A BOOK OF PREFACES

By H. L. MENCKEN

PUBLISHED AT THE BORZOI · NEW YORK · BY

ALFRED · A · KNOPF

COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. 

_Published September, 1917__Second edition, 1918__Third edition, August, 1920__Reprinted, January, 1922_

_Set up, electrotyped and printed by Vail-Ballou Co. , Binghamton, N. Y. Paper (Warren's) furnished by Henry Lindenmeyr & Sons, New York, N. Y. Bound by the Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass. _

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

_BY H. L. MENCKEN_

VENTURES INTO VERSEGEORGE BERNARD SHAW: HIS PLAYSMEN VERSUS THE MAN _With R. R. La Monte_A LITTLE BOOK IN C MAJORA BOOK OF CALUMNY [_The above books are out of print_]THE PHILOSOPHY OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHEA BOOK OF BURLESQUESIN DEFENSE OF WOMENA BOOK OF PREFACESPREJUDICES: FIRST SERIESPREJUDICES: SECOND SERIESTHE AMERICAN LANGUAGE

_New York: Alfred A Knopf_

PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION

This fourth printing of "A Book of Prefaces" offers me temptation, asthe third did, to revise the whole book, and particularly the chapterson Conrad, Dreiser and Huneker, all of whom have printed important newbooks since the text was completed. In addition, Huneker has died. Butthe changes that I'd make, after all, would be very slight, and so itseems better not to make them at all. From Conrad have come "The Arrowof Gold" and "The Rescue, " not to mention a large number of sumptuousreprints of old magazine articles, evidently put between covers for thesole purpose of entertaining collectors. From Dreiser have come "Free, ""Twelve Men, " "Hey, Rub-a-Dub-Dub" and some chapters of autobiography. From Huneker, before and after his death, have come "Unicorns, ""Bedouins, " "Steeple-Jack, " "Painted Veils" and "Variations. " But notone of these books materially modifies the position of its author. "TheArrow of Gold, " I suppose, has puzzled a good many of Conrad's admirers, but certainly "The Rescue" has offered ample proof that his old powersare not diminished. The Dreiser books, like their predecessors that Idiscuss here, reveal the curious unevenness of the author. Parts of"Free" are hollow and irritating, and nearly all of "Hey, Rub-a-Dub-Dub"is feeble, but in "Twelve Men" there are some chapters that rank withthe very best of "The Titan" and "Jennie Gerhardt. " The place of Dreiserin our literature is frequently challenged, and often violently, butnever successfully. As the years pass his solid dignity as an artistbecomes more and more evident. Huneker's last five works changed hisposition very little. "Bedouins, " "Unicorns" and "Variations" belongmainly to his journalism, but into "Steeple-Jack, " and above all into"Painted Veils" he put his genuine self. I have discussed all of thesebooks in other places, and paid my small tribute to the man himself, alight burning brightly through a dark night, and snuffed out only at thedawn. 

I should add that the prices of Conrad first editions given on page 56have been greatly exceeded during the past year or two. I should addalso that the Comstockian imbecilities described in Chapter IV are stillgoing on, and that the general trend of American legislation andjurisprudence is toward their indefinite continuance. 

 H. L. M. Baltimore, January 1, 1922. 

CONTENTS

 I. Joseph Conrad 11

 II. Theodore Dreiser 67

III. James Huneker 151

 IV. Puritanism as a Literary Force 197

 Index 285

A BOOK OF PREFACES

I

JOSEPH CONRAD

§ 1

"Under all his stories there ebbs and flows a kind of temperedmelancholy, a sense of seeking and not finding.... " I take the wordsfrom a little book on Joseph Conrad by Wilson Follett, privatelyprinted, and now, I believe, out of print. [1] They define both the moodof the stories as works of art and their burden and direction ascriticisms of life. Like Dreiser, Conrad is forever fascinated by the"immense indifference of things, " the tragic vanity of the blind gropingthat we call aspiration, the profound meaninglessness oflife--fascinated, and left wondering. One looks in vain for an attemptat a solution of the riddle in the whole canon of his work. Dreiser, more than once, seems ready to take refuge behind an indeterminate sortof mysticism, even a facile supernaturalism, but Conrad, from first tolast, faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact. His stories arenot chronicles of men who conquer fate, nor of men who are unbent andundaunted by fate, but of men who are conquered and undone. Eachprotagonist is a new Prometheus, with a sardonic ignominy piled upon hishelplessness. Each goes down a Greek route to defeat and disaster, leaving nothing behind him save an unanswered question. I can scarcelyrecall an exception. Kurtz, Lord Jim, Razumov, Nostromo, CaptainWhalley, Yanko Goorall, Verloc, Heyst, Gaspar Ruiz, Almayer: one and allthey are destroyed and made a mock of by the blind, incomprehensibleforces that beset them. 

Even in "Youth, " "Typhoon, " and "The Shadow Line, " superficially storiesof the indomitable, that same consuming melancholy, that same pressingsense of the irresistible and inexplicable, is always just beneath thesurface. Captain Mac Whirr gets the _Nan-Shan_ to port at last, but itis a victory that stands quite outside the man himself; he is no morethan a marker in the unfathomable game; the elemental forces, fightingone another, almost disregard him; the view of him that we get is oneof disdain, almost one of contempt. So, too, in "Youth. " A tale of thespirit's triumph, of youth besting destiny? I do not see it so. To meits significance, like that of "The Shadow Line, " is all subjective; itis an aging man's elegy upon the hope and high resolution that the yearshave blown away, a sentimental reminiscence of what the enigmatical godshave had their jest with, leaving only its gallant memory behind. Thewhole Conradean system sums itself up in the title of "Victory, " anincomparable piece of irony. Imagine a better label for that tragicrecord of heroic and yet bootless effort, that matchless picture, inmicrocosm, of the relentlessly cruel revolutions in the macrocosm!

Mr. Follett, perhaps with too much critical facility, finds the cause ofConrad's unyielding pessimism in the circumstances of his own life--hisdouble exile, first from Poland, and then from the sea. But this issurely stretching the facts to fit an hypothesis. Neither exile, it mustbe plain, was enforced, nor is either irrevocable. Conrad has been backto Poland, and he is free to return to the ships whenever the spiritmoves him. I see no reason for looking in such directions for his viewof the world, nor even in the direction of his nationality. We detectcertain curious qualities in every Slav simply because he is more giventhan we are to revealing the qualities that are in all of us. Introspection and self-revelation are his habit; he carries the study ofman and fate to a point that seems morbid to westerners; he is forevergabbling about what he finds in his own soul. But in the last analysishis verdicts are the immemorial and almost universal ones. Surely hisresignationism is not a Slavic copyright; all human philosophies andreligions seem doomed to come to it at last. Once it takes shape as theconcept of Nirvana, the desire for nothingness, the will to not-will. Again, it is fatalism in this form or that--Mohammedanism, Agnosticism... Calvinism! Yet again, it is the "Out, out, brief candle!" ofShakespeare, the "_Eheu fugaces_" of Horace, the "_Vanitas vanitatum;omnia vanitas!_" of the Preacher. Or, to make an end, it ismillenarianism, the theory that the world is going to blow up tomorrow, or the day after, or two weeks hence, and that all sweating and strivingare thus useless. Search where you will, near or far, in ancient ormodern times, and you will never find a first-rate race or anenlightened age, in its moments of highest reflection, that ever gavemore than a passing bow to optimism. Even Christianity, starting out as"glad tidings, " has had to take on protective coloration to survive, andtoday its chief professors moan and blubber like Johann in Herod'srain-barrel. The sanctified are few and far between. The vast majorityof us must suffer in hell, just as we suffer on earth. The divine grace, so omnipotent to save, is withheld from us. Why? There, alas, is yourinsoluble mystery, your riddle of the universe!... 

This conviction that human life is a seeking without a finding, that itspurpose is impenetrable, that joy and sorrow are alike meaningless, youwill see written largely in the work of most great creative artists. Itis obviously the final message, if any message is genuinely to be foundthere, of the nine symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven, or, at any rate, of the three which show any intellectual content at all. Mark Twain, superficially a humourist and hence an optimist, was haunted by it insecret, as Nietzsche was by the idea of eternal recurrence: it forceditself through his guard in "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What is Man?"In Shakespeare, as Shaw has demonstrated, it amounts to a veritableobsession. And what else is there in Balzac, Goethe, Swift, Molière, Turgenev, Ibsen, Dostoyevsky, Romain Rolland, Anatole France? Or in theZola of "L'Assomoir, " "Germinal, " "La Débâcle, " the wholeRougon-Macquart series? (The Zola of "Les Quatres Evangiles, " andparticularly of "Fécondité, " turned meliorist and idealist, and becameludicrous. ) Or in the Hauptmann of "Fuhrmann Henschel, " or in Hardy, orin Sudermann? (I mean, of course, Sudermann the novelist. Sudermann thedramatist is a mere mechanician. )... The younger men in all countries, in so far as they challenge the current sentimentality at all, seem tomove irresistibly toward the same disdainful skepticism. Consider thelast words of "Riders to the Sea. " Or Gorky's "Nachtasyl. " Or FrankNorris' "McTeague. " Or Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel. " Or the ironicalfables of Dunsany. Or Dreiser's "Jennie Gerhardt. " Or George Moore's"Sister Teresa. "

Conrad, more than any of the other men I have mentioned, grounds hiswork firmly upon this sense of cosmic implacability, this confession ofunintelligibility. The exact point of the story of Kurtz, in "Heart ofDarkness, " is that it is pointless, that Kurtz's death is as meaninglessas his life, that the moral of such a sordid tragedy is a wholesalenegation of all morals. And this, no less, is the point of the story ofFalk, and of that of Almayer, and of that of Jim. Mr. Follett (he mustbe a forward-looker in his heart!) finds himself, in the end, unable toaccept so profound a determinism unadulterated, and so he injects agratuitous and mythical romanticism into it, and hymns Conrad "as acomrade, one of a company gathered under the ensign of hope for commonwar on despair. " With even greater error, William Lyon Phelps arguesthat his books "are based on the axiom of the moral law. "[2] The onenotion is as unsound as the other. Conrad makes war on nothing; he ispre-eminently _not_ a moralist. He swings, indeed, as far from revoltand moralizing as is possible, for he does not even criticize God. Hisundoubted comradeship, his plain kindliness toward the soul hevivisects, is not the fruit of moral certainty, but of moralagnosticism. He neither protests nor punishes; he merely smiles andpities. Like Mark Twain he might well say: "The more I see of men, themore they amuse me--and the more I pity them. " He is _simpatico_precisely because of this ironical commiseration, this infinitedisillusionment, this sharp understanding of the narrow limits of humanvolition and responsibility.... I have said that he does not criticizeGod. One may even imagine him pitying God.... 

§ 2

But in this pity, I need not add, there is no touch of sentimentality. No man could be less the romantic, blubbering over the sorrows of hisown Werthers. No novelist could have smaller likeness to the brummagememotion-squeezers of the Kipling type, with their playhouse fustian andtheir naïve ethical cocksureness. The thing that sets off Conrad fromthese facile fellows, and from the shallow pseudo-realists who so oftencoalesce with them and become indistinguishable from them, is preciselyhis quality of irony, and that irony is no more than a proof of thegreater maturity of his personal culture, his essential superiority as acivilized man. It is the old difference between a Huxley and aGladstone, a philosophy that is profound and a philosophy that is merelycomfortable, "_Quid est veritas?_" and "Thus saith the Lord!" He bringsinto the English fiction of the day, not only an artistry that is vastlymore fluent and delicate than the general, but also a highly unusualsophistication, a quite extraordinary detachment from all petty ragesand puerile certainties. The winds of doctrine, howling all about him, leave him absolutely unmoved. He belongs to no party and has nothing toteach, save only a mystery as old as man. In the midst of the hystericalsplutterings and battle-cries of the Kiplings and Chestertons, thebooming pedagogics of the Wellses and Shaws, and the smirking atkey-holes of the Bennetts and de Morgans, he stands apart and almostalone, observing the sardonic comedy of man with an eye that sees everypoint and significance of it, but vouchsafing none of that sophomoricindignation, that Hyde Park wisdom, that flabby moralizing which freightand swamp the modern English novel. "At the centre of his web, " saysArthur Symons, "sits an elemental sarcasm discussing human affairs witha calm and cynical ferocity.... He calls up all the dreams and illusionsby which men have been destroyed and saved, and lays them mockinglynaked.... He shows the bare side of every virtue, the hidden heroism ofevery vice and crime. He summons before him all the injustices that havecome to birth out of ignorance and self-love.... And in all this thereis no judgment, only an implacable comprehension, as of one outsidenature, to whom joy and sorrow, right and wrong, savagery andcivilization, are equal and indifferent.... "[3]

Obviously, no Englishman! No need to explain (with something akin toapology) that his name is really not Joseph Conrad at all, but TeodorJosef Konrad Karzeniowski, and that he is a Pole of noble lineage, witha vague touch of the Asiatic in him. The Anglo-Saxon mind, in theselater days, becomes increasingly incapable of his whole point of view. Put into plain language, his doctrine can only fill it with wonder andfury. That mind is essentially moral in cut; it is believing, certain, indignant; it is as incapable of skepticism, save as a passing coryza ofthe spirit, as it is of wit, which is skepticism's daughter. Time waswhen this was not true, as Congreve, Pope, Wycherley and even Thackerayshow, but that time was before the Reform Bill of 1832, the greatintellectual levelling, the emancipation of the _chandala_. In these ourdays the Englishman is an incurable foe of distinction, and being so hemust needs take in with his mother's milk the delusions which go withthat enmity, and particularly the master delusion that all humanproblems, in the last analysis, are readily soluble, and that all thatis required for their solution is to take counsel freely, to listen towizards, to count votes, to agree upon legislation. This is the primeand immovable doctrine of the _mobile vulgus_ set free; it is theloveliest of all the fruits of its defective powers of observation andreasoning, and above all, of its defective knowledge of demonstratedfacts, especially in history. Take away this notion that there is somemysterious infallibility in the sense of the majority, this theory thatthe consensus of opinion is inspired, and the idea of equality begins towither; in fact, it ceases to have any intelligibility at all. But thenotion is not taken away; it is nourished; it flourishes on its owneffluvia. And out of it spring the two rules which give direction to allpopular thinking, the first being that no concept in politics or conductis valid (or more accurately respectable), which rises above thecomprehension of the great masses of men, or which violates any of theirinherent prejudices or superstitions, and the second being that thearticulate individual in the mob takes on some of the authority andinspiration of the mob itself, and that he is thus free to set himselfup as a soothsayer, so long as he does not venture beyond the aforesaidbounds--in brief, that one man's opinion, provided it observe thecurrent decorum, is as good as any other man's. 

Practically, of course, this is simply an invitation to quackery. Theman of genuine ideas is hedged in by taboos; the quack finds an audiencealready agape. The reply to the invitation, in the domain of appliedethics, is the revived and reinforced _Sklavenmoral_ that besets all ofus of English speech--the huggermugger morality of timorous, whining, unintelligent and unimaginative men--envy turned into law, cowardicesanctified, stupidity made noble, Puritanism. And in the theoreticalfield there is an even more luxuriant crop of bosh. Mountebanks almostinnumerable tell us what we should believe and practice, in politics, religion, philosophy and the arts. England and the United States, between them, house more creeds than all the rest of the world together, and they are more absurd. They rise, they flame, they fall and go out, but always there are new ones, always the latest is worse than the last. What modern civilization save this of ours could have produced ChristianScience, or the New Thought, or Billy Sundayism? What other could haveyielded up the mawkish bumptiousness of the Uplift? What other couldaccept gravely the astounding imbecilities of English philanthropy andAmerican law? The native output of fallacy and sentimentality, in fact, is not enough to satisfy the stupendous craving of the mob unleashed;there must needs be a constant importation of the aberrant fancies ofother peoples. Let a new messiah leap up with a new message in any partof the world, and at once there is a response from the two great freenations. Once it was Tolstoi with a mouldy asceticism made of catacombChristianity and senile soul-sickness; again it was Bergson, with aperfumed quasi-philosophy for the boudoirs of the faubourgs; yet againcame Rudolf Eucken and Pastor Wagner, with their middle-class beerinessand banality. The list need go no further. It begins with preposterousIndian swamis and yoghis (most of them, to do them justice, diligentJews from Grand street or the bagnios of Constantinople), and it endswith the fabulous Ibsen of the symbols (no more the real Ibsen thanChrist was a prohibitionist), the Ellen Key of the new gyneolatry andthe Signorina Montessori of the magical Method. It was a sure instinctthat brought Eusapia Palladino to New York. It was the same sureinstinct that brought Hall Caine. 

I have mentioned Ibsen. A glance at the literature he has spawned in thevulgate is enough to show how much his falser aspects have intrigued theAmerican mind and how little it has reacted to his shining skill as adramatic craftsman--his one authentic claim upon fame. Read JennetteLee's "The Ibsen Secret, "[4] perhaps the most successful of all theIbsen gemaras in English, if you would know the virulence of thenational appetite for bogus revelation. And so in all the arts. Whatever is profound and penetrating we stand off from; whatever isfacile and shallow, particularly if it reveal a moral or mystical color, we embrace. Ibsen the first-rate dramatist was rejected with indignationprecisely because of his merits--his sharp observation, his sardonicrealism, his unsentimental logic. But the moment a meretricious andplatitudinous ethical purpose began to be read into him--how heprotested against it!--he was straightway adopted into our flabbyculture. Compare Hauptmann and Brieux, the one a great artist, the otherno more than a raucous journalist. Brieux's elaborate proofs that twoand two are four have been hailed as epoch-making; one of his worstplays, indeed, has been presented with all the solemn hocus-pocus of areligious rite. But Hauptmann remains almost unknown; even the NobelPrize did not give him a vogue. Run the roll: Maeterlinck and hislanguishing supernaturalism, Tagore and his Asiatic wind music, SelmaLagerlöf and her old maid's mooniness, Bernstein, Molnar and company andtheir out-worn tricks--but I pile up no more names. Consider one fact:the civilization that kissed Maeterlinck on both cheeks, and Tagoreperhaps even more intimately, has yet to shake hands with AnatoleFrance.... 

This bemusement by superficial ideas, this neck-bending to quacks, thisendless appetite for sesames and apocalypses, is depressingly visible inour native literature, as it is in our native theology, philosophy andpolitics. "The British and American mind, " says W. L. George, [5] "hasbeen long honey-combed with moral impulse, at any rate since theReformation; it is very much what the German mind was up to the middleof the Nineteenth Century. " The artist, facing an audience which seemsincapable of differentiating between æsthetic and ethical values, tendsto become a preacher of sonorous nothings, and the actualmoralist-propagandist finds his way into art well greased. No otherpeople in Christendom produces so vast a crop of tin-horn haruspices. Wehave so many Orison Swett Mardens, Martin Tuppers, Edwin Markhams, Gerald Stanley Lees, Dr. Frank Cranes and Dr. Sylvanus Stalls that theiroutput is enough to supply the whole planet. We see, too, constantly, how thin is the barrier separating the chief Anglo-Saxon novelists andplaywrights from the pasture of the platitudinarian. Jones and Pineroboth made their first strikes, not as the artists they undoubtedly are, but as pinchbeck moralists, moaning over the sad fact that girls areseduced. Shaw, a highly dexterous dramaturgist, smothers his dramaturgyin a pifflish iconoclasm that is no more than a disguise for Puritanism. Bennett and Wells, competent novelists, turn easily from the novel tothe volume of shoddy philosophizing. Kipling, with "Kim" behind him, becomes a vociferous leader-writer of the _Daily Mail_ school, whoopinga pothouse patriotism, hurling hysterical objurgations at the foe. EvenW. L. George, potentially a novelist of sound consideration, drops hiscraft for the jehad of the suffragettes. Doyle, Barrie, Caine, Locke, Barker, Mrs. Ward, Beresford, Hewlett, Watson, Quiller-Couch--one andall, high and low, they are tempted by the public demand for sophistry, the ready market for pills. A Henry Bordeaux, in France, is anexception; in England he is the rule. The endless thirst to be soothedwith cocksure asseverations, the great mob yearning to be dosed andcomforted, is the undoing, over there, of three imaginative talents outof five. 

And, in America, of nearly five out of five. Winston Churchill may serveas an example. He is a literary workman of very decent skill; the nativecritics speak of him with invariable respect; his standing within thecraft was shown when he was unanimously chosen first president of theAuthors' League of America. Examine his books in order. They proceedsteadily from studies of human character and destiny, the properbusiness of the novelist, to mere outpourings of social and economicpanaceas, the proper business of leader writers, chautauquasrabble-rousers and hedge politicians. "The Celebrity" and "RichardCarvel, " within their limits, are works of art; "The Inside of the Cup"is no more than a compendium of paralogy, as silly and smattering as aspeech by William Jennings Bryan or a shocker by Jane Addams. Churchill, with the late Jack London to bear him company, may stand for a largeclass; in its lower ranks are such men as Reginald Wright Kauffman andWill Levington Comfort. Still more typical of the national taste formoral purpose and quack philosophy are the professional optimists andeye-dimmers, with their two grand divisions, the boarding-schoolromantics and the Christian Endeavor Society sentimentalists. Of theformer I give you George Barr McCutcheon, Owen Wister, the late RichardHarding Davis, and a horde of women--most of them now humanelytranslated to the moving pictures. Of the latter I give you the fairauthors of the "glad" books, so gigantically popular, so lavishlypraised in the newspapers--with the wraith of the later Howells, thevirtuous, kittenish Howells, floating about in the air above them. Noother country can parallel this literature, either in its copiousness orin its banality. It is native and peculiar to a civilization whicherects the unshakable certainties of the misinformed and quack-riddeninto a national way of life.... 

§ 3

My business, however, is not with the culture of Anglo-Saxondom, butonly with Conrad's place therein. That place is isolated and remote; heis neither of it nor quite in it. In the midst of a futile meliorismwhich deceives the more, the more it soothes, he stands out like somesinister skeleton at the feast, regarding the festivities with aflickering and impenetrable grin. "To read him, " says Arthur Symons, "isto shudder on the edge of a gulf, in a silent darkness. " There is noneed to be told that he is there almost by accident, that he came in achance passerby, a bit uncertain of the door. It was not an artisticchoice that made him write English instead of French; it was a choicewith its roots in considerations far afield. But once made, it concernedhim no further. In his first book he was plainly a stranger, and allhimself; in his last he is a stranger still--strange in his manner ofspeech, strange in his view of life, strange, above all, in his glowingand gorgeous artistry, his enthusiasm for beauty _per se_, his absolutedetachment from that heresy which would make it no more than a servantto some bald and depressing theory of conduct, some axiom of theuncomprehending. He is, like Dunsany, a pure artist. His work, as heonce explained, is not to edify, to console, to improve or to encourage, but simply to get upon paper some shadow of his own eager sense of thewonder and prodigality of life as men live it in the world, and of itsunfathomable romance and mystery. "My task, " he went on, "is, by thepower of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you _see_. That--and no more, and it iseverything. "... [6]

This detachment from all infra-and-ultra-artistic purpose, thisrepudiation of the rôle of propagandist, this avowal of what Nietzschewas fond of calling innocence, explains the failure of Conrad to fitinto the pigeon-holes so laboriously prepared for him by critics whomust shelve and label or be damned. He is too big for any of them, andof a shape too strange. He stands clear, not only of all the schools andfactions that obtain in latter-day English fiction, but also of thewhole stream of English literature since the Restoration. He is asisolated a figure as George Moore, and for much the same reason. Bothare exotics, and both, in a very real sense, are public enemies, forboth war upon the philosophies that caress the herd. Is Conrad thebeyond-Kipling, as the early criticism of him sought to make him?Nonsense! As well speak of Mark Twain as the beyond-Petroleum V. Nasby(as, indeed, was actually done). He is not only a finer artist thanKipling; he is a quite different kind of artist. Kipling, within hislimits, shows a talent of a very high order. He is a craftsman of theutmost deftness. He gets his effects with almost perfect assurance. Moreover, there is a poet in him; he knows how to reach the emotions. But once his stories are stripped down to the bare carcass theiremptiness becomes immediately apparent. The ideas in them are not theideas of a reflective and perspicacious man, but simply the ideas of amob-orator, a mouther of inanities, a bugler, a school-girl. Reduce anyof them to a simple proposition, and that proposition, in so far as itis intelligible at all, will be ridiculous. It is precisely here thatConrad leaps immeasurably ahead. His ideas are not only sound; they areacute and unusual. They plough down into the sub-strata of human motiveand act. They unearth conditions and considerations that lie concealedfrom the superficial glance. They get at the primary reactions. Inparticular and above all, they combat the conception of man as a pet andprivy councillor of the gods, working out his own destiny in a sort ofvacuum and constantly illumined by infallible revelations of his duty, and expose him as he is in fact: an organism infinitely more sensitiveand responsive than other organisms, but still a mere organism in theend, a brother to the wild things and the protozoa, swayed by the sameinscrutable fortunes, condemned to the same inchoate errors andirresolutions, and surrounded by the same terror and darkness.... 

But is the Conrad I here describe simply a new variety of moralist, differing from the general only in the drift of the doctrine hepreaches? Surely not. He is no more a moralist than an atheist is atheologian. His attitude toward all moral systems and axioms is that ofa skeptic who rejects them unanimously, even including, and perhapsespecially including, those to which, in moments of æsthetic detachment, he seems to give a formal and resigned sort of assent. It is thisconstant falling back upon "I do not know, " this incessant conversion ofthe easy logic of romance into the harsh and dismaying logic of fact, that explains his failure to succeed as a popular novelist, despite hisskill at evoking emotion, his towering artistic passion, his power totell a thumping tale. He is talked of, he brings forth a mass ofpunditic criticism, he becomes in a sense the fashion; but it would beabsurd to say that he has made the same profound impression upon thegreat class of normal novel-readers that Arnold Bennett once made, or H. G. Wells, or William de Morgan in his brief day, or even suchcheap-jacks as Anthony Hope Hawkins and William J. Locke. His showfascinates, but his philosophy, in the last analysis, is unbearable. Andin particular it is unbearable to women. One rarely meets a woman who, stripped of affection, shows any genuine enthusiasm for a Conrad book, or, indeed, any genuine comprehension of it. The feminine mind, whichrules in English fiction, both as producer and as consumer, cravesinevitably a more confident and comforting view of the world than Conradhas to offer. It seeks, not disillusion, but illusion. It protectsitself against the disquieting questioning of life by pretending thatall the riddles have been solved, that each new sage answers themafresh, that a few simple principles suffice to dispose of them. Women, one may say, have to subscribe to absurdities in order to account forthemselves at all; it is the instinct of self-preservation which sendsthem to priests, as to other quacks. This is not because they areunintelligent, but rather because they have that sharp and sure sort ofintelligence which is instinctive, and which passes under the name ofintuition. It teaches them that the taboos which surround them, howeverabsurd at bottom, nevertheless penalize their courage and curiosity withunescapable dudgeon, and so they become partisans of the existing order, and, per corollary, of the existing ethic. They may be menaced byphantoms, but at all events these phantoms really menace them. A womanwho reacted otherwise than with distrust to such a book as "Victory"would be as abnormal as a woman who embraced "Jenseits von Gut und Böse"or "The Inestimable Life of the Great Gargantua. "

As for Conrad, he retaliates by approaching the sex somewhat gingerly. His women, in the main, are no more than soiled and tattered cards in agame played by the gods. The effort to erect them into the customary"sympathetic" heroines of fiction always breaks down under the drum fireof the plain facts. He sees quite accurately, it seems to me, howvastly the rôle of women has been exaggerated, how little they amount toin the authentic struggle of man. His heroes are moved by avarice, byambition, by rebellion, by fear, by that "obscure inner necessity" whichpasses for nobility or the sense of duty--never by that puerile passionwhich is the mainspring of all masculine acts and aspirations in popularnovels and on the stage. If they yield to amour at all, it is only atthe urging of some more powerful and characteristic impulse, _e. G. _, afantastic notion of chivalry, as in the case of Heyst, or the thirst fordominion, as in the case of Kurtz. The one exception is offered byRazumov--and Razumov is Conrad's picture of a flabby fool, of asentimentalist destroyed by his sentimentality. Dreiser has shown muchthe same process in Witla and Cowperwood, but he is less free from theconventional obsession than Conrad; he takes a love affair far morenaïvely, and hence far more seriously. 

I used to wonder why Conrad never tackled a straight-out story ofadultery under Christianity, the standard matter of all our morepretentious fiction and drama. I was curious to see what his ethicalagnosticism would make of it. The conclusion I came to at first was thathis failure marked the limitations of his courage--in brief, that hehesitated to go against the orthodox axioms and assumptions in thedepartment where they were most powerfully maintained. But it seems tome now that his abstinence has not been the fruit of timidity, but ofdisdain. He has shied at the hypothesis, not at its implications. Hiswhole work, in truth, is a destructive criticism of the prevailingnotion that such a story is momentous and worth telling. The currentgyneolatry is as far outside his scheme of things as the current programof rewards and punishments, sins and virtues, causes and effects. He notonly sees clearly that the destiny and soul of man are not moulded bypetty jousts of sex, as the prophets of romantic love would have usbelieve; he is so impatient of the fallacy that he puts it as far behindhim as possible, and sets his conflicts amid scenes that it cannotpenetrate, save as a palpable absurdity. Love, in his stories, is eithera feeble phosphorescence or a gigantic grotesquerie. In "Heart ofDarkness, " perhaps, we get his typical view of it. Over all the frenzyand horror of the tale itself floats the irony of the trusting heartback in Brussels. Here we have his measure of the master sentimentalityof them all.... 

§ 4

As for Conrad the literary craftsman, opposing him for the moment toConrad the showman of the human comedy, the quality that all who writeabout him seem chiefly to mark in him is his scorn of conventional form, his tendency to approach his story from two directions at once, hisfrequent involvement in apparently inextricable snarls of narrative, sub-narrative and sub-sub-narrative. "Lord Jim, " for example, starts outin the third person, presently swings into an exhaustive psychologicaldiscussion by the mythical Marlow, then goes into a brisk narrative atsecond (and sometimes at third) hand, and finally comes to a halt uponan unresolved dissonance, a half-heard chord of the ninth: "And that'sthe end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic. " "Falk" is also a story within astory; this time the narrator is "one who had not spoken before, a manover fifty. " In "Amy Foster" romance is filtered through the prosaicsoul of a country doctor; it is almost as if a statistician told thetale of Horatius at the bridge. In "Under Western Eyes" the obfuscationis achieved by "a teacher of languages, " endlessly lamenting his lack ofthe "high gifts of imagination and expression. " In "Youth" and "Heartof Darkness" the chronicler and speculator is the shadowy Marlow, a"cloak to goe inbisabell" for Conrad himself. In "Chance" there are twoseparate stories, imperfectly welded together. Elsewhere there arehesitations, goings back, interpolations, interludes in the Socraticmanner. And almost always there is heaviness in the getting under weigh. In "Heart of Darkness" we are on the twentieth page before we see themouth of the great river, and in "Falk" we are on the twenty-fourthbefore we get a glimpse of Falk. "Chance" is nearly half done before thedrift of the action is clearly apparent. In "Almayer's Folly" we arethrown into the middle of a story, and do not discover its beginninguntil we come to "An Outcast of the Islands, " a later book. As instructure, so in detail. Conrad pauses to explain, to speculate, to lookabout. Whole chapters concern themselves with detailed discussions ofmotives, with exchanges of views, with generalizations abandoned as soonas they are made. Even the author's own story, "A Personal Record" (inthe English edition, "Some Reminiscences") starts near the end, and thengoes back, halting tortuously, to the beginning. 

In the eyes of orthodox criticism, of course, this is a grave fault. The Kipling-Wells style of swift, shouldering, button-holing writing hasaccustomed readers and critics alike to a straight course and a rapidtempo. Moreover, it has accustomed them to a forthright certainty anddirectness of statement; they expect an author to account for hischaracters at once, and on grounds instantly comprehensible. Thisomniscience is a part of the prodigality of moral theory that I havebeen discussing. An author who knows just what is the matter with theworld may be quite reasonably expected to know just what is the matterwith his hero. Neither sort of assurance, I need not say, is to be foundin Conrad. He is an inquirer, not a law-giver; an experimentalist, not adoctor. One constantly derives from his stories the notion that he is asmuch puzzled by his characters as the reader is--that he, too, isfeeling his way among shadowy evidences. The discoveries that we make, about Lord Jim, about Nostromo or about Kurtz, come as fortuitously andas unexpectedly as the discoveries we make about the real figures of ourworld. The picture is built up bit by bit; it is never flashed suddenlyand completely as by best-seller calciums; it remains a bit dim at theend. But in that very dimness, so tantalizing and yet so revealing, liestwo-thirds of Conrad's art, or his craft, or his trick, or whatever youchoose to call it. What he shows us is blurred at the edges, but so islife itself blurred at the edges. We see least clearly precisely what isnearest to us, and is hence most real to us. A man may profess tounderstand the President of the United States, but he seldom alleges, even to himself, that he understands his own wife. 

In the character and in its reactions, in the act and in the motive:always that tremulousness, that groping, that confession of finalbewilderment. "He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart.... "And the cloud enshrouds the inner man as well as the outer, the secretsprings of his being as well as the overt events of his life. "Hismeanest creatures, " says Arthur Symons, "have in them a touch of honour, of honesty, or of heroism; his heroes have always some error, weakness, or mistake, some sin or crime, to redeem. " What is Lord Jim, scoundreland poltroon or gallant knight? What is Captain MacWhirr, hero or simplyass? What is Falk, beast or idealist? One leaves "Heart of Darkness" inthat palpitating confusion which is shot through with intense curiosity. Kurtz is at once the most abominable of rogues and the most fantastic ofdreamers. It is impossible to differentiate between his vision and hiscrimes, though all that we look upon as order in the universe standsbetween them. In Dreiser's novels there is the same anarchy ofvaluations, and it is chiefly responsible for the rage he excites in theunintelligent. The essential thing about Cowperwood is that he is twodiverse beings at once; a puerile chaser of women and a great artist, aguinea pig and half a god. The essential thing about Carrie Meeber isthat she remains innocent in the midst of her contaminations, that thevirgin lives on in the kept woman. This is not the art of fiction as itis conventionally practised and understood. It is not explanation, labelling, assurance, moralizing. In the cant of newspaper criticism, itdoes not "satisfy. " But the great artist is never one who satisfies inthat feeble sense; he leaves the business to mountebanks who do itbetter. "My purpose, " said Ibsen, "is not to answer questions; it is toask them. " The spectator must bring something with him beyond the merefaculty of attention. If, coming to Conrad, he cannot, he is at thewrong door. 

§ 5

Conrad's predilection for barbarous scenes and the more bald andshocking sort of drama has an obviously autobiographical basis. His ownroad ran into strange places in the days of his youth. He moved amongmen who were menaced by all the terrestrial cruelties, and by the almostunchecked rivalry and rapacity of their fellow men, without anyappreciable barriers, whether of law, of convention or ofsentimentality, to shield them. The struggle for existence, as he sawit, was well nigh as purely physical among human beings as among thecarnivora of the jungle. Some of his stories, and among them his verybest, are plainly little more than transcripts of his own experience. Hehimself is the enchanted boy of "Youth"; he is the ship-master of "Heartof Darkness"; he hovers in the background of all the island books and isvisibly present in most of the tales of the sea. 

And what he got out of that early experience was more than a mere bodyof reminiscence; it was a scheme of valuations. He came to his writingyears with a sailor's disdain for the trifling hazards and emprises ofmarket places and drawing rooms, and it shows itself whenever he setspen to paper. A conflict, it would seem, can make no impression upon himsave it be colossal. When his men combat, not nature, but other men, they carry over into the business the gigantic method of sailorsbattling with a tempest. "The Secret Agent" and "Under Western Eyes"fill the dull back streets of London and Geneva with pursuits, homicidesand dynamitings. "Nostromo" is a long record of treacheries, butcheriesand carnalities. "A Point of Honor" is coloured by the senseless, insatiable ferocity of Gobineau's "Renaissance. " "Victory" ends with amassacre of all the chief personages, a veritable catastrophe of blood. Whenever he turns from the starker lusts to the pale passions of manunder civilization, Conrad fails. "The Return" is a thoroughly infirmpiece of writing--a second rate magazine story. One concludes at oncethat the author himself does not believe in it. "The Inheritors" isworse; it becomes, after the first few pages, a flaccid artificiality, abore. It is impossible to imagine the chief characters of the Conradgallery in such scenes. Think of Captain MacWhirr reacting to socialtradition, Lord Jim immersed in the class war, Lena Hermann seduced bythe fashions, Almayer a candidate for office! As well think ofHuckleberry Finn at Harvard, or Tom Jones practising law. 

These things do not interest Conrad, chiefly, I suppose, because he doesnot understand them. His concern, one may say, is with the gross anatomyof passion, not with its histology. He seeks to depict emotion, not inits ultimate attenuation, but in its fundamental innocence and fury. Inevitably, his materials are those of what we call melodrama; he is atone, in the bare substance of his tales, with the manufacturers of thebaldest shockers. But with a difference!--a difference, to wit, ofapproach and comprehension, a difference abysmal and revolutionary. Helifts melodrama to the dignity of an important business, and makes it ameans to an end that the mere shock-monger never dreams of. In itself, remember, all this up-roar and blood-letting is not incredible, nor evenimprobable. The world, for all the pressure of order, is still full ofsavage and stupendous conflicts, of murders and debaucheries, of crimesindescribable and adventures almost unimaginable. One cannot reasonablyask a novelist to deny them or to gloss over them; all one may demand ofhim is that, if he make artistic use of them, he render themunderstandable--that he logically account for them, that he give themplausibility by showing their genesis in intelligible motives andcolourable events. 

