Part 3

I confess that I have often tried to define this surrender quality in such a manner that I would cover it altogether and have not succeeded. The best thing I can do is to give examples.

“Vanity Fair” for instance is not a surrender book; there are parts of it altogether too detached. This does not detract from its glory; only, it doesn’t happen to be that kind. For surrender value I should much prefer “The Newcomes”, but Thackeray is not a perfect type of a surrender author. Neither, on the whole, is Dickens. He carries you off your feet; he bangs you up against the wall; he certainly absorbs you; he is like a contagion. But think of Parkman and his stories of conquest and Indians. Here, by that subtle alchemy of which I have spoken, you are immediately carried into another world, with swift and sure touches. After you have once read, as an instance, “Conspiracy of Pontiac”, how different is everything. To me the supreme pleasure of reading, after you have gotten through a surrender book, and it has become a possession, is to want to live it all over again. Nothing but high genius in writing has the power to enable you to do this.

Perhaps the biggest books in the world are not the surrender books. Neither Shakespeare nor Plato nor the Bible could qualify. There is a sense in which they are too big. There are, of course, stories in the Bible that have great surrender value. A reading of Shakespeare may easily be an absorbing occupation. I remember when, as a boy, I read his plays for the first time, their story value fascinated me, held me. But to meet these three works and come finally to enter into them and understand them requires a long experience with life. Indeed, it is not until we approach the end of life that, as we ponder over them, their great beauty and their profundity almost overawe us.

If you are a natural born reader, however, you can begin at almost any time to collect surrender books. “Les Miserables” is one of them. This is what Walter Scott might call a big bowwow surrender book. You must lead up to it almost with fasting and prayer; especially in these days, when a snatching of newspaper headings, and a fitful flitting from magazine page to magazine page, weakens one’s sense so of true literary values. I read “Les Miserables” when I was convalescing from a long illness, when my mind had been swept clean. It was a wonderful experience. But I suppose the most wonderful surrender experience in the world would be to have nothing to do but to read Balzac through.

And think of some of our modern authors in comparison with these surrender books I have mentioned! They make one shudder with their mosaic qualities, with their utter inability to transport you anywhere without your sinking on the ground and resting every few moments. I have in mind some of our more recent books where I felt as if I were obliged to hold up the author’s words all the time, as I went along.

You say of some books: “It takes him so long to say anything.”

But that isn’t quite it.

It took Victor Hugo long to say some things, but how well he said them! And while he was saying them you forgot that he was saying anything. You were moving along with him, almost without being aware of it. Think of the flight of Jean Valjean! Has the surrender value of that part ever been equaled?

_Hugh Walpole_

The egotism of most authors stalks in front of them as they enter the room. I have yet to discover such a thing round about the person of Hugh Walpole. He is the most modest author I know; yet, somehow, the most confident. He believes in his books; but he does not expect you to believe in them. If you do, he is glad. If you do not--well, then, there will always be another book, another chance for you to believe. Walpole is tall, broad-shouldered, practically always smiling. He has a wide forehead. He wears glasses. His platform manner is excellent, and he speaks, as he writes, with care and distinction. Walpole’s work is rich in background, as well as in a rare understanding of humanity without an overlarding of the sentimental. He is wise, tolerant, and youthful in his freshness of interest in life. He was born in Auckland, New Zealand. He is a son of the Bishop of Edinburgh. As a boy, he lived in America and attended a private school on Washington Square. While an undergraduate at Cambridge, he wrote two novels. One of them, “The Wooden Horse”, was his first published story. Before this, however, at the age of twelve, he is said to have written a novel concerning Guy Fawkes for the delectation of the family cook. For a time he worked as a journalist on “The London Standard”. Now, both in England and in the United States, he is the greatly popular young novelist of recognized worth. His attitude toward America is far more cordial than that of most English writers. Any differences of opinion he regrets and, as can be seen by his little tiff with Mr. Mencken, he is anxious to act as mediator. Socially popular, invited everywhere in London and New York, the real Walpole, I imagine, is the one who secludes himself in the little Cornish village of Polperro, walks among the fishermen, works long and diligently on his novels.

AN OPEN LETTER TO H. L. MENCKEN

My dear Mencken,

I have been intending to write to you for some months past a personal and private letter with nothing more urgent in it than an affectionate greeting and a strong appeal to you to come over here as soon as possible and share my excellent Irish whisky, but there have been certain utterances of yours in “The Smart Set” during the past few months that have led me to make this letter a public one, because the matter of it seems to me of general interest.

