By democratic literature I mean all honest writing, whether crude or carefully wrought, that endeavors to interpret the American scene in typical aspects for all who care to read. I mean Walt Whitman and Edgar Lee Masters; I mean a hundred writers of short stories who, lacking perhaps the final touch of art, have nevertheless put a new world and a new people momentarily upon the stage. I mean the addresses of Lincoln and of President Wilson.

With dilettante literature I come to a very different and less important classification: the vast company—how vast few even among natives suspect—of would-be writers, who in every town and county of the United States are writing, writing, writing what they hope to be literature, what is usually but a pallid imitation of worn-out literary forms. More people seem to be engaged in occasional production of poetry and fiction—and especially of poetry—in America, than in any single money-making enterprise characteristic of a great industrial nation. The flood pours through every editorial office in the land, trickles into the corners of country newspapers, makes short-lived dilettante magazines, and runs back, most of it, to its makers. It is not literature, for the bulk is bloodless, sentimental, or cheap, but it is significant of the now passionate American desire to express our nascent soul.

My chief difficulty is to explain what I mean by bourgeois literature. The flood of dilettante writing is subterranean; it is bourgeois literature that makes the visible rivers and oceans of American writing. And these fluid areas are like the lakes on maps of Central Asia—bounds cannot be set to them. One finds magazines (and pray remember that the magazine is as great a literary force as the book in America), one finds magazines whose entire function is to be admirably bourgeois for their two million odd of readers. And in the more truly literary and "aristocratic" periodicals, in the books published for the discriminating, the bourgeois creeps in and often is dominant. The bourgeois in American literature is a special variety that must not be too quickly identified with the literary product that bears the same name in more static civilizations. It is nearly always clever. Witness our short stories, which even when calculated not to puzzle the least intelligence nor to transcend the most modest limitations of taste, must be carefully constructed and told with facility or they will never see the light. And this literature is nearly always true to the superficies of life, to which, indeed, it confines itself. Wild melodrama is more and more being relegated to the "movies," soft sentimentality still has its place in the novel, but is losing ground in the people's library, the magazines. Life as the American believes he is living it, is the subject of bourgeois literature. But the sad limitation upon this vast output is that, whether poetry, criticism, or fiction, it does not interpret, it merely pictures; and this is the inevitable failure of pages that must be written always for a million or more of readers. It is standardized literature; and good literature, like the best airplanes, cannot be standardized.

Now the error made by most English critics in endeavoring to estimate the potentialities or the actualities of American literature, is to judge under the influence of this crushing weight of clever, mediocre writing. They feel, quite justly, its enormous energy and its terrible cramping power. They see that the best of our democratic writers belong on its fringe; see also that our makers of aristocratic literature and our dilettante escape its weight only when they cut themselves off from the life beat of the nation. And therefore, as a distinguished English poet recently said, America is doomed to a hopeless and ever-spreading mediocrity.

With this view I wish to take immediate issue upon grounds that are both actual and theoretical. There is a fallacy here to begin with, a fallacious analogy. It is true, I believe, in Great Britain, and also in France, that there are two separate publics; that the readers who purchase from the news stands are often as completely unaware of literary books for literary people as if these bore the imprint of the moon. But even in England the distinction is by no means sharp; and in America it is not a question of distinctions at all, but of gradations. In our better magazines are to be found all the categories of which I have written—even the dilettante; and it is a bold critic who will assert that pages one to twenty are read only by one group, and pages twenty to forty only by another. We are the most careless readers in the world; but also the most voracious and the most catholic.

And next, let us make up our minds once for all that a bourgeois literature—by which, let me repeat, I mean a literature that is good without being very good, true without being utterly true, clever without being fine—is a necessity for a vast population moving upward from generation to generation in the intellectual scale, toward a level that must be relatively low in order to be attainable. Let us say that such a literature cannot be real literature. I am content with that statement. But it must exist, and good may come of it.

This is the critical point toward which I have been moving in this lecture, and it is here that the hopeful influence of the American spirit, as I interpret it today, assumes its importance. That spirit is both idealistic and democratic. Idealistic in the sense that there is a profound and often foolishly optimistic belief in America that every son can be better than his father, better in education, better in taste, better in the power to accomplish and understand. Democratic in this sense, that with less political democracy than one finds in Great Britain, there is again a fundamental belief that every tendency, every taste, every capacity, like every man, should have its chance somehow, somewhere, to get a hearing, to secure its deservings, to make, to have, to learn what seems the best.

A vague desire, you say, resulting in confusion and mediocrity. This is true and will be true for some time longer; but instead of arguing in generalities let me illustrate these results by the literature I have been discussing.

When brought to bear upon the category of the dilettante, it is precisely this desire for "general improvement" that has encouraged such a curious outpouring from mediocre though sensitive hearts. The absence of strong literary tradition, the lack of deep literary soil, has been responsible for the insipidity of the product. The habit of reference to the taste of the majority has prevented us from taking this product too seriously. Without that instinctive distrust of the merely literary common to all bourgeois communities, we might well be presenting to you as typical American literature a gentle weakling whose manners, when he has them, have been formed abroad.

Aristocratic literature has suffered in one respect from the restraints of democracy and the compulsions of democratic idealism. It has lacked the self-confidence and therefore the vigor of its parallels in the old world. Emerson and Thoreau rose above these restrictions, and so did Hawthorne and Poe. But in later generations especially, our intellectual poetry and intellectual prose is too frequently though by no means always less excellent than yours. Nevertheless, thanks to the influence of this bourgeois spirit upon the intellects that in American towns must live with, if not share it; thanks, also, to the magazines through which our finer minds must appeal to the public rather than to a circle or a clique, the nerves of transfer between the community at large and the intellectuals are active, the tendons that unite them strong. I argue much from this.

Now theoretically, where you find an instinctive and therefore an honest passion for the ideals of democracy, you should find a great literature expressing and interpreting the democracy. I have given already some reasons why in practice this has not yet become an actuality in America. Let me add, in discussing the bearing of this argument upon the third category of American literature, the democratic, one more.

I doubt whether we yet know precisely what is meant by a great democratic literature. Democracy has been in transition at least since the French Revolution; it is in rapid transition now. The works which we call democratic are many of them expressive of phases merely of the popular life, just as so much American literature is expressive of localities and groups in America.

And usually the works of genius that we do possess have been written by converted aristocrats, like Tolstoy, and have a little of the fanaticism and over-emphasis of the convert. Or they represent and share the turgidity of the minds they interpret, like some of the work of Walt Whitman. All this is true, and yet a careful reader of American literature must be more impressed by such prose as Lincoln's, by such poems as Whitman's, such fiction as Mark Twain's at his best, than by many more elegant works of polite literature. For these—and I could add to them dozens of later stories and poems, ephemeral perhaps but showing what may be done when we burst the bourgeois chain—for these are discoveries in the vigor, the poignancy, the color of our democratic national life.

I have already hinted at what seems to me the way out and up for American literature. It will not be by fine writing that borrows or adapts foreign models, even English models which are not foreign to us. It will not come through geniuses of the backwoods, adopted by some coterie, and succeeding, when they do succeed, by their strangeness rather than the value of the life they depict. That might have happened in the romantic decades of the early nineteenth century; but our English literary tradition was a saving influence which kept us from gaucherie, even if it set limits upon our strength. Our expectation, so I think, is in the slowly mounting level of the vast bourgeois literature that fills not excellently, but certainly not discreditably, our books and magazines. There, and not in coteries, is our school of writing. When originality wearies of stereotypes and conventions, when energy and ability force the editorial hand, and appeal to the desire of Americans to know themselves, we shall begin a new era in American literature. Our problem is not chiefly to expose and attack and discredit the flat conventionality of popular writing. It is rather to crack the smooth and monotonous surface and stir the fire beneath it, until the lava of new and true imaginings can pour through. And this is, historically, the probable course of evolution. It was the Elizabethan fashion. The popular forms took life and fire then. The advice of the classicists, who wished to ignore the crude drama beloved of the public, was not heeded; it will not be heeded now. Our task is to make a bourgeois democracy fruitful. We must work with what we have.

Much has been said of the advantage for us, and perhaps for the world, which has come from the separation of the American colonies from Great Britain. Two systems of closely related political thinking, two national characters, have developed and been successful instead of one. Your ancestors opened the door of departure for mine, somewhat brusquely it is true, but with the same result, if not the same reason, as with the boys they sent away to school—they made men of us.

So it is with literature. American literature will never, as some critics would persuade us, be a child without a parent. In its fundamental character it is, and will remain, British, because at bottom the American character, whatever its blood mixture, is formed upon customs and ideals that have the same origin and a parallel development with yours. But this literature, like our political institutions, will not duplicate; like the seedling, it will make another tree and not another branch. In literature we are still pioneers. I think that it may be reserved for us to discover a literature for the new democracy of English-speaking peoples that is coming—a literature for the common people who do not wish to stay common. Like Lincoln's, it will not be vulgar; like Whitman's, never tawdry; like Mark Twain's, not empty of penetrating thought; like Shakespeare's it will be popular. If this should happen, as I believe it may, it would be a just return upon our share of a great inheritance.



TIME'S MIRROR

What is the use of criticizing modern literature unless you are willing to criticize modern life? And how many Americans are willing to criticize it with eyes wide open?

