T5 
 
 CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PS 121.MS3 
 
 A book of prefaces / 
 
 3 1924 022 058 477 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022058477 
 
A Book of Prefaces 
 

 
 <m — 1 
 
 
 BY H. L. MENCKEN 
 
 Ventures Into Verse {Out of 
 print) 
 
 George Bernard Shaw: His 
 Plays {Out of print) 
 
 The Philosophy of Friedrich 
 Nietzsche 
 
 The Gist of Nietzsche (Out of 
 print) 
 
 Men 'VS. the Man (•with R. R. 
 LaMonte) 
 
 Europe After 8:15 (with IF. H. 
 Wright and George Jean Na- 
 than) 
 
 The Artist 
 
 A Book of Burlesques 
 
 A Little Book in C Major 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
A Book of Prefaces 
 
 By 
 
 H. L. Mencken 
 
 [Opus 13] 
 
 New York Alfred A. Knopf Mcmxvii 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY 
 ALFRED A. KNOPF 
 
 PuUMed Sipumbtr, 1917 
 
 PS . 
 
 tjJ'S 
 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED S-^ATES OF AMERICA 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The design of these essays is indicated by the 
 word used to designate them. Each of the first 
 three prepares an approach to a definite man; the 
 fourth seeks to indicate some of the effects of a 
 literary influence that is often sensed but not often 
 examined. Of necessity, there is some criticism 
 of criticism in them, and particularly in the one on 
 Dreiser, an author who seems doomed to arouse 
 rages in the stupid. Worse, they invite criticism of 
 criticism of criticism, perhaps the last word in futile 
 writing. But I print them in the hope that, here 
 and there, they may at least blow a wind through 
 the prevailing fogs, and unveil what is sound and 
 important in some first-rate books. This, as I 
 conceive it, is what criticism is for: to find out what 
 an author is trying to do, and to beat a drum for 
 him when it is worth doing and he does it well. 
 Such chances to perform the ideal office are not too 
 numerous. More often the drumstick must labour 
 a tenderer leather and the critic must give a lowlier 
 show. Mencken. 
 
 Baltimore, 1917. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. Joseph Conrad 11 
 
 II. Theodore Dreiser 67 
 
 III. James Huneker 151 
 
 IV. Puritanism as a Literary Force 197 
 
I. JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 u 
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 §1 
 
 ' ' T TNDER all 'his stories there ebbs and 
 flows a kind of tempered melancholy, a 
 sense of seeking and not finding . . ." 
 I take the words from a little book on Joseph Con- 
 rad by Wilson FoUet, privately printed, and now, 
 I believe, out of print.^ They define both the mood 
 of the stories as works of art and their burden and 
 direction as criticisms of life. Like Dreiser, Con- 
 rad is forever fascinated by the "immense indiff er- "^ 
 ence of things," the tragic vanity of the blind grop- 
 ing that we call aspiration, the profound meaning- 
 lessness of life — fascinated, and left wondering. 
 One looks in vain for an attempt at a solution of 
 
 1 Joseph Conrad : A short study of his intellectual and emo- 
 tional attitude toward his work and of the chief characteris- 
 tics of his novels, by Wilson Follet ; New York, Doubleday, 
 
 Page & Co. (191S). "" 
 
 11 
 
12 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 the riddle in the whole canon of his work. Dreiser, 
 more than once, seems ready to take refuge behind 
 an indeterminate sort of mysticism, even a facile 
 supematuralism, but Conrad, from first to last, 
 faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact. 
 His stories are not chronicles of men who conquer 
 fate, nor of men who are unbent and undaunted 
 
 '' by fate, but of men who are conquered and imdone. 
 Each protagonist is a new Prometheus, with a 
 sardonic ignominy piled upon his helplessness. 
 Each goes down a Greek route to defeat and dis- 
 aster, leaving nothing behind him save an unan- 
 swered question. I can scarcely recall an excep- 
 tion. Kurtz, Lord Jim, Razumov, Nostromo, 
 Captain Whalley, Yanko Goorall, Verloc, Heyst, 
 
 ^ Caspar Ruiz, Almayer: one and all they are de- 
 stroyed and made a mock of by the blind, in- 
 
 ! comprehensible forces that beset them. 
 
 Even in "Youth," "Typhoon," and "The 
 Shadow Line," superficially stories of the indomi- 
 table, that same consuming melancholy, that same 
 pressing sense of the irresistible and inexplicable, 
 is always just beneath the surface. Captain Mac 
 Whirr gets the Nan-Shan to port at last, but it is a 
 victory that stands quite outside the man himself; 
 he is no more than a marker in the unfathomable 
 game; the elemental forces, fighting one another, 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 13 
 
 almost disregard him; the view of him that we get 
 is one of disdain, almost one of contempt. So, 
 too, in "Youth." A tale of the spirit's triumph, 
 of youth hesting destiny? I do not see it so. To 
 me its significance, like that of "The Shadow Line," 
 is all subjective; it is an aging man's elegy 
 upon the hope and high resolution that the 
 years have blown away, a sentimental rem- 
 iniscence of what the enigmatical gods have 
 had their jest with, leaving only its gallant mem- 
 ory behind. The whole Conradean system sums 
 itself up in the title of "Victory," an incomparable 
 piece of irony. Imagine a better label for that 
 tragic record of heroic and yet bootless effort, that 
 matchless picture, in microcosm, of the relent- 
 lessly cruel revolutions in the macrocosm! 
 
 Mr. Follet, perhaps with too much critical fa- 
 cility, finds the cause of Conrad's unyielding pes- 
 simism in the circumstances of his own life — ^his 
 double exile, first from Poland, and then from the 
 sea. But this is surely stretching the facts to fit 
 an hypothesis. Neither exile, it must be plain, 
 was enforced, nor is either irrevocable. Conrad 
 has been back to Poland, and he is free to return 
 to the ships whenever the spirit moves him. I see 
 no reason for looking in such directions for his 
 view of the world, nor even in the direction of his 
 
14 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 nationality. We detect certain curious qualities in 
 every Slav simply because he is more given than 
 we are to revealing the qualities that are in all 
 of us. Introspection and self-revelation are his 
 habit; he carries the study of man and fate to a 
 point that seems morbid to westerners; he is for- 
 ever gabbling about what he finds in his own soul. 
 But in the last analysis his verdicts are the imme- 
 morial and almost universal ones. Surely his res- 
 ignationism is not a Slavic copyright; all human 
 philosophies and religions seem doomed to come 
 to it at last. Once it takes shape as the concept 
 of Nirvana, the desire for nothingness, the will 
 to not-will. Again, it is fatalism in this form or 
 that — Mohammedanism, Agnosticism . . . Cal- 
 vinism! Yet again, it is the "Out, out, brief can- 
 dle!" of Shakespeare, the "Eheu fugaces' of Hor- 
 ace, the "Vanitas vanitatum; omnis vanitas!" of 
 the Preacher. Or, to make an end, it is millen- 
 niarism, the theory that the world is going to 
 blow up tomorrow, or the day after, or two weeks 
 hence, and that all sweating and striving are thus 
 useless. Search where you will, near or far, in 
 ancient or modern times, and you will never find 
 a first-rate race or an enlightened age, in its mo- 
 ments of highest reflection, that ever gave more 
 than a passing bow to optimism. Even Christian- 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 15 
 
 ity, starting out as "glad tidings," has had to take 
 on protective coloration to survive, and today its 
 chief professors moan and blubber like Johann in 
 Herod's rain-barrel. The sanctified are few and 
 far between. The vast majority of us must suffer 
 in hell, just as we suffer on earth. The divine 
 grace, so omnipotent to save, is withheld from us. 
 Why? There, alas, is your insoluble mystery, 
 your riddle of the universe ! . . . 
 
 This conviction that human life is a seeking 
 without a finding, that its purpose is impenetrable, 
 that joy and sorrow are alike meaningless, you will 
 see written largely in the work of most great cre- 
 ative artists. It is obviously the final message, if 
 any message is genuinely to be found there, of the 
 nine symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven, or, at 
 any rate, of the three which show any intellectual 
 content at all. Mark Twain, superficially a hu- 
 mourist and hence an optimist, was haunted by it in 
 secret, as Nietzsche was by the idea of eternal re- 
 currence: it forced itself through his guard in "The 
 Mysterious Stranger" and "What is Man?" In 
 Shakespeare, as Shaw has demonstrated, it amounts 
 to a veritable obsession. And what else is there 
 in Balzac, Goethe, Swift, Moliere, Turgenieff, Ib- 
 sen, Dostoievski, Remain RoUand, Anatole France? 
 Or in the Zola of "L'Assomoir," "Germinal," "La 
 
16 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 Debacle," the whole Rougon-Macquart series? 
 (The Zola of "Les Quatres Evangiles," and par- 
 ticularly of "Fecondite," turned meliorist and 
 idealist, and became ludicrous.) Or in the Haupt- 
 mann of "Fuhrmann Henschel," or in Hardy, or in 
 Sudermann? (I mean, of course, Sudermann the 
 novelist. Sudermann the dramatist is a mere 
 mechanician.) . . . The younger men in all coun- 
 tries, in so far as they challenge the current sen- 
 timentality at all, seem to move irresistibly toward 
 the same disdainful skepticism. Consider the last 
 words of "Riders to the Sea." Or Gorky's "Nachi 
 tasyl." Or Frank Norris' "McTeague." Or Ste- 
 phen Crane's "The Blue Hotel." Or the ironical 
 fables of Dunsany. Or Dreiser's "Jennie Ger- 
 h^rdt." Or George Moore's "Sister Teresa." 
 
 Conrad, more than any of the other men I have 
 mentioned, grounds his work firmly upon this sense 
 of cosmic implacability, this confession of unin- 
 telligibility. Thejexact point of the story of Kurtz, 
 in "Heart of Darkness," is that it is pointless, that 
 Kurtz's death is as meaningless as his life, that 
 the moral of such a sordid tragedy is a wholesale 
 negation of all morals. And this, no less, is the 
 point of the story of Falk, and that of Almayer, and 
 of that of Jim. Mr. Follet (he must be an Ameri- 
 can, and forward-looking!) finds himself, in the 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 17 
 
 end, unable to accept so profound a determinism 
 unadulterated, and so he injects a gratuitous and 
 mythical romanticism into it, and hymns Conrad 
 "as a comrade, one of a company gathered under 
 the ensign of hope for common war on despair." 
 With even greater error, William Lyon Phelps ar- 
 gues that his books "are based on the axiom of the 
 moral law." ^ The one notion is as unsound as 
 the other. Conrad makes war on nothing; he is 
 pre-eminently not a moralist. He swings, indeed, 
 as far from revolt and moralizing as is possible, 
 for he does not even criticize God. His undoubted 
 comradeship, his plain kindliness toward the soul 
 he vivisects, is not the fruit of moral certainty, 
 but of moral agnosticism. He neither protests 
 nor punishes; he merely smiles and pities. Like 
 Mark Twain he might well say: "The more I see 
 of men, the more they amuse me — and the more I 
 pity them." He is simpatico precisely because of 
 this ironical commiseration, this infinite disillu- 
 sionment, this sharp understanding of the narrow 
 limits of human volition and responsibility ... I 
 have said that he does not criticize God. One may 
 even imagine him pitying God . . . 
 
 iThe Advance of the English Novel. New York, Dodd, 
 Mead & Co., 1916, p. 215. 
 
18 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 §2 
 
 But in this pity, I need not add, there is no touch 
 of sentimentality. No man could be less the ro- 
 mantic, blubbering over the sorrows of his own 
 Werthers. No novelist could have smaller like- 
 ness to the brummagem emotion-squeezers of the 
 Kipling type, with their playhouse fustian and 
 their naif ethical cocksureness. The thing that 
 sets off Conrad from these facile fellows, and from 
 the shallow pseudo-realists who so often coalesce 
 with them and become indistinguishable from 
 them, is precisely his quality of irony, and that 
 irony is no more than a proof of the greater ma- 
 turity of his personal culture, his essential supe- 
 riority as a civilized man. It is the old difference 
 between a Huxley and a Gladstone, a philosophy 
 that is profound and a philosophy that is merely 
 comfortable, "Quid est Veritas?" and "Thus saith 
 the Lord!" He brings into the English fiction of 
 the day, not only an artistry that is vastly more 
 fluent and delicate than the general, but also a 
 highly unusual sophistication, a quite extraordi- 
 nary detachment from all petty rages and puerile 
 certainties. The winds of doctrine, howling all 
 about him, leave him absolutely unmoved. He 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 19 
 
 belongs to no party and has noriiing to teach, save 
 onlx a mystery as old as man. In the midst of the 
 hysterical splutterings and battle-cries of the Kip- 
 lings and Chestertons, the booming pedagogics of 
 the Wellses and Shaws, and the giggling at key- 
 holes of the Bennetts and de Morgans, he stands 
 apart and almost alone, observing the sardonic 
 comedy of man with an eye that sees every point 
 and significance of it, but vouchsafing none of that 
 sophomoric indignation, that Hyde Park wisdom, 
 that flabby moralizing which freight and swamp 
 the modem English novel. "'At the centre of his 
 web," says Arthur Symons, "sits an elemental sar- 
 casm discussing human affairs with a calm and 
 cynical ferocity . . . He calls up all the dreams 
 and illusions by which men have been destroyed 
 and saved, and lays them mockingly naked . . . 
 He shows the bare side of every virtue, the hidden 
 heroism of every vice and crime. He summons 
 before him all the injustices that have come to birth 
 out of ignorance and self-love . . . And in all this 
 there is no judgment, only an implacable compre- 
 hension, as of one outside nature, to whom joy 
 and sorrow, right and wrong, savagery and civili- 
 zation, are equal and indifferent . . ." ^ 
 
 Obviously, no Englishman ! No need to explain 
 
 1 Conrad, in the Forum, May, 1915. 
 
20 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 (with something akin to apology) that his name 
 is really not Joseph Conrad at all, but Teodor 
 Josef Konrad Karzeniowski, and that he is a Pole 
 of noble lineage, with a vague touch of the Asiatic 
 in him. The Anglo-Saxon mind, in these later 
 days, becomes increasingly incapable of his whole 
 point of view. Put into plain language, his doc- 
 trine can only fill it with wonder and fury. That 
 mind is essentially moral in cut; it is believing, 
 certain, indignant; it is as incapable of skepticism, 
 save as a passing coryza of the spirit, as it is of wit, 
 which is skepticism's daughter. Time was when 
 this was not true, as Congreve, Pope, Wycherley 
 and even Thackeray show, but that time was be- 
 fore the democratic enlightenment, the great intel- 
 lectual levelling, the emancipation of the chandala. 
 In these our days the Englishman is an incurable 
 democrat, and being so he must needs take in with 
 his mother's milk the vast repertoire of delusions 
 which go with democracy, and particularly the 
 master delusion that all human problems, in the 
 last analysis, are soluble, and that all that is re- 
 quired for their solution is to take counsel freely, 
 to listen to wizards, to count votes, to agree upon 
 legislation. This is the prime and immovable doc- 
 trine of the mobile vulgus set free; it is the loveli- 
 est of all the fruits of its defective powers of obser- 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 21 
 
 vation and reasoning, and above all, of its defective 
 knowledge of demonstrated facts, especially in his- 
 tory. Take away this notion that there is some 
 mysterious infallibility in the sense of the major- 
 ity, this theory that the consensus of opinion is 
 inspired, and the democratic idea begins to wither; 
 in fact, it ceases to have any intelligibility at all. 
 But the notion is not taken away; it is nourished; 
 it flourishes on its own effluvia. And out of it 
 spring the two rules which give direction to all 
 democratic thinking, the first being that no concept 
 in politics or conduct is valid (or more accurately 
 respectable), which rises above the comprehension 
 of the great masses of men, or which violates any 
 of their inherent prejudices or superstitions, and 
 the second being that the articulate individual in 
 the mob takes on some of the authority and inspira- 
 tion of the mob itself, and that he is thus free to 
 set himself up as a soothsayer, so long as he does 
 not venture beyond the aforesaid bounds — in brief, 
 that one man's opinion, provided it observe the 
 current decorum, is as good as any other man's. 
 
 Practically, of course, this is simply an invita- 
 tion to quackery. The man of genuine ideas is 
 hedged in by taboos; the quack finds an audience 
 already agape. The reply to the invitation, in the 
 domain of applied ethics, is the revived and rein- 
 
22 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 forced Sklavmoral that besets all of us of English 
 speech — the huggermugger morality of timorous, 
 whining, imintelligent and unimaginative men — 
 envy turned into law, cowardice sanctified, stupid- 
 ity made noble, Puritanism. And in the theoret- 
 ical field there is an even more luxuriant crop of 
 bosh. Mountebanks almost innumerable tell us 
 what we should believe and practice, in politics, 
 religion, philosophy and the arts. England and 
 the United States, between them, house more creeds 
 than all the rest of the world together, and they 
 are more absurd. They rise, they flame, they fall 
 and go out, but always there are new^ones, always 
 the latest is worse than the last. What modem 
 civilization save the Anglo-Saxon could have pro- 
 duced Christian Science, or the New Thought, or 
 Billy Sundayism? What other could have yielded 
 up the mawkish bumptiousness of the Uplift? 
 What other could accept gravely the astounding 
 imbecilities of English philanthropy and American 
 law? The native output of fallacy and sentimen- 
 tality, in fact, is not enough to satisfy the stupen- 
 dous craving of the mob unleashed; there must 
 needs be a constant importation of the aberrant 
 fancies of other peoples. Let a new messiah leap 
 up with a new message in any part of the world, 
 and at once there is a response from the two great 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 23 
 
 democracies. Once it was Tolstoi with a mouldy 
 asceticism made of catacomb Christianity and se- 
 nile soul-sickness; again it was Bergson, with a 
 perfumed quasi-philosophy for the boudoirs of the 
 faubourgs; yet again came Eucken and Pastor 
 Wagner, with their middle-class German beeriness 
 and banality. The list need go no further. It 
 begins with preposterous Indian swamis and yog- 
 his (most of them, to do them justice, diligent Jews 
 from Grand street or the bagnios of Constantino- 
 ple), and it ends with the fabulous Ibsen of the 
 symbols (no more the real Ibsen than Christ was a 
 prohibitionist) , the Ellen Key of the new gyneola- 
 try and the Signorina Montessori of the magical 
 Method. It was a sure instinct that brought Eu- 
 sapia Palladino to New York. It was the same 
 sure instinct that brought Hall Caine. 
 
 I have mentioned Ibsen. A glance at the liter- 
 ature he has spawned in the vulgate is enough to 
 show how much his falser aspects have intrigued 
 the Anglo-Saxon mind and how little it has reacted 
 to his shining skill as a dramatic craftsman — ^his 
 one authentic claim upon fame. Read Jennette 
 Lee's "The Ibsen Secret," ^ perhaps the most suc- 
 cessful of all the Ibsen gemaras in English, if you 
 would know the virulence of the racial appetite for 
 1 New York and London. G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1907. 
 
24 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 bogus revelation. And so in all the arts. What- 
 ever is profound and penetrating we stand off 
 from; whatever is facile and shallow, particularly 
 if it reveal a moral or mystical color, we embrace. 
 Ibsen the first-rate dramatist was rejected with in- 
 dignation precisely because of his merits — his 
 sharp observation, his sardonic realism, his unsen- 
 timental logic. But the, moment a meretricious 
 and platitudinous ethical purpose began to be read 
 into him — how he protested against it! — he was 
 straightway adopted into our flabby Kultur. Com- 
 pare Hauptmann and Brieux, the one a great artist, 
 the other no more than a raucous journalist. 
 Brieux's elaborate proofs that two and two are four 
 have been hailed as epoch-making ; one of his worst 
 plays, indeed, has been presented with all the sol- 
 emn hocus-pocus of a religious rite. But Haupt- 
 mann remains almost unknown; even the Nobel 
 Prize did not give him a vogue. Run the roll: 
 Maeterlinck and his languishing supernaturalism, 
 Tagore and his Asiatic wind music, Selma Lagerlof 
 arid her old maid's mooniness, Bernstein, Molner 
 and company and their out-worn tricks — but I pile 
 up no more names. Consider one fact: the civili- 
 zation that kissed Maeterlinck on both cheeks, and 
 Tagore perhaps even more intimately, has yet to 
 shake hands with Anatole France. , . . 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 25 
 
 This bemusement by superficial ideas, this neck- 
 bending to quacks, this endless appetite for sesames 
 and apocalypses, is depressingly visible in our na- 
 tive literature, as it is in our native theology, phil- 
 osophy and politics. "The British and American 
 mind," says W. L. George,^ "has been long honey- 
 combed with moral impulse, at any rate since the 
 Reformation; it is very 'much what the German 
 mind was up to the middle of the Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury." The artist, facing an audience which seems 
 incapable of differentiating between aesthetic and 
 ethical values, tends to become a preacher of son- 
 orous nothings, and the actual moralist-propagan- 
 dist finds his way into art well greased. No other 
 people in Christendom produces so vast a crop of 
 tin-horn haruspices. We have so many Orison 
 Swett Hardens, Martin Tuppers, Edwin Markhams, 
 Gerald Stanley Lees, Dr. Frank Cranes and Dr. Syl- 
 vanus Stalls that their output is enough to supply 
 the whole planet. We see, too, constantly, how 
 thin is the barrier separating the chief Anglo- 
 Saxon novelists and playwrights from the pasture 
 of the platitudinarian. Jones and Pinero both 
 made their first strikes, not as the artists they un- 
 doubtedly are, but as pinchbeck moralists, moan- 
 
 1 The Intelligence of Woman. Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 
 1916, p. 6-7. 
 
26 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 ing over the sad fact that girls are seduced. 
 Shaw, a highly dexterous dramaturgist, smothers 
 his dramaturgy in a pifflish iconoclasm that is no 
 more than a disguise for Puritanism. Bennett and 
 Wells, competent novelists, turn easily from the 
 novel to the volume of shoddy philosophizing. 
 Kipling, with "Kim" behind him, becomes a vo- 
 ciferous leader-writer of the Daily Mail school, 
 whooping a pothouse patriotism, hurling hysterical 
 objurgations at the foe. Even W. L. George, po- 
 tentially a novelist of sound consideration, drops 
 his craft for the jehad of the suffragettes. Doyle, 
 Barrie, Caine, Locke, Barker, Mrs. Ward, Beres- 
 ford, Hewlett, Watson, Quiller-Couch — one and 
 all, high and low, they are tempted by the public 
 demand for sophistry, the ready market for pills. 
 A Henry Bordeaux, in France, is an exception; in 
 England he is the rule. The endless thirst to be 
 soothed with cocksure asseverations, the great mob 
 yearning to be dosed and comforted, is the undo- 
 ing, over there, of three imaginative talents out 
 of five. 
 
 And, in America, of nearly five out of five. 
 Winston Churchill may serve as an example. He 
 is a literary workman of very decent skill; the na- 
 tive critics speak of him with invariable respect; 
 his standing within the craft was shown when he 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 27 
 
 was unanimously chosen first president of the Auth- 
 ors' League of America. Examine his books in 
 order. They proceed steadily from studies of 
 huratan character .jjoduiestiB^ the proper business 
 of the novelist, to mere outpourings of social and 
 economic panaceas, the proper business of leader 
 writers, chautauquas rabble-rousers and hedge poli- 
 ticians. "The Celebrity" and "Richard Carvel," 
 within their limits, are works of art; "The Inside 
 of the Cup" is no more than a compendium of 
 paralogy, as silly and smattering as a speech by 
 William Jennings Bryan or a shocker by Jane Ad- 
 dams. Churchill, with the late Jack London to 
 bear him company, may stand for a large class; 
 in its lower ranks are such men as Reginald Wright 
 Kauifman and Will Levington Comfort. Still 
 more typical of the national taste for moral pur- 
 pose and quack philosophy are the professional 
 optimists and eye-dimmers, with their two grand 
 divisions, the boarding-school romantics and the 
 Christian Endeavor Society sentimentalists. Of 
 the former I give you George Barr McCutcheon, 
 Owen Wister, the late Richard Harding Davis, and 
 a horde of women — most of them now humanely 
 translated to the moving pictures. Of the latter I 
 give you the fair authors of the "glad" books, so 
 gigantically popular, so lavishly praised in the 
 
28 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 newspapers — with the wraith of the later Howells, 
 the virtuous, kittenish Howells, floating about in 
 the air above them. No other country can parallel 
 this literature, either in its copiousness or in its 
 banality. It is native and peculiar to a civiliza- 
 tion which erects the smug vanities and certainties 
 of the ignorant and quack-ridden into a national 
 way of life. . . . 
 
 My business, however, is not with the culture of 
 Anglo-Saxondom, but only with Conrad's place 
 ^therein. That place is isolated and remote; he is 
 neither of it nor quite in it. In the midst of a 
 futile meliorism which deceives the more, the more 
 it soothes, he stands out like some sinister skele- 
 ton at the feast, regarding the festivities with a 
 flickering and impenetrable grin. "To read him," 
 says Arthur Symons, "is to shudder on the edge of 
 a gulf, in a silent darkness." There is no need 
 to be told that he is there almost by accident, that 
 he came in a chance passerby, a bit uncertain of 
 the door. It was not an artistic choice that made 
 him write English instead of French; it was a 
 choice with its roots in considerations far afield. 
 But once made, it concerned him no further. In 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 29 
 
 his first book he was plainly a stranger, and all 
 himself; in his last he is a stranger still — strange 
 in his manner of speech, strange in his view of life, 
 strange, above all, in his glowing and gorgeous 
 artistry, his enthusiasm for beauty per se, his ab- 
 solute detachment from that heresy which would 
 make it no more than a servant to some bald and de- 
 pressing theory of conduct, some axiom of the im- 
 comprehending. He is, likeDunsany, a pure art- 
 ist. His work, as he once explained, is not to 
 edify, to console, to improve or to encourage, but 
 simply to get upon paper some shadow of his own 
 eager sense of the wonder and prodigality of life 
 as men live it in the world, and of its unfathom- 
 able romance and mystery. "My task," he wenti^ 
 on, "is, by the power of the written word, to make 
 you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to 
 make you see. That — and no more, and it is 
 ^everything." . . .^ 
 
 This detachment from all infra-and-ultra-artistic 
 purpose, this repudiation of the role of propa- 
 gandist, this avowal of what Nietzsche was fond 
 of calling innocence, explains the failure of Con- 
 \ rad to fit into the pigeon-holes so laboriously pre- 
 ; pared for him by critics who must shelve and 
 label or be damned. He is too big for any of 
 
 1 In The New Review, Dec, 1897. 
 
30 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 them, and of a shape too strange. He stands 
 clear, not only of all the schools and factions that 
 obtain in latter-day English fiction, but also of 
 the whole stream of English literature since the 
 Restoration. He is as isolated a figure as George 
 Moore, and for much the same reason. Both are 
 exotics, and both, in a very real sense, are public 
 enemies, for both war upon the philosophies that 
 caress the herd. Is Conrad the beyond-Kipling, as 
 the early criticism of him sought to make him? 
 Nonsense! As well speak of Mark Twain as the 
 beyond-Petroleum V. Nasby (as, indeed, was ac- 
 tually done). He is not only a finer artist than 
 Kipling; he is a quite different kind of artist. 
 Kipling, within his limits, shows a talent of a 
 very high order. He is a craftsman of the utmost 
 deftness. He gets his effects with almost perfect 
 assurance. Moreover, there is a poet in him; he 
 known how to reach the emotions. But once his 
 stories are stripped down to the bare carcass their 
 emptiness becomes immediately apparent. The 
 ideas in them are not the ideas of a reflective and 
 perspicacious man, but simply the ideas of a mob- 
 orator, a mouther of inanities, a patriot, a school- 
 girl. Reduce any of them to a simple proposition, 
 and that proposition, in so far as it is intelligible 
 at all, will be ridiculous. It is precisely here that 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 31 ' 
 
 Conrad leaps immeasurably ahead. His ideas are 
 not only sound ; they are acute and unusual. They 
 plough down into the sub-strata of human motive 
 and act. They unearth conditions and considera- 
 tions that lie concealed from the superficial glance. 
 They get at the primary reactions. In particular 
 and above all, they combat the conception of man 
 as a pet and privy councillor of the gods, working 
 out his own destiny in a sort of vacuum and con- 
 stantly illumined by infallible revelations of his 
 duty, and expose him as he is in fact: an organ- 
 ism infinitely more sensitive and responsive than 
 other organisms, but still a mere organism in the 
 end, a brother to the wild things and the protozoa, 
 swayed by the same inscrutable fortunes, con- 
 demned to the same inchoate errors and irresolu- 
 tions, and surrounded by the same terror and dark- 
 ness . . . 
 
 But is the Conrad I here describe simply a new 
 variety of moralist, differing from the general only 
 in the drift of the doctrine he preaches? Surely 
 not. He is no more a moralist than an atheist is 
 a theologian. His attitude toward all moral sys- 
 tems and axioms is that of a skeptic who rejects 
 them unanimously, even including, and perhaps 
 especially including, those to which, in moments 
 of aesthetic detachment, he seems to give a formal 
 
32 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 and resigned sort of assent.') It is this constant 
 falling back upon "I do not know," this incessant 
 conversion of the easy logic of romance into the 
 harsh and dismaying logic of fact, that explains 
 his failure to succeed as a popular novelist, despite 
 his skill at evoking emotion, his towering artistic 
 passion, his power to tella thumping tale. He is 
 talked of, he brings forth a mass of punditic criti- 
 cism, he becomes in a sense the. fashion; but it 
 would be absurd to say that he has made the 
 same profound impression upon the great class of 
 normal novel-readers that Arnold Bennett once 
 made, or H. G. Wells, or William de Morgan in 
 his brief day, or even such cheap-jacks as Anthony 
 Hope Hawkins and William J. Locke. His show 
 fascinates, but his philosophy, in the last analysis, 
 is unbearable. And in particular it is unbearable 
 to women. One rarely meets a woman who, 
 stripped of affection,, shows any genuine enthu- 
 siasm for a Conrad book, or, indeed, any genuine 
 comprehension of it^ The feminine mind, which 
 rules in English fiction, both as producer and as 
 consumer, craves inevitably a more confident and 
 comforting view of the world than Conrad has to 
 offer. It seeks, not disillusion, but illusion. It 
 protects itself against the disquieting questioning 
 of life by pretending that all the riddles have been 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 33 
 
 solved, that each new sage answers them afresh, 
 that a few simple principles suffice to dispose of 
 them. Women, like democrats, have to subscribe 
 to absurdities in order to account for themselves 
 at all; it is the instinct of self-preservation which 
 sends them to priests, as to other quacks. This is 
 not because they are unintelligent, but rather be- 
 cause they have that sharp and sure sort of intelli- 
 gence which is instinctive, and which passes under 
 the name of intuition. It teaches them that the 
 taboos which surround them, however absurd at 
 bottom, nevertheless penalize their courage and 
 curiosity with unescapable dudgeon, and so they 
 become partisans of the existing order, and, per 
 corollary, of the existing ethic. They may be men- 
 aced by phantoms, but at all events these phan- 
 toms really menace them. A woman who reacted 
 otherwise than with distrust to such a book as "Vic- 
 tory" would be as abnormal as a woman who em- 
 braced "Jenseits von Gut und Bose" or "The In- 
 estimable Life of the Great Gargantua." 
 
 As for Conrad, he retaHates by approaching the 
 sex somewhat gingerly. (His women, in the main, 
 are no more than soiled and tattered cards in a 
 game played by the gods/ The effort to erect them 
 into the customary "sympathetic" heroines of fic- 
 tion always breaks down under the drum fire of 
 
34 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 the plain facts. He sees quite accurately, it 
 seems to me, how vastly the role of women has 
 been exaggerated, how little they amount to in the 
 authentic struggle of man. His heroes are moved 
 by avarice, by ambition, by rebellion, by fear, by 
 that "obscure inner necessity" which passes for 
 nobility or the sense of duty — never by that puer- 
 ile passion which is the mainspring of all mascu- 
 line acts and aspirations in popular novels and on 
 the stage. If they yield to amour at all, it is only 
 at the urging of some more powerful and character- 
 istic impulse, e.g., a fantastic notion of chivalry, as 
 in the case of Heyst, or the thirst for dominion, as in 
 the case of Kurtz. The one exception is offered 
 by Razumov^ — and Razumov is Conrad's picture 
 of a flabby fool, of a sentimentalist destroyed by 
 his sentimentality. Dreiser has shown much the 
 same process in Witla and Cowperwood, but he is 
 less free from the conventional obsession than, 
 Conrad ; he takes a love affair far more naively, and 
 hence far more seriously. 
 
 I used to wonder why Conrad never tackled a 
 straight-out story of adultery under Christianity, 
 the standard matter of all our more pretentious 
 fiction and drama. I was curious to see what his 
 ethical agnosticism would make of it. The con- 
 clusion I came to at first was that his failure 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 35 
 
 marked the limitations of his courage — in brief, 
 that he hesitated to go against the orthodox axioms 
 and assumptions in the department where they were 
 most powerfully maintained. But it seems to me 
 now that his abstinence has not been the fruit of 
 timidity, but of disdain. He has shied at the hy- 
 pothesis, not at its implications. His whole work, 
 in truth, is a destructive criticism of the prevailing 
 notion that such a story is momentous and worth 
 telling. The current gyneolatry is as far outside 
 his scheme of things as the current program of re- 
 wards and punishments, sins and virtues, causes 
 and effects. He not only sees clearly that the des- 
 tiny and soul of man are not moulded by petty 
 jousts of sex, as the prophets of romantic love 
 would have us believe; he is so impatient of the 
 fallacy that he puts it as far behind him as possi- 
 ble, and sets his conflicts amid scenes that it cannot 
 penetrate, save as a palpable absurdity. Love, in 
 his stories, is either a feeble phosphorescence or 
 a gigantic grotesquerie. In "Heart of Darkness," 
 perhaps, we get his typical view of it. Over all 
 the frenzy and horror of the tale itself floats the 
 irony of the trusting heart back in Brussels. Here 
 we have his measure of the master sentimentality 
 of them all. . . . 
 
36 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 §4 
 
 As for Conrad the literary craftsman, opposing 
 him for the moment to Conrad the showman of the 
 human comedy, the quality that all who write about 
 him seem chiefly to mark in him is his scorn of 
 conventional form, his tendency to approach his 
 story from two directions at once, his frequent 
 involvement in apparently inextricable snarls of 
 narrative, sub-narrative and sub-sub-narrative. 
 "Lord Jim," for example, starts out in the third 
 person, presently swings into an exhaustive psycho- 
 logical discussion by the mythical Marlow, then 
 goes into a brisk narrative at second (and some- 
 times at third) hand, and finally comes to a halt 
 upon an unresolved dissonance, a half -heard chord 
 of the ninth: "And that's the end. He passes 
 away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, for- 
 gotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic." 
 "Falk" is also a story within a story; this time the 
 narrator is "one who had not spoken before, a man 
 over fifty." In "Amy Foster" romance is filtered 
 through the prosaic soul of a country doctor; it is 
 almost as if a statistician told the tale of Horatius 
 at the bridge. In "Under Western Eyes" the ob- 
 fuscation is achieved by "a teacher of languages," 
 endlessly lamenting his lack of the "high gifts of 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 37 
 
 imagination and expression." In "Youth" and 
 "Heart of Darkness" the chronicler and specu- 
 lator is the shadowy Marlow, a "cloak to goe in- 
 bisabell" for Conrad himself. In "Chance" 
 there are tv/o separate stories, imperfectly welded 
 together. Elsewhere there are hesitations, goings 
 back, interpolations, interludes in the Socratic 
 manner. And almost always there is heaviness 
 in the getting under weigh. In "Heart of Dark- 
 ness" we are on the twentieth page before we see 
 the mouth of the great river, and in "Falk" we 
 are on the twenty-fourth before we get a glimpse of 
 Falk. "Chance" is nearly half done before the 
 drift of the action is clearly apparent. In "Al- 
 mayer's Folly" we are thrown into the middle of 
 a story, and do not discover its beginning until we 
 come to "An Outcast of the Islands," a later book. 
 As in structure, so in detail. Conrad pauses to ex- 
 plain, to speculate^ to look about. Whole chap- 
 ters concern themselves with detailed discussions 
 of motives, with exchanges of views, with generali- 
 'zations abandoned as soon as they are made. Even 
 the author's own story, "A Personal Record" (in 
 the English edition, "Some Reminiscences") starts 
 near the end, and then goes back, halting tortu- 
 ously, to the beginning. 
 
 In the eyes of orthodox criticism, of course, this 
 
38 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 is a grave fault. The Kipling-Wells style of swift, 
 shouldering, button-holing writing has accustomed 
 readers and critics alike to a straight course and 
 a rapid tempo. Moreover, it has accustomed them 
 to a forthright certainty and directness of state- 
 ment; they expect an author to account for his 
 characters at once, and on grounds instantly com- 
 prehensible. This omniscience is a part of the 
 prodigality of moral theory that I have been dis- 
 cussing. An author who knows just what is the 
 matter with the world may be quite reasonably ex- 
 pected to know just what is the matter with his 
 hero. Neither sort of assurance, I need not say, 
 is to be found in Conrad. [He is an inquirer, not 
 a law-giver; an experimentalist, not a doctor. One 
 constantly derives from his stories the notion that 
 he is as much puzzled by his characters as the 
 reader is — that he, too, is feeling his way among 
 shadowy evidences. The discoveries that we 
 make, about Lord Jim, about Nostromo or about 
 Kurtz, come as fortuitously and as unexpectedly 
 as the discoveries we make about the real figures 
 of our world. The picture is built upjjjt byj»it; 
 it is never flashed suddenly and completely as by 
 best-seller calciums; it remains a bit dim at the 
 end. But in that very dimness, so tantalizing and 
 yet so revealing, lies two-thirds of Conrad's art, or 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 39 
 
 his craft, or his trick, or whatever you choose to call 
 
 it. What he shows us is blurred at the edges, but 
 
 , so is life itself blurred at the edges. We see least 
 
 / clearly precisely what is nearest to us, and is hence 
 
 \ most real to us. A man may profess to understand 
 
 the President of the United States, but he seldom 
 
 alleges, even to himself, that he understands his 
 
 own wife. 
 
 In the character and in its reactions, in the act 
 and in the motive: always that tremulousness, that 
 groping, that confession of final bewilderment. 
 "He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at 
 heart ..." And the cloud enshrouds the inner 
 man as well as the outer, the secret springs of his 
 being as well as the overt events of his life. "His 
 meanest creatures," says Arthur Symons, "have in 
 them a touch of honour, of honesty, or of heroism; 
 his heroes have always some error, weakness, or 
 mistake, some sin or crime, to redeem." What is 
 Lord Jim, scoundrel and poltroon or gallant 
 knight? What is Captain MacWhirr, hero or sim- 
 ply ass? What is Falk, beast or idealist? One 
 leaves "Heart of Darkness" in that palpitating con- 
 fusion which is shot through with intense curiosity. 
 Kurtz is at once the most abominable of rogues 
 and the most fantastic of dreamers. It is impos- 
 sible to differentiate between his vision and his 
 
40 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 crimes, though all that we look upon as order in 
 the universe stands between them. In Dreiser's 
 novels there is the same anarchy of valuations, 
 and it is chiefly responsible for the rage he excites 
 in the unintelligent. The essential thing about 
 Cowperwood is that he is two diverse beings at 
 once ; a puerile chaser of women and a great artist, 
 a guinea pig and half a god. The essential thing 
 about Carrie Meeber is tliat she remains innocent 
 in the midst of her contaminations, that the virgin 
 lives on in the kept woman. This is not the art 
 of fiction as it is conventionally practised and 
 understood. It is not explanation, labelling, as- 
 surance, moralizing. In the cant of newspaper 
 criticism, it does not "satisfy." But the great 
 artist is never one who satisfies in that feeble 
 sense; he leaves the business to mountebanks who 
 do it better. "My purpose," said Ibsen, "is not 
 to answer questions; it is to ask them." The spec- 
 tator must bring something with him beyond the 
 mere faculty of attention. If, coming to Conrad, 
 he cannot, he is at the wrong door. 
 
 Conrad's predilection for barbarous scenes and 
 the more bald and shocking sort of drama has an 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 41 
 
 obviously autobiographical basis. His own road 
 ran into strange places in the days of his youth. 
 He moved among men who were menaced by all 
 the terrestrial cruelties, and by the almost un- 
 checked rivalry and rapacity of their fellow men, 
 without any appreciable barriers, whether of law, 
 of convention or of sentimentality, to shield them. 
 The struggle for existence, as he saw it, was well 
 nigh as purely physical among human beings as 
 among the camivora of the jungle. Some of his 
 stories, and among them his very best, are plainly 
 little more than transcripts of his own experience. 
 He himself is the enchanted boy of "Youth"; he 
 is the ship-master of "Heart of Darkness" ; he hov- 
 ers in the background of all the island books and 
 is visibly present in most of the tales of the sea. 
 
 And what he got out of that early experience was 
 more than a mere body of reminiscence; it was .a-^- 
 scheme of valuations. He came to his writing 
 years with a sailor's disdain for the trifling haz- 
 ards and emprises of market places and drawing 
 rooms, and it shows itself whenever he sets pen 
 to paper. A conflict, it would seem, can make 
 no impression upon him save it be colossal. When 
 his men combat, not nature, but other men, they 
 carry over into the business the gigantic method of 
 sailors battling with a tempest. "The Secret 
 
42 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 Agent" and "Under Western Eyes" fill the dull 
 back streets of London and Geneva with pursuits, 
 homicides and dynamitings. "Nostromo" is a 
 long record of treacheries, butcheries and carnali- 
 ties. "A Point of Honor" is coloured by the sense- 
 less, insatiable ferocity of Gobineau's "Renais- 
 sance." "Victory" ends with a massacre of all 
 the chief personages, a veritable catastrophe of 
 blood. Whenever he turns from the starker lusts 
 to the pale passions of man under civilization, Con- 
 rad fails. "The Return" is a thoroughly infirm 
 piece of writing — a second rate magazine story. 
 One concludes at once that the author himself does 
 not believe in it. "The Inheritors" is worse ; it be- 
 comes, after the first few pages, a flaccid artificial- 
 ity, a bore. It is impossible to imagine the chief 
 characters of the Conrad gallery in such scenes. 
 Think of Captain MacWhirr reacting to social 
 tradition, Lord Jim immersed in the class war, 
 Lena Hermann seduced by the fashions, Almayer 
 a candidate for office! As well think of Huckle- 
 berry Finn at Harvard, or Tom Jones practising 
 law. 
 
 These things do not interest Conrad, chiefly, I 
 suppose, because he does not understand them. 
 His concern, one may say, is with the gross anatomy 
 of passion, not with its histology. He seeks to de- 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 43 
 
 pict emotion, not in its ultimate attenuation, but 
 in its fundamental innocence and fury. Inevi- 
 tably, his materials are those of what we call melo- 
 drama; he is at one, in the bare substance of his 
 tales, with the manufacturers of the baldest shock- 
 ers. But with a difference! — a difference, to wit, 
 of approach and comprehension, a difference abys- 
 mal and revolutionary. He lifts melodrama to 
 the dignity of an important business, and makes 
 it a means to an end that the mere shock-monger 
 never dreams of. In itself, remember, all this 
 up-roar and blood-letting is not incredible, nor 
 even improbable. The world, for all the pressure 
 of order, is still full of savage and stupendous con- 
 flicts, of murders and debaucheries, of crimes in- 
 describable and adventures almost unimaginable. 
 One cannot reasonably ask a novelist to deny them 
 or to gloss over them ; all one may demand of him 
 is that, if he make artistic use of them, he render 
 them understandable — that he logically account for 
 them, that he give them plausibility by showing 
 their genesis in intelligible motives and colourable 
 events. 
 
 The objection to the conventional melodramatist 
 is that he fails to do this. It is not that his efforts 
 are too florid, but that his causes are too puny. 
 For all his exuberance of fancy, he seldom shows 
 
44 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 us a downright impossible event ; what he does con- 
 stantly show us is an inadequate and hence uncon- 
 vincing motive. In a cheap theatre we see a bad 
 actor, imperfectly disguised as a viscount, bind a 
 shrieking young woman to the railroad tracks, with 
 an express train approaching. Why does he do it? 
 The melodramatist offers a double-headed reason, 
 the first part being that the viscount is an amalgam 
 of Satan and Don Juan and the second being that 
 the young woman prefers death to dishonour. 
 Both parts are absurd. Our eyes show us at once 
 that the fellow is far more the floorwalker, the head 
 barber, the Knight of Pythias than either the Satan 
 or the Don Juan, and our experience of life tells us 
 that young women in yellow wigs do not actually 
 rate their virginity so dearly. But women are un- 
 doubtedly done to death in this way — ^not every day, 
 perhaps, but now and then. Men bind them, trains 
 run over them, the newspapers discuss the crime, 
 the pursuit of the felon, the ensuing jousting of 
 the jurisconsults. Why, then? The true answer, 
 when it is forthcoming at all, is always much more 
 complex than the melodramatist's answer. It may 
 be so enormously complex, indeed, as to transcend 
 all the normal laws of cause and effect. It may be 
 an answer made up largely, or even wholly, of the 
 fantastic, the astounding, the unearthly reasons of 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 45 
 
 lunacy. That is the chief, if not the only differ- 
 ence between melodrama and reality. The events 
 of the two may be, and often are identical. It is 
 only in their underlying network of causes that they 
 are dissimilar and incommensurate. 
 
 Here, in brief, you have the point of essential 
 distinction between the stories of Conrad, a supreme 
 artist in fiction, and the trashy confections of the 
 literary artisans — e.g., Sienkiewicz, Dumas, Lew 
 Wallace, and their kind. Conrad's materials, at 
 bottom, are almost identical with those of the arti- 
 sans. He, too, has his chariot races, his castaways, 
 his carnivals of blood in the arena. He, too, takes 
 us through shipwrecks, revolutions, assassinations, 
 gaudy heroisms, abominable treacheries. But 
 
 f always he illuminates the nude and amazing event 
 with shafts of light which reveal not only the last 
 I detail of its workings, but also the complex of ori- 
 *gins and inducements behind it. Always, he 
 throws about it a probability which, in the end, be- 
 comes almost inevitability. His "Nostromo," for 
 example, in its externals, is a mere tale of South 
 American turmoil; its materials are those of "Sol- 
 diers of Fortune." But what a difference in 
 method, in point of approach, in inner content! 
 Davis was content to show the overt act, scarcely 
 accounting for it at all, and then only in terms of 
 
46 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 conventional romance. Conrad penetrates to the 
 motive concealed in it, the psychological spring and 
 basis of it, the whole fabric of weakness, habit and 
 aberration underlying it. The one achieved an 
 agreeable romance, and an agreeable romance only. 
 The other achieves an extraordinarily brilliant and 
 incisive study of the Latin-American temperament 
 — a full length exposure of the perverse passions 
 and incomprehensible ideals which provoke pre- 
 sumably sane men to pursue one another 
 like wolves, and of the reactions of that in- 
 cessant pursuit upon the men themselves, and 
 upon their primary ideas, and upon the institutions 
 under which they live. I do not say that Conrad is 
 always exhaustive in his explanations, or that he is 
 accurate. In the first case 1 know that he often is 
 not, in the second case I do not know whether he is 
 or he isn't. But I do say that, within the scope of 
 his vision, he is wholly convincing; /that the men 
 and women he sets into his scene show ineluctably 
 vivid and persuasive personality; that the theories 
 he brings forward to account for their acts are in- 
 telligible ; that the effects of those acts, upon actors 
 and immediate spectators alike, are such as might 
 be reasonably expected to issue; that the final im- 
 pression is one of searching and indubitable 
 veracity. One leaves "Nostromo" with a memory 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 47 
 
 as intense and lucid as that of a real experience. 
 The thing is not mere photography. It is interpre- 
 tative painting at its highest. 
 
 In all his stories you will find this same concern 
 with the inextricable movement of phenomena and 
 noumena between event and event, this same cur- 
 iosity as to first causes and ultimate effects. Some- 
 times, as in "The Point of Honor" and "The End 
 of the Tether," he attempts to work out the obscure 
 genesis, in some chance emotion or experience, of 
 an extraordinary series of transactions. At other 
 times, as in "Typhoon," "Youth," "Falk" and "The 
 Shadow Line," his endeavour is to determine the 
 effect of some gigantic and fortuitous event upon the 
 mind and soul of a given man. At yet other times, 
 as in "Almayer's Folly," "Lord Jim" and "Under 1 
 Western Eyes," it is his aim to show how cause and 
 effect are intricately commingled, so that it is diffi- 
 cult to separate motive from consequence, and con- 
 sequence from motive. [But always it is the proc- 
 ess of mind rather than the actual act that interests 
 him. 1 Always he is trying to penetrate the actor's ; 
 mask and interpret the actor's frenzy. It is this 
 concern with the profounder aspects of human na- 
 ture, this bold grappling with the deeper and more 
 recondite problems of his art, that gives him con- 
 sideration as a first-rate artist. He differs from 
 
48 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 the common novelists of his time as a Beethoven 
 differs from a Mendelssohn. Some of them are 
 quite his equals in technical skill, and a few of 
 them, notably Bennett and Wells, often show an ac- 
 tual superiority, but when it comes to that graver 
 business which underlies all mere virtuosity, he is 
 immistakably the superior of the whole corps of 
 them. 
 
 This superiority is only the more vividly revealed 
 by the shop-worn shoddiness of most of his ma- 
 terials. He takes whatever is nearest to hand, out 
 of his own rich experience or out of the common 
 store of romance. He seems to disdain the petty 
 advantages which go with the invention of novel 
 plots, extravagant characters and unprecedented 
 snarls of circumstance. All the classical doings of 
 anarchists are to be found in "The Secret Agent" ; 
 one has heard them copiously credited, of late, to 
 German spies. "Youth," as a story, is no more 
 than an orthodox sea story, and W. Clark Russell 
 contrived better ones. In "Chance" we have a stem 
 father at his immemorial tricks. In "Victory" 
 there are villains worthy of Jack B. Yeats' melo- 
 dramas of the Spanish Main. In "Nostromo" we 
 encounter the whole stock company of Richard 
 Harding Davis and 0. Henry. And in "Under 
 Western Eyes" the protagonist is one who finds his 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 49 
 
 love among the women of his enemies — a situation 
 at the heart of all the military melodramas ever 
 written. 
 
 But what Conrad makes of that ancient and fly- 
 blown stuff, that rubbish from the lumber room of 
 the imagination! Consider, for example, "Under 
 Western Eyes," by no means the best of his stories. 
 The plot is that of "Shenandoah" and "Held by the 
 Enemy" — but how brilliantly it is endowed with a 
 new significance, how penetratingly its remotest 
 currents are followed out, how magnificently it is 
 made to fit into that colossal panorama of Holy 
 Russia! It is always this background, this complex 
 of obscure and baffling influences, this drama under 
 the drama, that Conrad spends his skill upon, and 
 not the obvious commerce of the actual stage. It is 
 not the special effect that he seeks, but the general 
 effect. It is not so much man the individual that ' 
 interests him, as the shadowy accumulation of tra- 
 ditions, instincts and blind chances which shapes the 
 individual's destiny. Here, true enough, we have 
 a full-length portrait of Razumov, glowing with life. 
 But here, far more importantly, we also have an 
 amazingly meticulous and illuminating study of the 
 Russian character, with all its confused mingling 
 of Western realism and Oriental fogginess, its crazy 
 tendency to go shooting off into the spaces of an in- 
 
50 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 comprehensible metaphysic, its general transcend- 
 ence of all that we Celts and Saxons and Latins hold 
 to be true of human motive and human act. Russia 
 is a world apart: that is the sum and substance of 
 the tale. In the island stories we have the same 
 elaborate projection of the East, of its fantastic bar- 
 barism, of brooding Asia. And in the sea stories 
 we have, perhaps for the first time in English fiction, 
 a vast and adequate picture of the sea, the symbol 
 at once of man's eternal striving and of his eternal 
 impotence. Here, at last, the colossus has found its 
 interpreter. There is in "Typhoon" and "The 
 Nigger of the Narcissus," and, above all, in "The 
 Mirror of the Sea," a poetic evocation of the sea's 
 stupendous majesty that is unparalleled outside the 
 ancient sagas. Conrad describes it with a degree 
 of graphic skill that is superb and incomparable. 
 He challenges at once the pictorial vigour of Hugo 
 and the aesthetic sensitiveness of Lafcadio Hearn, 
 and surpasses them both. And beyond this mere 
 dazzling visualization, he gets into his pictures an 
 overwhelming sense of that vast drama of which 
 they are no more than the flat, lifeless representation 
 — of that inexorable and uncompassionate struggle 
 which is life itself. The sea to him is a living 
 thing, an omnipotent and unfathomable thing, al- 
 most a god. He sees it as the Eternal Enemy, de- 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 51 
 
 ceitful in its caresses, sudden in its rages, relent- 
 less in its enmities, and forever a mystery. 
 
 §6 
 
 Conrad's first novel, "Almayer's Folly," was 
 printed in 1895. He tells us in "A Personal Rec- 
 ord" that it took him seven years to write it — seven 
 years of pertinacious effort, of trial and error, of 
 learning how to write. He was, at this time thirty- 
 eight years old. Seventeen years before, landing 
 in England to fit himself for the British merchant 
 service, he had made his first acquaintance with the 
 English language. The interval had been spent 
 almost continuously at sea — in the Eastern islands, 
 along the China coast, on the Congo and in the 
 South Atlantic. How he hesitated between French 
 and English is a story often told. Flaubert, in 
 those days, was his idol, and there is reason to be- 
 lieve that he actually sketched parts of "Almayer's 
 Folly" in French, but in the end the speech of his 
 daily business won, and English literature reaped 
 the greatest of all its usufructs from English sea 
 power. To this day there are marks of his vacilla- 
 tion in his style. His periods, more than once, have 
 an inept and foreign smack. In fishing for the 
 right phrase one sometimes feels that he finds a 
 
52 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 French phrase, or even a Polish phrase, and that it 
 loses something by being done into English. 
 
 The credit for discovering "Almayer's Folly," 
 as the publishers say, belongs to Edward Gamett, 
 then a reader for T. Fisher Unwin. The book was 
 brought out modestly and seems to have received 
 little attention. The first edition, it would appear, 
 ran to no more than a thousand copies ; at all events, 
 specimens of it are now very hard to find, and col- 
 lectors pay high prices for them. When "An Out- 
 cast of the Islands" followed, a year later, a few 
 alert readers began to take notice of the author, 
 and one of them was Sir (then Mr.) Hugh Clif- 
 ford, a former Governor of the Federated Malay 
 States and himself the author of several excellent 
 books upon the Malay. Clifford gave Conrad en- 
 couragement privately and talked him up in liter- 
 ary circles, but the majority of English critics re- 
 mained unaware of him. After an interval of two 
 years, during which he struggled between his desire 
 to write and the temptation to return to the sea, he 
 published "The Nigger of the Narcissus." ^ It 
 made a fair success of esteem, but still there was 
 no recognition of the author's true stature. Then 
 followed "Tales of Unrest" and "Lord Jim," and 
 
 1 Printed in the United States as Children of the Sea, but 
 now restored to its original title. 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 53 
 
 after them the feeblest of all the Conrad books, 
 "The Inheritors," written in collaboration with 
 Ford Madox Hueffer. It is easy to see in this col- 
 laboration, and no less in the character of the book, 
 an indication of irresolution, and perhaps even of 
 downright loss of hope. But success, in fact, was 
 just around the comer. In 1902 came "Youth," 
 and straightway Conrad was the lion of literary Lon- 
 don. The chorus of approval that greeted it was 
 almost a roar; all sorts of critics and reviewers, 
 from H. G. Wells to W. L. Courtney, and from 
 John Galsworthy to W. Robertson Nicholl, took a 
 hand. Writing home to the New York Times, W. 
 L. Alden reported that he had "not heard one dis- 
 senting voice in regard to the book," but that the 
 praise it received "was unanimous," and that the 
 newspapers and literary weeklies rivalled one an- 
 other "in their efforts to express their admiration 
 for it." 
 
 This benign whooping, however, failed to awaken 
 the enthusiasm of the mass of novel-readers and 
 brought but meagre orders from the circulating li- 
 braries. "Typhoon" came upon the heels of 
 "Youth," but still the sales of the Conrad books 
 continued small and the author remained in very 
 uncomfortable circumstances. Even after four or 
 five years he was still so poor that he was glad to 
 
54 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 accept a modest pension from the British Civil 
 List. This official recognition of his genius, when 
 it came at last, seems to have impressed the public, 
 characteristically enough, far more than his books 
 themselves had done, and the foundations were thus 
 laid for that wider recognition of his genius which 
 now prevails. But getting him on his legs was 
 slow work, and such friends as Hueffer, Clifford 
 and Galsworthy had to do a lot of arduous log- 
 rolling. Even after the splash made by "Youth" 
 his manuscripts continued to be hawked about from 
 publisher to publisher. His first eleven books show 
 six different imprints; it was not until his twelfth 
 that he settled down to a publisher. His American 
 editions tell an even stranger story. The first six 
 of them were brought out by six different publish- 
 ers ; the first eight by no less than seven. Even to- 
 day, though he has a regular American publisher 
 at last, he is once more on the town, so to speak, 
 in England, and some of his books are out of print. 
 Thanks to the indefatigable efforts of that Amer- 
 ican publisher (who labours for Gene Stratton-Por- 
 ter and Gerald Stanley Lee in the same manner) 
 Conrad has been forced upon the public notice in 
 the United States, and it is the fashion among all 
 who pretend to aesthetic consciousness to read him, 
 or, at all events, to talk about him. His books have 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 55 
 
 been brought together in a uniform edition for the 
 newly intellectual, bound in blue leather, like the 
 "complete library sets" of Kipling, 0. Henry, Guy 
 de Maupassant and Paul de Koch. The more liter- 
 ary newspapers print his praises; he is hymned 
 by professorial critics as a prophet of virtue; his 
 genius is certificated by such diverse authorities as 
 Hildegarde Hawthorne and Louis Joseph Vance; I 
 myself sit on a vague Conrad Committee, along with 
 Booth Tarkington, David Belasco, Irvin Cobb, Wal- 
 ter Pritchard Eaton and Hamlin Garland — surely 
 an astounding posse of literati! Moreover, Conrad 
 himself shows a disposition to reach out for a wider 
 audience. His "Victory," first published in Mun- 
 sey's Magazine, revealed obvious eflforts to be in- 
 telligible to the general. A few more turns of the 
 screw and it might have gone into the Saturday 
 Evening Post, between serials by Harris Dickson 
 and Rex Beach. 
 
 Meanwhile, in the shadow of this painfully grow- 
 ing celebrity as a novelist, Conrad takes on con- 
 deration as a bibelot, and the dealers in first edi- 
 tions probably make more profit out of some of his 
 books than ever he has made himself. His manu- 
 scripts are cornered, I believe, by an eminent 
 collector of literary curiosities in New York, who 
 seems to have a contract with the novelist to take 
 
56 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 them as fast as they are produced — perhaps the 
 only arrangement of the sort in literary history. 
 His first editions begin to bring higher premiums 
 than those of any other living author. Considering 
 the fact that the oldest of them is less than twenty- 
 five years old, they probably set new records for 
 tlie trade. Even the latest in date are eagerly 
 sought, and it is not uncommon to see an English 
 edition of a Conrad book sold at an advance in 
 New York within a month of its publication,^ 
 
 As I hint, however, there is not much reason to 
 believe that this somewhat extravagant fashion is 
 based upon any genuine liking, or any very wide- 
 
 1 Here are some actual prices from booksellers' catalogues : 
 
 1914-1915 1916 1917 
 
 Almayer's Folly (1895) $13. $2i. $35. 
 
 An Outcast of the Islands (1896) . . 11.50 20. 25. 
 
 The Nigger of the Narcissus (1898) 7.50 20. 20. 
 
 Tales of Unrest (1898) 13.50 20. 25. 
 
 Lord Jim (1900) 7.50 23.50 25. 
 
 The Inheritors (1901) 12. 20. 30. 
 
 Youth (1903) 5. 7.50 IS. 
 
 Typhoon (1903) 4. 5.50 IS. 
 
 Romance (1903) 5. 7.50 9. 
 
 Nostromo (lOO-t) 2.S0 4.50 5. 
 
 The Mirror of the Sea (1906) 5. 11. 15. 
 
 A Set of Six (1908) 3. 7.50 10. 
 
 Under Western Eyes (1911) 4.50 4.50 5. 
 
 Some Reminiscences (1913) 4.50 9. 12.50 
 
 Chance (1913) 2. 5. IS. 
 
 Victory (1915) 2. 2.50 4. 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 57 
 
 spread understanding. The truth is that, for all 
 the adept tub-thumping of publishers, Conrad's 
 sales still fall a good deal behind those of even the 
 most modest of best-seller manufacturers, and that 
 the respect with which his successive volumes are 
 received is accompanied by enthusiasm in a rela- 
 tively narrow circle only. A clan of Conrad fa- 
 natics exists, and surrounding it there is a body of 
 readers who read him because it is the intellectual 
 thing to do, and who talk of him because talking of 
 him is expected. But beyond that he seems to make 
 little impression. When "Victory" was printed in 
 Munseys Magazine it was a failure; no other single 
 novel, indeed, contributed more toward the aban- 
 donment of the policy of printing a complete novel 
 in each issue. The other popular magazines show 
 but small inclination for Conrad manuscripts. 
 Some time ago his account of a visit to Poland in 
 war-time was offered on the American market by an 
 English author's agent. At the start a price of 
 $2,500 was put upon it, but after vainly inviting 
 buyers for a couple of months it was finally dis- 
 posed of to a literary newspaper which seldom 
 spends so much as $2,500, I daresay, for a whole 
 month's supply of copy. 
 
 In the United States, at least, novelists are made 
 and unmade, not by critical majorities, but by 
 
58 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 women, male and female. The art of fiction 
 among us, as Henry James once said, "is almost 
 exclusively feminine." In the books of such a 
 man as William Dean Howells it is difficult to find 
 a single line that is typically and exclusively mas- 
 culine. One could easily imagine Edith Wharton, 
 or Mrs. Watts, or even Agnes Repplier, writing all 
 of them. When a first-rate novelist emerges from 
 obscurity it is almost always by some fortuitous 
 plucking of the dexter string. "Sister Carrie," for 
 example, has made a belated commercial success, 
 not because its dignity as a human document is 
 understood, but because it is mistaken for a sad 
 tale of amour, not unrelated to "The Woman Thou 
 Gavest Me" and "Dora Thome." In Conrad there 
 is no such sweet bait for the fair and sentimental. 
 The sedentary multipara, curled up in her boudoir 
 on a rainy afternoon, finds nothing to her taste in 
 his grim tales. The Conrad philosophy is harsh, 
 unyielding, repellent. The Conrad heroes are 
 nearly all boors and ruffians. Their very love-mak- 
 ing has something sinister and abhorrent in it; one 
 cannot imagine them in the moving pictures, played 
 by tailored beauties with long eye-lashes. More, I 
 venture that the censors would object to them, even 
 disguised as floor-walkers. Surely that would be 
 a besotted board which would pass the irregular 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 59 
 
 amours of Lord Jim, the domestic brawls of Al- 
 mayer, the revolting devil's mass of Kurtz, Falk's 
 disgusting feeding in the Southern Ocean, or the 
 butchery on Heyst's island. Stevenson's "Treasure 
 Island" has been put upon the stage, but "An Out- 
 cast of the Islands" would be as impossible there as 
 "Barry Lyndon" or "La Terre." The world fails 
 to breed actors for such roles, or stage managers 
 to penetrate such travails of the spirit, or audiences 
 for the revelation thereof. 
 
 With the Conrad cult, so discreetly nurtured out 
 of a Barabbasian silo, there arises a considerable 
 Conrad literature, most of it quite valueless. 
 Hxmeker's essay, in "Ivory, Apes and Peacocks," ^ 
 gets little beyond the obvious; William Lyon 
 Phelps, in "The Advance of the English Novel," 
 achieves only a meagre judgment; ^ Frederic Taber 
 Cooper tries to estimate such things as "The 
 Secret Agent" and "Under Western Eyes" in terms 
 of the Harvard enlightenment; ^ John Galsworthy 
 wastes himself upon futile comparisons ; * even Sir 
 Hugh Clifford, for all his quick insight, makes ir- 
 relevant objections to Conrad's principles of Malay 
 
 1 New York, Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1915, pp. 1-21. 
 
 2 New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1916, pp. 192-217. 
 
 sSome English Story Tellers a A Book of the Younger Nov- 
 elists; New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1912, pp. 1-30. 
 * A Disquisition on Conr9.d, Fortnightly Beview, April, 1908. 
 
60 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 psychology.^ Who cares? Conrad is his own 
 God, and creates his own Malay! The best of the 
 existing studies of Conrad, despite certain senti- 
 mentalities arising out of youth and race, is in the 
 little book of Wilson FoUet, before mentioned. 
 The worst is in the official biography by Richard 
 Curle,^ for which Conrad himself obtained a pub- 
 lisher and upon which his imprimatur may be thus 
 assumed to lie. If it does, then its absurdities are 
 nothing new, for we all know what a botch Ibsen 
 made of accounting for himself. But, even so, the 
 assumption stretches the probabilities more than 
 once. Surely it is hard to think of Conrad put- 
 ;ting "Lord Jim" below "Chance" and "The Secret 
 Agent" on the ground that it "raises a fierce moral 
 issue." Nothing, indeed, could be worse nonsense 
 • — save it be an American critic's doctrine that "Con- 
 rad denounces pessimism." "Lord Jim" no more 
 raises a moral issue than "The Titan." It is, if 
 anything, a devastating exposure of a moral issue. 
 Its villain is almost heroic; its hero, judged by his 
 peers, is a scoundrel. . . . 
 
 Hugh Walpole, himself a competent novelist, does 
 
 1 The Genius of Mr. Joseph Conrad, North American Re- 
 view, June, 1904. 
 
 2 Joseph Conrad: A Study; New York, Doubledar, Page & 
 Co., 1914. 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 61 
 
 far better in his little volume, "Joseph Conrad." ^ 
 In its brief space he is unable to examine all of the 
 books in detail, but he at least manages to get 
 through a careful study of Conrad's method, and 
 his professional skill and interest make it valuable. 
 
 §7 
 
 There is a notion that judgments of living artists 
 are impossible. They are bound to be corrupted, 
 we are told, by prejudice, false perspective, mob 
 emotion, error. The question whether this or that 
 man is great or small is one which only posterity 
 can answer. A silly begging of the question, for 
 doesn't posterity also make mistakes? Shake- 
 speare's ghost has seen two or three posterities, 
 beautifully at odds. Even today, it must notice a 
 difference in flitting from London to Berlin. The 
 shade of Milton has been tricked in the same way. 
 So, also, has Johann Sebastien Bach's. It needed 
 a Mendelssohn to rescue it from Coventry — and 
 now Mendelssohn himself, once so shining a light, 
 is condemned to the shadows in his turn. We are 
 not dead yet; we are here, and it is now. There- 
 fore, let us at least venture, guess, opine. 
 
 My own conviction, sweeping all those reaches of 
 
 1 Joseph Conrad; London, Nisbet & Co. (1916). 
 
62 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 living fiction that I know, is tha t Conrad's figu re 
 stands out from the fi^eld Jike jhe Alps Jrom the 
 Piedmont plain. ( He not only has no masters in the 
 novel; he has scarcely a colourable peer.j Perhaps 
 Thomas Hardy and Anatole France — old. men both, 
 their work behind them. But who else? James 
 is dead. Meredith is dead. So is George Moore, 
 though he lingers on. So are all the Russians of 
 the first rank; AndriefF, Gorki and their like are 
 light cavalry. In Sudermann, Germany has a 
 writer of short stories of very high calibre, but 
 where is the German novelist to match Conrad? 
 Clara Viebig? Thomas JVIann? Gustav Frens- 
 sen? Arthur Schnitzler? Surely not! As for 
 the Italians, they are either absurd tear-squeezers 
 or more absurd harlequins. As for the Spaniards 
 and the Scandinavians, they would pass for gen- 
 iuses only in Suburbia. In America, setting aside 
 an odd volume here and there, one can discern only 
 Dreiser — and of Dreiser's limitations I shall dis- 
 course anon. There remains England. England 
 has the best second-raters in the world; nowhere 
 else is the general level of novel writing so high; 
 nowhere else is there a corps of journeyman novel- 
 ists comparable to Wells, Bennett, Benson, Walpole, 
 Beresford, George, Galsworthy, Hichens, De Mor- 
 gan, Miss Sinclair, Hewlett and company. They 
 
JOSEPH CONRAD 63 
 
 have a prodigious facility; they know how to write; 
 even the least of them is, at all events, a more com- 
 petent artisan than, say, Dickens, or Bulwer-Lytton, 
 or Sienkiewicz, or Zola. But the literary grande 
 passion is simply not in them. They get nowhere 
 with their suave and interminable volumes. Their 
 view of the world and its wonders is narrow and 
 superficial. They are, at bottom, no more than 
 clever quacks. 
 
 As Galsworthy has said, Conrad lifts himself 
 immeasurably above them all. One might well call 
 him, if the term had not been cheapened into cant, 
 a cosmic artist. His mind works upon a colossal 
 scale; I he conjures up the general out of the par- 
 ticular. What he sees and describes in his books 
 is not merely this man's aspiration or that woman's 
 destiny, but the over whelming sweep and devja sta:. 
 tion of universal- forces, the great central drama 
 that is at the heart of all other dramas, the tragic 
 struggles of the soul of man under the gross stupid - 
 ity and obscene joking of^the^ods. "In the novels 
 ofXIonrad," says Galsworthy, "nature is first, man 
 is second." But not a mute, a docile second ! He 
 may think, as Walpole argues, that "life is too 
 strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons 
 of men," but he does not think that they are too 
 weak and poor in spirit to challenge it. It is the 
 
64 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 challenging that engrosses him, and enchants him, 
 and raises up the magic of his wonder. It is as 
 futile, in the end, as Hamlet's or Faust's — but still 
 a gallant and a gorgeous adventure, a game up- 
 roariously worth the playing, an enterprise "in- 
 scrutable : . . and excessively romantic." . . . 
 
 If you want to get his measure, read "Youth" or 
 "Falk" or "Heart of Darkness," and then try to 
 read the best of Kipling. I think you will come to 
 some understanding, by that simple experiment, of 
 the difference between an adroit artisan's bag of 
 tricks and the lofty sincerity and passion of a first- 
 rate artist. 
 
II. THEODORE DREISER 
 
II 
 
 THEODORE DREISER 
 
 § 1 
 
 OUT of the desert of American fictioneering, 
 so populous and yet so dreary, Dreiser 
 stands up — a phenomenon unescapably 
 visible, but disconcertingly hard to explain. What 
 forces combined to produce him in the first place, 
 and how has he managed to hold out so long against 
 the prevailing blasts — of disheartening misunder- 
 standing and misrepresentation, of Puritan suspi- 
 cion and opposition, of artistic isolation, of com- 
 mercial seduction? There is something downright 
 heroic in the way the man has held his narrow and 
 perilous ground, disdaining all compromise, un- 
 moved by the cheap success that lies so inviting 
 around the comer. He has faced, in his day, al- 
 most every form of attack that a serious artist can 
 conceivably encounter, and yet all of them together 
 have scarcely budged him an inch. He still plods 
 along in the laborious, cheerless way he first 
 marked out for himself; he is quite as undaunted 
 by baited praise as by bludgeoning, malignant 
 abuse; his later novels are, if anything, more un- 
 
 67 
 
68 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 yieldingly dreiserian than his earliest. As one 
 who has long sought to entice him in this direction 
 or that, fatuously presuming to instruct him in what 
 would improve him and profit him, I may well bear 
 a reluctant and resigned sort of testimony to his 
 gigantic steadfastness. It is almost as if any 
 change in his manner, any concession to what is 
 usual and esteemed, any amelioration of his blind, 
 relentless exercises of force majeure, were a physi- 
 cal impossibility. One feels him at last to be au- 
 thentically no more than a helpless instrument (or 
 victim) of that inchoate flow of forces which he him- 
 self is so fond of depicting as at once the answer to 
 the riddle of life, and a riddle ten times more vex- 
 ing and accursed. 
 
 And his origins, as I say, are quite as mysterious 
 as his motive power. To fit him into the unrolling 
 chart of American, or even of English fiction is ex- 
 tremely difficult. Save one thinks of H. B. Fuller 
 (whose "With the Procession" and "The Cliff- 
 Dwellers" are still remembered by Huneker, but by 
 whom else? ^), he seems to have had no fore-runner 
 
 1 Fuller's disappearance is one of the strangest phenomena of 
 American letters. I was astonished some time ago to discover 
 that he was still alive. Back in 1899 he was already so far 
 forgotten that William Archer mistook his name, calling him 
 Henry Y. Puller. Vide Archer's pamphlet, The American Lan- 
 guage; New York, 1899. 
 
THEODORE DREISER 69 
 
 among us, and for all the discussion of him that 
 goes on, he has few avowed disciples, and none of 
 them gets within miles of him. One catches echoes 
 of him, perhaps, in Willa Sibert Gather, in Mary 
 S. Watts, in David Graham Phillips, in Sherwood 
 Anderson and in Joseph Medill Patterson, but, after 
 all, they are no more than echoes. In Robert Her- 
 rick the thing descends to a feeble parody; in im- 
 itators further removed to sheer burlesque. All the 
 latter-day American novelists of consideration are 
 vajtly more facile than Dreiser in their philosophy, 
 as they are in their style. In the fact, perhaps, lies 
 the measure of their difference. What they lack, 
 great and small, is the gesture o£ pity, the note of 
 awe, the profound sense of wonder — in a^mrase, 
 thaT^oberness ot mm^^ which William Lyon 
 Phelps sees as the hallmark of Conrad and Hardy, 
 and which even the most stupid cannot escape in 
 Dreiser. The normal American novel, even in its 
 most serious forms, takes colour from the national 
 cocksureness and superficiality. It runs monoto- 
 nously to ready explanations, a somewhat infantile 
 smugness and hopefulness, a habit of reducing the 
 unknowable to terms of the not worth knowing. 
 What it cannot explain away with ready formulae, 
 as in the later Winston Ghurchill, it snickers over 
 as scarcely worth explaining at all, as in the later 
 
70' A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 Howells. Such a brave and tragic book as "Ethan 
 Frome" is so rare as to be almost singular, even with 
 Mrs. Wharton. There is, I daresay, not much mar- 
 ket for that sort of thing. In the arts, as in the 
 concerns of everyday, the American seeks escape 
 from the insoluble by pretending that it is solved. 
 A comfortable phrase is what he craves beyond all 
 things — and comfortable phrases are surely not to 
 be sought in Dreiser's stock. 
 
 I have heard argument that he is a follower of 
 Frank Norris, and two or three facts lend it a 
 specious probability. "McTeague" was printed in 
 1899; "Sister Carrie" a year later. Moreover, 
 Norris was the first to see the merit of the latter 
 book, and he fought a gallant fight, as literary ad- 
 visor to Doubleday, Page & Co., against its sup- 
 pression after it was in type. But this theory runs 
 aground upon two circumstances, the first being that 
 Dreiser did not actually read "McTeague," nor, in- 
 deed, grow aware of Norris, until after "Sister 
 Carrie" was completed, and the other being that 
 his development, once he began to write other books, 
 was along paths far distant from those pursued by 
 Norris himself. Dreiser, in truth, was a bigger 
 man than Norris from the start; it is to the latter's 
 unending honour that he recognized the fact in- 
 
 stanter, and yet did all he could to help his rival. 
 '1? 
 
THEODORE DREISER 71 
 
 It is imaginable, of course, that Norris, living fifteen 
 years longer, might have overtaken Dreiser, and 
 even surpassed him; one finds an arrow pointing 
 that way in "Vandover and the Brute" (not printed 
 until 1914) . But it swings sharply around in "The 
 Epic of the Wheat," In the second volume of that 
 incomplete trilogy, "The Pit," there is an obvious 
 concession to the popular taste in romance; the thing 
 is so frankly written down, indeed, that a play has 
 been made of it, and Broadway has applauded it. 
 And in "The Octopus," despite some excellent writ- 
 ing, there is a descent to a mysticism so fantastic 
 and preposterous that it quickly passes beyond seri- 
 ous consideration. Norris, in his day, swung even 
 lower — for example, in "A Man's Woman" and in 
 some of his short stories. He was a pioneer, per- 
 haps only half sure of the way he wanted to go, and 
 the evil lures of popular success lay all about him. 
 It is no wonder that he sometimes seemed to lose 
 his direction. 
 
 Emile Zola is another literary father whose 
 paternity grows dubious on examination. I once 
 printed an article exposing what seemed to me to 
 be a Zolaesque attitude of mind, and even some 
 trace of the actual Zola manner, in "Jennie Ger- 
 hardt" ; there came from Dreiser the news that he 
 had never read a line of Zola, and knew nothing 
 
72 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 about his novels. Not a complete answer, of 
 course; the influence might have been exerted at 
 second hand. But through whom? I confess that 
 I am vmable to name a likely medium. The effects 
 of Zola upon Anglo-Saxon fiction have been almost 
 nil; his only avowed disciple, George Moore, has 
 long since recanted and reformed; he has scarcely 
 rippled the prevailing romanticism. . . . Thomas 
 Hardy? Here, I daresay, we strike a better scent. 
 There are many obvious likenesses between "Tess 
 of the D'Urbervilles" and "Jennie Gerhardt" and 
 again between "Jude the Obscure" and ""Sister 
 Carrie." All four stories deal penetratingly and 
 poignantly with the essential tragedy of women ; all 
 disdain the petty, specious explanations of popular 
 fiction ; in each one finds a poetical and melancholy 
 beauty. Moreover, Dreiser himself confesses to an 
 enchanted discovery of Hardy in 1896, three years 
 before "Sister Carrie" was begun. But it is easy 
 to push such a fact too hard, and to search for like- 
 nesses and parallels that are really not there. The 
 truth is that Dreiser's points of contact with Hardy 
 might be easily matched by many striking points of 
 difference, and that the fundamental ideas in their 
 novels, despite a common sympathy, are anything 
 but identical. Nor does one apprehend any pon- 
 derable result of Dreiser's youthful enthusiasm for 
 
THEODORE DREISER 73 
 
 Balzac, which antedated his discovery of Hardy by 
 two years. He got from both men a sense of the 
 scope and dignity of the novel ; they taught him that 
 a story might be a good one, and yet considerably 
 more than a story; they showed him the essential 
 drama of the commonplace. But that they had 
 more influence in forming his point of view, or even 
 in shaping his technique, than any one of half a 
 dozen other gods of those young days — this I 
 scarcely find. In the structure of his novels, and 
 in their manner of approach to life no less, they 
 call up the work of Dostoevski and Turgenief far 
 more than the work of either of these men — but of 
 all the Russians save Tolstoi (as of Flaubert) 
 Dreiser himself tells us that he was ignorant until 
 ten years after "Sister Carrie." In his days of 
 preparation, indeed, his reading was so copious and 
 so disorderly that antagonistic influences must have 
 well-nigh neutralized one another, and so left the 
 curious youngster to work out his own method and 
 his own philosophy. Stevenson went down with 
 Balzac, Poe with Hardy, Dumas fils with Tolstoi. 
 There were even months of delight in Sienkiewicz, 
 Lew Wallace and E. P. Roe! The whole repertory 
 of the pedagogues had been fought through in 
 school and college: Dickens, Thackeray, Haw- 
 thorne, Washington Irving, Kingsley, Scott. Only 
 
74 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 Irving and Hawthorne seem to have made deep im- 
 pressions. "I used to lie under a tree," says 
 Dreiser, "and read 'Twice Told Tales' by the hour. 
 I thought 'The Alhambra' was a perfect creation, 
 and I still have a lingering affection for it." Add 
 Bret Harte, George Ebers, William Dean Howells, 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes, and you have a literary 
 stew indeed! . . . But for all its bubbling I see a 
 far more potent influence in the chance discovery 
 of Spencer and Huxley at twenty -three — the year of 
 choosing! Who, indeed, will ever measure the ef- 
 fect of those two giants upon the young men of that 
 era — Spencer with his inordinate meticulousness, 
 his relentless pursuit of facts, his overpowering syl- 
 logisms, and Huxley with his devastating agnosti- 
 cism, his insatiable questionings of the old axioms, 
 above all, his brilliant style? Huxley, it would 
 appear, has been condemned to the scientific hulks, 
 along with bores innumerable and unspeakable; one 
 looks in vain for any appreciation of him in trea- 
 tises on beautiful letters.^ And yet the man was a 
 
 1 For example, in The Cambridge History of English Lit- 
 erature, which runs to fourteen large volumes and a total of 
 nearly 10,000 pages, Huxley receives but a page and a quar- 
 ter of notice, and his remarkable mastery of English is barely 
 mentioned in passing. His two debates with Gladstone, in 
 which he did some of the best writing of the century, are not 
 noticed at all. 
 
THEODORE DREISER 75 
 
 superb artist in works, a master-writer even more 
 than a master-biologist, one of the few truly great 
 stylists that England has produced since the time 
 of Anne. One can easily imagine the effect of two 
 such vigorous and intriguing minds upon a youth 
 groping about for self -understanding and self-ex- 
 pression. They swept him clean, he tells us, of the 
 lingering faith of his boyhood — a mediaeval, Rhen- 
 ish Catholicism; — more, they filled him with a new 
 and eager curiosity, an intense interest in the life 
 that lay about him, a desire to seek out its hidden 
 workings and underlying causes. A young man 
 set afire by Huxley might perhaps make a very bad 
 novelist, but it is a certainty that he could never 
 make a sentimental and superficial one. There is 
 no need to go further than this single moving ad- 
 venture to find the genesis of Dreiser's disdain of 
 the current platitudes, his sense of life as a complex 
 biological phenomenon, only dimly comprehended, 
 and his tenacious way of thinking things out, and 
 of holding ^a what he finds good. Ah, that he had 
 learned from Huxley, not only how to inquire, but 
 also how to report! That he had picked up a 
 talent for that dazzling style, so sweet to the ear, so 
 damnably persuasive, so crystal-clear! 
 
 But the more one examines Dreiser, either as 
 writer or as theorist of man, the more his essential 
 
76 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 isolation becomes apparent. He got a habit of 
 mind from Huxley, but he completely missed Hux- 
 ley's habit of writing. He got a view of woman 
 from Hardy, but he soon changed it out of all re- 
 semblance. He got a certain fine ambition and 
 gusto out of Balzac, but all that was French and 
 characteristic he left behind. So with Zola, How- 
 ells, Tolstqi and the rest. The tracing of likenesses 
 quickly becomes rabbinism, almost cabalism. The 
 differences are huge and sprout up in all directions. 
 Nor do I see anything save a flaming up of colonial 
 passion in the current efforts to lit him into a Ger- 
 man frame, and make him an agent of Prussian 
 frightfulness in letters. Such bosh one looks for 
 in the Nation and the Boston Transcript, and there 
 is where one actually finds it. Even the New Re- 
 public has stood clear of it; it is important only 
 as material for that treatise upon the Anglo-Saxon 
 under the terror which remains to be written. The 
 name of the man, true enough, is obviously Ger- 
 manic, he has told us himself, in "A Traveler at 
 Forty," how he sought out and found the tombs of 
 his ancestors in some little town of the Rhine coun- 
 try. There are more of these genealogical revela- 
 tions in "A Hoosier Holiday," but they show a 
 Rhenish strain that was already running thin in 
 boyhood. No one, indeed, who reads a Dreiser 
 
THEODORE DREISER 77 
 
 novel can fail to see the gap separating the author 
 from these half-forgotten forbears. He shows 
 even less of German influence than of English in- 
 fluence. 
 
 There is, as a matter of fact, little in modem 
 German fiction that is intelligibly comparable to 
 "Jennie Gerhardt" and "The Titan," either as a 
 study of man or as a work of art. The naturalistic 
 movement of the eighties was launched by men 
 whose eyes were upon the theatre, and it is in that 
 field that nine-tenths of its force has been spent. 
 "German naturalism," says George Madison Priest, 
 quoting Gotthold Klee's "Grunziige der deutschen 
 Literaturgeschichte" "created a new type only in 
 the drama." ^ True enough, it has also produced 
 occasional novels, and some of them are respectable. 
 Gustav Frenssen's "Jom Uhl" is a specimen : it has 
 been done into English. Another is Clara Viebig's 
 "Das tagliche Brot," which Ludwig Lewissohn com- 
 pares to George Moore's "Esther Waters." Yet 
 another is Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks." But 
 it would be absurd to cite these works as evidences 
 of a national quality, and doubly absurd to think 
 of them as inspiring such books as "Jennie Ger- 
 hardt" and "The Titan," which excel them in every- 
 
 lA Brief History of German Literature; New York, Chas. 
 Scribner's Sons, 1909. 
 
78 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 thing save workmanship. The case of Mann re- 
 veals a tendency that is visible in nearly all of his 
 contemporaries. Starting out as an agnostic real- 
 ist not unlike the Arnold Bennett of "The Old 
 Wives' Tale," he has gradually taken on a hesitating 
 sort of romanticism, and in one of his later books, 
 "Konigliche Hoheit" (in English, "Royal High- 
 ness") he ends upon a note of sentimentalism bor- 
 rowed from Wagner's "Ring." Fraulein Viebig has 
 also succumbed to banal and extra-artistic purposes. 
 Her "Die Wacht am Rheim," for all its merits in 
 detail, is, at bottom, no more than an eloquent hymn 
 to patriotism — the most doggish and dubious of all 
 the virtues. As for Frenssen, he is a parson by 
 trade, and carries over into the novel a good deal 
 of the windy moralizing of the pulpit. All of these 
 German naturalists — and they are the only German 
 novelists worth considering — share the weakness of 
 Zola, their Stammvater. They, too, fall into the 
 morass that engulfed "Fecondite," and make senti- 
 mental propaganda. 
 
