Literature in the Making Part 12

"I do not believe," he said, "that the vogue of the romantic novel, or tale (which is a better word for describing the sort of fiction covered by this generic term), will ever die. The present war undoubtedly will alter the trend of the modern romantic fiction, but it will not in effect destroy it."

"How will it alter it?" I asked.

"Years most certainly will go by," he replied, "before the novelist may even hope to contend with the realities of this great and most unromantic conflict. Kings and courtiers are very ordinary, and, in some cases, ign.o.ble creatures in these days, and none of them appears to be romantic.

"We find a good many villains among our erstwhile heroes, and a good many heroes among our princ.i.p.al villains. People will not care to read war novels for a good many years to come, but it is inevitable that future generations will read even the lightest kind of fiction dealing with this war, horrible though it is. Just so long as the world exists there will be people who read nothing else but the red-blood, stirring romantic stories.

"There exists, of course, a cla.s.s of readers who will not be tempted by the romantic, who will not even tolerate it, because they cannot understand it. That cla.s.s may increase, but so will its ant.i.thesis.

"I know a man who has read the Bible through five or six times, not because he is of a religious turn of mind or even mildly devout, but because there is a lot of good, sound, exciting romance in it! A man who is without romance in his soul has no right to beget children, for he cannot love them as they ought to be loved. They represent romance at its best. He is, therefore, purely selfish in his possession of them."

Mr. McCutcheon had spoken of the probable effect of the war on the popular taste for romantic fiction. I reminded him of William Dean Howells's much-quoted statement, "War stops literature."

"War stops everything else," said Mr. McCutcheon, "so why not literature? It stops everything, I amend, except bloodshed, horror, and heartache.

"And when the war itself is stopped, you will find that literature will be revived with farming and other innocent and productive industries. I venture to say that some of the greatest literature the world has ever known is being written to-day. Out of the history of this t.i.tanic struggle will come the most profound literary expressions of all time, and from men who to-day are unknown and unconsidered."

I asked Mr. McCutcheon if he did not believe that the youthful energy of the United States was likely to make its citizens impatient of romance, that quality being generally considered the exclusive property of nations ancient in civilization. He did not think so.

"America," he said, "is essentially a romantic country, our great and profound commercialism to the contrary notwithstanding. America was born of adventure; its infancy was cradled in romance; it has grown up in thrills. And while to-day it may not reflect romance as we are p.r.o.ne to consider it, there still rests in America a wonderful treasure in the shape of undeveloped possibilities.

"We are, first of all, an eager, zestful, imaginative people. We are creatures of romance. We do two things exceedingly well--we dream and we perform.

"Our dreams are of adventure, of risk, of chance, of impossibilities, and of deeds that only the bold may conceive. And we find on waking from these dreams that we have performed the deeds we dreamed of.

"The Old World looks upon us as braggarts. Perhaps we are, but we are kindly, genial, smiling braggarts--and the braggart is, after all, our truest romanticist.

"I like to hear a grown man admit that he still believes in fairies.

That sort of man thinks of the things that are beautiful, even though they are invisible. And--if you stop to think about it--the most beautiful things in the world are invisible."

_BUSINESS INCOMPATIBLE WITH ART_

FRANK H. SPEARMAN

The late J. Pierpont Morgan writing sonnet sequences, Rockefeller regarding oil as useful only when mixed with pigment and spread upon canvas by his own deft hand, Carnegie designing libraries instead of paying for them--these are some of the entertaining visions that occur to the mind of Frank H. Spearman when he contemplates in fancy a civilization in which business no longer draws the master minds away from art.

I asked the author of _Nan of Music Mountain_ if he thought that the trend of present-day American life--its commercialism and materialism--affected the character of our literature. He replied:

"Let us take commercialism first: By it you mean the pursuit of business. Success in business brings money, power, and that public esteem we may loosely term fame--the admiration of our fellow-men and the sense of power among them.

"Commercialism, thus defined, affects the character of our literature in a way that none of our students of the subject seems to have apprehended. We live in an atmosphere of material striving. Our great rewards are material successes. The extremely important consequence is that our business life through its greater temptations--through its being able to offer the rewards of wealth and mastery and esteem--robs literature and the kindred arts of our keenest minds. We have, it is true, eminent doctors and lawyers, but the complaint that commercialism has invaded these professions only proves that they depend directly on business prosperity for a substantial portion of their own rewards.

"I am not forgetting the crust and garret as the traditional setting for the literary genius; but, when this state of affairs existed, the genius had no chance to become a business millionaire within ten years--or, for that matter, within a hundred. And while poverty provides an excellent foundation for a career, it is not so good as a superstructure--at least, not outside the ranks of the heroic few who renounce riches for spiritual things.

