THE RISE OF FICTION; WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
It is very seldom in the history of literature that important
developments take place without long preliminaries. From period to
period new emphasis is placed on old ideas, and old forms are given the
right of way in literary fashion. In the course of American literature,
roughly speaking, the dominating forms of literature have been in
succession: exposition and travel during the colonial period; poetry,
satirical and epic, in the Revolutionary period; poetry in all its
broader aspects during the first two thirds of the nineteenth century.
After the Civil War for fifty years fiction came to the front; from
about 1900 on a new emphasis was given to the stage and the playwright;
at present the most striking fact in world literature is the broadening
and deepening of the poetic currents again. Yet all of these forms are
always existent. To speak of the rise of fiction, then, is simply to
acknowledge the increased attention which for a period it demanded.
It is frequently said that America's chief contribution to world
literature has been the short story as developed since the Civil War.
Yet in America the ground had been prepared for this development by
many writers,--among them, as already mentioned in this history,
Washington Irving with "The Sketch Book" in 1819 (see pp. 118-131),
Hawthorne with "Twice-Told Tales" in 1838 (see pp. 240 and 243), Poe
with his various contributions to periodical literature in the 1840's
(see pp. 185-187), Mark Twain with "The Jumping Frog" of 1867, Bret
Harte with "The Luck of Roaring Camp" of 1870 and the great bulk of
his subsequent contributions (see p. 381), and Thomas Bailey Aldrich
with "Marjorie Daw" of 1873 and his other volumes of short stories. In
the meanwhile the novel had had its consecutive history--from Brockden
Brown beginning with 1798 (see pp. 100-109) to Cooper in 1820 (see pp.
141-157), William Gilmore Simms from 1833 (see p. 344), Hawthorne from
1850 on (see pp. 236-251), Mrs. Stowe from 1852 (see pp. 299-309), and
Holmes from 1861 (see pp. 320, 321). And these writers of short and
long fiction are only the outstanding story-tellers in America between
the beginning of the century and the years just after the Civil War.
In a chapter such as this no exhaustive survey is possible, for it
involves scores of writers and hundreds of books. The vital movement
started with a fresh and vivid treatment of native American material,
and it moved in a great sweeping curve from the West down past the
Gulf up through the southeastern states into New England, across to
the Middle West, and back into the Ohio valley until every part of the
country was represented by its expositors. The course of this newer
provincial fiction is suggested by the mention of Mark Twain's "Jumping
Frog" (1867, California), "The Luck of Roaring Camp" of Bret Harte
(1870, California), G. W. Cable's "Old Creole Days" (1879, Louisiana),
"Nights with Uncle Remus," by Joel Chandler Harris (1880, Georgia), "In
the Tennessee Mountains," by Charles Egbert Craddock (1884), "In old
Virginia," by Thomas Nelson Page (1887), "A New England Nun," by Mary
E. Wilkins Freeman (1891), "Main-Travelled Roads," by Hamlin Garland
(1891, the Middle West), "Flute and Violin," by James Lane Allen (1891,
the Ohio valley).
[Illustration:
CHRONOLOGICAL CHART II. AMERICAN LITERATURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900
Brockden Brown (1771=+1810)
Washington Irving (1783++++++=======++++++++++-1859)
Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790---=======++++++++++++++-1867)
Joseph Rodman Drake (1795==1820)
J. Fenimore Cooper (1789-----+=====+++++++1851)
Wm. Cullen Bryant (1794--+++++++++++=======++++++++++++-1878)
Edgar Allan Poe (1808-----------+++======1849)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803----------========++++++++++----1882)
Henry David Thoreau (1817----------+++++=====1862)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804--------+++++++++++=====++1864)
John G. Whittier (1807----------++++++++=========++++++++++1892)
Henry W. Longfellow (1807-----++++++++++++========+++++--1882)
James R. Lowell (1819--------+++++===========+++++++--1891)
Harriet B. Stowe (1811-------------+++++========++++++++++--1896)
Oliver W. Holmes (1809-----------++++++++++++=======++++++-1894)
Richard H. Stoddard (1825---------+=======++++++++++++-->1903)
Thomas B. Aldrich (1836-------+++======++++++++++>1907)
Edmund C. Stedman (1833-----------++======++++++++>1908)
Henry Timrod (1829----------=======1867)
Paul Hamilton Hayne (1830--------+==========+++++--1886)
Sidney Lanier (1842-------=========1881)
Walt Whitman (1819---------------=========+++++++++1892)
Bret Harte (1839-------------+=====++++++>1902)
Mark Twain (1835--------------+=======++++>1910)
Edward Rowland Sill (1841-------------=====++1887)
"Joaquin" Miller (1841-------------+====++++++>1913)
Richard Watson Gilder (1844---------------++=====+>1909)
Wm. Dean Howells (1837--------++++++++++++=======++>)
Wm. Vaughn Moody (1869------+++=>1910)
- Length of life, as far as included in this century
+ Period of authorship
= Most important period of authorship
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (1837- )
The preëminent figure in the field of American fiction during the
last half century has been William Dean Howells, a man who is widely
representative of the broad literary development in the country and
worthy of careful study as an artist and as a critic of life. Although
he has been an Easterner by residence for nearly half a century,
he is the greatest contribution of the West--or what was West in his
youth--to Eastern life and thought.
