by Frank Norris
Then lastly — the latest development — there is the cataclysm of the kindergarten, the checked apron drama, the pigtail passion, the epic of the broken slate-pencil. This needs a delicacy of touch that only a woman can supply, and as a matter of fact it is for the most part women who sign the stories. The interest in these is not so personal and retrospective as in the Skinny McCleave circle, for the kindergarten is too recent to be part of the childhood memories of the present generation of adult magazine readers. It is more informative, a presentation of conditions hitherto but vaguely known, and at the same time it is an attempt to get at and into the heart and head of a little child.
And in this last analysis it would seem as if here existed the barrier insurmountable. It is much to be doubted if ever a genius will arise so thoughtful, so sensitive that he will penetrate into more than the merest outside integument of a child’s heart. Certain phases have been guessed at with beautiful intention, certain rare insights have been attained with exquisite nicety, but somehow even the most sympathetic reader must feel that the insight is as rare as the interest is misguided.
Immanuel Kant conceived of, and, in the consummate power of his intellect, executed the “Critique of Pure Reason”; Darwin had taken the adult male and female human and tracked down their every emotion, impulse, quality and sentiment. The intellectual powers and heart-beats of a Napoleon or a Shakespeare have been reduced to more commonplace corner gossip, but after thousands of years of civilization, with the subject ever before us, its workings as near to us as air itself, the mind of a little child is as much a closed book, as much an enigma, as much a blank space upon the charts of our intellectual progress as at the very first.
Volumes have been written about the child, and stories for and of the child, and very learned men have lectured and other very eminent and noble men have taught, and it has all been going on for nineteen hundred and two years. And yet, notwithstanding all this, there lurks a mystery deep down within the eye of the five-year-old, a mystery that neither you nor I may know. You may see and understand what he actually does, but the thinking part of him is a second hidden nature that belongs to him and to other children, not to adults, not even to his mother. Once the older person invades the sphere of influence of this real undernature of the child and it congeals at once. It thaws and thrives only in the company of other children, and at the best we older ones may see it from a distance and from the outside. Between us and them it would appear that a great gulf is bridged; there is no knowing the child as he really is, and until the real child can be known the stories about him and the fiction and literature about him can at best be only a substitute for the real knowledge that probably never shall be ours.
NEWSPAPER CRITICISMS AND AMERICAN FICTION
The limitations of space impose a restricted title, and one hastens to qualify the substantive “criticisms” by the adjective “average.” Even “average” is not quite specialized enough; “vast majority” is more to the sense, and the proposition expanded to its fullest thus stands, “How is the vast majority of newspaper criticisms made, and how does it affect American Fiction?” And it may not be inappropriate at the outset to observe that one has adventured both hazards — criticism (of the “vast majority” kind) and also Fiction. One has criticized and has been criticized. Possibly then it may be permitted to speak a little authoritatively; not as the Scribes. Has it not astonished you how many of those things called by the new author “favourable reviews” may attach themselves — barnacles upon a lifeless hulk — to a novel that you know, that you know every one must, must know, is irretrievably bad? “On the whole, Mr.— ‘s story is a capital bit of vigorous writing that we joyfully recommend” —
“A thrilling story palpitating with life,”
“One of the very best novels that has appeared in a long time,” and the ever-new, ever-dutiful, ever-ready encomium, “Not a dull page in the book” (as if by the furthest stretch of conceivable human genius a book could be written that did not have a dull page; as if dull pages were not an absolute necessity). All these you may see strung after the announcement of publication of the novel. No matter, I repeat, how outrageously bad the novel may be. Now there is an explanation of this matter, and it is to be found not in the sincere admiration of little reviewers who lack the ingenuity to invent new phrases, but in the following fact: it is easier to write favourable than unfavourable reviews. It must be borne in mind that very few newspapers (comparatively) employ regularly paid book-reviewers whose business it is to criticize novels — and nothing else. Most book-reviewing is done as an odd job by subeditors, assistants and special writers in the intervals between their regular work. They come to the task with a brain already jaded, an interest so low as to be almost negligible, and with — as often as not — a mind besieged by a thousand other cares, responsibilities and projects.
The chief has said something like this (placing upon the scribe’s table a column of novels easily four feet high, sent in for review):
“Say, B — , these things have been stacking up like the devil lately, and I don’t want ’em kicking ‘round the office any longer. Get through with them as quick as you can, and remember that in an hour there’s such and such to be done.”
I tell you I have seen it happen like this a hundred times. And the scribe “must” read and “review” between twenty and thirty books in an hour’s time. One way of doing it is to search in the pages of the book for the “publisher’s notice,” a printed slip that has a favourable review — that is what it amounts to — all ready-made. The scribe merely turns this in with a word altered here and there. How he reviews the books that have not this publisher’s notice Heaven only knows. He is not to blame, as they must be done in an hour. Twenty books in sixty minutes — three minutes to each book. Now, it is impossible to criticize a book adversely after a minute and a half of reading (we will allow a minute and a half for writing the review). In order to write unfavourably it is necessary to know what one is writing about. But it is astonishing how much commendatory palaver already exists that can be applied to any kind or condition of novel. Is it a novel of adventure (the reviewer may know if it be such by the ship on the cover design) — it will be appropriate to use these terms: “Vibrant with energy,” or “Full of fine fighting,” or “The reader is carried with breathless interest from page to page of this exciting romance.” Is it a novel of rural life? These may be made use of: “Replete with quaint humour,”
“A faithful picture of an interesting phase of American life,” etc., etc. Is it a story of the West (you can guess that from the chapter headings), it will be proper to say, “A strong and vital portraying of the wild life of the trail and frontier.”
