Part 2

“What’s the good of that?” demanded his companion suspiciously. “Look at the cost!”

“Autographs,” replied the other tranquilly, “are going up. Some of mine are worth fifty dollars.”

His truculent friend let his jaw drop a little as he stared and digested this novel fact. He was interested in an indolent way. His suspicion, his truculence, his interest, all had a slightly meretricious air. He was on vacation. No doubt his attitude toward life at home was sane and humorous enough. Books were not his métier.

“Oh, no doubt,” the Englishman was saying. “It is very difficult to make a decent choice, once you leave the regular well known men. Even they,” he added, rubbing his nose with the side of his forefinger, “let you down at times.”

One of the salesmen reached behind him on the cushions and fished out a volume. “What would you say about this sort of thing,” he asked, handing it over. “Everybody seems to be reading them now.”

The Englishman accepted it gingerly, his rigid features assuming an expression of extreme concern, as though he felt he had been taken at a disadvantage. As he had. He had forgotten the American Law of Applied Responsibility. By this law, if you reveal an aptitude or a proclivity, you are instantly voted into a position where that aptitude or proclivity can be useful to the community and a source of profit to yourself. This peculiar custom is unknown in England, where a man of talent often spends half his life modestly concealing his ability, and the other half waiting for someone else to die, so that he can get a chance to use it. Realizing, however, that he was one of an imperial race, this particular Englishman braced himself, settled his eyeglass, and after examining the book said he had read it and “found it rather rot, you know.”

“Oh, no!” objected one of the officers, suddenly. “It is a very important book, if you look at it from the right standpoint. Did you read it through?”

“Couldn’t,” replied the Englishman in a small, precise voice. “I got as far as--as far as--well, anyhow, I had to chuck it. Not in my line.”

“Then you can hardly set up as a judge of it,” suggested the other. The Englishman was somewhat nettled.

“Only in so far as I couldn’t stay the whole distance,” he retorted. “That’s criticism in a way I take it. What!”

There was a general laugh and a readjustment of moods as the waiter approached with tall glasses.

“You were saying--” murmured the Englishman after a first libation.

“That a book like this one here, a solidly packed slab of fiction, is a sign of the times. It has no particular features of originality at all. But it has for its theme and milieu the Marquesas or some such island group in the South Seas, and just at present there is a very peculiar craze for the South Seas. Anything at all, so long as it is about the South Seas, may go with the public, and the publishers take the wildest chances. People without any ability to write at all are preparing huge masses of trivial travel talk and illustrating it with photographs of themselves in loin cloths grouped with native women who do not look beautiful even in the prints. Anything at all may make a hit. They, the publishers, think of ‘The Moon and Sixpence,’ forgetting that Somerset Maugham’s genius had a good deal to do with that book. They remember only that in spite of Curwood, Jack London, Ridgwell Cullum, and other specialists of the north, there is a decided set toward the South Seas.”

“How do you account for that?” asked one of the company.

“I can’t account for it, but I have sometimes felt that people were turning toward these distant spots of earth as to a kind of modern Hesperides or Fortunate Islands, where the troubles of life in steamheated apartments, department stores, and crowded subways, for instance, do not exist. The north and the west have been worked to death. The east, Europe and so forth, have gone down in our estimation as paradises. And so, led as usual by the artists, by Gauguin, Stevenson, and Somerset Maugham, we are all busy in the bazaars demanding private magic carpets to take us to the Sunny South Seas, where golden skinned men and delicious girls play _papalagis_ to the _wahines_. Or is it the _wahines_ which are played to the _papalagis_? I forget. Nor does it matter. This search for innocent and philosophic harems is bound to fail. Those islands have no existence save for the artists who discover them. If you look around the promenade deck here you will find most of the passengers reading about the distant coral groups of the Southern Pacific, with one or two exceptions who are reading about the coral lips of Ethel Dell’s heroines, or the cattle corrals of Zane Grey’s virile heroes. The author of this particular book, however, has rashly decided to do without photographs of repulsive Polynesian women. The character of his hero, a handsome Englishman in love with a Latin American president’s daughter, is out of date as well as out of drawing. Indeed there is no harm in a picture being out of drawing, as we say, if it carries you with it and conveys an authentic emotion. But to be out of date is the worst of literary crimes. All art is convention, and it is therefore imperative that you use the current convention to reveal the truth. This book reveals nothing save the author’s absurd notions of the ingredients of a romance.”

“A romance is a love story, I take it,” said someone.

