Every considerate person must respect, for example, the genius of Mr. Kipling and of Mr. Shaw, of Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett: yet the publication of a new book by any one of them is not, nowadays, an event in which it is possible to take real interest. It is an event which at bottom we deplore. And so is it with every writer whose manner has been admirable long enough to become familiar. He publishes perforce a book which in every essential we have already read, time and again. We purchase, in loyalty to old delight: but we labor through the text with a sort of unadmitted impatience, by which those braver persons who write book reviews are irritated far more candidly.
Meanwhile the report gets about that the man is making money out of his writing: and in the corrupting miasma of that rumor no literary reputation, howsoever lusty, can long survive. It follows thus that by the time a tolerably successful artist in letters is really in full control of his powers, such as they are, he is definitely, for the rest of his lifetime, outmoded. In fact, he has become in some sort a pest.
There is loss here for the reader, though, I confess, I can see no possible way out. But for the artist there is no weighty loss, nor any valid ground upon which, as it were, to repine. Every artist in letters must become, ere he reaches sixty, more or less of a nuisance to the world of current reading-matter: but that, after all, is not an affair with which he himself is vitally concerned. For this sybarite spoils paper, as I have elsewhere tried to explain, for his own diversion: he knows that the artist, lucky above all men, and alone of human beings, is sometimes, if only for a season, praised, and even is paid sound money, for diverting himself: and he knows, too, that to the artist, when the applause lessens and the autograph hunters depart, there still remains the chance—granted to him alone of human beings,—to continue to divert himself in precisely that way which he most prefers.
But from the front ranks of contemporary writers, from the ranks of those who exercise an actually vital and yet growing influence, an author at about the time of his fiftieth birthday must withdraw perforce. These ranks are being filled—again, perforce,—by the younger men who have at least the one indispensable quality. They are new.
Chapter VII. Which Deals with the Deplorable
MEANWHILE, I have said, “The average writer has reached his peak at, to my finding, forty: and with favoring luck, with all that he has learned of technique to counterbalance a perhaps lessened exuberance in creative power, he may retain that peak for some years.” The trouble is that he does not retain it indefinitely: the trouble is that in no great while the creative power is quite surely lessened; and the technique does but play futilely with the picked bones of defunct talents. The trouble is, in brief, that even for the most prodigally gifted of creative writers the way lies, by and by, downhill forever.
It has been the fate of but too many of our more captivating prosateurs to outlive their powers (which was a venial and often an unavoidable happening), and to outlive the desire to write, and yet, whether out of sheer habit or out of man’s normal need for an income, to go on writing,—which was in all respects a calamity. . . . Here my theme becomes difficult. For to name here the living were uncivil. It is politely possible, though, to point in one embracing gesture to Scott and Dickens and Thackeray,—inasmuch as their merits nowadays have no least concern with the demerits of Castle Dangerous or of Edwin Drood or of Philip,—and to recall the arid inferiority of these dead giants’ later labors, without any more of human pleasure than we unavoidably get from our betters’ downfall.
It is possible, too, to let the last-named speak for the three, of them. “All I can do now,” said Thackeray,—at about the time of his fiftieth’ birthday,—“is to bring out my old puppets, and put new bits of ribbon on them. I have told my tale in the novel department. I only repeat old things in a pleasant way. I have nothing new to say. I get sick of my task when I am ill, and I think, ‘Good Heavens! what is all this story about!’”
It is a query which has been echoed by his readers, and by the readers of Dickens, and by the readers of Scott, and by the readers of many another aging novelist. ... I pause here. I am tempted. But I reflect, rather wistfully, that I had resolved to name no living American author.
I now regret that resolve. I would much like here to speak frankly of my own generation in American letters.
Chapter VIII. Which Slightly Anticipates
YES, I would very much like here to speak frankly of my own generation in American letters. For it was, in so far as it stays at all memorable, the first generation which criticized the polity of the United States. It was the first generation which said flatly: All is not well with this civilization. And it was, pre-eminently, the generation which destroyed taboos,—not all taboos, of course, but a great many of those fetishes which the preceding generations had all left in unmolested honor.
To the other side, it is a generation of which the present-day survivors appear, to my finding, a bit ludicrously to go on fighting battles that were won long ago. It is a generation which nowadays evinces a quite distressing tendency to preserve at all costs the posture of Ajax defying the lightnings under an unclouded sky. It has thus become, already, a depressingly comic spectacle. It has done its work successfully: and that gratifying fact is the one fact which this generation of writers who prided themselves upon facing all facts, will not face to-day. Instead, it goes on working at its some-while-since-finished job, and it tilts at dead dragons, rather dodderingly, in the beginning palsy of superannuation.
So is it that, speaking always under the correction of time, I would say this is a generation destined quite quickly to be huddled away, by man’s common-sense, into oblivion. For this generation has said, All is not well. To say that is permitted; to say that is indeed a conventional gambit in every known branch of writing. But this generation thereafter proffered no panacea: and that especial form of reticence is not long permissible.
To the contrary it is most plain here that, just as Manuel told Coth, the dream is better. It is man’s nature to seek the dream; he requires an ever-present recipe for the millennium; and he vitally needs faith in some panacea or another which by and by will correct all ills. This generation has proffered no such recipe: and that queer omission has suggested, howsoever obliquely, that just possibly no panacea may exist anywhere. This is a truth which man’s intelligence can confront for no long while. He very much prefers that equivalent of hashish which I have seen described, in the better thought of and more tedious periodicals, as constructive criticism. Most properly, therefore, have those junior writers who were not ever harried by taboos, or by the draft laws, begun to suggest a tasteful variety of panaceas: and all persons blessed with common-sense, will eventually select, if but at random, some one or another of these recipes, wherein to invest faith, and wherefrom to extract comfort.
Meanwhile all intelligent persons will, moreover, put out of mind, as soon as may be possible, that unique and bothersome generation of writers who suggested no panacea whatever. . . . And meanwhile, too, as I have remarked a bit earlier, I intend in this place to say not anything about this generation.