The Pacific Monthly/Volume 17/Literature: Some Aspects in the West
Literature: Some Aspects in the West
By Porter Garnett
THE aesthetic growth of the West, particularly in literature, is matter of interest. It is as vital to our humanities and our civilization as our financial and commercial sanity. Its growth represents our intellectual status. But what are the facts of this growth? Divesting the subject of parochial prejudice, what conclusions are to be drawn from the output? "What is its weight, its importance? How much of value do the recent performances of Western writers hold? How much of their work is ephemeral, and how much has promise of permanence? A discussion of the subject may be fruitful of facts upon which to base a verdict.
The names that immediately occur to us are those of Joaquin Miller, George Sterling, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, James Hopper, Mary Austin, Gertrude Atherton. Some of these have produced work recently which will aid the discussion to be continued from month to month in this department. Others of secondary and tertiary importance will be touched upon as their art, their interest, or their significance in the interpretation of Western life, may suggest and a fairly complete survey of contemporary Western literature be attained. The term "Western literature" is, however, misleading if not altogether foolish. It implies a separateness, a category which has, or should have, nothing to do with art or its appraisement. Art is universal. In history it is divisible into periods, but, even in the perspective of years, its divisions are marked by nations and languages rather than by localities. Exceptions may be pointed out in the Attic and Laconic literatures and in Etruscan sculpture and Byzantine architecture, but such distinctions are matters of school rather than of geography. In treating Western expression in letters we are dealing not with a local aspect of art, nor with a part of a national literature, but with a part of the literature of a language. Let us speak then not of Western literature, but of literature in the West, and let us see what the West is contributing to the literature of the English tongue.
It may be safely said that English literature today, taken by and large, is made up of a vast amount of very admirable second-class work and a vast amount of work which drops off in diminishing degrees of unimportance. This great volume of second-class production may be again divided into an upper second class and a sub second class, or, to use the social terminology, an upper and a lower middle class. In the latter of these classes fully ninety-five per cent of the best that is being written belongs, and the greatest compliment that can be paid a writer is to say that he belongs to the upper middle class of literature. It remains for future generations to determine whether or not some of these are not of the first order of excellence—the universal and eternal.
In France the ratio more closely approximates a parity of the two classes. In the upper middle class, headed by Anatole France, and numbering in its order such men as Rictus, Octave Mirbeau, and Rostand, we see the race of giants continued and standards set by those great moderns, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Verlaine, in a fair way of being upheld after their passing. In English letters the race of giants is well-nigh extinct. Kipling and Conrad (a foreigner) loom large, but where shall we find a mate for these in stature? Henry James, say you? or Stephen Phillips? or Alfred Noyes? If we extend our quest to America are we arrested by the artistic proportions of W. D. Howells or Edith Wharton? Pursuing our search still farther West we can apply our tape measure to Miller and to Bierce, who, it is likely, have reached the height of their powers, and to Sterling and the others that have already been mentioned and who are still growing. On this figurative journey through the Land of Literature there are to be observed on all sides a horde of industrious pigmies, many of them extremely clever. Some of them have rolled logs down from the Great Commercial Mountains out of which they have made stilts on which they strut about, affecting the appearance and the manner of real giants. The deception is very often successful.
But, who knows, there may be giants as yet unfound in the demesne of English letters, and even in the West; giants who dwell in hidden places, but whose heads are in the clouds. Then, too, some of those we have cited—Sterling, London, Hopper, Austin, Atherton—may grow into gianthood. Let us watch them.
It is within the bounds of possibility that when critics, in years as yet remote, shall write of the literature of our time, they may bear out contemporary opinion, that, here in the West, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there were evidences of a literary vitality from which grew a group of writers of world-importance. Do the facts, observed at close range, support the belief? Literature in the West, up to the present time, has been sporadic, and, viewed largely, it has been negligible. Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller have left their impress on their time, but, aside from these, there is no one of whom the world has taken cognizance. But the West is spoken of and thought of as a cradle of art. Here the conditions of climate, the beauty of the earth, the freedom and vigor of living, unworn traditions, and the stimulus of a growing civilization are all hospitable to creative work and to the nourishment of the imagination. So, in truth, it may be that, here, in this far-off corner of the world, there may be some upon whose brows Fame shall yet press down the crown of immortality.
