by Frank Norris
One does not choose to believe that the art of fiction nor the standards of excellence have deteriorated since the day of Scott, Dickens and Thackeray. True, we have no men to equal them as yet, but they are surely coming. Time was, at the end of the seventeenth century, when the dearth of good fiction was even more marked than at present. But one must bear in mind that progress is never along a direct line, but by action and reaction. A period will supervene when a group of geniuses arise, and during the course of their activities the average of excellence is high, great books are produced, and a whole New Literature is launched. Their influence is profound; the first subschool of imitators follow good enough men but second-rate. These in turn are followed by the third-raters, and these by the fourth-raters, and no one is found bold enough to strike out for himself until the bottom is reached. Then comes the reaction, and once more the group of giants towers up from out the mass. We are probably living through the era of the fourth-raters just now, and one believes that we are rather near to the end even of that. The imitators of the romantic school have imitated to ten places decimals and have diluted and rediluted till they can hardly go further without producing something actually and really new. At any rate, the time is most propitious for a Man of Iron who can be bent to no former shape nor diluted to no old-time essence. Then will come the day of the New Literature, and the wind of Life itself will blow through the dry bones and fustian and sawdust of the Imitation, and the People will all at once realize how very far afield the fourth-raters have drawn them and how very different a good novel is from a bad one.
For say what you will, the People, the Plain People who Read, do appreciate good literature in the end. One must keep one’s faith in the People — the Plain People, the Burgesses, the Grocers — else of all men the artists are most miserable and their teachings vain. Let us admit and concede that this belief is ever so sorely tried at times. Many thousands of years ago the wisest man of his age declared that “the People imagine a vain thing.” Continually they are running away after strange gods; continually they are admiring the fake and neglecting actual worth. But in the end, and at last, they will listen to the true note and discriminate between it and the false. In the last analysis the People are always right. Somehow, and after all is said and done, they will prefer Walter Scott to G. P. R. James, Shakspere to Marlowe, Flaubert to Goncourt. Sometimes the preference is long in forming, and during this formative period they have many reversions, and go galloping, in herds of one hundred or one hundred and fifty thousand (swelling the circulations), after false gods. But note this fact: that the fustian and the tinsel and the sawdust are discovered very soon, and, once the discovery made, the sham idol can claim no single devotee.
In other words, it is a comfort to those who take the literature of the Americans — or even of the Anglo-Saxons — seriously to remember, in the long run and the larger view, that a circulation of two hundred, three hundred or four hundred thousand — judging even by this base-scale of “copies sold” — is not so huge after all. Consider. A “popular” novel is launched and sells its half-million. Within a certain very limited period of time, at most five years, this sale stops definitely and conclusively. The People have found out that it is not such a work of genius after all, and will have no more of it. But how about the circulation of the works of the real Masters, Scott and Dickens, say — to be more concrete, let us speak of “Ivanhoe” and “David Copperfield” — have not each of these “sold” more than two hundred thousand since publication? Is not two hundred million nearer the mark? And they are still selling. New editions are published every year. Does not this prove that the People are discriminating; that they are — after all — preferring the best literature to the mediocre; that they are not such a mindless herd after all; that in the end, in fine, they are always right? It will not do to decry the American public; to say that it has no taste, no judgment; that it “likes to be fooled.” It may be led away for a time by clamorous advertising and the “barking” of fakirs. But there comes a day when it will no longer be fooled. A million dollars’ worth of advertising would not today sell a hundred thousand copies of “Trilby.” But “Ivanhoe” and “Copperfield,” without advertising, without reclames for exploitation, are as marketable this very day as a sack of flour or a bag of wheat.
Mr. Metcalfe, in a recent issue of Life, has been lamenting the lack of good plays on the American stage during the past season, and surely no one can aver that the distinguished critic is not right. One cannot forbear a wince or two at the thought of what future art historians will say in their accounts of the American drama at the beginning of the twentieth century. Frankly and unreservedly the native American drama is just about as bad as it can be, and every intelligent-minded person is quite willing to say so. The causes are not difficult to trace. Two come to the mind at once, which in themselves alone would account for the degeneracy — i.e., the rage for Vaudeville and the exploitation of the Star. The first has developed in the last ten years, an importation from English music halls. Considered at first as a fad by the better class of theatre-goers, a thing to be countenanced with amused toleration like performing bears and the animal circus, it has been at length boosted and foisted upon the public attention till, like a veritable cancer, it has eaten almost into the very vitals of the Legitimate Comedy (using the word in its technical sense). Continually nowadays one may see a “specialty” — generally in the form of a dance — lugged in between the scenes of a perfectly sober, perfectly sane Comedy of Manners. The moment any one subordinate feature of a dramatic action is developed at the expense of vraisemblance and the Probabilities, and for the sake of amusing the galleries, there is the first bacillus of decay. Vaudeville is all very well by itself, and one will even go so far as to admit that it has its place as much as an Ibsen problem-play. But it should keep to that place. It is ludicrously out of place in a comedy — quite as much so as the “Bible Incident” in Ebsmith would be in a Hoyt farce. But because the “specialty,” because Vaudeville, will “go” with the “gallery” at any time and at any place, the manager and — the pity of it! — the author, too, will introduce it whenever the remotest possibility occurs, and by just so much the tone of the whole drama is lowered. It has got to such a pass by now, however, that one ought to be thankful if this same “tone” is not keyed down to the specialty.
