Chapter I: THINK he should. Moreover, I think I should set Smith an example by (3)

When your name on the bill-board suggests battle, murder, and sudden death, “hair-breadth’scapes, i’ th’ imminent deadly breach,” and that sort of thing, you need not be chagrined if, once inside, the eager throng resents bitterly your perfidy in offering nothing more blood-curdling than the heroine’s demand (the scene being set for five o’clock tea) for another lump of sugar. You may, if you please, leave Hamlet out of his own play; but do not, on peril of your fame, cut out your ghost, or neglect to provide some one to stick a sword into Polonius behind the arras. I can take up that particular book now and prove to any fair-minded man how prettily I could, by injecting a little paprika into my villains, have quadrupled its sale.

Having, I hope, some sense of humor, I resolved to bid farewell to cloak and pistols in a farce-comedy, which should be a take-off on my own popular performances. Humor being something that no one should tamper with who is not ready for the gibbet, I was not surprised that many hasty samplers of the book should entirely miss the joke, or that a number of joyless critics should have dismissed it hastily as merely another machine-made romance written for boarding-school girls and the weary commercial traveler yawning in the smoking-car. Yet this book also has been a “best-seller”! I have seen it, within a few weeks, prominently displayed in bookshop windows in half a dozen cities.

It was, I think, Mr. Clyde Fitch who first voiced the complaint that our drama is seriously affected by the demand of “the tired business man” to be amused at the theatre. The same may be said of fiction. A very considerable number of our toiling millions sit down wearily at night, and if the evening paper does not fully satisfy or social diversion offer, a story that will hold the attention without too great a tax upon the mind is welcomed. I should be happy to think that our ninety millions trim the lamp every evening with zest for “improving” literature; but the tired brain follows the line of least resistance, which unfortunately does not lead to alcoves where the one hundred best books wear their purple in solemn pomp. Even in my present mood of contrition, I am not sneering at that considerable body of my countrymen who have laid one dollar and eighteen cents upon the counter and borne home my little fictions. They took grave chances of my boring them; and when they rapped a second time on the counter and murmured another of my titles, they were expressing a confidence in me which I strove hard never to betray.

No one will, I am sure, deny me the satisfaction I have in the reflection that I put a good deal of sincere work into those stories,--for they are stories, not novels, and were written frankly to entertain; that they are not wholly ill-written; that they contain pages that are not without their grace; or that there is nothing prurient or morbid in any of them. And no matter how jejune stories of the popular romantic type may be,--a fact, O haughty critic, of which I am well aware,--I take some satisfaction as a good American in the knowledge that, in spite of their worthlessness as literature, they are essentially clean. The heroes may be too handsome, and too sure of themselves; the heroines too adorable in their sweet distress, as they wave the white handkerchief from the grated window of the ivied tower,--but their adventures are, in the very nature of things, _in usum Delphini_.

Some of my friends of the writing guild boast that they never read criticisms of their work. I have read and filed all the notices of my stories that bore any marks of honesty or intelligence. Having served my own day as reviewer for a newspaper, I know the dreary drudgery of such work. I recall, with shame, having averaged a dozen books an afternoon; and some of my critics have clearly averaged two dozen, with my poor candidates for oblivion at the bottom of the heap! Much American criticism is stupid or ignorant; but the most depressing, from my standpoint, is the flippant sort of thing which many newspapers print habitually. The stage, also, suffers like treatment, even in some of the more reputable metropolitan journals. Unless your book affords a text for a cynical newspaper “story,” it is quite likely to be ignored.

I cannot imagine that any writer who takes his calling seriously ever resents a sincere, intelligent, adverse notice. I have never written a book in less than a year, devoting all my time to it; and I resent being dismissed in a line, and called a writer of drivel, by some one who did not take the trouble to say why. A newspaper which is particularly jealous of its good name once pointed out with elaborate care that an incident, described in one of my stories as occurring in broad daylight, could not have been observed in moonlight by one of the characters at the distance I had indicated. The same reviewer transferred the scene of this story half-way across the continent, in order to make another point against its plausibility. If the aim of criticism be to aid the public in its choice of books, then the press should deal fairly with both author and public. And if the critics wish to point out to authors their failures and weaknesses, then it should be done in a spirit of justice. The best-selling of my books caused a number of critics to remark that it had clearly been inspired by a number of old romances--which I had not only never read, but of several of them I had never even heard.

