It was as a political economist that Bellamy attacked the problems

of a democratic society, and his radicalism begins and ends with the

interpretation he puts on the phrase. He was far from being a political

economist of the schools. His contempt for the older classical dogmas

was measureless. Manchesterism with its fetish of _laissez faire_ he

reckoned no better than a pseudo-science. “‘There were no political

economists before the Revolution,’” remarks one of the scholars of

the later age.[782] Such books as the _Wealth of Nations_, properly

speaking, should be called “Examinations into the Economic and Social

Consequences of trying to get along without any Political Economy.”

Before we shall get forward we must examine our terms.

Economy ... means the wise husbanding of wealth in production

and distribution. Individual economy is the science of this

husbandry when conducted in the interest of the individual without

regard to any others. Family economy is this husbandry carried

on for the advantage of a family group without regard to other

groups. Political economy, however, can only mean the husbandry

of wealth for the greatest advantage of the political or social

body, the whole number of the citizens constituting the political

organization. This sort of husbandry necessarily implies a public

or political regulation of economic affairs for the general

interest. But before the Revolution there was no conception of

such an economy, nor any organization to carry it out. All systems

and doctrines of economy previous to that time were distinctly

and exclusively private and individual in their whole theory and

practice. While in other respects our forefathers did in various

ways and degrees recognize a social solidarity and a political

unity with proportionate rights and duties, their theory and

practice as to all matters touching the getting and sharing of

wealth were aggressively and brutally individualistic, antisocial,

and unpolitical.[783]

A social arrangement based on an individual economy must necessarily

result in such monstrosities as the system of private capitalism with

its cash nexus. It is no other than an organized system of social

warfare, with all the appalling waste of war. Habit has blinded our

eyes or we should see the utter bankruptcy of individual competition,

that prides itself on its “famous process for beggaring a nation.”

“Were these serious men I saw about me,” cried Julian West as he

watched the folly of Washington Street, with its thousand shops madly

bidding against each other, its vulgar advertising and cheating and

swindling, “or children, who did their business on such a plan? Could

they be reasoning beings, who did not see the folly which, when the

product is made and ready for use, wastes so much of it in getting it

to the user? If people eat with a spoon that leaks half its contents

between bowl and lip, are they not likely to go hungry?”[784] What is

it but such folly which prevents society from doing the thousand things

which cry aloud to be done? So long as men must fight each other for

individual subsistence how shall they be able to join forces to fight

the common enemies, cold, hunger, disease? Our individualism keeps us

poverty-stricken; we are too poor to destroy the social squalor, too

poor to save our own lives.

If competition entails irretrievable waste, he points out, the system

of competitive profit involves economic suicide. It is a pistol which

private industrialism points at its own head. The struggle for profit

is the hidden cancer that is eating out the heart of modern society,

and Bellamy examines it searchingly in the chapter, “Economic Suicide

of the Profit System.”[785] Under private industrialism profits are

the oil to the wheels of industry, which turn in response to the

market. By the market is meant those who have money to buy with; and

demand is brisk or slack according to the diffusion of economic means.

When the buyers are satisfied and abstain from further purchases, the

market becomes glutted and the wheels of production cease to turn

“though starving and naked mobs might riot in the streets.” Profits,

however, must come out of somebody’s pocket; and the greater they are

the more the pocket that pays is emptied; unless replenished by other

profits, taken from still other pockets, it ceases to be able to buy in

like proportion. In consequence the market slacks off and the wheels

of industry run slower. The manufacturer takes his profits out of his

workmen, the merchant takes his out of the public--which is another

term for the workman; he who takes most grows rich fastest and is most

successful. Obviously, however, such riches are acquired at the expense

of the public capacity to buy; and such lessening capacity is ominous

of gluts and crises to ensue, with losses which must be made good by

greater profits when the wheels turn again. It is only too clear that

society is suffering from a chronic dyspepsia of its industrial system;

it cannot digest its food. The current maxim that a fair exchange is no

robbery--so confidently urged--cannot apply to the profit system, for

if the exchange is fair there is no profit, and if there is no profit

there will be no exchange. The further maxim that demand governs supply

and supply keeps pace with demand, refers only to the profit-market,

and quite overlooks the important detail of social need.

The stupidity of such a system Bellamy never tires of pointing out.

His striking analogy of the stage-coach has become a classic; the less

known parable of the water-tank[786] is equally vivid; a hundred other

shafts are directed at the profit-theory which underlies our individual

economy. Until the sway of such anarchy is broken, until society learns

to regulate its industrialism on the principles of a wise political

economy, there can be no hope of betterment. To create and apply this

wise political economy is the urgent business of democracy if it is not

to perish. It must be such an economy as shall satisfy both our ethical

ideals and our material needs. It must embody the spirit of democratic

solidarity and it must look beyond the demands of the profit-market to

the well-being of all. It must substitute coöperation for competitive

warfare. The criminal waste which keeps the gray wolves forever

snarling at the threshold of society, must cease; the specter of

poverty which disorders the lives of men and distempers their hopes,

must be banished by the united strength of all. If democracy cannot

achieve such a democratic political economy it must flounder through

deepening bogs until finally it sinks in the morass of plutocracy.

The fatal mistake of democracy heretofore has been the insufficiency

of its program. It is incredible how limited has been its vision and

how few and how minor have been its greatest revolutions. To overthrow

monarchy was excellent, but it did not bring in democracy; rather,

the unchecked sway of plutocracy. “‘The people, indeed, nominally

were sovereigns; but as these sovereigns were individually and as a

class the economic serfs of the rich, and lived at their mercy, the

so-called popular government became the mere stalking-horse of the

capitalists.’”[787] Political revolutions have proved heretofore to be

mere flashes in the pan; not until the economic revolution has been

effected will the old tyranny be blown to pieces:

The second phase in the evolution of the democratic idea began with

the awakening of the people to the perception that the deposing of

kings, instead of being the main end and mission of democracy, was

merely preliminary to its real programme, which was the use of the

collective social machinery for the indefinite promotion of the

welfare of the people at large....

Which amounts to saying ... that there never was a democratic

government properly so called before the twentieth century.... The

so-called republics of the first phase we class as pseudo-republics

or negative democracies....

Regarded as necessary steps in the evolution of society from pure

monarchy to pure democracy, these republics of the negative phase

mark a stage of progress; but if regarded as finalities they were

a type far less admirable on the whole than decent monarchies.

In respect especially to their susceptibility to corruption and

plutocratic subversion they were the worst kind of government

possible.... How could intelligent men delude themselves with the

notion that the most portentous and revolutionary idea of all time

had exhausted its influence and fulfilled its mission in changing

the title of the executive of a nation from king to President,

and the name of the national Legislature from Parliament to

Congress?... The American people fancied that they had set up a

popular government when they separated from England, but they were

deluded. In conquering the political power formerly exercised by

the king, the people had but taken the outworks of the fortress of

tyranny. The economic system which was the citadel and commanded

every part of the social structure remained in possession of

private and irresponsible rulers, and so long as it was held, the

possession of the outworks was of no use to the people, and only

retained by the sufferance of the garrison of the citadel. The

Revolution came when the people saw that they must either take the

citadel or evacuate the outworks.[788]

The significance of the title of Bellamy’s supplementary volume

should now be clear. The problem of democracy always and everywhere

is the problem of achieving economic equality. Without that all talk

of liberty and fraternity, all equality before the law, is empty and

sinister mockery. How can a man call himself citizen who must beg a

fellow citizen to become his master? How shall the wage-taker treat

his boss as a brother? Of what worth is equality before the law to

one without a job? Democracy and servitude cannot lie down together.

Wage-slavery debases the dignity of man; it puts upon him the greatest

of indignities, servitude to things; it cheats him of his right to

life, liberty, and happiness; it is the evil thing which degrades human

society to the level of the pigsty, and puts a premium upon the hoggish

instincts of men. It sows suspicion and hate between equals, changes

the unsuccessful into cringing sycophants, sets its heel upon the weak

and the helpless. The thing were too monstrous to be conceivable were

it not the everyday fact of life--more than that, were it not the ideal

of a supposedly democratic society, apologized for by our plutocratic

culture, defended by all that accounts itself respectable, buttressed

by the formidable turrets of the law, written down as a major premise

in our treatises on political science: and all in the sacred name of

individual enterprise. It is familiarity that blinds us to its evils,

and makes its victims only callous or sullen. And it endures because

men are deceived by its half-truths, seduced by its specious freedoms,

led astray by its fatuous promises. Being taught to set the privilege

of fighting above the privilege of helping, how should they not account

their egoism more sacred than their altruism?

When men shall leave off bounding their democratic horizons by the

old political economy and the old law, Bellamy was persuaded, they

will see more clearly. The political science of private property

conceived of government as a police power to safeguard the stake

of the individual in society. Very well, democracy needs only to

redefine the terms “stake-in-society” and “police power” to arrive at

a competent philosophy. The definition of the former is ready to hand

in the familiar words of the Declaration of Independence--the stake

of every man in society is no less than his life, his liberty, and

his happiness. To secure him in this stake is the primary function

of government. The property interpretation of the stake-in-society

principle was sound in its assumption of the economic as the

determining basis; we need only to democratize the interpretation to

arrive at our end.

“The primal principle of democracy is the worth and dignity of

the individual. That dignity, consisting in the quality of human

nature, is essentially the same in all individuals, and therefore

equality is the vital principle of democracy. To this intrinsic

and equal dignity of the individual all material conditions

must be made subservient, and personal accidents and attributes

subordinated. The raising up of the human being without respect of

persons is the constant and only rational motive of the democratic

policy. Contrast with this conception that precious notion of your

contemporaries as to restricting suffrage. Recognizing the material

disparities in the circumstances of individuals, they proposed to

conform the rights and dignities of the individual to his material

circumstances instead of conforming the material circumstances to

the essential and equal dignity of man.”

“In short ... while under our system we conformed men to things,

you think it more reasonable to conform things to men?”

“That is, indeed,” replied the doctor, “the vital difference

between the old and the new orders.”[789]

As a preliminary to this necessary end of conforming things to men

there must be a reinterpretation of the functions of the state. Here

again Bellamy’s political economy gives a surprising twist to the

current police theory of government.

“In my day ... it was considered that the proper functions of

government, strictly speaking, were limited to keeping the peace

and defending the people against the public enemy, that is to the

military and police powers.”

“And in heaven’s name, who are the public enemies?” exclaimed Dr.

Leete. “Are they France, England, Germany, or hunger, cold, and

nakedness?”[790]

The plutocratic interpretation of the police power signifies no other

than the protection of the individual in the enjoyment of the fruits

of his exploitation--that his right to keep and use what he has got

must be held more sacred than the welfare of society; that the law,

the military, the police, shall defend him in his right to do with his

winnings as he will. The democratic interpretation of the police power,

on the other hand, holds that the state must intervene to the end that

property shall serve a social and not a private interest; that the weak

shall not be exploited by individual enterprise; that all shall be

protected in their right to life, liberty, and happiness. It demands an

ethical basis for the social economy. The legal maxim that a man may do

as he will with his own, is open to question. The matter of ownership

ceases to be a legal question of title, and becomes a moral question

of right and justice. Land, the machinery of production, the profits

of organized industry, coal, ores, oil, lumber--are such things justly

subject to private preëmption? Shall the complex structure of society

be bottomed on the law of contract, or on the ethics of social justice?

Substitute one for the other and a revolution is accomplished.

Our ethics of wealth is ... extremely simple. It consists merely in

the law of self-preservation, asserted in the name of all against

the encroachments of any. It rests upon a principle which a child

can understand as well as a philosopher, and which no philosopher

ever attempted to refute--namely, the supreme right of all to live,

and consequently to insist that society shall be so organized as to

secure that right.[791]

Thus in the political science of democracy the old police theory of

government merges in an all-embracing trustee theory. To a paternal

state is entrusted the protection of the interests of society. That the

welfare of all shall be faithfully served, it is essential that the

common will control and direct the machinery for the production and

distribution of wealth. The anarchy of individualism must give place

to an ordered regimentation, under a centralized authority. The social

meaning of property must be probed to the bottom and the exact line

between public and private rights be marked off. This brings Bellamy to

his fundamental principle--the collectivistic organization of industry

as the _sine qua non_ of a democratic society. How effectively such a

centralized state must wage war upon poverty, how adequately it must

protect the citizen against the common enemies of cold, hunger, and

nakedness, it was the purpose of _Looking Backward_ and _Equality_ to

picture. “A horrible cockney dream,” William Morris called _Looking

Backward_; and by way of answer sketched his _News from Nowhere_,

loveliest of Utopias with its anarchistic freedom set in country

fields. Morris was an artist with an ample share of Ruskinian prejudice

against the machinery that Bellamy so greatly developed; nevertheless

Bellamy was far more modern and realistic in his understanding of the

part the machine will play in the society of the future. To socialize

the machine--to put upon it the slave-work of society, surely means

much to human freedom.

