In
the last past post, we’d just stepped into the pearly gates of Hamlin’s heaven. Now
let’s get into the labyrinthine meadows and meandering pathways that lead us by default, into the garden of spices ensconced within Hamlin’s pearly gates!
As we’ve stated earlier on, the best wine is served the
last! Ain’t it? And here you are served! Come thou literary soul, partake of the choicest
of wines from off the cellars of Hamlin’s heaven! Right here! right now!!
Eternity is yours! Entirely!!
Indeed,
restating one sentence from our past post yet again: Hamlin proves a
real invigorating read, enriching our sensibilities, fine-tuning our literary
focus, rejuvenating our literary hearts and pervading our literary souls to the
core!
This post would then be in continuation of Hamlin and his charm! Here
he speaks extensively on his delightful theory of art – that he calls Veritism!
Here
goes Hamlin -
THE secret of every lasting success in art and literature lies, I
believe, in a powerful, sincere, emotional concept of life first, and, second,
in the acquired power to convey that concept to others. This leads necessarily
to individuality in authorship, and to freedom from past models.
This theory of the veritist is, after all, a statement of his passion for
truth and for individual expression. The passion does not spring from theory;
the theory rises from the love of the verities, which seems to increase day by
day all over the Western world.
The veritist, therefore, must not be taken to be dogmatic, only so far as
he is personally concerned. He is occupied in stating his sincere convictions,
believing that only in that way is the cause of truth advanced.
He addresses himself to the mind prepared to listen. He destroys by displacement
not by attacking directly.
It is a settled conviction with me that each locality must produce its own
literary record, each special phase of life utter its own voice.
There is no other way for a true local expression to embody itself. The sun of
truth strikes each part of the earth at a little different angle; it is this
angle which gives life and infinite variety to literature. It is the subtle
differences which life presents in California and Oregon, for example, which will
produce, and justify, a Pacific-Coast literature.
In all that I have written upon local literature, I have told the
truth as I saw it. That others did not see it in the same light, was to be
expected. And in writing upon PacificCoast literature, undoubtedly I shall once
more be stating the cause of veritism; For the question of Pacific-Coast
literature is really the question of genuine American iterature. The same
principles apply to all sections of the land.
The mere fact that a writer happens to live in California or Oregon will
not make him a part of that literature, any more than Stevenson's life in Samoa
will make him a Samoan author. A nation, in the early part of its literary
history, is likely to sweep together all that can, by any construction, be called
its literature; but as it grows rich in real utterances, it eliminates one
after the other all those writings which its clearer judgment perceives to be
exotics.
Veritism, as I understand it, puts aside all models, even living writers.
Whatever he may do unconsciously, the artist must consciously stand alone
before nature and before life. Nature and life have changed since Miller and
Harte wrote. The California of to-day is quite different. The creative writer
to-day, if true to himself, finds himself interested in other subjects, and
finds himself believing in a different treatment of even the same material.
‘Being a farmer by birth and a novelist by occupation’, I saw most clearly the
literary possibilities of the farmer's life in the valleys of California and in
the stupendous forests of Oregon.
I saw children moving along to school in the shadow of the most splendid
mountains; I saw a youth plowing, behind him rose a row of palms, against which
he stood like a figure of bronze in relief; I saw young men and maidens walking
down aisles of green and crimson pepper-trees, and the aisles led to blue
silhouetted mountains;
I saw men herding cattle where the sun beat with hot radiance, and
strange cacti held out wild arms; I saw children playing about cabins, setting at
defiance the illimitable width and sunless depths of the Oregon forests, and I thought,
‘Perhaps one of these is the novelist or painter of the future’.
Perhaps the future poet of these spaces is plowing somewhere like
that, because it must be that from the splendor and dramatic contrast of such
scenes the poet will rise. He always has, and he always will. His feet will be
on the soil like Whittier's, and like Miller’s;
His song will differ from theirs because he will be an individual soul,
and because his time and his environment will not be the same.
Why should the Western artists and poets look away to Greece and Rome and Persia for
themes? I have met Western people who were writing blank-verse tragedies of the
Middle Ages and painting pictures of sirens and cherubs, and still considered
themselves Western writers and Western artists!
The reason is not hard to find. They had not risen to the perception of the
significant and beautiful in their own environment, or they were looking for
effects, without regard to
their sincere conviction. They were poets of books, not of life.
This insincerity is fatal to any great work of art. A man must be moved by
something higher than money, by something higher than hope of praise; he must
have a sleepless love in his heart urging him to re-create in the image the
life he has loved.
He must be burdened and without rest until he has given birth to his
conception. He will not be questioned when he comes; he will be known as a
product of some one time and place, a voice speaking the love of his heart.
The lovers who wander down the aisles of orange or lemon or pepper trees
will not marvel at blooms and shrubs. Their presence and perfume will be
familiar and lovely, not strange. The stark lines of the fir and the broadsword-thrust
of the banana-leaf will not attract their surprised look. All will be as
friendly and grateful as the maple or the Lombardy poplar to the Iowa
school-boy.
