Chapter IV: Part 4

This is not an argument for the abolition of criticism, nor for a false and sickly tolerance of bad writing. Sincerity in criticism helps to produce sincerity in creative art, and I flatter myself that my own young critical brutalities, of which I have given an instance, have had their share in the bringing to birth of a new and more sincere American literature. At the same time, I think that all criticism is motivated by jealousy and envy: the critic is a critic, usually, because he has not yet had the opportunity to do creative work himself; and he is able to be generous to creative artists only when he recognizes in their work something akin to what he wants to do himself, so that he can feel in such a writer an ally and not an enemy in his own prospective campaign. These motives are, of course, hidden deep below the level of consciousness; but they are there--and they have their origin in fear. The established writer fears the emergence of a new taste which will reject his work and leave him without an audience; he fears the younger generation that comes knocking at the door, and, with honorable exceptions, he sneers at the younger generation’s queer and different literary beginnings. But in precisely the same way, the younger generation fears the older--fears that the public taste will never change, that its own talents will never be recognized and rewarded, and that the Old Gods will reign forever; hence, in every organ of opinion which it can initiate or capture, it sneers at the older generation, and calls the productions of that generation by every bad name in the critical vocabulary.

It is human nature to be afraid; I am not complaining of that; but what I object to is the “rationalizing” of these fears, their elaborate justification by critical theory. It would be much better if we admitted the fact, and proceeded to deal with it as we deal with other fears, by social methods which tend to mitigate them. These social processes all fall into the general category of manners.

It is desirable, in the first place, that writers should, to some extent, know each other personally. It is sometimes objected that personal acquaintance makes honest criticism impossible. That is not true; it merely makes ill mannered criticism more unlikely. One cannot recklessly impute all sorts of vicious motives to a writer with whom one may presently have lunch; one is, in fact, required to criticize, and not merely malign, his works. It is my opinion that honest criticism, of the most unfavorable sort, is consistent with a degree of courtesy which would not interfere with agreeable personal relations between author and critic. Every writer has the experience of finding that some of his best friends do not like what he writes; but their friendship usually remains unimpaired, because the traditions of friendly intercourse require that this dislike shall be expressed in a friendly way. Your friend, in giving you his opinion in private, is under no obligation--as the unknown newspaper critic seems to be--to make you out a complete ass or an utter scoundrel. As a matter of fact, you are neither, and the friendly criticism is usually far more to the point than the newspaper denunciation.

The generations move swiftly in these days, and I, who am still a member of a younger generation which has just begun to get a foothold in the citadel of public taste, find myself denounced by a still younger generation as one of that gang of tyrants and oppressors whose authority must be destroyed if literature in America is ever to come into its own. I dare say I have incurred some of these denunciations by my critical airs of owning, together with my gang, the earth and the fulness thereof; but these airs were merely intended to impress a still older gang whom I had been in the habit of regarding as tyrants and oppressors. It is also true, doubtless, that I have sneered at some of these younger writers; certainly they have annoyed me by their tricks, especially by what seems to me a wilful unintelligibility; but even so, I ought not to have sneered. That is simply a bad critical habit which, once acquired, it is hard to get over.

In the pages of +The Bookman+ recently I was guilty of sneering at two writers of a “generation” younger than my own. I did not realize that I had done so until one of them called my attention to it in a letter. “Why”, he asked, “did you say that I had no point of view?” I apologized to him warmly, remarking that when critics said that about my own novels it always made me angry. An author, of course, always has a point of view, and it is absurd, as well as ill mannered, to assert that he is such a fool as to think that he can write a novel without one. He may fail to convey to his readers, or to some of them, what that point of view is; and the critic is perfectly within his rights in saying as much. But the critic has no right to assume that a novel which seems to him an inchoate collection of materials is anything worse than a failure on the part of the author, who certainly believed that he was presenting the public with an orderly and significant work of art. Moreover, it is honorable to fail in such an attempt; and it is the critic’s business, rather than to assume that the author has been too lazy to try to write a good novel, to discover why he has failed. It is merely easier for the critic to believe the worst; and it is generally the critic who is lazy, and not the novelist.

It is, of course, an imposition upon a poor devil who wants to write novels of his own to put him at a desk before a pile of other people’s novels and ask him to criticize them. No wonder he is often impatient; and no wonder, either, that lacking as yet the opportunity to make himself known to the public by novels of his own, he should seize the occasion to shine at the expense of the authors whom he is supposed to be criticizing. I have done that often enough myself to have no hesitation in attributing it as a natural impulse to other reviewers. And when I read one of those reviews of one of my own novels, I address the reviewer in imagination thus: “Young man, you have my sympathy. It is a shame that you should have to spend your precious hours, which should be dedicated to your own first novel, upon a book of mine in which you are obviously not interested in the least. This is a hard world for beginning novelists. But have patience--remember that some of us have gone through the same mill. And besides--I am really not to blame for your predicament. _I_ did not ask you to review my novel. And it is not quite fair of you to punish me for it. I do not want to keep you from writing your novels; all I want is the privilege of writing my own--a privilege which you seem to wish to take away from me. All right--you’ll get a taste of your own medicine some day! Who do you think is going to review that great book of yours when you do write it? Several dozen young men who want to write their own books, and who will consider your novel merely one more affliction to be impatiently suffered. Then you’ll see how it feels!”

