A Gossip on Criticism

I

ONE morning, when I was reading Mr. Owen Wister’s pungent paper on ‘Quack Novels and Democracy,’ my maid entered the room and said that she had been told that ‘an English transport had gone down.’ I gazed at her, but her words did not pierce the quick till she added that ‘ the dead bodies of men in uniform had been seen floating on the water.’ It was that concrete phrase, intuitively artistic, that stirred in me the very emotions that the chronicler sought to evoke. (I say sought, since it was asserted later that the news was fabricated, and instead of coming from Dutch fishermen had been put about by German agents!) Anyway, the man who penned that little phrase achieved his aim, which was to bring the scene before one’s eyes. A touch too much or too little and the scene would not be visualized so clearly or directly. Why do ‘official reports’ commonly convey so little to one’s mind? Because they are dryly and inartistically written, as in this specimen from Petrograd: —

‘Thanks to the efforts of our valiant regiments of the Caucasus and Turkestan, the resistance of the enemy was shattered. His rear-guards which were covering his retreat were annihilated,’ and so forth.

How flat and misty is the generalized outline here. We do not see the scene, because there is no sharp image of life in the phrase, ‘the resistance of the enemy was shattered.’ Nor do we need to be told that the regiments were ‘valiant’ or that rear-guards cover a retreat.

But though this dispatch, being inartistic, will not live, as a piece of favorable news it pleased the Russian public more, no doubt, than did the grim little chose vue by a war correspondent who wrote that he saw the Turkish prisoners fighting like wild beasts for scraps of food in the cattle-trucks, and that he had noticed one prisoner hold a wounded comrade down on his hands and knees, and then mount astride his back to eat the crust he had torn from him! This vivid vignette of the horrors of war, truly artistic in its pregnant force, is of the order that our English editors strike out of their columns. Why? Because the public is afraid of knowing things as they are. The artists strive to make men understand what forces move in human life and character, but the heedless public averts its eyes from the great poets and artists of our time such as Tolstoï and Whitman, and feeds on the vulgar sensationalism of the newspapers, and the fiction of Mr. Harold Bell Wright. This is not merely because the average citizen is both uncritical and superficial in his insight and taste, but because the particular self-interest of each generation conspires to obscure the beauty in truth.

What have these discursive remarks to do with criticism? my readers may inquire. Well, they introduce my little thesis: that the recurring failure, the ancient failure of American criticism, is its inability to recognize and appraise what the artistic force in literature achieves, and that while this remains so, its standard of critical values rests upon sand. It is not that I wish to exalt English standards. I make the admission frankly that our criticism suffers, though in less degree, from the same evil. But the traditional interest of the English leisured class in literary classics, and some measure of travel and liberal education, have combined to keep oases of taste above the muddy floods of mediocrity. The Englishman is practical-minded to a fault, and his excessive respect for social prosperity, worldly power, and strong character, have kept him vaguely intolerant of the life of ideas, and prone to rate too low the disinterested appeal of art, science, and letters. Being a bad psychologist, he responds very slowly to those profound, witty, or subtle analyses of life and conduct which distinguish the masterpieces of literature. But being independent in his instincts and judgments he resists the contagion of shibboleths and spiritual shams which, as Mr. Wister and others tell us, afflict American culture and life. Our social atmosphere of a mild good-tempered Philistinism therefore leaves the writer and artist in England free to go his way, and assert himself as he wishes, and his pursuits and work are recognized and ministered to by some score, perhaps five score, ‘critics’ in our press.

It is really on the catholicity of taste and mental responsiveness of these latter that the public reception of works of cultivated talent depends. They form an indispensable bridge between the talent and the public at large, and on their measure of insight and sincerity it rests whether a man of original genius can fight his way through to favoring recognition. Such a journal as the Manchester Guardian, for example, with its long tradition of critical integrity and intellectual breadth, serves as a rallying ground for everybody in the North of England who has a living interest in the humanities and in spiritual values. One suspects indeed that if the Manchester Guardian were to lower its standard of taste and to pursue, to-morrow, a purely commercial policy, not one reader in ten would make an active protest. Therefore it is the proprietor’s conscience, and the critical intelligence of a handful of men on the staff, that may be said to keep this intellectual beacon burning in the North. In many respects this Manchester paper is in advance of its public. It directs its taste. Thus the Guardian’s dramatic criticism is the best in the country, and it is no mere coincidence that Manchester is the home of the Repertory Theatre, a movement which has challenged effectively, though it has not overthrown, the commercialism of the London stage.

