C-NRLF 
 
 ON AMERICAN BOOKS 
 F. Hackett 
 
 
 
LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 DAVIS 
 
THE FREEMAN PAMPHLETS 
 
 ON AMERICAN BOOKS 
 
 Edited by 
 
 FRANCIS HACKETT 
 
 A symposium by five American critics 
 as printed in the London Nation 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 B. W. HUEBSCH, INC. 
 
 M C M X X 
 
ON AMERICAN BOOKS 
 
 Edited by 
 
 FRANCIS HACKETT 
 
 A symposium by five American critics 
 as printed in the London Nation 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 B. W. HUEBSCH, INC. 
 MCMXX 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNI\-PSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 DAVIS / 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 
 B. W. HUEBSCH, INC 
 
 PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. 
 
The contents of this pamphlet appeared as an 
 American supplement to the London Nation in 
 April, 1920. It was edited by Mr. Francis Hackett 
 after conversation with Mr. Massingham, editor of 
 the Nation, during the latter's visit to America. It 
 seemed to both men that a presentation to the Brit 
 ish of the state of letters in America would not be 
 untimely. 
 
 By arrangement with Mr. Massingham, and with 
 the consent of the authors who were good enough 
 to restore their respective articles to their original 
 form, Americans may now see their literature as in 
 a mirror. In fairness to the writers, the reader is 
 reminded that these papers were prepared quickly, 
 for purposes of a weekly publication and with a 
 view to stimulating interest rather than to give final 
 judgments. As artists they were reluctant to assent 
 to this reprint, but they yielded to persuasion good- 
 naturedly. 
 
 September, 1920. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 _ PAGE 
 
 AMERICAN CRITICISM TO-DAY . by J. E. Spingarn . 5 
 
 RECENT AMERICAN POETRY . by Padraic Colum . 15 
 
 THE LITERARY CAPITAL OF 
 
 THE UNITED STATES . . . by PL L. Mencken . 31 
 
 PHILOSOPHY IN AMERICA . . by Morris R. Cohen . 39 
 
 THE AMERICAN NOVEL . . . by Francis Hackett . 52 
 
American Criticism To-Day 
 
 AN American swashbuckler of letters has described 
 what is probably the Englishman's view of Amer 
 ican criticism. " The typical literary product of the 
 country," he says, " is still a refined essay in the 
 Atlantic Monthly, by Emerson, so to speak, out of 
 Charles Lamb, the sort of thing one might look to 
 be done by a somewhat advanced English curate." 
 And if Englishmen go to the Atlantic Monthly 
 and similar journals for America's outlook on life 
 or letters, that is the sort of thing they will often 
 find. 
 
 Only too much of American criticism is still of this 
 character the work of men escaping from diffi 
 culties by the half-hearted methods of reasonable 
 compromise that serve well enough in politics, but 
 fail in the arts, where all depends on what Keats 
 called a " fine excess," even when the excess is that 
 compression and restraint which, according to Goe 
 the, proves the master. Creative work of real 
 power, with the real tang and gusto of American 
 life, reaches Europe often enough, but only critics 
 of the most thin, timid, and derivative type seem 
 able to find any, even if a rather condescending, audi 
 ence, in England. 
 
 In America of late the critics have more than will 
 ingly grouped themselves according to the standards 
 of Old and New. On the surface the point at issue 
 
 5 
 
6 J.E. SPINGARN 
 
 sometimes seems almost a question of geography: 
 Does the Muse prefer the climate of New England 
 or the Middle West? Is it Pegasus, or a screech 
 owl, that is now hovering over Chicago? But at 
 bottom it is the old problem of the literary influence 
 of Europe, and how far the new America is to cut 
 loose from the older and more derivative literature 
 of New England. It is not wholly a new question, 
 for it has mildly agitated men's minds'ever since the 
 Declaration of Independence, and over seventy years 
 ago, in the jingling rhymes of his " Fable for 
 Critics," Lowell stated some of its aspects clearly 
 enough. 
 
 The older critics of to-day, those who have for 
 some time spoken with the most authority, have 
 scarcely concerned themselves with this problem. 
 They have conceived of themselves as citizens of a 
 Republic of Letters in which geographical bound 
 aries seemed almost literary accidents. They have 
 defined these boundaries often enough, but without 
 any personal sense of their relation to them. Mr. 
 Brownell, whether in u French Traits " or " Amer 
 ican Prose Masters," is alike carrying on the tradi 
 tions of the best French criticism, with its modeled 
 phrases and its clearness of architectonic, though 
 with less of its clearness in the substance of his 
 thought. Mr. Woodberry, in " The Heart of 
 Man," " The Torch," and " Masters of Literature," 
 is an inheritor of the Lowell tradition, in whom, de 
 spite many new influences, New England idealism car 
 ries on its appointed task of illuminating the meeting- 
 point of art and life. His biographies of Emerson 
 and Hawthorne have few equals among the briefer 
 
AMERICAN CRITICISM TO-DAY 7 
 
 histories of literary lives; and the best of his essays 
 on the great writers have a unity and lift that make 
 many of Lowell's seem those of a shrewd but old- 
 fashioned amateur. Mr. Huneker, in u Icono 
 clasts " and u Egoists," is the irresponsible 
 dilettante, for whom all the arts are an equal obses 
 sion, with a curiosity and flair for what is really dis 
 tinctive wherever he may find it, but with much of 
 Remy de Gourmont's interest in not obviously essen 
 tial detail. But perhaps least " American " of all 
 to an Englishman (for Englishmen have a very 
 special conception of what an American should be) 
 will appear Professor Santayana's " Interpretations 
 of Poetry and Religion " and " Three Religious 
 Poets," the work of a Harvard philosopher for 
 whom criticism has been merely an incident in a 
 remarkable career, and who writes always with a 
 high-bred and subtle distinction not unlike Cardinal 
 Newman's. Whether he is concerned with Lucre 
 tius or Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe, he has New 
 man's gift of at once illuminating and yet obscuring 
 his subject. He broods with delicate pleasure and 
 a keen mind over these greatest of writers; but the 
 work of more modern men men no more modern 
 than Whitman and Browning seems to him the 
 " poetry of barbarism." 
 
 There are younger critics who agree with him in 
 this verdict if all men short of forty may be 
 called young but none who can state it with the 
 same serenity and detachment. For, like all men 
 who espouse a cause and marshal all their forces in 
 the struggle, they take on the color of the gladiator 
 and the controversialist. The critics of to-day, like 
 
8 J.E. SPINGARN 
 
 the critics of the age of Boileau or the Romantic 
 Movement, feel forced, willy nilly, to take sides. 
 The new age and the new literature are facts, over 
 whelming facts, and everyone appears to think that 
 he must be for them or against them. 
 
 In the first place, there are the academic pessi 
 mists, among whom the best known are Paul Elmer 
 More and Professor Irving Babbitt. Under the lit 
 erary editorship of Mr. More, the New York 
 Nation continued to be (what it had been for 
 years) the organ of America's best scholarship, and 
 became, in addition, the high citadel of critical con 
 servatism. The ten or more volumes of his u Shel- 
 burne Essays," made up largely of his Nation 
 articles, represent the high-water mark of American 
 reaction. One after another the writers of the 
 modern world are (to use a phrase of his own) 
 " stretched on the rack of a harsh ethical theory." 
 Professor Babbitt's interest is still less predomin 
 antly literary; literature or criticism as an art seems 
 scarcely to exist for him; he lives in a world of 
 abstractions in which poems and novels serve merely 
 as documents in the history of culture. The books 
 in which he has presented this reaction in systematic 
 form, " The New Laokoon," the " Masters of Mod 
 ern French Criticism," and " Rousseau and Roman 
 ticism," seem pathetic illustrations of misused power. 
 For these men have the learning and culture of the 
 best academic critics of France; but what avails their 
 petulant erudition if it serves no other purpose than 
 to whine over the irrevocable past and to sneer at 
 the aspirations of modern men? To have a new 
 and original theory of the arts is for them " to part 
 
AMERICAN CRITICISM TO-DAY 9 
 
 company with Plato and Aristotle, and prove the 
 Greeks incompetent in matters of beauty " ! 
 Romanticism and the romantic temperament are 
 their special aversions. Why do these men harp on 
 this subject with an irritating iteration? Why does 
 the parvenu harp incessantly on the bad manners of 
 those about him? These men are themselves 
 Romanticists, with the romantic distaste for reality, 
 the romantic yearning for an imaginary past; they 
 are lashing their own hated weaknesses when they 
 seem to be lashing the world about them. Here are 
 the sad stigmata of the sterile soul. 
 
 In the second place, there are the modernists. 
 They have this in common, that they believe all ear 
 lier American literature, except Walt Whitman (and 
 possibly Emerson and Poe), vieux jeu and irretriev 
 ably bad. They also seem to agree that there are 
 no good critics in America. The ground for these 
 beliefs is that there has been too much mimicry of 
 Europe, too little concentration on our own life and 
 art. Most of them (though to this the little Lon 
 don-born circle of American Imagists is an excep 
 tion) seem to think that an American writer should 
 deal only with American life, and more particularly 
 with contemporary American life. In this they are 
 merely reviving some of the oldest illusions of crit 
 icism that the critic can determine in advance the 
 subjects of creative artists, that some subjects are 
 good material and others bad, and that any subject 
 can be made other than a theme of contemporary 
 life by the living poet. One who served in the 
 Great War may say without misunderstanding that 
 patriotism is a political and not an artistic ideal. 
 
(10 J.E.SPINGARN 
 
 But what may be without foundation for any rea 
 soned aesthetic theory may for the historic moment 
 be good practical advice. An older America did 
 need liberation from the long serfdom to 
 Europe and the mere parrot-like acceptance and 
 reiteration of her ideals and verdicts. There is no 
 real disparity between the demand that what has 
 been crude and raucous in American criticism needs 
 more culture, and the demand that American crit 
 icism should cease to be derivative and mimetic; for 
 what may be needed after all is one of the finest 
 products of culture, a true and original independence 
 of judgment and taste. 
 
