Literature in the Making Part 9

"The development of machinery has caused changes that impress me deeply.

It has produced immense alterations in the conditions of life and in the relations between people.

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

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

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

"The war is strengthening this tendency of women to take up work that is not domestic. I have heard it said that women first got into the undomestic kinds of business in France during the Napoleonic wars.

Napoleon wanted to have all the men out in the line of battle, so he had girls instructed in bookkeeping and other kinds of office work.

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

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

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

They must do this if the human race is to continue."

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

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

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

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

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

Again came that reminiscent smile. "Reformers can be very trying," he said. "Very trying, indeed. Did you ever read Brand Whitlock's _Forty Years of It_? Brand Whitlock had his own trials with the reformers.

Whitlock is a sensible, generous man, and his att.i.tude toward reformers is a good deal humorous and not at all violent. That would be Thackeray's att.i.tude toward them, I think, if he were living to-day.

He'd satirize the reformers instead of the sn.o.bs."

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

The society women who undertake sociological reform work find in Mr.

Martin no unsympathetic critic.

"These wealthy women," he said, "take up reform work as a recourse.

Society life is not very filling. They have a sense of emptiness. So they go in for reform, to fill out their lives more adequately.

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

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

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

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

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

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

_COMMERCIALIZING THE s.e.x INSTINCT_

ROBERT HERRICK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That, too, is an example, and a rather wearying example, of the commercializing of the s.e.x appeal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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