Part 7

Her chief cause of complaint is that my library contains no works of reference. In vain I tell her that I have a dictionary, the finest of all dictionaries. She only asks me coldly to produce it, and I--I cannot. And she will not accept my unsupported word. I am unable to produce the evidence because of all my books that dictionary is the most butterfly-like. It settles now here, now there, and remains so short a time in each place that Lalage, who has lived with me for eight months, claims with apparent sincerity that she has never seen it. When I have seen it myself I cannot say that I have paid much attention to it except to experience a pleasantly possessive thrill. I never consult it. I never need to. Usually I can grasp the meaning of an unfamiliar word by the context and as for spelling--well, I am a good speller. On those rare occasions when I really need to look up a word, my dictionary being so much the will-o’-the-wisp, I have a better and more informative way of looking it up. I take some book that I feel sure will somewhere or other contain the word and I read through it until my search is rewarded. In this way I refresh my memory of books that I have read and even sometimes read books that otherwise I never should have read.

Recently I have been informed that this practice of mine is one of the many admirable methods of the Chinese. To find the proper use of a word they search the classics. If that word does not appear in the classics, so much the worse for the word. It dies.

From the actual use I have made of my dictionary I have got little but sorrow. Many excellent words are ruined by too definite a knowledge of their meaning. There is the tragic case of “hectic”. I had always considered it a highly expressive word. I had used it joyously for years to mean a convenient combination of “nervous”, “excitable”, “feverish”. One ill-starred day I looked it up and I have never been able to use it since. Its actual meaning is so far removed from its meaning as used by me and the vulgar generally that I cannot even remember what it was. No one could be expected to remember it. It simply has nothing to do with the case.

But it is not only a dictionary that Lalage would have me possess. She thinks I should have an encyclopædia. Now this is really the height of folly. She knows that I have not sufficient room for those books that I already own. An encyclopædia is ugly and cumbersome. Also it is an expensive thing.

And to an encyclopædia there is the same serious objection that applies to most works of reference. It is too practical and too detailed. What information the average human mind might conceivably be able to grasp is smothered under a mass of technicalities and so lost.

I have, for instance, read the article on navigation in an encyclopædia. It was, doubtless, sound and, as such articles go, well constructed. Far be it from me to offer any impertinent, half baked criticism upon it. But the fact remains that not one shred of it clung in my mind. What knowledge I have of seamanship, and it is ample for my needs, I got from “The Hunting of the Snark”. From a work like that you learn indelibly. You learn with the Bellman. In company with that intelligent but untrained gentleman, I never knew whether an east wind blew from the east or to the east. It is not a thing one can easily inquire about. One might safely guess at it if it were not for the technical terms. The phrase “due east” is certainly confusing if not deliberately misleading. But after one reading of “The Hunting of the Snark” the truth is fixed in your mind.

I do not think I am peculiar in this. Is there anyone who has not learned more history from historical romances than from the pages of histories themselves? I believe not.

It might be possible, with a little research, to draw up a list of such substitutes to fill the places of all dull reference books on library shelves. Dozens of delectable ones flash into my mind. But I hold my hand because if I presented this list I should then be in the despicable position of having perpetrated a work of reference. This I have vowed I shall never do.

So I claim that Lalage is unreasonable. But I think privately that it is better so. Unreason never annoys me. I have with it unfailing patience. If Lalage came to me and complained that my housekeeping compared unfavorably with that of Mrs. Jellyby--if in these benighted days there are many who do not recognize Mrs. Jellyby I am glad of that, because they won’t know what I mean--if she pointed out that I begin a thousand things that I never finish, if she showed me that though I am potentially a capable person I never accomplish anything, she would be perfectly right. Reason would be all on her side. But then I should be very angry.

_Floyd Dell_

Floyd Dell was born in Barry, Illinois; but literary Chicago claims him as her own. He is a slight, shy, sensitive man, essentially the poet in temperament; but turned irrevocably novelist. His education, which was never formal after early high school days, is broad, and in some respects, deep. A voracious reader, he has taught himself what many academicians do not know how to teach: the ability to think constructively. His training as a writer began with reporting days in Davenport, Iowa. Later, in Chicago, he became associate, then editor of the Literary Page of the Chicago “Evening Post.” Since then he has been connected in one way or another with “The Masses” and “The Liberator” but he likes to feel that his active editorial days are past, and that practically all of his time can now be devoted to work on his novels. His critical viewpoint is well shown by the essay I use here. As a novelist he is more emotional. Any one of his three stories displays that. He is a conservative by nature, I believe, but intellectually a radical. He believes, however, that “politics have nothing to do with letters”. For that reason he has turned his political ideas into channels of literary criticism. Dell is keen, fearless and just. For a time he was somewhat biased by his great interest in psychoanalysis; but even this is wearing off and he has again become the thoroughly tolerant and wise young man. He is a born parent, and though he has his own son to instruct, he still enjoys the rôle of preceptor. To this position, however, he does not elect himself, and those who seek his advice are fortunate.