A new literature will come with the generation just coming to
manhood and womanhood on the Coast. If rightly educated, their eyes will turn
naturally to the wheat-fields, the forests, the lanes of orange-trees, the ranges
of unsurpassed mountains. They will try to express in the novel, the drama, in painting
and in song, the love and interest they take in the things close at hand.
This literature will not deal with crime and abnormities, nor with deceased
persons. It will deal, I believe, with the wholesome love of honest men for
honest women, with the heroism of labor, the comradeship of men, a drama of
average types of character, infinitely varied, but always characteristic.
In this literature will be the shadows of mountain-islands, the sweep
of dun plains, and dark-blue mountain-ranges silhouetted against a burning
yellow sky.
It will deal with mighty forests and with man's brave war against the
gloom and silence. It will have in it types of vanishing races, and prophecies of
coming citizens. It will have the perfume of the orange and lemon trees, the
purple dapple of spicy pepper-tree fruit, the grace of drooping, fern-like
acacia leaves.
And in the midst of these sights and sounds, moving to and fro in the shadow
of these mountains, and feeling the presence of this sea, will be men and women
working out the drama of life in a new way, thinking new thoughts, building a
happier, sunnier order of things, perhaps, where the laborer will face the
winter always without fear and without despondency.
The observer, the independent investigator of facts, could hardly be
said to have existed. Tradition, the organized conceptions of the race, reigned
over the individual, and men did not think. The Scriptures had said it all.
There was no room for science.
It is not my purpose to write the history of the development of
literature. I have drifted farther into the general subject than I intended. I
am merely preparing the way for some more or less valuable ideas upon the
future of American fiction.
Evolutionists explain the past by means of laws operative in the
present, by survivals of change. In an analogous way, we may infer (broadly, of
course) the future of society, and therefore its art, from changes just
beginning to manifest themselves. The developed future is always prophesied in
the struggling embryos of the present. In the mold of the present are the
swelling acorns of future forests.
Fiction already commands the present in the form of the novel of
life. It already outranks verse and the drama as a medium, of expression. It is
so flexible, admits of so many points of view, and comprehends so much (uniting
painting and rhythm to the drama and the pure narrative), that it has come to
be the highest form of expression in Russia, Germany, Norway, and France. It
occupies with easy tolerance the high seats in the synagogue, and felicitates
the other arts on having got in, or rather stayed in at all. At its best it
certainly is the most modern and unconventional of arts.
Taking it as it stands to-day in America, the novel not only shows its
relation to the past and the present, but it holds within itself prophecies of
impending change. No other medium of art expression is so sensitive to demand.
Change is sure. What will it be ?
We are about to enter the dark. We need a light. This flaming
thought from Whitman will do for the search-light of the profound deeps : All
that the past was not, the future will be.
If the past was bond, the future will be free. If the past was
feudalistic, the future will be democratic. If the past ignored and trampled
upon women, the future will place them side by side with men. If the child of
the past was ignored, the future will cherish him, And fiction will embody
these facts.
If the past was dark and battleful and bloody and barbarous, the future
will be peaceful and sunny. If the past celebrated lust and greed and love of
power, the future will celebrate continence and humility and altruism. If the
past was the history of a few titled personalities riding high on obscure waves
of nameless, suffering humanity, the future will be the day of high average
personality, the abolition of all privilege, the peaceful walking together of
brethren, equals before nature and before the law. And fiction will celebrate
this life.
One of these central elements of unchanging power, always manifest in
every really great literature, is sincerity in method. This produces
contemporaneousness. The great writers of the past did not write "for all
time," not even for the future. They mainly were occupied in interesting
some portion of their fellow-men. Shakespeare had no care and little thought of
the eighteenth century in his writing.
The fiction of the future will not be
romantic
in any such sense as Scott or Hugo was romantic, because to do that would be to
re-live the past, which is impossible; to imitate models, which is fatal.
Reader and writer will both be wanting. The element of originality follows from
the power of the element of sincerity. "All original art," says Taine,
"is self-regulative."
It does not imitate. It does not follow models. It stands before life,
and is accountant to life and self only. Therefore, the fiction of the future
must be original, and therefore selfregulative.
The fiction of the past dealt largely with types, often with
abstractions or caricatures. It studied men in heroic attitudes. It concerned
itself mainly with love and war. It did not study men intimately, except in
vicious or criminal moods.
As fiction has come to deal more and more with men and less with
abstractions, it will be safe to infer that this will continue. Eugene Veron
covered the ground fully when he said, "We care no longer for gods or
heroes; we care for men." This is true of veritism, whose power and influence
augment daily; even the romance writers feel its influence, and are abandoning
their swiftly running love-stories for studies of character.
Like the romantic school of painting, they are affected by the
influence they fear.
The novels of Bulwer, Scott, and Hugo, are, after all, mixed with aristocratic
influence, though Hugo had much more of what might be called the modern spirit,
even in his socalled historical studies.