And so one might run through the entire list. The books must be reviewed, the easiest way is the quickest, and the quickest way is to write in a mild and meaningless phraseology, innocuous, “favourable.” In this fashion is made the greater mass of American criticism. As to effects: It has of course no effect upon the novel’s circulation. Only one person is at all apt to take these reviews, this hack-work, seriously.
Only one person, I observed, is at all apt to take these reviews seriously. This way lies the harm. The new writer, the young fellow with his first book, who may not know the ways of reviewers. The author, who collects these notices and pastes them in a scrap-book. He is perilously prone to believe what the hacks say, to believe that there is “no dull page in the story,” that his novel is “one of the notable contributions to recent fiction,” and cherishing this belief he is fated to a wrench and a heartache when, six months after publication day, the semi-annual account of copies sold is rendered. There is unfortunately no palaver in the writing of this — no mild-mannered phraseology; and the author is made to see suddenly that “this exciting romance” which the reviewers have said the readers “would follow with a breathless interest till the end is reached and then wish for more,” has circulated among — possibly — five hundred of the breathless.
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br /> Thus, then, the vast majority of criticisms. It is not all, however, and it is only fair to say that there are exceptions — great papers which devote whole supplements to the consideration of literary matters and whose reviewers are deliberate, thoughtful fellows, who do not read more than one book a week, who sign their opinions and who have themselves a name, a reputation, to make or keep These must have an effect. But even the most conspicuous among them cannot influence very widely. They may help, so one believes, a good book which is already becoming popular. No one of them can “make” a book by a “favourable review,” as they could a little while ago in France. No number of them could do it, here in America. There are too many other reviewers. No one man, nor aggregation of men, can monopolize the requisite authority. And then with us the spirit of independent thinking and judgment is no doubt too prevalent.
NOVELISTS TO ORDER — WHILE YOU WAIT
Not at all absurd, “Novelists to order — while you wait,” provided you order the right sort, and are willing to wait long enough. In other words, it is quite possible to make a novelist, and a good one, too, if the thing is undertaken in the right spirit, just as it is possible to make a painter, or an actor, or a business man.
I am prepared to hear the old objections raised to this: “Ah, it must be born in you”; “no amount of training can ‘make’ an artist”; “poets are born and not made,” etc., etc. But I am also willing to contend that a very large percentage of this talk is sheer nonsense, and that what the world calls “genius” is, as often as not, the results of average ability specialized and developed. The original “spark” in the child-mind, that later on “kindles the world into flame with its light,” I do believe could be proved to be the same for the artist, the actor, the novelist, the inventor, even the financier and “magnate.” It is only made to burn in different lamps. Nor does any one believe that this “spark” is any mysterious, supernatural gift, some marvelous, angelic “genius,” God-given, Heaven-given, etc., etc., etc., but just plain, forthright, rectangular, everyday common sense, nothing more extraordinary or God-given than sanity. If it were true that Genius were the gift of the gods, it would also be true that hard work in cultivating it would be superfluous. As well be without genius if some plodder, some dullard, can by such work equal the best you can do — you with your God-given faculties.
Is it not much more reasonable — more noble, for the matter of that — to admit at once that all faculties, all intellects are God-given, the only difference being that some are specialized to one end, some to another, some not specialized at all. We call Rostand and Mr. Carnegie geniuses, but most of us would be unwilling to admit that the genius of the American financier differed in kind from the genius of the French dramatist. However, one believes that this is open to debate. As for my part, I suspect that, given a difference in environment and training, Rostand would have consolidated the American steel companies and Carnegie have written “L’Aiglon.” But one dares to go a little further — a great deal further — and claims that the young Carnegie and the young Rostand were no more than intelligent, matter-of-fact boys, in no wise different from the common house variety, grammar school product. They have been trained differently, that is all.
Given the ordinarily intelligent ten-year-old, and, all things being equal, you can make anything you like out of him — a minister of the gospel or a green-goods man, an electrical engineer or a romantic poet, or — return to our muttons — a novelist. If a failure is the result, blame the method of training, not the quantity or quality of the ten-year-old’s intellect. Don’t say, if he is a failure as a fine novelist, that he lacks genius for writing, and would have been a fine business man. Make no mistake, if he did not have enough “genius” for novel-writing he would certainly have not had enough for business.
“Why, then,” you will ask, “is it so impossible for some men, the majority of them, to write fine novels, or fine poems, or paint fine pictures? Why is it that this faculty seems to be reserved for the chosen few, the more refined, cultured, etc.? Why is it, in a word, that, for every artist (using the word to include writers, painters, actors, etc.) that appears there are thousands of business men, commercial “geniuses”?
