Chapter V: Part 5

"And what effect can it have on our literature? It might produce, I suppose, in the writer's mind, a sense of the necessity of haste, a passionate desire to get his effect as quickly as possible. But can it give him sharpness of intellect and keenness of aesthetic perception! I'd like to think so, but I can't. I don't see how literature can be produced in the city. Literature must have repose, and there is no repose in New York so far as I can see.

"Of course I have no right to speak for other writers. Some people can find repose in the city--I can't. I hear that people write on the trains, on the omnibus, and in the Subway--I don't see how they do it!"

"Have you noticed," I asked, as we left the lane and walked down a grassy slope toward the study, "that the city has not as yet set its mark on our literature?"

"I think," said John Burroughs, "that much of our modern fiction shows what I may call a metropolitan quality; it seems made up of showy streets and electric light. But I don't know. I don't read much fiction. I turn more to poetry and to meditative essays. Some poets find beauty in the city, and they must, I suppose, find repose there. Richard Watson Gilder spent nearly all his life in a city and reflected the life of the city in his poems. And Edmund Clarence Stedman was thoroughly a poet of the city. I don't think that any of Emerson's poems smack of the city. They smack of the country, and of Emerson's study in the country, his study under the pines, where, as he wrote:

the sacred pine-tree adds
To the leaves her myriads.

"Of the younger poets, John James Piatt has written beautifully of the city. He wrote a very fine poem called 'The Morning Street,' which appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ some years ago. In it he describes vividly the hush of early morning in a great city, when the steps of a solitary traveler echo from the walls of the sleeping houses. I don't suppose Piatt is known to many readers of this generation. He was a friend of Howells, and was the co-author with Howells of _Poems by Two Friends_, published in the early sixties. This was Howells's first venture."

We were in the bark-walled study now, seated before the great stone fireplace, in which some logs were blazing. On the stone shelf I saw, among the photographs of Carlyle and Emerson and other friends of my host, a portrait of Whitman.

"Your friend, Walt Whitman," I said, "got inspiration from the city."

"Yes," said John Burroughs, "he got inspiration from the city, but you wouldn't call his poems city poetry. His way of writing wasn't metropolitan, you know; you might say that he treated the city by a country method. What he loved about the city was its people--he loved the throngs of men, he loved human associations.

"But he was a born lover of cities, Whitman was. He loved the city in all its phases, mainly because he was such a lover of his kind, of the 'human critter,' as he calls him. Whitman spent most of his life in the city, and was more at home there than in the country. He came to Brooklyn when he was a boy, and there he worked in a law-office, and as a printer and on the _Eagle_.

"For a while, I remember, he drove a 'bus up and down Broadway when the driver, who was a friend of his, was sick. That's where he got the stuff he put in _The Funeral of an Old Omnibus-driver_. He put in it all the signs and catch-words of the 'bus-drivers."

John Burroughs pointed his steady old hand at a big framed photograph on the wall. It is an unusual portrait of Walt Whitman, showing him seated, with his hands clasped, with a flaring shirt collar, like a sailor's.

"Whitman," John Burroughs continued, "seems to be appealing more and more to young men. But in the modern Whitmanesque young poets I don't see much to suggest Whitman, except in form. They do clever things, but not elemental things, not things with a cosmic basis. Whitman, with all his commonness and nearness, reached out into the abysmal depths, as his imitators fail to do. I think Robert Frost has been influenced by Whitman. His _North of Boston_ is very good; it is genuine realism; it is a faithful, convincing picture of New England farm life. When I first saw the book I didn't think I'd read three pages of it, but I read it all with keen interest. It's absolutely true.

"I used to see Whitman often when he and I were working in Washington. And he came up to see me here. When I was in Washington Whitman used to like to come up to our house for Sunday morning breakfast. Mrs. Burroughs makes capital pancakes, and Walt was very fond of them, but he was always late for breakfast. The coffee would boil over, the griddle would smoke, car after car would go jingling by, and no Walt. But a car would stop at last, and Walt would roll off it and saunter up to the door--cheery, vigorous, serene, putting every one in good humor. And how he ate! He radiated health and hopefulness. This is what made his work among the sick soldiers in Washington of such inestimable value. Every one who came into personal relations with him felt his rare, compelling charm.

"Very few young literary men of Whitman's day accepted him. Stedman did, and the fact is greatly to his credit. Howells and Aldrich were repelled by his bigness. All the Boston poets except Emerson hesitated. Emerson didn't hesitate--unlike Lowell and Holmes, he kept open house for big ideas."

I asked Mr. Burroughs what, in his opinion, had brought about the change in the world's attitude toward Whitman.

"Well," he replied, looking thoughtfully into the radiant depths of the open fire, "when Whitman first appeared we were all subservient to the conventional standards of English literature. We understood and appreciated only the pretty and exact. Whitman came in his working-man's garb, in his shirt sleeves he sauntered into the parlor of literature.

"We resented it. But the young men nowadays are more liberal. More and more Whitman is forcing on them his open-air standards. Science supplemented by the human heart gives us a bigger and freer world than our forefathers knew. And then the European acceptance of Whitman had had its effect. We take our point of view so largely from Europe. And a force like Whitman's must be felt slowly; it's a cumulative thing."