_Looking Backward_ is a brief for no particular school of socialism,

although it inclines somewhat to Fabianism. Not through strikes,

boycotts and lockouts, was the great change brought about, but in

consequence of the spread of social intelligence and social ethics.

Unionism was not the father of the Revolution, nor agrarianism its

mother. Direct action and violence in any form rather hindered than

helped. Class propaganda was too narrow and too selfish. The anarchists

with their “red flag and talk about burning, sacking, and blowing

people up,” retarded the Revolution by frightening the timid and making

“a thousand enemies of their professed cause to one friend.” “The labor

parties, as such, never could have accomplished anything on a large or

permanent scale.”

It was not till a rearrangement of the industrial and social system

on a higher ethical basis, and for the more efficient production

of wealth, was recognized as the interest, not of one class, but

equally of all classes, of rich and poor, cultured and ignorant,

old and young, weak and strong, men and women, that there was any

prospect that it would be achieved. Then the national party arose

to carry it out by political methods.[792]

To wait for the consent of all would seem to the impatient a long

postponement of the millennium; yet the postponement, Bellamy argued,

need not be long. The overreaching greed of private capitalism was

daily hastening it. The new order must come about speedily as a

necessary consequence of two forces; the compulsion of economic

fact, and the stimulus of ideas. As the monopolistic tendencies of

private capitalism open the eyes of the dullest to the growth of a

plutocratic power beyond the control of the majority, a quick fear of

the impending tyranny must lead men to question the larger scope and

ultimate significance of the whole system. Under the lash of this fear

their minds will open to ideas which have long been knocking in vain

for admission. The sources of monopolistic power will be examined,

and the successive steps by which the few have gained control of the

machinery of production will become clear. Already the fertile idea of

the unearned increment which the land-taxers have got hold of and are

spreading widely, has prepared the way for the revolutionary doctrine

of the social fund. Let the common man once understand how small a

portion of wealth is produced by his private effort, and how large

a portion by the agency of social organization with its heritage of

experience and invention, and he will understand how unjustly private

capitalism appropriates what it has not earned. The conclusion that

wealth should belong to him who produces it, is a deduction of the

most elementary ethics; and since the production of wealth in quantity

is a consequence of the social organization and social heritage, the

conviction becomes irresistible that such wealth belongs to society

and cannot justly be appropriated by the individual.[793] Let such

an idea spread widely and the way is prepared for the taking over

by the state of the machinery of production, and the assumption by

it of the obligation of universal trusteeship. Then will come the

Revolution. Coöperation will take the place of competition; production

and distribution for the common well-being will destroy the malevolent

trinity of rent, interest, and profit, which have so long held the

world in poverty; the intelligent strength of all will stand between

the individual and cold, hunger, and nakedness. The noble words of

the Declaration of Independence will no longer be a catch-vote and

a mockery to the exploited multitude, but a reality. The democratic

ideal, with its social philosophy summarized in the phrase, “the only

wealth is life,” will destroy the last vestiges of ancient tyranny

and men will be free. Rooted in economic equality the fine flower

of individualism will expand as it cannot now in unfertile soil; a

generous and unstinted culture will spread the spirit of kindliness

through society, and a new and nobler art and religion will go hand in

hand with the new fellowship.

Only too clearly Edward Bellamy was an incorrigible idealist. He looked

into the future with more confident eyes than most of us; he saw in

the East the quickening of a new day where we see only darkness. A

child of the Enlightenment, he put his trust in the natural goodness

of men. They are not inherently base and ignoble, but the victims of

an evil system that breeds what is base and ignoble. “The folly of

men, not their hard-heartedness, was the great cause of the world’s

poverty. It was not the crime of man, nor of any class of men, that

made the race so miserable, but a hideous, ghastly mistake, a colossal

world-darkening blunder.”[794] In an arid land shall we waste the

little store of water, or shall we regulate it strictly, that the

desert may be brought to bloom as a garden?

The labor of men, I explained, was the fertilizing stream which

alone rendered earth habitable. It was but a scanty stream at best,

and its use required to be regulated by a system which expended

every drop to the best advantage, if the world were to be supported

in abundance. But how far from any system was the actual practice!

Every man wasted the precious fluid as he wished, animated only

by the equal motives of saving his own crop and spoiling his

neighbor’s, that his might sell the better. What with greed and

what with spite, some fields were flooded while others were

parched, and half the water ran wholly to waste. In such a land,

though a few by strength or cunning might win the means of luxury,

the lot of the great mass must be poverty, and of the weak and

ignorant bitter want and perennial famine.

Let but the famine-stricken nation assume the function it had

neglected, and regulate for the common good the course of the

life-giving stream, and the earth would bloom like one garden, and

none of its children lack any good thing. I described the physical

felicity, mental enlightenment, and moral elevation which would

then attend the lives of all men. With fervency I spoke of that new

world, blessed with plenty, purified by justice and sweetened by

brotherly kindness, the world of which I had indeed but dreamed,

but which might so easily be made real. But when I had expected

now surely the faces around me to light up with emotions akin

to mine, they grew ever more dark, angry, and scornful. Instead

of enthusiasm, the ladies showed only aversion and dread, while

the men interrupted me with shouts of reprobation and contempt.

“Madman!” “Pestilent fellow!” “Fanatic!” “Enemy of society!” were

some of their cries, and the one who had before taken his eyeglass

to me exclaimed, “He says we are to have no more poor. Ha! ha!”

“Put the fellow out!” exclaimed the father of my betrothed, and

at the signal the men sprang from their chairs and advanced upon

me.[795]

Like Henry George’s noble study of social poverty, _Looking Backward_

is a suggestive document of a generation that saw its finer spirits

repelled by the vulgar individualism of the Gilded Age. In the long

run, no doubt, its influence was slight and the hopes of the Bellamy

Nationalists, like the hopes of the Single-taxers, were doomed to

disappointment. Nevertheless it remains as a testimony to the fact

that in a blatant world of preëmption, exploitation, and progress,

were some who were concerned for a juster social order than the Gilded

Age dreamed of--a true commonwealth that free men might build if they

would.[796]

Footnotes

[777] Allyn B. Forbes, _The Literary Quest for Utopia, 1880-1900_.

“Social Forces,” Vol. VI, No. 2, December, 1927.

[778] _Nationalist_, Vol. I, p. 18.

[779] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 1.

[780] _The Duke of Stockbridge_, Chapter II, pp. 22, 28.

[781] _Ibid._, Chapter XXVI, p. 349.

[782] _Equality_, Chapter XXII, p. 189.

[783] _Ibid._, p. 189.

[784] _Looking Backward_, Chapter XXVIII, p. 314.

[785] _Equality_, Chapter XXII.

[786] _Equality_, Chapter XXIII, p. 195.

[787] _Equality_, Chapter II, p. 21.

[788] _Ibid._, Chapter II, pp. 19, 20, 21, 22.

[789] _Ibid._, Chapter III, p. 26.

[790] _Looking Backward_, Chapter VI, p. 59.

[791] _Equality_, Chapter XI, p. 74.

[792] _Looking Backward_, Chapter XXIV.

[793] See _Equality_, Chapter XIII--“Private Capital Stolen from the

Social Fund.”

[794] _Looking Backward_, Chapter XXVIII, p. 328.

[795] _Ibid._, pp. 328-9.

[796] At this point was to come a second section entitled “After

Bellamy; ‘Naturalism’; Tourgée’s _Murvale Eastman_.”--_Publisher._

Chapter IV • The Darkening Skies of Letters

So late as 1893, in spite of the stark ugliness of Hamlin Garland’s

pictures of the Middle Border, American realism was still unlike in

temper those somber etchings, burnt into dark patterns by the caustic

acids of European experience, that came from the hands of Russian and

German and French naturalists--sketches that in their bitter gloom

seemed tragically untrue to the homelier experience of America. In

appraising such difference in temper Howells ascribed it to the gulf

that separated American well-being from the poverty and injustice of

European societies. American realism was hopeful because American

life was hopeful. The novelist in this singularly favored land must

reflect the temper of a people made kindly by an abundant prosperity

and democratic justice, and in the sincerity of his realism he will

necessarily concern himself with the “more smiling aspects of life,

which are the more American.” Whoever should strike a “note so

profoundly tragic in American fiction” as was struck in Dostoevsky’s

_Crime and Punishment_, he asserted in 1891, “would do a false and

mistaken thing.”[797] And in a later work he spoke casually of our “gay

American horizons”--surely the most romantic phrase ever applied to a

sad and joyless people by a professed realist.

But while Howells was thus summing up the achievements of American

realism and somewhat overconfidently forecasting its future temper, he

was in fact writing the history of a past phase. Already the clouds

were gathering upon our “gay” horizons, and the current optimisms were

finding less food to feed on. The economics of this happy America were

coming to be regarded by vast numbers as a class economics, forecasting

a less democratic future. Young men born in the early seventies, when

Mr. Howells was entering upon his new realistic studies, were coming

to intellectual maturity in a very different age; a new science and

a consolidating economics were creating a somber temper that was

eventually to produce in _An American Tragedy_, a story not greatly

unlike that Russian tale which Mr. Howells, a short generation before,

had pronounced impossible to American experience. Stephen Crane and

Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser were the intellectual children of

the nineties, and their art was a reflection of that sober period of

American disillusion.

The artist, of course, in his creative work is only mediately

influenced by the current science and philosophy; yet even in his

aloofness from the specific problems of the laboratory and the study

he can scarcely escape the pervasive influence of the _Zeitgeist_.

And so, after Hamlin Garland, the realistic novel again took a new

course from the shifting winds of scientific doctrine. The generation

that succeeded the rebellious son of the Middle Border came too late

to maturity to share his faith in the benevolent universe of Herbert

Spencer, and got little comfort from a promised Utopia that only

awaited the enactment of certain statutory laws--laws that would

assure economic justice to all--to lay open its hospitable realm.

Far-reaching changes were coming over the temper of scientific

thought. The conclusions of the physical sciences were ravaging the

orderly preserves of biological evolution, with its cardinal doctrine

of organic growth and historical continuity; the hurrying march of

scientific investigation was leaving far behind the benevolent universe

conceived of by Victorian thinkers and was coming out upon higher and

bleaker tablelands of speculation. The universe that unfolded itself to

chemistry and physics was vaster and colder than biological evolution

with its doctrine of the conservation of energy, had imagined--a

vibrating mechanism shot through with energy, that revealed itself in

action and reaction, impersonal, amoral, dwarfing all the gods dreamed

of hitherto; a universe in which the generations of men have shrunk to

a pin-point in limitless space and all teleological hopes and fears

become the emptiest of futilities. It was the conception of determinism

that after long denial was at last coming to wide acceptance--a

conception that underlay the thinking of such diverse men as Comte and

Spencer and Marx, a conception implicit in the doctrine of continuity,

in the law of causality, in the Marxian law of concentration; and now

disencumbered of its teleological wrappings, disillusioned with the

doctrine of progress, it was to shape the new intellectual attitude

towards life.

In presence of such an extraordinary intellectual revolution the old

anthropomorphisms of metaphysics and ethics were doomed, and from

the revelations of physics and chemistry and psychology must come

an endeavor after a fresh evaluation of man’s duty and destiny in a

universe of immeasurable energy. An ethics that should square with the

new data of science must take its departure from the bleak fact of a

depersonalized universe, wherein man is but a single form of imprisoned

energy, localized for a brief instant and rising to momentary

consciousness in the eternal flux, about and through whom flows

the energy of an unprobed universe. As this mechanistic conception

found lodgment in minds prepared by a mechanical economics, the last

remaining vestiges of the old French romanticism were swept away; a

benevolent, egocentric universe was become unthinkable; progress was no

longer the inherent law of matter and of life; but instead, everywhere

change, disintegration and reintegration, a ceaseless and purposeless

flux to what final end the human mind could not forecast. Thus at a

stroke the benevolent cosmos of the fathers, wherein for generations

men had been providing themselves with sure refuges, was swept away;

and with its passing passed the old faiths--faith in freedom of the

will, in a purposive providence, in a universe that had been long in

travail to bring forth man, its last and dearest offspring for whom all

things work together for good. And with the decay of the traditional

faiths the younger generation was left to wander as best it might upon

the bleak tablelands of impersonal energy. Spencer’s “ultimate of

ultimates,” the Permanence of Force, that follows the law of evolution

and dissolution, had given way to Faraday’s electro-energy that is

indifferent to purpose.

