Part 10

Yet this Williams, during his long years in Congress, passed in Washington as an intellectual. Cloak-room and barroom gossip credited him with a profound education and very subtle parts. Such ideas, when they prevail in Washington, perhaps need and deserve no investigation; the same astute correspondents who propagated this one later coupled the preposterous Coolidge with Pericles. But maybe there was some logic in it, after all; Williams, at some time in the past, had been to Heidelberg and knew more or less German and French. That accomplishment, in a Southern politician, was sufficient to set the capital by the ears. So the Williams legend grew, and toward the end it rose to the dignity of a myth, like that of Dr. Taft’s eminence as a constitutional lawyer. Even the learned hero’s daily speeches on Teutonic mythology during the war did not drag him out of Valhalla himself. The press-gallery gaped and huzzahed.

But the Heidelberg chapter in Mr. Dickson’s book leaves the myth rather sick. It starts off, indeed, with a disconcerting couplet:

In Germany ’twas very clear He’d leave the rapiers for beer.

And what follows is distressingly silent about cultural accretions. Young Williams’ main business at Heidelberg, it appears, was putting the abominable Prussian _Junker_ in their place. They naturally assumed that their American fellow-student could be thrown about with impunity. Encountering him on the sidewalk, they tried, in the manner made historic by the Creel Press Bureau, to shove him off. Presently one of these fiends in human form came melodramatically to grief. Williams challenged him, and “according to Prussian ethics,” named the weapons--pistols. A shock, indeed! The monster expected sabers, at which he was diabolically expert, but Williams didn’t intend “to go home with his face all slashed, and have folks jeer at him for getting his jaw cut on a beer glass.” Facing cold lead, the Prussian was so scared that he fired prematurely. Worse, he so lost his wits that he addressed his antagonist as Freiherr Williams. That antagonist fired into a snowbank. Some time later, having thus got all that was of worth out of Heidelberg, he came sailing home, “full even then of his ultimate intention: he’d go in for politics, he’d become a professional politician.”

A professional politician he remained for thirty years, always in office, first in the House and then in the Senate. His start was slow--he practiced law for a time--, but once he was on the payroll he stayed there until old age was upon him. For a number of years he was Democratic leader in the House; twice he got the party vote for the Speakership. In the Senate he was technically in the ranks, but on great occasions he stepped forward. His specialties, toward the end, were the divine inspiration of Woodrow Wilson, the incomparable valor of the American soldier, the crimes of the Kaiser, the superiority of the “Anglo-Saxon,” the godlike bellicosity of the Confederate gentry, and the nature and functions of a gentleman. On these themes he discoursed almost every afternoon. The boys in the press-gallery liked him, and he got plenty of space. Always his rodomontades brought forth dark hints about his esoteric learning, and the news that, next after Henry Cabot Lodge, he was the most cultivated man in the Senate.

Mr. Dickson prints extracts from some of his speeches. Criticism, obviously, is an art not yet in practice in Mississippi, even among the literati. I used to read him in the _Congressional Record_; he was really not so bad as Dickson makes him out. His career, seen in retrospect, seems to have been mainly a vacuum. Once or twice he showed a certain fine dignity, strange in a Southern politician. He opposed the Prohibition frenzy. He voted against the bonus. But usually, despite his constant talk of independence, he ran with the party pack. For years a professional Jeffersonian, he brought his career to a climax by giving lyrical support to the Emperor Woodrow, who heaved the Jeffersonian heritage into the ash-can. During the La Follette uproar he was one of the most vociferous of the witch-burners. He passed out in silence, regretted for his rustic charm, but not much missed.

I commend “An Old-Fashioned Senator” to all persons who are interested in the struggle of the South to throw off its cobwebs. Both as document and as work of art the book makes it very plain why Mississippi’s place in that struggle is in the last rank.

8

_The Father of Service_

THE LIFE STORY OF ORISON SWETT MARDEN, by Margaret Connolly. New York: _The Thomas Y. Crowell Company_. [The American Mercury, February, 1926.]

If Dr. Martin had not written his first book, said Frank A. Munsey one day, he would have been a millionaire. By Munseyan standards, praise could go no higher--and Munsey knew his man, for they were fellow-waiters in a Summer hotel back in the ’70’s and kept up friendly exchange until Marden’s death in 1924. Both sprang from the hard, inhospitable soil of Northern New England, both knew dire poverty in youth, both got somewhere a yearning for literary exercises, and both cherished an immense respect for the dollar. But though fate brought them together when they were young, they chose different paths later on. Munsey, with “Afloat in a Great City,” “The Boy Broker,” and other inspirational master-works behind him, abandoned beautiful letters for the stock market, and eventually gathered in so much money that he could afford to butcher great newspapers in sheer excess of animal spirits, as lesser men butcher clay pigeons. Marden, going the other way, abandoned the hotel business, for which he seemed to have had genius, for the pen, and devoted the last thirty years of his life to composition.

