The weakness takes a good deal from his stature. It leaves him radiating a subtle flavor of the second-rate. With more courage, he would have gone a great deal further, and left a far deeper mark upon the intellectual history of his time. Not, perhaps, intrinsically as artist. He got as far in that direction as it is possible for a man of his training to go. “Huckleberry Finn” is a truly stupendous piece of work—perhaps the greatest novel ever written in English. And it would be difficult to surpass the sheer artistry of such things as “A Connecticut Yankee,” “Captain Storrnfield,” “Joan of Arc” and parts of “A Tramp Abroad”. But there is more to the making of literature than the mere depiction of human beings at their obscene follies; there is also the pay the play of ideas. Mark had ideas that were clear, that were vigorous, and that had an immediate appositeness. True enough, most of them were not quite original. As Prof. Schoenemann, of Harvard, once demonstrated, he got the notion of “The Mysterious Stranger” from Adolf Wilbrandt’s “Der Meister von Palmyra”; much of “What Is Man?” you will find in the forgotten harangues harangues of Ingersoll; in other directions he borrowed right and left. But it is only necessary to read either of the books I have just mentioned to see how thoroughly he recast everything he wrote; how brilliantly it came to be marked by the charm of his own personality; how he got his own peculiar and unmatchable eloquence into the merest statement of it. when, entering these regions of his true faith, he yielded to a puerile timidity—when he sacrificed his conscience and his self-respect to the idiotic popularity that so often more than half dishonored him—then he not only did a cruel disservice to his own permanent fame, but inflicted genuine damage upon the national literature. He was greater than all the others because he was more American, but in this one way, at least, he was less than them for the same reason.
Well, there he stands—a bit concealed, a bit false, but still a colossus. As I have said, I am inclined year by year to rate his achievement higher. In such a work as “Huckleberry Finn” there is something that vastly transcends the merit of all ordinary books. It has a merit that is special and extraordinary; it lifts itself above all hollow standards and criteria; it seems greater every time I read it. The books that gave Mark his first celebrity do not hold up so well. “The Jumping Frog” still wrings snickers, but after all, it is commonplace at bottom; even an Ellis Parker Butler might have conceivably written it. “The Innocents Abroad’, re-read today, is largely tedious. Its humors are artificial; its audacities are stale; its eloquence belongs to the fancy journalism of a past generation. Even “Tom Sawyer” and “A Tramp Abroad” have long stretches of flatness. But in “Huckleberry Finn, though he didn’t know it at the time and never quite realized it, Mark found himself. There, working against the grain, heartily sick of the book before it was done, always putting it off until tomorrow, he hacked out a masterpiece that expands as year. There, if I am not wrong, he produced the greatest work of the imagination that These States have yet seen.
The Dean
From PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES, 1919, pp. 52–58.
First printed, in part, in the, Smart Set, Jan., 1917, pp. 266–68.
Howells died in 1919
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, during his lifetime, was almost the national ideal of a literary character: an urbane, cleanly and highly respectable gentleman, a sitter on committees an intimate of professors and the prophets of movements, a placid conformist. The result was that in his last twenty years his successive books were not criticized, nor even adequately reviewed, but merely fawned over; the critics of the newspapers, male and female, could no more bring themselves to question them than they could question Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech, or Paul Elmer More, or their own virginity. The dean of American letters in point of years, and in point of published quantity, and in point of public prominence and influence, he was gradually enveloped in a web of superstitious reverence, and it still grates somewhat harshly to heat his actual achievement discussed in cold blood.
Nevertheless, all this merited respect for an industrious and inoffensive man is bound, soon or late, to yield to a critical examination of the artist within, and that examination will have its bitter moments for those who naïvely accept the Howells legend. It will show, without doubt, a competent journeyman, a contriver of pretty things, a facile stylist—but it will also show a long row of uninspired and hollow books, with no more ideas in them than so many volumes of the Ladies’ Home journal, and no more deep and contagious feeling than so many reports of autopsies, and no more glow and gusto than so many tables of prices. The profound dread and agony of life, the surge of passion and aspiration, the grand crash and glitter of things, the tragedy that runs eternally under the surface—all this the critic will seek in vain in Howells’s elegant and shallow volumes. And seeking it in vain, he will probably dismiss all of them together with fewer words than he gives to Huckleberry Finn.”