The reason seems to lie in this: and it is again a question of training. From the very first the average intelligent American boy is trained, not with a view toward an artistic career, but with a view to entering a business life. If the specialization of his faculties along artistic lines ever occurs at all it begins only when the boy is past the formative period. In other words, most people who eventually become artists are educated for the first eighteen or twenty years of their life along entirely unartistic lines. Biographies of artists are notoriously full of just such instances. The boy who is to become a business man finds, the moment he goes to school, a whole vast machinery of training made ready for his use, and not only is it a matter of education for him, but the whole scheme of modem civilization works in his behalf. No one ever heard of obstacles thrown in the way of the boy who announces for himself a money-making career; while for the artist, as is said, education, environment, the trend of civilization are not merely indifferent, but openly hostile and inimical. One hears only of those men who surmount — and at what cost to their artistic powers — those obstacles. How many thousands are there who succumb unrecorded!
So that it has not often been tried — the experiment of making a novelist while you wait — i.e., taking a ten-year-old of average intelligence and training him to be a novelist. Suppose all this modem, this gigantic perfected machinery — all this resistless trend of a commercial civilization were set in motion in favour of the little aspirant for honours in artistic fields, who is to say with such a training he would not in the end be a successful artist, painter, poet, musician or novelist. Training, not “genius,” would make him.
Then, too, another point. The artistic training should begin much, much earlier than the commercial training — instead of, as at present, so much later.
Nowadays, as a rule, the artist’s training begins, as was said, after a fourth of his life, the very best, the most important has been lived. You can take a boy of eighteen and make a business man of him in ten years. But at eighteen the faculties that make a good artist are very apt to be atrophied, hardened, unworkable. Even the ten-year-old is almost too old to begin on. The first ten years of childhood are the imaginative years, the creative years, the observant years, the years of a fresh interest in life. The child “imagines” terrors or delights, ghosts or fairies, creates a world out of his toys, and observes to an extent that adults have no idea of. (“Give me,” a detective once told me, “a child’s description of a man that is wanted. It beats an adult’s every single time.”) And imagination, creation, observation and an unblunted interest in life are exactly the faculties most needed by novelists.
At eighteen there comes sophistication — or a pretended sophistication, which is deadlier. Other men’s books take the place of imagination for the young man; creation in him is satisfied by dramas, horse-races and amusements. The newspapers are his observation, and oh, how he assumes to be above any pleasure in simple, vigorous life!
So that at eighteen it is, as a rule, too late to make a fine novelist out of him. He may start out in that career, but he will not go far — so far as he would in business. But if he was taken in hand as soon as he could write in words of three syllables, and instead of being crammed with commercial arithmetic (How many marbles did A have? If a man buys a piece of goods at 12 1/2 cents and sells it for 15 cents, etc., etc.) —
If he had been taken in hand when his imagination was alive, his creative power vigorous, his observation lynxlike, and his interest keen, and trained with a view toward the production of original fiction, who is to say how far he would have gone?
One does not claim that the artist is above the business man. Far from it. Only, when you have choked the powers of imagination and observation, and killed off the creative ability, and deadened the int
erest in life, don’t call it lack of genius.
Nor when some man of a different race than ours, living in a more congenial civilization, whose training from his youth up has been adapted to a future artistic profession, succeeds in painting the great picture, composing the great prelude, writing the great novel, don’t say he was born a “genius,” but rather admit that he was made “to order” by a system whose promoters knew how to wait.
THE “NATURE” REVIVAL IN LITERATURE
It has been a decade of fads, and “the people have imagined a vain thing,” as they have done from the time of Solomon and as no doubt they will till the day of the New Jerusalem. And in no other line of activity has the instability and changeableness of the taste of the public been so marked as in that of literature. Such an overturning of old gods and such a setting up of new ones, such an image-breaking, shrine-smashing, relic-ripping carnival I doubt has ever been witnessed in all the history of writing. It has been a sort of literary Declaration of Independence. For half a century certain great names, from Irving down to Holmes, were veritable Abracadabras — impeccable, sanctified. Then all at once the fin de siècle irreverence seemed to invade all sorts and conditions simultaneously, and the somber, sober idols were shouldered off into the dark niches, and not a man of us that did not trundle forth his own little tin-god-on-wheels, kowtowing and making obeisance, and going before with cymbals and a great noise, proclaiming a New Great One; now it was the great Colonial Image, now the Great Romantic Image, now the Great Minor-German Kingdom Image.
There are a great many very eminent and very wise critics who frown upon and deplore the reaction. But it is a question if, after all, the movement will not prove — ultimately — beneficial. Convention, blind adherence to established forms, inertia, is the dry rot of a national literature. Better the American public should read bad books than no books, and that same public is reading now as never before. It is a veritable upheaval, a breaking-up of all the old grounds. Better this than supineness; better this than immobility. Once the ground turned over a bit, harrowed and loosened, and the place is made ready for the good seed.