The outstanding fact in mass civilization as it exists in America and Western Europe to-day is that it moves with confidence in only one direction. The workers, after their escape from the industrial slavery of the last century, have only one plan for the future upon which they can unite, a greater share in material benefits. The possessors of capital have only one program upon which they agree, a further exploitation of material resources, for the greater comfort of the community and themselves. The professional classes have only one professional instinct in common, to discover new methods by which man's comfort may be made secure.

In this way of life, as the Buddhist might have called it, all our really effective energy discharges itself. Even the church is most active in social service, and philosophy is accounted most original when it accounts for behavior. Theology has become a stagnant science, and, to prove the rule by contraries, the main problem of man's spiritual relation to the universe, his end in living, and the secret of real happiness is left to a sentimental idealism in which reason, as the Greeks knew it, has less and less place, and primitive instinct, as the anthropologists define it, and the Freudian psychologists explain it, is given more and more control.

The flat truth is that, as a civilization, we are less sure of where we are going, where we want to go, how and for what we wish to live, than at any intelligent period of which we have full record. This is not pessimism. It is merely a fact, which is dependent upon our failure to digest the problems that democracy, machinery, feminism, and the destruction of our working dogmas by scientific discovery, have presented to us. All these things are more likely to be good than bad, all bear promise for the future, but all tend to confuse contemporary men. New power over nature has been given them and they are engaged in seizing it. New means of testing preconceived opinion are theirs, and they are using them. The numbers which can be called intelligent are tremendously augmented and the race to secure material comforts has become a mass movement which will not cease until the objective is won.

In the meantime, there is only one road which is clear—the road of material progress, and whether its end lies in the new barbarism of a mechanistic state where the mental and physical faculties will decline in proportion to the means discovered for healing their ills, or whether it is merely a path where the privileged leaders must mark step for a while until the unprivileged masses catch up with them in material welfare, no one knows and few that are really competent care to inquire.

Now this obsession with material welfare is the underlying premise with which all discussion of contemporary literature, and particularly American literature, must begin. Ours is a literature of an age without dogma, which is to say without a theory of living; the literature of an inductive, an experimental period, where the really vital attempt is to subdue physical environment (for the first time in history) to the needs of the common man. It is an age, therefore, interested and legitimately interested in behavior rather than character, in matter and its laws rather than in the control of matter for the purposes of fine living.

Therefore, our vital literature is behavioristic, naturalistic, experimental—rightly so I think—and must be so until we seek another way. That search cannot be long deferred. One expects its beginning at any moment, precisely as one expects, and with reason, a reaction against the lawless thinking and unrestrained impulses which have followed the war. One hopes that it will not be to Puritanism, unless it be that stoic state of mind which lay behind Puritanism, for no old solution will serve. The neo- Puritans to-day abuse the rebels, young and old, because they have thrown over dogma and discipline. The rebels accuse Puritanism for preserving the dogma that cramps instead of frees. It is neither return to the old nor the destruction thereof that we must seek, but a new religion, a new discipline, a new hope, and a new end which can give more significance to living than dwellers in our industrial civilization are now finding.

In the meantime, those who seek literary consolation are by no means to be urged away from their own literature, which contains a perfect picture of our feverish times, and has implicit within it the medicine for our ills, if they are curable. But they may be advised to go again and more often than is now the fashion to the writings of those men who found for their own time, a real significance, who could formulate a saving doctrine, and who could give to literature what it chiefly lacks to-day, a core of ethical conviction and a view of man in his world sub specie aeternitatis. It is the appointed time in which to read Dante and Milton, Shakespeare, and Goethe, above all Plato and the great tragedies of Greece. Our laughter would be sweeter if there were more depth of thought and emotion to our serious moods.



THE FAMILY MAGAZINE

Readers who like magazines will be pleased, those who do not like them perhaps distressed, to learn, if they are not already aware of it, that the magazine as we know it to-day is distinctly an American creation. They may stir, or soothe, their aroused emotions by considering that the magazine which began in England literally as a storehouse of miscellanies attained in mid- nineteenth century United States a dignity, a harmony, and a format which gave it preeminence among periodicals. Harper's and The Century in particular shared with Mark Twain and the sewing machine the honor of making America familiarly known abroad.

I do not wish to overburden this essay with history, but one of the reasons for the appearance of such a dominating medium in a comparatively unliterary country is relevant to the discussion to follow. The magazine of those days was vigorous. It was vigorous because, unlike other American publications, it was not oppressed by competition. Until the laws of international copyright were completed, the latest novels of the Victorians, then at their prime, could be rushed from a steamer, and distributed in editions which were cheap because no royalties had to be paid. Thackeray and Dickens could be sold at a discount, where American authors of less reputation had to meet full charges. And the like was true of poetry. But the magazine, like the newspaper, was not international; it was national at least in its entirety, and for it British periodicals could not be substituted. Furthermore, it could, and did, especially in its earlier years, steal unmercifully from England, so that a subscriber got both homebrew and imported for a single payment. Thus the magazine flourished in the mid-century while the American novel declined. A notable instance of this vigor was the effect of the growing magazine upon the infant short story. Our American magazine made the development of the American short story possible by creating a need for good short fiction. The rise of our short story, after a transitional period when the earliest periodicals and the illustrated Annuals sought good short stories and could not get them, coincides with the rise of the family magazine. It was such a demand that called forth the powers in prose of the poet, Poe. And as our magazine has become the best of its kind, so in the short story, and in the short story alone, does American literature rival the more fecund literatures of England and Europe.

That a strong and native tendency made the American magazine is indicated by the effect of our atmosphere upon the periodical which the English have always called a review. Import that form, as was done for The North American, The Atlantic Monthly, The Forum, or The Yale Review, and immediately the new American periodical begins to be a little more of a magazine, a little more miscellaneous in its content, a little less of a critical survey. Critical articles give place to memoirs and sketches, fiction or near fiction creeps in. There is always a tendency to lose type and be absorbed into the form that the mid-century had made so successful: a periodical, handsomely illustrated, with much fiction, some description, a little serious comment on affairs written for the general reader, occasional poetry, and enough humor to guarantee diversion. This is our national medium for literary expression—an admirable medium for a nation of long-distance commuters. And it is this "family magazine" I wish to discuss in its literary aspects.

The dominance of the family magazine as a purveyor of general literature in America has continued, but in our own time the species (like other strong organisms) has divided into two genres, which are more different than, on the surface, they appear. The illustrated literary magazine (the family magazine par excellence) must now be differentiated from the illustrated journalistic magazine, but both are as American in origin as the review and the critical weekly are English.

It was the native vigor of the family magazine that led to the Great Divergence of the 'nineties, which older readers will remember well. The literary historian of that period usually gives a different explanation. He is accustomed to say that the old-time "quality" magazines, Harper's, Scribner's, and the rest, were growing moribund when, by an effort of editorial genius, Mr. McClure created a new and rebellious type of magazine, which was rapidly imitated. We called it, as I remember, for want of a better title, the fifteen-cent magazine. In the wake of McClure's, came Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, The Ladies Home Journal, and all the long and profitable train which adapted the McClurean discovery to special needs and circumstances.

I do not believe that this is a true statement of what happened in the fruitful 'nineties. McClure's was not, speaking biologically, a new species at all; it was only a mutation in which the recessive traits of the old magazine became dominant while the invaluable type was preserved. To speak more plainly, the literary magazine, as America knew it, had always printed news, matured news, often stale news, but still journalism. Read any number of Harper's in the 'seventies for proof. And, pari passu, American journalism was eagerly trying to discover some outlet for its finer products, a medium where good pictures, sober afterthoughts, and the finish that comes from careful writing were possible. Harper's Weekly in Civil War days, and later, was its creation.

And now it was happily discovered that the family magazine had a potential popularity far greater than its limited circulation. With its month-long period of incubation, its elastic form, in which story, special article, poetry, picture, humor, could all be harmoniously combined, only a redistribution of emphasis was necessary in order to make broader its appeal. Mr. McClure journalized the family magazine. He introduced financial and economic news in the form of sensational investigations, he bid for stories more lively, more immediate in their interest, more journalistic than we were accustomed to read (Kipling's journalistic stories for example, were first published in America in McClure's). He accepted pictures in which certainty of hitting the public eye was substituted for a guarantee of art. And yet, with a month to prepare his number, and only twelve issues a year, he could pay for excellence, and insure it, as no newspaper had ever been able to do. And he was freed from the incubus of "local news" and day-by-day reports. In brief, under his midwifery, the literary magazine gave birth to a super-newspaper.

Needless to say, the great increase in the number of American readers and the corresponding decline in the average intelligence and discrimination of the reading public had much to do with the success of the journalistic magazine. Yet it may be stated, with equal truth, that the rapid advance in the average intelligence of the American public as a whole made a market for a super-newspaper in which nothing was hurried and everything well done. The contributions to literature through this new journalism have been at least as great during the period of its existence as from the "quality" magazine, the contributions toward the support of American authors much greater. Like all good journalism, it has included real literature when it could get and "get away with it."

Birth, however, in the literary as in the animal world, is exhausting and often leaves the parent in a debility which may lead to death. The periodical essay of the eighteenth century bore the novel of character, and died; the Gothic tale of a later date perished of the short story to which it gave its heart blood. The family magazine of the literary order has been debile, so radical critics charge, since its journalistic offspring began to sweep America. Shall it die?