This is the optimistic view quite in the spirit of our naive Western hopefulness. But the critic has to deal, nol with dreams, but with facts as he finds them and as he sees them. We may have potentialities even though we have not performances. It is well to be a little modest about such things. America has produced one author of the first class and only one (it is perhaps superfluous to say that this one is Poe). It has produced and is producing a goodly number of the second class, but the Pacific Coast will be doing very well if it adds, in the present generation, one more name in the upper middle class of literature to those of Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller. The likeliest candidate is George Sterling, whose noble poem, "The Testimony of the Suns," is a prop to the tottering edifice of English song.
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There is a tendency gaining strength among Western writers to draw their material from historical sources and for this purpose the archives, in which the Pacific Coast is peculiarly rich, are being studied with considerable diligence. The result will doubtless be that a body of fiction will be produced which will reflect something of the unique and interesting development of Western civilization. Gertrude Atherton, among recent writers, has taken the lead in this line of endeavor, while Frank Norris and some others have given us more or less literal pictures of Western life during our own time and of the period immediately antedating the present.
Among writers who are transmuting our history and traditions into literature, Mary Austin is the most notable artistically. Her latest book, The Flock (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.), should be greeted with delight by such as prize the best traditions of English prose-writing. It is welcome for the very reason that so little that is being written today has grace of form and style. Form, which is so much an essential of French literature—the birthright of every French homme de lettres great and small—is elusive and rare in our less plastic language. The stylist in English is scarce because his medium is refractory. When we find, as we do once in a while, a writer who has not only the sensitiveness and taste to discern the refinements of literary art, but the alchemy to express them in the written word, we should, indeed, be grateful. Such an one is Mary Austin.
The Flock is not fiction. It is a series of descriptive discourses on the history, traditions, manners and customs of the shepherds on the California ranges. It is an exposition comprehensive, detailed and thorough, undertaken by a literary woman whose life has been intimate of her theme. From the shepherds themselves she has drawn information and anecdote which she has molded with a fine skill and charming rhetoric into a work of artistic importance, taking over in the process no little of the atmosphere of this dispersed community. Such a subject would be unutterably dull, as dull, for example, as an article on the wool industry in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, if it were not for the art with which it is rendered. And yet some reservations are necessary. Mrs. Austin does not escape dullness wholly. Her narration of the habits of that most stupid of animals and the economics of the shepherd's trade are, at times, tedious because they are, at times, presented in a manner, if not exactly bald, at least a manner that is innocent of individuality and atmosphere. But such declensions are few and, taken all in all, the book is an admirably sustained artistic performance. It is remarkable that with a subject in many ways so ungracious, the literary woman has succeeded so well with her undertaking. It is an achievement.
Mrs. Austin has undoubtedly sought to impregnate her work with the spirit of the life of which she treats and which she knows so well, but, in this, she has not been altogether successful. The spell and atmosphere of her book is the spell and atmosphere of literary art rather than of the range and mesa. Her achievement is literary rather than human, aesthetic rather than interpretative. She has, however, at times caught the romance of the herder's life and made it convincing. She is sensible to the fact that the romance of his existence lies not so much in his work-a-day life, his labors, his trials, his joys and his adventures as in the kinship of these things and of himself with things of the past. Romance must have a background of something beyond our ken. Without it the incidents of the herder's life—his trespassings on reserves, his feuds with cattlemen, his killing by a ranger — are matter of no literary interest whatsoever; they belong rather to the domain of journalism. But dowered with the heritage of old civilizations, the sordid and uncouth tender of flocks, the heir to a line of sheepmen which reaches back to the infancy of the world, becomes a figure in whom the very spirit of romance is implicit.
The following quotations will serve at once to show how Mary Austin has savored the romance of her theme, and, at the same time, illustrate the charm of her style:
All the lost weathers of romance collect
between the ranges of the San Joaquin, like
old galleons adrift in purple, open spaces of
Sargasso. Shearing weather is a derelict
from the time of Admetus; gladness comes
out of the earth and exhales light. It has
its note, too, in the pipings of the Dauphinoises, seated on the ground with gilias coming up between their knees while the flutes remember France. Under the low, false firmament of cloud, pools of luminosity
collect in interlacing shallows of the hills.
