The Letters of Ambrose Bierce, With a Memoir by George Sterling. Ambrose Bierce
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his vivid, dramatic passages beats a hatred of war, not merely "unrighteous" war, but all war, the more disquieting because never allowed to become articulate. With bitter but beautiful truth he brings each tale to its tragic close, always with one last turn of the screw, one unexpected horror more. And in this book—note the solemn implication of the title he later gave it, In the Midst of Life—as well as in the next, Can Such Things Be, is still another subject which Bierce alone in his generation seemed unafraid to consider curiously: "Death, in warfare and in the horrid guise of the supernatural, was painted over and over. Man's terror in the face of death gave the artist his cue for his wonderful physical and psychologic microscopics. You could not pin this work down as realism, or as romance; it was the greatest human drama—the conflict between life and death—fused through genius. Not Zola, in the endless pages of his Debâcle, not the great Tolstoi in his great War and Peacehad ever painted war, horrid war, more faithfully than any of the stories of this book; not Maupassant had invented out of war's terrible truths more dramatically imagined plots.... There painted an artist who had seen the thing itself, and being a genius, had made it an art still greater.
Death of the young, the beautiful, the brave, was the closing note of every line of the ten stories of war in this book. The brilliant, spectacular death that came to such senseless bravery as Tennyson hymned for the music-hall intelligence in his Charge of the Light Brigade; the vision-starting, slow, soul-drugging death by hanging; the multiplied, comprehensible death that makes rivers near battlefields run red; the death that comes by sheer terror; death actual and imagined—every sort of death was on these pages, so painted as to make Pierre Loti's Book of Pity and Death seem but feeble fumbling."
Now death by the mid-Victorian was considered almost as undesirable an element in society as sex itself. Both must be passed over in silence or presented decently draped. In the eighties any writer who dealt unabashed with death was regarded as an unpleasant person. "Revolting!" cried the critics when they read Bierce's Chickamauga and The Affair at Coulter's Notch.
Bierce's style, too, by its very fineness, alienated his public. Superior, keen, perfect in detail, finite, compressed—such was his manner in the free and easy, prolix, rambling, multitudinous nineteenth century.
Bierce himself knew that although it is always the fashion to jeer at fashion, its rule is absolute for all that, whether it be fashion in boots or books.
"A correspondent of mine," he wrote in 1887 in his Examinercolumn, "a well-known and clever writer, appears surprised because I do not like the work of Robert Louis Stevenson. I am equally hurt to know that he does. If he was ever a boy he knows that the year is divided, not into seasons and months, as is vulgarly supposed, but into 'top time,' 'marble time,' 'kite time,' et cetera, and woe to the boy who ignores the unwritten calendar, amusing himself according to the dictates of an irresponsible conscience. I venture to remind my correspondent that a somewhat similar system obtains in matters of literature—a word which I beg him to observe means fiction. There are, for illustration—or rather, there were—James time, Howells time, Crawford time, Russell time and Conway time, each epoch—named for the immortal novelist of the time being—lasting, generally speaking, as much as a year.... All the more rigorous is the law of observance. It is not permitted to admire Jones in Smith time. I must point out to my heedless correspondent that this is not Stevenson time—that was last year." It was decidedly not Bierce time when Bierce's stories appeared.
And there was in him no compromise—or so he thought. "A great artist," he wrote to George Sterling, "is superior to his world and his time, or at least to his parish and his day." His practical application of that belief is shown in a letter to a magazine editor who had just rejected a satire he had submitted:
"Even you ask for literature—if my stories are literature, as you are good enough to imply. (By the way, all the leading publishers of the country turned down that book until they saw it published without them by a merchant in San Francisco and another sort of publishers in London, Leipsig and Paris.) Well, you wouldn't do a thing to one of my stories!
"No, thank you; if I have to write rot, I prefer to do it for the newspapers, which make no false pretenses and are frankly rotten, and in which the badness of a bad thing escapes detection or is forgotten as soon as it is cold.
"I know how to write a story (of 'happy ending' sort) for magazine readers for whom literature is too good, but I will not do so, so long as stealing is more honorable and interesting. I have offered you ... the best that I am able to make; and now you must excuse me." In these two utterances we have some clue to the secret of his having ceased, in 1893, to publish stories. Vigorously refusing to yield in the slightest degree to the public so far as his stories were concerned, he abandoned his best field of creative effort and became almost exclusively a "columnist" and a satirist; he put his world to rout, and left his "parish and his day" resplendently the victors.
All this must not be taken to mean that the "form and pressure of the time" put into Bierce what was not there. Even in his creative work he had a satiric bent; his early training and associations, too, had been in journalistic satire. Under any circumstances he undoubtedly would have written satire—columns of it for his daily bread, books of it for self-expression; but under more favorable circumstances he would have kept on writing other sort of books as well. Lovers of literature may well lament that Bierce's insistence on going his way and the demands of his "parish" forced him to overdevelop one power to the almost complete paralysis of another and a perhaps finer.
As a satirist Bierce was the best America has produced, perhaps the best since Voltaire. But when he confined himself to "exploring the ways of hate as a form of creative energy," it was with a hurt in his soul, and with some intellectual and spiritual confusion. There resulted a kink in his nature, a contradiction that appears repeatedly, not only in his life, but in his writings. A striking instance is found in his article To Train a Writer:
"He should, for example, forget that he is an American and remember that he is a man. He should be neither Christian nor Jew, nor Buddhist, nor Mahometan, nor Snake Worshiper. To local standards of right and wrong he should be civilly indifferent. In the virtues, so-called, he should discern only the rough notes of a general expediency; in fixed moral principles only time-saving predecisions of cases not yet before the court of conscience. Happiness should disclose itself to his enlarging intelligence as the end and purpose of life; art and love as the only means to happiness. He should free himself of all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, politics, simplifying his life and mind, attaining clarity with breadth and unity with height. To him a continent should not seem wide nor a century long. And it would be needful that he know and have an ever-present consciousness that this is a world of fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions—frothing mad!"
Up to that last sentence Ambrose Bierce beholds this world as one where tolerance, breadth of view, simplicity of life and mind, clear thinking, are at most attainable, at least worthy of the effort to attain; he regards life as purposive, as having happiness for its end, and art and love as the means to that good end. But suddenly the string from which he has been evoking these broad harmonies snaps with a snarl. All is evil and hopeless—"frothing mad." Both views cannot be held simultaneously by the same mind. Which was the real belief of Ambrose Bierce? The former, it seems clear. But he has been hired to be a satirist.
On the original fabric of Bierce's mind the satiric strand has encroached more than the design allows. There results not only considerable obliteration of the main design, but confusion in the substituted one. For it is significant that much of the work of Bierce seems to be that of what he would have called a futilitarian, that he seldom seems able to find a suitable field for his satire, a foeman worthy of such perfect steel as he brings to the encounter; he fights on all fields, on both sides, against all comers; ubiquitous, indiscriminate, he is as one who screams in pain at his own futility, one who "might be heard," as he says of our civilization, "from afar in space as a scolding and a riot." That Bierce would have spent so much of his superb power on the trivial and the ephemeral, breaking magnificent vials of wrath on Oakland nobodies, preserving insignificant black beetles in the amber of his art, is not merely, as it has long been,