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diff --git a/old/12563-8.txt b/old/12563-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..427f0d2 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/12563-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,4787 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) +by Carl Van Doren + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) + +Author: Carl Van Doren + +Release Date: June 8, 2004 [EBook #12563] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTS *** + + + + +Produced by Ted Garvin, Linda Cantoni, and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team. + + + + + +CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTS + +1900-1920 + + +BY + +CARL VAN DOREN + + + +1922 + + + + +To + +FREDA KIRCHWEY + + + + +PREFACE + + +_The American Novel_, published last year, undertook to trace the +progress of a literary type in the United States from its beginnings to +the end of the nineteenth century; _Contemporary American Novelists_ +undertakes to study the type as it has existed during the first two +decades of the twentieth century. Readers of both volumes may note that +in this later volume criticism has tended to supplant history. Only in +writing of dead authors can the critic feel that any considerable +portion of his task is done when he has arranged them in what he thinks +their proper categories and their true perspective. In the case of +living authors he has regularly to remember that he works with shifting +materials, with figures whose dimensions and importance may be changed +by growth, with persons who may desert old paths for new, reveal +unsuspected attributes, increase or fade with the mere revolutions of +time. All he can expect to do in dealing with any current type as fluid +as the novel, is, seizing upon it at some specific moment, to examine +the intentions and successes of outstanding or typical individuals and +to make the most accurate report possible concerning them. Whatever +general tendency there may be ought to appear from his examination. + +The general tendency appearing most clearly among the novelists here +studied is, of course, the drift of naturalism: initiated a full +generation ago by several restless spirits, of whom E.W. Howe and Hamlin +Garland are the most conspicuous survivors; continued by those young +geniuses Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, all dead before their +time, and by Theodore Dreiser, Robert Herrick, Upton Sinclair, happily +still alive; given a fresh impulse during the shaken years of the war +and of the recovery from war by such satirists as Edgar Lee Masters and +Sinclair Lewis and their companions in the new revolt. The intelligent +American fiction of the century has to be studied--so far as the novel +is concerned--largely in terms of its agreement or its disagreement with +this naturalistic tendency, which has been powerful enough to draw +Winston Churchill and Booth Tarkington into an approach to its +practices, to drive James Branch Cabell and Joseph Hergesheimer into +explicit dissent, and to throw into strong relief the balanced +independence of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. The year 1920, marking a +peak in the triumph of one or two species of naturalism and in some ways +closing a chapter, affords an admirable occasion to take stock. This +book, indeed, was planned and begun at the close of that year and has +firmly resisted the temptation to do more than glance at most of the +work produced since then--even at the price of giving what must seem +insufficient notice to _The Triumph of the Egg_ and _Three Soldiers_ +and of giving none at all to that still more recent masterpiece +_Cytherea_. While criticism pauses to take stock, creation steadily goes +on. + +Acknowledgments are due _The Nation_ for permission to reprint from its +pages those portions of the volume which have already been published +there. + +CARL VAN DOREN. + +March, 1922. + + + + +CONTENTS + + +I OLD STYLE + +1. Local Color +2. Romance + +II ARGUMENT + +1. Hamlin Garland +2. Winston Churchill +3. Robert Herrick +4. Upton Sinclair +5. Theodore Dreiser + +III ART + +1. Booth Tarkington +2. Edith Wharton +3. James Branch Cabell +4. Willa Cather +5. Joseph Hergesheimer + +IV NEW STYLE + +1. Emergent Types + +_Ellen Glasgow, William Allen White, Ernest Poole, Henry B. Fuller, Mary +Austin, Immigrants._ + +2. The Revolt from the Village + +_Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, E.W. Howe, Sinclair Lewis, Zona +Gale, Floyd Dell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Canfield, 1921._ + + + + +CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTS + + + + +CHAPTER I + +OLD STYLE + + +1. LOCAL COLOR + +A study of the American novel of the twentieth century must first of all +take stock of certain types of fiction which continue to persist, with +varying degrees of vitality and significance, from the last quarter of +the century preceding. + +There is, to begin with, the type associated with the now moribund cult +of local color, which originally had Bret Harte for its prophet, and +which, beginning almost at once after the Civil War, gradually broadened +out until it saw priests in every state and followers in every county. +Obedient to the example of the prophet, most of the practitioners of the +mode chose to be episodic rather than epic in their undertakings; the +history of local color belongs primarily to the historian of the short +story. Even when the local colorists essayed the novel they commonly did +little more than to expand some episode into elaborate dimensions or to +string beads of episode upon an obvious thread. Hardly one of them ever +made any real advance, either in art or reputation, upon his earliest +important volume: George Washington Cable, after more than forty years, +is still on the whole best represented by his _Old Creole Days_; and +so--to name only the chief among the survivors--after intervals not +greatly shorter are Mary N. Murfree ("Charles Egbert Craddock") by _In +the Tennessee Mountains_, Thomas Nelson Page by _In Ole Virginia_, Mary +E. Wilkins Freeman by _A Humble Romance and Other Stories_, James Lane +Allen by _Flute and Violin_, and Alice Brown by _Meadow-Grass_. + +The eager popular demand for these brevities does not entirely account +for the failure of the type to go beyond its first experimental stage. +The defects of local color inhere in the constitution of the cult +itself, which, as its name suggests, thought first of color and then of +form, first of the piquant surfaces and then--if at all--of the stubborn +deeps of human life. In a sense, the local colorists were all pioneers: +they explored the older communities as solicitously as they did the new, +but they most of them came earliest in some field or other and found--or +thought--it necessary to clear the top of the soil before they sank +shaft or spade into it. Moreover, they accepted almost without challenge +the current inhibitions of gentility, reticence, cheerfulness. They +confined themselves to the emotions and the ideas and the language, for +the most part, of the respectable; they disregarded the stormier or +stealthier behavior of mankind or veiled it with discreet periphrasis; +they sweetened their narratives wherever possible with a brimming +optimism nicely tinctured with amiable sentiments. Poetic justice +prospered and happy endings were orthodox. To a remarkable extent the +local colorists passed by the immediate problems of Americans--social, +theological, political, economic; nor did they frequently rise above the +local to the universal. They were, in short, ordinarily provincial, +without, however, the rude durability or the homely truthfulness of +provincialism at its best. + +To reflect upon the achievements of this dwindling cult is to discover +that it invented few memorable plots, devised almost no new styles, +created little that was genuinely original in its modes of truth or +beauty, and even added but the scantiest handful of characters to the +great gallery of the imagination. What local color did was to fit +obliging fiction to resisting fact in so many native regions that the +entire country came in some degree to see itself through literary eyes +and therefore in some degree to feel civilized by the sight. This is, +indeed, one of the important processes of civilization. But in this case +it was limited in its influence by the habits of vision which the local +colorists had. They scrutinized their world at the instigation of +benevolence rather than at that of intelligence; they felt it with +friendship rather than with passion. And because of their limitations of +intelligence and passion they fell naturally into routine ways and both +saw and represented in accordance with this or that prevailing formula. +Herein they were powerfully confirmed by the pressure of editors and a +public who wanted each writer to continue in the channel of his happiest +success and not to disappoint them by new departures. Not only did this +result in confining individuals to a single channel each but it resulted +in the convergence of all of them into a few broad and shallow streams. + +An excellent example may be found in the flourishing cycle of stories +which, while Bret Harte was celebrating California, grew up about the +life of Southern plantations before the war. The mood of most of these +was of course elegiac and the motive was to show how much splendor had +perished in the downfall of the old régime. Over and over they repeated +the same themes: how an irascible planter refuses to allow his daughter +to marry the youth of her choice and how true love finds a way; how a +beguiling Southern maiden has to choose between lovers and gives her +hand and heart to him who is stoutest in his adherence to the +Confederacy; how, now and then, love crosses the lines and a Confederate +girl magnanimously, though only after a desperate struggle with herself, +marries a Union officer who has saved the old plantation from a +marauding band of Union soldiers; how a pair of ancient slaves cling to +their duty during the appalling years and will not presume upon their +freedom even when it comes; how the gentry, though menaced by a riffraff +of poor whites, nevertheless hold their heads high and shine brightly +through the gloom; how some former planter and everlasting colonel +declines to be reconstructed by events and passes the remainder of his +years as a courageous, bibulous, orgulous simulacrum of his once +thriving self. Mr. Page's _In Ole Virginia_ and F. Hopkinson Smith's +_Colonel Carter of Cartersville_ in a brief compass employ all these +themes; and dozens of books which might be named play variations upon +them without really enlarging or correcting them. All of them were +kindly, humorous, sentimental, charming; almost all of them are steadily +fading out like family photographs. + +The South, however, did not restrict itself wholly to its plantation +cycle. In New Orleans Mr. Cable daintily worked the lode which had been +deposited there by a French and Spanish past and by the presence still +of Creole elements in the population. Yet he too was elegiac, +sentimental, pretty, even when his style was most deft and his +representations most engaging. Quaintness was his second nature; romance +was in his blood. Bras-Coupé, the great, proud, rebellious slave in _The +Grandissimes_, belongs to the ancient lineage of those African princes +who in many tales have been sold to chain and lash and have escaped from +them by dying. The postures and graces and contrivances of Mr. Cable's +Creoles are traditional to all the little aristocracies surviving, in +fiction, from some more substantial day. Yet in spite of these +conventions his better novels have a texture of genuine vividness and +beauty. In their portrayal of the manners of New Orleans they have many +points of quiet satire and censure that betray a critical intelligence +working seriously behind them. That critical disposition in Mr. Cable +led him to disagree with the majority of Southerners regarding the +justice due the Negroes; and it helped persuade him to spend the +remainder of his life in a distant region. + +The incident is symptomatic. While slavery still existed, public opinion +in the South had demanded that literature should exhibit the institution +only under a rosy light; public opinion now demanded that the problem in +its new guise should still be glossed over in the old way. In neither +era, consequently, could an honest novelist freely follow his +observations upon Southern life in general. The mind of the herd bore +down upon him and crushed him into the accepted molds. It seems a +curious irony that the Negroes who thus innocently limited the +literature of their section should have been the subjects of a little +body of narrative which bids fair to outlast all that local color hit +upon in the South. Joel Chandler Harris is not, strictly speaking, a +contemporary, but Uncle Remus is contemporary and perennial. His stories +are grounded in the universal traits of simple souls; they are also the +whimsical, incidental mirror of a particular race during a +significant--though now extinct--phase of its career. They are at once +as ancient and as fresh as folk-lore. + +Besides the rich planters and their slaves one other class of human +beings in the South especially attracted the attention of the local +colorists--the mountaineers. Certain distant cousins of this backwoods +stock had come into literature as "Pikes" or poor whites in the Far +West with Bret Harte and in the Middle West with John Hay and Edward +Eggleston; it remained for Charles Egbert Craddock in Tennessee and John +Fox in Kentucky to discover the heroic and sentimental qualities of the +breed among its highland fastnesses of the Great Smoky and Cumberland +Mountains. Here again formulas sprang up and so stifled the free growth +of observation that, though a multitude of stories has been written +about the mountains, almost all of them may be resolved into themes as +few in number as those which succeeded nearer Tidewater: how a stranger +man comes into the mountains, loves the flower of all the native +maidens, and clashes with the suspicions or jealousies of her +neighborhood; how two clans have been worn away by a long vendetta until +only one representative of each clan remains and the two forgive and +forget among the ruins; how a band of highlanders defend themselves +against the invading minions of a law made for the nation at large but +hardly applicable to highland circumstances; how the mountain virtues in +some way or other prove superior to the softer virtues--almost vices by +comparison--of the world of plains and cities. These formulas, however, +resulted from another cause than the popular complacency which hated to +be disturbed in Virginia and Louisiana. The mountain people, +inarticulate themselves, have uniformly been seen from the outside and +therefore have been studied in their surface peculiarities more often +than in their deeper traits of character. And, having once entered the +realm of legend, they continue to be known by the half-dozen +distinguishing features which in legend are always enough for any type. + +In the North and West, of course, much the same process went on as in +the South among the local colorists, conditioned by the same demands and +pressures. Because the territory was wider, however, in the expanding +sections, the types of character there were somewhat less likely to be +confined to one locality than in the section which for a time had a ring +drawn round it by its past and by the difficulty of emerging from it; +and because the career of North and West was not definitely interrupted +by the war, the types of fiction there have persisted longer than in the +South, where a new order of life, after a generation of clinging +memories, has moved toward popular heroes of a new variety. + +The cowboy, for instance, legitimate successor to the miners and +gamblers of Bret Harte, might derive from almost any one of the states +and might range over prodigious areas; it is partly accident, of course, +that he stands out so sharply among the numerous conditions of men +produced by the new frontier. Except on very few occasions, as in Alfred +Henry Lewis's racy Wolfville stories and in Frederick Remington's vivid +pictures, in Andy Adams's more minute chronicle _The Log of a Cowboy_, +in Owen Wister's more sentimental _The Virginian_, and in O. Henry's +more diversified _Heart of the West_ and its fellows among his books, +the cowboy has regularly moved on the plane of the sub-literary--in dime +novels and, latterly, in moving pictures. He, like the mountaineer of +the South, has himself been largely inarticulate except for his rude +songs and ballads; formula and tradition caught him early and in +fiction stiffened one of the most picturesque of human beings--a modern +Centaur, an American Cossack, a Western picaro--into a stock figure who +in a stock costume perpetually sits a bucking broncho, brandishes a +six-shooter or swings a lariat, rounds up stampeding cattle, makes +fierce war on Mexicans, Indians, and rival outfits, and ardently, humbly +woos the ranchman's gentle daughter or the timorous school-ma'am. He +still has no Homer, no Gogol, no Fenimore Cooper even, though he invites +a master of some sort to take advantage of a thrilling opportunity. + +The same fate of formula and tradition befell another type multiplied by +the local novelists--the bad boy. His career may be said to have begun +in New England, with Thomas Bailey Aldrich's reaction from the priggish +manikins who infested the older "juveniles"; but Mark Twain took him up +with such mastery that his subsequent habitat has usually been the +Middle West, where a recognized lineage connects Tom Sawyer and +Huckleberry Finn with Mitch Miller and Penrod Schofield and their +fellow-conspirators against the peace of villages. The bad boy, it must +be noticed, is never really bad; he is simply mischievous. He serves as +a natural outlet for the imagination of communities which are +respectable but which lack reverence for solemn dignity. He can play the +wildest pranks and still be innocent; he can have his adolescent fling +and then settle down into a prudent maturity. Both the influence of Mark +Twain and the local color tendency toward uniformity in type have held +the bad boy to a path which, in view of his character, seems singularly +narrow. In book after book he indulges in the same practical jokes upon +parents, teachers, and all those in authority; brags, fibs, fights, +plays truant, learns to swear and smoke, with the same devices and +consequences; suffers from the same agonies of shyness, the same +indifference to the female sex, the same awkward inclination toward +particular little girls. For the most part, thanks to the formulas, he +has been examined from the angle of adult irritation or amusement; only +very recently--as by Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson--has he +been credited with a life and passions more or less his own and +therefore as fully rounded as his stage of development permits. + +The American business man, with millions of imaginations daily turned +upon him, rarely appears in that fiction which sprang from local color +except as the canny trader of some small town or as the ruthless magnate +of some glittering metropolis. _David Harum_ remains his rural avatar +and _The Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son_ his most popular +commentary. Doubtless the existence of this type in every community +tends to warn off the searchers after local figures, who have preferred, +in their fashion, to be monopolists when they could. Doubtless, also, +the American business man has suffered from the critical light in which +he has been studied by the reflective novelists. But though the higher +grades of literature have refused to pay unstinted tribute and honor to +men of wealth, the lower grades have paid almost as lavishly as life +itself. + +Multitudes of poor boys in popular fiction rise to affluence by the +practice of the commercial virtues. To be self-made, the axiom tacitly +runs, is to be well-made. Time was in the United States when the true +hero had to start his career, unaided, from some lonely farm, from some +widow's cottage, or from some city slum; and although, with the growth +of luxury in the nation, readers have come to approve the heir who puts +on overalls and works up in a few months from the bottom of the factory +to the top, the standards of success are practically the same in all +instances: sleepless industry, restless scheming, resistless will, +coupled with a changeless probity in the domestic excellences. Nothing +is more curious about the American business man of fiction than the +sentimentality he displays in all matters of the heart. He may hold as +robustly as he likes to the doctrine that business is business and that +business and sympathy will not mix, but when put to the test he must +always soften under the pleadings of distress and be malleable to the +desires of mother, sweetheart, wife, or daughter. Even when a popular +novelist sets out to be reflective--say, for example, Winston +Churchill--he takes his hero up to the mountain of success and then +conducts him down again to the valley of humiliation, made conscious +that the love, after all, either of his family or of his society, is +better than lucre. Theodore Dreiser's stubborn habit of presenting his +rich men's will to power without abatement or apology has helped to keep +him steadily suspected. The popular romancers have contrived to mingle +passion for money and susceptibility to moralism somewhat upon the +analogy of those lucky thaumaturgists who are able to eat their cake and +have it too. + +A similar mixture occurs in the politician of popular tradition. He +hardly ever rises to the dimensions of statesmanship, and indeed rarely +belongs to the Federal government at all: Washington has always been +singularly neglected by the novelists. The American politician of +fiction is essentially a local personage, the boss of ward or village. +Customarily he holds no office himself but instead sits in some dusty +den and dispenses injustice with an even hand. Candidates fear his +influence and either truckle to him or advance against him with the +weapons of reform--failing, as a rule, to accomplish anything. Aldermen +and legislators are his creatures. His web is out in all directions: he +holds this man's mortgage, knows that man's guilty secret, discovers the +other's weakness and takes advantage of it. He is cynically illiterate +and contemptuous of the respectable classes. If need be he can resort to +outrageous violence to gain his ends. And yet, though the reflective +novelists have all condemned him for half a century, he sits fast in +ordinary fiction, where he is tolerated with the amused fatalism which +in actual American life has allowed his lease to run so long. What +justifies him is his success--his countrymen love success for its own +sake--and his kind heart. Like Robin Hood he levies upon the plethoric +rich for the deserving poor; and he yields to the tender entreaties of +the widow and the orphan with amiable gestures. + +The women characters evolved by the school of local color endure a +serious restriction from the excessive interest taken by the novelists +in the American young girl. Not only has she as a possible reader +established the boundaries beyond which they might not go in speaking of +sexual affairs but she has dominated the scene of their inventions with +her glittering energy and her healthy bloodlessness. Some differences +appear among the sections of the country as to what special phases of +her character shall be here or there preferred: she is ordinarily most +capricious in the Southern, most strenuous in the Western, most knowing +in the New York, and most demure in the New England novels. Yet +everywhere she considerably resembles a bright, cool, graceful boy +pretending to be a woman. Coeducation and the scarcity of chaperons have +made her self-possessed to a degree which mystifies readers not duly +versed in American folkways. Though she plays at love-making almost from +the cradle, she manages hardly ever to be scorched--a salamander, as one +novelist suggests, sporting among the flames of life. + +When native Victorianism was at its height, in the third quarter of the +nineteenth century, she inclined to piety as her mode of preservation; +at the present moment she inclines to a romping optimism which frightens +away both thought and passion. From _The Wide, Wide World_ to +_Pollyanna_, however, she has taken habitual advantage of the reverence +for the virgin which is one of the most pervasive elements in American +popular opinion. That reverence has many charming and wholesome aspects; +it has given young women a priceless freedom of movement in America +without the penalty of being constantly suspected of sexual designs +which they may not harbor. It must be remembered that the Daisy Millers +who awaken unjust European gossip are understood at home, and that the +understanding given them is a form of homage certainly no less honorable +than the compliments of gallantry. In actual experience, however, girls +grow up, whereas the popular fiction of the United States has done its +best to keep them forever children. Nothing breaks the crystal shallows +of their confidence. They are insolently secure in a world apparently +made for them. The little difficulties which perturb their courtship are +nine-tenths of them superficial and external matters, and the end comes +as smoothly as a fairy tale's, before doubt has ever had an opportunity +to shatter or passion the occasion to purge a spirit. From Hawthorne to +the beginnings of naturalism there was hardly a single profound love +story written in America. How could there be when green girls were the +sole heroines and censors? + +Among the older women created by the local color generation there were +certain fashionable successes and social climbers in the large cities +who have more complex fortunes than the young girls; but for the most +part they are merely typical or conventional--as selfish as gold and as +hard as agate. On somewhat humbler levels that generation--as Mary +Austin has pointed out of American fiction at large--came nearer to +reality by its representation of a type peculiar to the United States: +the "woman" who is also a "lady"; that is, who combines in herself the +functions both of the busy housewife and of the charming ornament of her +society. The gradual reduction in America of the servant class has +served to develop women who keep books and music beside them at their +domestic tasks as pioneer farmers kept muskets near them in the fields. +They devote to homely duties the time devoted by European ladies to +love, intrigue, public affairs; they preserve, thanks to countless +labor-saving devices, for more or less intellectual pursuits the +strength which among European women is consumed by habitual drudgery. +The combination of functions has probably done much to increase +sexlessness and to decrease helplessness, and so to produce almost a new +species of womanhood which is bound eventually to be of great moment in +the national life. Local color, however, taking the species for granted, +seems hardly to have been aware of its significant existence. + +Only New England emphasized a distinct type: the old maid. She has been +studied in that section as in no other quarter of the world. Expansion +and emigration after the Civil War drew very heavily upon the declining +Puritan stock; and naturally the young men left their native farms and +villages more numerously than the young women, who remained behind and +in many cases never married. Local fiction fell very largely into the +hands of women--Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, Sarah Orne +Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Alice Brown--who broke completely with +the age-old tradition of ridiculing spinsters no longer young. In the +little cycles which these story-tellers elaborated the old maid is +likely to be the center of her episode, studied in her own career and +not merely in that of households upon which she is some sort of +parasite. The heroine of Mrs. Freeman's _A New England Nun_ is an +illuminating instance: she has been betrothed to an absent, +fortune-hunting lover for fourteen years, and now that he is back she +finds herself full of consternation at his masculine habits and rejoices +when he turns to another woman and leaves his first love to the felicity +of her contented cell. + +What in most literatures appears as a catastrophe appears in New +England as a relief. Energy has run low in the calm veins of such women, +and they have better things to do than to dwell upon the lives they +might have led had marriage complicated them. Here genre painting +reaches its apogee in American literature: quaint interiors scrupulously +described; rounds of minute activity familiarly portrayed; skimpy moods +analyzed with a delicate competence of touch. At the same time, New +England literature was now too sentimental and now too realistic to +allow all its old maids to remain perpetually sweet and passive. In its +sentimental hours it liked to call up their younger days and to show +them at the point which had decided or compelled their future +loneliness--again and again discovering some act of abnegation such as +giving up a lover because of the unsteadiness of his moral principles or +surrendering him to another woman to whom he seemed for some reason or +other to belong. In its realistic hours local color in New England liked +to examine the atrophy of the emotions which in these stories often +grows upon the celibate. One formula endlessly repeated deals with the +efforts of some acrid spinster--or wife long widowed--to keep a young +girl from marriage, generally out of contempt for love as a trivial +weakness; the conclusion usually makes love victorious after a +thunderbolt of revelation to the hinderer. There are inquiries, too, +into the repressions and obsessions of women whose lives in this fashion +or that have missed their flowering. Many of the inquiries are +sympathetic, tender, penetrating, but most of them incline toward +timidity and tameness. Their note is prevailingly the note of elegy; +they are seen through a trembling haze of reticence. It is as if they +had been made for readers of a vitality no more abundant than that of +their angular heroines. + +It would be possible to make a picturesque, precious anthology of +stories dealing with the types and humors of New England. Different +writers would contribute different tones: Sarah Orne Jewett the tone of +faded gentility brooding over its miniature possessions in decaying +seaport towns or in idyllic villages a little further inland; Mary E. +Wilkins Freeman the tone of a stern honesty trained in isolated farms +and along high, exposed ridges where the wind seems to have gnarled the +dispositions of men and women as it has gnarled the apple trees and +where human stubbornness perpetually crops out through a covering of +kindliness as if in imitation of those granite ledges which everywhere +tend to break through the thin soil; Alice Brown the tone of a homely +accuracy touched with the fresh hues of a gently poetical temperament. +More detailed in actuality than the stories of other sections, these New +England plots do not fall so readily into formulas as do those of the +South and West; and yet they have their formulas: how a stubborn pride +worthy of some supreme cause holds an elderly Yankee to a petty, +obstinate course until grievous calamities ensue; how a rural wife, +neglected and overworked by her husband, rises in revolt against the +treadmill of her dull tasks and startles him into comprehension and +awkward consideration; how the remnant of some once prosperous family +puts into the labor of keeping up appearances an amount of effort which, +otherwise expended, might restore the family fortunes; how neighbors +lock horns in the ruthless litigation which in New England corresponds +to the vendettas of Kentucky and how they are reconciled eventually by +sentiment in one guise or another; how a young girl--there are no Tom +Joneses and few Hamlets in this womanly universe--grows up bright and +sensitive as a flower and suffers from the hard, stiff frame of pious +poverty; how a superb heroism springs out of a narrow life, expressing +itself in some act of pitiful surrender and veiling the deed under an +even more pitiful inarticulateness. + +The cities of New England have been almost passed over by the local +colorists; Boston, the capital of the Puritans, has singularly to depend +upon the older Holmes or the visiting Howells of Ohio for its reputation +in fiction. Ever since Hawthorne, the romancers and novelists of his +native province have taken, one may say, to the fields, where they have +worked much in the mood of Rose Terry Cooke, who called her best +collection of stories _Huckleberries_ to emphasize what she thought a +true resemblance between the crops and characters of New +England--"hardy, sweet yet spicy, defying storms of heat or cold with +calm persistence, clinging to a poor soil, barren pastures, gray and +rocky hillsides, yet drawing fruitful issues from scanty sources." + +Alas that as time goes on the issues of such art seem less fruitful than +once they seemed; that even Mrs. Freeman's _Pembroke_, one of the best +novels of its class, lacks form and structure, and seems to encroach +upon caricature in its study of the progress and consequences of Yankee +pride. After a fecund generation of such stories Edith Wharton in _Ethan +Frome_ has surpassed all her native rivals in tragic power and +distinction of language; Robert Frost has been able to distil the +essence of all of them in three slender books of verse; Edwin Arlington +Robinson in a few brief poems has created the wistful Tilbury Town and +has endowed it with pathos at once more haunting and more lasting than +that of any New England village chronicled in prose; it has remained for +the Pennsylvanian Joseph Hergesheimer in _Java Head_ to seize most +artfully upon the riches of loveliness that survive from the hour when +Massachusetts was at its noon of prosperity; and local color of the +orthodox tradition now persists in New England hardly anywhere except +around Cape Cod, of which Joseph C. Lincoln is the dry, quaint, amusing +laureate. + +Through the influence, in important measure, of Howells and the +_Atlantic Monthly_ the modes of fiction which were practised east of +Albany extended their example to other districts also: to northern New +York in Irving Bacheller; to Ohio in Mary S. Watts and Brand Whitlock; +to Indiana in Meredith Nicholson; to Wisconsin in Zona Gale; to Iowa and +Arkansas in Alice French ("Octave Thanet"); to Kansas in William Allen +White; to the Colorado mines in Mary Hallock Foote; to the Virginias in +Ellen Glasgow and Henry Sydnor Harrison; to Georgia in Will N. Harben; +and to other neighborhoods in other neighborly chroniclers whose mere +names could stretch out to a point beyond which critical emphasis would +be lost. New York City clung to less tender and more incisive habits of +fiction; that city's pace for local color was set by the deft, bright +Richard Harding Davis, Henry Cuyler Bunner, Brander Matthews, O. +Henry--all well known figures; by the late Herman Knickerbocker Vielé, +too little known, in whose novels, such as _The Last of the +Knickerbockers_, affectionate accuracy is mated with smiling, graceful +humor; and by David Gray, too little known, whose _Gallops_, concerned +with the horsy parish of St. Thomas Equinus near New York City, contains +the most amusing stories about fashionable sports which this republic +has brought forth. In the Middle West Edgar Watson Howe and Hamlin +Garland, and in the Far West Frank Norris and Jack London, broke with +the customary tendency by turning away from pathos toward tragedy, and +away from discreet benevolence toward emphatic candor. The prevailing +school of naturalism has made its principal advance upon the passing +school of local color by a sacrifice of genial neighborliness; no less +exact and detailed in observation than their predecessors, the +naturalists have insisted upon bringing criticism in and measuring the +most amiable locality by wider standards. Here lies the essential point +of difference between the old style and the new. + +It is by reference to this point that the credit--such as it is--of +being quite contemporary must be withheld from so earnest and varied a +novelist as Margaret Deland. That theological agonies like those in +_John Ward, Preacher_ were actually suffered a generation back and that +the book is a valuable document upon the times cannot explain away the +fact that Mrs. Deland herself appears to have been partly overwhelmed +by the storm which sweeps the parish of her story. So in her later +novels which have essayed such problems as divorce, the compulsions of +love, the inevitable clash of parents and children, she tugs at Gordian +knots with the patient fingers of goodwill when one slash with the +intelligence would cut her difficulties away. Suppose it possible, for +instance, that the heroine of _The Awakening of Helena Richie_ could +have been courageous enough to go to her lover to await the death of her +loathsome husband and then could have been so timid as to undergo the +perturbations over her conduct which almost break her heart in Old +Chester--suppose these contradictions might have dwelt together in +Helena, yet could Mrs. Deland not have noted and anatomized them in a +way to show that she saw the contradictions even while recording them? +Suppose that Elizabeth in _The Iron Woman_ was expected by her community +to pay superfluously for an hour's blind folly with a lifetime of +unhappiness and did undertake so to pay for it, yet could Mrs. Deland +not have pointed out that the situation was repugnant both to ordinary +common sense and to the very code of honor and stability which in the +end persuades David and Elizabeth to give each other up? + +The conclusions of these novels, which to thousands of readers have +seemed stern and terrible, are in reality terrible chiefly because they +are soft--soft with a sentimentalism swathed in folds of piety. The +customs of Old Chester stifle its inhabitants, who take a kind of stolid +joy in their fetters; and Mrs. Deland, with all her understanding, does +not illuminate them. The movements of her imagination are cumbered by a +too narrow--however charming--cage. Her excellence belongs to the hours +when, not trying to transcend her little Pennsylvania universe, she +brings accuracy and shrewdness and felicity to the chronicles of small +beer in _Old Chester Tales_ and _Dr. Lavendar's People_. These +strictures and this praise she earns by her adherence to the parochial +cult of local color. + + +2. ROMANCE + +If naturalism was a reaction from the small beer of local color, so, in +another fashion, was the flare-up of romance which attended and +succeeded the Spanish War. History was suddenly discovered to be +wonderful no less than humble life; and so was adventure in the +difficult quarters of the earth. That curious, that lush episode of +fiction endowed American literature with a phalanx of "best sellers" +some of which still continue to be sold, in diminished numbers; and it +endowed the national tradition with a host of gallant personages and +heroic incidents dug up out of old books or brought back from far quests +by land or water. It remains, however, an episode; the rococo romancers +did not last. Almost without exception they turned to other methods as +the romantic mood faded out of the populace. Of those who had employed +history for their substance only James Branch Cabell remained absolutely +faithful, revising, strengthening, deepening his art with irony and +beauty until it became an art exquisitely peculiar to himself. + +Mary Johnston was as faithful, but her fidelity had less growth in it. +Originally attracted to the heroic legend of colonial Virginia, she has +since so far departed from it as to produce in the _Long Roll_ and +_Cease Firing_ a wide panorama of the Civil War, in other books to study +the historic plight and current unrest of women, and here and there to +show an observant consciousness of the changing world; but her +imagination long ago sank its deepest roots into the traditions of the +Old Dominion. She brings to them, however, no fresh interpretations, as +satisfied as any medieval romancer to ring harmonious changes on ancient +themes, enlarging them, perhaps, with something spacious in her language +and liberal in her sentiments, yet transmitting her material rather as a +singer than as a poet, agreeably rather than creatively. + +As Miss Johnston leans upon history for her favorite staff, so James +Lane Allen leans upon "Nature." He is not, indeed, innocent of history. +His Kentucky is always conscious of its chivalric past, and his most +popular romance, _The Choir Invisible_, has its scene laid in and near +the Lexington of the eighteenth century. Nor is he innocent of the +devices of local color. His earliest collection of tales--_Flute and +Violin_--and his ingratiating comment upon it--_The Blue-Grass Region of +Kentucky_--once for all established the character which his chosen +district has in the world of the imagination. But from the first he held +principles of art which would not allow him to consider either history +or local color as ends in themselves. He believed they must be +employed, when employed, as elements contributory to some general effect +of beauty or of meaning. He has built up beauty with the most deliberate +hands, and he has sought to express the highest meanings in his art, +seeking to look through the "thin-aired regions of consciousness which +are ruled over by Tact to the underworld of consciousness where are +situated the mighty workshops, and where toils on forever the cyclopean +youth, Instinct." + +In this important program, however, he has constantly been handicapped +by his orthodoxies. John Gray, in _The Choir Invisible_, loving a woman +who though in love with him is bound in marriage to another, engages +himself to a young girl, shortly afterward to find that his real love is +free again; yet with a high gesture of sacrifice he holds to his +engagement and enters upon a union of duty which is sure to make two, +and possibly three, persons unhappy instead of one, though all of them +are equally guiltless. Mr. Allen approves of this immoral arithmetic +with a sentimentalism which has drawn rains of tears down thoughtless +cheeks. So in _The Reign of Law_ he exhibits a youth extricating himself +from an obsolete theology with sufferings which can be explained only on +the ground that the theology was too strong ever to have been escaped or +the youth too weak ever to have rebelled. And in _Aftermath_, sequel to +_A Kentucky Cardinal_, the author sentimentally and quite needlessly +stacks the cards against his hero and lets his heroine die, to bring, as +he might say, "the eternal note of sadness in." All this to show how +"Nature" holds men in her powerful hands and tortures them when they +struggle to follow the mind to liberty! To prove a thesis so profoundly +true and tragic Mr. Allen can do no more than borrow the tricks of +melodrama. + +Just how melodramatic his sentimentalism forces him to be has often been +overlooked because of his diction and his pictures. Though he tends to +the mellifluous and the saccharine he has in his better pages a dewy, +luminous style, with words choicely picked out and cadences delicately +manipulated. By comparison most of the local colorists of his period +seem homespun and most of the romancers a little tawdry. His method is +the mosaicist's, working self-consciously in fine materials. Movement +with him never leaps nor flows; in fact, it seems to dawdle when, too +often, he forgets to be vigilant in the interests of simplicity; it is +languid with scrupulous hesitations and accumulations. As to his +pictures, they come from a Kentucky glorified. When he says that in June +there "the warm-eyed, bronzed, foot-stamping young bucks forsake their +plowshares in the green rows, their reapers among the yellow beards; and +the bouncing, laughing, round-breasted girls arrange their ribbons and +their vows," Mr. Allen is remembering Theocritus, the _Pervigilium +Veneris_, and the silver ages of literature no less than his own state +and his own day. He uses local color habitually to ennoble it, and but +for his extravagant taste for sweetness he might have achieved pastorals +of an imperishable sort. + +Even as it is, the _Kentucky Cardinal-Aftermath_ story has all the +quaint grace of pressed flowers and remembered valentines, and _Summer +in Arcady_, his masterpiece, has at once rich passion and spare form. +Here Mr. Allen is at his best, representing young love springing up +fiercely, exuberantly, against a lovely background congenial to the +human mood. He has not known, however, how to keep up that difficult +equilibrium between artifice and simplicity which the idyl demands. His +later books tend to be turgid, oppressive, cloying with sentimentalism +and amorous obsessions in their graver moments, and in their lighter +moments to fall flat from a lack of the true sinews of comedy. + +Of a temper as different as possible from Mr. Allen's was Edgar Saltus, +just dead, who stood alone and decadent in a country which the _fin de +siècle_ scarcely touched with its graceful, graceless maladies. He began +his career, after a penetrating study of Balzac, with _The Philosophy of +Disenchantment_ and _The Anatomy of Negation_, erudite, witty challenges +to illusion, deriving primarily from Hartmann and Schopenhauer but +enriching their arguments with much inquisitive learning in current +French philosophers and poets. Erudition, however, was not Saltus's sole +equipment: his pessimism came, in part, from his literary masters but in +part also from a temperament which steadily followed its own impulses +and arrived at its own destinations. Cynical, deracinated, he turned +from his speculative doubts to the positive realities of sense, +becoming the historian of love and loveliness in sumptuous, perverse +phases. In _Mary Magdalen_ he dressed up a traditional courtesan in the +splendors of purple and gold and perfumed her with many quaint, +dangerous essences more exciting than her later career as penitent; in +_Imperial Purple_ he undertook a chronicle of the Roman emperors from +Julius Caesar to Heliogabolus, exhibiting them in the most splendid of +all their extravagances and sins; in _Historia Amoris_ he followed the +maddening trail of love and in _The Lords of the Ghostland_ the +saddening trail of faith through the annals of mankind. + +He wrote novels, too, of contemporary life, but they are his least +notable achievements. His personages in none of these novels manage to +convince; his plots are melodrama; his worldly wisdom has smirks and +postures in it; his style, now sharp now sagging, is unequal. Saltus +could not, it seems, dispense with antiquity and remoteness in his +books. Only when buried in the deep world of ancient story or when +ranging through the widest field of time did he become most himself. +Then he invited no comparisons with familiar actualities and could +assemble the most magnificent glories according to his whims and could +drape them in the most gorgeous stuffs. What especially touched his +imagination was the spectacle of imperial Rome as interpreted to him by +French decadence: that lust for power and sensation, those incredible +temples, palaces, feasts, revelries, blasphemies, butcheries. Commencing +with a beauty which knew no bounds, he moved on to lust or satiety or +impotence for his theme; in the end he brought little but a glittering +ferocity to that cold chronicle of the czars from Ivan to Catherine, +_The Imperial Orgy_. His phrases never failed him, flashing like gems or +snakes and clasping his exuberant materials in almost the only +discipline they ever had. Wit withheld him from utter lusciousness. +Though he employed Corinthian cadences and diction, he kept continually +checking them with the cynic twist of some deft colloquialism. To +venture into his microcosm is to bid farewell to all that is simple and +kindly; it is, however, to discover the terrible beauty that lurks +behind corruption, malevolent though delirious. + +Romance of the traditionary sort, it is plain, has lately lost its vogue +in the United States and is being neglected as at almost no other period +since Fenimore Cooper established its principal native modes. The +ancient romantic matters of the Settlement and the Revolution flourish +almost solely in tales for boys. There is of course still a matter of +the Frontier, but it is another frontier: the Canadian North and +Northwest, Alaska, the islands of the South Seas, latterly the battle +fields of France, and always the trails of American exploration wherever +they may chance to lead. The performers upon such themes--the Rex +Beaches, the Emerson Houghs, the Randall Parrishes, the Zane Greys, the +James Oliver Curwoods--march ordinarily under the noisy banner of "red +blood" and derive from Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, those +generous boys of naturalism whose temperaments carried them again and +again into the territories of vivid danger. Criticism notes in the later +annalists of "red blood" their spasmodic energy, their considerable +technical knowledge, their stereotyped characters, their recurrent +formulas, their uncritical, Rooseveltian opinions, their enormous +popularity, their almost complete lack of distinction in style or +attitude, and passes by without further obligation than to point out +that Stewart Edward White probably deserves to stand first among them by +virtue of a certain substantial range and panoramic faithfulness to the +life of the lumbermen represented in his most successful book, _The +Blazed Trail_. + +This phase of life deserves particular emphasis for the reason that +there has recently been growing up among the lumber-camps from the Bay +of Fundy to Puget Sound the legend of a mythical hero named Paul Bunyan +who is the only personage of the sort yet invented and elaborated by the +ordinary run of men in any American calling. Paul is less a patron saint +of the loggers than an autochthonous Munchausen, whose fame has been +extended almost entirely by word of mouth among lumbermen resting from +their work and vying with one another to see who could tell the most +stupendous yarn about Paul's prowess and achievements. The process +resembles that which in the folk everywhere has evolved enormous legends +about favorite heroes; the legend concerning Paul, however, is +essentially native in its accurate geography, in its passion for +grotesque exaggeration, in its hilarious metaphors, in its dry, +drawling, straight-faced narrative method. Exaggeration such as that in +some of these stories verges upon genius. When Paul goes West he +carelessly lets his pick drag behind him and cuts out the Grand Canyon +of the Colorado; he raises corn in Kansas prodigious enough to suck the +Mississippi dry and stop navigation; he builds a hotel so high that he +has "the last seven stories put on hinges so's they could be swung back +for to let the moon go by"; he achieves such feats of eating and +drinking and working and fighting and loving as make Hercules himself +seem a pallid fellow who should have gone upon the rowdy American +frontier to learn the great ways of adventure. Though it is true that +the legend has been developing for many years without adequate literary +use of it having yet been made, it lies ready for romance to handle; and +no discussion of contemporary American fiction can go deeper than the +surfaces without at least mentioning that hilarious chapbook _Paul +Bunyan Comes West_. + +That romance is just now being slighted appears from the lamentable +hiatus into which the fame of Charles D. Stewart has lately fallen. His +_Partners of Providence_ suffers from the inevitable comparison with +_Tom Sawyer_ and _Huckleberry Finn_ which it cannot stand, though it +continues the saga of the Mississippi with sympathy and knowledge; but +_The Fugitive Blacksmith_ has a flavor which few comparisons and no +neglect can spoil. Its protagonist, wrongly accused of a murder which he +by mischance finds it difficult to explain, takes to his heels and +lives by his mechanic wits among the villages of the lower Mississippi +through a diversity of adventures which puts his story among the little +masterpieces of the picaresque. Though it is clumsily garnished with +irrelevant things, it stands out above them, racy, rememberable. The +blacksmith has an ingenuity as varied as his experiences. Whereas other +picaroes cheat or fight or love their ways, this hero uses his dexterity +at unaccustomed trades until it is little less than intoxicating to see +him rise to each emergency. He is a proletarian Odysseus, and his +history is a quaint _Odyssey_ of the roving artisan. + +The matter of the Civil War, though very large in the American memory, +has in literature not quite reached a parity with the older matters of +the Settlement, the Revolution, and the Frontier, principally, no doubt, +because there has been only one period--and that a brief one--of +historical romance since the war. In connection with this matter, +however, there has been created the legend which at present is surely +the most potent of all the legendary elements dear to the American +imagination. + +Abraham Lincoln is, strictly speaking, more than a legend; he has become +a cult. Immediately after his death he lived in the national mind for a +time as primarily a martyr; then emphasis shifted to his humor and a +whole literature of waggish tales and retorts and apologues assembled +around his name; then he passed into a more sentimental zone and endless +stories were multiplied about his natural piety and his habit of +pardoning innocent offenders. Out of the efflorescence of all these +aspects of legend which accompanied the centenary of his birth there has +since seemed to be emerging--though the older aspects still persist as +well--a conception of him as a figure at once lofty and familiar, at +once sad and witty, at once Olympian and human. Among poets of all +grades of opinion Lincoln is the chief native hero: Edwin Arlington +Robinson has best expressed in words as firm as bronze the Master's +reputation for lonely pride and forgiving laughter; John Gould Fletcher, +with an eloquence found nowhere else in his work, likens Lincoln to a +tree so mighty that its branches reach the heavens and its roots the +primal rock and nations of men may rest in its shade; Edgar Lee Masters, +whose work is full of the shadow and light of Lincoln, has made his most +moving lyric an epitaph upon Ann Rutledge, the girl Lincoln loved and +lost; and Vachel Lindsay, in Lincoln's own Springfield, during the World +War thought of him as so stirred even in death by the horrors which then +alarmed the universe that he could not sleep but walked up and down the +midnight streets, mourning and brooding. It is precisely thus, in other +ages, that saints are said to appear at difficult moments, to quiet the +waves or turn the arrow aside. Without these more vulgar manifestations +Lincoln nevertheless lives as the founder of every cult lives, in the +echoes of his voice on many tongues and in the vibrations of his voice +in many affections. + +The novelists, unfortunately, fall behind the poets in the beauty and +wisdom with which they celebrate the figure of Lincoln, though they have +produced scores of volumes associated with it, upon the life not only of +Lincoln himself but of his mother, of his children, of this or that +friend or neighbor. Of the various novels--from Winston Churchill's _The +Crisis_ to Irving Bacheller's _A Man for the Ages_--which have sought to +mingle the right proportions of rural shrewdness and honorable dignity, +no one has yet been equal to the magnitude of its theme. They have +followed the customary paths of the historical romance without seeming +to realize that in a theme so spacious they could learn from the methods +of Plato with Socrates, of Shakespeare with his kingly heroes, of the +biographers of Francis of Assisi with their gracious saint. + +Few literary tasks are harder than the task of the critic holding a +steady course through the welter of novels which make a tumult in the +world and trying to indicate those which have some genuine significance +as works of art or intelligence or as documents upon the time. How shall +he dispose, for example, of such beguilers of the millions as Gene +Stratton Porter, who piles sentimentalism upon "Nature" till the soft +heap defies analysis, and Harold Bell Wright, who cannily mixes +sentimentalism with valor and prudence till the resultant blend tempts +appetites uncounted? Popularity has its arts no less than excellence; +and so has it its own kind of seriousness. Much as the advertiser and +the salesman have done to market tons of Mrs. Porter and Mr. Wright, +they could not have done it without the assistance furnished them by the +fact that their authors believe and feel the things they write. They +throb with all the popular impulses; they laugh when the multitude +laughs and weep when it weeps; and they have the gift--which is really +rare not common--of calling the multitude's attention to their books in +which is displayed, as in a consoling mirror, the sweet, rosy, empty +features of banality. + +How shall the patient critic dispose of Robert W. Chambers, who, +possessing in a high degree the qualities of narrative, of costume, of +dramatic effectiveness, of satire even (as witness _Iole_), has drifted +with the fashions for a generation and has latterly allowed himself to +decline to the manufacture of literary sillibub in the guise of novels +about the smart set and Bohemia? How shall the stern critic dispose of +Gertrude Atherton, who knows so much about California, New York, and the +international scene but who somehow fails to transmute her materials to +any lasting metal and leaves the impression of a vexed aristocrat +scolding the age without either convincing it or convicting it of very +serious deficiencies? How shall the accurate critic dispose of Frank +Harris, who was born in Ireland and who had the most conspicuous part of +his career in England, but who is a naturalized American citizen and who +has written in _The Bomb_ a vivid and intelligent novel dealing with the +Chicago "anarchists" of 1886? How shall the conscientious critic dispose +of the Owen Johnsons and the Rupert Hugheses and the Gouverneur +Morrises and the George Barr McCutcheons with all their energy and +information and good intentions and yet with their fatal lack of true +distinction? + +How shall the tolerant critic dispose of the writers of detective +stories whose name is legion and whose art is to fine fiction as +arithmetic to calculus--particularly Arthur Reeve, inventor of that +Craig Kennedy who with endless ingenuity solves problem after problem by +the introduction of scientific and pseudoscientific novelties? How shall +the puzzled critic dispose of Alice Duer Miller and her light, bright +stories of fashionable life; of Edward Lucas White and his vast +panoramas of South America and the ancient world; of Katherine Fullerton +Gerould, with her grim tales and her petulant conservatism; of those +energetic successors of O. Henry, Edna Ferber and Fanny Hurst; of the +late Charles Emmet Van Loan, with his intimate knowledge of sport; of +the schools and swarms of men and women who write short stories for the +most part but who occasionally essay a novel? How shall the worried +critic dispose of the more or less professional humorists who have +created characters and localities: Irvin S. Cobb, who, capable of better +things, prefers the paths of the grotesque and rolls his bulk through +current literature laughing at his own misadventures; Finley Peter +Dunne, inventor of that Mr. Dooley who makes it clear that the American +tradition which invented Poor Richard is still alive; Ring W. Lardner, +master of the racy vernacular of the almost illiterate; George Ade, +easily first of his class, fabulist and satirist? + +Perhaps it is best for the baffled critic to leave all of them to time +and, singling out the ten living novelists who seem to him most +distinguished or significant, to study them one by one, adding some +account of the school of fiction just now predominant. + + + + +CHAPTER II + +ARGUMENT + + +1. HAMLIN GARLAND + +The pedigree of the most energetic and important fiction now being +written in the United States goes unmistakably back to that creative +uprising of discontent in the eighties of the last century which brought +into articulate consciousness the larger share of the aspects of unrest +which have since continued to challenge the nation's magnificent, +arrogant grand march. + +The decade had Henry Adams for its bitter philosopher, despairing over +current political corruption and turning away to probe the roots of +American policy under Jefferson and his immediate successors; had the +youthful Theodore Roosevelt for its standard-bearer of a civic +conscience which was, plans went, to bring virtue into caucuses; had +Henry George for its spokesman of economic change, moving across the +continent from California to New York with an argument and a program for +new battles against privilege; had Edward Bellamy for its Utopian +romancer, setting forth a delectable picture of what human society might +become were the old iniquities reasonably wiped away and co-operative +order brought out of competitive chaos; had William Dean Howells for its +annalist of manners, turning toward the end of the decade from his +benevolent acceptance of the world as it was to stout-hearted, though +soft-voiced, accusations brought in the name of Tolstoy and the Apostles +against human inequality however constituted; had--to end the list of +instances without going outside the literary class--Hamlin Garland for +its principal spokesman of the distress and dissatisfaction then +stirring along the changed frontier which so long as free land lasted +had been the natural outlet for the expansive, restless race. + +Heretofore the prairies and the plains had depended almost wholly upon +romance--and that often of the cheapest sort--for their literary +reputation; Mr. Garland, who had tested at first hand the innumerable +hardships of such a life, became articulate through his dissent from +average notions about the pioneer. His earliest motives of dissent seem +to have been personal and artistic. During that youth which saw him +borne steadily westward, from his Wisconsin birthplace to windy Iowa and +then to bleak Dakota, his own instincts clashed with those of his +migratory father as the instincts of many a sensitive, unremembered +youth must have clashed with the dumb, fierce urges of the leaders of +migration everywhere. The younger Garland hungered on the frontier for +beauty and learning and leisure; the impulse which eventually detached +him from Dakota and sent him on a trepid, reverent pilgrimage to Boston +was the very impulse which, on another scale, had lately detached Henry +James from his native country and had sent him to the ancient home of +his forefathers in the British Isles. + +Mr. Garland could neither feel so free nor fly so far from home as +James. He had, in the midst of his raptures and his successes in New +England, still to remember the plight of the family he had left behind +him on the lonely prairie; he cherished a patriotism for his province +which went a long way toward restoring him to it in time. Sentimental +and romantic considerations, however, did not influence him altogether +in his first important work. He had been kindled by Howells in Boston to +a passion for realism which carried him beyond the suave accuracy of his +master to the somber veracity of _Main-Travelled Roads_, _Prairie +Folks_, and _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_. This veracity was more than +somber; it was deliberate and polemic. Mr. Garland, ardently a radical +of the school of Henry George, had enlisted in the crusade against +poverty, and he desired to tell the unheeded truth about the frontier +farmers and their wives in language which might do something to lift the +desperate burdens of their condition. Consequently his passions and his +doctrines joined hands to fix the direction of his art; he both hated +the frontier and hinted at definite remedies which he thought would make +it more endurable. + +It throws a strong light upon the progress of American society and +literature during the past generation to point out that the service +recently performed by _Main Street_ was, in its fashion, performed +thirty years ago by _Main-Travelled Roads_. Each book challenges the +myth of the rural beauties and the rural virtues; but whereas Sinclair +Lewis, in an intellectual and satiric age, charges that the villagers +are dull, Mr. Garland, in a moral and pathetic age, charged that the +farmers were oppressed. His men wrestle fearfully with sod and mud and +drought and blizzard, goaded by mortgages which may at almost any moment +snatch away all that labor and parsimony have stored up. His women, +endowed with no matter what initial hopes or charms, are sacrificed to +overwork and deprivations and drag out maturity and old age on the +weariest treadmill. The pressure of life is simply too heavy to be borne +except by the ruthless or the crafty. Mr. Garland, though nourished on +the popular legend of the frontier, had come to feel that the "song of +emigration had been, in effect, the hymn of fugitives." Illusion no less +than reality had tempted Americans toward their far frontiers, and the +enormous mass, once under way, had rolled stubbornly westward, crushing +all its members who might desire to hesitate or to reflect. + +The romancers had studied the progress of the frontier in the lives of +its victors; Mr. Garland studied it in the lives of its victims: the +private soldier returning drably and mutely from the war to resume his +drab, mute career behind the plow; the tenant caught in a trap by his +landlord and the law and obliged to pay for the added value which his +own toil has given to his farm; the brother neglected until his courage +has died and proffered assistance comes too late to rouse him; and +particularly the daughter whom a harsh father or the wife whom a brutal +husband breaks or drives away--the most sensitive and therefore the most +pitiful victims of them all. Mr. Garland told his early stories in the +strong, level, ominous language of a man who had observed much but chose +to write little. Not his words but the overtones vibrating through them +cry out that the earth and the fruits of the earth belong to all men and +yet a few of them have turned tiger or dog or jackal and snatched what +is precious for themselves while their fellows starve and freeze. +Insoluble as are the dilemmas he propounded and tense and unrelieved as +his accusations were, he stood in his methods nearer, say, to the humane +Millet than to the angry Zola. There is a clear, high splendor about his +landscapes; youth and love on his desolate plains, as well as anywhere, +can find glory in the most difficult existence; he might strip +particular lives relentlessly bare but he no less relentlessly clung to +the conviction that human life has an inalienable dignity which is +deeper than any glamor goes and can survive the loss of all its +trappings. + +Why did Mr. Garland not equal the intellectual and artistic success of +_Main-Travelled Roads_, _Prairie Folks_, and _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_ +for a quarter of a century? At the outset he had passion, knowledge, +industry, doctrine, approbation, and he labored hard at enlarging the +sagas of which these books were the center. Yet _Jason Edwards_, _A +Spoil of Office_, _A Member of the