His bibliography runs to a hundred or more volumes--a colossal, relentless, overwhelming deluge of bilge. All his books have the same subject: getting on in the world. That was, to him, the only conceivable goal of human aspiration. Day in and day out, for three decades, he preached his simple gospel to all mankind, not only in his books, but also in countless pamphlets, in lectures, and in the pages of his magazine, _Success_. Its success was instantaneous and durable. His first book, “Pushing to the Front,” rapidly went through a dozen editions, and was presently translated into a dozen foreign languages. It remained, to the end, his best-seller, but it had many formidable rivals. Altogether, his writings in book-form must have reached a total of 20,000,000 copies, including 3,000,000 in twenty-five tongues other than English. In Germany alone he sold more than 500,000 copies of thirty volumes. He remains to-day the most popular of American authors in Europe, and by immense odds. I have encountered translations of his books on the news-stands of remote towns in Spain, Poland and Czecho-Slovakia. In places where even Mark Twain is unknown--nay, even Jack London, Upton Sinclair and James Oliver Curwood--he holds aloft the banner of American literature.

I lack the stomach for the job myself, but I think a lot could be learned about the psychology of _Homo boobiens_ through an intensive study of Marden’s vast shelf of books. The few I have read seem to be exactly alike; no doubt all the rest resemble them very closely. What they preach, in brief, is the high value of hopefulness, hard work, high purpose and unflagging resolution. The appeal is to the natural discontent and vague aspiration of the common man. The remedy offered is partly practical and partly mystical--practical in its insistence upon the sound utility of the lowly virtues, mystical in its constant implication that matter will always yield to mind, that high thinking has a cash value. An evil philosophy? Surely not. A valid one? There it is not so easy to answer. Marden is full of proofs that what he preaches works--but only too often those proofs show the incredible appositeness and impeccability of patent-medicine testimonials. How many false hopes he must have raised in his day! One imagines humble hearts leaping to the gaudy tales of Judge Elbert Gary, Beethoven and Edison in the darkest reaches of Montenegro, Norway and Tennessee. Down went the dose, but was the patient actually cured? Well, perhaps, he at least _felt_ better--and that was something. Marden was not to be pinned down to clinical records; he was, in his way, a poet, and even more a prophet. A religious exaltation was in him; he knew how to roll his eyes. The first article of his creed was that it was a sin to despair--that realism was a black crime against the Holy Ghost. He reduced the Beatitudes to one: Blessed are they that believe in their stars, and are up and doing.

His influence was immense, and perhaps mainly for the good. He soothed his customers with his optimistic taffy, and made them happier. It is, indeed, small wonder that eminent figures in finance and industry admired him greatly, and gave his books to their slaves. He turned the discontents of those slaves inward; instead of going on strike and breaking windows they sat up nights trying to generate inspiration and practicing hope and patience. He was thus a useful citizen in a democratic state, and comparable to the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday. He preached a Direct Action of a benign and laudable sort, with Service running through it. His mark shines brilliantly from the forehead of every Y. M. C. A. secretary in the land, and from the foreheads, too, of most of the editorial writers. Many lesser platitudinarians followed him--for example, Dr. Frank Crane and the Rev. Dr. Henry van Dyke--, but he kept ahead of all of them. None other could put the obvious into such mellow and caressing terms. None other could so completely cast off all doubts and misgivings. When he spit on his hands and let himself out, the whole world began to sparkle like a Christmas tree. He was Kiwanis incarnate, with whispers of the Salvation Army. In early manhood he had cast off the demoniacal theology of his native hills, but one treasure of his Puritan heritage he retained to the end: he knew precisely and certainly what God wanted His children to be and do. God wanted them to be happy, and He wanted them to attain to happiness by working hard, saving money, obeying the boss, and keeping on the lookout for better jobs. Thus, after a hiatus of 137 years, Marden took up the torch of Poor Richard. He was, in his way, the American St. Paul. He was the pa of Kiwanis. He carried the gospel of American optimism to all the four quarters of the world.

9

_A Modern Masterpiece_

THE POET ASSASSINATED, by Guillaume Apollinaire, translated from the French by Matthew Josephson. New York: _The Broom Publishing Company_. [The American Mercury, March, 1924.]

