unconcerned. His satire knows no compunctions. An irreverent soul, he
dares the wrath not only of George F. Babbitt, but of the innumerable
clubs to which Babbitt belongs. A buoyant scoffer, he does not permit
even the organized wrath of the Chamber of Commerce to disturb his
equanimity. He provokes respectable people on principle, and he has
laid a devilish plan to work systematically through our sacred American
decalogue, smashing one commandment after another. Already behind him
is strewn a sorry wreckage of established creeds and authoritative
slogans--a wreckage that delights the wicked and gives aid and comfort
to all evil-wishers in our comfortable and excellent society. Not even
a banker is sacred to him. Rotarians and Kiwanians, Billy Sundays and
Billy Bryans, voluble Congressmen and silent Presidents, even our
venerable Constitution itself, he scoffs at and makes merry over. And
to add insult to injury, he prospers in his sins. His calculating
wickedness returns him a fattening bank account. His impudent satires
sell like bargain-counter silk stockings. We pay handsomely to see
ourselves most unhandsomely depicted. If we would only take a lesson
from the strategy of the heathen Chinese, we might boycott Mr. Lewis’s
wares and reduce him to the beggary that is more becoming to wickedness
than a wanton prosperity. But a Christian people will not go to school
to the heathen, and so Mr. Lewis prospers in his wickedness and waxes
vulgarly rich.
Now what is the tremendous discovery that Sinclair Lewis makes so
much of, and that we pay so great a price to learn? It is no other
than this: that the goodly United States of America are peopled by a
mighty herd, which like those earlier herds that rumbled about the
plains, drives foolishly in whatever direction their noses point--a
herd endowed with tremendous blind power, with big bull leaders, but
with minds rarely above their bellies and their dams. In the mass and
at their own romantic rating they are distinctly imposing--big-necked,
red-blooded, lusty, with glossy coats got from rich feeding-grounds,
and with a herd power that sweeps majestically onward in a cloud of
dust of its own raising, veritable lords and masters of a continent.
But considered more critically and resolved into individual members,
they appear to the realist somewhat stupid, feeble in brain and will,
stuffed with conceit of their own excellence, esteeming themselves the
great end for which creation has been in travail, the finest handiwork
of the Most High who spread the plains for their feeding-grounds: with
a vast respect for totems and fetishes; purveyors and victims of the
mysterious thing called Bunk, who valiantly horn to death any audacious
heretic who may suggest that rumbling about the plains, filling their
bellies, bellowing sacred slogans, and cornering the lushest grass, are
scarcely adequate objectives for such immense power: a vast middleman
herd, that dominates the continent, but cannot reduce it to order or
decency.
Consider, suggests Mr. Lewis, what this rumbling herd signifies in
the light of rational and humane ideals. What sort of custodians of
civilization are these lumbering mobsters with their back-slappings and
bellowings? What becomes of the good life in a society that flowers in
Rotarian conventions? The banker has reduced America to the level of a
banker’s Utopia, and now bids us admire his handiwork. Other societies,
aristocratic and feudal, honored the priest and knight and artist above
the usurer and tradesman; other generations professed to serve truth
and beauty and godliness in their daily lives; but the great American
herd cares nothing for such things. In the name of democracy priest
and knight and artist are turned lackeys to merchants and realtors, to
men who would not recognize faith or chivalry or imagination if they
met them on the golf course, and who understand democracy as little as
they understand Christianity. In this land of material abundance the
good life is reduced to being measured in commissions and percentages;
civilization comes to flower in the broker; the mahogany desk is the
altar at which we sacrifice in a land of triumphant materialism. “God
help the country,” said Fenimore Cooper, years ago when the herd was
small, “that has only commercial towns for its capitals.” “Such a
country is past helping,” retorts Sinclair Lewis. “God cannot help
it, or the Devil. In the name of George F. Babbitt and Dr. Almus
Pickerbaugh and the Reverend Elmer Gantry, what can be expected of such
a country? A people that worships the great god Bunk shall have its
reward!”
To prove his amiable thesis Mr. Lewis has been at enormous pains to
gather his materials at their sources. He has taken upon himself to
become a specialist in depicting the _genus Americanus_. He has loafed
along Main Street, played poker in back rooms with wicked young men,
drunk in respectable clubs, and exchanged hearty back-slappings with
the sons of Rotary. He has devoted days to the smoking-compartments of
Pullmans, garnering the ripest wisdom and choicest stories of traveling
salesmen. He has listened to philosophic brokers discourse on ethics,
studied political and constitutional theory with realtors, learned
all about Bolshevism from presidents of Chambers of Commerce, been
instructed in the elements of economics by Republican Congressmen,
discovered the fallacies in Darwinian evolution from clerical
fundamentalists and the superiority of Fascism over democracy from
the greatest captains of industry. No field of American experience
has escaped his minute investigation, no authority has eluded his
catechizing. In the course of his studies he has come to master the
lusty American language in its subtlest shades and manliest _nuances_,
from the comic supplement to Dunn and Bradstreet, and he talks easily
with Main Street in its own vernacular. His rich and copious vocabulary
fills a commonplace scholar with envy, and his ebullient slang, his
easy slovenliness of enunciation, inflict on the simple-minded user of
the King’s English a hopeless inferiority complex.
Thus amply equipped with all the resources of scholarship, he has
written four learned treatises in exemplification of the thesis that
the _genus Americanus_ is cousin-german to the scoffing Mr. Mencken’s
lately discovered _boobus Americanus_. The introductory study,
_Main Street_, provided a comprehensive background and setting for
the full-length portraits he was to draw later. Gopher Prairie,
situated in the heart of agricultural America--in Meredith Nicholson’s
Valley of Democracy where the old-fashioned, kindly, neighborly,
wholesome, democratic virtues are presumed to thrive in a congenial
habitat--becomes in his unsympathetic analysis a place that William
Allen White would not recognize as his home town. Here, he tells us, is
respectability made sluggish and sterile. Here is “slavery self-sought
and self-defended.” Here is “dullness made God.” Here, diluted and
spread over a vast territory, the spirit of Babbitt has erupted
in cheap and pretentious county-seats, parasites on the producing
hinterland over whose politics and credit and morals Main Street
tradesmen have set up a strict custodianship--futile and complacent and
drab, mere echoes of the greater cities that lie on the horizon and to
which the sons of Main Street turn for light and guidance.
It is these greater cities that constitute the true capitals of our
red-blooded Americans who proclaim themselves “the greatest race in
the world”--fruitful centers from which radiates the philosophy of
pep, punch, and progress for the upbuilding and enlightenment of the
world. Of these centers the hustling and mighty Zenith is the wonder
and admiration of all right-minded citizens; it is the brightest and
bloomiest sunflower of the great American garden. And in Zenith dwells
George F. Babbitt, realtor, Sinclair Lewis’s full-length portrait of
a hero sprung from the loins of America, the completest embodiment of
the triumphant American genius that is conquering the earth. Babbitt as
an upstanding he-member of the great herd is a marvel, the apotheosis
of the regnant middle class, the finished product of our snappy
civilization. Other lands, no doubt, have produced men accounted great.