Third House_ are dim names and the +Far Western tales which succeeded them grow too rapidly less impressive +as they grow older. The rise of historical romance among the American +followers of Stevenson at the end of the century and the subsequent rise +of flippancy under the leadership of O. Henry have both been blamed for +the partial eclipse into which Mr. Garland's reputation passed. As a +matter of fact, the causes were more fundamental than the mere +fickleness of literary reputation or than the demands of editors and +public that he repeat himself forever. In that first brilliant cycle of +stories this downright pioneer worked with the material which of all +materials he knew best and over which his imagination played most +eagerly. From them, however, he turned to pleas for the single tax and +to exposures of legislative corruption and imbecility about which he +neither knew nor cared so much as he knew and cared about the actual +lives of working farmers. His imagination, whatever his zeal might do in +these different surroundings, would not come to the old point of +incandescence. + +Instead, however, of diagnosing his case correctly Mr. Garland followed +the false light of local color to the Rocky Mountains and began the +series of romantic narratives which further interrupted his true growth +and, gradually, his true fame. He who had grimly refused to lend his +voice to the chorus chanting the popular legend of the frontier in which +he had grown up and who had studied the deceptive picture not as a +visitor but as a native, now became himself a visiting enthusiast for +the "high trails" and let himself be roused by a fervor sufficiently +like that from which he had earlier dissented. In his different way he +was as hungry for new lands as his father had been before him. Looking +upon local color as the end--when it is more accurately the +beginning--of fiction, he felt that he had exhausted his old community +and must move on to fresher pastures. + +Here the prime fallacy of his school misled him: he believed that if he +had represented the types and scenes of his particular region once he +had done all he could, when of course had he let imagination serve him +he might have found in that microcosm as many passions and tragedies and +joys as he or any novelist could have needed for a lifetime. Here, too, +the prime penalty of his school overtook him: he came to lay so much +emphasis upon outward manners that he let his plots and characters fall +into routine and formula. The novels of his middle period--such as _Her +Mountain Lover_, _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_, _Hester_, _The +Light of the Star_, _Cavanagh, Forest Ranger_--too frequently recur to +the romantic theme of a love uniting some powerful, uneducated +frontiersman and some girl from a politer neighborhood. Pioneer and lady +are always almost the same pair in varying costumes; the stories harp +upon the praise of plains and mountains and the scorn of cities and +civilization. These romances, much value as they have as documents and +will long continue to have, must be said to exhibit the frontier as +self-conscious, obstreperous, given to insisting upon its difference +from the rest of the world. In ordinary human intercourse such +insistence eventually becomes tiresome; in literature no less than in +life there is a time to remember local traits and a time to forget them +in concerns more universal. + +What concerns of Mr. Garland's were universal became evident when he +published _A Son of the Middle Border_. His enthusiasms might be +romantic but his imagination was not; it was indissolubly married to his +memory of actual events. The formulas of his mountain romances, having +been the inventions of a mind not essentially inventive, had been at +best no more than sectional; the realities of his autobiography, taking +him back again to _Main-Travelled Roads_ and its cycle, were personal, +lyrical, and consequently universal. All along, it now appeared, he had +been at his best when he was most nearly autobiographical: those vivid +early stories had come from the lives of his own family or of their +neighbors; _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_ had set forth what was practically +his own experience in its account of a heroine--not hero--who leaves her +native farm to go first to a country college and then to Chicago to +pursue a wider life, torn constantly between a passion for freedom and a +loyalty to the father she must tragically desert. + +In a sense _A Son of the Middle Border_ supersedes the fictive versions +of the same material; they are the original documents and the _Son_ the +final redaction and commentary. Veracious still, the son of that border +appears no longer vexed as formerly. Memory, parent of art, has at once +sweetened and enlarged the scene. What has been lost of pungent +vividness has its compensation in a broader, a more philosophic +interpretation of the old frontier, which in this record grows to epic +meanings and dimensions. Its savage hardships, though never minimized, +take their due place in its powerful history; the defeat which the +victims underwent cannot rob the victors of their many claims to glory. +If there was little contentment in this border there was still much +rapture. Such things Mr. Garland reveals without saying them too +plainly: the epic qualities of his book--as in Mark Twain's _Life on the +Mississippi_--lie in its implications; the tale itself is a candid +narrative of his own adventures through childhood, youth, and his first +literary period. + +This autobiographic method, applied with success in _A Daughter of the +Middle Border_ to his later life in Chicago and all the regions which he +visited, brings into play his higher gifts and excludes his lower. Under +slight obligation to imagine, he runs slight risk of succumbing to those +conventionalisms which often stiffen his work when he trusts to his +imagination. Avowedly dealing with his own opinions and experiences, he +is not tempted to project them, as in the novels he does somewhat too +frequently, into the careers of his heroes. Dealing chiefly with action +not with thought, he does not tend so much as elsewhere to solve +speculative problems with sentiment instead of with reflection. In the +_Son_ and the _Daughter_ he has the fullest chance to be autobiographic +without disguise. + +Here lies his best province and here appears his best art. It is an art, +as he employs it, no less subtle than humane. Warm, firm flesh covers +the bones of his chronology. He imparts reality to this or that +occasion, like a novelist, by reciting conversation which must come from +something besides bare memory. He rounds out the characters of the +persons he remembers with a fulness and grace which, lifelike as his +persons are, betray the habit of creating characters. He enriches his +analysis of the Middle Border with sensitive descriptions of the "large, +unconscious scenery" in which it transacted its affairs. If it is +difficult to overprize the documentary value of his saga of the Garlands +and the McClintocks and of their son who turned back on the trail, so is +it difficult to overpraise the sincerity and tenderness and beauty with +which the chronicle was set down. + + +2. WINSTON CHURCHILL + +The tidal wave of historical romance which toward the end of the past +century attacked this coast and broke so far inland as to inundate the +entire continent swept Winston Churchill to a substantial peak of +popularity to which he has since clung, with little apparent loss, by +the exercise of methods somewhat but not greatly less romantic than +those which first lifted him above the flood. He came during a moment +of national expansiveness. Patriotism and jingoism, altruism and +imperialism, passion and sentimentalism shook the temper which had been +slowly stiffening since the Civil War. Now, with a rush of unaccustomed +emotions, the national imagination sought out its own past, luxuriating +in it, not to say wallowing in it. + +In Mr. Churchill it found a romancer full of consolation to any who +might fear or suspect that the country's history did not quite match its +destiny. He had enough erudition to lend a very considerable "thickness" +to his scene, whether it was Annapolis or St. Louis or Kentucky or +upland New England. He had a sense for the general bearings of this or +that epoch; he had a firm, warm confidence in the future implied and +adumbrated by this past; he had a feeling for the ceremonial in all +eminent occasions. He had, too, a knack at archaic costume and knack +enough at the idiom in which his contemporaries believed their forebears +had expressed themselves. And he had, besides all these qualities needed +to make his records heroic, the quality of moral earnestness which +imparted to them the look of moral significance. Richard Carvel by the +exercise of simple Maryland virtues rises above the enervate young +sparks of Mayfair; Stephen Brice in _The Crisis_ by his simple Yankee +virtues makes his mark among the St. Louis rebels--who, however, are +gallant and noble though misguided men; canny David Ritchie in _The +Crossing_ leads the frontiersmen of Kentucky as the little child of +fable leads the lion and the lamb; crafty Jethro Bass in _Coniston_, +though a village boss with a pocketful of mortgages and consequently of +constituents, surrenders his ugly power at the touch of a maiden's hand. + +To reflect a little upon this combination of heroic color and moral +earnestness is to discover how much Mr. Churchill owes to the elements +injected into American life by Theodore Roosevelt. Is not _The +Crossing_--to take specific illustrations--connected with the same +central cycle as _The Winning of the West_? Is not _Coniston_, whatever +the date of its events, an arraignment of that civic corruption which +Roosevelt hated as the natural result of civic negligence and against +which he urged the duty of an awakened civic conscience? In time Mr. +Churchill was to extend his inquiries to regions of speculation into +which Roosevelt never ventured, but as regards American history and +American politics they were of one mind. "Nor are the ethics of the +manner of our acquisition of a part of Panama and the Canal," wrote Mr. +Churchill in 1918 in his essay on _The American Contribution and the +Democratic Idea_, "wholly defensible from the point of view of +international democracy. Yet it must be remembered that President +Roosevelt was dealing with a corrupt, irresponsible, and hostile +government, and that the Canal had become a necessity not only for our +own development, but for that of the civilization of the world." And +again: "The only real peril confronting democracy is the arrest of +growth." + +Roosevelt himself could not have muddled an issue better. Like him Mr. +Churchill has habitually moved along the main lines of national +feeling--believing in America and democracy with a fealty unshaken by +any adverse evidence and delighting in the American pageant with a gusto +rarely modified by the exercise of any critical intelligence. Morally he +has been strenuous and eager; intellectually he has been naïve and +belated. Whether he has been writing what was avowedly romance or what +was intended to be sober criticism he has been always the romancer first +and the critic afterwards. + +And yet since the vogue of historical romance passed nearly a score of +years ago Mr. Churchill has honestly striven to keep up with the world +by thinking about it. One novel after another has presented some +encroaching problem of American civic or social life: the control of +politics by interest in _Mr. Crewe's Career_; divorce in _A Modern +Chronicle_; the conflict between Christianity and business in _The +Inside of the Cup_; the oppression of the soul by the lust for temporal +power in _A Far Country_; the struggle of women with the conditions of +modern industry in _The Dwelling-Place of Light_. Nothing has hurried +Mr. Churchill or forced his hand; he has taken two or three years for +each novel, has read widely, has brooded over his theme, has reinforced +his stories with solid documentation. He has aroused prodigious +discussion of his challenges and solutions--particularly in the case of +_The Inside of the Cup_. That novel perhaps best of all exhibits his +later methods. John Hodder by some miracle of inattention or some +accident of isolation has been kept in his country parish from any +contact with the doubt which characterizes his age. Transferred to a +large city he almost instantly finds in himself heresies hitherto only +latent, spends a single summer among the poor, and in the fall begins +relentless war against the unworthy rich among his congregation. Thought +plays but a trivial part in Hodder's evolution. Had he done any real +thinking or were he capable of it he must long before have freed himself +from the dogmas that obstruct him. Instead he has drifted with the +general stream and learns not from the leaders but from the slower +followers of opinion. Like the politician he absorbs through his skin, +gathering premonitions as to which way the crowd is going and then +rushing off in that direction. + +If this recalls the processes of Roosevelt, hardly less does it recall +those of Mr. Churchill. Once taken by an idea for a novel he has always +burned with it as if it were as new to the world as to him. Here lies, +without much question, the secret of that genuine earnestness which +pervades all his books: he writes out of the contagious passion of a +recent convert or a still excited discoverer. Here lies, too, without +much question, the secret of Mr. Churchill's success in holding his +audiences: a sort of unconscious politician among novelists, he gathers +his premonitions at happy moments, when the drift is already setting in. +Never once has Mr. Churchill, like a philosopher or a seer, run off +alone. + +Even for those, however, who perceive that he belongs intellectually to +a middle class which is neither very subtle nor very profound on the one +hand nor very shrewd or very downright on the other, it is impossible to +withhold from Mr. Churchill the respect due a sincere, scrupulous, and +upright man who has served the truth and his art according to his +lights. If he has not overheard the keenest voices of his age, neither +has he listened to the voice of the mob. The sounds which have reached +him from among the people have come from those who eagerly aspire to +better things arrived at by orderly progress, from those who desire in +some lawful way to outgrow the injustices and inequalities of civil +existence and by fit methods to free the human spirit from all that +clogs and stifles it. But as they aspire and intend better than they +think, so, in concert with them, does Mr. Churchill. + +In all his novels, even the most romantic, the real interest lies in +some mounting aspiration opposed to a static régime, whether the passion +for independence among the American colonies, or the expanding movement +of the population westward, or the crusades against slavery or political +malfeasance, or the extrication of liberal temperaments from the +shackles of excessive wealth or poverty or orthodoxy. Yet the only +conclusions he can at all devise are those which history has devised +already--the achievement of independence or of the Illinois country, the +abolition of slavery, the defeat of this or that usurper of power in +politics. Rarely is anything really thought out. Compare, for instance, +his epic of matrimony, _A Modern Chronicle_, with such a penetrating--if +satirical--study as _The Custom of the Country_. Mrs. Wharton urges no +more doctrine than Mr. Churchill, and she, like him, confines herself to +the career of one woman with her successive husbands; but whereas the +_Custom_ is luminous with quiet suggestion and implicit commentary upon +the relations of the sexes in the prevailing modes of marriage, the +_Chronicle_ has little more to say than that after two exciting +marriages a woman is ready enough to settle peacefully down with the +friend of her childhood whom she should have married in the beginning. +In _A Far Country_ a lawyer who has let himself be made a tool in the +hands of nefarious corporations undergoes a tragic love affair, suffers +conversion, reads a few books of modern speculation, and resolutely +turns his face toward a new order. In the same precipitate fashion the +heroine of _The Dwelling-Place of Light_, who has given no apparent +thought whatever to economic problems except as they touch her +individually, suffers a shock in connection with her intrigue with her +capitalist employer and becomes straightway a radical, shortly +thereafter making a pathetic and edifying end in childbirth. In these +books there are hundreds of sound observations and elevated sentiments; +the author's sympathies are, as a rule, remarkably right; but taken as a +whole his most serious novels, however lifelike and well rounded their +surfaces may seem, lack the upholding, articulating skeleton of thought. + +Much the same lack of spiritual penetration and intellectual +consistency which has kept Mr. Churchill from ever building a very +notable realistic plot has kept him from ever creating any very +memorable characters. The author of ten novels, immensely popular for +more than a score of years, he has to his credit not a single +figure--man or woman--generally accepted by the public as either a type +or a person. With remarkably few exceptions he has seen his dramatis +personae from without and--doubtless for that reason--has apparently +felt as free to saw and fit them to his argument as he has felt with his +plots. Something preposterous in the millionaire reformer Mr. Crewe, +something cantankerous and passionate in the Abolitionist Judge Whipple +of _The Crisis_, above all something both tough and quaint in the +up-country politician Jethro Bass in _Coniston_ resisted the +argumentative knife and saved for those particular persons that look of +being entities in their own right which distinguishes the authentic from +the artificial characters of fiction. + +For the most part, however, Mr. Churchill has erred in what may be +called the arithmetic of his art: he has thought of men and women as +mere fractions of a unit of fiction, whereas they themselves in any but +romances must be the units and the total work the sum or product of the +fictive operation. Naturally he has succeeded rather worse with +characters of his own creating, since his conceptions in such cases have +come to him as social or political problems to be illustrated in the +conduct of beings suitably shaped, than in characters drawn in some +measure from history, with their individualities already more or less +established. Without achieving fresh or bold interpretations of John +Paul Jones or George Rogers Clark or Lincoln, Mr. Churchill has added a +good deal to the vividness of their legends; whereas in the case of +characters not quite so historical, such as Judge Whipple and Jethro +Bass, he has admirably fused his moral earnestness regarding American +politics with his sense of spaciousness and color in the American past. + +After the most careful reflection upon Mr. Churchill's successive +studies of contemporary life one recurs irresistibly to his romances. He +possesses, and has more than once displayed, a true romantic--almost a +true epic--instinct. Behind the careers of Richard Carvel and Stephen +Brice and David Ritchie and Jethro Bass appear the procession and +reverberation of stirring days. Nearer a Walter Scott than a Bernard +Shaw, Mr. Churchill has always been willing to take the memories of his +nation as they have come down to him and to work them without question +or rejection into his broad tapestry. A naturalistic generation is +tempted to make light of such methods; they belong, however, too truly +to good traditions of literature to be overlooked. + +A national past has many uses, and different dispositions find in it +instruction or warning, depression or exaltation. Mr. Churchill has +found in the American past a cause for exaltation chiefly; after his +ugliest chapters the light breaks and he closes always upon the note of +high confidence which resounds in the epics of robust, successful +nations. If in this respect he has too regularly flattered his +countrymen, he has also enriched the national consciousness by the +colors which he has brought back from his impassioned forays. Only now +and then, it must be remembered, do historical novels pass in their +original form from one generation to another; more frequently they +suffer a decomposition due to their lack of essential truth and descend +to the function of compost for succeeding harvests of romance. Though +probably but one or two of Mr. Churchill's books--perhaps not even +one--can be expected to outlast a generation with much vitality, he +cannot be denied the honor of having added something agreeable if +imponderable to the national memory and so of having served his country +in one real way if not in another. + + +3. ROBERT HERRICK + +If the novels of Robert Herrick were nothing else they would still be +indispensable documents upon that first and second decade of the +twentieth century in America, when a minority unconvinced by either +romance or Roosevelt set out to scrutinize the exuberant complacence +which was becoming a more and more ominous element in the national +character. Imperialism, running a cheerful career in the Caribbean and +in the Pacific, had set the mode for average opinion; the world to +Americans looked immense and the United States the most immense +potentiality in it. + +Small wonder then that the prevailing literature gave itself generally +to large proclamations about the future or to spacious recollections of +the past in which the note was hope unmodified. Small wonder either--be +it said to the credit of literature--that the same period caused and saw +the development of the most emphatic protest which has come from native +pens since the abolition of slavery--not excepting even the literary +rebels of the eighties. Much of that protest naturally expressed itself +in fiction, of many orders of intelligence and competence and intention. +Various voices have been louder or shriller or sweeter or in some cases +more thoroughgoing than Mr. Herrick's; but his is the voice which, in +fiction, has best represented the scholar's conscience disturbed by the +spectacle of a tumultuous generation of which most of the members are +too much undisturbed. + +In particular Mr. Herrick has concerned himself with the status of women +in the republic which has prided itself upon nothing more than upon its +attitude toward their sex, and he has regularly insisted upon carrying +his researches beyond that period of green girlhood which appears to be +all of a woman's life that can interest the popular fiction-mongers. He +knows, without anywhere putting it precisely into words, that the +elaborate language of compliment used by Americans toward women, though +deriving perhaps from a time when women were less numerous on the +frontier than men and were therefore specially prized and praised, has +become for the most part a hollow language. The pioneer woman earned +all the respect she got by the equal share she bore in the tasks of her +laborious world. Her successor in the comfortable society which the +frontier founded by its travail neither works nor breeds as those first +women did. But the energy thus happily released, instead of being +directed into other useful channels, has been encouraged to spend itself +upon the complex arts of the parasite. + +Ascribe it to the vanity of men who choose to regard women as luxurious +chattels and the visible symptoms of success; ascribe it to a wasteful +habit practised by a nation never compelled to make the best use of its +resources; ascribe it to the craft of a sex quick to seize its advantage +after centuries of disadvantage--ascribe it to whatever one will, the +fact remains that the United States has evolved a widely admired type of +woman who lacks the glad animal spontaneity of the little girl, the +ardent abandon of the mistress, the strong loyalty of the wife, the +deep, calm, fierce instincts of the mother; and who even lacks--although +here a change has taken place since Mr. Herrick began to chronicle +her--the confident impulse to follow her own path as an individual, +irrespective of her peculiar functions. It must be remembered, of +course, that Mr. Herrick has had in mind not the vast majority of women, +who in the United States as everywhere else on earth still fully +participate in life, but the American Woman, that traditional figure +compounded of timid ice and dainty insolence and habitually tricked out +with a wealth which holds the world so far away that it cannot see how +empty she really is. He has sought in his novels, by dissecting the +pretty simulacrum, to show that it has little blood and less soul. + +At times he writes with a biting animus. In _One Woman's Life_ Milly +schemes herself out of the plain surroundings into which she was born, +lapses from her designs enough to marry a poor man for love but +subsequently wrecks his career and wears him out by her ambitious +ignorance, and before she ends the story in the arms of another husband +has contrived to waste the savings of a friend of her own sex who tries +to help her. In _The Healer_ the doctor's wife continually drags him +back from the passionate exercise of his true gift, luring him with her +beauty to live in the world which nearly destroys him, though he finally +comprehends the danger and escapes her. And in _Together_, its epic +canvas crowded with all kinds and conditions of lovers and married +couples, Mr. Herrick never spares the type. Other novelists may be +content to show her glittering in her maiden plumage; he advances to the +point where it becomes clear that the qualities ordinarily exalted in +her are nothing but signs of an arrested spiritual and moral +development. Hard and wilful enough, she never becomes mature, and she +tangles the web of life with the heedless hands of a child. + +A less reflective novelist might be content with blaming or satirizing +her for her blind instinct to marry her richest suitor; for forcing him, +once married, to support her and her children at a pitch of luxury which +demands that he give up his personal aspirations in art or science or +altruism; for struggling so ruthlessly to plant her daughters in +prosperous soil which will nourish the "sacred seed" of the race +abundantly. Mr. Herrick, however, does not disapprove such instincts for +their own sake. He sees in them an element furnishing mankind with one +of its valuable sources of stability. What he assails is a national +conception which endows women with these instincts in mean, trivial, +unenlightened forms. + +His criticism of the American Woman, indeed, is but an emphatic point in +his larger criticism of human life, and he has singled her out +essentially, it seems, because of the shallowness of her lovely +pretenses. It is the shallowness, not the sex, which arouses him. In +_The Common Lot_, in _The Memoirs of an American Citizen_, in _Clark's +Field_, and in certain of the strands of _Together_ it is the women who +demand that, no matter what happens, they shall be allowed to live their +lives upon the high plane of integrity from which the casual world is +always trying to pull men and women down. Integrity in love, integrity +in personal conduct, integrity in business and public affairs--this Mr. +Herrick holds to with a profound, at times a bleak, consistency which +has both worried and limited his readers. Integrity in love leads +Margaret Pole in _Together_, for instance, from her foolish husband to +her lover during one lyric episode and thereafter holds them apart in +the consciousness of a love completed and not to be touched with +perishable flesh. In novel after novel the characters come to grief from +the American habit of extravagance, which, as Mr. Herrick represents +it, seems a serious offense against integrity--springing from a failure +to control vagrant desires and tying the spirit to the need of +superfluous things until it ceases to be itself. And with never wearied +iteration he comes back to the problem of how the individual can +maintain his integrity in the face of the temptation to get easy wealth +and cut a false figure in the world. + +Possibly it was a youth spent in New England that made Mr. Herrick as +sensitive as he has been to the atmosphere of affairs in Chicago, where +fortunes have come in like a flood during his residence there, and where +the popular imagination has been primarily enlisted in the game of +seeing where the next wave will break and of catching its golden spoil. +Mr. Herrick has not confined himself to Chicago for his scene; indeed, +he is one of the least local of American novelists, ranging as he does, +with all the appearances of ease, from New England to California, from +farm to factory, from city to suburb, and along the routes of pleasure +which Americans take in Europe. But Chicago is the true center of his +universe, and he is the principal historian in fiction of that roaring +village so rapidly turned town. He has not, however, been blown with the +prevailing winds. The vision that has fired most of his fellow citizens +has looked to him like a tantalizing but insubstantial mirage. Something +in his disposition has kept him cool while others were being made drunk +with opportunity. + +Is it the scholar in him, or the New Englander, or the moralist which +has compelled him to count the moral cost of material expansion? In the +first of his novels to win much of a hearing, _The Common Lot_, he +studies the career of an architect who becomes involved in the frauds of +dishonest builders and sacrifices his professional integrity for the +sake of quick, dangerous profits. _The Memoirs of an American Citizen_, +a precious document now too much neglected, follows a country youth of +good initial impulses through his rise and progress among the packers +and on to the Senate of the United States. This is one of the oldest +themes in literature, one of the themes most certain to succeed with any +public: Dick Whittington, the Industrious Apprentice, over again. Mr. +Herrick, however, cannot merely repeat the old drama or point the old +moral. His hero wriggles upward by devious ways and sharp practices, +crushing competitors, diverting justice, and gradually paying for his +fortune with his integrity. In the most modern idiom Mr. Herrick asks +again and again the ancient question whether the whole world is worth as +much as a man's soul. + +That mystical rigor which permits but one answer to the question +suggests to Mr. Herrick two avenues of cure from the evils accompanying +the disease he broods upon. One is a return to simple living under +conditions which quiet the restless nerves, allay the greedy appetites, +and restore the central will. The Master in _The Master of the Inn_, +Renault in _Together_, Holden in _The Healer_--all of them utter and +live a gospel of health which obviously corresponds to Mr. Herrick's +belief. When the world grows too loud one may withdraw from it; there +are still uncrowded spaces where existence marches simply. Remembering +them, Mr. Herrick's imagination, held commonly on so tight a fist, slips +its hood off and takes wing. And yet he knows that the north woods into +which a few favored men and women may withdraw are not cure enough for +the multitude. They must practise, or some one must practise for their +benefit, honorable refusals in the midst of life. The architect's wife +in _The Common Lot_, Harrington's sister in _The Memoirs of an American +Citizen_, the clear-eyed Johnstons in _Together_--they have or attain +the knowledge, which seems a paradox, that selfishness can fatally +entangle the individual in the perplexities of existence and that the +best chance for disentanglement may come from intelligent unselfishness. + +_Clark's Field_ amply illustrates this paradox. The field has for many +years lain idle in the midst of a growing town because of a flaw in the +title, and when eventually the title is quieted and the land is sold it +pours wealth upon heads not educated to use it with wisdom. Here is +unearned increment made flesh and converted into drama: the field that +might have been home and garden and playground becomes a machine, a +monster, which gradually visits evil upon all concerned. Then Adelle and +her proletarian cousin, aware that the field through the corruption of a +well-meant law has grown malevolent, resolve to break the spell by +surrendering their selfish interests and accepting the position of +unselfish trustees to the estate until--if that time ever comes--some +better means may be devised for making the earth serve the purposes of +those who live upon it. + +The solution does not entirely satisfy, of course. At best it is a +makeshift if considered in its larger bearings. It comes near, however, +to solving the problems as individuals of Adelle and her cousin, who +save more in character than they lose in pocket. And it might possibly +have come nearer still were it not for the handicap under which Mr. +Herrick, for all his intelligence and conscience, has labored as an +artist. That handicap is a certain stiffness on the plastic side of his +imagination. His conceptions come to him, if criticism can be any judge, +with a large touch of the abstract about them; his rationalizing +intelligence is always present at their birth. Nor do his narratives, +once under way, flow with the sure, effortless movement which is natural +to born story-tellers. His imagination, not quite continuous enough, +occasionally fails to fuse and shape disparate materials. It is likely +to fall short when he essays fancy or mystery, as in _A Life for a +Life_; or when he has a whimsy for amusing melodrama, as in _His Great +Adventure_. The flexibility which reveals itself in humor or in the +lighter irony is not one of his principal endowments. Restrained and +direct as he always is so far as language goes, he cannot always keep +his action absolutely in hand: this or that person or incident now and +then breaks out of the pattern; the skeleton of a formula now and then +becomes too prominent. + +It is his intelligence which makes his satire sharp and significant; it +is his conscience which lends passion to his representation and lifts +him often to a true if sober eloquence. But in at least two of his +novels imagination takes him, as only imagination can take a novelist, +beyond the reach of either intelligence or conscience. _Together_, a +little cumbersome, a little sprawling, nevertheless glows with an +intensity which gives off heat as well as light. It is more than an +exhaustive document upon modern marriage; it is interpretation as well. +_Clark's Field_, a sparer, clearer story, is even more than +interpretation; it is a work of art springing from a spirit which has +taken fire and has transmuted almost all its abstract conceptions into +genuine flesh and blood. That _Clark's Field_ is Mr. Herrick's latest +novel heightens the expectation with which one hears that after a +silence of seven years he now plans to return to fiction. + + +4. UPTON SINCLAIR + +The social and industrial order which has blacklisted Upton Sinclair +has, while increasing his rage, also increased his art. In his youth he +was primarily a lyric boy storming the ears of a world which failed to +detect in his romances the promise of which he himself was outspokenly +confident. His first character--the hero of _Springtime and Harvest_ +and of _The Journal of Arthur Stirling_--belonged to the lamenting race +of the minor poets, shaped his beauty in deep seclusion, and died +because it went unrecognized. Mr. Sinclair, though he had created +Stirling in his own image, did not die. Instead he began to study the +causes of public deafness and found the injustices which ever since he +has devoted his enormous energy to exposing. If that original motive +seems inadequate and if traces of it have been partially responsible for +his reputation as a seeker of personal notoriety, still it has lent +ardor to his crusade. And if he had not discovered so much injustice to +chronicle--if there had not been so much for him to discover--he must +have lacked the ammunition with which he has fought. + +As the evidences have accumulated he has been spared the need of +complaining merely because another minor poet was neglected and has been +able to widen his accusations until they include the whole multitude of +oppressions which free spirits have to contend against when they face +machines and privilege and mortmain. The industrial system which true +prophets have unanimously condemned for a century and a half helped to +pack Mr. Sinclair's records from the first; the war, with its vast +hysteria and blind panic, made it superfluous for him to add much +commentary in _Jimmie Higgins_ and _100%_ to the veritable episodes +which he there recounted. On some occasions fact itself has the impetus +of propaganda. The times have furnished Mr. Sinclair the keen, cool, +dangerous art of Thomas Paine. + +To mention Paine is to rank Mr. Sinclair with the ragged philosophers +among whom he properly belongs, rather than with learned misanthropes +like Swift or intellectual ironists like Bernard Shaw. An expansive +passion for humanity at large colors all this proletarian radical has +written. By disposition very obviously a poet, working with no subtle or +complex processes and without any of the lighter aspects of humor, Mr. +Sinclair simply refuses to accept existence as it stands and goes on +questioning it forever. _Samuel the Seeker_ seems a kind of allegory of +its author's own career. He, too, in the fashion of Samuel Prescott, +inquires of all he meets why they tolerate injustice and demands that +something or other be done at once. These are the methods of the ragged +philosophers, whereas the learned understand that justice comes slowly +and so rest now and then from effort; and the ironists understand that +justice may never come and so now and then sit down, detached and +cynical. + +Naïve inquirers like Upton Sinclair take and give fewer opportunities +for comfort. How can any one talk of the long ages of human progress +when a child may starve to death in a few days? How can any one take +refuge in irony when agony is always abroad, biting and rending? How can +any one leave to others the obligation to assail injustice when the +responsibility for it lies equally upon all, whether victims or victors, +who permit it to continue? A questioner so relentless can very soon bore +the questioned, especially if they are less strenuous or less inflamed +than he and can keep up his pitch neither of activity nor of anger; but +this is no proof that such an inquiry is impertinent or that answers are +impossible. Indeed, the chances are that the proportions of this +boredom and the animosity resulting from it will depend upon the extent +to which grievances do exist about which it is painful to think for the +reason that they so plainly should not exist. A complacent reader of any +of Mr. Sinclair's better books can stay complacent only by shutting up +the book and his mind again. + +Without doubt the various abuses which these books set forth have their +case seriously weakened by the violent quickness with which Mr. Sinclair +scents conspiracy among the enemies of justice. It is perhaps not to be +wondered at that he should so often fly to this conclusion; he has +himself, as his personal history in _The Brass Check_ makes clear +enough, been practically conspired against. But some instinct for +melodrama in his constitution has led him to invent a larger number of +conspirators than has been necessary to illustrate his contention. + +In _Love's Pilgrimage_, for instance, Thyrsis suffers tortures from the +fact that it takes time for a poet, however gifted, to make himself +heard. In reality, of course, the blame for this lies in about the same +quarter of the universe as that which establishes a period of years +between youth and maturity; to complain too bitterly about either ruling +is to waste on an inscrutable problem the strength which might better be +devoted to an annoying task. Mr. Sinclair, however, cools himself in no +such philosophy. He dramatizes Thyrsis's hungry longings and cruel +disappointments on Thyrsis's own terms, making the boy out a martyr with +powerful forces arrayed against him in a conspiracy to keep ascendant +genius down. Consequently the narrative has about it something shrill +and febrile; it is keyed too high to carry full conviction to any but +those who are straining at a similar leash. So also in _The Profits of +Religion_--which is to the present age what _The Age of Reason_ was to +an earlier revolutionary generation--Mr. Sinclair excessively simplifies +religious history by reducing almost the whole process to a conspiracy +on the part of priestcraft to hoodwink the people and so to fatten its +own greedy purse. He must know that the process has not been quite so +simple; but, leaving to others to say the things that all will say, he +studies "supernaturalism as a source of income and a shield to +privilege." Here again his instincts and methods as a melodramatist +assert themselves: he warms to the struggle and plays his lash upon his +conspiring priests in a mood of mingled duty and delight. + +_The Profits of Religion_ and _The Brass Check_ belong to a series of +treatises on the economic interpretation of culture which will later +examine education and literature as these two have examined the church +and journalism and which collectively will bear the title _The Dead +Hand_. Against the malign domination of the present by the past Mr. +Sinclair directs his principal assault. In the arts he sees the dead +hand holding the classics on their thrones and thrusting back new +masterpieces as they appear; in religion he sees it clothing the visions +of ancient poets in steel creeds and rituals and denying that such +visions can ever come to later spirits; in human society he sees it +welding the manacles of caste and hardening this or that temporary +pattern of life to a perpetual order. As he repeatedly suspects +conspiracy where none exists, so he repeatedly suspects deliberate +malice where he should perceive stupidity. + +Now stupidity, though certainly the cause of more evils than malice can +devise, is less employable as a villain: it is not anthropomorphic +enough for melodrama. Mr. Sinclair is moral first and then intellectual. +Touching upon such a theme as the horrors of venereal disease he feels +more than a rational man's contempt for the imbecility of parents who +will not instruct their daughters in anything but the sentimental +elements of sex; he feels the fury toward them that audiences feel +toward villains. It is much the same with his rather absurd novels +written to display the follies of fashionable life, _The Metropolis_ and +_The Moneychangers_: he finds more crime than folly in the extravagant +pursuit of pleasure on the part of the few while the many endure hunger +and cold, homelessness and joblessness, ignorance and rebellion and +premature decay. Though the satirists may smile at the silly few, the +ragged philosophers must weep for the miserable many. + +Class-consciousness is a great advantage to the writer of exciting +fiction, as numerous American novelists have shown--standing ordinarily, +however, on the side of the privileged orders. Mr. Sinclair in _The +Jungle_, his great success, taking his stand with the unprivileged, with +the wretched aliens in the Chicago stockyards, had the advantage that he +could represent his characters as actually contending against the +conspiracy which always exists when the exploiters of men see the +exploited growing restless. What outraged the public was the news, +later confirmed by official investigation, that the meat of a large part +of the world was being prepared, at great profit to the packers, under +conditions abominably unhygienic; what outraged Mr. Sinclair was the +spectacle of the lives which the workers in the yards were compelled to +lead if they got work--which meant life to them--at all. Thanks to the +conspiracy among their masters they could not help themselves; thanks to +the weight of the dead hand they could get no help from popular opinion, +which saw their plight as something essential to the very structure of +society, as Aristotle saw slavery. Mr. Sinclair proclaimed with a +ringing voice that their plight was not essential; and he prophesied the +revolution with an eloquence which, though the revolution has not come, +still warms and lifts the raw material with which he had to deal. + +Nothing about him has done more to make him an arresting novelist than +his conviction that mankind has not yet reached its peak, as the +pessimists think; and that the current stage of civilization, with all +that is unendurable about it, need last no longer than till the moment +when mankind determines that it need no longer endure. He speaks as a +socialist who has dug up a multitude of economic facts and can present +them with appalling force; he speaks as a poet sustained by visions and +generous hopes. + +How hope has worked in Mr. Sinclair appears with significant emphasis in +the contrast between _Manassas_ and _100%_; the two books illustrate the +range of American naturalism and the progressive disillusion of a +generation. _Manassas_ is the work of a man filled with epic memories +and epic expectations who saw in the Civil War a clash of titanic +principles, saw a nation being beaten out on a fearful anvil, saw +splendor and heroism rising up from the pits of slaughter. And in spite +of his fifteen years spent in discovering the other side of the American +picture Mr. Sinclair in _Jimmie Higgins_, the story of a socialist who +went to war against the Kaiser, showed traces still of a romantic pulse, +settling down, however, toward the end, to a colder beat. It is the +colder beat which throbs in _100%_, with a temperature that suggests +both ice and fire. Rarely has such irony been maintained in an entire +volume as that which traces the evolution of Peter Gudge from sharper to +patriot through the foul career of spying and incitement and persecution +opened to his kind of talents by the frenzy of noncombatants during the +war. To this has that patriotism come which on the red fields of +Virginia poured itself out in unstinting sacrifice; and, though the +sacrifice went on in France and Flanders, was it worth while, Mr. +Sinclair implicitly inquires, when the conflict, at no matter how great +a distance, could breed such vermin as Peter Gudge? Explicitly he does +not answer his question: his art has gone, at least for the moment, +beyond avowed argument, merely marshaling the evidence with ironic skill +and dispensing with the chorus. _100%_ is a document which honest +Americans must remember and point out when orators exclaim, in the +accents of official idealism, over the great days and deeds of the great +war. + +The road for Mr. Sinclair to travel is the road of irony and +documentation, both of which will hold him back from ineffectual rages +and thereby serve to enlarge his influence. Such genius for controversy +as his may be neither expected nor advised to look for quieter paths; it +feels, with Bernard Shaw, that "if people are rotting and starving in +all directions, and nobody else has the heart or brains to make a +disturbance about it, the great writers must." It is fair to say, +however, that certain readers heartily sympathetic toward Mr. Sinclair +observe in him a painful tendency to enjoy scandal for its own sake and +to generalize from it to an extent which hurts his cause; observe in him +a quite superfluous gusto when it comes to reporting bloody incidents +not always contributory to any general design; observe in him a frequent +over-use of the shout and the scream. He has himself given an +example--_100%_--on which such critical strictures are based; in that +best of his novels as well as best of his arguments he has avoided most +of his own defects. + +A revolutionary novelist naturally finds it difficult to represent his +world with the quiet grasp with which it can be represented by one who, +accepting the present frame of life, has studied it curiously, +affectionately, until it has left a firm, substantial image in the mind. +The revolutionist must see life as constantly whirling and melting under +his gaze; he must bring to light many facts which the majority overlook +but which it will seem to him like connivance with injustice to leave in +hiding; he must go constantly beyond what is to what ought to be. All +the more reason, then, why he should be as watchful as the most watchful +artist in his choice and use of the modes of his particular art. It +requires at least as much art to convert as to give pleasure. + + +5. THEODORE DREISER + +Much concerned about wisdom as Theodore Dreiser is, he almost wholly +lacks the dexterous knowingness which has marked the mass of fiction in +the age of O. Henry. Not only has Mr. Dreiser never allowed any one else +to make up his mind for him regarding the significance and aims and +obligations of mankind but he has never made up his mind himself. A +large dubitancy colors all his reflections. "All we know is that we +cannot know." The only law about which we can be reasonably certain is +the law of change. Justice is "an occasional compromise struck in an +eternal battle." Virtue and honesty are "a system of weights and +measures, balances struck between man and man." + +Prudence no less than philosophy demands, then, that we hold ourselves +constantly in readiness to discard our ancient creeds and habits and +step valiantly around the corner beyond which reality will have drifted +even while we were building our houses on what seemed the primeval and +eternal rock. Tides of change rise from deeps below deeps; cosmic winds +of change blow upon us from boundless chaos; mountains, in the long +geologic seasons, shift and flow like clouds; and the everlasting +heavens may some day be shattered by the explosion or pressure of new +circumstances. Somewhere in the scheme man stands punily on what may be +an Ararat rising out of the abyss or only a promontory of the moment +sinking back again; there all his strength is devoted to a dim struggle +for survival. How in this flickering universe shall man claim for +himself the honors of any important antiquity or any important destiny? +What, in this vast accident, does human dignity amount to? + +For a philosopher with views so wide it is difficult to be a dramatist +or a novelist. If he is consistent the most portentous human tragedy +must seem to him only a tiny gasp for breath, the most delightful human +comedy only a tiny flutter of joy. Against a background of suns dying on +the other side of Aldebaran any mole trodden upon by some casual hoof +may appear as significant a personage as an Oedipus or a Lear in his +last agony. To be a novelist or dramatist at all such a cosmic +philosopher must contract his vision to the little island we inhabit, +must adjust his interest to mortal proportions and concerns, must match +his narrative to the scale by which we ordinarily measure our lives. The +muddle of elements so often obvious in Mr. Dreiser's work comes from the +conflict within him of huge, expansive moods and a conscience working +hard to be accurate in its representation of the most honest facts of +manners and character. + +Granted, he might reasonably argue, that the plight and stature of all +mankind are essentially so mean, the novelist need not seriously bother +himself with the task of looking about for its heroic figures. Plain +stories of plain people are as valuable as any others. Since all larger +doctrines and ideals are likely to be false in a precarious world, it is +best to stick as close as possible to the individual. When the +individual is sincere he has at least some positive attributes; his +record may have a genuine significance for others if it is presented +with absolute candor. Indeed, we can partially escape from the general +meaninglessness of life at large by being or studying individuals who +are sincere, and who are therefore the origins and centers of some kind +of reality. + +That the sincerity which Mr. Dreiser practises differs in some respects +from that of any other American novelist, no matter how truthful, must +be referred to one special quality of his own temperament. Historically +he has his fellows: he belongs with the movement toward naturalism which +came to America when Hamlin Garland and Stephen Crane and Frank Norris, +partly as a protest against the bland realism which Howells expounded, +were dissenting in their various dialects from the reticences and the +romances then current. Personally Mr. Dreiser displays, almost alone +among American novelists, the characteristics of what for lack of a +better native term we have to call the peasant type--the type to which +Gorki belongs and which Tolstoy wanted to belong to. + +Enlarged by genius though Mr. Dreiser is; open as he is to all manner of +novel sensations and ideas; little as he is bound by the rigor of +village habits and prejudices--still he carries wherever he goes the +true peasant simplicity of outlook, speaks with the peasant's bald +frankness, and suffers a peasant confusion in the face of complexity. +How far he sees life on one simple plane may be illustrated by his short +story _When the Old Century Was New_, an attempt to reconstruct in +fiction the New York of 1801 which shows him, in spite of some +deliberate erudition, to be amazingly unable to feel at home in another +age than his own. This same simplicity of outlook makes _A Traveler at +Forty_ so revealing a document, makes the Traveler appear a true +Innocent Abroad without the hilarious and shrewd self-sufficiency of a +frontiersman of genius like Mark Twain. While it is true that Mr. +Dreiser's plain-speaking on a variety of topics euphemized by earlier +American realists has about it some look of conscious intention, and is +undoubtedly sustained by his literary principles, yet his candor +essentially inheres in his nature: he thinks in blunt terms before he +speaks in them. He speaks bluntly even upon the more subtle and +intricate themes--finance and sex and art--which interest him above all +others. + +On the whole he probably succeeds best with finance. The career of +Cowperwood in _The Financier_ and _The Titan_, a career notoriously +based upon that of Charles T. Yerkes, allowed Mr. Dreiser to exercise +his virtue of patient industry and to build up a solid monument of fact +which, though often dull enough, nevertheless continues generally to +convince, at least in respect to Cowperwood's business enterprises. The +American financier, after all, has rarely had much subtlety in his +make-up. Single-minded, tough-skinned, ruthless, "suggesting a power +which invents man for one purpose and no other, as generals, saints, and +the like are invented," he shoulders and hurls his bulk through a sea of +troubles and carries off his spoils. Such a man as Frank Cowperwood Mr. +Dreiser understands. He understands the march of desire to its goal. He +seems always to have been curious regarding the large operations of +finance, at once stirred on his poetical side by the intoxication of +golden dreams, something as Marlowe was in _The Jew of Malta_, and on +his cynical side struck by the mechanism of craft and courage and +indomitable impulse which the financier employs. Mr. Dreiser writes, it +is true, as an outsider; he simplifies the account of Cowperwood's +adventures after wealth, touching the record here and there with the +naïve hand of a peasant--even though a peasant of genius--wondering how +great riches are actually obtained and guessing somewhat awkwardly at +the mystery. And yet these guesses perhaps come nearer to the truth than +they might have come were either the typical financier or Mr. Dreiser +more subtle. You cannot set a poet to catch a financier and be at all +sure of the prize. As it is, this Trilogy of Desire (never completed in +the third part which was to show Cowperwood extending his mighty foray +into London) is as considerable an epic as American business has yet to +show. + +Cowperwood's lighter hours are devoted to pursuits almost as polygamous +as those of the leader of some four-footed herd. In this respect the +novels which celebrate him stand close to the more popular _Sister +Carrie_ and _Jennie Gerhardt_, both of them annals of women who fall as +easily as Cowperwood's many mistresses into the hand of the conquering +male. If Mr. Dreiser refuses to withhold his approbation from the +lawless financier, he withholds it even less from the lawless lover. No +moralism overlays the biology of these novels. Sex in them is a +free-flowing, expanding energy, working resistlessly through all human +tissue, knowing in itself neither good nor evil, habitually at war with +the rules and taboos which have been devised by mankind to hold its +amative impulses within convenient bounds. To the cosmic philosopher +what does it matter whether this or that human male mates with this or +that human female, or whether the mating endures beyond the passionate +moment? + +Viewing such matters thus Mr. Dreiser constantly underestimates the +forces which in civil society actually do restrain the expansive moods +of sex. At least he chooses to represent love almost always in its +vagrant hours. For this his favorite situation is in large part +responsible: that of a strong man, no longer generously young, loving +downward to some plastic, ignorant girl dazzled by his splendor and +immediately compliant to his advances. Mr. Dreiser is obsessed by the +spectacle of middle age renewing itself at the fires of youth--an +obsession which has its sentimental no less than its realistic traits. +What he most conspicuously leaves out of account is the will and +personality of women, whom he sees, or at least represents, with hardly +any exceptions as mere fools of love, mere wax to the wooer, who have no +separate identities till some lover shapes them. To something like this +simplicity the rôle of women in love is reduced by those Boccaccian +fabulists who adorn the village taproom and the corner grocery. + +Mr. Dreiser is reported to consider _The 'Genius'_, a massive, muddy, +powerful narrative, his greatest novel, though as a matter of fact it +cannot be compared with _Sister Carrie_ for insight or accuracy or +charm. His partiality may perhaps be ascribed to his strong inclination +toward the life of art, through which his 'Genius' moves, half hero and +half picaro. Witla remains mediocre enough in all but his sexual +unscrupulousness, but he is impelled by a driving force more or less +like those forces which impel Cowperwood. The will to wealth, the will +to love, the will to art--Mr. Dreiser conceives them all as blind +energies with no goal except self-realization. So conceiving them he +tends to see them as less conditioned than they ordinarily are in their +earthly progress by the resistance of statute and habit. Particularly is +this true of his representation of the careers of artists. Carrie +becomes a noted actress in a few short weeks; Witla almost as rapidly +becomes a noted illustrator; other minor characters here and there in +the novels are said to have prodigious power without exhibiting it. +Hardly ever does there appear any delicate, convincing analysis of the +mysterious behavior of true genius. Mr. Dreiser's artists are hardly +persons at all; they are creatures driven, and the wonder lies primarily +in the impelling energy. The cosmic philosopher in him sees the +beginning and the end of the artistic process better than the novelist +in him sees its methods. And the peasant in him, though it knows the +world of art as vivid and beautiful and though it has investigated that +world at first hand, still leads him to report it in terms often quaint, +melodramatic, invincibly rural. Witness the hundreds of times he calls +things "artistic." + +Two of his latest books indicate the range of his gifts and his +excellences. In _Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub_, which he calls A Book of the +Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life, he undertook to expound his +general philosophy and produced the most negligible of all his works. He +has no faculty for sustained argument. Like Byron, as soon as he begins +to reason he is less than half himself. In _Twelve Men_, on the other +hand, he displays the qualities by virtue of which he attracts and +deserves a serious attention. Rarely generalizing, he portrays a dozen +actual persons he has known, all his honesty brought to the task of +making his account fit the reality exactly, and all his large tolerance +exercised to present the truth without malice or excuses. Here lies the +field of his finest victories, here and in those adjacent tracts of +other books which are nearest this simple method: his representation of +old Gerhardt and of Aaron Berchansky in _The Hand of the Potter_; +numerous sketches of character in that broad pageant _A Hoosier +Holiday_; the tenderly conceived record of Caroline Meeber, wispy and +witless as she often is; the masterly study of Hurstwood's deterioration +in _Sister Carrie_--this last the peak among all Mr. Dreiser's +successes. + +Not the incurable awkwardness of his style nor his occasional merciless +verbosity nor his too frequent interposition of crude argument can +destroy the effect which he produces at his best--that of an eminent +spirit brooding over a world which in spite of many condemnations he +deeply, somberly loves. Something peasant-like in his genius may blind +him a little to the finer shades of character and set him astray in his +reports of cultivated society. His conscience about telling the plain +truth may suffer at times from a dogmatic tolerance which refuses to +draw lines between good and evil or between beautiful and ugly or +between wise and foolish. But he gains, on the whole, as much as he +loses by the magnitude of his cosmic philosophizing. These puny souls +over which he broods, with so little dignity in themselves, take on a +dignity from his contemplation of them. Small as they are, he has come +to them from long flights, and has brought back a lifted vision which +enriches his drab narratives. Something spacious, something now lurid +now luminous, surrounds them. From somewhere sound accents of an +authority not sufficiently explained by the mere accuracy of his +versions of life. Though it may indeed be difficult for a thinker of the +widest views to contract himself to the dimensions needed for +naturalistic art, and though he may often fail when he attempts it, when +he does succeed he has the opportunity, which the mere worldling lacks, +of ennobling his art with some of the great light of the poets. + + + + +CHAPTER III + +ART + + +1. BOOTH TARKINGTON + +Booth Tarkington is the glass of adolescence and the mold of Indiana. +The hero of his earliest novel, Harkless in _The Gentleman from +Indiana_, drifts through that narrative with a melancholy stride because +he has been seven long years out of college and has not yet set the +prairie on fire. But Mr. Tarkington, at the time of writing distant from +Princeton by about the same number of years and also not yet famous, +could not put up with failure in a hero. So Harkless appears as a mine +of latent splendors. Carlow County idolizes him, evil-doers hate him, +grateful old men worship him, devoted young men shadow his unsuspecting +steps at night in order to protect him from the villains of +Six-Cross-Roads, sweet girls adore him, fortune saves him from dire +adventures, and in the end his fellow-voters choose him to represent +their innumerable virtues in the Congress of their country without his +even dreaming what affectionate game they are at. This from the creator +of Penrod, who at the comical age of twelve so often lays large plans +for proving to the heedless world that he, too, has been a hero all +along! In somewhat happier hours Mr. Tarkington wrote _Monsieur +Beaucaire_, that dainty romantic episode in the life of Prince +Louis-Philippe de Valois, who masquerades as a barber and then as a +gambler at Bath, is misjudged on the evidence of his own disguises, +just escapes catastrophe, and in the end gracefully forgives the +gentlemen and ladies who have been wrong, parting with an exquisite +gesture from Lady Mary Carlisle, the beauty of Bath, who loves him but +who for a few fatal days had doubted. This from the creator of William +Sylvanus Baxter, who at the preposterous age of seventeen imagines +himself another Sydney Carton and after a silent, agonizing, +condescending farewell goes out to the imaginary tumbril! + +Just such postures and phantasms of adolescence lie behind all Mr. +Tarkington's more serious plots--and not merely those earlier ones which +he constructed a score of years ago when the mode in fiction was +historical and rococo. Van Revel in _The Two Van Revels_, convinced and +passionate abolitionist, nevertheless becomes as hungry as any +fire-eater of them all the moment Polk moves for war on Mexico, though +to Van Revel the war is an evil madness. In _The Conquest of Canaan_ +Louden plays Prince Hal among the lowest his town affords, only to mount +with a rush to the mayoralty when he is ready. _The Guest of Quesnay_ +takes a hero who is soiled with every vileness, smashes his head in an +automobile accident, and thus transforms him into that glorious kind of +creature known as a "Greek god"--beautiful and innocent beyond belief or +endurance. _The Turmoil_ is really not much more veracious, with its +ugly duckling, Bibbs Sheridan, who has ideas, loves beauty, and writes +verse, but who after years of futile dreaming becomes a master of +capital almost overnight. Even _The Magnificent Ambersons_, with its +wealth of admirable satire, does not satirize its own conclusion but +rounds out its narrative with a hasty regeneration. And what can a +critic say of such blatant nonsense as arises from the frenzy of +propaganda in _Ramsey Milholland_? + +Perhaps it is truer to call Mr. Tarkington's plots sophomoric than to +call them adolescent. Indeed, the mark of the undergraduate almost +covers them, especially of the undergraduate as he fondly imagines +himself in his callow days and as he is foolishly instructed to regard +himself by the more vinous and more hilarious of the old graduates who +annually come back to a college to offer themselves--though this is not +their conscious purpose--as an object lesson in the loud triviality +peculiar and traditional to such hours of reunion. Adolescence, however, +when left to itself, has other and very different hours which Mr. +Tarkington shows almost no signs of comprehending. + +The author of _Penrod_, of _Penrod and Sam_, and of _Seventeen_ passes +for an expert in youth; rarely has so persistent a reputation been so +insecurely founded. What all these books primarily recall is the winks +that adults exchange over the heads of children who are minding their +own business, as the adults are not; the winks, moreover, of adults who +have forgotten the inner concerns of adolescence and now observe only +its surface awkwardnesses. Real adolescence, like any other age of man, +has its own passions, its own poetry, its own tragedies and felicities; +the adolescence of Mr. Tarkington's tales is almost nothing but +farce--staged for outsiders. Not one of the characters is an individual; +they are all little monsters--amusing monsters, it is true--dressed up +to display the stock ambitions and the stock resentments and the stock +affectations and the stock perturbations of the heart which attend the +middle teens. The pranks of Penrod Schofield are merely those of Tom +Sawyer repeated in another town, without the touches of poetry or of the +informing imagination lent by Mark Twain. The sighs of "Silly Bill" +Baxter--at first diverting, it is also true--are exorbitantly multiplied +till reality drops out of the semblance. Calf-love does not always +remain a joke merely because there are mature spectators to stand by +nudging one another and roaring at the discomfort which love causes its +least experienced victims. Those knowing asides which accompany these +juvenile records have been mistaken too often for shrewd, even for +profound, analyses of human nature. Actually they are only knowing, as +sophomores are knowing with respect to their juniors by a few years. In +contemporary American fiction Mr. Tarkington is the perennial sophomore. + +If he may be said never to have outgrown Purdue and Princeton, so also +may he be said never to have outgrown Indiana. In any larger sense, of +course, he has not needed to. A novelist does not require a universe in +which to find the universe, which lies folded, for the sufficiently +perceptive eye, in any village. Thoreau and Emerson found it in Concord; +Thomas Hardy in Wessex has watched the world move by without himself +moving. But Mr. Tarkington has toward his native state the conscious +attitude of the booster. Smile as he may at the too emphatic patriotism +of this or that of her sons, he himself nevertheless expands under a +similar stimulus. The impulse of Harkless to clasp all Carlow County to +his broad breast obviously sprang from a mood which Mr. Tarkington +himself had felt. And that impulse of that first novel has been +repeated again and again in the later characters. _In the Arena_, fruit +of Mr. Tarkington's term in the Indiana legislature, is a study in +complacency. Setting out to take the world of politics as he finds it, +he comes perilously near to ending on the note of approval for it as it +stands--as good, on the whole, as any possible world. His satire, at +least, is on the side of the established order. A certain soundness and +rightness of feeling, a natural hearty democratic instinct, which +appears in the novels, must not be allowed to mislead the analyst of his +art. More than once, to his credit, he satirically recurs to the +spectacle of those young Indianians who come back from their travels +with a secret condescension, as did George Amberson Minafer: "His +politeness was of a kind which democratic people found hard to bear. In +a word, M. le Duc had returned from the gay life of the capital to show +himself for a week among the loyal peasants belonging to the old +chateau, and their quaint habits and costumes afforded him a mild +amusement." Such passages, however, may be matched with irritating +dozens in which Mr. Tarkington swallows Indiana whole. + +That may have been an easier task than to perform a similar feat with +the state to the east of Indiana, which has always been a sort of +halfway house between East and West; or with that to the north, with its +many alien mixtures; or with that to the south, the picturesque, +diversified colony of Virginia; or with that to the west, which, thanks +in large part to Chicago, is packed with savagery and genius. Indiana, +at any rate till very recently, has had an indigenous population, not +too daring or nomadic; it has been both prosperous and folksy, the apt +home of pastorals, the agreeable habitat of a sentimental folk-poet +like Riley, the natural begetter of a canny fabulist like George Ade. It +has a tradition of realism in fiction, but that tradition descends from +_The Hoosier School-Master_ and it includes a full confidence in the +folk and in the rural virtues--very different from that of E.W. Howe or +Hamlin Garland or Edgar Lee Masters in states a little further outside +the warm, cozy circle of the Hoosiers. Indiana has a tradition of +romance, too. Did not Indianapolis publish _When Knighthood Was in +Flower_ and _Alice of Old Vincennes_? They are of the same vintage as +_Monsieur Beaucaire_. And both romance and realism in Indiana have +traditionally worn the same smooth surfaces, the same simple--not to say +silly--faith in things-at-large: God's in His Indiana; all's right with +the world. George Ade, being a satirist of genius, has stood out of all +this; Theodore Dreiser, Indianian by birth but hopelessly a rebel, has +stood out against it; but Booth Tarkington, trying to be Hoosier of +Hoosiers, has given himself up to the romantic and sentimental elements +of the Indiana literary tradition. + +To practise an art which is genuinely characteristic of some section of +the folk anywhere is to do what may be important and is sure to be +interesting. But Mr. Tarkington no more displays the naïveté of a true +folk-novelist than he displays the serene vision that can lift a +novelist above the accidents of his particular time and place. This +Indianian constantly appears, by his allusions, to be a citizen of the +world. He knows Europe; he knows New York. Again and again, particularly +in the superb opening chapters of _The Magnificent Ambersons_, he rises +above the local prejudices of his special parish and observes with a +finely critical eye. But whenever he comes to a crisis in the building +of a plot or in the truthful representation of a character he sags down +to the level of Indiana sentimentality. George Minafer departs from the +Hoosier average by being a snob; time--and Mr. Tarkington's plot--drags +the cub back to normality. Bibbs Sheridan departs from the Hoosier +average by being a poet; time--and Mr. Tarkington's plot--drags the cub +back to normality. Both processes are the same. Perhaps Mr. Tarkington +would not deliberately say that snobbery and poetry are equivalent +offenses, but he does not particularly distinguish. Sympathize as he may +with these two aberrant youths, he knows no other solution than in the +end to reduce them to the ranks. He accepts, that is, the casual Hoosier +valuation, not with pity because so many of the creative hopes of youth +come to naught or with regret that the flock in the end so frequently +prevails over individual talent, but with a sort of exultant hurrah at +seeing all the wandering sheep brought back in the last chapter and +tucked safely away in the good old Hoosier fold. + +Viewed critically this attitude of Mr. Tarkington's is of course not +even a compliment to Indiana, any more than it is a compliment to women +to take always the high chivalrous tone toward them, as if they were +flawless creatures; any more than it is a compliment to the poor to +assume that they are all virtuous or to the rich to assume that they are +all malefactors of a tyrannical disposition. If Indiana plays microcosm +to Mr. Tarkington's art, he owes it to his state to find more there than +he has found--or has cared to set down; he owes it to his state now and +then to quarrel with the dominant majority, for majorities occasionally +go wrong, as well as men; he owes it to his state to give up his method +of starting his narrative himself and then calling in popular +sentimentalism to advise him how to bring it to an end. + +According to all the codes of the more serious kinds of fiction, the +unwillingness--or the inability--to conduct a plot to its legitimate +ending implies some weakness in the artistic character; and this +weakness has been Mr. Tarkington's principal defect. Nor does it in any +way appear that he excuses himself by citing the immemorial license of +the romancer. Mr. Tarkington apparently believes in his own conclusions. +Now this causes the more regret for the reason that he has what is next +best to character in a novelist--that is, knack. He has the knack of +romance when he wants to employ it: a light, allusive manner; a +sufficient acquaintance with certain charming historical epochs and the +"properties" thereto pertaining--frills, ruffs, rapiers, insinuation; a +considerable expertness in the ways of the "world"; gay colors, swift +moods, the note of tender elegy. He has also the knack of satire, which +he employs more frequently than romance. With what a rapid, joyous, +accurate eye he has surveyed the processes of culture in "the Midland +town"! How quickly he catches the first gesture of affectation and how +deftly he sets it forth, entertained and entertaining! From the +chuckling exordium of _The Magnificent Ambersons_ it is but a step to +_The Age of Innocence_ and _Main Street_. Little reflective as he has +allowed himself to be, he has by shrewd observation alone succeeded in +writing not a few chapters which have texture, substance, "thickness." +He has movement, he has energy, he has invention, he has good temper, he +has the leisure to write as well as he can if he wishes to. And, unlike +those dozens of living American writers who once each wrote one good +book and then lapsed into dull oblivion or duller repetition, he has +traveled a long way from the methods of his greener days. + +Why then does he continue to trifle with his thread-bare adolescents, as +if he were afraid to write candidly about his coevals? Why does he drift +with the sentimental tide and make propaganda for provincial +complacency? He must know better. He can do better. + +_February 1921._ + + +POSTSCRIPT.