"You believe," I said, "that Whitman is our greatest poet?"

"Oh yes," he replied, "Whitman is the greatest poet America has produced. He is great with the qualities that make Homer and the classic poets great. Emerson is more precious, more intellectual. Whitman and Emerson are our two greatest poets."

While we strolled over the pleasant turf and watched a wood-thrush resting in the cool of the evening above her half-built nest among the cherry blossoms, John Burroughs returned to the subject that we had discussed on our way from the station--the city's evil effect on literature.

"Business life," he said, "is inimical to poetry. To write poetry you must get into an atmosphere utterly different from that of the city. And one of the greatest of all enemies of literature is the newspaper. The style of writing that the newspaper has brought into existence is as far as possible from art and literature. When you are writing for a daily paper, you don't try to say a thing in a poetic or artistic way, but in an efficient way, in a business-like way. There is no appeal to the imagination, no ideality. A newspaper is a noisy thing that goes out into the street and shouts its way into the attention of people.

"If you are going to write poetry you must say to certain phases of the newspapers, 'Get thee behind me, Satan!' A poet can't be developing his gossiping faculty and turning everything hot off the griddle. The daily paper is a new institution, and it has come to stay. But it has bad manners, and it is the enemy of all meditation, all privacy, all things that make for great art.

"It's the same way with nature and writing about nature. From nature we get not literature, but the raw material for literature. It is very important for us to remember that the bee does not get honey from the flowers; it makes honey from what it gets from the flowers. What it gets from the flowers is nothing but sweet water. The bee gets its sweet water, retires, thinks it over, and by a private process makes it into honey.

"So many nature-writers fail to profit by the example of the bee. They go into the woods and come out again and write about their experience--but they don't give us honey. They don't retire and subject what they find in the woods to a private process. They don't give us honey; they give us just a little sweet water, pretty thoroughly diluted.

"In my own work--if I may mention it in all humbleness--I have tried for years not to give the world just a bare record, but to flavor it, so to speak, with my own personality, as the bee turns the sweet water that it gets into honey by adding its own formic acid.

"If I lived in the city I couldn't do any writing, unless I succeeded in obliterating the city from my consciousness. But I shouldn't try to force my standards on every one. Other men live in the cities and write--Carlyle did most of his work in London. But he lived a secluded life even in the city, and he had to have his yearly pilgrimage to Scotland."

It is some years since John Burroughs has written poetry, although all his prose is clearly the work of a poet. And it is safe to say that better known than any of his intimate prose studies of the out-of-door world--better known even than _Wake Robin_ and that immortal _A Hunt for the Nightingale_ and _In Fresh Fields_--is one of his poems, _Waiting_, the poem that begins:

Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
I rave no more 'gainst time or fate,
For lo! my own shall come to me.

"I wrote _Waiting_," he said, "in 1862, when I was reading medicine in the office of a country physician. It was a dingy afternoon, and I was feeling pretty blue. But the thought came to me--I suppose I got it from Goethe or some of the Orientals, probably by way of Emerson--that what belonged to me would come to me in time, if I waited--and if I also hustled. So I waited and I hustled, and my little poem turned out to be a prophecy. My own has come to me, as I never expected it to come. The best friends I have were seeking me all the while. There's Henry Ford; he had read all my books, and he came to me--that great-hearted man, the friend of all the birds, and my friend.

"The poem first appeared in the _Knickerbocker Magazine_. That magazine was edited by a Cockney named Kinneha Cornwallis. It ran long enough to print one of Cornwallis's novels, and then it died. I remember that the _Knickerbocker Magazine_ never paid me for _Waiting_, and the poem didn't attract any attention until Whittier printed it in his _Songs of Three Centuries_.

"It has been changed and tampered with and had all sorts of things done to it. It was found among the manuscripts of a poet down South after his death, and his literary executor was going to print it in his book. He wrote to me and asked if I could show a date for it earlier than 1882. I said, 'Yes, 1862!' and that settled that matter.

"There was a man in Boston that I wanted to kick! He wrote to me and asked if he could print _Waiting_ on a card and circulate it among his friends. I told him he could, and sent him an autographed copy to make sure he'd get it straight. He sent me a package of the printed cards, and I found that he had added a stanza to it--a religious stanza, all about Heaven's gate! He had left out the second stanza, and added this religious stanza. He was worried because God had been left out of my poem--poor God, ignored by a little atom like me!

"When people ask me where I got the idea in it, I generally say that my parents were old-school Baptists and believed in foreordination, and that's the way that foreordination cropped out in me--it's a sort of transcendental version of foreordination. I think the poem is true--like attracts like; it's the way in which we are constituted, rather than any conscious factor, that insures success. It's that that makes our fortunes, it's that that is the 'tide in the affairs of men' that Shakespeare meant."