 So independence, even in its transitional stage of 
 irritable revolt, deserved a welcome. This " new 
 freedom " has been furthered by many journals, by 
 many newspapers and reviews Reedy' s Mirror., 
 the Little Review, the Dial, the various poetry 
 magazines, Braithwaite's annual reviews of poetry 
 in the Boston Transcript and elsewhere, the 
 short-lived Seven Arts, the New Republic under 
 Francis Hackett (himself one of the keenest and 
 most delightful of our reviewers), and the liter 
 ary supplements of some of the daily newspapers, 
 among which Llewellyn Jones's in the Chicago 
 Evening Post has in this respect been a pioneer. 
 The general average of American reviewing is still 
 deplorable, as the author of any new book learns 
 only too soon; but we have at least reached the 
 stage, thank heaven, where every book worth while 
 is sure of some comment that goes to the very heart 
 of the subject. 
 
 Our modernists, then, are for the most part in- 
 
AMERICAN CRITICISM TO-DAY II 
 
 spirited by the sense of change and controversy. 
 They have the American feeling that things can be 
 changed, and literature as easily as a political sys 
 tem. They are chiefly concerned with problems of 
 practical wisdom; they skim lightly over the deep 
 sea of aesthetic thought; indeed, they all suffer from 
 want of brooding over the meaning of art. Thus 
 Van Wyck Brooks, in his earlier books, preached a 
 Middle Western theory of the new freedom (picture 
 to yourself young America writing Matthew 
 Arnold's theories of literature as a " criticism of 
 life " into the literary platform of the Progressive 
 Party!); and something of the same extra-literary 
 pre-occupation, with a new psychological twist, re 
 appears in his brilliant and remarkable study of 
 Mark Twain, which gives Mr. Brooks a place of 
 distinction in American criticism. The most raucous 
 and the most untameable is H. L. Mencken. He 
 uses a vernacular which Englishmen will recognize 
 as " American," and his thought has some of the 
 raciness of his own vernacular. Read his book on 
 the u American Language," a veritable encyclo 
 paedia of native idioms, and consider its challenge: 
 American speech is no longer to be regarded as sub 
 ject to British opinion, or even as a joint heritage of 
 the English-speaking world, but as a new and won 
 derful thing whose growth is to be entrusted to the 
 central authority of America only, to remake as 
 French or Italian remade its ancestral Latin, if need 
 be. Or read his "Prefaces" and "Prejudices," 
 full of a vitality and a verve that make one forget 
 lapses of taste and "smart Aleck" wit; here at 
 least is none of that thin anaemic hesitancy that has 
 
12 J. E. SPINGARN 
 
 been the earmark of the " best critics " of America's 
 past. His criticism has some of the virtues of the 
 surgeon's knife. He is undisciplined, even vulgar, 
 but keen with the love of literature and fearless of 
 what is new and unapproved. 
 
 Finally, there are the apologists and interpreters 
 of the " new poetry," the creators of a theory of an 
 " American Renaissance," including among many 
 others Amy Lowell and Louis Untermeyer, he with 
 the shrewdness and wit of Manhattan, she with the 
 self-assurance of Brahmin New England. Mr. 
 Untermeyer's " New Era in American Poetry " is 
 intelligent, sympathetic, often brilliant, with an eye 
 and ear for every new singer, however uncertain may 
 be his voice. It interprets the surface of things 
 with a remarkable shrewdness; but as a reprint of 
 occasional reviews it foregoes the effort of transmut 
 ing the snap judgments of journalism into the con 
 sidered and rounded judgments of literature, as if 
 the kaleidoscope were the fore-ordained instrument 
 of criticism. Miss Lowell has a " theory of 
 poetry " ; it, too, is concerned with the surface of 
 things, with the practical problems of meter, meta 
 phor, the choice of words and subjects, and other 
 matters in which America may have needed her keen 
 admonition and instruction. But her greatest serv 
 ice to criticism has been in interpreting contemporary 
 poets. In her " Six French Poets " and her " Tend 
 encies of Modern American Poetry " she does not 
 dissipate her forces over the whole field, but with 
 masculine directness and energy she selects her sub 
 jects from among the proved, the unproved, and the 
 unapproved; and daring ta deal with the latest poet 
 
AMERICAN CRITICISM TO-DAY 13 
 
 as if he (or sometimes she) were a classic, compels 
 attention by a certain naive sincerity, and almost 
 persuades us at times that hillocks are mountains, 
 and geese, swans. 
 
 In the field of dramatic criticism, Ludwig Lew- 
 isohn of the Nation and Francis Hackett of the 
 New Republic tower above their fellows, and 
 seem almost the harbingers of a new school. With 
 them we say farewell to the old mumblejumble 
 about " dramatic technique," " dramaturgic skill," 
 and the " theory of the theater," which for a genera 
 tion has served our critics both as an excuse for not 
 thinking and as a ground for accepting the sorriest 
 plays. Here at least are a new spirit and a new 
 approach; a play ceases to be a product of special 
 machine-made rules, and becomes a work of art, to 
 be judged by the standards common to all such 
 works. Mr. Lewisohn is one of the few critics in 
 America for whom learning and a wide culture have 
 served, not as a shackle, but as a ladder and a liber 
 ation. 
 
 The English reader of this roll-call of critics may 
 ask: Have any of these critics interpreted a single 
 writer with the touch of a master, or added a single 
 aesthetic idea to the sum total of our knowledge of 
 the meaning of art? Perhaps the English reader 
 may find an answer by asking the same question con 
 cerning the critics of his own country to-day. The 
 Victorian poet who said that " good critics are rarer 
 than good authors " was right. To feel deeply and 
 yet to think profoundly, to know much and yet to 
 write well it is no easy staircase that the great 
 critic has to climb. 
 
14 J . E. SPINGARN 
 
 It may be too much to ask of our critics that they 
 shall have a rounded aesthetic theory, though the 
 greatest criticism has most often proceeded from 
 philosophical minds. It may be too much to ask of 
 our critics that they shall be creative artists, though 
 the greatest modern critics have conceived of their 
 work as in the nature of an aesthetic creation. It may 
 be too much to ask of our critics that they shall 
 possess a rounded scholarship, though the greatest 
 critics have possessed a wide and disciplined culture. 
 But to ask that the moment's mood shall give way 
 to a deeper brooding on the meaning of beauty, that 
 literature be regarded with discreet reverence as an 
 art and not merely as a document in the history of a 
 nation's culture, and, above all, that criticism con 
 ceive of itself as sharing somewhat in the art which 
 it interprets, and speak with an independence of 
 judgment and taste worthy of its meaning and pur 
 pose this is not too much to ask, or to hope 
 from, the new America. 
 
 J. E. SPINGARN. 
 
Recent American Poetry 
 
 THERE was a boy in Springfield, Illinois, who refused 
 to grow up. Others started on their career of be 
 ing railways presidents and bank presidents and 
 corporation lawyers, but he refused to take on a 
 status. Moreover, he demanded things such as 
 boys in other countries are free of a folk-lore and 
 a romance of chivalry. He would not have these 
 as transplanted things; he wanted them to be as 
 close to him as the electric sign and the movie hall. 
 They were not given him, and so he began to create 
 them. The stars of the film, Mary Pickford and 
 Mae Marsh, became his Dulcineas and his Unas. 
 And he turned to the people whose speech and ges 
 ture had the most flavor of folk-life the negroes 
 
 and out of their story and their extravagant 
 music he made poems that have the quality of myth 
 and folk-lore. 
 
 The boy in Springfield was Vachel Lindsay. His 
 great discovery was the four-time measure in poetry 
 
 the measure related to rag-time and the negro 
 Jazz music. Gilbert Chesterton has used it to pro 
 duce a staccato effect in his ballad " Lepanto " 
 
 Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far, 
 Don John of Austria is going to the war, 
 Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold, 
 In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold, 
 15 
 
l6 PADRAIC COLUM 
 
 It was just the measure for a new troubadour to take 
 hold of a troubadour of the roads streaming with 
 automobiles. 
 
 All Vachel Lindsay's effort is to make a heritage 
 of romance for America. And it is not the rootless 
 romance of a Longfellow he would embody, but a 
 romance that will not be aloof from the picture- 
 house and the universal automobile. He himself is 
 the troubadour of his romance, reciting his poems 
 publicly according to a highly-suggestive method he 
 has worked out. He would, he has told us, appeal 
 to the higher vaudeville imagination. But what he 
 brings to that imagination is something profoundly 
 serious and profoundly ethical. He has made for 
 America a romance with most unexpected colors 
 the blackness of the Congo in his great negro poem; 
 the silks and brocades of China in his poem about the 
 Chinese laundry; the red of fire that is in his " Fire 
 man's Ball," and the glow of the West that is in his 
 " Santa Fe Trail." It is difficult to quote from 
 Lindsay's characteristic poems, for they have the 
 expositions and the climaxes and the stresses of a 
 drama, and in addition they are not free from stage 
 directions. However, I venture to quote a passage 
 from " The Santa Fe Trail." 
 
 This is the order of the music of the morning: 
 First, from the far East comes but a crooning; 
 The crooning turns to a sunrise singing. 
 Hark to the calm-horn, balm-horn, psalm-horn; 
 Hark to the faint-horn, quaint-horn, saint-horn. . . . 
 
 Hark to the pace-horn, chase-horn, race-horn! 
 And the holy veil of the dawn has gone, 
 
RECENT AMERICAN POETRY 17 
 
 Swiftly the brazen car comes on. 
 
 It burns in the East as the sunrise burns, 
 
 I see great flashes where the far trail turns. 
 
 Its eyes are lamps like the eyes of dragons. 
 
 It drinks gasoline from big red flagons. 
 
 Butting through the delicate mists of the morning, 
 
 It comes like lightning, goes past roaring. 
 
 It will hail all the wind-mills, taunting, ringing, 
 
 Dodge the cyclones, 
 
 Count the milestones, 
 
 On through the ranges the prairie-dog tills, 
 
 Scooting past the cattle on the thousand hills. . . . 
 