The objection to the conventional melodramatist is that he fails to dothis. It is not that his efforts are too florid, but that his causes aretoo puny. For all his exuberance of fancy, he seldom shows us adownright impossible event; what he does constantly show us is aninadequate and hence unconvincing motive. In a cheap theatre we see abad actor, imperfectly disguised as a viscount, bind a shrieking youngwoman to the railroad tracks, with an express train approaching. Whydoes he do it? The melodramatist offers a double-headed reason, thefirst part being that the viscount is an amalgam of Satan and Don Juanand the second being that the young woman prefers death to dishonour. Both parts are absurd. Our eyes show us at once that the fellow is farmore the floorwalker, the head barber, the Knight of Pythias than eitherthe Satan or the Don Juan, and our experience of life tells us thatyoung women in yellow wigs do not actually rate their virginity sodearly. But women are undoubtedly done to death in this way--not everyday, perhaps, but now and then. Men bind them, trains run over them, thenewspapers discuss the crime, the pursuit of the felon, the ensuingjousting of the jurisconsults. Why, then? The true answer, when it isforthcoming at all, is always much more complex than the melodramatist'sanswer. It may be so enormously complex, indeed, as to transcend all thenormal laws of cause and effect. It may be an answer made up largely, oreven wholly, of the fantastic, the astounding, the unearthly reasons oflunacy. That is the chief, if not the only difference between melodramaand reality. The events of the two may be, and often are identical. Itis only in their underlying network of causes that they are dissimilarand incommensurate. 

Here, in brief, you have the point of essential distinction between thestories of Conrad, a supreme artist in fiction, and the trashyconfections of the literary artisans--_e. G. _, Sienkiewicz, Dumas, LewWallace, and their kind. Conrad's materials, at bottom, are almostidentical with those of the artisans. He, too, has his chariot races, his castaways, his carnivals of blood in the arena. He, too, takes usthrough shipwrecks, revolutions, assassinations, gaudy heroisms, abominable treacheries. But always he illuminates the nude and amazingevent with shafts of light which reveal not only the last detail of itsworkings, but also the complex of origins and inducements behind it. Always, he throws about it a probability which, in the end, becomesalmost inevitability. His "Nostromo, " for example, in its externals, isa mere tale of South American turmoil; its materials are those of"Soldiers of Fortune. " But what a difference in method, in point ofapproach, in inner content! Davis was content to show the overt act, scarcely accounting for it at all, and then only in terms ofconventional romance. Conrad penetrates to the motive concealed in it, the psychological spring and basis of it, the whole fabric of weakness, habit and aberration underlying it. The one achieved an agreeableromance, and an agreeable romance only. The other achieves anextraordinarily brilliant and incisive study of the Latin-Americantemperament--a full length exposure of the perverse passions andincomprehensible ideals which provoke presumably sane men to pursue oneanother like wolves, and of the reactions of that incessant pursuit uponthe men themselves, and upon their primary ideas, and upon theinstitutions under which they live. I do not say that Conrad is alwaysexhaustive in his explanations, or that he is accurate. In the firstcase I know that he often is not, in the second case I do not knowwhether he is or he isn't. But I do say that, within the scope of hisvision, he is wholly convincing; that the men and women he sets into hisscene show ineluctably vivid and persuasive personality; that thetheories he brings forward to account for their acts are intelligible;that the effects of those acts, upon actors and immediate spectatorsalike, are such as might be reasonably expected to issue; that the finalimpression is one of searching and indubitable veracity. One leaves"Nostromo" with a memory as intense and lucid as that of a realexperience. The thing is not mere photography. It is interpretativepainting at its highest. 

In all his stories you will find this same concern with the inextricablemovement of phenomena and noumena between event and event, this samecuriosity as to first causes and ultimate effects. Sometimes, as in "ThePoint of Honor" and "The End of the Tether, " he attempts to work out theobscure genesis, in some chance emotion or experience, of anextraordinary series of transactions. At other times, as in "Typhoon, ""Youth, " "Falk" and "The Shadow Line, " his endeavour is to determine theeffect of some gigantic and fortuitous event upon the mind and soul of agiven man. At yet other times, as in "Almayer's Folly, " "Lord Jim" and"Under Western Eyes, " it is his aim to show how cause and effect areintricately commingled, so that it is difficult to separate motive fromconsequence, and consequence from motive. But always it is the processof mind rather than the actual act that interests him. Always he istrying to penetrate the actor's mask and interpret the actor's frenzy. It is this concern with the profounder aspects of human nature, thisbold grappling with the deeper and more recondite problems of his art, that gives him consideration as a first-rate artist. He differs fromthe common novelists of his time as a Beethoven differs from aMendelssohn. Some of them are quite his equals in technical skill, and afew of them, notably Bennett and Wells, often show an actualsuperiority, but when it comes to that graver business which underliesall mere virtuosity, he is unmistakably the superior of the whole corpsof them. 

This superiority is only the more vividly revealed by the shop-wornshoddiness of most of his materials. He takes whatever is nearest tohand, out of his own rich experience or out of the common store ofromance. He seems to disdain the petty advantages which go with theinvention of novel plots, extravagant characters and unprecedentedsnarls of circumstance. All the classical doings of anarchists are to befound in "The Secret Agent"; one has heard them copiously credited, oflate, to so-called Reds. "Youth, " as a story, is no more than anorthodox sea story, and W. Clark Russell contrived better ones. In"Chance" we have a stern father at his immemorial tricks. In "Victory"there are villains worthy of Jack B. Yeats' melodramas of the SpanishMain. In "Nostromo" we encounter the whole stock company of RichardHarding Davis and O. Henry. And in "Under Western Eyes" the protagonistis one who finds his love among the women of his enemies--a situationat the heart of all the military melodramas ever written. 

But what Conrad makes of that ancient and fly-blown stuff, that rubbishfrom the lumber room of the imagination! Consider, for example, "UnderWestern Eyes, " by no means the best of his stories. The plot is that of"Shenandoah" and "Held by the Enemy"--but how brilliantly it is endowedwith a new significance, how penetratingly its remotest currents arefollowed out, how magnificently it is made to fit into that colossalpanorama of Holy Russia! It is always this background, this complex ofobscure and baffling influences, this drama under the drama, that Conradspends his skill upon, and not the obvious commerce of the actual stage. It is not the special effect that he seeks, but the general effect. Itis not so much man the individual that interests him, as the shadowyaccumulation of traditions, instincts and blind chances which shapes theindividual's destiny. Here, true enough, we have a full-length portraitof Razumov, glowing with life. But here, far more importantly, we alsohave an amazingly meticulous and illuminating study of the Russiancharacter, with all its confused mingling of Western realism andOriental fogginess, its crazy tendency to go shooting off into thespaces of an incomprehensible metaphysic, its general transcendence ofall that we Celts and Saxons and Latins hold to be true of human motiveand human act. Russia is a world apart: that is the sum and substance ofthe tale. In the island stories we have the same elaborate projection ofthe East, of its fantastic barbarism, of brooding Asia. And in the seastories we have, perhaps for the first time in English fiction, a vastand adequate picture of the sea, the symbol at once of man's eternalstriving and of his eternal impotence. Here, at last, the colossus hasfound its interpreter. There is in "Typhoon" and "The Nigger of theNarcissus, " and, above all, in "The Mirror of the Sea, " a poeticevocation of the sea's stupendous majesty that is unparalleled outsidethe ancient sagas. Conrad describes it with a degree of graphic skillthat is superb and incomparable. He challenges at once the pictorialvigour of Hugo and the aesthetic sensitiveness of Lafcadio Hearn, andsurpasses them both. And beyond this mere dazzling visualization, hegets into his pictures an overwhelming sense of that vast drama of whichthey are no more than the flat, lifeless representation--of thatinexorable and uncompassionate struggle which is life itself. The sea tohim is a living thing, an omnipotent and unfathomable thing, almost agod. He sees it as the Eternal Enemy, deceitful in its caresses, suddenin its rages, relentless in its enmities, and forever a mystery. 

§ 6

Conrad's first novel, "Almayer's Folly, " was printed in 1895. He tellsus in "A Personal Record" that it took him seven years to writeit--seven years of pertinacious effort, of trial and error, of learninghow to write. He was, at this time thirty-eight years old. Seventeenyears before, landing in England to fit himself for the British merchantservice, he had made his first acquaintance with the English language. The interval had been spent almost continuously at sea--in the Easternislands, along the China coast, on the Congo and in the South Atlantic. That he hesitated between French and English is a story often told, buthe himself is authority for the statement that it is more symbolicalthan true. Flaubert, in those days, was his idol, as we know, but thespeech of his daily business won, and English literature reaped thegreatest of all its usufructs from English sea power. To this day thereare marks of his origins in his style. His periods, more than once, havean inept and foreign smack. In fishing for the right phrase onesometimes feels that he finds a French phrase, or even a Polish phrase, and that it loses something by being done into English. 

The credit for discovering "Almayer's Folly, " as the publishers say, belongs to Edward Garnett, then a reader for T. Fisher Unwin. The bookwas brought out modestly and seems to have received little attention. The first edition, it would appear, ran to no more than a thousandcopies; at all events, specimens of it are now very hard to find, andcollectors pay high prices for them. When "An Outcast of the Islands"followed, a year later, a few alert readers began to take notice of theauthor, and one of them was Sir (then Mr. ) Hugh Clifford, a formerGovernor of the Federated Malay States and himself the author of severalexcellent books upon the Malay. Clifford gave Conrad encouragementprivately and talked him up in literary circles, but the majority ofEnglish critics remained unaware of him. After an interval of two years, during which he struggled between his desire to write and the temptationto return to the sea, he published "The Nigger of the Narcissus. "[7] Itmade a fair success of esteem, but still there was no recognition of theauthor's true stature. Then followed "Tales of Unrest" and "Lord Jim, "and after them the feeblest of all the Conrad books, "The Inheritors, "written in collaboration with Ford Madox Hueffer. It is easy to see inthis collaboration, and no less in the character of the book, anindication of irresolution, and perhaps even of downright loss of hope. But success, in fact, was just around the corner. In 1902 came "Youth, "and straightway Conrad was the lion of literary London. The chorus ofapproval that greeted it was almost a roar; all sorts of critics andreviewers, from H. G. Wells to W. L. Courtney, and from John Galsworthyto W. Robertson Nicoll, took a hand. Writing home to the _New YorkTimes_, W. L. Alden reported that he had "not heard one dissenting voicein regard to the book, " but that the praise it received "was unanimous, "and that the newspapers and literary weeklies rivalled one another "intheir efforts to express their admiration for it. "

This benign whooping, however, failed to awaken the enthusiasm of themass of novel-readers and brought but meagre orders from the circulatinglibraries. "Typhoon" came upon the heels of "Youth, " but still the salesof the Conrad books continued small and the author remained in veryuncomfortable circumstances. Even after four or five years he was stillso poor that he was glad to accept a modest pension from the BritishCivil List. This official recognition of his genius, when it came atlast, seems to have impressed the public, characteristically enough, farmore than his books themselves had done, and the foundations were thuslaid for that wider recognition of his genius which now prevails. Butgetting him on his legs was slow work, and such friends as Hueffer, Clifford and Galsworthy had to do a lot of arduous log-rolling. Evenafter the splash made by "Youth" his publishing arrangements seem tohave remained somewhat insecure. His first eleven books show sixdifferent imprints; it was not until his twelfth that he settled down toa publisher. His American editions tell an even stranger story. Thefirst six of them were brought out by six different publishers; thefirst eight by no less than seven. But today he has a regular Americanpublisher at last, and in England a complete edition of his works is inprogress. 

Thanks to the indefatigable efforts of that American publisher (wholabours for Gene Stratton-Porter and Gerald Stanley Lee in the samemanner) Conrad has been forced upon the public notice in the UnitedStates, and it is the fashion among all who pretend to aestheticconsciousness to read him, or, at all events, to talk about him. Hisbooks have been brought together in a uniform edition for the newlyintellectual, bound in blue leather, like the "complete library sets" ofKipling, O. Henry, Guy de Maupassant and Paul de Kock. The more literarynewspapers print his praises; he is hymned by professorial critics as aprophet of virtue; his genius is certificated by such diverseauthorities as Hildegarde Hawthorne and Louis Joseph Vance; I myselflately sat on a Conrad Committee, along with Booth Tarkington, DavidBelasco, Irvin Cobb, Walter Pritchard Eaton and Hamlin Garland--surelyan astounding posse of _literati_! Moreover, Conrad himself shows adisposition to reach out for a wider audience. His "Victory, " firstpublished in _Munsey's Magazine_, revealed obvious efforts to beintelligible to the general. A few more turns of the screw and it mighthave gone into the _Saturday Evening Post_, between serials by HarrisDickson and Rex Beach. 

Meanwhile, in the shadow of this painfully growing celebrity as anovelist, Conrad takes on consideration as a bibelot, and the dealers infirst editions probably make more profit out of some of his books thanever he has made himself. His manuscripts are cornered, I believe, by aneminent collector of literary curiosities in New York, who seems to havea contract with the novelist to take them as fast as they areproduced--perhaps the only arrangement of the sort in literary history. His first editions begin to bring higher premiums than those of anyother living author. Considering the fact that the oldest of them isless than twenty-five years old, they probably set new records for thetrade. Even the latest in date are eagerly sought, and it is notuncommon to see an English edition of a Conrad book sold at an advancein New York within a month of its publication. [8]

As I hint, however, there is not much reason to believe that thissomewhat extravagant fashion is based upon any genuine liking, or anyvery widespread understanding. The truth is that, for all the adepttub-thumping of publishers, Conrad's sales still fall a good deal behindthose of even the most modest of best-seller manufacturers, and that therespect with which his successive volumes are received is accompanied byenthusiasm in a relatively narrow circle only. A clan of Conrad fanaticsexists, and surrounding it there is a body of readers who read himbecause it is the intellectual thing to do, and who talk of him becausetalking of him is expected. But beyond that he seems to make littleimpression. When "Victory" was printed in _Munsey's Magazine_ it was afailure; no other single novel, indeed, contributed more toward theabandonment of the policy of printing a complete novel in each issue. The other popular magazines show but small inclination for Conradmanuscripts. Some time ago his account of a visit to Poland in war-timewas offered on the American market by an English author's agent. At thestart a price of $2, 500 was put upon it, but after vainly invitingbuyers for a couple of months it was finally disposed of to a literarynewspaper which seldom spends so much as $2, 500, I daresay, for a wholemonth's supply of copy. 

In the United States, at least, novelists are made and unmade, not bycritical majorities, but by women, male and female. The art of fictionamong us, as Henry James once said, "is almost exclusively feminine. " Inthe books of such a man as William Dean Howells it is difficult to finda single line that is typically and exclusively masculine. One couldeasily imagine Edith Wharton, or Mrs. Watts, or even Agnes Repplier, writing all of them. When a first-rate novelist emerges from obscurityit is almost always by some fortuitous plucking of the dexter string. "Sister Carrie, " for example, has made a belated commercial success, notbecause its dignity as a human document is understood, but because it ismistaken for a sad tale of amour, not unrelated to "The Woman ThouGavest Me" and "Dora Thorne. " In Conrad there is no such sweet bait forthe fair and sentimental. The sedentary multipara, curled up in herboudoir on a rainy afternoon, finds nothing to her taste in his grimtales. The Conrad philosophy is harsh, unyielding, repellent. The Conradheroes are nearly all boors and ruffians. Their very love-making hassomething sinister and abhorrent in it; one cannot imagine them in themoving pictures, played by tailored beauties with long eye-lashes. More, I venture that the censors would object to them, even disguised asfloor-walkers. Surely that would be a besotted board which would passthe irregular amours of Lord Jim, the domestic brawls of Almayer, therevolting devil's mass of Kurtz, Falk's disgusting feeding in theSouthern Ocean, or the butchery on Heyst's island. Stevenson's "TreasureIsland" has been put upon the stage, but "An Outcast of the Islands"would be as impossible there as "Barry Lyndon" or "La Terre. " The worldfails to breed actors for such rôles, or stage managers to penetratesuch travails of the spirit, or audiences for the revelation thereof. 

With the Conrad cult, so discreetly nurtured out of a Barabbasian silo, there arises a considerable Conrad literature, most of it quitevalueless. Huneker's essay, in "Ivory, Apes and Peacocks, "[9] getslittle beyond the obvious; William Lyon Phelps, in "The Advance of theEnglish Novel, " achieves only a meagre judgment;[10] Frederic TaberCooper tries to estimate such things as "The Secret Agent" and "UnderWestern Eyes" in terms of the Harvard enlightenment;[11] John Galsworthywastes himself upon futile comparisons;[12] even Sir Hugh Clifford, forall his quick insight, makes irrelevant objections to Conrad'sprinciples of Malay psychology. [13] Who cares? Conrad is his own God, and creates his own Malay! The best of the existing studies of Conrad, despite certain sentimentalities arising out of youth and schooling, isin the book of Wilson Follett, before mentioned. The worst is in theofficial biography by Richard Curle, [14] for which Conrad himselfobtained a publisher and upon which his _imprimatur_ may be thus assumedto lie. If it does, then its absurdities are nothing new, for we allknow what a botch Ibsen made of accounting for himself. But, even so, the assumption stretches the probabilities more than once. Surely it ishard to think of Conrad putting "Lord Jim" below "Chance" and "TheSecret Agent" on the ground that it "raises a fierce moral issue. "Nothing, indeed, could be worse nonsense--save it be an Americancritic's doctrine that "Conrad denounces pessimism. " "Lord Jim" no moreraises a moral issue than "The Titan. " It is, if anything, a devastatingexposure of a moral issue. Its villain is almost heroic; its hero, judged by his peers, is a scoundrel.... 

Hugh Walpole, himself a competent novelist, does far better in hislittle volume, "Joseph Conrad. "[15] In its brief space he is unable toexamine all of the books in detail, but he at least manages to getthrough a careful study of Conrad's method, and his professional skilland interest make it valuable. 

§ 7

There is a notion that judgments of living artists are impossible. Theyare bound to be corrupted, we are told, by prejudice, false perspective, mob emotion, error. The question whether this or that man is great orsmall is one which only posterity can answer. A silly begging of thequestion, for doesn't posterity also make mistakes? Shakespeare's ghosthas seen two or three posterities, beautifully at odds. Even today, itmust notice a difference in flitting from London to Berlin. The shade ofMilton has been tricked in the same way. So, also, has Johann SebastianBach's. It needed a Mendelssohn to rescue it from Coventry--and nowMendelssohn himself, once so shining a light, is condemned to theshadows in his turn. We are not dead yet; we are here, and it is now. Therefore, let us at least venture, guess, opine. 

My own conviction, sweeping all those reaches of living fiction that Iknow, is that Conrad's figure stands out from the field like the Alpsfrom the Piedmont plain. He not only has no masters in the novel; he hasscarcely a colourable peer. Perhaps Thomas Hardy and Anatole France--oldmen both, their work behind them. But who else? James is dead. Meredithis dead. So is George Moore, though he lingers on. So are all theRussians of the first rank; Andrieff, Gorki and their like are lightcavalry. In Sudermann, Germany has a writer of short stories of veryhigh calibre, but where is the German novelist to match Conrad? ClaraViebig? Thomas Mann? Gustav Frenssen? Arthur Schnitzler? Surely not! Asfor the Italians, they are either absurd tear-squeezers or more absurdharlequins. As for the Spaniards and the Scandinavians, they would passfor geniuses only in Suburbia. In America, setting aside an odd volumehere and there, one can discern only Dreiser--and of Dreiser'slimitations I shall discourse anon. There remains England. England hasthe best second-raters in the world; nowhere else is the general levelof novel writing so high; nowhere else is there a corps of journeymannovelists comparable to Wells, Bennett, Benson, Walpole, Beresford, George, Galsworthy, Hichens, De Morgan, Miss Sinclair, Hewlett andcompany. They have a prodigious facility; they know how to write; eventhe least of them is, at all events, a more competent artisan than, say, Dickens, or Bulwer-Lytton, or Sienkiewicz, or Zola. But the literary_grande passion_ is simply not in them. They get nowhere with theirsuave and interminable volumes. Their view of the world and its wondersis narrow and superficial. They are, at bottom, no more than clevermechanicians. 

As Galsworthy has said, Conrad lifts himself immeasurably above themall. One might well call him, if the term had not been cheapened intocant, a cosmic artist. His mind works upon a colossal scale; he conjuresup the general out of the particular. What he sees and describes in hisbooks is not merely this man's aspiration or that woman's destiny, butthe overwhelming sweep and devastation of universal forces, the greatcentral drama that is at the heart of all other dramas, the tragicstruggles of the soul of man under the gross stupidity and obscenejoking of the gods. "In the novels of Conrad, " says Galsworthy, "natureis first, man is second. " But not a mute, a docile second! He may think, as Walpole argues, that "life is too strong, too clever and tooremorseless for the sons of men, " but he does not think that they aretoo weak and poor in spirit to challenge it. It is the challenging thatengrosses him, and enchants him, and raises up the magic of his wonder. It is as futile, in the end, as Hamlet's or Faust's--but still a gallantand a gorgeous adventure, a game uproariously worth the playing, anenterprise "inscrutable ... And excessively romantic. "... 

If you want to get his measure, read "Youth" or "Falk" or "Heart ofDarkness, " and then try to read the best of Kipling. I think you willcome to some understanding, by that simple experiment, of the differencebetween an adroit artisan's bag of tricks and the lofty sincerity andpassion of a first-rate artist. 

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Joseph Conrad: A short study of his intellectual and emotionalattitude toward his work and of the chief characteristics of his novels, by Wilson Follett; New York, Doubleday, Page & Co. (1915). 

[2] The Advance of the English Novel. New York, Dodd, Mead & Co. , 1916, p. 215. 

[3] Conrad, in the _Forum_, May, 1915. 

[4] New York and London. G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1907. 

[5] The Intelligence of Woman. Boston, Little, Brown & Co. , 1916, p. 6-7. 

[6] In _The New Review_, Dec. , 1897. 

[7] Printed in the United States as Children of the Sea, but nowrestored to its original title. 

[8] Here are some actual prices from booksellers' catalogues:

 1914 1916 1920

Almayer's Folly (1895) $12. $24. $40. An Outcast of the Islands (1896) 11. 50 20. 35. The Nigger of the Narcissus (1898) 7. 50 20. 35. Tales of Unrest (1898) 12. 50 20. 35. Lord Jim (1900) 7. 50 22. 50 25. The Inheritors (1901) 12. 20. 30. Youth (1902) 5. 7. 50 25. Typhoon (1903) 4. 5. 50 16. Romance (1903) 5. 7. 50 9. Nostromo (1904) 2. 50 4. 50 7. 50The Mirror of the Sea (1906) 5. 11. 15. A Set of Six (1908) 3. 7. 50 10. Under Western Eyes (1911) 4. 50 4. 50 6. Some Reminiscences (1912) 4. 50 9. 15. Chance (1913) 2. 5. 15. Victory (1915) 2. 2. 50 4. 25

[9] New York, Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1915, pp. 1-21. 

[10] New York, Dodd, Mead & Co. , 1916, pp. 192-217. 

[11] Some English Story Tellers: A Book of the Younger Novelists; NewYork, Henry Holt & Co. , 1912, pp. 1-30. 

[12] A Disquisition on Conrad, _Fortnightly Review_, April, 1908. 

[13] The Genius of Mr. Joseph Conrad, _North American Review_, June, 1904. 

[14] Joseph Conrad: A Study; New York, Doubleday, Page & Co. , 1914. 

[15] Joseph Conrad; London, Nisbet & Co. (1916). 

II

THEODORE DREISER

§ 1

Out of the desert of American fictioneering, so populous and yet sodreary, Dreiser stands up--a phenomenon unescapably visible, butdisconcertingly hard to explain. What forces combined to produce him inthe first place, and how has he managed to hold out so long against theprevailing blasts--of disheartening misunderstanding andmisrepresentation, of Puritan suspicion and opposition, of artisticisolation, of commercial seduction? There is something downright heroicin the way the man has held his narrow and perilous ground, disdainingall compromise, unmoved by the cheap success that lies so invitingaround the corner. He has faced, in his day, almost every form of attackthat a serious artist can conceivably encounter, and yet all of themtogether have scarcely budged him an inch. He still plods along in thelaborious, cheerless way he first marked out for himself; he is quite asundaunted by baited praise as by bludgeoning, malignant abuse; his laternovels are, if anything, more unyieldingly dreiserian than hisearliest. As one who has long sought to entice him in this direction orthat, fatuously presuming to instruct him in what would improve him andprofit him, I may well bear a reluctant and resigned sort of testimonyto his gigantic steadfastness. It is almost as if any change in hismanner, any concession to what is usual and esteemed, any ameliorationof his blind, relentless exercises of _force majeure_, were a physicalimpossibility. One feels him at last to be authentically no more than ahelpless instrument (or victim) of that inchoate flow of forces which hehimself is so fond of depicting as at once the answer to the riddle oflife, and a riddle ten times more vexing and accursed. 

And his origins, as I say, are quite as mysterious as his motive power. To fit him into the unrolling chart of American, or even of Englishfiction is extremely difficult. Save one thinks of H. B. Fuller (whose"With the Procession" and "The Cliff-Dwellers" are still remembered byHuneker, but by whom else?[16]), he seems to have had no fore-runneramong us, and for all the discussion of him that goes on, he has fewavowed disciples, and none of them gets within miles of him. One catchesechoes of him, perhaps, in Willa Sibert Cather, in Mary S. Watts, inDavid Graham Phillips, in Sherwood Anderson and in Joseph MedillPatterson, but, after all, they are no more than echoes. In RobertHerrick the thing descends to a feeble parody; in imitators furtherremoved to sheer burlesque. All the latter-day American novelists ofconsideration are vastly more facile than Dreiser in their philosophy, as they are in their style. In the fact, perhaps, lies the measure oftheir difference. What they lack, great and small, is the gesture ofpity, the note of awe, the profound sense of wonder--in a phrase, that"soberness of mind" which William Lyon Phelps sees as the hallmark ofConrad and Hardy, and which even the most stupid cannot escape inDreiser. The normal American novel, even in its most serious forms, takes colour from the national cocksureness and superficiality. It runsmonotonously to ready explanations, a somewhat infantile smugness andhopefulness, a habit of reducing the unknowable to terms of the notworth knowing. What it cannot explain away with ready formulae, as inthe later Winston Churchill, it snickers over as scarcely worthexplaining at all, as in the later Howells. Such a brave and tragicbook as "Ethan Frome" is so rare as to be almost singular, even withMrs. Wharton. There is, I daresay, not much market for that sort ofthing. In the arts, as in the concerns of everyday, the American seeksescape from the insoluble by pretending that it is solved. A comfortablephrase is what he craves beyond all things--and comfortable phrases aresurely not to be sought in Dreiser's stock. 

I have heard argument that he is a follower of Frank Norris, and two orthree facts lend it a specious probability. "McTeague" was printed in1899; "Sister Carrie" a year later. Moreover, Norris was the first tosee the merit of the latter book, and he fought a gallant fight, asliterary advisor to Doubleday, Page & Co. , against its suppression afterit was in type. But this theory runs aground upon two circumstances, thefirst being that Dreiser did not actually read "McTeague, " nor, indeed, grow aware of Norris, until after "Sister Carrie" was completed, and theother being that his development, once he began to write other books, was along paths far distant from those pursued by Norris himself. Dreiser, in truth, was a bigger man than Norris from the start; it is tothe latter's unending honour that he recognized the fact instanter, andyet did all he could to help his rival. It is imaginable, of course, that Norris, living fifteen years longer, might have overtaken Dreiser, and even surpassed him; one finds an arrow pointing that way in"Vandover and the Brute" (not printed until 1914). But it swings sharplyaround in "The Epic of the Wheat. " In the second volume of thatincomplete trilogy, "The Pit, " there is an obvious concession to thepopular taste in romance; the thing is so frankly written down, indeed, that a play has been made of it, and Broadway has applauded it. And in"The Octopus, " despite some excellent writing, there is a descent to amysticism so fantastic and preposterous that it quickly passes beyondserious consideration. Norris, in his day, swung even lower--forexample, in "A Man's Woman" and in some of his short stories. He was apioneer, perhaps only half sure of the way he wanted to go, and the evillures of popular success lay all about him. It is no wonder that hesometimes seemed to lose his direction. 

Émile Zola is another literary father whose paternity grows dubious onexamination. I once printed an article exposing what seemed to me to bea Zolaesque attitude of mind, and even some trace of the actual Zolamanner, in "Jennie Gerhardt"; there came from Dreiser the news that hehad never read a line of Zola, and knew nothing about his novels. Not acomplete answer, of course; the influence might have been exerted atsecond hand. But through whom? I confess that I am unable to name alikely medium. The effects of Zola upon Anglo-Saxon fiction have beenalmost _nil_; his only avowed disciple, George Moore, has long sincerecanted and reformed; he has scarcely rippled the prevailingromanticism.... Thomas Hardy? Here, I daresay, we strike a better scent. There are many obvious likenesses between "Tess of the D'Urbervilles"and "Jennie Gerhardt" and again between "Jude the Obscure" and "SisterCarrie. " All four stories deal penetratingly and poignantly with theessential tragedy of women; all disdain the petty, specious explanationsof popular fiction; in each one finds a poetical and melancholy beauty. Moreover, Dreiser himself confesses to an enchanted discovery of Hardyin 1896, three years before "Sister Carrie" was begun. But it is easy topush such a fact too hard, and to search for likenesses and parallelsthat are really not there. The truth is that Dreiser's points of contactwith Hardy might be easily matched by many striking points ofdifference, and that the fundamental ideas in their novels, despite acommon sympathy, are anything but identical. Nor does one apprehend anyponderable result of Dreiser's youthful enthusiasm for Balzac, whichantedated his discovery of Hardy by two years. He got from both men asense of the scope and dignity of the novel; they taught him that astory might be a good one, and yet considerably more than a story; theyshowed him the essential drama of the commonplace. But that they hadmore influence in forming his point of view, or even in shaping histechnique, than any one of half a dozen other gods of those youngdays--this I scarcely find. In the structure of his novels, and in theirmanner of approach to life no less, they call up the work of Dostoyevskyand Turgenev far more than the work of either of these men--but of allthe Russians save Tolstoi (as of Flaubert) Dreiser himself tells us thathe was ignorant until ten years after "Sister Carrie. " In his days ofpreparation, indeed, his reading was so copious and so disorderly thatantagonistic influences must have well-nigh neutralized one another, andso left the curious youngster to work out his own method and his ownphilosophy. Stevenson went down with Balzac, Poe with Hardy, Dumas_fils_ with Tolstoi. There were even months of delight in Sienkiewicz, Lew Wallace and E. P. Roe! The whole repertory of the pedagogues hadbeen fought through in school and college: Dickens, Thackeray, Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Kingsley, Scott. Only Irving andHawthorne seem to have made deep impressions. "I used to lie under atree, " says Dreiser, "and read 'Twice Told Tales' by the hour. I thought'The Alhambra' was a perfect creation, and I still have a lingeringaffection for it. " Add Bret Harte, George Ebers, William Dean Howells, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and you have a literary stew indeed!... But forall its bubbling I see a far more potent influence in the chancediscovery of Spencer and Huxley at twenty-three--the year of choosing!Who, indeed, will ever measure the effect of those two giants upon theyoung men of that era--Spencer with his inordinate meticulousness, hisrelentless pursuit of facts, his overpowering syllogisms, and Huxleywith his devastating agnosticism, his insatiable questionings of the oldaxioms, above all, his brilliant style? Huxley, it would appear, hasbeen condemned to the scientific hulks, along with bores innumerable andunspeakable; one looks in vain for any appreciation of him in treatiseson beautiful letters. [17] And yet the man was a superb artist in works, a master-writer even more than a master-biologist, one of the few trulygreat stylists that England has produced since the time of Anne. One caneasily imagine the effect of two such vigorous and intriguing minds upona youth groping about for self-understanding and self-expression. Theyswept him clean, he tells us, of the lingering faith of his boyhood--amediaeval, Rhenish Catholicism;--more, they filled him with a new andeager curiosity, an intense interest in the life that lay about him, adesire to seek out its hidden workings and underlying causes. A youngman set afire by Huxley might perhaps make a very bad novelist, but itis a certainty that he could never make a sentimental and superficialone. There is no need to go further than this single moving adventure tofind the genesis of Dreiser's disdain of the current platitudes, hissense of life as a complex biological phenomenon, only dimlycomprehended, and his tenacious way of thinking things out, and ofholding to what he finds good. Ah, that he had learned from Huxley, notonly how to inquire, but also how to report! That he had picked up atalent for that dazzling style, so sweet to the ear, so damnablypersuasive, so crystal-clear!

But the more one examines Dreiser, either as writer or as theorist ofman, the more his essential isolation becomes apparent. He got a habitof mind from Huxley, but he completely missed Huxley's habit of writing. He got a view of woman from Hardy, but he soon changed it out of allresemblance. He got a certain fine ambition and gusto out of Balzac, butall that was French and characteristic he left behind. So with Zola, Howells, Tolstoi and the rest. The tracing of likenesses quickly becomesrabbinism, almost cabalism. The differences are huge and sprout up inall directions. Nor do I see anything save a flaming up of colonialpassion in the current efforts to fit him into a German frame, and makehim an agent of Prussian frightfulness in letters. Such childish gabbleone looks for in the New York _Times_, and there is where one actuallyfinds it. Even the literary monthlies have stood clear of it; it isimportant only as material for that treatise upon the patrioteer and hisbawling which remains to be written. The name of the man, true enough, is obviously Germanic, and he has told us himself, in "A Traveler atForty, " how he sought out and found the tombs of his ancestors in somelittle town of the Rhine country. There are more of these genealogicalrevelations in "A Hoosier Holiday, " but they show a Rhenish strain thatwas already running thin in boyhood. No one, indeed, who reads aDreiser novel can fail to see the gap separating the author from thesehalf-forgotten forbears. He shows even less of German influence than ofEnglish influence. 

There is, as a matter of fact, little in modern German fiction that isintelligibly comparable to "Jennie Gerhardt" and "The Titan, " either asa study of man or as a work of art. The naturalistic movement of theeighties was launched by men whose eyes were upon the theatre, and it isin that field that nine-tenths of its force has been spent. "Germannaturalism, " says George Madison Priest, quoting Gotthold Klee's"Grunzüge der deutschen Literaturgeschichte" "created a new type only inthe drama. "[18] True enough, it has also produced occasional novels, andsome of them are respectable. Gustav Frenssen's "Jörn Uhl" is aspecimen: it has been done into English. Another is Clara Viebig's "Dastägliche Brot, " which Ludwig Lewisohn compares to George Moore's "EstherWaters. " Yet another is Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks. " But it would beabsurd to cite these works as evidences of a national quality, anddoubly absurd to think of them as inspiring such books as "JennieGerhardt" and "The Titan, " which excel them in everything saveworkmanship. The case of Mann reveals a tendency that is visible innearly all of his contemporaries. Starting out as an agnostic realistnot unlike the Arnold Bennett of "The Old Wives' Tale, " he has graduallytaken on a hesitating sort of romanticism, and in one of his laterbooks, "Königliche Hoheit" (in English, "Royal Highness") he ends upon anote of sentimentalism borrowed from Wagner's "Ring. " Fräulein Viebighas also succumbed to banal and extra-artistic purposes. Her "Die Wachtam Rhein, " for all its merits in detail, is, at bottom, no more than aneloquent hymn to patriotism--a theme which almost always bafflesnovelists. As for Frenssen, he is a parson by trade, and carries overinto the novel a good deal of the windy moralizing of the pulpit. All ofthese German naturalists--and they are the only German novelists worthconsidering--share the weakness of Zola, their _Stammvater_. They, too, fall into the morass that engulfed "Fécondité, " and make sentimentalpropaganda. 

I go into this matter in detail, not because it is intrinsically of anymoment, but because the effort to depict Dreiser as a secret agent ofthe Wilhelmstrasse, told off to inject subtle doses of _Kultur_ into anaïve and pious people, has taken on the proportions of an organizedmovement. The same critical imbecility which detects naught save a Tomcat in Frank Cowperwood can find naught save an abhorrent foreigner inCowperwood's creator. The truth is that the trembling patriots ofletters, male and female, are simply at their old game of seeing a manunder the bed. Dreiser, in fact, is densely ignorant of Germanliterature, as he is of the better part of French literature, and ofmuch of English literature. He did not even read Hauptmann until after"Jennie Gerhardt" had been written, and such typical German moderns asLudwig Thoma, Otto Julius Bierbaum and Richard Dehmel remain as strangeto him as Heliogabalus. 

§ 2

In his manner, as opposed to his matter, he is more the Teuton, for heshows all of the racial patience and pertinacity and all of the raciallack of humour. Writing a novel is as solemn a business to him astrimming a beard is to a German barber. He blasts his way through hisinterminable stories by something not unlike main strength; his writing, one feels, often takes on the character of an actual siege operation, with tunnellings, drum fire, assaults in close order and hand-to-handfighting. Once, seeking an analogy, I called him the Hindenburg of thenovel. If it holds, then "The 'Genius'" is his Poland. The field ofaction bears the aspect, at the end, of a hostile province meticulouslybrought under the yoke, with every road and lane explored to itsbeginning, and every crossroads village laboriously taken, inventoriedand policed. Here is the very negation of Gallic lightness andintuition, and of all other forms of impressionism as well. Here is noseries of illuminating flashes, but a gradual bathing of the whole scenewith white light, so that every detail stands out. 

