there is but one opera-house, and +that one was built by a Frenchman, and is now, I believe, closed. The +only domestic art this huge and opulent empire knows is in the hands of +Mexican greasers; its only native music it owes to the despised negro; +its only genuine poet was permitted to die up an alley like a stray dog. + + +Sec. 2 + +In studying the anatomy and physiology of American Puritanism, and its +effects upon the national literature, one quickly discerns two main +streams of influence. On the one hand, there is the influence of the +original Puritans--whether of New England or of the South--, who came to +the New World with a ready-made philosophy of the utmost clarity, +positiveness and inclusiveness of scope, and who attained to such a +position of political and intellectual leadership that they were able +to force it almost unchanged upon the whole population, and to endow it +with such vitality that it successfully resisted alien opposition later +on. And on the other hand, one sees a complex of social and economic +conditions which worked in countless irresistible ways against the rise +of that dionysian spirit, that joyful acquiescence in life, that +philosophy of the _Ja-sager_, which offers to Puritanism, today as in +times past, its chief and perhaps only effective antagonism. In other +words, the American of the days since the Revolution has had Puritanism +diligently pressed upon him from without, and at the same time he has +led, in the main, a life that has engendered a chronic hospitality to +it, or at all events to its salient principles, within. + +Dr. Kellner accurately describes the process whereby the aesthetic +spirit, and its concomitant spirit of joy, were squeezed out of the +original New Englanders, so that no trace of it showed in their +literature, or even in their lives, for a century and a half after the +first settlements. "Absorption in God," he says, "seems incompatible +with the presentation (_i.e._, aesthetically) of mankind. The God of the +Puritans was in this respect a jealous God who brooked no sort of +creative rivalry. The inspired moments of the loftiest souls were filled +with the thought of God and His designs; spiritual life was wholly +dominated by solicitude regarding salvation, the hereafter, grace; how +could such petty concerns as personal experience of a lyric nature, the +transports or the pangs of love, find utterance? What did a lyric +occurrence like the first call of the cuckoo, elsewhere so welcome, or +the first sight of the snowdrop, signify compared with the last Sunday's +sermon and the new interpretation of the old riddle of evil in the +world? And apart from the fact that everything of a personal nature must +have appeared so trivial, all the sources of secular lyric poetry were +offensive and impious to Puritan theology.... One thing is an +established fact: up to the close of the eighteenth century America had +no belletristic literature." + +This Puritan bedevilment by the idea of personal sin, this reign of the +God-crazy, gave way in later years, as we shall see, to other and +somewhat milder forms of pious enthusiasm. At the time of the +Revolution, indeed, the importation of French political ideas was +accompanied by an importation of French theological ideas, and such men +as Franklin and Jefferson dallied with what, in those days at least, was +regarded as downright atheism. Even in New England this influence made +itself felt; there was a gradual letting down of Calvinism to the +softness of Unitarianism, and that change was presently to flower in the +vague temporizing of Transcendentalism. But as Puritanism, in the strict +sense, declined in virulence and took deceptive new forms, there was a +compensating growth of its brother, Philistinism, and by the first +quarter of the nineteenth century, the distrust of beauty, and of the +joy that is its object, was as firmly established throughout the land as +it had ever been in New England. The original Puritans had at least been +men of a certain education, and even of a certain austere culture. They +were inordinately hostile to beauty in all its forms, but one somehow +suspects that much of their hostility was due to a sense of their +weakness before it, a realization of its disarming psychical pull. But +the American of the new republic was of a different kidney. He was not +so much hostile to beauty as devoid of any consciousness of it; he stood +as unmoved before its phenomena as a savage before a table of +logarithms. What he had set up on this continent, in brief, was a +commonwealth of peasants and small traders, a paradise of the +third-rate, and its national philosophy, almost wholly unchecked by the +more sophisticated and civilized ideas of an aristocracy, was precisely +the philosophy that one finds among peasants and small traders at all +times and everywhere. The difference between the United States and any +other nation did not lie in any essential difference between American +peasants and other peasants, but simply in the fact that here, alone, +the voice of the peasant was the single voice of the nation--that here, +alone, the only way to eminence and public influence was the way of +acquiescence in the opinions and prejudices of the untutored and +Philistine mob. Jackson was the _Stammvater_ of the new statesmen and +philosophers; he carried the mob's distrust of good taste even into the +field of conduct; he was the first to put the rewards of conformity +above the dictates of common decency; he founded a whole hierarchy of +Philistine messiahs, the roaring of which still belabours the ear. + +Once established, this culture of the intellectually disinherited tended +to defend and perpetuate itself. On the one hand, there was no +appearance of a challenge from within, for the exigent problems of +existence in a country that was yet but half settled and organized left +its people with no energy for questioning what at least satisfied their +gross needs, and so met the pragmatic test. And on the other hand, there +was no critical pressure from without, for the English culture which +alone reached over the sea was itself entering upon its Victorian +decline, and the influence of the native aristocracy--the degenerating +_Junkers_ of the great estates and the boorish magnates of the city +_bourgeoisie_--was quite without any cultural direction at all. The +chief concern of the American people, even above the bread-and-butter +question, was politics. They were incessantly hag-ridden by political +difficulties, both internal and external, of an inordinate complexity, +and these occupied all the leisure they could steal from the sordid work +of everyday. More, their new and troubled political ideas tended to +absorb all the rancorous certainty of their fading religious ideas, so +that devotion to a theory or a candidate became translated into devotion +to a revelation, and the game of politics turned itself into a holy war. +The custom of connecting purely political doctrines with pietistic +concepts of an inflammable nature, then firmly set up by skilful +persuaders of the mob, has never quite died out in the United States. +There has not been a presidential contest since Jackson's day without +its Armageddons, its marching of Christian soldiers, its crosses of +gold, its crowns of thorns. The most successful American politicians, +beginning with the anti-slavery agitators, have been those most adept at +twisting the ancient gauds and shibboleths of Puritanism to partisan +uses. Every campaign that we have seen for eighty years has been, on +each side, a pursuit of bugaboos, a denunciation of heresies, a snouting +up of immoralities. + +But it was during the long contest against slavery, beginning with the +appearance of William Lloyd Garrison's _Liberator_ in 1831 and ending at +Appomattox, that this gigantic supernaturalization of politics reached +its most astounding heights. In those days, indeed, politics and +religion coalesced in a manner not seen in the world since the Middle +Ages, and the combined pull of the two was so powerful that none could +quite resist it. All men of any ability and ambition turned to political +activity for self-expression. It engaged the press to the exclusion of +everything else; it conquered the pulpit; it even laid its hand upon +industry and trade. Drawing the best imaginative talent into its +service--Jefferson and Lincoln may well stand as examples--it left the +cultivation of belles lettres, and of all the other arts no less, to +women and admittedly second-rate men. And when, breaking through this +taboo, some chance first-rate man gave himself over to purely aesthetic +expression, his reward was not only neglect, but even a sort of +ignominy, as if such enterprises were not fitting for males with hair on +their chests. I need not point to Poe and Whitman, both disdained as +dreamers and wasters, and both proceeded against with the utmost rigours +of outraged Philistinism. + +In brief, the literature of that whole period, as Algernon Tassin shows +in "The Magazine in America,"[39] was almost completely disassociated +from life as men were then living it. Save one counts in such crude +politico-puritan tracts as "Uncle Tom's Cabin," it is difficult to find +a single contemporaneous work that interprets the culture of the time, +or even accurately represents it. Later on, it found historians and +anatomists, and in one work, at least, to wit, "Huckleberry Finn," it +was studied and projected with the highest art, but no such impulse to +make imaginative use of it showed itself contemporaneously, and there +was not even the crude sentimentalization of here and now that one finds +in the popular novels of today. Fenimore Cooper filled his romances, not +with the people about him, but with the Indians beyond the sky-line, and +made them half-fabulous to boot. Irving told fairy tales about the +forgotten Knickerbockers; Hawthorne turned backward to the Puritans of +Plymouth Rock; Longfellow to the Acadians and the prehistoric Indians; +Emerson took flight from earth altogether; even Poe sought refuge in a +land of fantasy. It was only the frank second-raters--_e.g._, Whittier +and Lowell--who ventured to turn to the life around them, and the +banality of the result is a sufficient indication of the crudeness of +the current taste, and the mean position assigned to the art of letters. +This was pre-eminently the era of the moral tale, the Sunday-school +book. Literature was conceived, not as a thing in itself, but merely as +a hand-maiden to politics or religion. The great celebrity of Emerson in +New England was not the celebrity of a literary artist, but that of a +theologian and metaphysician; he was esteemed in much the same way that +Jonathan Edwards had been esteemed. Even down to our own time, indeed, +his vague and empty philosophizing has been put above his undeniable +capacity for graceful utterance, and it remained for Dr. Kellner to +consider him purely as a literary artist, and to give him due praise for +his skill. + +The Civil War brought that era of sterility to an end. As I shall show +later on, the shock of it completely reorganized the American scheme of +things, and even made certain important changes in the national +Puritanism, or, at all events, in its machinery. Whitman, whose career +straddled, so to speak, the four years of the war, was the leader--and +for a long while, the only trooper--of a double revolt. On the one hand +he offered a courageous challenge to the intolerable prudishness and +dirty-mindedness of Puritanism, and on the other hand he boldly sought +the themes and even the modes of expression of his poetry in the +arduous, contentious and highly melodramatic life that lay all about +him. Whitman, however, was clearly before his time. His countrymen could +see him only as immoralist; save for a pitiful few of them, they were +dead to any understanding of his stature as artist, and even unaware +that such a category of men existed. He was put down as an invader of +the public decencies, a disturber of the public peace; even his eloquent +war poems, surely the best of all his work, were insufficient to get him +a hearing; the sentimental rubbish of "The Blue and the Gray" and the +ecstatic supernaturalism of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" were far +more to the public taste. Where Whitman failed, indeed, all subsequent +explorers of the same field have failed with him, and the great war has +left no more mark upon American letters than if it had never been +fought. Nothing remotely approaching the bulk and beam of Tolstoi's "War +and Peace," or, to descend to a smaller scale, Zola's "The Attack on the +Mill," has come out of it. Its appeal to the national imagination was +undoubtedly of the most profound character; it coloured politics for +fifty years, and is today a dominating influence in the thought of whole +sections of the American people. But in all that stirring up there was +no upheaval of artistic consciousness, for the plain reason that there +was no artistic consciousness there to heave up, and all we have in the +way of Civil War literature is a few conventional melodramas, a few +half-forgotten short stories by Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane, and a +half dozen idiotic popular songs in the manner of Randall's "Maryland, +My Maryland." + +In the seventies and eighties, with the appearance of such men as Henry +James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain and Bret Harte, a better day +seemed to be dawning. Here, after a full century of infantile +romanticizing, were four writers who at least deserved respectful +consideration as literary artists, and what is more, three of them +turned from the conventionalized themes of the past to the teeming and +colourful life that lay under their noses. But