--He has done better. Almost as if to prove a somewhat somber +critic in the wrong and to show that newer novelists have no monopoly of +the new style of seriousness, Mr. Tarkington has in _Alice Adams_ held +himself veracious to the end and has produced a genuinely significant +book. Alice is, indeed, less strictly a tragic figure than she appears +to be. Desire, in any of the deeper senses, she shows no signs of +feeling; what she loves in Russell is but incidentally himself and +actually his assured position and his assured prosperity. So considered, +her machinations to enchant and hold him have a comic aspect; one touch +more of exaggeration and she would pass over to join those sorry ladies +of the world of farce who take a larger visible hand in wooing than +human customs happen to approve. But Mr. Tarkington withholds that one +touch more of exaggeration. He understands that Alice's instinct to win +a husband is an instinct as powerful as any that she has and is all that +she has been taught by her society to have. In his handling she becomes +important; her struggle, without the aid of guardian dowager or +beguiling dot, becomes increasingly pathetic as the narrative advances; +and her eventual failure, though signalized merely by her resolution to +desert the inhospitable circles of privilege for the wider universe of +work, carries with it the sting of tragedy. + +Mr. Tarkington might have gone further than he has behind the bourgeois +assumptions which his story takes for granted, but he has probably been +wiser not to. Sticking to familiar territory, he writes with the +confident touch of a man unconfused by speculation. His style is still +swift, still easy, still flexible, still accurate in its conformity to +the vernacular. He attempts no sentimental detours and permits himself +no popular superfluities. He has retained all his tried qualities of +observation and dexterity while admitting to his work the element of a +sterner conscience than it has heretofore betrayed. With the honesty of +his conclusion goes the mingling of mirth and sadness in _Alice Adams_ +as another trait of its superiority. The manners of the young which +have always seemed so amusing to Mr. Tarkington and which he has kept on +watching and laughing at as his principal material, now practically for +the first time have evoked from him a considerate sense of the pathos of +youth. It strengthens the pathos of Alice's fate that the comedy holds +out so well; it enlarges the comedy of it that its pathos is so +essential to the action. Even the most comic things have their tears. + +_August 1921._ + + +2. EDITH WHARTON + +At the outset of the twentieth century O. Henry, in a mood of reaction +from current snobbism, discovered what he called the Four Million; and +during the same years, in a mood not wholly different, Edith Wharton +rediscovered what she would never have called the Four Hundred. Or +rather she made known to the considerable public which peeps at +fashionable New York through the obliging windows of fiction that that +world was not so simple in its magnificence as the inquisitive, but +uninstructed, had been led to believe. Behind the splendors reputed to +characterize the great, she testified on almost every page of her books, +lay certain arcana which if much duller were also much more desirable. +Those splendors were merely as noisy brass to the finer metal of the +authentic inner circles. These were very small, and they suggested an +American aristocracy rather less than they suggested the aborigines of +their native continent. + +Ralph Marvell in _The Custom of the Country_ described Washington +Square as the "Reservation," and prophesied that "before long its +inhabitants would be exhibited at ethnological shows, pathetically +engaged in the exercise of their primitive industries." Mrs. Wharton has +exhibited them in the exercise of industries not precisely primitive, +and yet aboriginal enough, very largely concerned in turning shapely +shoulders to the hosts of Americans anxious and determined to invade +their ancient reservations. As the success of the women in keeping new +aspirants out of drawing-room and country house has always been greater +than the success of the men in keeping them out of Wall Street, the +aboriginal aristocracy in Mrs. Wharton's novels transacts its affairs +for the most part in drawing-rooms and country houses. There, however, +to judge by _The House of Mirth_, _The Custom of the Country_, and _The +Age of Innocence_, the life of the inhabitants, far from being a +continuous revel as represented by the popular novelists, is marked by +nothing so much as an uncompromising decorum. + +Take the case of Lily Bart in _The House of Mirth_. She goes to pieces +on the rocks of that decorum, though she has every advantage of birth +except a fortune, and knows the rules of the game perfectly. But she +cannot follow them with the impeccable equilibrium which is needful; she +has the Aristotelian hero's fatal defect of a single weakness. In that +golden game not to go forward is to fall behind. Lily Bart hesitates, +oscillates, and is lost. Having left her appointed course, she finds on +trying to return to her former society that it is little less +impermeable to her than she has seen rank outsiders find it. Then there +is Undine Spragg in _The Custom of the Country_, who, marrying and +divorcing with the happy insensibility of the animals that mate for a +season only, undertakes to force her brilliant, barren beauty into the +centers of the elect. Such beauty as hers can purchase much, thanks to +the desires of men, and Undine, thanks to her own blindness as regards +all delicate disapproval, comes within sight of her goal. But in the end +she fails. The custom of her country--Apex City and the easy-going +West--is not the decorum of New York reinforced by European examples. +Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska in _The Age of Innocence_ neither lose +nor seek an established position within the social mandarinate of +Manhattan as constituted in the seventies of the last century. They +belong there and there they remain. But at what sacrifices of personal +happiness and spontaneous action! They walk through their little drama +with the unadventurous stride of puppets; they observe dozens of taboos +with a respect allied to terror. It is true that they appear to have +been the victims of the provincial "innocence" of their generation, but +the newer generation in New York is not entirely acquitted of a certain +complicity in the formalism of its past. + +From the first Mrs. Wharton's power has lain in the ability to reproduce +in fiction the circumstances of a compact community in a way that +illustrates the various oppressions which such communities put upon +individual vagaries, whether viewed as sin, or ignorance, or folly, or +merely as social impossibility. She has, of course, studied other +communities than New York: the priest-ridden Italy of the eighteenth +century in _The Valley of Decision_; modern France in _Madame de +Treymes_ and _The Reef_; provincial New England in _The Fruit of the +Tree_. What characterizes the New York novels characterizes these others +as well: a sense of human beings living in such intimate solidarity that +no one of them may vary from the customary path without in some fashion +breaking the pattern and inviting some sort of disaster. + +Novels written out of this conception of existence fall ordinarily into +partizanship, either on the side of the individual who leaves his herd +or on the side of the herd which runs him down or shuts him out for +good. Mrs. Wharton has always been singularly unpartizan, as if she +recognized it as no duty of hers to do more for the herd or its members +than to play over the spectacle of their clashes the long, cold light of +her magnificent irony. At the same time, however, her attitude toward +New York society, her most frequent theme, has slightly changed. _The +House of Mirth_, published in 1905, glows with certain of the colors of +the grand style. These appear hardly at all in _The Age of Innocence_, +published in 1920, as if Mrs. Wharton's feeling for ceremony had +diminished, as if the grand style no longer found her so susceptible as +formerly. Possibly her advance in satire may arise from nothing more +significant than her retreat into the past for a subject. Nevertheless, +one step forward could make her an invaluable satirist of the current +hour. + +Among Mrs. Wharton's novels are two--_Ethan Frome_ and _Summer_--which +unfold the tragedy of circumstances apparently as different as possible +from those chronicled in the New York novels. Her fashionable New York +and her rural New England, however, have something in common. In the +desolate communities which witness the agonies of Ethan Frome and +Charity Royall not only is there a stubborn village decorum but there +are also the bitter compulsions of a helpless poverty which binds feet +and wings as the most ruthless decorum cannot bind them, and which +dulls all the hues of life to an unendurable dinginess. As a member of +the class which spends prosperous vacations on the old soil of the +Puritans Mrs. Wharton has surveyed the cramped lives of the native +remnant with a pity springing from her knowledge of all the freedom and +beauty and pleasure which they miss. She consequently brings into her +narrative an outlook not to be found in any of the novelists who write +of rural New England out of the erudition which comes of more intimate +acquaintanceship. Without filing down her characters into types she +contrives to lift them into universal figures of aspiration or +disappointment. + +In _Ethan Frome_, losing from her clear voice for a moment the note of +satire, she reaches her highest point of tragic passion. In the bleak +life of Ethan Frome on his bleak hillside there blooms an exquisite love +which during a few hours of rapture promises to transform his fate; but +poverty clutches him, drives him to attempt suicide with the woman he +loves, and then condemns him to one of the most appalling expiations in +fiction--to a slavery in comparison with which his former life was +almost freedom. Not since Hawthorne has a novelist built on the New +England soil a tragedy of such elevation of mood as this. Freed from the +bondage of local color, that myopic muse, Mrs. Wharton here handles her +material not so much like a quarryman finding curious stones and calling +out about them as like a sculptor setting up his finished work on a +commanding hill. + +It has regularly been by her novels that Mrs. Wharton has attracted the +most attention, and yet her short stories are of a quite comparable +excellence. About fifty of them altogether, they show her swift, +ironical intelligence flashing its light into numerous corners of human +life not large enough to warrant prolonged reports. She can go as far +afield as to the ascetic ecstasies and agonies of medieval religion, in +_The Hermit and the Wild Woman_; or as to the horrible revenge of Duke +Ercole of Vicenza, in _The Duchess at Prayer_; or as to the murder and +witchcraft of seventeenth-century Brittany, in _Kerfol_. _Kerfol_, +_Afterward_, and _The Lady's Maid's Bell_ are as good ghost stories as +any written in many years. _Bunner Sisters_, an observant, tender +narrative, concerns itself with the declining fortunes of two +shopkeepers of Stuyvesant Square in New York's age of innocence. + +For the most part, however, the locality and temper of Mrs. Wharton's +briefer stories are not so remote as these from the center of her +particular world, wherein subtle and sophisticated people stray in the +crucial mazes of art or learning or love. Her artists and scholars are +likely to be shown at some moment in which a passionate ideal is in +conflict with a lower instinct toward profit or reputation, as when in +_The Descent of Man_ an eminent scientist turns his feet ruinously into +the wide green descent to "popular" science, or as when in _The Verdict_ +a fashionable painter of talent encounters the work of an obscure genius +and gives up his own career in the knowledge that at best he can never +do but third-rate work. Some such stress of conflict marks almost all +Mrs. Wharton's stories of love, which make up the overwhelming majority +of her work. Love with her in but few cases runs the smooth course +coincident with flawless matrimony. It cuts violently across the +boundaries drawn by marriages of convenience, and it suffers tragic +changes in the objects of its desire. + +What opportunity has a free, wilful passion in the tight world Mrs. +Wharton prefers to represent? Either its behavior must be furtive and +hypocritical or else it must incur social disaster. Here again Mrs. +Wharton will not be partizan. If in one story--such as _The Long +Run_--she seems to imply that there is no ignominy like that of failing +love when it comes, yet in another--such as _Souls Belated_--she sets +forth the costs and the entanglements that ensue when individuals take +love into their own hands and defy society. Not love for itself but love +as the most frequent and most personal of all the passions which bring +the community into clashes with its members--this is the subject of Mrs. +Wharton's curiosity and study. Her only positive conclusions about it, +as reflected in her stories, seem to be that love cuts deepest in the +deepest natures and yet that no one is quite so shallow as to love and +recover from it without a scar. Divorce, according to her +representations, can never be quite complete; one of her most amusing +stories, _The Other Two_, recounts how the third husband of a woman +whose first two husbands are still living gradually resolves her into +her true constituency and finds nothing there but what one husband after +another has made of her. + +In stories like this Mrs. Wharton occasionally leaves the restraint of +her ordinary manner to wear the keener colors of the satirist. _Xingu_, +for instance, with its famous opening sentence--"Mrs. Ballinger is one +of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous +to meet alone"--has the flash and glitter, and the agreeable +artificiality, of polite comedy. Undine Spragg and the many futile women +whom Mrs. Wharton enjoys ridiculing more than she gives evidence of +enjoying anything else belong nearly as much to the menagerie of the +satirist as to the novelist's gallery. It is only in these moments of +satire that Mrs. Wharton reveals much about her disposition: her +impatience with stupidity and affectation and muddy confusion of mind +and purpose; her dislike of dinginess; her toleration of arrogance when +it is high-bred. Such qualities do not help her, for all her spare, +clean movement, to achieve the march or rush of narrative; such +qualities, for all her satiric pungency, do not bring her into sympathy +with the sturdy or burly or homely, or with the broader aspects of +comedy. Lucidity, detachment, irony--these never desert her (though she +wrote with the hysterical pen that hundreds used during the war). So +great is her self-possession that she holds criticism at arm's length, +somewhat as her chosen circles hold the barbarians. If she had a little +less of this pride of dignity she might perhaps avoid her tendency to +assign to decorum a larger power than it actually exercises, even in the +societies about which she writes. Decorum, after all, is binding chiefly +upon those who accept it without question but not upon passionate or +logical rebels, who are always shattering it with some touch of violence +or neglect; neither does it bind those who stand too securely to be +shaken. For this reason the coils of circumstance and the pitfalls of +inevitability with which Mrs. Wharton besets the careers of her +characters are in part an illusion deftly employed for the sake of +artistic effect. She multiplies them as romancers multiply adventures. + +The illusion of reality in her work, however, almost never fails her, so +alertly is her mind on the lookout to avoid vulgar or shoddy romantic +elements. Compared to Henry James, her principal master in fiction, whom +she resembles in respect to subjects and attitude, she lacks exuberance +and richness of texture, but she has more intelligence than he. Compared +to Jane Austen, the novelist among Anglo-Saxon women whom Mrs. Wharton +most resembles, particularly as regards satire and decorum, she is the +more impassioned of the two. It may seem at first thought a little +strange to compare the vivid novels of the author of _The House of +Mirth_ with the mouse-colored narratives of the author of _Pride and +Prejudice_, for the twentieth century has added to all fiction many +overtones not heard in the eighteenth. But of no other woman writer +since Jane Austen can it be said quite so truthfully as of Mrs. Wharton +that her natural, instinctive habitat is a true tower of irony. + + +3. JAMES BRANCH CABELL + +Although most novelists with any historical or scholarly hankerings are +satisfied to invent here a scene and there a plot and elsewhere an +authority, James Branch Cabell has invented a whole province for his +imagination to dwell in. He calls it Poictesme and sets it on the map +of medieval Europe, but it has no more unity of time and place than has +the multitudinous land of _The Faerie Queene_. Around the reigns of Dom +Manuel, Count and Redeemer of Poictesme, epic hero of _Figures of +Earth_, father of the heroine in _The Soul of Melicent_ (later renamed +_Domnei_), father of that Dorothy la Desirée whom Jurgen loved (with +some other women), father also of that Count Emmerich who succeeded +Manuel as ruler at Bellegarde and Storisende--around the reigns of +Manuel and Emmerich the various sagas of Mr. Cabell principally revolve. +Scandinavia, however, conveniently impinges upon their province, with +Constantinople and Barbary, Massilia, Aquitaine, Navarre, Portugal, +Rome, England, Paris, Alexandria, Arcadia, Olympus, Asgard, and the +Jerusalems Old and New. As many ages of history likewise converge upon +Poictesme in its ostensible thirteenth or fourteenth century, from the +most mythological times only a little this side of Creation to the most +contemporary America of Felix Kennaston who lives at comfortable +Lichfield with two motors and with money in four banks but in his mind +habitually bridges the gap by imagined excursions into Poictesme and the +domains adjacent. + +Nothing but remarkable erudition in the antiquities as Cockaigne and +Faery could possibly suffice for such adventures as Mr. Cabell's, and he +has very remarkable erudition in all that concerns the regions which +delight him. And where no authorities exist he merrily invents them, as +in the case of his Nicolas of Caen, poet of Normandy, whose tales +_Dizain des Reines_ are said to furnish the source for the ten stories +collected in _Chivalry_, and whose largely lost masterpiece _Le Roman +de Lusignan_ serves as the basis for _Domnei_. One British critic and +rival of Mr. Cabell has lately fretted over the unblushing anachronisms +and confused geography of this parti-colored world. For less dull-witted +scholars these are the very cream of the Cabellian jest. + +The cream but not the substance, for Mr. Cabell has a profound creed of +comedy rooted in that romance which is his regular habit. Romance, +indeed, first exercised his imagination, in the early years of the +century when in many minds he was associated with the decorative Howard +Pyle and allowed his pen to move at the languid gait then characteristic +of a dozen inferior romancers. Only gradually did his texture grow +firmer, his tapestry richer; only gradually did his gaiety strengthen +into irony. Although that irony was the progenitor of the comic spirit +which now in his maturity dominates him, it has never shaken off the +romantic elements which originally nourished it. Rather, romance and +irony have grown up in his work side by side. His Poictesme is no less +beautiful for having come to be a country of disillusion; nor has his +increasing sense of the futility of desire robbed him of his old sense +that desire is a glory while it lasts. + +He allows John Charteris in _Beyond Life_--for the most part Mr. +Cabell's mouthpiece--to set forth the doctrine that romance is the real +demiurge, "the first and loveliest daughter of human vanity," whereby +mankind is duped--and exalted. "No one on the preferable side of Bedlam +wishes to be reminded of what we are in actuality, even were it +possible, by any disastrous miracle, ever to dispel the mist which +romance has evoked about all human doings." Therefore romance has +created the "dynamic illusions" of chivalry and love and common sense +and religion and art and patriotism and optimism, and therein "the ape +reft of his tail and grown rusty at climbing" has clothed himself so +long that as he beholds himself in the delusive mirrors he has for +centuries held up to nature he believes he is somehow of cosmic +importance. Poor and naked as this aspiring ape must seem to the eye of +reason, asks Mr. Cabell, is there not something magnificent about his +imaginings? Does the course of human life not singularly resemble the +dance of puppets in the hands of a Supreme Romancer? How, then, may any +one declare that romance has become antiquated or can ever cease to be +indispensable to mortal character and mortal interest? + +The difference between Mr. Cabell and the popular romancers who in all +ages clutter the scene and for whom he has nothing but amused contempt +is that they are unconscious dupes of the demiurge whereas he, aware of +its ways and its devices, employs it almost as if it were some +hippogriff bridled by him in Elysian pastures and respectfully +entertained in a snug Virginian stable. His attitude toward romance +suggests a cheerful despair: he despairs of ever finding anything truer +than romance and so contents himself with Poictesme and its tributaries. +The favorite themes of romance being relatively few, he has not troubled +greatly to increase them; war and love in the main he finds enough. + +Besides these, however, he has always been deeply occupied with one +other theme--the plight of the poet in the world. That sturdy bruiser +Dom Manuel, for instance, is at heart a poet who molds figures out of +clay as his strongest passion, although the world, according to its +custom, conspires against his instinct by interrupting him with love and +war and business, and in the end hustles him away before he has had time +to make anything more lovely or lasting than a reputation as a hero. In +the amazing fantasy _The Cream of the Jest_ Mr. Cabell has embodied the +visions of the romancer Felix Kennaston so substantially that +Kennaston's diurnal walks in Lichfield seem hardly as real as those +nightly ventures which under the guise of Horvendile he makes into the +glowing land he has created. Nor are the two universes separated by any +tight wall which the fancy must leap over: they flow with exquisite +caprice one into another, as indeed they always do in the consciousness +of a poet who, like Kennaston or Mr. Cabell, broods continually over the +problem how best to perform his function: "to write perfectly of +beautiful happenings." + +Of all the fine places in the world where beautiful happenings come +together, Mr. Cabell argues, incomparably the richest is in the +consciousness of a poet who is also a scholar. There are to be found the +precious hoarded memories of some thousands of years: high deeds and +burning loves and eloquent words and surpassing tears and laughter. +There, consequently, the romancer may well take his stand, distilling +bright new dreams out of ancient beauty. And if he adds the heady tonic +of an irony springing from a critical intelligence, so much the better. +When Mr. Cabell wishes to represent several different epochs in _The +Certain Hour_ he chooses to tell ten stories of poets--real or +imagined--as the persons in whom, by reason of their superior +susceptibility, the color of their epochs may be most truthfully +discovered; and when he wishes to decant his own wit and wisdom most +genuinely the vessel he normally employs is a poet. + +If the poets and warriors who make up the list of Mr. Cabell's heroes +devote their lives almost wholly to love, it is for the reason that no +other emotion interests him so much or seems to him to furnish so many +beautiful happenings about which to write perfectly. Love, like art, is +a species of creation, and the moods which attend it, though illusions, +are miracles none the less. Of the two aspects of love which especially +attract Mr. Cabell he has given the larger share of his attention to the +extravagant worship of women ("domnei") developed out of chivalry--the +worship which began by ascribing to the beloved the qualities of purity +and perfection, of beauty and holiness, and ended by practically +identifying her with the divine. This supernal folly reaches its apogee +in _Domnei_, in the careers of Perion and Melicent who are so uplifted +by ineffable desire that their souls ceaselessly reach out to each other +though obstacles large as continents intervene. For Perion the most +deadly battles are but thornpricks in the quest of Melicent; and such is +Melicent's loyalty during the years of her longing that the possession +of her most white body by Demetrios of Anatolia leaves her soul +immaculate and almost unperturbed. In this tale love is canonized: +throned on alabaster above all the vulgar gods it diffuses among its +worshipers a crystal radiance in which mortal imperfections perish--or +are at least forgotten during certain rapturous hours. + +Ordinarily one cynical touch will break such pretty bubbles; but Mr. +Cabell, himself a master of cynical touches and shrewdly anticipant of +them, protects his invention with the competent armor of irony, and now +and then--particularly in the felicitous tenson spoken by Perion and +Demetrios concerning the charms of Melicent--brings mirth and beauty to +an amalgam which bids fair to prove classic metal. A much larger share +of this mirth appears in _Jurgen_, which narrates with phallic candor +the exploits of a middle-aged pawnbroker of Poictesme in pursuit of +immortal desire. Of course he does not find it, for the sufficient +reason that, as Mr. Cabell understands such matters, the ultimate magic +of desire lies in the inaccessibility of the desired; and Jurgen, to +whom all women in his amorous Cockaigne are as accessible as bread and +butter, after his sly interval of rejuvenation comes back in the end to +his wife and his humdrum duty with a definite relief. He may be no more +in love with Dame Lisa than with his right hand, and yet both are +considerably more necessary to his well-being, he discovers, than a +number of more exciting things. + +Love in _Jurgen_ inclines toward another aspect of the passion which Mr. +Cabell has studied somewhat less than the chivalrous--the aspect of +gallantry. "I have read," says John Charteris, "that the secret of +gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its +inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that, among other requisites, +the gallant person will always consider the world with a smile of +toleration, and his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and +Heaven with a smile which is not distrustful--being thoroughly persuaded +that God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational." These +are the accents, set to slightly different rhythms, of a Congreve; and +if there is anything as remarkable about Mr. Cabell as the fact that he +has represented the chivalrous and the gallant attitudes toward love +with nearly equal sympathy, it is the fact that in an era of militant +naturalism and of renascent moralism he has blithely adhered to an +affection for unconcerned worldliness and has airily played Congreve in +the midst of all the clamorous, serious, disquisitive bassoons of the +national orchestra. + +In _The Cords of Vanity_ Robert Townsend goes gathering roses and +tasting lips almost as if the second Charles were still the lawful ruler +of his obedient province of Virginia; and in _The Rivet in Grandfather's +Neck_ Rudolph Musgrave, that quaint figure whittled out of chivalry and +dressed up in amiable heroics, is plainly contrasted with the glib rogue +of genius John Charteris, who, elsewhere in Mr. Cabell's books generally +the chorus, here enters the plot and exhibits a sorry gallantry in +action. Poictesme, these novels indicate, is not the only country Mr. +Cabell knows; he knows also how to feel at home, when he cares to, in +the mimic universe of Lichfield and Fairhaven, where gay ribbons +perpetually flutter, and where eyes and hands perpetually invite, and +where love runs a deft, dainty, fickle course in all weathers. + +That Felix Kennaston inhabits Lichfield in the flesh and in the spirit +elopes into Poictesme may be taken, after a fashion, as allegory with an +autobiographical foundation: _The Cream of the Jest_ is, on the whole, +the essence of Cabell. The book suggests, moreover, a critical +position--which is, that gallantry and Virginia have so far been +regrettably sacrificed to chivalry and Poictesme in the career of Mr. +Cabell's imagination. Not only the symmetry expected of that career +demands something different; so does its success with the gallantries of +Lichfield. In spite of all Mr. Cabell's accumulation of erudite +allusions the atmosphere of his Poictesme often turns thin and leaves +his characters gasping for vital breath; nor does he entirely restore it +by multiplying symbols as he does in _Jurgen_ and _Figures of Earth_ +until the background of his narrative is studded with rich images and +piquant chimeras that perplex more than they illuminate--and sometimes +bore. These chivalric loves beating their heads against the cold moon +are, after all, follies, however supernal; they are as brief as they are +bright; in the end even the greedy Jurgen turns back to honest salt from +too much sugar. + +Now in gallantry as Mr. Cabell conceives and represents it there is +always the salt of prudence, of satire, of comedy; and his gifts in this +direction are too great to be neglected. The comic spirit, let it be +remembered, has led Mr. Cabell from the softness and sweetness which in +spots disfigured his earlier romances--such as _The Line of Love and +Chivalry_--before he recently revised them; it has happily kept in hand +the wild wings of his later love stories; now it deserves to have its +way unburdened, at least occasionally. While it almost had its way in +Jurgen, where it behaved like a huge organ bursting into uproarious +laughter, it still had to carry the burden of much learning. It would be +freer of such delectable plunder could it once burst into uproar in the +midst of Virginia. Mr. Cabell has singled out two very dissimilar poets +for particular compliment: Marlowe and Congreve. As regards the still +more particular compliment of imitation, however, he has done Congreve +rather less than justice. + + +4. WILLA CATHER + +When Willa Cather dedicated her first novel, _O Pioneers!_, to the +memory of Sarah Orne Jewett, she pointed out a link of natural piety +binding her to a literary ancestor now rarely credited with descendants +so robust. The link holds even yet in respect to the clear outlines and +fresh colors and simple devices of Miss Cather's art; in respect to the +body and range of her work it never really held. The thin, fine +gentility which Miss Jewett celebrates is no further away from the rich +vigor of Miss Cather's pioneers than is the kindly sentiment of the +older woman from the native passion of the younger. Miss Jewett wrote of +the shadows of memorable events. Once upon a time, her stories all +remind us, there was an heroic cast to New England. In Miss Jewett's +time only the echoes of those Homeric days made any noise in the +world--at least for her ears and the ears of most of her literary +contemporaries. Unmindful of the roar of industrial New England she +kept to the milder regions of her section and wrote elegies upon the +epigones. + +In Miss Cather's quarter of the country there were still heroes during +the days she has written about, still pioneers. The sod and swamps of +her Nebraska prairies defy the hands of labor almost as obstinately as +did the stones and forests of old New England. Her Americans, like all +the Agamemnons back of Miss Jewett's world, are fresh from Europe, +locked in a mortal conflict with nature. If now and then the older among +them grow faint at remembering Bohemia or France or Scandinavia, this is +not the predominant mood of their communities. They ride powerfully +forward on a wave of confident energy, as if human life had more dawns +than sunsets in it. For the most part her pioneers are unreflective +creatures, driven by some inner force which they do not comprehend: they +are, that is perhaps no more than to say, primitive and epic in their +dispositions. + +Is it by virtue of a literary descent from the New England school that +Miss Cather depends so frequently upon women as protagonists? Alexandra +Bergson in _O Pioneers!_, Thea Kronborg in _The Song of the Lark_, +Ántonia Shimerda in _My Ántonia_--around these as girls and women the +actions primarily revolve. It is not, however, as other Helens or +Gudruns that they affect their universes; they are not the darlings of +heroes but heroes themselves. Alexandra drags her dull brothers after +her and establishes the family fortunes; Ántonia, less positive and more +pathetic, still holds the center of her retired stage by her rich, +warm, deep goodness; Thea, a genius in her own right, outgrows her +Colorado birthplace and becomes a famous singer with all the fierce +energy of a pioneer who happens to be an instinctive artist rather than +an instinctive manager, like Alexandra, or an instinctive mother, like +Ántonia. And is it because women are here protagonists that neither +wars, as among the ancients, nor machines, as among the moderns, promote +the principal activities of the characters? Less the actions than the +moods of these novels have the epic air. Narrow as Miss Cather's scene +may be, she fills it with a spaciousness and candor of personality that +quite transcends the gnarled eccentricity and timid inhibitions of the +local colorists. Passion blows through her chosen characters like a +free, wholesome, if often devastating wind; it does not, as with Miss +Jewett and her contemporaries, lurk in furtive corners or hide itself +altogether. And as these passions are most commonly the passions of +home-keeping women, they lie nearer to the core of human existence than +if they arose out of the complexities of a wider region. + +Something more than Miss Cather's own experience first upon the frontier +and then among artists and musicians has held her almost entirely to +those two worlds as the favored realms of her imagination. In them, +rather than in bourgeois conditions, she finds the theme most congenial +to her interest and to her powers. That theme is the struggle of some +elect individual to outgrow the restrictions laid upon him--or more +frequently her--by numbing circumstances. The early, somewhat +inconsequential _Alexander's Bridge_ touches this theme, though Bartley +Alexander, like the bridge he is building, fails under the strain, +largely by reason of a flawed simplicity and a divided energy. Pioneers +and artists, in Miss Cather's understanding of their natures, are +practically equals in single-mindedness; at least they work much by +themselves, contending with definite though ruthless obstacles and +looking forward, if they win, to a freedom which cannot be achieved in +the routine of crowded communities. To become too much involved, for her +characters, is to lose their quality. There is Marie Tovesky, in _O +Pioneers!_, whom nothing more preventable than her beauty and gaiety +drags into a confused status and so on to catastrophe. Ántonia, tricked +into a false relation by her scoundrel lover, and Alexandra, nagged at +by her stodgy family because her suitor is poor, suffer temporary +eclipses from which only their superb health of character finally +extricates them. Thea Kronborg, troubled by the swarming sensations of +her first year in Chicago, has to find her true self again in that +marvelous desert canyon in Arizona where hot sun and bright, cold water +and dim memories of the cliff-dwelling Ancient People detach her from +the stupid faces which have haunted and unnerved her. + +Miss Cather would not belong to her generation if she did not resent the +trespasses which the world regularly commits upon pioneers and artists. +For all the superb vitality of her frontier, it faces--and she knows it +faces--the degradation of its wild freedom and beauty by clumsy towns, +obese vulgarity, the uniform of a monotonous standardization. Her heroic +days endure but a brief period before extinction comes. Then her +high-hearted pioneers survive half as curiosities in a new order; and +their spirits, transmitted to the artists who are their legitimate +successors, take up the old struggle in a new guise. In the short story +called _The Sculptor's Funeral_ she lifts her voice in swift anger and +in _A Gold Slipper_ she lowers it to satirical contempt against the dull +souls who either misread distinction or crassly overlook it. + +At such moments she enlists in the crusade against dulness which has +recently succeeded the hereditary crusade of American literature against +wickedness. But from too complete an absorption in that transient war +she is saved by the same strength which has lifted her above the more +trivial concerns of local color. The older school uncritically delighted +in all the village singularities it could discover; the newer school no +less uncritically condemns and ridicules all the village +conventionalities. Miss Cather has seldom swung far either to the right +or to the left in this controversy. She has, apparently, few revenges to +take upon the communities in which she lived during her expanding youth. +An eye bent too relentlessly upon dulness could have found it in +Alexandra Bergson, with her slow, unimaginative thrift; or in Ántonia +Shimerda, who is a "hired girl" during the days of her tenderest beauty +and the hard-worked mother of many children on a distant farm to the end +of the story. Miss Cather, almost alone among her peers in this decade, +understands that human character for its own sake has a claim upon human +interest, surprisingly irrespective of the moral or intellectual +qualities which of course condition and shape it. + +"Her secret?" says Harsanyi of Thea Kronborg in _The Song of the Lark_. +"It is every artist's secret ... passion. It is an open secret, and +perfectly safe. Like heroism, it is inimitable in cheap materials." In +these words Miss Cather furnishes an admirable commentary upon the +strong yet subtle art which she herself practises. Fiction habitually +strives to reproduce passion and heroism and in all but chosen instances +falls below the realities because it has not truly comprehended them or +because it tries to copy them in cheap materials. It is not Miss +Cather's lucid intelligence alone, though that too is indispensable, +which has kept her from these ordinary blunders of the novelist: she +herself has the energy which enables her to feel passion and the honesty +which enables her to reproduce it. Something of the large tolerance +which she must have felt in Whitman before she borrowed from him the +title of _O Pioneers!_ breathes in all her work. Like him she has tasted +the savor of abounding health; like him she has exulted in the sense of +vast distances, the rapture of the green earth rolling through space, +the consciousness of past and future striking hands in the radiant +present; like him she enjoys "powerful uneducated persons" both as the +means to a higher type and as ends honorable in themselves. At the same +time she does not let herself run on in the ungirt dithyrambs of Whitman +or into his followers' glorification of sheer bulk and impetus. Taste +and intelligence hold her passion in hand. It is her distinction that +she combines the merits of those oddly matched progenitors, Miss Jewett +and Walt Whitman: she has the delicate tact to paint what she sees with +clean, quiet strokes; and she has the strength to look past casual +surfaces to the passionate center of her characters. + +The passion of the artist, the heroism of the pioneer--these are the +human qualities Miss Cather knows best. Compared with her artists the +artists of most of her contemporaries seem imitated in cheap materials. +They suffer, they rebel, they gesticulate, they pose, they fail through +success, they succeed through failure; but only now and then do they +have the breathing, authentic reality of Miss Cather's painters and +musicians. Musicians she knows best among artists--perhaps has been most +interested in them and has associated most with them because of the +heroic vitality which a virtuoso must have to achieve any real eminence. +The poet may languish over verses in his garret, the painter or sculptor +over work conceived and executed in a shy privacy; but the great singer +must be an athlete and an actor, training for months and years for the +sake of a few hours of triumph before a throbbing audience. It is, +therefore, not upon the revolt of Thea Kronborg from her Colorado +village that Miss Cather lays her chief stress but upon the girl's hard, +unspeculative, daemonic integrity. She lifts herself from alien +conditions hardly knowing what she does, almost as a powerful animal +shoulders its instinctive way through scratching underbrush to food and +water. Thea may be checked and delayed by all sorts of human +complications but her deeper nature never loses the sense of its proper +direction. Ambition with her is hardly more than the passion of +self-preservation in a potent spirit. + +That Miss Cather no less truly understands the quieter attributes of +heroism is made evident by the career of Ántonia Shimerda--of Miss +Cather's heroines the most appealing. Ántonia exhibits the ordinary +instincts of self-preservation hardly at all. She is gentle and +confiding; service to others is the very breath of her being. Yet so +deep and strong is the current of motherhood which runs in her that it +extricates her from the level of mediocrity as passion itself might fail +to do. Goodness, so often negative and annoying, amounts in her to an +heroic effluence which imparts the glory of reality to all it touches. +"She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize as +universal and true.... She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her +hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel +the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.... She was +a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races." It is not easy +even to say things so illuminating about a human being; it is all but +impossible to create one with such sympathetic art that words like these +at the end confirm and interpret an impression already made. + +_My Ántonia_, following _O Pioneers!_ and _The Song of the Lark_, holds +out a promise for future development that the work of but two or three +other established American novelists holds out. Miss Cather's recent +volume of short stories _Youth and the Bright Medusa_, striking though +it is, represents, it may be hoped, but an interlude in her brilliant +progress. Such passion as hers only rests itself in brief tales and +satire; then it properly takes wing again to larger regions of the +imagination. Vigorous as it is, its further course cannot easily be +foreseen; it has not the kind of promise that can be discounted by +confident expectations. Her art, however, to judge it by its past +career, can be expected to move in the direction of firmer structure and +clearer outline. After all she has written but three novels and it is +not to be wondered at that they all have about them certain of the +graceful angularities of an art not yet complete. _O Pioneers!_ contains +really two stories; _The Song of the Lark_, though Miss Cather cut away +an entire section at the end, does not maintain itself throughout at the +full pitch of interest; the introduction to _My Ántonia_ is largely +superfluous. Having freed herself from the bondage of "plot" as she has +freed herself from an inheritance of the softer sentiments, Miss Cather +has learned that the ultimate interest of fiction inheres in character. +It is a question whether she can ever reach the highest point of which +she shows signs of being capable unless she makes up her mind that it is +as important to find the precise form for the representation of a +memorable character as it is to find the precise word for the expression +of a memorable idea. At present she pleads that if she must sacrifice +something she would rather it were form than reality. If she desires +sufficiently she can have both. + + +5. JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER + +Joseph Hergesheimer employs his creative strategy over the precarious +terrain of the decorative arts, some of his work lying on each side of +the dim line which separates the most consummate artifice of which the +hands of talent are capable from the essential art which springs +naturally from the instincts of genius. On the side of artifice, +certainly, lie several of the shorter stories in _Gold and Iron_ and +_The Happy End_, for which, he declares, his grocer is as responsible as +any one; and on the side of art, no less certainly, lie at least _Java +Head_, in which artifice, though apparent now and then, repeatedly +surrenders the field to an art which is admirably authentic, and _Linda +Condon_, nearly the most beautiful American novel since Hawthorne and +Henry James. + +Standing thus in a middle ground between art and artifice Mr. +Hergesheimer stands also in a middle ground between the unrelieved +realism of the newer school of American fiction and the genteel moralism +of the older. "I had been spared," he says with regard to moralism, "the +dreary and impertinent duty of improving the world; the whole discharge +of my responsibility was contained in the imperative obligation to see +with relative truth, to put down the colors and scents and emotions of +existence." And with regard to realism: "If I could put on paper an +apple tree rosy with blossom, someone else might discuss the economy of +the apples." + +Mr. Hergesheimer does not, of course, merely blunder into beauty; his +methods are far from being accidental; by deliberate aims and principles +he holds himself close to the regions of the decorative. He likes the +rococo and the Victorian, ornament without any obvious utility, grace +without any busy function. He refuses to feel confident that the passing +of elegant privilege need be a benefit: "A maze of clipped box, old +emerald sod, represented a timeless striving for superiority, for, at +least, the illusion of triumph over the littorals of slime; and their +destruction in waves of hysteria, sentimentality, and envy was +immeasurably disastrous." For himself he clings sturdily, ardently, to +loveliness wherever he finds it--preferring, however, its richer, its +elaborated forms. + +To borrow an antithesis remarked by a brilliant critic in the work of +Amy Lowell, Mr. Hergesheimer seems at times as much concerned with the +stuffs as with the stuff of life. His landscapes, his interiors, his +costumes he sets forth with a profusion of exquisite details which gives +his texture the semblance of brocade--always gorgeous but now and then a +little stiff with its splendors of silk and gold. An admitted personal +inclination to "the extremes of luxury" struggles in Mr. Hergesheimer +with an artistic passion for "words as disarmingly simple as the leaves +of spring--as simple and as lovely in pure color--about the common +experience of life and death"; and more than anything else this conflict +explains the presence in all but his finest work of occasional heavy +elements which weight it down and the presence in his most popular +narratives of a constant lift of beauty and lucidity which will not let +them sag into the average. + +One comes tolerably close to the secret of Mr. Hergesheimer's career by +perceiving that, with an admirable style of which he is both conscious +and--very properly--proud, he has looked luxuriously through the world +for subjects which his style will fit. Particularly has he emancipated +himself from bondage to nook and corner. The small inland towns of _The +Lay Anthony_, the blue Virginia valleys of _Mountain Blood_, the +evolving Pennsylvania iron districts of _The Three Black Pennys_, the +antique Massachusetts of _Java Head_, the fashionable hotels and houses +of _Linda Condon_, the scattered exotic localities of the short +stories--in all these Mr. Hergesheimer is at home with the cool +insouciance of genius, at home as he could not be without an erudition +founded in the keenest observation and research. + +At the same time, he has not satisfied himself with the bursting +catalogues of some types of naturalism. "The individuality of places and +hours absorbed me ... the perception of the inanimate moods of place.... +Certainly houses and night and hills were often more vivid to me than +the people in or out of them." He has loved the scenes wherein his +events are transacted; he has brooded over their moods, their +significances. Neither pantheistic, however, nor very speculative, Mr. +Hergesheimer does not endow places with a half-divine, a half-satanic +sentience; instead he works more nearly in the fashion of his master +Turgenev, or of Flaubert, scrutinizing the surfaces of landscapes and +cities and human habitations until they gradually reveal what--for the +particular observer--is the essence of their charm or horror, and come, +obedient to the evoking imagination, into the picture. + +Substantial as Mr. Hergesheimer makes his scene by a masterful handling +of locality, he goes still further, adds still another dimension, by his +equally masterful handling of the past as an element in his microcosm. +"There was at least this to be said for what I had, in writing, laid +back in point of time--no one had charged me with an historical novel," +he boasts. Readers in general hardly notice how large a use of history +appears in, for instance, _The Three Black Pennys_ and _Java Head_. The +one goes as far back as to colonial Pennsylvania for the beginning of +its chronicle and the other as far as to Salem in the days of the first +clipper ship; and yet by no paraphernalia of languid airs or archaic +idioms or strutting heroics does either of the novels fall into the +orthodox historical tradition. They have the vivid, multiplied detail of +a contemporary record. And this is the more notable for the reason that +the characters in each of them stand against the background of a highly +technical profession--that of iron-making through three generations, +that of shipping under sail to all the quarters of the earth. The +wharves of Mr. Hergesheimer's Salem, the furnaces of his Myrtle Forge, +are thick with accurate, pungent, delightful facts. + +If he has explored the past in a deliberate hunt for picturesque images +of actuality with which to incrust his narrative, and has at +times--particularly in _The Three Black Pennys_--given it an exaggerated +patina, nevertheless he has refused to yield himself to the mere spell +of the past and has regularly subdued its "colors and scents and +emotions" to his own purposes. His materials may be rococo, but not his +use of them. The conflict between his personal preference for luxury and +his artistic passion for austerity shows itself in his methods with +history: though the historical periods which interest him are bounded, +one may say, by the minuet and the music-box, he permits the least +possible contagion of prettiness to invade his plots. They are fresh and +passionate, simple and real, however elaborate their trappings. With the +fullest intellectual sophistication, Mr. Hergesheimer has artistically +the courage of naïveté. He subtracts nothing from the common realities +of human character when he displays it in some past age, but preserves +it intact. The charming erudition of his surfaces is added to reality, +not substituted for it. + +Without question the particular triumph of these novels is the women who +appear in them. Decorative art in fiction has perhaps never gone +farther than with Taou Yuen, the marvelous Manchu woman brought home +from Shanghai to Salem as wife of a Yankee skipper in _Java Head_. She +may be taken as focus and symbol of Mr. Hergesheimer's luxurious +inclinations. By her bewildering complexity of costume, by her intricate +ceremonial observances, by the impenetrability of her outward demeanor, +she belongs rather to art than to life--an Oriental Galatea radiantly +adorned but not wholly metamorphosed from her native marble. Only at +intervals does some glimpse or other come of the tender flesh shut up in +her magnificent garments or of the tender spirit schooled by flawless, +immemorial discipline to an absolute decorum. That such glimpses come +just preserves her from appearing a mere figure of tapestry, a fine +mechanical toy. The Salem which before her arrival seems quaintly formal +enough immediately thereafter seems by contrast raw and new, and her +beauty glitters like a precious gem in some plain man's house. + +Much the same effect, on a less vivid scale, is produced in _The Three +Black Pennys_ by the presence on the Pennsylvania frontier--it is almost +that--of Ludowika Winscombe, who has always lived at Court and who +brings new fragrances, new dainty rites, into the forest; and in +_Mountain Blood_ by the presence among the Appalachian highlands of that +ivory, icy meretrix Meta Beggs who plans to drive the best possible +bargain for her virgin favors. Meta carries the decorative traits of Mr. +Hergesheimer's women to the point at which they suggest the marionette +too much; by his methods, of course, he habitually runs the risk of +leaving the flesh and blood out of his women. He leaves out, at least, +with no fluttering compunctions, any special concern for the simpler +biological aspects of the sex: "It was not what the woman had in common +with a rabbit that was important, but her difference. On one hand that +difference was moral, but on the other aesthetic; and I had been +absorbed by the latter." "I couldn't get it into my head that +loveliness, which had a trick of staying in the mind at points of death +when all service was forgotten, was rightly considered to be of less +importance than the sweat of some kitchen drudge." + +Such robust doctrine is a long way from the customary sentimentalism of +novelists about maids, wives, mothers, and widows. Indeed, Mr. +Hergesheimer, like Poe before him, inclines very definitely toward +beauty rather than toward humanity, where distinctions may be drawn +between them. In Linda Condon, however, his most remarkable creation, he +has brought humanity and beauty together in an intimate fusion. Less +exotic than Taou Yuen, Linda, with her straight black bang and her +extravagant simplicity of taste, is no less exquisite. And like Taou +Yuen she affords Mr. Hergesheimer the opportunity he most desires--"to +realize that sharp sense of beauty which came from a firm, delicate +consciousness of certain high pretensions, valors, maintained in the +face of imminent destruction.... In that category none was sharper than +the charm of a woman, soon to perish, in a vanity of array as momentary +and iridescent as a May-fly." It is as the poet musing upon the fleet +passage of beauty rather than as the satirist mocking at the vanity of +human wishes that Mr. Hergesheimer traces the career of Linda Condon; +but both poet and satirist meet in his masterpiece. + +A woman as lovely as a lyric, she is almost as insensible as a steel +blade or a bright star. The true marvel is that beauty so cold can +provoke such conflagrations. Granted--and certain subtle women decline +to grant it--that Linda with her shining emptiness could have kindled +the passion she kindles in the story, what must be the blackness of her +discovery that when her beauty goes she will have left none of the +generous affection which, had she herself given it through life, she +might by this time have earned in quantities sufficient to endow and +compensate her for old age! Mr. Hergesheimer does not soften the blow +when it comes--he even adds to her agony the clear consciousness that +she cannot feel her plight as more passionate natures might. But he +allows her, at the last, an intimation of immortality. From her +unresponding beauty, she sees, her sculptor lover has caught a madness +eventually sublimated to a Platonic vision which, partially forgetful of +her as an individual, has made him and his works great. Without, in the +common way, modeling her at all, he has snared the essence of her spirit +and has set it--as such mortal things go--everlastingly in bronze. + +If Mr. Hergesheimer offers Linda in the end only the hard comfort of a +perception come at largely through her intellect, still as far as the +art of his novel is concerned he has immensely gained by his refusal to +make any trivial concession to natural weaknesses. His latest conclusion +is his best. _The Lay Anthony_ ends in accident, _Mountain Blood_ in +melodrama; _The Three Black Pennys_, more successful than its +predecessors, fades out like the Penny line; _Java Head_ turns sharply +away from its central theme, almost as if _Hamlet_ should concern itself +during a final scene with Horatio's personal perplexities. Now the +conclusions of a novelist are on the whole the test of his judgment and +his honesty; and it promises much for fiction that Mr. Hergesheimer has +advanced so steadily in this respect through his seven books. + +He has advanced, too, in his use of decoration, which reached its most +sumptuous in _Java Head_ and which in _Linda Condon_ happily began to +show a more austere control. The question which criticism asks is +whether Mr. Hergesheimer has not gone as far as a practitioner of the +decorative arts can go, and whether he ought not, during the remainder +of the eminent career which awaits him, to work rather in the direction +marked by _Linda Condon_ than in that marked by _Java Head_. The rumor +that his friends advise him to become a "period novelist" must disquiet +his admirers--even those among them who cannot think him likely to act +upon advice so dangerous to his art. Doubtless he could go on and write +another _Salammbô,_ but he does not need to: he has already written +_Java Head_. When a novelist has reached the limits of decoration there +still stretches out before him the endless road--which Mr. Hergesheimer +has given evidence that he can travel--of the interpretation and +elucidation of human character and its devious fortunes in the world. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +NEW STYLE + + +1. EMERGENT TYPES + +_Ellen Glasgow_ + +Fiction, no less than life, has its broad flats and shallows from which +distinction emerges only now and then, when some superior veracity or +beauty or energy lifts a novelist or a novel above the mortal average. +Consider, for example, the work of Ellen Glasgow. In her representations +of contemporary Virginia she long stood with the local colorists, +practising with more grace than strength what has come to seem an older +style; in her heroic records of the Virginia of the Civil War and +Reconstruction she frequently fell into the orthodox monotone of the +historical romancers. By virtue of two noticeable qualities, however, +she has in her later books emerged from the level established by the +majority and has ranged herself with writers who seem newer and fresher +than her early models. + +One quality is her sense for the texture of life, which imparts to _The +Miller of Old Church_ a thickness of atmosphere decisively above that of +most local color novels. She has admitted into her story various classes +of society which traditional Virginia fiction regularly neglects; she +has enriched her narrative with fresh and sweet descriptions of the soft +Virginia landscape; she has bound her plot together with the best of all +ligatures--intelligence. If certain of her characters--Abel Revercomb, +Reuben Merryweather, Betsey Bottom--seem at times a little too much like +certain of Thomas Hardy's rustics, still the resemblance is hardly +greater than that which actually exists between parts of rural Virginia +and rural Wessex; Miss Glasgow is at least as faithful to her scene as +if she had devoted herself solely to a chronicle of rich planters, poor +whites, and obeisant freedmen. Without any important sacrifice of +reality she has enlarged her material by lifting it toward the plane of +the pastoral and rounding it out with poetic abundance instead of +whittling it down with provincial shrewdness or weakening it with +village sentimentalism. + +That she does not lack shrewdness appears from the evidences in _Life +and Gabriella_ and still more in _Virginia_ of her second distinctive +quality--a critical attitude toward the conventions of her locality. In +one Miss Glasgow exhibits a modern Virginia woman breaking her medieval +shell in New York; in the other she examines the subsequent career of a +typical Southern heroine launched into life with no equipment but +loveliness and innocence. Loveliness, Virginia finds, may fade and +innocence may become a nuisance if wisdom happens to be needed. She +fails to understand and eventually to "hold" her husband; she gives +herself so completely to her children that in the end she has nothing +left for herself and is tragically dispensable to them. _Virginia_ is at +once the most thorough and the most pathetic picture extant of the +American woman as Victorianism conceived and shaped and misfitted her. +But the book is much more than a tract for feminism to point to: it is +unexpectedly full and civilized, packed with observation, tinctured with +omen and irony. + + +_William Allen White_ + +If Miss Glasgow emerges considerably--though not immensely--above the +deadly levels of fiction, so does William Allen White. What lifts him is +his hearty, bubbling energy. He has the courage of all his convictions, +of all his sentiments, of all his laughter, of all his tears. He has a +multitude of right instincts and sound feelings, and he habitually +reverts to them in the intervals between his stricter hours of thought. +Such stricter hours he is far from lacking. They address themselves +especially to the task of showing why and how corruption works in +politics and of tracing those effects of private greed which ruin souls +and torture societies. The hero-villains of _A Certain Rich Man_ and of +_In the Heart of a Fool_ tread all the paths of selfishness and come to +hard ends in punishment for the offense of counting the head higher than +the heart. + +These books being crowded with quite obvious doctrine it is fair to say +of them that they directly inculcate the life of simple human virtues +and services and accuse the grosser American standards of success. They +do this important thing within the limits of moralism, progressivism, +and optimism. John Barclay, the rich man, when his evil course is run, +hastily, unconvincingly divests himself of his spoils and loses his life +in an heroic accident. Thomas Van Dorn, the fool, finally arrives at +desolation because there has been no God in his heart, but he has no +more instructive background for a contrast to folly than the spectacle +of a nation entering the World War with what is here regarded as a vast +purgation, a magnificent assertion of the divinity in mankind. How such +a conclusion withers in the light and fire of time! Right instincts and +sound feelings are not, after all, enough for a novelist: somewhere in +his work there must appear an intelligence undiverted by even the +kindliest intentions; much as he must be of his world, he must be also +in some degree outside it as well as above it. + +Yet to be of his world with such knowledge as Mr. White has of Kansas +gives him one kind of distinction if not a different kind. His two +longer narratives sweep epically down from the days of settlement to the +time when the frontier order disappeared under the pressure of change. +He has a moving erudition in the history and characters and motives and +humors of the small inland town; no one has ever known more about the +outward customs and behaviors of an American state than Mr. White. His +shorter stories not less than his novels are racy with actualities: he +has caught the dialect of his time and place with an ear that is +singularly exact; he has cut the costumes of his men and villages so +that hardly a wrinkle shows. In particular he understands the pathos of +boyhood, seen not so much, however, through the serious eyes of boys +themselves as through the eyes of reminiscent men reflecting upon young +joys and griefs that will shortly be left behind and upon little pomps +that can never come to anything. _The Court of Boyville_ is now +hilariously comic, now tenderly elegiac. None of Mr. White's +contemporaries has quite his power to shift from bursts of laughter to +sudden, agreeable tears. That flood of moods and words upon which he can +be swept beyond the full control of his analytical faculties is but a +symptom of the energy which, when he turns to narrative, sweeps him and +his readers out of pedestrian gaits. + + +_Ernest Poole_ + +By comparison the more critical Ernest Poole suffers from a deficiency +of both verve and humor. He began his career with the happy discovery of +a picturesque, untrodden neighborhood of New York City in _The Harbor_; +he consolidated his reputation with the thoughtful study of a troubled +father of troubling daughters in _His Family_; since then he has sounded +no new chords, strumming on his instrument as if magic had deserted him. +Perhaps it was not quite magic by which his work originally won its +hearing. There is something a little unmagical, a little mechanical, +about the fancy which personifies the harbor of New York and makes it +recur and reverberate throughout that first novel. The matter was +significant, but the manner seems only at times spontaneous and at times +only industrious. Intelligence, ideas, observations, perception--these +hold up well in _The Harbor_; it is poetry that flags, though poetry is +invoked to carry out the pattern. Over humor Mr. Poole has but moderate +power, as he has perhaps but moderate interest in it: his characters are +themselves either fiercely or sadly serious, and they are seen with an +eye which has not quite the forgiveness of laughter or the pity of +disillusion. Roger Gale in _His Family_ broods, mystified, over what +seems to him the drift of his daughters into the furious currents of a +new age. Yet they fall into three categories--with some American +reservations--of mother, nun, courtesan, about which there is nothing +new; and all the tragic elements of the book are almost equally ancient. +Without the spacious vision which sees eternities in hours _His Family_ +contents itself too much with being a document upon a particular hour of +history. It has more kindliness than criticism. + +Mr. Poole, one hates to have to say, is frequently rather less than +serious: he is earnest; at moments he is hardly better than merely +solemn. Nevertheless, _The Harbor_ and _His Family_--_His Family_ easily +the better of the two--are works of honest art and excellent documents +upon a generation. Mr. Poole feels the earth reeling beneath the +desperate feet of men; he sees the millions who are hopelessly +bewildered; he hears the cries of rage and fear coming from those who +foretell chaos; he catches the exaltation of those who imagine that +after so long a shadow the sunshine of freedom and justice will shortly +break upon them. With many generous expectations he waits for the +revolution which shall begin the healing of the world's wounds. +Meanwhile he paints the dissolving lineaments of the time in colors +which his own softness keeps from being very stern or very deep but +which are gentle and appealing. + + +_Henry B. Fuller_ + +The peculiar strength and the peculiar weakness of Henry B. Fuller lie +in his faithful habit of being a dilettante. A generation ago, when the +aesthetic poets and critics were in bloom, Mr. Fuller in _The Chevalier +of Pensieri-Vani_ and _The Chatelaine of La Trinité_ played with +sentimental pilgrimages in Italy or the Alps, packing his narratives +with the most affectionate kind of archaeology and yet forever +scrutinizing them with a Yankee smile. A little later, when Howells's +followers had become more numerous, Mr. Fuller joined them with minute, +accurate, amused representations of Chicago in _The Cliff-Dwellers_ and +_With the Procession_. Then, as if bored with longer flights, he settled +himself to writing sharp-eyed stories concerning the life of art as +conducted in Chicago--_Under the Skylights_--and of Americans traveling +in Europe--_From the Other Side, Waldo Trench and Others_. After _Spoon +River Anthology_ Mr. Fuller took such hints from its method as he +needed in the pungent dramatic sketches of _Lines Long and Short_. One +of these sketches, called _Postponement_, has autobiography, it may be +guessed, in its ironic, wistful record of a Midwestern American who all +his life longed and planned to live in Europe but who found himself +ready to gratify his desire only in the dread summer of 1914, when peace +departed from the earth to stay away, he saw, at least as long as he +could hope to live. There is the note of intimate experience, if not of +autobiography, in these lucid words spoken about the hero of _On the +Stairs_: "he wanted to be an artist and give himself out; he wanted to +be a gentleman and hold himself in. An entangling, ruinous paradox." + +Fate, if not fatalism, has kept Mr. Fuller, this dreamer about old +lands, always resident in the noisiest city of the newest land and +always less, it seems, than thoroughly expressive. Had there been more +passion in his constitution he might, perhaps, have either detached +himself from Chicago altogether or submerged himself in it to a point of +reconciliation. But passion is precisely what Mr. Fuller seems to lack +or to be chary of. He dwells above the furies. As one consequence his +books, interesting as every one of them is, suffer from the absence of +emphasis. His utterance comes in the tone of an intelligent drawl. +Spiritually in exile, he lives somewhat unconcerned with the drama of +existence surrounding him, as if his gaze were farther off. Yet though +deficiency in passion has made Mr. Fuller an amateur, it has allowed him +the longest tether in the exercise of a free, penetrating intelligence. +He is not lightly jostled out of his equilibrium by petty irritations +or swept off his feet by those torrents of ready emotion which sweep +through popular fiction by their own momentum. Whenever, in _A Daughter +of the Middle Border_, Hamlin Garland brings Mr. Fuller into his story, +there is communicated the sense of a vivid intellect somehow keeping its +counsel and yet throwing off rays of suggestion and illumination. + +Without much question it is by his critical faculties that Mr. Fuller +excels. He has the poetic energy to construct, but less frequently to +create. Such endowments invite him to the composition of memoirs. He +has, indeed, in _On the Stairs_, produced the memoirs, in the form of a +novel, of a Chicagoan who could never adapt himself to his native +habitat and who gradually sees the control of life slipping out of his +hands to those of other, more potent, more decisive, less divided men. +But suppose Mr. Fuller were to surrender the ironic veil of fiction +behind which he has preferred to hide his own spiritual adventures! +Suppose he were avowedly to write the history of the arts and letters in +Chicago! Suppose he were, rather more confidingly, to trace the career +of an actual, attentive dilettante in his thunderous town! + + +_Mary Austin_ + +Criticism perceives in Mary Austin the certain signs of a power which, +for reasons not entirely clear, has as yet failed to express itself +completely in forms of art. She herself prefers less to be judged by any +of her numerous books than to be regarded as a figure laboring somewhat +anonymously toward the development of a national culture founded at all +points on national realities. Behind this preference is a personal +experience which must be taken into account in any analysis of Mrs. +Austin's work. Born in Illinois, she went at twenty to California, to +live between the Sierra Nevada and the Mohave Desert. There she was soon +spiritually acclimated to the wilderness, studied among the Indians the +modes of aboriginal life, and in time came to bear the relation almost +of a prophetess to the people among whom she lived. Her first book, _The +Land of Little Rain_, interpreted the desert chiefly as landscape. Since +then she has, it may be said, employed the desert as a measure of life, +constantly bringing from it a sense for the primal springs of existence +into all her comment upon human affairs. _The Man Jesus_ examines the +career of a desert-dweller who preached a desert-wisdom to a confused +world. Her play _The Arrow Maker_ exhibits the behavior and fortunes of +a desert-seeress among her own people. _Love and the Soul-Maker_ +anatomizes love as a primal force struggling with and through +civilization. From Paiute and Shoshone medicine men, the only poets Mrs. +Austin knew during her formative years, she acquired that grounding in +basic rhythms which led her to write free verse years before it became +the fashion in sophisticated circles and persuaded her that American +poetry cannot afford to overlook the experiments and successes of the +first American poets in fitting expression to the actual conditions of +the continent. + +It has been of course a regular tradition among novelists in the United +States to weigh the "settlements" in a balance and to represent them as +lacking the hardy virtues of the backwoods. Mrs. Austin goes beyond this +naïve process. Whether she deals with the actual frontier--as in +_Isidro_ or _Lost Borders_ or _The Ford_--or with more crowded, more +complex regions--as in _The Woman of Genius_ or _26 Jayne Street_--she +keeps her particular frontier in mind not as an entity or a dogma but as +a symbol of the sources of human life and society. She creates, it +seems, out of depths of reflection and out of something even deeper than +reflection. She has observed the unconscious instincts of the individual +and the long memories of the race. The effect upon her novels of such +methods has been to widen their sympathies and to warm and lift their +style; it has also been to render them sometimes defective in structure +and sometimes obscure in meaning. If they are not glib, neither are they +always clean-cut or direct. Along with her generous intelligence she has +a good deal of the stubborn wilfulness of genius, and she has never +achieved a quite satisfactory fusion of the two qualities. She wears +something like the sibyl's robes and speaks with something like the +sibyl's strong accents, but the cool, hard discipline of the artist or +of the exact scholar only occasionally serves her. Much of her +significance lies in her promise. Faithful to her original vision, she +has moved steadily onward, growing, writing no book like its +predecessor, applying her wisdom continually to new knowledge, leaving +behind her a rich detritus which she will perhaps be willing to consider +detritus if it helps to nourish subsequent generations. + + +_Immigrants_ + +The newer stocks and neighborhoods in the United States have their +fictive records as well as the longer established ones, and there is +growing up a class of immigrant books which amounts almost to a separate +department of American literature. From Denmark, Germany, +Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, Russia, Rumania, Syria, Italy have come +passionate pilgrims who have set down, mostly in plain narratives, the +chronicles of their migration. As the first Americans contended with +nature and the savages, so these late arrivals contend with men and a +civilization no less hostile toward them; their writings continue, in a +way, the earliest American tradition of a concern with the risks and +contrivances by which pioneers cut their paths. Even when the immigrants +write fiction they tend to choose the same materials and thus to fall +into formulas, which are the more observable since the writers are the +survivors in the struggle and naturally tell about the successes rather +than the failures in the process of Americanization. + +Not all the stocks, of course, are equally interested in fiction or +gifted at it: the Russian Jews have the most notable novels to their +credit. Though these are generally composed by men not born in this +country, in Yiddish, and so belong to the history of that most +international of literatures, certain of them, having been translated, +belong obviously as well as actually to the common treasure of the +nation. Shalom Aleichem's _Jewish Children_ and Leon Kobrin's _A +Lithuanian Village_ surely belong, though their scenes are laid in +Europe; as do Sholom Asch's vivid, moving novels _Mottke the +Vagabond_--concerned with the underworld of Poland--and _Uncle +Moses_--concerned with the New York Ghetto--the recent translations of +which are slowly bringing to a wider American public the evidence that a +really eminent novelist has hitherto been partly hidden by his alien +tongue. + +There is no question whatever that the work of Abraham Cahan, Yiddish +scholar, journalist, novelist, belongs to the American nation. As far +back as the year in which Stephen Crane stirred many sensibilities with +his _Maggie_, the story of an Irish slum in Manhattan, Mr. Cahan +produced in _Yekl_ a book of similar and practically equal merit +concerning a Jewish slum in the same borough. But it and his later books +_The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories_ and _The White Terror and +the Red_ have been overwhelmed by novels by more familiar men dealing +with more familiar communities. The same has been true even of his +masterpiece, the most important of all immigrant novels, _The Rise of +David Levinsky_. It, too, records the making of an American, originally +a reader of Talmud in a Russian village and eventually the principal +figure in the cloak and suit trade in America. But it does more than +trace the career of Levinsky through his personal adventures: it traces +the evolution of a great industry and represents the transplanted +Russian Jews with affectionate exactness in all their modes of work and +play and love--another conquest of a larger Canaan. Here are fused +American hope and Russian honesty. At the end David, with all his New +World wealth, lacks the peace he might have had but for his sacrifice of +Old World integrity and faith. And yet the novel is very quiet in its +polemic. Its hero has gained in power; he is no dummy to hang maxims on. +Moving through a varied scene, gradually shedding the outward qualities +of his race, he remains always an individual, gnawed at by love in the +midst of his ambitions, subject to frailties which test his strength. + +The fact that Mr. Cahan wrote _David Levinsky_ not in his mother-tongue +but in the language of his adopted country may be taken as a sign that +American literature no less than the American population is being +enlarged by the influx of fresh materials and methods. The methods of +the Yiddish writers are, as might be expected, those of Russian fiction +generally, though in this they were anticipated by the critical +arguments of Howells and Henry James and are rivaled by the majority of +the naturalistic novelists. Their materials, as might not be expected, +have a sort of primitive power by comparison with which the orthodox +native materials of fiction seem often pale and dusty. The older +Americans, settled into smug routines, lack the vitality, the industry +of the newcomers. They are less direct and more provincial; they are +bundled up in gentilities and petty habits; they hide behind +old-fashioned reticences which soften the drama of their lives. With the +newer stocks an ancient process begins again. Their affairs are +conducted on the plane of desperate subsistence. Struggling to survive +at all, they cry out in the language of hunger and death; almost naked +in the struggle, they speak nakedly about livelihood and birth and +death. Sooner or later the immigrants must be perceived to have added +precious elements of passion and candor to American fiction. + + +2. THE REVOLT FROM THE VILLAGE + +_Edgar Lee Masters_ + +The newest style in American fiction dates from the appearance, in 1915, +of _Spoon River Anthology_, though it required five years for the +influence of that book to pass thoroughly over from poetry to prose. For +nearly half a century native literature had been faithful to the cult of +the village, celebrating its delicate merits with sentimental affection +and with unwearied interest digging into odd corners of the country for +persons and incidents illustrative of the essential goodness and heroism +which, so the doctrine ran, lie beneath unexciting surfaces. Certain +critical dispositions, aware of agrarian discontent or given to a +preference for cities, might now and then lay disrespectful hands upon +the life of the farm; but even these generally hesitated to touch the +village, sacred since Goldsmith in spite of Crabbe, sacred since +Washington Irving in spite of E.W. Howe. + +The village seemed too cosy a microcosm to be disturbed. There it lay in +the mind's eye, neat, compact, organized, traditional: the white church +with tapering spire, the sober schoolhouse, the smithy of the ringing +anvil, the corner grocery, the cluster of friendly houses; the venerable +parson, the wise physician, the canny squire, the grasping landlord +softened or outwitted in the end; the village belle, gossip, atheist, +idiot; jovial fathers, gentle mothers, merry children; cool parlors, +shining kitchens, spacious barns, lavish gardens, fragrant summer dawns, +and comfortable winter evenings. These were elements not to be discarded +lightly, even by those who perceived that time was discarding many of +them as the industrial revolution went on planting ugly factories +alongside the prettiest brooks, bringing in droves of aliens who used +unfamiliar tongues and customs, and fouling the atmosphere with smoke +and gasoline. Mr. Howe in _The Story of a Country Town_ had long ago +made it cynically clear--to the few who read him--that villages which +prided themselves upon their pioneer energy might in fact be stagnant +backwaters or dusty centers of futility, where existence went round and +round while elsewhere the broad current moved away from them. Mark Twain +in _The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg_ had more recently put it bitterly +on record that villages which prided themselves upon their simple +virtues might from lack of temptation have become a hospitable soil for +meanness and falsehood, merely waiting for the proper seed. And Clarence +Darrow in his elegiac _Farmington_ had insisted that one village at +least had been the seat of as much restless longing as of simple bliss. +_Spoon River Anthology_ in its different dialect did little more than to +confirm these mordant, neglected testimonies. + +That Mr. Masters was not neglected must be explained in part, of course, +by his different dialect. The Greek anthology had suggested to him +something which was, he said, "if less than verse, yet more than prose"; +and he went, with the step of genius, beyond any "formal resuscitation +of the Greek epigrams, ironical and tender, satirical and sympathetic, +as casual experiments in unrelated themes," to an "epic rendition of +modern life" which suggests the novel in its largest aspects. An +admirable scheme occurred to him: he would imagine a graveyard such as +every American village has and would equip it with epitaphs of a +ruthless veracity such as no village ever saw put into words. The effect +was as if all the few honest epitaphs in the world had suddenly come +together in one place and sent up a shout of revelation. + +Conventional readers had the thrill of being shocked and of finding an +opportunity to defend the customary reticences; ironical readers had the +delight of coming upon a host of witnesses to the contrast which irony +perpetually observes between appearance and reality; readers militant +for the "truth" discovered an occasion to demand that pious fictions +should be done away with and the naked facts exposed to the sanative +glare of noon. And all these readers, most of them unconsciously no +doubt, shared the fearful joy of sitting down at an almost incomparably +abundant feast of scandal. Where now were the mild decencies of +Tiverton, of Old Chester, of Friendship Village? The roofs and walls of +Spoon River were gone and the passers-by saw into every bedroom; the +closets were open and all the skeletons rattled undenied; brains and +breasts had unlocked themselves and set their most private treasures out +for the most public gaze. + +It was the scandal and not the poetry of _Spoon River_, criticism may +suspect, which particularly spread its fame. Mr. Masters used an +especial candor in affairs of sex, an instinct which, secretive +everywhere, has rarely ever been so much so as in the American villages +of fiction, where love ordinarily exhibited itself in none but the +chastest phases, as if it knew no savage vagaries, transgressed no +ordinances, shook no souls out of the approved routines. Reaction from +too much sweet drove Mr. Masters naturally to too much sour; sex in +Spoon River slinks and festers, as if it were an instinct which had not +been schooled--however imperfectly--by thousands of years of human +society to some modification of its rages and some civil direction of +its restless power. But here, as with the other aspects of behavior in +his village, he showed himself impatient, indeed violent, toward all +subterfuges. There is filth, he said in effect, behind whited +sepulchers; drag it into the light and such illusions will no longer +trick the uninstructed into paying honor where no honor appertains and +will no longer beckon the deluded to an imitation of careers which are +actually unworthy. + +Spoon River has not even the outward comeliness which the village of +tradition should possess: it is slack and shabby. Nor is its decay +chronicled in any mood of tender pathos. What strikes its chronicler +most is the general demoralization of the town. Except for a few saints +and poets, whom he acclaims with a lyric ardor, the population is sunk +in greed and hypocrisy and--as if this were actually the worst of +all--complacent apathy. Spiritually it dwindles and rots; externally it +clings to a pitiless decorum which veils its faults and almost makes it +overlook them, so great has the breach come to be between its practices +and its professions. Again and again its poet goes back to the heroic +founders of Spoon River, back to the days which nurtured Lincoln, whose +shadow lies mighty, beneficent, too often unheeded, over the degenerate +sons and daughters of a smaller day; and from an older, robuster +integrity Mr. Masters takes a standard by which he morosely measures the +purposelessness and furtiveness and supineness and dulness of the +village which has forgotten its true ancestors. + +Anger like his springs from a poetic elevation of spirit; toward the end +_Spoon River Anthology_ rises to a mystical vision of human life by +comparison with which the scavenging epitaphs of the first half seem, +though witty, yet insolent and trivial. It is perhaps not necessary to +point out that the numerous poets and novelists who have learned a +lesson from the book have learned it less powerfully from the difficult +later pages than from those in which the text is easiest. + +Mr. Masters himself has not always remembered the harder and better +lesson. During a half dozen years he has published more than a half +dozen books which have all inherited the credit of the _Anthology_ but +which all betray the turbulent, nervous habit of experimentation which +makes up a large share of his literary character. There comes to mind +the figure of a blind-folded Apollo, eager and lusty, who continually +runs forward on the trail of poetry and truth but who, because of his +blindfoldedness, only now and then strikes the central track. Five of +Mr. Masters's later books are collections of miscellaneous verse; during +the fruitful year 1920 he undertook two longer flights of fiction. In +_Mitch Miller_ he attempted in prose to write a new _Tom Sawyer_ for the +Spoon River district; in _Domesday Book_ he applied the method of _The +Ring and the Book_ to the material of Starved Rock. The impulse of the +first must have been much the same as Mark Twain's: a desire to catch in +a stouter net than memory itself the recollections of boyhood which +haunt disillusioned men. But as Mr. Masters is immensely less boylike +than Mark Twain, elegy and argument thrust themselves into the chronicle +of Mitch and Skeet, with an occasional tincture of a fierce hatred felt +toward the politics and theology of Spoon River. A story of boyhood, +that lithe, muscular age, cannot carry such a burden of doctrine. The +narrative is tangled in a snarl of moods. Its movement is often thick, +its wings often gummed and heavy. + +The same qualities may be noted in _Domesday Book_. Its scheme and +machinery are promising: a philosophical coroner, holding his inquest +over the body of a girl found mysteriously dead, undertakes to trace the +mystery not only to its immediate cause but up to its primary source and +out to its remotest consequences. At times the tale means to be an +allegory of America during the troubled, roiled, destroying years of the +war; at times it means to be a "census spiritual" of American society. +Elenor Murray, in her birth and love and sufferings and desperate end, +is represented as pure nature, "essential genius," acting out its fated +processes in a world of futile or corrupting inhibitions. But Mr. +Masters has less skill at portraying the sheer genius of an individual +than at arraigning the inhibitions of the individual's society. When he +steps down from his watch-tower of irony he can hate as no other +American poet does. His hates, however, do not always pass into poetry; +they too frequently remain hard, sullen masses of animosity not fused +with his narrative but standing out from it and adding an unmistakable +personal rhythm to the rough beat of his verse. So, too, do his heaps of +turgid learning and his scientific speculations often remain undigested. +A good many of his characters are cut to fit the narrative plan, not +chosen from reality to make up the narrative. The total effect is often +crude and heavy; and yet beneath these uncompleted surfaces are the +sinews of enormous power: a greedy gusto for life, a wide imaginative +experience, tumultuous uprushes; of emotion and expression, an acute if +undisciplined intelligence, great masses of the veritable stuff of +existence out of which great novels are made. + + +_Sherwood Anderson_ + +_Spoon River Anthology_ has called forth a smaller number of deliberate +imitations than might have been expected, and even they have utilized +its method with a difference. Sherwood Anderson, for example, in +_Winesburg, Ohio_ speaks in accents and rhythms obstinately his own, +though his book is, in effect, the _Anthology_ "transprosed." Instead of +inventing Winesburg immediately after Spoon River became famous he began +his career more regularly, with the novels _Windy McPherson's Son_ and +_Marching Men_, in which he employed what has become the formula of +revolt for recent naturalism. In both stories a superior youth, of +rebellious energy and somewhat inarticulate ambition, detaches himself +in disgust from his native village and makes his way to the city in +search of that wealth which is the only thing the village has ever +taught him to desire though it is unable to gratify his desires itself; +and in both the youth, turned man, finds himself sickening with his +prize in his hands and looks about him for some clue to the meaning of +the mad world in which he has succeeded without satisfaction. Sam +McPherson, after a futile excursion through the proletariat in search of +the peace which he has heard accompanies honest toil, settles down to +the task of bringing up some children he has adopted and thus of forcing +himself "back into the ranks of life." Beaut McGregor, refusing a +handsome future at the bar, sets out to organize the workers of Chicago +into marching men who drill in the streets and squares at night that +they may be prepared for action if only they can find some sort of goal +to march upon. + +These novels ache with the sense of a dumb confusion in America; with a +consciousness "of how men, coming out of Europe and given millions of +square miles of black fertile land mines and forests, have failed in the +challenge given them by fate and have produced out of the stately order +of nature only the sordid disorder of man." Out of this ache of +confusion comes no lucidity. Sam McPherson is not sure but that he will +find parenthood as petty as business was brutal; Beaut McGregor sets his +men to marching and their orderly step resounds through the final +chapters of his career as here recorded, but no one knows what will come +of it--they advance and wheel and retreat as blindly as any horde of +peasants bound for a war about which they do not know the causes, in a +distant country of which they have never heard the name. Mr. Anderson +worked in his first books as if he were assembling documents on the eve +of revolution. Village peace and stability have departed; ancient +customs break or fade; the leaven of change stirs the lump. + +From such arguments he turned aside to follow Mr. Masters into verse +with _Mid-American Chants_ and into scandal with _Winesburg, Ohio_. But +touching scandal with beauty as his predecessor touched it with irony, +Mr. Anderson constantly transmutes it. The young man who here sets out +to make his fortune has not greatly hated Winesburg, and the imminence +of his departure throws a vaguely golden mist over the village, which is +seen in considerable measure through his generous if inexperienced eyes. +A newspaper reporter, he directs his principal curiosity towards items +of life outside the commonplace and thus offers Mr. Anderson the +occasion to explore the moral and spiritual hinterlands of men and women +who outwardly walk paths strict enough. + +If the life of the tribe is unadventurous, he seems to say, there is +still the individual, who, perhaps all the more because of the rigid +decorums forced upon him, may adventure with secret desires through +pathless space. Only, the pressure of too many inhibitions can distort +human spirits into grotesque forms. The inhabitants of Winesburg tend +toward the grotesque, now this organ of the soul enlarged beyond all +symmetry, now that wasted away in a desperate disuse. They see visions +which in some wider world might become wholesome realities or might be +dispelled by the light but which in Winesburg must lurk about till they +master and madden with the strength which the darkness gives them. +Religion, deprived in Winesburg of poetry, fritters its time away over +Pharisaic ordinances or evaporates in cloudy dreams; sex, deprived of +spontaneity, settles into fleshly habit or tortures its victim with the +malice of a thwarted devil; heroism of deed or thought either withers +into melancholy inaction or else protects itself with a sullen or +ridiculous bravado. + +Yet even among such pitiful surroundings Mr. Anderson walks tenderly. He +honors youth, he feels beauty, he understands virtue, he trusts wisdom, +when he comes upon them. He broods over his creatures with affection, +though he makes no luxury of illusions. Much as he has detached himself +from the cult of the village, he still cherishes the memories of some +specific Winesburg. Much as he has detached himself from the hazy +national optimism of an elder style in American thinking, he still +cherishes a confidence in particular persons. _Winesburg, Ohio_ springs +from the more intimate regions of his mind and is consequently more +humane and less doctrinaire than his earlier novels. It has a similar +superiority over the book he wrote for 1920, _Poor White_, which returns +to the device of a bewildered strong man rising from a dull obscurity, +successful but unsatisfied. At the same time _Poor White_ proceeds from +an imagination which had been warmed with the creation of Winesburg and +its people and is richer, fuller, deeper than the angular sagas of +McPherson and McGregor. It does not yet show that Mr. Anderson can +construct a large plot or that his vision comes with a steady gleam; it +shows, rather, that he is still fumbling in the confusion of current +life to get hold of something true and simple and to make it clear. + +Perhaps he tried in _Poor White_ to manipulate a larger bulk than he is +yet ready for. Perhaps because he was aware of that he has worked in his +latest book, _The Triumph of the Egg_, with a variety of brief themes +and has excelled even _Winesburg_ in both poetry and truth. At least it +is certain that he keeps on advancing in his art. Although life has not +hardened for him, and he sees it still flowing or whirling, he steadily +sharpens his outlines and perfects the fierce intensity of his style. +Will his wisdom ever catch up with his passion and his observation? In +each successive book he has revealed himself as still hot with the fever +of his day's experiences. He has yet to show that he can go through the +confusion of new spiritual adventures and then set them down, +remembering, in tranquillity. + + +_E.W. Howe_ + +With _The Anthology of Another Town_ E.W. Howe, obviously on the +suggestion of Spoon River, returned to the caustic analysis of American +village life which he may be said to have inaugurated in _The Story of a +Country Town_ almost forty years before. Then he had been young enough +to feel it necessary to invent romantic embroideries for his grim tale, +somewhat as Emily Brontë under somewhat similar circumstances has done +for _Wuthering Heights_--the novel which Mr. Howe's story most +resembles. But all his inventions were stern, full of a powerful +dissatisfaction, merciless toward the idyllic versions of country life +which sweetened the decade of the eighties. Even among the pioneers whom +Mr. Masters idealizes there were, according to the older man, slackness +and shabbiness, and at the first opportunity to take their ease in the +new world they had won from nature they sank down, too nerveless for +passion or violence, into the easy vices: idleness, whining, gossip, +drunkenness, sodden inutility. Against such qualities Mr. Howe has from +the first proceeded with the doctrines of another Franklin, but of a +Franklin without whimsical persuasions or elegant graces. Having +apparently come to the conclusion that he was a failure as a novelist +because he made no great stir with his experiments in that trade, he +confined himself to more or less orthodox journalism for a generation, +and then, retiring, founded his organ of "indignation and +information"--_E.W. Howe's Monthly_--and began to pour forth the stream +of aphoristic honesty which makes him easily first among the rural +sages. + +In no sense, of course, does he assume the cosmopolitan and +international attitude which most of the naturalists assume: +"Provincialism," he curtly says, "is the best thing in the world." Nor +is he in any of the casual senses a radical: "In everything in which man +is interested, the world knows what is best for him.... Millions of men +have lived millions of years, and tried everything." Neither has he any +patience with speculation for its own sake: "There are no mysteries. +Where does the wind come from? It doesn't matter: we know the habits of +wind after it arrives." As to politics: "The people are always worsted +in an election." As to altruism: "The long and the short of it is, +whoever catches the fool first is entitled to shear him." As to love: +"We cannot permit love to run riot; we must build fences around it, as +we do around pigs." As to money: "In theory, it is not respectable to be +rich. In fact, poverty is a disgrace." As to literature: "Poets are +prophets whose prophesying never comes true." As to prudence: "Trying to +live a spiritual life in a material world is the greatest folly I know +anything about." As to persistent hopefulness: "Pessimism is always +nearer the truth than optimism." + +When the author of such aphorisms undertook to write another anthology +about another town he naturally avoided the mystical elevation of Spoon +River as well as its verse; he used the irony of a disillusioned man and +the directness of a bullet. His scheme was not to assemble epitaphs for +the dead of the village but to tell crisp anecdotes of the living. He +had no iniquities in the human order to assail, since he believes that +the order is just and that it rarely hurts any one who does not deserve +to be hurt by reason of some avoidable imbecility. He made no specialty +of scandal; he did not inquire curiously into the byways of sex; he let +pathology alone. He appears in the book to be--as he is in the flesh--a +wise old man letting his memory run through the town and recalling bits +of decent, illuminating gossip. He is willing to tell a fantastic yarn +with a dry face or to tuck a tragedy in a sentence; to repeat some +village legend in his own low tones or to puncture some village bubble +with a cynical inquiry. + +Yet for all his acceptance and tolerance of the village he is far from +helping to continue the sentimental traditions concerning it. The common +sense which he considers the basis of all philosophy--"If it isn't +common sense, it isn't philosophy"--he has the gift of expounding in a +language which is piercingly individual. It strips his village of +trivial local color and reduces it to the simplest terms--making it out +a more or less fortuitous congregation of human beings of whom some work +and some play, some behave themselves and some do not, some consequently +prosper and some fail, some are happy and some are miserable. His +village is not dainty, like a poem, for the reason that he believes no +village ever was; at least he has never seen one like that. +Downrightness like his is death to mere pretty notions about tribes and +towns quite as truly as are the positive indictments brought against +them by Mr. Masters and Mr. Anderson. If Mr. Howe is less vivid than +those two, because he distrusts passion and poetry, he is also quieter +and surer. "I am not an Agnostic; I _know_.... I have lived a long time, +and my real problems have always been simple." + + +_Sinclair Lewis_ + +_Spoon River Anthology_ was a collection of poems, _Winesburg, Ohio_ was +a collection of short stories, _The Anthology of Another Town_ was a +collection of anecdotes. It remained for a novel in the customary form, +Sinclair Lewis's _Main Street_, to bring to hundreds of thousands the +protest against the village which these books brought to thousands. + +Mr. Lewis, like Mr. Masters, clearly has revenges to take upon the +narrow community in which he grew up, nourished, no doubt, on the +complacency native to such neighborhoods and yet increasingly resentful. +Less poetical than his predecessor, the younger novelist went further in +both his specifications and his generalizations. Instead of brooding +closely, ironically, profoundly, under the black wings of the thought of +death, Mr. Lewis satisfies himself with a slashing portrait of Gopher +Prairie done to the life with the fingers of ridicule. He has +photographic gifts of accuracy; he has all the arts of mimicry; he has a +tireless gusto in his pursuit of the tedious commonplace. Each item of +his evidence is convincing, and the accumulation is irresistible. No +other American small town has been drawn with such exactness of detail +in any other American novel. Various elements of scandal crop out here +and there, but the principal accusation which Mr. Lewis brings against +his village--and indeed against all villages--is that of being dull. "It +is contentment ... the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful +of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as +the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is +slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dulness made God." + +Not dulness itself so much as dulness militant and prospering arouses +this satirist. The whole world, he believes, is being leveled by the +march of machines into one monotonous uniformity, before which all the +individual colors and graces and prides and habits flee--or would flee +if there were any asylum still uninvaded. Thus Mr. Lewis's voice +continues the opposition which Wordsworth raised to the coming of a +railroad into his paradise among the Lakes and which Ruskin and Matthew +Arnold and William Morris raised to the standardization of life which +went on during their century. The American voice, however, speaks of +American conditions. The villages of the Middle West, it asseverates, +have been conquered and converted by the legions of mediocrity, and now, +grown rich and vain, are setting out to carry the dingy banner, led by +the booster's calliope and the evangelist's bass drum, farther than it +has ever gone before--to make provincialism imperialistic; so that all +the native and instinctive virtues, freedoms, powers must rally in their +own defense. + +Mr. Lewis hates such dulness--the village virus--as the saints hate sin. +Indeed it is with a sort of new Puritanism that he and his +contemporaries wage against the dull a war something like that which +certain of their elders once waged against the bad. Only a satiric anger +helped out by the sense of being on crusade could have sustained the +author of _Main Street_ through the laborious compilation of those +brilliant details which illustrate the complacency of Gopher Prairie and +which seem less brilliant than laborious to bystanders not particularly +concerned in his crusade. The question, of course, arises whether the +ancient war upon stupidity is a better literary cause to fight in than +the equally ancient war upon sin. Both narrow themselves to doctrinal +contentions, apparently forgetting for the moment that either being +virtuous or being intelligent is but a half--or thereabouts--of +existence, and that the two qualities are hopelessly intertwined. There +are thoughtful novelists who, as they do not condemn lapses of virtue +too harshly, so also do not too harshly condemn deficiencies of +intelligence, feeling that the common humanity of men and women is +enough to make them fit for fiction. Mr. Lewis must be thought of as +sitting in the seat of the scornful, with the satirists rather than with +the poets, must be seen to recall the earlier, vexed, sardonic _Spoon +River_ rather than the later, calmer, loftier. + +Satire and moralism, however, have large rights in the domain of +literature. Had Mr. Lewis lacked remarkable gifts he could never have +written a book which got its vast popularity by assailing the populace. +The reception of _Main Street_ is a memorable episode in literary +history. Thousands doubtless read it merely to quarrel with it; other +thousands to find out what all the world was talking about; still other +thousands to rejoice in a satire which they thought to be at the +expense of stupid people never once identified with themselves; but that +thousands and hundreds of thousands read it is proof enough that +complacency was not absolutely victorious and that the war was on. + + +_Zona Gale_ + +Before _Main Street_ Sinclair Lewis, though the author of such promising +novels as _Our Mr. Wrenn_ and _The Job_, had been forced by the neglect +of his more serious work to earn a living with the smarter set among +American novelists, writing bright, colloquial, amusing chatter for +popular magazines. If it seems a notable achievement for a temper like +Mr. Masters's to have helped pave the way to popularity for Mr. Lewis, +it seems yet more notable to have performed a similar service for Zona +Gale, who for something like a decade before _Spoon River Anthology_ had +had a comfortable standing among the sweeter set. She was the inventor +of Friendship Village, one of the sweetest of all the villages from Miss +Mitford and Mrs. Gaskell down. Friendship lay ostensibly in the Middle +West, but it actually stood--if one may be pardoned an appropriate +metaphor--upon the confectionery shelf of the fiction shop, preserved in +a thick syrup and set up where a tender light could strike across it at +all hours. In story after story Miss Gale varied the same device: that +of showing how childlike children are, how sisterly are sisters, how +brotherly are brothers, how motherly are mothers, how fatherly are +fathers, how grandmotherly and grandfatherly are grandmothers and +grandfathers, and how loverly are all true lovers of whatever age, sex, +color, or condition. But beneath the human kindness which had permitted +Miss Gale to fall into this technique lay the sinews of a very subtle +intelligence; and she needed only the encouragement of a changing public +taste to be able to escape from her sugary preoccupations. Though the +action of _Miss Lulu Bett_ takes place in a different village, called +Warbleton, it might as well have been in Friendship--in Friendship seen +during a mood when its creator had grown weary of the eternal +saccharine. Now and then, she realized, some spirit even in Friendship +must come to hate all those idyllic posturings; now and then in some +narrow bosom there must flash up the fires of youth and revolution. It +is so with Lulu Bett, dim drudge in the house of her silly sister and of +her sister's pompous husband: a breath of life catches at her and she +follows it on a pitiful adventure which is all she has enough vitality +to achieve but which is nevertheless real and vivid in a waste of +dulness. + +Here was an occasion to arraign Warbleton as Mr. Lewis was then +arraigning Gopher Prairie; Miss Gale, instead of heaping up a multitude +of indictments, categorized and docketed, followed the path of +indirection which--by a paradoxical axiom of art--is a shorter cut than +the highway of exposition or anathema. Her story is as spare as the +virgin frame of Lulu Bett; her style is staccato in its lucid brevity, +like Lulu's infrequent speeches; her eloquence is not that of a torrent +of words and images but that of comic or ironic or tragic meaning packed +in a syllable, a gesture, a dumb silence. Miss Gale riddles the tedious +affectations of the Deacon household almost without a word of comment; +none the less she exhibits them under a withering light. The daughter, +she says, "was as primitive as pollen"--and biology rushes in to explain +Di's blind philanderings. "In the conversations of Dwight and Ina," it +is said of the husband and wife, "you saw the historical home forming in +clots in the fluid wash of the community"--and anthropology holds the +candle. Grandma Bett is, for the moment, the symbol of decrepit age, as +Lulu is the symbol of bullied spinsterhood. Yet in the midst of +applications so universal the American village is not forgotten, little +as it is alluded to. If the Friendships are sweet and dainty, so are +they--whether called Warbleton or something less satiric--dull and +petty, and they fashion their Deacons no less than their Pelleases and +Ettares. Thus hinting, Miss Gale, in her clear, flutelike way, joins the +chorus in which others play upon noisier instruments. + + +_Floyd Dell_ + +The year which saw the appearance of _Main Street_ and _Miss Lulu Bett_ +saw also that of _The Age of Innocence_, Edith Wharton's acid +delineation of the village of Manhattan in the genteel seventies, given +over to the "innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the +heart against experience"; saw Mary Borden's _The Romantic Woman_, with +its cosmopolitan amusement at the village of Iroquois, otherwise +Chicago; and saw Floyd Dell's _Moon-Calf_, which, standing on the other +side of controversy, lacks not only the disposition to sentimentalize +the village but even the disposition to ridicule it. + +Mr. Dell's emancipation is the fruit of a revolutionary detachment from +village standards which is too complete to have left traces of any such +rupture as is implied in almost every paragraph of _Main Street_. +_Moon-Calf_, recounting the adventures of a young poet in certain river +counties and towns and villages of Illinois, touches without heat upon +the spiritual and intellectual limitations of those neighborhoods. It +settles no old scores. It relates an unconventional career without +conventional reproaches and also without conventional heroics. Felix Fay +dreams and blunders and suffers but he goes on growing like a tree, +pushing his head up through one level of development after another until +he stands above the minor annoyances of his immaturity and looks out +over a broader world. He has a soul which is naturally socialist and yet +he never loses himself in proclamations or statistics. He can be fresh +and hopeful and yet learn from the remarkable old men he encounters. He +lives and loves with an instinctive freedom and yet he holds himself +equally secure from devastating extravagances and devastating +repressions. Mr. Dell writes as if he had steadier nerves than most of +the naturalists; as if he regarded their war upon the village as an +ancient brawl which may now be assumed to have been as much settled as +it ever will be. At least, it seems scarcely worth wrangling over. The +spirit seeking to release itself from trivial conditions behaves most +intelligently when it discreetly takes them into account and concerns +itself with them only enough to escape entanglements. Mr. Dell leaves it +to the moralists and the satirists to whip offenders, while he himself +goes on to construct some monument of beauty upon the ground which +moralism and satire are laboring to clear. + +_Moon-Calf_ is very beautiful. Felix has a poetic gift sufficient to +warm the record with fine verses and delicate susceptibilities upon +which his adventures leave exquisite impressions. Even when his +rebellion is at its highest pitch he wastes little energy in hating and +so avoids the astringency and perturbation of a state of mind which is +always perilous. To say Felix Fay is more or less to mean Floyd Dell, +for the narrative is obviously autobiographic at many points. But were +it entirely invention it would testify none the less to the affection +with which this novelist feels his world and the lucidity with which he +represents it. He has a genuine zest for human life, enjoying it, even +when it invites mirth or anger, because of the form and color and +movement which he perceives everywhere and particularly because of the +solid texture of reality of which he is admirably aware. Hatred closes +the eyes to a multitude of charms. If Mr. Dell suffered from it he +could never have enriched his fabric as he has with so many +circumstances chosen with an unargumentative hand; he could never have +extracted so much drama out of dusty people. Had he been a +sentimentalist he might have fallen into the soft processes of the local +color school when it came to portraying the various communities through +which Felix takes his way. Instead, the story is everywhere stiffened +with intelligence. Felix has no adventures more exciting than his +successive discoveries of new ideas. Even the women he loves fit into +the pattern of his career as a thinking being, and he emerges, however +moved, with a surer grasp of his expanding universe. That grasp would +lack much of its confidence if Mr. Dell employed a style less masterly. +As it is, he writes with a candid lucidity which everywhere lets in the +light and with a grace which rounds off the edges that mark the pamphlet +but not the work of art. He can be at once downright and graceful, at +once sincere and impersonal, at once revolutionary and restrained, at +once impassioned and reflective, at once enamored of truth and +scrupulous for beauty. + +When Felix Fay had escaped his original villages and had taken to the +wider pursuit of freedom in Chicago there was another chapter of his +career to be recorded; and that Mr. Dell sets down in _The Briary-Bush_, +wherein Felix finds that the trail of freedom ends, for him, in madness +and loneliness. From the first, though this moon-calf has steadily +blundered toward detachment from the common order, some aching instinct +has left him hungry for solid ground to stand on. The conflict troubles +him. He can succeed in his immediate occupations but he cannot +understand his powers or feel confident in his future. His world whirls +round and round, menaces, eludes, threatens to vanish altogether. Thrown +by dim forces into the arms of Rose-Ann, who seeks freedom no less +restlessly than he, he is married, and the two begin their passionate +experiment at a union which shall have no bonds but their common +determination to be free. Charming slaves of liberty! Felix is at heart +a Puritan and cannot take the world lightly, as it comes. His blunders +bruise and wound him. He punishes himself for all his vagaries. Rose-Ann +is not a Puritan, but she too has instincts that will not surrender, any +more than Felix's, to the doctrines which they both profess: jealousy +sleeps within her, and potential motherhood. She and Felix come to feel +that they have shirked life by their deliberate childlessness and that +life has deserted them. Yet separation proves unendurable. So they +resume marriage, vowing "not to be afraid of life or of any of the +beautiful things life may bring." Among these, of course, are to be +children and a house. + +Is this merely a return to their villages, merely domestic +sentimentalism in a lovely guise? Mr. Dell has gone a little too deep to +incur the full suspicion. He has got very near to the biological +foundations of two lives, where, for the moment, he rests his case. +There is more to come, however, in this spiritual history, whether +Felix Fay knows it or not. Let the house be built and the children be +born, and Felix and Rose-Ann, though citizens and parents, will still be +individuals and will still have to find out whether these complicated +threads of loyalty last better than the simple threads which broke. +Felix, in discovering the lure of stability, has not necessarily +completed the circle of his life. Freedom may allure him again. + +_The Briary-Bush_, less varied than _Moon-Calf_, is decidedly +profounder. It hovers over the dark waters of the unconscious on perhaps +the surest wings an American novel has ever used. Though it has probed +difficult natures and knows them thoroughly it does not flaunt its +knowledge but brings it in only when it can throw some revealing light +upon the outward perplexities of the lovers. Thus it gives depth and +timbre to the story, and yet allows the characters to seem actual +persons actually walking the world. At the same time, Mr. Dell does not +possess a too vivid sense of externality. In both his novels all facts +come through the mist of Felix's habitual confusion, and in that mist +they lose dramatic emphasis; muted, they are not able to break up the +agreeable monotone in which the narrative is delivered. But underneath +these surfaces, seen so poetically, there is a substantial bulk of human +life, immemorial folkways powerfully contending with the new rebellion +of reason. + + +_F. Scott Fitzgerald_ + +_Domesday Book_, _Poor White_, _The Anthology of Another Town_, _Main +Street_, _Miss Lulu Bett_, _The Age of Innocence_, _The Romantic Woman_, +and _Moon-Calf_ would make 1920 remarkable even if that year had not +brought forth other novels of equal rank; if it had not brought forth +James Branch Cabell's richly symbolical romance _Figures of Earth_ and +Upton Sinclair's bitter indictment _100%_. And though most of these seem +somber, there came along with them another novel in which were gaiety +and high spirits and the fires of youth. + +F. Scott Fitzgerald in _This Side of Paradise_ also had broken with the +village. He wrote of his gilded boys and girls as if average decorum +existed only to be shocked. But he made the curious discovery that +undergraduates could have brains and still be interesting; that they +need not give their lives entirely to games and adolescent politics; +that they may have heard of Oscar Wilde as well as of Rudyard Kipling +and of Rupert Brooke no less than of Alfred Noyes. Mr. Fitzgerald had +indeed his element of scandal to tantalize the majority, who debated +whether or not the rising generation could be as promiscuous in its +behavior as he made out. It is the brains in the book, however, not the +scandal, which finally count. His restless generation sparkles with +inquiry and challenge. When its elders have let the world fall into +chaos, why, youth questions, should it trust their counsels any longer? +Mirth and wine and love are more pleasant than that hollow wisdom, and +they may be quite as solid. + +_This Side of Paradise_ comes to no conclusion; it ends in weariness and +smoke, though at last Amory believes he has found himself in the midst +of a wilderness of uncertainties. Yet how vivid a document the book is +upon a whirling time, and how beguiling an entertainment! The narrative +flares up now into delightful verse and now into glittering comic +dialogue. It shifts from passion to farce, from satire to lustrous +beauty, from impudent knowingness to pathetic youthful humility. It is +both alive and lively. Few things more significantly illustrate the +moving tide of which the revolt from the village is a symptom than the +presence of such unrest as this among these bright barbarians. The +traditions which once might have governed them no longer hold. They +break the patterns one by one and follow their wild desires. And as they +play among the ruins of the old, they reason randomly about the new, +laughing. + + +_Dorothy Canfield_ + +If Floyd Dell seems in _The Briary-Bush_ to hint at the human necessity +to turn back by and by from freedom, Dorothy Canfield in _The Brimming +Cup_ pretty clearly argues for that necessity. Doubtless it is to go too +far to claim, as certain of her critics do, that she had made a +counter-attack upon the assailants of the village and the established +order, but it is sure that she gave comfort to many spirits disturbed +by the radical outbursts of 1920. Already in _The Squirrel Cage_ and +_The Bent Twig_ she had shown an affectionate knowledge of the ways of +households in small communities; and in _Hillsboro People_ she had added +another hardy, kindly neighborhood to the American array of villages in +fiction. _The Brimming Cup_ sounded a deeper note than any she had yet +struck. Suppose, the novel says, there were a woman who had been trained +in the wide world but was now living in a distant village; suppose she +had heard and felt the tumult of the age and had begun to question the +reality of her contentment; suppose, to make the conflict as dramatic as +possible, she should find herself tempted by a new love to give up the +settled companionship of her husband and the heavy burden of her +children to seek joy in a thrilling passion. + +Here Dorothy Canfield had an admirable theme and she rose to it with +power, but she permitted herself so easy a solution that her argument +stumbles lamentably. The lover who disrupts the warm circle of Marise's +life is after all only a selfish bounder, a mere villain; stirred as she +is by the promises he holds out of rapture and of luxury, she would be +simply foolish not to comprehend, as in the end she does, that she must +lose far more than she could gain by the exchange she contemplates. +Surely this is no argument in favor of loyalty as against love: it is +only a defense of loyalty, which does not need it, as against a fleeting +instability; and so it is hardly half as significant as it might have +been had the conflict been squarely met, great love contending with +great loyalty. Yet while the novel thus falls short of what it might +have undertaken it has numerous excellences. It is eloquent and +passionate and, very often, wise. Rarely have a mother's relations with +her children been so subtly represented; rarely have the manners of a +New England township been more convincingly portrayed. The setting glows +among its green hills and valleys, its snow and flowers. There are minor +characters that stand up vividly in the memory, like persons known face +to face. The atmosphere is at once tense with desire and spacious with +understanding. Though the materials come from an old tradition they have +been heated with the fires of the scrutinizing mind which burn beneath +the newer novelists. + + +_1921_ + +That memorable year of fiction which saw so many superior books produced +saw them successful beyond any reasonable expectation; and it is +scarcely to be wondered at that the year following--with which this +chronicle does not undertake to deal--should have responded to such +encouragement. If Dorothy Canfield challenged the tendency, Booth +Tarkington saw it and ventured _Alice Adams_. Sherwood Anderson in _The +Triumph of the Egg_ and Floyd Dell in _The Briary-Bush_ proceeded to +other triumphs. Half a dozen competent novelists followed naturalism +into the "exposure" of small towns or cramped lives: particularly C. +Kay Scott with the hard, crisp _Blind Mice_ and Charles G. Norris, rival +of his brother Frank Norris in veracity if not in fire, with _Brass_. +John Dos Passos in _Three Soldiers_, the most controverted novel of the +year, dealt brilliantly with the unheroic aspects of the American +Expeditionary Force. Evelyn Scott in _The Narrow House_ and Ben Hecht in +_Erik Dorn_ attempted, as Waldo Frank had already done in _The Dark +Mother_ and as some others now did less notably, to find a more elastic, +a more impressionistic technique, breaking up the "gray paragraph" and +quickening the tempo of their narratives. At the same time romance once +more showed its perennial face, suggesting that the future does not +belong to naturalism entirely. Donn Byrne in _Messer Marco Polo_ played +in a bright Gaelic way with the story of Marco Polo and his quest for +Golden Bells, the daughter of Kubla Khan. Robert Nathan wrote, in +_Autumn_, an all but perfect native idyl, grounded well enough in local +color, as suggestive of the soil as an old farmers' almanac, and yet +touched with the universal fingers of the pastoral. If American fiction +cannot long escape the village, at least here is a village of a sort +hardly thinkable before the revolt began. No matter what a flood of +angry truth _Spoon River Anthology_ let in, beauty survives. Many waters +cannot quench beauty. What truth extinguishes is the weaker flames. + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Contemporary American Novelists +(1900-1920), by Carl Van Doren + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTS *** + +***** This file should be named 12563-8.txt or 12563-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/1/2/5/6/12563/ + +Produced by Ted Garvin, Linda Cantoni, and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team. + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) + +Author: Carl Van Doren + +Release Date: June 8, 2004 [EBook #12563] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTS *** + + + + +Produced by Ted Garvin, Linda Cantoni, and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team. + + + + + +CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTS + +1900-1920 + + +BY + +CARL VAN DOREN + + + +1922 + + + + +To + +FREDA KIRCHWEY + + + + +PREFACE + + +_The American Novel_, published last year, undertook to trace the +progress of a literary type in the United States from its beginnings to +the end of the nineteenth century; _Contemporary American Novelists_ +undertakes to study the type as it has existed during the first two +decades of the twentieth century. Readers of both volumes may note that +in this later volume criticism has tended to supplant history. Only in +writing of dead authors can the critic feel that any considerable +portion of his task is done when he has arranged them in what he thinks +their proper categories and their true perspective. In the case of +living authors he has regularly to remember that he works with shifting +materials, with figures whose dimensions and importance may be changed +by growth, with persons who may desert old paths for new, reveal +unsuspected attributes, increase or fade with the mere revolutions of +time. All he can expect to do in dealing with any current type as fluid +as the novel, is, seizing upon it at some specific moment, to examine +the intentions and successes of outstanding or typical individuals and +to make the most accurate report possible concerning them. Whatever +general tendency there may be ought to appear from his examination. + +The general tendency appearing most clearly among the novelists here +studied is, of course, the drift of naturalism: initiated a full +generation ago by several restless spirits, of whom E.W. Howe and Hamlin +Garland are the most conspicuous survivors; continued by those young +geniuses Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, all dead before their +time, and by Theodore Dreiser, Robert Herrick, Upton Sinclair, happily +still alive; given a fresh impulse during the shaken years of the war +and of the recovery from war by such satirists as Edgar Lee Masters and +Sinclair Lewis and their companions in the new revolt. The intelligent +American fiction of the century has to be studied--so far as the novel +is concerned--largely in terms of its agreement or its disagreement with +this naturalistic tendency, which has been powerful enough to draw +Winston Churchill and Booth Tarkington into an approach to its +practices, to drive James Branch Cabell and Joseph Hergesheimer into +explicit dissent, and to throw into strong relief the balanced +independence of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. The year 1920, marking a +peak in the triumph of one or two species of naturalism and in some ways +closing a chapter, affords an admirable occasion to take stock. This +book, indeed, was planned and begun at the close of that year and has +firmly resisted the temptation to do more than glance at most of the +work produced since then--even at the price of giving what must seem +insufficient notice to _The Triumph of the Egg_ and _Three Soldiers_ +and of giving none at all to that still more recent masterpiece +_Cytherea_. While criticism pauses to take stock, creation steadily goes +on. + +Acknowledgments are due _The Nation_ for permission to reprint from its +pages those portions of the volume which have already been published +there. + +CARL VAN DOREN. + +March, 1922. + + + + +CONTENTS + + +I OLD STYLE + +1. Local Color +2. Romance + +II ARGUMENT + +1. Hamlin Garland +2. Winston Churchill +3. Robert Herrick +4. Upton Sinclair +5. Theodore Dreiser + +III ART + +1. Booth Tarkington +2. Edith Wharton +3. James Branch Cabell +4. Willa Cather +5. Joseph Hergesheimer + +IV NEW STYLE + +1. Emergent Types + +_Ellen Glasgow, William Allen White, Ernest Poole, Henry B. Fuller, Mary +Austin, Immigrants._ + +2. The Revolt from the Village + +_Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, E.W. Howe, Sinclair Lewis, Zona +Gale, Floyd Dell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Canfield, 1921._ + + + + +CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTS + + + + +CHAPTER I + +OLD STYLE + + +1. LOCAL COLOR + +A study of the American novel of the twentieth century must first of all +take stock of certain types of fiction which continue to persist, with +varying degrees of vitality and significance, from the last quarter of +the century preceding. + +There is, to begin with, the type associated with the now moribund cult +of local color, which originally had Bret Harte for its prophet, and +which, beginning almost at once after the Civil War, gradually broadened +out until it saw priests in every state and followers in every county. +Obedient to the example of the prophet, most of the practitioners of the +mode chose to be episodic rather than epic in their undertakings; the +history of local color belongs primarily to the historian of the short +story. Even when the local colorists essayed the novel they commonly did +little more than to expand some episode into elaborate dimensions or to +string beads of episode upon an obvious thread. Hardly one of them ever +made any real advance, either in art or reputation, upon his earliest +important volume: George Washington Cable, after more than forty years, +is still on the whole best represented by his _Old Creole Days_; and +so--to name only the chief among the survivors--after intervals not +greatly shorter are Mary N. Murfree ("Charles Egbert Craddock") by _In +the Tennessee Mountains_, Thomas Nelson Page by _In Ole Virginia_, Mary +E. Wilkins Freeman by _A Humble Romance and Other Stories_, James Lane +Allen by _Flute and Violin_, and Alice Brown by _Meadow-Grass_. + +The eager popular demand for these brevities does not entirely account +for the failure of the type to go beyond its first experimental stage. +The defects of local color inhere in the constitution of the cult +itself, which, as its name suggests, thought first of color and then of +form, first of the piquant surfaces and then--if at all--of the stubborn +deeps of human life. In a sense, the local colorists were all pioneers: +they explored the older communities as solicitously as they did the new, +but they most of them came earliest in some field or other and found--or +thought--it necessary to clear the top of the soil before they sank +shaft or spade into it. Moreover, they accepted almost without challenge +the current inhibitions of gentility, reticence, cheerfulness. They +confined themselves to the emotions and the ideas and the language, for +the most part, of the respectable; they disregarded the stormier or +stealthier behavior of mankind or veiled it with discreet periphrasis; +they sweetened their narratives wherever possible with a brimming +optimism nicely tinctured with amiable sentiments. Poetic justice +prospered and happy endings were orthodox. To a remarkable extent the +local colorists passed by the immediate problems of Americans--social, +theological, political, economic; nor did they frequently rise above the +local to the universal. They were, in short, ordinarily provincial, +without, however, the rude durability or the homely truthfulness of +provincialism at its best. + +To reflect upon the achievements of this dwindling cult is to discover +that it invented few memorable plots, devised almost no new styles, +created little that was genuinely original in its modes of truth or +beauty, and even added but the scantiest handful of characters to the +great gallery of the imagination. What local color did was to fit +obliging fiction to resisting fact in so many native regions that the +entire country came in some degree to see itself through literary eyes +and therefore in some degree to feel civilized by the sight. This is, +indeed, one of the important processes of civilization. But in this case +it was limited in its influence by the habits of vision which the local +colorists had. They scrutinized their world at the instigation of +benevolence rather than at that of intelligence; they felt it with +friendship rather than with passion. And because of their limitations of +intelligence and passion they fell naturally into routine ways and both +saw and represented in accordance with this or that prevailing formula. +Herein they were powerfully confirmed by the pressure of editors and a +public who wanted each writer to continue in the channel of his happiest +success and not to disappoint them by new departures. Not only did this +result in confining individuals to a single channel each but it resulted +in the convergence of all of them into a few broad and shallow streams. + +An excellent example may be found in the flourishing cycle of stories +which, while Bret Harte was celebrating California, grew up about the +life of Southern plantations before the war. The mood of most of these +was of course elegiac and the motive was to show how much splendor had +perished in the downfall of the old regime. Over and over they repeated +the same themes: how an irascible planter refuses to allow his daughter +to marry the youth of her choice and how true love finds a way; how a +beguiling Southern maiden has to choose between lovers and gives her +hand and heart to him who is stoutest in his adherence to the +Confederacy; how, now and then, love crosses the lines and a Confederate +girl magnanimously, though only after a desperate struggle with herself, +marries a Union officer who has saved the old plantation from a +marauding band of Union soldiers; how a pair of ancient slaves cling to +their duty during the appalling years and will not presume upon their +freedom even when it comes; how the gentry, though menaced by a riffraff +of poor whites, nevertheless hold their heads high and shine brightly +through the gloom; how some former planter and everlasting colonel +declines to be reconstructed by events and passes the remainder of his +years as a courageous, bibulous, orgulous simulacrum of his once +thriving self. Mr. Page's _In Ole Virginia_ and F. Hopkinson Smith's +_Colonel Carter of Cartersville_ in a brief compass employ all these +themes; and dozens of books which might be named play variations upon +them without really enlarging or correcting them. All of them were +kindly, humorous, sentimental, charming; almost all of them are steadily +fading out like family photographs. + +The South, however, did not restrict itself wholly to its plantation +cycle. In New Orleans Mr. Cable daintily worked the lode which had been +deposited there by a French and Spanish past and by the presence still +of Creole elements in the population. Yet he too was elegiac, +sentimental, pretty, even when his style was most deft and his +representations most engaging. Quaintness was his second nature; romance +was in his blood. Bras-Coupe, the great, proud, rebellious slave in _The +Grandissimes_, belongs to the ancient lineage of those African princes +who in many tales have been sold to chain and lash and have escaped from +them by dying. The postures and graces and contrivances of Mr. Cable's +Creoles are traditional to all the little aristocracies surviving, in +fiction, from some more substantial day. Yet in spite of these +conventions his better novels have a texture of genuine vividness and +beauty. In their portrayal of the manners of New Orleans they have many +points of quiet satire and censure that betray a critical intelligence +working seriously behind them. That critical disposition in Mr. Cable +led him to disagree with the majority of Southerners regarding the +justice due the Negroes; and it helped persuade him to spend the +remainder of his life in a distant region. + +The incident is symptomatic. While slavery still existed, public opinion +in the South had demanded that literature should exhibit the institution +only under a rosy light; public opinion now demanded that the problem in +its new guise should still be glossed over in the old way. In neither +era, consequently, could an honest novelist freely follow his +observations upon Southern life in general. The mind of the herd bore +down upon him and crushed him into the accepted molds. It seems a +curious irony that the Negroes who thus innocently limited the +literature of their section should have been the subjects of a little +body of narrative which bids fair to outlast all that local color hit +upon in the South. Joel Chandler Harris is not, strictly speaking, a +contemporary, but Uncle Remus is contemporary and perennial. His stories +are grounded in the universal traits of simple souls; they are also the +whimsical, incidental mirror of a particular race during a +significant--though now extinct--phase of its career. They are at once +as ancient and as fresh as folk-lore. + +Besides the rich planters and their slaves one other class of human +beings in the South especially attracted the attention of the local +colorists--the mountaineers. Certain distant cousins of this backwoods +stock had come into literature as "Pikes" or poor whites in the Far +West with Bret Harte and in the Middle West with John Hay and Edward +Eggleston; it remained for Charles Egbert Craddock in Tennessee and John +Fox in Kentucky to discover the heroic and sentimental qualities of the +breed among its highland fastnesses of the Great Smoky and Cumberland +Mountains. Here again formulas sprang up and so stifled the free growth +of observation that, though a multitude of stories has been written +about the mountains, almost all of them may be resolved into themes as +few in number as those which succeeded nearer Tidewater: how a stranger +man comes into the mountains, loves the flower of all the native +maidens, and clashes with the suspicions or jealousies of her +neighborhood; how two clans have been worn away by a long vendetta until +only one representative of each clan remains and the two forgive and +forget among the ruins; how a band of highlanders defend themselves +against the invading minions of a law made for the nation at large but +hardly applicable to highland circumstances; how the mountain virtues in +some way or other prove superior to the softer virtues--almost vices by +comparison--of the world of plains and cities. These formulas, however, +resulted from another cause than the popular complacency which hated to +be disturbed in Virginia and Louisiana. The mountain people, +inarticulate themselves, have uniformly been seen from the outside and +therefore have been studied in their surface peculiarities more often +than in their deeper traits of character. And, having once entered the +realm of legend, they continue to be known by the half-dozen +distinguishing features which in legend are always enough for any type. + +In the North and West, of course, much the same process went on as in +the South among the local colorists, conditioned by the same demands and +pressures. Because the territory was wider, however, in the expanding +sections, the types of character there were somewhat less likely to be +confined to one locality than in the section which for a time had a ring +drawn round it by its past and by the difficulty of emerging from it; +and because the career of North and West was not definitely interrupted +by the war, the types of fiction there have persisted longer than in the +South, where a new order of life, after a generation of clinging +memories, has moved toward popular heroes of a new variety. + +The cowboy, for instance, legitimate successor to the miners and +gamblers of Bret Harte, might derive from almost any one of the states +and might range over prodigious areas; it is partly accident, of course, +that he stands out so sharply among the numerous conditions of men +produced by the new frontier. Except on very few occasions, as in Alfred +Henry Lewis's racy Wolfville stories and in Frederick Remington's vivid +pictures, in Andy Adams's more minute chronicle _The Log of a Cowboy_, +in Owen Wister's more sentimental _The Virginian_, and in O. Henry's +more diversified _Heart of the West_ and its fellows among his books, +the cowboy has regularly moved on the plane of the sub-literary--in dime +novels and, latterly, in moving pictures. He, like the mountaineer of +the South, has himself been largely inarticulate except for his rude +songs and ballads; formula and tradition caught him early and in +fiction stiffened one of the most picturesque of human beings--a modern +Centaur, an American Cossack, a Western picaro--into a stock figure who +in a stock costume perpetually sits a bucking broncho, brandishes a +six-shooter or swings a lariat, rounds up stampeding cattle, makes +fierce war on Mexicans, Indians, and rival outfits, and ardently, humbly +woos the ranchman's gentle daughter or the timorous school-ma'am. He +still has no Homer, no Gogol, no Fenimore Cooper even, though he invites +a master of some sort to take advantage of a thrilling opportunity. + +The same fate of formula and tradition befell another type multiplied by +the local novelists--the bad boy. His career may be said to have begun +in New England, with Thomas Bailey Aldrich's reaction from the priggish +manikins who infested the older "juveniles"; but Mark Twain took him up +with such mastery that his subsequent habitat has usually been the +Middle West, where a recognized lineage connects Tom Sawyer and +Huckleberry Finn with Mitch Miller and Penrod Schofield and their +fellow-conspirators against the peace of villages. The bad boy, it must +be noticed, is never really bad; he is simply mischievous. He serves as +a natural outlet for the imagination of communities which are +respectable but which lack reverence for solemn dignity. He can play the +wildest pranks and still be innocent; he can have his adolescent fling +and then settle down into a prudent maturity. Both the influence of Mark +Twain and the local color tendency toward uniformity in type have held +the bad boy to a path which, in view of his character, seems singularly +narrow. In book after book he indulges in the same practical jokes upon +parents, teachers, and all those in authority; brags, fibs, fights, +plays truant, learns to swear and smoke, with the same devices and +consequences; suffers from the same agonies of shyness, the same +indifference to the female sex, the same awkward inclination toward +particular little girls. For the most part, thanks to the formulas, he +has been examined from the angle of adult irritation or amusement; only +very recently--as by Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson--has he +been credited with a life and passions more or less his own and +therefore as fully rounded as his stage of development permits. + +The American business man, with millions of imaginations daily turned +upon him, rarely appears in that fiction which sprang from local color +except as the canny trader of some small town or as the ruthless magnate +of some glittering metropolis. _David Harum_ remains his rural avatar +and _The Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son_ his most popular +commentary. Doubtless the existence of this type in every community +tends to warn off the searchers after local figures, who have preferred, +in their fashion, to be monopolists when they could. Doubtless, also, +the American business man has suffered from the critical light in which +he has been studied by the reflective novelists. But though the higher +grades of literature have refused to pay unstinted tribute and honor to +men of wealth, the lower grades have paid almost as lavishly as life +itself. + +Multitudes of poor boys in popular fiction rise to affluence by the +practice of the commercial virtues. To be self-made, the axiom tacitly +runs, is to be well-made. Time was in the United States when the true +hero had to start his career, unaided, from some lonely farm, from some +widow's cottage, or from some city slum; and although, with the growth +of luxury in the nation, readers have come to approve the heir who puts +on overalls and works up in a few months from the bottom of the factory +to the top, the standards of success are practically the same in all +instances: sleepless industry, restless scheming, resistless will, +coupled with a changeless probity in the domestic excellences. Nothing +is more curious about the American business man of fiction than the +sentimentality he displays in all matters of the heart. He may hold as +robustly as he likes to the doctrine that business is business and that +business and sympathy will not mix, but when put to the test he must +always soften under the pleadings of distress and be malleable to the +desires of mother, sweetheart, wife, or daughter. Even when a popular +novelist sets out to be reflective--say, for example, Winston +Churchill--he takes his hero up to the mountain of success and then +conducts him down again to the valley of humiliation, made conscious +that the love, after all, either of his family or of his society, is +better than lucre. Theodore Dreiser's stubborn habit of presenting his +rich men's will to power without abatement or apology has helped to keep +him steadily suspected. The popular romancers have contrived to mingle +passion for money and susceptibility to moralism somewhat upon the +analogy of those lucky thaumaturgists who are able to eat their cake and +have it too. + +A similar mixture occurs in the politician of popular tradition. He +hardly ever rises to the dimensions of statesmanship, and indeed rarely +belongs to the Federal government at all: Washington has always been +singularly neglected by the novelists. The American politician of +fiction is essentially a local personage, the boss of ward or village. +Customarily he holds no office himself but instead sits in some dusty +den and dispenses injustice with an even hand. Candidates fear his +influence and either truckle to him or advance against him with the +weapons of reform--failing, as a rule, to accomplish anything. Aldermen +and legislators are his creatures. His web is out in all directions: he +holds this man's mortgage, knows that man's guilty secret, discovers the +other's weakness and takes advantage of it. He is cynically illiterate +and contemptuous of the respectable classes. If need be he can resort to +outrageous violence to gain his ends. And yet, though the reflective +novelists have all condemned him for half a century, he sits fast in +ordinary fiction, where he is tolerated with the amused fatalism which +in actual American life has allowed his lease to run so long. What +justifies him is his success--his countrymen love success for its own +sake--and his kind heart. Like Robin Hood he levies upon the plethoric +rich for the deserving poor; and he yields to the tender entreaties of +the widow and the orphan with amiable gestures. + +The women characters evolved by the school of local color endure a +serious restriction from the excessive interest taken by the novelists +in the American young girl. Not only has she as a possible reader +established the boundaries beyond which they might not go in speaking of +sexual affairs but she has dominated the scene of their inventions with +her glittering energy and her healthy bloodlessness. Some differences +appear among the sections of the country as to what special phases of +her character shall be here or there preferred: she is ordinarily most +capricious in the Southern, most strenuous in the Western, most knowing +in the New York, and most demure in the New England novels. Yet +everywhere she considerably resembles a bright, cool, graceful boy +pretending to be a woman. Coeducation and the scarcity of chaperons have +made her self-possessed to a degree which mystifies readers not duly +versed in American folkways. Though she plays at love-making almost from +the cradle, she manages hardly ever to be scorched--a salamander, as one +novelist suggests, sporting among the flames of life. + +When native Victorianism was at its height, in the third quarter of the +nineteenth century, she inclined to piety as her mode of preservation; +at the present moment she inclines to a romping optimism which frightens +away both thought and passion. From _The Wide, Wide World_ to +_Pollyanna_, however, she has taken habitual advantage of the reverence +for the virgin which is one of the most pervasive elements in American +popular opinion. That reverence has many charming and wholesome aspects; +it has given young women a priceless freedom of movement in America +without the penalty of being constantly suspected of sexual designs +which they may not harbor. It must be remembered that the Daisy Millers +who awaken unjust European gossip are understood at home, and that the +understanding given them is a form of homage certainly no less honorable +than the compliments of gallantry. In actual experience, however, girls +grow up, whereas the popular fiction of the United States has done its +best to keep them forever children. Nothing breaks the crystal shallows +of their confidence. They are insolently secure in a world apparently +made for them. The little difficulties which perturb their courtship are +nine-tenths of them superficial and external matters, and the end comes +as smoothly as a fairy tale's, before doubt has ever had an opportunity +to shatter or passion the occasion to purge a spirit. From Hawthorne to +the beginnings of naturalism there was hardly a single profound love +story written in America. How could there be when green girls were the +sole heroines and censors? + +Among the older women created by the local color generation there were +certain fashionable successes and social climbers in the large cities +who have more complex fortunes than the young girls; but for the most +part they are merely typical or conventional--as selfish as gold and as +hard as agate. On somewhat humbler levels that generation--as Mary +Austin has pointed out of American fiction at large--came nearer to +reality by its representation of a type peculiar to the United States: +the "woman" who is also a "lady"; that is, who combines in herself the +functions both of the busy housewife and of the charming ornament of her +society. The gradual reduction in America of the servant class has +served to develop women who keep books and music beside them at their +domestic tasks as pioneer farmers kept muskets near them in the fields. +They devote to homely duties the time devoted by European ladies to +love, intrigue, public affairs; they preserve, thanks to countless +labor-saving devices, for more or less intellectual pursuits the +strength which among European women is consumed by habitual drudgery. +The combination of functions has probably done much to increase +sexlessness and to decrease helplessness, and so to produce almost a new +species of womanhood which is bound eventually to be of great moment in +the national life. Local color, however, taking the species for granted, +seems hardly to have been aware of its significant existence. + +Only New England emphasized a distinct type: the old maid. She has been +studied in that section as in no other quarter of the world. Expansion +and emigration after the Civil War drew very heavily upon the declining +Puritan stock; and naturally the young men left their native farms and +villages more numerously than the young women, who remained behind and +in many cases never married. Local fiction fell very largely into the +hands of women--Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, Sarah Orne +Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Alice Brown--who broke completely with +the age-old tradition of ridiculing spinsters no longer young. In the +little cycles which these story-tellers elaborated the old maid is +likely to be the center of her episode, studied in her own career and +not merely in that of households upon which she is some sort of +parasite. The heroine of Mrs. Freeman's _A New England Nun_ is an +illuminating instance: she has been betrothed to an absent, +fortune-hunting lover for fourteen years, and now that he is back she +finds herself full of consternation at his masculine habits and rejoices +when he turns to another woman and leaves his first love to the felicity +of her contented cell. + +What in most literatures appears as a catastrophe appears in New +England as a relief. Energy has run low in the calm veins of such women, +and they have better things to do than to dwell upon the lives they +might have led had marriage complicated them. Here genre painting +reaches its apogee in American literature: quaint interiors scrupulously +described; rounds of minute activity familiarly portrayed; skimpy moods +analyzed with a delicate competence of touch. At the same time, New +England literature was now too sentimental and now too realistic to +allow all its old maids to remain perpetually sweet and passive. In its +sentimental hours it liked to call up their younger days and to show +them at the point which had decided or compelled their future +loneliness--again and again discovering some act of abnegation such as +giving up a lover because of the unsteadiness of his moral principles or +surrendering him to another woman to whom he seemed for some reason or +other to belong. In its realistic hours local color in New England liked +to examine the atrophy of the emotions which in these stories often +grows upon the celibate. One formula endlessly repeated deals with the +efforts of some acrid spinster--or wife long widowed--to keep a young +girl from marriage, generally out of contempt for love as a trivial +weakness; the conclusion usually makes love victorious after a +thunderbolt of revelation to the hinderer. There are inquiries, too, +into the repressions and obsessions of women whose lives in this fashion +or that have missed their flowering. Many of the inquiries are +sympathetic, tender, penetrating, but most of them incline toward +timidity and tameness. Their note is prevailingly the note of elegy; +they are seen through a trembling haze of reticence. It is as if they +had been made for readers of a vitality no more abundant than that of +their angular heroines. + +It would be possible to make a picturesque, precious anthology of +stories dealing with the types and humors of New England. Different +writers would contribute different tones: Sarah Orne Jewett the tone of +faded gentility brooding over its miniature possessions in decaying +seaport towns or in idyllic villages a little further inland; Mary E. +Wilkins Freeman the tone of a stern honesty trained in isolated farms +and along high, exposed ridges where the wind seems to have gnarled the +dispositions of men and women as it has gnarled the apple trees and +where human stubbornness perpetually crops out through a covering of +kindliness as if in imitation of those granite ledges which everywhere +tend to break through the thin soil; Alice Brown the tone of a homely +accuracy touched with the fresh hues of a gently poetical temperament. +More detailed in actuality than the stories of other sections, these New +England plots do not fall so readily into formulas as do those of the +South and West; and yet they have their formulas: how a stubborn pride +worthy of some supreme cause holds an elderly Yankee to a petty, +obstinate course until grievous calamities ensue; how a rural wife, +neglected and overworked by her husband, rises in revolt against the +treadmill of her dull tasks and startles him into comprehension and +awkward consideration; how the remnant of some once prosperous family +puts into the labor of keeping up appearances an amount of effort which, +otherwise expended, might restore the family fortunes; how neighbors +lock horns in the ruthless litigation which in New England corresponds +to the vendettas of Kentucky and how they are reconciled eventually by +sentiment in one guise or another; how a young girl--there are no Tom +Joneses and few Hamlets in this womanly universe--grows up bright and +sensitive as a flower and suffers from the hard, stiff frame of pious +poverty; how a superb heroism springs out of a narrow life, expressing +itself in some act of pitiful surrender and veiling the deed under an +even more pitiful inarticulateness. + +The cities of New England have been almost passed over by the local +colorists; Boston, the capital of the Puritans, has singularly to depend +upon the older Holmes or the visiting Howells of Ohio for its reputation +in fiction. Ever since Hawthorne, the romancers and novelists of his +native province have taken, one may say, to the fields, where they have +worked much in the mood of Rose Terry Cooke, who called her best +collection of stories _Huckleberries_ to emphasize what she thought a +true resemblance between the crops and characters of New +England--"hardy, sweet yet spicy, defying storms of heat or cold with +calm persistence, clinging to a poor soil, barren pastures, gray and +rocky hillsides, yet drawing fruitful issues from scanty sources." + +Alas that as time goes on the issues of such art seem less fruitful than +once they seemed; that even Mrs. Freeman's _Pembroke_, one of the best +novels of its class, lacks form and structure, and seems to encroach +upon caricature in its study of the progress and consequences of Yankee +pride. After a fecund generation of such stories Edith Wharton in _Ethan +Frome_ has surpassed all her native rivals in tragic power and +distinction of language; Robert Frost has been able to distil the +essence of all of them in three slender books of verse; Edwin Arlington +Robinson in a few brief poems has created the wistful Tilbury Town and +has endowed it with pathos at once more haunting and more lasting than +that of any New England village chronicled in prose; it has remained for +the Pennsylvanian Joseph Hergesheimer in _Java Head_ to seize most +artfully upon the riches of loveliness that survive from the hour when +Massachusetts was at its noon of prosperity; and local color of the +orthodox tradition now persists in New England hardly anywhere except +around Cape Cod, of which Joseph C. Lincoln is the dry, quaint, amusing +laureate. + +Through the influence, in important measure, of Howells and the +_Atlantic Monthly_ the modes of fiction which were practised east of +Albany extended their example to other districts also: to northern New +York in Irving Bacheller; to Ohio in Mary S. Watts and Brand Whitlock; +to Indiana in Meredith Nicholson; to Wisconsin in Zona Gale; to Iowa and +Arkansas in Alice French ("Octave Thanet"); to Kansas in William Allen +White; to the Colorado mines in Mary Hallock Foote; to the Virginias in +Ellen Glasgow and Henry Sydnor Harrison; to Georgia in Will N. Harben; +and to other neighborhoods in other neighborly chroniclers whose mere +names could stretch out to a point beyond which critical emphasis would +be lost. New York City clung to less tender and more incisive habits of +fiction; that city's pace for local color was set by the deft, bright +Richard Harding Davis, Henry Cuyler Bunner, Brander Matthews, O. +Henry--all well known figures; by the late Herman Knickerbocker Viele, +too little known, in whose novels, such as _The Last of the +Knickerbockers_, affectionate accuracy is mated with smiling, graceful +humor; and by David Gray, too little known, whose _Gallops_, concerned +with the horsy parish of St. Thomas Equinus near New York City, contains +the most amusing stories about fashionable sports which this republic +has brought forth. In the Middle West Edgar Watson Howe and Hamlin +Garland, and in the Far West Frank Norris and Jack London, broke with +the customary tendency by turning away from pathos toward tragedy, and +away from discreet benevolence toward emphatic candor. The prevailing +school of naturalism has made its principal advance upon the passing +school of local color by a sacrifice of genial neighborliness; no less +exact and detailed in observation than their predecessors, the +naturalists have insisted upon bringing criticism in and measuring the +most amiable locality by wider standards. Here lies the essential point +of difference between the old style and the new. + +It is by reference to this point that the credit--such as it is--of +being quite contemporary must be withheld from so earnest and varied a +novelist as Margaret Deland. That theological agonies like those in +_John Ward, Preacher_ were actually suffered a generation back and that +the book is a valuable document upon the times cannot explain away the +fact that Mrs. Deland herself appears to have been partly overwhelmed +by the storm which sweeps the parish of her story. So in her later +novels which have essayed such problems as divorce, the compulsions of +love, the inevitable clash of parents and children, she tugs at Gordian +knots with the patient fingers of goodwill when one slash with the +intelligence would cut her difficulties away. Suppose it possible, for +instance, that the heroine of _The Awakening of Helena Richie_ could +have been courageous enough to go to her lover to await the death of her +loathsome husband and then could have been so timid as to undergo the +perturbations over her conduct which almost break her heart in Old +Chester--suppose these contradictions might have dwelt together in +Helena, yet could Mrs. Deland not have noted and anatomized them in a +way to show that she saw the contradictions even while recording them? +Suppose that Elizabeth in _The Iron Woman_ was expected by her community +to pay superfluously for an hour's blind folly with a lifetime of +unhappiness and did undertake so to pay for it, yet could Mrs. Deland +not have pointed out that the situation was repugnant both to ordinary +common sense and to the very code of honor and stability which in the +end persuades David and Elizabeth to give each other up? + +The conclusions of these novels, which to thousands of readers have +seemed stern and terrible, are in reality terrible chiefly because they +are soft--soft with a sentimentalism swathed in folds of piety. The +customs of Old Chester stifle its inhabitants, who take a kind of stolid +joy in their fetters; and Mrs. Deland, with all her understanding, does +not illuminate them. The movements of her imagination are cumbered by a +too narrow--however charming--cage. Her excellence belongs to the hours +when, not trying to transcend her little Pennsylvania universe, she +brings accuracy and shrewdness and felicity to the chronicles of small +beer in _Old Chester Tales_ and _Dr. Lavendar's People_. These +strictures and this praise she earns by her adherence to the parochial +cult of local color. + + +2. ROMANCE + +If naturalism was a reaction from the small beer of local color, so, in +another fashion, was the flare-up of romance which attended and +succeeded the Spanish War. History was suddenly discovered to be +wonderful no less than humble life; and so was adventure in the +difficult quarters of the earth. That curious, that lush episode of +fiction endowed American literature with a phalanx of "best sellers" +some of which still continue to be sold, in diminished numbers; and it +endowed the national tradition with a host of gallant personages and +heroic incidents dug up out of old books or brought back from far quests +by land or water. It remains, however, an episode; the rococo romancers +did not last. Almost without exception they turned to other methods as +the romantic mood faded out of the populace. Of those who had employed +history for their substance only James Branch Cabell remained absolutely +faithful, revising, strengthening, deepening his art with irony and +beauty until it became an art exquisitely peculiar to himself. + +Mary Johnston was as faithful, but her fidelity had less growth in it. +Originally attracted to the heroic legend of colonial Virginia, she has +since so far departed from it as to produce in the _Long Roll_ and +_Cease Firing_ a wide panorama of the Civil War, in other books to study +the historic plight and current unrest of women, and here and there to +show an observant consciousness of the changing world; but her +imagination long ago sank its deepest roots into the traditions of the +Old Dominion. She brings to them, however, no fresh interpretations, as +satisfied as any medieval romancer to ring harmonious changes on ancient +themes, enlarging them, perhaps, with something spacious in her language +and liberal in her sentiments, yet transmitting her material rather as a +singer than as a poet, agreeably rather than creatively. + +As Miss Johnston leans upon history for her favorite staff, so James +Lane Allen leans upon "Nature." He is not, indeed, innocent of history. +His Kentucky is always conscious of its chivalric past, and his most +popular romance, _The Choir Invisible_, has its scene laid in and near +the Lexington of the eighteenth century. Nor is he innocent of the +devices of local color. His earliest collection of tales--_Flute and +Violin_--and his ingratiating comment upon it--_The Blue-Grass Region of +Kentucky_--once for all established the character which his chosen +district has in the world of the imagination. But from the first he held +principles of art which would not allow him to consider either history +or local color as ends in themselves. He believed they must be +employed, when employed, as elements contributory to some general effect +of beauty or of meaning. He has built up beauty with the most deliberate +hands, and he has sought to express the highest meanings in his art, +seeking to look through the "thin-aired regions of consciousness which +are ruled over by Tact to the underworld of consciousness where are +situated the mighty workshops, and where toils on forever the cyclopean +youth, Instinct." + +In this important program, however, he has constantly been handicapped +by his orthodoxies. John Gray, in _The Choir Invisible_, loving a woman +who though in love with him is bound in marriage to another, engages +himself to a young girl, shortly afterward to find that his real love is +free again; yet with a high gesture of sacrifice he holds to his +engagement and enters upon a union of duty which is sure to make two, +and possibly three, persons unhappy instead of one, though all of them +are equally guiltless. Mr. Allen approves of this immoral arithmetic +with a sentimentalism which has drawn rains of tears down thoughtless +cheeks. So in _The Reign of Law_ he exhibits a youth extricating himself +from an obsolete theology with sufferings which can be explained only on +the ground that the theology was too strong ever to have been escaped or +the youth too weak ever to have rebelled. And in _Aftermath_, sequel to +_A Kentucky Cardinal_, the author sentimentally and quite needlessly +stacks the cards against his hero and lets his heroine die, to bring, as +he might say, "the eternal note of sadness in." All this to show how +"Nature" holds men in her powerful hands and tortures them when they +struggle to follow the mind to liberty! To prove a thesis so profoundly +true and tragic Mr. Allen can do no more than borrow the tricks of +melodrama. + +Just how melodramatic his sentimentalism forces him to be has often been +overlooked because of his diction and his pictures. Though he tends to +the mellifluous and the saccharine he has in his better pages a dewy, +luminous style, with words choicely picked out and cadences delicately +manipulated. By comparison most of the local colorists of his period +seem homespun and most of the romancers a little tawdry. His method is +the mosaicist's, working self-consciously in fine materials. Movement +with him never leaps nor flows; in fact, it seems to dawdle when, too +often, he forgets to be vigilant in the interests of simplicity; it is +languid with scrupulous hesitations and accumulations. As to his +pictures, they come from a Kentucky glorified. When he says that in June +there "the warm-eyed, bronzed, foot-stamping young bucks forsake their +plowshares in the green rows, their reapers among the yellow beards; and +the bouncing, laughing, round-breasted girls arrange their ribbons and +their vows," Mr. Allen is remembering Theocritus, the _Pervigilium +Veneris_, and the silver ages of literature no less than his own state +and his own day. He uses local color habitually to ennoble it, and but +for his extravagant taste for sweetness he might have achieved pastorals +of an imperishable sort. + +Even as it is, the _Kentucky Cardinal-Aftermath_ story has all the +quaint grace of pressed flowers and remembered valentines, and _Summer +in Arcady_, his masterpiece, has at once rich passion and spare form. +Here Mr. Allen is at his best, representing young love springing up +fiercely, exuberantly, against a lovely background congenial to the +human mood. He has not known, however, how to keep up that difficult +equilibrium between artifice and simplicity which the idyl demands. His +later books tend to be turgid, oppressive, cloying with sentimentalism +and amorous obsessions in their graver moments, and in their lighter +moments to fall flat from a lack of the true sinews of comedy. + +Of a temper as different as possible from Mr. Allen's was Edgar Saltus, +just dead, who stood alone and decadent in a country which the _fin de +siecle_ scarcely touched with its graceful, graceless maladies. He began +his career, after a penetrating study of Balzac, with _The Philosophy of +Disenchantment_ and _The Anatomy of Negation_, erudite, witty challenges +to illusion, deriving primarily from Hartmann and Schopenhauer but +enriching their arguments with much inquisitive learning in current +French philosophers and poets. Erudition, however, was not Saltus's sole +equipment: his pessimism came, in part, from his literary masters but in +part also from a temperament which steadily followed its own impulses +and arrived at its own destinations. Cynical, deracinated, he turned +from his speculative doubts to the positive realities of sense, +becoming the historian of love and loveliness in sumptuous, perverse +phases. In _Mary Magdalen_ he dressed up a traditional courtesan in the +splendors of purple and gold and perfumed her with many quaint, +dangerous essences more exciting than her later career as penitent; in +_Imperial Purple_ he undertook a chronicle of the Roman emperors from +Julius Caesar to Heliogabolus, exhibiting them in the most splendid of +all their extravagances and sins; in _Historia Amoris_ he followed the +maddening trail of love and in _The Lords of the Ghostland_ the +saddening trail of faith through the annals of mankind. + +He wrote novels, too, of contemporary life, but they are his least +notable achievements. His personages in none of these novels manage to +convince; his plots are melodrama; his worldly wisdom has smirks and +postures in it; his style, now sharp now sagging, is unequal. Saltus +could not, it seems, dispense with antiquity and remoteness in his +books. Only when buried in the deep world of ancient story or when +ranging through the widest field of time did he become most himself. +Then he invited no comparisons with familiar actualities and could +assemble the most magnificent glories according to his whims and could +drape them in the most gorgeous stuffs. What especially touched his +imagination was the spectacle of imperial Rome as interpreted to him by +French decadence: that lust for power and sensation, those incredible +temples, palaces, feasts, revelries, blasphemies, butcheries. Commencing +with a beauty which knew no bounds, he moved on to lust or satiety or +impotence for his theme; in the end he brought little but a glittering +ferocity to that cold chronicle of the czars from Ivan to Catherine, +_The Imperial Orgy_. His phrases never failed him, flashing like gems or +snakes and clasping his exuberant materials in almost the only +discipline they ever had. Wit withheld him from utter lusciousness. +Though he employed Corinthian cadences and diction, he kept continually +checking them with the cynic twist of some deft colloquialism. To +venture into his microcosm is to bid farewell to all that is simple and +kindly; it is, however, to discover the terrible beauty that lurks +behind corruption, malevolent though delirious. + +Romance of the traditionary sort, it is plain, has lately lost its vogue +in the United States and is being neglected as at almost no other period +since Fenimore Cooper established its principal native modes. The +ancient romantic matters of the Settlement and the Revolution flourish +almost solely in tales for boys. There is of course still a matter of +the Frontier, but it is another frontier: the Canadian North and +Northwest, Alaska, the islands of the South Seas, latterly the battle +fields of France, and always the trails of American exploration wherever +they may chance to lead. The performers upon such themes--the Rex +Beaches, the Emerson Houghs, the Randall Parrishes, the Zane Greys, the +James Oliver Curwoods--march ordinarily under the noisy banner of "red +blood" and derive from Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, those +generous boys of naturalism whose temperaments carried them again and +again into the territories of vivid danger. Criticism notes in the later +annalists of "red blood" their spasmodic energy, their considerable +technical knowledge, their stereotyped characters, their recurrent +formulas, their uncritical, Rooseveltian opinions, their enormous +popularity, their almost complete lack of distinction in style or +attitude, and passes by without further obligation than to point out +that Stewart Edward White probably deserves to stand first among them by +virtue of a certain substantial range and panoramic faithfulness to the +life of the lumbermen represented in his most successful book, _The +Blazed Trail_. + +This phase of life deserves particular emphasis for the reason that +there has recently been growing up among the lumber-camps from the Bay +of Fundy to Puget Sound the legend of a mythical hero named Paul Bunyan +who is the only personage of the sort yet invented and elaborated by the +ordinary run of men in any American calling. Paul is less a patron saint +of the loggers than an autochthonous Munchausen, whose fame has been +extended almost entirely by word of mouth among lumbermen resting from +their work and vying with one another to see who could tell the most +stupendous yarn about Paul's prowess and achievements. The process +resembles that which in the folk everywhere has evolved enormous legends +about favorite heroes; the legend concerning Paul, however, is +essentially native in its accurate geography, in its passion for +grotesque exaggeration, in its hilarious metaphors, in its dry, +drawling, straight-faced narrative method. Exaggeration such as that in +some of these stories verges upon genius. When Paul goes West he +carelessly lets his pick drag behind him and cuts out the Grand Canyon +of the Colorado; he raises corn in Kansas prodigious enough to suck the +Mississippi dry and stop navigation; he builds a hotel so high that he +has "the last seven stories put on hinges so's they could be swung back +for to let the moon go by"; he achieves such feats of eating and +drinking and working and fighting and loving as make Hercules himself +seem a pallid fellow who should have gone upon the rowdy American +frontier to learn the great ways of adventure. Though it is true that +the legend has been developing for many years without adequate literary +use of it having yet been made, it lies ready for romance to handle; and +no discussion of contemporary American fiction can go deeper than the +surfaces without at least mentioning that hilarious chapbook _Paul +Bunyan Comes West_. + +That romance is just now being slighted appears from the lamentable +hiatus into which the fame of Charles D. Stewart has lately fallen. His +_Partners of Providence_ suffers from the inevitable comparison with +_Tom Sawyer_ and _Huckleberry Finn_ which it cannot stand, though it +continues the saga of the Mississippi with sympathy and knowledge; but +_The Fugitive Blacksmith_ has a flavor which few comparisons and no +neglect can spoil. Its protagonist, wrongly accused of a murder which he +by mischance finds it difficult to explain, takes to his heels and +lives by his mechanic wits among the villages of the lower Mississippi +through a diversity of adventures which puts his story among the little +masterpieces of the picaresque. Though it is clumsily garnished with +irrelevant things, it stands out above them, racy, rememberable. The +blacksmith has an ingenuity as varied as his experiences. Whereas other +picaroes cheat or fight or love their ways, this hero uses his dexterity +at unaccustomed trades until it is little less than intoxicating to see +him rise to each emergency. He is a proletarian Odysseus, and his +history is a quaint _Odyssey_ of the roving artisan. + +The matter of the Civil War, though very large in the American memory, +has in literature not quite reached a parity with the older matters of +the Settlement, the Revolution, and the Frontier, principally, no doubt, +because there has been only one period--and that a brief one--of +historical romance since the war. In connection with this matter, +however, there has been created the legend which at present is surely +the most potent of all the legendary elements dear to the American +imagination. + +Abraham Lincoln is, strictly speaking, more than a legend; he has become +a cult. Immediately after his death he lived in the national mind for a +time as primarily a martyr; then emphasis shifted to his humor and a +whole literature of waggish tales and retorts and apologues assembled +around his name; then he passed into a more sentimental zone and endless +stories were multiplied about his natural piety and his habit of +pardoning innocent offenders. Out of the efflorescence of all these +aspects of legend which accompanied the centenary of his birth there has +since seemed to be emerging--though the older aspects still persist as +well--a conception of him as a figure at once lofty and familiar, at +once sad and witty, at once Olympian and human. Among poets of all +grades of opinion Lincoln is the chief native hero: Edwin Arlington +Robinson has best expressed in words as firm as bronze the Master's +reputation for lonely pride and forgiving laughter; John Gould Fletcher, +with an eloquence found nowhere else in his work, likens Lincoln to a +tree so mighty that its branches reach the heavens and its roots the +primal rock and nations of men may rest in its shade; Edgar Lee Masters, +whose work is full of the shadow and light of Lincoln, has made his most +moving lyric an epitaph upon Ann Rutledge, the girl Lincoln loved and +lost; and Vachel Lindsay, in Lincoln's own Springfield, during the World +War thought of him as so stirred even in death by the horrors which then +alarmed the universe that he could not sleep but walked up and down the +midnight streets, mourning and brooding. It is precisely thus, in other +ages, that saints are said to appear at difficult moments, to quiet the +waves or turn the arrow aside. Without these more vulgar manifestations +Lincoln nevertheless lives as the founder of every cult lives, in the +echoes of his voice on many tongues and in the vibrations of his voice +in many affections. + +The novelists, unfortunately, fall behind the poets in the beauty and +wisdom with which they celebrate the figure of Lincoln, though they have +produced scores of volumes associated with it, upon the life not only of +Lincoln himself but of his mother, of his children, of this or that +friend or neighbor. Of the various novels--from Winston Churchill's _The +Crisis_ to Irving Bacheller's _A Man for the Ages_--which have sought to +mingle the right proportions of rural shrewdness and honorable dignity, +no one has yet been equal to the magnitude of its theme. They have +followed the customary paths of the historical romance without seeming +to realize that in a theme so spacious they could learn from the methods +of Plato with Socrates, of Shakespeare with his kingly heroes, of the +biographers of Francis of Assisi with their gracious saint. + +Few literary tasks are harder than the task of the critic holding a +steady course through the welter of novels which make a tumult in the +world and trying to indicate those which have some genuine significance +as works of art or intelligence or as documents upon the time. How shall +he dispose, for example, of such beguilers of the millions as Gene +Stratton Porter, who piles sentimentalism upon "Nature" till the soft +heap defies analysis, and Harold Bell Wright, who cannily mixes +sentimentalism with valor and prudence till the resultant blend tempts +appetites uncounted? Popularity has its arts no less than excellence; +and so has it its own kind of seriousness. Much as the advertiser and +the salesman have done to market tons of Mrs. Porter and Mr. Wright, +they could not have done it without the assistance furnished them by the +fact that their authors believe and feel the things they write. They +throb with all the popular impulses; they laugh when the multitude +laughs and weep when it weeps; and they have the gift--which is really +rare not common--of calling the multitude's attention to their books in +which is displayed, as in a consoling mirror, the sweet, rosy, empty +features of banality. + +How shall the patient critic dispose of Robert W. Chambers, who, +possessing in a high degree the qualities of narrative, of costume, of +dramatic effectiveness, of satire even (as witness _Iole_), has drifted +with the fashions for a generation and has latterly allowed himself to +decline to the manufacture of literary sillibub in the guise of novels +about the smart set and Bohemia? How shall the stern critic dispose of +Gertrude Atherton, who knows so much about California, New York, and the +international scene but who somehow fails to transmute her materials to +any lasting metal and leaves the impression of a vexed aristocrat +scolding the age without either convincing it or convicting it of very +serious deficiencies? How shall the accurate critic dispose of Frank +Harris, who was born in Ireland and who had the most conspicuous part of +his career in England, but who is a naturalized American citizen and who +has written in _The Bomb_ a vivid and intelligent novel dealing with the +Chicago "anarchists" of 1886? How shall the conscientious critic dispose +of the Owen Johnsons and the Rupert Hugheses and the Gouverneur +Morrises and the George Barr McCutcheons with all their energy and +information and good intentions and yet with their fatal lack of true +distinction? + +How shall the tolerant critic dispose of the writers of detective +stories whose name is legion and whose art is to fine fiction as +arithmetic to calculus--particularly Arthur Reeve, inventor of that +Craig Kennedy who with endless ingenuity solves problem after problem by +the introduction of scientific and pseudoscientific novelties? How shall +the puzzled critic dispose of Alice Duer Miller and her light, bright +stories of fashionable life; of Edward Lucas White and his vast +panoramas of South America and the ancient world; of Katherine Fullerton +Gerould, with her grim tales and her petulant conservatism; of those +energetic successors of O. Henry, Edna Ferber and Fanny Hurst; of the +late Charles Emmet Van Loan, with his intimate knowledge of sport; of +the schools and swarms of men and women who write short stories for the +most part but who occasionally essay a novel? How shall the worried +critic dispose of the more or less professional humorists who have +created characters and localities: Irvin S. Cobb, who, capable of better +things, prefers the paths of the grotesque and rolls his bulk through +current literature laughing at his own misadventures; Finley Peter +Dunne, inventor of that Mr. Dooley who makes it clear that the American +tradition which invented Poor Richard is still alive; Ring W. Lardner, +master of the racy vernacular of the almost illiterate; George Ade, +easily first of his class, fabulist and satirist? + +Perhaps it is best for the baffled critic to leave all of them to time +and, singling out the ten living novelists who seem to him most +distinguished or significant, to study them one by one, adding some +account of the school of fiction just now predominant. + + + + +CHAPTER II + +ARGUMENT + + +1. HAMLIN GARLAND + +The pedigree of the most energetic and important fiction now being +written in the United States goes unmistakably back to that creative +uprising of discontent in the eighties of the last century which brought +into articulate consciousness the larger share of the aspects of unrest +which have since continued to challenge the nation's magnificent, +arrogant grand march. + +The decade had Henry Adams for its bitter philosopher, despairing over +current political corruption and turning away to probe the roots of +American policy under Jefferson and his immediate successors; had the +youthful Theodore Roosevelt for its standard-bearer of a civic +conscience which was, plans went, to bring virtue into caucuses; had +Henry George for its spokesman of economic change, moving across the +continent from California to New York with an argument and a program for +new battles against privilege; had Edward Bellamy for its Utopian +romancer, setting forth a delectable picture of what human society might +become were the old iniquities reasonably wiped away and co-operative +order brought out of competitive chaos; had William Dean Howells for its +annalist of manners, turning toward the end of the decade from his +benevolent acceptance of the world as it was to stout-hearted, though +soft-voiced, accusations brought in the name of Tolstoy and the Apostles +against human inequality however constituted; had--to end the list of +instances without going outside the literary class--Hamlin Garland for +its principal spokesman of the distress and dissatisfaction then +stirring along the changed frontier which so long as free land lasted +had been the natural outlet for the expansive, restless race. + +Heretofore the prairies and the plains had depended almost wholly upon +romance--and that often of the cheapest sort--for their literary +reputation; Mr. Garland, who had tested at first hand the innumerable +hardships of such a life, became articulate through his dissent from +average notions about the pioneer. His earliest motives of dissent seem +to have been personal and artistic. During that youth which saw him +borne steadily westward, from his Wisconsin birthplace to windy Iowa and +then to bleak Dakota, his own instincts clashed with those of his +migratory father as the instincts of many a sensitive, unremembered +youth must have clashed with the dumb, fierce urges of the leaders of +migration everywhere. The younger Garland hungered on the frontier for +beauty and learning and leisure; the impulse which eventually detached +him from Dakota and sent him on a trepid, reverent pilgrimage to Boston +was the very impulse which, on another scale, had lately detached Henry +James from his native country and had sent him to the ancient home of +his forefathers in the British Isles. + +Mr. Garland could neither feel so free nor fly so far from home as +James. He had, in the midst of his raptures and his successes in New +England, still to remember the plight of the family he had left behind +him on the lonely prairie; he cherished a patriotism for his province +which went a long way toward restoring him to it in time. Sentimental +and romantic considerations, however, did not influence him altogether +in his first important work. He had been kindled by Howells in Boston to +a passion for realism which carried him beyond the suave accuracy of his +master to the somber veracity of _Main-Travelled Roads_, _Prairie +Folks_, and _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_. This veracity was more than +somber; it was deliberate and polemic. Mr. Garland, ardently a radical +of the school of Henry George, had enlisted in the crusade against +poverty, and he desired to tell the unheeded truth about the frontier +farmers and their wives in language which might do something to lift the +desperate burdens of their condition. Consequently his passions and his +doctrines joined hands to fix the direction of his art; he both hated +the frontier and hinted at definite remedies which he thought would make +it more endurable. + +It throws a strong light upon the progress of American society and +literature during the past generation to point out that the service +recently performed by _Main Street_ was, in its fashion, performed +thirty years ago by _Main-Travelled Roads_. Each book challenges the +myth of the rural beauties and the rural virtues; but whereas Sinclair +Lewis, in an intellectual and satiric age, charges that the villagers +are dull, Mr. Garland, in a moral and pathetic age, charged that the +farmers were oppressed. His men wrestle fearfully with sod and mud and +drought and blizzard, goaded by mortgages which may at almost any moment +snatch away all that labor and parsimony have stored up. His women, +endowed with no matter what initial hopes or charms, are sacrificed to +overwork and deprivations and drag out maturity and old age on the +weariest treadmill. The pressure of life is simply too heavy to be borne +except by the ruthless or the crafty. Mr. Garland, though nourished on +the popular legend of the frontier, had come to feel that the "song of +emigration had been, in effect, the hymn of fugitives." Illusion no less +than reality had tempted Americans toward their far frontiers, and the +enormous mass, once under way, had rolled stubbornly westward, crushing +all its members who might desire to hesitate or to reflect. + +The romancers had studied the progress of the frontier in the lives of +its victors; Mr. Garland studied it in the lives of its victims: the +private soldier returning drably and mutely from the war to resume his +drab, mute career behind the plow; the tenant caught in a trap by his +landlord and the law and obliged to pay for the added value which his +own toil has given to his farm; the brother neglected until his courage +has died and proffered assistance comes too late to rouse him; and +particularly the daughter whom a harsh father or the wife whom a brutal +husband breaks or drives away--the most sensitive and therefore the most +pitiful victims of them all. Mr. Garland told his early stories in the +strong, level, ominous language of a man who had observed much but chose +to write little. Not his words but the overtones vibrating through them +cry out that the earth and the fruits of the earth belong to all men and +yet a few of them have turned tiger or dog or jackal and snatched what +is precious for themselves while their fellows starve and freeze. +Insoluble as are the dilemmas he propounded and tense and unrelieved as +his accusations were, he stood in his methods nearer, say, to the humane +Millet than to the angry Zola. There is a clear, high splendor about his +landscapes; youth and love on his desolate plains, as well as anywhere, +can find glory in the most difficult existence; he might strip +particular lives relentlessly bare but he no less relentlessly clung to +the conviction that human life has an inalienable dignity which is +deeper than any glamor goes and can survive the loss of all its +trappings. + +Why did Mr. Garland not equal the intellectual and artistic success of +_Main-Travelled Roads_, _Prairie Folks_, and _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_ +for a quarter of a century? At the outset he had passion, knowledge, +industry, doctrine, approbation, and he labored hard at enlarging the +sagas of which these books were the center. Yet _Jason Edwards_, _A +Spoil of Office_, _A Member of the Third House_ are dim names and the +Far Western tales which succeeded them grow too rapidly less impressive +as they grow older. The rise of historical romance among the American +followers of Stevenson at the end of the century