II

To pass on to the inquiry into the state of American criticism, one notes the divergent views of Mr. W. D. Howells and Mr. Owen Wister. Can they be reconciled? Mr. Howells, after wittily remarking that ‘ the production of bad fiction’ became ‘a germ disease which began to be epidemic shortly after the Spanish War and raged with an ever-increasing virulence,’ declares that American criticism is not to blame, ‘having shown a very notable fidelity to its duty.’ Mr. Wister, on his part, asserts that as regards literary criticism, America is still in the provincial stage. He states pointedly, ‘Until the genteel critic gathers heart not only to brand the bad but to celebrate the good, I doubt if there will exist any word too contemptuous for American criticism.’

A casual observer may adduce his impression that the staunch fortresses in America, where critics take their stand in defense of good literature, have the air of being beleaguered by the inhabitants and shut in by immense wastes of wild, uncultivated territory. One notes admirable criticism appearing here and there in the columns of weekly and monthly organs, but these voices seem confused and drowned in the thundering roar of the great flood tide of mediocrity sweeping past. And the attitude of the rank and file of reviewers in the daily press (with honorable exceptions) reminds one of the triumphant Ephraimites at the passages of Jordan. If an unorthodox artist or poet or novelist who would pass over with his work does not frame the four great shibboleths aright, he and his book are banned and cast in derision on the rocks. These four shibboleths, tests for literary righteousness, which, taken together, appear to exercise the tyranny of a great superstition over the modern American imagination, might perhaps be classified as (a) the commercial-success shibboleth; (b) the moral shibboleth; (c) the idealistic or sentimental shibboleth; (d) the optimistic shibboleth. I shall not touch on them separately but conjointly, while discussing the seeming incapacity of the American mind to recognize what the artistic force in literature is, and what it does achieve.

To glance for an instant, however, at the all-pervasive influence of (a) the commercial or market-place test,¹ one may suggest that it is time for American satirists to undermine its triumph by humor and ridicule. The spectacle of a great nation justly proud of its lavish resources of material refinement and secretly uneasy as to its spiritual taste and culture, might to-morrow inspire a great national humorist. And the critics who scan the horizon for the arrival of another Mark Twain may be reminded that he would probably have humble beginnings and hail from some obscure provincial district. Let me say here, before going further, that I believe firmly that American literature will count many great, original achievements within a couple of generations. All the pith and sap of a great literature are there, now inchoate in the social body, a ferment of spiritual force which sooner or later must burst into flower. The blend of buoyancy and gravity in the American temperament, of rare audacity and questioning conscientiousness, enriched by the foreign ingredients lavishly cast for generations into the national melting-pot, will find expression by and by in multiple freerunning springs of original genius, in works of conquering vigor and triumphant energy. But American critics, in their aim of hailing and supporting a native American literature, must make a continuous and sustained effort to penetrate the blank, rolling mist of conventional valuations, which ever threatens to veil and smother the works of original power and beauty.

Why is it that the American mind as represented by its literature is so prone to accept conventional, stereotyped valuations in place of first-hand, fearless analyses? The peculiar vice of commercialized civilization, and especially American civilization, lies in the association of what is useful and profitable materially with what is mean and ugly spiritually and æsthetically. The sin of ugliness is predominant in the cities. It is reflected in the mental atmosphere of the newspapers, with their unending stream of drab or sensationally colored reports of life’s multitudinous happenings. The ordinary man who eagerly accepts his newspaper’s superficial commentaries and its jumbled scrawls and transcripts of news, served up at lightning pressure by the pressmen on the trail, does not ask that these reports shall be palpably idealized, or moralized, or grossly conventionalized. But when the poet — Whitman yesterday, or Mr. Robert Frost to-day — shows us the essential beauty or force of life, working in the familiar scene, in the characteristic human impulse, the American reviewer applies instinctively his shibboleths: Is this piece of literature commercially profitable? Is it morally useful? Is it idealistically watertight? Is it happy in its ending?