Plato and Saul of Tarsus, St. Francis and Leonardo, Pascal and Galileo
and Hegel, were no doubt esteemed in their own times and by their own
cities; but Zenith does not go in for out-of-date merchandise; it is
up-to-the-minute and it specialized in George F. Babbitts. And so when
the Reverend Elmer Gantry rises to influence in Gopher Prairie, he is
called to Zenith as its spiritual counselor, and becomes the custodian
of the Zenith moralities, the apostle of Zenith Bunk, the devotee
of the Zenith Mumbo Jumbo. And through Zenith passes also Martin
Arrowsmith the rebel, the perverse outlandish scientist who refuses
to worship Mumbo Jumbo, on his solitary way to discover reality in a
world of Zenith chicanery. Babbitt, Gantry, Arrowsmith--these are the
figures that Sinclair Lewis comes upon in his exploration of the land
of the free and the home of the brave. A somewhat curious showing at
the best.
So slashing an attack upon our common creed and practice has naturally
aroused vigorous protest. Human nature does not like to have its idols
assailed; even the devotees of Mumbo Jumbo will defend their god
against the heretics; and Sinclair Lewis has become the target for
many a shaft. The critics have pressed home their counter attack with
ardor. They insist that he is suffering from an aggravated case of
astigmatism, and that in consequence he does not see eye to eye with
those of normal vision. The world is out of focus to him--askew in all
its structural lines; and this distorted vision prompts those jaundiced
opinions and malicious judgments in regard to the ideals cherished by
our best citizens. He has deliberately cultivated a spleen that makes
him dislike his neighbors because they are comfortable and contented.
Diogenes railing at mankind gained a vast reputation, but it is a nice
question if Diogenes was a useful citizen. What did he do to further
the well-being of his community? How much time and money did he give
to charity and the upbuilding of his city? For all his talking Mr.
Lewis does not seem to know what the good life is. He rails at Babbitt
for not being Plato, but does he understand the A B C of service? To
take a homely figure: the family cow, standing knee-deep in June and
chewing the cud of contentment, would excite his Diogenic scorn. As a
fault-finder and knocker, Brindle is not the equal of Diogenes; but
to criticize her mentality and manners, forgetful of the fact that
from the contented chewing of a plentiful cud will come a plentiful
supply of milk and cream and butter to sweeten the bread of life, is
a somewhat sorry business. In her modest, democratic sphere she is
devoted to service, and if there is a nobler function, Rotary humbly
confesses it had not discovered it. One must not, of course, press too
far the analogy between Brindle and Babbitt; the figure is useful only
to suggest that even in the lowliest spheres Mr. Lewis completely fails
to understand the fine ethical values that underlie and animate the
common American life at which he rails. How, then, shall he understand
them in the higher? Comfort and service are excellent things in
themselves, and if they can be merged in everyday experience, surely
the good life is in the way of achievement.
The point is of vast importance, for it is here that Diogenes Lewis,
his critics assert, has totally misread the meaning and faith of
America. Here in this prosperous land the union between comfort and
service--or to put it in more dignified phrase, the synthesis of
Hellenism and Hebraism--has been achieved in practice. A rich and
abundant life, motivated by a fine sense of ethical responsibility
and disciplined by a democratic public school, is, in sober fact, the
distinguishing characteristic of America that sets our country apart
from all other lands in western civilization. Call it a Babbitt warren
if you will, nevertheless where else has the industrial revolution been
brought so completely and happily under dominion to the democratic
ideal, or been so ennobled by ethical values? Here it has scattered
its wealth amongst the plain people with a bountiful hand, until the
poorest family enjoys its nickel-plated plumbing, its flivver, its
telephone, its radio, its movies, its funnies, and all the thousand
aids to comfort and intelligence which a few generations ago were
denied kings--the result of all which is a standard of living that our
forefathers would have envied. Our Hellenism is, happily, not Greek.
That, as every schoolboy in America knows, was established in slavery;
whereas our modern Hellenism is established in democracy and ennobled
by a sensitive social conscience. Here the master serves. The richest
and greatest amongst us--our Judge Garys and Andrew Mellons--are
servants of the nameless public, and dedicate their creative genius to
the common democratic prosperity. Our Hellenism, in short, is engrafted
on a sturdy Hebraic root and flowers in righteousness--in charity, in
education, in free clinics and hospitals, in scientific foundations, in
great public libraries, in all the vast gifts that wealth freely offers
to the cause of social amelioration. The Puritan strain is fortunately
still the American strain, and we owe much to those excellent
origins that Mr. Lewis scoffs at without understanding. Comfort and
service--Hellenism and Hebraism: if this is not the good life, where
shall one find it? In Bolshevik Russia? After all Diogenes Lewis is
no more important--or useful--than the gad-fly that Brindle brushes
from her glossy sides as she chews her cud. What gad-fly ever produced
butter?
If Sinclair Lewis is unimpressed by such arguments it is because he
is quite disillusioned with the current ideal of material progress.
His dreams do not find their satisfaction in good roads and cheap
gasoline. He would seem to be an incorrigible idealist who has been
bred up on the vigorous Utopianisms of the late nineteenth century.
In the golden days before the deluge he had gone blithely to school to
all the current idealisms that flourished in the land--to Jeffersonian
democracy and to Marxian socialism; and in the well-stocked
pharmacopoeias of hopeful young liberals he professed to discover
specifics for all our social ills. But the war destroyed his faith
in nostrums and removed his Utopia to a dim and foggy future. He has
not yet traveled so far in disillusion as Mr. Cabell, who has seen
fit to dwarf man to the compass of a flea on the epidermis of earth;
nor has he achieved the irony--or the technique--of Clarence Darrow,
who suggests casually: “Of course I know that Confucius was as great
a philosopher as Billy Sunday, and that as a thinker Buddha was the
equal of Billy Bryan. But still all orthodox people know that Confucius
and Buddha were spurious and the Billy brothers genuine.” He has not
even achieved the smug satisfaction of the psychologists who impose
their preposterous intelligence tests on simple folk and triumphantly
discover morons in respectable neighbors. Some lingering faith in our
poor human nature he still clings to. In the great American mass that
human nature is certainly foolish and unlovely enough. It is too often
blown up with flatulence, corroded with lust, on familiar terms with
chicanery and lying; it openly delights in hocus-pocus and discovers
its miracle-workers in its Comstocks and Aimee Semple McPhersons. But
for all its pitiful flabbiness human nature is not wholly bad, nor is
man so helpless a creature of circumstance as the cynics would have us
believe. There are other and greater gods than Mumbo Jumbo worshiped
in America, worthier things than hocus-pocus; and in rare moments even
Babbitt dimly perceives that the feet of his idol are clay. There are
Martin Arrowsmiths as well as Elmer Gantrys, and human nature, if it
will, can pull itself out of the trap. Bad social machinery makes
bad men. Put the banker in the scullery instead of the drawing-room;
exalt the test-tube and deflate the cash register; rid society of the
dictatorship of the middle class; and the artist and the scientist
will erect in America a civilization that may become what civilization
was in earlier days, a thing to be respected. For all his modernity
and the disillusion learned from Pullman-car philosophers, Sinclair
Lewis is still an echo of Jean Jacques and the golden hopes of the
Enlightenment--thin and far off, no doubt, but still an authentic echo.
