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DEFINITIONS

ESSAYS IN CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM

BY

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY, Ph.D.

Editor of _The Literary Review_ of _The New York Evening Post_, and a
member of the English Department of Yale University.

NEW YORK

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to acknowledge the courtesy of _The Atlantic
Monthly, Harper's Magazine, The Century Magazine, The Literary
Review of The New York Evening Post, The Bookman, The Nation, and
The North American Review_ for permission to reprint such of
these essays as have appeared in their columns.

PREFACE

The unity of this book is to be sought in the point of view of the
writer rather than in a sequence of chapters developing a single
theme and arriving at categorical conclusions. Literature in a
civilization like ours, which is trying to be both sophisticated
and democratic at the same moment of time, has so many sources and
so many manifestations, is so much involved with our social
background, and is so much a question of life as well as of art,
that many doors have to be opened before one begins to approach an
understanding. The method of informal definition which I have
followed in all these essays is an attempt to open doors through
which both writer and reader may enter into a better comprehension
of what novelists, poets, and critics have done or are trying to
accomplish. More than an entrance upon many a vexed controversy
and hidden meaning I cannot expect to have achieved in this book;
but where the door would not swing wide I have at least tried to
put one foot in the crack. The sympathetic reader may find his own
way further; or may be stirred by my endeavor to a deeper
appreciation, interest, and insight. That is my hope.

New York, April, 1922.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

I. ON FICTION

SENTIMENTAL AMERICA
FREE FICTION
A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION TOWARD FICTION
THE ESSENCE OF POPULARITY

II. ON THE AMERICAN TRADITION

THE AMERICAN TRADITION
BACK TO NATURE
THANKS TO THE ARTISTS
TO-DAY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: ADDRESSED TO THE BRITISH TIME'S MIRROR
THE FAMILY MAGAZINE

III. THE NEW GENERATION

THE YOUNG ROMANTICS
PURITANS ALL
THE OLDER GENERATION
A LITERATURE OF PROTEST
BARBARIANS A LA MODE

IV. THE REVIEWING OF BOOKS

A PROSPECTUS FOR CRITICISM
THE RACE OF REVIEWERS
THE SINS OF REVIEWING
MRS. WHARTON'S "THE AGE OF INNOCENCE"
MR. HERGESHEIMER'S "CYTHEREA"

V. PHILISTINES AND DILETTANTE

POETRY FOR THE UNPOETICAL EYE, EAR, AND MIND
OUT WITH THE DILETTANTE
FLAT PROSE

VI. MEN AND THEIR BOOKS

CONRAD AND MELVILLE
THE NOVELIST OF PITY
HENRY JAMES THE SATIRIC
RAGE OF BUTLER

CONCLUSION

DEFINING THE INDEFINABLE

I

ON FICTION

SENTIMENTAL AMERICA

The Oriental may be inscrutable, but he is no more puzzling than
the average American. We admit that we are hard, keen, practical,
--the adjectives that every casual European applies to us,--and yet
any book-store window or railway news-stand will show that we
prefer sentimental magazines and books. Why should a hard race--if
we are hard--read soft books?

By soft books, by sentimental books, I do not mean only the kind
of literature best described by the word "squashy." I doubt
whether we write or read more novels and short stories of the
tear-dripped or hyper-emotional variety than other nations.
Germany is--or was--full of such soft stuff. It is highly popular
in France, although the excellent taste of French criticism keeps
it in check. Italian popular literature exudes sentiment; and the
sale of "squashy" fiction in England is said to be threatened only
by an occasional importation of an American "best-seller." We have
no bad eminence here. Sentimentalists with enlarged hearts are
international in habitat, although, it must be admitted,
especially popular in America.

When a critic, after a course in American novels and magazines,
declares that life, as it appears on the printed page here, is
fundamentally sentimentalized, he goes much deeper than
"mushiness" with his charge. He means, I think, that there is an
alarming tendency in American fiction to dodge the facts of life--
or to pervert them. He means that in most popular books only red-
blooded, optimistic people are welcome. He means that material
success, physical soundness, and the gratification of the emotions
have the right of way. He means that men and women (except the
comic figures) shall be presented, not as they are, but as we
should like to have them, according to a judgment tempered by
nothing more searching than our experience with an unusually
comfortable, safe, and prosperous mode of living. Every one
succeeds in American plays and stories--if not by good thinking,
why then by good looks or good luck. A curious society the
research student of a later date might make of it--an upper world
of the colorless successful, illustrated by chance-saved collar
advertisements and magazine covers; an underworld of grotesque
scamps, clowns, and hyphenates drawn from the comic supplement;
and all--red-blooded hero and modern gargoyle alike--always in
good humor.

