Part 6

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.