"More than once," continued Mr. Spearman, "in meeting men among our masters of industry, I have been struck by the thought that these are the men who should be writing great books, painting great pictures, and building great cathedrals; their tastes, I have sometimes found, run in these directions quite as strongly as the tastes of lesser men who give themselves to literature, painting, or architecture. But the present-day market for cathedrals is somewhat straitened, and a great ambition may nowadays easily neglect the prospective rewards of literature for those of steel-making.

"Business success--not achieved in literature and the arts--comes first with us; in consequence, the ranks of those who follow these professions are robbed of the intellect that should contribute to them. This is the real way in which commercialism--our pursuit of business--affects our literature. It depletes, too, in the same way, the quality of men in our public life.

"Charles G. Dawes has called my attention more than once to the falling off in caliber among men from whose ranks our politicians and public men are drawn. It is not that our present administration is so conspicuously weak; go to any of the Presidential conventions this year and note the falling off in quality among the politicians. In one generation the change has been startling. The sons of the men that loomed large in public life twenty-five years ago to-day are masters of business.

"Business takes everything. We have had really magnificent financiers, such as the elder Morgan, who should be our Michael Angelo. I have known railroad executives who might have been distinguished novelists, and bankers who would have been great artists were the American people as obsessed with the painting of pictures and the making of statues as those of Europe once were.

"In Michael Angelo's day public interest in solving problems in manufacture and transportation did not overshadow that in painting and sculpture. Leonardo in our day would be building railroads, digging ca.n.a.ls, or inventing the aeroplane--and doing better, perhaps, at these things than any man living; he came perilously close to doing all of them in his own day.

"Before you can bring our steel-founders and business men into literature you must make success in literature and its kindred arts esteemed as the greatest reward. As it is, I fear it is likely to be chiefly those who through lack of capacity, inclination, or robust health are unequal to the heat and burden of great business that will be left for the secondary callings, among which we must at present rank literature. It would be interesting, too, to consider to what extent this movement of men toward business rewards has been compensated for by the opportunities afforded to women in the field thus deserted; we certainly have many clever women cultivating it."

"But what," I asked, "about materialism--not specifically commercialism, but materialism? Do you think that its evil effects are evident in contemporary literature?"

"Materialism--you mean the philosophy--has quite a different effect on any literature--a poisonous, a baneful effect, rather than a merely harmful one," Mr. Spearman answered. "Can you possibly have, at any time or anywhere, great art without a great faith? Since the era of Christianity, at any rate, it seems to me that periods of faith, or at least periods enjoying the reflexes and echoes of faith, have afforded the really nourishing atmosphere for artistic development. Spirituality provides that which the imagination may seize upon for the substance of its creative effort; without spirituality the imagination shrivels, and the materialist, while losing none of his characteristic confidence, shrinks continually to punier artistic stature."

Something in what Mr. Spearman had said reminded me of Henry Holt's criticisms of the modern magazines. So I asked Mr. Spearman what effect the development of the American magazine, with its high prices for serials and series of stories, had had upon our fiction. He answered:

"Good, I think. Our fiction must compete in its rewards with those of business. One of the rewards of either--even if you put it, in the first case, the lowest--is the monetary reward, and the more substantial that can be made, the more chance fiction will have of holding up its head.

"I have had occasion to watch pretty closely the development of the inclinations and ambitions of a number of average American boys--boys that have had fairly intimate opportunities to consider both literature and business. I have been startled more than once to find that as each of them came along and was asked what he wanted to do, the substance of his answer has been, 'Something to make money.'

"If you question your own youthful acquaintances, you will receive in most cases, I dare say, similar answers. I am afraid if Giotto had been a Wyoming shepherd-boy he would want to be a steel-maker. Anything that tends to attract the young to the pursuit of literature as a calling strengthens our fiction, and the magazine should have credit for an 'a.s.sist' in this direction. Don't forget, of course, that the magazine itself derives directly, by way of advertising, from business."

"Do you think, then," I asked, "that our writers are producing work as likely to endure as that which is being produced in England?"

