Chapter III: Part 3

"And that," said Mr. Wilson, "is another evil almost as great in its influence as the undeveloped taste of our women readers. I mean our lack of authoritative criticism. Now we really do get a good novel once in a blue moon, but one who has been made wary by the mass of trade novels would never suspect it from reading our book reviews. The good novel, it is true, is praised heartily, but then so are all the bad novels--and how is one to tell?

"At least eighty-five per cent. of our book reviews are mere amiable, perfunctory echoes of the enthusiastic 'canned' review which the publisher obligingly prints on the paper jacket of his best seller. I sometimes suspect this task is allotted to a member of the staff who is known to be 'fond of reading.'

"Another evil influence is often alleged--the pressure the business office puts on the reviewer to be tender with novels that are lavishly advertised, but I have never thought there was more than a grain of truth in this.

"Perhaps a publisher wouldn't continue to patronize a sheet that habitually blurted out the truth about his best sellers, but I really doubt that this was ever put to an issue. I don't believe the average book-reviewer knows any better than the average novelist the difference between a good and a bad novel.

"It isn't so with the other arts. We have critics for those. Music, sculpture, painting--we know the best and get the best.

"But, then, the novel is scarcely considered to be an art form. Any one can--and does--write a novel, if he can only find the time. It isn't supposed to be a thing one must study, like plumbing or architecture.

"The novelist who wants to write a best seller this year studies the best seller of last year, and wisely, because that is what the publisher wants--something like his last one that sold big. He is looking for it night and day and for nothing else. He wants good carpenters who have followed the design that women have liked. Fiction is the one art you don't take seriously, and there is no one to tell us we should; there are no critics to inform the writers and the readers and make the publishers timid.

"True, we have in this country two or three, possibly four, critics who can speak with authority, men who know what the novel has been, what it is with us, what it ought to be. One of them is a friend of mine, and I reproached him lately for not speaking out in meeting oftener.

"His defense was pathetic. First, that ninety out of a hundred of our novels are beneath criticism. Second, as to the remaining ten that would merit the rapier instead of the bludgeon--'criticism is harder to sell than post-meridian virtue. I have tried.'

"And he has to eat as often as any publisher. So there you are! People are not going to pay him for finding fault with something they are intensely satisfied with. It all comes back to the women. When their taste is corrected we shall have better novels. But not before then!"

"Mr. Wilson," I said, "do you believe that the development of the magazine, with its high prices and serialization, has been harmful or beneficial to fiction?"

"In the first place, the magazine hasn't developed," he answered. "It has merely multiplied--the cheap ones, I mean. And prices have not increased except to about a dozen of our national favorites. Where there is one writer who can get fifteen hundred dollars for a short story, or fifteen thousand dollars for the serial rights to a novel, there are a thousand who can get not more than a fifteenth of those prices.

"On the whole, I think that the effect of the cheap monthlies has been good. They are the only ones that welcome the new writer. They try him out. Then, if the public takes to him, the better magazines find it out after a while and form an alliance with him--that is, if his characters are so sweet and wholesome that the magazine can still be left on the center-table where Cuthbert or Berryl might see it after school.

"Nowadays I never expect to find a good short story in any of the cheap magazines. Of course, it does happen now and then, but not often enough to make me impatient for their coming. And, of course, the cheap monthlies do print, for the most part, what are probably the worst short stories that will ever be written in the world--the very furthest from anything real.

"These writers, too, like the novelists, study one another instead of life. We will say one of them writes a short story about a pure young shopgirl of flower-like beauty who, spending an evening of innocent recreation in a notorious Tenderloin dive (one of those places that I, for one, have never been able to find), is insulted by the leader of Tammany Hall, who is always hanging around there for evil purposes. At the last moment she is saved from his loathsome advances by a dashing young stranger in a cute-cut blue serge suit, who carries her off in a taxicab and marries her at 2 A.M. And he, of course, proves to be the great traction magnate who owns all the city's surface-car lines.

"The other writers, and some new ones that never before thought of writing, read this story, which is called 'All for Love,' and learn to do the 'type'--the pure young shopgirl, a bit slangy in spite of her flower-like beauty; the abhorrent politician (some day he will have a distressing mix-up with his very own daughter in one of these evil places--see if he doesn't!), the low-browed dive-keeper, and the honest young traction magnate. They will learn with a little practice to do these as the dupes of the 'Be-a-cartoonist!' schools learn to draw 'An Irishman,' 'A German,' 'A Jew,' and the dental facade of Colonel Roosevelt.

"But we must remember that O. Henry came to us from the cheap magazines, never did get into the higher-priced ones, and was, by the way, wretchedly paid for his stories. True, he received good prices in his later days, but I doubt if they raised the average for his output to two hundred dollars a story. He neglected to come to the feast in a wedding garment, so the more pretentious magazines would have none of him.

"For one O. Henry, then, we can forgive the lesser monthlies for the bulk of their stuff that can be read only by born otoliths. The more magazines, the better our chance of finding the new man, and only in the cheap ones can he come to life."

