PESpONSffilLIJIES 
 
 sT of the "sS- 
 
 NOVELIST ^ 
 
 Frzvivk Norris
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO

 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF 
 THE NOVELIST
 
 BOOKS BY 
 FRANK NORRIS 
 
 A DEAL IN WHEAT, And Other Stories of 
 the New and Old West 
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE NOVELIST 
 
 THE PIT ) 
 
 " The Epic of the Wheat " 
 THE OCTOPUS ) 
 
 A MAN'S WOMAN 
 
 McTEAGUE 
 
 BLIZ 
 
 MORAN OF THE LADY LETTY
 
 AND OTHER LITERARY 
 ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANK NORRIS 
 
 LONDON 
 
 GRANT RICHARDS 
 1903
 
 intrb 6n /Hanfiattan \~)rtst, 
 li tto JJarh, 8. S. .
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Responsibilities of the Novelist . i 
 The True Reward of the Novelist . .13 
 The Novel with a " Purpose " . . .23 
 Story-Tellers vs. Novelists . . -35 
 The Need of a Literary Conscience . . 47 
 
 A Neglected Epic 57 
 
 The Frontier Gone at Last . , -67 
 The Great American Novelist . . -83 
 New York as a Literary Centre . -9* 
 
 The American Public and "Popular" 
 
 Fiction ...... 101 
 
 Child Stories for Adults . . , .109 
 Newspaper Criticisms and American 
 
 Fiction 117 
 
 Novelists to Order While You Wait . 125 
 The "Nature" Revival in Literature . 135 
 The Mechanics of Fiction . . .145 
 Fiction Writing as a Business . . . 155 
 The "Volunteer Manuscript" . . .167 
 Retail Bookseller: Literary Dictator . 181
 
 CONTENTS Continued 
 
 PAGE 
 
 An American School of Fiction ? . .191 
 Novelists of the Future . . . .201 
 A Plea for Romantic Fiction . . .211 
 A Problem in Fiction . . . .221 
 Why Women Should Write the Best Novels 229 
 Simplicity in Art . . . . .239 
 Salt and Sincerity . . . . .249 
 Bibliography, Essays, Articles, Letters . 305 
 
 Short Stories 307 
 
 Poems Published 310 
 
 Books Published 310
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF 
 THE NOVELIST
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF 
 THE NOVELIST 
 
 IT is not here a question of the "unarrived," 
 the "unpublished" ; these are the care-free 
 irresponsibles whose hours are halcyon and 
 whose endeavours have all the lure, all the 
 recklessness of adventure. They are not recog- 
 nized; they have made no standards for 
 themselves, and if they play the saltimbanque 
 and the charlatan nobody cares and nobody 
 (except themselves) is affected. 
 
 But the writers in question are the successful 
 ones who have made a public and to whom 
 some ten, twenty or a hundred thousand 
 people are pleased to listen. You may believe 
 if you choose that the novelist, of all workers, 
 is independent that he can write what he 
 pleases, and that certainly, certainly he should 
 never "write down to his readers" that he 
 should never consult them at all. 
 
 On the contrary, I believe it can be proved 
 that the successful novelist should be more 
 than all others limited in the nature and charac- 
 ter of his work more than all others he should 
 
 3
 
 4 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 be careful of what he says ; more than all others 
 he should defer to his audience; more than all 
 others more even than the minister and the 
 editor he should feel "his public" and watch 
 his every word, testing carefully his every 
 utterance, weighing with the most relentless 
 precision his every statement; in a word, pos- 
 sess a sense of his responsibilities. 
 
 For the novel is the great expression of mod- 
 ern life. Each form of art has had its turn at 
 reflecting and expressing its contemporaneous 
 thought. Time was when the world looked to 
 the architects of the castles and great cathedrals 
 to truly reflect and embody its ideals. And 
 the architects serious, earnest men produced 
 such " expressions of contemporaneous thought" 
 as the Castle of Coucy and the Church of 
 Notre Dame. Then with other times came 
 other customs, and the painters had their day. 
 The men of the Renaissance trusted Angelo 
 and Da Vinci and Velasquez to speak for them, 
 and trusted not in vain. Next came the age of 
 drama. Shakespeare and Marlowe found the 
 value of x for the life and the times in which 
 they lived. Later on contemporary life had 
 been so modified that neither painting, archi- 
 tecture nor drama was the best vehicle of 
 expression, the day of the longer poems arrived, 
 and Pope and Dryden spoke for their fellows.
 
 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 5 
 
 Thus the sequence Each age speaks with 
 its own peculiar organ, and has left the Word 
 for us moderns to read and unders and. The 
 Castle of Coucy and the Church of Notre Dame 
 are the spoken words of the Middle Ages. The 
 Renaissance speaks and intelligib y to us 
 through the sibyls of the Sistine chapel and the 
 Mona Lisa. "Macbeth" and "Tamerlane" 
 resume" the whole spirit of the Elizabethan age, 
 while the "Rape of the Lock" is a wireless 
 message to us straight from the period of the 
 Restoration. 
 
 To-day is the day of the novel. In no other 
 day and by no other vehicle is contempora- 
 neous life so adequately expressed; and the 
 critics of the twenty-second century, reviewing 
 our times, striving to reconstruct our civiliza- 
 tion, will look not to the painters, not to the 
 architects nor dramatists, but to the novelists 
 to find our idiosyncrasy. 
 
 I think this is true. I think if the matter 
 could in any way be statisticized, the figures 
 would bear out the assumption. There is no 
 doubt the novel will in time "go out" of popu- 
 lar favour as irrevocably as the long poem has 
 gone, and for the reason that it is no longer 
 the right mode of expression. 
 
 It is interesting to speculate upon what will 
 take its place. Certainly the coming civiliza-
 
 6 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 tion will revert to no former means of expressing 
 its thought or its ideals. Possibly music will 
 be the interpreter of the life of the twenty-first 
 and twenty-second centuries. Possibly one 
 may see a hint of this in the characterization 
 of Wagner's operas as the " Music of the Future." 
 
 This, however, is parenthetical and beside 
 the mark. Remains the fact that to-day is the 
 day of the novel. By this one does not mean 
 that the novel is merely popular. If the novel 
 was not something more than a simple diver- 
 sion, a means of whiling away a dull evening, 
 a long railway journey, it would not, believe 
 me, remain in favour another day. 
 
 If the novel, then, is popular, it is popular 
 with a reason, a vital, inherent reason ; that is 
 to say, it is essential. Essential to resume 
 once more the proposition because it expresses 
 modern life better than architecture, better 
 than painting, better than poetry, better than 
 music. It is as necessary to the civilization 
 of the twentieth century as the violin is neces- 
 sary to Kubelik, as the piano is necessary to 
 Paderewski, as the plane is necessary to the 
 carpenter, the sledge to the blacksmith, the 
 chisel to the mason. It is an instrument, a 
 tool, a weapon, a vehicle. It is that thing 
 which, in the hand of man, makes him civilized 
 and no longer savage, because it gives him a
 
 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 7 
 
 power of durable, permanent expression. So 
 much for the novel the instrument. 
 
 Because it is so all-powerful to-day, the 
 people turn to him who wields this instrument 
 with every degree of confidence. They expect 
 and rightly that results shall be commen- 
 surate with means. The unknown archer who 
 grasps the bow of Ulysses may be expected by 
 the multitude to send his shaft far and true. 
 If he is not true nor strong he has no business 
 with the bow. The people give heed to him 
 only because he bears a great weapon. He 
 himself knows before he shoots whether or no 
 he is worthy. 
 
 It is all very well to jeer at the People and at 
 the People's misunderstanding of the arts, but 
 the fact is indisputable that no art that is not 
 in the end understood by the People can live 
 or ever did live a single generation. In the 
 larger view, in the last analysis, the People 
 pronounce the final judgment. The People, 
 despised of the artist, hooted, caricatured and 
 vilified, are after all, and in the main, the real 
 seekers after Truth. Who is it, after all, whose 
 interest is liveliest in any given work of art? 
 It is not now a question of esthetic interest 
 that is, the artist's, the amateur's, the cogno- 
 scente's. It is a question of vital interest. Say 
 what you will, Maggie Tulliver for instance
 
 8 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 is far more a living being for Mrs. Jones across 
 the street than she is for your sensitive, fastidi- 
 ous, keenly critical artist, litterateur, or critic. 
 The People Mrs. Jones and her neighbours 
 take the life history of these fictitious charac- 
 ters, these novels, to heart with a seriousness 
 that the esthetic cult have no conception of. 
 The cult consider them almost solely from their 
 artistic sides. The People take them into their 
 innermost lives. Nor do the People discrimi- 
 nate. Omnivorous readers as they are to-day, 
 they make little distinction between Maggie 
 Tulliver and the heroine of the last "popular 
 novel." They do not stop to separate true 
 from false ; they do not care. 
 
 How necessary it becomes, then, for those 
 who, by the simple art of writing, can invade 
 the heart's heart of thousands, whose novels 
 are received with such measureless earnestness 
 how necessary it becomes for those who 
 wield such power to use it rightfully. Is it not 
 expedient to act fairly? Is it not in Heaven's 
 name essential that the People hear, not a lie, 
 but the Truth? 
 
 If the novel were not one of the most impor- 
 tant factors of modern life ; if it were not the 
 completest expression of our civilization ; if its 
 influence were not greater than all the pulpits, 
 than all the newspapers between the oceans, it
 
 The Responsibilities of the Novelist g 
 
 would not be so important that its message 
 should be true. 
 
 But the novelist to-day is the one who reaches 
 the greatest audience. Right or wrong, the 
 People turn to him the moment he speaks, and 
 what he says they believe. 
 
 For the Million, Life is a contracted affair, is 
 bounded by the walls of the narrow channel of 
 affairs in which their feet are set. They have 
 no horizon. They look to-day as they never 
 have looked before, as they never will look 
 again, to the writer of fiction to give them an 
 idea of life beyond their limits, and they believe 
 him as they never have believed before and 
 never will again. 
 
 This being so, is it not difficult to understand 
 how certain of these successful writers of fiction 
 these favoured ones into whose hands the 
 gods have placed the great bow of Ulysses can 
 look so frivolously upon their craft ? It is not 
 necessary to specify. One speaks of those 
 whose public is measured by "one hundred 
 and fifty thousand copies sold." We know 
 them, and because the gods have blessed us 
 with wits beyond our deserving we know their 
 work is false. But what of the "hundred and 
 fifty thousand" who are not discerning and 
 who receive this falseness as Truth, who 
 believe this topsy-turvy picture of Life
 
 io The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 beyond their horizons is real and vital and 
 sane? 
 
 There is no gauge to measure the extent of 
 this malignant influence. Public opinion is 
 made no one can say how, by infinitesimal 
 accretions, by a multitude of minutest elements. 
 Lying novels, surely, surely in this day and age 
 of indiscriminate reading, contribute to this 
 more than all other influences of present-day 
 activity. 
 
 The Pulpit, the Press and the Novel these 
 indisputably are the great moulders of public 
 opinion and public morals to-day. But the 
 Pulpit speaks but once a week ; the Press is read 
 with lightning haste and the morning news is 
 waste-paper by noon. But the novel goes into 
 the home to stay. It is read word for word ; is 
 talked about, discussed ; its influence penetrates 
 every chink and corner of the family. 
 
 Yet novelists are not found wanting who 
 write for money. I do not think this is an 
 unfounded accusation. I do not think it asking 
 too much of credulity. This would not matter 
 if they wrote the Truth But these gentlemen 
 who are "in literature for their own pocket 
 every time" have discovered that for the 
 moment the People have confounded the Wrong 
 with the Right, and prefer that which is a lie 
 to that which is true. "Very well, then," say 
 
 \
 
 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 1 1 
 
 these gentlemen. " If they want a lie they 
 shall have it;" and they give the People a lie 
 in return for royalties. 
 
 The surprising thing about this is that you 
 and I and all the rest of us do not consider this 
 as disreputable do not yet realize that the 
 novelist has responsibilities. We condemn an 
 editor who sells his editorial columns, and we 
 revile the pulpit attainted of venality. But 
 the venal novelist he whose influence is greater 
 than either the Press or Pulpit him we greet 
 with a wink and the tongue in the cheek. 
 
 This should not be so. Somewhere the 
 protest should be raised, and those of us who 
 see the practice of this fraud should bring home 
 to ourselves the realization that the selling of 
 one hundred and fifty thousand books is a 
 serious business. The People have a right to 
 the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty 
 and the pursuit of happiness. It is not right 
 that they be exploited and deceived with false 
 views of life, false characters, false sentiment, 
 false morality, false history, false philosophy, 
 false emotions, false heroism, false notions of 
 self-sacrifice, false views of religion, of duty, of 
 conduct and of manners. 
 
 The man who can address an audience of 
 one hundred and fifty thousand people who 
 unenlightened believe what he says, has a
 
 12 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 heavy duty to perform, and tremendous respon- 
 sibilities to shoulder; and he should address 
 himself to his task not with the flippancy of a 
 catch-penny juggler at the county fair, but with 
 earnestness, with soberness, with a sense of his 
 limitations, and with all the abiding sincerity 
 that by the favour and mercy of the gods 
 may be his,
 
 THE TRUE REWARD OF THE NOVELIST
 
 THE TRUE REWARD OF THE NOVELIST 
 
 NOT that one quarrels with the historical 
 novel as such; not that one does not 
 enjoy good fiction wherever found, and in what- 
 ever class. It is the method of attack of the 
 latter-day copyists that one deplores their 
 attitude, the willingness of so very, very many 
 of them to take off the hat to Fashion, and then 
 hold the same hat for Fashion to drop pennies in. 
 
 Ah, but the man must be above the work or 
 the work is worthless, and the man better off at 
 some other work than that of producing fiction. 
 The eye never once should wander to the 
 gallery, but be always with single purpose 
 turned inward upon the work, testing it and 
 retesting it that it rings true 
 
 What one quarrels with is the perversion of a 
 profession, the detestable trading upon another 
 man's success. No one can find fault with 
 those few good historical novels that started 
 the fad. There was good workmanship in 
 these, and honesty. But the copyists, the 
 fakirs they are not novelists at all, though 
 they write novels that sell by the hundreds of
 
 1 6 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 thousands. They are business men. They 
 find out no, they allow some one else to find 
 out what the public wants, and they give it 
 to the public cheap, and advertise it as a new 
 soap is advertised. Well, they make money; 
 and, if that is their aim if they are content to 
 prostitute the good name of American literature 
 for a sliding scale of royalties let's have done 
 with them. They have their reward. But the 
 lamentable result will be that these copyists 
 will in the end so prejudice the people against 
 an admirable school of fiction the school of 
 Scott that for years to come the tale of historic 
 times will be discredited and many a great 
 story remain unwritten, and many a man of 
 actual worth and real power hold back in the 
 ranks for very shame of treading where so 
 many fools have rushed in. 
 
 For the one idea of the fakir the copyist 
 and of the public which for the moment listens 
 to him, is Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, first, last 
 and always Clothes. Not Clothes only in the 
 sense of doublet and gown, but Clothes of 
 speech, Clothes of manner, Clothes of customs. 
 Hear them expatiate over the fashion of wear- 
 ing a cuff, over a trick of speech, over the archi- 
 tecture of a house, the archeology of armour 
 and the like. It is all well enough in its way, 
 but so easily dispensed with if there be flesh and
 
 The True Reward of the Novelist 17 
 
 blood underneath. Veronese put the people 
 of his "Marriage at Cana" into the clothes of 
 his contemporaries. Is the picture any less a 
 masterpiece ? 
 
 Do these Little People know that Scott's 
 archeology was about one thousand years 
 "out" in Ivanhoe, and that to make a paral- 
 lel we must conceive of a writer describing 
 Richelieu say in small clothes and a top hat ? 
 But is it not Richelieu we want, and Ivanhoe, 
 not their clothes, their armour? And in spite 
 of his errors Scott gave us a real Ivanhoe. He 
 got beneath the clothes of an epoch and got 
 the heart of it, and the spirit of it (different 
 essentially and vitally from ours or from every 
 other, the spirit of feudalism) ; and he put forth 
 a masterpiece. 
 
 The Little People so very precise in the 
 matter of buttons and "bacinets" do not so. 
 Take the clothes from the people of their 
 Romances and one finds only wooden manikins. 
 Take the clothes from the epoch of which they 
 pretend to treat and what is there beneath ? It 
 is only the familiar, well-worn, well-thumbed 
 nineteenth or twentieth century after all. As 
 well have written of Michigan Avenue, Chicago, 
 as "La Rue de la Harpe," "The Great North 
 Road" or the "Appian Way." 
 
 It is a masquerade, the novel of the copyists ;
 
 1 8 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 and the people who applaud them are they 
 not the same who would hold persons in 
 respect because of the finery of their bodies? 
 A poor taste, a cheap one ; the taste of serving- 
 men, the literature of chambermaids. 
 
 To approach the same subject by a different 
 radius: why must the historical novel of the 
 copyist always be conceived of in the terms 
 of Romance ? Could not the formula of Real- 
 ism be applied at least as well, not the Realism 
 of mere externals (the copyists have that), but 
 the Realism of motives and emotions ? What 
 would we not give for a picture of the fifteenth 
 century as precise and perfect as one of Mr. 
 James's novels? Even if that be impossible, 
 the attempt, even though half-way successful, 
 would be worth while, would be better than 
 the wooden manikin in the tin-pot helmet and 
 baggy hose. At least we should get some- 
 where, even if no farther than Mr. Kingsley 
 took us in "Hereward," or Mr. Blackmore in 
 "Lorna Doone." 
 
 How about the business life and the student 
 life, and the artizan life and the professional 
 life, and above all, the home life of historic 
 periods ? Great Heavens ! There was some- 
 thing else sometimes than the soldier life. 
 They were not always cutting and thrusting, not 
 always night-riding, escaping, venturing, posing.
 
 The True Reward of the Novelist 19 
 
 Or suppose that cut-and-thrust must be the 
 order of the day, where is the "man behind," 
 and the heart in the man and the spirit in the 
 heart and the essential vital, elemental, all- 
 important true life within the spirit ? We are 
 all Anglo-Saxons enough to enjoy the sight of 
 a fight, would go a block or so out of the way 
 to see one, or be a dollar or so out of pocket. 
 But let it not be these jointed manikins worked 
 with a thread. At least let it be Mr. Robert 
 Fitzsimmons or Mr. James Jeffries. 
 
 Clothes, paraphernalia, panoply, pomp and 
 circumstance, and the copyist's public and the 
 poor bedeviled, ink-corroded hack of an over- 
 driven, underpaid reviewer on an inland paper 
 speak of the "vivid colouring" and "the fine 
 picture of a bygone age" it is easy to be 
 vivid with a pot of vermilion at the elbow. 
 Any one can scare a young dog with a false- 
 face and a roaring voice, but to be vivid and 
 use grays and browns, to scare the puppy with 
 the lifted finger, that's something to the point. 
 
 The difficult thing is to get at the life imme- 
 diately around you the very life in which you 
 move. No romance in it? No romance in 
 you, poor fool. As much romance on Michigan 
 Avenue as there is realism in King Arthur's 
 court. It is as you choose to see it. The 
 important thing to decide is, which formula is
 
 20 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 the best to help you grip the Real Life of this 
 or any other age. Contemporaries always 
 imagine that theirs is the prosaic age, and that 
 chivalry and the picturesque died with their 
 forbears. No doubt Merlin mourned for the 
 old time of romance. Cervantes held that 
 romance was dead. Yet most of the historical 
 romances of the day are laid in Cervantes's 
 time, or even after it. 
 
 Romance and Realism are constant qualities 
 of every age, day and hour. They are here 
 to-day. They existed in the time of Job. 
 They will continue to exist till the end of time, 
 not so much in things as in point of view of the 
 people who see things. 
 
 The difficulty, then, is to get at the immediate 
 life immensely difficult, for you are not only 
 close to the canvas, but are yourself part of 
 the picture. 
 
 But the historic age is almost done to hand. 
 Let almost any one shut himself in his closet 
 with a history and Violet LeDuc's Dictionaire 
 du Mobilier and, given a few months' time, he 
 can evolve an historical novel of the kind called 
 popular. He need not know men just clothes 
 and lingo, the " what-ho-without-there " gabble. 
 But if he only chose he could find romance and 
 adventure in Wall Street or Bond Street. But 
 romance there does not wear the gay clothes
 
 The True Reward of the Novelist 21 
 
 and the showy accouterments, and to discover 
 it the real romance of it means hard work 
 and close study, not of books, but of people 
 and actualities. 
 
 Not only this, but to know the life around 
 you you must live if not among people, then 
 in people. You must be something more than 
 a novelist if you can, something more than just 
 a writer. There must be that nameless sixth 
 sense or sensibility in you that great musicians 
 have in common with great inventors and great 
 scientists; the thing that does not enter into 
 the work, but that is back of it ; the thing that 
 would make of you a good man as well as a 
 good novelist ; the thing that differentiates the 
 mere business man from the financier (for it 
 is possessed of the financier and poet alike 
 so only they be big enough). 
 
 It is not genius, for genius is a lax, loose term 
 so flippantly used that its expressiveness is 
 long since lost. It is more akin to sincerity. 
 And there once more we halt upon the great 
 word sincerity, sincerity, and again sincerity. 
 Let the writer attack his historical novel with 
 sincerity and he cannot then do wrong. He 
 will see then the man beneath the clothes, and 
 the heart beneath both, and he will be so 
 amazed at the wonder of that sight that he will 
 forget the clothes. His public will be small,
 
 22 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 perhaps, but he will have the better reward of 
 the knowledge of a thing well done. Royalties 
 on editions of hundreds of thousands will not 
 pay him more to his satisfaction than that. 
 To make money is not the province of a novelist. 
 If he is the right sort, he has other responsibili- 
 ties, heavy ones. He of all men cannot think 
 only of himself or for himself. And when the 
 last page is written and the ink crusts on the 
 pen-point and the hungry presses go clashing 
 after another writer, the "new man" and the 
 new fashion of the hour, he will think of the 
 grim long grind of the years of his life that he 
 has put behind him and of his work that he has 
 built up volume by volume, sincere work, 
 telling the truth as he saw it, independent of 
 fashion and the gallery gods, holding to these 
 with gripped hands and shut teeth he will 
 think of all this then, and he will be able to say : 
 "I never truckled; I never took off the hat to 
 Fashion and held it out for pennies. By God, 
 I told them the truth. They liked it or they 
 didn't like it. What had that to do with me? 
 I told them the truth; I knew it for the truth 
 then, and I know it for the truth now." 
 
 And that is his reward the best that a 
 man may know ; the only one really worth the 
 striving for.
 
 THE NOVEL WITH A " PURPOSE"
 
 THE NOVEL WITH A " PURPOSE'! 
 
 A FTER years of indoctrination and expos- 
 ^ ^- tulation on the part of the artists, the 
 people who read appear at last to have grasped 
 this one precept "the novel must not preach," 
 but "the purpose of the story must be subordi- 
 nate to the story itself." It took a very long 
 time for them to understand this, but once it 
 became apparent they fastened upon it with a 
 tenacity comparable only to the tenacity of the 
 American schoolboy to the date "1492." " The 
 novel must not preach," you hear them say. 
 
 As though it were possible to write a novel 
 without a purpose, even if it is only the pur- 
 pose to amuse. One is willing to admit that 
 this savours a little of quibbling, for "pur- 
 pose" and purpose to amuse are two different 
 purposes. But every novel, even the most friv- 
 olous, must have some reason for the writing 
 of it, and in that sense must have a "purpose." 
 Every novel must do one of three things 
 it must (i) tell something, (2) show something, 
 or (3) prove something. Some novels do all 
 three of these; some do only two; all must do 
 at least one. 
 
 25
 
 26 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 The ordinary novel merely tells something, 
 elaborates a complication, devotes itself pri- 
 marily to things. In this class comes the 
 novel of adventure, such as "The Three 
 Musketeers." 
 
 The second and better class of novel shows 
 something, exposes the workings of a temper- 
 ament, devotes itself primarily to the minds 
 of human beings. In this class falls the novel 
 of character, such as "Romola." 
 
 The third, and what we hold to be the best 
 class, proves something, draws conclusions 
 from a whole congeries of forces, social ten- 
 dencies, race impulses, devotes itself not to 
 a study of men but of man. In this class falls 
 the novel with the purpose, such as "Les 
 Miserables." 
 
 And the reason we decide upon this last as 
 the highest form of the novel is because that, 
 though setting a great purpose before it as its 
 task, it nevertheless includes, and is forced to 
 include, both the other classes. It must tell 
 something, must narrate vigorous incidents 
 and must show something, must penetrate 
 deep into the motives and character of type- 
 men, men who are composite pictures of a 
 multitude of men. It must do this because 
 of the nature of its subject, for it deals with 
 elemental forces, motives that stir whole
 
 The Novel with a "Purpose" 27 
 
 nations. These cannot be handled as abstrac- 
 tions in fiction. Fiction can find expression 
 only in the concrete. The elemental forces, 
 then, contribute to the novel with a purpose 
 to provide it with vigorous action. In the 
 novel, force can be expressed in no other way. 
 The social tendencies must be expressed by 
 means of analysis of the characters of the men 
 and women who compose that society, and 
 the two must be combined and manipulated 
 to evolve the purpose to find the value of x. 
 
 The production of such a novel is probably 
 the most arduous task that the writer of fiction 
 can undertake. Nowhere else is success more 
 difficult ; nowhere else is failure so easy. Unskil- 
 fully treated, the story may dwindle down and 
 degenerate into mere special pleading, and the 
 novelist become a polemicist, a pamphleteer, 
 forgetting that, although his first consideration 
 is to prove his case, his means must be living 
 human beings, not statistics, and that his tools 
 are not figures, but pictures from life as he sees 
 it. The novel with a purpose is, one contends, 
 a preaching novel. But it preaches by telling 
 things and showing things. Only, the author 
 selects from the great storehouse of actual 
 life the things to be told and the things to be 
 shown, which shall bear upon his problem, his 
 purpose. The preaching, the moralizing, is
 
 28 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 the result not of direct appeal by the writer, 
 but is made should be made to the reader 
 by the very incidents of the story. 
 
 But here is presented a strange anomaly, a 
 distinction as subtle as it is vital. Just now 
 one has said that in the composition of the kind 
 of novel under consideration the purpose is 
 for the novelist the all-important thing, and 
 yet it is impossible to deny that the story, as 
 a mere story, is to the story-writer the one 
 great object of attention. How reconcile then 
 these two apparent contradictions? 
 
 For the novelist, the purpose of his novel, 
 the problem he is to solve, is to his story what 
 the keynote is to the sonata. Though the 
 musician cannot exaggerate the importance of 
 the keynote, yet the thing that interests him 
 is the sonata itself. The keynote simply 
 coordinates the music, systematizes it, brings 
 all the myriad little rebellious notes under a 
 single harmonious code. 
 
 Thus, too, the purpose in the novel. It is 
 important as an end and also as an ever- 
 present guide. For the writer it is as important 
 only as a note to which his work must be 
 attuned. The moment, however, that the 
 writer becomes really and vitally interested in 
 his purpose his novel fails. 
 
 Here is the strange anomaly. Let us suppose
 
 The Novel with a "Purpose" 29 
 
 that Hardy, say, should be engaged upon a 
 story which had for purpose to show the injus- 
 tices under which the miners of Wales were 
 suffering. It is conceivable that he could 
 write a story that would make the blood boil 
 with indignation. But he himself, if he is to 
 remain an artist, if he is to write his novel suc- 
 cessfully, will, as a novelist, care very little 
 about the iniquitous labour system of the 
 Welsh coal-mines. It will be to him as imper- 
 sonal a thing as the key is to the composer of a 
 sonata. As a man Hardy may or may not 
 be vitally concerned in the Welsh coal-miner. 
 That is quite unessential. But as a novelist, 
 as an artist, his sufferings must be for him a 
 matter of the mildest interest. They are 
 important, for they constitute his keynote. 
 They are not interesting for the reason that 
 the working out of his story, its people, 
 episodes, scenes and pictures, is for the 
 moment the most interesting thing in all 
 the world to him, exclusive of everything 
 else. Do you think that Mrs. Stowe was 
 more interested in the slave question than 
 she was in the writing of "Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin"? Her book, her manuscript, the 
 page-to-page progress of the narrative, were 
 more absorbing to her than all the Negroes 
 that were ever whipped or sold. Had it not
 
 30 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 been so, that great purpose-novel never would 
 have succeeded. 
 
 Consider the reverse " recondite 1 , " for in- 
 stance. The purpose for which Zola wrote the 
 book ran away with him. He really did care 
 more for the depopulation of France than 
 he did for his novel. Result sermons on the 
 fruitfulness of women, special pleading, a far- 
 rago of dry, dull incidents, overburdened and 
 collapsing under the weight of a theme that 
 should have intruded only indirectly. 
 
 This is preeminently a selfish view of the 
 question, but it is assuredly the only correct 
 one. It must be remembered that the artist 
 has a double personality, himself as a man, 
 and himself as an artist. But, it will be urged, 
 how account for the artist's sympathy in his 
 fictitious characters, his emotion, the actual 
 tears he sheds in telling of their griefs, their 
 deaths, and the like ? 
 
 The answer is obvious. As an artist his 
 sensitiveness is quickened because they are 
 characters in his novel. It does not at all 
 follow that the same artist would be moved to 
 tears over the report of parallel catastrophes 
 in real life. As an artist, there is every reason 
 to suppose he would welcome the news with 
 downright pleasure. It would be for him 
 "good material." He would see a story in it,
 
 The Novel with a "Purpose" 31 
 
 a good scene, a great character. Thus the 
 artist. What he would do, how he would 
 feel as a man is quite a different matter. 
 
 To conclude, let us consider one objection 
 urged against the novel with a purpose by the 
 plain people who read. For certain reasons, 
 difficult to explain, the purpose novel always 
 ends unhappily. It is usually a record of 
 suffering, a relation of tragedy. And the 
 plain people say, "Ah, we see so much suffering 
 in the world, why put it into novels? We 
 do not want it in novels." 
 
 One confesses to very little patience with 
 this sort. "We see so much suffering in the 
 world already!" Do they? Is this really 
 true? The people who buy novels are the 
 well-to-do people. They belong to a class 
 whose whole scheme of life is concerned solely 
 with an aim to avoid the unpleasant. Suffer- 
 ing, the great catastrophes, the social throes, 
 that annihilate whole communities, or that 
 crush even isolated individuals all these are 
 as far removed from them as earthquakes and 
 tidal-waves. Or, even if it were so, suppose 
 that by some miracle these blind eyes were 
 opened and the sufferings of the poor, the 
 tragedies of the house around the corner, 
 really were laid bare. If there is much pain 
 in life, all the more reason that it should appear
 
 32 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 in a class of literature which, in its highest form, 
 is a sincere transcription of life. 
 
 It is the complaint of the coward, this cry 
 against the novel with a purpose, because it 
 brings the tragedies and griefs of others to 
 notice. Take this element from fiction, take 
 from it the power and opportunity to prove 
 that injustice, crime and inequality do exist, 
 and what is left? Just the amusing novels, 
 the novels that entertain. The juggler in 
 spangles, with his balancing-pole and gilt ball, 
 does this. You may consider the modern 
 novel from this point of view. It may be a 
 flippant paper-covered thing of swords and 
 cloaks, to be carried on a railway journey and 
 to be thrown out the window when read, 
 together with the sucked oranges and peanut 
 shells. Or it may be a great force, that works 
 together with the pulpit and the universi- 
 ties for the good of the people, fearlessly prov- 
 ing that power is abused, that the strong 
 grind the faces of the weak, that an evil tree 
 is still growing in the midst of the garden, that 
 undoing follows hard upon unrighteousness, 
 that the course of Empire is not yet finished, 
 and that the races of men have yet to work out 
 their destiny in those great and terrible move- 
 ments that crush and grind and rend asunder 
 the pillars of the houses of the nations.
 
 The Novel with a "Purpose" 33 
 
 Fiction may keep pace with the Great 
 March, but it will not be by dint of amusing 
 the people. The muse is a teacher, not a 
 trickster. Her rightful place is with the 
 leaders, but in the last analysis that place is 
 to be attained and maintained not by cap-and- 
 bells, but because of a serious and sincere 
 interest, such as inspires the great teachers, 
 the great divines, the great philosophers, a 
 well-defined, well-seen, courageously sought-for 
 purpose.
 
 STORY-TELLERS VS. NOVELISTS
 
 STORY-TELLERS VS. NOVELISTS 
 
 TT is a thing accepted and indisputable that 
 a story-teller is a novelist, but it has 
 often occurred to one that the reverse is not 
 always true and that the novelist is not of 
 necessity a story-teller. The distinction is 
 perhaps a delicate one, but for all that it seems 
 to be decisive, and it is quite possible that 
 with the distinction in mind a different judg- 
 ment might be passed upon a very large part 
 of present-day fiction. It would even be 
 entertaining to apply the classification to the 
 products of the standard authors. 
 
 The story-telling instinct seems to be a gift, 
 whereas we trend to the heretical the art of 
 composing novels using the word in appo- 
 sition to stories, long or short may be 
 an acquirement. The one is an endowment, 
 the other an accomplishment. Accordingly 
 throughout the following paragraphs the expres- 
 sion, novelists of composition, for the time 
 being will be used technically, and will be 
 applied to those fiction-writers who have not 
 the story-telling faculty. 
 
 It would not be fair to attempt a proof that 
 37
 
 3 8 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 the one is better or worse than the other. 
 The difference is surely of kind and not of 
 degree. One will only seek to establish the 
 fact that certain eminent and brilliant novel- 
 writers are quite bereft of a sense of fiction, 
 that some of them have succeeded in spite of 
 this deficiency, and that other novel-writers 
 possessing this sense of fiction have succeeded 
 because of it, and in spite of many drawbacks 
 such as lack of training and of education. 
 
 It is a proposition which one believes to be 
 capable of demonstration that every child con- 
 tains in himself the elements of every known 
 profession, every occupation, every art, every 
 industry. In the five-year-old you may see 
 glimpses of the soldier, trader, farmer, painter, 
 musician, builder, and so on to the end of 
 the roster. Later, circumstances produce the 
 atrophy of all of these instincts but one, and 
 from that one specialized comes the career. 
 Thus every healthy-minded child no matter 
 if he develops in later years to be financier or 
 boot-maker is a story-teller. As soon as he 
 begins to talk he tells stories. Witness the 
 holocausts and carnage of the leaden 'platoons 
 of the nursery table, the cataclysms of the 
 Grand Trans-Continental Playroom and Front- 
 Hall Railroad system. This, though, is not 
 real story-telling. The toys practically tell
 
 Story-tellers vs. Novelists 39 
 
 the story for him and are no stimulant to the 
 imagination. However, the child goes beyond 
 the toys. He dramatizes every object of 
 his surroundings. The books of the library 
 shelves are files of soldiers, the rugs are isles 
 in the seaway of the floor, the easy chair is a 
 comfortable old gentleman holding out his 
 arms, the sofa a private brig or a Baldwin 
 locomotive, and the child creates of his sur- 
 roundings an entire and complex work of 
 fiction of which he is at one and the same 
 time hero, author and public. 
 
 Within the heart of every mature human 
 being, not a writer of fiction, there is the 
 withered remains of a little story-teller who 
 died very young. And the love of good 
 fiction and the appreciation of a fine novel in 
 the man of the world of riper years is I like 
 to think a sort of memorial tribute which he 
 pays to his little dead playmate of so very long 
 ago, who died very quietly with his little broken 
 tin locomotive in his hands on the cruel day 
 when he woke to the realization that it had 
 outlived its usefulness and its charm. 
 
