by Frank Norris
By the same token, then, is it not better to welcome and rejoice over this recent “literary-deluge” than to decry it? One is not sure it is not a matter for self-gratulation — not a thing to deplore and vilify. The “people” are reading, that is the point; it is not the point that immature, untrained writers are flooding the counters with their productions. The more the Plain People read the more they will discriminate. It is inevitable, and by and by they will demand “something better.” It is impossible to read a book without formulating an opinion upon it. Even the messenger boy can tell you that, in his judgment, No. 3,666, “The James Boys Brought to Bay,” is more — or less, as the case may be — exciting than No. 3,667, “The Last of the Fly-by-nights.” Well, that is something. Is it not better than that the same boy should be shooting craps around the comer? Take his dime novel from him, put him in the “No Book” condition — and believe me, he will revert to the craps. And so it is higher up the scale. In the name of American literature, let the Plain People read, anything — anything, whether it is three days or three years old. Mr. Carnegie will not educate the public taste by shutting his libraries upon recent fiction. The public taste will educate itself by much reading, not by restricted reading. “Books have never done harm,”
Victor Hugo said it, and a bad book — that is to say, a poor, cheap, ill-written, “trashy” book — is not after all so harmful as “no book” at all.
Later on, when the people have learned discrimination by much reading, it will not be necessary to bar fiction not three years old from the libraries, for by then the people will demand the “something better,” and the writers will have to supply it — or disappear, giving place to those who can, and then the literary standards will be raised.
II IN a recent number of his periodical, the editor of Harper’s Weekly prints a letter received from a gentleman who deplores the fact that the participants in the Harvard-Yale track teams are given a great place in the daily newspapers while — by implication — his son, an arduous student and winner of a “Townsend prize,” is completely and definitely ignored. “I could not but think of my son,” writes the gentleman, “a Yale Senior who, as one of the results of nine years’ devotion to study, won a Townsend prize.” One will ask the reader to consider this last statement. The publicity of the college athletes is not the point here. The point is “nine years’ devotion to study” and— “a Townsend prize.” Nine years — think of it — the best, the most important of a boy’s life given to devoted study! — not of Men, not of Life, not of Realities, but of the books of Other People, mere fatuous, unreasoned, pig-headed absorption of ideas at secondhand. And the result? Not a well-ordered mind, not a well-regulated reasoning machine, not a power of appreciation, not an ability to create. None of these, but — Great Heavens! — a Townsend Prize, a rectangular piece of the skin of a goat, dried and cured and marked with certain signs and symbols by means of a black pigment; this and a disk of the same metal the Uganda warrior hangs in his ears. A Townsend Prize. And for this a young American living in the twentieth century, sane, intelligent, healthful, has pored over Other People’s books, has absorbed Other People’s notions, has wearied his brain, has weakened his body, has shut himself from the wide world, has denied himself, has restrained himself, has stultified emotion, has in a word buried his talent in the earth wrapped carefully in a napkin. “And,” comments the editor, “the boy who won the Townsend prize for scholarship, if he keeps on, will some day be honoured by his fellowmen, when the athletic prize-winner, if he does nothing else, will be a director of a gymnasium. The serious worker comes out ahead every time.” But winning Townsend prizes by nine years of study is, we submit, not serious work, but serious misuse of most valuable time and energy. Scholarship? Will we never learn that times change and that sauce for the Renaissance goose is not sauce for the New Century gander? It is a fine thing, this scholarship, no doubt; but if a man be content with merely this his scholarship is of as much use and benefit to his contemporaries as his deftness in manicuring his finger nails. The United States in this year of grace of nineteen hundred and two does not want and does not need Scholars, but Men — Men made in the mould of the Leonard Woods and the Theodore Roosevelts, Men such as Colonel Waring, Men such as Booker Washington. The most brilliant scholarship attainable by human effort is not, to-day, worth nine years of any young man’s life. I think it is Nathaniel Hawthorne who tells the story of a “scholar” who one day, when a young man, found the tooth of a mammoth. He was a student of fossil remains, and in his enthusiasm set out to complete the skeleton. His mind filled with this one idea, to the exclusion of all else, he traveled up and down the world, year after year, picking up here a vertebra, here a femur, here a rib, here a clavicle. Years passed; he came to be an old man; at last he faced death. He had succeeded. The monstrous framework was complete. But he looked back upon the sixty years of his toil and saw that it was a vanity. He had to show for his life-work — the skeleton of a mammoth. And, believe this implicitly: if — as the editor and commentator remarks — if the Townsend prize-winner keeps on, this will be the result, a huge thing no doubt, a thing that looms big in the eye and in the imagination, but an empty thing, lifeless, bloodless, dead; yes and more than dead — extinct; a mere accumulation of dry bones, propped up lest it fall to the ground, a thing for the wind to blow through and the vulgar to gape at.
