WHY AUTHORS GO WRONG
AND
OTHER EXPLANATIONS

WHY AUTHORS
GO WRONG
AND OTHER EXPLANATIONS

BY
GRANT M. OVERTON
AUTHOR OF “THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS”

NEW YORK
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
1919

Copyright, 1919,
BY
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY

CONTENTS

WHY AUTHORS GO WRONG
AND
OTHER EXPLANATIONS

WHY AUTHORS GO
WRONG
AND OTHER EXPLANATIONS

I
WHY AUTHORS GO WRONG

THE subject of Why Authors Go Wrong is one to answering which a book might adequately be devoted and perhaps we shall write a book about it one of these days, but not now. When, as and if written the book dealing with the question will necessarily show the misleading nature of Mr. Arnold Bennett’s title, The Truth About an Author—a readable little volume which does not tell the truth about an author in general, but only what we are politely requested to accept as the truth about Arnold Bennett. Mr. Bennett may or may not be telling the truth about himself in that book; his regard for the truth in respect of the characters of his fiction has been variable. Perhaps he is more scrupulous when it comes to himself, but we are at liberty to doubt it. For a man who will occasionally paint other persons—even fictionary persons—as worse than they really are may not unnaturally be expected to depict himself as somewhat better than he is.

We must not stay with Mr. Bennett any longer just now. It is enough that he has not been content to wait for the curtain to rise and has insisted on thrusting himself into our prologue. Exit; and let us get back where we were.

We were indicating that Why Authors Go Wrong is an extensive subject. It is so extensive because there are many authors and many, many more readers. It is extensive because it is a moral and not a literary question, a human and not an artistic problem. It is extensive because it is really unanswerable and anything that is essentially unanswerable necessitates prolonged efforts to answer it, this on the well-known theory that it is better that many be bored than that a few remain dissatisfied.

2

Let us take up these considerations one by one.

It seems unlikely that any one will misunderstand the precise subject itself. What, exactly, is meant by an author “going wrong”? The familiar euphemism, as perhaps most frequently used, is anything but ambiguous. Ambiguous-sounding words are generally fraught with a deadly and specific meaning—another illustration of the eternal paradox of sound and sense.

But as used in the instance of an author, “going wrong” has a great variety of meanings. An author has gone wrong, for example, when he has deliberately done work under his best; he has gone wrong when he has written for sentimental or æsthetic reasons and not, as he should, for money primarily; he has gone wrong when he tries to uplift or educate his readers; he has gone wrong when he has written too many books, or has not written enough books, or has written too fast or not fast enough, or has written what he saw and not what he felt, or what he felt and not what he saw, or posed in any fashion whatsoever.

Ezra Pound, for example, has gone atrociously wrong by becoming a French Decadent instead of remaining a son of Idaho and growing up to be an American. Of course as a French Decadent he will always be a failure; as Benjamin De Casseres puts it, “the reality underlying his exquisite art is bourgeois and American. He is a ghost materialized by cunning effects of lights and mirrors.”

3

Mr. Robert W. Chambers went wrong in an entirely different fashion. The usual charge brought against Mr. Chambers is that he consented to do less than his best because it profited him. This is entirely untrue. Mr. Chambers’s one mistake was that he did not write to make money. Every writer should, because writing is a business and a business is something which can only be decently conducted with that end in view. Fancy a real estate business which should not be conducted to make money! We should have to stop it immediately. It would be a menace to the community, for there is no telling what wickedness of purpose might lie behind it. A business not conducted primarily to make money is not a business but a blind; and very likely a cover for operations of a criminal character. The safety of mankind lies in knowing motives and is imperilled by any enterprise that disguises them.

And so for Mr. Chambers to refrain deliberately from writing to make money was a very wrong thing for him to do. Far from having a wicked motive, he had a highly creditable motive, which does not excuse him in the least. His praiseworthy purpose was to write the best that was in him for the sake of giving pleasure to the widest possible number of his readers. There does not seem to be much doubt that he has done it; those who most disapprove of him will hardly deny that the vast sales of his half a hundred stories are incontestable evidence of his success in his aim. But what is the result? On every hand he is misjudged and condemned. He is accused of acting on the right motive, which is called wrong! He is not blamed, as he should be, for acting on a wrong motive, which would, if understood, have been called right! What he should have done, of course, was to write sanely and consistently to make money, as did Amelia Barr. Mrs. Barr was not a victim of widespread contemporary injustice and Mr. Chambers is and will remain so.

Take another illustration—Mr. Winston Churchill. One of the ablest living American novelists, he has gone so wrong that it cannot honestly be supposed he will ever go right again. His earlier novels were not only delightful but actually important. His later novels are intolerable. In such a novel as The Inside of the Cup Mr. Churchill is not writing with the honorable and matter-of-course object of selling a large number of copies and getting an income from them; he is writing with the dishonorable and unavowed object of setting certain ideas before you, the contemplation of which will, in his opinion, do you good. He wants you to think about the horror of a clergyman in leading strings to his wealthiest parishioner. As a fact, there is no horror in such a situation and Mr. Churchill cannot conjure up any. There is no horror, there are only two fools. Now if a man is a fool, he’s a fool; he cannot become anything else, least of all a sensible man. A clergyman in thrall to a rich individual of his congregation is a fool; and to picture him as painfully emancipating himself and becoming not only sensible but, as it were, heroic is to ask us to accept a contradiction in terms. For a fool is not a man who lacks sense, but a man who cannot acquire sense. Not even a miracle can make him sensible; if it could there would be no trouble with The Inside of the Cup, for a miracle, being, as G. K. Chesterton says, merely an exceptional occurrence, will always be acquiesced in by the intelligent reader.

4

It would be possible to continue at great length giving examples of authors who have gone wrong and specifying the fifty-seven varieties of ways they have erred. But the mere enumeration of fallen authors is terribly depressing and quite useless. If we are to accomplish any good end we must try to find out why they have allowed themselves to be deceived or betrayed and what can be done in the shape of rescue work or preventive effort in the future. Perhaps we can reclaim some of them and guide others aright.

After a consideration of cases—we shall not clog the discussion with statistics and shall confine ourselves to general results—we have been led by all the evidence to the conclusion that the principal trouble is with the authors. Little or none of the blame for the unfortunate situation rests on their readers. Indeed, in the majority of cases the readers are the great and unyielding force making for sanity and virtue in the author. Without the persistent moral pressure exerted by their readers many, many more authors would certainly stray from the path of business rectitude—not literary rectitude, for there is no such thing. What is humanly right is right in letters and nothing is right in letters that is wrong in the world.

The commonest way in which authors go wrong is one already stated: By ceasing to write primarily for money, for a living and as much more as may come the writer’s way. The commonest reason why authors go wrong in this way is comical—or would be if it were not so common. They feel ashamed to write for money first and last; they are seized with an absurd idea that there is something implicitly disgraceful in acting upon such a motive. And so to avoid something that they falsely imagine to be disgraceful they do something that they know is disgraceful; they write from some other motive and let the reader innocently think they are writing with the old and normal and honorable motive.

So widespread is this delusion that it is absolutely necessary to digress for a moment and explain why writing to make money is respectable! Why is anything respectable? Because it meets a human necessity and meets it in an open and aboveboard fashion without detriment to society in general or the individual in particular. All lawful business conforms to this definition and writing for money certainly does. Writing—or painting or sculpturing or anything else—not done to make money is not respectable because (1) it meets no human necessity, (2) it is not done openly and aboveboard, (3) it is invariably detrimental to society, and (4) it is nearly always harmful to individuals, and most harmful to the individual engaged upon it.

It is useless to say that a man who writes or paints or carves for something other than money meets a human necessity—a spiritual thirst for beauty, perhaps. There is no spiritual thirst for beauty which cannot be satisfied completely by work done for an adequate and monetary reward. And to satisfy the human longing for the beautiful without requiring a proper price is to demoralize society by showing men that they can have something for nothing.

5

Now it is just here that the moral pressure of the great body of readers is felt, a pressure that is constantly misunderstood by the author. So surely as the writer has turned from writing to make money and has taken up writing for art’s sake (whatever that means) or writing for some ethical purpose or writing in the interest of some propaganda, though it be merely the propaganda of his own poor, single intellect—just so surely as he has done this his readers find him out. Whether they then continue to read him or not depends entirely on what they think of his new and unavowed (but patent) motive. Of course readers ought to be stern; having caught their author in a wrong motive they ought to punish him by deserting him instantly. But readers are human; they are even surprisingly selfish at times; they are capable of considering their own enjoyment, and, dreadful to say, they are capable of considering it first. So if, as in the case of Mr. Chambers, they find his new motive friendly and flattering they read him more than ever; on the other hand, if they find the changed purpose disagreeable or tiresome, aiming to uplift them or to shock them unpleasantly or (sometimes) to make fun of them, they quit that author cold. And they hardly ever come back. Usually the author is not perspicacious enough to grasp the cause of the defection; it is amazing how seldom authors think there can be anything wrong with themselves. Usually the abandoned author goes right over and joins a small sect of highbrows and proclaims the deplorable state of his national literature. “The public be damned!” he says in effect, but the public is not damned, it is he that is damned, and the public has done its utmost to save him.

Sometimes an author deliberately does work that is less than his best, but he never does this with the idea of making money, or, if he entertains that idea, he fools no one but himself. There are known and even (we believe) recorded instances of an author ridiculing his own output and avowing with what he probably thought audacious candor: “Of course, this latest story of mine is junk—but it’ll sell 100,000 copies!”

It never does. The author is perfectly truthful in describing the book as worthless. If he implies as he always will in such a case that he deliberately did less than his best he is an unconscious liar. It was his best and its worthlessness was solely the result of his total insincerity. For a man or woman may write a very bad book and write it with an utter sincerity that will sell hundreds of thousands of copies; but no one can write a very fine book insincerely and have it sell.

The author who thinks that he has written a rather inferior novel for the sake of huge royalties has actually written the best he has in him, namely, a piece of cheese. The author who has actually written beneath his best has not done it for money, but to avoid making money. He thinks it is his best; he thinks it is something utterly artistic, æsthetically wonderful, highbrowedly pure, lofty and serene; he scorns money; to make money by it would be to soil it. What he cannot see is that it is not his best; that it is very likely quite his worst; that when he has done his best he will unavoidably make money unless, like the misguided mortal we have just mentioned, deep insincerity vitiates his work.