Here is one of those gentle swales where
sheep were always meant to be, a ewe covers
her belated lamb, or has stolen out from the
wardship of the dogs to linger until the decaying clot of bones and hide, which was
once her young, dissolves into its essences.
The flock from which she strayed feeds toward the flutter of a white rag on the hilltop
that signals a shearing going on in the clear
space of the canon below. Plain on the skyline with his sharp-eared dogs the herder
leans upon his staff.
An interest in elemental things and the
appeal that they make to the literary mind
are the impulses behind such a book as The
Flock. How genuine is the appeal and how
sincere the response are things that no one
can know—perhaps not even the author herself. Ardor for the elemental is one of the
most interesting phenomena of modern literary activity. Unfortunately, it often leads
authors into the evil ways of affectation, and
from this charge Mrs. Austin is not immune.
Before one reads very far in The Flock one
is struck by what appears to be, at first
blush, a simple and unaffected frankness.
Perhaps it would be better to call it boldness
or independence. But frankness, boldness,
and independence are things to be regarded
with suspicion; and, in the present instance.
the insincerity of it becomes apparent when
the frankness, or boldness, or independence
becomes forced and gratuitous. It is better
art to fail on the side of reticence.
In this book, devoted as it is to the glorification of the flock and its tenders, it is curious to note that the very best chapter does not deal with the sheep directly nor with the herder, but with the "go-between." as she calls the shepherd's dog. Mrs. Austin has in this chapter written as interestingly of animals as any writer who has made a specialty of such subjects, and, in point of literary charm, she has surpassed them by much.
The testimony of one so versed in the subject is of some peculiar value and interest on one point in particular. Mrs. Austin deprecates the "unfounded assumption" that insanity is prevalent among sheep-herders. She says: "With all my seeking into desert places there are three things that of my own knowledge I have not seen — a man who has rediscovered a lost mine, the heirs of one who died of the bite of a sidewinder and a shepherd who is insane." Turning to a recent book by Bishop Talbot, My People of the Plains (Harper & Brothers), the worthy prelate-author puts the weight of his authority on the other side of the question. Says he: "It is not to be wondered at that such a life (the sheep-herder's) often ends in insanity. It is said that the asylums are repleted year by year by a large contingent of these unfortunates. Indeed, their lot is a most pathetic one, and they sometimes even lose the power of speech and forget their names."
Bishop Talbot's book is of the West, but not from the West, the author being now Bishop of Central Pennsylvania. For many years, however, he was the pioneer bishop in Wyoming and Idaho, and it is of his life among the mining camps of these states and others that his book treats. My People of the Plains has no claim to literary quality. It is written in an easy forthright manner and consists very largely of amusing anecdotes which this most human ecclesiast tells with unction and humor. It cannot be said to be affined in any manner with the literature of the West as literature, but for what it is, an anecdotal account of the establishment of the Episcopal Church in the Northwest, it will be found interesting and sprightly by churchman and layman alike.
The following quotation is from a novel of the West by a Western author:
Even the young lady was seen to consume the viands set before her with more gusto than a restraining sense of romantic fitness would have dictated. Once or twice, as she bit a semi-circle out of a round of buttered bread, her eye, questing sidewise full of sly humor, caught McVeigh's and a sputter of laughter left her with humped-up shoulders, her lips lightly compressed on the mouthful.