The reviewing of books, regardless of the quality of the books, is likely to be for the young critic an agony that, to be endured, must be mitigated by some opportunity for presenting _himself_ to the public. That’s all right: if the book is not, in some sense, about himself, he has no business to be reading it; and if it _is_ about himself--as the most interesting novels are--he is quite right in saying so. The most entertaining, if not always the most informative, reviews are accounts of “the adventures of a soul among masterpieces”. But accounts of the misadventures of a soul among books that are not felt to be masterpieces can be very dreary and very offensive reading. If a book makes the critic angry, that is something; but if it merely bores him, why should he trouble to tell us so? A history of a critic’s boredom is itself a bore; and the critic who is bored by almost everything in the world lacks the essential ingredient of the critical faculty--a sensitiveness so acute that the critic can become excited over things which other people are too dull to notice for themselves. A habitual falling back upon the critic’s own experiences may or may not be a sign of æsthetic boredom; it all depends on whether the “I” thus placed in the foreground is relevant to the literary topic nominally under discussion. Every young newspaper man has tried the trick of handing the city editor a story of his failure to get an interview, instead of the interview. But no newspaper man has yet had the nerve to hand in a story of how he preferred to sit in the park and watch the pigeons rather than talk to the man he was sent to interview. A good deal of “brilliant” “young” “criticism” is like that.

But while there are many excuses to be made for bad manners in the young critic to whom book reviewing is an unwelcome chore, these excuses scarcely apply to the established novelist, who is presumably not reviewing books to keep the wolf from the door. The only good reason for one novelist’s reviewing a book by another is a genuine desire to say something about it. And he is dealing here with an equal whom he is under every obligation of civilized human intercourse to treat with courtesy.

I have already given an instance of my own failure to behave according to these standards, so I shall take the liberty of mentioning a similar failure on the part of another. One would not need to look far for instances. But as a most glaring example, I post up for consideration some excerpts from a review by a prominent American woman novelist, whom I prefer not to name here; though for purposes of incredulous reference I don’t mind stating that the review appeared in the initial number of “The Literary Digest International Book Review.”

I have always found ---- peculiarly interesting, for the reason
that she is one of the few women writers of fiction with intellect
as well as talent; and it has diverted me to speculate on what
she would have been if she had married and had a brood of
flesh-and-blood children, or if she had elected to study life and
men at first hand after the manner of Georges Sand and other gifted
ladies rather more discreet but no less thorough....

As I have intimated before, I have often wondered how Miss ----
would have treated sex, if, instead of being a woman of impeccable
virtue, she had chosen to be a _dame gallante_. Writers of
first-hand experience with the vital, but nevertheless commonplace,
facts of life, generally avoid erotic scenes, partly because a
suggestion and an appeal to the reader’s imagination is more
esthetic, partly because, their own curiosity satisfied, they have
no repressions or inhibitions to gratify in the act of writing.
The creative faculty takes a wider range. Sex plays its part in
their work as in Life. It is a mighty force, but it is not the
whole thing. Therefore, I do not hesitate to believe that if Miss
---- were as adventurous personally as she is imaginatively, her
striking talent would have a freer sweep....

Enough!

I see that I am a member of the older generation after all. But not in my wildest youthful days as a critic would I have considered it decent to taunt a woman novelist with her presumed virginity--or a man novelist, either, for that matter! When criticism opens its gates to such personal gossip as this about living writers, anything is possible--all standards of critical propriety are destroyed--there is no longer any protection for writers from the vulgar curiosity of a public less interested in literature than in “life”. And what will it all lead to, I ask, but red ruin and the breaking up of homes?

There are, as I can call to mind, a number of quaint facts alleged about the private lives of certain prominent contemporary writers, American as well as English; and speculations as to whether, if these facts had been otherwise, the prose or the poetry of these writers would be better or worse--such speculations would doubtless be more interesting to the general reader, trained in Sunday Supplement taste, than what has heretofore passed for criticism. Are we to expect this sort of thing? I hope not!

