Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

A work of art should express only that which elevates the ‘soul and pleases it in a noble manner. The feeling of the artist should not overstep these limits; it is wrong to venture beyond.

—BETTINA BRENTANO.

One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man’s life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it.

—MATTHEW ARNOLD.

IN MY brief career as a sort of jack-leg executive I had seen at close range all I wished to see of Western society’s floundering progress towards collectivism. American society’s antics in the course of this progress made a spectacle which was immensely amusing for a while, but one soon became weary of it. The absurdities of that decade were exceeded only by those of the succeeding decade, 1930-1940. Before that I could find no match for them in human history. American society had not the faintest idea of what it was doing or where it was going. It simply clung to its inveterate practice of making brag, bounce and quackery do duty for observation, reason and common sense. It had not yet got a glimpse of the elementary truth which was so clear to the mind of Mr. Jefferson, that in proportion as you give the State power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you; and that the State invariably makes as little as it can of the one power, and as much as it can of the other. Mr. Harding’s famous “return to normalcy” was not a return to anything. It was a mere acceleration of society’s lolloping, wallowing advance towards the goal at which it arrived in 1932.

There was nothing to be done about this, even if one had wished to do anything, which I certainly did not, so I reverted to my own pursuits. My editorial work had got me into the habit of writing, occasionally with a view of publishing something I had written; a habit which has gradually slacked off of late. I published two or three little books, none of which attracted any particular attention. The one thing which was a labour of grateful love, and in which I was truly interested, was my share in editing the Urquhart-Motteux translation of the works of Francis Rabelais. The Pantagrueline philosophy had held my chin above water ever since my days with C. J. as a graduate student, and I wanted to do what little I could do in return. I had no idea beyond this, and I was unfeignedly astonished when the firm of Harcourt, Brace and Co. consented to publish so unpromising a work.

But such has been the invariable hospitality of publishers, in my experience. My books have been unrewarding to them, but they have printed them hopefully, without complaint. I think Mr. Harcourt’s firm may have made a dollar or two out of my little study of Mr. Jefferson, but I am sure my other books have been published at a loss. I never had any but the most pleasant book-publishing relations. Moreover, besides those who have borne the burden and disappointment of my books, I have become acquainted with other publishers, and there is not one of them whom I have not come to regard with great respect and sincere liking.

Occasionally I contributed essays to periodicals. Mr. Wells, the editor of Harper’s, got me in the way of it, and I rather enjoyed it. I wrote a good deal for him at one time or another. After Mr. Wells retired, my old friend Mr. Sedgwick took me on with equal hospitality in behalf of the Atlantic. Mr. Mencken of the Mercury, and his successor, Mr. Palmer, were likewise hospitable; and thus for a long time, whenever I had something on my mind which seemed worth publishing, I would bring out an essay in one or another of these publications, perhaps three or four times in the course of a year.

With these editors my relations were always as pleasant and satisfactory as my relations with book-publishers. They were also as disinterested, for I do not imagine that my essays were ever anything of a circulation-getter. Probably I had some readers, but they were not of the sort that is likely to write in and tell the editor how they felt about what they read. My editors were all of the old style. Mr. Palmer was a young man, but in some mysterious way he had become infected with the old-style tradition, and when he found that Gresham’s law had made it impracticable to go on in that tradition, he quietly sold his magazine and gave up editing.

Judged from a contributor’s viewpoint, my editors were all one could desire. They respected the contributor, knew his rights, and saw to it that he got them. They had none of the finical “rage for interference” which George Borrow complained of in his London publisher. On the contrary, they let me express myself as I chose to do. Never that I can remember did Mr. Wells, Mr. Mencken or Mr. Palmer tamper with my copy in any way, and only once or twice did Mr. Sedgwick find some insignificant expression which he besought me to modify. I found him a very able and lovable man, a delightful friend. Under a queer feminine mask of fussiness and indecision he concealed a great deal of resourceful courage. When I proposed a subject to him he would groan and sigh, and vow I was bound to lose him his last subscriber, but in the end he would tell me to go ahead and write the essay. All these men had the power of mature and seasoned judgement; they were able to deal as justly with what they did not like as with what they did like. I remember once when some subordinate relucted at something I was publishing in Harper’s, Mr. Wells jerked his thumb towards him as he was passing by, and said to me in an undertone, “I’d print lots more stuff like that than he would—you see, I’ve got to stand for it, and he doesn’t.” An editor who insists that a contribution should in every way be a weak reflex of his own opinions or idiosyncrasies, or that it must conform to some set pattern of his own devising, seems to me an extremely poor, incompetent affair.

