Part 17

The young American literatus of today, with publishers ready and eager to give him a hearing, can scarcely imagine the difficulties which beset his predecessor of twenty years ago; he is, indeed, far too little appreciative of the freedom he has, and far too prone to flee from hard work to the solace of the martyr’s shroud. When I first began practise as a critic, in 1908, there was yet plenty of excuse for putting it on. It was a time of almost inconceivable complacency and conformity. Hamilton Wright Mabie was still alive and still taken seriously, and all the young pedagogues who aspired to the critical gown imitated him in his watchful stupidity. This camorra had delivered a violent wallop to Theodore Dreiser eight years before, and he was yet suffering from his bruises; it was not until 1911 that he printed “Jennie Gerhardt.” Miss Harriet Monroe and her gang of new poets were still dispersed and inarticulate; Miss Amy Lowell, as yet unaware of Imagism, was writing polite doggerel in the manner of a New England schoolmarm; the reigning dramatists of the nation were Augustus Thomas, David Belasco and Clyde Fitch; Miss Cather was imitating Mrs. Wharton; Hergesheimer had six years to go before he’d come to “The Lay Anthony”; Cabell was known only as one who provided the text for illustrated gift-books; the American novelists most admired by most publishers, by most readers and by all practising critics were Richard Harding Davis, Robert W. Chambers and James Lane Allen. It is hard indeed, in retrospect, to picture those remote days just as they were. They seem almost fabulous. The chief critical organ of the Republic was actually the Literary Supplement of the New York _Times_. The _Dial_ was down with diabetes in Chicago; the _Nation_ was made dreadful by the gloomy humors of Paul Elmer More; the _Bookman_ was even more saccharine and sophomoric than it is today. When the mild and _pianissimo_ revolt of the middle 90’s--a feeble echo of the English revolt--had spent itself, the Presbyterians marched in and took possession of the works. Most of the erstwhile revoltés boldly took the veil--notably Hamlin Garland. No novel that told the truth about life as Americans were living it, no poem that departed from the old patterns, no play that had the merest ghost of an idea in it had a chance. When, in 1908, Mrs. Mary Roberts Rinehart printed a conventional mystery story which yet managed to have a trace of sense in it, it caused a sensation. And when, two years later, Dr. William Lyon Phelps printed a book of criticism in which he actually ranked Mark Twain alongside Emerson and Hawthorne, there was as great a stirring beneath the college elms as if a naked fancy woman had run across the campus. If Hergesheimer had come into New York in 1908 with “Cytherea” under his arm, he would have worn out his pantaloons on publishers’ benches without getting so much as a polite kick. If Eugene O’Neill had come to Broadway with “The Hairy Ape,” he would have been sent to Edward E. Rose to learn the elements of his trade. The devilish and advanced thing, in those days, was for the fat lady star to give a couple of matinées of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.”

A great many men and a few women addressed themselves to the dispersal of this fog. Some of them were imaginative writers who found it simply impossible to bring themselves within the prevailing rules; some were critics; others were young publishers. As I look back, I can’t find any sign of concerted effort; it was, in the main, a case of each on his own. The more contumacious of the younger critics, true enough, tended to rally ’round Huneker, who, as a matter of fact, was very little interested in American letters, and the young novelists had a leader in Dreiser, who, I suspect, was quite unaware of most of them. However, it was probably Dreiser who chiefly gave form to the movement, despite the fact that for eleven long years he was silent. Not only was there a useful rallying-point in the idiotic suppression of “Sister Carrie”; there was also the encouraging fact of the man’s massive immovability. Physically and mentally he loomed up like a sort of headland--a great crag of basalt that no conceivable assault seemed able to touch. His predecessor, Frank Norris, was of much softer stuff. Norris, had he lived longer, would have been wooed and ruined, I fear, by the Mabies, Boyntons and other such Christian critics, as Garland had been wooed and ruined before him. Dreiser, fortunately for American letters, never had to face any such seduction. The critical schoolmarms, young and old, fell upon him with violence the moment he appeared above the horizon of his native steppe, and soon he was the storm center of a battle-royal that lasted nearly twenty years. The man himself was solid, granitic, without nerves. Very little cunning was in him and not much bellicose enterprise, but he showed a truly appalling tenacity. The pedagogues tried to scare him to death, they tried to stampede his partisans and they tried to put him into Coventry and get him forgotten, but they failed every time. The more he was reviled, sneered at, neglected, the more resolutely he stuck to his formula. That formula is now every serious American novelist’s formula. They all try to write better than Dreiser, and not a few of them succeed, but they all follow him in his fundamental purpose--to make the novel true. Dreiser added something, and here following him is harder: he tried to make the novel poignant--to add sympathy, feeling, imagination to understanding. It will be a long while before that enterprise is better managed than he managed it in “Jennie Gerhardt.”