_Zona Gale_

As a person, Zona Gale is thoroughly entertaining in two distinct moods. At one moment she speaks with the accents of “Pollyanna”, the next with those of her own “Grandma Bett”. She is slight, delicate, pretty, shy but firm. She is quiet in her gestures and her voice is soft. She will allow herself the great pleasure of an emotional experience such as helping a crippled boy to write, and finding in him something which is, presumably, quite beyond his actual talents. Yet she has a dry, detached manner of viewing life. While she has forced herself to believe that life is sweet and beautiful, her work often shows that she knows better than that. She was born in Portage, Wisconsin, and she has lived there most of her life, except while she was at the University of Wisconsin, and in New York City working on a newspaper. She is eager, ambitious, sympathetic. She has the ability to dramatize the optimistic side of events. She is the type that champions pacifism avidly and has principles about kindness to animals. She worked night and day in New York until she had succeeded in gaining the attention of various editors for her poems and short stories. She then returned to Wisconsin, where she remains. Occasionally she arrives suddenly in town, sees her friends, produces a play (there are two waiting in the Broadway offing now), indulges in a round of gaieties, then turns again to the native state and her charming mother. Her earlier books betrayed her most sentimental mood. “Miss Lulu Bett” and “Birth” show her at her truest. Perhaps she has been too cloistered ever to go beyond mild cynicism and surface realism. When she characterizes, she rings true, but when her characters require great emotional experience she finds herself at a loss. A writer of distinction, she has yet reached no stable ground. She is an artist only in part. Perhaps she is too much the woman to be the uncompromising craftsman.

THE NEW WORD IN PLAY PRODUCING

Producing a play seems to me, as I have recently watched it, to be partly the art of dealing with people. And the new word in dealing with people is to deal with them, not to direct them.

Watching Mr. Brock Pemberton staging my play, I used to think that if one of the oldtime producers were to enter the theatre, he would say: “But this man is not doing anything. He just sits there.” It was true that he seemed just to sit there, hour after hour. The director of my fears, he who stood tense or wild in the midst of the players and cried that fire from heaven had fallen on such and such a reading, or bit of business, or tempo--he was not in the theatre. Soon he will not be in any theatre. Or in any other creative work. Which means almost all work.

Instead there was, in this case, a man who sat in the house, halfway back, and who at first said principally: “From the beginning, please.” Or, “Once more, that scene.” And very often: “Come now. Let’s all help.” There also was I who in those first days kept saying to him: “Don’t you think that should be read so and so?” or “That oughn’t to be done so, just there” or “That isn’t the right reading.” And the invariable reply would be: “Let’s let them get the lines first.” “Let’s see if they won’t come to that in a day or two.” In the first weeks of rehearsal I must have said these things literal scores of times and always to that same reply, delivered without impatience and without a shadow of turning.

Gradually, in instance after instance, it was clear that the suggestion which I had been so eager to make was either finding its way into the reading by the feeling of the actors, or was being supplanted by something of their own creation that was better. When I spoke of this--“It means so much more when they find out a thing for themselves,” the producer said.

After a time, at the close of a rehearsal, he would go down to the front row and say: “I have a few notations--will you take them down?” He would make innumerable suggestions, and the company would note them on their parts. When a member of the company asked how a line should be read the first reply from the producer was usually: “How do you feel that line--what do you feel is the most natural reading?” Again and again he asked them for suggestions. If a line needed something and I could not make the suggestion, he would ask the one to whom it belonged to try to think of the thing he would like to say in such a situation. Some of the least unsatisfactory lines, therefore, came from the company themselves.

Often it seemed to me that the producer thought of himself as one of the company. And as if industrial difficulties might be solved if only all the coöperators in industry could recognize themselves in this way. That which Walter Hampden welcomes as “industrial and artistic coöperation” was assuredly here. It is the new word in industry as in art--the third word, the human factor. Yet in the end this play was shot through from first to last with the ideal of naturalism which all along had been the ideal of the producer--but he had developed it, he had not stamped it on from without.

This attitude cannot be unique. There must be others of the modern stage who are producing in this way, but it is not the old way, and it is not the way in which the public generally thinks of a production being made. Nearly everyone has said: “Isn’t it a terribly difficult experience, having a play put on? Isn’t it nervous work? Don’t you have to fight for your own interpretation?” But it was not difficult. There was nothing “nervous” about it--excepting that one couldn’t engage all the actors who applied for the parts. And so for my own interpretation, my fear was that they were sometimes reading a line in my way to please me when they knew it would be better some other way. I have always believed stage people to be the most likable people alive, and now I know it.

There is far more reason why play producing should be nervous work than that routine work should be so; because, first, there is no routine to follow and, second, everybody involved is in some degree a creative artist--who carries his own authority. By reason of the daily intimacy and the swift work and the high pressure and the risk for everybody, it is true that irony or arbitrary authority or lack of sympathy could make of play producing about as uncomfortable an association as any other association dominated by “nerves”. Perhaps, as Dr. Joseph Jastrow once suggested, all these things are not alone in the domain of art and of ethics but of manners. Or perhaps it is merely that theatrical producers, in common with all other business men, are eliminating waste--waste nerves along with the rest. The roots of art are fed and watered by undivined agencies. In this case I believe that the work ran smoothly because the producer was more intent on getting out of every creative worker his creative bit than in remembering that he was the director and that his way was best. He was not only directing a play--he was dealing with people. The final art.