I am not touching in this picture merely to attack it. It has been
abundantly attacked; what it needs is definition. For there is
much in this bourgeois, good-humored American literature of ours
which rings true, which is as honest an expression of our
individuality as was the more austere product of antebellum New
England. If American sentimentality does invite criticism,
American sentiment deserves defense.

Sentiment--the response of the emotions to the appeal of human
nature--is cheap, but so are many other good things. The best of
the ancients were rich in it. Homer's chieftains wept easily. So
did Shakespeare's heroes. Adam and Eve shed "some natural tears"
when they left the Paradise which Milton imagined for them. A
heart accessible to pathos, to natural beauty, to religion, was a
chief requisite for the protagonist of Victorian literature. Even
Becky Sharp was touched--once--by Amelia's moving distress.

Americans, to be sure, do not weep easily; but if they make
equivalent responses to sentiment, that should not be held against
them. If we like "sweet" stories, or "strong"--which means
emotional--stories, our taste is not thereby proved to be
hopeless, or our national character bad. It is better to be
creatures of even sentimental sentiment with the author of "The
Rosary," than to see the world _only_ as it is portrayed by the pens
of Bernard Shaw and Anatole France. The first is deplorable; the
second is dangerous. I should deeply regret the day when a simple
story of honest American manhood winning a million and a sparkling,
piquant sweetheart lost all power to lull my critical faculty and warm
my heart. I doubt whether any literature has ever had too much of
honest sentiment.

Good Heavens! Because some among us insist that the mystic rose of
the emotions shall be painted a brighter pink than nature allows,
are the rest to forego glamour? Or because, to view the matter
differently, psychology has shown what happens in the brain when a
man falls in love, and anthropology has traced marriage to a care
for property rights, are we to suspect the idyllic in literature
wherever we find it? Life is full of the idyllic; and no
anthropologist will ever persuade the reasonably romantic youth
that the sweet and chivalrous passion which leads him to mingle
reverence with desire for the object of his affections, is nothing
but an idealized property sense. Origins explain very little,
after all. The bilious critics of sentiment in literature have not
even honest science behind them.

I have no quarrel with traffickers in simple emotion--with such
writers as James Lane Allen and James Whitcomb Riley, for example.
But the average American is not content with such sentiment as
theirs. He wishes a more intoxicating brew, he desires to be
persuaded that, once you step beyond your own experience, feeling
rules the world. He wishes--I judge by what he reads--to make
sentiment at least ninety per cent efficient, even if a dream-
America, superficially resemblant to the real, but far different
in tone, must be created by the obedient writer in order to
satisfy him. His sentiment has frequently to be sentimentalized
before he will pay for it. And to this fault, which he shares with
other modern races, he adds the other heinous sin of
sentimentalism, the refusal to face the facts.

This sentimentalizing of reality is far more dangerous than the
romantic sentimentalizing of the "squashy" variety. It is to be
found in sex-stories which carefully observe decency of word and
deed, where the conclusion is always in accord with conventional
morality, yet whose characters are clearly immoral, indecent, and
would so display themselves if the tale were truly told. It is to
be found in stories of "big business" where trickery and rascality
are made virtuous at the end by sentimental baptism. If I choose
for the hero of my novel a director in an American trust; if I
make him an accomplice in certain acts of ruthless economic
tyranny; if I make it clear that at first he is merely subservient
to a stronger will; and that the acts he approves are in complete
disaccord with his private moral code--why then, if the facts
should be dragged to the light, if he is made to realize the exact
nature of his career, how can I end my story? It is evident that
my hero possesses little insight and less firmness of character.
He is not a hero; he is merely a tool. In, let us say, eight cases
out of ten, his curve is already plotted. It leads downward--not
necessarily along the villain's path, but toward moral
insignificance.