Whatever may be said against the young literary lions of the Foetal School, whether by such hoary iconoclasts as Ernest Boyd or by such virginal presbyters as John S. Sumner, the saving fact remains that the boys and girls have, beneath their false-faces, a sense of humor, and are not shy about playing it upon one another. Such passionate pioneers of the movement as _Broom_ and the _Little Review_ printed, in their day, capital parodies in every issue, many of them, I believe, deliberate and malicious--parodies of Ezra Pound by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and of the Baroness Elsa Freytag-Loringhoven by E. E. Cummings, and of E. E. Cummings by young Roosevelt J. Yahwitz, Harvard ’27. And the thing goes on to this day. Ah, that the rev. seniors of the Hypoendocrinal School were as gay and goatish! Ah, specifically, that Dr. Paul Elmer More would occasionally do a salacious burlesque of Dr. Brander Matthews, and that Dr. Matthews would exercise his forecastle wit upon the Pennsylvania Silurian, Prof. Fred Lewis Pattee!

In the present work, beautifully printed by the _Broom_ Press, there is jocosity in the grand manner. For a long while past, as time goes among such neo-logomaniacs, the youths of the movement have been whooping up one Guillaume Apollinaire. When this Apollinaire died in 1918, so they lamented, there passed out the greatest creative mind that France had seen since the Middle Ages. He was to Jean Cocteau, even, as Cocteau was to Eugène Sue. His books were uncompromising and revolutionary; had he lived he would have done to the banal prose of the Babbitts of letters what Eric Satie has done to the art of the fugue. Such news was not only printed in the _Tendenz_ magazines that come and go; it was transmitted by word of mouth from end to end of Greenwich Village. More, it percolated to graver quarters. The estimable _Dial_ let it be known that Apollinaire was a profound influence on the literature and perhaps still more on the art and spirit of this modern period. Once, when Dr. Canby was off lecturing in Lancaster, Pa., his name even got into the _Literary Review_.

This electric rumor of him was helped to prosperity by the fact that specific data about him were extremely hard to come by. His books seemed to be rare--some of them, indeed, unprocurable--, and even when one of them was obtained and examined it turned out to be largely unintelligible. He wrote, it appeared, in an occult dialect, partly made up of fantastic slang from the French army. He gave to old words new and mysterious meanings. He kept wholly outside the vocabulary at the back of “College French.” Even returning exiles from La Rotonde were baffled by some of his phrases; all that they could venture was that they were unprecedented and probably obscene. But the Village, as everyone knows, does not spurn the cabalistic; on the contrary, it embraces and venerates the cabalistic. Apollinaire grew in fame as he became unscrutable. Displacing Cocteau, Paul Morand, Harry Kemp, T. S. Eliot, André Salmon, Paul Valéry, Maxwell Bodenheim, Jean Giraudoux and all the other gods of that checkered dynasty, he was lifted to the first place in the Valhalla of the Advanced Thinkers. It was Apollinaire’s year....

The work before us is the pricking of the bladder--a jest highly effective, but somewhat barbarous. M. Josephson simply translates Apollinaire’s masterpiece, adds an _apparatus criticus_ in the manner of T. S. Eliot, and then retires discreetly to wait for the yells. They will make a dreadful din, or I am no literary pathologist! For what does “The Poet Assassinated” turn out to be? It turns out to be a dull pasquinade in the manner of a rather atheistic sophomore, with a few dirty words thrown in to shock the _booboisie_. From end to end there is not as much wit in it as you will hear in a genealogical exchange between two taxicab drivers. It is flat, flabby and idiotic. It is as profound as an editorial in the Washington _Star_ and as revolutionary as Ayer’s Almanac. It is the best joke pulled off on the Young Forward-Lookers since Eliot floored them with the notes to “The Waste Land.”

M. Josephson rather spoils its effect, I believe, by rubbing it in--that is, by hinting that Apollinaire was of romantic and mysterious origin--that his mother was a Polish lady of noble name and his father a high prelate of the Catholic Church--that he himself was born at Monte Carlo and baptized in Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome. This is too much. Apollinaire was, like all Frenchmen of humor, a German Jew. His father was a respectable waiter at Appenrodt’s, by name Max Spritzwasser: hence the _nom de plume_. His mother was a Mlle. Kunigunda Luise Schmidt, of Holzkirchen, Oberbayern.

10

_Sweet Stuff_

SIX DAYS OF THE WEEK: A BOOK OF THOUGHTS ABOUT LIFE AND RELIGION, by Henry van Dyke. New York: _Charles Scribner’s Sons_. [The American Mercury, March, 1925.]

I offer a specimen:

As living beings we are part of a universe of life.

A second:

Unless we men resolve to be good, the world will never be better.

A third:

Behind Christianity there is Christ.

A fourth:

If Washington had not liberated the American Republic, Lincoln would have had no Union to save.

A fifth:

Some people say that a revolution is coming on in our own age and country. It is possible.

A sixth:

God made us all.

A seventh:

It is a well-known fact that men can lie, and that very frequently they do.

An eighth:

To be foolish is an infirmity. To fool others is a trick.

A ninth:

The Bible was not given to teach science, but religion.

A tenth:

A whole life spent with God is better than half a life.

An eleventh:

Drunkenness ruins more homes and wrecks more lives than war.