I have had very little chance to observe editors of the newer style. From what I have seen of them, they impress me rather as misplaced journalists and salesmen than as editors. It is true that the editor was always a salesman, but it is also true that there are salesmen and salesmen. A salesman for the great house of Bagstock and Buggins, wine-merchants in the City ever since Charles I was beheaded, is a very different breed of cats from a high-pressure salesman of mass-produced gimcrackery. Bagstock and Buggins have always had about as much trade as they can carry comfortably, and their clients are their old hereditary friends, whose tastes and wishes they know as well as they know their own merchandise. So, when the salesman goes out he is aware that the House is distinctly less interested in his drumming up new clients than in his taking proper care of those he has. The old-style editor seemed to me to stand in much that same relation of salesmanship with his readers, while the new-style editor seems to stand more in the cutthroat-competitive attitude of Marks Pasinsky, Moe Griesman and Hymie Salzman towards potential buyers in the heyday of the cloak-and-suit trade, forty years ago.

In a society given over to the philosophy of economism, this is inevitable; and therefore I must not be taken as disparaging the more modern type of editor. The old-style editor is merely one of the casualties of economism. Gresham’s law has driven out his conception of the editorial function and has replaced it by that of the go-getter, just as in Brussels I saw it drive out the old-style restaurateur’s conception of his function and replace it by that of the mass-producer. Brussels was known the world over as a city of little restaurants providing the most consummate artistry in food. Two of them had been going concerns for something over three hundred years. One after another they disappeared under my eyes. First, the Stielen went; its site was taken over for an extension of a department-store, and when I first saw Brussels one could almost say there was no one there who knew what a department-store was. Then the Leyman went, then the Écrevisse, the Charlemagne, and so on, until when I finally left Brussels hardly any of the higher amenities of food were surviving, save in private kitchens.

So when, as in the case of Mr. Palmer, the modern editor is young, able, possessed of some literary standards and would do better if he could, so far am I from disparaging or finding fault with him that I feel he is much to be pitied. In the nature of things it is presumable that not many are of that character,—Gresham’s law would take care of that,—but no doubt some of them are. They have professionalised themselves, and considerations of one kind or another, usually economic, keep them in the groove of their profession. With only one life to live, they must continually feel their existence as cramping and dissatisfying, for as Paul Bourget says, every disused or misused faculty becomes a source of uneasiness.

Some years ago I was in company with half-a-dozen men when the talk somehow turned on the odd question of what are the three most degrading occupations open to man. When the question got around to me, I said I thought the first was holding office in a modern soi-disant republic, the second was editing an American metropolitan newspaper, and as for the third I was of two minds whether it would be white slave-trading or keeping an assignation-house. Every one laughed, though I had spoken quite seriously, and one gentleman whom I had not met before said he thought I ought to find a place somewhere in my categories for his job, since he was the chief fiction-editor or tripe-editor (for so he called it) of one of our leading popular mass-produced weekly publications.

He told us interesting things about his occupation. He amazed me by saying that notwithstanding the immense volume of trade-writing that is being done, publications like his are sometimes at their wit’s end to get enough printable tripe to fill their space. So this, I thought, is what Mr. Jefferson’s cherished principle of universal literacy has come to! The editor said further that in choosing material his aim was constantly at what he judged to be the lowest common denominator of intelligence, taste and style among his actual and prospective readers. Moreover, his sole official measure of the merit of a piece of fiction was its nearness to hitting the mark of this lowest common denominator, as indicated by the volume of sales. “A few weeks ago,” he said, “we featured a story that was a bit above the average, and that week our news-stand sales fell off sixty thousand.”

