\ 
 
 
 
CRUMBLING IDOLS 
 
CRUMBLING IDOLS 
 
 TWELVE ESSAYS ON ART 
 DEALING CHIEFLY WITH 
 LITERATURE, PAINTING AND THE 
 DRAMA BY HAMLIN GARLAND 
 
 CHICAGO AND CAMBRIDGE 
 
 PUBLISHED BY STONE AND 
 
 KIMBALL IN THE YEAR 
 
 MDCCCXCIV 
 
OujJi, 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1894 
 
 BY 
 
 HAMLIN GARLAND 
 
TO THE MEN AND WOMEN 
 OF AMERICA WHO HAVE THE 
 COURAGE TO BE ARTISTS. 
 
To love the truth in an age of lies ; 
 
 To holdfast art when hunger cries ; 
 To sing love s song in spite of hate, 
 Keeping his heart inviolate, 
 
 These are the artist s victories. 
 
A PERSONAL WORD. 
 
 THIS book is not a history; it is not a 
 formal essay : it is a series of suggestions. 
 
 I do not assume to speak for any one but 
 myself, being an individualist, and the 
 power of this writing to destroy or build rests 
 upon its reasonableness, simply. It does 
 not carry with it the weight of any literary 
 hierarchy. 
 
 It is intended to weaken the hold of con 
 ventionalism upon the youthful artist. It 
 aims also to be constructive, by its state 
 ment and insistent re-statement that Amer 
 ican art, to be enduring and worthy, must be 
 original and creative, not imitative. \s 
 
 My contention is not against literary artists 
 of the past, but against fetichism. Literary 
 prostration is as hopeless and sterile as pros 
 tration before Baal or Isis or Vishnu. It is 
 fitter to stand erect in these days. 
 
viii CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 Youth should study the past, not to get 
 away from the present, but to understand 
 the present and to anticipate the future. 
 I believe in the mighty pivotal present. I 
 believe in the living, not the dead. (^ The 
 men and women around me interest me 
 more than the saints and heroes of other 
 centuries.^ 
 
 I do not advocate an exchange of masters, 
 but freedom from masters. Life, Nature, 
 these should be our teachers. They are 
 masters who do not enslave. 
 
 Youth should be free from the dominion 
 of the dead; therefore I defend the indi 
 vidual right of the modern creative mind to 
 create in the image of life, and not in the 
 image of any literary master, living or dead. 
 
 There came a young man to Monet, say 
 ing, " Master, teach me to paint." To which 
 Monet replied, " I do not teach painting ; I 
 make paintings. There never has been, and 
 there never will be, but one teacher : there 
 she is!" and with one sweep of his arm 
 he showed the young man the splendor of 
 meadow and sunlight. " Go, learn of her, 
 and listen to all she will say to you. If she 
 
A PERSONAL WORD. ix 
 
 says nothing, enter a notary s office and copy 
 papers; that, at least, is not dishonorable, 
 and is better than copying nymphs." 
 
 It is this spirit which is reinvigorating art 
 in every nation of Europe ; and shall we sit 
 down and copy the last epics of feudalism, 
 and repeat the dying echoes of Romance ? 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 A PERSONAL WORD vii 
 
 I. PROVINCIALISM 3 
 
 II. NEW FIELDS 21 
 
 III. THE QUESTION OF SUCCESS . . 33 
 
 IV. LITERARY PROPHECY 39 
 
 V. LOCAL COLOR IN ART .... 57 
 
 VI. THE LOCAL NOVEL 69 
 
 VII. THE DRIFT OF THE DRAMA . . 83 
 
 VIII. THE INFLUENCE OF IBSEN ... 99 
 
 IX. IMPRESSIONISM 121 
 
 X. LITERARY CENTRES 145 
 
 XL LITERARY MASTERS 165 
 
 XII. A RECAPITULATORY AFTERWORD 183 
 
I. 
 
 PROVINCIALISM. 
 
j THE history of Amer- 
 
 PROVINCIALISM. iCa " UteratUre U the ^ 
 tory of provincialism 
 
 slowly becoming less all-pervasive the 
 history of the slow development of a dis 
 tinctive utterance. 
 
 By provincialism I mean dependence upon 
 a mother country for models of art produc 
 tion. This is the sense in which Taine or 
 Veron would use the word. The " provin 
 cialism " which the conservative deplores is 
 not provincialism, but the beginning of an 
 indigenous literature. 
 
 " The true makers of national literature," 
 writes Posnet, in his " Comparative Litera 
 ture," " are the actions and thoughts of the 
 nation itself. The place of these can never 
 be taken by the sympathies of a cultured 
 class too wide to be national, or those of a 
 central academy too refined to be provincial. 
 Provincialism is no ban in a truly national 
 literature." 
 
4 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 Using the word " provincialism," therefore, 
 from *he point of view of the central acad 
 emy, we have had too little of it. That is to 
 say, our colonial writers, and our writers 
 from 1800 on to 1860, had too little to do 
 with the life of the American people, and too 
 much concern with British critics. Using it 
 in its literary sense of dependence upon Eng 
 land and classic models, we have had too 
 much of it. 1 1 has kept us timidly imitating the 
 great writers of a nation far separated from 
 us naturally in its social and literary ideals. 
 
 The whole development can be epitomized 
 thus : Here on the eastern shore of America 
 lay a chain of colonies predominantly Eng 
 lish, soon to be provinces. Like all colonists, 
 they looked back to their mother-country for 
 support and encouragement in intellectual 
 affairs as in material things. They did not 
 presume to think for themselves. But the 
 Revolution taught them something. It 
 strengthened the feeling of separate identity 
 and responsibility. It liberated them in 
 politics, but left them still provincial (depen 
 dent) in literary and religious things. There 
 still remained some truth in the British sneer, 
 
PROVINCIALISM. 5 
 
 that American poets and artists were merely 
 shadows or doubles successively of Pope, 
 of Scott, of Byron, of Wordsworth, and of 
 Tennyson. In all the space between the 
 Revolution and the Civil War, American 
 poets reflected the American taste fairly 
 well, but the spirit and form of their work 
 (with a few notable exceptions) was imitative. 
 
 Here and there song was sung, from the 
 sincere wish to embody American life and 
 characteristic American thought. Each gen 
 eration grew less timid, and more manly 
 and individual. The Civil War came on, 
 and was an immense factor in building up 
 freedom from old-world models, and in de 
 veloping native literature. National feeling 
 had an immense widening and deepening. 
 From the interior of America, men and 
 women rose almost at once to make Ameri 
 can literature take on vitality and character. 
 
 American life had been lived, but not em 
 bodied in art. Native utterance had been 
 overawed and silenced by academic English 
 judgments ; but this began to change after 
 the Civil War. The new field began to 
 make itself felt, not all at once, but by 
 
6 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 degrees, through " Snow-bound " and " The 
 Biglow Papers" and "The Tales of the 
 Argonauts " and the " Songs of the Sierras." 
 But while this change was growing, there was 
 coming in in the Eastern cities the spirit of a 
 central academy that was to stand in pre 
 cisely the same relation to the interior of 
 America that London formerly occupied with 
 regard to the whole country. 
 
 It may be that New York is to threaten and 
 overawe the interior of America, as Paris 
 reigns over the French provinces. The work 
 of Mistral and the Felibrige may be needed 
 with us to keep original genius from being 
 silenced or distorted by a central academy 
 which is based upon tradition rather than 
 upon life and nature. Decentralization may 
 come to be needed here, as in Europe. 
 
 The evolutionist explains the past by the 
 study of laws operative in the present, and 
 by survivals of ancient conditions obscurely 
 placed in modern things, like sinking ice 
 bergs in a southern sea. The attitude of 
 mind (once universal with Americans) which 
 measured everything by British standards, 
 
PROVINCIALISM. 7 
 
 and timidly put new wine into old bottles, 
 can still be found among the academic devo 
 tees and their disciples. They are survivals 
 of a conception of life and literature once 
 universal. 
 
 The change which has taken place can be 
 specifically illustrated in the West. That is 
 to say, the general terms which could be ap 
 plied to the whole country up to the time of 
 the Civil War can be applied specifically to 
 the middle West to-day. As a Western man, 
 I think I may speak freely, without being 
 charged with undue prejudice toward the 
 States I name. 
 
 The school-bred West, broadly speaking, 
 is as provincial in its art as it is assertive of 
 Americanism in politics. The books it reads, 
 the pictures it buys, are nearly all of the con 
 ventional sort, or, worse yet, imitations of 
 the conventional. Its literary clubs valiantly 
 discuss dead issues in English literature, and 
 vote in majority against the indigenous and 
 the democratic. They have much to say 
 of the ideal and the universal in literature, 
 quite in the manner of their academical 
 instructors. 
 
8 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 The lower ranks of Western readers, as 
 everywhere, devour some millions of tons of 
 romantic love-stories, or stories of detectives 
 or Indians. It is a curious thing to contrast 
 the bold assertion of the political exhorter of 
 " America for Americans " with the enslave 
 ment of our readers and writers to various 
 shades of imitative forms of feudalistic litera 
 ture. America is not yet democratic in art, 
 whatever it may claim to be in politics. 
 
 These facts are not to be quarrelled about, 
 they are to be studied. They are signs of 
 life, and not of death. It is better that these 
 people should read such things than nothing 
 at all. They will rise out of it. They can 
 be influenced, but they must be approached 
 on the side of life, and not by way of the 
 academic. They are ready to support and 
 be helped by the art which springs from life. 
 
 It is the great intelligent middle class of 
 America, curiously enough, who are appar 
 ently most provincial. With them the ver 
 dict of the world is all-important. Their 
 education has been just sufficient to make 
 them distrustful of their own judgment. 
 They are largely the product of our schools. 
 
PRO VI NCI A L ISM. 9 
 
 They have been taught to believe that 
 Shakespeare ended the drama, that Scott 
 has closed the novel, that the English lan 
 guage is the greatest in the world, and that 
 all other literatures are curious, but not at 
 all to be ranked in power and humanity with 
 the English literature, etc., etc. 
 
 I speak advisedly of these things, because 
 I have been through this instruction, which 
 is well-nigh universal. This class is the 
 largest class in America, and makes up the 
 great body of school-bred Westerners. They 
 sustain with a sort of desperation all the 
 tenets of the conservative and romantic crit 
 icism in which they have been instructed. 
 
 It can almost be stated as a rule without an 
 exception that in our colleges there is no chair 
 of English literature which is not dominated 
 by conservative criticism, and where sneer 
 ing allusion to modern writers is not daily\ 
 made. The pupil is taught to worship the I / 
 past, and is kept blind to the mighty literary I P* 
 movements of his own time. If he comes-* 
 to understand Ibsen, Tolstoy, Bjornson, 
 Howells, Whitman, he must do it outside? 
 his instruction. 
 
io CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 This instruction is well meaning, but it is 
 benumbing to the faculties. It is essentially 
 hopeless. It blinds the eyes of youth to the 
 power and beauty of the life and literature 
 around him. It worships the past, despises 
 the present, and fears the future. Such 
 teaching is profoundly pessimistic, because 
 it sees literary ideals changing. It has not 
 yet seen that metamorphosis is the law of 
 all living things. It has not yet risen to 
 the perception that the question for America 
 to settle is not whether it can produce some 
 thing greater than the past, but whether it 
 lhall produce something different from the 
 past. Our task is not to imitate, but to 
 create. 
 
 Instruction of this kind inevitably deflects 
 the natural bent of the young artist, or dis 
 courages attempt altogether. It is the oppo 
 site of education ; that is, it represses rather 
 than leads out the distinctive individuality 
 of the student. 
 
 These conservative ideas affect the local 
 newspapers, and their literary columns are 
 too often full of the same gloomy comment. 
 They are timidly negative when not parti- 
 
PRO VI NCI A LISM. 1 1 
 
 sanly conservative. They can safely praise 
 Ruskin and Carlyle, and repeat an old slur 
 on Browning or Whitman. 
 
 There is also a class of critics who can 
 launch into two-column criticisms of a new 
 edition of " Rasselas," and leave unread a 
 great novel by Tolstoy, or a new transla 
 tion of Brand, or a new novel by Howells. 
 Their judgment is worthless to detect truth 
 and beauty in a work of art close at hand. 
 They wait for the judgment of the East, of 
 London. 
 
 The American youth is continually called 
 upon by such critics to take Addison or 
 Scott or Dickens or Shakespeare as a 
 model. Such instruction leads naturally to 
 the creation of blank-verse tragedies on 
 Columbus and Washington, a species of 
 work which seems to the radical the crown 
 ing absurdity of misplaced effort. 
 
 Thus, the American youth is everywhere 
 turned away from the very material which 
 he could best handle, which he knows most; 
 about, and which he really loves most, 
 material which would make him individual, 
 and fill him with hope and energy. Thei 
 
12 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 Western poet and novelist is not taught to 
 see the beauty and significance of life near 
 at hand. He is rather blinded to it by his 
 instruction. 
 
 He turns away from the marvellous 
 changes which border-life subtends in its 
 mighty rush toward civilization. He does 
 not see the wealth of material which lies at 
 his hand, in the mixture of races going on 
 with inconceivable celerity everywhere in 
 America, but with especial picturesqueness 
 in the West. If he sees it, he has not the 
 courage to write of it. 
 
 If, here and there, one has reached some 
 such perception, he voices it timidly, with an 
 apologetic look in his eye. 
 
 The whole matter appears to me to be a 
 question of the individuality. I feel that 
 Veron has stated this truth better than any 
 other man. In his assault upon the central 
 academy he says, in substance, " Education 
 should not conventionalize, should not mass 
 together ; it should individualize." 
 
 The Western youth, like the average 
 school-bred American, lacks the courage of 
 his real conviction. He really prefers the 
 
PROVINCIA LISM. 1 3 
 
 modern writer, the modern painter, but he 
 feels bound to falsify in regard to his real 
 mind. As a creative intelligence, he lacks the 
 courage to honestly investigate his surround 
 ings, and then stand by his judgment. Both 
 as reader and writer, he dreads the Eastern 
 comment. It is pitiful to see his eagerness to 
 conform ; he will even go beyond his teach 
 ers in conforming. Thus he starts wrong. 
 His standards of comparison are wrong. 
 He is forced into writing to please some 
 body else, which is fatal to high art. 
 
 To perceive the force of all this, and the 
 real hopelessness of instruction according to 
 conventional models, we have only to observe 
 how little that is distinctive has been pro 
 duced by the great Western middle States, 
 say Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa. Of what 
 does its writing consist ? 
 
 A multitude of little newspapers, first of 
 all, full of local news ; and larger newspapers 
 that are political organs, with some little 
 attention to literature on their inside pages. 
 Their judgments are mainly conservative, 
 but here and there in their news columns 
 one finds sketches of life so vivid one won- 
 
14 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 ders why writers so true and imaginative are 
 not recognized and encouraged. 
 
 The most of the short stories in these papers, 
 however, are absolutely colorless, where they 
 are not pirated exotics. In all that they 
 call " literature " these papers generally re 
 flect what they believe to be the correct 
 thing in literary judgment. In their un- 
 x" conscious moments they are fine and true. 
 \\ Art, they think, is something far away, and 
 // literary subjects must be something select 
 and very civilized. And yet for forty years 
 *4-- / an infinite drama has been going on in those 
 wide spaces of the West, a drama that is 
 \ as thrilling, as full of heart and hope and 
 \ battle, as any that ever surrounded any 
 
 I man; a life that was unlike any ever seen 
 
 on the earth, and which should have pro 
 duced its characteristic literature, its native 
 art chronicle. 
 
 As for myself, I am overwhelmed by the 
 majesty, the immensity, the infinite charm of 
 the life that goes on around me. Themes 
 are crying out to be written. Take, for a 
 single example, the history of the lumbering 
 district of the northern lakes, a picturesque 
 
PROVINCIALISM. 15 
 
 and peculiar life, that through a period of 
 thirty years has been continually changing 
 in all but a few of its essential features ; and 
 yet this life has had only superficial rep 
 resentation in the sketches of the tourist 
 or reporter; its inner heart has not been 
 uttered. 
 
 The subtle changes of thought and of life 
 that have come with the rise of a city like St, 
 Paul or Minneapolis; the life of the great 
 saw-mills and shingle-mills ; and the river- 
 life of the upper Mississippi are all fine sub 
 jects. So are the river towns like Dubuque 
 and Davenport, with their survivals of French 
 life reaching down to the present year, and 
 thus far unrecorded. 
 
 Then there is the mixture of races ; the com 
 ing in of the German, the Scandinavian ; the 
 marked yet subtle changes in their character. 
 Then there is the building of railroads, with 
 all their trickery and false promises and 
 worthless bonds ; the rise of millionnaires ; 
 the deepening of social contrasts. In short, 
 there is a great heterogeneous, shifting, brave 
 population, a land teeming with unrecorded 
 and infinite drama. 
 
1 6 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 It is only to the superficial observer that 
 this country seems colorless and dull ; to the 
 veritist it is full of burning interest, greatest 
 possibilities. I instance these localities be 
 cause I know something special about them ; 
 but the same words apply to Pennsylvania, 
 Ohio, or Kentucky. And yet how few writers 
 of national reputation this eventful century- 
 long march of civilization has produced ! 
 
 We have had the figures, the dates, the 
 bare history, the dime-novel statement of 
 ^pioneer life, but how few real novels! How 
 jfew accurate studies of speech and life! 
 \ There it lies, ready to be put into the novel 
 and the drama, and upon canvas ; and it must 
 be done by those born into it. Joaquin Mil 
 ler has given us lines of splendid poetry 
 touching this life, and Edward Eggleston, 
 Joseph Kirkland, Opie Read, Octave Thanet, 
 have dealt more or less faithfully with certain 
 phases of it ; but mainly the mighty West, 
 with its swarming millions, remains unde- 
 lineated in the novel, the drama, and the 
 poem. 
 
 The causes of it, as I have indicated, are 
 if twofold : first, lack of a market ; and, second, 
 
PR O VI NCI A LISM. l 7 
 
 lack of perception. This lack of perception 
 of the art-possibilities of common American 
 life has been due to several causes. Hard 
 life, toil, lack of leisure, have deadened and 
 calloused the perceiving mind, making life 
 hard, dull, and uninteresting. But, beyond 
 this, the right perception has been lacking 
 on the part of instructors and critics. 
 Everything has really tended to repress or 
 distort the art-feeling of the young man or 
 woman. They have been taught to imitate, 
 not to create. 
 
 But at last conditions are changing. All 
 over the West young people are coming on 
 who see that every literature in the past was 
 at its best creative and not imitative. Here 
 and there a paper or magazine lends itself 
 to the work of encouraging the young writer 
 in original work. They are likely to err 
 now on the side of flattery. Criticism should 
 be helpful, not indiscriminate either in praise 
 or blame. 
 
 And more than this, in every town of the 
 
 interior there are groups of people whose 
 
 firmness of conviction and broad culture 
 
 make them the controlling power in all 
 
 2 
 
1 8 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 local literary work. They are reading the 
 most modern literature, and their judgments 
 are not dependent upon New York or 
 London, though they find themselves in full 
 harmony with progressive artists every 
 where. They are clearly in the mi 
 nority, but they are a growing 
 company everywhere, and 
 their influence is felt by 
 every writer of the 
 progressive 
 group. 
 
II. 
 
 NEW FIELDS. 
 
n THE secret of every last->| 
 
 NEW FIELDS. ^ SU CeSS in ait ^^ 
 
 ature lies, I believe,; in a 
 powerful, sincere, emotional concept oflife 
 first, and, second, in the acquired power to 
 convey that concept to others. This leads 
 necessarily to individuality in authorship, and 
 to freedom from past models^j 
 
 This theory of the veritist is, after all, a / 
 statement of his passion for truth and for / 
 individual expression. The passion does not \ 
 spring from theory; the theory rises from ; 
 the love of the verities, which seems to 
 increase day by day all over the Western 
 world. 
 
 The veritist, therefore, must not be taken 
 to be dogmatic, only so far as he is per 
 sonally concerned. He is occupied in stating 
 his sincere convictions, believing that only 
 in that way is the cause of truth advanced. 
 He addresses himself to the mind prepared 
 
22 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 to listen. He destroys by displacement, not 
 by attacking directly. 
 
 Clt is a settled conviction with me that each 
 locality must produce its own literary record, 
 each special phase of life utter its own voice. 
 There is no other way for a true local ex 
 pression to embody itself. The sun of truth 
 strikes each part of the earth at a little dif 
 ferent angle ; it is this angle which gives 
 life and infinite variety to literature. It is 
 the subtle differences which life presents in 
 California and Oregon, for example, which 
 will produce, and justify, a Pacific-Coast 
 literature. 
 
 In all that I have written upon local liter 
 ature, I have told the truth as I saw it. That 
 others did not see it in the same light, was 
 to be expected. And in writing upon Pacific- 
 Coast literature, undoubtedly I shall once 
 more be stating the cause of veritism ; for 
 the question of Pacific-Coast literature is 
 really the question of genuine American 
 literature. The same principles apply to all 
 sections of the land. 
 
