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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Literature in the Making, by Various
+
+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: Literature in the Making
+       by some of its makers
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: Joyce Kilmer
+
+Release Date: November 13, 2010 [EBook #34313]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERATURE IN THE MAKING ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Elizaveta Shevyakhova, Suzanne Shell and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ LITERATURE IN THE MAKING
+ BY
+ SOME OF ITS MAKERS
+
+ PRESENTED BY
+ JOYCE KILMER
+
+ [Illustration]
+
+ HARPER & BROTHERS
+ NEW YORK AND LONDON
+
+
+
+
+ Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers
+ Printed in the United States of America
+ Published April, 1917
+
+
+
+
+ TO
+ LOUIS BEVIER, PH.D., LITT.D.
+ AND
+ LOUIS BEVIER, JR.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                   PAGE
+
+_WAR STOPS LITERATURE_                                                3
+
+                                        WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
+
+    William Dean Howells, the foremost American novelist of
+    his generation, was born at Martin's Ferry, Ohio, March
+    11, 1837. Most of his many novels have been realistic
+    and sympathetic studies of contemporary American life.
+    For some years he has written "The Editor's Easy Chair"
+    in _Harper's Magazine_. He has received honorary
+    degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Columbia, and
+    in 1915 the National Institute of Arts and Letters
+    awarded him its Gold Medal "For distinguished work in
+    fiction." _The Daughter of the Storage_ and _Years of
+    My Youth_ are his latest books.
+
+
+_THE JOYS OF THE POOR_                                               19
+
+                                             KATHLEEN NORRIS
+
+    Kathleen Norris was born in San Francisco, California,
+    July 16, 1880. She is the wife of Charles Gilman
+    Norris, himself a writer and the brother of the late
+    Frank Norris. Among Mrs. Norris's best-known novels are
+    _Mother_, _The Story of Julia Page_, and _The Heart of
+    Rachel_.
+
+
+_NATIONAL PROSPERITY AND ART_                                        35
+
+                                            BOOTH TARKINGTON
+
+    Booth Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, Indiana,
+    July 29, 1869. A prolific and brilliant writer, he has
+    scored many successes of different types, being the
+    author of the romantic drama _Monsieur Beaucaire_, and
+    of many novels dealing with contemporary Middle-Western
+    life. Recently he has, in _Seventeen_ and the "Penrod"
+    stories, given his attention to the comedies and
+    tragedies of American youth.
+
+
+_ROMANTICISM AND AMERICAN HUMOR_                                     45
+
+                                              MONTAGUE GLASS
+
+    Montague Glass was born at Manchester, England, July
+    23, 1877. Coming in his youth to the United States, he
+    brought into American fiction a new type--that of the
+    metropolitan Jewish-American business man. His _Potash
+    and Perlmutter_ and _Abe and Mawruss_ have given him a
+    European as well as an American reputation.
+
+
+_THE "MOVIES" BENEFIT LITERATURE_                                    63
+
+                                                   REX BEACH
+
+    Rex Beach was born at Atwood, Michigan, September 1,
+    1877. His novels deal chiefly with the West and the
+    North, and his favorite theme is adventurous life in
+    the open. Among his best-known books are _The
+    Spoilers_, _The Silver Horde_, and _Rainbow's End_.
+
+
+_WHAT IS GENIUS?_                                                    75
+
+                                          ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
+
+    Robert W. Chambers was born in Brooklyn, New York, May
+    26, 1865. One of the most widely read writers of his
+    time, he has given his attention chiefly to English and
+    American society, making it the theme of a large number
+    of novels, among which may be mentioned _The Fighting
+    Chance_, _Japonette_, and _Athalie_.
+
+
+_DETERIORATION OF THE SHORT STORY_                                   89
+
+                                            JAMES LANE ALLEN
+
+    James Lane Allen was born near Lexington, Kentucky, in
+    1849. In 1886 he gave up his profession of teaching to
+    devote his attention to literature. Many of his novels
+    deal with the South. Of them perhaps _The Kentucky
+    Cardinal_ and _The Choir Invisible_ are best known.
+
+
+_SOME HARMFUL INFLUENCES_                                           101
+
+                                           HARRY LEON WILSON
+
+    Harry Leon Wilson was born in Oregon, Illinois, May 1,
+    1867. He was co-author with Booth Tarkington of _The
+    Man from Home_, and his _Bunker Bean_ and _Ruggles of
+    Red Gap_ have given him a great reputation for
+    irresistible and peculiarly American humor.
+
+
+_THE PASSING OF THE SNOB_                                           119
+
+                                            EDWARD S. MARTIN
+
+    Edward Sandford Martin was born in Willowbrook, Owasco,
+    New York, January 2, 1856. His keen yet sympathetic
+    observation of modern life finds expression in essays,
+    many of which have been used editorially in Life.
+    Several volumes of his essays have been published,
+    among which may be mentioned _The Luxury of Children,
+    and Some Other Luxuries_ and _Reflections of a
+    Beginning Husband_.
+
+
+_COMMERCIALIZING THE SEX INSTINCT_                                  131
+
+                                              ROBERT HERRICK
+
+    Robert Herrick was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
+    April 26, 1868. He has been until recently a professor
+    at the University of Chicago. He is a critic and a
+    writer of realistic novels. _The Web of Life_, _The
+    Common Lot_, _Together_, and _Clark's Field_ are novels
+    that show Mr. Herrick's questioning attitude toward
+    some modern social institutions.
+
+
+_SIXTEEN DON'TS FOR POETS_                                          145
+
+                                            ARTHUR GUITERMAN
+
+    Arthur Guiterman was born of American parents in
+    Vienna, Austria, November 28, 1871. He is a writer of
+    deft and humorous light verse, of which a volume was
+    recently published under the title _The Laughing Muse_.
+    He contributes a weekly rhymed review to _Life_.
+
+
+_MAGAZINES CHEAPEN FICTION_                                         157
+
+                                      GEORGE BARR McCUTCHEON
+
+    George Barr McCutcheon was born on a farm in Tippecanoe
+    County, Indiana, July 26, 1866. He is a short-story
+    writer and novelist, devoting himself chiefly to tales
+    of adventure. _Beverley of Graustark_ and the volumes
+    that succeeded it have gained him many admirers among
+    lovers of romance.
+
+
+_BUSINESS INCOMPATIBLE WITH ART_                                    169
+
+                                           FRANK H. SPEARMAN
+
+    Frank H. Spearman was born at Buffalo, New York,
+    September 6, 1859. He is known both as a short-story
+    writer and a writer of articles on economic topics. His
+    novels are founded chiefly on themes dealing with the
+    great industrial enterprises of the West, especially
+    the railroads. The best known of these are _The
+    Daughter of a Magnate_ and _The Strategy of Great
+    Railroads_.
+
+
+_THE NOVEL MUST GO_                                                 187
+
+                                              WILL N. HARBEN
+
+    Will N. Harben, who was born in Dalton, Georgia, July
+    5, 1858, began his career in business in the South. His
+    entrance into literature began with the assistant
+    editorship of the _Youth's Companion_. He had gained a
+    distinctive place as an interpreter of phases of
+    Southern life in the company which includes Cable,
+    Harris, and Johnston. His novels include _Pole Baker_,
+    _Ann Boyd_, _Second Choice_, and many others.
+
+
+_LITERATURE IN THE COLLEGES_                                        199
+
+                                                JOHN ERSKINE
+
+    John Erskine was born in New York City, October 5,
+    1879. He is Adjunct Professor of English at Columbia
+    University, the author of many text-books and critical
+    works, of _Actaeon and Other Poems_ and of _The Moral
+    Obligation to be Intelligent and Other Essays_.
+
+
+_CITY LIFE VERSUS LITERATURE_                                       213
+
+                                              JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+    John Burroughs was born in Roxbury, New York, April 3,
+    1837. He taught school in his early years, and held for
+    a time a clerkship in the United States Treasury. Since
+    1874 he has devoted himself to literature and fruit
+    culture. Among his well-known "Nature" books may be
+    noted _Wake Robin_, _Bird and Bough_, and _Camping and
+    Tramping with Roosevelt_.
+
+
+_"EVASIVE IDEALISM" IN LITERATURE_                                  229
+
+                                               ELLEN GLASGOW
+
+    Ellen Glasgow was born in Richmond, Virginia, April 22,
+    1874. Her novels, among which may be mentioned _The
+    Voice of the People_, _The Romance of a Plain Man_, and
+    _Life and Gabriella_, deal chiefly with social and
+    psychological problems, and their scenes are for the
+    most part in the southern part of the United States.
+
+
+_"CHOCOLATE FUDGE" IN THE MAGAZINE_                                 241
+
+                                                FANNIE HURST
+
+    Fannie Hurst was born in St. Louis, October 19, 1889.
+    She has served as a saleswoman and as a waitress and
+    crossed the Atlantic in the steerage to get material
+    for her short stories of the life of the working-woman,
+    selections of which have been published with the titles
+    _Just Around the Corner_ and _Every Soul Hath Its
+    Song_.
+
+
+_THE NEW SPIRIT IN POETRY_                                          253
+
+                                                  AMY LOWELL
+
+    Amy Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachusetts,
+    February 9, 1874. She is prominently identified with
+    _vers libre_, _imagisme_, and other ultra-modern poetic
+    tendencies. She has published a volume of essays on
+    modern French poetry and three books of poems, of
+    which _Men, Women, and Ghosts_ is the most recent.
+
+
+_A NEW DEFINITION OF POETRY_                                        265
+
+                                    EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
+
+    Edwin Arlington Robinson was born in Head Tide, Maine,
+    December 22, 1869. He has written plays, but is chiefly
+    known for his poems, most of them studies of character.
+    His most recent volume is _Merlin: A Poem_.
+
+
+_LET POETRY BE FREE_                                                277
+
+                                   JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY
+
+    Josephine Preston Peabody was born in New York City.
+    She won the Stratford-on-Avon Prize for her poetic
+    drama _The Piper_. She has published many books of
+    verse, one of which, called _Harvest Moon_, deals
+    chiefly with woman's tragic share in the Great War. She
+    is the wife of Prof. Lionel Simeon Marks of Harvard.
+
+
+_THE HERESY OF SUPERMANISM_                                         289
+
+                                        CHARLES RANN KENNEDY
+
+    Charles Rann Kennedy was born at Derby, England,
+    February 14, 1871. His plays, dealing with social and
+    religious questions, include _The Servant in the
+    House_, _The Terrible Meek_, _The Idol-Breakers_, and
+    _The Rib of the Man_, his latest work.
+
+
+_THE MASQUE AND DEMOCRACY_                                          305
+
+                                               PERCY MACKAYE
+
+    Percy MacKaye was born in New York City, March 16,
+    1875. He has written many poems and plays, and has been
+    especially identified with the production of community
+    pageants and masques, having written and directed the
+    St. Louis Civic Masque in 1914, and the Shakespeare
+    Masque in New York City in 1916. Among his published
+    works may be mentioned _The Scarecrow_, _Jeanne d'Arc_,
+    _Sappho and Phaon_ and _Anti-Matrimony_ (plays) and
+    _Uriel and Other Poems_.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+This book is an effort to bridge the gulf between literary theory and
+literary practice. In these days of specialization it is more than ever
+true that the man who lectures and writes about the craft of writing
+seldom has the time or the inclination to show, by actual work, that he
+can apply his principles. On the other hand, the successful novelist,
+poet, or playwright devotes himself to his craft and seldom attempts to
+analyze and display the methods by which he obtains his effect, or even
+to state his opinion on matters intellectual and aesthetic.
+
+Now, the professor of English and the literary critic are valuable
+members of society, and the development of literature owes much to their
+counsel and guardianship. But there is a special significance in the
+opinion which the writer holds concerning his own trade, in the advice
+which he bases upon his own experience, in the theory of life and art
+which he has formulated for himself.
+
+Therefore I have spent considerable time in talking with some of the
+most widely read authors of our day, and in obtaining from them frank
+and informal statements of their points of view. I have purposely
+refrained from confining myself to writers of any one school or type of
+mind--the dean of American letters and the most advanced of our newest
+poetical anarchists alike are represented in these pages. The authors
+have talked freely, realizing that this was an opportunity to set forth
+their views definitely and comprehensively. They have not the time to
+write or lecture about their art, but they are willing to talk about it.
+
+They knew that through me they spoke, in the first place, to the great
+army of readers of their books who have a natural and pleasing curiosity
+concerning the personality of the men and women who devote their lives
+to providing them with entertainment, and, in some cases, instruction.
+They knew that through me they spoke, in the second place, to all the
+literary apprentices of the country, who look eagerly for precept and
+example to those who have won fame by the delightful labor of writing.
+They knew that through me they spoke, in the third place, to critics and
+students of literature of our own generation and, perhaps, of those that
+shall come after us. How eagerly would we read, for instance, an
+interview with Francis Bacon on the question of the authorship of
+Shakespeare's plays, or an interview with Oliver Goldsmith in which he
+gave his real opinion of Dr. Johnson, Garrick, and Boswell! A century or
+so from now, some of the writers who in this book talk to the world may
+be the objects of curiosity as great.
+
+The writers who have talked with me received me with courtesy, gave me
+freely of their time and thought, and showed a sincere desire for the
+furtherance of the purpose of this book. To them, accordingly, I tender
+my gratitude for anything in these pages which the reader may find of
+interest or of value. Their explanations of their literary creeds and
+practices were furnished in the first instance for the _New York Times_,
+to which I desire to express my acknowledgments.
+
+                                                   JOYCE KILMER.
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE IN THE MAKING
+
+
+
+
+_WAR STOPS LITERATURE_
+
+WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
+
+
+War stops literature. This is the belief of a man who for more than a
+quarter of a century has been in the front rank of the world's
+novelists, who wrote _The Rise of Silas Lapham_ and _A Modern Instance_
+and nearly a hundred other sympathetic interpretations of American life.
+
+Mr. William Dean Howells was the third writer to whom was put the
+question, "What effect will the Great War have on literature?" And he
+was the first to give a direct answer.
+
+A famous French dramatist replied: "I am not a prophet. I have enough to
+do to understand the present and the past; I cannot concern myself with
+the future." A famous English short-story writer said, "The war has
+already inspired some splendid poetry; it may also inspire great plays
+and novels, but, of course, we cannot tell as yet."
+
+But Mr. Howells said, quite simply, "War stops literature." He said it
+as unemotionally as if he were stating a familiar axiom.
+
+He does not consider it an axiom, however, for he supplied proof.
+
+"I have never believed," he said, "that great events produced great
+literature. They seldom call forth the great creative powers of man. In
+poetry it is not the poems of occasion that endure, but the poems that
+have come into being independently, not as the result of momentous
+happenings.
+
+"This war does not furnish the poet, the novelist, and the dramatist
+with the material of literature. For instance, the Germans, as every one
+will admit, have shown extraordinary valor. But we do not think of
+celebrating that valor in poetry; it does not thrill the modern writers
+as such valor thrilled the writers of bygone centuries. When we think of
+the valor of the Germans, our emotion is not admiration but pity.
+
+"And the reason for this is that fighting is no longer our ideal.
+Fighting was not a great ideal, and therefore it is no longer our ideal.
+All that old material of literature--the clashing of swords, the thunder
+of shot and shell, the great clouds of smoke, the blood and fury--all
+this has gone out from literature. It is an anachronism."
+
+"But the American Civil War produced literature, did it not?" I asked.
+
+"What great literature did it produce?" asked Mr. Howells in turn. "As I
+look back over my life and recall to mind the great number of books that
+the Civil War inspired I find that I am thinking of things that the
+American people have forgotten. They did not become literature, these
+poems and stories that came in such quantities and seemed so important
+in the sixties.
+
+"There were the novels of J. W. De Forest, for instance. They were well
+written, they were interesting, they described some phases of the Civil
+War truthfully and vividly. We read them when they were written--but you
+probably have never heard of them. No one reads them now. They were
+literature, but that about which they were written has ceased to be of
+literary interest.
+
+"Of course, the Civil War, because of its peculiar nature, was followed
+by an expansion, intellectual as well as social and economic. And this
+expansion undoubtedly had its beneficial effect on literature. But the
+Civil War itself did not have, could not have, literary expression.
+
+"Of all the writings which the Civil War directly inspired I can think
+of only one that has endured to be called literature. That is Lowell's
+'Commemoration Ode.'
+
+"War stops literature. It is an upheaval of civilization, a return to
+barbarism; it means death to all the arts. Even the preparation for war
+stops literature. It stopped it in Germany years ago. A little anecdote
+is significant.
+
+"I was in Florence about 1883, long after the Franco-Prussian War, and
+there I met the editor of a great German literary weekly--I will not
+tell you its name or his. He was a man of refinement and education, and
+I have not forgotten his great kindness to my own fiction. One day I
+asked him about the German novelists of the day.
+
+"He said: 'There are no longer any German novelists worthy of the name.
+Our new ideal has stopped all that. Militarism is our new ideal--the
+ideal of Duty--and it has killed our imagination. So the German novel is
+dead.'"
+
+"Why is it, then," I asked, "that Russia, a nation of militaristic
+ideals, has produced so many great novels during the past century?"
+
+"Russia is not Germany," answered the man who taught Americans to read
+Turgenieff. "The people of Russia are not militaristic as the people of
+Germany are militaristic. In Germany war has for a generation been the
+chief idea of every one. The nation has had a militaristic obsession.
+And this, naturally, has stifled the imagination.
+
+"But in Russia nothing of the sort has happened. Whatever the designs of
+the ruling classes may be, the people of Russia keep their simplicity,
+their large intellectuality and spirituality. And, therefore, their
+imagination and other great intellectual and spiritual gifts find
+expression in their great novels and plays.
+
+"I well remember how the Russian novelists impressed me when I was a
+young man. They opened to me what seemed to be a new world--and it was
+only the real world. There is Tcheckoff--have you read his _Orchard_?
+What life, what color, what beauty of truth are in that book!
+
+"Then there is Turgenieff--how grateful I am for his books! It must be
+thirty years since I first read him. Thomas Sargent Perry, of Boston, a
+man of the greatest culture, was almost the first American to read
+Turgenieff. Stedman read Turgenieff in those days, too. Soon all of the
+younger writers were reading him.
+
+"I remember very well a dinner at Whitelaw Reid's house in Lexington
+Avenue, when some of us young men were enthusiastic over the Russian
+novel, and the author we mentioned most frequently was Turgenieff.
+
+"Dr. J. G. Holland, the poet who edited _The Century_, lived across the
+street from Mr. Reid, and during the evening he came over and joined us.
+He listened to us for a long time in silence, hardly speaking a word.
+When he rose to go, he said: 'I have been listening to the conversation
+of these young men for over an hour. They have been talking about books.
+And I have never before heard the names of any of the authors they have
+mentioned.'"
+
+"Were those the days," I asked, "in which you first read Tolstoy?"
+
+"That was long before the time," answered Mr. Howells. "Tolstoy
+afterward meant everything to me--his philosophy as well as his
+art--far more than Turgenieff. Tolstoy did not love all his writing.
+He loved the thing that he wrote about, the thing that he lived and
+taught--equality. And equality is the best thing in the world. It
+is the thing for which the Best of Men lived and died.
+
+"I never met Tolstoy," said Mr. Howells. "But I once sent him a message
+of appreciation after he had sent a message to me. Tolstoy was great in
+the way he wrote as well as in what he wrote. Tolstoy's force is a moral
+force. His great art is as simple as nature."
+
+"Do you think that the Russian novelists have influenced your work?" I
+asked.
+
+"I think," Mr. Howells replied, "that I had determined what I was to do
+before I read any Russian novels. I first thought that it was necessary
+to write only about things that I knew had already been written about.
+Certain things had already been in books; therefore, I thought, they
+legitimately were literary subjects and I might write about them.
+
+"But soon I knew that this idea was wrong, that I must get my material,
+not out of books, but out of life. And I also knew that it was not
+necessary for me to look at life through English spectacles. Most of our
+writers had been looking at life through English spectacles; they had
+been closely following in the footsteps of English novelists. I saw
+that around me were the materials for my work. I saw around me
+life--wholesome, natural, human.
+
+"I saw a young, free, energetic society. I saw a society in which
+love--the greatest and most beautiful thing in the world--was innocent;
+a society in which the relation between man and woman was simple and
+pure. Here, I thought, are the materials for novels. Why should I go
+back to the people of bygone ages and of lands not my own?"
+
+"Do you think," I asked, "that romanticism has lost its hold on the
+novelists?"
+
+Mr. Howells smiled. "When realism," he said, "is once in a novelist's
+blood he never can degenerate into romanticism. Romanticism is no longer
+a literary force among English-speaking authors. Romanticism belongs to
+the days in which war was an aim, an ideal, instead of a tragic
+accident. It is something foreign to us. And literature must be native
+to the soil, affected, of course, by the culture of other lands and
+ages, but essentially of the people of the land and time in which it is
+produced. Realism is the material of democracy. And no great literature
+or art can arise outside of the democracy."
+
+Tolstoy was mentioned again, and Mr. Howells was asked if he did not
+think that the Russian novelist's custom of devoting a part of every day
+to work that was not literary showed that all writers would be better
+off if they were obliged to make a living in some other way than by
+writing. Mr. Howells gave his answer with considerable vigor. His calm,
+blue eyes lost something of their kindliness, and his lips were
+compressed into a straight, thin line before he said:
+
+"I certainly do not think so. The artist in letters or in lines should
+have leisure in which to perform his valuable service to society. The
+history of literature is full of heartbreaking instances of writers
+whose productive careers were retarded by their inability to earn a
+living at their chosen profession. The belief that poverty helps a
+writer is stupid and wrong. Necessity is not and never has been an
+incentive. Poverty is not and never has been an incentive. Writers and
+other creative artists are hindered, not helped, by lack of leisure.
+
+"I remember my own early experiences, and I know that my writing
+suffered very much because I could not devote all my time to it. I had
+to spend ten hours in drudgery for every two that I spent on my real
+work. The fact that authors who have given the world things that it
+treasures are forced to live in a state of anxiety over their finances
+is lamentable. This anxiety cannot but have a restrictive influence on
+literature. It is not want, but the fear of want, that kills."
+
+"Still, in spite of their precarious financial condition, modern authors
+are doing good work, are they not?" I asked.
+
+"Certainly they are," answered Mr. Howells, "the novelists especially.
+There is Robert Herrick, for example. His novels are interesting
+stories, and they also are faithful reflections of American life. Will
+Harben's work is admirable. It has splendid realism and fine humor.
+Perhaps one thing that has kept it, so far, from an appreciation so
+general as it will one day receive, is the fact that it deals, for the
+most part, with one special locality, a certain part of Georgia.
+
+"And in Spain--what excellent novelists they have there and have had for
+a long time! The realistic movement reached Spain long before it reached
+England and the United States. In fact, English-speaking countries were
+the last to accept it. I have taken great pleasure in the works of
+Armando Valdes. Then there are Perez Galdos and Emilia Pardo Bazian, and
+that priest who wrote a realistic novel about Madrid society. All these
+novelists are realists, and realists of power.
+
+"Then there are the great Scandinavians. I hope that I may some time
+attempt to express a little of my gratitude for the pleasure that
+Bjoernson's works have given me."
+
+I asked, "What do you think of contemporary poetry?"
+
+"I admired chiefly that of Thomas Hardy," said Mr. Howells. "His poems
+have force and actuality and music and charm. Masefield I like, with
+reservations. Three modern poets who give me great pleasure are Thomas
+Hardy, William Watson, and Charles Hanson Towne. The first one of Mr.
+Towne's poems that I read was "Manhattan." I have not forgotten the
+truth of that poetic interpretation of New York. His poems are beautiful
+and they are full of humanity. In his latest book there is a poem called
+'A Ballad of Shame and Dread' that moved me deeply. It is a slight
+thing, but it is wonderfully powerful. Like all of Towne's poetry, it is
+warm with human sympathy."
+
+"Do you think," I asked, "that the great social problems of the day, the
+feminine unrest, for instance, are finding their expression in
+literature?"
+
+"No," said Mr. Howells, "I cannot call to mind any adequate literary
+expression of the woman movement. Perhaps this is because the women who
+know most about it and feel it most strongly are not writers. The best
+things that have been said about woman suffrage in our time have been
+said by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She has written the noblest satire
+since Lowell. What wit she has, and what courage! Once I heard her
+address a meeting of Single-Taxers. Now, the Single-Taxers are all right
+so far as they go, but they don't go far enough. The Single-Taxers
+heckled her, but she had a retort ready for every interruption. She
+stood there with her brave smile and talked them all down."
+
+"Do you think that Ibsen expressed the modern feminine unrest in _The
+Doll's House_?" Mr. Howells was asked.
+
+"Ibsen seldom expressed things," was his reply. "He suggested them,
+mooted them, but he did not express them. _The Doll's House_ does not
+express the meaning of unrest, it suggests it. Ibsen told you where you
+stood, not where to go."
+
+Mr. Howells had recently presided at a meeting which was addressed by
+M. Brieux, and he expressed great admiration for the work of the French
+dramatist.
+
+"He is a great dramatist," he said. "He has given faithful reports of
+life, and faithful reports of life are necessarily criticisms of life.
+All great novels are criticisms of life. And I think that the poets will
+concern themselves more and more with the life around them. It is
+possible that soon we may have an epic in which the poet deals with the
+events of contemporary life."
+
+Mr. Howells is keenly awake to the effect which the war is having on
+conditions in New York. And in his sympathy for the society which
+inevitably must suffer for a war in which it is not directly concerned,
+the active interest of the novelist was evident. "If all this only could
+be reflected in a book!" he said. "If some novelist could interpret
+it!"
+
+
+
+
+_THE JOYS OF THE POOR_
+
+KATHLEEN NORRIS
+
+
+Any young woman who desires to become a famous novelist and short-story
+writer like Kathleen Norris will do well to take the following steps: In
+the first place, come to New York. In the second place, marry some one
+like Charles Gilman Norris.
+
+Of course, every one who read _Mother_ and _The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne_ and
+_Saturday's Child_ knew that the author was a married woman--and also a
+married woman with plenty of personal experience with babies and stoves
+and servants and other important domestic items. But not until I visited
+Kathleen Norris at her very genuine home in Port Washington did I
+appreciate the part which that domestic item called a husband has played
+in Kathleen Norris's communications to the world.
+
+I made this discovery after Charles Gilman Norris--accompanied by
+little Frank, who bears the name of the illustrious novelist who was his
+uncle--had motored me through Port Washington's pleasant avenues to the
+Norris house. Before a fire of crackling hickory logs, Kathleen Norris
+(clad in something very charming, which I will not attempt to describe)
+was talking about the qualities necessary to a writer's success. And one
+of these, she said, was a business sense.
+
+Now, Mrs. Norris did not look exactly business-like. Nor is "a business
+sense" the quality which most readers would immediately hit upon as the
+characteristic which made the author of _Gayley the Troubadour_
+different from the writers of other stories. I ventured to suggest this
+to Mrs. Norris.
+
+"I don't claim to possess a business sense," she said. "But my husband
+has a business sense. He has taken charge of selling my stories to the
+magazines and dealing with publishers and all of that. I do think that
+literally thousands of writers are hindered from ever reaching the
+public by the lack of business sense. And I know that my husband has
+been responsible for getting most of my work published. My stories have
+appeared since my marriage, you know. I don't need to have a business
+sense, all I have to do is to write the stories. My husband does all
+the rest--I don't need even to have any of the author's complacency, or
+the author's pride!"
+
+Mrs. Norris's fame is only about five years old--about as old as her
+son. I asked her about her life before she was known as a writer,
+expecting to hear picturesque tales of literary tribulations among the
+hills of California. But her description of her journey to success was
+not the conventional one; her journey was not for years paved with
+rejection slips and illumined with midnight oil.
+
+"It was New York that did it," she said. "When we first came to New York
+from California the editor of a magazine with which Mr. Norris was
+connected gave us a tea. Most of the people who were present were
+short-story writers and novelists. It was pleasant for me to meet them,
+and I enjoyed the afternoon. But my chief sensation was one of shock--it
+was a real shock to me to find that writers were people!
+
+"I felt as if I had met Joan of Arc, Caesar, Cleopatra, Alexander the
+Great, and all the great figures of history, and found them to be human
+beings like myself. 'These writers are not supermen and superwomen,' I
+said to myself, 'they are human beings like me. Why can't I do what
+they're doing?'
+
+"I thought this over after we went home that evening. And I made a
+resolve. I resolved that before the next tea that I attended I would
+tell a story. And when I next went to a tea I had sold a story."
+
+"To what publication had you sold it?" I asked.
+
+"To an evening paper," said Mrs. Norris; "but I had written and sold a
+story. That was something; it meant a great deal to me. My first stories
+were all sold to this evening paper, for twelve dollars each. This paper
+printed a story every day, paying twelve dollars for each of them, and
+giving a prize of fifty dollars for the best story published each week.
+I won one of the fifty-dollar prizes."
+
+Any one who to-day could buy a Kathleen Norris story for fifty dollars
+would be not an editor, but a magician. Yet the memory of that early
+triumph seemed to give Mrs. Norris real pleasure.
+
+"I wrote _What Happened to Alanna_ two years before the Fire," she said.
+("The Fire" means only one thing when a Californian says it.) "But most
+of my stories have been written since I came to New York."
+
+I asked Mrs. Norris for the history of one of her earliest stories, a
+story of California life which appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_. She
+said: "That story went to twenty-six magazines before it was printed. My
+husband had an alphabetical list of magazines. He sent the story first
+to the _Atlantic Monthly_ and then to twenty-five other magazines. They
+all returned it. Then he started at the top of the list again, and this
+time the _Atlantic Monthly_ accepted it."
+
+The mention of Mr. Norris's activities in selling this story brought our
+conversation back to the subject of the "business sense."
+
+"A writer needs the ability to sell a story as well as the ability to
+write it," said Mrs. Norris, "unless there is some one else to do the
+writing. Many a woman writes a really good story, sends it hopefully to
+an editor, gets it back with a printed notice of its rejection, and puts
+it away in a desk drawer. Then years later she tells her grandchildren
+that she once wanted to be an author, but found that she couldn't do it.
+
+"Now, that is no way for a writer to gain success. The writer must be
+persevering, not only in writing, but in trying to get his work before
+the public. Unless, as I said, there is some one else to supply the
+perseverance in getting the work before the public.
+
+"I think that the desire to write generally indicates the possession of
+the power to write. But young writers are too easily discouraged. But I
+have no right to blame a writer for being discouraged. I had frightful
+discouragement--until I was married."
+
+It is easy to see that Kathleen Norris does not hesitate to find in her
+own home life material for her industrious pen. Little Frank has
+undoubtedly served his mother as a model many times--which is not meant
+to indicate that he is that monstrosity, a model child. Indeed, Mrs.
+Norris believes that a novelist should use the material which lies ready
+at hand, instead of seeking for exotic and unusual topics. She sees that
+people want to read about the things with which they are already
+familiar, that they are not (as many young writers seem to think) eager
+for novelties.
+
+"I cannot understand," she said, "how it is that writers will clamor for
+recognition, and abuse the public for not welcoming them with
+enthusiasm, and yet will not give the public what they know that the
+public wants. So many people seem to want just their own sort of art,
+but to want money, too. Now, I wouldn't write for a million dollars some
+of those things that are called 'best sellers.' But I cannot see why a
+writer who is avowedly writing for the public should think it beneath
+him to treat the themes in which the public is interested. The greatest
+tragedy of literature is the writer who persists in trying to give the
+public what it does not want. Think of poor Gissing, for instance, dying
+embittered because he couldn't sell his work!"
+
+Mrs. Norris's conviction that a writer should use the material around
+him is so strong that she seems actually to be pained by the thought of
+all the excellent things for stories that are going to waste. I asked
+her if literature ever could come from apartment-houses. She said:
+
+"Of course it can! There is no reason why there shouldn't be good
+stories and novels of apartment-house life. One reason why we are not
+writing more and better stories of the life around us is because we are
+living that life so intensely--too intensely. We live in this country so
+close to our income that the problem of earning money makes us lose
+sight of the essentials of life. It would be a fine thing for us,
+mentally and spiritually, if we should live on less than we do. If, for
+example, a family that found it was in receipt of a few hundred dollars
+more a year than before should decide, therefore, to live under a
+simpler scale than before, to do away with some really worthless
+luxuries, what a fine thing that would be!"
+
+Of course many young writers come to Mrs. Norris for advice. And some of
+them excellently illustrate the tendency which she deprecates, the
+tendency to write about the unknown instead of the familiar.