Today, it seems to me, the American imaginative writer, whether he be novelist, poet or dramatist, is quite as free as he deserves to be. He is free to depict the life about him precisely as he sees it, and to interpret it in any manner he pleases. The publishers of the land, once so fearful of novelty, are now so hospitable to it that they constantly fail to distinguish the novelty that has hard thought behind it from that which has only some Village mountebank’s desire to stagger the wives of Rotarians. Our stage is perhaps the freest in the world--not only to sensations, but also to ideas. Our poets get into print regularly with stuff so bizarre and unearthly that only Christian Scientists can understand it. The extent of this new freedom, indeed, is so great that large numbers of persons appear to be unable to believe in it; they are constantly getting into sweats about the taboos and inhibitions that remain, for example, those nourished by comstockery. But the importance and puissance of comstockery, I believe, is quite as much overestimated as the importance and puissance of the objurgations still hurled at sense and honesty by the provincial professors of American Idealism, the Genius of America, and other such phantasms. The Comstocks, true enough, still raid an occasional book, particularly when their funds are running low and there is need to inflame Christian men, but that their monkeyshines ever actually _suppress_ a book of any consequence I very much doubt. The flood is too vast for them. Chasing a minnow with desperate passion, they let a whole school of whales go by. In any case, they confine their operations to the single field of sex, and it must be plain that it is not in the field of sex that the hottest battles against the old American manner have been fought and won. “Three Soldiers” was far more subversive of that manner than all the stories of sex ever written in America--and yet “Three Soldiers” came out with the imprint of one of the most respectable of American publishers, and was scarcely challenged. “Babbitt” scored a victory that was still easier, and yet more significant, for its target was the double one of American business and American Christianity; it set the whole world to laughing at two things that are far more venerated in the United States than the bodily chastity of women. Nevertheless, “Babbitt” went down so easily that even the alfalfa _Gelehrten_ joined in whooping for it, apparently on the theory that praising Lewis would make the young of the national species forget Dreiser. Victimized by their own craft, the _Gelehrten_ thus made a foul attack upon their own principles, for if their principles did not stand against just such anarchistic and sacrilegious books, then they were without any sense whatever, as was and is, indeed, the case.

I shall not rehearse the steps in the advance from “Sister Carrie,” suppressed and proscribed, to “Babbitt,” swallowed and hailed. The important thing is that, despite the caterwauling of the Comstocks and the pedagogues, a reasonable freedom for the serious artist now prevails--that publishers stand ready to print him, that critics exist who are competent to recognize him and willing to do battle for him, and that there is a large public eager to read him. What use is he making of his opportunity? Certainly not the worst use possible, but also certainly not the best. He is free, but he is not yet, perhaps, worthy of freedom. He lets the popular magazine, the movie and the cheap-John publisher pull him too hard in one direction; he lets the vagaries of his politics pull him too hard in another. Back in 1908 I predicted the destruction of Upton Sinclair the artist by Upton Sinclair the visionary and reformer. Sinclair’s bones now bleach upon the beach. Beside them repose those of many another man and woman of great promise--for example, Winston Churchill. Floyd Dell is on his way--one novel and two doses of Greenwich Village psychology. Hergesheimer writes novelettes for the _Saturday Evening Post_. Willa Cather has won the Pulitzer Prize--a transaction comparable to the election of Charles W. Eliot to the Elks. Masters turns to prose that somehow fails to come off. Dreiser, forgetting his trilogy, experiments rather futilely with the drama, the essay, free verse. Fuller renounces the novel for book reviewing. Tarkington is another Pulitzer prizeman, always on the verge of first-rate work but always falling short by an inch. Many of the White Hopes of ten or fifteen years ago perished in the war, as surely victims of its slaughter as Rupert Brook or Otto Braun; it is, indeed, curious to note that practically every American author who moaned and sobbed for democracy between the years 1914 and 1919 is now extinct. The rest have gone down the chute of the movies.