“Quite possibly. Nowadays, however, a romance has to take place on an island. Have you ever reflected upon the fascination islands seem to exert upon novelists? Think of the islands of literature--a veritable archipelago! Shakespeare with his ‘Tempest’ was an early victim. Swift invented a floating island. Defoe of course you recall. Modern authors teem with islands. ‘Treasure Island,’ ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau,’ ‘L’Ile des Pingouins,’ ‘The Island Princess,’ ‘Island Nights’ Entertainments,’ ‘The Isle of Unrest,’ ‘An Outcast of the Islands.’ You can even include Kipling’s ‘Islanders’ and Galsworthy’s ‘Island Pharisees’ if you are of a sardonic turn. There is something romantic in the very nature of an island, something finite, enclosed, cut off, remote--the centre of a mysterious hemispherical universe of sea and sky. I admit this because I am under the spell of an island myself. I know an island, not so large, which is very dear to my heart. All day and all night you can hear the immense rumor of the tides of human life washing to and fro in the caverns, almost ‘measureless to man,’ of her rocks. Each day increase the great cliffs of coralline structure fashioned by her millions of tiny inhabitants. The men are not golden skinned, but they have strong hearts and steady brains and are good comrades. As for the women, who would leave them for the doubtful charms of Polynesia? The women of my island are the most beautiful in the world, for they have been garnered from all over the world.”

“Where’s this place!” barked the truculent health seeker. “In the West Indies?”

The other man smiled a little and shook his head.

“Oh no,” he said, signaling to the waiter, “we’ve just left it. I was speaking of Manhattan.”

_John Erskine_

First, the lover of literature, second, the professor, I should say of John Erskine. This large, genial but positive gentleman has long been among the undergraduates one of the most popular professors at Columbia University. Yet he has preserved, in the midst of academic strictures, an unusual tolerance for modern tendencies in letters. While he chides you gently for carelessness of viewpoint or slovenly phrase, he is willing to find whatever is good in the new thing. His own poetry in its recent collection shows beauty of phrase, incisive imagery, and adherence to old models. Always he is interested in the young poet, and we find him the willing patron and adviser of undergraduate poets and poetry societies. Born in New York City, he took both his A.B. and his Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University. This has not made him, however, insular. As President of the Authors Club he made valiant attempts to keep that institution from a too rigid adherence to dusty tradition, and, if his efforts to unite and strengthen the unruly and amorphous Poetry Society of America were not successful, failure must be traced to the nature of the organization itself rather than to any lack of effort on Dr. Erskine’s part. His viewpoint is well illustrated by this essay in which he deplores the journalistic attitude. Technique, after all, is a god which cannot be lightly discarded. An able executive, a poet of charm, a teacher of great abilities, John Erskine has been a stabilizing force in American letters.

SPOTLIGHT OR FAME?

If a popular writer today ever asks himself what his chances are for fame, he may well conclude that popularity is all he should hope for. He must see that the public have become accustomed to reading books but once, as they read a newspaper; that to maintain his position he must continue to bring out new books; and that when he comes to an end, other writers will take his place. He will notice also that authors who once reached a large audience now miss their old effect even though they continue to produce books--as though they had left the track of popularity without knowing it. He may wonder whether they are merely repeating themselves before an audience that must have novelty, or whether--(comfort too tempting!)--their work has improved beyond the public taste.

However he analyzes it, the tendency he observes in our writing is a tendency toward journalism instead of art. The reward of journalistic success may be popularity, the temporary spotlight, but it cannot be fame. Fame is continued admiration for something that endures. The service that journalism renders us is too great not to have a vast appreciation, but the service is for a day, and the interest of a day is novelty, news, and the reward of news is the headline or the spotlight, not fame. Our books are largely written as news, advertised as news, criticized as news. Mr. Van Loon writes that James Harvey Robinson’s new book “is a bomb.” Another very contemporary critic says that Mr. Van Loon’s own new book “has all the thrills of a Nick Carter detective story”. Since the books so described are studies in history, we might expect them to have the praise of being true, but truth and news are not necessarily the same thing. To call a book a bomb or to compare it to a Nick Carter story is to give it the praise of news, which goes off but once. Mr. Van Loon and Mr. Robinson must write other books if they wish to hold the spotlight; the bombs of memory, however cherished, cannot compete with actual noises.

The journalistic tendency is felt perhaps in all the arts, but most in books and in the theatre, less in music, still less in painting, and least in architecture and sculpture. From these last we can learn, if we need a reminder, what are the conditions of enduring art, and what, in contrast to popularity, is fame. Sculpture and architecture, from the substantial nature of their medium, must submit to be looked at more than once, to be lived with, finally to be judged by the good opinions of many men over a long period of time; and a good opinion of such work, so lived with, will depend less on the first impression than on habitual contact. For such work popularity is difficult, if not impossible. “Three Soldiers” is a popular book; the Farragut statue in Madison Square is not a popular statue. What statue is popular? It can have only the better kind of success, if any; like the Farragut, it can be famous, loved and returned to over an indefinite length of time. For we can read a book once and throw it aside, or hear music or see a play but once, and then criticize it; it lies entirely in our choice whether we shall read or hear twice. How different our criticism would be if it were based on at least half a dozen readings and hearings.

