by Frank Norris
The school of fiction American in thought, in purpose and in treatment will come in time, inevitably. Meanwhile the best we can expect of the leaders is to remain steadfast, to keep unequivocably to the metes and bounds of the vineyards of their labours; no trespassing, no borrowing, no filching of the grapes of another man’s vines. The cultivation of one’s own vine is quite sufficient for all energy. We want these vines to grow — in time — to take root deep in American soil so that by and by the fruit shall be all of our own growing.
We do not want — distinctly and vehemently we do not want the vine-grower to leave his own grapes to rot while he flies off to the gathering of — what? The sodden lees of an ancient crushing.
NOVELISTS OF THE FUTURE
It seems to me that a great deal could be said on this subject — a great deal that has not been said before. There are so many novelists these latter days. So many whose works show that they have had no training, and it does seem that so long as the fiction writers of the United States go fumbling and stumbling along in this undisciplined fashion, governed by no rule, observing no formula, setting for themselves no equation to solve, that just so long shall we be far from the desirable thing — an American school of fiction. Just now (let us say that it is a pity) we have no school at all. We acknowledge no master, and we are playing at truant, incorrigible, unmanageable, sailing paper boats in the creek behind the schoolhouse, or fishing with bent pins in the pools and shallows of popular favour. That some catch goldfish there is no great matter, and is no excuse for the truancy. We are not there for the goldfish, if you please, but to remain in the school at work till we have been summoned to stand up in our places and tell the master what we have learned.
There’s where we should be, and if we do not observe the rules and conform to some degree of order, we should be rapped on the knuckles or soundly clumped on the head, and by vigorous discipline taught to know that formulas (a — b; a+b) are important things for us to observe, and that each and all of us should address ourselves with all diligence to finding the value of x in our problems.
It is the class in the Production of Original Fiction which of all the school contains the most truants. Indeed, its members believe that schooling for them is unnecessary. Not so with the other classes. Not one single member of any single one of them who does not believe that he must study first if he would produce afterward. Observe, there on the lower benches, the assiduous little would-be carpenters and stone-masons; how carefully they con their tables of measurement, their squares and compasses. “Ah, the toilers,” you say, “the grubby manual fellows — of course they must learn their trade!”
Very well, then. Consider — higher up the class, on the very front row of benches — the Fine Arts row, the little painters and architects and musicians and actors of the future. See how painfully they study, and study and study. The little stone-mason will graduate in a few months; but for these others of the Fine Arts classes there is no such thing as graduation. For them there shall never be a diploma, signed and sealed, giving them the right to call themselves perfected at their work. All their lives they shall be students. In the vacations — maybe — they write, or build, or sing, or act, but soon again they are back to the benches, studying, studying always; working as never carpenter or stone-mason worked. Now and then they get a little medal, a bit of gold and enamel, a bow of ribbon, that is all; the stonemason would disdain it, would seek it for the value of the metal in it. The Fine Arts people treasure it as the veteran treasures his cross.
And these little medals you — the truants, the bad boys of the paper boats and the goldfish — you want them, too; you claim them and clamour for them. You who declare that no study is necessary for you; you who are not content with your catch of goldfish, you must have the bits of ribbon and enamel, too. Have you deserved them? Have you worked for them? Have you found the value of x in your equation? Have you solved the parenthesis of your problem? Have you even done the problem at all? Have you even glanced or guessed at the equation? The shame of it be upon you! Come in from the goldfish and go to work, or stay altogether at the fishing and admit that you are not deserving of the medal which the master gives as a reward of merit.
“But there are no books that we can study,” you contest. “The architect and the musician, the painter and the actor — all of these have books ready to hand; they can learn from codified, systematized knowledge. For the novelist, where is there of cut-and-dried science that he can learn that will help him?”
And that is a good contention. No, there are no such books. Of all the arts, the art of fiction has no handbook. By no man’s teaching can we learn the knack of putting a novel together in the best way. No one has ever risen to say, “Here is how the plan should be; thus and so should run the outline.”