By no means. An America without the illustrated literary magazine, dignified, respectable, certain to contain something that a reader of taste can peruse with pleasure, would be an unfamiliar America. And it would be a barer America. In spite of our brood of special magazines for the literati and the advanced, which Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer praises so warmly, we are not so well provided with the distributive machinery for a national culture as to flout a recognized agency with a gesture and a sneer. But the family magazine has undeniably lost its vigorous appeal, and must be reinvigorated. The malady is due to no slackening of literary virility in the country; indeed there has probably not been so much literary energy in the country since the 'forties as now—not nearly so much. Nor is it due to a lack of good readers. Nor, in my opinion, to the competition of the journalistic magazine. The literary magazine does not compete, or at least ought not to compete, with its offspring, for it appeals either to a different audience or to different tastes.

Roughly stated, the trouble is that the public for these excellent magazines has changed, and they have not. Their public always was, and is, the so-called "refined" home public. Homes have changed, especially "refined" homes, and a new home means a new public.

The refined home nowadays has been to college. (There are a million college graduates now in the United States.) Forty years ago only scattered members had gone beyond the school. I do not propose to exaggerate the influence upon intelligence of a college education. It is possible, nay, it is common, to go through college and come out in any real sense uneducated. But it is not possible to pass through college, even as a professional amateur in athletics or as an inveterate flapper, without rubbing off the insulation here and there, without knowing what thought is stirring, what emotions are poignant, what ideas are dominant among the fraction of humanity that leads us. Refined homes may not be better or happier than they used to be, but if they are intellectual at all, they are more vigorously intellectual.

This means at the simplest that home readers of the kind I have been describing want stimulating food, not what our grandfathers used to call "slops." Sometimes they feed exclusively upon highly spiced journalism, but if they are literary in their tastes they will be less content with merely literary stories, with articles that are too solid to be good journalism, yet too popular to be profound, less content, in short, with dignity as a substitute for force.

What should be done about it specifically is a question for editors to answer. But this may be said. If the old literary omnibus is to continue, as it deserves, to hold the center of the roadway, then it must be driven with some vigor of the intellect to match the vigor of news which has carried its cheaper contemporary fast and far. By definition it cannot embrace a cause or a thesis, like the weeklies, and thank Heaven for that! It is clearly unsafe to stand upon mere dignity, respectability, or cost. That way lies decadence—such as overcame the old Quarterlies, the Annuals, and the periodical essayists. Vigor it must get, of a kind naturally belonging to its species, not violent, not raucous, not premature. It must recapture its public, and this is especially the "old American" (which does not mean the Anglo-Saxon) element in our mingled nation.

These old Americans are not moribund by any means, and it is ridiculous to suppose, as some recent importations in criticism do, that a merely respectable magazine will represent them. A good many of them, to be sure, regard magazines as table decorations, and for such a clientele some one some day will publish a monthly so ornamental that it will be unnecessary to read it in order to share its beneficent influences. The remainder are intellectualized, and many of them are emancipated from the conventions of the last generation, if not from those of their own. These demand a new vitality of brain, emotion, and spirit in their literary magazine, and it must be given to them.

No better proof of all this could be sought than the renaissance in our own times of the reviews and the weeklies, probably the most remarkable phenomenon in the history of American publishing since the birth of yellow journalism. By the weeklies I do not mean journals like The Outlook, The Independent, Vanity Fair, which are merely special varieties of the typically American magazine. I refer, of course, to The New Republic, The Nation, The Freeman, The Weekly Review in its original form, periodicals formed upon an old English model, devoted to the spreading of opinion, and consecrated to the propagation of intelligence. The success of these weeklies has been out of proportion to their circulation. Like the old Nation, which in a less specialized form was their predecessor, they have distinctly affected American thinking, and may yet affect our action in politics, education, and social relations generally. They are pioneers, with the faults of intellectual pioneers, over-seriousness, over-emphasis, dogmatism, and intolerance. Yet it may be said fairly that their chief duty, as with the editorial pages of newspapers, is to be consistently partisan. At least they have proved that the American will take thinking when he can get it. And by inference, one assumes that he will take strong feeling and vigorous truth in his literary magazines.

The reviews also show how the wind is blowing. The review, so- called, is a periodical presenting articles of some length, and usually critical in character, upon the political, social, and literary problems of the day. The distinction of the review is that its sober form and not too frequent appearance enable it to give matured opinion with space enough to develop it.

Clearly a successful review must depend upon a clientele with time and inclination to be seriously interested in discussion, and that is why the review, until recently, has best flourished in England where it was the organ of a governing class. In America, an intellectual class who felt themselves politically and socially responsible, has been harder to discover. We had one in the early days of the Republic, when The North American Review was founded. It is noteworthy that we are developing another now and have seen The Yale Review, the late lamented Unpartisan Review, and others join The North American, fringed, so to speak, by magazines of excerpt (of which much might be written), such as The Review of Reviews, Current Opinion, and The Literary Digest, in which the function of the review is discharged for the great community that insists upon reading hastily.

The review has come to its own with the war and reconstruction; which, considering its handicaps, is another argument that the family magazine should heed the sharpening of the American intellect. But, except for the strongest members of the family, it is still struggling, and still dependent for long life upon cheapness of production rather than breadth of appeal.

The difficulty is not so much with the readers as the writers. The review must largely depend upon the specialist writer (who alone has the equipment for specialist writing), and the American specialist cannot usually write well enough to command general intelligent attention. This is particularly noticeable in the minor reviews where contributions are not paid for and most of the writing is, in a sense, amateur, but it holds good in the magazines and the national reviews also. The specialist knows his politics, his biology, or his finance as well as his English or French contemporary, but he cannot digest his subject into words —he can think into it, but not out of it, and so cannot write acceptably for publication. Hence in science particularly, but also in biography, in literary criticism, and less often in history, we have to depend frequently upon English pens for our illumination.

The reasons for this very serious deficiency, much more serious from every point of view than the specialists realize, are well known to all but the specialists, and I do not propose to enter into them here. My point is that this very defect, which has made it so difficult to edit a valid and interesting review (and so creditable to succeed as we have in several instances succeeded), is a brake also upon the family magazine in its attempt to regain virility. The newspaper magazines have cornered the market for clever reporters who tap the reservoirs of special knowledge and then spray it acceptably upon the public. This is good as far as it goes, but does not go far. The scholars must serve us themselves—and are too often incapable.

Editorial embarrassments are increased, however, by the difficulty of finding these intellectualized old Americans who have drifted away from the old magazines and are being painfully collected in driblets by the weeklies and the reviews. They do not, unfortunately for circulation, all live in a London, or Paris. They are scattered in towns, cities, university communities, lonely plantations, all over a vast country. Probably that intellectualized public upon which all good magazines as well as all good reviews must depend, has not yet become so stratified and homogeneous after the upheavals of our generation that a commercial success of journalistic magnitude is possible, but it can and must be found.

The success of The Atlantic Monthly in finding a sizable and homogeneous public through the country is interesting in just this connection. It has, so it is generally understood, been very much a question of finding—of going West after the departing New Englander and his children, and hunting him out with the goods his soul desired. One remembers the Yankee peddlers who in the old days penetrated the frontier with the more material products of New England, pans, almanacs, and soap. But an observer must also note a change in the character of The Atlantic itself, how it has gradually changed from a literary and political review, to a literary and social magazine, with every element of the familiar American type except illustrations and a profusion of fiction; how in the attempt to become more interesting without becoming journalistic it has extended its operations to cover a wider and wider arc of human appeal. It has both lost and gained in the transformation, but it has undoubtedly proved itself adaptable and therefore alive. This is not an argument that the reviews should become magazines and that the old-line magazine should give up specializing in pictures and in fiction. Of course not. It is simply more proof that vigor, adaptability, and a keen sense of existing circumstances are the tonics they also need. The weekly lacks balance, the review, professional skill in the handling of serious subjects, the family magazine, a willingness to follow the best public taste wherever it leads.

It has been very difficult in this discussion, which I fear has resembled a shot-gun charge rather than a rifle bullet, to keep the single aim I have had in mind. The history of the periodical in American literary thinking has not yet been written. The history of American literature has but just been begun. My object has been to put the spotlight for a moment upon the typical American magazine, with just enough of its environment to make a background. What is seen there can best be summarized by a comparison. The American weekly is like the serious American play of the period. It has an over-emphasis upon lesson, bias, thesis, point. The review is like much American poetry. It is worthy, and occasionally admirable, but as a type it is weakened by amateur mediocrity in the art of writing. The family magazine is like the American short story. It has conventionalized into an often successful immobility. Both must move again, become flexible, vigorous, or their date will be upon them. And the family magazine, the illustrated literary magazine, is the most interesting vehicle of human expression and interpretation that we Americans have created. With a new and greater success, it will draw all our other efforts with it. If it fails, hope for the interesting review, the well-balanced weekly, is precarious. If they all submerge, we who like to read with discrimination and gusto will have to take to books as an exclusive diet, or make our choice between boredom and journalism.