 Even in the heart of some accepted and 
 successful fiction-writer you shall find this 
 little dead story-teller. These are the novelists 
 of composition, whose sense of fiction, under 
 stress of circumstances, has become so blunted
 
 4O The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 that when they come at last to full maturity 
 and to the power of using the faculty they can no 
 longer command it. These are novelists rather 
 of intellect than of spontaneous improvisation ; 
 and all the force of their spendid minds, every 
 faculty other than the lost fiction-faculty, 
 must be brought into play to compensate for 
 the lack. Some more than compensate for it, 
 so prodigal in resource, so persistent in effort, 
 so powerful in energy and in fertility of inven- 
 tion, that as it were by main strength they 
 triumph over the other writer, the natural 
 story-teller, from whose pen the book flows 
 with almost no effort at all. 
 
 Of this sort the novelists of intellect, in 
 whom the born story-teller is extinct, the 
 novelists of composition in a word the great 
 example, it would seem, is George Eliot. It 
 was by taking thought that the author of 
 "Romola" added to her stature. The result 
 is superb, but achieved at what infinite pains, 
 with what colossal labour of head rather than 
 of the heart ! She did not feel, she knew, and 
 to attain that knowledge what effort had to 
 be expended ! Even all her art cannot exclude 
 from her pages evidences of the labour, of 
 the superhuman toil. And it was labour 
 and toil for what? To get back, through 
 years of sophistication, of solemn education,
 
 Story-tellers vs. Novelists 41 
 
 of worldly wisdom, back again to the point 
 of view of the little lost child of the doll-house 
 days. 
 
 But sometimes the little story-teller does 
 not die, but lives on and grows with the man, 
 increasing in favour with God, till at L last he 
 dominates the man himself, and the playroom 
 of the old days simply widens its walls till it 
 includes the street outside, and the street 
 beyond and other streets, the whole city, the 
 whole world, and the story-teller discovers a 
 set of new toys to play with, and new objects 
 of a measureless environment to dramatize 
 about, and in exactly, exactly the same spirit 
 in which he trundled his tin train through the 
 halls and shouted boarding orders from the 
 sofa he moves now through the world's play- 
 room "making up stories"; only now his 
 heroes and his public are outside himself and 
 he alone may play the author. 
 
 For him there is but little effort required. 
 He has a sense of fiction. Every instant of 
 his day he is dramatizing. The cable-car has 
 for him a distinct personality. Every window 
 in the residence quarters is an eye to the soul 
 of the house behind. The very lamp-post on 
 the corner, burning on through the night and 
 through the storm, is a soldier, dutiful, vigilant 
 in stress. A ship is Adventure; an engine
 
 42 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 a living brute ; and the easy chair of his library 
 is still the same comfortable and kindly old 
 gentleman holding out his arms. 
 
 The men and women of his world are not 
 apt to be to him so important in themselves 
 as in relation to the whirl of things in which 
 he chooses to involve them. They cause 
 events, or else events happen to them, and by 
 an unreasoned instinct the story-teller pre- 
 serves the consistencies (just as the child 
 would not have run the lines of the hall railway 
 across the seaway of the floor between the 
 rugs). Much thought is not necessary to him. 
 Production is facile, a constant pleasure. The 
 story runs from his pen almost of itself ; it 
 takes this shape or that, he knows not why; 
 his people do this or that and by some blessed 
 system of guesswork they are somehow always 
 plausible and true to life. His work is hap- 
 hazard, yet in the end and in the main tremen- 
 dously probable. Devil-may-care, slipshod, 
 melodramatic, but invincibly persuasive, he 
 uses his heart, his senses, his emotions, every 
 faculty but that of the intellect. He does 
 not know; he feels. 
 
 Dumas was this, and "The Three Musketeers," 
 different from "Romola" in kind but not in 
 degree, is just as superb as Eliot at her best. 
 Only the Frenchman had a sense of fiction
 
 Story-tellers vs. Novelists 43 
 
 which the Englishwoman had not. Her novels 
 are character studies, are portraits, are por- 
 trayals of emotions or pictures of certain 
 times and certain events, are everything you 
 choose, but they are not stories, and no stretch 
 of the imagination, no liberalness of criticism 
 can make them such. She succeeded by dint 
 of effort where the Frenchman merely wrote. 
 
 George Eliot compensated for the defect arti- 
 ficially and succeeded eminently and conclu- 
 sively, but there are not found wanting cases 
 in modern literature where "novelists of com- 
 position" have not compensated beyond a very 
 justifiable doubt, and where, had they but re- 
 joiced in a very small modicum of this dowry 
 of the gods, their work would have been to 
 one's notion infinitely improved. 
 
 As, for instance, Tolstoi ; incontestably great 
 though he be, all his unquestioned power has 
 never yet won for him that same vivid sense 
 of fiction enjoyed by so (comparatively) unim- 
 portant a writer as the author of "Sherlock 
 Holmes." And of the two, judged strictly 
 upon their merits as story-tellers, one claims 
 for Mr. Doyle the securer if not the higher 
 place, despite the magnificent genius of the 
 novelist. 
 
 In the austere Russian gloomy, sad, ac- 
 quainted with grief the child died irrevoca-
 
 44 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 bly long, long ago ; and no power however vast, 
 no wisdom however profound, no effort how- 
 ever earnest, can turn one wheel on the little 
 locomotive of battered tin or send it one inch 
 along the old right-of-way between the nursery 
 and the front room. One cannot but feel that 
 the great author of "Anna Karenina" realizes 
 as much as his readers the limitations that 
 the loss of this untainted childishness imposes. 
 The power was all his, the wonderful intellectual 
 grip, but not the fiction spirit the child's 
 knack and love of "making up stories." Given 
 that, plus the force already his own, and what 
 a book would have been there ! The perfect 
 novel ! No doubt, clearer than all others, the 
 great Russian sees the partial failure of his 
 work, and no doubt keener and deeper than all 
 others sees that, unless the child-vision and the 
 child-pleasure be present to guide and to stimu- 
 late, the entrances of the kingdom must stay 
 forever shut to those who would enter, storm 
 they the gates never so mightily and beat they 
 never so clamorously at the doors. 
 
 Whatever the end of fiction may be, what- 
 ever the reward and recompense bestowed, 
 whatever object is gained by good work, the 
 end will not be gained, nor the reward won, 
 nor the object attained by force alone by 
 strength of will or of mind. Without the
 
 Story-tellers vs. Novelists 45 
 
 auxiliary of the little playmate of the old days 
 the great doors that stand at the end of the 
 road will stay forever shut. Look once, how- 
 ever, with the child's eyes, or for once touch 
 the mighty valves with the child's hand, and 
 Heaven itself lies open with all its manifold 
 wonders. 
 
 So that in the end, after all trial has been 
 made and every expedient tested, the simplest 
 way is the best and the humblest means the 
 surest. A little child stands in the midst of 
 the wise men and the learned, and their wis- 
 dom and their learning are set aside and they 
 are taught that unless they become as one of 
 these they shall in nowise enter into the 
 Kingdom of Heaven.
 
 THE NEED OF A LITERARY 
 CONSCIENCE
 
 THE NEED OF A LITERARY CONSCIENCE 
 
 pILATE saith unto them: what is truth?" 
 * and it is of record that he received no 
 answer and for very obvious reasons. For 
 is it not a fact, that he who asks that question 
 must himself find the answer, and that not 
 even one sent from Heaven can be of hope or 
 help to him if he is not willing to go down into 
 his own heart and into his own life to find it ? 
 
 To sermonize, to elaborate a disquisition on 
 nice distinctions of metaphysics is not appro- 
 priate here. But it is so one believes 
 appropriate to consider a certain very large 
 class of present day novelists of the United 
 States who seldom are stirred by that spirit 
 of inquiry that for a moment disturbed the 
 Roman, who do not ask what is truth, who do 
 not in fact care to be truthful at all, and who 
 and this is the serious side of the business 
 are bringing the name of American literature 
 perilously near to disrepute. 
 
 One does not quarrel for one instant with 
 the fact that certain books of the writers in 
 question have attained phenomenally large 
 circulations. This is as it should be. There 
 
 49
 
 50 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 are very many people in the United States, 
 and compared with such a figure as seventy 
 million, a mere hundred thousand of books 
 sold is no great matter. 
 
 But here so it seems is the point. He 
 who can address a hundred thousand people 
 is, no matter what his message may be, in an 
 important position. It is a large audience, 
 one hundred thousand, larger than any roofed 
 building now standing could contain. Less 
 than one one-hundredth part of that number 
 nominated Lincoln. Less than half of it won 
 Waterloo. 
 
 And it must be remembered that for every 
 one person who buys a book there are three 
 who will read it and half a dozen who will 
 read what some one else has written about it, so 
 that the sphere of influence widens indefinitely, 
 and the audience that the writer addresses 
 approaches the half -million mark. 
 
 Well and good; but if the audience is so 
 vast, if the influence is so far-reaching, if the 
 example set is so contagious, it becomes incum- 
 bent to ask, it becomes imperative to demand 
 that the half -million shall be told the truth and 
 not a lie. 
 
 And this thing called truth "what is it?" 
 says Pilate, and the average man conceives at 
 once of an abstraction, a vague idea, a term
 
 The Need of a Literary Conscience 51 
 
 borrowed from the metaphysicians, certainly 
 nothing that has to do with practical, tangible, 
 concrete work-a-day life. 
 
 Error ! If truth is not an actual workaday 
 thing, as concrete as the lamp-post on the 
 corner, as practical as a cable-car, as real and 
 homely and workaday and commonplace as a 
 bootjack, then indeed are we of all men most 
 miserable and our preaching vain. 
 
 And truth in fiction is just as real and just 
 as important as truth anywhere else as in 
 Wall Street, for instance. A man who does not 
 tell the truth there, and who puts the untruth 
 upon paper over his signature, will be very 
 promptly jailed. In the case of the Wall 
 Street man the sum of money in question 
 may be trivial $100, $50. But the untruth- 
 ful novelist who starts in motion something 
 like half a million dollars invokes not fear nor 
 yet reproach. If truth in the matter of the 
 producing of novels is not an elusive, intangible 
 abstraction, what, then, is it ? Let us get at the 
 hard nub of the business, something we can hold 
 in the hand. It is the thing that is one's own, 
 the discovery of a subject suitable for fictitious 
 narration that has never yet been treated, 
 and the conscientious study of that subject and 
 the fair presentation of results. Not a difficult 
 matter, it would appear, not an abstraction, not
 
 52 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 a philosophical kink. Newspaper reporters, 
 who are not metaphysicians, unnamed, unre- 
 warded, despised, even, and hooted and 
 hounded, are doing this every day. They do 
 it on a meager salary, and they call the affair 
 a "scoop." Is the standard of the novelist 
 he who is entrusted with the good name of 
 his nation's literature lower than that of a 
 reporter ? 
 
 "Ah, but it is so hard to be original," "ah, 
 but it is so hard to discover anything new." 
 Great Heavens ! when a new life comes into 
 the world for every tick of the watch in your 
 pocket a new life with all its complications, 
 and with all the thousand and one other com- 
 plications it sets in motion ! 
 
 Hard to be original ! when of all of those 
 billion lives your own is as distinct, as indi- 
 vidual, as "original," as though you were born 
 out of season in the Paleozoic age and yours 
 the first human face the sun ever shone upon. 
 
 Go out into the street and stand where the 
 ways cross and hear the machinery of life 
 work clashing in its grooves. Can the utmost 
 resort of your ingenuity evolve a better story 
 than any one of the millions that jog your 
 elbow? Shut yourself in your closet and turn 
 your eyes inward upon yourself deep into 
 yourself, down, down into the heart of you;
 
 The Need of a Literary Conscience 53 
 
 and the tread of the feet upon the pavement 
 is the systole and diastole of your own being 
 different only in degree. It is life ; and it is 
 that which you must have to make your book, 
 your novel life, not other people's novels. 
 
 Or look from your window. A whole Lit- 
 erature goes marching by, clamouring for a 
 leader and a master hand to guide it. You 
 have but to step from your doorway. And 
 instead of this, instead of entering into the 
 leadership that is yours by right divine, instead 
 of this, you must toilfully, painfully endeavour 
 to crawl into the armour of the chief of some 
 other cause, the harness of the leader of some 
 other progress. 
 
 But you will not fit into that panoply. You 
 may never brace that buckler upon your 
 arm, for by your very act you stand revealed 
 as a littler man than he who should be chief 
 a littler man and a weaker; and the casque 
 will fall so far over your face that it will only 
 blind you, and the sword will trip you, and 
 the lance, too ponderous, will falter in your 
 grip, and all that life which surges and thun- 
 ders behind you will in time know you to be 
 the false leader, and as you stumble will trample 
 you in its onrush, and leave you dead and for- 
 gotten upon the road. 
 
 And just as a misconception of the truth
 
 54 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 makes of this the simplest and homeliest of 
 things, a vagary, an abstraction and a bugbear, 
 so it is possible that a misconception of the 
 Leader creates the picture of a great and 
 dreadful figure wrapped in majesty, solemn 
 and profound. So that perhaps for very lack 
 of self-confidence, for very diffidence, one 
 shrinks from lifting the sword of him and 
 from enduing one's forehead with the casque 
 that seems so ponderous. 
 
 In other causes no doubt the leader must 
 be chosen from the wise and great. In science 
 and finance one looks to him to be a strong 
 man, a swift and a sure man. But the litera- 
 ture that to-day shouts all in vain for its chief 
 needs no such a one as this. Here the battle is 
 not to the strong nor yet the race to the swift. 
 Here the leader is no vast, stern being, profound, 
 solemn, knowing all things, but, on the contrary, 
 is as humble as the lowliest that follow after 
 him. So that it need not be hard to step into 
 that place of eminence. Not by arrogance, 
 nor by assumption, nor by the achievement of 
 the world's wisdom, shall you be made worthy 
 of the place of high command. But it will 
 come to you, if it comes at all, because you shall 
 have kept yourself young and humble and pure 
 in heart, and so unspoiled and unwearied and 
 un jaded that you shall find a joy in the mere
 
 The Need of a Literary Conscience 55 
 
 rising of the sun, a wholesome, sane delight 
 in the sound of the wind at night, a pleasure in 
 the sight of the hills at evening, shall see God 
 in a little child and a whole religion in a brood- 
 ing bird.
 
 A NEGLECTED EPIC
 
 A NEGLECTED EPIC 
 
 SUDDENLY we have found that there is 
 ^ no longer any Frontier. The westward- 
 moving course of empire has at last crossed 
 the Pacific Ocean. Civilization has circled the 
 globe and has come back to its starting point, 
 the vague and mysterious East. 
 
 The thing has not been accomplished peace- 
 fully. From the very first it has been an affair 
 of wars of invasions. Invasions of the East 
 by the West, and of raids North and South 
 raids accomplished by flying columns that 
 dashed out from both sides of the main army. 
 Sometimes even the invaders have fought 
 among themselves, as for instance the Trojan 
 War, or the civil wars of Italy, England and 
 America; sometimes they have turned back on 
 their tracks and, upon one pretext or another, 
 reconquered the races behind them, as for 
 instance Alexander's wars to the eastward, the 
 Crusades, and Napoleon's Egyptian campaigns. 
 
 Retarded by all these obstacles, the march 
 has been painfully slow. To move from 
 Egypt to Greece took centuries of time. More 
 
 59
 
 60 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 centuries were consumed in the campaign 
 that brought empire from Greece to Rome, 
 and still more centuries passed before it crossed 
 the Alps and invaded northern and western 
 Europe. 
 
 But observe. Once across the Mississippi, 
 the West our Far West was conquered in 
 about forty years. In all the vast campaign 
 from east to west here is the most signal vic- 
 tory, the swiftest, the completest, the most 
 brilliant achievement the wilderness subdued 
 at a single stroke. 
 
 Now all these various fightings to the 
 westward, these mysterious race-movements, 
 migrations, wars and wanderings have pro- 
 duced their literature, distinctive, peculiar, 
 excellent. And this literature we call epic. 
 The Trojan War gave us the "Iliad," the 
 "Odyssey" and the "^Eneid"; the campaign 
 of the Greeks in Asia Minor produced the 
 "Anabasis"; a whole cycle of literature grew 
 from the conquest of Europe after the fall of 
 Rome "The Song of Roland," "The Nibel- 
 ungenlied, " "The Romance of the Rose," 
 " Beowulf, " " Magnusson, " " The Scotch Border 
 Ballads," "The Poem of the Cid," "The 
 Hemskringla, " "Orlando Furioso, " "Jerusalem 
 Delivered, " and the like. 
 
 On this side of the Atlantic, in his clumsy,
 
 A Neglected Epic 61 
 
 artificial way, but yet recognized as a producer 
 of literature, Cooper has tried to chronicle the 
 conquest of the eastern part of our country. 
 Absurd he may be in his ideas of life and 
 character, the art in him veneered over with 
 charlatanism; yet the man was solemn enough 
 and took his work seriously, and his work is 
 literature. 
 
 Also a cycle of romance has grown up around 
 the Civil War. The theme has had its poets 
 to whom the public have been glad to listen. 
 The subject is vast, noble ; is, in a word, epic, 
 just as the Trojan War and the Retreat of the 
 Ten Thousand were epic. 
 
 But when at last one comes to look for the 
 literature that sprang from and has grown 
 up around the last great epic event in the 
 history of civilization, the event which in 
 spite of stupendous difficulties was consum- 
 mated more swiftly, more completely, more 
 satisfactorily than any like event since the 
 westward migration began I mean the con- 
 quering of the West, the subduing of the 
 wilderness beyond the Mississippi What has 
 this produced in the way of literature? The 
 dime novel ! The dime novel and nothing else. 
 The dime novel and nothing better. 
 
 The Trojan War left to posterity the charac- 
 ter of Hector ; the wars with the Saracens gave
 
 62 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 us Roland; the folklore of Iceland produced 
 Grettir ; the Scotch border poetry brought forth 
 the Douglas; the Spanish epic the Cid. But 
 the American epic, just as heroic, just as ele- 
 mental, just as important and as picturesque, 
 will fade into history leaving behind no finer 
 type, no nobler hero than Buffalo Bill. 
 
 The young Greeks sat on marble terraces 
 overlooking the ^Egean Sea and listened to 
 the thunderous roll of Homer's hexameter. 
 In the feudal castles the minstrel sang to the 
 young boys, of Roland. The farm folk of 
 Iceland to this very day treasure up and read 
 to their little ones hand-written copies of the 
 Gretla Saga chronicling the deeds and death of 
 Grettir the Strong. But the youth of the 
 United States learn of their epic by paying a 
 dollar to see the " Wild West Show. " 
 
 The plain truth of the matter is that we 
 have neglected our epic the black shame of it 
 be on us and no contemporaneous poet or 
 chronicler thought it worth his while to sing 
 the song or tell the tale of the West because 
 literature in the day when the West was being 
 won was a cult indulged in by certain well-bred 
 gentlemen in New England who looked east- 
 ward to the Old World, to the legends of 
 England and Norway and Germany and Italy 
 for their inspiration, and left the great, strong,
 
 A Neglected Epic 63 
 
 honest, fearless, resolute deeds of their own 
 countrymen to be defamed and defaced by 
 the nameless hacks of the "yellow back" 
 libraries. 
 
 One man who wrote "How Santa Glaus 
 Came to Simpson's Bar" one poet, one 
 chronicler did, in fact, arise for the moment, 
 who understood that wild, brave life and who 
 for a time gave promise of bearing record of 
 things seen. 
 
 One of the requirements of an epic a true 
 epic is that its action must devolve upon some 
 great national event. There was no lack of 
 such in those fierce years after '49. Just that 
 long and terrible journey from the Mississippi 
 to the ocean is an epic in itself. Yet no serious 
 attempt has ever been made by an American 
 author to render into prose or verse this event 
 in our history as "national" in scope, in origin 
 and in results as the Revolution itself. The 
 prairie schooner is as large a figure in the 
 legends as the black ship that bore Ulysses 
 homeward from Troy. The sea meant as 
 much to the Argonauts of the fifties as it did to 
 the ten thousand. 
 
 And the Alamo ! There is a trumpet-call 
 in the word; and only the look of it on the 
 printed page is a flash of fire. But the very 
 histories slight the deed, and to many an
 
 64 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 American, born under the same flag that the 
 Mexican rifles shot to ribbons on that splendid 
 day, the word is meaningless. Yet Thermopylae 
 was less glorious, and in comparison with that 
 siege the investment of Troy was mere wanton 
 riot. At the very least the Texans in that 
 battered adobe church fought for the honour 
 of their flag and the greater glory of their 
 country, not for loot or the possession of the 
 person of an adultress. Young men are taught 
 to consider the " Iliad, " with its butcheries, its 
 glorification of inordinate selfishness and vanity, 
 as a classic. Achilles, murderer, egoist, ruffian 
 and liar, is a hero. But the name of Bowie, 
 the name of the man who gave his life to his 
 flag at the Alamo, is perpetuated only in the 
 designation of a knife. Crockett is the hero 
 only of a "funny story " about a sagacious coon ; 
 while Travis, the boy commander who did what 
 Gordon with an empire back of him failed to do, 
 is quietly and definitely ignored. 
 
 Because we have done nothing to get at the 
 truth about the West ; because our best writers 
 have turned to the old-country folklore and 
 legends for their inspiration; because "melan- 
 choly harlequins" strut in fringed leggings 
 upon the street-corners, one hand held out for 
 pennies, we have come to believe that our West, 
 our epic, was an affair of Indians, road-agents
 
 A Neglected Epic 65 
 
 and desperadoes, and have taken no account 
 of the brave men who stood for law and justice 
 and liberty, and for those great ideas died by 
 the hundreds, unknown and unsung died that 
 the West might be subdued, that the last stage 
 of the march should be accomplished, that the 
 Anglo-Saxon should fulfil his destiny and 
 complete the cycle of the world. 
 
 The great figure of our neglected epic, the 
 Hector of our ignored Iliad, is not, as the dime 
 novels would have us believe, a lawbreaker, 
 but a lawmaker; a fighter, it is true, as is 
 always the case with epic figures, but a fighter 
 for peace, a calm, grave, strong man who 
 hated the lawbreaker as the hound hates the 
 wolf. 
 
 He did not lounge in barrooms; he did not 
 cheat at cards; he did not drink himself to 
 maudlin fury; he did not "shoot at the drop of 
 the hat." But he loved his horse, he loved 
 his friend, he was kind to little children ; he was 
 always ready to side with the weak against the 
 strong, with the poor against the rich. For 
 hypocrisy and pretense, for shams and subter- 
 fuges he had no mercy, no tolerance. He 
 was too brave to lie and too strong to steal. 
 The odds in that lawless day were ever against 
 him; his enemies were many and his friends 
 were few; but his face was always set bravely
 
 66 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 against evil, and fear was not in him even at 
 the end. For such a man as this could die no 
 quiet death in a land where law went no further 
 than the statute books and lite lay in the crook 
 of my neighbour's forefinger. 
 
 He died in defense of an ideal, an epic hero, 
 a legendary figure, formidable, sad. He died 
 facing down injustice, dishonesty and crime; 
 died "in his boots"; and the same world that 
 has glorified Achilles and forgotten Travis 
 finds none too poor to do him reverence. No 
 literature has sprung up around him this 
 great character native to America. He is of all 
 the world-types the one distinctive to us 
 peculiar, particular and unique. He is dead 
 and even his work is misinterpreted and mis- 
 understood. His very memory will soon be 
 gone, and the American epic, which, on the 
 shelves of posterity, should have stood shoulder 
 to shoulder with the " Hemskringla " and the 
 "Tales of the Nibelungen" and the "Song of 
 Roland," will never be written.
 
 THE FRONTIER GONE AT LAST
 
 THE FRONTIER GONE AT LAST 
 
 T TNTIL the day when the first United States 
 ^ marine landed in China we had always 
 imagined that out yonder somewhere in the 
 West was the borderland where civilization 
 disintegrated and merged into the -untamed. 
 Our skirmish-line was there, our posts that 
 scouted and scrimmaged with the wilderness, 
 a thousand miles in advance of the steady 
 march of civilization. 
 
 And the Frontier has become so much an 
 integral part of our conception of things that 
 it will be long before we shall all understand 
 that it is gone. We liked the Frontier; it was 
 romance, the place of the poetry of the Great 
 March, the firing-line where there was action 
 and fighting, and where men held each other's 
 lives in the crook of the forefinger. Those 
 who had gone out came back with tremendous 
 tales, and those that stayed behind made up 
 other and even more tremendous tales. 
 
 When we we Anglo-Saxons busked our- 
 selves for the first stage of the march, we 
 began from that little historic reach of ground 
 
 69
 
 70 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 in the midst of the Friesland swamps, and we 
 set our faces Westward, feeling no doubt the 
 push of the Slav behind us. Then the Frontier 
 was Britain and the sober peacefulness of land 
 where are the ordered, cultivated English farm- 
 yards of to-day was the Wild West of the 
 Frisians of that century ; and for the little chil- 
 dren of the Frisian peat cottages Hengist was 
 the Apache Kid and Horsa Deadwood Dick 
 freebooters, law-defiers, slayers-of-men, epic 
 heroes, blood brothers, if you please, of Boone 
 and Bowie. 
 
 Then for centuries we halted and the van 
 closed up with the firing-line, and we filled all 
 England and all Europe with our clamour 
 because for awhile we seemed to have gone 
 as far Westward as it was possible; and the 
 checked energy of the race reacted upon itself, 
 rebounded as it were, and back we went to the 
 Eastward again crusading, girding at the 
 Mahommedan, conquering his cities, breaking 
 into his fortresses with mangonel, siege-engine 
 and catapult just as the boy shut indoors 
 finds his scope circumscribed and fills the 
 whole place with the racket of his activity. 
 
 But always, if you will recall it, we had a 
 curious feeling that we had not reached the 
 ultimate West even yet, and there was still a 
 Frontier. Always that strange sixth sense
 
 The Frontier Gone at Last 71 
 
 turned our heads toward the sunset; and all 
 through the Middle Ages we were peeking and 
 prying into the Western horizon, trying to reach 
 it, to run it down, and the queer tales about 
 Vineland and that storm-driven Viking's ship 
 would not down. 
 
 And then at last a naked savage on the 
 shores of a little island in what is now our 
 West Indies, looking Eastward one morning, 
 saw the caravels, and on that day the Frontier 
 was rediscovered, and promptly a hundred 
 thousand of the more hardy rushed to the 
 skirmish-line and went at the wilderness as 
 only the Anglo-Saxon can. 
 
 And then the skirmish-line decided that it 
 would declare itself independent of the main 
 army behind and form an advance column of 
 its own, a separate army corps; and no sooner 
 was this done than again the scouts went for- 
 ward, went Westward, pushing the Frontier 
 ahead of them, scrimmaging with the wilder- 
 ness, blazing the way. At last they forced 
 the Frontier over the Sierra Nevadas down 
 to the edge of the Pacific. And here it would 
 have been supposed that the Great March 
 would have halted again as it did before the 
 Atlantic, that here at last the Frontier ended. 
 
 But on the first of May, 1898, a gun was fired 
 in the Bay of Manila, still farther Westward,
 
 72 The Responsibilities of ike Novelist 
 
 and in response the skirmish-line crossed the 
 Pacific, still pushing the Frontier before it. 
 Then came a cry for help from Legation Street 
 in Peking, and as the first boat bearing its 
 contingent of American marines took ground 
 on the Asian shore, the Frontier at last after 
 so many centuries, after so many marches, 
 after so much fighting, so much spilled blood, 
 so much spent treasure, dwindled down and 
 vanished; for the Anglo-Saxon in his course of 
 empire had circled the globe and brought the 
 new civilization to the old civilization, and 
 reached the starting point of history, the place 
 from which the migrations began. So soon as 
 the marines landed there was no longer any 
 West, and the equation of the horizon, the 
 problem of the centuries for the Anglo-Saxon 
 was solved. 
 
 So, lament it though we may, the Frontier 
 is gone, an idiosyncrasy that has been with us 
 for thousands of years, the one peculiar pic- 
 turesqueness of our life is no more. We may 
 keep alive for many years the idea of a Wild 
 West, but the hired cowboys and paid rough 
 riders of Mr. William Cody are more like 
 "the real thing" than can be found to-day in 
 Arizona, New Mexico or Idaho. Only the 
 imitation cowboys, the college-bred fellows 
 who "go out on a ranch," carry the revolver
 
 The Frontier Gone at Last 73 
 
 or wear the concho. The Frontier has become 
 conscious of itself, acts the part for the Eastern 
 visitor; and this self -consciousness is a sign, 
 surer than all others, of the decadence of a 
 type, the passing of an epoch. The Apache 
 Kid and Deadwood Dick have gone to join 
 Hengist and Horsa and the heroes of the 
 Magnusson Saga. 
 
 But observe. What happened in the Middle 
 Ages when for awhile we could find no Western 
 Frontier? The race impulse was irresistible. 
 March we must, conquer we must, and checked 
 in the Westward course of empire, we turned 
 Eastward and expended the resistless energy 
 that by blood was ours in conquering the Old 
 World behind us. 
 
 To-day we are the same race, with the same 
 impulse, the same power and, because there is 
 no longer a Frontier to absorb our overplus of 
 energy, because there is no longer a wilderness 
 to conquer and because we still must march, 
 still must conquer, we remember the old days 
 when our ancestors before us found the outlet 
 for their activity checked and, rebounding, 
 turned their faces Eastward, and went down 
 to invade the Old World. So we. No sooner 
 have we found that our path to the Westward 
 has ended than, reacting Eastward, we are at 
 the Old World again, marching against it,
 
 74 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 invading it, devoting our overplus of energy 
 to its subjugation. 
 
 But though we are the same race, with the 
 same impulses, the same blood-instincts as the 
 old Frisian marsh people, we are now come 
 into a changed time and the great word of our 
 century is no longer War, but Trade. 
 
 Or, if you choose, it is only a different word 
 for the same race-characteristic. The desire 
 for conquest say what you will was as big 
 in the breast of the most fervid of the Crusaders 
 as it is this very day in the most peacefully 
 disposed of American manufacturers. Had 
 the Lion-Hearted Richard lived to-day he 
 would have become a "leading representative 
 of the Amalgamated Steel Companies," and 
 doubt not for one moment that he would have 
 underbid his Manchester rivals in the matter 
 of bridge-girders. Had Mr. Andrew Carnegie 
 been alive at the time of the preachings of 
 Peter the Hermit he would have raised a com- 
 pany of gens d'armes sooner than all of his 
 brothers-in-arms, would have equipped his men 
 better and more effectively, would have been 
 first on the ground before Jerusalem, would have 
 built the most ingenious siege-engine and have 
 hurled the first cask of Greek-fire over the walls. 
 
 Competition and conquest are words easily 
 interchangeable, and the whole spirit of our
 
 The Frontier Gone at Last 75 
 
 present commercial crusade to the Eastward 
 betrays itself in the fact that we cannot speak 
 of it but in terms borrowed from the glossary 
 of the warrior. It is a commercial "invasion," 
 a trade "war," a "threatened attack" on the 
 part of America; business is "captured," 
 opportunities are "seized," certain industries 
 are "killed," certain former monopolies are 
 "wrested away." Seven hundred years ago a 
 certain Count Baldwin, a great leader in the 
 attack of the Anglo-Saxon Crusaders upon the 
 Old World, built himself a siege-engine which 
 would help him enter the beleaguered city of 
 Jerusalem. Jerusalem is beleaguered again 
 to-day, and the hosts of the Anglo-Saxon 
 commercial crusaders are knocking at the 
 gates. And now a company named for 
 another Baldwin and, for all we know, a 
 descendant of the Count leaders of the 
 invaders of the Old World, advance upon 
 the city, and, to help in the assault, 
 build an engine only now the engine is no 
 longer called a mangonel, but a locomotive. 
 
 The difference is hardly of kind and scarcely 
 of degree. It is a mere matter of names, and 
 the ghost of Saladin watching the present 
 engagement might easily fancy the old days 
 back again. 
 
 So perhaps we have not lost the Frontier,
 
 76 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 after all. A new phrase, reversing that of 
 Berkeley's, is appropriate to the effect that 
 "Eastward the course of commerce takes its 
 way," and we must look for the lost battle- 
 line not toward the sunset, but toward the 
 East. And so rapid has been the retrograde 
 movement that we must go far to find it, that 
 scattered firing-line, where the little skirmishes 
 are heralding the approach of the Great March. 
 We must already go farther afield than England. 
 The main body, even to the reserves, are 
 intrenched there long since, and even conti- 
 nental Europe is to the rear of the skirmishers. 
 
 Along about Suez we begin to catch up with 
 them where they are deepening the great canal, 
 and we can assure ourselves that we are fairly 
 abreast of the most distant line of scouts only 
 when we come to Khiva, to Samarcand, to 
 Bokhara and the Trans-Baikal country. 
 
 Just now one hears much of the "American 
 commercial invasion of England." But adjust 
 the field-glasses and look beyond Britain and 
 seach for the blaze that the scouts have left 
 on the telegraph poles and mile-posts of 
 Hungary, Turkey, Turkey in Asia, Persia, 
 Baluchistan, India and Siam. You'll find the 
 blaze distinct and the road, though rough hewn, 
 is easy to follow. Prophecy and presumption 
 be far from us, but it would be against all
 
 The Frontier Gone at Last 77 
 
 precedent that the Grand March should rest 
 forever upon its arms and its laurels along the 
 Thames, the Mersey and the Clyde, while its 
 pioneers and frontiersmen are making roads 
 for it to the Eastward. 
 
 Is it too huge a conception, too inordinate 
 an idea to say that the American conquest of 
 England is but an incident of the Greater 
 Invasion, an affair of outposts preparatory to 
 the real maneuver that shall embrace Europe, 
 Asia, the whole of the Old World? Why not? 
 And the blaze is ahead of us, and every now 
 and then from far off there in the countries 
 that are under the rising sun we catch the faint 
 sounds of the skirmishing of our outposts. One 
 of two things invariably happens under such 
 circumstances as these: either the outposts fall 
 back upon the main body or the main body 
 moves up to the support of its outposts. One 
 does not think that the outposts will fall back. 
 
 And so goes the great movement, Westward, 
 then Eastward, forward and then back. The 
 motion of the natural forces, the elemental 
 energies, somehow appear to be thus alterna- 
 tive action first, then reaction. The tides 
 ebb and flow again, the seasons have their 
 slow vibrations, touching extremes at periodic 
 intervals. Not impossibly, in the larger view,
 
 7 8 The Responsibilities of ike Novelist 
 
 is the analogy applicable to the movements of 
 the races. First Westward with the great 
 migrations, now Eastward with the course 
 of commerce, moving in a colossal arc measured 
 only by the hemispheres, as though upon the 
 equator a giant dial hand oscillated, in gradual 
 divisions through the centuries, now marking 
 off the Westward progress, now traveling pro- 
 portionately to the reaction toward the East. 
 
 Races must follow their destiny blindly, 
 but is it not possible that we can find in this 
 great destiny of ours something a little better 
 than mere battle and conquest, something a 
 little more generous than mere trading and 
 underbidding? Inevitably with constant 
 change of environment comes the larger view, 
 the more tolerant spirit, and every race move- 
 ment, from the first step beyond the Friesland 
 swamp to the adjustment of the first American 
 theodolite on the Himalayan watershed, is an 
 unconscious lesson in patriotism. Just now 
 we cannot get beyond the self -laudatory mood, 
 but is it not possible to hope that, as the prog- 
 ress develops, a new patriotism, one that shall 
 include all peoples, may prevail? The past 
 would indicate that this is a goal toward which 
 we trend. 
 
 In the end let us take the larger view, ignor- 
 ing the Frieslanders, the Anglo-Saxons, the
 
 The Frontier Gone at Last 79 
 
 Americans. Let us look at the peoples as 
 people and observe how inevitably as they 
 answer the great Westward impulse the true 
 patriotism develops. If we can see that it is 
 so with all of them we can assume that it must 
 be so with us, and may know that mere victory 
 in battle as we march Westward, or mere 
 supremacy in trade as we react to the East, 
 is not after all the great achievement of the 
 races, but patriotism. Not our present selfish 
 day conception of the word, but a new patriot- 
 ism, whose meaning is now the secret of the 
 coming centuries. 
 
