SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION
I
In 1870 American fiction ran in two currents: fiction of the _Atlantic_
type, read by the cultivated few, and fiction of Bonner's _New York
Ledger_ type, read openly by the literate masses and surreptitiously
by many others. There was also a very large class of readers that read
no novels at all. Puritanism had frowned upon fiction, the church
generally discountenanced it, and in many places prejudice ran deep.
George Cary Eggleston in the biography of his brother has recorded his
own experience:
It will scarcely be believed by many in the early years of the
twentieth century, that as late as the end of the third quarter
of the nineteenth, there still survived a bitter prejudice
against novels as demoralizing literature, and that even short
stories were looked upon with doubt and suspicion.... When
_The Hoosier Schoolmaster_ began to appear, a member of the
publishing house was sorely troubled. He had been a bitter and
vehement opponent of novels and novel reading. He had published
articles of his own in denunciation of fiction and in rebuke
of his friends in a great publishing house for putting forth
literature of that character. He now began to suspect that _The
Hoosier Schoolmaster_ was in fact a novel, and he was shocked
at the thought that it was appearing in a periodical published
by himself.... When the story was about to appear in book
form Edward wrote "A Novel" as a sub-title, and the publisher
referred to was again in a state of nervous agitation. He
could in no wise consent to proclaim himself as a publisher of
novels. In view of the large advance orders for the book he was
eager to publish the novel, but he could not reconcile himself
to the open admission that it was a novel.[153]
While _The Bread-Winners_ was running its anonymous course in the
_Century_ in 1884, its author, now known to have been John Hay, felt
called upon to issue an explanatory note:
I am engaged in business in which my standing would be
seriously compromised if it were known I had written a novel.
I am sure that my practical efficiency is not lessened by this
act, but I am equally sure that I could never recover from the
injury it would occasion me if known among my own colleagues.
For that positive reason, and for the negative one that I do
not care for publicity, I resolved to keep the knowledge of my
little venture in authorship restricted to as small a circle as
possible. Only two persons besides myself know who wrote _The
Bread-Winners_.
The final breaking down of this prejudice and the building up of the
new clientele of readers that at length gave prose fiction its later
enormous vogue is one of the most interesting phenomena of the period.
The novel gained its present respectability as a literary form by what
may be called an artifice. It came in disguised as moral instruction,
as character-building studies of life, as historical narrative,
as reform propaganda. _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, which had been read by
thousands who had never opened a novel before, had begun the work. _The
Hoosier Schoolmaster_ was allowed to appear in the columns of _Hearth
and Home_ because it was a moral tale for children and because it was
written by a minister whose motives no one could question. So with the
works of the Rev. E. P. Roe, and the stories of Dr. J. G. Holland,
who had gained an enormous following with his series of lay sermons
published under the name of Timothy Titcomb.
Perhaps Dr. Holland, more than any other writer of the time, is
responsible for this rehabilitation of the novel. He understood the
common people. His own origin had been humble--the son of a mechanic
of western Massachusetts, blessed with poverty, educated through
his own efforts, enabled after a long struggle to take a medical
diploma--educator, school teacher, superintendent of schools in
Vicksburg, Mississippi, and finally, under Samuel Bowles, assistant
editor of the Springfield, Massachusetts, _Republican_, which, largely
through his efforts, arose to national importance. He was forty when
the Timothy Titcomb letters entered upon their enormous popularity--it
is estimated that nearly half a million copies of the series were sold
first and last; he was fifty when he established _Scribner's Monthly_
and assumed its editorship.
_Scribner's_ under his direction became for the new period what the
_Atlantic Monthly_ had been for the period before. He was a moralist,
a plain man of the people, and he knew his clientele; he knew the
average American reader that makes up the great democratic mass, the
reader who had bought _The Wide, Wide World_, and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_,
and the _Titcomb Letters_. He gave them first of all a serial novel by
the Rev. George MacDonald, and he printed at the close of the first
volume of the _Monthly_ a letter from a reader, sample of thousands
which had filled his mail. Here is an extract:
I know of no writings better calculated than his [MacDonald's]
to draw out what is noble and true in the reader, or call forth
fine feelings and high resolves. They give impulse to life. We
come away from reading one of his books stronger and better
prepared for our life-work. Is not this the surest test of
excellence in a book?
It was this purpose that inspired his own fiction, _Arthur
Bonnicastle_, _Nicholas Minturn_, and the others, earnest, moral
tales sprinkled freely with sentiment, wholesome, but not high in
literary merit. No other man did so much to direct the period into the
well-known channels which it took. His whole influence was democratic.
He would publish literature for the people, and to him literature was
a serious thing, the voice of life. The group of new authors which
he gathered about him is comparable only with the group that James
T. Fields gathered about himself in the earlier golden days of the
_Atlantic_.
II
The period of moralizing fiction culminated with the work of the
Rev. Edward Payson Roe, whose first novel, _Barriers Burned Away_
(1872), with its background of the great Chicago fire, and its tense
moral atmosphere which skilfully concealed its sensationalism and its
plentiful sentiment, became enormously popular. When its author died in
1888 his publishers estimated that 1,400,000 copies of all his novels
had been sold, not counting pirated editions in many foreign languages,
and the sale of the books has been steady up to the present time.
Roe, like Holland, had sprung from the common people and had been
largely self-educated. For a time he had attended Williams College,
Massachusetts, he had enlisted for the war as the chaplain of a
regiment, and after the war had settled down as pastor of the First
Church at Highland Falls, New York. After nine years his health failed
him and he betook himself to an out-of-doors life, fruit raising at
Cornwall-on-Hudson, and his experience he embodied in several practical
handbooks like _Success with Small Fruits_, first published serially in
_Scribner's_. The last years of his life he gave to fiction, turning
it out with facility and in quantity and always with the theory that
he was thereby continuing his work as a pastor. "My books," he wrote,
"are read by thousands; my voice reached at most but a few hundred. My
object in writing, as in preaching, is to do good; and the question is,
Which can I do best? I think with the pen, and I shall go on writing no
matter what the critics say."[154]
That his novels are lacking in the higher elements of literary art, in
structure and style and creative imagination, is apparent even to the
uncritical, but that they are lacking in truth to life and power to
move the reader no one can declare. At every point they are wholesome
and manly. Roe's assertion that he worked with reverence in the
fundamental stuff of life one must admit or else deny his contention
that, "The chief evidence of life in a novel is the fact that it
lives."[155] Surely it must be admitted that few novels of the period
have shown more vitality.
His influence has been considerable. With Holland and his school he
helped greatly in the building up of that mass of novel readers, mostly
women it must be said, which by the middle of the eighties had reached
such enormous proportions. He led readers on to Lew Wallace's _The
Fair God_ and _Ben Hur_, and to the novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett,
who added to the conventional devices of Holland and Roe--sentiment,
sensation, love-centered interest culminating inevitably in marriage at
the close of the story--literary art and a certain dramatic power. She
was realistic in method,--her _That Lass o' Lowrie's_ (1877) reproduced
the Lancashire dialect in all its uncouthness--but the atmosphere
of her work was romantic. Her _Little Lord Fauntleroy_ (1886),
unquestionably the most successful juvenile of the period, has been
described as "a fairy tale of real life." All of her books, indeed,
have this fairy tale basis. She has been exceedingly popular, but she
cannot be counted among the original forces of the period. From her the
current of popularity flowed on to F. Marion Crawford's cosmopolitan
work, to Margaret Deland's strong problem novel _John Ward, Preacher_;
then it swelled into a flood with _David Harum_ and the historical
novels that made notable the nineties. At the close of the century
fiction was read by all and in quantities that seem incredible.
III
In a chapter which traces the growth of the novel, in distinction from
the growth of the sketch or the short story, F. Marion Crawford must
be given a leading place. Of all American writers he devoted himself
most fully to the major form of fiction. He wrote forty-five novels,
and few sketches and short stories: he was a novelist and only a
novelist. He appeared at the one moment when the type of fiction which
he represented was most certain of wide recognition. His earliest book,
_Mr. Isaacs_ (1882), dealt with a new, strange environment--India,
five years before Kipling made it his background; it had a religious
atmosphere--the mystic beliefs of the Orient; and it told a story with
sentiment and with dramatic movement. _Zoroaster_, with its opening
sentence, "The hall of the banquets was made ready for the feast in the
palace of Babylon," appealed to an audience that had rated _Ben Hur_
among the greatest of novels.
But the earliest books of Crawford showed little of the main current of
his work. No two novelists could differ more radically than he and Roe.
To him the purpose-novel was a bastard thing unworthy the powers of a
true artist.
Lessons, lectures, discussions, sermons, and didactics
generally belong to institutions set apart for especial
purposes and carefully avoided, after a certain age, by the
majority of those who wish to be amused. The purpose-novel
is an odious attempt to lecture people who hate lectures, to
preach to people who prefer their own church, and to teach
people who think they know enough already. It is an ambush, a
lying-in-wait for the unsuspecting public, a violation of the
social contract--and as such it ought to be either mercilessly
crushed or forced by law to bind itself in black and label
itself "Purpose" in very big letters.[156]
The office of the novel was, therefore, entertainment and only
entertainment. He has been the chief exponent in America of art for
art's sake. A novel, he maintained, is a little "pocket-stage" whose
only office is to please.