We admit the fact, but neither does that excuse the goldfishing and the paper-boat business. Some day the handbook may be compiled — it is quite possible — but meanwhile, and faute de mieux, there is that which you may study better than all handbooks.
Observe, now. Observe, for instance, the little painter scholars. On the fly-leaves of their schoolbooks they are making pictures — of what? Remember it, remember it and remember it — of the people around them. So is the actor, so the musician — all of the occupants of the Fine Arts bench. They are studying one another quite as much as their books — even more, and they will tell you that it is the most important course in the curriculum.
You — the truant little would-be novelist — you can do this, quite as easily as they, and for you it is all the more important, for you must make up for the intimate knowledge of your fellows what you are forced to lack in the ignorance of forms. But you cannot get this knowledge out there behind the schoolhouse — hooking goldfish. Come in at the tap of the bell and, though you have no books, make pictures on your slate, pictures of the Fine Arts bench struggling all their lives for the foolish little medals, pictures of the grubby little boys in the stone-mason’s comer, jeering the art classes for their empty toiling. The more you make these pictures, the better you shall do them. That is the kind of studying you can do, and from the study of your fellows you shall learn more than from the study of all the text-books that ever will be written.
But to do this you must learn to sit very quiet, and be very watchful, and so train your eyes and ears that every sound and every sight shall be significant to you and shall supply all the deficiency made by the absence of text-books.
This, then, to drop a very protracted allegory, seems to be the proper training of the novelist: The achieving less of an aggressive faculty of research than of an attitude of mind — a receptivity, an acute sensitiveness. And this can be acquired.
But it cannot be acquired by shutting oneself in one’s closet, by a withdrawal from the world, and that, so it would appear, is just the mistake so many would-be fiction writers allow themselves. They would make the art of the novelist an aristocracy, a thing exclusive, to be guarded from contact with the vulgar, humdrum, bread-and-butter business of life, to be kept unspotted from the world, considering it the result of inspirations, of exaltations, of subtleties and — above all things — of refinement, a sort of velvet jacket affair, a studio hocus-pocus, a thing loved of women and of esthetes.
What a folly! Of all the arts it is the most virile; of all the arts it will not, will not, will not flourish indoors. Dependent solely upon fidelity to life for existence, it must be practised in the very heart’s heart of life, on the street comer, in the market-place, not in the studios. God enlighten us! It is not an affair of women and esthetes, and the muse of American fiction is no chaste, delicate, superfine mademoiselle of delicate poses and “elegant” attitudinizings, but a robust, red-armed bonne femme, who rough-shoulders her way among men and among affairs, who finds a healthy pleasure in the jostlings of the mob and a hearty delight in the honest, rough-and-tumble, Anglo-Saxon give-and-take knockabout that for us means life. Choose her, instead of the sallow, palefaced statue-creat
ure, with the foolish tablets and foolish, upturned eyes, and she will lead you as brave a march as ever drum tapped to. Stay at her elbow and obey her as she tells you to open your eyes and ears and heart, and as you go she will show things wonderful beyond wonder in this great, new, blessed country of ours, will show you a life untouched, untried, full of new blood and promise and vigour.
She is a Child of the People, this muse of our fiction of the future, and the wind of a new country, a new heaven and a new earth is in her face and has blown her hair from out the fillets that the Old World muse has bound across her brow, so that it is all in disarray. The tan of the sun is on her cheeks, and the dust of the highway is thick upon her buskin, and the elbowing of many men has tom the robe of her, and her hands are hard with the grip of many things. She is hail-fellow-well-met with everyone she meets, unashamed to know the clown and unashamed to face the king, a hardy, vigorous girl, with an arm as strong as a man’s and a heart as sensitive as a child’s.
