C. C. Baldwin
The Men Who Make Our Novels
Dodd, Mead & Co.
New York 1924
To Judy
Whose Severest Critic I Am
Robert W. Chambers
"He is shy to the point of obscurity," says Rupert Hughes, who ought to know and can, I presume, be trusted on oath. "He is the least photographed, least press-agented, least 'posey' successful author in the world."
Of course, this would not necessarily make Mr. Chambers either famous, great or interesting; but it would add to our impression of him as a man - if true. But there has pored in on my desk, from Mr. Chambers' various agents and publishers, such a mass of photographs, interviews, magazine articles, press notices - Mr. Chambers in his garden, Mr. Chambers hunting wild boar, Mr. Chambers fishing, or discussing Chinese jade, at work, at play - that were I not already doubtful of the Major's say-so, I might be forced to believe in at least two, if not three or four, R. W. Chamberses. But I know that the sentences I have quoted are just the Major's way of saying more or less obscurely, that he is fond of Mr. Chambers. I know the Major's limitations. He cannot like you unless you are the most or the least something-or-other. To be simple, without pretense or affectation, is to be lost in that circle which, with the death of Howells, has taken to wholesaling novels in job lots to people who have no interest whatsoever in literature and very little in life - if they can escape into a world of trivial emotions and easy adventure they are happy.
II
To be shy and unphotographed is, to say the most, no proof of virtue. Shaw was never averse to speaking his mind and he towers above our little heirs of all the ages. But even so, Mr. Chambers cannot be called shy - as Willa Cather is shy, as Edwin Arlington Robinson is shy, as was W. H. Hudson. Mr. Chambers is none of the things that the Major claims for him. Why, then, did Hughes (who, at that time, was being paid to boost Chambers, among the others) write as he did? Because he could think of nothing else to say. Mr. Chambers must be made to seem astounding - and he isn't. He has facility and grace and wit; he had in him, some think, the makings of an artist; but he sold out early to ephemeral fancy and he made for himself, as he believes, a good bargain. He is well satisfied. He has not tried to do anything of enduring worth - and he never will. Forty-five volumes in the first twenty years of his writing life - short stories, novels, juveniles, verse, a play and nature studies - and not a one of them an improvement of the other. Indeed, had I my choice I'd take the first three or four and let the rest go hang. The best Chambers was his youth, his running on wherever the notion took him, his apparently inexhaustible ingenuity, his high spirits, his admiration for beautiful but empty-headed girls, his interest in the man who is not tied down to some tiresome job. But now that he wants to discuss divorce and the failure of most marriages, the brutality of the Germans, the God-fearing heroics of America, he is a bore.
III
Robert William Chambers was born in Brooklyn, May 26, 1865, but (as the Major says) he has tried to make amends for that early mistake. He has fought shy of the merely so-so, the commonplace, the ordinary, every-day life of our time. You have his measure when you ask him to write of the family next door. He can't do it. You would never recognize your neighbor as wither possible or probable once Mr. Chambers had been commissioned to put him into a book. He would become addicted to sipping Cologne; he would speak with sudden flashes - as though Wilde were his mentor; he would inherit a lot of rugs and bric-�-brac; his body would be beautiful; and without any evil intent he would succumb to the attractions of every pretty face he saw - but his feet would be so far off the ground it would be impossible to trip him up.
Mr. Chambers is not interested in his neighbors. He lives in a Hans Anderson world, a woodland world; and it is there he shines. When he writes of gardens, of lakes in the forest, of flowers and clouds and hills, he is at his best - and that best is pretty good.
IV
He studied drawing at the Art Students' League in New York, where he had Charles Dana Gibson as a fellow-pupil. With Gibson he went to submit his first sketches to Life. As might be expected, Gobson's drawings were refused, those of Chambers were accepted; so Chambers set sail for Paris and Gibson stayed home. In Paris Chambers studied at the �cole des Beaux Arts, and at Julian's, from 1886 - 1893. In 1889, at the age of twenty-four, he had his first painting accepted by the Salon - and he has been a Salon painter ever since.
If you have ever been in Paris you will know what that means. Sentiment and anecdote set up as the noblest end of art; a catering to every taste; smooth surfaces; imbecile smiles; learn what the public wants - and give till it hurts. Nothing of the pity of Rodin, the deep shadows of Brangwyn, the open-eyed wonder of Whistler; no excursions with Odilon Redon into the unknown, no attacking of convention with Augustus John or Jack Yeats; no freedom, no robust rebellion against an effeminate age - just something pretty, like a soap ad.