 The mere fact that a writer happens to 
 live in California or Oregon will not make 
 
NEW FIELDS. 23 
 
 him a part of that literature, any more than 
 Stevenson s life in Samoa will make him a 
 Samoan author. A nation, in the early part 
 of its literary history, is likely to sweep to 
 gether all that can, by any construction, be 
 called its literature ; but as it grows rich in 
 real utterances, it eliminates one after the 
 other all those writings which its clearer judg 
 ment perceives to be exotics. 
 
 The Pacific Coast is almost like another 
 world. Its distance from New York and 
 Boston, its semi-tropic plants, its strange 
 occupations, place it in a section by itself, 
 just as the rest of the nation falls naturally 
 into New England, the South, the Middle 
 States, and the Northwest ; and, in the same 
 way, from the Pacific States will continue 
 to come a distinct local literature. Its 
 vitality depends, in my judgment, upon this 
 difference in quality. 
 
 I say " continue to come," because we 
 can never overlook the great work done 
 by Joaquin Miller and Bret Harte. They 
 came to this strange new land, young and 
 impressionable. They became filled with the 
 life and landscape almost with the same 
 
24 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 power and sincerity as if they had been^born 
 here. Miller, especially, at his best, got far 
 below superficial wonder. He attained the 
 love for his subjects which is essential to 
 sincere art. The best of his work could not 
 have been produced anywhere else. It is 
 native as Shasta. 
 
 But neither of these men must be taken 
 for model. Veritism, as I understand it, 
 puts aside all models, even living writers. 
 Whatever he may do unconsciously, the 
 artist must consciously stand alone before 
 nature and before life. Nature and life have 
 changed since Miller and Harte wrote. The 
 California of to-day is quite different. The 
 creative writer to-day, if true to himself, finds 
 himself interested in other subjects, and finds 
 himself believing in a different treatment of 
 even the same material. 
 
 There is no necessity of treating the same 
 material, however. Vast changes, already in 
 progress, invite the writer. The coming in 
 of horticulture, the immigration of farmers 
 from all the Eastern States; the mingling of 
 races ; the feudalistic ownership of lands ; the 
 nomadic life of the farm-hands, the growth 
 
NEW FIELDS. 25 
 
 of cities, the passing Spanish civilization, 
 these are a few of the subjects which occur 
 to me as worthy the best work of novelist 
 and dramatist. 
 
 Being " a farmer by birth and a novelist by- 
 occupation," I saw most clearly the literary 
 possibilities of the farmer s life in the valleys 
 of California and in the stupendous forests 
 of Oregon. 
 
 I saw children moving along to school in 
 the shadow of the most splendid mountains ; 
 I saw a youth plowing, behind him rose a 
 row of palms, against which he stood like a 
 figure of bronze in relief ; I saw young men 
 and maidens walking down aisles of green 
 and crimson pepper-trees, and the aisles led to 
 blue silhouetted mountains ; I saw men herd 
 ing cattle where the sun beat with hot radi 
 ance, and strange cacti held out wild arms ; 
 I saw children playing about cabins, setting 
 at defiance the illimitable width and sun 
 less depths of the Oregon forests, and I 
 thought, " Perhaps one of these is the novelist 
 or painter of the future." 
 
 Perhaps the future poet of these spaces is 
 plowing somewhere like that, because it must 
 
26 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 be that from the splendor and dramatic con 
 trast of such scenes the poet will rise. He 
 always has, and he always will. His feet 
 will be on the soil like Whittier s, and like 
 Miller s ; his song will differ from theirs be 
 cause he will be an individual soul, and be 
 cause his time and his environment will not 
 be the same. 
 
 Why should the Western artists and poets 
 look away to Greece and Rome and Persia 
 for themes ? I have met Western people 
 who were writing blank-verse tragedies of 
 the Middle] Ages and painting pictures of 
 sirens and cherubs, and still considered them 
 selves Western writers and Western artists ! 
 The reason is not hard to find. They had 
 not risen to the perception of the significant 
 and beautiful in their own environment, or 
 they were looking for effects, without regard 
 to their sincere conviction. They were poets 
 of books, not of life. 
 
 This insincerity is fatal to any great work 
 of art. A man must be moved by some 
 thing higher than money, by something 
 higher than hope of praise; he must have 
 a sleepless love in his heart urging him 
 
NEW FIELDS. 27 
 
 to re-create in the image the life he has 
 loved. He must be burdened and without 
 rest until he has given birth to his concep 
 tion. He will not be questioned when he 
 comes; he will be known as a product of 
 some one time and place, a voice speaking 
 the love of his heart. 
 
 There was much of dross and effectism in 
 Miller s earlier work, but it was filled with 
 an abounding love of Sierra mountains and 
 forests and moving things, which made him 
 the great figure of the Coast. But the litera 
 ture which is to come from the Pacific slope, 
 in my judgment, will be intimate and human 
 beyond any California precedent. It will 
 not dodge or equivocate. It will state the 
 truth. It will not be spectacular, it will not 
 deal with the outside (as a tourist must do). 
 It will deal with the people and their home 
 dramas, their loves and their ambitions. It 
 will not seek themes. Themes will crowd 
 upon them and move them. 
 
 The lovers who wander down the aisles of 
 orange or lemon or pepper trees will not 
 marvel at blooms and shrubs. Their presence 
 and perfume will be familiar and lovely, not 
 
28 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 strange. The stark lines of the fir and the 
 broadsword-thrust of the banana-leaf will 
 not attract their surprised look. All will be 
 as friendly and grateful as the maple or the 
 Lombardy poplar to the Iowa school-boy. 
 
 A new literature will come with the gener 
 ation just coming to manhood and woman 
 hood on the Coast. If rightly educated, their 
 eyes will turn naturally to the wheat-fields, 
 the forests, the lanes of orange-trees, the 
 ranges of unsurpassed mountains. They 
 will try to express in the novel, the drama, in 
 painting and in song, the love and interest 
 they take in the things close at hand. 
 
 This literature will not deal with crime 
 and abnormities, nor with deceased persons. 
 It will deal, I believe, with the wholesome 
 love of honest men for honest women, with 
 the heroism of labor, the comradeship of men, 
 a drama of average types of character, in 
 finitely varied, but always characteristic. 
 
 In this literature will be the shadows of 
 mountain-islands, the sweep of dun plains, 
 and dark-blue mountain-ranges silhouetted 
 against a burning yellow sky. It will deal 
 with mighty forests and with man s brave war 
 
NEW FIELDS. 29 
 
 against the gloom and silence. It will have 
 in it types of vanishing races, and prophecies 
 of coming citizens. It will have the per 
 fume of the orange and lemon trees, the pur 
 ple dapple of spicy pepper-tree fruit, the 
 grace of drooping, fern-like acacia leaves. 
 
 And in the midst of these sights and 
 sounds, moving to and fro in the shadow of 
 these mountains, and feeling the presence of 
 this sea, will be men and women working 
 out the drama of life in a new way, thinking 
 new thoughts, building a happier, sunnier 
 order of things, perhaps, where the laborer 
 will face the winter always without fear and 
 without despondency. 
 
 When the real Pacific literature comes, it 
 
 will not be subject to misunderstanding. It 
 
 will be such a literature as no other 
 
 locality could produce, a literature 
 
 that could not have been written 
 
 in any other time, or among 
 
 other surroundings. 
 
 That is the test 
 
 of a national 
 
 literature. 
 
III. 
 
 THE QUESTION OF SUCCESS. 
 
BUT the question forced 
 on the young writer, even 
 
 THE QUESTION 
 
 when he is well disposed 
 
 OF SUCCESS. j j r -4.U j- 
 
 toward dealing with indig 
 enous material, is, Will it pay? Is there a 
 market for me ? 
 
 Let me answer by pointing out that almost 
 every novelist who has risen distinctively out 
 of the mass of story-writers in America, re 
 presents some special local life or some spe 
 cial social phase. 
 
 Mr. Cable stands for the Creole South f 
 Miss Murfree speaks for the mountaineer- 
 life in Tennessee ; Joel Harris represents the 
 new study of theNegro ; Miss Wilkins voices 
 the thought of certain old New England 
 towns ; Mr. Howells represents truthful 
 treatment of the cities of Boston and New 
 York ; Joseph Kirkland has dealt with early 
 Illinois life ; Harold Frederic has written 
 two powerful stories of interior New York 
 
34 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 life ; and so on through a list of equally brave 
 and equally fine writers. 
 
 I think it may be said, therefore, that suc 
 cess in indigenous lines is every year becom 
 ing more certain. You will not find your 
 market in the West yet, but the great maga 
 zines of the country are every year gaining 
 in Americanism. 
 
 If we look away to England, we see the 
 same principle illustrated. The most vital 
 blood of the English novel to-day comes from 
 the Provinces. Barrie with his " A Window 
 in Thrums," Kipling with his " Tales of the 
 Hills," Olive Schreiner with "An African 
 Farm," Jane Barlow with " Irish Idyls," 
 are putting to rout the two-volume British 
 novel, which never leaves anything out or 
 puts anything in. It is precisely the same 
 movement which is going on in Norway, 
 Holland, Hungary, all over Europe, in fact. 
 Wherever the common man rises to the 
 power of stating his interest in life, it takes 
 the form of local fiction. 
 
 The consideration of success, however, is 
 not the power which makes the true artist. 
 Deeper yet must be the keen creative delight, 
 
THE QUESTION OF SUCCESS. 35 
 
 the sweetest, deepest pleasure the artist 
 knows; the passion which sends him sup- 
 perless to bed in order that his story 
 shall reflect his own ideal, his own concept 
 of life. 
 
 But it may be concluded that the en 
 couragement of this local fiction will rob our 
 literature of its dignity. There is no dignity! 
 in imitation, it is mere pretence ; to seek dig 
 nity in form is like putting on stilts. The 
 assumption of the epic by an American poet 
 is like putting a chimney-pot hat on a child. 
 If we insist on sincerity, the question of dig 
 nity will take care of itself. Truth is a fine 
 preparation for dignity, and for beauty as 
 well. 
 
 Art, I must insist, is an individual thing, 
 the question of one man facing certain facts 
 and telling his individual relations to them. 
 His first care must be to present his own 
 concept. This is, I believe, the essence of 
 veritism : " Write of those things of which 
 you know most, and for which you care 
 most. By so doing you will be true to your 
 self, true to your locality, and true to your 
 time." 
 
36 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 I am a Western man ; my hopes and am 
 bitions for the West arise from absolute 
 knowledge of its possibilities. I want to see 
 its prairies, its river banks and coules, its 
 matchless skies, put upon canvas. I want 
 to see its young writers writing better books, 
 its young artists painting pictures that are 
 true to the life they live and the life they 
 know. I want to see the West supporting its 
 own painters and musicians and novelists; 
 and to that end I want to state my earnest 
 belief, which I have carefully matched with 
 the facts of literary history, that, to take a 
 place in the long line of poets and artists 
 in the English language, the Western 
 writer must, above all other things, 
 be true to himself and to his 
 time. To imitate is fatal. 
 Provincia lism (that is 
 to say, localism) 
 is no bait to 
 a national 
 literature. 
 
IV. 
 LITERARY PROPHECY. 
 
IT is interesting 
 to observe that all 
 
 LITERARY PROPHECY. 
 
 literary movements 
 
 in the past had little or no prevision. The 
 question of their future, their permanence, 
 did not disturb them. (My reading does not 
 disclose to me that Euphues or Spenser 
 ever thought of the dark future. Each 
 school lived for its day and time, apparently, 
 without disturbing prophecy. ) 
 
 Pope, the monarch of the^eitfcumscribed, 
 the emperor of literary lace and ruffles, so 
 far as I have read, had no gloomy fore 
 bodings. His dictatorship was the most 
 absolutely despotic and long-continued dic 
 tatorship the literary history of England has 
 ever seen. He could be pardoned for never 
 imagining that real flowers could come to be 
 enjoyed better than gilt and scarlet paper 
 roses, all alike. It is not to be wondered 
 at that he had no prevision of Whitman or 
 Ibsen, in the joyous jog-trot of his couplets. 
 
40 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 It is probable that where any thought of 
 the future troubled the artist, it unnerved 
 him. Thomas Browne saw oblivion like a 
 dark sea beneath him, but his view of life 
 was mainly statical ; he had no basis for 
 optimistic outlook. His skies were hung 
 with black. 
 
 Take larger movements, the Reforma 
 tion, for example. This movement, in its 
 day, filled the whole religious history of 
 of Europe. It transformed empires, and 
 planted colonies in the wilderness of the 
 west. It dominated art, literature, archi 
 tecture, laws, and yet it was but a phase of 
 intellectual development. Its order was 
 transitory ; and had an evolutionist been 
 born into that austere time, he would have 
 predicted the reaction to enjoyment of 
 worldly things which followed, and would 
 have foretold the sure passing away of the 
 whole world as it was then colored and dom 
 inated by puritanic thought. 
 
 In art, this narrowness and sincerity of 
 faith in itself has been the principal source 
 of power of every movement in the past. 
 To question was to weaken. Had Spenser 
 
LITERARY PROPHECY. 41 
 
 suspected the prosiness and hollow absurdity 
 of his combats (wherein the hero always 
 wins), had he perceived something else in 
 life better worth while than allegory and the 
 endless recounting of tales of chivalry, he 
 would have failed to embody as he did the 
 glittering and caparisoned barbarism of his 
 forbears. And the crown which Pope wore 
 would have rested like a plat of thorns on 
 his brow had he been visited by disturbing 
 visions of a time when men would prefer 
 their poetry in some other form than coup 
 lets or quatrains, and would even question 
 whether the "Essay on Man" was poetry 
 or not. 
 
 With no conception of what the world had 
 been, they had no guiding line to point to 
 that which the world was to be. The stati 
 cal idea of life and literature held in all 
 thought, except where men believed the 
 world was fallen from a golden age into 
 darkness and decay, or that it was again 
 declining to a fall. 
 
 Because Shakespeare and the group around 
 him were feudalistic, and did not believe in 
 the common personality ; because the critics 
 
42 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 of Dryden s day believed Shakespeare was a 
 savage ; because each age believed in its art 
 and in the world of thought around it, there 
 fore has each real age of literature embodied 
 more or less faithfully its own outlook upon 
 life, and gone peacefully, if not arrogantly, 
 to its grave at last, in blessed ignorance of 
 the green dust which the library of the future 
 held in store for it. 
 
 In the thought of philosophers, so-called, 
 the same traditional feeling held. The ob 
 server, the independent investigator of facts, 
 could hardly be said to have existed. Tra 
 dition, the organized conceptions of the race, 
 reigned over the individual, and men did not 
 think. The Scriptures had said it all. There 
 was no room for science. 
 
 But while each age can be held in general 
 terms to have had no prevision, it is probable 
 that some few of its greatest minds caught 
 a glimpse of coming change, and that this 
 power of prophecy grew slowly, and the 
 power of tradition grew less binding, until 
 there came upon the world the splendid light 
 of the development theory, uttered by Spencer 
 and Darwin. I think it is not too much to 
 
LITERARY PROPHECY. 43 
 
 say that, previous to the writing of these 
 men, definite prevision, even on the broadest 
 lines, was impossible, either in sociology or 
 literature. 
 
 Until men came to see system and pro 
 gression, and endless but definite succession 
 in art and literature as in geologic change ; 
 until the law of progress was enunciated, no 
 conception of the future and no reasonable 
 history of the past could be formulated. 
 Once prove literature and art subject to 
 social conditions, to environment and social 
 conformation, and the dominance of the epic 
 in one age, and of the drama in another, be 
 came as easy to understand and to infer as 
 any other fact of a people s history. 
 
 The study of evolution has made the 
 present the most critical and self-analytical 
 of all ages known to us. It has liberated 
 the thought of the individual as never be 
 fore, and the power of tradition grows 
 fainter year by year. 
 
 It is not my purpose to write the history 
 of the development of literature. I have 
 drifted farther into the general subject than 
 I intended. I am merely preparing the way 
 
44 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 for some more or less valuable ideas upon 
 the future of American fiction. 
 
 Evolutionists explain the past by means of 
 laws operative in the present, by survivals 
 of change. In an analogous way, we may 
 infer (broadly, of course) the future of so 
 ciety, and therefore its art, from changes 
 just beginning to manifest themselves. The 
 developed future is always prophesied in the 
 struggling embryos of the present. In the 
 mold of the present are the swelling acorns 
 of future forests. 
 
 Fiction already commands the present in 
 the form of the novel of life. It already out 
 ranks verse and the drama as a medium of 
 expression. It is so flexible, admits of so 
 many points of view, and comprehends so 
 much (uniting painting and rhythm to the 
 drama and the pure narrative), that it has 
 come to be the highest form of expression in 
 Russia, Germany, Norway, and France. It 
 occupies with easy tolerance the high seats 
 in the synagogue, and felicitates the other 
 arts on having got in, or rather stayed in 
 at all. At its best it certainly is the most 
 modern and unconventional of arts. 
 
LITERARY PROPHECY. 45 
 
 Taking it as it stands to-day in America, 
 the novel not only shows its relation to the 
 past and the present, but it holds within 
 itself prophecies of impending change. No 
 other medium of art expression is so sensi 
 tive to demand. Change is sure. What 
 will it be? 
 
 We are about to enter the dark. We need 
 a light. This flaming thought from Whit 
 man will do for the search-light of the pro 
 found deeps : All that the past was not, the 
 future will be. 
 
 If the past was bond, the future will be 
 free. If the past was feudalistic, the future 
 will be democratic. If the past ignored and 
 trampled upon women, the future will place 
 them side by side with men. If the child of 
 the past was ignored, the future will cherish 
 him. And fiction will embody these facts. 
 
 If the past was dark and battleful and 
 bloody and barbarous, the future will be 
 peaceful and sunny. If the past celebrated 
 lust and greed and love of power, the future 
 will celebrate continence and humility and 
 altruism. If the past was the history of a 
 few titled personalities riding high on obscure 
 
46 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 waves of nameless, suffering humanity, the 
 future will be the day of high average per 
 sonality, the abolition of all privilege, the 
 peaceful walking together of brethren, equals 
 before nature and before the law. And 
 fiction will celebrate this life. 
 
 If the past was gross and materialistic in 
 its religion, worshipping idols of wood and 
 stone, demanding sacrifices to appease God, 
 using creed as a club to make men conform 
 to a single interpretation of man s relation to 
 nature and his fellows, then the future will 
 be high and pure and subtle in its religious 
 interpretations ; and there will be granted to 
 individuals perfect freedom in the interpre 
 tation of nature s laws, a freedom in fact, as 
 well as in name. And to fiction is given 
 the task of subtilely embodying this splendid 
 creed. 
 
 All that the past was not, the future will 
 be. The question is not one of similarity, 
 but of difference. 
 
 As we run swiftly over the development of 
 literary history, we see certain elements being 
 left behind while others are carried forward. 
 
LITERARY PROPHECY. 47 
 
 Those which are carried forward are, how 
 ever, extremely general and fundamental. 
 They are the bones of art, not its curve of 
 flesh or flush of blood. 
 
 One of these central elements of unchang 
 ing power, always manifest in every really 
 great literature, is sincerity in method. This 
 produces contemporaneousness. The great 
 writers of the past did not write "for all 
 time," not even for the future. They mainly 
 were occupied in interesting some portion of 
 their fellow-men. Shakespeare had no care 
 and little thought of the eighteenth century 
 in his writing. 
 
 He studied his time, and tried sincerely to 
 state it in terms that would please those whom 
 he considered his judicious friends. Thus he 
 reflected (indirectly) the feudal age, for that 
 was the dominant thought of his day. So 
 Dryden and Pope, each at his best, portrayed 
 his day, putting his sincere and original com 
 ment upon the life around him, flavoring 
 every translation he made with the vice and 
 lawlessness which he felt to be the prevailing 
 elements of his immediate surroundings. In 
 the main, they believed in themselves. 
 
48 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 Measured by our standard, the writers of 
 the Restoration period were artificial in 
 manner and vile in thought. They smell 
 always of the bawdy-house, and their dramas 
 sicken us with the odor of the filth through 
 which their writers reeled the night before. 
 To themselves they were elegant, truthful, 
 and worthy of being taken seriously at their 
 best and forgiven for their worst. 
 
 The romantic school of fiction, while it 
 reigned, was self-justifiable, at least in great 
 figures like Scott and Hugo, because it was 
 a sincere expression of their likings and dis- 
 likings. It reflected directly and indirectly 
 their rebellion against the old, and put in evi 
 dence their conception of the office of litera 
 ture. It was also wholesome, and, in Hugo, 
 consciously humanitarian. The romancers 
 did their work. It will never be done so well 
 again, because all that follows their model 
 will be imitative ; theirs was the genuine 
 romanticism. 
 