He was born in 1837 at Martins Ferry, Ohio,--the second of eight
children. Perhaps the richness of his character is accounted for by the
varied strains in his ancestry. On his father's side his people were
wholly Welsh except his English great-grandmother, and on his mother's
wholly German except his Irish grandfather. His mother he has described
as the heart of the family, and his father as the soul. The family
fortunes were in money ways unsuccessful. His father's experience as a
country editor took him from place to place in a succession of ventures
which were harrassed by uncertain income and heavy debts. These were
always paid, but only by dint of unceasing effort. The Howells family
were, however, happy in their concord and in their daily enjoyment of
the best that books could bring them. Unlike many another youth who
has struggled into literary fame, William Dean found a ready sympathy
with his ambitions at home. His experience was less like Whitman's than
Bryant's. From childhood the printing office was his school and almost
his only school, for the district teachers had little to offer a child
of literary parentage "whose sense was open to every intimation of
beauty." Very early his desire for learning led him into what he called
"self-conducted inquiries" in foreign languages; and with the help of a
"sixteen-bladed grammar," a nondescript polyglot affair, he acquired in
turn a reading knowledge of Latin, Greek, Spanish, German, French, and
Italian. In the meanwhile he was reading and assimilating the popular
English favorites. It was typical of his experience that Longfellow led
him to his first studies of the Spanish language, bringing him back
to Spain, where he had traveled in fancy with Irving. Always he was
writing, for his life was "filled with literature to bursting," and
always imitating--now Pope, now Heine, now Cervantes, now Shakespeare.
As a printer on country journals he had the opportunity to place his
own wares before the public, often composing in type without ever
putting pen to paper. His father encouraged him to contribute to
journals of larger circulation, and the experience naturally led him
into professional journalism before he was of age. It led him also to
Columbus, the state capital, where he reported the proceedings of the
legislature and in time rose to the dignity of editorial writer. During
these years of late youth and early manhood his aspirations were like
Bret Harte's, all in the direction of poetry, and his earliest book
was a joint effort with James J. Piatt, "Poems of Two Friends," 1859.
This was a typical experience in literary history. Again and again at
the period of a change to a new form or, better, a revived artistic
form, the literary youth has started to write in the declining fashion
of his day and has been carried over into the rising vogue. "Paradise
Lost" was first conceived of as a five-act tragedy. "Amelia" and "Tom
Jones" were preceded by twenty-odd unsuccessful comedies. "The Lay of
the Last Minstrel" and "Marmion" and "The Lady of the Lake" were all
preliminary to "Waverley" and the tide of novels that followed. In 1860
Howells had five poems in the _Atlantic_ and had no expectation of
writing fiction; and it was another full decade, after the publication
of several volumes of sketches and travel observations, before he was
fairly launched on his real career.
In Columbus he had come by 1860 to a full enjoyment of an eager,
book-loving group. He was working enthusiastically as a journalist, but
his knowledge of politics and statecraft did not bring him to any vivid
sense of the social order. "What I wished to do always and evermore was
to think and dream and talk literature, and literature only, whether in
its form of prose or of verse, in fiction, or poetry, or criticism. I
held it a higher happiness to stop at a street corner with a congenial
young lawyer and enter upon a fond discussion of, say, De Quincey's
essays than to prove myself worthy the respect of any most eminent
citizen who knew not or loved not De Quincey." There was a succession
of fellow-journalists with whom he could have this sort of pleasure,
and there were houses in town where he could enjoy the finer pleasure
of talking over with the girls the stories of Thackeray and George
Eliot and Dickens and Charles Reade as they appeared in rapid sequence
in book or serial form. "It is as if we did nothing then but read late
novels and current serials which it was essential for us to know one
another's minds upon down to the instant; other things might wait, but
these things were pressing." During these years he developed a liking
for the social amenities, of which an enjoyment of polite literature
was a natural expression. Literature was an adornment of life and, as
he saw it, was confined to an interpretation of individual experience.
With the presidential candidacy of Lincoln, Howells became one of his
campaign biographers, and after the election and a period of anxious
waiting he received the appointment as United States consul to Venice.
Upon his return to this country he became an Easterner, settling
happily in Boston as assistant editor and then as editor in chief of
the _Atlantic Monthly_ from 1866 to 1881. This was a fulfillment beyond
his highest hopes. The great New England group were at the height of
their fame, and his connection with the unrivaled literary periodical
of America brought him into contact with them all. He was ready to
begin his own work as a writer of novels.
For the next twenty years he was a thoroughly conventional artist,
gaining satisfaction and giving pleasure through the exercise of his
admirable technique. In this period he wrote always, to borrow an
expression originally applied to Tennyson, as though a staid American
matron had just left the room: a matron who had been nurtured on the
reading which gave rise to his own literary passions--Goldsmith,
Cervantes, Irving, Longfellow, Scott, Pope, Mrs. Stowe, Dickens, and
Macaulay; a matron, in short, who was the Lady of the Aroostook at
forty-five, the mother of a numerous family, and aggressively concerned
that no book which fell into the hands of her daughters should cause
the blush of shame to rise upon the maiden cheek. He wrote not only
on an early experience in the life of this lady but on "A Modern
Instance," "A Woman's Reason," "Indian Summer," and, best of them all,
"The Rise of Silas Lapham." He was giving ground to Mr. Crothers's
pale-gray pleasures as a reader in the time when, as he said: "I turned
eagerly to some neutral tinted person who never had any adventure
greater than missing the train to Dedham, and I ... analyzed his
character, and agitated myself in the attempt to get at his feelings,
and I ... verified his story by a careful reference to the railroad
guide. I ... treated that neutral tinted person as a problem, and I ...
noted all the delicate shades in the futility of his conduct. When, on
any occasion that called for action, he did not know his own mind, I
... admired him for his resemblance to so many people who do not know
their own minds. After studying the problem until I came to the last
chapter ... I ... suddenly gave it up, and agreed with the writer that
it had no solution." Had nothing occurred to break the sequence, he was
on the way to wasting his energy, as Henry James did, "in describing
human rarities, or cases that are common enough only in the abnormal
groups of men and women living on the fringe of the great society of
active, healthy human beings."