 Ho for the tear-horn, scare-horn, dare-horn, 
 
 Ho for the gay-horn, bark-horn, bay-horn. 
 
 Ho for Kansas, land that restores us 
 
 When houses choke us, and great books bore us ! 
 
 Sunrise Kansas, harvester's Kansas, 
 
 A million men have found you before us. 
 
 Far away the Rachel- Jane, 
 
 Not defeated by the horns, 
 
 Sings amid a hedge of thorns: 
 
 " Love and life, 
 
 Eternal youth 
 
 Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet! 
 
 Dew and glory, 
 
 Love and truth, 
 
 Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet!" 
 
 It was in 1913 that Vachel Lindsay published 
 " General Booth Enters Heaven," the first of his 
 poems that had the appeal to the higher vaudeville 
 imagination. That was a few months after the 
 foundation of the Magazine he was published in 
 Poetry, a Magazine of Ferse, founded by Miss 
 
>l8 PADRAIC COLUM 
 
 Harriet Monroe herself an excellent poet with 
 the help of some of the business men of Chicago. 
 In the following year Poetry began to publish note 
 worthy contributions from another Illinois man, 
 Edgar Lee Masters. Mr. Masters was not a youth 
 like Vachel Lindsay; he was an established Chicago 
 lawyer, who, rumor had it, was about to be raised to 
 the bench when his friend William Jennings Bryan 
 discovered that he had unorthodox ideas about the 
 Deity. His contributions to Poetry with others 
 added appeared with the plain and irreplacable title 
 " Spoon River Anthology." 
 
 It is a book made up of readings from tombstones 
 of an Illinois village churchyard. Not epitaphs as 
 they were, but as they should have been written. 
 Did Mr. Masters owe his idea to a story of Mau 
 passant's? It mattered not, for he had made the 
 idea his own by the force with which he possessed 
 and expressed it. The result is a book which has 
 done much to carry American poetry away from the 
 Academic, from the Colonial tradition. 
 
 Critics might point out that when the " Spoon 
 River Anthology " was praised as poetry some odd 
 commitments were made. Obviously the form he 
 used the short unrhymed monologue gave Mr. 
 Masters little trouble after he had written the first 
 score of pieces; there could have been little of the 
 conquest of his material which every poet imposes 
 upon himself. One could reply that the poet was 
 shown in the background created a background 
 of tragic defeat against which were placed individ 
 uals absorbed in the comedy they were playing. 
 Mr. Masters showed himself a poet when he con- 
 
RECENT AMERICAN POETRY 19 
 
 templated the whole of the Spoon River community, 
 and a satirist when he wrote of particular life in it. 
 
 " The Spoon River Anthology " is really a terrific 
 satire on American life on the predatory-Puritan 
 American life. Its fortune is unaccountable. For 
 Americans dislike satire as the boy or girl dislikes 
 it; as those committed to an optimistic philosophy 
 dislike it. And yet here is a satire that attains to 
 the circulation of a best seller. Satire, of course, 
 is not always mockery; satire can be grave and 
 come out of a pitiful heart, and Mr. Masters' satire 
 had the quality of being grave and pitiful. 
 
 He has published many volumes since " The 
 Spoon River Anthology " " Songs and Satires,' 7 
 "Towards The Gulf," " The Great Valley." 1 
 Many of the important poems in these volumes cele 
 brate the history, the landscape, the personages of 
 "The Great Valley " the Valley of the Miss 
 issippi. Edgar Lee Masters is prodigal in his 
 poetry satires and hymns to the flesh and studies 
 in personality make up a great bulk of his work. 
 For him Browning's method is still to the good, and 
 a great deal of his poetry is in the form of dramatic 
 monologues. He has indicted men and women, but 
 observe how manfully he can praise a man by that 
 memorable poem of his u Simon surnamed Peter," 
 " You were called by Him, Peter, a rock, but we 
 give you the name of Peter the Flame." As an 
 example of Mr. Masters' work when it is at once 
 simple and intense, I quote one of the epitaphs of 
 " The Spoon River Anthology." 
 
 1 Since this was written Mr. Masters has published what is per 
 haps his most revealing book "Starved Rock." 
 
20 PADRAICCOLUM 
 
 ANNE RUTLEDGE 
 
 Out of me unworthy and unknown 
 
 The vibrations of deathless music; 
 
 " With malice toward none, with charity for all." 
 
 Out of me the forgiveness of millions towards millions, 
 
 And the beneficent face of a nation 
 
 Shining with justice and truth. 
 
 I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds, 
 
 Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln, 
 
 Wedded to him, not through union, 
 
 But through separation. 
 
 Bloom forever, O Republic, 
 
 From the dust of my bosom. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln ! He is the figure that the poets 
 of The Great Valley Masters, Lindsay, Sandburg 
 look to as the shining hero. If we put beside the 
 above a poem out of Carl Sandburg's " Corn Husk- 
 ers " we get a significant difference between Edgar 
 Lee Masters and a Chicago poet who has followed 
 him in publication. Here is Sandburg's : 
 
 FIRE LOGS 
 
 Nancy Hanks dreams by the fire ; 
 Dreams, and the logs sputter, 
 And the yellow tongues climb. 
 Red lines lick their way in flickers. 
 Oh, sputter, logs. 
 
 Oh, dream, Nancy. 
 Time now for a beautiful child. 
 Time now for a tall man to come. 
 
 Masters takes life at the end, and the younger Sand 
 burg takes it at the beginning. 
 
 There is a wonderful sense of beginnings in Carl 
 
RECENT AMERICAN POETRY 21 
 
 Sandburg's poems. His first book was called " Chi 
 cago Poems," and he writes again and again about 
 noises and crowds. But he is essentially a poet of 
 spaces and silences. His poems give us the prairie 
 landscape under its everlasting aspects of spring and 
 winter, summer and fall. And the memory of the 
 Indian dominates his prairie and his prairie-cities. 
 Sandburg has not Whitman's great rhythm, but he 
 has something of the freshness and the abundance of 
 Whitman's great vocabulary. And there is a kin 
 ship with earth and sky and water in all he writes. 
 Here is a poem from his second and latest book 
 " Corn Huskers " : 
 
 VALLEY SONG 
 
 Your eyes and the valley are memories. 
 
 Your eyes fire and the valley a bowl. 
 
 It was here a moonrise crept over the timberline. 
 
 It was here we turned the coffee cups upside down. 
 
 And your eyes and the moon swept the valley. 
 
 I will see you again to-morrow. 
 
 I will see you again in a million years. 
 
 I will never know your dark eyes again. 
 
 These are three ghosts I keep. 
 
 These are three sumach-red dogs I run with'. 
 
 All of it wraps and knots to a riddle: 
 I have the moon, the timberline, and you. 
 All three are gone and I keep all three. 
 
 So much for the poets of the Great Valley. The 
 poets of New England have their own distinctive- 
 ness. They have not, however, the same clear his 
 toric beginning, nor that relation of publication 
 
22 PADRAICCOLUM 
 
 which would let us put them in an historical order. 
 Edwin Arlington Robinson, for instance, was pub 
 lishing before there was a definitely American move 
 ment in poetry. His verse which marks no innova 
 tion is very different from the verse of the Middle- 
 Western poets; his outlook is more sophisticated. 
 But his people belong to a definite American milieu. 
 
 Some writers are born with a feeling for local 
 life, some achieve that feeling, and some everlast 
 ingly thrust it upon themselves. Edwin Arlington 
 Robinson belongs to the first company at all 
 events he parades no discovery of locality. In 
 America too there are decaying cities, and Robin 
 son's books " Captain Craig," " The Town by the 
 River," " The Man Against the Sky " give us the 
 men and women of such places. 
 
 Edwin Arlington Robinson is the poet of enig 
 matic character. He is too, the poet of suspended 
 drama. All his people are characters in a drama of 
 which the climax or the anti-climax has not been 
 reached. Have they passed the worst, or do they 
 face their worst? They do not know, and we are 
 not permitted to guess. Meanwhile they show a 
 defeated life but yet a life that knowing itself 
 defeated wins to a liberation which makes it a little 
 free and a little triumphant. " We have each a 
 darkening hill to climb," " I'll soon be changing as 
 all do to something I have always been," " The 
 lonely changelessness of dying." These are phrases 
 that show Mr. Robinson's reading of life. He can 
 write to a brave music, but he uses traditional verse- 
 forms, often, I think, to mark a mockery. If I were 
 asked to give his characteristic poem I should quote 
 
RECENT AMERICAN POETRY 23 
 
 " The Poor Relation " from " The Man Against the 
 Sky." These are the last three of the nine stanzas 
 of the poem. 
 
 None live who need fear anything 
 
 From her, whose losses are their pleasure; 
 
 The plover with a wounded wing 
 
 Stays not the flight that others measure; 
 
 So there she waits, and while she lives, 
 
 And death forgets, and faith forgives, 
 
 Her memories go foraging 
 
 For bits of childhood song they treasure. 
 
 And like a giant harp that hums 
 On always, and is always blending 
 The coming of what never comes 
 With what is past and has an ending, 
 The city trembles, throbs, and pounds 
 Outside, and through a thousand sounds 
 The small intolerable drums 
 Of Time are like slow drops descending. 
 
 Bereft enough to shame a sage 
 
 And given little to long sighing, 
 
 With no illusion to assuage 
 
 The lonely changelessness of dying, 
 
 Unsought, unthought-of, and unheardj 
 
 She sings and watches like a bird, 
 
 Safe in a comfortable cage 
 
 From which there will be no more flying. 
 
 If there is in America one poet more than another 
 whose name is a challenge, that poet is Miss Amy 
 Lowell. She is the propagandist of innovation. 
 She is besides a most abundant writer, and again and 
 again she makes in unrhymed and freely-rhythmed 
 verse poems that are undeniably beautiful. 
 
24 PADRAICCOLUM 
 
 She has had her failures, of course. But with 
 her abundance she can afford to efface them. Not 
 only is she a poet of distinction, but she is a liber 
 ating influence on American poetry. The new forms 
 for which she stands are likely to further the produc 
 tion of a distinctive poetic literature for America. 
 These new forms are words in a new declaration of 
 independence. For the American poet of the future 
 may be the child of a Syrian, a Greek, a Swede or a 
 Russian. The traditional rhythm of English verse 
 may not be in his blood, and he may fumble in his 
 poetry if he wishes to use it. But Miss Lowell 
 helps to fling into currency a verse rhythm that he 
 can mould as he pleases. And as he uses it he will 
 not be embarrassed by memories of forgotten dances 
 and disused harp-strings that are in the traditional 
 poetic measures of the British Islands. 
 
 Miss Lowell is above everything else a teller of 
 stories or rather a teller of stories that are at 
 tached to stories. She has an extraordinary love 
 a child's love fortunately retained for things as 
 things; windmills and balloons, jewels and violins 
 seen as things, pieces of furniture in an old attic. 
 She has named one of her books u Men, Women 
 and Ghosts," but I think a fitter title would have 
 been u Men, Women and Things." 
 
 She considers not always, happily that her 
 story is bound to an action. Now action with Amy 
 Lowell is certainly a way of spoiling something. It 
 cuts across her imaginative array of things. In one 
 of her poems " The Red Lacquer Music Stand " she 
 shows us a delightful collection of things in an old 
 attic. But then there comes along a boy who wants 
 
RECENT AMERICAN POETRY 25 
 
 to burn a sacrifice on one of the pieces and our 
 whole delighted contemplation is broken short. 
 
 I have written about her stories and about her 
 poems about things. But in Miss Lowell's volumes 
 are to be found three or four poems of personal 
 desire that are as intense as anything in American 
 poetry. One of these is " Patterns." Here the 
 story, the character, the things seen, all pass into one 
 thing a throb of the heart. I want to quote this 
 poem, but it is not possible to quote all of it. 
 
 PATTERNS 
 
 I walk down the garden paths, 
 
 And all the daffodils 
 
 Are blowing, and the bright blue squills. 
 
 I walk down the patterned garden-paths 
 
 In my stiff, brocaded gown. 
 
 With my powdered hair and jewelled fan, 
 
 I too am a rare 
 
 Pattern. As I wander down 
 
 The garden paths. 
 
 My dress is richly figured, 
 
 And the train 
 
 Makes a pink and silver stain 
 
 On the gravel, and the thrift 
 
 Of the borders. 
 
 Just a plate of current fashion, 
 
 Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes. 
 
 Not a softness anywhere about me, 
 
 Only whalebone and brocade. 
 
 And I sink on a seat in the shade 
 
 Of a lime tree. For my passion 
 
 Wars against the stiff brocade. 
 
 The daffodils and squills 
 
26 PADRAICCOLUM 
 
 Flutter in the breeze 
 
 As they please. 
 
 And I weep; 
 
 For the lime-tree is in blossom 
 
 And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom. 
 
 Underneath the fallen blossom 
 
 In my bosom. 
 
 Is a letter I have hid. 
 
 It was brought to me this morning by a rider from the Duke. 
 
 "Madame, we regret to inform you that Lord Hartwell 
 
 Died in action Thursday se'nnight." 
 
 As I read it in the white, morning sunlight, 
 
 The letters squirmed like snakes. 
 
 
 
 In Summer and in Winter I shall walk 
 
 Up and down 
 
 The patterned garden-paths 
 
 In my stiff, brocaded gown. 
 
 The squills and daffodils 
 
 Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters, and to snow. 
 
 1 shall go 
 
 Up and down, 
 
 In my gown. 
 
 Gorgeously arrayed, 
 
 Boned and stayed. 
 
 And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace 
 
 By each button, hook, and lace. 
 
 For the man who should loose me is dead, 
 
 Fighting with the Duke in Flanders, 
 
 In a pattern called war. 
 
 Christ! What are patterns for? 
 
 The poet most obviously of New England is 
 Robert Frost. I remember Robert Frost's once tell 
 ing me that his poems owed something of their incep- 
 
RECENT AMERICAN POETRY 27 
 
 tion to Virgil to the " Georgics," I imagine. It 
 would be curious to trace the likeness between 
 these poems in which conversations are interrupted 
 by telephone calls and the idyls of Virgil's husband 
 men. And yet a kinship exists in the reality of 
 scenes and people that are in both. 
 
 What is it that makes Robert Frost's people like 
 Wordsworth's or Burns' people and unlike Crabbe's 
 or Goldsmith's people? In the poetry of the eigh 
 teenth century we walk down a laneway and cross a 
 field and come to a place that we judge at once, say 
 ing, " It is horrible that they had to put up that 
 workhouse, or that they had to level the cottage." 
 And then we hear a story that is exciting and im 
 pressive, and the person or people that the story is 
 told about become familiar to us as familiar as a 
 brother, or a schoolmate, or a teacher. But Words 
 worth's or Burns' people can never be familiar to us 
 in that way. They can be no more familiar to us 
 than we can be familiar to ourselves. And Robert 
 Frost's people, with the scene they move in, have the 
 same sort of inaccessible life. 
 
 His fields with their stone-fences, his pastures with 
 their apple trees, his frame houses, have a character 
 of their own. And he can give character to inani 
 mate things to an unlived-in cottage, to the 
 neglected wood-pile that warms " the frozen swamp 
 . . . with the slow, smokeless burning of decay." 
 A wall has some undiscovered enemy, as we know 
 when we read one of his poems; and as he plods and 
 labors after the explanation, we get some hint of an 
 earthly mystery. Robert Frost has made no obvi 
 ous innovation in verse-technique. He has made a 
 
28 PADRAICCOLUM 
 
 certain featureless blank-verse his own; using this 
 verse, his men and women who obviously have little 
 eloquence, can reach to a speech that has beauty and 
 tragic power. I should like to quote from his dram 
 atic idyls " The Death of the Hired Man," " A 
 Servant to Servants," " The Self-seeker," in " North 
 of Boston"; and "The Home Stretch," and 
 " Snow " in " Mountain Interval," but isolated pas 
 sages do not show the power that is in these poems. 
 Instead I shall quote one of the short poems, not in 
 blank-verse, from Mr. Frost's latest book, " Moun 
 tain Interval." 
 
 THE GUM GATHERER 
 
 There overtook me and drew me in 
 
 To his down-hill, early morning stride, 
 
 And set me five miles on my road 
 
 Better than if he had had me ride, 
 
 A man with a swinging bag for load 
 
 And half the bag wound round his hand. 
 
 We talked like barking above the din 
 
 Of water we walked along beside. 
 
 And for my telling him where I'd been 
 
 And where I lived in mountain land 
 
 To be coming home the way I was, 
 
 He told me a little about himself. 
 
 He came from higher up in the pass 
 
 Where the grist of the new-beginning brooks 
 
 In blocks split off the mountain mass 
 
 And hopeless grist enough it looks 
 
 Ever to grind to soil for grass. 
 
 (The way it is will do for moss). 
 
 There he had built his stolen shack. 
 
 It had to be a stolen shack 
 
 Because of the fears of fire and loss 
 
RECENT AMERICAN POETRY 29 
 
 That trouble the sleep of lumber folk: 
 Visions of half the world turned black 
 And the sun shrunken yellow in smoke. 
 We know who when they come to town 
 Bring berries under the wagon seat, 
 Or a basket of eggs between their feet; 
 What this man brought in a cotton sack 
 Was gum, the gum of the mountain spruce. 
 He showed me lumps of the scented stuff 
 Like uncut jewels, dull and rough. 
 It comes to market golden brown; 
 But turns to pink beneath the teeth. 
 
 I told him this is a pleasant life 
 To set your breast to the bark of trees 
 Th'at all your days are dim beneath, 
 And reaching up with a little knife, 
 To loose the resin and take it down. 
 And bring it to market when you please. 
 
 America to-day is lucky enough to have in these a 
 company of poets whose names sound a challenge. 
 There are other names, of course, and they are by 
 no means secondary. But the poets named here 
 Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, 
 Vachel Lindsay, Edwin Arlington Robinson are the 
 ones whose banners wave over the field. 
 
 Is any one of them the heir of Whitman? No. 
 Whitman's heir has not yet been born. The poets 
 named have an idiom of their own an idiom that 
 in no way comes near Whitman's. They have a 
 power which comes out of a discovery which is 
 marked in English and in Irish poetry the discov 
 ery of local life, and that which made John Mase- 
 field and J. M. Synge has made too Edgar Lee Mas- 
 
30 PADRAICCOLUM 
 
 ters, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay and Robert 
 Frost. These poets, with Amy Lowell and Edwin 
 Arlington Robinson, have lifted American poetry 
 away from the academic, which in America is always 
 the Colonial. America may have to wait as long for 
 the heir of Whitman as England had to wait for the 
 heir of Chaucer, and there may be as much of 
 growth and change between. That change and 
 growth must eventuate in the emergence of America 
 as a full nationality. Her nationality has been a 
 political one, but it is now becoming an intellectual 
 one and the poets of to-day are the signs of, and the 
 help to a full nationality. 
 
 PADRAIC COLUM. 
 
The Literary Capital of the United States 
 
 HOWEVER largely New York may bulk in the imag 
 ination of Europe or in the sight of those Americans 
 who hang upon the front and rear edges of the 
 materialistic conception of history, it ceased long ago 
 to hold any leadership in that department of the 
 national life of the republic which has to do with 
 beautiful letters, or even to bear a part of any solid 
 consequence therein. There is no longer a New 
 York school of writers, as there was in Irving's day, 
 and in Poe's, and even in Whitman's and Mark 
 Twain's; there are, indeed, not more than two or 
 three New York writers in practice to-day who are 
 worthy of serious consideration at all. Scarcely a 
 book of capital importance to the national literature 
 has come out of the town for a generation. Nearly 
 every work of genuine and arresting originality pub 
 lished in the United States during that time, nearly 
 every work authentically representative of the life 
 and thought of the American people, from George 
 Ade's " Fables in Slang," to Edgar Lee Masters's 
 " The Spoon River Anthology,' and from Frank 
 Norris's " McTeague " to Theodore Dreiser's " Sis 
 ter Carrie," has been put together in the hinterland 
 and by a writer innocent of metropolitan influence. 
 