Had this appeared in Bret Harte's Condensed Novels or in Barry Pain's Playthings and Parodies, or in Ambrose Bierce's Prattle it would probably earn a hearty guffaw. It is to be found on page 9 of Miss Geraldine Bonner's latest novel, Rich Men's Children (The Bobbs-Merrill Co.). In this story Miss Bonner snuggles close to the popular taste for unliterature. Rich Men's Children deals with the parvenues of San Francisco society, men and women whose grandfathers were miners in early days and whose grandmothers took in washing. Her characters are, it would seem, patterned after types rather than individuals and she has drawn them with considerable skill. Skill and a certain kind of taste, rather than art, are the characteristics in her work, char- acteristics that almost redeem it from the category of eommonplaceness. But the story is of a commonplace type; the type of melo- dramatic narrative with a coating of super- ficial psychology. To its credit, be it said, the story is interesting, a quality that fulfills every requirement of the publishers and most requirements of the reading public. Certain parts of it are in a dramatic way rather strong, and it shows throughout a rather subtle observation; but these manifestations are matters of skill and ingenuity rather than art. The touch of the literary artist is not upon it. Despite copious and finicky descriptions of San Francisco, the flavor and atmosphere of the old city is suggested but never attained. The picture is one in which those who know the town can see its image, but to alien eyes it will be nebulous and imperfect. So, too, with the people in the book; they are drawn — particularly in the case of the central figure, the Bonanza King — with detail, circumstance, and precision, but even he leaves the impression of a skillfully made puppet and not of a man. He does not live. As a writer of such letters as, for years, have appeared from her pen in the Argonaut, Miss Bonner is perhaps the best woman journalist we have in America. Her style is distinctly journalistic, though above ordinary journalism. A little less vocabulary and embellished rhetoric and more feeling for the dignity of language are what Miss Bonner should cultivate in her writing of novels. As it is, Rich Men's Children is rather remote from Marius the Epicurean, for example.
It would be well if she would eliminate such a footless locution as "every now and then," an error of which Mrs. Austin is also guilty. It would be better, also, if she would not say restive when she means restless, nor speak of a "red glow" that "painted her serious, down-bent face with a hectic color," nor of a "hectic prospect" that "looked gray" nor of a hectic sunset. Miss Bonner evidently has a hectic tendency to use the word hectic improperly. And what are we to say of "The steady sweep (of the wind) would not be inaugurated till early in the afternoon"?
While dealing in molecular criticism it might not be out of place to point out some blunders, a pastime in which Ambrose Bierce has himself often indulged, in that supremely clever author's last work, The Cynic's Word Book (Doubleday, Page & Company). A fiddle, he says, is "an instrument to tickle human ears by friction of a horse's tail on the entrails of a cat." As a matter of fact fiddle-strings are not made of the entrails of a cat. In the invention of such a name as Sir Sycophas Aureolater, Bierce displays a better knowledge of Latin than of Greek. But Bierce's classical scholarship is most grievously at fault in his corrupt and un- authorized spelling of orang-utan, which he writes (in common with many others, be it said) "orang-outang." In the Malayan orang-utan, or more properly orang-hutan. is derived from orang, man, and hutan, the woods, of the woods, hence wild. The proper use of these two words will be found in the following sentence: Orang mengarang kitab pulang de-pergi nia ka-hutan — "the author went back to the woods."
In spite of these distressing blemishes The Cynic's Word Book is prodiguously illuminating and adroit. Bierce as a writter of short stories and as a master of literary expression in its best sense is unquestionably in the forefront of present-day writers, and the prophesy, often made by his admirers, that his work will live, is not perhaps so foolish as such prophesies commonly are. As a satirist he stands alone among moderns and we must go back to Juvenal and Martial to find his mate. This of Bierce as a satirist in epigram; in philosophy he is surpassed by Rochefoucauld and in wit by Oscar Wilde. The "Word Book" is pregnant with cynical wisdom and admirably contrived anecdotes. Here is one for example:
Connoisseur, n. A specialist who knows everything about something and nothing about anything else.
"An old wine-bibber having been smashed in a railway collision, some wine was poured upon his lips to revive him. 'Pauillac, 1873,' he murmured, and died."
It is with pain that we find Bierce indulging in puns and note such a false touch as his derivation of pterodactyl from an Irish name Terry Dactyl or Peter O'Dactyl. This article cannot be better closed than by another excerpt. It is:
Critic, n. A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody has ever tried to please him.
"There is a land of pure delight
Beyond the Jordan's flood,
Where saints, apparelled all in white,
Fling back the critic's mud.
And as he legs it through the skies,
His pelt a sable hue,
He sorrows sore to recognize
The missiles that he threw."