+
+"I was talking the other day to a young girl of my acquaintance who is a
+costume model," she said. "She has literary aspirations. Now, her life
+itself has been an interesting story--her rise from a shopgirl to her
+present position. And every now and then she will say something to me
+that is a most interesting revelation--something that indicates the rich
+store of experience that she might, if she would, draw upon in her
+stories. On one occasion she said to me, 'I went home and put my
+shoe-drawer in order.'
+
+"'What do you mean?' I asked. 'What is your shoe-drawer?'
+
+"'Why, my shoe-drawer!' she answered. 'You see, we costume models have
+to have a drawer full of shoes, because we must change our shoes to
+match every costume.'
+
+"Why is it," asked Mrs. Norris, "that a girl like that cannot see the
+value of such an incident as that? That shoe-drawer is a picturesque and
+interesting thing, unknown to most people. And this girl, who knows all
+about it, and wants to write, cannot see its literary value! And yet
+what more interesting subject is there for her to write about than that
+shoe-drawer? I do not see why writers will not appreciate the importance
+of writing about the things that are around them."
+
+Mrs. Norris gave a somewhat embarrassed laugh. "I really shouldn't
+attempt to lay down the law in this way," she said. "I can speak only
+for myself--I must write of the people and things that I know best, but
+I ought not to attempt to prescribe what other people shall write
+about."
+
+Mrs. Norris's chief literary enthusiasm seems to be Charles Dickens.
+"When we were all infants out in the backwoods of California," she said,
+"we battened on Dickens. Dickens and a writer whom I don't suppose
+anybody reads nowadays--Henry Kingsley. The boys read Sir Walter
+Scott's novels, and left Dickens to me. I read Dickens with delight, and
+I still read him with delight. I have found passages in Dickens of which
+I honestly believe there are no equal in all English literature except
+in Shakespeare. I do not think that there is ever a year in which I do
+not read some of Dickens's novels over again. Of course, any one can
+find Dickens's faults--but I do not see how any one can fail to find his
+excellences."
+
+"What is it in Dickens that especially attracts you?" I asked.
+
+Mrs. Norris was silent for a moment. Then she said: "I think I like him
+chiefly because he saw so clearly the joys of the poor. He did not give
+his poor people nothing but disease and oppression and despair. He gave
+them roast goose and plum pudding for their Christmas dinner--he gave
+them faith and hope and love. He knew that often the rich suffer and the
+poor are happy.
+
+"Many of the modern realists seem ignorant of the fact that the poor may
+be happy. They think that the cotter's Saturday night must always be
+squalid and sordid and dismal, and that the millionaire's Saturday night
+must be splendid and joyful. As a matter of fact, the poor family may
+be, and often is, healthier and happier in every way than the rich
+family. But these extreme realists are not like Dickens, they have not
+his intimate knowledge of the life of the poor. They have the outsider's
+viewpoint.
+
+"Too many writers are telling us about the sorrows of the poor. We need
+writers who will tell us about the joys of the poor. We need writers who
+will be aware of the pleasures to be derived from a good dinner of
+corned beef and cabbage and a visit to a moving-picture theater. Often
+when I pass a row of mean houses, as they would be called, I think
+gratefully of the good times that I have had in just such places."
+
+The thought of that little Celtic Californian reading Dickens among the
+redwood-trees appealed to me. So I asked Mrs. Norris to tell more about
+her childhood.
+
+"Well," she said, "we hear a great deal about the misery, the bleak and
+barren lives of the children who live in the tenements of New York's
+lower East Side. But I think that an East Side tenement child would die
+of ennui if it should be brought up as we were brought up. We had none
+of the amusing and exciting experiences of the East Side child--we had
+no white stockings, no ice-cream cones, no Coney Island, nothing of the
+sort.
+
+"We never even went to school. We would study French for a while with
+some French neighbor who had sufficient leisure to teach us, and then
+we'd study Spanish for a while with some Spaniard. That was the extent
+of our schooling.
+
+"My parents died when I was eighteen years old. I went to the city and
+tried my hand at different sorts of work. For one thing, I tried to get
+up children's parties, but in eighteen months I managed only one. Then I
+did settlement work, was a librarian, a companion, and society reporter
+on a newspaper. Then I got married--and wrote stories."
+
+Mrs. Norris was at one time opposed to woman suffrage. Now, however, she
+is a suffragist, but she refuses to say that she has been "converted" to
+suffragism.
+
+"I can't say that I have been converted to suffragism," she said, "any
+more than I can say that I have been converted to warm baths and
+tooth-brushes. And it does not seem to me that any women should need to
+defend her right to vote any more than she should need to defend her
+right to love her children. There is a theme for a novel--a big
+suffrage novel will be written one of these days."
+
+It may be that the author of _Mother_ will be the author of this "big
+suffrage novel." But at present she disclaims any such intention. But
+she admits that there is a purpose in all her portrayals of normal,
+wholesome American home life.
+
+"I don't think that I believe in 'art for art's sake,' as it is
+generally interpreted," she said. "Of course, I don't believe in what is
+called the commercial point of view--I have never written anything just
+to have it printed. But I do not believe that there is any one standard
+of art. I think that any book which the people ought to read must have
+back of it something besides the mere desire of the writer to create
+something. I never could write without a moral intention."
+
+
+
+
+_NATIONAL PROSPERITY AND ART_
+
+BOOTH TARKINGTON
+
+
+Mr. Booth Tarkington never will be called the George M. Cohan of
+fiction. His novel, _The Turmoil_, is surely an indictment of modern
+American urban civilization; of its materialism, its braggadocio, its
+contempt for the things of the soul.
+
+It was with the purpose of making this indictment a little clearer than
+it could be when it is surrounded by a story, that I asked Mr.
+Tarkington a few questions. And his answers are not likely to increase
+our national complacencies.
+
+In the first place, I asked Mr. Tarkington if the atmosphere of a young
+and energetic nation might not reasonably be expected to be favorable to
+literary and artistic expression.
+
+"Yes, it might," said Mr. Tarkington. "There may be spiritual progress
+in America as phenomenal as her material progress.
+
+"There is and has been extraordinary progress in the arts. But the
+people as a whole are naturally preoccupied with their material
+progress. They are much more interested in Mr. Rockefeller than in Mr.
+Sargent."
+
+The last two sentences of Mr. Tarkington's reply made me eager for
+something a little more specific on that subject.
+
+"What are the forces in America to-day," I asked, "that hinder the
+development of art and letters?"
+
+Mr. Tarkington replied: "There are no forces in America to-day that
+hinder the development of individuals in art and letters, save in
+unimportant cases here and there. But there is a spirit that hinders
+general personal decency, knows and cares nothing for beauty, and is
+glad to have its body dirty for the sake of what it calls 'prosperity.'
+
+"It 'wouldn't give a nickel' for any kind of art. But it can't and
+doesn't hinder artists from producing works of art, though it makes them
+swear."
+
+"But do not these conditions in many instances seriously hinder
+individual artists?"
+
+Mr. Tarkington smiled. "Nothing stops an artist if he is one," he said.
+"But many things may prevent a people or a community from knowing or
+caring for art.
+
+"The climate may be unfavorable; we need not expect the Eskimos to be
+interested in architecture. In the United States politicians have
+usually controlled the public purchase of works of art and the erection
+of public buildings. This is bad for the public, naturally."
+
+"I suppose," I said, "that the conditions you describe are distinctively
+modern, are they not? At what time in the history of America have
+conditions been most favorable to literary expression?"
+
+Mr. Tarkington's reply was not what I expected. "At all times," he said.
+"Literary expression does not depend on the times, though the
+appreciation of it does, somewhat."
+
+I asked Mr. Tarkington if he agreed with Mr. Gouverneur Morris in
+considering the short story a modern development. He did not.
+
+"There are short stories in the Bible," he said, "and in every
+mythology; 'folk stories' of all races and tribes. Probably Mr. Morris's
+definition of the short story would exclude these. I agree with him that
+short stories are better written nowadays."
+
+"But you do not believe," I said, "that American literature in general
+is better than it used to be, do you? Why is it that there is now no
+group of American writers like the New England group which included
+Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Emerson, and Thoreau?"
+
+"Why is there," Mr. Tarkington asked in turn, "no group like Homer
+(wasn't he a group?) in Greece? There may be, but if there is just such
+a modern group it would tend only to repeat the work of the Homeric
+group, which wouldn't be interesting to the rest of us.
+
+"The important thing is to find a group unlike Longfellow, Whittier,
+Lowell, Emerson, and Thoreau. That is, if one accepts the idea that it
+is important to find a group."
+
+Mr. Tarkington's criticisms of the modern American city have been so
+severe that I expected him to tell me that all writers should live in
+the country. But again he surprised me. In reply to my question as to
+which environment was more favorable to the production of literature,
+the city or the country, he said:
+
+"It depends upon the nerves of the writer. A writer can be born
+anywhere, and he can grow up anywhere."
+
+There has recently been considerable discussion--Professor Edward
+Garnet and Gertrude Atherton have taken a considerable share in it--on
+the relative merits of contemporary English and American fiction. I
+asked Mr. Tarkington if in his opinion the United States had at the
+present time novelists equal to those of England.
+
+"That is unanswerable!" he answered. "Writers aren't like baseball
+teams. What's the value of my opinion that _The Undiscovered Country_ is
+a 'greater' novel than _A Pair of Blue Eyes_? These questions remind me
+of school debating societies. Nothing is demonstrated, but everybody has
+his own verdict."
+
+Until I asked Mr. Tarkington about it I had heard only two opinions as
+to the probable effect on literature of the war. One was that which
+William Dean Howells tersely expressed by saying: "War stops
+literature," and the other was that the war is purifying and
+strengthening all forms of literary expression.
+
+But Mr. Tarkington had something new to say about it. "What effect," I
+asked, "is the war likely to have on American literature?"
+
+"None of consequence," he answered. "The poet will find the subject, war
+or no war. The sculptor doesn't depend upon epaulets."
+
+Mr. Tarkington is so inveterate a writer of serials, and his work is so
+familiar to the readers of the American magazines, that I desired to get
+his expert opinion as to whether or not the American magazines, with
+their remarkably high prices, had harmed or benefited fiction. His reply
+was somewhat non-committal.
+
+"They have induced many people to look upon the production of fiction as
+a profitable business," he said. "But those people would merely not have
+'tried fiction' at all otherwise. Prices have nothing to do with art."
+
+Mr. Tarkington had some interesting things to say about that venerable
+mirage, the Great American Novel. I asked him if that longed-for work
+would ever be written; if, for example, there would ever be a work of
+fiction reflecting American life as _Vanity Fair_ reflects English life.
+He replied:
+
+"If Thackeray had been an American he would not have written a novel
+reflecting American life as _Vanity Fair_ reflected the English life of
+its time. He would have written of New York; his young men would have
+come there after Harvard. The only safe thing to say of the Great
+American Novel is that the author will never know he wrote it."
+
+Mr. Charles Belmont Davis had told me that a writer who had some means
+of making a living other than writing would do better work than one who
+devoted himself exclusively to literature. I asked Mr. Tarkington what
+he thought about this.
+
+"I think," he said, "that it would be very well for a writer to have
+some means of making a living other than writing. There are likely to be
+times in his career when it would give him a sense of security
+concerning food. But I doubt if it would much affect his writing, unless
+he considered writing to be a business."
+
+Mr. Tarkington's answer to my next question is hereby commended to the
+attention of all those feminine revolutionists who believe that they are
+engaged in the pleasant task of changing the whole current of modern
+thought.
+
+"How has literature been affected," I asked, "by the suffrage movement
+and feminism?"
+
+Mr. Tarkington looked up in some surprise. "I haven't heard of any
+change," he said.
+
+The author of _The Turmoil_ could never be accused of jingoism. But he
+is far from agreeing with those critics who believe that American
+literature is merely "a phase of English literature." I asked him if he
+believed that there was such a thing as a distinctively American
+literature.
+
+"Certainly," he replied. "Is _Huckleberry Finn_ a phase? It's a
+monument; not an English one. English happens to be the language largely
+used."
+
+The allusion in Mr. Tarkington's last reply suggested--what every reader
+of _Penrod_ must know--that this novelist is an enthusiastic admirer of
+Mark Twain. So I told him that Mr. T. A. Daly had classed Mark Twain
+with Artemus Ward and Q. K. Philander Doesticks, P.B., and had said that
+these men wrote nothing of real merit and were "the Charlie Chaplins of
+their time."
+
+Mr. Tarkington smiled. "Get Mr. T. A. Daly to talk some more," he said.
+"We'd like to hear something about Voltaire and Flo Ziegfeld. Second
+thoughts indicate that 'T. A. Daly' is the pen name of Mr. Charlie
+Chaplin. Of course! And that makes it all right and natural. I thought
+at first that it was a joke."
+
+
+
+
+_ROMANTICISM AND AMERICAN HUMOR_
+
+MONTAGUE GLASS
+
+
+Once upon a time William Dean Howells leveled the keen lance of his
+satire against what he called "the monstrous rag baby of romanticism."
+In those simple days, literary labels were easily applied. A man who
+wrote about Rome, Italy, was a romanticist; a man who wrote about Rome,
+New York, was a Realist.
+
+Now, however, a writer who finds his themes in the wholesale business
+district of New York City does not disavow the title formerly given
+exclusively to makers of drawn-sword-and-prancing-steed fiction.
+Montague Glass is a romanticist.
+
+The laureate of the cloak-and-suit trade and biographer of Mr. Abe
+Potash and Mr. Mawruss Perlmutter does not believe that romance is a
+matter of time and place. A realistic novel, he believes, may be written
+about the Young Pretender or Alexander the Great, and a romance
+about--well, about Elkan Lubliner, American.
+
+Of course, I asked him to defend his claim to the name of romanticist.
+He did so, but in general terms, without special reference to his own
+work. For this widely read author has the amazing virtue of modesty.
+
+"I do not think," he said, "that the so-called historical novelists are
+the only romanticists. The difference between the two schools of writers
+is in method, rather than in subject.
+
+"A romanticist is a writer who creates an atmosphere of his own about
+the things with which he deals. He is the poet, the constructive artist.
+He calls into being that which has not hitherto existed.
+
+"A realist, however, is a writer who faithfully reproduces an atmosphere
+that already exists. He reports, records; one of his distinguishing
+characteristics must be his attention to detail. The romanticist is as
+truthful as the realist, but he deals with a few large truths rather
+than with many small facts."
+
+"And you," I said, determined to make the conversation more personal,
+"prefer the romantic method?"
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Glass, "I do. I prefer to use the romantic method, and
+to read the works of the writers who use it. I believe that there is
+more value in suggestion than in detailed description. For instance, I
+do not think that my stories would gain vividness if I should put all
+the dialogue--I tell my stories chiefly by means of dialogues, you
+know--into dialect. So I do not put down the dialogue phonetically. I
+spell the words correctly, not in accordance with the pronunciation of
+my characters.
+
+"This is not an invariable rule. When, for instance, Abe or Mawruss has
+learned a new long word which he uses frequently to show it off, he
+generally mispronounces it. He may say 'quincidence' for 'coincidence.'
+Such a mispronunciation as this I reproduce, for it has its significance
+as a revelation of character. But I do not attempt to put down all
+mispronunciations; I let the dialect be imagined.
+
+"The romanticist, you see, uses his own imagination and expects
+imagination in his readers. His method might be called impressionistic;
+he outlines and suggests, instead of describing exhaustively. The
+romanticist really is more economical than the realist, and he has more
+restraint."
+
+"Who are the leading romanticists of the day?" I asked.
+
+"Well," Mr. Glass replied, "my favorite among contemporary romanticists
+is Joseph Conrad. There is a man who is certainly no swashbuckling
+novelist of the Wardour Street school. He writes of modern life, and yet
+he is a romanticist through and through.
+
+"I think that I may justly claim to be one of the first admirers of
+Conrad in America. I used to read him when apparently the only other man
+in this part of the world to appreciate him was William L. Alden, who
+praised him in the columns of the _New York Times Review of Books_.
+
+"I well remember my discovery of Conrad. I went to Brooklyn to hear
+'Tosca' sung at the Academy of Music. I had bought my ticket, and I had
+about an hour to spend before it would be time for the curtain to rise.
+So I went across the street to the Brooklyn Public Library.
+
+"While I was idly looking over the novels on the shelves I came upon
+Conrad's _Typhoon_. I sat down and began to read it.
+
+"When I arose, I had finished the book. Also, I had missed the first two
+acts of the opera--and I had been eager to hear them. But Conrad more
+than compensated for the loss of those two acts.
+
+"Many of the modern English writers are romanticists. Galsworthy surely
+is no realist. And William de Morgan, although he writes at great length
+and has abundance of detail, is a romanticist. He does not use detail
+for its own sake, as the realists use it; he uses it only when it has
+some definite value in unfolding the plot or revealing character. He
+uses it significantly; he is particularly successful in using it
+humorously, as Daudet and Dickens used it. Arnold Bennett is a realist,
+and I think that one of the reasons why he is so widely read in the
+United States is because the life which he describes so minutely is a
+life much like that of his American readers. People like to read about
+the sort of life they already know. The average reader wants to have a
+sense of familiarity with the characters in his novels."
+
+Mr. Glass is a contrary person. It is contrary for the only novelist who
+knows anything about New York's cloak-and-suit trade to be of English
+birth and to look like a poet. It is contrary of him to have that
+distinctively American play, "Potash and Perlmutter," start its London
+run two years ago and be "still going strong." And it was contrary of
+him not to say, as he might reasonably be expected to say in view of his
+own success, that the encounters and adventures of business must be the
+theme of the American novelists of the future.
+
+"No," he said, in answer to my question, "I do not see any reason for
+the novelist to confine himself to business life. Themes for fiction are
+universal. A novelist should write of the life he knows best, whatever
+it may be.
+
+"I do not mean that the novelist should write about his own business. I
+mean that he should write about the psychology that he understands. A
+man who spends years in the cloak-and-suit business is not, therefore,
+qualified to write novels about that business, even if he is qualified
+to write novels at all.
+
+"I had no real knowledge of the cloak-and-suit trade when I began to
+write about it. I made many technical blunders. For instance, I had
+Potash and Perlmutter buying goods by the gross instead of by the piece.
+And I received many indignant letters pointing out my mistake.
+
+"I had never been in the cloak-and-suit trade. But my work as a lawyer
+had brought me into contact with many people who were in that business,
+and I had intimate knowledge of the psychology of the Jew, his religion,
+his humor, his tragedy, his whole attitude toward life.
+
+"The trouble with many young writers," said Mr. Glass, "is that they
+don't know what they are writing about. They are attempting to describe
+psychological states of which they have only third-hand knowledge. Their
+ideas have no semblance of truth, and therefore their work is absolutely
+unconvincing."
+
+"At any rate," I said, "you will admit that American writers are more
+and more inclined to make the United States the scene of their stories.
+Do you think that O. Henry's influence is responsible for this?"
+
+"No," said Mr. Glass, "I do not think that this is due to O. Henry's
+influence. It was a natural development. You see, O. Henry's literary
+life lasted for only about four years, and while he has had many
+imitators, I do not think that he can be given credit for directing the
+attention of American writers to the life of their own country.
+
+"Probably William Dean Howells should be called the founder of the
+modern school of American fiction. He was the first writer to achieve
+distinguished success for tales of modern American life. There were
+several other authors who began to write about Americans soon after Mr.
+Howells began--Thomas Janvier, H. C. Bunner, and Brander Matthews were
+among them.
+
+"Kipling's popularity gave a great impetus to the writing of short
+stories of modern life. It is interesting to trace the course of the
+short story from Kipling to O. Henry.
+
+"Did you ever notice," asked Mr. Glass, "that the best stories on New
+York life are written by people who have been born and brought up
+outside of the city? The writer who has always lived in New York seems
+thereby to be disqualified from writing about it, just as the man in the
+cloak-and-suit trade is too close to his subject to reproduce it in
+fiction. The writer who comes to New York after spending his youth
+elsewhere gets the full romantic effect of New York; he gets a
+perspective on it which the native New-Yorker seldom attains. The
+viewpoint of the writer who has always lived in New York is subjective,
+whereas one must have the objective viewpoint to write about the city
+successfully.
+
+"I have been surprised by the caricatures of American life which come
+from the pen of writers American by birth and ancestry. Recently I read
+a novel by an American who has--and deserves, for he is a writer of
+talent and reputation--a large following. This was a story of life in a
+manufacturing town with which the novelist is thoroughly familiar. It,
+however, appears to have been written to satisfy a grudge and
+consequently one could mistake it for the work of an Englishman who had
+once made a brief tour of America. For the big manufacturer who was the
+principal character in the story was vulgar enough to satisfy the
+prejudice of any reader of the _London Daily Mail_. Certainly the
+descriptions of the gaudy and offensive furniture in the rich
+manufacturer's house and the dialogue of the members of his family and
+the servants could provide splendid ammunition for the _Saturday Review_
+or _The Academy_. The book appears to be a caricature, and yet that
+novelist had lived most of his life among the sort of people about whom
+he was writing!
+
+"And how absolutely ignorant most New-Yorkers are of New York. Irvin
+Cobb comes here from Louisville, Kentucky, and gets an intimate
+knowledge of the city, and puts that knowledge into his short stories.
+But a man brought up here makes the most ridiculous mistakes when he
+writes about New York.
+
+"I read a story of New York life recently that absolutely disgusted me,
+its author was so ignorant of his subject. Yet he was a born New-Yorker.
+Let me tell you what he wrote. He said that a man went into an arm-chair
+lunch-room and bought a meal. His check amounted to sixty-five cents!
+Now any one who knows anything about arm-chair lunch-rooms beyond the
+mere fact of their existence knows that the cashier of such an
+institution would drop dead if a customer paid him sixty-five cents at
+one time. Then, the hero of this story had as a part of his meal in this
+arm-chair lunch-room a baked potato, for which he paid fifteen cents!
+Imagine a baked potato in such a place, and a fifteen-cent baked potato
+at that!"
+
+Mr. Glass did not, like most successful humorists, begin as a writer of
+tragedy. His first story to be printed was "Aloysius of the Docks," a
+humorous story of an East Side Irish boy, which appeared in 1900. The
+lower East Side was for many years the scene of most of his stories. But
+he does resemble most other writers in this respect, that he wrote
+verse before he wrote fiction. I asked him to show me some of his
+poetry, and he demurred somewhat violently. But, after all, a poet is a
+poet, and at last I succeeded in persuading him to produce this exhibit.
+Here it is--a poem by the author of "Potash and Perlmutter":
+
+    FERRYBOATS
+
+    There sounds aloft a warning scream,
+      The jingling bell gives tongue below,
+    She breasts again the busy stream,
+      And cleaves its murky tide to snow.
+    Bereft of burnished glittering brass,
+      Ungainly bulging fore and aft,
+    Slowly from shore to shore they pass--
+      The matrons of the river craft.
+
+Mr. Glass believes that humorous writing in America has changed more
+than any other sort. But he does not, as I thought he would, attribute
+this change to the increased cosmopolitanism of the country, to the
+influx of people from other lands.
+
+"Certainly our ideas of what is funny have changed," he said. "Humor is
+an ephemeral thing. A generation ago we laughed at what to-day would
+merely make us ill. The subjects and the methods of the humorists are
+different. Who nowadays can find a laugh in the pages of Artemus Ward,
+Philander Q. Doesticks, or Petroleum V. Nasby? Yet in their time these
+men set the whole continent in a roar.
+
+"Contrast two humorists typical of their respective periods--Bill Nye
+and Abe Martin. I remember many years ago reading a story by Bill Nye
+which every one then considered tremendously funny. He told how he went
+downtown and got a shave and put on a clean collar and as he said,
+'otherwise disguised himself.' When he got home his little dog refused
+to recognize him, and several pages were devoted to his efforts to
+persuade the dog of his identity. Then, failing to convince the dog that
+he was really the same Bill Nye in spite of his shave and clean collar,
+he impaled it on a pitchfork and buried it, putting over it the epitaph,
+'Not dead, but jerked hence by request.'
+
+"Now contrast with that a good example of modern American humor--a joke
+by Abe Martin which I recently saw. There was a picture of two or three
+men looking at a tattered tramp, and one of them was represented as
+saying: 'You wouldn't think to look at him that that man played an
+elegant game of billiards ten years ago!'
+
+"It is an entirely different form of humor, you see. Bill Nye and the
+writers of his school got their effects by grotesque misspelling,
+fantastic ideas, and by the liberal use of shock and surprise. The
+modern humor is subtler, more delicate, and more likely to endure.
+
+"I do not think that the fact that America has become more cosmopolitan
+has anything to do with this altered sense of humor. The American
+humorists do not select cosmopolitan themes; the best of them are
+distinctively American in their subject. Irvin Cobb, George Fitch, Kate
+Douglas Wiggin, Edna Ferber Stewart, who wrote _The Fugitive
+Blacksmith_--all these people draw their inspiration from purely
+American phases of the life around them."
+
+"What is it, then," I asked, "that has changed American humor?"
+
+"Leisure," answered Mr. Glass. "Philander Q. Doesticks and other
+humorists of his time wrote to amuse pioneers, people rough and
+elemental in their tastes. Their audience consisted of men who worked
+hard most of the time, and therefore had to be hit hard by any joke that
+was to entertain them at all. But as Americans grew more leisurely, and
+therefore had time to read, see plays, and look at pictures, they lost
+their taste for crude and violent horseplay, and the new sort of humor
+came in. Undoubtedly the same thing occurs in every newly settled
+country--Australia, for example. It is unlikely that the Australian of
+one hundred years from now will be amused by the things that amuse
+Australians to-day.
+
+"But the humor that entertains the citizens of a country of which the
+civilization is well established is likely to retain its charm through
+the years. Mark Twain's stories do not lose their flavor. But Mark Twain
+was not exclusively a humorist; he was a student of life and he
+reflected the tragedy of existence as well as its comedy. So does Irvin
+Cobb, who is the nearest approach to Mark Twain now living.
+
+"One source of Mark Twain's strength is his occasional vulgarity. That
+surely is something that we should have in greater abundance in American
+humor. I do not mean that our humorists should be pornographic and
+obscene; I mean merely that they should be allowed great freedom in
+their choice of themes. There is no humor without vulgarity. Our
+humorists have been so limited and restrained that we have no paper fit
+to be compared with _Simplicissimus_ or _Le Rire_.
+
+"You see, a vulgar thing is not offensive if it is funny. Fun for fun's
+sake is a much more important maxim than art for art's sake. The
+humorists have a greater need for freedom in choice of themes than the
+serious writers, especially the realistic writers, who are always
+demanding greater freedom."
+
+Mr. Glass returned to the subject of the failure of cosmopolitanism to
+influence American literature by calling attention to the fact that very
+few American writers find their themes among their foreign-born
+fellow-citizens. "Where," he asked, "are the German-Americans and the
+Italian-Americans? No writer knows these foreign-born citizens well
+enough to write about them. The best American stories are about native
+Americans. I admit that my stories are not about people peculiar to New
+York--you can find counterparts of 'Potash and Perlmutter' in Berlin,
+Paris, and London. But mine are not among the best stories of American
+character. The best story of American character is 'Daisy Miller.'"
+
+Mr. Glass believes that the technique of the short story has improved
+greatly during the last score of years, but he is not so favorable in
+his view of the modern novel, especially of the "cross-section of life"
+type of work. He believes that the war will produce a great revival of
+literary excellence in Europe, just as the Franco-Prussian War did; and
+he called attention to something which has apparently been neglected by
+most people who have discussed the subject--the tremendous inspiration
+which Guy de Maupassant found in the Franco-Prussian War. But he said,
+in conclusion:
+
+"But any man who sits down to judge American literature in the course of
+a few minutes' talk is an ass for his pains. Literary snap judgments are
+foolish things. Nothing that I have said to you has any value at all."
+
+
+
+
+_THE "MOVIES" BENEFIT LITERATURE_
+
+REX BEACH
+
+
+Even the most prejudiced opponent of the moving pictures will admit that
+they are becoming more intellectually respectable. Crude farce and
+melodrama are being replaced by versions of classic plays and novels;
+literature is elevating the motion picture. And Mr. Rex Beach believes
+that the motion picture is benefiting literature.
+
+This author of widely read novels had been talking to me about the
+departments of literature--the novel, the short story, and the rest--and
+among them he named the moving picture. I asked him if he believed that
+moving pictures were dangerous for novelists, leading them to fill their
+books with action, with a view to the profits of cinematographic
+reproduction. He said:
+
+"Well, authors are human beings, of course. They like to make money and
+to have their work reach as large an audience as possible. I suppose
+that the great majority of them keep their eyes on the screen, because
+they know how profitable the moving picture is and because they want
+their work seen by more people than would read their novels."
+
+"Do you think that this harms their work?" I asked.
+
+"It might if the novelists overdid it," he answered. "It would harm
+their work if they became nothing but scenario writers. But so far the
+result has been good.
+
+"The tendency of the moving picture has been to make authors visualize
+more clearly than ever before their characters and scenes that they are
+writing about. Their work has become more realistic. I do not mean
+realistic in the sense in which this word is used of some French
+writers; I do not mean erotic or morbid. I mean actual, convincing,
+clearly visualized.
+
+"Literature has elevated the moving picture, keeping it out, to a great
+extent, of melodrama and slap-stick comedy. And in return, the moving
+picture has done a service to fiction, making the authors give more
+attention to exact visualization."
+
+"Has American fiction been lacking in visualization?" I asked.
+
+"No," said Mr. Beach. "American novelists visualize more clearly to-day
+than they did four or five years ago, before the moving picture had
+become so important, but they always were strong in visualization. This
+sort of realism is America's chief contribution to fiction."
+
+"Then you believe that there is a distinctively American literature?" I
+asked. "You do not agree with the critic who said that American
+literature was 'a condition of English literature'?"
+
+"I do not agree with him," Mr. Beach replied. "American writers use the
+English language, so I suppose that what they write belongs to English
+literature. But there is a distinctively American literature; Americans
+talk in their own manner, think in their own manner, and handle business
+propositions in their own manner, and naturally they write in their own
+manner. American literature is different from other kinds of literature
+just as American business methods are different from those of Europe.
+
+"Fiction written in America must necessarily be tinged with American
+thought and American action. I have no patience with people who say
+that America has no literature. They say that nothing we are writing
+to-day will live. Well, what if that is true? It's true not only of
+literature, but of everything else.
+
+"Our roads won't last forever; they're built in a hurry to be used in a
+hurry. But they're better roads to drive and motor over than those old
+Roman roads of Europe. Our office-buildings won't last as long as the
+Pyramids, but they're better for business purposes.
+
+"Personally, I've never been enthusiastic over things that have no
+virtues but age and ugliness. I'd rather have a good, strong,
+serviceable piece of Grand Rapids furniture than any ramshackle,
+moth-eaten antique."
+
+"But don't you think," I asked, "that the permanence of a book's appeal
+is a proof of its greatness?"
+
+"I don't see how we can tell anything definite about the permanence of
+the appeal of books written in our time. And I don't mean by literature
+writings that necessarily endure through the ages. I believe that
+literature is the expression of the mind, the sentiment, the
+intellectual attitude of the people who live at the time it is written.
+I admit that our literature is ephemeral--like everything else about
+us--but I believe that it is good."
+
+Mr. Rex Beach was not pacing his floor nervously; he was crossing the
+room with the practical intention of procuring a cigarette.
+Nevertheless, his firm tread lent emphasis to his remarks.
+
+"There is a sort of literary snobbery," he said, "noticeable among
+people who condemn contemporaneous literature just because it is
+contemporaneous. The strongest proof that there is something good in the
+literature of the day is that it reaches a great audience. There must be
+something in it or people wouldn't read it.
+
+"The people are the final judges; it is to them that authors must
+appeal. Take any big question of public importance--after it has been
+discussed by politicians and newspapers, it is the people who at last
+decide it.
+
+"A man may have devoted his life to some tremendous achievement, and
+have left it as a monument to his fame. But it is to public opinion that
+we must look for the verdict on the value of his life's work.
+
+"Take Carnegie, for example; when he dies, you bet people will have his
+number! His ideas are a tremendous menace, and the people who believe
+as he does about peace will find themselves generally execrated one of
+these days.
+
+"It may seem to you that this has nothing to do with literature. But it
+has a good deal to do with it. I know that many things have been said
+about the effect on literature of the war. But I want to say that the
+war will have, I hope, one admirable effect on American writers--it will
+make them stir up the American conscience to a sense of the necessity
+for national defensive preparation. The writers must educate the people
+in world politics and show them the necessity for defensive action.
+Americans have a sort of mental inertia in regard to public questions,
+and the writers must overcome this inertia.
+
+"The writers must stir up the politicians and the people. There's been a
+whole lot of mush written about peace. There always will be war. We
+can't reform the world.