But all this, after all, may signify little. The shock troops have been piled up in great masses, but the ground is cleared for those that follow. Well, then, what of the youngsters? Do they show any sign of seizing their chance? The answer is yes and no. On the one hand there is a group which, revolving ’round the _Bookman_, talks a great deal and accomplishes nothing. On the other hand there is a group which, revolving ’round the _Dial_ and the _Little Review_, talks even more and does even less. But on the third hand, as it were, there is a group which says little and saws wood. There seems to be little in common between its members, no sign of a formal movement, with its _blague_ and its bombast, but all of them have this in common: that they owe both their opportunity and their method to the revolution that followed “Sister Carrie.” Most of them are from the Middle West, but they are distinct from the Chicago crowd, now degenerated to posturing and worse. They are sophisticated, disillusioned, free from cant, and yet they have imagination. The raucous protests of the evangelists of American Idealism seem to have no more effect upon them than the advances of the Expressionists, Dadaists and other such café-table prophets. Out of this dispersed and ill-defined group, I believe, something will come. Its members are those who are free from the two great delusions which, from the beginning, have always cursed American letters: the delusion that a work of art is primarily a moral document, that its purpose is to make men better Christians and more docile cannon-fodder, and the delusion that it is an exercise in logic, that its purpose is to prove something. These delusions, lingering beyond their time, are responsible for most of the disasters visible in the national literature today--the disasters of the radicals as well as those of the 100 per cent. dunderheads. The writers of the future, I hope and believe, will carefully avoid both of them.

XVII. PEOPLE AND THINGS

1

_The Capital of a Great Republic_

The fourth secretary of the Paraguayan legation.... The chief clerk to the House committee on industrial arts and expositions.... The secretary to the secretary to the Secretary of Labor.... The brother to the former Congressman from the third Idaho district.... The messenger to the chief of the Senate folding-room.... The doorkeeper outside the committee-room of the House committee on the disposition of useless executive papers.... The chief correspondent of the Toomsboro, Ga., _Banner_ in the Senate press-gallery.... The stenographer to the assistant chief entomologist of the Bureau of Animal Industry.... The third assistant chief computor in the office of the Naval Almanac.... The assistant Attorney-General in charge of the investigation of postal frauds in the South Central States.... The former wife of the former secretary to the former member of the Interstate Commerce Commission.... The brother to the wife of the _chargé d’affaires_ of Czecho-Slovakia.... The bootlegger to the ranking Democratic member of the committee on the election of President, Vice-President and representatives in Congress.... The acting assistant doorkeeper of the House visitors’ gallery.... The junior Senator from Delaware.... The assistant to the secretary to the chief clerk of the Division of Audits and Disbursements, Bureau of Stationery and Supplies, Postoffice Department.... The press-agent to the chaplain of the House.... The commercial attaché to the American legation at Quito.... The chauffeur to the fourth assistant Postmaster-General.... The acting substitute elevator-man in the Washington monument.... The brother to the wife of the brother-in-law of the Vice-President.... The aunt to the sister of the wife of the officer in charge of ceremonials, State Department.... The neighbor of the cousin of the step-father of the sister-in-law of the President’s pastor.... The superintendent of charwomen in Temporary Storehouse B7, Bureau of Navy Yards and Docks.... The assistant confidential clerk to the chief clerk to the acting chief examiner of the Patent Office.... The valet to the Chief Justice.