This is the attitude of mind of people who will not face truth; and the artist in literature, it must be repeated, is known by the peculiar truthfulness of his insight, as well as by the original manner, style, and atmosphere in which the forces of life and nature, men’s passions and appetites, their characters and ideas, their impulses, motives, and actions are reflected back to us by the mirage of his art. Let us take, for simple demonstration, the direct description we first quoted, — ‘ The dead bodies of men in uniform were seen floating in the water,’ — and reflect, how any lurid, sensational, sentimental, or rhetorical account, contributed by a vulgar mind, would cheapen the human appeal of the same, the appeal to our taste and feeling. But reflect further with what infinite variations artistic creative genius would stamp, in permanent lines and hues, the essential force and features of the tragedy in the minds of those relatives who waited and watched for the bringing to land of the bodies of those drowned men. The critic does not ask that the artist shall conceal anything significantly human in the scene. The latter selects, and emphasizes as he selects it, the characteristic and vital. That is what we mean when we speak of the peculiar truthfulness of the artist’s insight: he illumines, he shows us the essential qualities of things, the character of life in meaning perspective.

We all know what a reporter would make of the situation described in Crane’s The Open Boat, which is a masterpiece from the lightning-like vividness with which Crane flashes before us the tranquil indifference of nature to the struggles of four men shipwrecked on the coast of Florida. The American reader can enjoy this little classic because its tragic irony is shot through and through with a humorous zest. He is not enthusiastic over it, however, because the story is disconcerting to his pathetic belief that things must come right in the end. But let us suppose that a commonplace writer were to compose (a) a pathetic story of the oiler’s death, or (b) a sensational description of the landing of the bodies of the Lusitania victims. Let us suppose, also, that a creative artist of the rank of Crane or Maupassant, handling the latter theme, were to put the narrative in the mouth of a callous reporter, who, greedy after ‘copy,’ was inquisitively probing into a mother’s anguish. An uncritical audience would be highly affected by tales (a) and (b), but the majority of reviewers would greet the tale (c) with a chorus of condemnation of the ‘ sordidness ’ or ‘ brutality’ of its realism, not perceiving that its remorseless exposure of heartlessness would be a far more powerful appeal to an understanding of good and evil, and so to our sense of the beautiful, than would the rather sugary pathos of tales (a) and (b). The commonplace mind, disliking to face the truth, would style tale (c) ‘repellent,’ forgetting the Biblical tale of King David’s evil dealings with Uriah the Hittite (II Samuel, 41). And had Maupassant given us a variant in his best manner, of the story of Amnon’s rape of his sister Tamar, and of his murder by his brother Absalom (II Samuel, 13), the American press and public would indignantly protest that the subject was ‘ indecent ’ and was indeed altogether outside the pale of art! But nothing is outside the pale of art. And all such critics would be in the wrong did they fail to recognize that the remorseless tale of Amnon is great by its stern outlines, by the stern truthfulness with which it mirrors the destructive passions of the deceitful heart of man.

Observe that the common failure of the ordinary man to recognize great art when he sees it arises at root from his own weakness. When he sees a base act in life, the normal man reacts against it, and knows very well where to place evil in the scale of his human judgments. Nay! he even becomes a good artist himself when he has known a terrible or brutal experience, and when he recounts to others a narrative such as tale (b). But the very same man who, reacting thus against the cruelty of living fact, would indignantly burst through the network of conventional shibboleths, did the critics try to close his mouth, will employ these shibboleths himself to close Maupassant’s mouth! Why? It is owing to his own mental simplicity that the ordinary reader grows confused and unhappy when Tolstoï or Maupassant bids him watch in the mirror of art the nature of evil or the strands of cruelty in life. He is then made to realize acutely that cruelty and baseness are not merely incarnated there in the enemy’s figure before him, but they are forces here, latent in his own heart and interwoven in the whole scheme of nature; and being now, not active in doing, but passive in receiving, he feels his faith disturbed and grows distressed. It is the artist’s cunning force, the intensity of the Biblical artist’s or of Tolstoï’s unsparing analyses of the devious springs of men’s impulses and actions, that attacks the reader’s naïve wish to see merely the ‘presentable’ surface, the idealized exterior of life.