The intellectual backgrounds were thus preparing for a gloomier realism

than Howells’s or Garland’s, a realism that took its departure from two

postulates: that men are physical beings who can do no other than obey

the laws of a physical universe; and that in the vast indifferentism of

nature they are inconsequential pawns in a game that to human reason

has no meaning or rules. To assume that fate which rules human destiny

is malignant, is to assume a cosmic interest in man which finds no

justification in science; Man at best is only an inconsequential atom

in a mechanical flux, or at worst, as Jurgen puts it picturesquely,

only a bubble in fermenting swill. Such a conception, of course, made

slow headway against the traditional order of thought; and if it had

not been aided by a changing economics it would have found few to

follow a line of reasoning that led to such unpleasant conclusions.

The mind of the artist is more susceptible to concrete social fact

than to abstract physical principle, and the swift centralizing of

economics in the eighties and the nineties provided the stimulus for

the extraordinary reversal of thought marked by the contrast between

Emerson and Theodore Dreiser. Emerson was the apotheosis of two

centuries of decentralization that destroyed the pessimism brought

to the new world by refugees from the old, and found its inevitable

expression in the exaltation of the individual, free and excellent, the

child of a beneficent order; whereas Dreiser was the first spokesman of

a later America once more falling within the shadow of the pessimism

that springs from every centralized society shut up within the portals

of a static economics; that dwarfs the individual and nullifies his

will, reducing him from a child of God to a serf. Oddly enough it was

in the West that the new spirit first expressed itself most adequately;

amidst a society that was taking its first steps away from the

traditional philosophy of the dispersion. Frank Norris in California,

Dreiser in Indiana, Sherwood Anderson in Ohio, Masters and Sandburg

and Vachel Lindsay in Illinois, were the spokesmen of the resentment

welling up in the American heart at the loss of the older freedom and

individual dignity.[798]

Footnotes

[797] _Criticism and Fiction_, p. 128.

[798] The manuscript ends here. The first section of this chapter

was to be “Edwin Markham and ‘The Man with the Hoe.’” The second

was to be on “The Rise of Naturalism: Stephen Crane; Frank Norris.”

The first item of the addenda gives material on this subject and on

the two authors. The third would have been “Fiction Discovers the

City.”--_Publisher._

Addenda

The material given here comes from various sources, as indicated

by the notes. The syllabus referred to is that for Professor

Parrington’s lectures at the University of Washington, _The

American Novel Since 1890_ (1925). The order here follows that of

the contents of this book.

Naturalism in American Fiction[799]

Naturalism originated in France. Term first used by Zola. Chief

example--Flaubert’s _Mme. Bovary_. Contrast between Zola and Flaubert

reveals two diverse tendencies of the movement--a sociological study of

background, with a multitude of characters dwarfed by the _milieu_; and

psychological study of individual character.

Naturalism a child of nineteenth-century thought--offspring of Darwin,

Marx, Comte, Taine. The scientific movement created a scientific

attitude of mind and emphasized the law of causation. From this

emerged two fruitful ideas: (1) biological determinism, (2) economic

determinism. So Zola and Flaubert. Influence of Claude Bernard--“We

take men from the hands of the physiologist solely ... to solve

scientifically the question of how men behave in society.”

The criteria of naturalism are:

1. Objectivity. Seek the truth in the spirit of the scientist. “We

naturalists, we men of science,” Zola says, accepting Bernard’s

position, “we must admit of nothing occult; men are but phenomena and

the conditions of phenomena.”

2. Frankness. A rejection of Victorian reticence. The total man and

woman must be studied--the deeper instincts, the endless impulses. The

three strongest instincts are fear, hunger, sex. In the life of the

ordinary person, the third is most critical, hence the naturalist makes

much of it.

3. An amoral attitude toward material. The naturalist is not a judge,

he holds no brief for any ethical standards. He records what happens.

He “must possess a knowledge of the mechanisms inherent in man, show

the machinery of his intellectual and sensory manifestations, under

the influence of heredity and environment, such as physiology shall

give them to us, and then finally, to exhibit man living in social

conditions, produced by himself, which he modifies daily and in the

heart of which he is undergoing constant transformation.” (Zola.) This

is difficult to accept. Puritanism.

4. A philosophy of determinism. This is the vital principle of

naturalism, setting it off from realism. The scientist has turned

philosopher. It is the residuum of much pondering over life and its

meaning, and may result from:

a. Sociological emphasis--study of heredity and environment.

b. A broader mechanistic philosophy--Flaubert, Dreiser.

c. Fatalism: a world of malignant chance--Hardy.

5. A bias toward pessimism in selecting details. A reaction from the

romantic conception of a purposive will.

Romance springs from the longings of a baffled and thwarted will,

creating a world as we should like it wherein to find refuge. But the

naturalist will tolerate no such refuge. He will envisage the truth,

and the truth that he sees is that the individual is impotent in the

face of things. Hence it is as the victim, the individual defeated by

the world, and made a sardonic jest of, that the naturalist chooses

to portray man. Always that conception creeps in. It is seen and felt

throughout the texture of the story--a fate lurking in the background

and visible to the reader--and at some dramatic moment the conviction

comes home to the victim and is crystallized in bitter words wrenched

from his baffled will. The business of the story is to lead him up to

this crystallization.

There are two main forms--(1) Life is a trap. (2) Life is mean. So

Strindberg’s Countess Julie: “Everything is wreckage, that drifts over

the water until it sinks, sinks.” So Ray Pearson in Sherwood Anderson’s

_Winesburg, Ohio_: “Tricked, by Gad, tricked by life and made a fool

of.” So D. H. Lawrence: “We are prostituted, oh, prostituted by life.”

To Ma Westcott: “Life is duty. It is a lie.” This pressure may come

from without--_milieu_--or from within--imperious desires--but the

outcome is usually hopeless sorrow--sometimes stolid resignation,

sometimes fierce protest, but with no other end than annihilation. An

exception is Maugham’s _Of Human Bondage_.

6. A bias in selection of characters. The naturalist commonly chooses

one of three types:

a. Characters of marked physique and small intellectual

activity--persons of strong animal drives. They range all the way

from morons like Norris’s McTeague, Zola’s Nana, and Dreiser’s Jennie

Gerhardt to natures like Hardy’s Tess, and Sallie in _Of Human Bondage_.

b. Characters of excited, neurotic temperament, at the mercy of

moods, driven by forces that they do not stop to analyze. Such are

Strindberg’s Countess Julie, Sue, Emma Bovary, and the hero in _Of

Human Bondage_. Sometimes this is aggravated by some physical defect,

like a club-foot.

c. An occasional use of a strong character whose will is broken. Thus

Hardy’s Jude and the doctor in Strindberg’s _By the Open Sea_. But such

are comparatively infrequent.

Naturalism is pessimistic realism, with a philosophy that sets man

in a mechanical world and conceives of him as victimized by that

world. _Certain unconscious exaggerations of naturalism._ Since men

are victimized either by outer forces--the _milieu_--or by inner

drives--impulses and instincts--the naturalist from much brooding is

subject to certain temptations:

1. From concern over a devastating _milieu_ he may end in desiring

to change that _milieu_ to the end that men may achieve happiness.

Hence he tends to lose his objectivity and scientific detachment,

and becomes a partisan to a cause. Such was the fate of Zola. The

philosopher of naturalism, in practice he abandoned his principles and

became a reformer, attacking the church, the capitalistic order, etc.

His _J’accuse_ letter is characteristic of this. _Nana_, almost alone,

preserves the naturalistic attitude. This was the failure of the first

group of American naturalists--Frank Norris, Robert Herrick, Jack

London.

2. From much study of inner drives of low-grade characters the

naturalist is in danger of creating grotesques. Behavioristic

psychology may prove to be a further temptation, in creating a “sex

complex.” So Masters’s _Spoon River Anthology_, Sherwood Anderson,

D. H. Lawrence, Frank Norris. Most common in the later American

naturalists. So Brander Matthews.

3. From much emphasis on animal impulses the naturalist may turn man

into an animal. Men are more than sex-driven creatures--the city is

more than the slums. There are sewers, but why not accept the sewer

without messing over its contents as they flow to disintegration? This

is the commonest objection to naturalism. So Meredith: “The naturalist

sees the hog in nature, and takes nature for the hog.” It is certainly

an overcorrection--a reaction against the complacent optimism of

romanticism--against too much shutting of the eyes to slums and filth

and sewers. To a mechanist like Dreiser, who traces life and conduct

back to chemistry, or to the behaviorist, who traces it to ducts

and glands, it is rational. The charge may be true of Zola, of De

Maupassant, of Anderson, of Lawrence, but it is not true of Hardy, of

Maugham.

_Naturalism and the Conception of Tragedy._ Naturalistic books are

almost inevitably tragedies, but the philosophy of naturalism that

underlies them has played havoc with the Aristotelian conception of

tragedy. As Ludwig Lewisohn says, it has “rendered the traditional

principle of tragedy wholly archaic.” According to the Aristotelian

tradition, tragedy results when an essentially noble character

of heroic proportions transgresses an immutable moral law by a

self-originating will and suffers the punishment dealt by poetic

justice. So Macbeth, Othello, Lear, Hamlet. But this assumes two

things: (1) an eternally changeless moral law; (2) the existence of a

purposive will. Both of these the naturalist refuses to accept. Compare

Hardy.

It became clear that the self-originating element in human action

is small. The individual acts in harmony with his character,

which is largely the result of complex and uncontrollable causes.

It became even clearer that among the totality of moral values

an absolute validity can be assigned to a few only. Hence the

basic conception of tragic guilt was undermined from within and

from without. The transgression of an immutable moral law by a

self-originating will was seen to be an essentially meaningless

conception, since neither eternally changeless moral law nor

an uncaused volition is to be found in the universe that we

perceive.[800]

The tragedy of naturalism lies in the disintegration and the pity or

irony with which we contemplate man and his fate in the world.

_Naturalism and the Traditional American Temper._ The two most

characteristic qualities of the American temper are Puritanism and

optimism--the belief in the supremacy of the moral law, and the

conviction that this is a good world that man shapes to his will. This

is to be explained historically: the former is traditionally English,

the latter a product of new-world economics--a decentralized society.

Pessimistic determinism results inevitably from the sense of social

pressure on the individual. Social complexity entails a feeling of

coercive regimentation by forces too strong to contend against. These

forces are both internal and external: environment or the social

machine; heredity or the physical machine. The most complete dwarfing

of the individual will and significance takes place in the most crowded

societies, producing a corresponding philosophy and psychology. So the

fatalism of the Orient and the dream of Nirvana. The first widespread

philosophy of determinism among English people was spread by Calvinism.

Predestination was an alien thought, the last expression of a world

depressed by Roman regimentation and degeneration. Augustine preached

that men are evil, and men are doomed. This old-world dogma was brought

to America, where regimentation was impossible. A free economics

created a free-will philosophy and psychology. The will to succeed.

This flowered in Emerson. Philosophical optimism. The world is good,

man is good: let him stand upon his instincts and there abide and the

whole world will come round to him. “Trust thyself.” Since Emerson’s

time a new world has been emerging. The old shadow is falling across

the American mind. Determinism is in the air.

_Complexity and American Determinism._ Complexity springs from:

1. Machine industrialism. The bigness of the economic machine dwarfs

the individual and creates a sense of impotency.

2. The great city reduces the individual to a unit. By machine methods

of transportation and quantity output individual differences are worn

away. We dress, live, think, work, play, alike. The _Saturday Evening

Post_ is fast regimenting the American mind. Standardization.

3. Centralization of wealth is creating a caste regimentation.

4. A mechanistic psychology. Behaviorism: stimulus and response; ducts

and glands. The individual conceived as a mechanism driven by instincts

and habits.

America today is the greatest, most complex machine the world has

ever known. Individualism is giving way to regimentation, caste,

standardization. Optimism is gone; pessimism is on the horizon. The

psychology of naturalism is being prepared.

Three American writers began an experiment in naturalism in the middle

nineties--Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Harold Frederic. The early

death of all three stopped the movement, which was speedily overwhelmed

by the romantic deluge and the muckraking zeal. Crane was tubercular

and died at twenty-nine; Norris was cut down in the early thirties;

Harold Frederic removed to England, where he died.