and the subsequent rise +of flippancy under the leadership of O. Henry have both been blamed for +the partial eclipse into which Mr. Garland's reputation passed. As a +matter of fact, the causes were more fundamental than the mere +fickleness of literary reputation or than the demands of editors and +public that he repeat himself forever. In that first brilliant cycle of +stories this downright pioneer worked with the material which of all +materials he knew best and over which his imagination played most +eagerly. From them, however, he turned to pleas for the single tax and +to exposures of legislative corruption and imbecility about which he +neither knew nor cared so much as he knew and cared about the actual +lives of working farmers. His imagination, whatever his zeal might do in +these different surroundings, would not come to the old point of +incandescence. + +Instead, however, of diagnosing his case correctly Mr. Garland followed +the false light of local color to the Rocky Mountains and began the +series of romantic narratives which further interrupted his true growth +and, gradually, his true fame. He who had grimly refused to lend his +voice to the chorus chanting the popular legend of the frontier in which +he had grown up and who had studied the deceptive picture not as a +visitor but as a native, now became himself a visiting enthusiast for +the "high trails" and let himself be roused by a fervor sufficiently +like that from which he had earlier dissented. In his different way he +was as hungry for new lands as his father had been before him. Looking +upon local color as the end--when it is more accurately the +beginning--of fiction, he felt that he had exhausted his old community +and must move on to fresher pastures. + +Here the prime fallacy of his school misled him: he believed that if he +had represented the types and scenes of his particular region once he +had done all he could, when of course had he let imagination serve him +he might have found in that microcosm as many passions and tragedies and +joys as he or any novelist could have needed for a lifetime. Here, too, +the prime penalty of his school overtook him: he came to lay so much +emphasis upon outward manners that he let his plots and characters fall +into routine and formula. The novels of his middle period--such as _Her +Mountain Lover_, _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_, _Hester_, _The +Light of the Star_, _Cavanagh, Forest Ranger_--too frequently recur to +the romantic theme of a love uniting some powerful, uneducated +frontiersman and some girl from a politer neighborhood. Pioneer and lady +are always almost the same pair in varying costumes; the stories harp +upon the praise of plains and mountains and the scorn of cities and +civilization. These romances, much value as they have as documents and +will long continue to have, must be said to exhibit the frontier as +self-conscious, obstreperous, given to insisting upon its difference +from the rest of the world. In ordinary human intercourse such +insistence eventually becomes tiresome; in literature no less than in +life there is a time to remember local traits and a time to forget them +in concerns more universal. + +What concerns of Mr. Garland's were universal became evident when he +published _A Son of the Middle Border_. His enthusiasms might be +romantic but his imagination was not; it was indissolubly married to his +memory of actual events. The formulas of his mountain romances, having +been the inventions of a mind not essentially inventive, had been at +best no more than sectional; the realities of his autobiography, taking +him back again to _Main-Travelled Roads_ and its cycle, were personal, +lyrical, and consequently universal. All along, it now appeared, he had +been at his best when he was most nearly autobiographical: those vivid +early stories had come from the lives of his own family or of their +neighbors; _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_ had set forth what was practically +his own experience in its account of a heroine--not hero--who leaves her +native farm to go first to a country college and then to Chicago to +pursue a wider life, torn constantly between a passion for freedom and a +loyalty to the father she must tragically desert. + +In a sense _A Son of the Middle Border_ supersedes the fictive versions +of the same material; they are the original documents and the _Son_ the +final redaction and commentary. Veracious still, the son of that border +appears no longer vexed as formerly. Memory, parent of art, has at once +sweetened and enlarged the scene. What has been lost of pungent +vividness has its compensation in a broader, a more philosophic +interpretation of the old frontier, which in this record grows to epic +meanings and dimensions. Its savage hardships, though never minimized, +take their due place in its powerful history; the defeat which the +victims underwent cannot rob the victors of their many claims to glory. +If there was little contentment in this border there was still much +rapture. Such things Mr. Garland reveals without saying them too +plainly: the epic qualities of his book--as in Mark Twain's _Life on the +Mississippi_--lie in its implications; the tale itself is a candid +narrative of his own adventures through childhood, youth, and his first +literary period. + +This autobiographic method, applied with success in _A Daughter of the +Middle Border_ to his later life in Chicago and all the regions which he +visited, brings into play his higher gifts and excludes his lower. Under +slight obligation to imagine, he runs slight risk of succumbing to those +conventionalisms which often stiffen his work when he trusts to his +imagination. Avowedly dealing with his own opinions and experiences, he +is not tempted to project them, as in the novels he does somewhat too +frequently, into the careers of his heroes. Dealing chiefly with action +not with thought, he does not tend so much as elsewhere to solve +speculative problems with sentiment instead of with reflection. In the +_Son_ and the _Daughter_ he has the fullest chance to be autobiographic +without disguise. + +Here lies his best province and here appears his best art. It is an art, +as he employs it, no less subtle than humane. Warm, firm flesh covers +the bones of his chronology. He imparts reality to this or that +occasion, like a novelist, by reciting conversation which must come from +something besides bare memory. He rounds out the characters of the +persons he remembers with a fulness and grace which, lifelike as his +persons are, betray the habit of creating characters. He enriches his +analysis of the Middle Border with sensitive descriptions of the "large, +unconscious scenery" in which it transacted its affairs. If it is +difficult to overprize the documentary value of his saga of the Garlands +and the McClintocks and of their son who turned back on the trail, so is +it difficult to overpraise the sincerity and tenderness and beauty with +which the chronicle was set down. + + +2. WINSTON CHURCHILL + +The tidal wave of historical romance which toward the end of the past +century attacked this coast and broke so far inland as to inundate the +entire continent swept Winston Churchill to a substantial peak of +popularity to which he has since clung, with little apparent loss, by +the exercise of methods somewhat but not greatly less romantic than +those which first lifted him above the flood. He came during a moment +of national expansiveness. Patriotism and jingoism, altruism and +imperialism, passion and sentimentalism shook the temper which had been +slowly stiffening since the Civil War. Now, with a rush of unaccustomed +emotions, the national imagination sought out its own past, luxuriating +in it, not to say wallowing in it. + +In Mr. Churchill it found a romancer full of consolation to any who +might fear or suspect that the country's history did not quite match its +destiny. He had enough erudition to lend a very considerable "thickness" +to his scene, whether it was Annapolis or St. Louis or Kentucky or +upland New England. He had a sense for the general bearings of this or +that epoch; he had a firm, warm confidence in the future implied and +adumbrated by this past; he had a feeling for the ceremonial in all +eminent occasions. He had, too, a knack at archaic costume and knack +enough at the idiom in which his contemporaries believed their forebears +had expressed themselves. And he had, besides all these qualities needed +to make his records heroic, the quality of moral earnestness which +imparted to them the look of moral significance. Richard Carvel by the +exercise of simple Maryland virtues rises above the enervate young +sparks of Mayfair; Stephen Brice in _The Crisis_ by his simple Yankee +virtues makes his mark among the St. Louis rebels--who, however, are +gallant and noble though misguided men; canny David Ritchie in _The +Crossing_ leads the frontiersmen of Kentucky as the little child of +fable leads the lion and the lamb; crafty Jethro Bass in _Coniston_, +though a village boss with a pocketful of mortgages and consequently of +constituents, surrenders his ugly power at the touch of a maiden's hand. + +To reflect a little upon this combination of heroic color and moral +earnestness is to discover how much Mr. Churchill owes to the elements +injected into American life by Theodore Roosevelt. Is not _The +Crossing_--to take specific illustrations--connected with the same +central cycle as _The Winning of the West_? Is not _Coniston_, whatever +the date of its events, an arraignment of that civic corruption which +Roosevelt hated as the natural result of civic negligence and against +which he urged the duty of an awakened civic conscience? In time Mr. +Churchill was to extend his inquiries to regions of speculation into +which Roosevelt never ventured, but as regards American history and +American politics they were of one mind. "Nor are the ethics of the +manner of our acquisition of a part of Panama and the Canal," wrote Mr. +Churchill in 1918 in his essay on _The American Contribution and the +Democratic Idea_, "wholly defensible from the point of view of +international democracy. Yet it must be remembered that President +Roosevelt was dealing with a corrupt, irresponsible, and hostile +government, and that the Canal had become a necessity not only for our +own development, but for that of the civilization of the world." And +again: "The only real peril confronting democracy is the arrest of +growth." + +Roosevelt himself could not have muddled an issue better. Like him Mr. +Churchill has habitually moved along the main lines of national +feeling--believing in America and democracy with a fealty unshaken by +any adverse evidence and delighting in the American pageant with a gusto +rarely modified by the exercise of any critical intelligence. Morally he +has been strenuous and eager; intellectually he has been naive and +belated. Whether he has been writing what was avowedly romance or what +was intended to be sober criticism he has been always the romancer first +and the critic afterwards. + +And yet since the vogue of historical romance passed nearly a score of +years ago Mr. Churchill has honestly striven to keep up with the world +by thinking about it. One novel after another has presented some +encroaching problem of American civic or social life: the control of +politics by interest in _Mr. Crewe's Career_; divorce in _A Modern +Chronicle_; the conflict between Christianity and business in _The +Inside of the Cup_; the oppression of the soul by the lust for temporal +power in _A Far Country_; the struggle of women with the conditions of +modern industry in _The Dwelling-Place of Light_. Nothing has hurried +Mr. Churchill or forced his hand; he has taken two or three years for +each novel, has read widely, has brooded over his theme, has reinforced +his stories with solid documentation. He has aroused prodigious +discussion of his challenges and solutions--particularly in the case of +_The Inside of the Cup_. That novel perhaps best of all exhibits his +later methods. John Hodder by some miracle of inattention or some +accident of isolation has been kept in his country parish from any +contact with the doubt which characterizes his age. Transferred to a +large city he almost instantly finds in himself heresies hitherto only +latent, spends a single summer among the poor, and in the fall begins +relentless war against the unworthy rich among his congregation. Thought +plays but a trivial part in Hodder's evolution. Had he done any real +thinking or were he capable of it he must long before have freed himself +from the dogmas that obstruct him. Instead he has drifted with the +general stream and learns not from the leaders but from the slower +followers of opinion. Like the politician he absorbs through his skin, +gathering premonitions as to which way the crowd is going and then +rushing off in that direction. + +If this recalls the processes of Roosevelt, hardly less does it recall +those of Mr. Churchill. Once taken by an idea for a novel he has always +burned with it as if it were as new to the world as to him. Here lies, +without much question, the secret of that genuine earnestness which +pervades all his books: he writes out of the contagious passion of a +recent convert or a still excited discoverer. Here lies, too, without +much question, the secret of Mr. Churchill's success in holding his +audiences: a sort of unconscious politician among novelists, he gathers +his premonitions at happy moments, when the drift is already setting in. +Never once has Mr. Churchill, like a philosopher or a seer, run off +alone. + +Even for those, however, who perceive that he belongs intellectually to +a middle class which is neither very subtle nor very profound on the one +hand nor very shrewd or very downright on the other, it is impossible to +withhold from Mr. Churchill the respect due a sincere, scrupulous, and +upright man who has served the truth and his art according to his +lights. If he has not overheard the keenest voices of his age, neither +has he listened to the voice of the mob. The sounds which have reached +him from among the people have come from those who eagerly aspire to +better things arrived at by orderly progress, from those who desire in +some lawful way to outgrow the injustices and inequalities of civil +existence and by fit methods to free the human spirit from all that +clogs and stifles it. But as they aspire and intend better than they +think, so, in concert with them, does Mr. Churchill. + +In all his novels, even the most romantic, the real interest lies in +some mounting aspiration opposed to a static regime, whether the passion +for independence among the American colonies, or the expanding movement +of the population westward, or the crusades against slavery or political +malfeasance, or the extrication of liberal temperaments from the +shackles of excessive wealth or poverty or orthodoxy. Yet the only +conclusions he can at all devise are those which history has devised +already--the achievement of independence or of the Illinois country, the +abolition of slavery, the defeat of this or that usurper of power in +politics. Rarely is anything really thought out. Compare, for instance, +his epic of matrimony, _A Modern Chronicle_, with such a penetrating--if +satirical--study as _The Custom of the Country_. Mrs. Wharton urges no +more doctrine than Mr. Churchill, and she, like him, confines herself to +the career of one woman with her successive husbands; but whereas the +_Custom_ is luminous with quiet suggestion and implicit commentary upon +the relations of the sexes in the prevailing modes of marriage, the +_Chronicle_ has little more to say than that after two exciting +marriages a woman is ready enough to settle peacefully down with the +friend of her childhood whom she should have married in the beginning. +In _A Far Country_ a lawyer who has let himself be made a tool in the +hands of nefarious corporations undergoes a tragic love affair, suffers +conversion, reads a few books of modern speculation, and resolutely +turns his face toward a new order. In the same precipitate fashion the +heroine of _The Dwelling-Place of Light_, who has given no apparent +thought whatever to economic problems except as they touch her +individually, suffers a shock in connection with her intrigue with her +capitalist employer and becomes straightway a radical, shortly +thereafter making a pathetic and edifying end in childbirth. In these +books there are hundreds of sound observations and elevated sentiments; +the author's sympathies are, as a rule, remarkably right; but taken as a +whole his most serious novels, however lifelike and well rounded their +surfaces may seem, lack the upholding, articulating skeleton of thought. + +Much the same lack of spiritual penetration and intellectual +consistency which has kept Mr. Churchill from ever building a very +notable realistic plot has kept him from ever creating any very +memorable characters. The author of ten novels, immensely popular for +more than a score of years, he has to his credit not a single +figure--man or woman--generally accepted by the public as either a type +or a person. With remarkably few exceptions he has seen his dramatis +personae from without and--doubtless for that reason--has apparently +felt as free to saw and fit them to his argument as he has felt with his +plots. Something preposterous in the millionaire reformer Mr. Crewe, +something cantankerous and passionate in the Abolitionist Judge Whipple +of _The Crisis_, above all something both tough and quaint in the +up-country politician Jethro Bass in _Coniston_ resisted the +argumentative knife and saved for those particular persons that look of +being entities in their own right which distinguishes the authentic from +the artificial characters of fiction. + +For the most part, however, Mr. Churchill has erred in what may be +called the arithmetic of his art: he has thought of men and women as +mere fractions of a unit of fiction, whereas they themselves in any but +romances must be the units and the total work the sum or product of the +fictive operation. Naturally he has succeeded rather worse with +characters of his own creating, since his conceptions in such cases have +come to him as social or political problems to be illustrated in the +conduct of beings suitably shaped, than in characters drawn in some +measure from history, with their individualities already more or less +established. Without achieving fresh or bold interpretations of John +Paul Jones or George Rogers Clark or Lincoln, Mr. Churchill has added a +good deal to the vividness of their legends; whereas in the case of +characters not quite so historical, such as Judge Whipple and Jethro +Bass, he has admirably fused his moral earnestness regarding American +politics with his sense of spaciousness and color in the American past. + +After the most careful reflection upon Mr. Churchill's successive +studies of contemporary life one recurs irresistibly to his romances. He +possesses, and has more than once displayed, a true romantic--almost a +true epic--instinct. Behind the careers of Richard Carvel and Stephen +Brice and David Ritchie and Jethro Bass appear the procession and +reverberation of stirring days. Nearer a Walter Scott than a Bernard +Shaw, Mr. Churchill has always been willing to take the memories of his +nation as they have come down to him and to work them without question +or rejection into his broad tapestry. A naturalistic generation is +tempted to make light of such methods; they belong, however, too truly +to good traditions of literature to be overlooked. + +A national past has many uses, and different dispositions find in it +instruction or warning, depression or exaltation. Mr. Churchill has +found in the American past a cause for exaltation chiefly; after his +ugliest chapters the light breaks and he closes always upon the note of +high confidence which resounds in the epics of robust, successful +nations. If in this respect he has too regularly flattered his +countrymen, he has also enriched the national consciousness by the +colors which he has brought back from his impassioned forays. Only now +and then, it must be remembered, do historical novels pass in their +original form from one generation to another; more frequently they +suffer a decomposition due to their lack of essential truth and descend +to the function of compost for succeeding harvests of romance. Though +probably but one or two of Mr. Churchill's books--perhaps not even +one--can be expected to outlast a generation with much vitality, he +cannot be denied the honor of having added something agreeable if +imponderable to the national memory and so of having served his country +in one real way if not in another. + + +3. ROBERT HERRICK + +If the novels of Robert Herrick were nothing else they would still be +indispensable documents upon that first and second decade of the +twentieth century in America, when a minority unconvinced by either +romance or Roosevelt set out to scrutinize the exuberant complacence +which was becoming a more and more ominous element in the national +character. Imperialism, running a cheerful career in the Caribbean and +in the Pacific, had set the mode for average opinion; the world to +Americans looked immense and the United States the most immense +potentiality in it. + +Small wonder then that the prevailing literature gave itself generally +to large proclamations about the future or to spacious recollections of +the past in which the note was hope unmodified. Small wonder either--be +it said to the credit of literature--that the same period caused and saw +the development of the most emphatic protest which has come from native +pens since the abolition of slavery--not excepting even the literary +rebels of the eighties. Much of that protest naturally expressed itself +in fiction, of many orders of intelligence and competence and intention. +Various voices have been louder or shriller or sweeter or in some cases +more thoroughgoing than Mr. Herrick's; but his is the voice which, in +fiction, has best represented the scholar's conscience disturbed by the +spectacle of a tumultuous generation of which most of the members are +too much undisturbed. + +In particular Mr. Herrick has concerned himself with the status of women +in the republic which has prided itself upon nothing more than upon its +attitude toward their sex, and he has regularly insisted upon carrying +his researches beyond that period of green girlhood which appears to be +all of a woman's life that can interest the popular fiction-mongers. He +knows, without anywhere putting it precisely into words, that the +elaborate language of compliment used by Americans toward women, though +deriving perhaps from a time when women were less numerous on the +frontier than men and were therefore specially prized and praised, has +become for the most part a hollow language. The pioneer woman earned +all the respect she got by the equal share she bore in the tasks of her +laborious world. Her successor in the comfortable society which the +frontier founded by its travail neither works nor breeds as those first +women did. But the energy thus happily released, instead of being +directed into other useful channels, has been encouraged to spend itself +upon the complex arts of the parasite. + +Ascribe it to the vanity of men who choose to regard women as luxurious +chattels and the visible symptoms of success; ascribe it to a wasteful +habit practised by a nation never compelled to make the best use of its +resources; ascribe it to the craft of a sex quick to seize its advantage +after centuries of disadvantage--ascribe it to whatever one will, the +fact remains that the United States has evolved a widely admired type of +woman who lacks the glad animal spontaneity of the little girl, the +ardent abandon of the mistress, the strong loyalty of the wife, the +deep, calm, fierce instincts of the mother; and who even lacks--although +here a change has taken place since Mr. Herrick began to chronicle +her--the confident impulse to follow her own path as an individual, +irrespective of her peculiar functions. It must be remembered, of +course, that Mr. Herrick has had in mind not the vast majority of women, +who in the United States as everywhere else on earth still fully +participate in life, but the American Woman, that traditional figure +compounded of timid ice and dainty insolence and habitually tricked out +with a wealth which holds the world so far away that it cannot see how +empty she really is. He has sought in his novels, by dissecting the +pretty simulacrum, to show that it has little blood and less soul. + +At times he writes with a biting animus. In _One Woman's Life_ Milly +schemes herself out of the plain surroundings into which she was born, +lapses from her designs enough to marry a poor man for love but +subsequently wrecks his career and wears him out by her ambitious +ignorance, and before she ends the story in the arms of another husband +has contrived to waste the savings of a friend of her own sex who tries +to help her. In _The Healer_ the doctor's wife continually drags him +back from the passionate exercise of his true gift, luring him with her +beauty to live in the world which nearly destroys him, though he finally +comprehends the danger and escapes her. And in _Together_, its epic +canvas crowded with all kinds and conditions of lovers and married +couples, Mr. Herrick never spares the type. Other novelists may be +content to show her glittering in her maiden plumage; he advances to the +point where it becomes clear that the qualities ordinarily exalted in +her are nothing but signs of an arrested spiritual and moral +development. Hard and wilful enough, she never becomes mature, and she +tangles the web of life with the heedless hands of a child. + +A less reflective novelist might be content with blaming or satirizing +her for her blind instinct to marry her richest suitor; for forcing him, +once married, to support her and her children at a pitch of luxury which +demands that he give up his personal aspirations in art or science or +altruism; for struggling so ruthlessly to plant her daughters in +prosperous soil which will nourish the "sacred seed" of the race +abundantly. Mr. Herrick, however, does not disapprove such instincts for +their own sake. He sees in them an element furnishing mankind with one +of its valuable sources of stability. What he assails is a national +conception which endows women with these instincts in mean, trivial, +unenlightened forms. + +His criticism of the American Woman, indeed, is but an emphatic point in +his larger criticism of human life, and he has singled her out +essentially, it seems, because of the shallowness of her lovely +pretenses. It is the shallowness, not the sex, which arouses him. In +_The Common Lot_, in _The Memoirs of an American Citizen_, in _Clark's +Field_, and in certain of the strands of _Together_ it is the women who +demand that, no matter what happens, they shall be allowed to live their +lives upon the high plane of integrity from which the casual world is +always trying to pull men and women down. Integrity in love, integrity +in personal conduct, integrity in business and public affairs--this Mr. +Herrick holds to with a profound, at times a bleak, consistency which +has both worried and limited his readers. Integrity in love leads +Margaret Pole in _Together_, for instance, from her foolish husband to +her lover during one lyric episode and thereafter holds them apart in +the consciousness of a love completed and not to be touched with +perishable flesh. In novel after novel the characters come to grief from +the American habit of extravagance, which, as Mr. Herrick represents +it, seems a serious offense against integrity--springing from a failure +to control vagrant desires and tying the spirit to the need of +superfluous things until it ceases to be itself. And with never wearied +iteration he comes back to the problem of how the individual can +maintain his integrity in the face of the temptation to get easy wealth +and cut a false figure in the world. + +Possibly it was a youth spent in New England that made Mr. Herrick as +sensitive as he has been to the atmosphere of affairs in Chicago, where +fortunes have come in like a flood during his residence there, and where +the popular imagination has been primarily enlisted in the game of +seeing where the next wave will break and of catching its golden spoil. +Mr. Herrick has not confined himself to Chicago for his scene; indeed, +he is one of the least local of American novelists, ranging as he does, +with all the appearances of ease, from New England to California, from +farm to factory, from city to suburb, and along the routes of pleasure +which Americans take in Europe. But Chicago is the true center of his +universe, and he is the principal historian in fiction of that roaring +village so rapidly turned town. He has not, however, been blown with the +prevailing winds. The vision that has fired most of his fellow citizens +has looked to him like a tantalizing but insubstantial mirage. Something +in his disposition has kept him cool while others were being made drunk +with opportunity. + +Is it the scholar in him, or the New Englander, or the moralist which +has compelled him to count the moral cost of material expansion? In the +first of his novels to win much of a hearing, _The Common Lot_, he +studies the career of an architect who becomes involved in the frauds of +dishonest builders and sacrifices his professional integrity for the +sake of quick, dangerous profits. _The Memoirs of an American Citizen_, +a precious document now too much neglected, follows a country youth of +good initial impulses through his rise and progress among the packers +and on to the Senate of the United States. This is one of the oldest +themes in literature, one of the themes most certain to succeed with any +public: Dick Whittington, the Industrious Apprentice, over again. Mr. +Herrick, however, cannot merely repeat the old drama or point the old +moral. His hero wriggles upward by devious ways and sharp practices, +crushing competitors, diverting justice, and gradually paying for his +fortune with his integrity. In the most modern idiom Mr. Herrick asks +again and again the ancient question whether the whole world is worth as +much as a man's soul. + +That mystical rigor which permits but one answer to the question +suggests to Mr. Herrick two avenues of cure from the evils accompanying +the disease he broods upon. One is a return to simple living under +conditions which quiet the restless nerves, allay the greedy appetites, +and restore the central will. The Master in _The Master of the Inn_, +Renault in _Together_, Holden in _The Healer_--all of them utter and +live a gospel of health which obviously corresponds to Mr. Herrick's +belief. When the world grows too loud one may withdraw from it; there +are still uncrowded spaces where existence marches simply. Remembering +them, Mr. Herrick's imagination, held commonly on so tight a fist, slips +its hood off and takes wing. And yet he knows that the north woods into +which a few favored men and women may withdraw are not cure enough for +the multitude. They must practise, or some one must practise for their +benefit, honorable refusals in the midst of life. The architect's wife +in _The Common Lot_, Harrington's sister in _The Memoirs of an American +Citizen_, the clear-eyed Johnstons in _Together_--they have or attain +the knowledge, which seems a paradox, that selfishness can fatally +entangle the individual in the perplexities of existence and that the +best chance for disentanglement may come from intelligent unselfishness. + +_Clark's Field_ amply illustrates this paradox. The field has for many +years lain idle in the midst of a growing town because of a flaw in the +title, and when eventually the title is quieted and the land is sold it +pours wealth upon heads not educated to use it with wisdom. Here is +unearned increment made flesh and converted into drama: the field that +might have been home and garden and playground becomes a machine, a +monster, which gradually visits evil upon all concerned. Then Adelle and +her proletarian cousin, aware that the field through the corruption of a +well-meant law has grown malevolent, resolve to break the spell by +surrendering their selfish interests and accepting the position of +unselfish trustees to the estate until--if that time ever comes--some +better means may be devised for making the earth serve the purposes of +those who live upon it. + +The solution does not entirely satisfy, of course. At best it is a +makeshift if considered in its larger bearings. It comes near, however, +to solving the problems as individuals of Adelle and her cousin, who +save more in character than they lose in pocket. And it might possibly +have come nearer still were it not for the handicap under which Mr. +Herrick, for all his intelligence and conscience, has labored as an +artist. That handicap is a certain stiffness on the plastic side of his +imagination. His conceptions come to him, if criticism can be any judge, +with a large touch of the abstract about them; his rationalizing +intelligence is always present at their birth. Nor do his narratives, +once under way, flow with the sure, effortless movement which is natural +to born story-tellers. His imagination, not quite continuous enough, +occasionally fails to fuse and shape disparate materials. It is likely +to fall short when he essays fancy or mystery, as in _A Life for a +Life_; or when he has a whimsy for amusing melodrama, as in _His Great +Adventure_. The flexibility which reveals itself in humor or in the +lighter irony is not one of his principal endowments. Restrained and +direct as he always is so far as language goes, he cannot always keep +his action absolutely in hand: this or that person or incident now and +then breaks out of the pattern; the skeleton of a formula now and then +becomes too prominent. + +It is his intelligence which makes his satire sharp and significant; it +is his conscience which lends passion to his representation and lifts +him often to a true if sober eloquence. But in at least two of his +novels imagination takes him, as only imagination can take a novelist, +beyond the reach of either intelligence or conscience. _Together_, a +little cumbersome, a little sprawling, nevertheless glows with an +intensity which gives off heat as well as light. It is more than an +exhaustive document upon modern marriage; it is interpretation as well. +_Clark's Field_, a sparer, clearer story, is even more than +interpretation; it is a work of art springing from a spirit which has +taken fire and has transmuted almost all its abstract conceptions into +genuine flesh and blood. That _Clark's Field_ is Mr. Herrick's latest +novel heightens the expectation with which one hears that after a +silence of seven years he now plans to return to fiction. + + +4. UPTON SINCLAIR + +The social and industrial order which has blacklisted Upton Sinclair +has, while increasing his rage, also increased his art. In his youth he +was primarily a lyric boy storming the ears of a world which failed to +detect in his romances the promise of which he himself was outspokenly +confident. His first character--the hero of _Springtime and Harvest_ +and of _The Journal of Arthur Stirling_--belonged to the lamenting race +of the minor poets, shaped his beauty in deep seclusion, and died +because it went unrecognized. Mr. Sinclair, though he had created +Stirling in his own image, did not die. Instead he began to study the +causes of public deafness and found the injustices which ever since he +has devoted his enormous energy to exposing. If that original motive +seems inadequate and if traces of it have been partially responsible for +his reputation as a seeker of personal notoriety, still it has lent +ardor to his crusade. And if he had not discovered so much injustice to +chronicle--if there had not been so much for him to discover--he must +have lacked the ammunition with which he has fought. + +As the evidences have accumulated he has been spared the need of +complaining merely because another minor poet was neglected and has been +able to widen his accusations until they include the whole multitude of +oppressions which free spirits have to contend against when they face +machines and privilege and mortmain. The industrial system which true +prophets have unanimously condemned for a century and a half helped to +pack Mr. Sinclair's records from the first; the war, with its vast +hysteria and blind panic, made it superfluous for him to add much +commentary in _Jimmie Higgins_ and _100%_ to the veritable episodes +which he there recounted. On some occasions fact itself has the impetus +of propaganda. The times have furnished Mr. Sinclair the keen, cool, +dangerous art of Thomas Paine. + +To mention Paine is to rank Mr. Sinclair with the ragged philosophers +among whom he properly belongs, rather than with learned misanthropes +like Swift or intellectual ironists like Bernard Shaw. An expansive +passion for humanity at large colors all this proletarian radical has +written. By disposition very obviously a poet, working with no subtle or +complex processes and without any of the lighter aspects of humor, Mr. +Sinclair simply refuses to accept existence as it stands and goes on +questioning it forever. _Samuel the Seeker_ seems a kind of allegory of +its author's own career. He, too, in the fashion of Samuel Prescott, +inquires of all he meets why they tolerate injustice and demands that +something or other be done at once. These are the methods of the ragged +philosophers, whereas the learned understand that justice comes slowly +and so rest now and then from effort; and the ironists understand that +justice may never come and so now and then sit down, detached and +cynical. + +Naive inquirers like Upton Sinclair take and give fewer opportunities +for comfort. How can any one talk of the long ages of human progress +when a child may starve to death in a few days? How can any one take +refuge in irony when agony is always abroad, biting and rending? How can +any one leave to others the obligation to assail injustice when the +responsibility for it lies equally upon all, whether victims or victors, +who permit it to continue? A questioner so relentless can very soon bore +the questioned, especially if they are less strenuous or less inflamed +than he and can keep up his pitch neither of activity nor of anger; but +this is no proof that such an inquiry is impertinent or that answers are +impossible. Indeed, the chances are that the proportions of this +boredom and the animosity resulting from it will depend upon the extent +to which grievances do exist about which it is painful to think for the +reason that they so plainly should not exist. A complacent reader of any +of Mr. Sinclair's better books can stay complacent only by shutting up +the book and his mind again. + +Without doubt the various abuses which these books set forth have their +case seriously weakened by the violent quickness with which Mr. Sinclair +scents conspiracy among the enemies of justice. It is perhaps not to be +wondered at that he should so often fly to this conclusion; he has +himself, as his personal history in _The Brass Check_ makes clear +enough, been practically conspired against. But some instinct for +melodrama in his constitution has led him to invent a larger number of +conspirators than has been necessary to illustrate his contention. + +In _Love's Pilgrimage_, for instance, Thyrsis suffers tortures from the +fact that it takes time for a poet, however gifted, to make himself +heard. In reality, of course, the blame for this lies in about the same +quarter of the universe as that which establishes a period of years +between youth and maturity; to complain too bitterly about either ruling +is to waste on an inscrutable problem the strength which might better be +devoted to an annoying task. Mr. Sinclair, however, cools himself in no +such philosophy. He dramatizes Thyrsis's hungry longings and cruel +disappointments on Thyrsis's own terms, making the boy out a martyr with +powerful forces arrayed against him in a conspiracy to keep ascendant +genius down. Consequently the narrative has about it something shrill +and febrile; it is keyed too high to carry full conviction to any but +those who are straining at a similar leash. So also in _The Profits of +Religion_--which is to the present age what _The Age of Reason_ was to +an earlier revolutionary generation--Mr. Sinclair excessively simplifies +religious history by reducing almost the whole process to a conspiracy +on the part of priestcraft to hoodwink the people and so to fatten its +own greedy purse. He must know that the process has not been quite so +simple; but, leaving to others to say the things that all will say, he +studies "supernaturalism as a source of income and a shield to +privilege." Here again his instincts and methods as a melodramatist +assert themselves: he warms to the struggle and plays his lash upon his +conspiring priests in a mood of mingled duty and delight. + +_The Profits of Religion_ and _The Brass Check_ belong to a series of +treatises on the economic interpretation of culture which will later +examine education and literature as these two have examined the church +and journalism and which collectively will bear the title _The Dead +Hand_. Against the malign domination of the present by the past Mr. +Sinclair directs his principal assault. In the arts he sees the dead +hand holding the classics on their thrones and thrusting back new +masterpieces as they appear; in religion he sees it clothing the visions +of ancient poets in steel creeds and rituals and denying that such +visions can ever come to later spirits; in human society he sees it +welding the manacles of caste and hardening this or that temporary +pattern of life to a perpetual order. As he repeatedly suspects +conspiracy where none exists, so he repeatedly suspects deliberate +malice where he should perceive stupidity. + +Now stupidity, though certainly the cause of more evils than malice can +devise, is less employable as a villain: it is not anthropomorphic +enough for melodrama. Mr. Sinclair is moral first and then intellectual. +Touching upon such a theme as the horrors of venereal disease he feels +more than a rational man's contempt for the imbecility of parents who +will not instruct their daughters in anything but the sentimental +elements of sex; he feels the fury toward them that audiences feel +toward villains. It is much the same with his rather absurd novels +written to display the follies of fashionable life, _The Metropolis_ and +_The Moneychangers_: he finds more crime than folly in the extravagant +pursuit of pleasure on the part of the few while the many endure hunger +and cold, homelessness and joblessness, ignorance and rebellion and +premature decay. Though the satirists may smile at the silly few, the +ragged philosophers must weep for the miserable many. + +Class-consciousness is a great advantage to the writer of exciting +fiction, as numerous American novelists have shown--standing ordinarily, +however, on the side of the privileged orders. Mr. Sinclair in _The +Jungle_, his great success, taking his stand with the unprivileged, with +the wretched aliens in the Chicago stockyards, had the advantage that he +could represent his characters as actually contending against the +conspiracy which always exists when the exploiters of men see the +exploited growing restless. What outraged the public was the news, +later confirmed by official investigation, that the meat of a large part +of the world was being prepared, at great profit to the packers, under +conditions abominably unhygienic; what outraged Mr. Sinclair was the +spectacle of the lives which the workers in the yards were compelled to +lead if they got work--which meant life to them--at all. Thanks to the +conspiracy among their masters they could not help themselves; thanks to +the weight of the dead hand they could get no help from popular opinion, +which saw their plight as something essential to the very structure of +society, as Aristotle saw slavery. Mr. Sinclair proclaimed with a +ringing voice that their plight was not essential; and he prophesied the +revolution with an eloquence which, though the revolution has not come, +still warms and lifts the raw material with which he had to deal. + +Nothing about him has done more to make him an arresting novelist than +his conviction that mankind has not yet reached its peak, as the +pessimists think; and that the current stage of civilization, with all +that is unendurable about it, need last no longer than till the moment +when mankind determines that it need no longer endure. He speaks as a +socialist who has dug up a multitude of economic facts and can present +them with appalling force; he speaks as a poet sustained by visions and +generous hopes. + +How hope has worked in Mr. Sinclair appears with significant emphasis in +the contrast between _Manassas_ and _100%_; the two books illustrate the +range of American naturalism and the progressive disillusion of a +generation. _Manassas_ is the work of a man filled with epic memories +and epic expectations who saw in the Civil War a clash of titanic +principles, saw a nation being beaten out on a fearful anvil, saw +splendor and heroism rising up from the pits of slaughter. And in spite +of his fifteen years spent in discovering the other side of the American +picture Mr. Sinclair in _Jimmie Higgins_, the story of a socialist who +went to war against the Kaiser, showed traces still of a romantic pulse, +settling down, however, toward the end, to a colder beat. It is the +colder beat which throbs in _100%_, with a temperature that suggests +both ice and fire. Rarely has such irony been maintained in an entire +volume as that which traces the evolution of Peter Gudge from sharper to +patriot through the foul career of spying and incitement and persecution +opened to his kind of talents by the frenzy of noncombatants during the +war. To this has that patriotism come which on the red fields of +Virginia poured itself out in unstinting sacrifice; and, though the +sacrifice went on in France and Flanders, was it worth while, Mr. +Sinclair implicitly inquires, when the conflict, at no matter how great +a distance, could breed such vermin as Peter Gudge? Explicitly he does +not answer his question: his art has gone, at least for the moment, +beyond avowed argument, merely marshaling the evidence with ironic skill +and dispensing with the chorus. _100%_ is a document which honest +Americans must remember and point out when orators exclaim, in the +accents of official idealism, over the great days and deeds of the great +war. + +The road for Mr. Sinclair to travel is the road of irony and +documentation, both of which will hold him back from ineffectual rages +and thereby serve to enlarge his influence. Such genius for controversy +as his may be neither expected nor advised to look for quieter paths; it +feels, with Bernard Shaw, that "if people are rotting and starving in +all directions, and nobody else has the heart or brains to make a +disturbance about it, the great writers must." It is fair to say, +however, that certain readers heartily sympathetic toward Mr. Sinclair +observe in him a painful tendency to enjoy scandal for its own sake and +to generalize from it to an extent which hurts his cause; observe in him +a quite superfluous gusto when it comes to reporting bloody incidents +not always contributory to any general design; observe in him a frequent +over-use of the shout and the scream. He has himself given an +example--_100%_--on which such critical strictures are based; in that +best of his novels as well as best of his arguments he has avoided most +of his own defects. + +A revolutionary novelist naturally finds it difficult to represent his +world with the quiet grasp with which it can be represented by one who, +accepting the present frame of life, has studied it curiously, +affectionately, until it has left a firm, substantial image in the mind. +The revolutionist must see life as constantly whirling and melting under +his gaze; he must bring to light many facts which the majority overlook +but which it will seem to him like connivance with injustice to leave in +hiding; he must go constantly beyond what is to what ought to be. All +the more reason, then, why he should be as watchful as the most watchful +artist in his choice and use of the modes of his particular art. It +requires at least as much art to convert as to give pleasure. + + +5. THEODORE DREISER + +Much concerned about wisdom as Theodore Dreiser is, he almost wholly +lacks the dexterous knowingness which has marked the mass of fiction in +the age of O. Henry. Not only has Mr. Dreiser never allowed any one else +to make up his mind for him regarding the significance and aims and +obligations of mankind but he has never made up his mind himself. A +large dubitancy colors all his reflections. "All we know is that we +cannot know." The only law about which we can be reasonably certain is +the law of change. Justice is "an occasional compromise struck in an +eternal battle." Virtue and honesty are "a system of weights and +measures, balances struck between man and man." + +Prudence no less than philosophy demands, then, that we hold ourselves +constantly in readiness to discard our ancient creeds and habits and +step valiantly around the corner beyond which reality will have drifted +even while we were building our houses on what seemed the primeval and +eternal rock. Tides of change rise from deeps below deeps; cosmic winds +of change blow upon us from boundless chaos; mountains, in the long +geologic seasons, shift and flow like clouds; and the everlasting +heavens may some day be shattered by the explosion or pressure of new +circumstances. Somewhere in the scheme man stands punily on what may be +an Ararat rising out of the abyss or only a promontory of the moment +sinking back again; there all his strength is devoted to a dim struggle +for survival. How in this flickering universe shall man claim for +himself the honors of any important antiquity or any important destiny? +What, in this vast accident, does human dignity amount to? + +For a philosopher with views so wide it is difficult to be a dramatist +or a novelist. If he is consistent the most portentous human tragedy +must seem to him only a tiny gasp for breath, the most delightful human +comedy only a tiny flutter of joy. Against a background of suns dying on +the other side of Aldebaran any mole trodden upon by some casual hoof +may appear as significant a personage as an Oedipus or a Lear in his +last agony. To be a novelist or dramatist at all such a cosmic +philosopher must contract his vision to the little island we inhabit, +must adjust his interest to mortal proportions and concerns, must match +his narrative to the scale by which we ordinarily measure our lives. The +muddle of elements so often obvious in Mr. Dreiser's work comes from the +conflict within him of huge, expansive moods and a conscience working +hard to be accurate in its representation of the most honest facts of +manners and character. + +Granted, he might reasonably argue, that the plight and stature of all +mankind are essentially so mean, the novelist need not seriously bother +himself with the task of looking about for its heroic figures. Plain +stories of plain people are as valuable as any others. Since all larger +doctrines and ideals are likely to be false in a precarious world, it is +best to stick as close as possible to the individual. When the +individual is sincere he has at least some positive attributes; his +record may have a genuine significance for others if it is presented +with absolute candor. Indeed, we can partially escape from the general +meaninglessness of life at large by being or studying individuals who +are sincere, and who are therefore the origins and centers of some kind +of reality. + +That the sincerity which Mr. Dreiser practises differs in some respects +from that of any other American novelist, no matter how truthful, must +be referred to one special quality of his own temperament. Historically +he has his fellows: he belongs with the movement toward naturalism which +came to America when Hamlin Garland and Stephen Crane and Frank Norris, +partly as a protest against the bland realism which Howells expounded, +were dissenting in their various dialects from the reticences and the +romances then current. Personally Mr. Dreiser displays, almost alone +among American novelists, the characteristics of what for lack of a +better native term we have to call the peasant type--the type to which +Gorki belongs and which Tolstoy wanted to belong to. + +Enlarged by genius though Mr. Dreiser is; open as he is to all manner of +novel sensations and ideas; little as he is bound by the rigor of +village habits and prejudices--still he carries wherever he goes the +true peasant simplicity of outlook, speaks with the peasant's bald +frankness, and suffers a peasant confusion in the face of complexity. +How far he sees life on one simple plane may be illustrated by his short +story _When the Old Century Was New_, an attempt to reconstruct in +fiction the New York of 1801 which shows him, in spite of some +deliberate erudition, to be amazingly unable to feel at home in another +age than his own. This same simplicity of outlook makes _A Traveler at +Forty_ so revealing a document, makes the Traveler appear a true +Innocent Abroad without the hilarious and shrewd self-sufficiency of a +frontiersman of genius like Mark Twain. While it is true that Mr. +Dreiser's plain-speaking on a variety of topics euphemized by earlier +American realists has about it some look of conscious intention, and is +undoubtedly sustained by his literary principles, yet his candor +essentially inheres in his nature: he thinks in blunt terms before he +speaks in them. He speaks bluntly even upon the more subtle and +intricate themes--finance and sex and art--which interest him above all +others. + +On the whole he probably succeeds best with finance. The career of +Cowperwood in _The Financier_ and _The Titan_, a career notoriously +based upon that of Charles T. Yerkes, allowed Mr. Dreiser to exercise +his virtue of patient industry and to build up a solid monument of fact +which, though often dull enough, nevertheless continues generally to +convince, at least in respect to Cowperwood's business enterprises. The +American financier, after all, has rarely had much subtlety in his +make-up. Single-minded, tough-skinned, ruthless, "suggesting a power +which invents man for one purpose and no other, as generals, saints, and +the like are invented," he shoulders and hurls his bulk through a sea of +troubles and carries off his spoils. Such a man as Frank Cowperwood Mr. +Dreiser understands. He understands the march of desire to its goal. He +seems always to have been curious regarding the large operations of +finance, at once stirred on his poetical side by the intoxication of +golden dreams, something as Marlowe was in _The Jew of Malta_, and on +his cynical side struck by the mechanism of craft and courage and +indomitable impulse which the financier employs. Mr. Dreiser writes, it +is true, as an outsider; he simplifies the account of Cowperwood's +adventures after wealth, touching the record here and there with the +naive hand of a peasant--even though a peasant of genius--wondering how +great riches are actually obtained and guessing somewhat awkwardly at +the mystery. And yet these guesses perhaps come nearer to the truth than +they might have come were either the typical financier or Mr. Dreiser +more subtle. You cannot set a poet to catch a financier and be at all +sure of the prize. As it is, this Trilogy of Desire (never completed in +the third part which was to show Cowperwood extending his mighty foray +into London) is as considerable an epic as American business has yet to +show. + +Cowperwood's lighter hours are devoted to pursuits almost as polygamous +as those of the leader of some four-footed herd. In this respect the +novels which celebrate him stand close to the more popular _Sister +Carrie_ and _Jennie Gerhardt_, both of them annals of women who fall as +easily as Cowperwood's many mistresses into the hand of the conquering +male. If Mr. Dreiser refuses to withhold his approbation from the +lawless financier, he withholds it even less from the lawless lover. No +moralism overlays the biology of these novels. Sex in them is a +free-flowing, expanding energy, working resistlessly through all human +tissue, knowing in itself neither good nor evil, habitually at war with +the rules and taboos which have been devised by mankind to hold its +amative impulses within convenient bounds. To the cosmic philosopher +what does it matter whether this or that human male mates with this or +that human female, or whether the mating endures beyond the passionate +moment? + +Viewing such matters thus Mr. Dreiser constantly underestimates the +forces which in civil society actually do restrain the expansive moods +of sex. At least he chooses to represent love almost always in its +vagrant hours. For this his favorite situation is in large part +responsible: that of a strong man, no longer generously young, loving +downward to some plastic, ignorant girl dazzled by his splendor and +immediately compliant to his advances. Mr. Dreiser is obsessed by the +spectacle of middle age renewing itself at the fires of youth--an +obsession which has its sentimental no less than its realistic traits. +What he most conspicuously leaves out of account is the will and +personality of women, whom he sees, or at least represents, with hardly +any exceptions as mere fools of love, mere wax to the wooer, who have no +separate identities till some lover shapes them. To something like this +simplicity the role of women in love is reduced by those Boccaccian +fabulists who adorn the village taproom and the corner grocery. + +Mr. Dreiser is reported to consider _The 'Genius'_, a massive, muddy, +powerful narrative, his greatest novel, though as a matter of fact it +cannot be compared with _Sister Carrie_ for insight or accuracy or +charm. His partiality may perhaps be ascribed to his strong inclination +toward the life of art, through which his 'Genius' moves, half hero and +half picaro. Witla remains mediocre enough in all but his sexual +unscrupulousness, but he is impelled by a driving force more or less +like those forces which impel Cowperwood. The will to wealth, the will +to love, the will to art--Mr. Dreiser conceives them all as blind +energies with no goal except self-realization. So conceiving them he +tends to see them as less conditioned than they ordinarily are in their +earthly progress by the resistance of statute and habit. Particularly is +this true of his representation of the careers of artists. Carrie +becomes a noted actress in a few short weeks; Witla almost as rapidly +becomes a noted illustrator; other minor characters here and there in +the novels are said to have prodigious power without exhibiting it. +Hardly ever does there appear any delicate, convincing analysis of the +mysterious behavior of true genius. Mr. Dreiser's artists are hardly +persons at all; they are creatures driven, and the wonder lies primarily +in the impelling energy. The cosmic philosopher in him sees the +beginning and the end of the artistic process better than the novelist +in him sees its methods. And the peasant in him, though it knows the +world of art as vivid and beautiful and though it has investigated that +world at first hand, still leads him to report it in terms often quaint, +melodramatic, invincibly rural. Witness the hundreds of times he calls +things "artistic." + +Two of his latest books indicate the range of his gifts and his +excellences. In _Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub_, which he calls A Book of the +Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life, he undertook to expound his +general philosophy and produced the most negligible of all his works. He +has no faculty for sustained argument. Like Byron, as soon as he begins +to reason he is less than half himself. In _Twelve Men_, on the other +hand, he displays the qualities by virtue of which he attracts and +deserves a serious attention. Rarely generalizing, he portrays a dozen +actual persons he has known, all his honesty brought to the task of +making his account fit the reality exactly, and all his large tolerance +exercised to present the truth without malice or excuses. Here lies the +field of his finest victories, here and in those adjacent tracts of +other books which are nearest this simple method: his representation of +old Gerhardt and of Aaron Berchansky in _The Hand of the Potter_; +numerous sketches of character in that broad pageant _A Hoosier +Holiday_; the tenderly conceived record of Caroline Meeber, wispy and +witless as she often is; the masterly study of Hurstwood's deterioration +in _Sister Carrie_--this last the peak among all Mr. Dreiser's +successes. + +Not the incurable awkwardness of his style nor his occasional merciless +verbosity nor his too frequent interposition of crude argument can +destroy the effect which he produces at his best--that of an eminent +spirit brooding over a world which in spite of many condemnations he +deeply, somberly loves. Something peasant-like in his genius may blind +him a little to the finer shades of character and set him astray in his +reports of cultivated society. His conscience about telling the plain +truth may suffer at times from a dogmatic tolerance which refuses to +draw lines between good and evil or between beautiful and ugly or +between wise and foolish. But he gains, on the whole, as much as he +loses by the magnitude of his cosmic philosophizing. These puny souls +over which he broods, with so little dignity in themselves, take on a +dignity from his contemplation of them. Small as they are, he has come +to them from long flights, and has brought back a lifted vision which +enriches his drab narratives. Something spacious, something now lurid +now luminous, surrounds them. From somewhere sound accents of an +authority not sufficiently explained by the mere accuracy of his +versions of life. Though it may indeed be difficult for a thinker of the +widest views to contract himself to the dimensions needed for +naturalistic art, and though he may often fail when he attempts it, when +he does succeed he has the opportunity, which the mere worldling lacks, +of ennobling his art with some of the great light of the poets. + + + + +CHAPTER III + +ART + + +1. BOOTH TARKINGTON + +Booth Tarkington is the glass of adolescence and the mold of Indiana. +The hero of his earliest novel, Harkless in _The Gentleman from +Indiana_, drifts through that narrative with a melancholy stride because +he has been seven long years out of college and has not yet set the +prairie on fire. But Mr. Tarkington, at the time of writing distant from +Princeton by about the same number of years and also not yet famous, +could not put up with failure in a hero. So Harkless appears as a mine +of latent splendors. Carlow County idolizes him, evil-doers hate him, +grateful old men worship him, devoted young men shadow his unsuspecting +steps at night in order to protect him from the villains of +Six-Cross-Roads, sweet girls adore him, fortune saves him from dire +adventures, and in the end his fellow-voters choose him to represent +their innumerable virtues in the Congress of their country without his +even dreaming what affectionate game they are at. This from the creator +of Penrod, who at the comical age of twelve so often lays large plans +for proving to the heedless world that he, too, has been a hero all +along! In somewhat happier hours Mr. Tarkington wrote _Monsieur +Beaucaire_, that dainty romantic episode in the life of Prince +Louis-Philippe de Valois, who masquerades as a barber and then as a +gambler at Bath, is misjudged on the evidence of his own disguises, +just escapes catastrophe, and in the end gracefully forgives the +gentlemen and ladies who have been wrong, parting with an exquisite +gesture from Lady Mary Carlisle, the beauty of Bath, who loves him but +who for a few fatal days had doubted. This from the creator of William +Sylvanus Baxter, who at the preposterous age of seventeen imagines +himself another Sydney Carton and after a silent, agonizing, +condescending farewell goes out to the imaginary tumbril! + +Just such postures and phantasms of adolescence lie behind all Mr. +Tarkington's more serious plots--and not merely those earlier ones which +he constructed a score of years ago when the mode in fiction was +historical and rococo. Van Revel in _The Two Van Revels_, convinced and +passionate abolitionist, nevertheless becomes as hungry as any +fire-eater of them all the moment Polk moves for war on Mexico, though +to Van Revel the war is an evil madness. In _The Conquest of Canaan_ +Louden plays Prince Hal among the lowest his town affords, only to mount +with a rush to the mayoralty when he is ready. _The Guest of Quesnay_ +takes a hero who is soiled with every vileness, smashes his head in an +automobile accident, and thus transforms him into that glorious kind of +creature known as a "Greek god"--beautiful and innocent beyond belief or +endurance. _The Turmoil_ is really not much more veracious, with its +ugly duckling, Bibbs Sheridan, who has ideas, loves beauty, and writes +verse, but who after years of futile dreaming becomes a master of +capital almost overnight. Even _The Magnificent Ambersons_, with its +wealth of admirable satire, does not satirize its own conclusion but +rounds out its narrative with a hasty regeneration. And what can a +critic say of such blatant nonsense as arises from the frenzy of +propaganda in _Ramsey Milholland_? + +Perhaps it is truer to call Mr. Tarkington's plots sophomoric than to +call them adolescent. Indeed, the mark of the undergraduate almost +covers them, especially of the undergraduate as he fondly imagines +himself in his callow days and as he is foolishly instructed to regard +himself by the more vinous and more hilarious of the old graduates who +annually come back to a college to offer themselves--though this is not +their conscious purpose--as an object lesson in the loud triviality +peculiar and traditional to such hours of reunion. Adolescence, however, +when left to itself, has other and very different hours which Mr. +Tarkington shows almost no signs of comprehending. + +The author of _Penrod_, of _Penrod and Sam_, and of _Seventeen_ passes +for an expert in youth; rarely has so persistent a reputation been so +insecurely founded. What all these books primarily recall is the winks +that adults exchange over the heads of children who are minding their +own business, as the adults are not; the winks, moreover, of adults who +have forgotten the inner concerns of adolescence and now observe only +its surface awkwardnesses. Real adolescence, like any other age of man, +has its own passions, its own poetry, its own tragedies and felicities; +the adolescence of Mr. Tarkington's tales is almost nothing but +farce--staged for outsiders. Not one of the characters is an individual; +they are all little monsters--amusing monsters, it is true--dressed up +to display the stock ambitions and the stock resentments and the stock +affectations and the stock perturbations of the heart which attend the +middle teens. The pranks of Penrod Schofield are merely those of Tom +Sawyer repeated in another town, without the touches of poetry or of the +informing imagination lent by Mark Twain. The sighs of "Silly Bill" +Baxter--at first diverting, it is also true--are exorbitantly multiplied +till reality drops out of the semblance. Calf-love does not always +remain a joke merely because there are mature spectators to stand by +nudging one another and roaring at the discomfort which love causes its +least experienced victims. Those knowing asides which accompany these +juvenile records have been mistaken too often for shrewd, even for +profound, analyses of human nature. Actually they are only knowing, as +sophomores are knowing with respect to their juniors by a few years. In +contemporary American fiction Mr. Tarkington is the perennial sophomore. + +If he may be said never to have outgrown Purdue and Princeton, so also +may he be said never to have outgrown Indiana. In any larger sense, of +course, he has not needed to. A novelist does not require a universe in +which to find the universe, which lies folded, for the sufficiently +perceptive eye, in any village. Thoreau and Emerson found it in Concord; +Thomas Hardy in Wessex has watched the world move by without himself +moving. But Mr. Tarkington has toward his native state the conscious +attitude of the booster. Smile as he may at the too emphatic patriotism +of this or that of her sons, he himself nevertheless expands under a +similar stimulus. The impulse of Harkless to clasp all Carlow County to +his broad breast obviously sprang from a mood which Mr. Tarkington +himself had felt. And that impulse of that first novel has been +repeated again and again in the later characters. _In the Arena_, fruit +of Mr. Tarkington's term in the Indiana legislature, is a study in +complacency. Setting out to take the world of politics as he finds it, +he comes perilously near to ending on the note of approval for it as it +stands--as good, on the whole, as any possible world. His satire, at +least, is on the side of the established order. A certain soundness and +rightness of feeling, a natural hearty democratic instinct, which +appears in the novels, must not be allowed to mislead the analyst of his +art. More than once, to his credit, he satirically recurs to the +spectacle of those young Indianians who come back from their travels +with a secret condescension, as did George Amberson Minafer: "His +politeness was of a kind which democratic people found hard to bear. In +a word, M. le Duc had returned from the gay life of the capital to show +himself for a week among the loyal peasants belonging to the old +chateau, and their quaint habits and costumes afforded him a mild +amusement." Such passages, however, may be matched with irritating +dozens in which Mr. Tarkington swallows Indiana whole. + +That may have been an easier task than to perform a similar feat with +the state to the east of Indiana, which has always been a sort of +halfway house between East and West; or with that to the north, with its +many alien mixtures; or with that to the south, the picturesque, +diversified colony of Virginia; or with that to the west, which, thanks +in large part to Chicago, is packed with savagery and genius. Indiana, +at any rate till very recently, has had an indigenous population, not +too daring or nomadic; it has been both prosperous and folksy, the apt +home of pastorals, the agreeable habitat of a sentimental folk-poet +like Riley, the natural begetter of a canny fabulist like George Ade. It +has a tradition of realism in fiction, but that tradition descends from +_The Hoosier School-Master_ and it includes a full confidence in the +folk and in the rural virtues--very different from that of E.W. Howe or +Hamlin Garland or Edgar Lee Masters in states a little further outside +the warm, cozy circle of the Hoosiers. Indiana has a tradition of +romance, too. Did not Indianapolis publish _When Knighthood Was in +Flower_ and _Alice of Old Vincennes_? They are of the same vintage as +_Monsieur Beaucaire_. And both romance and realism in Indiana have +traditionally worn the same smooth surfaces, the same simple--not to say +silly--faith in things-at-large: God's in His Indiana; all's right with +the world. George Ade, being a satirist of genius, has stood out of all +this; Theodore Dreiser, Indianian by birth but hopelessly a rebel, has +stood out against it; but Booth Tarkington, trying to be Hoosier of +Hoosiers, has given himself up to the romantic and sentimental elements +of the Indiana literary tradition. + +To practise an art which is genuinely characteristic of some section of +the folk anywhere is to do what may be important and is sure to be +interesting. But Mr. Tarkington no more displays the naivete of a true +folk-novelist than he displays the serene vision that can lift a +novelist above the accidents of his particular time and place. This +Indianian constantly appears, by his allusions, to be a citizen of the +world. He knows Europe; he knows New York. Again and again, particularly +in the superb opening chapters of _The Magnificent Ambersons_, he rises +above the local prejudices of his special parish and observes with a +finely critical eye. But whenever he comes to a crisis in the building +of a plot or in the truthful representation of a character he sags down +to the level of Indiana sentimentality. George Minafer departs from the +Hoosier average by being a snob; time--and Mr. Tarkington's plot--drags +the cub back to normality. Bibbs Sheridan departs from the Hoosier +average by being a poet; time--and Mr. Tarkington's plot--drags the cub +back to normality. Both processes are the same. Perhaps Mr. Tarkington +would not deliberately say that snobbery and poetry are equivalent +offenses, but he does not particularly distinguish. Sympathize as he may +with these two aberrant youths, he knows no other solution than in the +end to reduce them to the ranks. He accepts, that is, the casual Hoosier +valuation, not with pity because so many of the creative hopes of youth +come to naught or with regret that the flock in the end so frequently +prevails over individual talent, but with a sort of exultant hurrah at +seeing all the wandering sheep brought back in the last chapter and +tucked safely away in the good old Hoosier fold. + +Viewed critically this attitude of Mr. Tarkington's is of course not +even a compliment to Indiana, any more than it is a compliment to women +to take always the high chivalrous tone toward them, as if they were +flawless creatures; any more than it is a compliment to the poor to +assume that they are all virtuous or to the rich to assume that they are +all malefactors of a tyrannical disposition. If Indiana plays microcosm +to Mr. Tarkington's art, he owes it to his state to find more there than +he has found--or has cared to set down; he owes it to his state now and +then to quarrel with the dominant majority, for majorities occasionally +go wrong, as well as men; he owes it to his state to give up his method +of starting his narrative himself and then calling in popular +sentimentalism to advise him how to bring it to an end. + +According to all the codes of the more serious kinds of fiction, the +unwillingness--or the inability--to conduct a plot to its legitimate +ending implies some weakness in the artistic character; and this +weakness has been Mr. Tarkington's principal defect. Nor does it in any +way appear that he excuses himself by citing the immemorial license of +the romancer. Mr. Tarkington apparently believes in his own conclusions. +Now this causes the more regret for the reason that he has what is next +best to character in a novelist--that is, knack. He has the knack of +romance when he wants to employ it: a light, allusive manner; a +sufficient acquaintance with certain charming historical epochs and the +"properties" thereto pertaining--frills, ruffs, rapiers, insinuation; a +considerable expertness in the ways of the "world"; gay colors, swift +moods, the note of tender elegy. He has also the knack of satire, which +he employs more frequently than romance. With what a rapid, joyous, +accurate eye he has surveyed the processes of culture in "the Midland +town"! How quickly he catches the first gesture of affectation and how +deftly he sets it forth, entertained and entertaining! From the +chuckling exordium of _The Magnificent Ambersons_ it is but a step to +_The Age of Innocence_ and _Main Street_. Little reflective as he has +allowed himself to be, he has by shrewd observation alone succeeded in +writing not a few chapters which have texture, substance, "thickness." +He has movement, he has energy, he has invention, he has good temper, he +has the leisure to write as well as he can if he wishes to. And, unlike +those dozens of living American writers who once each wrote one good +book and then lapsed into dull oblivion or duller repetition, he has +traveled a long way from the methods of his greener days. + +Why then does he continue to trifle with his thread-bare adolescents, as +if he were afraid to write candidly about his coevals? Why does he drift +with the sentimental tide and make propaganda for provincial +complacency? He must know better. He can do better. + +_February 1921._ + + +POSTSCRIPT.