_William Lyon Phelps_

Few professors of English literature have inspired the undergraduate at large as has William Lyon Phelps of Yale University. Professor Phelps humanizes literature, understands the ordinary human being’s approach to it, loves a good joke and is a constant but a master punster. As a lecturer he is known from coast to coast. His word on books is gospel to librarians and club women. This is due partly to his keen sense of the dramatic. If you could sit under him at Yale you would understand what I mean. Thoroughly of Connecticut is Professor Phelps. He was born in Hartford and educated at Yale, where he has lived ever since except for summers in Michigan and a sojourn for post-graduate work at Harvard. His published volumes are innumerable, as are his interests and activities. Alive to every movement in the theatre, exceedingly fond of music, interested in young people and their efforts, he is as definite a personality in American educational and literary life as I know. His library at New Haven, with its crackling fire, the Browning chair, Rufus the dog, and Mrs. Phelps, the always cordial hostess, is filled with undergraduates on any winter Sunday afternoon. Probably no man now living has created a love of books in so great a number of souls as has William Lyon Phelps. This is a task worth the greatest effort. It is one which needs must be prompted by enthusiasm which is a quality Professor Phelps has in the highest degree.

THE WHY OF THE BEST SELLER

There is no formula to fit the best seller. The Bible and Shakespeare are best sellers, and among authors of our time, such kindred souls as Henry Adams and Harold Bell Wright are emphatically in this class, though Wright somewhat more emphatically than Adams. The novel, “Main Street”, which included among its targets people who buy best sellers, is itself a best seller. The inhabitants of Main Street would seem to have a counter-weight in a balancing number of those who laugh at them. Thus, at all events, the country is safe. Complacency finds its complement in ridicule.

I admire both “Main Street” and its author; I rejoice in his success; but the cyclonic popularity of the book--if foreseen--might conceivably have tempered its zeal. To prove that people need it as much as they apparently want it, it should circulate only among the élite and be either vaguely irritating or downright incomprehensible to the general. Instead of being caviar, it is shredded wheat. The other alternative is that there are two million five hundred thousand élite in America, allowing conservatively five readers to every copy, and remembering that the sale has considerably increased since I began to write this article. Now to believe that there are millions of the élite in America is to believe that this is indeed God’s country; such a belief would put the believer forever on Main Street. The publishers do not regret the popularity of the book; and I hope Mr. Lewis has no qualms. He now has leisure to write even a better one, which he is certainly capable of doing.

Although Emerson’s squirrel did not envy the mountain, that was because he was Emerson’s squirrel, not a real one. Nearly everything small would like to be big. Many of the German dramatists who scorn Sudermann have unsuccessfully tried to copy his methods--so I read in the work of a German critic. There is no doubt that Henry James would have rejoiced in an enormous public, though in his art he followed the Rehoboam method. The small colleges have their distinct and inimitable merits; of which most of them are quietly and justly proud; but a few of them advertise the benefits of smallness so energetically that if it always paid to advertise, they would lose the quality advertised, as Professor Briggs has said in his own way.

Almost every great poet, dramatist, and novelist has been famous and popular in his own lifetime. Exceptions are only apparent; either the author has died young or his best work has appeared posthumously. Let no sour author trust in posterity. Posterity is far more cruel than the contemporary public; contemporaries abuse, but posterity forgets. When an author is really great, posterity ratifies contemporary opinion. Unfortunately, however, the fact that greatness is popular does not mean that popularity is a true indication of greatness. Where a once popular author is gone but not forgotten, I mean, when he is damned by posterity, there were dissenters while he was yet alive. Remember the exalted position of Southey and remember what Byron said of him.

Leaving out the rare appearances of genius, there is always I think a discernible reason why a poem, novel, or play is popular. When somebody frowns and says, “I cannot understand why Harold Bell Wright should sell by the million,” he is simply saying that he does not understand human nature. Although many individuals are cruel and selfish, the average person can be easily touched by an imaginary hero or villain--David was instantly stirred by the story of the ewe lamb, yet perhaps at that moment Bathsheba was in the room with her knitting. No critic believes that “Lightnin’” is as good a play as “Riders to the Sea”, but “Lightnin’”, which I am sorry to say bored me, is exactly the kind of thing that we call sure fire. It hit the centre of the bull’s eye, and, as in most plays and stories, the impelling force was a luscious mixture of sweetness and melodrama. It was what people call “wholesome”, which depends perhaps somewhat on the stomach. The vogue of “Lightnin’” is more interesting than the play; I mean we can learn more from it.