this promise of better +things was soon found to be no more than a promise. Mark Twain, after +"The Gilded Age," slipped back into romanticism tempered by +Philistinism, and was presently in the era before the Civil War, and +finally in the Middle Ages, and even beyond. Harte, a brilliant +technician, had displayed his whole stock when he had displayed his +technique: his stories were not even superficially true to the life they +presumed to depict; one searched them in vain for an interpretation of +it; they were simply idle tales. As for Howells and James, both quickly +showed that timorousness and reticence which are the distinguishing +marks of the Puritan, even in his most intellectual incarnations. The +American scene that they depicted with such meticulous care was chiefly +peopled with marionettes. They shrunk, characteristically, from those +larger, harsher clashes of will and purpose which one finds in all truly +first-rate literature. In particular, they shrunk from any +interpretation of life which grounded itself upon an acknowledgment of +its inexorable and inexplicable tragedy. In the vast combat of instincts +and aspirations about them they saw only a feeble jousting of comedians, +unserious and insignificant. Of the great questions that have agitated +the minds of men in Howells' time one gets no more than a faint and +far-away echo in his novels. His investigations, one may say, are +carried on _in vacuo_; his discoveries are not expressed in terms of +passion, but in terms of giggles. + +In the followers of Howells and James one finds little save an empty +imitation of their emptiness, a somewhat puerile parodying of their +highly artful but essentially personal technique. To wade through the +books of such characteristic American fictioneers as Frances Hodgson +Burnett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, F. Hopkinson Smith, Alice Brown, James +Lane Allen, Winston Churchill, Ellen Glasgow, Gertrude Atherton and +Sarah Orne Jewett is to undergo an experience that is almost terrible. +The flow of words is completely purged of ideas; in place of them one +finds no more than a romantic restatement of all the old platitudes and +formulae. To call such an emission of graceful poppycock a literature, +of course, is to mouth an absurdity, and yet, if the college professors +who write treatises on letters are to be believed, it is the best we +have to show. Turn, for example, to "A History of American Literature +Since 1870," by Prof. Fred Lewis Pattee, one of the latest and +undoubtedly one of the least unintelligent of these books. In it the +gifted pedagogue gives extended notice to no less than six of the nine +writers I have mentioned, and upon all of them his verdicts are +flattering. He bestows high praises, direct and indirect, upon Mrs. +Freeman's "grim and austere" manner, her "repression," her entire lack +of poetical illumination. He compares Miss Jewett to both Howells and +Hawthorne, not to mention Mrs. Gaskell--and Addison! He grows +enthusiastic over a hollow piece of fine writing by Miss Brown. And he +forgets altogether to mention Dreiser, or Sinclair, or Medill Patterson, +or Harry Leon Wilson, or George Ade!... + +So much for the best. The worst is beyond description. France has her +Brieux and her Henry Bordeaux; Germany has her Muehlbach, her stars of +the _Gartenlaube_; England contributes Caine, Corelli, Oppenheim and +company. But it is in our country alone that banality in letters takes +on the proportions of a national movement; it is only here that a work +of the imagination is habitually judged by its sheer emptiness of ideas, +its fundamental platitudinousness, its correspondence with the +imbecility of mob thinking; it is only here that "glad" books run up +sales of hundreds of thousands. Richard Harding Davis, with his ideals +of a floor-walker; Gene Stratton-Porter, with her snuffling +sentimentality; Robert W. Chambers, with his "society" romances for +shop-girls; Irvin Cobb, with his laboured, _Ayers' Almanac_ jocosity; +the authors of the _Saturday Evening Post_ school, with their heroic +drummers and stockbrokers, their ecstatic celebration of the stupid, the +sordid, the ignoble--these, after all, are our typical _literati_. The +Puritan fear of ideas is the master of them all. Some of them, in +truth, most of them, have undeniable talent; in a more favourable +environment not a few of them might be doing sound work. But they see +how small the ring is, and they make their tricks small to fit it. Not +many of them ever venture a leg outside. The lash of the ringmaster is +swift, and it stings damnably.... + +I say not many; I surely do not mean none at all. As a matter of fact, +there have been intermittent rebellions against the prevailing +pecksniffery and sentimentality ever since the days of Irving and +Hawthorne. Poe led one of them--as critic more than as creative artist. +His scathing attacks upon the Gerald Stanley Lees, the Hamilton Wright +Mabies and the George E. Woodberrys of his time keep a liveliness and +appositeness that the years have not staled; his criticism deserves to +be better remembered. Poe sensed the Philistine pull of a Puritan +civilization as none had before him, and combated it with his whole +artillery of rhetoric. Another rebel, of course, was Whitman; how he +came to grief is too well known to need recalling. What is less familiar +is the fact that both the _Atlantic Monthly_ and the _Century_ (first +called _Scribner's_) were set up by men in revolt against the reign of +mush, as _Putnam's_ and the _Dial_ had been before them. The salutatory +of the _Dial_, dated 1840, stated the case against the national +mugginess clearly. The aim of the magazine, it said, was to oppose "that +rigour of our conventions of religion and education which is turning us +to stone" and to give expression to "new views and the dreams of youth." +Alas, for these brave _revoltes_! _Putnam's_ succumbed to the +circumambient rigours and duly turned to stone, and is now no more. The +_Atlantic_, once so heretical, has become as respectable as the New York +_Evening Post_. As for the _Dial_, it was until lately the very pope of +orthodoxy and jealously guarded the college professors who read it from +the pollution of ideas. Only the _Century_ has kept the faith +unbrokenly. It is, indeed, the one first-class American magazine that +has always welcomed newcomers, and that maintains an intelligent contact +with the literature that is in being, and that consistently tries to +make the best terms possible with the dominant Philistinism. It cannot +go the whole way without running into danger; let it be said to the +credit of its editors that they have more than once braved that danger. + +The tale might be lengthened. Mark Twain, in his day, felt the stirrings +of revolt, and not all his Philistinism was sufficient to hold him +altogether in check. If you want to find out about the struggle that +went on within him, read the biography by Albert Bigelow Paine, or, +better still, "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What is Man?" Alive, he had +his position to consider; dead, he now speaks out. In the preface to +"What is Man?" dated 1905, there is a curious confession of his +incapacity for defying the taboos which surrounded him. The studies for +the book, he says, were begun "twenty-five or twenty-seven years +ago"--the period of "A Tramp Abroad" and "The Prince and the Pauper." It +was actually written "seven years ago"--that is, just after "Following +the Equator" and "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc." And why did it +lie so long in manuscript, and finally go out stealthily, under a +private imprint?[40] Simply because, as Mark frankly confesses, he +"dreaded (_and could not bear_) the disapproval of the people around" +him. He knew how hard his fight for recognition had been; he knew what +direful penalties outraged orthodoxy could inflict; he had in him the +somewhat pathetic discretion of a respectable family man. But, dead, he +is safely beyond reprisal, and so, after a prudent interval, the +faithful Paine begins printing books in which, writing knowingly behind +six feet of earth, he could set down his true ideas without fear. Some +day, perhaps, we shall have his microbe story, and maybe even his +picture of the court of Elizabeth. + +A sneer in Prof. Pattee's history, before mentioned, recalls the fact +that Hamlin Garland was also a rebel in his day and bawled for the Truth +with a capital T. That was in 1893. Two years later the guardians of the +national rectitude fell afoul of "Rose of Dutchers' Coolly" and Garland +began to think it over; today he devotes himself to the safer enterprise +of chasing spooks; his name is conspicuously absent from the Dreiser +Protest. Nine years before his brief offending John Hay had set off a +discreet bomb in "The Bread-Winners"--anonymously because "my standing +would be seriously compromised" by an avowal. Six years later Frank +Norris shook up the Phelpses and Mores of the time with "McTeague." +Since then there have been assaults timorous and assaults head-long--by +Bierce, by Dreiser, by Phillips, by Fuller--by Mary MacLanes and by +Upton Sinclairs--by ploughboy poets from the Middle West and by jitney +geniuses in Greenwich Village--assaults gradually tapering off to a mere +sophomoric brashness and deviltry. And all of them like snow-ballings of +Verdun. All of them petered out and ineffectual. The normal, the typical +American book of today is as fully a remouthing of old husks as the +normal book of Griswold's day. The whole atmosphere of our literature, +in William James' phrase, is "mawkish and dishwatery." Books are still +judged among us, not by their form and organization as works of art, +their accuracy and vividness as representations of life, their validity +and perspicacity as interpretations of it, but by their conformity to +the national prejudices, their accordance with set standards of niceness +and propriety. The thing irrevocably demanded is a "sane" book; the +ideal is a "clean," an "inspiring," a "glad" book. + + +Sec. 3 + +All this may be called the Puritan impulse from within. It is, indeed, +but a single manifestation of one of the deepest prejudices of a +religious and half-cultured people--the prejudice against beauty as a +form of debauchery and corruption--the distrust of all ideas that do not +fit readily into certain accepted axioms--the belief in the eternal +validity of moral concepts--in brief, the whole mental sluggishness of +the lower orders of men. But in addition to this internal resistance, +there has been laid upon American letters the heavy hand of a Puritan +authority from without, and no examination of the history and present +condition of our literature could be of any value which did not take it +constantly into account, and work out the means of its influence and +operation. That authority, as I shall show, transcends both in power and +in alertness the natural reactions of the national mind, and is +incomparably more potent in combating ideas. It is supported by a body +of law that is unmatched in any other country of Christendom, and it is +exercised with a fanatical harshness and vigilance that make escape from +its operations well nigh impossible. Some of its effects, both direct +and indirect, I shall describe later, but before doing so it may be well +to trace its genesis and development. + +At bottom, of course, it rests upon the inherent Puritanism of the +people; it could not survive a year if they were opposed to the +principle visible in it. That deep-seated and uncorrupted Puritanism, +that conviction of the pervasiveness of sin, of the supreme importance +of moral correctness, of the need of savage and inquisitorial laws, has +been a dominating force in American life since the very beginning. There +has never been any question before the nation, whether political or +economic, religious or military, diplomatic or sociological, which did +not resolve itself, soon or late, into a purely moral question. Nor has +there ever been any surcease of the spiritual eagerness which lay at the +bottom of the original Puritan's moral obsession: the American has been, +from the very start, a man genuinely interested in the eternal +mysteries, and fearful of missing their correct solution. The frank +theocracy of the New England colonies had scarcely succumbed to the +libertarianism of a godless Crown before there came the Great Awakening +of 1734, with its orgies of homiletics and its restoration of talmudism +to the first place among polite sciences. The Revolution, of course, +brought a set-back: the colonists faced so urgent a need of unity in +politics that they declared a sort of _Treuga Dei_ in religion, and that +truce, armed though it was, left its imprint upon the First Amendment to +the Constitution. But immediately the young Republic emerged from the +stresses of adolescence, a missionary army took to the field again, and +before long the Asbury revival was paling that of Whitefield, Wesley and +Jonathan Edwards, not only in its hortatory violence but also in the +length of its lists of slain. + +Thereafter, down to the outbreak of the Civil War, the country was +rocked again and again by furious attacks upon the devil. On the one +hand, this great campaign took a purely theological form, with a +hundred new and fantastic creeds as its fruits; on the other hand, it +crystallized into the hysterical temperance movement of the 30's and +40's, which penetrated to the very floor of Congress and put "dry" laws +upon the statute-books of ten States; and on the third hand, as it were, +it established a prudery in speech and thought from which we are yet but +half delivered. Such ancient and innocent words as "bitch" and "bastard" +disappeared from the American language; Bartlett