Believe me, she will lead you far from the studios and the esthetes, the velvet jackets and the uncut hair, far from the sexless creatures who cultivate their little art of writing as the fancier cultivates his orchid. Tramping along, then, with a stride that will tax your best paces, she will lead you — if you are humble with her and honest with her — straight into a World of Working Men, crude of speech, swift of action, strong of passion, straight to the heart of a new life, on the borders of a new time, and there and there only will you learn to know the stuff of which must come the American fiction of the future.
A PLEA FOR ROMANTIC FICTION
Let us at the start make a distinction.
Observe that one speaks of romanticism and not sentimentalism. One claims that the latter is as distinct from the former as is that other form of art which is called Realism. Romance has been often put upon and overburdened by being forced to bear the onus of abuse that by right should fall to sentiment; but the two should be kept very distinct, for a very high and illustrious place will be claimed for romance, while sentiment will be handed down the scullery stairs.
Many people to-day are composing mere sentimentalism, and calling it and causing it to be called romance; so with those who are too busy to think much upon these subjects, but who none the less love honest literature, Romance, too, has fallen into disrepute. Consider now the cut-and-thrust stories. They are all labeled Romances, and it is very easy to get the impression that Romance must be an affair of cloaks and daggers, or moonlight and golden hair. But this is not so at all. The true Romance is a more serious business than this. It is not merely a conjurer’s trick-box, full of flimsy quackeries, tinsel and claptraps, meant only to amuse, and relying upon deception to do even that. Is it not something better than this? Can we not see in it an instrument, keen, finely tempered, flawless — an instrument with which we may go straight through the clothes and tissues and wrappings of flesh down deep into the red, living heart of things?
Is all this too subtle, too merely speculative and intrinsic, too precieuse and nice and “literary”? Devoutly one hopes the contrary. So much is made of so-called Romanticism in present-day fiction that the subject seems worthy of discussion, and a protest against the misuse of a really noble and honest formula of literature appeals to be timely — misuse, that is, in the sense of limited use. Let us suppose for the moment that a romance can be made out of a cut-and-thrust business. Good Heavens, are there no other things that are romantic, even in this — falsely, falsely called — humdrum world of to-day? Why should it be that so soon as the novelist addresses himself — seriously — to the consideration of contemporary life he must abandon Romance and take up that harsh, loveless, colourless, blunt tool called Realism?
Now, let us understand at once what is meant by Romance and what by Realism. Romance, I take it, is the kind of fiction that takes cognizance of variations from the type of normal life. Realism is the kind of fiction that confines itself to the type of normal life. According to this definition, then, Romance may even treat of the sordid, the unlovely — as for instance, the novels of M. Zola. (Zola has been dubbed a Realist, but he is, on the contrary, the very head of the Romanticists.) Also, Realism, used as it sometimes is as a term of reproach, need not be in the remotest sense or degree offensive, but on the other hand respectable as a church and proper as a deacon — as, for instance, the novels of Mr. Howells.
The reason why one claims so much for Romance, and quarrels so pointedly with Realism, is that Realism stultifies itself. It notes only the surface of things. For it, Beauty is not even skin deep, but only a geometrical plane, without dimensions and depth, a mere outside. Realism is very excellent so far as it goes, but it goes no further than the Realist himself can actually see, or actually hear. Realism is minute; it is the drama of a broken teacup, the tragedy of a walk down the block, the excitement of an afternoon call, the adventure of an invitation to dinner. It is the visit to my neighbour’s house, a formal visit, from which I may draw no conclusions. I see my neighbour and his friends — very, oh, such very! probable people — and that is all. Realism bows upon the doormat and goes away and says to me, as we link arms on the sidewalk: “That is life.” And I say it is not. It is not, as you would very well see if you took Romance with you to call upon your neighbour.