+
+"The pacifists say that it is useless to arm because war cannot be
+prevented by armaments. The obvious answer to that is that neither can
+the failure to arm prevent war. And the verdict after the war will be
+better if we are prepared for it. The writers must call our attention to
+the folly of leaving ourselves open to attack.
+
+"It's hard to reach the conscience of the American people on any big
+issue. We are too independent, too indifferent, too ready to slump back.
+That's one of the penalties of democracy, I suppose; the national sense
+of patriotism becomes atrophied. It needs some whaling-big jolt to wake
+it up. Every American writer can help to do this.
+
+"The trouble is that we have too many men with feminine minds, too many
+of these delicate fellows with handkerchiefs up their sleeves. I can't
+imagine any women with ideas more feminine than those of Bryan--could
+any woman evolve anything more feminine than his peace-at-any-price
+idea?"
+
+Mr. Beach smiled. "I suppose I should not be talking about world
+politics," he said. "There are so many men who have specialized in that
+subject and are therefore competent to talk about it. I am only a
+specialist in writing."
+
+"Do you think," I asked, "that writers should be specialists in writing?
+Some people believe that the best fiction, for example, is produced by
+men who do some other work for a living."
+
+"I certainly believe that a writer should devote himself to writing,"
+said Mr. Beach. "This is an age of specialization, and literature is no
+exception to the general rule. Literature is like everything else--you
+must specialize in it to be successful."
+
+"This has not always been the case, has it?" I asked. "Has literature
+been produced by people who made writing only an avocation?"
+
+"Surely," said Mr. Beach. "It is only within the last few years that
+writers have been able to write for a living and make enough to keep the
+fringe off their cuffs."
+
+I asked what had caused this change.
+
+"It has been caused chiefly by the magazines. The modern magazines have
+done two important things for fiction--they have brought it within every
+one's reach, and they have increased the prices paid to the authors,
+thus enabling them to make a living by devoting themselves exclusively
+to writing."
+
+"But it has been said," I ventured, "that a writer, no matter how
+talented he may be, cannot make a comfortable living out of writing
+fiction unless he is most extraordinarily gifted with ideas, and that,
+therefore, a writer takes a tremendous risk if he throws himself upon
+literature for support."
+
+"How is a writer going to get ideas for stories," asked Mr. Beach, in
+turn, "unless he uses ideas? The more ideas a man uses, the more ideas
+will come to him.
+
+"The imaginative quality in a man is like any other quality; the more it
+is functioned the better it is functioned. If you fail to use any organ
+of your body, nature will in time let that organ go out of commission.
+
+"It is just the same with imagination as with any organ of the body. If
+a writer waits for ideas to come to him and ceases to exercise his
+imagination, his imagination will become atrophied. But if he uses his
+imagination it will grow stronger and ideas will come to him with
+increasing frequency."
+
+Mr. Beach is an enthusiastic advocate of the moving picture. In the
+course of his discussion of it he advanced an interesting theory as to
+the next stage of its development.
+
+"The next use of the moving picture," he said, "will be the editorial
+use. We have had the moving picture used as a comic device, as a device
+to spread news, and as an interpreter of fiction. But as yet no one has
+endeavored to use it as a means to mold public opinion in great vital
+issues of the day.
+
+"Of course, it has been used educationally, and as part of various
+propaganda schemes. But it will be used in connection with great
+political problems. It will become the most powerful of all influences
+for directing public opinion in politics and in everything else.
+
+"It will play a mighty part in the thought of the country and of the
+world.
+
+"I have seen men and women coming from a great moving-picture show
+almost hysterical with emotion. I have heard them shout and stamp and
+whistle at what they saw flashed before them on a white sheet as they
+never did in any theater.
+
+"What a strong argument 'The Birth of a Nation' presents! Now, suppose
+that same art and that same equipment were used to present arguments
+about some political issue of our own time, instead of one of our
+fathers' time. What a force that would be!"
+
+
+
+
+_WHAT IS GENIUS?_
+
+ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
+
+
+Sentimental Tommy's great predecessor in the relentless pursuit of the
+"right word" was, teachers of literature tell us, the unsentimental
+Gustave Flaubert. But these academic gentlemen, who insist that the
+writer shall spend hours, even days, if necessary, in perfecting a
+single sentence, seldom produce any literature. I asked Robert W.
+Chambers, who has written more "best sellers" than any other living
+writer, what he thought of Flaubert's method of work.
+
+He looked at me rather quizzically. "I think," he said, with a smile,
+"that Flaubert was slow. What else is there to think? Of course he was a
+matchless workman. But if he spent half a day in hunting for one word,
+he was slow, that's all. He might have gone on writing and then have
+come back later for that inevitable word."
+
+"But what do you think of Flaubert's method, as a method?" I asked. "Do
+you think that a writer who works with such laborious care is right?"
+
+"It's not a question of right or wrong," said Mr. Chambers, "it's a
+question of the individual writer's ability and tendency. If a man can
+produce novels like those of Flaubert, by writing slowly and
+laboriously, by all means let him write that way. But it would not be
+fair to establish that as the only legitimate method of writing.
+
+"Some authors always write slowly. With some of them it's like pulling
+teeth for them to get their ideas out on paper. It's the same way in
+painting. You may see half a dozen men drawing from the same model. One
+will make his sketch premier coup; another will devote an hour to his;
+another will work all day. They may be artists of equal ability. It is
+the result that counts, not the method or the time."
+
+"And what is it that makes a man an artist, in pigments or in words?" I
+asked. "Do you believe in the old saying that the poet--the creative
+artist--is born and not made?"
+
+"No," said Mr. Chambers, "I do not think that that is the truth. I think
+that with regard to the writer it is true to this extent, that there
+must exist, in the first place, the inclination to write, to express
+ideas in written words. Then the writer must have something to express
+really worthy of expression, and he must learn how to express it. These
+three things make the writer--the inclination to say something, the
+possession of something worth saying, and the knowledge of how to say
+it."
+
+"And where does genius come in?" I asked.
+
+"What is genius?" asked Mr. Chambers, in turn. "I don't know. Perhaps
+genius is the combination of these three qualities in the highest
+degree.
+
+"Of course," he added, with a laugh, "I know that all this is contrary
+to the opinion of the public. People like to believe that writers depend
+entirely upon an inspiration. They like to think that we are a hazy lot,
+sitting around and posing and waiting for some sort of divine afflatus.
+They think that writers sit around like a Quaker meeting, waiting for
+the spirit to move them."
+
+"But have there not been writers," I asked, "who seem to prove that
+there is some truth in the inspiration theory? There is William de
+Morgan, for example, beginning to write novels in his old age. He spent
+most of his life in working in ceramics, not with words."
+
+"On the contrary," said Mr. Chambers, "I think that William de Morgan
+proves my theory. He really spent all his life in learning to write--he
+was in training for being a novelist all the while. The novelist's
+training may be unconscious. He must have--as William de Morgan surely
+always has had--keen interest in the world. That is the main thing for
+the writer to have--a vivid interest in life. If we are to devote
+ourselves to the production of pictures of humanity according to our own
+temperaments, we must have this vivid interest in life; we must have
+intense curiosity. The men who have counted in literature have had this
+intense, never-satiated curiosity about life.
+
+"This is true for the romanticists as well as the realists. The most
+imaginative and fantastic romances must have their basis in real life.
+
+"I know of no better examples of this truth than the gargoyles which one
+sees in Gothic architecture in Europe. These extraordinary creatures
+that thrust their heads from the sides of cathedrals, misshapen and
+grotesque, are nevertheless thoroughly logical. That is, no matter how
+fantastic they may be, they have backbones and ribs and tails, and these
+backbones and ribs and tails are logical--that is, they could do what
+backbones and ribs and tails are supposed to do.
+
+"In real life there are no creatures like the gargoyles, but the
+important thing is that the gargoyles really could exist. This is a good
+example of the true method of construction. The base of the construction
+must rest on real knowledge. The medieval sculptors knew the formation
+of existing animals; therefore they knew how to make gargoyles."
+
+"How does this theory apply to poets?" I asked.
+
+"I don't know," answered Mr. Chambers, "but it seems to me to apply to
+all creative work. The artist must know life before he can build even a
+travesty on life."
+
+I called Mr. Chambers's attention to the work of certain ultra-modern
+poets who deliberately exclude life from their work. He was not inclined
+to take them seriously.
+
+"There always have been aberrations," he said, "and there always will
+be. They're bound to exist. And there is bound to be, from time to time,
+attitudinizing and straining after effect on the part of prose writers
+as well as poets. And it is all based on one thing--self-consciousness.
+It is self-consciousness that spoils the work of some modern writers."
+
+I asked Mr. Chambers to be more specific in his allusions. "I cannot
+mention names," he said, "but there are certain writers who are always
+conscious of the style in which they are writing. Sometimes they
+consciously write in the style of some other men. They are thinking all
+the while of their technique and equipment, and the result is that their
+work loses its effect. A writer should not be convinced all the while
+that he is a realist or a romanticist; he should not subject himself
+deliberately to some special school of writing, and certainly he should
+not be conscious of his own style. The less a writer thinks of his
+technique the sooner he arrives at self-expression.
+
+"It's just like ordinary conversation. A man is known by the way in
+which he talks--that is his 'style.' But he is not all the while acutely
+conscious of his manner of talking--unless he has an impediment in his
+speech. So the writer should be known by his untrammeled and
+unembarrassed expression."
+
+I asked Mr. Chambers what he thought of the idea that the popularity of
+magazines has vitiated the public taste and lowered the standard of
+fiction.
+
+"I do not think that this is the case," he said. "I do not see that the
+custom of serial publication has harmed the novel. It is not a modern
+innovation, you know. The novels of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot
+had serial publication. But I do believe that the American public reads
+less fiction than it did a generation ago, and that its taste is not so
+good as it was."
+
+This was a surprising statement to come from an author whom the public
+has received with such enthusiasm, so I asked Mr. Chambers to explain.
+
+"In the days of our forefathers," he said, "this was an Anglo-Saxon
+country. Then the average intelligence of the nation was higher and the
+taste in literature better. But there came the great rush of immigration
+to the United States from Europe, and the Anglo-Saxon culture of the
+country was diluted.
+
+"You see signs of this lowered standard of taste in fiction and on
+the stage. The demand is for primitive and childish stuff, and the
+reason for this is that the audience has only a sort of backstairs
+intelligence. If we had progressed along the lines in which we were
+headed before this wave of immigration, we would not be satisfied with
+the books and magazines that are given us to-day.
+
+"Of course the magazines are mechanically better to-day than they were a
+generation ago. Then we had not the photogravure and the half-tone and
+the other processes that make our magazines beautiful. But we had better
+taste and also we had more leisure.
+
+"I remember when one of the most widely read of our magazines was a
+popular science monthly, which printed articles by great scientists on
+biological and other topics. That was in the days when Darwin was
+announcing his theory of evolution--the first great jolt which orthodoxy
+received. People would not take time to read a magazine of that sort
+now. They are so occupied with business and dancing and all sorts of
+occupations that they have little leisure for reading."
+
+Mr. Chambers stopped talking suddenly and laughed. "I'm not a good man
+for you to bring these questions to," he said, "because I never have had
+any special reverence for books or literature as such. I reverence the
+books that I like, not all books."
+
+"And have you such a thing as a favorite author?" I asked.
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Chambers. "Dumas."
+
+During the 1870's Mr. Chambers was an art student in Paris, and he has
+many interesting memories of the French and English writers and painters
+who have made that period memorable. He knew Paul Verlaine (whose poetry
+he greatly admires), Charles Conder, and Aubrey Beardsley.
+
+"One day," he said, "I was out on a shooting-trip--I think it was in
+Belgium--and I met a young English poet, a charming fellow, whose work I
+was later to know and like. It was the poet who wrote at least one great
+poem--'Cynara'--it was Ernest Dowson.
+
+"I knew many of the Beaux Arts crowd, because my brother was a student
+of architecture at the Beaux Arts. And they were a decent, clean
+crowd--they were not 'decadents.' I do not take much stock in the pose
+of 'decadence,' nor in the artistic temperament. I never saw a real
+artist with the artistic temperament. I always associated that with
+weakness."
+
+Mr. Chambers, although he has intimate knowledge of the Quartier Latin,
+has little use for "Bohemia."
+
+"What is Bohemia?" he asked. "If it is a place where a number of artists
+huddle together for the sake of animal warmth, I have nothing to say
+against it. But if it is a place where a number of artists come to
+scorn the world, then it is a dangerous thing. The artist should not
+separate himself from the world.
+
+"These artistic and literary cults are wrong. I do not believe in
+professional clubs and cliques. If writers form a combination for
+business reasons, that is all right, but a writer should not associate
+exclusively with other writers; he should do his work and then go out
+and see and talk to people in other professions. We should sweep the
+cobwebs from the profession of writing and not try to fence it in from
+the public."
+
+To the somewhat trite question as to the effects of the war on
+literature, Mr. Chambers made first his usual modest answer, "I don't
+know." But when I told him of the author who had dogmatically stated
+that war always stops literature, and that the Civil War had produced no
+writing worthy of preservation, Mr. Chambers reconsidered.
+
+"Did he say that the Civil War had produced no literature worthy of
+preservation?" he said. "He must have forgotten that the Civil War
+caused one man to make contributions to our literature as valuable as
+anything we possess. He must have forgotten Abraham Lincoln."
+
+Before I left, I mentioned to Mr. Chambers the theory that literature
+is better as a staff than as a crutch, as an avocation than as a
+vocation. This, like the "inevitable word" theory, is greatly beloved by
+college professors. Mr. Chambers said:
+
+"I disagree utterly with that theory. Do you remember how Dr. Johnson
+wrote _Rasselas_? It was in order to raise the money to pay for his
+mother's funeral. I believe that the best work is done under pressure.
+Of course the work must be enjoyed; a man in choosing a profession
+should select that sort of work which he prefers to do in his leisure
+moments. Let him do for his lifework the task which he would select for
+his leisure--and let him not take himself too seriously!"
+
+
+
+
+_DETERIORATION OF THE SHORT STORY_
+
+JAMES LANE ALLEN
+
+
+That Edgar Allan Poe, in spite of his acknowledged genius, has had
+practically no influence on the development of the short story in
+America, and that the current short story written in America is inferior
+to that written during the years between 1870 and 1895, these are two
+remarkable statements made to me by James Lane Allen, the distinguished
+author of _The Choir Invisible_, _The Mettle of the Pasture_, and many
+another memorable novel.
+
+I found Mr. Allen in the pleasant workroom of his New York residence.
+Himself a Southerner, he is an enthusiastic admirer of the poet whose
+name is inseparably linked with Southern letters. But I was soon to find
+that he does not share the opinion of those who consider Poe the
+originator of the modern short story, nor does he rate Poe's influence
+in fiction as very wide.
+
+"There is always much interest in short stories," he said, "among
+authors, and in the great body of readers. You say that Mr. Gouverneur
+Morris believes that except Poe almost no writer before our generation
+could write short stories.
+
+"I do not wish to be placed in a position of publicly criticizing Mr.
+Gouverneur Morris's opinion of the short story. But it may not seem
+antagonistic to the opinion of any one to call attention to the fact
+that, of all American short stories yet written, the two most widely
+known in and outside our country were written independently of Poe.
+These are _The Man Without a Country_ and _Rip Van Winkle_.
+
+"As the technique of the American short story is understood and applied
+to-day, neither of these two stories can be regarded as a work of
+impeccable art. But flaws have not kept them from fame. By a common
+verdict the flawless short stories of the day are fameless. Certainly,
+also, Hawthorne was uninfluenced by Poe in writing short stories that
+remain secure among brief American classics.
+
+"This, of course, is limiting the outlook to our own literature. Beyond
+our literature, what of Balzac? In the splendor of his achievements with
+the novel, Balzac has perhaps been slighted as a master of the short
+story. Think, for instance, of such a colossal fragment as _The Atheists
+Mass_.
+
+"And what of Boccaccio? For centuries before Poe, the _Decameron_ shone
+before the eyes of the world as the golden treasury of model forms for
+the short story.
+
+"And centuries before Boccaccio, flashing from hand to hand all over the
+world, there was a greater treasury still, the treasury of _The Arabian
+Nights_.
+
+"It is no disparagement to Poe to say that his genius did not
+originate the genius of the short story. His true place, his logical
+place, in the development of the short story is that of a man with
+ancestors--naturally!
+
+"Since there is a breath of nativity blowing through his stories, I
+think it is the breath of far distant romance from somewhere. Certainly
+his stories are as remote from our civilization and from all things
+American as are Oriental tales."
+
+Mr. Allen showed he had given much thought to Edgar Allan Poe's place
+among the American fiction writers, so I thought that he might also have
+some interesting things to say about Poe as a poet. He had. He mentioned
+a quality of Poe's verse which for some reason or other seems
+heretofore to have escaped the notice of students of American poetry.
+
+"It may be worth while calling attention," he said, "to the fact that
+nearly all of Poe's poems belong to the night. Twelve o'clock noon never
+strikes to his poetic genius. His best poems are Poe's Nights, if not
+_Arabian Nights_.
+
+"There is a saying that the German novel long ago died of the full moon.
+To Poe the dead moon was the orb of life. The sun blotted him out."
+
+Great as is his admiration for Poe's genius, Mr. Allen does not believe
+he has greatly influenced American prose. He said:
+
+"As to the influence of Poe's short stories in our country, this seems
+to be a tradition mainly fostered by professors of English in American
+universities and by the historians of our literature. The tradition does
+not prevail among American writers. Actually there is no traceable stamp
+of the influence of his prose writings on the work of any American
+short-story writer known to me, save one. That one is Ambrose Bierce."
+
+"Why is it," I asked, "that Poe's influence on American fiction has been
+so slight?"
+
+"The main reason," Mr. Allen answered, "why Poe's stories have remained
+outside American imitation or emulation is perhaps because they are
+projected outside American sympathies. They lie to-day where they lay
+when they were written--beyond the confines of what the German calls the
+literature of the soil.
+
+"Poe and Ambrose Bierce are at least to be linked in this: that they are
+the two greatest and the two coldest of all American short-story
+writers. Any living American fictionist will perhaps bear testimony to
+the fact that he has never met any other writer who has been influenced
+by the stories of Poe."
+
+"Mr. Allen," I said, "you believe that the American short story has not
+been influenced by Poe; has the American short story, however, improved
+since his time?"
+
+"The renascence of the American short story," said Mr. Allen,
+thoughtfully, "its real efflorescence as a natural literary art form,
+took place after the close of the Civil War. The historians of our
+literature have, perhaps, as is customary with them, held to the strict
+continuity of tradition as explaining this renascence. If so, they have
+omitted one of the instinctive forces of human nature, which invariably
+act in nations that have literatures and act ungovernably at the
+termination of all wars.
+
+"After any war spontaneity in story-telling is one of the ungovernable
+impulses of human nature. This can be traced from modern literature back
+to primitive man returning from his feuds. When he had no literature, he
+carved his story on the walls of his cave or on a bone to tell the glory
+of the fight. Before he could even carve a bone he hung up a row of the
+heads of the defeated. Perhaps the original form of the war short story
+was a good, thick volume of heads. Within our own civilization the
+American Indian told his short stories in this way--with American heads
+or tufts of scalps--a sad way of telling them for our forefathers.
+
+"At the close of the American Civil War the atmosphere, both North and
+South, was charged with stories. The amazing fact is not that short
+stories should have begun at that time, but that they should have begun
+with such perfection. This perfection expressed itself more richly
+during the period, say, from 1870 to 1895--twenty-five years--than it
+has ever done since.
+
+"The evidence is at hand that the best of the American short stories
+written during that period outweigh in value those that have been
+written later--with the exception of those of one man. And this evidence
+takes this form--that these stories were collected into volumes, had an
+enormous sale, had the highest critical appreciation, have passed into
+the histories of literature written since, have gone into the courses of
+English literature now being taught in the universities, and are still
+steadily being sold.
+
+"Is this true of the best short stories being written now? Are any of
+the short stories written since that period being bound into volumes and
+extensively sold? Do the professors of English literature recommend them
+to their classes? That is the practical test.
+
+"The one exception is O. Henry. He alone stands out in the later period
+as a world within himself; as much apart from any one else as are
+Hawthorne and Poe."
+
+Mr. Allen did not express an opinion as to the probable effects on
+literature of the war. He said:
+
+"Now, the North and the South in the renascence of the short story after
+the Civil War divide honors about equally. But it is impossible to speak
+of the Southern short story, or indeed of Southern literature at all,
+without being brought to the brink of a subject which lies back of the
+whole philosophy of Southern literature."
+
+Mr. Allen paused for a moment. Then he continued, speaking with an
+intensity which reminded me of his Southern birth and upbringing:
+
+"Suppose that at the end of the present European war Germany should be
+victorious and France defeated. And suppose that in France there should
+not be left a single publishing-house, a single literary periodical, a
+single literary editor, a single critic, and scarcely even a single
+buyer of books.
+
+"And suppose that the defeated French people wanted to cry out their
+soul over their defeat and against their conquerors. And suppose that in
+order to do this every French novelist, short-story writer, or poet,
+unable to keep silent, should begin to write and begin to send his novel
+or his short story or his poem over into Germany to be read by a German
+editor, published by a German publisher, and sold in a German bookshop
+to a German reader. What kind of French literature of the war do you
+think would appear in Germany and be fostered there?
+
+"But this is exactly what happened after the war between the North and
+the South.
+
+"The few voices that began to be sent northward across the demolished
+battle-line could only be the voices that would be listened to and
+welcomed on the other side. That is the reason why that first literature
+was so mild, so tempered, so thin, so devitalized, that it seemed not to
+come from an enraged people, but from the memories of their ghosts.
+
+"As a result of finding war literature inexpressible in such conditions,
+the young generation of Southerners dropped the theme of war altogether
+and explored other paths. So that perhaps the most original and
+spontaneous fragments of this new Southern post-bellum literature are in
+the regions of the imagination, where no note of war is heard.
+
+"It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that if Joel Chandler
+Harris, a young Southerner, had possessed full freedom to wreak his
+genius on the war, the world might never have heard of 'Uncle Remus.'
+The world might never have known that among the cotton-plantations there
+dwelt a brother to AEsop and to La Fontaine."
+
+
+
+
+_SOME HARMFUL INFLUENCES_
+
+HARRY LEON WILSON
+
+
+From the Pacific Coast--from what is enthusiastically termed "the Golden
+West"--from that section of the United States which is large and
+chivalrous and gladly suffers suffrage--comes a voice, replying to my
+question: "What is the matter with contemporary fiction?"
+
+And the voice says, "_Cherchez la femme!_"
+
+It is the voice of Mr. Harry Leon Wilson, author of _Bunker Bean_,
+_Ruggles of Red Gap_, and many another popular novel, and co-author with
+Mr. Booth Tarkington of several successful plays. Mr. Wilson believes
+that the dullness and insincerity of our novels are due to the taste of
+most of their readers--that is, to the taste of the women.
+
+I asked Mr. Wilson what, in his opinion, was the influence most harmful
+to the development of literature in America.
+
+"I know little about literature," Mr. Wilson replied, "but if you mean
+the novel, I should say the intense satisfaction with it as it is, of
+the maker, the seller, and the buyer. And to trace this baneful
+satisfaction to its source, I should say it lies in the lack of a
+cultivated taste in our women readers of fiction.
+
+"Publishers are agreed, I believe, that women buy the great bulk of
+their output. The current novel is as deliberately planned to please the
+woman buyer as is any other bit of trade goods. The publisher knows what
+she wants to read, the writer finds out from the publisher, and you can
+see the result in the advertisements--and the writer's royalty
+statements.
+
+"'We want,' says the publisher, 'a stunning girl for the cover and a
+corking good love interest to catch the women.' (Publishers do talk that
+way when they have safely locked themselves in their low dens.)
+
+"This love interest is always said to be wholesome and sweet. I don't
+know. Certainly it is sweet enough. In the trade novel it's as if you
+took a segment of rich layer cake, the chocolate-and-jelly kind, poured
+over it a half-pint of nice thick molasses, and then, just to make sure,
+sprinkled this abundantly with fine sugar.
+
+"Anyway, that's what the publisher has found--and he has the best means
+of knowing--that the American woman will buy year in and year out. And
+you can't blame him for printing it. A publisher with ideals of his own
+couldn't last any longer than a grocer with ideals of his own, or a
+clergyman.
+
+"And least of all can you blame the author for writing this slush,
+because nine times out of ten he doesn't know any better. How should he,
+with no one to tell him?
+
+"And that," said Mr. Wilson, "is another evil almost as great in its
+influence as the undeveloped taste of our women readers. I mean our lack
+of authoritative criticism. Now we really do get a good novel once in a
+blue moon, but one who has been made wary by the mass of trade novels
+would never suspect it from reading our book reviews. The good novel, it
+is true, is praised heartily, but then so are all the bad novels--and
+how is one to tell?
+
+"At least eighty-five per cent. of our book reviews are mere amiable,
+perfunctory echoes of the enthusiastic 'canned' review which the
+publisher obligingly prints on the paper jacket of his best seller. I
+sometimes suspect this task is allotted to a member of the staff who is
+known to be 'fond of reading.'
+
+"Another evil influence is often alleged--the pressure the business
+office puts on the reviewer to be tender with novels that are lavishly
+advertised, but I have never thought there was more than a grain of
+truth in this.
+
+"Perhaps a publisher wouldn't continue to patronize a sheet that
+habitually blurted out the truth about his best sellers, but I really
+doubt that this was ever put to an issue. I don't believe the average
+book-reviewer knows any better than the average novelist the difference
+between a good and a bad novel.
+
+"It isn't so with the other arts. We have critics for those. Music,
+sculpture, painting--we know the best and get the best.
+
+"But, then, the novel is scarcely considered to be an art form. Any one
+can--and does--write a novel, if he can only find the time. It isn't
+supposed to be a thing one must study, like plumbing or architecture.
+
+"The novelist who wants to write a best seller this year studies the
+best seller of last year, and wisely, because that is what the publisher
+wants--something like his last one that sold big. He is looking for it
+night and day and for nothing else. He wants good carpenters who have
+followed the design that women have liked. Fiction is the one art you
+don't take seriously, and there is no one to tell us we should; there
+are no critics to inform the writers and the readers and make the
+publishers timid.
+
+"True, we have in this country two or three, possibly four, critics who
+can speak with authority, men who know what the novel has been, what it
+is with us, what it ought to be. One of them is a friend of mine, and I
+reproached him lately for not speaking out in meeting oftener.
+
+"His defense was pathetic. First, that ninety out of a hundred of our
+novels are beneath criticism. Second, as to the remaining ten that would
+merit the rapier instead of the bludgeon--'criticism is harder to sell
+than post-meridian virtue. I have tried.'
+
+"And he has to eat as often as any publisher. So there you are! People
+are not going to pay him for finding fault with something they are
+intensely satisfied with. It all comes back to the women. When their
+taste is corrected we shall have better novels. But not before then!"
+
+"Mr. Wilson," I said, "do you believe that the development of the
+magazine, with its high prices and serialization, has been harmful or
+beneficial to fiction?"
+
+"In the first place, the magazine hasn't developed," he answered. "It
+has merely multiplied--the cheap ones, I mean. And prices have not
+increased except to about a dozen of our national favorites. Where there
+is one writer who can get fifteen hundred dollars for a short story, or
+fifteen thousand dollars for the serial rights to a novel, there are a
+thousand who can get not more than a fifteenth of those prices.
+
+"On the whole, I think that the effect of the cheap monthlies has been
+good. They are the only ones that welcome the new writer. They try him
+out. Then, if the public takes to him, the better magazines find it out
+after a while and form an alliance with him--that is, if his characters
+are so sweet and wholesome that the magazine can still be left on the
+center-table where Cuthbert or Berryl might see it after school.
+
+"Nowadays I never expect to find a good short story in any of the cheap
+magazines. Of course, it does happen now and then, but not often enough
+to make me impatient for their coming. And, of course, the cheap
+monthlies do print, for the most part, what are probably the worst
+short stories that will ever be written in the world--the very furthest
+from anything real.
+
+"These writers, too, like the novelists, study one another instead of
+life. We will say one of them writes a short story about a pure young
+shopgirl of flower-like beauty who, spending an evening of innocent
+recreation in a notorious Tenderloin dive (one of those places that I,
+for one, have never been able to find), is insulted by the leader of
+Tammany Hall, who is always hanging around there for evil purposes. At
+the last moment she is saved from his loathsome advances by a dashing
+young stranger in a cute-cut blue serge suit, who carries her off in a
+taxicab and marries her at 2 A.M. And he, of course, proves to be the
+great traction magnate who owns all the city's surface-car lines.
+
+"The other writers, and some new ones that never before thought of
+writing, read this story, which is called 'All for Love,' and learn to
+do the 'type'--the pure young shopgirl, a bit slangy in spite of her
+flower-like beauty; the abhorrent politician (some day he will have a
+distressing mix-up with his very own daughter in one of these evil
+places--see if he doesn't!), the low-browed dive-keeper, and the honest
+young traction magnate. They will learn with a little practice to do
+these as the dupes of the 'Be-a-cartoonist!' schools learn to draw 'An
+Irishman,' 'A German,' 'A Jew,' and the dental facade of Colonel
+Roosevelt.
+
+"But we must remember that O. Henry came to us from the cheap magazines,
+never did get into the higher-priced ones, and was, by the way,
+wretchedly paid for his stories. True, he received good prices in his
+later days, but I doubt if they raised the average for his output to two
+hundred dollars a story. He neglected to come to the feast in a wedding
+garment, so the more pretentious magazines would have none of him.
+
+"For one O. Henry, then, we can forgive the lesser monthlies for the
+bulk of their stuff that can be read only by born otoliths. The more
+magazines, the better our chance of finding the new man, and only in the
+cheap ones can he come to life."
+
+Many dogmatic statements have been made concerning the great American
+novel. I have been told that it would come from the South, that it would
+come from the West, that it would never be written. But Mr. Wilson has a
+new and revolutionary theory.
+
+"Will there," I asked, "ever be the great American novel? That is, will
+there ever be a novel which reflects American life as adequately as
+_Vanity Fair_ reflects English life?"
+
+"There have already been dozens of them!" was Mr. Wilson's emphatic
+reply. "To go no farther back, Booth Tarkington wrote one the other day,
+and so did Theodore Dreiser. (Dreiser's story, 'The "Genius,"' of course
+couldn't have appeared in any American magazine. Trust your canny
+publisher not to let his magazine hand know what his book hand is
+doing!)
+
+"But let us lay forever that dear old question that has haunted our
+literary columns for so many years. The answer, of course, is that there
+is no novel that reflects English life any more adequately than _The
+Turmoil_, or '_The Genius_,' or _The Virginian_, or _Perch of the
+Devil_, or _Unleavened Bread_, or _The Rise of Silas Lapham_ reflects
+American life.
+
+"Certainly _Vanity Fair_ doesn't do this. It reflects but a very narrow
+section of London life. For the purposes of fictional portrayal England
+is just as big and difficult--as impossible in one novel--as the United
+States.
+
+"To know England through fiction one must go to all her artists, past
+and present, getting a little from each. Hardy gives us an England that
+Thackeray never suspected, and Galsworthy gives us still another, not to
+go on to the England of George Moore, Phillpotts, Quiller-Couch, Wells,
+Bennett, Walpole, George, or Mackenzie. I hope at the proper time that a
+tasteful little tablet will be erected to my memory for having laid this
+ancient and highly respectable apparition."
+
+In his interesting contribution to a symposium of opinions as to what
+are the six best novels in the English language, Mr. Wilson had some
+things to say about Dickens which were not likely to bring him a vote of
+thanks from the Dickens Fellowship. I wished to have his opinion of
+Dickens stated more definitely, and so, basing my question on a
+statement he had made in the symposium, I asked, "What qualities in the
+work of Charles Dickens make him a bad model for novelists to follow?"
+
+Mr. Wilson replied: "Dickens has been a blight to most writers who were
+susceptible to his vices. He was a great humorist, but an inferior
+novelist, and countless other inferior novelists have believed that they
+could be great humorists by following his childishly easy formula.
+
+"That is, those who were influenced by him copy his faults. Witness our
+school of characterization based on the Dickens method, a school holding
+that 'character' is a mere trick of giving your creation exaggerated
+mannerisms or physical surfaces--as with Dickens it was rarely anything
+else.
+
+"Dickens created vaudeville 'characters'--unsurpassed for twenty-minute
+sketches, deadly beyond that to the mentally mature. His stock in trade
+was the grotesque make-up. In stage talk he couldn't create a 'straight'
+part.
