LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 
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 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 ESSAYS ON LITERATURE FROM 
 The Literary Review

 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 ESSAYS ON LITERATURE 
 
 FROM 
 
 The Literary Review 
 
 THE FIRST VOLUME OF SELECTIONS FROM 
 
 The Literary Review of 
 The New York Evening Post 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY SEIDEL CANBY 
 
 WILLIAM ROSE 'JBENET 
 
 AMY LOVEMAN 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1921 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1920 AND 1921 
 BY THE NEW YORK EVENING POST, INC. 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1921 
 BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Set up and Printed. Published November, 1921. 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
 
 PREFACE 
 
 WE HAVE tried vainly to classify these 
 essays. They will follow no order, progress 
 by no logical development of thought, be- 
 cause they were written each in its time and 
 place, at a moment of irony, or anger, or 
 delight, or illumination. And yet we be- 
 lieve that this book has unity. It contains 
 a view of literature and life which is sincere 
 and perfectly definite. Although the prod- 
 uct of several minds, it represents but a single 
 philosophy of good writing and practicable 
 art. It is a literary program in parcels in- 
 stead of in bulk. 
 
 THE AUTHORS.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 RED BRICK LITERATURE 1 
 
 WHY DON'T THEY STOP? , 7 
 
 THE Two AMERICAS 15 
 
 NOVELS NOWADAYS 23 
 
 THE PLAIN PERSON 31 
 
 To THE GENERAL READER 37 
 
 PROSPERO AND THE "PICTURES" , 43 
 
 SHAMEFACED ART 49 
 
 IGNORANT ART 55 
 
 SLOVENLY PETER AND DAPPER SAM 61 
 
 "Is IT WHAT OUR READERS WANT?" 67 
 
 LITERARY REVIVALISM 73 
 
 THE MASQUERADING TRACT 79 
 
 ON LITERARY STRUCTURE 85 
 
 THE YOUNG REALISTS 93 
 
 ON REVIEWING 99 
 
 A SERMON FOR REVIEWERS 105 
 
 PATRONS AND PATRONAGE Ill 
 
 COTERIES 117 
 
 How CLASSICS ARE MADE 123 
 
 PERNICIOUS LITERATURE . . 129
 
 RED BRICK LITERATURE 
 
 You can readily note the effect of too much 
 city dwelling on a man, and you can almost 
 as easily tell when too much city dwelling lies 
 behind a book. The effect is similar, except 
 that the man may get over it, while the book 
 cannot: it is finished. 
 
 The signs of too much red brick, too much 
 granite and steel, too much roar and rattle 
 in a book are unmistakable, especially too 
 much red brick. The overurbanized book is 
 intelligent, its thought moves quickly, it is 
 vivid, it is clever, and sometimes smart. Its 
 style is nervous, and though it may be bad, it 
 is never dull. But dust gets into the lungs of 
 the cockney book and produces a thousand
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 tiny irritations that prickle out in oversen- 
 sitized words. The never-ceasing patter of 
 hurrying humanity, the crash and groan of 
 machines, make the authors irritable, and 
 their books are irritable. We have now a 
 school of irritable poetry, and we are getting 
 a school of irritable fiction. In the irritable 
 novel every one is disagreeable (including 
 the author), no one is virtuous or wants to 
 be, breakfast conversations consist chiefly of 
 sneers, and nasty smells and ugly sights are 
 as common as fresh-smelling linen in Vic- 
 torian homes. In irritable poetry the phrases 
 "I am weary," "I am angry," "I hate," "I 
 am bored" recur with some regularity. The 
 poems themselves are swift successions of 
 painful images like sparks of anger shot out 
 by a departing pedestrian whose foot has 
 been trod on in the crowd. The utterance 
 
 is broken and feverish like conversation in a 
 
 2
 
 RED BRICK LITERATURE 
 
 packed and swaying surface car. There is 
 no clear beginning and seldom an end. 
 
 In red brick literature there is also a curi- 
 ous lack of purpose, like the apparent lack 
 of any important purpose in so much swarm- 
 ing, chattering city life. The poetry is ma- 
 terial for poetry merely: vivid, tensely vivid 
 lines, fragments that record the unpleasant 
 impact of sensations upon a mind made sen- 
 sitive by jars, rattles, and inescapable contact 
 with millions of men. It has the inconsecu- 
 tiveness of a plunge into a subway for a ride 
 to the next station, or crossing Broadway at 
 Forty-second Street. The novels, too, are 
 purposeless in any large sense vivid tran- 
 scripts of experiences that are typical of 
 nothing but the unhappiest of a thousand 
 apartments, narratives where the energy of 
 the author goes into sensitized studies of be- 
 havior, precisely as one may spend a roaring
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 subway trip focussing the mind upon some 
 face across the way, until the last wrinkle or 
 blotch has found a word to describe it. 
 
 Red brick literature, indeed, tends always 
 to the morbid, if we use morbid in its usual 
 modern meaning, a brooding on the evidence 
 of the senses. Or it escapes morbidity by be- 
 ing smart or sensational. It needs air, space, 
 light, repose, meditation, solitude. 
 
 We do not complain of cities. They are at 
 the worst necessary evils and at the best the 
 testing grounds of the intellect. But taken in 
 continued, unremitted doses, become a daily, 
 yearly habit, city life is not fatal, for the 
 thought of some illustrious London cockneys, 
 and even more distinguished Parisians, 
 makes us pause at that word but overstimu- 
 lative to the literary person. It makes him 
 unduly conscious of an ego which minute by 
 minute is rubbed and scraped by the egos of
 
 RED BRICK LITERATURE 
 
 so many others. It makes him unduly con- 
 cerned with mediocrity, since where there is 
 not even a bench without a man or a woman 
 sitting on it mediocrity is forced upon him. 
 
 We do not advocate a migration from 
 Greenwich Village to the suburbs or the 
 prairies. By no means. It is better to have 
 lived and lost the power to write truly than 
 never to have lived in search of it at all. But 
 let these writers sometimes pack up their 
 bags and get out of the streets, out of the 
 studios, out of the subway, off and apart 
 from human cliques and congeries and the 
 noisy mass of mankind. The best criticism 
 of many a novel is a beech woods in March, 
 and a thundering sea on a misty beach is the 
 answer to much febrile poetry. Americans, 
 apparently, grow sentimental when they have 
 too much nature, if, indeed, the writers about 
 
 the untamed West can ever be said really to 
 5
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 experience nature at all: they grow neurotic 
 rapidly with too little. Lilacs in the back- 
 yard of a tenement, starved trees in a worn 
 park, are pretty and pathetic, but poor sub- 
 stitutes for the bay and cedar of a Connecti- 
 cut hillside or the pines of Arizona moun- 
 tains. He who loves the city must leave it, 
 and leave it often, or he will love it neither 
 wisely nor well. 
 
 H. S. C.
 
 WHY DON'T THEY STOP? 
 
 WHY are there so many able English novel- 
 ists, and so few really distinguished American 
 novelists? It is because the American 
 writer will not pay the price of distinction, 
 being too concerned with prices of a different 
 character. 
 
 We are all weary of the economic inter- 
 pretation of everything, including literature, 
 because economics usually have to be ex- 
 plained by the soul of man or the climate. 
 But it seems that the social economics of the 
 United States does explain much in the pres- 
 ent status of American literature. 
 
 The American novelist begins his career 
 with a "crude but powerful" novel that does 
 not succeed, and a few well-made short
 
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 stories that do. Two years later his mind 
 has cleared, his eye sharpened, his pen grown 
 more skilful. He writes a novel that serial- 
 izes successfully, disposes of 20,000 copies, 
 and then sells his story to the melting pot of 
 the movies for a very substantial check. His 
 six months' work has brought him what for 
 most professional men would be two years' 
 good income. His name is known, his mar- 
 ket is ready, all he has to do is to write. Skill 
 he possesses and a knowledge of his public. 
 Only his art is incomplete. It lacks finish, it 
 lacks depth, it lacks most of all the maturity 
 that comes from ardent, unremitting labor; 
 and he knows it. His style is good; it is not 
 excellent. It expresses his imaginings ; it will 
 not, like a great style, preserve them. Why 
 doesn't he stop large-scale production, and 
 learn to write? 
 
 This is the turning point, and nine out of 
 8
 
 WHY DON'T THEY STOP? 
 
 ten able Americans turn to the left. They 
 increase facility; they do not intensify their 
 art. They lay hands upon more of the pub- 
 lic; they do not tighten their grip. They 
 write more books, but not better books. 
 
 Why don't they stop? Since they belong 
 to a nation of speculators, why are they so 
 unwilling to speculate with their popularity? 
 Why do they invest their capital of reputa- 
 tion dully in the routine of a standardized 
 output, instead of using it to produce some- 
 thing new, something better, which will bring 
 them satisfaction as well as cash? Are they 
 timid, these captains-of-fiction, or are they 
 more enamored of luxury than of their pro- 
 fession? 
 
 Neither implication is wholly true, but 
 there is truth in both. If Geoff ry Wildairs, 
 the successful author, makes $10,000 a year, 
 he contracts obligations in the form of auto-
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 mobiles, clubs, and a taste for Southern 
 climates in February that require fifteen thou- 
 sand to satisfy them; and there is no sure 
 way of making ten thousand grow to fifteen 
 thousand while perfecting one's art, while, 
 having learned to write well, learning to 
 write better. Therefore he pursues the 
 nymph of luxury instead of the goddess of 
 fame, and finds her quite as elusive, and 
 knows her to be less excellent. 
 
 No one asks the American novelist to 
 starve like his Grub Street predecessor. For 
 Geoffry Wildairs and his fellows that is quite 
 unnecessary. We grant him five, ten, even 
 fifteen thousand a year as a "living wage"; 
 and his attempt to dig in, to consolidate his 
 art, is not likely, as publishing goes nowa- 
 days, to cause much, if any diminution. But 
 he must say : "I have enough income to keep 
 
 me afloat; now for good work." 
 10
 
 WHY DON'T THEY STOP? 
 
 Why doesn't he say it? Is the profes- 
 sional spirit less strong in America than in 
 England and France? Has writing with us 
 become a business, with the code of a busi- 
 ness instead of a profession ? Do we lack the 
 strength of resistance which alone enables a 
 writer to write for sufficient profits from 
 great excellence, instead of great profits from 
 continuing mediocrity? For it is weak to 
 write a "strong novel" 'when one can write a 
 good one. And in the long run it is foolish. 
 Not even in this heyday of short-story and 
 movie profits can an author keep up with a 
 profiteer, a picture star, or a stock manipu- 
 lator. The ultimate luxury is ever beyond 
 his reach. He may achieve four bathrooms, 
 but scarcely an indoor swimming pool. He 
 may own two cars and a saddle horse, but 
 three and a stable will be out of his reach. 
 
 When the money begins to come in a 
 11
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 steady flow instead of drop by drop, when 
 one's name goes from the bottom to the 
 top of the column, then is the time to take 
 counsel with perfection, to consult the de- 
 sires of the spirit, to ask whether it is better 
 to be the author of five good books or ten 
 thousand facile pages. 
 
 There are, at a guess, fifty American 
 novelists making this year incomes so large 
 that only extravagance can spend them. Ten 
 of these are writing precisely what their 
 Lord and Maker in His inscrutable wisdom 
 created them to write. Ten are convinced 
 that next year they will slow down produc- 
 tion and go on a quality instead of a quantity 
 basis. Ten have hardened their hearts and 
 long since thrown over vain regrets for what 
 they might have written. Five have won 
 through to a success they never expected by 
 
 doing the best that was in them, let come 
 12
 
 WHY DON'T THEY STOP? 
 
 what might. And the rest, however high- 
 hearted and flippantly cynical in public, are 
 familiar with the dead spaces of the night 
 when there is gnashing of teeth for the re- 
 ward which alone tempts them the reward 
 of a durable excellence now known to be 
 
 forever out of reach. 
 
 H. S. C. 
 
 13
 
 THE TWO AMERICAS 
 
 AMERICA as the novelist sees it just now is a 
 very confusing country. Indeed it is not one 
 country at all, but two, and outwardly they 
 very little resemble each other. 
 