Many dogmatic statements have been made concerning the great American novel. I have been told that it would come from the South, that it would come from the West, that it would never be written. But Mr. Wilson has a new and revolutionary theory.

"Will there," I asked, "ever be the great American novel? That is, will there ever be a novel which reflects American life as adequately as _Vanity Fair_ reflects English life?"

"There have already been dozens of them!" was Mr. Wilson's emphatic reply. "To go no farther back, Booth Tarkington wrote one the other day, and so did Theodore Dreiser. (Dreiser's story, 'The "Genius,"' of course couldn't have appeared in any American magazine. Trust your canny publisher not to let his magazine hand know what his book hand is doing!)

"But let us lay forever that dear old question that has haunted our literary columns for so many years. The answer, of course, is that there is no novel that reflects English life any more adequately than _The Turmoil_, or '_The Genius_,' or _The Virginian_, or _Perch of the Devil_, or _Unleavened Bread_, or _The Rise of Silas Lapham_ reflects American life.

"Certainly _Vanity Fair_ doesn't do this. It reflects but a very narrow section of London life. For the purposes of fictional portrayal England is just as big and difficult--as impossible in one novel--as the United States.

"To know England through fiction one must go to all her artists, past and present, getting a little from each. Hardy gives us an England that Thackeray never suspected, and Galsworthy gives us still another, not to go on to the England of George Moore, Phillpotts, Quiller-Couch, Wells, Bennett, Walpole, George, or Mackenzie. I hope at the proper time that a tasteful little tablet will be erected to my memory for having laid this ancient and highly respectable apparition."

In his interesting contribution to a symposium of opinions as to what are the six best novels in the English language, Mr. Wilson had some things to say about Dickens which were not likely to bring him a vote of thanks from the Dickens Fellowship. I wished to have his opinion of Dickens stated more definitely, and so, basing my question on a statement he had made in the symposium, I asked, "What qualities in the work of Charles Dickens make him a bad model for novelists to follow?"

Mr. Wilson replied: "Dickens has been a blight to most writers who were susceptible to his vices. He was a great humorist, but an inferior novelist, and countless other inferior novelists have believed that they could be great humorists by following his childishly easy formula.

"That is, those who were influenced by him copy his faults. Witness our school of characterization based on the Dickens method, a school holding that 'character' is a mere trick of giving your creation exaggerated mannerisms or physical surfaces--as with Dickens it was rarely anything else.

"Dickens created vaudeville 'characters'--unsurpassed for twenty-minute sketches, deadly beyond that to the mentally mature. His stock in trade was the grotesque make-up. In stage talk he couldn't create a 'straight' part.

"Strip his people of their make-ups, verbal, hirsute, sartorial, surgical, pathological, what not--and dummies remain. Meet them once and you know them for the rest of the tale, the Micawbers, Gamps, Pecksniffs, Nicklebys; each has his stunt and does it over and over at each new meeting, to the--for me, at least--maddening delay of the melodrama. I like melodrama as well as any one, badgered heroines, falsely accused heroes, missing wills, trap-doors, disguised philanthropists, foul murders, and even slow-dying children who are not only moralists, but orators; and I like to see the villain get his at last, and get it good; but I can't read Dickens any more, because the tale must be held up every five minutes for one of the funny 'characters' to do his stunt.

"How many years will it take us--writers, I mean--to realize that there are no characters in Dickens in the sense that Dmitri in _The Brothers Caramazov_ is a character? How few of our current novelists can distinguish between the soulless caricaturing of Dickens and the genuine character-drawing of a Turgenieff or a Dostoievski!

"How few of us can see how the soul of Dmitri is slowly unfolded to the reader with never a bit of make-up! To this moment, I don't know if he wore a beard or not; but I know the man. Dickens would have given him funny whiskers, astigmatism, a shortened leg, a purple nose, and still to make sure we wouldn't mistake him a catch phrase for his utterance.

"Any novelist who has mastered the rudiments of his craft, even though he hasn't an atom of humor in his make-up, can write a Dickens novel, and any publisher will print it for the Christmas trade if it's fairly workman-like, and it will be warmly praised in the reviews. That happens every season.

"And that's why Dickens is a bad model. If one must have a model, why not Hall Caine, infinitely the superior of Dickens as a craftsman? Of course, having no humor, he can't be read by people who have, but he knows his trade, where Dickens was a preposterous blunderer."

Charles Belmont Davis once told me that a novelist should have some other regular occupation besides writing. I asked Mr. Wilson his opinion on this subject.

"Mr. Davis didn't originate this theory," he said. "It's older than he is. Anyway, I don't believe in it. I know of no business to-day that would leave a man time to write novels, and a novelist worth his salt won't have time for any other business.

"Of course, the ideal novelist would at one time or another have been anything. The ideal novelist has two passions, people and words, and he should have had and should continue to have as many points of contact with life as possible. But if he has reached the point where he can write to please me, I want him not to waste time doing anything else.

