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AND OTHER EXPLANATIONS

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.

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 aesthetic 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."

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.

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.

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 it meets no human necessity, it is not done openly and aboveboard, it is invariably detrimental to society, and 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.

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 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 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 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 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, aesthetically 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.

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:

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.

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

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 . 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.

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.

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.

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!

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?

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

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!

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 . 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.

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.

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.

Now for the cases.

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, subpoenas 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.

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 or will demand a searching examination of his private life . 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?

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