Whether we like Mr. Lewis’s technique or not, whether we agree with
his indictment of middle-class ideals or dissent from it, his writings
are suggestive documents symptomatic of a dissatisfied generation
given over to disillusion. The optimistic dreams of middle-class
capitalism are not so golden as they seemed to us before the war; and
these pudgy novels are slashing attacks on a world that in mouthing
empty shibboleths is only whistling to keep up its courage. The faith
of America is dead. These brisk pages are filled with the doings
of automata--not living men but the simulacra of men, done with
astonishing verisimilitude, speaking an amazingly realistic language,
professing a surprising lifelikeness; yet nevertheless only shells from
which the life has departed, without faith or hope or creative energy,
not even aware that they are dead.
It is this consciousness of sketching in a morgue that differentiates
Mr. Lewis from the earlier satirists of middle-class America, who in
the hopeful years before the war were busily engaged in rebuilding the
American temple. The preceding generation--earnest souls like Robert
Herrick and Jack London and Upton Sinclair--were as well aware of the
shortcomings of our industrial order as Sinclair Lewis, and hated them
as vigorously. From the days of Emerson and George Ripley, of Carlyle
and Ruskin, capitalistic society had been persistently subjected to
sharp and devastating analysis; its drabness and regimentation, its
sterility and emptiness and joylessness, had been pointed out by
many pens. The Victorians long ago discovered that no generous or
humane civilization was to be expected from the hands of Plugson of
Undershot--that the banker conceiving of human felicity in terms of
eight per cent. is a mean and shabby fellow in comparison with St.
Francis or Michelangelo. Long before Sherwood Anderson, William Morris
had observed that the workman no longer sings in the factory as in
other days he sang over his tool, and concluded that the creation of
beauty is more important for human happiness than figuring profits from
mass production.
But those earlier analysts were dealing with causes of which they
could only forecast the ultimate consequences, whereas Sinclair Lewis
is dealing with effects. Plugson of Undershot is now the universal
dictator. Before the war there was still life and hope in western
civilization; it was not yet reduced to being a common Babbitt warren,
with its Billy Sundays and Almus Pickerbaughs, its artists and editors
and scientists, on the Plugson pay-roll. What emerges from the drab
pages of Sinclair Lewis that is suggestive is the authoritative
pronouncement that the effects forecast by the earlier critics have
become in our day the regnant order of things. Babbitt is the son of
Plugson of Undershot, and Babbitt is a walking corpse who refuses to
be put decently away to make room for living men. An empty soul, he is
the symbol of our common emptiness. Historically he marks the final
passing in America of the civilization that came from the fruitful
loins of the eighteenth century. For a hundred and fifty years western
civilization had sustained its hopes on the rich nourishment provided
by the great age of the Enlightenment. Faith in the excellence of
man, in the law of progress, in the ultimate reign of justice, in the
conquest of nature, in the finality and sufficiency of democracy,
faith in short in the excellence of life, was the great driving force
in those earlier, simpler days. It was a noble dream--that dream of
the Enlightenment--but it was slowly dissipated by an encompassing
materialism that came likewise out of the eighteenth century. Faith in
machinery came to supersede faith in man; the Industrial Revolution
submerged the hopes of the French Revolution. And now we have fallen
so low that our faith in justice, progress, the potentialities of
human nature, the excellence of democracy, is stricken with pernicious
anemia, and even faith in the machine is dying. Only science remains
to take the place of the old romantic creed, and science with its
psychology and physics is fast reducing man to a complex bundle of
glands, at the mercy of a mechanistic universe. Babbitt, to be sure,
has not yet discovered the predicament he is in, but Martin Arrowsmith
knows; and while Babbitt is whistling somewhat futilely, Arrowsmith is
hard at work in the laboratory seeking a new philosophy to take the
place of the old. The outlook is not promising, but until a new faith
emerges from the test-tube Sinclair Lewis will wander in the fogs of
disillusion.
But enough of such crape-hanging at a time when our best minds
are engaged in the great work of stabilizing prosperity. What are
test-tubes in comparison with the infallible statistics patriotically
disseminated by the National City Bank? To parade such heresies in
the face of the progressive American public is enough to damn any
man, genius or not. We want no carpers or cynics in our congenial
membership. We must all get together to put across the drive for a
bigger and richer and better America; and so, reluctantly, despite the
fact that in many ways he is a good fellow, we blackball Sinclair Lewis.
Sherwood Anderson: A Psychological Naturalist[831]
Unlike our earlier naturalists in handling of material and dramatic
interests. Concerned with inner life rather than outer, with hidden
drives rather than environment. Accepts the main criteria of
naturalism: determinism, distortion, pessimism. A lean and sparing
writer whose symbolisms are obscure and puzzling. A single theme:
the disastrous effect of frustrations and repressions that create
grotesques. Due to (1) Crude, narrow environment that drives to strange
aberrations; (2) Repressed instincts that break forth in abnormal
action. The consequence a black loneliness--the hunger of fellowship
and its denial. Limited in scope to episodic crises--hence his better
stories short. Many failures: _Marching Men_; _Windy McPherson’s Son_;
_Poor White_ (1920); _Many Marriages_ (1923)--a clumsy account of a
Babbitt gone on a psychological spree; _Horses and Men_ (1923)--some
more Grotesques; see in particular “A Chicago Hamlet.”
_Winesburg, Ohio_ (1918). A prose _Spoon River Anthology_, with an
excellent collection of grotesques. Sharp vignettes; lonely, thwarted
lives, “confused and disconcerted by the facts of life.” A background
of earlier America, crude and ugly, that drives to religious fanaticism
in Steve Bentley; to passionate rebellion in Kate Swift; to bitter
irony in Ray Pearson. Note the deterministic conclusion of “The Untold
Lie”--“Tricked, by Gad, that’s what I was; tricked by life and made
a fool of”; and the pessimism: ... “he shouted a protest against his
life, against all life, against everything that makes life ugly.”
_The Triumph of the Egg_ (1921). A strange and difficult book with
its subtle symbolisms. The theme is the common hunger for romance and
fellowship that confuses itself with sex and is unsatisfied. Suggested
in prefatory poem: “I have a wonderful story to tell but know no way to
tell it.”
1. _The Egg._ An epitome of his philosophy of grotesques. The egg
breeds life that is futile, and life reproduces the egg. A morbid
disgust that would bottle the egg, and the failure.