It would be a misfortune to seem to be attacking journalism as such; what is here intended is only to distinguish between journalism and art. Art is the expression of life we can live with habitually. But there is much about life which we ought to know, and yet we do not care to dwell on, nor even enjoy hearing the first time. To give us this, along with other news, is the function of journalism. Mrs. Stowe’s disclosure of Byron’s private life may have been as necessary to print as she thought it was, in the interest of justice and morality, but it was journalism, not art. As much may be said today for Mr. O’Neill’s plays, which as they follow each other in journalistic succession maintain a journalistic success by bringing headline news of society. If Mr. O’Neill should stop writing now, would his plays hold the stage? Of course the question is irrelevant if he is primarily concerned with educating us to the truth, as Mrs. Stowe was, but if he has an artist’s interest in the permanent audience, in the judgment that ripens with long acquaintance, he may ask himself whether he has written anything yet that human beings will care to live with. “Three Soldiers”, to return to the striking example, was frankly advertised and properly criticized as journalism, as news, revelations of the now-it-can-be-told kind. In what he had to tell, Mr. Dos Passos, like Mrs. Stowe in her Byron story, may have been wrong, and nothing worse can be said of news than that it is not correct. But whether wrong or right, the book will be read widely as long as the psychology of the American soldier is a subject of popular debate, and then it will become as forgotten as Mrs. Stowe’s far more sensational paper. For all we know, Mr. Dos Passos may be an artist as well as a journalist. When he begins the career of the artist, he will learn the old truth about art, that it is long, and that its reward in fame comes slowly. The same experience will come to Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Speare, or to any others who bring us news of the Younger Generation; they now enjoy our gratitude for the news, but in that kind of popularity there are always the seeds of neglect and obscurity--they must bring us more news, and more news, and they must keep up to date, or we will have another town crier. And what town crier, for all the attention he got, ever had fame?

It would be a misfortune also to seem to say that the author who misses popularity is necessarily an artist, or that even temporary success is not to be admired. But in American letters we are beginning to wonder why our great successes are so transitory; why a writer who sells more copies of his first book than did Thackeray or Dickens, does not continue like them to reach a large public with succeeding books; and why he does not, like them, continue to be read after he has ceased to write. The explanation suggested is that most American writers, not only today but throughout the last twenty-five years, have written as journalists--have put out their material not as life but as news about life, and the critics have discussed it as news, and the readers have come to look for the news in it, and for nothing else. Some novelists still writing began their work with successful stories of local color, which we read in order to learn about Louisiana or Pennsylvania or the middle west; having got the information we were looking for, we went elsewhere to look into other novelties. It goes without saying that in this process we readers have done injustice to many a work of art; “Old Creole Days” and “Main Traveled Roads” have something for the permanent reader, as well as for the news seeker, and “Trilby”--to speak of an English book, is still a magnificent romance of friendship and chivalry, though it expired of its own success as a bulletin from the Latin Quarter and a document in hypnotism.

Are we doing a similar injustice to works of art today, by asking of them only a temporary service? How many of us will read a novel or a poem more than once, or will go several times to the same play? How many young writers care to aim at such an audience, who ask of art the privilege of entering themselves into the novel or poem or play, of living the lives of the characters, of falling in love with hero or heroine, of hating the villain, and of repeating this experience with deeper emotions on each rereading? The future of our literature is bound up with such questions. We shall have plenty of stories of the studious or psychological kind, plenty of philosophical or social minded novels and poems, but that is not enough; we must have the opportunity to reach experience in our own imagination, and do our own thinking about it. The author’s point of view, if presented apart from life or with life only as an illustration of it, is after all nothing but news. We read a book by Mr. Keynes to get his latest ideas on the economics of the Treaty, or a book by Mr. Shaw to see what he will say next, or one by Winston Churchill, once an artist, to see whether we share his opinion of the churches or his guesses about immortality; but to art we return to meet old friends like Tom Sawyer or Leatherstocking or David Harum or Doctor Lavendar, to be with them, to come under their influence, to reflect upon their fortunes. I thought I saw such art in “The Age of Innocence”, but most of my neighbors read the book as a sort of Baedeker of old New York, to catch Mrs. Wharton in mistakes of information. Now I think I see such art in Joseph Anthony’s “The Gang”, which I read with pleasure the more undisturbed because my neighbors find in it no news at all, and therefore leave it alone.