This editor was a pleasant, companionable man of good taste, considerable ability, a lively sense of humour, in all ways very far above his distressing occupation. I felt extremely sorry for him; he seemed a poor miserable wretch. I hope God will have mercy on his soul.

II

While living in Europe I almost completely lost the run of literary produce in England and America. This was not deliberate. It was due somewhat to indolence, largely to preoccupation with other literatures, but chiefly to the fact that there was hardly any English print available where I was, and what there was of it was slight and poor. This was especially true of Brussels in my earlier days there. The Belgian is one ahead of the Swiss in the matter of native languages. The Swiss rubs along on German, French and Italian, while the Belgian has to wrestle with Flemish, French, Walloon and German. These tongues, however, are pretty sharply localised. Brussels is the only place in the kingdom where Flemish and French meet, so a person living there can get on with either. To the north and west is solid Flemish, Walloon begins at Liége and runs to the French line, while over on the Prussian border there are about fifty thousand Belgians who speak German. I got the impression that there was less English spoken in Brussels, and less English print available there, than in any other Western European capital I visited, except Lisbon. I found a considerable amount of colloquial English going on in Antwerp, and for some reason that I could not make out there was also a little of it here and there in Bruges; but in Brussels I went for months on end without sight or sound of my native tongue.

So it was that in my four years as an amateur editor in New York I brought a fairly fresh eye to bear upon the postwar literary doings which had taken place without my knowledge. In the field of creative art, if one can call it that, the field of ποίησις, Dichtung, whether prose or verse, they presented a remarkable sight. In a way I was prepared for something of the kind, because I had already seen evidence, especially in France, that the current practice of music, painting and sculpture had become a tohu-bohu, a chaos of confusion, and one would expect the current practice of literature to be in even worse case because naturally a larger number of ill-assorted aspirants would be trying their hand at it. The period presented a curious phenomenon, one that I think may have been unique. Writing is an occupation, and up to the period I speak of I believe it is the only one, in which a person who knows nothing whatever about it can engage and quite often achieve a popular success; so the success of incompetent writers in this period was not exceptional. I do not know of any other time, however, when it has been possible for a person who knew nothing whatever about painting or music or sculpture to make any kind of success, popular or otherwise, in the practice of any of those arts. Yet I had seen it done; I had seen, for example, a great vogue of French painters, a whole school of them, who (with one exception) did not even know how to draw; and I had also seen a considerable popular interest extended towards French and German composers who clearly lacked even the most elementary discipline to fit them for what they were trying to do or wanted to do. I had furthermore nibbled with long teeth at some specimens of “modernity” in French and German writings, and saw in them no sign of anything more promising than unwarranted ambition. So, with what I had seen, and with my knowledge of what American society’s critical insight and judgement were worth, I was, as I said, in a way prepared to encounter the astonishing cultural extravagances that awaited my return to America.

I was amused by them, and still more amused by the effort to create a vogue for them and glorify them as permanent enrichments of art and culture, but I did not give them any serious attention, for I expected them shortly to succumb to asphyxiation in the atmosphere of their own inanity and peter out, as in fact they did. To tell the truth, I was rather inclined to encourage certain of these promoters of literary absurdities when it fell in my way to do so. They were mainly young persons, ardent, bungfull of self-consciousness, not doing much actual harm,—probably not even much harming themselves in the long-run,—and they seemed to be having such a glorious, disorderly, irresponsible good time out of tousling our poor old austere alphabet that one could not be stepmotherly with them, even in one’s heart. Was life given us for any purpose but that we should get a good time out of it? Surely I think not. The sound Pantagruelist and Rabelaisian remembers that his maistre et seigneur Pantagruel never tried to reform Panurge or wean him from his amusing deviltries, though he himself took no part in them. That is the way Panurge was, Pantagruel took him as he was, loved him as he was, did not wish him to be other than he was, always countenanced him even when he entered on paths which he himself was disinclined to tread. According to the great Pantagrueline philosophy, the only reform that any one is called upon to attempt is reform of oneself. One notices that Pantagruel was extremely strict about that, for all that a precisian moralist might call his culpable laxness towards Panurge.