1 • Stephen Crane[801]

Stephen Crane was the genius of his generation. His work began with

_Maggie: A Girl of the Streets_ (1893). “It was the first bit of

naturalism in American letters ... an episodic bit of slum fiction

ending with the tragic quality of Greek drama.” “The first ironical

novel ever written by an American.” It was privately printed at first,

and not published until 1896. It is detached, objective, amoral,

dealing with a world without virtues but tyrannized by taboos. It is a

bit of life, beginning and ending casually. Here is the end:

In a room a woman sat at a table, eating like a fat monk in a

picture. A soiled, unshaven man pushed open the door and entered.

“Well,” said he, “Mag’s dead.”[802]

It is a world without virtue and yet one that uses the social taboo

to condemn Mag--the only pure one of the lot. The story was an attack

on everything that was respectable in American literature--a notable

achievement in a world of shoddy romanticism. It was an affront to

every instinct of the genteel tradition, and was rejected by a public

steeped in that same shoddy romanticism.

Crane’s next novel was the first great American war story--_The Red

Badge of Courage_ (1894). It was a _tour de force_, inspired by

Zola’s _Le débâcle_, but more by Tolstoi--_War and Peace_ and perhaps

_Sebastopol_. The individual is caught between the external war machine

and the inner instinct machine. There is a conflict of impulses--fear,

pride, the instinct of self-preservation, chiefly the fear of fear. The

hero is at the mercy of the crowd psychology and blind chance. Crane

follows Tolstoi in assuming that victories are accidents, the outcome

of a blind clash of unintelligent forces, rather than due to strategy

and generalship. The study is psychological--that of the fear of the

recruit, his feeling that he alone is marked as the target of the

enemy. The impression of helplessness is the same as in _Maggie_--both

are atoms among a host of other atoms.

_Short Stories._ The best are “The Blue Hotel,” “The Experiment in

Misery,” “The Open Boat.” The first is a story of social responsibility

and social guilt. The murder of the Swede is just part of the backwash

of a topsy-turvy life: the victim of things. “Every sin is the result

of a collaboration.” The second is a story of a “hobo”--down-and-outer,

who hears “the war of the city in his ear.” “The protest of the wretch

who feels the touch of the imperturbable granite wheels, and who then

cries with an impersonal eloquence, with a strength not from him,

giving voice to the wail of a whole section, a class, a people.”[803]

2 • Frank Norris[804]

The most stimulating and militant of our early naturalists--the only

one who wrote consciously with a definite creed. He had thought out a

naturalistic philosophy under the inspiration of Zola. “He was never

without a yellow paper-covered novel of Zola in his hand,” wrote his

brother of him. His two chief novels reveal the twin tendencies as

revealed in _Nana_ and _Le débâcle_: The study of the individual in

his reaction to environment, and the study of social forces and their

impact upon a group of related individuals.

_His Work._ Falls into three groups: (1) Romance--_Blix_, _Moran of the

Lady Letty_, (2) Naturalism--_McTeague_, _Vandover and the Brute_; (3)

_The Pit_ and _A Deal in Wheat_. Between the two latter groups stands

_The Octopus_. The dates of the earlier works uncertain. Commonly

believed that Norris began as a romantic and worked out of it slowly.

Another view that he wrote romances as a means of arriving, side by

side with his serious work. Thus he seems to have begun _McTeague_

about 1894--although it was not published till 1899.

_Theory._ His passion for truth more ardent--or more noisy--than

Crane’s: his objectivity less. The strong conviction of a deterministic

universe was on him, but he never quite attained the scientific

detachment. His nature large and eager. Like Zola he loved large

canvases. This induced him rather to the sociological than to the

individualistic study. _The Octopus_ more representative of his genius

than _McTeague_. Man in society, his theme: not mere men and women as

ends in themselves. This grew on him--the second phase. The novelist

must deal “with elemental forces, motives that stir whole nations.

These cannot be handled as abstractions in fiction.... The social

tendencies must be expressed by means of an analysis of the characters

of the men and women who compose that society, and the two must be

combined and manipulated to evolve the purpose--to find the value of

_x_.”[805] Above all, avoid propaganda.

Unskillfully treated, the story may dwindle down and degenerate

into mere special pleading, and the novelist becomes a polemicist,

a pamphleteer, forgetting that although his first consideration is

to prove his case, his _means_ must be living human beings, not

statistics, and that his tools are not figures, but pictures of

life as he sees it....

Consider the reverse--_Recondite_, for instance. The purpose for

which Zola wrote the book ran away with him. He really did care

more for the depopulation of France than he did for his work.

Result--sermons on the fruitfulness of women, special pleading,

a farrago of dry, dull incidents, overburdened and collapsing

under the weight of a theme that should have intruded only

indirectly.[806]

He never quite arrives at the amoral attitude. Ethical values

persist in intruding themselves, sometimes quite incidentally, as in

_McTeague_, but increasingly, as in _The Octopus_ and _The Pit_.

“McTeague”

Dedicated to Gates. The first considerable contribution to naturalism

by an American writer. His carefully written work over which he labored

five years.

_Theme._ A study in character disintegration that follows upon economic

pressure. The unmaking of a man and woman by the caprice of events.

The characters are simple. McTeague is heavy and stupid, slow in his

movements but a blind bull when aroused. Trina neat and pretty but

with unhappy potentialities in her thrift. In neither is there a

will-to-power strong enough to give strength of character.

_The Note of Determinism._ A world of chance that victimizes them.

The note struck by the lottery and the $5,000. By chance McTeague

became a dentist, met Trina, proposed. But the chance that was making

a man of him and a woman of Trina was preparing their downfall through

Marcus Schouler. The wrestling-match was the turning-point. The two

disintegrate together, each aggravating the weakness of the other. As

Trina’s neatness was pulling Mac up and making him self-respecting,

so her thrift grew into miserliness under pressure of his failure to

provide, and this embittered the essentially fair and generous nature

of Mac.

_Inner Drives._ Little sex in the book after the first complication.

Both Mac and Trina caught unexpectedly, yet handled differently. The

latter pure naturalism. “The Woman is awakened, and, starting from her

sleep, catches blindly at what first the newly awakened eyes light

upon. It is a spell, a witchery, ruled by chance alone, inexplicable--a

fairy queen enamored of a clown with ass’s ears.”[807] But in McTeague,

oddly enough, the same instinct is judged and pronounced evil. Norris

abandons the amoral attitude and argues that heritage from the lower

life is evil. It is the weeds that spring up and stifle, as in Sherwood

Anderson’s “Seeds.”

Below the fine fabric of all that was good in him ran the foul

stream of hereditary evil, like a sewer. The vices and sins of

his father and his father’s father, to the third and fourth and

five hundredth generation, tainted him. The evil of an entire race

flowed in his veins. Why should it be? He did not desire it. Was he

to blame?[808]

The entire handling of sex in Trina, from the first frightened yielding

to the later docile submission to Mac’s brutality, his sadism, is

admirably handled from the point of view of modern psychology. Norris

was not a psychologist but in this he succeeded surprisingly.

_Romantic Elements._ Yet even in this severe study Norris has yielded

to his romantic tendencies.

1. His patent effort to give dramatic unity to the whole through the

symbol of gold. An exaggeration that is almost Dickens-like, with its

warping singleness. The gold tooth, the $5,000, Trina’s twenty-dollar

gold pieces, the imaginary gold plate of Maria Macapa, the absurd

canary in the gilt cage, the discovery of the gold mine. The wonder is

that he didn’t give Trina gold hair instead of black.

2. The use of a minor action: Maria Macapa and old Zerkow. The same

pursuit of a phantom and the same outcome in murder. McTeague and Trina

are real; Maria and Zerkow are grotesques.

3. The use of foils: Old Grannis and Miss Baker. Justified in romantic

literature by contrast. The self-effacing, timid drawing together

contrasted with the brute directness of McTeague. They do not marry,

and preserve their dream world.

4. The use of the revenge motive: Marcus Schouler--the dramatic pursuit

into Death Valley and the end.

“Vandover and the Brute”

An unfinished work--but a huge and terrible torso.

_Theme._ Revealed in the title. The two natures of man and the

sloughing-off of the higher till the wolf is left. Done with a terrible

directness, till the naked man is on all fours, padding up and down in

his room. A grim and sordid theme but not quite achieved. The thing got

away from him. If he had chiseled it as he chiseled _McTeague_, holding

it off objective and amoral, it would have been a tremendous piece. But

it is insufficiently motivated.

_Determinism._ A study in will. Vandover set over against Charlie

Geary and Dolly Haight. The latter a victim of momentary weakness; the

former a victim of constitutional pliability. A sensuous egotism that

grows and consumes. Geary alone survives--the egoist who drives forward

ruthlessly. A study of the slow, long descent--a chain of circumstances

that finally binds him hand and foot. His props knocked away one by

one--partly by fate, partly by himself: his father, the girl whom he

loves, his concern for respectable opinion, his art, his money. The

conclusion intensely dramatic--more so than the romance of _McTeague_.

The comment of Garland on _McTeague_ applies equally to _Vandover_:

“What avail is this study of sad lives? for it does not even lead to a

notion of social betterment.” His interest is “not that of the ethical

teacher.”

“The Octopus”

_McTeague_ and _Vandover_ are of the city and its sordid evil ways.

They are studies in psychology. _The Octopus_ is of the great

California valleys and the evils that have come into the farm life

with the railroad. It is a study in economics--the first of a long

series of such studies. One can easily see how the theme caught the

imagination of Norris, how his mind felt the relief from the narrow

world and sordid wretchedness of _Vandover_. A certain magnificence

in Norris responded to the epic breadth of the valleys--they fired

his imagination--the vast sweep and power of nature: the rich soil,

the brilliant sun that lays its palpitating heat upon the land, the

quick response in flowers and fruit. The land is eager to produce;

its fruitfulness is overpowering. There is an epic sweep of life and

reproduction here; and this epic of the soil is linked with the

tragedy wrought by the Southern Pacific--the economic machinery of

man’s making. The facts were well known and they took hold of Norris’s

imagination. His sympathy is aroused and yet instead of attacking the

railroad he weaves it into his deterministic philosophy.

_Theme._ Ostensibly the wheat. Norris planned a huge trilogy of its

growing (_The Octopus_), marketing (_The Pit_), consumption (_The

Wolf_--never written). In reality, the impotence of unimportant

individuals in the struggle with things as they are. In _The Octopus_

the individual is dwarfed by the vast spaces, he is crumpled and

despoiled by the railroad. The flock of sheep destroyed by the train is

only a symbol of the men and women of the valley, under the wheels of

modern industrialism.

_Action._ A huge canvas with crowding figures and abundant action.

“The canvas swarms with actualities--plowing, planting, harvesting,

sheep-herding, merry-making, rabbit-killing, love, labor, birth,

death”--all keyed high and swept into a palpitating background. A

“strongly interwrought group of episodes,” that fall into certain

series of developments too:

1. The atrophy of Magnus Derrick, which might well be a story in itself.

2. The development of Annixter, “out of an absolute, yet not gross,

materiality,” through the love of Hilma Tree; and then their final

annihilation.

3. A host of background characters--supernumeraries--that give a sense

of epic sweep.

_The Note of Romance._ The riot of color, of life, arouse the latent

romance of his nature. He cannot remain detached but projects himself

into the story in the person of Vanamee. He returns to the use of the

symbol as in _McTeague_--the wheat. He allows his villain to perish

melodramatically. How much more convincing is the figure of Charlie

Geary setting Vandover to work than S. Behrman in the hold of the

vessel.

In the end he abandons the amoral attitude. After proclaiming the

doctrine of determinism--that the railroads are the masters--not the

puppets of men--he takes refuge in a moral order. In the large balance,

the wheat remains, rectifying wrong--saving other lives to make good

what it here destroys. “The larger view always and through all shams,

all wickednesses, discovers the Truth that will, in the end, prevail,

and all things, surely, inevitably, resistlessly, work together for

good.”[809] Nevertheless in contemplating the injustice done by the

railroads, Norris neither demands nor expects relief.

_The Octopus_ exemplifies Norris’ theory of broad-scale work. It “draws

conclusions from a whole congeries of forces, social development, race

impulses.” It “devotes itself not to the study of men but of man.”

Sidney Lanier[810]

An original nature. Rejects both the genteel tradition and the ideals

of the rising middle class. An artist to whom life means beauty.