The books of this period, in other words, were all the work of a
well-schooled, unprejudiced observer whose ambition was to make
transcripts of life. "Venetian Life" and "Italian Journeys" were the
first logical expression of his desire and his capacities--books of
the same sort as "Bracebridge Hall" and "Outre-Mer" and "Views Afoot"
and "Our Old Home" (see p. 269, note). "A Foregone Conclusion" and
"A Fearful Responsibility" simply cross the narrow bridge between
exposition and fiction but employ the same point of view and the same
technique. Howells was interested in American character and in the
nice distinctions between the different levels of culture. In "Silas
Lapham," his greatest novel written before 1890, the blunt Vermonter is
set in contrast with certain Boston aristocrats. He amasses a fortune,
becomes involved in speculation, in business injustice, and in ruin.
But whatever Howells had to say then of social and economic forces, he
said of powers as impersonal as gravitation. Business was business, and
the man subjected to it was subjected to influences as capricious but
as inevitable as the climate of New England.
More and more as a realist he devoted himself to the presentation of
character at the expense of plot. "The art of fiction," he wrote in his
essay on Henry James in 1882, "has become a finer art in our day than
it was with Dickens or Thackeray. We could not suffer the confidential
attitude of the latter now nor the mannerism of the former any more
than we could endure the prolixity of Richardson or the coarseness
of Fielding. These great men are of the past--they and their methods
and interests; even Trollope and Reade are not of the present." He
dismissed moving accidents and dire catastrophes from the field of
the new novel, substituting for fire and flood the slow smolder of
individual resentment and a burst of feminine tears. With "April Hopes"
of 1887 he deliberately wrote an unfinished story, following two young
and evidently incompatible people to the marriage altar, but leaving
their subsequent sacrifice to the imagination of the reader, who must
imagine his own sequel or go without.
However, when he was past fifty he underwent a social conversion.
And when he wrote his next book about his favorite characters, the
Marches, he and they together risked "A Hazard of New Fortunes." He
and they were no longer content to play at life under comfortable and
protected circumstances. They went down into the metropolis, competed
with strange and uncouth people, and learned something about poverty
and something about justice. In fact they learned what went into
"Annie Kilburn" and "The Quality of Mercy" and "The World of Chance"
and "A Traveler from Altruria" and "The Eye of a Needle," learning it
all through the new vision given by the belated reading of a great
European. Writing from his heart of this conversion Mr. Howells says,
in "My Literary Passions":
It is as if the best wine at this high feast, where I have sat so
long, had been kept for the last and I need not deny a miracle in it
in order to attest my skill in judging vintages. In fact I prefer to
believe that my life has been full of miracles, and that the good
has always come to me at the right time, so that I could profit most
by it. I believe that if I had not turned the corner of my fiftieth
year, when I first knew Tolstoy, I should not have been able to know
him as fully as I did. He has been to me that final consciousness,
which he speaks of so wisely in his essay on Life. I came in it to
the knowledge of myself in ways I had not dreamt of before, and began
at last to discern my relations to the race, without which we are
nothing. The supreme art in literature had its highest effect in
making me set art forever below humanity, and it is with the wish to
offer the greatest homage to his heart and mind which any man can pay
another, that I close this record with the name of Lyof Tolstoy.
This passage we can hardly overvaluate. Taken by itself, it is merely a
punctuation point in one author's autobiography, but seen against its
background it records the epoch-marking fact that in the very years
when America as one expression of itself was producing such native-born
spokesmen as Whitman and Mark Twain and Joaquin Miller, it was also,
in the spiritual successor to Longfellow and Lowell, making reverent
acknowledgment, not to the splendors of an ancient civilization but
to the newest iconoclasm in the Old World. It is not unworthy of
comment that the influence of Tolstoy was exerted upon Howells after
his removal to New York City, where he has been associated with the
editorial staff of _Harper's Magazine_ ever since 1881, and that
the experiences of the Marches in their hazard of new fortunes is
apparently autobiographical.
There was no violent change in the material or method of his
fiction-writing. It was simply enriched with a new purpose. To his old
power to portray the individual in his mental and emotional processes
he added a criticism of the rôle the individual played in society. He
added a new consciousness of the institution of which the individual
was always the creator, sometimes the beneficiary, and all too often
the victim. His maturity as a man and as a writer secured him in his
human and artistic equilibrium, and in this degree has distinguished
him from younger authors who have written with the same convictions
and purposes. He has written no novels as extreme as Sinclair's "The
Jungle," which ends with a diatribe on socialism, although he has been
a socialist; he has written nothing quite so insistent as Whitlock's
"The Turn of the Balance," although he has been keenly aware of the
difference between justice and the operation of the legal system. Every
story has contained a recognition that life is infinitely complex,
with a great deal of redeeming and a great deal of unintelligent and
baffling good in it. Furthermore, he has written always out of his own
experience and with all his old skill as a novelist, so that he has
never done anything so clumsily commendable as Page's "John Marvel,
Assistant" or anything so clearly prepared for by painstaking study as
Churchill's "The Inside of the Cup."
By 1894 Howells had come to the point where he wished to present his
social thesis as a thesis, and he did so in "A Traveler from Altruria,"
which is not a novel at all but a series of conversations on the nature
of American life as contrasted with life in an ideal state. Mr. Homos
from Altruria (Mr. Man from Other Land) is the traveler who gets his
first impressions of America by visiting a conservative novelist, Mr.
Twelvemough, at a summer resort in which the hotel furnishes "a sort
of microcosm of the American republic." Here, in addition to the host,
are an enlightened banker, a complacent manufacturer, an intolerant
professor of economics, a lawyer, a minister, and a society woman "who
as a cultivated American woman ... was necessarily quite ignorant
of her own country, geographically, politically and historically";
and here also are the hotel keeper, the baggage porter, a set of
college-girl waitresses, and a surrounding population of "natives,"
as the summer resorter invidiously describes the inhabitants whom he
doesn't quite dare to call peasants. In the earlier part of the essay
the social cleavages are embarrassingly revealed,--the ignominy of
being a manual laborer or, worse still, a domestic servant, and the
consequent struggle to escape from toil and all the conditions that
surround it. This leads quickly to a study of the economic situation in
a republic where every man is for himself.