And yet, I cannot end my story that way for Americans. There _must_ be
a grand moral revolt. There must be resistance, triumph, and not only
spiritual, but also financial recovery. And this, likewise, is
sentimentality. Even Booth Tarkington, in his excellent "Turmoil," had
to dodge the logical issue of his story; had to make his hero exchange
a practical literary idealism for a very impractical, even though a
commercial, utopianism, in order to emerge apparently successful at
the end of the book. A story such as the Danish Nexo's "Pelle the
Conqueror," where pathos and the idyllic, each intense, each
beautiful, are made convincing by an undeviating truth to experience,
would seem to be almost impossible of production just now in America.

It is not enough to rail at this false fiction. The chief duty of
criticism is to explain. The best corrective of bad writing is a
knowledge of why it is bad. We get the fiction we deserve,
precisely as we get the government we deserve--or perhaps, in each
case, a little better. Why are we sentimental? When that question
is answered, it is easier to understand the defects and the
virtues of American fiction. And the answer lies in the
traditional American philosophy of life.

To say that the American is an idealist is to commit a
thoroughgoing platitude. Like most platitudes, the statement is
annoying because from one point of view it is indisputably just,
while from another it does not seem to fit the facts. With regard
to our tradition, it is indisputable. Of the immigrants who since
the seventeenth century have been pouring into this continent a
proportion large in number, larger still in influence, has been
possessed of motives which in part at least were idealistic. If it
was not the desire for religious freedom that urged them, it was
the desire for personal freedom; if not political liberty, why
then economic liberty (for this too is idealism), and the
opportunity to raise the standard of life. And of course all these
motives were strongest in that earlier immigration which has done
most to fix the state of mind and body which we call being
American. I need not labor the argument. Our political and social
history support it; our best literature demonstrates it, for no
men have been more idealistic than the American writers whom we
have consented to call great. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne,
Whitman--was idealism ever more thoroughly incarnate than in them?

And this idealism--to risk again a platitude--has been in the air of
America. It has permeated our religious sects, and created
several of them. It has given tone to our thinking, and even more
to our feeling. I do not say that it has always, or even usually,
determined our actions, although the Civil War is proof of its
power. Again and again it has gone aground roughly when the ideal
met a condition of living--a fact that will provide the
explanation for which I seek. But optimism, "boosting," muck-
raking (not all of its manifestations are pretty), social service,
religious, municipal, democratic reform, indeed the "uplift"
generally, is evidence of the vigor, the bumptiousness of the
inherited American tendency to pursue the ideal. No one can doubt
that in 1918 we believed, at least, in idealism.
Nevertheless, so far as the average individual is concerned, with
just his share and no more of the race-tendency, this idealism
has been suppressed, and in some measure perverted. It is this
which explains, I think, American sentimentalism.

Consider, for example, the ethics of conventional American
society. The American ethical tradition is perfectly definite and
tremendously powerful. It belongs, furthermore, to a population
far larger than the "old American" stock, for it has been
laboriously inculcated in our schools and churches, and
impressively driven home by newspaper, magazine, and book. I shall
not presume to analyze it save where it touches literature. There
it maintains a definite attitude toward all sex-problems: the
Victorian, which is not necessarily, or even probably, a bad one.
Man should be chaste, and proud of his chastity. Woman must be so.
It is the ethical duty of the American to hate, or at least to
despise, all deviations, and to pretend--for the greater prestige
of the law--that such sinning is exceptional, at least in America.
And this is the public morality he believes in, whatever may be
his private experience in actual living. In business, it is the
ethical tradition of the American, inherited from a rigorous
Protestant morality, to be square, to play the game without
trickery, to fight hard but never meanly. Over-reaching is
justifiable when the other fellow has equal opportunities to be
"smart"; lying, tyranny--never. And though the opposites of all
these laudable practices come to pass, he must frown on them in
public, deny their rightness even to the last cock-crow--
especially in the public press.