And many of those details, of course, are trivial; even irritating. Theydo not help the picture; they muddle and obscure it; one wondersimpatiently what their meaning is, and what the purpose may be ofrevealing them with such a precise, portentous air.... Turn to page 703of "The 'Genius. '" By the time one gets there, one has hewn and hackedone's way through 702 large pages of fine print--97 long chapters, morethan 250, 000 words. And yet, at this hurried and impatient point, withthe _coda_ already begun, Dreiser halts the whole narrative to explainthe origin, nature and inner meaning of Christian Science, and to makeus privy to a lot of chatty stuff about Mrs. Althea Jones, aprofessional healer, and to supply us with detailed plans andspecifications of the apartment house in which she lives, works hertawdry miracles, and has her being. Here, in sober summary, are theparticulars:

 1. That the house is "of conventional design. "

 2. That there is "a spacious areaway" between its two wings. 

 3. That these wings are "of cream-coloured pressed brick. "

 4. That the entrance between them is "protected by a handsome wrought-iron door. "

 5. That to either side of this door is "an electric lamp support of handsome design. "

 6. That in each of these lamp supports there are "lovely cream-coloured globes, shedding a soft lustre. "

 7. That inside is "the usual lobby. "

 8. That in the lobby is "the usual elevator. "

 9. That in the elevator is the usual "uniformed negro elevator man. "

 10. That this negro elevator man (name not given) is "indifferent and impertinent. "

 11. That a telephone switchboard is also in the lobby. 

 12. That the building is seven stories in height. 

In "The Financier" there is the same exasperating rolling up ofirrelevant facts. The court proceedings in the trial of Cowperwood aregiven with all the exactness of a parliamentary report in the London_Times_. The speeches of the opposing counsel are set down nearly infull, and with them the remarks of the judge, and after that the opinionof the Appellate Court on appeal, with the dissenting opinions as a sortof appendix. In "Sister Carrie" the thing is less savagely carried out, but that is not Dreiser's fault, for the manuscript was revised by someanonymous hand, and the printed version is but little more than half thelength of the original. In "The Titan" and "Jennie Gerhardt" no suchbrake upon exuberance is visible; both books are crammed with detailsthat serve no purpose, and are as flat as ditch-water. Even in the twovolumes of personal record, "A Traveler at Forty" and "A HoosierHoliday, " there is the same furious accumulation of trivialities. Consider the former. It is without structure, without selection, withoutreticence. One arises from it as from a great babbling, half drunken. Onthe one hand the author fills a long and gloomy chapter with the storyof the Borgias, apparently under the impression that it is news, and onthe other hand he enters into intimate and inconsequential confidencesabout all the persons he meets en route, sparing neither the innocentnor the obscure. The children of his English host at Bridgely Levelstrike him as fantastic little creatures, even as a bit uncanny--and heduly sets it down. He meets an Englishman on a French train who pleaseshim much, and the two become good friends and see Rome together, but thefellow's wife is "obstreperous" and "haughty in her manner" and so"loud-spoken in her opinions" that she is "really offensive"--and downit goes. He makes an impression on a Mlle. Marcelle in Paris, and sheaccompanies him from Monte Carlo to Ventimiglia, and there gives him aparting kiss and whispers, "_Avril-Fontainebleau_"--and lo, this sweetone is duly spread upon the minutes. He permits himself to be arrestedby a fair privateer in Piccadilly, and goes with her to one of the densof sin that suffragettes see in their nightmares, and cross-examines herat length regarding her ancestry, her professional ethics and ideals, and her earnings at her dismal craft--and into the book goes a fullreport of the proceedings. He is entertained by an eminent Dutch juristin Amsterdam--and upon the pages of the chronicle it appears that thegentleman is "waxy" and "a little pedantic, " and that he is probably thesort of "thin, delicate, well barbered" professor that Ibsen had in mindwhen he cast about for a husband for the daughter of General Gabler. 

Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practisesit--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking downof ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell itall. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less byhis exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers. A Dreiser novel, at least of the later canon, cannot be read as other novels are read--ona winter evening or summer afternoon, between meal and meal, travellingfrom New York to Boston. It demands the attention for almost a week, anduses up the faculties for a month. If, reading "The 'Genius, '" one wereto become engrossed in the fabulous manner described in the publishers'advertisements, and so find oneself unable to put it down and go to bedbefore the end, one would get no sleep for three days and three nights. 

Worse, there are no charms of style to mitigate the rigours of thesevast steppes and pampas of narration. Joseph Joubert's saying that"words should stand out well from the paper" is quite incomprehensibleto Dreiser; he never imitates Flaubert by writing for "_la respirationet l'oreille_. " There is no painful groping for the inevitable word, orfor what Walter Pater called "the gipsy phrase"; the common, even thecommonplace, coin of speech is good enough. On the first page of "JennieGerhardt" one encounters "frank, open countenance, " "diffident manner, ""helpless poor, " "untutored mind, " "honest necessity, " and half a dozenother stand-bys of the second-rate newspaper reporter. In "SisterCarrie" one finds "high noon, " "hurrying throng, " "unassumingrestaurant, " "dainty slippers, " "high-strung nature, " and "cool, calculating world"--all on a few pages. Carrie's sister, Minnie Hanson, "gets" the supper. Hanson himself is "wrapped up" in his child. Carriedecides to enter Storm and King's office, "no matter what. " In "TheTitan" the word "trig" is worked to death; it takes on, toward the end, the character of a banal and preposterous refrain. In the other booksone encounters mates for it--words made to do duty in as many senses asthe American verb "to fix" or the journalistic "to secure. "... 

I often wonder if Dreiser gets anything properly describable as pleasureout of this dogged accumulation of threadbare, undistinguished, uninspiring nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, participles andconjunctions. To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies--the man whosearches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying athing above the thing said--there is in writing the constant joy ofsudden discovery, of happy accident. A phrase springs up full blown, sweet and caressing. But what joy can there be in rolling up sentencesthat have no more life and beauty in them, intrinsically, than so manyelection bulletins? Where is the thrill in the manufacture of such aparagraph as that in which Mrs. Althea Jones' sordid habitat isdescribed with such inexorable particularity? Or in the laboriousconfection of such stuff as this, from Book I, Chapter IV, of "The'Genius'"?:

 The city of Chicago--who shall portray it! This vast ruck of life that had sprung suddenly into existence upon the dank marshes of a lake shore!

Or this from the epilogue to "The Financier":

 There is a certain fish whose scientific name is _Mycteroperca Bonaci_, and whose common name is Black Grouper, which is of considerable value as an afterthought in this connection, and which deserves much to be better known. It is a healthy creature, growing quite regularly to a weight of two hundred and fifty pounds, and living a comfortable, lengthy existence because of its very remarkable ability to adapt itself to conditions.... 

Or this from his pamphlet, "Life, Art and America":[19]

 Alas, alas! for art in America. It has a hard stubby row to hoe. 

But I offer no more examples. Every reader of the Dreiser novels mustcherish astounding specimens--of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, ofwhole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so manylumps of sodium hyposulphite. Here and there, as in parts of "The Titan"and again in parts of "A Hoosier Holiday, " an evil conscience seems tohaunt him and he gives hard striving to his manner, and more than oncethere emerges something that is almost graceful. But a backslidingalways follows this phosphorescence of reform. "The 'Genius, '" comingafter "The Titan, " marks the high tide of his bad writing. There arepassages in it so clumsy, so inept, so irritating that they seem almostunbelievable; nothing worse is to be found in the newspapers. Nor isthere any compensatory deftness in structure, or solidity of design, tomake up for this carelessness in detail. The well-made novel, of course, can be as hollow as the well-made play of Scribe--but let us at leasthave a beginning, a middle and an end! Such a story as "The 'Genius'" isas gross and shapeless as Brünnhilde. It billows and bulges out like acloud of smoke, and its internal organization is almost as vague. Thereare episodes that, with a few chapters added, would make veryrespectable novels. There are chapters that need but a touch or two tobe excellent short stories. The thing rambles, staggers, trips, heaves, pitches, struggles, totters, wavers, halts, turns aside, trembles on theedge of collapse. More than once it seems to be foundering, both in theequine and in the maritime senses. The tale has been heard of a tree sotall that it took two men to see to the top of it. Here is a novel sobrobdingnagian that a single reader can scarcely read his way throughit.... 

§ 3

Of the general ideas which lie at the bottom of all of Dreiser's work itis impossible to be in ignorance, for he has exposed them at length in"A Hoosier Holiday" and summarized them in "Life, Art and America. " Intheir main outlines they are not unlike the fundamental assumptions ofJoseph Conrad. Both novelists see human existence as a seeking without afinding; both reject the prevailing interpretations of its meaning andmechanism; both take refuge in "I do not know. " Put "A Hoosier Holiday"beside Conrad's "A Personal Record, " and you will come upon parallelsfrom end to end. Or better still, put it beside Hugh Walpole's "JosephConrad, " in which the Conradean metaphysic is condensed from the novelseven better than Conrad has done it himself: at once you will see howthe two novelists, each a worker in the elemental emotions, each a rebelagainst the current assurance and superficiality, each an alien to hisplace and time, touch each other in a hundred ways. 

"Conrad, " says Walpole, "is of the firm and resolute conviction thatlife is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons ofmen. " And then, in amplification: "It is as though, from some highwindow, looking down, he were able to watch some shore, from whosesecurity men were forever launching little cockleshell boats upon alimitless and angry sea.... From his height he can follow theirfortunes, their brave struggles, their fortitude to the very end. Headmires their courage, the simplicity of their faith, but his ironysprings from his knowledge of the inevitable end. "... 

Substitute the name of Dreiser for that of Conrad, and you will have tochange scarcely a word. Perhaps one, to wit, "clever. " I suspect thatDreiser, writing so of his own creed, would be tempted to make it"stupid, " or, at all events, "unintelligible. " The struggle of man, ashe sees it, is more than impotent; it is gratuitous and purposeless. There is, to his eye, no grand ingenuity, no skilful adaptation of meansto end, no moral (or even dramatic) plan in the order of the universe. He can get out of it only a sense of profound and inexplicable disorder. The waves which batter the cockleshells change their direction at everyinstant. Their navigation is a vast adventure, but intolerablyfortuitous and inept--a voyage without chart, compass, sun or stars.... 

So at bottom. But to look into the blackness steadily, of course, isalmost beyond the endurance of man. In the very moment that itsimpenetrability is grasped the imagination begins attacking it with palebeams of false light. All religions, I daresay, are thus projected fromthe questioning soul of man, and not only all religious, but also allgreat agnosticisms. Nietzsche, shrinking from the horror of that abyssof negation, revived the Pythagorean concept of _der ewigenWiederkunft_--a vain and blood-curdling sort of comfort. To it, after awhile, he added explanations almost Christian--a whole repertoire ofwhys and wherefores, aims and goals, aspirations and significances. Thelate Mark Twain, in an unpublished work, toyed with an equally daringidea: that men are to some unimaginably vast and incomprehensible Beingwhat the unicellular organisms of his body are to man, and so on _adinfinitum_. Dreiser occasionally inclines to much the same hypothesis;he likens the endless reactions going on in the world we know, themyriadal creation, collision and destruction of entities, to the slowaccumulation and organization of cells _in utero_. He would make usspecks in the insentient embryo of some gigantic Presence whose form isstill unimaginable and whose birth must wait for Eons and Eons. Again, he turns to something not easily distinguishable from philosophicalidealism, whether out of Berkeley or Fichte it is hard to make out--thatis, he would interpret the whole phenomenon of life as no more than anappearance, a nightmare of some unseen sleeper or of men themselves, an"uncanny blur of nothingness"--in Euripides' phrase, "a song sung by anidiot, dancing down the wind. " Yet again, he talks vaguely of theintricate polyphony of a cosmic orchestra, cacophonous to our dull ears. Finally, he puts the observed into the ordered, reading a purpose in thedisplayed event: "life was intended to sting and hurt".... But these areonly gropings, and not to be read too critically. From speculations andexplanations he always returns, Conrad-like, to the bald fact: to "thespectacle and stress of life. " All he can make out clearly is "a vastcompulsion which has nothing to do with the individual desires or tastesor impulses of individuals. " That compulsion springs "from the settlingprocesses of forces which we do not in the least understand, over whichwe have no control, and in whose grip we are as grains of dust or sand, blown hither and thither, for what purpose we cannot even suspect. "[20]Man is not only doomed to defeat, but denied any glimpse orunderstanding of his antagonist. Here we come upon an agnosticism thathas almost got beyond curiosity. What good would it do us, asks Dreiser, to know? In our ignorance and helplessness, we may at least get aslave's consolation out of cursing the unknown gods. Suppose we saw themstriving blindly, too, and pitied them?... 

But, as I say, this scepticism is often tempered by guesses at apossibly hidden truth, and the confession that this truth may existreveals the practical unworkableness of the unconditioned system, atleast for Dreiser. Conrad is far more resolute, and it is easy to seewhy. He is, by birth and training, an aristocrat. He has the gift ofemotional detachment. The lures of facile doctrine do not move him. Inhis irony there is a disdain which plays about even the ironist himself. Dreiser is a product of far different forces and traditions, and iscapable of no such escapement. Struggle as he may, and fume and protestas he may, he can no more shake off the chains of his intellectual andcultural heritage than he can change the shape of his nose. What thatheritage is you may find out in detail by reading "A Hoosier Holiday, "or in summary by glancing at the first few pages of "Life, Art andAmerica. " Briefly described, it is the burden of a believing mind, amoral attitude, a lingering superstition. One-half of the man's brain, so to speak, wars with the other half. He is intelligent, he isthoughtful, he is a sound artist--but there come moments when a deadhand falls upon him, and he is once more the Indiana peasant, snuffingabsurdly over imbecile sentimentalities, giving a grave ear toquackeries, snorting and eye-rolling with the best of them. Onegeneration spans too short a time to free the soul of man. Nietzsche, tothe end of his days, remained a Prussian pastor's son, and hencetwo-thirds a Puritan; he erected his war upon holiness, toward the end, into a sort of holy war. Kipling, the grandson of a Methodist preacher, reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and itsribaldries pass away and he falls back upon his fundamentals. And thatother English novelist who springs from the servants' hall--let us notbe surprised or blame him if he sometimes writes like a bounder. 

The truth about Dreiser is that he is still in the transition stagebetween Christian Endeavour and civilization, between Warsaw, Indianaand the Socratic grove, between being a good American and being a freeman, and so he sometimes vacillates perilously between a moralsentimentalism and a somewhat extravagant revolt. "The 'Genius, '" onthe one hand, is almost a tract for rectitude, a Warning to the Young;its motto might be _Scheut die Dirnen_! And on the other hand, it isfull of a laborious truculence that can only be explained by imaginingthe author as heroically determined to prove that he is a plain-spokenfellow and his own man, let the chips fall where they may. So, in spots, in "The Financier" and "The Titan, " both of them far better books. Thereis an almost moral frenzy to expose and riddle what passes for moralityamong the stupid. The isolation of irony is never reached; the man isstill evangelical; his ideas are still novelties to him; he is assolemnly absurd in some of his floutings of the Code Américain as he isin his respect for Bouguereau, or in his flirtings with the New Thought, or in his naïve belief in the importance of novel-writing. Somewhere orother I have called all this the Greenwich Village complex. It is notgenuine artists, serving beauty reverently and proudly, who herd inthose cockroached cellars and bawl for art; it is a mob of half-educatedyokels and cockneys to whom the very idea of art is still novel, andintoxicating--and more than a little bawdy. 

Not that Dreiser actually belongs to this ragamuffin company. Far fromit, indeed. There is in him, hidden deep-down, a great instinctiveartist, and hence the makings of an aristocrat. In his muddled way, held back by the manacles of his race and time, and his steps madeuncertain by a guiding theory which too often eludes his owncomprehension, he yet manages to produce works of art of unquestionablebeauty and authority, and to interpret life in a manner that is poignantand illuminating. There is vastly more intuition in him thanintellectualism; his talent is essentially feminine, as Conrad's ismasculine; his ideas always seem to be deduced from his feelings. Theview of life that got into "Sister Carrie, " his first book, was not theproduct of a conscious thinking out of Carrie's problems. It simply gotitself there by the force of the artistic passion behind it; itscoherent statement had to wait for other and more reflective days. Thething began as a vision, not as a syllogism. Here the name of FranzSchubert inevitably comes up. Schubert was an ignoramus, even in music;he knew less about polyphony, which is the mother of harmony, which isthe mother of music, than the average conservatory professor. Butnevertheless he had such a vast instinctive sensitiveness to musicalvalues, such a profound and accurate feeling for beauty in tone, that henot only arrived at the truth in tonal relations, but even went beyondwhat, in his day, was known to be the truth, and so led an advance. Likewise, Giorgione da Castelfranco and Masaccio come to mind: paintersof the first rank, but untutored, unsophisticated, uncouth. Dreiser, within his limits, belongs to this sabot-shod company of the elect. Onethinks of Conrad, not as artist first, but as savant. There is somethingof the icy aloofness of the laboratory in him, even when the images heconjures up pulsate with the very glow of life. He is almost asself-conscious as the Beethoven of the last quartets. In Dreiser thething is more intimate, more disorderly, more a matter of pure feeling. He gets his effects, one might almost say, not by designing them, but byliving them. 

But whatever the process, the power of the image evoked is not to begainsaid. It is not only brilliant on the surface, but mysterious andappealing in its depths. One swiftly forgets his intolerable writing, his mirthless, sedulous, repellent manner, in the face of the Atheniantragedy he instils into his seduced and soul-sick servant girls, hisbarbaric pirates of finances, his conquered and hamstrung supermen, hiswives who sit and wait. He has, like Conrad, a sure talent for depictingthe spirit in disintegration. Old Gerhardt, in "Jennie Gerhardt, " isalone worth all the _dramatis personae_ of popular American fictionsince the days of "Rob o' the Bowl"; Howells could no more have createdhim, in his Rodinesque impudence of outline, than he could have createdTartuffe or Gargantua. Such a novel as "Sister Carrie" stands quiteoutside the brief traffic of the customary stage. It leaves behind it anunescapable impression of bigness, of epic sweep and dignity. It is nota mere story, not a novel in the customary American meaning of the word;it is at once a psalm of life and a criticism of life--and thatcriticism loses nothing by the fact that its burden is despair. Here, precisely, is the point of Dreiser's departure from his fellows. He putsinto his novels a touch of the eternal _Weltschmerz_. They get below thedrama that is of the moment and reveal the greater drama that is withoutend. They arouse those deep and lasting emotions which grow out of therecognition of elemental and universal tragedy. His aim is not merely totell a tale; his aim is to show the vast ebb and flow of forces whichsway and condition human destiny. One cannot imagine him consenting toConan Doyle's statement of the purpose of fiction, quoted withcharacteristic approval by the New York _Times_: "to amuse mankind, tohelp the sick and the dull and the weary. " Nor is his purpose toinstruct; if he is a pedagogue it is only incidentally and as aweakness. The thing he seeks to do is to stir, to awaken, to move. Onedoes not arise from such a book as "Sister Carrie" with a smirk ofsatisfaction; one leaves it infinitely touched. 

§ 4

It is, indeed, a truly amazing first book, and one marvels to hear thatit was begun lightly. Dreiser in those days (_circa_ 1899), had seven oreight years of newspaper work behind him, in Chicago, St. Louis, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh and New York, and was beginning to feelthat reaction of disgust which attacks all newspaper men when theenthusiasm of youth wears out. He had been successful, but he saw howhollow that success was, and how little surety it held out for thefuture. The theatre was what chiefly lured him; he had written plays inhis nonage, and he now proposed to do them on a large scale, and so getsome of the easy dollars of Broadway. It was an old friend from Toledo, Arthur Henry, who turned him toward story-writing. The two had met whileHenry was city editor of the _Blade_, and Dreiser a reporter looking fora job. [21] A firm friendship sprang up, and Henry conceived a highopinion of Dreiser's ability, and urged him to try a short story. Dreiser was distrustful of his own skill, but Henry kept at him, andfinally, during a holiday the two spent together at Maumee, Ohio, hemade the attempt. Henry had the manuscript typewritten and sent it to_Ainslee's Magazine_. A week or so later there came a cheque for $75. 

This was in 1898. Dreiser wrote four more stories during the yearfollowing, and sold them all. Henry now urged him to attempt a novel, but again his distrust of himself held him back. Henry finally tried arather unusual argument: he had a novel of his own on the stocks, [22]and he represented that he was in difficulties with it and in need ofcompany. One day, in September, 1899, Dreiser took a sheet of yellowpaper and wrote a title at random. That title was "Sister Carrie, " andwith no more definite plan than the mere name offered the book began. Itwent ahead steadily enough until the middle of October, and had come bythen to the place where Carrie meets Hurstwood. At that point Dreiserleft it in disgust. It seemed pitifully dull and inconsequential, andfor two months he put the manuscript away. Then, under renewed urgingsby Henry, he resumed the writing, and kept on to the place whereHurstwood steals the money. Here he went aground upon a comparativelysimple problem; he couldn't devise a way to manage the robbery. Late inJanuary he gave it up. But the faithful Henry kept urging him, and inMarch he resumed work, and soon had the story finished. The latter part, despite many distractions, went quickly. Once the manuscript wascomplete, Henry suggested various cuts, and in all about 40, 000 wordscame out. The fair copy went to the Harpers. They refused it withoutceremony and soon afterward Dreiser carried the manuscript to Doubleday, Page & Co. He left it with Frank Doubleday, and before long there camenotice of its acceptance, and, what is more, a contract. But after thestory was in type it fell into the hands of the wife of one of themembers of the firm, and she conceived so strong a notion of itsimmorality that she soon convinced her husband and his associates. Therefollowed a series of acrimonious negotiations, with Dreiser holdingresolutely to the letter of his contract. It was at this point thatFrank Norris entered the combat--bravely but in vain. The piousBarabbases, confronted by their signature, found it impossible to throwup the book entirely, but there was no nomination in the bond regardingeither the style of binding or the number of copies to be issued, andso they evaded further dispute by bringing out the book in a very smalledition and with modest unstamped covers. Copies of this edition are noweagerly sought by book-collectors, and one in good condition fetches $25or more in the auction rooms. Even the second edition (1907), bearingthe imprint of B. W. Dodge & Co. , carries an increasing premium. 

The passing years work strange farces. The Harpers, who had refused"Sister Carrie" with a spirit bordering upon indignation in 1900, tookover the rights of publication from B. W. Dodge & Co. , in 1912, andreissued the book in a new (and extremely hideous) format, with apublisher's note containing smug quotations from the encomiums of the_Fortnightly Review_, the _Athenaeum_, the _Spectator_, the _Academy_and other London critical journals. More, they contrived humorously topush the date of their copyright back to 1900. But this new enthusiasmfor artistic freedom did not last long. They had published "JennieGerhardt" in 1911 and they did "The Financier" in 1912, but when "TheTitan" followed, in 1914, they were seized with qualms, and suppressedthe book after it had got into type. In this emergency the English firmof John Lane came to the rescue, only to seek cover itself when theComstocks attacked "The 'Genius, '" two years later.... For his highservices to American letters, Walter H. Page, of Doubleday, Page & Co. , was made ambassador to England, where "Sister Carrie" is regarded(according to the Harpers), as "the best story, on the whole, that hasyet come out of America. " A curious series of episodes. Another proof, perhaps, of that cosmic imbecility upon which Dreiser is so fond ofdiscoursing.... 

But of all this I shall say more later on, when I come to discuss thecritical reception of the Dreiser novels, and the efforts made by theNew York Society for the Suppression of Vice to stop their sale. Thething to notice here is that the author's difficulties with "SisterCarrie" came within an ace of turning him from novel-writing completely. Stray copies of the suppressed first edition, true enough, fell into thehands of critics who saw the story's value, and during the first year ortwo of the century it enjoyed a sort of esoteric vogue, andencouragement came from unexpected sources. Moreover, a somewhatbowdlerized English edition, published by William Heinemann in 1901, made a fair success, and even provoked a certain mild controversy. Butthe author's income from the book remained almost _nil_, and so he wasforced to seek a livelihood in other directions. His history during thenext ten years belongs to the tragicomedy of letters. For five of themhe was a Grub Street hack, turning his hand to any literary job thatoffered. He wrote short stories for the popular magazines, or specialarticles, or poems, according as their needs varied. He concoctedfabulous tales for the illustrated supplements of the Sunday newspapers. He rewrote the bad stuff of other men. He returned to reporting. He didodd pieces of editing. He tried his hand at one-act plays. He evenventured upon advertisement writing. And all the while, the best that hecould get out of his industry was a meagre living. 

In 1905, tiring of the uncertainties of this life, he accepted a post onthe staff of Street & Smith, the millionaire publishers of cheapmagazines, servant-girl romances and dime-novels, and here, in the veryslums of letters, he laboured with tongue in cheek until the next year. The tale of his duties will fill, I daresay, a volume or two in theautobiography on which he is said to be working; it is a chronicle fullof achieved impossibilities. One of his jobs, for example, was to reducea whole series of dime-novels, each 60, 000 words in length, to 30, 000words apiece. He accomplished it by cutting each one into halves, andwriting a new ending for the first half and a new beginning for thesecond, with new titles for both. This doubling of their propertyaroused the admiration of his employers; they promised him an assuredand easy future in the dime-novel business. But he tired of it, despitethis revelation of a gift for it, and in 1906 he became managing editorof the _Broadway Magazine_, then struggling into public notice. A yearlater he transferred his flag to the Butterick Building, and becamechief editor of the _Delineator_, the _Designer_ and other such gospelsfor the fair. Here, of course, he was as much out of water as in thedime-novel foundry of Street & Smith, but at all events the pay wasgood, and there was a certain leisure at the end of the day's work. In1907, as part of his duties, he organized the National Child RescueCampaign, which still rages as the _Delineator's_ contribution to theUplift. At about the same time he began "Jennie Gerhardt. " It is curiousto note that, during these same years, Arnold Bennett was slaving inLondon as the editor of _Woman_. 

Dreiser left the _Delineator_ in 1910, and for the next half year or soendeavoured to pump vitality into the _Bohemian Magazine_, in which hehad acquired a proprietary interest. But the _Bohemian_ soon departedthis life, carrying some of his savings with it, and he gave over hisenforced leisure to "Jennie Gerhardt, " completing the book in 1911. Itspublication by the Harpers during the same year worked his finalemancipation from the editorial desk. It was praised, and what is more, it sold, and royalties began to come in. A new edition of "SisterCarrie" followed in 1912, with "The Financier" hard upon its heels. Since then Dreiser has devoted himself wholly to serious work. "TheFinancier" was put forth as the first volume of "a trilogy of desire";the second volume, "The Titan, " was published in 1914; the third is yetto come. "The 'Genius'" appeared in 1915; "The Bulwark" is justannounced. In 1912, accompanied by Grant Richards, the London publisher, Dreiser made his first trip abroad, visiting England, France, Italy andGermany. His impressions were recorded in "A Traveler at Forty, "published in 1913. In the summer of 1915, accompanied by Franklin Booth, the illustrator, he made an automobile journey to his old haunts inIndiana, and the record is in "A Hoosier Holiday, " published in 1916. His other writings include a volume of "Plays of the Natural and theSupernatural" (1916); "Life, Art and America, " a pamphlet againstPuritanism in letters (1917); a dozen or more short stories andnovelettes, a few poems, and a three-act drama, "The Hand of thePotter. "

Dreiser was born at Terre Haute, Indiana, on August 27, 1871, and, likemost of us, is of mongrel blood, with the German, perhaps, predominating. He is a tall man, awkward in movement and nervous inhabit; the boon of beauty has been denied him. The history of his youthis set forth in full in "A Hoosier Holiday. " It is curious to note thathe is a brother to the late Paul Dresser, author of "The Banks of theWabash" and other popular songs, and that he himself, helping Paul overa hard place, wrote the affecting chorus:

 Oh, the moon is fair tonight along the Wabash, From the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay; Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming ... 

But no doubt you know it. 

§ 5

The work of Dreiser, considered as craftsmanship pure and simple, isextremely uneven, and the distance separating his best from his worst isalmost infinite. It is difficult to believe that the novelist who wrotecertain extraordinarily vivid chapters in "Jennie Gerhardt, " and "AHoosier Holiday, " and, above all, in "The Titan, " is the same whoachieved the unescapable dulness of parts of "The Financier" and thegeneral stupidity and stodginess of "The 'Genius. '" Moreover, the tideof his writing does not rise or fall with any regularity; he neitherimproves steadily nor grows worse steadily. Only half an eye is neededto see the superiority of "Jennie Gerhardt, " as a sheer piece ofwriting, to "Sister Carrie, " but on turning to "The Financier, " whichfollowed "Jennie Gerhardt" by an interval of but one year, one observesa falling off which, at its greatest, is almost indistinguishable from acollapse. "Jennie Gerhardt" is suave, persuasive, well-ordered, solid instructure, instinct with life. "The Financier, " for all its merits indetail, is loose, tedious, vapid, exasperating. But had any critic, inthe autumn of 1912, argued thereby that Dreiser was finished, that hehad shot his bolt, his discomfiture would have come swiftly, for "TheTitan, " which followed in 1914, was almost as well done as "TheFinancier" had been ill done, and there are parts of it which remain, tothis day, the very best writing that Dreiser has ever achieved. But "The'Genius'"? Ay, in "The 'Genius'" the pendulum swings back again! It isflaccid, elephantine, doltish, coarse, dismal, flatulent, sophomoric, ignorant, unconvincing, wearisome. One pities the jurisconsult who iscondemned, by Comstockian clamour, to plough through such a novel. In itthere is a sort of humourless _reductio ad absurdum_, not only of theDreiser manner, but even of certain salient tenets of the Dreiserphilosophy. At its best it has a moral flavour. At its worst it isalmost maudlin.... 

The most successful of the Dreiser novels, judged by sales, is "SisterCarrie, " and the causes thereof are not far to seek. On the one hand, its suppression in 1900 gave it a whispered fame that was converted intoa public celebrity when it was republished in 1907, and on the otherhand it shares with "Jennie Gerhardt" the capital advantage of having ayoung and appealing woman for its chief figure. The sentimentalists thushave a heroine to cry over, and to put into a familiar pigeon-hole;Carrie becomes a sort of Pollyanna. More, it is, at bottom, a tale oflove--the one theme of permanent interest to the average Americannovel-reader, the chief stuffing of all our best-selling romances. Trueenough, it is vastly more than this--there is in it, for example, theastounding portrait of Hurstwood--, but it seems to me plain that itsrelative popularity is by no means a test of its relative merit, andthat the causes of that popularity must be sought in other directions. Its defect, as a work of art, is a defect of structure. Like Norris'"McTeague" it has a broken back. In the midst of the story of Carrie, Dreiser pauses to tell the story of Hurstwood--a memorably vivid andtragic story, to be sure, but still one that, considering artistic formand organization, does damage to the main business of the book. Itsoutstanding merit is its simplicity, its unaffected seriousness andfervour, the spirit of youth that is in it. One feels that it waswritten, not by a novelist conscious of his tricks, but by a novicecarried away by his own flaming eagerness, his own high sense of theinterest of what he was doing. In this aspect, it is perhaps moretypically Dreiserian than any of its successors. And maybe we may seekhere for a good deal of its popular appeal, for there is a contagion innaïveté as in enthusiasm, and the simple novel-reader may recognize thekinship of a simple mind in the novelist. 

But it is in "Jennie Gerhardt" that Dreiser first shows his truemettle.... "The power to tell the same story in two forms, " said GeorgeMoore, "is the sign of the true artist. " Here Dreiser sets himself thatdifficult task, and here he carries it off with almost complete success. Reduce the story to a hundred words, and the same words would alsodescribe "Sister Carrie. " Jennie, like Carrie, is a rose grown fromturnip-seed. Over each, at the start, hangs poverty, ignorance, the dumbhelplessness of the Shudra, and yet in each there is that indescribablesomething, that element of essential gentleness, that innate inwardbeauty which levels all barriers of caste, and makes Esther a fit queenfor Ahasuerus. Some Frenchman has put it into a phrase: "_Une âme grandedans un petit destin_"--a great soul in a small destiny. Jennie has sometouch of that greatness; Dreiser is forever calling her "a big woman";it is a refrain almost as irritating as the "trig" of "The Titan. "Carrie, one feels, is of baser metal; her dignity never rises toanything approaching nobility. But the history of each is the history ofthe other. Jennie, like Carrie, escapes from the physical miseries ofthe struggle for existence only to taste the worse miseries of thestruggle for happiness. Don't mistake me; we have here no maudlin talesof seduced maidens. Seduction, in truth, is far from tragedy for eitherJennie or Carrie. The gain of each, until the actual event has been leftbehind and obliterated by experiences more salient and poignant, isgreater than her loss, and that gain is to the soul as well as to thecreature. With the rise from want to security, from fear to ease, comesan awakening of the finer perceptions, a widening of the sympathies, agradual unfolding of the delicate flower called personality, anincreased capacity for loving and living. But with all this, and as apart of it, there comes, too, an increased capacity for suffering--andso in the end, when love slips away and the empty years stretch before, it is the awakened and supersentient woman that pays for the folly ofthe groping, bewildered girl. The tragedy of Carrie and Jennie, inbrief, is not that they are degraded, but that they are lifted up, notthat they go to the gutter, but that they escape the gutter and glimpsethe stars. 

But if the two stories are thus variations upon the same sombre theme, if each starts from the same place and arrives at the same dark goal, ifeach shows a woman heartened by the same hopes and tortured by the sameagonies, there is still a vast difference between them, and thatdifference is the measure of the author's progress in his craft duringthe eleven years between 1900 and 1911. "Sister Carrie, " at bottom, isno more than a first sketch, a rough piling up of observations andideas, disordered and often incoherent. In the midst of the story, as Ihave said, the author forgets it, and starts off upon another. In"Jennie Gerhardt" there is no such flaccidity of structure, no suchvacillation in aim, no such proliferation of episode. Considering thatit is by Dreiser, it is extraordinarily adept and intelligent in design;only in "The Titan" has he ever done so well. From beginning to end thenarrative flows logically, steadily, congruously. Episodes there are, ofcourse, but they keep their proper place and bulk. It is always Jenniethat stands at the centre of the traffic; it is in Jennie's soul thatevery scene is ultimately played out. Her father and mother; SenatorBrander, the god of her first worship; her daughter Vesta, and LesterKane, the man who makes and mars her--all these are drawn with infinitepainstaking, and in every one of them there is the blood of life. But itis Jennie that dominates the drama from curtain to curtain. Not an eventis unrelated to her; not a climax fails to make clearer the strugglesgoing on in her mind and heart. 

It is in "Jennie Gerhardt" that Dreiser's view of life begins to take oncoherence and to show a general tendency. In "Sister Carrie" the thingis still chiefly representation and no more; the image is undoubtedlyvivid, but its significance, in the main, is left undisplayed. In"Jennie Gerhardt" this pictorial achievement is reinforced byinterpretation; one carries away an impression that something has beensaid; it is not so much a visual image of Jennie that remains as a senseof the implacable tragedy that engulfs her. The book is full of artisticpassion. It lives and glows. It awakens recognition and feeling. Itslucid ideational structure, even more than the artless gusto of "SisterCarrie, " produces a penetrating and powerful effect. Jennie is no mereindividual; she is a type of the national character, almost thearchetype of the muddled, aspiring, tragic, fate-flogged mass. And thescene in which she is set is brilliantly national too. The Chicago ofthose great days of feverish money-grabbing and crazy aspiration maywell stand as the epitome of America, and it is made clearer here thanin any other American novel--clearer than in "The Pit" or "TheCliff-Dwellers"--clearer than in any book by an Easterner--almost asclear as the Paris of Balzac and Zola. Finally, the style of the storyis indissolubly wedded to its matter. The narrative, in places, has analmost scriptural solemnity; in its very harshness and baldness there issomething subtly meet and fitting. One cannot imagine such a historydone in the strained phrases of Meredith or the fugal manner of HenryJames. One cannot imagine that stark, stenographic dialogue adorned withthe tinsel of pretty words. The thing, to reach the heights it touches, could have been done only in the way it has been done. As it stands, Iwould not take anything away from it, not even its journalisticbanalities, its lack of humour, its incessant returns to C major. Aprimitive and touching poetry is in it. It is a novel, I am convinced, of the first consideration.... 

In "The Financier" this poetry is almost absent, and that fact islargely to blame for the book's lack of charm. By the time we see him in"The Titan" Frank Cowperwood has taken on heroic proportions and theromance of great adventure is in him, but in "The Financier" he is stilllittle more than an extra-pertinacious money-grubber, and not unrelatedto the average stock broker or corner grocer. True enough, Dreiser saysspecifically that he is more, that the thing he craves is not money butpower--power to force lesser men to execute his commands, power tosurround himself with beautiful and splendid things, power to amusehimself with women, power to defy and nullify the laws made for thetimorous and unimaginative. But the intent of the author never reallygets into his picture. His Cowperwood in this first stage is hard, commonplace, unimaginative. In "The Titan" he flowers out as a blend ofrevolutionist and voluptuary, a highly civilized Lorenzo theMagnificent, an immoralist who would not hesitate two minutes aboutseducing a saint, but would turn sick at the thought of harming a child. But in "The Financier" he is still in the larval state, and a repellentsordidness hangs about him. 

Moreover, the story of his rise is burdened by two defects which stillfurther corrupt its effect. One lies in the fact that Dreiser is quiteunable to get the feel, so to speak, of Philadelphia, just as he isunable to get the feel of New York in "The 'Genius. '" The other is thatthe style of the writing in the book reduces the dreiserian manner toabsurdity, and almost to impossibility. The incredibly lazy, involvedand unintelligent description of the trial of Cowperwood I have alreadymentioned. We get, in this lumbering chronicle, not a cohesive andluminous picture, but a dull, photographic representation of the wholetedious process, beginning with an account of the political obligationsof the judge and district attorney, proceeding to a consideration of thehabits of mind of each of the twelve jurymen, and ending with a summaryof the majority and minority opinions of the court of appeals, and adiscussion of the motives, ideals, traditions, prejudices, sympathiesand chicaneries behind them, each and severally. When Cowperwood goesinto the market, his operations are set forth in their last detail; weare told how many shares he buys, how much he pays for them, what thecommission is, what his profit comes to. When he comes into chancecontact with a politician, we hear all about that politician, includinghis family affairs. When he builds and furnishes a house, the chiefrooms in it are inventoried with such care that not a chair or a rug ora picture on the wall is overlooked. The endless piling up of suchnon-essentials cripples and incommodes the story; its drama is toocopiously swathed in words to achieve a sting; the Dreiser mannerdevours and defeats itself. 