The life and the training of Crawford gave him a viewpoint which was
singularly different from that held by the short story writers who were
so busily exploiting provincial little neighborhoods in all the remote
nooks and corners of the land. His training had given him an outlook
more cosmopolitan than even that of Henry James. He had been born at
Bagni-di-Lucca, in Tuscany, son of Thomas Crawford the sculptor, and
he had spent the first eleven years of his life in Rome. Later he had
studied at Concord, New Hampshire; at Trinity College, Cambridge; at
Karlsruhe, at Heidelberg; and finally at Rome, where he had specialized
in the classics. In 1873 he was at Allahabad, India, connected with the
_Indian Herald_, and later on, his health failing, he visited his uncle
in New York, Samuel Ward, brother of Julia Ward Howe, and at his advice
threw some of his Indian experiences into the form of fiction. The
instant success of _Mr. Isaacs_ determined his career. After extensive
travels in Turkey and elsewhere, he settled down in Italy in a
picturesque villa overlooking the Bay of Naples, and there he spent the
remaining years of his life, years of enormous literary productivity,
and of growing popularity with readers both in America and in Europe.
No other American novelist has ever covered so much of territory.
He wrote with first-hand knowledge of life in America, in England,
in Germany, in Italy, in Constantinople, and India, and he wrote
with scholarly accuracy historical novels dealing with times and
places as diverse as Persia in the times of Zoroaster; as the
second crusade--_Via Crucis_; as the era of Philip II in Spain--_In
the Palace of the King_; as Venice in the Middle Ages--_Marietta,
a Maid of Venice_; as early Arabia--_Kahled_; and as early
Constantinople--_Arethusa_.
The heart of his work undoubtedly is made up of the fifteen novels that
deal with life in Rome and its environs: _Saracinesca_, _Sant' Ilario_,
_Don Orsino_, _Taquisara_, _Corleone_, _Casa Braccio_, _A Roman
Singer_, _Marzio's Crucifix_, _Heart of Rome_, _Cecilia_, _Whosoever
Shall Offend_, _Pietro Ghisleri_, _To Leeward_, _A Lady of Rome_, and
_The White Sister_. The novels deal almost exclusively with the middle
and higher classes of Rome, classes of which most Americans know
nothing at all, for, to quote from the opening chapter of _To Leeward_:
There are two Romes. There is the Rome of the intelligent
foreigner, consisting of excavations, monuments, tramways,
hotels, typhoid fever, incense, and wax candles; and there
is the Rome within, a city of antique customs, good and bad,
a town full of aristocratic prejudices, of intrigues, of
religion, of old-fashioned honor and new-fashioned scandal, of
happiness and unhappiness, of just people and unjust.
It is this other half Rome, unknown to the casual tourist, unknown to
any not native born and Romanist in faith, that he has shown us, as
Howells attempted to show the social life of Boston and New England,
and as Cable sought to enter the heart of Creole New Orleans. With what
success? Those who know most of Roman life have spoken with praise.
He has given to his aristocracy perhaps too much of charm, they say;
too much of inflexible will, it may be; too much of fire and fury; yet
on the whole he has been true to the complex life he has sought to
reproduce, truer, perhaps, than Howells has been to Boston or Cable to
New Orleans, for he has worked from the inside as one native born, as
one reared in the society he describes, even to the detail of accepting
its religious belief. One may well believe it, for everywhere in the
novels is the perfection of naturalness, the atmosphere of reality.
With his seven stories of American life, _An American Politician_
and the others, he is less convincing. He wrote as a foreigner, as
an observer of the outward with no fullness of sympathy, no depth of
knowledge. He was European in viewpoint and in experience, and he knew
better the European background--Germany as in _Greifenstein_ and _The
Cigarette-Maker's Romance_, or England as in _The Tale of a Lonely
Parish_, or even Constantinople as in _Paul Patoff_.
He wins us first with his worldliness, his vast knowledge of the
surfaces of life in all lands. He is full of cosmopolitan comparisons,
wisdom from everywhere, modern instances from Stamboul and Allahabad
and Rome. To read him is like walking through foreign scenes with
a fully informed guide, a marvelous guide, indeed, a patrician, a
polished man of the world. Everywhere in his work an atmosphere
of good breeding--charming people of culture and wideness of
experience: diplomats, artists, statesmen, noblemen, gentlemen of
the world and ladies indeed. There is no coarseness, no dialect, no
uncouth characters. We are in the world of wealth, of old-established
institutions, of traditions and social laws that are inflexible. In the
telling of the tale he has but a single purpose:
We are not poets, because we can not be. We are not genuine
playwriters for many reasons; chiefly, perhaps, because we are
not clever enough, since a successful play is incomparably
more lucrative than a successful novel. We are not preachers,
and few of us would be admitted to the pulpit. We are not,
as a class, teachers or professors, nor lawyers, nor men of
business. We are nothing more than public amusers. Unless we
choose we need not be anything less. Let us, then, accept our
position cheerfully, and do the best we can to fulfil our
mission, without attempting to dignify it with titles too
imposing for it to bear, and without degrading it by bringing
its productions down even a little way, from the lowest level
of high comedy to the highest level of buffoonery.[157]
From this standpoint he has succeeded to the full. He has told his
stories well; he holds his reader's interest to the end. Slight though
his stories may often be in development, they are ingenious always in
construction and they are cumulative in interest. He has undoubted
dramatic power, sparkling dialogue, thrust and parry, whole novels like
_Saracinesca_, for instance, that might be transferred to the stage
with scarcely an alteration. His characters and episodes appeal to him
always from the dramatic side. The novel, indeed, as he defines it is a
species of drama:
It may fairly be claimed that humanity has, within the past
hundred years, found the way of carrying a theater in its
pocket; and so long as humanity remains what it is, it will
delight in taking out its pocket-stage and watching the antics
of the actors, who are so like itself and yet so much more
interesting. Perhaps that is, after all, the best answer to
the question, "What is a novel?" It is, or ought to be, a
pocket-stage. Scenery, light, shade, the actors themselves, are
made of words, and nothing but words, more or less cleverly
put together. A play is good in proportion as it represents
the more dramatic, passionate, romantic, or humorous sides of
real life. A novel is excellent according to the degree in
which it produces the illusions of a good play--but it must not
be forgotten that the play is the thing, and that illusion is
eminently necessary to success.[157]
Often he overdoes this dramatic element and becomes melodramatic; we
lose the impression of real life and feel an atmosphere of staginess,
that exaggeration of effect which thrills for a moment and then
disgusts.
And right here comes the chief indictment against him: he works without
deep emotion, without tenderness, without altruism, without the higher
reaches of imagination. He has no social or moral purpose, as Howells
had. He sees the body but not the soul, society rather than life in its
deeper currents, a society marvelously complex in its requirements and
its accouterments, its conventions and traditions, but he looks little
below the superficial, the temporal, the merely worldly. He is inferior
to Howells inasmuch as he lacks poetry, he lacks humor, he lacks heart.
He is inferior to James and George Meredith inasmuch as he had no power
of introspection and no distinctive style. He had no passion--he never
becomes enthusiastic even about his native Italy; he had little love
for nature--the city engrosses him, not trees and mountains and lakes.
He writes of the human spectacle and is content if he bring amusement
for the present moment.
He was, therefore, one more influence in the journalization of the
novel. He wrote rapidly and easily, and his style is clear and natural,
but it is also without distinction. His pictures are vividly drawn
and his stories are exceedingly readable--journalistic excellences,
but there is nothing of inspiration about them, no breath of genius,
no touch of literature in the stricter sense of that word. Like every
skilful journalistic writer, he has the power to visualize his scene,
to paint characters with vividness, and to make essentials stand out.
Notably was this true of his historical fiction. Characters like Philip
II. and Eleanor, Queen of France, he can make real men and women that
move and convince. He has created a marvelous gallery of characters,
taking his forty-five novels together, complex and varied beyond that
produced by any other American novelist, and there are surprisingly
few repetitions. He stands undoubtedly as the most brilliant of
the American writers of fiction, the most cosmopolitan, the most
entertaining. His galaxy of Roman novels, especially the _Saracinesca_
group, bids fair to outlive many novels that contain deeper studies of
human life and that are more inspired products of literary art.
IV
The direct opposite of F. Marion Crawford, in literary belief, as
in background and object, was Margaretta Wade Deland, who came into
literary prominence at the close of the eighties. Unlike Crawford, she
was a poet, a realist, a depicter of life within a narrow provincial
area, and, moreover, a worker in the finer materials of life, the
problems of the soul.
The essentials of her biography are few. She was born and reared
at Manchester, a little Pennsylvania village, now swallowed up by
the great manufacturing city of Allegheny; she went at sixteen to
New York to study drawing and design at Cooper Institute; and after
her graduation she became instructor in design at the Girls' Normal
College, New York City. In 1880 she was married to Lorin F. Deland and
removed to Boston, where she has since resided. In 1886 she issued
her first book--a collection of poems entitled _An Old Garden_, and
two years later _John Ward, Preacher_, a novel that attracted instant
and widespread attention because of its likeness in theme to _Robert
Elsmere_, then at the height of its enormous vogue. Since that time she
has published four other major novels: _Sidney_, _Philip and His Wife_,
_The Awakening of Helena Richie_, and _The Iron Woman_, and many short
stories, notably the collections entitled _The Wisdom of Fools_, _Old
Chester Tales_, and _Dr. Lavendar's People_.
By nature and early environment Mrs. Deland was serious and
contemplative. The little Pennsylvania town, later to be immortalized
as Old Chester, during her childhood was a place of traditions, a
bit of antiquity amid the newness about it, of well-bred old English
and Scotch and Irish families with deep religious prejudices and
with narrow yet wholesome and kindly ideals. She was reared in a
religious atmosphere--her father was a Presbyterian and her mother an
Episcopalian, the combination so disastrous in _John Ward, Preacher_.
She lived amid books, all of which she might read save only the
novels, a prohibition that proved to be a good one, for when at last
she was led to write fiction of her own, she went about it with no
conventional preconceptions. It made for freshness, for originality, of
concentration upon life rather than upon form and the tradition of the
elders. It was an environment that cultivated the poet as well as the
Puritan within her, the sensitiveness for Nature, the deeps of love
and life that were to find expression in a note like this, recorded in
her first volume:
O distant Christ, the crowded, darkening years
Drift slow between thy gracious face and me:
My hungry heart leans back to look for thee,
But finds the way set thick with doubts and fears.
My groping hands would touch thy garment's hem,
Would find some token thou art walking near;
Instead, they clasp but empty darkness drear,
And no diviner hands reach out to them.
My straining eyes, O Christ, but long to mark
A shadow of thy presence, dim and sweet,
Or far-off light to guide my wandering feet,
Or hope for hands prayer-beating 'gainst the dark.
It was, therefore, but natural that her work should be both serious
and ethical and that it should be touched with beauty. In _John
Ward, Preacher_, she took as her theme the revolt of a soul against
the infallibilities of a system of belief. It is not necessarily a
religious novel or yet a purpose novel. The primary _motif_ of _Robert
Elsmere_ is theological and doctrinal discussion. It is religious
polemic made attractive by being cast into story form and as such it
deserves the anathema of Crawford, but in Mrs. Deland's novel the human
interest is paramount. Religion is the force that acts upon two lives,
just as jealousy might have been taken or misdirected love or any other
human dynamic, and the novel is the record of the reactions under the
stress.
So with all her novels. The theme is the destruction or the redemption
of a soul, the abasement or the rehabilitation of a character through
some immaterial force applied from within. She deals with great ethical
and sociological forces: heredity, as in her novelette _The Hands of
Esau_; divorce, as in _The Iron Woman_; the compelling power of love,
as in _Sidney_. Her primary aim is not, as with Crawford and Harte,
simply to entertain; it is rather to expose the human soul to its own
view, to show it its limitations and its dangers, that the soul may be
purged through fear of what may be--the aim indeed of the Greek drama.
Her equipment for the work was complete. To feminine tenderness and
insight she added a depth of view and an analysis that is masculine.
She was a poet too, but a poet with the severity of form and the moving
realism of the short story writer. Two of her novels, _The Awakening
of Helena Richie_ and _The Iron Woman_, have not been surpassed in
construction and in moving power by any other writer of the period.
Her _Old Chester Tales_ also, with their central figure Dr. Lavendar,
have the elements that make for permanence. They are really without
time or place. Old Chester undoubtedly is in western Pennsylvania, the
author's native town, but it might be New England as well. The tales
deal with universal types and with universal _motifs_ with a broadness
and a sympathy and a literary art that raises them into the realm of
the rarer classics. From them emerges the figure of Dr. Lavendar to
place beside even Adams and Primrose. Place is not dwelt upon; humanity
is all. They are not so much stories as fragments of actual life
touched with the magic of poetry and of ethic vision. From that worldly
social area of life presented to us by such latter-day novelists as
Crawford and Edith Wharton and Robert Chambers they are as far removed
as is a fashionable Newport yacht, with its club-centered men and
cigarette-smoking women, from the simple little hamlet among the hills.
V
During the closing years of the century there came into American
literature, suddenly and unheralded, a group of young men, journalists
for the most part, who for a time seemed to promise revolution. They
brought in with a rush enthusiasm, vigor, vitality; they had no
reverence for old forms or old ideals; they wrote with fierceness
and cocksureness books like Garland's _Crumbling Idols_ and Norris's
_The Responsibilities of the Novelist_, which called shrilly for
Truth, TRUTH: "Is it not, in Heaven's name, essential that the people
hear not a lie, but the Truth? If the novel were not one of the most
important factors of life; if it were not the completest expression
of our civilization; if its influence were not greater than all the
pulpits, than all the newspapers between the oceans, it would not be so
important that its message should be true." They would produce a new
American literature, one stripped of prudishness and convention; they
would go down among the People and tell them the plain God's Truth as
Zola defined Truth, for the People were hungry for it. "In the larger
view, in the last analysis, the People pronounce the final judgment.
The People, despised of the artist, hooted, caricatured, and vilified,
are, after all, and in the main, the real seekers after Truth." The
group was a passing phenomenon. Many of its members were dead before
they had done more than outline their work: Wolcott Balestier and
Stephen Crane at thirty, Frank Norris at thirty-two, Henry Harland
and Harold Frederic in the early forties, and the others, like R. H.
Davis, for instance, turned at length to historical romance and other
conventional fields.
The impetus undoubtedly came from the enormous and sudden vogue
of Kipling. Balestier was his brother-in-law and had collaborated
with him in writing _The Naulahka_. Then he had written the novel
_Benefits Forgot_, a work of remarkable promise, but remarkable only
for its promise. The vigor and directness and picturing power of the
young Kipling were qualities that appealed strongly to young men of
journalistic training. Like him, they were cosmopolitans and had
seen unusual areas of life. Crane had represented his paper in the
Greco-Turkish War and in the Cuban campaign, Norris had been in the
South African War, Richard Harding Davis had been at all the storm
centers of his time, Frederic was the European correspondent of the New
York _Times_, and Harland became at length editor of the London _Yellow
Book_.
The genius of the group undoubtedly was Stephen Crane (1871-1900). He
was frail of physique, neurotic, intense, full of a vibrant energy
that drove him too fiercely. He was naturally lyrical, romantic,
impulsively creative, but his training made him, as it made most of
the group, a realist--a depressed realist after Zola. His earliest
work was his best, _Maggie, a Girl of the Streets_, a grim and brutal
picture of the darker strata of New York City--his most distinctive
creation. But he had no patience, no time, for collecting material. He
was too eager, too much under the dominance of moods, to investigate,
and his later novel, _The Red Badge of Courage_, which purports to be
a realistic story of army life in the Civil War, is based upon a kind
of manufactured realism that is the product not of observation or of
gathered data, but of an excessively active imagination. When he died,
though he was but thirty, he had done his work. Despite his lyrical
power and his undoubted imagination, his place is not large.
For Frank Norris (1870-1902) more may be said, though undoubtedly
he has been judged by his contemporaries more by what he dreamed of
doing and what, perhaps, he might have done had he lived than by his
actual accomplishment. He had had unusual training for the epic task
he set himself. He had been born in Chicago and had spent there the
first fifteen years of his life, he had been educated in the San
Francisco high school, at the University of California, and at Harvard,
then for a year or two he had studied art in Paris. Later he was war
correspondent of the San Francisco _Chronicle_, then editor of the
San Francisco _Wave_, then special war correspondent for _McClure's
Magazine_ during the Spanish War.
When he began to write fiction, and he began early, he was an ardent
disciple of Zola, a realist of the latter-day type, a teller of
the Truth as Zola conceived of the Truth. "Mere literature" was a
thing outworn, graces of style and gentleness of theme belonged to
the effeminate past. A masculine age had come to which nothing was
common or unclean provided it were but the Truth. Like Crane, he was
eager, excited, dominated by his theme until it became his whole
life. He could work only in major key, in _fortissimo_, with themes
continent-wide presented with the Kipling vigor and swing.
In his earlier work, _Vandover and the Brute_, _McTeague_, and the
like, he swung to the extreme of his theory. To tell the truth was
to tell with microscopic detail the repulsive things of physical
life. There are stories of his that reek with foul odors and jangle
repulsively upon the eye and the ear. The short fiction "A Man's Woman"
is an advance even upon Zola. It is Truth, but it is the truth about
the processes of the sewer and the physiological facts about starvation:
The tent was full of foul smells: the smell of drugs and of
moldy gunpowder, the smell of dirty rags, of unwashed bodies,
the smell of stale smoke, of scorching sealskin, of soaked and
rotting canvas that exhaled from the tent cover--every smell
but that of food.
_McTeague_ is a brutal book: it gets hold of one's imagination and
haunts it like an odor from a morgue. So with certain scenes from
_Vandover and the Brute_. One sees for weeks the ghastly face of that
drowning Jew who, after the wreck of the steamer, was beaten off again
and again until his mashed fingers could no longer gain a hold. True to
life it undoubtedly is, but to what end?
Norris's master work was to be his trilogy, the epic of the wheat, the
allegory of financial and industrial America. He explained his purpose
in the preface to _The Pit_:
These novels, while forming a series, will be in no way
connected with each other save by their relation to (1) the
production, (2) the distribution, (3) the consumption of
American wheat. When complete they will form the story of a
crop of wheat from the time of its sowing as seed in California
to the time of its consumption as bread in a village of Western
Europe.
The first novel, _The Octopus_, deals with the war between the
wheat grower and the Railroad Trust; the second, _The Pit_, is
the fictitious narrative of a "deal" in the Chicago wheat pit;
while the third, _The Wolf_, will probably have for its pivotal
episode the relieving of a famine in an old world community.
He lived to complete only the first two, and it is upon these two that
his place as a novelist must depend. They represent his maturer work,
his final manner, and they undoubtedly show what would have been his
product had he been spared to complete his work.
The two books impress one first with their vastness of theme. The whole
continent seems to be in them. They have an untamed power, an elemental
quality, an unconfined sweep that is Russian in its quality. They are
epics, epics of a new continent with its untold richness in corn and
wheat, its enmeshing railroads, its teeming cities of the plain, its
restless human types--new birth of our new soil. The excitement and the
enthusiasm of the novelist flow from every page. To read long is to be
filled with the trembling eagerness of the wheat pit and the railroad
yard. The style is headlong, excited, illuminated hotly with Hugo-like
adjectives. Through it all runs a symbolism that at times takes full
control. The railroad dominates _The Octopus_, the wheat _The Pit_
as fully as the hemp dominates Allen's _Reign of Law_. The books are
allegories. The Western farmer is in the grip of an octopus-like
monster, the railroad, that is strangling him. The ghastly horror of
the locomotive that plows at full speed through a flock of sheep is
symbolic of his helplessness.
To the right and left, all the width of the right of way,
the little bodies had been flung; backs were snapped against
the fence-posts; brains knocked out. Caught in the barbs of
the wire, wedged in, the bodies hung suspended. Under foot
it was terrible; the black blood, winking in the starlight,
seeped down into the clay between the ties with a long sucking
murmur.... Abruptly, Presley saw again in his imagination the
galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its
single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon;
but saw it now as the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible,
flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of
the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path; the
leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil,
the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the Monster, the
Colossus, the Octopus.
Garland in such pictures as "Under the Lion's Paw" tends to arouse his
reader to mutiny, to the cry "This thing must stop!" Norris fills him
with shuddering horror and leaves him unnerved.
Tremendous energy the novels undoubtedly have and truth too, so far as
it goes. They have imaginative power of no inferior type and an ardor
that is contagious. It was worth while to have written them: they
picture for all time a unique phase of American life, but it is no
great loss to our literature that the two were not expanded into a long
series. In the higher sense of the word they are not literature; they
are remarkably well done newspaper "stories." Like most of the work of
his group of writers, they are journalistic in pitch and in intent:
stirring narratives, picturesque presentings of unusual material,
timely studies in dynamic style. But literary art is founded upon
restraint, reserve, poise. These stories lack finish, concentration,
and even, at times, good taste. Everywhere full organ, everywhere
tenseness, everywhere excitement. A terrible directness there is, but
it tends no whither and it comes to no terminus of conclusion.
Norris unquestionably lacked knowledge of many of the most fundamental
areas of human life. He was too insistently modern. Like the mere
journalist, he was obsessed with but a single thought: the value of the
present moment. He lacked a sense of the past, personal background,
inner life, power to weigh and balance and compare, and, lacking these,
he lacked the elements that make for the literature of permanence.
Henry Harland's (1861-1905) earliest work, _As It Was Written_ (1885),
_Mrs. Peixada_, and _The Yoke of the Thora_ (1887), written under the
pen name "Sidney Luska," presented certain phases of Jewish life and
character in New York with a grim power that seemed promising, but his
later work was decadent. Harold Frederic was a more substantial figure.
A typical American, self-made and self-educated, climbing by rapid
stages from the positions of farm hand, photographer, and proof-reader
to the editorship of influential papers like the Albany _Journal_, at
twenty-eight he was the European representative of the New York _Times_
and an international correspondent of rare power. Novel-writing he took
up as a recreation. His earliest work, which appeared in _Scribner's
Magazine_, _Seth's Brother's Wife_ (1887), was a novel of New York
farm life, Garland-like in its depressing realism. Later stories like
_In the Valley_ and _The Copperhead_ dealt with a background of the
Civil War. His greatest success came with _The Damnation of Theron
Ware_, published in England with the title _Illumination_, a remarkable
book especially in its earlier chapters, full of vigor and truth.
Undoubtedly he possessed the rare gift of story-telling, and had he,
like Crawford, devoted himself wholly to the art, he might have done
work to compare with any other written during the period. But he was
a journalist with newspaper standards, he worked in haste, he lacked
repose and the sense of values, and as a result a republication of
his novels has not been called for. He is to be ranked with Crane and
Norris as a meteor of brilliance rather than a fixed light.
VI
The new realism was short lived. Even while its propaganda like
_Crumbling Idols_ and _The Responsibilities of the Novelist_ were
spreading the news that Walter Scott was dead and that the god of
things as they are had come in his power, a new romantic period already
had begun. Maurice Thompson, one of the most clear-eyed critics of the
period, wrote in May, 1900:
Just how deep and powerful the present distinct movement toward
a romantic revival may be no one can tell. Many facts, however,
point to a veering of popular interest from the fiction of
character analysis and social problems to the historical novel
and the romance of heroic adventure. We have had a period of
intense, not to say morbid, introversion directed mainly upon
diseases of the social, domestic, political, and religious
life of the world. It may be that, like all other currents
of interest when turned upon insoluble problems, this rush
of inquiry, this strain of exploitation, has about run its
course.... Great commercial interest seems to be turned or
turning from the world of commonplace life and the story of
the analysis of crime and filth to the historical romance, the
story of heroism, and the tale of adventure. People seem to be
interested as never before in the interpretation of history.
It may be that signs in the air of great world changes have
set all minds more or less to feeling out for precedents and
examples by which to measure the future's probabilities.[158]
The causes of this later wave of romanticism, a wave that was wider
than America, have been variously estimated. Harold Frederic suggested
Blackmore as the possible fountain head. "Was it _Lorna Doone_, I
wonder, that changed the drift in historical fiction? The book, after
it was once introduced to public attention by that comic accident which
no one can blame Mr. Blackmore for grinding his teeth over, achieved,
as it deserved, one of the great successes of our time--and great
successes set men thinking."[159] Paul Leicester Ford, himself an
historian and a notable producer of historical romance, was inclined
to another explanation: "At the present moment [1897] there seems a
revival of interest in American history, and the novelist has been
quickly responsive to it."[160] The English critic E. A. Bennett
offered still another solution: "America is a land of crazes. In
other words, it is simple: no derision is implied.... And America is
also a land of sentimentalism. It is this deep-seated quality which,
perhaps, accounts for the vogue of history in American fiction. The
themes of the historical novel are so remote, ideas about them exist
so nebulously in the mind, that a writer may safely use the most
bare-faced distortions to pamper the fancy without offending that
natural and racial shrewdness which would bestir itself if a means of
verification were at hand. The extraordinary notion still obtains that
human nature was different 'in those days'; that the good old times
were, somehow, 'pretty,' and governed by fates poetically just."[161]
Ford undoubtedly was right in assigning the immediate outburst at the
close of the century to a new interest in American history. The war
with Spain brought about a burst of patriotism and of martial feeling
that made the swashbuckling romance and the episode from the American
Revolution seem peculiarly appropriate. But the war was by no means the
only cause. The reaction had come earlier, a reaction from the excess
of reality that had come with the eighties. The influence of Stevenson
must not be overlooked, Stevenson who, type of his age, had sickened
early of the realistic, the analytic, the problematic.
"I do desire a book of adventure," Stevenson had written to
Henley as early as 1884, "a romance--and no man will get or
write me one. Dumas I have read and re-read too often; Scott,
too, and I am short. I want to hear swords clash. I want a
book to begin in a good way; a book, I guess, like _Treasure
Island_.... Oh, my sighings after romance, or even Skeltery,
and O! the weary age which will produce me neither!
"'CHAPTER I
"'The night was damp and cloudy, the ways foul. The single
horseman, cloaked and booted, who pursued his way across
Willesden Common, had not met a traveler, when the sound of
wheels....'
"'CHAPTER II
"'"Yes, sir," said the old pilot, "she must have dropped into
the bay a little afore dawn. A queer craft she looks."
"'"She shows no colors," returned the young gentleman, musingly.
"'"They're a-lowering of a quarter-boat, Mr. Mark," resumed the
old salt. "We shall soon know more of her."
"'"Aye," replied the young gentleman called Mark, "and here,
Mr. Seadrift, comes your sweet daughter Nancy tripping down the
cliff."
"'"God bless her kind heart, sir," ejaculated old Seadrift.'"
Be the cause what it may, for a time historical romance was the
dominant literary form in America. In 1902, Bliss Perry, editor of the
_Atlantic_, could write of "the present passion for historical novels."
To what extent they were a passion may be learned from the records
of publishers. By the summer of 1901, Ford's _Janice Meredith_ had
sold 275,000 copies, Mary Johnston's _To Have and to Hold_, 285,000,
and Churchill's _The Crisis_, 320,000, and his _Richard Carvel_,
420,000.[162] One might give equally large figures for such favorites
as Charles Major's _When Knighthood Was in Flower_, Tarkington's
_Monsieur Beaucaire_, Mitchell's _Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker_, Thompson's
_Alice of Old Vincennes_, and very many others, foreign as well as
American.
The novels fall into two classes: those in which the historical
element is made emphatic and those which are pure romances. Of the
former class Paul Leicester Ford's _Janice Meredith_ is, perhaps, the
best type; of the latter, Mitchell's _Hugh Wynne_. Ford was first of
all a historian, a bibliographer, a tireless delver among historical
sources. He had been educated in his father's library, which contained
the finest collection of Americana in the world, and at twelve we find
him publishing on his own press a genealogy of Webster of his own
compilation. His later bibliographical and historical work centered
about the American Revolution. When he turned to fiction it was as a
historian, a specialist who would exploit real historical characters
and real areas of American life. _The Honorable Peter Stirling_ was a
study of ward politics with the young Grover Cleveland as the central
figure. It was an accurate picture, vigorous and truthful, and even
though a fiction it is a valuable historical document. So it was with
_Janice Meredith_, a historian's day-dream over his Americana. It
presents an accurate picture of the social conditions of its time. Many
of its characters are revolutionary leaders: Washington is a central
figure--"The true George Washington," presented with all his failings
as well as with all his excellences.
It was natural that Ford should make much of the material that he knew
so thoroughly: he brought it in sometimes for its own sake rather
than for the sake of the story. Undoubtedly he falsified history by
making his real personages, like Washington and Franklin, take part
in conversations that never occurred and do things that strictly
never were done, but it is equally true that he has given us the best
conception that is now possible of how it must have felt to live in
the days of the Revolution. His chief excellences were his vigor and
vivacity, and his Norris-like mastery of details. He was a realist
enamoured of truth who extended his realism into the domain of romance.
His faults all centered about his undoubted deficiency in literary art:
he lacked constructive power and distinction of style. His stories
are the diversions of a professional historian, brilliant but without
promise of permanence.
Typical of the second variety of historical romance is the work
of Silas Weir Mitchell, poet, romancer, artist, and historian. Dr.
Mitchell was of Philadelphia as Dr. Holmes was of Boston, and like Dr.
Holmes he gave his most vigorous years completely to his profession.
He was fifty-three and one of the leading world specialists on nervous
diseases when he wrote his first full novel, _In War Time_. His own
explanation, given in later years to a gathering of University of
Pennsylvania men, has often been quoted:
When success in my profession gave me the freedom of long
summer holidays, the despotism of my habits of work would
have made entire idleness mere _ennui_. I turned to what,
except for stern need, would have been my lifelong work from
youth--literature--bored by idleness, wrote my first novel.
The confession in the latter sentence is significant. Poetry all his
life was to him an exalted thing, as it was, indeed, to Stoddard and
the other poets of beauty. In later years he published many volumes
of it and contributed it to the magazines, but never for money. It
explains much in his work. No other novelist of the period has so
filled his fiction with quoted lyrics and with lyrical prose. It is
here that he differs from writers like Ford and Norris: he would
produce literature.
His list of work is a varied one. His first long novel and also his
last dealt with the Civil War, in which he had served three years as a
surgeon. Then, like Dr. Holmes, he wrote pathological studies on which
he brought to bear his vast medical knowledge, novels like _Dr. North
and His Friends_ and _Constance Trescott_; he wrote brilliant tales of
French life, like _The Adventures of Francois_, Dr. Mitchell's favorite
among his novels, and _A Diplomatic Adventure_; he wrote idyllic
studies of Nature like _When All the Woods Are Green_, and _Far in the
Forest_, and, best of all, the historical romances _Hugh Wynne, Free
Quaker_, and _The Red City_.
These novels more than any others written during the period are
products of an exact and extensive knowledge of the materials of which
they are woven. We feel at every point that we are in the hands of
an expert, the ablest neurologist of his generation, who has seen
intimately vast areas of life of which the average reader knows
nothing. His analysis of a character has the exactness of a clinic and
he adds to it, moreover, an imaginative power that makes us see as
well as know and feel. He is skilful in characterization. "Character,"
he once wrote, "is best delineated by occasional broad touches, without
much explanatory comment, without excess of minute description. If I
fail to characterize, I fail in novel writing." He has not failed.
Octavia Blake in the novel _Roland Blake_ is drawn with peculiar skill;
so is Lucretia Hunter in _Circumstance_, so is Constance Trescott, that
study of over-devotion. Always is he best in his studies of femininity,
doubtless because women had played so large a part in his medical
practice.
With few exceptions his characters are from the higher classes,
"gentlefolk," he has called them in his novel _Dr. North_, and he has
made them alive, as Howells was unable to do, and even James. He has
discussed the point himself: "Nor can I tell why some men can not
create gentlefolk. It is not knowledge, nor is it the being in or of
their world that gives this power. Thackeray had it; so had Trollope;
Dickens never; nor, in my mind, was George Eliot always happy in this
respect; and of the living I shall say nothing."[163] We feel this
quality most strongly in his historical novels. He knew intimately
his background, Old Philadelphia with its exclusive aristocracy, and
he has been able to transport his reader into the very atmosphere of
old Second Street, in the days when it contained the most distinctive
social set in America. He was a part of it; he wrote as if he were
writing his own family history, lovingly, reverently. He was writing
romance, but he was writing it as one who is on sacred historical
ground where error of fact or of inference is unpardonable. He has
himself outlined the work of the historical romancer:
Suppose I have a story to tell and wish to evolve character
amid the scenery and events of an historical episode. Suppose,
for instance, the story to lie largely in a great city. For
years I must study the topography, dress, manners, and family
histories; must be able in mind to visit this or that house;
know where to call, whom I shall see, the hours of meals, the
diet, games, etc. I must know what people say on meeting and
parting. Then I must read letters, diaries, and so on, to get
the speech forms and to enable me, if it be autobiography,
to command the written style of the day. Most men who write
thus of another time try to give the effect of actuality by
an excessive use of archaic forms. Only enough should be used
to keep from time to time some touch of this past, and not so
much as to distract incessantly by needless reminders. It is
an art, and, like all good art effects, it escapes complete
analysis.
Then as to the use of historical characters. These must
naturally influence the fate of your puppets; they must never
be themselves the most prominent personages of your story.[163]
He presents his material with skill: he is a story-teller; his plots
move strongly and always by means not of explanations but of the
self-development of his characters. Even his most minor figures form a
distinct part of the movement. His style has more of distinction than
has any other of the later romancers. He brought to his work the older
ideals of literary form and expression, and he wrought not with the
haste of the journalist and special correspondent, but with the leisure
of the deliberate man of letters. Without question he is as large a
figure in his period as Dr. Holmes was in his, and there are those who
would rank him as the greater of the two. That he has not been given a
more commanding place is due undoubtedly to his great fame as a medical
expert. The physician has overshadowed the author.
VII
The enormous quantity and richness of the fiction of the period make
impossible extended criticism of any save those who were leaders or
innovators. Many did most excellent work, work indeed in some cases
that seems to point to permanence, yet since they brought nothing new
either in material or in method we need not dwell long upon them.
No type of fiction, for instance, was more abundant all through
the period than that which we have called the E. P. Roe type, and
the most voluminous producer of it undoubtedly was Captain, later
General, Charles King, who created no fewer than fifty-five novels of
the half-sensational, half-sentimental type which we associate with
the name of Roe. With his wide knowledge of army life, especially as
lived in the frontier camps of the West after the Civil War, he was
able to give his work a verisimilitude that added greatly to their
popularity. The love story was skilfully blended with what seemed to
be real history. The frontier stories of Mary Hallock Foote, wife
of a civil engineer whose work called him into the mining camps of
Colorado and Idaho, have the same characteristics. Their author, a
clever illustrator, was able to extend her art to her descriptions of
the primitive regions and savage humanity of the frontier, and for
a time she was compared even with Bret Harte. But not for long. Her
books, save for their novelty of setting, have no characteristics that
are not conventional. Better is the work of Clara Louise Burnham.