"Personally, I wish I might have been, for varying intervals, a Russian Grand Duke, an Eighth Avenue undertaker, the manager of a five-and-ten-cent store, a head waiter, a burglar, a desk sergeant at the Thirtieth Street Police Station, and a malefactor of great wealth, preferably one that gets into the snapshots at Newport, reading from left to right. But Heaven has denied me practically all of these avenues to a knowledge of my humankind, and I am too busy keeping up with the current styles of all millinery fiction to take to any of them at this late day.

"Besides, I have a bad example to deter me, having just read _The High Priestess_, by Robert Grant, who has another business than novel writing--something connected with the law, I believe, in Boston. I have no means of knowing how valuable a civic unit he may have been in his home town, but I do feel that he has cheated the world of a great deal by keeping to this other business, whatever it may be.

"From the author of _Unleavened Bread_ we once had a right to expect much. But _The High Priestess_ chiefly makes me regret that he didn't have to write novels or starve; by its virtues of construction, which are many and admirable, and by its utter lack of power to communicate any emotion whatsoever, which is conspicuous and lamentable. He seems to have written his novel with an adding-machine, and instinctively I blame that 'other business' of his, in which he seems to have forgotten--for he did know it once--that a novelist may or may not think straight, but he must feel.

"Perhaps he wasn't a real novelist, after all. I suspect a real novelist would starve in any other business."

I told Mr. Wilson that a prominent American humorist writer had classed Mark Twain with Artemus Ward and Philander Doesticks, and said that these men were not genuine humorists, but "the Charlie Chaplins of their time."

Mr. Wilson smiled. "Isn't this rather high praise for Charlie Chaplin?" he asked. "How far is this idolatry of the movie actor to go, anyway? True, Mr. Chaplin is a skilled comedian, pre-eminent in his curious new profession, but to my thinking he lacks repose at those supreme moments when he is battering the faces of his fellow-histrions with the wet mop or the stuffed club, or walking on their stomachs; but I may be prejudiced. I know I shouldn't have ranked him with Mark Twain, arch-humanist and satirist and one of the few literary artists who have attained the world stature--so that we must go back and back to Cervantes to find his like."

_THE PASSING OF THE SNOB_

EDWARD S. MARTIN

If William Makepeace Thackeray were alive to-day he would not write a _Book of Snobs_. He might write a _Book of Reformers_.

This is the opinion of that shrewd and kindly satirist, Edward S. Martin. I found him not in New York, the city whose lights and shadows are reflected in much of his graceful prose and pungent verse, but out among the Connecticut hills. In the pleasant study of his quaint Colonial cottage he talked about the thing he delights to observe--humanity.

"Thackeray would not write a _Book of Snobs_ to-day," he said. "The snob is not now the appealing subject that he was in the early days of the reign of Queen Victoria. Thackeray could not now find enough snobs and snobbery to write about, either in England or in America. Snobs are by way of having punctured tires these days.

"Don't you think that the snobs were always very much apart from our civilization and national ideals? They were a symptom of an established and conservative society. And this established and conservative society Thackeray in his way helped to break down.

"To-day, in England and in the United States, that kind of society is in a precarious condition. If Thackeray were now writing, he would not satirize snobs. It is more likely that he would satirize the reformers. I think that all the snobs have hit the sawdust trail."

"How did this happen?" I asked. "What was it that did away with the snobs?"

"It was largely a natural process of change," said Mr. Martin. "The snobs were put on the defensive. You see, there is a harder push of democracy now than there was in Thackeray's time. The world of which the snob was so conspicuous a part seems, especially since the war began, to have passed away. Of course the literature of that world is not dead, but for the moment it seems obsolete.

"To-day the whole attention of civilized mankind is fixed on the great fundamental problems; there is no time for snobbery. For one thing, there is the problem of national self-preservation. And there has recently been before the civilized world, more strongly than ever before, the great problem of the development of democracy.

"I suppose that the war will check, to a certain extent, the development of democracy. In England the great task of the hour is to organize all the powers of society for defense against attack, against attack by a power organized for forty years for that attack.

"I suppose England will get organization out of this war. And if we get into the war, we'll get organization out of it."

Mr. Martin is generally thought of as a critic of social rather than political conditions. But he is keenly interested in politics. Speaking of American politics and the possibility of America's entering the war, he said:

"For the past fifteen years our greatest activity in politics has been to rip things open. It seemed to most people that the organization was getting too strong and that it was controlled by too few people. The fight has been against that condition.

"But if we became involved in a serious war trouble the energy of our people would be directed to an attempt to secure increased efficiency. We would become closely organized again. I don't think we'd lose the benefit of what has been done in the past years, but we would come to a turn in the road.

"I suppose it would bring us all together, if we got into this war, and I suppose we'd get some good out of it.

"You see, the people who formerly directed our Government haven't had much power for several years. Now they are valuable people. And they will come back into power again, but with greatly modified conditions.

"I don't think that a new set of people are going to manage the affairs of the nation. I think that the affairs of the nation will be managed by the people who managed them before. But these people will be much more under control than they were before, and they will be subject to new laws.