+
+"Strip his people of their make-ups, verbal, hirsute, sartorial,
+surgical, pathological, what not--and dummies remain. Meet them once and
+you know them for the rest of the tale, the Micawbers, Gamps,
+Pecksniffs, Nicklebys; each has his stunt and does it over and over at
+each new meeting, to the--for me, at least--maddening delay of the
+melodrama. I like melodrama as well as any one, badgered heroines,
+falsely accused heroes, missing wills, trap-doors, disguised
+philanthropists, foul murders, and even slow-dying children who are not
+only moralists, but orators; and I like to see the villain get his at
+last, and get it good; but I can't read Dickens any more, because the
+tale must be held up every five minutes for one of the funny
+'characters' to do his stunt.
+
+"How many years will it take us--writers, I mean--to realize that there
+are no characters in Dickens in the sense that Dmitri in _The Brothers
+Caramazov_ is a character? How few of our current novelists can
+distinguish between the soulless caricaturing of Dickens and the genuine
+character-drawing of a Turgenieff or a Dostoievski!
+
+"How few of us can see how the soul of Dmitri is slowly unfolded to the
+reader with never a bit of make-up! To this moment, I don't know if he
+wore a beard or not; but I know the man. Dickens would have given him
+funny whiskers, astigmatism, a shortened leg, a purple nose, and still
+to make sure we wouldn't mistake him a catch phrase for his utterance.
+
+"Any novelist who has mastered the rudiments of his craft, even though
+he hasn't an atom of humor in his make-up, can write a Dickens novel,
+and any publisher will print it for the Christmas trade if it's fairly
+workman-like, and it will be warmly praised in the reviews. That happens
+every season.
+
+"And that's why Dickens is a bad model. If one must have a model, why
+not Hall Caine, infinitely the superior of Dickens as a craftsman? Of
+course, having no humor, he can't be read by people who have, but he
+knows his trade, where Dickens was a preposterous blunderer."
+
+Charles Belmont Davis once told me that a novelist should have some
+other regular occupation besides writing. I asked Mr. Wilson his opinion
+on this subject.
+
+"Mr. Davis didn't originate this theory," he said. "It's older than he
+is. Anyway, I don't believe in it. I know of no business to-day that
+would leave a man time to write novels, and a novelist worth his salt
+won't have time for any other business.
+
+"Of course, the ideal novelist would at one time or another have been
+anything. The ideal novelist has two passions, people and words, and he
+should have had and should continue to have as many points of contact
+with life as possible. But if he has reached the point where he can
+write to please me, I want him not to waste time doing anything else.
+
+"Personally, I wish I might have been, for varying intervals, a Russian
+Grand Duke, an Eighth Avenue undertaker, the manager of a
+five-and-ten-cent store, a head waiter, a burglar, a desk sergeant at
+the Thirtieth Street Police Station, and a malefactor of great wealth,
+preferably one that gets into the snapshots at Newport, reading from
+left to right. But Heaven has denied me practically all of these avenues
+to a knowledge of my humankind, and I am too busy keeping up with the
+current styles of all millinery fiction to take to any of them at this
+late day.
+
+"Besides, I have a bad example to deter me, having just read _The High
+Priestess_, by Robert Grant, who has another business than novel
+writing--something connected with the law, I believe, in Boston. I have
+no means of knowing how valuable a civic unit he may have been in his
+home town, but I do feel that he has cheated the world of a great deal
+by keeping to this other business, whatever it may be.
+
+"From the author of _Unleavened Bread_ we once had a right to expect
+much. But _The High Priestess_ chiefly makes me regret that he didn't
+have to write novels or starve; by its virtues of construction, which
+are many and admirable, and by its utter lack of power to communicate
+any emotion whatsoever, which is conspicuous and lamentable. He seems to
+have written his novel with an adding-machine, and instinctively I
+blame that 'other business' of his, in which he seems to have
+forgotten--for he did know it once--that a novelist may or may not think
+straight, but he must feel.
+
+"Perhaps he wasn't a real novelist, after all. I suspect a real novelist
+would starve in any other business."
+
+I told Mr. Wilson that a prominent American humorist writer had classed
+Mark Twain with Artemus Ward and Philander Doesticks, and said that
+these men were not genuine humorists, but "the Charlie Chaplins of their
+time."
+
+Mr. Wilson smiled. "Isn't this rather high praise for Charlie Chaplin?"
+he asked. "How far is this idolatry of the movie actor to go, anyway?
+True, Mr. Chaplin is a skilled comedian, pre-eminent in his curious new
+profession, but to my thinking he lacks repose at those supreme moments
+when he is battering the faces of his fellow-histrions with the wet mop
+or the stuffed club, or walking on their stomachs; but I may be
+prejudiced. I know I shouldn't have ranked him with Mark Twain,
+arch-humanist and satirist and one of the few literary artists who have
+attained the world stature--so that we must go back and back to
+Cervantes to find his like."
+
+
+
+
+_THE PASSING OF THE SNOB_
+
+EDWARD S. MARTIN
+
+
+If William Makepeace Thackeray were alive to-day he would not write a
+_Book of Snobs_. He might write a _Book of Reformers_.
+
+This is the opinion of that shrewd and kindly satirist, Edward S.
+Martin. I found him not in New York, the city whose lights and shadows
+are reflected in much of his graceful prose and pungent verse, but out
+among the Connecticut hills. In the pleasant study of his quaint
+Colonial cottage he talked about the thing he delights to
+observe--humanity.
+
+"Thackeray would not write a _Book of Snobs_ to-day," he said. "The snob
+is not now the appealing subject that he was in the early days of the
+reign of Queen Victoria. Thackeray could not now find enough snobs and
+snobbery to write about, either in England or in America. Snobs are by
+way of having punctured tires these days.
+
+"Don't you think that the snobs were always very much apart from our
+civilization and national ideals? They were a symptom of an established
+and conservative society. And this established and conservative society
+Thackeray in his way helped to break down.
+
+"To-day, in England and in the United States, that kind of society is in
+a precarious condition. If Thackeray were now writing, he would not
+satirize snobs. It is more likely that he would satirize the reformers.
+I think that all the snobs have hit the sawdust trail."
+
+"How did this happen?" I asked. "What was it that did away with the
+snobs?"
+
+"It was largely a natural process of change," said Mr. Martin. "The
+snobs were put on the defensive. You see, there is a harder push of
+democracy now than there was in Thackeray's time. The world of which the
+snob was so conspicuous a part seems, especially since the war began, to
+have passed away. Of course the literature of that world is not dead,
+but for the moment it seems obsolete.
+
+"To-day the whole attention of civilized mankind is fixed on the great
+fundamental problems; there is no time for snobbery. For one thing,
+there is the problem of national self-preservation. And there has
+recently been before the civilized world, more strongly than ever
+before, the great problem of the development of democracy.
+
+"I suppose that the war will check, to a certain extent, the development
+of democracy. In England the great task of the hour is to organize all
+the powers of society for defense against attack, against attack by a
+power organized for forty years for that attack.
+
+"I suppose England will get organization out of this war. And if we get
+into the war, we'll get organization out of it."
+
+Mr. Martin is generally thought of as a critic of social rather than
+political conditions. But he is keenly interested in politics. Speaking
+of American politics and the possibility of America's entering the war,
+he said:
+
+"For the past fifteen years our greatest activity in politics has been
+to rip things open. It seemed to most people that the organization was
+getting too strong and that it was controlled by too few people. The
+fight has been against that condition.
+
+"But if we became involved in a serious war trouble the energy of our
+people would be directed to an attempt to secure increased efficiency.
+We would become closely organized again. I don't think we'd lose the
+benefit of what has been done in the past years, but we would come to a
+turn in the road.
+
+"I suppose it would bring us all together, if we got into this war, and
+I suppose we'd get some good out of it.
+
+"You see, the people who formerly directed our Government haven't had
+much power for several years. Now they are valuable people. And they
+will come back into power again, but with greatly modified conditions.
+
+"I don't think that a new set of people are going to manage the affairs
+of the nation. I think that the affairs of the nation will be managed by
+the people who managed them before. But these people will be much more
+under control than they were before, and they will be subject to new
+laws.
+
+"How much good government by commission is going to do I don't know. We
+have not as yet had good enough men to enter into this important work,
+and the best of those who have entered have not stayed in this
+employment. So the development of experts in government has not come
+along as well as people hoped it would."
+
+The genial philosopher smiled quizzically and rose from his chair.
+
+"I'm afraid I'm getting too political," he said, pacing slowly up and
+down the room. "Let's get back to snobs and snobbery.
+
+"You asked me a few minutes ago why the snob had become so inconspicuous
+a figure in our modern society. Well, I know one reason for this altered
+condition of affairs. Woman has abolished the snob. Woman has changed
+man."
+
+"And what changed woman?" I asked.
+
+"Many things; the development of machinery, for instance," he replied.
+"Woman has not changed so much as the conditions of life have changed.
+
+"The development of machinery has caused changes that impress me deeply.
+It has produced immense alterations in the conditions of life and in the
+relations between people.
+
+"War has been changed in a striking manner by this development of
+machinery. Never in the history of warfare was machinery so prominent
+and important as to-day. In fact, I think I am justified in speaking of
+this war as a machine-bore!
+
+"Machinery really has had a great deal to do with changing the
+condition and activities of woman, and has been a powerful influence in
+bringing about the modern movement for women's suffrage. Machinery has
+changed the employment of women and forced them into kinds of work which
+are not domestic.
+
+"The typewriter and the telephone have revolutionized our methods of
+doing business. The typewriter and the telephone have filled our offices
+with women. They are doing work which twenty years ago would have been
+considered most unfeminine.
+
+"The war is strengthening this tendency of women to take up work that is
+not domestic. I have heard it said that women first got into the
+undomestic kinds of business in France during the Napoleonic wars.
+Napoleon wanted to have all the men out in the line of battle, so he had
+girls instructed in bookkeeping and other kinds of office work.
+
+"The business activities of Frenchwomen date from that time. And a
+similar result seems to be coming out of this war. In France, in
+England, in all the countries engaged in the war the women are filling
+the positions left vacant by the men."
+
+"Do you think," I asked, "that this is a good thing for civilization,
+this increased activity of women in business?"
+
+"I don't know," said Mr. Martin, musingly. "I don't know. But I do know
+this, that the main employment of woman is to rear a family. Office
+work, administrative work--these things are of only secondary
+importance. The one vital thing for women to do is to rear families.
+They must do this if the human race is to continue."
+
+"Mr. Martin," I said, "you told me that Thackeray, if he were alive,
+would satirize the reformers. Just what sort of reformer is it that has
+taken the place of the snob?"
+
+Mr. Martin did not at once answer. He smiled, as if enjoying some
+entertaining memory. Then he started to speak, and mentioned the name of
+a prominent reformer. But his New England caution checked him. He said:
+
+"No, I'd better not say anything about that. I'd rather not. I'd rather
+say that the things that the snobs admired and particularly embodied
+have lost prestige during the last twenty years.
+
+"After 1898, after our great rise to prosperity, the captains of
+industry and of finance were the great men of the country. But I think
+these great men are less stunning now than they were then. And money is
+less stunning, too.
+
+"All the business of money-making has had a great loss of prestige since
+1900. People think more of other things. And the people who are thinking
+of other things than money-making have more of a 'punch' than they had
+before. The wise have more of a punch, and so have the foolish."
+
+Again came that reminiscent smile. "Reformers can be very trying," he
+said. "Very trying, indeed. Did you ever read Brand Whitlock's _Forty
+Years of It_? Brand Whitlock had his own trials with the reformers.
+Whitlock is a sensible, generous man, and his attitude toward reformers
+is a good deal humorous and not at all violent. That would be
+Thackeray's attitude toward them, I think, if he were living to-day.
+He'd satirize the reformers instead of the snobs."
+
+Mr. Martin is not inclined to condemn or to accept absolutely any of the
+modern reform movements. "All reform movements," he said, "run until
+they get a check. Then they stop. But what they have accomplished is not
+lost."
+
+The society women who undertake sociological reform work find in Mr.
+Martin no unsympathetic critic.
+
+"These wealthy women," he said, "take up reform work as a recourse.
+Society life is not very filling. They have a sense of emptiness. So
+they go in for reform, to fill out their lives more adequately.
+
+"But I don't know that I'd call that kind of thing reform. I'd call it a
+large form of social activity. These women are attending to a great mass
+of people who need this attention. But the bulk of this kind of work is
+too small for it to be called reform.
+
+"In New York there are very many young people who need care and
+leadership. The neglected and incompetent must be looked after. The
+old-fashioned family control has been considerably loosened, and an
+attempt must be made to guard those who are therefore less protected
+than they would have been a generation ago. Certainly these efforts to
+look after young people who don't have enough care taken of them by
+their families are directed in the right direction."
+
+I asked Mr. Martin what he thought of the present condition of American
+literature, particularly the work presented to the public on the pages
+of magazines.
+
+"Just now," he said, "the newspapers seem to have almost everything. The
+great interest of the last few years has been in the newspapers. They
+have had a tremendous story to tell, they have told it every day, and
+other things have seemed, in comparison, flat and lifeless.
+
+"It has been a hard time for every sort of a publication not absolutely
+up to the minute all the time. The newspapers have had the field almost
+to themselves.
+
+"And I think that the newspapers have greatly improved. They have had an
+immense chance, and it has been very stimulating."
+
+
+
+
+_COMMERCIALIZING THE SEX INSTINCT_
+
+ROBERT HERRICK
+
+
+"Realism," said Robert Herrick, "is not the celebration of sexuality." I
+had not recalled to earth that merry divine whose lyric invitation to go
+a-Maying still echoes in the heart of every lover of poetry. The Robert
+Herrick with whom I was talking is a poet and a discriminating critic of
+poetry, but the world knows him chiefly for his novels--_The Common
+Lot_, _Together_, _Clark's Field_, and other intimate studies of
+American life and character. He is a realist, and not many years ago
+there were critics who thought that his manner of dealing with sexual
+themes was dangerously frank. Therefore, the statement that he had just
+made seemed to me particularly significant.
+
+"It seems to have become the fashion," he said, "to apply the term
+Realist to every writer who is obsessed with sex. I think I know the
+reason for this. Our Anglo-Saxon prudery kept all mention of sex
+relations out of our fiction for many years. Among comparatively modern
+novelists the realists were the first to break the shackles of this
+convention, and write frankly of sex. And from this it has come, most
+unfortunately, that realism and pornography are often confused by
+novelists and critics as well as by the public.
+
+"This confusion of ideas was apparent in some of the criticisms of my
+novel _Together_. In an early chapter of the book there was an incident
+which was intended to show that the man and woman who were the chief
+figures in the book were spiritually incompatible, that their relations
+as husband and wife would be wrong. This was, in fact, the theme of the
+book, and this incident in the first chapter was intended to foreshadow
+the later events of their married life. Well, the critics who disliked
+this chapter said that what they objected to was its 'gross realism.'
+
+"Now, as a matter of fact, that part of the book was not realistic at
+all. I was describing something unusual, abnormal, while realism has to
+do with the normal. The critic had, of course, a perfect right to
+believe that the subject ought not to be treated at all, but 'gross
+realism' was the most inappropriate description possible.
+
+"Undoubtedly there are many writers who believe that they are realists
+because they write about nothing but sex. Undoubtedly, too, there are
+many writers who are conscious of the commercial value of sex in
+literature. Of course a writer ought to be conscious of the sex impulse
+in life, but he ought not to display it constantly. I wish our writers
+would pay less attention to the direct manifestations of sex and more to
+its indirect influence, to the ways in which it affects all phases of
+activity."
+
+"Who are some of the writers who seem to you to be especially ready to
+avail themselves of the commercial value of sex?" I asked.
+
+Mr. Herrick smiled. "I think you know the writers I mean without my
+mentioning their names," he said. "They write for widely circulated
+magazines, and make a great deal of money, and their success is due
+almost entirely to their industrious celebration of sexual affairs. You
+know the sort of magazine for which they write--it always has on the
+cover a highly colored picture of a pretty woman, never anything else.
+That, too, is an example, and a rather wearying example, of the
+commercializing of the sex appeal.
+
+"I think that Zola, although he was a great artist, was often conscious
+of the business value of the sex theme. He knew that that sort of thing
+had a tremendous appeal, and, for me, much of his best work is marred by
+his deliberate introduction of sex, with the purpose--which, of course,
+he realized--of making a sensation and selling large editions of his
+books. This sort of commercialism was not found in the great Russian
+realists, the true realist--Dostoievski, for example. But it is found in
+the work of some of the modern Russian writers who are incorrectly
+termed realists."
+
+"Mr. Herrick," I asked, "just what is a realist?"
+
+Mr. Herrick's youthful face, which contrasts strangely with his white
+hair, took on a thoughtful expression.
+
+"The distinction between realism and romanticism," he said, "is one of
+spirit rather than of method. The realist has before him an aim which is
+entirely different from that of the romanticist.
+
+"The realist writes a novel with one purpose in view. And that purpose
+is to render into written words the normal aspect of things.
+
+"The aim of the romanticist is entirely different. He is concerned only
+with things which are exciting, astonishing--in a word, abnormal.
+
+"I do not like literary labels, and I think that the names 'realist' and
+'romanticist' have been so much misused that they are now almost
+meaningless. The significance of the term changes from year to year; the
+realists of one generation are the romanticists of the next.
+
+"Bulwer Lytton was considered a realist in his day. But we think of him
+only as a sentimental and melodramatic romanticist whose work has no
+connection with real life.
+
+"Charles Dickens was considered a realist by the critics of his own
+generation, and it is probable that he considered himself a realist. But
+his strongest instinct was toward the melodramatic. He wrote chiefly
+about simple people, it is true, and chiefly about his own land and
+time. But the fact that a writer used his contemporaries as subjects
+does not make him a realist. Dickens's people were unusual; they were
+better or worse than most people, and they had extraordinary adventures;
+they did not lead the sort of life which most people lead. Therefore,
+Dickens cannot accurately be called a realist."
+
+"You called Dostoievski a realist," I said. "What writers who use the
+English language seem to you to deserve best the name of realist?"
+
+"I think," said Mr. Herrick, "that the most thoroughgoing realist who
+ever wrote in England was Anthony Trollope. _Barchester Towers_ and
+_Framley Parsonage_ are masterpieces of realism; they give a faithful
+and convincing picture of the every-day life of a section of English
+society with which their author was thoroughly familiar. Trollope
+reflected life as he saw it--normal life. He was a great realist.
+
+"In the United States there has been only one writer who has as great a
+right to the name realist as had Anthony Trollope. That man is William
+Dean Howells. Mr. Howells has always been interested in the normal
+aspect of things. He has taken for his subject a sort of life which he
+knows intimately; he has not sought for extraordinary adventures for his
+theme, nor has he depicted characters remote from our experience. His
+novels are distinguished by such fidelity to life that he has an
+indisputable claim to be called a realist.
+
+"But, as I said, it is dangerous and unprofitable to attempt to label
+literary artists. Thackeray was a realist. Yet _Henry Esmond_ is classed
+as a romantic novel. In that book Thackeray used the realistic method;
+he spent a long time in studying the manners and customs of the time
+about which he was writing; and all the details of the sort of life
+which he describes are, I believe, historically accurate. And yet _Henry
+Esmond_ is a romance from beginning to end; it is a romantic novel
+written by a realist, and written according to what is called the
+realistic method.
+
+"On the other hand, Sir Walter Scott was a romanticist. No one will deny
+that. Yet in many of his early books he dealt with what may be called
+realistic material; he described with close fidelity to detail a sort of
+life and a sort of people with which he was well acquainted.
+
+"Whether a writer is a realist or a romanticist is, after all, I think,
+partly a matter of accident or culture. I happen to be a realist because
+I was brought up on the great Russian realists like Gogol and the great
+English realists from George Elliot down to Thomas Hardy. If I had been
+brought up on romantic writers I suppose that I might now be writing an
+entirely different sort of novel from that with which I am associated.
+
+"There is a sounder distinction," said Mr. Herrick, "than that which
+people try to draw between the realistic novel and the romantic novel.
+This is the distinction between the novel of character and the novel of
+events. Personally, I never have been able to see how the development of
+character can be separated from the plot of a novel. A book in which the
+characters exhibit exactly the same characteristics, moral and
+intellectual, in the last chapter as in the first, seems to me to be
+utterly worthless.
+
+"I will, however, make one exception--that is, the novel of the Jules
+Verne type. In this sort of book, and in romances of the Monte Cristo
+kind, action is the only thing with which the author and the reader are
+concerned, and any attempt to develop character would clog the wheels of
+the story.
+
+"But every other kind of novel depends on character. Even in the best
+work of Dumas, in _The Three Musketeers_, for example, the characters of
+the principal figures develop as the story progresses.
+
+"The highest interest of a novel depends upon the development of its
+characters. If the characters are static, then the book is feeble. I
+have never been able to see how the plot and the development of the
+characters can be separated.
+
+"Of course, the novel of character is full of adventure. The adventures
+of Henry James's characters are of absorbing interest, but they are
+psychological adventures, internal adventures. If some kind person
+wanted to give one of Henry James's novels what is commonly called 'a
+bully plot' the novel would fail."
+
+As to the probable effect on literature of the war, Mr. Herrick has a
+theory different from that of any other writer with whom I have
+discussed the subject.
+
+"I think," he said, "that after the war we shall return to fatuous
+romanticism and weak sentimentality in literature. The tendency will be
+to read novels in order to forget life, instead of reading them to
+realize life. There will be a revival of a deeper religious sense,
+perhaps, but there will also be a revival of mere empty formalism in
+religion. It has been so in the past after great convulsions. Men need
+time to recover their spiritual pride, their interest in ideas."
+
+But Mr. Herrick's own reaction to the war does not seem to justify his
+pessimistic prophecy. Certainly the personal experience which he next
+narrated to me does not indicate that Mr. Herrick is growing sentimental
+and romantic.
+
+"When I was in Rome recently," he said, "I was much impressed by
+D'Annunzio. I was interested in him as a problem, as a picturesque
+literary personality, as a decadent raffine type regenerated by the war.
+I have not read any of his books for many years.
+
+"I took some of D'Annunzio's books to read on my voyage home. I read _Il
+Piacere_. I realized its charm, I realized the highly aesthetic quality
+of its author, a scholarly and exact aestheticism as well as an emotional
+aestheticism. But, nevertheless, I had to force myself to read the book.
+It was simply a description of a young man's amorous adventures. And I
+could not see any reason for the existence of this carefully written
+record of passional experiences.
+
+"It seemed to me that the war had swept this sort of thing aside, or had
+swept aside my interest in this sort of thing. The book seemed to me as
+dull and trivial and as remote as a second-rate eighteenth-century
+novel. And I wondered if we would ever again return to the time when
+such a record of a young man's emotional and sensual experiences would
+be worth while.
+
+"I came to the conclusion that D'Annunzio himself would not now write
+such a novel. I think that it would seem to him to be too trivial a
+report on life. I think that the war has so forced the essential things
+of life upon the attention of young men."
+
+
+
+
+_SIXTEEN DON'TS FOR POETS_
+
+ARTHUR GUITERMAN
+
+
+Arthur Guiterman has been called the Owen Seaman of America. Of course
+he isn't, any more than Owen Seaman is the Arthur Guiterman of England.
+But the verse which brings Arthur Guiterman his daily bread is turned no
+less deftly than is that of _Punch's_ famous editor. Arthur Guiterman is
+not a humorist who writes verse; he is a poet with an abundant gift of
+humor.
+
+Now, the author of _The Antiseptic Baby and the Prophylactic Pup_ and
+_The Quest of the Riband_, and of those unforgetable rhymed reviews,
+differs from most other poets not only in possessing an abnormally
+developed sense of humor, but also in being able to make a comfortable
+living out of the sale of his verse. But when he talked to me recently
+he was by no means inclined to advise all able young poets to expect
+their poetry to provide them with board and lodging.
+
+"Of course it is possible to make a living out of verse," he said. "Walt
+Mason does, and so does Berton Braley. And now most of my income comes
+from my verse. Formerly I wrote short stories, but I haven't written one
+for seven or eight years.
+
+"Nevertheless, I think it is inadvisable for any one to set out with the
+idea of depending on the sale of verse as a means of livelihood. You
+see, there are, after all, two forms, and only two forms, of literary
+expression--the prose form and the verse form. Some subjects suit the
+prose form, others suit the verse form. Any one who makes writing his
+profession has ideas severally adapted to both of these forms. And every
+writer should be able to express his idea in whichever of these two
+forms suits it better.
+
+"Now, the verse form is older than the prose form. And so I have come to
+look upon it as the form peculiarly attractive to youth. Many writers
+outgrew the tendency to use the verse form, but some never outgrew it.
+Sir Walter Scott was a verse-writer before he was a prose-writer, and so
+was Shakespeare. So were many modern writers--Robert W. Chambers, for
+example.
+
+"This theory is true especially in regard to lyric verse. The lyric is
+nearly always the work of a young man. As a man grows older he sings
+less and preaches more. Certainly this was true of Milton.
+
+"I never thought that I should write verse for a living. But verse
+happens to be the medium that I love. I ran across my first poem the
+other day--it was about fireflies, and I was eight years old when I
+wrote it. Certainly nearly all writers write verse before they write
+prose; perhaps it is atavistic. I don't know that Henry James began with
+verse. But I would be willing to bet that he did.
+
+"One trouble with a great many people who make a living out of writing
+verse is that they feel obliged always to be verse-writers, never to
+write prose, even when the subject demands that medium. Alfred Noyes
+gives us an example of this unfortunate tendency in his _Drake_. I am
+not disparaging Alfred Noyes's work; he has written charming lyrics, but
+in _Drake_, and perhaps in some of the _Tales from the Mermaid Tavern_,
+I feel that he has written verse not because the subject was especially
+suited to that medium, but because he felt that he was a verse-writer
+and therefore should not write prose."
+
+Mr. Guiterman is firmly convinced, however, that a verse-writer ought to
+be able, in time, to make a living out of his work.
+
+"If a man calls himself a writer," he said, "he ought to be able to make
+a living out of writing. And I think that the writer of verse has a
+greater opportunity to-day than ever before. I don't mean to say that
+the appreciation of poetry is more intense than ever before, but it is
+more general. More people are reading poetry now than in bygone
+generations.
+
+"Compare with the traditions that we have to-day those of the early
+nineteenth century, of the time of Byron and Sir Walter Scott. Then
+books of verse sold in large quantities, it is true, but to a relatively
+small public, to one class of readers. Now not only the poet, but also
+the verse-writer has an enormous public. If a really great poet should
+arise to-day he would find awaiting him a larger public than that known
+by any poet of the past. But it would be necessary for the poet to be
+great for him to find this public. Byron would be more generally
+appreciated to-day, if he were to live again, than he was in his own
+generation. I mention Byron because I think it probable that the next
+great poet will have something of Byron's dynamic quality."
+
+"Who was the last great poet?" I asked.
+
+"How is one to decide whether or not a poet is great?" asked Mr.
+Guiterman in turn. "My own feeling is that the late William Vaughn Moody
+was a great poet in the making. Perhaps he never really fulfilled his
+early promise; perhaps he went back to the themes of bygone ages too
+much in finding themes for his poetry. It may be that the next really
+great poet will sing an entirely different strain; it may be that I will
+be one of those who will say that his work is all bosh.
+
+"But at any rate, he won't be an imitation Whitman or anything of that
+sort. He won't be any special school, nor will he think that he is
+founding a school. But it may be that his admirers will found a school
+with him as its leader, and they may force him to take himself
+seriously, and thus ruin himself."
+
+Returning to the subject of the advisability of a writer being able to
+express himself in verse as well as in prose, Mr. Guiterman said:
+
+"Especially in our generation is it true that good verse requires
+extreme condensation. In most work to-day brevity is desirable. The
+epigram beats the epic. If Milton were living to-day he would not write
+epics. I don't think it improbable that we have men with Miltonic minds,
+and they are not writing epics.
+
+"If a man finds that he cannot express his idea in verse more forcefully
+than he can in prose, then he ought to write prose. Very often a writer
+is interested in some little incident which he would not be justified in
+treating in prose, something too slight to be the theme of a short
+story. This is the sort of thing which he should put into verse. There
+is Leigh Hunt's _Jennie Kissed Me_, for example. Suppose he had made a
+short story of it."
+
+Thinking of this poet's financial success, I asked him just what course
+he would advise a young poet to pursue who had no means of livelihood
+except writing.
+
+"Well, the worst thing for him to do," said Mr. Guiterman, "would be to
+devote all his attention to writing an epic. He'd starve to death.
+
+"I suppose the best thing for him to do would be to write on as many
+subjects as possible, including those of intense interest to himself.
+What interests him intensely is sure to interest others, and the number
+of others whom it interests will depend on how close he is by nature to
+the mind of his place and time. He should get some sort of regular work
+so that he need not depend at first upon the sale of his writings. This
+work need not necessarily be literary in character, although it would be
+advisable for him to get employment in a magazine or newspaper office,
+so that he may get in touch with the conditions governing the sale of
+manuscripts.
+
+"He should write on themes suggested by the day's news. He should write
+topical verse; if there is a political campaign on, he should write
+verse bearing upon that; if a great catastrophe occurs, he should write
+about that, but he must not write on these subjects in a commonplace
+manner.
+
+"He should send his verses to the daily papers, for they are the
+publications most interested in topical verse. But also he should
+attempt to sell his work to the magazines, which pay better prices than
+the newspapers. If it is in him to do so, he should write humorous
+verse, for there is always a good market for humorous verse that is
+worth printing. He should look up the publishers of holiday cards, and
+submit to them Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter verses, for which he
+would receive, probably, about five dollars apiece. He should write
+advertising verses, and he should, perhaps, make an alliance with some
+artist with whom he can work, each supplementing the work of the other."
+
+"Mr. Guiterman," I said, "is this the advice that you would give to John
+Keats if he were to ask you?"
+
+"Yes, certainly," said Mr. Guiterman. "But you understand that our
+hypothetical poet must all the time be doing his own work, writing the
+sort of verse which he specially desires to write. If his pot-boiling is
+honestly done, it will help him with his other work.
+
+"He must study the needs and limitations of the various publications. He
+must recognize the fact that just because he has certain powers it does
+not follow that everything he writes will be desired by the editors.
+Marked ability and market ability are different propositions.
+
+"If he finds that the magazines are not printing sad sonnets, he must
+not write sad sonnets. He must adapt himself to the demands of the day.
+
+"There is high precedent for this course. You asked if I would give
+this advice to the young Keats. Why not, when Shakespeare himself
+followed the line of action of which I spoke? He began as a lyric poet,
+a writer of sonnets. He wrote plays because he saw that the demand was
+for plays, and because he wanted to make a living and more than a
+living. But because he was Shakespeare his plays are what they are.
+
+"The poet must be influenced by the demand. There is inspiration in the
+demand. Besides the material reward, the poet who is influenced by the
+demand has the encouraging, inspiring knowledge that he is writing
+something that people want to read."
+
+I asked Mr. Guiterman to give me a list of negative commandments for the
+guidance of aspiring poets. Here it is:
+
+"Don't think of yourself as a poet, and don't dress the part.
+
+"Don't classify yourself as a member of any special school or group.
+
+"Don't call your quarters a garret or a studio.
+
+"Don't frequent exclusively the company of writers.
+
+"Don't think of any class of work that you feel moved to do as either
+beneath you or above you.
+
+"Don't complain of lack of appreciation. (In the long run no really good
+published work can escape appreciation.)
+
+"Don't think you are entitled to any special rights, privileges, and
+immunities as a literary person, or have any more reason to consider
+your possible lack of fame a grievance against the world than has any
+shipping-clerk or traveling-salesman.
+
+"Don't speak of poetic license or believe that there is any such thing.
+
+"Don't tolerate in your own work any flaws in rhythm, rhyme, melody, or
+grammar.
+
+"Don't use 'e'er' for 'ever,' 'o'er' for 'over,' 'whenas' or 'what time'
+for 'when,' or any of the 'poetical' commonplaces of the past.
+
+"Don't say 'did go' for 'went,' even if you need an extra syllable.
+
+"Don't omit articles or prepositions for the sake of the rhythm.
+
+"Don't have your book published at your own expense by any house that
+makes a practice of publishing at the author's expense.
+
+"Don't write poems about unborn babies.
+
+"Don't--don't write hymns to the great god Pan. He is dead; let him rest
+in peace!
+
+"Don't write what everybody else is writing."
+
+
+
+
+_MAGAZINES CHEAPEN FICTION_
+
+GEORGE BARR McCUTCHEON
+
+
+Why is the modern American novel inferior to the modern English novel?