Already, indeed, the Howells legend tends to become a mere legend, and empty of all genuine significance. Who actually reads the Howells novels? Who even remembers their names? “The Minister’s Charge,” “An Imperative Duty,” “The Unexpected Guests,” “Out of the Question,” No Love Lost“ – these titles are already as meaningless as a roll of Sumerian kings. Perhaps “The Rise of Silas Lapham” survives, at least in the colleges—but go read it if you would tumble downstairs. The truth about Howells is that he really had nothing to say, for all the charm he got into saying it. His psychology was superficial, amateurish, often nonsensical; his irony was scarcely more than a polite facetiousness; his characters simply refused to live. No figure even remotely comparable to Norris’s McTeague or Dreiser’s Frank Cowperwood is to be encountered in his novels. He was quite unequal to any such evocation of the race-spirit, of the essential conflict of forces among us, of the peculiar drift and color of American life. The world he mover in was suburban, caged, flabby. He could no more have written the last chapters of “Lord Jim” than he could have written the Book of Mark.
As a critic he belonged to a measurably higher level, if only because of his eager curiosity, his gusto for minor novelty. He dealt valiant licks for E. W. Howe, Frank Norris, Edith Wharton and William Vaughn Moody. He brought forward the Russians diligently and persuasively, albeit they left no mark upon his own manner. In his ingratiating way, back in the 7os and 8os, he made war upon some of the worst of the prevailing sentimentalities. But his history as a critic is full of errors and omissions. One finds him loosing a fanfare for W. B. Trites, the Philadelphia Zola, and praising Frank A. Munsey—and one finds him leaving the discovery of all the Shaws, George Moores, Dreisers, Synges and Galsworthys to the Pollards and Hunekers. Busy in the sideshows, he didn’t see the elephants go by.… Here temperamental defects handicapped him. Turn to his “My Mark Twain” and you will see what I mean. The Mark that is exhibited in this book is a Mark whose Himalayan outlines are discerned but hazily through a pink fog of Howells. There is a moral note in the tale—an obvious effort to palliate, to touch up, to excuse. Poor Mark, of course, was charming, and there was talent in him, but what a weakness he had for thinking aloud—and such shocking thoughts! How barbarous his contempt for the strict sonata form! It seems incredible that two men so unlike should have found common denominators for friendship lasting forty-four years. The one derived form Rabelais, Chaucer, the Elizabethans and Benvenuto—buccaneers of the literary high seas, loud laughters, law-breakers, giants of a lordlier day; the other came down from Jane Austen, Washington Irving and Hannah More. The one wrote English as Michelangelo hacked marble, broadly, brutally, mangnificently; the other was a maker of pretty waxen groups. The one was utterly unconscious of the way he achieved his staggering effects; the other was the most toilsome, fastidious and self-conscious of craftsmen.…
What remains of Howells is his style. He inverted a new harmony of “the old, old words.” He destroyed the Johnsonian periods of the Poe tradition, and erected upon the ruins a complex and savory carelessness, full of soft naïvetés that were
sophisticated to the last degree. Like Mark, but in a diametrically different way, he loosened the tightness of English, and let a blast of air into it. He achieved, for all his triviality, for all his narrowness of vision, a pungent and often admirable style.
Ambrose Bierce
From PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES, 1927, pp. 259–65. With additions from the American Mercury, Sept., 1929, pp. 125–26. Bierce disappeared in Mexico in 1914 and is supposed to have been killed there
THE REPUTATION of Bierce has always radiated an occult, artificial, drug-store scent. He has been hymned in a passionate, voluptuous, inordinate way by a small band of Disciples, and he has been passed over altogether by the great majority of American critics, and no less by the great majority of American readers. Certainly it would be absud to say that he is generally read, even by the intelligentsia. Most of his books, in fact, are out of print and almost unobtainable, and there is little evidence that his massive Collected Works, printed in twelve volumes between 1909 and 1912, have gone into anything even remotely approaching a wide circulation.