 Consider then the beginnings of patriotism. 
 At the very first, the seed of the future nation 
 was the regard of family; the ties of common 
 birth held men together, and the first feeling 
 of patriotism was the love of family. But the 
 family grows, develops by lateral branches, 
 expands and becomes the clan. Patriotism is 
 the devotion to the clan, and the clansmen 
 will fight and die for its supremacy. 
 
 Then comes the time when the clans, tired 
 of the roving life of herders, halt a moment 
 and settle down in a chosen spot; the tent, 
 becoming permanent, evolves the dwelling- 
 house, and the encampment of the clan becomes 
 at last a city. Patriotism now is civic pride; 
 the clan absorbed into a multitude of clans is
 
 8o The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 forgotten; men speak of themselves as Atheni- 
 ans, not as Greeks, as Romans, not as Italians. 
 It is the age of cities. 
 
 The city extends its adjoining grazing fields ; 
 they include outlying towns, other cities, and 
 finally the State comes into being. Patriotism 
 no longer confines itself to the walls of the 
 city, but is enlarged to encompass the entire 
 province. Men are Hanoverians or Wurtem- 
 burgers, not Germans; Scots or Welsh, not 
 English; are even Carolinians or Alabamans 
 rather than Americans. 
 
 But the States are federated, pronounced 
 boundaries fade, State makes common cause 
 with State, and at last the nation is born. 
 Patriotism at once is a national affair, a far 
 larger, broader, truer sentiment than that first 
 huddling about the hearthstone of the family. 
 The word "brother" may be applied to men 
 unseen and unknown, and a countryman is 
 one of many millions. 
 
 We have reached this stage at the present, 
 but if all signs are true, if all precedent may 
 be followed, if all augury may be relied on 
 and the tree grow as we see the twig is bent, 
 the progress will not stop here. 
 
 By war to the Westward the family fought 
 its way upward to the dignity of the nation ; by 
 reaction Eastward the nation may in patriotic
 
 The Frontier Gone at Last 81 
 
 effect merge with other nations, and others 
 and still others, peacefully, the bitterness of 
 trade competition may be lost, the business 
 of the nations seen as a friendly quid pro quo, 
 give and take arrangement, guided by a gen- 
 erous reciprocity. Every century the bound- 
 aries are widening, patriotism widens with 
 the expansion, and our countrymen are those of 
 different race, even different nations. 
 
 Will it not go on, this epic of civilization, 
 this destiny of the races, until at last and at 
 the ultimate end of all we who now arrogantly 
 boast ourselves as Americans, supreme in 
 conquest, whether of battle-ship or of bridge- 
 building, may realize that the true patriotism 
 is the brotherhood of man and know that the 
 whole world is our nation and simple humanity 
 our countrymen?
 
 THE GREAT AMERICAN 
 NOVELIST
 
 THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELIST 
 
 all the overworked phrases of over- 
 worked book reviewers, the phrase, the 
 "Great American Novelist," is beyond doubt 
 worn the thinnest from much handling or 
 mishandling. Continually the little literary 
 middlemen who come between the producers 
 and the consumers of fiction are mouthing the 
 words with a great nourish of adjectives, scare- 
 heading them in Sunday supplements or pla- 
 carding them on posters, crying out, "Lo, he 
 is here!" or "lo, there!" But the heathen 
 rage and the people imagine a vain thing. 
 The G. A. N. is either as extinct as the Dodo 
 or as far in the future as the practical aeroplane. 
 He certainly is not discoverable at the present. 
 
 The moment a new writer of fiction begins to 
 make himself felt he is gibbeted upon this 
 elevation upon this false, insecure elevation, 
 for the underpinning is of the flimsiest, and at 
 any moment is liable to collapse under the 
 victim's feet and leave him hanging in midair 
 by head and hands, a fixture and a mockery. 
 
 And who is to settle the title upon the aspi- 
 rant in the last issue? Who is to determine 
 
 85
 
 86 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 what constitutes the G. A. N. Your candidate 
 may suit you, but your neighbour may have 
 a very different standard to which he must 
 conform. It all depends upon what you mean 
 by Great, what you mean by American. Shake- 
 speare has been called great, and so has Mr. 
 Stephen Phillips. Oliver Wendell Holmes 
 was American, and so is Bret Harte. Who is 
 to say? 
 
 And many good people who deplore the 
 decay of American letters are accustomed to 
 refer to the absence of a G. A. N. as though 
 there were a Great English Novelist or a Great 
 French Novelist. But do these two people 
 exist? Ask any dozen of your friends to 
 mention the Great English Novelist, and out of 
 the dozen you will get at least a half-dozen 
 different names. It will be Dickens or Scott or 
 Thackeray or Bronte or Eliot or Stevenson, 
 and the same with the Frenchman. And it 
 seems to me that if a novelist were great 
 enough to be universally acknowledged to be 
 the Great one of his country, he would cease 
 to belong to any particular geographical area 
 and would become a heritage of the whole 
 world ; as for instance Tolstoi ; when one thinks 
 of him it is is it not? as a novelist first and 
 as a Russian afterward. 
 
 But if one wishes to split hairs, one might
 
 The Great American Novelist 87 
 
 admit that while the Great American Novelist 
 is yet to be born, the possibility of A note 
 the indefinite article A Great American Novel 
 is not too remote for discussion. But such a 
 novel will be sectional. The United States is 
 a Union, but not a unit, and the life in one part 
 is very, very different from the life in another. 
 It is as yet impossible to construct a novel 
 which will represent all the various charac- 
 teristics of the different sections. It is only 
 possible to make a picture of a single locality. 
 What is true of the South is not true of the 
 North. The West is different, and the Pacific 
 Coast is a community by itself. 
 
 Many of our very best writers are working 
 on this theory. Bret Harte made a study of 
 the West as he saw it, and Mr. Howells has 
 done the same for the East. Cable has worked 
 the field of the Far South, and Eggleston has 
 gone deep into the life of the Middle West. 
 
 But consider a suggestion. It is an argu- 
 ment on the other side, and to be fair one must 
 present it. It is a good argument, and if based 
 on fact is encouraging in the hope that the 
 Great man may yet appear. It has been said 
 that "what is true vitally and inherently 
 true for any one man is true for all men." 
 Accordingly, then, what is vitally true of the 
 Westerner is true of the Bostonian yes, and
 
 88 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 of the creole. So that if Mr. Cable, say, should 
 only go deep enough into the hearts and lives of 
 his Creoles, he would at last strike the universal 
 substratum and find the elemental thing that 
 is common to the creole and to the Puritan 
 alike yes, and to the Cowboy and Hoosier 
 and Greaser and Buckeye and Jay Hawker, 
 and that, once getting hold of that, he could 
 produce the Great American Novel that should 
 be a picture of the entire nation. 
 
 Now, that is a very ingenious argument and 
 sounds very plausible. But it won't do, and 
 for this reason: If an American novelist 
 should go so deep into the lives of the people 
 of any one community that he would find the 
 thing that is common to another class of people 
 a thousand miles away, he would have gone 
 too deep to be exclusively American. He 
 would not only be American, but English as 
 well. He would have sounded the world-note ; 
 he would be a writer not national, but inter- 
 national, and his countrymen would be all 
 humanity, not the citizens of any one nation. 
 He himself would be a heritage of the whole 
 world, a second Tolstoi, which brings us back 
 to the very place from which we started. 
 
 And the conclusion of the whole matter? 
 That fiction is very good or very bad there 
 is no middle ground; that writers of fiction m
 
 The Great American Novelist 89 
 
 their points of view are either limited to a cir- 
 cumscribed area or see humanity as a tremen- 
 dous conglomerate whole; that it must be 
 either Mary Wilkins or George Eliot, Edward 
 Eggleston or William Shakespeare; that the 
 others do not weigh very much in the balance 
 of the world's judgment; and that the Great 
 American Novel is not extinct like the Dodo, 
 but mythical like the Hippogriff, and that the 
 thing to be looked for is not the Great American 
 Novelist, but the Great Novelist who shall also 
 be an American.
 
 NEW YORK AS A LITERARY 
 CENTRE
 
 NEW YORK AS A LITERARY CENTRE 
 
 TT has been given to the present writer 
 * to know a great many of what one 
 may call The Unarrived in literary work, and 
 of course to be one himself of that "innumer- 
 able caravan," and speaking authoritatively 
 and of certain knowledge, the statement may 
 be made, that of all the ambitions of the Great 
 Unpublished, the one that is strongest, the 
 most abiding, is the ambition to get to New 
 York. For these, New York is the "point de 
 depart," the pedestal, the niche, the indispensa- 
 ble vantage ground; as one of the unpub- 
 lished used to put it : " It is a place that I can 
 stand on and holler." 
 
 This man lived in a second-class town west 
 of the Mississippi, and one never could persuade 
 him that he might holler from his own, his 
 native heath, and yet be heard. He said it 
 would be "the voice of one crying in the 
 wilderness." New York was the place for 
 him. Once land him in New York and all 
 would be gas and gaiters. 
 
 There are so many thousands like this young 
 man of mine that a word in this connection 
 
 93
 
 94 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 seems appropriate; and the object of this 
 present writing is to protest against this blind 
 and unreasoned hegira, and to urge the point 
 that tradition, precedent to the contrary not- 
 withstanding, New York is not a literary 
 centre. 
 
 I am perfectly well aware that this statement 
 savours of hearsay, but at the same time I think 
 it can be defended. As for instance : 
 
 Time was when Boston claimed the dis- 
 tinction that one now denies to New York. 
 But one asserts that Boston made her claims 
 good. In those days the reactionary movement 
 of populations from the cities toward the coun- 
 try had not set in. A constant residence 
 winter and summer in the country was not 
 dreamed of by those who had the leisure and 
 the money to afford it. As much as possible 
 the New England writers crowded to Boston, 
 or to Cambridge, which is practically the same 
 thing, and took root in the place. There was 
 their local habitation; there they lived, and 
 thence they spread their influence. Remember 
 that at the height of the development of the 
 New England school there were practically no 
 other writers of so great importance the length 
 and breadth of the land. This huddling about 
 a common point made it possible to visit all 
 the homes of nearly all of the most eminent
 
 New York as a Literary Centre 95 
 
 American literati in a single day. The younger 
 men, the aspirants, the Unpublished, however, 
 thrown into such society, could not fail to be 
 tremendously impressed, and, banded together 
 as these great ones were, their influence counted 
 enormously. It was no unusual sight to see 
 half a dozen of these at the same dinner table. 
 They all knew each other intimately, these 
 Bostonians, and their word was Lex, and the 
 neophites came from all corners of the compass 
 to hear them speak, and Boston did in good 
 earnest become the Hub, the centre of Literary 
 thought and work in the United States. 
 
 But no such conditions obtain in New York 
 to-day. During the last ten years two very 
 important things have happened that bear upon 
 this question. First has come the impulse 
 toward a country life a continued winter and 
 summer residence in the country. Authors 
 more than any other class of workers can afford 
 this since their profession can be carried any- 
 where. They need no city offices. They 
 are not forced to be in touch with the actual 
 business life of Broadway. Secondly, since 
 the days of the Bostonian supremacy a tre- 
 mendous wave of literary production has 
 swept over the United States. Now England 
 has ceased to be the only place where books are 
 written. Poems are now indited in Dakota,
 
 96 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 novels composed in Wyoming, essays written 
 in Utah, and criticisms flourish in Kansas. A 
 thousand and one Little Centres have sprung 
 up. Literary groups are formed everywhere, 
 in Buffalo, in San Francisco, in Indianapolis 
 and Chicago. 
 
 All this detracts from the preponderance of 
 any one city, such as New York, as Literary 
 dictator. You shall find but a very small and 
 meager minority of the Greater Men of Letters 
 who have their homes in Manhattan. Most of 
 them preferred to live in the places whereof 
 they treat in their books, in New Orleans, 
 in Indiana, in Kentucky, or Virginia, or 
 California, or Kansas, or Illinois. If they 
 come to New York at all it is only tem- 
 porarily, to place their newest book or to 
 arrange with publishers for future work. 
 
 The result of this is as is claimed. New 
 York is not a literary centre. The publishing 
 houses are there, the magazines, all the dis- 
 tributing machinery, but not the writers. They 
 do not live there. They do not care to come 
 there. They regard the place simply as a 
 distributing point for their wares. 
 
 Literary centres produce literary men. Paris, 
 London and Boston all have their long lists of 
 native-born writers men who were born in 
 these cities and whose work was identified
 
 New York as a Literary Centre 97 
 
 with them. But New York can claim but 
 ridiculously few of the men of larger caliber 
 as her own. James Whitcomb Riley is from 
 Indiana, Joel Chandler Harris is a Southerner. 
 Howells came from Boston, Cable from New 
 Orleans, Hamlin Garland from the West. Bret 
 Harte from California, Mark Twain from the 
 Middle West, Harold Frederic and Henry 
 James found England more congenial than the 
 greatest city of their native land. Even among 
 the younger generation there are but few who 
 can be considered as New Yorkers. Although 
 Richard Harding Davis wrote accurately and 
 delightfully of New York people, he was not 
 born in New York, did not receive his first 
 impetus from New York influences, and does 
 not now live in New York. Nor is his best 
 work upon themes or subjects in any way 
 related to New York. 
 
 In view of all these facts it is difficult to see 
 what the Great Unpublished have to gain by 
 a New York residence. Indeed, it is much 
 easier to see how very much they have to lose. 
 
 The writing of fiction has many drawbacks, 
 but one of its blessed compensations is the fact 
 that of all the arts it is the most independent. 
 Independent of time, of manner and of place. 
 Wherever there is a table and quiet, there the 
 novel may be written. "Ah, but the publishing
 
 98 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 houses are in New York." What has that to do 
 with it? Do not for a moment suppose that 
 your novel will be considered more carefully 
 because you submit it in person. It is not as 
 though you were on the lookout for odd jobs 
 which, because of a personal acquaintance with 
 editors and publishers, might be put in your 
 way. The article, the story, the essay, poem 
 or novel is just as good, just as available, just as 
 salable whether it comes from Washington 
 Territory or Washington Square. 
 
 Not only this, but one believes that actual 
 residence in New York is hostile and inimical 
 to good work. The place, admittedly, teems 
 with literary clubs, circles, associations, organ- 
 izations of pseudo-literati, who foregather at 
 specified times to "read papers" and "discuss 
 questions." It is almost impossible for the 
 young writer who comes for a first time to the 
 city to avoid entangling himself with them; 
 and of the influences that tend to stultify 
 ambition, warp original talent and definably 
 and irretrievably stamp out the last spark of 
 productive ability one knows of none more 
 effective than the literary clubs. 
 
 You will never find the best men at these 
 gatherings. You will never hear the best work 
 read in this company, you will never evolve 
 any original, personal, definite ideas or ideals
 
 New York as a Literary Centre 99 
 
 under such influence. The discussions of the 
 literary clubs are made up of puerile argu- 
 ments that have done duty for years in the 
 college text-books. Their work the papers 
 quoted and stories read aloud is commonplace 
 and conventional to the deadliest degree, while 
 their "originality" the ideas that they claim 
 are their very own is nothing but a distor- 
 tion and dislocation of preconceived notions, 
 mere bizarre effects of the grotesque and the 
 improbable. "Ah, but the spur of competi- 
 tion." Competition is admirable in trade 
 it is even desirable in certain arts. It has no 
 place in a literary career. It is not as though 
 two or more writers were working on the 
 same story, each striving to better the others. 
 That would, indeed, be true competition. But 
 in New York, where the young writer any 
 writer may see a dozen instances in a week of 
 what he knows is inferior work succeeding 
 where he fails, competition is robbed of all 
 stimulating effect and, if one is not very careful, 
 leaves only the taste of ashes in the mouth 
 and rancour and discontent in the heart. 
 
 With other men's novels the novelist has 
 little to do. What this writer is doing, what 
 that one is saying, what books this publishing 
 house is handling, how many copies so-and-so's 
 book is selling all this fuss and feathers
 
 ioo The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 of "New York as a literary centre" should be 
 for him so many distractions. It is all very 
 well to say "let us keep in touch with the 
 best thought in our line of work." "Let us be 
 in the movement." The best thought is not 
 in New York; and even if it were, the best 
 thought of other men is not so good for you as 
 your own thought, dug out of your own vitals 
 by your own unaided efforts, be it never so 
 inadequate. 
 
 You do not have to go to New York for that. 
 Your own ideas, your own work will flourish 
 best if left alone untrammeled and uninfluenced. 
 And believe this to be true, that wherever 
 there is a table, a sheet of paper and a pot of 
 ink, there is a Literary Centre if you will. You 
 will find none better the world over.
 
 THE AMERICAN PUBLIC AND 
 " POPULAR" FICTION
 
 THE AMERICAN PUBLIC AND " POPU- 
 LAR FICTION 
 
 HE American people judged by Old World 
 standards even sometimes according 
 to native American standards have always 
 been considered a practical people, a material 
 people. 
 
 We have been told and have also told our- 
 selves that we are hard-headed, that we rejoiced 
 in facts and not in fancies, and as an effect of 
 this characteristic were not given to books. 
 We were not literary, we assumed, were not 
 fond of reading. We, who were subjugating 
 a continent, who were inventing machinery 
 and building railroads, left it to the older and 
 more leisurely nations to France and to 
 England to read books. 
 
 On the face of it this would seem a safe 
 assumption. As a matter of fact, the American 
 people are the greatest readers in the world. 
 That is to say, that, count for count, there 
 are more books read in the United States in one 
 year than in any other country of the globe in 
 the same space of time. 
 
 Nowhere do the circulations attain such 
 103
 
 104 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 magnitude as they do with us. A little while 
 ago ten years ago the charge that we did 
 not read was probably true. But there must 
 exist some mysterious fundamental connection 
 between this recent sudden expansion of things 
 American geographic, commercial and other- 
 wise and the demand for books. Imperialism, 
 Trade Expansion, the New Prosperity and the 
 Half Million Circulation all came into existence 
 at about the same time. 
 
 Merely the fact of great prosperity does not 
 account for the wider reading. Prosperous 
 periods, good prices, easy credit and a mobile 
 currency have occurred often before without 
 producing the demand for books. Something 
 more than prosperity has suddenly swept across 
 the continent and evaded the spirit of the 
 times. Something very like an awakening, 
 something very like a renaissance and the 
 70,000,000 have all at once awakened to the 
 fact that there are books to be read. As 
 with all things sudden, there is noticeable with 
 this awakening a lack of discrimination, the 
 70,000,000 are so eager for books that, faute 
 de mieux, anything printed will pass current for 
 literature. It is a great animal, this American 
 public, and having starved for so long, it is 
 ready, once aroused, to devour anything. And 
 the great presses of the country are for the most
 
 The American Public and "Popular" Fiction 105 
 
 part merely sublimated sausage machines that 
 go dashing along in a mess of paper and printer's 
 ink turning out the meat for the monster. 
 
 There are not found wanting many who 
 deplore this and who blackguard the great 
 brute for his appetite. Softly, softly. If the 
 Megatherium has been obliged to swallow 
 wind for sustenance for several hundred years, 
 it would be unkind to abuse him because he eats 
 the first lot of spoiled hay or over-ripe twigs 
 that is thrust under the snout of him. Patience 
 and shuffle the cards. Once his belly filled, and 
 the pachyderm will turn to the new-mown 
 grass and fruit trees in preference to the hay 
 and twigs. 
 
 So the studios and the Browning classes need 
 not altogether revile the great American public. 
 Better bad books than no books ; better half a 
 loaf of hard bread than no frosted wedding- 
 cake. The American people, unlike the English, 
 unlike the French and other Europeans, have 
 not been educated and refined and endoctrinated 
 for 2,000 years, and when you remember what 
 they have done in one hundred years, tamed an 
 entire continent, liberated a race, produced a 
 Lincoln, invented the telegraph, spanned the 
 plains when you remember all this, do not 
 spurn the 70,000,000 because they do not 
 understand Henry James, but be glad that they
 
 io6 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 even care for "The Duchess" and "Ouida." 
 The wonder of it is not that they do not read 
 or appreciate the best, but that they have set 
 apart any time at all in the struggle of civiliz- 
 ing the wilderness and forging steel rivets to 
 so much as pick up any kind or description of 
 a book. 
 
 Consider the other nations, France for 
 instance the very sanctum of Art, the home 
 and birthplace of literature. Compare the 
 rural districts of France with the rural dis- 
 tricts of the United States, and in the com- 
 parison allow, if you like, for all the centuries 
 of quiet uninterrupted growth, the wilderness 
 tamed, life domesticated, reduced to routine 
 that modern France enjoys. Do you suppose for 
 one moment that a bourgeois family of say 
 Tours is on the same level in the matter of 
 its reading as the household of a contractor's 
 family in for example Martinez, California, 
 or Cheyenne, Wyoming ? 
 
 I tell you there is no comparison whatever. 
 The West may be wild even yet, may be what 
 Boston would call uncultured, but it reads. 
 There are people in Cheyenne and Martinez 
 who can express an opinion and a more 
 intelligent opinion, mark you on Maeterlinck 
 and Bourget, better than the same class of 
 readers in Belgium and France. And quite
 
 The American Public and ''Popular" Fiction 107 
 
 as likely as not the same class of people in the 
 very native countries of the two writers named 
 have never so much as heard of these writers. 
 
 This, admittedly, is the exception, but if our 
 exceptional Martinez and Cheyenne people are 
 so far advanced in literary criticism, we may 
 reasonably expect that the rank and file below 
 them are proportionately well on. Maeterlinck 
 and Bourget are closed books to those rank- 
 and-file readers yet. But again I say, this is not 
 the point. The point is, that they are readers 
 at all. Let them in the name of future 
 American literature read their Duchesses and 
 Ouidas and Edna Lyalls and Albert Rosses. 
 What are their prototypes in France, Germany 
 and Russia reading? They simply are not 
 reading at all, and as often as not it is not 
 because of the lack of taste, but because of 
 the lack of sheer downright ability, because 
 they do not know how to read. 
 
 A very great man once said that "books 
 never have done harm," and under this sign let 
 us conquer. There is hardly a better to be 
 found. Instead, then, of deploring the vast 
 circulation of mediocre novels, let us take 
 the larger view and find in the fact not a 
 weakness, but a veritable strength. The more 
 one reads it is a curious consolatory fact 
 the more one is apt to discriminate. The
 
 io8 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 ten-year-old who reads "Old Sleuth" to-day, 
 in a little while will find Scott more to his liking. 
 Just now the 70,000,000 is ten years old. But 
 it" is started right. Patience. Books have 
 never done harm, and in the end let us be 
 certain that the day will come when the real 
 masterpiece, the real literature, will also be 
 selling in its "five hundredth thousand."
 
 CHILD STORIES FOR ADULTS
 
 CHILD STORIES FOR ADULTS 
 
 'TpHERE was a time, none too remote at 
 * this date of writing, when juvenile and 
 adult fiction were two separate and distinct 
 classifications. Boys read stories for boys 
 and girls stories for girls, and the adults con- 
 tented themselves with the wise lucubrations 
 of their equals in years. But the last few 
 years have changed all that have changed 
 everything in American literature, in fact. 
 
 Some far-distant day, when the critics and 
 litterateurs of the twenty-second and twenty- 
 third centuries shall be writing of our day and 
 age, they will find a name for the sudden and 
 stupendous demand for reading matter that 
 has penetrated to all classes and corners since 
 1890. A great deal could be said upon this 
 sudden demand in itself, and I think it can be 
 proved to be the first effects of a genuine awak- 
 ening a second Renaissance. But the sub- 
 ject would demand an article by itself, and 
 in the meanwhile we may use the term awaken- 
 ing as a self-evident fact and consider not so 
 much the cause as the effects. 
 
 One of the effects, as has been already sug- 
 iii
 
 ii2 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 gested, is the change in classifications. Old 
 forms and formulas are, or are being rapidly 
 broken up, and one school and style merging 
 into others, till now what was once amusement 
 for the children has become entertaining for the 
 elders. And vice versa. The abruptness of 
 the awakening has disjointed and inverted all 
 the old fabric. "Robinson Crusoe," written 
 for adults, is now exclusively a "juvenile," 
 while "Treasure Island," written for boys, has 
 been snapped up by the parents. 
 
 Simultaneously with this topsy-turvy busi- 
 ness, and I am sure in some way connected 
 with it, comes the craze for stories about very 
 young children for adult reading. A boy's 
 story must now be all about the doings of men, 
 fighters preferably, man-slayers, terrible fellows 
 full of blood and fury, stamping on their 
 quarter-decks or counting doubloons by torch- 
 light on unnamed beaches. Meanwhile the 
 boy's father with a solemn interest is following 
 the fortunes of some terrible infant of the 
 kindergarten, or the vagaries of a ten-year-old 
 of a country town, or the teacup tragedy of 
 "The Very Little Girl," or "The Indiscretion 
 of Pinky Trevethan," or "The Chastening of 
 Skinny McCleave," etc., etc. 
 
 It is interesting to try to account for this. 
 It may either be a fad or a phase. It is almost
 
 Child Stories for Adults 113 
 
 too soon to tell, but in either case the matter 
 is worth considering. 
 
 Roughly speaking, the Child's Stories for 
 Adults fall into three classes. First there is 
 "The Strange Child Story." This is a very 
 old favourite, and was pretty well installed 
 long before the more recent developments. 
 In "The Strange Child Story" the bid for the 
 reader's pity and sympathy fairly clamoured 
 from between the lines. Always and per- 
 sistently The Strange Child was misunderstood. 
 He had "indefinable longings" that were 
 ridiculed, budding talents that were nipped, 
 heartaches terrible, tear-compelling heart- 
 aches that were ignored; and he lived in an 
 atmosphere of gloom, hostility and loneliness 
 that would have maddened an eremite. 
 
 But as his kind declined in popular esti- 
 mate the country boy, the ten-year-old who 
 always went in swimmin' and lost his tow 
 appeared in the magazines. There is no 
 sentiment about him. Never a tear need be 
 shed over the vicarious atonements of Pinky 
 Trevethan or Skinny McCleave. 
 
 It is part of the game to pretend that the 
 Pinkys and Skinnys and Peelys and Mickeys 
 are different individuals. Error. They are 
 merely different names of the boy that peren- 
 nially and persistently remains the same. Do
 
 ii4 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 you know who he is? He is the average 
 American business man before he grew up. 
 That accounts for his popularity. The average 
 business man had clean forgotten all about 
 those early phases of primitive growth, and it 
 amuses him immensely to find out that the 
 scribe has been making a study of him and 
 bringing to light the forgotten things that are 
 so tremendously familiar when presented to 
 the consideration. It is not fiction nor yet 
 literature in the straightest sense of the word, 
 this rehabilitation of Skinny McCleave. It has 
 a value vaguely scientific, the same value that a 
 specimen, a fossil insect, has when brought to 
 the attention of the savant. It is the study of 
 an extinct species, a report upon the American 
 boy of thirty years ago. 
 
 Then lastly the latest development there 
 is the cataclysm of the kindergarten, the 
 checked apron drama, the pigtail passion, the 
 epic of the broken slate-pencil. This needs 
 a delicacy of touch that only a woman can 
 supply, and as a matter of fact it is for the most 
 part women who sign the stories. The interest 
 in these is not so personal and retrospective as 
 in the Skinny McCleave circle, for the kinder- 
 garten is too recent to be part of the childhood 
 memories of the present generation of adult 
 magazine readers. It is more informative, a
 
 Child Stories for Adults 115 
 
 presentation of conditions hitherto but vaguely 
 known, and at the same time it is an attempt to 
 get at and into the heart and head of a little 
 child. 
 
 And in this last analysis it would seem as if 
 here existed the barrier insurmountable. It 
 is much to be doubted if ever a genius will 
 arise so thoughtful, so sensitive that he will 
 penetrate into more than the merest outside 
 integument of a child's heart. Certain phases 
 have been guessed at with beautiful intention, 
 certain rare insights have been attained 
 with exquisite nicety, but somehow even 
 the most sympathetic reader must feel 
 that the insight is as rare as the interest is 
 misguided. 
 
 Immanuel Kant conceived of, and, in the 
 consummate power of his intellect, executed 
 the "Critique of Pure Reason"; Darwin had 
 taken the adult male and female human and 
 tracked down their every emotion, impulse, 
 quality and sentiment. The intellectual powers 
 and heart-beats of a Napoleon or a Shake- 
 speare have been reduced to more common- 
 place corner gossip, but after thousands of 
 years of civilization, with the subject ever be- 
 fore us, its workings as near to us as air itself, 
 the mind of a little child is as much a closed 
 book, as much an enigma, as much a blank
 
 n6 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 space upon the charts of our intellectual 
 progress as at the very first. 
 
 Volumes have been written about the child, 
 and stories for and of the child, and very 
 learned men have lectured and other very 
 eminent and noble men have taught, and it 
 has all been going on for nineteen hundred and 
 two years. And yet, notwithstanding all this, 
 there lurks a mystery deep down within the 
 eye of the five-year-old, a mystery that neither 
 you nor I may know. You may see and 
 understand what he actually does, but the 
 thinking part of him is a second hidden nature 
 that belongs to him and to other children, not 
 to adults, not even to his mother. Once the 
 older person invades the sphere of influence of 
 this real undernature of the child and it congeals 
 at once. It thaws and thrives only in the 
 company of other children, and at the best we 
 older ones may see it from a distance and from 
 the outside. Between us and them it would 
 appear that a great gulf is bridged; there 
 is no knowing the child as he really is, and until 
 the real child can be known the stories about 
 him and the fiction and literature about him 
 can at best be only a substitute for the real 
 knowledge that probably never shall be ours.
 
 NEWSPAPER CRITICISMS AND 
 AMERICAN FICTION
 
 NEWSPAPER CRITIOSMS AND AMERICAN 
 FICTION 
 
 limitations of space impose a re- 
 stricted title, and one hastens to 
 qualify the substantive "criticisms" by the 
 adjective "average." Even "average" is not 
 quite specialized enough; "vast majority" is 
 more to the sense, and the proposition expanded 
 to its fullest thus stands, "How is the vast 
 majority of newspaper criticisms made, and 
 how does it affect American Fiction?" And 
 it may not be inappropriate at the outset to 
 observe that one has adventured both hazards 
 
 criticism (of the "vast majority" kind) and 
 also Fiction. One has criticized and has been 
 criticized. Possibly then it may be permitted 
 to speak a little authoritatively; not as the 
 Scribes. Has it not astonished you how many 
 of those things called by the new author 
 "favourable reviews" may attach themselves 
 
 barnacles upon a lifeless hulk to a novel 
 that you know, that you know every one must, 
 must know, is irretrievably bad? "On the 
 whole, Mr. - 's story is a capital bit of vigor- 
 ous writing that we joyfully recommend" 
 
 119
 
 120 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 "A thrilling story palpitating with life," "One 
 of the very best novels that has appeared in 
 a long time," and the ever-new, ever-dutiful, 
 ever-ready encomium, " Not a dull page in the 
 book" (as if by the furthest stretch of con- 
 ceivable human genius a book could be written 
 that did not have a dull page ; as if dull pages 
 were not an absolute necessity). All these 
 you may see strung after the announcement of 
 publication of the novel. No matter, I repeat, 
 how outrageously bad the novel may be. Now 
 there is an explanation of this matter, and it 
 is to be found not in the sincere admiration 
 of little reviewers who lack the ingenuity to 
 invent new phrases, but in the following fact: 
 it is easier to write favourable than unfavour- 
 able reviews. It must be borne in mind that 
 very few newspapers (comparatively) employ 
 regularly paid book-reviewers whose business 
 it is to criticize novels and nothing else. Most 
 book-reviewing is done as an odd job by sub- 
 editors, assistants and special writers in the 
 intervals between their regular work. They 
 come to the task with a brain already jaded, 
 an interest so low as to be almost negligible, 
 and with as often as not a mind besieged 
 by a thousand other cares, responsibilities 
 and projects. 
 
 The chief has said something like this
 
 Newspaper Criticisms and American Fiction 121 
 
 (placing upon the scribe's table a column of 
 novels easily four feet high, sent in for review) : 
 
 "Say, B , these things have been stacking 
 
 up like the devil lately, and I don't want 'em 
 kicking 'round the office any longer. Get 
 through with them as quick as you can, and 
 remember that in an hour there's such and 
 such to be done." 
 
 I tell you I have seen it happen like this a 
 hundred times. And the scribe "must" read 
 and "review" between twenty and thirty 
 books in an hour's time. One way of doing it 
 is to search in the pages of the book for the 
 "publisher's notice," a printed slip that has a 
 favourable review that is what it amounts 
 to all ready-made. The scribe merely turns 
 this in with a word altered here and there. 
 How he reviews the books that have not this 
 publisher's notice Heaven only knows. He 
 is not to blame, as they must be done in 
 an hour. Twenty books in sixty minutes 
 three minutes to each book. Now, it is impos- 
 sible to criticize a book adversely after a 
 minute and a half of reading (we will allow a 
 minute and a half for writing the review). In 
 order to write unfavourably it is necessary to 
 know what one is writing about. But it is 
 astonishing how much commendatory palaver 
 already exists that can be applied to any kind
 
 122 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 or condition of novel. Is it a novel of adven- 
 ture (the reviewer may know if it be such by 
 the ship on the cover design) it will be appro- 
 priate to use these terms: "Vibrant with 
 energy," or "Full of fine fighting," or "The 
 reader is carried with breathless interest from 
 page to page of this exciting romance." Is it 
 a novel of rural life ? These may be made use 
 of: "Replete with quaint humour," "A faithful 
 picture of an interesting phase of American 
 life," etc., etc. Is it a story of the West (you 
 can guess that from the chapter headings), it 
 will be proper to say, "A strong and vital por- 
 traying of the wild life of the trail and frontier." 
 
 And so one might run through the entire 
 list. The books must be reviewed, the easiest 
 way is the quickest, and the quickest way is 
 to write in a mild and meaningless phraseology, 
 innocuous, "favourable." In this fashion is 
 made the greater mass of American criticism. 
 As to effects: It has of course no effect upon 
 the novel's circulation. Only one person is at 
 all apt to take these reviews, this hack-work, 
 seriously. 
 
 Only one person, I observed, is at all apt to 
 take these reviews seriously. This way lies the 
 harm. The new writer, the young fellow with 
 his first book, who may not know the ways of 
 reviewers. The author, who collects these
 
 Newspaper Criticisms and American Fiction 123 
 
 notices and pastes them in a scrap-book. He 
 is perilously prone to believe what the hacks 
 say, to believe that there is "no dull page in 
 the story," that his novel is " one of the notable 
 contributions to recent fiction," and cherishing 
 this belief he is fated to a wrench and a heart- 
 ache when, six months after publication day, 
 the semi-annual account of copies sold is 
 rendered. There is unfortunately no palaver 
 in the writing of this no mild-mannered 
 phraseology; and the author is made to see 
 suddenly that "this exciting romance" which 
 the reviewers have said the readers "would 
 follow with a breathless interest till the end 
 is reached and then wish for more," has circu- 
 lated among possibly five hundred of the 
 breathless. 
 
 Thus, then, the vast majority of criticisms. 
 It is not all, however, and it is only fair to say 
 that there are exceptions great papers which 
 devote whole supplements to the consideration 
 of literary matters and whose reviewers are 
 deliberate, thoughtful fellows, who do not read 
 more than one book a week, who sign their opin- 
 ions and who have themselves a name, a reputa- 
 tion, to make or keep These must have an 
 effect. But even the most conspicuous among 
 them cannot influence very widely. They 
 may help, so one believes, a good book which
 
 124 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 is already becoming popular. No one of them 
 can "make" a book by a "favourable review," 
 as they could a little while ago in France. No 
 number of them could do it, here in America. 
 There are too many other reviewers. No one 
 man, nor aggregation of men, can monopolize 
 the requisite authority. And then with us the 
 spirit of independent thinking and judgment 
 is no doubt too prevalent.
 