2. _Out of Nowhere Into Nothing._ Theme is the “white wonder of
life”--what it is and the part it plays in shaping life; a sex illusion
that in its mystic appeal to youth guarantees the perpetuation of the
race. To age there is no “white wonder,” but the life processes are
dirty, and lead to final imprisonment in a common trap. Hence the
“white wonder” is the supreme jest of nature, sardonic, beguiling,
gathering its victims who eagerly run their predetermined course.
3. _Brothers._ A suggestion of the true “white wonder of life”--the
brotherhood of man in a lonely world--“beyond words, beyond
passion--the fellowship in living, the fellowship in life.” But men
cannot break through the walls of themselves to grasp it, and the
dirt of the world destroys its beauty. “The whole story of mankind’s
loneliness, of the effort to reach out to unattainable beauty, tried to
get itself expressed from the lips of a mumbling old man, crazed with
loneliness.” “We have different names but we are brothers.” “Already
I have written three hundred, four hundred thousand words. Are there
no words that lead into life?” See conclusion of “The Man in the Brown
Coat.”
_A Story Teller’s Story_ (1924). An attempt to lay bare the emotional
life of one seeking to be an artist in America; to plumb his own
consciousness, to escape from a world he hates. Such escape comes from
reaching down “through all the broken surface distractions of modern
life to that old craft out of which culture springs.” He must pull
himself free from a deadening and devastating routine of an industrial
society with its empty ambitions. And having found his craft he finds a
recompense in life. “I sang as I worked, as in my boyhood I had often
seen old craftsmen sing and as I had never heard men sing in factories.
And for what I had written at such times I had been called unclean by
men and women who had never known me, could have no personal reasons
for thinking me unclean. Was I unclean? Were the hands that, for such
brief periods of my life, had really served me, had they been unclean
at such moments of service?” A stimulating and suggestive document of
modern life.
The note of determinism in Anderson expressed in two images, the wall
and escape--running to get away from what holds us fast. But in running
away from the old self to find a new, we carry the old self with us.
Anderson one of the three or four most important men now writing
fiction in America. Compare with D. H. Lawrence.
A New Romance
The new romance and the new naturalism both spring from a common
root--hatred of the meanness and ugliness of modern life; but romance
seeks to evade and forget what naturalism examines curiously. It is a
defense mechanism against things as they are and springs from:
1. Disgust at the verisimilitude of naturalism that parades the crude
ugliness of life as if it were the reality. The dream more important
than the fact, for our real existence is within the imagination,
removed from material futilities, where we may satisfy our hunger for
beauty, for far-ranging adventure, for ideal existence.
2. The impulse to free creation. Real life overshadowed and darkened by
a sense of impotence; men are flies caught in the web of circumstance.
But in romance the will is unshackled and the free imagination plays
with time and space, shaping fate to its liking in terms of beauty,
dwelling in a world as we should like it to be. Romance hence is the
ideal cosmos of the ego.
3. The spirit of youth that has brooded over life and refuses to
abandon its dreams. The inevitable outcome irony, an undertone of
sadness, a recognition of the pessimism against which it desires to be
a defense. This the final note. So compare the _Eros et mors_ of old
romance....[832]
1917-1924[833]
_Introduction_: With the entry of America into the war came a sharp
change in literary development. Regimentation due to war psychology
destroyed the movement of social criticism which dominated fiction
between 1903 and 1917. The liberal movement in economics and politics
came to an abrupt end, and the problem novel ceased to be written.
Almost overnight it became old-fashioned. The year 1918 sterile.[834]
With the year 1919 began a new literary period. Three major movements:
1. A resurgence of naturalism, inspired by psychology rather than by
economics, with a tendency to impressionism in handling: represented by
Sherwood Anderson.
2. A new romanticism, seeking ideal beauty as a defense against reality
and emerging in irony: represented by James Branch Cabell.
3. A new criticism: A revolt of the young intellectuals against
the dominant middle class--its Puritanism, its Victorianism, its
acquisitive ideals: represented by Sinclair Lewis.
I • The Small Town in Fiction
The first expression of the new literature. Chiefly a middle-western
development--and a late phase of the literature of the local. A
reaction from the “economic city,” with its centralizing economics,
which dominated the problem novel. Two antagonistic interpretations:
(1) The romantic small town, or the theory of a kindly, democratic
world; (2) The realistic small town, or the theory of a petty,
competitive world.
I. _The Romantic Interpretation of the Small Town._ A hold-over from
an earlier period. Derives from Riley; elaborated and defended by
Meredith Nicholson, _The Valley of Democracy_ (1918). According to
this theory the middle-western village is: (1) A land of economic
well-being, uncursed by poverty and unspoiled by wealth; (2) A land
of “folksiness”--the village a great family in its neighborliness,
friendliness, sympathy; (3) Primarily middle-class, and therefore
characteristically American, wholesome, and human in spite of its
prosaic shortcomings; (4) The home of American democracy, dominated
by the spirit of equality, where men are measured by their native
qualities.[835]
William Allen White: A Son of the Middle Border
Product of middle-class, Puritan Kansas. Dominated by sentiment,
believes in the essential fairness of men. Two major ideas: (1)
Belief in the excellence of western village life; (2) Fear lest
this life be submerged by industrialism. A romantic and political
Progressive. Formulated his political theory in _The Old Order
Changeth_ (1910)--thesis, that America is changing from representative
republicanism to democracy. The problem is to make business honest. Not
an intellectual. His plots resemble Thackeray’s--leisurely, gossipy,
confidential asides, a large canvas, many figures, a long period of
time. His attitude admirably expressed in _Emporia and New York_ (1906).
_At the Court of Boyville_ (1899). The romance of youth set against
the background of the small town. A world of dreams and loveliness:
adventures that await beyond the horizon; the glory of pigtails and
overalls. The democracy of the vacant lot: rivalry in marbles and
hand-springs--the leadership of the capable. Sincerer work than
Tarkington’s _Penrod_. Contrast with Garland’s _Son of the Middle
Border_, and Mark Twain’s _Tom Sawyer_.
_A Certain Rich Man_ (1909). His plunge into the problem novel. Theme:
fear of the economic city that draws the villager into its web. A
contrast between the two worlds and two social ideals--the friendly
democracy of the older America threatened by economic centralization.
_In the Heart of a Fool_ (1918). One of the last of the problem
novels. Theme--the invasion of the small town by industrialism and the
disintegration of village virtues. The story of an idealist who opposes
the ends of Main Street and his destruction by the herd. A suggestion
of Sinclair Lewis. The conclusion--the excellence of love and the
foolishness of selfishness. The background characters, studies in the
reaction of the older ideal to the new egoism.
Booth Tarkington: The Dean of American Middle-Class Letters
Possesses the virtues of cleverness, optimism, humor, respectability.