And, correspondingly, the parrot cry for conventional values that to-day dominates the popular mind in America is largely the fear of commercialized society lest it should be told unpleasant truths about itself; lest the unpleasant gulf between its own daily practice and its ‘ideals’ should be sounded by the artist. Similarly the puritan’s confused fear of sensuous beauty, and his desperate shutting of the eyes to the interdependence of body and soul, of flesh and spirit, is a sign of his own weakness, of his lack of truthfulness. In such an atmosphere of make-believe, there is and can be neither real art nor real beauty, dominated as it is by considerations of utility and material profit and ‘ideals,’ and divorced as it is from mental sincerity and the beauty of truth. The only art that is possible is the art of the parlor, with its polite appearances and polite conversations; and indeed the art of a typical ‘bestseller’ is one that goes with the best parlor, with its neat carpet and giltframed pictures and easy chairs and airless atmosphere. The people who thrive there have no conception of what art is, for they imagine that art should sustain them in their narrow ideas of ‘good,’ and their sugary sentimentalism and their restless gospel of ‘ getting on.’

This would not be worth emphasizing if for three generations the great majority of American critics had not sheltered themselves behind the fence of mild academicism and conventional verdicts. They have never associated art with the simple enjoyment of life as a spectacle, never hailed with understanding such pure pieces of art as Crane’s An Experiment in Misery, where his description of a vagrant’s misery in a grimy lodging-house infects one with all the artistic joyousness that is traditionally associated with Botticelli’s Spring.

But it is unnecessary to adduce instances to drive home our contention, that if the artistic force in literature is that force which reproduces and transmits to us the artist’s temperamental sensations of life or nature, any parti pris in the shape of conventional valuations, or of prejudices, social and moral, is, ipso facto, fatal to good criticism. All a priori valuations must be directly in conflict with critical catholicity of taste and a disinterested, intuitive response to the original manner, quality, and atmosphere of the author’s method. The critic’s duty is, first, to lend an attentive ear to what the new artist is telling us, and how he is telling it, and then to determine his rank according to the original force and beauty of his achievement. That is all, but the critic knows well that it is precisely because the new creative vision, be it Poe’s or Whitman’s or Crane’s, is so original, that it affects the contemporary mind as something strange and disturbing and excites the hostility of the commonplace person.

III

The commonplace person! — the secret is out. The failure of modern criticism generally and of American criticism in particular, is that it instinctively defers to and exalts the commonplace view. It has a taste for mediocrity. I take up a novel by Mr. W. D. Howells, and I see that the quality of his literary work is peculiar to himself and is unmistakable. No one ever wrote precisely like this, and no one ever will again. And so with the stories of, say, Crane and Frank Norris and O. Henry, or the works of Grace King and Robert Frost, The Pleasant Ways of St. Medard and North of Boston; they have added by their quality of vision to the stock of artistic riches; they are sharply unique, with a particular subtlety of their own. But when I take up, say, The Harbor by Mr. Poole, The Titan by Mr. Dreiser, or The Far Country by Mr. Winston Churchill, if I perceive that their experience and sensations of life do not add this fresh beauty in quality of vision or style, I know where to place them. Where? In a different, a lower category. They deserve an honorable place. They are to be welcomed and prized, but — and this distinction is vital — their creative imagination only multiplies patterns of insight and feeling of masses or groups of cultivated minds round us. The works — showing indeed talented observation and insight — of this latter class of writers, however much they diverge as individuals in experience and outlook, are not sufficiently rich in creative originality, and so they belong to the cultivated mass. That is their value and their limitation.