 One is the dun America and the other is 
 rosy America. The dun America is a land 
 of back yards, spittoons, Main Streets, ce- 
 ment walks, shiny stiff rooms, and ugliness 
 everywhere. It is inhabited by fearfully 
 bourgeois people, whose humor is confined 
 to "jollying," and whose life, for the males, 
 is business, and either drinking or fishing, or 
 both; and for the females, gossip or bridge, 
 or both. Its range of interests is about as 
 
 broad as the front yard and as long as Main 
 15
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 Street, no longer. When it goes to parties 
 to amuse itself it is either barbarous or vul- 
 gar or stupid, or all three of them. Its at- 
 titude toward international politics is that of 
 1890, its opinion of labor problems dates 
 from before the industrial revolution. The 
 prevailing dunness is shot through with 
 streaks of yellow and weak violet, but dingy 
 is its color, dingy its soul. 
 
 In sharp, in impossible contrast is rosy 
 America. This is a land of hearty villages 
 and vigorous towns, clean and prosperous, 
 shrewd and homely, kindly and in the best 
 sense aspiring. It is a land of quaint wise 
 age and nai've youth. It is humorous, it is 
 energetic: it won the war even if it did not 
 fight much of it, saved Europe from starving, 
 and showed itself capable of organization as 
 well as sacrifice. It is a common-sense country, 
 
 deeply idealistic, and its aesthetic sense has 
 16
 
 THE TWO AMERICAS 
 
 already outrun its environment. New York 
 amuses it, the immigrants do not dismay it, 
 its "home towns," with all their imperfec- 
 tions, it adores. 
 
 Which is the true America? Which are 
 the true observers? The writers who give 
 us rosy America (if we exclude the senti- 
 mentalists) are intelligent people, good to 
 meet, good to talk with, wise and humorous. 
 They have been a little too fortunate in their 
 own lives perhaps for absolute clarity of 
 vision ; but they convince you of their Amer- 
 ica are they not of it I 
 
 The writers who write of dun America, on 
 the contrary, are usually rebels against en- 
 vironment, men and women who have felt 
 themselves misfits in the home town, misfits 
 in college, critics of the existing order wher- 
 ever they lived, and happy nowhere. They 
 
 are the nomads who wander from oasis to 
 17
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 oasis, their horses always saddled, their ar- 
 rows ever bright. 
 
 Are there then rather than two Americas 
 only two states of mind, two sets of experi- 
 ences, two moods of observation which turn 
 plain America into sweetness or bile ? That 
 is a conclusion too weak to stand upon. 
 
 For, of course, the two-sidedness is in 
 America as well as in the observers. The 
 virtues and the faults are both there. From 
 the window one sees a jumble of ugly brick 
 walls, a sky tainted by coal smoke, signs of- 
 fensive in vulgarity as in ugliness. Yet be- 
 neath is a good sort of people busy support- 
 ing families that are cheery as often as mean 
 minded, as often interested in China, child 
 welfare, good books, and happy conversation 
 as in the price of stocks, the sins of their 
 neighbors, and alcohol. In short, no Main 
 
 Street is just as it looks to any individual at 
 18
 
 THE TWO AMERICAS 
 
 any given moment of mood and time. But 
 this is a conclusion too platitudinous to rest 
 upon. 
 
 For the two Americas which interest us 
 are by no means so simple as the ancient 
 struggle between good and evil that goes on 
 in every village. They are special phases of 
 this old conflict and just now they may be 
 denominated city and town. 
 
 The city in America has gathered to itself 
 sweetness and vigor; it has sucked from the 
 country whence all strength comes, and now 
 goes back for refreshment. The city encour- 
 ages breadth of thinking and living. It en- 
 courages and rewards vitality. But it is the 
 city also which is the prime vulgarizer, which 
 produces the man without angles and with- 
 out home, the woman without occupation, the 
 life without individuality. And the city is 
 
 master. 
 
 19
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 The town is slave. It apes the city and 
 apes it badly. Its vulgarity is second-best 
 and its mediocrity imitative. Its faults are 
 all displayed on Main Street, like cans of veg- 
 etables in a grocer's window. City faults are 
 easier to study in a town than in the place 
 of their origin because they are unrelieved 
 and cruder. Yet the town keeps its individu- 
 ality, keeps its pride, keeps its friendships. It 
 is the country freshman in college, with big, 
 hearty hands, and a big, hearty voice, and 
 a big heart under impossible "college cut" 
 clothes, acquiring vices that when he is more 
 civilized he will forget. 
 
 The American soul is passing from the 
 country through the town to the city, and 
 perhaps back to the town and on to the coun- 
 try again. It was the country that first en- 
 gaged our novelists. Then it was the city. 
 20
 
 THE TWO AMERICAS 
 
 Now, for a while, because it reveals our soul 
 in transition, it is the small town. The rosy 
 writers on the whole see not untruly. The 
 American town is not all Main Street, and 
 Main Street is not as bad as it is painted, or 
 even built. Ugliness is a phase of transition, 
 like the unshaven chin on Sunday morning. 
 The city, with all its leadership toward light 
 and sweetness of living, is more dangerous 
 than the town to America. 
 
 But the nomads come sweeping down upon 
 our complacencies like the Arabs and the 
 Scythians that Wells describes, restlessly dis- 
 content, stirring up our fat lives, pricking 
 illusions, shooting arrows of satire down 
 smug streets. They disturb us, but they keep 
 us moving. They make us feel the dunness 
 of life that has lost the simple reality of
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 interest and experience. Now that the In- 
 dian and the pioneer and the cowboy have 
 gone, and the founders have become stolid 
 and wealthy, Main Street needs them. 
 
 H. S. C. 
 
 22
 
 ^NOVELS NOWADAYS 
 
 IT is no unusual thing to hear at any dinner 
 table emphatically derogatory comment from 
 those of an elder and more discretionary gen- 
 eration upon the somewhat embittering sub- 
 ject of "novels nowadays." The concomitant 
 reminder is usually (though expressed other- 
 wise) of the delightfully sedative qualities of 
 the great Victorian contributions to litera- 
 ture. By comparison how much pleasanter, 
 nobler, and so on. . . . 
 
 But the novel of manners was a dynamic 
 force in the Victorian era. Is not the elder 
 generation looking back upon its great hey- 
 day rather for what one H. A. Taine called 
 "minute details and practical counsels" than 
 
 for the "imagination and dreams" it fur- 
 23
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 nished the audience of its own period? The 
 vital social anger of Dickens is forgotten, 
 perhaps, in approving the "delicacy and de- 
 votion" of his heroes the gloomy satire of 
 Thackeray in the "quaintness" of an Amelia 
 Sedley. It is all so odd and pleasant and 
 old-fashioned and far away. And then these 
 authors were such great moralists. 
 
 Where, however, Dickens and Thackeray 
 are loved by the younger generation it is not 
 for any such stale virtuousness ; it is rather 
 for their living virtuosity, their wit, sincerity, 
 and creative power. And the younger gen- 
 eration seeks even further. 
 
 It seeks beneath the individual conscious- 
 ness, so typical of all human nature, into the 
 unconscious, so strongly differentiated in each 
 individual by impedimenta of early influ- 
 ence and training. Scientific research into 
 
 human motives and behavior has added much 
 24
 
 NOVELS NOWADAYS 
 
 to our knowledge since the Victorian era ; all 
 this the contemporary writer has at his dis- 
 posal. Many are beginning to profit by it. 
 A character's motives are subject to a more 
 extended survey; the casual impressions of 
 the individual acquire greater momentous- 
 ness. A deeper sympathy on the part of the 
 author, even for the "villain of the piece," 
 is increasingly apparent. 
 
 But the point surely is that we live to-day 
 in a more subjective age. It is an age of the 
 individual's explanation of himself. Author- 
 ity, even the conventions that the greatest of 
 the Victorians tacitly accepted, has every- 
 where been called into question. Mere pres- 
 entation of life as a panorama above which 
 the author sits like a god, even though a 
 sardonic god, upholding certain tables of the 
 law, has taken on a certain taint of super- 
 ficiality. The picture of society is now pre- 
 25
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 sented far more through the deep reactions 
 of one individual than as a conglomerate 
 whole where a great variety of interesting 
 creatures move, weaving "plots," restricted 
 by the necessity of not stepping out of their 
 own "characters" in the scheme. 
 
 In short, the author has descended from 
 Olympus. Life is approached merely through 
 the eyes of one particularly sophisticated in- 
 dividual in it. For a certain gain there is 
 usually corresponding loss. But the methods 
 of approach in novel-writing are changing, 
 because the times have changed. It is rather 
 futile to expect life to be static to expect 
 the methods of one age to be the same as 
 that of another that is past. 
 
 If a comparison is demanded as to "great- 
 ness" perhaps Emerson's squirrel may an- 
 swer for us, as he did to the mountain, "If I 
 
 cannot carry forests on my back, neither can 
 26
 
 NOVELS NOWADAYS 
 
 you crack a nut." Joyce's "Portrait of the 
 Artist as a Young Man" need hardly be 
 damned because it is not the "Hamlet" of 
 Shakespeare. It is an attempt to do some- 
 thing entirely different. 
 
 Again, if the question of the "morality" 
 of the modern novelist prove a burning one, 
 as it ever has and ever will, a calm consider- 
 ation of the great novels of the world's liter- 
 ature might greatly disillusionize the ortho- 
 dox. And if the Anglo-Saxon novel be 
 growing more European a consummation 
 we hardly dare hope for why, after all, 
 those novels that the European viewpoint has 
 produced are not altogether negligible. Our 
 idea in America of the function of the novel- 
 ist can stand a little improvement. 
 
 For how does Taine deal with the "moral- 
 ity" of the great Victorians? "It is there- 
 fore to ignore man, to reduce him ... to 
 27
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 an aggregate of virtues and vices; it is to lose 
 sight in him of all but the exterior and social 
 side; it is to neglect the inner and natural 
 element. You will find the same fault in 
 English criticism, always moral, never psy- 
 chological . . ." 
 
 Perhaps it is for this reason, neglect of 
 that "inner and natural element," that 
 "novels nowadays" have been tending so pro- 
 nouncedly toward autobiographical analysis. 
 More and more the psychological, among 
 the books that matter; less and less the 
 "moral." 
 
 And the interest of the younger generation 
 in this trend is both healthy and hopeful. It 
 is a sounding for greater depth. The old- 
 style novel of manners was not enough. Even 
 its worthiest successors in our own period 
 pall. The seine of literature is let down 
 
 deeper beneath life's apparent level, into 
 28
 
 NOVELS NOWADAYS 
 
 further fathoms of the sea of motive and 
 complex impulse. Thus peculiar things are 
 dredged to the surface ; some things, indeed, 
 at which the elder generation shudders and 
 from which it hastily averts its eyes. For 
 the author does not moralize about them, he 
 seems only to seek a more universal under- 
 standing. Yet throughout the history of 
 literature this has been the guiding motive 
 of the true creator. His main problem is 
 simply to render all human action as intel- 
 ligible as possible in the light of his own 
 
 time. 
 
 W. R. B. 
 
 29
 
 THE PLAIN PERSON 
 
 WHAT does the plain, everyday person want 
 in his books? 
 
 He wants "good English." Not shimmer- 
 ing experiments with rare words; nor daring 
 combinations of clauses that explode into 
 dashes and dots. Not long words solemnly 
 arranged he has long since outgrown re- 
 spect for that kind of pedantry. Not, by any 
 means, halting, imperfect sentences, with bad 
 grammar in them, nor sloppy writing that 
 means two things at once. These last are 
 precisely what he does not want. He desires 
 good English, and he does not have to be a 
 stylist in order to know when he gets it. 
 
 He also wants life as it is, or life as he 
 
 would like to have it. 
 31
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 If it is to be life as it is, then he desires life 
 as he knows it. He does not favor pictures 
 of societies more intellectual than intelligent, 
 where all the talk is of art, technique, motifs, 
 tastes, suppressed ambitions, and compressed 
 experiences. He does not want to read of 
 people whose work, play, and love are never 
 just what they seem to be, but always signi- 
 ficant socially or psychologically, importing 
 horrid lessons for the race if it doesn't watch 
 out. He likes his sociology straight, when 
 he likes it at all. He does not care to read 
 of families where tendencies toward sex in- 
 dulgence, hysteria, hatred, crime break out 
 before breakfast and devastate the household 
 by night. He is perfectly well aware of such 
 tendencies in himself and in his own family, 
 but tries with some success to hold them in 
 check, and prefers a book with equal self- 
 restraint. 
 