III

THE NEW GENERATION

THE YOUNG ROMANTICS

We have talked about the younger generation as if youth were a new phenomenon that had to be named and described, like a strange animal in the Garden of Eden. No wonder that our juniors have become self-conscious and have begun to defend themselves. Nevertheless, the generation born after the 'eighties has had an experience unique in our era. It has been urged, first by men and then by events, to discredit the statements of historians, the pictures of poets and novelists, and it has accepted the challenge. The result is a literature which speaks for the younger writers better, perhaps, than they speak for themselves, and this literature no reader whose brain is still flexible can afford to neglect; for to pass by youth for maturity is sooner or later to lose step with life.

In recent decades the novel especially, but also poetry, has drifted toward biography and autobiography. The older poets, who yesterday were the younger poets, such men as Masters, Robinson, Frost, Lindsay, have passed from lyric to biographic narrative; the younger poets more and more write of themselves. In the novel the trend is even more marked. An acute critic, Mr. Wilson Follett, has recently noted that the novel of class or social consciousness, which only ten years ago those who teach literature were discussing as the latest of late developments, has already given way to a vigorous rival. It has yielded room, if not given place, to the novel of the discontented person. The young men, and in a less degree the young women, especially in America, where the youngest generation is, I believe, more vigorous than elsewhere, have taken to biographical fiction. Furthermore, what began as biography, usually of a youth trying to discover how to plan his career, has drifted more and more toward autobiography—an autobiography of discontent.

There is, of course, nothing particularly new about biographical fiction. There is nothing generically new about the particular kind of demi-autobiographies that the advanced are writing just now. The last two decades have been rich in stories that need only a set of notes to reveal their approximate faithfulness to things that actually happened. But there is an emphasis upon revolt and disillusion and confusion in these latest novels that is new. They are no longer on the defensive, no longer stories of boys struggling to adapt themselves to a difficult world (men of forty- odd still write such stories); their authors are on the offensive, and with a reckless desire to accomplish their objectives, they shower us with such a profusion of detail, desert the paths of use and wont in fiction so freely, and so often disregard the comfort, not to speak of the niceties, of the reader, that "the young realists" has seemed a fair, although, as I think, a misleading title, for their authors. To a critic they are most interesting, for the novel of the alleged young realist is like a fresh country boy on a football field, powerful, promising, and utterly wasteful of its strength.

Recent American literature has been especially rich in such novels. There was, for example, Fitzgerald's ragged, but brilliant, "This Side of Paradise," which conducted aimless and expansive youth from childhood through college. There was the much more impressive "Main Street," biographic in form, but with teeth set on edge in revolt. There was the vivid and ill-controlled sex novel "Erik Dorn," and Evelyn Scott's "The Narrow House," in which the miseries of a young girl caught in the squalid and the commonplace had their airing. There was Stephen Benet's "The Beginning of Wisdom," where the revolt was a poet's, and the realist's detail selected from beauty instead of from ugliness; and Aikman's "Zell," in which youth rubs its sore shoulders against city blocks instead of university quadrangles. There was Dos Passos's "Three Soldiers," in which the boy hero is crushed by the war machine his elders have made. These are type examples, possibly not the best, certainly not the worst, drawn from the workshops of the so-called young realists.

What is the biography of this modern youth? His father, in the romantic 'nineties, usually conquered the life of his elders, seldom complained of it, never spurned it. His son-in-the-novel is born into a world of intense sensation, usually disagreeable. Instead of a "Peter Ibbetson" boyhood, he encounters disillusion after disillusion. At the age of seven or thereabout he sees through his parents and characterizes them in a phrase. At fourteen he sees through his education and begins to dodge it. At eighteen he sees through morality and steps over it. At twenty he loses respect for his home town, and at twenty-one discovers that our social and economic system is ridiculous. At twenty-three his story ends because the author has run through society to date and does not know what to do next. Life is ahead of the hero, and presumably a new society of his own making. This latter, however, does not appear in any of the books, and for good reasons.

In brief, this literature of the youngest generation is a literature of revolt, which is not surprising, but also a literature characterized by a minute and painful examination of environment. Youth, in the old days, when it rebelled, escaped to romantic climes or adventurous experience from a world which some one else had made for it. That is what the hacks of the movies and the grown-up children who write certain kinds of novels are still doing. But true youth is giving us this absorbed examination of all possible experiences that can come to a boy or girl who does not escape from every-day life, this unflattering picture of a world that does not fit, worked out with as much evidence as if each novel were to be part of a brief of youth against society. Indeed, the implied argument is often more important than the story, when there is a story. And the argument consists chiefly of "this happened to me," "I saw this and did not like it," "I was driven to this or that," until the mass of circumstantial incident and sensation reminds one of the works of Zola and the scientific naturalists who half a century ago tried to put society as an organism into fiction and art.

No better example has been given us than Dos Passos's "Three Soldiers," a book that would be tiresome (and is tiresome to many) in its night after night and day after day crammed with every possible unpleasant sensation and experience that three young men could have had in the A. E. F. And that the experiences recorded were unpleasant ones, forced upon youth, not chosen by its will, is thoroughly characteristic. If it had not been for the rebellious pacifism in this book, it is questionable whether readers who had not been in France, and so could not relish the vivid reality of the descriptions, would have read to the end of the story.

The cause of all this is interesting, more interesting than some of the results. The full result we can scarcely judge yet, for despite signs of power and beauty and originality, only one or two of these books have reached artistic maturity; but we can prepare to comprehend it.

Here, roughly, is what I believe has happened, and if I confine my conclusions to fiction, it is not because I fail to realize that the effects are and will be far broader.

The youths of our epoch were born and grew up in a period of criticism and disintegration. They were children when the attack upon orthodox conceptions of society succeeded the attack upon orthodox conceptions of religion. We know how "the conflict between religion and science" reverberated in nineteenth-century literature and shaped its ends. The new attack was quite different. Instead of scrutinizing a set of beliefs, it scrutinized a method of living. Insensibly, the intelligent youth became aware that the distribution of wealth and the means of getting it were under attack; that questions were raised as to the rights of property and the causes and necessity of war. Soon moral concepts began to be shaken. He learned that prostitution might be regarded as an economic evil. He found that sex morality was regarded by some as a useful taboo; psychology taught him that repression could be as harmful as excess; the collapse of the Darwinian optimists, who believed that all curves were upward, left him with the inner conviction that everything, including principle, was in a state of flux. And his intellectual guides, first Shaw, and then, when Shaw became vieux jeu, De Gourmont, favored that conclusion.

Then came the war, which at a stroke destroyed his sense of security and with that his respect for the older generation that had guaranteed his world. Propaganda first enlightened him as to the evil meanings of imperialistic politics, and afterward left him suspicious of all politics. Cruelty and violent change became familiar. He had seen civilization disintegrate on the battlefield, and was prepared to find it shaky at home.

Then he resumed, or began, his reading and his writing. His reading of fiction and poetry, especially when it dealt with youth, irritated him. The pictures of life in Dickens, in "The Idylls of the King," in the Henty books, in the popular romantic novels and the conventional social studies, did not correspond with his pictures. They in no sense corresponded with the descriptions of society given by the new social thinkers whose ideas had leaked through to him. They did not square with his own experience. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" rang false to a member of the 26th Division. Quiet stories of idyllic youth in New England towns jarred upon the memories of a class-conscious youngster in modern New York. Youth began to scrutinize its own past, and then to write, with a passionate desire to tell the real truth, all of it, pleasant, unpleasant, or dirty, regardless of narrative relevance.

The result was this new naturalism, a propaganda of the experience of youth, where the fact that mother's face was ugly, not angelic, is supremely important, more important than the story, just because it was the truth. And as the surest way to get all the truth is to tell your own story, every potential novelist wrote his own story, enriching it, where sensation was thin, from the biographies of his intimates. Rousseau was reborn without his social philosophy. Defoe was reincarnated, but more anxious now to describe precisely what happened to him than to tell an effective tale.

This is a very different kind of truth-telling from, let us say, Mrs. Wharton's in "The Age of Innocence" or Zona Gale's in "Miss Lulu Bett." It does not spring from a desire to tell the truth about human nature.

These asserters of youth are not much interested in any human nature except their own, not much, indeed, in that, but only in the friction between their ego and the world. It is passionate truth, which is very different from cool truth; it is subjective, not objective; romantic, not classical, to use the old terms which few nowadays except Professor Babbitt's readers understand. Nor is it the truth that Wells, let us say, or, to use a greater name, Tolstoy was seeking. It is not didactic or even interpretative, but only the truth about the difference between the world as it is and the world as it was expected to be; an impressionistic truth; in fact, the truth about my experiences, which is very different from what I may sometime think to be the truth about mankind.

It will be strange if nothing very good comes from this impulse, for the purpose to "tell the world" that my vision of America is startlingly different from what I have read about America is identical with that break with the past which has again and again been prelude to a new era. I do not wish to discuss the alleged new era. Like the younger generation, it has been discussed too much and is becoming evidently self-conscious. But if the autobiographical novel is to be regarded as its literary herald (and they are all prophetic Declarations of Independence), then we may ask what has the new generation given us so far in the way of literary art.