 The fiction of the future will not be roman 
 tic in any such sense as Scott or Hugo 
 was romantic, because to do that would be 
 to re-live the past, which is impossible ; to 
 
LITERARY PROPHECY. 49 
 
 imitate models, which is fatal. Reader and 
 writer will both be wanting. The element of 
 originality follows from the power of the ele 
 ment of sincerity. " All original art," says 
 Taine, "is self-regulative." It does not 
 imitate. It does not follow models. It 
 stands before life, and is accountant to life 
 and self only. Therefore, the fiction of the 
 future must be original, and therefore self- 
 regulative. 
 
 The fiction of the past dealt largely with 
 types, often with abstractions or caricatures. 
 It studied men in heroic attitudes. It con 
 cerned itself mainly with love and war. It 
 did not study men intimately, except in 
 vicious or criminal moods. 
 
 As fiction has come to deal more and more 
 with men and less with abstractions, it will 
 be safe to infer that this will continue. 
 Eugene Veron covered the ground fully when 
 he said, " We care no longer for gods or 
 heroes ; we care for men." This is true of 
 veritism, whose power and influence augment 
 daily; even the romance writers feel its 
 influence, and are abandoning their swiftly 
 running love-stories for studies of character. 
 4 
 
50 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 Like the romantic school of painting, they 
 are affected by the influence they fear. 
 
 The novels of Bulwer, Scott, and Hugo, 
 are, after all, mixed with aristocratic influence, 
 though Hugo had much more of what might 
 be called the modern spirit, even in his so- 
 called historical studies. 
 
 It is safe to say that the fiction of the 
 future will grow more democratic in outlook 
 and more individualistic in method. Impres 
 sionism, in its deeper sense, means the state 
 ment of one s own individual perception of 
 life and nature, guided by devotion to truth. 
 Second to this great principle is the law that 
 each impression must be worked out faith 
 fully on separate canvases, each work of 
 art complete in itself. Literalism, the book 
 that can be quoted in bits, is like a picture 
 that can be cut into pieces. It lacks unity. 
 The higher art would seem to be the art 
 that perceives and states the relations of 
 things, giving atmosphere and relative values 
 as they appeal to the sight. 
 
 Because the novels of the past were long, 
 involved, given to discussion and comment 
 upon the action, so the novel of the future 
 will be shorter and simpler and less obvious 
 
LITERARY PROPHECY. 51 
 
 in its method. It will put its lessons into 
 general effect rather than into epigrams. 
 Discussion will be in the relations of its 
 characters, not on quotable lines or para 
 graphs. Like impressionism in painting, it 
 will subordinate parts to the whole. 
 
 It will teach, as all earnest literature has 
 done, by effect ; but it will not be by direct 
 expression, but by placing before the reader 
 the facts of life as they stand related to the 
 artist. This relation will not be put into 
 explanatory notes, but will address itself to 
 the perception of the reader. 
 
 Turning our attention for a moment to the 
 actualities of modern fiction, we find destruc 
 tive criticism to be the most characteristic 
 literary expression of the present and of the 
 immediate future, because of this slow rising 
 of the literary mind to prevision of change 
 in life. 
 
 Because the fictionist of to-day sees a 
 more beautiful and peaceful future social 
 life, and, in consequence, a more beautiful 
 and peaceful literary life, therefore he is 
 encouraged to deal truthfully and at close 
 grapple with the facts of his immediate 
 present. His comment virtually amounts to 
 
52 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 satire or prophecy, or both. Because he is 
 sustained by love and faith in the future, 
 he can be mercilessly true. He strikes at 
 thistles, because he knows the unrotted seed 
 of loveliness and peace needs but sun and 
 the air of freedom to rise to flower and 
 fragrance. 
 
 The realist or veritist is really an optimist, 
 a dreamer. He sees life in terms of what it 
 might be, as well as in terms of what it is ; 
 but he writes of what is, and, at his best, 
 suggests what is to be, by contrast. He 
 aims to be perfectly truthful in his delinea 
 tion of his relation to life, but there is a 
 tone, a color, which comes unconsciously 
 into his utterance, like the sobbing stir of 
 the muted violins beneath the frank, clear 
 song of the clarionet ; and this tone is one 
 of sorrow that the good time moves so 
 slowly in its approach. 
 
 He aims to hasten the age of beauty and 
 peace by delineating the ugliness and war 
 fare of the present; but ever the converse 
 of his picture rises in the mind of the 
 reader. He sighs for a lovelier life. He 
 is tired of warfare and diseased sexualism, 
 and Poverty the mother of Envy. He 
 
LITERARY PROPHECY. 53 
 
 is haggard with sympathetic hunger, and 
 weary with the struggle to maintain his 
 standing place on this planet, which he con 
 ceives was given to all as the abode of 
 peace. With this hate in his heart and this 
 ideal in his brain the modern man writes 
 his stories of life. They are not always 
 pleasant, but they are generally true, and 
 always they provoke thought. 
 
 This element of sad severity will change 
 as conditions change for the common man, 
 but the larger element of sincerity, with re 
 sulting contemporaneousness, will remain. 
 Fiction, to be important and successful, 
 must be original and suited to its time. As 
 the times change, fiction will change. This 
 must always be remembered. 
 
 The surest way to write for all time is to 
 embody the present in the finest form with 
 the highest sincerity and with the frankest 
 truthfulness. The surest way to write for 
 other lands is to be true to our own land and 
 true to the scenes and people we love, and 
 love in a human and direct way without 
 being educated up to it or down to it. 
 
 The people can never be educated to love 
 the past, to love Shakespeare and Homer. 
 
54 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 Students may be taught to believe they 
 believe, but the great masses of American 
 readers want the modern comment. They 
 want the past colored to suit their ideas of 
 life, that is, the readers of romance ; on 
 higher planes of reading they want sincere 
 delineation of modern life and thought, and 
 Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dante, Milton, 
 are fading away into mere names, books 
 we should read but seldom do. 
 
 Thus it will be seen that the fiction of 
 the immediate future will be the working 
 out of plans already in hand. There is 
 small prophecy in it, after all. We have 
 but to examine the ground closely, and we 
 see the green shoots of the coming harvest 
 beneath our very feet. We have but to 
 examine closely the most na ive and 
 local of our novels, and the coming 
 literature will be foreshadowed 
 there. The local novelist 
 seems to be the com 
 ing woman ! Lo 
 cal color is 
 the royal 
 robe. 
 
V. 
 LOCAL COLOR IN ART. 
 
LOCAL color in fiction is 
 
 demonstrably the life of 
 LOCAL COLOR 
 
 fiction. It is the native 
 
 IN ART. . .. 
 
 element, the differentiating 
 element. It corresponds to the endless and 
 vital charm of individual peculiarity. It is the 
 differences which interest us ; the similarities 
 do not please, do not forever stimulate and 
 feed as do the differences. Literature would 
 die of dry rot if it chronicled the similarities 
 only, or even largely. 
 
 Historically, the local color of a poet or 
 dramatist is of the greatest value. The 
 charm of Horace is the side light he throws 
 on the manners and customs of his time. 
 The vital in Homer lies, after all, in his 
 local color, not in his abstractions. Because 
 the sagas of the North delineate more 
 exactly how men and women lived and 
 wrought in those days, therefore they have 
 always appealed to me with infinitely greater 
 power than Homer. 
 
58 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 Similarly, it is the local color of Chaucer 
 that interests us to-day. We yawn over his 
 tales of chivalry which were in the manner 
 of his contemporaries, but the Miller and 
 the Priest interest us. Wherever the man 
 of the past in literature showed us what he 
 really lived and loved, he moves us. We 
 understand him, and we really feel an in 
 terest in him. 
 
 Historically, local color has gained in 
 beauty and suggestiveness and humanity 
 from Chaucer down to the present day. 
 Each age has embodied more and more of 
 its actual life and social conformation until 
 the differentiating qualities of modern art 
 make the best paintings of Norway as dis 
 tinct in local color as its fiction is vital 
 and indigenous. 
 
 Every great moving literature to-day is 
 full of local color. It is this element which 
 puts the Norwegian and Russian almost at 
 the very summit of modern novel writing, 
 and it is the comparative lack of this distinc 
 tive flavor which makes the English and 
 French take a lower place in truth and 
 sincerity. 
 
LOCAL COLOR IN ART. 59 
 
 Everywhere all over the modern European 
 world, men are writing novels and dramas as 
 naturally as the grass or corn or flax grows. 
 The Provencal, the Hun, the Catalonian, the 
 Norwegian, is getting a hearing. This liter 
 ature is not the literature of scholars ; it is 
 the literature of lovers and doers ; of men 
 who love the modern and who have not been 
 educated to despise common things. 
 
 These men are speaking a new word. 
 They are not hunting themes, they are strug 
 gling to express. 
 
 Conventional criticism does not hamper or 
 confine them. They are rooted in the soil. 
 They stand among the corn-fields and they 
 dig- in the peat-bogs. They concern them 
 selves with modern and very present words 
 and themes, and they have brought a new 
 word which is to divide in half the domain 
 of beauty. 
 
 They have made art the re-creation of the 
 beautiful and the significant. Mere beauty 
 no longer suffices. Beauty is the world-old 
 aristocrat who has taken for mate this 
 mighty young plebeian Significance. Their 
 child is to be the most human and humane 
 literature ever seen. 
 
60 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 It has taken the United States longer to 
 achieve independence of English critics 
 than it took to free itself from old-world 
 political and economic rule. Its political 
 freedom was won, not by its gentlemen and 
 scholars, but by its yeomanry; and in the 
 same way our national literature will come 
 in its fulness when the common American 
 rises spontaneously to the expression of his 
 concept of life. 
 
 The fatal blight upon most American art 
 has been, and is to-day, its imitative quality, 
 which has kept it characterless and facti 
 tious, a forced rose-culture rather than the 
 free flowering of native plants. 
 
 Our writers despised or feared the home 
 market. They rested their immortality upon 
 the " universal theme," which was a theme 
 of no interest to the public and of small 
 interest to themselves. 
 
 During the first century and a half, our 
 literature had very little national color. It 
 was quite like the utterance of corresponding 
 classes in England. But at length Bryant and 
 Cooper felt the influence of our mighty forests 
 and prairies. Whittier uttered something of 
 
LOCAL COLOR IN ART. 61 
 
 New England boy-life, and Thoreau prodded 
 about among newly discovered wonders, and 
 the American literature got its first start. 
 
 Under the influence of Cooper came the 
 stories of wild life from Texas, from Ohio, 
 and from Illinois. The wild, rough settle 
 ments could not produce smooth and cultured 
 poems or stories ; they only furnished forth 
 rough-and-ready anecdotes, but in these 
 stories there were hints of something fine 
 and strong and native. 
 
 As the settlements increased in size, as 
 the pressure of the forest and the wild beast 
 grew less, expression rose to a higher plane ; 
 men softened in speech and manner. All 
 preparations were being made for a local 
 literature raised to the level of art. 
 
 The Pacific slope was first in the line. By 
 the exceptional interest which the world took 
 in the life of the gold fields, and by the for 
 ward urge which seems always to surprise the 
 pessimist and the scholiast, two young men 
 were plunged into that wild life, led across 
 the plains set in the shadow of Mount Shasta, 
 and local literature received its first great 
 marked, decided impetus. 
 
62 
 
 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 To-day we have in America, at last, a 
 group of writers who have no suspicion of 
 imitation laid upon them. Whatever faults 
 they may be supposed to have, they are at 
 any rate, themselves. American critics can 
 depend upon a characteristic American liter 
 ature of fiction and the drama from these 
 people. 
 
 The corn has flowered, and the cotton-boll 
 has broken into speech. 
 
 Local color what is it? It means that 
 the writer spontaneously reflects the life 
 hich goes on around him. It is natural 
 nd unstrained art. 
 
 It is, in a sense, unnatural and artificial to 
 find an American writing novels of Russia 
 or Spain or the Holy Land. He cannot hope 
 to do it so well as the native. The best he 
 can look for is that poor word of praise, 
 " He does it very well, considering he is an 
 alien." 
 
 If a young writer complain that there are 
 no themes at home, that he is forced to go 
 abroad for prospective and romance, I an 
 swer there is something wrong in his educa 
 tion or his perceptive faculty. Often he is 
 
LOCAL COLOR IN ART. 63 
 
 more anxious to win a money success than 
 to be patiently one of art s unhurried devotees. 
 
 I can sympathize with him, however, for 
 criticism has not helped him to be true. 
 Criticism of the formal kind and spontane 
 ous expression are always at war, like the 
 old man and the youth. They may politely 
 conceal it, but they are mutually destructive. 
 
 Old men naturally love the past ; the books 
 they read are the master-pieces ; the great 
 men are all dying off, they say ; the young man 
 should treat lofty and universal themes, as 
 they used to do. These localisms are petty. 
 These truths are disturbing. Youth annoys 
 them. Spontaneousness is formlessness, and 
 the criticism that does not call for the ab 
 stract and the ideal and the beautiful is lead 
 ing to destruction, these critics say. 
 
 And yet there is a criticism which helps, 
 which tends to keep a writer at his best ; but 
 such criticism recognizes the dynamic force 
 of a literature, and tries to spy out tenden 
 cies. This criticism to-day sees that local 
 color means national character, and is aid 
 ing the young writer to treat his themes in 
 the best art. 
 
64 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 I assert it is the most natural thing in 
 the world for a man to love his native land 
 and his native, intimate surroundings. Born 
 into a web of circumstances, enmeshed in 
 common life, the youthful artist begins to 
 think. All the associations of that child 
 hood and the love-life of youth combine to 
 make that web of common affairs, threads of 
 silver and beads of gold; the near-at-hand 
 things are the dearest and sweetest after all. 
 
 As the reader will see, I am using local 
 color to mean something more than a forced 
 study of the picturesque scenery of a State. 
 
 Local color in a novel means that it has 
 such quality of texture and back-ground that 
 it could not have been written in any other 
 place or by any one else than a native. 
 
 It means a statement of life as indigenous 
 as the plant-growth. It means that the pic 
 turesque shall not be seen by the author, 
 that every tree and bird and mountain shall 
 be dear and companionable and necessary, 
 not picturesque ; the tourist cannot write the 
 local novel. 
 
 From this it follows that local color must 
 not be put in for the sake of local color. It 
 
LOCAL COLOR IN ART. 65 
 
 must go in, it will go in, because the writer 
 naturally carries it with him half uncon 
 sciously, or conscious only of its signifi 
 cance, its interest to him. 
 
 He must not stop to think whether it will 
 interest the reader or not. He must be 
 loyal to himself, and put it in because he 
 loves it. If he is an artist, he will make his 
 reader feel it through his own emotion. 
 
 What we should stand for is not univer 
 sality of theme, but beauty and strength of 
 treatment, leaving the writer to choose his 
 theme because he loves it. 
 
 Here is the work of the critic. Recog 
 nizing that the theme is beyond his control, 
 let him aid the young writer to delineate 
 simply and with unwavering strokes. Even 
 here the critic can do little, if he is possessed 
 of the idea that the young writer of to-day 
 should model upon Addison or Macaulay or 
 Swift. 
 
 There are new criterions to-day in writing 
 as in painting, and individual expression is 
 the aim. The critic can do much to aid a 
 young writer to not copy an old master or 
 any other master. Good criticism can aid 
 S 
 
66 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 him to be vivid and simple and unhackneyed 
 in his technique, the subject is his own 
 affair. 
 
 I agree with him who says, Local art must 
 be raised to the highest levels in its expres 
 sion ; but in aiding this perfection of tech 
 nique we must be careful not to cut into 
 the artist s spontaneity. To apply 
 ancient dogmas of criticism to 
 our life and literature would 
 be benumbing to ar 
 tist and fatal to 
 his art. 
 
VI. 
 THE LOCAL NOVEL. 
 
THE local novel 
 seems to be the heir- 
 
 THE LOCAL NOVEL. . 
 
 apparent to the king 
 dom of poesy. It is already the most prom 
 ising of all literary attempts to-day ; certainly 
 it is the most sincere. It seems but begin 
 ning its work. It is "hopelessly contem 
 poraneous ; " that is its strength. It is (at 
 its best) unaffected, natural, emotional. It is 
 sure to become all-powerful. It will redeem 
 American literature, as it has already re 
 deemed the South from its conventional and 
 highly wrought romanticism. 
 
 By reason of growing truth and sincerity 
 the fiction of the South has risen from the 
 dead. It is now in the spring season of 
 shooting wilding plants and timorous blades 
 of sown grains. Its future is assured. Its 
 soil is fertilized with the blood of true men. 
 Its women are the repositories of great, vital, 
 sincere, emotional experiences which will 
 inevitably appear in their children, and at 
 
70 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 last in art, and especially in fiction. The 
 Southern people are in the midst of a battle 
 more momentous than the Rebellion, because 
 it is the result of the Rebellion ; that is, the 
 battle of intrenched privilege against the 
 swiftly-spreading democratic idea of equality 
 before the law and in the face of nature. 
 
 They have a terribly, mightily dramatic 
 race-problem on their hands. The South is 
 the meeting-place of winds. It is the seat 
 of swift and almost incalculable change ; and 
 this change, this battle, this strife of invisible 
 powers, is about to enter their fiction.. 
 
 The|4egro has already entered it. He has 
 brought a musical speech to his masters, and 
 to the new fiction. He has brought a strange 
 and pleading song into music. The finest 
 writers of the New South already find him a 
 never-failing source of interest. He is not, 
 of course, the only subject of Southern fic 
 tion, nor even the principal figure ; but he is 
 a necessary part, and a most absorbingly 
 interesting part. 
 
 The future of fiction in the South will also 
 depict the unreconstructed rebel unreser 
 vedly, and the race-problem without hate 
 
THE LOCAL NOVEL. 71 
 
 or contempt or anger; for the highest art 
 will be the most catholic in its sympathy. 
 It will delineate vast contending forces, and 
 it will be a great literature. 
 
 The ftegro will enter the fiction of the 
 South, first, as subject ; second, as artist in 
 his own right. His first attempts will be imi 
 tative, but he will yet utter himself, as surely 
 as he lives. He will contribute a poetry and 
 a novel as peculiarly his own as the songs 
 he sings. He may appear, also, in a strange 
 half-song, half-chant, and possibly in a 
 drama peculiar to himself; but in some 
 form of fiction he will surely utter the 
 sombre and darkly-florid genius for emo 
 tional utterance which characterizes him. 
 
 In the North the novel will continue local 
 for some time to come. It will delineate the 
 intimate life and speech of every section of our 
 enormous and widely scattered republic. It 
 will catch and fix in charcoal the changing, 
 assimilating races, delineating the pathos 
 and humor and the infinite drama of their 
 swift adjustment to new conditions. Cali 
 fornia, New Mexico, Idaho, Utah, Oregon, 
 each wonderful locality in our Nation of 
 
72 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 Nations will yet find its native utterance. 
 The superficial work of the tourist and 
 outsider will not do. The real novelist of 
 these sections is walking behind the plow or 
 trudging to school in these splendid potential 
 environments. 
 
 This local movement will include the cities 
 as well, and St. Louis, Chicago, San Fran 
 cisco, will be delineated by artists born of 
 each city, whose work will be so true that it 
 could not have been written by any one from 
 the outside. The real utterance of a city or 
 a locality can only come when a writer is 
 born out of its intimate heart. To such an 
 one, nothing will be " strange " or " pictur 
 esque ; " all will be familiar, and full of 
 significance or beauty. The novel of the 
 slums must be written by one who has 
 played there as a child, and taken part in 
 all its amusements ; not out of curiosity, but 
 out of pleasure seeking. It cannot be done 
 from above nor from the outside. It must 
 be done out of a full heart and without 
 seeking for effect. 
 
 The artist should not look abroad to see 
 how others are succeeding. Success does 
 
THE LOCAL NOVEL. 73 
 
 not always measure merit. It took nearly a 
 third of a century for Whitman and Monet 
 to be recognized. The great artist never 
 conforms. He does not trail after some 
 other man s success. He works out his 
 individual perception of things. 
 
 The contrast of city and country, every 
 where growing sharper, will find its reflec 
 tion in this local novel of the immediate 
 future, the same tragedies and comedies, 
 with the essential difference called local 
 color, and taking place all over the land, 
 wherever cities arise like fungi, unhealthy, 
 yet absorbing as subjects of fictional art. 
 
 As I have elsewhere pointed out, the drama 
 will join the novel in this study of local 
 conditions. It will be derived from fiction, 
 and in many cases the dramatist and novelist 
 will be the same person. In all cases the 
 sincerity of the author s love for his scenes 
 and characters will find expression in tender 
 care for truth, and there will be made to 
 pass before our eyes wonderfully suggestive 
 pictures of other lives and landscapes. The 
 drama will grow in dignity and importance 
 along these lines. 
 