‘But wait a little,’ the kind reader may exclaim,—‘now you contradict yourself. You first asserted that the sentence “The dead bodies of men in uniform were seen floating on the water ” was intuitively artistic. Well, is there anything “sharply unique” in the quality of that description? And does not The Harbor offer us many admirable descriptions on this broad level of “artistic” excellence?’ To this the answer is that genuine artistic force is certainly in evidence in the planning and execution of The Harbor, and this has enabled Mr. Poole to give pleasure and instruction to scores of thousands of American readers, and to Mr. Howells himself; but that the artistic force diffused throughout the book nowhere bursts into the fire of genius. His art acts as a good steady illuminant of his theme, and is turned on like gas in a chandelier, nicely regulated by his skillful care and judgment; but his art is never fused by exquisite touches into the flame of inspiration. As art it is on the highest level of mediocrity. Observe we say the highest level; for could Mr. Poole take one step upwards, only one step, he would attain the rank which is denied to thousands of highly talented men.

And — to repeat a criticism that we have offered elsewhere — first let us consider his strength and weakness. A novel that is planned on symmetrical, powerful lines, that aims at picturing in just perspective the struggle between the shipping companies and the captains of industry, with Wall Street behind them, and the exploited mass of dockers, stokers, laborers, — a novel that has breadth of vision and atmospheric actuality, — for this one ought indeed to be grateful. It may be owned frankly that the novel of large social vision, in which the life of modern types is shown as conditioned by mass movements and the pressure of economic forces, is rarely offered us. The Anglo-Saxon novelist, unlike the Latin, has little aptitude for generalization, is weak in the architectural sense, and departs from the individual, particular unit, achieving national significance or epical breadth by accident, as it were, as in Tom Jones and Vanity Fair. Indeed, in most of the exceptions to this rule, as Frank Norris’s The Pit and Mr. Galsworthy’s The Man of Property, one detects very quickly the influence of the French naturalists. No doubt Mr. Poole not only has a natural gift for viewing society in the large, but his philosophic sense has been stimulated and trained by the study of good models. His canvas, ambitious in size, is not grandiose; his central purpose, the delineation of the great Harbor as a tidal way of human energies, changing with the generations, focusing and radiating, receiving and giving forth new forces and forms of the nation’s development, does not dwarf his characters. In fact, so far as clarity of design, structural skill, descriptive talent, and faithful observation can prevail, The Harbor is conscientious and spirited. It is a novel that holds one’s attention by the interest and variety of its scenes, one that is instructive, one that rarely falls in execution beneath a certain level standard of excellence. What more do you want, then? the American critics may ask. It seems ungrateful to reply that The Harbor is lacking both in imaginative intensity and in artistic originality.

Mr. Poole’s audience is not indeed affronted by a strange vision, by a style peculiar in quality, by characters, spiritual atmosphere, or æsthetic force intense and self-centred. Any intelligent person can understand and appreciate The Harbor, which is, indeed, primarily a work of sound intelligence, and not one of artistic inspiration. The wiry, quick-witted young hero, Billy, who ‘makes good’ at college, and later as a magazine writer wins success, and marries a sweet and capable girl, Eleanore, has no individuality; neither has Eleanore, who is an amalgam of feminine virtues. His father, who typifies the out-of-date American ship-owner, with his belief in a big mercantile marine; and her father, Dillon, the masterful engineer, who concentrates on the economic problem of organizing the port and the traffic of the railways and the shipping lines on a scientific basis, are no doubt representative, but are almost devoid of personal features. Even Joe Kramer, the fiery Socialist, whose life work it is to champion the sweated worker against the forces of capitalism and commercialism, is at best a silhouette, living in his energetic gestures and fighting power, but never intimately portrayed in his idiosyncrasies. Joe’s revolutionary activities in Russia and on European battlefields are as obviously imaginary as Billy’s view of Paris is ‘made in America.’ The people are not distinguished one from another by those subtle inflections of manner and feeling by which character declares itself. So with their personal relations — they are generalized, not particularized. Thus, one knows nothing more of Billy’s and Eleanore’s married life than that they are affectionate with one another, that she is any good wife, and that he is any hard-working husband. Better, in its suggestive touch of surprise, is the sketch of the relations of Marsh, the strike-leader, with the disillusioned, bitter Mrs. Marsh. This shows more artistic cunning, precisely because it discloses the fresh gesture of a snapshot from life. If we are not much interested by the fugitive episode of Joe Kramer’s and Sue’s love-affair, it is not because it is unconvincing, but because the author has not shown us in intimate detail how this man and woman affected one another. The general lines of their actions and behavior are there, but not the revealing minutiæ.