tells us, indeed, in +his "Dictionary of Americanisms,"[41] that even "bull" was softened to +"male cow." This was the Golden Age of euphemism, as it was of euphuism; +the worst inventions of the English mid-Victorians were adopted and +improved. The word "woman" became a term of opprobrium, verging close +upon downright libel; legs became the inimitable "limbs"; the stomach +began to run from the "bosom" to the pelvic arch; pantaloons faded into +"unmentionables"; the newspapers spun their parts of speech into such +gossamer webs as "a statutory offence," "a house of questionable repute" +and "an interesting condition." And meanwhile the Good Templars and Sons +of Temperance swarmed in the land like a plague of celestial locusts. +There was not a hamlet without its uniformed phalanx, its affecting +exhibit of reformed drunkards. The Kentucky Legislature succumbed to a +travelling recruiting officer, and two-thirds of the members signed the +pledge. The National House of Representatives took recess after recess +to hear eminent excoriators of the Rum Demon, and more than a dozen of +its members forsook their duties to carry the new gospel to the bucolic +heathen--the vanguard, one may note in passing, of the innumerable +Chautauquan caravan of later years. + +Beneath all this bubbling on the surface, of course, ran the deep and +swift undercurrent of anti-slavery feeling--a tide of passion which +historians now attempt to account for on economic grounds, but which +showed no trace of economic origin while it lasted. Its true quality was +moral, devout, ecstatic; it culminated, to change the figure, in a +supreme discharge of moral electricity, almost fatal to the nation. The +crack of that great spark emptied the jar; the American people forgot +all about their pledges and pruderies during the four years of Civil +War. The Good Templars, indeed, were never heard of again, and with them +into memory went many other singular virtuosi of virtue--for example, +the Millerites. But almost before the last smoke of battle cleared away, +a renaissance of Puritan ardour began, and by the middle of the 70's it +was in full flower. Its high points and flashing lighthouses halt the +backward-looking eye; the Moody and Sankey uproar, the triumphal entry +of the Salvation Army, the recrudescence of the temperance agitation and +its culmination in prohibition, the rise of the Young Men's Christian +Association and of the Sunday-school, the almost miraculous growth of +the Christian Endeavour movement, the beginnings of the vice crusade, +the renewed injection of moral conceptions and rages into party politics +(the "crime" of 1873!), the furious preaching of baroque Utopias, the +invention of muckraking, the mad, glad war of extermination upon the +Mormons, the hysteria over the Breckenridge-Pollard case and other like +causes, the enormous multiplication of moral and religious associations, +the spread of zooephilia, the attack upon Mammon, the dawn of the uplift, +and last but far from least, comstockery. + +In comstockery, if I do not err, the new Puritanism gave a sign of its +formal departure from the old, and moral endeavour suffered a general +overhauling and tightening of the screws. The difference between the two +forms is very well represented by the difference between the program of +the half-forgotten Good Templars and the program set forth in the Webb +Law of 1913, or by that between the somewhat diffident prudery of the +40's and the astoundingly ferocious and uncompromising vice-crusading of +today. In brief, a difference between the _re_nunciation and +_de_nunciation, asceticism and Mohammedanism, the hair shirt and the +flaming sword. The distinguishing mark of the elder Puritanism, at least +after it had attained to the stature of a national philosophy, was its +appeal to the individual conscience, its exclusive concern with the +elect, its strong flavour of self-accusing. Even the rage against +slavery was, in large measure, an emotion of the mourners' bench. The +thing that worried the more ecstatic Abolitionists was their sneaking +sense of responsibility, the fear that they themselves were flouting the +fire by letting slavery go on. The thirst to punish the concrete +slave-owner, as an end in itself, did not appear until opposition had +added exasperation to fervour. In most of the earlier harangues against +his practice, indeed, you will find a perfect willingness to grant that +slave-owner's good faith, and even to compensate him for his property. +But the new Puritanism--or, perhaps more accurately, considering the +shades of prefixes, the neo-Puritanism--is a frank harking back to the +primitive spirit. The original Puritan of the bleak New England coast +was not content to flay his own wayward carcass: full satisfaction did +not sit upon him until he had jailed a Quaker. That is to say, the +sinner who excited his highest zeal and passion was not so much himself +as his neighbour; to borrow a term from psychopathology, he was less the +masochist than the sadist. And it is that very peculiarity which sets +off his descendant of today from the ameliorated Puritan of the era +between the Revolution and the Civil War. The new Puritanism is not +ascetic, but militant. Its aim is not to lift up saints but to knock +down sinners. Its supreme manifestation is the vice crusade, an armed +pursuit of helpless outcasts by the whole military and naval forces of +the Republic. Its supreme hero is Comstock Himself, with his pious boast +that the sinners he jailed during his astounding career, if gathered +into one penitential party, would have filled a train of sixty-one +coaches, allowing sixty to the coach. + +So much for the general trend and tenor of the movement. At the bottom +of it, it is plain, there lies that insistent presentation of the idea +of sin, that enchantment by concepts of carnality, which has engaged a +certain type of man, to the exclusion of all other notions, since the +dawn of history. The remote ancestors of our Puritan-Philistines of +today are to be met with in the Old Testament and the New, and their +nearer grandfathers clamoured against the snares of the flesh in all +the councils of the Early Church. Not only Western Christianity has had +to reckon with them: they have brothers today among the Mohammedan Sufi +and in obscure Buddhist sects, and they were the chief preachers of the +Russian Raskol, or Reformation. "The Ironsides of Cromwell and the +Puritans of New England," says Heard, in his book on the Russian church, +"bear a strong resemblance to the Old Believers." But here, in the main, +we have asceticism more than Puritanism, as it is now visible; here the +sinner combated is chiefly the one within. How are we to account for the +wholesale transvaluation of values that came after the Civil War, the +transfer of ire from the Old Adam to the happy rascal across the street, +the sinister rise of a new Inquisition in the midst of a growing luxury +that even the Puritans themselves succumbed to? The answer is to be +sought, it seems to me, in the direction of the Golden Calf--in the +direction of the fat fields of our Midlands, the full nets of our lakes +and coasts, the factory smoke of our cities--even in the direction of +Wall Street, that devil's chasm. In brief, Puritanism has become +bellicose and tyrannical by becoming rich. The will to power has been +aroused to a high flame by an increase in the available draught and +fuel, as militarism is engendered and nourished by the presence of men +and materials. Wealth, discovering its power, has reached out its long +arms to grab the distant and innumerable sinner; it has gone down into +its deep pockets to pay for his costly pursuit and flaying; it has +created the Puritan _entrepreneur_, the daring and imaginative organizer +of Puritanism, the baron of moral endeavour, the invincible prophet of +new austerities. And, by the same token, it has issued its letters of +marque to the Puritan mercenary, the professional hound of heaven, the +moral _Junker_, the Comstock, and out of his skill at his trade there +has arisen the whole machinery, so complicated and so effective, of the +new Holy Office. + +Poverty is a soft pedal upon all branches of human activity, not +excepting the spiritual, and even the original Puritans, for all their +fire, felt its throttling caress. I think it is Bill Nye who has +humorously pictured their arduous life: how they had to dig clams all +winter that they would have strength enough to plant corn, and how they +had to hoe corn all summer that they would have strength enough to dig +clams. That low ebb of fortune worked against the full satisfaction of +their zeal in two distinct ways. On the one hand, it kept them but +ill-prepared for the cost of offensive enterprise: even their occasional +missionarying raids upon the Indians took too much productive energy +from their business with the corn and the clams. And on the other hand, +it kept a certain restraining humility in their hearts, so that for +every Quaker they hanged, they let a dozen go. Poverty, of course, is no +discredit, but at all events, it is a subtle criticism. The man +oppressed by material wants is not in the best of moods for the more +ambitious forms of moral adventure. He not only lacks the means; he is +also deficient in the self-assurance, the sense of superiority, the +secure and lofty point of departure. If he is haunted by notions of the +sinfulness of his neighbours, he is apt to see some of its worst +manifestations within himself, and that disquieting discovery will tend +to take his thoughts from the other fellow. It is by no arbitrary fiat, +indeed, that the brothers of all the expiatory orders are vowed to +poverty. History teaches us that wealth, whenever it has come to them by +chance, has put an end to their soul-searching. The Puritans of the +elder generations, with few exceptions, were poor. Nearly all Americans, +down to the Civil War, were poor. And being poor, they subscribed to a +_Sklavenmoral_. That is to say, they were spiritually humble. Their eyes +were fixed, not upon the abyss below them, but upon the long and rocky +road ahead of them. Their moral passion spent most of its force in +self-accusing, self-denial and self-scourging. They began by howling +their sins from the mourners' bench; they came to their end, many of +them, in the supreme immolation of battle. + +But out of the War came prosperity, and out of prosperity came a new +morality, to wit, the _Herrenmoral_. Many great fortunes were made in +the War itself; an uncountable number got started during the two decades +following. What is more, this material prosperity was generally +dispersed through all classes: it affected the common workman and the +remote farmer quite as much as the actual merchant and manufacturer. Its +first effect, as we all know, was a universal cockiness, a rise in +pretensions, a comforting feeling that the Republic was a success, and +with it, its every citizen. This change made itself quickly obvious, and +even odious, in all the secular relations of life. The American became a +sort of braggart playboy of the western world, enormously sure of +himself and ludicrously contemptuous of all other men. And on the +ghostly side there appeared the same accession of confidence, the same +sure assumption of authority, though at first less self-evidently and +offensively. The religion of the American thus began to lose its inward +direction; it became less and less a scheme of personal salvation and +more and more a scheme of pious derring-do. The revivals of the 70's had +all the bounce and fervour of those of half a century before, but the +mourners' bench began to lose its standing as their symbol, and in its +place appeared the collection basket. Instead of accusing himself, the +convert volunteered to track down and bring in the other fellow. His +enthusiasm was not for repentance, but for what he began to call +service. In brief, the national sense of energy and fitness gradually +superimposed itself upon the national Puritanism, and from that marriage +sprung a keen _Wille zur Macht_, a lusty will to power.