N. Bryllion Fagin

“ But we can bring to bear upon a rising generation of readers and writers all the force of our warm logic to combat the notion that any standard of morality, no matter how sublime, has any determining value in art. We can insist that a story might be entirely devoid of any moral significance and yet be an immortal masterpiece; that the whole notion is merely another one of the confusions we have inherited from an age which was too busy developing the raw resources of a vast young continent—a task which necessitated the invocation of Providential aid—to pay attention to literature. ”

“ The real perfection of our short story is yet to come. The signs are that it is having its birth pangs at this time. Writers of rich promise have come to the fore recently—and here and there a magazine, either new or an old one with a new policy, to receive their product. Our perfected short story will be bold, fearless, [99] vital; beating with the vigorous pulse of a giant nation stretching its limbs. It will be truly American—optimistic, with the rugged optimism of a Walt Whitman; brave, with the courage of an impetuous youth; rich, with the colors of a fertile soil and a blending humanity. ”

“ We cannot hope to have a discriminating reading public in a day. Too long have we impressed upon our public the blessings of a happy disposition and the artistry of reflecting it in our literature. Too long have we brazened about our pride in Pollyanna, Wallingford, Torchy, and a hundred other fictive chasers of the blues, who won’t take defeat but go on singing on their way. The happy story, with its breezy [105] style, its giggling climax, and its smacking dénouement has become a fixed type from which our readers’ affection cannot be so quickly alienated. ”

“ Existing social and political institutions may be defended in our fiction but not attacked or criticized; their merits may be extolled, but their demerits must not be betrayed to an innocent world. Private property is sacred; the State is always right—except when it attempts to interfere with Property; then a thinly veiled story decrying this interference as autocratic, tyrannous and un-American might get by and bring a fair price. Progress is a generality that affects us but little; the laws of change are suspended when applied to our literary reactions to our social life. ”

“ Let a piece of literary art reflect an unhackneyed thought, let it break any one of our ancient taboos, let it dare to belittle any one of our glorified generalities and dogmas—and it is promptly howled down as un-American. The literature of every other country on earth affords an interpretative and critical view of the psychology of the national mind it reflects, while American literature is least reflective of the American national mind, except in one particular: its cringing fear of the truth. ”

“ In this period of awakening, of the real birth of American literature, the genuine educator, always an open-minded student, can do no better than revaluate all his acceptances, all his hardened dogmas, all his hereditary literary and educational truths. If he is to help the confused multitude, baffled by a sudden consciousness of the phenomena of existence, to literary self-expression, he must first realize that no formulas are of any avail in the crises of life and therefore are of no avail in literature, the artistic emanation or transmutation of life. ”

“ Among the many hundreds of men and women who derive their daily bread and clothes and gasoline by directing the story-fancy of the country’s million or more literary aspirants, I class myself among the most conscientious and least harmful. The share of injury I may have contributed has simply been the unavoidable accompaniment of being engaged in a profession grounded upon the popular belief that literature is a trade, like plumbing, or tailoring, or hod-carrying, and requires but an understanding of the stupendous emoluments involved and a will to learn. ”

“ Which merely proves that if our fiction still has a measure of suspense it is not due to our clever technique but to the almost fabulous stupidity of the large mass of readers. We have evolved our tricks of technique for the prime purpose of maintaining a keen suspense, of keeping the outcome of the conflict which every story must have in the balance, of heightening the reader’s curiosity to follow the destiny of the hero or heroine in whose behalf his sympathies have been enlisted to a satisfactory end. ”

“ To deny the artist the prerogative to touch upon it unless it be in praise is to deny him the means to probe the human soul. To compel him to accept any institution as infallible and therefore beyond question of imperfection is to fetter his spirit. That a man who is a respected member of a respected church cannot be a thief in his business life or a brute at home is a more prostituting doctrine, the more so if not actually believed in but adopted for commercial purposes only, than any harlot was ever guided by, because it is so flagrantly contrary to truth. ”

“ It is strange to us, accustomed as we are to clever artificiality, it is even grotesque—this simplicity, naturalness, and daring, but it marks the birth of the American short story—that colorful short form which is destined to become the most perfect artistic expression of our national life. After all, to the true artist the public is no problem, it being composed primarily of himself alone. ”

“ What literature can a country produce which refuses to take even the most timid peep at life as it is, which [72] shuts its eyes in very horror at the most fundamental problems of the land, which does not brood, contemplate or inquire, which does not know the benediction of a tear or the relief of a sigh? Can a steady diet of sugar produce anything more invigorating than diabetes? And literary sugar is what we think and preach and worship. All heroines are pretty; all heroes succeed; all complications are solved; wedding bells ring; promotions are given out; only bad people die young ”

“ Maybe some day we shall get away from writing with a set of rules before us, and then we shall have literature instead of best sellers. Maybe the trouble with our writing is that we have developed technique to such a point that Tom, Dick and Harry are masters of technique and anybody who can get the hang of it can write a publishable story. Maybe our fiction has been whetted to a razor edge, until it is technique and nothing else. ”