V
He returned to New York in 1893, and for a time supported himself by doing illustrations for Life, Vogue, Truth, etc. Then it occurred to him, under the influence of Henri Murger's La Vie de Boh�me, to make some use of his Latin Quarter experiences and he wrote In the Quarter. It was immediately accepted. It was successful in its way. And Mr. Chambers (who thought nothing of devoting seven years to learning the rudiments of black and white) decided overnight that he was a writer of parts. Discipline was unnecessary, form, coherence, accent and restraint. You merely babbled on and - there's your book. How different it all might have been had he been a student of literature as he was a student of the lesser arts - had he suffered, for a while, the agonies of refusal. But his instant acceptance by the public gave him a contempt for the craft of the novelist. It was just one of a dozen things that he could do and do well enough to earn a fair living. So he set to work on The King in Yellow; and before the year was out his second book had been published. His facility was his undoing. He became easy-going as his readers, as uncritical, as well-pleaded with any and everything.
VI
In The Quarter describes, in a series of vivid pen pictures, the usual ups and downs in the modern art student's like, the pathos and humor of it all, the poverty, the feasts, the entanglement of a American with a Parisian model of the better sort, an estrangement brought about by the American's inheritance of a fortune, the interference of a jealous sister, and finally with all the melodrama considered so essential, the murder of the American by the sister. In short a pretty howdy-do, without coherence or reason - but lively, moving with the lighting speed which is so characteristic of Mr. Chambers at his most exuberant.
VII
The King In Yellow clinched Mr. Chamber's decision. He would throw over illustrating and become in deadly earnest, an author - at first of short stories, and then, in The Witch of Ellangowgn, with Ada Rehan as Meg Merrilies, of a play for Augustin Daly - dramatized from Scott's novel, so tradition had it, in a week.
VIII
Mr. Chambers knows how to tell a story; and if you want to have the hair raised on your head, read The King In Yellow - or The Makers of Moons, for preference, all about a band of unscrupulous counterfeiters who have discovered the alchemist's long-sought gold, moonshine gold that defies chemical analyses but leaves, wherever it is found, curious, crawling, misshapen creatures, half crab, half spider, a-litter on the ground. And there the dream-lady who appears to the hero, standing beside a fairy fountain, speaking of a magic city beyond, the seat-scented gardens, the pleasant noise of the summer wind, laden with bee music and the music of bells."
IX
Followed then, at irregular intervals, four novels dealing with the Franco-Prussian War - Lorraine, Ashes of Empire, The Red Republic and The Maids of Paradise - all with their languishing heroines, and for heroes, dashing young Americans who overcome evil as easily as, in less proper times, Boccacio's anchorite put the devil back into hell; situations bordering on farce, characters for the most part as wooden as their heads, but all recounted in the accepted manner, following the fashion set by Stanley Weyman, Max Pemberton and that fine faker, Richard Harding Davis.
X
Then, in an off moment, Mr. Chambers lost his temper and blurted out some of the bitter truths he had learned in his always heretofore guarded dissatisfaction with things as they are. He ridiculed American culture, American architecture, American society, the petty like of our self-styled Bohemians, the second-rate scribblers who do our writing for us; and he did it all so vigorously that, among his friends, a cry went up against him - Chambers Chambers had blundered. They wanted the Outsiders recalled.
But it is, for all that, a sincere and honest piece of work. --
XI
"Far up the ravine of masonry and iron a beautiful spire, blue in the distance, rose from a Gothic church that seemed to close the great thoroughfare at its northern limit.
"That's Grace Church," said Oliver, with a little catch in his voice.
"It was first familiar landmark that he had sound in the city of his boyhood - and he had been away only a dozen years. Suddenly he realized the difference between a city in the Old World acceptance of the term, and the city before his eyes - this stupendous excrescence of naked iron, gaunt under its skin of paint, flimsily colossal, ludicrously sad - this half-begun, irrational, gaudy, dingy monstrosity - this temporary fair-ground, choked with tinsel, ill-paved, ill-lighted, stark, treeless, swarming, crawling with humanity."
XII
I hear it said that Mr. Chambers would like to go back to the "Outsiders"; that he is tired of pretending that wealth and mere numbers are enough, that beauty follows after the crowd; that when a fat broker builds his summer home on the North Shore it is worth a volume of extravagant prose. Mr. Chambers is, rumor says, aweary of boosters and boasters, of Athalie and Iole, the gilt and monotony of Newport and Palm Beach.
Perhaps. But it is late for him to be turning over a new leaf. Editors are hard put to it to fill their gawdy magazines with just the right mixture of daring and drivel - and Mr. Chambers knows their formula. Money may not be the only good, but (time out of mind) it has made the mare go. The editors will keep Mr. Chambers put. And watching much difficulty, for it is possible that if he took to serious writing - took to imitating Mr. Brotnfield - he would fail. He will not repeat the sarcasms of the Outsiders. He is getting on; and three-halfpenny-worth of ease is worth sixpence to him.
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