 32
 
 THE PLAIN PERSON 
 
 He craves a book world where he may find 
 all the intensely real things he sees in 
 glimpses now and then in his own life, but 
 of which he has never enough. The humors 
 and the adventure of experience in odd cor- 
 ners. The character, good and bad, that 
 comes out like colors in the sunshine at crises. 
 The nobleness of life that he admires, the 
 success he longs for, the pathos which makes 
 him sorry, the tragedy that he feels under- 
 lying, and the meanness that he can hate. 
 These things he knows are true, and he likes 
 to read of them. 
 
 But if it is not to be the truth about the 
 world he knows, then he wants to hear of the 
 world as he would like to have it of ro- 
 mance. But he doesn't wish it all kisses and 
 tears and moral platitudes. Nor all wild ex- 
 ploits of movie heroes. Nor all happy tales 
 
 of silly happy people. It must be a world 
 33
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 where a man can take his common sense and 
 a woman her humor. It must not revolve on 
 a movie plot designed for immigrants and 
 the illiterate. He wants to read of a life 
 where a sensible but not unromantic person, 
 who is neither neurotic nor brainless, might 
 thoroughly enjoy himself. 
 
 And who is the plain, everyday person 
 when it 'comes to reading books? He is all 
 of us, with the exception of the connoisseur, 
 the specialist, and the loving appraiser of 
 books, whose long apprenticeship to good 
 reading gives them the means as well as the 
 right to a greater catholicity. It is all of us, 
 except the foppish and eccentric readers, the 
 newfangled and the supercilious, the diseased 
 of mind and the warped aesthetically. It is all 
 of us, except the barbarian and the half liter- 
 ate, the vulgar in taste and the indifferent. 
 
 And this leaves so many that it is strange 
 34
 
 THE PLAIN PERSON 
 
 that authors who write for money and good 
 repute, and publishers who prefer a sure 
 twenty thousand to a speculative thousand 
 do not consider us more carefully. For 
 when we get what we want we will buy and 
 read and pass it on even unto the next gen- 
 eration. 
 
 There must always be a fringe of the ex- 
 perimental in literature poems bizarre in 
 form and curious in content, stories that over- 
 reach for what has not hitherto been put in 
 story form, criticism that mingles a search 
 for new truth with bravado. We should 
 neither scoff at this trial margin not take it 
 too seriously. Without it, literature becomes 
 inert and complacent. But the everyday per- 
 son's reading is not, ought not to be, in the 
 margin. He asks for a less experimental 
 diet, and his choice is sound. If authors and 
 
 publishers would give him more heed they 
 35
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 would do wisely. They are afraid of the 
 swarming populace who clamor for vulgar 
 sensation (and will pay only what it is 
 worth), and they are afraid of petulant 
 literati who insist upon sophisticated sensa- 
 tion (and desire complimentary copies). 
 The stout middle class, as in politics and in- 
 dustry, has far less influence than its good 
 sense and its good taste and its ready purse 
 
 deserve. 
 
 H. S. C. 
 
 36
 
 TO THE GENERAL READER 
 
 THE American reader has been abused. 
 Whenever an editorial writer needs a topic, 
 or a critic desires to be quoted, or an author 
 loses his temper, the American reader is the 
 victim. He is superficial, he is sentimental; 
 he is lazy, he is ignorant; he is stingy, he is 
 provincial ; he is everything that will fill up a 
 newspaper paragraph or make a stinging re- 
 view criticism. 
 
 It is not our purpose here to defend the 
 general reader, although we know him well, 
 and like him. On the contrary, it is our de- 
 sire at this writing to add one more charge 
 to the account, the charge which in our judg- 
 ment is most worth making against his liter- 
 ary integrity. But chivalry requires that he 
 37
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 should be cleared of false imputations before 
 renewed chastening. 
 
 Now, American readers are not a bit more 
 superficial or lazy or sentimental or ignor- 
 ant or stingy or provincial than British read- 
 ers or French or German. There may be 
 more Americans fond of sentimental books, 
 because far more Americans read books. 
 Nothing could exceed the depths of slushiness 
 into which the relatively few British of the 
 semi-literate classes who read books at all 
 descend. Any traveller who will study an 
 English newsstand shelf may convince him- 
 self of that. Likewise, there may be more nu- 
 merically of lazy readers, superficial readers, 
 provincial readers, ignorant readers in a 
 country like America, where reading is a na- 
 tional habit than in foreign parts, where it 
 is still a class peculiarity. As for stinginess, 
 
 the publishers have been trying to convict the 
 38
 
 TO THE GENERAL READER 
 
 American public of buying too few books, 
 and rightly, for it is the purchase of good 
 reading in permanent form that stabilizes 
 culture; yet one should consider the money 
 spent by the average American family yearly 
 for reading matter, much of which, though 
 periodical in form, is good, and later goes 
 into books. Nowhere in the world is there 
 anything comparable to our voracious read- 
 ing of periodical literature, and while the 
 habit has its serious abuses it should not be 
 underrated, scorned, or hastily condemned. 
 
 So much, therefore, by way of clearing the 
 air of too often repeated accusations. Our 
 own charge against the general reader is as 
 general as he is, and is directed against liter- 
 ate and semi-literate alike. The American 
 reader is generous and appreciative, he ap- 
 plauds mental agility and cleverness, he has a 
 
 keen sense for action, a healthy distrust of 
 39
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 rhetoric, and a ready approval for whatever 
 interests him ; but his sense of beauty is dull. 
 He does not ask for beauty, he does not ex- 
 pect beauty, and when he gets beauty he often 
 does not recognize it. 
 
 The reference is not to "purple patches" 
 and literary ornamentation of the encrusted 
 variety. This is an often deceptive beauty 
 that we are all of us likely to praise unread. 
 Beauty in a completer sense is what is meant 
 that organic beauty which comes as natu- 
 rally as dew upon grass when the imagination 
 is true and piercing and the garment of ex- 
 pression fits the thought like a gown. Re- 
 flection and depth of emotion have much to 
 do with such beauty and in general Ameri- 
 can readers do not appreciate depth of 
 feeling, as is too clear from the books we 
 praise as "deep." Perfect workmanship, 
 
 where a structure of words arises like a build- 
 40
 
 TO THE GENERAL READER 
 
 ing from the idea of the architect, is another 
 factor and we Americans are insensitive to 
 perfect workmanship, as is proved by our 
 ready enthusiasm for mere cleverness and 
 our tardy recognition of the writings of 
 Gather and Hergesheimer and Cabell and 
 Frost and Robinson and Santayana, where 
 the author has dealt with his theme as a great 
 portrait painter with his subject, ceasing 
 labor only when he has written the truth, the 
 whole truth, and nothing but the truth of 
 what he sees and feels. 
 
 It is two very simple things one would ask 
 of the general reader merely to be discon- 
 tented with short cuts to literature; stories 
 that are told just to fill out ingenious plots, 
 poems that rephrase platitudes, essays that 
 are smart but get nowhere all writing that 
 is machine-made, insincere, sloppy, meretri- 
 cious, flat, stale, and unprofitable; and next, 
 41
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 to ask for beauty in the right sense, to ask 
 that a story or a poem be beautiful as a 
 cathedral, a sword, a steel building, a race 
 horse, an automobile, a carved gem can be 
 beautiful. We are a slovenly race but a 
 clever one, and we can give the public what it 
 wants when it wants it. Doubtless the pearls 
 cast before swine were artificial; and our 
 writers' pearls have often been artificial too, 
 because their audience, although risen far 
 above husks, has been content with fabricated 
 gems. Authors will have more real pearls 
 to sell when there is a better market for 
 
 them. 
 
 H. S. C. 
 
 42
 
 PROSPERO AND THE "PICTURES" 
 
 Per. This is a most majesticke vision, and 
 Harmonious charmingly: may I be bold 
 To thinke these spirits? 
 
 Pro. Spirits, which by mine Art 
 I have from their confines call'd to enact 
 My present fancies. 
 
 Per. Let me live here ever, 
 So rare a wondred Father, and a wise 
 Makes this place Paradise. 
 
 SINCE the somewhat morganatic marriage of 
 literature to the "movies" there have been 
 but few "majesticke visions." Many experi- 
 ments have been made in the adapting of 
 novels and stories to the screen, and much 
 time and money have been wasted. So has 
 much sage advice. Nevertheless, we should 
 
 like to venture a suggestion. 
 43
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 We feel that in their choice of literature 
 the producers have overlooked one realm of 
 fiction peculiarly adapted to transformation 
 into moving pictures, by reason of the me- 
 chanical resources of the latter. We refer 
 to what we may roughly term the "literature 
 of fantasy" a type of literature out of 
 which the stage finds it mechanically impos- 
 sible to make convincing plays, but out of 
 which the devices of the movie camera could 
 easily create not only ocular delights but 
 magic illusions not to be bettered even by the 
 most masterly writing. Yet the movies remain 
 content with mere "trick films" and animated 
 cartoons, and, when they turn to stories, 
 plunge heavily on ultra-sensational and ultra- 
 moral dramas of modern life, with plots the 
 most puerile, sentimental, and obvious. 
 
 Yet we believe the producer of "pictures" 
 
 might be a veritable Prospero at enchanting 
 44
 
 PROSPERO AND THE "PICTURES" 
 
 many Ferdinands, figured as his audience. 
 Certainly there is an Ariel in his service at 
 the wave of whose wand any optical illusion 
 is possible, from the djinn of the Arabian 
 Nights taking substance from the spiralling 
 smoke of the fisherman's jar to the comic 
 possibilities of such a masterpiece of short 
 fiction as H. G. Wells's "The Man Who 
 Could Work Miracles," where a greatly 
 imaginative and profoundly human fan- 
 tasy could be set forth with delightful actu- 
 ality. 
 
 There is also a large, almost unexplored 
 field in fairy tales both ancient and modern, 
 in weird and fantastic poetry, in the prose of 
 writers who let the lightning of truly creative 
 imagination or the rainbows of quaint fancy 
 play upon the borderland between the real 
 and the unreal. As diverse writers as Poe, 
 
 James Stephens, Wells (in his earlier work), 
 
 45
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 Anstey, Coleridge, Barrie, and many others 
 could be named. Yes, we are perfectly 
 aware that Barrie's "The Admirable Crich- 
 ton" has been produced as "Male and 
 Female." 
 
 For, if there is an Ariel in Prospero's serv- 
 ice, there is also a Caliban. 
 
 Pro. (Aside.) I had forgot that foule conspiracy 
 Of the beast Caliban and his confederates 
 Against my life: the minute of their plot 
 Is almost come. 
 
 The fact remains that the production of 
 solid, stodgy, ranting, weepy, hectic traves- 
 ties of real life founded on second-rate novels 
 and magazine stories is, at this writing, the 
 Caliban of the movies. In such productions 
 half the reasons for the movies existing as 
 an independent art are deliberately abjured. 
 No use is made of their immense facilities 
 
 for rendering difficult illusions convincing or 
 46
 
 PROSPERO AND THE "PICTURES" 
 
 great flights of the imagination poignantly 
 real. There is only a crude representation, 
 usually soggy with sentiment, of a theme that 
 could be far more artistically handled either 
 in the written world or on the stage. Its 
 best moments are of overstressed ranting ac- 
 tion, necessary to get the wordless effect 
 "over"; its worst are those passages where 
 the written or spoken word would be most 
 significant, but where the mere dumb show 
 is obvious and wearisome. We have wit- 
 nessed any number of these "real life" 
 dramas, and yawned our way out. From the 
 deliberately "significant" movie good Lord 
 deliver us I Whereas what "majesticke 
 visions," "harmonious charmingly," if Pros- 
 pero would only call on Ariel more often I 
 
 We must leave it there. Much of the 
 world's greatest literature belongs in the 
 
 magical, fantastic realm. And the movies 
 47
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 could far more easily make us believe in the 
 actuality of an Aladdin's lamp or Wells's 
 men in the moon than in the stock characters, 
 stock situations, stock plots, and stock 
 tragedy and comedy of their translations 
 from the literature of "real life." Let Pros- 
 pero call on his spirits to "enact his present 
 fancies." There have been so few experi- 
 ments in the movies' 'own natural field. So 
 far Caliban has threatened Prospero to some 
 effect with "all the infection that the Sunne 
 sucks up." Yet is Prospero, indeed, "so 
 rare a wondred father" that we marvel he 
 has heretofore so rarely and so feebly dared 
 
 to wave his wand. 
 