74 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 Both drama and novel will be colloquial. 
 This does not mean that they will be exclu 
 sively in the dialects, but the actual speech 
 of the people of each locality will unques 
 tionably be studied more closely than ever 
 before. Dialect is the life of a language, 
 precisely as the common people of the 
 nation form the sustaining power of its 
 social life and art. 
 
 And so in the novel, in the short story, 
 and in the drama by the work of a multi 
 tude of loving artists, not by the work of an 
 over-topping personality will the intimate 
 social, individual life of the nation be de 
 picted. Before this localism shall pass away, 
 such a study will have been made of this 
 land and people as has never been made by 
 any other age or social group, a literature 
 from the plain people, reflecting their unre 
 strained outlook on life, subtle in speech 
 and color, humane beyond precedent, humor 
 ous, varied, simple in means, lucid as water, 
 searching as sunlight. 
 
 To one who believes each age to be its 
 own best interpreter, the idea of "decay 
 of fiction" never comes. That which the 
 
THE LOCAL NOVEL. 75 
 
 absolutist takes for decay is merely change. 
 The conservative fears change ; the radical 
 welcomes it. The conservative tries to ar 
 gue that fundamentals cannot change ; that 
 they are the same yesterday, to-day, and to 
 morrow. If that were true, then a sorrowful 
 outlook on the future would be natural. 
 Such permanency would be death. Life 
 means change. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the minute differenti 
 ations of literature which the conservative 
 calls its non-essentials, are really its essen 
 tials. Vitality and growth are in these " non- 
 essentials. " 1 1 is the difference in characters, 
 not their similarity, which is forever interest 
 ing. It is the subtle coloring individuality 
 gives which vitalizes landscape art, and so 
 it is the subtle differences in the interpre 
 tation of life which each age gives that 
 vitalizes its literature and makes it its 
 own. 
 
 The individuality of the artist is the saving 
 grace of art ; and landscape painting will 
 not be fantastic so long as men study na 
 ture. It will never be mere reproduction 
 so long as the artist represents it as he sees 
 
76 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 it. The fact will correct the fantasy. The 
 artist will color the fact. 
 
 The business of the present is not to ex 
 press fundamentals, but to sincerely present 
 its own minute and characteristic interpre 
 tation of life. This point cannot be too often 
 insisted upon. Unless a writer add some 
 thing to the literature of his race, has he jus 
 tification? Is there glory in imitation? Is 
 the painter greatest who copies old masters, 
 or is it more praiseworthy to embody an 
 original conception ? These are very impor 
 tant questions for the young artist. 
 
 To perceive the hopelessness of absolutism 
 in literature, you have but to stop a moment 
 to think. Admit that there are perfect mod 
 els to which must be referred all subsequent 
 writing, and we are committed to a barren 
 round of hopeless imitations. The young 
 writer is disheartened or drawn off into imi 
 tations, and ruined for any real expression. 
 This way of looking at literature produced 
 our Barlows and Coltons and Hillhouses, 
 with their "colossi of cotton-batting," and it 
 produces blank-verse dramas to-day. 
 
 But the relativists in art are full of hope. 
 
THE LOCAL NOVEL. 77 
 
 They see that life is the model, or, rather, 
 that each man stands accountable to himself 
 first, and to the perceived fact of life second. 
 Life is always changing, and literature 
 changes with it. It never decays; it changes. 
 Poetry that is to say impassioned personal 
 outlook on life is in no more danger of ex 
 tinction to-day than in the days of Edmund 
 Spenser. The American novel will continue 
 to grow in truth to American life without re 
 gard to the form and spirit of the novel or 
 drama of the past. Consciously or uncon 
 sciously, the point of view of the modern 
 writer is that of the veritist, or truth stater. 
 
 Once out of the period of tutelage, it is 
 natural for youth to overleap barriers. He 
 naturally discards the wig and cloak of his 
 grandfathers. He comes at last to reject, 
 perhaps a little too brusquely, the models 
 which conservatism regards with awe. He 
 respects them as history, but he has life, 
 abounding, fresh, contiguous life ; life that 
 stings and smothers and overwhelms and ex 
 alts, like the salt, green, snow-tipped ocean 
 surf ; life, with its terrors and triumphs, right 
 here and now ; its infinite drama, its allure- 
 
78 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 ment, its battle, and its victories. Life is 
 the model, truth is the master, the heart of 
 the man himself his motive power. The 
 pleasure of re-creating in the image of na 
 ture is the artist s unfailing reward. 
 
 To him who sees that difference, not simi 
 larity, is the vitalizing quality, there is no 
 sorrow at change. The future will take care 
 of itself. In the space of that word " differ 
 ence " lies all the infinite range of future art. 
 Some elements are comparatively unchang 
 ing. The snow will fall, spring will come, 
 men and women love, the stars will rise and 
 set, and grass return again and again in 
 vast rhythms of green, but society will not 
 be the same. 
 
 The physical conformation of our nation 
 will change. It will lose its wildness, its 
 austerity. Its unpeopled plains will pass 
 away, and gardens will bloom where the hot 
 sand now drifts. Cities will rise where now 
 the elk and the mountain lions are. Swifter 
 means of transportation will bring the lives 
 of different sections into closer relationship. 
 It will tend to equalize intellectual opportuni 
 ties. The physical and mental life of men 
 
THE LOCAL NOVEL. 79 
 
 and women will be changed, the relation of 
 man to man, and man to woman, will change 
 in detail, and the fiction of the future will 
 express these changes. 
 
 To the veritist, therefore, the present is 
 the vital theme. The past is dead, and the 
 future can be trusted to look after itself. 
 The young men and maidens of that time 
 will find the stars of their present brighter 
 than the stars of 92, the people around them 
 more absorbing than books, and their own 
 outlook on life more reasonable than 
 that of dead men. Their writing 
 and painting, in proportion to 
 its vitality and importance, 
 will reflect this, their 
 natural attitude, to 
 ward life and 
 history. 
 
VII. 
 THE DRIFT OF THE DRAMA. 
 
THE American drama, 
 
 VII 
 
 from the earliest time of 
 
 its entry into the colonies, 
 
 THE DRAMA. ^ intensified and car . 
 
 ried to the farthest absurdity the principle 
 of dependence upon other times and coun 
 tries for models. It has reflected at various 
 times Shakespeare, Dryden, Bulwer, Schil 
 ler, Sheridan, Scott, and Dickens, not to 
 speak of other and unnameable depths of 
 imitation. 
 
 Even when impassioned genius rose to the 
 delineation of native scenes, no landscape 
 was remote enough or wild enough to keep 
 out the tender English maiden and the 
 villain in top-coat and riding-boots. The 
 question of inheritance, the production of 
 lost wills, and the final restoration of the 
 heroine to her own true lover went on quite 
 in the standard British manner. 
 
 Once or twice, however, by the sheer 
 force of the subject, conventions were driven 
 
84 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 out. But these instances simply throw into 
 greater contrast the universal sterility of 
 invention. 
 
 Ephemeral dramas of Revolutionary times 
 and plays of American society, wherein 
 the characters were all ticketed as Master 
 Lively, Simon Solemn, or Mistress Long 
 Tongue, abounded up to 1840; the histor 
 ical dramas of this period were mere spec 
 tacles, and had no literary value of any 
 sort. 
 
 Historically, the Civil War marks an 
 epoch in the drama, as it does in poetry 
 and the novel. It divided the old from the 
 new, not in abrupt separation, but with the 
 coming of that mighty outburst of national 
 passion the old was thrown into pale ob 
 scurity, to linger on for a while, but to 
 lose vitality as the New moved inexorably 
 forward. 
 
 The border drama seems to have been the 
 first decided indication of Americanism in 
 the drama. It sprang almost directly from 
 the novel of adventure represented by Cooper 
 and Bird and Webber, and was equally gory. 
 Of this sort was " Tamora " and * Shot in 
 
THE DRIFT OF THE DRAMA. 85 
 
 the Eye." However, the tender, fainting 
 maiden and the irreproachable lover were 
 always found in even these mid-forest com 
 plications. It had the merit, to be sure, of 
 being in prose, and at times approached a 
 study of life. 
 
 Later, the novels of Bret Harte and Joa- 
 quin Miller gave a higher turn to these 
 border dramas, and the Indian took a subor 
 dinate position, the miner and desperado 
 holding the centre of the stage. As these 
 novels were immensely higher in literary 
 style and arrangement, so the dramas mod 
 elled upon them could not entirely escape 
 being touched here and there with truth and 
 poetry. 
 
 It is a curious consideration that people 
 will endure, upon the stage, absurdities which 
 would disgust them in the novel. The stage 
 has always been conventional, symbolical, at 
 its best ; and the swift movement, the glare 
 of lights, and the atmosphere of artificiality 
 in the decoration, have bewildered the judg 
 ment, and made the very worst melodrama 
 disgracefully acceptable to large masses of 
 fairly well educated people. 
 
86 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 We find, therefore, a public apparently 
 willing to pay for the worn-out fashions of 
 the novel, sitting with small uneasiness 
 before dramatic writing which is below the 
 level of even the weekly story papers. 
 
 The ambitious " society plays " are for the 
 most part on the level of the " Saturday Eve 
 ning Romancer." Their heroes never appear 
 without creases in their trousers, and their 
 heroines are actuated by the same character 
 less and flabby sentiment all heroines have 
 manifested for centuries ; and the men and 
 women of both melodrama and society plays 
 appear to be sexually diseased, precisely as in 
 the French novel and the cheap story paper. 
 
 Where the technique is better, the outlook 
 on life is hopelessly false and pathologic, 
 quite on the model of the satyriasic French 
 novelists, who seem to find healthy human 
 feeling a bore, and who scent a suggestive 
 situation with the nostrils of a vulture. 
 Thus, while the American novel has grown 
 steadily more truthful and wholesome, the 
 drama, with several notable exceptions, has 
 kept the low level of imitative English sensa 
 tionalism and sterile French sexualism. 
 
THE DRIFT OF THE DRAMA 87 
 
 While the above statement of the low plane 
 of the drama is true in general, there are 
 indubitable signs of change, and change for 
 the better ; and it requires little prophetic 
 insight to predict that the drama is soon to 
 take its place beside the novel. 
 
 The border drama seems to have lodged 
 at last in the ten cent theatres. The English 
 melodrama is a great deal discredited, almost 
 rejected. The ephemeral farce-comedy seems 
 to be losing its dominion, being superseded 
 on the serious side by character comedy, and 
 on its amusement side by the comic opera, 
 which occasionally really amuses people. 
 
 The one-part play still holds a place on 
 the stage, by reason of the survival of the 
 " star," but the public is demanding some 
 thing more than a monologue. And one by 
 one the one-part plays are discredited and die 
 out. The better public demand a play which 
 shall present in some sort the proportions of 
 art. 
 
 Burlesque seems to have been filling in a 
 transition state. When old forms are decay 
 ing, they are always food for the satirists. 
 It is not without reason that the farce-comedy 
 
88 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 writers have held the stage for ten years. 
 They had a work to do, and they have done 
 it merrily and well. It was their business to 
 invalidate the absurd sentiment and false 
 action of the old plays. It is a very good 
 sign to see an audience laugh heartily when 
 the mock heavy villain walks on dragging his 
 toes, and smiling sardonically. The burles- 
 quer has made the strut and shout of old- 
 time tragedy absurd, and has weakened the 
 bonds which kept the school-bred American 
 enslaved to the idea that Shakespeare and 
 the glorious old comedies ended the forms of 
 the drama. The burlesquer respects nothing 
 but the truth, which he cannot distort. 
 
 There could be no progress, no native out 
 put, so long as the past lay like a brazen 
 wall across the way of the young dramatist. 
 The free untrodden paths do not lie in the 
 direction of. the past. Shakespeare and 
 Moliere are to be ignored as models, pre 
 cisely as they expressed themselves in youth 
 ful unconcern of yEschylus and Sophocles. 
 
 The undue worship of Shakespeare or any 
 other dramatist is fatal to individual creation. 
 There can be only one creative model, and 
 
THE DRIFT OF THE DRAMA. 89 
 
 that is life. Truth and sincerity of purpose 
 on the part of the writer, if he be of gen 
 uinely creative temper, will lead him to the 
 untrod spaces without theory and without 
 slavery. 
 
 The American realist should stand for a 
 liberated art. If this means emancipation 
 from Shakespeare, or Scott, or Hugo, very 
 well ; but we should not argue for a change 
 of masters. We should condemn with equal 
 severity imitation of a living master like 
 Ibsen. 
 
 A work of art is an individual thing, a 
 relation of one human soul to life, emotion 
 ally expressed. The artist will find many 
 having the same outlook substantially, but 
 as an artist he has nothing to do with that. 
 His only obligation is to be true to life as it 
 seems to him from his personal angle of 
 vision. 
 
 It may be said again at this point that the 
 past is not vital to the millions of America. 
 Critics of the scholastic sort, with their 
 natural or acquired conservatism, have half- 
 convinced a certain class of Americans 
 (small, in relation to sixty millions of people) 
 
90 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 that there are dramatic gods in the past, 
 before whom all intellects and especially 
 all creative youth, are to bow down; but 
 the great body of American readers rebel 
 against such intellectual slavery. It needs 
 the illuminating genius of Edwin Booth to 
 make "Hamlet" endurable. These facts are 
 admitted by the theatre manager, who has 
 his uses, after all. With him " Shakespeare 
 spells failure." The public prefers " Held 
 by the Enemy " and " The Lost Paradise " 
 and "Shore Acres" to "Hamlet,", which 
 is their privilege. 
 
 This has nothing to do with the great 
 ness of Shakespeare any more than it has 
 with the grandeur of ./Eschylus. It is simply 
 proof that neither of these great figures are 
 part of our lives to-day. They are educa 
 tional in effect. They illuminate the past 
 with marvellous, inestimable light; but the 
 sorrows of a child, the story of a struggling, 
 hopeless $legro, or the parting of an old 
 Hoosier farmer from his daughter, gets 
 closer to us, touches us in a more vital way, 
 than the death of Hamlet or the passion of 
 Clytemnestra. 
 
 L 
 
THE DRIFT OF THE DRAMA. 91 
 
 A perception of these changes in values is 
 necessary to the modern dramatist. Natu 
 rally, if he proceeds upon what he believes 
 to be the popular track, without the motive 
 which is absolutely necessary for good art, 
 of expressing his own individual feeling, he 
 must recognize this change of sentiment. 
 The feeling of the average man must be 
 taken into account, rather than the judgment 
 of the pedant. 
 
 It may be sorrowful to the student con 
 servative and to the aristocratic party in 
 literature to see old dramatic forms draw 
 off, but to others it is a sign of liberty and 
 of native new birth. It is as natural as the 
 growth of grass. The spontaneous out 
 growth of native art may modify old forms, 
 it must not be bound by them. 
 
 The fight is not between Shakespeare and 
 Sheridan on one side, and the forces repre 
 sented by V aides and Ibsen and Howells 
 on the other j it is the immitigable war be 
 tween creative Youth and reminiscent Age. 
 It is the rebellious demand of youth for the 
 right to utter himself in his own way, with 
 out reference to past models. It is youth 
 
92 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 facing life and the future over against age 
 and aristocracy, clinging to the inheritances 
 of the past, and facing certain death. 
 
 Every great group of dramatists in the 
 past, every great change in painting, has 
 met the same opposition; the same anath 
 emas have been winged, the same warnings 
 have been uttered that are now being brought 
 against those who refuse to be bound by the 
 dramatic models of the past, or by the old 
 masters in paint and oil. The veritist ac 
 cepts as a matter of course the opposition 
 he meets. 
 
 The promise of change in the drama is 
 becoming fulfilment in the rapid rise of the 
 local drama, which is following exactly in the 
 line marked out by the local novel ; that is 
 to say, the best dramas of American life of 
 the last ten years have risen from the loyal 
 love of the dramatist for certain local phases 
 of American life ; and in each case the love 
 of subject has aided the dramatist to over 
 ride, in some degree, barren conventions, 
 and to produce lifelike groups of characters. 
 
 You have but to run over a few of the 
 names to perceive this. " The Old Home- 
 
THE DRIFT OF THE DRAMA. 93 
 
 stead," " Blue Jeans," " The County Fair," 
 " Alabama," " Shore Acres," " In Mizzoura," 
 etc. 
 
 It must here again be repeated that the 
 radical critic often takes interest in some art 
 output, not because it is a perfect product, 
 a rounded masterpiece in imitation of some 
 model, but because it indicates a desire for 
 change ; because it prophesies new things. 
 
 He praises "Shore Acres," "Alabama," 
 and "In Mizzoura " because they are sig 
 nificant of change from melodrama to native 
 character comedy. They are leaves, show 
 ing the set of the current. Where the actu 
 ating motive of the dramatist is to celebrate 
 some life he has lived and loved, the tradi 
 tions of the drama count for less ; truth 
 counts for more. 
 
 Instances of this are to be seen in Mr. 
 Herne s " Shore Acres" and "In Mizzoura," 
 by Augustus Thomas. Mr. Herne s " Shore 
 Acres " has not only opened a new dispen 
 sation in New England drama, but by its 
 great money success will encourage all other 
 dramatists working upon local themes. It 
 more nearly approaches the delineation of 
 
94 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 New England life than any other play to 
 date. It rises in some scenes nearly to the 
 level of Miss Wilkins s stories. 
 
 Veritism is unquestionably acting upon 
 the drama as impressionism has already 
 transformed painting, and changed the cur 
 rent of literature. Veritism discredits plots 
 and formal complications. It deals with life 
 face to face, and swiftly and surely and 
 always from the individual artist s stand 
 point. Characters and the relation of groups 
 of characters are coming to have more value 
 than plot. 
 
 When Mr. Howells remarked upon this 
 some years ago, the walls of Jericho were 
 apparently shaken down, to judge from the 
 dust and noise of reverberating explosion. 
 Managers, secure in possession of the 
 " Crimes of London " and the " Gaslights of 
 Paris," turned the American dramatist out 
 on the street, through the medium of their 
 suave black porters. As several of them 
 plainly said, they had no use for American 
 dramatists. But to-day every marked and 
 continued success on our stage is an Amer 
 ican drama of character, treated with more 
 or less of sincerity and truth. 
 
THE DRIFT OF THE DRAMA. 95 
 
 Everywhere the value of truth increases, 
 not only from the literary side of the stage, 
 but from its commercial side. Mr. Harri- 
 gan s character sketches of New York low 
 life will be supplemented or superseded by 
 character studies of all classes of New York 
 society. Mr. Brander Matthews, Mr. Clyde 
 Fitch, and Mr. Richard Harding Davis are 
 likely to make finished and valuable con 
 tributions to local New York drama. 
 
 Mr. Joel Harris is writing a drama of the 
 South. Mr. Cable is reported to be drama 
 tizing one of his novels. Miss Wilkins has 
 made a most excellent beginning with " Giles 
 Corey." She will do better when she handles 
 a modern theme. Without question, the 
 local novelists and the local dramatists are 
 to be co-workers in future, and the whole 
 outlook is very fine and promising. 
 
 Our stage is soon to be filled with the 
 most amusing and interesting, because truth 
 ful and most human characters ever grouped 
 on any one national stage. Every vitally 
 interesting theme will find its dramatists, for 
 there is no set law for the form and theme 
 of the drama. 
 
96 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 There is only one law for the dramatist : 
 he must interest his audience from start to 
 finish. Interest does not mean merely to 
 amuse. The stage cannot long remain a 
 mere amusement. It must interest and in 
 struct as well, or it will pall upon the public 
 palate like a diet of honey or vinegar. Public 
 taste changes with great rapidity, making con 
 ditions which seem stable vanish like smoke. 
 Less than five years ago we were lost in 
 a tumult of English melodrama. Every the 
 atre echoed with the voices of the hero and 
 the heavy villain. We seem likely to begin 
 the next season practically without the aid 
 of cheap English drama, and more and bet 
 ter American plays are promised than at any 
 other time in the history of our drama. 
 
 Taste is certainly rising to meet the 
 dramatist, who was on the higher levels 
 long before the public (or, at least, 
 before the manager), waiting impa 
 tiently a chance to put his best 
 work before the world. 
 His chance seems 
 coming at 
 last. 
 
VIII. 
 
 4 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF IBSEN. 
 
VIII IN this transition stage 
 
 THE INFLUENCE the W rkS f Henrik ^ 
 OF IBSEN. Sen ^ COmin S to have 
 
 great significance. No 
 doubt there is a good deal of manufactured 
 admiration current, but there is enough of 
 genuine enthusiasm to make his ideas and 
 works an issue. His significance is very 
 great. 
 
 He not only represents a distinctive phase 
 of dramatic writing, but he stands (con 
 sciously) for the idea of progress in art. 
 He stands for actuality. He is consistently 
 and wholly progressive, and may be taken to 
 represent the whole movement in dramatic 
 art commonly called realism, but which 
 might be called " modernism." 
 
