What are we to conclude from this cursory sketch of the quality of
three different sorts of American hope represented in our fiction?
To the hope for a paradise of supernal beauty we owe much delicate
artistry of a high order; one may maintain, however, as Emerson and
Lowell did, that other things being equal, the truthful representation
of typical humanity alone produces that harmony which yields the
highest beauty. To this hope we owe much which, when read for
recreation, can give delight; one takes issue only with those, like
Poe and Cabell, who take Arcadianism seriously as a universal way of
life and would substitute it for a literary ideal which resolutely
confronts life and seeks to solve its meaning. To the hope for a
paradise of American nature, a physical paradise, we owe the imposing
of order upon the natural chaos of the wilderness; we owe the physical
“improvements,” the miracles of the machinery and science of a great
nation. Of what ultimate avail, however, are material resources,
physical comfort, time-saving machinery, and science unless the time
and energy conserved are used for higher intellectual or spiritual
ends, for the attainment of happiness? To those who have recorded this
hope in fiction we owe the faithful preservation of an important aspect
of the social history of America; but literature is greater than social
history: it aspires to embody the meaning of life in terms at once
timeless and universal and beautiful. Our frontier lands are exhausted,
and those who have sought the physical paradise of a standardized
industrialism have found nothing but boredom and despair. In place of
this dead level of repression and standardisation let us develop a new
respect for personality--for personality richly varied and healthily
individual. Let us re-direct the joy-giving passion for creation
through the matchless resources of the realm of the spirit. If both
the rarest happiness and the rarest beauty are the fruit only of the
hope of a paradise within, it would appear that American fiction would
in the future be wise in dealing not with escape or with externalities
but with the infinite variety and eternal mystery of the human soul’s
conflict between appetite and aspiration on its quest for an exalted
inward happiness. Before we can expect American fiction to do this,
however, the way must be prepared by the development of an adequate
social imagination. For great art has always been organic with and
supported by the life and vision of a whole people. Shakespeare was the
“Soul of the Age,” Dante the “voice of ten silent centuries.” A hope
must have throbbed in the breasts of a whole age before a writer can
body it forth with the concentration, the brooding intensity, and the
unerring congruency to human nature demanded of great art. Such a hope,
such a social imagination, such an agreement in aspiration, can be
developed best, perhaps, through education--through our interpreters of
literature in college and university. Mindful of the heritage of heroic
pioneers, we must embark upon our intellectual pioneering with the same
resolute courage, the same loyal devotion, the same consecration to a
high cause. Although our scholars are still being lured aside either to
the camp of the æsthetes or the camp of the philologists, America must
hereafter strive to develop the “middle-of-the-road” scholar who shall
be, as Emerson said, Man Thinking, the delegated mind of society, whose
major aim shall be the purposeful and discriminating interpretation of
the record man has left, in terms of beauty, regarding “the conduct of
life” and the path to peace. When such scholar-critics have developed
such a social imagination, such a popular unanimity of hope, we shall
be ready to receive the artist of genius who is to write for us the
great American novel.
Note--For copyrighted evidence used in the foregoing essay I am
indebted as follows: Sherwood Anderson, _Poor White_ (Modern
Library, N. Y., 1925); Dorothy Canfield Fisher, _The Brimming
Cup_ (Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1921); James Branch Cabell,
_The Cream of the Jest_ (Modern Library, N. Y., 1922); _Jurgen_
(Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1927); _Beyond Life_ (Modern Library,
N. Y., 1919); _Straws and Prayerbooks_ (Robert M. McBride and
Co., N. Y., 1925); Willa Cather, _The Professor’s House_ (Alfred
A. Knopf, N. Y., 1925); Floyd Dell, _Moon-Calf_ (Alfred A. Knopf,
N. Y., 1921); R. W. Emerson, _Complete Works_ (Houghton Mifflin
Co., Boston, 1903); _Journals_ (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston,
1909-14); _The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle_ (Houghton
Mifflin Co., Boston, 1888); Norman Foerster, _American Criticism_
(Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1928); Hamlin Garland, _A Son of
the Middle Border_ (Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1927); Joseph
Hergesheimer, _Linda Condon_ (Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1919); Mark
Twain, _Complete Works_ (American Publishing Co., Hartford, 1903);
A. B. Paine, _Mark Twain, A Biography_ (Harper and Brothers, N. Y.,
1912); F. L. Pattee, “James Fenimore Cooper” (_American Mercury_,
Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y.); Gregory Paine, Introduction to _The
Deerslayer_ (Harcourt, Brace and Co., N. Y., 1927); O. E. Rolvaag,
_Giants in the Earth_ (Harper and Brothers, N. Y., 1929).
_Dionysus in Dismay_