CRITICISM AND BAD MANNERS

When I was twenty-two years old, and had just become the associate literary editor of a Chicago newspaper, I had a painful experience. The year was 1909, and in that year Hamilton Mabie, Richard Watson Gilder, and Henry van Dyke still set the standards to which American literary culture conformed; Dreiser had been suppressed and was, by all but a few, forgotten; Mencken was just beginning to be heard of as the writer of a caustic column in the Baltimore “Sun”; Sinclair Lewis had just graduated from Yale and got a job as a reporter somewhere; and Sherwood Anderson was an advertising man who dreamed of writing a novel. In those days Winston Churchill represented the sober dignity of literature to the American public. And in poetry--well, nobody paid much attention to poetry anyway, in those days; there were real poets, such as Vaughn Moody and Anna Hempstead Branch, but they were overshadowed by the colossal fame of James Whitcomb Riley. The voices of Vachel Lindsay, Louis Untermeyer, Ezra Pound, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, were yet to be heard. And it was in connection with poetry that the painful incident I am about to tell happened to me.

There was an American poet--and I hope he will forgive me for telling the story--who shared the universal neglect accorded to poetry at that time, and yet, or so it was said among those who knew, was an authentically great poet. He had been acclaimed abroad. Foreign praise has always weighed heavily in the American scale of critical opinion; it weighed with me. It happened that I had not read any of this great poet’s works; but I was prepared to be his American discoverer.

At this point, through a friend, the poet himself heard of my interest in him, and sent me a complete set of his works, each volume being inscribed: “From an older to a younger poet.” Here I must confess that the poet had been shown some of my youthful verses, and was reported to have praised them; and perhaps it was his good opinion of my poetry which made me so ready to have a good opinion of his.

Then--alas--I read his works. They represented, to my mind, the banal old; and, whether or not they were as banal as I thought, they were certainly unlike what I wanted American poetry to be. And I found myself in a painful situation. If I wrote what I thought about this poet, it would be bad manners; if I refrained from writing anything at all, that would be cowardly; and if I wrote anything less than the truth, I would be in league with error.

The result was that, with a feeling of desperate heroism, I wrote the whole truth, as I saw it--mercilessly, and at considerable length; two columns of damnation, as bitter and incisive as only a young critic in a virtuous mood could make it. I hate to think how the poet must have felt, reading that review without any preliminary warning!

I can find many excuses for my young cruelty; but they amount to a plea of ignorance. Not that I think I was wrong about the poet; at least, the younger generation of critics agreed with me, and among us we blazed a way for the new American poetry. I do not go back on my youthful opinions; but I do regret my youthful manners, and I make in my behalf the plea of ignorance.

I did not know how it hurts to be criticized like that, for one thing. I have learned since then. Furthermore, I did not know how great an advantage a reviewer has over an author. The young reviewer feels--at least I did--that he is St. George attacking the Dragon. But that is scarcely the case. The Dragon of Error is usually a well meaning old Dragon; and St. George is not merely, as he thinks of himself, a boy from the provinces who must needs exert all his powers--he has, in his newspaper, a modern machine of efficient destruction, and he is really firing from a battleship upon helpless villages. The authors haven’t newspapers to fight back in; and besides, it is not their business to fight back.

I did not realize, then, that it is no crime against truth and beauty to write bad poetry or bad fiction. Goodness knows, the bad writers, no less than the good ones, are usually dedicated to truth and beauty, as sincerely as any young critic. They are doing the best they can. Who--including Harold Bell Wright--would not be glad to write a book which the young critics would place in the pantheon of literature? And who--including the late Henry James--would not have been glad to be able to write a best seller? One writes what one can.