Mr. Howells suggests that an analogy may be drawn between Mr. Poole’s epical aim and that of his predecessor, Frank Norris. Between their aims, certainly. But turn to the first chapter of The Octopus and note the nervous, resourceful, and sure handling of the characters of Presley, Harran, Annixter, and Varamee. What suppleness, dexterity, and intimacy of touch! You know the men through and through, — their shaping circumstances and the laws of their being. You feel the impelling force of their temperaments in their gestures and voices, as they halt or go forward, constrained by their aims, and by the winds of their destiny. But there is nothing of this psychological force and nervous creative intensity in Mr. Poole’s characterization. His people are impelled and controlled, so to say, each by a separate automatic switch, visible in the author’s grip, which imparts to them each one set of motives, one manner of feeling, and one way of affecting the spectator. The photographer has posed them in one special attitude, and bade them look straight in front, while he takes the likeness. They do not change and fluctuate, and ripen before our eyes, like Norris’s people. Again, note in The Octopus how the sense of personal contacts, of the shock and hurry of incident, of daily accident, of the coming and going and pressure and surge of life, all blend into the epic force of the drama, which moves in actual heat and energy before the spectators’ gaze, there in the teeming Californian arena. But Mr. Poole’s drama, again, is largely static. The confusion and surprise of life are not conveyed in his studied, cinematographic arrangements which carry on his story, indeed, and us with it, from point to point. Only in his strike scenes do we gain an actual sense of movement, collision, interfusion, and intricacy.

But how ungrateful to draw this invidious comparison between The Octopus and The Harbor! Mr. Poole has never claimed that his work ranks with Norris’s, and he would be the first to admit that in subtlety of touch, as well as in its richness of artistic illusion, it is inferior to that youthful master’s. We should owe him an apology for, Procrustes-like, stretching his valuable, carefully wrought novel on the bed of a genius, did not the critics so constantly fail to draw the line between the novel of skillful talent and the novel of creative genius. It is with fiction as with that large majority of modern works of art in our galleries, works which, however excellent in design and technical skill, are deficient in temperamental originality. Talented as they are, they are, in fact, ‘brain-spun.’

IV

When the critic turns to The Titan, he is faced with the old dilemma. Ought he to insist on the particular significance for society which a novel may possess as a document of life? or ought he rather to lay stress on its æsthetic shortcomings? This critic has observed elsewhere: ‘To subject a piece of contemporary literature to high æsthetic literary standards is often simply to suppress its significance. As the majority of new works are but the age’s ephemeral children, they can only make an appeal to their parent age; the critic’s duty is therefore to fix, in the significant documents of the life of his time, the character of his age; and to the majority of literary works he will do justice by treating them as revelations of the contemporary mind, knowing that though the inner individual spirit of these documents may be of little significance, its testimony to the overlordship of the age may be of very much.’ And Mr. Dreiser is very significant! Very unrepresentative he is in his honest, set determination to tell his countrymen all those sinister, ugly truths concerning the national life, with which their newspapers teem, but for mirroring which in fiction the novelist is boycotted.

And yet how representative is Mr. Dreiser in his disregard for beauty, for beauty of form, for the fine shades of living subtlety! How is one to account for this curious contradiction in the author’s attitude? One hazards the suggestion that Mr. Dreiser has been seduced by Balzac’s example — Balzac who was defined as being ‘a sociologist rather than a novelist.’ If only our author had studied Horace instead! It is not a question of ‘realism,’ for Horace’s descriptions of the daily life of the Roman citizen are quite as intimately ‘realistic ’ as are Mr. Dreiser’s descriptions of the life of his Chicago financiers. But while Horace selects the essential detail and rejects everything superfluous, Mr. Dreiser rejects nothing! Everything goes into his pot!