The two novelists whose books enjoy the biggest sales in America are Gene Stratton-Porter and Harold Bell Wright. In part they owe their circulation to the invincible sentimentality in the human breast. America has no monopoly of this emotion. These two authors are surely not inferior to the beknighted Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, and the late Mrs. Barclay in England, to the late Georges Ohnet in France, to a hundred sloppy novelists in Germany. Every human heart has a percentage of slush. Why should we be surprised at the vogue of Harold Bell Wright when we remember the Dempsey-Carpentier fight? What must Tex Rickard really think of the intelligence of the public? Nothing like this had been seen since the days of Barnum--the expectation of millions whipped to just the right froth, so that whether the fighters were in condition or not, the public was precisely ripe for picking. It was a shame not to take the money. And how fortunate that Dempsey won, as I fervently hoped he would! If he had lost, the world would have wallowed in a trough of sentimentality. In France, the home of art and intelligence, in Paris, the home of intellectual cynicism and mockery, Carpentier would have eclipsed not only Marshal Foch, but all the poets and dramatists. He might have had any decoration. His wife and child would have come to America; it is terrifying to think of the sentimental gush that would have been slobbered on this excellent family. Carpentier is undoubtedly a good fellow and an attractive personality, and I understand that Dempsey is not popular. But for one thing we should all be grateful to Jack Dempsey--he saved us from ourselves.

I am informed on good authority that one of our motion picture actresses--not _the_ one--receives weekly five hundred sentimental letters from American men. The private irregularities of a millionaire apparently interest more newspaper readers than disarmament or the League of Nations. Therefore let no one wonder at the vogue of Harold Bell Wright, and let no one waste any ammunition on it. His books are certainly better reading than the sensations just mentioned. Any one of his novels costs less than a ticket to a musical comedy, and gives more in return.

A word of encouragement to public librarians. Along with ministers of the gospel and teachers in the grade schools, public librarians form the finest class of people in America, because they do the most good. Their opportunities for helpfulness come every day, and most of them are eager to take advantage of the chance. Now their bugbear is Harold Bell Wright. Every time a boy or girl asks for Harold, they vainly try to give him something else. And their souls are filled with distress when the child walks off with Harold under his arm.

I believe it is better that the infant, whether in or out of his teens, should read Harold Bell Wright than not read at all. And surely his elders, who inhale sentimentality in other forms, cannot justly cast a stone. Wright knows how to tell a story adapted to an elementary grade of intelligence; the reader discovers that books are a permanent source of happiness; with them at any moment he may change his environment and his companions, and live in a world of excitement. After a time, he will in many instances proceed to better and more subtle books, and find happiness of a finer kind. He is in the garden of printed pages; let him not forget that the one who led him through the gates was Harold Bell Wright. My pity goes out to the boy or girl who is not brought up with books; who grows up without any insurance against life.

Personally, I have had enough of Harold Bell Wright. I have read every word of two of his books--“When a Man’s a Man”, and “Helen of the Old House”. This “Helen of the Old House” has the ingredients nicely mixed. It is filled with dripping sentiment. There is not a single real character, no one who resembles a complex human being. Each person is put there to support the thesis--which is, that the only way out of labor troubles is for employer and employé to work harmoniously together. An employé who strikes without good reason is every whit as bad as a German imperialist, says Harold Bell Wright; and an employer who is only a profiteer is bad in just the same way. Granted. Let us then organize against both offenders--against the corrupt capitalist and against Bolshevism. Here Harold is undoubtedly Wright.

Whatever may be this book’s offenses against literary art--and I saw enough without looking for them--it is really a sermon preached on the labor question. And as his solution is correct, true statement being usually unoriginal, it is possible that many of his readers will profit by his discourse, skilfully adapted as it is to their comprehension. I believe his motive is excellent; he wishes to use his prodigious popularity to help his country and humanity. He knows well enough that the shortest cut to the ordinary intelligence is by the sentimental route, and like a spellbinder, his muzzle velocity is very high. The difficulty is that if the world could be saved by sentimental melodrama, we should have been saved long ago. Nearly all sentimental melodramas are on the side of virtue; as were the novels of Oliver Optic and Horatio Alger, Jr.

I have no particular desire to join the army of those who satirize virtue. As between virtue and vice, even in this ridiculous world, virtue actually seems to me less absurd than vice.

The case of Gene Stratton-Porter is not quite so easy as that of her running mate. The publishers tell us that nine million copies of her books have been sold. With five readers to each copy, this means a circulation of forty-five million. She is a public institution, like Yellowstone Park, and I should not think she would care any more than a mountain for adverse criticism. She does, though. Wise men know that more than half the things that appear in print are not true, and yet many have such a superstitious reverence for type that an attack or a misrepresentation fills them with real agony. Even those whose position seems immovable--Pope, Tennyson, Henry James--suffered torture when they read an adverse criticism printed in an ephemeral paper, and written by a nobody. One of Yale’s greatest presidents, in the eighteenth century, saw an unfavorable criticism of his book in an English journal, and he immediately fainted away.

Gene Stratton-Porter lives in a swamp, arrays herself in man’s clothes, and sallies forth in all weathers to study the secrets of nature. I believe she knows every bug, bird, and beast in the woods. I believe she recognizes every sound in a forest, and can tell you what caused it. She is primarily a naturalist, one of the foremost in America, and has published a number of books on flora and fauna, illustrated with photographs of her own taking. These books--which are closest to her heart--have only a moderate sale. Thus she hit upon the plan of writing sentimental novels, in which her observation of nature is brought to the attention of America. I have no doubt that she has led millions of boys and girls into the study of natural objects; that she has accomplished in this way much permanent good.

She is as full of energy as Roosevelt, and as hearty an American. She could have retired on a fortune long ago, but she will never retire until the day of her death, which I hope may be long distant. She is eaten up with ambition, and with the joy of life; few have more fun in their daily existence than she. I have no doubt that if the public could see some of the letters which she receives by the cartload, they would share her belief that she has not lived in vain.

I have read three of her novels--“A Girl of the Limberlost”, “A Daughter of the Land”, and the one just published, “Her Father’s Daughter”. The first of these with all its nature lore, was rather too sentimental for me, and the third impossible; but I defy any unprejudiced person to read “A Daughter of the Land” to the end, without enthusiasm for the story. The style is so crude that one must determine not to be stopped by it; one must not quit. Apart from the lack of stylistic art, one will find an admirable story, with a real plot and real characters; nothing is shirked or softened in the course of the novel, and the heroine is a girl that holds one’s attention, not merely by what happens to her, but by what she is. There is a certain grandeur in the conception of the tale, like a great architectural idea disguised by bad drawing. Furthermore, just now, when everybody thinks everybody else ought to be a farmer, this epic of the farm has a particular importance. Here was a girl who really loved the country; loved living on a farm; loved all kinds of agricultural work; loved to make and see things grow. And, as presented in the novel, this love is understandable and intelligible. There are not many such girls. But it would be well if there were more.

Living all her life in daily contact with nature, there is an elemental force in Gene Stratton-Porter which partly accounts for the hitting power of her novels. But in her latest story, “Her Father’s Daughter”, her passion for the California mountains and deserts has made her neglect not only the graces of style but the reality of her supposedly human beings. Linda, the high school wonder, is an impossible person; and the contrast between her, as a child of nature, and her supposititious sister, Eileen, stands out too grossly. By far the best things in this book are the cooking receipts and the intimate facts about the desert. Here the reader feels like a child in the author’s hands.

In addition to the literary shortcomings of this novel, it is sadly marred by anti-Japanese propaganda. Somebody in California has been stuffing our novelist, who is more gullible in international politics than in the study of nature. The villain of the story is a Japanese, who, enraged at losing his place at the head of his class in the high school, attempts to murder the boy who outpaced him, and is himself done to death by Katherine O’Donovan, the Strong Cook, otherwise the best character in the novel.

Despite my disappointment in “Her Father’s Daughter”, I shall read Gene Stratton-Porter’s next novel. If she is not a literary artist, she is anyhow a wonderful woman. No one lives closer to nature than she; and her undoubted vigor comes partly from this contact.

But if one wishes to see the difference between girls that are made to fit a purpose, and a real girl--the difference between puppets and humanity--let one, after reading “Helen of the Old House”, and “Her Father’s Daughter”, study with attention Booth Tarkington’s “Alice Adams”.

_Kenneth Macgowan_

Of all of our American dramatic critics, Kenneth Macgowan is probably the best known in England. This is partly because in his books he has chosen to discuss the drama as a whole, its development and its experiments, rather than to confine his efforts entirely to current reviewing. Also, he has allied himself with such experimenters as Robert Edmond Jones, the scene designer, and Eugene O’Neill. Macgowan is of Scotch-New England descent. He was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts, and was graduated from Harvard. He gravitated to New York City journalism via the Boston “Transcript” and the Philadelphia “Public Ledger”. Macgowan is slight, forceful, capable of great enthusiasm and of violent prejudice. He has always been an apostle of the new, of the slightly bizarre. His “Continental Stagecraft” is a book which challenges the American producer. His “The Theatre of Tomorrow” was a sort of glorified modern footnote to Craig and Moderwell. A young man much interested in trends and ideas, his influence has already been marked in the development of the American theatre.

RELIGION AND THE THEATER

For twenty years now there has been a great fuss going on about something called the new movement in the theatre. Craig, Appia, Reinhardt; Bakst, Urban, Jones; simplicity, suggestion, synthesis; _Drehbühne_, _pointillage_, _régisseur_; art theatre, little theatre, circus theatre--in spite of the confusion of such catchwords, it is hard to escape the belief that this ferment in the theatre means something. Something for life and from life; something for art and from art. Something immensely important to the sense of godhead in man which is life and art together, life and art fecundating one another.

