AN UNREELING REALIST

The Titan, by Theodore Dreiser [John Lane Company, New York]

Theodore Dreiser possesses none of the standard qualifications for the art of fiction writing. He is not imaginative but inventive; he is not clever but clear; he is not excited but calm. Whatever the flaws in his considerable body of work no fair-minded reader may say that it is made to catch popular applause. Its tremendous distinction is sincerity. Another characteristic which his novels exhibit is resolute purpose. Dreiser is aiming at something, and in The Titan, the second book in an unfinished trilogy, he takes a long if wobbly step toward it. Previously to the publishing of this volume he had not even hinted at what he intended to work out. One thing was certain: he was not a trifler; he was not trying to write best sellers; literary success was not in his mind. He had set out seriously and indefatigably to write, not so much what he felt and thought, as what he saw. Some day he would try to get at the realities that lay back of their representations. He would probably undertake to reveal the soul of the American nation. He would pass through the growth stages of a nation, and achieve some kind of spiritual national life. In the last two pages of The Titan this guess at his purpose receives appreciable encouragement. Moreover, it is made evident for the first time, in these concluding paragraphs, that Dreiser’s prosaic realism springs not only from a vague, deep idealism but a large, hidden spirituality. For at the core of him Dreiser is a profoundly religious person.

Neither his style nor his stuff is far above the dead level of mediocrity; in fact, Dreiser’s rhetoric is often inexcusably atrocious—intentionally crude, one is tempted to assert. Obviously he is not interested in style; he is conscious of something bigger than that revealing itself in a huge, ugly, unfinished moving picture—a net result symbolical of a young, raw, riotous, unsynthesized national life. One is therefore tempted to say that Dreiser, more than any other author, is the personification of America. He represents the composite personality of Uncle Sam.

After reading The Financier and running far into the interminable pages of The Titan I felt that in the absence of cameras, kodaks, Baedekers, and historians Dreiser would be worth while. His endless reels of pictorial facts did not impress me as possessing sufficient animation successfully to compete with these odd rivals, but I admired his consistent sincerity and simplicity and felt that something important was promised by the mere unfinishedness of his pictures. I was sure that he did not write as one inspired, and certainly not as one fired. And after finishing The Titan I felt that here was a work having the aspects of a seriously performed duty, exacted by fidelity to some personal theory of industrial change. I could not imagine the author happy as an artist is happy in his creative work; he was too conscious of service to a cause. But in the last paragraph I discovered a big, personal note which introduced an attitude that extends beyond the borders of materialism. It presented another Dreiser—an author who was much more than a cinematograph, snapping superficial impressions of a vast panorama. Two years ago I should not have attributed the following words to Theodore Dreiser:

After laboring through arid deserts of description, this memorable passage, fraught with recognition, satisfaction, challenge, hope, and promise, stands out as an oasis.

The Titan, by virtue of its bold, graphic strokes, loses its identity as a tree, with sharply defined individual characters, and represents the forest. It is more like a jungle, and the jungle is our national life, into which the morning sun inevitably will shine.

—DeWitt C. Wing.

THE REVOLT OF THE “ONCE BORN”

Challenge, by Louis Untermeyer. [The Century Company, New York]

There has recently appeared a volume of verse by Louis Untermeyer which is an excellent example of the determinedly young and eupeptic philosophy so prevalent today—the philosophy of revolt. The book is named Challenge and as challenge it must be considered. To be sure it is rhymed, but the fact seems quite incidental. To rhyme a polemic does not make it poetry, and one feels sure that Mr. Untermeyer is more proud of the spiritual attitude than of the artistry.

The book is a revolt, but a careful perusal of its pages fails to reveal against what it revolts. At first glance one might think it socialistic, but it is not clearly enough visualized for that. Socialism has at least found the enemy. Mr. Untermeyer manfully girds on his armor and sets forth to war, shouting his challenge lustily the while. And why, after all, be particular about having an actual enemy? Life, with a capital L, can do duty for that, or “the scornful and untroubled skies,” or the “cold complacency of earth.” The revolt is the point, and Mr. Untermeyer drives it home with all the phrases of frozen impetuosity to be discovered in a very useful vocabulary. “Athletic courage,” “eager night,” “Life’s lusty banner,” “impetuous winds,” “raging mirth,” etc., are scattered carefully through the pages. But unfortunately, virility—with all due respect to the reviewer who mentioned these poems in the June number of The Little Review—has a way of oozing out of such phrases, leaving them empty of everything save a painful determination to be manly at all costs.