This is not an argument for the abolition of criticism, nor for a false and sickly tolerance of bad writing. Sincerity in criticism helps to produce sincerity in creative art, and I flatter myself that my own young critical brutalities, of which I have given an instance, have had their share in the bringing to birth of a new and more sincere American literature. At the same time, I think that all criticism is motivated by jealousy and envy: the critic is a critic, usually, because he has not yet had the opportunity to do creative work himself; and he is able to be generous to creative artists only when he recognizes in their work something akin to what he wants to do himself, so that he can feel in such a writer an ally and not an enemy in his own prospective campaign. These motives are, of course, hidden deep below the level of consciousness; but they are there--and they have their origin in fear. The established writer fears the emergence of a new taste which will reject his work and leave him without an audience; he fears the younger generation that comes knocking at the door, and, with honorable exceptions, he sneers at the younger generation’s queer and different literary beginnings. But in precisely the same way, the younger generation fears the older--fears that the public taste will never change, that its own talents will never be recognized and rewarded, and that the Old Gods will reign forever; hence, in every organ of opinion which it can initiate or capture, it sneers at the older generation, and calls the productions of that generation by every bad name in the critical vocabulary.

It is human nature to be afraid; I am not complaining of that; but what I object to is the “rationalizing” of these fears, their elaborate justification by critical theory. It would be much better if we admitted the fact, and proceeded to deal with it as we deal with other fears, by social methods which tend to mitigate them. These social processes all fall into the general category of manners.

It is desirable, in the first place, that writers should, to some extent, know each other personally. It is sometimes objected that personal acquaintance makes honest criticism impossible. That is not true; it merely makes ill mannered criticism more unlikely. One cannot recklessly impute all sorts of vicious motives to a writer with whom one may presently have lunch; one is, in fact, required to criticize, and not merely malign, his works. It is my opinion that honest criticism, of the most unfavorable sort, is consistent with a degree of courtesy which would not interfere with agreeable personal relations between author and critic. Every writer has the experience of finding that some of his best friends do not like what he writes; but their friendship usually remains unimpaired, because the traditions of friendly intercourse require that this dislike shall be expressed in a friendly way. Your friend, in giving you his opinion in private, is under no obligation--as the unknown newspaper critic seems to be--to make you out a complete ass or an utter scoundrel. As a matter of fact, you are neither, and the friendly criticism is usually far more to the point than the newspaper denunciation.

The generations move swiftly in these days, and I, who am still a member of a younger generation which has just begun to get a foothold in the citadel of public taste, find myself denounced by a still younger generation as one of that gang of tyrants and oppressors whose authority must be destroyed if literature in America is ever to come into its own. I dare say I have incurred some of these denunciations by my critical airs of owning, together with my gang, the earth and the fulness thereof; but these airs were merely intended to impress a still older gang whom I had been in the habit of regarding as tyrants and oppressors. It is also true, doubtless, that I have sneered at some of these younger writers; certainly they have annoyed me by their tricks, especially by what seems to me a wilful unintelligibility; but even so, I ought not to have sneered. That is simply a bad critical habit which, once acquired, it is hard to get over.

In the pages of +The Bookman+ recently I was guilty of sneering at two writers of a “generation” younger than my own. I did not realize that I had done so until one of them called my attention to it in a letter. “Why”, he asked, “did you say that I had no point of view?” I apologized to him warmly, remarking that when critics said that about my own novels it always made me angry. An author, of course, always has a point of view, and it is absurd, as well as ill mannered, to assert that he is such a fool as to think that he can write a novel without one. He may fail to convey to his readers, or to some of them, what that point of view is; and the critic is perfectly within his rights in saying as much. But the critic has no right to assume that a novel which seems to him an inchoate collection of materials is anything worse than a failure on the part of the author, who certainly believed that he was presenting the public with an orderly and significant work of art. Moreover, it is honorable to fail in such an attempt; and it is the critic’s business, rather than to assume that the author has been too lazy to try to write a good novel, to discover why he has failed. It is merely easier for the critic to believe the worst; and it is generally the critic who is lazy, and not the novelist.

It is, of course, an imposition upon a poor devil who wants to write novels of his own to put him at a desk before a pile of other people’s novels and ask him to criticize them. No wonder he is often impatient; and no wonder, either, that lacking as yet the opportunity to make himself known to the public by novels of his own, he should seize the occasion to shine at the expense of the authors whom he is supposed to be criticizing. I have done that often enough myself to have no hesitation in attributing it as a natural impulse to other reviewers. And when I read one of those reviews of one of my own novels, I address the reviewer in imagination thus: “Young man, you have my sympathy. It is a shame that you should have to spend your precious hours, which should be dedicated to your own first novel, upon a book of mine in which you are obviously not interested in the least. This is a hard world for beginning novelists. But have patience--remember that some of us have gone through the same mill. And besides--I am really not to blame for your predicament. _I_ did not ask you to review my novel. And it is not quite fair of you to punish me for it. I do not want to keep you from writing your novels; all I want is the privilege of writing my own--a privilege which you seem to wish to take away from me. All right--you’ll get a taste of your own medicine some day! Who do you think is going to review that great book of yours when you do write it? Several dozen young men who want to write their own books, and who will consider your novel merely one more affliction to be impatiently suffered. Then you’ll see how it feels!”