We are therefore ready, before going further, to formulate certain paradoxical principles governing all literary work.

6

To understand why authors go wrong we must first understand how authors may go right. The paradoxical rules which if observed will hold the author to the path of virtue and rectitude may be formulated briefly as follows:

1. An author must write to make money first of all, and every other purpose must be secondary to this purpose of money making.

The paradoxy inherent in this principle is that while writing the author must never for a single moment think of the money he may make.

2. Every writer must have a stern and insistent moral purpose in his writing, and especially must he be animated by this purpose if he is writing fiction.

The paradoxy here is that never, under any circumstances, may the writer exhibit his moral purpose in his work.

3. A writer must not write too much nor must he write too little. He is writing too much if his successive books sell better and better; he is writing too little if each book shows declining sales.

This may appear paradoxical, but consider: If the writer’s work is selling with accelerated speed the market for his wares will very quickly be over-supplied. This happened to Mr. Kipling one day. He had the wisdom to stop writing almost entirely, to let his production fall to an attenuated trickle; with the result that saturation was avoided, and there is now and will long continue to be a good, brisk, steady demand for his product.

On the other hand, consider the case of Mrs. Blank (the reader will not expect us to be either so ungallant or so professionally unethical or so commercially unfair as to give her name). Mrs. Blank wrote a book every two or three years, and each was more of a plug than its predecessor. She began writing a book a year, and the third volume under her altered schedule was a best seller. It was also her best novel.

7

Then why? why? why? do the authors go wrong? Because, if we must say it in plain English, they disregard every principle of successful authorship. When they have written a book or two and have made money they get it into their heads that it is ignoble to write for money and they try to write for something else—for Art, usually. But it is impossible to write for Art, for Art is not an end but a means. When they do not try to write for Art they try to write for an Ethical Purpose, but they exhibit it as inescapably as if the book were a pulpit and the reader were sitting in a pew. Indeed, some modern fiction cannot be read unless you are sitting in a pew, and a very stiff and straight backed pew at that; not one of these old fashioned, roomy, high walled family pews such as Dickens let us sit in, pews in which one could be comfortable and easy and which held the whole family, pews in which you could box the children’s ears lightly without doing it publicly; no! the pews the novelists make us sit in these days are these confounded modern pews which stop with a jab in the small of your back and which are no better than public benches, but are intensely more uncomfortable—pews in which, to ease your misery, you can do nothing but look for the mote in your neighbor’s eye and the wrong color in your neighbor’s cravat.

Because—to get back to the whys of the authors—because when they are popular they overpopularize themselves, and when they are unpopular they lack the gumption to write more steadily and fight more gamely for recognition. We don’t mean critical recognition, but popular recognition. How can an author expect the public, his public, any public to go on swallowing him in increased amounts at meals placed ever closer together—for any length of time? And how, equally, can an author expect a public, his public, or any public, to acquire a taste for his work when he serves them a sample once a week, then once a month, then once a year? Why, a person could not acquire a taste for olives that way.

8

We have no desire to be personal for the sake of being personal, but we have every desire to be personal in this discussion for the sake of being impersonal, pointed, helpful and clear. It is time to take a perfectly fresh and perfectly illustrative example of how not to write fiction. We shall take the case of Mr. Owen Johnson and his new novel, Virtuous Wives.

Mr. Johnson will be suspected by the dense and conventional censors of American literature of having written Virtuous Wives to make money. Alackaday, no! If he had a much better book might have come from his typewriter. Mr. Johnson was not thinking primarily of money, as he should have been (prior to the actual writing of the story). He was filled with a moral and uplifting aim. He had been shocked to the marrow by the spectacle of the lives led by some New York women—the kind Alice Duer Miller writes discreetly about. The participation of America in the war had not begun. The performances of an inconsiderable few were unduly conspicuous. Mr. Johnson decided to write a novel that would hold up these disgusting triflers (and worse) to the scorn of sane and decent Americans. He set to work. He finished his book. It was serialized in one of the several magazines which have displaced forever the old Sunday school library in the field of Awful Warning literature. In these forums Mr. Galsworthy and Gouverneur Morris inscribe our present-day chronicles of the Schoenberg-Cotta family, and writ large over their instalments, as part of the editorial blurb, we read the expression of a fervent belief that Vice has never been so Powerfully, Brilliantly and Convincingly Depicted in All Its Horror by Any Pen. But we divagate.

Mr. Johnson’s novel was printed serially and appeared then as a book with a solemn preface—the final indecent exhibition, outside of the story itself, of his serious moral purpose. And as a book it is failing utterly of its purpose. It has sold and is selling and Mr. Johnson is making and will make money out of it—which is what he did not want. What he did want he made impossible when he unmasked his great aim.

The world may be perverse, but you have to take it as it is. The world may be childish, but none of us will live to see it grow up. If the world thinks you write with the honest and understandable object of making a living it attributes no ulterior motive to you. The world says: “John Smith, the butcher, sells me beefsteak in order to buy Mrs. Smith a new hat and the little Smiths shoes.” The world buys the steaks and relishes them. But if John Smith tells the world and his wife every time they come to his shop: “I am selling you this large, juicy steak to give you good red blood and make you Fit,” then the world and his wife are resentful and say: “We think we don’t like your large, juicy steaks. We are red blooded enough to have our own preferences. We will just go on down the street to the delicatessen—we mean the Liberty food shop—and buy some de-Hohenzollernized frankfurters, the well-known Liberty sausage. To hell with the Kaiser!” And so John Smith merely makes money. Oh, yes, he makes money; a large, juicy steak is a large, juicy steak no matter how deadly the good intent in selling it. But John Smith is defeated in his real purpose. He does not furnish the world and his wife with the red corpuscles he yearned to give them.

9

At this juncture we seem to hear exasperated cries of this character: “What do you mean by saying that an author must write for money first and last and yet must have a stern moral purpose? How can the two be reconciled? Why must he think of money until he begins to write and never after he begins to write? We understand why the moral object must not obtrude itself, but why need it be there at all?”

Can a man serve two masters? Can he serve money and morality? Foolish question No. 58,914! He not only can but he always does when his work is good.

A painter—a good painter—is a man who burns to enrich the world with his work and is determined to make the world pay him decently for it. A good sculptor is a man who has gritted his teeth with a resolution to give the world certain beautiful figures for which the world must reward him—or he will know the reason why! A good corset manufacturer is a man who is filled with an almost holy yearning to make people more shapely and more comfortable than he found them—and he is fanatically resolved that they shall acknowledge his achievement by making him rich!

For that’s the whole secret. How is a man to know that he has painted great portraits or landscapes or carved lovely monuments or made thousands shapelier and more easeful if not by the money they paid him? How is an author to know that he has amused or instructed thousands if not by the size of his royalty checks? By hearsay? By mind reading? By plucking the petals of a daisy—“They love me. They love me not”?

Every man can and must serve two masters, but the one is the thing that masters him and the other is the evidence of his mastery. Every man must before beginning work fix his mind intently upon the making of money, the money which shall be an evidence of his mastery; every man on beginning work and for the duration of the work must fix his mind intently and exclusively on the service of morality, the great master whose slave he is in the execution of an Invisible Purpose. And no man dare let his moral purpose expose itself in his work, for to do that is to do a presumptuous and sacrilegious thing. The Great Moralizer, who has in his hands each little one of us workers, holds his Purpose invisible to us; how then can we venture to make visible what He keeps invisible, how can we have the audacity to practice a technique that He Himself does not employ?

For He made the world and all that is in it. And He made it with a moral end in view, as we most of us believe. But not the wisest of us pretends that that moral object is clearly visible. It does not disclose itself to us directly; we are aware of it only indirectly; and are influenced by it forevermore. If the world was so made, who are we that think ourselves so much more adroit than Him as to be able to expose boldly what He veils and to reveal what He hath hidden?

There are those, of course, who see no moral explanation of the universe; but they are not always consistent. There is that famous passage of Joseph Conrad’s in which he declines the ethical view and says he would fondly regard the panorama of creation as pure spectacle—the marvellous spectacle being, perchance, a moral end in itself. And yet no man ever wrote with a deeper manifestation and a more perfect concealment of his moral purpose than Conrad; for exactly the thing to which all his tales are passionate witnesses is the sense of fidelity, of loyalty, of endurance—above all, the sense of fidelity—that exists in mankind. Man, in the Conradist view, is a creature of an inexhaustible loyalty to himself and to his fellows. This inner and utter fidelity it is which makes the whole legend of Lord Jim, which is the despairing cry that rings out at the last in Victory, which reaches lyric heights in Youth, which is the profound pathos of The End of the Tether, which, in its corruption by an incorruptible metal, the silver of the mine, forms the dreadful tragedy of Nostromo. An immortal, Conrad, but not the admiring and passive spectator he diffidently declares himself to be!

10

Have we covered all the cases? Obviously not. It is no more possible to deal with all the authors who go wrong than it is to call all the sinners to repentance. But sin is primarily a question between the sinner and his own conscience, and the errors of authors are invariably questions between the authors and the public. The public is the best conscience many an author has; and the substitution of a private self-justification for a public vindication has seldom been a markedly successful undertaking in human history. Yet there is a class of writers for whom no public vindication is possible; who affect, indeed, to scorn it; who set themselves up as little gods. They are the worshippers of Art. They are the ones who not only do not admit but who deliberately deny a moral purpose in anything; who think that a something they call pure Beauty is the sole end of existence, of work, of life, and is alone to be worshipped. It is a cult of Baal.

For these Artists despise money, and in despising money they cheapen themselves and become creatures of barter. They sneer at morality and reject it; immediately the world disappears: “And the earth was without form, and void.” They demoralize honest people with whom they come in contact by demolishing the possibly imperfect but really workable standards which govern normal lives—and never replacing them. What is their Beauty? It is what each one of them thinks beautiful. What is their Art? It is what each cold little selfish soul among them chooses to call Art. What is their achievement? Self-destruction. They are the spiritual suicides, they are the moral defectives, they are the outcasts of humanity, the lepers among the workers of the world. For them there can be neither pity nor forgiveness; for they deny the beauty of rewarded toil, the sincerity of honest labor, the mystical humanity of man.