Honors all the Victorian taboos. Life is an agreeable experience--to
the successful, hence it is well to rise. His chief theme, middle-class
romance as exemplified in the “valley of democracy”: courtship of
nice young people through the agencies of parties and picnics. A
skillful writer, with a light touch, but his art destroyed by love of
popularity--a novel ends well that ends happily. A perennial sophomore,
purveyor of comfortable literature to middle-class America.[836]
_The Gentleman from Indiana_ (1899). A dramatization of the “good, dear
people” theme. The college man who goes back to his people to live and
work with them. A satisfying life results from merging individual life
in the common village life. A flabby and somewhat saccharine philosophy.
_Alice Adams_ (1921). The story of an instinctive actress and her
competitive struggle for social position and a man. A clever,
attractive, lovable girl defeated by her background--led into foolish
little deceits to keep up appearances--victim of middle-class
conventionality. Shabby parlors versus conservatories as settings for
proposals. The Adams family has fallen behind their acquaintances in
the business of rising in the world, and Alice sinks to a lower social
scale. An overrated book.
_The Midlander_ (1923). A contribution to booster literature and
an unconscious satire on the emptiness of the middle-class mind. A
real-estate venture and what came of it. The conception that “man
is a wealth-and-comfort-producing machine.” Supposed to be tragedy,
but the tragedy lies in preferring the imported to the domestic
article--choosing a New York girl instead of a local one. The suburb
thrives, the automobile business goes forward, and the gods of getting
on smile in the end.[837]
The other numerous titles of Tarkington signify nothing except to
lovers of comfortable literature. The clever Hoosier has ceased to be
an artist--the great failure in contemporary American fiction.
Dorothy Canfield (Fisher)
A clever dramatizer of the obvious: believes in the Woman Triumphant,
and discovers in the right education of children--particularly
girls--the solution of all problems. Two main themes:
1. A protest against the demands of “social life.” _The Squirrel
Cage_ (1912). A contribution to the problem novel. A William Morris
suggestion of the sufficiency of handicraft as an escape from social
demands. An arraignment of the American home where the father scarcely
knows the children and the mother is shut away from the outside world.
_The Bent Twig_ (1915). A study of university community life--the
struggle between plain living and high thinking--of social pleasure and
no thinking.
2. The defense of the village. The belief that community fellowship--a
gathering to watch a century plant bloom--breeds an artistic spirit
finer than old-world art and culture can offer. Especially a Vermont
town is ideal for the proper bringing up of children. _The Brimming
Cup_ (1920). A story of the right bringing up of children. _Rough Hewn_
(1922). The love of art and travel which leads inevitably to a Vermont
town and marriage. _Raw Material_ (1923). Sketches. The point of view
given in “Paul Meyer”--the folly of thinking that a normal girl should
prefer philology to matrimony.
II • The Realistic Small Town and the New Naturalism
The work of the younger intellectuals, more disciplined than the
muckrakers, with wider culture and severer standards. Concerned for
civilization, the things of the spirit, a free creative individualism,
rather than political liberalism. A searching criticism of the
triumphant middle class, its ideals and its habitat, the town and
city; the repressive tyrannies of its herd mind; the futility of
its materialism. Back of the novelists is a group of essayists,
young critics of established ways: Van Wyck Brooks, Ludwig Lewisohn,
Randolph Bourne, H. L. Mencken. They embody a reaction from: (1) The
acquisitive ideal of a machine civilization. (2) “The great illusion
of American civilization, the illusion of optimism”--the staple of
middle-class business morale. (3) The sentimentalism of “comfortable
literature,” that evades reality and weakens the intellectual fiber.
(4) The inhibitions of a Puritanism that has lost its sanctions. (5)
The White-Tarkington doctrine of the “beautiful people” and “folksy
village.”
The movement began with Masters’s _Spoon River Anthology_ (1915). An
earlier work is E. W. Howe’s _Story of a Country Town_ (1883):--stark,
grim, unrelieved, revealing the “smoldering discontent of an
inarticulate frontier.”
Zona Gale--The Transition from Romance to Realism
I. Friendship Village romance. _The Loves of Pelleas and Etarre_
(1907). Everyone is helpful, everyone loves, or wants to, or is unhappy
for lack of it. _Friendship Village_ (1908). A world where there is no
sorrow, or sickness, and where brotherly love rules. Of the “folksy”
school.
II. The shift to realism. _Miss Lulu Bett_ (1920). A homely village
tragedy of the repressed soul that rebels under the irritation of
domestic pin-pricks. Plebeian characters, thin, cheap, tiresome; set in
a shoddy world and rubbing each other’s nerves. Deacon Dwight a sadist;
Miss Lulu a grotesque. Treated from the outside in contrast with
Sherwood Anderson’s method. _Faint Perfume_ (1923). A glorification of
martyrdom. The conviction that life is hard, and the excellence of the
economy of pain. A partial return to the _Friendship Village_ note, but
like _Miss Lulu Bett_ in the picture of a self-worshiping family.[838]
Donn Byrne[839]
American born but Irish bred. His early work, _The Stranger’s Banquet_
(1919), half problem novel--industrialism--which offered little scope
for the Celtic wistfulness in which he conceives romance to lie.
_Messer Marco Polo_ (1921). The romance of distant times and places,
of unfamiliar backgrounds and lovely worlds: medieval Venice and its
pageantry; a far quest over burning sands; the loveliness of little
Golden Bells at the court of Kubla Khan; the ardor of love that tangles
itself in religion. A wistfulness and beauty of phrase that remind
one of Synge’s _Riders to the Sea_. The loveliest romance of recent
years.[840]
_The Wind That Bloweth_ (1922). A rich fabric--Gaelic folk; the woman
of the boulevard; the white sun-baked road to Damascus; the fire of
revolution; the crack of cordage as the ship rounds the Horn--a saga of
the unquiet heart.
_The Changeling_ (1923). Short stories of quaint places, forgotten
people; the Bible and love of Ireland. Done with excellent
craftsmanship.
_Blind Raftery_ (1924). A tale of a blind harpist in Dean Swift’s
Ireland and of his wife, Hilaria, who sings the song of the women of
the streets in Cadiz. Life teaches them a philosophy expressed by
the harpist in these words: “We sit a little while by ourselves in
an apart, dark place, and we learn truths, of how certain things one
believes to be good are but vulgar selfish things, and how certain
things the small think evil are but futile accidents. And we learn to
be kind; such wisdom comes when we are dead. And those who have never
died in life ... are pleasant shallow people, soulless as seals.”
Robert Nathan
Began like Donn Byrne with a problem study--_Peter Kindred_ (1919). A
dual personality cut asunder and embodied in two characters: David the
romantic fades out of the story, and Peter becomes a modern, absorbed
in eugenics. A background of Phillips Exeter and Harvard.
_Autumn_ (1921). An idyll of loneliness, with a commentary on
materialism, done in simple, wistful language.
1. Mr. Jeminy, a village philosopher, disciple of Boëthius and St.
Francis, half pagan and yet Christian. Troubled over the poverty of the
world that does not amass “love, peace, the quiet of the heart, the
work of one’s hand.”
