Points of View (Sherman)/An Apology for Essayists of the Press
We live in an age of fascinating literary movements. First the poets organized a movement, which became so comprehensive that there was no public left to view the procession, and the only distinction attainable in connection with it was not to participate. Then the new truth-telling novelists started a parade along Main Street, clad in their dismalest togs and attended by bands of mismated, rebellious mid-Western wives, and joyless, unmated females of New England. (It is generally understood that every female residing in New England is a spinster.) And now a third movement,[1] of the essayists, is forming and sweeping down upon us, a somewhat rollicking movement, preluded by the victorious blast of Professor Stephen Leacock's trumpet: "The appearance of Benchley's first book is an event in the history of literature not equaled since Milton produced his 'Paradise Lost.'"
Enter, then, Christopher Morley, with a scarlet plume in his cap, smoking his faithful pipe of briar and bearing aloft his plum pudding; Robert Cortes Holliday, swinging his walking stick like Taillefer at the Battle of Hastings; young Heywood Broun, tossing his witty quips to left and right, and bearing aloft Heywood Broun, Jr.; the before-heralded Robert Benchley, in cap and bells, presenting an excellent imitation of a Canadian professor of political economy; then, more sedately, Mr. Colby, with his hesitant smile, followed by the thirty other essayists, old and new, recently mustered by the scarlet-plumed master of the revels. The entire demonstration has a festive and holiday air. At the turn of the street one can fancy Mr. Morley leading in singing "God rest you, merry bourgeoisie, let nothing you dismay."
Suppose for the moment we fix our attention on these three "literary movements," and inquire, in the impressionistic manner, how they affect us. After one has read a yard or two of average American contemporary verse, ranging from "Rodin" Lindsay's "Johnny Appleseed" to Mr. Masters's "Domesday Book," one is left with a faint sense of strain in the appreciative organs, coupled with a furtive suspicion that verse as a vehicle of modern American life is pretty nearly obsolete. After one has read a shelf full of the new novelists, ranging from Ben Hecht's "Erik Dorn" to the "Three Soldiers" of John Dos Passos, or Anderson's "The Triumph of the Egg," one is left with a sombre sense that one is wandering in a wilderness, obscure with blue and gray shadows, where moon calves leap in and out of bramble bushes a-searching for their eyes. But when one has spent a week-end with the new essayists, one comes away, not exactly filled and satisfied, not precisely inspired and uplifted, but feeling, as Pepys would say, "mighty pleasant." In the psychical circumstances created by the two previous movements, this "mighty pleasant" feeling becomes significant and demands consideration.
Why do the essayists leave us with this "mighty pleasant" feeling, so that we are disposed to say to a young woman seeking advice, "Flirt with a poet, engage yourself to a novelist, but marry an essayist"? Well, first of all, the true essayist since Montaigne's time has been a man of even, easy, adaptable temper. Brought to a stand by the opposing pressures of Catholic piety and Renaissance paganism, the French ancestor of all our essayists found an escape from the over-strenuous appeals of faith in a mild but universal skepticism, including in its serenely quizzical consideration his own experience. And so at every recoil from the violence of partisanship, from the fatigue of "strained attitudes," the modern spirit tends to slip into the form of Montaigne.
The essay lends itself better to a balanced representation of life than either free verse or the current realistic novel. For the ordinary life is not like a modern poem—it has more rhythm and reason and regularity. Life is not like a "realistic" novel—it has more bright spots, more sunlight and more apple blossoms, more spiritual variety. The ordinary life indeed is itself an essay, starting from nowhere in particular and arriving at no definite destination this side of death, but picking its way, like a litde river, now with "bright speed," and now with reluctance and fond lingerings, over all sorts of obstacles and through all sorts of channels, which would be merely humdrum but for the shifting moods and humors that play over a bottom of commonplace with the transient magic of shadow and light.