Of them no more. Let us go back in a closing moment to the contemplation of the great body of men and women who labor cheerfully and honorably, if rather often somewhat mistakenly, to make their living, to do good work and make the world pay them for it, yet leaving with the world the firm conviction that it has had a little the better of the bargain! These are the authors who “go wrong,” and with whose well-meant errors we have been dealing, not very methodically but perhaps not unhelpfully. Is there, then, no parting word of advice we can give our authors? To be sure there is! When our authors are quite sure they will not go wrong, they may go write!

A BARBARIC YAWP

II
A BARBARIC YAWP

IT was the handy phrase to describe Walt Whitman: The “barbaric yawp.” In its elegant inelegance the neatly adjectived noun was felt to be really brilliant. Stump speakers “made the eagle scream”; a chap like Whitman had to be characterized handily too.

The epigrammatic mind is the card index mind. Now the remarkable thing about the card index is its casualty list. People who card index things are people who proceed to forget those things. The same metal rod that transfixes the perforated cards pierces the indexers’ brains. A mechanical device has been called into play. Brains are unnecessary any more. The day of pigeonholes was slightly better; for the pigeonholes were not unlike the human brain in which things are tucked away together, because they really have some association with each other. But the card index alphabetizes ruthlessly. Fancy an alphabetical brain!

Epigrams are like that. A man cannot take the trouble to think; he falls back on an epigram. He cannot take the trouble to remember and so he card indexes. The upshot is that he can find nothing in the card index and of course has no recollection to fall back on. Or he recalls the epigram without having the slightest idea what it was meant to signify.

But this is not to be about card indexes nor even about epigrams. It is to be a barbaric yawp, by which it is to be supposed was once meant the happy consciousness and the proud wonder that struck into the heart of an American poet. Whitman was not so much a poet as the chanteyman of Longfellow’s Ship of State. There was an hour when the chanteyman had an inspiration, when he saw as by an apocalyptic light all the people of these United States linked and joined in a common effort. Every man, woman and child of the millions tailed on the rope; every one of them put his weight and muscle to the task. It was a tremendous hour. It was the hour of a common effort. It was the hour for which, Walt felt, men had risked their lives a century earlier. It was a revealed hour; it had not yet arrived; but it was sure to come. And in the glow of that revelation the singer lifted up his voice and sang.... God grant he may be hearing the mighty chorus!

2

America is not a land, but a people. And a people may have no land and still they will remain a people. There has, for years, been no country of Poland; but there are Poles. There has been a country of Russia for centuries, but there is to-day no Russian people. What makes a people? Not a land certainly. Not political forms nor political sovereignty. Not even political independence. Nor, for that matter, voices that pretend or aspire to speak the thoughts of a nation. Poland has had such voices and Russia has had her artists, musicians, novelists, poets.

The thing that makes a people is a thing over which statesmen have no control. Geography throws no light on the subject. Nor does that study of the races of man which is called anthropology. It is not a psychological secret (psychology covers a multitude of guesses). Philosophy may evolve beautiful systems of thought, but systems of thought have nothing to do with the particular puzzle before us.

The secret must be sought elsewhere. Is it an inherited thing, this thing that makes a people? That can’t be; ours is a mixed inheritance here in America. Is it an abstract idea? Abstract ideas are never more than architectural pencillings and seldom harden into concrete foundations. Is it a common emotion? If it were we should be able to agree on a name for it. Is it an instinct? An instinct might be back of it.

What is left? Can it be a religion? As such it should be easily recognizable. But an element of religion? An act of faith?

Yes, for faith may exist with or without a creed, and the act of faith may be deliberate or involuntary. Willed or unwilled the faith is held; formulated or unformulated the essential creed is there. Let us look at the people of America, men and women of very divergent types and tempers far apart; men and women of inextricable heredities and of confusing beliefs—even, ordinarily, of clashing purposes. Each believes a set of things, but the beliefs of them all can be reduced to a lowest common denominator, a belief in each other; just as the beliefs of them all have a highest common multiple, a willingness to die in defence of America. To some of them America means a past, to some the past has no meaning; to some of them America means a future, to others a future is without significance. But to all of them America means a present to be safeguarded at the cost of their lives, if need be; and the fact that the present is the translation of the past to some and the reading of the future to others is incidental.

3

We would apply these considerations to the affair of literature; and having been tiresomely generalizing we shall get down to cases that every one can understand.

The point we have tried to make condenses to this: The present is supremely important to us all. To some of us it is all important because of the past, and to some of us it is of immense moment because of the future, and to the greatest number (probably) the present is of overshadowing concern because it is the present—the time when they count and make themselves count. It is now or never, as it always is in life, though the urgency of the hour is not always so apparent.

It was now or never with the armies in the field, with the men training in the camps, with the coal miners, the shipbuilders, the food savers in the kitchens. It is just as much now or never with the poets, the novelists, the essayists—with the workers in every line, although they may not see so distinctly the immediacy of the hour. Everybody saw the necessity of doing things to win the war; many can see the necessity of doing things that will constitute a sort of winning after the war. There is always something to be won. If it is not a war it is an after the war. “Peace hath its victories no less renowned than war” is a fine sounding line customarily recited without the slightest recognition of its real meaning. The poet did not mean that the victories of peace were as greatly acclaimed as the victories of war, but that the sum total of their renown was as great or greater because they are more enduring.

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Now for the cases.

It is the duty, the opportunity and the privilege of America now, in the present hour, to make it impossible hereafter for any one to raise such a question as Bliss Perry brings up in his book The American Spirit in Literature, namely, whether there is an independent American literature. Not only does Mr. Perry raise the question, but, stated as baldly as we have stated it, the query was thereupon discussed, with great seriousness, by a well-known American book review! We are happy to say that both Mr. Perry and the book review decided that there is such a thing as an American literature, and that American writing is not a mere adjunct (perhaps a caudal appendage) of English literature. All Americans will feel deeply gratified that they could honorably come to such a conclusion. But not all Americans will feel gratified that the conclusion was reached on the strength of Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Whitman, Poe and others of the immortal dead. Some Americans will wish with a faint and timid longing that the conclusion might have been reached, or at least sustained, on the strength of Tarkington, Robert Herrick, Edith Wharton, Mary Johnston, Gertrude Atherton, Mary S. Watts, William Allen White, Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell, Edna Ferber, Joseph Hergesheimer, Owen Wister and a dozen or so other living writers over whose relative importance as witnesses for the affirmative we have no desire to quarrel. Mr. Howells, we believe, was called to the stand.

If we had not seen it we should refuse to credit our senses. The idea of any one holding court to-day to decide the question as to the existence of an independent American literature is incredibly funny. It is the peculiarity of criticism that any one can set up a court anywhere at any time for any purpose and with unlimited jurisdiction. There are no rules of procedure. There are no rules of evidence. There is no jury; the people who read books may sit packed in the court room, but there must be no interruptions. Order in the court! Usually the critic-judge sits alone, but sometimes there are special sessions with a full bench. Writs are issued, subpœnas served, witnesses are called and testimony is taken. An injunction may be applied for, either temporary or permanent. Nothing is easier than to be held in contempt.

5

The most striking peculiarity of procedure in the Critical Court is with regard to what constitutes evidence. You might, in the innocence of your heart, suppose that a man’s writings would constitute the only admissible evidence. Not at all. His writings have really nothing to do with the case. What is his Purpose? If, as a sincere individual, he has anywhere exposed or stated his object in writing books counsel objects to the admission of this Purpose as evidence on the ground that it is incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial; and not sound Art. On the other hand if, as an artist, he has embodied his Purpose in his fiction so that every intelligent reader may discover it for himself and feel the glow of a personal discovery, counsel will object to the admission of his books as evidence on the ground that they are incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial; and not the best proof. Counsel will demand that the man himself be examined personally as to his purpose (if he is alive) or will demand a searching examination of his private life (if he be dead). The witness is always a culprit and browbeating the witness is always in order. I am a highbrow and you are a lowbrow; what the devil do you mean by writing a book anyway?

Before the trial begins the critic-judge enunciates certain principles on which the verdict will be based and the verdict is based on those principles whether they find any application in the testimony or not. A favorite principle with the man on the bench is that all that is not obscure is not Art. It isn’t phrased as intelligibly as that, to be sure; a common way to put it is to lay down the rule that the popularity of a book (which means the extent to which it is understood and therefore appreciated) has nothing to do with the case, tra-la, has nothing to do with the case. Another principle is that sound can be greater than sense, which, in the lingo of the Highest Criticism, is the dictum that words and sentences can have a beauty apart from the meaning (if any) that they seek to convey. And there really is something in this idea; for example, what could be lovelier than the old line, “Eeny, meeny, miny-mo”? Shakespeare, a commercial fellow who wrote plays for a living, knew this when he let one of his characters sing:

“When that I was and a little tiny boy,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

A foolish thing was but a toy,

For the rain it raineth every day.”

And a little earlier in Twelfth Night:

“Like a mad lad,

Pare thy nails, dad;

Adieu, goodman devil.”

Which is not only beautiful as sound, but without the least sense unless it hath the vulgarity to be looked for in the work of a mercenary playwright.

6

But the strangest thing about the proceedings in the Critical Court is their lack of contemporary interest. Rarely, indeed, is anything decided here until it has been decided everywhere else. For the great decisions are the decisions of life and not decisions on the past. A man has written twenty books and he is dead. He is ripe for consideration by the Critical Court. A man has written two novels and has eighteen more ahead of him. The Critical Court will leave him alone until he is past all helping. It seems never to occur to the critic-judge that a young man who has written two novels is more important than a dead man who has written twenty novels. For the young man who has written two novels has some novels yet to be written; he can be helped, strengthened, encouraged, advised, corrected, warned, counselled, rebuked, praised, blamed, presented with bills of particulars, and—heartened. If he has not genius nothing can put it in him, but if he has, many things can be done to help him exploit it. And a man who is dead cannot be affected by anything you say or do; the critic-judge has lost his chance of shaping that writer’s work and can no longer write a decree, only an epitaph.