There is in her fiction more of imaginative power and more command of
the subtleties of style, but even her best efforts fall far short of
distinction.
Of the romancers of the period the leader for a time unquestionably was
Julian Hawthorne, only son of the greatest of American romancers. In
his earlier days he devoted himself to themes worthy of the Hawthorne
name and treated them in what fairly may be called the Hawthorne
manner. His novels, like _Bressant_ and _Archibald Malmaison_, were
hailed everywhere as remarkably promising work and there were many
who predicted for him a place second only to his father's. But the
man lacked seriousness, conscience, depth of life, knowledge of the
human heart. After a short period of worthy endeavor he turned to
the sensational and the trivial, and became a yellow journalist. No
literary career seemingly so promising has ever failed more dismally.
Stronger romancers by far have been Blanche Willis Howard, Frederick
J. Stimson, and Arthur Sherburne Hardy. Few American women have been
more brilliant than Miss Howard. Her _One Summer_ has a sprightliness
and a humor about it that are perennial, and her Breton romance _Guenn_
is among the greatest romances of the period in either England or
America. The spirit of true romance breathes from it; and it came
alive from its creator's heart and life. So far does it surpass all
her other work that she is rated more and more now as a single-work
artist. She passed her last years away from America in Stuttgart, where
her husband, Herr von Teuffel, was acting as court physician to the
king of Wuertemberg. Hardy also was a romancer, a stylist of the French
type, brilliant, finished. Few have ever brought to fiction a mind
more keenly alert and more analytical. He was a mathematician of note,
a writer of treatises on least squares and quarternions. But he was a
poet as well and a romancer. His _But yet a Woman_ has an atmosphere
about it that is rarely found in literature in English. His _Passe
Rose_ is the most idealistic of all the historical romances: it moves
like a prose poem. Stimson too had artistic imagination, grace of style
of the old type joined to the freshness and vigor of the new period.
It is to be regretted that he chose to devote himself to the law and
write legal treatises that are everywhere recognized as authoritative
rather than to do highly distinctive work in the more creative field of
prose romance. None of these writers may be said to have added anything
really new to the province in which they worked and so may be dismissed
with a brief comment. They worked in old material with old methods and
largely with old ideals, and though they worked often with surpassing
skill, they were followers rather than leaders.
Several novels made much stir in the day of their first appearance,
Bellamy's _Looking Backward_, for instance, John Hay's _The
Bread-Winners_ (1884), and Fuller's _The Cliff Dwellers_, that picture
of Chicago life that for a time was thought to be as promising as Frank
Norris's realistic work. Robert Grant's humorous and sprightly studies
of society and life were also at various times much discussed, but all
of them are seen now to have been written for their own generation
alone. With every decade almost there comes a newness that for a time
is supposed to put into eclipse even the fixed stars. A quarter of a
century, however, tells the story. The Norwegian scholar and poet and
novelist Boyesen, who did what Howells really did not do, take Tolstoy
as his master, was thought for two decades to be of highest rank, but
to-day his work, save for certain sections of his critical studies, is
no longer read.
Even F. Hopkinson Smith is too near just at present for us to prophesy
with confidence, yet it is hard to believe that his Colonel Carter
is to be forgotten, and there are other parts of his work, like _Tom
Grogan_ and _Caleb West_, books that centered about his profession
of lighthouse architect, that seem now like permanent additions
to American fiction. There was a breeziness about his style, a
cosmopolitanism, a sense of knowledge and authority that is most
convincing. Some of his short stories, like those for instance in
_At Close Range_--"A Night Out," to be still more specific--have a
picturing power, a perfect naturalness, an accuracy of diction, that
mark them as triumphs of realism in its best sense. Like Dr. Mitchell,
he came late to literature, but when he did come he came strongly,
laden with a wealth of materials, and he has left behind him a handful
at least of novels and studies that bid fair to endure long.
VIII
Of the younger group of novelists, those writers born in the sixties
and early seventies and publishing their first novels during the first
decade of the new century, we shall say little. The new spirit of
nationality that came in the seventies did not furnish the impulse
that produced the work of this second generation of the period. It is
a school of novelists distinct and by itself. We may only call the
roll of its leaders, arranging it, perhaps, in the order of seniority:
Gertrude Franklin Atherton (1859----), Bliss Perry (1860----), Owen
Wister (1860----), John Fox, Jr. (1863----), Holman F. Day (1865----),
Robert W. Chambers (1865----), Meredith Nicholson (1866----), David
Graham Philips (1867-1911), Robert Herrick (1868----), Newton Booth
Tarkington (1869----), Mary Johnston (1870----), Edith Wharton (----),
Alice Hegan Rice (1870----), Winston Churchill (1871----), Stewart
Edward White (1873----), Ellen Anderson Glasgow (1874----), Jack
London (1876-1916). The earlier work of some of these writers falls
under classifications which we have already discussed, as for instance
Churchill's _Richard Carvel_, Mary Johnston's _Prisoners of Hope_,
Chambers's _Cardigan_, and Wister's _The Virginian_. Of the great mass
of the fiction of the group, however, and of a still younger group
we shall say nothing. It was not inspired by the impulse that in the
sixties and the seventies produced the National Period.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
JOSIAH GILBERT HOLLAND. (1819-1881.) _History of Western
Massachusetts_, 1855; _The Bay Path_, 1857; _Bitter-Sweet_ [a
poem], 1858; _Letters to Young People_, 1858; _Gold Foil_, 1859;
_Miss Gilbert's Career_, 1860; _Lessons in Life_, 1861; _Letter
to the Joneses_, 1863; _Plain Talks on Familiar Subjects_, 1865;
_Life of Lincoln_, 1865; _Kathrina_ [a poem], 1867; _The Marble
Prophecy_, 1872; _Arthur Bonnicastle_, 1873; _Garnered Sheaves_,
1873; _Mistress of the Manse_, 1874; _Seven Oaks_, 1875;
_Nicholas Minturn_, 1877; _Every-Day Topics_ (two series), 1870,
1882.
EDWARD PAYSON ROE. (1838-1888.) _Barriers Burned Away_, 1872;
_What Can She Do?_ 1873; _The Opening of a Chestnut Burr_, 1874;
_From Jest to Earnest_, 1875; _Near to Nature's Heart_, 1876;
_A Knight of the Nineteenth Century_, 1877; _A Face Illumined_,
1878; _A Day of Fate_, 1880; _Without a Home_, 1881; _His Somber
Rivals_, 1883; _An Unexpected Result_, 1883; _Nature's Serial
Story_, 1884; _A Young Girl's Wooing_, 1884; _Driven Back to
Eden_, 1885; _An Original Belle_, 1885; _He Fell in Love with His
Wife_, 1886; _The Earth Trembled_, 1887; _Found, yet Lost_, 1888;
_Miss Lou_, 1888; _E. P. Roe: Reminiscences of His Life._ By his
sister, Mary A. Roe, 1899.
FRANCES ELIZA HODGSON BURNETT. (1849----.) _That Lass o'
Lowrie's_, 1877; _Surly Tim_, 1877; _Haworth's_, 1879;
_Louisiana_, 1880; _A Fair Barbarian_, 1881; _Through One
Administration_, 1883; _Little Lord Fauntleroy_, 1886; _Editha's
Burglar_, 1888; _Sara Crewe_, 1888; _The Pretty Sister of Jose_,
1889; _Little Saint Elizabeth_, 1890; _Giovanni and the Other_,
1892; _The One I Knew Best of All_ [autobiography], 1893; _Two
Little Pilgrims' Progress_, 1895; _A Lady of Quality_, 1896; _His
Grace of Osmonde_, 1897; _In Connection with the De-Willoughby
Claim_, 1899; _The Making of a Marchioness_, 1901; _The Methods
of Lady Walderhurst_, 1902; _In the Closed Room_, 1904; _A Little
Princess: Being the Whole Story of Sara Crewe_, 1905; _Dawn of
a To-morrow_, 1906; _Earlier Stories_, first and second series,
1906; _Queen Silver-Bell_, 1906; _Racketty-Packetty House_,
1906; _The Shuttle_, 1907; _Cozy Lion_, 1907; _Good Wolf_, 1908;
_Spring Cleaning; as Told by Queen Crosspatch_, 1908; _Land of
the Blue Flower_, 1909; _Baby Crusoe and His Man Saturday_, 1909;
_Secret Garden_, 1911; _My Robin_, 1912; _T. Tembaron_, 1913.
FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD. (1854-1909.) _Mr. Isaacs_, 1882;
_Doctor Claudius_, 1883; _A Roman Singer_, _To Leeward_, and
_An American Politician_, 1884; _Zoroaster_, 1885; _A Tale of a
Lonely Parish_, 1886; _Marzio's Crucifix_, _Paul Patoff_, and
_Saracinesca_, 1887; _With the Immortals_, 1888; _Greifenstein_
and _Sant' Ilario_, 1889; _The Cigarette-maker's Romance_, 1890;
_Kahled_ and _The Witch of Prague_, 1891; _The Three Fates_, _The
Children of the King_, and _Don Orsino_, 1892; _Marion Darche_,
_Pietro Ghisleri_, and _The Novel: What It Is_, 1893; _Katherine
Lauderdale_, _Love in Idleness_, _The Ralstons_, _Casa Braccio_,
and _Adam Johnstone's Son_, 1894; _Taquisara_, and _Corleone_,
1896; _Ave Roma Immortalis_, 1898; _Via Crucis_, 1899; _In the
Palace of the King_, _Southern Italy and Sicily_, and _The
Rulers of the South_, 1900; _Marietta, a Maid of Venice_, 1901;
_Cecilia, A Story of Modern Rome_, 1902; _The Heart of Rome_,
and _Man Overboard_, 1903; _Whosoever Shall Offend_, 1904; _Fair
Margaret and Salve Venetia_, 1905; _A Lady of Rome_, 1906;
_Arethusa and The Little City of Hope_, 1907; _The Primadonna_
and _The Diva's Ruby_, 1908; _The White Sister_, 1909.
MARGARETTA WADE DELAND. (1857----.) _The Old Garden and Other
Verses_, 1886; _John Ward, Preacher_, 1888; _Florida Days_, 1889;
_Sidney_, 1890; _Story of a Child_, 1892; _Mr. Tommy Dove, and
Other Stories_, 1893; _Philip and His Wife_, 1894; _The Wisdom of
Fools_, 1897; _Old Chester Tales_, 1898; _Dr. Lavendar's People_,
1903; _The Common Way_, 1904; _The Awakening of Helena Ritchie_,
1906; _An Encore_, 1907; _R. J. Mother and Some Other People_,
1908; _Where the Laborers Are Few_, 1909; _The Way of Peace_,
1910; _The Iron Woman_, 1911; _The Voice_, 1912; _Partners_,
1913; _The Hands of Esau_, 1914.
STEPHEN CRANE. (1871-1900.) _The Black Riders and Other Lines_,
1895; _The Red Badge of Courage: Episode of the American Civil
War_, 1895; _Maggie: a Girl of the Streets_, 1896; _George's
Mother_, 1896; _The Little Regiment, and Other Episodes of the
American Civil War_, 1896; _The Third Violet_, 1897; _The Open
Boat, and Other Tales of Adventure_, 1898; _The Monster and Other
Stories_, 1899; _Active Service: a Novel_, 1899; _War Is Kind_,
1899; _Whilomville Stories_, 1900; _Great Battles of the World_,
1900; _Wounds in the Rain: War Stories_, 1900.
FRANK NORRIS. (1870-1902.) _Moran of "The Lady Letty,"_ 1898;
_Blix_, 1899; _McTeague: a Story of San Francisco_, 1899; _A
Man's Woman_, 1900; _The Octopus: a Story of California_, 1901;
_The Pit: a Story of Chicago_, 1902; _A Deal in Wheat, and Other
Stories_, 1903; _Complete Works. Golden Gate Edition. Seven
Volumes_, 1903; _Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other
Literary Essays_, 1903; _Vandover and the Brute_.
HAROLD FREDERIC. (1856-1898.) _Seth's Brother's Wife: a Study of
Life in the Greater New York_, 1887; _The Lawton Girl_, 1890; _In
the Valley_, 1891; _Young Emperor William II. of Germany_, 1891;
_The New Exodus: a Study of Israel in Russia_, 1892; _The Return
of O'Mahony_, 1892; _The Copperhead_, 1893; _Marsena, and Other
Stories of the War Time_, 1894; _Mrs. Albert Grundy: Observations
in Philistia_, 1896; _The Damnation of Theron Ware_, 1896; _March
Hares_, 1896; _The Deserter and Other Stories: a Book of Two
Wars_, 1898; _Gloria Mundi_, 1899; _The Market-Place_, 1899.
PAUL LEICESTER FORD. (1865-1902.) _Who Was the Mother of
Franklin's Son?_ 1889; _The Honorable Peter Stirling and What
People Thought of Him_, 1894; _The True George Washington_, 1896;
_The Great K. and A. Robbery_, 1897; _The Story of an Untold
Love_, 1897; _Tattle Tales of Cupid_, 1898; _Janice Meredith:
a Story of the American Revolution_, 1899; _The Many-sided
Franklin_, 1899; _Wanted: a Match-maker_, 1900; _A House Party_,
1901; _Wanted: a Chaperon_, 1902; _A Checked Love Affair; and
the Cortelyou Feud_, 1903; _Love Finds a Way_, 1904; _Thomas
Jefferson_, 1904. His bibliographies and edited work not listed.
SILAS WEIR MITCHELL. (1829-1914.) _Hephzibah Guiness_, 1880;
_Thee and You_, 1880; _A Draft on the Bank of Spain_, 1880; _In
War Time_, 1882; _The Hill of Stones and Other Poems_, 1883;
_Roland Blake_, 1886; _Far in the Forest_, 1889; _The Cup of
Youth and Other Poems_, 1889; _The Psalm of Death and Other
Poems_, 1890; _Characteristics_, 1892; _Francis Blake: a Tragedy
of the Sea_, 1892; _The Mother and Other Poems_, 1892; _Mr. Kris
Kringle: a Christmas Tale_, 1893; _Philip Vernon: a Tale in
Prose and Verse_, 1895; _When All the Woods Are Green: a Novel_,
1894; _Madeira's Party_, 1895; _Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker_, 1897;
_Adventures of Francois, Foundling, Thief, Juggler, and Fencing
Master, During the French Revolution_, 1898; _Autobiography of
a Quack_, 1900; _Dr. North and His Friends_, 1900; _The Wager
and Other Poems_, 1900; _Circumstance_, 1901; _A Comedy of
Conscience_, 1903; _Little Stories_, 1903; _New Samaria and The
Summer of St. Martin_, 1904; _The Youth of Washington_, 1904;
_Constance Trescott_, 1905; _A Diplomatic Adventure_, 1905; _The
Red City: a Novel of the Second Administration of President
Washington_, 1907; _John Sherwood, Ironmaster_, 1910; _The
Guillotine Club and Other Stories_, 1910; _Westways_, 1913. His
many medical works not listed.
CHARLES KING. (1844----.) _The Colonel's Daughter; or, Winning
His Spurs_, 1883; _Marion's Faith_, 1886; _The Deserter_, 1887;
_From the Ranks_, 1887; _A War-Time Wooing_, 1888; _Between
the Lines_, 1889; _Sunset Pass_, 1889; _Laramie; or, the Queen
of Bedlam: a Story of the Sioux War of 1876_, 1889; _Starlight
Ranch, and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier_, 1890;
_The Colonel's Christmas Dinner_, 1890; _Campaigning with Crook
and Stories of Army Life_, 1890; _Trials of a Staff Officer_,
1891; _Two Soldiers_, 1891; _Dunraven Ranch_, 1891; _Captain
Blake_, 1891; _Foes in Ambush_, 1893; _A Soldier's Secret: a
Story of the Sioux War of 1890_, 1893; _Waring's Peril_, 1894;
_Initial Experience and Other Stories_, 1894; _Cadet Days: a
Story of West Point_, 1894; _Under Fire_, 1895; _Story of Fort
Frayne_, 1895; _Rancho del Muerlo_, 1895; _Captain Close_, 1895;
_Sergeant Croesus_, 1895; _An Army Wife_, 1896; _A Garrison
Tangle_, 1896; _A Tame Surrender: a Story of the Chicago Strike_,
1896; _Trooper Ross_, 1896; _Trumpeter Fred: a Story of the
Plains_, 1896; _Warrior Gap: a Story of the Sioux Outbreak of
1868_, 1897; _Ray's Recruit_, 1898; _The General's Double: a
Story of the Army of the Potomac_, 1898; _A Wounded Name_, 1898;
_Trooper Galahad_, 1899; _From School to Battlefield_, 1899; _In
Spite of Foes_, 1901; _From the Ranks_, 1901; _Norman Holt: a
Story of the Army of the Cumberland_, 1901; _Ray's Daughter: a
Story of Manila_, 1901; _Conquering Corps Badge and Other Stories
of the Philippines_, 1902; _The Iron Brigade_, 1902; _Way Out
West_, 1902; _An Apache Princess_, 1903; _A Daughter of the
Sioux_, 1903; _Comrades in Arms_, 1904; _A Knight of Columbia_,
1904; _A Medal of Honor_, 1905; _Famous and Decisive Battles of
the World_, 1905; _A Soldier's Trial: an Episode of the Canteen
Crusade_, 1905; _Farther Story of Lieutenant Sandy Ray_, 1906;
_Tonio, Son of the Sierras_, 1906; _Captured: a Story of Sandy
Bay_, 1907; _The Rock of Chicamauga_, 1907; _To the Front_, 1908;
_Lanier of the Cavalry_, 1909; _The True Ulysses S. Grant_, 1914.