It is safe to say that the fiction of the
future will
grow more democratic in outlook and more individualistic in method.
Impressionism, in its deeper sense, means the statement of one's own individual
perception of life and nature, guided by devotion to truth.
Second to this great principle is the law that each impression must be
worked out faithfully on separate canvases, each work of art complete in
itself. Literalism, the book that can be quoted in bits, is like a picture that
can be cut into pieces.
It lacks unity.
The higher art would seem to be the art that perceives and states the
relations of things, giving atmosphere and relative values as they appeal to
the sight.
The realist or veritist is really an optimist, a dreamer. He sees life in
terms of what it might be, as well as in terms of what it is; but he writes of
what is, and, at his best, suggests what is to be, by contrast. He aims to be
perfectly truthful in his delineation of his relation to life, but there is a
tone, a color, which comes unconsciously into his utterance, like the sobbing
stir of the muted violins beneath the frank, clear song of the clarionet; and
this tone is one of sorrow that the good time moves so slowly in its approach.
He aims to hasten the age of beauty and
peace
by delineating the ugliness and warfare of the present; but ever the converse
of his picture rises in the mind of the reader. He sighs for a lovelier life.
He is tired of warfare and diseased sexualism, and Poverty the mother of Envy.
Students may be taught to believe they believe, but the great masses of
American readers want the modern comment. They want the past colored to suit
their ideas of life, that is, the readers of romance;
On higher planes 'of reading they want sincere delineation of modern life
and thought, and Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dante, Milton, are fading away into
mere names, books we should read but seldom do.
We have but to examine the ground
closely,
and we see the green shoots of the coming harvest beneath our very feet. We
have but to examine closely the most naive and local of our novels, and the
coming literature will be foreshadowed there. The local novelist seems to be
the corning woman ! Local color is the royal robe.
LOCAL color in fiction is demonstrably the life of fiction. It is the native element, the
differentiating element. It corresponds to the endless and vital charm of
individual peculiarity. It is the differences which interest us; the
similarities do not please, do not forever stimulate and feed as do the
differences. Literature would die of dry rot if it chronicled the similarities
only, or even largely.
Every great moving literature to-day is full of local color. It is
this element which puts the Norwegian and Russian almost at the very summit of
modern novel writing, and It is the comparative lack of this distinctive flavor
which makes the English and French take a lower place in truth and sincerity.
Everywhere all over the modern European world, men are writing novels
and dramas as naturally as the grass or corn or flax grows. The Provencal, the
Hun, the Catalonian, the Norwegian, is getting a hearing. This literature is
not the literature of scholars; it is the literature of lovers and doers; of
men who love the modern and who have not been educated to despise common
things. These men are speaking a new word. They are not hunting themes, they are
struggling to express.
Conventional criticism does not hamper or confine them. They are
rooted in the soil. They stand among the corn-fields and they digi in the
peat-bogs. They concern themselves with modern and very present words and
themes, and they have brought a new word which is to divide in half the domain
of beauty.
They have made art the re-creation of the beautiful and the significant.
Mere beauty no longer suffices. Beauty is the world-old aristocrat who has
taken for mate this mighty young plebeian Significance. Their child is to be
the most human and humane literature ever seen.
It has taken the United States longer to achieve independence of English critics
than it took to free itself from old-world political and economic rule. Its
political freedom was won, not by its gentlemen and scholars, but by its
yeomanry; and in the same way our national literature will come in its fulness
when the common American rises spontaneously to the expression of his concept
of life.
The fatal blight upon most American art has been, and is to-day, its
imitative quality, which has kept it characterless and factitious, a forced
rose-culture rather than the free flowering of native plants.
Our writers despised or feared the home market. They rested their immortality
upon the ‘universal theme’, which was a theme of no interest to the public and
of small interest to themselves.
As the reader will see, I am using local color to mean something more
than a forced study of the picturesque scenery of a State.
Local color in a novel means that it has such quality of texture and
back-ground that it could not have been written in any other place or by any
one else than a native.
It means a statement of life as indigenous as the plant-growth.
It means that the picturesque shall not be seen by the author, that every
tree and bird and mountain shall be dear and companionable and necessary, not
picturesque; the tourist cannot write the local novel.
From this it follows that local color must not be put in for the sake of local
color. It must go in, it will go in, because the writer naturally carries it
with, him half unconsciously, or conscious only of its significance, its
interest to him. He must not stop to think whether it will interest the reader
or not. He must be loyal to himself, and put it in because he loves it. If he
is an artist, he will make his reader feel it through his own emotion.
And as noted critic Scupin Richards rightly avers, “Hamlin
is for real the pied piper who has you tied tighter, wound around his charmed magic casements – his words!”
How trueeey!!!
And
he, one hopes, would sure give the likes of an Arnold or a Dryden
a run for their money!
Hail
Hamlin - the pied piper who vouches to veritism and to local
colour!
image: amazondotcom, Goscinny & Uderzo’s
Obelix, and this blogger's!
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