But though Mr. Untermeyer is not quite clear on some subjects he is very clear on others. Several things seem to have struck him with peculiar force—that city streets are dirty, for instance; that strife is tonic for young blood; and that it is difficult for the human soul to conceive of complete annihilation. These things he proclaims passionately and challenges the world to disprove them. A little couplet from Kipling’s Jungle Book suggests itself rather maliciously as the probable attitude of the world towards this outbreak:

Seriously, however, Mr. Untermeyer’s attitude is what William James calls the attitude of the “once born.” One feels that he thinks in one dimension, that he does not see around his subject, nor hear the overtones which surround every happening for a man of deep intellect. The revolt is Walt Whitman’s magnificent revolt, which is overpowering in a giant, cropping out in a man of very ordinary stature, where it sits a little ridiculously.

As philosophy much of this, printed on a neat little card, would do splendidly to hang in a business office for the encouragement of the employees. As poetry it is negligible. Mr. Untermeyer lacks entirely the one gift which could redeem it—the gift of poignancy. This lack is particularly striking in the middle section, called Interludes, in which he pauses for a little from revolt. These are love songs and lyrics, a field in which anything not perfect is no longer acceptable. And Mr. Untermeyer’s are not perfect. His sense of rhythm is extremely primitive and his lyrics are full of words. Only now and then, when he forgets for a moment how manly he is, does he say anything simply enough to strike home. These lines, for instance, from Irony stick:

But in the main it is unfortunate that Mr. Untermeyer, who writes so much and so readably on the subject of poetry, should put out so pretentious and undeveloped a volume as this is. It is inevitable that it should affect his standing as a critic, and there seems little doubt that his work in that field is really valuable to the cause of poetry in America today.

—Eunice Tietjens.

TWO BIOGRAPHIES: VERLAINE AND TOLSTOY

Paul Verlaine, by Wilfred Thorley; Tolstoy: His Life and Writings, by Edward Garnett. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]

When autumn is in your heart—not that of the golden delirium of exotic agony, but bleak weeping autumn of crucifixion and dead leaves—what dirge, what note haunts you in accompaniment to your grief? Maddening darts from Tchaikowsky’s PathÉtique, or Weltschmerz-moans from Beethoven’s Marchia Funebre, or an unuttered accord known only to your soul? Or, if you are a brother of mine, do your lips soundlessly mutter this?

Don’t you hear the resonance of the tolling bells in Chopin’s Funeral March? Your sorrow grows crescendo as you proceed, recalling Massenet’s ElÉgie:

When I think of Paul Verlaine I invariably recall Oscar Wilde, despite or because of the abysmal dissimilarity of the two personalities. The sincere, ingenuous, all-loving child Paul, and the thoroughly artificial, paradoxical Oscar; the typical Bohemian with the criminal-face like that of Dostoevsky, and the salon-idol, the refined and gorgeous bearer of the sun-flower. Fate had somewhat reconciled the two contrasts. Both had been “sinners,” both were condemned by society and imprisoned, both had “repented”—one in De Profundis where the haughty humility of the self-enamored artist stirs us with its artificial beauty; the other in the primitive-Christian—nay, Catholic—Sagesse:

Some months ago in reviewing Edmond Lepelletier’s voluminous book, (Paul Verlaine: His Life and Work) I remarked that the Poet of Absinthe and Violets was still awaiting his Boswell. My view has not changed after reading Wilfrid Thorley’s monograph on Verlaine; but my wish for an adequate biography of the signer of Romances sans Paroles has now become counterbalanced by an earnest prayer that the memory of the poet may be saved from such indelicate manipulators as Mr. Thorley. Why this respectable Englishman should have attempted to treat the life of the most wayward French poet since Villon can be explained by no other reason than that it was a case of “made to order.” When a Velasquez is pierced by a fanatical suffragette the whole civilized world is roused to indignation; but when an honest philistine unceremoniously puffs his cheap smoke into the face of a dead poet there is not a single protest against that sort of vandalism. Fear of the editor’s blue pencil restrains me from putting my attitude more outspokenly. A conscientious compilator would have found sufficient material for an unpretentious sketch of the life of Verlaine and for an appreciation of his works. Lepelletier gives an amazing mass of facts and personal reminiscences (you may ignore his naive interpretations); Arthur Symons in The Symbolist Movement in Literature has a masterpiece essay on Verlaine, not to mention a number of other French and English writers who have given us glimpses of the imperceptible image of the poet—writers who knew what they were taking about. Mr. Thorley has made use of various sources, but in a peculiar way. He fished out the anecdotal scraps, the piquant details, the filthy hints, and patched up a caricature-portrait of a lewd, perverse “undesirable,” whose poetry (I quote reluctantly) “was born solely of the genitals,” whose “life is but the trite old story of the emotions developed at the expense of domestic peace and civic order; of art for art’s sake made to condone the manner of its begetting, and the trend of its appeal; of the hushed acquiescence in emotion as a sacred thing, whatever the quality of the impulse from which it ripens or the level of ideas on which it feeds.” Out of the ninety-odd pages of stuff seventy-nine are devoted to “biography” sufficiently spicy to make any toothless old rake chuckle; the rest is given over to “criticism”—a mutilated melange of some of the views of Symons, George Moore, and others, flavored with the compilator’s own commonplaces. I quote from the closing lines:

And this was written in Anno Domini 1914!

A sense of fairness urges me to rehabilitate the “English mind” by recalling a passage from Mr. Thorley’s compatriot, Arthur Symons:

It is high time that this axiom became a truism and that we cease to measure the artist with the yard-stick of conventional morality. “L’art, mes enfants, c’est d’Être absolument soi-mÊme,” sang Verlaine, and somewhere else he reveals a bit of that self with his usual sincerity:

“And, indeed, I should echo, a hundred times no!” exclaims the Englishman, Arthur Symons.

I cannot resist the temptation of quoting the happiest definition of Verlaine’s personality written by Charles Morice back in 1888:

I have not mentioned the most striking “feature” of Mr. Thorley’s ... production—the appendix. Six of Verlaine’s poems are translated by him for the benefit of those who do not understand French “intimately.” “To offer them to other readers, would, of course, be an impertinence,” he modestly admits. Impertinence is not the word for that outrage. I have experienced physical pain at the sight of the Hunnish sacrilege committed by this well-wishing moralist. The poet, for whom “De la musique avant toute chose; De la musique encore et toujours!” who had pleaded, “Car nous voulons la nuance encore, Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance!” has been mercilessly crucified in the form of quasi-Tennysonian, taffy-like verses. One recalls with gratitude the careful albeit pale translations of Gertrude Hall, who at least had the sense of Æsthetic propriety in endeavoring to remain true to the master’s meter and rhythm.

From Tolstoy’s diary in 1855:

From a letter to the poet Fet in 1898:

From the fragment There are no guilty people:

On his death-bed at the railroad station Astapovo, November, 1910:

Tolstoy’s failure was inevitable, for he had approached life with the uncompromising logic of a child or a god. For fifty years he preached his religion, and during all that time he remained splendidly inconsistent. He opposed private property and proceeded to live on his estate; he had denounced marriage and was a father to thirteen children. Notwithstanding his deadly hatred for the Russian government, he bitterly denounced the liberals and the revolutionists for their “un-Christian” ways of fighting the enemy; but his greatest contradiction, to the joy of the intellectual world, consisted in the victory of the artist over the moralist as manifested in his numerous novels and plays.

The work of Edward Garnett is conscientious and is, to my knowledge, the best short biography of Tolstoy. It was a happy idea to discard the traditional portrait and use a reproduction of Kramskoy’s painting, which dates back to the sixties, if I am not mistaken. It is when looking at this portrait, a great piece of art in itself, that we envisage the author of War and Peace. A few words from the description of Tolstoy’s face by P. A. Terzeyeonvo:

Mr. Garnett succeeds in giving the quintessence of Tolstoy’s works and teachings in less than a hundred pages. Like most of the Russian’s eulogistic biographers, Mr. Garnett has not escaped the fallacy of exaggerating the moral power that Tolstoy exercised over the government. To say that the Czar and his ministers “dared not touch” the outspoken anarchist and heretic “out of dread of Europe—nay, of Russia,” is to reveal one’s ignorance of the brazen defiance displayed by Muscovite autocrats in regard to public opinion. As the Germans put it: “Herr Kossack, schÄmen Sie sich!” Tolstoy, as a matter of fact, had helped to check the revolutionary spirit of his compatriots in a greater degree than the tyrannic persecutions of Von-Plehve. Had he not appealed time and again to embrace his doctrine of Non-Resistance? Had he not denounced the revolutionists as violent prototypes of their hangers? Could the government see any danger in a man who wrote in The Times during the revolution of 1905: “To free oneself from the government it is only necessary to abstain from participating in it and supporting it. Our consciousness of the law of God demands from us only one thing: moral self-perfection, i. e., the liberation of oneself from all those weaknesses and vices which make one the slave of governments and the participation in their crimes”? Another tragic contradiction of the restless soul of the anarchist who, despite himself, renders aid to the despots.