But in connection with this subject one may cite so high an authority as Doctor Patton of Princeton, who has recently said that nowadays men do not go to colleges to become scholars, and that it was time and money wasted to try to make them such. This is a good saying and should be taken to heart by every college faculty between the oceans. Sooner or later there is bound to come a fundamental change in the mode of instruction now in favour in most American colleges. The times demand it; the character of the student body, the character of the undergraduate, is changing. One chooses to believe that the college of the end of the present century will be an institution where only specialized work will be indulged in. There will be courses in engineering, in electricity, in agriculture, in law, in chemistry, in biology, in mining, etc., and the so-called general “literary” or “classical” courses will be relegated to the limbo of Things No Longer Useful. Any instructor in collegiate work will tell you to-day that the men in the special courses are almost invariably the hardest, steadiest, most serious workers. The man who studies law at college finishes his work a lawyer, he who studies engineering ends an engineer, the student of biology graduates a biologist, the student of chemistry, a chemist. But the student in the “literary” course does not — no, not once in a thousand instances — graduate a literary man. He spends the four years of his life over a little Greek, a little Latin, a little mathematics, a little literature, a little history, a little “theme” writing, and comes out — just what it would be difficult to say. But he has in most cases acquired a very pronounced distaste for the authors whose work he has studied in class and lecture-room. Great names such as those of Carlyle, Macaulay and De Quincey are associated in his mind only with tedium. He never will go back to these books, never read with enjoyment what once was “work.” Even his conscientiousness — supposing him to be animated with such a motive — will trap him and trick him. I do not think that I shall ever forget the spectacle and impression of a student in my own Alma Mater — a little lass of seventeen (the college was co-educational), with her hair still down her back and her shoes yet innocent of heels, rising in her place in the classroom to read before a half-hundred of raw boys and undeveloped girls — not three months out of the high school — a solemn and quite unintelligible “theme” on “The Insincerity of Thomas Babington Macaulay.”
Just at the time of the present writing a controversy has been started in London literary circles as to the legitimacy of a reviewer publishing the whole or parts of the same unsigned article in two or more periodicals. Mr. Arthur Symons is the reviewer under fire, and his article a critique of the dramas of Mr. Stephen
Phillips. It was Mr. Phillips, so we are told, who first started the protest, and he has found followers’ and champions. And on first consideration there does seem to be ground for complaint here. It has been assumed that the first publisher of the article has a right to expect that for the money he pays to the writer this latter shall give to him all he has to say upon the subject. If he has very much to say — enough for another article — is it not the duty of the scribe to condense and compact so that the matter may be represented as a unit and not as a fragment? Moreover, does it seem fair to Mr. Phillips that three reviews — as was the case — all unfavourable, should appear in as many publications, thus giving to the public the impression that a group of critics, instead of merely one, was hostile to his work? Lastly, it has been urged that it is not honest to sell a thing twice — that if a horse has been sold by A to B, A cannot sell it again to C.
But none of the objections seems valid. If the space allotted to the article in the paper is not sufficient, that is the fault of the editor, not the writer. The editor pays only for what he prints: the surplusage is still the author’s property and can be by him disposed of as such. As for the public considering the single — unfavourable — review as the opinions of three men, and as such unfair to Mr. Phillips, this as well is inadequate and incompetent. Another critic, reviewing Mr. Phillips favourably, is just as much at liberty to split up his work as the adverse reviewer. Last of all, it is under certain circumstances perfectly honest to sell the same thing twice. Articles, stories, poems and the like are continually syndicated in hundreds of newspapers simultaneously, and in this sense are sold over and over again. The analogy between the sale of a horse and the sale of a bit of literature is quite misleading. For the matter of that, the writer does not sell the actual concrete manuscript of his work, but merely the right to print it, and unless the word “exclusively” is understood in the agreement he is in no wise bound. The writer is not selling his copy as the owner sells his horse. The analogy would be true if A sold to B the use of the horse. When B had got the “use” out of the animal no one will deny the right of A to sell the same “use” to C, D, E, and so on through the whole alphabet. The reviewer of books has a hard enough time of it as it is. It is only fair to give him the same freedom as a livery stable keeper.
It has often occurred to me as a thing of some importance and certain significance that all great travelers are great writers. And the fact is so well established, the effect flows so nvariably from the cause, that there would seem to be here a matter for reflection. One affirms and will maintain that the one is the direct result of the other, that the faculty of adequate expression, of vivid presentation, of forceful and harmonious grouping of words, is engendered and stimulated and perfected by wide journeying.
This is not at all an orthodox view, not at all the theory cherished by our forbears. The writer, according to unvarying belief, is the man of the closet, the bookish man, a student, a sedentary, a consumer of kerosene, a reader rather than a rover. And the idea is plausible.
The nomad, he without local habitation, has no leisure, no opportunity, nor even actual concrete place to write. Would it not seem that literature is the quiet art, demanding an unperturbed mind, an unexcited, calm, reposeful temperament? This is a very defensible position, but it is based upon a foundation of sand. It assumes that the brain of the writer is a jar full of a precious fluid — a bottle full of wine to be poured out with care and with a hand so quiet, so restful and unshaken that not a drop be spilled. Very well. But when the jar, when the bottle is emptied — then what? Believe me, the gods give but one vintage to one man. There will be no refilling of the vessel; and even the lees are very flat, be the wine ever so good. The better the grape, the bitterer the dregs; and the outpouring of the “best that is in you” in the end will be soured by that brackish, fade sediment that follows upon lavish expenditure, so that the man ends ignobly and because of exhaustion and depletion, with all the product of his early and mature richness making more prominent and pitiful the final poverty and tenuity of his outgiving — ends the butt of critics, the compassion of the incompetent, a shard kicked of every scullion.
And in all the world there is nothing more lamentable than this — the end of a man once strong who has used himself up but who decants lees and not wine. Even when the lees are spent he absorbs them once more and once more gives them forth, each time a little staler, a little thinner, a little feebler, realizing his exhaustion, yet — urged by some whip of fortune — forced to continue the miserable performance till the golden bowl be broken and the pitcher shattered at the fountain.
But suppose the productive power of the writer be considered not as a golden bowl to be emptied and in the end broken, but as a silver cord of finest temper that only needs to be kept in tune. True, the cord may be stretched to the breaking-point. But its end comes at the very height and in the very consummate fulness of its capacity, and oh, the grand worldgirdling Note that it sends forth in the breaking! — the very soul of it at mightiest tension, the very spirit of it at fiercest strain. What matter the loosening or the snapping when so noble an Amen as that vibrates through the nations to sound at once the Height and the End of an entire Life — a whole existence concentrated into a single cry!
Or it may become out of tune. But this is no great matter, because so easily remedied. The golden bowl once emptied there will be no refilling, but by some blessed provision of heaven nothing is easier than to attune the cords of being which are also the cords — the silver singing cords — of expression.
But — and here we come around once more to the point de depart — the silver cords once gone discordant, once jaded and slack, will not, cannot be brought again to harmony in the closet, in the study, in the seclusion of the cabinet. Tinker them never so cunningly, never so delicately, they will not ring true for you. Thought will avail nothing, nor even rest, nor even relaxation. Of oneself, one cannot cause the Master-note to which they will respond to vibrate. The cords have been played on too much. For all your pottering they will yet remain a little loose, and so long as they are loose the deftest fingering, the most skilful touch, will produce only false music.