--He has done better. Almost as if to prove a somewhat somber +critic in the wrong and to show that newer novelists have no monopoly of +the new style of seriousness, Mr. Tarkington has in _Alice Adams_ held +himself veracious to the end and has produced a genuinely significant +book. Alice is, indeed, less strictly a tragic figure than she appears +to be. Desire, in any of the deeper senses, she shows no signs of +feeling; what she loves in Russell is but incidentally himself and +actually his assured position and his assured prosperity. So considered, +her machinations to enchant and hold him have a comic aspect; one touch +more of exaggeration and she would pass over to join those sorry ladies +of the world of farce who take a larger visible hand in wooing than +human customs happen to approve. But Mr. Tarkington withholds that one +touch more of exaggeration. He understands that Alice's instinct to win +a husband is an instinct as powerful as any that she has and is all that +she has been taught by her society to have. In his handling she becomes +important; her struggle, without the aid of guardian dowager or +beguiling dot, becomes increasingly pathetic as the narrative advances; +and her eventual failure, though signalized merely by her resolution to +desert the inhospitable circles of privilege for the wider universe of +work, carries with it the sting of tragedy. + +Mr. Tarkington might have gone further than he has behind the bourgeois +assumptions which his story takes for granted, but he has probably been +wiser not to. Sticking to familiar territory, he writes with the +confident touch of a man unconfused by speculation. His style is still +swift, still easy, still flexible, still accurate in its conformity to +the vernacular. He attempts no sentimental detours and permits himself +no popular superfluities. He has retained all his tried qualities of +observation and dexterity while admitting to his work the element of a +sterner conscience than it has heretofore betrayed. With the honesty of +his conclusion goes the mingling of mirth and sadness in _Alice Adams_ +as another trait of its superiority. The manners of the young which +have always seemed so amusing to Mr. Tarkington and which he has kept on +watching and laughing at as his principal material, now practically for +the first time have evoked from him a considerate sense of the pathos of +youth. It strengthens the pathos of Alice's fate that the comedy holds +out so well; it enlarges the comedy of it that its pathos is so +essential to the action. Even the most comic things have their tears. + +_August 1921._ + + +2. EDITH WHARTON + +At the outset of the twentieth century O. Henry, in a mood of reaction +from current snobbism, discovered what he called the Four Million; and +during the same years, in a mood not wholly different, Edith Wharton +rediscovered what she would never have called the Four Hundred. Or +rather she made known to the considerable public which peeps at +fashionable New York through the obliging windows of fiction that that +world was not so simple in its magnificence as the inquisitive, but +uninstructed, had been led to believe. Behind the splendors reputed to +characterize the great, she testified on almost every page of her books, +lay certain arcana which if much duller were also much more desirable. +Those splendors were merely as noisy brass to the finer metal of the +authentic inner circles. These were very small, and they suggested an +American aristocracy rather less than they suggested the aborigines of +their native continent. + +Ralph Marvell in _The Custom of the Country_ described Washington +Square as the "Reservation," and prophesied that "before long its +inhabitants would be exhibited at ethnological shows, pathetically +engaged in the exercise of their primitive industries." Mrs. Wharton has +exhibited them in the exercise of industries not precisely primitive, +and yet aboriginal enough, very largely concerned in turning shapely +shoulders to the hosts of Americans anxious and determined to invade +their ancient reservations. As the success of the women in keeping new +aspirants out of drawing-room and country house has always been greater +than the success of the men in keeping them out of Wall Street, the +aboriginal aristocracy in Mrs. Wharton's novels transacts its affairs +for the most part in drawing-rooms and country houses. There, however, +to judge by _The House of Mirth_, _The Custom of the Country_, and _The +Age of Innocence_, the life of the inhabitants, far from being a +continuous revel as represented by the popular novelists, is marked by +nothing so much as an uncompromising decorum. + +Take the case of Lily Bart in _The House of Mirth_. She goes to pieces +on the rocks of that decorum, though she has every advantage of birth +except a fortune, and knows the rules of the game perfectly. But she +cannot follow them with the impeccable equilibrium which is needful; she +has the Aristotelian hero's fatal defect of a single weakness. In that +golden game not to go forward is to fall behind. Lily Bart hesitates, +oscillates, and is lost. Having left her appointed course, she finds on +trying to return to her former society that it is little less +impermeable to her than she has seen rank outsiders find it. Then there +is Undine Spragg in _The Custom of the Country_, who, marrying and +divorcing with the happy insensibility of the animals that mate for a +season only, undertakes to force her brilliant, barren beauty into the +centers of the elect. Such beauty as hers can purchase much, thanks to +the desires of men, and Undine, thanks to her own blindness as regards +all delicate disapproval, comes within sight of her goal. But in the end +she fails. The custom of her country--Apex City and the easy-going +West--is not the decorum of New York reinforced by European examples. +Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska in _The Age of Innocence_ neither lose +nor seek an established position within the social mandarinate of +Manhattan as constituted in the seventies of the last century. They +belong there and there they remain. But at what sacrifices of personal +happiness and spontaneous action! They walk through their little drama +with the unadventurous stride of puppets; they observe dozens of taboos +with a respect allied to terror. It is true that they appear to have +been the victims of the provincial "innocence" of their generation, but +the newer generation in New York is not entirely acquitted of a certain +complicity in the formalism of its past. + +From the first Mrs. Wharton's power has lain in the ability to reproduce +in fiction the circumstances of a compact community in a way that +illustrates the various oppressions which such communities put upon +individual vagaries, whether viewed as sin, or ignorance, or folly, or +merely as social impossibility. She has, of course, studied other +communities than New York: the priest-ridden Italy of the eighteenth +century in _The Valley of Decision_; modern France in _Madame de +Treymes_ and _The Reef_; provincial New England in _The Fruit of the +Tree_. What characterizes the New York novels characterizes these others +as well: a sense of human beings living in such intimate solidarity that +no one of them may vary from the customary path without in some fashion +breaking the pattern and inviting some sort of disaster. + +Novels written out of this conception of existence fall ordinarily into +partizanship, either on the side of the individual who leaves his herd +or on the side of the herd which runs him down or shuts him out for +good. Mrs. Wharton has always been singularly unpartizan, as if she +recognized it as no duty of hers to do more for the herd or its members +than to play over the spectacle of their clashes the long, cold light of +her magnificent irony. At the same time, however, her attitude toward +New York society, her most frequent theme, has slightly changed. _The +House of Mirth_, published in 1905, glows with certain of the colors of +the grand style. These appear hardly at all in _The Age of Innocence_, +published in 1920, as if Mrs. Wharton's feeling for ceremony had +diminished, as if the grand style no longer found her so susceptible as +formerly. Possibly her advance in satire may arise from nothing more +significant than her retreat into the past for a subject. Nevertheless, +one step forward could make her an invaluable satirist of the current +hour. + +Among Mrs. Wharton's novels are two--_Ethan Frome_ and _Summer_--which +unfold the tragedy of circumstances apparently as different as possible +from those chronicled in the New York novels. Her fashionable New York +and her rural New England, however, have something in common. In the +desolate communities which witness the agonies of Ethan Frome and +Charity Royall not only is there a stubborn village decorum but there +are also the bitter compulsions of a helpless poverty which binds feet +and wings as the most ruthless decorum cannot bind them, and which +dulls all the hues of life to an unendurable dinginess. As a member of +the class which spends prosperous vacations on the old soil of the +Puritans Mrs. Wharton has surveyed the cramped lives of the native +remnant with a pity springing from her knowledge of all the freedom and +beauty and pleasure which they miss. She consequently brings into her +narrative an outlook not to be found in any of the novelists who write +of rural New England out of the erudition which comes of more intimate +acquaintanceship. Without filing down her characters into types she +contrives to lift them into universal figures of aspiration or +disappointment. + +In _Ethan Frome_, losing from her clear voice for a moment the note of +satire, she reaches her highest point of tragic passion. In the bleak +life of Ethan Frome on his bleak hillside there blooms an exquisite love +which during a few hours of rapture promises to transform his fate; but +poverty clutches him, drives him to attempt suicide with the woman he +loves, and then condemns him to one of the most appalling expiations in +fiction--to a slavery in comparison with which his former life was +almost freedom. Not since Hawthorne has a novelist built on the New +England soil a tragedy of such elevation of mood as this. Freed from the +bondage of local color, that myopic muse, Mrs. Wharton here handles her +material not so much like a quarryman finding curious stones and calling +out about them as like a sculptor setting up his finished work on a +commanding hill. + +It has regularly been by her novels that Mrs. Wharton has attracted the +most attention, and yet her short stories are of a quite comparable +excellence. About fifty of them altogether, they show her swift, +ironical intelligence flashing its light into numerous corners of human +life not large enough to warrant prolonged reports. She can go as far +afield as to the ascetic ecstasies and agonies of medieval religion, in +_The Hermit and the Wild Woman_; or as to the horrible revenge of Duke +Ercole of Vicenza, in _The Duchess at Prayer_; or as to the murder and +witchcraft of seventeenth-century Brittany, in _Kerfol_. _Kerfol_, +_Afterward_, and _The Lady's Maid's Bell_ are as good ghost stories as +any written in many years. _Bunner Sisters_, an observant, tender +narrative, concerns itself with the declining fortunes of two +shopkeepers of Stuyvesant Square in New York's age of innocence. + +For the most part, however, the locality and temper of Mrs. Wharton's +briefer stories are not so remote as these from the center of her +particular world, wherein subtle and sophisticated people stray in the +crucial mazes of art or learning or love. Her artists and scholars are +likely to be shown at some moment in which a passionate ideal is in +conflict with a lower instinct toward profit or reputation, as when in +_The Descent of Man_ an eminent scientist turns his feet ruinously into +the wide green descent to "popular" science, or as when in _The Verdict_ +a fashionable painter of talent encounters the work of an obscure genius +and gives up his own career in the knowledge that at best he can never +do but third-rate work. Some such stress of conflict marks almost all +Mrs. Wharton's stories of love, which make up the overwhelming majority +of her work. Love with her in but few cases runs the smooth course +coincident with flawless matrimony. It cuts violently across the +boundaries drawn by marriages of convenience, and it suffers tragic +changes in the objects of its desire. + +What opportunity has a free, wilful passion in the tight world Mrs. +Wharton prefers to represent? Either its behavior must be furtive and +hypocritical or else it must incur social disaster. Here again Mrs. +Wharton will not be partizan. If in one story--such as _The Long +Run_--she seems to imply that there is no ignominy like that of failing +love when it comes, yet in another--such as _Souls Belated_--she sets +forth the costs and the entanglements that ensue when individuals take +love into their own hands and defy society. Not love for itself but love +as the most frequent and most personal of all the passions which bring +the community into clashes with its members--this is the subject of Mrs. +Wharton's curiosity and study. Her only positive conclusions about it, +as reflected in her stories, seem to be that love cuts deepest in the +deepest natures and yet that no one is quite so shallow as to love and +recover from it without a scar. Divorce, according to her +representations, can never be quite complete; one of her most amusing +stories, _The Other Two_, recounts how the third husband of a woman +whose first two husbands are still living gradually resolves her into +her true constituency and finds nothing there but what one husband after +another has made of her. + +In stories like this Mrs. Wharton occasionally leaves the restraint of +her ordinary manner to wear the keener colors of the satirist. _Xingu_, +for instance, with its famous opening sentence--"Mrs. Ballinger is one +of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous +to meet alone"--has the flash and glitter, and the agreeable +artificiality, of polite comedy. Undine Spragg and the many futile women +whom Mrs. Wharton enjoys ridiculing more than she gives evidence of +enjoying anything else belong nearly as much to the menagerie of the +satirist as to the novelist's gallery. It is only in these moments of +satire that Mrs. Wharton reveals much about her disposition: her +impatience with stupidity and affectation and muddy confusion of mind +and purpose; her dislike of dinginess; her toleration of arrogance when +it is high-bred. Such qualities do not help her, for all her spare, +clean movement, to achieve the march or rush of narrative; such +qualities, for all her satiric pungency, do not bring her into sympathy +with the sturdy or burly or homely, or with the broader aspects of +comedy. Lucidity, detachment, irony--these never desert her (though she +wrote with the hysterical pen that hundreds used during the war). So +great is her self-possession that she holds criticism at arm's length, +somewhat as her chosen circles hold the barbarians. If she had a little +less of this pride of dignity she might perhaps avoid her tendency to +assign to decorum a larger power than it actually exercises, even in the +societies about which she writes. Decorum, after all, is binding chiefly +upon those who accept it without question but not upon passionate or +logical rebels, who are always shattering it with some touch of violence +or neglect; neither does it bind those who stand too securely to be +shaken. For this reason the coils of circumstance and the pitfalls of +inevitability with which Mrs. Wharton besets the careers of her +characters are in part an illusion deftly employed for the sake of +artistic effect. She multiplies them as romancers multiply adventures. + +The illusion of reality in her work, however, almost never fails her, so +alertly is her mind on the lookout to avoid vulgar or shoddy romantic +elements. Compared to Henry James, her principal master in fiction, whom +she resembles in respect to subjects and attitude, she lacks exuberance +and richness of texture, but she has more intelligence than he. Compared +to Jane Austen, the novelist among Anglo-Saxon women whom Mrs. Wharton +most resembles, particularly as regards satire and decorum, she is the +more impassioned of the two. It may seem at first thought a little +strange to compare the vivid novels of the author of _The House of +Mirth_ with the mouse-colored narratives of the author of _Pride and +Prejudice_, for the twentieth century has added to all fiction many +overtones not heard in the eighteenth. But of no other woman writer +since Jane Austen can it be said quite so truthfully as of Mrs. Wharton +that her natural, instinctive habitat is a true tower of irony. + + +3. JAMES BRANCH CABELL + +Although most novelists with any historical or scholarly hankerings are +satisfied to invent here a scene and there a plot and elsewhere an +authority, James Branch Cabell has invented a whole province for his +imagination to dwell in. He calls it Poictesme and sets it on the map +of medieval Europe, but it has no more unity of time and place than has +the multitudinous land of _The Faerie Queene_. Around the reigns of Dom +Manuel, Count and Redeemer of Poictesme, epic hero of _Figures of +Earth_, father of the heroine in _The Soul of Melicent_ (later renamed +_Domnei_), father of that Dorothy la Desiree whom Jurgen loved (with +some other women), father also of that Count Emmerich who succeeded +Manuel as ruler at Bellegarde and Storisende--around the reigns of +Manuel and Emmerich the various sagas of Mr. Cabell principally revolve. +Scandinavia, however, conveniently impinges upon their province, with +Constantinople and Barbary, Massilia, Aquitaine, Navarre, Portugal, +Rome, England, Paris, Alexandria, Arcadia, Olympus, Asgard, and the +Jerusalems Old and New. As many ages of history likewise converge upon +Poictesme in its ostensible thirteenth or fourteenth century, from the +most mythological times only a little this side of Creation to the most +contemporary America of Felix Kennaston who lives at comfortable +Lichfield with two motors and with money in four banks but in his mind +habitually bridges the gap by imagined excursions into Poictesme and the +domains adjacent. + +Nothing but remarkable erudition in the antiquities as Cockaigne and +Faery could possibly suffice for such adventures as Mr. Cabell's, and he +has very remarkable erudition in all that concerns the regions which +delight him. And where no authorities exist he merrily invents them, as +in the case of his Nicolas of Caen, poet of Normandy, whose tales +_Dizain des Reines_ are said to furnish the source for the ten stories +collected in _Chivalry_, and whose largely lost masterpiece _Le Roman +de Lusignan_ serves as the basis for _Domnei_. One British critic and +rival of Mr. Cabell has lately fretted over the unblushing anachronisms +and confused geography of this parti-colored world. For less dull-witted +scholars these are the very cream of the Cabellian jest. + +The cream but not the substance, for Mr. Cabell has a profound creed of +comedy rooted in that romance which is his regular habit. Romance, +indeed, first exercised his imagination, in the early years of the +century when in many minds he was associated with the decorative Howard +Pyle and allowed his pen to move at the languid gait then characteristic +of a dozen inferior romancers. Only gradually did his texture grow +firmer, his tapestry richer; only gradually did his gaiety strengthen +into irony. Although that irony was the progenitor of the comic spirit +which now in his maturity dominates him, it has never shaken off the +romantic elements which originally nourished it. Rather, romance and +irony have grown up in his work side by side. His Poictesme is no less +beautiful for having come to be a country of disillusion; nor has his +increasing sense of the futility of desire robbed him of his old sense +that desire is a glory while it lasts. + +He allows John Charteris in _Beyond Life_--for the most part Mr. +Cabell's mouthpiece--to set forth the doctrine that romance is the real +demiurge, "the first and loveliest daughter of human vanity," whereby +mankind is duped--and exalted. "No one on the preferable side of Bedlam +wishes to be reminded of what we are in actuality, even were it +possible, by any disastrous miracle, ever to dispel the mist which +romance has evoked about all human doings." Therefore romance has +created the "dynamic illusions" of chivalry and love and common sense +and religion and art and patriotism and optimism, and therein "the ape +reft of his tail and grown rusty at climbing" has clothed himself so +long that as he beholds himself in the delusive mirrors he has for +centuries held up to nature he believes he is somehow of cosmic +importance. Poor and naked as this aspiring ape must seem to the eye of +reason, asks Mr. Cabell, is there not something magnificent about his +imaginings? Does the course of human life not singularly resemble the +dance of puppets in the hands of a Supreme Romancer? How, then, may any +one declare that romance has become antiquated or can ever cease to be +indispensable to mortal character and mortal interest? + +The difference between Mr. Cabell and the popular romancers who in all +ages clutter the scene and for whom he has nothing but amused contempt +is that they are unconscious dupes of the demiurge whereas he, aware of +its ways and its devices, employs it almost as if it were some +hippogriff bridled by him in Elysian pastures and respectfully +entertained in a snug Virginian stable. His attitude toward romance +suggests a cheerful despair: he despairs of ever finding anything truer +than romance and so contents himself with Poictesme and its tributaries. +The favorite themes of romance being relatively few, he has not troubled +greatly to increase them; war and love in the main he finds enough. + +Besides these, however, he has always been deeply occupied with one +other theme--the plight of the poet in the world. That sturdy bruiser +Dom Manuel, for instance, is at heart a poet who molds figures out of +clay as his strongest passion, although the world, according to its +custom, conspires against his instinct by interrupting him with love and +war and business, and in the end hustles him away before he has had time +to make anything more lovely or lasting than a reputation as a hero. In +the amazing fantasy _The Cream of the Jest_ Mr. Cabell has embodied the +visions of the romancer Felix Kennaston so substantially that +Kennaston's diurnal walks in Lichfield seem hardly as real as those +nightly ventures which under the guise of Horvendile he makes into the +glowing land he has created. Nor are the two universes separated by any +tight wall which the fancy must leap over: they flow with exquisite +caprice one into another, as indeed they always do in the consciousness +of a poet who, like Kennaston or Mr. Cabell, broods continually over the +problem how best to perform his function: "to write perfectly of +beautiful happenings." + +Of all the fine places in the world where beautiful happenings come +together, Mr. Cabell argues, incomparably the richest is in the +consciousness of a poet who is also a scholar. There are to be found the +precious hoarded memories of some thousands of years: high deeds and +burning loves and eloquent words and surpassing tears and laughter. +There, consequently, the romancer may well take his stand, distilling +bright new dreams out of ancient beauty. And if he adds the heady tonic +of an irony springing from a critical intelligence, so much the better. +When Mr. Cabell wishes to represent several different epochs in _The +Certain Hour_ he chooses to tell ten stories of poets--real or +imagined--as the persons in whom, by reason of their superior +susceptibility, the color of their epochs may be most truthfully +discovered; and when he wishes to decant his own wit and wisdom most +genuinely the vessel he normally employs is a poet. + +If the poets and warriors who make up the list of Mr. Cabell's heroes +devote their lives almost wholly to love, it is for the reason that no +other emotion interests him so much or seems to him to furnish so many +beautiful happenings about which to write perfectly. Love, like art, is +a species of creation, and the moods which attend it, though illusions, +are miracles none the less. Of the two aspects of love which especially +attract Mr. Cabell he has given the larger share of his attention to the +extravagant worship of women ("domnei") developed out of chivalry--the +worship which began by ascribing to the beloved the qualities of purity +and perfection, of beauty and holiness, and ended by practically +identifying her with the divine. This supernal folly reaches its apogee +in _Domnei_, in the careers of Perion and Melicent who are so uplifted +by ineffable desire that their souls ceaselessly reach out to each other +though obstacles large as continents intervene. For Perion the most +deadly battles are but thornpricks in the quest of Melicent; and such is +Melicent's loyalty during the years of her longing that the possession +of her most white body by Demetrios of Anatolia leaves her soul +immaculate and almost unperturbed. In this tale love is canonized: +throned on alabaster above all the vulgar gods it diffuses among its +worshipers a crystal radiance in which mortal imperfections perish--or +are at least forgotten during certain rapturous hours. + +Ordinarily one cynical touch will break such pretty bubbles; but Mr. +Cabell, himself a master of cynical touches and shrewdly anticipant of +them, protects his invention with the competent armor of irony, and now +and then--particularly in the felicitous tenson spoken by Perion and +Demetrios concerning the charms of Melicent--brings mirth and beauty to +an amalgam which bids fair to prove classic metal. A much larger share +of this mirth appears in _Jurgen_, which narrates with phallic candor +the exploits of a middle-aged pawnbroker of Poictesme in pursuit of +immortal desire. Of course he does not find it, for the sufficient +reason that, as Mr. Cabell understands such matters, the ultimate magic +of desire lies in the inaccessibility of the desired; and Jurgen, to +whom all women in his amorous Cockaigne are as accessible as bread and +butter, after his sly interval of rejuvenation comes back in the end to +his wife and his humdrum duty with a definite relief. He may be no more +in love with Dame Lisa than with his right hand, and yet both are +considerably more necessary to his well-being, he discovers, than a +number of more exciting things. + +Love in _Jurgen_ inclines toward another aspect of the passion which Mr. +Cabell has studied somewhat less than the chivalrous--the aspect of +gallantry. "I have read," says John Charteris, "that the secret of +gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its +inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that, among other requisites, +the gallant person will always consider the world with a smile of +toleration, and his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and +Heaven with a smile which is not distrustful--being thoroughly persuaded +that God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational." These +are the accents, set to slightly different rhythms, of a Congreve; and +if there is anything as remarkable about Mr. Cabell as the fact that he +has represented the chivalrous and the gallant attitudes toward love +with nearly equal sympathy, it is the fact that in an era of militant +naturalism and of renascent moralism he has blithely adhered to an +affection for unconcerned worldliness and has airily played Congreve in +the midst of all the clamorous, serious, disquisitive bassoons of the +national orchestra. + +In _The Cords of Vanity_ Robert Townsend goes gathering roses and +tasting lips almost as if the second Charles were still the lawful ruler +of his obedient province of Virginia; and in _The Rivet in Grandfather's +Neck_ Rudolph Musgrave, that quaint figure whittled out of chivalry and +dressed up in amiable heroics, is plainly contrasted with the glib rogue +of genius John Charteris, who, elsewhere in Mr. Cabell's books generally +the chorus, here enters the plot and exhibits a sorry gallantry in +action. Poictesme, these novels indicate, is not the only country Mr. +Cabell knows; he knows also how to feel at home, when he cares to, in +the mimic universe of Lichfield and Fairhaven, where gay ribbons +perpetually flutter, and where eyes and hands perpetually invite, and +where love runs a deft, dainty, fickle course in all weathers. + +That Felix Kennaston inhabits Lichfield in the flesh and in the spirit +elopes into Poictesme may be taken, after a fashion, as allegory with an +autobiographical foundation: _The Cream of the Jest_ is, on the whole, +the essence of Cabell. The book suggests, moreover, a critical +position--which is, that gallantry and Virginia have so far been +regrettably sacrificed to chivalry and Poictesme in the career of Mr. +Cabell's imagination. Not only the symmetry expected of that career +demands something different; so does its success with the gallantries of +Lichfield. In spite of all Mr. Cabell's accumulation of erudite +allusions the atmosphere of his Poictesme often turns thin and leaves +his characters gasping for vital breath; nor does he entirely restore it +by multiplying symbols as he does in _Jurgen_ and _Figures of Earth_ +until the background of his narrative is studded with rich images and +piquant chimeras that perplex more than they illuminate--and sometimes +bore. These chivalric loves beating their heads against the cold moon +are, after all, follies, however supernal; they are as brief as they are +bright; in the end even the greedy Jurgen turns back to honest salt from +too much sugar. + +Now in gallantry as Mr. Cabell conceives and represents it there is +always the salt of prudence, of satire, of comedy; and his gifts in this +direction are too great to be neglected. The comic spirit, let it be +remembered, has led Mr. Cabell from the softness and sweetness which in +spots disfigured his earlier romances--such as _The Line of Love and +Chivalry_--before he recently revised them; it has happily kept in hand +the wild wings of his later love stories; now it deserves to have its +way unburdened, at least occasionally. While it almost had its way in +Jurgen, where it behaved like a huge organ bursting into uproarious +laughter, it still had to carry the burden of much learning. It would be +freer of such delectable plunder could it once burst into uproar in the +midst of Virginia. Mr. Cabell has singled out two very dissimilar poets +for particular compliment: Marlowe and Congreve. As regards the still +more particular compliment of imitation, however, he has done Congreve +rather less than justice. + + +4. WILLA CATHER + +When Willa Cather dedicated her first novel, _O Pioneers!_, to the +memory of Sarah Orne Jewett, she pointed out a link of natural piety +binding her to a literary ancestor now rarely credited with descendants +so robust. The link holds even yet in respect to the clear outlines and +fresh colors and simple devices of Miss Cather's art; in respect to the +body and range of her work it never really held. The thin, fine +gentility which Miss Jewett celebrates is no further away from the rich +vigor of Miss Cather's pioneers than is the kindly sentiment of the +older woman from the native passion of the younger. Miss Jewett wrote of +the shadows of memorable events. Once upon a time, her stories all +remind us, there was an heroic cast to New England. In Miss Jewett's +time only the echoes of those Homeric days made any noise in the +world--at least for her ears and the ears of most of her literary +contemporaries. Unmindful of the roar of industrial New England she +kept to the milder regions of her section and wrote elegies upon the +epigones. + +In Miss Cather's quarter of the country there were still heroes during +the days she has written about, still pioneers. The sod and swamps of +her Nebraska prairies defy the hands of labor almost as obstinately as +did the stones and forests of old New England. Her Americans, like all +the Agamemnons back of Miss Jewett's world, are fresh from Europe, +locked in a mortal conflict with nature. If now and then the older among +them grow faint at remembering Bohemia or France or Scandinavia, this is +not the predominant mood of their communities. They ride powerfully +forward on a wave of confident energy, as if human life had more dawns +than sunsets in it. For the most part her pioneers are unreflective +creatures, driven by some inner force which they do not comprehend: they +are, that is perhaps no more than to say, primitive and epic in their +dispositions. + +Is it by virtue of a literary descent from the New England school that +Miss Cather depends so frequently upon women as protagonists? Alexandra +Bergson in _O Pioneers!_, Thea Kronborg in _The Song of the Lark_, +Antonia Shimerda in _My Antonia_--around these as girls and women the +actions primarily revolve. It is not, however, as other Helens or +Gudruns that they affect their universes; they are not the darlings of +heroes but heroes themselves. Alexandra drags her dull brothers after +her and establishes the family fortunes; Antonia, less positive and more +pathetic, still holds the center of her retired stage by her rich, +warm, deep goodness; Thea, a genius in her own right, outgrows her +Colorado birthplace and becomes a famous singer with all the fierce +energy of a pioneer who happens to be an instinctive artist rather than +an instinctive manager, like Alexandra, or an instinctive mother, like +Antonia. And is it because women are here protagonists that neither +wars, as among the ancients, nor machines, as among the moderns, promote +the principal activities of the characters? Less the actions than the +moods of these novels have the epic air. Narrow as Miss Cather's scene +may be, she fills it with a spaciousness and candor of personality that +quite transcends the gnarled eccentricity and timid inhibitions of the +local colorists. Passion blows through her chosen characters like a +free, wholesome, if often devastating wind; it does not, as with Miss +Jewett and her contemporaries, lurk in furtive corners or hide itself +altogether. And as these passions are most commonly the passions of +home-keeping women, they lie nearer to the core of human existence than +if they arose out of the complexities of a wider region. + +Something more than Miss Cather's own experience first upon the frontier +and then among artists and musicians has held her almost entirely to +those two worlds as the favored realms of her imagination. In them, +rather than in bourgeois conditions, she finds the theme most congenial +to her interest and to her powers. That theme is the struggle of some +elect individual to outgrow the restrictions laid upon him--or more +frequently her--by numbing circumstances. The early, somewhat +inconsequential _Alexander's Bridge_ touches this theme, though Bartley +Alexander, like the bridge he is building, fails under the strain, +largely by reason of a flawed simplicity and a divided energy. Pioneers +and artists, in Miss Cather's understanding of their natures, are +practically equals in single-mindedness; at least they work much by +themselves, contending with definite though ruthless obstacles and +looking forward, if they win, to a freedom which cannot be achieved in +the routine of crowded communities. To become too much involved, for her +characters, is to lose their quality. There is Marie Tovesky, in _O +Pioneers!_, whom nothing more preventable than her beauty and gaiety +drags into a confused status and so on to catastrophe. Antonia, tricked +into a false relation by her scoundrel lover, and Alexandra, nagged at +by her stodgy family because her suitor is poor, suffer temporary +eclipses from which only their superb health of character finally +extricates them. Thea Kronborg, troubled by the swarming sensations of +her first year in Chicago, has to find her true self again in that +marvelous desert canyon in Arizona where hot sun and bright, cold water +and dim memories of the cliff-dwelling Ancient People detach her from +the stupid faces which have haunted and unnerved her. + +Miss Cather would not belong to her generation if she did not resent the +trespasses which the world regularly commits upon pioneers and artists. +For all the superb vitality of her frontier, it faces--and she knows it +faces--the degradation of its wild freedom and beauty by clumsy towns, +obese vulgarity, the uniform of a monotonous standardization. Her heroic +days endure but a brief period before extinction comes. Then her +high-hearted pioneers survive half as curiosities in a new order; and +their spirits, transmitted to the artists who are their legitimate +successors, take up the old struggle in a new guise. In the short story +called _The Sculptor's Funeral_ she lifts her voice in swift anger and +in _A Gold Slipper_ she lowers it to satirical contempt against the dull +souls who either misread distinction or crassly overlook it. + +At such moments she enlists in the crusade against dulness which has +recently succeeded the hereditary crusade of American literature against +wickedness. But from too complete an absorption in that transient war +she is saved by the same strength which has lifted her above the more +trivial concerns of local color. The older school uncritically delighted +in all the village singularities it could discover; the newer school no +less uncritically condemns and ridicules all the village +conventionalities. Miss Cather has seldom swung far either to the right +or to the left in this controversy. She has, apparently, few revenges to +take upon the communities in which she lived during her expanding youth. +An eye bent too relentlessly upon dulness could have found it in +Alexandra Bergson, with her slow, unimaginative thrift; or in Antonia +Shimerda, who is a "hired girl" during the days of her tenderest beauty +and the hard-worked mother of many children on a distant farm to the end +of the story. Miss Cather, almost alone among her peers in this decade, +understands that human character for its own sake has a claim upon human +interest, surprisingly irrespective of the moral or intellectual +qualities which of course condition and shape it. + +"Her secret?" says Harsanyi of Thea Kronborg in _The Song of the Lark_. +"It is every artist's secret ... passion. It is an open secret, and +perfectly safe. Like heroism, it is inimitable in cheap materials." In +these words Miss Cather furnishes an admirable commentary upon the +strong yet subtle art which she herself practises. Fiction habitually +strives to reproduce passion and heroism and in all but chosen instances +falls below the realities because it has not truly comprehended them or +because it tries to copy them in cheap materials. It is not Miss +Cather's lucid intelligence alone, though that too is indispensable, +which has kept her from these ordinary blunders of the novelist: she +herself has the energy which enables her to feel passion and the honesty +which enables her to reproduce it. Something of the large tolerance +which she must have felt in Whitman before she borrowed from him the +title of _O Pioneers!_ breathes in all her work. Like him she has tasted +the savor of abounding health; like him she has exulted in the sense of +vast distances, the rapture of the green earth rolling through space, +the consciousness of past and future striking hands in the radiant +present; like him she enjoys "powerful uneducated persons" both as the +means to a higher type and as ends honorable in themselves. At the same +time she does not let herself run on in the ungirt dithyrambs of Whitman +or into his followers' glorification of sheer bulk and impetus. Taste +and intelligence hold her passion in hand. It is her distinction that +she combines the merits of those oddly matched progenitors, Miss Jewett +and Walt Whitman: she has the delicate tact to paint what she sees with +clean, quiet strokes; and she has the strength to look past casual +surfaces to the passionate center of her characters. + +The passion of the artist, the heroism of the pioneer--these are the +human qualities Miss Cather knows best. Compared with her artists the +artists of most of her contemporaries seem imitated in cheap materials. +They suffer, they rebel, they gesticulate, they pose, they fail through +success, they succeed through failure; but only now and then do they +have the breathing, authentic reality of Miss Cather's painters and +musicians. Musicians she knows best among artists--perhaps has been most +interested in them and has associated most with them because of the +heroic vitality which a virtuoso must have to achieve any real eminence. +The poet may languish over verses in his garret, the painter or sculptor +over work conceived and executed in a shy privacy; but the great singer +must be an athlete and an actor, training for months and years for the +sake of a few hours of triumph before a throbbing audience. It is, +therefore, not upon the revolt of Thea Kronborg from her Colorado +village that Miss Cather lays her chief stress but upon the girl's hard, +unspeculative, daemonic integrity. She lifts herself from alien +conditions hardly knowing what she does, almost as a powerful animal +shoulders its instinctive way through scratching underbrush to food and +water. Thea may be checked and delayed by all sorts of human +complications but her deeper nature never loses the sense of its proper +direction. Ambition with her is hardly more than the passion of +self-preservation in a potent spirit. + +That Miss Cather no less truly understands the quieter attributes of +heroism is made evident by the career of Antonia Shimerda--of Miss +Cather's heroines the most appealing. Antonia exhibits the ordinary +instincts of self-preservation hardly at all. She is gentle and +confiding; service to others is the very breath of her being. Yet so +deep and strong is the current of motherhood which runs in her that it +extricates her from the level of mediocrity as passion itself might fail +to do. Goodness, so often negative and annoying, amounts in her to an +heroic effluence which imparts the glory of reality to all it touches. +"She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize as +universal and true.... She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her +hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel +the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.... She was +a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races." It is not easy +even to say things so illuminating about a human being; it is all but +impossible to create one with such sympathetic art that words like these +at the end confirm and interpret an impression already made. + +_My Antonia_, following _O Pioneers!_ and _The Song of the Lark_, holds +out a promise for future development that the work of but two or three +other established American novelists holds out. Miss Cather's recent +volume of short stories _Youth and the Bright Medusa_, striking though +it is, represents, it may be hoped, but an interlude in her brilliant +progress. Such passion as hers only rests itself in brief tales and +satire; then it properly takes wing again to larger regions of the +imagination. Vigorous as it is, its further course cannot easily be +foreseen; it has not the kind of promise that can be discounted by +confident expectations. Her art, however, to judge it by its past +career, can be expected to move in the direction of firmer structure and +clearer outline. After all she has written but three novels and it is +not to be wondered at that they all have about them certain of the +graceful angularities of an art not yet complete. _O Pioneers!_ contains +really two stories; _The Song of the Lark_, though Miss Cather cut away +an entire section at the end, does not maintain itself throughout at the +full pitch of interest; the introduction to _My Antonia_ is largely +superfluous. Having freed herself from the bondage of "plot" as she has +freed herself from an inheritance of the softer sentiments, Miss Cather +has learned that the ultimate interest of fiction inheres in character. +It is a question whether she can ever reach the highest point of which +she shows signs of being capable unless she makes up her mind that it is +as important to find the precise form for the representation of a +memorable character as it is to find the precise word for the expression +of a memorable idea. At present she pleads that if she must sacrifice +something she would rather it were form than reality. If she desires +sufficiently she can have both. + + +5. JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER + +Joseph Hergesheimer employs his creative strategy over the precarious +terrain of the decorative arts, some of his work lying on each side of +the dim line which separates the most consummate artifice of which the +hands of talent are capable from the essential art which springs +naturally from the instincts of genius. On the side of artifice, +certainly, lie several of the shorter stories in _Gold and Iron_ and +_The Happy End_, for which, he declares, his grocer is as responsible as +any one; and on the side of art, no less certainly, lie at least _Java +Head_, in which artifice, though apparent now and then, repeatedly +surrenders the field to an art which is admirably authentic, and _Linda +Condon_, nearly the most beautiful American novel since Hawthorne and +Henry James. + +Standing thus in a middle ground between art and artifice Mr. +Hergesheimer stands also in a middle ground between the unrelieved +realism of the newer school of American fiction and the genteel moralism +of the older. "I had been spared," he says with regard to moralism, "the +dreary and impertinent duty of improving the world; the whole discharge +of my responsibility was contained in the imperative obligation to see +with relative truth, to put down the colors and scents and emotions of +existence." And with regard to realism: "If I could put on paper an +apple tree rosy with blossom, someone else might discuss the economy of +the apples." + +Mr. Hergesheimer does not, of course, merely blunder into beauty; his +methods are far from being accidental; by deliberate aims and principles +he holds himself close to the regions of the decorative. He likes the +rococo and the Victorian, ornament without any obvious utility, grace +without any busy function. He refuses to feel confident that the passing +of elegant privilege need be a benefit: "A maze of clipped box, old +emerald sod, represented a timeless striving for superiority, for, at +least, the illusion of triumph over the littorals of slime; and their +destruction in waves of hysteria, sentimentality, and envy was +immeasurably disastrous." For himself he clings sturdily, ardently, to +loveliness wherever he finds it--preferring, however, its richer, its +elaborated forms. + +To borrow an antithesis remarked by a brilliant critic in the work of +Amy Lowell, Mr. Hergesheimer seems at times as much concerned with the +stuffs as with the stuff of life. His landscapes, his interiors, his +costumes he sets forth with a profusion of exquisite details which gives +his texture the semblance of brocade--always gorgeous but now and then a +little stiff with its splendors of silk and gold. An admitted personal +inclination to "the extremes of luxury" struggles in Mr. Hergesheimer +with an artistic passion for "words as disarmingly simple as the leaves +of spring--as simple and as lovely in pure color--about the common +experience of life and death"; and more than anything else this conflict +explains the presence in all but his finest work of occasional heavy +elements which weight it down and the presence in his most popular +narratives of a constant lift of beauty and lucidity which will not let +them sag into the average. + +One comes tolerably close to the secret of Mr. Hergesheimer's career by +perceiving that, with an admirable style of which he is both conscious +and--very properly--proud, he has looked luxuriously through the world +for subjects which his style will fit. Particularly has he emancipated +himself from bondage to nook and corner. The small inland towns of _The +Lay Anthony_, the blue Virginia valleys of _Mountain Blood_, the +evolving Pennsylvania iron districts of _The Three Black Pennys_, the +antique Massachusetts of _Java Head_, the fashionable hotels and houses +of _Linda Condon_, the scattered exotic localities of the short +stories--in all these Mr. Hergesheimer is at home with the cool +insouciance of genius, at home as he could not be without an erudition +founded in the keenest observation and research. + +At the same time, he has not satisfied himself with the bursting +catalogues of some types of naturalism. "The individuality of places and +hours absorbed me ... the perception of the inanimate moods of place.... +Certainly houses and night and hills were often more vivid to me than +the people in or out of them." He has loved the scenes wherein his +events are transacted; he has brooded over their moods, their +significances. Neither pantheistic, however, nor very speculative, Mr. +Hergesheimer does not endow places with a half-divine, a half-satanic +sentience; instead he works more nearly in the fashion of his master +Turgenev, or of Flaubert, scrutinizing the surfaces of landscapes and +cities and human habitations until they gradually reveal what--for the +particular observer--is the essence of their charm or horror, and come, +obedient to the evoking imagination, into the picture. + +Substantial as Mr. Hergesheimer makes his scene by a masterful handling +of locality, he goes still further, adds still another dimension, by his +equally masterful handling of the past as an element in his microcosm. +"There was at least this to be said for what I had, in writing, laid +back in point of time--no one had charged me with an historical novel," +he boasts. Readers in general hardly notice how large a use of history +appears in, for instance, _The Three Black Pennys_ and _Java Head_. The +one goes as far back as to colonial Pennsylvania for the beginning of +its chronicle and the other as far as to Salem in the days of the first +clipper ship; and yet by no paraphernalia of languid airs or archaic +idioms or strutting heroics does either of the novels fall into the +orthodox historical tradition. They have the vivid, multiplied detail of +a contemporary record. And this is the more notable for the reason that +the characters in each of them stand against the background of a highly +technical profession--that of iron-making through three generations, +that of shipping under sail to all the quarters of the earth. The +wharves of Mr. Hergesheimer's Salem, the furnaces of his Myrtle Forge, +are thick with accurate, pungent, delightful facts. + +If he has explored the past in a deliberate hunt for picturesque images +of actuality with which to incrust his narrative, and has at +times--particularly in _The Three Black Pennys_--given it an exaggerated +patina, nevertheless he has refused to yield himself to the mere spell +of the past and has regularly subdued its "colors and scents and +emotions" to his own purposes. His materials may be rococo, but not his +use of them. The conflict between his personal preference for luxury and +his artistic passion for austerity shows itself in his methods with +history: though the historical periods which interest him are bounded, +one may say, by the minuet and the music-box, he permits the least +possible contagion of prettiness to invade his plots. They are fresh and +passionate, simple and real, however elaborate their trappings. With the +fullest intellectual sophistication, Mr. Hergesheimer has artistically +the courage of naivete. He subtracts nothing from the common realities +of human character when he displays it in some past age, but preserves +it intact. The charming erudition of his surfaces is added to reality, +not substituted for it. + +Without question the particular triumph of these novels is the women who +appear in them. Decorative art in fiction has perhaps never gone +farther than with Taou Yuen, the marvelous Manchu woman brought home +from Shanghai to Salem as wife of a Yankee skipper in _Java Head_. She +may be taken as focus and symbol of Mr. Hergesheimer's luxurious +inclinations. By her bewildering complexity of costume, by her intricate +ceremonial observances, by the impenetrability of her outward demeanor, +she belongs rather to art than to life--an Oriental Galatea radiantly +adorned but not wholly metamorphosed from her native marble. Only at +intervals does some glimpse or other come of the tender flesh shut up in +her magnificent garments or of the tender spirit schooled by flawless, +immemorial discipline to an absolute decorum. That such glimpses come +just preserves her from appearing a mere figure of tapestry, a fine +mechanical toy. The Salem which before her arrival seems quaintly formal +enough immediately thereafter seems by contrast raw and new, and her +beauty glitters like a precious gem in some plain man's house. + +Much the same effect, on a less vivid scale, is produced in _The Three +Black Pennys_ by the presence on the Pennsylvania frontier--it is almost +that--of Ludowika Winscombe, who has always lived at Court and who +brings new fragrances, new dainty rites, into the forest; and in +_Mountain Blood_ by the presence among the Appalachian highlands of that +ivory, icy meretrix Meta Beggs who plans to drive the best possible +bargain for her virgin favors. Meta carries the decorative traits of Mr. +Hergesheimer's women to the point at which they suggest the marionette +too much; by his methods, of course, he habitually runs the risk of +leaving the flesh and blood out of his women. He leaves out, at least, +with no fluttering compunctions, any special concern for the simpler +biological aspects of the sex: "It was not what the woman had in common +with a rabbit that was important, but her difference. On one hand that +difference was moral, but on the other aesthetic; and I had been +absorbed by the latter." "I couldn't get it into my head that +loveliness, which had a trick of staying in the mind at points of death +when all service was forgotten, was rightly considered to be of less +importance than the sweat of some kitchen drudge." + +Such robust doctrine is a long way from the customary sentimentalism of +novelists about maids, wives, mothers, and widows. Indeed, Mr. +Hergesheimer, like Poe before him, inclines very definitely toward +beauty rather than toward humanity, where distinctions may be drawn +between them. In Linda Condon, however, his most remarkable creation, he +has brought humanity and beauty together in an intimate fusion. Less +exotic than Taou Yuen, Linda, with her straight black bang and her +extravagant simplicity of taste, is no less exquisite. And like Taou +Yuen she affords Mr. Hergesheimer the opportunity he most desires--"to +realize that sharp sense of beauty which came from a firm, delicate +consciousness of certain high pretensions, valors, maintained in the +face of imminent destruction.... In that category none was sharper than +the charm of a woman, soon to perish, in a vanity of array as momentary +and iridescent as a May-fly." It is as the poet musing upon the fleet +passage of beauty rather than as the satirist mocking at the vanity of +human wishes that Mr. Hergesheimer traces the career of Linda Condon; +but both poet and satirist meet in his masterpiece. + +A woman as lovely as a lyric, she is almost as insensible as a steel +blade or a bright star. The true marvel is that beauty so cold can +provoke such conflagrations. Granted--and certain subtle women decline +to grant it--that Linda with her shining emptiness could have kindled +the passion she kindles in the story, what must be the blackness of her +discovery that when her beauty goes she will have left none of the +generous affection which, had she herself given it through life, she +might by this time have earned in quantities sufficient to endow and +compensate her for old age! Mr. Hergesheimer does not soften the blow +when it comes--he even adds to her agony the clear consciousness that +she cannot feel her plight as more passionate natures might. But he +allows her, at the last, an intimation of immortality. From her +unresponding beauty, she sees, her sculptor lover has caught a madness +eventually sublimated to a Platonic vision which, partially forgetful of +her as an individual, has made him and his works great. Without, in the +common way, modeling her at all, he has snared the essence of her spirit +and has set it--as such mortal things go--everlastingly in bronze. + +If Mr. Hergesheimer offers Linda in the end only the hard comfort of a +perception come at largely through her intellect, still as far as the +art of his novel is concerned he has immensely gained by his refusal to +make any trivial concession to natural weaknesses. His latest conclusion +is his best. _The Lay Anthony_ ends in accident, _Mountain Blood_ in +melodrama; _The Three Black Pennys_, more successful than its +predecessors, fades out like the Penny line; _Java Head_ turns sharply +away from its central theme, almost as if _Hamlet_ should concern itself +during a final scene with Horatio's personal perplexities. Now the +conclusions of a novelist are on the whole the test of his judgment and +his honesty; and it promises much for fiction that Mr. Hergesheimer has +advanced so steadily in this respect through his seven books. + +He has advanced, too, in his use of decoration, which reached its most +sumptuous in _Java Head_ and which in _Linda Condon_ happily began to +show a more austere control. The question which criticism asks is +whether Mr. Hergesheimer has not gone as far as a practitioner of the +decorative arts can go, and whether he ought not, during the remainder +of the eminent career which awaits him, to work rather in the direction +marked by _Linda Condon_ than in that marked by _Java Head_. The rumor +that his friends advise him to become a "period novelist" must disquiet +his admirers--even those among them who cannot think him likely to act +upon advice so dangerous to his art. Doubtless he could go on and write +another _Salammbo,_ but he does not need to: he has already written +_Java Head_. When a novelist has reached the limits of decoration there +still stretches out before him the endless road--which Mr. Hergesheimer +has given evidence that he can travel--of the interpretation and +elucidation of human character and its devious fortunes in the world. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +NEW STYLE + + +1. EMERGENT TYPES + +_Ellen Glasgow_ + +Fiction, no less than life, has its broad flats and shallows from which +distinction emerges only now and then, when some superior veracity or +beauty or energy lifts a novelist or a novel above the mortal average. +Consider, for example, the work of Ellen Glasgow. In her representations +of contemporary Virginia she long stood with the local colorists, +practising with more grace than strength what has come to seem an older +style; in her heroic records of the Virginia of the Civil War and +Reconstruction she frequently fell into the orthodox monotone of the +historical romancers. By virtue of two noticeable qualities, however, +she has in her later books emerged from the level established by the +majority and has ranged herself with writers who seem newer and fresher +than her early models. + +One quality is her sense for the texture of life, which imparts to _The +Miller of Old Church_ a thickness of atmosphere decisively above that of +most local color novels. She has admitted into her story various classes +of society which traditional Virginia fiction regularly neglects; she +has enriched her narrative with fresh and sweet descriptions of the soft +Virginia landscape; she has bound her plot together with the best of all +ligatures--intelligence. If certain of her characters--Abel Revercomb, +Reuben Merryweather, Betsey Bottom--seem at times a little too much like +certain of Thomas Hardy's rustics, still the resemblance is hardly +greater than that which actually exists between parts of rural Virginia +and rural Wessex; Miss Glasgow is at least as faithful to her scene as +if she had devoted herself solely to a chronicle of rich planters, poor +whites, and obeisant freedmen. Without any important sacrifice of +reality she has enlarged her material by lifting it toward the plane of +the pastoral and rounding it out with poetic abundance instead of +whittling it down with provincial shrewdness or weakening it with +village sentimentalism. + +That she does not lack shrewdness appears from the evidences in _Life +and Gabriella_ and still more in _Virginia_ of her second distinctive +quality--a critical attitude toward the conventions of her locality. In +one Miss Glasgow exhibits a modern Virginia woman breaking her medieval +shell in New York; in the other she examines the subsequent career of a +typical Southern heroine launched into life with no equipment but +loveliness and innocence. Loveliness, Virginia finds, may fade and +innocence may become a nuisance if wisdom happens to be needed. She +fails to understand and eventually to "hold" her husband; she gives +herself so completely to her children that in the end she has nothing +left for herself and is tragically dispensable to them. _Virginia_ is at +once the most thorough and the most pathetic picture extant of the +American woman as Victorianism conceived and shaped and misfitted her. +But the book is much more than a tract for feminism to point to: it is +unexpectedly full and civilized, packed with observation, tinctured with +omen and irony. + + +_William Allen White_ + +If Miss Glasgow emerges considerably--though not immensely--above the +deadly levels of fiction, so does William Allen White. What lifts him is +his hearty, bubbling energy. He has the courage of all his convictions, +of all his sentiments, of all his laughter, of all his tears. He has a +multitude of right instincts and sound feelings, and he habitually +reverts to them in the intervals between his stricter hours of thought. +Such stricter hours he is far from lacking. They address themselves +especially to the task of showing why and how corruption works in +politics and of tracing those effects of private greed which ruin souls +and torture societies. The hero-villains of _A Certain Rich Man_ and of +_In the Heart of a Fool_ tread all the paths of selfishness and come to +hard ends in punishment for the offense of counting the head higher than +the heart. + +These books being crowded with quite obvious doctrine it is fair to say +of them that they directly inculcate the life of simple human virtues +and services and accuse the grosser American standards of success. They +do this important thing within the limits of moralism, progressivism, +and optimism. John Barclay, the rich man, when his evil course is run, +hastily, unconvincingly divests himself of his spoils and loses his life +in an heroic accident. Thomas Van Dorn, the fool, finally arrives at +desolation because there has been no God in his heart, but he has no +more instructive background for a contrast to folly than the spectacle +of a nation entering the World War with what is here regarded as a vast +purgation, a magnificent assertion of the divinity in mankind. How such +a conclusion withers in the light and fire of time! Right instincts and +sound feelings are not, after all, enough for a novelist: somewhere in +his work there must appear an intelligence undiverted by even the +kindliest intentions; much as he must be of his world, he must be also +in some degree outside it as well as above it. + +Yet to be of his world with such knowledge as Mr. White has of Kansas +gives him one kind of distinction if not a different kind. His two +longer narratives sweep epically down from the days of settlement to the +time when the frontier order disappeared under the pressure of change. +He has a moving erudition in the history and characters and motives and +humors of the small inland town; no one has ever known more about the +outward customs and behaviors of an American state than Mr. White. His +shorter stories not less than his novels are racy with actualities: he +has caught the dialect of his time and place with an ear that is +singularly exact; he has cut the costumes of his men and villages so +that hardly a wrinkle shows. In particular he understands the pathos of +boyhood, seen not so much, however, through the serious eyes of boys +themselves as through the eyes of reminiscent men reflecting upon young +joys and griefs that will shortly be left behind and upon little pomps +that can never come to anything. _The Court of Boyville_ is now +hilariously comic, now tenderly elegiac. None of Mr. White's +contemporaries has quite his power to shift from bursts of laughter to +sudden, agreeable tears. That flood of moods and words upon which he can +be swept beyond the full control of his analytical faculties is but a +symptom of the energy which, when he turns to narrative, sweeps him and +his readers out of pedestrian gaits. + + +_Ernest Poole_ + +By comparison the more critical Ernest Poole suffers from a deficiency +of both verve and humor. He began his career with the happy discovery of +a picturesque, untrodden neighborhood of New York City in _The Harbor_; +he consolidated his reputation with the thoughtful study of a troubled +father of troubling daughters in _His Family_; since then he has sounded +no new chords, strumming on his instrument as if magic had deserted him. +Perhaps it was not quite magic by which his work originally won its +hearing. There is something a little unmagical, a little mechanical, +about the fancy which personifies the harbor of New York and makes it +recur and reverberate throughout that first novel. The matter was +significant, but the manner seems only at times spontaneous and at times +only industrious. Intelligence, ideas, observations, perception--these +hold up well in _The Harbor_; it is poetry that flags, though poetry is +invoked to carry out the pattern. Over humor Mr. Poole has but moderate +power, as he has perhaps but moderate interest in it: his characters are +themselves either fiercely or sadly serious, and they are seen with an +eye which has not quite the forgiveness of laughter or the pity of +disillusion. Roger Gale in _His Family_ broods, mystified, over what +seems to him the drift of his daughters into the furious currents of a +new age. Yet they fall into three categories--with some American +reservations--of mother, nun, courtesan, about which there is nothing +new; and all the tragic elements of the book are almost equally ancient. +Without the spacious vision which sees eternities in hours _His Family_ +contents itself too much with being a document upon a particular hour of +history. It has more kindliness than criticism. + +Mr. Poole, one hates to have to say, is frequently rather less than +serious: he is earnest; at moments he is hardly better than merely +solemn. Nevertheless, _The Harbor_ and _His Family_--_His Family_ easily +the better of the two--are works of honest art and excellent documents +upon a generation. Mr. Poole feels the earth reeling beneath the +desperate feet of men; he sees the millions who are hopelessly +bewildered; he hears the cries of rage and fear coming from those who +foretell chaos; he catches the exaltation of those who imagine that +after so long a shadow the sunshine of freedom and justice will shortly +break upon them. With many generous expectations he waits for the +revolution which shall begin the healing of the world's wounds. +Meanwhile he paints the dissolving lineaments of the time in colors +which his own softness keeps from being very stern or very deep but +which are gentle and appealing. + + +_Henry B. Fuller_ + +The peculiar strength and the peculiar weakness of Henry B. Fuller lie +in his faithful habit of being a dilettante. A generation ago, when the +aesthetic poets and critics were in bloom, Mr. Fuller in _The Chevalier +of Pensieri-Vani_ and _The Chatelaine of La Trinite_ played with +sentimental pilgrimages in Italy or the Alps, packing his narratives +with the most affectionate kind of archaeology and yet forever +scrutinizing them with a Yankee smile. A little later, when Howells's +followers had become more numerous, Mr. Fuller joined them with minute, +accurate, amused representations of Chicago in _The Cliff-Dwellers_ and +_With the Procession_. Then, as if bored with longer flights, he settled +himself to writing sharp-eyed stories concerning the life of art as +conducted in Chicago--_Under the Skylights_--and of Americans traveling +in Europe--_From the Other Side, Waldo Trench and Others_. After _Spoon +River Anthology_ Mr. Fuller took such hints from its method as he +needed in the pungent dramatic sketches of _Lines Long and Short_. One +of these sketches, called _Postponement_, has autobiography, it may be +guessed, in its ironic, wistful record of a Midwestern American who all +his life longed and planned to live in Europe but who found himself +ready to gratify his desire only in the dread summer of 1914, when peace +departed from the earth to stay away, he saw, at least as long as he +could hope to live. There is the note of intimate experience, if not of +autobiography, in these lucid words spoken about the hero of _On the +Stairs_: "he wanted to be an artist and give himself out; he wanted to +be a gentleman and hold himself in. An entangling, ruinous paradox." + +Fate, if not fatalism, has kept Mr. Fuller, this dreamer about old +lands, always resident in the noisiest city of the newest land and +always less, it seems, than thoroughly expressive. Had there been more +passion in his constitution he might, perhaps, have either detached +himself from Chicago altogether or submerged himself in it to a point of +reconciliation. But passion is precisely what Mr. Fuller seems to lack +or to be chary of. He dwells above the furies. As one consequence his +books, interesting as every one of them is, suffer from the absence of +emphasis. His utterance comes in the tone of an intelligent drawl. +Spiritually in exile, he lives somewhat unconcerned with the drama of +existence surrounding him, as if his gaze were farther off. Yet though +deficiency in passion has made Mr. Fuller an amateur, it has allowed him +the longest tether in the exercise of a free, penetrating intelligence. +He is not lightly jostled out of his equilibrium by petty irritations +or swept off his feet by those torrents of ready emotion which sweep +through popular fiction by their own momentum. Whenever, in _A Daughter +of the Middle Border_, Hamlin Garland brings Mr. Fuller into his story, +there is communicated the sense of a vivid intellect somehow keeping its +counsel and yet throwing off rays of suggestion and illumination. + +Without much question it is by his critical faculties that Mr. Fuller +excels. He has the poetic energy to construct, but less frequently to +create. Such endowments invite him to the composition of memoirs. He +has, indeed, in _On the Stairs_, produced the memoirs, in the form of a +novel, of a Chicagoan who could never adapt himself to his native +habitat and who gradually sees the control of life slipping out of his +hands to those of other, more potent, more decisive, less divided men. +But suppose Mr. Fuller were to surrender the ironic veil of fiction +behind which he has preferred to hide his own spiritual adventures! +Suppose he were avowedly to write the history of the arts and letters in +Chicago! Suppose he were, rather more confidingly, to trace the career +of an actual, attentive dilettante in his thunderous town! + + +_Mary Austin_ + +Criticism perceives in Mary Austin the certain signs of a power which, +for reasons not entirely clear, has as yet failed to express itself +completely in forms of art. She herself prefers less to be judged by any +of her numerous books than to be regarded as a figure laboring somewhat +anonymously toward the development of a national culture founded at all +points on national realities. Behind this preference is a personal +experience which must be taken into account in any analysis of Mrs. +Austin's work. Born in Illinois, she went at twenty to California, to +live between the Sierra Nevada and the Mohave Desert. There she was soon +spiritually acclimated to the wilderness, studied among the Indians the +modes of aboriginal life, and in time came to bear the relation almost +of a prophetess to the people among whom she lived. Her first book, _The +Land of Little Rain_, interpreted the desert chiefly as landscape. Since +then she has, it may be said, employed the desert as a measure of life, +constantly bringing from it a sense for the primal springs of existence +into all her comment upon human affairs. _The Man Jesus_ examines the +career of a desert-dweller who preached a desert-wisdom to a confused +world. Her play _The Arrow Maker_ exhibits the behavior and fortunes of +a desert-seeress among her own people. _Love and the Soul-Maker_ +anatomizes love as a primal force struggling with and through +civilization. From Paiute and Shoshone medicine men, the only poets Mrs. +Austin knew during her formative years, she acquired that grounding in +basic rhythms which led her to write free verse years before it became +the fashion in sophisticated circles and persuaded her that American +poetry cannot afford to overlook the experiments and successes of the +first American poets in fitting expression to the actual conditions of +the continent. + +It has been of course a regular tradition among novelists in the United +States to weigh the "settlements" in a balance and to represent them as +lacking the hardy virtues of the backwoods. Mrs. Austin goes beyond this +naive process. Whether she deals with the actual frontier--as in +_Isidro_ or _Lost Borders_ or _The Ford_--or with more crowded, more +complex regions--as in _The Woman of Genius_ or _26 Jayne Street_--she +keeps her particular frontier in mind not as an entity or a dogma but as +a symbol of the sources of human life and society. She creates, it +seems, out of depths of reflection and out of something even deeper than +reflection. She has observed the unconscious instincts of the individual +and the long memories of the race. The effect upon her novels of such +methods has been to widen their sympathies and to warm and lift their +style; it has also been to render them sometimes defective in structure +and sometimes obscure in meaning. If they are not glib, neither are they +always clean-cut or direct. Along with her generous intelligence she has +a good deal of the stubborn wilfulness of genius, and she has never +achieved a quite satisfactory fusion of the two qualities. She wears +something like the sibyl's robes and speaks with something like the +sibyl's strong accents, but the cool, hard discipline of the artist or +of the exact scholar only occasionally serves her. Much of her +significance lies in her promise. Faithful to her original vision, she +has moved steadily onward, growing, writing no book like its +predecessor, applying her wisdom continually to new knowledge, leaving +behind her a rich detritus which she will perhaps be willing to consider +detritus if it helps to nourish subsequent generations. + + +_Immigrants_ + +The newer stocks and neighborhoods in the United States have their +fictive records as well as the longer established ones, and there is +growing up a class of immigrant books which amounts almost to a separate +department of American literature. From Denmark, Germany, +Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, Russia, Rumania, Syria, Italy have come +passionate pilgrims who have set down, mostly in plain narratives, the +chronicles of their migration. As the first Americans contended with +nature and the savages, so these late arrivals contend with men and a +civilization no less hostile toward them; their writings continue, in a +way, the earliest American tradition of a concern with the risks and +contrivances by which pioneers cut their paths. Even when the immigrants +write fiction they tend to choose the same materials and thus to fall +into formulas, which are the more observable since the writers are the +survivors in the struggle and naturally tell about the successes rather +than the failures in the process of Americanization. + +Not all the stocks, of course, are equally interested in fiction or +gifted at it: the Russian Jews have the most notable novels to their +credit. Though these are generally composed by men not born in this +country, in Yiddish, and so belong to the history of that most +international of literatures, certain of them, having been translated, +belong obviously as well as actually to the common treasure of the +nation. Shalom Aleichem's _Jewish Children_ and Leon Kobrin's _A +Lithuanian Village_ surely belong, though their scenes are laid in +Europe; as do Sholom Asch's vivid, moving novels _Mottke the +Vagabond_--concerned with the underworld of Poland--and _Uncle +Moses_--concerned with the New York Ghetto--the recent translations of +which are slowly bringing to a wider American public the evidence that a +really eminent novelist has hitherto been partly hidden by his alien +tongue. + +There is no question whatever that the work of Abraham Cahan, Yiddish +scholar, journalist, novelist, belongs to the American nation. As far +back as the year in which Stephen Crane stirred many sensibilities with +his _Maggie_, the story of an Irish slum in Manhattan, Mr. Cahan +produced in _Yekl_ a book of similar and practically equal merit +concerning a Jewish slum in the same borough. But it and his later books +_The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories_ and _The White Terror and +the Red_ have been overwhelmed by novels by more familiar men dealing +with more familiar communities. The same has been true even of his +masterpiece, the most important of all immigrant novels, _The Rise of +David Levinsky_. It, too, records the making of an American, originally +a reader of Talmud in a Russian village and eventually the principal +figure in the cloak and suit trade in America. But it does more than +trace the career of Levinsky through his personal adventures: it traces +the evolution of a great industry and represents the transplanted +Russian Jews with affectionate exactness in all their modes of work and +play and love--another conquest of a larger Canaan. Here are fused +American hope and Russian honesty. At the end David, with all his New +World wealth, lacks the peace he might have had but for his sacrifice of +Old World integrity and faith. And yet the novel is very quiet in its +polemic. Its hero has gained in power; he is no dummy to hang maxims on. +Moving through a varied scene, gradually shedding the outward qualities +of his race, he remains always an individual, gnawed at by love in the +midst of his ambitions, subject to frailties which test his strength. + +The fact that Mr. Cahan wrote _David Levinsky_ not in his mother-tongue +but in the language of his adopted country may be taken as a sign that +American literature no less than the American population is being +enlarged by the influx of fresh materials and methods. The methods of +the Yiddish writers are, as might be expected, those of Russian fiction +generally, though in this they were anticipated by the critical +arguments of Howells and Henry James and are rivaled by the majority of +the naturalistic novelists. Their materials, as might not be expected, +have a sort of primitive power by comparison with which the orthodox +native materials of fiction seem often pale and dusty. The older +Americans, settled into smug routines, lack the vitality, the industry +of the newcomers. They are less direct and more provincial; they are +bundled up in gentilities and petty habits; they hide behind +old-fashioned reticences which soften the drama of their lives. With the +newer stocks an ancient process begins again. Their affairs are +conducted on the plane of desperate subsistence. Struggling to survive +at all, they cry out in the language of hunger and death; almost naked +in the struggle, they speak nakedly about livelihood and birth and +death. Sooner or later the immigrants must be perceived to have added +precious elements of passion and candor to American fiction. + + +2. THE REVOLT FROM THE VILLAGE + +_Edgar Lee Masters_ + +The newest style in American fiction dates from the appearance, in 1915, +of _Spoon River Anthology_, though it required five years for the +influence of that book to pass thoroughly over from poetry to prose. For +nearly half a century native literature had been faithful to the cult of +the village, celebrating its delicate merits with sentimental affection +and with unwearied interest digging into odd corners of the country for +persons and incidents illustrative of the essential goodness and heroism +which, so the doctrine ran, lie beneath unexciting surfaces. Certain +critical dispositions, aware of agrarian discontent or given to a +preference for cities, might now and then lay disrespectful hands upon +the life of the farm; but even these generally hesitated to touch the +village, sacred since Goldsmith in spite of Crabbe, sacred since +Washington Irving in spite of E.W. Howe. + +The village seemed too cosy a microcosm to be disturbed. There it lay in +the mind's eye, neat, compact, organized, traditional: the white church +with tapering spire, the sober schoolhouse, the smithy of the ringing +anvil, the corner grocery, the cluster of friendly houses; the venerable +parson, the wise physician, the canny squire, the grasping landlord +softened or outwitted in the end; the village belle, gossip, atheist, +idiot; jovial fathers, gentle mothers, merry children; cool parlors, +shining kitchens, spacious barns, lavish gardens, fragrant summer dawns, +and comfortable winter evenings. These were elements not to be discarded +lightly, even by those who perceived that time was discarding many of +them as the industrial revolution went on planting ugly factories +alongside the prettiest brooks, bringing in droves of aliens who used +unfamiliar tongues and customs, and fouling the atmosphere with smoke +and gasoline. Mr. Howe in _The Story of a Country Town_ had long ago +made it cynically clear--to the few who read him--that villages which +prided themselves upon their pioneer energy might in fact be stagnant +backwaters or dusty centers of futility, where existence went round and +round while elsewhere the broad current moved away from them. Mark Twain +in _The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg_ had more recently put it bitterly +on record that villages which prided themselves upon their simple +virtues might from lack of temptation have become a hospitable soil for +meanness and falsehood, merely waiting for the proper seed. And Clarence +Darrow in his elegiac _Farmington_ had insisted that one village at +least had been the seat of as much restless longing as of simple bliss. +_Spoon River Anthology_ in its different dialect did little more than to +confirm these mordant, neglected testimonies. + +That Mr. Masters was not neglected must be explained in part, of course, +by his different dialect. The Greek anthology had suggested to him +something which was, he said, "if less than verse, yet more than prose"; +and he went, with the step of genius, beyond any "formal resuscitation +of the Greek epigrams, ironical and tender, satirical and sympathetic, +as casual experiments in unrelated themes," to an "epic rendition of +modern life" which suggests the novel in its largest aspects. An +admirable scheme occurred to him: he would imagine a graveyard such as +every American village has and would equip it with epitaphs of a +ruthless veracity such as no village ever saw put into words. The effect +was as if all the few honest epitaphs in the world had suddenly come +together in one place and sent up a shout of revelation. + +Conventional readers had the thrill of being shocked and of finding an +opportunity to defend the customary reticences; ironical readers had the +delight of coming upon a host of witnesses to the contrast which irony +perpetually observes between appearance and reality; readers militant +for the "truth" discovered an occasion to demand that pious fictions +should be done away with and the naked facts exposed to the sanative +glare of noon. And all these readers, most of them unconsciously no +doubt, shared the fearful joy of sitting down at an almost incomparably +abundant feast of scandal. Where now were the mild decencies of +Tiverton, of Old Chester, of Friendship Village? The roofs and walls of +Spoon River were gone and the passers-by saw into every bedroom; the +closets were open and all the skeletons rattled undenied; brains and +breasts had unlocked themselves and set their most private treasures out +for the most public gaze. + +It was the scandal and not the poetry of _Spoon River_, criticism may +suspect, which particularly spread its fame. Mr. Masters used an +especial candor in affairs of sex, an instinct which, secretive +everywhere, has rarely ever been so much so as in the American villages +of fiction, where love ordinarily exhibited itself in none but the +chastest phases, as if it knew no savage vagaries, transgressed no +ordinances, shook no souls out of the approved routines. Reaction from +too much sweet drove Mr. Masters naturally to too much sour; sex in +Spoon River slinks and festers, as if it were an instinct which had not +been schooled--however imperfectly--by thousands of years of human +society to some modification of its rages and some civil direction of +its restless power. But here, as with the other aspects of behavior in +his village, he showed himself impatient, indeed violent, toward all +subterfuges. There is filth, he said in effect, behind whited +sepulchers; drag it into the light and such illusions will no longer +trick the uninstructed into paying honor where no honor appertains and +will no longer beckon the deluded to an imitation of careers which are +actually unworthy. + +Spoon River has not even the outward comeliness which the village of +tradition should possess: it is slack and shabby. Nor is its decay +chronicled in any mood of tender pathos. What strikes its chronicler +most is the general demoralization of the town. Except for a few saints +and poets, whom he acclaims with a lyric ardor, the population is sunk +in greed and hypocrisy and--as if this were actually the worst of +all--complacent apathy. Spiritually it dwindles and rots; externally it +clings to a pitiless decorum which veils its faults and almost makes it +overlook them, so great has the breach come to be between its practices +and its professions. Again and again its poet goes back to the heroic +founders of Spoon River, back to the days which nurtured Lincoln, whose +shadow lies mighty, beneficent, too often unheeded, over the degenerate +sons and daughters of a smaller day; and from an older, robuster +integrity Mr. Masters takes a standard by which he morosely measures the +purposelessness and furtiveness and supineness and dulness of the +village which has forgotten its true ancestors. + +Anger like his springs from a poetic elevation of spirit; toward the end +_Spoon River Anthology_ rises to a mystical vision of human life by +comparison with which the scavenging epitaphs of the first half seem, +though witty, yet insolent and trivial. It is perhaps not necessary to +point out that the numerous poets and novelists who have learned a +lesson from the book have learned it less powerfully from the difficult +later pages than from those in which the text is easiest. + +Mr. Masters himself has not always remembered the harder and better +lesson. During a half dozen years he has published more than a half +dozen books which have all inherited the credit of the _Anthology_ but +which all betray the turbulent, nervous habit of experimentation which +makes up a large share of his literary character. There comes to mind +the figure of a blind-folded Apollo, eager and lusty, who continually +runs forward on the trail of poetry and truth but who, because of his +blindfoldedness, only now and then strikes the central track. Five of +Mr. Masters's later books are collections of miscellaneous verse; during +the fruitful year 1920 he undertook two longer flights of fiction. In +_Mitch Miller_ he attempted in prose to write a new _Tom Sawyer_ for the +Spoon River district; in _Domesday Book_ he applied the method of _The +Ring and the Book_ to the material of Starved Rock. The impulse of the +first must have been much the same as Mark Twain's: a desire to catch in +a stouter net than memory itself the recollections of boyhood which +haunt disillusioned men. But as Mr. Masters is immensely less boylike +than Mark Twain, elegy and argument thrust themselves into the chronicle +of Mitch and Skeet, with an occasional tincture of a fierce hatred felt +toward the politics and theology of Spoon River. A story of boyhood, +that lithe, muscular age, cannot carry such a burden of doctrine. The +narrative is tangled in a snarl of moods. Its movement is often thick, +its wings often gummed and heavy. + +The same qualities may be noted in _Domesday Book_. Its scheme and +machinery are promising: a philosophical coroner, holding his inquest +over the body of a girl found mysteriously dead, undertakes to trace the +mystery not only to its immediate cause but up to its primary source and +out to its remotest consequences. At times the tale means to be an +allegory of America during the troubled, roiled, destroying years of the +war; at times it means to be a "census spiritual" of American society. +Elenor Murray, in her birth and love and sufferings and desperate end, +is represented as pure nature, "essential genius," acting out its fated +processes in a world of futile or corrupting inhibitions. But Mr. +Masters has less skill at portraying the sheer genius of an individual +than at arraigning the inhibitions of the individual's society. When he +steps down from his watch-tower of irony he can hate as no other +American poet does. His hates, however, do not always pass into poetry; +they too frequently remain hard, sullen masses of animosity not fused +with his narrative but standing out from it and adding an unmistakable +personal rhythm to the rough beat of his verse. So, too, do his heaps of +turgid learning and his scientific speculations often remain undigested. +A good many of his characters are cut to fit the narrative plan, not +chosen from reality to make up the narrative. The total effect is often +crude and heavy; and yet beneath these uncompleted surfaces are the +sinews of enormous power: a greedy gusto for life, a wide imaginative +experience, tumultuous uprushes; of emotion and expression, an acute if +undisciplined intelligence, great masses of the veritable stuff of +existence out of which great novels are made. + + +_Sherwood Anderson_ + +_Spoon River Anthology_ has called forth a smaller number of deliberate +imitations than might have been expected, and even they have utilized +its method with a difference. Sherwood Anderson, for example, in +_Winesburg, Ohio_ speaks in accents and rhythms obstinately his own, +though his book is, in effect, the _Anthology_ "transprosed." Instead of +inventing Winesburg immediately after Spoon River became famous he began +his career more regularly, with the novels _Windy McPherson's Son_ and +_Marching Men_, in which he employed what has become the formula of +revolt for recent naturalism. In both stories a superior youth, of +rebellious energy and somewhat inarticulate ambition, detaches himself +in disgust from his native village and makes his way to the city in +search of that wealth which is the only thing the village has ever +taught him to desire though it is unable to gratify his desires itself; +and in both the youth, turned man, finds himself sickening with his +prize in his hands and looks about him for some clue to the meaning of +the mad world in which he has succeeded without satisfaction. Sam +McPherson, after a futile excursion through the proletariat in search of +the peace which he has heard accompanies honest toil, settles down to +the task of bringing up some children he has adopted and thus of forcing +himself "back into the ranks of life." Beaut McGregor, refusing a +handsome future at the bar, sets out to organize the workers of Chicago +into marching men who drill in the streets and squares at night that +they may be prepared for action if only they can find some sort of goal +to march upon. + +These novels ache with the sense of a dumb confusion in America; with a +consciousness "of how men, coming out of Europe and given millions of +square miles of black fertile land mines and forests, have failed in the +challenge given them by fate and have produced out of the stately order +of nature only the sordid disorder of man." Out of this ache of +confusion comes no lucidity. Sam McPherson is not sure but that he will +find parenthood as petty as business was brutal; Beaut McGregor sets his +men to marching and their orderly step resounds through the final +chapters of his career as here recorded, but no one knows what will come +of it--they advance and wheel and retreat as blindly as any horde of +peasants bound for a war about which they do not know the causes, in a +distant country of which they have never heard the name. Mr. Anderson +worked in his first books as if he were assembling documents on the eve +of revolution. Village peace and stability have departed; ancient +customs break or fade; the leaven of change stirs the lump. + +From such arguments he turned aside to follow Mr. Masters into verse +with _Mid-American Chants_ and into scandal with _Winesburg, Ohio_. But +touching scandal with beauty as his predecessor touched it with irony, +Mr. Anderson constantly transmutes it. The young man who here sets out +to make his fortune has not greatly hated Winesburg, and the imminence +of his departure throws a vaguely golden mist over the village, which is +seen in considerable measure through his generous if inexperienced eyes. +A newspaper reporter, he directs his principal curiosity towards items +of life outside the commonplace and thus offers Mr. Anderson the +occasion to explore the moral and spiritual hinterlands of men and women +who outwardly walk paths strict enough. + +If the life of the tribe is unadventurous, he seems to say, there is +still the individual, who, perhaps all the more because of the rigid +decorums forced upon him, may adventure with secret desires through +pathless space. Only, the pressure of too many inhibitions can distort +human spirits into grotesque forms. The inhabitants of Winesburg tend +toward the grotesque, now this organ of the soul enlarged beyond all +symmetry, now that wasted away in a desperate disuse. They see visions +which in some wider world might become wholesome realities or might be +dispelled by the light but which in Winesburg must lurk about till they +master and madden with the strength which the darkness gives them. +Religion, deprived in Winesburg of poetry, fritters its time away over +Pharisaic ordinances or evaporates in cloudy dreams; sex, deprived of +spontaneity, settles into fleshly habit or tortures its victim with the +malice of a thwarted devil; heroism of deed or thought either withers +into melancholy inaction or else protects itself with a sullen or +ridiculous bravado. + +Yet even among such pitiful surroundings Mr. Anderson walks tenderly. He +honors youth, he feels beauty, he understands virtue, he trusts wisdom, +when he comes upon them. He broods over his creatures with affection, +though he makes no luxury of illusions. Much as he has detached himself +from the cult of the village, he still cherishes the memories of some +specific Winesburg. Much as he has detached himself from the hazy +national optimism of an elder style in American thinking, he still +cherishes a confidence in particular persons. _Winesburg, Ohio_ springs +from the more intimate regions of his mind and is consequently more +humane and less doctrinaire than his earlier novels. It has a similar +superiority over the book he wrote for 1920, _Poor White_, which returns +to the device of a bewildered strong man rising from a dull obscurity, +successful but unsatisfied. At the same time _Poor White_ proceeds from +an imagination which had been warmed with the creation of Winesburg and +its people and is richer, fuller, deeper than the angular sagas of +McPherson and McGregor. It does not yet show that Mr. Anderson can +construct a large plot or that his vision comes with a steady gleam; it +shows, rather, that he is still fumbling in the confusion of current +life to get hold of something true and simple and to make it clear. + +Perhaps he tried in _Poor White_ to manipulate a larger bulk than he is +yet ready for. Perhaps because he was aware of that he has worked in his +latest book, _The Triumph of the Egg_, with a variety of brief themes +and has excelled even _Winesburg_ in both poetry and truth. At least it +is certain that he keeps on advancing in his art. Although life has not +hardened for him, and he sees it still flowing or whirling, he steadily +sharpens his outlines and perfects the fierce intensity of his style. +Will his wisdom ever catch up with his passion and his observation? In +each successive book he has revealed himself as still hot with the fever +of his day's experiences. He has yet to show that he can go through the +confusion of new spiritual adventures and then set them down, +remembering, in tranquillity. + + +_E.W. Howe_ + +With _The Anthology of Another Town_ E.W. Howe, obviously on the +suggestion of Spoon River, returned to the caustic analysis of American +village life which he may be said to have inaugurated in _The Story of a +Country Town_ almost forty years before. Then he had been young enough +to feel it necessary to invent romantic embroideries for his grim tale, +somewhat as Emily Bronte under somewhat similar circumstances has done +for _Wuthering Heights_--the novel which Mr. Howe's story most +resembles. But all his inventions were stern, full of a powerful +dissatisfaction, merciless toward the idyllic versions of country life +which sweetened the decade of the eighties. Even among the pioneers whom +Mr. Masters idealizes there were, according to the older man, slackness +and shabbiness, and at the first opportunity to take their ease in the +new world they had won from nature they sank down, too nerveless for +passion or violence, into the easy vices: idleness, whining, gossip, +drunkenness, sodden inutility. Against such qualities Mr. Howe has from +the first proceeded with the doctrines of another Franklin, but of a +Franklin without whimsical persuasions or elegant graces. Having +apparently come to the conclusion that he was a failure as a novelist +because he made no great stir with his experiments in that trade, he +confined himself to more or less orthodox journalism for a generation, +and then, retiring, founded his organ of "indignation and +information"--_E.W. Howe's Monthly_--and began to pour forth the stream +of aphoristic honesty which makes him easily first among the rural +sages. + +In no sense, of course, does he assume the cosmopolitan and +international attitude which most of the naturalists assume: +"Provincialism," he curtly says, "is the best thing in the world." Nor +is he in any of the casual senses a radical: "In everything in which man +is interested, the world knows what is best for him.... Millions of men +have lived millions of years, and tried everything." Neither has he any +patience with speculation for its own sake: "There are no mysteries. +Where does the wind come from? It doesn't matter: we know the habits of +wind after it arrives." As to politics: "The people are always worsted +in an election." As to altruism: "The long and the short of it is, +whoever catches the fool first is entitled to shear him." As to love: +"We cannot permit love to run riot; we must build fences around it, as +we do around pigs." As to money: "In theory, it is not respectable to be +rich. In fact, poverty is a disgrace." As to literature: "Poets are +prophets whose prophesying never comes true." As to prudence: "Trying to +live a spiritual life in a material world is the greatest folly I know +anything about." As to persistent hopefulness: "Pessimism is always +nearer the truth than optimism." + +When the author of such aphorisms undertook to write another anthology +about another town he naturally avoided the mystical elevation of Spoon +River as well as its verse; he used the irony of a disillusioned man and +the directness of a bullet. His scheme was not to assemble epitaphs for +the dead of the village but to tell crisp anecdotes of the living. He +had no iniquities in the human order to assail, since he believes that +the order is just and that it rarely hurts any one who does not deserve +to be hurt by reason of some avoidable imbecility. He made no specialty +of scandal; he did not inquire curiously into the byways of sex; he let +pathology alone. He appears in the book to be--as he is in the flesh--a +wise old man letting his memory run through the town and recalling bits +of decent, illuminating gossip. He is willing to tell a fantastic yarn +with a dry face or to tuck a tragedy in a sentence; to repeat some +village legend in his own low tones or to puncture some village bubble +with a cynical inquiry. + +Yet for all his acceptance and tolerance of the village he is far from +helping to continue the sentimental traditions concerning it. The common +sense which he considers the basis of all philosophy--"If it isn't +common sense, it isn't philosophy"--he has the gift of expounding in a +language which is piercingly individual. It strips his village of +trivial local color and reduces it to the simplest terms--making it out +a more or less fortuitous congregation of human beings of whom some work +and some play, some behave themselves and some do not, some consequently +prosper and some fail, some are happy and some are miserable. His +village is not dainty, like a poem, for the reason that he believes no +village ever was; at least he has never seen one like that. +Downrightness like his is death to mere pretty notions about tribes and +towns quite as truly as are the positive indictments brought against +them by Mr. Masters and Mr. Anderson. If Mr. Howe is less vivid than +those two, because he distrusts passion and poetry, he is also quieter +and surer. "I am not an Agnostic; I _know_.... I have lived a long time, +and my real problems have always been simple." + + +_Sinclair Lewis_ + +_Spoon River Anthology_ was a collection of poems, _Winesburg, Ohio_ was +a collection of short stories, _The Anthology of Another Town_ was a +collection of anecdotes. It remained for a novel in the customary form, +Sinclair Lewis's _Main Street_, to bring to hundreds of thousands the +protest against the village which these books brought to thousands. + +Mr. Lewis, like Mr. Masters, clearly has revenges to take upon the +narrow community in which he grew up, nourished, no doubt, on the +complacency native to such neighborhoods and yet increasingly resentful. +Less poetical than his predecessor, the younger novelist went further in +both his specifications and his generalizations. Instead of brooding +closely, ironically, profoundly, under the black wings of the thought of +death, Mr. Lewis satisfies himself with a slashing portrait of Gopher +Prairie done to the life with the fingers of ridicule. He has +photographic gifts of accuracy; he has all the arts of mimicry; he has a +tireless gusto in his pursuit of the tedious commonplace. Each item of +his evidence is convincing, and the accumulation is irresistible. No +other American small town has been drawn with such exactness of detail +in any other American novel. Various elements of scandal crop out here +and there, but the principal accusation which Mr. Lewis brings against +his village--and indeed against all villages--is that of being dull. "It +is contentment ... the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful +of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as +the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is +slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dulness made God." + +Not dulness itself so much as dulness militant and prospering arouses +this satirist. The whole world, he believes, is being leveled by the +march of machines into one monotonous uniformity, before which all the +individual colors and graces and prides and habits flee--or would flee +if there were any asylum still uninvaded. Thus Mr. Lewis's voice +continues the opposition which Wordsworth raised to the coming of a +railroad into his paradise among the Lakes and which Ruskin and Matthew +Arnold and William Morris raised to the standardization of life which +went on during their century. The American voice, however, speaks of +American conditions. The villages of the Middle West, it asseverates, +have been conquered and converted by the legions of mediocrity, and now, +grown rich and vain, are setting out to carry the dingy banner, led by +the booster's calliope and the evangelist's bass drum, farther than it +has ever gone before--to make provincialism imperialistic; so that all +the native and instinctive virtues, freedoms, powers must rally in their +own defense. + +Mr. Lewis hates such dulness--the village virus--as the saints hate sin. +Indeed it is with a sort of new Puritanism that he and his +contemporaries wage against the dull a war something like that which +certain of their elders once waged against the bad. Only a satiric anger +helped out by the sense of being on crusade could have sustained the +author of _Main Street_ through the laborious compilation of those +brilliant details which illustrate the complacency of Gopher Prairie and +which seem less brilliant than laborious to bystanders not particularly +concerned in his crusade. The question, of course, arises whether the +ancient war upon stupidity is a better literary cause to fight in than +the equally ancient war upon sin. Both narrow themselves to doctrinal +contentions, apparently forgetting for the moment that either being +virtuous or being intelligent is but a half--or thereabouts--of +existence, and that the two qualities are hopelessly intertwined. There +are thoughtful novelists who, as they do not condemn lapses of virtue +too harshly, so also do not too harshly condemn deficiencies of +intelligence, feeling that the common humanity of men and women is +enough to make them fit for fiction. Mr. Lewis must be thought of as +sitting in the seat of the scornful, with the satirists rather than with +the poets, must be seen to recall the earlier, vexed, sardonic _Spoon +River_ rather than the later, calmer, loftier. + +Satire and moralism, however, have large rights in the domain of +literature. Had Mr. Lewis lacked remarkable gifts he could never have +written a book which got its vast popularity by assailing the populace. +The reception of _Main Street_ is a memorable episode in literary +history. Thousands doubtless read it merely to quarrel with it; other +thousands to find out what all the world was talking about; still other +thousands to rejoice in a satire which they thought to be at the +expense of stupid people never once identified with themselves; but that +thousands and hundreds of thousands read it is proof enough that +complacency was not absolutely victorious and that the war was on. + + +_Zona Gale_ + +Before _Main Street_ Sinclair Lewis, though the author of such promising +novels as _Our Mr. Wrenn_ and _The Job_, had been forced by the neglect +of his more serious work to earn a living with the smarter set among +American novelists, writing bright, colloquial, amusing chatter for +popular magazines. If it seems a notable achievement for a temper like +Mr. Masters's to have helped pave the way to popularity for Mr. Lewis, +it seems yet more notable to have performed a similar service for Zona +Gale, who for something like a decade before _Spoon River Anthology_ had +had a comfortable standing among the sweeter set. She was the inventor +of Friendship Village, one of the sweetest of all the villages from Miss +Mitford and Mrs. Gaskell down. Friendship lay ostensibly in the Middle +West, but it actually stood--if one may be pardoned an appropriate +metaphor--upon the confectionery shelf of the fiction shop, preserved in +a thick syrup and set up where a tender light could strike across it at +all hours. In story after story Miss Gale varied the same device: that +of showing how childlike children are, how sisterly are sisters, how +brotherly are brothers, how motherly are mothers, how fatherly are +fathers, how grandmotherly and grandfatherly are grandmothers and +grandfathers, and how loverly are all true lovers of whatever age, sex, +color, or condition. But beneath the human kindness which had permitted +Miss Gale to fall into this technique lay the sinews of a very subtle +intelligence; and she needed only the encouragement of a changing public +taste to be able to escape from her sugary preoccupations. Though the +action of _Miss Lulu Bett_ takes place in a different village, called +Warbleton, it might as well have been in Friendship--in Friendship seen +during a mood when its creator had grown weary of the eternal +saccharine. Now and then, she realized, some spirit even in Friendship +must come to hate all those idyllic posturings; now and then in some +narrow bosom there must flash up the fires of youth and revolution. It +is so with Lulu Bett, dim drudge in the house of her silly sister and of +her sister's pompous husband: a breath of life catches at her and she +follows it on a pitiful adventure which is all she has enough vitality +to achieve but which is nevertheless real and vivid in a waste of +dulness. + +Here was an occasion to arraign Warbleton as Mr. Lewis was then +arraigning Gopher Prairie; Miss Gale, instead of heaping up a multitude +of indictments, categorized and docketed, followed the path of +indirection which--by a paradoxical axiom of art--is a shorter cut than +the highway of exposition or anathema. Her story is as spare as the +virgin frame of Lulu Bett; her style is staccato in its lucid brevity, +like Lulu's infrequent speeches; her eloquence is not that of a torrent +of words and images but that of comic or ironic or tragic meaning packed +in a syllable, a gesture, a dumb silence. Miss Gale riddles the tedious +affectations of the Deacon household almost without a word of comment; +none the less she exhibits them under a withering light. The daughter, +she says, "was as primitive as pollen"--and biology rushes in to explain +Di's blind philanderings. "In the conversations of Dwight and Ina," it +is said of the husband and wife, "you saw the historical home forming in +clots in the fluid wash of the community"--and anthropology holds the +candle. Grandma Bett is, for the moment, the symbol of decrepit age, as +Lulu is the symbol of bullied spinsterhood. Yet in the midst of +applications so universal the American village is not forgotten, little +as it is alluded to. If the Friendships are sweet and dainty, so are +they--whether called Warbleton or something less satiric--dull and +petty, and they fashion their Deacons no less than their Pelleases and +Ettares. Thus hinting, Miss Gale, in her clear, flutelike way, joins the +chorus in which others play upon noisier instruments. + + +_Floyd Dell_ + +The year which saw the appearance of _Main Street_ and _Miss Lulu Bett_ +saw also that of _The Age of Innocence_, Edith Wharton's acid +delineation of the village of Manhattan in the genteel seventies, given +over to the "innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the +heart against experience"; saw Mary Borden's _The Romantic Woman_, with +its cosmopolitan amusement at the village of Iroquois, otherwise +Chicago; and saw Floyd Dell's _Moon-Calf_, which, standing on the other +side of controversy, lacks not only the disposition to sentimentalize +the village but even the disposition to ridicule it. + +Mr. Dell's emancipation is the fruit of a revolutionary detachment from +village standards which is too complete to have left traces of any such +rupture as is implied in almost every paragraph of _Main Street_. +_Moon-Calf_, recounting the adventures of a young poet in certain river +counties and towns and villages of Illinois, touches without heat upon +the spiritual and intellectual limitations of those neighborhoods. It +settles no old scores. It relates an unconventional career without +conventional reproaches and also without conventional heroics. Felix Fay +dreams and blunders and suffers but he goes on growing like a tree, +pushing his head up through one level of development after another until +he stands above the minor annoyances of his immaturity and looks out +over a broader world. He has a soul which is naturally socialist and yet +he never loses himself in proclamations or statistics. He can be fresh +and hopeful and yet learn from the remarkable old men he encounters. He +lives and loves with an instinctive freedom and yet he holds himself +equally secure from devastating extravagances and devastating +repressions. Mr. Dell writes as if he had steadier nerves than most of +the naturalists; as if he regarded their war upon the village as an +ancient brawl which may now be assumed to have been as much settled as +it ever will be. At least, it seems scarcely worth wrangling over. The +spirit seeking to release itself from trivial conditions behaves most +intelligently when it discreetly takes them into account and concerns +itself with them only enough to escape entanglements. Mr. Dell leaves it +to the moralists and the satirists to whip offenders, while he himself +goes on to construct some monument of beauty upon the ground which +moralism and satire are laboring to clear. + +_Moon-Calf_ is very beautiful. Felix has a poetic gift sufficient to +warm the record with fine verses and delicate susceptibilities upon +which his adventures leave exquisite impressions. Even when his +rebellion is at its highest pitch he wastes little energy in hating and +so avoids the astringency and perturbation of a state of mind which is +always perilous. To say Felix Fay is more or less to mean Floyd Dell, +for the narrative is obviously autobiographic at many points. But were +it entirely invention it would testify none the less to the affection +with which this novelist feels his world and the lucidity with which he +represents it. He has a genuine zest for human life, enjoying it, even +when it invites mirth or anger, because of the form and color and +movement which he perceives everywhere and particularly because of the +solid texture of reality of which he is admirably aware. Hatred closes +the eyes to a multitude of charms. If Mr. Dell suffered from it he +could never have enriched his fabric as he has with so many +circumstances chosen with an unargumentative hand; he could never have +extracted so much drama out of dusty people. Had he been a +sentimentalist he might have fallen into the soft processes of the local +color school when it came to portraying the various communities through +which Felix takes his way. Instead, the story is everywhere stiffened +with intelligence. Felix has no adventures more exciting than his +successive discoveries of new ideas. Even the women he loves fit into +the pattern of his career as a thinking being, and he emerges, however +moved, with a surer grasp of his expanding universe. That grasp would +lack much of its confidence if Mr. Dell employed a style less masterly. +As it is, he writes with a candid lucidity which everywhere lets in the +light and with a grace which rounds off the edges that mark the pamphlet +but not the work of art. He can be at once downright and graceful, at +once sincere and impersonal, at once revolutionary and restrained, at +once impassioned and reflective, at once enamored of truth and +scrupulous for beauty. + +When Felix Fay had escaped his original villages and had taken to the +wider pursuit of freedom in Chicago there was another chapter of his +career to be recorded; and that Mr. Dell sets down in _The Briary-Bush_, +wherein Felix finds that the trail of freedom ends, for him, in madness +and loneliness. From the first, though this moon-calf has steadily +blundered toward detachment from the common order, some aching instinct +has left him hungry for solid ground to stand on. The conflict troubles +him. He can succeed in his immediate occupations but he cannot +understand his powers or feel confident in his future. His world whirls +round and round, menaces, eludes, threatens to vanish altogether. Thrown +by dim forces into the arms of Rose-Ann, who seeks freedom no less +restlessly than he, he is married, and the two begin their passionate +experiment at a union which shall have no bonds but their common +determination to be free. Charming slaves of liberty! Felix is at heart +a Puritan and cannot take the world lightly, as it comes. His blunders +bruise and wound him. He punishes himself for all his vagaries. Rose-Ann +is not a Puritan, but she too has instincts that will not surrender, any +more than Felix's, to the doctrines which they both profess: jealousy +sleeps within her, and potential motherhood. She and Felix come to feel +that they have shirked life by their deliberate childlessness and that +life has deserted them. Yet separation proves unendurable. So they +resume marriage, vowing "not to be afraid of life or of any of the +beautiful things life may bring." Among these, of course, are to be +children and a house. + +Is this merely a return to their villages, merely domestic +sentimentalism in a lovely guise? Mr. Dell has gone a little too deep to +incur the full suspicion. He has got very near to the biological +foundations of two lives, where, for the moment, he rests his case. +There is more to come, however, in this spiritual history, whether +Felix Fay knows it or not. Let the house be built and the children be +born, and Felix and Rose-Ann, though citizens and parents, will still be +individuals and will still have to find out whether these complicated +threads of loyalty last better than the simple threads which broke. +Felix, in discovering the lure of stability, has not necessarily +completed the circle of his life. Freedom may allure him again. + +_The Briary-Bush_, less varied than _Moon-Calf_, is decidedly +profounder. It hovers over the dark waters of the unconscious on perhaps +the surest wings an American novel has ever used. Though it has probed +difficult natures and knows them thoroughly it does not flaunt its +knowledge but brings it in only when it can throw some revealing light +upon the outward perplexities of the lovers. Thus it gives depth and +timbre to the story, and yet allows the characters to seem actual +persons actually walking the world. At the same time, Mr. Dell does not +possess a too vivid sense of externality. In both his novels all facts +come through the mist of Felix's habitual confusion, and in that mist +they lose dramatic emphasis; muted, they are not able to break up the +agreeable monotone in which the narrative is delivered. But underneath +these surfaces, seen so poetically, there is a substantial bulk of human +life, immemorial folkways powerfully contending with the new rebellion +of reason. + + +_F. Scott Fitzgerald_ + +_Domesday Book_, _Poor White_, _The Anthology of Another Town_, _Main +Street_, _Miss Lulu Bett_, _The Age of Innocence_, _The Romantic Woman_, +and _Moon-Calf_ would make 1920 remarkable even if that year had not +brought forth other novels of equal rank; if it had not brought forth +James Branch Cabell's richly symbolical romance _Figures of Earth_ and +Upton Sinclair's bitter indictment _100%_. And though most of these seem +somber, there came along with them another novel in which were gaiety +and high spirits and the fires of youth. + +F. Scott Fitzgerald in _This Side of Paradise_ also had broken with the +village. He wrote of his gilded boys and girls as if average decorum +existed only to be shocked. But he made the curious discovery that +undergraduates could have brains and still be interesting; that they +need not give their lives entirely to games and adolescent politics; +that they may have heard of Oscar Wilde as well as of Rudyard Kipling +and of Rupert Brooke no less than of Alfred Noyes. Mr. Fitzgerald had +indeed his element of scandal to tantalize the majority, who debated +whether or not the rising generation could be as promiscuous in its +behavior as he made out. It is the brains in the book, however, not the +scandal, which finally count. His restless generation sparkles with +inquiry and challenge. When its elders have let the world fall into +chaos, why, youth questions, should it trust their counsels any longer? +Mirth and wine and love are more pleasant than that hollow wisdom, and +they may be quite as solid. + +_This Side of Paradise_ comes to no conclusion; it ends in weariness and +smoke, though at last Amory believes he has found himself in the midst +of a wilderness of uncertainties. Yet how vivid a document the book is +upon a whirling time, and how beguiling an entertainment! The narrative +flares up now into delightful verse and now into glittering comic +dialogue. It shifts from passion to farce, from satire to lustrous +beauty, from impudent knowingness to pathetic youthful humility. It is +both alive and lively. Few things more significantly illustrate the +moving tide of which the revolt from the village is a symptom than the +presence of such unrest as this among these bright barbarians. The +traditions which once might have governed them no longer hold. They +break the patterns one by one and follow their wild desires. And as they +play among the ruins of the old, they reason randomly about the new, +laughing. + + +_Dorothy Canfield_ + +If Floyd Dell seems in _The Briary-Bush_ to hint at the human necessity +to turn back by and by from freedom, Dorothy Canfield in _The Brimming +Cup_ pretty clearly argues for that necessity. Doubtless it is to go too +far to claim, as certain of her critics do, that she had made a +counter-attack upon the assailants of the village and the established +order, but it is sure that she gave comfort to many spirits disturbed +by the radical outbursts of 1920. Already in _The Squirrel Cage_ and +_The Bent Twig_ she had shown an affectionate knowledge of the ways of +households in small communities; and in _Hillsboro People_ she had added +another hardy, kindly neighborhood to the American array of villages in +fiction. _The Brimming Cup_ sounded a deeper note than any she had yet +struck. Suppose, the novel says, there were a woman who had been trained +in the wide world but was now living in a distant village; suppose she +had heard and felt the tumult of the age and had begun to question the +reality of her contentment; suppose, to make the conflict as dramatic as +possible, she should find herself tempted by a new love to give up the +settled companionship of her husband and the heavy burden of her +children to seek joy in a thrilling passion. + +Here Dorothy Canfield had an admirable theme and she rose to it with +power, but she permitted herself so easy a solution that her argument +stumbles lamentably. The lover who disrupts the warm circle of Marise's +life is after all only a selfish bounder, a mere villain; stirred as she +is by the promises he holds out of rapture and of luxury, she would be +simply foolish not to comprehend, as in the end she does, that she must +lose far more than she could gain by the exchange she contemplates. +Surely this is no argument in favor of loyalty as against love: it is +only a defense of loyalty, which does not need it, as against a fleeting +instability; and so it is hardly half as significant as it might have +been had the conflict been squarely met, great love contending with +great loyalty. Yet while the novel thus falls short of what it might +have undertaken it has numerous excellences. It is eloquent and +passionate and, very often, wise. Rarely have a mother's relations with +her children been so subtly represented; rarely have the manners of a +New England township been more convincingly portrayed. The setting glows +among its green hills and valleys, its snow and flowers. There are minor +characters that stand up vividly in the memory, like persons known face +to face. The atmosphere is at once tense with desire and spacious with +understanding. Though the materials come from an old tradition they have +been heated with the fires of the scrutinizing mind which burn beneath +the newer novelists. + + +_1921_ + +That memorable year of fiction which saw so many superior books produced +saw them successful beyond any reasonable expectation; and it is +scarcely to be wondered at that the year following--with which this +chronicle does not undertake to deal--should have responded to such +encouragement. If Dorothy Canfield challenged the tendency, Booth +Tarkington saw it and ventured _Alice Adams_. Sherwood Anderson in _The +Triumph of the Egg_ and Floyd Dell in _The Briary-Bush_ proceeded to +other triumphs. Half a dozen competent novelists followed naturalism +into the "exposure" of small towns or cramped lives: particularly C. +Kay Scott with the hard, crisp _Blind Mice_ and Charles G. Norris, rival +of his brother Frank Norris in veracity if not in fire, with _Brass_. +John Dos Passos in _Three Soldiers_, the most controverted novel of the +year, dealt brilliantly with the unheroic aspects of the American +Expeditionary Force. Evelyn Scott in _The Narrow House_ and Ben Hecht in +_Erik Dorn_ attempted, as Waldo Frank had already done in _The Dark +Mother_ and as some others now did less notably, to find a more elastic, +a more impressionistic technique, breaking up the "gray paragraph" and +quickening the tempo of their narratives. At the same time romance once +more showed its perennial face, suggesting that the future does not +belong to naturalism entirely. Donn Byrne in _Messer Marco Polo_ played +in a bright Gaelic way with the story of Marco Polo and his quest for +Golden Bells, the daughter of Kubla Khan. Robert Nathan wrote, in +_Autumn_, an all but perfect native idyl, grounded well enough in local +color, as suggestive of the soil as an old farmers' almanac, and yet +touched with the universal fingers of the pastoral. If American fiction +cannot long escape the village, at least here is a village of a sort +hardly thinkable before the revolt began. No matter what a flood of +angry truth _Spoon River Anthology_ let in, beauty survives. Many waters +cannot quench beauty. What truth extinguishes is the weaker flames. + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Contemporary American Novelists +(1900-1920), by Carl Van Doren + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTS *** + +***** This file should be named 12563.txt or 12563.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/1/2/5/6/12563/ + +Produced by Ted Garvin, Linda Cantoni, and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team. + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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