To be brutally frank: Nobody cares what the Critical Court thinks of Whitman or Poe or Longfellow or Hawthorne. Everybody cares what Tarkington does next, what Mary Johnston tackles, what the developments are in the William Allen White case, what becomes of Joseph Hergesheimer, whether Amy Lowell achieves great work in that contrapuntal poetry she calls polyphonic prose. On these things depend the present era in American literature and the possibilities of the future. And these things are more or less under our control.

The people of America not only believe that there is an independent American literature, but they believe that there will continue to be. Some of them believe in the past of that literature, some of them believe in its future; but all of them believe in its present and its presence. Their voice may be stifled in the Critical Court (silence in the court!) but it is audible everywhere else. It is heard in the bookshops where piles of new fiction melt away, where new verse is in brisk demand, where new biographies and historical works are bought daily and where books on all sorts of weighty subjects flake down from the shelves into the hands of customers.

The voice of the American people is articulate in the offices of newspapers which deal with the news of new books. It makes a seismographic record in the ledgers of publishing houses. It comes to almost every writer in letters of inquiry, comment and commendation. What, do you suppose, a writer like Gene Stratton-Porter cares whether the Critical Court excludes her work or condemns it? She can re-read hundreds and thousands of letters from men and women who tell her how profoundly her books have—tickled their fancy? pleased their love of verbal beauty? taxed their intellectuals to understand? No, merely how profoundly her books have altered their whole lives.

Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye! The Critical Court is in session. All who have business with the court draw near and give attention!

IN THE CRITICAL COURT

III
IN THE CRITICAL COURT

THE Critical Court being in session, William Dean Howells, H. W. Boynton, W. C. Brownell, Wilson Follett and William Marion Reedy sitting, the case of Booth Tarkington, novelist, is called.

Counsel for the Prosecution: If it please the court, this case should go over. The defendant, Mr. Tarkington, is not dead yet.

Mr. Howells: I do not know how my colleagues feel, but I have no objection to considering the work of Mr. Tarkington while he is alive.

Mr. Follett: I think it would be better if we deferred the consideration of Mr. Tarkington until it is a little older.

Counsel for the Defense (in this case Mr. Robert Cortes Holliday, biographer of Tarkington): “It”?

Mr. Follett: I mean his work, or works. Perhaps I should have said “them.”

Mr. Holliday: “They,” not “them.” Exception. And “are” instead of “is.” Gentlemen, I have no wish to prejudice the case for my client, but I must point out that if you wait until he is a little older he may be dead.

Mr. Boynton: So much the better. We can then consider his works in their complete state and with reference to his entire life.

Mr. Holliday: But it would then be impossible to give any assistance to Mr. Tarkington. The chance to influence his work would have passed.

Mr. Brownell: That is relatively unimportant.

Mr. Holliday: I beg pardon but Mr. Tarkington feels it rather important to him.

Mr. Boynton: My dear Mr. Holliday, you really must remember that it is not what seems important to Mr. Tarkington that can count with us, but what is important in our eyes.

Mr. Holliday: Self-importance.

Mr. Boynton (stiffly): Certainly not. Merely self-confidence. But on my own behalf I may say this: I am unwilling to consider Mr. Tarkington’s works in this place at this time; but I am willing to pass judgment in an article for a newspaper or a monthly magazine or some other purely perishable medium. That should be sufficient for Mr. Tarkington.

Mr. Follett: I think the possibility of considering Mr. Tarkington must be ruled out, anyway, as one or more of his so-called works have first appeared serially in the Saturday Evening Post.

Mr. Holliday (noting the effect of this revelation on the members of the court): Very well, I will not insist. Booth, you will have to get along the best you can with newspaper and magazine reviews and with what people write to you or tell you face to face. Be brave, Tark, and do as you aren’t done by. After all, a few million people read you and you make enough to live on. The court will pass on you after you are dead, and if you dictate any books on the ouija board the court’s verdict may be helpful to you then; you might even manage the later Henry James manner.

Clerk of the Court (Prof. William Lyon Phelps): Next case! Mrs. Atherton please step forward!

Mrs. Atherton (advancing with composure): I can find no one to act for me, so I will be my own counsel. I will say at the outset that I do not care for the court, individually or collectively, nor for its verdict, whatever it may be.

Prof. Phelps: I must warn you that anything you say may, and probably will, be used against you.

Mrs. Atherton: Oh, I don’t mind that; it’s the things the members of the court have said against me that I purpose to use against them.

Mr. Brownell: Are you, by any chance, referring to me, Madam?

Mrs. Atherton: I do not refer to persons, Mr. Brownell. I hit them. No, I had Mr. Boynton particularly in mind. And perhaps Gene Stratton-Porter. Is she here? (Looks around menacingly). No. Well, go ahead with your nonsense.

Mr. Howells (rising): I think I will withdraw from consideration of this case. Mrs. Atherton has challenged me so often——

Mr. Boynton: No, stay. I am going to stick it out——

Mr. Follett: I think there is no question but that we should hold the defendant in contempt.

Mrs. Atherton: Mutual, I assure you. (She sweeps out of the room and a large section of the public quietly follows her.)

Clerk Phelps: Joseph Hergesheimer to the bar! (A short, stocky fellow with twinkling eyes steps forward.) Mr. Hergesheimer?

Mr. Hergesheimer: Right.

Mr. Reedy: Good boy, Joe!

Mr. Follett: It won’t do, it won’t do at all. There’s only The Three Black Pennys and Gold and Iron and a novel called Java Head to go by. Saturday Evening Post. And bewilderingly unlike each other. Seem artistic but are too popular, I fancy, really to be sound.

Mr. Hergesheimer: With all respect, I should like to ask whether this is a court of record?

Mr. Howells: It is.

Mr. Hergesheimer: In that case I think I shall press for a verdict which may be very helpful to me. I should like also to have the members of the court on record respecting my work.

Mr. Boynton: Just as I feared. My dear fellow, while we should like to be helpful and will endeavor to give you advice to that end it must be done unobtrusively ... current reviews ... we’ll compare your work with that of Hawthorne and Hardy or perhaps a standard Frenchman. That will give you something to work for. But you cannot expect us to say anything definite about you at this stage of your work. Suppose we were to say what we really think, or what some really think, that you are the most promising writer in America to-day, promising in the sense that you have most of your work before you and in the sense that your work is both popular and artistically fine. Don’t you see the risk?

Mr. Hergesheimer: I do, and I also see that you would make your own reputation much more than you would make mine. I write a story. I risk everything with that story. You deliver a verdict. Why shouldn’t you take a decent chance, too?

Mr. Follett: Why should I take any more chances than I have to with my contemporaries? I pick them pretty carefully, I can tell you.

Mr. Hergesheimer: I shall write a novel to be published after my death. There was Henry Adams. He stipulated that The Education of Henry Adams should not be published until after his death; and everybody says it is positively brilliant.

Mr. Follett (relieved): That is a wise decision. But don’t be disheartened. I’ll probably be able to get around to you in ten years, anyway. (Mr. Hergesheimer bows and retires.)

Clerk Phelps: John Galsworthy!

Mr. Follett (brightening): Some of the Englishmen! This is better! Besides, I know all about Galsworthy.

Mr. Galsworthy (coming forward): I feel much honored.

Counsel for the Prosecution: If the court please, I must state that for some time now Mr. Galsworthy has been published serially in a magazine with a circulation of one digit and six ciphers. Or one cipher and six digits, I cannot remember which.

Mr. Brownell: What, six? Then he has more readers than can be counted on the fingers of one hand. There are only five fingers on a hand. I think this is conclusive.

Mr. Boynton: Oh, decidedly.

Mr. Follett: But I put him in my book on modern novelists, all of whom were hand picked.

Mr. Galsworthy (with much calmness for one uttering a terrible heresy): Perhaps that’s the difficulty, really. All hand picked. Do you know, I rather believe in literary windfalls. But I beg to withdraw. (And he does.)

The Clerk: Herbert George Wells!

Mr. Wells (sauntering up and speaking with a certain inattention): Respecting my long novel, Joan and Peter, there are some points that need to be made clear. Peter, you know, is called Petah by Joan. Petah is a sapient fellow. He is even able to admire the Germans because, after all, they knew where they were going, they knew what they were after, their education had them headed for something. It had, indeed. I think Petah overlooks the fact that it had headed them for Paris in 1914.

The point that Oswald and I make in the book is that England and the Empire, in 1914 and prior thereto, had not been headed for anything, educationally or otherwise, except Littleness in every field of political endeavor, except Stupidity in every province of human affairs. And the proof of this, we argue, is found in the first three years of the Great War. No doubt. The first three years of the war prove so many things that this may well be among them; don’t you think so?

Without detracting from the damning case which Oswald and I make out against England it does occur to me, as I poke over my material for a new book, that as the proof of a pudding is in the eating so the proof of a nation at war is in the fighting. Indisputable as the bankruptcy of much British leadership has been, indisputable as it is that General Gough lost tens of thousands of prisoners, hundreds of guns and vast stores of ammunition, it is equally indisputable that the Australians who died like flies at the Dardanelles died like men, that the Tommies who were shot by their own guns at Neuve Chapelle went forward like heroes, that the undersized and undernourished and unintellectual Londoners from Whitechapel who fell in Flanders gave up their immortal souls like freemen and Englishmen and kinsmen of the Lion Heart.

And if it comes to a question as to the blame for the war as distinguished from the question as to the blame for the British conduct of the war, the latter being that with which Joan and Peter is almost wholly concerned, I should like to point out now, on behalf of myself and the readers of my next book, that perhaps I am not entirely blameless. Perhaps I bear an infinitesimal portion of the terrible responsibility which I have showed some unwillingness to place entirely and clearly on Germany.

For after all, it was Science that made the war and that waged it; it was the idolatry of Science that had transformed the German nation by transforming the German nature. It was the proofs of what Science could do that convinced Prussia of her power, that made her confident that with this new weapon she could overstride the earth. I had a part in setting up that worship of Science. I have been not only one of its prophets but a high priest in its temple.