When pinned by embarrassing questions the defenders of the American
faith take refuge in what they regard as the static quality of human
nature, but are further embarrassed by the Altrurian's innocent
surprise at their tactics. He does not understand that it is in human
nature for the first-come to be first served, or for every man to be
for himself, or for a man "to squeeze his brother man when he gets him
in his grip," or for employers to take it out of objecting employees
in any way they can. To Mr. Twelvemough it is a matter of doubt as to
whether the traveler is ironically astute or innocently simple in his
implication that even human nature is subject to development.
The latter two thirds of the book are a composite indictment of an
economic system which permits slavery in everything but name and
which extols the rights of the individual only as they apply to the
property holder. This culminates with the concluding lecture by the
Altrurian--an "account of his own country, which grew more and more
incredible as he went on, and implied every insulting criticism of
ours." The book concludes:
We parted friends; I even offered him some introductions; but his
acquaintance had become more and more difficult, and I was not sorry
to part with him. That taste of his for low company was incurable,
and I was glad that I was not to be responsible any longer for
whatever strange thing he might do next. I think he remained very
popular with the classes he most affected; a throng of natives,
construction hands, and table-girls saw him off on his train; and he
left large numbers of such admirers in our house and neighborhood,
devout in the faith that there was such a commonwealth as Altruria,
and that he was really an Altrurian. As for the more cultivated
people who had met him, they continued of two minds upon both points.
These are the convictions which dominate in all the later works. On the
whole it is a significant fact that novels of so radical a thesis have
attracted so little opposition. Never was an iconoclast received with
such unintelligent tolerance. The suavity of his manner, the continued
appearance of his books of travel and observation, the recurrence (as
in "The Kentons") to his old type of work or the resort (as in the long
unpublished "Leatherwood God") to fresh woods and pastures new, and
all the while the humorous presentation of his favorite characters,
particularly the bumptious young business man and the whimsically
incoherent American woman, beguile his readers into a blind and bland
assumption of Mr. Howells's harmlessness. Possibly because they have
been less skillful and more explicit, novel after novel from younger
hands has excited criticism and the healthy opposition which prove
that the truth has struck home. Perhaps his largest influence being
indirectly exerted, his lack of sensationalism or sentimentalism debar
him from the "best-seller" class; but for fifty years he has been
consistently followed by the best-reading class, and no novelist of the
newer generation has been unconscious of his work.
Henry James (1843-1916), whose work in some respects has been
comparable to that of Howells, was a writer of so distinct an
individuality that he has been the subject of much criticism and no
little amiable controversy. Born in New York of literary parentage,
educated in the university towns of Europe, and resident most of his
life abroad, he developed into an international novelist, chiefly
interested in the various shades of the contrasting cultures in the
Old World and the New. Of his subject matter one story is about as
good an example as another, for James was remarkably consistent. The
backgrounds are almost always intercontinental or transatlantic.
The characters belong to the leisure class. The episodes, where they
exist, are adventures of the mind. In the earlier stories, such as
"The American" (1877), plot is more eventful and definitive and style
is more lucid than in the later ones. In these James seemed to be
so fascinated with his intricate discriminations of feeling that he
confined himself largely to psychological analysis in a style which
became increasingly obscured by subtle indirections. Thus "The Awkward
Age" (1899) is a narrative in ten short "books" centering about the
marriage and non-marriage of two London girls. Aggie, who has been
brought up in the fashion of Richard Feverel translated into feminine
terms, is married off to a wealthy and decent man twice her age, and
after a short experience turns out to be altogether unfitted for his
degree of sophistication. Nanda, wise from the beginning, fails to
win the most attractive man of the lot, and in the end is adopted and
carried off to the country by a charming old Victorian gentleman.
Nothing objective happens. The tale is told in ten long conversations,
each entitled for one of the chief characters and occupying most of
one of the books. All the characters talk with circuitous elusiveness,
and all employ the same idiom, with the single exception of Aggie
in her first two appearances, when she is supposed to be hopelessly
ingenuous. In his attitude toward these people James put himself in a
somewhat equivocal position. With their general social and spiritual
insufficiency he had no patience. They represent the world of "Vanity
Fair" and "The Newcomes" done down to date. But at the time he betrayed
a lurking admiration for them, their ways, and their attitude toward
life. Like the rest of his stories, "The Awkward Age" has little to do
with the world of affairs in any group aspect. It is like a piece of
Swiss carving on ivory. It has the same marvelous minuteness of detail,
the same inutility, the same remote and attenuated relationship to any
deep emotional experience or vigorous human endeavor. Unless one is
devoted to the gospel of art for art's sake, one cannot appreciate the
good of this sort of endeavor. In his narrowly limited field Mr. James
is a master. For more than forty years and in more than thirty volumes
he did the thing that he elected to without compromise in behalf of
popularity. Yet admire him as much as they may, most readers turn
from him with relief to the literature of activity and of the normal,
healthy human beings who are seldom to be encountered in the pages of
Henry James.
Before mentioning in detail the types of American realistic novel which
have followed on the work of Mr. Howells, something should be said
about the very considerable output of romantic fiction of which he has
been strangely intolerant; for it is strange that a man of his gentle
generosity should be so insistent on the wrongness of an artistic point
of view which is complementary to his own, though different from it.
Distinctions between romance and realism often lead into a dangerous
"no man's land," and discussions of the term are harder to close than
to begin. However, Sir Walter Raleigh's contention that the essence of
romance lies in remoteness and the glamour of unfamiliarity--though not
inclusive of all romance--will serve as an index for grouping here.
In 1879, 1880, and 1882 three men, the first of whom is still
producing, set out on long careers of popularity. They were George
W. Cable (1844- ), Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908), and F. Marion
Crawford (1854-1909). Mr. Cable's contribution has been the
interpretation of the elusive and fascinating character of the New
Orleans creole. Cable was bred in the river port when the old part of
the city was less like the decaying heart of a mushroom than it is
to-day. He grew up in an understanding of the courtly, high-spirited
gentry of this exotic people, not studying either the people or their
traditions for the sake of writing them up. He felt the beauty, but
no less the futility, of their life. He was in no hurry to write for
publication, but when he did so his fame was soon made. His subsequent
departure from the South and his settling in New England seemed to
many critics to be an abandonment of the richest field that life had to
offer him. It was said for years, until it became one of the literary
commonplaces, that Mr. Cable would never again rise to the level
of "Old Creole Days" (1879), "The Grandissimes" (1880), or "Madame
Delphine" (1881). The fourteen volumes of the next third of a century
seemed to fulfill this dreary prophecy. Yet all the time the South was
the home of his imagination, and with 1918 he gave the lie to all his
Jeremiahs. The "Lovers of Louisiana" has quite as fine a touch as the
works of nearly forty years ago. Mr. Cable sees the old charm in this
life of an echoing past and the same fatuousness. At this distance
into the twentieth century he leads his old characters and their
children by new paths into the future, but he presents the graces of
their obsolescent life in the familiar narrative style of his early
successes--a style as fleeting yet as distinctive as the aroma of old
lace.
Joel Chandler Harris, like George W. Cable, did his work in presenting
the life of a vanishing race--the antebellum negro. He finished off his
formal education, which ended when he was twelve, with the schooling
of the printing shop, and passed from this into journalistic work
with a succession of papers, of which the _Atlanta Constitution_ is
best known. Boy life on the plantation gave him his material in the
folklore of the negro, and a chance bit of substituting gave him his
very casual start as the creator of "Uncle Remus." Northern readers
were quick to recognize that Harris had given a habitation and a name
to the narrative stuff that folklorists had already begun to collect
and collate. The material goes back to the farthest sources of human
tradition, but "Uncle Remus" was a new story-teller with a gift
amounting to little short of genius. So his stories have the double
charm of recording the lore of the negro and of revealing his humor,
his transparent deceitfulness, his love of parade, his superstition,
his basic religious feeling, and his pathos. Harris seemed to draw his
material from a bottomless spring. Starting with "Uncle Remus: his
Songs and Sayings" in 1881, Harris produced six other volumes in the
next ten years and brought the total to fourteen in folk stories alone
before his death in 1908. As the aptest of criticisms on his own work,
one of his admirers has well quoted Harris's comment on a book of Mark
Twain: "It is history, it is romance, it is life. Here we behold a
human character stripped of all tiresome details; we see people growing
and living; we laugh at their humor, share their griefs, and, in the
midst of it all, behold, we are taught the lesson of honesty, justice
and mercy."
The fluent romance of Marion Crawford is of a different and a lower
order. He was a sort of professional cosmopolitan,--American by birth,
educated largely abroad, widely traveled, and resident for most of his
maturity on the Bay of Naples. He could turn off romances of Persia, of
Constantinople, of Arabia, of medieval Venice, of Rome, and of England
with about equal success. He had no great artistic purpose, admitting
complacently that he was not great enough to be a poet or clever enough
to be a successful playwright. He had no ethical purpose. He had not
even a high ideal of craftsmanship, putting out eight volumes in 1903
and 1904 alone. He deserves mention as a prolific and self-respecting
entertainer who converted his knowledge of the world into a salable
commodity and established a large market for his superficial romances.
With the turn of the century--almost two decades after the débuts
of Cable, Harris, and Crawford--a new interest began to spread from
the collegians to the reading public as a whole, the same influences
which were producing as leaders in the scholastic field Von Holst,
Channing, McMaster, Hart, Jameson, and McLaughlin--masters of American
history--extending to the people at large. In 1897 appeared Weir
Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne." In the spring of 1898 came the war with Spain.
In 1899 Ford's "Janice Meredith" and Churchill's "Richard Carvel"
were published; in 1900, Mary Johnston's "To Have and to Hold"; and
in 1901 Churchill's "The Crisis"--four novels which by the end of
the latter year had reached a combined sale of 1,200,000 copies. For
a little while the vogue of the historical romance passed all recent
precedent. The natural zest for stories of olden days was reënforced by
the revival of national feeling, and the popular authors of the moment
reaped a golden harvest from the public, whom they at once charmed and
instructed.
In the meanwhile, however, the describers and critics of contemporary
American life were by no means on the wane. In the shifting currents
of fiction various types of realism have come to the surface and are
conspicuous in the tide. They all fall under the definition formulated
by Mr. Perry: the sort of fiction that "does not shrink from the
commonplace or from the unpleasant in its effort to depict things as
they are and life as it is"; but within this definition they may be
separated into two main classes. The first is the type that begins and
ends with portrayal of human life, deals with the individual, and aims
only to please. The second is written with the intent of pronouncing
a criticism on the ways of men as they live together, presents its
characters against a social and institutional background, and aims
to influence the opinions of its readers. The difference between the
two is, of course, the difference between the earlier and the later
novels of Mr. Howells. In his later studies Mr. Howells is always
dealing unaggressively but searchingly with the problem of economic
justice, but this is only one of three broad fields. All modern
problem and purpose novels are devoted, simply or complexly, to the
market--property; the altar--religion; and the hearthstone--domestic
life. This classification, which is useful only as long as it is
employed cautiously for a general guide, leads to a cross-survey of
recent fiction by kinds rather than by individual authors.