He revivifies nature--is almost pagan in his adoration of the beauty

of the sun and water. A half-personification of the sun-myth. He is

essentially religious. To Longfellow and Tennyson nature is pretty

embroidery; to Emerson it is a dwelling-place of the oversoul; to

Lanier it is an object of adoration. See “The Marshes of Glynn.”

He attacks industrialism--the first of the poets to cry out against

it as a deadly blight on life and civilization. See “Corn,” “The

Symphony,” “The Jacquerie.”

He seeks a new religion, recognizing a quantitative element.

The Incomparable Mr. Cabell[811]

The successive volumes of James Branch Cabell have provided the

tribe of critical Jeffries with a rich vein of diversion. They have

recognized no closed season in their full-lunged pursuit of the

strange heirs of Mr. Cabell’s invention, and such Homeric absurdities

of comment have been flung at him, that he is in a fair way to become

our classic example of the fatuousness of contemporary estimates. As

whimsical as Bernard Shaw, as provocative as Chesterton, he is more

incomprehensible than either to all readers who do not choose to like

what they have not always liked. Professing to be a romancer, and

defending the glory of romance with inimitable witchery of phrase,

he writes no romance that lovers of convention can understand. The

lovely fabrics of his tales of Poictesme are all shimmer and sheen,

woven of magic and veiling mysteries, instead of the correct taffeta

and grosgrain; and the brilliant stuff of his tales of gallantry is

fashioned of wit and poetry, instead of the customary wigs and sword

play. Those to whom romance suggests _When Knighthood Was in Flower_,

will find only obscurities and coarseness in _Figures of Earth_

(1921) and _Jurgen_ (1919, _enl._ ed. 1921); and those who delight

in the stage rufflings of _Monsieur Beaucaire_, will discover only a

libertine in _The Cords of Vanity_ (1909, rev. ed. 1920). And if the

reader boggles at such tales what can he hope to make of that strange,

ironical whimsy, _The Cream of the Jest_ (1917, rev. ed. 1922)? One

needs to walk warily in dealing with Mr. Cabell, or the jest of which

he is such a master will turn sardonically upon the critic. In all

his thinking vague hinterlands lie behind the commonplace, cryptic

meanings lurk behind the obvious; and the credulous, easy-going reader

finds himself puzzled, and at last floundering quite hopelessly in a

land of bogs and marsh-lights. And yet was ever another writer born

to us Americans so insistent upon being understood? He has elaborated

his views of life and art at length, and repeated them in successive

volumes over nearly a score of years; and finally in what may have

been a mood of sheer disgust at the stupidity of those who buy books,

he reëlaborated his philosophy and wrote it out in good set terms

within the covers of a single volume. _Beyond Life_ is an essay

altogether remarkable for its haunting beauty of phrase, its honest

agnosticism, its brooding irony. It is enough to turn one cynic to

consider that so noble a book should have called forth from a reputable

gentleman, presumably of good taste and sound judgment, the comment

that it “contains cheap and shallow pessimistic observations on human

limitations.”

That _Beyond Life_ (1919), with other of Mr. Cabell’s books, contains

“observations on the limitations of human nature,” is quite obvious;

for Mr. Cabell deals in comedy, and what is to become of comedy if

it shall not observe those limitations and laugh at them? That it is

even pessimistic may likewise be argued with some plausibility; but to

assert that it is cheap and shallow is preposterous. An inquisitive

mind, deeply concerned with ultimate values, cannot be cheap and

shallow. And yet the fault of such widespread misinterpretation may lie

in part at Mr. Cabell’s own doorstep. An inveterate jester, his sallies

often carry implications far beyond the obvious; his strange whimsies

spring from depths of thought and emotion beyond the understanding of

the careless. His attitude towards life is an odd mixture of the modern

and the medieval: there is a medieval simplicity and frankness, a

naïve wonder at the mystery that underlies the common, an incorrigible

idealism; and this medieval attitude is drenched in modern agnosticism.

He passes easily from a broad Chaucerian humor that laughs frankly at

the relations of men and women, to a mystical idealization of those

relations; and the problem of reconciling the humor and the ideal

becomes a serious business with him. He hates the cant and dishonesty

of our _bourgeois_ existence, and he refuses to take seriously the

host of petty concerns that most of us are very serious about. If

he were less the artist he would join the disaffected and turn to

rend this foolish world; but the spirit of comedy saves him and he

contents himself with a jest. But the Cabellian jest uncovers depths

of meditation that reveal the philosopher and the poet. In his own

large meaning of the word Mr. Cabell is an economist. He is greatly

dissatisfied with the “futile body-wasting,” which under the “dynamic

illusion known as common sense” passes for life, and is concerned to

discover what abiding increment a man may get from his body during

its brief existence as an entity. His mind is haunted with a sense of

realities that lie beneath the surface appearances, and that insist on

trickling from his pen in strange comments. It is a careless reader

who is deceived or put off the scent by his whimsical vocabulary, who

insists on conventional meanings for words which Mr. Cabell chooses

to use otherwise than conventional persons use them. Romance and

realism--words with which he plays constantly and upon which he hangs

his philosophy--do not signify the spurious romance of childish minds,

or the shoddy realism of practical minds. If one must insist upon

translating his vocabulary into ordinary terms, let us understand that

to Mr. Cabell romance and realism mean idealism and conventionalism;

and to the profound distinction between these two attitudes towards

life, he dedicates his work.

I have called Mr. Cabell a poet, and the justification lies in his

persistent idealization of life in terms of beauty. At his birth he was

endowed by an unkind fate with imagination. Now imagination may be a

very pretty and amiable gift, highly useful for gilding one’s egoism,

putting honey in thistles, proving itself practical by arraying life in

gay robes in order that it may seem an altogether lovely and desirable

mistress; or it may prove a decidedly parlous faculty to play with.

It can summon bogies, and terrors that are vaster and more real than

bogies. A brooding imagination can work havoc with one’s complacency.

When Carlyle was in a mood to enjoy his nerves he would let his

imagination range beyond the comfortable confines of convention, to

consider the universe and the position of man therein--the black flow

of time and the terrifying immensity of background against which man

is set; and he would come back to dinner with Jane Welsh Carlyle with

a sick stomach and an ill temper. It was not very gallant, but it was

very natural to a man unnerved by what he had contemplated. Considered

with open eyes reality is too overpowering for weak man, and because

he could not relieve the tension with a jest, Carlyle’s imagination

inflicted chronic dyspepsia upon him. To conventional persons the

dyspepsia and Jane Welsh Carlyle’s sharp replies to her husband’s ill

humor, seem the important reality, and the overpowering visions of

time and space that were at the root of the family discord, seem no

other than romance. In this curious world of convention all things are

topsy-turvy, and it needs a tremendous effort of will to set them only

a little right.

To this effort Mr. Cabell’s life work has been dedicated with unruffled

urbanity. Like Carlyle he chooses to roam far in his philosophic

quests, and like Thoreau he comes home at nightfall with little

more than a handful of stardust in his wallet. He loves to sally

forth on the greatest of adventures--the pursuit of reality where it

lies broadcast, hidden from practical eyes that refuse to see. He is

impelled by the old wonder that has haunted men from the beginning

of their long upward climb; the wonder and the fear of life. Now to

anyone but a fool or a poet, only too plainly life is petty and gross

and inconsequential, from the moment when with superfluous blood and

pain we are brought into the world, to the time when we return by an

unlovely process to chemical elements. It is compounded of vanity,

as the old poet long ago observed. The practical, about which we

make so much pother and over which we chatter so foolishly, is only

an illusion which men hug because it keeps them in self-conceit. Mr.

Cabell refuses to accept any such illusions at their face value. He

will not be humbugged by foolish persons who pretend to talk wisely.

What is man? he insists on asking: A parasite on the thin rind of a

planet that swings silently through interstellar space--“an ape who

chatters to himself of kinship with the archangels while filthily he

digs for groundnuts.” If this is the reality to which the philosopher

must come finally--and like Hamlet Mr. Cabell does not shirk the

contemplation of graveyard facts--then must the thoughtful man accept

logically a frank pessimism, and on this foundation build such a hut

as may best shelter him for the few days of his unintelligible life.

Over this sorry conclusion Mr. Cabell broods much, and because he is

a human being with a will to enjoy life and think well of himself, he

uses every faculty to scramble out of the pit and find a pleasanter

refuge for the brief time of his existence. The idealist in him engages

the pessimist, and like so many other moderns he goes out in quest of

that which may keep him sane. It is true that man is an ape reft of his

tail and grown rusty at climbing, but is that the whole story? It is

evident that men in all times have refused to believe that they are not

something other than apes--their very dreams seem to belie a conclusion

so mean and ignoble. Is there not some deeper _élan vital_, some hidden

impulse that drives man forward and upward even while his mind is on

groundnuts? “Yet more clearly do I perceive,” argues the idealist,

“that this same man is a maimed god.... He is under penalty condemned

to compute eternity with false weights and to estimate infinity with a

yardstick; and he very often does it.... There lies the choice which

every man must make--or rationally to accept his own limitations? or

stupendously to play the fool and swear that he is at will omnipotent.”

This would seem to be a hard choice, but Mr. Cabell does not hesitate.

He patches up his agnosticism with the will to believe, on the

pragmatic grounds that it seems to work. For man “rationally to accept

his own limitations,” is to defeat everything worth while in life; it

is to yield the battle to a black pessimism. Whereas “stupendously to

play the fool and swear that he is at will omnipotent,” may end in

creating the will to omnipotence, and the fool in some preposterous

fashion may prove that he is indeed divine. Let man but accept his

logical limitations and he returns to the ape reft of more than his

tail, fallen to gibbering in the mud, refusing to take hold of that

rope of sand by which miraculously he has drawn himself forward

hitherto. For accepting his limitations means contenting himself

with material fact, and “the trouble with facts seems to be, that

if one treats them out of relation to the rest of life, they become

lies.” In the “stupefying mist of common sense” men walk blindly. The

practical, the conventional, are alien to the deeper reality which is

shadowed forth by emotions and dreams; which refuses to disclose itself

nakedly, but hides behind symbols, haunting the mind even while one

is pottering among inconsequentials. This deeper reality itself may

be but a dream, but nevertheless it possesses the power of creating

a will to believe, upon which hangs man’s destiny. Hence the tales

which we tell ourselves are significant because through some occult

process they foreshadow the thing that may be; they prod the foolish

will to omnipotence to believe that we shall outgrow the ape. For grown

rusty at climbing, the ape-man “however dimly, feels himself to be a

symbol, and the frail representative of Omnipotence in a place that is

not home; and so strives blunderingly, from mystery to mystery, with

pathetic makeshifts, not understanding anything, greedy in all desires,

and honeycombed with poltroonery, and yet ready to give all, and to die

fighting, for the sake of that undemonstrable idea.”

It is because he is terrified at the meanness of what practical men

call reality, that Mr. Cabell turns away from it to find the true life

in dreams. Not only are they pleasanter, they are more useful; they are

all that man has to aid him in the appalling task of getting himself

out of the slime, that he may walk in green fields. We need to turn

Prospero’s words around--our dreams are such stuff as we are made

on. They alone are real and salutary, for amid all their ramblings

they seem dimly to suggest some end; amidst their rank egoisms they

seem to foreshadow a purpose: and may not that end and purpose be

the eventual creation of a life for man that shall be worthy of his

dreams? It is illogical to assume that man can pull himself up by his

own bootstraps, but how else shall he pull himself up? Is not man the

inveterate romancer somehow blindly creating a noble romance of man?

“To what does the whole business tend?” he asks at the conclusion of

_Beyond Life_, “--why, how in heaven’s name should I know? We can but

be content to note that all goes forward, toward something.... It may

be that we are nocturnal creatures perturbed by rumors of a dawn which

comes inevitably, as prologue to a day wherein we and our children

have no part whatever. It may be that when our arboreal propositus

descended from his palm tree and began to walk upright about the earth,

his progeny were forthwith committed to a journey in which today is

only a way-station. Yet I prefer to take it that we are components

of an unfinished world, and that we are but as seething atoms which

ferment toward its making, if merely because man as he now exists can

hardly be the finished product of any Creator whom one could very

heartily revere. We are being made into something quite unpredictable,

I imagine: and through the purging and the smelting, we are sustained

by an instinctive knowledge that we are being made into something

better. For this we know, quite incommunicably, and yet as surely as we

know that we will have it thus. And it is this will that stirs in us to

have the creatures of earth and the affairs of earth, not as they are,

but ‘as they ought to be,’ which we call romance. But when we note how

visibly it sways all life we perceive that we are talking about God.”