And I am all the more dismayed, therefore, when I find myself, as in Joan and Peter, still kneeling at the shrine. What is the cure for war? I ask. Petah tells us that our energies must have some other outlet. We must explore the poles and dig through the earth to China. He himself will go back to Cambridge and get a medical degree; and if he is good enough he’ll do something on the border line between biology and chemistry. Joan will build model houses. And the really curious thing is that the pair of them seem disposed to run the unspeakable risks of trying to educate still another generation, a generation which, should it have to fight a war with a conquering horde from Mars, might blame Peter and Joan severely for the sacrifices involved, just as they blame the old Victorians for the sacrifice of 1914-1918.

Mr. Howells: In heaven’s name, what is this tirade?

Mr. Brownell: Mr. Wells is merely writing his next book, that’s all.

(As it is impossible to stop Mr. Wells the court adjourns without a day.)

BOOK “REVIEWING”

IV
BOOK “REVIEWING”

ON the subject of Book “Reviewing” we feel we can speak freely, knowing all about the business, as we do, though by no means a practitioner, and having no convictions on the score of it. For we point with pride to the fact that, though many times indicted, a conviction has never been secured against us. However, it isn’t considered good form (whatever that is) to talk about your own crimes. For instance, after exhausting the weather, you should say pleasantly to your neighbor: “What an interesting burglary you committed last night! We were all quite stirred up!” It is almost improper (much worse than merely immoral) to exhibit your natural egoism by remarking: “If I do say it, that murder I did on Tuesday was a particularly good job!”

For this reason, if for no other, we would refrain, ordinarily, from talking about book “reviewing”; but since Robert Cortes Holliday has mentioned the subject in his Walking-Stick Papers and thus introduced the indelicate topic once and for all, there really seems no course open but to pick up the theme and treat it in a serious, thoughtful way.

2

Book reviewing is so called because the books are not reviewed, or viewed (some say not even read). They are described with more or less accuracy and at a variable length. They are praised, condemned, weighed and solved by the use of logarithms. They are read, digested, quoted and tested for butter fat. They are examined, evalued, enjoyed and assessed; criticised, and frequently found fault with (not the same thing, of course); chronicled and even orchestrated by the few who never write words without writing both words and music. James Huneker could make Irvin Cobb sound like a performance by the Boston Symphony. Others, like Benjamin De Casseres, have a dramatic gift. Mr. De Casseres writes book revues.

3

Any one can review a book and every one should be encouraged to do it. It is unskilled labor. Good book reviewers earn from $150 to $230 a week, working only in their spare time, like the good-looking young men and women who sell the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Country Gentleman but who seldom earn over $100 a week. Book reviewing is one of the very few subjects not taught by the correspondence schools, simply because there is nothing to teach. It is so simple a child can operate it with perfect safety. Write for circular giving full particulars and our handy phrasebook listing 2,567 standard phrases indispensable to any reviewer—FREE.

In reviewing a book there is no method to be followed. Like one of the playerpianos, you shut the doors (i.e., close the covers) and play (or write) by instinct! Although no directions are necessary we will suggest a few things to overcome the beginner’s utterly irrational sense of helplessness.

One of the most useful comments in dealing with very scholarly volumes, such as A History of the Statistical Process in Modern Philanthropical Enterprises by Jacob Jones, is as follows: “Mr. Jones’s work shows signs of haste.” The peculiar advantage of this is that you do not libel Mr. Jones; the haste may have been the printer’s or the publisher’s or almost anybody’s but the postoffice’s. In the case of a piece of light fiction the best way to start your review is by saying: “A new book from the pen of Alice Apostrophe is always welcome.” But suppose the book is a first book? One of the finest opening sentences for the review of a first book runs: “For a first novel, George Lamplit’s Good Gracious! is a tale of distinct promise.” Be careful to say “distinct”; it is an adjective that fits perfectly over the shoulders of any average-chested noun. It gives the noun that upright, swagger carriage a careful writer likes his nouns to have.

4

But clothes do not make the man and words do not make the book review. A book review must have a Structure, a Skeleton, if it be no more than the skeleton in the book closet. It must have a backbone and a bite. It must be able to stand erect and look the author in the face and tell him to go to the Home for Indigent Authors which the Authors’ League will build one of these days after it has met running expenses.

Our favorite book reviewer reviews the ordinary book in four lines and a semi-colon. Unusual books drain his vital energy to the extent of a paragraph and a half, three adjectives to the square inch.

He makes it a point to have one commendatory phrase and one derogatory phrase, which gives a nicely balanced, “on the one hand ... on the other hand” effect. He says that the book is attractively bound but badly printed; well-written but deficient in emotional intensity; full of action but weak in characterization; has a good plot but is devoid of style.

He reads all the books he reviews. Every little while he pounces upon a misquotation on page 438, or a misprint on page 279. Reviewers who do not read the books they review may chance upon such details while idly turning the uncut leaves or while looking at the back cover, but they never bring in three runs on the other side’s error. They spot the fact that the heroine’s mother, who was killed in a train accident in the fourth chapter, buys a refrigerator in the twenty-third chapter, and they indulge in an unpardonable witticism as to the heroine’s mother’s whereabouts after her demise. But the wrong accent on the Greek word in Chapter XVII gets by them; and as for the psychological impulse which led the hero to jump from Brooklyn Bridge on the Fourth of July they miss it entirely and betray their neglect of their duty by alluding to him as a poor devil crazed with the heat. The fact is, of course, that he did a Steve Brodie because he found something obscurely hateful in the Manhattan skyline. Day after day, while walking to his work on the Brooklyn Rapid Transit, he gazed at the saw-toothed outline of the buildings limned against the sky. Day by day his soul kept asking: “Why don’t they get a gold filling for that cavity between the Singer and Woolworth towers?” And he would ask himself despondently: “Is this what I live for?” And gradually he felt that it was not. He felt that it might be something to die about, however. And so, with the rashness of youth, he leaped. The George Meredith-Thomas Hardy irony came into the story when he was pulled out of the river by his rival in Dorinda’s affections, Gregory Anthracyte, owner of the magnificent steam yacht Chuggermugger.

So much for the anatomy of a book review. Put backbone into it. Read before you write. Look before you leap. Be just, be fair, be impartial; and when you damn, damn with faint praise, and when you praise, praise with faint damns. Be all things to all books. Remember the author. Review as you would be reviewed by. If a book is nothing in your life it may be the fault of your life. And it is always less expensive to revise your life than to revise the book. Your life is not printed from plates that cost a fortune to make and another fortune to throw away. “Life is too short to read inferior books,” eh? Books are too good to be guillotined by inferior lives—or inferior livers. Bacon said some books were to be digested, but he neglected to mention a cure for dyspeptics.

5

But when we say so much we have only touched the surface of a profound matter. The truth of that matter, the full depth of it, may as well be plumbed at once. A book cannot be reviewed. It can only be written about or around. It is insusceptible of such handling as is accorded a play, for example.

A man with more or less experience in seeing plays and with more or less knowledge of the drama goes to the first performance of a new comedy or tragedy or whatnot. There it is before him in speech and motion and color. It is acted. The play, structurally, is good or bad; the acting is either good or bad. Every item of the performance is capable of being resolved separately and estimated; and the collective interest or importance of these items can be determined, is, in fact, determined once and for all by the performance itself. The observer gets their collective impact at once and his task is really nothing but a consideration afterward in such detail as he cares to enter upon of just how that impact was secured. Did you ever, in your algebra days, or even in your arithmetically earnest childhood, “factor” a quantity or a number? Take 91. A little difficult, 91, but after some mental and pencil investigation you found that it was obtained by multiplying 13 by 7. Very well. You knew how the impact of 91 was produced; it was produced by multiplying 13 by 7. You had reviewed the number 91 in the sense that you might review a play.

Now it is impossible to review a book as you would factor a number or a play. You can’t be sure of the factors that make up the collective impact of the book upon you. There’s no way of getting at them. They are summed up in the book itself and no book can be split into multipliable parts. A book is not the author times an idea times the views of the publisher. A book is unfactorable, often undecipherable. It is a growth. It is a series of accretions about a central thought. The central thought is like the grain of sand which the oyster has pearled over. The central thought may even be a diseased thought and the pearl may be a very lovely and brilliant pearl, superficially at least, for all that. There is nothing to do with a book but to take it as it is or go at it hammer and tongs, scalpel and curette, chisel and auger—smashing it to pieces, scraping and cutting, boring and cleaving through the layers of words and subsidiary ideas and getting down eventually to the heart of it, to the grain of sand, the irritant thought that was the earliest foundation.

Such surgery may be highly skilful or highly and wickedly destructive; it may uncover something worth while and it may not; naturally, you don’t go in for much of it, if you are wise, and as a general thing you take a book as it is and not as it once was or as the author may, in the innocence of his heart or the subtlety of his experience, have intended it to be.

6

Surgery on a book is like surgery on a human being, for a book is alive; ordinarily the only justification for it is the chance of saving life. If the operator can save the author’s life (as an author) by cutting he ought to go ahead, of course. The fate of one book is nothing as against the lives of books yet unwritten; the feelings of the author are not necessarily of more account than the screams of the sick child’s parent. There have been such literary operations for which, in lieu of the $1,000 fee of medical practise, the surgeon has been rewarded and more than repaid by a private letter of acknowledgement and heartfelt thanks. No matter how hard up the recipient of such a letter may be, the missive seldom turns up in those auction rooms where the A. L. S. (or Autograph Letter with Signature) sometimes brings an unexpected and astonishingly large price.

7

There is a good deal to be said for taking a book as it is. Most books, in fact, should be taken that way. For the number of books which contain within them issues of life and death is always very small. You may handle new books for a year and come upon only one such. And when you do, unless you recognize its momentousness, no responsibility rests on you to do anything except follow a routine procedure. In this domain ignorance is a wholly valid excuse; no one would think of blaming a general practitioner of medicine for not removing the patient’s vermiform appendix on principle, so to say. Unless he apprehended conclusively that the man had appendicitis and unless he knew the technique of the operation he would certainly be blamed for performing it. Similarly, unless the handler of new books is dead sure that a fatality threatens Harold Bell Wright or John Galsworthy or Mary Roberts Rinehart, unless the new book of Mr. Wright or Mr. Galsworthy or Mrs. Rinehart is a recognizable and unmistakable symptom, unless, further, he knows what to uncover in that book and how to uncover it, he has no business to take the matter in hand at all. Though the way of most “reviewers” with new books suggests that their fundamental motto must be that one good botch deserves another.