Apparently the novel and the short story, as we have known them, are to be scrapped. Plot, which began to break down with the Russians, has crumbled into a maze of incident. You can no longer assume that the hero's encounter with a Gipsy in Chapter II is preparation for a tragedy in Chapter XXIX. In all probability the Gipsy will never be heard from again. She is irrelevant except as a figment in the author's memory, as an incident in autobiography. Setting, the old familiar background, put on the story like wall- paper on a living-room, has suffered a sea change also. It comes now by flashes, like a movie-film. What the ego remembers, that it describes, whether the drip of a faucet or the pimple on the face of a traffic policeman. As for character, there is usually but one, the hero; for the others live only as he sees them, and fade out when he looks away. If he is highly sexed, like Erik Dorn, the other figures appear in terms of sex, just as certain rays of light will bring out only one color in the objects they shine against.

The novel, in fact, has melted and run down into a diary, with sometimes no unity except the personality whose sensations are recorded. Many of us have wished to see the conventional story forms broken to bits. It was getting so that the first sentence ofa short story or the first chapter of a novel gave the whole show away. We welcomed the English stories of a decade ago that began to give the complexities of life instead of the conventions of a plot. But this complete liquidation rather appals us. The novels I have mentioned so far in this article have all together not enough plot to set up one lively Victorian novel. Benet, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald—the flood-gates of each mind have been opened, and all that the years had dammed up bursts forth in a deluge of waters, carrying flotsam and jetsam and good things and mud.

It is not surprising that, having given up plot, these writers escape from other restraints also. The more energetic among them revel in expression, and it seems to make little difference whether it is the exquisite chiaroscuro of Chicago they are describing, or spots on a greasy apron. The less enthusiastic are content to be as full of gritty realistic facts as a fig of seeds; but with all of them everything from end to beginning, from bottom to top, must be said.

And just here lies the explanation of the whole matter. As one considers the excessive naturalism of the young realists and asks just why they find it necessary to be so excessively, so effusively realistic, the conviction is inborn that they are not realists at all as Hardy, Howells, even James were realists; they are romanticists of a deep, if not the deepest, dye, even the heartiest lover of sordid incident among them all.

I am aware, of course, that "romantic" is a dangerous word, more overworked than any other in the vocabulary of criticism, and very difficult to define. But in contrast with its opposites it can be made to mean something definite. Now, the romanticism of the juniors is not the opposite of realism; it sometimes embraces realism too lovingly for the reader's comfort. But it is the opposite of classicism. It is emotional expansiveness as contrasted with the classic doctrine of measure and restraint. By this, the older meaning of romanticism, we may put a tag upon the new men that will help to identify them. Their desire is to free their souls from the restraints of circumstance, to break through rule and convention, to let their hearts expand.

But they do not fly into Byronic melancholy or Wordsworthian enthusiasm for the mysterious abstract; they are far more likely to fly away from them. Byron and Wordsworth do not interest them, and Tennyson they hate. Romantic in mood, they are realistic, never classical, in their contact with experience. In poetry they prefer free verse, in prose they eschew grand phrases and sonorous words. It has been the hard realism of an unfriendly world that has scraped them to the raw, and they retaliate by vividly describing all the unpleasant things they remember. Taught by the social philosophers and war's disillusions that Denmark is decaying, they do not escape to Cathay or Bohemia, but stay at home and passionately narrate what Denmark has done to them. Romantic Zolas, they have stolen the weapons of realism to fight the battle of their ego. And the fact that a few pause in their naturalism to soar into idyllic description or the rapture of beauty merely proves my point, that they are fundamentally romantics seeking escape, and that autobiographical realism is merely romanticism a la mode.

Let us criticize it as such, remembering that we may be reading the first characteristic work of a new literary era. Let us give over being shocked. Those who were shocked by Byron, the apostle of expansiveness, merely encouraged him to be more shocking. Nor is it any use to sit upon the hydrant of this new expansiveness. If a youth desires to tell the world what has happened to him, he must be allowed to do so, provided he has skill and power enough to make us listen. And these juniors have power even when skill has not yet been granted them. What is needed is a hose to stop the waste of literary energy, to conserve and direct it. Call for a hose, then, as much as you please, but do not try to stop the waters with your Moses's rod of conservative indignation.

It is no crime to be a romantic,—it is a virtue, if that is the impulse of the age,—but it is a shame to be a wasteful romantic. Waste has always been the romantic vice—waste of emotion, waste of words, the waste that comes from easy profusion of sentiment and the formlessness that permits it. Think of "The Excursion," of Southey, and of the early poems of Shelley, of Scott at his wordiest. And these writers also are wasteful, in proportion to their strength.

They waste especially their imagination. Books like "The Three Soldiers" spill over in all directions—spill into poetry, philosophy, into endless conversation, and into everything describable. Books like "The Beginning of Wisdom" are still more wasteful. Here is the poignant biography of a boy who loves his environment even when it slays him, plus a collection of prose idylls, plus a group of poems, plus a good piece of special reporting, plus an assortment of brilliant letters; and imbedded in the mass, like a thread of gold in a tangle of yarn, as fresh and exquisite a love-story as we have had in recent English. Of course I do not mean that all these elements cannot be woven into, made relevant to, a theme, a story. Stendhal, himself a romantic, as these men are romantics, could do it. But our romantics do not so weave them; they fling them out as contributions to life's evidence, they fail to relate them to a single interpretation of living, and half of the best incidents are waste, and clog the slow-rolling wheels of the story.

They waste their energy also. So keenly do they love their own conception of true living that their imaginations dwell with a kind of horrid fascination upon the ugly things that thwart them. Hence in a novel like "Main Street," the interest slackens as one begins to feel that the very vividness of the story comes from a vision strained and aslant, unable to tear eyes from the things that have cramped life instead of expanding it. The things that these writers love in life often they never reach until the last chapter, and about them they have little to say, being exhausted by earlier virulence.

Waste, of course, is a symptom of youth and vitality as well as of unbridled romanticism, but that is no reason for praising a book because it is disorderly. We do not praise young, vigorous states for being disorderly. Life may not be orderly, but literature must be. That is a platitude which it seems necessary to repeat.

It is difficult to estimate absolute achievement except across time, and the time has been too brief to judge of the merits of the young romanticists. My guess is that some of them will go far. But the diagnosis at present seems to show an inflammation of the ego. The new generation is discovering its soul by the pain of its bruises, as a baby is made aware of its body by pin-pricks and chafes. It is explaining its dissatisfactions with more violence than art.

Therefore at present the satirists and the educators hold the best cards, and most of them are elderly. No one of les jeunes writes with the skill, with the art, of Mrs. Wharton, Miss Sinclair, Tarkington, Galsworthy, or Wells. It should not long be so in a creative generation. In sheer emotion, in vivid protest that is not merely didactic, the advantage is all with the youngsters. But they waste it. They have learned to criticize their elders, but not themselves. They have boycotted the books of writers who were young just before themselves, but they have not learned to put a curb on their own expansiveness. We readers suffer. We do not appreciate their talents as we might, because we lose our bearings in hectic words or undigested incident. We lose by the slow realization of their art.

Youth is a disease that cures itself, though sometimes too late. The criticism I have made, in so far as it refers to youthful impetuosity, is merely the sort of thing that has to be said to every generation, and very loudly to the romantic ones. But if these autobiographians are, as I believe, expansive romanticists, that is of deeper significance, and my hope is that the definition may prove useful to them as well as to readers who with an amazed affection persist in following them wherever they lead.



PURITANS ALL

When anything goes wrong in politics the American practice is to charge it against the Administration. In literature all grievances are attributed to the Puritans. If a well-written book does not sell, it is because the Puritans warped our sense of beauty; if an honest discussion of sex is attacked for indecency, it is the fault of the Puritan inheritance; if the heroes and heroines of new narratives in prose or verse jazz their way to destruction or impotence, it is in protest against the Puritans.

Who is this terrible Puritan? Apparently he is all America's ancestor, and whether you were born in Delaware or in South Carolina, in Montana or in Jugoslavia, you must adopt him as great-great-grandfather or declare yourself alien.

What was he, or rather, what did he stand for, and inflict upon us, to-day? Here there is some confusion. According to one set of critics he is not so much a hater of the arts as indifferent to their charms, not so much a Milton scornful of easy beauty, as a Philistine, deaf and blind to the aesthetic. But these writers have apparently confounded Great-great-grandfather Puritan with Grandpa Victorian, the Victorian that Matthew Arnold scolded and Shaw made fun of. He is a type as different from the real Puritan as the slum dweller from the primitive barbarian. "Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour" to flay such ignorant traducers of those who knew at least the beauty of austerity and holiness.

According to a less numerous but more clear-headed group of enemies the Puritan is to be censured chiefly for the rigidity of his conscience. He will not let us enjoy such "natural" pleasures as mirth, love, drinking, and idleness without a bitter antidote of remorse. He keeps books dull and reticent, makes plays virtuously didactic, and irritates all but the meek and the godly into revolt.

I am not an uncritical admirer of the Puritan, although I believe he is more nearly on the side of the angels than is his opposite. I deprecate the smug virtuosity which his kind often favor, I dislike a vinegar morality, and am repelled by the monstrous egoism of the idea that redeeming one's soul is such a serious matter that every moment spared from contemplating the sins of others or the pieties of oneself is irretrievably wasted.