 Realism, in its true sense, in the sense in 
 which the Spanish novelist Valdes uses it, 
 and as Mr. Howells uses it, does not mean 
 the reproduction in a drama of tanks and 
 fire-engines, or real burglars blowing open 
 
ioo CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 a safe. Neither does realism in the novel 
 mean the study of murderers, insane or crim 
 inal classes. Realism in its broadest mean 
 ing is simply the idea of perceiving and 
 stating the truth in an individual way, irre 
 spective of past models. It is progress in art. 
 It does not despise the past, but, on the other 
 hand, it does not accept any man or age as 
 model. 
 
 Ibsen, the great Norwegian poet and dra 
 matist, having become an issue in the drama, 
 the study of his methods is likely to yield good 
 results, 
 
 He is a realist first, in his choice of theme. 
 He is not content with the themes common 
 to dramas. He deals with life, and modern 
 life, primarily with Norwegian life, but 
 with the life of other lands secondarily, for 
 the reason that his theme is common and 
 modern, and his aim truth. The passions, 
 situations of his drama, appeal to us as real, 
 because they are actualities of his land and 
 time. 
 
 He is modern, in that his domain is one 
 upon which no dramatist of the Elizabe 
 than or of the romantic German age has ever 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF IBSEN. 101 
 
 trenched. Values in his plays.are readjusted 
 to suit modern life. I Je not* Only treats of 
 modern themes, but gives the modern man s 
 comment upon them. , 
 
 Thus his choice of motive in itself an 
 nounces a widening of the domain of the 
 drama. No longer restricted to the cardinal 
 passions, love, fear, hate, jealousy, or re 
 venge, all emotions, and especially all new, 
 distinctively modern and intellectual emo 
 tions, are to be used as basis for the coming 
 drama. 
 
 Life is to be depicted, not love-life. Sexual 
 attractions and perplexities do not form life, 
 but only part of life. Even the old passions 
 are taking new forms. Ambition concerns 
 itself with new objects, and hate has new 
 expressions. Life is in continual process of 
 change, and in conformity to these social 
 and individual changes the drama always has 
 changed and must ever change. 
 
 Ibsen s work not only predicts the im 
 pending change ; it enforces it. His themes 
 could not have been used by any other age ; 
 in no past age would they have been under- 
 stood, nor are they now, for a vast and 
 electric prophecy runs through them all. 
 
102 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 .It is an advanced condition of mind, an 
 exceptional mental development that enables 
 Ibsen to nd poetry and significance in the 
 realities of -modern Hie. He was born a 
 reformer. His plays are not merely radical 
 in theory, they are sections of life, seg 
 ments, not circles; for nothing begins or 
 ends in this world. All is ebb and flow. 
 It is only in the romance that things are 
 finished, rounded out, and smoothed down. 
 
 His realities are, moreover, common reali 
 ties. Take " The Enemy of Society," for 
 example, perhaps the most radical in form 
 and subject (dramatically) of all his plays. 
 See how small a part the passion of love or 
 jealousy plays in it ! See how great a part 
 pure intellect plays ! 
 
 The theme is sociological. The treatment 
 so magnificently direct and masterly, the 
 characterization so honest, we are made to 
 feel very near these townsmen whose secret 
 feelings and thoughts are being laid bare to 
 us. Note what wide representative reach 
 has been attained by being faithful to actual 
 conditions. It might all have happened at 
 Bar Haven or at Boomtown, Nebraska. 
 The same lying, booming, robbing goes on 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF IBSEN. 103 
 
 where the social conditions are similar, the 
 same deceits and corruptions ; being true to 
 the Norwegian village, he attains the widest 
 interest. 
 
 I repeat, he is a realist in his choice of 
 subject, because he treats of ideas, emotions, 
 and situations new to the drama but common 
 to life, and deals with them all in a new way. 
 We are done with machinery, fustian, and 
 clap-trap as we enter his dramatic world. 
 Worn-out themes have no place in the six 
 or seven social dramas he has given us. 
 
 How true and unconventional his style. 
 We hardly realize how false and stilted cur 
 rent stage-conversation is, till we hear the 
 real word spoken there. His words come 
 to us at times like thrust of naked fists. 
 They shake the hearer with their weight of 
 real passion. In one sense this speech is as- 
 toundingly direct, and then again it is subtly 
 indirect as in life. Observe how his love- 
 making proceeds. How chary of words. 
 Only a hint here and there. Its expression 
 is left mainly to the tone of the voice, or put 
 into the vibrant undertone when talking of 
 the weather, or it is dramatized in the face. 
 
104 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 For example, see Hovstadt with Petra in 
 " The Enemy of Society." As in life, where 
 the word " love " means most it is used char 
 ily ; especially is this true among the middle 
 classes. On the stage, however, it is so 
 common as to lose all significance and 
 sacredness. 
 
 Observe also that in the superb reality of 
 his plays the soliloquy is lost, that hoary 
 monstrosity; that cheap way of explain 
 ing to the audience what the dramatist had 
 not the skill to suggest ; that ancient de 
 vice, by which the hero tells the gallery that 
 his heart is breaking, while the villain ex 
 plains the plot and unfolds his wickedness ! 
 The soliloquy, the stronghold of the con 
 ventional drama, is gone when we enter the 
 theatre where Ibsen s later plays are being 
 performed. 
 
 Verity demands, also, simplicity of plan. 
 Observe this in " The Doll-Home," in 
 " Ghosts," in " Rosmersholm." No compli 
 cations, no external intricacies, hardly any 
 thing approaching a plot, the interest de 
 pending entirely upon the characterization 
 and the thought. The pursuit and not the 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF IBSEN. 105 
 
 end, has become (as in the novel) the leading 
 motive. 
 
 The plan springs from the characters, and 
 unrolls mysteriously, with all the unforeseen 
 changes of life itself. Nothing can be fore 
 told any more than in a novel of life. At his 
 best he takes a common man or a represen 
 tative man and follows him through a moral 
 or mental change, with all his logical con 
 nections, and leaves him as abruptly as he 
 began. 
 
 There are no heroines, villains, and heroes 
 in these uncompromising dramas. Their race 
 is run. The accommodating gentleman who 
 keeps things stirred up through four acts in 
 order that the hero may display himself, is 
 out of business in this modern drama. Krog- 
 stadt is the nearest approach to this facto 
 tum, the villain, and he is only a man gone 
 wrong, and persecuting, not for love of it, but 
 for love of his children, persecution based 
 on the affection of a father and not on lust 
 and greed. 
 
 This brings me to one of the greatest dis 
 tinctions of all, and that is the dramatist s 
 treatment of motives. One hardly dares 
 
io6 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 say how much this may come to mean to 
 the realist. Nothing shows the great Nor 
 wegian s power of delineation and his love 
 for verity and for justice more clearly than 
 his treatment of the moving forces of his 
 characters. He sees them completely in 
 form and dress, speech and motive. They 
 are men and women. 
 
 As one reads " Pillars of Society," for 
 example, following the study of Bernick, it 
 seems at first like a merciless satire, but 
 wait and see ! The drama mounts at length 
 into the region of motives. It tells that the 
 hypocrite Bernick is himself a product of 
 conditions. He has his side of the story, and 
 the power to state it well-nigh irresistibly. 
 " Perhaps you think I acted from selfish 
 motives," Bernick pleads. " If I had stood 
 alone, then, I would have begun the world 
 again, cheerfully and bravely. But you don t 
 understand how the head of a great house 
 becomes a living part of the business he 
 inherits, with its enormous responsibility. 
 Do you know that the weal or woe of 
 thousands depends upon him ? " 
 
 LONA. It is for the sake of the com- 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF IBSEN. 107 
 
 munity then, that for these fifteen years you 
 have stood upon a lie ? 
 
 BERNICK. A lie? 
 
 LONA. I call it the lie, the threefold 
 lie. 
 
 BERNICK. Would you have me sacri 
 fice my domestic happiness and my position 
 in society ? 
 
 LONA. What right have you to stand 
 where you are standing ? 
 
 BERNICK. I Ve gained more and more 
 right every day for fifteen years, by all 
 I ve labored for, by my whole life, by all 
 I ve won. 
 
 We begin to ponder; we ask ourselves 
 whether we would have done better had we 
 been in his place. 
 
 Thus each character has, in a sense, his 
 justification. We see things from their stand 
 point. The fluent and all-embracing sym 
 pathy of the dramatist has gone around these 
 men and women. Malformed and twisted 
 as they are, they have always a dramatic 
 justification for their action. 
 
 We come now to his dramatic situations, 
 where again his faithfulness to fact is shown. 
 
io8 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 In life, how slight a thing leads to a tragedy ! 
 A misapprehension, a feeling of foolish pride, 
 a jest, a word or two spoken hastily, these 
 are the causes of many a life-long separation, 
 many a tragic sorrow. Considered from the 
 stage, how slight is the barrier between Nora 
 and Thorvald in "The Doll-Home," but 
 how insuperable considered from the stand 
 point of life. 
 
 We have a difference arising between 
 the brothers Stockman in " The Enemy of 
 Society," a difference based upon deep 
 mental disagreements, upon fundamental 
 facts, and which will separate them forever. 
 
 There is something recognizably immiti 
 gable in these terrible moods. They shake 
 us, for we recognize our own liability to such 
 disasters ; but in the melodrama and the 
 romantic play, no matter what happens, we 
 remain tranquil. Though the heroine be 
 burned at the stake, and the hero thrice set 
 upon, we know that through flame and bolt, 
 and wastes of sea, in spite of hate and pur 
 chased justice, they will come forth vindi 
 cated and unharmed in the joyous fifth act. 
 We know this, and feel about for our over 
 shoes. 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF IBSEN. 109 
 
 But in the plays of Ibsen we do not find 
 ourselves able to predict what changes may 
 come, for the reason that the action springs 
 from and depends upon the characters. The 
 full meaning of this may not appear at first 
 sight. To have the action spring from the 
 characters is to destroy the traditional plot 
 It means to have individuals, not situations. 
 It means that this is the farthest present re 
 move from the immitigable doom in ^-Eschy- 
 lus, and the fixed complications of Shake 
 spearian comedy. It destroys romantic plots 
 and under-plots. 
 
 On the same general principle of verity 
 first and effect afterwards, is Ibsen s superb 
 treatment of what are called irrelevant char 
 acters, irrelevant incident. He selects cer 
 tain characters for delineation, and then uses 
 such others as naturally come into the range 
 of his drama; and as the action passes on 
 and leaves them behind, they do not reappear. 
 They served their purpose and are lost to 
 view. 
 
 The dramatist takes two or three life-lines, 
 which he holds in his hands, and, like the 
 novelist, traces them through the maze of in- 
 
i io CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 cident. For example, in " The Doll-Home " 
 there are two central figures ; around them 
 are changing groups of men and women. 
 The hearer or reader feels that these people 
 are a part of life, that other men and women 
 meet and influence them for a time and pass 
 out of their lives. Only the few are in any 
 way accounted for at the end. 
 
 This is in accordance with the ideas put 
 by Olive Schreiner into that strange and 
 powerful preface to " An African Farm " : 
 
 " Human life may be painted according to two 
 methods. There is the stage method. Accord 
 ing to that, each character is duly marshalled at 
 first and ticketed. We know with an immutable 
 certainty that at the right crises each will reap 
 pear, act his part, and when the curtain falls all 
 will stand before it bowing. There is a sense of 
 satisfaction in this and completeness. But there 
 is another method, the method of the life we 
 lead. Here nothing can be prophesied. There 
 is a strange coming and going of feet. Men 
 appear, act, and react upon each other and pass 
 away. When the crisis comes, the man who 
 would fit it does not appear. When the curtain 
 falls, no one is ready. . . . Life may be painted 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF IBSEN. in 
 
 according to either method, but the methods 
 are different. The canons of criticism that bear 
 upon the one, cut cruelly across the other." 
 
 Here is the creed, if creed it may be called, 
 of the absolute veritistor realist. Ibsen may 
 be criticised, but only with reference to this 
 principle of verity. If there is irrelevant 
 incident in life, then it does not belong to 
 the drama. There are no traditional cri- 
 terions by which to judge a man whose aim 
 is, not to conform to traditions, but to ignore 
 them. 
 
 See the power of an " irrelevant character " 
 in Dr. Rank ! Apparently unrelated, yet 
 what power lies in his coming and going. 
 Nothing in the play seemed to me more irre 
 sistibly courageous and true than the hand 
 ling of that modern man. 
 
 But was he irrelevant ? Is he not subtly 
 related? Does he not throw into relief the 
 life, the abounding animality, of Thorvald 
 and the unthinking happiness of Nora ? He 
 seems to me deeply significant as a foil, such 
 as we see in daily life, when the dead lie 
 silently in the dim room, 
 
ii2 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 " And the summer morning is cool and sweet, 
 And we hear the live folk laugh in the street." 
 
 Every character we note closely stands in 
 a subtle relation to us in real life, and every 
 character which comes naturally into the 
 drama of verities has significance. The 
 traditional law that it must " help the story 
 on " has no significance where the story is 
 lost sight of in the development of character, 
 where the pursuit and not the end is the first 
 consideration, as with the realist. 
 
 On the score of pure modernness, original 
 ity, and truth, both in subject and method, 
 I am inclined to put " The Enemy of Soci 
 ety " at the head of the dramas I have read 
 of the great Norwegian. It is the most mod 
 ern, the most unconventional, the most radi 
 cal, and, to me, one of the most powerful 
 dramas ever written. Love plays in it but 
 the small part it should; other ideas and 
 emotions absorb us. Like a section of life, 
 it has no beginning and no end. It has no 
 machinery, and nothing is forced. It is as 
 modern as the telephone. 
 
 " Yes, and as lacking in beauty," says 
 some one. "To you? I reply; "to me it 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF IBSEN. 113 
 
 has something that is higher than beauty ; 
 it has truth." 
 
 Using the same criterion, life, we see that 
 " The Pillars of Society " is not quite so mod 
 ern. It has a little of the machinery of the 
 stage left. Things happen here and there, 
 but it is powerfully unconventional, for all 
 that. It is filled with superb living figures, 
 and the treatment of Bernick is beyond 
 praise. A powerful satire, it does not fail 
 of doing justice to each figure. 
 
 Finally, Ibsen s treatment of woman stamps 
 his radical departure from old standards more 
 clearly, perhaps, than any other point. The 
 feudalistic woman has been for centuries 
 either a sovereign or a servant, a heroine or 
 a drudge. In the ordinary drama she is long- 
 suffering, patient, and beautiful, or is pretty 
 and provokes laughter. 
 
 Predominantly, from the days of Edmund 
 Spenser to the last issue of the dime novel, 
 the heroine has been characterless, colorless, 
 and passive. In the romantic drama she 
 has languished in dungeons, been the pas 
 sive subject of duels and abductions, cal 
 umny, and reproach. She has been deceived, 
 8 
 
ii4 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 driven from home, cheated of her inheritance, 
 schemed for by villains, and rescued by he 
 roes, while gazing with big round eyes at 
 the world which was a chaos of crime and 
 wickedness. Her bodily allurements have 
 been harped upon and exaggerated till she 
 has imagined the whole world eager to pos 
 sess her, warring only for her. It is impos 
 sible to estimate the harm this sort of lying 
 has produced. 
 
 To pass from such an atmosphere to that 
 of Ibsen s plays is like going from a ques 
 tionable ballroom, filled with painted and 
 simpering faces, out into the crisp bracing 
 air of the street, filled with healthy and vigo 
 rous men and women ; like going into a home 
 where man and wife, equal in fact as in law, 
 are discussing the questions of the day with 
 a party of valued friends. And yet in the 
 feudalistic picture there was once large ele 
 ment of truth. It is no longer true ; it should 
 be discarded. A new woman has appeared 
 in life. 
 
 Dramatically, Ibsen s women are centres 
 of action; not passive dramatic "bones of 
 contention," but active agents in their turn. 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF IBSEN. 115 
 
 Indeed, they take the play in their own hands 
 at times. They re-act upon men, they rise 
 above men at times in the perception of jus 
 tice, of absolute ethics ; they are out in the 
 world, the men s world. They may not un 
 derstand it very well, but they are at least in 
 it, and having their opinion upon things, and 
 voicing their emotions. They are out of the 
 unhealthy air of the feudalistic romance, so 
 much is certain, so much is gain. They are 
 grappling, not merely with affairs, but with 
 social problems. 
 
 My criticism of Ibsen in this particular is 
 again on the score of reality. In his rebound 
 from the false and degrading pictures of 
 women as having but one life, love-life, he 
 has, in my estimation, used too large a pro 
 portion of remarkable women to be perfectly 
 true to his time and country ; and in order 
 to emphasize the growing power and expand 
 ing individuality of the modern woman, he 
 has once or twice included the improbable, if 
 not the impossible, in the action of his women. 
 
 There is also a strain of morbid psychol 
 ogy in many of his characters which I do 
 not value. I prefer his studies of more com- 
 
ii6 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 mon phases of modern intellectual life. Yet 
 the whole outcome of even these studies of 
 morbid conditions is helpful, fine, and strong, 
 and he does not lose his grasp on surround 
 ing facts, when studying these special cases. 
 
 It is a trite saying that the sense of humor 
 is a " saving grace." This element is not 
 lacking in Ibsen, but it is not so well devel 
 oped as to give that peculiar touch of saving 
 grace. There is a plenty of grim humor, but 
 there is little of kindly humor in his plays. 
 He is kept from being extravagant not by the 
 sense of the ridiculous so much as by sheer 
 intellect and deep vibrant sympathy. The 
 humor that is everywhere a corrective in the 
 fervid sympathy and burning social discon 
 tent of Mr. Howells s later novels is not 
 found in Ibsen ; and, lacking it, " The Doll- 
 Home " lacks the fine poise a humorous sense 
 of human frailties gives to a serious work of 
 fiction. 
 
 One closes a reading of these astounding 
 dramas with the consciousness that some 
 thing electric has passed by. They stand so 
 sheer above most of the dramas of the age 
 that it is no wonder the critics are amazed 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF IBSEN. 117 
 
 and enraged. The person who comes to like 
 these dramas and their methods is likely to 
 find his taste for conventional heroics dis 
 turbed, if not destroyed. The romantic ab 
 surdities of the day cannot flourish long in 
 the same atmosphere. Ibsen is a great her 
 ald, his dramas lead to the future. 
 
 Observe, I do not claim for him superhu 
 man merit. These plays are not the farther 
 wall. They are not yet on a plane with the 
 great novels of the day. Their purpose is 
 too obvious, but they are a superb advance. 
 Ibsen already sees the beauty and signifi 
 cance of the common life of the day. He 
 begins to recognize no such thing as " com 
 monplace." He exemplifies the magnificent 
 sayings of Tolstoy, Valdes, and Whitman, all 
 using almost the same words. 
 
 "In nature there is nothing either great 
 or small, all is equal. All is equally great, 
 equally just, equally beautiful. To talk of 
 the trifles of life is not posssible to him who 
 has meditated on the great problem of exist 
 ence. The trifle does not exist absolutely, 
 only as a relative term. That which is a 
 trifle to some is a great fact to others. In 
 
ii8 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 all that is particular we may be shown the 
 general, in all that is finite the infinite. Art 
 is charged with its revelation." 
 
 Realism is not a theory, it is a condition 
 of mind, of sensibility. The realist has only 
 one law, to be true to himself ; only one crite 
 rion, life. He must love genuinely what he 
 depicts, and be true. Anything that he loves, 
 the artist will make important to others as to 
 himself. He must not be discouraged if the 
 general public does not love the same fact as 
 himself. He will find sympathizers at last. 
 
 If there is one great idea dominant in the 
 present age, it is this : " Art is not the repro 
 duction of art ; each epoch must have its own 
 ./ art." Each age writes, paints, sings of its 
 own time and for its time. All genuine mod 
 ern art must conform to this general and in 
 exorable law. 
 
 Ibsen has helped us in our war against 
 conventionalisms, but he must not domi 
 nate us. His plays are not to 
 be models. Our drama will 
 be more human, more 
 wholesome, and more 
 humorou s. 
 
IX. 
 
 IMPRESSIONISM. 
 
ix EVERY competent 
 
 observer who passed 
 
 IMPRESSIONISM. 
 
 through the art palace 
 at the Exposition was probably made aware 
 of the immense growth of impressionistic 
 or open-air painting. If the Exposition had 
 been held five years ago, scarcely a trace of 
 the blue-shadow idea would have been seen 
 outside the work of Claude Monet, Pisarro, 
 and a few others of the French and Spanish 
 groups. 
 
 To-day, as seen in this wonderful collection, 
 impressionism as a principle has affected the 
 younger men of Russia, Norway, Sweden, 
 Denmark, and America as well as the plein 
 air school of Giverney. Its presence is put 
 in evidence to the ordinary observer in the 
 prevalence of blue or purple shadows, and 
 by the abundance of dazzling sun-light 
 effects. 
 