2

_Ambassadors of Christ_

Fifth avenue rectors with shining morning faces, preaching on Easter to pews packed with stockbrokers, defendants in salacious divorce suits, members of the Sulgrave Foundation and former Zionists.... Evangelists of strange, incomprehensible cults whooping and bawling at two or three half-witted old women and half a dozen scared little girls in corrugated iron tabernacles down near the railroad-yards.... Mormon missionaries pulling door-bells in Wheeling, W. Va., and Little Rock, Ark., and handing naughty-looking tracts to giggling servant girls.... Baptist doctors of divinity calling upon John the Baptist and John D. Rockefeller to bear witness that the unducked will sweat in hell forevermore.... Methodist candidates for the sacred frock, sent out to preach trial sermons to backward churches in the mail-order belt, proving magnificently in one hour that Darwin was an ignoramus and Huxley a scoundrel.... Irish priests denouncing the Ku Klux Klan.... Rabbis denouncing Henry Ford.... Presbyterians denouncing Flo Zeigfeld.... Fashionable divines officiating at gaudy home weddings, their ears alert for the popping of corks.... Street evangelists in Zanesville, O., trying to convince a cop and five newsboys that no man will be saved unless he be born again.... Missionaries in smelly gospel-shops along the waterfront, expounding the doctrine of the atonement to boozy Norwegian sailors, half of them sound asleep.... Cadaverous high-church Episcopalians.... Little fat Lutherans with the air of prosperous cheese-mongers.... Dunkards with celluloid collars and no neckties.... Southern Methodists who still believe in slavery.... Former plumbers, threshing-machine engineers and horse-doctors turned into United Brethren bishops.... Missionaries collecting money from the mill children in Raleigh, N. C., to convert the Spaniards and Italians to Calvinism.... Episcopal archdeacons cultivating the broad English _a_.... Swedenborgians trying to explain the “Arcana Cœlestia” to flabbergasted newspaper reporters.... Polish clergymen leaping out of the windows at Polish weddings in Johnstown, Pa., hoping that the next half-dozen beer-bottles won’t hit them.... Methodists pulling wires for bishoprics.... Quakers foreclosing mortgages.... Baptists busy among the women.

3

_Bilder aus schöner Zeit_

The excellent lunch that the illustrious Crispi used to serve at Delmonico’s at five o’clock in the afternoon.... The incomparable orange blossom cocktails at Sherry’s, and the plates of salted nuts.... The tavern cocktails at the Beaux Arts, each with its dash of absinthe.... The Franziskaner Mai-Bock at Lüchow’s.... Dear old Sieg’s noble Rhine wines at the Kaiserhof.... The long-tailed clams and Spring onions at Rogers’, with Pilsner to wash them down.... The amazingly good American quasi-Pilsner, made by Herr Abner, on the Raleigh roof in Washington.... The Castel del Remy at the Brevoort, cheap but perfect.... The very dark Kulmbacher at the Pabst place in 125th street in the last days of civilization.... The burgundy from the Cresta Blanca vineyards in California.... Michelob on warm Summer evenings, with the crowd singing “Throw Out the Lifeline!”... The old-time Florestan cocktails--50 per cent. London gin, 25 per cent. French vermouth and 25 per cent. Martini-Rossi, with a dash of Angostura bitters--drink half, then drink a glass of beer, and then drink the other half.... That Hoboken red wine, so strangely smooth and lovely.... The bad red wine (but capital cooking) at the Frenchman’s in Lexington avenue.... Del Pezzo’s superb Chianti.... The ale at Keen’s.... Obst’s herrings, with Löwenbraü to slack them.... The astounding cocktail made by the head waiter at Henri’s.... Drinking Faust all night in St. Louis in 1904.... The musty ale at Losekam’s in Washington.... The draft _Helles_ at Krüger’s in Philadelphia.... A Pilsner luncheon at the old Grand Union, from one to six.... A stray bottle of perfect sauterne found in Rahway, New Jersey.... A wild night drinking Swedish punch and hot water.... Two or three hot Scotch nights.... Twenty or thirty Bass’ ale nights.... Five or six hundred Pilsner nights....

4

_The High Seas_

The kid who sits in the bucket of tar.... The buxom stewardess who comes in and inquires archly if one rang.... The humorous piano-tuner who tunes the grand piano in the music-room in the 15-16ths-tone scale.... The electric fan which, when a stray zephyr blows in through the porthole, makes a noise like a dentist’s drill.... The alien ship’s printer who, in the daily wireless paper, reports a baseball score of 165 to 3.... The free Christian Science literature in the reading-room.... The pens in the writing-room.... The elderly _Grosshändler_ with the young wife.... The red-haired girl in the green sweater.... The retired bootlegger disguised as a stockbroker.... The stockbroker disguised as a United States Senator.... The boy who climbs into the lifeboat.... The chief steward wearing the No. 18³⁄₄ collar.... The mysterious pipes that run along the stateroom ceilings.... The discovery that one forgot to pack enough undershirts.... The night watchman who raps on the door at 3.30 A. M. to deliver a wireless message reading “Sorry missed you. Bon voyage”.... The bartender who adds a dash of witchhazel to cocktails.... The wilting flowers standing in ice-pitchers and spittoons in the hallways.... The fight in the steerage.... The old lady who gets stewed and sends for the doctor.... The news that the ship is in Long. 43°, 41′, 16″ W, Lat. 40°, 23′, 39″ N.... The report that the starboard propeller has lost a blade.