But I object still more strongly to the anti-Puritans. Those rebels who make unconventionality their only convention, with their distrust of duty because they see no reason to be dutiful, and their philosophic nihilism, which comes to this, that all things having been proved false except their own desires, their desires become a philosophy, those anti-Puritans, as one sees them, especially in plays and on the stage, are an obstreperous, denying folk that seldom know their own minds to the end of the story. In fiction, distrusting what the Puritans call duty, they are left gasping in the last chapter, wondering usually what they are to do next; while the delightful lack of conscience that makes the flappers audacious and the young men so unremorsefully naughty leads to nothing at the end but a passionate desire to discover some new reason for living (which I take to mean, a new conscience) even if homes and social utility are wrecked in the attempt.

Why has duty become so unpopular in American literature? Is it because she is, after all, just what that loftiest if not most impeccable of Puritans called her, stern daughter of the voice of God? Is there to be no more sternness in our morals now we understand their psychology, no voice commanding us to do this or not to do that because there is a gulf set between worth and worthlessness? Is it true that because we are not to be damned for playing golf on Sunday, nothing can damn us? That because the rock-ribbed Vermont ancestor's idea of duty can never be ours, we have no duty to acknowledge? Is it true that if we cease being Puritans we can remain without principle, swayed only by impulse and events?

When these questions are answered to the hilt, we shall get something more vital than anti-Puritanism in modern American literature.



THE OLDER GENERATION

The American Academy of Arts and Letters says a word for the Older Generation now and then by choosing new academicians from its ranks. No one else for a long while now has been so poor as to do it reverence. Indeed, the readers of some of our magazines must have long since concluded that there are no fathers and mothers in the modern literary world, but only self-created heralds of the future who do not bother even to be rebellious against a generation they condemn.

The older generation is in a difficult situation, because, apparently, no one knows precisely who and what it is. The younger generation, of course, is made up of every one who dislikes Tennyson, believes in realism, reads De Gourmont, and was not responsible for the war. That is perfectly definite. We are somewhat puzzled by the uncounted hordes of the youthful in appearance who support the movies, are stolidly conservative in the colleges, never heard of De Gourmont, and have forgotten the war. But perhaps that is some other younger generation which no one has taken the trouble to write about—yet.

As for the older generation, what actually is it, and who in reality are they? The general impression seems to be that they are the Victorians, they are Howells and his contemporaries, they are the men and women who created the family magazine, invented morality, revived Puritanism, and tried to impose evolution on a society that preferred devolution by international combat. But these men are all dead, or have ceased writing. They are not our older generation. It is true that they are famous and so convenient for reference, but it is not accurate nor fair to drag them from their graves for purposes of argument.

The true older generation, of which one seldom hears in current criticism except in terms of abuse, remains to be discovered, and we herewith announce its personnel, so that the next time the youthful writer excoriates it in the abstract all may know just whom he means. Among the older generation in American literature are H. L. Mencken and Mrs. Edith Wharton, Booth Tarkington and Stuart P. Sherman, Miss Amy Lowell and Mr. Frank Moore Colby, Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson, Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg, Mrs. Gerould and Professor William Lyon Phelps, Edgar Lee Masters, Joseph Hergesheimer, and most of the more radicaleditors of New York. Here is this group of desiccated Victorians, upholders of the ethics of Mr. Pickwick, and the artistic theories of Bulwer-Lytton. Here are the bogies of outworn conservatism, numbered like a football team. Mark their names, and know from now on that most of the books that you have supposed were solid in artistry and mature in thought, though perhaps novel in tone or in method, were written by the older generation.

Perhaps when the younger generation pretend to confuse their immediate predecessors with Ruskin and Carlyle, with Browning, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Matthew Arnold, they are merely strategic. For it is still dangerous to assault the citadels of the great Victorians with no greater books than the youthful volumes of 1918-1921, no matter how many breaches the war has left in the walls of their philosophy. It is far easier to assume that they are still alive in pallid survival, and to attack a hypothetic older generation, which, representing nothing real, can therefore not strike back.

Let the younger generation go back to its muttons, let it attend to its most pressing business, which is to create. It is vigorous, prolific, and, to my judgment, full of promise, but so far has done little or nothing not summarized in these words. It must pay its debt to time before it grows much older, or go down among expectations unrealized. It has few hours to waste upon attacking an older generation which, as it is described, does not exist except in youthful imagination, a generation actually of the middle-aged which in the meantime is bearing the burden of invention, creation, revolution in art while the youngsters are talking.

I should like to see less about the younger and more of this older generation in literary criticism. It is a fresh subject, scarcely touched by writers, and full of surprises. The jaded reader should be told that, in spite of rumors to the contrary, the middle-aged still exist.



A LITERATURE OF PROTEST

I have pursued the discussions of the new American realism through university gatherings and literary inquests. Stripped of all metaphysics and relieved of all subtlety the conclusion of the matter is inescapable. It is not the realism of the realists, or the freedom of free verse, or the radicalism of the radical that in itself offends the critics, it is the growing ugliness of American literature. The harsh and often vulgar lines of Masters (so they say) seem to disdain beauty. Vachel Lindsay's shouted raptures are raucous. Miss Lowell's polyphonies have intellectual beauty, but the note is sharp, the splendors pyrotechnic. Robert Frost's restrained rhythms are homely in the single line. The "advanced" novelists, who win the prizes and stir up talk, are flat in style when not muddy in their English. They do not lift. An eighteenth century critic would call American literature ugly, or at least homely, if he dipped into its realities, rococo if he did not.

This is the sum of a criticism so strongly felt that it raises a barrier to appreciation, almost a gate shut against knowledge between the good American readers and the progressives in our literature. Sandburg and Lindsay between them will cause more acrimony in a gathering of English teachers than even Harold Bell Wright. Miss Lowell carries controversy with her, triumphantly riding upon it. Their critics wish form as they have known form, want beauty such as they possess in riper literatures, want maturity, richness, suavity, grace, and the lift of noble thinking, nobly expressed. It may be remarked, in passing, that they also would like to live in English manors in gardened landscapes and have French cathedrals rise above their perfect towns!

It ought to be clear that we shall never get beauty of this kind, or of any absolute kind, in American writing until there is more beauty in American life. Amidst the vulgarities of signboards, cries of cheap newspapers, noisy hustle of trivial commercialism, and the flatness of standardized living, it is hard to feel spiritual qualities higher than optimism and reform. In general, wherever we have touched America we have made it uglier, as a necessary preliminary perhaps to making it anything at all, but uglier nevertheless. There was more hardship perhaps but also more clear beauty in Colonial days than in our own. More clear beauty, we say, because the present has its own vigorous beauty, more complex than what went before, but not yet clarified from the ugly elements that are making it. The forests and the skyscrapers are beautiful in America, but pretty much everything else below and between is soiled or broken by progress and prosperity.

And it is of the things in between, of America in the making, that these new writers, whose lack of pure beauty we deplore, and whose occasional gratuitous ugliness we dislike, are writing. They are protesting against its sordidness and crudity far more effectively than the cloistered reader who recites Shelley, saying "Why can't they write as he does." Like all that is human they share the qualities of their environment, like all fighters they acquire the faults of the enemy. They hate, often enough, the ugliness which a generation of progress has implanted in their own minds. They have been educated, perhaps, by the movies, Main Street conversation, formalized schools, and stale Methodism, and they hate their education. Or like the poets mentioned above they are moved by the pathos, the injustice, the confused beauty, the promise, not of some land of the past, but of the country under their feet, and write of what stirs them in terms that fit.

It is only when one understands this new American writing to be a literature of protest, that one begins to sympathize with its purposes, admire its achievements, and be tolerant of its limitations. For such a literature has very definite limitations. It is preparative rather than ultimate. The spaciousness of great imagination is seldom in it, and it lacks those grand and simple conceptions which generalize upon the human race. It is cluttered with descriptions of the enemy, it is nervous, or morbid, or excited, or over-emphatic. That it strikes out occasional sparks of vivid beauty, and has already produced masterpieces in poetry, is to be wondered at and praised.

But some one had to begin to write of the United States as it is. We could not go on with sentimental novels and spineless lyrics forever. Some writers had to refocus the instrument and look at reality again. And what the honest saw was not beautiful as Tennyson knew beauty, not grand, not even very pleasant. It is their job to make beauty out of it, beauty of a new kind probably, because it will accompany new truth; but they must have time. Surprise, shock, experiment, come first. The new literature deserves criticism, but it also deserves respect. Contempt for it is misplaced, aversion is dangerous since it leads to ignorance, wholesale condemnation such as one hears from professional platforms and reads in newspaper editorials is as futile as the undiscriminating praise of those who welcome novelty just because it is new.



BARBARIANS A LA MODE

The liberal mind, which just now is out of a job in politics, might very well have a look at the present state of literature. A task is there ready for it.

Our literature is being stretched and twisted or hacked and hewed by dogmatists. Most of the critics are too busy gossiping about plots and the private lives of authors to devote much attention to principles. But the noble few who still can write about a book without falling into it, or criticize an author's style without dragging in his taste in summer resorts, are chiefly concerned with classifications. Is our author conservative or radical? Are his novels long or short skirted? Does he write for Harper's or The Dial? They have divided America chronologically into the old and the new and geographically into East or West of the Alleghanies, or North or South of Fourteenth Street in New York. Such creative writers as have a definite philosophy of composition are equally categorical. And both are calling upon liberal minds, who are supposed to have no principles of their own, to umpire the controversy.