+Of course, there are some patriotic critics who believe that it is not
+inferior. But most readers of fiction speak of H. G. Wells and Compton
+Mackenzie, for example, with a respect and admiration which they do not
+extend to living American novelists.
+
+Why is this? Is it because of snobbishness or literary colonialism on
+the part of the American public? George Barr McCutcheon does not think
+so. The author of _Beverly of Graustark_ and many another popular
+romance believes that there is in America a force definitely harmful to
+the novel. And that force is the magazine.
+
+"The development of the magazine," he said to me, "has affected fiction
+in two ways. It has made it cheap and yet expensive, if you know what I
+mean.
+
+"Novels written solely with the view to sensationalism are more than
+likely to bring discredit, not upon the magazine, but upon the writer.
+He gets his price, however, and the public gets its fiction.
+
+"In my humble opinion, a writer should develop and complete his novel
+without a thought of its value or suitability to serial purposes. He
+should complete it to his own satisfaction--if that is possible--before
+submitting it to either editor or publisher. They should not be
+permitted to see it until it is in its complete form."
+
+"But you yourself write serial stories, do you not?" I asked.
+
+"I have never written a serial," answered Mr. McCutcheon. "Some of my
+stories have been published serially, but they were not written as
+serials.
+
+"I am quite convinced in my own mind that if we undertake to analyze the
+distinction between the first-class English writers of to-day and many
+of our Americans, we will find that their superiority resolves itself
+quite simply into the fact that they do not write their novels as
+serials. In other words, they write a novel and not a series of
+chapters, parts, and instalments."
+
+"Do you think that the American novel will always be inferior to the
+English novel?" I asked. "Is it not probable that the American novel
+will so develop as to escape the effects of serialization?"
+
+"There is no reason," Mr. McCutcheon replied, "why Americans should not
+produce novels equal to those of the English, provided the same care is
+exercised in the handling of their material, and that they make haste as
+slowly as possible. Just so long, however, as we are menaced by the
+perils of the serial our general output will remain inferior to that of
+England.
+
+"I do not mean to say that we have no writers in this country who are
+the equals in every respect of the best of the English novelists. We
+have some great men and women here, sincere, earnest workers who will
+not be spoiled."
+
+Mr. McCutcheon has no respect for the type of novel, increasingly
+popular of late, in which the author devotes page after page to glowing
+accounts of immorality with the avowed intention of teaching a high
+moral lesson. He has little faith in the honesty of purpose of the
+authors of works of this sort.
+
+"The so-called sex novel," he said, "is one of our gravest fatalities. I
+may be wrong, but I am inclined to think that most novels of that
+character are written, not from an aesthetic point of view, but for the
+somewhat laudable purpose of keeping the wolf from the door and at the
+same time allowing the head of the family to ride in an automobile of
+his own.
+
+"The typical serial writer is animated by the desire, or perhaps it is
+an obligation, to make the 'suspended interest' paramount to all else.
+This interest must not be allowed to flag between instalments.
+
+"The keen desire for thrills must be gratified at all costs. It is
+commanded by the editor--and I do not say that the editor errs. His
+public expects it in a serial. It must not be disappointed."
+
+I asked Mr. McCutcheon if he believed that a writer could produce
+sensational and poorly constructed fiction in order to make a living and
+yet keep his talent unimpaired; if a writer was justified in writing
+trash in order to gain leisure for serious work. He replied:
+
+"There are writers to-day who persist in turning out what they
+vaingloriously describe as 'stuff to meet the popular demand.' They
+invariably or inevitably declare that some day they will 'be in a
+position to write the sort of stuff they want to write.'
+
+"These writers say, in defense of their position, that they are not even
+trying to do their best work, that they are merely biding their time,
+and that--some day! I very much doubt their sincerity, or, at any rate,
+their capacity for self-analysis. I believe that when an author sets
+himself down to write a book (I refer to any author of recognized
+ability), he puts into that book the best that is in him at the time.
+
+"It is impossible for a good, conscientious writer to work on a plane
+lower than his best. Only hack writers can do such things.
+
+"There is not one of us who does not do his best when he undertakes to
+write his book. We only confess that we have not done our best when a
+critic accuses us of pot-boiling, and so forth. Then we rise in our
+pride and say, 'Oh, well, I can do better work than this, and they know
+it.'
+
+"It is true that we may not be doing the thing that we really want to
+do, but I am convinced that we are unconsciously doing our best, just
+the same. It all resolves itself into this statement--a good workman
+cannot deliberately do a poor piece of work.
+
+"I am free to confess that I have done my very best in everything I have
+undertaken. It may fall short of excellence as viewed from even my own
+viewpoint, but it is the best I know how to do.
+
+"So you may take it from me that the writer who declares that he is
+going to do something really worth while, just as soon as he gets
+through doing the thing that the public expects him to do, is deceiving
+himself and no one else. An author cannot stand still in his work. He
+either progresses or retrogrades, and no man progresses except by means
+of steady improvement. He cannot say, 'I will write a poor book this
+year and a great book next year.'"
+
+Mr. McCutcheon is so unashamedly a romanticist that I expected to find
+him an enthusiastic partisan of the first and greatest master of the
+romantic novel in English. But, to my surprise, he said:
+
+"I suppose the world has outgrown Sir Walter Scott's novels. It is quite
+natural that it should. The world is older and conditions have changed.
+The fairest simile I can offer in explanation is that as man himself
+grows older he loses, except in a too frequently elastic memory, his
+interest in the things that moved him when he was a boy."
+
+But while Mr. McCutcheon believes (in defiance of the opinion of the
+publishers who continue to bring out, year by year, their countless new
+editions of the Waverley Novels in all the languages of the civilized
+world) that the spell of the Wizard of the North has waned, he
+nevertheless believes that the romantic novel has lost none of its
+ancient appeal.
+
+"I do not believe," he said, "that the vogue of the romantic novel, or
+tale (which is a better word for describing the sort of fiction covered
+by this generic term), will ever die. The present war undoubtedly will
+alter the trend of the modern romantic fiction, but it will not in
+effect destroy it."
+
+"How will it alter it?" I asked.
+
+"Years most certainly will go by," he replied, "before the novelist may
+even hope to contend with the realities of this great and most
+unromantic conflict. Kings and courtiers are very ordinary, and, in some
+cases, ignoble creatures in these days, and none of them appears to be
+romantic.
+
+"We find a good many villains among our erstwhile heroes, and a good
+many heroes among our principal villains. People will not care to read
+war novels for a good many years to come, but it is inevitable that
+future generations will read even the lightest kind of fiction dealing
+with this war, horrible though it is. Just so long as the world exists
+there will be people who read nothing else but the red-blood, stirring
+romantic stories.
+
+"There exists, of course, a class of readers who will not be tempted by
+the romantic, who will not even tolerate it, because they cannot
+understand it. That class may increase, but so will its antithesis.
+
+"I know a man who has read the Bible through five or six times, not
+because he is of a religious turn of mind or even mildly devout, but
+because there is a lot of good, sound, exciting romance in it! A man who
+is without romance in his soul has no right to beget children, for he
+cannot love them as they ought to be loved. They represent romance at
+its best. He is, therefore, purely selfish in his possession of them."
+
+Mr. McCutcheon had spoken of the probable effect of the war on the
+popular taste for romantic fiction. I reminded him of William Dean
+Howells's much-quoted statement, "War stops literature."
+
+"War stops everything else," said Mr. McCutcheon, "so why not
+literature? It stops everything, I amend, except bloodshed, horror, and
+heartache.
+
+"And when the war itself is stopped, you will find that literature will
+be revived with farming and other innocent and productive industries. I
+venture to say that some of the greatest literature the world has ever
+known is being written to-day. Out of the history of this titanic
+struggle will come the most profound literary expressions of all time,
+and from men who to-day are unknown and unconsidered."
+
+I asked Mr. McCutcheon if he did not believe that the youthful energy of
+the United States was likely to make its citizens impatient of romance,
+that quality being generally considered the exclusive property of
+nations ancient in civilization. He did not think so.
+
+"America," he said, "is essentially a romantic country, our great and
+profound commercialism to the contrary notwithstanding. America was born
+of adventure; its infancy was cradled in romance; it has grown up in
+thrills. And while to-day it may not reflect romance as we are prone to
+consider it, there still rests in America a wonderful treasure in the
+shape of undeveloped possibilities.
+
+"We are, first of all, an eager, zestful, imaginative people. We are
+creatures of romance. We do two things exceedingly well--we dream and
+we perform.
+
+"Our dreams are of adventure, of risk, of chance, of impossibilities,
+and of deeds that only the bold may conceive. And we find on waking from
+these dreams that we have performed the deeds we dreamed of.
+
+"The Old World looks upon us as braggarts. Perhaps we are, but we are
+kindly, genial, smiling braggarts--and the braggart is, after all, our
+truest romanticist.
+
+"I like to hear a grown man admit that he still believes in fairies.
+That sort of man thinks of the things that are beautiful, even though
+they are invisible. And--if you stop to think about it--the most
+beautiful things in the world are invisible."
+
+
+
+
+_BUSINESS INCOMPATIBLE WITH ART_
+
+FRANK H. SPEARMAN
+
+
+The late J. Pierpont Morgan writing sonnet sequences, Rockefeller
+regarding oil as useful only when mixed with pigment and spread upon
+canvas by his own deft hand, Carnegie designing libraries instead of
+paying for them--these are some of the entertaining visions that occur
+to the mind of Frank H. Spearman when he contemplates in fancy a
+civilization in which business no longer draws the master minds away
+from art.
+
+I asked the author of _Nan of Music Mountain_ if he thought that the
+trend of present-day American life--its commercialism and
+materialism--affected the character of our literature. He replied:
+
+"Let us take commercialism first: By it you mean the pursuit of
+business. Success in business brings money, power, and that public
+esteem we may loosely term fame--the admiration of our fellow-men and
+the sense of power among them.
+
+"Commercialism, thus defined, affects the character of our literature in
+a way that none of our students of the subject seems to have
+apprehended. We live in an atmosphere of material striving. Our great
+rewards are material successes. The extremely important consequence is
+that our business life through its greater temptations--through its
+being able to offer the rewards of wealth and mastery and esteem--robs
+literature and the kindred arts of our keenest minds. We have, it is
+true, eminent doctors and lawyers, but the complaint that commercialism
+has invaded these professions only proves that they depend directly on
+business prosperity for a substantial portion of their own rewards.
+
+"I am not forgetting the crust and garret as the traditional setting for
+the literary genius; but, when this state of affairs existed, the genius
+had no chance to become a business millionaire within ten years--or, for
+that matter, within a hundred. And while poverty provides an excellent
+foundation for a career, it is not so good as a superstructure--at
+least, not outside the ranks of the heroic few who renounce riches for
+spiritual things.
+
+"More than once," continued Mr. Spearman, "in meeting men among our
+masters of industry, I have been struck by the thought that these are
+the men who should be writing great books, painting great pictures, and
+building great cathedrals; their tastes, I have sometimes found, run in
+these directions quite as strongly as the tastes of lesser men who give
+themselves to literature, painting, or architecture. But the present-day
+market for cathedrals is somewhat straitened, and a great ambition may
+nowadays easily neglect the prospective rewards of literature for those
+of steel-making.
+
+"Business success--not achieved in literature and the arts--comes first
+with us; in consequence, the ranks of those who follow these professions
+are robbed of the intellect that should contribute to them. This is the
+real way in which commercialism--our pursuit of business--affects our
+literature. It depletes, too, in the same way, the quality of men in our
+public life.
+
+"Charles G. Dawes has called my attention more than once to the falling
+off in caliber among men from whose ranks our politicians and public men
+are drawn. It is not that our present administration is so conspicuously
+weak; go to any of the Presidential conventions this year and note the
+falling off in quality among the politicians. In one generation the
+change has been startling. The sons of the men that loomed large in
+public life twenty-five years ago to-day are masters of business.
+
+"Business takes everything. We have had really magnificent financiers,
+such as the elder Morgan, who should be our Michael Angelo. I have known
+railroad executives who might have been distinguished novelists, and
+bankers who would have been great artists were the American people as
+obsessed with the painting of pictures and the making of statues as
+those of Europe once were.
+
+"In Michael Angelo's day public interest in solving problems in
+manufacture and transportation did not overshadow that in painting and
+sculpture. Leonardo in our day would be building railroads, digging
+canals, or inventing the aeroplane--and doing better, perhaps, at these
+things than any man living; he came perilously close to doing all of
+them in his own day.
+
+"Before you can bring our steel-founders and business men into
+literature you must make success in literature and its kindred arts
+esteemed as the greatest reward. As it is, I fear it is likely to be
+chiefly those who through lack of capacity, inclination, or robust
+health are unequal to the heat and burden of great business that will be
+left for the secondary callings, among which we must at present rank
+literature. It would be interesting, too, to consider to what extent
+this movement of men toward business rewards has been compensated for by
+the opportunities afforded to women in the field thus deserted; we
+certainly have many clever women cultivating it."
+
+"But what," I asked, "about materialism--not specifically commercialism,
+but materialism? Do you think that its evil effects are evident in
+contemporary literature?"
+
+"Materialism--you mean the philosophy--has quite a different effect on
+any literature--a poisonous, a baneful effect, rather than a merely
+harmful one," Mr. Spearman answered. "Can you possibly have, at any time
+or anywhere, great art without a great faith? Since the era of
+Christianity, at any rate, it seems to me that periods of faith, or at
+least periods enjoying the reflexes and echoes of faith, have afforded
+the really nourishing atmosphere for artistic development. Spirituality
+provides that which the imagination may seize upon for the substance of
+its creative effort; without spirituality the imagination shrivels, and
+the materialist, while losing none of his characteristic confidence,
+shrinks continually to punier artistic stature."
+
+Something in what Mr. Spearman had said reminded me of Henry Holt's
+criticisms of the modern magazines. So I asked Mr. Spearman what effect
+the development of the American magazine, with its high prices for
+serials and series of stories, had had upon our fiction. He answered:
+
+"Good, I think. Our fiction must compete in its rewards with those of
+business. One of the rewards of either--even if you put it, in the first
+case, the lowest--is the monetary reward, and the more substantial that
+can be made, the more chance fiction will have of holding up its head.
+
+"I have had occasion to watch pretty closely the development of the
+inclinations and ambitions of a number of average American boys--boys
+that have had fairly intimate opportunities to consider both literature
+and business. I have been startled more than once to find that as each
+of them came along and was asked what he wanted to do, the substance of
+his answer has been, 'Something to make money.'
+
+"If you question your own youthful acquaintances, you will receive in
+most cases, I dare say, similar answers. I am afraid if Giotto had been
+a Wyoming shepherd-boy he would want to be a steel-maker. Anything that
+tends to attract the young to the pursuit of literature as a calling
+strengthens our fiction, and the magazine should have credit for an
+'assist' in this direction. Don't forget, of course, that the magazine
+itself derives directly, by way of advertising, from business."
+
+"Do you think, then," I asked, "that our writers are producing work as
+likely to endure as that which is being produced in England?"
+
+Mr. Spearman smiled whimsically. "Your question suggests to me," he
+replied, "rather than any judgment in the case, the reflection that the
+average English writer has possessed over our average American writer
+the very great advantage of an opportunity to become really educated; to
+this extent their equipment is appreciably stronger than ours. If you
+will read the ordinary run of English fiction or play-writing and
+compare it with similar work of ours, you cannot fail to note the better
+finish in their work. And in expressing a conviction that our writers
+are somewhat handicapped as to this factor in their equipment, I do not
+indict them for wasted opportunities; I indict our own substantial
+failure in educational methods. For a generation or more we have
+experimented, and from the very first grade in our grammar-schools up to
+the university courses there have resulted confusion and ineptitude. I
+instance specifically our experimentation with electives and our
+widespread contempt for the classics. To attempt to master any of the
+arts and not to be intimately familiar with what the Greeks and the
+Romans have left us of their achievement--not to speak of those, to us,
+uncharted seas of medieval achievement in every direction following the
+twelfth century--is to make the effort under a distinct disadvantage.
+
+"The average English writer has had much more of this intimacy, or at
+least a chance at much more of it, than the average American writer. In
+the sphere of literary criticism I have heard Mr. Brownell speak of the
+better quality of even the anonymous English literary criticism so
+frequently to be found in their journals when compared with similar
+American work. There is only one explanation for these things, and it
+lies in the training. All of this not implying, in indirect answer to
+your question, that the English writer is to bear away the prize in the
+competition for literary permanence. American Samsons may, despite
+everything, burst their bonds; but if they win it will often be without
+what their teachers should have supplied.
+
+"Mr. Brownell, in his definitive essay on Cooper, in comparing the
+material at Balzac's hand with that at Cooper's, remarks on the fact
+that Cooper's background was essentially nature. 'Nothing, it is true,
+is more romantic than nature,' adds Mr. Brownell, 'except nature plus
+man. But the exception is prodigious.' Europe measures behind her
+writers almost three thousand years of man.
+
+"We have in this country no atmosphere of Christian tradition such as
+that which pervades Europe--English-speaking people parted with historic
+Christianity before they came here. But, willingly or unwillingly, the
+English and the Continental writers are saturated with this magnificent
+background of Christianity--they can't escape it. And what I note as
+striking evidence of the value to them of this brooding spirit of twenty
+European centuries is the fact that their very pagans choose Christian
+material to work with. Goethe himself, fine old pagan that he was,
+turned to Christian quarries for his _Faust_. The minor pagans turn in
+likewise, though naturally with slighter results. But to all of them,
+Christianity, paraphrasing Samson, might well say: 'If ye had not plowed
+with my heifer, ye had not read--your own riddle of longed-for
+recognition.'"
+
+"Why is it that the art of fiction is no longer taken as seriously as it
+was, for example, in the time of Sir Walter Scott?"
+
+"I don't know how seriously," countered Mr. Spearman, "you mean your
+question to be taken. It suggests that in the day of Walter Scott the
+field of novel-writing was still so new that only bolder spirits
+ventured into it. It was not a day when the many could attempt the novel
+with any assurances of success in marketing their wares. In consequence
+we got then the work of only big men and women. Pioneers--though not
+necessarily respectable--are a hardy lot.
+
+"Still--touching on your other question about the great American
+novel--if I wished to develop great musicians I should start every one
+possible at studying music, and I can't help thinking that the more
+there are among us who attempt novels the greater probability there will
+be for the production of a masterpiece. A man's mind is a mine. Neither
+he nor any one else knows what is in it. Possessing the property in fee
+simple, he has, of course, certain valuable proprietary rights. But the
+only way I know of to find out to a certainty just what lies within the
+property is persistently to tunnel and drift, or, as Mr. Brownell says,
+'to get out what is in you.' And I am in complete accord with him in the
+belief that temperament is the best possible endowment for a
+novelist--and temperament comes, if you are a Christian, from God; if a
+pagan, from the gods."
+
+Mr. Spearman returned to his theme of the effect of materialism on
+literature in the course of a discussion of the French novel of the day
+as compared to the novel of Zola and his imitators. He said:
+
+"I think the important thing for Zola was that his day coincided with a
+materialistic ascendency in the thought of France. He lived at a time
+admirably suited to a man of his type. Zola found a France weak and
+contemptible in its government, and in consequence a soil in which
+grossness could profitably be cultivated.
+
+"He was by no means a great artist; he was merely a writer writhing for
+recognition when he turned to filth. He took it up to commercialize it,
+to turn it into money and reputation. Men such as he are continually, at
+different times and in different countries, lifting their heads. But
+unless they are sustained by what chances to be a loose public attitude
+on questions of decency, they are clubbed into silence.
+
+"And just why should the exploitation of filth assume to monopolize the
+word 'realism'? To define precisely what realism should include and
+exclude would call for hard thinking. But it doesn't take much thought
+to reach the conclusion that mere annalists of grossness have no proper
+monopoly of the term. Grossness is no adequate foundation for a literary
+monument; it is not even a satisfactory corner-stone. The few writers
+one thinks of that constitute exceptions would have left a better
+monument without it.
+
+"But if you wish to realize how fortunate Zola was in coinciding with a
+period when the chief effort of the ruling spirits of France was to war
+on all forces that strove to conserve decency, try to imagine what sort
+of a reception _L'Assommoir_ would be accorded to-day by the tears of
+France stricken through calamity to its knees.
+
+"France is experiencing now realism of quite another sort from that
+propagated by Zola--a realism that is wringing the souls and turning
+the thoughts of a great and unhappy people back once more to the eternal
+verities; in these grossness never had a place.
+
+"And if you don't want to think in grossness, don't read in it; if you
+don't want to act in grossness, don't think in it. To exploit it is to
+exaggerate its proper significance in the affairs of life.
+
+"Twenty-five years ago an American writer set out as a Zola disciple to
+give us something American along Zola's lines. He made a failure of
+it--so complete that he was forced to complain that later efforts in
+which he returned to paths of decency were refused by editors and
+publishers. He had spoiled his name as an asset. If you are curious to
+note how far the bars have been let down in his direction in twenty-five
+years, contemplate what passes to-day among us with quite a footing of
+magazine and book popularity. It means simply that we are falling into
+those conditions of public indifference in which moral parasites may
+flourish. But if one were forced to-day to choose in France between the
+material taken up by Zola after his failure to cultivate successfully
+cleaner fields, and that chosen by Rene Bazin and the new and hopeful
+French school of spirituality, there could be no question that the
+latter would afford the better opportunity. And there can be no real
+question but that the exponents of grossness are likewise opportunists,
+looking first of all for a market for their names--as most men are
+doing. But some men, by reason of inclination or voluntary restraint,
+have restricted themselves in their choice of literary materials."
+
+Mr. Spearman has recently given much of his time to moving-picture work,
+with the result that his name is nearly as familiar to the devotees of
+the flickering screen as to habitual magazine readers. I asked him how
+the development of the moving picture is likely to affect literature. He
+replied:
+
+"What I can say on this point will perhaps be more directly of interest
+to writers themselves; the development of the moving picture broadens
+their market. It has, if you will let me put it in this way, increased
+the number of our theaters in their capacity for absorbing material for
+the drama a thousandfold. Inevitably a new industry developing with such
+amazing rapidity is still in the experimental stages, and those who know
+it best say its possibilities are but just beginning. What I note of
+interest to the literary worker is that men advanced and in authority
+in the production of pictures have reached this conclusion: Behind every
+good picture there must be a good story. The slogan to-day is 'The story
+is the thing.' And those close to the 'inside' of the industry say
+to-day to the fictionist: 'Hold on to your stories. Within a year or two
+they will command from the movies much higher prices than to-day,
+because the supply is fast becoming exhausted.'"
+
+It was in the course of his remarks about the rewards of literature that
+Mr. Spearman told an interesting story concerning Henry James and George
+du Maurier. He said:
+
+"The recent death of Henry James is bringing out many anecdotes
+concerning him. At the time of George du Maurier's death it was recalled
+that he had once given the material for _Trilby_ to Henry James with
+permission to use it; and the story ran that, resolving to use it
+himself, Mr. James returned the material to Du Maurier, who wrote the
+novel from it.
+
+"But I don't think it has ever appeared that the real reason why Henry
+James did not attempt _Trilby_ was that he possessed no musical sense;
+Mr. James himself told me this, and without a sense of music the
+material was useless to any one. I discussed the incident with him some
+ten years ago and he added, in connection with _Trilby_ and Du Maurier,
+other interesting facts.
+
+"_Trilby_ did not at first make a signal success in England. Its first
+big hit was made in _Harper's Magazine_. Not realizing the American
+possibilities, Mr. du Maurier, when offered by Harper & Brothers a
+choice between royalties and five thousand dollars outright for the book
+rights, took the lump sum as if it were descended straight from heaven.
+When the news of the extraordinary success of the book in this country
+reached him, he realized his serious mistake, and in the family circle
+there was keen depression over it. But further surprises were in store
+for him. To their eternal credit, the house of Harper &
+Brothers--honorable then as now--in view of the unfortunate situation in
+which their author had placed himself, voluntarily canceled the first
+contract and restored Du Maurier to a royalty basis. The fear in the
+English home then was that this arrangement would come too late to bring
+in anything. Not only, however, did the book continue to sell, but the
+play came on, and together the rights afforded George du Maurier a
+competency that banished further worry from the home."
+
+
+
+
+_THE NOVEL MUST GO_
+
+WILL N. HARBEN
+
+
+The novel is doomed. If the automobile, the aeroplane, and the moving
+picture continue to develop during the next ten years as they have
+developed during the last ten, people will cease almost entirely to take
+interest in fiction.
+
+It was not Henry Ford who told me this. Neither was it Mr. Wright, nor
+M. Pathe. The man who made this ominous prophecy about the novel is
+himself a successful novelist. He is Will N. Harben, author of _Pole
+Baker_, _Ann Boyd_, _The Desired Woman_, and many other widely read
+tales of life in rural Georgia.
+
+Although he is so closely associated with the Southern scenes about
+which he has written, Mr. Harben spends most of his time in New York
+nowadays. He justifies this course interestingly--but before I tell his
+views on this subject I will repeat what he had to say about this
+possible extinction of the novel.
+
+"You have read," he said, "of the tremendous vogue of _Pickwick Papers_
+when it was first published. No work of fiction since that time has been
+received with such enthusiasm.
+
+"In London at that time you would find statuettes of Pickwick, Mr.
+Winkle, and Sam Weller in the shop windows. There were Pickwick
+punch-ladles, Pickwick teaspoons, Pickwick souvenirs of all sorts.
+
+"Now, when you walk down Broadway, do you find any reminders of the
+popular novels of the day? You do not, except of course in the
+bookshops. But you do find things that remind you of contemporary taste.
+In the windows of stationers and druggists you find statuettes not of
+characters in the fiction of the day, but of Charlie Chaplin.
+
+"Of course the moving picture has not supplanted the novel. But people
+all over the country are becoming less and less interested in fiction.
+The time which many people formerly gave to the latest novel they now
+give to the latest film.
+
+"And the moving picture is by no means the only thing which is weaning
+us away from the novel. The automobile is a powerful influence in this
+direction.
+
+"Take, for instance, the town from which I come--Dalton, Georgia. There
+the people who used to read novels spend their time which they used to
+give to that entertainment riding around in automobiles. Sometimes they
+go on long trips, sometimes they go to visit their friends in near-by
+towns. But automobiling is the way in which they nowadays are accustomed
+to spend their leisure.
+
+"Naturally, this has its effect on their attitude toward novels. Years
+ago, when Dalton had a population of about three thousand, it had two
+well-patronized bookshops. Now it has a population of about seven
+thousand and no bookshops at all!
+
+"I suppose one of the reasons is that people live their adventures by
+means of the automobile, and therefore do not care so much about getting
+adventures from the printed page. But the chief reason is one of
+time--the fact is that people more and more prefer automobiling to
+reading.
+
+"Now, if the aeroplane were to be perfected--as we have every reason to
+believe it will be--so that we could travel in it as we now do in the
+automobile, what possible interest would we have in reading dry novels?
+It seems likely that in a hundred years we will be able to see clearly
+the surface of Mars--do you think that people will want to read novels
+when this wonderful new world is before their eyes?
+
+"The authors themselves are beginning to realize this. They are becoming
+more and more nervous. They are not the placid creatures that they were
+in Sir Walter Scott's day. They feel that people are not as interested
+in them and their works as they used to be. I doubt very much if any
+publisher to-day would be interested, for example, in an author who
+produced a novel as long as _David Copperfield_ and of the same
+excellence."
+
+"But do you think," I asked, "that the fault is entirely that of the
+public? Haven't the authors changed, too?"
+
+"I think that the authors have changed," said Mr. Harben, reflectively.
+"The authors do not live as they used to live.
+
+"The authors no longer live with the people about whom they write.
+Instead, they live with other authors.
+
+"Nowadays, an author achieves success by writing, we will say, about
+the people of his home in the Far West. Then he comes to New York. And
+instead of living with the sort of people about whom he writes, he lives
+with artists. That must have its effect upon his work."
+
+"But is not that what you yourself did?" I asked. "A New York
+apartment-house is certainly the last place in the world in which to
+look for the historian of _Pole Baker_!"
+
+Mr. Harben smiled. "But I don't live with artists," he said. "I try to
+live with the kind of people I write about. I resolved a long time ago
+to try to avoid living with literary people and to live with all sorts
+of human beings--with people who didn't know or care whether or not I
+was a writer.
+
+"So I have for my friends and acquaintances sailors, merchants--people
+of all sorts of professions and trade. And people of that sort--people
+who make no pretensions to be artists--are the best company for a
+writer, for they open their hearts to him. A writer can learn how to
+write about humanity by living with humanity, instead of with other
+people who are trying to write about humanity."
+
+"But at any rate you have left the part of the country about which you
+write," I said. "And wasn't that one of the things for which you
+condemned our hypothetical writer of Western tales?"
+
+"Not necessarily," said Mr. Harben. "It sometimes happens that an author
+can write about the scenes he knows best only after he has gone away
+from them. I know that this is true of myself.
+
+"It's in line with the old saws about 'distance lends enchantment' and
+'emotion remembered in tranquillity,' you know. I believe that Du
+Maurier was able to write his vivid descriptions of life in the Latin
+Quarter of Paris because he went to London to do it.
+
+"You see, I absorbed life in Georgia for many years. And in New York I
+can remember it and get a perspective on it and write about it."
+
+"Then," I said, "you would go to Georgia, I suppose, if you wanted to
+write a story about life in a New York apartment?"
+
+Mr. Harben thought for a moment. "No," he said, slowly, "I don't think
+that I'd go to Georgia to write about New York. I think that a novel
+about New York must be written in New York--while a novel about Dalton,
+Georgia, must be written away from Dalton, Georgia."
+
+"How do you account for that?" I asked.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Harben, "for one thing there is something bracing about
+New York's atmosphere that makes it easier to write when one is here.
+Once I tried to write a novel in Dalton, and I simply couldn't do it.
+
+"And the reason why a novel about New York must be written in New York
+is because you can't absorb New York as you might absorb Georgia, so to
+speak, and then go away and express it. New York is so thoroughly
+artificial that there is nothing about it which a writer can absorb.
+
+"New York hasn't the puzzles and adventures and surprises that Georgia
+has. Everybody knows about apartment-houses and skyscrapers and subways
+and elevators and dumb-waiters--there's nothing new to say about them.
+
+"I sometimes think that the reason why the modern novel about New York
+City is so uninteresting is because everybody tries to write about New
+York City. And their novels are all of one pattern--necessarily, because
+life in New York City is all of one pattern.
+
+"In bygone days this was not true of New York. For instance, Mr.
+Howells's novels about New York City were about a community in which
+people lived in real houses and had families and friends. In those days
+life in New York had its problems and surprises and adventures; it was
+not lived mechanically and according to a set pattern.
+
+"What I have said about the advisability of an author's leaving the
+scenes about which he is to write is not universally true. There are
+writers who do better work by staying in the place where the scenes of
+their stories are laid. For instance, Joel Chandler Harris did better
+work by staying in the South than he would have done if he had gone
+away."
+
+"But wasn't that because his negro folk-tales were a sort of 'glorified
+reporting' rather than creative work?" I asked.
+
+"No," said Mr. Harben; "they were creative work. Joel Chandler Harris
+remembered just the bare skeleton of the stories as the negro had told
+them to him. And he developed them imaginatively. That was creative
+work. And he did most of his writing, and the best of his writing, in
+the office of _The Constitution_."
+
+"In view of what you said about the difficulty of absorbing New York
+life," I suggested, "I suppose that, in your opinion, the great American
+novel will not be written about New York."
+
+"What do you mean by the great American novel?" asked Mr. Harben. "So
+far as I know there is no great English novel or great Russian novel."
+
+"I suppose that the term means a novel inevitably associated with the
+national literature," I said. "You cannot think of English literature
+without thinking of _Vanity Fair_, for instance. Certainly there is no
+American novel so conspicuously a reflection of our national life as
+that novel is of English life."
+
+"Well," said Mr. Harben, "it is difficult to think of American
+literature or of American life without thinking of the novels of William
+Dean Howells. But the great American novel, to use that term, would be
+less likely to come into being than the great English novel.
+
+"You see, the United States is not as compact as England. London, it may
+be said, is England; it has all the characteristics of England, and in
+the season all England may be met there."
+
+Mr. Harben is not in sympathy with the theories of some of our modern
+realists.
+
+"The trouble with the average realist," he said, "is that he doesn't
+believe that the emotions are real. As a matter of fact, the greatest
+source of material for the novelist is to be found in the emotional and
+spiritual side of human nature. If writers were more receptive to
+spiritual and emotional impressions they would make better novels. It is
+the soul of man that the greatest novels are written about--there is
+Dostoievski's _Crime and Punishment_, for example!"