American political history is a long record of idealistic
tendencies toward democracy working painfully through a net of
graft, pettiness, sectionalism, and bravado, with constant
disappointment for the idealist who believes, traditionally, in
the intelligence of the crowd. American social history is a
glaring instance of how the theory of equal dignity for all men
can entangle itself with caste distinctions, snobbery, and the
power of wealth. American economic history betrays the pioneer
helping to kick down the ladder which he himself had raised toward
equal opportunity for all. American literary history--especially
contemporary literary history--reflects the result of all this for
the American mind. The sentimental in our literature is a direct
consequence.

The disease is easily acquired. Mr. Smith, a broker, finds himself
in an environment of "schemes" and "deals" in which the quality of
mercy is strained, and the wind is decidedly not tempered to the
shorn lamb. After all, business is business. He shrugs his
shoulders and takes his part. But his unexpended fund of native
idealism--if, as is most probable, he has his share--seeks its
due satisfaction. He cannot use it in business; so he takes it out
in a novel or a play where, quite contrary to his observed
experience, ordinary people like himself act nobly, with a success
that is all the more agreeable for being unexpected. His wife, a
woman with strange stirrings about her heart, with motions toward
beauty, and desires for a significant life and rich, satisfying
experience, exists in day-long pettiness, gossips, frivols,
scolds, with money enough to do what she pleases, and nothing
vital to do. She also relieves her pent-up idealism in plays or
books--in high-wrought, "strong" novels, not in adventures in
society such as the kitchen admires, but in stories with violent
moral and emotional crises, whose characters, no matter how
unlifelike, have "strong" thoughts, and make vital decisions;
succeed or fail significantly. Her brother, the head of a
wholesale dry-goods firm, listens to the stories the drummers
bring home of night life on the road, laughs, says to himself
regretfully that the world has to be like that; and then, in
logical reaction, demands purity and nothing but aggressive purity
in the books of the public library.

The hard man goes in for philanthropy (never before so frequently
as in America); the one-time "boss" takes to picture-collecting;
the railroad wrecker gathers rare editions of the Bible; and tens
of thousands of humbler Americans carry their inherited idealism
into the necessarily sordid experiences of life in an imperfectly
organized country, suppress it for fear of being thought "cranky"
or "soft," and then, in their imagination and all that feeds their
imagination, give it vent. You may watch the process any evening
at the "movies" or the melodrama, on the trolley-car or in the
easy chair at home.

This philosophy of living which I have called American idealism
is in its own nature sound, as is proved in a hundred directions
where it has had full play. Suppressed idealism, like any other
suppressed desire, becomes unsound. And here lies the ultimate
cause of the taste for sentimentalism in the American _bourgeoisie._
An undue insistence upon happy endings, regardless of the premises of
the story, and a craving for optimism everywhere, anyhow, are sure
signs of a "morbid complex," and to be compared with some justice to
the craving for drugs in an alcoholic deprived of liquor. No one can
doubt the effect of the suppression by the Puritan discipline of that
instinctive love of pleasure and liberal experience common to us all.
Its unhealthy reaction is visible in every old American community. No
one who faces the facts can deny the result of the suppression by
commercial, bourgeois, prosperous America of our native idealism.
The student of society may find its dire effects in politics, in
religion, and in social intercourse. The critic cannot overlook
them in literature; for it is in the realm of the imagination that
idealism, direct or perverted, does its best or its worst.

Sentiment is not perverted idealism. Sentiment _is_ idealism,
of a mild and not too masculine variety. If it has sins, they are
sins of omission, not commission. Our fondness for sentiment
proves that our idealism, if a little loose in the waist-band and
puffy in the cheeks, is still hearty, still capable of active
mobilization, like those comfortable French husbands whose plump
and smiling faces, careless of glory, careless of everything but
thrift and good living, one used to see figured on a page whose
superscription read, "Dead on the field of honor."

The novels, the plays, the short stories, of sentiment may prefer
sweetness, perhaps, to truth, the feminine to the masculine
virtues, but we waste ammunition in attacking them. There never
was, I suppose, a great literature of sentiment, for not even "The
Sentimental Journey" is truly great. But no one can make a diet
exclusively of "noble" literature; the charming has its own cozy
corner across from the tragic (and a much bigger corner at that).
Our uncounted amorists of tail-piece song and illustrated story
provide the readiest means of escape from the somewhat uninspiring
life that most men and women are living just now in America.