2. A village background. Mr. Jeminy wished to teach the children the
secret of happiness instead of the folly of plus and minus, and was
turned out of his school. An echo of _Main Street_ in its commentary
on village narrowness, hardness, gossip. A frigid Puritanism that
disapproves Mr. Jeminy for speaking disrespectfully of God and denies
happiness to Mrs. Wicket who is under God’s sentence of unhappiness.
3. A note of determinism. A world of grotesques--all are hemmed in
and cramped, longing for fresh experience and strange adventures, all
are unhappy. So Aaron Bade with his flute and his “awkward thoughts
and clumsy feelings.” Margaret Bade with her conviction, “Life is so
much spilt milk”; Farmer Barly with his commentary, “Folks are queer
crotchets”; Anna Barly with her yearning for the “white wonder of life”
and the trap. An indictment of New England for its destruction of
natural happiness and the simple joy of life.
4. A profound irony. The end of Mr. Jeminy’s hopefulness is
disillusion. “Here within this circle of hills, is to be found faith,
virtue, passion, and good sense. In this valley youth is not without
courage, or age without wisdom.” The outcome disproves this faith. Of
his many pupils, “Not one is tidy of mind, or humble of heart. Not one
has learned to be happy in poverty, or gentle in good fortune.” Life as
a whole is futile. The dead alone can ask God the meaning of life. “But
for us, who remain, it has no meaning.” The tale is Robert Frost done
in prose--compare “Mending Wall.”
_The Puppet Master_ (1923). The most graceful fantasy in American
literature. Papa Jonas, the puppet creator and master, watches the
love of Annabelle Lee, a rag doll with shoe-button eyes, and Mr.
Aristotle, a red-nosed, philosopher-clown puppet; and of Mary Holly and
Christopher Lane, the poet. The theme is love--“Love is a man’s soul:
it does not grow like his hopes, it does not break like his heart....
But love goes by after a while.” Papa Jonas is Mr. Jeminy, converted
to the Stoic philosophy but lacking love. The note of determinism
persists, but the Stoic attitude overcomes. “Yes,” he said slowly, “one
must make the best of what one has.”
Joseph Hergesheimer: a Sophisticated Romantic
Began as a painter. After fourteen years’ apprenticeship was accepted
by the _Saturday Evening Post_, and began a career in popularity that
rivals Tarkington’s. Possesses the virtues and vices of the _Post_
school. In earlier work a colorist, painting statuesques against
artfully arranged backgrounds; a connoisseur of fabrics and poses and
nature settings--nearly as “much concerned with the stuffs as with the
stuff of life.” In _Cytherea_ the setting a sophisticated manipulation
of the theme, as the hot Cuban night in Cobra with its naked primitive
passions. A dabbler in psychology that develops into a crude
Freudianism, particularly in _Cytherea_. Always a hint of artistic
insincerity; something of a poseur yet a sensuous artist nature. His
gorgeous prose style spotty and streaked by amazing crudeness.
_The Three Black Pennys_ (1917). A study in the breaking out of
willfulness in successive generations, set against a background of
the history of iron-making in Pennsylvania. An elaboration of _Tubal
Cain_. An anticlimax arranged for dramatic significance, suggesting the
decay of romance in a hundred and fifty years of American industrial
development. The first episode is Hergesheimer at his best. Howat
Penny a study in moods that make him “angry at life”; but swept on by
the will to possess. Ludowica Winscomb embodies a favorite theme--the
suggestion of an older culture contrasted with the crude American
reality. So compare Taou Yuen.
_Linda Condon_ (1919). A study in the decay of surface beauty--an
empty form caught in the web of a shallow mother and the demands of
stronger natures, but preserved by lack of emotional concern. Handled
skillfully, with a somewhat forced unity symbolized by Linda’s straight
black bang; but the story leaves one with a sense of unconcern for
Linda and her fate. The ending melodramatic. Note Van Doren’s curious
comment--“nearly the most beautiful American novel since Hawthorne and
Henry James.”
_Java Head_ (1919). The story of an exotic that languishes in an
uncongenial habitat. A contrast in backgrounds: the romance of old
Salem in the days of the clipper ship; the romance of a far older
East that makes Salem seem raw and crude. Taou Yuen a decorative lay
figure, with aristocratic suggestions beyond anything the West knows.
The dramatic significance of opium, that hangs like a pall over the
East and brings degeneration and death to Puritan Salem. The end
with its cheap love adventure, a conscious satire on western life.
Hergesheimer’s best work. A romantic atmosphere got without archaic
trappings of speech and manners; nevertheless makes much of costume.
_Balisand_ (1924). A romance of a Virginia Federalist in the days of
the Revolution and after. A rich background of plantation life, with a
touch of somewhat cheap mysticism. Of the school of Washington rather
than Jefferson. A better work than _The Bright Shawl_ or _Cytherea_.
His other titles signify little. Yet see the _Saturday Evening Post_
for a series of furniture stories. Characteristic of his concern for
the “stuffs of life.” See in particular, “Mahogany” (Vol. 195, no. 53,
January, 1923); “Pewter” (Vol. 196, no. 23, January, 1924); “Oak” (Vol.
196, no. 3, July, 1923).[841]
IV • Certain Other Writers
Edith Wharton--The Genteel Tradition and the New Plutocracy
A temperamental aristocrat, endowed with keen intelligence and ripe
culture. Observes the ways of a wealthy society without culture and
unconcerned with standards. A protest against the domination of
the middle class. Mrs. Wharton isolated in America by her native
aristocratic tastes. The older New York society without real
distinction, bound by convention and with middle-class concern for
respectability; the new society a vulgar plutocracy; outside both a
pushing _nouveau-riche_ class eager to climb. Hence she turns to the
authentic aristocracy of Europe for satisfaction of her genteel tastes.
In spirit she belongs to the _ancien régime_. The highest law of
society is convention, but it must be noble, not vulgar.
_The House of Mirth_ (1905). A story of New York’s gilded society,
and how it served one of its daughters. Lily Bart, trained for social
leadership in a plutocracy, a finished and costly parasite, seeking
a market for her beauty, yet restrained by instinctive refinement
from seeing the game through. Lacking money she is caught in a web of
convention and destroyed. In her world convention is the social law,
and the tragedy flows from her inability to rise above it or to keep it
wholly. The contrast between Selden and Trenor--the aristocrat and the
plutocrat--characteristic of Mrs. Wharton.
_Ethan Frome_ (1911). A dramatization of the “narrow house” theme--life
held relentlessly in the grip of poverty and duty. A bleak and joyless
existence that seeks escape and suffers lingering tragedy. Thereafter a
stern isolation and iron repression. Mrs. Wharton’s finest work.