+
+In spite of his criticisms of some of the methods of the modern
+realists, Mr. Harben believes strongly in the importance of one
+realistic dogma, that which has to do with detailed description.
+
+"Why is it that _Pepys's Diary_ is interesting to us?" he asked. "It is
+because of its detail.
+
+"But if Pepys had been a Howells--if he had been as careful in
+describing great things as he was in describing small things--then his
+_Diary_ would be ten times more valuable to us than it is. And so
+Howells's novels will be valuable to people who read them a thousand
+years from now to get an idea of how we live.
+
+"That is, Howells's novels will be valuable if people read novels in the
+years that are to come! Perhaps they will not be reading novels or
+anything else. For all we know, thought-transference may become as
+common a thing as telephony is now. And if this comes to pass nobody
+will read!"
+
+
+
+
+_LITERATURE IN THE COLLEGES_
+
+JOHN ERSKINE
+
+
+Brown of Harvard is no more. The play of that name may still be running,
+but of Harvard life it is now about as accurate a picture as _Trelawney
+of the Wells_ is of modern English life. At Harvard, and at all the
+great American universities, the dashing, picturesque young athlete is
+no longer the prevailing type of the undergraduate ideal.
+
+Of course, undergraduate athletics and undergraduate athletes
+persist--it would be a tragedy if they did not--but the type of youth
+that has been rather effectively denominated the "rah-rah boy" is
+increasingly difficult to find. His place has been taken, not by the
+"grind," the plodding, prematurely old student, caring only for his
+books and his scholastic record, but by a normal young man, aware that
+the campus is not the most important place in the world; aware, in
+fact, that the university is not the universe.
+
+This young man knows about class politics, but also about international
+politics; about baseball, but also about contemporary literature. He is
+much more a citizen than his predecessor of ten years since, less
+provincial, less aristocratic. And he not only enjoys literature, but
+actually desires to create it.
+
+The chief enthusiasm at Harvard seems to be the drama; indeed, the Brown
+of Harvard to-day must be represented not as a crimson-sweatered
+gladiator but as a cross between Strindberg and George M. Cohan. At
+Columbia--I have Prof. John Erskine's word for it--there has lately
+developed a genuine interest in--what do you suppose? Poetry!
+
+I interviewed the bulletin-board outside Hamilton Hall before I
+interviewed Professor Erskine, and it, too, surprised me. It was not the
+bulletin-board of my not altogether remote undergraduate days. It bore
+notices telling of a meeting of the "Forum for Religious Discussion," of
+an anti-militaristic mass-meeting, of a rehearsal of an Elizabethan
+drama. It was a sign of the times.
+
+Professor Erskine said that undergraduate ideals had greatly changed
+during the last few years. I asked him how this had come to pass.
+
+"Well," he replied, "I think that college life reflects the ordinary
+life of the world more closely than is usually believed. This is a day
+of general cultural and spiritual awakening. The college student is
+waking, just as everybody else is waking; like everybody else, he is
+becoming more interested in the great things of life. There is no reason
+why the college walls should shut him in from the hopes, ambitions, and
+problems of the rest of humanity.
+
+"It isn't only the boys that have changed--the parents have changed too.
+Time was when the father and mother wanted their son to go to college so
+that he could join a group of pleasant, nice-mannered boys of good
+family. Now they have a definite idea of the practical value of a
+college education, they send their son to college intelligently.
+
+"Also, the whole theory of teaching has changed. The purely Germanic
+system has been superseded by something more humane. The old idea of
+scholarship for its own sake is no longer insisted upon. Instead, the
+subjects taught are treated in their relation to life, the only way in
+which they can be of real interest to the students.
+
+"You will look in vain in the modern university for the old type of
+absent-minded, dry-as-dust professor. He has been superseded by the
+professor who is a man as well as a scholar. And naturally he approaches
+his subject and his classes in a different spirit from that of his
+predecessor.
+
+"We have a new sort of teacher of English. He is not now (as was once
+often the case) a retired clergyman, or a specialist recruited from some
+unliterary field. He is, in many cases, a creative artist, a dramatist,
+a novelist, or a poet.
+
+"When I was in college this was not generally true. Then such a
+professor as George Edward Woodberry or Brander Matthews was unique. Now
+the college wants poets and creative writers."
+
+These are Professor Erskine's actual words. I asked him to repeat his
+last statement and he said, apparently with no sense of the amazement
+which his words caused in me, "The college wants the poets!" The stone
+which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner.
+
+But, then, there are poets and poets. There is, for example, Prof.
+Curtis Hidden Page. There is also one John Erskine, author of _Actaeon
+and Other Poems_, and Adjunct Professor of English at Columbia
+University. There is also Prof. Alfred Noyes. But there are also some
+thousand or so poets in the United States who will be surprised to know
+that the college wants them. Academic appreciation of poets has
+generally consisted of a cordial welcome given their collected works two
+hundred years after their deaths.
+
+"English as a cultural finish," Professor Erskine continued, "has gone
+by the board. English is taught nowadays with as much seriousness as
+philosophy or history. Art in all its forms is considered as the history
+of the race, and treated seriously by the student as well as by the
+professor. To-day the students regard Shakespeare and Tennyson as very
+important men. They study them as in a course in philosophy they would
+study Bergson. Literature, philosophy, and history have been drawn
+together as one subject, as they should be."
+
+"What," I asked, "are some of the extra-curricular manifestations of
+literary interest among the students?"
+
+"In the first place," he answered, "the extraordinary amount of writing
+done by the students. It is not at all unusual now for a Columbia
+student to sell his work to the regular magazines. The student who
+writes for the magazines and newspapers is no longer a novelty.
+Randolph Bourne, who was recently graduated, contributed a number of
+essays to the _Atlantic Monthly_ during his junior and senior years.
+
+"Many of the students write for the newspapers. The better sort of
+newspaper humorists have had a strong influence on the undergraduate
+mind; they have shown the way to writing things that are funny but have
+an intellectual appeal. This has resulted in the production of some
+really excellent light verse. Also, Horace's stock has gone up.
+
+"During the last two years some remarkable plays have been handed into
+the Columbia University Dramatic Association. Not only were they
+serious, but also they were highly poetic.
+
+"And this," said Professor Erskine, "marks what I hope is the
+distinguishing literary atmosphere at Columbia. The trend of the plays
+written by Columbia students is strongly poetic. This is not true,
+perhaps, of the plays written by students of other institutions. The
+writers of plays want to write poetic plays, and--what is perhaps even
+more surprising--the other students do not consider poetic drama
+'high-brow stuff.'
+
+"Philolexian, the oldest of the Columbia literary societies, has been
+producing Elizabethan plays. These plays have been enthusiastically
+received, and the enthusiasm does not seem to show any signs of dying
+down. The students come to the study of these plays with a feeling of
+familiarity, for they have seen them acted."
+
+"Does this enthusiasm for literature show itself in the college
+magazine?" I asked.
+
+"It shows itself," answered Professor Erskine, "by the absence of a
+literary magazine. The literary magazine has completely collapsed. In
+small colleges, far away from the cities where the regular magazines are
+published, the college magazine is the only available outlet for the
+work of the students who can write. But here in New York the students
+know the condition of the literary market, and the more skilful writers
+among them do not care to give their writings to an amateur publication
+when they can sell them off the campus. So the _Columbia Monthly_ got
+only second-best material. The boys who really could write would not
+sacrifice their work by burying it in a college publication, so the
+_Columbia Monthly_ died.
+
+"The history of a literary club we have up here, called Boar's Head, is
+significant. It was started as a sort of revival of an older
+organization called King's Crown. At first the program consisted of an
+address at each meeting by some prominent writer. For a while the
+meetings were well attended, but gradually the interest died down.
+
+"At length I found what the trouble was--the boys wanted to do their own
+entertaining. Now work by the members is read at every meeting; there
+are no addresses by outsiders.
+
+"And here again the poetic trend of the undergraduate mind at Columbia
+is displayed. The Scribblers' Club, which consisted of short-story
+writers, is dead--there were not enough short-story writers to support
+it. And at the meetings of Boar's Head there have been read, during the
+past two years, only one or two short stories.
+
+"The boys bring plays and poems to the Boar's Head meetings, but not
+short stories. Last year most of the poems which were read were short
+lyrics. Toward the end of last year and during the present year longer
+poems have been read. They are not poems in the Masefield manner; they
+are modeled rather on Keats and Coleridge. This fact has interested me
+because the magazines, as a rule, have not been buying long poems. I
+was interested to see that William Stanley Braithwaite, in his excellent
+_Anthology of Magazine Verse and Year-Book of American Poetry_, calls
+attention to the increasing popularity of the longer poem.
+
+"Last year Boar's Head decided to bring out a little book containing the
+best of the poems that were read at its meetings. A number of
+subscribers at twenty-five cents each were procured, and _Quad Ripples_
+was published. It contained only short poems. This year Boar's Head has
+published _Odes and Episodes_, a collection of light verse by one of its
+former members, Archie Austin Coates. It soon will publish a collection
+of poems read at its meetings, and all these poems are long. Some of
+these poems are so good that it is a real sacrifice for the boys to have
+them printed in this book instead of in some magazine.
+
+"Of course, there were always 'literary men' at Columbia, but they were
+considered unusual. Now they no longer even form a class by themselves.
+One of our best writers of light verse is the captain of the baseball
+team.
+
+"Speaking of light verse and baseball," continued Professor Erskine,
+"there is a certain connection between the _Columbia Monthly_ and
+football, besides the obvious parallel which lies in the fact that both
+have ceased to exist. Some of the boys express eagerness to revive the
+college magazine, just as they express eagerness to revive football. But
+it is, I believe, merely a matter of pride with them. They are eager to
+have football and to have a college magazine; they are not so eager to
+contribute to the support of either institution.
+
+"One proof of the literary renascence of Columbia is that the essays
+written in the regular course of the work in philosophy and in English
+are better than ever before."
+
+"Do you believe," I asked, "that being in the city has had a good effect
+on literary activity among Columbia students?"
+
+He answered: "I do think so, decidedly. It has produced an extreme
+individualism and has given the boys enterprising minds. It is true that
+it has its disadvantages, it has made the student, so to speak,
+centrifugal, and has destroyed collegiate co-operation of the old sort.
+But it has produced an original, independent type of student.
+
+"The older type of college student was interested in football because he
+knew that people expected him to be interested in football. The
+Columbia student of to-day is interested in poetry, not because it is a
+Columbia tradition to be interested in poetry, but because his tastes
+are naturally literary."
+
+Several of the causes of this poetic renascence at Columbia had been
+mentioned in the course of our conversation, but Professor Erskine had
+ignored one of the most important of them. So I will mention it now. It
+is John Erskine.
+
+
+
+
+_CITY LIFE VERSUS LITERATURE_
+
+JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+
+"Well," said John Burroughs, "she doesn't seem to want us out here, so I
+guess we'll have to go in." So we left the little summer-house
+overlooking the Hudson and went into the bark-walled study.
+
+Now, "she" was a fat and officious robin, and her nest was in a corner
+of the summer-house just over my head, as I sat with the
+poet-naturalist. The nest was full of hungry and unprepossessing young
+robins, and the mother robin seemed to be annoyed in her visits to it by
+our talk. As we walked to the study, leaving to the robin family
+undisputed possession of the summer-house, I heard John Burroughs say in
+tones of mild indignation, half to himself and half to me:
+
+"I won't stand this another year! This is the third year she's taken
+possession of that summer-house, and next May she simply must build her
+nest somewhere else!"
+
+Nevertheless, I think that this impudent robin will rear her 1917 brood
+in John Burroughs's summer-house, if she wants to.
+
+When I walked up from the station to Riverby--John Burroughs's
+twenty-acre home on the west shore of the Hudson--I was surprised by the
+agility of my seventy-nine-year-old companion. He walked with the
+elastic step of a young man, and his eyes and brain were as alert as in
+the days when he showed Emerson and Whitman the wild wonders of the
+hills.
+
+"Living in the city," he said, "is a discordant thing, an unnatural
+thing. The city is a place to which one goes to do business; it is a
+place where men overreach one another in the fight for money. But it is
+not a place in which one can live.
+
+"Years ago, I think, it was possible to have a home in the city. I used
+to think that a home in Boston might possibly be imagined. But no one
+can have a home in New York in all that noise and haste.
+
+"Sometimes I am worried by the thought of the effect that life in the
+city will have on coming generations. All this grind and rush and roar
+of the Subway and the surface cars must have some effect on the children
+of New-Yorkers. And that effect cannot be good.
+
+"And what effect can it have on our literature? It might produce, I
+suppose, in the writer's mind, a sense of the necessity of haste, a
+passionate desire to get his effect as quickly as possible. But can it
+give him sharpness of intellect and keenness of aesthetic perception! I'd
+like to think so, but I can't. I don't see how literature can be
+produced in the city. Literature must have repose, and there is no
+repose in New York so far as I can see.
+
+"Of course I have no right to speak for other writers. Some people can
+find repose in the city--I can't. I hear that people write on the
+trains, on the omnibus, and in the Subway--I don't see how they do it!"
+
+"Have you noticed," I asked, as we left the lane and walked down a
+grassy slope toward the study, "that the city has not as yet set its
+mark on our literature?"
+
+"I think," said John Burroughs, "that much of our modern fiction shows
+what I may call a metropolitan quality; it seems made up of showy
+streets and electric light. But I don't know. I don't read much
+fiction. I turn more to poetry and to meditative essays. Some poets find
+beauty in the city, and they must, I suppose, find repose there. Richard
+Watson Gilder spent nearly all his life in a city and reflected the life
+of the city in his poems. And Edmund Clarence Stedman was thoroughly a
+poet of the city. I don't think that any of Emerson's poems smack of the
+city. They smack of the country, and of Emerson's study in the country,
+his study under the pines, where, as he wrote:
+
+        the sacred pine-tree adds
+    To the leaves her myriads.
+
+"Of the younger poets, John James Piatt has written beautifully of the
+city. He wrote a very fine poem called 'The Morning Street,' which
+appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ some years ago. In it he describes
+vividly the hush of early morning in a great city, when the steps of a
+solitary traveler echo from the walls of the sleeping houses. I don't
+suppose Piatt is known to many readers of this generation. He was a
+friend of Howells, and was the co-author with Howells of _Poems by Two
+Friends_, published in the early sixties. This was Howells's first
+venture."
+
+We were in the bark-walled study now, seated before the great stone
+fireplace, in which some logs were blazing. On the stone shelf I saw,
+among the photographs of Carlyle and Emerson and other friends of my
+host, a portrait of Whitman.
+
+"Your friend, Walt Whitman," I said, "got inspiration from the city."
+
+"Yes," said John Burroughs, "he got inspiration from the city, but you
+wouldn't call his poems city poetry. His way of writing wasn't
+metropolitan, you know; you might say that he treated the city by a
+country method. What he loved about the city was its people--he loved
+the throngs of men, he loved human associations.
+
+"But he was a born lover of cities, Whitman was. He loved the city in
+all its phases, mainly because he was such a lover of his kind, of the
+'human critter,' as he calls him. Whitman spent most of his life in the
+city, and was more at home there than in the country. He came to
+Brooklyn when he was a boy, and there he worked in a law-office, and as
+a printer and on the _Eagle_.
+
+"For a while, I remember, he drove a 'bus up and down Broadway when the
+driver, who was a friend of his, was sick. That's where he got the
+stuff he put in _The Funeral of an Old Omnibus-driver_. He put in it all
+the signs and catch-words of the 'bus-drivers."
+
+John Burroughs pointed his steady old hand at a big framed photograph on
+the wall. It is an unusual portrait of Walt Whitman, showing him seated,
+with his hands clasped, with a flaring shirt collar, like a sailor's.
+
+"Whitman," John Burroughs continued, "seems to be appealing more and
+more to young men. But in the modern Whitmanesque young poets I don't
+see much to suggest Whitman, except in form. They do clever things, but
+not elemental things, not things with a cosmic basis. Whitman, with all
+his commonness and nearness, reached out into the abysmal depths, as his
+imitators fail to do. I think Robert Frost has been influenced by
+Whitman. His _North of Boston_ is very good; it is genuine realism; it
+is a faithful, convincing picture of New England farm life. When I first
+saw the book I didn't think I'd read three pages of it, but I read it
+all with keen interest. It's absolutely true.
+
+"I used to see Whitman often when he and I were working in Washington.
+And he came up to see me here. When I was in Washington Whitman used to
+like to come up to our house for Sunday morning breakfast. Mrs.
+Burroughs makes capital pancakes, and Walt was very fond of them, but he
+was always late for breakfast. The coffee would boil over, the griddle
+would smoke, car after car would go jingling by, and no Walt. But a car
+would stop at last, and Walt would roll off it and saunter up to the
+door--cheery, vigorous, serene, putting every one in good humor. And how
+he ate! He radiated health and hopefulness. This is what made his work
+among the sick soldiers in Washington of such inestimable value. Every
+one who came into personal relations with him felt his rare, compelling
+charm.
+
+"Very few young literary men of Whitman's day accepted him. Stedman did,
+and the fact is greatly to his credit. Howells and Aldrich were repelled
+by his bigness. All the Boston poets except Emerson hesitated. Emerson
+didn't hesitate--unlike Lowell and Holmes, he kept open house for big
+ideas."
+
+I asked Mr. Burroughs what, in his opinion, had brought about the change
+in the world's attitude toward Whitman.
+
+"Well," he replied, looking thoughtfully into the radiant depths of the
+open fire, "when Whitman first appeared we were all subservient to the
+conventional standards of English literature. We understood and
+appreciated only the pretty and exact. Whitman came in his working-man's
+garb, in his shirt sleeves he sauntered into the parlor of literature.
+
+"We resented it. But the young men nowadays are more liberal. More and
+more Whitman is forcing on them his open-air standards. Science
+supplemented by the human heart gives us a bigger and freer world than
+our forefathers knew. And then the European acceptance of Whitman had
+had its effect. We take our point of view so largely from Europe. And a
+force like Whitman's must be felt slowly; it's a cumulative thing."
+
+"You believe," I said, "that Whitman is our greatest poet?"
+
+"Oh yes," he replied, "Whitman is the greatest poet America has
+produced. He is great with the qualities that make Homer and the classic
+poets great. Emerson is more precious, more intellectual. Whitman and
+Emerson are our two greatest poets."
+
+While we strolled over the pleasant turf and watched a wood-thrush
+resting in the cool of the evening above her half-built nest among the
+cherry blossoms, John Burroughs returned to the subject that we had
+discussed on our way from the station--the city's evil effect on
+literature.
+
+"Business life," he said, "is inimical to poetry. To write poetry you
+must get into an atmosphere utterly different from that of the city. And
+one of the greatest of all enemies of literature is the newspaper. The
+style of writing that the newspaper has brought into existence is as far
+as possible from art and literature. When you are writing for a daily
+paper, you don't try to say a thing in a poetic or artistic way, but in
+an efficient way, in a business-like way. There is no appeal to the
+imagination, no ideality. A newspaper is a noisy thing that goes out
+into the street and shouts its way into the attention of people.
+
+"If you are going to write poetry you must say to certain phases of the
+newspapers, 'Get thee behind me, Satan!' A poet can't be developing his
+gossiping faculty and turning everything hot off the griddle. The daily
+paper is a new institution, and it has come to stay. But it has bad
+manners, and it is the enemy of all meditation, all privacy, all things
+that make for great art.
+
+"It's the same way with nature and writing about nature. From nature we
+get not literature, but the raw material for literature. It is very
+important for us to remember that the bee does not get honey from the
+flowers; it makes honey from what it gets from the flowers. What it gets
+from the flowers is nothing but sweet water. The bee gets its sweet
+water, retires, thinks it over, and by a private process makes it into
+honey.
+
+"So many nature-writers fail to profit by the example of the bee. They
+go into the woods and come out again and write about their
+experience--but they don't give us honey. They don't retire and subject
+what they find in the woods to a private process. They don't give us
+honey; they give us just a little sweet water, pretty thoroughly
+diluted.
+
+"In my own work--if I may mention it in all humbleness--I have tried for
+years not to give the world just a bare record, but to flavor it, so to
+speak, with my own personality, as the bee turns the sweet water that it
+gets into honey by adding its own formic acid.
+
+"If I lived in the city I couldn't do any writing, unless I succeeded in
+obliterating the city from my consciousness. But I shouldn't try to
+force my standards on every one. Other men live in the cities and
+write--Carlyle did most of his work in London. But he lived a secluded
+life even in the city, and he had to have his yearly pilgrimage to
+Scotland."
+
+It is some years since John Burroughs has written poetry, although all
+his prose is clearly the work of a poet. And it is safe to say that
+better known than any of his intimate prose studies of the out-of-door
+world--better known even than _Wake Robin_ and that immortal _A Hunt for
+the Nightingale_ and _In Fresh Fields_--is one of his poems, _Waiting_,
+the poem that begins:
+
+    Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
+      Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
+    I rave no more 'gainst time or fate,
+      For lo! my own shall come to me.
+
+"I wrote _Waiting_," he said, "in 1862, when I was reading medicine in
+the office of a country physician. It was a dingy afternoon, and I was
+feeling pretty blue. But the thought came to me--I suppose I got it from
+Goethe or some of the Orientals, probably by way of Emerson--that what
+belonged to me would come to me in time, if I waited--and if I also
+hustled. So I waited and I hustled, and my little poem turned out to be
+a prophecy. My own has come to me, as I never expected it to come. The
+best friends I have were seeking me all the while. There's Henry Ford;
+he had read all my books, and he came to me--that great-hearted man, the
+friend of all the birds, and my friend.
+
+"The poem first appeared in the _Knickerbocker Magazine_. That magazine
+was edited by a Cockney named Kinneha Cornwallis. It ran long enough to
+print one of Cornwallis's novels, and then it died. I remember that the
+_Knickerbocker Magazine_ never paid me for _Waiting_, and the poem
+didn't attract any attention until Whittier printed it in his _Songs of
+Three Centuries_.
+
+"It has been changed and tampered with and had all sorts of things done
+to it. It was found among the manuscripts of a poet down South after his
+death, and his literary executor was going to print it in his book. He
+wrote to me and asked if I could show a date for it earlier than 1882. I
+said, 'Yes, 1862!' and that settled that matter.
+
+"There was a man in Boston that I wanted to kick! He wrote to me and
+asked if he could print _Waiting_ on a card and circulate it among his
+friends. I told him he could, and sent him an autographed copy to make
+sure he'd get it straight. He sent me a package of the printed cards,
+and I found that he had added a stanza to it--a religious stanza, all
+about Heaven's gate! He had left out the second stanza, and added this
+religious stanza. He was worried because God had been left out of my
+poem--poor God, ignored by a little atom like me!
+
+"When people ask me where I got the idea in it, I generally say that my
+parents were old-school Baptists and believed in foreordination, and
+that's the way that foreordination cropped out in me--it's a sort of
+transcendental version of foreordination. I think the poem is true--like
+attracts like; it's the way in which we are constituted, rather than any
+conscious factor, that insures success. It's that that makes our
+fortunes, it's that that is the 'tide in the affairs of men' that
+Shakespeare meant."
+
+A few rods from John Burroughs's riverside house a brown thrush is
+building her nest in a cherry-tree. She is a bird of individual ideas,
+and is thoroughly convinced that paper, not twigs and leaves, forms the
+proper basis for her work. It is pleasant to think of John Burroughs
+seated in his study communing with the memories of Whitman and Emerson,
+and his other great dead friends. But it is pleasanter to think of him,
+as I saw him, anxious and intent, his great white beard mingled with the
+cherry blossoms, as he strolled over to fix the paper base of the
+thrush's nest so that the wind could not destroy it.
+
+
+
+
+_"EVASIVE IDEALISM" IN LITERATURE_
+
+ELLEN GLASGOW
+
+
+What is the matter with American literature? There are many answers that
+might be made to this often-asked question. "Nothing" might be one
+answer. "Commercialism" might be another. But the answer given by Ellen
+Glasgow, whose latest successful novel of American manners and morals is
+_Life and Gabriella_, is "evasive idealism."
+
+I found the young woman who has found in our Southern States themes for
+sympathetic realism rather than picturesque romance temporarily
+resident, inappropriately enough, in a hotel not far from Broadway and
+Forty-second Street. And I found her to be a woman of many ideas and
+strong convictions. One strongly felt and forcibly expressed conviction
+was that the "evasive idealism" which is evident in so much of our
+popular fiction is in reality the chief blemish on the American
+character, manifesting its baleful influence in our political, social,
+and economic life. Miss Glasgow first used the term "evasive idealism"
+in an effort to explain why contemporary English novels are better than
+contemporary American novels.
+
+"Certainly," she said, "the novels written by John Galsworthy and the
+other English novelists of the new generation are better than anything
+that we are producing in the United States at the present time. And I
+think that the reason for this is that in America we demand from our
+writers, as we demand from our politicians, and in general from those
+who theoretically are our men of light and leading, an evasive idealism
+instead of a straightforward facing of realities. In England the demand
+is for a direct and sincere interpretation of life, and that is what the
+novelists of England, especially the younger novelists, are making. But
+what the American public seems to desire is the cheapest sort of sham
+optimism. And apparently our writers--a great many of them--are ready
+and eager to meet this demand.
+
+"You know the sort of book which takes best in this country. It is the
+sort of book in which there is not from beginning to end a single
+attempt to portray a genuine human being. Instead there are a number of
+picturesque and attractive lay figures, and one of them is made to
+develop a whimsical, sentimental, and maudlinly optimistic philosophy of
+life.
+
+"That is what the people want--a sugary philosophy, utterly without any
+basis in logic or human experience. They want the cheapest sort of false
+optimism, and they want it to be uttered by a picturesque, whimsical
+character, in humorous dialect. Books made according to this receipt
+sell by the hundreds of thousands.
+
+"I don't know which is the more tragic, the fact that a desire for this
+sort of literary pabulum exists, or the fact that there are so many
+writers willing to satisfy that desire. But I do know that the
+widespread enthusiasm for this sort of writing is the reason for the
+inferiority of our novels to those of England. And, furthermore, I think
+that this evasive idealism, this preference for a pretty sham instead of
+the truth, is evident not only in literature, but in every phase of
+American life.
+
+"Look at our politics! We tolerate corruption; graft goes on
+undisturbed, except for some sporadic attacks of conscience on the part
+of various communities. The ugliness of sin is there, but we prefer not
+to look at it. Instead of facing the evil and attacking it manfully we
+go after any sort of a false god that will detract our attention from
+our shame. Just as in literature we want the books which deal not with
+life as it is, but with life as it might be imagined to be lived, so in
+politics we want to face not hard and unpleasant facts, but agreeable
+illusions.
+
+"Nevertheless," said Miss Glasgow, "I think that in literature there are
+signs of a movement away from this evasive idealism. It is much more
+evident in England than in America, but I think that in the course of
+time it will reach us, too. We shall cease to be 'slaves of words,' as
+Sophocles said, and learn that the novelist's duty is to understand and
+interpret life. And when our novelists and our readers of novels
+appreciate the advisability of this attitude, then will the social and
+political life of the United States be more wholesome than it has been
+for many a year. The new movement in the novel is away from sentimental
+optimism and toward an optimism that is genuine and robust."
+
+"Then a novel may be at once optimistic and realistic?" I said. "That
+is not in accord with the generally received ideas of realism."
+
+"It is true of the work of the great realists," answered Miss Glasgow.
+"True realism is optimistic, without being sentimental."
+
+"What realists have been optimistic?" I asked.
+
+"Well," said Miss Glasgow, "Henry Fielding, one of the first and
+greatest of English realists, surely was an optimist. And there was
+Charles Dickens--often, it is true, he was sentimental, but at his best
+he was a robust optimist.
+
+"But the greatest modern example of the robust optimistic realist,
+absolutely free from sentimentality, is George Meredith. Galsworthy, who
+surely is a realist, is optimistic in such works as _The Freelands_ and
+_The Patricians_. And Meredith is always realistic and always
+optimistic.
+
+"The optimism I mean, the optimism which is a distinguishing
+characteristic of George Meredith's works, does not come from an evasion
+of facts, but from a recognition of them. The constructive novelist, the
+novelist who really interprets life, never ignores any of the facts of
+life. Instead, he accepts them and builds upon them. And he perceives
+the power of the will to control destiny; he knows that life is not what
+you get out of it, but what you put into it. This is what the younger
+English novelists know and what our novelists must learn. And it is
+their growing recognition of this spirit that makes me feel that the
+tendency of modern literature is toward democracy."
+
+"What is the connection between democracy and the tendency you have
+described?" I asked.
+
+"To me," Miss Glasgow answered, "true democracy consists chiefly in the
+general recognition of the truth that will create destiny. Democracy
+does not consist in the belief that all men are born free and equal or
+in the desire that they shall be born free and equal. It consists in the
+knowledge that all people should possess an opportunity to use their
+will to control--to create--destiny, and that they should know that they
+have this opportunity. They must be educated to the use of the will, and
+they must be taught that character can create destiny.
+
+"Of course, environment inevitably has its effect on the character, and,
+therefore, on will, and, therefore, on destiny. You can so oppress and
+depress the body that the will has no chance. True democracy provides
+for all equal opportunities for the exercise of will. If you hang a
+man, you can't ask him to exercise his will. But if you give him a
+chance to live--which is the democratic thing to do--then you put before
+him an opportunity to exercise his will."
+
+"But what are the manifestations of this new democratic spirit?" I
+asked. "Is not the war, which is surely the greatest event of our time,
+an anti-democratic thing?"
+
+"The war is not anti-democratic," Miss Glasgow replied, "any more than
+it is anti-autocratic. Or rather, I may say it is both anti-democratic
+and anti-autocratic. It is a conflict of principles, a deadly struggle
+between democracy and imperialism. It is a fight for the new spirit of
+democracy against the old evil order of things.
+
+"Of course, I do not mean that the democracy of France and England is
+perfect. But with all its imperfections it is nearer true democracy than
+is the spirit of Germany. We should not expect the democracy of our
+country to be perfect. The time has not come for that. 'Man is not man
+as yet,' as Browning said in _Paracelsus_.
+
+"The war is turning people away from the false standards in art and
+letters which they served so long. The highly artificial romantic novel
+and drama are impossible in Europe to-day. The war has made that sort
+of thing absolutely absurd. And America must be affected by this just as
+every other nation in the world is affected. To our novelists and to all
+of us must come a sense of the serious importance of actual life,
+instead of a sense of the beauty of romantic illusions. There are many
+indications of this tendency in our contemporary literature. For
+instance, in poetry we have the Spoon River Anthology--surely a sign of
+the return of the poet to real life. But the greatest poets, like the
+greatest novelists, have always been passionately interested in real
+life. Walt Whitman and Robert Browning always were realists and always
+were optimistic. Whitman was a most exultant optimist; he was optimistic
+even about dying.
+
+"Among recent books of verse I have been much impressed by Masefield's
+_Good Friday_. There is a work which is both august and sympathetic; Mr.
+Masefield's treatment of his theme is realistic, yet thoroughly
+reverent. There is one line in it which I think I never shall forget. It
+is, 'The men who suffer most endure the least.'
+
+"_Good Friday_ is a sign of literature's strong tendency toward reality.
+It seems to me to be a phase of the general breaking down of the
+barriers between the nations, the classes, and the sexes. But this
+breaking down of barriers is something that most of our novelists have
+been ignoring. Mary Watts has recognized it, but she is one of the very
+few American novelists to do so."
+
+"But this sort of consciousness is not generally considered to be a
+characteristic of the realistic novelist," I said. And I mentioned to
+Miss Glasgow a certain conspicuous American novelist whose books are
+very long, very dull, and distinguished only by their author's obsession
+with sex. He, I said, was the man of whom most people would think first
+when the word realist was spoken.
+
+"Of course," said Miss Glasgow, "we must distinguish between a realist
+and a vulgarian, and I do not see how a writer who is absolutely without
+humor can justly be called a realist. Consider the great realists--Jane
+Austen, Henry Fielding, Anthony Trollope, George Meredith--they all had
+humor. What our novelists need chiefly are more humor and a more serious
+attitude toward life. If our novelists are titanic enough, they will
+have a serious attitude toward life, and if they stand far enough off
+they will have humor.
+
+"I hope," Miss Glasgow added, "that America will produce better
+literature after the war. I hope that a change for the better will be
+evident in all branches of literary endeavor. We have to-day many
+novelists who start out with the serious purpose of interpreting life.
+But they don't interpret it. They find that it is easier to give the
+people what they want than to interpret life. Therefore this change in
+the character of our novels must come after the people themselves are
+awakened to a sense of the importance of real life, instead of life
+sentimentally and deceptively portrayed.