A few rods from John Burroughs's riverside house a brown thrush is building her nest in a cherry-tree. She is a bird of individual ideas, and is thoroughly convinced that paper, not twigs and leaves, forms the proper basis for her work. It is pleasant to think of John Burroughs seated in his study communing with the memories of Whitman and Emerson, and his other great dead friends. But it is pleasanter to think of him, as I saw him, anxious and intent, his great white beard mingled with the cherry blossoms, as he strolled over to fix the paper base of the thrush's nest so that the wind could not destroy it.

_"EVASIVE IDEALISM" IN LITERATURE_

ELLEN GLASGOW

What is the matter with American literature? There are many answers that might be made to this often-asked question. "Nothing" might be one answer. "Commercialism" might be another. But the answer given by Ellen Glasgow, whose latest successful novel of American manners and morals is _Life and Gabriella_, is "evasive idealism."

I found the young woman who has found in our Southern States themes for sympathetic realism rather than picturesque romance temporarily resident, inappropriately enough, in a hotel not far from Broadway and Forty-second Street. And I found her to be a woman of many ideas and strong convictions. One strongly felt and forcibly expressed conviction was that the "evasive idealism" which is evident in so much of our popular fiction is in reality the chief blemish on the American character, manifesting its baleful influence in our political, social, and economic life. Miss Glasgow first used the term "evasive idealism" in an effort to explain why contemporary English novels are better than contemporary American novels.

"Certainly," she said, "the novels written by John Galsworthy and the other English novelists of the new generation are better than anything that we are producing in the United States at the present time. And I think that the reason for this is that in America we demand from our writers, as we demand from our politicians, and in general from those who theoretically are our men of light and leading, an evasive idealism instead of a straightforward facing of realities. In England the demand is for a direct and sincere interpretation of life, and that is what the novelists of England, especially the younger novelists, are making. But what the American public seems to desire is the cheapest sort of sham optimism. And apparently our writers--a great many of them--are ready and eager to meet this demand.

"You know the sort of book which takes best in this country. It is the sort of book in which there is not from beginning to end a single attempt to portray a genuine human being. Instead there are a number of picturesque and attractive lay figures, and one of them is made to develop a whimsical, sentimental, and maudlinly optimistic philosophy of life.

"That is what the people want--a sugary philosophy, utterly without any basis in logic or human experience. They want the cheapest sort of false optimism, and they want it to be uttered by a picturesque, whimsical character, in humorous dialect. Books made according to this receipt sell by the hundreds of thousands.

"I don't know which is the more tragic, the fact that a desire for this sort of literary pabulum exists, or the fact that there are so many writers willing to satisfy that desire. But I do know that the widespread enthusiasm for this sort of writing is the reason for the inferiority of our novels to those of England. And, furthermore, I think that this evasive idealism, this preference for a pretty sham instead of the truth, is evident not only in literature, but in every phase of American life.

"Look at our politics! We tolerate corruption; graft goes on undisturbed, except for some sporadic attacks of conscience on the part of various communities. The ugliness of sin is there, but we prefer not to look at it. Instead of facing the evil and attacking it manfully we go after any sort of a false god that will detract our attention from our shame. Just as in literature we want the books which deal not with life as it is, but with life as it might be imagined to be lived, so in politics we want to face not hard and unpleasant facts, but agreeable illusions.

"Nevertheless," said Miss Glasgow, "I think that in literature there are signs of a movement away from this evasive idealism. It is much more evident in England than in America, but I think that in the course of time it will reach us, too. We shall cease to be 'slaves of words,' as Sophocles said, and learn that the novelist's duty is to understand and interpret life. And when our novelists and our readers of novels appreciate the advisability of this attitude, then will the social and political life of the United States be more wholesome than it has been for many a year. The new movement in the novel is away from sentimental optimism and toward an optimism that is genuine and robust."

"Then a novel may be at once optimistic and realistic?" I said. "That is not in accord with the generally received ideas of realism."

"It is true of the work of the great realists," answered Miss Glasgow. "True realism is optimistic, without being sentimental."

"What realists have been optimistic?" I asked.

"Well," said Miss Glasgow, "Henry Fielding, one of the first and greatest of English realists, surely was an optimist. And there was Charles Dickens--often, it is true, he was sentimental, but at his best he was a robust optimist.

"But the greatest modern example of the robust optimistic realist, absolutely free from sentimentality, is George Meredith. Galsworthy, who surely is a realist, is optimistic in such works as _The Freelands_ and _The Patricians_. And Meredith is always realistic and always optimistic.

"The optimism I mean, the optimism which is a distinguishing characteristic of George Meredith's works, does not come from an evasion of facts, but from a recognition of them. The constructive novelist, the novelist who really interprets life, never ignores any of the facts of life. Instead, he accepts them and builds upon them. And he perceives the power of the will to control destiny; he knows that life is not what you get out of it, but what you put into it. This is what the younger English novelists know and what our novelists must learn. And it is their growing recognition of this spirit that makes me feel that the tendency of modern literature is toward democracy."

"What is the connection between democracy and the tendency you have described?" I asked.

"To me," Miss Glasgow answered, "true democracy consists chiefly in the general recognition of the truth that will create destiny. Democracy does not consist in the belief that all men are born free and equal or in the desire that they shall be born free and equal. It consists in the knowledge that all people should possess an opportunity to use their will to control--to create--destiny, and that they should know that they have this opportunity. They must be educated to the use of the will, and they must be taught that character can create destiny.