Not at all. Better, if you don’t know what to do, to leave bad enough alone.

But since the book as it is forms 99 per cent. of the subject under consideration this aspect of dealing with new books should be considered first and most extensively. Afterward we can revert to the one percent. of books that require to go under the knife.

8

Now the secret of taking a book as it is was never very abstruse and is always perfectly simple; nevertheless, it seems utterly to elude most of the persons who deal with new books. It is a secret only because it is forever hidden from their eyes. Or maybe they deliberately look the other way.

There exists in the world as at present constituted a person called the reporter. He is, mostly, an adjunct of the daily newspaper; in small places, of the weekly newspaper. It is, however, in the cities of America that he is brought to his perfection and in this connection it is worth while pointing out what Irvin Cobb has already noted—the difference between the New York reporter and the reporter of almost any other city in America. The New York reporter “works with” his rival on another sheet; the reporter outside New York almost never does this. Cobb attributed the difference to the impossible tasks that confront reporters in New York, impossible, that is, for single-handed accomplishment. A man who should attempt to cover alone some New York assignments, to “beat” his fellow, would be lost. Of course where a New York paper details half a dozen men to a job real competition between rival outfits is feasible and sometimes occurs. But the point here is this: The New York reporter, by generally “working with” his fellow from another daily, has made of his work a profession, with professional ideals and standards, a code, unwritten but delicate and decidedly high rules of what is honorable and what is not. Elsewhere reporting remains a business, decently conducted to be sure, open in many instances to manifestations of chivalry; but essentially keen, sharp-edged, cutthroat competition.

Now it is of the reporter in his best and highest estate that we would speak here—the reporter who is not only a keen and honest observer but a happy recorder of what he sees and hears and a professional person with ethical ideals in no respect inferior to those of any recognized professional man on earth.

There are many things which such a reporter will not do under any pressure of circumstance or at the beck of any promise of reward. He will not distort the facts, he will not suppress them, he will not put in people’s mouths words that they did not say and he will not let the reader take their words at face value if, in the reporter’s own knowledge, the utterance should be perceptibly discounted. No reporter can see and hear everything and no reporter’s story can record even everything that the observer contrived to see and hear. It must record such things as will arouse in the reader’s mind a correct image and a just impression.

How is this to be done? Why, there is no formula. There’s no set of rules. There’s nothing but a purpose animating every word the man writes, a purpose served, and only half-consciously served, by a thousand turns of expression, a thousand choices of words. Like all honest endeavors to effect a purpose the thing is spoiled, annulled, made empty of result by deliberate art. Good reporters are neither born nor made; they evolve themselves and without much help from any outside agency, either. They can be hindered but not prevented, helped but not hurt. You may remember a saying that God helps those who help themselves. The common interpretation of this is that when a man gets up and does something of his own initiative Providence is pretty likely to play into his hands a little; not at all, that isn’t what the proverb means. What it does mean is just this: That those who help themselves, who really do lift themselves by their bootstraps, are helped by God; that it isn’t they who do the lifting but somebody bigger than themselves. Now there is no doubt whatever that good reporters are good reporters because God makes them so. They aren’t good reporters at three years of age; they get to be. Does this seem discouraging? It ought to be immensely encouraging, heartening, actually “uplifting” in the finest sense of a tormented word. For if we believed that good reporters were born and not made there would be no hope for any except the gifted few, endowed from the start; and if we believed that good reporters were made and not born there would be absolutely no excuse for any failures whatever—every one should be potentially a good reporter and it would be simply a matter of correct training. But if we believe that a good reporter is neither born nor made, but makes himself with the aid of God we can be unqualifiedly cheerful. There is hope for almost any one under such a dispensation; moreover, if we believe in God at all and in mankind at all we must believe that between God and mankind the supply of topnotch reporters will never entirely fail. The two together will come pretty nearly meeting the demand every day in the year.

9

Perhaps the reader is grumbling, in fact, we seem to hear murmurs. What has all this about the genesis and nature of good reporters to do with the publication of new books? Why, this: The only person who can deal adequately and amply with 99 new books out of a hundred—the 99 that require to be taken as they are—is the good reporter. He’s the boy who can read the new book as he would look and listen at a political convention, or hop around at a fire—getting the facts, getting them straight (yes, indeed, they do get them straight) and setting them down, swiftly and selectively, to reproduce in the mind of the public the precise effect of the book itself. The effect—not the means by which it was achieved, not the desirability of it having been achieved, not the artistic quality of it, not the moral worth of it, not anything in the way of a corollary or lesson or a deduction, however obvious—just the effect. That’s reporting. That’s getting and giving the news. And that’s what the public wants.

Some people seem to think there is something shameful in giving the public what it wants. They would, one supposes, highly commend the grocer who gave his customer something “just as good” or (according to the grocer) “decidedly better.” But substitution, open or concealed, is an immoral practice. Nothing can justify it, no nobility of intention can take it out of the class of deception and cheating.

But, they cry, the public does not want what is sufficiently good, let alone what is best for it; that is why it is wrong to give the public what it wants. So they shift their ground and think to escape on a high moral plateau or table land. But the table land is a tip-table land. What they mean is that they are confidently setting their judgment of what the public ought to want against the public’s plain decision what it does want. They are a few dozens against many millions, yet in their few dozen intelligences is collected more wisdom than has been the age-long and cumulative inheritance of all the other sons of earth. They really believe that.... Pitiable....

10

A new book is news. This might almost be set down as axiomatic and not as a proposition needing formal demonstration by the Euclidean process. Yet it is susceptible of such demonstration and we shall demonstrate accordingly.

In the strict sense, anything that happens is news. Everybody remembers the old distinction, that if a dog bites a man it is very likely not news, but that if a man bites a dog it is news beyond all cavil. Such a generalization is useful and fairly harmless (like the generalization we ourselves have just indulged in and are about proving) if—a big if—the broad exception be noted. If a dog bites John D. Rockefeller, Jr., it is not only news but rather more important, or certainly more interesting, news than if John Jones of Howlersville bites a dog. For the chances are that John Jones of Howlersville is a poor demented creature, after all. Now the dog that bites Mr. Rockefeller is very likely a poor, demented creature, too; but the distinction lies in this: the dog bitten by John Jones is almost certainly not as well-known or as interesting or as important in the lives of a number of people as Mr. Rockefeller. Pair off the cur that puts his teeth in the Rockefeller ankle, if you like, with the wretch who puts his teeth in an innocent canine bystander (it’s the innocent bystander who always gets hurt); do this and you still have to match up the hound of Howlersville with Mr. Rockefeller. And the scale of news values tips heavily away from Howlersville and in the direction of 26 Broadway.

So it is plain that not all that happens is news compared with some that happens. The law of specific interest, an intellectual counterpart of the law of specific gravity in the physical world, rules in the world of events. Any one handling news who disregards this law does so at his extreme peril, just as any one building a ship heavier than the water it displaces may reasonably expect to see his fine craft sink without a trace.

Since a new book is a thing happening it is news, subject to the broad correction we have been discussing above, namely, that in comparison with other new books it may not be news at all, its specific interest may be so slight as to be negligible entirely.

But if a particular new book is news, if its specific interest is moderately great, then obviously, we think, the person best fitted to deal with it is a person trained to deal with news, namely, a reporter. Naturally we all prefer a good reporter.

11

The question will at once be raised: How is the specific interest of a new book to be determined? We answer: Just as the specific interest of any kind of potential news or actual news is determined—in competition with the other news of the day and hour. What is news one day isn’t news another. This is a phenomenon of which the regular reader of every daily paper is more or less consciously aware. There are some days when “there’s no news in the paper.” There are other days when the news in the paper is so big and so important that all the lesser occurrences which ordinarily get themselves chronicled are crowded out. Granting a white paper supply which does not at present exist, it would, of course, be possible on the “big days” to record all these lesser doings; and consistently, day in and day out, to print nicely proportioned accounts of every event attaining to a certain fixed level of specific interest. But the reader who may think he would like this would speedily find out that he didn’t. Some days he would have a twelve page newspaper and other days (not Sundays, either) he would have one of thirty-six pages. He would be lost, or rather, his attention would be lost in the jungle of events that all happened within twenty-four hours, with the profuse luxuriance of tropical vegetation shooting up skyward by inches and feet overnight. His natural appetite for a knowledge of what his fellows were doing would be alternately starved and overfed; malnutrition would lead to chronic and incurable dyspepsia; soon he would become a hateful misanthrope, shunning his fellow men and having a seizure every time Mr. Hearst brought out the eighth edition (which is the earliest and first) of the New York Evening Journal. It is really dreadful to think what havoc a literal adhesion to the motto of the New York Times—“All the news that’s fit to print”—would work in New York City.

No mortal has more than a certain amount of time daily and a certain amount of attention (according to his mental habit and personal interest) to bestow on the perusal of a newspaper, or news, or the printed page of whatever kind. On Sunday he has much more, it is likely, but still there is a limit and a perfectly finite bound. Consequently the whole problem for the persons engaged in gathering and preparing news for presentation to readers sums up in this: “How many of the day’s doings attaining or exceeding a certain level of public interest and importance, shall we set before our clients?” Easily answered, in most cases; and the size of the paper is the index of the answer. Question Two: “What of the day’s doings shall be served up in the determined space?”

For this question there is never an absolute or ready answer, and there never can be. On some of the affairs to be reported all journalists would agree; but they would differ in their estimates of the relative worth of even these and the lengths at which they should be treated; about lesser occurrences there would be no fixed percentage of agreement.