"How much good government by commission is going to do I don't know. We have not as yet had good enough men to enter into this important work, and the best of those who have entered have not stayed in this employment. So the development of experts in government has not come along as well as people hoped it would."

The genial philosopher smiled quizzically and rose from his chair.

"I'm afraid I'm getting too political," he said, pacing slowly up and down the room. "Let's get back to snobs and snobbery.

"You asked me a few minutes ago why the snob had become so inconspicuous a figure in our modern society. Well, I know one reason for this altered condition of affairs. Woman has abolished the snob. Woman has changed man."

"And what changed woman?" I asked.

"Many things; the development of machinery, for instance," he replied. "Woman has not changed so much as the conditions of life have changed.

"The development of machinery has caused changes that impress me deeply. It has produced immense alterations in the conditions of life and in the relations between people.

"War has been changed in a striking manner by this development of machinery. Never in the history of warfare was machinery so prominent and important as to-day. In fact, I think I am justified in speaking of this war as a machine-bore!

"Machinery really has had a great deal to do with changing the condition and activities of woman, and has been a powerful influence in bringing about the modern movement for women's suffrage. Machinery has changed the employment of women and forced them into kinds of work which are not domestic.

"The typewriter and the telephone have revolutionized our methods of doing business. The typewriter and the telephone have filled our offices with women. They are doing work which twenty years ago would have been considered most unfeminine.

"The war is strengthening this tendency of women to take up work that is not domestic. I have heard it said that women first got into the undomestic kinds of business in France during the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon wanted to have all the men out in the line of battle, so he had girls instructed in bookkeeping and other kinds of office work.

"The business activities of Frenchwomen date from that time. And a similar result seems to be coming out of this war. In France, in England, in all the countries engaged in the war the women are filling the positions left vacant by the men."

"Do you think," I asked, "that this is a good thing for civilization, this increased activity of women in business?"

"I don't know," said Mr. Martin, musingly. "I don't know. But I do know this, that the main employment of woman is to rear a family. Office work, administrative work--these things are of only secondary importance. The one vital thing for women to do is to rear families. They must do this if the human race is to continue."

"Mr. Martin," I said, "you told me that Thackeray, if he were alive, would satirize the reformers. Just what sort of reformer is it that has taken the place of the snob?"

Mr. Martin did not at once answer. He smiled, as if enjoying some entertaining memory. Then he started to speak, and mentioned the name of a prominent reformer. But his New England caution checked him. He said:

"No, I'd better not say anything about that. I'd rather not. I'd rather say that the things that the snobs admired and particularly embodied have lost prestige during the last twenty years.

"After 1898, after our great rise to prosperity, the captains of industry and of finance were the great men of the country. But I think these great men are less stunning now than they were then. And money is less stunning, too.

"All the business of money-making has had a great loss of prestige since 1900. People think more of other things. And the people who are thinking of other things than money-making have more of a 'punch' than they had before. The wise have more of a punch, and so have the foolish."

Again came that reminiscent smile. "Reformers can be very trying," he said. "Very trying, indeed. Did you ever read Brand Whitlock's _Forty Years of It_? Brand Whitlock had his own trials with the reformers. Whitlock is a sensible, generous man, and his attitude toward reformers is a good deal humorous and not at all violent. That would be Thackeray's attitude toward them, I think, if he were living to-day. He'd satirize the reformers instead of the snobs."

Mr. Martin is not inclined to condemn or to accept absolutely any of the modern reform movements. "All reform movements," he said, "run until they get a check. Then they stop. But what they have accomplished is not lost."

The society women who undertake sociological reform work find in Mr. Martin no unsympathetic critic.

"These wealthy women," he said, "take up reform work as a recourse. Society life is not very filling. They have a sense of emptiness. So they go in for reform, to fill out their lives more adequately.

"But I don't know that I'd call that kind of thing reform. I'd call it a large form of social activity. These women are attending to a great mass of people who need this attention. But the bulk of this kind of work is too small for it to be called reform.

"In New York there are very many young people who need care and leadership. The neglected and incompetent must be looked after. The old-fashioned family control has been considerably loosened, and an attempt must be made to guard those who are therefore less protected than they would have been a generation ago. Certainly these efforts to look after young people who don't have enough care taken of them by their families are directed in the right direction."

I asked Mr. Martin what he thought of the present condition of American literature, particularly the work presented to the public on the pages of magazines.

"Just now," he said, "the newspapers seem to have almost everything. The great interest of the last few years has been in the newspapers. They have had a tremendous story to tell, they have told it every day, and other things have seemed, in comparison, flat and lifeless.

"It has been a hard time for every sort of a publication not absolutely up to the minute all the time. The newspapers have had the field almost to themselves.

"And I think that the newspapers have greatly improved. They have had an immense chance, and it has been very stimulating."