 I go into this matter in detail, not because it is 
 intrinsically of any moment, but because the effort 
 to depict Dreiser as a secret agent of the Wilhelm- 
 strasse, told off to inject subtle doses of Kultur into 
 a naif and pious people, has taken on the propor- 
 tions of an organized movement. The same critical 
 
THEODORE DREISER 79 
 
 imbecility which detects naught save a Tom cat in 
 Frank Cowperwood can find naught save an abhor- 
 rent foreigner in Cowperwood's creator. The 
 truth is that the trembling patriots of letters, male 
 and female, are simply at their old game of seeing 
 a man under the bed. Dreiser, in fact, is densely 
 ignorant of German literature, as he is of the bet- 
 ter part of French literature, and of much of Eng- 
 lish literature. He did not even read Hauptmann 
 until after "Jennie Gerhardt" had been written, 
 and such typical German modems as Ludwig 
 Thoma, Otto Julius Bierbaum and Richard Dehmel 
 remain as strange to him as Heliogabalus. 
 
 §2 
 
 In his manner, as opposed to his matter, he 
 is more the Teuton, for he shows all of the racial 
 patience and pertinacity and all of the racial lack 
 of humour. Writing a novel is as solemn a busi-\ 
 ness to him as trimming a beard is to a German; 
 barber. He blasts his way through his intermi- 
 nable stories by something not unlike main strength; 
 his writing, one feels, often takes on the character 
 of an actual siege operation, with tunnellings, drum 
 fire, assaults in close order and hand-to-hand fight- 
 ing. Once, seeking an analogy, I called him the 
 
80 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 Hinjpnhiirr f^f thf no vel. I f it holds, then "The 
 Genius' " is his Poland. The field of action bears 
 the aspect, at the end, of a hostile province meticu- 
 lously brought under the yoke, with every road and 
 lane explored to its beginning, and every cross- 
 roads village laboriously taken, inventoried and\ 
 policed. Here is the very negation of Gallic light- \ 
 ness and intuition, and of all other forms of im^ 
 pressionism as well. Here is no series of illuminat- 
 ing flashes, but a gradual bathing of the whole scene 
 with white light, so that every detail stands out. 
 
 And many of those details, of course, are trivial; 
 even irritating. They do not help the picture; they 
 muddle and obscure it; one wonders impatiently 
 what their meaning is, and what the purpose may 
 be of revealing them with such a precise, portentous 
 air. . . . Turn to page 703 of "The 'Genius.' " 
 By the time one gets there, one has hewn and hacked 
 one's way through 702 large pages of fine print 
 — 97 long chapters, more than 250,000 words. 
 And yet, at this hurried and impatient point, with 
 the coda already begun, Dreiser halts the whole nar- 
 rative to explain the origin, nature and inner mean- 
 ing of Christian Science, and to make us privy to 
 a lot of chatty stuff about Mrs. Althea Jones, a pro- 
 fessional healer, and to supply us with detailed 
 plans and specifications of the apartment house in 
 
THEODORE DREISER 81 
 
 which she lives, works her tawdry miracles, and has 
 her being. Here, in sober summary, are the par- 
 ticulars : 
 
 1. That the house is "of conventional design." 
 
 2. That there is "a spacious areaway" between its two 
 wings. 
 
 3. That these wings are "of cream-coloured pressed brick." 
 
 4. That the entrance between them is "protected by a hand- 
 some wrought-iron door." 
 
 5. That to either side of this door is "an electric lamp sup- 
 port of handsome design.'' 
 
 6. That in each of these lamp supports there are "lovely 
 cream-coloured globes, shedding a soft lustre." 
 
 7. That inside is "the usual lobby.'' 
 
 8. That in the lobby is "the usual elevator." 
 
 9. That in the elevator is the usual "uniformed negro ele- 
 vator man." 
 
 10. That this negro elevator man (name not given) is "in- 
 different and impertinent." 
 
 11. That a telephone switchboard is also in the lobby. 
 
 12. That the building is seven stories in height. 
 
 In "The Financier" there is the same exasperat- 
 ing rolling up of irrelevant facts. The court pro- 
 ceedings in the trial of Cowperwood are given with 
 all the exactness of a parliamentary report in the 
 London Times. The speeches of the opposing 
 counsel are set down nearly in full, and with them 
 the remarks of the judge, and after that the opinion 
 of the Appellate Court on appeal, with the dissenting 
 opinions as a sort of appendix. In "Sister Carrie" 
 the thing is less savagely carried out, but that is 
 
82 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 not Dreiser's fault, for the manuscript was revised 
 by some anonymous hand, and the printed version 
 is but little more than half the length of the original. 
 In "The Titan" and "Jennie Gerhardt" no such 
 brake upon exuberance is visible; both books are 
 crammed with details that serve no purpose, and 
 are as flat as ditch-water. Even in the two volumes 
 of personal record, "A Traveler at Forty" and "A 
 Hoosier Holiday," there is the same furious accu- 
 mulation of trivialities. Consider the former. It 
 is without structure, without selection, without reti- 
 cence. One arises from it as from a great babbling, 
 half drunken. On the one hand the author fills a 
 long and gloomy chapter with the story of the 
 Borgias, apparently under the impression that it is 
 news, and on the other hand he enters into intimate 
 and inconsequential confidences about all the per- 
 sons he meets en route, sparing neither the innocent 
 nor the obscure. The children of his English host 
 at Bridgely Level strike him as fantastic little crea- 
 tures, even as a bit uncanny — and he duly sets it 
 down. He meets an Englishman on a French train 
 who pleases him much, and the two become good 
 friends and see Rome together, but the fellow's wife 
 is "obstreperous" and "haughty in her manner" and 
 so "loud-spoken in her opinions" that she is "really 
 offensive" — and down it goes. He makes an im- 
 
THEODORE DREISER 83 
 
 pression on a Mile. Marcelle in Paris, and she ac- 
 companies him from Monte Carlo to Ventimiglia, 
 and there gives him a parting kiss and whispers, 
 "Avril-Fontainebleau" — and lo, this sweet one is 
 duly spread upon the minutes. He permits himself 
 to be arrested by a fair privateer in Piccadilly, and 
 goes with her to one of the dens of sin that suf- 
 fragettes see in their nightmares, and cross-examines 
 her at length regarding her ancestry, her profes- 
 sional ethics and ideals, and her earnings at her 
 dismal craft — and into the book goes a full report 
 of the proceedings. He is entertained by an emi- 
 nent Dutch jurist in Amsterdam — and upon the 
 pages of the chronicle it appears that the gentleman 
 is "waxy" and "a little pedantic," and that he is 
 probably the sort of "thin, delicate, well barbered" 
 professor that Ibsen had in mind when he cast about 
 for a husband for the daughter of General Gabler. 
 Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands 
 it and practises it — an endless piling up^^of_^in- 
 utiae, an almost f erocious tracking down of Hbhs,\ 
 electro ns andj iolecules, an unshakaHedetermiha- 
 tion to tell it all. Unels amazed by~the mole-like 
 diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperat- 
 ing disregard for the ease of his readers. A 
 Dreiser novel, at least of the later canon, cannot be 
 read as other novels are read — on a winter evening 
 
84 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 or summer afternoon, between meal and meal, 
 travelling from New York to Boston. It demands 
 the attention for almost a week, and uses up the 
 faculties for a month. If, reading "The 'Genius,' " 
 one were to become engrossed in the fabulous man- 
 ner described in the publishers' advertisements, and 
 so find oneself unable to put it down and go to 
 bed before the end, one would get no sleep for three 
 days and three nights. 
 
 Worse, there ar e no charm s of style to mi jigate- 
 the rigours of these vast_steppes_and pampas of 
 narration. Joseph Joubert's saying that "words" 
 sEould stand out well from the paper" is quite in- 
 comprehensible to Dreiser; he never imitates Flau- 
 ^bert by writing for "la respiration et I'oreille." 
 There is no painful groping for the inevitable word, 
 or for what Walter Pater called "the gipsy phrase" ; 
 the commo n^ even the comm onpl ace, coin of sp eech 
 is good enough. On the first page of "Jennie Ger- 
 hardt' one encounters "frank, open countenance," 
 "diffident manner," "helpless poor," "untutored 
 mind," "honest necessity," and half a dozen other 
 stand-bys of the second-rate newspaper reporter. 
 Ir> "Sister- Carrie" one finds "hi^h noon," "huxry-- 
 ing throng," "unassuming restaurant," "dainty 
 slippers," "high-strung nature," and "cool, calculat- 
 
THEODORE DREISER 85 
 
 ing world" — all on a few pages. Carrie's sister, 
 Minnie Hanson, "gets" the supper. Hanson him- 
 self is "wrapped up" in his child. Carrie decides 
 to enter Storm and King's office, "no matter what." 
 In "The Titan" the word "trig" is worked to death; 
 it takes on, toward the end, the character of a banal 
 and preposterous refrain. In the other books one 
 encounters mates for it — words made to do duty 
 in as many senses as the American verb "to fix" or 
 the journalistic "to secure." . . . 
 
 I often wonder if Dreiser gets anything properly 
 describable as pleasure out of this dogged accumu- 
 lation of thr eadbare, u ndistinguished, uninspiring; 
 nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, par- 
 ticiples and conjunctions. To the man with an ear 
 for verbal delicacies — the man who searches pain- 
 fully for the perfect word, and puts the way of say- 
 ing a thing above the thing said — there is in writing 
 the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy ac- 
 cident. A phrase springs up full blown, sweet and 
 caressing. But what joy can there be in rolling 
 up sentences that have no more life and beauty in 
 them, intrinsically, than so many election bulletins? 
 Where is the thrill in the manufacture of such a 
 paragraph as that in which Mrs. Althea Jones' 
 sordid habitat is described with such inexorable par- 
 
86 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 ticularity? Or in the laborious confection of 
 such stuff as this, from Book I, Chapter IV, of "The 
 'Genius'"?: 
 
 The city of Chicago — who shall portray it ! This vast ruck 
 of life that had sprung suddenly into existence upon the dank 
 marshes of a lake shore ! 
 
 Or this from the epilogue to "The Financier"; 
 
 There is a certain fish whose scientific name is .My cteroperca 
 Bonaci, and whose common name is Black Grouper, which is 
 of considerable value as an afterthought in this connection, 
 and which deserves much to be better known. It is a healthy 
 creature, growing quite regularly to a weight of two hundred 
 and fifty pounds, and living a comfortable, lengthy existence 
 because of its very remarkable ability to adapt itself to con- 
 ditions. . . . 
 
 Or this from his pamphlet, "Life, Art and Amer- 
 ica": 1 
 
 Alas, alas! for art in America. It has a hard stubby row 
 to hoe. 
 
 But I offer no more examples. Every reader of 
 the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding speci- 
 mens — of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of 
 whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as 
 brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulphite. 
 Here and there, as in parts of "The Titan" and 
 again in parts of "A Hoosier Holiday," an evil 
 
 1 New York, 1917; reprinted from The Seven Arts for Feb., 
 1917. 
 
THEODORE DREISER 87 
 
 conscience seems to haunt him and he gives hard 
 striving to his manner, and more than once there 
 emerges something that is almost graceful. But 
 a backsliding always follows this phosphorescence 
 of reform. "The 'Genius,' " coming after "The 
 Titan," marks the high tide of his bad writing. 
 There are passages in it so clumsy, so inept, so ir- 
 ritating that they seem almost unbelievable; nothing 
 worse is to be found in the newspapers. Nor is 
 there any compensatory deftness in structure, or 
 solidity of design, to make up for this carelessness 
 in detail. The well-made novel, of course, can be 
 as hollow as the well-made play of Scribe — but let 
 us at least have a beginning, a middle and an end! 
 Such a story as "The 'Genius' " is as gross and 
 shapeless as Briinnhilde. It billows and bulges out 
 like a cloud of smoke, and its internal organization 
 is almost as vague. There are episodes that, with 
 a few chapters added, would make very respectable 
 novels. There are chapters that need but a touch or 
 two to be excellent short stories. The thing ram- 
 bles, staggers, trips, heaves, pitches, struggles, tot- 
 ters, wavers, halts, turns aside, trembles on the edge 
 of collapse. More than once it seems to be foun- 
 dering, both in the equine and in the maritime 
 senses. The tale has been heard of a tree so tall 
 that it took two men to see to the top of it. Here 
 
88 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 is a novel so brobdingnagian that a single reader 
 can scarcely read his way through it. . . . 
 
 Of the general ideas which lie at the bottom of 
 all of Dreiser's work it is impossible to be in igno- 
 rance, for he has exposed them at l ength in "A 
 Hoosier Holiday" and summarized them in "Life, 
 Art and America." In their main outlines they are 
 not unlike the fundamental assumptions of Joseph 
 Conrad. Both novelists see human existence as a 
 seeking without a finding; both reject the prevailing 
 interpretations of its meaning and mechanism; both 
 take refuge in "I do not know." Put "A Hoosier 
 Holiday" beside Conrad's "A Personal Record," 
 and you will come upon parallels from end to end. 
 Or better still, put it beside Hugh Walpole's "Joseph 
 Conrad," in which the Conradean metaphysic is 
 condensed from the novels even better than Con- 
 rad has done it himself: at once you will see how 
 the two novelists, each a worker in the elemental 
 emotions, each a rebel against the current assur- 
 ance and superficiality, each an alien to his place 
 and time, touch each other in a hundred ways. 
 
 "Conrad," says Walpole, "is of the firm and 
 resolute conviction that life is too strong, too clever 
 
THEODORE DREISER 89 
 
 and too remorseless for the sons of men." And 
 then, in amplification: "It is as though, from 
 some high window, looking down, he were able to 
 watch some shore, from whose security men were 
 forever launching little cockleshell boats upon a 
 limitless and angry sea. . . . From his height he 
 can follow their fortunes, their brave struggles, 
 their fortitude to the very end. He admires their 
 courage, the simplicity of their faith, but his irony 
 springs from his knowledge of the inevitable 
 end." . . . 
 
 Substitute the name of Dreiser for that of Con- 
 rad, and you will have to change scarcely a word. 
 Perhaps one, to wit, "clever." I suspect that 
 Dreiser, writing so of his own creed, would be 
 tempted to make it "stupid," or, at all events, "un- 
 intelligible." The struggle o f man, as h e sees it, 
 is more than impotent; it is gratuitous and purpose- 
 less. There is, to his eye, no grand ingenuity, no 
 skilful adaptation of means to end, no moral (or 
 even dramatic) plan in the order of the universe. 
 He can get out of it only a sense of profound and 
 inexplicable disorder. The waves which batter the 
 cockleshells change their direction at every instant. 
 Their navigation is a vast adventure, but intolerably 
 fortuitous and inept — a voyage without chart, com- 
 pass, sun or stars. , . . 
 
90 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 So at bottom. But to look into the blackness 
 steadily, of course, is almost beyond the endurance 
 of man. In the very moment that its impenetra- 
 bility is grasped the imagination begins attacking 
 it with pale beams of false light. All religions, I 
 daresay, are thus projected from the questioning 
 soul of man, and not only all religious, but also 
 all great agnosticisms. Nietzsche, shrinking from 
 the horror of that abyss of negation, revived the 
 Pythagorean concept of der ewigen Wiederkunft — 
 a vain and blood-curdling sort of comfort. To it, 
 after a while, he added explanations almost Chris- 
 tian — a whole repertoire of whys and wherefores, 
 aims and goals, aspirations and significances. The 
 late Mark Twain, in an unpublished work, toyed 
 with aHe^qually daring idea: that men are to some 
 unimaginably vast and incomprehensible Being 
 what the unicellular organisms of his body are to 
 man, and so on ad infinitum. Dreiser occasion- 
 ally inclines to much the same hypothesis ; he likens 
 the endless reactions going on in the world we 
 know, the myriadal creation, collision and destruc- 
 tion of entities, to the slow accumulation and or- 
 ganization of cells in utero. He would make us 
 specks in the insentient embryo of some gigantic 
 Presence whose form is still unimaginable and 
 whose birth must wait for Eons and Eons. Again, 
 
THEODORE DREISER 91 
 
 he turns to something not easily distinguishable 
 from philosophical idealism, whether out of Berke- 
 ley or Fichte it is hard to make out — that is, he 
 would interpret the whole phenomenon of life as 
 no more than an appearance, a nightmare of some 
 unseen sleeper or of men themselves, an "uncanny 
 blur of nothingness" — in Euripides' phrase, "a 
 song sung by an idiot, dancing down the wind." 
 Yet again, he talks vaguely of the intricate poly- 
 phony of a cosmic orchestra, cacophonous to our 
 dull ears. Finally, he puts the observed into the 
 ordered, reading a purpose in the displayed event: 
 "life was intended to sting and hurt" . . . But 
 these are only gropings, and not to be read too 
 critically. From speculations and explanations he 
 always returns, Conrad-like, to the bald fact: to 
 "the spectacle and stress of life." All he can make 
 out clearly is "a vast compulsion which has nothing 
 to do with the individual desires or tastes of im- 
 pulses of individuals." That compulsion springs 
 "from the settling processes of forces which we do 
 not in the least understand, over which we have no 
 control, and in whose grip we are as grains of dust 
 or sand, blown hither and thither, for what pur- 
 pose we cannot even suspect." ^ Man is not only 
 doomed to defeat, but denied any glimpse or un- 
 
 1 Life, Art and America, p. 5. 
 
92 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 derstanding of his antagonist. Here we come 
 upon an agnosticism that has almost got beyond 
 curiosity. What good would it do us, asks Dreiser, 
 to know? In our ignorance and helplessness, we 
 may at least get a slave's consolation out of cursing 
 the unknown gods. Suppose we saw them striving 
 blindly, too, and pitied them? . . . 
 
 But, as I say, this scepticism is often tempered 
 by guesses at a possibly hidden truth, and the con- 
 fession that this truth may exist reveals the prac- 
 tical unworkableness of the unconditioned system, 
 at least for Dreiser. Conrad is far more resolute, 
 and it is easy to see why. He is, by birth and 
 training, an aristocrat. He has the gift of emo- 
 tional detachment. The lures of facile doctrine 
 do not move him. In his irony there is a disdain 
 which plays about even the ironist himself. 
 Dreiser is a product of far different forces and 
 traditions, and is capable of no such escapement. 
 Struggle as he may, and fume and protest as he 
 may, he can no more shake off the chains of his in- 
 tellectual and cultural heritage than he can change 
 the shape of his nose. What that heritage is you 
 may find out in detail by reading "A Hoosier Holi- 
 day," or in summary by glancing at the first few 
 pages of "Life, Art and America." Briefly de- 
 scribed, it is the burden of a believing mind, a 
 
THEODORE DREISER 93 
 
 moral attitude, a lingering superstition. One-half 
 of the man's brain, so to speak, wars with the other 
 half. He is intelligent, he is thoughtful, he is a 
 sound artist — but there come moments when a dead 
 hand falls upon him, and he is once more the In- 
 diana peasant, snuffing absurdly over imbecile sen- 
 timentalities, giving a grave ear to quackeries, 
 snorting and eye-rolling with the best of them. 
 One generation spans too short a time to free the 
 soul of man. Nietzsche, to the end of his days, 
 remained a Prussian pastor's son, and hence two- 
 thirds a Puritan; he erected his war upon holiness, 
 toward the end, into a sort of holy war. Kipling, 
 the grandson of a Methodist preacher, reveals the 
 tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth 
 and its ribaldries pass away and he falls back upon 
 his fundamentals. And that other English novelist 
 who springs from the servants' hall — let us not be 
 surprised or blame him if he sometimes writes like 
 a boimder. 
 
 The truth about Dreiser is that he is still in the 
 transition stage between Christian Endeavour and 
 civilization, between Warsaw, Indiana and the 
 Socratic grove, between being a good American and 
 being a free man, and so he sometimes vacillates 
 perilously between a moral sentimentalism and a 
 somewhat extravagant revolt.. "The 'Genius,' " on-- 
 
94 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 the one hand, is ahnost a tract for rectitude, a 
 Warning to the Young; its motto might be Scheut 
 die Dirnen! And on the other hand, it is full of a 
 laborious truculence that can only be explained 
 by imagining the author as heroically determined 
 to prove that he is a plain-spoken fellow and his 
 own man, let the chips fall where they may. So, 
 in spots, in "The Financier" and "The Titan," both 
 of them far better books. There is an ahnost moral 
 frenzy to expose and riddle what passes for mor- 
 ality among the stupid. The isolation of irony is 
 never reached; the man is still evangelical; his 
 ideas are still novelties to him; he is as solemnly 
 absurd in some of his floutings of the Code Ameri- 
 can as he is in his respect for Bouguereau, or in 
 his flirtings with the New Thought, or in his naif 
 belief in the importance of novel-writing. Some- 
 where or other I have called all this the Greenwich 
 Village complex. It is not genuine artists, serving 
 beauty reverently and proudly, who herd in those 
 cockroached cellars and bawl for art; it is a mob 
 of half -educated yokels and cockneys to whom the 
 very idea of art is still novel, and intoxicating — 
 and more than a little bawdy. 
 
 Not that Dreiser actually belongs to this raga- 
 muffin company. Far from it, indeed. There is 
 in him, hidden deep-down, a great instinctive artist, 
 
THEODORE DREISER 95 
 
 and hence the makings of an aristocrat. In his 
 muddled way, held back by the manacles of his 
 race and time, and his steps made uncertain by a 
 guiding theory which too often eludes his own com- 
 prehension, he yet manages to produce works of 
 art of unquestionable beauty and authority, and to 
 interpret life in a manner that is poignant and 
 illuminating. There is vastly rpnr^ '"'iiitinn in 
 him than intellectualism; his talent is essentially 
 feminine, as Conrad's is masculine; his ideas al- 
 ways seem to be deduced from his feelings. The 
 view of life that got into "Sister Carrie," his fii;s|; 
 bookj^was not the product of a conscious thinking 
 out of Carrie's problems. It simply got itself there 
 by the force of the artistic passion behind it; it$ 
 coherent statement- had to wait for ^ther a nd more . 
 reflecfive days. The thing began as a vision, not 
 as a syllogism. Here the name of Franz Schubert 
 inevitably comes up. Schubert was an ignoramus, 
 even in music; he knew less about polyphony, which 
 is the mother of harmony, which is the mother 
 of music, than the average conservatory profes- 
 sor. But nevertheless he had such a vast instinc- 
 tive sensitiveness to musical values, such a pro- 
 found and accurate feeling for beauty in tone, that 
 he not only arrived at the truth in tonal relations, but 
 even went beyond what, in his day, was known to 
 
96 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 be the truth, and so led an advance. Likewise, 
 Giorgione da Castelfranco and Masaccio come to 
 mind: painters of the first rank, but untutored, un- 
 sophisticated, imcouth. Dreiser, within his limits, 
 belongs to this .f abot-shod company of the elect. 
 One thinks of Conrad, not as artist first, but as 
 savant. There is something of the icy aloofness of 
 the laboratory in him, even when the images he 
 conjures up pulsate with the very glow of life. 
 He is almost as self-conscious as the Beethoven of 
 the last quartets. In Dreiser the thing is more in- 
 timate, more disorderly, more a matter of pure 
 feeling. , H e gets his ..£ffgctav.one niight almost say, 
 not by designing them, but by living them. 
 
 But whateverlIi5"protess, th'epower of the image 
 evoked is not to be gainsaid. It is not only bril- 
 liant on the surface, but mysterious and appealing 
 in its depths. One swiftly forgets his intolerable 
 writing, his mirthless, sedulous, repellent manner, 
 in the face of the Athenian tragedy he instils into 
 his seduced and soul-sick servant girls, his bar- 
 baric pirates of finances, his conquered and ham- 
 strung supermen, his wives who sit and wait. He 
 has, like Conrad, a sure talent for depicting the 
 spirit in disintegration. Old Gerhardt, in "Jennie 
 Gerhardt," is alone worth all the dramatis per- 
 sonae of popular American fiction since the days 
 
THEODORE DREISER 97 
 
 of "Rob o' the Bowl"; Howells could no more 
 have created him, in his Rodinesque impudence of 
 outline, than he could have created Tartuffe or 
 Gargantua. Such a novel as "Sister Carrie" stands 
 quite outside the brief JrafiBcaf. the, -customaiy: 
 stage^ It leaves behind it an imescapable impres- 
 sion of bigness, of epic sweep and dignity. It is 
 not a mere story, not a novel in the customary 
 American meaning of the word; it_is at once a 
 psalm of life and a criticism of Jiffr — and that, 
 criticism loses nothing by the fact that its burden 
 is despair. Here, precisely, is the point of Drei- 
 ser's departure from his fellows. He puts into 
 his novels a touch of the eternal Weltschmerz. 
 They get below the drama that is of the mo- 
 ment and reveal the greater drama that is with- 
 out end. They arouse those deep and lasting 
 emotions which grow out of the recognition of 
 elemental and universal tragedy. His aim is 
 not merely to tell a tale; his aim is to show the 
 vast ebb and flow of forces which sway and condi- 
 tion human destiny. One cannot imagine him con- 
 senting to Conan Doyle's staTement of the purpose 
 of fiction, quoted with characteristic approval by the 
 New York Times: "to amuse mankind, to help 
 the sick and the dull and the weary." Nor is his 
 purpose to instruct; if he is a pedagogue it is only 
 
98 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 incidentally and as a weakness. The thing, he 
 seeks to do is to stir, to awaken, to^move. One does 
 not arise from such a book as "Sister Carrie" with 
 a smirk of satisfaction; one leaves it infinitely 
 touched. 
 
 § 4 
 
 It is, indeed, a truly amazing first book, and one 
 marvels to hear that it was begun lightly. Dreiser 
 in those days (circa 1899), had seven or eight years 
 of newspaper work behind him, in Chicago, St. 
 Louis, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh and 
 New York, and was beginning to feel that reaction 
 of disgust which attacks all newspaper men when 
 the enthusiasm of youth wears out. He had been 
 successful, but he saw how hollow that success was, 
 and how little surety it held out for the future. 
 The theatre was what chiefly lured him; he had 
 written plays in his nonage, and he now proposed to 
 do them on a large scale, and so get some of the 
 easy dollars of Broadway. It was an old friend 
 from Toledo, Arthur Henry, who turned him to- 
 ward story-writing. The two had met while Henry 
 was city editor of the Blade, and Dreiser a reporter 
 looking for a job.^ A firm friendship sprang up, and 
 Henry conceived a high opinion of Dreiser's ability, 
 
 1 The episode is related in A Hoosier Holiday. 
 
THEODORE DREISER 99 
 
 and urged him to try a short story. Dreiser was 
 distrustful of his own skill, but Henry kept at him, 
 and finally, during a holiday the two spent together 
 at Maumee, Ohio, he made the attempt. Henry 
 had the manuscript typewritten and sent it to 
 A inslee's Magazine. A week or so later there came 
 a cheque for $75. 
 
 This was in 1898. Dreiser wrote four more 
 stories during the year following, and sold them 
 all. Henry now urged him to attempt a novel, but 
 again his distrust of himself held him back. 
 Henry finally tried a rather unusual argument: 
 he had a novel of his own on the stocks,^ and he 
 represented that he was in difficulties with it and in 
 need of company. One day, in September, 1899, 
 Drieser took a sheet of yellow paper and wrote a 
 title at random. That title was "Sister Carrie," 
 and with no more definite plan than the mere name 
 offered the book began. It went ahead steadily 
 enough until the middle of October, and had come 
 by then to the place where Carrie meets Hurstwood. 
 At that point Dreiser left it in disgust. It seemed 
 pitifully dull and inconsequential, and for two 
 months he put the manuscript away. Then, under 
 renewed urgings by Henry, he resumed the writing, 
 and kept on to the place where Hurstwood steals 
 
 1 A Princess of Arcady, published in 1900. 
 
100 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 the money. Here he went aground upon a com- 
 paratively simple problem; he couldn't devise a 
 way to manage the robbery. Late in January he 
 gave it up. But the faithful Henry kept urging 
 him, and in March he resumed work, and soon had 
 the story finished. The latter part, despite many 
 distractions, went quickly. Once the manuscript 
 was complete, Henry suggested various cuts, and 
 in all about 40,000 words came out. The fair copy 
 went to the Harpers, They refused it without 
 ceremony and soon afterward Dreiser carried the 
 manuscript to Doubleday, Page & Co. He left 
 it with Frank Doubleday, and before long there 
 came notice of its acceptance, and, what is more, a 
 contract. But after the story was in type it fell into 
 the hands of the wife of one of the members of 
 the firm, and she conceived so strong a notion of 
 its immorality that she soon convinced her husband 
 and his associates. There followed a series of 
 acrimonious negotiation, with Dreiser holding reso- 
 lutely to the letter of his contract. It was at this 
 point that Frank Norris entered the combat — 
 bravely but in vain. The pious Barabbases, con- 
 fronted by their signature, found it impossible to 
 throw up the book entirely, but there was no nomi- 
 nation in the bond regarding either the style of 
 binding or the number of copies to be issued, and 
 
THEODORE DREISER 101 
 
 so they evaded further dispute by bringing out 
 the book in a very small edition and with modest 
 unstamped covers. Copies of this edition are now 
 eagerly sought by book-collectors, and one in good 
 condition fetches $25 or more in the auction rooms. 
 Even the second edition (1907), bearing the im- 
 print of B. W. Dodge & Co., carries an increasing 
 premium. 
 
 The passing years work strange farces. The 
 Harpers, who had refused "Sister Carrie" with a 
 spirit bordering upon indignation in 1900, took 
 over the rights of publication from B. W. Dodge & 
 Co., in 1912, and reissued the book in a new (and 
 extremely hideous) format, with a publisher's note 
 containing smug quotations from the encomiums 
 of the Fortnightly Review, the Athenaeum, the 
 Spectator, the Academy and other London critical 
 journals. More, they contrived humorously to 
 push the date of their copyright back to 1900. But 
 this new enthusiasm for artistic freedom did not last 
 long. They had published "Jennie Gerhardt" in 
 1911 and they did "The Financier" in 1912, but 
 when "The Titan" followed, in 1914, they were 
 seized with qualms, and suppressed the book after 
 it had got into type. In this emergency the Eng- 
 lish firm of John Lane came to the rescue, only to 
 seek cover itself when the Comstocks attacked "The 
 
102 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 'Genius,' " two years later. . . . For his high serv- 
 ices to American letters, Walter H. Page, of 
 Doubleday, Page & Co., was made ambassador to 
 England, where "Sister Carrie" is regarded (ac- 
 cording to the Harpers), as "the best story, on the 
 whole, that has yet come out of America." A 
 curious series of episodes. Another proof, per- 
 haps, of that cosmic imbecility upon which Dreiser 
 is so fond of discoursing. . . . 
 
 But of all this I shall say more later on, when 
 I come to discuss the critical reception of the Drei- 
 ser novels, and the efforts made by the New York 
 Society for the Suppression of Vice to stop their 
 sale. The thing to notice here is that the author's 
 difficulties with "Sister Carrie" came within an 
 ace of turning him from novel-writing completely. 
 Stray copies of the suppressed first edition, true 
 enough, fell into the hands of critics who saw the 
 story's value, and during the first year or two of 
 the century it enjoyed a sort of esoteric vogue, and 
 encouragement came from unexpected sources. 
 Moreover, a somewhat bowdlerized English edi- 
 tion, published by William Heinemann in 1901, 
 made a fair success, and even provoked a certain 
 mild controversy. But the author's income from 
 the book remained almost nil, and so he was forced 
 to seek a livelihood in other directions. His his- 
 
THEODORE DREISER 103 
 
 tory during the next ten years belongs to the tragi- 
 comedy of letters. For five of them he was a Grub 
 Street hack, turning his hand to any literary job 
 that offered. He wrote short stories for the popu- 
 lar magazines, or special articles, or poems, accord- 
 ing as their needs varied. He concocted fabulous 
 tales for the illustrated supplements of the Sunday 
 newspapers. He rewrote the bad stuff of other 
 men. He returned to reporting. He did odd 
 pieces of editing. He tried his hand at one-act 
 plays. He even ventured upon advertisement 
 writing. And all the while, the best that he could 
 get out of his industry was a meagre living. 
 
 In 1905, tiring of the uncertainties of this life, 
 he accepted a post on the staff of Street & Smith, 
 the millionaire publishers of cheap magazines, serv- 
 ant-girl romances and dime-novels, and here, in 
 the very slums of letters, he laboured with tongue 
 in cheek imtil the next year. The tale of his duties 
 will fill, I daresay, a volume or two in the autobiog- 
 raphy on which he is said to be working; it is a 
 chronicle full of achieved impossibilities. One of 
 his jobs, for example, was to reduce a whole series 
 of dime-novels, each 60,000 words in length, to 
 30,000 words apiece. He accomplished it by cut- 
 ting each one into halves, and writing a new end- 
 ing for the first half and a new beginning for the 
 
104 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 second, with new titles for both. This doubling 
 of their property aroused the admiration of his 
 employers ; they promised him an assured and easy 
 future in the dime-novel business. But he tired 
 of it, despite this revelation of a gift for it, and in 
 1906 he became managing editor of the Broadway 
 Magazine, then struggling into public notice. A 
 year later he transferred his flag to the Butterick 
 Building, and became chief editor of the Delin- 
 eator, the Designer and other such gospels for the 
 fair. Here, of course, he was as much out of water 
 as in the dime-novel foundry of Street & Smith, but 
 at all events the pay was good, and there was a 
 certain leisure at the end of the day's work. In 
 1907, as part of his duties, he organized the Na- 
 tional Child Rescue Campaign, which still rages as 
 the Delineator's contribution to the Uplift. At 
 about the same time he began "Jennie Gerhardt." 
 It is curious to note that, during these same years, 
 Arnold Bennett was slaving in London as the editor 
 of Woman. ' 
 
 Dreiser left the Delineator in 1910, and for the 
 next half year or so endeavoured to pump vitality 
 into the Bohemian Magazine, in which he had ac- 
 quired a proprietary interest. But the Bohemian 
 soon departed this life, carrying some of his sav- 
 ings with it, and he gave over his enforced leisure 
 
THEODORE DREISER 105 
 
 to "Jennie Gerhardt," completing the book in 1911. 
 Its publication by the Harpers during the same 
 year worked his final emancipation from the edi- 
 torial desk. It was praised, and what is more, it 
 sold, and royalties began to come in. A new edi- 
 tion of "Sister Carrie" followed in 1912, with "The 
 Financier" hard upon its heels. Since then Dreiser 
 has devoted himself wholly to serious work. "The 
 Financier" was put forth as the first volume of "a 
 trilogy of desire"; the second volume, "The 
 Titan," was published in 1914; the third is yet to 
 come. "The 'Genius' " appeared in 1915; "The 
 Bulwark" is just announced. In 1912, accom- 
 panied by Grant Richards, the London publisher, 
 Dreiser made his first trip abroad, visiting England, 
 France, Italy and Germany. His impressions were 
 recorded in "A Traveler at Forty," published in 
 1913. In the summer of 1915, accompanied by 
 Franklin Booth, the illustrator, he made an automo- 
 bile journey to his old haunts in Indiana, and the 
 record is in "A Hoosier Holiday," published in 
 1916. His other writings include a volume of 
 "Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural" 
 (1916); "Life, Art and America," a pamphlet 
 against Puritanism in letters (1917); a dozen or 
 more short stories and novelettes, a few poems, and 
 a three-act drama, "The Hand of the Potter." 
 
106 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 Dreiser was born at Terra Haute, Indiana, on 
 August 27, 1871, and, like most of us, is of mon- 
 grel blood, with the German, perhaps, predom- 
 inating. He is a tall man, awkward in movement 
 and nervous in habit; the boon of beauty has been 
 denied him. The history of his youth is set forth in 
 full in "A Hoosier Holiday." It is curious to note 
 that he is a brother to the late Paul Dresser, author 
 of "The Banks of the Wabash" and other popular 
 songs, and that he himself, helping Paul over a hard 
 place, wrote the affecting chorus: 
 
 Oh, the moon is fair tonight along the Wabash, 
 
 From the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay; 
 
 Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming . . . 
 
 But no doubt you know it. 
 
 The work of Dreiser, considered as craftsman- 
 ship pure and simple, is extremely uneven, and the 
 distance separating his best from his worst is almost 
 infinite. It is difficult to believe that the novelist 
 who wrote certain extraordinarily vivid chapters in 
 "Jennie Gerhardt," and "A Hoosier Holiday," and, 
 above all, in "The Titan," is the same who achieved 
 the unescapable dulness of parts of "The Finan- 
 cier" and the general stupidity and stodginess of 
 
THEODORE DREISER 107 
 
 "The 'Genius.' " Moreover, the tide of his writing 
 does not rise or fall with any regularity ; he neither 
 improves steadily nor grows worse steadily. Only 
 half an eye is needed to see the superiority of 
 "Jennie Gerhardt," as a sheer piece of writing, to 
 "Sister Carrie," but on turning to "The Financier," 
 which followed "Jennie Gerhardt" by an interval 
 of but one year, one observes a falling off which, 
 at its greatest, is almost indistinguishable from a 
 collapse. "Jennie Gerhardt" is suave, persuasive, 
 well-ordered, solid in structure, instinct with life. 
 "The Financier," for all its merits in detail, is 
 loose, tedious, vapid, exasperating. But had any 
 critic, in the autumn of 1912, argued thereby that 
 Dreiser was finished, that he had shot his bolt, his 
 discomfiture would have come swiftly, for "The 
 Titan," which followed in 1914, was almost as well 
 done as "The Financier" had been ill done, and 
 there are parts of it which remain, to this day, the 
 very best writing that Dreiser has ever achieved. 
 But "The 'Genius' "? Ay, in "The 'Genius' " the 
 pendulum swings back again! It is flaccid, ele- 
 phantine, doltish, coarse, dismal, flatulent, sopho- 
 moric, ignorant, unconvincing, wearisome. One 
 pities the jurisconsult who is condemned, by Com- 
 stockian clamour, to plough through such a novel. 
 In it there is a sort of humourless reductio ad ab- 
 
108 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 surdum, not only of the Dreiser manner, but even 
 of certain salient tenets of the Dreiser philosophy. 
 At its best it has a moral flavour. At its worst it is 
 almost maudlin. . . . 
 
 The most successful of the Dreiser novels, 
 judged by sales, is "Sister Carrie," and the causes 
 thereof are not far to seek. On the one hand, its 
 suppression in 1900 gave it a whispered fame that 
 was converted into a public celebrity when it was 
 republished in 1907, and on the other hand it shares 
 with "Jennie Gerhardt" the capital advantage of 
 having a young and appealing woman for its chief 
 figure. The sentimentalists thus have a heroine to 
 cry over, and to put into a familiar pigeon-hole; 
 Carrie becomes a sort of PoUyanna. More, it is, 
 at bottom, a tale of love — the one theme of per- 
 manent interest to the average American novel- 
 reader, the chief stuffing of all our best-selling 
 romances. True enough, it is vastly more than this 
 there is in it, for example, the astounding portrait 
 of Hurstwood — , but it seems to me plain that its 
 relative popularity is by no means a test of its rela- 
 tive merit, and that the causes of that popularity 
 must be sought in other directions. Its defect, as 
 a work of art, is a defect of structure. Like Nor- 
 ris' "McTeague" it has a broken back. In the 
 midst of tlie story of Carrie, Dreiser pauses to tell 
 
THEODORE DREISER 109 
 
 the story of Hurstwood — a memorably vivid and 
 tragic story, to be sure, but still one that, consider- 
 ing artistic form and organization, does damage to 
 the main business of the book. Its outstanding 
 merit is its simplicity, its unaffected seriousness and 
 fervour, the spirit of youth that is in it. One feels 
 that it was written, hot by a novelist conscious of 
 his tricks, but by a novice carried away by his own 
 flaming eagerness, his own high sense of the inter- 
 est of what he was doing. In this aspect, it is per- 
 haps more typically Dreiserian than any of its suc- 
 cessors. And maybe we may seek here for a good 
 deal of its popular appeal, for there is a contagion 
 in naivete as in enthusiasm, and the simple novel- 
 reader may recognize the kinship of a simple mind 
 in the novelist. 
 
 But it is in "Jennie Gerhardt" that Dreiser first 
 shows his true mettle. . . . "The power to tell the 
 same story in two forms," said George Moore, "is 
 the sign of the true artist." Here Dreiser sets him- 
 self that difficult task, and here he carries it off with 
 almost complete success. Reduce the story to a 
 hundred words, and the same words would also 
 describe "Sister Carrie." Jennie, likeCarrig^is a 
 ros e grown j rom tumip^-seed. 'Uver ,eacn, atjhe 
 start, hangs poverty ^Jgnorance, the dumb helpless- 
 nesrof the Shudra, and yet in eachjherejsjhat in- 
 
110 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 describable something, that element of essential ' 
 geiitleness, that innate inward beauty which levels 
 all barriers of caste, and makes Esther a fit queen 
 for Ahasuerus. Some Frenchman has put it into a 
 phrase: "line dme grande dqjis un petit destin" 
 — a great soul in a small destiny. N Jennie has some 
 touch of that greatness; Dreiser /is forever calling 
 her " a big woman"; it is a refrain almost as irri- 
 tating as the "trig" of "The Titan." Carrie, one 
 feels, is of baser metal; her dignity never rises to 
 anything approaching nobility. But the history of 
 each is the history of the other. Jennie, like Car- 
 rie, escapes from the physical miseries of the strug- 
 gle for existence only to taste the worse miseries of 
 the struggle for happiness. Don't mistake me ; we 
 have here no maudlin tales of seduced maidens. 
 Seduction, in truth, is far from tragedy for either 
 Jennie or Carrie. The gain of each, until the actual 
 event has been left behind and obliterated by ex- 
 periences more salient and poignant, is greater than 
 her loss, and that gain is to the soul as well as to 
 the creature. With the rise from want to. s ecur ity, 
 from fear to ease, comes an awakening of the finer 
 perceptions, a widening of the sympathies, a grad- 
 ual unfolding of the delicate flower called per- 
 sonality, an increased capacity for loving and 
 living. But with all this, and as a part of it, there 
 
THEODORE DREISER 111 
 
 comes, too, an increased capacity for suffering — 
 and so in the end, when love slips away and the 
 empty years stretch before, it is the awakened and 
 supersentient woman that pays for the folly of the 
 groping, bewildered girl. The tragedj;^ of Carrie 
 and Jennie, in brief, is not that they are jlegraded, 
 but that_Aej^are Ufted up, not that, they go to the 
 gutter, but that they escape the gutter and glimpse 
 the stafil ' 
 
 But if the two stories are thus variations upon 
 the same sombre theme, if each starts from the same 
 place and arrives at the same dark goal, if each 
 shows a woman heartened by the same hopes and 
 tortured by the same agonies, there is still a vast 
 difference between them, and that difference is the 
 measure of the author's progress in his craft during 
 the eleven years between 1900 and 1911. "Sister 
 Carrie," at bottom, is no more than a first sketch, a 
 rough piling up of observations and ideas, disor- 
 dered and often incoherent. In the midst of the 
 story, as I have said, the author forgets it, and starts 
 off upon another. In "Jennie Gerhardt" there is no 
 such flaccidity of structure, no such vacillation in 
 aim, no such proliferation of episode. Consider- 
 ing that it is by Dreiser, it is extraordinarily adept 
 and intelligent in design; only in "The Titan" has 
 he ever done so well. From beginning to end the 
 
112 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 narrative flows logically, steadily, congruously. 
 Episodes there are, of course, but they keep their 
 proper place and bulk. It is always Jennie 
 stands at the centre of the traffic; it is in Jennie's 
 soul thaTevery scene is uitimatelyplayed out. Her 
 father and mother; Senator Brander, the god of her 
 first worship ; her daughter Vesta, and Lester Kane, 
 the man who makes and mars her — all these are 
 drawn with infinite painstaking, and in every one 
 of them there is the blood of life. But it is Jennie 
 that dominates the drama from curtain to curtain. 
 Not an event is unrel ated to her; not a climax fails 
 to make clearer the struggles going on in her mind 
 and heart. 
 