But the exploiting of the Star, it would seem, is, of all others, the great cause of the mediocrity of present-day dramatic literature. One has but to glance at the theatre programmes and bills to see how matters stand. The name of the leading lady or leading man is “scare-headed” so that the swiftest runner cannot fail to see. Even the manager proclaims his patronymic in enormous “caps.” But the author! — as often as not his name is not discoverable at all. The play is nothing — thus it would seem the managers would have us believe — it is the actress, her speeches, her scenes, her gowns, her personality, that are the all-important essentials. It is notorious how plays are cut, and readjusted, and dislocated to suit the Star. Never mind whether or not the scene is artistic, is vivid, is dramatic. Does the Star get the best of it? If not, write it over. The Star must have all the good lines. If they cannot be built into the Star’s part, cut ’em out. The Probabilities, the construction, artistic effect, climax, even good, common, forthright, horse sense, rot ‘em! who cares for ‘em? Give the Star the lime-light — that’s the point.
If the audience is willing to pay its money to see Miss Marlowe, Miss Mannering or Mrs. Carter put through her paces, that’s another thing; but let us not expect that good dramas will issue forth from this state of affairs.
Where are the Books for Girls? Adults’ books there are and books for boys by the carload, but where is the book for the young girls? Something has already been said about literature for the amiable young woman, but this, now, is a very different person. One means the girl of fourteen to eighteen. The boy passing through this most trying formative period finds his literature ready to hand. Boys’
books, tales of hunting, adventure and sport abound. They are good books, too, sane, “healthy,” full of fine spirit and life. But the girl, where does she read? Surely the years between fourteen and eighteen are even more trying to a young girl than to a boy. She is not an active animal. When the boy is out-of-doors, pitching curves or “running the ends,” the girl (even yet in the day and age of “athletics for women”) is in the house, and, as like as not, reading. And reading what, if you please? The feeblest, thinnest, most colourless lucubrations that it is given to the mind of misguided man to conceive or to perpetuate. It must be this or else the literature of the adult; and surely the novels written for mature minds, for men and women who have some knowledge of the world and powers of discrimination, are not good reading, in any sense of the word, for a sixteen-year-old girl in the formative period of her life.
Besides Alcott, no one has ever written intelligently for girls. Surely there is a field here. Surely a Public, untried and unexplored, is wailing for its author; nor is it a public wanting in enthusiasm, loyalty or intelligence.
But for all this great parade and prating of emancipated women it nevertheless remains a fact that the great majority of twentieth-century opinion is virtually Oriental in its conception of the young girl. The world to-day is a world for boys, men and women. Of all humans, the young girl, the sixteen-year-old, is the least important — or, at least, is so deemed. Wanted: a Champion. Wanted: the Discoverer and Poet of the Very Young Girl. Unimportant she may now appear to you, who may yet call her by her first name without fear and without reproach. But remember this, you who believe only in a world of men and boys and women; the Very Young Girl of to-day is the woman of to-morrow, the wife of the day after, and the mother of next week. She only needs to put up her hair and let down her frocks to become a very important person indeed. Meanwhile, she has no literature; meanwhile, faute de mieux, she is trying to read Ouida and many other books intended for maturer minds; or, worse than all, she is enfeebling her mind by the very thin gruel purveyed by the mild-mannered gentlemen and ladies who write for the Sunday-school libraries. Here is a bad business; here is a field that needs cultivation.
All very well to tend and train the saplings, the oaks and the vines. The flowers — they have not bloomed vet — are to be thought about, too.
All the more so that the young girl takes a book to heart infinitely more than a boy. The boy — his story once read — votes it “bully,” takes down his cap, and there’s an end. But the average Very Young Girl does not read her story: she lives it, lingers over it, weeps over it, lies awake nights over it. So long as she lives she will never quite forget the books she read when she was sixteen. It is not too much to say that the “favourite” books of a girl at this age become a part of her life. They influence her character more than any of us, I imagine, would suspect or admit. All the more reason, then, that there should not only be good books for girls, but plenty of good books.
THE END
ARTICLES AND SKETCHES
CONTENTS
ARTICLES AND SKETCHES FROM THE SAN FRANCISCO WAVE
SUGGESTIONS, 1870
A HOTEL BEDROOM
BRUTE
THE END OF THE ACT
A SOUTH SEA EXPEDITION
NEW YEAR’S AT SAN QUENTIN
A “LAG’S” RELEASE
AMONG CLIFF DWELLERS
SAILING OF THE EXCELSIOR
PASSING OF “LITTLE PETE”
THE SANTA CRUZ VENETIAN CARNIVAL
A CALIFORNIA JUBILEE
HUNTING HUMAN GAME
THE BOMBARDMENT
AT HOME FROM EIGHT TO TWELVE
COSMOPOLITAN SAN FRANCISCO
FICTION IN REVIEW
MILLARD’S TALES
LACKAYE “MAKING-UP.”