 W. R. B. 
 
 48
 
 SHAMEFACED ART 
 
 "GREAT art demands passionate apprecia- 
 tion." It would be interesting to take a con- 
 sensus of American opinion upon that pro- 
 nouncement. Many smiles could be counted, 
 much ironic comment heard, but we fear that 
 unqualified acquiescence would be confined 
 entirely to the folk commonly supposed to 
 inhabit batik-hung studios in Greenwich Vil- 
 lage. And yet the dictum is mere truth. 
 
 Say it in French, "Great art demands pas- 
 sionate appreciation." It would not sound 
 half so silly. But of course. Great art is a 
 passion of the spirit. 
 
 Here in the United States we pride our- 
 selves upon being a rugged people, and we 
 
 are upon business bent. We are doers, not 
 49
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 dreamers: building blast furnaces and fac- 
 tories, growing and reaping vast acreages of 
 wheat, indulging in engineering feats, volubly 
 advertising all products under the sun, at- 
 tending conventions, amassing money, en- 
 thralled by country houses, motor cars, and 
 golf links. Each to his job, we say but art 
 is not a job ; art is a luxury. Pleasant if you 
 can afford it. Yes. But it is not real work.. 
 
 The cultivated foreigner, however, looks 
 curiously upon our activities and ingenuities 
 coupled with our casual neglect of a native 
 art. In our department stores, for instance, 
 he notes the superabundance of our books, 
 their attractive jackets, the hard-hitting "ap- 
 peal" of their advertisements. But litera- 
 ture? Here and there, perhaps, buried in 
 the welter somewhere, lying rather out of 
 it, lost in the spreading shadow of best sell- 
 ers. "Do you judge all books, then, by the 
 50
 
 SHAMEFACED ART 
 
 number of copies they sell every author by 
 the amount of his royalties?" To the for- 
 eigner it would seem so. 
 
 The general public in America does so 
 judge. Of what import that a man should 
 write a book if it is not what the majority of 
 the people want to read? The greatest au- 
 thors have always appealed to the most peo- 
 ple. Other books fail by comparison. Such 
 is the verdict. To everything, even to books, 
 we apply a standard of Usefulness which 
 we interpret most singularly. As for your 
 "Great art demands passionate apprecia- 
 tion," that is merely a whine from the little 
 fellows who have not "succeeded." Trust 
 healthy American judgment to pick the right 
 books, the big books, the books that count. 
 
 But unfortunately, rugged though he may 
 appear, a true artist is compact of sensibility 
 
 and subtlety. He is not to be measured with 
 51
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 a yardstick, appraised in a generalization for- 
 mulated by the average intelligence. He can 
 be truly approached only by minds at least 
 desirous of the qualities his own evinces. His 
 work is also the product of an intellectual 
 passion, inevitable in creation, not written 
 for this "purpose" or that. Only where it 
 meets an answering passion of the mind is 
 its full meaning delivered. This older na- 
 tions understand. We, not yet. 
 
 We are too much afraid of seeming any- 
 thing but red-blooded, rough, rugged, hale, 
 hearty, healthy. Subtlety is insidious, sensi- 
 bility we confuse with weakness, art with 
 "artyness." We take refuge from what we 
 do not understand in our chief pride, our Na- 
 tional Sense of Humor. Strange how much 
 escapes it I 
 
 So beside the business man and the pro- 
 fessional man the artist goes shamefaced. 
 52
 
 SHAMEFACED ART 
 
 He adopts perforce their heartiness, their 
 healthiness, their rough, rugged, hale red- 
 bloodedness at least superficially. He en- 
 deavors to make his writing into as much of 
 a business as possible. He hopes to appear 
 "practical." He fears to be accused of tem- 
 perament. Or he simply does nothing of the 
 sort, rebels entirely, and, in the eyes of the 
 general public, enters the national sideshow 
 of freaks. 
 
 A truly preposterous situation, for it is as 
 if the social body practiced a deliberate stulti- 
 fication of its own keenest sense organs. The 
 intelligence of the true artist is the nerve 
 centre of his age. Through him alone do we 
 truly see, feel, and come to understand our 
 time. 
 
 It is no plea for special dispensation to 
 point out that such widespread indifference 
 
 and misjudgment stunt the growth to mental 
 53
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 maturity of any nation. When the artist is 
 regarded as a true worker and not a drone 
 in our society, when the many strive at least 
 to meet him on his own ground instead of 
 always insisting that he must meet them on 
 theirs, then only will the great energy that 
 is in the brawn and sinew of our social body 
 have a fit brain and spirit to guide it. 
 
 W. R. B. 
 
 54
 
 IGNORANT ART 
 
 TIME was that a dime novel was a dime novel, 
 but now it sells for $2 and is called literature. 
 Why is it that a hundred million people 
 can produce only a handful of novels and 
 short stories in a year which have more real 
 value for humanity than a course dinner that 
 is gobbled down and forgotten? It is usual 
 to damn an undiscriminating public for this 
 failure in art; but it is not the public that 
 writes fiction. The American public for a 
 hundred years has been reading the best fic- 
 tion written abroad. A half dozen English 
 story tellers have had their reputations made 
 in America. 
 
 We believe that editors do not give their 
 
 best public what it wants. But editors do 
 55
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 not write the fiction they publish. They can- 
 not make silk purses out of sows' ears, even 
 if they want to, which has not yet been 
 proved. Every editor will assert that he is 
 searching for genius, and if we are not con- 
 vinced that he knows genius when he sees it, 
 we must admit his further contention, that 
 water cannot rise above its source. 
 
 No; public taste, ease of publication, 
 variety of interest, even editorial capability, 
 have all risen with the intellectual develop- 
 ment of the country; only the professional 
 writers, as a class, have not progressed. 
 They have become astonishingly clever, as 
 clever as the mechanism of a Ford; but as a 
 class they have not moved ten feet towards 
 literature. They have standardized their 
 product without improving the model. 
 
 For one thing, as a class they do not know 
 
 enough. It is nonsense to suppose that a 
 56
 
 IGNORANT ART 
 
 man can write a great book with substance 
 and endurance to it unless he knows more, 
 much more, than the general reader. Yet 
 let that general reader take the average short 
 story, or serialized novel, and test it for 
 the real wisdom involved. If he finds a 
 range of knowledge beyond his own he will 
 be lucky. The intellectual background of 
 much expensive American fiction is just about 
 equal to that of the average college graduate 
 a year after he has taken his degree. 
 
 Furthermore, as a class they do not think 
 enough. It is absurd to suppose that a 
 good book, with any seriousness to it, can 
 be written without hard and deep thinking. 
 Our writers of fiction are sprinters. Their 
 bottom has been sacrificed to speed. They 
 can be incredibly clever, but not even mod- 
 erately profound. The general reader does 
 
 not want to be bored by heavy thinking, but 
 
 57
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 he does want something more valuable than 
 the commonplace thoughts of everyday Am- 
 ericans, chopped, peppered, and put into a 
 brilliant short story. If he cannot reflect 
 himself, he wants some one to reflect for 
 him; and our story writers seldom reflect. 
 They are too busy writing, to reflect. They 
 are so busy building potato bins that they 
 don't hoe their potatoes. Literature without 
 reflection behind it is oyster soup without 
 oysters. The two greatest American stories, 
 "The Scarlet Letter" and "Huckleberry 
 Finn," are products of reflection even more 
 than of art. How can a brain attached to 
 a typewriter and fed on nothing more nour- 
 ishing than hurried thinking hope to rival 
 them? 
 
 It is not fair to call our professional 
 writers, as a class, illiterate ; but ignorant by 
 
 any severe standard they certainly are, and 
 
 58
 
 IGNORANT ART 
 
 the numerous exceptions who do know, and 
 do think, confirm the criticism by the as- 
 tonishing difference of their product. It is 
 not fair to call our professional story tellers 
 trivial, but, as a class, superficial they cer- 
 tainly are, especially the cleverest and the 
 most emotional among them. Most of the 
 stories that are called "great" in the adver- 
 tisements fail to make the reader think or 
 feel anything he has not thought or felt a 
 hundred times before. Most of them give 
 him a picture of life and himself that is false. 
 There is a theory generally held that you 
 have to know an immense amount to be a 
 scholar, or a scientist, that you have to think 
 deeply to be a lawyer, that you have to feel 
 intensely to be a musician, a painter, or a 
 preacher; but that to be a writer all you 
 need is a fluent pen, some acquaintance with 
 
 Alaska, the South Seas, or the slums, and a 
 
 59
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 mind ingenious in character depiction and 
 plot. It is a bad theory, and this year, which 
 has seen at least four fine American novels in 
 which study, reflection, and matured knowl- 
 edge have confirmed and strengthened art, 
 is a good year in which to proclaim its bad- 
 ness. The American writer's best public is 
 deserting him for foreign literature because 
 he tells them nothing they do not already 
 
 know. 
 
 H. S. C. 
 
 60
 
 SLOVENLY PETER & DAPPER SAM 
 
 WE remember only too well the Slovenly 
 Peter of our childhood, who wouldn't keep 
 himself clean, wouldn't clip his finger nails, 
 wouldn't brush his hair. Are there too many 
 Struwel Peters in American literature? 
 
 The critics think so, especially university 
 critics. They manhandle our realistic poets 
 of the Mississippi Valley, execrating flat 
 rhythms, ugly words, dishevelled phrases. 
 They quote selected passages from our se- 
 rious novels full of loose constructions and 
 blurred meanings, passages that read as if 
 a mouthful of words had been spat at the 
 page. They fling out at journalism which 
 with a jaunty air rips off whole paragraphs 
 
 that mean little or nothing, or, like the finan- 
 61
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 cial editor's forecasts, take back at the end 
 what the beginning proposes. 
 
 There is as much slovenly writing in 
 America as there is slovenly dressing in Eng- 
 land. And both come from the same cause, 
 the opiate of "don't care." And precisely as 
 your person of literary or social worth in 
 England is most likely to dress on ordinary 
 occasions as the whim or the nearest articles 
 suggest, so that a hideous bonnet or a pair 
 of wrinkled trousers are much more likely to 
 belong to a viscountess or a baronet than to 
 a shop girl or a bank clerk, just so a careless, 
 take-me-for-what-I-am fashion of writing 
 (especially in fiction) is very likely in Amer- 
 ica to accompany real substance, deep obser- 
 vation, and intense sincerity. He who is 
 hailed by many as our greatest novelist is 
 one of the worst manipulators of English 
 
 that ever wrote books worthy to be read. 
 62
 
 SLOVENLY PETER & DAPPER SAM 
 
 And yet Slovenly Peter is not so familiar 
 in America, and not half so dangerous to the 
 cause of real literature, as Dapper Sam. 
 Slovenly Peter, like many a bad boy, may 
 grow up to be one of the mighty. When 
 his finger nails begin to annoy him, he will 
 clip them. When dirty hands become dis- 
 tasteful, he will wash them, and he will wash 
 them well. But Dapper Sam is already as 
 grown up as he will ever be. He is finished; 
 and he knows it and is proud of it. There 
 is nothing in him to reform. 
 
 Dapper Sam is legion. He writes the 
 short stories that are perfectly built and 
 mean nothing. He writes the plays that con- 
 form, like straw hats, exactly to this year's 
 model. It is he who is responsible for the 
 deathly English of so much competent 
 
 journalism sentence after sentence without 
 63
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 one phrase of distinction, one word chosen 
 with care. He has developed a style for 
 novel writing which is like a sounding gallery, 
 all echoes of past voices, nothing that is his 
 own, nothing that carries personality, noth- 
 ing that some one else could not have writ- 
 ten. He writes ream after ream of mediocre 
 poetry, prettily phrased, adequately rhymed, 
 that travels, like the parcel post, all over the 
 United States; quite fit to print, quite fit to 
 read, but as empty of individuality as souls 
 which have lost touch with their egoes. 
 
 Dapper Sam never meditates, never 
 grows spiritually excited, never is wrought 
 up over his fellow man, never makes Eng- 
 lish his own. He writes, but he does not 
 compose; he borrows words, but does not 
 own them. He never plays upon his instru- 
 ment, but puts roll after roll of records into 
 64
 
 SLOVENLY PETER & DAPPER SAM 
 
 the aperture and treads out competent and 
 mechanical music. 
 