_The Custom of the Country_ (1915). A study of the social climber. The
best of a series of novels satirizing the encroachments on New York
exclusiveness by the rising plutocracy and its daughters. The western
plutocracy of pork presumably more vulgar than the eastern plutocracy
of Wall Street, yet between them the older gentry crushed. So compare
Boyesen, _Social Strugglers_ (1893); Robert Grant, _Unleavened Bread_
(1900). Undine Spragg, like Selma White, pushing, heartless, vulgar,
showy, is set over against Ralph Marvell, a refined “dabbler with
life”; Peter Van Degen, the “plunger”; and Elmer Moffatt, the self-made
man. She embodies all that Mrs. Wharton most hates; all climbers are
vulgar, she believes, both men and women.
_The Age of Innocence_ (1920). A study of the older world of the
eighteen-seventies. A loving yet satirical picture of a Pharisaic
society, “wholly absorbed in barricading self against the unpleasant”;
that lives secluded, protected by its taboos, and fears reality.
A sterile world of clan conventions and negations; a decadent
Victorianism. The Van der Luydens of Skuytercliff are of the same stuff
as the Dagonets in _The Custom of the Country_; and the dilettante
Newland Archer is another Ralph Marvell. Into this dead world enters
Ellen Olenska with her vivid old-world experiences, who threatens to
rebel, yet finally yields to the clan taboos. The book fades out like
the lives of the Van der Luydens. An admirable work.
_Old New York_ (1924). Four carefully done tales that sketch New York
in the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies. A return to her best
manner, with the finish of _The Age of Innocence_.
Her other later work not important. _Glimpses of the Moon_ (1922)
inconsequential; and _A Son at the Front_ (1923)--an attempt to
document the reactions of an artist with a son in the army--only half
successful.
Mrs. Wharton a finished artist who grasps her material firmly; an
intellectual attitude, delighting in irony. Unaffected by the problem
novel, and schools of naturalism or romanticism. Not a thinker like
Cabell, whose irony springs from an imagination that contemplates man
in his relation to cosmic forces, but an observer whose irony springs
from noting the clash between men and social convention. The last
of our literary aristocrats of the genteel tradition. Her attitude
expressed in the words, “_Je suis venue trop tard dans un monde trop
vulgaire._”
Willa Cather: Epics of Women
The Middle Border of Hamlin Garland seen through different eyes. She
looks back lovingly to a pioneer West, as the cradle of heroic lives.
An epic breadth of prairie spaces and industrious years, with a note
of regret--_Optima dies prima fugit._ Against this background she sets
her immigrant women, with their vigor and wealth of life, and considers
how the West has dealt with them. Peasant heroines, with their strong
natures hidden under queer speech and garb, set in a waste of wild
red grass, bitter winters, burning summers, virgin soil and great
loneliness. A long-ignored theme--the lot of the immigrant who has come
on a desperate adventure--the struggle of their children with the soil.
Compare _The Jungle_, for the industrial exploitation of the immigrant.
Has matured slowly. _The Troll Garden_ (1905), and _Alexander’s Bridge_
(1910), are inconsequential. Her real work done late. Belongs to no
school. Is neither naturalistic nor romantic. Is unconcerned with
problems. Except for a single attack on the ugliness of the small
western town--“The Sculptor’s Funeral” in _The Troll Garden_--she
ignores middle-class America and its Main Streets. An individual
artist, sincere, capable; an excellent craftsman.
_O Pioneers_ (1913). The story of Alexandra Bergson, a daughter of the
Middle Border; calm, tenacious, capable; loving the soil and bringing
it to abundant productiveness. The new world had brought out diverse
qualities in the Swedish peasant family; the older brothers common,
dull, vulgarized by Americanization; the younger brother suggestive
of the better side of American opportunity. Alexandra the directing
mind and controlling will. Over against her is set the Bohemian Marie
Tovesky, childlike in her spontaneous enthusiasm. The tragic ending
handled with great skill. Thrown about the whole, a harsh Nebraska
countryside through changing periods. One who had not lived through
similar experiences and loved the memory could not write so.
_The Song of the Lark_ (1915). The story of Thea Kronberg, who by
virtue of fierce energy and iron strength rises to triumph as an
artist. There are no romantic stage-effects, only the passionate
struggle of a tenacious will. Thea a peasant nature of vast solidity.
The most convincing story of artist life written by an American. A
changing background: the mean little Colorado town, the loneliness of
Chicago, Europe, the great spaces of the Southwest.
_My Ántonia_ (1918). The story of Ántonia Shimerda: an opulent peasant
nature with strong mother instinct, thwarted by meager opportunities
and vulgar environment. Her life runs a narrow round: the early
pioneer experience with its loneliness and black tragedy; the town
experience of the hired girl, who lives eagerly; the later life of a
hard-working mother on a lonely farm. Ántonia “a rich mine of life like
the founder of early races,” loving, generous, eager, yet belonging
to the soil. To vulgarize such natures by cramming them into a
conventional mold, passes for Americanization--this the implied thesis.
_One of Ours_ (1922). The story of Claude Wheeler, with strength
imprisoned by a society that opens its opportunities to Main Street
natures like Bayliss Wheeler. A suggestion of naturalism in the
handling of the theme: Claude caught by the negative character Enid
Royse because he fails to appreciate the complementary strength of
Gladys Farmer--a true Cather woman, enmeshed in Gopher Prairie. A
futile, ironical ending: better to die in battle than be destroyed by
the pettiness of Gopher Prairie. The war atmosphere seems curiously
old-fashioned.
_The Lost Lady_ (1923). A change of theme. The story of Mrs. Forester,
an embodiment of traditional feminine charm, quite superior to such
incidents as age or loyalty--a type of woman outside Miss Cather’s
experience and understanding.[842]
V • Some War Books
The late war the first in our history that has produced an aftermath
of searching criticism in fiction or drama. The romantic note dominant
in all earlier accounts, particularly of the Revolution and the
Rebellion. Such stories written by men who took no part in them. The
Civil War produced only one book of realistic criticism, that was
mutilated by the publisher to temper its cynicism, and that enjoyed no
popularity--_The Recollections of a Private_, by Warren Goss. The late
war is producing a considerable group, all realistic and critical; the
romantic note has not yet appeared.
John Dos Passos
_Three Soldiers_ (1921). A naturalistic handling of war that serves
as a commentary on _One of Ours_. The most notable American work on
the theme since Stephen Crane’s _The Red Badge of Courage_. Similar
in temper to Henri Barbusse, _Under Fire_, but dealing with the
barracks and the drill field. Compare with Andreas Latzko, _Men in
War_--impressionistic in handling. Dos Passos a young artist from the
university, an idealist who enlists and is disillusioned. A study of
the war machine and the effect of regimentation on different types of
men--the contrast between army discipline and a lax individualism,
and the disasters that may ensue from sudden change. Fuselli a
low-grade character who wants to rise; Chrisfield a solid animal who
becomes sullen; Andrews a highly nervous organism, to whom routine is
killing. Coarse episodes set in a brilliant background: the glamour of
militarism gone.
E. E. Cummings
_The Enormous Room_ (1922). A brilliant revelation of the tortures
endured by an artist unjustly imprisoned in a French military prison.