 The phenomenon, so far as I know, is unique. It 
 is impossible to imagine saying that of London, or of 
 
 31 
 
32 H. L. MENCKEN 
 
 Paris, or of Berlin, or even of such somnolent and 
 second-rate capitals as Christiania and Berne. But 
 New York itself is unique. Alone among the great 
 cities of the world it has no definite intellectual life, 
 no body of special ideals and opinions, no aristo 
 cratic attitudes. Even the common marks of nation 
 ality are few and faint; one half wonders, observing 
 its prodigious crowds and noting their lethargic re 
 actions, if it is actually American at all. Huge, 
 Philistine, self-centered, ignorant and vulgar, it is 
 simply a sort of free port, a Hansa town, a place 
 where the raw materials of civilization are received, 
 sorted, baled, and reshipped. In all the fine arts it 
 is a mere wholesaler, and vastly less the connoisseur 
 than the auctioneer. It has in Central Park the 
 western world's largest storehouse of artistic fossils 
 and mummies, real and fraudulent, good and bad 
 and yet it seldom, if ever, produces a picture worth 
 looking at. Its peculiarly obnoxious social pushers, 
 Christian and Jew, pour out millions for music every 
 year and yet even Philadelphia has a better 
 orchestra. It prints four-fifths of the books of the 
 nation and nine-tenths of its magazines and yet 
 the salient men among its native authors are Robert 
 W. Chambers, Owen Johnson, and James Mont 
 gomery Flagg. 
 
 Life buzzes and coruscates on Manhattan Island, 
 but the play of ideals is not there. The New York 
 spirit, for all the gaudy pretentiousness of the town, 
 is a spirit of timidity, of regularity, of safe medio 
 crity. The typical New Yorker, whether artist or 
 mere trader, feels the heavy hand of the capitalistic 
 bourgeoisie upon him at all times. He is always 
 
THE LITERARY CAPITAL 33 
 
 looking over his shoulder furtively, in fear that he 
 may have done something that is not approved, and 
 so brought down upon himself some inexplicable 
 penalty. Here are the great rewards, but here also 
 are the inviolable taboos. The individual, facing 
 that relentless regimentation, is afraid to be himself. 
 Above all, he is afraid to be an American. The 
 town is shoddily cosmopolitan, second-rate Euro 
 pean, extraordinarily cringing, a sort of international 
 Jenkins. 
 
 The artist arriving from the provinces is con 
 fronted at once by that alarmed orderliness, that 
 fear of ideas. If he is still young and full of gas 
 and able to take a chance, he commonly throws him 
 self gallantly into Greenwich Village, the tawdry 
 Latin Quarter of the town only to find presently 
 that Greenwich Village has been regimented too, 
 that its revolts are artificial, and empty, that commer 
 cial Jews behind the door pull its wires. But if, as 
 is more likely, he comes in with a bit of sound work 
 behind him, and is eager to get firm earth under him, 
 then his descent follows more swiftly. A subtle 
 something wars upon the elements that make him 
 what he is. His ideas are delicately flattened out. 
 He learns to do things as they should be done. New 
 York swarms with such wrecks of talents men 
 who arrived with one or two promising books behind 
 them, and are now highly respectable inmates of 
 publishers' bordellos. 
 
 But the United States, for all that, occasionally 
 produces a good book. Now and then it even pene 
 trates to Europe Dreiser's " Sister Carrie," the 
 Masters' " Anthology," London's " The Call of the 
 
34 H.L.MENCKEN 
 
 Wild." More often it is hauled up by the Atlantic 
 Willa Gather's " My Antonia," Sherwood Ander 
 son's " Winesburg, Ohio," Carl Sandburg's " Chi 
 cago Poems," Cabell's " The Cream of the Jest." 
 Where do they come from? Not from New York: 
 it produces nothing, as we have seen. Not from Bos 
 ton: it is as tragically dead as Alexandria or Padua. 
 Not from Philadelphia: it is an intellectual slum. 
 Not from San Francisco: its old life and color are 
 gone, and the Methodists, Baptists and other such 
 vermin of God now dominate it. Not from Wash 
 ington, or St. Louis, or New Orleans, or Baltimore : 
 they are simply flabby and degraded villages. Nay, 
 from none of these, but from Chicago ! Chicago 
 the unspeakable and incomparable, at once the most 
 hospitably cosmopolitan and the most thoroughly 
 American of American cities : 
 
 " Hog Butcher for the World, 
 Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, 
 Player with Railroads, and the Nation's Freight Handler; " 
 
 " Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, 
 half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool 
 Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads, and 
 Freight Handler." 
 
 In Chicago there is the mysterious something that 
 makes for individuality, personality, charm; in Chi 
 cago a spirit broods upon the face of the waters. 
 Find a writer who is indubitably an American in 
 every pulse-beat, an Amercan who has something 
 new and peculiarly American to say and who says it 
 in an unmistakably American way, and nine times 
 
THE LITERARY CAPITAL 35 
 
 out of ten you will find that he has some sort of 
 connection with the gargantuan abattoir by Lake 
 Michigan that he was bred there, or got his start 
 there, or passed through there in the days when he 
 was young and tender. 
 
 It is, indeed, amazing how steadily a Chicago 
 influence shows itself when the literary ancestry and 
 training of present-day American writers are investi 
 gated. The brand of the sugar-cured ham seems to 
 be upon all of them. With two exceptions, there is 
 not a single American novelist of the younger gen 
 eration that is, a serious novelist, a novelist de 
 serving a civilized reader's notice who has not 
 sprung from the Middle Empire that has Chicago 
 for its capital. I nominate the two exceptions at 
 once : Abraham Cahan, Lithuanian Jew, always 
 vastly more Russian than American, and James 
 Branch Cabell, last survivor of the old aristocracy 
 of the South. All the rest have come from the Chi 
 cago palatinate : Dreiser, Anderson, Miss Cather, 
 Mrs. Watts, Tarkington, Wilson, Herrick, Patter 
 son, even Churchill. It was Chicago that produced 
 Henry B. Fuller, the pioneer of the modern Amer 
 ican novel. It was Chicago that inspired and de 
 veloped Frank Norris, its first practitioner of genius. 
 And it was Chicago that produced Dreiser, undoubt 
 edly the greatest artist of them all. 
 
 The astounding literary productivity of Indiana, 
 the most salient phenomenon of latter-day American 
 literature, is largely ascribable to the influence of 
 the inland capital by the lake. The limits of the city 
 run almost to the Indiana frontier : the youth of the 
 state turns to it instinctively; it as plainly dominates 
 
36 H. L. MENCKEN 
 
 the energy and aspiration of all that fertile region 
 as Boston dominates the six states of New England. 
 From Ade to Dreiser nearly all the bright young 
 Indianians have gone to Chicago for a semester or 
 two, and not only the Indianians, but also the young 
 sters of all the other Middle Western States. It 
 has drawn them in from their remote wheat-towns 
 and far-flung railway junctions, and it has given them 
 an impulse that New York simply cannot match 
 an impulse toward independence, toward honesty, 
 toward a peculiar vividness and naivete in brief, 
 toward the unaffected self-expression that is at the 
 bottom of sound art. New York, when it lures such 
 a recruit eastward, makes a pliant conformist of him, 
 and so ruins him out of hand. But Chicago, how 
 ever short the time it has him, leaves him irrevocably 
 his own man, with a pride sufficient to carry through 
 a decisive trial of his talents. 
 
 What lies at the bottom of all this, I dare say, is 
 the elemental curiosity of a simple and somewhat 
 ignorant people the naive delight of hog butchers, 
 freight handlers, the stackers of wheat, in the grand 
 clash and clatter of ideas. New York affects a 
 superior sophistication, and in part it is genuine; 
 Boston is already senile; Philadelphia is too stupid to 
 be interested. But in Chicago there is an eager 
 ness to hear and see, to experience and experiment. 
 The town is colossally rich; it is ever-changing; it 
 yearns for distinction. The new-comers who pour in 
 from the wheatlands want more than mere money; 
 they want free play for their prairie energy; they 
 seek more imaginative equivalent for the stupendous 
 activity that they were bred to. It is thus a superb 
 
THE LITERARY CAPITAL 37 
 
 market for merchants of the new. And in particular 
 it is a superb market for the merchant whose wares, 
 though new, have a familiar air which is to say, 
 on the aesthetic plane for the sort of art that is 
 recognizably national in its themes and its idioms, 
 and combines a Yankee sharpness of observation 
 with a homely simplicity the sort of art that one 
 finds in a novel by Dreiser or a poem by Sandburg 
 the only sort that stands free of imitation and is 
 absolutely American. 
 