The liberal mind, which I believe in, though I hesitate to define it, has too much work before it to umpire in a dispute over the relative taste of the decayed and the raw. In literature, as in pretty much everything else, the central problem is not the struggle of the old with the new; it is the endless combat of civilization (which is old and new) against barbarism. Under which banner our writers are enlisting is the vital question. Whether they are radical or conservative will always in the view of history be interesting, but may be substantially unimportant. And the function of the liberal mind, with its known power to dissolve illiberal dogmatism, is to discover the barbarian wherever he raises his head, and to convert or destroy him.

The Greeks had a short way of defining the barbarian which we can only envy. To them, all men not Greeks were barbarians. By this they meant that only the Greeks had learned to desire measure in all things, liberty safeguarded by law, and knowledge of the truth about life. Men not desiring these things were barbarous, no matter how noble, how rich, and how honest. The ancient and highly conservative Egyptians were barbarous; the youthful and new- fangled Gauls were barbarous. An Egyptian in nothing else resembled a Gaul, but both in the eyes of the Greek were barbarians.

Evolution and devolution have intervened. The Gaul has become one of the standards of civilization; the Egyptian has died of his conservatism; but the problem of the barbarian remains the same. There are neo-Gauls to-day and neo-Egyptians.

These gentry do not belong to the welter of vulgar barbarism, the curse of a half educated, half democratized age. They are found among the upper classes of the intellect, and can rightly be called by such names as conservative or radical, which show that they are part of the minority that thinks. Indeed, they are not barbarous at all in the harsh modern sense of the word; yet the Greeks would have condemned them.

The barbarism of the neo-Gaul is unrestraint ("punch" is the nearest modern equivalent). The neo-Gaul is an innovator and this is his vice. It is a byproduct of originality and a symptom of a restless desire for change. The realist who makes a poem, not on his lady's eyebrows but her intestines, is a good current example. The novelist who shovels undistinguished humanity, just because it is human, into his book is another. The versifier who twists and breaks his rhythm solely in order to get new sounds is a third. A fourth is the stylist who writes in disjointed phrases and expletives, intended to represent the actual processes of the mind.

The realist poet, so the Greeks would have said, lacks measure. He destroys the balance of his art by asking your attention for the strangeness of his subject. It is as if a sculptor should make a Venus of chewing gum. The novelist lacks self-restraint. Life interests him so much that he devours without digesting it. The result is like a moving picture run too fast. The versifier also lacks measure. He is more anxious to be new than to be true, and he seeks effects upon the reader rather than forms for his thought. The bizarre stylist misses truth by straining too much to achieve it. Words are only symbols. They never more than roughly represent a picture of thought. A monologue like this, as the heroine goes to shop: Chapel Street...the old hardware shop...scissors, skates glittering, moonlight on the ice...old Dr. Brown's head, like a rink. Rink...a queer word! Pigeons in the air above the housetops—automobiles like elephants. Was her nose properly powdered?... Had she cared to dance with him after all? is not absolutely true: it is not the wordless images that float through the idle mind, but only a symbol of them, more awkward and less informative than the plain English of what the heroine felt and thought.

All these instances are barbarous in the Greek sense, and their perpetrators, no matter how cultivated, how well-meaning, how useful sometimes as pioneers and pathbreakers, are barbarians. Some of them should be exposed; some chided; some labored with, according to the magnitude and the nature of their offense. The critics who uphold and approve them should be dealt with likewise. And it is the reader with the liberal mind who is called to the task. He is in sympathy, at least, with change, and knows that the history of civilization has been a struggle to break away from tradition and yet not go empty-handed; he can understand the passion to express old things in a new and better way, or he is not intellectually liberal. It takes a liberal mind to distinguish between barbarism and progress.

Next there is the rigor mortis of the neo-Egyptians, the barbarism of the dead hand, called by the unkind and the undiscriminating, academic barbarism.

Let us humor the Menckenites by so calling it, and then add that it is by no means confined to the colleges, although it is a vice more familiar in critics than in creative artists. A Ph.D. is quite unnecessary in order to be academic in this sense, just as one does not have to be a scholar in order to be pedantical. To stand pat in one's thinking (and this is the neo-Egyptian fault) is to be barbarous, whatever the profession of the thinker. True, the victims of this hardening of the brain are precisely those men and women most likely to fling taunts at the moderns, just those who would rather be charged with immorality than barbarism. And yet, to be bound to the past is as barbarous in the Greek sense as to be wholly immersed in the present. The Egyptians for all their learning were barbarians.

Barbarian is not as rude a word as it sounds. Most of the great romanticists had strains of the barbarous in them—the young Shakespeare among them. Indeed, much may be said for sound barbarian literature, until it becomes self-conscious, though not much for barbarian criticism. Nevertheless, I do not intend in this sally against the slavish barbarism of the merely academic mind to hurl the epithet recklessly. Lusty conservatives who attack free verse, free fiction, ultra realism, "jazzed" prose, and the socialistic drama as the diseases of the period have my respect and sympathy, when it is a disease and not change as change that they are attacking. And, often enough, these manifestations are symptoms of disease, a plethoric disease arising from too high blood pressure. Hard-hitting conservatives were never more needed in literature than now, when any one can print anything that is novel, and find some one to approve of it. But there are too many respectable barbarians among our American conservatives who write just what they wrote twenty years ago, and like just what they liked twenty years ago, because that is their nature. In 1600 they would have done the same for 1579. Without question men were regretting in 1600 the genius of the youthful Shakespeare of the '80's, later quenched by commercialism (see the appeals to the pit and the topical references in "Hamlet"); and good conservatives were certainly regretting the sad course of the drama which, torn from the scholars and flung to the mob, had become mad clowning. What we need in the Tory line is not such ice-bound derelicts but men who are passionate about the past because they find their inspiration there, men and women who belabor the present not for its existence, but because it might have been better if it had been wiser.

They must, in short, be Greeks, not barbarians. It is the reverse of barbarous to defend the old, but the man who can see no need, no good, no hope in change is a barbarian. He flinches from the truth physical and the truth spiritual that life is motion. I particularly refer to the literary person who sneers at novels because they are not epics, and condemns new poems or plays unread if they deal with a phase of human evolution that does not please him. I mean the critic who drags his victim back to Aristotle or Matthew Arnold and slays him on a text whose application Aristotle or Arnold would have been the first to deny. I mean the teacher who by ironic thrust and visible contempt destroys the faith of youth in the literary present without imparting more than a pallid interest in the past. I mean the essayist who in 1911 described Masefield as an unsound and dangerous radical in verse, and in 1921 accepts him as the standard "modern" poet by whom his degenerate successors are to be measured.

All this is barbarism because it is ignorance or denial of the laws of growth. It belongs anthropologically with totemism, sacerdotalism, neo-ritualism, and every other remnant of the terrible shackles of use and wont which chained early man to his past. It is Egyptian. Its high priests are sometimes learned but their minds are frozen. Beware of them.

In England, so far as I am able to judge, this variety of barbarism shows itself usually in a rather snobbish intolerance of anything not good form in literature. The universities still protect it, but its home is in London, among the professional middle class.

In America its symptom is well-disguised fear. Some of us are afraid of our literary future just as many of us are afraid of democracy. Poetry and criticism (we feel) which used to be written by classicists and gentlemen are now in the hands of the corn-fed multitude, educated God knows how or where. Fiction, once a profession, has become a trade, and so has the drama. The line between journalism and literature is lost. Grub Street has become an emporium. Any one, anything can get into a story or a sonnet....

The Greek of to-day (as we venture to define him) views all this with some regret, and more concern. He sees that fine traditions are withering, that fine things are being marred by ignorant handling. He fears debasement, he hates vulgarity, and his realist soul admits the high probability of both in a society whose standards are broader than they are high. But he also sees new energies let loose and new resources discovered; he recognizes new forms of expression, uncouth or colloquial perhaps, but capable of vitality and truth, and not without beauty. He bends his mind toward them, knowing that if he ignores them their authors will ignore him and his kind.

The Egyptian is afraid. He pulls his mantle closer about him and walks by on the other side.

Here again is work for the liberal mind. If it is really liberal— which means that training and disposition have made it free to move through both the past and the present—it can cope with this Egyptian barbarism; for liberal-minded lovers of literature, by performing a very simple operation in psychoanalysis, can understand how love for the good old times may cause fear lest we lose their fruits, and how fear blinds the critic's eye, makes his tongue harsh, and his judgment rigid as death.

Liberalism in politics is sulking just now, like Achilles in his tent, its aid having been invited too early, or too late. But the liberal spirit can never rest, and we solicit its help in literature. I have mentioned the Gauls and the Egyptians as the enemies within the camp of the intellectual, but beyond them lie the uncounted numbers of the outer barbarians, the mass of the unillumined, to whom neither tradition nor revolt, nor anything which moves and has its being in the intellect has any significance. Here is the common enemy of all, who can be conquered only by converting him. When the Gaul and the Egyptian are liberalized, the real job begins.

"If we compose well here, to Parthia."