The number of more or less successful portrayers of provincial types
in American fiction defies even enumeration. The most effective have,
however, been unsatisfied with depicting the mere idiosyncrasies
of a region heavily propped by dialect and have gone on to the
interpretation of life as it might express itself anywhere under
similar conditions. Thus the "Old Chester" of Mrs. Margaret Deland
(1857- ) is a study of isolated conservatisms thrown into relief
by the wise sanity of Dr. Lavendar. Old Chester, we are told, is
in Pennsylvania. It might be in any state or country where narrow
respectability could intrench itself. It is an American Cranford. In
the "Old Chester Tales" (1898) "The Promises of Dorothea" involve her
utterly respectable elopement with Mr. King, whose worst offense in the
eyes of her guardian maiden aunts is that he has lived abroad for many
years. The implied departure from Old Chester customs is sufficient
condemnation. "Good for the Soul" culminates with the doctor's sensible
advice to Elizabeth Day, who, at the end of twelve years of happy
marriage, is oppressed by the memory of a Bohemian girlhood of which
her husband is ignorant. "Suppose," said the doctor, "I hadn't found
her a good woman, should I have told her to hold her tongue?" "The
Child's Mother" is the story of an unregenerate whose baby Dr. Lavendar
keeps away from her by a process we should call blackmail if it were
not practiced by a saint. Wide and varied as her output is, Mrs. Deland
has nowhere shown her artistry more finely than in the two Dr. Lavendar
volumes.
The comments of Edith Wharton (1862- ) on American life are from
the cosmopolitan point of view and present a series of pictures of
the American woman which for harshness of uncharity are difficult
to parallel. As a matter of fact America is so vast and varied
that there is no national type of woman. Mrs. Wharton's women are
representative of one stratum just as Christy's pictorial girls are.
They are the product of indulgence which makes them hard, capricious,
and completely selfish. Lily Bart of "The House of Mirth" (1905)
begins high in the social scale, compromises reluctantly with moneyed
ambition, and in one instance after another defeats herself by delay
and equivocation in a declining series of "affairs." More approachable
than irreproachable, she suffers from the social beclouding of her
reputation and, in the end, as a consequence of her low standards
but her lack of shamelessness she succumbs to the circumstances that
created her and arrives at a miserable death. Undine Spragg, in "The
Custom of the Country" (1913), first married and divorced in a Western
town is then brought to New York, introduced into society and "made"
by her good looks and her brazen ambition. She wrecks the life of her
second husband, a refined gentleman, and then as a result of much
foreign residence marries a Frenchman of family. From him she runs
away, finally to remarry Moffatt, who, throughout the story, has been
her familiar spirit, subtly revealing his intimacy of feeling, and
increasing his hold upon her as he rises in the money world. The title
gives the cue to the story as a whole and to its several parts. By
nature Undine is coarse-grained, showy, and selfish; by upbringing she
becomes incorrigible. Her first and last husband is one of her own
kind--sufficiently so that he is capable of resuming with her after her
streaky, intermediate career. The second is broken on her overweening
selfishness; the third, by virtue of his ancient family tradition, is
able to save himself though not to mold or modify her. At the end, with
Moffatt and all his immense wealth, she is still confronted by "the
custom of the country." Because of her divorces "she could never be
an ambassador's wife; and as she advanced to welcome her first guest
she said to herself that it was the one part she was really made for."
This is the Wharton formula: none of her women really triumphs. Lily
Bart's downfall is one with her death. She had breathed the stifling
atmosphere from her city childhood; what seemed to save Undine was the
initial vigor of her Western youth, but even she could not successfully
defy the ways of the world.
Hamlin Garland (1860- ) in 1891 achieved with his "Main-Traveled
Roads" as quickly earned a reputation as Cable and Harris had done
with their first volumes. The son of a sturdy Western pioneer, he had
passed a boyhood of incessant toil before breaking away to earn his
own schooling, which culminated with several years of self-directed
study in Boston. A vacation return in 1887 to Wisconsin, Dakota, and
Iowa revealed to him the story-stuff of his early life, and during the
next two years he wrote the realistic studies which won him his first
recognition. In them, he explained later, he tried to embody the stern
truth. "Though conditions have changed somewhat since that time, yet
for the hired man and the renter farm life in the West is still a stern
round of drudgery. My pages present it--not as the summer boarder or
the young lady novelist sees it--but as the working farmer endures it."
To the reader of Mr. Garland's work as a whole it is evident that the
richest part of his life was over with the writing of this book and "A
Spoil of Office" (1892) and "Rose of Dutcher's Coolly" (1895). With the
adoption of city life his interests became diffuse and miscellaneous,
as his writing did also. The almost startling strength of "A Son of the
Middle Border" (1918) reënforces this conviction, for this late piece
of autobiography is the story of the author's first thirty-three years
and owes its fine power to the fact that in composing it Mr. Garland
renewed his youth like the eagle's. What he propounded in his booklet
of essays, "Crumbling Idols" (1894), he illustrated in his stories
up to that time. In them he made his best contribution to American
literature, except for this recent reminiscent volume. In almost every
quarter of the country similar expositions of American life were
multiplied and to such an extent that Mrs. Deland, Mrs. Wharton, and
Mr. Garland are chosen simply as illustrations of an output which would
require volumes for full treatment.
In the field of realism which is concerned with a criticism of
institutional life, Mrs. Deland wrote a memorable book in "John Ward,
Preacher" (1888). This was the same year in which Mrs. Humphry Ward's
"Robert Elsmere" appeared. Both were indexes to the religious unrest of
the whole Victorian period,--an unrest apparent in America since the
rise of the Unitarians and the activities of the Transcendentalists,
and recorded in such novels as Mrs. Stowe's "Oldtown Folks" and Bayard
Taylor's "Hannah Thurston," as well as in the underlying currents
of Holmes's Breakfast-Table series. The explicit story of John Ward
is the tragic history of his love and marriage with Helen Jaffrey.