 For such originality Chicago has a perennial wel 
 come, and where the welcome is, there the guests are 
 to be found. Go back twenty or thirty years, and 
 you will scarcely find an American literary move 
 ment that did not originate under the shadow of the 
 stockyards. In the eighteen-nineties New York 
 turned its eyes toward England, but Chicago had 
 Savoys of its own, and at least one publishing house 
 that grandly proclaimed the doom of the old order, 
 and trotted out its Fullers and Mary MacLanes, and 
 imported Ibsen and Maeterlinck, then as strange as 
 Heliogabalus. The new poetry movement is thor 
 oughly Chicagoan; the majority of its chief poets 
 are from the Middle West; Poetry, the organ of 
 the movement, is published in Chicago. So with the 
 little theater movement. Long before it was heard 
 of in New York, it was firmly on its legs in Chicago. 
 And to support these various reforms and revolts, 
 some of them already of great influence, others abor 
 tive and quickly forgotten, there is in Chi 
 cago a body of critical opinion that is unsurpassed 
 for discretion and intelligence in America. The 
 New York newspapers, in the main, employ third- 
 
38 H. L. MENCKEN 
 
 rate journalistic hacks as dramatic critics, and their 
 book reviews are ignorant and ridiculous. But in 
 Chicago there is an abundance of sound work in both 
 fields, and even the least of the newspapers makes a 
 palpable effort to be honest and well-informed. . . . 
 So much for the Chicagoiad. Lying out there 
 where the prairie runs down to the Great Lakes lies 
 the real capital of the United States. It is over 
 grown, it is oafish, it shows many of the characters 
 of the upstart and the bounder, but under its surface 
 there is a genuine earnestness, a real interest in ideas, 
 a sound curiosity about the prodigal and colorful life 
 of the people of the republic. The literature of the 
 country, at the moment, is in a state bordering upon 
 paralysis. The war greatly augmented its chronic 
 imitativeness; worse, it greatly strengthened the Pur 
 itan machinery for putting down intellectual experi 
 ment and enterprise; the statute books are heavy 
 to-day with ferociously repressive laws, and many of 
 them bear harshly on the man of letters. But men 
 of high hope look for a reaction toward freedom in 
 ideas, and, what is more, toward a sane and self- 
 respecting nationalism. If it ever comes, it will not 
 come from New York: New York is too timorous. 
 It will come, I think, from Chicago. 
 
 H. L. MENCKEN. 
 
Philosophy in America 
 
 IN philosophy as well as in law and literature, the 
 United States have remained British colonies. 
 This does not mean that the gates of intellectual 
 America have been completely shut to French and 
 German thought. The community of western civil 
 ization, which found in Latin its common tongue, has 
 never been completely broken up; and it is doubtful 
 whether the philosophic mind or genius can ever be 
 entirely nationalized. But the ties of a common 
 language and community of traditions have undoubt 
 edly withstood a Declaration of Independence, two 
 wars, and an unprecedented influx of foreign peoples. 
 Even after our graduate schools had been organized 
 on German models and a large number of those who 
 wished to qualify as teachers had deemed it neces 
 sary to take their Ph.D. in Germany, our prevailing 
 philosophic modes did not deviate much from the 
 fashions followed in Great Britain. Our most in 
 fluential thinkers like Fiske, James, Dewey, and even 
 Royce, have been brought up in the tradition set by 
 Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Mill: and where Ger 
 man influence is undeniable, it has largely come to 
 us through the mediation of British thinkers, such 
 as Coleridge, Hamilton, T. H. Green, Bosanquet, 
 and Bradley. The result is that one can pass 
 from the pages of our philosophical reviews to those 
 of British publications without noticing any general 
 
 39 
 
40 MORRIS R. COHEN 
 
 difference except perhaps a somewhat higher stand 
 ard of philosophic workmanship prevailing in the 
 latter. The greater maturity of British philosophic 
 writings can partly be explained by the external con 
 ditions which in the United States are unfavorable 
 for long-sustained and deliberate philosophic com 
 position. With few notable exceptions, such as W. 
 M. Salter, H. R. Marshall, and C. A. Strong, our 
 philosophic writers are all professional teachers who 
 are always under some official or moral pressure to 
 publish, even though their long schedules of routine 
 teaching, heavy administrative duties, and inade 
 quate pay, do not leave them much leisure or free 
 dom of mind for philosophic thinking, reading and 
 writing. 
 
 The recent publication of Mr. Kemp Smith's mag 
 nificent " Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure 
 Reason" (1918), written, if not perhaps entirely 
 conceived in Princeton University, serves to remind 
 us that while British influence in our literature has 
 been predominantly English and in the realm of our 
 common law almost exclusively so, in philosophy the 
 Scottish influence has been out of all proportion to 
 the numerical strength of the Scottish people. The 
 natural or common-sense realism of the school of 
 Thomas Reid was introduced in Princeton by Presi 
 dent Witherspoon, a Scottish immigrant who be 
 came one of the signers of our Declaration of Inde 
 pendence. It spread in the beginning of the nine 
 teenth century until it became the predominant phil 
 osophy in America remaining so up to about 
 1890, when James McCosh died at Princeton, Fran 
 cis Bowen at Harvard, and Noah Porter at Yale. 
 
PHILOSOPHY IN AMERICA 41 
 
 Many reasons can be assigned for this peculiar phe 
 nomenon the superior Scottish experience in, and 
 aptitude for, intellectual controversy; the natural 
 kinship between Presbyterian theology and that of 
 Calvinistic New England; the decay of intellectual 
 traditions in the South through the economic decline 
 of the older seaboard aristocracy; and, not least, 
 the readiness with which the " philosophy of com 
 mon sense " could be adopted for purposes of dog 
 matic teaching. Being entirely free from any sub 
 tleties or unorthodox views as to the nature of the 
 material world, the soul, or God, it could easily be 
 taught in dogmatic form, and students could readily 
 recite on it. The social demands which shape educa 
 tional systems have made the American college 
 much more like a Scotch college than anything on the 
 Oxford model; i. e., it has aimed to give somewhat 
 elementary instruction in a number of subjects to a 
 great many, rather than intensive training to a select 
 class. Philosophy was thus originally taught 
 usually by the president of the college who was an 
 ordained minister as a part of Christian apolo 
 getics in the training of Christian citizens. For 
 while Church and State have been separated since the 
 end of the eighteenth century, the churches have 
 retained real control, even over colleges that are not 
 avowedly denominational. 
 
 The last decade of the nineteenth century, how 
 ever, witnessed a rapid expansion of the American 
 educational system and a transformation of our 
 leading colleges into universities. This naturally 
 created a demand for teachers more technically 
 equipped, even if more secular. The teaching of 
 
44 MORRIS R. COHEN 
 
 existence of an absolute or eternal self as a knower; 
 and (3) dualists like Rogers, Lovejoy, Pratt and 
 'Drake who, though they adhere rigidly to the ordi 
 nary distinction between subject and object, yet in 
 many ways follow the idealistic analysis of knowl 
 edge. Some years ago, George Howison and 
 Thomas Davidson represented a vigorous and pun 
 gent form of pluralistic or personal idealism in which 
 the whole universe appeared as a democracy or 
 republic of free spirits. But they seem to have left 
 no direct disciples. C. M. Bakewell of Yale who 
 was closely associated with both of these men seems 
 now a devoted follower of Royce though it should 
 be added that in Royce's later thought, pluralism 
 rather than monism is emphasized, and community 
 rather than the Absolute Spirit. 
 
 It is usual to regard both James and Dewey as 
 pragmatists, and doubtless their agreement is pro 
 found and significant; yet, in some respects, they are 
 temperamentally at the opposite poles of the phil 
 osophic sphere. While both have their roots in 
 British utilitarianism, and both follow Peirce in 
 asserting that the meaning of any truth is to be found 
 in its consequences, James insists that these conse 
 quences must be particulars, while Dewey insists that 
 the process of knowing must be practical. Dewey 
 and his followers are essentially moralists, inter 
 ested in philosophy as a help to conduct in bettering 
 or reforming the world. James is a spiritualist, 
 interested in what constitutes well-being rather than 
 well-doing. Dewey glorifies the function of the 
 intellect in the transformation of reality: James 
 trusts more to intuition as a revelation of reality. 
 
PHILOSOPHY IN AMERICA 45 
 
 Thus to James, pragmatism is a method whereby the 
 values of the old supernaturalism may still be main 
 tained, while Dewey's pragmatism or instrumental- 
 ism is a method for eliminating such concepts as God, 
 freedom, and immortality which he claims have out 
 lived their value as sanctions. Philosophy hence 
 forth must devote itself to aid in transforming our 
 empirical world. 
 
 Nearly all American pragmatists now are follow 
 ers of Dewey, who is thus the only American to have 
 founded a new philosophical school. The number 
 and the contagious enthusiasm of his disciples is con 
 tinually increasing. The recent volume of co-oper 
 ative studies entitled " Creative Intelligence " 
 (1917) gives a fair idea of the achievement as well 
 as the programme of his school, though one of the 
 studies, that by Dr. H. M. Kallen, leans more on 
 Santayana than on Dewey. Though Dewey himself 
 disowns the intention, the Chicago School is in fact 
 distinctly hostile to purely theoretic philosophy, to 
 the satisfaction of idle curiosity or rational wonder 
 for its own sake. The intellect is to illumine var 
 ious needs and has no separate needs of its 
 own. But that one can sympathize with pragma 
 tism and yet not forego interest in metaphysical or 
 speculative philosophy has recently been brilliantly 
 shown by J. E. Boodin's " Realistic Universe " 
 
 (1917)- 
 
 At the beginning of this century the prevailing 
 Lockean dogma that the immediate object of knowl 
 edge is always an idea of our own, began to be vigor 
 ously assailed both in England and in America. 
 Though priority in this respect belongs to Mr. G. E. 
 
46 MORRISR. COHEN 
 
 Moore of Trinity, the American pioneers of this 
 movement, Woodbridge, Montague and Perry, 
 seem to have been independently determined in their 
 course Perry, through his analysis of the inade 
 quacy of Royce's claim that the idealistic position 
 has been definitely proved; Montague, through con 
 siderations which appear in the Natural Realism of 
 Thomas Case; and Woodbridge, through the rejec 
 tion of the Cartesian tradition that the mind is an 
 independent substance or bare spectator of material 
 nature. In insisting on a return to the Aristotelian 
 notion of the mind as a psyche, the form or function 
 of an organized body responding to its environment, 
 he believed himself to be also in agreement with the 
 deliverance of modern physics and biology, which 
 indicate that consciousness is an outgrowth of life 
 which has been gradually evolved on a globe orig 
 inally incapable of bearing it. 
 