_COMMERCIALIZING THE SEX INSTINCT_

ROBERT HERRICK

"Realism," said Robert Herrick, "is not the celebration of sexuality." I had not recalled to earth that merry divine whose lyric invitation to go a-Maying still echoes in the heart of every lover of poetry. The Robert Herrick with whom I was talking is a poet and a discriminating critic of poetry, but the world knows him chiefly for his novels--_The Common Lot_, _Together_, _Clark's Field_, and other intimate studies of American life and character. He is a realist, and not many years ago there were critics who thought that his manner of dealing with sexual themes was dangerously frank. Therefore, the statement that he had just made seemed to me particularly significant.

"It seems to have become the fashion," he said, "to apply the term Realist to every writer who is obsessed with sex. I think I know the reason for this. Our Anglo-Saxon prudery kept all mention of sex relations out of our fiction for many years. Among comparatively modern novelists the realists were the first to break the shackles of this convention, and write frankly of sex. And from this it has come, most unfortunately, that realism and pornography are often confused by novelists and critics as well as by the public.

"This confusion of ideas was apparent in some of the criticisms of my novel _Together_. In an early chapter of the book there was an incident which was intended to show that the man and woman who were the chief figures in the book were spiritually incompatible, that their relations as husband and wife would be wrong. This was, in fact, the theme of the book, and this incident in the first chapter was intended to foreshadow the later events of their married life. Well, the critics who disliked this chapter said that what they objected to was its 'gross realism.'

"Now, as a matter of fact, that part of the book was not realistic at all. I was describing something unusual, abnormal, while realism has to do with the normal. The critic had, of course, a perfect right to believe that the subject ought not to be treated at all, but 'gross realism' was the most inappropriate description possible.

"Undoubtedly there are many writers who believe that they are realists because they write about nothing but sex. Undoubtedly, too, there are many writers who are conscious of the commercial value of sex in literature. Of course a writer ought to be conscious of the sex impulse in life, but he ought not to display it constantly. I wish our writers would pay less attention to the direct manifestations of sex and more to its indirect influence, to the ways in which it affects all phases of activity."

"Who are some of the writers who seem to you to be especially ready to avail themselves of the commercial value of sex?" I asked.

Mr. Herrick smiled. "I think you know the writers I mean without my mentioning their names," he said. "They write for widely circulated magazines, and make a great deal of money, and their success is due almost entirely to their industrious celebration of sexual affairs. You know the sort of magazine for which they write--it always has on the cover a highly colored picture of a pretty woman, never anything else. That, too, is an example, and a rather wearying example, of the commercializing of the sex appeal.

"I think that Zola, although he was a great artist, was often conscious of the business value of the sex theme. He knew that that sort of thing had a tremendous appeal, and, for me, much of his best work is marred by his deliberate introduction of sex, with the purpose--which, of course, he realized--of making a sensation and selling large editions of his books. This sort of commercialism was not found in the great Russian realists, the true realist--Dostoievski, for example. But it is found in the work of some of the modern Russian writers who are incorrectly termed realists."

"Mr. Herrick," I asked, "just what is a realist?"

Mr. Herrick's youthful face, which contrasts strangely with his white hair, took on a thoughtful expression.

"The distinction between realism and romanticism," he said, "is one of spirit rather than of method. The realist has before him an aim which is entirely different from that of the romanticist.

"The realist writes a novel with one purpose in view. And that purpose is to render into written words the normal aspect of things.

"The aim of the romanticist is entirely different. He is concerned only with things which are exciting, astonishing--in a word, abnormal.

"I do not like literary labels, and I think that the names 'realist' and 'romanticist' have been so much misused that they are now almost meaningless. The significance of the term changes from year to year; the realists of one generation are the romanticists of the next.

"Bulwer Lytton was considered a realist in his day. But we think of him only as a sentimental and melodramatic romanticist whose work has no connection with real life.

"Charles Dickens was considered a realist by the critics of his own generation, and it is probable that he considered himself a realist. But his strongest instinct was toward the melodramatic. He wrote chiefly about simple people, it is true, and chiefly about his own land and time. But the fact that a writer used his contemporaries as subjects does not make him a realist. Dickens's people were unusual; they were better or worse than most people, and they had extraordinary adventures; they did not lead the sort of life which most people lead. Therefore, Dickens cannot accurately be called a realist."

"You called Dostoievski a realist," I said. "What writers who use the English language seem to you to deserve best the name of realist?"

"I think," said Mr. Herrick, "that the most thoroughgoing realist who ever wrote in England was Anthony Trollope. _Barchester Towers_ and _Framley Parsonage_ are masterpieces of realism; they give a faithful and convincing picture of the every-day life of a section of English society with which their author was thoroughly familiar. Trollope reflected life as he saw it--normal life. He was a great realist.

"In the United States there has been only one writer who has as great a right to the name realist as had Anthony Trollope. That man is William Dean Howells. Mr. Howells has always been interested in the normal aspect of things. He has taken for his subject a sort of life which he knows intimately; he has not sought for extraordinary adventures for his theme, nor has he depicted characters remote from our experience. His novels are distinguished by such fidelity to life that he has an indisputable claim to be called a realist.