A twelfth:

Anything out of the ordinary line will attract notice.

Tupper _est mort_! _Hoch_ Tupper! _Hoch, hoch! Dreimal hoch!_

IX. THE FRINGES OF LOVELY LETTERS

1

_Authorship as a Trade_

It is my observation as an editor that most beginning authors are attracted to the trade of letters, not because they have anything apposite and exigent to say, but simply, because it seems easy. Let us imagine an ambitious and somewhat gassy young gal, turned out of the public high-school down the street with good marks in English--that is, in the sort of literary composition practiced by schoolma’ms. Having read “Ulysses,” “Jurgen” and “Babbitt,” she is disinclined to follow her mother too precipitately into the jaws of holy monogamy--or, at all events, she shrinks from marrying such a clod as her father is, and as her brothers and male classmates will be to-morrow. What to do? The professions demand technical equipment. Commerce is sordid. The secretary, even of a rich and handsome man, must get up at 7.30 A. M. Most of the fine arts are regarded, by her family, as immoral. So she pays $3 down on a second-hand typewriter, lays in a stock of copy paper, and proceeds to enrich the national literature.

It is such aspirants, I suppose, who keep the pot boiling for the schools of short-story writing and scenario writing that now swarm in the land. Certainly these schools, in so far as I have any acquaintance with them, offer nothing of value to the beginner of genuine talent. They seem to be run, in the main, by persons as completely devoid of critical sense as so many Congressmen, street railway curve-greasers or Methodist revivalists. Their text-books are masses of unmitigated rubbish. But no doubt that rubbish seems impressive enough to the customers I have mentioned, for it is both very vague and very cocksure--an almost irresistible combination. So a hundred thousand second-hand Coronas rattle and jingle in ten thousand remote and lonely towns, and the mail of every magazine editor in America is as heavy as the mail of a get-rich-quick stockbroker.

Unluckily, there is seldom anything in this mail to bulge his eyes and make his heart go pitter-pat. What he finds in it, day in and day out, is simply the same dull, obvious, shoddy stuff--the same banal and threadbare ideas set forth in the same flabby and unbeautiful words. They all seem to write alike, as, indeed, they all seem to think alike. They react to stimuli with the machine-like uniformity and precision of soldiers in a file. The spectacle of life is to all of them exactly the same spectacle. They bring no more to it, of private, singular vision, than so many photographic lenses. In brief, they are unanimously commonplace, unanimously stupid. Free education has cursed them with aspirations beyond their congenital capacities, and they offer the art of letters only the gifts suitable to the lowly crafts of the jazz-baby and the schoolma’m. They come from an intellectual level where conformity seems the highest of goods, and so they lack the primary requisite of the imaginative author: the capacity to see the human comedy afresh, to discover new relations between things, to discover new significances in man’s eternal struggle with his fate. What they have to say is simply what any moderately intelligent suburban pastor or country editor would have to say, and so it is not worth hearing.

This disparity between aspiration and equipment runs through the whole of American life; material prosperity and popular education have made it a sort of national disease. Two-thirds of the professors in our colleges are simply cans full of undigested knowledge, mechanically acquired; they cannot utilize it; they cannot think. We are cursed likewise with hordes of lawyers who would be happier and more useful driving trucks, and hordes of doctors who would be strained even as druggists. So in the realm of beautiful letters. Poetry has become a recreation among us for the intellectually unemployed and unemployable: persons who, a few generations ago, would have taken it out on china-painting. The writing of novels is undertaken by thousands who lack the skill to describe a dog-fight. The result is a colossal waste of paper, ink and postage--worse, of binding cloth and gold foil. For a great deal of this drivel, by one dodge or another, gets into print. Many of the correspondence-school students, after hard diligence, learn how to write for the cheap magazines; not a few of them eventually appear between covers, and are solemnly reviewed.

Does such stuff sell? Apparently it does, else the publishers would not print so much, of it. Its effect upon those who read it must be even worse than that of the newspapers and popular magazines. They come to it with confident expectations. It is pretentiously bound; _ergo_, there must be something in it. That something is simply platitude. What has been said a thousand times is said all over again. This time it must be true! Thus the standardization of the American mind goes on, and against ideas that are genuinely novel there are higher and higher battlements erected. Meanwhile, on the lower levels, where the latest recruits to letters sweat and hope, this rubbish is laboriously imitated. Turn to any of the cheap fiction magazines, and you will find out how bad it can be at its worst. No, not quite at its worst, for the contributors to the cheap fiction magazines have at least broken into print--they have as they say, made the grade. Below them are thousands of aspirants of even slenderer talents--customers of the correspondence schools, patrons of lectures by itinerant literary pedagogues, patient manufacturers of the dreadful stuff that clogs every magazine editor’s mail. Here is the ultimate reservoir of the national literature--and here, unless I err, is only bilge.