"Of course, environment inevitably has its effect on the character, and, therefore, on will, and, therefore, on destiny. You can so oppress and depress the body that the will has no chance. True democracy provides for all equal opportunities for the exercise of will. If you hang a man, you can't ask him to exercise his will. But if you give him a chance to live--which is the democratic thing to do--then you put before him an opportunity to exercise his will."

"But what are the manifestations of this new democratic spirit?" I asked. "Is not the war, which is surely the greatest event of our time, an anti-democratic thing?"

"The war is not anti-democratic," Miss Glasgow replied, "any more than it is anti-autocratic. Or rather, I may say it is both anti-democratic and anti-autocratic. It is a conflict of principles, a deadly struggle between democracy and imperialism. It is a fight for the new spirit of democracy against the old evil order of things.

"Of course, I do not mean that the democracy of France and England is perfect. But with all its imperfections it is nearer true democracy than is the spirit of Germany. We should not expect the democracy of our country to be perfect. The time has not come for that. 'Man is not man as yet,' as Browning said in _Paracelsus_.

"The war is turning people away from the false standards in art and letters which they served so long. The highly artificial romantic novel and drama are impossible in Europe to-day. The war has made that sort of thing absolutely absurd. And America must be affected by this just as every other nation in the world is affected. To our novelists and to all of us must come a sense of the serious importance of actual life, instead of a sense of the beauty of romantic illusions. There are many indications of this tendency in our contemporary literature. For instance, in poetry we have the Spoon River Anthology--surely a sign of the return of the poet to real life. But the greatest poets, like the greatest novelists, have always been passionately interested in real life. Walt Whitman and Robert Browning always were realists and always were optimistic. Whitman was a most exultant optimist; he was optimistic even about dying.

"Among recent books of verse I have been much impressed by Masefield's _Good Friday_. There is a work which is both august and sympathetic; Mr. Masefield's treatment of his theme is realistic, yet thoroughly reverent. There is one line in it which I think I never shall forget. It is, 'The men who suffer most endure the least.'

"_Good Friday_ is a sign of literature's strong tendency toward reality. It seems to me to be a phase of the general breaking down of the barriers between the nations, the classes, and the sexes. But this breaking down of barriers is something that most of our novelists have been ignoring. Mary Watts has recognized it, but she is one of the very few American novelists to do so."

"But this sort of consciousness is not generally considered to be a characteristic of the realistic novelist," I said. And I mentioned to Miss Glasgow a certain conspicuous American novelist whose books are very long, very dull, and distinguished only by their author's obsession with sex. He, I said, was the man of whom most people would think first when the word realist was spoken.

"Of course," said Miss Glasgow, "we must distinguish between a realist and a vulgarian, and I do not see how a writer who is absolutely without humor can justly be called a realist. Consider the great realists--Jane Austen, Henry Fielding, Anthony Trollope, George Meredith--they all had humor. What our novelists need chiefly are more humor and a more serious attitude toward life. If our novelists are titanic enough, they will have a serious attitude toward life, and if they stand far enough off they will have humor.

"I hope," Miss Glasgow added, "that America will produce better literature after the war. I hope that a change for the better will be evident in all branches of literary endeavor. We have to-day many novelists who start out with the serious purpose of interpreting life. But they don't interpret it. They find that it is easier to give the people what they want than to interpret life. Therefore this change in the character of our novels must come after the people themselves are awakened to a sense of the importance of real life, instead of life sentimentally and deceptively portrayed.

"I think that our novels to-day are better than they were twenty-five years ago. Of course, we have no Hawthorne to-day, but the general average of stories is better than it was. We have so many accomplished writers of short stories. There is Katharine Fullerton Gerould. What an admirable artist she is! Mary E. Wilkins has written some splendid interpretations of New England life, and Miss Jewett reflected the mind and soul of a part of our country."

_"CHOCOLATE FUDGE" IN THE MAGAZINES_

FANNIE HURST

Only a few years ago Fannie Hurst's name was unknown to most readers. But in a surprisingly short time Miss Hurst's short stories, especially her sympathetic and poignantly realistic studies of the life of the Jewish citizens of New York, have earned for her popular as well as critical approval.

Fannie Hurst's fame has been won almost entirely through the most widely circulated weekly and monthly magazines. And yet when I talked to this energetic young woman the other morning in her studio in Carnegie Hall, I found her attitude toward the magazines anything but friendly. She accused them of printing what she called "chocolate-fudge" fiction. And she said it in a way which indicated that chocolate fudge is not her favorite dish.

"I do not feel," she said, "that the American magazine is exerting itself toward influencing our fiction for the better. In most cases it is content to pander to the untutored public taste instead of attempting anything constructive.

"The magazine public is, after all, open to conviction. But phlegm and commercialism on the part of most of our magazines lead them to give the public what it wants rather than what is good for it.

"'If chocolate-fudge fiction will sell the magazine, give 'em chocolate fudge!' say editors and publishers. Small wonder that American fiction-readers continue bilious in their demands. Authors, meanwhile, who like sweet butter on their bread--it is amazing how many do--continue to postpone that Big Idea, and American fiction pauses by the wayside."

