Points of View (Sherman)/Brander Matthews and the Mohawks
Criticise the book before you, and don't write a parallel essay, for which the volume you have in hand serves only as a peg. This is No. VII of Twelve Rules For Good Reviewers, formulated by Brander Matthews in an essay on "The Whole Duty of Critics," 1892.
I should try to follow this rule if its maker himself had not led me astray by sub-announcing in "The Tocsin of Revolt" a theme which he does not develop. Here is the theme which lurks in the first short essay:
When a man finds himself at last slowly climbing the slopes which lead to the lonely peak of three-score-and-ten he is likely to discover that his views and his aspirations are not in accord with those held by men still living in the foothills of youth. He sees that things are no longer what they were half a century earlier and that they are not now tending in the direction to which they then pointed. If he is wise, he warns himself against the danger of becoming a mere praiser of past times; and if he is very wise he makes every effort to understand and to appreciate the present and not to dread the future. He may even wonder whether he is not suffering from a premature hardening of the arteries of sympathy. He finds himself denounced as a reactionary; and he doubts whether he has the courage of his reactions.
Whenever I turn away from this paragraph to comment on the other essays in this volume, I seem to see Brander Matthews peering into a dusky street, and to hear the sound of the tocsin bell.
"The younger generation is knocking at the door. "That is the pretty phrase which used to be employed to describe the coming of age of a numerous group of new talents. It evokes the image of eager but modest youngsters, rather timorously offering their maiden speeches, their first poems, and their unsunned paintings to the critical scrutiny of their elders and their masters. And as a matter of fact one can call up out of literary history actual instances of such behavior on the part of the younger men—even in America, and even among critics and poets. With such deference the youthful William Dean Howells approached James Russell Lowell. With such reverence, Whitman offered his Leaves of Grass to his master Emerson. For the moment I am unable to think of other American cases. But then consider the respect of Johnson for Pope, of Pope and Congreve for Dryden, of Dryden for Honest Ben, or the religious tribute of the young Milton to his immediate predecessor, Shakespeare. The graceful antique mode of "knocking at the door" is now so completely forgotten that I must be allowed to present one exquisite illustration of it by a Son of Ben:
Know I have pray'd thee,
For old religion's sake,
Saint Ben, to aid me.
When I, thy Herrick,
Honouring thee on my knee
Offer my lyric.
And a new altar
And thou, Saint Ben, shalt be
Writ in my psalter.
The beauty of this antique relation between the elder and the younger writers is lost because the younger generation no longer knocks at the door. It thunders at the door, it batters, it hammers, it bangs, it thumps, it kicks, it whacks, it wrenches, it lunges, it storms—it would require a Rabelaisian vocabulary to express all the indignities which the younger generation substitutes for knocking at the door. This somewhat barbaric performance, Brander Matthews, with his unfailing courtesy of phrase, calls sounding a "tocsin" at the door.
The ringleaders of this innovation in manners, "the most impatient of our young people, are hardened journalists of forty, with a following of youths upon whose caustic lips the maternal milk is hardly dry. They are determined to have a better time than their fathers had. I sympathize with the object. But I am not always sure that they are going about "the great task of happiness" in the best way. From Samuel Butler of saintly memory, for example, they have adopted the theory that the chief obstacle to happiness in the path of children is their parents. At first thought the idea perhaps commends itself as offering to youthful impatience—generally so vague and objectless—something definite to work upon. But then I pick up the morning paper and read that one of our young people has confessed to having placed poison in her father-in-law's coffee because "he was old and such a care." That obstacle to her happiness is removed, but now another has arisen in its place. To put the matter in the happiest light, there is a certain want of amenity in the act, which one suspects, will rather poison the pleasure which the act was intended to procure. There is an inauspicious rowdiness about the present picnic on Parnassus, Laurel wreaths snatched from the heads of others seem somehow to lack the significance of laurel wreaths bestowed—the leaves are scattered, the garland is bare.
It may be due to a Chinese prejudice, but I have never been able to join with any great alacrity of spirit in the nearly universal contemporary sport of deriding the classics, or indeed any perpetuated mold in which the human spirit of a bygone age or generation expressed all that it knew of grace or charm or power. In cruel old myths, in grotesque images of primitive art, in the hard brilliance of early eighteenth century verse, in the perhaps excessive saccharinity of early Victorian representations of women, even in fashion-plates five years old, there is the pathos of things that Time, the "eternal philanderer," once loved and caressed and swore eternal fidelity to, and then left behind him in the vacant banquet halls and the grey solitudes of history. One of our newspapers has the custom of displaying every Sunday, side by side with the latest idols of stage and society, the idols of 1900, in all the borrowed glories that twenty years have filched. If we think a guffaw the right reaction to the best effect that 1900 could produce, we had better laugh quickly and have it over with, before our laughter is drowned by an outburst from the chucklers at our heels. But in the contemplation of these contrasts, the finer sense will shiver, knowing how soon le dernier cri becomes the farewell of warm life frozen into the past.