From this persistent will to romance--the incorrigible propensity to

follow the dynamic illusion of dreams that is so deep an instinct of

human nature--Mr. Cabell deduces a conception of art that to careless

readers seems whimsically perverse; and from it likewise emerges the

lambent irony that plays like diffused lightning about the horizons

of his thought. The function of art in society, he insists, is to

comfort and inspire man with its divine beauty. Without the artist this

is but a grim and forbidding place where men live; and unless every

man is somewhat the artist, and seeks his compensations in the lure

of romance, it must remain grim and forbidding. It is therefore the

privilege and the duty of the artist “to prevaricate tenderly about

the universe”; to create for life a meaning that is not apparent, by

clothing it in beauty and adducing for it a noble significance. It is

his mission to lure men away from the contemplation of facts which

terrify or debase, from all ignoble and depressing realism, to pursue

the ideal and entice the imagination to enter and dwell in a world as

it ought to be. The artist, therefore, is a Moses in the wilderness,

pointing men to the Promised Land, and even enabling them to go forward

and taste its fruits while they still dwell in the wilderness.

Now of all the dreams which lure men, the one universal and potent

dream, Mr. Cabell asserts with Freudian understanding, is the woman

dream. Its roots are deep in the ape-animal; it drives men inexorably,

for upon it depends the very existence of the race. And therefore, a

shrewd mother-nature has somehow transmuted its base materials into

the very stuff of romance, commingling with it all high and generous

impulses, making of it the loveliest dream that visits man’s weak

head. In consequence of which ironic transmutation this lovely dream

“hoodwinks humanity through the dynamic illusion known as love,

in order that humanity may endure, and the groans of a lover be

perpetuated in the wails of an infant.” Considered in one light this

is the very “cream of the jest” that nature perpetrates upon man; but

considered in another light, does it not turn out to be the supreme

jest which man has perpetrated upon nature? For once he has been

taught the alphabet of romance, through the crude necessity of race

preservation, he has gone far in his studies, and turned romancer on a

great scale. From this raw material of biological sex-love he has woven

the fabrics of his religion, of his art, of his idealism; he has dipped

it in gleaming dyes, twisted it to quaint patterns, fashioned from it

lovely robes to cover what is ugly. It is the wellspring and source of

all romance.

Through this open door of woman-worship Mr. Cabell chooses to enter his

world of deeper realities. “There is in every human being that which

demands communion with something more fine and potent than itself,”

and this something more fine and potent he seeks in the woman of his

dreams. It was so when the world was young, and it will be so as long

as there is youth left in the world. In early times this object of

adoration was the witch-woman, the Circes and Calypsos of ancient

tales; later it became the lady-mistress of chivalric ideals; today

it is the dream maiden whom the young man woos but never finds in

marriage, and not finding her is impelled to turn to the ever-young

and ever-lovely Helens and Ettarres of old romance. A good half

of Mr. Cabell’s work is given over to this curious celebration of

woman-worship. It is elaborated in _Domnei_ (1920), in _Jurgen_, in

_Figures of Earth_. In the strange tales of the land of Poictesme the

drama flows from the balking and thwarting of this woman quest by the

Dame Niafers and Dame Lisas of the commonplace world, to man’s undoing.

Nevertheless “the long, high, fruitless questing does not ever end,

but, rather, is temporarily remitted for the society of Dame Niafer and

of Dame Lisa. For ... one perceives that, even in remote Poictesme,

those aging nympholepts, Dom Manuel and Jurgen--they also--were

heartened to endure the privileges of happily married persons by a sure

faith, discreetly left unvoiced, that these hard-won, fond, wearisome,

and implacable wives were, after all, just temporary makeshifts. By

and by would Freydis and Helen return, at their own season.”--For the

dream persists in the very face of present fact, and in this lies

man’s hope. “In youth all men that live have been converts if but in

transitory allegiance, to that religion of the world’s youth--to the

creed of _domnei_, or woman-worship.” Now it is “the very essence

of _domnei_, that the woman one loves is providentially set between

the lover’s apprehension and God, as the mobile and vital image and

corporeal reminder of Heaven, as a quick symbol of beauty and holiness,

of purity and perfection. In her the lover views all qualities which

can be comprehended by merely human faculties.” “If but in honor, his

heart stays bound to his first and only real love, that woman of whom

he never tires. Her coming is not yet. He can but wait, sustained by

his sure faith ... that some day her glory will be apparent, and he

will enter gladly into her secret kingdom, and will find her kisses all

that in youth he foreknew to be not impossible.... And meanwhile this

prescience, somehow, informs all art ... and makes it to him a vital

thing.... And there seems to be no beauty in the world save those stray

hints of her, whose ultimate revealment is not yet.... And it is very

often through desire to express his faith in this withheld perfection,

of which he has been conscious in broken glimpses from afar, that he

turns artist.... For every art is a confession of faith in that which

is not yet.”

But however adroitly man has turned the jest against nature, and

erected a noble palace from base materials, the jest remains,

mixed with the mortar, and the structure cannot endure for long.

It is insubstantial, and at any moment the cloud-capped towers may

disintegrate and the dream palace disappear, leaving not a rack behind.

There remains only the jest. This unhappy ending Mr. Cabell foresees,

and hence emerges the profound irony that underlies all his writing.

To such disillusionment must all things come. Life is no more than a

comedy, played by puppets; bitter, with more tears than laughter in

it; yet because tears are futile and unnerving, what remains for the

gallant gentleman but to confront life with a jest? Mr. Cabell does not

wholly forego his chivalric ideal even while he is contemplating the

vanity of all endings in the light of their beginnings. As Horvendile

the clerk, he clings to it, even though he is doomed to walk the

streets of Lichfield, Virginia, in the form of Felix Kennaston, who

passes--to his own incredulous amusement--as a personage of some

importance, with two automobiles and money in four banks. He possesses

the magic sigil of Scoteia, by the potency of which he can send forth

his soul to meet Ettarre, and recover the raptures that Felix Kennaston

no longer knows. But the sigil of Scoteia turns out to be the half-top

of a pomade glass from his wife’s dressing-table; the potency is gone;

and he remains at last no more than a respectable citizen with his

automobiles and money in four banks. _The Cream of the Jest_ reduces

the chivalric ideal to pure irony.

By a transition more natural, perhaps, to a Virginian than to another

American, Mr. Cabell turns from the contemplation of chivalry to the

study of gallantry; and shifts the theme of his romances from the

ecstatic adoration of the Woman, whom to possess is to lose, to the

gay pursuit and enjoyment of women. In “The Rivet in Grandfather’s

Neck” he chooses to set a decidedly shabby and roue gallantry over

against a somewhat futile and antiquated southern chivalry. He loves

both the gallant and the gentleman, and he spares neither; they are

equally the descendants of that Cavalier ideal which flourished so

rankly in the soil of the old planter society; nevertheless the

quaint and lovable Rudolph Musgrave with his gentle heroics comes

off distinctly better than his brilliant half-brother, the novelist

John Charteris. One might, indeed, wonder at Mr. Cabell’s treatment

of the artist Charteris, were it not so distinctly Shavian. It is

odd how similar is his conception of the artist to the definition

of Shaw--one who wriggles into the confidence of women to learn

their secrets only to betray them. Nevertheless Jack Charteris, the

brilliant thinker and talker of _Beyond Life_, mouthpiece of the

Cabellian philosophy, deserves better treatment than he gets in the

story of this sorry escapade; he comes quite too near the likeness

of the mountebank Sheridan. In _The Cords of Vanity_ gallantry

reveals itself more attractively; it is gilded with youth and wit

and poetry. It is Congreve at his best, scintillating, brilliant,

with a delightful affectation of pose and gesture; and it is Marlowe

also, with its galloping wit steeped in pure poetry. There is the

true Elizabethan rapture of fine words and lovely images and quaint

conceits. “Meantime,” says young Robert Townsend, “being in love, I

refined upon the notions of love with the ingenuity of an Elizabethan.”

There you have the spirit of the book. It is more than a pretty piece

of paganism; it is the brightest tale of gallantry in our literature,

masterly in the restrained irony of its inimitable conclusion.

It is obvious, however, that the mood which finally will receive

dramatization from Mr. Cabell cannot be summed up in the ideal of

gallantry. What that mood is one finds revealed at length by John

Charteris in _Beyond Life_. It is the quintessence of irony distilled

from long observation of human life, but it is not Congreve, much

less is it Sheridan. Those shameless and selfish roues began as

artists but they ended as mountebanks; life taught them cynicism and

not tenderness; it sharpened their wit and dulled their sympathy.

The higher irony lay quite beyond their natures. But with Mr. Cabell

tenderness, sympathy, an ardent concern for the inevitable failure

that lies in wait upon aspiration, are so strong and urgent that under

the governance of a mind less intellectual, they must inevitably run

into sentimentality. But there is in Mr. Cabell something of the

intellectual austerity of Matthew Arnold, and it conducts him to

the same ends. Consider such a passage as this: “Through a merciful

dispensation, we are one and all of us created very vain and very

dull.... Vanity it is that pricks us indefatigably to play the ape to

every dream romance induces; yet vanity is but the stirrup-cup: and

urgent need arises that human dullness retain us (as it does) securely

blinded, lest we observe the wayside horrors of our journey and go mad.

One moment of clear vision as to man’s plight in the universe would

be quite sufficient to set the most philosophic gibbering. Meanwhile

with bandaged eyes we advance: and human sanity is guided by the brave

and pitiable and tireless dullness of mankind.... Yet how varied are

the amiable activities of human dullness, which tend alike to protect

and to enliven human progress! Dullness it is, of course, that brews

and quaffs Dutch courage; ... that fosters salutary optimism as to the

destiny of mankind, in flat defiance of everything mankind can do,

and does unblushingly.... And finally dullness it is that lifts up

heart and voice alike, to view a parasite infesting the epidermis of a

midge among the planets, and cries. _Behold, this is the child of God,

All-mighty and All-worshipful, made in the likeness of his Father!_...

These and how many other wholesome miracles are daily brought about by

our dullness, by our brave and pitiable and tireless dullness, by our

really majestic dullness, in firm alliance with the demiurgic spirit

of romance.... For that to which romance conducts, in all the affairs

of life ... is plain enough--distinction and clarity, and beauty and

symmetry, and tenderness and truth and urbanity.”

Here then is the note that still awaits adequate dramatization in a

comedy greater than he has yet written--a cosmic irony suffused with

tenderness and truth and urbanity. Above all, urbanity. Mr. Cabell

has played too long with the ideal of gallantry; he has devoted too

much precious time to creating Millamants to fall in love with; he has

listened too credulously to the voice of Congreve. “I have read,” says

Charteris, out of Congreve, “that the secret of gallantry is to accept

the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug;

as well as that, among other requisites, the gallant person will always

consider the world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with

a smile of honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is not

distrustful--being thoroughly persuaded that God is kindlier than the

genteel would regard as rational.” Surely the cosmic irony that loves

men’s dullness because it alone can preserve them from madness, and

retorts upon the cosmic terrors with a jest, is higher than gallantry

and more enduring. It arrives at tolerance for all human shortcomings;

it embraces high and low in its sympathies; it achieves urbanity as a

final goal. It is the stuff of which great literature is made. And Mr.

Cabell is creating great literature. A self-reliant intellectual, rich

in the spoils of all literatures, one of the great masters of English

prose, the supreme comic spirit thus far granted us, he stands apart

from the throng of lesser American novelists, as Mark Twain stood

apart, individual and incomparable.

Footnotes

[799] Notes for a lecture delivered at the University of California in

1922.--_Publisher._

[800] Ludwig Lewisohn, _Modern Drama_, New York, 1915, p. 3.

[801] From lecture notes and the syllabus.--_Publisher._

[802] Stephen Crane, _Works_, New York, 1926, Vol. 10, p. 216.

[803] _Ibid._, Vol. 11, p. 21.

[804] Lecture notes.--_Publisher._

[805] _The Responsibilities of the Novelist_, “The Novel with a

‘Purpose,’” Garden City, N. Y., 1928, Vol. 7, p. 22.

[806] _Ibid._, p. 22.

[807] Frank Norris, _Complete Works_, New York, n. d., Vol. III, p. 58.

[808] _Ibid._, p. 22.

[809] Frank Norris, _The Octopus_, New York, 1906, p. 652.