So I often, sincerely enough, gave a friendly word to breathless young literary innovators, though I did it more or less in the spirit of a professor under whom I sat for a time as a graduate student. He was a big rawboned Irishman with a gorgeous brogue, a graduate of Trinity in the great days of Mahaffy and Tyrrell. He had also been ordained in the Anglican Church by Whately, the redoubtable archbishop of Dublin, who was a tremendous fellow in all his ways, and moreover probably in some respects the most cantankerous old cuss that ever filled an episcopal chair. My professor—his name is immaterial, so let me call him Murphy—was a man exactly after Whately’s own heart. I remember him once shuffling into his lecture-room, glaring around at us from under his bushy red eyebrows, and saying, “Look out f’r ye’erselves this mornin’, gintlemen. Mrs. Murphy an’ I have had a disagreement!” Whately might well have done just that.

He had a son named Jimmy, an exemplary fine fellow and a good student in the class next below ours. After leading a sober, righteous and uninteresting life for twenty years or so, as the Book of Common Prayer prescribes, Jimmy suddenly broke out on a roaring spree one night and came home in a state of advanced decomposition, thinking he could make his way to bed without arousing anybody. As he was half-way upstairs, creeping on all-fours, the old man appeared on the stair-landing in a long cotton nightshirt, with a nightlamp in his hand. They considered each other in silence for a minute or two, and then the old man said, “Go it, Jimmy! Go it! Ye’re very young. Ye have plinty iv time befure ye to diskiver what a fool ye ar’re. So, go it!” With these words he turned back into his bedroom, closing both the door and the incident in one magisterial motion.

In many ways the youthful dabblers in literature, painting and music kept reminding me of Jimmy, especially when I contemplated the upshot of their efforts. The other day I blew the dust off a volume of their productions in verse, and remarked once more how strongly symptomatic their aberrations were; and looking back upon the parallel aberrations which I had observed in Europe, I saw how right Menander was in saying that evil communications corrupt good manners. A second Max Nordau of the ’twenties, tracing his way down from Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Verlaine, to our young American aspirants, might well have conceived a Degeneracy as a sequel to his predecessor’s Degeneration. The unmistakable mark of degeneracy which stood out on the period’s attempts at artistic production was an intense and conscious preoccupation with the subjective. As Goethe remarked, all eras in a state of decline and dissolution are subjective, while in all great eras which have been really in a state of progression, every effort is directed from the inward to the outward world; it is of an objective nature. I have always believed, as Goethe did, that here one comes on a true sense of the term classic. Work done in the great progressive eras,—the work of the Augustan and Periclean periods, the work of the Elizabethans, of Erasmus, Marot, Rabelais, Cervantes, Montaigne,—one accepts these as classic, not at all because they are old, but because they are objective and therefore strong, sound, joyous, healthy. Work done in an era of decadence is subjective, and therefore with the rarest and most fragmentary exceptions pathological, weak, bizarre, unhealthy. Indeed as Goethe suggested, in the interest of clearness one might very well make a clean sweep of all terms like classic, modernist, realist, naturalist and substitute the simple terms healthy and sickly.

Hence it was the symptomatic character of artistic practice both in Europe and America that chiefly interested me. In Europe I saw a good deal of “modernist” French painting, done in the ’twenties by Pascin, Soutine, Picasso, de Segonzac, de la Fresnaye, Metzinger, Dufy and others. In literature I also nibbled gingerly at specimens of subjectivity in excelsis furnished by Proust, Laforgue, Dujardin and practitioners of the “stream of consciousness” principle. One’s presumptions upon any society from which such work could emanate and get itself accepted, were inescapable. At Gastein nine years ago, in talking with a member of the old German General Staff, I spoke of a possible attack on France. He opened his eyes wide with astonishment, and said, “We shall not attack France. We have no idea of attacking France. Why should we? Why should any one attack France? Let her alone, and she will collapse.” I had occasion to remember this six years later, for certainly the passage of von Reichenau’s forces from Sedan to the seacoast could hardly be dignified by the name of an attack. It was a promenade.

