John Erskine

First, the lover of literature, second, the professor, I should say of John Erskine. This large, genial but positive gentleman has long been among the undergraduates one of the most popular professors at Columbia University. Yet he has preserved, in the midst of academic strictures, an unusual tolerance for modern tendencies in letters. While he chides you gently for carelessness of viewpoint or slovenly phrase, he is willing to find whatever is good in the new thing. His own poetry in its recent collection shows beauty of phrase, incisive imagery, and adherence to old models. Always he is interested in the young poet, and we find him the willing patron and adviser of undergraduate poets and poetry societies. Born in New York City, he took both his A.B. and his Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University. This has not made him, however, insular. As President of the Authors Club he made valiant attempts to keep that institution from a too rigid adherence to dusty tradition, and, if his efforts to unite and strengthen the unruly and amorphous Poetry Society of America were not successful, failure must be traced to the nature of the organization itself rather than to any lack of effort on Dr. Erskine’s part. His viewpoint is well illustrated by this essay in which he deplores the journalistic attitude. Technique, after all, is a god which cannot be lightly discarded. An able executive, a poet of charm, a teacher of great abilities, John Erskine has been a stabilizing force in American letters.

SPOTLIGHT OR FAME?

If a popular writer today ever asks himself what his chances are for fame, he may well conclude that popularity is all he should hope for. He must see that the public have become accustomed to reading books but once, as they read a newspaper; that to maintain his position he must continue to bring out new books; and that when he comes to an end, other writers will take his place. He will notice also that authors who once reached a large audience now miss their old effect even though they continue to produce books—as though they had left the track of popularity without knowing it. He may wonder whether they are merely repeating themselves before an audience that must have novelty, or whether—(comfort too tempting!)—their work has improved beyond the public taste.

However he analyzes it, the tendency he observes in our writing is a tendency toward journalism instead of art. The reward of journalistic success may be popularity, the temporary spotlight, but it cannot be fame. Fame is continued admiration for something that endures. The service that journalism renders us is too great not to have a vast appreciation, but the service is for a day, and the interest of a day is novelty, news, and the reward of news is the headline or the spotlight, not fame. Our books are largely written as news, advertised as news, criticized as news. Mr. Van Loon writes that James Harvey Robinson’s new book “is a bomb.” Another very contemporary critic says that Mr. Van Loon’s own new book “has all the thrills of a Nick Carter detective story”. Since the books so described are studies in history, we might expect them to have the praise of being true, but truth and news are not necessarily the same thing. To call a book a bomb or to compare it to a Nick Carter story is to give it the praise of news, which goes off but once. Mr. Van Loon and Mr. Robinson must write other books if they wish to hold the spotlight; the bombs of memory, however cherished, cannot compete with actual noises.

The journalistic tendency is felt perhaps in all the arts, but most in books and in the theatre, less in music, still less in painting, and least in architecture and sculpture. From these last we can learn, if we need a reminder, what are the conditions of enduring art, and what, in contrast to popularity, is fame. Sculpture and architecture, from the substantial nature of their medium, must submit to be looked at more than once, to be lived with, finally to be judged by the good opinions of many men over a long period of time; and a good opinion of such work, so lived with, will depend less on the first impression than on habitual contact. For such work popularity is difficult, if not impossible. “Three Soldiers” is a popular book; the Farragut statue in Madison Square is not a popular statue. What statue is popular? It can have only the better kind of success, if any; like the Farragut, it can be famous, loved and returned to over an indefinite length of time. For we can read a book once and throw it aside, or hear music or see a play but once, and then criticize it; it lies entirely in our choice whether we shall read or hear twice. How different our criticism would be if it were based on at least half a dozen readings and hearings.