[810] Lecture notes.--_Publisher._

[811] Reprinted by permission from _The Pacific Review_, December,

1921.--_Publisher._

The Problem Novel and the Diversion from Naturalism[812]

No sooner was naturalism fairly under way than it was well-nigh

submerged under a wave of social speculation and inquiry. The years

1903-1917 were a distinctive period--a time of extraordinary ferment,

when America was seeking to readjust her ideals and institutions

to a revolutionary economic order that had come upon her. The

popular phase was revealed in the muckracking movement, a movement

which instructed the American middle class in certain elements of

economics--particularly the close connection between economics and

politics. But underneath, an intellectual revolution was in progress,

setting steadily towards a new social philosophy. The old America had

been intensely conservative, naïvely provincial and self-satisfied,

compassed by a complacence founded on optimism--the gospel of the

business man. The new America was eager and hopeful, impatient to

square institutions to the new conditions. The total movement was

profoundly democratic--a new Jacksonianism rising in protest against a

menacing plutocracy.

1. _The Movement of Criticism._ The work of a vigorous social idealism.

Passed through three broad phases:

a. Political. The movement of Progressivism, 1903-1912. An attempt to

democratize the machinery of government to the end that the will of

the majority shall prevail. Its impulse and much of its program came

from Populism; and it resulted in a clarification of the issue between

republicanism and democracy. An attack on the representative system

and the checks and balances of the Fathers. It gave rise to a critical

examination of the spirit and purpose of the Constitution.[813]

b. Economic. A growing conviction that talk of political democracy is

futile except in so far as it leads to economic democracy. That power

is economic in origin and that those who control the economics will

control the government. The gospel of economic determinism. Certain

conclusions emerged:

1. That capitalism is no longer competitive but monopolistic.

2. That _laissez-faire_ism no longer suffices.

3. That centralization has submerged the individual citizen; that he

is impotent before the leviathan corporation; and that henceforth the

struggle is to be between organized groups for the control of the

state.[814]

c. Literary. An examination and rejection of traditional literary and

cultural ideas. An attack upon:

1. Puritan reticence and smug respectability.

2. Middle-class optimism and sentimentality.

Led by H. L. Mencken, Ludwig Lewisohn, and the younger intellectuals.

The bias aristocratic.

2. _The Incoming of Old-World Thought._ The breaking-down of the older

provincialism and the reception of new ideas.

a. The philosophy of collectivism. Derived chiefly from Germany and

England; largely Marxian and Fabian. The conviction that the state

must absorb the trust. Later the appearance of syndicalism and guild

socialism, based on a distrust of the bureaucratic, omnicompetent

state. Anarchism has remained alien in spirit.[815]

b. The new aristocracy. A reversion from an easy-going Jacksonianism

based on the doctrine of equalitarianism. A direct denial of that

doctrine and the theory of leadership. In business the doctrine of the

expert and the rule of efficiency. In philosophy the doctrine of the

intellectual aristocrat--a suggestion of Nietzsche and the will to

power. Thus Mencken joins hands with Judge Gary in upholding the ethics

of the strong. The total result an effective denial of our traditional

ideal of democracy.

c. The problem novel. All this ferment entered into literature,

tyrannizing in its insistence. Old forms became old-fashioned

overnight. The novel was so useful that it was drafted by the new

crusading enthusiasm. Romance and naturalism alike were swept away;

the political novel and the economic novel took their place to arouse

public opinion to action. It was the glorification of propaganda.

Except for James Branch Cabell and Edith Wharton not a writer escaped.

There is something pathetic in the way the harmless bleating

romantics were dragged at the chariot wheels of social problems. Booth

Tarkington, Mary Johnston, Winston Churchill, William Allen White, were

sacrificed equally with potential naturalists like Robert Herrick,

Upton Sinclair, and Ernest Poole. Their careers may be seen from

Churchill, Poole, and Herrick.

1. Winston Churchill. [The most representative of the spirit of

Progressivism.] A conscientious middle-class romantic. Churchill was a

faithful reflector of middle-class movements. His work falls into three

phases:

[a. _Romantic historical tales._ _Richard Carvel_ (1899) the type

of Cavalier romance. A blend of Thackeray’s _Henry Esmond_ and _The

Virginians_, John Paul Jones added for extra historical flavor. A

double background: (1) the old South of the Revolution with a Loyalist

villain and a patriot hero; (2) the London of Brooks Club and a gaming

aristocracy, with Charles Fox. The heroine another edition of Beatrix

Esmond the hero another Henry Esmond. _The Crisis_ (1910) a romance

of the borderland of the Civil War: a fire-eating Southern heroine

and a sober Yankee-Puritan hero. _The Crossing_ (1904) a romance of

the settlement of the Inland Empire. A theme not yet adequately dealt

with in American fiction. The story breaks in two: the first half

Churchill’s best work in romance; the last half his worst.[816]]

b. _Political novels._ Coincided with the rise of the Progressive

movement. _Coniston_ (1906) a study of the legislative boss in New

Hampshire. A reflection of his experience in the state legislature.

How the “interests,” and in particular the railroads, manage to put

their bills through. Jethro Bass sells political control to the highest

bidder.

_Mr. Crewe’s Career_ (1908): the same theme a generation later.

Consolidation of the railroads has brought about absentee dictatorship

of state politics. The boss has removed to New York and manages the

legislature through his local lawyer. The philosophy of big-business

prosperity rests on property rights, held in trusteeship by the

corporations that fill the empty dinner pails, make and unmake business

confidence. The revolt of the younger generation--Austen Vane and

Victoria Flint, in whom stirs a new social conscience.

c. _Economic novels._ Began with _The Inside of the Cup_ (1913), a

venture in higher criticism and social interpretation. So compare

_Robert Elsmere_ (1888). An attack on old dogmas and an attempt to

discover the democratic springs of Christianity. The clash between

the reborn Son of God and an unregenerate society, and the need to

establish the Kingdom of God in this world. The church today controlled

by business subscriptions. The solution to be sought in a free pulpit,

supported by the common people, preaching a new social Christianity.

_A Far Country_ (1915), a study in the emptiness of the profit motive.

A background of banking--J. P. Morgan and Company. The dissatisfaction

of the prodigal son who has wasted his intellectual and moral

patrimony--the lawyer who sells his brain to rise and loses the

things that make life worth while. His conversion brings the call to

self-education.

_The Dwelling Place of Light_ (1917), a study of the blighting effect

of industrialism on the native Yankee stock that has failed to rise

into the exploiting class. The restlessness of modern life due to the

failure of normal instincts to find satisfaction in daily existence--an

emptiness due to loss of beauty, freedom, creative craftsmanship. The

search for compensation brings death and not life. A background of the

Lawrence strike and syndicalism.

2. Robert Herrick. The most promising of the potential naturalists.

An intellectual fascinated by the crude materialism of Chicago in the

late nineties. Suffered from the inhibitions of a Puritan idealism;

the problems of this raw world cried aloud for solution--the woman

question, the labor question, the problem of the professions--and

warped him away from naturalism, making him an easy victim of the new

social enthusiasm. The key to his thought--economic determinism.

_The Memoirs of an American Citizen_ (1905). His best work and the

nearest approach to naturalism. A detailed study of the American

business man--the captain of industry who rises in a competitive

society by his own will. The competitive order, he perceives, requires

an ethics different from the Christian ideal. The survival of the

fittest means the survival of the strongest, the most cunning and

unscrupulous. The realist who deals with facts discovers that he lives

in a world of pigs--little pigs of the village, larger hogs of the

city. To get in the trough a man must have fingers and toes and use

them. The world belongs to the strong. That which gives dignity is

bigness: the larger the hog, the more imposing. Little business is

dirty and petty, but big business may become poetic. To grind a mess of

sausages is messy, but to provide sausages for every breakfast table

in America is grandiose. To realize his ambition Van Harrington plays

fast and loose with conventional ethics, but unlike Frank Cowperwood

he seeks a new ethics. As a superman his work will be justified by its

creativeness, by its service to humanity.

_A Life for a Life_ (1910). In certain other of his work Herrick

betrays naturalistic tendencies, notably in _The Web of Life_ (1900),

where he considers the problem of social complexity and how it binds

the life of men and women and determines their fate. But in _A Life

for a Life_ he surrenders wholly to the problem. His theme is how the

predatory egoism of the profit-struggle may be cured, and he presents

alternative solutions: syndicalism and Christianity. The cure lies in

individual self-conquest--breaking through the web of “things as they

are” and choosing life instead of power.

Herrick was on the threshold of naturalism. He felt the complexity of

life and the determining force of that complexity; but he failed to

achieve the attitude of objectivity.

3. Ernest Poole. _The Harbor_ (1915). The culmination of the novel of

naturalistic propaganda and the most widely read. A dramatic record of

a changing industrial order, traced through three stages: (1) The old

world of small competitive business that is dead; (2) The present world

of corporation control; (3) The world of syndicalistic control that

struggles to be born.

Against this changing world stands the young idealist troubled in

his loyalties, who sets up different gods to worship: (1) The idol

of art--aloofness from the mass struggle; (2) The idol of efficiency

by the supermen who rule in trusteeship; (3) The idol of mass

solidarity and workers’ control--the conclusion that is on the dawn of

realization: “The world for all the workers.” _Conclusion._ The ferment

of social thought, shot through with Marxianism, familiarized the

American novelists with one doctrine important for the naturalist--the

doctrine of economic determinism. In none of them did it pass over

into a larger conception of philosophical determinism, and this sets

the limitation to their naturalism. The common zeal for reform or

revolution, moreover, kept them from objectivity. In none is there the

calm detachment and the amoral presentation of material without which

naturalism sinks into propaganda. Their position presupposes a large

confidence in individual initiative--a confidence in the power of men

to alter the world they live in. It is admirable, but it is not the way

of the naturalists, who do not seek to change what they regard as an

essentially unresponsive world that changes only after its own way.

Jack London: The Novelist of the Proletariat[817]

Experienced the harsh contacts of a seasonal worker and tramp. Became a

Marxian socialist and revolutionist, preaching the war of the classes

in _The Iron Heel_ (1908), _The Revolution_ (1910), and other works. A

man of strong vital energy with a philosophy shaped by Darwin, Spencer,

and Nietzsche. Emphasizes a passionate will-to-power, a superman of

swift and violent action.

_The Call of the Wild_ (1903); a study in atavism, brilliant, poetic,

set against a wild Alaska background. The resurgence of the primitive

wolf-instincts in a domesticated dog.

_The Sea Wolf_ (1904); the frankest statement in American literature

of the unbridled will-to-power, egoistic, amoral. A malignant ferocity

in a philosophical, herculean sea captain, whose body is destroyed by

paresis, but whose malignancy is unconquered.

_Martin Eden_ (1909); autobiographical. So compare _John Barleycorn_

(1913). The former deals with his struggle to educate himself, to

write, and to gain recognition. A background of his experience at the

University of California. A profound contempt for _bourgeois_ standards

of life and thought. The note of revolution and the lapsing of the

will-to-live.

London carries to the extreme the “elemental” of Norris, translating it

into the primitive and abysmal. A potential naturalist in his amoral

attitude and his underlying pessimism, but carried away by zeal of

revolution. Lacks restraint and finish.

Upton Sinclair[818]

The most insistent and outspoken of the muckrakers. Began as a

novelist, but his art submerged by propaganda--a profound suspicion of

capitalism and all its ways.

_The Jungle_ (1906); a story of the packing houses and the immigrant:

the technique of “speeding up” and the labor scrap-heap. The social

consequences of the profit principle--saving everything but the squeal

of the hog and the health of the laborer.

_King Coal_ (1917); a story of the Rockefeller coal fields in Colorado

and the miners’ union. Probably his most skillful story.

Numerous other titles, among them: _The Brass Check_, an examination

of the American newspaper--the charge that these are the tools

of plutocracy; _The Goose Step_, an examination of the American

university--the charge that these serve wealth; _The Goslings_, an

attack upon the public school as an agent of capitalism.