The implicit story is based on the insufficiency of religious dogma
detached from life. Mrs. Deland's convictions resulted later in the
genuine strength of her best single character, Dr. Lavendar, and in
the subordinate religious motif of "The Iron Woman" (1910) (see p.
307). In recent years the narrative treatment of the problem to attract
widest attention has been Churchill's "The Inside of the Cup" (1913),
a story which one is tempted to believe gained its reading more from
its author's reputation and the prevailing interest in the problem
than from its artistic excellence. Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Ward wrote out
of long experience in life; Mr. Churchill seems rather to have felt
the need of introducing this theme into his many-volumed exposition of
America and to have read up on the literature of the subject with the
same thoroughness that characterized his preparation for more strictly
historical stories.
The novels of economic life are far more numerous and more urgent in
tone. One of the earliest was John Hay's "The Breadwinners" (1883).
It is significant that this appeared anonymously, the talented poet
and politician preferring not to be known as a story-teller. The labor
unrest of the early 80's disturbed him. Desire for education seemed
to result unfortunately, and with a very clear impatience Mr. Hay
expounded the hardships of wealth in the midst of a labor uprising.
To go to the root of the difficulty did not seem to occur to him.
Shortly after this early industrial novel Mr. Howells was to attack
the problem in a broader and deeper way (see pp. 418-421). And while
Howells was still making his successive approaches a whole succession
of younger men joined the assault. With many of them there was no such
vital experience as their senior had passed through; they were rather
writing as journalists and utilizing the novel, sometimes clumsily and
often feverishly. Few have done work which could at all compare with
that of Frank Norris (1870-1902). His interrupted trilogy--an epic of
the wheat--fulfilled the promise of his early efforts, "Vendover and
the Brute" and "McTeague," and made his early death the occasion of a
deep loss. Of these three novels "The Octopus" (1901) forms the story
of a crop of wheat and deals with the war between the wheat-grower
and the railroad trust; the second, "The Pit" (1903), is a story of
the middleman; the third, "The Wolf" (never written), was to have
dealt with the consumption in Europe. Norris's aspiration was no less
than that of his own character Presley, the poet. "He strove for
the diapason, the great song which should embrace in itself a whole
epoch, a complete era, the voice of an entire people...." With a great
imaginative grasp he conceived of the wheat as an enormous, primitive
force.
The Wheat that had killed Cressler, that had ingulfed Jadwin's
fortune and all but unseated reason itself; the Wheat that had
intervened like a great torrent to drag her husband from her side
and drown him in the roaring vortices of the Pit, had passed on,
resistless, along its ordered and predetermined courses from West to
East, like a vast Titanic flood, had passed, leaving Death and Ruin
in its wake, but bearing Life and Prosperity to the crowded cities
and centres of Europe.
The number and the temper of stories written without Norris's breadth
of vision or skill brought down on many of their authors the epithet
of "muck-raker" in common with the sensational writers of magazine
exposures. Among the saner and, consequently, more effective purpose
novels the writings of Winston Churchill and Brand Whitlock have helped
to offset the shrill cries of Upton Sinclair and Jack London.
The American novels which center about sex and the family have passed
through rapid changes during the twentieth century. In 1902 Mr. Bliss
Perry, discussing tendencies of American novelists in his "A Study
of Prose Fiction," declared that the American novel was free from
equivocal morality, that "people who want the sex-novel, and want it
prepared with any literary skill, have to import it from across the
water," and concluded with the confident assertion that while American
fiction "may not be national, and may not be great, it will have at
least the negative virtue of being clean." A few pages later in the
same chapter he made an observing comment of which he failed to see the
implication when he noted that conversation between writers of fiction
was likely to center about men like Turgenieff, and Tolstoi, Flaubert
and Daudet, Björnson and D'Annunzio. The influence of these men was
soon to be felt, both directly and through the medium of Englishmen
from the generation of Hardy to that of Wells and Galsworthy. And
within a dozen years it had extended so far that the National Institute
of Arts and Letters went on record in warning and protest against
the morbid insistency of an increasing number of younger writers.
This wave was a symptom not only of a literary influence but, more
deeply, of the world-wide attempt to re-estimate the rights and duties
and privileges of womankind. There are few subjects on which people
of recent years have done more thinking, and few on which they have
arrived at less certain conclusions. With the collapse of the great
"conspiracy of silence" that has surrounded certain aspects of personal
and family life, it has been natural for the present generation to fall
into the same errors into which Whitman had fallen. Naturally, too,
the evil thinker seized on the occasion for evil speech. There has
been every shade of expression from blatant wantonness to high-minded
and self-respecting honesty. Thus we can account for Mr. Theodore
Dreiser, who seems to feel that freedom of speech should be gratefully
acknowledged by indulgence to the farthest extreme. And thus we can
account for Mr. Ernest Poole, who, in "His Family," has presented an
extraordinarily fine summary of the broad and perplexing theme.
The English novel is nearing the end of its second century of
influence. It is a constant in literature which will probably attract
more readers than any other single form. Yet it will have its times of
greater and lesser popularity, and it seems to have passed the height
of a wave shortly after 1900. First the drama came forward with a new
challenge to serious attention, and of late poetry has reëstablished
itself as a living language.
BOOK LIST
=_General References_=
BESANT, SIR WALTER. The Art of Fiction. 1884.
BURTON, RICHARD. Forces in Fiction. 1902.
CRAWFORD, F. MARION. The Novel: what it is. 1903.
CROSS, W. L. The Development of the English Novel. 1899.
FISKE, H. S. Provincial Types in American Fiction. 1903.
GARLAND, HAMLIN. Crumbling Idols. 1894.
HOWELLS, W. D. Criticism and Fiction. 1895.
HOWELLS, W. D. Heroines of Fiction. 1901.
JAMES, HENRY. The Art of Fiction, in _Partial Portraits_.
JAMES, HENRY. The New Novel, in _Notes on Novelists_. 1914.