But at the end of an era of unmitigated economism, what else could one expect? How otherwise could a society dominated by this philosophy express itself, whether in literature, music, the graphic arts, politics, or any other mode of its collective life? All these manifestations seemed to me purely exhibitory, and therefore quite in the order of nature. So also seemed to me the character of the ephemera who appeared in the rôle of chief exhibitors, star performers. Not long ago I heard a Frenchwoman say, “I dislike Hitler heartily, I dislike everything he does and says, but the fact remains that Hitler is only the result of us”—and she made a wide sweeping circular gesture which brought the whole of Western society within the scope of her indictment. An analyst like Nordau would find the heads of our collectivist governments in both hemispheres, all of them without exception, as wholly in the order of nature, as purely exhibitory, as were the Rimbauds, Verlaines and Gauguins of the last century. Revolting as they are, they are nevertheless precisely the forms of organic life which one must expect to see, and does see, if one insists on turning over the social plank which has so long lain rotting in the muck of economism.

III

During my four years in New York I found our amateurs of creative literature largely touched by the strange spirit of desperateness which seemed to rest on a whole generation of youth in that period. Putting it roughly, I should say that it rested heaviest on those who were approaching adolescence when the war ended and were in their early twenties when I first noticed them. In respect of their malady they were exactly like Misha in Tourgueniev’s marvellous piece of analysis called A Desperate Character. As I observed them carefully they kept reminding me of Misha at every turn; if I had not known his story I believe I could not have understood them. Desperate characters is just what they were. I saw them everywhere here, and when I returned to Europe I saw many who had transferred themselves to Continental centres, mainly to Paris, existing as mere wastrels. The peculiar thing about them was that their desperateness, like Misha’s, was directed only against themselves. Depraved, they were not; no one could say so; they were simply obsessed by Misha’s almost insane passion for self-destruction. They were unwilling to hurt any one but themselves, and never consciously did so, though through ignorance and thoughtlessness no doubt they often did. Towards others their impulses were generous, kindly, simple-hearted, affectionate. They were truthful, and with Misha’s ill-assorted type of courage, they were very brave. Some of them had all Misha’s power of attraction and his genius for friendship. Like Misha, they had frankly given themselves up for lost, and were wretched, dissatisfied, desperate. With all their good qualities which marked them sometimes with a certain touch of nobleness, and with all their fine loyalty to anomalous social codes of their own devising, they were desperate characters; no other name describes them.

When such as these take to expressing themselves in literature, as some did, not much in the way of good art can reasonably be expected. They have little to express but an overdeveloped and disorderly self-consciousness, and this is a most refractory material for art to manage. Il dit tout ce qu’il veut,—so runs the terrible sentence of a French critic,—mais malheureusement il n’a rien à dire. Yet sometimes the Not-ourselves shoulders its way to the front of most unpromising circumstances and produces a work of art. John Reed, a desperate character who threw away his life on the Russian revolution, addressed an absent sweetheart in a few lines of pure and exquisite lyric verse which might well have been written by a Herrick or a Lovelace. Only a trifle, it is true, and it stands alone for its merit in the thin volume in which it is printed; but there it is.

As I read it my mind turned to thoughts of Villon, a desperate character of the old days, from whom a philosopher might draw a fairly clear line of resemblance down through Misha and Reed to the desperate characters of the ’twenties. One never knows when or where the spirit’s breath will rest, or what will come of its touch. “The spirit breathes where it will,” 1 said the Santissimo Salvatore, “and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth.” Out of the slums of Paris, out of the lowest depths of wretchedness and desperateness, came the voice which celebrated the belles dames du temps jadis in immortal verse. A lowlived drunken tinker lying in Bedford gaol conceived the Pilgrim’s Progress.

The only certainty I could arrive at concerning the literary produce of the ’twenties was the one which I had already long entertained, that art goes rancid when as art it becomes consciously this-or-that; and that the one invincible and implacable enemy of art is the writer’s self-consciousness, his preoccupation with the subjective. Writers sometimes produce a work of art, perhaps great art, with no intention of doing anything of the kind, and every intention of doing something else. They do it in pursuance of some purpose, but the relation of that purpose to art is fortuitous, and in their pursuance of it they do not deliberately bind themselves to making their work illustrative of any wire-drawn formula or theory of art. One writer wrote in haste, oppressed by terrible grief, under great pressure for immediate money, and produced Rasselas. Another wrote avowedly to entertain the boarding-school Backfisch and women of the lower-middle class, and produced Evalina. This was pure market-writing, as far as the authors’ intentions went; in point of art, they were not concerned to show themselves as representing any school or sect or theory. They simply went ahead and did the best they could in behalf of the object they had in view.

