by Frank Norris
III THERE can be no question nor reasonable doubt that the “language, institutions and religion” of fiction writers are at present undergoing the most radical revolution in the history of literature. And I mean by that that the men themselves are changing — their characters, their attitudes toward life; even the mode and manner of their own life. Those who are not thus changing are decaying. And those others, the Great Unarrived who do not recognize the Change, who do not acknowledge the Revolution, will never succeed, but will perish untimely almost before they can be said to have been born at all.
Time was when the author was an aristocrat, living in seclusion, unspotted from the world. But the Revolution of which there is question here has meted out to him the fate that Revolutions usually prepared for Aristocrats, and his successor is, must be, must be — if he is to voice the spirit of the times aright, if he is to interpret his fellows justly — the Man of the People, the Good Citizen.
How the novelists of the preceding generation played the Great Game is no matter for discussion here. Times were different then. One shut oneself in the study; one wore a velvet coat; one read a great deal and quoted Latin; one knew the classics; one kept apart from the vulgar profane and never, never, never read the newspapers. But for the novelist of the next fifty years of this twentieth century these methods, these habits, this conception of literature as a cult, as a refinement to be kept inviolate from the shoulderings and elbowings of the Common People is a clog, is a stumbling-block, is a pitfall, a bog, mire, trap — anything you like that is false, misleading and pernicious.
I have no patience with a theory of literature — and oh, how often one hears it preached! — that claims the Great Man belongs only to the cultured few. “You must write,” so these theorists explain, “for that small number of fine minds who because of education, because of delicate, fastidious taste are competent to judge. “ I tell you this is wrong. It is precisely the same purblind prejudice that condemned the introduction of the printing-press because it would cheapen and vulgarize the literature of the day. A literature that cannot be vulgarized is no literature at all and will perish just as surely as rivers run to the sea. The things that last are the understandable things — understandable to the common minds, the Plain People, understandable, one is almost tempted to say, to the very children.
It is so in every branch of art: in music, painting, sculpture, architecture. The great monuments of these activities, the things that we retain longest and cherish with the most care are plain almost to bareness. The most rudimentary mind can understand them. All the learning, all the culture, all the refinement in the world will not give you a greater thrill on reading your “Iliad” than the boy of fifteen enjoys. Is the “Marseillaise” a thing of subtlety or refinement? Are the Pyramids complex? Are Angelo’s Sibyls involved? But the “Iliad,” the “Marseillaise,” the Pyramids, the Sibyls will endure and endure and endure while men have eyes to see, ears to hear and hearts to be moved. These great things, these monuments were not written nor composed, nor builded, nor painted for the select, for the cultured. When Homer wrote there were no reading circles. Rouget de Lisle gave no “recitals.” One does not have to “read up” to understand the message of Cheops, nor take a course of art lectures to feel the mystery of the Delphic Sibyl.
And so to come back to the starting place, the Revolution in the character of the writer of fiction. If the modem novelist does not understand the Plain People, if he does not address himself directly to them intelligibly and simply, he will fail. But he will never understand them by shutting himself away from them. He must be — and here one comes to the conclusion of the whole matter — a Man of the World. None more so. Books have no place in his equipment, have no right to be there; will only cumber and confuse him. His predecessor never read the newspapers, but for him the newspaper is more valuable than all the tomes of Ruskin, all the volumes of Carlyle. And more valuable than all are the actual, vital Affairs of Men. The function of the novelist of this present day is to comment upon life as he sees it. He cannot get away from this; this is his excuse for existence, the only claim he has upon attention. How necessary then for him — of all men — to be in the midst of life! He cannot plunge too deeply into it. Politics will help him, and Religious Controversies, Explorations, Science, the newest theory of Socialism, the latest development of Biology. He should find an interest in Continental diplomacy and should have opinions on the chances of a Russo-Japanese war over the Corean question. He should be able to tell why it is of such unusual importance for Queen Wilhelmina of Holland to give birth to an heir, and should know who ought to be nominated for Governor of his native State at the next conventional. No piece of information — mere downright acquisition of fact — need be considered worthless. Nothing is too trivial to be neglected. I know a novelist of international reputation who told me that the following little bits of knowledge (collected heaven knows where and stored up for years in some pigeon-hole of his memory) had been of use to him in the composition of a novel he is now at work upon: That great cities tend to grow to the westward; that race-horses are shod with a long and narrow shoe; and that the usual price charged by an electrician for winding an armature is four dollars. And he seemed prouder of the fact that he had these tiny odds and ends at his command, when needed, than he was of the honorary degree just conferred upon him by Harvard University.
I suppose this is an exaggerated case, and it is not to be denied that it is better to have a Harvard degree than to know the shape of a race-horse’s shoe, but it surely goes to prove the point that, as far as actual material worth and use were concerned, the fugitive foolish memory-notes were of more present help than the university degree, and that so far as information is concerned the novelist cannot know too much.