[42] The American +Puritan, by now, was not content with the rescue of his own soul; he +felt an irresistible impulse to hand salvation on, to disperse and +multiply it, to ram it down reluctant throats, to make it free, +universal and compulsory. He had the men, he had the guns and he had the +money too. All that was needed was organization. The rescue of the +unsaved could be converted into a wholesale business, unsentimentally +and economically conducted, and with all the usual aids to efficiency, +from skilful sales management to seductive advertising, and from +rigorous accounting to the diligent shutting off of competition. + +Out of that new will to power came many enterprises more or less futile +and harmless, with the "institutional" church at their head. Piety was +cunningly disguised as basketball, billiards and squash; the sinner was +lured to grace with Turkish baths, lectures on foreign travel, and free +instructions in stenography, rhetoric and double-entry book-keeping. +Religion lost all its old contemplative and esoteric character, and +became a frankly worldly enterprise, a thing of balance-sheets and +ponderable profits, heavily capitalized and astutely manned. There was +no longer any room for the spiritual type of leader, with his white +choker and his interminable fourthlies. He was displaced by a brisk +gentleman in a "business suit" who looked, talked and thought like a +seller of Mexican mine stock. Scheme after scheme for the swift +evangelization of the nation was launched, some of them of truly +astonishing sweep and daring. They kept pace, step by step, with the +mushroom growth of enterprise in the commercial field. The Y. M. C. A. +swelled to the proportions of a Standard Oil Company, a United States +Steel Corporation. Its huge buildings began to rise in every city; it +developed a swarm of specialists in new and fantastic moral and social +sciences; it enlisted the same gargantuan talent which managed the +railroads, the big banks and the larger national industries. And beside +it rose the Young People's Society of Christian Endeavour, the +Sunday-school associations and a score of other such grandiose +organizations, each with its seductive baits for recruits and money. +Even the enterprises that had come down from an elder and less expansive +day were pumped up and put on a Wall Street basis: the American Bible +Society, for example, began to give away Bibles by the million instead +of by the thousand, and the venerable Tract Society took on the feverish +ardour of a daily newspaper, even of a yellow journal. Down into our own +day this trustification of pious endeavour has gone on. The Men and +Religion Forward Movement proposed to convert the whole country by 12 +o'clock noon of such and such a day; the Order of Gideons plans to make +every traveller read the Bible (American Revised Version!) whether he +will or not; in a score of cities there are committees of opulent +devotees who take half-pages in the newspapers, and advertise the +Decalogue and the Beatitudes as if they were commodities of trade. + +Thus the national energy which created the Beef Trust and the Oil Trust +achieved equal marvels in the field of religious organization and by +exactly the same methods. One needs be no psychologist to perceive in +all this a good deal less actual religious zeal than mere lust for +staggering accomplishment, for empty bigness, for the unprecedented and +the prodigious. Many of these great religious enterprises, indeed, soon +lost all save the faintest flavour of devotion--for example, the Y. M. +C. A., which is now no more than a sort of national club system, with +its doors open to any one not palpably felonious. (I have drunk +cocktails in Y. M. C. A. lamaseries, and helped fallen lamas to bed.) +But while the war upon godlessness thus degenerated into a secular sport +in one direction, it maintained all its pristine quality, and even took +on a new ferocity in another direction. Here it was that the lamp of +American Puritanism kept on burning; here, it was, indeed, that the lamp +became converted into a huge bonfire, or rather a blast-furnace, with +flames mounting to the very heavens, and sinners stacked like cordwood +at the hand of an eager black gang. In brief, the new will to power, +working in the true Puritan as in the mere religious sportsman, +stimulated him to a campaign of repression and punishment perhaps +unequalled in the history of the world, and developed an art of militant +morality as complex in technique and as rich in professors as the elder +art of iniquity. + +If we take the passage of the Comstock Postal Act, on March 3, 1873, as +a starting point, the legislative stakes of this new Puritan movement +sweep upward in a grand curve to the passage of the Mann and Webb Acts, +in 1910 and 1913, the first of which ratifies the Seventh Commandment +with a salvo of artillery, and the second of which put the overwhelming +power of the Federal Government behind the enforcement of the +prohibition laws in the so-called "dry" States. The mind at once recalls +the salient campaigns of this war of a generation: first the attack upon +"vicious" literature, begun by Comstock and the New York Society for the +Suppression of Vice, but quickly extending to every city in the land; +then the long fight upon the open gambling house, culminating in its +practical disappearance; then the recrudesence of prohibition, abandoned +at the outbreak of the Civil War, and the attempt to enforce it in a +rapidly growing list of States; then the successful onslaught upon the +Louisiana lottery, and upon its swarm of rivals and successors; then the +gradual stamping-out of horse-racing, until finally but two or three +States permitted it, and the consequent attack upon the pool-room; then +the rise of a theatre-censorship in most of the large cities, and of a +moving picture censorship following it; then the revival of +Sabbatarianism, with the Lord's Day Alliance, a Canadian invention, in +the van; then the gradual tightening of the laws against sexual +irregularity, with the unenforceable New York Adultery Act as a typical +product; and lastly, the general ploughing up and emotional discussion +of sexual matters, with compulsory instruction in "sex hygiene" as its +mildest manifestation and the mediaeval fury of the vice crusade as its +worst. Differing widely in their targets, these various Puritan +enterprises had one character in common: they were all efforts to combat +immorality with the weapons designed for crime. In each of them there +was a visible effort to erect the individual's offence against himself +into an offence against society. Beneath all of them there was the +dubious principle--the very determining principle, indeed, of +Puritanism--that it is competent for the community to limit and +condition the private acts of its members, and with it the inevitable +corollary that there are some members of the community who have a +special talent for such legislation, and that their arbitrary fiats are, +and of a right ought to be, binding upon all. + + +Sec. 4 + +This is the essential fact of the new Puritanism; its recognition of the +moral expert, the professional sinhound, the virtuoso of virtue. Under +the original Puritan theocracy, as in Scotland, for example, the chase +and punishment of sinners was a purely ecclesiastical function, and +during the slow disintegration of the theocracy the only change +introduced was the extension of that function to lay helpers, and +finally to the whole body of laymen. This change, however, did not +materially corrupt the ecclesiastical quality of the enterprise: the +leader in the so-called militant field still remained the same man who +led in the spiritual field. But with the capitalization of Puritan +effort there came a radical overhauling of method. The secular arm, as +it were, conquered as it helped. That is to say, the special business of +forcing sinners to be good was taken away from the preachers and put +into the hands of laymen trained in its technique and mystery, and there +it remains. The new Puritanism has created an army of gladiators who are +not only distinct from the hierarchy, but who, in many instances, +actually command and intimidate the hierarchy. This is conspicuously +evident in the case of the Anti-Saloon League, an enormously effective +fighting organization, with a large staff of highly accomplished experts +in its service. These experts do not wait for ecclesiastical support, +nor even ask for it; they force it. The clergyman who presumes to +protest against their war upon the saloon, even upon the quite virtuous +ground that it is not effective enough, runs a risk of condign and +merciless punishment. So plainly is this understood, indeed, that in +more than one State the clergy of the Puritan denominations openly take +orders from these specialists in excoriation, and court their favour +without shame. Here a single moral enterprise, heavily capitalized and +carefully officered, has engulfed the entire Puritan movement, and a +part has become more than the whole.[43] + +In a dozen other directions this tendency to transform a religious +business into a purely secular business, with lay backers and lay +officers, is plainly visible. The increasing wealth of Puritanism has +not only augmented its scope and its daring, but it has also had the +effect of attracting clever men, of no particular spiritual enthusiasm, +to its service. Moral endeavour, in brief, has become a recognized +trade, or rather a profession, and there have appeared men who pretend +to a special and enormous knowledge of it, and who show enough truth in +their pretension to gain the unlimited support of Puritan capitalists. +The vice crusade, to mention one example, has produced a large crop of +such self-constituted experts, and some of them are in such demand that +they are overwhelmed with engagements. The majority of these men have +wholly lost the flavour of sacerdotalism. They are not pastors, but +detectives, statisticians and mob orators, and not infrequently their +secularity becomes distressingly evident. Their aim, as they say, is to +do things. Assuming that "moral sentiment" is behind them, they override +all criticism and opposition without argument, and proceed to the +business of dispersing prostitutes, of browbeating and terrorizing weak +officials, and of forcing legislation of their own invention through +City Councils and State Legislatures. Their very cocksureness is their +chief source of strength. They combat objection with such violence and +with such a devastating cynicism that it quickly fades away. The more +astute politicians, in the face of so ruthless a fire, commonly profess +conversion and join the colours, just as their brethren went over to +prohibition in the "dry" States, and the newspapers seldom hold out much +longer. The result is that the "investigation" of the social evil +becomes an orgy, and that the ensuing "report" of the inevitable "vice +commission" is made up of two parts sensational fiction and three parts +platitude. Of all the vice commissions that have sat of late in the +United States, not one has done its work without the aid of these +singularly confident experts, and not one has contributed an original +and sagacious idea, nor even an idea of ordinary common sense, to the +solution of the problem. + +I need not go on piling up examples of this new form of Puritan +activity, with its definite departure from a religious foundation and +its elaborate development as an everyday business. The impulse behind it +I have called a _Wille zur Macht_, a will to power. In terms more +homely, it was described by John Fiske as "the disposition to domineer," +and in his usual unerring way, he saw its dependence on the gratuitous +assumption of infallibility. But even stronger than the Puritan's belief +in his own inspiration is his yearning to make some one jump. In other +words, he has an ineradicable liking for cruelty in him: he is a +sportsman even before he is a moralist, and very often his blood-lust +leads him into lamentable excesses. The various vice crusades afford +innumerable cases in point. In one city, if the press dispatches are to +be believed, the proscribed women of the Tenderloin were pursued with +such ferocity that seven of them were driven to suicide. And in another +city, after a campaign of repression so unfortunate in its effects that +there were actually protests against it by clergymen elsewhere, a +distinguished (and very friendly) connoisseur of such affairs referred +to it ingenuously as more fun "than a fleet of aeroplanes." Such +disorderly combats with evil, of course, produce no permanent good. It +is a commonplace, indeed, that a city is usually in worse condition +after it has been "cleaned up" than it was before, and I need not point +to New York, Los Angeles and Des Moines for the evidence as to the +social evil, and to any large city, East, West, North, South, for the +evidence as to the saloon. But the Puritans who finance such enterprises +get their thrills, not out of any possible obliteration of vice, but out +of the galloping pursuit of the vicious. The new Puritan gives no more +serious thought to the rights and feelings of his quarry than the gunner +gives to the rights and feelings of his birds. From the beginning of the +prohibition campaign, for example, the principle of compensation has +been violently opposed, despite its obvious justice, and a complaisant +judiciary has ratified the Puritan position. In England and on the +Continent that principle is safeguarded by the fundamental laws, and +during the early days of the anti-slavery agitation in this country it +was accepted as incontrovertible, but if any American statesman were to +propose today that it be applied to the license-holder whose lawful +franchise has been taken away from him arbitrarily, or to the brewer or +distiller whose costly plant has been rendered useless and valueless, he +would see the days of his statesmanship brought to a quick and violent +close. + +But does all this argue a total lack of justice in the American +character, or even a lack of common decency? I doubt that it would be +well to go so far in accusation. What it does argue is a tendency to put +moral considerations above all other considerations, and to define +morality in the narrow Puritan sense. The American, in other words, +thinks that the sinner has no rights that any one is bound to respect, +and he is prone to mistake an unsupported charge of sinning, provided it +be made violently enough, for actual proof and confession. What is more, +he takes an intense joy in the mere chase: he has the true Puritan taste +for an _auto da fe_ in him. "I am ag'inst capital punishment," said Mr. +Dooley, "but we won't get rid av it so long as the people enjie it so +much." But though he is thus an eager spectator, and may even be lured +into taking part in the pursuit, the average American is not disposed to +initiate it, nor to pay for it. The larger Puritan enterprises of today +are not popular in the sense of originating in the bleachers, but only +in the sense of being applauded from the bleachers. The burdens of the +fray, both of toil and of expense, are always upon a relatively small +number of men. In a State rocked and racked by a war upon the saloon, it +was recently shown, for example, that but five per cent. of the members +of the Puritan denominations contributed to the war-chest. And yet the +Anti-Saloon League of that State was so sure of