 This growth of an idea in painting must 
 not be confounded with a mere vogue. It 
 
122 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 is evolutionary, if not destructive, in the eyes 
 of the old-school painters, at least. To the 
 younger men it assumes almost as much 
 importance as the law of gravity. With 
 them it is the true law of light and shade. 
 
 It may be worth while to consider, quite 
 apart from technical terms, the principles 
 upon which this startling departure from the 
 conventional manner is based. 
 
 The fundamental idea of the impression 
 ists, as I understand /it, is that a picture 
 should be a unified impression. It should 
 not be a mosaic, but a complete and of course 
 momentary concept of the sense of sight. 
 It should not deal with the concepts of other 
 senses (as touch), nor with judgments ; it 
 should be the stayed and reproduced effect 
 of a single section of the world of color upon 
 the eye. It should not be a number of 
 pictures enclosed in one frame, but a single 
 idea impossible of subdivision without loss. 
 
 They therefore strive to represent in color 
 an instantaneous effect of light and shade 
 as presented by nature, and they work in the 
 open air necessarily. They are concerned 
 with atmosphere always. They know that 
 
IMPRESSIONISM. 123 
 
 the landscape is never twice alike. Every 
 degree of the progress of the sun makes a new 
 picture. They follow the most splendid and 
 alluring phases of nature, putting forth 
 almost superhuman effort to catch impres 
 sions of delight under which they quiver. 
 
 They select some moment, some centre of 
 interest, generally of the simplest character. 
 This central object they work out with great 
 care, but all else fades away into subordinate 
 blur of color, precisely as in life. We look 
 at a sheep, for example, feeding under a 
 tree. We see the sheep with great clearness, 
 and the tree and the stump, but the fence 
 and hill outside the primary circle of vision 
 are only obscurely perceived. The meadow 
 beyond is a mere blur of yellow-green. This 
 is the natural arrangement. If we look at 
 the fence or the meadow, another picture is 
 born. 
 
 It will thus be seen that these men are 
 veritists in the best sense of the word. 
 They are referring constantly to nature. If 
 you look carefully at the Dutch painters and 
 the English painters of related thought, you 
 will find them working out each part of the 
 
124 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 picture with almost the same clearness. 
 Their canvases are not single pictures, they 
 are mosaics of pictures, packed into one 
 frame. Values are almost equal everywhere. 
 
 This idea of impressionism makes much of 
 the relation and interplay of light and shade, 
 not in black and white, but in color. Im 
 pressionists are, above all, colorists. They 
 cannot sacrifice color for multiple lines. 
 They do not paint leaves, they paint masses 
 of color ; they paint the effect of leaves upon 
 the eye. 
 
 They teach that the retina perceives only 
 plane surfaces. The eye takes note, in its 
 primary impressions, of masses rather than 
 lines. This idea affects the painting of 
 groups ; and the most advanced painter 
 never loses the unity of light effects, no 
 matter how tempting a subject may be, nor 
 how complex. 
 
 This may be illustrated by reference to a 
 picture exhibited in the Norwegian section, 
 " The First Communion." The scene is the 
 sitting or dining room of a well-to-do family. 
 It is lighted by a single hanging-lamp. The 
 family stand in a semi-circle against the wall. 
 
IMPRESSIONISM. 125 
 
 The minister stands silhouetted against the 
 light of the lamp. He is the principal figure 
 of the group, and yet, because truth demanded 
 his position there, he remains a shadow, 
 but a luminous shadow, kindly, dignified, and 
 authoritative. 
 
 The lamp casts blue-green and orange 
 streaks and blurs of color across the table, 
 and over the white shirts and collars. Some 
 of the faces are vague masses of light, won 
 derfully full of character. Few faces are 
 outlined definitely. The whole is simply a 
 splendid and solemn impression, as if in 
 passing by in the darkness one had caught, 
 through an open door, a glance at a hushed 
 and reverential communion ceremony. It is 
 like Dagnan-Bouveret with better color. 
 
 Without pointing out, as one might, con 
 spicuous examples of the literal delineation 
 of groups (in the American section as well 
 as elsewhere), I would call attention to the 
 fact that this is the modern picture. It is 
 also the dramatic picture, because it takes up 
 and relates at a stroke the impression of a 
 dramatic moment. The mosaic is the un 
 true picture because the eye never sees all 
 
126 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 faces with equal clearness, especially at a 
 moment of dramatic interest. 
 
 This singleness of impression destroys, of 
 course, all idea of " cooked up " pictures, as 
 the artists say. There are, moreover, no 
 ornate or balanced effects. The painter takes 
 a swift glance at a hill-side, whose sky-line 
 cuts the picture diagonally, perhaps. It has 
 a wind-blown tuft of trees upon it, possibly. 
 A brook comes into the foreground casually. 
 Or he takes for subject a hay-stack in a 
 field, painting it for the variant effects of 
 sun-light. He finds his heart s-full of beauty 
 and mystery in a bit of a meadow with a row 
 of willows. 
 
 He takes intimate views of nature ; but if 
 he painted the heart of the Andes, he would 
 do it, not as the civil engineer sees it, but as 
 he himself sees it and loves it. 
 
 The second principle, and the one most 
 likely to be perceived by the casual observer, 
 is the use of "raw" colors. The impres 
 sionist does not believe nature needs toning 
 or harmonizing. Her colors, he finds, are 
 primary, and are laid on in juxtaposition. 
 Therefore the impressionist does not mix 
 
IMPRESSIONISM. 127 
 
 his paints upon his palette. He paints with 
 nature s colors, red, blue, and yellow ; and 
 he places them fearlessly on the canvas side 
 by side, leaving the eye to mix them, as in 
 nature. 
 
 For example, the late Dennis M. Bunker, 
 in painting a meadow stream, did not hesitate 
 to paint the water blue as the sky, nor to 
 paint the red band of rust-like silt on the 
 margin of the stream in close juxtaposition 
 to the vivid green of the meadow grass. This 
 picture, beside a Dutch or English conven 
 tional landscape, was as radically different, as 
 radiantly beautiful, as a sunlit day in New 
 England June put over against a dull day 
 on the low-lands of the North Sea; and 
 this is right. The painter was not account 
 able to the Dutch or English or French 
 painters of any time or place ; he was 
 accountable only to nature and to his own 
 sense. 
 
 This placing of red, blue, and yellow side 
 by side gives a crispness and brilliancy, and 
 a peculiar vibratory quality to sky and earth 
 which is unknown to the old method. And 
 if the observer will forget conventions and 
 
128 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 will refer the canvas back to nature instead, 
 he will find this to be the true concept. 
 
 I once asked a keen lover of nature who 
 knew nothing about painting, to visit a gal 
 lery with me and see some impressionistic 
 works which had shocked the city. I asked 
 him to stand before these pictures and tell 
 me just what he thought of them. 
 
 He looked long and earnestly, and then 
 turned with an enthusiastic light in his eyes, 
 " That is June grass under the sunlight." 
 
 His eyes had not been educated to despise 
 the vigor and splendor of nature. He cared 
 nothing for Corot or Constable or Turner. I 
 believe that the unspoiled perception of a 
 lover of untempered nature will find in the 
 pictures of the best impressionists the quality 
 he calls " natural." 
 
 To most eyes the sign-manual of the im 
 pressionist is the blue shadow. And it must 
 be admitted that too many impressionists 
 have painted as if the blue shadow were 
 the only distinguishing sign of the difference 
 between the new and the old. The gallery- 
 trotter, with eyes filled with dead and buried 
 symbolisms of nature, comes upon Bunker s 
 
IMPRESSIONISM. 1 29 
 
 meadows, or Binding s mountain-tops, or Lar 
 son s sunsets, and exclaims, "Oh, see those 
 dreadful pictures ! Where did they get such 
 colors." 
 
 To see these colors is a development. In 
 my own case, I may confess, I got my first 
 idea of colored shadows from reading one of 
 Herbert Spencer s essays ten years ago. I 
 then came to see blue and grape-color in the 
 shadows on the snow. By turning my head 
 top-side down, I came to see that shadows 
 falling upon yellow sand were violet, and 
 the shadows of vivid sunlight falling on the 
 white of a macadamized street were blue, 
 like the shadows on snows. 
 
 Being so instructed, I came to catch 
 through the corners of my eyes sudden 
 glimpses of a radiant world which vanished 
 as magically as it came. On my horse I 
 caught glimpses of this marvellous land of 
 color as I galloped across some bridge. In 
 this world stone-walls were no longer cold 
 gray, they were warm purple, deepening as 
 the sun westered. And so the landscape grew 
 radiant year by year, until at last no painter s 
 impression surpassed my world in beauty. 
 9 
 
130 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 As I write this, I have just come in from 
 a bee-hunt over Wisconsin hills, amid splen 
 dors which would make Monet seem low- 
 keyed. Only Enneking and some few others 
 of the American artists, and some of the 
 Norwegians have touched the degree of 
 brilliancy and sparkle of color which was in 
 the world to-day. Amid bright orange foli 
 age, the trunks of beeches glowed with steel- 
 blue shadows on their eastern side. Sumach 
 flamed with marvellous brilliancy among 
 deep cool green grasses and low plants 
 untouched by frost. Everywhere amid the 
 red and orange and crimson were lilac and 
 steel-blue shadows, giving depth and vigor 
 and buoyancy which Corot never saw (or 
 never painted), a world which Inness does 
 not represent. Enneking comes nearer, but 
 even he tones unconsciously the sparkle of 
 these colors. 
 
 Going from this world of frank color to 
 the timid apologies and harmonies of the old- 
 school painters is depressing. Never again 
 can I find them more than mere third-hand 
 removes of nature. The Norwegians come 
 nearer to seeing nature as I see it than any 
 
IMPRESSIONISM. 131 
 
 other nationality. Their climate must be 
 somewhat similar to that in which my life 
 has been spent, but they evidently have 
 more orange in their sunlight. 
 
 The point to be made here is this, the 
 atmosphere and coloring of Russia is not 
 the atmosphere of Holland. The atmos 
 phere of Norway is much clearer and the 
 colors more vivid than in England. One 
 school therefore cannot copy or be based 
 upon the other without loss. Each painter 
 should paint his own surroundings, with 
 nature for his teacher, rather than some 
 Dutch master, painting the never-ending 
 mists and rains of the sea-level. 
 
 This brings me to my settled conviction 
 that art, to be vital, must be local in its sub 
 ject ; its universal appeal must be in its work 
 ing out, in the way it is done. Dependence 
 upon the English or French groups is alike 
 fatal to fresh, individual art. 
 
 The impressionist is not only a local 
 painter, in choice of subject he deals with 
 the present. The impressionist is not an 
 historical painter, he takes little interest in 
 the monks and brigands of the Middle Ages. 
 
132 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 He does not feel that America is without 
 subjects to paint because she has no castles 
 and donjon keeps. He loves nature, not 
 history. His attitude toward nature is a per 
 sonal one. He represents the escape from 
 childish love of war and the glitter of steel. 
 
 The impressionist paints portraits and 
 groups, but paints them as he sees them, 
 not as others see them. He has no receipt 
 for " flesh color." He never sees human 
 flesh unrelated in its color, it is always af 
 fected by other colors. He paints the yel 
 low hair of a child with red, blue, and yellow, 
 the gray hair of the grandmother with the 
 same primary colors, and attains such truth 
 and vigor that the portraits made with 
 brown shadows seem dull and flat. Observe 
 some of the portraits by Bunker, by Zorn, by 
 Bertha Wegmann and Mrs. Perry, or the 
 figures in firelight by Benson or Tarbell, and 
 you find them all subtle studies of the inter 
 play of color, with no hard and fast line 
 between colors. The face gives to the dress, 
 the dress to the face. 
 
 True, these pictures are not calculated for 
 study with a magnifying glass. Meissonier 
 
IMPRESSIONISM. 133 
 
 and Detaille always seem to me to partake 
 of the art which carves a coach-and-four out 
 of walnuts ; and there are a great many esti 
 mable folk who think paintings are to be 
 smelled of, in order to test their quality. 
 Everything is not worked out in these im 
 pressionist groups ; there is the suggestion of 
 a true impression in their technical handling. 
 
 Their work is not hasty, however. It is 
 the result of hard study. They work rapidly, 
 but not carelessly. They are like skilled 
 musicians ; the actual working out of the 
 melody is rapid, but it has taken vast study 
 and practice. Lines are few, colors simple, 
 but they are marvellously exact. It must 
 never be forgotten that they are not delineat 
 ing a scene; they are painting a personal 
 impression of a scene, which is vastly 
 different. 
 
 The impressionist does not paint Cherubs 
 and Loves and floating iron chains. He has 
 no conventional pictures, full of impossible 
 juxtapositions. He takes fresh, vital themes, 
 mainly out-of-door scenes. He aims always 
 at freshness and vigor. 
 
 The impressionist is a buoyant and cheer- 
 
134 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 ful painter. He loves the open air, and the 
 mid-day sun. He has little to say about the 
 " mystery " and " sentiment " of nature. 
 His landscapes quiver with virile color. 
 He emphasizes (too often over-emphasizes) 
 his difference in method, by choosing the 
 most gorgeous subjects. At his worst, the 
 impressionist is daring in his choice of sub 
 ject and over-assertive in his handling. Nat 
 urally, in his reaction he has swung back 
 across the line too far. 
 
 This leads Monet to paint the same hay 
 stack in twenty different lights, in order to 
 emphasize the value of color and atmos 
 phere over mere subject. It leads Dodge 
 McKnight to paint water " till it looks as if 
 skinned," as one critic said. It led Bunker 
 to paint the radiant meadows of June, and 
 leads Remington to paint the hot hollows 
 between hills of yellow sand, over which a 
 cobalt, cloudless sky arches. 
 
 The impressionist, if he is frank, admits the 
 value, historically, of the older painters, but 
 also says candidly, " They do not represent 
 me." I walked through the loan exhibition 
 with a man who cared nothing for precedent, 
 
IMPRESSIONISM. 1 3 5 
 
 a keen, candid man ; and I afterward 
 visited the entire gallery with a painter, a 
 strong and earnest man, who had grown out 
 of the gray-black-and-brown method. 
 
 Both these men shook their heads at 
 Inness, Diaz, Corot, Troyon, Rousseau, and 
 Millet. The painter said, a little sadly, as 
 if surrendering an illusion, " They do not 
 represent nature to me any more. They re 
 all too indefinite, too weak, too lifeless in 
 shadow. They reproduce beautifully, but 
 their color is too muddy and cold." 
 
 The other man was not even sad. He 
 said, "I don t like them, that s all there 
 is about it. I don t see nature that way. 
 Some of them are decorative, but they are 
 not nature. I prefer Monet or Hassam or 
 the Norwegians." 
 
 As for me, these paintings have no power 
 or influence on my life, other than to make 
 me feel once more the inexorable march of 
 art. I respect these men, they were such 
 deep and tender souls ! They worked so 
 hard and so long to embody their conception 
 of nature, but they do not represent me, do 
 not embody the sunlight and shadow I see. 
 
136 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 They conceived too much, they saw too 
 little. The work of a man like Enneking or 
 Steele or Remington, striving to paint native 
 scenes, and succeeding, is of more interest 
 to me than Diaz. 
 
 It is blind fetichism, timid provincialism, 
 or commercial greed which puts the works 
 of " the masters " above the living, breathing 
 artist. Such is the power of authority that 
 people who feel no answering thrill from 
 some smooth, dim old paintings are afraid 
 to say they do not care for them for fear 
 some one will charge them with stupidity or 
 ignorance. 
 
 The time is coming when the tyranny of 
 such criticism will be overthrown. There is 
 no exclusive patent on painting. There are 
 just as faithful artists to-day as ever lived, 
 and much more truthful than any past age 
 could have been. Day by day the old sinks 
 an inch. The same questions face the painter 
 that face the novelist or the sculptor. Has 
 the last word been said ? Did the masters 
 utter the last word ? Are there no new king 
 doms of art ? It is the age-worn demand of 
 the old that the new shall conform. 
 
IMPRESSIONISM. 137 
 
 The old masters saw nature in a certain 
 way, right or wrong it does not matter; 
 youth must conform. They saw nature in 
 a sombre fashion, therefore youth must be 
 decorous. Youth, in impressionism, to-day 
 is saying, " I have nothing to do with Con 
 stable or Turner. Their success or failure 
 is nothing to me, as an artist. It is my own 
 impression of nature I am to paint, not theirs. 
 I am to be held accountable to nature, not to 
 the painters of a half-century ago. 
 
 " If I see plum-colored shadows on the 
 snow, or violet shadows on the sand ; if the 
 clouds seen above perpendicular cliffs seem 
 on edge ; if a town on a hill in a wild wind 
 seems to lean, then I am to paint it so. I 
 am painting my love for nature, not some 
 other s perception. If this is iconoclasm, I 
 cannot help it." 
 
 Very similarly, the tyranny of the classic 
 in sculpture is giving way, and America is 
 beginning to do the work she can do best. 
 Very probably, sculpture will yet embody 
 in stone and bronze the scenes we all love in 
 American life. John Rogers, in his timid 
 way, pointed the way after all. Lanceray, 
 
138 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 the Russian sculptor, won great fame by em 
 bodying, in a way never before realized, the 
 habits and dress of his native land. Theat 
 rical at times, but accurate and swift and 
 unified always, he certainly has demonstrated 
 that a mighty future exists for sculpture, once 
 the tyranny of the Greek is overthrown. 
 
 There are few limitations to sculpture. 
 Whatever the artist loves and wishes to put 
 into bronze or marble, that is allowable. All 
 things point toward genre sculpture, colored 
 to the life, not conventionally painted, as in 
 Greek art, when sculpture was but just de 
 tached from architecture. Wherever the 
 freed soul of the sculptor loves most, there 
 will his eager hand create in the image of 
 his passion. 
 
 Our wild animals have already found a 
 great artist in Kemeys. The Indian and 
 the negro also are being spiritedly handled, 
 but the workman in his working clothes, the 
 brakeman, the thresher on the farm, the heater 
 at the furnace, the cow-boy on his horse, the 
 young man in the haying field, offer equally 
 powerful and characteristic subjects. There 
 are no traditional limitations to sculpture. 
 
JMPRESSIONISM. 139 
 
 Whatever the sculptor loves and desires to 
 fashion, that is his best possible subject. 
 
 The iconoclast is a necessity. He it is 
 who breaks out of the hopeless circle of tra 
 ditional authority. His declaration of inde 
 pendence is a disturbance to those who sleep 
 on the bosom of the dead prophets. The 
 impressionist is unquestionably an iconoclast, 
 and the friends of the dead painters are prop 
 erly alarmed. Here, as everywhere, there are 
 the two parties, the one standing for the 
 old, the other welcoming the new. A con 
 test like that between realism and romanti 
 cism is not playful, it is destructive. 
 
 To a man educated in the school of Mu 
 nich, the pictures, both of the Norwegians and 
 of the Giverney group of Frenchmen and all 
 other pictures with blue and purple shadows, 
 are a shock. They are not merely variants, 
 they are flags of anarchy ; they leave no 
 middle ground, apparently. If they are right, 
 then all the rest are wrong. By contrast the 
 old is slain. 
 
 Not merely this, but to the connoisseur who 
 believes that Corot, Rousseau, or Millet 
 
140 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 touched the highest point of painting, these 
 impressionists are intruders, "they come in 
 unbidden ; they are ribald when they are not 
 absurd." It is the same old fight between, 
 authority and youth, between the individual 
 and the mass. " We do not welcome change, 
 we conservatives. It discredits our masters 
 and confuses us with regard to works we 
 have considered to be mountain-peaks of 
 endeavor." 
 
 As a matter of fact, they are justified in 
 taking a serious view of the situation. The 
 change in method indicated by vivid and 
 fearless coloring, indicates a radical change 
 in attitude toward the physical universe. It 
 stands for an advance in the perceptive power 
 of the human eye. Mercifully, for youth, 
 the world of humankind and physical nature 
 forever offers new phases for discovery, for 
 a new work of art ; just as new subtleties of 
 force lure minds like Edison s into the shadow, 
 so to the young and unfettered artists new 
 worlds of art beckon. 
 
 Let the critic who thinks this a vogue or 
 fad, this impressionist view of nature, beware. 
 It is a discovery, born of clearer vision and 
 
IMPRESSIONISM. 141 
 
 more careful study, a perception which 
 was denied the early painters, precisely as the 
 force we call electricity was an ungovernable 
 power a generation ago. 
 
 The dead must give way to the living. It 
 may be sad, but it is the inexorable law, and 
 the veritist and the impressionist will try to 
 submit gracefully to the method of the icono 
 clasts who shall come when they in their 
 turn are old and sad. 
 
 For the impressionists rank themselves 
 with those who believe the final word will 
 never be spoken upon art. That they have 
 added a new word to painting, no competent 
 critic will deny. It has made nature more 
 radiantly beautiful, this new word. Like the 
 word of a lover, it has exalted the painter to 
 see nature irradiated with splendor never seen 
 before. Wherever it is most originally worked 
 out, it makes use of a fundamental principle 
 in an individual way, and it has brought 
 painting abreast of the unprejudiced 
 perception of the lover of na 
 ture. The principle is as 
 broad as air, its work 
 ing out should be 
 individual. 
 