 Woodbridge is one of the few Americans to insist 
 that metaphysics or philosophy of nature is of 
 greater or more primary importance than psychol 
 ogy or epistemology. The Lockean argument that 
 we must examine the mind as an instrument of 
 knowledge before we can study the nature of things 
 known he rejects as fallacious since we cannot indulge 
 in any inquiry as to the nature of knowledge without 
 assuming that some things are already known. The 
 question how knowledge in general is possible does 
 not explain anything in particular; e.g., why the 
 flowers bloom in the spring. 
 
 Woodbridge is one of the many instances of Amer 
 ican scholars and philosophers swallowed up by the 
 great Moloch of American university administra- 
 
PHILOSOPHY IN AMERICA 47 
 
 tion ; but the neo-realistic movement of which he has 
 been the pioneer has flourished, thanks partly to the 
 powerful support from the mathematical logic of 
 Bertrand Russell. Indeed, since the publication of 
 the " New Realism" (1912) by Marvin, Perry, 
 Spaulding, Montague, Holt, and Pitkin, no Amer 
 ican school has been more energetic. Marvin's " In 
 troduction to Metaphysics " and his " History of 
 European Philosophy," Spaulding's " New Nation 
 alism," Perry's " Present Tendencies of Philos 
 ophy," Holt's " Concept of Consciousness," and 
 " The Freudian Wish," as well as the periodical 
 contributions of Montague, Pitkin, and McGilvary 
 form a body of writings not paralleled during the 
 same period by any other school. Holt, in partic 
 ular, has been effective in transforming neo-realism 
 from a mere protest against the idealistic theory of 
 knowledge into a positive doctrine of neutral mon 
 ism, holding that both mental and physical complexes 
 ultimately consist of neutral logical elements. 
 
 When we turn from the problem of knowledge 
 and related psychological issues, to general meta 
 physics or to the more special philosophical sciences, 
 such as logic, ethics, philosophy of history, etc., there 
 is comparatively little to report. In the past the 
 history of philosophy occupied a large part of our 
 attention, and the Cornell School, headed by Creigh- 
 ton, Thilly, Hammond and Albee still attach great 
 importance to such studies. But the sum of our 
 achievement in this field is not to be compared with 
 such work as that of Zeller, Gomperz, Hareau, 
 Dietrici, Benn, Whitaker, Burnett or A. E. Taylor. 
 Still, one can mention Lovejoy's studies on the his- 
 
48 MORRIS R. COHEN 
 
 tory of evolution, Albee on utilitarianism, Husik on 
 medieval philosophy and Reilly on early American 
 philosophy, as notable and certainly useful contribu 
 tions. Sheldon's recent book, " The Strife of Sys 
 tems " (1918), while just and accurate in its esti 
 mate and analysis of contemporary philosophical 
 systems, including Thomism, is primarily metaphysi 
 cal rather than historical in its interest. Carefully 
 applying the principles of identity and diversity, of 
 external and internal relations, to the diverse sys 
 tems, the author has undoubtedly made the most 
 important recent contributions to the neglected field 
 of metaphysics. 
 
 In the field of logic proper the work inaugurated 
 by Chas. Peirce, the most original American phil 
 osopher, is now generally recognized as epoch-mak 
 ing. Royce's contributions in this field may perhaps 
 prove a more enduring monument than his better 
 known books. His pupils, C. I. Lewis of California, 
 and H. M. Sheffer of Harvard, are actively continu 
 ing this work. Lewis's " Survey of Symbolic 
 Logic " (1919) is one of the few recent publications 
 of which American scholarship can well be proud. 
 
 In the field of ethics, Felix Adler's " Ethical Phil 
 osophy of Life " (1918) is, whatever one may think 
 of its Kantian background, certainly a thought-pro 
 voking and soul-stirring book of a unique character. 
 Dewey's " Democracy and Education " sums up his 
 philosophy in its practical applications and incident 
 ally illumines some of the dark corners in his theo 
 retic views. 
 
 No account of American philosophy should fail to 
 mention the works of Santayana, especially his " Life 
 
PHILOSOPHY IN AMERICA 49 
 
 of Reason," the most distinctive systematic treatise 
 on philosophy that America has produced. But the 
 limits of our space will not permit justice to this 
 magnificent work. It must be remarked, however, 
 that its systematic neglect is one of the most instruct 
 ive facts about American philosophy. 
 
 This article deals with technical philosophy in 
 America rather than with the philosophy of the 
 American people. If the latter be a real entity it 
 has had remarkably little to do with the former. A 
 country that has had a political experience unique in 
 the world's history, has, up to very recently, pro 
 duced almost nothing original and important in the 
 field of professed political philosophy. No country 
 has more professional teachers of philosophy and 
 proportionately fewer readers of philosophic litera 
 ture in the general public. If the Danish philoso 
 pher Kirkgaard be right in his contention that we live 
 forward and think backward, we can say that Amer 
 ica has been too busy building up a new continent to 
 change its ancient habits of thought. So far as a 
 cloistered observer can tell, the great mass of the 
 American people are either absorbed in questions of 
 an immediately practical bearing, or else in religious 
 thought of a traditionally pietistic character. If the 
 tired strenuous business man takes to philosophy in 
 his leisure moments, he is most likely to take up with 
 the New Thought movement, which also interests 
 his more leisured wife. This diluted theosophy or 
 neo-platonism is actually the most popular philosophy 
 in America. It shows results. It brings to men 
 and women solace, comfort and success, and satis 
 fies in a quasi-intellectual way the yearning for the 
 
50 MORRISR. COHEN 
 
 Beyond which is ever the Nemesis of worldliness. 
 If the reader is inclined to scoff at and ignore the 
 genuine human service which this New Thought is 
 rendering, I hasten to recommend to him the " His 
 tory of the New Thought Movement," edited by 
 Horatio Dresser, who is a Harvard Ph.D., an ortho 
 dox professor of philosophy, and the author of books 
 which have probably sold in larger numbers than 
 those of Santayana, Royce and Dewey. 
 
 Since the war, our philosophic periodicals have 
 been devoting a larger amount of space to questions 
 of social philosophy, but so long as our philosophic 
 training is so inadequate in its preparation for the 
 scientific handling of masses of facts, we are not likely 
 to produce startling results. Our teachers of eco 
 nomics, sociology and political science have been 
 working in the main on the basis of the German his 
 torical philosophy, but the background of popular 
 American economic, political, and legal discussion is 
 still dominated by our traditional eighteenth-century 
 individualism or natural law philosophy. The writ 
 ings of Roscoe Pound, Dean of the Harvard Law 
 School, offe'r perhaps the best promise of a genuinely 
 modern contribution to social philosophy. 
 
 From the point of view of Western or European 
 culture, America has not as yet produced a philos 
 opher as influential as was Gibbs in the realm of 
 physics or Lester Ward in the realm of sociology. 
 Though Ward, and even Gibbs, may well be counted 
 among philosophers, this can be done only by dis 
 regarding the unmistakable tendency to separate 
 technical philosophy entirely from physical and social 
 
PHILOSOPHY IN AMERICA 51 
 
 theory. But James, Dewey, and Baldwin in the 
 field of psychology and education, and Chauncey 
 Wright, C. S. Peirce, Royce and Santayana in the 
 field of logic and metaphysics, are names which can 
 glorify any country. The stress of recent events has 
 not brought forth in America a thinker as clear, 
 radical, and courageous as Bertrand Russell; nor 
 have we a philosopher as pre-eminent as Bradley, 
 whose silence on the burning issues of the war is a 
 rebuke to those who forget that even in times of 
 great passion it is not meet for the philosopher to 
 add to the torrents of hasty words. 
 
 MORRIS R. COHEN. 
 
The Recent American Novel 
 
 IT is interesting to search a recent volume of English 
 critical articles, Mr. Robert Lynd's charming " Old 
 and New Masters," and not find in it one American 
 novelist. Henry James is there, but to Henry 
 James the United States was an aesthetic purgatory 
 from which he ascended to Europe. He is Mr. 
 Lynd's only American, and he no more belongs to 
 his native country than Mr. Conrad to Poland. 
 What makes the omission interesting is not at all 
 the critic's obliviousness, if it is obliviousness, but 
 the fact that this low visibility should be so much a 
 matter of course. In the English eye the American 
 novel is not yet significant. It exists. For the 
 curious everything exists. But it has not taken on a 
 very distinct and salient character. More, undoubt 
 edly, than the novels of Canada and Australia, or, 
 for that matter, the novels of Jamaica and Malta; 
 but not immeasurably more. And it cannot be ex 
 plained by saying that critics like Mr. Lynd are too 
 hard to please. He at least has a place for James 
 Elroy Flecker and for Mr. Cunninghame Graham. 
 
 This failure of the American novel to leap the 
 critical Atlantic, observable elsewhere than in Mr. 
 Lynd, may partly be accounted for by the habit of 
 English readers. Even genius has had its difficul 
 ties about arriving from Scandinavia and Russia, or 
 crossing the Irish Channel or the Straits of Dover. 
 
 52 
 
THE AMERICAN NOVEL 53 
 
 But granted the polite stare that meets the outsider, 
 and the sedate readers behind it, there are certain 
 peculiarities in the nature of the American novel 
 which indicate to some degree its comparative failure 
 to define itself. 
 
 The chief of these peculiarities, as many see them, 
 is (in the jargon of the psycho-analyst) an inferior 
 ity complex. This neurotic sense of inferiority does 
 not directly affect the great thriving class of fiction- 
 manufacturers which is common to England and the 
 United States. Novel-makers like Robert W. 
 Chambers, George Barr McCutcheon, Gene Strat- 
 ton Porter, Owen Johnson, the Pollyanna lady, 
 Harold McGrath, Thomas Dixon, and the incredible 
 Harold Bell Wright, are simply exponents of a form 
 of business enterprise to be grouped with the jam 
 and pickle business of Crosse and Blackwell, that 
 has nothing to do with art. Even men like Rupert 
 Hughes and Samuel Merwin and Meredith Nichol 
 son, who understand fiction as an art, are not free 
 from the taint of business enterprise in arranging 
 their creations. But the American novelist as artist, 
 the man of aesthetic significance, is subordinated in 
 a much subtler respect. He is the victim, ill or 
 convalescent, of what Mr. Santayana has perfectly 
 termed the "genteel tradition "; and this tradition 
 is the outcome of a national timidity a sense of 
 aesthetic inferiority. 
 