support from below that +it presumed to stand as the spokesman of the whole Christian community, +and even ventured to launch excommunications upon contumacious +Christians, both lay and clerical, who objected to its methods. +Moreover, the great majority of the persons included in the contributing +five per cent. gave no more than a few cents a year. The whole support +of the League devolved upon a dozen men, all of them rich and all of +them Puritans of purest ray serene. These men supported a costly +organization for their private entertainment and stimulation. It was +their means of recreation, their sporting club. They were willing to +spend a lot of money to procure good sport for themselves--_i.e._, to +procure the best crusading talent available--and they were so successful +in that endeavour that they enchanted the populace too, and so shook the +State. + +Naturally enough, this organization of Puritanism upon a business and +sporting basis has had a tendency to attract and create a type of +"expert" crusader whose determination to give his employers a good show +is uncontaminated by any consideration for the public welfare. The +result has been a steady increase of scandals, a constant collapse of +moral organizations, a frequent unveiling of whited sepulchres. Various +observers have sought to direct the public attention to this significant +corruption of the new Puritanism. The New York _Sun_, for example, in +the course of a protest against the appointment of a vice commission for +New York, has denounced the paid agents of private reform organizations +as "notoriously corrupt, undependable and dishonest," and the Rev. Dr. +W. S. Rainsford, supporting the charge, has borne testimony out of his +own wide experience to their lawlessness, their absurd pretensions to +special knowledge, their habit of manufacturing evidence, and their +devious methods of shutting off criticism. But so far, at all events, +no organized war upon them has been undertaken, and they seem to +flourish more luxuriantly year after year. The individual whose common +rights are invaded by such persons has little chance of getting justice, +and less of getting redress. When he attempts to defend himself he finds +that he is opposed, not only by a financial power that is ample for all +purposes of the combat and that does not shrink at intimidating juries, +prosecuting officers and judges, but also by a shrewdness which shapes +the laws to its own uses, and takes full advantage of the miserable +cowardice of legislatures. The moral gladiators, in brief, know the +game. They come before a legislature with a bill ostensibly designed to +cure some great and admitted evil, they procure its enactment by +scarcely veiled insinuations that all who stand against it must be +apologists for the evil itself, and then they proceed to extend its aims +by bold inferences, and to dragoon the courts into ratifying those +inferences, and to employ it as a means of persecution, terrorism and +blackmail. The history of the Mann Act offers a shining example of this +purpose. It was carried through Congress, over the veto of President +Taft, who discerned its extravagance, on the plea that it was needed to +put down the traffic in prostitutes; it is enforced today against men +who are no more engaged in the traffic in prostitutes than you or I. +Naturally enough, the effect of this extension of its purposes, against +which its author has publicly protested, has been to make it a truly +deadly weapon in the hands of professional Puritans and of denouncers of +delinquency even less honest. "Blackmailers of both sexes have arisen," +says Mr. Justice McKenna, "using the terrors of the construction now +sanctioned by the [Supreme] Court as a help--indeed, the means--for +their brigandage. The result is grave and should give us pause."[44] + +But that is as far as objection has yet gone; the majority of the +learned jurist's colleagues swallowed both the statute and its +consequences.[45] There is, indeed, no sign as yet of any organized war +upon the alliance between the blackmailing Puritan and the +pseudo-Puritan blackmailer. It must wait until a sense of reason and +justice shows itself in the American people, strong enough to overcome +their prejudice in favour of the moralist on the one hand, and their +delight in barbarous pursuits and punishments on the other. I see but +faint promise of that change today. + + +Sec. 5 + +I have gone into the anatomy and physiology of militant Puritanism +because, so far as I know, the inquiry has not been attempted before, +and because a somewhat detailed acquaintance with the forces behind so +grotesque a manifestation as comstockery, the particular business of the +present essay, is necessary to an understanding of its workings, and of +its prosperity, and of its influence upon the arts. Save one turn to +England or to the British colonies, it is impossible to find a parallel +for the astounding absolutism of Comstock and his imitators in any +civilized country. No other nation has laws which oppress the arts so +ignorantly and so abominably as ours do, nor has any other nation handed +over the enforcement of the statutes which exist to agencies so openly +pledged to reduce all aesthetic expression to the service of a stupid +and unworkable scheme of rectitude. I have before me as I write a +pamphlet in explanation of his aims and principles, prepared by Comstock +himself and presented to me by his successor. Its very title is a +sufficient statement of the Puritan position: "MORALS, Not Art or +Literature."[46] The capitals are in the original. And within, as a +sort of general text, the idea is amplified: "It is a question of peace, +good order and morals, and not art, literature or science." Here we have +a statement of principle that, at all events, is at least quite frank. +There is not the slightest effort to beg the question; there is no +hypocritical pretension to a desire to purify or safeguard the arts; +they are dismissed at once as trivial and degrading. And jury after jury +has acquiesced in this; it was old Anthony's boast, in his last days, +that his percentage of convictions, in 40 years, had run to 98.5.[47] + +Comstockery is thus grounded firmly upon that profound national +suspicion of the arts, that truculent and almost unanimous Philistinism, +which I have described. It would be absurd to dismiss it as an +excrescence, and untypical of the American mind. But it is typical, too, +in the manner in which it has gone beyond that mere partiality to the +accumulation of a definite power, and made that power irresponsible and +almost irresistible. It was Comstock himself, in fact, who invented the +process whereby his followers in other fields of moral endeavour have +forced laws into the statute books upon the pretence of putting down +John Doe, an acknowledged malefactor, and then turned them savagely upon +Richard Roe, a peaceable, well-meaning and hitherto law-abiding man. And +it was Comstock who first capitalized moral endeavour like baseball or +the soap business, and made himself the first of its kept professors, +and erected about himself a rampart of legal and financial immunity +which rid him of all fear of mistakes and their consequences, and so +enabled him to pursue his jehad with all the advantages in his favour. +He was, in brief, more than the greatest Puritan gladiator of his time; +he was the Copernicus of a quite new art and science, and he devised a +technique and handed down a professional ethic that no rival has been +able to better. + +The whole story is naively told in "Anthony Comstock, Fighter,"[48] a +work which passed under the approving eye of the old war horse himself +and is full of his characteristic pecksniffery.[49] His beginnings, it +appears, were very modest. When he arrived in New York from the +Connecticut hinterland, he was a penniless and uneducated clod-hopper, +just out of the Union army, and his first job was that of a porter in a +wholesale dry-goods house. But he had in him several qualities of the +traditional Yankee which almost always insure success, and it was not +long before he began to make his way. One of these qualities was a +talent for bold and ingratiating address; another was a vast appetite +for thrusting himself into affairs, a yearning to run things--what the +Puritan calls public spirit. The two constituted his fortune. The second +brought him into intimate relations with the newly-organized Young Men's +Christian Association, and led him to the discovery of a form of moral +endeavour that was at once novel and fascinating--the unearthing and +denunciation of "immoral" literature. The first, once he had attracted +attention thereby, got him the favourable notice, and finally the +unlimited support, of the late Morris K. Jesup, one of the earliest and +perhaps the greatest of the moral _entrepreneurs_ that I have described. +Jesup was very rich, and very eager to bring the whole nation up to +grace by _force majeure_. He was the banker of at least a dozen +grandiose programs of purification in the seventies and eighties. In +Comstock he found precisely the sort of field agent that he was looking +for, and the two presently constituted the most formidable team of +professional reformers that the country had ever seen. + +The story of the passage of the Act of Congress of March 3, 1873,[50] +under cover of which the Comstock Society still carries on its campaigns +of snouting and suppression, is a classical tale of Puritan impudence +and chicanery. Comstock, with Jesup and other rich men backing him +financially and politically,[51] managed the business. First, a number +of spectacular raids were made on the publishers of such pornographic +books as "The Memoirs of Fanny Hill" and "Only a Boy." Then the +newspapers were filled with inflammatory matter about the wide dispersal +of such stuff, and its demoralizing effects upon the youth of the +republic. Then a committee of self-advertising clergymen and "Christian +millionaires" was organized to launch a definite "movement." And then a +direct attack was made upon Congress, and, to the tune of fiery moral +indignation, the bill prepared by Comstock himself was forced through +both houses. All opposition, if only the opposition of inquiry, was +overborne in the usual manner. That is to say, every Congressman who +presumed to ask what it was all about, or to point out obvious defects +in the bill, was disposed of by the insinuation, or even the direct +charge, that he was a covert defender of obscene books, and, by +inference, of the carnal recreations described in them. We have grown +familiar of late with this process: it was displayed at full length in +the passage of the Mann Act, and again when the Webb Act and the +Prohibition Amendment were before Congress. In 1873 its effectiveness +was helped out by its novelty, and so the Comstock bill was rushed +through both houses in the closing days of a busy session, and President +Grant accommodatingly signed it. + +Once it was upon the books, Comstock made further use of the prevailing +uproar to have himself appointed a special agent of the Postoffice +Department to enforce it, and with characteristic cunning refused to +take any salary. Had his job carried a salary, it would have excited the +acquisitiveness of other virtuosi; as it was, he was secure. As for the +necessary sinews of war, he knew well that he could get them from Jesup. +Within a few weeks, indeed, the latter had perfected a special +organization for the enforcement of the new statute, and it still +flourishes as the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; or, as +it is better known, the Comstock Society. The new Federal Act, dealing +only with the mails, left certain loopholes; they were plugged up by +fastening drastic amendments upon the New York Code of Criminal +Procedure--amendments forced through the legislature precisely as the +Federal Act had been forced through Congress.[52] With these laws in his +hands Comstock was ready for his career. It was his part of the +arrangement to supply the thrills of the chase; it was Jesup's part to +find the money. The partnership kept up until the death of Jesup, in +1908, and after that Comstock readily found new backers. Even his own +death, in 1915, did not materially alter a scheme of things which +offered such admirable opportunities for the exercise of the Puritan +love of spectacular and relentless pursuit, the Puritan delusion of +moral grandeur and infallibility, the Puritan will to power. + +Ostensibly, as I have said, the new laws were designed to put down the +traffic in frankly pornographic books and pictures--a traffic which, of +course, found no defenders--but Comstock had so drawn them that their +actual sweep was vastly wider, and once he was firmly in the saddle his +enterprises scarcely knew limits. Having disposed of "The Confessions of +Maria Monk" and "Night Life in Paris," he turned to Rabelais and the +Decameron, and having driven these ancients under the book-counters, he +pounced upon Zola, Balzac and Daudet, and having disposed of these too, +he began a _pogrom_ which, in other hands, eventually brought down such +astounding victims as Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" and Harold +Frederic's "The Damnation of Theron Ware." All through the eighties and +nineties this ecstatic campaign continued, always increasing in violence +and effectiveness. Comstock became a national celebrity; his doings were +as copiously reported by the newspapers as those of P. T. Barnum or John +L. Sullivan. Imitators sprang up in all the larger cities: there was +hardly a public library in the land that did not begin feverishly +expurgating its shelves; the publication of fiction, and particularly of +foreign fiction, took on the character of an extra hazardous enterprise. +Not, of course, that the reign of terror was not challenged, and +Comstock himself denounced. So early as 1876 a national organization +demanding a reasonable amendment of the postal laws got on its legs; in +the late eighties "Citizen" George Francis Train defied the whirlwind by +printing the Old Testament as a serial; many indignant victims, +acquitted by some chance in the courts, brought suit against Comstock +for damages. Moreover, an occasional judge, standing out boldly against +the usual intimidation, denounced him from the bench; one of them, Judge +Jenkins, accused him specifically of "fraud and lying" and other +"dishonest practices."