Part 3

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'?"