But what is the distinctive feature of this new mass-movement of the essayists? Of course, we must recognize that there were American essayists of a sort before the advent of young Heywood Broun and young Robert Benchley. There were, for examples, Dr. Crothers and Dr. van Dyke; Professor Santayana, Professor James, Professor Matthews and Professor Woodberry; W. D. Howells, Henry James, P. E. More, and Mark Twain; Miss Repplier, Mrs. Gerould and others. Several of these elders also did some rather decent things in their day. But the special character of the new movement is not given by writers of their complexion. The piquant figures in it are no longer clergymen, professors, novelists and literary ladies, carefully excogitating smooth discourses in the calm intervals between sermons, lectures, novels and babies.
The new men, who give a quicker tempo to the movement, are a light-footed generation for whom the way was prepared by Eugene Field, "Mr. Dooley," B. L. Taylor, Don Marquis and the blandly omniscient Simeon Strunsky. They are, in short, for the most part busy newspaper men, secretly with child of Heaven knows what grand poems and plays and novels, yet producing their serio-comic column with daily or weekly regularity, the office boy at their elbows and the presses roaring for copy. "Literature," you say in your haste, "produced by men who are too busy to write, for men who are too busy to read?" No, not that; literature, rather, by men capable of taking joy in writing, like a sporting robin which built its nest and laid its bright blue eggs just above the coupling-pin between the engine and tender of a jolting little train that, twice a week, links a series of villages among the Green Mountains.
These young men, with obvious community of feeling, are striving to create a new literary public and to provide for that public a new literary fare, relatively free from political intoxicants. Journalists or near-journalists by training or temper or "environmental" necessity, they contemplate no longer the narrow circle reached by the old-fashioned review, but the wide circle composed of every man and woman who reads a newspaper. This is the true democratic reading public. Like the periodical essayists of Queen Anne's time, with their Scandal Clubs and Tatlers and Spectator Clubs, they undertake to meet their readers where they are, and they know that to do so their writing must sound like an extension of familiar conversation. It must introduce no topic that can't be made current. It must be light enough to be digested with coffee and rolls. It must be pointed enough to wake up the man from New Jersey crossing the ferry in the cool, sleepy-eyed morning. It must be amusing enough to relax the tension of the tired business man and make him forget, when he goes up to bed, to mourn for his lost night cap.
The "colyumist" blazed out the way to the new public. And cannibalistic critics among the elder bigwigs like to dispose of the "colyumist" as Dr. Johnson in his loftier vein disposed of his friend Garrick: "Davy hath a pleasant wit, but he is a futile fellow." Now the "colyumist," taken singly and in detail, is not very formidable, to be sure. But let us first analyze our specimens, and then construct the species.
Christopher Morley chats me some forty chats, from which I recall that he went to Haverford, that he formed himself on R. L. S. and Joseph Conrad; that he likes lunching in odd places about town with fellow-craftsmen; that he likes Captain Bone and all tales of the sea, and that he loves the pungent odors and mellow tints of old shops and streets around the Post Office and Bowling Green. I thrust my thumb into the plum pudding of this professional amateur of the city, this Jim Hawkins of Broadway, so keen to make Manhattan a treasure island, and I fetch out a plum on the best way to clean an old pipe, or I fetch out this note on the character of the late Francis Gummere: "It was characteristic of him that he usually smoked Robin Hood, that admirable five-cent cigar, because the name and the picture of an outlaw on the band reminded him of the fourteenth century ballads he knew by heart." The Dignity of Letters has never laid her heavy hand on Christopher Morley, but the gusto of letters waits for him at every corner. Youth, romance, the sweetness of life and the shade of R. L. Stevenson in velveteen jacket—these are the spirits that have put him under obligation and that whisper him among the blue and gray shadows of an unimaginative realism to be blithe and yet more blithe.