[53] But the spirit of American Puritanism was on +his side. His very extravagances at once stimulated and satisfied the +national yearning for a hot chase, a good show--and in the complaints of +his victims, that the art of letters was being degraded, that the +country was made ridiculous, the newspaper-reading populace could see no +more than an affectation. The reform organization of 1876 lasted but +five years; and then disbanded without having accomplished anything; +Train was put on trial for "debauching the young" with an "obscene" +serial;[54] juries refused to bring in punitive verdicts against the +master showman. + +In carrying on this way of extermination upon all ideas that violated +their private notions of virtue and decorum, Comstock and his followers +were very greatly aided by the vagueness of the law. It prohibited the +use of the mails for transporting all matter of an "obscene, lewd, +lascivious ... or filthy" character, but conveniently failed to define +these adjectives. As a result, of course, it was possible to bring an +accusation against practically _any_ publication that aroused the +comstockian blood-lust, however innocently, and to subject the persons +responsible for it to costly, embarrassing and often dangerous +persecution. No man, said Dr. Johnson, would care to go on trial for his +life once a week, even if possessed of absolute proofs of his innocence. +By the same token, no man wants to be arraigned in a criminal court, +and displayed in the sensational newspapers, as a purveyor of indecency, +however strong his assurance of innocence. Comstock made use of this +fact in an adroit and characteristically unconscionable manner. He held +the menace of prosecution over all who presumed to dispute his tyranny, +and when he could not prevail by a mere threat, he did not hesitate to +begin proceedings, and to carry them forward with the aid of florid +proclamations to the newspapers and ill concealed intimidations of +judges and juries. + +The last-named business succeeded as it always does in this country, +where the judiciary is quite as sensitive to the suspicion of sinfulness +as the legislative arm. A glance at the decisions handed down during the +forty years of Comstock's chief activity shows a truly amazing +willingness to accommodate him in his pious enterprises. On the one +hand, there was gradually built up a court-made definition of obscenity +which eventually embraced almost every conceivable violation of Puritan +prudery, and on the other hand the victim's means of defence were +steadily restricted and conditioned, until in the end he had scarcely +any at all. This is the state of the law today. It is held in the +leading cases that anything is obscene which may excite "impure +thoughts" in "the minds ... of persons that are susceptible to impure +thoughts,"[55] or which "tends to deprave the minds" of any who, because +they are "young and inexperienced," are "open to such +influences"[56]--in brief, that anything is obscene that is not fit to +be handed to a child just learning to read, or that may imaginably +stimulate the lubricity of the most foul-minded. It is held further that +words that are perfectly innocent in themselves--"words, abstractly +considered, [that] may be free from vulgarism"--may yet be assumed, by a +friendly jury, to be likely to "arouse a libidinous passion ... in the +mind of a modest woman." (I quote exactly! The court failed to define +"modest woman.")[57] Yet further, it is held that any book is obscene +"which is unbecoming, immodest...."[58] Obviously, this last decision +throws open the door to endless imbecilities, for its definition merely +begs the question, and so makes a reasonable solution ten times harder. +It is in such mazes that the Comstocks safely lurk. Almost any printed +allusion to sex may be argued against as unbecoming in a moral +republic, and once it is unbecoming it is also obscene. + +In meeting such attacks the defendant must do his fighting without +weapons. He cannot allege in his defence that the offending work was put +forth for a legitimate, necessary and decent purpose;[59] he cannot +allege that a passage complained of is from a standard work, itself in +general circulation;[60] he cannot offer evidence that the person to +whom a book or picture was sold or exhibited was not actually depraved +by it, or likely to be depraved by it;[61] he cannot rest his defence on +its lack of such effect upon the jurymen themselves;[62] he cannot plead +that the alleged obscenity, in point of fact, is couched in decent and +unobjectionable language;[63] he cannot plead that the same or a similar +work has gone unchallenged elsewhere;[64] he cannot argue that the +circulation of works of the same class has set up a presumption of +toleration, and a tacit limitation of the definition of obscenity.[65] +The general character of a book is not a defence of a particular +passage, however unimportant; if there is the slightest descent to what +is "unbecoming," the whole may be ruthlessly condemned.[66] Nor is it an +admissible defence to argue that the book was not generally circulated, +and that the copy in evidence was obtained by an _agent provocateur_, +and by false representations.[67] Finally, all the decisions deny the +defendant the right to introduce any testimony, whether expert or +otherwise, that a book is of artistic value and not pornographic, and +that its effect upon normal persons is not pernicious. Upon this point +the jury is the sole judge, and it cannot be helped to its decision by +taking other opinions, or by hearing evidence as to what is the general +opinion. + +Occasionally, as I have said, a judge has revolted against this +intolerable state of the court-and Comstock-made law, and directed a +jury to disregard these astounding decisions.[68] In a recent New York +case Judge Samuel Seabury actually ruled that "it is no part of the duty +of courts to exercise a censorship over literary productions."[69] But +in general the judiciary has been curiously complaisant, and more than +once a Puritan on the bench has delighted the Comstocks by prosecuting +their case for them.[70] With such decisions in their hands and such aid +from the other side of the bar, it is no wonder that they enter upon +their campaigns with impudence and assurance. All the odds are in their +favour from the start. They have statutes deliberately designed to make +the defence onerous; they are familiar by long experience with all the +tricks and surprises of the game; they are sheltered behind +organizations, incorporated without capital and liberally chartered by +trembling legislatures, which make reprisals impossible in case of +failure; above all, they have perfected the business of playing upon the +cowardice and vanity of judges and prosecuting officers. The newspapers, +with very few exceptions, give them ready aid. Theoretically, perhaps, +many newspaper editors are opposed to comstockery, and sometimes they +denounce it with great eloquence, but when a good show is offered they +are always in favour of the showman[71]--and the Comstocks are showmen +of undoubted skill. They know how to make a victim jump and writhe in +the ring; they have a talent for finding victims who are prominent +enough to arrest attention; they shrewdly capitalize the fact that the +pursuer appears more heroic than the prey, and the further fact that the +newspaper reader is impatient of artistic pretensions and glad to see an +artist made ridiculous. And behind them there is always the steady +pressure of Puritan prejudice--the Puritan feeling that "immorality" is +the blackest of crimes, and that its practitioner has no rights. It was +by making use of these elements that Comstock achieved his prodigies, +and it is by making use of them that his heirs and assigns keep up the +sport today. Their livelihood depends upon the money they can raise +among the righteous, and the amount they can raise depends upon the +quality of the entertainment they offer. Hence their adept search for +shining marks. Hence, for example, the spectacular raid upon the Art +Students' League, on August 2, 1906. Hence the artful turning to their +own use of the vogue of such sensational dramatists as Eugene Brieux and +George Bernard Shaw, and of such isolated plays as "Trilby" and "Sapho." +Hence the barring from the mails of the inflammatory report of the +Chicago Vice Commission--a strange, strange case of dog eating dog. + +But here we have humour. There is, however, no humour in the case of a +serious author who sees his work damaged and perhaps ruined by a +malicious and unintelligent attack, and himself held up to public +obloquy as one with the vendors of pamphlets of flagellation and filthy +"marriage guides." He finds opposing him a flat denial of his decent +purpose as an artist, and a stupid and ill-natured logic that baffles +sober answer.[72] He finds on his side only the half-hearted support of +a publisher whose interest in a single book is limited to his profits +from it, and who desires above all things to evade a nuisance and an +expense. Not a few publishers, knowing the constant possibility of +sudden and arbitrary attack, insert a clause in their contracts whereby +an author must secure them against damage from any "immoral" matter in +his book. They read and approve the manuscript, they print the book and +sell it--but if it is unlucky enough to attract the comstockian +lightning, the author has the whole burden to bear,[73] and if they +seek safety and economy by yielding, as often happens, he must consent +to the mutilation or even the suppression of his work. The result is +that a writer in such a situation, is practically beaten before he can +offer a defence. The professional book-baiters have laws to their +liking, and courts pliant to their exactions; they fill the newspapers +with inflammatory charges before the accused gets his day in court; they +have the aid of prosecuting officers who fear the political damage of +their enmity, and of the enmity of their wealthy and influential +backers; above all, they have the command of far more money than any +author can hope to muster. Finally, they derive an advantage from two of +the most widespread of human weaknesses, the first being envy and the +second being fear. When an author is attacked, a good many of his rivals +see only a personal benefit in his difficulties, and not a menace to +the whole order, and a good many others are afraid to go to his aid +because of the danger of bringing down the moralists' rage upon +themselves. Both of these weaknesses revealed themselves very amusingly +in the Dreiser case, and I hope to detail their operations at some +length later on, when I describe that _cause celebre_ in a separate +work. + +Now add to the unfairness and malignancy of the attack its no less +disconcerting arbitrariness and fortuitousness, and the path of the +American author is seen to be strewn with formidable entanglements +indeed. With the law what it is, he is quite unable to decide _a priori_ +what is permitted by the national delicacy and what is not, nor can he +get any light from the recorded campaigns of the moralists. They seem to +strike blindly, unintelligently, without any coherent theory or plan. +"Trilby" is assaulted by the united comstockery of a dozen cities, and +"The Yoke" somehow escapes. "Hagar Revelly" is made the subject of a +double prosecution in the State and Federal courts, and "Love's +Pilgrimage" and "One Man" go unmolested. The publisher of +Przybyszewski's "Homo Sapiens" is forced to withdraw it; the publisher +of Artzibashef's "Sanine" follows it with "The Breaking Point." The +serious work of a Forel is brought into court as pornography, and the +books of Havelock Ellis are barred from the mails; the innumerable +volumes on "sex hygiene" by tawdry clergymen and smutty old maids are +circulated by the million and without challenge. Frank Harris is +deprived of a publisher for his "Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confession" +by threats of immediate prosecution; the newspapers meanwhile dedicate +thousands of columns to the filthy amusements of Harry Thaw. George +Moore's "Memoirs of My Dead Life" are bowdlerized, James Lane Allen's "A +Summer in Arcady" is barred from libraries, and a book by D. H. Lawrence +is forbidden publication altogether; at the same time half a dozen cheap +magazines devoted to sensational sex stories attain to hundreds of +thousands of circulation. A serious book by David Graham Phillips, +published serially in a popular monthly, is raided the moment it appears +between covers; a trashy piece of nastiness by Elinor Glyn goes +unmolested. Worse, books are sold for months and even years without +protest, and then suddenly attacked; Dreiser's "The 'Genius,'" +Kreymborg's "Edna" and Forel's "The Sexual Question" are examples. Still +worse, what is held to be unobjectionable in one State is forbidden in +another as _contra bonos mores_.