It seems peculiarly clear that the new forces in the theatre have been working toward a spiritual change far more novel, far more interesting, and naturally far more important than any of the technical changes which they have brought about.

The technical changes have been confusing. First this business of scenic designers and revolving stages and all manner of show and mechanism; and now the “naked stage”, the permanent setting, abdication of the artist, scrapping of the machines, the actor alone on a podium or in a circus ring. All in the name of drama.

There is only one explanation. These changes have come as part of an attempt to restore the theatre to its old functions. They are two very extraordinary functions. One may be debauched into titillation, or may rise to that fulness of vitality, that excitation, upon which the second function of the theater is based--the function of exaltation.

Between the old theatre, in which these functions worked as potently as they worked seldom, and the theatre in which they may work again, lay the theatre of realism. It was the product of a tremendous force, a force for evil as well as good--twentieth century science. Science made the theatre realistic and realism made the drama scientific. It ceased to be a show. It became a photograph. The drama was made “truer”, but only in the sense that a photograph may be truer to fact than a drawing by Picasso. It achieved resemblance to life. And then it ceased to have excitement or exaltation, because excitement, in the vivid sense in which I use it here, is a most uncommon thing in modern life, and because exaltation is rare and hidden, showing seldom in outward relations. Both are too exceptional for realism.

The restoration of excitement to the theatre may appear to degrade it from the exact and austere report of life which realism demanded. But the thrill of movement and event is the element in the theatre which lifts our spirits to the point where exaltation is possible. The power of the theatre lies in just this ability to raise us to ecstasy through the love of vitality which is the commonest sign of divinity in life. And when the theatre gives us ecstasy, what becomes of science? And who cares?

The new forces in the theatre have struggled more or less blindly toward this end. They have tried beauty, richness, novelty to win back excitement. They have only just begun to see that the liveliest excitation in the playhouse may come from the art of the actor and the art of the _régisseur_ when they are stripped to the task of providing exaltation. Present the actor as an actor and the background as an honest material background, and you are ready for what glories the playwright and the peculiar genius of the theatre can provide. The drama is free again for its eternal task--the showing of the soul of life.

Just how much this may mean is perhaps the test of your belief in the theatre. It is the conviction of some of us that there has resided in the theatre--and our hope that there may reside once more--something akin to the religious spirit. A definition of this spirit is difficult. It is certainly not religion. It goes behind religion. It is the exaltation of which formal creeds are a product. It is the vitality which informs life, and begets art. Out of the intensity of spiritual feeling which rises from the eternal processes of the universe, and in turn becomes conscious of them, the thing is born which made Greek tragedy noble, and which called drama back to life in the Middle Ages. Then it was the spirit of religion. To-day we might call it the spirit of life.

Both consciously and unconsciously men of the theatre have sought to win back this exaltation. The latest attempt is in some ways the most daring and the most interesting. Max Reinhardt, leaving the playhouse altogether, has tried to find it in a wedding of the drama and the church. Before this is in print Reinhardt will have produced Calderon’s mystic drama, “The Theatre of the World”, under the high altar of the Collegien Kirche in Salzburg. It is impossible now to speak of how far he has been able to effect an æsthetic union between the handsome rococo edifice and the platform for his players; it is only possible to speculate on the spiritual feeling which spectators may gain through looking up at the actors from a flat floor instead of looking down upon them. I cannot speak of the actual presence of exaltation in the audience, but we can speculate together on the possibilities of winning back spiritual vitality for the drama by union with the church.

First of all, there comes the disquieting thought that the theatre presents the spectacle these days of a bird that lays eggs in other birds’ nests. It isn’t content with the one it has used for some centuries. It must go snooping about looking for a new haven for the drama. It tries the circus. It tries the ballroom. It shows us the Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin, and the Redoutensaal in the palace of Marie Theresa in Vienna. It even seems to have got a notion of laying its eggs on the fourth wall. As this wall was the only thing not thoroughly real in the realistic theatre, the result--the motion picture--is a bit of a scramble. And now the cuckoo theatre has its eye on the church.

A truer charge might be that the human animal has a perverse liking for novelty, but even that could be countered with the assertion that out of the stimulation of novelty, as out of almost any stimulation, man can make art--if he has it in him. As to that strange bird, the theatre, it has never had good homekeeping habits. It laid its eggs on Greek altars, and in mangers of Christian chapels. It nested in inn yards in England, and in tennis courts in France. The fact that the theatre has a habit of roaming is worth about as much in this discussion of its chance in the modern church, as the fact that it once found ecstasy by the Greek altar and never produced anything approaching dramatic literature while it was in the Christian church.