 NOVELISTS TO ORDER WHILE 
 YOU WAIT
 
 NOVELISTS TO ORDER WHILE YOU 
 WAIT 
 
 at all absurd, "Novelists to order 
 while you wait," provided you order 
 the right sort, and are willing to wait long 
 enough. In other words, it is quite possible 
 to make a novelist, and a good one, too, 
 if the thing is undertaken in the right spirit, 
 just as it is possible to make a painter, or an 
 actor, or a business man. 
 
 I am prepared to hear the old objections 
 raised to this: "Ah, it must be born in you"; 
 "no amount of training can 'make' an artist"; 
 "poets are born and not made," etc., etc. 
 But I am also willing to contend that a very 
 large percentage of this talk is sheer non- 
 sense, and that what the world calls "genius" 
 is, as often as not, the results of average 
 ability specialized and developed. The original 
 "spark" in the child-mind, that later on 
 "kindles the world into flame with its light," 
 I do believe could be proved to be the same for 
 the artist, the actor, the novelist, the inventor, 
 even the financier and "magnate." It is only 
 made to burn in different lamps. Nor does any 
 127
 
 128 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 one believe that this " spark" is any mysterious, 
 supernatural gift, some marvelous, angelic 
 "genius," God-given, Heaven-given, etc., etc., 
 etc., but just plain, forthright, rectangular, 
 everyday common sense, nothing more extra- 
 ordinary or God-given than sanity. If it were 
 true that Genius were the gift of the gods, it 
 would also be true that hard work in cultivat- 
 ing it would be superfluous. As well be with- 
 out genius if some plodder, some dullard, can 
 by such work equal the best you can do you 
 with your God-given faculties. 
 
 Is it not much more reasonable more noble, 
 for the matter of that to admit at once that all 
 faculties, all intellects are God-given, the only 
 difference being that some are specialized to one 
 end, some to another, some not specialized at 
 all. We call Rostand and Mr. Carnegie geniuses, 
 but most of us would be unwilling to admit 
 that the genius of the American financier 
 differed in kind from the genius of the French 
 dramatist. However, one believes that this is 
 open to debate. As for my part, I suspect that, 
 given a difference in environment and training, 
 Rostand would have consolidated the American 
 steel companies and Carnegie have written 
 "L'Aiglon." But one dares to go a little 
 further a great deal further and claims that 
 the young Carnegie and the young Rostand
 
 Novelists to Order While You Wait 129 
 
 were no more than intelligent, matter-of-fact 
 boys, in no wise different from the common 
 house variety, grammar school product. They 
 have been trained differently, that is all. 
 
 Given the ordinarily intelligent ten-year-old, 
 and, all things being equal, you can make 
 anything you like out of him a minister of 
 the gospel or a green-goods man, an electrical 
 engineer or a romantic poet, or return to our 
 muttons a novelist. If a failure is the result, 
 blame the method of training, not the quantity 
 or quality of the ten-year-old's intellect. Don't 
 say, if he is a failure as a fine novelist, that he 
 lacks genius for writing, and would have been 
 a fine business man. Make no mistake, if he 
 did not have enough "genius" for novel -writing 
 he would certainly have not had enough for 
 business. 
 
 "Why, then," you will ask, "is it so impos- 
 sible for some men, the majority of them, to 
 write fine novels, or fine poems, or paint fine 
 pictures? Why is it that this faculty seems 
 to be reserved for the chosen few, the more 
 refined, cultured, etc. ? Why is it, in a word, 
 that, for every artist (using the word to in- 
 clude writers, painters, actors, etc.) that appears 
 there are thousands of business men, com- 
 mercial "geniuses"? 
 
 The reason seems to lie in this: and it is
 
 130 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 again a question of training. From the very 
 first the average intelligent American boy is 
 trained, not with a view toward an artistic 
 career, but with a view to entering a business 
 life. If the specialization of his faculties along 
 artistic lines ever occurs at all it begins only 
 when the boy is past the formative period. In 
 other words, most people who eventually 
 become artists are educated for the first eighteen 
 or twenty years of their life along entirely 
 unartistic lines. Biographies of artists are 
 notoriously full of just such instances. The 
 boy who is to become a business man finds, the 
 moment he goes to school, a whole vast machin- 
 ery of training made ready for his use, and not 
 only is it a matter of education for him, but the 
 whole scheme of modern civilization works in 
 his behalf. No one ever heard of obstacles 
 thrown in the way of the boy who announces 
 for himself a money-making career; while for 
 the artist, as is said, education, environment, 
 the trend of civilization are not merely indiffer- 
 ent, but openly hostile and inimical. One hears 
 only of those men who surmount and at what 
 cost to their artistic powers those obstacles. 
 How many thousands are there who succumb 
 unrecorded ! 
 
 So that it has not often been tried the 
 experiment of making a novelist while you
 
 Novelists to Order While You Wait 131 
 
 wait i. e., taking a ten-year-old of average 
 intelligence and training him to be a novelist. 
 Suppose all this modern, this gigantic perfected 
 machinery all this resistless trend of a com- 
 mercial civilization were set in motion in favour 
 of the little aspirant for honours in artistic 
 fields, who is to say with such a training he 
 would not in the end be a successful artist, 
 painter, poet, musician or novelist. Training, 
 not "genius," would make him. 
 
 Then, too, another point. The artistic train- 
 ing should begin much, much earlier than the 
 commercial training instead of, as at present, 
 so much later. 
 
 Nowadays, as a rule, the artist's training 
 begins, as was said, after a fourth of his life, 
 the very best, the most important has been 
 lived. You can take a boy of eighteen and 
 make a business man of him in ten years. But 
 at eighteen the faculties that make a good 
 artist are very apt to be atrophied, hardened, 
 unworkable. Even the ten-year-old is almost 
 too old to begin on. The first ten years of 
 childhood are the imaginative years, the creative 
 years, the observant years, the years of a 
 fresh interest in life. The child "imagines" 
 terrors or delights, ghosts or fairies, creates a 
 world out of his toys, and observes to an extent 
 that adults have no idea of. ("Give me," a
 
 132 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 detective once told me, "a child's description 
 of a man that is wanted. It beats an adult's 
 every single time.") And imagination, creation, 
 observation and an unblunted interest in life are 
 exactly the faculties most needed by novelists. 
 
 At eighteen there comes sophistication or a 
 pretended sophistication, which is deadlier. 
 Other men's books take the place of imagination 
 for the young man; creation in him is satisfied 
 by dramas, horse-races and amusements. The 
 newspapers are his observation, and oh, how 
 he assumes to be above any pleasure in simple, 
 vigorous life ! 
 
 So that at eighteen it is, as a rule, too late 
 to make a fine novelist out of him. He may 
 start out in that career, but he will not go 
 far so far as he would in business. But if he 
 was taken in hand as soon as he could write in 
 words of three syllables, and instead of being 
 crammed with commercial arithmetic (How 
 many marbles did A have? If a man buys a 
 piece of goods at 12^ cents and sells it for 
 15 cents, etc., etc.) 
 
 If he had been taken in hand when his 
 imagination was alive, his creative power 
 vigorous, his observation lynxlike, and his 
 interest keen, and trained with a view toward 
 the production of original fiction, who is to say 
 how far he would have gone?
 
 Novelists to Order While You Wait 133 
 
 One does not claim that the artist is above 
 the business man. Far from it. Only, when 
 you have choked the powers of imagination 
 and observation, and killed off the creative 
 ability, and deadened the interest in life, don't 
 call it lack of genius. 
 
 Nor when some man of a different race than 
 ours, living in a more congenial civilization, 
 whose training from his youth up has been 
 adapted to a future artistic profession, succeeds 
 in painting the great picture, composing the 
 great prelude, writing the great novel, don't 
 say he was born a "genius," but rather admit 
 that he was made "to order" by a system whose 
 promoters knew how to wait.
 
 THE "NATURE" REVIVAL IN LITER- 
 ATURE 
 
 TT has been a decade of fads, and "the 
 A people have imagined a vain thing," 
 as they have done from the time of Solomon 
 and as no doubt they will till the day of the 
 New Jerusalem. And in no other line of activity 
 has the instability and changeableness of the 
 taste of the public been so marked as in that 
 of literature. Such an overturning of old gods 
 and such a setting up of new ones, such an 
 image-breaking, shrine-smashing, relic-ripping 
 carnival I doubt has ever been witnessed in all 
 the history of writing. It has been a sort of 
 literary Declaration of Independence. For 
 half a century certain great names, from 
 Irving down to Holmes, were veritable Abra- 
 cadabras impeccable, sanctified. Then all at 
 once the fin de siecle irreverence seemed to 
 invade all sorts and conditions simultaneously, 
 and the somber, sober idols were shouldered 
 off into the dark niches, and not a man of us 
 that did not trundle forth his own little tin- 
 god-on-wheels, kowtowing and making obei- 
 137
 
 138 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 sance, and going before with cymbals and a 
 great noise, proclaiming a New Great One; 
 now it was the great Colonial Image, now the 
 Great Romantic Image, now the Great Minor- 
 German Kingdom Image. 
 
 There are a great many very eminent and 
 very wise critics who frown upon and deplore 
 the reaction. But it is a question if, after all, 
 the movement will not prove ultimately 
 beneficial. Convention, blind adherence to 
 established forms, inertia, is the dry rot of a 
 national literature. Better the American public 
 should read bad books than no books, and 
 that same public is reading now as never 
 before. It is a veritable upheaval, a breaking- 
 up of all the old grounds. Better this than 
 supineness ; better this than immobility. Once 
 the ground turned over a bit, harrowed and 
 loosened, and the place is made ready for the 
 good seed. 
 
 Some of this, one chooses to believe, has 
 already been implanted. In all the parade of 
 the new little tin-gods some may be discovered 
 that are not tin, but sterling. Of all the fads, 
 the most legitimate, the most abiding, the 
 most inherent so it would appear is the 
 "Nature" revival. Indeed, it is not fair 
 to call it a fad at all. For it is a return 
 to the primitive, sane life of the country,
 
 The "Nature' 1 Revival in Literature 139 
 
 and the natural thing by its very character 
 cannot be artificial, cannot be a "fad." The 
 writers who have followed where Mr. Thompson 
 Seton blazed the way are so numerous and so 
 well known that it is almost superfluous in this 
 place to catalogue or criticize them. But it is 
 significant of the strength of this movement 
 that such an outdoor book as "Bob, Son of 
 Battle," was unsuccessful in England, and only 
 attained its merited popularity when published 
 here in America. We claimed the "good gray 
 dog" as our own from the very first, recognizing 
 that the dog has no nationality, being indeed a 
 citizen of the whole world. The flowers in 
 " Elizabeth's German Garden" also world citi- 
 zens we promptly transplanted to our own 
 soil. Mr. Mowbray, with his mingling of fact 
 and fiction, made his country home for the 
 benefit I have no doubt of hundreds who 
 have actually worked out the idea suggested 
 in his pages. The butterfly books, the garden 
 books, the flower books, expensive as they are, 
 have been in as much demand as some very 
 popular novels. Mr. Dugmore astonished and 
 delighted a surprisingly large public with his 
 marvelous life-photographs of birds, while 
 even President Roosevelt himself deemed 
 Mr. Wallihan's "Photographs of Big Game" 
 of so much importance and value that
 
 140 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 he wrote the introductory notice to that ex- 
 cellent volume. 
 
 It is hardly possible to pick up a magazine 
 now that does not contain the story of some 
 animal hero. Time was when we relegated 
 this sort to the juvenile periodicals. But now 
 we cannot get too much of it. Wolves, rabbits, 
 hounds, foxes, the birds, even the reptilia, all 
 are dramatized, all figure in their little roles. 
 Tobo and the Sand-hill Stag parade upon the 
 same pages as Mr. Christie's debutantes and 
 Mr. Smedley's business men, and, if you please, 
 have their love affairs and business in precisely 
 the same spirit. All this cannot but be signifi- 
 cant, and, let us be assured, significant of good. 
 The New England school for too long domi- 
 nated the entire range of American fiction 
 limiting it, specializing it, polishing, refining 
 and embellishing it, narrowing it down to a 
 veritable cult, a thing to be safeguarded by 
 the elect, the few, the aristocracy. It is small 
 wonder that the reaction came when and as 
 it did; small wonder that the wearied public, 
 roused at length, smashed its idols with 
 such vehemence; small wonder that, declaring 
 its independence and finding itself suddenly 
 untrammeled and unguided, it flew off 
 "mobishly" toward false gods, good only 
 because they were new.
 
 The "Nature"' Revival in Literature 141 
 
 All this is small wonder. The great wonder 
 is this return to nature, this unerring groping 
 backward toward the fundamentals, in order 
 to take a renewed grip upon life. If you care 
 to see a proof of how vital it is, how valuable, 
 look into some of the magazines of the seventies 
 and eighties. It is astonishing to consider 
 that we ever found an interest in them. The 
 effect is like entering a darkened room. And 
 not only the magazines, but the entire literature 
 of the years before the nineties is shadowed and 
 oppressed with the bugbear of "literature." 
 Outdoor life was a thing apart from our read- 
 ing. Even the tales and serials whose mise 
 en scene was in the country had no breath of 
 the country in them. The " literature " in them 
 suffocated the life, and the humans with their 
 everlasting consciences, their heated and arti- 
 ficial activities, filled all the horizon, admitting 
 the larks and the robins only as accessories ; con- 
 sidering the foxes, the deer and the rabbits only 
 as creatures to be killed, to be pursued, to be 
 exterminated. But Mr. Seton and his school, 
 and the Mowbrays, and the Ollivants, the 
 Dugmores and the Wallihans opened a door, 
 opened a window, and mere literature has had 
 to give place to life. The sun has come in and 
 the great winds, and the smell of the baking 
 alkali on the Arizona deserts and the reek of the
 
 142 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 tar- weed on the Colorado slopes; and nature 
 has ceased to exist as a classification of science, 
 has ceased to be wm-understood as an aggregate 
 of botany, zoology, geology and the like, and 
 has become a thing intimate and familiar and 
 rejuvenating. 
 
 There is no doubt that the estate of Ameri- 
 can letters is experiencing a renaissance. For- 
 mality, the old idols, the demi-gorgons 
 and autocrats no longer hold an absolute 
 authority. A multitude of false gods are 
 clamouring for recognition, shouldering 
 one another about to make room for their 
 altars, soliciting incense as if it were 
 patronage. No doubt these "draw many after 
 them," but the "nature revival" has brought 
 the galvanizing, vital element into this tumult 
 of little inkling sham divinities and has shown 
 that life is better than "literature," even if the 
 "literature" be of human beings and the life 
 be that of a faithful dog. 
 
 Vitality is the thing, after all. Dress the 
 human puppet never so gaily, bedeck it never 
 so brilliantly, pipe before it never so cunningly, 
 and, fashioned in the image of God though it 
 be, just so long as it is a puppet and not a 
 person, just so long the great heart of the 
 people will turn from it, in weariness and 
 disgust, to find its interest in the fidelity of
 
 The "Nature" Revival in Literature 143 
 
 the sheep-dog of the North o' England, the 
 intelligence of a prairie wolf of Colorado, or 
 the death-fight of a bull moose in the tim- 
 berlands of Ontario.
 
 THE MECHANICS OF FICTION
 
 THE MECHANICS OF FICTION 
 
 TITTE approach a delicate subject. And 
 if the manner of approach is too 
 serious it will be very like the forty thousand 
 men of the King of France who marched terribly 
 and with banners to the top of the hill with the 
 meager achievement of simply getting there. 
 Of all the arts, as one has previously observed, 
 that of novel-writing is the least mechanical. 
 Perhaps, after all, rightly so; still it is hard 
 to escape some formality, some forms. There 
 must always be chapter divisions, also a begin- 
 ning and an end, which implies a middle, con- 
 tinuity, which implies movement, which in turn 
 implies a greater speed or less, an accelerated, 
 retarded or broken action; and before the 
 scoffer is well aware he is admitting a multitude 
 of set forms. No one who sets a thing in 
 motion but keeps an eye and a hand upon its 
 speed. No one who constructs but keeps 
 watch upon the building, strengthening here, 
 lightening there, here at the foundations 
 cautious and conservative, there at the cornice 
 fantastic and daring. In all human occupa- 
 tions, trades, arts or business, science, morals 
 M7
 
 148 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 or religion, there exists, way at the bottom, 
 a homogeneity and a certain family likeness, 
 so that, quite possibly after all, the discussion 
 of the importance of the mechanics of fiction 
 may be something more than mere speculative 
 sophistry. 
 
 A novel addresses itself primarily to a reader, 
 and it has been so indisputably established 
 that the reader's time and effort of attention 
 must be economized that the fact need not be 
 mentioned in this place it would not econo- 
 mize the reader's time nor effort of attention. 
 
 Remains then the means to be considered, 
 or in other words, How best to tell your story. 
 
 It depends naturally upon the nature of the 
 story. The formula which would apply to one 
 would not be appropriate for another. That 
 is very true, but at the same time it is hard to 
 get away from that thing in any novel which, 
 let us call, the pivotal event. All good novels 
 have one. It is the peg upon which the fabric 
 of the thing hangs, the nucleus around which 
 the shifting drifts and currents must suddenly 
 coagulate, the sudden releasing of the 
 brake to permit for one instant the entire 
 machinery to labour, full steam, ahead. Up 
 to that point the action must lead; from it, it 
 must decline. 
 
 But and here one holds at least one mechan-
 
 The Mechanics of Fiction 149 
 
 ical problem the approach, the leading up to 
 this pivotal event must be infinitely slower 
 than the decline. For the reader's interest 
 in the story centres around it, and once it is 
 disposed of attention is apt to dwindle very 
 rapidly and thus back we go again to the 
 economy proposition. 
 
 It is the slow approach, however, that tells. 
 The unskilled, impatient of the tedium of 
 meticulous elaboration, will rush at it in a 
 furious gallop of short chapters and hurried 
 episodes, so that he may come the sooner to 
 the purple prose declamation and drama that 
 he is sure he can handle with such tremendous 
 effect. 
 
 Not so the masters. Watch them during 
 the first third say of their novels. Nothing 
 happens or at least so you fancy. People 
 come and go, plans are described, localities, 
 neighbourhoods; an incident crops up just for 
 a second for which you can see no reason, a note 
 sounds that is puzzlingly inappropriate. The 
 novel continues. There seems to be no prog- 
 ress; again that perplexing note, but a little 
 less perplexing. By now we are well into the 
 story. There are no more new people, but the 
 old ones come back again and again, and yet 
 again; you remember them now after they 
 are off the stage; you are more intimate with
 
 150 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 the two main characters. Then comes a series 
 of pretty incidents in which these two are 
 prominent. The action still lags, but little by 
 little you are getting more and more acquainted 
 with these principal actors. Then perhaps 
 comes the first acceleration of movement. The 
 approach begins ever so little to rise, and 
 that same note which seemed at first so out of 
 tune sounds again and this time drops into place 
 in the progression, beautifully harmonious, 
 correlating the whole gamut. By now all the 
 people are "on"; by now all the groundwork 
 is prepared. You know the localities so well 
 that you could find your way about among 
 them in the dark; hero and heroine are inti- 
 mate acquaintances. 
 
 Now the action begins to increase in speed. 
 The complication suddenly tightens; all along 
 the line there runs a sudden alert. An episode 
 far back there in the first chapter, an episode 
 with its appropriate group of characters, is 
 brought forward and, coming suddenly to the 
 front, collides with the main line of development 
 and sends it off upon an entirely unlooked- 
 for tangent. Another episode of the second 
 chapter let us suppose all at once makes 
 common cause with a more recent incident, and 
 the two produce a wholly unlooked-for counter- 
 influence which swerves the main theme in
 
 The Mechanics of Fiction 151 
 
 still another direction, and all this time the 
 action is speeding faster and faster, the compli- 
 cation tightening and straining to the breaking 
 point, and then at last a "motif" that has been 
 in preparation ever since the first paragraph 
 of the first chapter of the novel suddenly comes 
 to a head, and in a twinkling the complication 
 is solved with all the violence of an explosion, 
 and the catastrophe, the climax, the pivotal 
 event fairly leaps from the pages with a rush 
 of action that leaves you stunned, breathless 
 and overwhelmed with the sheer power of its 
 presentation. And there is a master-work of 
 fiction. 
 
 Reading, as the uninitiated do, without an 
 eye to the mechanics, without a consciousness 
 of the wires and wheels and cogs and springs 
 of the affair, it seems inexplicable that these 
 great scenes of fiction short as they are 
 some of them less than a thousand words in 
 length should produce so tremendous an 
 effect by such few words, such simple language ; 
 and that sorely overtaxed word, "genius," is 
 made to do duty as the explanation. But the 
 genius is rare that in one thousand simple words, 
 taken by themselves, could achieve the effect 
 for instance of the fight aboard The Flying 
 Scud in Stevenson's "Wrecker." Taken by 
 itself, the scene is hardly important except
 
 152 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 from the point of view of style and felicity of 
 expression. It is the context of the story 
 that makes it so tremendous, and because 
 Osborne and Stevenson prepared for that 
 very scene from the novel's initial chapter. 
 
 And it seems as if there in a phrase one could 
 resume the whole system of fiction-mechanics 
 preparations of effect. 
 
 The unskilled will invariably attempt to 
 atone for lack of such painstaking preparation 
 for their "Grande Scenes" by hysteria, and by 
 exclamation in presenting the catastrophe. 
 They declaim, they shout, stamp, shake their 
 fists and flood the page with sonorous adjectives, 
 call upon heaven and upon God. They sum- 
 mon to their aid every broken-down device to 
 rouse the flaccid interest of the reader, and con- 
 clusively, irretrievably and ignominiously fail. 
 It is too late for heroic effort then, and the 
 reader, uninterested in the character, unfamiliar 
 with the locale, unattracted by any charm of 
 "atmosphere," lays down the book unper- 
 turbed and forgets it before dinner. 
 
 Where is the fault? Is it not in defective 
 machinery? The analogies are multitudinous. 
 The liner with hastily constructed boilers will 
 flounder when she comes to essay the storm; 
 and no stoking however vigorous, no oiling 
 however eager, if delayed till then, will avail
 
 The Mechanics of Fiction 153 
 
 to aid her to ride through successfully. It is 
 not the time to strengthen a wall when the 
 hurricane threatens; prop and stay will not 
 brace it then. Then the thing that tells is 
 the plodding, slow, patient, brick-by-brick 
 work, that only half shows down there at the 
 foot half -hidden in the grass, obscure, unnoted. 
 No genius is necessary for this sort of work, 
 only great patience and a willingness to plod, 
 for the time being. 
 
 No one is expected to strike off the whole 
 novel in one continued fine frenzy of inspiration. 
 As well expect the stone-mason to plant his 
 wall in a single day. Nor is it possible to lay 
 down any rule of thumb, any hard-and-fast 
 schedule in the matter of novel writing. But 
 no work is so ephemeral, so delicate, so in a 
 word artistic that it cannot be improved by 
 systematizing. 
 
 There is at least one indisputably good 
 manner in which the unskilled may order his 
 work besides the one of preparation already 
 mentioned. He may consider each chapter 
 as a unit, distinct, separate, having a definite 
 beginning, rise, height and end, the action 
 continuous, containing no break in time, the 
 locality unchanged throughout no shifting 
 of the scene to another environment. Each 
 chapter thus treated is a little work in itself,
 
 154 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 and the great story of the whole novel is told 
 thus as it were in a series of pictures, the author 
 supplying information as to what has inter- 
 vened between the end of one chapter and the 
 beginning of the next by suggestion or by 
 actual resume. As often as not the reader 
 himself can fill up the gap by the context. 
 
 This may be over-artificial, and it is con- 
 ceivable that there are times when it is neces- 
 sary to throw artificiality to the winds. But 
 it is the method that many of the greatest 
 fiction writers have employed, and even a 
 defective system is at any rate, in fiction 
 better than none.
 
 FICTION WRITING AS A 
 BUSINESS
 
 FICTION WRITING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 ^T^HE exaggerated and exalted ideas of the 
 * unenlightened upon this subject are, I 
 have found, beyond all reason and beyond all 
 belief. The superstition that with the 
 publication of the first book comes fame and 
 affluence is as firmly rooted as that other 
 delusion which asks us to suppose that "a 
 picture in the Paris Salon" is the certificate of 
 success, ultimate, final, definite. 
 
 One knows, of course, that very naturally 
 the "Eben Holden" and "David Harum" and 
 "Richard Carvel" fellows make fortunes, and 
 that these are out of the discussion; but also 
 one chooses to assume that the average, honest, 
 middle-class author supports himself and even 
 a family by the sale of his novels lives on his 
 royalties. 
 
 Royalties ! Why in the name of heaven were 
 they called that, those microscopic sums that 
 too, too often are less royal than beggarly? 
 It has a fine sound royalty. It fills the 
 mouth. It can be said with an air royalty. 
 But there are plenty of these same royalties 
 that will not pay the typewriter's bill.
 
 158 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 Take an average case. No, that will not 
 do, either, for the average published novel I 
 say it with my right hand raised is, irretriev- 
 ably, hopelessly and conclusively, a financial 
 failure. 
 
 Take, then, an unusually lucky instance, 
 literally a novel whose success is extraordinary, 
 a novel which has sold 2,500 copies. I repeat 
 that this is an extraordinary success. Not one 
 book out of fifteen will do as well. But let us 
 consider it. The author has worked upon it 
 for at the very least three months. It is 
 published. Twenty-five hundred copies are 
 sold. Then the sale stops. And by the word 
 stop one means cessation in the completest 
 sense of the word. There are people I know 
 plenty of them who suppose that when a book 
 is spoken of as having stopped selling, a gener- 
 ality is intended, that merely a falling off of the 
 initial demand has occurred. Error. When 
 a book a novel stops selling, it stops with 
 the definiteness of an engine when the fire goes 
 out. It stops with a suddenness that is appall- 
 ing, and thereafter not a copy, not one single, 
 solitary copy is sold. And do not for an instant 
 suppose that ever after the interest may be 
 revived. A dead book can no more be resusci- 
 tated than a dead dog. 
 
 But to go back. The 2,500 have been sold.
 
 Fiction Writing as a Business 159 
 
 The extraordinary, the marvelous has been 
 achieved. What does the author get out of 
 it ? A royalty of ten per cent. Two hundred 
 and fifty dollars for three months' hard work. 
 Roughly, less than $20 a week, a little more than 
 $2.50 a day. An expert carpenter will easily 
 make twice that, and the carpenter has infi- 
 nitely the best of it in that he can keep the 
 work up year in and year out, where the 
 novelist must wait for a new idea, and the 
 novel writer must then jockey and maneuver 
 for publication. Two novels a year is about 
 as much as the writer can turn out and yet 
 keep a marketable standard. Even admitting 
 that both the novels sell 2,500 copies, there is 
 only $500 of profit. In the same time the 
 carpenter has made his $1,800, nearly four 
 times as much. One may well ask the 
 question: Is fiction writing a money-making 
 profession ? 
 
 The astonishing thing about the affair is 
 that a novel may make a veritable stir, almost 
 a sensation, and yet fail to sell very largely. 
 
 There is so-and-so's book. Everywhere you 
 go you hear about it. Your friends have read 
 it. It is in demand at the libraries. You don't 
 pick up a paper that does not contain a review 
 of the story in question. It is in the "Book 
 of the Month" column. It is even, even the
 
 160 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 pinnacle of achievement in that shining roster, 
 the list of best sellers of the week. 
 
 Why, of course the author is growing rich ! 
 Ah, at last he has arrived ! No doubt he will 
 build a country house out of his royalties. 
 Lucky fellow ; one envies him. 
 
 Catch him unawares and what is he doing? 
 As like as not writing unsigned book reviews 
 at five dollars a week in order to pay his 
 board bill and glad of the chance. 
 
 It seems incredible. But one must remem- 
 ber this : That for every one person who buys 
 a book, there will be six who will talk about it. 
 And the half -thousand odd reviewers who are 
 writing of the book do not buy it, but receive 
 "editorial" copies from the publishers, upon 
 which no royalty is paid. 
 
 I know it for an undisputed fact that a certain 
 novel which has ever been called the best 
 American novel of the nineteenth century, and 
 which upon publication was talked about, 
 written about and even preached about, from 
 the Atlantic to the Pacific, took ten years in 
 which to attain the sale of 10,000 copies. Even 
 so famous, so brilliant an author as Harold 
 Frederic did not at first sell conspicuously. 
 "That Lawton Girl," "The Copperhead," 
 "Seth's Brother's Wife," masterpieces though 
 they are, never made money for the writer.
 
 Fiction Writing as a Business 161 
 
 Each sold about 2,000 copies. Not until 
 "Theron Ware" was published did Mr. 
 Frederic reap his reward. 
 
 Even so great a name as that of George 
 Meredith is not a "sesame," and only within 
 the last few years has the author of "Evan 
 Harrington" made more than five or six 
 hundred dollars out of any one of his world- 
 famous books. 
 
 But of course there is another side. For 
 one thing, the author is put to no expense in 
 the composing of his novel. (It is not always 
 necessary to typewrite the manuscript.) The 
 carpenter must invest much money in tools; 
 must have .a shop. Shop rent and tools repaired 
 or replaced cut into his $1,800 of profit. Or 
 take it in the fine arts. The painter must have 
 a studio, canvases, models, brushes, a whole 
 equipment ; the architect must have his draught- 
 ing room, the musician his instrument. But 
 so far as initial expense is concerned, a half- 
 dollar will buy every conceivable necessary 
 tool the novelist may demand. He needs no 
 office, shop or studio ; models are not required. 
 The libraries of the city offer him a quiet 
 working place if the home is out of the 
 question. Nor, as one has so often urged, is 
 any expensive training necessary before his 
 money-earning capacity is attained. The archi-
 
 1 62 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 tect must buy instruction for many years. 
 The painter must study in expensive studios, 
 the musician must learn in costly conservatories, 
 the singer must be taught by high-priced 
 maestros. Furthermore, it is often necessary 
 for the aspirant to travel great distances to 
 reach the cities where his education is to be 
 furthered; almost invariably a trip to and a 
 residence in Europe is indispensable. It is a 
 great undertaking and an expensive one to 
 prepare for the professions named, and it takes 
 years of time years during which the aspirant 
 is absolutely non-productive. 
 
 But the would-be novel writer may deter- 
 mine between breakfast and dinner to essay 
 the plunge, buy (for a few cents) ink and 
 paper between dinner and supper, and have 
 the novel under way before bedtime. 
 
 How much of an outlay of money does his 
 first marketable novel represent? Practically 
 nothing. On the other hand, let us ask the 
 same question of, say, the painter. How 
 much money has he had to spend before he was 
 able to paint his first marketable picture? To 
 reach a total sum he must foot up the expenses 
 of at least five years of instruction and study, 
 the cost of living during that time, the cost of 
 materials, perhaps even the price of a trip to 
 Paris. Easily the sum may reach $5,000.
 
 Fiction Writing as a Business 163 
 
 Fifty cents' worth of ink and paper do not 
 loom large beside this figure. 
 
 Then there are other ways in which the fiction 
 writer may earn money by fiction. The 
 novelist may look down upon the mere writer 
 of short stories, or may even look down upon 
 himself in the same capacity, but as a rule the 
 writer of short stories is the man who has the 
 money. It is much easier to sell the average 
 short story than the average novel. Infinitely 
 easier. And the short story of the usual length 
 will fetch $100. One thousand people think 
 of it one thousand people must buy copies of 
 your novel before it will earn so much for you. 
 It takes three months to complete the novel 
 the novel that earns the $250. But with 
 ingenuity, the writer should be able to turn 
 out six short stories in the same time, and 
 if he has luck in placing them there is $600 
 earned more than twice the sum made by 
 the novel. So that the novelist may eke out 
 the alarming brevity of his semiannual state- 
 ments by writing and selling "short stuff." 
 
 Then so far as the novel is concerned 
 there is one compensation, one source of revenue 
 which the writer enjoys and which is, as a rule, 
 closed to all others. Once the carpenter sells 
 his piece of work it is sold for good and all. 
 The painter has but one chance to make money
 
 164 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 from the sale of his picture. The architect 
 receives payment for his design and there is the 
 end. But the novelist and one speaks now of 
 the American may sell the same work over 
 many times. Of course, if the novel is a fail- 
 ure it is a failure, and no more is said. But 
 suppose it is a salable, readable, brisk bit of 
 narrative, with a swift action and rapid move- 
 ment. Properly managed, this, under favour- 
 able conditions, might be its life history: 
 First it is serialized either in the Sunday press 
 or, less probably, in a weekly or monthly. 
 Then it is made up into book form and sent over 
 the course a second time. The original pub- 
 lisher sells sheets to a Toronto or Montreal 
 house and a Canadian edition reaps a like 
 harvest. It is not at all unlikely that a special 
 cheap cloth edition may be bought and launched 
 by some large retailer either of New York or 
 Chicago. Then comes the paper edition with 
 small royalties, it is true, but based upon an 
 enormous number of copies, for the usual paper 
 edition is an affair of tens of thousands. Next 
 the novel crosses the Atlantic and a small sale 
 in England helps to swell the net returns, which 
 again are added to possibly by the "colonial 
 edition" which the English firm issues. Last 
 of all comes the Tauchnitz edition, and with 
 this (bar the improbable issuing of later special
 
 Fiction Writing as a Business 165 
 
 editions) the exploitation ceases. Eight separate 
 times the same commodity has been sold, no 
 one of the sales militating against the success of 
 the other seven, the author getting his fair slice 
 every time. Can any other trade, profession 
 or art (excepting only the dramatist, which is, 
 after all, a sister art) show the like? Even 
 (speaking of the dramatist) there may be a 
 ninth reincarnation of the same story and the 
 creatures of the writer's pages stalk forth upon 
 the boards in cloak and buskin. 
 
 And there are the indirect ways in which he 
 may earn money. Some of his ilk there are 
 who lecture. Nor are there found wanting 
 those who read from their own works. Some 
 write editorials or special articles in the maga- 
 zines and newspapers with literary depart- 
 ments. But few of them have "princely" 
 incomes.
 
 THE " VOLUNTEER MANU- 
 SCRIPT"
 
 THE "VOLUNTEER MANUSCRIPT" 
 
 AT a conservative estimate there are 
 ^ * 70,000,000 people in the United States. 
 At a liberal estimate 100,000 of these have lost 
 the use of both arms; remain then 69,900,000 
 who write novels. Indeed, many are called, 
 but few oh, what a scanty, skimped handful 
 that few represent are chosen. 
 
 The work of choosing these few, or rather 
 of rejecting these many, devolves upon the 
 manuscript readers for the baker's dozen of 
 important New York publishing houses, and a 
 strange work it is, and strange are the contri- 
 butions that pass under their inspection. 
 
 As one not unfamiliar with the work of 
 "reading," the present writer may offer a little 
 seasonable advice. 
 
 i. First have your manuscript typewritten. 
 The number of manuscripts is too great and 
 the time too short to expect the reader to 
 decipher script; and, besides, ideas presented 
 or scenes described in type are infinitely more 
 persuasive, more plausible than those set down 
 in script. A good story typewritten will appear 
 169
 
 170 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 to better advantage; a poor one similarly 
 treated seems less poverty stricken. 
 
 2. Do not, by any manner of means, announce 
 in a prefatory note that you "lay no claim to 
 literary excellence," with the intention thereby 
 of .ingratiating yourself with regard to the 
 "reader," winning him over by a parade of 
 modesty. Invariably the statement is prejudi- 
 cial, producing an effect exactly contrary to 
 the one desired. It will make the mildest of 
 "readers" angry. If you have no claims upon 
 literary excellence, why in Heaven's name are 
 you bothering him to read your work ? 
 