[74] Altogether, there is madness, and +no method in it. The livelihoods and good names of hard-striving and +decent men are at the mercy of the whims of a horde of fanatics and +mountebanks, and they have no way of securing themselves against attack, +and no redress for their loss when it comes. + + +Sec. 6 + +So beset, it is no wonder that the typical American maker of books +becomes a timorous and ineffective fellow, whose work tends inevitably +toward a feeble superficiality. Sucking in the Puritan spirit with the +very air he breathes, and perhaps burdened inwardly with an inheritance +of the actual Puritan stupidity, he is further kept upon the straight +path of chemical purity by the very real perils that I have just +rehearsed. The result is a literature full of the mawkishness that the +late Henry James so often roared against--a literature almost wholly +detached from life as men are living it in the world--in George Moore's +phrase, a literature still at nurse. It is on the side of sex that the +appointed virtuosi of virtue exercise their chief repressions, for it is +sex that especially fascinates the lubricious Puritan mind; but the +conventual reticence that thus becomes the enforced fashion in one field +extends itself to all others. Our fiction, in general, is marked by an +artificiality as marked as that of Eighteenth Century poetry or the +later Georgian drama. The romance in it runs to set forms and stale +situations; the revelation, by such a book as "The Titan," that there +may be a glamour as entrancing in the way of a conqueror of men as in +the way of a youth with a maid, remains isolated and exotic. We have no +first-rate political or religious novel; we have no first-rate war +story; despite all our national engrossment in commercial enterprise, we +have few second-rate tales of business. Romance, in American fiction, +still means only a somewhat childish amorousness and sentimentality--the +love affairs of Paul and Virginia, or the pale adulteries of their +elders. And on the side of realism there is an almost equal vacuity and +lack of veracity. The action of all the novels of the Howells school +goes on within four walls of painted canvas; they begin to shock once +they describe an attack of asthma or a steak burning below stairs; they +never penetrate beneath the flow of social concealments and urbanities +to the passions that actually move men and women to their acts, and the +great forces that circumscribe and condition personality. So obvious a +piece of reporting as Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" or Robert Herrick's +"Together" makes a sensation; the appearance of a "Jennie Gerhardt" or a +"Hagar Revelly" brings forth a growl of astonishment and rage. + +In all this dread of free inquiry, this childish skittishness in both +writers and public, this dearth of courage and even of curiosity, the +influence of comstockery is undoubtedly to be detected. It constitutes a +sinister and ever-present menace to all men of ideas; it affrights the +publisher and paralyzes the author; no one on the outside can imagine +its burden as a practical concern. I am, in moments borrowed from more +palatable business, the editor of an American magazine, and I thus know +at first hand what the burden is. That magazine is anything but a +popular one, in the current sense. It sells at a relatively high price; +it contains no pictures or other baits for the childish; it is frankly +addressed to a sophisticated minority. I may thus assume reasonably, I +believe, that its readers are not sex-curious and itching adolescents, +just as my colleague of the _Atlantic Monthly_ may assume reasonably +that his readers are not Italian immigrants. Nevertheless, as a +practical editor, I find that the Comstocks, near and far, are oftener +in my mind's eye than my actual patrons. The thing I always have to +decide about a manuscript offered for publication, before ever I give +any thought to its artistic merit and suitability, is the question +whether its publication will be permitted--not even whether it is +intrinsically good or evil, moral or immoral, but whether some roving +Methodist preacher, self-commissioned to keep watch on letters, will +read indecency into it. Not a week passes that I do not decline some +sound and honest piece of work for no other reason. I have a long list +of such things by American authors, well-devised, well-imagined, +well-executed, respectable as human documents and as works of art--but +never to be printed in mine or any other American magazine. It includes +four or five short stories of the very first rank, and the best one-act +play yet done, to my knowledge, by an American. All of these pieces +would go into type at once on the Continent; no sane man would think of +objecting to them; they are no more obscene, to a normal adult, than his +own bare legs. But they simply cannot be printed in the United States, +with the law what it is and the courts what they are. + +I know many other editors. All of them are in the same boat. Some of +them try to get around the difficulty by pecksniffery more or less +open--for example, by fastening a moral purpose upon works of art, and +hawking them as uplifting.[75] Others, facing the intolerable fact, +yield to it with resignation. And if they didn't? Well, if one of them +didn't, any professional moralist could go before a police magistrate, +get a warrant upon a simple affidavit, raid the office of the offending +editor, seize all the magazines in sight, and keep them impounded until +after the disposition of the case. Editors cannot afford to take this +risk. Magazines are perishable goods. Even if, after a trial has been +had, they are returned, they are worthless save as waste paper. And what +may be done with copies found in the actual office of publication may be +done too with copies found on news-stands, and not only in one city, but +in two, six, a dozen, a hundred. All the costs and burdens of the +contest are on the defendant. Let him be acquitted with honour, and +invited to dinner by the judge, he has yet lost his property, and the +Comstock hiding behind the warrant cannot be made to pay. In this +concealment, indeed, lurk many sinister things--not forgetting personal +enmity and business rivalry. The actual complainant is seldom uncovered; +Comstockery, taking on a semi-judicial character, throws its chartered +immunity around the whole process. A hypothetical outrage? By no means. +It has been perpetrated, in one American city or another, upon fully +half of the magazines of general circulation published today. Its +possibility sticks in the consciousness of every editor and publisher +like a recurrent glycosuria.[76] + +But though the effects of comstockery are thus abominably insane and +irritating, the fact is not to be forgotten that, after all, the thing +is no more than an effect itself. The fundamental causes of all the +grotesque (and often half-fabulous) phenomena flowing out of it are to +be sought in the habits of mind of the American people. They are, as I +have shown, besotted by moral concepts, a moral engrossment, a delusion +of moral infallibility. In their view of the arts they are still unable +to shake off the naive suspicion of the Fathers.[77] A work of the +imagination can justify itself, in their sight, only if it show a moral +purpose, and that purpose must be obvious and unmistakable. Even in +their slow progress toward a revolt against the ancestral Philistinism, +they cling to this ethical bemusement: a new gallery of pictures is +welcomed as "improving," to hear Beethoven "makes one better." Any +questioning of the moral ideas that prevail--the principal business, it +must be plain, of the novelist, the serious dramatist, the professed +inquirer into human motives and acts--is received with the utmost +hostility. To attempt such an enterprise is to disturb the peace--and +the disturber of the peace, in the national view, quickly passes over +into the downright criminal. + +These symptoms, it seems to me, are only partly racial, despite the +persistent survival of that third-rate English strain which shows itself +so ingenuously in the colonial spirit, the sense of inferiority, the +frank craving for praise from home. The race, in truth, grows mongrel, +and the protest against that mongrelism only serves to drive in the +fact. But a mongrel race is necessarily a race still in the stage of +reaching out for culture; it has not yet formulated defensible +standards; it must needs rest heavily upon the superstitions that go +with inferiority. The Reformation brought Scotland among the civilized +nations, but it took Scotland a century and a half to live down the +Reformation.[78] Dogmatism, conformity, Philistinism, the fear of +rebels, the crusading spirit; these are the marks of an upstart people, +uncertain of their rank in the world and even of their direction.[79] A +cultured European, reading a typical American critical journal, must +needs conceive the United States, says H. G. Wells, as "a vain, +garrulous and prosperous female of uncertain age and still more +uncertain temper, with unfounded pretensions to intellectuality and an +ideal of refinement of the most negative description ... the Aunt Errant +of Christendom."[80] There is always that blushful shyness, that +timorous uncertainty, broken by sudden rages, sudden enunciations of +impeccable doctrine, sudden runnings amuck. Formalism is the hall-mark +of the national culture, and sins against the one are sins against the +other. The American is school-mastered out of gusto, out of joy, out of +innocence. He can never fathom William Blake's notion that "the lust of +the goat is also to the glory of God." He must be correct, or, in his +own phrase, he must bust. + +_Via trita est tutissima._ The new generation, urged to curiosity and +rebellion by its mounting sap, is rigorously restrained, regimented, +policed. The ideal is vacuity, guilelessness, imbecility. "We are +looking at this particular book," said Comstock's successor of "The +'Genius,'" "from the standpoint of its harmful effect on female readers +of immature mind."[81] To be curious is to be lewd; to know is to yield +to fornication. Here we have the mediaeval doctrine still on its legs: a +chance word may arouse "a libidinous passion" in the mind of a "modest" +woman. Not only youth must be safeguarded, but also the "female," the +untrustworthy one, the temptress. "Modest," is a euphemism; it takes +laws to keep her "pure." The "locks of chastity" rust in the Cluny +Museum; in place of them we have comstockery.... + +But, as I have said in hymning Huneker, there is yet the munyonic +consolation. Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals. We +have yet no delivery, but we have at least the beginnings of a revolt, +or, at all events, of a protest. We have already reached, in Howells, +our Hannah More; in Clemens, our Swift; in Henry James, our Horace +Walpole; in Woodberry, Robinson _et al._, our Cowpers, Southeys and +Crabbes; perhaps we might even make a composite and call it our Johnson. +We are sweating through our Eighteenth Century, our era of sentiment, +our spiritual measles. Maybe a new day is not quite so far off as it +seems to be, and with it we may get our Hardy, our Conrad, our +Swinburne, our Thomas, our Moore, our Meredith and our Synge. + +THE END + +FOOTNOTES: + +[38] American Literature, tr. by Julia Franklin; New York, Doubleday, +Page & Co., 1915. + +[39] New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1916. + +[40] The first edition for public sale did not appear until June, 1917, +and in it the preface was suppressed. + +[41] Second edition; Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1859, xxvi. + +[42] _Cf._ The Puritan, by Owen Hatteras, _The Smart Set_, July, 1916; +and The Puritan's Will to Power, by Randolph S. Bourne, _The Seven +Arts_, April, 1917. + +[43] An instructive account of the organization and methods of the +Anti-Saloon League, a thoroughly typical Puritan engine, is to be found +in Alcohol and Society, by John Koren; New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1916. + +[44] U. S. Rep., vol. 242, No. 7, p. 502. + +[45] The majority opinion, written by Mr. Justice Day, is given in U. S. +Rep., vol. 242, no. 7, pp. 482-496. + +[46] New York, (1914). + +[47] I quote from page 157 of Anthony Comstock, Fighter, the official +biography. On page 239 the number of his prosecutions is given as 3,646, +with 2,682 convictions, which works out to but 73 per cent. He is +credited with having destroyed 50 tons of books, 28,425 pounds of +stereotype plates, 16,900 photographic negatives, and 3,984,063 +photographs--enough to fill "sixteen freight cars, fifteen loaded with +ten tons each, and the other nearly full." + +[48] By Charles Gallaudet Trumbull; New York, Fleming H. Revell Co. +(1913). + +[49] An example: "All the evil men in New York cannot harm a hair of my +head, were it not the will of God. If it be His will, what right have I +or any one to say aught? I am only a speck, a mite, before God, yet not +a hair of my head can be harmed unless it be His will. Oh, to live, to +feel, to be--Thy will be done!" (pp. 84-5). Again: "I prayed that, if my +bill might not pass, I might go back to New York submissive to God's +will, feeling that it was for the best. I asked for forgiveness and +asked that my bill might pass, if possible; but over and above all, that +the will of God be done" (p. 6). Nevertheless, Comstock neglected no +chance to apply his backstairs pressure to the members of both Houses. + +[50] Now, with amendments, sections 211, 212 and 245 of the United +States Criminal Code. + +[51] _Vide_ Anthony Comstock, Fighter, pp. 81, 85, 94. + +[52] Now sections 1141, 1142 and 1143 of the Penal Laws of New York. + +[53] U. S. _vs._ Casper, reported in the _Twentieth Century_, Feb. 11, +1892. + +[54] The trial court dodged the issue by directing the jury to find the +prisoner not guilty on the ground of insanity. The necessary +implication, of course, was that the