Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

The Progress of the Modern Author Up and Down the Slopes of Parnassus

WALLACE IRWIN

WHEN Jefferson adorned the Declaration of Independence with a phrase so quotable that it has bitten into the stone tablets of America's Decalogue he was speaking, I suppose, for the rank and file of our new democracy, for the people who drove mules in his day and Fords in ours; for the families who in 1776 sold tallow dips and in 1925 conduct Standard Oil filling stations.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness! A sincere patriot, an inspired statesman, Jefferson believed in equality and simplicity, and that despite the fact that he owned slaves and lived in a little palace at Monticello. Like many another prophet he had all the facts against him, but the truth was on his side. He wanted to create for mankind, a state where the rubbish of feudalism would be swept aside, where man could live out his destiny with a full mind, a full stomach and all the freedom that a man can enjoy without infringing upon his neighbor's right to happiness.

NOW I have chosen Jefferson's most memorable phrase as a text for my sermon, not with reference to the bearing it may have upon our nation at large, but with reference to that clamorous minority which is always regarded as exotic in Anglo-Saxon countries. I mean the artists, and particularly the literary artists. For there are few writers who have won their way with the point of a pen or the key of a typewriter who have not had to meet the question of their right to enjoy the ordinary comforts, to pay their bills on the first of the month and keep up with what they call in California "the white man's standard of living."

For countless ages—since the beginning of time, perhaps—it has been generally supposed that if one of the tribe varied in temperament from the others he should be rewarded by cold, hunger and neglect. If the savage poet preferred singing to hunting, he was left to carry on his business at his own risk. It is easy to imagine the prehistoric scene. The Old Man of the Tribe selects his stone hatchet, calls his valiant young warriors about him and fares to the forest to kill the giant aurach. The poet, the historian, the novelist, physically unfit, perhaps, or too absent-minded to deliver a blow in a vital spot, has been relegated to the sidelines where, at least, he will not be in the way. And after the combat, what? The carcass of the dead aurach is portioned off. According to precedent, the Old Man of the Tribe gets the tenderloin, his sons the sirloin, the high priest the rump, the medicine man the ribs. The entrails go to the squaws and the children. This rite completed, the victors go their way and permit the poet to slide down from his tree and look over what remains. It is little more than a bare skeleton, and if there is any meat left on it he must dispute it with the wolves.

BUT the bones are his, and because he had a sympathy for all brute hunger, he tosses a generous share of them to his rough friends, the wolves. Between them all they gnaw the skeleton down until it is glistening white as ivory. The poet sits and muses. He sees beauty in these gleaming, white surfaces. They are not only beautiful, but they have a use as well. They are something to write on, to give permanence to his dream. Therefore he seizes a fragment of a broken spear and on the huge thighbone he begins his composition:

"The Old Man of our Tribe is great beyond the greatness of all other men of all other tribes," he scrawls. "When he awakes the sun rises. When he sleeps it is night. He sits alone in his cave, speaking only with the gods who tell him of the water holes where the beasts come down to drink. His kill in men and animals surpasses that of all other chieftains. All living things are afraid of him. Even his wives. I have seen him kill nine aurachs by knocking their heads against the mountains. I have seen him capture two mastodons by tying their trunks together. Where will the world go when he dies? What will become of the sun and moon?"

This bit of vers libre, subject to revision, is scratched upon a thigh bone and carried cautiously to the Old Man of the Tribe who, if he is kindly disposed, will pay for it with a half pint of corn meal.

ALL this may be a clumsy parable, but it is plain to see that the literary man has been tolerated throughout the ages as an odd adornment to the serious work of making war, love and money. He has been a handy fellow to call in after dinner and amuse the company with glowing tributes to the sublime taste, heroic deeds and exalted ancestry of the fat patrician who happens to be giving the party. In classic times and in the middle ages the bard and story teller followed a princely train among the jesters, concubines and mercenaries. A poet without a patron became a sort of barefoot mendicant. Homer was one of them, begging and harping from palace to palace. Another one—and we must take him more as an idea than an individual—was that dark-skinned genius who whined before the striped tents, where Arab sheiks reposed, and spun that golden chain of magic and wit which we have learned to call the Arabian Nights' Entertainment.

The literary man had to choose between the alternatives, either to wander in rags or to walk smugly behind the chariot wheels of the lord who owned him. Virgil, for instance, chose the latter course and wrote the Aeneid to order so that a Roman patrician might be tickled by an epic as flattering to Rome as the wandering Homer's lines were to the vanity of Greece. Despite the laurels he wore, the social position he enjoyed, Virgil was no less a slave than the African lad Terence whose lines so pleased his master that he was permitted to sit at the princely table and accept the morsels given him.

THROUGH the Graeco-Roman period of culture, through the dark ages, through the Renaissance a man of letters was as indispcnsible to any noble household as the buffoon or the executioner. Some great lords who had a reputation for being good to their help treated their poets almost as well as they did their gamekeepers. But it was not considered good form to receive a poet as an equal, for such people, as was well known, were apt to forget their place and presume upon a master's kindness. Their jobs were definitely cut out for them. They were allowed to sing freely of the birds and the flowers and the rills—preferably on the ducal estates to which they were attached —to invent pretty lyrics celebrating the charms of the duke's marriageable daughters, to sing of clashing arms in such battles as featured the noble family in victorious attitudes. And when books were published, at ducal expense, they were supposed to be elaborately dedicated to My Most Worshipful Lord, Defender of the Faith, Flower of Chivalry and Patron of the Muses, His Grace, the Duke of Rottingham. For such services the poet received his board and a sum of money approximating eight dollars per month.

Under such circumstances is it at all strange that a poet occasionally rebelled? There is the notorious instance of Dante who ran amuck, wrote the Inferno and gave himself the infinite satisfaction of consigning half the noble Florentine families to a hell imperishable. I have always had a suspicion that Dante's inspiration was more human than religious. With all the Italian's cunning love of vengeance he bided his time and "got even" for that agelong patronage system which enslaved poor Virgil, his guide through the Infernal Gloom.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Civilization has always been arranging it so that the literary genius should not have access to any of these three most desirable things. The Pharisees have always associated the Scribe with a fondness for misery. He should be eccentric by nature, live in extreme discomfort and die young, preferably of tuberculosis. "Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought," confessed Shelley and they made the most of it. "Hunger makes poets sing and pigs squeal"— that was a maxim which came into being with London's Grub Street and was about as wise as to say that hunger makes figs sing and poets squeal.

WHEN literature shook off the shackles of noble patronage and copyright came in and books were sold on the royalty basis, the literary man began to find out what real misery was. That was at about the time when the world discovered that a surgeon was something better than a barber. Art began moving out of the servants' quarters in the palace and taking up lodgings in Grub Street within convenient walking^distance of the Debtors' Prison. I have always wondered just why the royalty system was invented. Was it an evidence of growing literary self-respect or merely a device on the part of the Dukes to get rid of the Authors?

However, it came about. The simple scribblers at first looked upon it wide-eyed, viewing another New Freedom. The fevered imagination of genius saw gold nuggets and precious stones strewn along the Strand in London, even as it was strewn along the strand of fabled Virginia and Carolina. Well, the author soon found the stones, but they were not precious; they were of the same flinty, gritty quality as those stones which were served the poor poet who asked for bread. For a century after the royalty system came into being there was an epidemic of starvation in the literary ghetto of London. Neither life nor happiness had been achieved by the change. A few bolder spirits like Defoe and Bunyan struck out for liberty and found themselves in jail.

Then came the age of machinery, of mechanical monsters, grinding the earth under the heel of industrialism. It was initiated with the Georges and flowered in the complacent reign of Victoria. The history of martyrdom began showing a newer, more alarming development. Lord Byron, Lord Lytton, Lord Macaulay, Lord Tennyson and Disraeli gorged the rapid press with histories, poems, romances. Sir Walter Scott, singing pompously of deeds wherein every hero was an earl, every villain a churl, would have gained the smiles of the fat little queen who believed that only nice people should be mentioned in literature. Scott made the blunder of his life when he died fi\e years before Victoria's succession to the throne, for in him God made the Victorian par excellence. The lordly scribes whom I have mentioned

enjoyed a little happiness and some life, within narrow limits. Some of them fought for romantic ideals of liberty. But of personal liberty they had nothing. Instinctively they had thrown themselves back to the feudal state where the bard and scrivener must listen to and adorn his master's voice. But Lytton, Macaulay, Tennyson, Disraeli were less free than their prototypes of old who had but one lord to amuse and mollify; the later bards must needs amuse and mollify a whole House of Lords or lose their heads, socially and politically as Byron, the naughty boy of the group, most successfully did.

At this point the authors of humbler origin began to look about them with wide, hungry, rolling eyes. The competition, quite obviously, was unfair. "We, too, must find a master!" they cried, and as by common consent offered themselves to the greatest tyrant of them all, the common people whom Scott, from his Highland eminence, once referred to as "the many-headed monster". Burns began valiantly by writing humble songs for humble folk and spoke at times so pungently and so bitingly that he would have gone to jail save for the fact that his dialect was too obscure for the royal family to understand. Keats and Shelley were insurgents too, but they had the good sense to die young in an age when anaemia added glamour to a literary reputation.

As Mr. George M. Cohan said, in satirizing America, "P. T. Barnum had the right idea." In his own time and country Charles Dickens had the right idea .too. He achieved much happiness and in his own peculiar way, some life. But liberty was not for him. He was quick to perceive the power that lies in superjournalism, and he sold himself promptly to the many-headed monster. Roughly speaking, Dickens was the William Randolph Hearst of fiction. His heroes were pure, persecuted saints, speaking in stilted editorials; his buffoons were comic strips; his crusades were shouted forth like great black headlines; and with it all, there was a reportorial genius that managed to convey, though in distorted perspective, an atmospheric picture of his time and his city.

THE wealth of Golconda began pouring on him, and at the golden music a whole world of scribblers began raising their diminished heads, realizing that man, in order to make a living by his pen, need be neither a lord nor a lackey. Write for the people! That was the thing. True, in order to please this polycephalous divinity the author must needs observe a hundred precautions. He was confronted by a long list of Don'ts. Don't admit that landed proprietors arc sometimes human beings with generous, if weak impulses. Don't admit that orphans arc sometimes criminal defectives and would, had they the power and the money, develop into tyrants as cruel and bloody as Agrippa. Don't admit that men arc of the same mould, floundering in the same boat, pointed rather aimlessly at the same vague goal. Don't have any soft greys in your picture—do it all in violent blacks and staring whites with the whites reserved for the poor and lowly who must be quaintly ungrammatical —with the exception of the hero, who is expected to speak in perfectly rounded paragraphs.

By this means many righteous reforms were brought about, I readily grant you. But in point of artistic honesty the method was no more sound than that of the primitive poet who cringed With a decorated bone to the cave of the Old Man of the Tribe; no more honest than that of the Georgian poet who dedicated his volley of flattering rhymes to My Most Worshipful Lord, Defender of the Faith, Flower of Chivalry and Patron of the Muses, His Grace, the Duke of Rottingham.

To dig up Thackeray at this point is to go dyer old ground, to revive a shopworn discussion. But in his time he achieved more life, more liberty and more happiness than the others, merely because he was faithful to his art in his fashion. By dint of hacking at newspaper squibs and straining at the humor that was in him he survived to the point where he could tell the truth and build a lasting tower of it. In his latter days he passed the little house where he spent a year in the composition of Vanity Fair, and removing his hat he said, "I can never do it again. I have taken, too many crops out of my brain." Samuel Butler, who was not recognized until his grave was forgotten, was the legitimate heir of Thackeray. Arnold Bennett—the Bennett who wrote Old Wives' Tale, was in direct line of succession; for that rich, fat book of Midlands life marks another renaissance of English literature.

SOMEWHERE in the last half century a change has come over the material condition of authors. Before the invention of the automobile the impertinent fellows began cruising in their private yachts. The slopes of Helicon were displayed so brilliantly that some suspected American real estate operators of raising the slogan "Boom Helicon and Parnassus Addition." Magazine serializing was on the increase and the crude forefathers of our newspaper syndicates were beginning to show their heads. But the change was gradual, at that. As a small boy—that must have been nearly forty years ago—I was astonished to hear that Bill Nyc, one of the richest writers -in America, was receiving a hundred dollars a week for his articles.

