Jack London in his confessions of his struggle for recognition as a writer gives this formula for success in literature: Health, Work, and a Philosophy of Life. Health is necessary, of course, in order to do any hard work, and in a world against which old Malthus railed, nothing can be attained without hard work. But it is the value of the third ingredient which is most often overlooked and the absence of which is responsible for the failure of most of our literary output to rise above the level of mediocrity. We have noted, in another place, that Jack London himself, in the bulk of his production, failed to strike more than an occasional deep and sincere chord, but it was not because his ear was faulty; it was simply because his audience rejected precisely the deep chord.
Let it be understood that by a philosophy of life Jack London did not refer to any definite view on economic reform or social regeneration. Narrow, limited, prejudiced views have but little place in literature; if presented by the hand of an artist, they may appeal for a short time, but never for very long. Great writers there have been who were not as actively engaged in the squabbles of the world as Jack London was and who did not take definite sides in the skirmishes of any generation but they have all had a philosophy of life none the less, in that they have all had a broad, philosophic comprehension of the basic laws which govern human life and actions; of causes and effects conducive to human suffering and happiness; and of the reactions of these basic laws upon the author himself so that he is able to present them from a definite angle—his angle.
It is the possession of this individual angle upon the everlasting panorama of life and death which distinguishes the vital master from the flabby mechanic. We might call it philosophy of life, independence of mind, originality, idealism, or what not, in all cases it makes for substance—the thing by which a work of art lives.
No slight is intended on the value of form in literature. If the appropriate masterful form clothes this vital substance, so much the better, of course, but it is the substance that is the protoplasm. Form follows fads and fashions, and is decidedly mortal; substance alone illustrates the immutable law of the indestructibility of matter. With all their beautiful rhetoric and genial humor, the Spectator and Tatler papers of Addison and Steele are mildly entertaining dead matter today, but the tragedies and comedies of the Bard of Avon are as appealing today as three centuries ago, even though handicapped by a form no longer in vogue. Dostoyevsky’s novels, to take a more modern example, were written in a style as clumsy and uncouth as ever novels could be written in, but their burning pages sear the souls of men who read them. The gift of substance is in them—a fiery miracle, an Apocalypse.
The one supremely outstanding feature in our American fiction is its lack of substance. Some of us have the O. Henry style and some of us have the Henry James style and still others have the Washington Irving or the Poe style; some of us can plot and others can end a story with a flourish; some possess a dazzling vocabulary and others are genii of rhetoric—but how many have something sustaining to impart to a world drowning in platitudes? How much of worth has our fiction added to the world’s sum of comprehension of beauty, of truth? We have developed schools and systems of teaching and learning how to say things; we have bent every effort toward the evolving of a science of expression only to find that we have been too busy expressing to acquire what to express. American ethics has always been a point of national pride, but we have never applied it to the art of talking brilliantly when one has nothing to say. As George Macdonald once put it: “... If a man has nothing to communicate, there is no reason why he should have a good style, any more than why he should have a good purse without any money, or a good scabbard without any sword.”
Again, the acquisition of nobility of form is not to be discouraged, but the possession of something to tell the world is the sublimest of gifts, and gains the world’s everlasting gratitude; and the greatest seeming anomaly in the conditions under which American literature is produced is that this gift is not only rated at a discount but fought, vilified, grappled with. The only way the gift can be acquired, if it can, is through an insatiable interest in the stuff and forms of life; but such interest leads to inquiry and inquiry leads to heresy; venerable taboos are broken. The anomaly becomes a normal result of an inferior conception of the rights and functions of literature. Prejudices are placed above art; policies above truth; words above meanings.
Once, at a suffrage gathering, a young writer was introduced by a friend to a famous writer whose encouragement the beginner desired. At the end of the evening the friend asked the famous writer for his impressions of the budding genius. “I have not read any of his work,” the famous writer answered, “but I am afraid he has not the makings of a genius. The way he snubbed the poor girl I introduced him to merely because she is a salesgirl indicates that he lacks the voracious interest in the human element which marks the true artist. How is he ever going to talk Man when he doesn’t know Man?”
Voracious interest—that’s the path that leads to the gift of substance, to the “philosophy of life,” the original angle! Cæsar saw before he conquered. And he had to come a long way before he could see. But he wanted to see. And it is wanting to see that is the whip of genius. Dickens walked the streets of London for hours, through rain and fog and slush and shine, because he wanted to see it, all of it, every nook and corner of it. Balzac tramped the length and breadth of Paris, haunted parks and shops and drawing-rooms, because the human comedy appealed to him. The Russian Kuprin dressed himself in a diver’s suit and had himself lowered many fathoms into the Black Sea because he wanted to experience the sensations of a diver. And Jack London circled the globe because he wanted to see what it is like.
A little class-room episode comes to mind. In the poetry class Carl Sandburg came up for discussion. A few of his Chicago poems were read when a fair would-be poet spoke up in protest. “I have lived in Chicago all my life,” she said, “and have never seen the things Sandburg sees!” But there was another student in the room, a very unobtrusive little girl sitting somewhere in the back of the room, and she suddenly came to her instructor’s rescue. “That’s why you are not Sandburg!” she exclaimed....
The true artist is the perpetual explorer. He cannot invent the substance of his work, but he can discover it in the life of nature and his fellow-men. And the more he sees the more he learns to see, for to be able to see the new and unexplored in the old and elemental is the highest art in itself. A hunchback to a child in the streets is an object to throw stones at, to a Victor Hugo he is a grand, heroic figure, fierce and glorious in his pathetic grandeur. A typhoon to a Chinese fisherman represents the wrath of his god for the omission of a prayer or a sacrifice; to Joseph Conrad it symbolizes the majestic resentment of the Sea itself against man’s desecration of its peace and beauty and mystery. Only the American artist knows no symbols and is warned against attempting to know.