But none the less the book has compensatory merits. Its charactersketches, for all the cloud of words, are lucid and vigorous. Out ofthat enormous complex of crooked politics and crookeder finance, Cowperwood himself stands out in the round, comprehensible and alive. And all the others, in their lesser measures, are done almost aswell--Cowperwood's pale wife, whimpering in her empty house; AileenButler, his mistress; his doddering and eternally amazed old father; hisold-fashioned, stupid, sentimental mother; Stener, the City Treasurer, adish-rag in the face of danger; old Edward Malia Butler, that barbarianin a boiled shirt, with his Homeric hatred and his broken heart. Particularly old Butler. The years pass and he must be killed and putaway, but not many readers of the book, I take it, will soon forgethim. Dreiser is at his best, indeed, when he deals with old men. Intheir tragic helplessness they stand as symbols of that unfathomablecosmic cruelty which he sees as the motive power of life itself. More, even, than his women, he makes them poignant, vivid, memorable. Thepicture of old Gerhardt is full of a subtle brightness, though he isalways in the background, as cautious and penny-wise as an ancient crow, trotting to his Lutheran church, pathetically ill-used by the world henever understands. Butler is another such, different in externals, butat bottom the same dismayed, questioning, pathetic old man.... 

In "The Titan" there is a tightening of the screws, a clarifying of theaction, an infinite improvement in the manner. The book, in truth, hasthe air of a new and clearer thinking out of "The Financier, " as "JennieGerhardt" is a new thinking out of "Sister Carrie. " With almost the samematerials, the thing is given a new harmony and unity, a newplausibility, a new passion and purpose. In "The Financier" the artisticvoluptuary is almost completely overshadowed by the dollar-chaser; in"The Titan" we begin to see clearly that grand battle between artist andman of money, idealist and materialist, spirit and flesh, which is theinforming theme of the whole trilogy. The conflict that makes the drama, once chiefly external, now becomes more and more internal; it is playedout within the soul of the man himself. The result is a character sketchof the highest colour and brilliance, a superb portrait of a complex andextremely fascinating man. Of all the personages in the Dreiser books, the Cowperwood of "The Titan" is perhaps the most radiantly real. He isaccounted for in every detail, and yet, in the end, he is not accountedfor at all; there hangs about him, to the last, that bafflingmysteriousness which hangs about those we know most intimately. There isin him a complete and indubitable masculinity, as the eternal feminineis in Jennie. His struggle with the inexorable forces that urge him onas with whips, and lure him with false lights, and bring him todisillusion and dismay, is as typical as hers is, and as tragic. In hisultimate disaster, so plainly foreshadowed at the close, there is theclearest of all projections of the ideas that lie at the bottom of allDreiser's work. Cowperwood, above any of them, is his protagonist. 

The story, in its plan, is as transparent as in its burden. It has anaustere simplicity in the telling that fits the directness of the thingtold. Dreiser, as if to clear decks, throws over all the immemorialbaggage of the novelist, making short shrift of "heart interest, "conventional "sympathy, " and even what ordinarily passes for romance. In"Sister Carrie, " as I have pointed out, there is still a sweet dish forthe sentimentalists; if they don't like the history of Carrie as a workof art they may still wallow in it as a sad, sad love story. Carrie isappealing, melting; she moves, like Marguerite Gautier, in an atmosphereof romantic depression. And Jennie Gerhardt, in this aspect, is merelyCarrie done over--a Carrie more carefully and objectively drawn, perhaps, but still conceivably to be mistaken for a "sympathetic"heroine in a best-seller. A lady eating chocolates might jump from"Laddie" to "Jennie Gerhardt" without knowing that she was jumping tenthousand miles. The tear jugs are there to cry into. Even in "TheFinancier" there is still a hint of familiar things. The first Mrs. Cowperwood is sorely put upon; old Butler has the markings of an iratefather; Cowperwood himself suffers the orthodox injustice and languishesin a cell. But no one, I venture, will ever fall into any such mistakein identity in approaching "The Titan. " Not a single appeal to facilesentiment is in it. It proceeds from beginning to end in a forthright, uncompromising, confident manner. It is an almost purely objectiveaccount, as devoid of cheap heroics as a death certificate, of a strongman's contest with incontestable powers without and no lessincontestable powers within. There is nothing of the conventional outlawabout him; he does not wear a red sash and bellow for liberty; fatewrings from him no melodramatic defiances. In the midst of the battle heviews it with a sort of ironical detachment, as if lifted above himselfby the sheer aesthetic spectacle. Even in disaster he asks for noquarter, no generosity, no compassion. Up or down, he keeps his zest forthe game that is being played, and is sufficient unto himself. 

Such a man as this Cowperwood of the Chicago days, describedromantically, would be indistinguishable from the wicked earls andseven-foot guardsmen of Ouida, Robert W. Chambers and The Duchess. Butdescribed realistically and coldbloodedly, with all that wealth ofminute and apparently inconsequential detail which Dreiser piles up soamazingly, he becomes a figure astonishingly vivid, lifelike andengrossing. He fits into no _a priori_ theory of conduct or scheme ofrewards and punishments; he proves nothing and teaches nothing; theforces which move him are never obvious and frequently unintelligible. But in the end he seems genuinely a man--a man of the sort we see aboutus in the real world--not a patent and automatic fellow, reactingdocilely and according to a formula, but a bundle of complexities andcontradictions, a creature oscillating between the light and theshadow--at bottom, for all his typical representation of a race and acivilization, a unique and inexplicable personality. More, he is a manof the first class, an Achilles of his world; and here the achievementof Dreiser is most striking, for he succeeds where all fore-runnersfailed. It is easy enough to explain how John Smith courted his wife, and even how William Brown fought and died for his country, but it isinordinately difficult to give plausibility to the motives, feelings andprocesses of mind of a man whose salient character is that theytranscend all ordinary experience. Too often, even when made by thehighest creative and interpretative talent, the effort has resolveditself into a begging of the question. Shakespeare made Hamletcomprehensible to the groundlings by diluting that half of him which wasShakespeare with a half which was a college sophomore. In the same wayhe saved Lear by making him, in large part, a tedious and obscene olddonkey--the blood brother of any average ancient of any average Englishtap-room. Tackling Caesar, he was rescued by Brutus' knife. GeorgeBernard Shaw, facing the same difficulty, resolved it by drawing acomposite portrait of two or three London actor-managers and half adozen English politicians. But Dreiser makes no such compromise. Hebangs into the difficulties of his problem head on, and if he does notsolve it absolutely, he at least makes an extraordinarily close approachto a solution. In "The Financier" a certain incredulity still hangsabout Cowperwood; in "The Titan" he suddenly comes unquestionably real. If you want to get the true measure of this feat, put it beside thefailure of Frank Norris with Curtis Jadwin in "The Pit. "... 

"The 'Genius, '" which interrupted the "trilogy of desire, " marks thenadir of Dreiser's accomplishment, as "The Titan" marks its apogee. Theplan of it, of course, is simple enough, and it is one that Dreiser, athis best, might have carried out with undoubted success. What he istrying to show, in brief, is the battle that goes on in the soul ofevery man of active mind between the desire for self-expression and thedesire for safety, for public respect, for emotional equanimity. It is, in a sense, the story of Cowperwood told over again, but with animportant difference, for Eugene Witla is a much less self-reliant andpowerful fellow than Cowperwood, and so he is unable to muster up thevast resolution of spirits that he needs to attain happiness. "TheTitan" is the history of a strong man. "The 'Genius'" is the history ofa man essentially weak. Eugene Witla can never quite choose his route inlife. He goes on sacrificing ease to aspiration and aspiration to easeto the end of the chapter. He vacillates abominably and forever betweentwo irreconcilable desires. Even when, at the close, he sinks into awhining sort of resignation, the proud courage of Cowperwood is not inhim; he is always a bit despicable in his pathos. 

As I say, a story of simple outlines, and well adapted to the dreiserianpen. But it is spoiled and made a mock of by a donkeyish solemnity ofattack which leaves it, on the one hand, diffuse, spineless andshapeless, and on the other hand, a compendium of platitudes. It is asif Dreiser, suddenly discovering himself a sage, put off the highpassion of the artist and took to pounding a pulpit. It is almost as ifhe deliberately essayed upon a burlesque of himself. The book is anendless emission of the obvious, with touches of the scandalous to lightup its killing monotony. It runs to 736 pages of small type; its readingis an unbearable weariness to the flesh; in the midst of it one hasforgotten the beginning and is unconcerned about the end. Mingled withall the folderol, of course, there is stuff of nobler quality. Certainchapters stick in the memory; whole episodes lift themselves to thefervid luminosity of "Jennie Gerhardt"; there are character sketchesthat deserve all praise; one often pulls up with a reminder that thething is the work of a proficient craftsman. But in the main it lumbersand jolts, wabbles and bores. A sort of ponderous imbecility gets intoit. Both in its elaborate devices to shake up the pious and its imposingdemonstrations of what every one knows, it somehow suggests the advancedthinking of Greenwich Village. I suspect, indeed, that the _vin rouge_was in Dreiser's arteries as he concocted it. He was at the intellectualmenopause, and looking back somewhat wistfully and attitudinizinglytoward the goatish days that were no more. 

But let it go! A novelist capable of "Jennie Gerhardt" has rights, privileges, prerogatives. He may, if he will, go on a spiritual drunknow and then, and empty the stale bilges of his soul. Thackeray, havingfinished "Vanity Fair" and "Pendennis, " bathed himself in the sheep'smilk of "The Newcomes, " and after "The Virginians" he did "TheAdventures of Philip. " Zola, with "Germinal, " "La Débâcle" and "LaTerre" behind him, recreated himself horribly with "Fécondité. " Tolstoi, after "Anna Karenina, " wrote "What Is Art?" Ibsen, after "Et Dukkehjem"and "Gengangere, " wrote "Vildanden. " The good God himself, after allthe magnificence of Kings and Chronicles, turned Dr. Frank Crane and sobotched his Writ with Proverbs.... A weakness that we must allow for. Whenever Dreiser, abandoning his fundamental scepticism, yields to theirrepressible human (and perhaps also divine) itch to label, tomoralize, to teach, he becomes a bit absurd. Observe "The 'Genius, '" andparts of "A Hoosier Holiday" and of "A Traveler at Forty, " and of "Playsof the Natural and the Supernatural. " But in this very absurdity, itseems to me, there is a subtle proof that his fundamental scepticism issound.... 

I mention the "Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural. " They areingenious and sometimes extremely effective, but their significance isnot great. The two that are "of the natural" are "The Girl in theCoffin" and "Old Ragpicker, " the first a laborious evocation of thegruesome, too long by half, and the other an experiment in photographicrealism, with a pair of policemen as its protagonists. All five plays"of the supernatural" follow a single plan. In the foreground, as itwere, we see a sordid drama played out on the human plane, and in thebackground (or in the empyrean above, as you choose) we see theoperation of the god-like imbecilities which sway and flay us all. Thetechnical trick is well managed. It would be easy for suchfour-dimensional pieces to fall into burlesque, but in at least twocases, to wit, in "The Blue Sphere" and "In the Dark, " they go off withan air. Superficially, these plays "of the supernatural" seem to show anabandonment to the wheezy, black bombazine mysticism which crops uptoward the end of "The 'Genius. '" But that mysticism, at bottom, is nomore than the dreiserian scepticism made visible. "For myself, " saysDreiser somewhere, "I do not know what truth is, what beauty is, whatlove is, what hope is. " And in another place: "I admit a vast compulsionwhich has nothing to do with the individual desires or tastes orimpulses. " The jokers behind the arras pull the strings. It is pretty, but what is it all about?... The criticism which deals only withexternals sees "Sister Carrie" as no more than a deft adventure intorealism. Dreiser is praised, when he is praised at all, for makingCarrie so clear, for understanding her so well. But the truth is, ofcourse, that his achievement consists precisely in making patent theimpenetrable mystery of her, and of the tangled complex of striving andaspiration of which she is so helplessly a part. It is in this sensethat "Sister Carrie" is a profound work. It is not a book of glibexplanations, of ready formulae; it is, above all else, a book ofwonder.... 

Of "A Traveler at Forty" I have spoken briefly. It is heavy with theobvious; the most interesting thing in it is the fact that Dreiser hadnever seen St. Peter's or Piccadilly Circus until he was too old foreither reverence or romance. "A Hoosier Holiday" is far moreilluminating, despite its platitudinizing. Slow in tempo, discursive, reflective, intimate, the book covers a vast territory, and lingers inpleasant fields. One finds in it an almost complete confession of faith, artistic, religious, even political. And not infrequently thatconfession takes the form of ingenuous confidences--about the fortunesof the house of Dreiser, the dispersed Dreiser clan, the old neighboursin Indiana, new friends made along the way. In "A Traveler at Forty"Dreiser is surely frank enough in his vivisections; he seldom forgets avanity or a wart. In "A Hoosier Holiday" he goes even further; hespeculates heavily about all his _dramatis personae_, prodding into themotives behind their acts, wondering what they would do in this or thatsituation, forcing them painfully into laboratory jars. They become, inthe end, not unlike characters in a novel; one misses only the neatnessof a plot. Strangely enough, the one personage of the chronicle whoremains dim throughout is the artist, Franklin Booth, Dreiser's hostand companion on the long motor ride from New York to Indiana, and themaker of the book's excellent pictures. One gets a brilliant etching ofBooth's father, and scarcely less vivid portraits of Speed, thechauffeur; of various persons encountered on the way, and of friends andrelatives dredged up out of the abyss of the past. But of Booth onelearns little save that he is a Christian Scientist and a fine figure ofa man. There must have been much talk during those two weeks ofcareening along the high-road, and Booth must have borne some part init, but what he said is very meagrely reported, and so he is stillsomewhat vague at the end--a personality sensed but scarcelyapprehended. 

However, it is Dreiser himself who is the chief character of the story, and who stands out from it most brilliantly. One sees in the man all thespecial marks of the novelist: his capacity for photographic andrelentless observation, his insatiable curiosity, his keen zest in lifeas a spectacle, his comprehension of and sympathy for the poor strivingof humble folks, his endless mulling of insoluble problems, hisrecurrent Philistinism, his impatience of restraints, his fascinatedsuspicion of messiahs, his passion for physical beauty, his relish forthe gaudy drama of big cities; his incurable Americanism. The panoramathat he enrols runs the whole scale of the colours; it is a series ofextraordinarily vivid pictures. The sombre gloom of the Pennsylvaniahills, with Wilkes-Barre lying among them like a gem; the procession oflittle country towns, sleepy and a bit hoggish; the flash of Buffalo, Cleveland, Indianapolis; the gargantuan coal-pockets and ore-docks alongthe Erie shore; the tinsel summer resorts; the lush Indiana farmlands, with their stodgy, bovine people--all of these things are sketched insimply, and yet almost magnificently. I know, indeed, of no book whichbetter describes the American hinterland. Here we have no idle spying bya stranger, but a full-length representation by one who knows the thinghe describes intimately, and is himself a part of it. Almost every mileof the road travelled has been Dreiser's own road in life. He knew thoseunkempt Indiana towns in boyhood; he wandered in the Indiana woods; hecame to Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo as a young man; all the roots of hisexistence are out there. And so he does his chronicle _con amore_, withmany a sentimental dredging up of old memories, old hopes and olddreams. 

Save for passages in "The Titan, " "A Hoosier Holiday" marks the hightide of Dreiser's writing--that is, as sheer writing. His old faultsare in it, and plentifully. There are empty, brackish phrases enough, God knows--"high noon" among them. But for all that, there is anundeniable glow in it; it shows, in more than one place, an approach tostyle; the mere wholesaler of words has become, in some sense aconnoisseur, even a voluptuary. The picture of Wilkes-Barre girt in byher hills is simply done, and yet there is imagination in it, andtouches of brilliance. The sombre beauty of the Pennsylvania mountainsis vividly transferred to the page. The towns by the wayside aredifferentiated, swiftly drawn, made to live. There are excellentsketches of people--a courtly hotelkeeper in some God-forsaken hamlet, his self-respect triumphing over his wallow; a group of babbling CivilWar veterans, endlessly mouthing incomprehensible jests; the half-grownbeaux and belles of the summer resorts, enchanted and yet a bitstaggered by the awakening of sex; Booth _père_ and his sinisterpolitics; broken and forgotten men in the Indiana towns; policemen, waitresses, farmers, country characters; Dreiser's own people--the boysand girls of his youth; his brother Paul, the Indiana Schneckenburgerand Francis Scott Key; his sisters and brothers; his beaten, hopeless, pious father; his brave and noble mother. The book is dedicated to thismother, now long dead, and in a way it is a memorial to her, a monumentto affection. Life bore upon her cruelly; she knew poverty at its lowestebb and despair at its bitterest; and yet there was in her a touch offineness that never yielded, a gallant spirit that faced and foughtthings through. One thinks, somehow, of the mother of Gounod.... Her sonhas not forgotten her. His book is her epitaph. He enters into herpresence with love and with reverence and with something not far fromawe.... 

As for the rest of the Dreiser compositions, I leave them to yourcuriosity. 

§ 6

Dr. William Lyon Phelps, the Lampson professor of English language andliterature at Yale, opens his chapter on Mark Twain in his "Essays onModern Novelists" with a humorous account of the critical imbecilitywhich pursued Mark in his own country down to his last years. Thefavourite national critics of that era (and it extended to 1895, at theleast) were wholly blind to the fact that he was a great artist. Theyadmitted him, somewhat grudgingly, a certain low dexterity as a clown, but that he was an imaginative writer of the first rank, or even of thefifth rank, was something that, in their insanest moments, never so muchas occurred to them. Phelps cites, in particular, an ass named ProfessorRichardson, whose "American Literature, " it appears, "is still astandard work" and "a deservedly high authority"--apparently incolleges. In the 1892 edition of this _magnum opus_, Mark is dismissedwith less than four lines, and ranked below Irving, Holmes andLowell--nay, actually below Artemus Ward, Josh Billings and Petroleum V. Nasby! The thing is fabulous, fantastic, _unglaublich_--but neverthelesstrue. Lacking the "higher artistic or moral purpose of the greaterhumourists" (_exempli gratia_, Rabelais, Molière, Aristophanes!!), Markis dismissed by this Professor Balderdash as a hollow buffoon.... Butstay! Do not laugh yet! Phelps himself, indignant at the stupidity, nowproceeds to credit Mark with a moral purpose!... Turn to "The MysteriousStranger, " or "What is Man?"... 

College professors, alas, never learn anything. The identical gentlemanwho achieved this discovery about old Mark in 1910, now seeks to disposeof Dreiser in the exact manner of Richardson. That is to say, he essaysto finish him by putting him into Coventry, by loftily passing overhim. "Do not speak of him, " said Kingsley of Heine; "he was a wickedman!" Search the latest volume of the Phelps revelation, "The Advance ofthe English Novel, " and you will find that Dreiser is not once mentionedin it. The late O. Henry is hailed as a genius who will have "abidingfame"; Henry Sydnor Harrison is hymned as "more than a clever novelist, "nay, "a valuable ally of the angels" (the right-thinker complex! art asa form of snuffling!), and an obscure Pagliaccio named Charles D. Stewart is brought forward as "the American novelist most worthy to fillthe particular vacancy caused by the death of Mark Twain"--but Dreiseris not even listed in the index. And where Phelps leads with his batonof birch most of the other drovers of rah-rah boys follow. I turn, forexample, to "An Introduction to American Literature, " by Henry S. Pancoast, A. M. , L. H. D. , dated 1912. There are kind words for RichardHarding Davis, for Amélie Rives, and even for Will N. Harben, but not asyllable for Dreiser. Again, there is a "A History of AmericanLiterature, " by Reuben Post Halleck, A. M. , LL. D. , dated 1911. LewWallace, Marietta Holley, Owen Wister and Augusta Evans Wilson havetheir hearings, but not Dreiser. Yet again, there is "A History ofAmerican Literature Since 1870, " by Prof. Fred Lewis Pattee, [23]instructor in "the English language and literature" somewhere inPennsylvania. Pattee has praises for Marion Crawford, Margaret Delandand F. Hopkinson Smith, and polite bows for Richard Harding Davis andRobert W. Chambers, but from end to end of his fat tome I am unable tofind the slightest mention of Dreiser. 

So much for one group of heroes of the new Dunciad. That it includesmost of the acknowledged heavyweights of the craft--the Babbitts, Mores, Brownells and so on--goes without saying; as Van Wyck Brooks has pointedout, [24] these magnificoes are austerely above any consideration of theliterature that is in being. The other group, more courageous and morehonest, proceeds by direct attack; Dreiser is to be disposed of by amoral _attentat_. Its leaders are two more professors, Stuart P. Shermanand H. W. Boynton, and in its ranks march the lady critics of thenewspapers, with much shrill, falsetto clamour. Sherman is the only oneof them who shows any intelligible reasoning. Boynton, as always, is amere parroter of conventional phrases, and the objections of the ladiesfade imperceptibly into a pious indignation which is indistinguishablefrom that of the professional suppressors of vice. 

What, then, is Sherman's complaint? In brief, that Dreiser is a liarwhen he calls himself a realist; that he is actually a naturalist, andhence accursed. That "he has evaded the enterprise of representing humanconduct, and confined himself to a representation of animal behaviour. "That he "imposes his own naturalistic philosophy" upon his characters, making them do what they ought not to do, and think what they ought notto think. That "he has just two things to tell us about FrankCowperwood: that he has a rapacious appetite for money, and a rapaciousappetite for women. " That this alleged "theory of animal behaviour" isnot only incorrect but downright immoral, and that "when one-half theworld attempts to assert it, the other half rises in battle. "[25]

Only a glance is needed to show the vacuity of all this _brutum fulmen_. Dreiser, in point of fact, is scarcely more the realist or thenaturalist, in any true sense, than H. G. Wells or the later GeorgeMoore, nor has he ever announced himself in either the one character orthe other--if there be, in fact, any difference between them that anyone save a pigeon-holding pedagogue can discern. He is really somethingquite different, and, in his moments, something far more stately. Hisaim is not merely to record, but to translate and understand; the thinghe exposes is not the empty event and act, but the endless mystery outof which it springs; his pictures have a passionate compassion in themthat it is hard to separate from poetry. If this sense of the universaland inexplicable tragedy, if this vision of life as a seeking without afinding, if this adept summoning up of moving images, is mistaken bycollege professors for the empty, meticulous nastiness of Zola in"Pot-Bouille"--in Nietzsche's phrase, for "the delight to stink"--thensurely the folly of college professors, as vast as it seems, has beenunderestimated. What is the fact? The fact is that Dreiser's attitude ofmind, his manner of reaction to the phenomena he represents, the wholeof his alleged "naturalistic philosophy, " stems directly, not from Zola, Flaubert, Augier and the younger Dumas, but from the Greeks. In themidst of democratic cocksureness and Christian sentimentalism, ofdoctrinaire shallowness and professorial smugness, he stands for a pointof view which at least has something honest and courageous about it;here, at all events, he is a realist. Let him put a motto to his books, and it might be:

[Greek:

_Iô geneai brotôn, Hôs umas isa chai to mêdenZôsas enarithmô. _

]

If you protest against that as too harsh for Christians and collegeprofessors, right-thinkers and forward-lookers, then you protest against"Oedipus Rex. "[26]

As for the animal behaviour prattle of the learned head-master, itreveals, on the one hand, only the academic fondness for seizing uponhigh-sounding but empty phrases and using them to alarm the populace, and on the other hand, only the academic incapacity for observing factscorrectly and reporting them honestly. The truth is, of course, that thebehaviour of such men as Cowperwood and Witla and of such women asCarrie and Jennie, as Dreiser describes it, is no more merely animalthan the behaviour of such acknowledged and undoubted human beings asWoodrow Wilson and Jane Addams. The whole point of the story of Witla, to take the example which seems to concern the horrified watchmen most, is this: that his life is a bitter conflict between the animal in himand the aspiring soul, between the flesh and the spirit, between whatis weak in him and what is strong, between what is base and what isnoble. Moreover, the good, in the end, gets its hooks into the bad: aswe part from Witla he is actually bathed in the tears of remorse, andresolved to be a correct and godfearing man. And what have we in "TheFinancier" and "The Titan"? A conflict, in the ego of Cowperwood, between aspiration and ambition, between the passion for beauty and thepassion for power. Is either passion animal? To ask the question is toanswer it. 

I single out Dr. Sherman, not because his pompous syllogisms have anyplausibility in fact or logic, but simply because he may well stand asarchetype of the booming, indignant corrupter of criteria, the moralistturned critic. A glance at his paean to Arnold Bennett[27] at oncereveals the true gravamen of his objection to Dreiser. What offends himis not actually Dreiser's shortcoming as an artist, but Dreiser'sshortcoming as a Christian and an American. In Bennett's volumes ofpseudo-philosophy--_e. G. _, "The Plain Man and His Wife" and "The Feastof St. Friend"--he finds the intellectual victuals that are to histaste. Here we have a sweet commingling of virtuous conformity andcomplacent optimism, of sonorous platitude and easy certainty--here, inbrief, we have the philosophy of the English middle classes--and here, by the same token, we have the sort of guff that the half-educated ofour own country can understand. It is the calm, superior num-skullerythat was Victorian; it is by Samuel Smiles out of Hannah More. Theoffence of Dreiser is that he has disdained this revelation and goneback to the Greeks. Lo, he reads poetry into "the appetite forwomen"--he rejects the Pauline doctrine that all love is below thediaphragm! He thinks of Ulysses, not as a mere heretic and criminal, butas a great artist. He sees the life of man, not as a simple theorem inCalvinism, but as a vast adventure, an enchantment, a mystery. It is nowonder that respectable school-teachers are against him.... 

The comstockian attack upon "The 'Genius'" seems to have sprung out ofthe same muddled sense of Dreiser's essential hostility to all that issafe and regular--of the danger in him to that mellowed Methodism whichhas become the national ethic. The book, in a way, was a directchallenge, for though it came to an end upon a note which even aMethodist might hear as sweet, there were undoubted provocations indetail. Dreiser, in fact, allowed his scorn to make off with histaste--and _es ist nichts fürchterlicher als Einbildungskraft ohneGeschmack_. The Comstocks arose to the bait a bit slowly, but none theless surely. Going through the volume with the terrible industry of aSunday-school boy dredging up pearls of smut from the Old Testament, they achieved a list of no less than 89 alleged floutings of thecode--75 described as lewd and 14 as profane. An inspection of thesespecifications affords mirth of a rare and lofty variety; nothing couldmore cruelly expose the inner chambers of the moral mind. When youngWitla, fastening his best girl's skate, is so overcome by the carnalityof youth that he hugs her, it is set down as lewd. On page 51, havingbecome an art student, he is fired by "a great, warm-tinted nude ofBouguereau"--lewd again. On page 70 he begins to draw from the figure, and his instructor cautions him that the female breast is round, notsquare--more lewdness. On page 151 he kisses a girl on mouth and neckand she cautions him: "Be careful! Mamma may come in"--still more. Onpage 161, having got rid of mamma, she yields "herself to him gladly, joyously" and he is greatly shocked when she argues that an artist (sheis by way of being a singer) had better not marry--lewdness doublydamned. On page 245 he and his bride, being ignorant, neglect theprinciples laid down by Dr. Sylvanus Stall in his great works on sexhygiene--lewdness most horrible! But there is no need to proceedfurther. Every kiss, hug and tickle of the chin in the chronicle islaboriously snouted out, empanelled, exhibited. Every hint that Witla isno vestal, that he indulges his unchristian fleshliness, that he burnsin the manner of I Corinthians, VII, 9, is uncovered to the moralinquisition. 

On the side of profanity there is a less ardent pursuit of evidences, chiefly, I daresay, because their unearthing is less stimulating. (Beside, there is no law prohibiting profanity in books: the wholeinquiry here is but so much _lagniappe_. ) On page 408, in describing acharacter called Daniel C. Summerfield, Dreiser says that the fellow is"very much given to swearing, more as a matter of habit than of foulintention, " and then goes on to explain somewhat lamely that "no pictureof him would be complete without the interpolation of his variousexpressions. " They turn out to be _God damn_ and _Jesus Christ_--threeof the latter and five or six of the former. All go down; the pure inheart must be shielded from the knowledge of them. (But what of theimmoral French? They call the English _Goddams_. ) Also, three plain_damns_, eight _hells_, one _my God_, five _by Gods_, one _go to thedevil_, one _God Almighty_ and one plain _God_. Altogether, 31 specimensare listed. "The 'Genius'" runs to 350, 000 words. The profanity thusworks out to somewhat less than one word in 10, 000.... Alas, thecomstockian proboscis, feeling for such offendings, is not as alert aswhen uncovering more savoury delicacies. On page 191 I find anoverlooked _by God_. On page 372 there are _Oh God, God curse her_, and_God strike her dead_. On page 373 there are _Ah God, Oh God_ and threeother invocations of God. On page 617 there is _God help me_. On page720 there is _as God is my judge_. On page 723 there is _I'm no damnedgood_.... But I begin to blush. 

When the Comstock Society began proceedings against "The 'Genius, '" agroup of English novelists, including Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, W. L. George and Hugh Walpole, cabled an indignant caveat. This bestirred theAuthor's League of America to activity, and its executive committeeissued a minute denouncing the business. Later on a protest of American_literati_ was circulated, and more than 400 signed, including suchhighly respectable authors as Winston Churchill, Percy MacKaye, BoothTarkington and James Lane Allen, and such critics as Lawrence Gilman, Clayton Hamilton and James Huneker, and the editors of such journals asthe _Century_, the _Atlantic Monthly_ and the _New Republic_. Among myliterary lumber is all the correspondence relating to this protest, notforgetting the letters of those who refused to sign, and some day I hopeto publish it, that posterity may not lose the joy of an extremelydiverting episode. The case attracted wide attention and was the themeof an extraordinarily violent discussion, but the resultant benefits toDreiser were more than counterbalanced, I daresay, by the withdrawal of"The 'Genius'" itself. [28]

§ 7

Dreiser, like Mark Twain and Emerson before him, has been far morehospitably greeted in his first stage, now drawing to a close, inEngland than in his own country. The cause of this, I daresay, liespartly in the fact that "Sister Carrie" was in general circulation overthere during the seven years that it remained suppressed on this side. It was during these years that such men as Arnold Bennett, TheodoreWatts-Dunton, Frank Harris and H. G. Wells, and such critical journalsas the _Spectator_, the _Saturday Review_ and the _Athenaeum_ becameaware of him, and so laid the foundations of a sound appreciation of hissubsequent work. Since the beginning of the war, certain Englishnewspapers have echoed the alarmed American discovery that he is aliterary agent of the Wilhelmstrasse, but it is to the honour of theEnglish that this imbecility has got no countenance from reputableauthority and has not injured his position. 

At home, as I have shown, he is less fortunate. When criticism is notmerely an absurd effort to chase him out of court because his ideas arenot orthodox, as the Victorians tried to chase out Darwin and Swinburne, and their predecessors pursued Shelley and Byron, it is too oftendesigned to identify him with some branch or other of "radical"poppycock, and so credit him with purposes he has never imagined. ThusChautauqua pulls and Greenwich Village pushes. In the middle groundthere proceeds the pedantic effort to dispose of him by labelling him. One faction maintains that he is a realist; another calls him anaturalist; a third argues that he is really a disguised romanticist. This debate is all sound and fury, signifying nothing, but out of it hascome a valuation by Lawrence Gilman[29] which perhaps strikes very closeto the truth. He is, says Mr. Gilman, "a sentimental mystic who employsthe mimetic gestures of the realist. " This judgment is apt in particularand sound in general. No such thing as a pure method is possible in thenovel. Plain realism, as in Gorky's "Nachtasyl" and the war stories ofAmbrose Bierce, simply wearies us by its vacuity; plain romance, if weever get beyond our nonage, makes us laugh. It is their artisticcombination, as in life itself, that fetches us--the subtle projectionof the concrete muddle that is living against the ideal orderliness thatwe reach out for--the eternal war of experience and aspiration--thecontrast between the world as it is and the world as it might be orought to be. Dreiser describes the thing that he sees, laboriously andrelentlessly, but he never forgets the dream that is behind it. "Hegives you, " continues Mr. Gilman, "a sense of actuality; but he givesyou more than that: out of the vast welter and surge, the plethoricirrelevancies, ... Emerges a sense of the infinite sadness and mysteryof human life. "... [30]

"To see truly, " said Renan, "is to see dimly. " Dimness or mystery, callit what you will: it is in all these overgrown and formless, butprofoundly moving books. Just what do they mean? Just what is Dreiserdriving at? That such questions should be asked is only a proof of thestraits to which pedagogy has brought criticism. The answer is simple:he is driving at nothing, he is merely trying to represent what he seesand feels. His moving impulse is no flabby yearning to teach, toexpound, to make simple; it is that "obscure inner necessity" of whichConrad tells us, the irresistible creative passion of a genuine artist, standing spell-bound before the impenetrable enigma that is life, enamoured by the strange beauty that plays over its sordidness, challenged to a wondering and half-terrified sort of representation ofwhat passes understanding. And _jenseits von Gut und Böse_. "Formyself, " says Dreiser, "I do not know what truth is, what beauty is, what love is, what hope is. I do not believe any one absolutely and I donot doubt any one absolutely. I think people are both evil andwell-intentioned. " The hatching of the Dreiser bugaboo is here; it isthe flat rejection of the rubber-stamp formulae that outrages pettyminds; not being "good, " he must be "evil"--as William Blake said ofMilton, a true poet is always "of the devil's party. " But in that verygroping toward a light but dimly seen there is a measure, it seems tome, of Dreiser's rank and consideration as an artist. "Now comes thepublic, " says Hermann Bahr, "and demands that we explain what the poetis trying to say. The answer is this: If we knew exactly he would not bea poet.... "

FOOTNOTES:

[16] Fuller's comparative obscurity is one of the strangest phenomena ofAmerican letters. Despite his high achievement, he is seldom discussed, or even mentioned. Back in 1899 he was already so far forgotten thatWilliam Archer mistook his name, calling him Henry Y. Puller. _Vide_Archer's pamphlet, The American Language; New York, 1899. 

[17] For example, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, whichruns to fourteen large volumes and a total of nearly 10, 000 pages, Huxley receives but a page and a quarter of notice, and his remarkablemastery of English is barely mentioned in passing. His two debates withGladstone, in which he did some of the best writing of the century, arenot noticed at all. 

[18] A Brief History of German Literature; New York, Chas. Scribner'sSons, 1909. 

[19] New York, 1917; reprinted from _The Seven Arts_ for Feb. , 1917. 

[20] Life, Art and America, p. 5. 

[21] The episode is related in A Hoosier Holiday. 

[22] A Princess of Arcady, published in 1900. 

[23] New York, The Century Co. , 1916. 

[24] In _The Seven Arts_, May, 1917. 

[25] The _Nation_, Dec. 2, 1915. 

[26] 1186-1189. So translated by Floyd Dell: "O ye deathward-goingtribes of man, what do your lives mean except that they go tonothingness?"

[27] The New York _Evening Post_, Dec. 31, 1915. 

[28] Despite the comstockian attack, Dreiser is still fairly wellrepresented on the shelves of American public libraries. A canvas of thelibraries of the 25 principal cities gives the following result, an Xindicating that the corresponding book is catalogued, and a - that isnot:

 Sister Carrie | Jennie Gerhardt | | The Financier | | | The Titan | | | | A Traveler at Forty | | | | | The "Genius" | | | | | | Plays of the Natural | | | | | | | A Hoosier Holiday | | | | | | | |New York X - - X X X X XBoston - - - - X - X -Chicago X X X X X X X XPhiladelphia X X X X X X X XWashington - - - - X - X -Baltimore - - - - X - - -Pittsburgh - - X X X X - XNew Orleans - - - - - - - -Denver X X X X X X X XSan Francisco X X X X X - - XSt. Louis X X X X X - X -Cleveland X X X X - X X -Providence - - - - - - - -Los Angeles X X X X X X X XIndianapolis X X X - X - X XLouisville X X - X X X X XSt. Paul X X - - X - X XMinneapolis X X X - X - X -Cincinnati X X X - X - X XKansas City X X X X X X X XMilwaukee - - - - X - X XNewark X X X X X X X XDetroit X X X - X X X XSeattle X X - - X - X XHartford - - - - - - - X

This table shows that but two libraries, those of Providence and NewOrleans, bar Dreiser altogether. The effect of alarms from newspaperreviewers is indicated by the scant distribution of The "Genius, "which is barred by 14 of the 25. It should be noted that some of theselibraries issue certain of the books only under restrictions. This Iknow to be the case in Louisville, Los Angeles, Newark and Cleveland. The Newark librarian informs me that Jennie Gerhardt is to be removedaltogether, presumably in response to some protest from local Comstocks. In Chicago The "Genius" has been stolen, and on account of thewithdrawal of the book the Public Library has been unable to get anothercopy. 

[29] The _North American Review_, Feb. , 1916. 

[30] Another competent valuation, by Randolph Bourne, is in _The Dial_, June 14, 1917. 