publication complained of was +actually obscene. In 1895, one Wise, of Clay Center, Kansas, sent a +quotation from the Bible through the mails, and was found guilty of +mailing obscene matter. See The Free Press Anthology, compiled by +Theodore Schroeder; New York, Truth Seeker Pub. Co., 1909, p. 258. + +[55] U. S. _vs._ Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 368-9 (1877). + +[56] _Idem_, 362; People _vs._ Muller, 96 N. Y., 411; U. S. _vs._ Clark, +38 Fed. Rep. 734. + +[57] U. S. _vs._ Moore, 129 Fed., 160-1 (1904). + +[58] U. S. _vs._ Heywood, judge's charge, Boston, 1877. Quoted in U. S. +_vs._ Bennett, 16 Blatchford. + +[59] U. S. _vs._ Slenker, 32 Fed. Rep., 693; People _vs._ Muller, 96 N. +Y. 408-414; Anti-Vice Motion Picture Co. _vs._ Bell, reported in the +_New York Law Journal_, Sept. 22, 1916; Sociological Research Film +Corporation _vs._ the City of New York, 83 Misc. 815; Steele _vs._ +Bannon, 7 L. R. C. L. Series, 267; U. S. _vs._ Means, 42 Fed. Rep. 605, +etc. + +[60] U. S. _vs._ Cheseman, 19 Fed. Rep., 597 (1884). + +[61] People _vs._ Muller, 96 N. Y., 413. + +[62] U. S. _vs._ Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 368-9. + +[63] U. S. _vs._ Smith, 45 Fed. Rep. 478. + +[64] U. S. _vs._ Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 360-1; People _vs._ Berry, 1 N. +Y., Crim. R., 32. + +[65] People _vs._ Muller, 32 Hun., 212-215. + +[66] U. S. _vs._ Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 361. + +[67] U. S. _vs._ Moore, 16 Fed. Rep., 39; U. S. _vs._ Wright, 38 Fed. +Rep., 106; U. S. _vs._ Dorsey, 40 Fed. Rep., 752; U. S. _vs._ Baker, 155 +Mass., 287; U. S. _vs._ Grimm, 15 Supreme Court Rep., 472. + +[68] Various cases in point are cited in the Brief on Behalf of +Plaintiff in Dreiser _vs._ John Lane Co., App. Div. 1st Dept. N. Y., +1917. I cite a few: People _vs._ Eastman, 188 N. Y., 478; U. S. _vs._ +Swearingen, 161 U. S., 446; People _vs._ Tylkoff, 212 N. Y., 197; In the +matter of Worthington Co., 62 St. Rep. 116-7; St. Hubert Guild _vs._ +Quinn, 64 Misc., 336-341. But nearly all such decisions are in New York +cases. In the Federal courts the Comstocks usually have their way. + +[69] St. Hubert Guild _vs._ Quinn, 64 Misc., 339. + +[70] For example, Judge Chas. L. Benedict, sitting in U. S. _vs._ +Bennett, _op. cit._ This is a leading case, and the Comstocks make much +of it. Nevertheless, a contemporary newspaper denounces Judge Benedict +for his "intense bigotry" and alleges that "the only evidence which he +permitted to be given was on the side of the prosecution." (Port Jervis, +N. Y., _Evening Gazette_, March 22, 1879.) Moreover, a juror in the +case, Alfred A. Valentine, thought it necessary to inform the newspapers +that he voted guilty only in obedience to judicial instructions. + +[71] _Vide_ Newspaper Morals, by H. L. Mencken, the _Atlantic Monthly_, +March, 1914. + +[72] As a fair specimen of the sort of reasoning that prevails among the +consecrated brethren I offer the following extract from an argument +against birth control delivered by the present active head of the New +York Society for the Suppression of Vice before the Women's City Club of +New York, Nov. 17, 1916: + +"Natural and inevitable conditions, over which we can have no control, +will assert themselves wherever population becomes too dense. This has +been exemplified time after time in the history of the world where +over-population has been corrected by manifestations of nature or by +war, flood or pestilence.... Belgium may have been regarded as an +over-populated country. Is it a coincidence that, during the past two +years, the territory of Belgium has been devastated and its population +scattered throughout the other countries of the world?" + +[73] For example, the printed contract of the John Lane Co., publisher +of Dreiser's The "Genius," contains this provision: "The author hereby +guarantees ... that the work ... contains nothing of a scandalous, an +immoral or a libelous nature." The contract for the publication of The +"Genius" was signed on July 30, 1914. The manuscript had been carefully +read by representatives of the publisher, and presumably passed as not +scandalous or immoral, inasmuch as the publication of a scandalous or +immoral book would have exposed the publisher to prosecution. About +8,000 copies were sold under this contract. Two years later, in July, +1916, the Society for the Suppression of Vice threatened to begin a +prosecution unless the book was withdrawn. It was withdrawn forthwith, +and Dreiser was compelled to enter suit for a performance of the +contract. The withdrawal, it will be noticed, was not in obedience to a +court order, but followed a mere comstockian threat. Yet Dreiser was at +once deprived of his royalties, and forced into expensive litigation. +Had it not been that eminent counsel volunteered for his defence, his +personal means would have been insufficient to have got him even a day +in court. + +[74] The chief sufferers from this conflict are the authors of moving +pictures. What they face at the hands of imbecile State boards of +censorship is described at length by Channing Pollock in an article +entitled "Swinging the Censor" in the _Bulletin_ of the Authors' League +of America for March, 1917. + +[75] For example, the magazine which printed David Graham Phillips' +Susan Lenox: Her Rise and Fall as a serial prefaced it with a moral +encomium by the Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst. Later, when the novel +appeared in book form, the Comstocks began an action to have it +suppressed, and forced the publisher to bowdlerize it. + +[76] An account of a typical prosecution, arbitrary, unintelligent and +disingenuous, is to be found in Sumner and Indecency, by Frank Harris, +in _Pearson's Magazine_ for June, 1917, p. 556. + +[77] For further discussions of this point consult Art in America, by +Aleister Crowley, _The English Review_, Nov., 1913; Life, Art and +America, by Theodore Dreiser, _The Seven Arts_, Feb., 1917; and The +American; His Ideas of Beauty, by H. L. Mencken, _The Smart Set_, Sept., +1913. + +[78] _Vide_ The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. XI, p. +225. + +[79] The point is discussed by H. V. Routh in The Cambridge History of +English Literature, vol. XI, p. 290. + +[80] In Boon; New York, George H. Doran Co., 1915. + +[81] In a letter to Felix Shay, Nov. 24, 1916. + + + + +INDEX + + +Abolitionists, 213, 231 + +Agnosticism, 14, 17 + +Alden, W. L., on Conrad, 53 + +"Almayer's Folly," 12, 16, 37, 42, 47, 51, 52, 56, 59 + +American Bible Society, 239 + +American mind, 25, 197-8, 207 et seq. + +"Amy Foster," 36 + +Anglo-Saxon point of view, 20-3 + +Animal behaviour, theory of, 135 + +"Anthony Comstock, Fighter," 254 _n_, 255 et seq. + +Anti-Saloon League, 244 et seq., 249-50 + +Art Students' League raid, 269 + + +Balzac, H. de, 15, 73, 76, 113, 155, 202, 260 + +"Banks of the Wabash, The," 106 + +Beauty, Dreiser on, 126 + +Benedict, Judge Chas. L., and Comstockery, 267 _n_. + +Bennett, Arnold, 19, 26, 32, 48, 62, 78, 104, 137, 142, 143 + +Bible, declared obscene, 261-2 + +Bierce, Ambrose, 146, 202, 216, 224 + +"Blue Sphere, The," 126 + +_Bohemian Magazine_, 104 + +Bourne, Randolph, 147 _n_, 158, 237 _n_. + +Boynton, H. W., 134, 158 + +British mind, 25 + +Brooks, Van Wyck, 134 + +_Butler, Edward Malia_, 116 et seq., 119 + + +Calvinism, 14, 139, 164, 197 et seq. + +Catholicism, Dreiser's, 75 + +Censorship, theatre, 241; moving picture, 242, 274 + +_Century Magazine_, 143, 221 + +"Chance," 37, 48, 56, 60 + +Chicago Vice Commission, report of, 269 + +"Children of the Sea," _see_ "Nigger of the Narcissus, The" + +"Chopin: the Man and His Music," 166, 169 et seq. + +Clemens, S. L., _see_ Twain, Mark + +Clifford, Hugh, 52, 54, 59 + +Comstock, Anthony, 253 et seq. + +Comstock Postal Acts of 1873, 241, 257 et seq. + +Comstocks, attack on Dreiser, 101-2, 140 et seq. + +Conrad, Joseph, birth and parentage, 20; + first book, 51; + early success, 53; + pensioned, 54; + his books as bibelots, 56; + style, 36 et seq.; + materials, 40 et seq.; + irony, 13, 18; + ethical agnosticism, 17, 29-32; + on women, 33-5; + statement of his task, 29; + contrasted with other authors, 30, 45, 48-9, 88 et seq., 96 + +_Cowperwood, Frank_, 79, 114 et seq., 135, 201 + +Criticism in America, 153 et seq., 191-2 + +Curle, Richard, 60 + + +_Delineator_, 104 + +de Pachmann, Vladimir, 171, 178 + +Dewey, John, 152-3 + +Dime novels, Dreiser as editor of, 103 + +Doubleday, Page & Co., 70, 100-1, 102 + +Drama League of America, 180, 182 + +Dreiser, Theodore, birth and parentage, 76-7, 106; + early influences, 68 et seq.; + career in journalism, 98-105; + first book, 70, 98 et seq.; + dates of books, 100, 105; + plays, 105, 125-6; + travel books, 105, 127-131; + style, 79 et seq., 113; + mysticism, 12; + agnosticism, 88 et seq., 147; + his novels criticized, 106 et seq.; + academic attitude toward, 131 et seq.; + attacked by Comstocks, 139 et seq.; + contrasted with Conrad, 34, 88 et seq. + +Dresser, Paul, 106, 130 + + +"Egoists," 179, 181 + +"End of the Tether, The," 47 + + +"Falk," 16, 36, 39, 47, 59, 64 + +Fiction, English, 18, 19 + +"Financier, The," 81, 86, 101, 105, 107, 114, 122, 138 + +Flaubert, Gustave, 73, 84, 136, 181 + +Follett, Wilson, 11, 13, 17, 60 + + +Garnett, Edward, 52 + +"'Genius,' The," 80-1, 83, 86, 87, 93, 105, 107, 115, 122, 125, + 139, 226, 270, 273, 282 + +_Gerhardt, Jennie_, 109-10, 119, 137 + +_Gerhardt, Jennie's_ father, 96, 117 + +German mind, 25 + +"Girl in the Coffin, The," 125 + +Good Templars, 228-30 + +_Goorall, Yanko_, 12 + +Great Awakening of 1734, 227 + +Greenwich Village, 124, 145, 224 + + +"Hand of the Potter, The," 105 + +_Hanson, Minnie_, 85 + +Hardy, Thomas, 16, 62, 69, 71, 72, 76, 260 + +Harper & Bros., 100-2, 105 + +Harvard, 163, 169, 177 + +"Heart of Darkness," 35, 36, 41, 64 + +_Herrenmoral_, 236 + +_Heyst_, 12, 34, 59 + +"Hoosier Holiday, A," 76, 86, 88, 92, 105, 106, 125, 127 et seq. + +Hope, Dreiser on, 126 + +Howells, W. D., 28, 58, 74, 76, 97, 156, 159, 188, 205, 217, 218, + 275, 282 + +Hueffer, Ford Madox, 53, 54 + +Huneker, James, birth and parentage, 164; + in journalism, 167, 183; + as music student, 166-7; + as a critic, 159 et seq., 190-4; + books on music, 168-175; + stories, 188-90; + on Conrad, 59; + his aims, 193; + style, 180 et seq. + +_Hurstwood_, 99, 108-9 + + +Ibsen, Henrik, 15, 23, 24, 40, 83, 124, 156, 160-1, 162, 182, 200 + +"Iconoclasts," 169, 170, 179, 181 + +"Inheritors, The," 42, 53, 56 + +"In the Dark," 126 + +"Ivory, Apes and Peacocks," 59 + + +James, Henry, 58, 62, 113, 217, 218, 283 + +"Jennie Gerhardt," 16, 71, 76-7, 82, 84, 96, 101, 105-9, 111-2, 117, + 124, 276 + +Jesup, Morris K., 257 et seq. + +_Jim, Lord_, 12, 16, 38, 39, 42, 59 + +_Jones, Althea_, 80-1, 85 + +Joseffy, Rafael, 167, 178 + + +Kellner, Leon, 197 et seq. + +_Kultur-Novellen_, Huneker's, 188 et seq. + +_Kurtz_, 12, 16, 34, 38, 39, 59 + + +Libraries, Dreiser's books in American, 143-5 _n_. + +"Life, Art and America," 86, 88, 92, 105 + +"Lord Jim," 36, 47, 56, 60 + +Lord's Day Alliance, 242 + +Love, Dreiser on, 126 + + +_MacWhirr, Capt._, 12, 37, 42 + +Mann Act, 241, 251-2, 258 + +_Marlow_, 36, 37 + +_Meeber, Carrie_, 40, 85, 99, 109 et seq., 126, 137 + +"Melomaniacs," 188 et seq. + +Men and Religions Forward Movement, 239 + +Methodism, 139, 197, 277 + +"Mezzotints in Modern Music," 168 + +"Mirror of the Sea, The," 50, 56 + +"Morals, Not Art or Literature," 253 + + +Naturalism, German, 77 + +"New Cosmopolis," 165, 183 et seq. + +Nietzsche, F. W., 15, 29, 90, 93, 136, 158, 162, 173, 180, 181, 183, + 192, 193 + +"Nigger of the Narcissus, The," 50, 52, 56 + +Norris, Frank, 15, 70, 71, 100, 108, 122, 163, 191, 224 + +"Nostromo," 12, 38, 42, 45, 46-7, 48, 56 + + +"Old Fogy," 170 et seq., 179, 181 + +"Old Ragpicker," 125 + +"Outcast of the Islands, An," 37 + + +Page, Walter H., 102 + +"Pathos of Distance, The," 164 + +"Personal Record, A," 37, 51, 88 + +Pilsner, 165, 184-5 + +"Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural," 105, 125 + +Poe, Edgar Allan, 73, 151, 152, 154, 180-1, 189, 214, 221 + +"Point of Honor, The," 42, 47 + +Prague, 165, 185-6 + +Prohibition, 228-9, 244 et seq. + +Prudery, American, 228 + + +_Razumov_, 12, 34, 49 + +Resignationism, 14 + +"Return, The," 42 + +"Romance," 56 + +_Ruiz, Gaspar_, 12 + +Russia, Conrad's picture of, 49-50 + + +Sea, Conrad's pictures of, 50-1 + +"Secret Agent, The," 42, 48, 59, 60 + +"Set of Six, A.," 56 + +"Shadow Line, The," 12, 13, 47 + +Shakespeare, Wm., 14-5, 61, 155, 121, 199, 204 + +Shaw, G. B., 15, 16, 19, 26, 121-2, 161, 182, 269 + +"Sister Carrie," 58, 70, 71, 73, 81, 84, 95, 97, 98 et seq., 105, + 107, 108, 109, 111, 112-3, 117, 119, 126, 143, 201 + +_Sklavenmoral_, 22, 235 + +Slav, qualities of, 14 + +"Some Reminiscences," 37, 56. (_See also_ "Personal Record, A.") + +Sons of Temperance, 228 + +Street & Smith, 103-4 + +Symons, Arthur, 19, 28-9, 39 + + +"Tales of Unrest," 52, 56 + +"Titan, The," 60, 77, 82, 86, 101, 105, 106, 111, 114, 117 et seq., + 129, 138, 201, 275 + +Train, George Francis, 261-2 + +"Traveler at Forty, A.," 76, 82, 105, 125, 127 + +Truth, Dreiser on, 126 + +Twain, Mark, 15, 17, 30, 90, 131-2, 133, 143, 151, 202, 203-4, 217, 222 + +"Typhoon," 12, 47, 50, 53 + + +"Under Western Eyes," 36, 42, 47, 48, 49, 56, 59 + + +"Victory," 13, 33, 42, 48, 55, 56 + +"Visionaries," 188 et seq. + + +Webb Law, 230, 241, 258 + +Wells, H. G., 19, 32, 38, 48, 53, 62, 135, 142, 144, 281 + +_Wille zur Macht_, the Puritan, 237, 246 + +_Witla, Eugene_, 122 et seq., 137, 140 et seq. + + +Young Men's Christian Association, 230, 238, 240, 256 + +"Youth," 12, 13, 37, 41, 48, 53, 54, 56, 64 + + +Zola, Emile, 15-6, 63, 71-2, 76, 78, 113, 124, 136, 202, 216, 260 + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Book of Prefaces, by H. L. 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