Drawing the Curtain

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

THE old-fashioned novelists drew the curtain when the situation became intimately personal. ‘Let us now,’ they said, ‘leave the happy lovers to themselves.’

We have changed all that. Instead of drawing the curtain before happy lovers at the end of the story, our novelists now discover unhappy married people at the beginning. Ample opportunity has been given for several years for the novel-reader to determine which plan he likes better. One is t old that to portray life as it is one must take down the curtains, shades, screens and other devices for privacy; that realism consists chiefly in revealing all that the older novelists left out; that nothing is too sacred or too revolting for the aims of the Artist.

The crude story of the cowboy who tore away the towel pinned before the window by a gentle Easterner while taking a bath suggests itself. ‘I only wanted to know what you are so damn private about,’ said the cowboy. One may guess that a desire for privacy is resented in undeveloped society. It seems to imply a kind of rebuke, or an unsocial and selfish disposition. But one of the chief tests of a developed society is the ease with which one may ensure one’s privacy, to do well or ill. And the quarrel that one may have with novelists of the present day is due to their fashion of ignoring privacy, and revealing what only the physician or alienist sees and hears, — in a word, in publishing what is never public.

A grave charge against the exploitation of intimacy is to be found in the very nature of literature that lasts. ‘ It is fanciful,’ says Shakespeare, several times in as many different ways. It cannot in its most elaborate and final analysis be true to a particular set of facts. No one wants literature to be that. It is to be a play of fancy, endowed with verisimilitude if the writer thinks best; as unreal as a dream if another writer so desires. But fancy, or the stronger creation of imagination, it must be to endure.

More than that: the fancy and imagination must create something that maybe publicly regarded, talked about, held aloft in each generation; loved, sung, and commemorated. Now some particular facts and phases of human nature are singularly unfit for such publicity. Making one’s toilet is a natural and unconscious operation; it is a personal matter — which is accomplished behind closed doors. It is most truthfully described when it is taken for granted. In so taking this and other facts for granted the older novelists were greater artists than they knew. We may take for granted activities in the kitchen, and the intimacies of other apartments. So far, the dentist’s chair has not occupied a prominent place in realistic fiction, yet no one can deny that frequent or belated visits to the dentist are actually important facts of life. This bare reference betrays the grotesque character of any realism, unless the subject-matter be wisely chosen.

Wisely chosen? Who can say? Anyone can say, who calmly surveys literature that has been loved and venerated. Whatever will bear publicity, talk, — whatever people take a pride in possessing and knowing, — may be safely left to the writer, realist though he be. Any form of personal gratification, of selfishness, avoids publicity, avoids the light. How then can it be good matter for literature? Personal gratification undoubtedly best serves the ends of those writers who in turn serve those most interested in personal gratification; and as the number of those thus served is large the returns to the writer are substantial. Yet the testimony of literature that lasts is that such gratification has not engaged the greatest minds. One might almost generalize, and say that some kind of renunciation — Entsagung — has appealed to them more strongly. Is it not in part due to the plain and open character of the virtue, and to a certain shame-facedness in gratification?

Here we come to the core of the matter. Despite the flings at Puritanism, it may be that we must bring modesty back to our literature, if it is to be great as that of the past is great. The stuff of literature is immodest even as personal behavior is immodest. There is, to use the same grotesque illustration, there is immodesty in public revelations about one’s teeth. Whatever the Artist may say to the contrary, a layman may feel that the obtrusion of private matters upon our attention is inartistic. Modesty about such matters is more beautiful, more harmonious, more simple. The less said the better.

One feels indeed that the flings at Puritanism have been the least bit uncritical. Are we really to regard the Artist as a person who writes to be known as a kind of Greek, who limits spiritual significance to legs and movements of the body? Is Art merely Bacchic? People who live in temperate and cold climates have a very natural inclination to prefer the modesty of clothes to surprising revelations of anatomy. Carlyle liked to play with the fancy of a clothed and unclothed society. But Carlyle’s concern was with the revelations of the mind and soul, not with those of the body, or of its ills and functions. He expressly warns us against making too much of all that is not mind and soul. Wherein lies the greatness of writers from Aristophanes to Swift—and Carlyle himself — who have emphasized the unsavory and immodest, if not in their keen sense of the unworthiness of their subject? The salt of their genius has been this sense of the grotesque inadequacy of such material for serious purposes.

If realists and various kinds of problem writers were content to be, or could be, humorists, no one could find fault with their product. Only the humorist — the writer born with a sense of the incongruity and grotesque in human nature — can make much that is worth while in the long run out of immodesty, whatever airs and graces and professions it may give itself. Only that which is public in kind can long endure publicity. The rest is death; or it belongs to the privacy of the home, of the chapel, or of the consulting-room of the pathologist. To publish such material as literature is to violate the commonest truth of human nature. Age-long instincts of modesty, reaching back to the very animals, may not be abashed by the cry of ‘toujours l’audace’ without giving false and sentimental values to the material employed.

If distinguished exceptions in literary achievement may be suggested in this contention — and where without humor are they to be found? — one may answer that each generation is quite competent to assess literary values as it sees fit. Writers try this and that, and oblivion follows most novelties. Modesty of subject-matter and modesty of style have preserved a surprising number of books. Our audits are by no means closed. What did it mean when Puritan and Quaker would have none of the paint, powder, plaster and paste of the Caroline period? A hundred years ahead of his time Sir Thomas More clothed his supermen with the outward signs of inward modesty. Immodesty and display his supermen regarded with charitable condescension, as common to strangers who knew no better. To any one with a historical background the literary use of what is essentially private in its nature clogs rather than frees the fancy; and if it be unsavory or unpalatable one is glad to leave such a book alone, and turn to the writers whom one can discuss freely, nay joyfully, with family, friends, and students.