Mr. Holliday takes me for twenty-eight turns about town. We visit undertakers' shops, murder trials, lunchrooms and hotels; we talk with "traffic cops" and landladies and editors; we patter about Mr. Huneker and other famous men who have recently died; we step into a "colorful" place where we can see John Drew and Joseph Hergesheimer and Alexander Woollcott and young Burton Rascoe toying with the celery; we glance over the want ads in the morning paper; we study some photographs which illustrate the difference between the female form divine as conceived by Fragonard and as seen by Schopenhauer, and then we dip into the underworld and visit various doggeries where gentlemen can obtain a thimbleful of the needful at "80 cents a throw." Mr. Holliday has been around a good deal, has acquired a kind of Beau Brummelish sophistication, and notices with less gusto than young Jim Hawkins—I mean Christopher Morley—the pristine bloom of things. In compensation, he notices other things that might have escaped my attention. What I recall most distinctly of our "nosing" about Washington and our calls on celebrities in New York is that President Harding wore a single ring but "no pin to his tie," and that Mr. Chesterton wore heavy woolen socks, "very much coming down about his ankles." So we confirm that brilliant aphorism: Life is a bundle of little things.
Young Heywood Broun is a Harvard man of about 30. He likes Stevenson, Hardy, H. G. Wells, Leonard Merrick and Mark Twain; and he holds that a girl should think twice before marrying any one who doesn't like them. He declares that some of his best friends have been Yale men, and, regretting the strained feelings between Yale and Harvard, he suggests that all might get happily together in crying, "To hell with Princeton!" He intends to meet Clayton Hamilton's standards for the dramatic critic, namely, to stand bareheaded in the nave of Amiens, to climb the Acropolis by moonlight, and to walk with whispers into the hushed presence of the Frari Madonna of Bellini before he attempts to review the performance of "Up in Mabel's Room." He likes the zoo and baseball, has a nice paper on "How to Be a Lion Tamer," and believes that "children who don't see Charlie Chaplin have, of course, been robbed of much of their childhood." He has one two-year-old child who tells him that "Goliath loves you," and out of this wealth of parental experience he offers counsel to expectant motherhood. He has one touch of radicalism: in the rare intervals when he is not thinking of himself as the first parent, he informs his readers that Dr. Holt is a better guide to the upbringing of children than their grandmothers! He has courage: he doesn't hesitate to stuff all this into one container with dialogue, fables, and parodies, and call it a book.
Young Robert Benchley, as I have already intimated, is the most overt and unashamed humorist in our parade. I don't know why I should try to gild the refined gold of Professor Leacock's careful tribute, except to add that Gluyas Williams's illustrations are up to the text and are, in my opinion, altogether unequaled since Raphael produced his Sistine Madonna. If Hogarth could see how Mr. Williams has penetrated the soul of his author and doubled the force of his expression, he would blush to acknowledge his own crude sketches. Mr. Benchley's twenty-two masterpieces show a more constructive and impersonal imagination than we found in the scrapbook of Heywood Broun; and he discloses less of that studious, fostered and affectionate provincialism which distinguishes the true New Yorker. With feasting eye and wide-swooping wing he dives only for "nation-wide" interests, passes from letterwriting to amateur gardening and stoking one's own furnace, from bridge (the best thing since "Mrs. Battle on Whist") to the higher salesmanship and New Year's resolutions, from Percy Mackaye's community drama to the sorrows of automobiling and tabloid versions of the American Magazine, Harper's and the Saturday Evening Post. And whenever he passes, one feels, if not better, yet more cheerful about things.
Frank Moore Colby has a professorial record in the background of his journalistic career; and he doesn't write with the abandon and gay incoherence of the "colyumist" who has never lost sleep by asking himself whether contributing to Vanity Fair is not infra dig. His title, however, The Margin of Hesitation, denotes him truly as one who has attained the right temper of the periodical essayist, the tolerant smiling skepticism of the literary newspaper man, who first writes out a blanket acceptance of the universe and then proceeds to question everything in it, not wholesale and with a shout like the editor of a radical weekly, but bit by bit, softly, like an epicure questioning the flavor of a glass of grapejuice. "The new thinker," says Mr. Colby thoughtfully, "is merely a man who does not know what other people have thought." Later he remarks in an excellent discourse on "The Pleasures of Anxiety:" "In middle-aged conversation there is always a certain coziness in political despair, and the thought of a large general disaster coming on has, at any rate, one bright side in the way it warms up elderly conversers." He, himself, reads for recreation the alarming radical journals which his friends abhor, because, as he softly remarks: "Any man who is about half convinced that he and a few others are the sole remaining friends of civilization finds some dramatic zest in life." For a world that is always turning up with a painted face, dusty and overheated, Mr. Colby prescribes, like Mr. Dick: "Give it a bath—a bath of irony."