 If one were to go to the source of this tradition, 
 one would have to analyze Puritanism as well as 
 Colonialism; and nothing of America's ungracious 
 religiousness and provincialism, succeeded by com 
 mercial hurry and bustle, could be left out. But 
 
54 FRANCIS HACKETT 
 
 these are only indirect and indeed debatable con 
 tributing factors, and it is to the influence of the 
 American college and the critics bred by the Amer 
 ican college, that the genteel tradition is more 
 directly to be ascribed. At one time, the period of 
 the transcendentalists, there was a possibility that a 
 culture might be formed for the nation which would 
 permit the partial emancipation of the American 
 spirit in the severe and almost forbidding presence of 
 classical culture. But before this civilized and civ 
 ilizing culture was established, the Civil War came, 
 and with it the expansion of the railroads and the 
 incursion of the immigrants. A hasty national 
 homogeneity was then quickly developed of rapid 
 transit, cheap newspapers, standardized clothing, 
 national advertising, big business, hotels, theaters, 
 summer resorts, " mail order " houses, good plumb 
 ing, universal tooth-brushes, Ford cars and Evinrude 
 engines. This machine-process homogeneity, with 
 telegraph and telephone and rotary press and mov 
 ing picture to speed it on, outran the most desperate 
 of efforts toward cultivation. To any one who has 
 seen them, the New York elevated railway structures 
 are alone enough to indicate the untutored energy 
 which the transcendentalists had failed to harness. 
 It was energy, however, that really needed direction 
 from the aesthetic monitors of the country, or if not 
 direction, then impregnation. But these monitors, 
 chillily comparing the barbarism around them to the 
 classicism across the ocean, had little better to offer 
 than repression. 
 
 In view of the immense prestige of English fiction 
 in America through the latter part of the nineteenth 
 
THE AMERICAN NOVEE '$$ 
 
 century, with American professors and critics and 
 editors maintaining this prestige, the Atlantic sea 
 board was frigid to native fiction. The New Eng 
 land short story grew, bare and wind-beaten and 
 close to the ground, but only William Dean Howells, 
 from Ohio, could write an eager assured story like 
 u A Boy's Town," or a profoundly illuminating ver 
 sion of current life like " The Rise of Silas Lapham." 
 There were competent storytellers North and South, 
 and a few really skillful and delightful ones, but out 
 side Mr. Howells, the novel in the East was thinly 
 derivative. It would have been hard in any case, I 
 suppose, to devise against a shifting American back 
 ground such rooted and rounded histories of men 
 and women as the nineteenth-century taste in novels 
 demanded. To give to American society the living- 
 ness that American readers were finding in Turgenev 
 and Meredith, and Tolstoi and Hardy, called for 
 something not yet quite sure in common conscious 
 ness American society itself. For that reason 
 the one clear success, though at first purely popular, 
 was Mark Twain's, whose country and whose rich 
 expression of it was unlike anything European. 
 
 At the head of respectable novelists at present 
 stands Winston Churchill, a robust exponent of the 
 " genteel tradition." With him, fresher and less 
 platitudinous, are to be reckoned Ernest Poole, 
 author of " The Harbor," H. K. Webster, author of 
 " The Great Adventure," William Allen White, who 
 wrote " A Certain Rich Man," and Henry Sydnor 
 Harrison, of u Queed." Ellen Glasgow, Mary 
 Johnston of " The Long Roll," and the mellifluous 
 James Lane Allen, are representatives of the same 
 
56 FRANCIS HACKETT 
 
 class. Judge Robert Grant, who wrote " The Chip 
 pendales/' is rather more platitudinous than Winston 
 Churchill and decidedly more fatigued. Mrs. 
 Wharton is also fatigued, but for all her low temper 
 ature and the social furs with which she clothes it, 
 she is not without high distinction. Not so distin 
 guished is Mrs. Katherine Fullerton Gerould, yet 
 her short stories, " Vain Oblations," and others, 
 exhibit a fine talent marred by snobbishness. Much 
 more important, though unwieldy and clayey, is the 
 Easterner, Robert Herrick, who wrote " The Com 
 mon Lot " and " Together," in Chicago. All of 
 this group, however, may be said to be subordinate 
 as artists. Not one of them is so affluent in nature 
 or so radiant in inspiration as to overcome the heavy 
 hand of Puritanic repression or the cold hand of 
 gentility. 
 
 But beyond the Alleghany Mountains one notes a 
 different aesthetic spirit. Whatever individuality is 
 to be found in the American novel, at all comparable 
 with that of the Russian or the French novel of 
 yesterday, has been won by men and women with the 
 outlook of the pioneer. In many cases theirs has 
 been less a lyrical naturalness than a violent revul 
 sion against gentility, but even where it has been a 
 conscious revolt it has had something in it of the 
 verve of a new society, a society not digging deep 
 into its human soil but at least superficially excited 
 and strenuous in action. 
 
 The novel is, first of all, the personality's, but is it 
 by accident that California bred Jack London and 
 Frank Norris? California is neither colonial nor 
 genteel, and it gave easy birth to " The Octopus," 
 
THE AMERICAN NOVEL $J 
 
 Norris's brilliant story of warfare against railroad 
 monopoly, and " McTeague," his magnificent study 
 of an energized brute. Mrs. Atherton is also a 
 Californian and in some sense a free novelist, but not 
 even Jack London, an open-handed man who wrote 
 beyond his literary means, had the primal novelist 
 instinct of Frank Norris. 
 
 In and around the newspaper offices of the Middle 
 West, however, has developed that group of Ameri 
 can novelists whose experience defied the virus of 
 respectability. The most titantic is Theodore Drei 
 ser, much more fuscous than Frank Norris, but also 
 much more obedient to that rude experience of life 
 which the moralist and the leader-writer are always 
 asking the writer of fiction to betray. " Sister 
 Carrie " remains perhaps his best novel. David 
 Graham Phillips, another man from Indiana, had 
 persistence and strength, but no pliancy and no 
 inflection of tone. He dilated rather than imag 
 ined. Brand Whitlock, now ambassador to Belg- 
 ium> wrote several excellent novels of politics and 
 prison life, " The Thirteenth District " being a 
 quietly veristic study of the profession of machine- 
 politics. Upton Sinclair, an Easterner who has 
 moved west by natural law, showed in " The 
 Jungle " and " Love's Pilgrimage " a more extreme 
 form of naturalistic revolt than any of his contem 
 poraries, but ungoverned by any real sense of the 
 disinterestedness of art. A late comer is Sherwood 
 Anderson, author of " Windy McPherson's Son," 
 " Marching Men," and " Winesburg, Ohio " a 
 naturalist with a skirl of music haunting him. And 
 another is the Jewish editor, Abraham Cahan, whose 
 
58 FRANCIS HACKETT 
 
 " David Levinsky " is a crude but vehemently honest 
 report of the processes of the melting pot. 
 
 Because most of these men were newspaper writ 
 ers, and consequently in the thick of American activ 
 ity, they naturally resisted and resented the genteel 
 tradition. But being newspaper men, to a certain 
 extent bored outsiders as regards the regular run 
 of life and cynical insiders as regards character and 
 reputation, and yet credulous insiders as regards the 
 gigantesque and the spectacular immediately sur 
 rounding them, their revolt against gentility has been 
 open to aesthetic attack from the old guard. Yet it 
 must be said that those whose spirit was conceivably 
 finer have proved less viable. Henry B. Fuller, 
 whose " The Cliff-Dwellers " and " With the Pro 
 cession " focussed Chicago so justly and so sensi 
 tively twenty years ago, made his escape to Italy and 
 to silence. Booth Tarkington, the romancer from 
 Indiana, has hovered more closely over his era, but 
 has never quite alighted. The same may be said of 
 Hamlin Garland, who wrote " Rose of Butchers 
 Coolly " and lately " A Son of the Middle Border," 
 and of Stewart Edward White, whose " The Blazed 
 Trail " is memorable. Two other writers, Miss 
 Willa Gather and James Branch Cabell, are said to 
 have an art all their own, but I have not yet read 
 them. 
 
 What is the upshot? A cluster of common assoc 
 iations is accumulating for cultivated Americans, but 
 the upholders of the genteel tradition are still inim 
 ical to any except the recognized European accent. 
 The Puritans, on the other hand, resist everything 
 that is not purposeful or edifying. Meanwhile the 
 
THE AMERICAN NOVEL 59 
 
 men who disregard these prejudices, who face the 
 raw United States with a desperate resolution to 
 subdue it to the novel, have not as yet succeeded 
 indubitably. And, as they struggle, dramatic and 
 narrative energy has poured headlong into the chan 
 nels of poetry. Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Frost, 
 Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, and even Edwin 
 Arlington Robinson, have put into new form those 
 expressions of American reality, or their own reality 
 in terms of America, which in another society might 
 well have found form in fiction. But it is in verse, 
 not in fiction, that young America is seeking to ex 
 press itself. There are in the United States no such 
 novelists coming up as Beresford, Mackenzie, Swin- 
 nerton, Miss Richardson, Miss Delafield, Joyce. 
 
 But the possibilities of the American novel are 
 still practically untouched. One new development 
 of the novel, the egoistic form of Joyce, may easily 
 invite the men who are repressed in other directions. 
 If the novel can desert the community and the clan, 
 to become the intensive history of personality and 
 personal contacts, then the young American literary 
 artist may quickly make himself at home. But 
 granted that this is a limited possibility, out of the 
 democratic form of the Dreiser novel may come a 
 much deeper and more beautiful expression. The 
 Dreiser novel may be only a chrysalis, preserving the 
 novel until it has conquered not only the gentility but 
 the fear of free individuality which is still the great 
 est enemy of American art. 
 
 FRANCIS HACKETT. 
 
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