—Alexander S. Kaun.

INTROSPECTION

Chance, by Joseph Conrad. [Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.]

Did you ever take supper in the apartments of a dear bachelor friend, on a night when the wind howled outside the window, and the rain beat against the pane? And after the satisfying meal, whose perfect appointment made you forget all save the luxury of living, did you retire to the spacious living room, and after accepting an aromatic Havana, stretch your feet out to the crackling log fire, and as the smoke from your cigar crawled upward listen to the philosophical analyses of your cultured host on that marvelously simple and profoundly complex servant and master of man, the human mind? Of such an evening is the atmosphere of Chance. Not academically deep, but deep from the standpoint of a full life and an active intelligence.

Everyone loves to analyze his fellow creatures. Some do it well, some do it badly, but we all do it. Conrad does it masterfully. There doesn’t seem to be a type which holds a mystery for him. The village pillar; the frail, ill-fated maid; the buxsom housewife; the silent captain ashore and afloat; the opinionated, retired old gentleman; the cynical, good-natured man of thirty-five; the flat, tintless fraud. Into the mental realm of all these he makes expeditions long and short. His characters live. They mingle good and bad, and, as strong characters should, weave for themselves a charming story of love, adventure, trial, and victory, never trite, and always surprising. It is a tale built of character studies and garnished with odd conjective philosophy.

There is something about Conrad which gives a warm feeling about the heart. A certain fineness of humor, a certain fullness of sympathy. He never mixes his similes; they always take the same tone and the same color. For instance:

No, this illustration is not of Conrad’s finest, but in a homely way it illustrates a deep sympathy with life, which this strong worker and writer gives in such bountiful measure in all his literature; and, to quote an eminent writer, “Literature and Conrad are interchangeable terms.”

—Henry Blackman Sell.

AN AMERICAN NOVEL

Clark’s Field, by Robert Herrick. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]

It was but the other day that Mr. Herrick told us what he thought about the American novel. Those who read the trenchant article found not only a criticism of our machine-like fictionists and their half-baked methods, but also a sturdy conviction that the day was surely approaching when we should demand and receive a truer and more vital presentation of our national life in our literature. And if Mr. Herrick, long since tagged an apostate to our national creed of turgid optimism, believes this, we can safely trust to his cool vision and be glad that the tide has turned. The rich human material lies ready at hand, and the audience is fast growing intelligent and discriminating. As yet, however, “we await the writer or writers keen enough to perceive the opportunity, powerful enough to interest the public in what it has been unwilling to heed, and of course endowed with sufficient insight to comprehend our big new world.”

Whatever may be said for our other novelists, surely not one of them can exhibit a mingling of the powers of insight and artistry equal to that of Robert Herrick. His work from the beginning has been an honest and incisive attempt to interpret our life in its peculiar and universal aspects, in spite of the clamor of the public at his tearing away of the veils of sentimentality and prudery. The errors into which he fell were due to the ardor of his spiritual vision, which drove him into an impassioned taking of sides. He has emerged from that stage into what his critics call his “old manner,” a more objective treatment of his material. But in the process of change something was lost—the element of flaming intensity which gave the reader a similar capacity to feel. In this latest performance, as well as in One Woman’s Life, he is always cool, clear-sighted, and admirably efficient in the task he sets himself; but never passionate. On the contrary, despite the pervading atmosphere of earnestness, he often assumes a playful satiric tone, mordant but not bitter,—a method well suited to his matter and purpose.