I have a suspicion, indeed, that Bierce did a serious disservice to himself when he put those twelve volumes together. Already an old man at the time, he permitted his nostalgia for his lost youth to get the better of his critical faculty, never very powerful at best, and the result was a depressing assemblage of worn-out and fly-blown stuff, much of it quite unreadable. If he had boiled the collection down to four volumes, or even to six, it might have got him somewhere, but as it is, his good work is lost in a morass of bad and indifferent work. I doubt that anyone save the Bierce fanatics aforesaid has ever plowed through the whole twelve volumes. They are filled with epigrams against frauds long dead and forgotten, and echoes of old and puerile newspaper controversies, and experiments in fiction that belong to a dark and expired age. But in the midst of all this blather there are some pearls—more accurately, there are two of them. One consists of the series of epigrams called “The Devil’s Dictionary”; the other consists of the war stories, commonly called “Tales of Soldiers and Civilians.” Among the latter are some of the best war stories ever written—things fully worthy to be ranged beside Zola’s “L’ Attaque du Moulin,” Kipling’s “The Taking of Lungtungpen,” or Ludwig Thoma’s “Ein Bayrischer Soldat.” And among the former are some of the most gorgeous witticisms in the English language.
Bierce, I believe, was the first writer of fiction ever to treat war realistically, He antedated even Zola. It is common to say that he came out of the Civil war with a deep and abiding loathing of slaughter—that he wrote his war stories in disillusion, and as a sort of pacifist. But this is certainly not believed by anyone who knew him, as I did in his last years. What he got out of his services in the field was not a sentimental horror of it, but a cynical delight in it. It appeared to him as a sort of magnificent reductio ad absurdum of all romance. The world viewed war as something heroic, glorious, idealistic. Very well, he would show how sordid and filthy it was—how stupid, savage and degrading. But to say this is not to say that he disapproved it. On the contrary, he vastly enjoyed the chance its discussion gave him to set forth dramatically what he was always talking about and gloating over: the infinite imbecility of man. There was nothing of the milk of human kindness in old Ambrose; he did not get the nickname of Bitter Bierce for nothing. What delighted him most in this life was the spectacle of human cowardice and folly. He put man, intellectually, somewhere between the sheep and the horned cattle, and as a hero somewhere below the rats. His war stories, even when they deal with the heroic, do not depict soldiers, even when they deal with the heroic, do not depict soldiers as heroes; they depict them as bewildered fools, doing things without sense, submitting to torture and outrage without resistance, dying at last like hogs in Chicago. So far in this life, indeed, I have encountered no more thorough-going cynic than Bierce was. His disbelief in, man went even further than Mark Twain’s he was quite unable to imagine the heroic, in any ordinary sense. Nor, for that matter, the wise. Man to him, was the most stupid and ignoble of animals. But at the same time the most amusing. Out of the spectacle of life about him he got an unflagging and Gargantuan joy. The obscene farce of politics delighted him. He was an almost amorous connoisseur of theology and theologians. He howled with mirth whenever he thought of a professor, a doctor or a husband.
Another character that marked him, perhaps flowing out of this same cynicism, was his curious taste for macabre. All of his stories show it. He delighted in hangings, autopsies, dissecting-rooms. Death to him was not something repulsive, but a sort of low comedy—the last act of a squalid and rib-rocking buffoonery. When, grown old and weary, he departed for Mexico, and there—if legend is to be believed—marched into the revolution them going on, and had himself shot, there was certainly nothing in the transaction to surprise his acquaintances. The whole thing was typically Biercian. He died happy, one may be sure, if his executioners made a botch of dispatching him—if there was a flash of the grotesque at the end. Once I enjoyed the curious experience of going to a funeral with him. His conversation to and from the crematory was superb—a long series of gruesome but highly amusing witticisms. He had tales to tell of crematories that had caught fire and singed the mourners, of dead bibuli whose mortal remains had exploded, of widows guarding the fires all night to make sure that their dead husbands did not escape. The gentleman whose carcass we were burning had been a literary critic. Bierce suggested that his ashes be molded into bullets and shot at publishers, that they be presented to the library of the New York lodge of Elks, that they be mailed anonymously to Ella Wheeler Wilcox, then still alive. Later on, when he heard that they had been buried in Iowa, he exploded in colossal mirth. The last time I saw him he predicted that the Christians out there would dig them up and throw them over the State line. On his own writing desk, he once told me, he kept the ashes of his son. I suggested idly that the ceremental urn must be a formidable ornament. “Urn hell!” he answered. “I keep them in a cigar-box!”