MRS. CARTER AT HOME
BELASCO ON PLAYS
A CALIFORNIA ARTIST
A MINER INTERVIEWED
WHEN A WOMAN HESITATES
WESTERN CITY TYPES
THE OPINIONS OF LEANDER
SOUTH AFRICAN ARTICLES
A CALIFORNIAN IN THE CITY OF CAPE TOWN
FROM CAPE TOWN TO KIMBERLEY MINE
IN THE COMPOUND OF A DIAMOND MINE
IN THE VELDT OF THE TRANSVAAL
A ZULU WAR DANCE
JACK HAMMOND IN JOHANNESBURG AND PRETORIA
SPANISH WAR ARTICLES
WITH LAWTON AT EL CANEY
SANTIAGO’S SURRENDER
COMIDA: AN EXPERIENCE IN FAMINE
ARTICLES AND SKETCHES FROM THE SAN FRANCISCO WAVE
SUGGESTIONS, 1870
THE advanced post had made a barricade for themselves out of a vast quantity of furniture that had been flung out of the country house near by: sideboards, chairs, mattresses, a huge dining table, and a big upright piano. Over this barricade leaned a sergeant and a corporal of the squad, scanning the country narrowly with field glasses.
One of the soldiers sitting on a packing case that had held cartridges was playing a song on the piano, singing the words at the same time. His head was wound up in a strip of brocaded satin torn from a chair back, for his temple had been laid open. It was bitter cold, and his feet were encased only in the cheap boots with pasteboard soles furnished by the government contractors; but he sang for all that at the top of his voice a pretty little song:
“Tu m’as promts un baiser pour
Ce soir ma brune.”
On a sudden he stopped with a discord and fell over upon the instrument, gulping up blood over the white ivory keys. A puff of blue smoke curled up from the window of the country house. The sergeant cried out, “Alerte, here they are; sight for one hundred metres.”
A HOTEL BEDROOM
The walls were whitewashed and bare of pictures or ornaments, and the floor was covered with a dull turkey-red carpet. The furniture was a set, all the pieces having a family resemblance to each other. The bed stood against the right-hand wall, a huge double bed with the name of the hotel on the corners of its spread and pillow cases. In the exact middle of the room underneath the gas fixtures was the centre table, and on it a pitcher of ice water and a porcelain match safe, with ribbed sides, in the form of a truncated cone. Precisely opposite the bed stood the bureau, near to the bureau was the door of the closet, and next to this in the corner was the washstand with its new cake of soap and its three clean, glossy towels. To the left of the door was the electric bell and the directions for using it; and on the door itself a card as to the hours for meals, the rules of the hotel, and the extract from the code regulating the liabilities of innkeepers. The room was clean, aggressively, defiantly clean, and there was a smell of soap in the air.
It was bare of any personality; of the hundreds who had lived and suffered and perhaps died there, not a trace or suggestion remained. Their different characters had not left the least impress upon its air and appearance. Only a few hairpins were scattered on the bottom of one of the drawers and two forgotten medicine bottles still remained upon the top shelf of the closet.
BRUTE
He had been working all day in a squalid neighbourhood by the gas works and coal yards, surrounded by lifting cranes, pile drivers, dredging machines, engines of colossal, brutal strength, where all about him were immense blocks of granite, tons of pig iron; everything had been enormous, crude, had been huge in weight, tremendous in power, gigantic in size.
By long association with such things he had become like them, huge, hard, brutal, strung with a crude, blind strength, stupid, unreasoning. He was on his way home now, his immense hands dangling half-open at his sides; his head empty of thought. He only desired to be fed and to sleep. At a street crossing he picked up a white violet, very fresh, not yet trampled into the mud. It was a beautiful thing, redolent with the scent of the woods, suggestive of everything pretty and delicate. It was almost like a smile-made flower. It lay very light in the hollow of his immense calloused palm. In some strange way it appealed to him, and blindly he tried to acknowledge his appreciation. He looked
at it stupidly, perplexed, not knowing what to do; then instinctively his hand carried it to his mouth; he ground it between his huge teeth and slowly ate it. It was the only way he knew.
San Francisco Wave, March 13, 1897.
THE END OF THE ACT
THE house was crowded to the doors. There was no longer any standing room, and many were even sitting on the steps of the aisles. In the boxes the gentlemen were standing up behind the chairs of large plain ladies in showy toilets and diamonds. The atmosphere was heavy with the smell of gas, of plush upholstery, of wilting bouquets, and of sachet. A fine vapour, as of the visible exhalations of many breaths, pervaded the house, blurring the lowered lights and dimming the splendour of the great glass chandelier.
It was warm to suffocation, a dry irritating warmth that perspiration did not relieve, while the air itself was stale and close as though fouled by being breathed over and over again. In the topmost gallery, banked with tiers of watching faces, the heat must have been unbearable.