Our great cry has always been: “Acquire form!” Grammar, rhetoric, metrics, technique—these have been the indispensable tools of our writers. They still are. But having acquired them our writers find they can fashion nothing beautiful, nothing lasting, nothing that will weather the storms of time. For no tools, no matter how sharp or perfect, can accomplish the feat of fashioning something out of vacuum. The American story always has laid claims to style—but it hasn’t lived. Writers have come and had their vogue and gone. Even years back when style was more leisurely and rounded, when the badge of haste was not upon it, Charles Dudley Warner remarked: “We may be sure that any piece of literature which attracts only by some trick of style, however it may blaze up for a day and startle the world with its flash, lacks the element of endurance. We do not need much experience to tell us the difference between a lamp and a Roman candle.”
This remark can be elaborated on, explained, complemented. The truth is that there can be no style without substance. These elements are not separate entities; only superficially do they seem to be. How much sweetness can a “sweet nothing” contain? How much beauty can a work of “art” contain which has emptiness of thought and ugliness of conception? How much truth can be embedded in a fundamental falsehood? Every great poet has found the soul of his poem determining its form. Great style grows from within—it is an off-shoot of great substance. To the American writer this relationship has never been apparent; and most of our critics, professing a lofty æstheticism from the shadows of their academies, have never paid attention to it. Our literature cannot boast the possession of a single lucid outline of this vital relationship between form and substance such as the following from Remy de Gourmont’s “Le Probleme du Style.” I wonder how many authors of textbooks exhorting American would-be authors to learn the cabalistic lore of expression have ever read this:
“A new fact or a new idea is worth more than a fine phrase. A lovely phrase is a lovely thing and so is a lovely flower. But their duration is almost the same—a day, a century. Nothing dies more swiftly than a style which does not rest upon the solidity of vigorous thinking. Such a style shrivels like a stretched skin; it falls in a heap as ivy does from the rotten tree that once gave it support....
“It is probably an error to attempt to distinguish between form and substance.... There is no such thing as amorphous matter; all thought has a limit, hence a form, since it is a partial representation of true or possible, real or imaginary life. Substance engenders form exactly as the tortoise and the oyster do the materials of their respective shells....
“Form without a foundation, style without thought—what a poor thing it is!...
“If nothing lives in literature except by its style, that is because works well thought out are invariably well written. But the converse is not true. Style alone is nothing....
“The sign of the man in any intellectual work is the thought. The thought is the man. And style and thought are one.”[27]
If we were candid enough the proper answer to make to this brilliant Frenchman would be: “Who told you that literature is an ‘intellectual work’?” But we are not candid enough. Only in our strictly professional journals do we dare liken literature to cobbling or tin-smithing or hod-carrying; in the official world, in our lectures and book-reviews, we consider it an art and talk of Muses and Pegasus and all the artistic divinities of Mount Olympus and Chillicothe.
A simple confession will not be amiss here. This discussion has been largely a plea for the man and woman who would find in literature, and in the short story specifically, the relief of a burdened soul. The influences that would withhold this relief are multitudinous and powerful. The struggle is unequal and pathetic. But of the hundreds of literary aspirants that have come to my personal notice only an isolated individual here and there was blessed with any kind of a burden. The vast multitude of souls were cheerfully lightweight and unencumbered. These aspirants came to study technique so that they might learn how to write salable stories, but they had no stories to tell. Some of them believed they could become great story writers because when at school they had received excellent marks in composition; others claimed on more general grounds a gift of expression and they wished to put it to practical use. That it was necessary to have lived in order to write of life was a thought that had never occurred to them. They were blissfully unaware of such a necessity. They needed form, nothing else, and applied themselves conscientiously toward its acquisition. The irony of the whole matter is that they actually estimated their deficiency accurately: form was what they wanted, and nothing else. After a while they began to sell. In all cases the unhappy aspirants who were plagued with thoughts and emotions have found it harder to sell, no matter how much excellence of form they succeeded in acquiring. In the field of the American short story, the “lightweights” have it, so far.
It is true, of course, that even a lightweight must have something to clothe with his all-potent form—be it a skeleton ever so rattling. But that has been answered in Chapter IV on the Moving Pictures. There are themes a-plenty, airy, optimistic, harmless themes that no respectable editor, reader, or Board of Censorship can object to. They can be adapted and readapted an infinity of times, provided each time a new twist or a “different” trick is introduced.
All our themes seem to have divided themselves into two grand classes: Stereotyped themes out of which stories are made, and Life themes out of which literature is made. The first class contains an abundance of material that any one might have for the taking, but which to make salable requires all the tricks of form that we have so flamboyantly evolved to disguise its hackneyed origin. The second class contains all the substances of existence that only those that feel their kinship thereto can transmute into literature. All the style and form that the science of writing can teach cannot hope to produce one breathing story unless the theme is eloquent with this kinship. Such is the story of genius—the story that lives and endures. Such a story may or may not have mechanical values; it will captivate and thrill; ruffle and soothe; make and destroy. Such a story will be found to have a theme not chosen with an eye for gallery approval; not even because the writer himself approves of it. One cannot approve or disapprove of the stuff he is made of. One merely accepts it. After all there is only one theme—inexhaustible—out of which genuine literature has always been and always will be made, perhaps it is the simple theme of Tagore’s court poet: “The theme of Krishna, the lover god, and Radha, the beloved, the Eternal Man and the Eternal Woman, the sorrow that comes from the beginning of time, and the joy without end.”[28]