“ One of the surest tags of the American short story has been its happy ending. No matter what vicissitudes the hero or heroine may have undergone, what problems and tragedies may have overtaken them, what unmendable exploits of circumstance or fate they may have been subjected to, in the end all must be well with them. The happy ending is a direct result of our uplift optimism, of our Pollyanna philosophy of life, of our fear of reality. We have always justified it on the ground of our national psychology, which, we claim, is buoyant and aggressive and won’t accept defeat. ”

“ In the world of men, with the dark mystery of death as an ever-present certainty, thus sowing a sense of the futility of all human aspirations and achievement in the hearts of even the most aggressive of us; with a lurking consciousness of insurmountable limitations besetting our fondest dreams; with a still more pronounced consciousness that the maturing of dreams frequently marks their decay, and almost always marks the thawing of their dewy glitter—in such a world, literature, welling up from the depths of inner consciousness, cannot help being tinged with sadness. ”

“ It is this last point—the devious ways of unsuspected preaching—that my profession is concerned with. Either we are altogether silent on the subject of religion in literature, deeming it too ticklish a subject upon which to commit ourselves, or we are zealous in our efforts to perpetuate the tradition that literature must complement the work of the church, only in a less outspoken way. Perhaps we do not do it consciously but the results obtained are the same. We merely advise students as to what subjects may be exploited and what subjects may not. ”

“ Moreover, when a man or a woman hands in a story which has no earthly chance of being accepted by any magazine because it is burdened with a soul which violates every tradition and rule and policy by which magazines are governed, it becomes my duty to enlighten this student that his is not the way to “get by.” For even such a student—an exception, to be sure—has read our advertising literature, has studied the popular psychology of success, and [11] often, like the other plodders, sincerely believes that a published story is a masterpiece, a rejected one worthless. ”

“ Why not be a story writer? The work does not seem hard; compensation is said to be good; and one is master of one’s own time and destiny. The would-be casts his lot on the side of practical reasoning, pays in a sum of money to a school of fiction-writing or enrolls for a course with one of our universities, buys a typewriter on the installment plan, and begins to collect editorial rejection slips. ”

“ But with all the available supply of novel plot material exhausted by writers who had the good fortune of being here before our generation had an opportunity, what is left to us is neither clever, bright, nor entertaining. However, O. Henry proved that it was possible to take the same age-old material and brighten it up with a coat of sparkling cleverness. He had but to juggle his incidents in such a way as to make them follow one another in a most spectacular sequence. He had but to play upon the credulity of his reader. ”

“ If a writer has read statistics of extra-generous donations made to various church funds and has found among the names of donors not a few of universally notorious embezzlers, he must ignore the fact, if only in the interests of his career. His motto must be: Never write anything about church that could not be turned into an advertisement of the institution. If the motto conflicts with life, scratch life.
And yet religion, like sex, is one of the basic forces of life; it has helped to shape the course of human history and civilization. ”

“ For no tools, no matter how sharp or perfect, can accomplish the feat of fashioning something out of vacuum. The American story always has laid claims to style—but it hasn’t lived. Writers have come and had their vogue and gone. Even years [120] back when style was more leisurely and rounded, when the badge of haste was not upon it, Charles Dudley Warner remarked: “We may be sure that any piece of literature which attracts only by some trick of style, however it may blaze up for a day and startle the world with its flash, lacks the element of endurance. ”

“ How much truth can be embedded in a fundamental falsehood? Every great poet has found the soul of his poem determining its form. Great style grows from within—it is an off-shoot of great substance. To the American writer this relationship has never been apparent; and most of our critics, professing a lofty æstheticism from the shadows of their academies, have never paid attention to it. Our literature cannot boast the possession of a single lucid outline of this vital relationship between form and substance such as the following from Remy de Gourmont’s “Le Probleme du Style.” ”

“ By far the greater number have imbibed our teachings. Their work shows a striving after cleverness, witty flippancy, grotesque slang, and an attempt to cap the dénouement with a novel twist, a perfectly surprising turn. Thus we know that our work is not in vain; at least some of our students are on the way to success.
Again, this is not a plea on behalf of those incompetents who are not O. Henryesquely gifted and are therefore not on the way to success. It is merely a dispassionate consideration of the profession of teaching story-writing and its existing standards and ethics. ”

“ The curse of catering to the public has been a fallacy as great as that of our technique; we have assumed that fiction is made to order for a public, just as we have taught that technique comes first and story substance next. The great writers have all come before their public and have had to wait for the public to catch up with them, but if they hadn’t come first the public would never have caught up. ”

“ The true artist is the perpetual explorer. He cannot invent the substance of his work, but he can discover it in the life of nature and his fellow-men. And the more he sees the more he learns to see, for to be able to see the new and unexplored in the old and elemental is the highest art in itself. ”