Literature in the Making Part 8

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

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

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

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

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

"d.i.c.kens created vaudeville 'characters'--unsurpa.s.sed for twenty-minute sketches, deadly beyond that to the mentally mature. His stock in trade was the grotesque make-up. In stage talk he couldn't create a 'straight'

part.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Wilson smiled. "Isn't this rather high praise for Charlie Chaplin?"

he asked. "How far is this idolatry of the movie actor to go, anyway?

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

_THE Pa.s.sING OF THE Sn.o.b_

EDWARD S. MARTIN

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

This is the opinion of that shrewd and kindly satirist, Edward S.

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

"Thackeray would not write a _Book of Sn.o.bs_ to-day," he said. "The sn.o.b is not now the appealing subject that he was in the early days of the reign of Queen Victoria. Thackeray could not now find enough sn.o.bs and sn.o.bbery to write about, either in England or in America. Sn.o.bs are by way of having punctured tires these days.

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

"To-day, in England and in the United States, that kind of society is in a precarious condition. If Thackeray were now writing, he would not satirize sn.o.bs. It is more likely that he would satirize the reformers.

I think that all the sn.o.bs have hit the sawdust trail."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But if we became involved in a serious war trouble the energy of our people would be directed to an attempt to secure increased efficiency.

We would become closely organized again. I don't think we'd lose the benefit of what has been done in the past years, but we would come to a turn in the road.

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

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

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

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

The genial philosopher smiled quizzically and rose from his chair.

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

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

"And what changed woman?" I asked.

"Many things; the development of machinery, for instance," he replied.

"Woman has not changed so much as the conditions of life have changed.