12

Now the application of all this to the business of giving the news of books should be fairly clear. A new book is news—and so, sometimes, is an old one, rediscovered. Since a new book is news it should be dealt with by a news reporter. Not all that happens is news; not all the new books published are news; new books, like new events of all sorts, are news when they compete successfully with a majority of their kind.

There is no more sense in reporting—that is, describing individually at greater or less length—all the new books than there would be in reporting every incident on the police blotters of a lively American city. Recording new books is another matter; somewhere, somehow, most occurrences in this world get recorded in written words that reach nearly all who are interested in the happenings (as in letters) or are accessible to the interested few (as the police records). The difference between the reporter and the recorder is not entirely a difference of details given. The recorder usually follows a prescribed formula and makes his record conform thereto; the good reporter never has a formula and never can have one. Let us see how this works out with the news of books.

13

The recorder of new books generally compiles a list of Books Received or Books Just Published and he does it in this uninspired and conscientious manner:

IN THE HEART OF A FOOL. By William Allen White. A story of Kansas in the last half-century, centered in a single town, showing its evolution from prairie to an industrial city with difficult economic and labor problems; the story told in the lives of a group of people, pioneers and the sons of pioneers—their work, ambitions, personal affairs, &c. New York: The Macmillan Company. $1.60.

That would be under the heading Fiction. An entry under the heading Literary Studies or Essays might read:

OUR POETS OF TO-DAY. By Howard Willard Cook. Volume II. in a series of books on modern American writers. Sketches of sixty-eight American poets, nearly all living, including Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell, Witter Bynner, Robert Service, Edgar Guest, Charles Divine, Carl Sandburg, Joyce Kilmer, Sara Teasdale, George Edward Woodberry, Percy Mackaye, Harriet W. Monroe, &c. New York: Moffat, Yard & Co. $1.60.

These we hasten to say would be unusually full and satisfactory records, but they would be records just the same—formal and precise statements of events, like the chronological facts affixed to dates in an almanac. If all records were like these there would be less objection to them; but it is an astonishing truth that most records are badly kept. Why, one may never fathom; since the very formality and precision make a good record easy. Yet almost any of the principal pages or magazines in the United States devoted to the news of new books is likely to make a record on this order:

IN THE HEART OF A FOOL. By William Allen White. Novel of contemporary American life. New York, &c.

Such a record is, of course, worse than inadequate; it is actually misleading. Mr. White’s book happens to cover a period of fifty years. “Contemporary American life” would characterize quite as well, or quite as badly, a story of New York and Tuxedo by Robert W. Chambers.

14

The reporter works in entirely another manner. He is concerned to present the facts about a new book in a way sufficiently arresting and entertaining to engage the reader. As Mr. Holliday says with fine perception, the true function of the describer of new books is simply to bring a particular volume to the attention of its proper public. To do that it is absolutely necessary to “give the book,” at least to the extent of enabling the reader of the article to determine, with reasonable accuracy (1) whether the book is for him, that is, addressed to a public of which he is one, and (2) whether he wants to read it or not.

Whether the book is good or bad is not the point. A man interested in sociology may conceivably want to read a book on sociology even though it is an exceedingly bad book on that subject and even though he knows its worthlessness. He may want to profit by the author’s mistakes; he may want to write a book to correct them; or he may merely want to be amused at the spectacle of a fellow sociologist making a fool of himself, a spectacle by no means rare but hardly ever without a capacity for giving joy to the mildly malicious.

The determination of the goodness or badness of a book is not and should not be a deliberate purpose of the good book reporter. Why? Well, in many cases it is a task of supererogation. Take a reporter who goes to cover a public meeting at which speeches are made. He does not find it necessary to say that Mr. So-and-So’s speech was good. He records what Mr. So-and-So says, or a fair sample of it; which is enough. The reader can see for himself how good or bad it was and reach a conclusion based on the facts as tempered by his personal beliefs, tastes and ideas.

In the same way, it is superfluous for the book reporter to say that Miss Such-and-Such’s book on New York is rotten. All he need do is to set down the incredible fact that Miss Such-and-Such locates the Woolworth building at Broadway, Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third street, and refers to the Aquarium as the fisheries section of the Bronx Zoo. If this should not appear a sufficient notice of the horrible nature of the volume the reporter may very properly give the truth about the Woolworth building and the Aquarium for the benefit of people who have never visited New York and might be unable to detect Miss Such-and-Such’s idiosyncrasies.

The rule holds in less tangible matters. Why should the book reporter ask his reader to accept his dictum that the literary style of a writer is atrocious when he can easily prove it by a few sentences or a paragraph from the book?

15

Yet books are still in the main “reviewed,” instead of being given into the hands of trained news reporters. Anything worse than the average book “review” it would certainly be difficult to find in the length and breadth of America. And England, despite the possession of some brilliant talents, is nearly as badly off.

No one who is not qualified as a critic should attempt to criticise new books.

There are but few critics in any generation—half a dozen or perhaps a dozen men in any single one of the larger countries are all who could qualify at a given time; that much seems evident. What is a critic? A critic is a person with an education unusually wide either in life or in letters, and preferably in both. He is a person with huge backgrounds. He has read thousands of books and has by one means or another abstracted the essence of thousands more. He has perhaps travelled a good deal, though this is not essential; but he has certainly lived with a most peculiar and exceptional intensity, descending to greater emotional and intellectual depths than the majority of mankind and scaling higher summits; he has, in some degree, the faculty of living other people’s lives and sharing their human experiences which is the faculty that, in a transcendent degree, belongs to the novelist and storyteller. A critic knows the past and the present so well that he is able to erect standards, or uncover old standards, by which he can and does measure the worth of everything that comes before him. He can actually show you, in exact and inescapable detail, how De Morgan compares with Dickens and how Gilbert K. Chesterton ranks with Swift and whether Thackeray learned more from Fielding or from Daniel Defoe and he can trace the relation between a period in the life of Joseph Conrad and certain scenes and settings in The Arrow of Gold.

Such a man is a critic. Of course critics make mistakes but they are not mistakes of ignorance, of personal unfitness for the task, of pretension to a knowledge they haven’t. They are mistakes of judgment; such mistakes as very eminent jurists sometimes make after years on the bench. The jurist is reversed by the higher court and the critic is reversed by the appellate decree of the future.

The mistakes of a real critic, like the mistakes of a real jurist, are always made on defensible, and sometimes very sound, grounds; they are reasoned and seasoned conclusions even if they are not the correct conclusions. The mistakes of the 9,763 persons who assume the critical ermine without any fitness to wear it are quite another matter; and they are just the mistakes that would be made by a layman sitting in the jurist’s seat. The jurist knows the precedents, the rules of evidence, the law; he is tolerant and admits exceptions into the record. So the critic; with the difference that the true critic merely presides and leaves the verdict to that great jury of true and right instincts which we call “the public.” The genuine critic is concerned chiefly to see that the case gets before the jury cleanly. Without presuming to tell the jury what its verdict must be—except in extraordinary circumstances—he does instruct it what the verdict should be on, what should be considered in arriving at it, what principles should guide the decision.

But the near-critic (God save the mark!) has it in his mind that he must play judge and jury too. He doesn’t like the writer’s style, or thinks the plot is poor, or this bad or that defective. Instead of carefully outlining the evidence on which the public might reach a correct verdict on these points he delivers a dictum. It doesn’t go, of course, at least for long; and it never will.

Let us be as specific as is possible in this, as specific, that is, as a general discussion can be and remain widely applicable.

I don’t like the writer’s style. I am not a person of critical equipment or pretensions. I am, we will say, a book reporter. I do not declare, with a fiat and a flourish, that the style is bad; I merely present a chunk of it. There is the evidence, and nothing else is so competent, so relevant or so material, as the lawyers would say. I may, in the necessity to be brief and the absence of space for an excerpt, say that the style is adjectival, or adverbial, or diffuse, or involved or florid or something of that sort, if I know it to be. These would be statements of fact. “Bad” is a statement of opinion.

I may call the plot “weak” if it is weak (a fact) and if I know weakness in a plot (which qualifies me to announce the fact). But if I call the plot “poor” I am taking a good deal upon myself. Its poorness is a matter of opinion. Some stories are spoiled by a strong plot which dominates the reader’s interest almost to the exclusion of other things—fine characterization, atmosphere, and so on.

And even restrictions of space can hardly excuse the lack of courtesy, or worse, shown by the near-critic who calls the plot weak or the style diffuse or involved, however much these may be facts, and who does not at least briefly explain in what way the style is diffuse (or involved) and wherein the weakness of the plot resides. But to put a finger on the how or the where or the why requires a knowledge and an insight that the near-critic does not possess and will not take the trouble to acquire; so we are asking him to do the impossible. Nevertheless we can ask him to do the possible; and that is to leave off talking or writing on matters he knows nothing about.

16

The task of training good book reporters is not a thing to be easily and lightly undertaken. And the first essential in the making of such a reporter is the inculcation of a considerable humility of mind. A near-critic can afford to think he knows it all, but a book reporter cannot. Besides a sense of his own limitations the book reporter must possess and develop afresh from time to time a mental attitude which may best be summed up in this distinction: When a piece of writing seems to him defective he must stop short and ask himself, “Is this defect a fact or is it my personal feeling?” If it is a fact he must establish it to his own, and then to the reader’s, satisfaction. If it is his personal impression or feeling, merely, as he may conclude on maturer reflection, he owes it to those who will read his article either not to record it or to record it as a personal thing. There is no sense in saying only the good things that can be said about a book that has bad things in it. Such a course is dishonest. It is equally dishonest, and infinitely more common, to pass off private opinions as statements of fact.

When in doubt, the doubt should be resolved in favor of the author. A good working test of fact versus personal opinion is this: If you, as a reporter, cannot put your finger on the apparent flaw, cannot give the how or where or why of the thing that seems wrong, it must be treated as your personal feeling. A fact that you cannot buttress might as well not be a fact at all—unless, of course, it is self-evident, in which case you have only to state it or exhibit your evidence to command a universal assent.