 3. Enclose a forwarding address in case 
 of rejection. This, seemingly, is superfluous 
 advice. But it is astonishing how many manu- 
 scripts come in innocent even of the author's 
 name, with never a scrap nor clue as to their 
 proper destination. 
 
 4. Don't ask for criticism. The reader is 
 not a critic. He passes only upon the avail- 
 ability of the manuscript for the uses of the 
 publisher who employs him. And a manu- 
 script of paramount literary quality may be 
 rejected for any number of reasons, none of 
 which have anything to do with its literary 
 worth or accepted for causes equally outside 
 the domain of letters. Criticism is one thing, 
 professional "reading" quite another.
 
 The "Volunteer Manuscript" 171 
 
 5. Don't bother about "enclosing stamps for 
 return." The manuscript will go back to you 
 by c. o. d. express. 
 
 6. Don't submit a part of a manuscript. 
 It is hard enough sometimes to judge the story 
 as a whole, and no matter how discouraging 
 the initial chapter may be the publisher will 
 always ask to see the remaining portions before 
 deciding. 
 
 7. Don't write to the publisher beforehand 
 asking him if he will consider your manuscript. 
 If it is a novel he will invariably express his 
 willingness to consider it. How can he tell 
 whether he wants it or not until he, through 
 his "reader," has seen it? 
 
 8. Don't expect to get an answer much 
 before a month. Especially if your story has 
 merit, it must pass through many hands and 
 be considered by many persons before judg- 
 ment is rendered. The better it is the longer 
 you will wait before getting a report. 
 
 9. Don't, in Heaven's name, enclose com- 
 mendatory letters written by your friends, 
 favourable reviews by your pastor or by the 
 president of the local college. The story will 
 speak for itself more distinctly than any of 
 your acquaintances. 
 
 10. Don't say you will revise or shorten to 
 suit the tastes or judgment of the publisher.
 
 172 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 At best that's a servile humility that in itself 
 is a confession of weakness and that will make 
 you no friends at court. 
 
 11. Don't forward a letter of introduction, 
 no matter from how near a friend of the pub- 
 lisher. The publisher will only turn the MS. 
 over to his "readers," and with them the letter 
 from a stranger carries no weight. 
 
 12. Don't write a Colonial novel. 
 
 13. Don't write a Down East novel. 
 
 14. Don't write a " Prisoner of Zenda " novel. 
 
 15. Don't write a novel. 
 
 1 6. Try to keep your friends from writing 
 novels. 
 
 And of all the rules, one is almost tempted 
 to declare that the last two are the most 
 important. For to any one genuinely inter- 
 ested in finding "good stuff" in the ruck 
 and run of volunteer manuscripts, nothing is 
 more discouraging, nothing more apparently 
 hopeless of ultimate success than the consistent 
 and uniform trashiness of the day's batch of 
 submitted embryonic novels. Infinitely better 
 for their author had they never been written; 
 infinitely better for him had he employed his 
 labour at the very least it is labour of three 
 months upon the trade or profession to which 
 he was bred. It is very hard work to write a 
 good novel, but it is much harder to write a
 
 The "Volunteer Manuscript" 173 
 
 bad one. Its very infelicity is a snare to the 
 pen, its very clumsiness a constant demand 
 for laborious boosting and propping. 
 
 And consider another and further word of 
 advice number 17, if you please. Don't go 
 away with that popular idea that your manu- 
 script will be considered, or if really and unde- 
 niably good will be heedlessly rejected. Bad 
 manuscripts are not read from cover to cover. 
 The reader has not the right to waste his 
 employer's time in such unremunerative dili- 
 gence. Often a page or two will betray the 
 hopelessness of the subsequent chapters, and no 
 one will demand of the "reader" a perusal of a 
 work that he knows will be declined in the end. 
 
 Nor was there ever a sincere and earnest 
 effort that went unappreciated in a publisher's 
 place of business. I have seen an entire office 
 turned upside down by a "reader" who believed 
 he had discovered among the batch of volumin- 
 ous MS. something "really good, you know," 
 and who almost forced a reading of the offering 
 in question upon every member of the firm 
 from the senior partner down to the assistant 
 salesman. 
 
 As a rule, all manuscripts follow the same 
 routine. From the clerk who receives them 
 at the hands of the expressman they go to the 
 recorder, who notes the title, address and date
 
 174 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 of arrival, and also, after turning them over 
 to the junior reader, the fact of the transfer. 
 The junior reader's report upon the manu- 
 script is turned in to one of the members of 
 the firm, whose decision is final. The manu- 
 script itself goes up to the senior reader, 
 who also reports upon it to the firm member. 
 If both reports are unfavourable, this latter 
 directs the manuscript to be returned with or 
 without a personal letter, as he deems proper. 
 If both the readers' reports are favourable, or 
 even if one is sufficiently laudatory, he calls 
 for the manuscript and reads it himself. If he 
 disagrees with the readers' reports, the manu- 
 script is declined. If not, he passes the manu- 
 script on to one of the partners of the* house, 
 who also reads it. The two "talk it over," and 
 out of the conference comes the ultimate 
 decision in the matter. 
 
 Sometimes the circulation manager and head 
 salesman are consulted to decide whether or 
 not putting all questions of the book's literary 
 merits aside the "thing will sell." And 
 doubt not for a moment that their counsel 
 carries weight. 
 
 Another feature of the business which it is 
 very well to remember is that all publishers 
 cannot be held responsible for the loss of or 
 damage to unsolicited manuscripts. If you
 
 The "Volunteer Manuscript" 175 
 
 submit the MS. of a novel you do it at your own 
 risk, and the carelessness of an office-boy may 
 lose for you the work of many months years, 
 even ; work that you could never do over again. 
 You could demand legally no reparation. The 
 publishers are not responsible. Only in a case 
 where a letter signed by one of the "heads" 
 has been sent to the author requesting that the 
 manuscript be forwarded does the situation 
 become complicated. But in the case of an 
 unknown writer the monetary value of his work 
 in a court of law would be extremely difficult 
 to place, and even if an award of damages could 
 be extorted it would hardly more than pay the 
 typewriter's bill. 
 
 But the loss of manuscript may be of serious 
 import to the publisher for all that. That 
 reputation for negligence in the matter of 
 handling unsolicited matter fastens upon a 
 firm with amazing rapidity. Bothersome as 
 the number of volunteer manuscripts are, they 
 do to a certain extent gauge the importance 
 of a given concern. And as they arrive in 
 constantly increasing quantities, the house 
 may know that it is growing in favour and in 
 reputation : and so a marked falling off reverses 
 the situation. Writers will be naturally averse 
 to submitting manuscripts to offices which are 
 known to be careless. And I know of at least
 
 176 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 one instance where the loss of a couple of manu- 
 scripts within a month produced a marked 
 effect upon the influx of the volunteers. Some- 
 how the news of the loss always gets out, and 
 spreads by some mysterious means till it is 
 heard of from strangely remote quarters. The 
 author will, of course, tell his friends of the 
 calamity, and will make more ado over the 
 matter than if his story was accepted. Of 
 course, this particular story is the one great 
 masterpiece of his career; the crass stupidity 
 of the proud and haughty publisher has ruined 
 his chance of success, and the warning: "Don't 
 send your stuff to that firm. It will be lost !" 
 is passed on all along the line. So that repeated 
 instances of the negligence may in the end 
 embarrass the publisher, and the real master- 
 piece, the first novel of a New Man, goes to a 
 rival. 
 
 I have in mind one case where a manuscript 
 was lost under peculiarly distressing circum- 
 stances. The reader, who had his office in 
 the editorial rooms of a certain important house 
 of New York, was on a certain day called to 
 the reception room to interview one of the host 
 of writers who came daily to submit their 
 offerings in person. 
 
 In this case the reader confronted a little 
 gentleman in the transition period of genteel
 
 The "Volunteer Manuscript' 1 177 
 
 decay. He was a Frenchman. His mustache, 
 tight, trim and waxed, was white. The frock 
 coat was buttoned only at the waist; a silk 
 handkerchief puffed from the pocket, and a 
 dried carnation, lamentably faded, that had 
 done duty for many days, enlivened with a 
 feeble effort the worn silk lapel. 
 
 But the innate French effervescence, debo- 
 nair, 'insouciant, was not gone yet. The 
 little gentleman presented a card. Of course 
 the name boasted that humblest of titles 
 baron. The Baron, it appeared, propitiated 
 destiny by "Instruction in French, German 
 and Italian," but now instruction was no 
 longer propitious. With a deprecating giggle 
 this was explained; the Baron did not 
 wish to make the "reader" feel bad to 
 embarrass him. 
 
 "I will probably starve very soon," he 
 observed, still with the modifying little giggle, 
 and, of course, the inevitable shrug, "unless 
 my faith something turns up." 
 
 It was to be turned up, evidently, by means of 
 an attenuated manuscript which he presented. 
 He had written during the intervals of 
 instruction a series of articles on the charac- 
 ter of Americans as seen by a Frenchman, and 
 these had been published by a newspaper of 
 the town in which he instructed an absolutely
 
 178 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 obscure town, lost and forgotten, away up 
 among the New Hampshire hills. 
 
 The articles, he insinuated, might be made 
 into a book a book that might be interesting 
 to the great American public. And, with a 
 naivete that was absolutely staggering, he 
 assumed without question that the firm would 
 publish his book that it was really an impor- 
 tant contribution to American literature. 
 
 He would admit that he had not been paid 
 very liberally by the country paper for the 
 articles as they appeared. He was not Emile 
 Zola. If he was he might have sold his articles 
 at fifteen or twenty dollars each. 
 
 He said just that. Think of it ! The poor 
 little Instructor-Baron Zola ! Fifteen dollars ! 
 Well! 
 
 He left the articles neatly cut out and 
 pasted in a copy-book with the "reader," and 
 gave as his address a dreadfully obscure hotel. 
 
 The "reader" could not make up his mouth to 
 tell him, even before looking over the first para- 
 graph of the first article, that as a book the 
 commercial value of the offering was absolutely, 
 irrevocably and hopelessly nil, and so the little 
 manuscript went into the mill and in two days 
 was lost. 
 
 I suppose that never in the history of that 
 particular firm was the search for a missing
 
 The ''Volunteer Manuscript" 179 
 
 manuscript prosecuted with half the energy 
 or ardour that ensued upon the discovery of 
 this particular loss. From the desk-files of 
 the senior partner to the shipping-slips of the 
 packer's assistant the hunt proceeded and all 
 in vain. 
 
 Meanwhile the day approached on which the 
 Baron was to come for his answer and at last it 
 arrived, and promptly at the appointed hour 
 the poor little card with the hyphenated titled 
 name written carefully and with beautiful 
 flourishes in diluted ink was handed in. 
 
 Do you know what the publisher did? He 
 wrote the absurd, pompous name across the 
 order line of a check and signed his own name 
 underneath, and the check was for an amount 
 that would make even unpropitious Destiny 
 take off his hat and bow politely. 
 
 And I tell you that my little Instructor- 
 Baron, with eminent good-humour, but with the 
 grand manner, a Marechal du royaume, waved 
 it aside. Turenne could have been no more 
 magnificent. (They do order these matters 
 better in France.) His whole concern 
 hunger-pinched as he may easily have been 
 at the very moment his whole concern was 
 to put the embarrassed publisher at his ease, 
 to make this difficulty less difficult. 
 
 He assured him that his articles were written
 
 180 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 comme-ci, comme-ca, for his own amusement, 
 that he could not think of accepting, etc. 
 
 And I like to remember that this whole 
 affair, just as if it had been prepared in 
 advance for a popular magazine whose editor 
 insisted upon "happy endings," did end 
 well, and the publisher, who at the moment 
 was involved in the intricacies of a vast corre- 
 spondence with a Parisian publishing house, 
 found a small position as translator in one of 
 his sub-departments for the little Instructor- 
 Baron who had the great good fortune to 
 suffer the loss of a manuscript in the right 
 place. 
 
 And now the card engraved, if you please 
 bears proudly the Baron's name, supported 
 by the inscription, "Official Translator and 
 Director of Foreign Correspondence to the 
 O f & Co., Publishers. "
 
 RETAIL BOOKSELLER: LITERARY 
 DICTATOR
 
 RETAIL BOOKSELLER: LITERARY 
 DICTATOR 
 
 all the various and different kinds 
 and characters of people who are con- 
 cerned in the writing and making of a novel, 
 including the author, the publisher, the critic, 
 the salesman, the advertisement writer, 
 the drummer of all this "array of talent," 
 as the bill-boards put it, which one has the most 
 influence in the success of the book? Who, 
 of all these, can, if he chooses, help or hurt the 
 sales the most? assuming for the moment 
 that sales are the index of success, the kind of 
 success that at the instant we are interested in. 
 Each one of these people has his followers 
 and champions. There are not found wanting 
 those who say the publisher is the all-in-all. 
 And again it is said that a critic of authority 
 can make a book by a good review or ruin it 
 by an unfavourable one. The salesman, others 
 will tell you he who is closest allied to the 
 money transaction can exert the all-powerful 
 influence. Or again, surely in this day of 
 exploitation and publicity the man who con- 
 cocts great "ads" is the important one. 
 183
 
 184 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 The author is next included. He can do no 
 more than write the book, and as good books 
 have failed and bad ones have succeeded 
 always considering failure and success in their 
 most sordid meanings the mere writing need 
 not figure. But the fact remains that there 
 are cases where publishers have exerted every 
 device to start a book and still have known it 
 to remain upon their hands; that critics have 
 raved to heaven or damned to hell, and the 
 novel has fallen or flown in spite and not 
 because of them; that salesmen have cajoled 
 and schemed, and yet have returned with 
 unfilled orders, and that advertisements that 
 have clamoured so loudly that even they who 
 ran must have read, and yet the novel in 
 question remained inert, immovable, a failure, 
 a "plug." 
 
 All these, then, have been tried and at times 
 have been found wanting. There yet remains 
 one exponent of the business of distributing 
 fiction who has not been considered. He, one 
 claims, can do more than any or all of the gen-- 
 tlemen just mentioned to launch or strand a 
 novel. 
 
 Now let it be understood that by no possible 
 manner of means does one consider him infalli- 
 ble. Again and again have his best efforts 
 come to nothing. This, however, is what is
 
 Retail Bookseller: Literary Dictator 185 
 
 claimed: he has more influence on success or 
 failure than any of the others. And who is he ? 
 The retailer. One can almost affirm that 
 he is a determining factor in American fiction ; 
 that, in a limited sense, with him, his is the 
 future. Author, critic, analyst and essayist 
 may hug to themselves a delusive phantom of 
 hope that they are the moulders of public 
 opinion, they and they alone. That may be, 
 sometimes. But consider the toiling and spin- 
 ning retailer. What does the failure or success 
 of the novel mean to the critic ? Nothing more 
 than a minute and indefinite increase or decrease 
 of prestige. The publisher who has many 
 books upon his list may recoup himself on one 
 failure by a compensating success. The sales- 
 man's pay goes on just the same whether his 
 order slips are full or blank; likewise the 
 stipend of the writer of "ads." The author 
 has no more to lose materially than the price 
 of ink and paper. But to the retail bookseller 
 a success means money made ; failure, money 
 lost. If he can dispose of an order of fifty 
 books he is ahead by calculable, definite, con- 
 crete profits. If he cannot dispose of the fifty 
 his loss is equally calculable, equally definite, 
 equally concrete. Naturally, being a business 
 man, he is a cautious man. He will not order 
 a book which he deems unsalable, but he will
 
 1 86 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 lay in a stock of one that promises returns. 
 Through him the book is distributed to the 
 public. If he has a book in stock, the public 
 gets it. If he does not have it, the public goes 
 without. The verdict of the public is the essen- 
 tial to popularity or unpopularity, and the 
 public can only pass verdict upon what it has 
 read. The connection seems clear and the 
 proposition proved that the retail bookseller 
 is an almost paramount influence in American 
 literature. 
 
 It is interesting to see what follows from this 
 and to note how the retailer in the end can 
 effectually throttle the sham novelist who has 
 fooled the public once. Were it not for the 
 retailer, the sham novelist would get an 
 indefinite number of chances for his life ; but so 
 long as the small book-dealer lives and acts, 
 just so long will bad work and one means by 
 this wholly bad, admittedly bad, hopelessly 
 bad work fail to trick the reading public twice. 
 Observe now the working of it. Let us take a 
 typical case. A story by an unknown writer 
 is published. By strenuous exploitation the 
 publishers start a vogue. The book begins 
 to sell. The retailer, observing the campaign 
 of publicity managed by the publishers, stocks 
 up with the volume ; surely when the publishers 
 are backing the thing so strong it will be a safe
 
 Retail Bookseller: Literary Dictator 187 
 
 venture; surely the demand, will be great. It 
 does prove a safe venture ; the demand is great ; 
 the retailer disposes of fifty, then of a second 
 order of one hundred, then of two hundred, 
 then of five hundred. The book is now in the 
 hands of the public. It is read and found 
 sadly, sadly wanting. It is not a good story; 
 it is trivial; it is insincere. Far and wide the 
 story is condemned. 
 
 Meanwhile the unknown writer, now become 
 famous, is writing a second novel. It is finished, 
 issued, and the salesman who travels for the 
 publishers begins to place his orders. The 
 retailer, remembering the success of this author's 
 past venture, readily places a large order. Two 
 hundred is not, in his opinion, an overstock. So 
 it goes all over the country. Returns are made 
 to the author, and he sees that some fifty 
 thousand have been sold. Encouraging, is it 
 not? Yes, fifty thousand have been sold 
 by the publisher to the retailer; but here is the 
 point not by the retailer to the public. Of 
 the two hundred our dealer took from the 
 publisher's traveling salesman, one hundred 
 and ninety yet remain upon his counters. The 
 public, fooled once, on the first over-praised, 
 over-exploited book, refuse to be taken in a 
 second time. Who is the loser now ? Not the 
 author, who draws royalties on copies sold to
 
 1 88 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 the tradesman the retailer ; not the publisher, 
 who makes his profit out of the same trans- 
 action; but the retailer, who is loaded down 
 with an unsalable article. 
 
 Meanwhile our author writes his third novel. 
 So far as he can see, his second book is as great 
 a popular success as his first. His semiannual 
 statements are there to show it there it is in 
 black and white; figures can't lie. The third 
 novel is finished and launched. At the end of 
 the first six months after publication day the 
 author gets his publisher's statement of sales. 
 Instead of the expected 10,000 copies sold, 
 behold the figure is a bare 1,500. At the end of 
 the second six months the statement shows 
 about 250. The book has failed. Why? Be- 
 cause the retailer refuses to order it. He has 
 said to the soliciting salesman, "Why should I, 
 in Heaven's name, take a third book by this 
 man when I have yet one hundred and ninety 
 copies of his second novel yet to sell?" 
 
 It is hard for the salesman to controvert 
 that argument. He may argue that the third 
 book is a masterpiece, and mark this it may 
 in fact be a veritable, actual masterpiece, a 
 wonderful contribution to the world's litera- 
 ture; it is all of no effect. There stands the 
 block of unsold books, 190 strong, and all the 
 eloquence in the world will not argue them
 
 Retail Bookseller: Literary Dictator 189 
 
 off the counter. After this our author's pub- 
 lisher will have none of his books. Even if he 
 writes a fourth and submits it, the publisher 
 incontinently declines it. This author is no 
 longer a "business proposition." 
 
 There cannot but be an element of satisfac- 
 tion in all this, and a source of comfort to those 
 who take the welfare of their country's litera- 
 ture seriously to heart. The sham novelist 
 who is in literature (what shall we say) "for his 
 own pocket every time" sooner or later meets 
 the wave of reaction that he cannot stem nor 
 turn and under which he and his sham are con- 
 clusively, definitely and irrevocably buried. 
 Observe how it works out all down the line. 
 He fools himself all of the time, he fools the 
 publisher three times, he fools the retail dealer 
 twice, and he fools the Great American Public 
 just exactly once.
 
 AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF 
 FICTION?
 
 AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF FICTION? 
 
 TT seems to me that it is a proposition 
 not difficult of demonstration that the 
 United States of America has never been able 
 to boast of a school of fiction distinctively its 
 own. And this is all the more singular when 
 one considers that in all other activities 
 Americans are peculiarly independent in 
 thought and in deed, and have acquired 
 abroad a reputation even a notoriety for 
 being original. 
 
 In the mechanical arts, in the industries, in 
 politics, in business methods, in diplomacy, in 
 ship -building, in war, even in dentistry, if you 
 please even in the matter of riding race-horses 
 Americans have evolved their own methods, 
 quite different from European methods. 
 
 Hardy and adventurous enough upon all other 
 lines, disdainful of conventions, contemptuous 
 of ancient custom, we yet lag behind in the 
 arts slow to venture from the path blazed 
 long ago by Old World masters. 
 
 It is preeminently so in the fine arts. No 
 sooner does an American resolve upon a career 
 of painting, sculpture or architecture than
 
 194 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 straight he departs for Paris, the Beaux Arts 
 and the Julien atelier; and, his education 
 finished, returns to propagate French ideas; 
 French methods; and our best paintings to- 
 day are more French than American; French 
 in conception, in composition, in technique 
 and treatment. 
 
 I suppose that the nearest we ever came to 
 an organized school of native-born Americans, 
 writing about American things from an Ameri- 
 can point of view, was in the days of Lowell, 
 Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier and the rest of 
 that illustrious company. But observe : How 
 is this group spoken of and known to literature ? 
 Not as the American school, but as the New 
 England school. Even the appellation "New" 
 England as differentiated from "old" England 
 is significant. And New England is not 
 America. 
 
 Hawthorne, it will be urged, is a great name 
 among American writers of fiction. Not pecu- 
 liarly American, however. Not so distinctively 
 and unequivocally as to lay claim to a vigorous 
 original Americanism. "The Scarlet Letter" 
 is not an American story, but rather a story of 
 an English colony on North American soil. 
 " The Marble Faun" is frankly and unreservedly 
 foreign. Even the other novels were pictures
 
 An American School of Fiction? 195 
 
 of a very limited and circumscribed life the 
 life of New England again. 
 
 Cooper, you will say, was certainly American 
 in attitude and choice of subject ; none more so. 
 None less, none less American. As a novelist 
 he is saturated with the romance of the con- 
 temporary English story-tellers. It is true 
 that his background is American. But his 
 heroes and heroines talk like the characters out 
 of Bulwer in their most vehement moods, while 
 his Indians stalk through all the melodramatic 
 tableaux of Byron, and declaim in the periods 
 of the border noblemen in the pages of Walter 
 Scott. 
 
 Poe we may leave out of classification; he 
 shone in every branch of literature but that of 
 novel-writing. Bret Harte was a writer of 
 short stories and oh, the pity of it, the folly 
 of it ! abandoned the field with hardly more 
 than a mere surface-scratching. 
 
 There can be no doubt that had Mr. Henry 
 James remained in America he would have been 
 our very best writer. If he has been able to 
 seize the character and characteristics so forci- 
 bly of a people like the English, foreign to 
 him, different, unfamiliar, what might he not 
 have done in the very midst of his own country- 
 men, into whose company he was born, reared 
 and educated. All the finish of style, the
 
 196 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 marvelous felicity of expression would still have 
 been his and at the same time, by the very 
 nature of the life he lived and wrote about, 
 the concrete, the vigorous, the simple direct 
 action would have become a part of his work, 
 instead of the present ultimate vagueness and 
 indecision that so mars and retards it. 
 
 Of all the larger names remain only those 
 of Mr. Howells and Mr. Clemens. But as the 
 novelists, as such, are under consideration, 
 even Mark Twain may be left out of the dis- 
 cussion. American to the core, posterity will 
 yet know him not as a novel-writer, but as a 
 humourist. Mr. Howells alone is left, then, 
 after the elimination is complete. Of all pro- 
 ducers of American fiction he has had the broad- 
 est vision, at once a New Englander and a New 
 Yorker, an Easterner and in the Eastern sense 
 a Westerner. But one swallow does not make 
 a summer, nor does one writer constitute a 
 "school." Mr. Howells has had no successors. 
 Instead, just as we had with "Lapham" 
 and "The Modern Instance" laid the founda- 
 tion of fine, hardy literature, that promised to 
 be our very, very own, we commence to build 
 upon it a whole confused congeries of borrowed, 
 faked, pilfered romanticisms, building a crum- 
 bling gothic into a masonry of honest brown- 
 stone, or foisting colonial porticos upon fa$ades
 
 An Atnerican School of Fiction? 197 
 
 of Montpelier granite, and I cannot allow this 
 occasion to pass without protest against what 
 I am sure every serious-minded reader must 
 consider a lamentable discrowning. 
 
 Of the latter-day fiction writers Miss Wilkins 
 had more than all others convinced her public 
 of her sincerity. Her field was her own; the 
 place was ceded to her. No other novelist 
 could invade her domain and escape the censure 
 that attaches to imitation. Her public was 
 loyal to her because it believed in her, and it 
 was a foregone conclusion that she would be 
 loyal to it. 
 
 More than this: A writer who occupies so 
 eminent a place as Miss Wilkins, who has 
 become so important, who has exerted and 
 still can exert so strong an influence, cannot 
 escape the responsibilities of her position. 
 She cannot belong wholly to herself, cannot be 
 wholly independent. She owes a duty to the 
 literature of her native country. 
 
 Yet in spite of all this, and in spite of the fact 
 that those who believe in the future of our 
 nation's letters look to such established repu- 
 tations as hers to keep the faith, to protest, 
 though it is only by their attitude, silently and 
 with dignity, against corruptions, degradations ; 
 in spite of all this, and in the heyday of her 
 power, Miss Wilkins chooses to succumb to
 
 198 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 the momentary, transitory set of the tide, and 
 forsaking her own particular work, puts forth, 
 one of a hundred others, a "colonial romance." 
 It is a discrowning. It can be considered as 
 no less. A deliberate capitulation to the 
 clamour of the multitude. Possibly the novel- 
 ist was sincere, but it is perilously improbable 
 that she would have written her "Colonial 
 Romance" had not "colonial romances" been 
 the fashion. On the face of it Miss Wilkins 
 has laid herself open to a suspicion of dis- 
 ingenuousness that every honest critic can 
 only deplore. Even with all the sincerity in 
 the world she had not the right to imperil the 
 faith of her public, to undermine its confidence 
 in her. She was one of the leaders. It is as 
 if a captain, during action, had deserted to 
 the enemy. 
 
 It could not have been even for the baser 
 consideration of money. With her success 
 assured in advance Miss Wilkins can be 
 above such influences. Nor of fame. Surely 
 no great distinction centres upon writers of 
 " colonial romances " of late. Only the author 
 herself may know her motives, but we who 
 looked to her to keep the standard firm and 
 high have now to regret the misfortune of a 
 leader lost, a cause weakened 
 
 However, it is a question after all if a "school,"
 
 An American School of Fiction? 199 
 
 understood in the European sense of the word, 
 is possible for America just yet. France has 
 had its schools of naturalism and romance, 
 Russia its schools of realism, England its schools 
 of psychologists. But France, Russia and 
 England now, after so many centuries of 
 growth, may be considered as units. Certain 
 tendencies influence each one over its whole 
 geographical extent at the same time. Its 
 peoples have been welded together to a certain 
 homogeneousness. It is under such conditions 
 that "schools" of fiction, of philosophy, of 
 science and the like arise. 
 
 But the United States are not yet, in the 
 European sense, united. We have existed as 
 a nation hardly more than a generation and 
 during that time our peoples have increased 
 largely by emigration. From all over the 
 globe different races have been pouring in upon 
 us. The North has been settled under one 
 system, the South under another, the Middle 
 West under another, the East under another. 
 South Central and Far West under still others. 
 There is no homogeneousness among us as yet. 
 The Westerner thinks along different lines from 
 the Easterner and arrives at different con- 
 clusions. What is true of California is false of 
 New York. Mr. Cable's picture of life is a far 
 different thing than that of Mr. Howells.
 
 200 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 The "school" implies a rallying of many 
 elements under one standard. But no such 
 thing is possible to-day for American writers. 
 Mr. Hamlin Garland could not merge his per- 
 sonality nor pool his ideals with Edith Wharton. 
 Their conceptions of art are as different as the 
 conditions of life they study in their books. 
 
 The school of fiction American in thought, 
 in purpose and in treatment will come in time, 
 inevitably. Meanwhile the best we can expect 
 of the leaders is to remain steadfast, to keep 
 unequivocably to the metes and bounds of the 
 vineyards of their labours; no trespassing, no 
 borrowing, no filching of the grapes of another 
 man's vines. The cultivation of one's own 
 vine is quite sufficient for all energy. We want 
 these vines to grow in time to take root deep 
 in American soil so that by and by the fruit 
 shall be all of our own growing. 
 
 We do not want distinctly and vehemently 
 we do not want the vine-grower to leave his own 
 grapes to rot while he flies off to the gathering 
 of what? The sodden lees of an ancient 
 crushing.
 
 NOVELISTS OF THE FUTURE
 
 NOVELISTS OF THE FUTURE 
 
 TT seems to me that a great deal could be 
 *- said on this subject a great deal that 
 has not been said before. There are so many 
 novelists these latter days. So many whose 
 works show that they have had no training, 
 and it does seem that so long as the fiction 
 writers of the United States go fumbling and 
 stumbling along in this undisciplined fashion, 
 governed by no rule, observing no formula, 
 setting for themselves no equation to solve, 
 that just so long shall we be far from the desir- 
 able thing an American school of fiction. 
 Just now (let us say that it is a pity) we have 
 no school at all. We acknowledge no master, 
 and we are playing at truant, incorrigible, 
 unmanageable, sailing paper boats in the creek 
 behind the schoolhouse, or fishing with bent 
 pins in the pools and shallows of popular favour. 
 That some catch goldfish there is no great 
 matter, and is no excuse for the truancy. We 
 are not there for the goldfish, if you please, but 
 to remain in the school at work till we have 
 been summoned to stand up in our places and 
 tell the master what we have learned. 
 203
 
 204 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 There's where we should be, and if we do not 
 observe the rules and conform to some degree 
 of order, we should be rapped on the knuckles 
 or soundly clumped on the head, and by vigor- 
 ous discipline taught to know that formulas 
 (a b; a-}-b) are important things for us to 
 observe, and that each and all of us should 
 address ourselves with all diligence to finding 
 the value of x in our problems. 
 
 It is the class in the Production of Original 
 Fiction which of all the school contains the 
 most truants. Indeed, its members believe 
 that schooling for them is unnecessary. Not 
 so with the other classes. Not one single mem- 
 ber of any single one of them who does not 
 believe that he must study first if he would pro- 
 duce afterward. Observe, there on the lower 
 benches, the assiduous little would-be car- 
 penters and stone-masons ; how carefully they 
 con their tables of measurement, their squares 
 and compasses. "Ah, the toilers," you say, 
 "the grubby manual fellows of course they 
 must learn their trade !" 
 
 Very well, then. Consider higher up the 
 class, on the very front row of benches the 
 Fine Arts row, the little painters and architects 
 and musicians and actors of the future. See 
 how painfully they study, and study and study. 
 The little stone-mason will graduate in a few
 
 Novelists of the Future 205 
 
 months; but for these others of the Fine Arts 
 classes there is no such thing as graduation. 
 For them there shall never be a diploma, signed 
 and sealed, giving them the right to call 
 themselves perfected at their work. All their 
 lives they shall be students. In the vacations 
 maybe they write, or build, or sing, or act, 
 but soon again they are back to the benches, 
 studying, studying always; working as never 
 carpenter or stone-mason worked. Now and 
 then they get a little medal, a bit of gold and 
 enamel, a bow of ribbon, that is all ; the stone- 
 mason would disdain it, would seek it for the 
 value of the metal in it. The Fine Arts people 
 treasure it as the veteran treasures his cross. 
 
 And these little medals you the truants, the 
 bad boys of the paper boats and the goldfish 
 you want them, too; you claim them and 
 clamour for them. You who declare that no 
 study is necessary for you; you who are not 
 content with your catch of goldfish, you must 
 have the bits of ribbon and enamel, too. Have 
 you deserved them? Have you worked for 
 them ? Have you found the value of x in your 
 equation? Have you solved the parenthesis 
 of your problem? Have you even done the 
 problem at all? Have you even glanced or 
 guessed at the equation? The shame of it be 
 upon you ! Come in from the goldfish and go
 
 206 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 to work, or stay altogether at the fishing and 
 admit that you are not deserving of the medal 
 which the master gives as a reward of merit. 
 
 " But there are no books that we can study," 
 you contest. " The architect and the musician, 
 the painter and the actor all of these have 
 books ready to hand; they can learn from 
 codified, systematized knowledge. For the 
 novelist, where is there of cut-and-dried science 
 that he can learn that will help him?" 
 
 And that is a good contention. No, there 
 are no such books. Of all the arts, the art of 
 fiction has no handbook. By no man's teach- 
 ing can we learn the^knack of putting a novel 
 together in the best way. No one has ever 
 risen to say, "Here is how the plan should be; 
 thus and so should run the outline." 
 
 We admit the fact, but neither does that 
 excuse the goldfishing and the paper-boat busi- 
 ness. Some day the handbook may be com- 
 piled it is quite possible but meanwhile, and 
 faute de mieux, there is that which you may 
 study better than all handbooks. 
 
 Observe, now. Observe, for instance, the 
 little painter scholars. On the fly-leaves of 
 their schoolbooks they are making pictures 
 of what? Remember it, remember it and 
 remember it of the people around them. So 
 is the actor, so the musician all of the occu-
 
 Novelists of the Future 207 
 
 pants of the Fine Arts bench. They are study- 
 ing one another quite as much as their books 
 even more, and they will tell you that it is 
 the most important course in the curriculum. 
 
 You the truant little would-be novelist 
 you can do this, quite as easily as they, and for 
 you it is all the more important, for you must 
 make up for the intimate knowledge of your 
 fellows what you are forced to lack in the igno- 
 rance of forms. But you cannot get this 
 knowledge out there behind the schoolhouse 
 hooking goldfish. Come in at the tap of the 
 bell and, though you have no books, make 
 pictures on your slate, pictures of the Fine 
 Arts bench struggling all their lives for the 
 foolish little medals, pictures of the grubby 
 little boys in the stone-mason's corner, jeering 
 the art classes for their empty toiling. The 
 more you make these pictures, the better you 
 shall do them. That is the kind of studying 
 you can do, and from the study of your fellows 
 you shall learn more than from the study of all 
 the text-books that ever will be written. 
 
 But to do this you must learn to sit very 
 quiet, and be very watchful, and so train your 
 eyes and ears that every sound and every 
 sight shall be significant to you and shall 
 supply all the deficiency made by the absence 
 of text-books.
 
 208 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 This, then, to drop a very protracted alle- 
 gory, seems to be the proper training of the 
 novelist: The achieving less of an aggressive 
 faculty of research than of an attitude of mind 
 a receptivity, an acute sensitiveness. And 
 this can be acquired. 
 
 But it cannot be acquired by shutting one- 
 self in one's closet, by a withdrawal from the 
 world, and that, so it would appear, is just the 
 mistake so many would-be fiction writers allow 
 themselves. They would make the art of the 
 novelist an aristocracy, a thing exclusive, to 
 be guarded from contact with the vulgar, 
 humdrum, bread-and-butter business of life, 
 to be kept unspotted from the world, consider- 
 ing it the result of inspirations, of exaltations, 
 of subtleties and above all things of refine- 
 ment, a sort of velvet jacket affair, a studio 
 hocus-pocus, a thing loved of women and of 
 esthetes. 
 