 The editors, perhaps, have helped in his 
 making, for he serves their purpose well, 
 both in quantity never failing and in a quality 
 which, like canned tomatoes and gasolene, 
 can be bought safely with foreknowledge as 
 to what one is getting and how it will be 
 received. The public, quite certainly, are 
 at least equally responsible our slovenly, 
 good-natured public, who wish to read 
 quickly, painlessly. He is made in the image 
 he has selected. We can do nothing for 
 him. He can do nothing for himself. 
 
 The creature, like the movies, and chew- 
 ing gum, and the yellow press, and standard 
 collars, has a real usefulness in a democracy 
 in process of being educated. But he should 
 be branded. Critics should hang "Dapper 
 
 Sam" across his shoulders. He should be 
 65
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 prevented from snubbing the Slovenly Peters, 
 who, unkempt though they may be, are bet- 
 ter than he is. He should be forbidden to 
 pass for the man of letters he is not. 
 
 H. S. C. 
 
 66
 
 "IS IT WHAT OUR READERS 
 
 WANT?" 
 
 IT seems high time to reexamine a shibboleth 
 that has for many years simplified editing 
 for the Gileadites of the blue pencil in the 
 strongholds of financially successful Amer- 
 ican magazines. Large corporations nowa- 
 days conduct groups of such periodicals. To 
 their editors the test query that heads this 
 article appears beautifully practical and 
 logical and is, in actual value, exquisitely the 
 reverse. It is obvious that we are not speak- 
 ing here of magazines specializing in any 
 definitely circumscribed field, nor of the an- 
 cient and overdignified "quality group," as 
 advertisers call it. We refer to the great 
 
 moneyed mediums popularly supposed to en- 
 67
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 courage creative literature. The truth is 
 that American readers are left still wanting 
 by the modern magazine, however, prevalent 
 be a certain form of specious and meretri- 
 cious writing. 
 
 Modern advertising has degenerated sim- 
 ply into a study of how the desire to spend 
 money may be played upon by any one with 
 a product to sell. Its peculiar (to say the 
 least) application of psychology has grad- 
 ually taken hold of the handling of periodical 
 literature. Whether or not you "go in" very 
 thoroughly for statistics, you attempt to as- 
 certain the particular kind of trash that 
 soothes without puzzling the stereotyped 
 mind; the concocted verisimilitude that passes 
 for "real life" with the unthinking. You 
 work out its value in dollars and cents as a 
 circulation builder. You arrive at a mathe- 
 matical conclusion that has no more to do 
 68
 
 "IS IT WHAT READERS WANT?" 
 
 with that difficult and delighting art we call 
 "good writing" than a mail order catalogue. 
 You can then compose a recipe for the kind 
 of thing your readers will "eat up." Sex, 
 sensationalism, sentimentality, "up to the 
 minute" stuff. And think of the money you 
 can make at it! If you make money the 
 magazine is a success; you, as a writer, are 
 a success; you can buy a country place in the 
 environs of Manhattan and own your own 
 car. 
 
 This, then, is the Lure of Literature for 
 the younger writers in America who have a 
 style and something to say. They either suc- 
 cumb to this philosophy or they do not. If 
 they do not, well, their experience in the past 
 has been that they do not flourish, though the 
 necessarily independent attitude of the strong- 
 minded young writer is, to a slight degree, 
 
 better recognized now, due to much painful 
 69
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 pioneering. But in general the old meaning- 
 less query, "Is it what our readers want?" 
 rules supreme. 
 
 For we know well enough what they want 
 want in its true sense of "lack." They 
 want a literature that is a living expression 
 of unusual personalities, not a syncopated 
 tune, played on a cash register, by shrewd 
 but mediocre minds. They want analyses of 
 human beings by minds capable at least of in- 
 telligent, if not of profound, interpretation; 
 they want stories dealing with old situations, 
 either in the light of modern rationality, what 
 there is of it, or, at least, from a freshly per- 
 sonal point of view. They want work of 
 intellectual integrity and uncompromising in- 
 dividuality. They get the products of fake, 
 sensationalism, compromise, adherence to 
 formula. They get fed to them constantly 
 
 everything that appeals to their worst tastes, 
 70
 
 "IS IT WHAT READERS WANT?" 
 
 to their cheapest desires, to their weakest 
 (if unanalyzed) emotions. They gobble this 
 pap, and the editors wax proud that they 
 "know human nature." 
 
 For it works out in dollars and cents, you 
 see. It works out in dollars and cents. Is 
 not that, after all, the highest standard? 
 Turning to the days of the early Renaissance, 
 when the passion for ideas and culture was 
 otherwise, we are led to wonder just how 
 greatly the world progresses. Well, we have 
 at least produced some few smaller pub- 
 lishers and booksellers, who, thrive as they 
 may, tend with ingenuous ardor the flicker- 
 ing flame on the altar of good writing. We 
 have seen a few of the smaller "faddish" 
 magazines evincing a real desire for inde- 
 pendent expression. The flourishing maga- 
 zine companies that exist as large commercial 
 
 organizations primarily cannot wholly over- 
 71
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 shadow the country with the dollar mark. 
 They merely do the best they can. 
 
 Think it over. Take a glance at the 
 magazine counter in any subway station; 
 weigh and analyze the amount of yawp, bun- 
 combe, purely meretricious appeal. Then de- 
 cide whether this attack is ill-grounded or 
 not. And, in the last analysis, the remedy 
 lies with the readers. It is by their suffrages 
 that such a condition exists. What do you 
 
 want? 
 
 W. R. B. 
 
 72
 
 . 
 
 LITERARY REVIVALISM 
 
 THE religious revival is still a phenomenon 
 that exercises peculiar power over the minds 
 of the multitude. But its heyday has passed. 
 The awakening of a "social consciousness," 
 through treatise and oratory, much of it in 
 the revival spirit, has also lost its first, fine, 
 careless rapture. Is the time now ripe for 
 purely literary and artistic revivalism? 
 Would it be possible to sway audiences in the 
 cause of art and literature with any of that 
 strange power over the emotions possessed, 
 for instance, by even the shabbiest of Gospel- 
 shouters? Would it be possible to organize 
 any kind of a crusade in the cause of litera- 
 ture? Could the right influence conceivably 
 
 be wielded to convert the many? 
 73
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 In the case of one modern poet and 
 pamphleteer, sturdy effort to awaken small 
 towns to an appreciation of literature and 
 art (accompanied by exhortations to civic 
 improvement) has recently met with some 
 success in the Middle West. Consideration 
 of what this man has done inspires our in- 
 terrogation. Nothing like the influence of a 
 Ruskin on the art of the England of his time 
 has heretofore come to pass in the case of 
 literature in America. We have had our 
 Elbert Hubbard and our Chautauqua for the 
 rank and file, experiments like Seymour 
 Eaton's Booklover's Library, but little be- 
 yond this. We have the present bookselling 
 campaign, with its slogan of "Buy a Book 
 a Week," we have the publisher's blurb and 
 the shouting advertisement. But the average 
 person (not the bookish or naturally artistic 
 
 person) lacks the proper mental stimulus 
 
 74
 
 LITERARY REVIVALISM 
 
 from minds possessed of a truly discriminat- 
 ing enthusiasm for literature. 
 
 Literature in itself is a term that the aver- 
 age person looks at suspiciously. Discourses 
 by eminent authorities on letters he shuns. 
 Sensitive and detached essays on the peculiar 
 charm of rare and classic volumes he will 
 not read. He needs a combination of the cir- 
 cus barker and the genuine savant with a 
 distinct sense of humor to awaken his per- 
 ceptions to the glamour and pleasure residing 
 in really good books. For he will fight like a 
 steer against "improving his mind." 
 
 And, unfortunately, so few of us are 
 properly qualified to be barkers before the 
 booth of literature. Though we sing, beat 
 the tom-tom, whine, or shout, the general 
 public, unimpressed, drifts by. The pub- 
 lishers' posters, where every new novel is 
 
 hailed and acclaimed as the greatest some- 
 
 75
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 thing since something else, and extracts from 
 press clippings furnish starred ejaculations 
 these, oh, they are just "advertising" ! What 
 shall I read? Read the reviewers? Which 
 can I trust? I'll read some book they're all 
 saying the same thing about. It stands to 
 reason there must be something in it, if 
 they're all talking about it; and then I can 
 talk about it, too. That is the way the aver- 
 age man chooses his seasonal reading. 
 
 So the need is for some Billy Sunday or 
 Gen. William Booth of literature, with the 
 same power over the spirit of the masses 
 that these exhorters exercised in the name of 
 the Gospel in the past, and yet, let us hope, 
 with a good deal more intelligence and bet- 
 ter taste than have been evinced by at least 
 one of them. Such a man could perhaps do 
 a good deal toward arousing popular inter- 
 est in the best books, more than Elbert Hub- 
 76
 
 LITERARY REVIVALISM 
 
 bard or the Chautauqua, five-foot shelves, 
 special editions, or any number of cheap fic- 
 tion libraries. 
 
 How he is to operate is another question. 
 The poet we referred to has mapped out 
 thoroughly and originally his own campaign 
 for the State of Illinois. But what is more 
 important, he has succeeded in beginning to 
 "put it over." Why? First, because he 
 convinces as an actual practicing creator in 
 the art he preaches. Second, because he is 
 possessed of an almost daemonic enthusiasm 
 inherited from a religious revivalist parent- 
 age. He has turned all the exhorter's desire 
 for spiritual regeneration into a new channel. 
 Art and literature have possessed him as his 
 parents were possessed by the flames of re- 
 ligious faith. Third, he possesses extraordi- 
 nary sensitiveness to all manifestations of 
 
 beauty, and a distinct power of discriminat- 
 77
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 ing between the genuine and the tawdry in 
 art, and between the dead and the living. 
 
 This is the type of new literary revivalist, 
 possibly with some modifications, who might 
 do much for a renaissance of literary interest 
 in America, that those who came to scoff 
 might remain to pray, that one of the most 
 valuable stimuli to the spirit of man might be 
 regained for our nation. Truly, where a soul 
 is saved to the appreciation of good writing, 
 intellectual integrity, genuinely fine feeling 
 and out of the snares and pitfalls of mere 
 emotional welter, sentimentality, raucous un- 
 reality, highly seasoned melodrama the 
 composite soul of a nation is enlightened and 
 strengthened by just that much. 
 
 W. R. B. 
 
 78
 
 THE MASQUERADING TRACT 
 
 WHY is it that so much of the writing of the 
 day, while vivid and provocative enough, is 
 yet ineffectual as criticism of life and imper- 
 fect as art? That our intellectual journals, 
 with all their earnestness, are hardly less 
 ephemeral in nature than their less sober 
 fellows the fiction magazines? That our 
 novels with a moral, like "Main Street" and 
 "Winesburg, Ohio," will in all probability in 
 a few years' time have gathered the cobwebs 
 of literary history? That our poetry with a 
 didactic bent will live only in the anthologies 
 if at all? 
 
 In part at least it is because American 
 literature of the present has acquired a pro- 
 pagandist turn, and is serving the ends of 
 79
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 particular theses Bather than of universal art. 
 In our lightest fiction, as well as our most 
 solid criticism, we have taken to pointing a 
 moral to adorn our taie. What the tract es- 
 sayed to do in the past, the novel, the review, 
 even poetry attempts to do to-day. True, 
 the intention is frequently disguised; often, 
 perhaps, not consciously present in the mind 
 of the author. But nevertheless it exists. 
 Take, for example, the type of story that 
 appears in the Saturday Evening Post the 
 most widely read of our periodicals. What 
 does it do but preach again and once again 
 the value of daring, self-confidence, and re- 
 sourcefulness? It is a sugar-coated homily 
 on those virtues. Take our current criticism. 
 Most of it is unbiassed in the sense that it is 
 free from personal animus, but how little of 
 it is divorced from the writer's desire to 
 
 maintain some political, or social, or ethical 
 80
 
 THE MASQUERADING TRACT 
 
 thesis. Take a novel like "Main Street." It 
 is a tract against the soul-shattering experi- 
 ences of life n a small town. 
 