I know that you are set tight in your own opinions like a toad in its hole, and you know how greatly, in the past, I have admired many of those same dogmatisms. It is only because I admire so greatly your critical mind and feel that you are doing a most important work for English as well as American letters, that I write to you as I do. There is little hope of changing you, but it is time that someone on this side of the Atlantic challenged some of your absurd views about the English novel and, above all, about English contemporary criticism.

In these recent numbers of “The Smart Set” you have returned again and again to the main charges; one, that the English critics are engaged in a sort of conspiracy against the contemporary American novel; the other, that the same English critics are busied with log-rolling in connection with their favorite novelists. You make distinct charges, for instance, that no American novelist, save Hergesheimer, and Edith Wharton, is treated with any respect over here: that is, that we deliberately and of malice aforethought despise and condemn James Branch Cabell, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Floyd Dell, Ben Hecht and the rest, and that we praise the works of, in your opinion, poor novelists like Frank Swinnerton and Michael Sadleir, and neglect the genius of such an author as W. L. George. You also imply that the American public is paying too much attention to the contemporary English novel and is neglecting the brilliant new American novel now arising. Why, you ask, should the Americans flatter the English in this way when the English so utterly neglect the American?

My dear Mencken, it is really time that you paid a visit to this happy little island of ours. I should be very sorry indeed were you to come just at the time of my visit to America. I look forward to eating, if not drinking, with you in Baltimore, but even at the risk of missing your most engaging company, I do beg you to come over. I regard it as a matter of the utmost importance that the English and American novelists should just at this time go hand in hand together. There is a new American novel of the greatest interest and individualism, just as there is a new language. It has already certain characteristics most definitely of its own, yielding nothing to past tradition, English or other, standing strongly on its own feet, the most interesting movement, I think, in American letters of the last fifty years.

There is no reason however why, because of this new and splendid phenomenon, the American critics should decide that the American public has no more use for the English novel. The more individual and distinctive the American novel becomes, the more different will it be from the English and the more enjoyable will both be in comparison and in friendly rivalry. It is quite impossible, for instance (to take one or two recent examples), for any Englishman to father such books as “Main Street”, “Moon-Calf”, “Miss Lulu Bett”, “Cytherea”, or “Three Soldiers”, just as it would be equally impossible for “To Let” or “Dangerous Ages” or “The Death of Society” or “Crome Yellow” to have come from an American talent. Surely this is a good thing. Instead of both countries producing, as they were engaged in doing twenty years ago, insipid historical romances that might have come from anywhere, the younger generations of both peoples are now working on their own grounds, cultivating most happily their own gardens.

That brings me directly to your charge that the English critics are neglecting the more recent American novelists. You except Edith Wharton and Joseph Hergesheimer, so I will not speak of them, only hinting in parenthesis that if you imagine that Hergesheimer’s art is European rather than American, you are making the greatest mistake of your young critical life; but is it true for a single moment that Cabell, Booth Tarkington, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Miss Cather and the others are passed over here? That their novels do not command great sales here is perfectly true. For some reason, the American novel presents English readers with conditions that are very difficult for them to understand. Part of the difficulty is beyond question this problem of the new American language. Take “Main Street” or “Three Soldiers” or “Moon-Calf”, and you will find pages of those books peppered with phrases that to nine Englishmen out of ten are quite unintelligible. When you get to the words of Don Marquis or Ring Lardner they might, for most English readers, be just as readily written in Russian or Chinese. But it is not only difficulty of language. American conditions simply have no parallel in this country. The majority of Englishmen have not visited the United States, and many of those who have been there have penetrated no farther than the wilds of New York and Chicago.

Such a book as one of the very finest of all American novels, “My Ántonia”, is simply not intelligible to the ordinary English reader, and the small sales of “Main Street” over here are entirely due to the fact that we have nothing in our country at all parallel with the cultural conditions of your own small towns. It would be in many ways much better for us if we had.

That these writers are critically neglected, is simply untrue. You mention Cabell’s name. The limited edition of “Jurgen” that John Lane published over here has been one of the great successes of the autumn. The 3,000 copies of that edition were sold out within the first fortnight, and booksellers are besieged with requests for it. That book had columns of reviews in all the leading literary journals. The only important paper that treated it with contempt was “The London Mercury”, whose notices of fiction are by far its weakest section. “Figures of Earth”, which has just appeared here, has again been treated with the most serious attention. Sherwood Anderson has hitherto been presented in England by his weakest work only, and it is not the fault of the English critics if they do not yet realize how considerable an artist he is. Such a book as Ben Hecht’s “Erik Dorn” has not, I think, yet been published here, but in any case you would not, I imagine, wish to have that represented as the finest flower of American contemporary genius. Booth Tarkington has had critical attention here for years. “The Narrow House” by Evelyn Scott received any number of reviews, and “Miss Lulu Bett” was greeted with the greatest enthusiasm.