III

JAMES HUNEKER

§ 1

Edgar Allan Poe, I am fond of believing, earned as a critic a good dealof the excess of praise that he gets as a romancer and a poet, andanother over-estimated American dithyrambist, Sidney Lanier, wrote thebest textbook of prosody in English;[31] but in general the criticalwriting done in the United States has been of a low order, and mostAmerican writers of any genuine distinction, like most American paintersand musicians, have had to wait for understanding until it appearedabroad. The case of Emerson is typical. At thirty, he was known in NewEngland as a heretical young clergyman and no more, and his famethreatened to halt at the tea-tables of the Boston Brahmins. It remainedfor Landor and Carlyle, in a strange land, to discern his higherpotentialities, and to encourage him to his real life-work. Mark Twain, as I have hitherto shown, suffered from the same lack of criticalperception at home. He was quickly recognized as a funny fellow, trueenough, but his actual stature was not even faintly apprehended, andeven after "Huckleberry Finn" he was still bracketed with such laboriousfarceurs as Artemus Ward. It was Sir Walter Besant, an Englishman, whofirst ventured to put him on his right shelf, along with Swift, Cervantes and Molière. As for Poe and Whitman, the native recognition oftheir genius was so greatly conditioned by a characteristic horror oftheir immorality that it would be absurd to say that their own countryunderstood them. Both were better and more quickly apprehended inFrance, and it was in France, not in America, that each founded aschool. What they had to teach we have since got back at secondhand--the tale of mystery, which was Poe's contribution, throughGaboriau and Boisgobey; and _vers libre_, which was Whitman's, throughthe French _imagistes_. 

The cause of this profound and almost unbroken lack of critical insightand enterprise, this puerile Philistinism and distrust of ideas amongus, is partly to be found, it seems to me, in the fact that the typicalAmerican critic is quite without any adequate cultural equipment for theoffice he presumes to fill. Dr. John Dewey, in some late remarks uponthe American universities, has perhaps shown the cause thereof. Thetrouble with our educational method, he argues, is that it falls betweenthe two stools of English humanism and German relentlessness--that itproduces neither a man who intelligently feels nor a man who thoroughlyknows. Criticism, in America, is a function of this half-educated andconceited class; it is not a popular art, but an esoteric one; even inits crassest journalistic manifestations it presumes to a certainacademic remoteness from the concerns and carnalities of everyday. Inevery aspect it shows the defects of its practitioners. The Americancritic of beautiful letters, in his common incarnation, is no more thana talented sophomore, or, at best, a somewhat absurd professor. Hesuffers from a palpable lack of solid preparation; he has no backgroundof moving and illuminating experience behind him; his soul has notsufficiently adventured among masterpieces, nor among men. Imagine aTaine or a Sainte-Beuve or a Macaulay--man of the world, veteran ofphilosophies, "lord of life"--and you imagine his complete antithesis. Even on the side of mere professional knowledge, the primary material ofhis craft, he always appears incompletely outfitted. The grand sweep anddirection of the literary currents elude him; he is eternally on thesurface, chasing bits of driftwood. The literature he knows is thefossil literature taught in colleges--worse, in high schools. It must bedead before he is aware of it. And in particular he appears ignorant ofwhat is going forward in other lands. An exotic idea, to penetrate hisconsciousness, must first become stale, and even then he is apt to purgeit of all its remaining validity and significance before adopting it. 

This has been true since the earliest days. Emerson himself, though aman of unusual discernment and a diligent drinker from German spigots, nevertheless remained a _dilettante_ in both aesthetics and metaphysicsto the end of his days, and the incompleteness of his equipment nevershowed more plainly than in his criticism of books. Lowell, if anything, was even worse; his aesthetic theory, first and last, was nebulous andsuperficial, and all that remains of his pleasant essays today is theirsomewhat smoky pleasantness. He was a Charles Dudley Warner in noblertrappings, but still, at bottom, a Charles Dudley Warner. As for Poe, though he was by nature a far more original and penetrating critic thaneither Emerson or Lowell, he was enormously ignorant of good books, andmoreover, he could never quite throw off a congenital vulgarity oftaste, so painfully visible in the strutting of his style. The man, forall his grand dreams, had a shoddy soul; he belonged authentically tothe era of cuspidors, "females" and Sons of Temperance. His occasionalaffectation of scholarship has deceived no one. It was no more thanYankee bluster; he constantly referred to books that he had never read. Beside, the typical American critic of those days was not Poe, but hisarch-enemy, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, that almost fabulous ass--a Baptistpreacher turned taster of the beautiful. Imagine a Baptist valuingBalzac, or Molière, or Shakespeare, or Goethe--or Rabelais!

Coming down to our own time, one finds the same endless amateurishness, so characteristic of everything American, from politics to cookery--thesame astounding lack of training and vocation. Consider the solemnponderosities of the pious old maids, male and female, who write bookreviews for the newspapers. Here we have a heavy pretension to culture, a campus cocksureness, a laborious righteousness--but of sound aestheticunderstanding, of alertness and hospitality to ideas, not a trace. Thenormal American book reviewer, indeed, is an elderly virgin, asuperstitious bluestocking, an apostle of Vassar _Kultur_; and hercustomary attitude of mind is one of fascinated horror. (The HamiltonWright Mabie complex! The "white list" of novels!) William DeanHowells, despite a certain jauntiness and even kittenishness of manner, was spiritually of that company. For all his phosphorescent heresies, hewas what the up-lifters call a right-thinker at heart, and soaked in thenational tradition. He was easiest intrigued, not by force andoriginality, but by a sickly, _Ladies' Home Journal_ sort of piquancy;it was this that made him see a genius in the Philadelphia Zola, W. B. Trites, and that led him to hymn an abusive business letter by Frank A. Munsey, author of "The Boy Broker" and "Afloat in a Great City, " as asignificant human document. Moreover Howells ran true to type in anotherway, for he long reigned as the leading Anglo-Saxon authority on theRussian novelists without knowing, so far as I can make out, more thanten words of Russian. In the same manner, we have had enthusiasts forD'Annunzio and Mathilde Serao who knew no Italian, and celebrants ofMaeterlinck and Verhaeren whose French was of the finishing school, andIbsen authorities without a single word of Dano-Norwegian--I met oneonce who failed to recognize "Et Dukkehjem" as the original title of "ADoll's House, "--and performers upon Hauptmann who could no more read"Die Weber" than they could decipher a tablet of Tiglath-Pileser III. 

Here and there, of course, a more competent critic of beautiful lettersflings out his banner--for example, John Macy, Ludwig Lewisohn, AndréTridon, Francis Hackett, Van Wyck Brooks, Burton Rascoe, E. A. Boyd, Llewellyn Jones, Otto Heller, J. E. Spingarn, Lawrence Gilman, the lateJ. Percival Pollard. Well-informed, intelligent, wide-eyed men--but onlyfour of them even Americans, and not one of them with a wide audience, or any appreciable influence upon the main stream of American criticism. Pollard's best work is buried in the perfumed pages of _Town Topics_;his book on the Munich wits and dramatists[32] is almost unknown. Hellerand Lewisohn make their way slowly; a patriotic wariness, I daresay, mixes itself up with their acceptance. Gilman disperses his talents; heis quite as much musician as critic of the arts. As for Macy, I recentlyfound his "The Spirit of American Literature, "[33] by long odds thesoundest, wisest book on its subject, selling for fifty cents on a Fifthavenue remainder counter. 

How many remain? A few competent reviewers who are primarily somethingelse--Harvey, Aikin, Untermeyer and company. A few youngsters on thenewspapers, struggling against the business office. And then a leap tothe Victorians, the crêpe-clad pundits, the bombastic word-mongers ofthe campus school--H. W. Boynton, W. C. Brownell, Paul Elmer More, William Lyon Phelps, Frederick Taber Cooper _et al. _ Here, undoubtedly, we have learning of a sort. More, it appears, once taught Sanskrit tothe adolescent suffragettes of Bryn Mawr--an enterprise as stimulating(and as intelligible) as that of setting off fire-works in a blindasylum. Phelps sits in a chair at Yale. Boynton is a master of arts inEnglish literature, whatever that may mean. Brownell is both L. H. D. AndLitt. D. , thus surpassing Samuel Johnson by one point, and Hazlitt, Coleridge and Malone by two. But the learning of these august_umbilicarii_, for all its pretensions, is precisely the sterile, foppish sort one looks for in second-rate college professors. Theappearance is there, but not the substance. One ingests a horse-doctor'sdose of words, but fails to acquire any illumination. Read More onNietzsche[34] if you want to find out just how stupid criticism can be, and yet show the outward forms of sense. Read Phelps' "The Advance ofthe English Novel"[35] if you would see a fine art treated as a moralmatter, and great works tested by the criteria of a small-townSunday-school, and all sorts of childish sentimentality whooped up. Andplough through Brownell's "Standards, "[36] if you have the patience, andthen try to reduce its sonorous platitudes to straight-forward anddefensible propositions. 

§ 2

Now for the exception. He is, of course, James Gibbons Huneker, thesolitary Iokanaan in this tragic aesthetic wilderness, the only criticamong us whose vision sweeps the whole field of beauty, and whosereports of what he sees there show any genuine gusto. That gusto of his, I fancy, is two-thirds of his story. It is unquenchable, contagious, inflammatory; he is the only performer in the commissioned troupe whoknows how to arouse his audience to anything approaching enthusiasm. Therest, even including Howells, are pedants lecturing to the pure inheart, but Huneker makes a joyous story of it; his exposition, transcending the merely expository, takes on the quality of anadventure hospitably shared. One feels, reading him, that he is charmedby the men and women he writes about, and that their ideas, even when herejects them, give him an agreeable stimulation. And to the charm thathe thus finds and exhibits in others, he adds the very positive charm ofhis own personality. He seems a man who has found the world fascinating, if perhaps not perfect; a friendly and good-humoured fellow; no frigidscholiast, but something of an epicure; in brief, the reverse of thecustomary maker of books about books. Compare his two essays on Ibsen, in "Egoists" and "Iconoclasts, " to the general body of American writingupon the great Norwegian. The difference is that between a portrait anda Bertillon photograph, Richard Strauss and Czerny, a wedding and anautopsy. Huneker displays Ibsen, not as a petty mystifier of the women'sclubs, but as a literary artist of large skill and exalted passion, andwithal a quite human and understandable man. These essays were writtenat the height of the symbolism madness; in their own way, they even showsome reflection of it; but taking them in their entirety, how clearlythey stand above the ignorant obscurantism of the prevailing criticismof the time--how immeasurably superior they are, for example, to thatfavourite hymn-book of the Ibsenites, "The Ibsen Secret" by JennetteLee! For the causes of this difference one need not seek far. They areto be found in the difference between the bombastic half-knowledge of aschool teacher and the discreet and complete knowledge of a man ofculture. Huneker is that man of culture. He has reported more ofinterest and value than any other American critic, living or dead, butthe essence of his criticism does not lie so much in what hespecifically reports as in the civilized point of view from which hereports it. He is a true cosmopolitan, not only in the actual range ofhis adventurings, but also and more especially in his attitude of mind. His world is not America, nor Europe, nor Christendom, but the wholeuniverse of beauty. As Jules Simon said of Taine: "_Aucun écrivain denos jours n'a ... Découvert plus d'horizons variés et immenses_. "

Need anything else be said in praise of a critic? And does anextravagance or an error here and there lie validly against the sayingof it? I think not. I could be a professor if I would and show you slipsenough--certain ponderous nothings in the Ibsen essays, alreadymentioned; a too easy bemusement at the hands of Shaw; a vacillatingover Wagner; a habit of yielding to the hocus-pocus of the mystics, particularly Maeterlinck. On the side of painting, I am told, there areeven worse aberrations; I know too little about painting to judge formyself. But the list, made complete, would still not be over-long, andfew of its items would be important. Huneker, like the rest of us, hassinned his sins, but his judgments, in the overwhelming main, holdwater. He has resisted the lure of all the wild movements of thegeneration; the tornadoes of doctrine have never knocked him over. Ninetimes out of ten, in estimating a new man in music or letters, he hascome curiously close to the truth at the first attempt. And he hasalways announced it in good time; his solo has always preceded thechorus. He was, I believe, the first American (not forgetting WilliamMorton Payne and Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, the pioneers) to write aboutIbsen with any understanding of the artist behind the prophet's mask; hewas the first to see the rising star of Nietzsche (this was back in1888); he was beating a drum for Shaw the critic before ever Shaw thedramatist and mob philosopher was born (_circa_ 1886-1890); he waswriting about Hauptmann and Maeterlinck before they had got well set ontheir legs in their own countries; his estimate of Sudermann, bearingdate of 1905, may stand with scarcely the change of a word today; he dida lot of valiant pioneering for Strindberg, Hervieu, Stirner and Gorki, and later on helped in the pioneering for Conrad; he was in the van ofthe MacDowell enthusiasts; he fought for the ideas of such painters asDavies, Lawson, Luks, Sloan and Prendergest (Americans all, by the way:an answer to the hollow charge of exotic obsession) at a time when evenManet, Monet and Degas were laughed at; he was among the first to give ahand to Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane and H. B. Fuller. In sum, he gave some semblance of reality in the United States, afterother men had tried and failed, to that great but ill-starred revoltagainst Victorian pedantry, formalism and sentimentality which began inthe early 90's. It would be difficult, indeed, to overestimate thepractical value to all the arts in America of his intellectualalertness, his catholic hospitality to ideas, his artistic courage, andabove all, his powers of persuasion. It was not alone that he sawclearly what was sound and significant; it was that he managed, by thesheer charm of his writings, to make a few others see and understand it. If the United States is in any sort of contact today, however remotely, with what is aesthetically going on in the more civilized countries--ifthe Puritan tradition, for all its firm entrenchment, has eager andresourceful enemies besetting it--if the pall of Harvard quasiculture, by the Oxford manner out of Calvinism, has been lifted ever solittle--there is surely no man who can claim a larger share of creditfor preparing the way.... 

§ 3

Huneker comes out of Philadelphia, that depressing intellectual slum, and his first writing was for the Philadelphia _Evening Bulletin_. He ispurely Irish in blood, and is of very respectable ancestry, his maternalgrandfather and godfather having been James Gibbons, the Irish poet andpatriot, and president of the Fenian Brotherhood in America. Once, in areview of "The Pathos of Distance, " I ventured the guess that there wasa German strain in him somewhere, and based it upon the beery melancholyvisible in parts of that book. Who but a German sheds tears over theempty bottles of day before yesterday, the Adelaide Neilson of 1877? Whobut a German goes into woollen undershirts at 45, and makes his will, and begins to call his wife "Mamma"? The green-sickness of youth isendemic from pole to pole, as much so as measles; but what race save thewicked one is floored by a blue distemper in middle age, withsentimental burblings _a cappella_, hallucinations of lost loves, andan unquenchable lacrymorrhea?... I made out a good case, but I waswrong, and the penalty came swiftly and doubly, for on the one hand theBoston _Transcript_ sounded an alarm against both Huneker and me asGerman spies, and on the other hand Huneker himself proclaimed that, even spiritually, he was less German than Magyar, less "Hun" than Hun. "I am, " he said, "a Celto-Magyar: Pilsner at Donneybrook Fair. Even theGerman beer and cuisine are not in it with the Austro-Hungarian. " Here, I suspect, he meant to say Czech instead of Magyar, for isn't Pilsen inBohemia? Moreover, turn to the chapter on Prague in "New Cosmopolis, "and you will find out in what highland his heart really is. In thisbook, indeed, is a vast hymn to all things Czechic--the Pilsen_Urquell_, the muffins stuffed with poppy-seed jam, the spiced chickenliver _en casserole_, the pretty Bohemian girls, the rose and goldenglory of Hradschin Hill.... One thinks of other strange infatuations:the Polish Conrad's for England, the Scotch Mackay's for Germany, theLow German Brahms' for Italy. Huneker, I daresay, is the firstCelto-Czech--or Celto-Magyar, as you choose. (Maybe the name suggestssomething. It is not to be debased to _Hoon_-eker, remember, but kept at_Hun_-eker, rhyming initially with _nun_ and _gun_. ) An unearthlymarriage of elements, by all the gods! but there are pretty children ofit.... 

Philadelphia humanely disgorged Huneker in 1878. His father designed himfor the law, and he studied the institutes at the Philadelphia LawAcademy, but like Schumann, he was spoiled for briefs by the strongerpull of music and the _cacoëthes scribendi_. (Grandpa John Huneker hadbeen a composer of church music, and organist at St. Mary's. ) In theyear mentioned he set out for Paris to see Liszt; his aim was to makehimself a piano virtuoso. His name does not appear on his own exhaustivelist of Liszt pupils, but he managed to quaff of the Pierian spring atsecond-hand, for he had lessons from Theodore Ritter (_né_ Bennet), agenuine pupil of the old walrus, and he was also taught by the venerableGeorges Mathias, a pupil of Chopin. These days laid the foundations fortwo subsequent books, the "Chopin: the Man and His Music" of 1900, andthe "Franz Liszt" of 1911. More, they prepared the excavations for allof the others, for Huneker began sending home letters to thePhiladelphia _Bulletin_ on the pictures that he saw, the books that heread and the music that he heard in Paris, and out of them graduallygrew a body of doctrine that was to be developed into full-lengthcriticism on his return to the United States. He stayed in Paris untilthe middle 80's, and then settled in New York. 

All the while his piano studies continued, and in New York he became apupil of Rafael Joseffy. He even became a teacher himself and was forten years on the staff of the National Conservatory, and showed himselfat all the annual meetings of the Music Teachers' Association. But bitby bit criticism elbowed out music-making, as music-making had elbowedout criticism with Schumann and Berlioz. In 1886 or thereabout he joinedthe _Musical Courier_; then he went, in succession, to the old_Recorder_, to the _Morning Advertiser_, to the _Sun_, to the _Times_, and finally to the Philadelphia _Press_ and the New York _World_. Various weeklies and monthlies have also enlisted him: _Mlle. New York_, the _Atlantic Monthly_, the _Smart Set_, the _North American Review_ and_Scribner's_. He has even stooped to _Puck_, vainly trying to make anAmerican _Simplicissimus_ of that dull offspring of synagogue andbarbershop. He has been, in brief, an extremely busy and not toofastidious journalist, writing first about one of the arts, and thenabout another, and then about all seven together. But music has been thesteadiest of all his loves; his first three books dealt almost whollywith it; of his complete canon more than half have to do with it. 

§ 4

His first book, "Mezzotints in Modern Music, " published in 1899, revealed his predilections clearly, and what is more, his criticalinsight and sagacity. One reads it today without the slightest feelingthat it is an old story; some of the chapters, obviously reworkings ofarticles for the papers, must go back to the middle 90's, and yet thejudgments they proclaim scarcely call for the change of a word. Thesingle noticeable weakness is a too easy acquiescence in the emptyshowiness of Saint-Saëns, a tendency to bow to the celebrated Frenchparlour magician too often. Here, I daresay, is an echo of old Parisdays, for Camille was a hero on the Seine in 1880, and there was eventalk of pitting him against Wagner. The estimates of other men arejudiciously arrived at and persuasively stated. Tschaikowsky iscorrectly put down as a highly talented but essentially shallowfellow--a blubberer in the regalia of a philosopher. Brahms, then stillunder attack by Henry T. Finck, of the _Evening Post_ (the press-agentof Massenet: ye gods, what Harvard can do, even to a Würtemberger!) issubjected to a long, an intelligent and an extremely friendly analysis;no better has got into English since, despite too much stress on thepiano music. And Richard Strauss, yet a nine days' wonder, is describedclearly and accurately, and his true stature indicated. The rest of thebook is less noteworthy; Huneker says the proper things about Chopin, Liszt and Wagner, and adds a chapter on piano methods, the plain fruitof his late pedagogy. But the three chapters I have mentioned areenough; they fell, in their time, into a desert of stupidity; they set astandard in musical criticism in America that only Huneker himself hasever exceeded. 

The most popular of his music books, of course, is the "Chopin" (1900). Next to "Iconoclasts, " it is the best seller of them all. More, it hasbeen done into German, French and Italian, and is chiefly responsiblefor Huneker's celebrity abroad as the only critic of music that Americahas ever produced. Superficially, it seems to be a monument of pedantry, a meticulous piling up of learning, but a study of it shows that it isvery much more than that. Compare it to Sir George Grove's staggeringtome on the Beethoven symphonies if you want to understand thedifference between mere scholastic diligence and authentic criticism. The one is simply a top-heavy mass of disorderly facts and worshippingenthusiasm; the other is an analysis that searches out every nook andcorner of the subject, and brings it into coherence and intelligibility. The Chopin rhapsodist is always held in check by the sound musician;there is a snouting into dark places as well as a touching up of highlights. I myself am surely no disciple of the Polish tuberose--hissweetness, in fact, gags me, and I turn even to Moszkowski forrelief--but I have read and re-read this volume with endless interest, and I find it more bethumbed than any other Huneker book in my library, saving only "Iconoclasts" and "Old Fogy. " Here, indeed, Huneker is onhis own ground. One often feels, in his discussions of orchestral music, that he only thinks orchestrally, like Schumann, with an effort--thatall music, in his mind, gets itself translated into terms of pianomusic. In dealing with Chopin no such transvaluation of values isnecessary; the raw materials are ready for his uses without preparation;he is wholly at home among the black keys and white. 

His "Liszt" is a far less noteworthy book. It is, in truth, scarcely abook at all, but merely a collection of notes for a book, some of themconsiderably elaborated, but others set down in the altogether. Onereads it because it is about Liszt, the most fantastic figure that evercame out of Hungary, half devil and half clown; not because there is anyconflagration of ideas in it. The chapter that reveals most of Hunekeris the appendix on latter-day piano virtuosi, with its estimates of suchmen as de Pachmann, Rosenthal, Paderewski and Hofmann. Much better stuffis to be found in "Overtones, " "The Pathos of Distance" and "Ivory, Apesand Peacocks"--brilliant, if not always profound studies of Strauss, Wagner, Schoenberg, Moussorgsky, and even Verdi. But if I had my choiceof the whole shelf, it would rest, barring the "Chopin, " on "OldFogy"--the _scherzo_ of the Hunekeran symphony, the critic taking aholiday, the Devil's Mass in the tonal sanctuary. In it Huneker is athis very choicest, making high-jinks with his Davidsbund of one, rattling the skeletons in all the musical closets of the world. Here, throwing off his critic's black gown, his lays about him right and left, knocking the reigning idols off their perches; resurrecting the old, olddead and trying to pump the breath into them; lambasting on one page andlauding on the next; lampooning his fellow critics and burlesquing theirrubber stamp fustian; extolling Dussek and damning Wagner; swearingmighty oaths by Mozart, and after him, Strauss--not Richard, but Johann!The Old Fogy, of course, is the thinnest of disguises, a mere veil ofgossamer for "Editor" Huneker. That Huneker in false whiskers isinimitable, incomparable, almost indescribable. On the one hand, he is aprodigy of learning, a veritable warehouse of musical information, true, half-true and apocryphal; on the other hand, he is a jester who delightsin reducing all learning to absurdity. Reading him somehow suggestshearing a Bach mass rescored for two fifes, a tambourine in B, a windmachine, two tenor harps, a contrabass oboe, two banjos, eight tubas andthe usual clergy and strings. The substance is there; every note isstruck exactly in the middle--but what outlandish tone colours, whatstrange, unearthly sounds! It is not Bach, however, who first comes tomind when Huneker is at his tricks, but Papa Haydn--the Haydn of theSurprise symphony and the Farewell. There is the same gargantuan gaiety, the same magnificent irreverence. Haydn did more for the symphony thanany other man, but he also got more fun out of it than any other man. 

"Old Fogy, " of course, is not to be taken seriously: it is frankly apiece of fooling. But all the same a serious idea runs through the bookfrom end to end, and that is the idea that music is getting toosubjective to be comfortable. The makers of symphonies tend to forgetbeauty altogether; their one effort is to put all their own petty trialsand tribulations, their empty theories and speculations into cacophony. Even so far back as Beethoven's day that autobiographical habit hadbegun. "Beethoven, " says Old Fogy, is "dramatic, powerful, a maker ofstorms, a subduer of tempests; but his speech is the speech of aself-centred egotist. He is the father of all the modern melomaniacs, who, looking into their own souls, write what they see therein--misery, corruption, slighting selfishness and ugliness. " Old Ludwig's groans, ofcourse, we can stand. He was not only a great musician, but also a greatman. It is just as interesting to hear him sigh and complain as it wouldbe to hear the private prayers of Julius Caesar. But what ofTschaikowsky, with his childish Slavic whining? What of Liszt, with hischeap playacting, his incurable lasciviousness, his plebeian warts? Whatof Wagner, with his delight in imbecile fables, his popinjay vanity, hissoul of a _Schnorrer_? What of Richard Strauss, with his warmed-overNietzscheism, his flair for the merely horrible? Old Fogy sweeps themall into his ragbag. If art is to be defined as beauty seen through atemperament, then give us more beauty and cleaner temperaments! Back tothe old gods, Mozart and Bach, with a polite bow to Brahms and asentimental tear for Chopin! Beethoven tried to tell his troubles in hismusic; Mozart was content to ravish the angels of their harps. And asfor Johann Sebastian, "there was more real musical feeling, upliftingand sincerity in the old Thomas-kirche in Leipzig ... Than in all yourmodern symphony and oratorio machine-made concerts put together. "

All this is argued, to be sure, in extravagant terms. Wagner is a mereghoul and impostor: "The Flying Dutchman" is no more than a parody onWeber, and "Parsifal" is "an outrage against religion, morals andmusic. " Daddy Liszt is "the inventor of the Liszt pupil, a bad pianoplayer, a venerable man with a purple nose--a Cyrano de Cognac nose. "Tschaikowsky is the Slav gone crazy on vodka. He transformed Hamlet into"a yelling man" and Romeo and Juliet into "two monstrous Cossacks, whogibber and squeak at each other while reading some obscene volume. " "HisManfred is a libel on Byron, who was a libel on God. " And even Schumannis a vanishing star, a literary man turned composer, a pathologicalcase. But, as I have said, a serious idea runs through all thisconcerto for slapstick and seltzer siphon, and to me, at least, thatidea has a plentiful reasonableness. We are getting too much melodrama, too much vivisection, too much rebellion--and too little music. Turnfrom Tschaikowsky's Pathétique or from any of his wailing tone-poems toSchubert's C major, or to Mozart's Jupiter, or to Beethoven's _kleineSinfonie in F dur_: it is like coming out of a _Kaffeeklatsch_ into theopen air, almost like escaping from a lunatic asylum. The oneunmistakable emotion that much of this modern music from the steppes andmorgues and _Biertische_ engenders is a longing for form, clarity, coherence, a self-respecting tune. The snorts and moans of the pothouseWerthers are as irritating, in the long run, as the bawling of a child, the squeak of a pig under a gate. One yearns unspeakably for a composerwho gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them withboth ears open, and then recapitulates them unashamed, and then hangs abrisk coda to them, and then shuts up. 

§ 5

So much for "Old Fogy" and the musical books. They constitute, not onlythe best body of work that Huneker himself has done, but the best bodyof musical criticism that any American has done. Musical criticism, inour great Calvinist republic, confines itself almost entirely totransient reviewing, and even when it gets between covers, it keeps itstrivial quality. Consider, for example, the published work of HenryEdward Krehbiel, for long the _doyen_ of the New York critics. I pick uphis latest book, "A Second Book of Operas, "[37] open it at random, andfind this:

 On January 31, 1893, the Philadelphia singers, aided by the New York Symphony Society, gave a performance of the opera, under the auspices of the Young Men's Hebrew Association, for the benefit of its charities, at the Carnegie Music Hall, New York. Mr. Walter Damrosch was to have conducted, but was detained in Washington by the funeral of Mr. Blaine, and Mr. Hinrichs took his place. 

O Doctor _admirabilis, acutus et illuminatissimus_! Needless to say theuniversities have not overlooked this geyser of buttermilk: he is anhonourary A. M. Of Yale. His most respectable volume, that on negrofolksong, impresses one principally by its incompleteness. It may bepraised as a sketch, but surely not as a book. The trouble withKrehbiel, of course, is that he mistakes a newspaper morgue forParnassus. He has all of the third-rate German's capacity forunearthing facts, but he doesn't know how either to think or to write, and so his criticism is mere pretence and pishposh. W. J. Henderson, ofthe _Sun_, doesn't carry that handicap. He is as full of learning asKrehbiel, as his books on singing and on the early Italian opera show, but he also wields a slippery and intriguing pen, and he could be hugelyentertaining if he would. Instead, he devotes himself to manufacturingprimers for the newly intellectual. I can find little of the charm ofhis _Sun_ articles in his books. Lawrence Gilman? A sound musician butone who of late years has often neglected music for the other arts. Philip H. Goepp? His three volumes on the symphonic repertoire leavetwice as much to be said as they say. Carl Van Vechten? A very promisingnovice, but not yet at full growth. Philip Hale? His giganticannotations scarcely belong to criticism at all; they are musicaltalmudism. Beside, they are buried in the program books of the BostonSymphony Orchestra, and might as well be inscribed on the temple wallsof Baalbec. As for Upton and other such fellows, they are merely musicalchautauquans, and their tedious commentaries have little more value thanthe literary criticisms in the religious weeklies. One of them, aHarvard _maestro_, has published a book on the orchestra in which, onseparate pages, the reader is solemnly presented with pictures of firstand second violins!

It seems to me that Huneker stands on a higher level than any of theseindustrious gentlemen, and that his writings on music are of much morevalue, despite his divided allegiance among the _beaux arts_. Whatevermay be said against him, it must at least be admitted that he knowsChopin, and that he has written the best volumes upon the tuberculousPole in English. Vladimir de Pachmann, that king of all Chopin players, once bore characteristic testimony to the fact--I think it was inLondon. The program was heavy with the études and ballades, and Hunekersat in the front row of fanatics. After a storm of applause de Pachmannrose from the piano stool, levelled a bony claw at Huneker, andpronounced his dictum: "_He_ knows more than _all_ of you. " Joseffyseems to have had the same opinion, for he sought the aid of his oldpupil in preparing his new edition of Chopin, the first volume of whichis all he lived to see in print.... And, beyond all the others, Hunekerdisdains writing for the kindergarten. There is no stooping in hisdiscourse; he frankly addresses himself to an audience that has gonethrough the forms, and so he avoids the tediousness of the A B Cexpositors. He is the only American musical critic, save Van Vechten, who thus assumes invariably that a musical audience exists, and the onlyone who constantly measures up to its probable interests, supposing itto be there. Such a book as "Old Fogy, " for all its buffoonery, isconceivable only as the work of a sound musician. Its background is oneof the utmost sophistication; in the midst of its wildest extravagancesthere is always a profound knowledge of music on tap, and a profoundlove of it to boot. Here, perhaps, more than anywhere else, Huneker'sdelight in the things he deals with is obvious. It is not a seminarythat he keeps, but a sort of club of tone enthusiasts, and membership init is infinitely charming. 

§ 6

This capacity for making the thing described seem important anddelightful, this quality of infectious gusto, this father-talent of allthe talents that a critic needs, sets off his literary criticism no lessthan his discourse on music and musicians. Such a book as "Iconoclasts"or "Egoists" is full of useful information, but it is even more full ofagreeable adventure. The style is the book, as it is the man. It isarch, staccato, ironical, witty, galloping, playful, polyglot, allusive--sometimes, alas, so allusive as to reduce the Drama Leaguerand women's clubber to wonderment and ire. In writing of plays or ofbooks, as in writing of cities, tone-poems or philosophies, Hunekeralways assumes that the elements are already well-grounded, that he isdealing with the initiated, that a pause to explain would be an affront. Sad work for the Philistines--but a joy to the elect! All thispolyphonic allusiveness, this intricate fuguing of ideas, is not to beconfused, remember, with the hollow showiness of the academicsoothsayer. It is as natural to the man, as much a part of him as theclanging Latin of Johnson, or, to leap from art to art Huneker-wise, thedamnable cross-rhythms of Brahms. He could no more write without hisstock company of heretic sages than he could write without his ration ofmalt. And, on examination, all of them turned out to be real. They arefar up dark alleys, but they are there!... And one finds them, at last, to be as pleasant company as the multilingual puns of Nietzsche orDebussy's chords of the second. 

As for the origin of that style, it seems to have a complex ancestry. Huneker's first love was Poe, and even today he still casts affectionateglances in that direction, but there is surely nothing of Poe'selephantine labouring in his skipping, _pizzicato_ sentences. Then cameCarlyle--the Carlyle of "Sartor Resartus"--a god long forgotten. Huneker's mother was a woman of taste; on reading his first scribblings, she gave him Cardinal Newman, and bade him consider the Queen's English. Newman achieved a useful purging; the style that remained was ready forFlaubert. From the author of "L'Education Sentimentale, " I daresay, camethe deciding influence, with Nietzsche's staggering brilliance offeringsuggestions later on. Thus Huneker, as stylist, owes nearly all toFrance, for Nietzsche, too, learned how to write there, and to the endof his days he always wrote more like a Frenchman than a German. Hisgreatest service to his own country, indeed, was not as anarch, but asteacher of writing. He taught the Germans that their language had a snapin it as well as sighs and gargles--that it was possible to write Germanand yet not wander in a wood. There are whole pages of Nietzsche thatsuggest such things, say, as the essay on Maurice Barrès in "Egoists, "with its bold tropes, its rapid gait, its sharp _sforzandos_. And youwill find old Friedrich at his tricks from end to end of "Old Fogy. "

Of the actual contents of such books as "Egoists" and "Iconoclasts" itis unnecessary to say anything. One no longer reads them for theirmatter, but for their manner. Every flapper now knows all that is worthknowing about Ibsen, Strindberg, Maeterlinck and Shaw, and a great dealthat is not worth knowing. We have disentangled Hauptmann fromSudermann, and, thanks to Dr. Lewisohn, may read all his plays inEnglish. Even Henry Becque has got into the vulgate and is familiar tothe Drama League. As for Anatole France, his "Revolt of the Angels" ison the shelves of the Carnegie Libraries, and the Comstocks have let itpass. New gods whoop and rage in Valhalla: Verhaeren, Artzibashef, Przybyszewski. Huneker, alas, seems to drop behind the procession. Hewrites nothing about these second-hand third-raters. He has come toWedekind, Schnitzler, Schoenberg, Korngold and Moussorgsky, and he hasdischarged a few rounds of shrapnel at the Gallo-Asiatic petti-coatphilosopher, Henri Bergson, but here he has stopped, as he has stoppedat Matisse, Picasso, Epstein and Augustus John in painting. As he sayshimself, "one must get off somewhere. "... 

Particularly if one grows weary of criticism--and in Huneker, of late, Idetect more than one sign of weariness. Youth is behind him, and with itsome of its zest for exploration and combat. "The pathos of distance" isa phrase that haunts him as poignantly as it haunted Nietzsche, itsmaker. Not so long ago I tried to induce him to write some new Old Fogysketches, nominating Puccini, Strawinsky, Schoenberg, Korngold, Elgar. He protested that the mood was gone from him forever, that he could notturn the clock back twenty years. His late work in _Puck_, the _Times_and the _Sun_, shows an unaccustomed acquiescence in current valuations. He praises such one-day masterpieces as McFee's "Casuals of the Sea"; heis polite to the gaudy heroines of the opera-house; he gags a bit atWright's "Modern Painting"; he actually makes a gingery curtsy to FrankJewett Mather, a Princeton professor.... The pressure in the gaugescan't keep up to 250 pounds forever. Man must tire of fighting afterawhile, and seek his ease in his inn.... 

Perhaps the post-bellum transvaluation of all values will bring Hunekerto his feet again, and with something of the old glow and gusto in him. And if the new men do not stir up, then assuredly the wrecks of theancient cities will: the Paris of his youth; Munich, Dresden, Vienna, Brussels, London; above all, Prague. Go to "New Cosmopolis" and you willfind where his heart lies, or, if not his heart, then at all events hisoesophagus and pylorus.... Here, indeed, the thread of his meditationsis a thread of nutriment. However diverted by the fragrance of the Dutchwoods, the church bells of Belgium, the music of Stuttgart, the badpictures of Dublin, the plays of Paris, the musty romance of old Wien, he always comes back anon to such ease as a man may find in his inn. "The stomach of Vienna, " he says, "first interested me, not its soul. "And so, after a dutiful genuflexion to St. Stephen's ("Old Steffel, " asthe Viennese call it), he proceeds to investigate the paprika-chicken, the _Gulyas_, the _Risi-bisi_, the _Apfelstrudel_, the _Kaiserschmarrn_and the native and authentic _Wienerschnitzel_. And from food todrink--specifically, to the haunts of Pilsner, to "certain semi-sacredhouses where the ritual of beer-drinking is observed, " to the shrines atwhich beer maniacs meet, to "a little old house near a Greek church"where "the best-kept Pilsner in Vienna may be found. "

The best-kept Pilsner in Vienna! The phrase enchants like an entrance ofthe horns. The best caviare in Russia, the worst actor on Broadway, themost virtuous angel in Heaven! Such superlatives are transcendental. Andyet, --so rare is perfection in this world!--the news swiftly follows, unexpected, disconcerting, that the best Pilsner in Vienna is far shortof the ideal. For some undetermined reason--the influence of theAmerican tourist? the decay of the Austrian national character?--theVienna _Bierwirte_ freeze and paralyze it with too much ice, so that itchills the nerves it should caress, and fills the heart below withheaviness and repining. Avoid Vienna, says Huneker, if you are one whounderstands and venerates the great Bohemian brew! And if, deluded, youfind yourself there, take the first _D-zug_ for Prague, that lovelycity, for in it you will find the Pilsen _Urquell_, and in the Pilsen_Urquell_ you will find the best Pilsner in Christendom--its colour aphosphorescent, translucent, golden yellow, its foam like whipped cream, its temperature exactly and invariably right. Not even at Pilsen itself(which the Bohemians call Plezen) is the emperor of malt liquors morestupendously grateful to the palate. Write it down before you forget:the Pilsen _Urquell_, Prague, Bohemia, 120 miles S. S. E. Of Dresden, onthe river Moldau (which the natives call the Vitava). Ask for FräuleinOttilie. Mention the name of Herr Huneker, the American_Schriftsteller_. 