 Now, the desire constantly to enforce a 
 moral or establish a theory may lead to an 
 elevated literature, but it also conduces to a 
 cramped one. You cannot square the circle 
 in literature any more than in mathematics. 
 If you have to exalt a precept you must of 
 necessity subordinate to it other generalities. 
 You become a special pleader. And since 
 special pleading is apt to be of the moment 
 and rigidly circumscribed you produce a 
 literature that lacks the qualities that make 
 for power and endurance. 
 
 Matthew Arnold summed up the rule for 
 English criticism in the one word "disinter- 
 estedness," and maintained that criticism was 
 to show its disinterestedness by "steadily re- 
 fusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior, 
 81
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 political, practical considerations about ideas, 
 which plenty of people will be sure to attach 
 to them . . . but which criticism really has 
 nothing to do with." And surely it is at 
 least in part, because our present-day criti- 
 cism has departed so far from this rule, be- 
 cause it is in such large measure polemic and 
 controversial, that, despite its frequent keen- 
 ness and occasional brilliance, it has made 
 little lasting contribution to letters. 
 
 With fiction we are in no better case. Our 
 more serious novelists, like our critics, are 
 writing to establish definite contentions. In- 
 stead of looking upon society as a whole, they 
 are focusing their vision on its excrescences, 
 and exhibiting instead of the organism itself 
 its festers and its sore spots. The great 
 Victorians were wiser. They, too, saw the 
 shortcomings and injustices of their time ; and 
 
 they, too, levelled the shafts of their art 
 82
 
 THE MASQUERADING TRACT 
 
 against them. But they never forgot that 
 the whole is larger than its part, and they 
 depicted the human drama in its grandeur 
 as well as in its pettiness. Because they 
 showed life as more various than the con- 
 ditions against which they were directed, 
 Dickens's novels have outlived the abuses 
 which he flayed in them. Because he saw 
 something in human nature to exalt as well 
 as to satirize, Thackeray is with the im- 
 mortals. 
 
 We do not wish to decry the high intention 
 that goes into much of the more serious writ- 
 ing, both critical and imaginative, of the day. 
 But we do wish to maintain that so long as 
 our authors continue to use their talents to 
 expound a thesis, or exploit a prejudice, so 
 long as they isolate phenomena and on the 
 basis of those isolated phenomena generalize 
 
 about life, they will produce criticism that 
 83
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 will interest the reader of the moment and 
 will hold the reader of the future not at all, 
 and fiction that will have a local but not a 
 lasting or universal appeal. They will give 
 to the world a significant literature, but not 
 
 a distinguished one. 
 
 A. L. 
 
 84
 
 ON LITERARY STRUCTURE 
 
 Two main classes of creative prose writing 
 can be discerned in America to-day: that 
 which editors stamp as "good fiction," that 
 which our younger writers attempt and be- 
 lieve in as "literature." The former is built 
 according to a formula with definite struc- 
 tural qualities we all recognize. The latter 
 is in numerous instances experimental, tenta- 
 tive in outline, meandering, amorphous for 
 the best of our young writers, with genuine 
 gifts of imagination, observation, and real- 
 istic truthfulness, have turned definitely away 
 from the formulas of the current periodical. 
 Let us examine such formulas a little more 
 closely. In the first place, the new magazine 
 
 writer who becomes a nine days' wonder is 
 85
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 usually the man or woman possessed of in- 
 timate and first-hand knowledge of some par- 
 ticular locality and class of people, rather 
 than a being of truly superior intelligence. 
 Such a writer may genuinely and sincerely 
 portray actual life, whether that of the East 
 Side Semite, the Southern negro, the profes- 
 sional baseball player, or any other group, 
 but his most valuable contribution remains 
 merely local color. His talent is very defi- 
 nitely circumscribed. He simply supplies new 
 backgrounds for old plots, new "lingo" for 
 old characters. He also supplies the old, 
 obvious, and easily grasped motivation, swift 
 action, and robust, middle-class sentiment. 
 
 We could indeed give the young author 
 two sound pieces of advice on how to succeed 
 as a magazine writer. One is to pick at once 
 a locality not already exploited in fiction. 
 
 Given the opportunity to emigrate to Zam- 
 86
 
 ON LITERARY STRUCTURE 
 
 boanga or Van Diemen's Land for an in- 
 tensive study of the natives in those parts, all 
 the better. Let him get to know thoroughly 
 the local colloquialisms, what the inhabitants 
 have for breakfast and dinner, their tribal 
 customs, how they furnish their houses, their 
 folk - lore, table - manners, all their daily 
 whims, habits, and humors. Then let him 
 concoct a plot. 
 
 Let him concoct it with due regard to the 
 popular human triangle and around the three 
 great central facts of life birth, love, and 
 death. Let him remember that there must 
 always be a love "interest" and a more or 
 less happy ending. Let him remember that 
 the story must be built according to one of a 
 very few time-hallowed designs, preferably 
 plotted to satisfy the magazinist's craving for 
 two essentials, viz., some kind of a mystery 
 
 that is solved and the triumph of the under- 
 87
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 dog that is, a certain conventional type of 
 underdog. 
 
 So far, so good. This is the "straight 
 dope." But what of younger writers who 
 impress by their intelligence yet refuse to 
 conform to any such set standards and rules ? 
 "Real life isn't that way!" they submit, some- 
 times haughtily. And, of course, we know 
 it isn't. All our lives have definite begin- 
 nings, when we are first thrust forth con- 
 gestedly squalling into a cold world. Beyond 
 that? Have they really any one definite 
 turning point, any definite climax, indeed any 
 great reason for being that we can point out 
 (whatever we may hope or believe) ? No. 
 Is not life infinitely more complicated and 
 involved than the formulas would seem to 
 indicate? It is. Is not present-day society in 
 a state of undeniable flux and uncertainty? 
 
 It is. Are not the new departures of science 
 88
 
 ON LITERARY STRUCTURE 
 
 and philosophy, the social ferment, the inter- 
 national tangle, the new reforms, the new 
 freedoms, the new prohibitions, the "new" 
 everything so qualifying and coloring our 
 lives and the thought of our time that it is 
 almost impossible to expect clear-cut and defi- 
 nite intaglios of the period from any writer 
 possessed of real greatness as an interpreter? 
 Yes. Are these old cut-and-dried textbook and 
 magazine-office formulas then all we need? 
 How about new forms, experimentation, 
 pioneer efforts? How about them indeed! 
 It seems to us entirely natural and a witness 
 of life that they should appeal more strongly 
 to the rising generation of writers than the 
 mechanical, commercialized process that have 
 raised so high the average technical excellence 
 of our fiction and so stultified and deadened 
 its intellectual content. 
 
 But. The eternal "but," again. How 
 89
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 about combining structure and the fine 
 frenzy? How about pouring new interpre- 
 tation, new vision, a new depth and uni- 
 versality of appeal (aside from mere local 
 color) into not the old moulds, necessarily, 
 but into moulds nevertheless, from which 
 form not formlessness may emerge? To 
 use another figure, how about building the 
 new fiction upon some definitely articulated 
 skeleton, rather than letting it meander forth 
 in an essentially invertebrate and jellyfish 
 condition as to structure, however vivid, 
 virile, and true its content? Can no golden 
 mean be arrived at, or rather, is not the full 
 Shakespearean equipment (in lesser degree, 
 we may grant) still possible: interpretation 
 of one's own state of society with universal 
 appeal, understanding of human nature, and 
 a true sense of the baffling complexities 
 
 of life conveyed, at the same time, with 
 90
 
 ON LITERARY STRUCTURE 
 
 sharp technique, definite structure, satisfying 
 form? 
 
 It has been done in the past with the at 
 that time "new" revelations of the past. It 
 may even, we venture to say, have been done 
 once or twice within the last ten years. Cer- 
 tainly it can be done again living, breathing 
 sculpture by new Pygmalions, wrought from 
 the common clay of life that lies all about us I 
 
 W. R. B. 
 
 91
 
 THE YOUNG REALISTS 
 
 WE forget the precise age of Malvolio, but 
 we think that famous Puritan was of about 
 the same age as our younger realists. Though 
 less brainy, like them he was cross-gartered 
 and despaired of his world. 
 
 The younger realists do not like America. 
 Our much admired country, once dotted with 
 friendly villages, the home of virile pioneers, 
 seems to them in a stage of pimply indiges- 
 tion following upon the colic of the industrial 
 revolution. Simplicity has given way to 
 frivolity, courage to shrewdness, craftsman- 
 ship to the machine-made, beauty to ugliness, 
 spiritual energy to greed, joy of working to 
 the dulness of routine. The man who in- 
 vents a corn cutter to save labor succeeds 
 93
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 only in damning a town by making it wealthy. 
 The village that tries to get educated sticks 
 half way and becomes a horrid example. 
 Love degenerates into a guerrilla warfare 
 between selfishness and appetite. Out, cursed 
 spot, that calls itself Dayton, or Chicago, or 
 New York! they cry, and back to the fresh 
 simplicities of the '70's, or forward to some 
 new social organization where a man can own 
 his soul again I 
 
 We should be much inclined to agree with 
 them (except as to the fresh simplicities of 
 the '70's), if they did not take such a cross- 
 gartered view of the matter. Surely the 
 world has creaked this way before and got 
 over it. Surely, Ohio, let us say, is not quite 
 so dull and drab and hopeless a place as they 
 make out, even now, when prosperity has 
 ruined it. 
 
 We prefer the philosophy of the older 
 94
 
 THE YOUNG REALISTS 
 
 realists. They knew what messieurs les 
 jeunes have just discovered, that all is vanity, 
 and they said so in great swinging phrases 
 that made kings take action not easily ac- 
 counted for by economic theory. Consider 
 Bossuet, for example, as he reflects upon the 
 life of Maria Henrietta : 
 
 Commencez aujourd'hui a mepriser les faveurs du 
 monde; et toutes les fois que vous serez dans ces 
 lieux augustes, dans ces superbes palais a qui Ma- 
 dame donnait un eclat que vos yeux recherchent 
 encore; toutes les fois que, regardant cette grande 
 place qu'elle remplissait si bien, vous sentirez 
 qu'elle y manque, songez que cette gloire que vous 
 admiriez faisait son peril en cette vie, et que dans 
 1'autre elle est devenue le sujet d'un examen 
 rigoureux, ou rien n'a etc capable de la rassurer que 
 cette sincere resignation qu'elle a eu aux ordres de 
 Dieu et les saintes humiliations de la penitence. 
 
 And if the French is difficult of translation, 
 substitute the terser Latin of Ecclesiastes : 
 
 "Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas." 
 95
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 Did this brave Bossuet, knowing that all, 
 all (even realism) was vanity, lose interest 
 in the doings of the great and spirited lady 
 whose earthly career he was celebrating? 
 On the contrary. The conviction that in the 
 sight of God a thousand years were as a day 
 gave him a certain perspective that our mod- 
 erns lack. Once you are convinced (and are 
 they convinced?) that spiritual, or, if you 
 prefer the term, ideal, values only count, you 
 become more tolerant of the poor human 
 animal, running hither and thither, burrow- 
 ing, acquiring, loving, dying. You may smile 
 at his vain endeavors (and the sense of hu- 
 mor is born), you may pity his pretensions 
 and so gauge fairly his attempts to be heroic, 
 you feel the childishness of his pettier sins, 
 and so are not afraid. 
 
 The young realists who cross-garter their 
 
 spirits until all this bustling, irrelevant life of 
 96
 
 THE YOUNG REALISTS 
 
 ours in America becomes a sordid struggle 
 among machines, are afraid of life. They 
 are of the seed of the martyrs, and they will 
 go to the stake before they will smile at the 
 spectacle of civilization trying to ruin itself, 
 as it has always done, and has often suc- 
 ceeded in doing. But they lack the qualities 
 ascribed to angels, who, so we are told, are 
 made by men both to laugh and to weep. 
 
 H. S. C. 
 
 97
 
 ON REVIEWING 
 
 THERE used to be three kinds of reviewing, 
 and now there are at least four, but they are 
 not the same kinds. 
 
 There was, in earlier days, the voluminous 
 essay that took a book for its text, and then 
 forgot the book in a brand new treatment of 
 the subject. Often enough the book died and 
 the review lived on as literature. More 
 often the book lived on and the essay 
 perished of its own irrelevant dulness. 
 There was the venomous review written to 
 air a creed or satisfy a hate; and there was 
 the book review proper, which stuck to its 
 book like a starfish to an oyster, and gutted 
 it. 
 