The sentimental, however,--whether because of an excess of
sentiment softening into "slush," or of a morbid optimism, or of a
weak-eyed distortion of the facts of life,--is perverted. It needs
to be cured, and its cure is more truth. But this cure, I very
much fear, is not entirely, or even chiefly, in the power of the
"regular practitioner," the honest writer. He can be honest; but
if he is much more honest than his readers, they will not read
him. As Professor Lounsbury once said, a language grows corrupt
only when its speakers grow corrupt, and mends, strengthens, and
becomes pure with them. So with literature. We shall have less
sentimentality in American literature when our accumulated store
of idealism disappears in a laxer generation; or when it finds due
vent in a more responsible, less narrow, less monotonously
prosperous life than is lived by the average reader of fiction in
America. I would rather see our literary taste damned forever than
have the first alternative become--as it has not yet--a fact. The
second, in these years rests upon the knees of the gods.

All this must not be taken in too absolute a sense. There are
medicines, and good ones, in the hands of writers and of critics,
to abate, if not to heal, this plague of sentimentalism. I have
stated ultimate causes only. They are enough to keep the mass of
Americans reading sentimentalized fiction until some fundamental
change has come, not strong enough to hold back the van of
American writing, which is steadily moving toward restraint,
sanity, and truth. Every honest composition is a step forward in
the cause; and every clear-minded criticism.

But one must doubt the efficacy, and one must doubt the
healthiness, of reaction into cynicism and sophisticated
cleverness. There are curious signs, especially in what we may
call the literature of New York, of a growing sophistication that
sneers at sentiment and the sentimental alike. "Magazines of
cleverness" have this for their keynote, although as yet the
satire is not always well aimed. There are abundant signs that the
generation just coming forward will rejoice in such a pose. It is
observable now in the colleges, where the young literati turn up
their noses at everything American,--magazines, best-sellers, or
one-hundred-night plays,--and resort for inspiration to the
English school of anti-Victorians: to Remy de Gourmont, to Anatole
France. Their pose is not altogether to be blamed, and the men to
whom they resort are models of much that is admirable; but there
is little promise for American literature in exotic imitation. To
see ourselves prevailingly as others see us may be good for
modesty, but does not lead to a self-confident native art. And it
is a dangerous way for Americans to travel. We cannot afford such
sophistication yet. The English wits experimented with cynicism in
the court of Charles II, laughed at blundering Puritan morality,
laughed at country manners, and were whiffed away because the
ideals they laughed at were better than their own. Idealism is not
funny, however censurable its excesses. As a race we have too much
sentiment to be frightened out of the sentimental by a blase
cynicism.

At first glance the flood of moral literature now upon us--social-
conscience stories, scientific plays, platitudinous "moralities"
that tell us how to live--may seem to be another protest against
sentimentalism. And that the French and English examples have been
so warmly welcomed here may seem another indication of a reaction
on our part. I refer especially to "hard" stories, full of
vengeful wrath, full of warnings for the race that dodges the
facts of life. H. G. Wells is the great exemplar, with his
sociological studies wrapped in description and tied with a plot.
In a sense, such stories are certainly to be regarded as a protest
against truth-dodging, against cheap optimism, against "slacking,"
whether in literature or in life. But it would be equally just to
call them another result of suppressed idealism, and to regard
their popularity in America as proof of the argument which I have
advanced in this essay. Excessively didactic literature is often a
little unhealthy. In fresh periods, when life runs strong and both
ideals and passions find ready issue into life, literature has no
burdensome moral to carry. It digests its moral. Homer digested
his morals. They transfuse his epics. So did Shakespeare.

Not so with the writers of the social-conscience school. They are
in a rage over wicked, wasteful man. Their novels are bursted
notebooks--sometimes neat and orderly notebooks, like Mr.
Galsworthy's or our own Ernest Poole's, sometimes haphazard ones,
like those of Mr. Wells, but always explosive with reform. These
gentlemen know very well what they are about, especially Mr.
Wells, the lesser artist, perhaps, as compared with Galsworthy,
but the shrewder and possibly the greater man. The very
sentimentalists, who go to novels to exercise the idealism which
they cannot use in life, will read these unsentimental stories,
although their lazy impulses would never spur them on toward any
truth not sweetened by a tale.

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