Of all the eminent and noble cities between the Alleghenies and theBalkans, Prague seems to be Huneker's favourite. He calls it poetic, precious, delectable, original, dramatic--a long string of adjectives, each argued for with eloquence that is unmistakably sincere. He standsfascinated before the towers and pinnacles of the Hradschin, "a miracleof tender rose and marble white with golden spots of sunshine that wouldhave made Claude Monet envious. " He pays his devotions to the Chapel ofSt. Wenceslaus, "crammed with the bones of buried kings, " or, at anyrate, to the shrine of St. John Nepomucane, "composed of nearly two tonsof silver. " He is charmed by the beauty of the stout, black-haired, red-cheeked Bohemian girls, and hopes that enough of them will emigrateto the United States to improve the fading pulchritude of our ownhouris. But most of all, he has praises for the Bohemian cuisine, withits incomparable apple tarts, and its dumplings of cream cheese, and forthe magnificent, the overpowering, the ineffable Pilsner of Prague. ThisPilsner motive runs through the book from cover to cover. In the midstof Dutch tulip-beds, Dublin cobblestones, Madrid sunlight and AtlanticCity leg-shows, one hears it insistently, deep down in the orchestra. The cellos weave it into the polyphony, sometimes clearly, sometimes inscarcely recognizable augmentation. It is heard again in the wood-wind;the bassoons grunt it thirstily; it slides around in the violas; itrises to a stately choral in the brass. And chiefly it is in minor. Chiefly it is sounded by one who longs for the Pilsen _Urquell_ in a farland, and among a barbarous and teetotaling people, and in an atmosphereas hostile to the recreations of the palate as it is to the recreationsof the intellect. 

As I say, this Huneker is a foreigner and hence accursed. There issomething about him as exotic as a samovar, as essentially un-Americanas a bashi-bazouk, a nose-ring or a fugue. He is filled to the throttlewith strange and unnational heresies. He ranks Beethoven miles above thenative gods, and not only Beethoven, but also Bach and Brahms, and notonly Bach and Brahms, but also Berlioz, Bizet, Bruch and Bülow andperhaps even Balakirew, Bellini, Balfe, Borodin and Boïeldieu. Heregards Budapest as a more civilized city than his native Philadelphia, Stendhal as a greater literary artist than Washington Irving, "KünstlerLeben" as better music than "There is Sunlight in My Soul. " Irish? Istill doubt it, despite the _Stammbaum_. Who ever heard of an Irishepicure, an Irish _flâneur_, or, for that matter, an Irishcontrapuntist? The arts of the voluptuous category are unknown west ofCherbourg; one leaves them behind with the French pilot. Even theCzech-Irish hypothesis (or is it Magyar-Irish?) has a smell of thelamp. Perhaps it should be Irish-Czech.... 

§ 7

There remain the books of stories, "Visionaries" and "Melomaniacs. " Itis not surprising to hear that both are better liked in France andGermany than in England and the United States. ("Visionaries" has evenappeared in Bohemian. ) Both are made up of what the Germans call_Kultur-Novellen_--that is, stories dealing, not with the emotionscommon to all men, but with the clash of ideas among the civilized andgodless minority. In some of them, _e. G. _, "Rebels of the Moon, " whatone finds is really not a story at all, but a static discussion, halfaesthetic and half lunatic. In others, _e. G. _, "Isolde's Mother, " thewhole action revolves around an assumption incomprehensible to thegeneral. One can scarcely imagine most of these tales in the magazines. They would puzzle and outrage the readers of Gouverneur Morris andGertrude Atherton, and the readers of Howells and Mrs. Wharton no less. Their point of view is essentially the aesthetic one; the overwhelmingimportance of beauty is never in any doubt. And the beauty thusvivisected and fashioned into new designs is never the simpleWordsworthian article, of fleecy clouds and primroses all compact; onthe contrary, it is the highly artificial beauty of pigments andtone-colours, of Cézanne landscapes and the second act of "Tristan andIsolde, " of Dunsanyan dragons and Paracelsian mysteries. Here, indeed, Huneker riots in the aesthetic occultism that he loves. Music slidesover into diabolism; the Pobloff symphony rends the firmament of Heaven;the ghost of Chopin drives Mychowski to drink; a single drum-beatfinishes the estimable consort of the composer of the Tympani symphony. In "The Eighth Deadly Sin" we have a paean to perfume--the only one, sofar as I know, in English. In "The Hall of the Missing Footsteps" webehold the reaction of hasheesh upon Chopin's ballade in F major.... Strangely-flavoured, unearthly, perhaps unhealthy stuff. I doubt that itwill ever be studied for its style in our new Schools of Literature; adevilish cunning if often there, but it leaves a smack of thepharmacopoeia. However, as George Gissing used to say, "the artistshould be free from everything like moral prepossession. " This lets inthe Antichrist.... 

Huneker himself seems to esteem these fantastic tales above all hisother work. Story-writing, indeed, was his first love, and his Opus 1 abad imitation of Poe, by name "The Comet, " was done in Philadelphia solong ago as July 4, 1876. (Temperature, 105 degrees Fahrenheit. ) Onerather marvels that he has never attempted a novel. It would have beenas bad, perhaps, as "Love Among the Artists, " but certainly no bore. Hemight have given George Moore useful help with "Evelyn Innes" and"Sister Teresa": they are about music, but not by a musician. As for me, I see no great talent for fiction _qua_ fiction in these two volumes ofexotic tales. They are interesting simply because Huneker the storyteller so often yields place to Huneker the playboy of the arts. Suchthings as "Antichrist" and "The Woman Who Loved Chopin" are no more, atbottom, than second-rate anecdotes; it is the filling, the sauce, theembroidery that counts. But what filling! What sauce! Whatembroidery!... One never sees more of Huneker.... 

§ 8

He must stand or fall, however, as critic. It is what he has writtenabout other men, not what he has concocted himself, that makes a figureof him, and gives him his unique place in the sterile literature of therepublic's second century. He stands for a _Weltanschauung_ that is notonly un-national, but anti-national; he is the chief of all the curbersand correctors of the American Philistine; in praising the arts he hasalso criticized a civilization. In the large sense, of course, he hashad but small influence. After twenty years of earnest labour, he findshimself almost as alone as a Methodist in Bavaria. The body of nativecriticism remains as I have described it; an endless piling up ofplatitudes, an homeric mass of false assumptions and jejune conclusions, an insane madness to reduce beauty to terms of a petty and pornographicmorality. One might throw a thousand bricks in any American city withoutstriking a single man who could give an intelligible account of eitherHauptmann or Cézanne, or of the reasons for holding Schumann to havebeen a better composer than Mendelssohn. The boys in our colleges arestill taught that Whittier was a great poet and Fennimore Cooper a greatnovelist. Nine-tenths of our people--perhaps ninety-nine hundredths ofour native-born--have yet to see their first good picture, or to heartheir first symphony. Our Chamberses and Richard Harding Davises arenational figures; our Norrises and Dreisers are scarcely tolerated. Ofthe two undoubted world figures that we have contributed to letters, onewas allowed to die like a stray cat up an alley and the other wasmistaken for a cheap buffoon. Criticism, as the average American"intellectual" understands it, is what a Frenchman, a German or aRussian would call donkeyism. In all the arts we still cling to theideals of the dissenting pulpit, the public cemetery, the electric sign, the bordello parlour. 

But for all that, I hang to a somewhat battered optimism, and one of thechief causes of that optimism is the fact that Huneker, after all theseyears, yet remains unhanged. A picturesque and rakish fellow, a believerin joy and beauty, a disdainer of petty bombast and moralizing, a swornfriend of all honest purpose and earnest striving, he has given his lifeto a work that must needs bear fruit hereafter. While the collegepedagogues of the Brander Matthews type still worshipped the dead bonesof Scribe and Sardou, Robertson and Bulwer-Lytton, he preached the newand revolutionary gospel of Ibsen. In the golden age of Rosa Bonheur's"The Horse Fair, " he was expounding the principles of thepost-impressionists. In the midst of the Sousa marches he whooped forRichard Strauss. Before the rev. Professors had come to Schopenhauer, oreven to Spencer, he was hauling ashore the devil-fish, Nietzsche. Nostranger poisons have ever passed through the customs than those he hasbrought in his baggage. No man among us has ever urged more ardently, orwith sounder knowledge or greater persuasiveness, that catholicity oftaste and sympathy which stands in such direct opposition to the boomingcertainty and snarling narrowness of Little Bethel. 

If he bears a simple label, indeed, it is that of anti-Philistine. Andthe Philistine he attacks is not so much the vacant and harmless fellowwho belongs to the Odd Fellows and recreates himself with _Life_ and_Leslie's Weekly_ in the barber shop, as that more belligerent andpretentious donkey who presumes to do battle for "honest" thought and a"sound" ethic--the "forward looking" man, the university ignoramus, theconservator of orthodoxy, the rattler of ancient phrases--what Nietzschecalled "the Philistine of culture. " It is against this fat milch cow ofwisdom that Huneker has brandished a spear since first there was aHuneker. He is a sworn foe to "the traps that snare the attention frompoor or mediocre workmanship--the traps of sentimentalism, of falsefeeling, of cheap pathos, of the cheap moral. " He is on the trail ofthose pious mountebanks who "clutter the marketplaces with their booths, mischievous half-art and tubs of tripe and soft soap. " Superficially, asI say, he seems to have made little progress in this benign _pogrom_. But under the surface, concealed from a first glance, he has undoubtedlyleft a mark--faint, perhaps, but still a mark. To be a civilized man inAmerica is measurably less difficult, despite the war, than it used tobe, say, in 1890. One may at least speak of "Die Walküre" without beinglaughed at as a half-wit, and read Stirner without being confused withCastro and Raisuli, and argue that Huxley got the better of Gladstonewithout being challenged at the polls. I know of no man who pushed inthat direction harder than James Huneker. 

FOOTNOTES:

[31] The Science of English Verse; New York, Scribner, 1880. 

[32] Masks and Minstrels of New Germany; Boston, John W. Luce & Co. , 1911. 

[33] New York, Doubleday, Page & Co. , 1913. 

[34] The Drift of Romanticism; Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co. , 1913. 

[35] New York, Dodd, Mead & Co. , 1916. 

[36] New York, Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1917. 

[37] New York, The Macmillan Co. , 1917. 

IV

PURITANISM AS A LITERARY FORCE

§ 1

"Calvinism, " says Dr. Leon Kellner, in his excellent little history ofAmerican literature, [38] "is the natural theology of the disinherited;it never flourished, therefore, anywhere as it did in the barren hillsof Scotland and in the wilds of North America. " The learned doctor ishere speaking of theology in what may be called its narrow technicalsense--that is, as a theory of God. Under Calvinism, in the New World aswell as in the Old, it became no more than a luxuriant demonology; evenGod himself was transformed into a superior sort of devil, ever wary andwholly merciless. That primitive demonology still survives in thebarbaric doctrines of the Methodists and Baptists, particularly in theSouth; but it has been ameliorated, even there, by a growing sense ofthe divine grace, and so the old God of Plymouth Rock, as practicallyconceived, is now scarcely worse than the average jail warden orItalian padrone. On the ethical side, however, Calvinism is dying a muchharder death, and we are still a long way from the enlightenment. Savewhere Continental influences have measurably corrupted the Puritanidea--_e. G. _, in such cities as New York, San Francisco and NewOrleans, --the prevailing American view of the world and its mysteries isstill a moral one, and no other human concern gets half the attentionthat is endlessly lavished upon the problem of conduct, particularly ofthe other fellow. It needed no official announcement to define thefunction and office of the republic as that of an international expertin morals, and the mentor and exemplar of the more backward nations. Within, as well as without, the eternal rapping of knuckles andproclaiming of new austerities goes on. The American, save in moments ofconscious and swiftly lamented deviltry, casts up all ponderable values, including even the values of beauty, in terms of right and wrong. He isbeyond all things else, a judge and a policeman; he believes firmly thatthere is a mysterious power in law; he supports and embellishes itsoperation with a fanatical vigilance. 

Naturally enough, this moral obsession has given a strong colour toAmerican literature. In truth, it has coloured it so brilliantly thatAmerican literature is set off sharply from all other literatures. Innone other will you find so wholesale and ecstatic a sacrifice ofaesthetic ideas, of all the fine gusto of passion and beauty, to notionsof what is meet, proper and nice. From the books of grisly sermons thatwere the first American contribution to letters down to that amazingliterature of "inspiration" which now flowers so prodigiously, with twoliterary ex-Presidents among its chief virtuosi, one observes norelaxation of the moral pressure. In the history of every otherliterature there have been periods of what might be called moralinnocence--periods in which a naif _joie de vivre_ has broken throughall concepts of duty and responsibility, and the wonder and glory of theuniverse have been hymned with unashamed zest. The age of Shakespearecomes to mind at once: the violence of the Puritan reaction offers ameasure of the pendulum's wild swing. But in America no such generalrising of the blood has ever been seen. The literature of the nation, even the literature of the enlightened minority, has been under harshPuritan restraints from the beginning, and despite a few stealthyefforts at revolt--usually quite without artistic value or even commonhonesty, as in the case of the cheap fiction magazines and that ofsmutty plays on Broadway, and always very short-lived--it shows not theslightest sign of emancipating itself today. The American, try as hewill, can never imagine any work of the imagination as wholly devoid ofmoral content. It must either tend toward the promotion of virtue, or besuspect and abominable. 

If any doubt of this is in your mind, turn to the critical articles inthe newspapers and literary weeklies; you will encounter enough proofsin a month's explorations to convince you forever. A novel or a play isjudged among us, not by its dignity of conception, its artistic honesty, its perfection of workmanship, but almost entirely by its orthodoxy ofdoctrine, its platitudinousness, its usefulness as a moral tract. Adigest of the reviews of such a book as David Graham Phillips' "SusanLenox" or of such a play as Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler" would make astoundingreading for a Continental European. Not only the childish incompetentswho write for the daily press, but also most of our critics ofexperience and reputation, seem quite unable to estimate a piece ofwriting as a piece of writing, a work of art as a work of art; theyalmost inevitably drag in irrelevant gabble as to whether this or thatpersonage in it is respectable, or this or that situation in accordancewith the national notions of what is edifying and nice. Fullynine-tenths of the reviews of Dreiser's "The Titan, " without questionthe best American novel of its year, were devoted chiefly to indignantdenunciations of the morals of Frank Cowperwood, its central character. That the man was superbly imagined and magnificently depicted, that hestood out from the book in all the flashing vigour of life, that hiscreation was an artistic achievement of a very high and difficultorder--these facts seem to have made no impression upon the reviewerswhatever. They were Puritans writing for Puritans, and all they couldsee in Cowperwood was an anti-Puritan, and in his creator another. Itwill remain for Europeans, I daresay, to discover the true stature of"The Titan, " as it remained for Europeans to discover the true statureof "Sister Carrie. "

Just how deeply this corrective knife has cut you may find plainlydisplayed in Dr. Kellner's little book. He sees the throttling influenceof an ever alert and bellicose Puritanism, not only in our grandliterature, but also in our petit literature, our minor poetry, even inour humour. The Puritan's utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust ofall romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, hisunbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savagecruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarouspersecution--these things have put an almost unbearable burden upon theexchange of ideas in the United States, and particularly upon that formof it which involves playing with them for the mere game's sake. On theone hand, the writer who would deal seriously and honestly with thelarger problems of life, particularly in the rigidly-partitioned ethicalfield, is restrained by laws that would have kept a Balzac or a Zola inprison from year's end to year's end; and on the other hand the writerwho would proceed against the reigning superstitions by mockery has beensilenced by taboos that are quite as stringent, and by an indifferencethat is even worse. For all our professed delight in and capacity forjocosity, we have produced so far but one genuine wit--AmbroseBierce--and, save to a small circle, he remains unknown today. Our greathumourists, including even Mark Twain, have had to take protectivecolouration, whether willingly or unwillingly, from the prevailingethical foliage, and so one finds them levelling their darts, not at thestupidities of the Puritan majority, but at the evidences of lesseningstupidity in the anti-Puritan minority. In other words, they have donebattle, not against, but _for_ Philistinism--and Philistinism is nomore than another name for Puritanism. Both wage a ceaseless warfareupon beauty in its every form, from painting to religious ritual, andfrom the drama to the dance--the first because it holds beauty to be amean and stupid thing, and the second because it holds beauty to bedistracting and corrupting. 

Mark Twain, without question, was a great artist; there was in himsomething of that prodigality of imagination, that aloof engrossment inthe human comedy, that penetrating cynicism, which one associates withthe great artists of the Renaissance. But his nationality hung aroundhis neck like a millstone; he could never throw off his nativePhilistinism. One ploughs through "The Innocents Abroad" and throughparts of "A Tramp Abroad" with incredulous amazement. Is such coarse andignorant clowning to be accepted as humour, as great humour, as the besthumour that the most humorous of peoples has produced? Is it really themark of a smart fellow to lift a peasant's cackle over "Lohengrin"? IsTitian's chromo of Moses in the bullrushes seriously to be regarded asthe noblest picture in Europe? Is there nothing in Latin Christianity, after all, save petty grafting, monastic scandals and the worship of theknuckles and shin-bones of dubious saints? May not a civilized man, disbelieving in it, still find himself profoundly moved by its dazzlinghistory, the lingering remnants of its old magnificence, the charm ofits gorgeous and melancholy loveliness? In the presence of all beauty ofman's creation--in brief, of what we roughly call art, whatever itsform--the voice of Mark Twain was the voice of the Philistine. Aliterary artist of very high rank himself, with instinctive gifts thatlifted him, in "Huckleberry Finn" to kinship with Cervantes andAristophanes, he was yet so far the victim of his nationality that heseems to have had no capacity for distinguishing between the good andthe bad in the work of other men of his own craft. The literarycriticism that one occasionally finds in his writings is chiefly trivialand ignorant; his private inclination appears to have been toward suchromantic sentimentality as entrances school-boys; the thing thatinterested him in Shakespeare was not the man's colossal genius, but theabsurd theory that Bacon wrote his plays. Had he been born in France(the country of his chief abomination!) instead of in a Puritan villageof the American hinterland, I venture that he would have conquered theworld. But try as he would, being what he was, he could not get rid ofthe Puritan smugness and cocksureness, the Puritan distrust of newideas, the Puritan incapacity for seeing beauty as a thing in itself, and the full peer of the true and the good. 

It is, indeed, precisely in the works of such men as Mark Twain that onefinds the best proofs of the Puritan influence in American letters, forit is there that it is least expected and hence most significant. Ournative critics, unanimously Puritans themselves, are anaesthetic to theflavour, but to Dr. Kellner, with his half-European, half-Orientalculture, it is always distinctly perceptible. He senses it, not only inthe harsh Calvinistic fables of Hawthorne and the pious gurglings ofLongfellow, but also in the poetry of Bryant, the tea-party niceness ofHowells, the "maiden-like reserve" of James Lane Allen, and even in thework of Joel Chandler Harris. What! A Southern Puritan? Well, why not?What could be more erroneous than the common assumption that Puritanismis exclusively a Northern, a New England, madness? The truth is that itis as thoroughly national as the kindred belief in the devil, and runsalmost unobstructed from Portland to Portland and from the Lakes to theGulf. It is in the South, indeed, and not in the North, that it takes onits most bellicose and extravagant forms. Between the upper tier of NewEngland and the Potomac river there was not a single prohibitionstate--but thereafter, alas, they came in huge blocks! And behind thatinfinitely prosperous Puritanism there is a long and unbroken tradition. Berkeley, the last of the Cavaliers, was kicked out of power in Virginiaso long ago as 1650. Lord Baltimore, the Proprietor of Maryland, wasbrought to terms by the Puritans of the Severn in 1657. The ScotchCovenanter, the most uncompromising and unenlightened of all Puritans, flourished in the Carolinas from the start, and in 1698, or thereabout, he was reinforced from New England. In 1757 a band of Puritans invadedwhat is now Georgia--and Georgia has been a Puritan barbarism eversince. Even while the early (and half-mythical) Cavaliers were still innominal control of all these Southern plantations, they clung to thesea-coast. The population that moved down the chain of the Appalachiansduring the latter part of the eighteenth century, and then swept overthem into the Mississippi valley, was composed almost entirely ofPuritans--chiefly intransigeants from New England (where Unitarianismwas getting on its legs), kirk-crazy Scotch, and that plupiousbeauty-hating folk, the Scotch-Irish. "In the South today, " said JohnFiske a generation ago, "there is more Puritanism surviving than in NewEngland. " In that whole region, an area three times as large as Franceor Germany, there is not a single orchestra capable of playingBeethoven's C minor symphony, or a single painting worth looking at, ora single public building or monument of any genuine distinction, or asingle factory devoted to the making of beautiful things, or a singlepoet, novelist, historian, musician, painter or sculptor whosereputation extends beyond his own country. Between the Mason and Dixonline and the mouth of the Mississippi there is but one opera-house, andthat one was built by a Frenchman, and is now, I believe, closed. Theonly domestic art this huge and opulent empire knows is in the hands ofMexican greasers; its only native music it owes to the despised negro;its only genuine poet was permitted to die up an alley like a stray dog. 

§ 2

In studying the anatomy and physiology of American Puritanism, and itseffects upon the national literature, one quickly discerns two mainstreams of influence. On the one hand, there is the influence of theoriginal Puritans--whether of New England or of the South--, who came tothe New World with a ready-made philosophy of the utmost clarity, positiveness and inclusiveness of scope, and who attained to such aposition of political and intellectual leadership that they were ableto force it almost unchanged upon the whole population, and to endow itwith such vitality that it successfully resisted alien opposition lateron. And on the other hand, one sees a complex of social and economicconditions which worked in countless irresistible ways against the riseof that dionysian spirit, that joyful acquiescence in life, thatphilosophy of the _Ja-sager_, which offers to Puritanism, today as intimes past, its chief and perhaps only effective antagonism. In otherwords, the American of the days since the Revolution has had Puritanismdiligently pressed upon him from without, and at the same time he hasled, in the main, a life that has engendered a chronic hospitality toit, or at all events to its salient principles, within. 

Dr. Kellner accurately describes the process whereby the aestheticspirit, and its concomitant spirit of joy, were squeezed out of theoriginal New Englanders, so that no trace of it showed in theirliterature, or even in their lives, for a century and a half after thefirst settlements. "Absorption in God, " he says, "seems incompatiblewith the presentation (_i. E. _, aesthetically) of mankind. The God of thePuritans was in this respect a jealous God who brooked no sort ofcreative rivalry. The inspired moments of the loftiest souls were filledwith the thought of God and His designs; spiritual life was whollydominated by solicitude regarding salvation, the hereafter, grace; howcould such petty concerns as personal experience of a lyric nature, thetransports or the pangs of love, find utterance? What did a lyricoccurrence like the first call of the cuckoo, elsewhere so welcome, orthe first sight of the snowdrop, signify compared with the last Sunday'ssermon and the new interpretation of the old riddle of evil in theworld? And apart from the fact that everything of a personal nature musthave appeared so trivial, all the sources of secular lyric poetry wereoffensive and impious to Puritan theology.... One thing is anestablished fact: up to the close of the eighteenth century America hadno belletristic literature. "

This Puritan bedevilment by the idea of personal sin, this reign of theGod-crazy, gave way in later years, as we shall see, to other andsomewhat milder forms of pious enthusiasm. At the time of theRevolution, indeed, the importation of French political ideas wasaccompanied by an importation of French theological ideas, and such menas Franklin and Jefferson dallied with what, in those days at least, wasregarded as downright atheism. Even in New England this influence madeitself felt; there was a gradual letting down of Calvinism to thesoftness of Unitarianism, and that change was presently to flower in thevague temporizing of Transcendentalism. But as Puritanism, in the strictsense, declined in virulence and took deceptive new forms, there was acompensating growth of its brother, Philistinism, and by the firstquarter of the nineteenth century, the distrust of beauty, and of thejoy that is its object, was as firmly established throughout the land asit had ever been in New England. The original Puritans had at least beenmen of a certain education, and even of a certain austere culture. Theywere inordinately hostile to beauty in all its forms, but one somehowsuspects that much of their hostility was due to a sense of theirweakness before it, a realization of its disarming psychical pull. Butthe American of the new republic was of a different kidney. He was notso much hostile to beauty as devoid of any consciousness of it; he stoodas unmoved before its phenomena as a savage before a table oflogarithms. What he had set up on this continent, in brief, was acommonwealth of peasants and small traders, a paradise of thethird-rate, and its national philosophy, almost wholly unchecked by themore sophisticated and civilized ideas of an aristocracy, was preciselythe philosophy that one finds among peasants and small traders at alltimes and everywhere. The difference between the United States and anyother nation did not lie in any essential difference between Americanpeasants and other peasants, but simply in the fact that here, alone, the voice of the peasant was the single voice of the nation--that here, alone, the only way to eminence and public influence was the way ofacquiescence in the opinions and prejudices of the untutored andPhilistine mob. Jackson was the _Stammvater_ of the new statesmen andphilosophers; he carried the mob's distrust of good taste even into thefield of conduct; he was the first to put the rewards of conformityabove the dictates of common decency; he founded a whole hierarchy ofPhilistine messiahs, the roaring of which still belabours the ear. 

Once established, this culture of the intellectually disinherited tendedto defend and perpetuate itself. On the one hand, there was noappearance of a challenge from within, for the exigent problems ofexistence in a country that was yet but half settled and organized leftits people with no energy for questioning what at least satisfied theirgross needs, and so met the pragmatic test. And on the other hand, therewas no critical pressure from without, for the English culture whichalone reached over the sea was itself entering upon its Victoriandecline, and the influence of the native aristocracy--the degenerating_Junkers_ of the great estates and the boorish magnates of the city_bourgeoisie_--was quite without any cultural direction at all. Thechief concern of the American people, even above the bread-and-butterquestion, was politics. They were incessantly hag-ridden by politicaldifficulties, both internal and external, of an inordinate complexity, and these occupied all the leisure they could steal from the sordid workof everyday. More, their new and troubled political ideas tended toabsorb all the rancorous certainty of their fading religious ideas, sothat devotion to a theory or a candidate became translated into devotionto a revelation, and the game of politics turned itself into a holy war. The custom of connecting purely political doctrines with pietisticconcepts of an inflammable nature, then firmly set up by skilfulpersuaders of the mob, has never quite died out in the United States. There has not been a presidential contest since Jackson's day withoutits Armageddons, its marching of Christian soldiers, its crosses ofgold, its crowns of thorns. The most successful American politicians, beginning with the anti-slavery agitators, have been those most adept attwisting the ancient gauds and shibboleths of Puritanism to partisanuses. Every campaign that we have seen for eighty years has been, oneach side, a pursuit of bugaboos, a denunciation of heresies, a snoutingup of immoralities. 

But it was during the long contest against slavery, beginning with theappearance of William Lloyd Garrison's _Liberator_ in 1831 and ending atAppomattox, that this gigantic supernaturalization of politics reachedits most astounding heights. In those days, indeed, politics andreligion coalesced in a manner not seen in the world since the MiddleAges, and the combined pull of the two was so powerful that none couldquite resist it. All men of any ability and ambition turned to politicalactivity for self-expression. It engaged the press to the exclusion ofeverything else; it conquered the pulpit; it even laid its hand uponindustry and trade. Drawing the best imaginative talent into itsservice--Jefferson and Lincoln may well stand as examples--it left thecultivation of belles lettres, and of all the other arts no less, towomen and admittedly second-rate men. And when, breaking through thistaboo, some chance first-rate man gave himself over to purely aestheticexpression, his reward was not only neglect, but even a sort ofignominy, as if such enterprises were not fitting for males with hair ontheir chests. I need not point to Poe and Whitman, both disdained asdreamers and wasters, and both proceeded against with the utmost rigoursof outraged Philistinism. 

In brief, the literature of that whole period, as Algernon Tassin showsin "The Magazine in America, "[39] was almost completely disassociatedfrom life as men were then living it. Save one counts in such crudepolitico-puritan tracts as "Uncle Tom's Cabin, " it is difficult to finda single contemporaneous work that interprets the culture of the time, or even accurately represents it. Later on, it found historians andanatomists, and in one work, at least, to wit, "Huckleberry Finn, " itwas studied and projected with the highest art, but no such impulse tomake imaginative use of it showed itself contemporaneously, and therewas not even the crude sentimentalization of here and now that one findsin the popular novels of today. Fenimore Cooper filled his romances, notwith the people about him, but with the Indians beyond the sky-line, andmade them half-fabulous to boot. Irving told fairy tales about theforgotten Knickerbockers; Hawthorne turned backward to the Puritans ofPlymouth Rock; Longfellow to the Acadians and the prehistoric Indians;Emerson took flight from earth altogether; even Poe sought refuge in aland of fantasy. It was only the frank second-raters--_e. G. _, Whittierand Lowell--who ventured to turn to the life around them, and thebanality of the result is a sufficient indication of the crudeness ofthe current taste, and the mean position assigned to the art of letters. This was pre-eminently the era of the moral tale, the Sunday-schoolbook. Literature was conceived, not as a thing in itself, but merely asa hand-maiden to politics or religion. The great celebrity of Emerson inNew England was not the celebrity of a literary artist, but that of atheologian and metaphysician; he was esteemed in much the same way thatJonathan Edwards had been esteemed. Even down to our own time, indeed, his vague and empty philosophizing has been put above his undeniablecapacity for graceful utterance, and it remained for Dr. Kellner toconsider him purely as a literary artist, and to give him due praise forhis skill. 

The Civil War brought that era of sterility to an end. As I shall showlater on, the shock of it completely reorganized the American scheme ofthings, and even made certain important changes in the nationalPuritanism, or, at all events, in its machinery. Whitman, whose careerstraddled, so to speak, the four years of the war, was the leader--andfor a long while, the only trooper--of a double revolt. On the one handhe offered a courageous challenge to the intolerable prudishness anddirty-mindedness of Puritanism, and on the other hand he boldly soughtthe themes and even the modes of expression of his poetry in thearduous, contentious and highly melodramatic life that lay all abouthim. Whitman, however, was clearly before his time. His countrymen couldsee him only as immoralist; save for a pitiful few of them, they weredead to any understanding of his stature as artist, and even unawarethat such a category of men existed. He was put down as an invader ofthe public decencies, a disturber of the public peace; even his eloquentwar poems, surely the best of all his work, were insufficient to get hima hearing; the sentimental rubbish of "The Blue and the Gray" and theecstatic supernaturalism of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" were farmore to the public taste. Where Whitman failed, indeed, all subsequentexplorers of the same field have failed with him, and the great war hasleft no more mark upon American letters than if it had never beenfought. Nothing remotely approaching the bulk and beam of Tolstoi's "Warand Peace, " or, to descend to a smaller scale, Zola's "The Attack on theMill, " has come out of it. Its appeal to the national imagination wasundoubtedly of the most profound character; it coloured politics forfifty years, and is today a dominating influence in the thought of wholesections of the American people. But in all that stirring up there wasno upheaval of artistic consciousness, for the plain reason that therewas no artistic consciousness there to heave up, and all we have in theway of Civil War literature is a few conventional melodramas, a fewhalf-forgotten short stories by Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane, and ahalf dozen idiotic popular songs in the manner of Randall's "Maryland, My Maryland. "

In the seventies and eighties, with the appearance of such men as HenryJames, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain and Bret Harte, a better dayseemed to be dawning. Here, after a full century of infantileromanticizing, were four writers who at least deserved respectfulconsideration as literary artists, and what is more, three of themturned from the conventionalized themes of the past to the teeming andcolourful life that lay under their noses. But this promise of betterthings was soon found to be no more than a promise. Mark Twain, after"The Gilded Age, " slipped back into romanticism tempered byPhilistinism, and was presently in the era before the Civil War, andfinally in the Middle Ages, and even beyond. Harte, a brillianttechnician, had displayed his whole stock when he had displayed histechnique: his stories were not even superficially true to the life theypresumed to depict; one searched them in vain for an interpretation ofit; they were simply idle tales. As for Howells and James, both quicklyshowed that timorousness and reticence which are the distinguishingmarks of the Puritan, even in his most intellectual incarnations. TheAmerican scene that they depicted with such meticulous care was chieflypeopled with marionettes. They shrunk, characteristically, from thoselarger, harsher clashes of will and purpose which one finds in all trulyfirst-rate literature. In particular, they shrunk from anyinterpretation of life which grounded itself upon an acknowledgment ofits inexorable and inexplicable tragedy. In the vast combat of instinctsand aspirations about them they saw only a feeble jousting of comedians, unserious and insignificant. Of the great questions that have agitatedthe minds of men in Howells' time one gets no more than a faint andfar-away echo in his novels. His investigations, one may say, arecarried on _in vacuo_; his discoveries are not expressed in terms ofpassion, but in terms of giggles. 

In the followers of Howells and James one finds little save an emptyimitation of their emptiness, a somewhat puerile parodying of theirhighly artful but essentially personal technique. To wade through thebooks of such characteristic American fictioneers as Frances HodgsonBurnett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, F. Hopkinson Smith, Alice Brown, JamesLane Allen, Winston Churchill, Ellen Glasgow, Gertrude Atherton andSarah Orne Jewett is to undergo an experience that is almost terrible. The flow of words is completely purged of ideas; in place of them onefinds no more than a romantic restatement of all the old platitudes andformulae. To call such an emission of graceful poppycock a literature, of course, is to mouth an absurdity, and yet, if the college professorswho write treatises on letters are to be believed, it is the best wehave to show. Turn, for example, to "A History of American LiteratureSince 1870, " by Prof. Fred Lewis Pattee, one of the latest andundoubtedly one of the least unintelligent of these books. In it thegifted pedagogue gives extended notice to no less than six of the ninewriters I have mentioned, and upon all of them his verdicts areflattering. He bestows high praises, direct and indirect, upon Mrs. Freeman's "grim and austere" manner, her "repression, " her entire lackof poetical illumination. He compares Miss Jewett to both Howells andHawthorne, not to mention Mrs. Gaskell--and Addison! He growsenthusiastic over a hollow piece of fine writing by Miss Brown. And heforgets altogether to mention Dreiser, or Sinclair, or Medill Patterson, or Harry Leon Wilson, or George Ade!... 

So much for the best. The worst is beyond description. France has herBrieux and her Henry Bordeaux; Germany has her Mühlbach, her stars ofthe _Gartenlaube_; England contributes Caine, Corelli, Oppenheim andcompany. But it is in our country alone that banality in letters takeson the proportions of a national movement; it is only here that a workof the imagination is habitually judged by its sheer emptiness of ideas, its fundamental platitudinousness, its correspondence with theimbecility of mob thinking; it is only here that "glad" books run upsales of hundreds of thousands. Richard Harding Davis, with his idealsof a floor-walker; Gene Stratton-Porter, with her snufflingsentimentality; Robert W. Chambers, with his "society" romances forshop-girls; Irvin Cobb, with his laboured, _Ayers' Almanac_ jocosity;the authors of the _Saturday Evening Post_ school, with their heroicdrummers and stockbrokers, their ecstatic celebration of the stupid, thesordid, the ignoble--these, after all, are our typical _literati_. ThePuritan fear of ideas is the master of them all. Some of them, intruth, most of them, have undeniable talent; in a more favourableenvironment not a few of them might be doing sound work. But they seehow small the ring is, and they make their tricks small to fit it. Notmany of them ever venture a leg outside. The lash of the ringmaster isswift, and it stings damnably.... 

I say not many; I surely do not mean none at all. As a matter of fact, there have been intermittent rebellions against the prevailingpecksniffery and sentimentality ever since the days of Irving andHawthorne. Poe led one of them--as critic more than as creative artist. His scathing attacks upon the Gerald Stanley Lees, the Hamilton WrightMabies and the George E. Woodberrys of his time keep a liveliness andappositeness that the years have not staled; his criticism deserves tobe better remembered. Poe sensed the Philistine pull of a Puritancivilization as none had before him, and combated it with his wholeartillery of rhetoric. Another rebel, of course, was Whitman; how hecame to grief is too well known to need recalling. What is less familiaris the fact that both the _Atlantic Monthly_ and the _Century_ (firstcalled _Scribner's_) were set up by men in revolt against the reign ofmush, as _Putnam's_ and the _Dial_ had been before them. The salutatoryof the _Dial_, dated 1840, stated the case against the nationalmugginess clearly. The aim of the magazine, it said, was to oppose "thatrigour of our conventions of religion and education which is turning usto stone" and to give expression to "new views and the dreams of youth. "Alas, for these brave _révoltés_! _Putnam's_ succumbed to thecircumambient rigours and duly turned to stone, and is now no more. The_Atlantic_, once so heretical, has become as respectable as the New York_Evening Post_. As for the _Dial_, it was until lately the very pope oforthodoxy and jealously guarded the college professors who read it fromthe pollution of ideas. Only the _Century_ has kept the faithunbrokenly. It is, indeed, the one first-class American magazine thathas always welcomed newcomers, and that maintains an intelligent contactwith the literature that is in being, and that consistently tries tomake the best terms possible with the dominant Philistinism. It cannotgo the whole way without running into danger; let it be said to thecredit of its editors that they have more than once braved that danger. 

The tale might be lengthened. Mark Twain, in his day, felt the stirringsof revolt, and not all his Philistinism was sufficient to hold himaltogether in check. If you want to find out about the struggle thatwent on within him, read the biography by Albert Bigelow Paine, or, better still, "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What is Man?" Alive, he hadhis position to consider; dead, he now speaks out. In the preface to"What is Man?" dated 1905, there is a curious confession of hisincapacity for defying the taboos which surrounded him. The studies forthe book, he says, were begun "twenty-five or twenty-seven yearsago"--the period of "A Tramp Abroad" and "The Prince and the Pauper. " Itwas actually written "seven years ago"--that is, just after "Followingthe Equator" and "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. " And why did itlie so long in manuscript, and finally go out stealthily, under aprivate imprint?[40] Simply because, as Mark frankly confesses, he"dreaded (_and could not bear_) the disapproval of the people around"him. He knew how hard his fight for recognition had been; he knew whatdireful penalties outraged orthodoxy could inflict; he had in him thesomewhat pathetic discretion of a respectable family man. But, dead, heis safely beyond reprisal, and so, after a prudent interval, thefaithful Paine begins printing books in which, writing knowingly behindsix feet of earth, he could set down his true ideas without fear. Someday, perhaps, we shall have his microbe story, and maybe even hispicture of the court of Elizabeth. 

A sneer in Prof. Pattee's history, before mentioned, recalls the factthat Hamlin Garland was also a rebel in his day and bawled for the Truthwith a capital T. That was in 1893. Two years later the guardians of thenational rectitude fell afoul of "Rose of Dutchers' Coolly" and Garlandbegan to think it over; today he devotes himself to the safer enterpriseof chasing spooks; his name is conspicuously absent from the DreiserProtest. Nine years before his brief offending John Hay had set off adiscreet bomb in "The Bread-Winners"--anonymously because "my standingwould be seriously compromised" by an avowal. Six years later FrankNorris shook up the Phelpses and Mores of the time with "McTeague. "Since then there have been assaults timorous and assaults head-long--byBierce, by Dreiser, by Phillips, by Fuller--by Mary MacLanes and byUpton Sinclairs--by ploughboy poets from the Middle West and by jitneygeniuses in Greenwich Village--assaults gradually tapering off to a meresophomoric brashness and deviltry. And all of them like snow-ballings ofVerdun. All of them petered out and ineffectual. The normal, the typicalAmerican book of today is as fully a remouthing of old husks as thenormal book of Griswold's day. The whole atmosphere of our literature, in William James' phrase, is "mawkish and dishwatery. " Books are stilljudged among us, not by their form and organization as works of art, their accuracy and vividness as representations of life, their validityand perspicacity as interpretations of it, but by their conformity tothe national prejudices, their accordance with set standards of nicenessand propriety. The thing irrevocably demanded is a "sane" book; theideal is a "clean, " an "inspiring, " a "glad" book. 

§ 3

All this may be called the Puritan impulse from within. It is, indeed, but a single manifestation of one of the deepest prejudices of areligious and half-cultured people--the prejudice against beauty as aform of debauchery and corruption--the distrust of all ideas that do notfit readily into certain accepted axioms--the belief in the eternalvalidity of moral concepts--in brief, the whole mental sluggishness ofthe lower orders of men. But in addition to this internal resistance, there has been laid upon American letters the heavy hand of a Puritanauthority from without, and no examination of the history and presentcondition of our literature could be of any value which did not take itconstantly into account, and work out the means of its influence andoperation. That authority, as I shall show, transcends both in power andin alertness the natural reactions of the national mind, and isincomparably more potent in combating ideas. It is supported by a bodyof law that is unmatched in any other country of Christendom, and it isexercised with a fanatical harshness and vigilance that make escape fromits operations well nigh impossible. Some of its effects, both directand indirect, I shall describe later, but before doing so it may be wellto trace its genesis and development. 

At bottom, of course, it rests upon the inherent Puritanism of thepeople; it could not survive a year if they were opposed to theprinciple visible in it. That deep-seated and uncorrupted Puritanism, that conviction of the pervasiveness of sin, of the supreme importanceof moral correctness, of the need of savage and inquisitorial laws, hasbeen a dominating force in American life since the very beginning. Therehas never been any question before the nation, whether political oreconomic, religious or military, diplomatic or sociological, which didnot resolve itself, soon or late, into a purely moral question. Nor hasthere ever been any surcease of the spiritual eagerness which lay at thebottom of the original Puritan's moral obsession: the American has been, from the very start, a man genuinely interested in the eternalmysteries, and fearful of missing their correct solution. The franktheocracy of the New England colonies had scarcely succumbed to thelibertarianism of a godless Crown before there came the Great Awakeningof 1734, with its orgies of homiletics and its restoration of talmudismto the first place among polite sciences. The Revolution, of course, brought a set-back: the colonists faced so urgent a need of unity inpolitics that they declared a sort of _Treuga Dei_ in religion, and thattruce, armed though it was, left its imprint upon the First Amendment tothe Constitution. But immediately the young Republic emerged from thestresses of adolescence, a missionary army took to the field again, andbefore long the Asbury revival was paling that of Whitefield, Wesley andJonathan Edwards, not only in its hortatory violence but also in thelength of its lists of slain. 

Thereafter, down to the outbreak of the Civil War, the country wasrocked again and again by furious attacks upon the devil. On the onehand, this great campaign took a purely theological form, with ahundred new and fantastic creeds as its fruits; on the other hand, itcrystallized into the hysterical temperance movement of the 30's and40's, which penetrated to the very floor of Congress and put "dry" lawsupon the statute-books of ten States; and on the third hand, as it were, it established a prudery in speech and thought from which we are yet buthalf delivered. Such ancient and innocent words as "bitch" and "bastard"disappeared from the American language; Bartlett tells us, indeed, inhis "Dictionary of Americanisms, "[41] that even "bull" was softened to"male cow. " This was the Golden Age of euphemism, as it was of euphuism;the worst inventions of the English mid-Victorians were adopted andimproved. The word "woman" became a term of opprobrium, verging closeupon downright libel; legs became the inimitable "limbs"; the stomachbegan to run from the "bosom" to the pelvic arch; pantaloons faded into"unmentionables"; the newspapers spun their parts of speech into suchgossamer webs as "a statutory offence, " "a house of questionable repute"and "an interesting condition. " And meanwhile the Good Templars and Sonsof Temperance swarmed in the land like a plague of celestial locusts. There was not a hamlet without its uniformed phalanx, its affectingexhibit of reformed drunkards. The Kentucky Legislature succumbed to atravelling recruiting officer, and two-thirds of the members signed thepledge. The National House of Representatives took recess after recessto hear eminent excoriators of the Rum Demon, and more than a dozen ofits members forsook their duties to carry the new gospel to the bucolicheathen--the vanguard, one may note in passing, of the innumerableChautauquan caravan of later years. 

Beneath all this bubbling on the surface, of course, ran the deep andswift undercurrent of anti-slavery feeling--a tide of passion whichhistorians now attempt to account for on economic grounds, but whichshowed no trace of economic origin while it lasted. Its true quality wasmoral, devout, ecstatic; it culminated, to change the figure, in asupreme discharge of moral electricity, almost fatal to the nation. Thecrack of that great spark emptied the jar; the American people forgotall about their pledges and pruderies during the four years of CivilWar. The Good Templars, indeed, were never heard of again, and with theminto memory went many other singular virtuosi of virtue--for example, the Millerites. But almost before the last smoke of battle cleared away, a renaissance of Puritan ardour began, and by the middle of the 70's itwas in full flower. Its high points and flashing lighthouses halt thebackward-looking eye; the Moody and Sankey uproar, the triumphal entryof the Salvation Army, the recrudescence of the temperance agitation andits culmination in prohibition, the rise of the Young Men's ChristianAssociation and of the Sunday-school, the almost miraculous growth ofthe Christian Endeavour movement, the beginnings of the vice crusade, the renewed injection of moral conceptions and rages into party politics(the "crime" of 1873!), the furious preaching of baroque Utopias, theinvention of muckraking, the mad, glad war of extermination upon theMormons, the hysteria over the Breckenridge-Pollard case and other likecauses, the enormous multiplication of moral and religious associations, the spread of zoöphilia, the attack upon Mammon, the dawn of the uplift, and last but far from least, comstockery. 

In comstockery, if I do not err, the new Puritanism gave a sign of itsformal departure from the old, and moral endeavour suffered a generaloverhauling and tightening of the screws. The difference between the twoforms is very well represented by the difference between the program ofthe half-forgotten Good Templars and the program set forth in the WebbLaw of 1913, or by that between the somewhat diffident prudery of the40's and the astoundingly ferocious and uncompromising vice-crusading oftoday. In brief, a difference between the _re_nunciation and_de_nunciation, asceticism and Mohammedanism, the hair shirt and theflaming sword. The distinguishing mark of the elder Puritanism, at leastafter it had attained to the stature of a national philosophy, was itsappeal to the individual conscience, its exclusive concern with theelect, its strong flavour of self-accusing. Even the rage againstslavery was, in large measure, an emotion of the mourners' bench. Thething that worried the more ecstatic Abolitionists was their sneakingsense of responsibility, the fear that they themselves were flouting thefire by letting slavery go on. The thirst to punish the concreteslave-owner, as an end in itself, did not appear until opposition hadadded exasperation to fervour. In most of the earlier harangues againsthis practice, indeed, you will find a perfect willingness to grant thatslave-owner's good faith, and even to compensate him for his property. But the new Puritanism--or, perhaps more accurately, considering theshades of prefixes, the neo-Puritanism--is a frank harking back to theprimitive spirit. The original Puritan of the bleak New England coastwas not content to flay his own wayward carcass: full satisfaction didnot sit upon him until he had jailed a Quaker. That is to say, thesinner who excited his highest zeal and passion was not so much himselfas his neighbour; to borrow a term from psychopathology, he was less themasochist than the sadist. And it is that very peculiarity which setsoff his descendant of today from the ameliorated Puritan of the erabetween the Revolution and the Civil War. The new Puritanism is notascetic, but militant. Its aim is not to lift up saints but to knockdown sinners. Its supreme manifestation is the vice crusade, an armedpursuit of helpless outcasts by the whole military and naval forces ofthe Republic. Its supreme hero is Comstock Himself, with his pious boastthat the sinners he jailed during his astounding career, if gatheredinto one penitential party, would have filled a train of sixty-onecoaches, allowing sixty to the coach. 

So much for the general trend and tenor of the movement. At the bottomof it, it is plain, there lies that insistent presentation of the ideaof sin, that enchantment by concepts of carnality, which has engaged acertain type of man, to the exclusion of all other notions, since thedawn of history. The remote ancestors of our Puritan-Philistines oftoday are to be met with in the Old Testament and the New, and theirnearer grandfathers clamoured against the snares of the flesh in allthe councils of the Early Church. Not only Western Christianity has hadto reckon with them: they have brothers today among the Mohammedan Sufiand in obscure Buddhist sects, and they were the chief preachers of theRussian Raskol, or Reformation. "The Ironsides of Cromwell and thePuritans of New England, " says Heard, in his book on the Russian church, "bear a strong resemblance to the Old Believers. " But here, in the main, we have asceticism more than Puritanism, as it is now visible; here thesinner combated is chiefly the one within. How are we to account for thewholesale transvaluation of values that came after the Civil War, thetransfer of ire from the Old Adam to the happy rascal across the street, the sinister rise of a new Inquisition in the midst of a growing luxurythat even the Puritans themselves succumbed to? The answer is to besought, it seems to me, in the direction of the Golden Calf--in thedirection of the fat fields of our Midlands, the full nets of our lakesand coasts, the factory smoke of our cities--even in the direction ofWall Street, that devil's chasm. In brief, Puritanism has becomebellicose and tyrannical by becoming rich. The will to power has beenaroused to a high flame by an increase in the available draught andfuel, as militarism is engendered and nourished by the presence of menand materials. Wealth, discovering its power, has reached out its longarms to grab the distant and innumerable sinner; it has gone down intoits deep pockets to pay for his costly pursuit and flaying; it hascreated the Puritan _entrepreneur_, the daring and imaginative organizerof Puritanism, the baron of moral endeavour, the invincible prophet ofnew austerities. And, by the same token, it has issued its letters ofmarque to the Puritan mercenary, the professional hound of heaven, themoral _Junker_, the Comstock, and out of his skill at his trade therehas arisen the whole machinery, so complicated and so effective, of thenew Holy Office. 

Poverty is a soft pedal upon all branches of human activity, notexcepting the spiritual, and even the original Puritans, for all theirfire, felt its throttling caress. I think it is Bill Nye who hashumorously pictured their arduous life: how they had to dig clams allwinter that they would have strength enough to plant corn, and how theyhad to hoe corn all summer that they would have strength enough to digclams. That low ebb of fortune worked against the full satisfaction oftheir zeal in two distinct ways. On the one hand, it kept them butill-prepared for the cost of offensive enterprise: even their occasionalmissionarying raids upon the Indians took too much productive energyfrom their business with the corn and the clams. And on the other hand, it kept a certain restraining humility in their hearts, so that forevery Quaker they hanged, they let a dozen go. Poverty, of course, is nodiscredit, but at all events, it is a subtle criticism. The manoppressed by material wants is not in the best of moods for the moreambitious forms of moral adventure. He not only lacks the means; he isalso deficient in the self-assurance, the sense of superiority, thesecure and lofty point of departure. If he is haunted by notions of thesinfulness of his neighbours, he is apt to see some of its worstmanifestations within himself, and that disquieting discovery will tendto take his thoughts from the other fellow. It is by no arbitrary fiat, indeed, that the brothers of all the expiatory orders are vowed topoverty. History teaches us that wealth, whenever it has come to them bychance, has put an end to their soul-searching. The Puritans of theelder generations, with few exceptions, were poor. Nearly all Americans, down to the Civil War, were poor. And being poor, they subscribed to a_Sklavenmoral_. That is to say, they were spiritually humble. Their eyeswere fixed, not upon the abyss below them, but upon the long and rockyroad ahead of them. Their moral passion spent most of its force inself-accusing, self-denial and self-scourging. They began by howlingtheir sins from the mourners' bench; they came to their end, many ofthem, in the supreme immolation of battle. 

But out of the War came prosperity, and out of prosperity came a newmorality, to wit, the _Herrenmoral_. Many great fortunes were made inthe War itself; an uncountable number got started during the two decadesfollowing. What is more, this material prosperity was generallydispersed through all classes: it affected the common workman and theremote farmer quite as much as the actual merchant and manufacturer. Itsfirst effect, as we all know, was a universal cockiness, a rise inpretensions, a comforting feeling that the Republic was a success, andwith it, its every citizen. This change made itself quickly obvious, andeven odious, in all the secular relations of life. The American became asort of braggart playboy of the western world, enormously sure ofhimself and ludicrously contemptuous of all other men. And on theghostly side there appeared the same accession of confidence, the samesure assumption of authority, though at first less self-evidently andoffensively. The religion of the American thus began to lose its inwarddirection; it became less and less a scheme of personal salvation andmore and more a scheme of pious derring-do. The revivals of the 70's hadall the bounce and fervour of those of half a century before, but themourners' bench began to lose its standing as their symbol, and in itsplace appeared the collection basket. Instead of accusing himself, theconvert volunteered to track down and bring in the other fellow. Hisenthusiasm was not for repentance, but for what he began to callservice. In brief, the national sense of energy and fitness graduallysuperimposed itself upon the national Puritanism, and from that marriagesprung a keen _Wille zur Macht_, a lusty will to power. [42] The AmericanPuritan, by now, was not content with the rescue of his own soul; hefelt an irresistible impulse to hand salvation on, to disperse andmultiply it, to ram it down reluctant throats, to make it free, universal and compulsory. He had the men, he had the guns and he had themoney too. All that was needed was organization. The rescue of theunsaved could be converted into a wholesale business, unsentimentallyand economically conducted, and with all the usual aids to efficiency, from skilful sales management to seductive advertising, and fromrigorous accounting to the diligent shutting off of competition. 

Out of that new will to power came many enterprises more or less futileand harmless, with the "institutional" church at their head. Piety wascunningly disguised as basketball, billiards and squash; the sinner waslured to grace with Turkish baths, lectures on foreign travel, and freeinstructions in stenography, rhetoric and double-entry book-keeping. Religion lost all its old contemplative and esoteric character, andbecame a frankly worldly enterprise, a thing of balance-sheets andponderable profits, heavily capitalized and astutely manned. There wasno longer any room for the spiritual type of leader, with his whitechoker and his interminable fourthlies. He was displaced by a briskgentleman in a "business suit" who looked, talked and thought like aseller of Mexican mine stock. Scheme after scheme for the swiftevangelization of the nation was launched, some of them of trulyastonishing sweep and daring. They kept pace, step by step, with themushroom growth of enterprise in the commercial field. The Y. M. C. A. Swelled to the proportions of a Standard Oil Company, a United StatesSteel Corporation. Its huge buildings began to rise in every city; itdeveloped a swarm of specialists in new and fantastic moral and socialsciences; it enlisted the same gargantuan talent which managed therailroads, the big banks and the larger national industries. And besideit rose the Young People's Society of Christian Endeavour, theSunday-school associations and a score of other such grandioseorganizations, each with its seductive baits for recruits and money. Even the enterprises that had come down from an elder and less expansiveday were pumped up and put on a Wall Street basis: the American BibleSociety, for example, began to give away Bibles by the million insteadof by the thousand, and the venerable Tract Society took on the feverishardour of a daily newspaper, even of a yellow journal. Down into our ownday this trustification of pious endeavour has gone on. The Men andReligion Forward Movement proposed to convert the whole country by 12o'clock noon of such and such a day; the Order of Gideons plans to makeevery traveller read the Bible (American Revised Version!) whether hewill or not; in a score of cities there are committees of opulentdevotees who take half-pages in the newspapers, and advertise theDecalogue and the Beatitudes as if they were commodities of trade. 

Thus the national energy which created the Beef Trust and the Oil Trustachieved equal marvels in the field of religious organization and byexactly the same methods. One needs be no psychologist to perceive inall this a good deal less actual religious zeal than mere lust forstaggering accomplishment, for empty bigness, for the unprecedented andthe prodigious. Many of these great religious enterprises, indeed, soonlost all save the faintest flavour of devotion--for example, the Y. M. C. A. , which is now no more than a sort of national club system, withits doors open to any one not palpably felonious. (I have drunkcocktails in Y. M. C. A. Lamaseries, and helped fallen lamas to bed. )But while the war upon godlessness thus degenerated into a secular sportin one direction, it maintained all its pristine quality, and even tookon a new ferocity in another direction. Here it was that the lamp ofAmerican Puritanism kept on burning; here, it was, indeed, that the lampbecame converted into a huge bonfire, or rather a blast-furnace, withflames mounting to the very heavens, and sinners stacked like cordwoodat the hand of an eager black gang. In brief, the new will to power, working in the true Puritan as in the mere religious sportsman, stimulated him to a campaign of repression and punishment perhapsunequalled in the history of the world, and developed an art of militantmorality as complex in technique and as rich in professors as the elderart of iniquity. 

If we take the passage of the Comstock Postal Act, on March 3, 1873, asa starting point, the legislative stakes of this new Puritan movementsweep upward in a grand curve to the passage of the Mann and Webb Acts, in 1910 and 1913, the first of which ratifies the Seventh Commandmentwith a salvo of artillery, and the second of which put the overwhelmingpower of the Federal Government behind the enforcement of theprohibition laws in the so-called "dry" States. The mind at once recallsthe salient campaigns of this war of a generation: first the attack upon"vicious" literature, begun by Comstock and the New York Society for theSuppression of Vice, but quickly extending to every city in the land;then the long fight upon the open gambling house, culminating in itspractical disappearance; then the recrudesence of prohibition, abandonedat the outbreak of the Civil War, and the attempt to enforce it in arapidly growing list of States; then the successful onslaught upon theLouisiana lottery, and upon its swarm of rivals and successors; then thegradual stamping-out of horse-racing, until finally but two or threeStates permitted it, and the consequent attack upon the pool-room; thenthe rise of a theatre-censorship in most of the large cities, and of amoving picture censorship following it; then the revival ofSabbatarianism, with the Lord's Day Alliance, a Canadian invention, inthe van; then the gradual tightening of the laws against sexualirregularity, with the unenforceable New York Adultery Act as a typicalproduct; and lastly, the general ploughing up and emotional discussionof sexual matters, with compulsory instruction in "sex hygiene" as itsmildest manifestation and the mediaeval fury of the vice crusade as itsworst. Differing widely in their targets, these various Puritanenterprises had one character in common: they were all efforts to combatimmorality with the weapons designed for crime. In each of them therewas a visible effort to erect the individual's offence against himselfinto an offence against society. Beneath all of them there was thedubious principle--the very determining principle, indeed, ofPuritanism--that it is competent for the community to limit andcondition the private acts of its members, and with it the inevitablecorollary that there are some members of the community who have aspecial talent for such legislation, and that their arbitrary fiats are, and of a right ought to be, binding upon all. 

§ 4

This is the essential fact of the new Puritanism; its recognition of themoral expert, the professional sinhound, the virtuoso of virtue. Underthe original Puritan theocracy, as in Scotland, for example, the chaseand punishment of sinners was a purely ecclesiastical function, andduring the slow disintegration of the theocracy the only changeintroduced was the extension of that function to lay helpers, andfinally to the whole body of laymen. This change, however, did notmaterially corrupt the ecclesiastical quality of the enterprise: theleader in the so-called militant field still remained the same man wholed in the spiritual field. But with the capitalization of Puritaneffort there came a radical overhauling of method. The secular arm, asit were, conquered as it helped. That is to say, the special business offorcing sinners to be good was taken away from the preachers and putinto the hands of laymen trained in its technique and mystery, and thereit remains. The new Puritanism has created an army of gladiators who arenot only distinct from the hierarchy, but who, in many instances, actually command and intimidate the hierarchy. This is conspicuouslyevident in the case of the Anti-Saloon League, an enormously effectivefighting organization, with a large staff of highly accomplished expertsin its service. These experts do not wait for ecclesiastical support, nor even ask for it; they force it. The clergyman who presumes toprotest against their war upon the saloon, even upon the quite virtuousground that it is not effective enough, runs a risk of condign andmerciless punishment. So plainly is this understood, indeed, that inmore than one State the clergy of the Puritan denominations openly takeorders from these specialists in excoriation, and court their favourwithout shame. Here a single moral enterprise, heavily capitalized andcarefully officered, has engulfed the entire Puritan movement, and apart has become more than the whole. [43]

In a dozen other directions this tendency to transform a religiousbusiness into a purely secular business, with lay backers and layofficers, is plainly visible. The increasing wealth of Puritanism hasnot only augmented its scope and its daring, but it has also had theeffect of attracting clever men, of no particular spiritual enthusiasm, to its service. Moral endeavour, in brief, has become a recognizedtrade, or rather a profession, and there have appeared men who pretendto a special and enormous knowledge of it, and who show enough truth intheir pretension to gain the unlimited support of Puritan capitalists. The vice crusade, to mention one example, has produced a large crop ofsuch self-constituted experts, and some of them are in such demand thatthey are overwhelmed with engagements. The majority of these men havewholly lost the flavour of sacerdotalism. They are not pastors, butdetectives, statisticians and mob orators, and not infrequently theirsecularity becomes distressingly evident. Their aim, as they say, is todo things. Assuming that "moral sentiment" is behind them, they overrideall criticism and opposition without argument, and proceed to thebusiness of dispersing prostitutes, of browbeating and terrorizing weakofficials, and of forcing legislation of their own invention throughCity Councils and State Legislatures. Their very cocksureness is theirchief source of strength. They combat objection with such violence andwith such a devastating cynicism that it quickly fades away. The moreastute politicians, in the face of so ruthless a fire, commonly professconversion and join the colours, just as their brethren went over toprohibition in the "dry" States, and the newspapers seldom hold out muchlonger. The result is that the "investigation" of the social evilbecomes an orgy, and that the ensuing "report" of the inevitable "vicecommission" is made up of two parts sensational fiction and three partsplatitude. Of all the vice commissions that have sat of late in theUnited States, not one has done its work without the aid of thesesingularly confident experts, and not one has contributed an originaland sagacious idea, nor even an idea of ordinary common sense, to thesolution of the problem. 

I need not go on piling up examples of this new form of Puritanactivity, with its definite departure from a religious foundation andits elaborate development as an everyday business. The impulse behind itI have called a _Wille zur Macht_, a will to power. In terms morehomely, it was described by John Fiske as "the disposition to domineer, "and in his usual unerring way, he saw its dependence on the gratuitousassumption of infallibility. But even stronger than the Puritan's beliefin his own inspiration is his yearning to make some one jump. In otherwords, he has an ineradicable liking for cruelty in him: he is asportsman even before he is a moralist, and very often his blood-lustleads him into lamentable excesses. The various vice crusades affordinnumerable cases in point. In one city, if the press dispatches are tobe believed, the proscribed women of the Tenderloin were pursued withsuch ferocity that seven of them were driven to suicide. And in anothercity, after a campaign of repression so unfortunate in its effects thatthere were actually protests against it by clergymen elsewhere, adistinguished (and very friendly) connoisseur of such affairs referredto it ingenuously as more fun "than a fleet of aeroplanes. " Suchdisorderly combats with evil, of course, produce no permanent good. Itis a commonplace, indeed, that a city is usually in worse conditionafter it has been "cleaned up" than it was before, and I need not pointto New York, Los Angeles and Des Moines for the evidence as to thesocial evil, and to any large city, East, West, North, South, for theevidence as to the saloon. But the Puritans who finance such enterprisesget their thrills, not out of any possible obliteration of vice, but outof the galloping pursuit of the vicious. The new Puritan gives no moreserious thought to the rights and feelings of his quarry than the gunnergives to the rights and feelings of his birds. From the beginning of theprohibition campaign, for example, the principle of compensation hasbeen violently opposed, despite its obvious justice, and a complaisantjudiciary has ratified the Puritan position. In England and on theContinent that principle is safeguarded by the fundamental laws, andduring the early days of the anti-slavery agitation in this country itwas accepted as incontrovertible, but if any American statesman were topropose today that it be applied to the license-holder whose lawfulfranchise has been taken away from him arbitrarily, or to the brewer ordistiller whose costly plant has been rendered useless and valueless, hewould see the days of his statesmanship brought to a quick and violentclose. 

But does all this argue a total lack of justice in the Americancharacter, or even a lack of common decency? I doubt that it would bewell to go so far in accusation. What it does argue is a tendency to putmoral considerations above all other considerations, and to definemorality in the narrow Puritan sense. The American, in other words, thinks that the sinner has no rights that any one is bound to respect, and he is prone to mistake an unsupported charge of sinning, provided itbe made violently enough, for actual proof and confession. What is more, he takes an intense joy in the mere chase: he has the true Puritan tastefor an _auto da fé_ in him. "I am ag'inst capital punishment, " said Mr. Dooley, "but we won't get rid av it so long as the people enjie it somuch. " But though he is thus an eager spectator, and may even be luredinto taking part in the pursuit, the average American is not disposed toinitiate it, nor to pay for it. The larger Puritan enterprises of todayare not popular in the sense of originating in the bleachers, but onlyin the sense of being applauded from the bleachers. The burdens of thefray, both of toil and of expense, are always upon a relatively smallnumber of men. In a State rocked and racked by a war upon the saloon, itwas recently shown, for example, that but five per cent. Of the membersof the Puritan denominations contributed to the war-chest. And yet theAnti-Saloon League of that State was so sure of support from below thatit presumed to stand as the spokesman of the whole Christian community, and even ventured to launch excommunications upon contumaciousChristians, both lay and clerical, who objected to its methods. Moreover, the great majority of the persons included in the contributingfive per cent. Gave no more than a few cents a year. The whole supportof the League devolved upon a dozen men, all of them rich and all ofthem Puritans of purest ray serene. These men supported a costlyorganization for their private entertainment and stimulation. It wastheir means of recreation, their sporting club. They were willing tospend a lot of money to procure good sport for themselves--_i. E. _, toprocure the best crusading talent available--and they were so successfulin that endeavour that they enchanted the populace too, and so shook theState. 

Naturally enough, this organization of Puritanism upon a business andsporting basis has had a tendency to attract and create a type of"expert" crusader whose determination to give his employers a good showis uncontaminated by any consideration for the public welfare. Theresult has been a steady increase of scandals, a constant collapse ofmoral organizations, a frequent unveiling of whited sepulchres. Variousobservers have sought to direct the public attention to this significantcorruption of the new Puritanism. The New York _Sun_, for example, inthe course of a protest against the appointment of a vice commission forNew York, has denounced the paid agents of private reform organizationsas "notoriously corrupt, undependable and dishonest, " and the Rev. Dr. W. S. Rainsford, supporting the charge, has borne testimony out of hisown wide experience to their lawlessness, their absurd pretensions tospecial knowledge, their habit of manufacturing evidence, and theirdevious methods of shutting off criticism. But so far, at all events, no organized war upon them has been undertaken, and they seem toflourish more luxuriantly year after year. The individual whose commonrights are invaded by such persons has little chance of getting justice, and less of getting redress. When he attempts to defend himself he findsthat he is opposed, not only by a financial power that is ample for allpurposes of the combat and that does not shrink at intimidating juries, prosecuting officers and judges, but also by a shrewdness which shapesthe laws to its own uses, and takes full advantage of the miserablecowardice of legislatures. The moral gladiators, in brief, know thegame. They come before a legislature with a bill ostensibly designed tocure some great and admitted evil, they procure its enactment byscarcely veiled insinuations that all who stand against it must beapologists for the evil itself, and then they proceed to extend its aimsby bold inferences, and to dragoon the courts into ratifying thoseinferences, and to employ it as a means of persecution, terrorism andblackmail. The history of the Mann Act offers a shining example of thispurpose. It was carried through Congress, over the veto of PresidentTaft, who discerned its extravagance, on the plea that it was needed toput down the traffic in prostitutes; it is enforced today against menwho are no more engaged in the traffic in prostitutes than you or I. Naturally enough, the effect of this extension of its purposes, againstwhich its author has publicly protested, has been to make it a trulydeadly weapon in the hands of professional Puritans and of denouncers ofdelinquency even less honest. "Blackmailers of both sexes have arisen, "says Mr. Justice McKenna, "using the terrors of the construction nowsanctioned by the [Supreme] Court as a help--indeed, the means--fortheir brigandage. The result is grave and should give us pause. "[44]

But that is as far as objection has yet gone; the majority of thelearned jurist's colleagues swallowed both the statute and itsconsequences. [45] There is, indeed, no sign as yet of any organized warupon the alliance between the blackmailing Puritan and thepseudo-Puritan blackmailer. It must wait until a sense of reason andjustice shows itself in the American people, strong enough to overcometheir prejudice in favour of the moralist on the one hand, and theirdelight in barbarous pursuits and punishments on the other. I see butfaint promise of that change today. 

§ 5

I have gone into the anatomy and physiology of militant Puritanismbecause, so far as I know, the inquiry has not been attempted before, and because a somewhat detailed acquaintance with the forces behind sogrotesque a manifestation as comstockery, the particular business of thepresent essay, is necessary to an understanding of its workings, and ofits prosperity, and of its influence upon the arts. Save one turn toEngland or to the British colonies, it is impossible to find a parallelfor the astounding absolutism of Comstock and his imitators in anycivilized country. No other nation has laws which oppress the arts soignorantly and so abominably as ours do, nor has any other nation handedover the enforcement of the statutes which exist to agencies so openlypledged to reduce all aesthetic expression to the service of a stupidand unworkable scheme of rectitude. I have before me as I write apamphlet in explanation of his aims and principles, prepared by Comstockhimself and presented to me by his successor. Its very title is asufficient statement of the Puritan position: "MORALS, Not Art orLiterature. "[46] The capitals are in the original. And within, as asort of general text, the idea is amplified: "It is a question of peace, good order and morals, and not art, literature or science. " Here we havea statement of principle that, at all events, is at least quite frank. There is not the slightest effort to beg the question; there is nohypocritical pretension to a desire to purify or safeguard the arts;they are dismissed at once as trivial and degrading. And jury after juryhas acquiesced in this; it was old Anthony's boast, in his last days, that his percentage of convictions, in 40 years, had run to 98. 5. [47]

Comstockery is thus grounded firmly upon that profound nationalsuspicion of the arts, that truculent and almost unanimous Philistinism, which I have described. It would be absurd to dismiss it as anexcrescence, and untypical of the American mind. But it is typical, too, in the manner in which it has gone beyond that mere partiality to theaccumulation of a definite power, and made that power irresponsible andalmost irresistible. It was Comstock himself, in fact, who invented theprocess whereby his followers in other fields of moral endeavour haveforced laws into the statute books upon the pretence of putting downJohn Doe, an acknowledged malefactor, and then turned them savagely uponRichard Roe, a peaceable, well-meaning and hitherto law-abiding man. Andit was Comstock who first capitalized moral endeavour like baseball orthe soap business, and made himself the first of its kept professors, and erected about himself a rampart of legal and financial immunitywhich rid him of all fear of mistakes and their consequences, and soenabled him to pursue his jehad with all the advantages in his favour. He was, in brief, more than the greatest Puritan gladiator of his time;he was the Copernicus of a quite new art and science, and he devised atechnique and handed down a professional ethic that no rival has beenable to better. 

The whole story is naïvely told in "Anthony Comstock, Fighter, "[48] awork which passed under the approving eye of the old war horse himselfand is full of his characteristic pecksniffery. [49] His beginnings, itappears, were very modest. When he arrived in New York from theConnecticut hinterland, he was a penniless and uneducated clod-hopper, just out of the Union army, and his first job was that of a porter in awholesale dry-goods house. But he had in him several qualities of thetraditional Yankee which almost always insure success, and it was notlong before he began to make his way. One of these qualities was atalent for bold and ingratiating address; another was a vast appetitefor thrusting himself into affairs, a yearning to run things--what thePuritan calls public spirit. The two constituted his fortune. The secondbrought him into intimate relations with the newly-organized Young Men'sChristian Association, and led him to the discovery of a form of moralendeavour that was at once novel and fascinating--the unearthing anddenunciation of "immoral" literature. The first, once he had attractedattention thereby, got him the favourable notice, and finally theunlimited support, of the late Morris K. Jesup, one of the earliest andperhaps the greatest of the moral _entrepreneurs_ that I have described. Jesup was very rich, and very eager to bring the whole nation up tograce by _force majeure_. He was the banker of at least a dozengrandiose programs of purification in the seventies and eighties. InComstock he found precisely the sort of field agent that he was lookingfor, and the two presently constituted the most formidable team ofprofessional reformers that the country had ever seen. 

The story of the passage of the Act of Congress of March 3, 1873, [50]under cover of which the Comstock Society still carries on its campaignsof snouting and suppression, is a classical tale of Puritan impudenceand chicanery. Comstock, with Jesup and other rich men backing himfinancially and politically, [51] managed the business. First, a numberof spectacular raids were made on the publishers of such pornographicbooks as "The Memoirs of Fanny Hill" and "Only a Boy. " Then thenewspapers were filled with inflammatory matter about the wide dispersalof such stuff, and its demoralizing effects upon the youth of therepublic. Then a committee of self-advertising clergymen and "Christianmillionaires" was organized to launch a definite "movement. " And then adirect attack was made upon Congress, and, to the tune of fiery moralindignation, the bill prepared by Comstock himself was forced throughboth houses. All opposition, if only the opposition of inquiry, wasoverborne in the usual manner. That is to say, every Congressman whopresumed to ask what it was all about, or to point out obvious defectsin the bill, was disposed of by the insinuation, or even the directcharge, that he was a covert defender of obscene books, and, byinference, of the carnal recreations described in them. We have grownfamiliar of late with this process: it was displayed at full length inthe passage of the Mann Act, and again when the Webb Act and theProhibition Amendment were before Congress. In 1873 its effectivenesswas helped out by its novelty, and so the Comstock bill was rushedthrough both houses in the closing days of a busy session, and PresidentGrant accommodatingly signed it. 

Once it was upon the books, Comstock made further use of the prevailinguproar to have himself appointed a special agent of the PostofficeDepartment to enforce it, and with characteristic cunning refused totake any salary. Had his job carried a salary, it would have excited theacquisitiveness of other virtuosi; as it was, he was secure. As for thenecessary sinews of war, he knew well that he could get them from Jesup. Within a few weeks, indeed, the latter had perfected a specialorganization for the enforcement of the new statute, and it stillflourishes as the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; or, asit is better known, the Comstock Society. The new Federal Act, dealingonly with the mails, left certain loopholes; they were plugged up byfastening drastic amendments upon the New York Code of CriminalProcedure--amendments forced through the legislature precisely as theFederal Act had been forced through Congress. [52] With these laws in hishands Comstock was ready for his career. It was his part of thearrangement to supply the thrills of the chase; it was Jesup's part tofind the money. The partnership kept up until the death of Jesup, in1908, and after that Comstock readily found new backers. Even his owndeath, in 1915, did not materially alter a scheme of things whichoffered such admirable opportunities for the exercise of the Puritanlove of spectacular and relentless pursuit, the Puritan delusion ofmoral grandeur and infallibility, the Puritan will to power. 

Ostensibly, as I have said, the new laws were designed to put down thetraffic in frankly pornographic books and pictures--a traffic which, ofcourse, found no defenders--but Comstock had so drawn them that theiractual sweep was vastly wider, and once he was firmly in the saddle hisenterprises scarcely knew limits. Having disposed of "The Confessions ofMaria Monk" and "Night Life in Paris, " he turned to Rabelais and theDecameron, and having driven these ancients under the book-counters, hepounced upon Zola, Balzac and Daudet, and having disposed of these too, he began a _pogrom_ which, in other hands, eventually brought down suchastounding victims as Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" and HaroldFrederic's "The Damnation of Theron Ware. " All through the eighties andnineties this ecstatic campaign continued, always increasing in violenceand effectiveness. Comstock became a national celebrity; his doings wereas copiously reported by the newspapers as those of P. T. Barnum or JohnL. Sullivan. Imitators sprang up in all the larger cities: there washardly a public library in the land that did not begin feverishlyexpurgating its shelves; the publication of fiction, and particularly offoreign fiction, took on the character of an extra hazardous enterprise. Not, of course, that the reign of terror was not challenged, andComstock himself denounced. So early as 1876 a national organizationdemanding a reasonable amendment of the postal laws got on its legs; inthe late eighties "Citizen" George Francis Train defied the whirlwind byprinting the Old Testament as a serial; many indignant victims, acquitted by some chance in the courts, brought suit against Comstockfor damages. Moreover, an occasional judge, standing out boldly againstthe usual intimidation, denounced him from the bench; one of them, JudgeJenkins, accused him specifically of "fraud and lying" and other"dishonest practices. "[53] But the spirit of American Puritanism was onhis side. His very extravagances at once stimulated and satisfied thenational yearning for a hot chase, a good show--and in the complaints ofhis victims, that the art of letters was being degraded, that thecountry was made ridiculous, the newspaper-reading populace could see nomore than an affectation. The reform organization of 1876 lasted butfive years; and then disbanded without having accomplished anything;Train was put on trial for "debauching the young" with an "obscene"serial;[54] juries refused to bring in punitive verdicts against themaster showman. 

In carrying on this way of extermination upon all ideas that violatedtheir private notions of virtue and decorum, Comstock and his followerswere very greatly aided by the vagueness of the law. It prohibited theuse of the mails for transporting all matter of an "obscene, lewd, lascivious ... Or filthy" character, but conveniently failed to definethese adjectives. As a result, of course, it was possible to bring anaccusation against practically _any_ publication that aroused thecomstockian blood-lust, however innocently, and to subject the personsresponsible for it to costly, embarrassing and often dangerouspersecution. No man, said Dr. Johnson, would care to go on trial for hislife once a week, even if possessed of absolute proofs of his innocence. By the same token, no man wants to be arraigned in a criminal court, and displayed in the sensational newspapers, as a purveyor of indecency, however strong his assurance of innocence. Comstock made use of thisfact in an adroit and characteristically unconscionable manner. He heldthe menace of prosecution over all who presumed to dispute his tyranny, and when he could not prevail by a mere threat, he did not hesitate tobegin proceedings, and to carry them forward with the aid of floridproclamations to the newspapers and ill concealed intimidations ofjudges and juries. 

The last-named business succeeded as it always does in this country, where the judiciary is quite as sensitive to the suspicion of sinfulnessas the legislative arm. A glance at the decisions handed down during theforty years of Comstock's chief activity shows a truly amazingwillingness to accommodate him in his pious enterprises. On the onehand, there was gradually built up a court-made definition of obscenitywhich eventually embraced almost every conceivable violation of Puritanprudery, and on the other hand the victim's means of defence weresteadily restricted and conditioned, until in the end he had scarcelyany at all. This is the state of the law today. It is held in theleading cases that anything is obscene which may excite "impurethoughts" in "the minds ... Of persons that are susceptible to impurethoughts, "[55] or which "tends to deprave the minds" of any who, becausethey are "young and inexperienced, " are "open to suchinfluences"[56]--in brief, that anything is obscene that is not fit tobe handed to a child just learning to read, or that may imaginablystimulate the lubricity of the most foul-minded. It is held further thatwords that are perfectly innocent in themselves--"words, abstractlyconsidered, [that] may be free from vulgarism"--may yet be assumed, by afriendly jury, to be likely to "arouse a libidinous passion ... In themind of a modest woman. " (I quote exactly! The court failed to define"modest woman. ")[57] Yet further, it is held that any book is obscene"which is unbecoming, immodest.... "[58] Obviously, this last decisionthrows open the door to endless imbecilities, for its definition merelybegs the question, and so makes a reasonable solution ten times harder. It is in such mazes that the Comstocks safely lurk. Almost any printedallusion to sex may be argued against as unbecoming in a moralrepublic, and once it is unbecoming it is also obscene. 

In meeting such attacks the defendant must do his fighting withoutweapons. He cannot allege in his defence that the offending work was putforth for a legitimate, necessary and decent purpose;[59] he cannotallege that a passage complained of is from a standard work, itself ingeneral circulation;[60] he cannot offer evidence that the person towhom a book or picture was sold or exhibited was not actually depravedby it, or likely to be depraved by it;[61] he cannot rest his defence onits lack of such effect upon the jurymen themselves;[62] he cannot pleadthat the alleged obscenity, in point of fact, is couched in decent andunobjectionable language;[63] he cannot plead that the same or a similarwork has gone unchallenged elsewhere;[64] he cannot argue that thecirculation of works of the same class has set up a presumption oftoleration, and a tacit limitation of the definition of obscenity. [65]The general character of a book is not a defence of a particularpassage, however unimportant; if there is the slightest descent to whatis "unbecoming, " the whole may be ruthlessly condemned. [66] Nor is it anadmissible defence to argue that the book was not generally circulated, and that the copy in evidence was obtained by an _agent provocateur_, and by false representations. [67] Finally, all the decisions deny thedefendant the right to introduce any testimony, whether expert orotherwise, that a book is of artistic value and not pornographic, andthat its effect upon normal persons is not pernicious. Upon this pointthe jury is the sole judge, and it cannot be helped to its decision bytaking other opinions, or by hearing evidence as to what is the generalopinion. 

Occasionally, as I have said, a judge has revolted against thisintolerable state of the court-and Comstock-made law, and directed ajury to disregard these astounding decisions. [68] In a recent New Yorkcase Judge Samuel Seabury actually ruled that "it is no part of the dutyof courts to exercise a censorship over literary productions. "[69] Butin general the judiciary has been curiously complaisant, and more thanonce a Puritan on the bench has delighted the Comstocks by prosecutingtheir case for them. [70] With such decisions in their hands and such aidfrom the other side of the bar, it is no wonder that they enter upontheir campaigns with impudence and assurance. All the odds are in theirfavour from the start. They have statutes deliberately designed to makethe defence onerous; they are familiar by long experience with all thetricks and surprises of the game; they are sheltered behindorganizations, incorporated without capital and liberally chartered bytrembling legislatures, which make reprisals impossible in case offailure; above all, they have perfected the business of playing upon thecowardice and vanity of judges and prosecuting officers. The newspapers, with very few exceptions, give them ready aid. Theoretically, perhaps, many newspaper editors are opposed to comstockery, and sometimes theydenounce it with great eloquence, but when a good show is offered theyare always in favour of the showman[71]--and the Comstocks are showmenof undoubted skill. They know how to make a victim jump and writhe inthe ring; they have a talent for finding victims who are prominentenough to arrest attention; they shrewdly capitalize the fact that thepursuer appears more heroic than the prey, and the further fact that thenewspaper reader is impatient of artistic pretensions and glad to see anartist made ridiculous. And behind them there is always the steadypressure of Puritan prejudice--the Puritan feeling that "immorality" isthe blackest of crimes, and that its practitioner has no rights. It wasby making use of these elements that Comstock achieved his prodigies, and it is by making use of them that his heirs and assigns keep up thesport today. Their livelihood depends upon the money they can raiseamong the righteous, and the amount they can raise depends upon thequality of the entertainment they offer. Hence their adept search forshining marks. Hence, for example, the spectacular raid upon the ArtStudents' League, on August 2, 1906. Hence the artful turning to theirown use of the vogue of such sensational dramatists as Eugène Brieux andGeorge Bernard Shaw, and of such isolated plays as "Trilby" and "Sapho. "Hence the barring from the mails of the inflammatory report of theChicago Vice Commission--a strange, strange case of dog eating dog. 

But here we have humour. There is, however, no humour in the case of aserious author who sees his work damaged and perhaps ruined by amalicious and unintelligent attack, and himself held up to publicobloquy as one with the vendors of pamphlets of flagellation and filthy"marriage guides. " He finds opposing him a flat denial of his decentpurpose as an artist, and a stupid and ill-natured logic that bafflessober answer. [72] He finds on his side only the half-hearted support ofa publisher whose interest in a single book is limited to his profitsfrom it, and who desires above all things to evade a nuisance and anexpense. Not a few publishers, knowing the constant possibility ofsudden and arbitrary attack, insert a clause in their contracts wherebyan author must secure them against damage from any "immoral" matter inhis book. They read and approve the manuscript, they print the book andsell it--but if it is unlucky enough to attract the comstockianlightning, the author has the whole burden to bear, [73] and if theyseek safety and economy by yielding, as often happens, he must consentto the mutilation or even the suppression of his work. The result isthat a writer in such a situation, is practically beaten before he canoffer a defence. The professional book-baiters have laws to theirliking, and courts pliant to their exactions; they fill the newspaperswith inflammatory charges before the accused gets his day in court; theyhave the aid of prosecuting officers who fear the political damage oftheir enmity, and of the enmity of their wealthy and influentialbackers; above all, they have the command of far more money than anyauthor can hope to muster. Finally, they derive an advantage from two ofthe most widespread of human weaknesses, the first being envy and thesecond being fear. When an author is attacked, a good many of his rivalssee only a personal benefit in his difficulties, and not a menace tothe whole order, and a good many others are afraid to go to his aidbecause of the danger of bringing down the moralists' rage uponthemselves. Both of these weaknesses revealed themselves very amusinglyin the Dreiser case, and I hope to detail their operations at somelength later on, when I describe that _cause célèbre_ in a separatework. 

Now add to the unfairness and malignancy of the attack its no lessdisconcerting arbitrariness and fortuitousness, and the path of theAmerican author is seen to be strewn with formidable entanglementsindeed. With the law what it is, he is quite unable to decide _a priori_what is permitted by the national delicacy and what is not, nor can heget any light from the recorded campaigns of the moralists. They seem tostrike blindly, unintelligently, without any coherent theory or plan. "Trilby" is assaulted by the united comstockery of a dozen cities, and"The Yoke" somehow escapes. "Hagar Revelly" is made the subject of adouble prosecution in the State and Federal courts, and "Love'sPilgrimage" and "One Man" go unmolested. The publisher ofPrzybyszewski's "Homo Sapiens" is forced to withdraw it; the publisherof Artzibashef's "Sanine" follows it with "The Breaking Point. " Theserious work of a Forel is brought into court as pornography, and thebooks of Havelock Ellis are barred from the mails; the innumerablevolumes on "sex hygiene" by tawdry clergymen and smutty old maids arecirculated by the million and without challenge. Frank Harris isdeprived of a publisher for his "Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confession"by threats of immediate prosecution; the newspapers meanwhile dedicatethousands of columns to the filthy amusements of Harry Thaw. GeorgeMoore's "Memoirs of My Dead Life" are bowdlerized, James Lane Allen's "ASummer in Arcady" is barred from libraries, and a book by D. H. Lawrenceis forbidden publication altogether; at the same time half a dozen cheapmagazines devoted to sensational sex stories attain to hundreds ofthousands of circulation. A serious book by David Graham Phillips, published serially in a popular monthly, is raided the moment it appearsbetween covers; a trashy piece of nastiness by Elinor Glyn goesunmolested. Worse, books are sold for months and even years withoutprotest, and then suddenly attacked; Dreiser's "The 'Genius, '"Kreymborg's "Edna" and Forel's "The Sexual Question" are examples. Stillworse, what is held to be unobjectionable in one State is forbidden inanother as _contra bonos mores_. [74] Altogether, there is madness, andno method in it. The livelihoods and good names of hard-striving anddecent men are at the mercy of the whims of a horde of fanatics andmountebanks, and they have no way of securing themselves against attack, and no redress for their loss when it comes. 

§ 6

So beset, it is no wonder that the typical American maker of booksbecomes a timorous and ineffective fellow, whose work tends inevitablytoward a feeble superficiality. Sucking in the Puritan spirit with thevery air he breathes, and perhaps burdened inwardly with an inheritanceof the actual Puritan stupidity, he is further kept upon the straightpath of chemical purity by the very real perils that I have justrehearsed. The result is a literature full of the mawkishness that thelate Henry James so often roared against--a literature almost whollydetached from life as men are living it in the world--in George Moore'sphrase, a literature still at nurse. It is on the side of sex that theappointed virtuosi of virtue exercise their chief repressions, for it issex that especially fascinates the lubricious Puritan mind; but theconventual reticence that thus becomes the enforced fashion in one fieldextends itself to all others. Our fiction, in general, is marked by anartificiality as marked as that of Eighteenth Century poetry or thelater Georgian drama. The romance in it runs to set forms and stalesituations; the revelation, by such a book as "The Titan, " that theremay be a glamour as entrancing in the way of a conqueror of men as inthe way of a youth with a maid, remains isolated and exotic. We have nofirst-rate political or religious novel; we have no first-rate warstory; despite all our national engrossment in commercial enterprise, wehave few second-rate tales of business. Romance, in American fiction, still means only a somewhat childish amorousness and sentimentality--thelove affairs of Paul and Virginia, or the pale adulteries of theirelders. And on the side of realism there is an almost equal vacuity andlack of veracity. The action of all the novels of the Howells schoolgoes on within four walls of painted canvas; they begin to shock oncethey describe an attack of asthma or a steak burning below stairs; theynever penetrate beneath the flow of social concealments and urbanitiesto the passions that actually move men and women to their acts, and thegreat forces that circumscribe and condition personality. So obvious apiece of reporting as Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" or Robert Herrick's"Together" makes a sensation; the appearance of a "Jennie Gerhardt" or a"Hagar Revelly" brings forth a growl of astonishment and rage. 

In all this dread of free inquiry, this childish skittishness in bothwriters and public, this dearth of courage and even of curiosity, theinfluence of comstockery is undoubtedly to be detected. It constitutes asinister and ever-present menace to all men of ideas; it affrights thepublisher and paralyzes the author; no one on the outside can imagineits burden as a practical concern. I am, in moments borrowed from morepalatable business, the editor of an American magazine, and I thus knowat first hand what the burden is. That magazine is anything but apopular one, in the current sense. It sells at a relatively high price;it contains no pictures or other baits for the childish; it is franklyaddressed to a sophisticated minority. I may thus assume reasonably, Ibelieve, that its readers are not sex-curious and itching adolescents, just as my colleague of the _Atlantic Monthly_ may assume reasonablythat his readers are not Italian immigrants. Nevertheless, as apractical editor, I find that the Comstocks, near and far, are oftenerin my mind's eye than my actual patrons. The thing I always have todecide about a manuscript offered for publication, before ever I giveany thought to its artistic merit and suitability, is the questionwhether its publication will be permitted--not even whether it isintrinsically good or evil, moral or immoral, but whether some rovingMethodist preacher, self-commissioned to keep watch on letters, willread indecency into it. Not a week passes that I do not decline somesound and honest piece of work for no other reason. I have a long listof such things by American authors, well-devised, well-imagined, well-executed, respectable as human documents and as works of art--butnever to be printed in mine or any other American magazine. It includesfour or five short stories of the very first rank, and the best one-actplay yet done, to my knowledge, by an American. All of these pieceswould go into type at once on the Continent; no sane man would think ofobjecting to them; they are no more obscene, to a normal adult, than hisown bare legs. But they simply cannot be printed in the United States, with the law what it is and the courts what they are. 

I know many other editors. All of them are in the same boat. Some ofthem try to get around the difficulty by pecksniffery more or lessopen--for example, by fastening a moral purpose upon works of art, andhawking them as uplifting. [75] Others, facing the intolerable fact, yield to it with resignation. And if they didn't? Well, if one of themdidn't, any professional moralist could go before a police magistrate, get a warrant upon a simple affidavit, raid the office of the offendingeditor, seize all the magazines in sight, and keep them impounded untilafter the disposition of the case. Editors cannot afford to take thisrisk. Magazines are perishable goods. Even if, after a trial has beenhad, they are returned, they are worthless save as waste paper. And whatmay be done with copies found in the actual office of publication may bedone too with copies found on news-stands, and not only in one city, butin two, six, a dozen, a hundred. All the costs and burdens of thecontest are on the defendant. Let him be acquitted with honour, andinvited to dinner by the judge, he has yet lost his property, and theComstock hiding behind the warrant cannot be made to pay. In thisconcealment, indeed, lurk many sinister things--not forgetting personalenmity and business rivalry. The actual complainant is seldom uncovered;Comstockery, taking on a semi-judicial character, throws its charteredimmunity around the whole process. A hypothetical outrage? By no means. It has been perpetrated, in one American city or another, upon fullyhalf of the magazines of general circulation published today. Itspossibility sticks in the consciousness of every editor and publisherlike a recurrent glycosuria. [76]

But though the effects of comstockery are thus abominably insane andirritating, the fact is not to be forgotten that, after all, the thingis no more than an effect itself. The fundamental causes of all thegrotesque (and often half-fabulous) phenomena flowing out of it are tobe sought in the habits of mind of the American people. They are, as Ihave shown, besotted by moral concepts, a moral engrossment, a delusionof moral infallibility. In their view of the arts they are still unableto shake off the naïve suspicion of the Fathers. [77] A work of theimagination can justify itself, in their sight, only if it show a moralpurpose, and that purpose must be obvious and unmistakable. Even intheir slow progress toward a revolt against the ancestral Philistinism, they cling to this ethical bemusement: a new gallery of pictures iswelcomed as "improving, " to hear Beethoven "makes one better. " Anyquestioning of the moral ideas that prevail--the principal business, itmust be plain, of the novelist, the serious dramatist, the professedinquirer into human motives and acts--is received with the utmosthostility. To attempt such an enterprise is to disturb the peace--andthe disturber of the peace, in the national view, quickly passes overinto the downright criminal. 

These symptoms, it seems to me, are only partly racial, despite thepersistent survival of that third-rate English strain which shows itselfso ingenuously in the colonial spirit, the sense of inferiority, thefrank craving for praise from home. The race, in truth, grows mongrel, and the protest against that mongrelism only serves to drive in thefact. But a mongrel race is necessarily a race still in the stage ofreaching out for culture; it has not yet formulated defensiblestandards; it must needs rest heavily upon the superstitions that gowith inferiority. The Reformation brought Scotland among the civilizednations, but it took Scotland a century and a half to live down theReformation. [78] Dogmatism, conformity, Philistinism, the fear ofrebels, the crusading spirit; these are the marks of an upstart people, uncertain of their rank in the world and even of their direction. [79] Acultured European, reading a typical American critical journal, mustneeds conceive the United States, says H. G. Wells, as "a vain, garrulous and prosperous female of uncertain age and still moreuncertain temper, with unfounded pretensions to intellectuality and anideal of refinement of the most negative description ... The Aunt Errantof Christendom. "[80] There is always that blushful shyness, thattimorous uncertainty, broken by sudden rages, sudden enunciations ofimpeccable doctrine, sudden runnings amuck. Formalism is the hall-markof the national culture, and sins against the one are sins against theother. The American is school-mastered out of gusto, out of joy, out ofinnocence. He can never fathom William Blake's notion that "the lust ofthe goat is also to the glory of God. " He must be correct, or, in hisown phrase, he must bust. 

_Via trita est tutissima. _ The new generation, urged to curiosity andrebellion by its mounting sap, is rigorously restrained, regimented, policed. The ideal is vacuity, guilelessness, imbecility. "We arelooking at this particular book, " said Comstock's successor of "The'Genius, '" "from the standpoint of its harmful effect on female readersof immature mind. "[81] To be curious is to be lewd; to know is to yieldto fornication. Here we have the mediaeval doctrine still on its legs: achance word may arouse "a libidinous passion" in the mind of a "modest"woman. Not only youth must be safeguarded, but also the "female, " theuntrustworthy one, the temptress. "Modest, " is a euphemism; it takeslaws to keep her "pure. " The "locks of chastity" rust in the ClunyMuseum; in place of them we have comstockery.... 

But, as I have said in hymning Huneker, there is yet the munyonicconsolation. Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals. Wehave yet no delivery, but we have at least the beginnings of a revolt, or, at all events, of a protest. We have already reached, in Howells, our Hannah More; in Clemens, our Swift; in Henry James, our HoraceWalpole; in Woodberry, Robinson _et al. _, our Cowpers, Southeys andCrabbes; perhaps we might even make a composite and call it our Johnson. We are sweating through our Eighteenth Century, our era of sentiment, our spiritual measles. Maybe a new day is not quite so far off as itseems to be, and with it we may get our Hardy, our Conrad, ourSwinburne, our Thomas, our Moore, our Meredith and our Synge. 

THE END

FOOTNOTES:

[38] American Literature, tr. By Julia Franklin; New York, Doubleday, Page & Co. , 1915. 

[39] New York, Dodd, Mead & Co. , 1916. 

[40] The first edition for public sale did not appear until June, 1917, and in it the preface was suppressed. 

[41] Second edition; Boston, Little, Brown & Co. , 1859, xxvi. 

[42] _Cf. _ The Puritan, by Owen Hatteras, _The Smart Set_, July, 1916;and The Puritan's Will to Power, by Randolph S. Bourne, _The SevenArts_, April, 1917. 

[43] An instructive account of the organization and methods of theAnti-Saloon League, a thoroughly typical Puritan engine, is to be foundin Alcohol and Society, by John Koren; New York, Henry Holt & Co. , 1916. 

[44] U. S. Rep. , vol. 242, No. 7, p. 502. 

[45] The majority opinion, written by Mr. Justice Day, is given in U. S. Rep. , vol. 242, no. 7, pp. 482-496. 

[46] New York, (1914). 

[47] I quote from page 157 of Anthony Comstock, Fighter, the officialbiography. On page 239 the number of his prosecutions is given as 3, 646, with 2, 682 convictions, which works out to but 73 per cent. He iscredited with having destroyed 50 tons of books, 28, 425 pounds ofstereotype plates, 16, 900 photographic negatives, and 3, 984, 063photographs--enough to fill "sixteen freight cars, fifteen loaded withten tons each, and the other nearly full. "

[48] By Charles Gallaudet Trumbull; New York, Fleming H. Revell Co. (1913). 

[49] An example: "All the evil men in New York cannot harm a hair of myhead, were it not the will of God. If it be His will, what right have Ior any one to say aught? I am only a speck, a mite, before God, yet nota hair of my head can be harmed unless it be His will. Oh, to live, tofeel, to be--Thy will be done!" (pp. 84-5). Again: "I prayed that, if mybill might not pass, I might go back to New York submissive to God'swill, feeling that it was for the best. I asked for forgiveness andasked that my bill might pass, if possible; but over and above all, thatthe will of God be done" (p. 6). Nevertheless, Comstock neglected nochance to apply his backstairs pressure to the members of both Houses. 

[50] Now, with amendments, sections 211, 212 and 245 of the UnitedStates Criminal Code. 

[51] _Vide_ Anthony Comstock, Fighter, pp. 81, 85, 94. 

[52] Now sections 1141, 1142 and 1143 of the Penal Laws of New York. 

[53] U. S. _vs. _ Casper, reported in the _Twentieth Century_, Feb. 11, 1892. 

[54] The trial court dodged the issue by directing the jury to find theprisoner not guilty on the ground of insanity. The necessaryimplication, of course, was that the publication complained of wasactually obscene. In 1895, one Wise, of Clay Center, Kansas, sent aquotation from the Bible through the mails, and was found guilty ofmailing obscene matter. See The Free Press Anthology, compiled byTheodore Schroeder; New York, Truth Seeker Pub. Co. , 1909, p. 258. 

[55] U. S. _vs. _ Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 368-9 (1877). 

[56] _Idem_, 362; People _vs. _ Muller, 96 N. Y. , 411; U. S. _vs. _ Clark, 38 Fed. Rep. 734. 

[57] U. S. _vs. _ Moore, 129 Fed. , 160-1 (1904). 

[58] U. S. _vs. _ Heywood, judge's charge, Boston, 1877. Quoted in U. S. _vs. _ Bennett, 16 Blatchford. 

[59] U. S. _vs. _ Slenker, 32 Fed. Rep. , 693; People _vs. _ Muller, 96 N. Y. 408-414; Anti-Vice Motion Picture Co. _vs. _ Bell, reported in the_New York Law Journal_, Sept. 22, 1916; Sociological Research FilmCorporation _vs. _ the City of New York, 83 Misc. 815; Steele _vs. _Bannon, 7 L. R. C. L. Series, 267; U. S. _vs. _ Means, 42 Fed. Rep. 605, etc. 

[60] U. S. _vs. _ Cheseman, 19 Fed. Rep. , 597 (1884). 

[61] People _vs. _ Muller, 96 N. Y. , 413. 

[62] U. S. _vs. _ Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 368-9. 

[63] U. S. _vs. _ Smith, 45 Fed. Rep. 478. 

[64] U. S. _vs. _ Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 360-1; People _vs. _ Berry, 1 N. Y. , Crim. R. , 32. 

[65] People _vs. _ Muller, 32 Hun. , 212-215. 

[66] U. S. _vs. _ Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 361. 

[67] U. S. _vs. _ Moore, 16 Fed. Rep. , 39; U. S. _vs. _ Wright, 38 Fed. Rep. , 106; U. S. _vs. _ Dorsey, 40 Fed. Rep. , 752; U. S. _vs. _ Baker, 155Mass. , 287; U. S. _vs. _ Grimm, 15 Supreme Court Rep. , 472. 

[68] Various cases in point are cited in the Brief on Behalf ofPlaintiff in Dreiser _vs. _ John Lane Co. , App. Div. 1st Dept. N. Y. , 1917. I cite a few: People _vs. _ Eastman, 188 N. Y. , 478; U. S. _vs. _Swearingen, 161 U. S. , 446; People _vs. _ Tylkoff, 212 N. Y. , 197; In thematter of Worthington Co. , 62 St. Rep. 116-7; St. Hubert Guild _vs. _Quinn, 64 Misc. , 336-341. But nearly all such decisions are in New Yorkcases. In the Federal courts the Comstocks usually have their way. 

[69] St. Hubert Guild _vs. _ Quinn, 64 Misc. , 339. 

[70] For example, Judge Chas. L. Benedict, sitting in U. S. _vs. _Bennett, _op. Cit. _ This is a leading case, and the Comstocks make muchof it. Nevertheless, a contemporary newspaper denounces Judge Benedictfor his "intense bigotry" and alleges that "the only evidence which hepermitted to be given was on the side of the prosecution. " (Port Jervis, N. Y. , _Evening Gazette_, March 22, 1879. ) Moreover, a juror in thecase, Alfred A. Valentine, thought it necessary to inform the newspapersthat he voted guilty only in obedience to judicial instructions. 

[71] _Vide_ Newspaper Morals, by H. L. Mencken, the _Atlantic Monthly_, March, 1914. 

[72] As a fair specimen of the sort of reasoning that prevails among theconsecrated brethren I offer the following extract from an argumentagainst birth control delivered by the present active head of the NewYork Society for the Suppression of Vice before the Women's City Club ofNew York, Nov. 17, 1916:

"Natural and inevitable conditions, over which we can have no control, will assert themselves wherever population becomes too dense. This hasbeen exemplified time after time in the history of the world whereover-population has been corrected by manifestations of nature or bywar, flood or pestilence.... Belgium may have been regarded as anover-populated country. Is it a coincidence that, during the past twoyears, the territory of Belgium has been devastated and its populationscattered throughout the other countries of the world?"

[73] For example, the printed contract of the John Lane Co. , publisherof Dreiser's The "Genius, " contains this provision: "The author herebyguarantees ... That the work ... Contains nothing of a scandalous, animmoral or a libelous nature. " The contract for the publication of The"Genius" was signed on July 30, 1914. The manuscript had been carefullyread by representatives of the publisher, and presumably passed as notscandalous or immoral, inasmuch as the publication of a scandalous orimmoral book would have exposed the publisher to prosecution. About8, 000 copies were sold under this contract. Two years later, in July, 1916, the Society for the Suppression of Vice threatened to begin aprosecution unless the book was withdrawn. It was withdrawn forthwith, and Dreiser was compelled to enter suit for a performance of thecontract. The withdrawal, it will be noticed, was not in obedience to acourt order, but followed a mere comstockian threat. Yet Dreiser was atonce deprived of his royalties, and forced into expensive litigation. Had it not been that eminent counsel volunteered for his defence, hispersonal means would have been insufficient to have got him even a dayin court. 

[74] The chief sufferers from this conflict are the authors of movingpictures. What they face at the hands of imbecile State boards ofcensorship is described at length by Channing Pollock in an articleentitled "Swinging the Censor" in the _Bulletin_ of the Authors' Leagueof America for March, 1917. 

[75] For example, the magazine which printed David Graham Phillips'Susan Lenox: Her Rise and Fall as a serial prefaced it with a moralencomium by the Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst. Later, when the novelappeared in book form, the Comstocks began an action to have itsuppressed, and forced the publisher to bowdlerize it. 

[76] An account of a typical prosecution, arbitrary, unintelligent anddisingenuous, is to be found in Sumner and Indecency, by Frank Harris, in _Pearson's Magazine_ for June, 1917, p. 556. 

[77] For further discussions of this point consult Art in America, byAleister Crowley, _The English Review_, Nov. , 1913; Life, Art andAmerica, by Theodore Dreiser, _The Seven Arts_, Feb. , 1917; and TheAmerican; His Ideas of Beauty, by H. L. Mencken, _The Smart Set_, Sept. , 1913. 

[78] _Vide_ The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. XI, p. 225. 

[79] The point is discussed by H. V. Routh in The Cambridge History ofEnglish Literature, vol. XI, p. 290. 

[80] In Boon; New York, George H. Doran Co. , 1915. 

[81] In a letter to Felix Shay, Nov. 24, 1916. 

INDEX

Abolitionists, 213, 231

Agnosticism, 14, 17

Alden, W. L. , on Conrad, 53

"Almayer's Folly, " 12, 16, 37, 42, 47, 51, 52, 56, 59

American Bible Society, 239

American mind, 25, 197-8, 207 et seq. 

"Amy Foster, " 36

Anglo-Saxon point of view, 20-3

Animal behaviour, theory of, 135

"Anthony Comstock, Fighter, " 254 _n_, 255 et seq. 

Anti-Saloon League, 244 et seq. , 249-50

Art Students' League raid, 269

Balzac, H. De, 15, 73, 76, 113, 155, 202, 260

"Banks of the Wabash, The, " 106

Beauty, Dreiser on, 126

Benedict, Judge Chas. L. , and Comstockery, 267 _n_. 

Bennett, Arnold, 19, 26, 32, 48, 62, 78, 104, 137, 142, 143

Bible, declared obscene, 261-2

Bierce, Ambrose, 146, 202, 216, 224

"Blue Sphere, The, " 126

_Bohemian Magazine_, 104

Bourne, Randolph, 147 _n_, 158, 237 _n_. 

Boynton, H. W. , 134, 158

British mind, 25

Brooks, Van Wyck, 134

_Butler, Edward Malia_, 116 et seq. , 119

Calvinism, 14, 139, 164, 197 et seq. 

Catholicism, Dreiser's, 75

Censorship, theatre, 241; moving picture, 242, 274

_Century Magazine_, 143, 221

"Chance, " 37, 48, 56, 60

Chicago Vice Commission, report of, 269

"Children of the Sea, " _see_ "Nigger of the Narcissus, The"

"Chopin: the Man and His Music, " 166, 169 et seq. 

Clemens, S. L. , _see_ Twain, Mark

Clifford, Hugh, 52, 54, 59

Comstock, Anthony, 253 et seq. 

Comstock Postal Acts of 1873, 241, 257 et seq. 

Comstocks, attack on Dreiser, 101-2, 140 et seq. 

Conrad, Joseph, birth and parentage, 20; first book, 51; early success, 53; pensioned, 54; his books as bibelots, 56; style, 36 et seq. ; materials, 40 et seq. ; irony, 13, 18; ethical agnosticism, 17, 29-32; on women, 33-5; statement of his task, 29; contrasted with other authors, 30, 45, 48-9, 88 et seq. , 96

_Cowperwood, Frank_, 79, 114 et seq. , 135, 201

Criticism in America, 153 et seq. , 191-2

Curle, Richard, 60

_Delineator_, 104

de Pachmann, Vladimir, 171, 178

Dewey, John, 152-3

Dime novels, Dreiser as editor of, 103

Doubleday, Page & Co. , 70, 100-1, 102

Drama League of America, 180, 182

Dreiser, Theodore, birth and parentage, 76-7, 106; early influences, 68 et seq. ; career in journalism, 98-105; first book, 70, 98 et seq. ; dates of books, 100, 105; plays, 105, 125-6; travel books, 105, 127-131; style, 79 et seq. , 113; mysticism, 12; agnosticism, 88 et seq. , 147; his novels criticized, 106 et seq. ; academic attitude toward, 131 et seq. ; attacked by Comstocks, 139 et seq. ; contrasted with Conrad, 34, 88 et seq. 

Dresser, Paul, 106, 130

"Egoists, " 179, 181

"End of the Tether, The, " 47

"Falk, " 16, 36, 39, 47, 59, 64

Fiction, English, 18, 19

"Financier, The, " 81, 86, 101, 105, 107, 114, 122, 138

Flaubert, Gustave, 73, 84, 136, 181

Follett, Wilson, 11, 13, 17, 60

Garnett, Edward, 52

"'Genius, ' The, " 80-1, 83, 86, 87, 93, 105, 107, 115, 122, 125, 139, 226, 270, 273, 282

_Gerhardt, Jennie_, 109-10, 119, 137

_Gerhardt, Jennie's_ father, 96, 117

German mind, 25

"Girl in the Coffin, The, " 125

Good Templars, 228-30

_Goorall, Yanko_, 12

Great Awakening of 1734, 227

Greenwich Village, 124, 145, 224

"Hand of the Potter, The, " 105

_Hanson, Minnie_, 85

Hardy, Thomas, 16, 62, 69, 71, 72, 76, 260

Harper & Bros. , 100-2, 105

Harvard, 163, 169, 177

"Heart of Darkness, " 35, 36, 41, 64

_Herrenmoral_, 236

_Heyst_, 12, 34, 59

"Hoosier Holiday, A, " 76, 86, 88, 92, 105, 106, 125, 127 et seq. 

Hope, Dreiser on, 126

Howells, W. D. , 28, 58, 74, 76, 97, 156, 159, 188, 205, 217, 218, 275, 282

Hueffer, Ford Madox, 53, 54

Huneker, James, birth and parentage, 164; in journalism, 167, 183; as music student, 166-7; as a critic, 159 et seq. , 190-4; books on music, 168-175; stories, 188-90; on Conrad, 59; his aims, 193; style, 180 et seq. 

_Hurstwood_, 99, 108-9

Ibsen, Henrik, 15, 23, 24, 40, 83, 124, 156, 160-1, 162, 182, 200

"Iconoclasts, " 169, 170, 179, 181

"Inheritors, The, " 42, 53, 56

"In the Dark, " 126

"Ivory, Apes and Peacocks, " 59

James, Henry, 58, 62, 113, 217, 218, 283

"Jennie Gerhardt, " 16, 71, 76-7, 82, 84, 96, 101, 105-9, 111-2, 117, 124, 276

Jesup, Morris K. , 257 et seq. 

_Jim, Lord_, 12, 16, 38, 39, 42, 59

_Jones, Althea_, 80-1, 85

Joseffy, Rafael, 167, 178

Kellner, Leon, 197 et seq. 

_Kultur-Novellen_, Huneker's, 188 et seq. 

_Kurtz_, 12, 16, 34, 38, 39, 59

Libraries, Dreiser's books in American, 143-5 _n_. 

"Life, Art and America, " 86, 88, 92, 105

"Lord Jim, " 36, 47, 56, 60

Lord's Day Alliance, 242

Love, Dreiser on, 126

_MacWhirr, Capt. _, 12, 37, 42

Mann Act, 241, 251-2, 258

_Marlow_, 36, 37

_Meeber, Carrie_, 40, 85, 99, 109 et seq. , 126, 137

"Melomaniacs, " 188 et seq. 

Men and Religions Forward Movement, 239

Methodism, 139, 197, 277

"Mezzotints in Modern Music, " 168

"Mirror of the Sea, The, " 50, 56

"Morals, Not Art or Literature, " 253

Naturalism, German, 77

"New Cosmopolis, " 165, 183 et seq. 

Nietzsche, F. W. , 15, 29, 90, 93, 136, 158, 162, 173, 180, 181, 183, 192, 193

"Nigger of the Narcissus, The, " 50, 52, 56

Norris, Frank, 15, 70, 71, 100, 108, 122, 163, 191, 224

"Nostromo, " 12, 38, 42, 45, 46-7, 48, 56

"Old Fogy, " 170 et seq. , 179, 181

"Old Ragpicker, " 125

"Outcast of the Islands, An, " 37

Page, Walter H. , 102

"Pathos of Distance, The, " 164

"Personal Record, A, " 37, 51, 88

Pilsner, 165, 184-5

"Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural, " 105, 125

Poe, Edgar Allan, 73, 151, 152, 154, 180-1, 189, 214, 221

"Point of Honor, The, " 42, 47

Prague, 165, 185-6

Prohibition, 228-9, 244 et seq. 

Prudery, American, 228

_Razumov_, 12, 34, 49

Resignationism, 14

"Return, The, " 42

"Romance, " 56

_Ruiz, Gaspar_, 12

Russia, Conrad's picture of, 49-50

Sea, Conrad's pictures of, 50-1

"Secret Agent, The, " 42, 48, 59, 60

"Set of Six, A. , " 56

"Shadow Line, The, " 12, 13, 47

Shakespeare, Wm. , 14-5, 61, 155, 121, 199, 204

Shaw, G. B. , 15, 16, 19, 26, 121-2, 161, 182, 269

"Sister Carrie, " 58, 70, 71, 73, 81, 84, 95, 97, 98 et seq. , 105, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112-3, 117, 119, 126, 143, 201

_Sklavenmoral_, 22, 235

Slav, qualities of, 14

"Some Reminiscences, " 37, 56. (_See also_ "Personal Record, A. ")

Sons of Temperance, 228

Street & Smith, 103-4

Symons, Arthur, 19, 28-9, 39

"Tales of Unrest, " 52, 56

"Titan, The, " 60, 77, 82, 86, 101, 105, 106, 111, 114, 117 et seq. , 129, 138, 201, 275

Train, George Francis, 261-2

"Traveler at Forty, A. , " 76, 82, 105, 125, 127

Truth, Dreiser on, 126

Twain, Mark, 15, 17, 30, 90, 131-2, 133, 143, 151, 202, 203-4, 217, 222

"Typhoon, " 12, 47, 50, 53

"Under Western Eyes, " 36, 42, 47, 48, 49, 56, 59

"Victory, " 13, 33, 42, 48, 55, 56

"Visionaries, " 188 et seq. 

Webb Law, 230, 241, 258

Wells, H. G. , 19, 32, 38, 48, 53, 62, 135, 142, 144, 281

_Wille zur Macht_, the Puritan, 237, 246

_Witla, Eugene_, 122 et seq. , 137, 140 et seq. 

Young Men's Christian Association, 230, 238, 240, 256

"Youth, " 12, 13, 37, 41, 48, 53, 54, 56, 64

Zola, Emile, 15-6, 63, 71-2, 76, 78, 113, 124, 136, 202, 216, 260