My reading of current novels and poetry at that time, however, was desultory and not extensive. I was impressed by the enormous amount of market-writing that was being done. On the one hand, the wide spread of a frail and futile literacy had set up a great demand for a frail and futile literature to match. On the other hand, publishing had become one of the country’s major industries, and the ensuing competition was so sharp that each house had to keep its presses going at full speed in order to live. It was a case of “print or die” with all of them, in an effort to capture a share of the market furnished by the faintly literate, and the operation of Gresham’s law set the general standard of what was printable. As some one put it, a good book, from a publisher’s point of view, was a book as nearly as possible like another book which had sold a great number of copies.

In consequence, the great mass of writing produced to meet this demand bore a curiously stereotyped character. As art, it was nothing; and in point of workmanship it all stood at the same level of mediocrity. For all one could discern, the whole of it might have been done by the same hand. The hall-mark of individual authorship had disappeared. One could not possibly tell from reading this-or-that popular work which one of the authors who were prominent in public favour had written it. The dearth of imagination, of inventive power, manifested in these productions was also remarkable. In some cases one could hardly escape the conviction that an author had merely changed the names of his characters and their locale, and then written the same story over and over again. The same state of things appeared to prevail in British market-writing, judged by the specimens of it which were reproduced here by the thousand; though as a rule the British writers’ workmanship was better than ours.

Yet “the spirit breathes where it will.” In Montague Glass, whose work lived well over into this period, America produced one of the greatest delineators of character that ever held a pen; and in Glass’s contemporary, Finley Peter Dunne, it produced the soundest and most perspicacious of all critics of American society, with the single exception of Artemus Ward. The fate of these two men was interesting to me, as furnishing perhaps the most conspicuous proof that Gresham’s law has destroyed the last hope of literary criticism’s resurrection in America. It has created circumstances whereby in literary criticism as well as in social and political criticism “the test of a great mind is its power of agreement in the opinions of small minds.” In other words, it has effectively arranged matters so that there shall never be at any one time in America more than a corporal’s guard of persons capable of recognising and identifying a work of literary art if they saw one.

Both Glass and Dunne were market-writers. Their work had a wide vogue, it was eagerly accepted, and it furnished amusement to millions. But in their respective fields they were also great artists, and as such they were never recognised. So I saw their vogue pass, leaving no mark to show their true position and status in the country’s literary history. I saw this with especial regret in the case of Glass, for his work turns attention steadily upon a social asset of immense value, which is rapidly disappearing from among us; I refer to the authentic Hebrew culture and tradition. America opened its doors wide to this Oriental people, and Jews have made many important contributions to our civilisation; and Gresham’s law has seen to it that the most important are those for which they get the least credit. Readers of Arnold’s Literature and Dogma, if any still exist, will have no trouble about getting the point of this observation. But among other powerful incentives, our silly notion of the “melting-pot” and our sillier conception of its function, encouraged them in a preposterously superficial and impracticable attempt to Occidentalise themselves; and this attempt entailed a self-chosen disparagement and sacrifice of their culture. Our society has lost incalculably by this, and aside from the cultural damage to the Jews themselves, I believe the social consequences of this attempt will be most unfortunate for them.