+
+"I think that our novels to-day are better than they were twenty-five
+years ago. Of course, we have no Hawthorne to-day, but the general
+average of stories is better than it was. We have so many accomplished
+writers of short stories. There is Katharine Fullerton Gerould. What an
+admirable artist she is! Mary E. Wilkins has written some splendid
+interpretations of New England life, and Miss Jewett reflected the mind
+and soul of a part of our country."
+
+
+
+
+_"CHOCOLATE FUDGE" IN THE MAGAZINES_
+
+FANNIE HURST
+
+
+Only a few years ago Fannie Hurst's name was unknown to most readers.
+But in a surprisingly short time Miss Hurst's short stories, especially
+her sympathetic and poignantly realistic studies of the life of the
+Jewish citizens of New York, have earned for her popular as well as
+critical approval.
+
+Fannie Hurst's fame has been won almost entirely through the most widely
+circulated weekly and monthly magazines. And yet when I talked to this
+energetic young woman the other morning in her studio in Carnegie Hall,
+I found her attitude toward the magazines anything but friendly. She
+accused them of printing what she called "chocolate-fudge" fiction. And
+she said it in a way which indicated that chocolate fudge is not her
+favorite dish.
+
+"I do not feel," she said, "that the American magazine is exerting
+itself toward influencing our fiction for the better. In most cases it
+is content to pander to the untutored public taste instead of attempting
+anything constructive.
+
+"The magazine public is, after all, open to conviction. But phlegm and
+commercialism on the part of most of our magazines lead them to give the
+public what it wants rather than what is good for it.
+
+"'If chocolate-fudge fiction will sell the magazine, give 'em chocolate
+fudge!' say editors and publishers. Small wonder that American
+fiction-readers continue bilious in their demands. Authors, meanwhile,
+who like sweet butter on their bread--it is amazing how many
+do--continue to postpone that Big Idea, and American fiction pauses by
+the wayside."
+
+"What is the remedy for this condition, Miss Hurst?" I asked. "Would
+matters be better if the writers did not have to comply with the demands
+of the magazines--if they had some other means of making a living than
+writing?"
+
+Miss Hurst did not answer at once. At length she said, thoughtfully:
+
+"It would seem that to escape this almost inevitable overlapping of
+bread and sweet butter the writer of short stories should not depend
+upon the sale of his work for a living, but should endeavor to provide
+himself with some other source of income.
+
+"Theoretically, at least, such a condition would eliminate the
+pot-boilers and safeguard the serious worker from the possibility of
+'misshaping' his art to meet a commercial condition.
+
+"I say theoretically because from my own point of view I cannot conceive
+of short-story writing as an avocation. The gentle art of short fiction
+consumes just about six hours of my day at the rate of from twenty to
+twenty-five days on a story of from eight to ten thousand words. And
+since I work best from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., I can think of no remunerative
+occupation outside those hours except cabaret work or night clerking."
+
+"What about present-day relationship between American publishers and
+authors?" I asked, "Do you think they are all they should be?"
+
+"American publishers and authors," Miss Hurst replied, "to-day seem to
+be working somewhat at cross-purposes, owing partially, I think, to the
+great commercial significance that has become attached to the various
+rights, such as motion-picture, serial, dramatic, book, etc., and which
+are to be reckoned with in the sale of fiction.
+
+"There is little doubt that authors have suffered at the hands of
+publishers on these various scores, oftener than not the publisher and
+not the author reaping the benefits accruing from the author's ignorance
+of conditions or lack of foresight.
+
+"The Authors' League has been formed to remedy just that evil--and it
+was a crying one.
+
+"On the other hand, it is certain that fiction-writers are better paid
+to-day than ever in the history of literature, and if a man is writing a
+seventy-five-dollar story there is a pretty good reason why.
+
+"I feel a great deal of hesitancy about the present proposed affiliation
+of authors with labor. There is so much to be said on both sides!
+
+"If the publisher represents capital and the author labor, my sympathies
+immediately veer me toward labor. But do they? That same question has
+recently been thrashed out by the actors, and they have gone over to
+labor. Scores of our most prominent American authors are of that same
+persuasion.
+
+"I cannot help but feel that for publisher and author to assume the
+relationship of employer and employee is a dangerous step. All forms of
+labor do not come under the same head. And I am the last to say that
+writing is not hard labor. But Cellini could hardly have allied himself
+with an iron-workers' guild. All men are mammals, but not all mammals
+are men!
+
+"It seems doubly unfortunate, with the Authors' League in existence to
+direct and safeguard the financial destiny of the author, to take a step
+which immediately places the author and publisher on the same basis of
+relationship that exists between hod-carrier and contractor.
+
+"As a matter of fact, I am almost wont to question the traditional lack
+of business acumen in authors. On the contrary, almost every successful
+author of my acquaintance not only is pretty well able to take care of
+himself, but owns a motor-car and a safety-deposit box at the same time.
+And I find the not-so-successful authors prodding pretty faithfully to
+get their prices up.
+
+"The Authors' League is a great institution and fills a great need. It
+was formed for just the purpose that seems to be prompting authors to
+unionize--to instruct authors in their rights and protect them against
+infringements.
+
+"Why unionize? Next, an author will find himself obliged to lay aside
+his pen when the whistle blows, and publishers will be finding
+themselves obliged to deal in open-shop literature."
+
+"And what effect are the moving pictures going to have on fiction?" I
+asked. "Will it be good or bad?"
+
+"Up to the present," Miss Hurst replied, "moving pictures have, in my
+opinion, been little else than a destructive force where American
+fiction is concerned. Picturized fiction is on a cheap and sensational
+level. Even classics and standardized fiction are ruthlessly defamed by
+tawdry presentation. With the mechanics of the motion picture so
+advanced, it is unfortunate that the photoplay itself is not keeping
+pace with that advancement.
+
+"Motion pictures are in the hands of laymen, and they show it. The
+scenario-writers, so-called 'staff writers,' have sprung up overnight,
+so to speak, and, from what I understand, when authors venture into the
+field they are at the mercy of the moving-picture director.
+
+"Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett could not endure to sit through the
+picture presentation of _Little Lord Fauntleroy_, so mutilated was it.
+
+"Of course, scenario-writing is a new art, and this interesting form of
+expression has hardly emerged from its infancy. Except perhaps in such
+great spectacles as 'The Birth of a Nation,' where, after all, the play
+is not the thing."
+
+I asked Miss Hurst if she agreed with those who believe that Edgar Allan
+Poe's short stories have never been surpassed. I found that she did not.
+
+"I should say," she said, "that since Poe's time we have had masters of
+the short story who have equaled him. Poe is, of course, the legitimate
+father of the American short story, and, coupled with that fact, was
+possessed of that kind of self-consciousness which enabled him to
+formulate a law of composition which has not been without its influence
+upon our subsequent short fiction.
+
+"But in American letters there is little doubt that in the last one
+hundred years the short story has made more progress than any other
+literary type. We are becoming not only proficient, but pre-eminent in
+the short story. I can think off-hand of quite a group of writers, each
+of whom has contributed short-story classics to our literature.
+
+"There are Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James (if we may claim him),
+Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, O. Henry, Richard
+Harding Davis, Jack London, and Booth Tarkington. And I am sure that
+there are various others whose names do not occur to me at this moment."
+
+"You mentioned O. Henry," I said. "Then you do not share Katharine
+Fullerton Gerould's belief that O. Henry's influence on modern fiction
+is bad?"
+
+"I decidedly disagree," said Miss Hurst, with considerable firmness,
+"with the statement that O. Henry wrote incidents rather than short
+stories, and is a pernicious influence in modern letters. That his
+structural form is more than anecdotal can be shown by an analysis of
+almost any of his plots.
+
+"But it seems pedantic to criticize O. Henry on the score of structure.
+Admitting that the substance of his writings does rest on frail
+framework, even sometimes upon the trick, he built with Gothic skill and
+with no obvious pillars of support.
+
+"Corot was none the less a landscape artist because he removed that
+particular brown tree from that particular green slope. O. Henry's
+facetiousness and, if you will, his frail structures, are no more to be
+reckoned with than, for instance, the extravagance of plot and the
+morbid formality we find in Poe.
+
+"The smiting word and the polished phrase he quite frankly subordinated
+to the laugh, or the tear with a sniffle. Just as soon call red woolen
+underwear pernicious!
+
+"The Henry James school has put a super-finish upon literature which, it
+is true, gives the same satisfying sense of wholeness that we get from a
+Greek urn. But, after all, chastity is not the first and last requisite.
+O. Henry loved to laugh with life! It was not in him to regard it with a
+Mona Lisa smile."
+
+Miss Hurst has confined her attention so closely to American
+metropolitan life that I thought it would be interesting to have her
+opinion as to the truth of the remark, attributed to William Dean
+Howells, that American literature is merely a phase of English
+literature. In reply to my question she said:
+
+"I agree with Mr. Howells that American literature up to now has been
+rather a phase of English literature. His own graceful art is an example
+of cousinship. American literature probably will continue to be an
+effort until our American melting-pot ceases boiling.
+
+"_David Copperfield_ and _Vanity Fair_ come from a people whose lineage
+goes back by century-plants and not by Mayflowers. Theodore Dreiser and
+Ernest Poole, sometimes more or less inarticulately, are preparing us
+for the great American novel. When we reach a proper consistency the
+boiling is bound to cease, and, just as inevitably, the epic novel must
+come."
+
+
+
+
+_THE NEW SPIRIT IN POETRY_
+
+AMY LOWELL
+
+
+Miss Amy Lowell, America's chief advocate and practitioner of the new
+poetry, would wear, I supposed, a gown by Bakst, with many Oriental
+jewels. And incense would be burning in a golden basin. And Miss Lowell
+would say that the art of poetry was discovered in 1916.
+
+But there is nothing exotic or artificial about Miss Lowell's appearance
+and surroundings. Nor did the author of _Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_
+express, when I talked to her the other day, any of the extravagant
+opinions which conservative critics attribute to the _vers libristes_.
+Miss Lowell talked with the practicality which is of New England and the
+serenity which is of Boston; she was positive, but not narrowly
+dogmatic; she is keenly appreciative of contemporary poetry, but she has
+the fullest sense of the value of the great heritage of poetical
+tradition that has come down to us through the ages.
+
+There is so much careless talk of _imagisme_, _vers libre_, and the new
+poetry in general that I thought it advisable to begin our talk by
+asking for a definition or a description of the new poetry. In reply to
+my question Miss Lowell said:
+
+"The thing that makes me feel sure that there is a future in the new
+poetry is the fact that those who write it follow so many different
+lines of thought. The new poetry is so large a subject that it can
+scarcely be covered by one definition. It seems to me that there are
+four definite sorts of new poetry, which I will attempt to describe.
+
+"One branch of the new poetry may be called the realistic school. This
+branch is descended partly from Whitman and partly from the
+prose-writers of France and England. The leading exponents of it are
+Robert Frost and Edgar Lee Masters. These two poets are different from
+each other, but they both are realists, they march under the same
+banner.
+
+"Another branch of the new poetry consists of the poets whose work shows
+a mixture of the highly imaginative and the realistic. Their thought
+verges on the purely imaginative, but is corrected by a scientific
+attitude of mind. I suppose that this particular movement in English
+poetry may be said to have started with Coleridge, but in England the
+movement hardly attained its due proportions. Half of literary England
+followed Wordsworth, half followed Byron. It is in America that we find
+the greatest disciple of Coleridge in the person of Edgar Allan Poe. The
+force of the movement then went back to France, where it showed clearly
+in Mallarme and the later symbolists. To-day we see this tendency
+somewhat popularized in Vachell Lindsay, although perhaps he does not
+know it. And if I may be so bold as to mention myself, I should say that
+I in common with most other imagists belong to this branch, that I am at
+once a fantasist and a realist.
+
+"Thirdly, we have the lyrico-imaginative type of poet. Of this branch
+the best example that I can call to mind is John Gould Fletcher. The
+fourth group of the new poets consists of those who are descended
+straight from Matthew Arnold. They show the Wordsworth influence
+corrected by experience and education. Browning is in their line of
+descent. Characteristics of their work are high seriousness,
+astringency, and a certain pruning down of poetry so that redundancy is
+absolutely avoided. Of this type the most striking example is Edwin
+Arlington Robinson."
+
+"Miss Lowell," I said, "the opponents of the new poetry generally attack
+it chiefly on account of its form--or rather, on account of its
+formlessness. And yet what you have said has to do only with the idea
+itself. You have said nothing about the way in which the idea is
+expressed."
+
+"There is no special form which is characteristic of the new poetry,"
+said Miss Lowell, "and of course 'formlessness' is a word which is
+applied to it only by the ignorant. The new poetry is in every form.
+Edgar Lee Masters has written in _vers libre_ and in regular rhythm.
+Robert Frost writes in blank verse. Vachell Lindsay writes in varied
+rhyme schemes. I write in both the regular meters and the newer forms,
+such as _vers libre_ and 'polyphonic prose.'
+
+"It is a mistake to suppose, as many conservative critics do, that
+modern poetry is a matter of _vers libre_. _Vers libre_ is not new, but
+it is valuable to give vividness when vividness is desired. _Vers libre_
+is a difficult thing to write well, and a very easy thing to write
+badly. This particular branch of the new poetry movement has been
+imitated so extensively that it has brought the whole movement into
+disrepute in the eyes of casual observers. But we must remember that no
+movement is to be judged by its obscure imitators. A movement must be
+judged by the few people at its head who make the trend. There cannot be
+many of them. In the history of the world there are only a few supreme
+artists, only a small number of great artists, only a limited number of
+good artists. And to suppose that we in America at this particular
+moment can be possessed of many artists worthy of consideration is
+ridiculous.
+
+"Undoubtedly the fact that a great number of people are engaged to-day
+in producing poetry is a great stimulus and helps to create a proper
+atmosphere for those men whose work may live. For it is a curious fact
+that the artistic names that have come down to us are those of men who
+have lived in the so-called great artistic periods, when many other men
+were working at the same thing."
+
+I asked Miss Lowell to tell something of this _vers libre_ which is so
+much discussed and so little understood. She said:
+
+"_Vers libre_ is based upon rhythm. Its definition is 'A verse form
+based upon cadence rather than upon exact meter.' It is a little
+difficult to define cadence when dealing with poetry. I might call it
+the sense of balance.
+
+"The unit of _vers libre_ is the strophe, not the line or the foot, as
+in regular meter. The strophe is a group of words which round themselves
+satisfactorily to the ear. In short poems this complete rounding may
+take place only at the end, making the poem a unit of a single movement,
+the lines serving only to give the slight up-and-down effect necessary
+to the voice when the poem is read aloud.
+
+"In longer poems the strophe may be a group of lines. Poetry being a
+spoken and not a written art, those not well versed in the various
+poetic forms will find it simpler to read _vers libre_ poems aloud,
+rather than to try to get their rhythm from the printed page. For people
+who are used only to the exact meters, the printed arrangement of a
+_vers libre_ poem is a confusing process. To a certain extent cadence is
+dependent upon quantity--long and short syllables being of peculiar
+importance. Words hurried over in reading are balanced by words on which
+the reader pauses. Remember, also, that _vers libre_ can be either
+rhymed or unrhymed."
+
+"One objection," I said, "that many critics bring up against unrhymed
+poetry is that it cannot be remembered."
+
+"I cannot see that that is of the slightest importance," Miss Lowell
+replied. "The music that we whistle when we come out of the theater is
+not the greatest music we have heard.
+
+    "Zaccheus he
+    Did climb a tree
+    His Lord to see
+
+is easily remembered. But I refuse to think that it is great poetry.
+
+"The enemies of _vers libre_," she continued, "say that _vers libre_ is
+in no respect different from oratory. Now, there is a difference between
+the cadence of _vers libre_ and the cadence of oratory. Lincoln's
+Gettysburg address is not _vers libre_, it is rhythmical prose. At the
+prose end of cadence is rhythmical prose; at the verse end is _vers
+libre_. The difference is in the kind of cadence.
+
+"Recently a writer in _The Nation_ took some of Meredith's prose and
+made it into _vers libre_ poems which any poet would have been glad to
+write. Then he took some of my poems and turned them into prose, with a
+result which he was kind enough to call beautiful. He then pertinently
+asked what was the difference.
+
+"I might answer that there is no difference. Typography is not relevant
+to the discussion. Whether a thing is written as prose or as verse is
+immaterial. But if we would see the advantage which Meredith's
+imagination enjoyed in the freer forms of expression, we need only
+compare these lyrical passages from his prose works with his own
+metrical poetry."
+
+I asked Miss Lowell about the charge that the new poets are lacking in
+reverence for the great poets of the past. She believes that the charge
+is unfounded. Nevertheless, she believes that the new poets do well to
+take the New England group of writers less seriously than conservative
+critics would have them take them.
+
+"America has produced only two great poets, Whitman and Poe," said Miss
+Lowell. "The rest of the early American poets were cultivated gentlemen,
+but they were more exactly English provincial poets than American poets,
+and they were decidedly inferior to the parent stock. The men of the New
+England group, with the single exception of Emerson, were cultivated
+gentlemen with a taste for literature--they never rose above that level.
+
+"No one can judge his contemporaries. We cannot say with certainty that
+the poets of this generation are better than their predecessors. But
+surely we can see that the new poets have more originality, more of the
+stuff out of which poetry is made, than their predecessors had, aside
+from the two great exceptions that I have mentioned."
+
+"What is the thing that American poetry chiefly needs?" I asked.
+
+"Well," said Miss Lowell, "I wish that there were a great many changes
+in our attitude toward literature. I wish that no man could expect to
+make a living by writing. I wish that the magazines did not pay for
+contributions--few of them do in France, you know. And I wish that the
+newspapers did not try to review books. But the thing that we chiefly
+need is informed and authoritative criticism.
+
+"We have very few critics, we have practically none who are writing
+separate books on contemporary verse. When I was writing my _French
+Poets_ I read twenty or thirty books on contemporary French poetry,
+serious books, written by critics who make a specialty of the poetry of
+their own day.
+
+"We have nothing like this in America. The men who write critical books
+write of the literature of a hundred years ago. No critical mind is
+bent toward contemporary verse. There are a few newspaper critics who
+pay serious attention to contemporary verse--William Stanley
+Braithwaite, O. W. Firkins, and Louis Untermeyer, for example--but there
+are only a few of them.
+
+"What is to be desired is for some one to be as interested in criticism
+as the poets are in poetry. It was the regularity of Sainte-Beuve's
+'Causeries du Lundi' that gave it its weight. What we want is a critic
+like that, who is neither an old man despairing of a better job nor a
+young man using his newspaper work as a stepping-stone to something
+higher. Of course, brilliant criticisms of poetry appear from time to
+time, but what we need is criticism as an institution.
+
+"After all," said Miss Lowell, in conclusion, "there are only two kinds
+of poetry, good poetry and bad poetry. The form of poetry is a matter of
+individual idiosyncrasy. It is only the very young and the very old, the
+very inexperienced or the numbed, who say, 'This is the only way in
+which poetry shall be written!'"
+
+
+
+
+_A NEW DEFINITION OF POETRY_
+
+EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
+
+
+At no time in the history of literature have the critics been able to
+agree upon a definition of poetry. And the recent popularity of _vers
+libre_ and _imagisme_ has made the definer's task harder than ever
+before. Is rhyme essential to poetry? Is rhythm essential to poetry? Can
+a mere reflection of life justly be called poetry, or must imagination
+be present?
+
+I put some of these questions to Edwin Arlington Robinson, who wrote
+_Captain Craig_, _The Children of the Night_, _The Town Down the River_,
+_The Man Against the Sky_ and _Merlin: A Poem_. And this man, whom
+William Stanley Braithwaite and other authoritative critics have called
+the foremost of American poets, this student of life, who was revealing
+the mysterious poetry of humanity many years before Edgar Lee Masters
+discovered to the world the vexed spirits that haunt Spoon River,
+rewarded my questioning with a new definition of poetry. He said:
+
+"Poetry is a language that tells us, through a more or less emotional
+reaction, something that cannot be said.
+
+"All real poetry, great or small, does this," he added. "And it seems to
+me that poetry has two characteristics. One is that it is, after all,
+undefinable. The other is that it is eventually unmistakable."
+
+"'Eventually'!" I said. "Then you think that poetry is not always
+appreciated in the lifetime of its maker?"
+
+Mr. Robinson smiled whimsically. "I never use words enough," he said.
+"It is not unmistakable as soon as it is published, but sooner or later
+it is unmistakable.
+
+"And in the poet's lifetime there are always some people who will
+understand and appreciate his work. I really think that it is impossible
+for a real poet permanently to escape appreciation. And I can't imagine
+anything sillier for a man to do than to worry about poetry that has
+once been decently published. The rest is in the hands of Time, and Time
+has more than often a way of making a pretty thorough job of it."
+
+"But why is it," I asked, "that a great poet so often is without honor
+in his own generation, where mediocrity is immediately famous?"
+
+"It's hard to say," said Mr. Robinson, thoughtfully regarding the
+glowing end of his cigar. "Many causes prevent poetry from being
+correctly appraised in its own time. Any poetry that is marked by
+violence, that is conspicuous in color, that is sensationally odd, makes
+an immediate appeal. On the other hand, poetry that is not noticeably
+eccentric sometimes fails for years to attract any attention.
+
+"I think that this is why so many of Kipling's worst poems are greatly
+overpraised, while some of his best poems are not appreciated. _Gunga
+Din_, which is, of course, a good thing in its way, has been praised far
+more than it deserves, because of its oddity. And the poem beginning
+'There's a whisper down the field' has never been properly appreciated.
+It's one of the very best of Kipling's poems, although it is marred by a
+few lapses of taste. One of his greatest poems, by the way, _The
+Children of the Zodiac_, happens to be in prose.
+
+"But I am always revising my opinion of Kipling. I have changed my mind
+about him so often that I have no confidence in my critical judgment.
+That is one of the reasons why I do not like to criticise my American
+contemporaries."
+
+"Do you think," I asked, "that this tendency to pay attention chiefly to
+the more sensational poets is as characteristic of our generation as of
+those that came before?"
+
+"I think it applies particularly to our own time," he replied. "More
+than ever before oddity and violence are bringing into prominence poets
+who have little besides these two qualities to offer the world, and some
+who have much more. It may seem very strange to you, but I think that a
+great modern instance of this tendency is the case of Robert Browning.
+The eccentricities of Browning's method are the things that first turned
+popular attention upon him, but the startling quality in Browning made
+more sensation in his own time than it can ever make again. I say this
+in spite of the fact that Browning and Wordsworth are taken as the
+classic examples of slow recognition. Wordsworth, you know, had no
+respect for the judgment of youth. It may have been sour grapes, but I
+am inclined to think that there was a great deal of truth in his
+opinion.
+
+"I think it is safe to say that all real poetry is going to give at some
+time or other a suggestion of finality. In real poetry you find that
+something has been said, and yet you find also about it a sort of nimbus
+of what can't be said.
+
+"This nimbus may be there--I wouldn't say that it isn't there--and yet I
+can't find it in much of the self-conscious experimenting that is going
+on nowadays in the name of poetry.
+
+"I can't get over the impression," Mr. Robinson went on, with a
+meditative frown, "that these post-impressionists in painting and most
+of the _vers libristes_ in poetry are trying to find some sort of short
+cut to artistic success. I know that many of the new writers insist that
+it is harder to write good _vers libre_ than to write good rhymed
+poetry. And judging from some of their results, I am inclined to agree
+with them."
+
+I asked Mr. Robinson if he believed that the evident increase in
+interest in poetry, shown by the large sales of the work of Robert Frost
+and Edgar Lee Masters and Rupert Brooke, indicated a real renascence of
+poetry.
+
+"I think that it indicates a real renascence of poetry," he replied. "I
+am sufficiently child-like and hopeful to find it very encouraging."
+
+"Do you think," I asked, "that the poetry that is written in America
+to-day is better than that written a generation ago?"
+
+"I should hardly venture to say that," said Mr. Robinson. "For one
+thing, we have no Emerson. Emerson is the greatest poet who ever wrote
+in America. Passages scattered here and there in his work surely are the
+greatest of American poetry. In fact, I think that there are lines and
+sentences in Emerson's poetry that are as great as anything anywhere."
+
+I asked Mr. Robinson whether he thought the modern English poets were
+doing better work than their American contemporaries. At first he was
+unwilling to express an opinion on this subject, repeating his statement
+that he mistrusted his own critical judgment. But he said:
+
+"Within his limits, I believe that A. E. Housman is the most authentic
+poet now writing in England. But, of course, his limits are very sharply
+drawn. I don't think that any one who knows anything about poetry will
+ever think of questioning the inspiration of _A Shropshire Lad_."
+
+"Would you make a similar comment on any other poetry of our time?" I
+asked.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Robinson, reflectively, "I think that no one will
+question the inspiration of some of Kipling's poems, of parts of John
+Masefield's _Dauber_, and some of the long lyrics of Alfred Noyes. But I
+do not think that either of these poets gives the impression of finality
+which A. E. Housman gives. But the way in which I have shifted my
+opinion about some of Rudyard Kipling's poems, and most of Swinburne's,
+makes me think that Wordsworth was very largely right in his attitude
+toward the judgment of youth. But where my opinions have shifted, I
+think now that I always had misgivings. I fancy that youth always has
+misgivings in regard to what is later to be modified or repudiated."
+
+Then I asked Mr. Robinson if he thought that the war had anything to do
+with the renascence of poetry.
+
+"I can't see any connection," he replied. "The only effect on poetry
+that the war has had, so far as I know, is to produce those five sonnets
+by Rupert Brooke. I can't see that it has caused any poetical event. And
+there's no use prophesying what the war will or will not do to poetry,
+because no one knows anything about it. The Civil War seems to have had
+little effect on poetry except to produce Julia Ward Howe's _Battle
+Hymn of the Republic_, Whitman's poems on the death of Lincoln, and
+Lowell's 'Ode.'"
+
+"Mr. Robinson," I said, "there has been much discussion recently about
+the rewards of poetry, and Miss Amy Lowell has said that no poet ought
+to be expected to make a living by writing. What do you think about it?"
+
+"Should a poet be able to make a living out of poetry?" said Mr.
+Robinson. "Generally speaking, it is not possible for a poet to make a
+decent living by his work. In most cases it would be bad for his
+creative faculties for a poet to make as much money as a successful
+novelist makes. Fortunately, there is no danger of that. Now, assuming
+that a poet has enough money to live on, the most important thing for
+him to have is an audience. I mean that the best poetry is likely to be
+written when poetry is in the air. If a poet with no obligations and
+responsibilities except to stay alive can't live on a thousand dollars a
+year (I don't undertake to say just how he is going to get it), he'd
+better go into some other business."
+
+"Then you don't think," I said, "that literature has lost through the
+poverty of poets?"
+
+"I certainly do believe that literature has lost through the poverty of
+poets," said Mr. Robinson. "I don't believe in poverty. I never did. I
+think it is good for a poet to be bumped and knocked around when he is
+young, but all the difficulties that are put in his way after he gets to
+be twenty-five or thirty are certain to take something out of his work.
+I don't see how they can do anything else.
+
+"Some time ago you asked me," said Mr. Robinson, "how I accounted for
+our difficulty in making a correct estimate of the poetry of one's own
+time. The question is a difficult one. I don't even say that it has an
+answer. But the solution of the thing seems to me to be related to what
+I said about the quality of finality that seems to exist in all real
+poetry. Finality seems always to have had a way of not obtruding itself
+to any great extent."
+
+
+
+
+_LET POETRY BE FREE_
+
+JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY
+
+
+Mrs. Lionel Marks--or Josephine Preston Peabody, to call her by the name
+which she has made famous--is a poet whose tendency has always been
+toward democracy. From _The Singing Leaves_, her first book of lyrics,
+to _The Piper_ (the dramatic poem which received the Stratford-on-Avon
+prize in 1910), and _The Wolf of Gubbio_, the poetic representation of
+events in St. Francis's life in her latest published book, she has
+chosen for her theme not fantastic and rare aspects of nature, nor the
+new answers of her own emotions, but things that are common to all
+normal mankind--such as love and religion. Also, without seeming to
+preach, she is always expressing her love for Liberty, Equality, and
+Fraternity, and although she never dwells upon the overworked term, she
+is as devoted an adherent of the brotherhood of man as was William
+Morris.
+
+Therefore I was eager to learn whether or not she held the
+opinion--often expressed during the past months--that poetry is becoming
+more democratic, less an art practised and appreciated by the chosen
+few. Also I wanted to know if she saw signs of this democratization of
+poetry in the development of free verse, or _vers libre_, as those who
+write it prefer to say, in the apparently growing tendency of poets to
+give up the use of rhyme and rhythm.
+
+"Certainly, poetry is steadily growing more democratic," said Mrs.
+Marks. "More people are writing poetry to-day than fifty years ago, and
+the appreciation of poetry is more general. Most poets of genuine
+calling are writing now with the world in mind as an audience, not
+merely for the entertainment of a little literary cult.
+
+"But I do not think that the _vers libre_ fad has any connection with
+this tendency, or with the development of poetry at all. Indeed, I do
+not think that the cult is growing; we hear more of it in the United
+States than we did a year or two ago, but that is chiefly because London
+and Paris have outworn its novelty, so the _vers libristes_ concentrate
+their energies on Chicago and New York.
+
+"I love some 'free verse.' Certainly, there may be times when a poet
+finds he can express his idea or his emotion better without rhyme and
+rhythm than with them. But verse that is ostentatiously free--free verse
+that obviously has been made deliberately--that is a highly artificial
+sort of writing, bears no more relation to literature than does an
+acrostic. Neither the themes nor the methods of those who call
+themselves _vers libristes_ are democratic; they are, in the worst sense
+of the word, the sense which came into use at the time of the French
+Revolution, aristocratic.
+
+"The canon of the _vers libristes_ is essentially aristocratic. They
+contend, absurdly enough, that all traditional forms of rhyme and rhythm
+constitute a sort of bondage, and therefore they arbitrarily rule them
+out. Not for them are the fetters that bound Shelley's spirit to the
+earth! Also they arbitrarily rule out what they call, with their
+fondness for labels, the 'sociological note,' 'didacticism,'
+'meanings'--any ideas or emotions, in fact, that may be called communal
+or democratic.
+
+"My own canon is that all themes are fit for poetry and that all methods
+must justify themselves. If I may be permitted to make a clumsy
+wooden-toy apothegm I would say that poetry is rhythmic without and
+within. If we turn Carlyle's sometimes cloudy prose inside out we find
+that it has a silver lining of poetry.
+
+"Neither can I understand why the _vers libristes_ believe that their
+sort of writing is new. Leopardi wrote what would be called good
+_imagisme_, although the _imagistes_ do not seem to be aware of the
+fact, and the theory that rhyme is undesirable in poetry has appeared
+sporadically time and again in the history of poetry. When Sir Philip
+Sidney was alive there were pedants who argued against the use of rhyme,
+and some of them confuted their own arguments by writing charming lyrics
+in the traditional manner. By dint of reading the fine eye-cracking
+print in the Globe Edition of Spenser I found that the author of the
+_Faerie Queen_ at one time took seriously Gabriel Harvey's arguments
+against rhyme and made an unbelievably frightful experiment in rhymeless
+verse--as bad as the parodists of our band-wagon.
+
+"The other day I asked some one in the Greek department of Harvard how
+to read a fragment of Sappho's that I wanted to teach my children to
+say. He said that no one nowadays could know how certain of Sappho's
+poems really should be read, because the music for them had been lost,
+and they were all true lyrics, meant to be sung and sung by Sappho to
+music of her own making. So you see that poets who avowedly make verses
+that can appeal only to the eye, successions of images, in which the
+position of the words on the page is of great importance, believe that
+they are the successors of poets whose work was meant not to be read,
+but to be sung, whose verses fitted the regular measure of music.
+
+"As I said before," said Mrs. Marks, smiling, "I have no objection to
+free verse when it is a spontaneous expression. But I do object to free
+verse when it is organized into a cult that denies other freedoms to
+other poets! And I object to the bigotry of some of the people who are
+trying to impose free verse upon an uninterested world.
+
+"And also I object to the unfairness of some of the advocates of free
+verse. When they compare free verse, and what I suppose I must call
+chained verse, they take the greatest example of unrhymed poetry that
+they can find--the King James version of the Book of Job, perhaps--and
+say: 'This is better than "Yankee Doodle." Therefore, free verse is
+better than traditional verse.'