A Boston newspaper which I greatly admire once published an editorial in which I was pilloried as a type of writer who basely commercializes his talent. It was a cruel stab; for, unlike my heroes, I do not wear a mail-shirt under my dress-coat. Once, wandering into a church in my own city, at a time when a dramatized version of one of my stories was offered at a local theatre, I listened to a sermon that dealt in the harshest terms with such fiction and drama.

Extravagant or ignorant praise is, to most of us, as disheartening as stupid and unjust criticism. The common practice of invoking great names to praise some new arrival at the portal of fame cannot fail to depress the subject of it. When my first venture in fiction was flatteringly spoken of by a journal which takes its criticisms seriously as evidencing the qualities that distinguish Mr. Howells, I shuddered at the hideous injustice to a gentleman for whom I have the greatest love and reverence; and when, in my subsequent experiments, a critic somewhere gravely (it seemed, at least, to be in a spirit of sobriety!) asked whether a fold of Stevenson’s mantle had not wrapped itself about me, the awfulness of the thing made me ill, and I fled from felicity until my publisher had dropped the heart-breaking phrase from his advertisements. For I may be the worst living author, and at times I am convinced of it; but I hope I am not an immitigable and irreclaimable ass.

American book reviewers, I am convinced from a study of my returns from the clipping bureaus for ten years, dealing with my offerings in two kinds of fiction, are a solid phalanx of realists where they are anything at all. This attitude is due, I imagine, to the fact that journalism deals, or is supposed to deal, with facts. Realism is certainly more favorably received than romance. I cheerfully subscribe to the doctrine that fiction that lays strong hands upon aspects of life as we are living it is a nobler achievement than tales that provide merely an evening’s entertainment. Mr. James has, however, simplified this whole question. He says, “The only classification of the novel that I can understand is into that which has life, and that which has it not”; and if we must reduce this matter of fiction to law, his dictum might well be accepted as the first and last canon. And in this connection I should like to record my increasing admiration for all that Mr. James has written of novels and novelists. In one place and another he has expressed himself fully and confidently on fiction as a department of literature. The lecture on Balzac that he gave in this country a few years ago is a masterly and authoritative document on the novel in general. His “Partial Portraits” is a rich mine of ripe observation on the distinguishing qualities of a number of his contemporaries, and the same volume contains a suggestive and stimulating essay on fiction as an art. With these in mind it seems to me a matter for tears that Mr. James, with his splendid equipment and beautiful genius, should have devoted himself so sedulously, in his own performances in fiction, to the contemplation of cramped foreign vistas and exotic types, when all this wide, surging, eager, laboring America lay ready to his hand.

I will say of myself that I value style beyond most things; and that if I could command it, I should be glad to write for so small an audience, the “fit though few,” that the best-selling lists should never know me again; for with style go many of the requisites of great fiction,--fineness and sureness of feeling, and a power over language by which characters cease to be bobbing marionettes and become veritable beings, no matter whether they are Beatrix Esmonds, or strutting D’Artagnans, or rascally Bartley Hubbards, or luckless Lily Barts. To toss a ball into the air, and keep it there, as Stevenson did so charmingly in such pieces as “Providence and the Guitar,”--this is a respectable achievement; to mount Roy Richmond as an equestrian statue,--that, too, is something we would not have had Mr. Meredith leave undone. Mr. Rassendyll, an English gentleman playing at being king, thrills the surviving drop of mediævalism that is in all of us. “The tired business man” yields himself to the belief that the staccato of hoofs on the asphalt street, which steals in to him faintly at his fireside, is really an accompaniment to the hero’s mad ride to save the king. Ah, the joy in kings dies hard in us!