 It is in "Jennie Gerhardt" that Dreiser's view of 
 life begins to take on coherence and to show a gen- 
 eral tendency. In "Sister Carrie" the thing is still 
 chiefly representation and no more ; the image is 
 undoubtedly vivid, but its significance, in the main, 
 is left undisplayed. In "Jennie Gerhardt" this 
 pictorial achievement is reinforced by interpreta- 
 tion; one carries away an impression that some- 
 thing has been said; it is not so much a visual 
 image of Jennie that remains as a sense of the 
 implacable tragedy that engulfs her. The book is 
 full of artistic^_£assion. It lives_ajiii_glows. It 
 awakens recognition and feeling. Its lucid idea- 
 
THEODORE DREISER 113 
 
 tional structure, even more than the artless gusto 
 of "Sister CEurrie," produces a penetrating and 
 powerful effect. Jennie is no mere individual; she 
 is a type of the national character, almost the arche- 
 type of the muddled, aspiring, tragic, fate-flogged 
 mass. And the scene in which she is set is fetil- 
 liantly national too. The Chicago of those great 
 days of feverish money-grabbing and crazy aspira- 
 tion may well stand as the epitome of America, and 
 it is made clearer here than in any other American 
 novel— clearer than in "The Pit" or "The Cliff- 
 Dwellers" — clearer than in any book by an East- 
 erner — almost as clear as the Paris of Balzac and 
 Zola. Finally, the style of the story is indis- 
 solubly wedded to its matter. The narrative, in 
 places, has an almost scriptural solemnity; in its 
 very harshness and baldness there is something 
 subtly meet and fitting. One cannot imagine such 
 a history done in the strained phrases of Meredith 
 or the fugal manner of Henry James. One cannot 
 imagine that stark, stenographic dialogue adorned 
 with the tinsel of pretty words. The thing, to reach 
 the heights it touches, could have been done only 
 in the way it has been done. As it stands, I would 
 not take anything away from it, not even its jour- 
 nalistic banalities, its lack of humour, its incessant 
 returns to C major. A primitive and touching 
 
114 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 poetry is in it. It is a novel, I am convinced, of 
 the first consideration. . . . 
 
 In "The Financier" this poetry is almost wholly 
 absent, and fact is largely to blame for the book's 
 lack of charm. By the time we see him in "The 
 Titan" Frank Cowperwood has taken on heroic pro- 
 portions and the romance of great adventure is in 
 him, but in "The Financier" he is still little more 
 than an extra-pertinacious money-grubber, and not 
 unrelated to the average stock broker or corner 
 grocer. True enough, Dreiser says specifically 
 that he is more, that the thing he craves is not money 
 but power — power to force lesser men to execute his 
 commands, power to surround himself with beau- 
 tiful and splendid things, power to amuse him- 
 self with women, power to defy and nullify the 
 laws made for the timorous and unimagina- 
 tive. But the intent of the author never really 
 gets into his picture. His Cowperwood in this 
 first stage is hard, commonplace, unimaginative. 
 In "The Titan" he flowers out as a blend of 
 revolutionist and voluptuary, a highly civilized 
 Lorenzo the Magnificent, an immoralist who would 
 not hesitate two minutes about seducing a saint, 
 but would turn sick at the thought of harm- 
 ing a child. But in "The Financier" he is still in 
 
THEODORE DREISER 115 
 
 the larval state, and a repellent sordidness hangs 
 about him. 
 
 Moreover, the story of his rise is burdened by 
 two defects which still further corrupt its effect. 
 One lies in the fact that Dreiser is quite unable to 
 get the feel, so to speak, of Philadelphia, just as he 
 is unable to get the feel of New York in "The 
 'Genius.' " The other is that the style of the writ- 
 ing in the book reduces the dreiserian manner to 
 absurdity, and almost to impossibility. The in- 
 credibly lazy, involved and imintelligent descrip- 
 tion of the trial of Cowperwood I have already men- 
 tioned. We get, in this lumbering chronicle, not a 
 cohesive and luminous picture, but a dull, photo- 
 graphic representation of the whole tedious process, 
 beginning with an account of the political obliga- 
 tions of the judge and district attorney, proceeding 
 to a consideration of the habits of mind of each of 
 the twelve jurymen, and ending with a summary of 
 the majority and minority opinions of the court of 
 appeals, and a discussion of the motives, ideals, 
 traditions, prejudices, sympathies and chicaneries 
 behind them, each and severally. When Cowper- 
 wood goes into the market, his operations are set 
 forth in their last detail; we are told how many 
 shares he buys, how much he pays for them, what 
 
116 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 the commission is, what his profit comes to. When 
 he comes into chance contact with a politician, we 
 hear all about that politician, including his family 
 affairs. When he builds and furnishes a house, 
 the chief rooms in it are inventoried with such care 
 that not a chair or a rug or a picture on the wall is 
 overlooked. The endless piling up of such non- 
 essentials cripples and incommodes the story; its 
 drama is too copiously swathed in words to achieve 
 a sting; the Dreiser manner devours and defeats 
 itself. 
 
 But none the less the book has compensatory 
 merits. Its character sketches, for all the cloud of 
 words, are lucid and vigorous. Out of that enor- 
 mous complex of crooked politics and crookeder 
 finance, Cowperwood himself stands out in the 
 round, comprehensible and alive. And all the 
 other, in their lesser measures, are done almost 
 as well — Cowperwood's pale wife, whimpering in 
 her empty house; Aileen Butler, his mistress; his 
 doddering and eternally amazed old father; his old- 
 fashioned, stupid, sentimental mother; Stener, the 
 City Treasurer, a dish-rag in the face of danger; 
 old Edward Malia Butler, that barbarian in a boiled 
 shirt, with his Homeric hatred and his broken heart. 
 Particularly old Butler. The years pass and he 
 must be killed and put away, but not many readers 
 
THEODORE DREISER 117 
 
 of the book, I take it, will soon forget him. Dreiser 
 is at his best, indeed, when he deals with old men. 
 In their tragic hplplpssnpsfijjipy stan d as symbols of 
 that unfathomablecosmic cruelty which he sees as 
 the motive power of life itself. More, even, than 
 his women, he makes them poignant, vivid, memo- 
 rable. The picture of old Gerhardt is full of a 
 subtle brightness, though he is always in the back- 
 ground, as cautious and penny-wise as an ancient 
 crow, trotting to his Lutheran church, pathetically 
 ill-used by the world he never understands. But- 
 ler is another such, different in externals, but at 
 bottom the same dismayed, questioning, pathetic old 
 man. . . . 
 
 In "The Titan" there is a tightening of the 
 screws, a clarifying of the action, an infinite im- 
 provement in the manner. The book, in truth, has 
 the air of a new and clearer thinking out of "The 
 Financier," as "Jennie Gerhardt" is a new thinking 
 out of "Sister Carrie." With almost the same 
 materials, die thing is given a new harmony and 
 unity, a new plausibility, a new passion and pur- 
 pose. In "The Financier" the artistic voluptuary 
 is almost completely overshadowed by the dollar- 
 chaser; in "The Titan" we begin to see clearly that 
 grand battle between artist and man of money, 
 idealist and materialist, spirit and flesh, which is 
 
118 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 the informing theme of the whole trilogy. The con- 
 flict that makes the drama, once chiefly external, 
 now becomes more and more internal; it is played 
 out within the soul of the man himself. The result 
 is a character sketch of the highest colour and bril- 
 liance, a superb portrait of a complex and ex- 
 tremely fascinating man. Of all the personages in 
 the Dreiser books, the Cowperwood of "The Titan" 
 is perhaps the most radiantly real. He is accounted 
 for in every detail, and yet, in the end, he is not 
 accounted for at all; there hangs about him, to the 
 last, that baffling mysteriousness which hangs about 
 those we know most intimately. There is in him 
 a complete and indubitable masculinity, as the eter- 
 nal feminine is in Jennie. His struggle with the 
 inexorable forces that urge him on as with whips, 
 and lure him with false lights, and bring him to 
 disillusion and dismay, is as typical as hers is, and 
 as tragic. In his ultimate disaster, so plainly fore- 
 shadowed at the close, there is the clearest of all 
 projections of the ideas that lie at the bottom of all 
 Dreiser's work. Cowperwood, above any of them, 
 is his protagonist. 
 
 The story, in its plan, is as transparent as in its 
 burden. It has an austere simplicity in the telling 
 that fits the directness of the thing told. Dreiser, 
 as if to clear decks, throws over all the immemorial 
 
THEODORE DREISER 119 
 
 baggage of the novelist, making short shrift of 
 "heart interest," conventional "sympathy," and 
 even what ordinarily passes for romance. In "Sis- 
 ter Carrie," as I have pointed out, thereisstill a 
 sweet dish far, the .sP!ntimentalist&;-if they don't like i 
 the history of Carrie as a work^f art they may still _^ 
 wallow in it_as.a sad, sad. love story. Carrie is 
 appealing, melting; she moves, like Marguerite; 
 Gautier, in an atmosphere of romantic depression. ' 
 .And Jennie Gerhardt, in this aspect, is merely Car- 
 rie done over — a Carrie more carefully and ob- 
 jectively drawn, perhaps, but still conceivably to be 
 mistaken for a "sympathetic" heroine in a best- 
 seller. A lady eating chocolates might jump from 
 "Laddie" to "Jennie Gerhardt" without knowing 
 that she was jumping ten thousand miles. The tear 
 jugs are there to cry into. Even in "The Finan- 
 cier" there is still a hint of familiar things. The 
 first Mrs. Cowperwood is sorely put upon; old But- 
 ler has the markings of an irate father; Cowper- 
 wood himself suffers the orthodox injustice and 
 languishes in a cell. But no one, I venture, will 
 ever fall into any such mistake in identity in ap- 
 proaching "The Titan." Not a single appeal to 
 facile sentiment is in it. It proceeds from begin- 
 ning to end in a forthright, uncompromising, confi- 
 dent manner. It is an almost purely objective 
 
120 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 account, as devoid of cheap heroics as a death cer- 
 tificate, of a strong man's contest with incontestable 
 powers without and no less incontestable powers 
 within. There is nothing of the conventional out- 
 law about him; he does not wear a red sash and 
 bellow for liberty; fate wrings from him no melo- 
 dramatic defiances. In the midst of the battle he 
 views it with a sort of ironical detachment, as if 
 lifted above himself by the sheer aesthetic spectacle. 
 Even in disaster he asks for no quarter, no gener- 
 osity, no compassion. Up or down, he keeps his 
 zest for the game that is being played, and is suffi- 
 cient unto himself. 
 
 Such a man as this Cowperwood of the Chicago 
 days, described romantically, would be indistin- 
 guishable from the wicked earls and seven-foot 
 guardsmen of Ouida, Robert W. Chambers and The 
 Duchess. But described realistically and cold- 
 bloodedly, with all that wealth of minute and ap- 
 parently inconsequential detail which Dreiser piles 
 up so amazingly, he becomes a figure astonishingly 
 vivid, lifelike and engrossing. He fits into no a 
 priori theory of conduct or scheme of rewards and 
 punishments; he proves nothing and teaches noth- 
 ing; the forces which move him are never obvious 
 and frequently unintelligible. But in the end he 
 seems genuinely a man — a man of the sort we see 
 
THEODORE DREISER 121 
 
 about us in the real world — not a patent and auto- 
 matic fellow, reacting docilely and according to a 
 formula, but a bundle of complexities and contra- 
 dictions, a creature oscillating between the light and 
 the shadow — at bottom, for all his typical repre- 
 sentation of a race and a civilization, a unique and 
 inexplicable personality. More, he is a man of the 
 first class, an Achilles of his world; and here the 
 achievement of Dreiser is most striking, for he 
 succeeds where all fore-runners failed. It is easy 
 enough to explain how John Smith courted his wife, 
 and even how William Brown fought and died for 
 his country, but it is inordinately difficult to give 
 plausibility to the motives, feelings and processes 
 of mind of a man whose salient character is that 
 they transcend all ordinary experience. Too often, 
 even when made by the highest creative and inter- 
 pretative talent, the effort has resolved itself into a 
 begging of the question. Shakespeare made Ham- 
 let comprehensible to the groundlings by diluting 
 that half of him which was Shakespeare with a half 
 which was a college sophomore. In the same way 
 he saved Lear by making him, in large part, a 
 tedious and obscene old donkey — ^the blood brother 
 of any average ancient of any average English tap- 
 room. Tackling Caesar, he was rescued by Brutus' 
 knife. George Bernard Shaw, facing the same dif- 
 
122 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 ficulty, resolved it by drawing a composite portrait 
 of two or three London actor-managers and a half 
 a dozen English politicians. But Dreiser makes no 
 such compromise. He bangs into the difficulties of 
 his problem head on, and if he does not solve it 
 absolutely, he at least makes an extraordinarily 
 close approach to a solution. In "The Financier" 
 a certain incredulity still hangs about Cowperwood ; 
 in "The Titan" he suddenly comes unquestionably 
 real. If you want to get the true measure of this 
 feat, put it beside the failure of Frank Norris with 
 Curtis Jadwin in "The Pit." . . . 
 
 "The 'Genius,' " which interrupted the "trilogy 
 of desire," marks the nadir of Dreiser's accom- 
 plishment, as "The Titan" marks its apogee. The 
 plan of it, of course, is simple enough, and it is one 
 that Dreiser, at his best, might have carried out with 
 undoubted success. What he is trying to show, in 
 brief, is the battle that goes on in the soul of every 
 man of active mind between the desire for self-ex- 
 pression and the desire for safety, for public re- 
 spect, for emotional equanimity. It is, in a sense, 
 the story of Cowperwood told over again, but with 
 an important difference, for Eugene Witla is a much 
 less self-reliant and powerful fellow than Cowper- 
 wood, and so he is unable to muster up the vast 
 resolution of spirits that he needs to attain happi- 
 
THEODORE DREISER 123 
 
 ness. "The Titan" is the history of a strong man. 
 "The 'Genius' " is the history of a man essentially 
 weak. Eugene Witla can never quite choose his 
 route in life. He goes on sacrificing ease to as- 
 piration and aspiration to ease to the end of the 
 chapter. He vacillates abominably and forever 
 between two irreconcilable desires. Even when, at 
 the close, he sinks into a whining sort of resigna- 
 tion, the proud courage of Cowperwood is not in 
 him; he is always a bit despicable in his pathos. 
 
 As I say, a story of simple outlines, and well 
 adapted to the preiserian pen. But it is spoiled 
 and made a mock of by a donkeyish solemnity of 
 attack which leaves it, on the one hand, diffuse, 
 spineless and shapeless, and on the other hand, a 
 compendium of platitudes. It is as if Dreiser, sud- 
 denly discovering himself .ja sage, put off the high 
 passion of the artist and took to pounding a pulpit. 
 It is almost as if he deliberately essayed upon a bur- 
 lesque of himself. The book is an endless emission 
 of the obvious, with touches of the scandalous to 
 light up its killing monotony. It runs to 736 pages 
 of small type; its reading is an unbearable weari- 
 ness to the flesh ; in the midst of it one has forgotten 
 the beginning and is unconcerned about the end. 
 Mingled with all the folderol, of course, there is 
 stuff of nobler quality. Certain chapters stick in 
 
124 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 the memory; whole episodes lift themselves to the 
 fervid luminosity of "Jennie Gerhardt"; there are 
 character sketches that deserve all praise ; one often 
 pulls up with a reminder that the thing is the work 
 of a proficient craftsman. But in the main it lum- 
 bers and jolts, wabbles and bores. A sort of pon- 
 derous imbecility gets into it. Both in its elaborate 
 devices to shake up the pious and its imposing 
 demonstrations of what every one knows, it somehow 
 suggests the advanced thinking of Greenwich Vil- 
 lage. I suspect, indeed, that the vin rouge was in 
 Dreiser's arteries as he concocted it. He was at the 
 intellectual menopause, and looking back somewhat 
 wistfully and attitudinizingly toward the goatish 
 days that were no more. 
 
 But let it go! A novelist capable of "Jennie 
 Gerhardt" has rights, privileges, prerogatives. He 
 may, if he will, go on a spiritual drunk now and 
 then, and empty the stale bilges of his soul. Thack- 
 eray, having finished "Vanity Fair" and "Penden- 
 nis," bathed himself in the sheep's milk of "The 
 Newcomes," and after "The Virginians" he did 
 "The Adventures of Philip." Zola, with "Ger- 
 minal," "La Debacle" and "La Terre" behind him, 
 recreated himself horribly with "Fecondite." Tol- 
 stoi, after "Anna Karenina," wrote "What Is Art?" 
 Ibsen, after "Et Dukkehjem" and "Gengangere," 
 
THEODORE DREISER 125 
 
 wrote "Vildanden." The good God himself, after 
 all the magnificence of Kings and Chronicles, 
 turned Dr. Frank Crane and so botched his Writ 
 with Proverbs. . . . A weakness that we must allow 
 for. Whenever Dreiser, abandoning his funda- 
 mental scepticism, yields to the irrepressible hu- 
 man (and perhaps also divine) itch to label, to 
 moralize, to teach, he becomes a bit absurd. Ob- 
 serve "The 'Genius,' " and parts of "A Hoosier 
 Holiday" and of "A Traveler at Forty," and of 
 "Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural." But 
 in this very absurdity, it seems to me, there is a 
 subtle proof that his fundamental scepticism is 
 sound. . . . 
 
 I mention the "Plays of the Natural and the 
 Supernatural." They are ingenious and sometimes 
 extremely effective, but their significance is not 
 great. The two that are "of the natural" are "The 
 Girl in the Coffin" and "Old Ragpicker," the first 
 a laborious evocation of the gruesome, too long by 
 half, and the other an experiment in photographic 
 realism, with a pair of policemen as its protago- 
 nists. All five plays "of the supernatural" follow 
 a single plan. In the foreground, as it were, we see 
 a sordid drama played out on the human plane, and 
 in the background (or in the empyrean above, as 
 you choose) we see the operation of the god-like 
 
126 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 - 
 
 imbecilities which sway and flay us all. The tech- 
 nical trick is well managed. It would be easy for 
 such four-dimensional pieces to fall into burlesque, 
 but in at least two cases, to wit, in "The Blue 
 Sphere" and "In the Dark," they go off with an air. 
 Superficially, these plays "of the supernatural" 
 seem to show an abandonment to the wheezy, black 
 bombazine mysticism which crops up toward 
 the end of "The 'Genius.' " But that mysticism, 
 at bottom, is no more than the dreiserian 
 scepticism made visible. "For myself," says 
 Dreiser somewhere, "I do not know what truth 
 is, what beauty is, what love is, what hope is." 
 And in another place: "I admit a vast compulsion 
 which has nothing to do with the individual desires 
 or tastes or impulses." The jokers behind the arras 
 pull the strings. It is pretty, but what is it all 
 about? . . . The criticism which deals only with 
 externals sees "Sister Carrie" as no more than a 
 deft adventure into realism. Dreiser is praised, 
 when he is praised at all, for making Carrie so clear, 
 for imderstanding her so well. But the truth is, of 
 course, that his achievement consists precisely in 
 making patent the impenetrable mystery of her, and 
 of the tangle complex of striving and aspiration of 
 which she is so helplessly a part. It is in this sense 
 that "Sister Carrie" is a profound work. It is not 
 
THEODORE DREISER 127 
 
 a book of glib explanations, of ready formulae ; it 
 is, above all else, a book of wonder. . . . 
 
 Of "A Traveler at Forty" I have spoken briefly. 
 It is heavy with the obvious; the most interesting 
 thing in it is the fact that Dreiser had never seen St. 
 Peter's or Piccadilly Circus until he was too old for 
 either reverence or romance. "A Hoosier Holi- 
 day" is far more illuminating, despite its platitu- 
 dinizing. Slow in tempo, discursive, reflective, in- 
 timate, the book covers a vast territory, and lingers 
 in pleasant fields. One finds in it an almost com- 
 plete confession of faith, artistic, religious, even 
 political. And not infrequently that confession 
 takes the form of ingenuous confidences — about the 
 fortunes of the house of Dreiser, the dispersed 
 Dreiser clan, the old neighbours in Indiana, new 
 friends made along the way. In "A Traveler at 
 . Forty" Dreiser is surely frank enough in his vivi- 
 sections; he seldom forgets a vanity or a wart. In 
 "A Hoosier Holiday" he goes even further; he 
 speculates heavily about all his dramatis personae, 
 prodding into the motives behind their acts, won- 
 dering what they would do in this or that situation, 
 forcing them painfully into laboratory jars. They 
 become, in the end, not unlike characters in a novel; 
 one misses only the neatness of a plot. Strangely 
 enough, the one personage of the chronicle who re- 
 
128 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 mains dim throughout is the artist, Franklin Booth, 
 Dreiser's host and companion on the long motor ride 
 from New York to Indiana, and the maker of the 
 book's excellent pictures. One gets a brilliant etch- 
 ing of Booth's father, and scarcely less vivid por. 
 traits of Speed, the chauffeur; of various persons 
 encountered on the way, and of friends and rela- 
 tives dredged up out of the abyss of the past. But 
 of Booth one learns little save that he is a Christian 
 Scientist and a fine figure of a man. There must 
 have been much talk during those two weeks of 
 careening along the high-road, and Booth must have 
 borne some part in it, but what he said is very 
 meagrely reported, and so he is still somewhat 
 vague at the end — a personality sensed but scarcely 
 apprehended. 
 
 However, it is Dreiser himself who is the chief 
 character of the story, and who stands out from it 
 most brilliantly. One sees in the man all the spe- 
 cial marks of the novelist: his capacity for photo- 
 graphic and relentless observation, his insatiable 
 curiosity, his keen zest in life as a spectacle, his 
 comprehension of and sympathy for the poor striv- 
 ing of humble folks, his endless mulling of insol- 
 uble problems, his recurrent Philistinism, his im- 
 patience of restraints, his fascinated suspicion of 
 messiahs, his passion for physical beauty, his relish 
 
THEODORE DREISER 129 
 
 for the gaudy drama of big cities; his incurable 
 Americanism. The panorama that he enrols runs 
 the whole scale of the colours; it is a series of ex- 
 traordinarily vivid pictures. The sombre gloom of 
 the Pennsylvania hills, with Wilkes-Barre lying 
 among them like a gem; the procession of little 
 country towns, sleepy and a bit hoggish; the flash 
 of Buffalo, Cleveland, Indianapolis; the gargantum 
 coal-pockets and ore-docks along the Erie shore; 
 the tinsel summer resorts; the lush Indiana farm- 
 lands, with their stodgy, bovine people — all of these 
 things are sketched in simply, and yet almost mag- 
 nificently. I know, indeed, of no book which better 
 describes the American hinterland. Here we have 
 no idle spying by a stranger, but a full-length rep- 
 resentation by one who knows the thing he describes 
 intimately, and is himself a part of it. Almost 
 every mile of the road travelled has been Dreiser's 
 own road in life. He knew those unkempt In- 
 diana towns in boyhood; he wandered in the In- 
 diana woods; he came to Toledo, Cleveland, Buf- 
 falo as a young man; all the roots of his existence 
 are out there. And so he does his chronicle con 
 amore, with many a sentimental dredging up of 
 old memories, old hopes and old dreams. 
 
 Save for passages in "The Titan," "A Hoosier 
 Holiday" marks the high tide of Dreiser's writing 
 
130 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 — that is, as sheer writing. His old faults are in it, 
 and plentifully. There are empty, brackish 
 phrases enough, God knows — "high noon" among 
 them. But for all that, there is an undeniable glow 
 in it; it shows, in more than one place, an approach 
 to style ; the mere wholesaler of words has become, 
 in some sense a connoisseur, even a voluptuary. 
 The picture of Wilkes-Barre girt in by her hills is 
 simply done, and yet there is imagination in it, and 
 touches of brilliance. The sombre beauty of the 
 Pennsylvania mountains is vividly transferred to the 
 page. The towns by the wayside are differentiated, 
 swiftly drawn, made to live. There are excellent 
 sketches of people — a courtly hotelkeeper in some 
 God-forsaken hamlet, his self-respect triumphing 
 over his wallow; a group of babbling Civil War 
 veterans, endlessly mouthing incomprehensible 
 jests; the half -grown beaux and belles of the sum- 
 mer resorts, enchanted and yet a bit staggered by 
 the awakening of sex; Booth pere and his sinister 
 politics; broken and forgotten men in the Indiana 
 towns; policemen, waitresses, farmers, country 
 characters; Dreiser's own people — the boys and 
 girls of his youth; his brother Paul, the Indiana 
 Schneckenburger and Francis Scott Key; his sisters 
 and brothers; his beaten, hopeless, pious father; his 
 brave and noble mother. The book is dedicated to 
 
THEODORE DREISER 131 
 
 this mother, now long dead, and in a way it is a 
 memorial to her, a monument to affection. Life 
 bore upon her cruelly; she knew poverty at its lowest 
 ebb and despair at its bitterest; and yet there was in 
 her a touch of fineness that never yielded, a gallant 
 spirit that faced and fought things through. One 
 thinks, somehow, of the mother of Gounod. . . . 
 Her son has not forgotten her. His book is her 
 epitaph. He enters into her presence with love and 
 with reverence and with something not far from 
 awe. . . . 
 
 As for the rest of the Dreiser compositions, I 
 leave them to your curiosity. 
 
 §6 
 
 Dr. William Lyon Phelps, the Lampson profes- 
 sor of English language and literature at Yale, 
 opens his chapter on Mark Twain in his "Essays 
 on Modem Novelists" with a humorous account 
 of the critical imbecility which pursued Mark in his 
 own country down to his last years. The favourite 
 national critics of that era (and it extended to 1895, 
 at the least) were wholly blind to the fact that he 
 was a great artist. They admitted him, somewhat 
 grudgingly, a certain low dexterity as a clown, but 
 
132 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 that he was an imaginative writer of the first rank, 
 or even of the fifth rank, was something that, in 
 their insanest moments, never so much as occurred 
 to them. Phelps cites, in particular, an ass named 
 Professor Richardson, whose "American Liter- 
 ature," it appears, "is still a standard work" and "a 
 deservedly high authority" — apparently in col- 
 leges. In the 1892 edition of this magnum opus, 
 Mark is dismissed with less than four lines, and 
 ranked below Irving, Holmes and Lowell — nay, 
 actually below Artemus Ward, Josh Billings and 
 Petroleum V. Nasby! The thing is fabulous, fan- 
 tastic, unglaublich — but nevertheless true. Lack- 
 ing the "higher artistic or moral purpose of the 
 greater humourists" {exempli gratia, Rabelais, 
 Moliere, Aristophanes ! ! ) , Mark is dismissed by this 
 Professor Balderdash as a hollow buffoon. . . . 
 But stay! Do not laugh yet! Phelps himself, indig-' 
 nant at the stupidity, now proceeds to credit Mark 
 with a moral purpose! . . . Turn to "The Myste- 
 rious Stranger," or "What is Man?". . . 
 
 College professors, alas, never learn anything. 
 The identical gentleman who achieved this dis- 
 covery about old Mark in 1910, now seeks to dis- 
 pose of Dreiser in the exact manner of Richardson. 
 That is to say, he essays to finish him by putting him 
 
THEODORE DREISER 133 
 
 into Coventry, by loftily passing over him. "Do 
 not speak of him," said Kingsley of Heine; "he was 
 a wicked man!" Search the latest volume of the 
 Phelps revelation, "The Advance of the English 
 Novel," and you will find that Dreiser is not once 
 mentioned in it. The late 0. Henry is hailed as a 
 genius who will have "abiding fame"; Henry Syd- 
 nor Harrison is hymned as "more than a clever 
 novelist," nay, "a valuable ally of the angels" (the 
 right-thinker complex! art as a form of snuffling!), 
 and an obscure Pagliaccio named Charles D. Stew- 
 art is brought forward as "the American novelist 
 most worthy to fill the particular vacancy caused by 
 the death of Mark Twain" — but Dreiser is not even 
 listed in the index. And where Phelps leads with 
 his baton of birch most of the other drovers of rah- 
 rah boys follow. I turn, for example, to "An In- 
 troduction to American Literature," by Henry S. 
 Pancoast, A.M., L.H.D., dated 1912. There are 
 kind words for Richard Harding Davis, for Amelia 
 Rives, and even for Will N. Harben, but not a 
 syllable for Dreiser. Again, there is a "A History 
 of American Literature," by Reuben Post Halleck, 
 A.M., LL.D., dated 1911. Lew Wallace, Marietta 
 HoUey, Owen Wister and Augusta Evans Wilson 
 have their hearings, but not Dreiser. Yet again, 
 
134 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 there is "A History of American Literature Since 
 1870," by Prof. Fred Lewis Pattee/ instructor in 
 "the English language and literature" somewhere 
 in Pennsylvania. Pattee has praises for Marion 
 Crawford, Margaret Deland and F. Hopkinson 
 Smith, and polite bows for Richard Harding Davis 
 and Robert W. Chambers, but from end to end of his 
 fat tome I am unable to find the slightest mention of 
 Dreiser. 
 
 So much for one group of heroes of the new 
 Dunciad. That it includes most of the acknowl- 
 edged heavyweights of the craft — the Babbitts, 
 Mores, Brownells and so on — goes without saying; 
 as Van Wyck Brooks has pointed out,^ these mag- 
 nificoes are austerely above any consideration of 
 the literature that is in being. The other group, 
 more courageous and more honest, proceeds by 
 direct attack; Dreiser is to be disposed of by a 
 moral attentat. Its leaders are two more profes- 
 sors, Stuart P. Sherman and H. W. Boynton, and in 
 its ranks march the lady critics of the newspapers, 
 with much shrill, falsetto clamour. Sherman is 
 the only one of them who shows any intelligible 
 reasoning. Boynton, as always, is a mere parroter 
 of conventional phrases, and the objections of the 
 
 1 New York, The Century Co., 1916. 
 
 2 In The Seven Arts, May, 1917. 
 
THEODORE DREISER 135 
 
 ladies fade imperceptibly into a pious indignation 
 which is indistinguishable from that of the profes- 
 sional suppressors of vice. 
 
 What, then, is Sherman's complaint? In brief, 
 that Dreiser is a liar when he calls himself a realist; 
 that he is actually a naturalist, and hence accursed. 
 That "he has evaded the enterprise of representing 
 human conduct, and confined himself to a represen- 
 tation of animal behaviour." That he "imposes 
 his own naturalistic philosophy" upon his charac- 
 ters, making them do what they ought not to do, and ' 
 think what they ought not to think. That "he has 
 just two things to tell us about Frank Cowperwood : 
 that he has a rapacious appetite for money, and a 
 rapacious appetite for women." That this alleged 
 "theory of animal behaviour", is not only incorrect 
 •but downright immoral, and that "when one-half 
 the world attempts to assert it, the other half rises 
 in battle.^ 
 
 Only a glance is needed to show the vacuity of 
 all this brutum fulmen. Dreiser, in point of fact, is 
 scarcely more the realist or the naturalist, in any 
 true sense, than H. G. Wells or the later George 
 Moore, nor has he ever announced himself in either 
 the one character or the other — if there be, in fact, 
 any difference between them that any one save a 
 
 1 The NaUon, Dec. 3, 1915, 
 
136 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 pigeon-holding pedagogue can discern. He is 
 really something quite different, and, in his mo- 
 ments, something far more stately. His aim is not 
 merely to record, but to translate and understand; 
 the thing he exposes is not the empty event and act, 
 but the endless mystery out of which it springs; his 
 pictures have a passionate compassion in them that 
 it is hard to separate from poetry. If this sense of 
 the universal and inexplicable tragedy, if this vision 
 of life as a seeking without a finding, if this adept 
 summoning up of moving images, is mistaken by 
 college professors for the empty, met/iculous nasti- 
 ness of Zola in "Pot-Bouille" — in Nietzsche's 
 phrase, for "the delight lo stink" — ^then surely the 
 folly of college professors, as vast as it seems, has 
 been underestimated. What is the fact? The fact 
 is that Dreiser's attitude of mind, his manner of re- 
 action to the phenomena he represents, the whole 
 of his alleged "naturalistic philosophy," stems 
 directly, not from Zola, Flaubert, Augier and the 
 younger Dumas, but from the Greeks. In the midst 
 of democratic cocksureness and Christian senti- 
 mentalism, of doctrinaire shallowness and profes- 
 sorial smugness, he stands for a point of view which 
 at least has something honest and courageous about 
 it ; here, at all events, he is a realist. Let him put 
 a motto to his books, and it might be : 
 
THEODORE DREISER 137 
 
 1(1) yeveai ppOTuiv, 
 
 'Qs vix,a.% i8a Kat to ijltjScv 
 
 Zu>(Ja.<s IvapiO/xia. 
 
 If you protest against that as too harsh for 
 Christians and college professors, right-thinkers and 
 forward-lookers, then you protest against "Oedi- 
 pus Rex." ^ 
 
 As for the animal behaviour prattle of the learned 
 head-master, it reveals, on the one hand, only the 
 academic fondness for seizing upon high-sounding 
 but empty phrases and using them to alarm the pop- 
 ulace, and on the other hand, only the academic in- 
 capacity for observing facts correctly and report- 
 ing them honestly. The truth is, of course, that 
 the behaviour of such men as Cowperwood and 
 Witla and of such women as Carrie and Jennie, as 
 Dreiser describes it, is no more merely animal than 
 the behaviour of such acknowledged and xmdoubted 
 beings as Dr. Woodrow Wilson and Dr. Jane 
 Addams. The whole point of the story of Witla, 
 to take the example which seems to concern the 
 horrified watchmen most, is this: that his life is a 
 bitter conflict between the animal in him and the 
 aspiring soul, between the flesh and the spirit, be- 
 
 1 1186-1189. So translated by Floyd DeU: "O ye deathward- 
 going tribes of man, what do your lives mean except that they 
 go to nothingness?" 
 
138 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 tween what is weak in him and what is strong, be- 
 tween what is base and what is noble. Moreover, 
 the good, in the end, gets its hooks into the bad: 
 as we part from Witla he is actually bathed in the 
 tears of remorse, and resolved to be a correct and 
 godfearing man. And what have we in "The 
 Financier" and "The Titan"? A conflict, in the 
 ego of Cowperwood, between aspiration and am- 
 bition, between the passion for beauty and the 
 passion for power. Is either passion animal? To 
 ask the question is to answer it. 
 
 I single out Dr. Sherman, not because his pomp- 
 ous syllogisms have any plausibility in fact or 
 logic, but simply because he may well stand as 
 archetype of the booming, indignant corrupter of 
 criteria, the moralist turned critic. A glance at 
 his paean to Arnold Bennett ^ at once reveals the 
 true gravamen of his objection to Dreiser. What 
 off"ends him is not actually Dreiser's shortcoming 
 as an artist, but Dreiser's shortcoming as a Chris- 
 tian and an American. In Bennett's volumes of 
 pseudo-philosophy — e.g., "The Plain Man and 
 His Wife" and "The Feast of St. Friend"— he 
 finds the intellectual victuals that are to his taste. 
 Here we have a sweet commingling of virtuous con- 
 formity and complacent optimism, of sonorous 
 
 1 The New York Evening Post, Dec. 31, 1915. 
 
THEODORE DREISER 139 
 
 platitude and easy certainty — ^here, in brief, we 
 have the philosophy of the English middle classes 
 — and here, by the same token, we have the sort 
 of guff that the half -educated of our own country 
 can imderstand. It is the calm, superior num- 
 skuUery that was Victorian; it is by Samuel Smiles 
 out of Hannah More. The offence of Dreiser is 
 that he has disdained this revelation and gone back 
 to the Greeks. Lo, he reads poetry into "the ap- 
 petite for women" — ^he rejects the jPauline doctrine 
 that all love is below the diaphragm! He- thinks 
 of Ulysses, not as a mere heretic and criminal, but 
 as a great artist. He sees the life of man, not as 
 a simple theorem in Calvinism, but as a vast ad- 
 venture, an enchantment, a mystery. It is no won- 
 der that respectable school-teachers are against 
 him. .[ . . 
 
 The comstockian attack upon "The 'Genius' " 
 seems to have sprung out of the same muddled 
 sense of Dreiser's essential hostility to all that is 
 safe and regular — of the danger in him to that 
 mellowed Methodism which has become the na- 
 tional ethic. The book, in a way, was a direct 
 challenge, for though it came to an end upon a 
 note which even a Methodist might hear as sweet, 
 there were undoubted provocations in detail. 
 Dreiser, in fact, allowed his scorn to make off with 
 
140 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 his taste — and es ist nichts filrchtlicher ah Einbil- 
 dungskraft ohne Geschmack. The Comstocks 
 arose to the bait a bit slowly, but none the less 
 surely. Going through the volume with the ter- 
 rible industry of a Sunday-school boy dredging 
 up pearls of smut from the Old Testament, they 
 achieved a list of no less than 89 alleged floutings 
 of the code — 75 described as lewd and 14 as pro- 
 fane. An inspection of these specifications affords 
 mirth of a rare and lofty variety; nothing could 
 more cruelly expose the inner chambers of the 
 moral mind. When young Witla, fastening his 
 best girl's skate, is so overcome by the carnality of 
 youth that he hugs her, it is set down as lewd. On 
 page 51, having become an art student, he is fired 
 by "a great, warm-tinted nude of Bouguereau" — 
 lewd again. On page 70 he begins to draw from 
 the figure, and his instructor cautions him that the 
 female breast is round, not square — more lewd- 
 ness. On page 151 he kisses a girl on mouth and 
 neck and she cautions him: "Be careful! 
 Mamma may come in" — still more. On page 161, 
 having got rid of mamma, she yields "herself to 
 him gladly, joyously" and he is greatly shocked 
 when she argues that an artist (she is by way of 
 being a singer) had better not marry — lewdness 
 doubly damned. On page 245 he and his bride. 
 
THEODORE DREISER 141 
 
 being ignorant, neglect the principles laid down by 
 Dr, Sylvanus Stall in his great works on sex hy- 
 giene — lewdness most horrible! But there is no 
 need to proceed further. Every kiss, hug and 
 tickle of the chin in the chronicle is laboriously 
 snouted out, empanelled, exhibited. Every hint 
 that Witla is no vestal, that he indulges his un- 
 christian fleshliness, that he burns in the manner 
 of I Corinthians, VII, 9, is uncovered to the moral 
 inquisition. 
 
 On the side of profanity there is a less ardent 
 pursuit of evidences, chiefly, I daresay, because 
 their unearthing is less stimulating. (Beside, there 
 is no law prohibiting profanity in books : the whole 
 inquiry here is but so much lagniappe.) On page 
 408, in describing a character called Daniel C. 
 Summerfield, Dreiser says that the fellow is "very 
 much given to swearing, more as a matter of habit 
 than of foul intention," and then goes on to explain 
 somewhat lamely that "no picture of him would be 
 complete without the interpolation of his various 
 expressions." They turn out to be God damn and 
 Jesus Christ — ^three of the latter and five or six of 
 the former. All go down; the pure in heart must 
 be shielded from the knowledge of them. (But 
 what of the immoral French? They call the Eng- 
 lish Goddams.) Also, three plain damns, eight 
 
142 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 hells, one my God, five by Gods, one go to the devil, 
 one God Almighty and one plain God. Altogether, 
 31 specimens are listed. "The 'Genius' " runs to 
 350,000 words. The profanity thus works out to 
 somewhat less than one word in 10,000. . • . Alas, 
 the comstockian proboscis, feeling for such offend- 
 ings, is not as alert as when uncovering more sav- 
 oury delicacies. On page 191 I find an overlooked 
 by God. On page 372 there are Oh God, God 
 curse her, and God strike her dead. On page 373 
 there are Ah God, Oh God and three other invoca- 
 tions of God. On page 617 there is God help me. 
 On page 720 there is as God is my judge. On page 
 723 there is Fm no damned good. . . . But I be- 
 gin to blush. 
 