The fact, however, remains that the American novel is at present dealing with conditions unknown to the English reader, while the English novel is speaking of manners and customs that have been known for generations to American visitors.

I come to your second charge, which is that the English reviewer is a fellow of small cliques and coteries who is engaged in praising only the works of his own set. Never was there anything falser. You instance certain names, Frank Swinnerton, Michael Sadleir and others. The fact of the matter is that there is a very wholesome tendency among English critics here to knock any novelist on the head as soon as he shows signs of getting above himself. This is an admirable and most natural instinct in human nature, peculiar not only to the English. You will remember that Henry James in some articles in the “Times” just before the war collected certain young novelists together and either patted them on the head or rapped them on the knuckles according to the way in which you interpreted his rather mysterious prose. In any case, he gave them undue prominence, they having but just then chipped the egg, having the whole of their young literary lives in front of them. They have suffered from this paternal blessing ever since, and in their case, at any rate, there have been no logs rolled. Neither W. L. George nor Frank Swinnerton was mentioned by Henry James. Mr. George has had, it is true, some severe criticism for his last two or three novels, but that is because they are provocative and argumentative, they were pacifist in tendency during the war, and have on one occasion at least been concerned with backgrounds that were not perhaps the atmospheres in which his talent could work most naturally.

Frank Swinnerton, until after the publication of “Nocturne”, had universal praise from the critics. After “Nocturne” he became a public figure, a definite representative of the younger English novel and therefore a legitimate Aunt Sally. “Coquette”, one of his very best novels and certainly one of the best English novels of the last ten years, received a very mixed press indeed, and you are quite wrong if you imagine that he is being praised unduly. He is working most wisely in a small corner of contemporary English life that he knows absolutely, that is his own by right of mastery, and if you think “Nocturne”, “Coquette”, “On the Staircase”, and “The Happy Family” are poor novels, I can only reply to you that you don’t know the English life of which he is writing.

As to Michael Sadleir, of whose “Privilege” you spoke with a contemptuous sniff, there has, in his case, been no conspiracy to praise. The reviews of that book were very divided. I would not have expected you to be in sympathy with it. It is a romantic work both definitely and deliberately, and has for its most ancient ancestor the highly colored Mrs. Radcliffe whose fiction I suspect you of never having read.

But these are mere matters of opinion. What I want to say to you is that there is no evidence anywhere of log-rolling in the reviewing of fiction in England today. With regard to modern poetry I am not so sure, but I can speak there with no authority.

What it comes to, my dear Mencken, is that we want you over here for a little while. Aren’t you conscious yourself of an increasing tinge of provincialism in your critical utterances? Don’t you really think that there is plenty of room for the contemporary English and American novels to walk hand in hand? What we want over here is some definite authority who will speak to us about the present development of the American novel. You’re the man for that. Come over and help us. I can promise you a most cordial welcome.

Yours ever,

+Hugh Walpole+.

_H. L. Mencken_

That a violent critic should ever prove other than the most mild mannered of men is unthinkable. Mencken, the bitter, the cynical, the terrible, is in reality a large, healthy, Germanic figure who lives in a white house with green blinds in Baltimore, his home town, with his mother. He is thoroughly domestic and exceedingly fond of beer. There you have him! He is clever in his speech, though not so quick to the attack as his co-editor, George Jean Nathan. His complexion is florid, his manners sturdy, his gestures broad. His life has been devoted to journalism and to a hearty public dislike of American politics, and the more obvious “booberies” of the American scene. Yet he is an earnest ballyboo for such idiosyncrasies as the so-called American language, on which he has written a huge tome which must have involved much painstaking research. He is, in the main, anti-British, though he seems to have enjoyed himself when he was in London last season. At heart he is a sentimentalist. This he has learned to conceal; but he has never been able to destroy all copies of “Ventures into Verse” published in 1901. That and the quality of “The Smart Set” poetry betray him. As a critical force he has had large influence in molding the younger writers of America. He is often a champion for uncompromising realism. He is far more interested in life problems, however, than in the technique of writing. By nature a philosopher and a politician, he has become by accident an editor and critic. With his co-editor he is now engaged in a new venture, the establishing of a new monthly magazine, “The American Mercury.”

MR. MENCKEN REPLIES

My dear Walpole:

The facts, alas, confound you. During the past year I have reviewed exactly 25 novels in “The Smart Set”, setting aside mere notices. Of these, 7 were English and 18 were American. Of the English novels, I anointed 3 with praise, or 43%; of the American novels, 9, or 50%. Two of the English novels I denounced as garbage, and 5 of the American--28.5% and 27.7% respectively. Regarding two of the English novels and four of the American I was in doubt--28.5% and 22.3% respectively.