 In our time we are more various in our 
 99
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 reviewing. The essay-review has become 
 more honest, calls itself an essay now out- 
 right, and instead of borrowing a theme 
 from recent publications stands on its own 
 subject and develops its own thoughts. By 
 this the essay gains, the book suffers. For it 
 is well known that makers of books would 
 rather be talked about irrelevantly than not 
 be talked about at all. 
 
 The venomous review has been trans- 
 mogrified. The swashbucklers of criticism, 
 who used to lay about with their "This will 
 never do," and their "Contemptible scrib- 
 bling puppy," and their "Purveyor of sedi- 
 tion and heresy," have given place to social 
 reformers and radical theorists who will re- 
 view any book that gives them a chance to 
 preach, but neglect the rest. Gall has been 
 exchanged for physic. Some prefer gall. 
 
 As for the gutter of books, the review 
 100
 
 ON REVIEWING 
 
 that followed the text wherever it led 
 specialists perform that task now in technical 
 journals, just as specialists now perform the 
 operations that once could be had in any 
 barber's or apothecary's shop. No one 
 reads the technical journals but specialists, 
 and so books for the general reader, in this 
 respect, have fared hardly. 
 
 They have space enough, however, if their 
 subject permits, in a new kind of reviewing 
 which has flowered like the dandelion in this 
 our America. The gossipy review has be- 
 come an American fashion. Where the critic 
 of the quarterlies poured out his informa- 
 tion, the new reviewer uptilts his personality. 
 As in one, so in the other, the book is only 
 an excuse for a display of words. As in one 
 it was not the book that counted, but the 
 essay about it, so in the other it is not the 
 
 book either, it is the temperament of the re- 
 101
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 viewer. Not perception but a witty phrase 
 makes a good criticism; and whether the 
 reader buys the book is of little importance, 
 provided he reads and is amused by the re- 
 view of it. 
 
 What is good reviewing? 
 
 Certainly good reviewing must review 
 must dissect and expound, interpret, and 
 praise or blame the book. All reviewers can- 
 not be paragraphers, columnists, though that 
 just now seems to be the fashion. Anything 
 from autumn frocks to the nebular hypo- 
 thesis may be criticised, but a book review 
 must (curious that it is necessary to say it) 
 re-see a book through the eyes of a critic and 
 interpreter. 
 
 And certainly also a good reviewer will 
 not bury himself in his book, like an ant in 
 a sugar bowl. We are bored by reviews 
 
 which see only the book and never its back- 
 102
 
 ON REVIEWING 
 
 ground, because they do not review the book; 
 they merely photograph it, and usually by 
 snapshot, and badly. To review a book is 
 to discuss it in relation to literature, its litera- 
 ture especially, whether lyric poetry, mystery 
 story, or character novel; to set it against 
 this background and then to relate it to the 
 interests and experience of the reader. A 
 reviewer must neither stay outside nor inside 
 of the book he is reading. He must be 
 amphibious, or, better, like the airman, he 
 must first look about him, and then soar. 
 This is the art, as distinguished from the 
 science, and the trade, of reviewing. 
 
 So much for the philosophy of book criti- 
 cism. The practice is simpler than the theory 
 and also more difficult. For it amounts 
 merely to this: that every book should have 
 the kind of reviewing which can best describe 
 
 it and the reviewer who can best review it. 
 103
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 Uniformity is the curse of modern life ; it is 
 not merely a curse ; it is unnecessary and un- 
 wise in reviewing. Good thinking needs good 
 minds. Good reviewing requires, chiefly, 
 good reviewers. Let us pray for them. 
 
 H. S. G 
 
 104
 
 A SERMON FOR REVIEWERS 
 
 A. CLUTTON-BROCK, essayist and art critic 
 of the London Times, frees his heart in a 
 recent number of the Nation and Athenteum 
 of a burden of reproach. Reviewing in Eng- 
 land has been demoralized, he thinks, by a 
 press that has no opinions of its own. "It 
 has a notion that its readers wish to read 
 reviews, and that they procure publishers' 
 advertisements; but at the same time it sees 
 small commercial value in them, grudges the 
 space for them, and pays the reviewers as 
 little as possible. And it is able to pay them 
 very little because there are many people who 
 like reviewing. When they begin it it seems 
 delightful to get a book for nothing." But 
 
 their very love of writing puts them in the 
 105
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 power of their employers, and they either 
 give up reviewing or become mere hacks, 
 who, since they must review more books than 
 they can read in order to stay alive, must 
 cultivate the art of concealing their ignor- 
 ance. It is strange, he thinks, that publishers 
 should waste space to quote from reviews 
 which speak of "Undeniable charm of style," 
 "Notable contribution to contemporary 
 thought," "There is not a dull page from 
 cover to cover." 
 
 Thus far, and with some show of ill-tem- 
 per himself, A. Glutton-Brock. We leave to 
 the consciences of newspaper reviewers, the 
 judgment of American readers, and the 
 perusers of publishers' advertisements how 
 far his words hold good for America. 
 
 And yet, without ungenerously revealing 
 our own opinions as to the facts of the case, 
 
 there is one item that may be added to this 
 106
 
 A SERMON FOR REVIEWERS 
 
 reviewers' sermon one sin that is more 
 deadly than reviewing a book without read- 
 ing it because it is committed by men and 
 women whose opinions really count. And 
 this deadly sin is reviewing a book without 
 comprehending it. 
 
 We swing too often in our better American 
 criticism between the extremes of cool super- 
 ficiality and warm sentimentalism. Either the 
 reviewer bluntly and unsympathetically says 
 whether the book is good or bad, and lets it 
 go at that, in which he is a classifier merely, 
 or, with a (haply unconscious) eye to the 
 publishers' notices that will blazon his name 
 so titillatingly in some subsequent week, he 
 effervesces in a profusion of epithets that 
 would have made a Greek stare and an Eliza- 
 bethan long to show how enthusiasm could 
 be expressed by a man with a real vocabulary. 
 
 And the book is either categoried, dis- 
 107
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 sected, desiccated until whatever life juice it 
 had blows away in the dust of a dry style ; or 
 it is kissed to pieces like a lover's token, be- 
 dewed by caresses, mauled and toyed over 
 by an enthusiast until its beauties are made as 
 vulgar as a Broadway cheek. 
 
 Like Elijah, we believe ourselves one of 
 an infinitesimal minority, the minority that 
 still believes a book review should distinguish 
 the merits and defects of a book and explain 
 them; that does not believe it should be a 
 contribution to publicity for the book, or the 
 reviewer. And if there are thousands of oth- 
 ers, as Elijah was told, that have not bowed 
 the knee unto Baal, let them come forward; 
 there will be many to welcome them. Yet 
 we do not believe that merits are measured 
 by inches, or defects either so many para- 
 graphs good, so many bad, the net result, as 
 108
 
 A SERMON FOR REVIEWERS 
 
 the book review digest puts it, being -j . 
 
 Such a symbol, and indeed mere statement, 
 generally avails little, and sometimes noth- 
 ing: it is the argument from authority, and 
 in art there is no autocracy of opinion. Only 
 in books of fact and theory are such literal 
 pronouncements valuable. No, the review- 
 er's task is to merge his own personality 
 for the moment with what life there is in his 
 book, and when he writes communicate some- 
 how, somewhere, its pulse to his reader. 
 Many other things he should do, but this he 
 must do if he is to write useful criticism, and 
 we will never forgive him if he fails, unless, 
 indeed, the book has no pulse. 
 
 Criticism, if we may conclude with a home- 
 ly example, is neither the scales that weigh 
 nor the icing that sweetens, but the yeast that, 
 
 for readers, leavens the lump. A good re- 
 109
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 viewer must have cool brains and a warm 
 heart. He must have enthusiasms and guard 
 them, and his likings must be as strong as his 
 hates. It is no profession for a hack. 
 
 H. S. C. 
 
 110
 
 PATRONS AND PATRONAGE 
 
 THE further we "progress" into the twen- 
 tieth century the easier it becomes to defend 
 the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. There 
 were no Saturday Evening Post and Hearst's 
 Magazine then to enrich the poor writer, 
 few pots of gold with strings to them to be 
 found anywhere. But as poets and play- 
 wrights remind us, in longing accents, there 
 was always the patron, and not too uncom- 
 monly the patron of taste. 
 
 The patron of the arts as Chaucer knew 
 him, and Shakespeare, and Dr. Johnson we 
 do not want back again. It is true that with- 
 out him much admirable literature would 
 
 have remained unwritten or unpublished, 
 111
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 since the times provided no sure sustenance 
 for most men of letters except by patronage. 
 But the patron was, when all is said, a feudal 
 chief. His service meant loyalty and respect 
 for caste then; now it would mean servility. 
 And if the bought pen that distributes mod- 
 ern propaganda is less honorable than those 
 earlier writers of fawning preface and ful- 
 some dedication, yet we would gain nothing 
 by making flattery as profitable as it was in 
 the past. 
 
 We do not want the feudal patron, but 
 there is still need and opportunity for pa- 
 tronage. Capital now, as in Elizabeth's day, 
 has a way of coyly choosing the pockets of 
 a minority for her abiding place ; and capital 
 is a public trust, now as then, when, in theory 
 at least, it was so held and so employed. 
 That poets, novelists, dramatists who write 
 
 finely for the few, instead of profitably for 
 112
 
 PATRONS AND PATRONAGE 
 
 the many, should be kept like dogs, servants, 
 mistresses, offends our democratic sense, and 
 rightly. We cannot accept the feudal view- 
 point because our world is not feudal and 
 probably never again will be. But there are 
 better ways by which the rich man can grasp 
 his opportunity. 
 
 Why is it that those who endow colleges, 
 churches, societies, foundations with such 
 care for perpetuity, and such precautions to 
 secure usefulness, should have given so little 
 money and little thought to the arts? It is 
 arguable that a theatre or a magazine is as 
 good a subject for proper endowment as an 
 institution for scientific research, and not un- 
 arguable that it might be a more interesting 
 one. Proper endowment, we say. That 
 means endowed with due precaution that 
 money shall be spent for expansion and at- 
 tainment rather than mere security. "Root 
 
 r 113 -
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 hog or die" must remain somewhere in the 
 prescription. 
 
 And what safer and more glorious use 
 could be made of superfluous millions than to 
 give the able writer what in his early ma- 
 turity he needs beyond all earthly things 
 the precious gift of time ? Art is the greed- 
 iest of mistresses. Time she does not nibble 
 at; she devours. Art is the most jealous of 
 mistresses. In youth and in middle or later 
 age she will share her chosen one with busi- 
 ness, with teaching, with law, the labors of 
 the hack, and routine of every description. 
 But there is a year or two or more when she 
 must have all of him body and soul. All 
 his thought, all his time, must be hers. Some 
 fortunates can yield, more must resist for 
 lack of sustenance, and lead a double life, not 
 richly productive. An endowment for leisure 
 
 leisure to create, for those who have proved 
 114
 
 PATRONS AND PATRONAGE 
 
 their potentiality how has such an obvious 
 asset for a nation escaped its gift of millions? 
 For it must be remembered that the pa- 
 tron did not, as the vulgar suppose, save 
 places at his table for needy creators merely 
 because he hungered for praise. That is too 
 easy an explanation. He desired, as we all 
 desire, a more interesting life. They made 
 life more interesting for him by giving it 
 beauty, vividness, and significance the ser- 
 vice of literature. Education is one way of 
 making life more valuable; literature is 
 another. Neither should be pauperized or 
 driven into commercialism. Both (until the 
 millennium, when we shall be paid what work 
 is worth in terms of true value to the human 
 race ; when perhaps not so many as now will 
 feel the burden of millions), both may be 
 
 helpfully subsidized. 
 
 H. S. C. 
 
 115
 
 COTERIES 
 
 THERE is gossip in literature as well as in 
 politics. If it is no more reliable, it is usual- 
 ly less malicious; but there has been edge to 
 recent discussion of those mutual admiration 
 societies unlimited, called coteries, that spe- 
 cialize in publicity and have been sometimes 
 successful in making men and women fa- 
 mous by the simple device of mentioning 
 them at least three times a day. It sounds 
 like the Buddhist's attempt to secure the at- 
 tention of his god by numerous twists of his 
 prayer wheel. Yet, whereas the Buddhist's 
 success is perhaps open to speculation, abun- 
 dant instances prove (so it is said) that if a 
 
 group of friends shout each the other's name 
 117
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 at the great god Public he will turn his hairy 
 ear, listen, and believe. 
 