 What a folly ! Of all the arts it is the most 
 virile; of all the arts it will not, will not, will 
 not flourish indoors. Dependent solely upon 
 fidelity to life for existence, it must be practised 
 in the very heart's heart of life, on the street 
 corner, in the market-place, not in the studios. 
 God enlighten us ! It is not an affair of women 
 and esthetes, and the muse of American fiction 
 is no chaste, delicate, superfine mademoi-
 
 Novelists of the Future 209 
 
 selle of delicate poses and "elegant" attitudin- 
 izings, but a robust, red-armed bonne femme, 
 who rough-shoulders her way among men and 
 among affairs, who finds a healthy pleasure in 
 the jostlings of the mob and a hearty delight 
 in the honest, rough-and-tumble, Anglo-Saxon 
 give-and-take knockabout that for us means 
 life. Choose her, instead of the sallow, pale- 
 faced statue-creature, with the foolish tablets 
 and foolish, upturned eyes, and she will lead 
 you as brave a march as ever drum tapped to. 
 Stay at her elbow and obey her as she tells you 
 to open your eyes and ears and heart, and as you 
 go she will show things wonderful beyond 
 wonder in this great, new, blessed country of 
 ours, will show you a life untouched, untried, 
 full of new blood and promise and vigour. 
 
 She is a Child of the People, this muse of our 
 fiction of the future, and the wind of a new 
 country, a new heaven and a new earth is in 
 her face and has blown her hair from out the 
 fillets that the Old World muse has bound across 
 her brow, so that it is all in disarray. The tan 
 of the sun is on her cheeks, and the dust of the 
 highway is thick upon her buskin, and the 
 elbowing of many men has torn the robe of her, 
 and her hands are hard with the grip of many 
 things. She is hail-fellow-well-met with every 
 one she meets, unashamed to know the clown
 
 210 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 and unashamed to face the king, a hardy, 
 vigorous girl, with an arm as strong as a man's 
 and a heart as sensitive as a child's. 
 
 Believe me, she will lead you far from the 
 studios and the esthetes, the velvet jackets 
 and the uncut hair, far from the sexless crea- 
 tures who cultivate their little art of writing 
 as the fancier cultivates his orchid. Tramping 
 along, then, with a stride that will tax your best 
 paces, she will lead you if you are humble 
 with her and honest with her straight into 
 a World of Working Men, crude of speech, swift 
 of action, strong of passion, straight to the heart 
 of a new life, on the borders of a new time, and 
 there and there only will you learn to know 
 the stuff of which must come the American 
 fiction of the future.
 
 A PLEA FOR ROMANTIC FICTION
 
 A PLEA FOR ROMANTIC FICTION 
 
 T ET us at the start make a distinction. 
 ^ Observe that one speaks of romanti- 
 cism and not sentimentalism. One claims that 
 the latter is as distinct from the former as is 
 that other form of art which is called Realism. 
 Romance has been often put upon and over- 
 burdened by being forced to bear the onus of 
 abuse that by right should fall to sentiment; 
 but the two should be kept very distinct, for 
 a very high and illustrious place will be claimed 
 for romance, while sentiment will be handed 
 down the scullery stairs. 
 
 Many people to-day are composing mere 
 sentimentalism, and calling it and causing it to 
 be called romance ; so with those who are too 
 busy to think much upon these subjects, but 
 who none the less love honest literature, 
 Romance, too, has fallen into disrepute. 
 Consider now the cut-and-thrust stories. 
 They are all labeled Romances, and it is 
 very easy to get the impression that Romance 
 must be an affair of cloaks and daggers, 
 or moonlight and golden hair. But this is 
 not so at all. The true Romance is a 
 
 213
 
 214 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 more serious business than this. It is not 
 merely a conjurer's trick-box, full of flimsy 
 quackeries, tinsel and claptraps, meant 
 only to amuse, and relying upon deception to 
 do even that. Is it not something better than 
 this? Can we not see in it an instrument, 
 keen, finely tempered, flawless an instrument 
 with which we may go straight through the 
 clothes and tissues and wrappings of flesh down 
 deep into the red, living heart of things ? 
 
 Is all this too subtle, too merely speculative 
 and intrinsic, too precieuse and nice and 
 "literary" ? Devoutly one hopes the contrary. 
 So much is made of so-called Romanticism in 
 present-day fiction that the subject seems 
 worthy of discussion, and a protest against the 
 misuse of a really noble and honest formula 
 of literature appeals to be timely misuse, that 
 is, in the sense of limited use.- Let us suppose 
 for the moment that a romance can be made 
 out of a cut-and-thrust business. Good 
 Heavens, are there no other things that are 
 romantic, even in this falsely, falsely called 
 humdrum world of to-day? Why should it 
 be that so soon as the novelist addresses himself 
 seriously to the consideration of contem- 
 porary life he must abandon Romance and take 
 up that harsh, loveless, colourless, blunt tool 
 called Realism?
 
 A Plea for Romantic Fiction 215 
 
 Now, let us understand at once what is 
 meant by Romance and what by Realism. 
 Romance, I take it, is the kind of fiction that 
 takes cognizance of variations from the type of 
 normal life. Realism is the kind of fiction 
 that confines itself to the type of normal life. 
 According to this definition, then, Romance 
 may even treat of the sordid, the un- 
 lovely as for instance, the novels of M. Zola. 
 (Zola has been dubbed a Realist, but he is, on the 
 contrary, the very head of the Romanticists.) 
 Also, Realism, used as it sometimes is as a term 
 of reproach, need not be in the remotest sense 
 or degree offensive, but on the other hand 
 respectable as a church and proper as a deacon 
 as, for instance, the novels of Mr. Howells. 
 
 The reason why one claims so much for 
 Romance, and quarrels so pointedly with 
 Realism, is that Realism stultifies itself. It 
 notes only the surface of things. For it, Beauty 
 is not even skin deep, but only a geometrical 
 plane, without dimensions and depth, a mere 
 outside. Realism is very excellent so far as it 
 goes, but it goes no further than the Realist 
 himself can actually see, or actually hear. 
 Realism is minute ; it is the drama of a broken 
 teacup, the tragedy of a walk down the block, 
 the excitement of an afternoon call, the adven- 
 ture of an invitation to dinner. It is the visit
 
 216 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 to my neighbour's house, a formal visit, from 
 which I may draw no conclusions. I see my 
 neighbour and his friends very, oh, such very ! 
 probable people and that is all. Realism 
 bows upon the doormat and goes away and 
 says to me, as we link arms on the sidewalk: 
 "That is life." And I say it is not. It. is not, 
 as you would very well see if you took Romance 
 with you to call upon your neighbour. 
 
 Lately you have been taking Romance a 
 weary journey across the water ages and 
 the flood of years and haling her into the 
 fusby, musty, worm-eaten, moth-riddled, rust- 
 corroded "Grandes Salles" of the Middle Ages 
 and the Renaissance, and she has found the 
 drama of a bygone age for you there. But 
 would you take her across the street to your 
 neighbour's front parlour (with the bisque 
 fisher-boy on the mantel and the photograph 
 of Niagara Falls on glass hanging in the front 
 window) ; would you introduce her there ? Not 
 you. Would you take a walk with her on Fifth 
 Avenue, or Beacon Street, or Michigan Avenue ? 
 No, indeed. Would you choose her for a com- 
 panion of a morning spent in Wall Street, or an 
 afternoon in the Waldorf-Astoria? You just 
 guess you would not. 
 
 She would be out of place, you say inap- 
 propriate. She might be awkward in my
 
 A Plea for Romantic Fiction 217 
 
 neighbour's front parlour, and knock over the 
 little bisque fisher-boy. Well, she might. If 
 she did, you might find underneath the base of 
 the statuette, hidden away, tucked away 
 what ? God knows. But something that would 
 be a complete revelation of my neighbour's 
 secretest life. 
 
 So you think Romance would stop in the 
 front parlour and discuss medicated flannels 
 and mineral waters with the ladies? Not for 
 more than five minutes. She would be off up- 
 stairs with you, prying, peeping, peering into 
 the closets of the bedroom, into the nursery, 
 into the sitting-room; yes, and into that little 
 iron box screwed to the lower shelf of the closet 
 in the library; and into those compartments 
 and pigeon-holes of the secretaire in the 
 study. She would find a heartache (maybe) 
 between the pillows of the mistress's bed, and 
 a memory carefully secreted in the master's 
 deed-box. She would come upon a great hope 
 amid the books and papers of the study-table 
 of the young man's room, and perhaps 
 who knows an affair, or, great Heavens, an 
 intrigue, in the scented ribbons and gloves and 
 hairpins of the young lady's bureau. And she 
 would pick here a little and there a little, 
 making up a bag of hopes and fears and a pack- 
 age of joys and sorrows great ones, mind you
 
 218 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 and then come down to the front door, and, 
 stepping out into the street, hand you the bags 
 and package and say to you "That is Life !" 
 
 Romance does very well in the castles of the 
 Middle Ages and the Renaissance chateaux, 
 and she has the entree there and is very well 
 received. That is all well and good. But let 
 us protest against limiting her to such places 
 and such times. You will find her, I grant you, 
 in the chatelaine's chamber and the dungeon 
 of the man-at-arms; but, if you choose to look 
 for her, you will find her equally at home in the 
 brownstone house on the corner and in the 
 office-building downtown. And this very day, 
 in this very hour, she is sitting among the rags 
 and wretchedness, the dirt and despair of the 
 tenements of the East Side of New York. 
 
 " What ? " I hear you say, "look for Romance 
 the lady of the silken robes and golden crown, 
 our beautiful, chaste maiden of soft voice and 
 gentle eyes look for her among the vicious 
 ruffians, male and female, of Allen Street and 
 Mulberry Bend?" I tell you she is there, and 
 to your shame be it said you will not know 
 her in those surroundings. You, the aristo- 
 crats, who demand the fine linen and the purple 
 in your fiction; you, the sensitive, the delicate, 
 who will associate with your Romance only so 
 long as she wears a silken gown. You will not
 
 A Plea for Romantic Fiction 219 
 
 follow her to the slums, for you believe that 
 Romance should only amuse and entertain you, 
 singing you sweet songs and touching the harp 
 of silver strings with rosy-tipped fingers. If 
 haply she should call to you from the squalour 
 of a dive, or the awful degradation of a dis- 
 orderly house, crying: "Look! listen! This, 
 too, is life. These, too, are my children ! Look 
 at them, know them and, knowing, help!" 
 Should she call thus you would stop your ears ; 
 you would avert your eyes and you would 
 answer, "Come from there, Romance. Your 
 place is not there !" And you would make of 
 her a harlequin, a tumbler, a sword-dancer, 
 when, as a matter of fact, she should be by 
 right divine a teacher sent from God. 
 
 She will not often wear the robe of silk, the 
 gold crown, the jeweled shoon; will not always 
 sweep the silver harp. An iron note is hers 
 if so she choose, and coarse garments, and 
 stained hands; and, meeting her thus, it is for 
 you to know her as she passes know her for 
 the same young queen of the blue mantle 
 and lilies. She can teach you if you will be 
 humble to learn teach you by showing. 
 God help you if at last you take from Romance 
 her mission of teaching; if you do not believe 
 that she has a purpose a nobler purpose and a 
 mightier than mere amusement, mere enter-
 
 220 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 tainment. Let Realism do the entertaining 
 with its meticulous presentation of teacups, 
 rag carpets, wall-paper and haircloth sofas, 
 stopping with these, going no deeper than it 
 sees, choosing the ordinary, the untroubled, 
 the commonplace. 
 
 But to Romance belongs the wide world for 
 range, and the unplumbed depths of the human 
 heart, and the mystery of sex, and the problems 
 of life, and the black, unsearched penetralia 
 of the soul of man. You, the indolent, must 
 not always be amused. What matter the 
 silken clothes, what matter the prince's houses? 
 Romance, too, is a teacher, and if throwing 
 aside the purple she wears the camel' s-hair 
 and feeds upon the locusts, it is to cry aloud 
 unto the people, "Prepare ye the way of the 
 Lord; make straight his path."
 
 A PROBLEM IN FICTION
 
 A PROBLEM IN FICTION 
 
 OO many people writers more especially 
 ^ claim stridently and with a deal of 
 gesturing that because a thing has happened 
 it is therefore true. They have written a 
 story, let us say, and they bring it to you to 
 criticize. You lay your finger upon a certain 
 passage and say "Not true to life." The 
 author turns on you and then annihilates you 
 in his own mind with the words, "But it 
 actually happened." Of course, then, it must 
 be true. On the contrary, it is accurate only. 
 For the assumption is, that truth is a higher 
 power of accuracy that the true thing includes 
 the accurate; and assuming this, the authors 
 of novels that are not successful suppose 
 that if they are accurate, if they tell the thing 
 just as they saw it, that they are truthful. It 
 is not difficult to show that a man may be 
 as accurate as the spectroscope and yet lie like 
 a Chinese diplomat. As for instance: Let us 
 suppose you have never seen a sheep, never 
 heard of sheep, don't know sheep from shav- 
 ings. It devolves upon me to enlighten your 
 223
 
 224 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 ignorance. I go out into the field and select 
 from the flock a black sheep, bring it before 
 you, and, with the animal there under our 
 eyes, describe it in detail, faithfully, omitting 
 nothing, falsifying nothing, exaggerating noth- 
 ing. I am painfully accurate. But you go 
 away with the untrue conviction that all sheep 
 are black ! I have been accurate, but I have 
 not been true. 
 
 So it is with very, very many novels, written 
 with all earnestness and seriousness. Every 
 incident has happened in real life, and because 
 it is picturesque, because it is romantic, because, 
 in a word, it is like some other novel, it is seized 
 upon at once, and serves as the nucleus of a tale. 
 Then, because this tale fails of success, because 
 it fails to impress, the author blames the public, 
 not himself. He thinks he has gone to life for 
 his material, and so must be original, new and 
 true. It is not so. Life itself is not always 
 true; strange as it may seem, you may be able 
 to say that life is not always true to life from 
 the point of view of the artist. It happened 
 once that it was my unfortunate duty to tell 
 a certain man of the violent death of his only 
 brother, whom he had left well and happy but 
 an hour before. This is how he took it: He 
 threw up both hands and staggered back, pre- 
 cisely as they do in melodrama, exclaiming all
 
 A Problem in Fiction 225 
 
 in a breath: "Oh, my God! This is terrible! 
 What will mother say?" You may say what 
 you please, this man was not true to life. 
 From the point of view of the teller of tales 
 he was theatrical, false, untrue, and though the 
 incident was an actual fact and though the 
 emotion was real, it had no value as " material," 
 and no fiction writer in his senses would have 
 thought of using it in his story. 
 
 Naturally enough it will be asked what, then, 
 is the standard. How shall the writer guide 
 himself in the treatment of a pivotal, critical 
 scene, or how shall the reader judge whether 
 or not he is true. Perhaps, after all, the word 
 "seem," and not the word "true," is the most 
 important. Of course no good novelist, no 
 good artist, can represent life as it actually is. 
 Nobody can, for nobody knows. Who is to say 
 what life actually is ? It seems easy easy for 
 us who have it and live in it and see it and hear 
 it and feel it every millionth part of every 
 second of the time. I say that life is actually 
 this or that, and you say it is something else, 
 and number three says " Lo ! here," and number 
 four says "Lo! there." Not even science is 
 going to help you; no two photographs, even, 
 will convey just the same impression of the 
 same actuality; and here we are dealing not 
 with science, but with art, that instantly
 
 226 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 involves the personality of the artist and all 
 that that means. Even the same artist will 
 not see the same thing twice exactly alike. 
 His personality is one thing to-day and another 
 thing to-morrow is one thing before dinner 
 and another thing after it. How, then, to 
 determine what life actually is? 
 
 The point is just this. In the fine arts we 
 do not care one little bit about what life actually 
 is, but what it looks like to an interesting, 
 impressionable man, and if he tells his story 
 or paints his picture so that the majority of 
 intelligent people will say, "Yes, that must 
 have been just about what would have hap- 
 pened under those circumstances," he is true. 
 His accuracy cuts no figure at all. He need 
 not be accurate if he does not choose to be. 
 If he sees fit to be inaccurate in order to make 
 his point so only his point be the conveying 
 of a truthful impression that is his affair. We 
 have nothing to do with that. Consider the 
 study of a French cuirassier by Detaille ; where 
 the sunlight strikes the brown coat of the horse, 
 you will see, if you look close, a mere smear of 
 blue light blue. This is inaccurate. The 
 horse is not blue, nor has he any blue spots. 
 Stand at the proper distance and the blue smear 
 resolves itself into the glossy reflection of the 
 sun, and the effect is true.
 
 A Problem in Fiction 227 
 
 And in fiction: Take the fine scene in 
 "Ivanhoe," where Rebecca, looking from the 
 window, describes the assault upon the outer 
 walls of the castle to the wounded knight lying 
 on the floor in the room behind her. If you 
 stop and think, you will see that Rebecca 
 never could have found such elaborate language 
 under the stress of so great excitement those 
 cleverly managed little climaxes in each phrase, 
 building up to the great climax of the para- 
 graph, all the play of rhetoric, all the nice chain 
 and adjustment of adjectives; she could not 
 possibly have done it. Neither you nor I, nor 
 any of us, with all the thought and time and 
 labour at our command, could have ever written 
 the passage. But is it not admirably true 
 true as the truth itself ? It is not accurate : it 
 is grossly, ludicrously inaccurate; but the fire 
 and leap and vigour of it; there is where the 
 truth is. Scott wanted you to get an impres- 
 sion of that assault on the barbican, and you 
 do get it. You can hear those axes on the outer 
 gate as plainly as Rebecca could; you can see 
 the ladders go up, can hear them splinter, can 
 see and feel and know all the rush and trample 
 and smashing of that fine fight, with the Fetter- 
 lock Knight always to the fore, as no merely 
 accurate description accurate to five points 
 of decimals could ever present it.
 
 228 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 So that one must remember the distinction, 
 and claim no more for accuracy than it deserves 
 and that's but little. Anybody can be 
 accurate the man with the foot-rule is that. 
 Accuracy is the attainment of small minds, 
 the achievement of the commonplace, a mere 
 machine-made thing that comes with nig- 
 gardly research and ciphering and mensuration 
 and the multiplication table, good in its place, 
 so only the place is very small. In fiction it 
 can under certain circumstances be dispensed 
 with altogether. It is not a thing to be striven 
 for. To be true is the all-important business, 
 and, once attaining that, "all other things shall 
 be added unto you." Paint the horse pea- 
 green if it suits your purpose ; fill the mouth of 
 Rebecca with gasconades and rhodomontades 
 interminable: these things do not matter. It 
 is truth that matters, and the point is whether 
 the daubs of pea-green will look like horseflesh 
 and the mouth-filling words create the impres- 
 sion of actual battle.
 
 WHY WOMEN SHOULD WRITE 
 THE BEST NOVELS
 
 WHY WOMEN SHOULD WRITE THE 
 BEST NOVELS 
 
 TT is rather curious upon reflection and upon 
 looking over the rank and file of achieve- 
 ment during the period of recorded history, 
 to observe that of all the occupations at first 
 exclusively followed by men, that of writing 
 has been in all civilizations and among all 
 people one of the very first to be successfully 
 mark the qualification of the adverb to be 
 successfully invaded by women. We hear of 
 women who write poetry long before we hear 
 of women who paint pictures or perform upon 
 musical instruments or achieve distinction 
 upon the stage. 
 
 It would seem as if, of all the arts, that of 
 writing is the one to which women turn the 
 quickest. Great success in the sciences or in 
 mercantile pursuits is, of course, out of the 
 question, so that as at the first it may be 
 said, speaking largely, that of all the masculine 
 occupations, that of writing is the first to be 
 adopted by women. 
 
 If it is the first it must be because it is the 
 easiest. Now to go very far back to the 
 231
 
 232 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 earliest beginnings, all occupations, whether 
 artistic or otherwise, were the prerogative of 
 the male; considering this fact, I say, does it 
 not follow, or would not the inference be strong, 
 that given an equal start women would 
 write more readily than men, would do so 
 because they could do so; that writing is 
 a feminine not accomplishment merely but 
 gift. 
 
 So that the whole matter leads up to the point 
 one wishes to make, namely, that here, in our 
 present day and time, it should be easier for 
 women to write well than for men. And 
 as writing to-day means the writing of fiction, 
 we arrive, somewhat deviously and perhaps 
 after jumping many gaps and weak spots en 
 route a little lamely, at the very last result of 
 all, which is this: Women should be able to 
 write better novels than men. 
 
 But under modern conditions there are 
 many more reasons for this success of women 
 in fiction than merely a natural inherent gift 
 of expression. 
 
 One great reason is leisure. The average 
 man, who must work for a living, has no time 
 to write novels, much less to get into that 
 frame of mind, or to assume that mental 
 attitude by means of which he is able to see 
 possibilities for fictitious narrative in the
 
 Why Women Should Write the Best Novels 233 
 
 life around him. But, as yet, few women 
 (compared with the armies of male workers) 
 have to work for a living, and it is an unusual 
 state of affairs in which the average woman of 
 moderate circumstances could not, if she would, 
 take from three to four hours a day from her 
 household duties to devote to any occupation 
 she deemed desirable. 
 
 Another reason is found, one believes, in 
 the nature of women's education. From almost 
 the very first the young man studies with an 
 eye to business or to a profession. In many 
 State colleges nowadays all literary courses, 
 except the most elementary which, indeed, 
 have no place in collegiate curriculums are 
 optional. But what girls' seminary does not 
 prescribe the study of literature through all 
 its three or four years, making of this study a 
 matter of all importance ? And while the courses 
 of literature do not, by any manner of means, 
 make a novelist, they familiarize the student 
 with style and the means by which words are 
 put together. The more one reads the easier 
 one writes. 
 
 Then, too (though this reason lies not so 
 much in modern conditions as in basic princi- 
 ples), there is the matter of temperament. 
 The average man is a rectangular, square-cut, 
 matter-of-fact, sober-minded animal who does
 
 234 The Responsibilities of ike Novelist 
 
 not receive impressions easily, who is not 
 troubled with emotions and has no over- 
 mastering desire to communicate his sensations 
 to anybody. But the average woman is just 
 the reverse of all these. She is impressionable, 
 emotional and communicative. And impres- 
 sionableness, emotionality and communicative- 
 ness are three very important qualities of mind 
 that make for novel writing. 
 
 The modern woman, then, in a greater 
 degree than her contemporaneous male, has 
 the leisure for novel writing, has the education 
 and has the temperament. She should be 
 able to write better novels, and as a matter 
 of fact she does not. It is, of course, a con- 
 ceded fact that there have been more great men 
 novelists than women novelists, and that to-day 
 the producers of the best fiction are men and 
 not women. There are probably more women 
 trying to write novels than there are men, but 
 for all this it must be admitted that the ranks 
 of the "arrived" are recruited from the razor 
 contingent. 
 
 Why, then, with such a long start and with 
 so many advantages of temperament, opportu- 
 nity and training should it be that women do not 
 write better novels than men ? 
 
 One believes that the answer is found in 
 the fact that life is more important than liter-
 
 Why Women Should Write the Best Novels 235 
 
 ature, and in the wise, wise, old, old adage that 
 experience is the best teacher. Of all the 
 difficult things that enter into the learning of a 
 most difficult profession, the most difficult of all 
 for the intended novelist to acquire is the 
 fact that life is better than literature. The 
 amateur will say this with conviction, will 
 preach it in public and practise the exact 
 reverse in private. But it still remains true 
 that all the temperament, all the sensitiveness 
 to impressions, all the education in the world 
 will not help one little, little bit in the writing 
 of the novel if life itself, the crude, the raw, the 
 vulgar, if you will, is not studied. An hour's 
 experience is worth ten years of study of 
 reading other people's books. But this fact 
 is ignored, and the future writer of what it is 
 hoped will be the great novel of his day and age 
 studies the thoughts and products of some 
 other writer, of some other great novel, of some 
 other day and age, in the hope that thereby 
 much may be learned. And much will be learned 
 very much, indeed of the methods of con- 
 struction ; and if the tyro only has wits enough 
 to study the great man's formula, well and good. 
 But the fascination of a great story-writer 
 especially upon the young, untried little story- 
 writer is strong, and before the latter is well 
 aware he is taking from the big man that which
 
 236 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 he has no right to take. He is taking his code 
 of ethics, his view of life, his personality, even 
 to the very incidents and episodes of his story. 
 He is studying literature and not life. 
 
 If he had gone direct to life itself, all would 
 have been different. He would have developed 
 in his own code, his own personality, and he 
 would have found incidents and episodes that 
 were new yes, and strikingly forceful, better 
 than any he could have imagined or stolen, 
 and which were all his own. In the end, if the 
 gods gave him long life and a faculty of appli- 
 cation, he would have evolved into something 
 of a writer of fiction. 
 
 All this digression is to try to state the 
 importance of actual life and actual experience, 
 and it bears upon the subject in hand in this, 
 that women who have all the other qualifica- 
 tions of good novelists are, because of nature 
 and character that invariably goes with these 
 qualifications, shut away from the study of, 
 and the association with, the most important 
 thing of all for them real life. Even making 
 allowances for the emancipation of the New 
 Woman, the majority of women still lead, in 
 comparison with men, secluded lives. The 
 woman who is impressionable is by reason 
 of this very thing sensitive (indeed, sensi- 
 tiveness and impressionableness mean almost
 
 Why Women Should Write the Best Novels 237 
 
 the same thing), and it is inconceivably hard for 
 the sensitive woman to force herself into the 
 midst of that great, grim complication of men's 
 doings that we call life. And even admitting 
 that she finds in herself the courage to do 
 this, she lacks the knowledge to use knowl- 
 edge thus gained. The faculty of selection 
 comes even to men only after many years of 
 experience. 
 
 So much for causes exterior to herself, and it 
 is well to admit at once that the exterior causes 
 are by far the most potent and the most impor- 
 tant ; but there are perhaps causes to be found 
 in the make-up of the woman herself which 
 keep her from success in fiction. Is it not a fact 
 that protracted labour of the mind tells upon 
 a woman quicker than upon a man. Be it 
 understood that no disparagement, no invidious 
 comparison is intended. Indeed, it is quite 
 possible that her speedier mental fatigue is due 
 to the fact that the woman possesses the more 
 highly specialized organ. 
 
 A man may grind on steadily for an almost 
 indefinite period, when a woman at the same 
 task would begin, after a certain point, to "feel 
 her nerves," to chafe, to fret, to try to do too 
 much, to polish too highly, to develop more 
 perfectly. Then come fatigue, harassing 
 doubts, more nerves, a touch of hysteria occa-
 
 238 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 sionally, exhaustion, and in the end complete 
 discouragement and a final abandonment of 
 the enterprise: and who shall say how many 
 good, even great, novels have remained half 
 written, to be burned in the end, because their 
 women authors mistook lack of physical 
 strength for lack of genuine ability ?
 
 SIMPLICITY IN ART
 
 SIMPLICITY IN ART 
 
 upon a time I had occasion to buy 
 so uninteresting a thing as a silver 
 soup-ladle. The salesman at the silversmith's 
 was obliging and for my inspection brought 
 forth quite an array of ladles. But my purse 
 was flaccid, anemic, and I must pick and 
 choose with all the discrimination in the world. 
 I wanted to make a brave showing with my 
 gift to get a great deal for my money. I 
 went through a world of soup-ladles ladles 
 with gilded bowls, with embossed handles, with 
 chased arabesques, but there were none to my 
 taste. "Or perhaps," says the salesman, 
 "you would care to look at something like 
 this," and he brought out a ladle that was as 
 plain and as unadorned as the unclouded sky 
 and about as beautiful. Of all the others this 
 was the most to my liking. But the price ! ah, 
 that anemic purse ; and I must put it from me ! 
 It was nearly double the cost of any of the rest. 
 And when I asked why, the salesman said : 
 
 "You see, in this highly ornamental ware 
 the flaws of the material don't show, and you 
 241
 
 242 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 can cover up a blow-hole or the like by wreaths 
 and beading. But this plain ware has got to 
 be the very best. Every defect is apparent." 
 And there, if you please, is a conclusive com- 
 ment upon the whole business a final basis of 
 comparison of all things, whether commercial 
 or artistic; the bare dignity of the unadorned 
 that may stand before the world all unashamed, 
 panoplied rather than clothed in the conscious- 
 ness of perfection. We of this latter day, we 
 painters and poets and writers artists must 
 labour with all the wits of us, all the strength 
 of us, and with all that we have of ingenuity 
 and perseverance to attain simplicity. But 
 it has not always been so. At the very earliest, 
 men forgotten, ordinary men were born with 
 an easy, unblurred vision that to-day we would 
 hail as marvelous genius. Suppose, for instance, 
 the New Testament was all unwritten and one 
 of us were called upon to tell the world that 
 Christ was born, to tell of how we had seen 
 Him, that this was the Messiah. How the 
 adjectives would marshal upon the page, how 
 the exclamatory phrases would cry out, how 
 we would elaborate and elaborate, and how 
 our rhetoric would flare and blazen till so we 
 should imagine the ear would ring and the 
 very eye would be dazzled; and even then we 
 would believe that our words were all so few
 
 Simplicity in Art 243 
 
 and feeble. It is beyond words, we should 
 vociferate. So it would be. That is very 
 true words of ours. Can you not see how we 
 should dramatize it? We would make a point 
 of the transcendent stillness of the hour, of the 
 deep blue of the Judean midnight, of the lip- 
 lapping of Galilee, the murmur of Jordan, the 
 peacefulness of sleeping Jerusalem. Then the 
 stars, the descent of the angel, the shepherds 
 all the accessories. And our narrative would 
 be as commensurate with the subject as the 
 flippant smartness of a "bright" reporter in 
 the Sistine chapel. We would be striving to 
 cover up our innate incompetence, our impo- 
 tence to do justice to the mighty theme by 
 elaborateness of design and arabesque intricacy 
 of rhetoric. 
 
 But on the other hand listen: 
 
 "The days were accomplished that she 
 should be delivered, and she brought forth 
 her first born son and wrapped him in swaddling 
 clothes and laid him in a manger, because there 
 was no room for them in the inn. " 
 
 Simplicity could go no further. Absolutely 
 not one word unessential, not a single adjective 
 that is not merely descriptive. The whole 
 matter stated with the terseness of a military 
 report, and yet there is the epic, the world 
 epic, beautiful, majestic, incomparably digni-
 
 244 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 fied, and no ready writer, no Milton nor Shak- 
 spere, with all the wealth of their vocabularies, 
 with all the resources of their genius, with all 
 their power of simile or metaphor, their pomp 
 of eloquence or their royal pageantry of hexa- 
 meters, could produce the effect contained in 
 these two simple declarative sentences. 
 
 The mistake that we little people are so 
 prone to make is this: that the more intense 
 the emotional quality of the scene described, 
 the more "vivid," the more exalted, the more 
 richly coloured we suppose should be the 
 language. 
 
 When the crisis of the tale is reached there 
 is where we like the author to spread himself, 
 to show the effectiveness of his treatment. 
 But if we would only pause to take a moment's 
 thought we must surely see that the simplest, 
 even the barest statement of fact is only not 
 all-sufficient but all-appropriate. 
 
 Elaborate phrase, rhetoric, the intimacy 
 of metaphor and allegory and simile is for- 
 givable for the unimportant episodes where 
 the interest of the narrative is languid; where 
 we are willing to watch the author's ingenuity 
 in the matter of scrolls and fretwork and 
 mosaics-rococo work. But when the catas- 
 trophe comes, when the narrative swings clear 
 upon its pivot and we are lifted with it from
 
 Simplicity in Art 245 
 
 out the world of our surroundings, we want 
 to forget the author. We want no adjectives 
 to blur our substantives. The substantives 
 may now speak for themselves. We want no 
 metaphor, no simile to make clear the matter. 
 If at this moment of drama and intensity the 
 matter is not of itself preeminently clear no 
 verbiage, however ingenious, will clarify it. 
 Heighten the effect. Does exclamation and 
 heroics on the part of the bystanders ever make 
 the curbstone drama more poignant? Who 
 would care to see Niagara through coloured 
 fire and calcium lights. 
 
 The simple treatment, whether of a piece 
 of silversmith work or of a momentous religious 
 epic, is always the most difficult of all. It 
 demands more of the artist. The unskilful 
 story-teller as often as not tells the story to 
 himself as well as to his hearers as he goes along. 
 Not sure of exactly how he is to reach the end, 
 not sure even of the end itself, he must feel his 
 way from incident to incident, from page to 
 page, fumbling, using many words, repeating 
 himself. To hide the confusion there is one 
 resource elaboration, exaggerated outline, 
 violent colour, till at last the unstable outline 
 disappears under the accumulation, and the 
 reader is to be so dazzled with the wit of the 
 dialogue, the smartness of the repartee, the
 
 246 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 felicity of the diction, that he will not see the 
 gaps and lapses in the structure itself just 
 as the "nobby" drummer wears a wide and 
 showy scarf to conceal a soiled shirt-bosom. 
 
 But in the master-works of narrative there 
 is none of this shamming, no shoddyism, no 
 humbug. There is little more than bare out- 
 line, but in the care with which it is drawn, 
 how much thought, what infinite pains go to 
 the making of each stroke, so that when it is 
 made it falls just at the right place and exactly 
 in its right sequence. This attained, what need 
 is there for more? Comment is superfluous. 
 If the author make the scene appear terrible 
 to the reader he need not say in himself or in 
 the mouth of some protagonist, " It is terrible !" 
 If the picture is pathetic so that he who reads 
 must weep, how superfluous, how intrusive 
 should the author exclaim, "It was pitiful to 
 the point of tears." If beautiful, we do not 
 want him to tell us so. We want him to make 
 it beautiful and our own appreciation will 
 supply the adjectives. 
 
 Beauty, the ultimate philosophical beauty, 
 is not a thing of elaboration, but on the con- 
 trary of an almost barren nudity: a jewel may 
 be an exquisite gem, a woman may have a 
 beautiful arm, but the bracelet does not make 
 the arm more beautiful, nor the arm the brace-
 
 Simplicity in Art 247 
 
 let. One must admire them separately, and 
 the moment that the jewel ceases to have a 
 value or a reason upon the arm it is better in 
 the case, where it may enjoy an undivided 
 attention. 
 
 But after so many hundreds of years of art 
 and artists, of civilization and progress, we have 
 got so far away from the sane old homely 
 uncomplex way of looking out at the world 
 that the simple things no longer charm, and 
 the simple declarative sentence, straightforward, 
 plain, seems flat to our intellectual palate flat 
 and tasteless and crude. 
 
 What we would now call simple our forbears 
 would look upon as a farrago of gimcrackery, 
 and all our art the art of the better-minded 
 of us is only a striving to get back to the 
 unblurred, direct simplicity of those writers 
 who could see that the Wonderful, the Coun- 
 selor, the mighty God, the Prince of Peace, 
 could be laid in a manger and yet be the 
 Saviour of the world. 
 
 It is this same spirit, this disdaining of sim- 
 plicity that has so warped and inflated The 
 First Story, making of it a pomp, an affair of 
 gold-embroidered vestments and costly choirs, 
 of marbles, of jeweled windows and of incense, 
 unable to find the thrill as formerly in the plain 
 and humble stable, and the brown-haired,
 
 248 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 grave-eyed peasant girl, with her little baby; 
 unable to see the beauty in the crumbling mud 
 walls, the low-ceiled interior, where the only 
 incense was the sweet smell of the cow's breath, 
 the only vestments the swaddling clothes, 
 rough, coarse-fibered, from the hand-looms of 
 Nazareth, the only pomp the scanty gifts of 
 three old men, and the only chanting the 
 crooning of a young mother holding her first- 
 born babe upon her breast.
 