Bierce followed Poe in most of his short stories, but it is only a platitude to say that he wrote better than Poe. He had a far firmer grasp upon character; he was less literary and more observant. Unluckily, his stories seemed destined to go the way of Poe’s. Their influence upon the modern American short story, at least upon its higher levels, is almost nil. When they are imitated at all, it is by the lowly hacks who manufacture thrillers for the pulp magazines. Meanwhile, it remains astonishing that his wit is so little remembered. In “The Devil’s Dictionary” are some of the most devastating epigrams ever written. “Ah, that we could fall into women’s arms without falling into their hands”: it is hard to find a match for that in Oscar himself. I recall another: “Opportunity: a favorable occasion for grasping a disappointment.” Another: “Once: enough.” A third: “Husband: one who, having dined, is charged with the care of the plate.” A fourth: “Our vocabulary is defective: we give the same name to woman’s lack of temptation and man’s lack of opportunity.” A fifth: “Slang is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage cans on their way to the dump.”
Bierce’s critical judgments were often silly, as when he put Longfellow above Whitman, and not infrequently they were strongly colored by personal considerations, as when he over-praised George Sterling’s poem, “The Wine of Wizardry.” He was too little read to be a sound critic of letters, and he lacked the capacity to separate the artist from the man. Even his treatise on the art of writing, “Write it Right.” is full of puerilities, for it never seems to have occurred to him that language, like literature, is a living thing, and not a mere set of rules. Writing of the trade he practised all his life. he wrote like a somewhat saucy schoolma’am, and when another schoolma’am lifted his stuff the theft went almost undetected. His own style was extraordinarily tight and unresilient, and his fear of rhetoric often took all the life out of his ideas. His stories, despite their melodramatic effectiveness, begin to seem old-fashioned; they belong to the era before the short story cease
d to be a formal intellectual exercise and became a transcript of life. The people in them simply do not live and breathe; Ring Lardner, whose manner Bierce would have detested, did a hundred times better in that direction. They are probably read today, not as literature, but as shockers. Their appalling gruesomeness is what keeps in them such life as they have. Some of them deserve a better kind of immortality.
Bierce’s social criticism, like his literary criticism, was often amusing but seldom profound. It had, however, the virtue of being novel in its day, and so it made its mark. He was the first American to lay about him with complete gusto, charging and battering the frauds who ranged the country. The timorousness of Mark Twain was not in him; no head was lofty enough to escape his furious thwack. Such berserk men have been rare in our history; the normal Americano, even when he runs amok, shows a considerable discretion. But there was no more discretion in Bierce than you will find in a runaway locomotive. Had he been a more cautions man, the professors of literature would be politer to him today.
Stephen Crane
From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Jan. 19, 1924.
A review of Stephen Crane, by Thomas Beer; New York, 1923
NEXT to Poe and Walt Whitman, Crane seems destined to go down into history as the most romantic American author of the Nineteenth Century. Even while he lived legend was busy with him. He was, by one story, a young man of mysterious and probably aristocratic origin, the scion of a Junker family in decay. He was, by another, a practitioner of strange, levantine vices—an opium smoker, a devotee of hashish. He was, by a third, the heaviest drinker known to vital statistics since Daniel Webster. He was, by a fourth, a consorter with harlots and the lover of Sarah Bernhardt. He was, by a fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth, the worst dead beat in New York.
Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage) Page 56