In the relation of the church and the theatre there seems to be a problem for Europe and a problem for America. The possibility of the two uniting appears much greater in Europe. Europe--particularly central and southern Europe, where Catholicism flourishes--holds far more of genuine religious spirit than does America. Moreover, the church there has the strength of tradition and of art behind it. The æsthetic-emotional grip of the churches themselves, their architecture, their atmosphere, the sense of continuity that lives in them, grips men and women whose minds reject or ignore the authority of dogma. Even an American, cut off from the traditional side of this life, would feel a thrill in a drama in the Collegien Kirche in Salzburg or in the Cathedral of Chartres that no performance in a theatre could give him. The beauty of the ages would bless the drama in almost any European building except a theatre. But come to America and try to imagine “Everyman” in Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street, or “The Theatre of the World” in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, not to bring it down to the level of a Methodist meeting house. The theatre can always make religion more dramatic; witness the experiments of the Reverend William Norman Guthrie and Claude Bragdon with lighting and dance in St. Mark’s in the Bouwerie. But I do not think that any American church short of some Spanish Indian mission in the southwest can make the drama more religious.

For America--and, I suspect, for Europe, too--the problem is to find a way to the spirit independent of the church. It is not a question of producing plays in cathedrals but of producing the spirit of life in plays. It is not: Can religion make itself theatrical? but: Can the theatre make itself--in a new sense--religious?

If modern life, particularly the life of America, were spiritual in any degree, all this would be simple. Church and theatre would both minister--as neither of them does now--to the life of the spirit. America has no art and no religion which can make drama religious. America doesn’t believe, in any deep sense. Science has shattered dogma, and formal religion has not been able to absorb an artistic or a philosophic spirit great enough to recreate the religious spirit in men.

The thing is still more difficult because there is nowhere in this country--unless, again, it is in the southwest--a sense of the age-long processes of life which are part of the soil and which leave their mark in men and women through the physical things that have always cradled them. In Europe even the cities hold this ancient and natural thing; they are shaped by man and time even as the fields and the hills are shaped by time and man. These cities bask and lie easy. There is a sense of long, slow growth in the very stones. In America, it is not only that our cities are new and brash. Our countryside is the same. Even our farmhouses stick out of the land like square boxes. As simple a house in Europe has a width that reconciles it with the sweep of the fields. The American farmhouse is a symbol of our separation from the soil. We are out of touch with the earthy vitality of life which might bring us at least a little sense of the eternal.

If the man of the theatre gives up the American church as a path to the spirit of life, and if he finds no religion in modernity from which to bring religion to the stage, what can he do? Is it possible that he can create spiritual affirmation in the people by creating it in the theatre? Can he see the vision himself, and if he sees it and embodies it, can it make over the people?

Clive Bell, writing in “Art”, has described how such artists as William Blake and a very few others have reached the spiritual reality of existence--the thing we should call religion--directly, by pure intuition: “Some artists seem to have come at it by sheer force of imagination, unaided by anything without them; they have needed no material ladder to help them out of matter. They have spoken with reality as mind to mind.”

Vision of this sort is so inordinately rare that it seems as though some other way must be found to open spiritual truth to the artist of the theatre. The only other way is through the deepest understanding of life itself. What can the artist find in American life to bring the vision? Nothing, surely, on the surface. Our architects have reached a more noteworthy expression than perhaps any of our painters, because they have somehow managed to identify themselves with a spirit of affirmation behind those industrial forms that our commercial imperialism presents to view in our men of position like Morgan and Ford, our periodicals like “The American Magazine” and “The Saturday Evening Post”, our subways, our cigarette ads, our patent medicines, and our Kuppenheimer clothes.

The artist of the theatre who is to create ecstasy by finding it, must see deeper than the architects behind the sham of American life. He must grasp the Spirit of America in a meaning so extraordinary that the use we ordinarily make of that phrase will seem impossibly and blasphemously cheap. We have hints of what the artist must see and understand in Sandburg’s sense of Chicago, in Vachel Lindsay’s sense of the middle west, in Waldo Frank’s sense of New Mexico.

When theatrical genius has grasped the truth of America, it must be his business to make of himself and his theatre a magnifying glass for the rest of his fellows. What he has been able to seize by sheer intuition, he must put in such form that it can seize all America. It is the hope of the theatre that it can make the vision of one man become the vision of many.

There is no reason why a man of the theatre should not have the vision; it has come to other artists. They have been able to transfer some share of it to the sensitive, the developed, the intellectual. The artist of the theatre can perhaps transfer it to millions, to the uneducated and the dull as well as to the receptive. In the theatre he has a very extraordinary instrument. It is the art nearest to life; its material is almost life itself. This physical identity which it has with our very existence is the thing that can enable the artist to visualize with amazing intensity a religious spirit of which he has sensed only the faintest indications in life. He can create a world which shines with exaltation and which seems--as it indeed is--a world of reality. He can give the religious spirit the pervading presence in the theatre which it once had in the life of the Greeks and of the people of the Middle Ages. And when men and women see eternal spirit in such a form, who can say that they will not take it to them?

_Robert Cortes Holliday_