Given a sprightly tale with a lost message to recover, throw in a fight on the stair, scatter here and there pretty dialogues between the lover and the princess he serves, and we are all, as we breathlessly follow, the rankest royalists. Tales of real Americans, kodaked “in the sun’s hot eye,” much as they refresh me,--I speak of myself now, not as a writer or critic, but as the man in the street,--never so completely detach the weary spirit from mundane things as tales of events that never were on sea or land. Why should I read of Silas Lapham to-night, when only an hour ago I was his competitor in the mineral-paint business? The greatest fiction must be a criticism of life; but there are times when we crave forgetfulness, and lift our eyes trustfully to the flag of Zenda.

But the creator of Zenda, it is whispered, is not an author of the first or even of the second rank, and the adventure story, at its best, is only for the second table. I am quite aware of this. But pause a moment, O cheerless one! Surely Homer is respectable; and the Iliad, the most strenuous, the most glorious and sublime of fictions, with the very gods drawn into the moving scenes, has, by reason of its tremendous energy and its tumultuous drama, not less than for its majesty as literature, established its right to be called the longest-selling fiction of the ages.

All the world loves a story; the regret is that the great novelists--great in penetration and sincerity and style--do not always have the story-telling knack. Mr. Marion Crawford was, I should say, a far better story-teller than Mr. James or Mr. Howells; but I should by no means call him a better novelist. A lady of my acquaintance makes a point of bestowing copies of Mr. Meredith’s novels upon young working-women whom she seeks to uplift. I am myself the most ardent of Meredithians, and yet I must confess to a lack of sympathy with this lady’s high purpose. I will not press the point, but a tired working-girl would, I think, be much happier with one of my own beribboned confections than with even Diana the delectable.

Pleasant it is, I must confess, to hear your wares cried by the train-boy; to bend a sympathetic ear to his recital of your merits, as he appraises them; and to watch him beguile your fellow travelers with the promise of felicity contained between the covers of the book which you yourself have devised, pondered, and committed to paper. The train-boy’s ideas of the essentials of entertaining fiction are radically unacademic, but he is apt in hitting off the commercial requirements. A good book, one of the guild told me, should always begin with “talking.” He was particularly contemptuous of novels that open upon landscape and moonlight,--these, in the bright lexicon of his youthful experience, are well-nigh unsalable. And he was equally scornful of the unhappy ending. The sale of a book that did not, as he put it, “come out right,” that is, with the merry jingle of wedding-bells, was no less than a fraud upon the purchaser. On one well-remembered occasion my vanity was gorged by the sight of many copies of my latest offering in the hands of my fellow travelers, as I sped from Washington to New York. A poster, announcing my new tale, greeted me at the station as I took flight; four copies of my book were within comfortable range of my eye in the chair-car. Before the train started, I was given every opportunity to add my own book to my impedimenta.

The sensation awakened by the sight of utter strangers taking up your story, tasting it warily, clinging to it if it be to their liking, or dropping it wearily or contemptuously if it fail to please, is one of the most interesting of the experiences of authorship. On the journey mentioned, one man slept sweetly through what I judged to be the most intense passage in the book; others paid me the tribute of absorbed attention. On the ferry-boat at Jersey City, several copies of the book were interposed between seemingly enchanted readers and the towers and spires of the metropolis. No one, I am sure, will deny to such a poor worm as I the petty joys of popular recognition. To see one’s tale on many counters, to hear one’s name and titles recited on boats and trains, to find in mid-ocean that your works go with you down to the sea in ships, to see the familiar cover smiling welcome on the table of an obscure foreign inn,--surely the most grudging critic would not deprive a writer of these rewards and delights.

