FullReads

This will never do…. The case of Mr. Wordsworth, we perceive, is now manifestly hopeless; and we give him up as altogether incurable, and beyond the power of criticism … making up our minds, though with the most sincere pain and reluctance, to consider him as finally lost to the good cause of poetry…. The volume before us, if we were to describe it very shortly, we should characterize as a tissue of moral and devotional ravings, in which innumerable changes are rung upon a few very simple and familiar ideas.

The world of readers has not ratified Jeffrey’s savage comments on “The Excursion,” for (to reckon only by the purse) any frequenter of old bookshops can pick up that original issue of the Edinburgh Review for a few cents, while the other day we saw a first edition of the maligned “Excursion” sold for thirty dollars. A hundred years ago it was the critic’s pleasure to drub authors with cruel and unnecessary vigour. But we think that almost equal harm can be done by the modern method of hailing a new “genius” every three weeks.

For example, there is something subtly troublesome to us in the remark that Sinclair Lewis made about Evelyn Scott’s novel, “The Narrow House.” The publishers have used it as an advertising slogan, and the words have somehow buzzed their way into our head:

“Salute to Evelyn Scott: she belongs, she understands, she is definitely an artist.”

We have been going about our daily affairs, climbing subway stairs, dodging motor trucks, ordering platters of stewed rhubarb, with that refrain recurring and recurring. Salute to Evelyn Scott! (we say to ourself as we stand in line at the bank, waiting to cash a small check). She belongs, she understands. And then, as we go away, pensively counting the money (they’ve got some clean Ones down at our bank, by the way; we don’t know whether the larger denominations are clean or not, we haven’t seen any since Christmas), we find ourself mumbling, She is definitely an artist.

We wonder why that pronouncement annoys us so. We haven’t read all Mrs. Scott’s book yet, and doubt our strength to do so. It is a riot of morbid surgery by a fumbling scalpel: great powers of observation are put to grotesque misuse. It is crammed with faithful particulars neither relevant nor interesting. (Who sees so little as he who looks through a microscope?) At first we thought, hopefully, that it was a bit of excellent spoof; then, regretfully, we began to realize that not only the publishers but even the author take it seriously. It feels as though it had been written by one of the new school of Chicago realists. It is disheartening that so influential a person as Mr. Lewis should be fooled by this sort of thing.

So there is something intensely irritating to us (although we admire Mr. Lewis) in that “She belongs, she understands, she is definitely an artist.” In the first place, that use of the word artist as referring to a writer always gives us qualms unless used with great care. Then again, She belongs somehow seems to intimate that there is a registered clique of authors, preferably those who come down pretty heavily upon the disagreeable facts of life and catalogue them with gluttonous care, which group is the only one that counts. Now we are strong for disagreeable facts. We know a great many. But somehow we cannot shake ourself loose from the instinctive conviction that imagination is the without-which-nothing of the art of fiction. Miss Stella Benson is one who is not unobservant of disagreeables, but when she writes she can convey her satire in flashing, fantastic absurdity, in a heavenly chiding so delicate and subtle that the victim hardly knows he is being chidden. The photographic facsimile of life always seems to us the lesser art, because it is so plainly the easier course.