Literature in the Making Part 17

"I say theoretically because from my own point of view I cannot conceive of short-story writing as an avocation. The gentle art of short fiction consumes just about six hours of my day at the rate of from twenty to twenty-five days on a story of from eight to ten thousand words. And since I work best from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., I can think of no remunerative occupation outside those hours except cabaret work or night clerking."

"What about present-day relations.h.i.+p between American publishers and authors?" I asked, "Do you think they are all they should be?"

"American publishers and authors," Miss Hurst replied, "to-day seem to be working somewhat at cross-purposes, owing partially, I think, to the great commercial significance that has become attached to the various rights, such as motion-picture, serial, dramatic, book, etc., and which are to be reckoned with in the sale of fiction.

"There is little doubt that authors have suffered at the hands of publishers on these various scores, oftener than not the publisher and not the author reaping the benefits accruing from the author's ignorance of conditions or lack of foresight.

"The Authors' League has been formed to remedy just that evil--and it was a crying one.

"On the other hand, it is certain that fiction-writers are better paid to-day than ever in the history of literature, and if a man is writing a seventy-five-dollar story there is a pretty good reason why.

"I feel a great deal of hesitancy about the present proposed affiliation of authors with labor. There is so much to be said on both sides!

"If the publisher represents capital and the author labor, my sympathies immediately veer me toward labor. But do they? That same question has recently been thrashed out by the actors, and they have gone over to labor. Scores of our most prominent American authors are of that same persuasion.

"I cannot help but feel that for publisher and author to a.s.sume the relations.h.i.+p of employer and employee is a dangerous step. All forms of labor do not come under the same head. And I am the last to say that writing is not hard labor. But Cellini could hardly have allied himself with an iron-workers' guild. All men are mammals, but not all mammals are men!

"It seems doubly unfortunate, with the Authors' League in existence to direct and safeguard the financial destiny of the author, to take a step which immediately places the author and publisher on the same basis of relations.h.i.+p that exists between hod-carrier and contractor.

"As a matter of fact, I am almost wont to question the traditional lack of business ac.u.men in authors. On the contrary, almost every successful author of my acquaintance not only is pretty well able to take care of himself, but owns a motor-car and a safety-deposit box at the same time.

And I find the not-so-successful authors prodding pretty faithfully to get their prices up.

"The Authors' League is a great inst.i.tution and fills a great need. It was formed for just the purpose that seems to be prompting authors to unionize--to instruct authors in their rights and protect them against infringements.

"Why unionize? Next, an author will find himself obliged to lay aside his pen when the whistle blows, and publishers will be finding themselves obliged to deal in open-shop literature."

"And what effect are the moving pictures going to have on fiction?" I asked. "Will it be good or bad?"

"Up to the present," Miss Hurst replied, "moving pictures have, in my opinion, been little else than a destructive force where American fiction is concerned. Picturized fiction is on a cheap and sensational level. Even cla.s.sics and standardized fiction are ruthlessly defamed by tawdry presentation. With the mechanics of the motion picture so advanced, it is unfortunate that the photoplay itself is not keeping pace with that advancement.

"Motion pictures are in the hands of laymen, and they show it. The scenario-writers, so-called 'staff writers,' have sprung up overnight, so to speak, and, from what I understand, when authors venture into the field they are at the mercy of the moving-picture director.

"Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett could not endure to sit through the picture presentation of _Little Lord Fauntleroy_, so mutilated was it.

"Of course, scenario-writing is a new art, and this interesting form of expression has hardly emerged from its infancy. Except perhaps in such great spectacles as 'The Birth of a Nation,' where, after all, the play is not the thing."

I asked Miss Hurst if she agreed with those who believe that Edgar Allan Poe's short stories have never been surpa.s.sed. I found that she did not.

"I should say," she said, "that since Poe's time we have had masters of the short story who have equaled him. Poe is, of course, the legitimate father of the American short story, and, coupled with that fact, was possessed of that kind of self-consciousness which enabled him to formulate a law of composition which has not been without its influence upon our subsequent short fiction.

"But in American letters there is little doubt that in the last one hundred years the short story has made more progress than any other literary type. We are becoming not only proficient, but pre-eminent in the short story. I can think off-hand of quite a group of writers, each of whom has contributed short-story cla.s.sics to our literature.

"There are Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James (if we may claim him), Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, O. Henry, Richard Harding Davis, Jack London, and Booth Tarkington. And I am sure that there are various others whose names do not occur to me at this moment."

"You mentioned O. Henry," I said. "Then you do not share Katharine Fullerton Gerould's belief that O. Henry's influence on modern fiction is bad?"

"I decidedly disagree," said Miss Hurst, with considerable firmness, "with the statement that O. Henry wrote incidents rather than short stories, and is a pernicious influence in modern letters. That his structural form is more than anecdotal can be shown by an a.n.a.lysis of almost any of his plots.

"But it seems pedantic to criticize O. Henry on the score of structure.

Admitting that the substance of his writings does rest on frail framework, even sometimes upon the trick, he built with Gothic skill and with no obvious pillars of support.

"Corot was none the less a landscape artist because he removed that particular brown tree from that particular green slope. O. Henry's facetiousness and, if you will, his frail structures, are no more to be reckoned with than, for instance, the extravagance of plot and the morbid formality we find in Poe.

"The smiting word and the polished phrase he quite frankly subordinated to the laugh, or the tear with a sniffle. Just as soon call red woolen underwear pernicious!