In a recent number of The Bookman there appears an able article under the title “Attacking the Newspapers.” The title is a trifle misleading, since the author’s point and text are a defense of modem journalism, or rather let us say an apology. The apology is very well done. The manner of presentation is ingenious, the style amusing, but none the less one cannot let the article pass without protest or, at the least, comment.
The original function of a newspaper was, and still should be, to tell the news — and, if you please, nothing more than that. The “policy” of the paper was (before the days of the yellow press) advocated and exploited in the editorial columns.
The whole difficulty lies in the fact that nowadays the average newspaper is violently partizan and deliberately alters news to suit its partizanship. “Not a very criminal procedure,” I hear it said; “for by reading the opposition papers the public gets the other side.” But one submits that such a course is criminal, and that it can be proved to be such. How many people do you suppose read the “opposition” papers? The American newspaper readers have not time to read “both sides” unless presented to them in one and the same paper.
Observe now how this partizanship works injustice and ruin. Let us suppose a given newspaper is hostile to the Governor of the State. Now every man — even a journalist — has a right to his opinions and his hostilities, and important men in public life must expect to be abused. There are for them compensations; their position is too high, too secure to be shaken by the vituperation of malevolent journals. But these journals have one favourite form of attacking important public men which, though it does not always harm the personage assaulted, may easily ruin the subordinates with which he surrounds himself. This is the habit of discrediting the statesman by defaming his appointees. The Governor, we will say, has appointed John Smith to be the head of a certain institution of the State. But the Governor has incurred the enmity of the Daily Clarion — the leading newspaper. Promptly the Clarion seizes upon Smith. His career as head of the institution has been a record of misrule (so the Clarion reads), has been characterized by extravagance, incompetency, mismanagement, and even misappropriation of the State’s money. And here begins the cruel injustice of the business. The
editor of that paper will set no bounds upon the lengths to which he will urge his reporters in their vilification of Smith. The editor knows he is a liar, the reporters know they are liars, but the public, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, ignoring motives, unable to see that the real object of attack is the Governor, unable to understand the brute callousness and wretched hypocrisy of the whole proceeding, believes the calumny, believes that Smith is an incompetent, a spendthrift, even a thief. And even the better class of readers, even the more intelligent who make allowances for the paper’s political prejudices, will listen to the abuse and believe that there “must be some fire where there is so much smoke.” Do you suppose for one moment that Smith will ever get a hearing in that paper? Do you suppose its reporters will ever credit him with a single honest achievement, a single sincere effort? If you do, you do not understand modem journalism.
Ah, but the opposition papers! They will defend Smith. They will champion him as vehemently as the Clarion attacks. That is all very well, but suppose there are no opposition papers. Politics are very complicated. The press of a given community is not always equally divided between the Republican and Democratic parties. Time and time again it happens that all the leading newspapers of a city, a county, or even a State, Democratic, Republican, Independent, etc., are banded together to oppose some one Large Man.
Where then will Smith get his hearing? He cannot fight all the newspapers at once. He is not strong enough to retaliate even upon the meanest. The papers are afraid of nothing he can do. They hold absolute power over his good name and reputation. And for the sake of feeding fat the grudge they bear the Great One they butcher the subordinate without ruth and without reproach. Believe me, it has been shown repeatedly that, placed in such a position, the modem newspaper will check at no lie however monstrous, at no calumny however vile. If Smith holds a position of trust he will be trumpeted from end to end of the community as a defaulter, gambling away the public moneys entrusted to his care. He will be pictured as a race-track follower, a supporter of fast women, a thief, a blackguard, and a reprobate. If he holds an administrative office, it will be shown how he has given and taken bribes; how he has neglected his duties and ignored his responsibilities till his office has engendered calamity, ruin, and even actual physical suffering. If his work is in the nature of supervision over one of those State institutions where the helpless are cared for — the infirm, the imbecile, the aged, or sick, or poor — his cruelty to his wards will be the theme, and he will be written of and pictured as whipping or torturing old men and little children, imprisoning, tormenting, making a hell of what was meant to be a help.
And the man once blackened after this fashion will never again rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the public. The people who read newspapers always believe the worst, and when an entire press, or even the major part of it, unite to defame a man there is no help or redress possible. He is ruined, ruined professionally and financially, ruined in character, in pocket, and in the hopes of ever getting back the good name that once was his.
And all this is done merely as a political move, merely to discredit the Big Man who put Smith in his place, merely to hurt his chances of renomination, merely to cut down the number of his votes. It is butchery; there is no other word than this with which to characterize the procedure, butchery as cruel, as wanton and as outrageous as ever bloodied the sands of the Colosseum. It is even worse than this, for the victim has no chance for his life. His hands are tied before the beasts are loosed. He is trussed and downed before the cages are opened, and the benches thunder for his life, not as for a victim to be immolated, but as a criminal to be punished. He is getting only his deserts, his very memory is an execration, and his name whenever mentioned is a by-word and a hissing.
And this in face of the fact that the man may be as innocent of the charges urged as if he had never been born.
Yet Doctor Colby in The Bookman article writes:— “If we must attack the newspapers let it be as critics, not as crusaders, for the people who write for them are under no stricter obligations than ourselves.” What! the reporter or the editor who by some fillip of fortune is in a position to make public opinion in the minds of a million people under no more obligations than you and I! If every obligation bore down with an all but intolerable weight it is in just his case. His responsibility is greater than that of the Pulpit, greater than that of the Physician, greater than that of the Educator. If you would see the use to which it is put, you have only to try to get at the real truth in the case of the next public character assailed and vilified in the public prints.
Doctor Colby is wrong. It is a crusade and not a criticism that will put down the modem yellow newspaper from the bad eminence to which the minds of the hysterical, of the violent, of the ignorant, brutal and unscrupulous have exalted it.
IV
THERE is a certain journal of the Middle West of the United States which has proclaimed, with a great flourish of trumpets, that Mme. Humbert of Paris would have made a great “fictionist” if she had not elected to become a great swindler. This is that Mme. Humbert who cheated a number of bankers, capitalists and judges out of a great deal of money with a story of $20,000,000 in a safe which for certain reasons she could not open. Very naturally, when her hand was forced the safe was empty. And this person, the Middle West paper claims, is a great novelist manquée, “a female Dumas or Hugo.” The contention would not be worthy of notice were it not for the fact that it is an opinion similar to that held by a great number of people intelligent enough to know better. In a word, it is the contention that the personal morality of the artist (including “fictionists”) has nothing to do with his work, and that a great rascal may be a good painter, good musician, good novelist. With painters, musicians and the like this may or may not be true. With the novelist one contends, believes and avers that it is absolutely and unequivocally false, and that the mind capable of theft, of immorality, of cruelty, of foulness, or falseness of any kind is incapable, under any circumstances, or by any degree of stimulation, of producing one single important, artistic or useful piece of fiction. The better the personal morality of the writer, the better his writings. Tolstoi, for instance: it is wholly and solely due to the man’s vast goodness and philanthropy that his novels carry weight. The attitude of the novelist toward his fellow-men and women is the great thing, not his inventiveness, his ingenuity, his deftness, or glibness, or verbal dexterity. And the mind wholly mean, who would rob a friend of $40,000 (after the manner of the Humbert person), or could even wilfully and deliberately mar the pleasure of a little child, could never assume toward the world at large that attitude of sympathy and generosity and toleration that is the first requisite of the really great novelist. Always you will find this thing true: that the best, the greatest writers of fiction are those best loved of troops of friends; and for the reason that, like the Arab philosopher of the poem, they, first of all, have “loved their fellow-men.” It is this that has made their novels great. Consider Stevenson, or our own “Dean,” or Hugo, or Scott, men of the simplest lives, uncompromising in rectitude, scrupulously, punctiliously, Quixotically honest; their morality — surely in the cases of Stevenson and Hugo — setting a new standard of religion, at the least a new code of ethics. And thus it goes right down the line, from the greater lights to the lesser and to the least. It is only the small men, the “minor” people among the writers of books who indulge in eccentricities that are only immortalities under a different skin; who do not pay their debts; who borrow without idea of returning; who live loose, “irregular,” wretched, vicious lives, and call it “Bohemianism,” and who believe that “good work” can issue from the turmoil, that the honeycomb will be found in the carcass, and the sweet come forth from the putrid. So that in the end one may choose to disagree with the Middle West editor and to affirm that it is not the ingenious criminal who is the novelist manqué, but the philanthropist, the great educator, the great pulpit orator, the great statesman. It is from such stuff that the
important novels are made, not from the deranged lumber and disordered claptrap of the brain of a defective.
In the course of a speech made at a recent dinner given in London, Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace has deplored the fact that our present generation of English writers has produced no worthy successors to the great men of the midVictorian period — that there are no names to place beside Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Browning, or Keats. But he also brought forward extenuating circumstances, chief among which was the fact that the novelists of to-day were working overtime to supply the demands of an ever-increasing public, and that, by implication, their work was therefore deteriorating. One does not believe that this is so. Rapid work may cause the deterioration of a commercial article, but it by no means follows that the authors who are called upon to produce a very large number of books are forced into the composition of unworthy literature. The writer’s brain does not hold the material for his books. It is not like a storehouse, from which things may be taken till nothing remains. The writer’s material is life itself, inexhaustible and renewed from day to day, and his brain is only the instrument that adapts life to fiction. True, this instrument itself may wear out after awhile, but it usually lasts as long as the man himself, and is good for more work than the unthinking would believe possible. As a matter of fact, the best novelists have, as a rule, been the most prolific, have been those who had to write rapidly and much to satisfy, if not the demands of the public, then at least other more personal demands, none the less insistent, Scott and Dickens were unusually prolific, yet the rapidity with which they accomplished their work did not hurt the quality of the work itself. Balzac and Dumas produced whole libraries of books and yet kept their standards high. As one has urged before, it is the demand of the People that produces the great writer, not reduces the quality and fineness of his work. If he has the “divine spark,” the breath of the millions will fan rather than extinguish it.