5

_The Shrine of Mnemosyne_

The little town of Kirkwall, in the Orkney Islands, in a mid-Winter mist, flat and charming like a Japanese print.... San Francisco and the Golden Gate from the top of Twin Peaks.... Gibraltar on a Spring day, all in pastel shades, like the back-drop for a musical comedy.... My first view of the tropics, the palm-trees suddenly bulging out of the darkness of dawn, the tremendous stillness, the sweetly acid smell, the immeasurable strangeness.... The Trentino on a glorious morning, up from Verona to the Brenner Pass.... Central Germany from Bremen to Munich, all in one day, with the apple trees in bloom.... Copenhagen on a wild night, with the _Polizei_ combing the town for the American who upset the piano.... Christiania in January, with the snow-clad statue of Ibsen looming through the gloom like a ghost in a cellar.... The beach at Tybee Island, with the faint, blood-curdling rattle of the land-crabs.... Jacksonville after the fire in 1902, with the hick militiamen firing their machine-guns all night.... The first inauguration of Woodrow, and the pretty suffragette who drank beer with me at the Raleigh.... A child playing in the yard of a God-forsaken town in the Wyoming desert.... Bryan’s farewell speech at the St. Louis Convention in 1904.... Hampton Court on Chestnut Sunday.... A New Year’s Eve party on a Danish ship, 500 miles off the coast of Greenland.... The little pile of stones on the beach of Watling’s Island, marking the place where Columbus landed.... The moon of the Caribbees, seen from a 1000-ton British tramp.... A dull night in a Buffalo hotel, reading the American Revised Version of the New Testament.... The day I received the proofs of my first book.... A good-bye on an Hoboken pier.... The Palace Hotel in Madrid.

INDEX

Adams, Samuel, 118

Aggasiz, Alexander, 41

Allen, James Lane, 286

Americanism, 10

American Legion, 10, 38, 163, 195

Anglo-Saxon, 21 _ff._

Anti-Saloon League, 10, 88, 161, 183

Atherton, Gertrude, 21

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 117

Beck, James M., 9

Beers, Henry A., 12

Beethoven, Ludwig van, 240, 251, 263

Bennett, Arnold, 281

Benson, Admiral, 256

Bill of Rights, 99, 100, 226

Bismarck, Otto von, 117

Bonaparte, Charles J., 230

_Bookman_, 286, 292

Boyd, Ernest, 15

Boynton, Percy H., 14

Brahms, Johannes, 251

Brandeis, Louis D., 101

Brann, Otto, 292

Brook, Rupert, 292

Brooks, Van Wyck, 18

Brownell, Wm. C., 9, 14, 16

Browning, Robert, 118

Bryan, Wm. Jennings, 58, 60

Bryant, William Cullen, 16

Bush, Irving T., 214

Butler, Nicholas Murray, 170

Cabell, James Branch, 14, 18, 40, 284, 285

Cather, Willa, 285, 291

Chambers, Robert W., 286

Chaplin, Charlie, 261

Chicago _Literary Times_, 12

Civil Service Reform, 229

Churchill, Winston, 291

Clemens, Samuel L., 15, 17, 19, 138, 279, 280, 286

Cleveland, Grover, 69

Comstock, Anthony, 164

_Congressional Record_, 43, 53, 122

Conrad, Joseph, 141, 276, 281

Coolidge, Calvin, 15, 48, 193, 263

Cooper, James Fenimore, 16, 280

Crane, Frank, 41

Creel, George, 9, 256

Czolgosz, Leon, 185

Daniels, Josephus, 257

D’Annunzio, Gabrielle, 261

Dante, 106

Daugherty, Harry, 188, 193, 226

Davis, Richard Harding, 286

Dell, Floyd, 291

Denby, Edward, 184, 193

Dewey, George, 255

_Dial_, 12, 286, 292

Dos Passos, John, 284, 290

Doughty of Texas, 11 _ff._, 20

Dreiser, Theodore, 12, 17, 18, 21, 117, 285, 287 _ff._, 292

Edward VII, 273

Edwards, Jonathan, 126

Eliot, Charles W., 35, 37, 292

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 15, 17, 142, 280

Erskine, John, 14

Espionage Act, 87

Evans, Fighting Bob, 254

Fall, Albert B., 182

Fisk, James, 118, 280

Fitch, Clyde, 285

Ford, Henry, 50, 232

Frank, Waldo, 12