These are advantages, and we must not be impatient of any writer who
continues a short-story writer when he might freely become a novelist.
Now that a writer can profitably do so, he may prefer to grow his
fiction on the dwarf stock. He may plausibly contend that this was the
original stock, and that the novella was a short story many ages before
its name was appropriated by the standard variety, the duodecimo
American, or the three-volume English; that Boccaccio was a world-wide
celebrity five centuries before George Eliot was known to be a woman. To
be sure, we might come back at him with the Greek romancers; we might
ask him what he had to say to the interminable tales of Heliodorus and
Longus, and the rest, and then not let him say.
But no such controversy is necessary to the enjoyment of the half dozen
volumes of short stories at hand, and we gladly postpone it till we have
nothing to talk about. At present we have only too much to talk about in
a book so robust and terribly serious as Mr. Hamlin Garland's volume
called Main-Travelled Roads. That is what they call the highways in the
part of the West that Mr. Garland comes from and writes about; and these
stories are full of the bitter and burning dust, the foul and trampled
slush, of the common avenues of life, the life of the men who hopelessly
and cheerlessly make the wealth that enriches the alien and the idler,
and impoverishes the producer.
If any one is still at a loss to account for that uprising of the
farmers in the West which is the translation of the Peasants' War into
modern and republican terms, let him read Main-Travelled Roads, and he
will begin to understand, unless, indeed, Mr. Garland is painting the
exceptional rather than the average. The stories are full of those
gaunt, grim, sordid, pathetic, ferocious figures, whom our satirists
find so easy to caricature as Hayseeds, and whose blind groping for
fairer conditions is so grotesque to the newspapers and so menacing to
the politicians. They feel that something is wrong, and they know that
the wrong is not theirs. The type caught in Mr. Garland's book is not
pretty; it is ugly and often ridiculous; but it is heart-breaking in its
rude despair.
The story of a farm mortgage, as it is told in the powerful sketch
"Under the Lion's Paw," is a lesson in political economy, as well as a
tragedy of the darkest cast. "The Return of the Private" is a satire of
the keenest edge, as well as a tender and mournful idyl of the unknown
soldier who comes back after the war with no blare of welcoming trumpets
or flash of streaming flags, but foot-sore, heart-sore, with no stake in
the country he has helped to make safe and rich but the poor man's
chance to snatch an uncertain subsistence from the furrows he left for
the battle-field.
"Up the Coolly," however, is the story which most pitilessly of all
accuses our vaunted conditions, wherein every man has the chance to rise
above his brother and make himself richer than his fellows. It shows us
once for all what the risen man may be, and portrays in his good-natured
selfishness and indifference that favorite ideal of our system. The
successful brother comes back to the old farmstead, prosperous,
handsome, well-dressed, and full of patronizing sentiment for his
boyhood days there, and he cannot understand why his brother, whom hard
work and corroding mortgages have eaten all the joy out of, gives him a
grudging and surly welcome. It is a tremendous situation, and it is the
allegory of the whole world's civilization: the upper dog and the under
dog are everywhere, and the under dog nowhere likes it.
But the allegorical effects are not the primary intent of Mr. Garland's
work: it is a work of art, first of all, and we think of fine art;
though the material will strike many gentilities as coarse and common.
In one of the stories, "Among the Corn-Rows," there is a good deal of
burly, broad-shouldered humor of a fresh and native kind; in "Mrs.
Ripley's Trip" is a delicate touch, like that of Miss Wilkins; but Mr.
Garland's touches are his own, here and elsewhere. He has a certain
harshness and bluntness, an indifference to the more delicate charms of
style, and he has still to learn that though the thistle is full of an
unrecognized poetry, the rose has a poetry, too, that even over-praise
cannot spoil. But he has a fine courage to leave a fact with the reader,
ungarnished and unvarnished, which is almost the rarest trait in an
Anglo-Saxon writer, so infantile and feeble is the custom of our art;
and this attains tragical sublimity in the opening sketch, "A Branch
Road," where the lover who has quarrelled with his betrothed comes back
to find her mismated and miserable, such a farm wife as Mr. Garland has
alone dared to draw, and tempts the broken-hearted drudge away from her
loveless home. It is all morally wrong, but the author leaves you to say
that yourself. He knows that his business was with those two people,
their passions and their probabilities.
W. D. HOWELLS
(In the Editor's Study, "Harper's Magazine").