Clark’s Field tells the story of the influence of property upon the human beings who own it and hope to reap gold from its increasing value. All that is left of the great Clark farm is a fifty-acre field in a growing New England town, bequeathed jointly to the two brothers, Edward and Samuel, the former of whom has emigrated to the West and wholly disappeared from the ken of his relatives. So at first the tale is of the baleful influence of expectation delayed again and again: in the case of Samuel who cannot sell the land because of his brother’s half-interest, and who in consequence sinks into a sodden inertia; in his son’s disintegration into a lazy and drunken “Vet”; in his sister Addie’s sordid and pathetic sally into life resulting in the birth of another human being destined to taste of the fruit of their tree and to find it, one day, very bitter. The greater portion of the novel, then, deals with the influence of the realized wealth upon the unformed, colorless little girl, Adelle, the last of the Clarks. It is a masterly piece of work—the gradual development of the pale rooming-house drudge into the silly and insolent woman of fashion, and slowly but certainly into a human being with a soul. Less promising stuff for a heroine neither fate nor Mr. Herrick could have chosen; the latter delights in ample admissions throughout the book of Adelle’s lack of beauty, brains, and charm. Yet he is always sufficiently temperate to escape the danger of caricature. Adelle is a convincing figure. The slow dawning upon her consciousness of the power of money, her “magic lamp” which she need only rub to gratify any desire, is followed by swift and constant use of the new weapon. It brings her a fresh assurance, a few scatter-brained friends, some stylish clothes, and, at length, a callow youth for a husband. It never brings her contact with a real person or friendship with a stimulating individual; nor can it save her from the failure of her marriage, nor compensate her for the death of her little boy.

Adelle’s story, then, turns out to be what we least expected it,—a hopeful one. It leaves us with almost a sense of security, for is she not one of those who can “derive good from her mistakes,” and therefore “the safest sort of human being to raise in this garden plot of souls”? And although we are still saddled with “that absurd code of inheritance and property rights that the Anglo-Saxon peoples have preserved from their ancient tribal days in the gloomy forests of the lower Rhine,” the situation is not without hope, since it has yielded a man of the judge’s type, in whom the beauty of a past idealism is coupled with the freshness of a new vision of responsibility.

To hark back to the recent article in The Yale Review, we believe that Mr. Herrick himself has given us an American novel—thoroughly American in situation, character, treatment, and even in philosophy. We, as a people, are beginning to suspect our boastful optimism as we become aware of the sordidness beneath the fair exterior of our glorious civilization. And in accordance with the western temperament, the awareness of wrong leads not to bitter cynicism but to sturdy efforts toward amelioration. Such, then, is the spirit of Clark’s Field—a hopefulness in the power of courage, and labor, and a growing sense of social responsibility to move mounds that seem to have become immovable mountains through a tenacious fostering of tradition.

—Marguerite Swawite.

THE “SAVAGE” PAINTERS

Cubists and Post Impressionism, by Arthur Jerome Eddy. [A. C. McClurg and Company, Chicago.]

An attempt to explain the new schools in art “in plain, every-day terms.” An earnest appeal for tolerance in regard to seemingly perversive forms. The book has a wealth of material and numerous quotations from Picasso, Picabia, CÉzanne, Matisse, and others, considerably more interesting and instructive than Mr. Eddy’s own truisms. Although the author repeatedly resents any accusation in his adherence to Cubism, the reader gets the impression that the Cubistic movement has received a more thorough and fair treatment than the other new schools. Of the sixty-nine reproductions of Post-Impressionistic paintings and sculpture, only five represent the Futurists. Idillon Redon, who gave us the greater delight in last year’s International Exhibition, is totally ignored. Among the Self-Portraits that of Matisse is sorely missed—a work that helps greatly in understanding the quaint painter of the Woman in Red Madras. Whether Mr. Eddy will succeed in convincing the prejudiced conservatives is doubtful; but in those who have appreciated the daring attempts of the new schools his book will arouse a renewed longing for the foreign “savages” and an ardent hope for their further invasions in our “sane and healthful” galleries.

THE SAME BOOK FROM ANOTHER STANDPOINT

(With apologies to the author of Tender Buttons)

Oil and Water

Enough water is plenty and more, more is almost plenty enough. Enthusiastically hurting sad size, such size, same size slighter, same splendor simpler, same sore sounder. Glazed glitter, eddy eddies discover discovered discoveries, discover Mediterranean sea, large print large. Small print small, picked plumes painters and penmen, pretty pieces Picasso, Picabia plus Plato, Hegel, CÉzanne, Kandinsky, more plenty more, small print single sign of oil supposing shattering scatter and scattering certainly splendidly. Suppose oil surrounded with watery sauce, suppose spare solely inside, suppose the rest.

—A. S. K.