Lately you have been taking Romance a weary journey across the water — ages and the flood of years — and haling her into the fusby, musty, worm-eaten, moth-riddled, rust-corroded “Grandes Salles” of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and she has found the drama of a bygone age for you there. But would you take her across the street to your neighbour’s front parlour (with the bisque fisher-boy on the mantel and the photograph of Niagara Falls on glass hanging in the front window); would you introduce her there? Not you. Would you take a walk with her on Fifth Avenue, or Beacon Street, or Michigan Avenue? No, indeed. Would you choose her for a companion of a morning spent in Wall Street, or an afternoon in the Waldorf-Astoria? You just guess you would not.
She would be out of place, you say — inappropriate. She might be awkward in my neighbour’s front parlour, and knock over the little bisque fisher-boy. Well, she might. If she did, you might find underneath the base of the statuette, hidden away, tucked away — what? God knows. But something that would be a complete revelation of my neighbour’s secretest life.
So you think Romance would stop in the front parlour and discuss medicated flannels and mineral waters with the ladies? Not for more than five minutes. She would be off upstairs with you, prying, peeping, peering into the closets of the bedroom, into the nursery, into the sitting-room; yes, and into that little iron box screwed to the lower shelf of the closet in the library; and into those compartments and pigeon-holes of the secretaire in the study. She would find a heartache (maybe) between the pillows of the mistress’s bed, and a memory carefully secreted in the master’s deed-box. She would come upon a great hope amid the books and papers of the study-table of the young man’s room, and — perhaps — who knows — an affair, or, great Heavens, an intrigue, in the scented ribbons and gloves and hairpins of the young lady’s bureau. And she would pick here a little and there a little, making up a bag of hopes and fears and a package of joys and sorrows — great ones, mind you — and then come down to the front door, and, stepping out into the street, hand you the bags and package and say to you— “That is Life!”
Romance does very well in the castles of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance chateaux, and she has the entree there and is very well received. That is all well and good. But let us protest against limiting her to such places and such times. You will find her, I grant you, in the chatelaine’s chamber and the dungeon of the man-at-arms; but, if you choose to look for her, you will find her equally at home in the brownstone house on the corner and in the office-building downtown. And this very day, in this very hour, she is sitting among the rags and wretchedness, the dirt and despair of the tenements of the East Side of New York.
“What?” I hear you say, “loo
k for Romance — the lady of the silken robes and golden crown, our beautiful, chaste maiden of soft voice and gentle eyes — look for her among the vicious ruffians, male and female, of Allen Street and Mulberry Bend?” I tell you she is there, and to your shame be it said you will not know her in those surroundings. You, the aristocrats, who demand the fine linen and the purple in your fiction; you, the sensitive, the delicate, who will associate with your Romance only so long as she wears a silken gown. You will not follow her to the slums, for you believe that Romance should only amuse and entertain you, singing you sweet songs and touching the harp of silver strings with rosy-tipped fingers. If haply she should call to you from the squalour of a dive, or the awful degradation of a disorderly house, crying: “Look! listen! This, too, is life. These, too, are my children! Look at them, know them and, knowing, help!”
Should she call thus you would stop your ears; you would avert your eyes and you would answer, “Come from there, Romance. Your place is not there!” And you would make of her a harlequin, a tumbler, a sword-dancer, when, as a matter of fact, she should be by right divine a teacher sent from God.
She will not often wear the robe of silk, the gold crown, the jeweled shoon; will not always sweep the silver harp. An iron note is hers if so she choose, and coarse garments, and stained hands; and, meeting her thus, it is for you to know her as she passes — know her for the same young queen of the blue mantle and lilies. She can teach you if you will be humble to learn — teach you by showing. God help you if at last you take from Romance her mission of teaching; if you do not believe that she has a purpose — a nobler purpose and a mightier than mere amusement, mere entertainment. Let Realism do the entertaining with its meticulous presentation of teacups, rag carpets, wall-paper and haircloth sofas, stopping with these, going no deeper than it sees, choosing the ordinary, the untroubled, the commonplace.