In Europe also, during the post-war period when literature was almost as deep in the doldrums there as it was here, I had occasion to see how nature pursues her own free way, regardless of the formulas and prescriptions which purblind men devise. I came upon two works of excellent art where, under the circumstances, one would hardly expect to find them. One was Les Thibaults, by Roger Martin du Gard. It was published in sections appearing at intervals of some length. I read about half of it in French, and the rest of it lately in an uncommonly good translation. I had a high opinion of it. The second work was one mailed to me in Brussels by an American friend who was travelling in England. It was a tour de force of pure creative fancy, and of an art unexampled in any work of the period which I had seen, or in any I have seen since then in the literature of any country. It was Bruce Marshall’s Father Malachy’s Miracle. I should not know where to look for a power of character-portrayal superior to that which is applied everywhere, to all sorts and conditions of men and women, throughout this small volume. With equal precision, completeness and convincing force it exhibits what goes on in the mind of subjects as diverse as a Benedictine monk, ballet-girls, dancers, a Scots bishop, a jovial Scots rounder, an Italian cardinal, a pair of raw Irish priests, a precious brace of British theatrical promoters and their hard-boiled wives, and an ultra-modernist British Protestant parson. I have looked industriously for something to match this achievement within the same limit of proportions,—for as I said, the book is small,—but I have not as yet found anything.

IV

A few months ago I re-read two or three of William J. Locke’s earlier novels, to see how well the opinion I had formed of them twenty years ago was holding up, and whether I still felt the attraction of one special interest in them. Locke was a prolific market-writer, extremely popular and successful. His later pre-war work ran somewhat on momentum, but even so it was good strong momentum. Perhaps, like Thackeray, he may have “taken too many crops out of his brain” at too short intervals. The war impaired his powers, as it might well have done, and by comparison even with The Glory of Clementina his post-war work is probably negligible. Locke was a man of sensitive artistic instincts and fine culture, who observed closely and wrote charmingly. One would say he had been educated in the bad old way, as I was, for the mark of “the grand old fortifying classical curriculum” was clearly visible on his estimate of life and on his conception of his task.

It was by this latter aspect,—his idea of what true fiction is and what it is for,—that his work had a special interest for me. He seemed to have got his idea pretty straight from Hesiod and Aristotle, and had probably considered with some care what had been done with it in the romances of Apuleius, Heliodorus, Longus, Achilles Tatius. At all events Septimus and The Beloved Vagabond took me back as promptly as when I first read them, years ago, to Aristotle’s profound analysis of the difference between history and fiction; and I thought at once how admirably, how delightfully, Locke’s work exemplified Aristotle’s critical dictum on the true and proper nature of fiction. History, Aristotle says, represents things only as they are, while fiction represents them as they might be and ought to be; and therefore of the two, he adds, “fiction is the more philosophical and the more highly serious.”2

My impression is that Septimus and The Beloved Vagabond come up to Aristotle’s specifications beyond cavil or question. There is not an implausible character in them, or an implausible situation; they all “might be,” might easily be. Moreover, I believe the normal ordinary run of opinion, uninfluenced by any hard-and-fast literary formula, would agree that they “ought to be.” Locke takes title as an artist, I think, not only by presenting his characters and situations as they might be and ought to be, but also by doing it without communicating to the reader any sense of strain or affectation. The reader assents to them at once; and this assent completes the establishment of Locke’s work as a work of art. I repeat that I am speaking of his earlier work. Here and there Clementina stirs a sense of strain, and what I have read of those which follow,—true, I have read but two,—pretty well keep that sense alive throughout.

For many years, indeed ever since first I had mulled over Aristotle as a student in college, I had been in the habit of applying his dry analytical remark as a test of whatever creative literature came before me. Nothing in my experience or observation during the ‘twenties weakened my faith in that procedure, but on the contrary everything tended to confirm it. This test enabled me to put my finger firmly on the reason for my disinclination towards most of the fiction current at the time, especially the Tendenzschrift, the sociological novel, and the “novel with a purpose.” I was reminded that with all my respect for Flaubert’s ability I could get nowhere with Madame Bovary. Not all my regard for the valour and industry of Zola, for the fine literary qualities of the Goncourts, could keep my nose to the grindstone of La Terre or Soeur Philomène. These are not works of fiction, but of history; and if I wanted history I preferred getting it from historians. There was a wealth of sound criticism in the French musician’s remark on Honegger’s imitation of the sounds of a locomotive; he said that if he wanted to listen to a locomotive he went down to the railway-station. The vigorous young American publicists who are constructing novels around the various social and political phenomena of the moment aim only at presenting things as they are. Their work, as far as I have seen it, is not fiction, it is history. It may be sound history or bad history, inaccurate history, but in either case it is history. It has neither the philosophical character nor the high seriousness which distinguish true fiction, and it lacks them because it presents things only as they are, and not as they might be and ought to be.