 When the Comstock Society began proceedings 
 against "The 'Genius,' " a group of English novel- 
 ists, including Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, W. L. 
 George and Hugh Walpole, cabled an indignant 
 caveat. This bestirred the Author's League of 
 America to activity, and its executive committee 
 issued a minute denouncing the business. Later 
 on a protest of American literati was circulated, 
 and more than 400 signed, including such highly 
 respectable authors as Winston Churchill, Percy 
 MacKaye, Booth Tarkington and James Lane Allen, 
 and such critics as Lawrence Gilman, Clayton 
 
THEODORE DREISER 143 
 
 Hamilton and James Huneker, and the editors of 
 such journals as the Century, the Atlantic Monthly 
 and the New Republic. Among my literary lum- 
 ber is all the correspondence relating to this pro- 
 test, not forgetting the letters of those who refused 
 to sign, and some day I hope to publish it, that 
 posterity may not lose the joy of an extremely di- 
 verting episode. Meanwhile, the case moves with 
 stately dignity through the interminable corridors 
 of jurisprudence, and the bulk of the briefs and 
 exhibits that it throws off begins to rival the stag- 
 gering bulk of "The 'Genius' " itself.^ 
 
 Dreiser, like Mark Twain and Emerson before 
 him, has been far more hospitably greeted in his 
 first stage, now drawing to a close, in England 
 than in his own country. The cause of this, I dare- 
 say, lies partly in the fact that "Sister Carrie" was 
 in general circulation over there during the seven 
 years that it remained suppressed on this side. It 
 was during these years that such men as Arnold 
 Bennett, Theodore Watts-Dunton, Frank Harris and 
 
 1 Despite the comstockian attack, Dreiser is still fairly well 
 represented on the shelves of American public libraries. A 
 canvas of the libraries of the 25 principal cities gives the fol- 
 lowing result, an X indicating that the corresponding book 
 is catalogued, and ■» — that is not: [Over] 
 
144 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 H. G. Wells, and such critical journals as the Spec- 
 tator, the Saturday Review and the Athenaeum be- 
 
 
 
 
 
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 < 
 
 X 
 
 — 
 
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 X 
 
 — 
 
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 X 
 
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 X 
 
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 X 
 
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 X 
 
 X 
 
 X 
 
 X 
 
 X 
 
 X 
 
 X 
 
 — 
 
 — 
 
 — 
 
 — 
 
 X 
 
 — 
 
 X 
 
 — 
 
 New York 
 
 Boston 
 
 Chicago 
 
 Philadelphia 
 
 Washington 
 
 Baltimore — — — — X — — — 
 
 Pittsburgh — — x X X X - X 
 
 New Orleans — — — — — — — — 
 
 Denver X X X X X X X X 
 
 San Francisco X X X X X — — X 
 
 St. Louis X X X X X - X - 
 
 Cleveland X X X X - X X - 
 
 Providence — — — — — — — — 
 
 Los Angeles X X X X X X X X 
 
 Indianapolis X X X — X — X X 
 
 Louisville X X — X X X X X 
 
 St. Paul X X - - X - X X 
 
 Minneapolis X X X — X — X — 
 
 Cincinnati X X X — X — X X 
 
 Kansas City X X X X X X X X 
 
 Milwaukee — — — — x — X X 
 
 Newark X X X X X X X X 
 
 Detroit X X X — X X X X 
 
 Seattle X X — — X — X X 
 
 Hartford — — — — — — — x 
 
 [Over] 
 
THEODORE DREISER 147 
 
 that: out of the vast weker and surge, the plethoric 
 irrelevancies, . . . emerges a sense of the infinite 
 sadness and mystery of human life." . . .^ 
 
 "To see truly," said Renan, "is to see dimly." 
 Dimness or mystery, call it what you will: it is in 
 all these overgrown and formless, but profoundly 
 moving books. Just what do they mean? Just 
 what is Dreiser driving at? That such questions 
 should be asked is only a proof of the straits to 
 which pedagogy has brought criticism. The an- 
 swer is simple: he is driving at nothing, he is 
 merely trying to represent what he sees and feels. 
 His moving impulse is no flabby yearning to teach, 
 to expound, to make simple; it is that "obscure 
 inner necessity" of which Conrad tells us, the ir- 
 resistible creative passion of a genuine artist, stand- 
 ing spell-bound before the impenetrable enigma 
 that is life, enamoured by the strange beauty that 
 plays over its sordidness, challenged to a wonder- 
 ing and half -terrified sort of representation of what 
 passes understanding. And jenseits von Gut und 
 Bose. "For myself," says Dreiser, "I do not know 
 what truth is, what beauty is, what love is, what 
 hope is. I do not believe any one absolutely and 
 I do not doubt any one absolutely. I think peo- 
 
 1 Another competent valuation, by Randolph Bourne, is in 
 The Dial, June 14, 1917. 
 
148 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 pie are both evil and well-intentioned." The hatch- 
 ing of the Dreiser bugaboo is here; it is the flat 
 rejection of the rubber-stamp formulae that out- 
 rages petty minds; not being "good," he must be 
 "evil" — as William Blake said of Milton, a true 
 poet is always "of the devil's party." But in that 
 very groping toward a light but dimly seen there 
 is a measure, it seems to me, of Dreiser's rank and 
 consideration as an artist. "Now comes the pub- 
 lic," says Hermann Bahr, "and demands that we 
 explain what the poet is trying to say. The answer 
 is this: If we knew exactly he would not be a 
 poet. . . ." 
 
III. JAMES HUNEKER 
 
Ill 
 
 JAMES HUNEKER 
 § 1 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE, I am fond of believ- 
 ing, earned as a critic a good deal of the 
 excess of praise that he gets as a romancer 
 and a poet, and another over-estimated American 
 dithyrambist, Sidney Lanier, wrote the best text- 
 book of prosody in English; ^ but in general the 
 critical writing done in the United States has been 
 of a low order, and most American writers of any 
 genuine distinction, like most American painters 
 and musicians, have had to wait for understanding 
 until it appeared abroad. The case of Emerson 
 is typical. At thirty, he was known in New Eng- 
 land as a heretical young clergyman and no more, 
 and his fame threatened to halt at the tea-tables of 
 the Boston Brahmins. It remained for Landor and 
 Carlyle, in a strange land, to discern his higher 
 potentialities, and to encourage him to his real life- 
 work. Mark Twain, as I have hitherto shown, suf- 
 
 iThe Science of English Verse; New York, Scribner, 1880. 
 151 
 
152 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 fered from the same lack of critical perception at 
 home. He was quickly recognized as a funny fel- 
 low, true enough, but his actual stature was not 
 even faintly apprehended, and even after "Huckle- 
 berry Finn" he was still bracketed with such labo- 
 rious farceurs as Artemus Ward. It was Sir Wal- 
 ter Besant, an Englishman, who first ventured to put 
 him on his right shelf, along with Swift, Cervantes 
 and Moliere. As for Poe and Whitman, the na- 
 tive recognition of their genius was so greatly con- 
 ditioned by a characteristic horror of their immor- 
 ality that it would be absurd to say that their own 
 country understood them. Both were better and 
 more quickly apprehended in France, and it was 
 in France, not in America, that each founded a 
 school. What they had to teach we have since got 
 back at second hand — the tale of mystery, which 
 was Poe's contribution, through Gaboriau and 
 Boisgobey; and vers libre, which was Whitman's, 
 through the French imagistes. 
 
 The cause of this profound and almost unbroken 
 lack of critical insight and enterprise, this puerile 
 Philistinism and distrust of ideas among us, is 
 partly to be found, it seems to me, in the fact that 
 the typical American critic is quite without any 
 adequate cultural equipment for the office he pre- 
 sumes to fill. Dr. John Dewey, in some late re- 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 153 
 
 marks upon the American universities, has perhaps 
 shown the cause thereof. The trouble with our 
 educational method, he argues, is that it falls be- 
 tween the two stools of English humanism and Ger- 
 man relentlessness — that it produces neither a man 
 who intelligently feels nor a man who thoroughly 
 knows. Criticism, in America, is a function of 
 this half -educated and conceited class; it is not a 
 popular art, but an esoteric one; even in its crass- 
 est journalistic manifestations it presumes to a 
 certain academic remoteness from the concerns and 
 carnalities of everyday. In every aspect it shows 
 the defects of its practitioners. The American 
 critic of beautiful letters, in his common incarna- 
 tion, is no more than a talented sophomore, or, at 
 best, a somewhat absurd professor. He suffers 
 from a palpable lack of solid preparation; he has 
 no background of moving and illuminating experi- 
 ence behind him; his soul has not sufficiently ad- 
 ventured among masterpieces, nor among men. 
 Imagine a Taine or a Sainte-Beuve or a Macaulay 
 — man of the world, veteran of philosophies, "lord 
 of life" — and you imagine his complete antithesis. 
 Even on the side of mere professional knowledge, 
 the primary material of his craft, he always ap- 
 pears incompletely outfitted. The grand sweep 
 and direction of the literary currents elude him; 
 
154 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 he is eternally on the surface, chasing hits of drift- 
 wood. The literature he knows is the fossil litera- 
 ture taught in colleges — worse, in high schools. 
 ^ It must be dead before he is aware of it. And in 
 particular he appears ignorant of what is going 
 forward in other lands. An exotic idea, to pene- 
 trate his consciousness, must first become stale, and 
 even then he is apt to purge it of all its remaining 
 validity and significance before adopting it. 
 
 This has been true since the earliest days. Em- 
 erson himself, though a man of unusual discern- 
 ment and a diligent drinker from German spigots, 
 nevertheless remained a dilettante in both aesthetics 
 and metaphysics to the end of his days, and the 
 incompleteness of his equipment never showed more 
 plainly than in his criticism of hooks. Lowell, if 
 anything, was even worse ; his aesthetic theory, first 
 and last, was nebulous and superficial, and all that 
 remains of his pleasant essays today is their some- 
 what smoky pleasantness. He was a Charles Dud- 
 ley Warner in nobler trappings, but still, at bottom, 
 a Charles Dudley Warner. As for Poe, though he 
 was by nature a far more original and penetrating 
 critic than either Emerson or Lowell, he was enor- 
 mously ignorant of good books, and moreover, he 
 could never quite throw off a congenital vulgarity 
 of taste, so painfully visible in the strutting of his 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 155 
 
 style. The man, for all his grand dreams, had a 
 shoddy soul; he belonged authentically to the era 
 of cuspidors, "females" and Sons of Temperance. 
 His occasional affectation of scholarship has de- 
 ceived no one. It was no more than Yankee blus- 
 ter; he constantly referred to books that he had 
 never read. Beside, the typical American critic 
 of those days was not Poe, but his arch-enemy, 
 Rufus Wilmot Griswold, that almost fabulous ass — 
 a Baptist preacher turned taster of the beautiful. 
 Imagine a Baptist valuing Balzac, or Moliere, or 
 Shakespeare, or Goethe — or Rabelais! 
 
 Coming down to our own time, one finds the 
 same endless amateurishness, so characteristic of 
 everything American, from politics to cookery — 
 the same astounding lack of training and vocation. 
 Consider the solemn ponderosities of the pious old 
 maids, male and female, who write book reviews 
 for the newspapers. Here we have a heavy pre- 
 tension to culture, a campus cocksureness, a la- 
 borious righteousness — but of sound aesthetic un- 
 derstanding, of alertness and hospitality to ideas, 
 not a trace. The normal American book reviewer, 
 indeed, is an elderly virgin, a superstitious blue- 
 stocking, an apostle of Vassar Kultur; and her cus- 
 tomary attitude of mind is one of fascinated horror. 
 (The Hamilton Wright Mabie complex! The 
 
156 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 "white list" of novels!) William Dean Howells, 
 despite a certain jauntiness and even kittenishness 
 of manner, is spiritually of that company. For 
 all his phosphorescent heresies, he is what the up- 
 lifters call a right-thinker at heart, and soaked in 
 the national tradition. He is easiest intrigued, 
 not by force and originality, but by a sickly, 
 Ladies' Home Journal sort of piquancy; it was this 
 that made him see a genius in the Philadelphia 
 Zola, W. B. Trites, and that led him to hymn an 
 abusive business letter by Frank A. Munsey, author 
 of "The Boy Broker" and "Afloat in a Great City," 
 as a significant human document. Moreover How- 
 ells runs true to type in another way, for he long 
 reigned as the leading Anglo-Saxon authority on 
 the Russian novelists without knowing, so far as I 
 can make out, more than ten words of Russian. 
 In the same manner, we have had enthusiasts for 
 D'Annunzio and Mathilde Serao who knew no Ital- 
 ian, and celebrants of Maeterlinck and Verhaeren 
 whose French was of the finishing school, and Ibsen 
 authorities without a single word of Dano-Nor- 
 wegian — I met one once who failed to recognize 
 "Et Dukkehjem" as the original title of "A Doll's 
 House," — and performers upon Hauptmann who 
 could no more read "Die Weber" than they could 
 decipher a tablet of Tiglath-Pileser III. 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 157 
 
 Here and there, of course, a more competent 
 critic of beautiful letters flings out his banner — 
 for example, John Macy, Ludwig Lewisohn, Andre 
 Tridon (it is a pity Tridon writes so little: his 
 slaughter of Maeterlinck was extraordinarily well 
 performed), Otto Heller, J. E. Spingam, Willard 
 Huntington Wright, the late Percival Pollard. 
 Well-informed, intelligent, wide-eyed men — but 
 only two of them even Americans, and not one of 
 them with a wide audience, or any appreciable in- 
 fluence upon the main stream of American crit- 
 icism. Pollard's best work is buried in the per- 
 fumed pages of Town Topics; his book on the 
 Munich wits and dramatists ^ is almost unknown. 
 Heller and Lewisohn make their way slowly; a 
 patriotic wariness, I daresay, mixes itself up with 
 their acceptance. Wright turns to journalism and 
 to theoretical aesthetics — a colossal dispersal in- 
 deed. As for Macy, I recently found his "The 
 Spirit of American Literature," ^ by long odds the 
 soundest, wisest book on its subject, selling for 
 fifty cents on a Fifth avenue remainder counter. 
 
 How many remain? A few competent review- 
 ers who are primarily something else — Gilman, 
 
 1 Masks and Minstrels of New Germany; Boston, John W. 
 Luce & Co., 1911. 
 
 2 New York, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1913. 
 
158 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 Bourne, Untermeyer and company. A few young- 
 sters on the newspapers, struggling against the busi- 
 ness office. And then a leap to the Victorians, the 
 crepe-clad pundits, the bombastic word-mongers of 
 the Nation school — H. W. Boynton, W. C. Brow- 
 nell, Paul Elmer More, William Lyon Phelps, 
 Frederick Taber Copper et al. Here, undoubt- 
 edly, we have learning of a sort. More, it ap- 
 pears, once taught Sanskrit to the adolescent suf- 
 fragettes of Bryn Mawr — an enterprise as stimu- 
 lating (and as intelligible) as that of setting oif 
 fire-works in a blind asylum. Phelps sits in a 
 chair at Yale. Boynton is a master of arts in Eng- 
 lish literature, whatever that may mean. Brow- 
 nell is both L.H.D. and Litt.D., thus surpassing 
 Samuel Johnson by one point, and Hazlitt, Col- 
 eridge and Malone by two. But the learning of 
 these august umbilicarii, for all its pretensions, is 
 precisely the sterile, foppish sort one looks for in 
 second-rate college professors. The appearance is 
 there, but not the substance. One ingests a horse- 
 doctor's dose of words, but fails to acquire any il- 
 lumination. Read More on Nietzsche ^ if you want 
 to find out just how stupid criticism can be, and yet 
 show the outward forms of sense. Read Phelps' 
 
 1 The Drift of Romanticism; Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 
 1913. 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 159 
 
 "The Advance of the English Novel" ^ if you would 
 see a fine art treated as a moral matter, and great 
 works tested by the criteria of a small-town Sunday- 
 school, and all sorts of childish sentimentality 
 whooped up. And plough through Brownell's 
 "Standards," ^ if you have the patience, and then 
 try to reduce its sonorous platitudes to straight- 
 forward and defensible propositions. 
 
 Now for the exception. He is, of course, James 
 Gibbons Huneker, the solitary lokanaan in this 
 tragic aesthetic wilderness, the only critic among 
 us whose vision sweeps the whole field of beauty, 
 and whose reports of what he sees there show any 
 genuine gusto. That gusto of his, I fancy, is two- 
 thirds of his story. It is unquenchable, contagious, 
 inflammatory; he is the only performer in the com- 
 missioned troupe who knows how to arouse his 
 audience to anything approaching enthusiasm. 
 The rest, even including Howells, are pedants lec- 
 turing to the pure in heart, but Huneker makes a 
 joyous story of it; his exposition, transcending the 
 merely expository, takes on the quality of an ad- 
 
 1 New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1916. 
 
 2 New York, Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1917. 
 
160 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 venture hospitably shared. One feels, reading 
 him, that he is charmed by the men and women he 
 writes about, and that their ideas, even when he 
 rejects them, give him an agreeable stimulation. 
 And to the charm that he thus finds and exhibits 
 in others, he adds the very positive charm of his 
 own personality. He seems a man who has found 
 the world fascinating, if perhaps not perfect; a 
 friendly and good-humoured fellow; no frigid 
 scholiast, but something of an epicure ; in brief, the 
 reverse of the customary maker of books about 
 books. Compare his two essays on Ibsen, in 
 "Egoists" and "Iconoclasts" to the general body of 
 American writing upon the great Norwegian. The 
 difference is that between a portrait and a Bertillon 
 photograph, Richard Strauss and Czemy, a wed- 
 ding and an autopsy. Huneker displays Ibsen, not 
 as a petty mystifier of the women's clubs, but as a 
 literary artist of large skill and exalted passion, 
 and withal a quite human and understandable 
 man. These essays were written at the height of 
 the symbolism madness; in their own way, they 
 even show some reflection of it; but taking them in 
 their entirety, how clearly they stand above the 
 ignorant obscurantism of the prevailing criticism of 
 the time — how immeasurably superior they are, 
 for example, to that favourite hymn-book of the 
 
) 
 
 JAMES HUNEKER 161 
 
 Ibsenites, "The Ibsen Secret" by Jennette Lee! 
 For the causes of this difference one need not seek 
 far. They are to be found in the difference be- 
 tween the bombastic half-knowledge of a school 
 teacher and the discreet and complete knowledge 
 of a man of culture. Huneker is that man of cul- 
 ture. He has reported more of interest and value 
 than any other American critic, living or dead, but 
 the essence of his criticism does not lie so much in 
 what he specifically reports as in the civilized point 
 of view from which he reports it. He is a true 
 cosmopolitan, not only in the actual range of his 
 adventurings, but also and more especially in his 
 attitude of mind. His world is not America, nor 
 Europe, nor Christendom, but the whole universe 
 of beauty. As Jules Simon said of Taine: "Acun 
 ecrivain de nos jours n'a . . . decouvert plus 
 d'horizons varies et immenses." 
 ' Need anything else be said in praise of a critic? 
 And does an extravagance or an error here and 
 there lie validly against the saying of it? I think 
 not. I could be a professor if I would and show 
 you slips enough — certain ponderous nothings in 
 the Ibsen essays, already mentioned; a too easy 
 bemusement at the hands of Shaw; a vacillating 
 over Wagner; a habit of yielding to the hocus- 
 pocus of the mystics, particularly Maeterlinck. 
 
162 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 On the side of painting, I am told, there are even 
 worse aberrations; I know too little about painting 
 to judge for myself. But the list, made complete, 
 would still not be over-long, and few of its items 
 would be important. Huneker, like the rest of us, 
 has sinned his sins, but his judgments, in the over- 
 whelming main, hold water. He has resisted the 
 lure of all the wild movements of the generation; 
 the tornadoes of doctrine have never knocked him 
 over. Nine times out of ten, in estimating a new 
 man in music or letters, he has come curiously 
 close to the truth at the first attempt. And he has 
 always announced it in good time; his solo has al- 
 ways preceded the chorus. He was, I believe, the 
 first American (not forgetting William Morton 
 Payne and Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, the pioneers) 
 to write about Ibsen with any understanding of the 
 artist behind the prophet's mask; he was the first 
 to see the rising star of Nietzsche (this was back in 
 1888) ; he was beating a drum for Shaw the critic 
 before ever Shaw the dramatist and mob philoso- 
 pher was bom {circa 1886-1890) ; he was writing 
 about Hauptmann and Maeterlinck before they had 
 got well set on their legs in their own countries; 
 his estimate of Sudermann, bearing date of 1905, 
 may stand with scarcely the change of a word to- 
 day; he did a lot of valiant pioneering for Strind- 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 163 
 
 berg, Herview, Stirner and Gorki, and later on 
 helped in the pioneering for Conrad; he was in the 
 van of the MacDowell enthusiasts; he fought for 
 the ideas of such painters as Davies, Lawson, Luks, 
 Sloan and Prendergest (Americans all, by the way: 
 an answer to the hollow charge of exotic obsession) 
 at a time when even Manet, Monet and Degas were 
 laughed at; he was among the first to give a hand 
 to Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane 
 and H. B. Fuller. In sum, he gave some semblance 
 of reality in the United States, after other men had 
 tried and failed, to that great but ill-starred revolt 
 against Victorian pedantry, formalism and senti- 
 mentality which began in the early 90's. It would 
 be difficult, indeed, to overestimate the practical 
 value to all the arts in America of his intellectual 
 alertness, his catholic hospitality to ideas, his ar- 
 tistic courage, and above all, his powers of per- 
 suasion. 'It was not alone that he saw clearly what 
 was sound and significant; it was that he managed, 
 by the sheer charm of his writings, to make a few 
 others see and imderstand it. If the United States 
 is in any sort of contact today, however remotely, 
 with what is aesthetically going on in the more 
 civilized countries — if the Puritan tradition, for all 
 its firm entrenchment, has eager and resourceful 
 enemies besetting it — if the pall of Harvard quasi- 
 
164 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 culture, by the Oxford manner out of Calvinism, 
 has been lifted ever so little — there is surely no 
 man who can claim a larger share of credit for pre- 
 paring the way. • . . 
 
 §3 
 
 Huneker comes out of Philadelphia, that de- 
 pressing intellectual slum, and his first writing was 
 for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. He is 
 purely Irish in blood, and is of very respectable 
 ancestry, his maternal grandfather and godfather 
 having been James Gibbons, the Irish poet and 
 patriot, and president of the Fenian Brotherhood 
 in America. Once, in a review of "The Pathos of 
 Distance," I ventured the guess that there was a 
 German strain in him somewhere, and based it upon 
 the beery melancholy visible in parts of that book. 
 Who but a German sheds tears over the empty 
 bottles of day before yesterday, the Adelaide Neil- 
 son of 1877? Who but a German goes into wool- 
 len undershirts at 45, and makes his will, and be- 
 gins to call his wife "Mamma"? The green-sick- 
 ness of youth is endemic from pole to pole, as much 
 so as measles; but what race save the wicked one 
 is floored by a blue distemper in middle age, with 
 sentimental burblings a cappella, hallucinations of 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 165 
 
 lost loves, and an unquenchable lacrymorrhea? 
 ... I made out a good case, but I was wrong, and 
 the penalty came swiftly and doubly, for on the 
 one hand the Boston Transcript sounded an alarm 
 against both Huneker and me as German spies, and 
 on the other hand Huneker himself proclaimed that, 
 even spiritually, he was less German than Magyar, 
 less "Hun" than Hun. "I am," he said, "a Celto- 
 Magyar: Pilsner at Donneybrook Fair. Even the 
 German beer and cuisine' are not in it with the 
 Austro-Hungarian." Here, I suspect, he meant to 
 say Czech instead of Magyar, for isn't Pilsen in 
 Bohemia? Moreover, turn to the chapter on 
 Prague in "New Cosmopolis," and you will find 
 out in what highland his heart really is. In this 
 book, indeed, is a vast hymn to all things Czechic — 
 the Pilsen Urquell, the muffins stuffed with poppy- 
 seed jam, the spiced chicken liver en casserole, the 
 pretty Bohemian girls, the rose and golden glory of 
 Hradcany Hill. . . . One thinks of other strange 
 infatuations: the Polish Conrad's for England, the 
 Scotch Mackay's for Germany, the Low German 
 Brahms' for Italy. Huneker, I daresay, is the first 
 Celto-Czech — or Celto-Magyar, as you choose. 
 (Maybe the name suggests something. It is not to 
 be debased to Hoon-eker, remember, but kept at 
 Hun-eker, rhyming initially with nun and gun.) 
 
166 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 An unearthly marriage of elements, by all the gods! 
 but there are pretty children of it. . . , 
 
 Philadelphia humanely disgorged Huneker in 
 1878. His father designed him for the law, and 
 he studied the institutes at the Philadelphia Law 
 Academy, but like Schumann, he was spoiled for 
 briefs by the stronger pull of music and the 
 cacoethes scribendi. (Grandpa John Huneker had 
 been a composer of church music, and organist at 
 St. Mary's.) In the year mentioned he set out 
 for Paris to see Liszt ; his aim was to make himself 
 a piano virtuoso. His name does not appear on 
 his own exhaustive list of Liszt pupils, but he man- 
 aged to quaff of the Pierian spring at second-hand, 
 for he had lessons from Theodore Ritter (ree Ben- 
 net), a genuine pupil of the old walrus, and he 
 was also taught by the venerable Georges Mathias, 
 a pupil of Chopin. These days laid the founda- 
 tions for two subsequent books, the "Chopin: the 
 Man and His Music" of 1900, and the "Franz 
 Liszt" of 1911. More, they prepared the excava- 
 tions for all of the others, for Huneker began send- 
 ing home letters to the I^hiladelphia Bulletin on the 
 pictures that he saw, the books that he read and the 
 music that he heard in Paris, and out of them 
 gradually grew a body of doctrine that was to be 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 167 
 
 developed into full-length criticism on his return 
 to the United States. He stayed in Paris until the 
 middle 80's, and then settled in New York. 
 
 All the while his piano studies continued, and 
 in New York he became a pupil of Rafael JosefFy. 
 He even became a teacher himself and was for ten 
 years on the staff of the National Conservatory, 
 and showed himself at all the annual meetings of 
 the Music Teachers' Association. But bit by bit 
 criticism elbowed out music-making, as music-mak- 
 ing had elbowed out criticism with Schumann and 
 Berlioz. In 1886 or thereabout he joined the 
 Musical Courier; then he went, in succession, to 
 the old Recorder, to the Morning Advertiser, to the 
 Sun, to the Times, and finally back to the Sun, in 
 whose columns he still occasionally holds forth. 
 Various weeklies and monthlies have also enlisted 
 him: Mile. New York, the Atlantic Monthly, the 
 Smart Set, the North American Review and Scrib- 
 ner's. He has even stooped to Puck, vainly trying 
 to make an American Simplicissimus of that dull 
 offspring of synagogue and barbershop. He has 
 been, in brief, an extremely busy and not too fas- 
 tidious journalist, writing first about one of the 
 arts, and then about another, and then about all 
 seven together. But music has been the steadiest 
 
168 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 of all his loves; his first three books dealt almost 
 wholly with it; of his complete canon more than 
 half have to do with it. 
 
 § 4. 
 
 His first book, "Mezzotints in Modem Music," 
 published in 1899, revealed his predilections 
 clearly, and what is more, his critical insight and 
 sagacity. One reads it today without the slightest 
 feeling that it is an old story ; some of the chapters, 
 obviously reworkings of articles for the papers, 
 must go back to the middle 90's, and yet the judg- 
 ments they proclaim scarcely call for the change 
 of a word. The single noticeable weakness is a 
 too easy acquiescence in the empty showiness of 
 Saint-Saens, a tendency to bow to the celebrated 
 French parlour magician too often. Here, I dare- 
 say, is an echo of old Paris days, for Camille was 
 a hero on the Seine in 1880, and there was even 
 talk of pitting him against Wagner. The esti- 
 mates of other men are judiciously arrived at and 
 persuasively stated. Tschaikowsky is correctly 
 put down as highly talented but essentially shallow 
 fellow — a blubberer in the regalia of a philosopher. 
 Brahms, then still under attack by Henry T. Finck, 
 of the Evening Post (the press-agent of Massenet: 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 169 
 
 ye gods, what Harvard can do, even to a Wiirttem- 
 berger!) is subjected to a long, an intelligent and 
 an extremely friendly analysis; no better has got 
 into English since, despite too much stress on the 
 piano music. And Richard Strauss, yet a nine 
 days' wonder, is described clearly and accurately, 
 and his true stature indicated. The rest of the book 
 is less noteworthy; Huneker says the proper things 
 about Chopin, Liszt and Wagner, and adds a chap- 
 ter on piano methods, the plain fruit of his late 
 pedagogy. But the three chapters I have men- 
 tioned are enough; they fell, in their time, into a 
 desert of stupidity; they set a standard in musical 
 criticism in America that only Huneker himself has 
 ever exceeded. 
 
 The most popular of his music books, of course, 
 is the "Chopin" (1900). Next to "Iconoclasts," 
 it is the best seller of them all. More, it has been 
 done into German, French and Italian, and is 
 chiefly responsible for Huneker's celebrity abroad 
 as the only critic of music that America has ever 
 produced. Superficially, it seems to be a monu- 
 ment of pedantry, a meticulous piling up of learn- 
 ing, but a study of it shows that it is very much 
 more than that. Compare it to Sir George Grove's 
 staggering tome on the Beethoven symphonies if 
 you want to understand the difference between mere 
 
170 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 scholastic diligence and authentic criticism. The 
 one is simply a top-heavy mass of disorderly facts 
 and worshipping enthusiasm; the other is an an- 
 alysis that searches out every nook and comer of 
 the subject, and brings it into coherence and in- 
 telligibility. The Chopin rhapsodist is always 
 held in check by the sound musician; there is a 
 snouting into dark places as well as a touching up 
 of high lights. I myself am surely no disciple of 
 the Polish tuberose — his sweetness, in fact, gags 
 me, and I turn even to Moszkowski for relief — but 
 I have read and re-read this volume with endless 
 interest, and I find it more bethumbed than any 
 other Huneker book in my library, saving only 
 "Iconoclasts" and "Old Fogy." Here, indeed, 
 Huneker is on his own ground. One often feels, 
 in his discussions of orchestral music, that he only 
 thinks orchestrally, like Schumann, with an effort 
 — that all music, in his mind, gets itself translated 
 into terms of piano music. In dealing with Chopin 
 no such transvaluation of values is necessary; the 
 raw materials are ready for his uses without prep- 
 aration; he is wholly at home among the black 
 keys and white. 
 
 His "Liszt" is a far less noteworthy book. It 
 is, in truth, scarcely a book at all, but merely a 
 collection of notes for a book, some of them con- 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 171 
 
 siderably elaborated, but others set down in the 
 altogether. One reads it because it is about Liszt, 
 the most fantastic figure that ever came out of 
 Hungary, half devil and half clown; not because 
 there is any conflagration of ideas in it. The chap- 
 ter that reveals most of Huneker is the appendix 
 on latter-day piano virtuosi, with its estimates of 
 such men as de Pachmann, Rosenthal, Paderewski 
 and Hofmann. Much better stuff is to be found in 
 "Overtones," "The Pathos of Distance" and "Ivory, 
 Apes and Peacocks" — brilliant, if not always pro- 
 found studies of Strauss, Wagner, Schoenberg, 
 Moussorgsky, and even Verdi. But if I had my 
 choice of the whole shelf, it would rest, barring the 
 "Chopin," on "Old Fogy"— the scherzo of the 
 Hunekeran symphony, the critic taking a holiday, 
 the Devil's Mass in the tonal sanctuary. In it 
 Huneker is at his very choicest, making high- jinks 
 with his Davidsbund of one, rattling the skeletons 
 in all the musical closets of the world. Here, 
 throwing off his critic's black gown, his lays about 
 him right and left, knocking the reigning idols off 
 their perches; resurrecting the old, old dead and 
 trying to pump the breath into them; lambasting 
 on one page and lauding on the next; lampooning 
 his fellow critics and burlesquing their rubber 
 stamp fustian; extolling Dussek and damning Wag- 
 
172 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 ner; swearing mighty oaths by Mozart, and after 
 him, Strauss — not Richard, but Johann! The Old 
 Fogy, of course, is the thinnest of disguises, a mere 
 veil of gossamer for "Editor" Huneker. That 
 Huneker in false whiskers is inimitable, incom- 
 parable, almost indescribable. On the one hand, he 
 is a prodigy of learning, a veritable warehouse of 
 musical information, true, half-true and apocry- 
 phal; on the other hand, he is a jester who delights 
 in reducing all learning to absurdity. Reading 
 him somehow suggests hearing a Bach mass re- 
 scored for two fifes, a tambourine in B, a wind 
 machine, two tenor harps, a contrabass oboe, two 
 banjos, eight tubas and the usual clergy and 
 strings. The substance is there; every note is 
 struck exactly in the middle — but what outlandish 
 tone colours, what strange, unearthly sounds! It 
 is not Bach, however, who first comes to mind when 
 Huneker is at his tricks, but Papa Haydn — the 
 Haydn of the Surprise symphony and the Farewell. 
 There is the same gargantuan gaiety, the same mag- 
 nificent irreverence. Haydn did more for the 
 symphony than any other man, but he also got 
 more fun out' of it than any other man. 
 
 "Old Fogy," of course, is not to be taken se- 
 riously: it is frankly a piece of fooling. But all 
 the same a serious idea runs through the book from 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 173 
 
 end to end, and that is the idea that music is get- 
 ting too subjective to be comfortable. The makers 
 of symphonies tend to forget beauty altogether; 
 their one effort is to put all their own petty trials 
 and tribulations, their empty theories and specula- 
 tions into cacophony. Even so far back as 
 Beethoven's day that autobiographical habit had be- 
 gim. "Beethoven," says Old Fogy, is "dramatic, 
 powerful, a maker of storms, a subduer of tem- 
 pests; but his speech is the speech of a self-cen- 
 tred egotist. He is the father of all the modem 
 melomaniacs, who, looking into their own souls, 
 write what they see therein — misery, corruption, 
 slighting selfishness and ugliness." Old Ludwig's 
 groans, of course, we can stand. He was not only 
 a great musician, but also a great man. It is just 
 as interesting to hear him sigh and complain as it 
 would be to hear the private prayers of Julius 
 Caesar. But what of Tschaikowsky, with his child- 
 ish Slavic whining? What of Liszt, with his cheap 
 playacting, his incurable lasciviousness, his ple- 
 beian warts? What of Wagner, with his delight in 
 imbecile fables, his popinjay vanity, his soul of 
 a Schnorrer? What of Richard Strauss, with his 
 warmed-over Nietzscheism, his flair for the merely 
 horrible? Old Fogy sweeps them all into his rag- 
 bag. If art is to be defined as beauty seen through 
 
174 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 a temperament, then give us more beauty and 
 cleaner temperaments! Back to the old gods, 
 Mozart and Bach, with a polite bow to Brahms and 
 a sentimental tear for Chopin! Beethoven tried 
 to tell his troubles in his music; Mozart was content 
 to ravish the angels of their harps. And as for 
 Johann Sebastian, "there was more real musical 
 feeling, uplifting and sincerity in the old Thomas- 
 kirche in Leipzig . . . than in all your modem 
 symphony and oratorio machine-made concerts put 
 together." 
 
 All this is argued, to be sure, in extravagant 
 terms. Wagner is a mere ghoul and impostor: 
 "The Flying Dutchman" is no more than a parody 
 on Weber, and "Parsifal" is "an outrage against 
 religion, morals and music." Daddy Liszt is "the 
 inventor of the Liszt pupil, a bad piano player, a 
 venerable man with a purple nose — a Cyrano de 
 Cognac nose." Tschaikowsky is the Slav gone 
 crazy on vodka. He transformed Hamlet into "a 
 yelling man" and Romeo and Juliet into "two 
 monstrous Cossacks, who gibber and squeak at each 
 other while reading some obscene volume." "His 
 Manfred is a libel on Byron, who was a libel on 
 God." And even Schumann is a vanishing star, a 
 literary man turned composer, a pathological case. 
 But, as I have said, a serious idea runs through all 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 175 
 
 this concerto for slapstick and seltzer siphon, and 
 to me, at least, that idea has a plentiful reasonable- 
 ness. We are getting too much melodrama, too 
 much vivisection, too much rebellion — and too lit- 
 tle music. Turn from Tschaikowsky's Pathetique 
 or from any of his wailing tone-poems to Schu- 
 bert's C major, or to Mozart's Jupiter, or to 
 Beethoven's kleine Sinfonie in F dur: it is like com- 
 ing out of a Kaffeeklatsch into the open air, almost 
 like escaping from a lunatic asylum. The one 
 unmistakable emotion that much of this modem 
 music from the steppes and morgues and Biertische 
 engenders is a longing for form, clarity, coherence, 
 a self-respecting tune. The snorts and moans of 
 the pothouse Werthers are as irritating, in the long 
 run, as the bawling of a child, the squeak of a pig 
 under a gate. One yearns unspeakably for a com- 
 poser who gives out his pair of honest themes, and 
 then develops them with both ears open, and then 
 recapitulates them unashamed, and then hangs a 
 brisk coda to them, and then shuts up. 
 
 §5 
 
 So much for "Old Fogy" and the musical books. 
 They constitute, not only the best body of work that 
 Huneker himself has done, but the best body of 
 
176 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 musical criticism that any American has done. 
 Musical criticism, in our great Calvinist republic, 
 confines itself almost entirely to transient review- 
 ing, and even when it gets between covers, it keeps 
 its trivial quality. Consider, for example, the pub- 
 lished work of Henry Edward Krehbiel, for long 
 the doyen of the New York critics. I pick up his 
 latest book, "A Second Book of Operas," ^ open it 
 at random, and find this: 
 
 On January 31, 1893, the Philadelphia singers, aided by the 
 New York Symphony Society, gave a performance of the 
 opera, under the auspices of the Young Men's Hebrew Asso- 
 ciation, for the benefit of its charities, at the Carnegie Music 
 Hall, New York. Mr. Walter Damrosch was to have con- 
 ducted, but was detained in Washington by the funeral of Mr. 
 Blaine, and Mr. Hinrichs took his place. 
 
 Doctor admirabilis, acutus et illuminatissi- 
 mus! Needless to say the universities have not 
 overlooked this geyser of buttermilk: he is an 
 honourary A.M. of Yale. His most respectable 
 volume, that on negro folksong, impresses, one prin- 
 cipally by its incompleteness. It may be praised 
 as a sketch, but surely not as a book. The trouble 
 with Krehbiel, of course, is that he mistakes a 
 newspaper morgue for Parnassus. He has all of 
 the third-rate German's capacity for unearthing 
 
 iNew York, The Macmillan Co., 1917. 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 177 
 
 facts, but he doesn't know how either to think or to 
 write, and so his criticism is mere pretence and 
 pishposh. W. J. Henderson, of the Sun, doesn't 
 carry that handicap. He is as full of learning as 
 Krehbiel, as his books on singing and on the early 
 Italian opera show, but he also wields a slippery 
 and intriguing pen, and he could be hugely enter- 
 taining if he would. Instead, he devotes himself 
 to manufacturing primers for the newly intel- 
 lectual. I can find little of the charm of his Sun 
 articles in his books. Lawrence Gilman? A 
 sound musician but one who of late years has 
 often neglected music for the other arts. Philip 
 H. Goepp? His three volumes on the symphonic 
 repertoire leave twice as much to be said as they 
 say. Carl Van Vechten? A very promising nov- 
 ice, but not yet at full growth. Philip Hale? 
 His gigantic annotations scarcely belong to criti- 
 cism at all; they are musical talmudism. Beside, 
 the'y are buried in the program books of the Bos- 
 ton Symphony Orchestra, and might as well be in- 
 scribed on the temple walls of Baalbec. As for 
 Upton and other such fellows, they are merely 
 musical chautauquans, and their tedious commen- 
 taries have little more value than the literary 
 criticisms in the religious weeklies. One of them, 
 a Harvard maestro, has published a book on the 
 
178 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 orchestra in which, on separate pages, the reader is 
 solemnly presented with pictures of first and second 
 violins! 
 
 It seems to me that Huneker stands on a higher 
 level than any of these industrious gentlemen, and 
 that his writings on music are of much more value, 
 despite his divided allegiance among the beaux 
 arts. Whatever may be said against him, it must 
 at least be admitted that he knows Chopin, and that 
 he has written the best volumes upon the tuber- 
 culous Pole in English. Vladimir de Pachman, 
 that king of all Chopin players, once bore charac- 
 teristic testimony to the fact — I think it was in 
 London. The program was heavy with the etudes 
 and ballades, and Huneker sat in the front row of 
 fanatics. After a storm of applause de Pachmann 
 rose from the piano stool, levelled a bony claw at 
 Huneker, and pronounced his dictum: "He knows 
 more than all of you." Joseffy seems to have had 
 the same opinion, for he sought the aid of his old 
 pupil in preparing his new edition of Chopin, the 
 first volume of which is all he lived to see in print. 
 . . . And, beyond all the others, Huneker disdains 
 writing for the kindergarten. There is no stoop- 
 ing in his discourse; he frankly addresses him- 
 self to an audience that has gone through the forms, 
 and so he avoids the tediousness of the A B C ex- 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 179 
 
 positors. He is the only American musical critic, 
 save Van Vechten, who thus assumes invariably that 
 a musical audience exists, and the only one who 
 constantly measures up to its probable interests, 
 supposing it to be there. Such a book as "Old 
 Fogy," for all its buffoonery, is conceivable only 
 as the work of a sound musician. Its background 
 is one of the utmost sophistication; in the midst of 
 its wildest extravagances there is always a pro- 
 found knowledge of music on tap, and a profound 
 love of it to boot. Here, perhaps, more than any- 
 where else, Huneker's delight in the things he deals 
 with is obvious. It is not a seminary that he 
 keeps, but a sort of club of tone enthusiasts, and 
 membership in it is infinitely charming. 
 
 §6 
 
 This capacity for making the thing described 
 seem important and delightful, this quality of in- 
 fectious gusto, this father-talent of all the talents 
 that a critic needs, sets off his literary criticism no 
 less than his discourse on music and musicians. 
 Such a book as "Iconoclasts" or "Egoists" is full 
 of useful information, but it is even more full of 
 agreeable adventure. The style is the book, as it 
 is the man. It is arch, staccato, ironical, witty. 
 
180 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 galloping, playful, polyglot, allusive — sometimes, 
 alas, so allusive as to reduce the Drama Leaguer 
 and women's clubber to wonderment and ire. In 
 writing of plays or of books, as in writing of cities, 
 tone-poems or philosophies, Huneker always as- 
 sumes that the elements are already well-grounded, 
 that he is dealing with the initiated, that a pause 
 to explain would be an affront. Sad work for the 
 Philistines — but a joy to the elect! All this poly- 
 phonic allusiveness, this intricate fuguing of ideas, 
 is not to be confused, remember, with the hollow 
 showiness of the academic soothsayer. It is as 
 natural to the man, as much a part of him as the 
 clanging Latin of Johnson, or, to leap from art to 
 art Huneker-wise, the damnable cross-rhythms of 
 Brahms. He could no more write without his stock 
 company of heretic sages than he could write with- 
 out his ration of malt. And, on examination, all 
 of them turned out to be real. They are far up 
 dark alleys, but they are there! . . . And one finds 
 them, at last, to be as pleasant company as the 
 multilingual puns of Nietzsche or Debussy's chords 
 of the second. 
 
 As for the origin of that style, it seems to have 
 a complex ancestry. Huneker's first love was Poe, 
 and even today he still casts affectionate glances in 
 that direction, but there is surely nothing of Poe's 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 181 
 
 elephantine labouring in his skipping, pizzicato 
 sentences. Then came Carlyle — the Carlyle of 
 "Sartor Resartus" — a god long forgotten. Hune- 
 ker's mother was a woman of taste ; on reading his 
 first scribblings, she gave him Cardinal Newman, 
 and bade him consider the Queen's English. New- 
 man achieved a useful purging; the style that re- 
 mained was ready for Flaubert. From the author 
 of "L'Education Sentimentale," I daresay, came 
 the deciding influence, with Nietzsche's staggering 
 brilliance offering suggestions later on. Thus 
 Huneker, as stylist, owes nearly all to France, for 
 Nietzsche, too, learned how to write there, and to 
 the end of his days he always wrote more like a 
 Frenchman than a German. His greatest service 
 to his own country, indeed, was not as anarch, but 
 as teacher of writing. He taught the Germans that 
 their language had a snap in it as well as sighs and 
 gargles — that it was possible to write German and 
 yet not wander in a wood. There are whole pages 
 of Nietzsche that suggest such things, say, as the 
 essay on Maurice Barres in "Egoists," with its bold 
 tropes, its rapid gait, its sharp sforzandos. And 
 you will find old Friedrich at his tricks from end to 
 end of "Old Fogy." 
 
