Literature: Some Aspects in the West
By Porter Garnett
THE aesthetic growth of the West, particularly in literature, is matter of interest. It is as vital to our humanities and our civilization as our financial and commercial sanity. Its growth represents our intellectual status. But what are the facts of this growth? Divesting the subject of parochial prejudice, what conclusions are to be drawn from the output? "What is its weight, its importance? How much of value do the recent performances of Western writers hold? How much of their work is ephemeral, and how much has promise of permanence? A discussion of the subject may be fruitful of facts upon which to base a verdict.
The names that immediately occur to us are those of Joaquin Miller, George Sterling, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, James Hopper, Mary Austin, Gertrude Atherton. Some of these have produced work recently which will aid the discussion to be continued from month to month in this department. Others of secondary and tertiary importance will be touched upon as their art, their interest, or their significance in the interpretation of Western life, may suggest and a fairly complete survey of contemporary Western literature be attained. The term "Western literature" is, however, misleading if not altogether foolish. It implies a separateness, a category which has, or should have, nothing to do with art or its appraisement. Art is universal. In history it is divisible into periods, but, even in the perspective of years, its divisions are marked by nations and languages rather than by localities. Exceptions may be pointed out in the Attic and Laconic literatures and in Etruscan sculpture and Byzantine architecture, but such distinctions are matters of school rather than of geography. In treating Western expression in letters we are dealing not with a local aspect of art, nor with a part of a national literature, but with a part of the literature of a language. Let us speak then not of Western literature, but of literature in the West, and let us see what the West is contributing to the literature of the English tongue.
It may be safely said that English literature today, taken by and large, is made up of a vast amount of very admirable second-class work and a vast amount of work which drops off in diminishing degrees of unimportance. This great volume of second-class production may be again divided into an upper second class and a sub second class, or, to use the social terminology, an upper and a lower middle class. In the latter of these classes fully ninety-five per cent of the best that is being written belongs, and the greatest compliment that can be paid a writer is to say that he belongs to the upper middle class of literature. It remains for future generations to determine whether or not some of these are not of the first order of excellence—the universal and eternal.
In France the ratio more closely approximates a parity of the two classes. In the upper middle class, headed by Anatole France, and numbering in its order such men as Rictus, Octave Mirbeau, and Rostand, we see the race of giants continued and standards set by those great moderns, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Verlaine, in a fair way of being upheld after their passing. In English letters the race of giants is well-nigh extinct. Kipling and Conrad (a foreigner) loom large, but where shall we find a mate for these in stature? Henry James, say you? or Stephen Phillips? or Alfred Noyes? If we extend our quest to America are we arrested by the artistic proportions of W. D. Howells or Edith Wharton? Pursuing our search still farther West we can