 In London two coteries are said to dom- 
 inate the field of current literature. If you 
 write for fame it is well to belong to one or 
 the other of them praise your friends and 
 be praised by them, damn and be damned by 
 (a kind of reverse publicity) your enemies. 
 But as the rival magazines around which the 
 two coteries centre are published in the same 
 street, and the editors thereof frequently 
 lunch together, there is always the possi- 
 bility of trading votes, or of a union against 
 the outsider. 
 
 Are there literary coteries organized for 
 mutual puffery in America? If so, the worse 
 for American literature. Are there groups 
 of friends and admirers who appreciate good 
 work done obscurely and endeavor to obtain 
 
 recognition for it? If not, the fact would 
 118
 
 COTERIES 
 
 be surprising. Let those who believe that 
 literature needs no advertisement consider 
 how sound literature which happens not to 
 be popular is to be brought before its best 
 readers if not by its friends. 
 
 The publishers, speaking generally, do not 
 do it. They are forced by what are believed 
 to be the rules for success to praise all their 
 books with a completeness that detracts from 
 emphasis ; and if there is any difference to be 
 made, then they must praise most highly the 
 books that will sell most readily. They dare 
 not (here is the vicious circle) advertise a 
 newcomer whose sole virtue is the excellence 
 of his art until he has already been so much 
 advertised that it pays to advertise him. 
 
 The general magazines will not do it. 
 They must play for circulation, because with- 
 out circulation they cannot print as many and 
 
 as expensive copies as our magazines must 
 119
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 print nowadays to be regarded as respectable. 
 They will play up their own coterie of es- 
 tablished reputations, but new writers must 
 pay an entrance fee in the shape of a "story" 
 that will please everybody or have it paid for 
 them in reputation made by their friends. 
 
 Critical reviews can do something for 
 sound literature by obscure writers (whether 
 new or old), but in a world of shrill adver- 
 tisement and raucous claims of everything 
 for everybody they can do relatively little. 
 Editors are fallible; there are many books; 
 reviewers are no more trustworthy than 
 editors; space is at a premium; and the ob- 
 scure by its very obscurity is hard to distin- 
 guish and dangerous to praise. The duty 
 and the privilege of such reviews are clear. 
 The performance will always be lagging. 
 
 We should therefore be charitable, at the 
 
 least, toward the coterie here in America. 
 120
 
 COTERIES 
 
 The poet who stops his public reading to 
 speak well of another's poems may con- 
 ceivably be paying a debt, but more probably 
 is moved by enthusiasm for good poetry that 
 he knows and his hearers do not. The 
 novelist who praises his friend's novel may 
 be hoping for a return of the consideration, 
 but more probably is stirred by a sense of 
 merit unrewarded. There Is a loyalty to 
 the profession among authors as among 
 journalists. Both classes must labor against 
 a proprietary public that will accept the in- 
 different in preference to the best, the cheap 
 instead of the expensive. There are books, 
 now justly famous in American literature, 
 that would never have been published if the 
 friends of the authors had not urged their 
 publication, which would have been little 
 read if some group of admirers (a coterie) 
 
 had not publicly praised them. Something 
 121
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 should be said for the coterie. It is de- 
 plorable when it is used to exploit publicity. 
 
 It is good when it is honest. 
 
 H. S. C. 
 
 122
 
 HOW CLASSICS ARE MADE 
 
 THE question at this writing is no longer, 
 What is a classic? The publishers settled 
 that long ago. A classic is a small, dun 
 book, dog-eared, with to-morrow's assign- 
 ment written on the fly leaf. Or it is a solid 
 volume, handsomely upholstered, of the kind 
 that is described as 8to or 4to and obviously 
 belongs in a set. 
 
 The vital question is, How can a classic 
 be made? For, curiously enough, in an age 
 supposedly enamored of the ephemeral, 
 classics are, financially speaking, an asset. 
 They constitute the surplus of a publishing 
 business, and a reasonable percentage of each 
 new generation of authors must be classi- 
 cized, added to surplus, so to speak, if the 
 123
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 business is to remain sound. But how can a 
 classic be made? 
 
 It was made in the old days by sweating 
 brains and toiling imagination, until thought 
 and experience were distilled into expression. 
 It won its way to recognition or it met instant 
 approval: it was damned by the critics or 
 was welcomed by them; in any case, it sur- 
 vived, and grew better and sweeter as the 
 temporary in its pages blurred and the per- 
 manent gained emphasis. 
 
 But publishers nowadays have different 
 ideas. They believe in speeding up the slow 
 processes of fame. Sweating labor, toiling 
 imagination, the slow ripening of apprecia- 
 tion, these with them are vieux jeu, useful but 
 not indispensible. Go to, they say, we need a 
 classic. And their procedure is not unlike the 
 famous generations of the Bible ; for Adver- 
 tisement begets Publicity, and Publicity be- 
 124
 
 HOW CLASSICS ARE MADE 
 
 gets Notoriety, and Notoriety begets Puffery, 
 and Puffery begets Fame, and Fame begets a 
 classic, which lives in the publisher's list from 
 generation unto generation. 
 
 There must be a seed of Jacob from which 
 all the prodigious growth may spring; there 
 must be a good book, or, preferably, books; 
 but with sound seed, good manure, and a 
 proper cultivation anything is possible. 
 
 The experiment begins (to change the fig- 
 ure) with a gentle snow of press notices, 
 whispering: "He is great"; "he is famous"; 
 
 "Professor approves him" ; "the 
 
 Review ranks him with Fielding"; "the Pres- 
 ident is reading him." Follows a blast from 
 the middle page of some weekly: "Did you 
 
 know that G was an American classic? 
 
 Read what they sayl" 
 
 Then silence for a while to give the essay- 
 ists, sluggish folk, time to turn uneasily in 
 125
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 their desk chairs, hear that another writer is 
 worthy of "serious attention," and write. 
 Essayists are the priests of classic making. 
 They pour the sacred oil. But much is 
 spilled, and much of it is water. 
 
 Then, by prearrangement, come mighty 
 configurations on the rear pages of nationally 
 circulated journals; family interiors with chil- 
 dren in process of being cultivated, bookcases 
 
 full of the works of G , pictures of 
 
 G in boxes, pictures of his heroes, his 
 
 heroines, in characteristic attitudes. Also 
 riddles, as: "If you were caught between 
 floors in an elevator with a Bolshevik and a 
 
 Vampire what would you do? Read G 
 
 and learn what Joseph did." And then sub- 
 scription offers, by sets, with a guarantee that 
 a signature brings you intellectual happiness 
 for life. 
 
 Last state of all, some one lectures on 
 126
 
 HOW CLASSICS ARE MADE 
 
 G to the French Academy; he is re- 
 viewed (with gross errors of locality and a 
 misspelling of his middle name) in the Lon- 
 don Athena, and the Literary Digest reports 
 him as having been heard of in Oxford 
 (though not in the Bodleian). The classic 
 is made. 
 
 The publishers, to tell truth, are often 
 right (let us say almost every other time) in 
 their selection of material for classics. And 
 since publishers are not mere traders of the 
 printed page, but gentlemen at least as cul- 
 tivated as critics and writers of editorials, 
 this is not surprising. Even the much- 
 maligned publicity agent knows a good book 
 when he sees one. 
 
 I do not, as Caesar remarked, much 
 dislike the matter, but the manner of their 
 speech. It is not what they do. Heaven 
 
 knows, literature, and American literature, 
 127
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 when it is good (great, one need not say) 
 deserves all the honest advertising that can 
 be given it. It is the way they do it. If 
 some corn-fed writer of the Middle West, 
 some chronicler of the deserted New Eng- 
 land farm, some Californian, brilliant with 
 the white light of the high Sierras, has writ- 
 ten well, has made a bid for a popularity last- 
 ing beyond his first editions, let us not be 
 niggardly in critical praise or advertisement. 
 But overpraise will not insure him for poster- 
 ity, and notoriety brings its reaction. En- 
 tered to the sound of horns and trumpets 
 under surplus, he may prove to be watered 
 stock, a bond with no security behind it. 
 
 Publishers should be prevented, under 
 pain of loss of copyright, from using the 
 Word "classic" except at the equinoxes, and 
 never for any author born after the mid 
 
 nineteenth century. 
 
 H. S. C. 
 128
 
 PERNICIOUS LITERATURE! 
 
 A VERY plausible case may be made out for 
 the perniciousness of literature. Philoso- 
 phically considered, of what do the great 
 books we read for our education consist? Of 
 ideals belonging to a culture different from 
 ours; of a morality based upon different con- 
 ditions; of standards of chivalry, romance, 
 class duty, which, however applicable once, 
 for us, at best, are arbitrary; of taboos, re- 
 ligious, ethical, social, which have lost their 
 raison d'etre. 
 
 And of what do the good books of this 
 generation fundamentally consist? Of at- 
 tempts to impose upon the imagination of 
 
 the reader the ideas of contemporary life 
 129
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 achieved by some partial observer; of an 
 imperfect philosophy of living stereotyped in 
 its imperfections and circulated widely. 
 
 The result (so it is said) is a cramping of 
 natural development. Facts we feed and 
 grow upon: but false ideas, stale principles, 
 illusory ideals (like Scott's pseudo-mediaeval- 
 ism) clog the digestion, set up mental aches 
 and pains, cause abnormalities, and check 
 growth or thwart it. We have to live in 
 the present; but even the new books we read 
 would persuade us to think like 1919 or 
 1920; indeed, the prejudices and preposses- 
 sions of these books belong roughly a decade 
 earlier. If we take to the classics, Boswell 
 argues a fantastic feudalism; Shakespeare a 
 departed aristocracy; Milton a lost theology; 
 Keats lives in a world where industrialism 
 does not exist. We may enjoy their books, 
 
 nourish our imaginations there, escape from 
 130
 
 PERNICIOUS LITERATURE 
 
 life as it is. But we are marked by the ex- 
 perience; we are held back; we lose our men- 
 tal freedom. 
 
 And therefore imaginative literature is 
 pernicious, and the better it is, the worse 
 for us ! 
 
 There is no escaping this argument by 
 denying it totally. It is through books which 
 are the containers of tradition that the dead 
 hand of the past reaches out to clutch. The 
 merest popular novel in gay slip covers when 
 analyzed reveals a complex of soul-numbing 
 ingredients that is perfectly appalling. Ideas 
 of honor drifted down from mediaeval 
 France; vague religious beliefs, part Chris- 
 tian, part Hebrew, part Mithraic; concep- 
 tions of a "gentleman" and a "lady" which 
 belong to early Victorian literature ; a moral 
 code which came from Switzerland via Scot- 
 land and Ulster; neo-romantic sentimental- 
 131
 
 SATURDAY PAPERS 
 
 ism left over from the 40's this is just a 
 beginning. 
 
 Do not think that you can read a book, 
 even a bad book, without encountering con- 
 ventions of thought which are as incongruous 
 in this age as herds of bison or knights in 
 armor. You take your sacred individuality 
 in hand every time you open a book. You 
 never shut one without having drunk in tradi- 
 tion with your draught. 
 
 All this is true, even if somewhat exag- 
 gerated in statement. But why have we be- 
 come so arrogant about sacred individuali- 
 ties? Since when has a man ceased to take 
 his ease in his Shakespeare which he reads 
 for the exalting of his spirit, and for the love 
 of life, and for laughter and beauty be- 
 cause he fears corruption from some slant 
 on the mob, some hint of a trace of a moral 
 
 code no longer workable ! Since when have 
 132
 
 PERNICIOUS LITERATURE 
 
 we feared to share the spiritual experiences 
 of our ancestors (and this is literature) lest 
 these should persuade us to live, think, be- 
 lieve like them! But if we have any indi- 
 viduality worth considering we cannot be like 
 them ; and our thoughts will be poor thoughts, 
 and our life a thin one, if we are afraid of 
 our past. Only a coward thinks that litera- 
 ture is pernicious because it is old. 
 
 H. S. C. 
 
 133
 
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