 Of the actual contents of such books as "Egoists" 
 and "Iconoclasts" it is unnecessary to say any- 
 
182 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 thing. One no longer reads them for their matter, 
 but for their manner. Every flapper now knows 
 all that is worth knowing about Ibsen, Strindberg, 
 Maeterlinck and Shaw, and a great deal that is not 
 worth knowing. We have disentangled Haupt- 
 mann from Sudermann, and, thanks to Dr. Lew- 
 isohn, may read all his plays in English. Even 
 Henry Becque has got into the vulgate and is 
 familiar to the Drama League. As for Anatole 
 France, his "Revolt of the Angels" is on the shelves 
 of the Carnegie Libraries, and the Comstocks have 
 let it pass. New gods whoop and rage in Valhalla: 
 Verhaeren, Artzibashef, Przhevalski. Huneker, 
 alas, seems to drop behind the procession. He 
 writes nothing about these second-hand third-raters. 
 He has come to Wedekind, Schnitzler, Schoenberg, 
 Komgold and Moussorgsky, and he has discharged 
 a few rounds of shrapnel at the Gallo- Asiatic petti- 
 coat philosopher, Henri Bergson, but here he has 
 stopped, as he has stopped at Matisse, Picasso, Ep- 
 stein and Augustus John in painting. As he says 
 himself, "one must get off somewhere." . . . 
 
 Particularly if one grows weary of criticism — 
 and in Huneker, of late, I detect more than one 
 sign of weariness. Youth is behind him, and with 
 it some of its zest for exploration and combat. 
 "The pathos of distance" is a phrase that haunts 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 183 
 
 him as poignantly as it haunted Nietzsche, its 
 maker. Not so long ago I tried to induce him to 
 write some new Old Fogy sketches, nominating 
 Puccini, Strawinsky, Schoenberg, Komgold, Elgar. 
 He protested that the mood was gone from him 
 forever, that he could not turn the clock back 
 twenty years. His late work in Puck, the Times 
 and the Sun, shows an unaccustomed acquiescence 
 in current valuations. He praises such one-day 
 masterpieces as McFee's "Casuals of the Sea" ; he 
 is polite to the kept idealists of the New Republic; 
 he gags a bit at Wright's "Modem Painting"; he 
 actually makes a gingery curtsy to Frank Jewett 
 Mather, a Princeton professor. . . . The pressure 
 in the gauges can't keep up to 250 pounds forever. 
 Man must tire of fighting after awhile, and seek 
 his ease in his inn. . . . 
 
 Perhaps the post-bellum transvaluation of all 
 values will bring Huneker to his feet again, and 
 with something of the old glow and gusto in him. 
 And if the new men do not stir up, then assuredly 
 the wrecks of the ancient cities will: the Paris of 
 his youth; Munich, Dresden, Vienna, Brussels, 
 London; above all, Prague. Go to "New Cos- 
 mopolis" and you will find where his heart lies, or, 
 if not his heart, then at all events his oesophagus 
 and pylorus. . . . Here, indeed, the thread of his 
 
184 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 meditations is a thread of nutriment. However 
 diverted by the fragrance of the Dutch woods, the 
 church bells of Belgium, the music of Stuttgart, the 
 bad pictures of Dublin, the plays of Paris, the 
 musty romance of old Wien, he always comes back 
 anon to such ease as a man may find in his inn. 
 "The stomach of Vienna," he says, "first interested 
 me, not its soul." And so, after a dutiful genu- 
 flexion to St. Stephen's ("Old Steffel," as the Vien- 
 nese call it), he proceeds to investigate the paprika- 
 chicken, the Gulyas, the Risi-bisi, the Apfelstrudel, 
 the Kaiserchmam and the native and authentic 
 Wiener schnitzel. And from food to drink — spe- 
 cifically, to the haunts of Pilsner, to "certain semi- 
 sacred houses where the ritual of beer-drinking is 
 observed," to the shrines at which beer maniacs 
 meet, to "a little old house near a Greek church" 
 where "the best-kept Pilsner in Vienna may be 
 found." 
 
 The best-kept Pilsner in Vienna! The phrase 
 enchants like an entrance of the horns. The best 
 caviare in Russia, the worst actor on Broadway, the 
 most virtuous angel in Heaven! Such superlatives 
 are transcendental. And yet, — so rare is perfec- 
 tion in this world! — the news swiftly follows, un- 
 expected, disconcerting, that the best Pilsner in 
 Vienna is far short of the ideal. For some unde- 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 185 
 
 termined reason — the influence of the American 
 tourist? the decay of the Austrian national charac- 
 ter? — the Vienna Bierwirte freeze and paralyze it 
 with too much ice, so that it chills the nerves it 
 should caress, and fills the heart below with heavi- 
 ness and repining. Avoid Vienna, says Huneker, 
 if you are one who understands and venerates the 
 great Bohemian brew! And if, deluded, you find 
 yourself there, take the first D-zug for Prague, that 
 lovely city, for in it you will find the Pilsen Ur- 
 quell, and in the Pilsen Urquell you will find the 
 best Pilsner in Christendom — its colour a phos- 
 phorescent, translucent, golden yellow, its foam 
 like whipped cream, its temperature exactly and in- 
 variably right. Not even at Pilsen itself (which 
 the Bohemians call Plzen) is the emperor of malt 
 liquors more stupendously grateful to the palate. 
 Write it down before you forget: the Pilsen Ur- 
 quell, Prague, Bohemia, 120 miles S. S. E. of 
 Dresden, on the river Moldau (which the natives 
 call the Vltava). Ask for Fraulein Ottilie. Men- 
 tion the name of Herr Huneker, the American 
 Schriftsteller. 
 
 Of all the eminent and noble cities between the 
 AUeghenies and the Balkans, Prague seems to be 
 Huneker's favourite. He calls it poetic, precious, 
 delectable, original, dramatic — a long string of 
 
186 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 adjectives, each argued for with eloquence that is 
 unmistakably sincere. He stands fascinated be- 
 fore the towers and pinnacles of the Hradcany, "a 
 miracle of tender rose and marble white with 
 golden spots of sunshine that would have made 
 Claude Monet envious." He pays his devotions to 
 the Chapel of St. Wenceslas, "crammed with the 
 bones of buried kings," or, at any rate, to the shrine 
 of St. John Nepomucane, "composed of nearly two 
 tons of silver," He is charmed by the beauty of 
 the stout, black-haired, red-cheeked Bohemian girls, 
 and hopes that enough of them will emigrate to the 
 United States to improve the fading pulchritude of 
 our own houris. But most of all, he has praises for 
 the Bohemian cuisine, with its incomparable apple 
 tarts, and its dumplings of cream cheese, and for 
 the magnificent, the overpowering, the ineffable 
 Pilsner of Prague. This Pilsner motive runs 
 through the book from cover to cover. In the 
 midst of Dutch tulip-beds, Dublin cobblestones, 
 Madrid sunlight and Atlantic City leg-shows, one 
 hears it insistently, deep down in the orchestra. 
 The cellos weave it into the polyphony, sometimes 
 clearly, sometimes in scarcely recognizable aug- 
 mentation. It is heard again in the wood-wind; 
 the bassoons grunt it thirstily; it slides around in 
 the violas; it rises to a stately choral in the brass. 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 187 
 
 And chiefly it is in minor. Chiefly it is sounded 
 by one who longs for the Pilsen Urquell in a far 
 land, and among a barbarous and teetotaling peo- 
 ple, and in an atmosphere as hostile to the recrea- 
 tions of the palate as it is to the recreations of the 
 intellect. 
 
 As I say, this Huneker is a foreigner and hence 
 accursed. There is something about him as exotic 
 as a samovar, as essentially un-American as a 
 bashi-bazouk, a nose-ring or a fugue. He is filled 
 to the throttle with strange and unpatriotic heresies. 
 He ranks Beethoven miles above the national gods, 
 and not only Beethoven, but also Bach and Brahms, 
 and not only Bach and Brahms, but also Berlioz, 
 Bizet, Bruch and Biilow and perhaps even Bala- 
 kirew, Bellini, Balfe, Borodin and Boieldieu. He 
 regards Budapest as a more civilized city than 
 his native Philadelphia, Stendhal as a greater lit- 
 erary artist than Washington Irving, "Kiinstler 
 Leben" as better music than "There is Sunlight in 
 My Soul." Irish? I still doubt it, despite the 
 Stammbaum. Who ever heard of an Irish epicure, 
 an Irish flaneur, or, for that matter, an Irish con- 
 trapuntist? The arts of the voluptuous category 
 are unknown west of Cherbourg; one leaves them 
 behind with the French pilot. Even the Czech- 
 Irish hypothesis (or is it Magyar-Irish?) has a 
 
188 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 smell of the lamp. Perhaps it should be Irish- 
 Czech. . . . 
 
 There remain the books of stories, "Visionaries" 
 and "Melomaniacs." It is not surprising to hear 
 that both are better liked in France and Germany 
 than in England and the United States. ("Vision- 
 aries" has even appeared in Bohemian. ) Both are 
 made up of what the Germans call Kultur-JS ovellen 
 — that is, stories dealing, not with the emotions 
 common to all men, but with the clash of ideas 
 among the civilized and godless minority. In 
 some of them, e.g., "Rebels of the Moon," what 
 one finds is really not a story at all, but a static dis- 
 cussion, half aesthetic and half lunatic. In others, 
 e.g., "Isolde's Mother," the whole action revolves 
 around an assumption incomprehensible to the gen- 
 eral. One can scarcely imagine most of these tales 
 in the magazines. They would puzzle and out- 
 rage the readers of Gouverneur Morris and Ger- 
 trude Atherton, and the readers of Howells and 
 Mrs. Wharton no less. Their point of view is es- 
 sentially the aesthetic one; the overwhelming im- 
 portance of beauty is never in any doubt. And the 
 beauty thus vivisected and fashioned into new de- 
 signs is never the simple Wordsworthian article. 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 189 
 
 of fleecy clouds and primroses all compact; on the 
 contrary, it is the highly artificial beauty of pig- 
 ments and tone-colours, of Cezanne landscapes and 
 the second act of "Tristan und Isolde," of Dun- 
 sanyan dragons and Paracelsian mysteries. Here, 
 indeed, Huneker riots in the aesthetic occultism that 
 he loves; Music slides over into diabolism; the 
 Pobloff" symphony rends the firmament of Heaven; 
 the ghost of Chopin drives Mychowski to drink; a 
 single drum-beat finishes the estimable consort of 
 the composer of the Tympani symphony. In "The 
 Eighth Deadly Sin" we have a paean to perfume — 
 the only one, so far as I know, in English, In 
 "The Hall of the Missing Footsteps" we behold 
 the reaction of hasheesh upon Chopin's ballads in F 
 major. . . . Strangely-flavoured, unearthly, per- 
 haps unhealthy stuff. I doubt that it will ever be 
 studied for its style in our new Schools of Liter- 
 ature; a devilish cunning if often there, but it 
 leaves a smack of the pharmacopoeia. However, 
 as George Gissing used to say, "the artist should 
 be free from everything like moral prepossession." 
 This lets in the Antichrist. . . . 
 
 Huneker himself seems to esteem these fantastic 
 tales above all his other work. Story-writing, in- 
 deed, was his first love, and his Opus 1, a bad imi- 
 tation of Poe, by name "The Comet," was done in 
 
190 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 Philadelphia so long ago as July 4, 1876. (Tem- 
 perature, 105 degrees Fahrenheit.) One rather 
 marvels that he has never attempted a novel. It 
 would have been as bad, perhaps, as "Love Among 
 the Artists," but certainly no bore. He might have 
 given George Moore useful help with "Eveljm 
 Innes" and "Sister Teresa": they are about music, 
 but not by a musician. As for me, I see no great 
 talent for fiction qua fiction in these two volumes 
 of exotic tales. They are interesting simply be- 
 cause Huneker the story teller so often yields place 
 to Huneker the playboy of the arts. Such things as 
 "Antichrist" and "The Woman Who Loved 
 Chopin" are no more, at bottom, than second-rate 
 anecdotes; it is the filling, the sauce, the embroid- 
 ery that counts. But what filling! What sauce! 
 What embroidery! . . . One never sees more of 
 Huneker, . . . 
 
 § 8 
 
 He must stand or fall, however, as critic. It is 
 what he has written about other men, not what he 
 has concocted himself, that makes a figure of him, 
 and gives him his unique place in the sterile liter- 
 ature of the republic's second century. He stands 
 for a Weltanschauung that is not only un-national, 
 but anti-national; he is the chief of all the curbers 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 191 
 
 and correctors of the American Philistine; in 
 praising the arts he has also criticized a civilization. 
 In the large sense, of course, he has had but small 
 influence. After twenty years of earnest labour, 
 he finds himself almost as alone as a Methodist in 
 Bavaria. T he bod y of native criticism remains as 
 I have described it; an endless piling up of plati- 
 tudes, an homeric mass of false assumptions and 
 jejune conclusions, an insane madness to reduce 
 beauty to terms of a petty and pornographic mor- 
 ality. One might throw a thousand bricks in any 
 American city without striking a single man who 
 could give an intelligible account of either Haupt- 
 mann or Cezanne, or of the reasons for holding 
 Schumann to have been a better composer than 
 Mendelssohn. The boys in our colleges are still 
 taught that Whittier was a great poet and Fenni- 
 more Cooper a great novelist. Nine-tenths of our 
 people — perhaps ninety-nine hundredths of our 
 native-bom — have yet to see their first good pic- 
 ture, or to hear their first symphony. Our Cham- 
 berses and Richard Harding Davises are national 
 figures; our Norrises and Dreisers are scarcely tol- 
 erated. Of the two undoubted world figures that 
 we have contributed to letters, one was allowed to 
 die like a stray cat up an alley and the other was 
 mistaken for a cheap buffoon. Criticism, as the 
 
192 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 average American "intellectual" understands it, is 
 what a Frenchman, a German or a Russian would 
 call donkeyism. In all the arts we still cling to 
 the ideals of the dissenting pulpit, the public ceme- 
 tery, the electric sign, the bordello parlour. 
 
 But for all that, I hang to a somewhat battered 
 optimism, and one of the chief causes of that op- 
 timism is the fact that Huneker, after all these 
 years, yet remains unhanged. A picturesque and 
 rakish fellow, a believer in joy and beauty, a dis- 
 dainer of petty bombast and moralizing, a sworn 
 friend of all honest purpose and earnest striving, 
 he has given his life to a work that must needs bear 
 fruit hereafter. While the college pedagogues of 
 the Brander Matthews type still worshipped the 
 dead bones of Scribe and Sardou, Robertson and 
 Bulwer-Lytton, he preached the new and revolu- 
 tionary gospel of Ibsen. In the golden age of Rosa 
 Bonheur's "The Horse Fair," he was expounding 
 the principles of the post-impressionists. In the 
 midst of the Sousa marches he whooped for Rich- 
 ard Strauss. Before the rev. professors had come 
 to Schopenhauer, or even to Spencer, he was haul- 
 ing ashore the devil-fish, Nietzsche. No stranger 
 poisons have ever passed through the customs than 
 those he has brought in his baggage. No man 
 among us has ever urged more ardently, or with 
 
JAMES HUNEKER 193 
 
 sounder knowledge or greater persuasiveness, that 
 catholicity of taste and sympathy which stands in 
 such direct opposition to the booming certainty 
 and snarling narrowness of Little Bethel. 
 
 If he bears a simple label, indeed, it is that of 
 anti-Philistine. And the Philistine he attacks is 
 not so much the vacant and harmless fellow who 
 belongs to the Odd Fellows and recreates himself 
 with Life and Leslie's Weekly in the barber shop, as 
 that more belligerent and pretentious donkey who 
 presumes to do battle for "honest" thought and a 
 "sound" ethic — the "forward looking" man, the 
 university ignoramus, the conservator of orthodoxy, 
 the rattler of ancient phrases — what Nietzsche 
 called "the Philistine of culture." It is against 
 this fat milch cow of wisdom that Huneker has 
 brandished a spear since first there was a Huneker. 
 He is a sworn foe to "the traps that snare the atten- 
 tion from poor or mediocre workmanship — the 
 traps of sentimentalism, of false feeling, of cheap 
 pathos, of the cheap moral." He is on the trail of 
 those pious mountebanks who "clutter the market- 
 places with their booths, mischievous half-art and 
 tubs of tripe and soft soap." Superficially, as I 
 say, he seems to have made little progress in this 
 benign pogrom. But under the surface, concealed 
 from a first glance, he has undoubtedly left a mark 
 
194 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 — faint, perhaps, but still a mark. To be a civi- 
 lized man in America is measurably less difficult, 
 despite the war, than it used to be, say, in 1890. 
 One may at least speak of "Die Walkiire" without 
 being laughed at as a half-wit, and read Stimer 
 without being confused with Castro and Rasuili, 
 and argue that Huxley got the better of Gladstone 
 without being challenged at the polls. I know of 
 no man who pushed in that direction harder than 
 James Huneker. 
 
IV. PURITANISM AS A LITERARY FORCE 
 
IV 
 
 PURITANISM AS A LITERARY FORCE 
 
 § 1 
 
 "C 
 
 ALVINISM," says Dr. Leon Kellner, in 
 in his excellent little history of Ameri- 
 can literature/ "is the natural theology 
 of the disinherited; it never flourished, therefore, 
 anywhere as it did in the barren hills of Scotland 
 and in the wilds of North America." The learned 
 doctor is here speaking of theology in what may be 
 called its narrow technical sense — that is, as a 
 theory of God. Under Calvinism, in the New 
 World as well as in the Old, it became no more 
 than a luxuriant demonology; even God himself 
 was transformed into a superior sort of devil, ever 
 wary and wholly merciless. That primitive de- 
 monology still survives in the barbaric doctrines of 
 the Methodists and Baptists, particularly in the 
 South; but it has been ameliorated, even there, by a 
 growing sense of the divine grace, and so the old 
 God of Plymouth Rock, as practically conceived, 
 
 1 American Literature, tr. by Julia Franklin; New York, 
 Doubleday, Page & Co., 191,5. 
 
 197 
 
198 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 is now scarcely worse than the average jail warden 
 or Italian padrone. On the ethical side, however, 
 Calvinism is dying a much harder death, and we 
 are still a long way from the enlightenment. Save 
 where Continental influences have measurably cor- 
 rupted the Puritan idea — e.g., in such cities as 
 New York, St. Louis and New Orleans, the prevail- 
 ing American view of the world and its mysteries 
 is still a purely moral one, and no other human con- 
 cern gets half the attention that is endlessly lav- 
 ished upon the problem of conduct, particularly of 
 the other fellow. It needed no announcement of a 
 President of the United States to define the repub- 
 lic's destiny as that of an international expert in 
 morals, and the mentor and exemplar of the less 
 righteous nations. Within, as well as without, the 
 eternal rapping of knuckles and proclaiming of 
 new austerities goes on. The American, save in ' 
 moments of conscious and swiftly lamented devil- 
 try, casts up all ponderable values, including even 
 the values of beauty, in terms of right and wrong. 
 He is beyond all things else, a judge and a police- 
 man; he believes firmly that there is a mysterious 
 power in law; he supports and embellishes its 
 operation with a fanatical vigilance. 
 
 Naturally enough, this moral obsession has given 
 a strong colour to American literature. In truth, it 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 199 
 
 has coloured it so brilliantly that American lit- 
 erature is set off sharply from all other literaturesl 
 In none other will you find so wholesale and ec\ 
 static a sacrifice of aesthetic ideas, of all the fine; 
 gusto of passion and beauty, to notions of what is 
 meet, proper and nice. From the books of grisly 
 sermons that were the first American contribution 
 to letters down to that amazing literature of "in- 
 spiration" which now flowers so prodigiously, with 
 two literary Presidents among its chief virtuosi, 
 one observes no relaxation of the moral pressure. 
 In the history of every other literature there have 
 been periods of what might be called moral inno- 
 cence — ^periods in which a naif joie de vivre has 
 broken through all concepts of duty and respon- 
 sibility, and the wonder and glory of the universe 
 have been hymned with unashamed zest. The age 
 of Shakespeare comes to mind at once : the violence 
 of the Puritan reaction offers a measure of the pen- 
 dulum's wild swing. But in America no such gen- 
 eral rising of the blood has ever been seen. The 
 literature of the nation, even the literature of the 
 enlightened minority, has been under harsh Puri- 
 tan restraints from the beginning, and despite a 
 few stealthy efforts at revolt — usually quite without 
 artistic value or even common honesty, as in the 
 case of the cheap fiction magazines and that of 
 
200 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 smutty plays on Broadway, and always very short- 
 lived — it shows not the slightest sign of emancipat- 
 ing itself today. The American, try as he will, 
 can never imagine any work of the imagination as 
 I wholly devoid of moral content. It must either 
 tend toward the promotion of virtue, or be suspect 
 and abominable. 
 
 If any doubt of this is in your mind, turn to the 
 critical articles in the newspapers and literary 
 weeklies; you will encounter enough proofs in a 
 month's explorations to convince you forever. A 
 novel or a play is judged among us, not by its dig- 
 nity of conception, its artistic honesty, its perfec- 
 tion of workmanship, but almost entirely by its 
 orthodoxy of doctrine, its platitudinousness, its 
 usefulness as a moral tract. A digest of the re- 
 views of such a book as David Graham Phillips' 
 "Susan Lenox" or of such a play as Ibsen's "Hedda 
 Gabler" would make astoimding reading for a 
 Continental European. Not only the childish in- 
 competents who write for the daily press, but also 
 most of our critics of experience and reputation, 
 seem quite unable to estimate a piece of writing as 
 a piece of writing, a work of art as a work of art ; 
 they almost inevitably drag in irrelevant gabble as 
 to whether this or that personage in it is respectable, 
 or this or that situation in accordance with the 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 201 
 
 national notions of what is edifying and nice. 
 Fully nine-tenths of the reviews of Dreiser's "The 
 Titan," without question the best American novel 
 of its year, were devoted chiefly to indigent de- 
 nunciations of the morals of Frank Cowperwood, 
 its central character. That the man was superbly 
 imagined and magnificently depicted, that he stood 
 out from the book in all the flashing vigour of life, 
 that his creation was an artistic achievement of a 
 very high and difficult order — these facts seem to 
 have made no impression upon the reviewers what- 
 ever. They were Puritans writing for Puritans, 
 and all they could see in Cowperwood was an anti- 
 Puritan, and in his creator another. It will re- 
 main for Europeans, I daresay, to discover the true 
 stature of "The Titan," as it remained for Euro- 
 peans to discover the true stature of "Sister Car- 
 ne. 
 
 Just how deeply this corrective knife has cut 
 you may find plainly displayed in Dr. Kellner's 
 little book. He sees the throttling influence of an 
 ever alert and bellicose Puritanism, not only in our 
 grand literature, but also in our petit literature, our 
 minor poetry, even in our humour. The Puritan's 
 utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of all 
 romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of 
 opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak 
 
202 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 j and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, his 
 1 lust for relentless and barbarous persecution — 
 • these things have put an almost unbearable burden 
 ; upon the exchange of ideas in the United States, 
 and particularly upon that form of it which in- 
 ' volves playing with them for the mere game's sake. 
 On the one hand, the writer who would deal se- 
 riously and honestly with the larger problems of 
 life, particularly in the rigidly-partitioned ethical 
 field, is restrained by laws that would have kept a 
 Balzac or a Zola in prison from year's end to year's 
 end; and on the other hand the writer who would 
 proceed against the reigning superstitions by mock- 
 ery has been silenced by taboos that are quite as 
 stringent, and by an indifference that is even 
 worse. For all our professed delight in and ca- 
 pacity for jocosity, we have produced so far but 
 one genuine wit — Ambrose Bierce — and, save to a 
 small circle, he remains unknown today. Our 
 great humourists, including even Mark Twain, 
 have had to take protective colouration, whether 
 willingly or unwillingly, from the prevailing ethi- 
 cal foliage, and so one finds them levelling their 
 darts, not at the stupidities of the Puritan majority, 
 but at the evidences of lessening stupidity in the 
 anti-Puritan minority. In other words, they have 
 done battle, not against, but for Philistinism — and 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 203 
 
 Philistinism is no more than another name for 
 Puritanism. Both wage a ceaseless warfare upon 
 beauty in its every form, from painting to religious 
 ritual, and from the drama to the dance — the first 
 because it holds beauty to be a mean and stupid 
 thing, and the second because it holds beauty to be 
 distracting and corrupting. 
 
 Mark Twain, without question, was a great artist; 
 there was in him something of that prodigality of 
 imagination, that aloof engrossment in the human 
 comedy, that penetrating cynicism, which one asso- 
 ciates with the great artists of the Renaissance, 
 But his nationality hung around his neck like a| 
 millstone; he could never throw off his native 
 Philistinism. One ploughs through "The Inno-/ 
 cents Abroad" and through parts of "A Tramp 
 Abroad" with incredulous amazement. Is such 
 coarse and ignorant clowning to be accepted as 
 humour, as great humour, as the best humour that 
 the most humorous of peoples has produced? Is 
 it really the mark of a smart fellow to lift a 
 peasant's cackle over "Lohengrin"? Is Titian's 
 chromo of Moses in the buUrushes seriously to be 
 regarded as the noblest picture in Europe? Is 
 there nothing in Latin Christianity, after all, save 
 petty grafting, monastic scandals and the worship 
 of the knuckles and shin-bones of dubious saints? 
 
204 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 May not a civilized man, disbelieving in it, still 
 find himself profoundly moved by its dazzling his- 
 tory, the lingering remnants of its old magnificence, 
 the charm of its gorgeous and melancholy loveli- 
 ness? In the presence of all beauty of man's crea- 
 tion — in brief, of what we roughly call art, what- 
 ever its form — the voice of Mark Twain was the 
 voice of the Philistine. A literary artist of very 
 high rank himself, with instinctive gifts that lifted 
 him, in "Huckleberry Finn" to kinship with Cer- 
 vantes and Aristophanes, he was yet so far the vic- 
 tim of his nationality that he seems to have had no 
 capacity for distinguishing between the good and 
 the bad in the work of other men of his own craft. 
 The literary criticism that one occasionally finds in 
 his writings is chiefly trivial and ignorant; his pri- 
 vate inclination appears to have been toward such 
 romantic sentimentality as entrances school-boys; 
 the thing that interested him in Shakespeare was not 
 the man's colossal genius, but the absurd theory 
 that Bacon wrote his plays. Had he been bom in 
 France (the country of his chief abomination!) 
 instead of in a Puritan village of the American hin- 
 terland, I venture that he would have conquered 
 the world. But try as he would, being what he was, 
 he could not get rid of the Puritan smugness and 
 cocksureness, the Puritan distrust of new ideas, the 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 205 
 
 Puritan incapacity for seeing beauty as a thing in 
 itself, and the full peer of the true and the good. 
 
 It is, indeed, precisely in the works of such men 
 as Mark Twain that one finds the best proofs of the 
 Puritan influence in American letters, for it is there 
 that it is least expected and hence most significant. 
 Our native critics, unanimously Puritans them 
 selves, are anaesthetic to the flavour, but to Dr. Kell 
 ner, with his half -European, half -Oriental culture, 
 it is always distinctly perceptible. He senses it, 
 not only in the harsh Calvinistic fables of Haw 
 thome and the pious gurglings of Longfellow, but 
 also in the poetry of Bryant, the tea-party niceness 
 of Howells, the "maiden-like reserve" of James 
 Lane Allen, and even in the work of Joel Chand- 
 ler Harris. What! A Southern Puritan? Well, 
 why not? What could be more erroneous than the 
 common assumption that Puritanism is exclusively 
 a Northern, a New England, madness? The truth 
 is that it is as thoroughly national as the kindred 
 belief in democracy, and runs almost unobstructed 
 from Portland to Portland and from the Lakes to 
 the Gulf. It is in the South, indeed, and not in the 
 North, that it takes on its most bellicose and ex- 
 travagant forms. Between the upper tier of New 
 England and the Potomac river there is not a single 
 prohibition state — but thereafter, alas, they come in 
 
206 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 huge blocks! And behind that infinitely pros- 
 perous Puritanism there is a long and unbroken tra- 
 dition. Berkeley, the last of the Cavaliers, was 
 kicked out of power in Virginia so long ago as 
 1650. Lord Baltimore, the Proprietor of Mary- 
 land, was brought to terms by the Puritans of the 
 Severn in 1657. The Scotch Covenanter, the most 
 imcompromising and unenlightened of all Puri- 
 tans, flourished in the Carolinas from the start, and 
 in 1698, or thereabout, he was reinforced from 
 New England. In 1757 a band of Puritans in- 
 vaded what is now Georgia — and Georgia has been 
 a Puritan barbarism ever since. Even while the 
 early (and half -mythical) Cavaliers were still in 
 nominal control of all these Southern plantations, 
 they clung to the sea-coast. The population that 
 moved down the chain of the Appalachians during 
 the latter part of the eighteenth century, and then 
 swept over them into the Mississippi valley, was 
 composed almost entirely of Puritans — chiefly in- 
 transigeants from New England (where Unita- 
 rianism was getting on its legs), kirk-crazy Scotch, 
 and that plupious and beauty-hating folk, the 
 Scotch-Irish. "In the South today," said John 
 Fiske a generation ago, "there is more Puritanism 
 surviving than in New England." In that whole 
 region, an area three times as large as France or 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 207 
 
 Germany, there is not a single orchestra capable of 
 playing Beethoven's C minor symphony, or a single 
 painting worth looking at, or a single public build- 
 ing or monument of any genuine distinction, or a 
 single factory devoted to the making of beautiful 
 things, or a single poet, novelist, historian, musi- 
 cian, painter or sculptor whose reputation extends 
 beyond his own country. Between the Mason and 
 Dixon line and the mouth of the Mississippi there is 
 but one opera-house, and that one was built by a 
 Frenchman, and is now, I believe, closed. The 
 only domestic art this huge and opulent empire 
 knows is in the hands of Mexican greasers; its only 
 native music it owes to the despised negro; its only 
 genuine poet was permitted to die up an alley like 
 a stray dog. 
 
 §2 
 
 In studying the anatomy and physiology of 
 American Puritanism, and its effects upon the na- 
 tional literature, one quickly discerns two main 
 streams of influence. On the one hand, there is the 
 influence of the original Puritans — ^whether of New 
 England or of the South — , who came to the New 
 World with a ready-made philosophy of the utmost 
 clarity, positiveness and inclusiveness of scope, and 
 who attained to such a position of political and 
 
208 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 intellectual leadership that they were able to force 
 it almost unchanged upon the whole population, and 
 to endow it with such vitality that it successfully 
 resisted alien opposition later on. And on the 
 other hand, one sees a complex of social and eco- 
 nomic conditions which worked in coimtless irre- 
 sistible ways against the rise of that dionysian 
 /spirit, that joyful acquiescence in life, that philos- 
 ophy of the Ja-sager, which offers to Puritanism, 
 today as in times past, its chief and perhaps only 
 effective antagonism. In other words, the Ameri- 
 can of the days since the Revolution has had Puri- 
 tanism diligently pressed upon him from without, 
 and at the same time he has led, in the main, a 
 life that has engendered a chronic hospitality to it, 
 or at all events to its salient principles, within. 
 
 Dr. Kellner accurately described the process 
 whereby the aesthetic spirit, and its concomitant 
 spirit of joy, were squeezed out of the original New 
 Englanders, so that no trace of it showed in their 
 literature, or even in their lives, for a century and a 
 half after the first settlements. "Absorption in 
 God," he says, "seems incompatible with the pres- 
 entation (i.e., aesthetically) of mankind. The God 
 of the Puritans was in this respect a jealous God 
 who brooked no sort of creative rivalry. The in- 
 spired moments of the loftiest souls were filled with 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 209 
 
 the thought of God and His designs; spiritual life 
 was wholly dominated by solicitude regarding sal- 
 vation, the hereafter, grace; how could such petty 
 concerns as personal experience of a lyric nature, 
 the transports or the pangs of love, find utterance? 
 What did a lyric occurrence like the first call of the 
 cuckoo, elsewhere so welcome, or the first sight of 
 the snowdrop, signify compared with the last Sun- 
 day's sermon and the new interpretation of the old 
 riddle of evil in the world? And apart from the 
 fact that everything of a personal nature must have 
 appeared so trivial, all the sources of secular lyric 
 poetry were offensive and impious to Puritan 
 theology. . . . One thing is an established fact: up 
 to the close of the eighteenth century America had 
 no belletristic literature." 
 
 This Puritan bedevilment by the idea of personal 
 sin, this reign of the God-crazy, gave way in later 
 years, as we shall see, to other and somewhat milder 
 forms of pious enthusiasm. At the time of the 
 Revolution, indeed, the importation of French 
 political ideas was accompanied by an importation 
 of French theological ideas, and such men as Frank- 
 lin and Jefferson dallied with what, in those days 
 at least, was regarded as downright atheism. 
 Even in New England this influence made itself 
 felt; there was a gradual letting down of Calvinism 
 
210 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 to the softness of Unitarianism, and that change was 
 presently to flower in the vague temporizing of 
 Transcendentalism. But as Puritanism, in the 
 strict sense, declined in virulence and took decep- 
 tive new forms, there was a compensating growth of 
 its brother, Philistinism, and by the first quarter of 
 the nineteenth century, the distrust of beauty, and 
 of the joy that is its object, was as firmly estab- 
 lished throughout the land as it had ever been in 
 New England. The original Puritans had at least 
 been men of a certain education, and even of a 
 certain austere culture. They were inordinately 
 hostile to beauty in all its forms, but one somehow 
 suspects that much of their hostility was due to a 
 sense of their weakness before it, a realization of 
 its disarming psychical pull. But the American of 
 the new republic was of a different kidney. He 
 was not so much hostile to beauty as devoid of any 
 consciousness of it; he stood as unmoved before its 
 phenomena as a savage before a table of loga- 
 rithms. What he had set up on this continent, in 
 brief, was a commonwealth of peasants and small 
 traders, a paradise of the third-rate, and its national 
 philosophy, almost wholly unchecked by the more 
 sophisticated and civilized ideas of an aristocracy, 
 was precisely the philosophy that one finds among 
 peasants and small traders at all times and every- 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 211 
 
 where. The difference between the United States 
 and any other nation did not lie in any essential 
 difference between American peasants and other 
 peasants, but simply in the fact that here, alone, 
 the voice of the peasant was the single voice of the 
 nation — that here, alone, the only way to eminence 
 and public influence was the way of acquiescence 
 in the opinions and prejudices of the stupid and 
 Philistine mob. Jackson was the Stammvater of 
 the new statesmen and philosophers ; he carried the 
 mob's distrust of good taste even into the field of 
 conduct ; he was the first to put the rewards of con- 
 formity above the dictates of common decency; he 
 founded a whole hierarchy of Philistine messiahs, 
 the roaring of which still belabours the ear. 
 
 Once established, this culture of the intellec- 
 tually disinherited tended to defend and perpetuate 
 itself. On the one hand, there was no appearance 
 of a challenge from within, for the exigeant prob- 
 lems of existence in a country that was yet but half 
 settled and organized left its people with no energy 
 for questioning what at least met their grosser 
 needs, and so met the pragmatic test. And on the 
 other hand, there was no critical pressure from 
 without, for the English culture which alone 
 reached over the sea was itself entering upon its 
 Victorian decline, and the influence of the native 
 
212 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 aristocracy — the degenerating Junkers of the great 
 estates and the boorish magnates of the city bour- 
 geoisie — was quite without any cultural direction 
 at all. The chief concern of the American people, 
 even above the bread-and-butter question, was poli- 
 tics. They were incessantly hag-ridden by politi- 
 cal difficulties, both internal and external, of an 
 inordinate complexity, and these occupied all the 
 leisure they could steal from the sordid work of 
 everyday. More, their new and troubled political 
 ideas tended to absorb all the rancorous certainty 
 of their fading religious ideas, so that devotion to 
 a theory or a candidate became translated into de- 
 votion to a revelation, and the game of politics 
 turned itself into a holy war. The custom of con- 
 necting purely political doctrines with pietistic con- 
 cepts of an inflammable nature, then firmly set up 
 by skilful persuaders of the mob, has never quite 
 died out in the United States. There has not been 
 a presidential contest since Jackson's day without 
 its Armageddons, its marching of Christian sol- 
 diers, its crosses of gold, its crowns of thorns. 
 The most successful American politicians, begin- 
 ning with the anti-slavery agitators, have been those 
 most adept at twisting the ancient gauds and shib- 
 boleths of Puritanism to partisan uses. Every 
 campaign that we have seen for eighty years has 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 213 
 
 been, on each side, a pursuit of bugaboos, a de- 
 nunciation of heresies, a snouting up of immoral- 
 ities. 
 
 But it was during the long contest against slavery, 
 beginning with the appearance of William Lloyd 
 Garrison's Liberator in 1831 and ending at Ap- 
 pomattox, that this gigantic supematuralization of 
 politics reached its most astounding heights. In 
 those days, indeed, politics and religion coalesced 
 in a manner not seen in the world since the 
 Middle Ages, and the combined pull of the 
 two was so powerful that none could quite resist 
 it. All men of any ability and ambition turned 
 to political activity for self-expression. It en- 
 gaged the press to the exclusion of everything 
 else; it conquered the pulpit; it even laid its 
 hand upon industry and trade. Drawing the 
 best imaginative talent into its service — Jeffer- 
 son and Lincoln may well stand as examples 
 ■ — it left the cultivation of belles lettres, and 
 of all the other arts no less, to women and ad- 
 mittedly second-rate men. And when, breaking 
 through this taboo, some chance first-rate man gave 
 himself over to purely aesthetic expression, his re- 
 ward was not only neglect, but even a sort of 
 ignominy, as if such enterprises were not fitting 
 for males with hair on their chests. I need not 
 
214 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 point to Poe and Whitman, both disdained as 
 dreamers and wasters, and both proceeded against 
 with the utmost rigours of outraged Philistinism. 
 
 In brief, the literature of that whole period, as 
 Algernon Tassin shows in "The Magazine in Amer- 
 ica," ^ was almost completely disassociated from 
 life as men were then living it. Save one counts 
 in such crude politico-puritan tracts as "Uncle 
 Tom's Cabin," it is difficult to find a single con- 
 temporaneous work that interprets the culture of 
 the time, or even accurately represents it. Later 
 on, it found historians and anatomists, and in one 
 work, at least, to wit, "Huckleberry Finn," it was 
 studied and projected with the highest art, but no 
 such impulse to make imaginative use of it showed 
 itself contemporaneously, and there was not even 
 the crude sentimentalization of here and now that 
 one finds in the popular novels of today. Feni- 
 more Cooper filled his romances, not with the peo- 
 ple about him, but with the Indians beyond the 
 sky-line, and made them half-fabulous to boot. 
 Irving told fairy tales about the forgotten Knicker- 
 bockers; Hawthorne turned backward to the Puri- 
 tans of Plymouth Rock; Longfellow to the Acadians 
 and the prehistoric Indians; Emerson took flight 
 from earth altogether; even Poe sought refuge in a 
 
 1 New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1916. 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 215 
 
 land of fantasy. It was only the frank second- 
 raters — e.g., Whittier and Lowell — who ventured 
 to turn to the life around them, and the banality 
 of the result is a sufHcient indication of the crude- 
 ness of the current taste, and the mean position as- 
 signed to the art of letters. This was pre-emi- 
 nently the era of the moral tale, the Sunday-school 
 book. Literature was conceived, not as a thing in 
 itself, but merely as a hand-maiden to politics or 
 religion. The great celebrity of Emerson in New 
 England was not the celebrity of a literary artist, 
 but that of a theologian and metaphysician; he 
 was esteemed in much the same way that Jonathan 
 Edwards had been esteemed. Even down to our 
 own time, indeed, his vague and empty philosophiz- 
 ing has been put above his undeniable capacity 
 for graceful utterance, and it remained for Dr. 
 Kellner to consider him purely as a literary artist, 
 and to give him due praise for his skill. 
 
 The Civil War brought that era of sterility to an 
 end. As I shall show later on, the shock of it com- 
 pletely reorganized the American scheme of things, 
 and even made certain important changes in the 
 national Puritanism, or, at all events, in its ma- 
 chinery. "Whitman, whose career straddled, so to 
 speak, the four years of the war, was the leader — 
 and for a long while, the only trooper — of a double 
 
216 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 revolt. On the one hand he offered a courageous 
 challenge to the intolerable prudishness and dirty- 
 mindedness of Puritanism, and on the other hand 
 he boldly sought the themes and even the modes of 
 expression of his poetry in the arduous, contentious 
 and highly melodramatic life that lay all about 
 him. Whitman, however, was clearly before his 
 time. His countrymen could see him only as im- 
 moralist; save for a pitiful few of them, they were 
 dead to any understanding of his stature as artist, 
 and even unaware that such a category of men ex- 
 isted. He was put down as an invader of the pub- 
 lic decencies, a disturber of the public peace; even 
 his eloquent war, poems, surely the best of all his 
 work, were insufficient to get him a hearing; the 
 sentimental rubbish of "The Blue and the Gray" 
 and the ecstatic super-naturalism of "The Battle 
 Hymn of the Republic" were far more to the public 
 taste. Where Whitman failed, indeed, all sub- 
 sequent explorers of the same field have failed with 
 him, and the great war has left no more mark upon 
 American letters than if it had never been fought. 
 Nothing remotely approaching the bulk and beam 
 of Tolstoi's "War and Peace," or, to descend to a 
 smaller scale, Zola's "The Attack on the Mill," has 
 come out of it. Its appeal to the national imagina- 
 tion was undoubtedly of the most profound char- 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 217 
 
 acter; it coloured politics for fifty years, and is 
 today a dominating influence in the thought of 
 whole sections of the American people. But in all 
 that stirring up there was no upheaval of artistic 
 consciousness, for the plain reason that there was 
 no artistic consciousness there to heave up, and all 
 we have in the way of Civil War literature is a few 
 conventional melodramas, a few half-forgotten 
 short stories by Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane, 
 and a half dozen idiotic popular songs in the man- 
 ner of Randall's "Maryland, My Maryland." 
 