The literary Mohawks, however, are somewhat deficient in the finer sense. As the fighting organization of the younger generation, they fear the past as an enemy at their rear, and they hold that military considerations demand the devastation of the territory immediately behind their lines, and the destruction of all able-bodied men who will not actively enlist in their band. For some time, as everyone knows, they have been trying to blow up the National Academy of Arts and Letters as the stronghold, precisely, of the preceding generation. At frequent intervals their chieftains have advanced whooping to the portals of that serene citadel, and, uttering every taunt known to them, have challenged the Academicians collectively and severally to come forth and do battle. In the interior of a national academy there broods the quiet of a club organized by old field marshals. Its membership is made up for the most part of men who are remembering, not fighting, their campaigns. In the judgment of their peers, they have reached the head of their professions. They have passed through the cold spring of experimentation and the dusty summer of struggle and unrecognized achievement to that clear autumnal season in which one writes one's memoirs, and composes tributes to one's departing comrades, and turns an eye of curiosity and unenvious welcome upon the promising work of younger men.
If you are a member of the Academy, as Brander Matthews is, and if you hear ringing through the streets and alleys of the Republic of Letters the shouts of the Mohawks and the detonation of their bombs against your door, you will probably feel some astonishment at the alteration in literary manners during the last decade, and some irritation at the disturbance of your peace. You do not understand what grievance the Mohawks have against you.
You have, to be sure, reached the age when the transitory fashions of the hour no longer impress you as overpoweringly interesting, nor the fashions of twenty years ago as overwhelmingly funny. You are interested now rather in those permanent human passions and virtues and powers, in that play of wit and imagination, in that instinct of craftsmanship, in that study of perfection, in all those fluid elements of the intellectual and artistic life which are present in every great age, and which make the artists and scholars of all ages, in the higher sense, contemporary. You can appreciate the talent of Charlie Chaplin, and yet remember without humiliation your admiration for Coquelin and Edwin Booth. Your relish for the work of contemporary playwrights does not, to you, seem to require the "scrapping" even of so old a workman as Molière. You have given many younger men their "start," and have been the first to salute their maiden efforts; and yet you have not denounced your own masters, Arnold and Lowell, nor renounced your own coevals. You have dared to honor the memory of many men, friends of yours, who were born in your own time or a few years earlier or later—Aldrich, Bunner, Lounsbury, Stevenson, Austin Dobson. Andrew Lang, Howells, Stedman, McDowell, Mark Twain, Saint-Gaudens, and innumerable others.
With that eagerness to understand the world you are living in, which has always characterized you, you lean from your window to catch the hostile shouting of the Mohawks in the street, so that you may learn the head and front of your offending. From the cries that come up, you find that they hate all things that begin with P. They are carrying on a propaganda against the following: Propagandists, Prohibitionists, Prudes, Purists, Puritans, and Professors. You scrutinize your conscience. You find that in strictness you are none of these.
You were ever a "clubbable" man. You stepped without struggle into a congenial and intelligent society which you had no desire to "reform." You have regarded literature and the arts not as instruments of social salvation but rather as part of the accomplished expression of society. You have sought to give distinction to the American short story by perfecting its technique. You have been a zealous friend to the living drama and to all the arts of the theatre. You followed Lowell in your graceful defense of the independence of American writers and of the free creative American use of the English tongue.
They may charge you on technical grounds with being a professor; but in your own conscience you know that you have never been that. You were formed before pedagogy had a chance to deform you. You were forty before you ever told anecdotes in a professorial chair or brought the intoxicating airs of Bohemia and the great world of letters within the drab walls of a classroom. No Mohawk hates the pedantries of scholarship more sincerely than you do. You have successfully resisted the laws of gravitation. You are a lover of artistic form, you are a craftsman, and in whatever you have touched, criticism, the informal essay, the story, the drama, even the New York Times, you have shown your delight in literary workmanship. Your immense acquaintance with the interesting people of your time at home and abroad, your French clarity and ease of expression, and your sense that the highest use of learning is to increase the vivacity and the charm of human intercourse during a man's own lifetime—these things have made you what the Mohawks are howling for, a man of letters who is also a man of the world.
What, then, is the young people's grievance against you? Your unpardonable sin is that you are seventy. Therefore they batter at your door. It is the new manners.
In these circumstances a wise man, after due reflection, will probably be inclined to treat the disturbance like the bombardment of Halloween revellers. But there are three methods of dealing with Halloween revellers. One is to close shutters and say nothing. That is what is called "giving the absent treatment." One is to discharge a shotgun among the crowd. This is bucolic incivility. Brander Matthews is incapable of incivility. It is an incapacity which he shares with most of the distinguished writers of his generation. He adopts the third method. He steps out on his verandah, makes a charming speech to the Mohawks on youth and age and their common need of the traditions of their art, and then he distributes cider and apples—he blandly discusses American aphorisms, American architecture, repartee, conversation, cosmopolitan cookery, the length of Cleopatra's Nose, the modernity of Molière, Roosevelt, and memories of Mark Twain.