LANIER, SIDNEY. The English Novel. 1883.
MATTHEWS, BRANDER. Aspects of Fiction. 1896.
MATTHEWS, BRANDER. The Historical Novel and Other Essays. 1901.
NORRIS, FRANK. The Responsibilities of the Novelist. 1901.
PATTEE, F. L. American Literature since 1870, chaps. xi, xii, xvii.
1916.
PERRY, BLISS. A Study of Prose Fiction, chap. xiii. 1902.
PHELPS, W. L. Essays on Modern Novelists. (Howells, Mark Twain.) 1910.
=_Individual Works_=
The field is so extensive that no lists of works by the authors
mentioned are included here. The novels selected for reading can be
taken from the specific references in the text. All the works are in
print and easily available.
=_Magazine Articles_=
The magazine articles on fiction are extremely numerous. From among
those since 1900 the following are of special interest:
1900-1904. New Element in Modern Fiction. N. Boyce. _Bookman_, Vol.
XIII, p. 149. April, 1901.
Novel and the Short Story. G. Atherton. _Bookman_, Vol.
XVII, pp. 36-37. March, 1903.
Novel and the Theater. _Nation_, Vol. LXXII, pp. 210-211.
March 14, 1901.
1905-1909. Confessions of a Best-Seller. _Atlantic_, Vol. CIV, pp.
577-585. November, 1909.
Convention of Romance. _Bookman_, Vol. XXVI, pp. 266-267.
November, 1907.
Humor and the Heroine. _Atlantic_, Vol. XCV, pp. 852-854.
June, 1905.
Mob Spirit in Literature. H. D. Sedgwick. _Atlantic_, Vol.
XCVI, pp. 9-15. July, 1905.
Purpose Novel. F. T. Cooper. _Bookman_, Vol. XXII, pp.
131-132. October, 1905.
1910-1914. American and English Novelists. _Nation_, Vol. XCVIII,
pp. 422-423. April 16, 1914.
American backgrounds for fiction:
Georgia. W. N. Harben. _Bookman_, Vol. XXXVIII, pp.
186-192. October, 1913.
North Carolina. T. Dixon. _Bookman_, Vol. XXXVIII, pp.
511-514. January, 1914.
Tennessee. M. T. Daviess. _Bookman_, Vol. XXXVIII, pp.
394-399. December, 1913.
North Country of New York. I. Bacheller. _Bookman_, Vol.
XXXVIII, pp. 624-628. February, 1914.
Pennsylvania Dutch. H. R. Martin. _Bookman_, Vol.
XXXVIII, pp. 244-247. November, 1913.
American Novel in England. G. Atherton. _Bookman_, Vol.
XXX, pp. 633-640. February, 1910.
Recent Reflections of a Novel-Reader. _Atlantic_, Vol.
CXII, pp. 689-701. November, 1913. Vol. CXIII, pp.
490-500. April, 1914.
Big Movements in Fiction. F. T. Cooper. _Bookman_, Vol.
XXXIII, pp. 80-82. March, 1911.
Characters in Recent Fiction. M. Sherwood. _Atlantic_,
Vol. CIX, pp. 672-684. May, 1912.
Fault-Findings of a Novel-Reader. _Atlantic_, Vol. CV, pp.
14-23. January, 1910.
Morality in Fiction and Some Recent Novels. F. T. Cooper.
_Bookman_, Vol. XXXVIII, pp. 666-672. February, 1914.
Newest Woman. K. F. Gerould. _Atlantic_, Vol. CIX, pp.
606-611. May, 1912.
Relation of the Novel to the Present Social Unrest.
_Bookman_, Vol. XL, pp. 276-303. November, 1914.
Art in Fiction. E. Phillpotts. _Bookman_, Vol. XXXI, pp.
17-18. March, 1910.
1915. American Style in American Fiction. F. F. Kelly.
_Bookman_, Vol. XLI, pp. 299-302. May, 1915.
Free Fiction. H. S. Canby. _Atlantic_, Vol. CXVI, pp.
60-68. June, 1915.
Advance of the English Novel. W. L. Phelps. _Bookman_,
Vol. XLII, pp. 128-134, 381-388, 389-396.
October-December, 1915.
Literary Merchandise. G. Atherton. _New Republic_, Vol.
III, pp. 223-224. July 3, 1915.
1916. New York of the Novelists: a New Pilgrimage. A. B.
Maurice, _Bookman_, Vol. XLII, pp. 20-41, 165-192,
301-315, 436-452, 569-589, 696-713. September,
1915-February, 1916.
Realism and Recent American Fiction. H. W. Boynton.
_Nation_, Vol. CII, pp. 380-382. April 6, 1916.
Russian View of American Literature. A. Yarmolinsky.
_Bookman_, Vol. XLIV, pp. 44-48. September, 1916.
Recent Reflections of a Novel-Reader. _Atlantic_, Vol.
CXVII, pp. 632-642. May, 1916.
Sex in Fiction. _Nation_, Vol. CI, p. 716. Dec. 16, 1915.
Woman's Mastery of the Story. G. M. Stratton. _Atlantic_,
Vol. CXVII, pp. 668-676. May, 1916.
1917. Analysis of Fiction in the United States, 1911-1916. F.
E. Woodward. _Bookman_, Vol. XLV, pp. 187-191. April,
1917.
Apotheosis of the Worker in Modern Fiction. L. M. Field.
_Bookman_, Vol. XLV, pp. 89-92. March, 1917.
New Orthodoxy in Fiction. L. M. Field. _Bookman_, Vol.
XLV, pp. 175-178. April, 1917.
Outstanding Novels of the Year. H. W. Boynton. _Nation_,
Vol. CV, pp. 599-601. Nov. 29, 1917.
Sixteen Years of Fiction. A. B. Maurice. _Bookman_, Vol.
XLIV, pp. 484-492. January, 1917.