 In the seventies and eighties, with the appear- 
 ance of such men as Henry James, William Dean 
 Howells, Mark Twain and Bret Harte, a better day 
 seemed to be dawning. Here, after a full century 
 of infantile romanticizing, were four writers who 
 at least deserved respectful consideration as liter- 
 ary artists, and what is more, three of them turned 
 from the conventionalized themes of the past to the 
 teeming and colourful life that lay under their 
 noses. But this promise of better things was soon 
 found to be no more than a promise. Mark Twain, 
 after "The Gilded Age," slipped back into ro- 
 manticism tempered by Philistinism, and was pres- 
 ently in the era before the Civil War, and finally 
 in the Middle Ages, and even beyond. Harte, a 
 brilliant technician, had displayed his whole stock 
 
218 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 when he had displayed his technique: his stories 
 were not even superficially true to the life they 
 presumed to depict; one searched them in vain for 
 an interpretation of it; they were simply idle tales. 
 As for Howells and James, both quickly showed 
 that timorousness and reticence which are the dis- 
 tinguishing marks of the Puritan, even in his most 
 intellectual incarnations. The American scene 
 that they depicted with such meticulous care was 
 chiefly peopled with marionettes. They shrunk, 
 characteristically, from those larger, harsher 
 clashes of will and purpose which one finds in all 
 truly first-rate literature. In particular, they 
 shrunk from any interpretation of life which 
 grounded itself upon an acknowledgment of its in- 
 exorable and inexplicable tragedy. In the vast 
 combat of instincts and aspirations about them 
 they saw only a feeble jousting of comedians, un- 
 serious and insignificant. Of the great questions 
 that have agitated the minds of men in Howells' 
 time one gets no more than a faint and far-away 
 echo in his novels. His investigations, one may 
 say, are carried on in vacuo; his discoveries are 
 not expressed in terms of passion, but in terms of 
 giggles. 
 
 In the followers of Howells and James one finds 
 little save an empty imitation of their emptiness, 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 219 
 
 a somewhat puerile parodying of their highly art- 
 ful but essentially personal technique. To wade 
 through the books of such characteristic American 
 fictioneers as Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mary E. 
 Wilkins Freeman, F. Hopkinson Smith, Alice 
 Brown, James Lane Allen, Winston Churchill, Ellen 
 Glasgow, Gertrude Atherton and Sarah Ome Jewett 
 is to undergo an experience that is almost terrible. 
 The flow of words is completely purged of ideas; 
 in place of them one finds no more than a romantic 
 restatement of all the old platitudes and formulae. 
 To call such an emission of graceful poppycock a 
 literature, of course, is to mouth an absurdity, and 
 yet, if the college professors who write treatises on 
 letters are to be believed, it is the best we have to 
 show. Turn, for example, to "A History of Amer- 
 ican Literature Since 1870," by Prof. Fred Lewis 
 Pattee, one of the latest and undoubtedly one of 
 the least unintelligent of these books. In it the 
 gifted pedagogue gives extended notice to no less 
 than six of the nine writers I have mentioned, and 
 upon all of them his verdicts are flattering. He 
 bestows high praises, direct and indirect, upon 
 Mrs. Freeman's "grim and austere" manner, her 
 "repression," her entire lack of poetical illumina- 
 tion. He compares Miss Jewett to both Howells 
 and Hawthorne, not to mention Mrs. Gaskell — and 
 
220 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 Addison! He grows enthusiastic over a hollow 
 piece of fine writing by Miss Brown. And he for- 
 gets altogether to mention Dreiser, or Sinclair, or 
 Medill Patterson, or Harry Leon Wilson, or George 
 Ade! . . . 
 
 So much for the best. The worst is beyond de- 
 scription. France has her Brieux and her Henry 
 Bordeaux; Germany has her Miihlbach, her stars of 
 the Gartenlaube; England contributes Caine, Cor- 
 elli, Oppenheim and company. But it is in our 
 country alone that banality in letters takes on the 
 proportions of a national movement ; it is only here 
 that a work of the imagination is habitually judged 
 by its sheer emptiness of ideas, its fundamental 
 platitudinousness, its correspondence with the im- 
 becility of mob thinking; it is only here that "glad" 
 books run up sales of hundreds of thousands. 
 Richard Harding Davis, with his ideals of a floor- 
 walker; Gene Stratton-Porter, with her snuffling 
 sentimentality; Robert W. Chambers, with his "so- 
 ciety" romances for shop-girls; Irvin Cobb, with 
 his laboured, Ayers' Almanac jocosity; the authors 
 of the Saturday Evening Post school, with their 
 heroic drummers and stockbrokers, their ecstatic 
 celebration of the stupid, the sordid, the ignoble — 
 these, after all, are our typical literati. The Puri- 
 tan fear of ideas is the master of them all. Some 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 221 
 
 of them, in truth, most of them, have undeniable 
 talent; in a more favourable environment not a 
 few of them might be doing sound work. But they 
 see how small the ring is, and they make their 
 tricks small to fit it. Not many of them ever 
 venture a leg outside. The lash of the ringmaster 
 is swift, and it stings damnably. . . . 
 
 I say not many; I surely do not mean none at 
 all. As a matter of fact, there have been intermit- 
 tent rebellions against the prevailing pecksnifFery 
 and sentimentality ever since the days of Irving 
 and Hawthorne. Poe led one of them — as critic 
 more than as creative artist. His scathing attacks 
 upon the Gerald Stanley Lees, the Hamilton Wright 
 Mabies and the George E. Woodberrys of his time 
 keep a liveliness and appositeness that the years 
 have not staled; his criticism deserves to be better 
 remembered. Poe sensed the Philistine pull of a 
 Puritan civilization as none had before him, and 
 combated it with his whole artillery of rhetoric. 
 Another rebel, of course, was Whitman; how he 
 came to grief is too well known to need recalling. 
 What is less familiar is the fact that both the At- 
 lantic Monthly and the Century (first called Scrib- 
 ners) were set up by men in revolt against the 
 reign of mush, as Putnam's and the Dial had been 
 before them. The salutatory of the Dial, dated 
 
222 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 1840, stated the case against the national mugginess 
 clearly. The aim of the magazine, it said, was to 
 oppose "that rigour of our conventions of religion 
 and education which is turning us to stone" and to 
 give expression to "new views and the dreams of 
 youth." Alas, for these brave revokes! Put- 
 nam's succumbed to the circumambient rigours and 
 duly turned to stone, and is now no more. The 
 Atlantic, once so heretical, has become as respecta- 
 ble as the New York Evening Post. As for the 
 Dial, it was imtil lately the very pope of orthodoxy 
 and jealously guarded the college professors who 
 read it from the pollution of ideas. Only the 
 Century has kept the faith imbrokenly. It is, in- 
 deed, the one first-class American magazine that 
 has ahvays welcomed newcomers, and that main- 
 tains an intelligent contact ^dth the literature that 
 is in being, and that consistently tries to make the 
 best terms possible with the dominant Philistinism. 
 It cannot go the whole Avay -^vidiout running into 
 danger; let it be said to the credit of its editors 
 that they have more than once braved that danger. 
 The tale might be lengthened. Mark Twain, in 
 his day. felt the stirrings of revolt, and not all his 
 Philistinism -(s-as sufficient to hold him altogether 
 in check. If you -svant to find out about the strug- 
 gle diat went on within him, read the biography by 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 223 
 
 Albert Bigelow Paine, or, better still, "The Mysteri- 
 ous Stranger" and "What is Man?" Alive, he had 
 his position to consider; dead, he now speaks out. 
 In the preface to "What is Man?" dated 1905, 
 there is a curious confession of his incapacity for 
 defying the taboos which surrounded him. The 
 studies for the book, he says, were begun "twenty- 
 five or twenty-seven years ago" — the period of "A 
 Tramp Abroad" and "The Prince and the Pauper." 
 It was actually written "seven years ago" — that is, 
 just after "Following the Equator" and "Personal 
 Recollections of Joan of Arc." And why did it 
 lie so long in manuscript, and finally go out stealth- 
 ily, under a private imprint? ^ Simply because, 
 as Mark frankly confesses, he "dreaded {and could 
 not bear) the disapproval of the people around" 
 him. He knew how hard his fight for recognition 
 had been; he knew what direful penalties outraged 
 orthodoxy could inflict; he had in him the some- 
 what pathetic discretion of a respectable family 
 man. But, dead, he is safely beyond reprisal, and 
 so, after a prudent interval, the faithful Paine be- 
 gins printing books in which, writing knowingly 
 behind six feet of earth, he could set down his true 
 ideas without fear. Some day, perhaps, we shall 
 
 1 The first edition for public sale did not appear until June, 
 1917, and in it the preface was suppressed. 
 
224 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 have his microbe story, and maybe even his picture 
 of the court of Elizabeth. 
 
 A sneer in Prof. Pattee's history, before men- 
 tioned, recalls the fact that Hamlin Garland was 
 also a rebel in his day and bawled for the Truth 
 with a capital T. That was in 1893. Two years 
 later the guardians of the national rectitude fell 
 afoul of "Rose of Butchers' Coolly" and Garland 
 began to think it over; today he devotes himself to 
 the safer enterprise of chasing spooks; his name 
 is conspicuously absent from the Dreiser Protest. 
 Nine years before his brief offending John Hay had 
 set off a discreet bomb in "The Bread-Winners" — 
 anonymously because "my standing would be seri- 
 ously compromised" by an avowal. Six years 
 later Frank Norris shook up the Phelpses and 
 Mores of the time with "McTeague." Since then 
 there have been assaults timorous and assaults 
 head-long — by Bierce, by Dreiser, by Phillips, by 
 Fuller — ^by Mary MacLane and George Sylvester 
 Viereck — by ploughboy poets from the Middle 
 West and by jitney geniuses in Greenwich Village 
 — assaults gradually tapering off to a mere sopho- 
 moric brashness and deviltry. And all of them 
 like snow-ballings of Verdun. All of them petered 
 out and ineffectual. The normal, the typical 
 American book of today is as fully a remouthing 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 225 
 
 of old husks as the normal book of Griswold's day. 
 The whole atmosphere of our literature, in William 
 James' phrase, is "mawkish and dishwatery." 
 Books are still judged among us, not by their form 
 and organization as works of art, their accuracy 
 and vividness as representations of life, their valid- 
 ity and perspicacity as interpretations of it, but by 
 their conformity to the national prejudices, their 
 accordance with set standards of niceness and pro- 
 priety. The thing irrevocably demanded is a 
 "sane" book; the ideal is a "clean," an "inspir- 
 ing," a "glad" book. 
 
 §3 
 
 All this may be called the Puritan impulse from 
 within. It is, indeed, but a single manifestation 
 of one of the deepest prejudices of a religious and 
 half -cultured people — the prejudice against beauty 
 as a form of debauchery and corruption — the dis- 
 trust of all ideas that do not fit readily into certain 
 accepted axioms — ^the belief in the eternal validity 
 of moral concepts — in brief, the whole mental slug- 
 gishness of the lower orders of men. But in ad- 
 dition to this internal resistance, there has been laid 
 upon American letters the heavy hand of a Puritan 
 authority from without, and no examination of the 
 
226 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 history and present condition of our literature could 
 be of any value which did not take it constantly 
 into account, and work out the means of its in- 
 fluence and operation. That authority, as I shall 
 show, transcends both in power and in alertness the 
 natural reactions of the national mind, and is in- 
 comparably more potent in combating ideas. It 
 is supported by a body of law that is unmatched in 
 any other country of Christendom, and it is ex- 
 ercised with a fanatical harshness and vigilance 
 that make escape from its operations well nigh im- 
 possible. Some of its effects, both direct and in- 
 direct, I shall describe later, but before doing so 
 it may be well to trace its genesis and develop- 
 ment. 
 
 At bottom, of course, it rests upon the inherent 
 Puritanism of the people; it could not survive a 
 year if they were opposed to the principle visible in 
 it. That deep-seated and uncorrupted Puritanism, 
 that conviction of the pervasiveness of sin, of the 
 supreme importance of moral correctness, of the 
 need of savage and inquisitorial laws, has been a 
 dominating force in American life since the very 
 beginning. There has never been any question 
 before the nation, whether political or economic, 
 religious or military, diplomatic or sociological, 
 which did not resolve itself, soon or late, into a 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 227 
 
 purely moral question. Nor has there ever been 
 any surcease of the spiritual eagerness which lay 
 at the bottom of the original Puritan's moral obses- 
 sion: the American has been, from the very start, 
 a man genuinely interested in the eternal mysteries, 
 and fearful of missing their correct solution. The 
 frank theocracy of the New England colonies had 
 scarcely succumbed to the libertarianism of a god- 
 less Crown before there came the Great Awakening 
 of 1734, with its orgies of homiletics and its resto- 
 ration of talmudism to the first place among polite 
 sciences. The Revolution, of course, brought a 
 set-back: the colonists faced so urgent a need of 
 unity in politics that they declared a sort of Treuga 
 Dei in religion, and that truce, armed though it 
 was, left its imprint upon the First Amendment to 
 the Constitution. But immediately the young Re- 
 public emerged from the stresses of adolescence, a 
 missionary army took to the field again, and before 
 long the Asbury revival was paling that of White- 
 field, Wesley and Jonathan Edwards, not only in 
 its hortatory violence but also in the length of its 
 lists of slain. 
 
 Thereafter, down to the outbreak of the Civil 
 War, the country was rocked again and again by 
 furious attacks upon the devil. On the one hand, 
 this great campaign took a purely theological form. 
 
228 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 with a hundred new and fantastic creeds as its 
 fruits; on the other hand, it crystallized into the 
 hysterical temperance movement of the 30's and 
 40's, which penetrated to the very floor of Congress 
 and put "dry" laws upon the statute-books of ten 
 States; and on the third hand, as it were, it es- 
 tablished a prudery in speech and thought from 
 which we are yet but half delivered. Such ancient 
 and innocent words as "bitch" and "bastard" dis- 
 appeared from the American language; Bartlett 
 tells us, indeed, in his "Dictionary of American- 
 isms," ^ that even "bull" was softened to "male 
 cow." This was the Golden Age of euphemism, 
 as it was of euphuism; the worst inventions of the 
 English mid- Victorians were adopted and improved. 
 The word "woman" became a term of opprobrium, 
 verging close upon downright libel; legs became 
 the inimitable "limbs"; the stomach began to run 
 from the "bosom" to the pelvic arch; pantaloons 
 faded into "unmentionables"; the newspapers spun 
 their parts of speech into such gossamer webs as "a 
 statutory offence," "a house of questionable repute" 
 and "an interesting condition." And meanwhile 
 the Good Templars and Sons of Temperance 
 swarmed in the land like a plague of celestial 
 locusts. There was not a hamlet without its uni- 
 1 Second edition ; Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1859, xxvi. 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 229 
 
 formed phalanx, its affecting exhibit of reformed 
 drunkards. The Kentucky Legislature succumbed 
 to a travelling recruiting officer, and two-thirds of 
 the members signed the pledge. The National 
 House of Representatives took recess after recess to 
 hear eminent excoriators of the Rum Demon, and 
 more than a dozen of its members forsook their 
 duties to carry the new gospel to the bucolic heathen 
 — the vanguard, one may note in passing, of the 
 innumerable Chautauquan caravan of later years. 
 Beneath all this bubbling on the surface, of 
 course, ran the deep and swift undercurrent of anti- 
 slavery feeling — a tide of passion which historians 
 now attempt to account for on economic grounds, 
 but which showed no trace of economic origin while 
 it lasted. Its true quality was moral, devout, 
 ecstatic; it culminated, to change the figure, in a 
 supreme discharge of moral electricity, almost fa- 
 tal to the nation. The crack of that great spark 
 emptied the jar; the American people forgot all 
 about their pledges and pruderies during the four 
 years of Civil War. The Good Templars, indeed, 
 were never heard of again, and with them into 
 memory went many other singular virtuosi of vir- 
 tue — for example, the Millerites. But almost be- 
 fore the last smoke of battle cleared away, a re- 
 naissance of Puritan ardour began, and by the mid- 
 
230 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 die of the 70's it was in full flower. Its high points 
 and flashing lighthouses halt the backward-looking 
 eye; the Moody and Sankey uproar, the triumphal 
 entry of the Salvation Army, the recrudescence of 
 the temperance agitation and its culmination in pro- 
 hibition, the rise of the Young Men's Qiristian As- 
 sociation and of the Sunday-school, the almost 
 miraculous growth of the Christian Endeavour 
 movement, the beginnings of the vice crusade, the 
 renewed injection of moral conceptions and rages 
 into party politics (the "crime" of 1873!), the 
 furious preaching of baroque Utopias, the inven- 
 tion of muckraking, the mad, glad war of exter- 
 mination upon the Mormons, the hysteria over the 
 Breckenridge-PoUard case and other like causes, 
 the enormous multiplication of moral and religious 
 associations, the spread of zoophilia, the attack 
 upon Mammon, the dawn of the uplift, and last but 
 far from least, comstockery. 
 
 In comstockery, if I do not err, the new Puritan- 
 ism gave a sign of its formal departure from the 
 old, and moral endeavour suffered a general over- 
 hauling and tightening of the screws. The differ- 
 ence between the two forms is very well represented 
 by the difference between the program of the half- 
 forgotten Good Templars and the program set forth 
 in the Webb Law of 1913, or by that between the 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 231 
 
 somewhat diffident prudery of the 40's and the as- 
 toundingly ferocious and uncompromising vice- 
 crusading of today. In brief, a difference between 
 the renunciation and denunciation, asceticism and 
 Mohammedanism, the hair shirt and the flaming 
 sword. The distinguishing mark of the elder 
 Puritanism, at least after it had attained to the 
 stature of a national philosophy, was its appeal to 
 the individual conscience, its exclusive concern 
 with the elect, its strong flavour of self -accusing. 
 Even the rage against slavery was, in large meas- 
 ure, an emotion of the mourners' bench. The 
 thing that worried the more ecstatic Abolitionists 
 was their sneaking sense of responsibility, the fear li 
 that they themselves were flouting the fire by letting ,/ 
 slavery go on. The thirst to punish the concrete 
 slave-owner, as an end in itself, did not appear 
 until opposition had added exasperation to fervour. 
 In most of the earlier harangues against his prac- 
 tice, indeed, you will find a perfect willingness to 
 grant that slave-owner's good faith, and even to 
 compensate him for his property. But the new 
 Puritanism — or, perhaps more accurately, consider- 
 ing the shades of prefixes, the neo-Puritanism — is 
 a frank harking back to the primitive spirit. The 
 original Puritan of the bleak New England coast 
 was not content to flay his own wayward carcass: 
 
232 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 full satisfaction did not sit upon him until he had 
 jailed a Quaker. That is to say, the sinner who 
 excited his highest zeal and passion was not so much 
 himself as his neighbour; to borrow a term from 
 psychopathology, he was less the masochist than the 
 sadist. And it is that very peculiarity which sets 
 off his descendant of today from the ameliorated 
 Puritan of the era between the Revolution and the 
 Civil War. The new Puritanism is not ascetic, but 
 militant. Its aim is not to lift up saints but to 
 knock down sinners. Its supreme manifestation 
 is the vice crusade, an armed pursuit of helpless 
 outcasts by the whole military and naval forces of 
 the Republic. Its supreme hero is Comstock Him- 
 self, with his pious boast that the sinners he jailed 
 during his astounding career, if gathered into one 
 penitential party, would have filled a train of 
 sixty-one coaches, allowing sixty to the coach. 
 
 So much for the general trend and tenor of the 
 movement. At the bottom of it, it is plain, there 
 lies that insistent presentation of the idea of sin, 
 that enchantment by concepts of carnality, which 
 has engaged a certain type of man, to the exclusion 
 of all other notions, since the dawn of history. 
 The remote ancestors of our Puritan-Philistines of 
 today are to be met with in the Old Testament and 
 the New, and their nearer grandfathers clamoured 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 233 
 
 against the snares of the flesh in all the councils of 
 the Early Church. Not only Western Christianity 
 has had to reckon with them: they have brothers 
 today among the Mohammedan Sufi and in obscure 
 Buddhist sects, and they were the chief preachers 
 of the Russian Raskol, or Reformation. "The 
 Ironsides of Cromwell and the Puritans of New 
 England," says Heard, in his book on the Russian 
 church, "bear a strong resemblance to the Old Be- 
 lievers." But here, in the main, we have asceti- 
 cism more than Puritanism, as it is now visible ; here 
 the sinner combated is chiefly the one within. How 
 are we to account for the wholesale transvaluation 
 of values that came after the Civil War, the transfer 
 of ire from the Old Adam to the happy rascal across 
 the street, the sinister rise of a new Inquisition in 
 the midst of a growing luxury that even the Puritans 
 themselves succumbed to? The answer is to be 
 sought, it seems to me, in the direction of the Golden 
 Calf — in the direction of the fat fields of our Mid- 
 lands, the full nets of our lakes and coasts, the fac- 
 tory smoke of our cities — even in the direction of 
 Wall Street, that devil's chasm. In brief, Puritan- 
 ism has become bellicose and tyrannical by becom- 
 ing rich. The will to power has been aroused to 
 a high flame by an increase in the available draught 
 and fuel, as militarism is engendered and nour- 
 
234 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 ished by the presence of men and materials. 
 Wealth, discovering its power, has reached out its 
 long arms to grab the distant and innumerable sin- 
 ner; it has gone down into its deep pockets to pay 
 for his costly pursuit and flaying; it has created 
 the Puritan entrepreneur, the daring and imagina- 
 tive organizer of Puritanism, the baron of moral 
 endeavour, the invincible prophet of new austeri- 
 ties. And, by the same token, it has issued its let- 
 ters of marque to the Puritan mercenary, the pro- 
 fessional hound of heaven, the moral Junker, the 
 Comstock, and out of his skill at his trade there 
 has arisen the whole machinery, so complicated 
 and so efi"ective, of the new Holy Office. 
 
 Poverty is a soft pedal upon all branches of hu- 
 man activity, not excepting the spiritual, and even 
 the original Puritans, for all their fire, felt its 
 throttling caress. I think it is Bill Nye who has 
 humorously pictured their arduous life: how they 
 had to dig clams all winter that they would have 
 strength enough to plant corn, and how they had to 
 hoe com all summer that they would have strength 
 enough to dig clams. That low ebb of fortune 
 worked against the full satisfaction of their zeal 
 in two distinct ways. On the one hand, it kept 
 them but ill-prepared for the cost of off'ensive en- 
 terprise: even their occasional missionarying raids 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 235 
 
 upon the Indians took too much productive energy 
 from their business with the com and the clams. 
 And on the other hand, it kept a certain restrain- 
 ing humility in their hearts, so that for every 
 Quaker they hanged, they let a dozen go. Poverty, 
 of course, is no discredit, but at all events, it is a 
 subtle criticism. The man oppressed by material 
 wants is not in the best of moods for the more am- 
 bitious forms of moral adventure. He not only 
 lacks the means; he is also deficient in the self- 
 assurance, the sense of superiority, the secure and 
 lofty point of departure. If he is haunted by no- 
 tions of the sinfulness of his neighbours, he is apt 
 to see some of its worst manifestations within him- 
 self, and that disquieting discovery will tend to 
 take his thoughts from the other fellow. It is by 
 no arbitrary fiat, indeed, that the brothers of all 
 the expiatory orders are vowed to poverty. His- 
 tory teaches us that wealth, whenever it has come 
 to them by chance, has put an end to their soul- 
 searching. The Puritans of the elder generations, 
 with few exceptions, were poor. Nearly all Amer- j 
 icans, down to the Civil War, were poor. And be- 
 ing poor, they subscribed to a Sklavmoral. That 
 is to say, they were spiritually humble. Their 
 eyes were fixed, not upon the abyss below them, but 
 upon the long and rocky road ahead of them. 
 
236 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 Their moral passion spent most of its force 
 in self-accusing, self-denial and self-scourging. 
 They began by howling their sins from the mourn- 
 ers' bench; they came to their end, many of them, 
 in the supreme immolation of battle. 
 
 But out of the War came prosperity, and out of 
 prosperity came a new morality, to wit, the Her- 
 renmoral. Many great fortunes were made in the 
 War itself; an uncountable number got started dur- 
 ing the two decades following. What is more, this 
 material prosperity was generally dispersed through 
 all classes: it affected the common workman and 
 the remote farmer quite as much as the actual mer- 
 chant and manufacturer. Its first effect, as we all 
 know, was a universal cockiness, a rise in preten- 
 sions, a comforting feeling that the Republic was 
 a success, and with it, its every citizen. This 
 change made itself quickly obvious, and even 
 odious, in all the secular relations of life. The 
 American became a sort of braggart playboy of the 
 western world, enormously sure of himself and 
 ludicrously contemptuous of all other men. And 
 on the ghostly side there appeared the same acces- 
 sion of confidence, the same sure assumption of au- 
 thority, though at first less self-evidently and of- 
 fensively. The religion of the American thus 
 began to lose its inward direction; it became less 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 237 
 
 and less a scheme of personal salvation and more 
 and more a scheme of pious derring-do. The re- 
 vivals of the 70's had all the bounce and fervour 
 of those of half a century before, but the mourners' 
 bench began to lose its standing as their symbol, 
 and in its place appeared the collection basket. 
 Instead of accusing himself, the convert volunteered 
 to track down and bring in the other fellow. His 
 enthusiasm was not for repentance, but for what he 
 began to call service. In brief, the national sense 
 of energy and fitness gradually superimposed itself 
 upon the national Puritanism, and from that mar- 
 riage sprung a keen Wille zur Macht, a lusty will 
 to power.^ The American Puritan, by now, was 
 not content with the rescue of his own soul; he felt 
 an irresistible impulse to hand salvation on, to dis- 
 perse and multiply it, to ram it down reluctant 
 throats, to make it free, universal and compulsory. 
 He had the men, he had the guns and he had the 
 money too. All that was needed was organization. 
 The rescue of the unsaved could be converted into 
 a wholesale business, unsentimentally and economi- 
 cally conducted, and with all the usual aids to 
 efficiency, from skilful sales management to se- 
 
 1 Cf. The Puritan, by Owen Hatteras, The Smart Set, July, 
 1916; and The Puritan's Will to Power, by Randolph S. 
 Bourne, The Seven Arts, April, 1917. 
 
238 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 ductive advertising, and from rigorous accounting 
 to the diligent shutting off of competition. 
 
 Out of that new will to power came many en- 
 terprises more or less futile and harmless, with the 
 "institutional" church at their head. Piety was 
 cunningly disguised as basketball, billiards and 
 squash; the sinner was lured to grace with Turkish 
 baths, lectures on foreign travel, and free instruc- 
 tions in stenography, rhetoric and double-entry 
 book-keeping. Religion lost all its old contempla- 
 tive and esoteric character, and became a frankly 
 worldly enterprise, a thing of balance-sheets and 
 ponderable profits, heavily capitalized and astutely 
 manned. There was no longer any room for the 
 spiritual type of leader, with his white choker and 
 his interminable fourthlies. He was displaced by 
 a brisk gentleman in a "business suit" who looked, 
 talked and thought like a seller of Mexican mine 
 stock. Scheme after scheme for the swift evangeli- 
 zation of the nation was launched, some of them of 
 truly astonishing sweep and daring. They kept 
 pace, step by step, with the mushroom growth of 
 enterprise in the commercial field. The Y. M. C. 
 A. swelled to the proportions of a Standard Oil 
 Company, a United States Steel Corporation. Its 
 hugh buildings began to rise in every city; it de- 
 veloped a swarm of specialists in new and fantastic 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 239 
 
 moral and social sciences; it enlisted the same gar- 
 gantuan talent which managed the railroads, the 
 big banks and the larger national industries. And 
 beside it rose the Young People's Society of Chris- 
 tian Endeavour, the Sunday-school associations and 
 a score of other such grandiose organizations, 
 each with its seductive baits for recruits and 
 money. Even the enterprises that had come down 
 from an elder and less expansive day were pumped 
 up and put on a Wall Street basis: the American 
 Bible Society, for example, began to give away 
 Bibles by the million instead of by the thousand, 
 and the venerable Tract Society took on the fever- 
 ish ardour of a daily newspaper, even of a yellow 
 journal. Down into our own day this trustifica- 
 tion of pious endeavour has gone on. The Men 
 and Religion Forward Movement proposed to con- 
 vert the whole country by 12 o'clock noon of such 
 and such a day; the Order of Gideons plans to make 
 every traveller read the Bible (American Revised 
 Version!) whether he will or not; in a score of 
 cities there are committees of opulent devotees who 
 take half-pages in the newspapers, and advertise 
 the Decalogue and the Beatitudes as if they were 
 commodities of trade. 
 
 Thus the national energy which created the Beef 
 Trust and the Oil Trust achieved equal marvels in 
 
240 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 the field of religious organization and by exactly 
 the same methods. One needs be no psychologist 
 to perceive in all this a good deal less actual re- 
 ligious zeal than mere lust for staggering accom- 
 plishment, for empty bigness, for the unprece- 
 dented and the prodigious. Many of these great 
 religious enterprises, indeed, soon lost all save the 
 faintest flavour of devotion — for example, the Y. 
 M. C. A., which is now no more than a sort of 
 national club system, with its doors open to any one 
 not palpably felonious. (I have drunk cocktails in 
 Y. M. C. A. lamaseries, and helped fallen lamas to 
 bed.) But while the war upon godlessness thus 
 degenerated into a secular sport in one direction, it 
 maintained all its pristine quality, and even took on 
 a new ferocity in another direction. Here it was 
 that the lamp of American Puritanism kept on 
 burning; here, it was, indeed, that the lamp be- 
 came converted into a huge bonfire, or rather a 
 blast-furnace, with flames mounting to the very 
 heavens, and sinners stacked like cordwood at the 
 hand of an eager black gang. In brief, the new 
 will to power, working in the true Puritan as in the 
 mere religious sportsman, stimulated him to a cam- 
 paign of repression and punishment perhaps un- 
 equalled in the history of the world, and developed 
 an art of militant morality as complex in technique 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 241 
 
 and as rich in professors as the elder art of 
 iniquity. 
 
 If we take the passage of the Comstock Postal 
 Act, on March 3, 1873, as a starting point, the legis- 
 lative stakes of this new Puritan movement sweep 
 upward in a grand curve to the passage of the Mann 
 and Webb Acts, in 1910 and 1913, the first of 
 which ratifies the Seventh Commandment with a 
 salvo of artillery, and the second of which puts the 
 overwhelming power of the Federal Government 
 behind the enforcement of the prohibition laws in 
 the so-called "dry" States. The mind at once re- 
 calls the salient campaigns of this war of a gener- 
 ation: first the attack upon "vicious" literature, be- 
 gun by Comstock and the New York Society for the 
 Suppression of Vice, but quickly extending to every 
 city in the land; then the long fight upon the open 
 gambling house, culminating in its practical dis- 
 appearance; then the recrudesence of prohibition, 
 abandoned at the outbreak of the Civil War, and 
 the attempt to enforce it in a rapidly growing list of 
 States; then the successful onslaught upon the 
 Louisiana lottery, and upon its swarm of rivals and 
 successors ; then the gradual stamping-out of horse- 
 racing, until finally but two or three States per- 
 mitted it, and the consequent attack upon the pool- 
 room; then the rise of a theatre-censorship in most 
 
242 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 of the large cities, and of a moving picture censor- 
 ship following it; then the revival of Sabbata- 
 rianism, with the Lord's Day Alliance, a Canadian 
 invention, in the van; then the gradual tightening 
 of the laws against sexual irregularity, with the 
 unenforceable New York Adultery Act as a typical 
 product; and lastly, the general ploughing up and 
 emotional discussion of sexual matters, with com- 
 pulsory instruction in "sex hygiene" as its mildest 
 manifestation and the mediaeval fury of the vice 
 crusade as its worst. Differing widely in their tar- 
 gets, these various Puritan enterprises had one 
 character in common: they were all efforts to com- 
 bat immorality with the weapons designed for 
 crime. In each of them there was a visible effort 
 to erect the individual's offence against himself into 
 an offence against society. Beneath all of them 
 there was the dubious principle — the very deter- 
 mining principle, indeed, of Puritanism — that it is 
 competent for the community to limit and condition 
 the private acts of its members, and with it the in- 
 evitable corollary that there are some members of 
 the community who have a special talent for such 
 legislation, and that their arbitrary fiats are, and of 
 a right ought to be, binding upon all. 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 243 
 
 § 4 
 
 This is the essential fact of the new Puritanism; 
 its recognition of the moral expert, the professional 
 sinhound, the virtuoso of virtue. Under the orig- 
 inal Puritan theocracy, as in Scotland, for example, 
 the chase and pimishment of sinners was a purely 
 ecclesiastical function, and during the slow dis- 
 integration of the theocracy the only change intro- 
 duced was the extension of that function to lay 
 helpers, and finally to the whole body of laymen. 
 This change, however, did not materially corrupt 
 the ecclesiastical quality of the enterprise: the 
 leader in the so-called militant field still remained 
 the same man who led in the spiritual field. But 
 with the capitalization of Puritan effort there came 
 a radical overhauling of method. The secular 
 arm, as it were, conquered as it helped. That is to 
 say, the special business of forcing sinners to be 
 good was taken away from the preachers and put 
 into the hands of laymen trained in its technique 
 and mystery, and there it remains. The new 
 Puritanism has created an army of gladiators who 
 are not only distinct from the hierarchy, but who, 
 in many instances, actually command and intimi- 
 date the hierarchy. This is conspicuously evident 
 
244 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 in the case of the Anti-Saloon League, an enor- 
 mously effective fighting organization, with a large 
 staff of highly accomplished experts in its serv- 
 ice. These experts do not wait for ecclesiastical 
 support, not even ask for it; they force it. The 
 clergyman who presumes to protest against their 
 war upon the saloon, even upon the quite virtuous 
 ground that it is not eflfective enough, runs a risk of 
 condign and merciless punishment. So plainly is 
 this understood, indeed, that in more than one State 
 the clergy of the Puritan denominations openly 
 take orders from these specialists in excoriation, 
 and court their favour without shame. Here a 
 single moral enterprise, heavily capitalized and 
 carefully officered, has engulfed the entire Puritan 
 movement, and a part has become more than the 
 whole. ^ 
 
 In a dozen other directions this tendency to trans- 
 form a religious business into a purely secular 
 business, with lay backers and lay officers, is plainly 
 visible. The increasing wealth of Puritanism has 
 not only augmented its scope and its daring, but it 
 has also had the effect of attracting clever men, of 
 
 1 An instructive account of the organization and methods of 
 the Anti-Saloon League, a thoroughly typical Puritan engine, 
 is to be found in Alcohol and Society, by John Koren; New 
 Yorii, Henry Holt & Co., 1916. 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 245 
 
 no particular spiritual enthusiasm, to its service. 
 Moral endeavour, in brief, has become a recognized 
 trade, or rather a profession, and there have ap- 
 peared men who pretend to a special and enormous 
 knowledge of it, and who show enough truth in their 
 pretension to gain the unlimited support of Puritan 
 capitalists. The vice crusade, to mention one ex- 
 ample, has produced a large crop of such self -con- 
 stituted experts, and some of them are in such de- 
 mand that they are overwhelmed with engage- 
 ments. The majority of these men have wholly lost 
 the flavour of sacerdotalism. They are not pas- 
 tors, but detectives, statisticians and mob orators, 
 and not infrequently their secularity becomes dis- 
 tressingly evident. Their aim, as they say, is to do 
 things. Assuming that "moral sentiment" is be- 
 hind them, they override all criticism and opposi- 
 tion without argument, and proceed to the business 
 of dispersing prostitutes, of browbeating and ter- 
 rorizing weak officials, and of forcing legislation of 
 their own invention through City Councils and State 
 Legislatures. Their very cocksureness is their 
 chief source of strength. They combat objection 
 with such violence and with such a devastating 
 cynicism that it quickly fades away. The more 
 astute politicians, in the face of so ruthless a fire, 
 commonly profess conversion and join the colours. 
 
246 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 just as their brethren go over to prohibition in the 
 "dry" States, and the newspapers seldom hold out 
 much longer. The result is that the "investigation" 
 of the social evil becomes an orgy, and that the 
 ensuing "report" of the inevitable "vice commis- 
 sion" is made up of two parts sensational fiction 
 and three parts platitude. Of all the vice commis- 
 sions that have sat of late in the United States, not 
 one has done its work without the aid of these sin- 
 gularly confident experts, and not one has con- 
 tributed an original and sagacious idea, nor even an 
 idea of ordinary common sense, to the solution of 
 the problem. 
 
 I need not go on piling up examples of this new 
 form of Puritan activity, with its definite departure 
 from a religious foundation and its elaborate de- 
 velopment as an everyday business. The impulse 
 behind it I have called a Wille zur Macht, a will to 
 power. In terms more homely, it was described 
 by John Fiske as "the disposition to domineer," and 
 in his usual unerring way, he saw its dependence on 
 the gratuitous assumption of infallibility. But 
 even stronger than the Puritan's belief in his own 
 inspiration is his yearning to make some one jump. 
 In other words, he has an ineradicable liking for 
 cruelty in him : he is a sportsman even before he is 
 a moralist, and very often his blood-lust leads him 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 247 
 
 into lamentable excesses. The various vice cru- 
 sades afford innumerable cases in point. In one 
 city, if the press dispatches are to be believed, the 
 proscribed women of the Tenderloin were pursued 
 with such ferocity that seven of them were driven to 
 suicide. And in another city, after a campaign of 
 repression so unfortunate in its effects that there 
 were actually protests against it by clergymen else- 
 where, a distinguished (and very friendly) con- 
 noisseur of such affairs referred to it ingenuously 
 as more fun "than a fleet of aeroplanes." Such 
 disorderly combats with evil, of course, produce no 
 permanent good. It is a commonplace, indeed, 
 that a city is usually in worse condition after it has 
 been "cleaned up" than it was before, and I need 
 not point to New York, Los Angeles and Des Moines 
 for the evidence as to the social evil, and to Savan- 
 nah, Atlanta and Charleston, South Carolina, for 
 the evidence as to the saloon. But the Puritans 
 who finance such enterprises get their thrills, not 
 out of any possible obliteration of vice, but out of 
 the galloping pursuit of the vicious. The new 
 Puritan gives no more serious thought to the rights 
 and feelings of his quarry than the gunner gives to 
 the rights and feelings of his birds. From the 
 beginning of the prohibition campaign, for ex- 
 ample, the principle of compensation has been vio- 
 
248 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 lently opposed, despite its obvious justice, and a 
 complaisant judiciary has ratified the Puritan posi- 
 tion. In England and on the Continent that prin- 
 ciple is safeguarded by the fundamental laws, and 
 during the early days of the anti-slavery agitation 
 in this country it was accepted as incontrovertible, 
 but if any statesman of the "dry" States were to 
 propose today that it be applied to the license- 
 holder whose lawful franchise is taken away from 
 him arbitrarily, or to the brewer or distiller whose 
 costly plant is rendered useless and valueless, he 
 would see the days of his statesmanship brought to a 
 quick and violent close. 
 
 But does all this argue a total lack of justice in 
 the American character, or even a lack of common 
 decency? I doubt that it would be well to go so 
 far in accusation. What it does argue is a tend- 
 ency to put moral considerations above all other 
 considerations, and to define morality in the narrow 
 Puritan sense. The American, in other words, 
 thinks that the sinner has no rights that any one is 
 bound to respect, and he is prone to mistake an 
 unsupported charge of sinning, provided it be made 
 violently enough, for actual proof and confession. 
 What is more, he takes an intense joy in the mere 
 chase: he has the true Puritan taste for an auto da 
 fe in him. "I am ag'inst capital punishment," 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 249 
 
 said Mr. Dooley, "but we won't get rid av it so long 
 as the people enjie it so much." But though he is 
 thus an eager spectator, and may even be lured into 
 taking part in the pursuit, the average American 
 is not disposed to initiate it, nor to pay for it. The 
 larger Puritan enterprises of today are not popular 
 in the sense of originating in the bleachers, but only 
 in the sense of being applauded from the bleachers. 
 The burdens of the fray, both of toil and of expense, 
 are always upon a relatively small number of men. 
 In a State rocked and racked by a war upon the 
 saloon, it was recently shown, for example, that but 
 five per cent, of the members of the Puritan de- 
 nominations contributed to the war-chest. And 
 yet the Anti-Saloon League of that State was so 
 sure of support from below that it presumed to 
 stand as the spokesman of the whole Christian com- 
 munity, and even ventured to launch excommuni- 
 cations upon contumacious Christians, both lay and 
 clerical, who object, to its methods. Moreover, the 
 great majority of the persons included in the con- 
 tributing five per cent, gave no more than a few 
 cents a year. The whole support of the League de- 
 volved upon a dozen men, all of them rich and all 
 of them Puritans of purest ray serene. These men 
 supported a costly organization for their private 
 entertainment and stimulation. It was their means 
 
250 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 of recreation, their sporting club. They were will- 
 ing to spend a lot of money to procure good sport 
 for themselves — i.e., to procure the best crusading 
 talent available — and they were so successful in 
 that endeavour that they enchanted the populace 
 too, and so shook the State. 
 
 Naturally enough, this organization of Puritan- 
 ism upon a business and sporting basis has had a 
 tendency to attract and create a type of "expert" 
 crusader, whose determination to give his em- 
 ployers a good show is uncontaminated by any con- 
 sideration for the public welfare. The result has 
 been a steady increase of scandals, a constant col- 
 lapse of moral organizations, a frequent unveiling 
 of whited sepulchres. Various observers have 
 sought to direct the public attention to this signifi- 
 cant corruption of the new Puritanism. The New 
 York Sun, for example, in the course of a protest 
 against the appointment of a vice commission for 
 New York, has denounced the paid agents of pri- 
 vate reform organizations as "notoriously corrupt, 
 undependable and dishonest," and the Rev. Dr. W. 
 S. Rainsford, supporting the charge, has borne testi- 
 mony out of his own wide experience to their law- 
 lessness, their absurd pretensions to special knowl- 
 edge, their habit of manufacturing evidence, and 
 their devious methods of shutting off criticism. 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 251 
 
 But so far, at all events, no organized war upon 
 them has been undertaken, and they seem to flour- 
 ish more luxuriantly year after year. The indi- 
 vidual whose common rights are invaded by such 
 persons has little chance of getting justice, and less 
 of getting redress. When he attempts to defend 
 himself he finds that he is opposed, not only by a 
 financial power that is ample for all purposes of the 
 combat and that does not shrink at intimidating 
 juries, prosecuting officers and judges, but also by 
 a shrewdness which shapes the laws to its own uses, 
 and takes full advantage of the miserable cowardice 
 of legislatures. The moral gladiators, in brief, 
 know the game. They come before a legislature 
 with a bill ostensibly designed to cure some great 
 and admitted evil, they procure its enactment by 
 scarcely veiled insinuations that all who stand 
 against it must be apologists for the evil itself, and 
 then they proceed to extend its aims by bold infer- 
 ences, and to dragoon the courts into ratifying those 
 inferences, and to employ it as a means of persecu- 
 tion, terrorism and blackmail. The history of the 
 Mann Act off"ers a shining example of this purpose. 
 It was carried through Congress, over the veto of 
 President Taft, who discerned its extravagance, on 
 the plea that it was needed to put down the traffic 
 in prostitutes ; it is enforced today against men who 
 
252 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 are no more engaged in the traffic in prostitutes than 
 you or I. Naturally enough, the effect of this ex- 
 tension of its purposes against which its author has 
 publicly protested, has been to make it a truly 
 deadly weapon in the hands of professional Puri- 
 tans and of denouncers of delinquency even less 
 honest. "Blackmailers of both sexes have arisen," 
 says Mr. Justice McKenna, "using the terrors of 
 the construction now sanctioned by the [Supreme] 
 Court as a help — indeed, the means — for their 
 brigandage. The result is grave and should give 
 us pause." ^ 
 
 But that is as far as objection has yet gone; the 
 majority of the learned jurist's colleagues swal- 
 lowed both the statute and its consequences.^ 
 There is, indeed, no sign as yet of any organized 
 war upon the alliance between the blackmailing 
 Puritan and the pseudo-Puritan blackmailer. It 
 must wait until a sense of reason and justice itself 
 in the American people, strong enough to over- 
 come their inherent prejudice in favour of the 
 moralist on the one hand, and their delight in bar- 
 barous pursuits and punishments on the other. I 
 see but faint promise of that change today. 
 