To quote here a former criticism, ‘We see a bold American hand in the encomium blazoned on the book’s wrapper — “The size of this man, Cowperwood, genius of finance, protagonist of great business combines, art patron, light o’ love, and the scope of Mr. Dreiser’s ability are united in this new book, totally unlike fiction as we have come to know it — a book big in matter and a long book too,” and so forth. There you have it! the national conviction that size counts for more than quality, that a big book or a big business must necessarily dwarf the appeal of books or businesses of lesser scope or compass. . . . We cannot concede the claim that the multiplicity of the titanic Mr. Cowperwood’s loveaffairs invests them with more interest than does the solitary infidelity of the little grocer in the back street round the corner. On the contrary the grocer’s conjugal lapse is likely to mean more to him and his family. All Mr. Cowperwood’s amours run much the same course, and as soon as we have grasped this we become comparatively uninterested in the identity of the next candidate for his affections or the fate that awaits her. Indeed, these ladies, Aileen, Rita, Stephanie, Claudia, and so forth, till we reach the last of the cluster, Berenice, are not much more interesting than are a set of chairs in a “ parlor suite.”

‘ So with the millionaire’s lavish dealings as an “ art patron.” We are told that “in London he bought a portrait by Raeburn; in Paris a ploughing scene by Millet, a small Jan Steen, a battle-piece by Meissonier, and a romantic courtyard scene by Isabey”; and later on, that the fascinating American girl, Berenice, when she saw the Greek frieze in his splendid New York mansion, “knew that he and she had one God in common — Art; and that his mind was fixed on things beautiful as on a shrine.” Gammon! The Titan’s knowledge of art only reflected what his dealer and his check-book told him, and he would have purchased with lavish enthusiasm that vulgar series of Fragonards that have recently passed and repassed, at fabulous prices, into the possession of his fellow American millionaires. The real shrine at which Berenice and her magnate worship is the shrine of money-power, and that is why Mr. Dreiser’s detailed exposition of his Chicago boss’s career has national significance, although its value as art is intrinsically small.

‘No, Mr. Dreiser’s eulogistic wrapper hits the wrong nail on the head when it claims that “the book is totally unlike fiction as we have come to know it.” On the contrary, its merit is that in its heavy, lumbering, conscientious way, The Titan presents, à la Balzac, a detailed picture of Mammon-worship in the States a generation back: a picture of the swamp of public corruption, of “graft” and “boodle” and private greed, in which the jungle of “financial interests” are enrooted. Frank Cowperwood, the financier, just released from a Philadelphia prison, makes a fresh start in the rising city, Chicago; and Mr. Dreiser traces with unrelenting, praiseworthy frankness the sordid maze of intrigue, bribery, and corruption which the Titan threads to gain his throne of money-power. It is the story of a human jungle and of financial beasts of prey stalking and striking down “a democracy groveling and wallowing, slowly, blindly trying to stagger to its feet.” The author is to be congratulated on his exposure, not only of the intricate web of intrigue, financial and political, which the “masterful” Cowperwood spins in order to secure his “controlling interests” in the gas companies and street railways of Chicago, but of the atmosphere of hypocrisy which the wealthy citizens, the bank presidents, and directors of trusts and combines generate for their own purposes.

‘ Of course, there is nothing particularly new in the picture, but Mr. Dreiser is one of the very few American novelists who have dared to dispense with the idealistic veils under which, in fiction, the unpleasant truth gracefully hides its features. The pity is that, obsessed by the idea of bigness, the author insists, so to say, on dragging us up to every floor of his giant hotel, and making us peep into all the offices and suites of apartments.

‘Now this method is a clumsy one in art and defeats its purpose. Mr. Dreiser rarely introduces a character without giving a comprehensive sketch of his past and his social position, and we soon grow bored by the multiplicity of explanations and conversations, all of equal significance. There is no play of light and shade in the novel, but everything is exhibited in the hard, level glare, so to speak, of an enormous chamber lit from the ceiling. Crowds of people come and go, and one remembers little more of them than of a file of faces passing in an interminable procession. The artist, above all things, needs so to select and concentrate his details that his figures contrast and his scenes interest by dramatic surprise. But there is no surprise and no relief in Mr. Dreiser’s human drama: everything sweeps past our eyes at the same level pace, as on a train journey. It is a pity, for at times one suspects that the scenes closely crowded together are like pictures in exhibitions, which kill one another by numbers and by mere proximity. But this is the logical effect of the worship of Bigness, whether in art or commerce or civilization; the charm of individuality is crushed down till it is lost in a mass of ponderous uniformity. The colossal ends in the insignificant.’