LITERARY CENTRES. 
 
x A FAVORITE pro- 
 
 LITERARY CENTRES. P Siti n With * e 
 business-man of the 
 
 West is this : " If the West had been settled 
 first, the East would be a wilderness to-day, 
 for the reason (as he goes on to explain) that 
 the fertile soil, the vast cities, the ease of 
 communication of the midland, would have 
 made it the home of all ease, refinement, 
 culture, and art. The East would have been 
 only a fringe of seaport towns, with fine 
 shooting and fishing lands as a background." 
 If he happens to be a business-man with 
 an imagination (there are such), he will then 
 say : " The East has therefore had its day as 
 a commercial centre. The West has finally 
 been discovered. The East has poured its 
 millions of men and money into the Missis 
 sippi valley, and these millions of men have 
 taken root in the soil ; and to-day, in the year 
 of 1894, the commercial dominance of the 
 East is distinctly on the wane. Henceforth, 
 
146 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 the centre of commercial activity in the 
 United States is to be the West. Hence 
 forth, when men of the Old World speak of 
 America, they will not think of Boston and 
 New York and Philadelphia, they will mean 
 Chicago and the Mississippi valley." 
 
 There is, of course, an element of exagger 
 ation in this, but there is also in it a larger 
 truth and a magnificent enthusiasm, an 
 enthusiasm which rises above commercial 
 considerations. The man who really dares 
 to face the future, and, of course, the man 
 who dares to face the future is he who finds 
 his interests served by it, the man who can 
 sit down and think of the on-coming millions 
 of the great Mississippi valley, must admit 
 that over-statement of its importance is quite 
 impossible, given time enough for fulfilment. 
 
 Commercially, the West rushes toward the 
 future. Cities rise with velocity hitherto 
 inconceivable. True, they are mushrooms 
 to some extent, and are founded upon greed 
 and speculation to a sorrowful extent; but 
 the people are coming on after all, people of 
 higher wisdom and purer life, who will make 
 these mushroom cities temples to art and 
 
LITERARY CENTRES. 147 
 
 song. This great basin, like Egypt, like Ger 
 many, is to be a " well of nations." It will con 
 tinually revivify and reinvigorate the East, 
 the extreme North, and the extreme South. 
 It will be the base of food supply ; the heart 
 of the nation ; the place of interchange. 
 
 This leads me to a proposition, which I 
 make on my own account. Literary horizons 
 also are changing with almost equal swift 
 ness. Centres of art production are moving 
 westward ; that is to say, the literary supre 
 macy of the East is passing away. There are 
 other and subtler causes than commercial 
 elements at work. Racial influences are at 
 work, and changes in literary and social 
 ideals are hastening a far-reaching subdivi 
 sion, if not decentralization, of power. 
 
 In the West there is coming into expression 
 and literary influence the great Scandinavian 
 and Germanic element to which the tradi 
 tions of English literature are very weak and 
 unimportant, and to whom Boston and New 
 York are of small account. They have 
 their own race-traditions which neutralize 
 those of the English language which they 
 speak, and thus their minds are left free to 
 
148 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 choose the most modern things. It is im 
 possible for them to take on the literary 
 traditions of their adopted tongue with equal 
 power, and they find their own less binding 
 by change. 
 
 Again, literary traditions are weakening 
 all along the line. The old is passing away, 
 the new is coming on. As the old fades 
 away, the strongholds of tradition and classic 
 interest are forgotten and left behind. This 
 mighty change is a silent one, but it is irresis 
 tible. This can be illustrated in the change 
 which has swept over Boston, Concord, and 
 Cambridge during the last ten or twenty 
 years. 
 
 Boston has claimed and held supremacy 
 in American literature for more than half 
 a century. Made illustrious by Emerson, 
 Hawthorne, Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, 
 Lowell, the New England group, it easily 
 kept its place as the most important literary 
 centre in America. New York was second, 
 and Philadelphia third. This Cambridge 
 group has been called "the polite group" 
 and " the Library group." Its members took 
 things for the most part at second hand. 
 
LITERARY CENTRES. 149 
 
 They read many books, and mainly wrote 
 gentle and polite poems on books and events. 
 Whittier and Hawthorne, notwithstanding 
 their larger originality, were, after all, related. 
 They took things in a bookish way. It 
 would be absurd to say they were weak or 
 poor, they were very high and noble; but 
 they belonged to another period. They were 
 more closely allied with the past, with Eng 
 lish traditions, than we, and were actuated 
 by different ideals of life. 
 
 So long as this group lived, Boston was 
 the literary autocrat of the nation. But the 
 school of book-poets is losing power. And, 
 with the change in literary creed, Boston has 
 lost its high place, and it is but natural that 
 she should now take a rather mournful view 
 of American literature. 
 
 New York to-day claims to be, and is, the 
 literary centre of America. Boston artists 
 one by one go to New York. Literary men 
 find their market growing there, and dying 
 out in Boston. They find quicker and 
 warmer appreciation in New York, and the 
 critical atmosphere more hospitable. The 
 present receives a larger share of attention 
 
150 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 than in Boston. Henceforward New York, 
 and not Boston, is to be the great dictator 
 of American literature. New York already 
 assumes to be able to make or break a novel 
 ist or playwright. Certainly it is the centre 
 of magazine production ; and the magazine is, 
 on the whole, the greatest outlet for distinc 
 tive American art. 
 
 We are more American in our illustrating 
 and in our fiction than in any other lines of 
 artistic work. New York is the centre of 
 oil-painting as well as of illustration, and its 
 markets exceed those of almost all other 
 American cities taken together. In short, 
 its supremacy in art must be conceded to be 
 as complete to-day as its commercial domi 
 nation in railways and stocks. 
 
 And yet New York is in danger of assum 
 ing too much. She must not forget that 
 the writers and painters who make her illus 
 trious are very largely products of the South 
 and West. One needs but to run over the 
 list of the leading magazine-writers of the 
 last ten years, to see how true this is. Ohio 
 sends William D. Howells; Virginia sends 
 Thomas Nelson Page and Amelie Rives ; 
 
LITERARY CENTRES. 151 
 
 Indiana sends Edward Eggleston, James 
 Whitcomb Riley, Mrs. Catherwood. Ten 
 nessee is represented by the Murfree sisters. 
 Georgia, by Joel Harris and Richard Malcolm 
 Johnston. Louisiana finds voice through 
 George W. Cable and Ruth McEnnery 
 Stuart. Arkansas and Kentucky are repre 
 sented by Alice French and James Lane 
 Allen ; and so through a notable list. These 
 are but a few of the best known of the 
 names. Thus, every part of the West or 
 South is represented in the literary domina 
 tion of New York. 
 
 It is not so much a victory of New York 
 over Boston, it is the rising to literary power 
 of the whole nation. New York is but the "\ V"" 
 trumpet through which the whole nation is \ 
 at last speaking. Let New York remember /^ 
 this and be humble, for the same causes that 
 have cut away the pride of Boston will cer 
 tainly bring about a corresponding change 
 in the relation of New York to the South 
 and West. 
 
 It was easy for Boston to maintain her 
 literary supremacy while the whole popula 
 tion of the nation was less than forty mil- 
 
152 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 lions, when the whole West was a frontier, 
 and the South was a slave-country. It will 
 be hard for New York to retain her present 
 supremacy with a nation of seventy millions 
 of people, with cities containing half a 
 million people springing up in the interior 
 and on the Western sea, not to mention 
 Chicago, whose shadow already menaces 
 New York. 
 
 Already Chicago claims to have pushed 
 New York from her seat as ruler of our 
 commerce. The whole West and South are 
 in open rebellion against her financial rule. 
 Chicago equals, possibly outnumbers her, in 
 population, and certainly outspeeds her in 
 enterprise. The rise of Chicago as a literary 
 and art centre is a question only of time, 
 and of a very short time ; for the Columbian 
 Exposition has taught her her own capabili 
 ties in something higher than business. The 
 founding of vast libraries and universities 
 and art museums is the first formal step, the 
 preparation-stage ; expression will follow 
 swiftly. Magazines and publishing-houses 
 are to come. 
 
 The writers have already risen. Every 
 
LITERARY CENTRES. 153 
 
 literary man must have a beginning some 
 where, and there are scores of original young 
 writers and artists just rising to power in 
 the West. They need only a channel for 
 utterance ; it will come, and they will 
 speak. 
 
 It is not contended that the names quoted 
 above are the best, that they represent the 
 perfect art of the new school. Most of them 
 are young writers, all of them are significant 
 of things to come, but many of them are 
 already of national, even international, fame. 
 The absolutist in his sneer at the rising young 
 artists forgets that the literary masters he 
 worships were once as helpless to reply to 
 the question : What have you done ? 
 
 It is not intended to say that New York 
 has not her native share in this new move 
 ment ; I aim merely to show that never 
 again can a city or a group of States over 
 shadow the whole of literary America. It 
 is not merely a question of New York and 
 Chicago now, it is the rise of literary centres 
 all over the nation. Henceforth, St. Louis, 
 New Orleans, Atlanta, Denver, San Fran 
 cisco, Cincinnati, St. Paul, and Minneapolis, 
 
154 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 and a dozen more interior cities are to be 
 reckoned with. 
 
 Like Avignon and Marseilles, they will 
 have literary men and literary judgments of 
 their own. The process is one of decentral 
 ization, together with one of unification. 
 
 Never again will any city dominate Amer 
 ican literature ; and, in my judgment, there 
 will be no over-topping personalities in art. 
 The average is rising ; the peaks will seem 
 to sink. 
 
 There are other reasons for the revolt 
 against the domination of the East over the 
 whole nation. New York, like Boston, is too 
 near London. It is no longer American. 
 It is losing touch with the people. Chicago 
 is much more American, notwithstanding its 
 foreign population. Its dominant population 
 is splendidly American, drawn from the im 
 mediate States, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, 
 Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Ohio. It does not 
 profess to be exclusive ; it professes to be a 
 meeting-place. Of course, it has its tremu 
 lous and timid imitators of New York and 
 Boston imitations of London and Paris ; 
 but these people are in a sad minority. 
 
 *-v 
 
 /*/ A tfL^V - 
 
 I///V 
 
LITERARY CENTRES. 155 
 
 The great body of men and women who 
 give strength and originality to Chicago are 
 people who care very little what New York 
 thinks of their work, and the doings of 
 London and Paris are not more vital. 
 
 No critic whose eyes are not fastened upon 
 the past can imagine a hopeless literary 
 future for this great nation. To the con 
 servative, who thinks change necessarily 
 destructive and hopeless, the future is a 
 blank. To the radical, who feels change to 
 be necessary and natural, the present and 
 the future are filled with magnificent prom 
 ise. The horizon widens each year, includ 
 ing more cities, more writers, more lovers of 
 light and song, more makers of literature. 
 Literary invention is as inevitable as the 
 manipulation of the material universe. The 
 material always subtends the intellectual. 
 Activity in material comes ultimately to be 
 expressed, and expression is commensurate 
 with the deed. 
 
 " Bigness does not count," the East says 
 in answer to the West. Yes, but it does ! 
 The prairies lead to general conceptions. 
 The winds give strength and penetration 
 
156 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 and alertness. The mighty stretches of 
 woods lead to breadth and generosity of 
 intellectual conception. The West and 
 South are coming to be something more 
 than big, coming to the expression of a new 
 world, coming to take their places in the 
 world of literature, as in the world of action, 
 and no sneer from gloomy prophets of the 
 dying past can check or chill them. 
 
 The literature which is already springing 
 up in those great interior spaces of the South 
 and West is to be a literature, not of books, 
 but of life. It will draw its inspiration from 
 original contact with men and with nature. 
 It will have at first the rough-hewn quality 
 of first-hand work. It is to out-run the old- 
 world limitations. 
 
 Its vitalizing element will be its difference 
 of treatment, which will not be that of any 
 other literature of any other place or time, 
 and it is extremely improbable that it will 
 ever submit to any central academy, whether 
 in New York or Chicago. 
 
 This school will be one where most nota 
 bly the individuality of each writer will be 
 respected, and this forbids strict conformity 
 
LITERARY CENTRES. 157 
 
 to accepted models. When life is the model 
 and truth the criterion and individualism the 
 coloring element of a literature, the central 
 academy has small power. There will be 
 association as of equals, not slavish accep 
 tance of dictation. 
 
 Then again, hero-worship in literature is 
 weakening. In the days when there were 
 few literary men, and these few men pro 
 fessedly held strange powers entirely distinct 
 from their fellows, something of awe went 
 with the reader s admiration. To-day, when 
 the ranks of the poets are thick with adepts, 
 and when the novelists write of comprehen 
 sible subjects and lay no claim to mystic 
 power, both poet and novelist are approached 
 without ceremony. This also weakens the 
 hold of the central academy. 
 
 The blight upon the literature of the 
 West, like that of all provinces, has been 
 its timidity, its tendency to work in accepted 
 modes, its childish desire to write for the 
 applause of its masters in the East. This 
 has been, in fact, the weakness of the entire 
 output of American literature. The West 
 only emphasizes the fact. In material things, 
 
158 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 America has boundless self-assertion, but in 
 the arts it has imitated because of its failure 
 to perceive its proper relation to the litera 
 ture of the world. The West, reckoning 
 itself an annex of the East, has imitated 
 imitations. 
 
 Because the East considered itself Eng 
 lish in general character, the West, so far as 
 most of its writers are concerned, has ac 
 quiesced. As a matter of fact, the West is 
 not English. The Northwest is more largely 
 Teutonic and Scandinavian, and the peo 
 ple of Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois are far 
 removed from England and from English 
 conceptions of life ; and this distance is sure 
 to find its statement in literature. Wiscon 
 sin, Iowa, Minnesota, Dakota, and other 
 Western States are half composed of men 
 and women of Germanic or Scandinavian 
 extraction. The literature rising from these 
 people will not be English. It will be some 
 thing new ; it will be, and ought to be, Amer 
 ican, that is to say, a new composite. 
 
 The centre of this literature of national 
 scope, therefore, cannot be in the East. It 
 will not be dominated by the English idea. 
 
LITERARY CENTRES 159 
 
 It will have no reference to Tennyson or 
 Longfellow or Arnold. Its reference to the 
 north of Europe, to Norway or Germany, will 
 have less of benumbing effect, for these 
 northern peoples are not so deeply enslaved 
 to the past as England is. 
 
 The West should work in accordance with 
 the fundamental principles of good writing ; 
 that is, it should seek to attain the most per 
 fect lucidity, expressiveness, flexibility, and 
 grace. Its technique should be comprehen 
 sible, clear in outline, and infinitely sugges 
 tive, ready to be submitted to the world, but 
 free to use new forms. 
 
 The choice of subject and the quality which 
 enters into it, like a subtle flavor into wine, 
 should be individual, not subject to any school 
 or master. 
 
 The judgment of the East should take rank 
 merely among other judgments ; it should 
 not be held all-important. 
 
 The purpose of this writing is not merely 
 to combat literary centralization, but also to 
 build up local centres. Wherever a human 
 soul is moved by genuine love of nature and 
 of men to the conscientious and faithful study 
 
160 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 of the expression of his emotions, there is a 
 literary centre. Around him are grouped 
 minds whose candid criticism can aid and 
 direct him ; but this criticism must not evade, 
 nor demand conformity to tradition ; it must 
 demand of the young writer truth, sincerity, 
 and individuality. 
 
 Let the critics of the local centres remem 
 ber Mistral and Whitcomb Riley, who won 
 their way among the people before the criti 
 cal journals would take count of them. It 
 is the man who has no knowledge of accepted 
 forms, and who therefore refers every work of 
 art back to nature, who is quickest to respond 
 to the literature of life. The average Ameri 
 can is quick to thrill to real emotion, only he 
 wants it direct and unaffected. 
 
 I believe in the local magazine. With the 
 growth of inland cities in wealth and refine 
 ment, the magazine will come to displace the 
 mere newspaper, possibly the newspaper will 
 grow into the magazine. The work of the 
 local magazines like " The Southern," " The 
 Californian," " The Midland," " The Over 
 land," can be made of vast importance in the 
 nation s life. 
 
LITERARY CENTRES. 161 
 
 Let them keep close to the local life, devel 
 oping the best that is, the simplest and 
 most natural talent of their region, making 
 their appeal constantly to the unspoiled yet 
 discerning taste of the middle-conditioned 
 people, and they will succeed. " They have 
 always failed in the past," says the doubter ; 
 possibly, but the past is not the present 
 or the future. Taste is rising. Culture is 
 broadening swiftly. A new generation is 
 coming on, a generation of veritists. Con 
 ditions grow more hospitable to this local 
 literature with great rapidity. What was true 
 of local conditions five years ago will scarcely 
 be true to-day. 
 
 O Sayers and Doers of this broad, free 
 inland America of ours ! to you is given the 
 privilege of being broad and free in your life 
 and letters. You should not be bound to a 
 false and dying culture, you should not 
 endeavor to re-enact the harsh and fierce 
 and false social dramas of the Old World. 
 You should not turn your face to the east, to 
 the past Your comment should be that of 
 free men and women, loving equality, justice, 
 truth. 
 
 ii 
 
162 CRUMBLING IDOLS 
 
 Yours not to worship crumbling idols ; your 
 privilege and pleasure should be to face life 
 and the material earth in a new way, mould 
 ing old forms of government into new 
 shapes, catching from earth and 
 sea and air, new songs to 
 sing, new thoughts to 
 frame, new deeds 
 to dare. 
 
XI. 
 
 LITERARY MASTERS. 
 
IT is all a question 
 
 LITERARY MASTERS. f maSterS Ther6 
 are masters who set 
 
 free, there are masters who enslave. The 
 best critic is he who frees, and the best 
 criticism of the Old World has demanded of 
 America, not imitations of the old forms, but 
 free, faithful, characteristic work. It is the 
 second-class critic who enslaves to the past, 
 unable to comprehend advance. 
 
 For fifty years the best critics of England 
 and of Europe have been calling for the 
 native utterance of American writers. Pos- 
 nett, Dowden, Taine, Ve ron, Freiligrath, 
 Bjornson, every critic who has perceived 
 the forward movement of all art, has looked 
 for a new conception, a new flavor, a new 
 manner in American literature ; and almost 
 as constantly have the conservative and 
 narrow critics of Boston and New York 
 discouraged the truest, freest utterance of 
 
1 66 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 the American poet and novelist. Not all 
 have been of this hopeless type, but it 
 remains true as a general comment. Upon 
 the tender springing plant of American liter 
 ature the frost of conservative culture has 
 ever fallen. No wonder the young writer 
 has turned to copying old forms, and so 
 benumbed and sterilized his creative soul. 
 
 It really comes down to a contest, not 
 between the East and the West, but between 
 sterile culture and creative work; between 
 mere scholarship and wisdom; between con 
 servative criticism and native original liter 
 ary production. 
 
 It is a question of books versus a litera 
 ture of life, a struggle between adaption to 
 new surroundings and conformity to the 
 ancestral type. It is only because there 
 happen to be more conservatives in the East 
 that the contest takes on the appearance 
 of a war between East and West. 
 
 The East has its magnificent radicals, men 
 who stand for free art and modern art. I 
 do not forget the encouragement which the 
 young writer owes to them; and yet these 
 Eastern radicals will be the first to acknowl- 
 
LITERARY MASTERS. 167 
 
 edge the truth I write concerning the dangers 
 of a centralization of power. 
 
 Shall our literature be a literature of the 
 East, in mode if not in subject, or shall it be 
 national ? Is it to be only so large as the 
 conception of New York and Boston critics, 
 or shall it be as big and broad and democra 
 tic as the best thought of the whole nation ? 
 Is every work of art of every Western or 
 Southern man or woman to be submitted 
 with timid air to a jury that represents only 
 a section of American society, a section 
 which is really nearer the Old World than 
 the New, or shall the writing be addressed 
 to the whole nation ? Is it safe to depend 
 upon a half-dozen publishing houses, or a 
 half-dozen magazines, for outlet? Would it 
 not be better to have many magazines, pro 
 vided, of course, the standard of excellence 
 were high ? Editors and critics are human. 
 They are likely, at best, to be biassed by 
 their personal likes and dislikes. It is not 
 well that too much power be vested in any 
 one city. 
 
 The supposition is that America finds 
 amplest outlet in its present magazines, which 
 
1 68 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 are mainly in the East ; but this is not true. 
 It is a physical impossibility first; and, 
 second, the theory is that the magazines are 
 conducted for Eastern readers and in har 
 mony with the traditions inherited by the 
 East. 
 