_Thomas L. Masson_

For nearly thirty years Tom Masson was the Managing Editor of “Life”. He watched it through various phases of humor and propaganda. He knew the writers of light and of heavier verse, the artists of gay or of poignant sketches, the fashioners of new anecdotes, the cullers of old. This short, slight, wiry Connecticut Yankee, who peers at you through large and heavy spectacles, has probably read, written, and planned more jokes than any other living human being. His voice is as dry and as sharp as his wit. Now, when he is not editing his department, “Short Turns and Encores”, for “The Saturday Evening Post”, he sits out in New Jersey and busily writes essays and short stories. For such a quiet little man to have been the cause of so many riotous laughs seems odd. I have never heard him laugh loudly himself--just a soft, short, nervous, almost apologetic laugh, as if it seemed to him a sin really to laugh at a thing which might not be as funny as it should be. However, there is always the twinkle behind the glasses. Like “Surrender Books” his essays are often quiet bookish observations, usually with a quaint viewpoint, developed and explained by several thousand rambling but delightful words. His acquaintance among American writers is unlimited, for there is no man so dull that he does not like to consider himself funny; and I fancy many a lay reader of these paragraphs will look back with a blush to the time when Tom Masson rejected, or perhaps accepted, a whimsical or at least a would-be amusing manuscript.

SURRENDER BOOKS

There is a class of books that nobody apparently has ever thought of grouping before. Yet they have a very definite place in the mind of each one of us who is devoted to reading, and to know what they are is to have information of great value. They are what I may term surrender books. And presently I hope by example to explain them very definitely.

Of course, lists of books that one ought to read always vary according to taste, and nothing indeed has involved so much controversy as what these books should be. There cannot in the nature of things be any uniform method of selection, this always depending upon individual taste, previous education, heritage, environment, etc. But it seems to me that it is possible to create a new standard which deals with surrender books alone, and I should think that lovers of books generally would be fairly well agreed as to what these are. We may expect differences, but not the violent differences we have observed among those who just make lists of the best books.

What then is a surrender book?

By “surrender” I mean that power a book has over you to make you surrender yourself to it completely. There are plenty of good books that do not have this power. It is also true that many of the books that do have this power are not necessarily novels. The surrender books indeed are in a class by themselves--as I have hinted, a unique class quite apart from anything else in literature. I possess a few of them, and I would not part from these books for anything in the world that I can think of. I cannot, however, explain them definitely all at once. I can do so only little by little. If I should attempt to make a complete definition of a surrender book, you would immediately begin to qualify it; yet it is quite definite, when you understand the conditions.

A surrender book is one that carries with it a complete atmosphere. It is just as if the author had the power to invent a world of his own, in which there is nothing superfluous, and from which, when you once get into it, you do not want to part. Furthermore, all the outside world has left you; nothing else matters. The power to do this is a distinct power; it appears to me to be a peculiarity of some authors. It may not be the highest power. But there it is--a quite definite thing.

A surrender book is one that we are quite content to be let alone with. It is not necessarily an exciting book, which, so to speak, acts upon us like a disease. It may have that quality, and yet it may not. “The Count of Monte Cristo” is a surrender book; it has its imperfections, but it qualifies. And also, in my experience, so does James Ford Rhodes’s history of the United States. Mr. Rhodes first got together the materials to make his world, then he assimilated them, and after that, by the peculiar power I have referred to, he created his illusion. When you step into the first volume, you are living over again, with him, the history of your country. He has made an atmosphere for you; you are carried along by it, it envelops you completely. You don’t care much what happens outside. I suppose, indeed, that it may be said of a surrender book that it has the power of hypnotizing you. Now the same thing is true of Jane Austen as of Mr. Rhodes. I am aware that there are people who don’t like Jane Austen. Mark Twain couldn’t abide her. He ranted when he mentioned her name. He said that any library would be a good one without the works of Jane Austen in it. But Mark Twain’s literary judgment wasn’t worth a whoop. There is nothing superfluous about Jane Austen. She has the power of making you feel that you are there, moving about, guided by her fairy wand, and not caring to be anywhere else.

I should say after all that the quality which enables an author to produce this illusion is one in which he is able to inspire our immediate confidence. If you are at the circus and you see a trapeze performer hesitate over his act, you are at once filled with nervousness about him. Every moment that you view him is an agony. But if he shows that he is perfectly able to control himself, you view his performance with pleasure and serenity. This surrender power is due to the care with which the author has written his book; but this is by no means all. Many an author who has taken infinite pains is deadly dull, and irritatingly accurate. Neither is it due to a dramatic quality. Some authors, who have this dramatic trick, are constantly leading up to climaxes which absorb you at the time, and yet you have not surrendered as a whole. You still retain your self-possession, you are still looking and have one eye on the outside world.