And the deadly peril is that the cords of Life and the cords of expression lie so close together, are so intricately mingled, that the man cannot always tell that the cords of expression are singing out of tune. Life and expression are two parts of the same instrument. If the whole life be out of tune, how can the man distinguish the false music from the true? There is a danger here, but it is not great. Sooner or later the conviction comes that the productive power is menaced. A little frankness with oneself, a little uncompromising testing of the strings, and the dissonance begins to impress itself.
And — as was said — the remedy is not to be found by the taking of thought, but by an heroic, drastic thrusting out from the grooves and cogs of the life of other men — of the life of the city and the comfortable stay-at-home, hour-to-hour humdrum, and a determined journeying out into the great wide world itself.
The further a-field the better. The Master-note will not be heard within “commuting distance of the city.” The whir of civilization smothers it. The click of the telegraph, the hiss of steam and the clatter of the printing-press drown it out. It is not always and of necessity a loud note. Though Nansen heard it in the thunder of the pack-ice of the Farthest North, it came to the ear of Stevenson in the lap of lazy wavelets in the hushed noonday of a South Sea strand.
Travel is the only way. Travel in any direction, by any means, so only it be far — very, very far — is the great attuner of the listless cords of the writer’s instrument. For again and again and again his power is not a bowl to be emptied, but an instrument to be played on. To be of use it must be sensitive and responsive and true. And to be kept sensitive and responsive and true it must go once in so often to the great Tuner — to Nature.
We speak of the Mountains, the Rivers, Deserts and Oceans as though we knew them. We know the Adirondacks fr
om a fortnight in a “summer camp”; the Rivers and the Deserts in kinetoscopic glimpses from the Pullman’s windows; the Ocean — God forgive us! — from the beach of a “resort” or the deck of an Atlantic “greyhound.” And I think the gods of the Mountains, Rivers, Deserts and Oceans must laugh in vast contempt of our credulity to suppose that we have found their secrets or heard their music in this timid, furtive peeping and pilfering. For such little minds as these the gods have inexhaustible stores of tinkling cymbals and sounding brasses — Brummagem ware that they sell us for the price of “commutation tickets” and mileage-books.
The real knowledge, the real experience that tautens and trims the fibers of being, that times the cords, is a very different matter. The trail and the tall ship lead to those places where the Master-note sounds, lead to those untracked, uncharted comers of the earth, and dull indeed must be the tympanum that once within earshot cannot hear its majestic diapason. It sounds in the canyons of the higher mountains, in the plunge of streams and swirling of rivers yet without names — in the wildernesses, the plains, the wide-rimmed deserts. It sings a sonorous rhapsody in the rigging of the clipper ship driven by the trade winds, in the ratlines and halyards of South Sea schooners, and drums “reveille” on the tense, hard sails of the fishing-boats off the “Banks.” You can hear it in the cry of the lynx, the chant of the wild goose, the call of the moose, and in the “break” of the salmon in the deeper pools below the cataract. It is in the roar of the landslide and in the drone of the cicada; in the war-whoop of the savage and in the stridulating of crickets; in the thunder of the tempest and in the faintest breath of laziest zephyrs.
And the silver cord of our creative faculty — the thing nearest to perfection in all the makeup of our imperfect human nature — responds to this Master-note with the quickness and sensitiveness of music-mathematics; responds to it, attunes itself to it, vibrates with its vibration, thrills with its quivering, beats with its rhythm, and tautens itself and freshens itself and lives again with its great pure, elemental life, and the man comes back once more to the world of men with a true-beating heart, and a true-hearing ear, so that he understands once more, so that his living, sensitive, delicately humming instrument trembles responsive to the emotions and impulses and loves and joys and sorrows and fears of his fellows, and the Man writes true and clear, and his message rings with harmony and with melody, with power and with passion of the prophets interpreting God’s handwriting to the world of men.