 1 U. S. Rep., vol. 94S, No. 7, p. 502. 
 
 2 The majority opinion, written by Mr. Justice Day, is given 
 in U. S. Rep., vol. 242, no. 7, pp. 482-496. 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 253 
 
 §5 
 
 I have gone into the anatomy and physiology of 
 militant Puritanism because, so far as I know, the 
 inquiry; has not been attempted before, and because 
 a somewhat detailed acquaintance with the forces 
 behind so grotesque a manifestation as com- 
 stockery, the particular business of the present 
 essay, is necessary to an understanding of its work- 
 ings, and of its prosperity, and of its influence upon 
 the arts. Save one turn to England or to the Brit- 
 ish colonies, it is impossible to find a parallel for 
 the astounding absolutism of Comstock and his imi- 
 tators in any civilized country. No other nation 
 has laws which oppress the arts so ignorantly and 
 so abominably as ours do, nor has any other nation 
 handed over the enforcement of the statutes which 
 exist to agencies so openly pledged to reduce all 
 aesthetic expression to the service of a stupid and 
 unworkable scheme of rectitude. I have before me 
 as I write a pamphlet in explanation of his aims and 
 principles, prepared by Comstock himself and pre- 
 sented to me by his successor. Its very title is a 
 sufficient statement of the Puritan position: 
 "MORALS, Not Art or Literature." ^ The capi- 
 
 iNew York, (1914). 
 
254 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 tals are in the original. And within, as a sort of 
 general text, the idea is amplified: "It is a ques- 
 tion of peace, good order and morals, and not art, 
 literature or science." Here we have a statement 
 of principle that, at all events, is at least quite 
 frank. There is not the slightest effort to beg the 
 question; there is no hypocritical pretension to a 
 desire to purify or safeguard the arts; they are 
 dismissed at once as trivial and degrading. And 
 jury after jury has acquiesced in this; it was old 
 Anthony's boast, in his last days, that his per- 
 centage of convictions, in 40 years, had run to 
 98.5.1 
 
 Comstockery is thus grounded firmly upon that 
 profound national suspicion of the arts, that trucu- 
 lent and almost unanimous Philistinism, which I 
 have described. It would be absurd to dismiss it 
 as an excrescence, and untypical of the American 
 mind. But it is typical, too, in the manner in which 
 it has gone beyond that mere partiality to the ac- 
 cumulation of a definite power, and made that 
 
 1 1 quote from page 157 of Anthony Comstock, Fighter, the 
 official biography. On page 239 the number of his prosecutions 
 is given as 3,646, with 2,683 convictions, which works out to 
 but 73 per cent. He is credited with ha%'ing destroyed 50 tons 
 of books, 38,425 pounds of stereotype plates, 16,900 photo- 
 graphic negatives, and 3,984,063 photographs — enough to fill 
 "sixteen freight cars, fifteen loaded with ten tons each, and the 
 other nearly full." 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 255 
 
 power irresponsible and almost irresistible. It was 
 Comstock himself, in fact, who invented the process 
 whereby his followers in other fields of moral en- 
 deavour have forced laws into the statute books 
 upon the pretence of putting down John Doe, an ac- 
 knowledged malefactor, and then turned them 
 savagely upon Richard Roe, a peaceable, well- 
 meaning and hitherto law-abiding man. And it was 
 Comstock who first capitalized moral endeavour 
 like baseball or the soap business, and made him- 
 self the first of its kept professors, and erected about 
 himself a rampart of legal and financial immunity 
 which rid him of all fear of mistakes and their con- 
 sequences, and so enabled him to pursue his jehad 
 with all the advantages in his favour. He was, in 
 brief, more than the greatest Puritan gladiator of 
 his time; he was the Copernicus of a quite new art 
 and science, and he devised a technique and handed 
 down a professional ethic that no rival has been 
 able to better. 
 
 The whole story is naively told in "Anthony 
 Comstock, Fighter," ^ a work which passed under 
 the approving eye of the old war horse himself and 
 is full of his characteristic pecksniffery.^ His 
 
 iBy Charles Gallaudet Trumbull; New York, Fleming H. 
 Revell Co. (1913). 
 2 An example: "All the evil men in New York cannot harm 
 
256 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 beginnings, it appears, were very modest. When 
 he arrived in New York from the Connecticut hin- 
 terland, he was a penniless and uneducated clod- 
 hopper, just out of the Union army, and his first 
 job was that of a porter in a wholesale dry-goods 
 house. But he had in him several qualities of the 
 traditional Yankee which almost always insure suc- 
 cess, and it was not long before he began to make 
 his way. One of these qualities was a talent for 
 bold and ingratiating address; another was a vast 
 appetite for thrusting himself into affairs, a yearn- 
 ing to run things — ^what the Puritan calls public 
 spirit. The two constituted his fortune. The sec- 
 ond brought him into intimate relations with the 
 newly-organized Young Men's Christian Associa- 
 tion, and led him to the discovery of a form of 
 moral endeavour that was at once novel and fas- 
 cinating — the unearthing and denunciation of "im- 
 
 a hair of my head, were it not the will of God. If it be His 
 will, what right have I or any one to say aught? I am only a 
 speck, a mite, before God, yet not a hair of my head can be 
 harmed unless it be His will. Oh, to live, to feel, to be — Thy 
 will be done!" (pp. 84-5). Again: "I prayed that, if my bill 
 might not pass, I might go back to New York submissive to 
 God's will, feeling that it was for the best. I asked for for- 
 giveness and asked that my bill might pass, if possible; but 
 over and above all, that the will of God be done" (p. 6), 
 Nevertheless, Comstock neglected no chance to apply his back- 
 stairs pressure to the members of both Houses. 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 257 
 
 moral" literature. The first, once he had at- 
 tracted attention thereby, got him the favourable 
 notice, and finally the unlimited support, of the late 
 Morris K. Jesup, one of the earliest and perhaps 
 the greatest of the moral entrepreneurs that I have 
 described. Jesup was very rich, and very eager to 
 bring the whole nation up to grace by force ma- 
 jeure. He was the banker of at least a dozen 
 grandiose programs of purification in the seventies 
 and eighties. In Comstock he found precisely the 
 sort of field agent that he was looking for, and the 
 two presently constituted the most formidable team 
 of professional reformers that the country had ever 
 seen. 
 
 The story of the passage of the Act of Congress 
 of March 3, 1873,^ under cover of which the Com- 
 stock Society still carries on its campaigns of snout- 
 ing and suppression, is a classical tale of Puritan 
 impudence and chicanery. Comstock, with Jesup 
 and other rich men backing him financially and 
 politically,^ managed the business. First, a num- 
 ber of spectacular raids were made on the pub- 
 lishers of such pornographic books as "The 
 Memoirs of Fanny Hill" and "Only a Boy." 
 
 1 Now, with amendments, sections 211, 213 and 245 of the 
 United States Criminal Code. 
 
 2 Vide Anthony Comstock, Fighter, pp. 81, 85, 94.. 
 
258 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 Then the newspapers were filled with inflammatory 
 matter about the wide dispersal of such stuff, and 
 its demoralizing effects upon the youth of the repub- 
 lic. Then a committee of self -advertising clergy- 
 men and "Christian millionaires" was organized to 
 launch a definite "movement." And then a direct 
 attack was made upon Congress, and, to the tune of 
 fiery moral indignation, the bill prepared by Com- 
 stock himself was forced through both houses. All 
 opposition, if only the opposition of inquiry, was 
 overborne in the usual manner. That is to say, 
 every Congressman who presumed to ask what it 
 was all about, or to point out obvious defects in the 
 bill, was disposed of the insinuation, or even the 
 direct charge, that he was a covert defender of 
 obscene books, and, by inference, of the carnal 
 recreations described in them. We have grown 
 familiar of late with this process : it was displayed 
 at full length in the passage of the Mann Act, and 
 again when the Webb Act and other such prohibi- 
 tion measures were before Congress. In 1873 its 
 effectiveness was helped out by its novelty, and so 
 the Comstock bill was rushed through both houses 
 in the closing days of a busy session, and President 
 Grant accommodatingly signed it. 
 
 Once it was upon the books, Comstock made fur- 
 ther use of the prevailing uproar to have himself 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 259 
 
 appointed a special agent of the Postoffice Depart- 
 ment to enforce it, and with characteristic cunning 
 refused to take any salary. Had his job carried a 
 salary, it would have excited the acquisitiveness of 
 other virtuosi; as it was, he was secure. As for 
 the necessary sinews of war, he knew well that he 
 could get them from Jesup. Within a few weeks, 
 indeed, the latter had perfected a special organ- 
 ization for the enforcement of the new statute, and 
 it still flourishes as the New York Society for the 
 Suppression of Vice; or, as it is better known, the 
 Comstock Society. The new Federal Act, dealing 
 only with the mails, left certain loopholes; they 
 were plugged up by fastening drastic amendments 
 upon the New York Code of Criminal Procedure — 
 amendments forced through the legislature pre- 
 cisely as the Federal Act had been forced through 
 Congress.^ With these laws in his hands Comstock 
 was ready for his career. It was his part of the 
 arrangement to supply the thrills of the chase; it 
 was Jesup's part to find the money. The partner- 
 ship kept up until the death of Jesup, in 1908, and 
 after that Comstock readily found new backers. 
 Even his own death, in 1915, did not materially 
 alter a scheme of things which offered such admi- 
 
 1 Now sections IVA, 1142 and 1143 of the Penal Laws of 
 New York. 
 
260 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 Table opportunities for the exercise of the Puritan 
 love of spectacular and relentless pursuit, the Puri- 
 tan delusion of moral grandeur and infallibility, 
 the Puritan will to power. 
 
 Ostensibly, as I have said, the new laws were 
 designed to put down the traffic in frankly porno- 
 graphic books and pictures — a traffic which, of 
 course, found no defenders — but Comstock had so 
 drawn them that their actual sweep was vastly 
 wider, and once he was firmly in the saddle his en- 
 terprises scarcely knew limits. Having disposed 
 of "The Confessions of Maria Monk" and "Night 
 Life in Paris," he turned to Rabelais and the De- 
 cameron, and having driven these ancients under 
 the book-counters, he pounced upon Zola, Balzac 
 and Daudet, and having disposed of these too, he 
 began a pogrom which, in other hands, eventually 
 brought down such astounding victims as Thomas 
 Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" and Harold Frederic's 
 "The Damnation of Theron Ware^" All through 
 the eighties and nineties this ecstatic campaign con- 
 tinued, always increasing in violence and effective- 
 ness. Comstock became a national celebrity; his 
 doings were as copiously reported by the news- 
 papers as those of P. T. Bamum or John L. Sulli- 
 van. Imitators sprang up in all the larger cities: 
 there was hardly a public library in the land that 
 
PURITANISM A LITKKAKY FORCE 261 
 
 did not begin feverishly expurgating its shelves; 
 the publication of fiction, and particularly of for- 
 eign fiction, took on the character of an extra 
 hazardous enterprise. Not, of course, that the 
 reign of terror was not challenged, and Comstock 
 himself denounced. So early as 1876 a national 
 organization demanding a reasonable amendment 
 of the postal laws got on its legs ; in the late eighties 
 "Citizen" George Francis Train defied the whirl- 
 wind by printing the Old Testament as a serial; 
 many indignant victims, acquitted by some chance 
 in the courts, brought suit against Comstock for 
 damages. Moreover, an occasional judge, stand- 
 ing out boldly against the usual intimidation, de- 
 nounced him from the bench; one of them. Judge 
 Jenkins, accused him specifically of "fraud and 
 lying" and other "dishonest practices." ^ But the 
 spirit of American Puritanism was on his side. 
 His very extravagances at once stimulated and sat- 
 isfied the national yearning for a hot chase, a good 
 show — and in the complaints of his victims, that 
 the art of letters was being degraded, that the coun- 
 try was made ridiculous, the newspaper-reading 
 populace could see no more than an affectation. 
 The reform organization of 1876 lasted but five 
 
 1 U. S. vs. Casper, reported in the Twentieth Century, Feb. 
 11, 1892. 
 
262 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 years; and then disbanded without having accom- 
 plished anything; Train was duly jailed for "de- 
 bauching the young" with an "obscene" serial; ^ 
 juries refused to bring in punitive verdicts against 
 the master showman. 
 
 In carrying on this way of extermination upon 
 all ideas that violated their private notions of vir- 
 tue and decorum, Comstock and his followers were 
 very greatly aided by the vagueness of the law. It 
 prohibited the use of the mails for transporting all 
 matter of an "obscene, lewd, lascivious ... or 
 filthy" character, but conveniently failed to define 
 these adjectives. As a result, of course, it was 
 possible to bring an accusation against practically 
 any publication that aroused the comstockian 
 blood-lust, however innocently, and to subject the 
 persons responsible for it to costly, embarrassing 
 and often dangerous persecution. No man, said 
 Dr. Johnson, would care to go on trial for his life 
 once a week, even if possessed of absolute proofs 
 of his innocence. By the same token, no man 
 
 1 The trial court dodged the issue by directing the jury to 
 find the prisoner not guilty on the ground of insanity. The 
 necessary implication, of course, was that the publication com- 
 plained of was actually obscene. In 1895, one Wise, of Clay 
 Center, Kansas, sent a quotation from the Bible through the 
 mails, and was found guilty of mailing obscene matter. See 
 The Free Press Anthology, compiled by Theodore Schroeder; 
 New York, Truth Seeker Pub. Co., 1909, p. 358. 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 263 
 
 wants to be arraigned in a criminal court, and dis- 
 played in the sensational newspapers, as a pur- 
 veyor of indecency, however strong his assurance 
 of innocence. Comstock made use of this fact in 
 an adroit and characteristically unconscionable 
 manner. He held the menace of prosecution over 
 all who presumed to dispute his tyranny, and when 
 he could not prevail by a mere threat, he did not 
 hesitate to begin proceedings, and to carry them 
 forward with the aid of florid proclamations to the 
 newspapers and ill concealed intimidations of 
 judges and juries. 
 
 The last-named business succeeded as it always 
 does in this country, where the judiciary is quite as 
 sensitive to the suspicion of sinfulness as the legis- 
 lative arm. A glance at the decisions handed down 
 during the forty years of Comstock's chief activity 
 shows a truly amazing willingness to accommodate 
 him in his pious enterprises. On the one hand, 
 there was gradually built up a court-made defini- 
 tion of obscenity which eventually embraced al- 
 most every conceivable violation of Puritan pru- 
 dery, and on the other hand the victim's means of 
 defence were steadily restricted and conditioned, 
 until in the end he had scarcely any at all. This is 
 the state of the law today. It is held in the lead- 
 ing cases that anything is obscene which may excite 
 
264 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 "impure thoughts" in "the minds ... of persons 
 that are susceptible to impure thoughts," ^ or 
 which "tends to deprave the minds" of any who, 
 because they are "young and inexperienced," are 
 "open to such influences" ^ — in brief, that any- 
 thing is obscene that is not fit to be handed to a 
 child just learning to read, or that may imaginably 
 stimulate the lubricity of the most foul-minded. It 
 is held further that words that are perfectly inno- 
 cent in themselves — "words, abstractly considered, 
 [that] may be free from vulgarism" — may yet be 
 assumed, by a friendly jury, to be likely to 
 "arouse a libidinous passion ... in the mind of 
 a modest woman." (I quote exactly! The court 
 failed to define "modest woman.") ^ Yet further, 
 it is held that any book is obscene "which is unbe- 
 coming, immodest. ..." * Obviously, this last 
 decision throws open tlie door to endless imbecili- 
 ties, for its definition merely begs the question, and 
 so makes a reasonable solution ten times harder. 
 It is in such mazes that the Comstocks safely lurk. 
 Almost any printed allusion to sex may be argued 
 
 lU. S. m. Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 368-9 (1877). 
 
 2 Idem, 362; People vs. MuUer, 96 N. Y., 411; U. S. lis. 
 Clark, 38 Fed. Rep. 734.. 
 
 8U. S. vs. Moore, 139 Fed., 160-1 (1904). 
 
 * U. S. vs. Heywood, judge's charge, Boston, 1877. Quoted 
 in U. S. vs. Bennett, 16 Blatchford. 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 265 
 
 against as unbecoming in a moral republic, and 
 once it is unbecoming it is also obscene. 
 
 In meeting such attacks the defendant must do 
 his fighting without weapons. He cannot allege in 
 his defence that the offending work was put forth 
 for a legitimate, necessary and decent purpose; ^ 
 he cannot allege that a passage complained of is 
 from a standard work, itself in general circula- 
 tion; ^ he cannot offer evidence that the person to 
 whom a book or picture was sold or exhibited was 
 not actually depraved by it, or likely to be depraved 
 by it; * he cannot rest his defence on its lack of such 
 effect upon the jurymen themselves ; * he cannot 
 plead that the alleged obscenity, in point of fact, is 
 couched in decent and unobjectionable language; ^ 
 he cannot plead that the same or a similar work has 
 gone unchallenged elsewhere ; ® he cannot argue 
 that the circulation of works of the same class has 
 
 1 U. S. vs. Slenker, 32 Fed. Rep., 693; People vs. MuUer, 96 
 N. Y. 408-414,; Anti-Vice Motion Picture Co. vs. Bell, reported 
 in the New York Law Journal, Sept. 22, 1916; Sociological Re- 
 search Film Corporation vs. the City of New York, 83 Misc. 
 815; Steele vs. Bannon, 7 L. R. C. L. Series, 267; U. S. vs. 
 Means, 42 Fed. Rep. 605, etc. 
 
 2U. S. vs. Cheseman, 19 Fed. Rep., 597 (1884). 
 
 3 People vs. MuUer, 96 N. Y., 413. 
 
 * U. S. vs. Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 368-9. 
 
 5 U. S. vs. Smith, 45 Fed. Rep. 478. 
 
 6 U. S. vs. Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 360-1 ; People vs. Berry, 
 1 N. Y., Crim. R., 32. 
 
266 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 set up a presumption of toleration, and a tacit 
 limitation of the definition of obscenity.^ The 
 general character of a book is not a defence of a 
 particular passage, however unimportant; if there 
 is the slightest descent to what is "unbecoming," 
 the whole may be ruthlessly condemned.^ Nor is 
 it an admissible defence to argue that the book was 
 not generally circulated, and that the copy in evi- 
 dence was obtained by an agent provacateur, and 
 by false representations.^ Finally, all the deci- 
 sions deny the defendant the right to introduce any 
 testimony, whether expert or otherwise, that a book 
 is of artistic value and not pornographic, and that 
 its effect upon normal persons is not pernicious. 
 Upon this point the jury is the sole judge, and it 
 cannot be helped to its decision by taking other 
 opinions, or by hearing evidence as to what is the 
 general opinion. 
 
 Occasionally, as I have said, a judge has re- 
 volted against this intolerable state of the court- and 
 Comstock-made law, and directed a jury to dis- 
 regard these astounding decisions.* In a recent 
 
 1 People vs. MuUer, 3-3 Hun., 212-215. 
 
 2U. S. vs. Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 361. 
 
 8 U. S. vs. Moore, 16 Fed. Rep., 39; U. S. vs. Wright, 38 Fed. 
 Rep., 106; U. S. vs. Dorsey, 40 Fed. Rep., 752; U. S. vs. Baker, 
 155 Mass., 287; U. S. vs. Grimm, 15 Supreme Court Rep., 472. 
 
 * Various cases in point are cited in the Brief on Behalf of 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 267 
 
 New York case Judge Samuel Seabury actually 
 ruled that "it is no part of the duty of courts to ex- 
 ercise a censorship over literary productions." * 
 But in general the judiciary has been curiously 
 complaisant, and more than once a Puritan on the 
 bench has delighted the Comstocks by prosecuting 
 their case for them.^ With such decisions in their 
 hands and such aid from the other side of the bar, it 
 is no wonder that they enter upon their campaigns 
 with impudence and assurance. All the odds are 
 in their favour from the start. They have statutes 
 deliberately designed to make the defence onerous; 
 they are familiar by long experience with all the 
 
 Plaintiff in Dreiser vs. John Lane Co., App. Div. 1st Dept. N. 
 Y., 1917. I cite a few: People vs. Eastman, 188 N. Y., 478; 
 U. S. vs. Swearingen, i61 U. S., 446; People vs. Tylkoff, 212 
 N. Y., 197; In the matter of Worthington Co., 63 St. Rep. 
 116-7; St. Hubert Guild vs. Quinn, 64 Misc., 336-341. But 
 nearly all such decisions are in New York cases. In the Fed- 
 eral courts the Cqpistocks usually have their way. 
 
 1 St. Hubert Guild vs. Quinn, 64 Misc., 339. 
 
 2 For example. Judge Chas. L. Benedict, sitting in U. S. vs. 
 Bennett, op. cit. This is a leading case, and the Comstocks 
 make much of it. Nevertheless, a contemporary newspaper 
 denounces Judge Benedict for his "intense bigotry" and al- 
 leges that "the only evidence which he permitted to be given 
 was on the side of the prosecution." (Port Jervis, N. Y., 
 Evening Gazette, March 22, 1879.) Moreover, a juror in the 
 case, Alfred A. Valentine, thought it necessary to inform the 
 newspapers that he voted guilty only in obedience to judicial 
 instructions. 
 
268 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 tricks and surprises of the game; they are shel- 
 tered behind organizations, incorporated without 
 capital and liberally chartered by trembling legis- 
 latures, which make reprisals impossible in case 
 of failure; above all, they have perfected the busi- 
 ness of playing upon the cowardice and vanity of 
 judges and prosecuting officers. The newspapers, 
 with very few exceptions, give them ready aid. 
 Theoretically, perhaps, many newspaper editors are 
 opposed to comstockery, and sometimes they de- 
 nounce it with great eloquence, but when a good 
 show is offered they are always in favour of the 
 showman ^ — and the Comstocks are showmen of 
 undoubted skill. They know how to make a vic- 
 tim jump and writhe in the ring; they have a talent 
 for finding victims who are prominent enough to 
 arrest attention; they shrewdly capitalize the fact 
 that the pursuer appears more heroic than the prey, 
 and the further fact that the newspaper reader is 
 impatient of artistic pretensions and glad to see an 
 artist made ridiculous. And behind them there is 
 always the steady pressure of Puritan prejudice — 
 the Puritan feeling that "immorality" is the 
 blackest of crimes, and that its practitioner has no 
 rights. It was by making use of these elements 
 
 1 Virle Newspaper Morals, by H. L. Mencken, the Atlantic 
 Monthly, March, 1914. 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 269 
 
 that Comstock achieved his prodigies, and it is by 
 making use of them that his heirs and assigns keep 
 up the sport today. Their livelihood depends upon 
 the money they can raise among the righteous, and 
 the amount they can raise depends upon the quality 
 of the entertainment they offer. Hence their adept 
 search for shining marks. Hence, for example, the 
 spectacular raid upon the Art Students' League, on 
 August 2, 1906. Hence the artful turning to their 
 own use of the vogue of such sensational dramatists 
 as Eugene Brieux and George Bernard Shaw, and 
 of such isolated plays as "Trilby" and "Sapho." 
 Hence the barring from the mails of the inflamma- 
 tory report of the Chicago Vice Commission — a 
 strange, strange case of dog eating dog. 
 
 But here we have humour. There is, however, 
 no humour in the case of a serious author who sees 
 his work damaged and perhaps ruined by a mali- 
 cious and unintelligent attack, and himself held 
 up to public obloquy as one with the vendors of 
 pamphlets of flagellation and filthy "marriage 
 guides." He finds opposing him a flat denial of 
 his decent purpose as an artist, and a stupid and ill- 
 natured logic that baffles sober answer.^ He finds 
 
 1 As a fair specimen of the sort of reasoning that prevails 
 among the consecrated brethren I offer the following extract 
 from an argument against birth control delivered by the 
 
270 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 on his side only the half-hearted support of a pub- 
 lisher whose interest in a single book is limited to 
 his profits from it, and who desires above all things 
 to evade a nuisance and an expense. Not a few 
 publishers, knowing the constant possibility of sud- 
 den and arbitrary attack, insert a clause in their 
 contracts whereby an author must secure them 
 against damage from any "immoral" matter in his 
 book. They read and approve the manuscript, 
 they print the book and sell it — but if it is unlucky 
 enough to attract the comstockian lightning, the 
 author has the whole burden to bear,^ and if they 
 
 present active head of the New York Society for the Sup- 
 pression of Vice before the Women's City Club of New York, 
 Nov. 17, 1916: 
 
 "Natural and Inevitable conditions, over which we can have 
 no control, will assert themselves wherever population becomes 
 too dense. This has been exemplified time after time in the 
 history of the world where over-population has been corrected 
 by manifestations of nature or by war, flood or pestilence. 
 . . . Belgium may have been regarded as an over-populated 
 country. Is it a coincidence that, during the past two years, 
 the territory of Belgium has been devastated and its popula- 
 tion scattered throughout the other countries of the world?" 
 
 1 For example, the printed contract of the John Lane Co., 
 publisher of Dreiser's The "Genius," contains this provision: 
 "The author hereby guarantees . . . that the work . . . con- 
 tains nothing of a scandalous, an immoral or a libelous na- 
 ture." The contract for the publication of The "Genius" was 
 signed on July 30, 1914. The manuscript had been carefully 
 read by representatives of the publisher, and presumably 
 passed as not scandalous or immoral, inasmuch as the publi- 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 271 
 
 seek safety and economy by yielding, as often hap- 
 pens, he must consent to the mutilation or even the 
 suppression of his work. The result is that a 
 writer in such a situation, is practically beaten be- 
 fore he can offer a defence. The professional 
 book-baiters have laws to their liking, and courts 
 pliant to their exactions; they fill the newspapers 
 with inflammatory charges before the accused gets 
 his day in court; they have the aid of prosecuting 
 officers who fear the political damage of their 
 enmity, and of the enmity of their wealthy and 
 influential backers; above all, they have the com- 
 mand of far more money than any author can hope 
 to muster. Finally, they derive an advantage from 
 two of the most widespread of human weaknesses, 
 the first being envy and the second being fear. 
 When an author is attacked, a good many of his 
 rivals see only a personal benefit in his difficulties, 
 
 cation of a scandalous or immoral book would have exposed 
 the publisher to prosecution. About 8,000 copies were sold un- 
 der this contract. Two years later, in July, 1916, the Society 
 for the Suppression of Vice threatened to begin a prosecution 
 imless the book was withdrawn. It was withdrawn forthwith, 
 and Dreiser was compelled to enter suit for a performance of 
 the contract. The withdrawal, it will be noticed, was not in 
 obedience to a court order, but followed a mere comstockian 
 threat. Yet Dreiser was at once deprived of his royalties, and 
 forced into expensive litigation. Had it not been that eminent 
 counsel volunteered for his defence, his personal means would 
 have been insufficient to have got him even a day in court. 
 
272 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 and not a menace to the whole order, and a good 
 many others are afraid to go to his aid because 
 of the danger of bringing down the moralists' 
 rage upon themselves. Both of these weak- 
 nesses revealed themselves very amusingly in 
 the Dreiser case, and I hope to detail their oper- 
 ations at some length later on, when I describe that 
 cause celebre in a separate work. 
 
 Now add to the unfairness and malignancy of 
 the attack its no less disconcerting arbitrariness and 
 fortuitousness, and the path of the American 
 author is seen to be strewn with formidable en- 
 tanglements indeed. With the law what it is, he is 
 quite unable to decide a priori what is permitted by 
 the national delicacy and what is not, nor can he 
 get any light from the recorded campaigns of the 
 moralists. They seem to strike blindly, unintel- 
 ligently, without any coherent theory or plan. 
 "Trilby" is assaulted by the united comstockery of 
 a dozen cities, and "The Yoke" somehow escapes. 
 "Hagar Revelly" is made the subject of a double 
 prosecution in the State and Federal courts, and 
 "Love's Pilgrimage" and "One Man" go un- 
 molested. The publisher of Przhevalski's "Homo 
 Sapiens" is forced to withdraw it; the publisher 
 of Artzibashef's "Sanine" follows it with "The 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 273 
 
 Breaking Point." The serious work of a Forel 
 is brought into court as pornography, and the 
 books of Havelock Ellis are barred from the mails; 
 the innumerable volumes on "sex hygiene" by 
 tawdry clergymen and smutty old maids are circu- 
 lated by the million and without challenge. Frank 
 Harris is deprived of a publisher for his "Oscar 
 Wilde: His Life and Confession" by threats of im- 
 mediate prosecution; the newspapers meanwhile 
 dedicate thousands of columns to the filthy amuse- 
 ments of Harry Thaw. George Moore's "Memoirs 
 of My Dead Life" are bowdlerized, James Lane 
 AUen's "A Summer in Arcady" is barred from 
 libraries, and a book by D. H. Lawrence is forbid- 
 den publication altogether; at the same time half a 
 dozen cheap magazines devoted to sensational sex 
 stories attain to hundreds of thousands of circula- 
 tion. A serious book by David Graham Phillips, 
 published serially in a popular monthly, is raided 
 the moment it appears between covers; a trashy 
 piece of nastiness by Elinor Glyn goes unmolested. 
 Worse, books are sold for months and even years 
 without protest, and then suddenly attacked; Drei- 
 ser's "The 'Genius,'" Kreymborg's "Edna" and 
 Forel's "The Sexual Question" are examples. Still 
 worse, what is held to be unobjectionable in one 
 
274 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 State is forbidden in another as contra bonas 
 mores} Altogether, there is madness, and no 
 method in it. The livelihoods and good names of 
 hard-striving and decent men are at the mercy of 
 the whims of a horde of fanatics and mountebanks, 
 and they have no way of securing themselves 
 against attack, and no redress for their loss when 
 it comes. 
 
 §6 
 
 So beset, it is no wonder that the typical Amer- 
 ican maker of books becomes a timorous and in- 
 effective fellow, whose work tends inevitably to- 
 ward a feeble superficiality. Sucking in the Puri- 
 tan spirit with the very air he breathes, and per- 
 haps burdened inwardly with an inheritance of the 
 actual Puritan stupidity, he is further kept upon the 
 straight path of chemical purity by the very real 
 perils that I have just rehearsed. The result is a 
 literature full of the mawkishness that the late 
 Henry James so often roared against — a literature 
 almost wholly detached from life as men are living 
 it in the world — in George Moore's phrase, a liter- 
 
 1 The chief sufferers from this conflict are the authors of 
 moving pictures. What they face at the hands of imbecile 
 State boards of censorship is described at length by Channing 
 Pollock in an article entitled "Swinging the Censor" in the BuU 
 letin of the Authors' League of America for March, 1917. 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 275 
 
 ature still at nurse. It is on the side of sex that the 
 appointed virtuosi of virtue exercise their chief re- 
 pressions, for it is sex that especially fascinates the 
 lubricious Puritan mind; but the conventual reti- 
 cence that thus becomes the enforced fashion in one 
 field extends itself to all others. Our fiction, in 
 general, is marked by an artificiality as marked as 
 that of Eighteenth Century poetry or the later 
 Georgian drama. The romance in it runs to set 
 forms and stale situations; the revelation, by such 
 a book as "The Titan," that there may be a glamour 
 as entrancing in the way of a conqueror of men as 
 in the way of a youth with a maid, remains isolated 
 and exotic. We have no first-rate political or re- 
 ligious novel; we have no first-rate war story; de- 
 spite all our national engrossment in commercial 
 enterprise, we have few second-rate tales of busi- 
 ness. Romance, in American fiction, still means 
 only a somewhat childish amorousness and senti- 
 mentality — ^the love affairs of Paul and Virginia, 
 or the pale adulteries of their elders. And on the 
 side of realism there is an almost equal vacuity and 
 lack of veracity. The action of all the novels of 
 the Howells school goes on within four walls of 
 painted canvas; they begin to shock once they de- 
 scribe an attack of asthma or a steak burning below 
 stairs; they never penetrate beneath the flow of 
 
276 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 social concealments and urbanities to the passions 
 that actually move men and women to their acts, 
 and the great forces that circimascribe and condi- 
 tion personality. So obvious a piece of reporting 
 as Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" or Robert Her- 
 rick's "Together" makes a sensation; the appear- 
 ance of a "Jennie Gerhardt" or a "Hagar Revelly" 
 brings forth a growl of astonishment and rage. 
 
 In all this dread of free inquiry, this childish 
 skittishness in both writers and public, this dearth 
 of courage and even of curiosity, the influence of 
 comstockery is undoubtedly to be detected. It con- 
 stitutes a sinister and ever-present menace to all 
 men of ideas; it aff'rights the publisher and para- 
 lyzes the author; no one on the outside can imagine 
 its burden as a practical concern. I am, in mo- 
 ments borrowed from more palatable business, the 
 editor of an American magazine, and I thus know 
 at first hand what the burden is. That magazine is 
 anything but a popular one, in the current sense. 
 It sells at a relatively high price; it contains no 
 pictures or other baits for the childish; it is frankly 
 addressed to a sophisticated minority. I may thus 
 assume reasonably, I believe, that its readers are 
 not sex-curious and itching adolescents, just as my 
 colleague of the Atlantic Monthly may assume rea- 
 sonably that his readers are not Italian immi- 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 277 
 
 grants. Nevertheless, as a practical editor, I find 
 that the Comstocks, near and far, are oftener in 
 my mind's eye than my actual patrons. The thing 
 I always have to decide about a manuscript offered 
 for publication, before ever I give any thought to 
 its artistic merit and suitability, is the question 
 whether its publication will be permitted — not even 
 whether it is intrinsically good or evil, moral or 
 immoral, but whether some roving Methodist 
 preacher, self-commissioned to keep watch on let- 
 ters, will read indecency into it. Not a week passes 
 that I do not decline some sound and honest piece 
 of work for no other reason. I have a long list of 
 such things by American authors, well-devised, 
 well-imagined, well-executed, respectable as human 
 documents and as works of art — but never to be 
 printed in mine or any other American magazine. 
 It includes four or five short stories of the very first 
 rank, and the best one-act play yet done, to my 
 knowledge, by an American. All of these pieces 
 would go into type at once on the Continent; no 
 sane man would think of objecting to them; they 
 are no more obscene, to a normal adult, than his 
 own bare legs. But they simply cannot be printed 
 in the United States, with the law what it is and the 
 courts what they are. 
 
 I know many other editors. All of them are in 
 
278 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 the same boat. Some of them try to get around 
 the difficulty by pecksnifFery more or less open — 
 for example, by fastening a moral purpose upon 
 works of art, and hawking them as uplifting/ 
 Others, facing the intolerable fact, yield to it with 
 resignation. And if they didn't? Well, if one of 
 them didn't, any professional moralist could go 
 before a police magistrate, get a warrant upon a 
 simple affidavit, raid the office of the offending edi- 
 tor, seize all the magazines in sight, and keep them 
 impounded until after the disposition of the case. 
 Editors cannot afford to take this risk. Magazines 
 are perishable goods. Even if, after a trial has 
 been had, they are returned, they are worthless save 
 as waste paper. And what may be done with 
 copies found in the actual office of publication may 
 be done too with copies found on news-stands, and 
 not only in one city, but in two, six, a dozen, a hun- 
 dred. All the costs and burdens of the contest are 
 on the defendant. Let him be acquitted with 
 honour, and invited to dinner by the judge, he has 
 yet lost his property, and the Comstock hiding be- 
 
 1 For example, the magazine which printed David Graham 
 Phillips' Susan Lenox: Her Rise and Fall as a serial prefaced 
 it with a moral encomium by the Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst. 
 Later, when the novel appeared in book form, the Comstocks 
 began an action to have it suppressed, and forced the publisher 
 to bowdlerize it. 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 279 
 
 hind the warrant cannot be made to pay. In this 
 conceabnent, indeed, lurk many sinister things — 
 not forgetting personal enmity and business rivalry. 
 The actual complainant is seldom uncovered; 
 Comstockery, taking on a semi-judicial character, 
 throws its chartered immunity around the whole 
 process. A hypothetical outrage? By no means. 
 It has been perpetrated, in one American city or 
 another, upon fully half of the magazines of gen- 
 eral circulation published today. Its possibility 
 sticks in the consciousness of every editor and pub- 
 lisher like a recurrent glycosuria.^ 
 
 But though the effects of comstockery are thus 
 abominably insane and irritating, the fact is not to 
 be forgotten that, after all, the thing is no more than 
 an effect itself. The fundamental causes of all the 
 grotesque (and often half -fabulous) phenomena 
 flowing out of it are to be sought in the habits of 
 mind of the American people. They are, as I have 
 shown, besotted by moral concepts, a moral en- 
 grossment, a delusion of moral infallibility. In 
 their view of the arts they are still unable to shake 
 off the naive suspicion of the Fathers.^ A work of 
 
 1 An account of a typical prosecution, arbitrary, unintelligent 
 and disingenuous, is to be found in Sumner and Indecency, by 
 Frank Harris, in Pearson's Magazine for June, 1917, p. 556. 
 
 2 For further discussions of this point consult Art in Amer- 
 ica, by Aleister Crowley, The English Review, Nov., 1913; Life, 
 
280 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 the imagination can justify itself, in their sight, 
 only if it show a moral purpose, and that purpose 
 must be obvious and unmistakable. Even in their 
 slow progress toward a revolt against the ancestral 
 Philistinism, they cling to this ethical bemusement : 
 a new gallery of pictures is welcomed as "improv- 
 ing," to hear Beethoven "makes one better." Any 
 questioning of the moral ideas that prevail — ^the 
 principal business, it must be plain, of the novelist, 
 the serious dramatist, the professed inquirer into 
 human motives and acts — is received with the ut- 
 most hostility. To attempt such an enterprise is to 
 disturb the peace — and the disturber of the peace, 
 in the national view, quickly passes over into the 
 downright criminal. 
 
 These symptoms, it seems to me, are only partly 
 racial, despite the persistent survival of that third- 
 rate English strain which shows itself so ingen- 
 uously in the colonial spirit, the sense of infe- 
 riority, the frank craving for praise from home. 
 The race, in truth, grows mongrel, and the protest 
 against that mongrelism only serves to drive in the 
 fact. But a mongrel race is necessarily a race still 
 in the stage of reaching out for culture; it has not 
 
 Art and America, hj Theodore Dreiser, The Seven Arts, Feb., 
 1917; and The American; His Ideas of Beauty, by H. L. 
 Mencken, The Smart Set, Sept., 1913. 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 281 
 
 yet formulated defensible standards ; it must needs 
 rest heavily upon the superstitions that go with 
 inferiority. The Reformation brought Scotland 
 among the civilized nations, but it took Scotland a 
 century and a half to live down the Reformation/ 
 Dogmatism, conformity, Philistinism, the fear of 
 rebels, the crusading spirit; these are the marks of 
 an upstart people, uncertain of their rank in the 
 world and even of their direction.^ A cultured Eu- 
 ropean, reading a typical American critical journal, 
 must needs conceive the United States, says H. G. 
 Wells, as "a vain, garrulous and prosperous female 
 of uncertain age and still more uncertain temper, 
 with unfounded pretensions to intellectuality and 
 an ideal of refinement of the most negative descrip- 
 tion . . . the Aunt Errant of Christendom." * 
 There is always that blushful shyness, that timorous 
 uncertainty, broken by sudden rages, sudden enun- 
 ciations of impeccable doctrine, sudden runnings 
 amuck. Formalism is the hall-mark of the na- 
 tional culture, and sins against the one are sins 
 against the other. The American is school-mas- 
 tered out of gusto, out of joy, out of innocence. 
 
 1 Vide The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. 
 XI, p. 225. 
 
 2 The point is discussed by H. V. Routh in The Cambridge 
 History of English Literature, vol. XI, p. 290. 
 
 Bin Boon; New York, George H. Doran Co., 1915. 
 
282 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 
 He can never fathom William Blake's notion that 
 "the lust of the goat is also to the glory of God." 
 He must be correct, or, in his own phase, he must 
 bust. 
 
 Via trita est tutissima. The new generation, 
 urged to curiosity and rebellion by its mounting 
 sap, is rigorously restrained, regimented, policed. 
 The ideal is vacuity, guilelessness, imbecility. 
 "We are looking at this particular book," said 
 Comstock's successor of "The 'Genius,' " "from the 
 standpoint of its harmful effect on female readers 
 of immature mind." ^ To be curious is to be lewd; 
 to know is to yield to fornication. Here we have 
 the mediaeval doctrine still on its legs: a chance 
 word may arouse "a libidinous passion" in the 
 mind of a "modest" woman. Not only youth must 
 be safeguarded, but also the "female," the un- 
 trustworthy one, the temptress. "Modest," is a 
 euphemism; it takes laws to keep her "pure." The 
 "locks of chastity" rust in the Cluny Museum; in 
 place of them we have comstockery. . . . 
 
 But, as I have said in hymning Huneker, there is 
 yet the munyonic consolation. Time is a great 
 legalizer, even in the field of morals. We have yet 
 no delivery, but we have at least the beginnings of 
 a revolt, or, at all events, of a protest. We have 
 
 1 In a letter to Felix Shay, Nov. 3-i, 1916. 
 
PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 283 
 
 already reached, in Howells, our Hannah More; in 
 Clemens, our Swift; in Henry James, our Horace 
 Walpole; in Woodberry, Robinson et al., our Cow- 
 pers, Southeys and Crabbes; perhaps we might 
 even make a composite and call it our Johnson. 
 We are sweating through our Eighteenth Century, 
 our era of sentiment, our spiritual measles. 
 Maybe a new day is not quite so far off as it seems 
 to be, and with it we may get our Hardy, our Con- 
 rad, our Swinburne, our Thoma, our Moore, our 
 Meredith and our Synge. 
 
 THE END 
 
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