"What is the remedy for this condition, Miss Hurst?" I asked. "Would matters be better if the writers did not have to comply with the demands of the magazines--if they had some other means of making a living than writing?"

Miss Hurst did not answer at once. At length she said, thoughtfully:

"It would seem that to escape this almost inevitable overlapping of bread and sweet butter the writer of short stories should not depend upon the sale of his work for a living, but should endeavor to provide himself with some other source of income.

"Theoretically, at least, such a condition would eliminate the pot-boilers and safeguard the serious worker from the possibility of 'misshaping' his art to meet a commercial condition.

"I say theoretically because from my own point of view I cannot conceive of short-story writing as an avocation. The gentle art of short fiction consumes just about six hours of my day at the rate of from twenty to twenty-five days on a story of from eight to ten thousand words. And since I work best from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., I can think of no remunerative occupation outside those hours except cabaret work or night clerking."

"What about present-day relationship between American publishers and authors?" I asked, "Do you think they are all they should be?"

"American publishers and authors," Miss Hurst replied, "to-day seem to be working somewhat at cross-purposes, owing partially, I think, to the great commercial significance that has become attached to the various rights, such as motion-picture, serial, dramatic, book, etc., and which are to be reckoned with in the sale of fiction.

"There is little doubt that authors have suffered at the hands of publishers on these various scores, oftener than not the publisher and not the author reaping the benefits accruing from the author's ignorance of conditions or lack of foresight.

"The Authors' League has been formed to remedy just that evil--and it was a crying one.

"On the other hand, it is certain that fiction-writers are better paid to-day than ever in the history of literature, and if a man is writing a seventy-five-dollar story there is a pretty good reason why.

"I feel a great deal of hesitancy about the present proposed affiliation of authors with labor. There is so much to be said on both sides!

"If the publisher represents capital and the author labor, my sympathies immediately veer me toward labor. But do they? That same question has recently been thrashed out by the actors, and they have gone over to labor. Scores of our most prominent American authors are of that same persuasion.

"I cannot help but feel that for publisher and author to assume the relationship of employer and employee is a dangerous step. All forms of labor do not come under the same head. And I am the last to say that writing is not hard labor. But Cellini could hardly have allied himself with an iron-workers' guild. All men are mammals, but not all mammals are men!

"It seems doubly unfortunate, with the Authors' League in existence to direct and safeguard the financial destiny of the author, to take a step which immediately places the author and publisher on the same basis of relationship that exists between hod-carrier and contractor.

"As a matter of fact, I am almost wont to question the traditional lack of business acumen in authors. On the contrary, almost every successful author of my acquaintance not only is pretty well able to take care of himself, but owns a motor-car and a safety-deposit box at the same time. And I find the not-so-successful authors prodding pretty faithfully to get their prices up.

"The Authors' League is a great institution and fills a great need. It was formed for just the purpose that seems to be prompting authors to unionize--to instruct authors in their rights and protect them against infringements.

"Why unionize? Next, an author will find himself obliged to lay aside his pen when the whistle blows, and publishers will be finding themselves obliged to deal in open-shop literature."

"And what effect are the moving pictures going to have on fiction?" I asked. "Will it be good or bad?"

"Up to the present," Miss Hurst replied, "moving pictures have, in my opinion, been little else than a destructive force where American fiction is concerned. Picturized fiction is on a cheap and sensational level. Even classics and standardized fiction are ruthlessly defamed by tawdry presentation. With the mechanics of the motion picture so advanced, it is unfortunate that the photoplay itself is not keeping pace with that advancement.

"Motion pictures are in the hands of laymen, and they show it. The scenario-writers, so-called 'staff writers,' have sprung up overnight, so to speak, and, from what I understand, when authors venture into the field they are at the mercy of the moving-picture director.

"Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett could not endure to sit through the picture presentation of _Little Lord Fauntleroy_, so mutilated was it.

"Of course, scenario-writing is a new art, and this interesting form of expression has hardly emerged from its infancy. Except perhaps in such great spectacles as 'The Birth of a Nation,' where, after all, the play is not the thing."

I asked Miss Hurst if she agreed with those who believe that Edgar Allan Poe's short stories have never been surpassed. I found that she did not.

"I should say," she said, "that since Poe's time we have had masters of the short story who have equaled him. Poe is, of course, the legitimate father of the American short story, and, coupled with that fact, was possessed of that kind of self-consciousness which enabled him to formulate a law of composition which has not been without its influence upon our subsequent short fiction.

"But in American letters there is little doubt that in the last one hundred years the short story has made more progress than any other literary type. We are becoming not only proficient, but pre-eminent in the short story. I can think off-hand of quite a group of writers, each of whom has contributed short-story classics to our literature.

"There are Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James (if we may claim him), Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, O. Henry, Richard Harding Davis, Jack London, and Booth Tarkington. And I am sure that there are various others whose names do not occur to me at this moment."

"You mentioned O. Henry," I said. "Then you do not share Katharine Fullerton Gerould's belief that O. Henry's influence on modern fiction is bad?"