It would be a misfortune to seem to be attacking journalism as such; what is here intended is only to distinguish between journalism and art. Art is the expression of life we can live with habitually. But there is much about life which we ought to know, and yet we do not care to dwell on, nor even enjoy hearing the first time. To give us this, along with other news, is the function of journalism. Mrs. Stowe’s disclosure of Byron’s private life may have been as necessary to print as she thought it was, in the interest of justice and morality, but it was journalism, not art. As much may be said today for Mr. O’Neill’s plays, which as they follow each other in journalistic succession maintain a journalistic success by bringing headline news of society. If Mr. O’Neill should stop writing now, would his plays hold the stage? Of course the question is irrelevant if he is primarily concerned with educating us to the truth, as Mrs. Stowe was, but if he has an artist’s interest in the permanent audience, in the judgment that ripens with long acquaintance, he may ask himself whether he has written anything yet that human beings will care to live with. “Three Soldiers”, to return to the striking example, was frankly advertised and properly criticized as journalism, as news, revelations of the now-it-can-be-told kind. In what he had to tell, Mr. Dos Passos, like Mrs. Stowe in her Byron story, may have been wrong, and nothing worse can be said of news than that it is not correct. But whether wrong or right, the book will be read widely as long as the psychology of the American soldier is a subject of popular debate, and then it will become as forgotten as Mrs. Stowe’s far more sensational paper. For all we know, Mr. Dos Passos may be an artist as well as a journalist. When he begins the career of the artist, he will learn the old truth about art, that it is long, and that its reward in fame comes slowly. The same experience will come to Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Speare, or to any others who bring us news of the Younger Generation; they now enjoy our gratitude for the news, but in that kind of popularity there are always the seeds of neglect and obscurity—they must bring us more news, and more news, and they must keep up to date, or we will have another town crier. And what town crier, for all the attention he got, ever had fame?

It would be a misfortune also to seem to say that the author who misses popularity is necessarily an artist, or that even temporary success is not to be admired. But in American letters we are beginning to wonder why our great successes are so transitory; why a writer who sells more copies of his first book than did Thackeray or Dickens, does not continue like them to reach a large public with succeeding books; and why he does not, like them, continue to be read after he has ceased to write. The explanation suggested is that most American writers, not only today but throughout the last twenty-five years, have written as journalists—have put out their material not as life but as news about life, and the critics have discussed it as news, and the readers have come to look for the news in it, and for nothing else. Some novelists still writing began their work with successful stories of local color, which we read in order to learn about Louisiana or Pennsylvania or the middle west; having got the information we were looking for, we went elsewhere to look into other novelties. It goes without saying that in this process we readers have done injustice to many a work of art; “Old Creole Days” and “Main Traveled Roads” have something for the permanent reader, as well as for the news seeker, and “Trilby”—to speak of an English book, is still a magnificent romance of friendship and chivalry, though it expired of its own success as a bulletin from the Latin Quarter and a document in hypnotism.

Are we doing a similar injustice to works of art today, by asking of them only a temporary service? How many of us will read a novel or a poem more than once, or will go several times to the same play? How many young writers care to aim at such an audience, who ask of art the privilege of entering themselves into the novel or poem or play, of living the lives of the characters, of falling in love with hero or heroine, of hating the villain, and of repeating this experience with deeper emotions on each rereading? The future of our literature is bound up with such questions. We shall have plenty of stories of the studious or psychological kind, plenty of philosophical or social minded novels and poems, but that is not enough; we must have the opportunity to reach experience in our own imagination, and do our own thinking about it. The author’s point of view, if presented apart from life or with life only as an illustration of it, is after all nothing but news. We read a book by Mr. Keynes to get his latest ideas on the economics of the Treaty, or a book by Mr. Shaw to see what he will say next, or one by Winston Churchill, once an artist, to see whether we share his opinion of the churches or his guesses about immortality; but to art we return to meet old friends like Tom Sawyer or Leatherstocking or David Harum or Doctor Lavendar, to be with them, to come under their influence, to reflect upon their fortunes. I thought I saw such art in “The Age of Innocence”, but most of my neighbors read the book as a sort of Baedeker of old New York, to catch Mrs. Wharton in mistakes of information. Now I think I see such art in Joseph Anthony’s “The Gang”, which I read with pleasure the more undisturbed because my neighbors find in it no news at all, and therefore leave it alone.