Theodore Dreiser: Chief of American Naturalists[819]

Against this background of eager ferment and various propaganda stands

Theodore Dreiser, who is of this changing world and yet apart from

it: the most detached and keenly observant of all our writers, a huge

figure of ungainly proportions--a heavy-footed peasant with unslaked

curiosity and a boundless pity, who is determined to examine critically

“this animal called man” and portray him truthfully. He tramps across

fields straight to his objective, messing sadly the neat little beds

of American convention, peering into the secret places that are marked

“Not Open To The Public,” keeping nothing hidden, ashamed of nothing,

apologizing for nothing. Not since Walt Whitman has there been another

such frank and detached projection of reality, such insistence that the

world shall stop and consider those facts which convention has politely

agreed to ignore. Naturally a great hue and cry of the Pharisees

has been raised against him. The respectable middle class will have

none of this peasant directness and brutal truth. He has entered our

_bourgeois_ society “murmurous of morality” with an alien philosophy,

which he must defend. At every moment he feels under the necessity

of assisting the truth as he sees it, and instead of suffering his

portrayal to stand on its own feet he props it up with argument and

interminable debate. The artist suffers at the hands of the disputant.

_The Man and his Philosophy._ Marked by an immense and open-eyed

curiosity that ends in agnosticism. His anthropocentric conceptions:

I have lived now to my fortieth year and have seen a good deal of

life.... But I am one of those curious persons who cannot make up

their minds about anything. I read and read.... But I find that one

history contradicts another, one philosopher drives out another.

Essayists, in the main, point out flaws and paradoxes in the

current conception of things, novelists, dramatists and biographers

spread tales of endless disasters, or silly illusions concerning

life, duty, opportunity and the like. And I sit here and read and

read, when I have time, wondering.[820]

“Nothing is proved, all is permitted,” he says in _The Titan_. Men

will do what they think they can get away with. In briefest terms his

philosophy may be phrased thus:

1. The world is without reason or meaning to us. Why we are here and to

what end is unknowable.

2. Men are chemical compounds, existing in a world where they play

about like water-flies, skipping restlessly and unintelligently as

their legs drive them, whom the universe in its vast indifference

suffers for a time.

3. Men divide into the strong and the weak; not the good and the bad.

The will to power, the desire for pleasure, drive men on their courses.

What restrains? Moral codes and social conventions, often useful, often

harmful.

A metaphysical idealism will always tell him that it is better to

preserve a cleanly balance, and the storms of circumstance will

teach him a noble stoicism. Beyond this there is nothing which can

reasonably be imposed upon the conscience of man.[821]

4. Hence the profound need of sympathy and mercy.

Let no one underestimate the need of pity. We live in a stony

universe whose hard, brilliant forces rage fiercely. From the

prowling hunger of the Hyrcan tiger to the concentric grip of

Arcturus and Canopus there is the same ruthless, sightless

disregard of the individual and the minor thing. Life moves in

an ordered hierarchy of forces of which the lesser is as nothing

to the greater ... And in the midst of the rip of desperate

things--in odd crannies and chance flaws between forces--there

spring and blossom these small flowers of sentiment. Tenderness!

Mercy! Affection! Sorrow! The Hindus worship an image of pain.

And well they may. It is a classic amid the painless, the

indifferent--Nirvana. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall

receive mercy! No, no. Blessed are the merciful, for they create

mercy. Of such is the kingdom of the ideal.[822]

_His Attitude toward his Material._ Dreiser possesses a vast and

terrifying imagination. Like James Branch Cabell he broods over the

plight of man in the universe. But he does not seek refuge in the

ideal. He will confront things as they are. The very chemistry of

decaying flesh fascinates him. It is a phenomenon of this impersonal

and relentless universe. Compared with the realities of time and space

and force--what is man and what are his puny efforts and ideals?

The damnable scheme of things which we call existence brings about

conditions whereby whole masses suffer who have no cause to suffer,

and ... whole masses joy who have no cause for joy.... We suffer

for our temperaments, which we did not make, and for our weaknesses

and lacks, which are no part of our willing or doing.[823]

_His Objectivity._ The larger view of life gives detachment. Only one

who has emerged from the jungle can see the whole in broad perspective.

In no other American writer, except Whitman, is such complete

detachment achieved. His life is a long process of stripping away group

illusions, of casting off group conventions. And for this the mass

cannot forgive him, for the mass live in the strait-jacket of custom,

thinking in no other terms than group or tribal terms, worshiping the

communal idols, clinging to the tribal taboos. They cannot achieve

individuality themselves and they hate Dreiser. It puts him outside the

tribe, for the first law of the tribe is tribal-mindedness. Whoever is

not of us is against us. Whoever questions the validity of the tribal

sanctions is an enemy and must be destroyed. It is in vain that Dreiser

asserts vehemently that he is telling the truth. Another version of the

truth than the tribal version is not wanted.

The significance of Dreiser lies in the fact that he is an individual

apart--one who has broken with the group and sits in judgment on the

group sanctions. He is an anarchist who will be partisan to no taboos.

This is a rare and perilous thing to do. He stands outside.

_His Amoral Attitude._ It is on this score that Dreiser stands

condemned by our _bourgeois_ censors. His amoral attitude is strangely

metamorphosed into immorality. His indifference to the common

preachments, his inability to accept Christian maxims, his refusal to

do lip service to creeds--this is set down as evidence of viciousness,

for _ipso facto_ there can be no other moral standards than the

tribal standards. What is Dreiser’s justification? This, that in the

physical universe he can discover no morality--no justice, mercy,

pity, but everywhere great and indifferent force. And in society--in

the instincts of men and in their hidden desires and secret acts--a

disregard of conventional morality. Society is steeped in hypocrisy.

He saw no morals anywhere--nothing but moods, emotions, needs,

greeds. People talked and talked, but they acted according to their

necessities and desires.[824]

But in frankly revealing the hypocrisy of men Dreiser is no cynic.

There is in him a profound morality--the morality of truth and pity

and mercy. Let us not stone men for their sins but deal generously and

kindly with them. What he protests against is superimposed codes. There

is, for him, “in Nature, no such thing as the right to do, or the right

not to do.”[825]

But is there not social expediency? To which the individual for his own

good should conform? Experience has taught men some excellent things.

_His Work._ Dreiser has given us full-length portraits of two

women--Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt--and of two men--Eugene

Witla and Frank Cowperwood. These constitute his major contribution

and on them his reputation rests.[826] In addition there is _Hey

Rub-a-Dub-Dub_, a book of essays in which his philosophy is set forth,

a naturalistic play, _The Hand of the Potter_--a study in pathology

where the hand of the potter slipped--a book of travel, and some

short stories. Of his four major characters the two women are passive

and pliable, easily made victims of circumstance. Of the two men

one--Eugene Witla--is weak, and the other--Frank Cowperwood--is the

supreme example in American literature of the will to power.

_The Financier_ and _The Titan_. A colossal study of the American

business man, in two volumes of a total of 1332 pages. Compared with

this all other studies are crude and unconvincing. Here the thing has

been done once for all.

“These crude and greedy captains of finance had to be given some kind

of literary embodiment, and Dreiser has hammered a raw epic out of

their lives.”[827]

Where did Dreiser get his intimate and detailed information concerning

high finance? Where his knowledge of such a character? Out of his own

powerful mind. Cowperwood a portrait of Charles Yerkes. Two periods:

his Philadelphia life to 1873; his Chicago life to 1898. In both he

molds circumstance to his advantage; in both he is caught by chance and

fails.

_The Man._ Driven by three impulses: love of power, love of women, love

of art. There is in him a unity of character and an inevitability of

development that are overwhelming. Dreiser does not judge, apologize,

praise, or condemn; he is content to permit the character to develop.

From first to last he is detached and objective. He presents Cowperwood

as a magnificent physical and mental machine: a born fighter and

leader, strong, alert, with a cool resourceful mind. A pronounced

hardness that goes with strength--contempt for the weakling, impatience

with the inefficient. In his sex passages there is no glamour of

romance. They are direct and brutal--but more moral than glamorous.

Nevertheless great personal charm--the magnetism of a virile mind and

indomitable will. To men he is an inspiration, to women a fascination.

And yet a frank egoist, self-centered, imperturbable.

The fate of the individualist: in pitting his will against life

Cowperwood feared chance, which undid him in Philadelphia. But his

very prevision, which carried him to triumph, brought his downfall.

The many are stronger than the superman. And in the end, failure.

Strength endures for so short a time and is so weak. Age, weakness,

social forces--these undermine the strong. A vast irony. Cowperwood is

punished not because he is evil but because he is a man.

_Cowperwood’s Philosophy._ From his youth up life was a puzzle to him.

Nothing was certain, for beyond and above all was a blind, irrational

chance. Nevertheless within reasonable limits it was plain enough that

strength and intelligence prevail. This lesson he first learned from

the squib and the lobster, and it became his guiding principle. When

chance had brought him within the shadow of the penitentiary, he summed

it up:

It is a grim, bitter world we are all born into.... Who was to

straighten out the matter of the unjust equipment with which most

people began? Who was to give them strong minds in place of feeble

ones, able bodies instead of wretched ones? Where were they to get

pure-tendencies instead of impure ones, as the world looked on

these things?... Some were sent into the world with a great lust

and great ability for wealth like himself, a mind swift to see, a

body strong to endure; and some were sent half equipped, almost

shapeless and formless.... Strength and weakness--there lay the

key, the answer.[828]

Stuart Sherman on Dreiser:

By eliminating distinctively human motives and making animal

instincts the supreme factors in human life, Mr. Dreiser reduces

the problem of the novelist to the lowest possible terms.... His

philosophy quite excludes him from the field in which the great

realist must work. He has deliberately rejected the novelist’s

supreme task--understanding and presenting the development of

character; he has chosen only to illustrate the unrestricted flow

of temperament. He has evaded the enterprise of representing human

conduct; he has confined himself to representation of animal

behavior.[829]

And the two novels he says are “like a club sandwich composed of slices

of business, alternating with erotic episodes.” It is true, but the

failure is one of art that does not merge them. What would Sherman

have? Shall these impulses be eliminated from literature, or from human

nature itself?

Sinclair Lewis: Our Own Diogenes[830]

As the row of his pudgy orange-backed volumes lengthens on the shelf,

it becomes evident that Sinclair Lewis is the bad boy of American

letters whose thoughts are on bent-pins while the deacon is laboring

in prayer. His irrepressible satire belongs to a new and irritatingly

effective school. He has studied the technique of the realists, and

under the beguiling pretense of telling the truth objectively and

dispassionately, he insists on revealing to us unaccommodated man as a

poor, bare, forked animal, who like Jurgen persists in thinking himself

a monstrous clever fellow. He is maliciously severe on all respectable

dignities. In his hands the noble _homo sapiens_ of common repute

is translated into an ignoble _homo libidinus et ventosissimus_--an

unattractive animal that runs in herds, serves its belly, and has a

taking way with the dams. The free-born American citizen, master of the

earth and its destiny, is little flattered by the portrait he draws,

and Mr. Lewis finds himself, in consequence, _persona non grata_ in any

convention of Elks or Rotarians.

The method he has chosen to adopt is a clever advance over the

technique of the eighteenth century, when pricking balloons was the

business of every wit. Those older satirists--nagging souls like Pope

and bold bad fellows like Churchill--were mainly concerned to annoy

their victims with pin-pricks. They were too completely the gentleman

to grow chummy with base fellows whom they frankly despised; and in

consequence they never discovered half the possibilities of the gentle

art of satire. Sinclair Lewis is wiser than they were. He has learned

that before one can effectively impale one’s victim, one must know all

his weaknesses and take him off his guard. So he ingratiatingly makes

up to George F. Babbitt of Zenith, drinks chummily with him, swaps

greasy jokes, learns all the hidden vanities and secret obscenities

that slip out in the confidences of the cups, beguiles him into

painting his own portrait in the manly midnight hours; and when the

last garment that covers his nakedness is stripped off, the flashlight

explodes and the camera has caught the victim in every feature of his

mean and vacuous reality.

No doubt it is an ungentlemanly thing to do--a calculating betrayal of

trusting human nature done in the sacred name of art; and it is certain

that the unhappy victim will hate the artist when he sees the developed

print next morning. Yet the picture is extraordinarily lifelike. All

the unlovely details of fat stomach and flabby muscles are sharply

revealed. It is too late to put on one’s clothes, and _homo sapiens_ in

the person of George F. Babbitt is revealed as a shambling, two-legged

animal, for the world to laugh at. The method is immensely clever;

it is the last word in the technique of despoiling one’s victim of

adventitious dignity, without which life becomes a mean, bleak affair;

but it is scarcely charitable. To think well of oneself and to wish

to impose that good opinion upon others, are common human weaknesses

that every tailor blesses. Without clothes man is only a caricature of

the godlike, and the artist who betrays our nakedness to our enemies

is very far from a gentleman. The confidences of the cups must be held

sacred, for if we cannot drink without fear of our babbling being

reported, what becomes of goodfellowship?