"The Henry James school has put a super-finish upon literature which, it is true, gives the same satisfying sense of wholeness that we get from a Greek urn. But, after all, chast.i.ty is not the first and last requisite.

O. Henry loved to laugh with life! It was not in him to regard it with a Mona Lisa smile."

Miss Hurst has confined her attention so closely to American metropolitan life that I thought it would be interesting to have her opinion as to the truth of the remark, attributed to William Dean Howells, that American literature is merely a phase of English literature. In reply to my question she said:

"I agree with Mr. Howells that American literature up to now has been rather a phase of English literature. His own graceful art is an example of cousins.h.i.+p. American literature probably will continue to be an effort until our American melting-pot ceases boiling.

"_David Copperfield_ and _Vanity Fair_ come from a people whose lineage goes back by century-plants and not by Mayflowers. Theodore Dreiser and Ernest Poole, sometimes more or less inarticulately, are preparing us for the great American novel. When we reach a proper consistency the boiling is bound to cease, and, just as inevitably, the epic novel must come."

_THE NEW SPIRIT IN POETRY_

AMY LOWELL

Miss Amy Lowell, America's chief advocate and pract.i.tioner of the new poetry, would wear, I supposed, a gown by Bakst, with many Oriental jewels. And incense would be burning in a golden basin. And Miss Lowell would say that the art of poetry was discovered in 1916.

But there is nothing exotic or artificial about Miss Lowell's appearance and surroundings. Nor did the author of _Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_ express, when I talked to her the other day, any of the extravagant opinions which conservative critics attribute to the _vers libristes_.

Miss Lowell talked with the practicality which is of New England and the serenity which is of Boston; she was positive, but not narrowly dogmatic; she is keenly appreciative of contemporary poetry, but she has the fullest sense of the value of the great heritage of poetical tradition that has come down to us through the ages.

There is so much careless talk of _imagisme_, _vers libre_, and the new poetry in general that I thought it advisable to begin our talk by asking for a definition or a description of the new poetry. In reply to my question Miss Lowell said:

"The thing that makes me feel sure that there is a future in the new poetry is the fact that those who write it follow so many different lines of thought. The new poetry is so large a subject that it can scarcely be covered by one definition. It seems to me that there are four definite sorts of new poetry, which I will attempt to describe.

"One branch of the new poetry may be called the realistic school. This branch is descended partly from Whitman and partly from the prose-writers of France and England. The leading exponents of it are Robert Frost and Edgar Lee Masters. These two poets are different from each other, but they both are realists, they march under the same banner.

"Another branch of the new poetry consists of the poets whose work shows a mixture of the highly imaginative and the realistic. Their thought verges on the purely imaginative, but is corrected by a scientific att.i.tude of mind. I suppose that this particular movement in English poetry may be said to have started with Coleridge, but in England the movement hardly attained its due proportions. Half of literary England followed Wordsworth, half followed Byron. It is in America that we find the greatest disciple of Coleridge in the person of Edgar Allan Poe. The force of the movement then went back to France, where it showed clearly in Mallarme and the later symbolists. To-day we see this tendency somewhat popularized in Vach.e.l.l Lindsay, although perhaps he does not know it. And if I may be so bold as to mention myself, I should say that I in common with most other imagists belong to this branch, that I am at once a fantasist and a realist.

"Thirdly, we have the lyrico-imaginative type of poet. Of this branch the best example that I can call to mind is John Gould Fletcher. The fourth group of the new poets consists of those who are descended straight from Matthew Arnold. They show the Wordsworth influence corrected by experience and education. Browning is in their line of descent. Characteristics of their work are high seriousness, astringency, and a certain pruning down of poetry so that redundancy is absolutely avoided. Of this type the most striking example is Edwin Arlington Robinson."

"Miss Lowell," I said, "the opponents of the new poetry generally attack it chiefly on account of its form--or rather, on account of its formlessness. And yet what you have said has to do only with the idea itself. You have said nothing about the way in which the idea is expressed."

"There is no special form which is characteristic of the new poetry,"

said Miss Lowell, "and of course 'formlessness' is a word which is applied to it only by the ignorant. The new poetry is in every form.

Edgar Lee Masters has written in _vers libre_ and in regular rhythm.

Robert Frost writes in blank verse. Vach.e.l.l Lindsay writes in varied rhyme schemes. I write in both the regular meters and the newer forms, such as _vers libre_ and 'polyphonic prose.'

"It is a mistake to suppose, as many conservative critics do, that modern poetry is a matter of _vers libre_. _Vers libre_ is not new, but it is valuable to give vividness when vividness is desired. _Vers libre_ is a difficult thing to write well, and a very easy thing to write badly. This particular branch of the new poetry movement has been imitated so extensively that it has brought the whole movement into disrepute in the eyes of casual observers. But we must remember that no movement is to be judged by its obscure imitators. A movement must be judged by the few people at its head who make the trend. There cannot be many of them. In the history of the world there are only a few supreme artists, only a small number of great artists, only a limited number of good artists. And to suppose that we in America at this particular moment can be possessed of many artists worthy of consideration is ridiculous.

"Undoubtedly the fact that a great number of people are engaged to-day in producing poetry is a great stimulus and helps to create a proper atmosphere for those men whose work may live. For it is a curious fact that the artistic names that have come down to us are those of men who have lived in the so-called great artistic periods, when many other men were working at the same thing."

I asked Miss Lowell to tell something of this _vers libre_ which is so much discussed and so little understood. She said: