for the fact that I seem to recognize the same symptoms among my fellow-writers. I do not suggest that they have begun to distrust themselves. Heaven forbid. But I do suggest that consciously or unconsciously they have begun to distrust and to weary of their medium. They do not really believe in fiction any more. They are tired of it. They trudge along the old beaten paths because there seems nowhere else to go. But the landmarks have become nauseatingly familiar. Even the beginners have had the road described to them so often-they have had so much vicarious experience of its vicissitudes-they know so well in advance every possible complication of the itinerary that they are bored with the journey before they start. It does not matter which end they begin at or whether the chief travelers are godlike or monstrous or Mere People, as Daisy Ashford would say; fundamentally it is the same old stunt. And a stunt is essentially insincere, and insincerity spells boredom, and boredom -death.

It seems to me there is the odor of death about the first story of the youngest story-teller.

And it is not only in the writing. It is in the writers. Many of them, by their almost ferocious endeavor to appear new and different suggest a conscious staleness. The more they assert themselves as people engaged in a difficult and specialized task, the more they endeavor to individualize themselves in the public imagination by eccentricities or sheer bad manners, the more one suspects that if there is anything new under the sun they at any rate have not found it.

They have formed a sort of established colony amongst whom the customs of the pioneer still pertain without the audacity and the courage which made them endurable.

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The proof of the pudding is in the eating. And I venture to suggest that, all appearances to the contrary, the reading public is losing its taste for the highly standardized nourishment with which we contrive to serve them. The appearances are deceptive. Every day more people are learning to read and, more unfortunately, learning to write. It has become a new indoor sport for classes who fifty years ago never wrote or read a line if they could help it. The result is an overpowering increase in demand and output. But among those who have regarded books just as essential to their well-being and culture as toothbrushes, and for whom the best type of novelist hopes he is writing, indifference to fiction has long since set in. In other words, whilst new seams are being opened up, the old seams are rapidly becoming worked out. If producers and consumers still look over the ground picking up a fragment here and a fragment there, writing and reading in fact what they can find to write or read about, it is because there is, at present, nothing better to be found.

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There is too much fiction. It is poured in upon us from our newspapers and from every sort of public platform. Our very lives, our very selves are built up to correspond to a standardized make-believe. For a hundred years or so-since the possibilities of the industry were

first discovered-we have endured contentedly. Our Victorians were perfectly satisfied with the picture of men and women which they offered to the world and which was politely reflected back to them by their authors. They were neither self-analytical nor self-conscious and they believed implicitly that they were what they appeared to be. Every now and then a rebel would break the smooth and shining surface of the quiet pond in which they caught their own pleasing reflections -some wild poet or Ibsen tossing in the white-hot stone of his remorseless genius. But they were invariably frightened by their poets and horrified by "Ghosts."

But ours is a less happy age. We are balanced between two stools. Though we are far from demanding the truth we are nauseated with lies. We yearn for the bitter medicine but we have not the courage to order it. We go on drinking soft drinks

our intellectual soda-fountains though we know full well that our digestions are going to pieces as a consequence. We know that our real life is almost unbroken country into which only a few brave minds have penetrated and that fiction is just fiction. The fact that it has been served up to us with every sort of polished and unpolished artifice does not make it any more than what it really is—a glorified, adult fairystory grown stale with repetition.

The more alert among our authors have made note of the inevitably resulting stagnation. And, like aging beauties aware of a falling off both of their powers and of their admirers, they resort outrageously to the rouge-pot. To keep themselves nim

ble and supple they perform giddy and bewildering gymnastics. Some of them leave out their verbs. Some invert their sentences so that a perfect commonplace bears a seductive suggestion of lurking originality. Some assume an engaging air of rustic simplicity. Others perform feats of sheer industry, crowding into two volumes what Maupassant could have tossed off in two pages. They try, in fact, not only to appear different but to feel different -to suggest to themselves that they at least are grappling sincerely with real life. To their yearning spirits Freud appeared like a rescuing angel. He gave into their hands the tangled skeins of human complexities, and with those skeins they have been playing ever since, weaving the same old patterns with new colors and bewildering themselves and their readers into a state of delight as muddle-headed, as naïve and unsophisticated as that with which our ancestors accepted Ouida. Their discovery of obscenity, for instance, is as touching as though an unlettered savage, adrift in the Pacific, had suddenly bumped into the United States. To him the discovery would appear overwhelming to others who had already heard tell of that country and even lived in it, somewhat less

So.

In fact the so-called realists seem to me to have affected exactly nothing in their final effect upon fiction. And the main trouble with them is that they are not realists. James Joyce exploring actual and metaphorical lavatories, Wells panting a little in his rôle of prophet and exploding sociological and theological platitudes with the delighted air

of a small boy who has just discovered gunpowder, Dreiser who appears to be suffering from a form of intellectual elephantiasis and who in the painful effort to attain truth smothers it under an avalanche of irrelevant detail-to pick out three moderns haphazard—are as far from reality as Harold Bell Wright sitting on a pink cloud and dripping pink smiles on a pink world. They are all mere romantics approaching romance from a different angle. And we are aware-those of us who are aware of ourselves and we are an increasing number-that they are as far from depicting the soul of man, or if you prefer it his essential self, as the advertiser depicting the Real Husband in the Real Home being reunited to a Neglected Wife because she has bought a Patent Carpet-Sweeper out of her dress

our

of Freudianism only add to sense of irritation. Some obscure urge to conform still drives us. With every new psychological discovery we obligingly cut an imitative caper. But the lie is beginning to gall. The literary simulacre of ourselves, dogging our footsteps, is becoming something more than tiresome. We are not like that. We are neither so simple nor so complicated.

If a visiting Martian, having read our modern novels and magazines, were able to make a cross-section slice of all the homes in the world. and of all the minds of the people in those homes he would be immensely puzzled. He would be driven to the conclusion that here was a race that for some undiscovered reason paid large prices to a number of peculiarly constructed people to paint a subtle and entirely deceptive portrait of themselves. The portrait would be realistic in so far as it bore a superficial relation to the social, moral and intellectual habits of the mass. It would be fundamentally deceptive in so far as it left the essential nature of man's conflict with himself and with the universe untouched.

Man is a spirit. That is one of the disturbing facts which modern fiction has got to take into account or perish. It is true that that spirit is involved with materialism and that materialism is therefore a vital part of the story. But it is not the whole of the story. And we have allowed it to become an obsession. Worst of all it has helped us to put off the final reckoning with the more elusive aspect of ourselves. It is easy to depict ourselves as being entirely concerned with bonds, radios, mo

tor-cars, soda-fountains and the latest labor-saving devices. It is still easier to depict man as a sort of chemical formula or as an intellectual and emotional Ford car with standardized emotions, complexes and reactions. Any well brought up subscriber to a Course of Fiction Writing by Correspondence can do and unfortunately does as much. That is why there are so many writers and so many magazines. It is not so easy to depict man as a lost son of God, baffled, confused, tormented and self-tormenting, but none the less heroically battling his way through to his unknown goal. That is why there are so few poets.

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But even at the more obvious task we authors are not honest workmen. We are not allowed to be. There are a hundred aspects of every day life, well known to all of us, which are forbidden ground. There are millions of people who, judging by our biographers, do not exist at all. And it is not merely a matter of morals. The taboos stretch right and left into politics and commerce. As an example I venture to suggest that a story dealing honestly with modern advertising or suggesting that motor-cars are not a necessary adjunct to happiness would never see the light of day in any magazine. Religion, color, capital and labor, any vital question involving real life in the most accepted sense of the word-is ruled out from the start. It is true that I am speaking particularly of so-called popular fiction. But it is incredible how far these taboos stretch and how effectively they have locked our best minds into a cowardly, wearisome formula.

Art has been braver. Perhaps an artist is of necessity braver, for he takes his life in his hands when he devotes himself to art. From the outset the artist realizes that his chances of material prosperity are few and far between. His work has to be his happiness, his satisfaction and his high adventure. And if he has no joy in high adventure he is likely to be diverted into real estate or any other obvious means to a comfortable and prosperous end.

The artist, having already lost the world, has nothing left to lose but his sincerity. And as a result Art has very largely stripped itself of artifice. It has got back to essentials -to the primitives who cared very little whether a man's nose was in the middle of his face or not but who cared a great deal whether they were expressing truly his relation to God. And by "God" I mean that unknown quantity which is as actual to us as our daily bread, equally whether we believe in it or not.

Those of us who saw the recent Brancussi exhibition in New York will remember his two bird statuesone in brass, one in marble. They were not like birds at all in the accepted sense. Brancussi had stripped them of wings, beaks, eyes, claws and feathers. But they were birds. They were more than birds. They were the spirit of birds. One could never have wearied of them. For they were eternal truths.

There are no Brancussis in modern literature. There are a few experimentalists like Gertrude Stein who fail because they are playing with technique. They attain nothing but obscurity. Nobody understands Gertrude Stein. Possibly not even

The Russians-and to a lesser extent the Germans-have indeed made one great effort to bring fiction into relation with real life. As Brancussi stripped his birds of wings and feathers so they divested their characters of the inessential impedimenta with which humanity saddles itself. Money, position, possessions and all the complications in which those things involve us even our complexes and inhibitions of which the Russians were perfectly aware without Freud-were relegated to a subordinate importance. There remained Man himself painted against a background of Eternity.

For a time the Russian vogue was tremendous. But the wave spent itself. The Russians were too difficult to follow. Our Highbrows shrank from a task which must have inevitably reduced them to the level of the Lowbrows-a declension too cruel to be contemplated. Perhaps also the time was not ripe. At any rate it was much easier to go on juggling with syntax and psycho

analysis as long as the reading public would endure it. And the public is notoriously long-suffering.

But I believe that the end is in sight. By that I do not mean that the end of fiction is in sight. There have been story-tellers ever since man became articulate enough to lie about himself and there will be story-tellers till that millennium dawns when he will have found courage to tell the truth. But fiction as we know it to-day is a product of the last two hundred years and may well be nothing but a fashion which having reached its height will pass away, giving place to a new form and a new inspiration.

I cannot guess what that new form will be like. Nor when the new story-teller will appear-nor whether he will lead the way or be driven by the urgency of our need. There is nothing, lying hidden in the future about which I am more curious. Nevertheless I realize that it is just as well for me that he does not come in my time. For like the rest of my kind I have only a romantic and theoretic love for garrets and simple living.

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