MARY HALLOCK FOOTE. (1847----.) _The Led-Horse Claim: Romance of
a Mining Camp_, 1883; _John Bodewin's Testimony_, 1885; _The Last
Assembly Ball_, 1886; _The Chosen Valley_, 1892; _Coeur d'Alene_,
1894; _In Exile and Other Stories_, 1894; _The Cup of Trembling
and Other Stories_, 1895; _Little Fig-tree Stories_, 1899; _The
Prodigal_, 1900; _The Desert and The Sown_, 1902; _A Touch of
Sin and Other Stories_, 1903; _Royal Americans_, 1910; _Picked
Company: a Novel_, 1912.
CLARA LOUISE BURNHAM. (1854----.) _No Gentleman_, 1881; _A Sane
Lunatic_, 1882; _Dearly Bought_, 1884; _Next Door_, 1886; _Young
Maids and Old_, 1888; _The Mistress of Beech Knoll_, 1890; _Miss
Bragg's Secretary_, 1892; _Dr. Latimer_, 1893; _Sweet Clover_,
1894; _The Wise Woman_, 1895; _Miss Archer Archer_, 1897; _A
Great Love_, 1898; _A West Point Wooing_, 1899; _Miss Prichard's
Wedding Trip_, 1901; _The Right Princess_, 1902; _Jewel_, 1903;
_Jewel's Story Book_, 1904; _The Opened Shutters_, 1906; _The
Leaven of Love_, 1908; _Clever Betsey_, 1910; _The Inner Flame_,
1912.
JULIAN HAWTHORNE. (1846----.) _Bressant_, 1873; _Idolatry_,
1874; _Saxon Studies_, 1875; _Garth_, 1877; _Mrs. Gainsborough's
Diamonds_, 1878; _Archibald Malmaison_, 1879; _Sebastian
Strome_, 1880; _Fortune's Fool_, 1883; _Dust: a Novel_, 1883;
_Beatrix Randolph_, 1883; _Prince Saroni's Wife_, 1884; _Noble
Blood_, 1884; _Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife: a Biography_,
1885; _Love--or a Name_, 1885; _Sinfire_, 1886; _The Trial of
Gideon_, 1886; _John Parmelee's Curse_, 1886; _Confessions and
Criticisms_, 1887; five novels from the Diary of Inspector
Byrnes: _The Tragic Mystery_, _The Great Bank Robbery_, _An
American Penman_, _Section 558_, 1887, and _Another's Crime_,
1888; _The Professor's Sister: a Romance_; _A Miser of Second
Avenue_, 1888; _A Dream and a Forgetting_, 1888; _David
Poindexter's Disappearance_, 1888; _Kildhurin's Oak_, 1889;
_Constance_, 1889; _Pauline_, 1890; _A Stage Friend_, 1890;
_American Literature: an Elementary Textbook_ [with Leonard
Lemmon], 1891; _Humors of the Fair_, 1893; _Six Cent Sam's_,
1893; _The Golden Fleece: a Romance_, 1896; _A Fool of Nature_,
1896; _Love Is a Spirit_, 1896; _A History of the United States_,
1898; _Hawthorne and His Circle_, 1903; _The Secret of Solomon_,
1909; _Lovers in Heaven_, 1910; _The Subterranean Brotherhood_,
1914.
BLANCHE WILLIS HOWARD, Mrs. von Teuffel. (1847-1898.) _One
Summer_, 1877; _One Year Abroad_, 1877; _Aunt Serena_, 1881;
_Guenn: a Wave of the Breton Coast_, 1884; _The Open Door_, 1891;
_A Fellowe and His Wife_ [with W. Sharp], 1892; _A Battle and a
Boy_, 1892; _No Heroes_, 1893; _Seven on the Highways_, 1897;
_Dionysius, the Weaver's Heart's Dearest_, 1899; _The Garden of
Eden_, 1900.
EDWARD BELLAMY. (1850-1898.) _Six to One: a Nantucket Idyl_,
1878; _Dr. Heidenhoff's Process_, 1880; _Miss Luddington's
Sister: a Romance of Immortality_, 1884; _Looking Backward,
2000-1881_, 1888; _Equality_, 1897; _A Blindman's World, and
Other Stories_, 1898; _The Duke of Stockbridge: a Romance of
Shay's Rebellion_, 1900.
HJALMAR HJORTH BOYESEN. (1848-1895.) _Gunnar_, 1874; _A
Norseman's Pilgrimage_, 1875; _Tales from Two Hemispheres_,
1876; _Falconberg_, 1879; _Goethe and Schiller: Their Lives and
Works_, 1879; _Queen Titania_, 1881; _Ilka on the Hill-Top_,
1881; _Idyls of Norway and Other Poems_, 1882; _A Daughter
of the Philistines_, 1883; _The Story of Norway_, 1886; _The
Modern Vikings_, 1887; _Vagabond Tales_, 1889; _The Light of
Her Countenance_, 1889; _The Mammon of Unrighteousness_, 1891;
_Essays on German Literature_, 1892; _Boyhood in Norway_, 1892;
_The Golden Calf: a Novel_, 1892; _Social Strugglers_, 1893;
_Commentary on the Writings of Henrik Ibsen_, 1894; _Literary and
Social Silhouettes_, 1894; _Essays on Scandinavian Literature_,
1895.
ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY. (1847----.) _Francesca of Rimini: a
Poem_, 1878; _But Yet a Woman_, 1883; _The Wind of Destiny_,
1886; _Passe Rose_, 1889; _Life and Letters of Joseph Hardy
Neesima_, 1891; _Songs of Two_, 1900; _His Daughter First_, 1903;
_Aurelie_, 1912; _Diane and Her Friends_, 1914. His mathematical
works not listed.
ROBERT GRANT. (1852----.) _The Little Tin Gods-on-Wheels; or,
Society in Our Modern Athens_, 1879; _The Confessions of a
Frivolous Girl_, 1880; _The Lambs: a Tragedy_, 1882; _An Average
Man_, 1884; _Face to Face_, 1886; _The Knave of Hearts: a Fairy
Story_, 1886; _A Romantic Young Lady_, 1886; _Jack Hall_, 1887;
_Jack in the Bush; or, a Summer on a Salmon River_, 1888; _The
Carletons_, 1891; _Mrs. Harold Stagg_, 1891; _The Reflections of
a Married Man_, 1892; _The Opinions of a Philosopher_, 1893; _The
Art of Living_, 1895; _A Bachelor's Christmas_, 1895; _The North
Shore of Massachusetts_, 1896; _Search-Light Letters_, 1899;
_Unleavened Bread_, 1900; _The Undercurrent_, 1904; _The Orchid_,
1905; _Law-breakers and Other Stories_, 1906; _The Chippendales_,
1909; _Confessions of a Grandfather_, 1912.
FREDERICK JESUP STIMSON, "J. S. of Dale." (1855----.) _Rollo's
Journey to Cambridge_, 1879; _Guerndale, an Old Story_, 1882;
_The Crime of Henry Vane_, 1884; _The Sentimental Calendar_,
1886; _First Harvests_, 1888; _Mrs. Knollys and Other Stories_,
1894; _Pirate Gold_, 1896; _King Noanett: a Story of Old Virginia
and Massachusetts Bay_, 1896; _Jethro Bacon of Sandwich_, 1902;
_In Cure of Her Soul_, 1906. His law publications not listed.
HENRY BLAKE FULLER. (1857----.) _The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani_,
1891; _The Chatelaine of La Trinite_, 1892; _The Cliff-Dwellers_,
1893; _With the Procession_, 1895; _The Puppet-Booth: Twelve
Plays_, 1896; _From the Other Side: Stories of Transatlantic
Travel_, 1898; _The Last Refuge: a Sicilian Romance_, 1900;
_Under the Skylights_, 1901; _Waldo Trench and Others: Stories of
Americans in Italy_, 1908.
FRANCIS HOPKINSON SMITH. (1838-1915.) _Old Lines in New Black
and White_, 1885; _Well-Worn Roads_, 1886; _A White Umbrella in
Mexico_, 1889; _A Book of the Tile Club_, 1890; _Col. Carter
of Cartersville_, 1891; _A Day at Laguerre's_, 1892; _American
Illustrators_, 1892; _A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others_,
1895; _Tom Grogan_, 1896; _Gondola Days_, 1897; _Venice of
To-day_, 1897; _Caleb West_, 1898; _The Other Fellow_, 1899; _The
Fortunes of Oliver Horn_, 1902; _The Under Dog_, 1903; _Col.
Carter's Christmas_, 1904; _At Close Range_, 1905; _The Wood Fire
in Number 3_, 1905; _The Tides of Barnegat_, 1906; _The Veiled
Lady_, 1907; _The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman_, 1907;
_Peter_, 1908; _Forty Minutes Late_, 1909; _Kennedy Square_,
1911; _The Arm-Chair at the Inn_, 1912; _In Thackeray's London_,
1913; _In Dickens's London_, 1914.