The Millennium arrived, I think, when Mr. S. S. McClure invented a twenty-five cent magazine that would sell for a dime. Kipling and Conan Doyle were purchased at the rate of a dollar a word. For one short paragraph they were paid several times as much as blind Milton received for his "Paradise Lost." Tarkington's popularity became opulence. Jack London bought farms in California. And all this, I venture to point out, had little to do with the making of books. The magazines were the thing, a direct, cheap contact between producer and consumer. From every port in the civilized world the gold rush began for America. America ho! Here lay the gold of India which Columbus failed to discover in the fronded Carrabees.

This state of affairs, it is sad to admits greatly improved our authors without improving our authorship. The judicious grieved, recalling the lost ideals of La Boheme; genius, drunk with wine and spiritual glamour, scrawling by candle-light; François Villon, hiding in a thieves' kitchen to lisp out his ballades; Coleridge, eating opium to stay his pain, swooning among Kublai's floating domes, then tearing his dream in twain because an impious bill collector knocked upon his door. And who, asked the grieving judicious, were these audacious plutocrats, riding in closed Packards while their publishers drove Fords? Authors! Ye gods and goddesses of eld! They were wearing short hair, having their clothes cut in London; only by the thickness of their eye-glasses could they be told from other tired business men.

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But the w'orst—and Russia has vividly proved this—is usually followed by more of it. An inventor learned how to make photographs move their arms and legs, contort their faces, throw crockery, leap from bridges. An evening's entertainment could be put out in quantity production, produced simultaneously in a thousand theaters. The motion picture industry—the most industrious of all industries—yearned for novels to cut up and maim and throw upon the screen. A man's literary merit began to be judged from the angle of its photographicpossibilities. Rolls-Royces began parking all along the slopes of Parnassus. The fragrance of asphodels gave place to the vapor of gasoline. The author, in fact, had found a newer, richer master.

Now what of this newest, richest master upon whom the author has learned to fawn? It has been bitterly said that the motion picture producers buy the rights to novels merely for the sadistic pleasure of mangling them. This is an exaggerated statement, torn from a bleeding heart. But there is no doubt that the screen version bears very little resemblance to the novel from which it is adapted. As for me, I recently wrote a novel the scene of which was laid in Louisville, Kentucky. When I saw it in the motion pictures I was mildly surprised to learn that the scenario writer had shifted my story to Switzerland and invented a thrilling, if quite extraneous act on an Alpine glacier.

All of which is grievous, no doubt. But viewed from an Olympian altitude, the motion pictures are far less a blight to American art than some would make them out to be. When I sell a book to Hollywood I console myself with the following sophistry: Those who have read my novel will know that the story haS been violated; those who haven't read my novel won't care. In a practical sense Hollywood has been a greater patron of letters than any number of our purely cultural societies. And for this reason. Art is no orchid. It requires rich ground to feed upon and undisturbed leisure on which to thrive. Or to vary my figure, when the wolf howls at the door inspiration flies out of the window. To do the cinema industry justice, it has actually endowed art by giving the artist a sufficient income to carry on his work. That has been my own experience, and if truth were told, it has been the experience of many another writer. Like his prototype of the twelfth century, the Duke of Hollywood is a dangerous patron. Under his protection a bard may sink to the indignity of a hired ballad-monger or rise to the dignity of a Chaucer. The weaker of us are absorbed into the movies and sink below the level. The stronger of us recall the quavering words of Uncle Tom, "You may break this poor old body, Simon Legree, but my soul belongs to God."

Now in this rambling paper I have striven to illustrate one thing. The poet, the historian, the story teller are no more free men than are the tailor, the banker, the paper-hanger. Like the general run of men we have our chains forged for us, or we forge them for ourselves. From the others we differ only in that we see the stars from our prison windows and write their records on our walls. In what we call freedom we are merely changing from one master to another. Some masters are better than others, infinitely so. If artistic liberty has advanced with the ages, it is only in the respect that it has permitted us to choose whom we shall serve.