"But, as I said, it is dangerous and unprofitable to attempt to label literary artists. Thackeray was a realist. Yet _Henry Esmond_ is classed as a romantic novel. In that book Thackeray used the realistic method; he spent a long time in studying the manners and customs of the time about which he was writing; and all the details of the sort of life which he describes are, I believe, historically accurate. And yet _Henry Esmond_ is a romance from beginning to end; it is a romantic novel written by a realist, and written according to what is called the realistic method.

"On the other hand, Sir Walter Scott was a romanticist. No one will deny that. Yet in many of his early books he dealt with what may be called realistic material; he described with close fidelity to detail a sort of life and a sort of people with which he was well acquainted.

"Whether a writer is a realist or a romanticist is, after all, I think, partly a matter of accident or culture. I happen to be a realist because I was brought up on the great Russian realists like Gogol and the great English realists from George Elliot down to Thomas Hardy. If I had been brought up on romantic writers I suppose that I might now be writing an entirely different sort of novel from that with which I am associated.

"There is a sounder distinction," said Mr. Herrick, "than that which people try to draw between the realistic novel and the romantic novel. This is the distinction between the novel of character and the novel of events. Personally, I never have been able to see how the development of character can be separated from the plot of a novel. A book in which the characters exhibit exactly the same characteristics, moral and intellectual, in the last chapter as in the first, seems to me to be utterly worthless.

"I will, however, make one exception--that is, the novel of the Jules Verne type. In this sort of book, and in romances of the Monte Cristo kind, action is the only thing with which the author and the reader are concerned, and any attempt to develop character would clog the wheels of the story.

"But every other kind of novel depends on character. Even in the best work of Dumas, in _The Three Musketeers_, for example, the characters of the principal figures develop as the story progresses.

"The highest interest of a novel depends upon the development of its characters. If the characters are static, then the book is feeble. I have never been able to see how the plot and the development of the characters can be separated.

"Of course, the novel of character is full of adventure. The adventures of Henry James's characters are of absorbing interest, but they are psychological adventures, internal adventures. If some kind person wanted to give one of Henry James's novels what is commonly called 'a bully plot' the novel would fail."

As to the probable effect on literature of the war, Mr. Herrick has a theory different from that of any other writer with whom I have discussed the subject.

"I think," he said, "that after the war we shall return to fatuous romanticism and weak sentimentality in literature. The tendency will be to read novels in order to forget life, instead of reading them to realize life. There will be a revival of a deeper religious sense, perhaps, but there will also be a revival of mere empty formalism in religion. It has been so in the past after great convulsions. Men need time to recover their spiritual pride, their interest in ideas."

But Mr. Herrick's own reaction to the war does not seem to justify his pessimistic prophecy. Certainly the personal experience which he next narrated to me does not indicate that Mr. Herrick is growing sentimental and romantic.

"When I was in Rome recently," he said, "I was much impressed by D'Annunzio. I was interested in him as a problem, as a picturesque literary personality, as a decadent raffine type regenerated by the war. I have not read any of his books for many years.

"I took some of D'Annunzio's books to read on my voyage home. I read _Il Piacere_. I realized its charm, I realized the highly aesthetic quality of its author, a scholarly and exact aestheticism as well as an emotional aestheticism. But, nevertheless, I had to force myself to read the book. It was simply a description of a young man's amorous adventures. And I could not see any reason for the existence of this carefully written record of passional experiences.

"It seemed to me that the war had swept this sort of thing aside, or had swept aside my interest in this sort of thing. The book seemed to me as dull and trivial and as remote as a second-rate eighteenth-century novel. And I wondered if we would ever again return to the time when such a record of a young man's emotional and sensual experiences would be worth while.

"I came to the conclusion that D'Annunzio himself would not now write such a novel. I think that it would seem to him to be too trivial a report on life. I think that the war has so forced the essential things of life upon the attention of young men."

_SIXTEEN DON'TS FOR POETS_

ARTHUR GUITERMAN

Arthur Guiterman has been called the Owen Seaman of America. Of course he isn't, any more than Owen Seaman is the Arthur Guiterman of England. But the verse which brings Arthur Guiterman his daily bread is turned no less deftly than is that of _Punch's_ famous editor. Arthur Guiterman is not a humorist who writes verse; he is a poet with an abundant gift of humor.

Now, the author of _The Antiseptic Baby and the Prophylactic Pup_ and _The Quest of the Riband_, and of those unforgetable rhymed reviews, differs from most other poets not only in possessing an abnormally developed sense of humor, but also in being able to make a comfortable living out of the sale of his verse. But when he talked to me recently he was by no means inclined to advise all able young poets to expect their poetry to provide them with board and lodging.

"Of course it is possible to make a living out of verse," he said. "Walt Mason does, and so does Berton Braley. And now most of my income comes from my verse. Formerly I wrote short stories, but I haven't written one for seven or eight years.