Mr. Spearman smiled whimsically. "Your question suggests to me," he replied, "rather than any judgment in the case, the reflection that the average English writer has possessed over our average American writer the very great advantage of an opportunity to become really educated; to this extent their equipment is appreciably stronger than ours. If you will read the ordinary run of English fiction or play-writing and compare it with similar work of ours, you cannot fail to note the better finish in their work. And in expressing a conviction that our writers are somewhat handicapped as to this factor in their equipment, I do not indict them for wasted opportunities; I indict our own substantial failure in educational methods. For a generation or more we have experimented, and from the very first grade in our grammar-schools up to the university courses there have resulted confusion and inept.i.tude. I instance specifically our experimentation with electives and our widespread contempt for the cla.s.sics. To attempt to master any of the arts and not to be intimately familiar with what the Greeks and the Romans have left us of their achievement--not to speak of those, to us, uncharted seas of medieval achievement in every direction following the twelfth century--is to make the effort under a distinct disadvantage.

"The average English writer has had much more of this intimacy, or at least a chance at much more of it, than the average American writer. In the sphere of literary criticism I have heard Mr. Brownell speak of the better quality of even the anonymous English literary criticism so frequently to be found in their journals when compared with similar American work. There is only one explanation for these things, and it lies in the training. All of this not implying, in indirect answer to your question, that the English writer is to bear away the prize in the compet.i.tion for literary permanence. American Samsons may, despite everything, burst their bonds; but if they win it will often be without what their teachers should have supplied.

"Mr. Brownell, in his definitive essay on Cooper, in comparing the material at Balzac's hand with that at Cooper's, remarks on the fact that Cooper's background was essentially nature. 'Nothing, it is true, is more romantic than nature,' adds Mr. Brownell, 'except nature plus man. But the exception is prodigious.' Europe measures behind her writers almost three thousand years of man.

"We have in this country no atmosphere of Christian tradition such as that which pervades Europe--English-speaking people parted with historic Christianity before they came here. But, willingly or unwillingly, the English and the Continental writers are saturated with this magnificent background of Christianity--they can't escape it. And what I note as striking evidence of the value to them of this brooding spirit of twenty European centuries is the fact that their very pagans choose Christian material to work with. Goethe himself, fine old pagan that he was, turned to Christian quarries for his _Faust_. The minor pagans turn in likewise, though naturally with slighter results. But to all of them, Christianity, paraphrasing Samson, might well say: 'If ye had not plowed with my heifer, ye had not read--your own riddle of longed-for recognition.'"

"Why is it that the art of fiction is no longer taken as seriously as it was, for example, in the time of Sir Walter Scott?"

"I don't know how seriously," countered Mr. Spearman, "you mean your question to be taken. It suggests that in the day of Walter Scott the field of novel-writing was still so new that only bolder spirits ventured into it. It was not a day when the many could attempt the novel with any a.s.surances of success in marketing their wares. In consequence we got then the work of only big men and women. Pioneers--though not necessarily respectable--are a hardy lot.

"Still--touching on your other question about the great American novel--if I wished to develop great musicians I should start every one possible at studying music, and I can't help thinking that the more there are among us who attempt novels the greater probability there will be for the production of a masterpiece. A man's mind is a mine. Neither he nor any one else knows what is in it. Possessing the property in fee simple, he has, of course, certain valuable proprietary rights. But the only way I know of to find out to a certainty just what lies within the property is persistently to tunnel and drift, or, as Mr. Brownell says, 'to get out what is in you.' And I am in complete accord with him in the belief that temperament is the best possible endowment for a novelist--and temperament comes, if you are a Christian, from G.o.d; if a pagan, from the G.o.ds."

Mr. Spearman returned to his theme of the effect of materialism on literature in the course of a discussion of the French novel of the day as compared to the novel of Zola and his imitators. He said:

"I think the important thing for Zola was that his day coincided with a materialistic ascendency in the thought of France. He lived at a time admirably suited to a man of his type. Zola found a France weak and contemptible in its government, and in consequence a soil in which grossness could profitably be cultivated.

"He was by no means a great artist; he was merely a writer writhing for recognition when he turned to filth. He took it up to commercialize it, to turn it into money and reputation. Men such as he are continually, at different times and in different countries, lifting their heads. But unless they are sustained by what chances to be a loose public att.i.tude on questions of decency, they are clubbed into silence.

"And just why should the exploitation of filth a.s.sume to monopolize the word 'realism'? To define precisely what realism should include and exclude would call for hard thinking. But it doesn't take much thought to reach the conclusion that mere annalists of grossness have no proper monopoly of the term. Grossness is no adequate foundation for a literary monument; it is not even a satisfactory corner-stone. The few writers one thinks of that const.i.tute exceptions would have left a better monument without it.

"But if you wish to realize how fortunate Zola was in coinciding with a period when the chief effort of the ruling spirits of France was to war on all forces that strove to conserve decency, try to imagine what sort of a reception _L'a.s.sommoir_ would be accorded to-day by the tears of France stricken through calamity to its knees.