All that we have been saying respecting the fact or fancy of a flaw in a piece of writing applies with equal force, naturally, to the favorable as well as the unfavorable conclusion you, as a book reporter, may reach. Because a story strikes you as wonderful it does not follow that it is wonderful. You are under a moral obligation, at least, to establish the wonder of it. The procedure for the book reporter who has to describe favorably and for the book reporter who has to report unfavorably is the same. First comes the question of fact, then the citation, if possible, of evidence; and if that be impossible the brief indication of the how, the where, the why of the merit reported. If the meritoriousness remains a matter of personal impression it ought so to be characterized but may warrantably be recorded where an adverse impression would go unmentioned. The presumption is in favor of the author. It should be kept so.

17

In all this there is nothing impossible, nothing millennial. But what has been outlined of the work of the true book reporter is as far as possible from what we very generally get to-day. We get unthinking praise and unthinking condemnation; we do not expect analysis but we have a right to expect straightaway exposition and a condensed transliteration of the book being dealt with.

“Praise,” we have just said, and “condemnation.” That is what it is, and there is no room in the book reporter’s task either for praise or condemnation. He is not there to praise the book any more than a man is at a political convention to praise a nominating speech; he is there to describe the book, to describe the speech, to report either. A newspaperman who should begin his account of a meeting in this fashion, “In a lamentably poor speech, showing evidences of hasty preparation, Elihu Root,” &c., would be fired—and ought to be. No matter if a majority of those who heard Mr. Root thought the same way about it.

18

The book reporter will be governed in his work by the precise news value in the book he is dealing with at the moment he is dealing with it. This needs illustration.

On November 11, 1918, an armistice was concluded in Europe, terminating a war that had lasted over four years. In that four years books relating to the war then being waged had sold heavily, even at times outselling fiction. Had the war drawn to a gradual end the sales of these war books would probably have lessened, little by little, until they reached and maintained a fairly steady level. From this they would doubtless have declined, as the end drew near, lower and lower, until the foreseen end came, when the interest in them would have been as great, but not much greater, than the normal interest in works of a historical or biographical sort.

But the end came overnight; and suddenly the whole face of the world was transformed. The reaction in the normal person was intense. In an instant war books of several pronounced types became intolerable reading. How I Reacted to the War, by Quintus Quintuple seemed tremendously unimportant. Even Mr. Britling was, momentarily, utterly stale and out of date. Reminiscences of the German ex-Kaiser were neither interesting nor important; he was a fugitive in Holland.

The book reporter who had any sense of news values grasped this immediately. Books that a month earlier would have been worth 1,000 to 1,500 word articles were worth a few lines or no space at all. On the other hand books which had a historical value and a place as interesting public records, such as Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, were not diminished either in interest or in importance.

Some books which had been inconsequential were correspondingly exalted by the unprecedented turn of affairs. These were books on such subjects as the re-education of disabled fighters, the principles which might underlie the formation of a league of nations, problems of reconstruction of every sort. They had been worth, some of them, very small articles a week earlier; now they were worth a column or two apiece.

19

No doubt we ought to conclude this possibly tedious essay with some observations on the one per cent. of books which call for swift surgery. But such an enterprise is, if not impossible, extraordinarily difficult for the reason that the same operation is never called for twice.

In a sense it is like cutting diamonds, or splitting a large stone into smaller stones. The problem varies each time. The cutter respects certain principles and follows a careful technique. That is all.

We shall, for the sake of the curious, take an actual instance. In 1918 there was published a novel called Foes by Mary Johnston, an American novelist of an endowment so decided as fairly to entitle her to the designation “a genius.”

Miss Johnston’s first novel had appeared twenty years earlier. Her first four books—nay, her first two, the second being To Have and to Hold—placed her firmly in the front rank of living romantic writers. The thing that distinguished her romanticism was its sense of drama in human affairs and human destiny. Added to this was a command of live, nervous, highly poetic prose. History—romance; it did not matter. She could set either movingly before you.

Her work showed steady progress, reaching a sustained culmination in her two Civil War novels, The Long Roll and Cease Firing. She experimented a little, as in her poetic drama of the French Revolution, The Goddess of Reason, and in The Fortunes of Garin, a tapestry of mediæval France. The Wanderers was a more decided venture, but a perfectly successful. Then came Foes.

Considered purely as a romantic narrative, as a story of friendship transformed into hatred and the pursuit of a private feud under the guise of wreaking Divine vengeance, Foes is a superb tale. Considered as a novel, Foes is a terrible failure.

Why? Is it not sufficient to write a superb tale? Yes, if you have essayed nothing more. Is a novel anything more than “a good story, well told”? Yes, if the writer essays to make more of it.

The novelist who has aimed at nothing beyond the “good story, well told” has a just grievance against any one who asks anything further. But against the novelist who has endeavored to make his story, however good, however well told, the vehicle for a human philosophy or a metaphysical speculation, the reader has a just grievance—if the endeavor has been unsuccessful or if the philosophy is unsound.

Now as to the soundness or unsoundness of a particular philosophy every reader must pronounce for himself. The metaphysical idea which was the basis of Miss Johnston’s novel was this: All gods are one. All deities are one. Christ, Buddha; it matters not. “There swam upon him another great perspective. He saw Christ in light, Buddha in light. The glorified—the unified. Union.” Upon this idea Miss Johnston reconciles her two foes.

This perfectly comprehensible mystical conception is the rock on which the whole story is founded—and the rock on which it goes to pieces. It will be seen at once that the conception is one which no Christian can entertain and remain a Christian—nor any Buddhist, and remain a Buddhist, either. To the vast majority of mankind, therefore, the philosophy of Foes was unsound and the novel was worthless except for the superficial incidents and the lovely prose in which they were recounted.

It might be thought that for those who accepted the mystical concept Miss Johnson imposed, Foes would have been a novel of the first rank. No, indeed; and for this reason:

Her piece of mysticism was supposed to be arrived at and embraced by a dour Scotchman of about the year of Our Lord 1750. It was supposed to transform the whole nature of that man so as to lead him to give over a life-long enmity in which he had looked upon himself as a Divine instrument to punish an evil-doer.

Now however reasonable or sound or inspiring and inspiriting the mystical idea may have seemed to any reader, he could not but be fatally aware that, as presented, the thing was a flat impossibility. Scotchmen of the year 1750 were Christians above all else. They were, if you like, savage Christians; some of them were irreligious, some of them were God-defying, none of them were Deists in the all-inclusive sense that Miss Johnston prescribes. The idea that Christ and Buddha might possibly be nothing but different manifestations of the Deity is an idea which could never have occurred to the eighteenth century Scotch mind—and never did. Least of all could it have occurred to such a man as Miss Johnston delineates in Alexander Jardine.

The thing is therefore utterly anachronistic. It is a historical anachronism, if you like, the history here being the history of the human spirit in its religious aspects. Every reader of the book, no matter how willing he may have been to accept the novelist’s underlying idea, was aware that the endeavor to convey it had utterly failed, was aware that Miss Johnston had simply projected her idea, her favorite bit of mysticism, into the mind of one of her characters, a Scotchman living a century and a half earlier! But the thoughts that one may think in the twentieth century while tramping the Virginia hills are not thoughts that could have dawned in the mind of a Scottish laird in the eighteenth century, not even though he lay in the flowering grass of the Roman Campagna.

... And so there, in Foes, we have the book in a hundred which called for something more than the intelligent and accurate work of the book reporter. Here was a case of a good novelist, and a very, very good one, gone utterly wrong. It was not sufficient to convey to the prospective reader a just idea of the story and of the qualities of it. It was necessary to cut and slash, as cleanly and as swiftly and as economically as possible—and as dispassionately—to the root of the trouble. For if Miss Johnston were to repeat this sort of performance her reputation would suffer, not to speak of her royalties; readers would be enraged or misled; young writers playing the sedulous ape would inflict dreadful things upon us; tastes and tempers would be spoiled; publishers would lose money;—and, much the worst of all, the world would be deprived of the splendid work Mary Johnston could do while she was doing the exceedingly bad work she did do.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the blunder in Foes was the fact that there was no necessity for it. The Christian religion, which was the religion of Alexander Jardine, provides for reconciliation, indeed, it exacts it. There was the way for Miss Johnston to bring her foes together. Of course, it would not have been intellectually so exciting. But there is such a thing as emotional appeal, and it is not always base; there are emotions in the human so high and so lofty that it is wiser not to try to transcend them....

The appearance of part of the foregoing in Books and the Book World of The Sun, New York, brought a letter from Kansas which should find a place in this volume. The letter, with the attempted answer, may as well be given here. The writer is head of the English department in a State college. He wrote:

20

“I hope that the mails lost for your college professors of English subscribers their copies of Books and the Book World [containing the foregoing observations on Book Reporting].... College professors do not like to be disturbed—and most of us cannot be, for that matter. The TNT in those pages was not meant for us, perhaps, but it should have been.

“When I read Book Reporting I dictated three pages of protest, but did not send it on—thanks to my better judgment.... Then I decided, since you had added so much to my perturbation, to ask you to help me.

“We need it out here—literary help only, of course. This is the only State college on what was once known as the ‘Great Plains.’ W. F. Cody won his sobriquet on Government land which is now our campus. Our students are the sons and daughters of pioneers who won over grasshoppers, droughts, hot winds and one crop farms. They are so near to real life that the teaching of literature must be as real as the literature—rather, it ought to be. That’s where I want you to help me.

“I am not teaching literature here now as I was taught geology back in Missouri. That’s as near as I shall tell you how I teach—it is bad enough and you might not help me if I did. (Perhaps, in fairness to you, I should say that for several years never less than one-third of those to whom we gave degrees have majored in English, and always as many as the next two departments combined.)

“Here’s what I am tired of and want to get away from:

“1. Testing students on reading a book by asking fact questions about what is in the book—memory work, you see.

“2. Demanding of students a scholarship in the study of literature that is so academic that it is Prussian.

“3. Demanding that students serve time in literature classes as a means of measuring their advance in the study of literature.

“Here’s what I want you to help me with in some definite concrete way: (Sounds like a college professor making an assignment—beg pardon.)

“1. Could you suggest a scheme of ‘book reporting’ for college students in literature classes? (An old book to a new person is news, isn’t it?)

“2. Give me a list of books published during the last ten years that should be included in college English laboratory classes in literature. I want your list. I have my own, but fear it is too academic.