So Aristotle’s remark has stood always as my first canon of criticism applicable to creative writing. For me, it determines in every case the answer to the question whether this-or-that work is or is not true fiction, and if it is or is not, why. My second canon bears on the question: What is fiction for, what is its true intention, its proper function? This second canon was very well put in terms by Prince Alexander Kropotkin when he advised his brother to read poetry. He said, “Poetry makes you better.” I imagine that Prince Kropotkin would have made no difficulties about including prose as well as verse under his term, as the Greeks did and the Germans do; indeed, if Russian has an inclusive term like Dichtung, he may have used it; I do not know. He put the fact exactly, however. A work of the creative imagination which makes you better fulfils the true intention of such literature, and one which fails to do this fails of its true intention.

There is an important distinction here. The Goncourts spoke scornfully of a certain type of literature as an “anodyne.” They had something on their side, no doubt, but they were undiscriminating, as our readers and reviewers often are when they lump off certain works under the general stigma of “escape-literature.” Any creative work which one reads with attention will make one forget one’s troubles for the time being, as will a hand at bridge or billiards or watching a lively comedy on the stage. Some works do this and do no more; in the reaction from them their total effect comes to nothing. Others do this, and their total effect is enervating. Others again do this, but they are so conceived that the reading of them elevates and fortifies the spirit, they are spiritually dynamogenous, they make one better. The Goncourts missed this distinction as completely as the degenerate realism and naturalism of the ‘twenties missed it; and in the absence of anything remotely resembling a sound and authoritative criticism, the true function of creative writing, as well as its true character, is everywhere lost sight of at the present time.

I have no idea of pressing my two canons of criticism upon any one’s acceptance, nor am I disposed to argue for their usefulness to all in general. I can say only that they are fundamental to the development of the literary and cultural element in my philosophy of existence. Culture is knowing the best that has been thought and said in the world; in other words, culture means reading, not idle and casual reading, but reading that is controlled and directed by a definite purpose. Reading, so understood, is difficult, and contrary to an almost universal belief, those who can do it are very few. I have already remarked the fact that there is no more groundless assumption than that literacy carries with it the ability to read. At the age of seventy-nine Goethe said that those who make this assumption “do not know what time and trouble it costs to learn to read. I have been working at it for eighteen years, and I can’t say yet that I am completely successful.” In the course of the rigorous discipline which learning to read imposes, I have found that with regard to creative literature the canons of Aristotle and Prince Kropotkin together make the most efficient sieve for a preliminary straining-out of what may be worth reading, and separating it from the prodigious mass of what is not.

Again, the effect of keeping good company in literature is exactly what it is in life. Keeping good company is spiritually dynamogenous, elevating, bracing. It makes one better. Keeping bad company is disabling; keeping indifferent company is enervating and retarding. In literature one has the best company in the world at complete command; one also has the worst. One has a social conscience which dissuades one from harbouring unprofitable company in life, and I find that my two canons are a great aid and support for an analogous literary conscience which speaks up against consorting with unprofitable company in literature.

Literary art is appreciable only by a minority, as indeed all art must be. This minority are capable of exercising a literary conscience and of keeping themselves under its direction. They are unable to make its intimations prevail at all generally, nor are they called upon to attempt this obvious impossibility. They can, however, make them prevail in the development of their own culture, and with that their responsibility ends. The task of enlightening the literary conscience and enforcing its decrees upon oneself is difficult enough to make one glad of any substantial help that one can get; and (though, as I said, I speak only for myself) I have had more substantial help from my two basic canons of criticism than from any other source.

• 1Τό πνεṽμα ὅπου θέλει πνεĩ John III, 8. There can be no doubt about this reading. The Vulgate has Spiritus ubi vult spirat. I do not know what led King James’s translators to give the reading which appears in the Authorised Version.
• 2Φιλοσοφώτερον καὶ σπονδαιότερον. I hope I have not made too free with Aristotle’s ỏια ἃν γένοιτο but I think the implication is certainly there.