There is also that considerable army of readers who write to an author in various keys of condemnation or praise. I have found my correspondence considerably augmented by the large sales of a book. There are persons who rejoice to hold before your eyes your inconsistences; or who test you, to your detriment, in the relentless scale of fact. Some one in the Connecticut hills once criticized severely my use of “that” and “which,”--a case where an effort at precision was the offense,--and I was involved, before I knew it, in a long correspondence. I have several times been taken severely to task by foes of tobacco for permitting my characters to smoke. Wine, I have found, should be administered to one’s characters sparingly, and one’s hero must never produce a flask except for restorative uses,--after, let us say, a wild gallop, by night, in the teeth of a storm to relieve a beleaguered citadel, or when the heroine has been rescued at great peril from the clutch of the multitudinous sea. Those strange spirits who pour out their souls in anonymous letters have not ignored me. I salute them with much courtesy, and wish them well of the gods. Young ladies whose names I have inadvertently applied to my heroines have usually dealt with me in agreeable fashion. The impression that authors have an unlimited supply of their own wares to give away is responsible for the importunity of managers of church fairs, philanthropic institutions, and the like, who assail one cheerfully through the mails. Before autograph-hunters I have always been humble; I have felt myself honored by their attentions; and in spite of their dread phrase, “Thanking you in advance,”--which might be the shibboleth of their fraternity, from its prevalence,--I greet them joyfully, and never filch their stamps.

Now, after all, could anything be less harmful than my tales? The casual meeting of my hero and heroine in the first chapter has always been marked by the gravest circumspection. My melodrama has never been offensively gory,--in fact, I have been ridiculed for my bloodless combats. My villains have been the sort that anyone with any kind of decent bringing-up would hiss. A girl in white, walking beside a lake, with a blue parasol swinging back of her head, need offend no one. That the young man emerging from the neighboring wood should not recognize her at once as the young woman ordained in his grandfather’s will as the person he must marry to secure the estate, seems utterly banal, I confess; but it is the business of romance to maintain illusions. Realism, with the same agreed state of facts, recognizes the girl immediately--and spoils the story. Or I might put it thus: in realism, much or all is obvious in the first act; in romance, nothing is quite clear until the third. This is why romance is more popular than realism, for we are all children and want to be surprised. Why villains should always be so stupid, and why heroines should so perversely misunderstand the noble motives of heroes, are questions I cannot answer. Likewise before dear old Mistaken Identity--the most venerable impostor in the novelist’s cabinet--I stand dumbly grateful.

On the stage, where a plot is most severely tested, but where the audience must, we are told, always be in the secret, we see constantly how flimsy a mask the true prince need wear. And the reason for this lies in the primal and--let us hope--eternal childlikeness of the race. The Zeitgeist will not grind us underfoot so long as we are capable of joy in make-believe, and can renew our youth in the frolics of Peter Pan.

You, sir, who re-read “The Newcomes” every year, and you, madam, reverently dusting your Jane Austen,--I am sadder than you can be that my talent is so slender; but is it not a fact that you have watched me at my little tricks on the mimic stage, and been just a little astonished when the sparrow, and not the dove, emerged from the handkerchief? But you prefer the old writers; and so, dear friends, do I!

Having, as I have confessed, deliberately tried my hand at romance merely to see whether I could swim the moat under a cloud of the enemy’s arrows, and to gain experience in the mechanism of story-writing, I now declare (though with no illusion as to the importance of the statement) that I have hung my sword over the fireplace; that I shall not again thunder upon the tavern door at midnight; that not much fine gold could tempt me to seek, by means however praiseworthy, to bring that girl with the blue parasol to a proper appreciation of the young gentleman with the suit-case, who even now is pursuing her through the wood to restore her lost handkerchief. It has been pleasant to follow the bright guidon of romance; even now, from the window of the tall office-building in which I close these reflections, I can hear the bugles blowing and look upon

“Strangest skies and unbeholden seas.”

But I feel reasonably safe from temptation. Little that men do is, I hope, alien to me; and the life that surges round me, and whose sounds rise from the asphalt below, or the hurrying feet on the tiles in my own corridor of this steel-boned tower,--the faint tinkle of telephones, the click of elevator doors,--these things, and the things they stand for, speak with deep and thrilling eloquence; and he who would serve best the literature of his time and country will not ignore them.

THE END

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A

FOOTNOTE:

[1] “Heckling the Church,” _The Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1911.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.