"I decidedly disagree," said Miss Hurst, with considerable firmness, "with the statement that O. Henry wrote incidents rather than short stories, and is a pernicious influence in modern letters. That his structural form is more than anecdotal can be shown by an analysis of almost any of his plots.

"But it seems pedantic to criticize O. Henry on the score of structure. Admitting that the substance of his writings does rest on frail framework, even sometimes upon the trick, he built with Gothic skill and with no obvious pillars of support.

"Corot was none the less a landscape artist because he removed that particular brown tree from that particular green slope. O. Henry's facetiousness and, if you will, his frail structures, are no more to be reckoned with than, for instance, the extravagance of plot and the morbid formality we find in Poe.

"The smiting word and the polished phrase he quite frankly subordinated to the laugh, or the tear with a sniffle. Just as soon call red woolen underwear pernicious!

"The Henry James school has put a super-finish upon literature which, it is true, gives the same satisfying sense of wholeness that we get from a Greek urn. But, after all, chastity is not the first and last requisite. O. Henry loved to laugh with life! It was not in him to regard it with a Mona Lisa smile."

Miss Hurst has confined her attention so closely to American metropolitan life that I thought it would be interesting to have her opinion as to the truth of the remark, attributed to William Dean Howells, that American literature is merely a phase of English literature. In reply to my question she said:

"I agree with Mr. Howells that American literature up to now has been rather a phase of English literature. His own graceful art is an example of cousinship. American literature probably will continue to be an effort until our American melting-pot ceases boiling.

"_David Copperfield_ and _Vanity Fair_ come from a people whose lineage goes back by century-plants and not by Mayflowers. Theodore Dreiser and Ernest Poole, sometimes more or less inarticulately, are preparing us for the great American novel. When we reach a proper consistency the boiling is bound to cease, and, just as inevitably, the epic novel must come."

_THE NEW SPIRIT IN POETRY_

AMY LOWELL

Miss Amy Lowell, America's chief advocate and practitioner of the new poetry, would wear, I supposed, a gown by Bakst, with many Oriental jewels. And incense would be burning in a golden basin. And Miss Lowell would say that the art of poetry was discovered in 1916.

But there is nothing exotic or artificial about Miss Lowell's appearance and surroundings. Nor did the author of _Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_ express, when I talked to her the other day, any of the extravagant opinions which conservative critics attribute to the _vers libristes_. Miss Lowell talked with the practicality which is of New England and the serenity which is of Boston; she was positive, but not narrowly dogmatic; she is keenly appreciative of contemporary poetry, but she has the fullest sense of the value of the great heritage of poetical tradition that has come down to us through the ages.

There is so much careless talk of _imagisme_, _vers libre_, and the new poetry in general that I thought it advisable to begin our talk by asking for a definition or a description of the new poetry. In reply to my question Miss Lowell said:

"The thing that makes me feel sure that there is a future in the new poetry is the fact that those who write it follow so many different lines of thought. The new poetry is so large a subject that it can scarcely be covered by one definition. It seems to me that there are four definite sorts of new poetry, which I will attempt to describe.

"One branch of the new poetry may be called the realistic school. This branch is descended partly from Whitman and partly from the prose-writers of France and England. The leading exponents of it are Robert Frost and Edgar Lee Masters. These two poets are different from each other, but they both are realists, they march under the same banner.

"Another branch of the new poetry consists of the poets whose work shows a mixture of the highly imaginative and the realistic. Their thought verges on the purely imaginative, but is corrected by a scientific attitude of mind. I suppose that this particular movement in English poetry may be said to have started with Coleridge, but in England the movement hardly attained its due proportions. Half of literary England followed Wordsworth, half followed Byron. It is in America that we find the greatest disciple of Coleridge in the person of Edgar Allan Poe. The force of the movement then went back to France, where it showed clearly in Mallarme and the later symbolists. To-day we see this tendency somewhat popularized in Vachell Lindsay, although perhaps he does not know it. And if I may be so bold as to mention myself, I should say that I in common with most other imagists belong to this branch, that I am at once a fantasist and a realist.

"Thirdly, we have the lyrico-imaginative type of poet. Of this branch the best example that I can call to mind is John Gould Fletcher. The fourth group of the new poets consists of those who are descended straight from Matthew Arnold. They show the Wordsworth influence corrected by experience and education. Browning is in their line of descent. Characteristics of their work are high seriousness, astringency, and a certain pruning down of poetry so that redundancy is absolutely avoided. Of this type the most striking example is Edwin Arlington Robinson."

"Miss Lowell," I said, "the opponents of the new poetry generally attack it chiefly on account of its form--or rather, on account of its formlessness. And yet what you have said has to do only with the idea itself. You have said nothing about the way in which the idea is expressed."

"There is no special form which is characteristic of the new poetry," said Miss Lowell, "and of course 'formlessness' is a word which is applied to it only by the ignorant. The new poetry is in every form. Edgar Lee Masters has written in _vers libre_ and in regular rhythm. Robert Frost writes in blank verse. Vachell Lindsay writes in varied rhyme schemes. I write in both the regular meters and the newer forms, such as _vers libre_ and 'polyphonic prose.'