It may be true that the "colyumist" is a futile fellow, taken singly—as impotent as a single swallow to make a summer. But a mass-movement of them from their points of vantage on the great newspapers, a mass-movement of them against the doors of anxious publishers, merits attention. These wits and jesters and ironists of the press who buzz around the news and editorials are, or are becoming, a body of writers as sensible and useful as we possess. From the field of journalism they glean what little scent and nectar they can, and pass by quick flights into the adjacent field of literature. They bear the same relation to the "serious" editorial writer and the savage critic that bees bear to wasps and hornets. The raw stuff of life which in the one case goes chiefly to strengthen the sting is in the other case converted chiefly into wax and honey—"sources of sweetness and light." They are beginning to create a literary atmosphere with "organic filaments" of civility.
The present swarming of the diurnal and hebdomadal essayists is, therefore, agreeably ominous. They are not doing any "big constructive thinking." They refuse to accept responsibility for the universe. These journalistic humanists are modest; they do not even attempt to reform the world. They are occupied rather in discovering how many likable things there are in the world as it is, and they seem satisfied if they make it no worse. Of all the sorts of their fellowmen they say, as Charles Lamb said of a certain not very prepossessing person: "How can we hate them? We know them." They recur to old things—old poetry, old customs, old streets—with an affectionate familiarity; and they touch vulgar things, the pompous and humdrum people, the annoying incidents, the tedious routine of daily life, with a humor which debrutalizes them and helps the man in a treadmill to see himself as a figure in a comedy. They are thus giving to New York City, for instance, a more genial and kindly air than it has had since the days of Diedrich Knickerbocker.
They refuse to have anything to do with notabilities, except in dressing-gown and slippers by the fire, in the disarming hours of the night, when a statesman will confidentially take back the lies he has been telling all day, and "Willy" Yeats, forgetting to chant about the silver apples of the moon, will gossip about his contemporaries with as spicy a malice as George Moore. They haunt that level, these humanists, where men are conscious of their common humanity; and they treat with equal respect all representatives who are great in their kind: Mr. Wells, Mr. Bryan, Charlie Chaplin, M. Viviani, Babe Ruth, Einstein, Pavlowa, Lloyd George, Jack Dempsey and Caruso. It is their habit to walk all the way around wooden horses and to look all gift horses in the mouth. They are cultivating in themselves and in a pretty thick stratum of the great democratic reading public a Missourian temper of inquiry about some of the Big Constructive Thinking, a lenity and amused tolerance toward even the painful virtues of their neighbors, and a quiet self-possession (recall Mr. Holliday's observation that the President had "no pin to his tie")—a quiet self-possession and an ability to relish one's "daily bread" amid all the pomps and splendors and indignities of the human lot.
They tend to make the stranger at home in the world, and the lonely and insignificant man in town or country, who talks with no one morning, noon or night, feel yet, as he opens his paper, that he is not the only one of his kind, but that he is neighboured on all sides by his kindred and that in farmhouse and town mansion and White House there are millions of other strangers, essentially as lonely and insignificant as he. This is, perhaps, as near to a homelike feeling as a man can expect to come in this world.
- ↑ See Plum Pudding by Christopher Morley; Modern Essays (33 essayists represented), selected by Christopher Morley; Turns About Town by Robert Cortes Holliday; Seeing Things at Night by Heywood Broun; Of All Things by Robert C. Benchley; The Margin of Hesitation by Frank Moore Colby.