+
+"You see," said Mrs. Marks, "the commonest thing there is, I may say the
+most democratic thing, is the rhythm of the heart-beat. A true poet
+cannot ignore this. At the greatest times in his life, when he is filled
+with joy or despair, or when he has a sense of portent, man is aware of
+his heart, of its beat, of its recurrent tick, tick; he is aware of the
+rhythm of life. When we are dying, perhaps the only sense that remains
+with us is the sense of rhythm--the feeling that the grains of sand are
+running, running, running out.
+
+"The pulse-beat is a tremendous thing. It is the basis of all that men
+have in common. All life is locked up in its regularly recurrent rhythm.
+And it is that rhythm that appears in our love-songs, our war-songs, in
+all the poetry of the human cycle from lullabies to funeral chants. In
+the great moments of life men feel that they must be sharing, that they
+must have something in common with other men, and so their emotions
+crystallize into the ritual of rhythm, which is the most democratic
+thing that there is.
+
+"Primitive poetry, poetry that comes straight from the hearts of the
+people, sometimes circulating for generations without being committed to
+paper, is strongly traditional. The convention of regular rhyme and
+rhythm is never absent. What could be more conventional and more
+democratic than the old ballad, with its recurrent refrain in which the
+audience joined? Centuries ago in the Scotch Highlands the
+ballad-makers, like the men who wrote the 'Come-all-ye's' in our
+great-grandfather's time, used regular rhyme and rhythm. And if these
+poets were not democratic, then there never was such a thing as a
+democratic poet."
+
+"But is it not true," I asked, "that Whitman is considered the most
+democratic poet of his day, and that his avoidance of rhyme and regular
+rhythm is advanced as proof of his democracy?"
+
+"Whitman," said Mrs. Marks, "was a democrat in principle, but not in
+poetic practice. He loved humanity, but he still waits to reach his
+widest audience because his verse lacks strongly stressed, communal
+music. The only poems which he wrote that really reached the hearts of
+the people quickly are those which are most nearly traditional in
+form--_When Lilacs Last in Dooryards Bloomed_ and _Captain, My Captain!_
+in which he used rhyme.
+
+"You see, nothing else establishes such a bond with memory as rhyme.
+
+"Did you ever think," said Mrs. Marks, suddenly, "that the truest
+exuberance of life always expresses itself rhythmically? Children are
+generous with the most intricate rhythms; they do not eat ice-cream in
+the disorderly grown-up way; they eat it in a pattern, turning the
+saucer around and around; they skit alternate flagstones or every third
+step on the stairway. Because they are overflowing with life they
+express themselves in rhythm. _Vers libre_ is too grown-up to be the
+most vital poetry; one of the ways in which the poet must be like a
+little child is in possessing an exuberance of life. His life must
+overflow.
+
+"The poets especially remember that Christ said, 'I am come that ye
+might have life and that ye might have it more abundantly.'
+
+"The rhythm of life," said Mrs. Marks, thoughtfully. "The rhythm of
+life. Who is conscious of his heart-beats except at the great moments of
+life, and who is unconscious of them then? The music of poetry is the
+witness of that intense moment when there is discovered to man or woman,
+when there reverberates through his brain and being, the tremendous
+rhythm and refrain whereby we live."
+
+Mrs. Marks has no patience with those who use the term "sociological" in
+depreciation of all poetry that is not intensely subjective and
+personal.
+
+"There are some critics," she said, "who would condemn the Lord's Prayer
+as 'sociological' because it begins 'Our Father' instead of 'My Father.'
+
+"The true poet must be a true democrat; he must, if he can, share with
+all the world the vision that lights him; he must be in sympathy with
+the people. The war has made a great many European poets aware of this
+fact. Think how the war changed Rupert Brooke, for instance? He had been
+a most aristocratic poet, making poems, some of which could only repel
+minds less in love with the fantastic. But he shared the great emotion
+of his countrymen, and so he wrote out of his deeply wakened, sudden
+simplicity those sonnets which they all can understand and must forever
+cherish.
+
+"The war will help make poetry. It has swept away the fads and cults
+from Europe; they find a peaceful haven in the United States, but they
+will not live as dogmas. In the democracy that is soon to come may all
+'isms' founder and lose themselves! And may all true freedoms come into
+their own, with the maker, his mind and his tools."
+
+
+
+
+_THE HERESY OF SUPERMANISM_
+
+CHARLES RANN KENNEDY
+
+
+"But, of course," said Charles Rann Kennedy, violently (he says most
+things rather violently), "you understand that the war's most important
+effect on literature was clearly evident long before the war began!"
+
+I did not understand this statement, and said so. Thereupon the author
+of _The Servant in the House_ and _The Terrible Meek_ said:
+
+"We have so often been told that great events cast their shadows before,
+that the tremendous truth of the phrase has ceased to impress us. The
+war which began in August, 1914, exercised a tremendous influence over
+the mind of the world in 1913, 1912, 1911, and 1910. The great wave of
+religious thought which swept over Europe and America during those years
+was caused by the approach of the war. The tremendous pacifist
+movement--not the weak, bloodless pacifism of the poltroon, but the
+heroic, flaming pacifism of the soldier-hearted convinced of sin--was a
+protest against the menacing injustice of the war; it was the world's
+shudder of dread.
+
+"The literature of the first decade of the twentieth century was more
+thoroughly and obviously influenced by the war than will be that of the
+decade following. Think of that amazing quickening of the conscience of
+the French nation, a quickening which found expression in the novels of
+Rene Bazin, the immortal ballads of Francis Jammes, and in the work of
+countless other writers! These people were preparing themselves and
+their fellow-countrymen for the mighty ordeal which was before them.
+
+"It is blasphemous to say that the war can only affect things that come
+after it; to say that is to attempt to limit the powers of God. There
+are, of course, some writers who can only feel the influence of a thing
+after it has become evident; after they have carefully studied and
+absorbed it. But there are others, the manikoi, the prophetic madmen,
+who are swayed by what is to happen rather than by what has happened.
+I'm one of them.
+
+"The war held me in its spell long before the German troops crossed
+Belgian soil. I wrote my _The Terrible Meek_ by direct inspiration from
+heaven in Holy Week, 1912.
+
+"I put that in," said Mr. Kennedy (who looks very much like Gilbert K.
+Chesterton's _Man-alive_), suddenly breaking off the thread of his
+discourse, "not only because I know that it is the absolute truth, but
+because of the highly entertaining way in which it is bound to be
+misinterpreted.
+
+"New York's dramatic critics, the Lord Chamberlain of England, the
+military authorities of Germany and Great Britain--all these people were
+charmingly unanimous in finding _The Terrible Meek_ blasphemous,
+villainous, poisonous. Even the New York MacDowell Club, after two
+stormy debates, decided to omit all mention of _The Terrible Meek_ from
+its bulletin. Perhaps this was not entirely because the play was
+'sacrilegious'; the club may possibly have been influenced by the fact
+that its author was a loud person with long hair, who told unpleasant
+truths in reputable gatherings. And copies of the published book of the
+play, which were accompanied by friendly letters from the author, were
+refused by every monarch now at war in Europe!
+
+"But in 1914 and 1915 _The Terrible Meek_ suddenly found, to its own
+amazement, that it had become a respectable play! Its connection with
+the present war became evident. It has been the subject of countless
+leading articles; it has been read, and even acted, in thousands of
+churches. On the occasion of the first production of the despised play
+in New York City, my wife and I received a small pot of roses from a
+girls' school which we sometimes visit. In due time this was planted by
+the porch of our summer home in Connecticut. This year--three years only
+after its planting--the rose-tree covers three-quarters of the big
+porch, and last summer it bore thousands of blooms. Now these things are
+a parable!
+
+"No, the Lord does not have to wait until the beginnings of mighty wars
+for them vitally to influence the literature of the world. Upon some of
+us He places the burden of the coming horror years before.
+
+"Although I am and always have been violently opposed to war, I cannot
+help observing what this war has already commenced to do for literature.
+It is killing Supermanism--and I purposely call it by that name to
+distinguish it from the mere actual doctrine that Nietzsche may or may
+not have taught. The damnable heresy, as it historically happened among
+us, was already beginning to influence very badly most of our young
+writers. Clever devilism caught the trick of it too easily. Now, heresy
+is sin always and everywhere; and this heresy was a particularly black
+and deadly kind of sin. It ate into the very heart of our life.
+
+"And yet there was a reason, almost an excuse, for the power which the
+Superman idea got over the minds of writers after Bernard Shaw's first
+brilliant and engaging popularization of it. And the excuse is that
+Supermanism, with its emphasis on strength and courage and life, was to
+a great extent a healthy and almost inevitable reaction from the maudlin
+milk-and-water sort of theology and morals that had been apologetically
+handed out to us by weak-kneed religious teachers.
+
+"We had too much of the 'gentle Jesus' of the Sunday-school. In our maze
+of evil Protestantisms, we had lost sight of the real Son of God who is
+Jesus Christ. We had lost the terrible and lovely doctrine of the wrath
+of the Lamb.
+
+"And so a great many writers turned to Supermanism with a shout of
+relief. They were sick of milk and water, and this seemed to be strong
+wine. But Supermanism is heresy, and it rapidly spread over the world,
+most perniciously influencing all intellectual life.
+
+"And there were so many things to help Supermanism! There was the
+general acceptance of the doctrine of biological necessity as an
+argument for war--Bernhardi actually used that phrase, I believe--the
+idea that affairs of the spirit are determined exteriorly. There was the
+acceptance of various extraordinary interpretations of Darwin's theory
+of evolution! Every little man called himself a scientist, and took his
+own little potterings-about very seriously. Everything had to be a
+matter of observation, these little fellows said; they would believe
+only what they saw. They didn't know that real scientists always begin
+_a priori_, that real scientists always know the truth first and then
+set about to prove it.
+
+"Well, all these people helped the heresy of Supermanism along. But the
+people who helped it along chiefly were the apologetic Christians, who
+should have combated it with fire and sword. It was helped along by the
+sort of Christian who calls himself 'liberal' and 'progressive,' the
+sort of Christian who says, 'Of course, I'm not orthodox.' When any one
+says that to me, I always answer him in the chaste little way which so
+endears me to my day and generation: 'Hell, aren't you? I hope I am!'
+
+"This sort of so-called Christian helps Supermanism in two ways. In the
+first place, the 'progressive' Christians are great connoisseurs of
+heresy, they simply love any new sort of blasphemous philosophy, whether
+it comes from Germany or Upper Tooting. They love to try to assimilate
+all the new mad and wicked ideas, and graft them on Christianity. I
+suppose it's their idea of making the Lord Jesus Christ up to date and
+attractive. They love to try to engrave pretty patterns on the Rock of
+Ages. And Supermanism was to them a new and alluring pattern.
+
+"Of course a Supermanism might be worked out on strictly Christian
+lines, the Superman in that case being the Christ. But that is not the
+way in which the theory has historically worked out. No! Mr. Superman as
+we've actually known him in the world recently is the Beast that was
+taken, and with him the false prophets that wrought miracles before him,
+with which he had deceived them that had received the mark of the Beast
+and them that had worshiped his image. And these, in the terrible
+symbolism of St. John, you will remember, got fire and brimstone for
+their pains! As now!
+
+"Then there was your Christian Supermanism that tried to get up a weak
+little imitation of the wrath of the Lamb. This was your bastard by
+theatricality and popularity out of so-called muscular Christianity. Not
+the virile 'muscular Christianity' of Charles Kingsley, mind you--a
+power he won almost alone, by blood and tears; but the 'safe' thing of
+the after generation, the 'all things to all men'--when success was well
+assured. This is your baseball Christianity, the Christianity of the
+'punch,' of the piled-up heap of dollars, of the commercially counted
+'conversions' and the rest of the blasphemies! Christ deliver us from
+it, if needs be, even by fire!
+
+"Well, Supermanism cast its shadow over all forms of literary
+expression. The big and the little mockers all fell under its
+spell--they had their fling at Christianity in their novels, their
+plays, their poems. In the novel Supermanism was evident not so much in
+direct attacks on Christianity as in a brutal and pitiless realism.
+Perhaps some of this hard realism was a natural reaction from the
+eye-piping sentimentality of some of the Victorian writers. But most of
+it was merely Supermanism in fiction--pessimism, egotism, fatalism,
+cruelty.
+
+"One thing to be said for the Christian Scientists, the Mental Healers,
+the New Thought people generally, is that they did a real service
+through all this bad time by refusing to recognize any such heresy as
+biological determination as applied to things spiritual. They really did
+teach man's freedom up there in the heavens where he properly belongs.
+They refused to be bound by the earth, and all the appearances and the
+exterior causes thereof. Their Superman, if they ever used the phrase,
+was at least the Healer, the spirit spent for others, not for self.
+
+"If you were to ask me what were the war's most conspicuous effects on
+literature just at present, I would say conviction of sin, repentance
+and turning to God. There can be no suggestion of Supermanism in our
+literature now. We have rediscovered the Christian Virtues. If a man
+writes something about blond-beasting through the world for his own
+good, all we have to do is to stick up in front of his eyes a crucifix.
+For the world has seen courage and self-abnegation of the kind that
+Christ taught--it has seen men throw their lives away. The war has
+shown the world that the man who will throw away his life is braver and
+stronger and greater than the man who plunges forward to safety over the
+lives of others. The world has learned that he who loses his life shall
+gain it.
+
+"The war has thrown a clear light upon Christianity, and now all the
+little apologetic 'progressive' Christians see that the world had never
+reacted against orthodox Christianity as such, but only against the
+bowelless unbelief which masqueraded as Christianity. We have had so
+many ministers who talked about Christ as they would have talked about
+kippered herrings--even with less enthusiasm. But now any one who speaks
+or writes about Christianity after this will have to know that he has to
+do with something terribly real.
+
+"Of course, during the war the only people who can write about it are
+those who are in the red-hot period of youth. Young men of genius write
+in times of stress. The war forces genius to flower prematurely--that is
+how we got the noble sonnets of Rupert Brooke.
+
+"And after the war will come to the making of literature the man who has
+conquered pain and agony. And that is the real Superman, the Christian
+Superman, the Superman who has always been the normal ideal of the
+world. Carlyle's Superman was nearer the truth than was Nietzsche's, for
+Carlyle's Superman idea was grounded in courage and sacrifice and love;
+his Superman was some one worth fighting for and dying for. And the war
+is showing us that this is the true Superman, if we want to save the
+world for nobler ends.
+
+"And the war, I believe, will do away with the tommy-rotten objection to
+'message' in literature. Don't misunderstand me. Of course, we all
+object to the stupid 'story with a purpose' in the Sunday-school sense
+of that phrase. We don't want literature used as a sugar-coating around
+the illuminating lesson that God loves little Willie because he fed the
+dicky-birds and didn't say 'damn'! Yet we want literature to awake again
+and be as always in the great days--a message. Literature must be a
+direct message from the heart of the author to the heart of the world.
+The _Prometheus Vinctus_ was such a message. So also the _Antigone_. All
+Greek drama was.
+
+"All the little literary and artistic cults are dead or dying. The idea
+of literature as a thing distinct from life is dead. Writers can never
+again think of themselves as a race separate from the rest of humanity.
+All the artificial Bohemias have been destroyed, and can never again
+exist; for now at last the new world is about to dawn. Christ is coming.
+
+"And yet this war has made evident the importance of literature. It has
+made words real again. It has shown that men cannot live forever on a
+lie, written or spoken. God has come upon us like a thief in the night,
+and He has judged by our words. Some of us He has turned to madness and
+the vain babblings of heathendom. I am no wild chauvinist; though a man,
+English-born, it gives me no joy to speak of Germans as Huns, and to
+heap up hate and indignation against them. Nor in my wildest flights of
+romanticism can I dream that an England yet possessing Lord Northcliffe
+and the present Government can be all that God might call delightful.
+Mr. Superman has invaded England right enough, that I sadly know; and
+Prussianism is not all in Potsdam.
+
+"Yet it is significant, in view of the Superman's birthplace, in view of
+the fact that the German people have very largely accepted his doctrine
+and ideal, that the men who stand for speech among them, in their public
+manifestoes have been delivered over unto confusion and a lie. The
+logician has been illogical, the literary artist rendered without form
+and void. Their very craft has turned to impotence and self-destruction.
+I repeat, this is no happiness to me. Rather, I think of the Germany I
+have loved, and I weep for the pity of it all. I am no friend of kings
+and kaisers and bankers and grocers and titled newspaper editors, that I
+should make their bloodiness mine. But I cannot help but see the sign of
+God written across the heavens in words of living fire.
+
+"As I said in _The Terrible Meek_: 'There is great power in words. All
+the things that ever get done in the world, good or bad, are done by
+words.'
+
+"What we'll have to rediscover is that literature, like life, begins
+with the utterance of a word. And until people realize once again that a
+word is no mere dead thing buried in a dictionary, but the actual,
+awful, wonderful Life of God Himself, we shall neither have nor deserve
+to have a literature!"
+
+
+
+
+_THE MASQUE AND DEMOCRACY_
+
+PERCY MACKAYE
+
+
+The community masque, _Caliban by the Yellow Sands_, is primarily
+intended to honor the memory of Shakespeare on the three-hundredth
+anniversary of his death. But its significance goes further than the
+purpose of commemoration. Mr. Percy MacKaye, the author, tells me that
+he sees his masque as part of a movement which shall bring poetry to the
+service of the entire community, which shall make poetry democratic, in
+the best sense of the word, and that the result of this movement will be
+to create conditions likely to produce out of the soil of America a
+great renascence of the drama.
+
+Mr. MacKaye undoubtedly is the busiest poet in the United States of
+America. When he talked to me about the significance of the community
+masque, rehearsals of the various groups that are to take part in it
+were going on all over the city. Every few minutes he was called away
+to confer with some of the directors of the masque, or some of the
+actors taking part in it. For a while Mr. John Drew was with us, talking
+of his appearance, in the character of Shakespeare, in epilogue. Mr.
+Robert Edmund Jones, the designer of the inner scenes, brought over some
+new drawings, and there were telephone conversations about music and
+costumes and other important details of the monster production.
+
+"The fact," said Mr. MacKaye, "that the masque is a poem primarily
+intended to be heard rather than to be read, is itself a movement toward
+the earlier and more democratic uses of poetry. Poetry appeals
+essentially to the ear, and is an art of the spoken word, yet, on
+account of our conditions of life, the written word is considered
+poetry.
+
+"This was not true in Shakespeare's time. And in the sort of work that I
+am doing is shown a return to the old ideal. A masque is a poem that can
+be visualized and acted. First of all it must be a poem, otherwise it
+cannot be anything but a more or less warped work of art.
+
+"With much of the new movement in the theater I am heartily in sympathy;
+but the movement seems to me one-sided. A large part of it has to do
+with visualization. Emphasis is laid on the appeal to the eye rather
+than the appeal to the ear, because the men of genius, like Gordon
+Craig, who have been leaders in the movement, have been interested in
+that phase of dramatic presentation.
+
+"Now I think that this one-sidedness is regrettable. When Gordon Craig
+called his book on dramatic visualization _The Art of the Theater_ he
+was wrong. He should have called it 'An Art of the Theater.'
+
+"These men have neglected part of the human soul. They have forgotten
+that the greatest part of the appeal of a drama is to the ear. The ear
+brings up the most subtle of all life's associations and connotations.
+By means of the ear the motions and ideas are conjured up in the mind of
+the audience.
+
+"Now, while the new movement in the theater is visual in character, the
+new movement in poetry is, so to speak, audible. The American poets are
+insisting more and more on the importance of the spoken word in poetry,
+as distinct from its shadow on the printed page. Whether they write
+_vers libre_ or the usual rhymed forms, they appreciate the fact that
+they must write poems that will be effective when read aloud. Surely
+this is a wholesome movement, likely to tend more and more toward
+definite dramatic expression on the part of the poets, whether to
+audiences through actors on the stage, or to audiences gathered to hear
+the direct utterances of the poets themselves.
+
+"This being so, the stage tending more toward visualization, and poetry
+tending more and more toward the spoken word, where shall we look for
+the co-ordinating development? I think that we shall find it in the
+community masque. The community masque draws out of the unlabored and
+untrammeled resources of our national life its inspiration and its
+theme. It requires our young poets to get closely in touch with our
+national life, with our history and with contemporary attitudes and
+ideals. To do this it is first of all necessary to have the poetic
+vision. The great need of the day is of the poet trained in the art of
+the theater.
+
+"The pageant and the masque offer the ideal conditions for the rendering
+of poetry. The poet who writes the lyric may or may not ordinarily be
+the one to speak it. In the masque the one who speaks the poem is the
+one chosen to do so because of his special fitness for the task. I have
+chosen my actors for the Shakespeare masque with special reference to
+their ability to speak poetry."
+
+"But what has this to do," I asked, "with making poetry more
+democratic?"
+
+"For one thing," Mr. MacKaye answered, "it gives the poet a larger
+audience. People who never read poetry will listen to poetry when it is
+presented to them in dramatic form. I have found that the result of the
+presentation of a community masque is to interest in poetry a large
+number of people who had hitherto been deaf to its appeal. In St. Louis,
+when I started a masque, that queer word with a 'q' in it was understood
+by a comparatively small number. But after the masque was produced
+nearly every high-school boy and girl in the town was writing masques.
+
+"No one can observe the progress of the community masque without seeing
+that it is surely a most democratic art form. I read my St. Louis masque
+before assemblies of ministers, in negro high schools, before clubs of
+advertising-men, at I. W. W. meetings--before men of all conditions of
+life and shades of opinion. It afforded them a sort of spiritual and
+intellectual meeting-place, it gave them a common interest. Surely that
+is a democratic function.
+
+"The democracy of the masque was forcefully brought to my attention
+again at the recent dinner by Otto Kahn to the Mayor's Honorary
+Committee for the New York Shakespeare Celebration. After James M. Beck
+had made a speech, Morris Hillquit, also a member of the committee,
+arose and addressed the company. He pointed out more clearly than I have
+heard it done before that in this cause extremes of opinion met, that
+art was producing practical democracy.
+
+"And yet," said Mr. MacKaye, hastily, "the masque stands for the
+democracy of excellence, not the democracy of mediocrity. What is art
+but self-government, the harmonizing of the elements of the mind? There
+can be no art where there is no discipline, there can be no art where
+there is not a high standard of excellence.
+
+"As I said," he continued, "the original appeal of poetry was to the ear
+as well as to the eye. In the days when poetry was a more democratic art
+than it has been in our time and that of our fathers, the poet spoke his
+poems to a circle of enthralled listeners. The masque is spoken through
+many mouths, but it might be spoken or chanted by the bard himself.
+
+"There has never before been so great an opportunity for the revival of
+the poetic drama. Ordinarily when a poetic drama is presented the cast
+has been drawn from actors trained in the rendition of prose. Inevitably
+the tendency has been for them to give a prose value to the lines of
+poetry. In selecting a cast for a masque, special attention is given to
+the ability of the actors to speak poetry, so the poem is presented as
+the poet intended.
+
+"It may be that the pageant and masque movement represents the full
+flowering of the renascence of poetry which all observers of
+intellectual events have recognized. But these movements are perennial;
+I do not like to think of a renascence of poetry because I do not think
+that poetry has been dead. I feel that it is desirable for the poets to
+become aware of the opportunities presented to them by the masque, the
+opportunities to combine the art of poetry with the art of the theater,
+and thus put poetry at the service of mankind.
+
+"I have felt that the Poetry Society of America, an organization whose
+activities certainly are stimulating and encouraging to every friend of
+the art, might serve poetry better if its members were to place more
+emphasis on creation and less on criticism. At their meetings now
+criticism is the dominant note. Poems written by the members are read
+aloud and criticized from the floor. This is excellent, in its place,
+but its effect is to lay stress on the critical function of the poet,
+which, after all, is not his main function. What the members of the
+Poetry Society should do is to seek co-operatively to create something.
+And for this the masque offers them a golden opportunity.
+
+"The flowering of poetry is a thing of infinite variety. There must be
+variety in a masque if the masque is to continue to be a worthy and
+popular art form. Standardization would be fatal to the masque, and I
+have stood out against it with all the power I possess. The masque and
+the pageant must not degenerate into traveling shows, done according to
+a fixed receipt. There must be the vision in it, and when the people see
+the vision they respond marvelously."
+
+Percy MacKaye is the son of Steele MacKaye, the author of _Hazel Kirke_
+and other popular plays. From the very beginning of his literary career
+his chief ambition has seemed to be to bring about a closer
+_rapprochement_ between poetry and the drama.
+
+When Mr. MacKaye was graduated from Harvard, in 1897, there were in that
+university no courses, technical or otherwise, in the modern drama. The
+official acceptance of his own commencement part _On the Need of
+Imagination in the Drama of To-day_ was the first official sanction of
+the subject, which was commented upon by the _Boston Transcript_ as
+something unprecedented in the annals of university discussion,
+especially of Harvard. It was not until seven or eight years had passed
+that Prof. George P. Baker began his courses in dramatic technique.
+
+The development of the pageant and the masque has been for years the
+object of Mr. MacKaye's tireless endeavors. He has spoken of the masque
+as "the potential drama of democracy." Two years ago in St. Louis he had
+his first technical opportunity on a large scale to experiment in
+devising this sort of communal entertainment. There, during five
+performances, witnessed by half a million people, some seven thousand
+citizens of St. Louis took part in his masque, in association with the
+pageant by Thomas Wood Stevens.
+
+"The outgoing cost of the St. Louis production," said Mr. MacKaye, "was
+$122,000; the income, $139,000. The balance of $17,000 has been devoted
+to a fund for civic art. If these seem large sums, we must look back to
+the days of the classic Greek drama and remember that the cost of
+producing a single play by Sophocles at Athens was $500,000.
+
+"The St. Louis production was truly a drama of, for, and by the people,
+a true community masque. _Caliban by the Yellow Sands_ is a community
+masque, given as the central popular expression of some hundreds of
+supplementary Shakespearian celebrations.
+
+"I call this work a masque, because it is a dramatic work of symbolism,
+involving in its structure pageantry, poetry, and the dance. But I have
+not thought to relate its structure to a historic form; I have simply
+sought by its structure to solve a problem of the art of the theater.
+That problem is the new one of creating a focus of dramatic technique
+for the growing but groping movement vaguely called 'pageantry,' which
+is itself a vital sign of social evolution--the half-desire of the
+people not merely to remain receptive to a popular art created by
+specialists, but to take part themselves in creating it; the
+desire,--that is, of democracy consistently to seek expression through
+a drama of and by the people, not merely for the people.
+
+"Six years ago, after the pageant-masque of the city of Gloucester,
+Massachusetts, I wrote, in _Scribner's Magazine_, an article in which I
+said that I found in the three American pageant-masques which I had seen
+recently, the Gloucester Pageant, the Masque at Aspet, and the
+California Redwood Festival, the expression of community spirit focused
+by co-operating artists in dramatic form. I said then, what I feel even
+more strongly after my work with the St. Louis Pageant and the
+Shakespearian Masque, that pageantry is poetry for the masses.
+
+"The parade of Election Day, the processions of Antics and Horribles on
+the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving Day, the May-Queen rituals of
+children--these make an elemental appeal to every one. What is this
+elemental appeal? Is it not the appeal of symbolism, the expression of
+life's meanings in sensuous form? Crude though it may be, pageantry
+satisfies an elemental instinct for art, a popular demand for poetry.
+This instinct and this demand, like other human instincts and demands,
+may be educated, refined, developed into a mighty agency of
+civilization. Refinement of this deep, popular instinct will result
+from a rational selection in correlation of the elements of pageantry.
+Painting, dancing, music, and sculpture (the last as applied to classic
+groupings) are appropriately the special arts for selecting those
+elements, and drama is the special art of correlating them.
+
+"The form of pageantry most popular and impressive in appeal as a fine
+art is that of the dramatic pageant, or masque. It is not limited to
+historic themes. All vital modern forces and institutions of our nation
+might appropriately find symbolic expression in the masque.
+
+"And in this would be seen the making of art democratic. Thus would the
+art of poetry and the art of the drama be put at the service of mankind.
+Artistic gifts, which now are individualized and dispersed, would be
+organized to express the labors and aspirations of communities,
+reviving, for the noblest humanism of our own times, the traditions of
+Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Jonson, and Inigo Jones. The development of the
+art of public masques, dedicated to civic education, would do more than
+any other agency to provide popular symbolic form and tradition for the
+stuff of a noble national drama. The present theaters cannot develop a
+public art, since they are dedicated to a private speculative business.
+The association of artists and civic leaders in the organization of
+public masques would tend gradually to establish a civic theater, owned
+by the people and conducted by artists, in every city of the nation.
+
+"I expressed these ideas," said Mr. MacKaye, "some years ago, before the
+pageant movement had reached its present pitch of popularity. All my
+experiences since that time have given me a firmer conviction that the
+masque is the drama of democracy, and I believe that the chief value of
+the Shakespearian masque is as a step forward in the progress of the
+co-operative dramatic and poetic expression of the people.
+
+"_Caliban by the Yellow Sands_ will be given at the City College Stadium
+May 23d, 24th, 25th, 26th, and 27th. After its New York performance it
+will be available for production elsewhere on a modified scale of stage
+performance. After June 1st it is planned that a professional company,
+which will co-operate with the local communities, will take the masque
+on tour.
+
+"The subtitle of _Caliban by the Yellow Sands_ is _A Community Masque of
+the Art of the Theater_, _Devised and Written to Commemorate the
+Tercentenary of the Death of Shakespeare_. The dramatic-symbolic motive
+of the masque I have taken from Scene 2 of Act I of _The Tempest_, where
+Prospero says:
+
+                            It was mine art
+    When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape
+    The pine and let thee out.
+
+"The art of Prospero I have conceived as the art of Shakespeare in its
+universal scope--that many-visioned art of the theater, which age after
+age has come to liberate the imprisoned imagination of mankind from the
+fetters of brute force and ignorance; that same art which, being usurped
+or stifled by groping part-knowledge, prudery, or lust, has been botched
+in its ideal aims, and has wrought havoc, hypocrisy, and decadence.
+Caliban is in this masque that passionate child-curious part of us all,
+groveling close to his origin, yet groping up toward that serener plane
+of pity and love, reason, and disciplined will, on which Miranda and
+Prospero commune with Ariel and his spirits.
+
+"The theme of the masque--Caliban seeking to learn the art of
+Prospero--is, of course, the slow education of mankind through the
+influences of co-operative art--that is, of the art of the theater in
+its full social scope. This theme of co-operation is expressed earliest
+in the masque through the lyric of Ariel's Spirits taken from _The
+Tempest_; it is sounded, with central stress, in the chorus of peace
+when the kings clasp hands on the Field of the Cloth of Gold; and, with
+final emphasis, in the gathering together of the creative forces of
+dramatic art in the Epilogue.
+
+"So I have tried to make the masque bring that message of co-operation
+which I think all true art should bring. And the masque is the form
+which seems to me destined to bring about this desired co-operation, to
+bring back, perhaps, the conditions which existed in the spacious days
+of the great Greek drama. The growth in popularity of masques and
+pageants is preparing the way for a new race of poet dramatists, of
+poets who will use their knowledge of the art of the theater to
+interpret the people to themselves. And out of this new artistic
+democracy will come, let us hope, our new national poetry and our new
+national drama."
+
+THE END
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+
+The duplicate book title and chapter titles have been removed. Also the
+following misprints have been corrected:
+
+    TOC: put in "Tippecanoe" without a hyphen (in "Tippecanoe
+    County, Indiana")
+
+    TOC: "Mackaye" changed to "MacKaye", as in all other instances
+    ("Percy Mackaye was born in New York City...")
+
+    p. 56: "countinent" changed to "continent" ("Yet in their time
+    these men set the whole countinent in a roar.")
+
+    p. 75: period is added after the middle initial W (ROBERT W.
+    CHAMBERS)
+
+    p. 78: period is added the following sentence: The most
+    imaginative and fantastic romances must have their basis in real
+    life.
+
+    p. 107: put in "dive-keeper" with a hyphen (no other instance in
+    the text)
+
+    p. 112: put in "soulless" without a hyphen (no other instances
+    in the text)
+
+    p. 178: opening double quote changed to single quote ('If ye had
+    not plowed with my heifer....)
+
+    p. 218: put in "catch-words" with a hyphen (no other instances
+    in the text)
+
+    p. 243: put in "motion-picture" with a hyphen (no other
+    instances in the text)
+
+    p. 247: put in "off-hand" with a hyphen ("I can think off-hand
+    of quite a group of writers....")
+
+    p. 283: put in "Dooryards" without a hyphen ("When Lilacs Last
+    in Dooryards Bloomed")
+
+    p. 293: put in "everywhere" without a hyphen ("heresy is sin
+    always and everywhere;")
+
+    p. 294: "Of couse" changed to "Of course" ("Of course, I'm not
+    orthodox.")
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Literature in the Making, by Various
+
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