"It is a mistake to suppose, as many conservative critics do, that modern poetry is a matter of _vers libre_. _Vers libre_ is not new, but it is valuable to give vividness when vividness is desired. _Vers libre_ is a difficult thing to write well, and a very easy thing to write badly. This particular branch of the new poetry movement has been imitated so extensively that it has brought the whole movement into disrepute in the eyes of casual observers. But we must remember that no movement is to be judged by its obscure imitators. A movement must be judged by the few people at its head who make the trend. There cannot be many of them. In the history of the world there are only a few supreme artists, only a small number of great artists, only a limited number of good artists. And to suppose that we in America at this particular moment can be possessed of many artists worthy of consideration is ridiculous.

"Undoubtedly the fact that a great number of people are engaged to-day in producing poetry is a great stimulus and helps to create a proper atmosphere for those men whose work may live. For it is a curious fact that the artistic names that have come down to us are those of men who have lived in the so-called great artistic periods, when many other men were working at the same thing."

I asked Miss Lowell to tell something of this _vers libre_ which is so much discussed and so little understood. She said:

"_Vers libre_ is based upon rhythm. Its definition is 'A verse form based upon cadence rather than upon exact meter.' It is a little difficult to define cadence when dealing with poetry. I might call it the sense of balance.

"The unit of _vers libre_ is the strophe, not the line or the foot, as in regular meter. The strophe is a group of words which round themselves satisfactorily to the ear. In short poems this complete rounding may take place only at the end, making the poem a unit of a single movement, the lines serving only to give the slight up-and-down effect necessary to the voice when the poem is read aloud.

"In longer poems the strophe may be a group of lines. Poetry being a spoken and not a written art, those not well versed in the various poetic forms will find it simpler to read _vers libre_ poems aloud, rather than to try to get their rhythm from the printed page. For people who are used only to the exact meters, the printed arrangement of a _vers libre_ poem is a confusing process. To a certain extent cadence is dependent upon quantity--long and short syllables being of peculiar importance. Words hurried over in reading are balanced by words on which the reader pauses. Remember, also, that _vers libre_ can be either rhymed or unrhymed."

"One objection," I said, "that many critics bring up against unrhymed poetry is that it cannot be remembered."

"I cannot see that that is of the slightest importance," Miss Lowell replied. "The music that we whistle when we come out of the theater is not the greatest music we have heard.

"Zaccheus he
Did climb a tree
His Lord to see

is easily remembered. But I refuse to think that it is great poetry.

"The enemies of _vers libre_," she continued, "say that _vers libre_ is in no respect different from oratory. Now, there is a difference between the cadence of _vers libre_ and the cadence of oratory. Lincoln's Gettysburg address is not _vers libre_, it is rhythmical prose. At the prose end of cadence is rhythmical prose; at the verse end is _vers libre_. The difference is in the kind of cadence.

"Recently a writer in _The Nation_ took some of Meredith's prose and made it into _vers libre_ poems which any poet would have been glad to write. Then he took some of my poems and turned them into prose, with a result which he was kind enough to call beautiful. He then pertinently asked what was the difference.

"I might answer that there is no difference. Typography is not relevant to the discussion. Whether a thing is written as prose or as verse is immaterial. But if we would see the advantage which Meredith's imagination enjoyed in the freer forms of expression, we need only compare these lyrical passages from his prose works with his own metrical poetry."

I asked Miss Lowell about the charge that the new poets are lacking in reverence for the great poets of the past. She believes that the charge is unfounded. Nevertheless, she believes that the new poets do well to take the New England group of writers less seriously than conservative critics would have them take them.

"America has produced only two great poets, Whitman and Poe," said Miss Lowell. "The rest of the early American poets were cultivated gentlemen, but they were more exactly English provincial poets than American poets, and they were decidedly inferior to the parent stock. The men of the New England group, with the single exception of Emerson, were cultivated gentlemen with a taste for literature--they never rose above that level.

"No one can judge his contemporaries. We cannot say with certainty that the poets of this generation are better than their predecessors. But surely we can see that the new poets have more originality, more of the stuff out of which poetry is made, than their predecessors had, aside from the two great exceptions that I have mentioned."

"What is the thing that American poetry chiefly needs?" I asked.

"Well," said Miss Lowell, "I wish that there were a great many changes in our attitude toward literature. I wish that no man could expect to make a living by writing. I wish that the magazines did not pay for contributions--few of them do in France, you know. And I wish that the newspapers did not try to review books. But the thing that we chiefly need is informed and authoritative criticism.

"We have very few critics, we have practically none who are writing separate books on contemporary verse. When I was writing my _French Poets_ I read twenty or thirty books on contemporary French poetry, serious books, written by critics who make a specialty of the poetry of their own day.

"We have nothing like this in America. The men who write critical books write of the literature of a hundred years ago. No critical mind is bent toward contemporary verse. There are a few newspaper critics who pay serious attention to contemporary verse--William Stanley Braithwaite, O. W. Firkins, and Louis Untermeyer, for example--but there are only a few of them.