 SALT AND SINCERITY
 
 SALT AND SINCERITY 
 
 I 
 
 TF the signs of the times may be read 
 aright, and the future forecasted, the 
 volume of short stories is in a fair way of 
 becoming a "rare book." Fewer and fewer 
 of this kind of literature are published every 
 year, and only within the last week one of the 
 foremost of the New York publishers has said 
 that, so far as the material success was con- 
 cerned, he would prefer to undertake a book 
 of poems rather than a book of stories. Also 
 he explains why. And this is the interesting 
 thing. One has always been puzzled to account 
 for this lapse from a former popularity of a 
 style of fiction certainly legitimate and incon- 
 testably entertaining. The publisher in ques- 
 tion cites the cheap magazines the monthlies 
 and weeklies as the inimical factors. The 
 people go to them for their short stories, not 
 to the cloth-bound volumes for sale at a dollar 
 or a dollar and a half. Why not, if the cheap 
 magazines give "just as good"? Often, too, 
 they give the very same stories which, later, 
 are republished in book form. As the case 
 251
 
 252 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 stands now, any fairly diligent reader of two 
 or three of the more important monthlies and 
 weeklies may anticipate the contents of the 
 entire volume, and very naturally he cannot 
 be expected to pay a dollar for something he 
 already has. 
 
 Or even suppose as is now generally 
 demanded by the publisher the author adds 
 to the forthcoming collection certain hitherto 
 unpublished stories. Even this does not tempt 
 the buyer. Turning over the leaves at the 
 bookseller's, he sees two, three, five, half a 
 dozen familiar titles. "Come," says he, "I 
 have read three-fourths of this book already. 
 I have no use for it. " 
 
 It is quite possible that this state of affairs 
 will produce important results. It is yet, 
 perhaps, too soon to say, but it is not outside 
 the range of the probable that, in America 
 at least, it will, in time to come, engender a 
 decay in the quality of the short story. It 
 may be urged that the high prices paid by 
 periodicals to the important short-story writers 
 the best men will still act as a stimulus to 
 production. But this does not follow by any 
 means. Authors are queer cattle. They do 
 not always work for money, but sometimes for 
 a permanent place in the eyes of the world. 
 Books give them this not fugitive short
 
 Salt and Sincerity 253 
 
 stories, published here and there, and at 
 irregular intervals. Reputations that have 
 been made by short stories published in periodi- 
 cals may be counted upon the fingers of one 
 hand. The "life of a novel" to use a trade 
 term is to a certain extent indeterminable. 
 The life of a short story, be it never so excellent, 
 is prolonged only till the next issue of the 
 periodical in which it has appeared. If the 
 periodical is a weekly it will last a week, if a 
 monthly a month and not a day more. If 
 very good, it will create a demand for another 
 short story by the same author, but that one 
 particular contribution, the original one, is 
 irretrievably and hopelessly dead. 
 
 If the author is in literature "for his own 
 pocket every time," he is generally willing to 
 accept the place of a short-story writer. If 
 he is one of the "best men," working for a 
 "permanent place," he will turn his attention 
 and time, his best efforts, to the writing of 
 novels, reverting to the short story only when 
 necessary for the sake of boiling the Pot and 
 chasing the Wolf. He will abandon the field 
 to the inferior men, or enter it only to dispose 
 of "copy" which does not represent him at his 
 best. And, as a result, the quality of the short 
 story will decline more and more. 
 
 So, "taking one consideration with another,"
 
 254 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 it may be appropriate to inquire if it is not 
 possible that the American short story is liable 
 to decline in quality and standard of excellence. 
 
 And now comes again this question addressed 
 to certain authors, "Which book do you con- 
 sider your best?" and a very industrious and 
 painstaking person is giving the answer to the 
 world. 
 
 To what end it is difficult to see. Who cares 
 which of the "Waverleys" Sir Walter thought 
 his best? or which of the Rougon-Maquart 
 M. Zola favours the most? The author's 
 point of view is very different from yours 
 the reader's. Which one do you think the 
 best ? That's the point. Do you not see that 
 in the author's opinion the novel he is working 
 on at the moment, or which is in press and 
 about to appear in fine, the last one written 
 is for a very long time the best he has done? 
 He would be a very poor kind of novelist if he 
 did not think that. 
 
 And even in retrospect his opinion as to 
 "his best book" is not necessarily final. For 
 he will see good points in "unsuccessful" 
 novels that the public and critics have never 
 and will never discover; and also defects in 
 what the world considers his masterpiece that 
 for him spoil the entire story. His best novel 
 is, as was said, the last he has written, or and
 
 Salt and Sincerity 255 
 
 this more especially the one he is going to 
 write. For to a certain extent this is true of 
 every author, whether fiction writer or not. 
 Though he very often does better than he thinks 
 he can, he never does so well as he knows he might. 
 
 His best book is the one that he never quite 
 succeeds in getting hold of firmly enough to 
 commit to paper. It is always just beyond 
 him. Next year he is going to think it out, 
 or the next after that, and instead he compro- 
 mises on something else, and his chef d'auvre 
 is always a little ahead of him. If this, too, 
 were not so, he would be a poor kind of writer. 
 So that it seems to me the most truthful answer 
 to the question, "What is your best book?' 
 would be, "The one I shall never write. " 
 
 Another ideal that such of the "people who 
 imagine a vain thing" have long been pursuing 
 is an English Academy of letters, and now 
 that "the British Academy for the promotion 
 of Historical, Philosophical and Philological 
 studies" has been proposed, the old discussion 
 is revived, and especially in England there is 
 talk of a British Academy, something on the 
 same lines as the Academie Fran^aise, which 
 shall tend to promote and reward particularly 
 the production of good fiction. In a word, 
 it would be a distinction reserved only for the 
 worthy, a charmed circle that would open only
 
 256 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 to the elite upon the vote of those already 
 admitted. The proposition strikes one as pre- 
 eminently ridiculous. Literature is of all arts 
 the most democratic; it is of, by and for the 
 people in a fuller measure than even govern- 
 ment itself. And one makes the assertion 
 without forgetting that fine mouth-filling 
 phrase, the "aristocracy of letters." The 
 survival of the fittest is as good in the evolution 
 of our literature as of our bodies, and the best 
 "academy" for the writers of the United 
 States is, after all, and in the last analysis, to 
 be found in the judgment of the people, exer- 
 cised throughout the lapse of a considerable 
 time. For, give the people time enough, and 
 they will always decide justly. 
 
 It was in connection with this talk about an 
 "Academy" that Mr. Hall Caine has made the 
 remark that "no academic study of a thing 
 so variable, emotional and independent as the 
 imaginative writer's art could be anything but 
 mischievous." One is inclined to take excep- 
 tion to the statement. Why should the aca- 
 demic study of the principles of writing fiction 
 be mischievous? Is it not possible to codify 
 in some way the art of construction of novels 
 so that they may be studied to advantage? 
 This has, of course, never been done. But one 
 believes that, if managed carefully and with a
 
 Salt and Sincerity 257 
 
 proper disregard of " set forms" and hampering 
 conventions, it would be possible to start and 
 maintain a school of fiction-writing in the 
 most liberal sense of the word " school. " Why 
 should it be any more absurd than the painting 
 schools and music schools ? Is the art of music, 
 say, any less variable, less emotional, less 
 independent, less imaginative than the fiction- 
 writer's. Heretical as the assertion may ap- 
 pear, one is thoroughly convinced that the art 
 of novel writing (up to a certain point, bien 
 entendu} can be acquired by instruction just as 
 readily and with results just as satisfactory 
 and practical as the arts of painting, sculpture, 
 music, and the like. The art of fiction is, in 
 general, based upon four qualities of mind: 
 observation, imagination, invention and sym- 
 pathy. Certainly the first two are "acquired 
 characters. " Kindergarten children the world 
 over are acquiring them every day. Invention 
 is immensely stimulated by observation and 
 imagination, while sympathy is so universally 
 a fundamental quality with all sorts and condi- 
 tions of men and women especially the latter 
 that it needs but little cultivation. Why, 
 then, would it be impossible for a few of our 
 older, more seriously minded novelists to 
 launch a School of Instruction in the Art 
 of Composition just as Bougereau, Lefevre,
 
 258 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 Boulanger and Tony Robert Fleury founded 
 J alien's in Paris ? 
 
 At present the stimulus to, and even the 
 manner of, production of very much of Ameri- 
 can fiction is in the hands of the publishers. 
 No one not intimately associated with any one 
 of the larger, more important "houses" can 
 have any idea of the influence of the publisher 
 upon latter-day fiction. More novels are writ- 
 ten practically to order than the public has 
 r.ny notion of. The publisher again and again 
 picks out the man (one speaks, of course, of 
 the younger generation), suggests the theme, 
 and exercises, in a sense, all the functions of 
 instructor during the period of composition. 
 In the matter of this "picking out of the man" 
 it is rather curious to note a very radical change 
 that has come about in the last five years. 
 Time was when the publisher waited for the 
 unknown writer to come to him with his manu- 
 script. But of late the Unknown has so fre- 
 quently developed, under exploitation and by 
 direct solicitation of the publisher, into a 
 "money-making proposition" of such formid- 
 able proportions that there is hardly a publish- 
 ing house that does not now hunt him out with 
 all the resources at its command. Certain 
 fields are worked with the thoroughness, 
 almost, of a political canvass, and if a given
 
 Salt and Sincerity 259 
 
 State as, for instance, Indiana has suddenly 
 evolved into a region of great literary activity, 
 it is open to suspicion that it is not because 
 there is any inherent literary quality in the 
 people of the place greater than in other States, 
 but that certain firms of publishers are "work- 
 ing the ground." 
 
 It might not have been altogether out of 
 place if upon the Victor Hugo monument 
 which has just been unveiled in Paris there had 
 been inscribed this, one of the most important 
 of the great Frenchman's maxims: 
 
 "Les livres n'ont jamais faites du mal"; 
 
 and I think that in the last analysis, this is the 
 most fitting answer to Mr. Carnegie, who, in 
 his address before the Author's Club, put him- 
 self on record as willing to exclude from the 
 libraries he is founding all books not three years 
 old. No doubt bad books have a bad influence, 
 but bad books are certainly better than no 
 books at all. For one must remember that the 
 worst books are not printed the really tawdry, 
 really pernicious, really evil books. These are 
 throttled in manuscript by the publishers, who 
 must be in a sense public censors. No book, 
 be assured, goes to press but that there is 
 oh, hidden away like a grain of mustard 
 some bit, some modicum, some tiny kernel of
 
 260 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 good in it. Perhaps it is not that seed of good- 
 ness that the cultured, the fastidious care much 
 about. Perhaps the discriminating would call 
 it a platitude. But one is willing to believe 
 that somewhere, somehow, this atom of real 
 worth makes itself felt and that's a beginning. 
 It will create after awhile a taste for reading. 
 And a taste for reading is a more important 
 factor in a nation's literary life than the birth 
 of a second Shakespeare. 
 
 It is the people, after all, who "make a litera- 
 ture. " If they read, the few, the " illuminati, " 
 will write. But first must come the demand 
 come from the people, the Plain People, the 
 condemned bourgeoisie. The select circles of 
 the elite, the "studio" hangers-on, the refined, 
 will never, never, clamour they never so loudly, 
 toil they never so painfully, produce the Great 
 Writer. The demand which he is to supply 
 comes from the Plain People from the masses, 
 and not from the classes. There is more signifi- 
 cance as to the ultimate excellence of American 
 letters in the sight of the messenger boy 
 devouring his "Old Sleuths" and "Deadwood 
 Dicks" and " Boy Detectives, " with an earnest, 
 serious absorption, than in the spectacle of a 
 "reading circle" of dilletanti coquetting with 
 Verlaine and pretending that they understand. 
 
 By the same token, then, is it not better to
 
 Salt and Sincerity 261 
 
 welcome and rejoice over this recent "literary 
 deluge" than to decry it? One is not sure 
 it is not a matter for self-gratulation not a 
 thing to deplore and vilify. The "people" are 
 reading, that is the point ; it is not the point that 
 immature, untrained writers are flooding the 
 counters with their productions. The more 
 the Plain People read the more they will dis- 
 criminate. It is inevitable, and by and by 
 they will demand "something better." It is 
 impossible to read a book without formulating 
 an opinion upon it. Even the messenger boy 
 can tell you that, in his judgment, No. 3,666, 
 "The James Boys Brought to Bay," is more 
 or less, as the case may be exciting than No. 
 3,667, "The Last of the Fly-by-nights. " Well, 
 that is something. Is it not better than that 
 the same boy should be shooting craps around 
 the corner? Take his dime novel from him, 
 put him in the "No Book" condition and 
 believe me, he will revert to the craps. And 
 so it is higher up the scale. In the name of 
 American literature, let the Plain People read, 
 anything anything, whether it is three days 
 or three years old. Mr. Carnegie will not 
 educate the public taste by shutting his libraries 
 upon recent fiction. The public taste will 
 educate itself by much reading, not by restricted 
 reading. "Books have never done harm,"
 
 262 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 Victor Hugo said it, and a bad book that is 
 to say, a poor, cheap, ill-written, "trashy" 
 book is not after all so harmful as "no 
 book" at all. 
 
 Later on, when the people have learned dis- 
 crimination by much reading, it will not be 
 necessary to bar fiction not three years old 
 from the libraries, for by then the people will 
 demand the "something better," and the 
 writers will have to supply it or disappear, 
 giving place to those who can, and then the 
 literary standards will be raised.
 
 II 
 
 IN a recent number of his periodical, the 
 editor of Harper's Weekly prints a letter 
 received from a gentleman who deplores the 
 fact that the participants in the Harvard- 
 Yale track teams are given a great place in 
 the daily newspapers while by implication 
 his son, an arduous student and winner of a 
 "Townsend prize," is completely and definitely 
 ignored. "I could not but think of my son," 
 writes the gentleman, "a Yale Senior who, as 
 one of the results of nine years' devotion to 
 study, won a Townsend prize." One will ask 
 the reader to consider this last statement. The 
 publicity of the college athletes is not the point 
 here. The point is "nine years' devotion to 
 study" and "a Townsend prize." Nine years 
 think of it the best, the most important 
 of a boy's life given to devoted study ! not of 
 Men, not of Life, not of Realities, but of the 
 books of Other People, mere fatuous, unrea- 
 soned, pig-headed absorption of ideas at second- 
 hand. And the result? Not a well-ordered 
 mind, not a well-regulated reasoning machine, 
 263
 
 264 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 not a power of appreciation, not an ability to 
 create. None of these, but Great Heavens ! 
 a Townsend Prize, a rectangular piece of the skin 
 of a goat, dried and cured and marked with 
 certain signs and symbols by means of a black 
 pigment ; this and a disk of the same metal the 
 Uganda warrior hangs in his ears. A Townsend 
 Prize. And for this a young American living 
 in the twentieth century, sane, intelligent, 
 healthful, has pored over Other People's books, 
 has absorbed Other People's notions, has 
 wearied his brain, has weakened his body, has 
 shut himself from the wide world, has denied 
 himself, has restrained himself, has stultified 
 emotion, has in a word buried his talent in the 
 earth wrapped carefully in a napkin. "And," 
 comments the editor, "the boy who won the 
 Townsend prize for scholarship, if he keeps on, 
 will some day be honoured by his fellowmen, 
 when the athletic prize-winner, if he does 
 nothing else, will be a director of a gymnasium. 
 The serious worker comes out ahead every time." 
 But winning Townsend prizes by nine years 
 of study is, we submit, not serious work, 
 but serious misuse of most valuable time and 
 energy. Scholarship? Will we never learn 
 that times change and that sauce for the 
 Renaissance goose is not sauce for the New 
 Century gander ? It is a fine thing, this scholar-
 
 Salt and Sincerity 265 
 
 ship, no doubt; but if a man be content with 
 merely this his scholarship is of as much use and 
 benefit to his contemporaries as his deftness in 
 manicuring his finger nails. The United States 
 in this year of grace of nineteen hundred and 
 two does not want and does not need Scholars, 
 but Men Men made in the mould of the 
 Leonard Woods and the Theodore Roosevelts, 
 Men such as Colonel Waring, Men such as 
 Booker Washington. The most brilliant schol- 
 arship attainable by human effort is not, 
 to-day, worth nine years of any young man's 
 life. I think it is Nathaniel Hawthorne who 
 tells the story of a "scholar" who one day, 
 when a young man, found the tooth of a mam- 
 moth. He was a student of fossil remains, 
 and in his enthusiasm set out to complete the 
 skeleton. His mind filled with this one idea, 
 to the exclusion of all else, he traveled up and 
 down the world, year after year, picking up 
 here a vertebra, here a femur, here a rib, here 
 a clavicle. Years passed ; he came to be an old 
 man; at last he faced death. He had suc- 
 ceeded. The monstrous framework was com- 
 plete. But he looked back upon the sixty years 
 of his toil and saw that it was a vanity. He 
 had to show for his life-work the skeleton of 
 a mammoth. And, believe this implicitly : if 
 as the editor and commentator remarks if
 
 266 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 the Townsend prize-winner keeps on, this will 
 be the result, a huge thing no doubt, a thing 
 that looms big in the eye and in the imagina- 
 tion, but an empty thing, lifeless, bloodless, 
 dead; yes and more than dead extinct; a 
 mere accumulation of dry bones, propped up 
 lest it fall to the ground, a thing for the wind 
 to blow through and the vulgar to gape at. 
 
 But in connection with this subject one may 
 cite so high an authority as Doctor Patton of 
 Princeton, who has recently said that nowa- 
 days men do not go to colleges to become 
 scholars, and that it was time and money 
 wasted to try to make them such. This is a 
 good saying and should be taken to heart 
 by every college faculty between the oceans. 
 Sooner or later there is bound to come a funda- 
 mental change in the mode of instruction now 
 in favour in most American colleges. The 
 times demand it; the character of the student 
 body, the character of the undergraduate, is 
 changing. One chooses to believe that the 
 college of the end of the present century will be 
 an institution where only specialized work will 
 be indulged in. There will be courses in engi- 
 neering, in electricity, in agriculture, in law, 
 in chemistry, in biology, in mining, etc., and 
 the so-called general "literary" or "classical" 
 courses will be relegated to the limbo of Things
 
 Salt and Sincerity 267 
 
 No Longer Useful. Any instructor in collegiate 
 work will tell you to-day that the men in the 
 special courses are almost invariably the hard- 
 est, steadiest, most serious workers. The man 
 who studies law at college finishes his work a 
 lawyer, he who studies engineering ends an 
 engineer, the student of biology graduates 
 a biologist, the student of chemistry, a chemist. 
 But the student in the "literary" course does 
 not no, not once in a thousand instances 
 graduate a literary man. He spends the four 
 years of his life over a little Greek, a little 
 Latin, a little mathematics, a little literature, 
 a little history, a little "theme" writing, and 
 comes out just what it would be difficult to 
 say. But he has in most cases acquired a very 
 pronounced distaste for the authors whose 
 work he has studied in class and lecture-room. 
 Great names such as those of Carlyle, Macaulay 
 and De Quincey are associated in his mind 
 only with tedium. He never will go back to 
 these books, never read with enjoyment what 
 once was "work." Even his conscientious- 
 ness supposing him to be animated with such 
 a motive will trap him and trick him. I dc 
 not think that I shall ever forget the spectacle 
 and impression of a student in my own Alma 
 Mater a little lass of seventeen (the college 
 was co-educational), with her hair still down
 
 268 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 her back and her shoes yet innocent of heels, 
 rising in her place in the classroom to read 
 before a half-hundred of raw boys and unde- 
 veloped girls not three months out of the 
 high school a solemn and quite unintelligible 
 "theme" on "The Insincerity of Thomas 
 Babington Macaulay." 
 
 Just at the time of the present writing a 
 controversy has been started in London literary 
 circles as to the legitimacy of a reviewer pub- 
 lishing the whole or parts of the same unsigned 
 article in two or more periodicals. Mr. Arthur 
 Symons is the reviewer under fire, and his article 
 a critique of the dramas of Mr. Stephen Phillips. 
 It was Mr. Phillips, so we are told, who first 
 started the protest, and he has found followers 
 and champions. And on first consideration 
 there does seem to be ground for complaint 
 here. It has been assumed that the first 
 publisher of the article has a right to expect 
 that for the money he pays to the writer this 
 latter shall give to him all he has to say upon 
 the subject. If he has very much to say 
 enough for another article is it not the duty 
 of the scribe to condense and compact so that 
 the matter may be represented as a unit and 
 not as a fragment? Moreover, does it seem 
 fair to Mr. Phillips that three reviews as was 
 the case all unfavourable, should appear in as
 
 Salt and Sincerity 269 
 
 many publications, thus giving to the public 
 the impression that a group of critics, instead 
 of merely one, was hostile to his work ? Lastly, 
 it has been urged that it is not honest to sell a 
 thing twice that if a horse has been sold by 
 A to B, A cannot sell it again to C. 
 
 But none of the objections seems valid. If 
 the space allotted to the article in the paper 
 is not sufficient, that is the fault of the editor, 
 not the writer. The editor pays only for what 
 he prints: the surplusage is still the author's 
 property and can be by him disposed of as 
 such. As tor the public considering the single 
 unfavourable review as the opinions of three 
 men, and as such unfair to Mr. Phillips, this 
 as well is inadequate and incompetent. Another 
 critic, reviewing Mr. Phillips favourably, is just 
 as much at liberty to split up his work as the 
 adverse reviewer. Last of all, it is under 
 certain circumstances perfectly honest to sell 
 the same thing twice. Articles, stories, poems 
 and the like are continually syndicated in 
 hundreds of newspapers simultaneously, and 
 in this sense are sold over and over again. 
 The analogy between the sale of a horse and 
 the sale of a bit of literature is quite misleading. 
 For the matter of that, the writer does not sell 
 the actual concrete manuscript of his work, 
 but merely the right to print it, and unless the
 
 270 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 word "exclusively" is understood in the agree- 
 ment he is in no wise bound. The writer is 
 not selling his copy as the owner sells his horse. 
 The analogy would be true if A sold to B the 
 use of the horse. When B had got the "use" 
 out of the animal no one will deny the right of 
 A to sell the same "use" to C, D, E, and so on 
 through the whole alphabet. The reviewer of 
 books has a hard enough time of it as it is. It 
 is only fair to give him the same freedom as a 
 livery stable keeper. 
 
 It has often occurred to me as a thing of 
 some importance and certain significance that 
 all great travelers are great writers. And the 
 fact is so well established, the effect flows so 
 nvariably from the cause, that there would 
 seem to be here a matter for reflection. One 
 affirms and will maintain that the one is the 
 direct result of the other, that the faculty of 
 adequate expression, of vivid presentation, of 
 forceful and harmonious grouping of words, is 
 engendered and stimulated and perfected by 
 wide journeying. 
 
 This is not at all an orthodox view, not at 
 all the theory cherished by our forbears. The 
 writer, according to unvarying belief, is the man 
 of the closet, the bookish man, a student, a 
 sedentary, a consumer of kerosene, a reader 
 rather than a rover. And the idea is plausible.
 
 Salt and Sincerity 271 
 
 The nomad, he without local habitation, has 
 no leisure, no opportunity, nor even actual 
 concrete place to write. Would it not seem 
 that literature is the quiet art, demanding an 
 unperturbed mind, an unexcited, calm, repose- 
 ful temperament? This is a very defensible 
 position, but it is based upon a foundation of 
 sand. It assumes that the brain of the writer 
 is a jar full of a precious fluid a bottle full of 
 wine to be poured out with care and with a 
 hand so quiet, so restful and unshaken that not 
 a drop be spilled. Very well. But when the 
 jar, when the bottle is emptied then what? 
 Believe me, the gods give but one vintage to 
 one man. There will be no refilling of the ves- 
 sel ; and even the lees are very flat, be the wine 
 ever so good. The better the grape, the bitterer 
 the dregs; and the outpouring of the "best that 
 is in you" in the end will be soured by that 
 brackish, fade sediment that follows upon 
 lavish expenditure, so that the man ends 
 ignobly and because of exhaustion and deple- 
 tion, with all the product of his early and mature 
 richness making more prominent and pitiful 
 the final poverty and tenuity of his outgiving 
 ends the butt of critics, the compassion of the 
 incompetent, a shard kicked of every scullion. 
 And in all the world there is nothing more 
 lamentable than this the end of a man once
 
 272 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 strong who has used himself up but who decants 
 lees and not wine. Even when the lees are 
 spent he absorbs them once more and once 
 more gives them forth, each time a little staler, 
 a little thinner, a little feebler, realizing his 
 exhaustion, yet urged by some whip of for- 
 tune forced to continue the miserable per- 
 formance till the golden bowl be broken and 
 the pitcher shattered at the fountain. 
 
 But suppose the productive power of the 
 writer be considered not as a golden bowl to 
 be emptied and in the end broken, but as a 
 silver cord of finest temper that only needs to be 
 kept in tune. True, the cord may be stretched 
 to the breaking-point. But its end comes at 
 the very height and in the very consummate 
 fulness of its capacity, and oh, the grand world- 
 girdling Note that it sends forth in the breaking ! 
 the very soul of it at mightiest tension, the 
 very spirit of it at fiercest strain. What matter 
 the loosening or the snapping when so noble 
 an Amen as that vibrates through the nations 
 to sound at once the Height and the End of 
 an entire Life a whole existence concentrated 
 into a single cry ! 
 
 Or it may become out of tune. But this is 
 no great matter, because so easily remedied. 
 The golden bowl once emptied there will be 
 no refilling, but by some blessed provision of
 
 Salt and Sincerity 273 
 
 heaven nothing is easier than to attune the 
 cords of being which are also the cords the 
 silver singing cords of expression. 
 
 But and here we come around once more 
 to the point de depart the silver cords once 
 gone discordant, once jaded and slack, will 
 not, cannot be brought again to harmony in the 
 closet, in the study, in the seclusion of the cabi- 
 net. Tinker them never so cunningly, never so 
 delicately, they will not ring true for you. 
 Thought will avail nothing, nor even rest, 
 nor even relaxation. Of oneself, one cannot 
 cause the Master-note to which they will 
 respond to vibrate. The cords have been 
 played on too much. For all your pottering 
 they will yet remain a little loose, and so long 
 as they are loose the deftest fingering, the most 
 skilful touch, will produce only false music. 
 
 And the deadly peril is that the cords of 
 Life and the cords of expression lie so close 
 together, are so intricately mingled, that the 
 man cannot always tell that the cords of expres- 
 sion are singing out of tune. Life and expres- 
 sion are two parts of the same instrument. If 
 the whole life be out of tune, how can the man 
 distinguish the false music from the true? 
 There is a danger here, but it is not great. 
 Sooner or later the conviction comes that the 
 productive power is menaced. A little frank-
 
 274 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 ness with oneself, a little uncompromising 
 testing of the strings, and the dissonance 
 begins to impress itself. 
 
 And as was said the remedy is not to be 
 found by the taking of thought, but by an 
 heroic, drastic thrusting out from the grooves 
 and cogs of the life of other men of the life 
 of the city and the comfortable stay-at-home, 
 hour-to-hour humdrum, and a determined 
 journeying out into the great wide world itself. 
 
 The further a-field the better. The Master- 
 note will not be heard within "commuting 
 distance of the city." The whir of civilization 
 smothers it. The click of the telegraph, the 
 hiss of steam and the clatter of the printing- 
 press drown it out. It is not always and of 
 necessity a loud note. Though Nansen heard 
 it in the thunder of the pack-ice of the Farthest 
 North, it came to the ear of Stevenson in the 
 lap of lazy wavelets in the hushed noonday 
 of a South Sea strand. 
 
 Travel is the only way. Travel in any 
 direction, by any means, so only it be far 
 very, very far is the great attuner of the list- 
 less cords of the writer's instrument. For 
 again and again and again his power is not a 
 bowl to be emptied, but an instrument to be 
 played on. To be of use it must be sensitive 
 and responsive and true. And to be kept sensi-
 
 Salt and Sincerity 275 
 
 tive and responsive and true it must go once 
 in so often to the great Tuner to Nature. 
 
 We speak of the Mountains, the Rivers, 
 Deserts and Oceans as though we knew them. 
 We know the Adirondacks from a fortnight in a 
 " summer camp "; the Rivers and the Deserts 
 in kinetoscopic glimpses from the Pullman's 
 windows ; the Ocean God forgive us ! from 
 the beach of a "resort" or the deck of an 
 Atlantic "greyhound." And I think the gods 
 of the Mountains, Rivers, Deserts and Oceans 
 must laugh in vast contempt of our credulity 
 to suppose that we have found their secrets or 
 heard their music in this timid, furtive peeping 
 and pilfering. For such little minds as these 
 the gods have inexhaustible stores of tinkling 
 cymbals and sounding brasses Brummagem 
 ware that they sell us for the price of "commu- 
 tation tickets" and mileage-books. 
 
 The real knowledge, the real experience that 
 tautens and trims the fibers of being, that tunes 
 the cords, is a very different matter. The trail 
 and the tall ship lead to those places where the 
 Master-note sounds, lead to those untracked, 
 uncharted corners of the earth, and dull indeed 
 must be the tympanum that once 'within ear- 
 shot cannot hear its majestic diapason. It 
 sounds in the canyons of the higher mountains, 
 in the plunge of streams and swirling of rivers
 
 276 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 yet without names in the wildernesses, the 
 plains, the wide-rimmed deserts. It sings a 
 sonorous rhapsody in the rigging of the clipper 
 ship driven by the trade winds, in the ratlines 
 and halyards of South Sea schooners, and 
 drums "reveille" on the tense, hard sails of the 
 fishing-boats off the " Banks. " You can hear 
 it in the cry of the lynx, the chant of the wild 
 goose, the call of the moose, and in the "break" 
 of the salmon in the deeper pools below the 
 cataract. It is in the roar of the landslide and 
 in the drone of the cicada; in the war-whoop 
 of the savage and in the stridulating of crickets ; 
 in the thunder of the tempest and in the faintest 
 breath of laziest zephyrs. 
 
 And the silver cord of our creative faculty 
 the thing nearest to perfection in all the make- 
 up of our imperfect human nature responds 
 to this Master-note with the quickness and 
 sensitiveness of music-mathematics; responds 
 to it, attunes itself to it, vibrates with its 
 vibration, thrills with its quivering, beats with 
 its rhythm, and tautens itself and freshens itself 
 and lives again with its great pure, elemental 
 life, and the man comes back once more to the 
 world of men with a true-beating heart, and a 
 true-hearing ear, so that he understands once 
 more, so that his living, sensitive, delicately 
 humming instrument trembles responsive to
 
 Salt and Sincerity 277 
 
 the emotions and impulses and loves and joys 
 and sorrows and fears of his fellows, and the 
 Man writes true and clear, and his message rings 
 with harmony and with melody, with power 
 and with passion of the prophets interpreting 
 God's handwriting to the world of men.
 
 Ill 
 
 THERE can be no question nor reasonable 
 doubt that the "language, institutions 
 and religion" of fiction writers are at 
 present undergoing the most radical revolution 
 in the history of literature. And I mean by 
 that that the men themselves are changing 
 their characters, their attitudes toward life; 
 even the mode and manner of their own life. 
 Those who are not thus changing are decaying. 
 And those others, the Great Unarrived who 
 do not recognize the Change, who do not 
 acknowledge the Revolution, will never succeed, 
 but will perish untimely almost before they 
 can be said to have been born at all. 
 
 Time was when the author was an aristocrat, 
 living in seclusion, unspotted from the world. 
 But the Revolution of which there is question 
 here has meted out to him the fate that Revolu- 
 tions usually prepared for Aristocrats, and his 
 successor is, must be, must be if he is to voice 
 the spirit of the times aright, if he is to interpret 
 his fellows justly the Man of the People, the 
 Good Citizen. 
 
 How the novelists of the preceding genera- 
 279
 
 280 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 tion played the Great Game is no matter for dis- 
 cussion here. Times were different then. One 
 shut oneself in the study; one wore a velvet 
 coat; one read a great deal and quoted Latin; 
 one knew the classics ; one kept apart from the 
 vulgar profane and never, never, never read 
 the newspapers. But for the novelist of the 
 next fifty years of this twentieth century these 
 methods, these habits, this conception of litera- 
 ture as a cult, as a refinement to be kept invio- 
 late from the shoulderings and elbowings of 
 the Common People is a clog, is a stumbling- 
 block, is a pitfall, a bog, mire, trap anything 
 you like that is false, misleading and pernicious. 
 I have no patience with a theory of literature 
 and oh, how often one hears it preached ! 
 that claims the Great Man belongs only to the 
 cultured few. "You must write," so these 
 theorists explain, "for that small number of 
 fine minds who because of education, because 
 of delicate, fastidious taste are competent to 
 judge." I tell you this is wrong. It is precisely 
 the same purblind prejudice that condemned 
 the introduction of the printing-press because 
 it would cheapen and vulgarize the literature 
 of the day. A literature that cannot be vul- 
 garized is no literature at all and will perish 
 just as surely as rivers run to the sea. The 
 things that last are the understandable things
 
 Salt and Sincerity 281 
 
 understandable to the common minds, the 
 Plain People, understandable, one is almost 
 tempted to say, to the very children. 
 
 It is so in every branch of art: in music, 
 painting, sculpture, architecture. The great 
 monuments of these activities, the things that 
 we retain longest and cherish with the most 
 care are plain almost to bareness. The most 
 rudimentary mind can understand them. All 
 the learning, all the culture, all the refinement 
 in the world will not give you a greater thrill 
 on reading your " Iliad" than the boy of fifteen 
 enjoys. Is the "Marseillaise" a thing of 
 subtlety or refinement? Are the Pyramids 
 complex? Are Angelo's Sibyls involved ? But 
 the "Iliad," the "Marseillaise," the Pyramids, 
 the Sibyls will endure and endure and endure 
 while men have eyes to see, ears to hear and 
 hearts to be moved. These great things, these 
 monuments were not written nor composed, 
 nor builded, nor painted for the select, for the 
 cultured. When Homer wrote there were no 
 reading circles. Rouget de Lisle gave no 
 "recitals." One does not have to "read up" 
 to understand the message of Cheops, nor take 
 a course of art lectures to feel the mystery of 
 the Delphic Sibyl. 
 
 And so to come back to the starting place, 
 the Revolution in the character of the writer of
 
 282 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 fiction. If the modern novelist does not under- 
 stand the Plain People, if he does not address 
 himself directly to them intelligibly and simply, 
 he will fail. But he will never understand 
 them by shutting himself away from them. 
 He must be and here one comes to the con- 
 clusion of the whole matter a Man of the 
 World. None more so. Books have no place 
 in his equipment, have no right to be there; 
 will only cumber and confuse him. His prede- 
 cessor never read the newspapers, but for him 
 the newspaper is more valuable than all the 
 tomes of Ruskin, all the volumes of Carlyle. 
 And more valuable than all are the actual, vital 
 Affairs of Men. The function of the novelist of 
 this present day is to comment upon life as he 
 sees it. He cannot get away from this ; this is 
 his excuse for existence, the only claim he has 
 upon attention. How necessary then for him 
 of all men to be in the midst of life ! He can- 
 not plunge too deeply into it. Politics will 
 help him, and Religious Controversies, Explora- 
 tions, Science, the newest theory of Socialism, 
 the latest development of Biology. He should 
 find an interest in Continental diplomacy and 
 should have opinions on the chances of a 
 Russo-Japanese war over the Corean question. 
 He should be able to tell why it is of such 
 unusual importance for Queen Wilhelmina of
 
 Salt and Sincerity 283 
 
 Holland to give birth to an heir, and should 
 know who ought to be nominated for Governor 
 of his native State at the next convention. 
 
 No piece of information mere downright 
 acquisition of fact need be considered worth- 
 less. Nothing is too trivial to be neglected. 
 I know a novelist of international reputation 
 who told me that the following little bits of 
 knowledge (collected heaven knows where and 
 stored up for years in some pigeon-hole of his 
 memory) had been of use to him in the com- 
 position of a novel he is now at work upon: 
 That great cities tend to grow to the westward ; 
 that race-horses are shod with a long and 
 narrow shoe; and that the usual price charged 
 by an electrician for winding an armature is 
 four dollars. And he seemed prouder of the 
 fact that he had these tiny odds and ends at his 
 command, when needed, than he was of the 
 honorary degree just conferred upon him by 
 Harvard University. 
 