"Nevertheless, I think it is inadvisable for any one to set out with the idea of depending on the sale of verse as a means of livelihood. You see, there are, after all, two forms, and only two forms, of literary expression--the prose form and the verse form. Some subjects suit the prose form, others suit the verse form. Any one who makes writing his profession has ideas severally adapted to both of these forms. And every writer should be able to express his idea in whichever of these two forms suits it better.

"Now, the verse form is older than the prose form. And so I have come to look upon it as the form peculiarly attractive to youth. Many writers outgrew the tendency to use the verse form, but some never outgrew it. Sir Walter Scott was a verse-writer before he was a prose-writer, and so was Shakespeare. So were many modern writers--Robert W. Chambers, for example.

"This theory is true especially in regard to lyric verse. The lyric is nearly always the work of a young man. As a man grows older he sings less and preaches more. Certainly this was true of Milton.

"I never thought that I should write verse for a living. But verse happens to be the medium that I love. I ran across my first poem the other day--it was about fireflies, and I was eight years old when I wrote it. Certainly nearly all writers write verse before they write prose; perhaps it is atavistic. I don't know that Henry James began with verse. But I would be willing to bet that he did.

"One trouble with a great many people who make a living out of writing verse is that they feel obliged always to be verse-writers, never to write prose, even when the subject demands that medium. Alfred Noyes gives us an example of this unfortunate tendency in his _Drake_. I am not disparaging Alfred Noyes's work; he has written charming lyrics, but in _Drake_, and perhaps in some of the _Tales from the Mermaid Tavern_, I feel that he has written verse not because the subject was especially suited to that medium, but because he felt that he was a verse-writer and therefore should not write prose."

Mr. Guiterman is firmly convinced, however, that a verse-writer ought to be able, in time, to make a living out of his work.

"If a man calls himself a writer," he said, "he ought to be able to make a living out of writing. And I think that the writer of verse has a greater opportunity to-day than ever before. I don't mean to say that the appreciation of poetry is more intense than ever before, but it is more general. More people are reading poetry now than in bygone generations.

"Compare with the traditions that we have to-day those of the early nineteenth century, of the time of Byron and Sir Walter Scott. Then books of verse sold in large quantities, it is true, but to a relatively small public, to one class of readers. Now not only the poet, but also the verse-writer has an enormous public. If a really great poet should arise to-day he would find awaiting him a larger public than that known by any poet of the past. But it would be necessary for the poet to be great for him to find this public. Byron would be more generally appreciated to-day, if he were to live again, than he was in his own generation. I mention Byron because I think it probable that the next great poet will have something of Byron's dynamic quality."

"Who was the last great poet?" I asked.

"How is one to decide whether or not a poet is great?" asked Mr. Guiterman in turn. "My own feeling is that the late William Vaughn Moody was a great poet in the making. Perhaps he never really fulfilled his early promise; perhaps he went back to the themes of bygone ages too much in finding themes for his poetry. It may be that the next really great poet will sing an entirely different strain; it may be that I will be one of those who will say that his work is all bosh.

"But at any rate, he won't be an imitation Whitman or anything of that sort. He won't be any special school, nor will he think that he is founding a school. But it may be that his admirers will found a school with him as its leader, and they may force him to take himself seriously, and thus ruin himself."

Returning to the subject of the advisability of a writer being able to express himself in verse as well as in prose, Mr. Guiterman said:

"Especially in our generation is it true that good verse requires extreme condensation. In most work to-day brevity is desirable. The epigram beats the epic. If Milton were living to-day he would not write epics. I don't think it improbable that we have men with Miltonic minds, and they are not writing epics.

"If a man finds that he cannot express his idea in verse more forcefully than he can in prose, then he ought to write prose. Very often a writer is interested in some little incident which he would not be justified in treating in prose, something too slight to be the theme of a short story. This is the sort of thing which he should put into verse. There is Leigh Hunt's _Jennie Kissed Me_, for example. Suppose he had made a short story of it."

Thinking of this poet's financial success, I asked him just what course he would advise a young poet to pursue who had no means of livelihood except writing.

"Well, the worst thing for him to do," said Mr. Guiterman, "would be to devote all his attention to writing an epic. He'd starve to death.

"I suppose the best thing for him to do would be to write on as many subjects as possible, including those of intense interest to himself. What interests him intensely is sure to interest others, and the number of others whom it interests will depend on how close he is by nature to the mind of his place and time. He should get some sort of regular work so that he need not depend at first upon the sale of his writings. This work need not necessarily be literary in character, although it would be advisable for him to get employment in a magazine or newspaper office, so that he may get in touch with the conditions governing the sale of manuscripts.

"He should write on themes suggested by the day's news. He should write topical verse; if there is a political campaign on, he should write verse bearing upon that; if a great catastrophe occurs, he should write about that, but he must not write on these subjects in a commonplace manner.

"He should send his verses to the daily papers, for they are the publications most interested in topical verse. But also he should attempt to sell his work to the magazines, which pay better prices than the newspapers. If it is in him to do so, he should write humorous verse, for there is always a good market for humorous verse that is worth printing. He should look up the publishers of holiday cards, and submit to them Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter verses, for which he would receive, probably, about five dollars apiece. He should write advertising verses, and he should, perhaps, make an alliance with some artist with whom he can work, each supplementing the work of the other."