"What is to be desired is for some one to be as interested in criticism as the poets are in poetry. It was the regularity of Sainte-Beuve's 'Causeries du Lundi' that gave it its weight. What we want is a critic like that, who is neither an old man despairing of a better job nor a young man using his newspaper work as a stepping-stone to something higher. Of course, brilliant criticisms of poetry appear from time to time, but what we need is criticism as an institution.

"After all," said Miss Lowell, in conclusion, "there are only two kinds of poetry, good poetry and bad poetry. The form of poetry is a matter of individual idiosyncrasy. It is only the very young and the very old, the very inexperienced or the numbed, who say, 'This is the only way in which poetry shall be written!'"

_A NEW DEFINITION OF POETRY_

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

At no time in the history of literature have the critics been able to agree upon a definition of poetry. And the recent popularity of _vers libre_ and _imagisme_ has made the definer's task harder than ever before. Is rhyme essential to poetry? Is rhythm essential to poetry? Can a mere reflection of life justly be called poetry, or must imagination be present?

I put some of these questions to Edwin Arlington Robinson, who wrote _Captain Craig_, _The Children of the Night_, _The Town Down the River_, _The Man Against the Sky_ and _Merlin: A Poem_. And this man, whom William Stanley Braithwaite and other authoritative critics have called the foremost of American poets, this student of life, who was revealing the mysterious poetry of humanity many years before Edgar Lee Masters discovered to the world the vexed spirits that haunt Spoon River, rewarded my questioning with a new definition of poetry. He said:

"Poetry is a language that tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction, something that cannot be said.

"All real poetry, great or small, does this," he added. "And it seems to me that poetry has two characteristics. One is that it is, after all, undefinable. The other is that it is eventually unmistakable."

"'Eventually'!" I said. "Then you think that poetry is not always appreciated in the lifetime of its maker?"

Mr. Robinson smiled whimsically. "I never use words enough," he said. "It is not unmistakable as soon as it is published, but sooner or later it is unmistakable.

"And in the poet's lifetime there are always some people who will understand and appreciate his work. I really think that it is impossible for a real poet permanently to escape appreciation. And I can't imagine anything sillier for a man to do than to worry about poetry that has once been decently published. The rest is in the hands of Time, and Time has more than often a way of making a pretty thorough job of it."

"But why is it," I asked, "that a great poet so often is without honor in his own generation, where mediocrity is immediately famous?"

"It's hard to say," said Mr. Robinson, thoughtfully regarding the glowing end of his cigar. "Many causes prevent poetry from being correctly appraised in its own time. Any poetry that is marked by violence, that is conspicuous in color, that is sensationally odd, makes an immediate appeal. On the other hand, poetry that is not noticeably eccentric sometimes fails for years to attract any attention.

"I think that this is why so many of Kipling's worst poems are greatly overpraised, while some of his best poems are not appreciated. _Gunga Din_, which is, of course, a good thing in its way, has been praised far more than it deserves, because of its oddity. And the poem beginning 'There's a whisper down the field' has never been properly appreciated. It's one of the very best of Kipling's poems, although it is marred by a few lapses of taste. One of his greatest poems, by the way, _The Children of the Zodiac_, happens to be in prose.

"But I am always revising my opinion of Kipling. I have changed my mind about him so often that I have no confidence in my critical judgment. That is one of the reasons why I do not like to criticise my American contemporaries."

"Do you think," I asked, "that this tendency to pay attention chiefly to the more sensational poets is as characteristic of our generation as of those that came before?"

"I think it applies particularly to our own time," he replied. "More than ever before oddity and violence are bringing into prominence poets who have little besides these two qualities to offer the world, and some who have much more. It may seem very strange to you, but I think that a great modern instance of this tendency is the case of Robert Browning. The eccentricities of Browning's method are the things that first turned popular attention upon him, but the startling quality in Browning made more sensation in his own time than it can ever make again. I say this in spite of the fact that Browning and Wordsworth are taken as the classic examples of slow recognition. Wordsworth, you know, had no respect for the judgment of youth. It may have been sour grapes, but I am inclined to think that there was a great deal of truth in his opinion.

"I think it is safe to say that all real poetry is going to give at some time or other a suggestion of finality. In real poetry you find that something has been said, and yet you find also about it a sort of nimbus of what can't be said.

"This nimbus may be there--I wouldn't say that it isn't there--and yet I can't find it in much of the self-conscious experimenting that is going on nowadays in the name of poetry.

"I can't get over the impression," Mr. Robinson went on, with a meditative frown, "that these post-impressionists in painting and most of the _vers libristes_ in poetry are trying to find some sort of short cut to artistic success. I know that many of the new writers insist that it is harder to write good _vers libre_ than to write good rhymed poetry. And judging from some of their results, I am inclined to agree with them."

I asked Mr. Robinson if he believed that the evident increase in interest in poetry, shown by the large sales of the work of Robert Frost and Edgar Lee Masters and Rupert Brooke, indicated a real renascence of poetry.

"I think that it indicates a real renascence of poetry," he replied. "I am sufficiently child-like and hopeful to find it very encouraging."