 This is not complaint. No young writer 
 of to-day has less cause for complaint than I. 
 It is a statement of fact. There have arisen 
 in the East these great magazines, hospita 
 ble in their way, but limited and inadequate 
 to the expression of the art-life of this great 
 nation. Their influence has been beneficent, 
 is yet ; but there is a greater, truer, and 
 freer expression of this people which will 
 come only with the rise of native inland 
 magazines. 
 
 As a matter of fact, this controversy is 
 not sectional. It is in the East as well as in 
 the West. All over America, in towns and 
 cities, there are groups of readers whom our 
 reigning monthlies do not represent. These 
 readers have not only all the substantial 
 acquirements of the conservatives, but pos 
 sess a broader Americanism and a more inti 
 mate knowledge of American life than the 
 
LITERARY MASTERS. 169 
 
 aristocrat who prides himself on never having 
 been farther west than Buffalo. 
 
 The culture represented by these radicals 
 is not alone based upon knowledge of dead 
 forms of art; it includes living issues of 
 art. The number of these readers increases 
 year by year. They stand for ideas and con 
 ditions of the future, and from them artists 
 are rising, filled with courage and moved by 
 convictions of their allegiance to truth. These 
 people demand something more than smooth 
 conventional work. They realize the tendency 
 of young authors not to write as they really 
 feel, but as they think the editors of the 
 great magazines would have them write. 
 They realize the danger which lies in putting 
 into the hands of a few men, no matter how 
 fine they may be, the directing power of 
 American literature. 
 
 These cultivated and fearless radicals join 
 Western readers in saying, " By what right 
 do you of the conservative East assume to 
 be final judges of American literature ? 
 What special qualifications does a residence 
 on the extreme eastern shore of our nation 
 give you, by which to settle all questions of 
 a national literature ? " 
 
170 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 " The West is crude," Eastern critics are 
 
 Vfond of saying. 
 "What do you mean by that? Do you 
 mean that there are not men and women of 
 the highest type in the West ? Do you mean 
 that we do not conform to your specific ideal 
 of culture ? Or do you mean that we have 
 not been self-respecting enough in our own 
 thinking? In what lies your assumed supe 
 riority over the West ? " 
 
 To this the East replies : " We are the 
 occupying claimants of the glory of the great 
 men of this century s literature. We have 
 also the great libraries, the museums, the 
 great universities, which make us the centre 
 of critical intelligence. Granting your great 
 railways, your stupendous enterprises, your 
 great cities, the East still remains, and must 
 remain, the centre of the highest literary 
 culture in America." 
 
 The West rejoins : " That is precisely the 
 point at issue. We deny that the East is to 
 be the exclusive home of the broadest cul 
 ture. We feel that much of this culture is 
 barren and insincere. It has a hopeless 
 outlook. It leads nowhere. It treads a 
 circle, like the logic of the Koran. 
 
LITERARY MASTERS. 171 
 
 " Culture is not creative power. Scholar 
 ship does not imply wisdom. We do not 
 believe a city at our farthest East can 
 remain the city most progressive in its art, 
 most unbiassed in its judgments. The 
 American city of broadest culture is hence 
 forth to be that where the broad, free cur 
 rents of American life daily ebb and flow. 
 Such a city can know and will know all 
 that the East knows of fundamental prin 
 ciples of art and literature, and will have 
 a wider knowledge of the scope and action 
 of American life." 
 
 The conservative of the East then says : 
 "It will take a hundred vears to make a West 
 ern city into the likeness of New York or 
 Boston. The mellow charm of our literary 
 atmosphere is the growth of two centuries. 
 Our very streets are lined with suggestive 
 walls and historical tablets. Our drawing- 
 rooms and our clubs represent the flowering 
 culture of ten generations." 
 
 The West quickly responds : " Keep your 
 past. Hug your tablets to your bosom : 
 you are welcome to all that; we are con 
 cerned with the present, and with the splen- 
 
172 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 dor of the future. Your culture is too largely 
 of the moribund. Cleverness will not save 
 you. You fail to conceive that our idea of 
 culture is a different and, we assert, a higher 
 form, because it refers to a culture of living 
 forms. Besides, culture, even of the broad 
 est, is only part of it ; creative power is the 
 crowning splendor of a nation s life. Scholar 
 ship does not necessarily imply wisdom. 
 The study of the past does little for original 
 genius. Libraries and universities produce 
 few of the great leaders of American thought ; 
 all that books can give is our inheritance as 
 well as yours." 
 
 The radical continues: "We deny that 
 the Eastern art atmosphere is necessary 
 to the production of original works of art. 
 We doubt the ability of New York or 
 Boston criticism to pass final judgment 
 upon a Western work of art, because the 
 conditions of our life are outside the circle of 
 its intimate knowledge. A criticism which 
 stands for old things, we repeat, is not the 
 criticism which is to aid the production of 
 characteristic American art. America is not 
 to submit itself to the past; it is to be free." 
 
LITERARY MASTERS. 173 
 
 " Do you mean to say that you propose to 
 cut loose from the past ? " asks the tradition 
 alist. 
 
 " By no means. We expect to assert our 
 right to our day, as Russia, Norway, Ger 
 many, and others of our neighbor nations 
 have done. The youth of all nations are in the 
 fight. We are in the midst of one of those 
 returning cycles of progress in art when the 
 young man attains his majority. America 
 has begun to attain her majority, to claim the 
 right to a free choice in art as well as in 
 government, to speak her own mind in her 
 own way." 
 
 " Permit us are you to use as a medium, 
 Choctaw or English ? " the East inquires, in 
 strenuously polite phrase. 
 
 "That illustrates the inadequateness and 
 the illiberality of your attitude toward us. 
 We propose to use the speech of living men 
 and women. We are to use actual speech 
 as we hear it and to record its changes. We 
 are to treat of the town and city as well as of 
 the farm, each in its place and through the 
 medium of characteristic speech. We pro 
 pose to discard your nipping accent, your 
 
174 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 nice phrases, your balanced sentences, and 
 your neat proprieties inherited from the eigh 
 teenth century. Our speech is to be as 
 individual as our view of life." 
 
 The conservative replies : " Your view of 
 life is of no interest to us. We do not see 
 the necessity of Americans troubling to write 
 or paint at all in future. We have books 
 and paintings enough in the market. When 
 we want a book, we buy a classic, and know 
 what we are getting. When we want a paint 
 ing, there are Corots and Rousseaus and 
 Bouguereaus in the markets. Produce wheat 
 .and corn and railway-stocks yet awhile, and 
 don t trouble yourself about literary prob 
 lems. Read the classics for the improve 
 ment of your style. In the mean time, we 
 will see that American literature is not 
 vulgarized." 
 
 The Western radical warmly replies : " Who 
 constituted you the guardian of American 
 literature ? What do you know of the needs 
 or tastes of the people " 
 
 Testily the aristocrat breaks in : " My dear 
 sir, I care nothing for any tastes but my 
 own. I don t like the common American in 
 
LITERARY MASTERS. 175 
 
 life, and I don t like him in books. There 
 fore " 
 
 " There ! " rejoins the radical, triumphantly. 
 " There is a second point admitted. You 
 have no sympathy with the American peo 
 ple of middle condition. You are essentially 
 aristocratic and un-American in your posi 
 tion. From your library, or from the car- 
 window, you look upon our life ; that is the 
 extent of your knowledge of our conditions, 
 at best. For the most part you have never 
 been west of Niagara Falls. How can you 
 be just to this literature which springs from 
 a life you do not know or sympathize 
 with? 
 
 " We are forming a literature from direct 
 contact with life, and such a literature can 
 be estimated only by unbiassed minds and 
 by comparison with nature and the life we 
 live. Are you fitted to be the court of last 
 resort upon our writing by reason of your 
 study of English novels and your study of 
 last-century painting? The test of a work 
 of art is not, Does it conform to the best 
 models? but, Does it touch and lift and 
 exalt men ? And we profess ability to per- 
 
176 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 ceive these qualities even west of the Missis 
 sippi River. 
 
 "We care little for the free-masonry of 
 literary phrases which relates one spectacled 
 enthusiast over dead men s books to a simi 
 lar devotee of dead men s pictures. The 
 West should aim to be wise rather than 
 cultured. Wisdom is democratic, culture is 
 an aristocrat. Wisdom is knowledge of 
 principle, culture is a knowledge of forms 
 and accepted conditions; the contention is 
 world old, but necessary." 
 
 In the above colloquy, which may be 
 typical in a measurable degree, I have put 
 the Western radical over against the Eastern 
 conservative, not because there are not con 
 servatives in the West and radicals in the 
 East, but because it is my sincere convic 
 tion, taking the largest view, that the in 
 terior is to be henceforth the real America. 
 From these interior spaces of the South 
 and West the most vivid and fearless and 
 original utterance of the coming American 
 democracy will come. 
 
 This is my conviction. I might adduce 
 
LITERARY MASTERS. 177 
 
 arguments based on the difference in races ; 
 I might speculate upon the influence of the 
 Irish and Jews and Italians upon New 
 York and Boston, and point out the quicker 
 assimilation of the Teutonic races in the 
 West, but it would only be passed over by 
 the reader. 
 
 I confess to a certain failure to adequately 
 portray what I mean. The things I would 
 put in evidence are intangible. There are 
 the mighty spaces of the West, the swarming 
 millions of young men and women coming 
 on in this empire of the Mississippi valley. 
 Some imaginative Easterners caught glimpses 
 of it at the Exposition, where the Eastern cul 
 ture and accent was swallowed up and lost 
 in the mighty flood of the middle West, un 
 known and inarticulate, but tremendous in 
 its mass. 
 
 It is impossible to convey to others the 
 immense faith in this land which intimate 
 knowledge, gained by fifty thousand miles 
 of travel, has built up in me. I know my 
 West ; I know its young minds. I can see 
 their eager faces before me as I write. I 
 know the throb of creative force everywhere 
 12 
 
1 78 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 thrilling the young men and women of these 
 States, and yet I realize my inability to put 
 it in evidence. I might mention names, 
 writers of whose power I am assured, 
 they would be unknown ; circumstances may 
 crush them. 
 
 America is the most imaginative and 
 creative of nations. Its inventions, its huge 
 constructions, prove that. Only in its litera 
 ture and art has it been bound by tradition. 
 Its inventive and its original constructive 
 genius arose from needs which dominated 
 tradition. Its great railways, bridges, tun 
 nels, transportation facilities, were perfected 
 by minds which rose out of the common 
 ranks of American life. The genuine Amer 
 ican literature, in the same way, must come 
 from the soil and the open air, and be like 
 wise freed from tradition. Such an epoch is 
 upon us. 
 
 Lowell felt this, in spite of his English 
 environment. In his old age something of 
 his early faith in America came back to him. 
 
 " No : morning and the dewy prime are born 
 into the earth again with every child. It is our 
 
LITERARY MASTERS. 179 
 
 fault if drouth and dust usurp the noon. . . . 
 
 Our time is not an unpoetic one. This lesson I 
 
 learn from the past : that grace and goodness, the 
 
 fair, the noble, and the true will never cease 
 
 out of the world till the God from whom 
 
 they emanate ceases out of it. ... 
 
 Lives of the great poets teach 
 
 us they were the men of 
 
 their generation who 
 
 felt most deeply the 
 
 meaning of the 
 
 present." 
 
XII. 
 
 A RECAPITULATORY AFTER- 
 WORD. 
 
X]J THERE come times 
 
 A RECAPITULATORY * the development 
 
 AFTER-WORD. f ^ " When 
 
 the creative mind 
 
 re-asserts itself, and shakes itself loose from 
 the terrible power of the past. This dis 
 sent, this demand for artistic freedom, is 
 always made by youth, and always meets 
 with the bitter and scornful opposition of the 
 old. To conform is easy, it is like sleep. 
 To dissent is action in the interests of the 
 minority. 
 
 At certain times a great writer like Dante 
 or Shakespeare or Hugo or Ibsen rises, a 
 grand innovator and dissenter, and holds 
 intellectual dominion over the world during 
 his life, apparently by his personal force 
 and expression ; and after his death, critics 
 who draw their rules of art from him come 
 to worship and bow down before him as 
 a demigod of literature. He becomes a 
 fetich. 
 
1 84 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 Once an author reaches this stage, he be 
 comes an incubus. His personal defects are 
 exalted into universal excellencies, methods 
 to be copied. He becomes fee standard of 
 measurement for the critic without discern 
 ment or judgment of his own. It is so 
 easy to say of the new artist, " He paints 
 purple shadows on the snow ; Corot did not, 
 therefore the young artist is wrong." Of such 
 is the criticism based upon past models. 
 
 Meanwhile, Shakespeare and Corot are in 
 nocent of this. Were Corot living to-day, he 
 would be in the advance line of present art. 
 Shakespeare would be grappling with present 
 themes, like the tremendous iconoclast he 
 was. Burns would be a social radical and 
 a writer of modern dialect. These men re 
 belled against authority in their day. They 
 did not dream of becoming obstructing au 
 thorities after their death. 
 
 As a matter of fact, literary power is not 
 personal; it is at bottom sociologic. The 
 power of the writer is derived from the so 
 ciety in which he lives ; like the power of a 
 general, which springs from the obedience of 
 his army. When society changes, when his 
 
A RECAPITULATORY AFTER-WORD. 185 
 
 audience dies, the writer s power passes away. 
 This is the natural law, and would take way 
 easily and quickly were there not other ten 
 dencies to conserve and retard, just as in the 
 animal organisms. 
 
 Schools are conservative forces. They are 
 nearly always linked with the aristocratic 
 and the old, especially in their art instruc 
 tions. Universities are bulwarks of tradi 
 tion. They are pools left on the beach 
 by an ebbing tide. They conserve the 
 past. They study the living present but 
 little. They are founded upon books. 
 They teach conformity, they do not develop 
 personality. 
 
 The natural thing for our society to-day 
 is to demand of its artists fresh and vivid 
 interpretations of nature and society. The 
 feudalistic forms of life are drawing off. 
 The certainly democratic is coming on. It 
 is natural for Americans to say : Sophocles, 
 Shakespeare, Moliere, Schiller do not satisfy 
 us. They represent other outlooks upon 
 life. They do not touch us directly. We 
 prefer a more human and sympathetic art, 
 something nearer and sweeter. 
 
1 86 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 This, I repeat, is the natural feeling of the 
 ordinary man or woman of to-day, and yet 
 such has been the power of the conservative 
 forces in art that the dissenter acquiesced 
 in outer expression while privately throwing 
 his Shakespeare aside for Dickens, George 
 Eliot, Hugo, and Turgenief. He has ap 
 plauded the orator who said " Shakespeare 
 ended the drama ; " but he has left Shake 
 speare to gather dust on his library walls 
 while he reads the newspaper and meets his 
 friends in conversation about the latest comic 
 opera. In other words, literary hypocrites 
 are made plentiful by the pressure of conser 
 vative criticism precisely as in the religious 
 world. 
 
 The quality most needed in literary dis 
 cussion to-day is not learning, it is candor. 
 Literary discussion is full of lies. Men pro 
 fess to admire things which do not touch 
 them. They uphold forms of art which they 
 know to be dead. They fear to be called 
 destructionists. They feel in some way bound 
 to lie for the sake of youth. Youth must be 
 dulled into a literary hypocrite, and so all 
 mouths are set awry. 
 
A RECAPITULATORY AFTER-WORD. 187 
 
 But an era of reorganization is upon us. 
 The common man is again moving in intel 
 lectual unrest, as in the time of Burns and 
 Shelley. The young men are to speak their 
 minds. The re-assertion of artistic indepen 
 dence is to be made. The literary fetich is 
 to fail of power, and original genius once 
 more push the standards of art forward. 
 
 As a matter of fact, old idols are crumbling 
 in literature and painting as in religion. 
 " Changeless throughout the centuries, they 
 sit upon their inapproachable thrones," cries 
 the rhetorician; but it is only a fine figure of 
 speech. As a matter of fact, they are being 
 worn away. An impalpable sand, blown upon 
 them by ceaseless winds from free spaces, 
 has worn them down ; their blurred features 
 wear a look of vague appeal. They are no 
 longer as gods ! 
 
 Below them the changing currents of hu 
 man life, grown quicker, pass by without 
 looking up there where they sit. Great seams 
 are opening in the base of their thrones ; they 
 will soon fall, these few remaining ones, as 
 all the others have fallen, and the rivers of 
 life will pass by on the other side. 
 
1 88 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 That this should happen seems dreadful 
 and impossible to the conservative mind ; to 
 the dissenter, it is in conformity with the 
 great law of evolution. The dynamic con 
 ception of art does not mourn over decay ; it 
 faces the on-coming day, content to be and 
 to do, now. 
 
 " ^Eschylus, there he lies, deep in the past, 
 a colossal fragment, his brow projecting 
 above the sands of centuries," cries Hugo. 
 Yes, there he lies, and there Shakespeare 
 lies, sunk and sinking, just as every other 
 human soul sinks into the sand. In the 
 illimitable sweep of the centuries there is 
 little to choose between a reign of two cen 
 turies and one of fifty years. 
 
 In the carcass of every dead lion, maggots 
 breed and fatten, unmindful of the green grass 
 and the fresh wind blowing by, hearing not 
 the living lion s royal tread. So the scholiast 
 bores and bores in the dead body of the past ; 
 his sluggish sense dead to the smell of grow 
 ing corn and the moving by of living things. 
 
 Not from such sources does a living litera 
 ture flow. Each age of strong creative cap 
 ability reveals life in its own fashion ; that 
 
A RECAPITULATORY AFTER-WORD. 189 
 
 is, each creative age in the past uttered its 
 own truth as over against the convention 
 alized dogmas of its teachers. I believe such 
 a period of literary breaking-away has come 
 in America. Whitman announced it, but 
 could not exemplify it in popular form. He 
 voiced its force, its love of liberty and love of 
 comrades, but he was the prophet, not the 
 exemplar. He said well, that the real lit 
 erature of America could not be a polite 
 literature. The nation is too great, too 
 sincere. 
 
 There is coming in this land the mightiest 
 assertion in art of the rights of man and the 
 glory of the physical universe ever made in 
 the world. It will be done, not by one man, 
 but by many men and women. It will be 
 born, not of drawing-room culture, nor of 
 imitation, nor of fear of masters, nor will it 
 come from homes of great wealth. It will 
 come from the average American home, in 
 the city as well as in the country. It will 
 deal with all kinds and conditions. It will 
 be born of the mingling seas of men in the 
 vast interior of America, because there the 
 
190 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 problem of the perpetuity of our democracy, 
 the question of the liberty as well as the 
 nationality of our art, will be fought out. 
 This literature will be too great to submit to 
 the domination of any literary centre or liter 
 ary jmaster. With cities of a half a mil 
 lion inhabitants, scattered from Pittsburg to 
 Seattle, New York and Chicago will alike 
 be made humble. 
 
 Rise, O young man and woman of Amer 
 ica ! Stand erect ! Face the future with a 
 song on your lips and the light of a broader 
 day in your eyes. Turn your back on the 
 past, not in scorn, but in justice to the future. 
 Cease trying to be correct, and become crea 
 tive. This is our day. The past is not 
 vital. It is a highway of dust, and Homer, 
 yEschylus, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare 
 are milestones. Libraries do not create 
 great poets and artists; they seldom aid, 
 and they often warp and destroy them. To 
 know Shakespeare is good. To know your 
 fellow-men is better. All that Shakespeare 
 knew of human life, you may know, but 
 not at second hand, not through Shake- 
 
A RECAPITULATORY AFTER-WORD 191 
 
 speare, not through the eyes of the dead, but 
 at first hand. 
 
 In evolution there are always two vast 
 fundamental forces: one, the inner, which 
 propels ; the other, the outer, which adapts 
 and checks. One forever thrusts toward 
 new forms, the other forever moulds, con 
 serves, adapts, reproduces. Progress is the 
 resultant of these forces. 
 
 The force that flowers is the individual, 
 that which checks and moulds is environ 
 ment. Impulse is the stronger to-day, to 
 morrow conformity chills and benumbs. Of 
 such cycles is the history of art. Rebellious 
 youth breaks from the grim hand of the 
 past and toils in his own way till he grows 
 old, and then becomes oppressor in his 
 turn; and death again liberates youth, whose 
 keen nostril breathes again the air of heaven 
 as if the centuries had been clock-ticks. 
 
 Of what avail then, O you of the dead 
 past ! 
 
 What fear ye, O youth, to whom life smells 
 so sweet ! Accept the battle challenge cheer- 
 
192 CRUMBLING IDOLS. 
 
 fully, as those before you have done. What 
 you win, you must fight for as of old. And 
 remember, life and death both fight with you. 
 Idols crumble and fall, but the skies lift 
 their unmoved arch of blue, and 
 the earth sends forth its rhyth 
 mic pulse of green, and in 
 the blood of youth there 
 comes the fever of 
 rebellious art. 
 
. . Printed by John 
 Wilson & Son . . at 
 the University Press 
 . in Cambridge for . 
 STONE & KIMBALL 
 in the year of our Lord 
 . MDCCCXC1V . . 
 
4789 
 
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