IV

THE REVIEWING OF BOOKS

A PROSPECTUS FOR CRITICISM

Criticism, in one respect, is like science: there is pure science, so-called, and applied science; there is pure criticism and applied criticism, which latter is reviewing. In applied science, principles established elsewhere are put to work; in reviewing, critical principles are, or should be, put to work in the analysis of books, but the books, if they are really important, often make it necessary to erect new critical principles. In fact, it is impossible to set a line where criticism ceases and reviewing begins. Good criticism is generally applicable to all literature; good reviewing is good criticism applied to a new book. I see no other valid distinction.

Reviewing in America has had a career by no means glorious. In the early nineteenth century, at the time of our first considerable productivity in literature, it was sporadic. The great guns— Lowell, Emerson—fired critical broadsides into the past; only occasionally (as in "A Fable for Critics") were they drawn into discussions of their contemporaries, and then, as in the Emerson- Whitman affair, they sometimes regretted it. Reviewing was carried on in small type, in the backs of certain magazines. Most of it was verbose and much of it was worthless as criticism. The belated recognition of the critical genius of Poe was due to the company he kept. He was a sadly erratic reviewer, as often wrong, I suppose, as right, but the most durable literary criticism of the age came from his pen, and is to be found in a review, a review of Hawthorne's short stories.

After the Civil War the situation did not immediately improve. We had perhaps better reviewing, certainly much better mediums of criticism, such, for example, as The Nation, and, later, The Critic, but not more really excellent criticism. The magazines and newspapers improved, the weekly, as a medium of reviewing, established itself, though it functioned imperfectly; the individuals of force and insight who broke through current comment into criticism were more plentiful, but not more eminent.

The new era in reviewing, our era, began with two phenomena, of which the first had obscure beginnings and the second can be exactly dated.

The first was modern journalism. Just when journalism became personal, racy, and inclusive of all the interests of modern life, I cannot say. Kipling exhibits its early effects upon literature, but Kipling was an effect, not a cause. No matter when it began, we have seen, in the decade or two behind us, reviewing made journalistic, an item of news, but still more a means of entertainment.

The journalistic reviewer, who is still the commonest variety, had one great merit. He was usually interesting. Naturally so, since he wrote not to criticize the book that had been given him, but to interest his readers. Yet by the very nature of the case he labored under a disadvantage which forever barred him from calling himself critic as well as reviewer. He was a specialist in reporting, in making a story from the most unpromising material, and also in the use of his mother tongue, but a specialist, usually, in no other field whatsoever. Fiction, poetry, biography, science, history, politics, theology—whatever came to his mill was grist for the paper, and the less he knew of the subject and the less he had read and thought, the more emphatic were his opinions.

The club and saber work of Pope's day and Christopher North's has gone—advertising has made it an expensive luxury, and here at least commercialism has been of service to literature. It was wholesale and emphatic praise that became a trademark of journalistic reviewing. First novels, or obscure novels, were sometimes handled roughly by a reviewer whose duty was to prepare a smart piece of copy. But when books by the well known came to his desk it was safer to praise than to damn, because in damning one had to give reasons, whereas indiscriminate praise needed neither knowledge nor excuse. Furthermore, since the chief object was to have one's review read, excessive praise had every advantage over measured approval. Who would hesitate between two articles, one headed "The Best Book of the Year," and the other, "A New Novel Critically Considered"!

Thus, journalism per se has done little for the cause of American reviewing, and directly or indirectly it has done much harm, if only by encouraging publishers who found no competent discussions of their wares to set up their own critics, who poured out through the columns of an easy press commendations of the new books which were often most intelligent, but never unbiased.

The newspapers, however, have rendered one great service to criticism. In spite of their attempts to make even the most serious books newsy news, they, and they alone, have kept pace with the growing swarm of published books. The literary supplement, which proposed to review all books not strictly technical or transient, was a newspaper creation. And the literary supplement, which grew from the old book page, contained much reviewing which was in no bad sense journalistic. Without it the public would have had only the advertisements and the publishers' announcements to classify, analyze, and in some measure describe the regiment of books that marches in advance of our civilization.

We were not to be dependent, however, upon the budding supplements and the clever, ignorant reviewing, which, in spite of notable exceptions, characterized the newspaper view of books. The technical critic of technical books had long been practising, and his ability increased with the advance in scholarship that marked the end of the nineteenth century. The problem was how to make him write for the general intelligent reader. For years the old Nation, under the editorship of Garrison and of Godkin, carried on this struggle almost single-handed. For a generation it was the only American source from which an author might expect a competent review of a serious, non-technical book. But the weight of the endeavor was too much for it. Fiction it largely evaded, as the London Times Literary Supplement does to-day. And with all the serious books in English awaiting attention in a few pages of a single weekly, it is no wonder that the shelves of its editorial office held one of the best modern libraries in New York! Or that Christmas, 1887, was the time chosen to review a gift edition of 1886! The old Dial had a like struggle, and a resembling difficulty.

It was in 1914 that The New Republic applied a new solution to the problem, and from its pages and from the other "intellectual weeklies" which have joined it, has come not merely some of the best reviewing that we have had, but also a distinct lift upwards in the standard of our discussion of contemporary books of general interest. After 1914 one could expect to find American reviews of certain kinds of books which were as excellent as any criticisms from England or from France.

But the solution applied was of such a character as to limit definitely its application. The New Republic, the present Nation, The Freeman, The Weekly Review, and, in a little different sense, The Dial, were founded by groups held together, with the exception of The Dial coterie, not by any common attitude towards literature, or by any specific interest in literature itself, but rather by a common social philosophy. These journals, again with the one exception, were devoted primarily to the application of their respective social philosophies. Even when in reviews or articles there was no direct social application, there was a clear irradiation from within. When The New Republic is humorous, it is a social-liberal humor. When The Freeman is ironic there is usually an indirect reference to the Single Tax. And The Dial will be modern or perish.

As a result of all this the space given to books at large in the social-political journals was small. And in that space one could prophesy with some exactness the reviewing to be expected. Books of social philosophy, novels with a thesis, poetry of radical emotion, documented history, and the criticism of politics or economic theory have had such expert reviewing as America has never before provided in such quantity. But there was a certain monotony in the conclusions reached. "Advanced" books had "advanced" reviewers who approved of the author's ideas even if they did not like his book. Conservative books were sure to be attacked in one paragraph even if they were praised in another. What was much more deplorable, good, old-fashioned books, that were neither conservative nor radical, but just human, had an excellent chance of interesting no one of these philosophical editors and so of never being reviewed at all. Irving, Cooper of the Leatherstocking Series, possibly Hawthorne, and quite certainly the author of "Huckleberry Finn" would have turned over pages for many a day without seeing their names at all.

Thus the intellectual weekly gave us an upstanding, competentcriticism of books with ideas in them—when the ideas seemed important to the editors; a useful service, but not a comprehensive one; the criticism of a trend rather than a literature; of the products of a social group rather than the outspeaking of a nation. Something more was needed.

Something more was needed; and specifically literary mediums that should be catholic in criticism, comprehensive in scope, sound, stimulating, and accurate.

To be catholic in criticism does not mean to be weak and opinionless. A determination to discuss literature honestly and with insight, letting conclusions be what they must, may be regarded as a sufficient editorial stock in trade. It is fundamental, but it is not sufficient. Just as there is personality behind every government, so there should be a definite set of personal convictions behind literary criticism, which is not a science, though science may aid it. Sterilized, dehumanized criticism is almost a contradiction in terms, except in those rare cases where the weighing of evidential facts is all that is required. But these cases are most rare. Even a study of the text of Beowulf, or a history of Norman law, will be influenced by the personal emotions of the investigator, and must be so criticized. Men choose their philosophy according to their temperament; so do writers write; and so must critics criticize. Which is by no means to say that criticism is merely an affair of temperament, but rather to assert that temperament must not be left out of account in conducting or interpreting criticism.

Ideally, then, the editors of a catholic review should have definite convictions, if flexible minds, established principles, if a wide latitude of application. But although a review may thus be made catholic, it cannot thus attain comprehensiveness. There are too many books; too many branches upon the luxuriant tree of modern knowledge. No editorial group, no editorial staff, can survey the field competently unless they strictly delimit it by selection, and that means not to be comprehensive. Yet if the experts are to be called in, the good critics, the good scholars, the good scientists, until every book is reviewed by the writer best qualified to review it, then we must hope to attain truth by averages as the scientists do, rather than by dogmatic edict. For if it is difficult to guarantee in a few that sympathy with all earnest books which does not preclude rigid honesty in the application of firmly held principles, it is more difficult with the many. And if it is hard to exclude bias, inaccuracy, over- statement, and inadequacy from the work even of a small and chosen group, it is still harder to be certain of complete competence if the net is thrown more widely.

In fact, there is no absolute insurance against bad criticism except the intelligence of the reader. He must discount where discount is necessary, he must weigh the authority of the reviewer, he must listen to the critic as the protestant to his minister, willing to be instructed, but aware of the fallibility of man.

Hence, a journal of comprehensive criticism must first select its reviewers with the greatest care and then print vouchers for their opinions, which will be the names of the reviewers. Hence it must open its columns to rebuttals or qualifications, so that the reader may form his own conclusions as to the validity of the criticism, and, after he has read the book, judge its critics.