 I suppose this is an exaggerated case, and it 
 is not to be denied that it is better to have a 
 Harvard degree than to know the shape of a 
 race-horse's shoe, but it surely goes to prove 
 the point that, as far as actual material worth 
 and use were concerned, the fugitive foolish 
 memory-notes were of more present help than 
 the university degree, and that so far as infor-
 
 284 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 mation is concerned the novelist cannot know 
 too much. 
 
 In a recent number of The Bookman there 
 appears an able article under the title "Attack- 
 ing the Newspapers." The title is a trifle 
 misleading, since the author's point and text 
 are a defense of modern journalism, or rather 
 let us say an apology. The apology is very 
 well done. The manner of presentation is 
 ingenious, the style amusing, but none the less 
 one cannot let the article pass without protest 
 or, at the least, comment. 
 
 The original function of a newspaper was, 
 and still should be, to tell the news and, 
 if you please, nothing more than that. The 
 "policy" of the paper was (before the days 
 of the yellow press) advocated and exploited 
 in the editorial columns. 
 
 The whole difficulty lies in the fact that 
 nowadays the avefage newspaper is violently 
 partizan and deliberately alters news to suit its 
 partizanship. "Not a very criminal proced- 
 ure," I hear it said; "for by reading the 
 opposition papers the public gets the other 
 side. " But one submits that such a course is 
 criminal, and that it can be proved to be such. 
 How many people do you suppose read the 
 "opposition" papers? The American news- 
 paper readers have not time to read "both
 
 and Sincerity 285 
 
 sides" unless presented to them in one and 
 the same paper. 
 
 Observe now how this partizanship works 
 injustice and ruin. Let us suppose a given 
 newspaper is hostile to the Governor of the 
 State. Now every man even a journalist 
 has a right to his opinions and his hostilities, 
 and important men in public life must expect 
 to be abused. There are for them compensa- 
 tions; their position is too high, too secure to 
 be shaken by the vituperation of malevolent 
 journals. But these journals have one favour- 
 ite form of attacking important public men 
 which, though it does not always harm the 
 personage assaulted, may easily ruin the sub- 
 ordinates with which he surrounds himself. 
 This is the habit of discrediting the statesman 
 by defaming his appointees. The Governor, 
 we will say, has appointed John Smith to be 
 the head of a certain institution of the State. 
 But the Governor has incurred the enmity of 
 the Daily Clarion the leading newspaper. 
 Promptly the Clarion seizes upon Smith. His 
 career as head of the institution has been a 
 record of misrule (so the Clarion reads), has 
 been characterized by extravagance, incom- 
 petency, mismanagement, and even misappro- 
 priation of the State's money. And here begins 
 the cruel injustice of the business. The editor
 
 286 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 of that paper will set no bounds upon the 
 lengths to which he will urge his reporters in 
 their vilification of Smith. The editor knows 
 he is a liar, the reporters know they are liars, 
 but the public, ninety -nine times out of a 
 hundred, ignoring motives, unable to see that 
 the real object of attack is the Governor, 
 unable to understand the brute callousness and 
 wretched hypocrisy of the whole proceeding, 
 believes the calumny, believes that Smith is an 
 incompetent, a spendthrift, even a thief. 
 And even the better class of readers, even the 
 more intelligent who make allowances for the 
 paper's political prejudices, will listen to the 
 abuse and believe that there "must be some 
 fire where there is so much smoke." Do you 
 suppose for one moment that Smith will ever 
 get a hearing in that paper? Do you suppose 
 its reporters will ever credit him with a single 
 honest achievement, a single sincere effort? 
 If you do, you do not understand modern 
 journalism. 
 
 Ah, but the opposition papers ! They will 
 defend Smith. They will champion him as 
 vehemently as the Clarion attacks. That is 
 all very well, but suppose there are no opposition 
 papers. Politics are very complicated. The 
 press of a given community is not always 
 equally divided between the Republican and
 
 Salt and Sincerity 287 
 
 Democratic parties. Time and time again it 
 happens that all the leading newspapers of a 
 city, a county, or even a State, Democratic, 
 Republican, Independent, etc., are banded to- 
 gether to oppose some one Large Man. 
 
 Where then will Smith get his hearing? 
 He cannot fight all the newspapers at once. 
 He is not strong enough to retaliate even 
 upon the meanest. The papers are afraid 
 of nothing he can do. They hold absolute 
 power over his good name and reputation. 
 And for the sake of feeding fat the grudge 
 they bear the Great One they butcher the 
 subordinate without ruth and without re- 
 proach. Believe me, it has been shown 
 repeatedly that, placed in such a position, 
 the modern newspaper will check at no lie 
 however monstrous, at no calumny however 
 vile. If Smith holds a position of trust he 
 will be trumpeted from end to end of the 
 community as a defaulter, gambling away 
 the public moneys entrusted to his care. He 
 will be pictured as a race-track follower, a 
 supporter of fast women, a thief, a blackguard, 
 and a reprobate. If he holds an administra- 
 tive office, it will be shown how he has given 
 and taken bribes; how he has neglected his 
 duties and ignored his responsibilities till his 
 office has engendered calamity, ruin, and even
 
 288 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 actual physical suffering. If his work is in the 
 nature of supervision over one of those State 
 institutions where the helpless are cared for 
 the infirm, the imbecile, the aged, or sick, or 
 poor his cruelty to his wards will be the theme, 
 and he will be written of and pictured as whip- 
 ping or torturing old men and little children, 
 imprisoning, tormenting, making a hell of what 
 was meant to be a help. 
 
 And the man once blackened after this 
 fashion will never again rehabilitate himself 
 in the eyes of the public. The people who read 
 newspapers always believe the worst, and when 
 an entire press, or even the major part of it, 
 unite to defame a man there is no help or 
 redress possible. He is ruined, ruined profes- 
 sionally and financially, ruined in character, 
 in pocket, and in the hopes of ever getting 
 back the good name that once was his. 
 
 And all this is done merely as a political move, 
 merely to discredit the Big Man who put Smith 
 in his place, merely to hurt his chances of 
 renomination, merely to cut down the number 
 of his votes. It is butchery; there is no other 
 word than this with which to characterize the 
 procedure, butchery as cruel, as wanton and 
 as outrageous as ever bloodied the sands of the 
 Colosseum. It is even worse than this, for the 
 victim has no chance for his life. His hands
 
 Salt and Sincerity 289 
 
 are tied before the beasts are loosed. He is 
 trussed and downed before the cages are opened, 
 and the benches thunder for his life, not as 
 for a victim to be immolated, but as a criminal 
 to be punished. He is getting only his deserts, 
 his very memory is an execration, and his 
 name whenever mentioned is a by-word and 
 a hissing. 
 
 And this in face of the fact that the man 
 may be as innocent of the charges urged as if 
 he had never been born. 
 
 Yet Doctor Colby in The Bookman article 
 writes: "If we must attack the newspapers 
 let it be as critics, not as crusaders, for the 
 people who write for them are under no 
 stricter obligations than ourselves. " What ! the 
 reporter or the editor who by some fillip of 
 fortune is in a position to make public opinion 
 in the minds of a million people under no more 
 obligations than you and I ! If every obliga- 
 tion bore down with an all but intolerable 
 weight it is in just his case. His responsibility 
 is greater than that of the Pulpit, greater than 
 that of the Physician, greater than that of the 
 Educator. If you would see the use to which 
 it is put, you have only to try to get at the real 
 truth in the case of the next public character 
 assailed and vilified in the public prints. 
 
 Doctor Colby is wrong. It is a crusade and
 
 290 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 not a criticism that will put down the modern 
 yellow newspaper from the bad eminence to 
 which the minds of the hysterical, of the violent, 
 of the ignorant, brutal and unscrupulous have 
 exalted it.
 
 IV 
 
 THERE is a certain journal of the Middle 
 West of the United States which has 
 proclaimed, with a great flourish of trumpets, 
 that Mme. Humbert of Paris would have made 
 a great "fictionist" if she had not elected to 
 become a great swindler. This is that Mme. 
 Humbert who cheated a number of bankers, 
 capitalists and judges out of a great deal of 
 money with a story of $20,000,000 in a safe 
 which for certain reasons she could not open. 
 Very naturally, when her hand was forced the 
 safe was empty. And this person, the Middle 
 West paper claims, is a great novelist manquee, 
 "a female Dumas or Hugo." The contention 
 would not be worthy of notice were it not for 
 the fact that it is an opinion similar to that 
 held by a great number of people intelligent 
 enough to know better. In a word, it is the 
 contention that the personal morality of the 
 artist (including "fictionists") has nothing 
 to do with his work, and that a great rascal 
 may be a good painter, good musician, good 
 novelist. With painters, musicians and the 
 291
 
 292 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 like this may or may not be true. With the 
 novelist one contends, believes and avers that 
 it is absolutely and unequivocally false, and that 
 the mind capable of theft, of immorality, of 
 cruelty, of foulness, or falseness of any kind is 
 incapable, under any circumstances, or by any 
 degree of stimulation, of producing one single 
 important, artistic or useful piece of fiction. 
 The better the personal morality of the writer, 
 the better his writings. Tolstoi, for instance: 
 it is wholly and solely due to the man's vast 
 goodness and philanthropy that his novels 
 carry weight. The attitude of the novelist 
 toward his fellow-men and women is the great 
 thing, not his inventiveness, his ingenuity, 
 his deftness, or glibness, or verbal dexterity. 
 And the mind wholly mean, who would rob a 
 friend of $40,000 (after the manner of the 
 Humbert person), or could even wilfully and 
 deliberately mar the pleasure of a little child, 
 could never assume toward the world at large 
 that attitude of sympathy and generosity and 
 toleration that is the first requisite of the 
 really great novelist. Always you will find 
 this thing true: that the best, the greatest 
 writers of fiction are those, best loved of troops 
 of friends; and for the reason that, like the 
 Arab philosopher of the poem, they, first of all, 
 have "loved their fellow-men." It is this that
 
 Salt and Sincerity 293 
 
 has made their novels great. Consider Steven- 
 son, or our own "Dean," or Hugo, or Scott, 
 men of the simplest lives, uncompromising in 
 rectitude, scrupulously, punctiliously, Quixoti- 
 cally honest ; their morality surely in the cases 
 of Stevenson and Hugo setting a new standard 
 of religion, at the least a new code of ethics. 
 And thus it goes right down the line, from the 
 greater lights to the lesser and to the least. It 
 is only the small men, the "minor" people 
 among the writers of books who indulge in 
 eccentricities that are only immortalities under 
 a different skin; who do not pay their debts; 
 who borrow without idea of returning; who 
 live loose, " irregular," wretched, vicious lives, 
 and call it " Bohemianism," and who believe 
 that "good work" can issue from the turmoil, 
 that the honeycomb will be found in the 
 carcass, and the sweet come forth from the 
 putrid. So that in the end one may choose to 
 disagree with the Middle West editor and to 
 affirm that it is not the ingenious criminal who 
 is the novelist manque, but the philanthropist, 
 the great educator, the great pulpit orator, the 
 great statesman. It is from such stuff that the 
 important novels are made, not from the 
 deranged lumber and disordered claptrap of the 
 brain of a defective. 
 
 In the course of a speech made at a recent
 
 294 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 dinner given in London, Sir Donald Mackenzie 
 Wallace has deplored the fact that our present 
 generation of English writers has produced no 
 worthy successors to the great men of the mid- 
 Victorian period that there are no names to 
 place beside Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Brown- 
 ing, or Keats. But he also brought forward 
 extenuating circumstances, chief among which 
 was the fact that the novelists of to-day were 
 working overtime to supply the demands of an 
 ever-increasing public, and that, by implication, 
 their work was therefore deteriorating. One 
 does not believe that this is so. Rapid work 
 may cause the deterioration of a commercial 
 article, but it by no means follows that the 
 authors who are called upon to produce a very 
 large number of books are forced into the com- 
 position of unworthy literature. The writer's 
 brain does not hold the material for his books. 
 It is not like a storehouse, from which things 
 may be taken till nothing remains. The 
 writer's material is life itself, inexhaustible 
 and renewed from day to day, and his brain 
 is only the instrument that adapts life to fiction. 
 True, this instrument itself may wear out after 
 awhile, but it usually lasts as long as the man 
 himself, and is good for more work than the 
 unthinking would believe possible. As a matter 
 of fact, the best novelists have, as a rule, been
 
 Salt and Sincerity 295 
 
 the most prolific, have been those who had to 
 write rapidly and much to satisfy, if not the 
 demands of the public, then at least other 
 more personal demands, none the less insistent. 
 Scott and Dickens were unusually prolific, yet 
 the rapidity with which they accomplished 
 their work did not hurt the quality of the work 
 itself. Balzac and Dumas produced whole 
 libraries of books and yet kept their standards 
 high. As one has urged before, it is the demand 
 of the People that produces the great writer, 
 not reduces the quality and fineness of his work. 
 If he has the "divine spark," the breath of the 
 millions will fan rather than extinguish it. 
 
 One does not choose to believe that the art of 
 fiction nor the standards of excellence have 
 deteriorated since the day of Scott, Dickens 
 and Thackeray. True, we have no men to 
 equal them as yet, but they are surely coming. 
 Time was, at the end of the seventeenth 
 century, when the dearth of good fiction was 
 even more marked than at present. But 
 one must bear in mind that progress is never 
 along a direct line, but by action and reaction. 
 A period will supervene when a group of 
 geniuses arise, and during the course of their 
 activities the average of excellence is high, 
 great books are produced, and a whole New 
 Literature is launched. Their influence is
 
 296 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 profound ; the first subschool of imitators follow 
 good enough men but second-rate. These in 
 turn are followed by the third-raters, and these 
 by the fourth-raters, and no one is found bold 
 enough to strike out for himself until the bot- 
 tom is reached. Then comes the reaction, and 
 once more the group of giants towers up from 
 out the mass. We are probably living through 
 the era of the fourth-raters just now, and one 
 believes that we are rather near to the end even 
 of that. The imitators of the romantic school 
 have imitated to ten places decimals and have 
 diluted and rediluted till they can hardly go 
 further without producing something actually 
 and really new. At any rate, the time is most 
 propitious for a Man of Iron who can be bent 
 to no former shape nor diluted to no old-time 
 essence. Then will come the day of the New 
 Literature, and the wind of Life itself will blow 
 through the dry bones and fustian and saw- 
 dust of the Imitation, and the People will all at 
 once realize how very far afield the fourth- 
 raters have drawn them and how very differ- 
 ent a good novel is from a bad one. 
 
 For say what you will, the People, the Plain 
 People who Read, do appreciate good literature 
 in the end. One must keep one's faith in the 
 People the Plain People, the Burgesses, the 
 Grocers else of all men the artists are most
 
 Salt and Sincerity 297 
 
 miserable and their teachings vain. Let us 
 admit and concede that this belief is ever so 
 sorely tried at times. Many thousands of 
 years ago the wisest man of his age declared 
 that "the People imagine a vain thing. " Con- 
 tinually they are running away after strange 
 gods; continually they are admiring the fake 
 and neglecting actual worth. But in the end, 
 and at last, they will listen to the true note and 
 discriminate between it 'and the false. In the 
 last analysis the People are always right. Some- 
 how, and after all is said and done, they will 
 prefer Walter Scott to G. P. R. James, Shak- 
 spere to Marlowe, Flaubert to Goncourt. 
 Sometimes the preference is long in forming, 
 and during this formative period they have 
 many reversions, and go galloping, in herds of 
 one hundred or one hundred and fifty thousand 
 (swelling the circulations), after false gods. 
 But note this fact: that the fustian and the 
 tinsel and the sawdust are discovered very 
 soon, and, once the discovery made, the 
 sham idol can claim no single devotee. 
 
 In other words, it is a comfort to those who 
 take the literature of the Americans or even 
 of the Anglo-Saxons seriously to remember, 
 in the long run and the larger view, that a circu- 
 lation of two hundred, three hundred or four 
 hundred thousand judging even by this base-
 
 298 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 scale of "copies sold" is not so huge after all. 
 Consider. A "popular" novel is launched 
 and sells its half-million. Within a certain 
 very limited period of time, at most five years, 
 this sale stops definitely and conclusively. 
 The People have found out that it is not such a 
 work of genius after all, and will have no more 
 of it. But how about the circulation of the 
 works of the real Masters, Scott and Dickens, 
 say to be more concrete, let us speak of 
 "Ivanhoe" and "David Copperfield" have 
 not each of these " sold " more than two hundred 
 thousand since publication? Is not two hun- 
 dred million nearer the mark? And they are 
 still selling. New editions are published every 
 year. Does not this prove that the People 
 are discriminating; that they are after all 
 preferring the best literature to the mediocre; 
 that they are not such a mindless herd after all ; 
 that in the end, in fine, they are always right ? 
 It will not do to decry the American public; 
 to say that it has no taste, no judgment ; that 
 it "likes to be fooled." It may be led away 
 for a time by clamorous advertising and the 
 "barking" of fakirs. But there comes a day 
 when it will no longer be fooled. A million 
 dollars' worth of advertising would not today 
 sell a hundred thousand copies of "Trilby." 
 But "Ivanhoe" and "Copperfield," without
 
 Salt and Sincerity 299 
 
 advertising, without reclames for exploitation, 
 are as marketable this very day as a sack of 
 flour or a bag of wheat. 
 
 Mr. Metcalfe, in a recent issue of Life, has 
 been lamenting the lack of good plays on the 
 American stage during the past season, and 
 surely no one can aver that the distinguished 
 critic is not right. One cannot forbear a wince 
 or two at the thought of v/hat future art histori- 
 ans will say in their accounts of the American 
 drama at the beginning of the twentieth century. 
 Frankly and unreservedly the native American 
 drama is jusl; about as bad as it can be, and 
 every intelligent-minded person is quite willing 
 to say so. The causes are not difficult to trace. 
 Two come to the mind at once, which in them- 
 selves alone would account for the degeneracy 
 i. e., the rage for Vaudeville and the exploita- 
 tion of the Star. The first has developed in 
 the last ten years, an importation from English 
 music halls. Considered at first as a fad by 
 the better class of theatre-goers, a thing to be 
 countenanced with amused toleration like 
 performing bears and the animal circus, it has 
 been at length boosted and foisted upon the 
 public attention till, like a veritable cancer, it 
 has eaten almost into the very vitals of the 
 Legitimate Comedy (using the word in its tech- 
 nical sense). Continually nowadays one may
 
 300 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 see a "specialty" generally in the form of a 
 dance lugged in between the scenes of a 
 perfectly sober, perfectly sane Comedy of 
 Manners. The moment any one subordinate 
 feature of a dramatic action is developed at the 
 expense of vraisemblance and the Probabilities, 
 and for the sake of amusing the galleries, there is 
 the first bacillus of decay. Vaudeville is all 
 very well by itself, and one will even go so far 
 as to admit that it has its place as much as 
 an Ibsen problem-play. But it should keep to 
 that place. It is ludicrously out of place in a 
 comedy quite as much so as the " Bible 
 Incident" in Ebsmith would be in a Hoyt farce. 
 But because the "specialty," because Vaude- 
 ville, will "go" with the "gallery" at any time 
 and at any place, the manager and the pity 
 of it ! the author, too, will introduce it when- 
 ever the remotest possibility occurs, and by 
 just so much the tone of the whole drama is 
 lowered. It has got to such a pass by now, 
 however, that one ought to be thankful if this 
 same " tone " is not keyed down to the specialty. 
 But the exploiting of the Star, it would seem, 
 is, of all others, the great cause of the mediocrity 
 of present-day dramatic literature. One has 
 but to glance at the theatre programmes and 
 bills to see how matters stand. The name of the 
 leading lady or leading man is "scare-headed"
 
 Salt and Sincerity 301 
 
 so that the swiftest runner cannot fail to see. 
 Even the manager proclaims his patronymic 
 in enormous "caps." But the author! as 
 often as not his name is not discoverable at all. 
 The play is nothing thus it would seem the 
 managers would have us believe it is the 
 actress, her speeches, her scenes, her gowns, 
 her personality, that are the all-important 
 essentials. It is notorious how plays are cut, 
 and readjusted, and dislocated to suit the Star. 
 Never mind whether or not the scene is artistic, 
 is vivid, is dramatic. Does the Star get the 
 best of it? If not, write it over. The Star 
 must have all the good lines. If they cannot 
 be built into the Star's part, cut 'em out. 
 The Probabilities, the construction, artistic 
 effect, climax, even good, common, forthright, 
 horse sense, rot 'em ! who cares for 'em ? Give 
 the Star the lime-light that's the point. 
 
 If the audience is willing to pay its money to 
 see Miss Marlowe, Miss Mannering or Mrs. 
 Carter put through her paces, that's another 
 thing; but let us not expect that good dramas 
 will issue forth from this state of affairs. 
 
 Where are the Books for Girls? Adults' 
 books there are and books for boys by 
 the carload, but where is the book for the 
 young girls? Something has already been 
 said about literature for the amiable young
 
 302 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 woman, but this, now, is a very different 
 person. One means the girl of fourteen to 
 eighteen. The boy passing through this most 
 trying formative period finds his literature 
 ready to hand. Boys' books, tales of hunting, 
 adventure and sport abound. They are good 
 books, too, sane, "healthy," full of fine spirit 
 and life. But the girl, where does she read? 
 Surely the years between fourteen and eighteen 
 are even more trying to a young girl than to a 
 boy. She is not an active animal. When the 
 boy is out-of-doors, pitching curves or " running 
 the ends, " the girl (even yet in the day and age 
 of "athletics for women") is in the house, and, 
 as like as not, reading. And reading what, if 
 you please? The feeblest, thinnest, most 
 colourless lucubrations that it is given to the 
 mind of misguided man to conceive or to per- 
 petuate. It must be this or else the literature 
 of the adult; and surely the novels written for 
 mature minds, for men and women who have 
 some knowledge of the world and powers of 
 discrimination, are not good reading, in any 
 sense of the word, for a sixteen-year-old girl in 
 the formative period of her life. 
 
 Besides Alcott, no one has ever written 
 intelligently for girls. Surely there is a field 
 here. Surely a Public, untried and unex- 
 plored, is wailing for its author; nor is it a
 
 Salt and Sincerity 303 
 
 public wanting in enthusiasm, loyalty or 
 intelligence. 
 
 But for all this great parade and prating of 
 emancipated women it nevertheless remains 
 a fact that the great majority of twentieth- 
 century opinion is virtually Oriental in its 
 conception of the young girl. The world to-day 
 is a world for boys, men and women. Of all 
 humans, the young girl, the sixteen-year-old, is 
 the least important or, at least, is so deemed. 
 Wanted : a Champion. Wanted : the Discoverer 
 and Poet of the Very Young Girl. Unimportant 
 she may now appear to you, who may yet call 
 her by her first name without fear and without 
 reproach. But remember this, you who believe 
 only in a world of men and boys and women; 
 the Very Young Girl of to-day is the woman of 
 to-morrow, the wife of the day after, and the 
 mother of next week. She only needs to put 
 up her hair and let down her frocks to become 
 a very important person indeed. Meanwhile, 
 she has no literature; meanwhile, faute de 
 mieux, she is trying to read Ouida and many 
 other books intended for maturer minds; or, 
 worse than all, she is enfeebling her mind by 
 the very thin gruel purveyed by the mild- 
 mannered gentlemen and ladies who write for 
 the Sunday-school libraries. Here is a bad 
 business; here is a field that needs cultivation.
 
 304 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 All very well to tend and train the saplings, 
 the oaks and the vines. The flowers they 
 have not bloomed vet are to be thought 
 about, too. 
 
 All the more so that the young girl takes a 
 book to heart infinitely more than a boy. The 
 boy his story once read votes it "bully," 
 takes down his cap, and there's an end. But 
 the average Very Young Girl does not read her 
 story: she lives it, lingers over it, weeps over 
 it, lies awake nights over it. So long as she 
 lives she will never quite forget the books she 
 read when she was sixteen. It is not too much 
 to say that the "favourite" books of a girl at 
 this age become a part of her life. They influ- 
 ence her character more than any of us, I 
 imagine, would suspect or admit. All the 
 more reason, then, that there should not only 
 be good books for girls, but plenty of good 
 books. 
 
 THE END.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY, ESSAYS, ARTI- 
 CLES, LETTERS 
 
 "Ancient Armour" (first published article), San Fran- 
 cisco Chronicle, March 31, 1889. 
 
 Series of letters from South Africa concerning Uitlander 
 Insurrection, published in the San Francisco Chronicle: 
 "A Californian in City of Cape Town," January 19, 1896; 
 " In the Compound of a Diamond Mine," February a, 1896 ; 
 "From Cape Town to Kimberley Mine," January 26, 1896 ; 
 "In the Veldt of the Transvaal," February 9, 1896; "A 
 Zulu War Dance," March 15, 1896. 
 
 "Types of Western Men," published in San Francisco 
 Wave, May 2, 1896. 
 
 "Western City Types," published in San Francisco 
 Wave, May 9, 1896. 
 
 "The Bivalve at Home," published in San Francisco 
 Wave, July 16, 1896. 
 
 "Italy in California," published in San Francisco 
 Wave, October 24, 1896. 
 
 "A Question of Ideals," published in San Francisco 
 Wave, December 26, 1897. 
 
 " New Year's at San Quentin," published in San Fran- 
 cisco Wave, January 9, 1897. 
 
 "Hunting Human Game," published in San Francisco 
 Wave, January 23, 1897. 
 
 "Passing of Little Pete," published in San Francisco 
 Wave, January 30, 1897. 
 
 "A California Artist," published in San Francisco 
 Wave, February 6, 1897. 
 
 "A Lag's Release," published in San Francisco Wave, 
 March 12, 1897. 
 
 305
 
 306 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 "Among the Cliff- Dwellers," published in San Fran- 
 cisco Wave, May 15, 1897. 
 
 "The Sailing of the 'Excelsior,'" published in San 
 Francisco Wave, July 31, 1897. 
 
 "The Tale and the Truth," published in San Francisco 
 Wave, September 25, 1897. 
 
 "Art Education in San Francisco," published in San 
 Francisco Wave, September 25, 1897. 
 
 "The End of the Act," published in San Francisco 
 Wave, November 27, 1897. 
 
 "Comida," published in Atlantic Monthly, March, 1899. 
 
 "With Lawton to Caney," published in Century 
 Magazine, June, 1899. 
 
 "Student Life in Paris," published in Collier's Weekly, 
 May 12, 1900. 
 
 Series of New York letters to Chicago American, com- 
 mencing May, 1901 September, 1901. 
 
 Series of Articles to Boston Transcript, commencing 
 November 15 February 5 (weekly articles). 
 
 "The Unknown Author and the Publisher," published 
 in World's Work, April, 1901. 
 
 "True Reward of the Novelist," published in World's 
 Work, September, 1901. 
 
 "Mr. Kipling's 'Kim,'" published in World's Work, 
 September, 1901. 
 
 "Story-Teller vs. Novelist," published in World's Work, 
 March, 1903. 
 
 "The Frontier Gone at Last," published in World's 
 Work, February, 1902. 
 
 "The Need of a Literary Conscience," published in 
 World's Work, May, 1902. 
 
 "The Novel with a Purpose," published in World's 
 Work, May, 1902. 
 
 Series of articles to The Critic, entitled "Salt and 
 Sincerity," published monthly from May to October, 1902. 
 
 "Life in the Mining Region," published in Everybody's 
 Magazine, September, 1902. 
 
 "In Defense of Doctor W. Lawlor," published in San 
 Francisco Argonaut, August n, 1902.
 
 Bibliography 307 
 
 "The Responsibilities of a Novelist," published in 
 The Critic, December, 1902. 
 
 "The Neglected Epic," published in World's Work, 
 December, 1902. 
 
 The "Great American Novelist," syndicated, January 
 
 19. 1903- 
 
 "The American Public and Popular Fiction," syndi- 
 cated, February 2, 1903. 
 
 "Child Stories for Adults," syndicated, February 9, 
 1903. 
 
 "The Nature Revival in Literature," syndicated, 
 February 16, 1903. 
 
 "Novelists to Order While You Wait," syndicated, 
 February 23, 1903. 
 
 "Newspaper Criticism and American Fiction," syndi- 
 cated, March 9, 1903. 
 
 "Richard Harding Davis," syndicated, January 26, 
 1903. 
 
 "Chances of Unknown Writers," syndicated, March 2, 
 1903. 
 
 SHORT STORIES 
 
 "Babazzouin," published in San Francisco Argonaut, 
 May, 1891. 
 
 "Son of a Sheik," published in San Francisco Argonaut, 
 June, 1891. 
 
 "Le Gongleur de Taillebois," published in San Fran- 
 cisco Wave, December 25, 1891. 
 
 "Arachne," published in San Francisco Wave, 1892. 
 
 "Lauth," published in Overland Monthly, March, 1893. 
 
 "Travis Hallets, Half-Back," published in Overland 
 Monthly, January, 1894. 
 
 "Outward and Visible Signs Series" of short stories, 
 published in the Overland Monthly, commencing February, 
 1 894 titles as follows : "Thoroughbred," February, 1 894 ; 
 "She and the Other Fellow," March, 1894; "The Most 
 Noble Conquest of Man," May, 1894; "Outside the 
 Zewana," July, 1894; "After Strange Gods, "October, 1894.
 
 308 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 "The Caged Lion," published in San Francisco Argo- 
 naut, August, 1894. 
 
 "A Defense of the Flag," published in San Francisco 
 Argonaut, October, 1895. 
 
 "A Salvation Boom in Matabeleland," published in 
 San Francisco Wave, April 25, 1896. 
 
 "The Heroism of Jonesie," published in San Francisco 
 Wave, May 16, 1896. 
 
 Series of Sketches entitled ' ' Man Proposes," published in 
 San Francisco Wave, May 23, 1896; May 30, 1896; June 13, 
 1896; June 27, 1896; July 4, 1896. 
 
 "In the Heat of Battle," published in San Francisco 
 Wave, December 19, 1896. 
 
 "His Sister," published in San Francisco Wave, Decem- 
 ber 28, 1896. 
 
 "The Puppets and the Puppy," San Francisco Wave, 
 May 22, 1897. 
 
 "Beer and Skittles," published in San Francisco Wave, 
 May 29, 1897. 
 
 "Through a Glass Darkly," published in San Francisco 
 Wave, June 12, 1897. 
 
 "Little Dramas of the Curbstone," published in San 
 Francisco Wave, June 26, 1897. 
 
 "The Strangest Thing," published in San Francisco 
 Wave, July 3, 1897. 
 
 "This Animal of a Buldy Jones," published in San 
 Francisco Wave, July 17, 1897. 
 
 "Boom," published in San Francisco Wave, August 7, 
 1897. 
 
 " Reversion to Type," published in San Francisco Wave, 
 August 14, 1897. 
 
 "House with the Blinds," published in San Francisco 
 Wave, August 21, 1897. 
 
 "The Third Circle," published in San Francisco Wave, 
 August 28, 1897. 
 
 "The End of the Beginning," published in San Fran- 
 cisco Wave, September 4, 1897. 
 
 "A Case for Lombroso," published in San Francisco 
 Wave, September n, 1897.
 
 Bibliography 309 
 
 "His Single Blessedness," published in San Francisco 
 Wave, September 18, 1897. 
 
 "Execution without Judgment," published in San 
 Francisco Wave, October 2, 1897. 
 
 "Miracle Joyeux," published in San Francisco Wave, 
 October 9, 1897. 
 
 "Judy's Service of Gold Plate," published in San 
 Francisco Wave, October 16, 1897. 
 
 "The Associated Un-Charities," published in San 
 Francisco Wave, October 30, 1897. 
 
 "Fantasie Printaniere," published in San Francisco 
 Wave, November 6, 1897. 
 
 "His Dead Mother's Portrait," published in San 
 Francisco Wave, November 13, 1897. 
 
 "Shorty Stack, Pugilist," published in San Francisco 
 Wave, November 20, 1897. 
 
 "Isabella Regina," published in San Francisco Wave, 
 November 27, 1897. 
 
 "Perverted Tales" (Parodies on several well-known 
 authors) , published in San Francisco Wave, December 
 25, 1897: "The Rickshaw that Happened," by R d 
 K g; "The Green Stone of Unrest," by S n Cr e; "Van 
 Bubble's Story," by R d H g D s; "Ambrosia Beer," 
 by A e B e; "I Call on Lady Dotty," by A y H e; 
 " The Hero of Tomato Can," by B t H e. 
 
 "The Drowned Who Do Not Die," published in San 
 Francisco Wave, September 24, 1898. 
 
 " Miracle Joyeux," republished McClure's Magazine, 
 December, 1898. 
 
 "This Animal of a Buldy Jones," republished in 
 McClure's Magazine, March, 1899. 
 
 "The Riding of Felipe," published in Everybody's 
 Magazine, March, 1901. 
 
 " Buldy Jones, Chef du Claque," published in Everybody's 
 Magazine, May, 1901. 
 
 " Kirkland at Quarter," published in Saturday Evening 
 Post, December 12, 1901. 
 
 "A Memorandum of Sudden Death," published in 
 Collier's Weekly, January, 1902.
 
 310 The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
 
 "A Bargain with Peg-leg," published in Collier's 
 Weekly, March i, 1902. 
 
 " Grettir at Drangey," published in Everybody's Magazine 
 March, 1902. 
 
 "A Statue in an Old Garden," published by Ladies' 
 Home Journal about April, 1902. 
 
 "Dying Fires," published in Smart Set about April, 
 1902. 
 
 "The Passing of Cock-Eye Blacklock," published in 
 Century Magazine, July, 1902. 
 
 "The Guest of Honour," published in the Pilgrim 
 Magazine, July and August, 1902. 
 
 " A Deal in Wheat," published in Everybody's Magazine, 
 August, 1902. 
 
 "Two Hearts That Beat as One," published in Brander 
 Magazine (unable to ascertain date). 
 
 "The Dual Personality of Slick Dick Nickerson," pub- 
 lished in Collier's Weekly, November, 1902. 
 
 "The Ship That Saw a Ghost," published in Overland 
 Monthly, December, 1902. 
 
 "The Wife of Chino," published in Century Magazine, 
 January, 1903. 
 
 "The Ghost in the Cross-Trees, " published in New York 
 Herald, March, 1903. 
 
 POEMS PUBLISHED 
 
 "Poitier," medieval ballad, published in Berklyian 
 Magazine, 1891. 
 
 " Brunhilda," poem, illustrated by author, published 
 in California Illustrated Magazine (discontinued), 1891. 
 
 " Crepusculum," sonnet, published by Overland Monthly, 
 April, 1892. 
 
 BOOKS PUBLISHED 
 
 "Yvernelle," long poem, published by Lippincott & 
 Company, 1892. 
 
 " Moran of the Lady Letty," serialized in San Francisco
 
 Bibliography 311 
 
 Wave about January, 1898. Published by Doubleday & 
 McClure, September, 1898. 
 
 "McTeague," published by Doubleday & McClure, 
 February, 1899. 
 
 "Blix," serialized in The Puritan about April, 1899. 
 Published by Doubleday & McClure, September, 1899. 
 
 "A Man's Woman," serialized in New York Evening 
 Sun about July October, 1899; in San Francisco 
 Chronicle, July 23, 1899 October 8, 1899. Published by 
 Doubleday & McClure, February, 1900. 
 
 "Octopus," published by Doubleday, Page & Company, 
 April, 1901. 
 
 "The Pit," serialized in Saturday Evening Post, Septem- 
 ber 27, 1902 January 31, 1903. Published by Doubleday. 
 Page & Company, January, 1903.
 
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