The reviewing of books, regardless of the quality of the books, is likely to be for the young critic an agony that, to be endured, must be mitigated by some opportunity for presenting _himself_ to the public. That’s all right: if the book is not, in some sense, about himself, he has no business to be reading it; and if it _is_ about himself--as the most interesting novels are--he is quite right in saying so. The most entertaining, if not always the most informative, reviews are accounts of “the adventures of a soul among masterpieces”. But accounts of the misadventures of a soul among books that are not felt to be masterpieces can be very dreary and very offensive reading. If a book makes the critic angry, that is something; but if it merely bores him, why should he trouble to tell us so? A history of a critic’s boredom is itself a bore; and the critic who is bored by almost everything in the world lacks the essential ingredient of the critical faculty--a sensitiveness so acute that the critic can become excited over things which other people are too dull to notice for themselves. A habitual falling back upon the critic’s own experiences may or may not be a sign of æsthetic boredom; it all depends on whether the “I” thus placed in the foreground is relevant to the literary topic nominally under discussion. Every young newspaper man has tried the trick of handing the city editor a story of his failure to get an interview, instead of the interview. But no newspaper man has yet had the nerve to hand in a story of how he preferred to sit in the park and watch the pigeons rather than talk to the man he was sent to interview. A good deal of “brilliant” “young” “criticism” is like that.

But while there are many excuses to be made for bad manners in the young critic to whom book reviewing is an unwelcome chore, these excuses scarcely apply to the established novelist, who is presumably not reviewing books to keep the wolf from the door. The only good reason for one novelist’s reviewing a book by another is a genuine desire to say something about it. And he is dealing here with an equal whom he is under every obligation of civilized human intercourse to treat with courtesy.

I have already given an instance of my own failure to behave according to these standards, so I shall take the liberty of mentioning a similar failure on the part of another. One would not need to look far for instances. But as a most glaring example, I post up for consideration some excerpts from a review by a prominent American woman novelist, whom I prefer not to name here; though for purposes of incredulous reference I don’t mind stating that the review appeared in the initial number of “The Literary Digest International Book Review.”

I have always found ---- peculiarly interesting, for the reason that she is one of the few women writers of fiction with intellect as well as talent; and it has diverted me to speculate on what she would have been if she had married and had a brood of flesh-and-blood children, or if she had elected to study life and men at first hand after the manner of Georges Sand and other gifted ladies rather more discreet but no less thorough....

As I have intimated before, I have often wondered how Miss ---- would have treated sex, if, instead of being a woman of impeccable virtue, she had chosen to be a _dame gallante_. Writers of first-hand experience with the vital, but nevertheless commonplace, facts of life, generally avoid erotic scenes, partly because a suggestion and an appeal to the reader’s imagination is more esthetic, partly because, their own curiosity satisfied, they have no repressions or inhibitions to gratify in the act of writing. The creative faculty takes a wider range. Sex plays its part in their work as in Life. It is a mighty force, but it is not the whole thing. Therefore, I do not hesitate to believe that if Miss ---- were as adventurous personally as she is imaginatively, her striking talent would have a freer sweep....

Enough!

I see that I am a member of the older generation after all. But not in my wildest youthful days as a critic would I have considered it decent to taunt a woman novelist with her presumed virginity--or a man novelist, either, for that matter! When criticism opens its gates to such personal gossip as this about living writers, anything is possible--all standards of critical propriety are destroyed--there is no longer any protection for writers from the vulgar curiosity of a public less interested in literature than in “life”. And what will it all lead to, I ask, but red ruin and the breaking up of homes?

There are, as I can call to mind, a number of quaint facts alleged about the private lives of certain prominent contemporary writers, American as well as English; and speculations as to whether, if these facts had been otherwise, the prose or the poetry of these writers would be better or worse--such speculations would doubtless be more interesting to the general reader, trained in Sunday Supplement taste, than what has heretofore passed for criticism. Are we to expect this sort of thing? I hope not!

_Zona Gale_