"Mr. Guiterman," I said, "is this the advice that you would give to John Keats if he were to ask you?"

"Yes, certainly," said Mr. Guiterman. "But you understand that our hypothetical poet must all the time be doing his own work, writing the sort of verse which he specially desires to write. If his pot-boiling is honestly done, it will help him with his other work.

"He must study the needs and limitations of the various publications. He must recognize the fact that just because he has certain powers it does not follow that everything he writes will be desired by the editors. Marked ability and market ability are different propositions.

"If he finds that the magazines are not printing sad sonnets, he must not write sad sonnets. He must adapt himself to the demands of the day.

"There is high precedent for this course. You asked if I would give this advice to the young Keats. Why not, when Shakespeare himself followed the line of action of which I spoke? He began as a lyric poet, a writer of sonnets. He wrote plays because he saw that the demand was for plays, and because he wanted to make a living and more than a living. But because he was Shakespeare his plays are what they are.

"The poet must be influenced by the demand. There is inspiration in the demand. Besides the material reward, the poet who is influenced by the demand has the encouraging, inspiring knowledge that he is writing something that people want to read."

I asked Mr. Guiterman to give me a list of negative commandments for the guidance of aspiring poets. Here it is:

"Don't think of yourself as a poet, and don't dress the part.

"Don't classify yourself as a member of any special school or group.

"Don't call your quarters a garret or a studio.

"Don't frequent exclusively the company of writers.

"Don't think of any class of work that you feel moved to do as either beneath you or above you.

"Don't complain of lack of appreciation. (In the long run no really good published work can escape appreciation.)

"Don't think you are entitled to any special rights, privileges, and immunities as a literary person, or have any more reason to consider your possible lack of fame a grievance against the world than has any shipping-clerk or traveling-salesman.

"Don't speak of poetic license or believe that there is any such thing.

"Don't tolerate in your own work any flaws in rhythm, rhyme, melody, or grammar.

"Don't use 'e'er' for 'ever,' 'o'er' for 'over,' 'whenas' or 'what time' for 'when,' or any of the 'poetical' commonplaces of the past.

"Don't say 'did go' for 'went,' even if you need an extra syllable.

"Don't omit articles or prepositions for the sake of the rhythm.

"Don't have your book published at your own expense by any house that makes a practice of publishing at the author's expense.

"Don't write poems about unborn babies.

"Don't--don't write hymns to the great god Pan. He is dead; let him rest in peace!

"Don't write what everybody else is writing."

_MAGAZINES CHEAPEN FICTION_

GEORGE BARR McCUTCHEON

Why is the modern American novel inferior to the modern English novel? Of course, there are some patriotic critics who believe that it is not inferior. But most readers of fiction speak of H. G. Wells and Compton Mackenzie, for example, with a respect and admiration which they do not extend to living American novelists.

Why is this? Is it because of snobbishness or literary colonialism on the part of the American public? George Barr McCutcheon does not think so. The author of _Beverly of Graustark_ and many another popular romance believes that there is in America a force definitely harmful to the novel. And that force is the magazine.

"The development of the magazine," he said to me, "has affected fiction in two ways. It has made it cheap and yet expensive, if you know what I mean.

"Novels written solely with the view to sensationalism are more than likely to bring discredit, not upon the magazine, but upon the writer. He gets his price, however, and the public gets its fiction.

"In my humble opinion, a writer should develop and complete his novel without a thought of its value or suitability to serial purposes. He should complete it to his own satisfaction--if that is possible--before submitting it to either editor or publisher. They should not be permitted to see it until it is in its complete form."

"But you yourself write serial stories, do you not?" I asked.

"I have never written a serial," answered Mr. McCutcheon. "Some of my stories have been published serially, but they were not written as serials.

"I am quite convinced in my own mind that if we undertake to analyze the distinction between the first-class English writers of to-day and many of our Americans, we will find that their superiority resolves itself quite simply into the fact that they do not write their novels as serials. In other words, they write a novel and not a series of chapters, parts, and instalments."

"Do you think that the American novel will always be inferior to the English novel?" I asked. "Is it not probable that the American novel will so develop as to escape the effects of serialization?"

"There is no reason," Mr. McCutcheon replied, "why Americans should not produce novels equal to those of the English, provided the same care is exercised in the handling of their material, and that they make haste as slowly as possible. Just so long, however, as we are menaced by the perils of the serial our general output will remain inferior to that of England.

"I do not mean to say that we have no writers in this country who are the equals in every respect of the best of the English novelists. We have some great men and women here, sincere, earnest workers who will not be spoiled."

Mr. McCutcheon has no respect for the type of novel, increasingly popular of late, in which the author devotes page after page to glowing accounts of immorality with the avowed intention of teaching a high moral lesson. He has little faith in the honesty of purpose of the authors of works of this sort.