Whereas Mr. Poole’s failure lay in lack of intensity of creative imagination, Mr. Dreiser fails in his inability to show his human drama in its true spiritual perspective, and to stamp it in in permanent lines and hues of beauty. In both cases the rich stuff of the teeming national life is before us, in both cases the treatment is ambitious and highly conscientious, but in neither case is there born anything unique in quality of vision or style. We may therefore repeat that the creative imagination of each of our two authors only multiplies general patterns of insight and feeling of masses or groups of cultivated minds. And the critic, passing on, will search all the more eagerly for authors who, whether representative or not, stand out more clearly in vision and insight from the mass of cultivated minds. Such an author, it seems to me, is Miss Cather, whose delightful picture of the life of a family of Swedish immigrants in a Nebraskan homestead is no doubt known to the readers of the Atlantic Monthly. I shall not therefore offer here any appreciation of the freshness of its individual charm, or of the calm strength of her portraiture of the Bergsons, of Alexandra, the large-hearted heroine, of Frank and Marie Shabata, of Emil, Ivar, and Amédee. This work, O Pioneers, with its record, so typical, of a network of immigrant roots which are thrusting deep into American soil, and fructifying the national life with its ramifying human energies, belongs to a precious, if small, class of American novels which it is difficult to praise too highly.

Even higher, in its literary art, must we rank Grace King’s The Pleasant Ways of St. Medard, a story rare in its historical significance. This poignant lament for the South, at the close of the Civil War, rehearses a woman’s lingering memories of the charm and grace of the New Orleans atmosphere, and of the poignant humiliation suffered by a ruined family. Will not its exquisite shades of feeling, delicate in vibrating sadness, give this novel a permanent place as an American literary classic?

V

To recapitulate: as regards fiction and poetry no subject or theme is outside the pale of art. The literary artist is known by the spirit of his treatment; and fresh beauties, fresh forces are generated in a greater or lesser degree by the work of creative spirits.

It is by this unique temperamental quality, something peculiar to himself as expressed in the fresh intensity, power, or charm of his imagination and insight, that we assess the rank of a literary artist.

It is from the perception of the significant relations of the living parts to the general scheme of nature and life that new pieces of art are continually being born.

Any conventional valuations, social or moral, as to what is ‘good,’ ‘beautiful,’ or ‘useful,’ or any stereotyped academic or æsthetic formulas are necessarily inimical to the powers of art.

In mediocre art the public sees its own face as in a glass, and loves to see mirrored back to it its own familiar features.

The critic may aim at showing what significant light a piece of indifferent or bad art may cast on the life of society, but his main object is, first to lend an attentive ear to what a literary artist is telling us, and then to make clear anything false, commonplace, or weak in his outlook or treatment, and to hail any elements of original power or beauty.

It is time to bring to a close this gossip on criticism, but before doing so the writer would like to direct his readers’ attention to the work of a novelist of rank, Mr. Vincent O’Sullivan — work which, we fancy, has curiously almost escaped the attention of Americans. This is probably due in great part to the fact that Mr. O’Sullivan has spent many years abroad. His last novel, The Good Girl, the story of the victimization of the American hero, Vendred, by an English family, the Dovers, who sponge and prey upon him, finding their weapon in his infatuation for the beautiful Mrs. Dover, is one of accomplished psychological skill. The portraiture of Mrs. Dover, a self-indulgent and sensuous nature, is a triumph of artistic veracity, and the relations of both husband and wife to their victim, relations which are veiled by a mask of sinister shadowiness, are painted with true subtlety. One could wish that the author had replaced some of the discursive episodes of his detailed narrative by a bolder and intenser dramatic handling of his main situation. One may add also that the analysis of the character of the weak hero, Vendred, is wanting in sharp precision. But whatever be its artistic flaws, The Good Girl is one of the most accomplished novels of its year, one that entitles its author to a place among the first twenty modern American novelists.