Certainly these figures show no chauvinistic bias. I receive about 350 novels every year--a great many more than any man could read. I pick out for review those that seem most likely to be interesting or significant. Is it remarkable that an American should find 2-4/7 times as many of these among American books as among English books? What English reviewer, in the other direction, shows a score so high, or even half so high? Or so close a correspondence between the two series of percentages?

The log-rolling I complain of has its chief scene in the United States, not in England. It takes the form of extravagant efforts to promote the American sale of books by Englishmen of a small group, most of them bad. It is carried on partly by publishing houses dealing in English goods, and partly by touring propagandists and literary bagmen. It is aided by certain American journals that practise a puerile and slimy Anglophilism. It has become a public nuisance, and when I deal with it at all I treat it as such. The English opinion upon which it is presumably based seems to me to be incompetent, and, in part at least, disingenuous. It is a body of opinion that is ignorantly and incurably anti-American.

I need not tell you, my dear Walpole, that when I chance to take a hack at such a fraud it is done without the slightest messianic purpose. I am entirely devoid of public spirit, and it would give me no more joy to see log-rolling stopped than it would give me to see baptism by total immersion stopped. But it diverts me to chase mountebanks, and so I occasionally yield to the vice. Now you jump into the arena and get in my way. Back to your place! Specifically, back to the bar under the grandstand, where I’ll be delighted presently to join you and drink a _Humpen_ with you, for you are not a mountebank but an honest artist (as I have more than once declared in print), and you no more belong among the zanies I pursue than I belong among the syndics of the Y. M. C. A.

I refuse absolutely to talk about the American novel when I get to England, or about anything else so depressing. But I have some amusing scandal for you, and you may rest assured that I’ll not neglect your Irish _Schnapps_.

Yours----

+H. L. Mencken+.

_Charles Henry Meltzer_

A dramatic critic who flayed John Drew in his youth and has reached a mellow old age without losing his enthusiasm for carping over fine points in the theatre, Charles Henry Meltzer is a dignified figure. His contact with both American and continental theatres has been long and intimate. Born in England, of Russian extraction, he is an accomplished linguist. He has written plays in French as well as in English. He has made many opera librettos. He has acted as foreign correspondent for various New York newspapers in numerous foreign capitals. He was dramatic and musical critic for both the New York “Herald” and “World.” A precise yet entertaining gentleman, meticulous, courteous, widely read, a type that one does not often meet in theatrical circles of today.

SARAH BERNHARDT

I am old enough to have been under the spell of Sarah Bernhardt when she was in her prime; and young enough to have kept the enthusiasm which she awoke in me till the last days of her long life drew near. To most reviewers of the hour here in New York, with their near backgrounds, Bernhardt has sometimes seemed a tedious legend. But to those of us who were fortunate enough to applaud her at the Théâtre-Français on great nights gone by, she will be always dear and an unfading glory.

It is not, though, to the actress who has passed on to another stage that I ask permission to pay tribute--the poor tribute of a friend who knew her closely, at her best and worst, and who, despite her human faults and human frailties, admired her always and believed her a great woman. Beside her even Duse, a rare artist, seems rather trifling to the writer of these lines. While of the “stars”, so called, to whom most here bow down, who has a scintilla of her brightness?

She was an artist, of the finest, highest kind. But she was first a character--a woman of compelling will and force, individual, all herself, a burning flame. Incidentally, but only in a small way, she was in turn sculptor, painter, and writer. She had invented several plays, some of which were never acted, while one was seen and rather well received at the Paris Odéon. She had also now and then dashed off some novels. Of these the last, I think, was “Petite Idole”, published here last year as “The Idol of Paris”. It is largely autobiographical.

If any person in the world has proved the truth of the perhaps misleading dictum which defines genius as the art of taking infinite pains, Bernhardt surely has. She was an honest, tireless, never resting worker in her chosen field. Her art was the one god she always worshipped. And to that art she gave up all her strength. She had no patience with her many gifted rivals who were content with being charming and inspired. Unless they worked to make the utmost of their gifts, she would condemn them. Thanks to her patience, her intelligence and honesty, her artistic honesty, when she was seventy she could still delight her audiences. Behind all her most amazing exhibitions, we could perceive the great technique which made them possible. Her technique helped her to the very end. It overcame, at times, the tragic handicap of an actress who had lost one of her limbs. It enabled her, only a few years ago, to play the death scene in “La Dame aux Camélias” as touchingly as in her early days. Her devotion to the technique of her art shamed our young “stars”. But our reviewers only saw in her--a woman: a woman maimed and aging, and not beautiful, perhaps, who fought with passion to retain her envied queenship.