Supplements _Three Soldiers_ in destroying the appeal of military
glamour. An attack particularly on the common notion of heroic,
chivalrous France.
Thomas Boyd
_Through the Wheat_ (1923). An impressionistic handling of the
reactions of a normal American soldier, Private Hicks, to the war.
The keynote is numbness--a deadly numbness which offers the sole
defense of the normal mind against the horrors it confronts. Its
matter-of-factness, detached point of view, and the ordinariness of the
hero, set it apart from _Three Soldiers_ and _The Enormous Room_. An
excellent bit of impressionism.
Laurence Stallings
_Plumes_ (1924). A story of war by one who has suffered mutilation
from it. The theme--“If you are smashed badly ... and if you have any
intelligence you must remake a world to live in.” A study of post-war
disillusionment, naturalistically handled. So compare the play in which
he collaborated--_What Price Glory?_
VI • Youth in Revolt--Certain Purveyors of the Hectic
A group of youthful poseurs at the mercy of undigested reactions to
Nietzsche, Butler, Dadaism, Vorticism, Socialism; overbalanced by
changes in American critical and creative standards, and in love with
copious vocabularies and callow emotions. Given to satirizing the
educational methods of _alma mater_; quick to espouse new causes;
enthusiastic for revolt as a profession. A prolific movement which as
yet has accomplished nothing seriously creative.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
_This Side of Paradise_ (1921); _The Beautiful and the Damned_ (1922).
A bad boy who loves to smash things to show how naughty he is; a bright
boy who loves to say smart things to show how clever he is. Precocious,
ignorant--a short candle already burnt out.
Stephen Vincent Benét and Floyd Dell
Benét: _Heavens and Earth_ (1920); _The Beginning of Wisdom_ (1921);
_Young People’s Pride_ (1923); _Jean Hugenot_ (1923). Floyd Dell: _Moon
Calf_ (1921); _Briary Bush_ (1922); _Janet March_ (1923).
Luminaries of the school which holds that the sufficient tests of
intellectual emancipation are rolled hose, midnight discussions, black
coffee, and the discarding of wedding rings. Floyd Dell the most
serious and ablest of the group.
Ben Hecht
_Eric Dorn_ (1921); _Gargoyles_ (1922). An almost naturalistic distrust
of formal education, love, and government, and an unsubstantiated
belief in the efficacy of revolt in general and the romance of city
streets in particular. A burnt-out rocket. His last books--_1001
Afternoons in Chicago_ (1923) and _Florentine Dagger_ (1924) worse than
inconsequential.
Ole Rölvaag’s “Giants in the Earth”[843]
The dramatic contrast between Per Hansa, type of the natural pioneer
who sees the golden light of promise flooding the windswept plains, and
Beret, child of an old folk civilization who hungers for the home ways
and in whose heart the terror of loneliness gathers, penetrates to the
deeper reality of life as it was lived for three hundred years on the
American frontier. It is not a late or rare phenomenon; it is only late
and rare in literature. We have been used to viewing the frontier in
broad and generous perspective and have responded most sympathetically
to the epic note that runs through the tale of the conquest of the
continent. It is the great American romance that gives life and drama
to our history. It was this epic quality that de Tocqueville felt when
he discovered the poetry of America in the silent march of a race
toward the far-off Pacific, hewing its way triumphantly through forests
and mountains to arrive at its objective. But the emotional side, the
final ledger of human values, we have too little considered--the men
and women broken by the frontier, the great army of derelicts who
failed and were laid away, like the Norse immigrant lad, in forgotten
graves. The cost of it all in human happiness--the loneliness, the
disappointments, the renunciations, the severing of old ties and
quitting of familiar places, the appalling lack of those intangible
cushions for the nerves that could not be transported on horseback or
in prairie schooners: these imponderables too often have been left out
of the reckoning in our traditional romantic interpretation. But with
the growth of a maturer realism we are beginning to understand how
great was the price exacted by the frontier; and it is because _Giants
in the Earth_, for the first time in our fiction, evaluates adequately
the settlement in terms of emotion, because it penetrates to the secret
inner life of men and women who undertook the heavy work of subduing
the wilderness, that it is--quite apart from all artistic values--a
great historical document.
If in one sense the conquest of the continent is the great American
epic, in another sense it is the great American tragedy. The vastness
of the unexplored reaches, the inhospitality of the wilderness, the
want of human aid and comfort when disaster came, these were terrifying
things to gentle souls whom fate had not roughhewn for pioneering. Fear
must have been a familiar visitor to the heart of the pioneer woman,
and for a hundred and fifty years this fear of the dark wilderness was
one reason why the settlements clung to the more hospitable seaboard.
There, at least, was an outlook toward the old home. But with the
crossing of the Allegheny Mountains, following the Revolutionary War,
the frontier spirit came into its own. A spirit of restlessness took
possession of men, and the thin line of settlements advanced swiftly,
overrunning the Inland Empire with its interminable forests and
malarial swamps, sprawling rudely from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of
Mexico. To subdue the land was no easy task. Upon the old and the weak
the wilderness laid a ruthless hand, and even of the strength of the
young it took heavy toll. Tragedy was always lurking at the door of
the backwoods cabin. In Beveridge’s _Life of Lincoln_ there is a grim
story of the hardships suffered by the Lincoln family in Indiana that
leaves no room for romance--husband, wife, two children, and later an
old couple, were forced to pig together all winter in a brush camp open
on one side to the weather, with only a fire in front for cooking and
heating--a mode of life below that of the Indian in his skin teepee.
And then a mysterious disease fell upon them, virulent and fateful,
and the old couple were taken from their cots on the ground and put
away beneath the soil to find what rest they might there. That men
should break and women go mad under such strain is no more than may be
expected of human nature. Beret, the wife of Per Hansa, brooding in her
sod-hut in Dakota, afraid of life and of her own thoughts, and turning
for comfort to a dark religion, is a type of thousands of frontier
women who--as the historian Ridpath said of his parents--“toiled and
suffered and died that their children might inherit the promise.”
* * * * *
Very likely we should have felt the tragedy of the frontier long
ago if we had been as much concerned with inner experience as with
outward act, if we had been psychologists as well as chroniclers.
But we have been too prone to romanticize the objective reality and
disguise slatternly ways with the garb of backwoods independence. The
realistic eighteenth century made no such mistake. Such infrequent
glimpses of the first frontier as we catch in our early literature
suggest a swift descent into grossness as the settlements were left
behind. In the _Journal of Madam Sarah Knight_, which dates from the
opening years of the eighteenth century, are brief notes of what fell
under her sharp eyes on a horseback trip from Boston to New York. The
sketches she has penciled are far from bucolic. Certain of the figures
that emerge casually from her pages are no other than decivilized
grotesques--animal-like creatures for whom returning to a state of
nature meant living filthily in mean huts, traveling back centuries
toward the primitive ways of the cavemen. Of the emotional reactions of
these early children of the wilderness Madam Knight tells us nothing;
so casual an observer would have no opportunity to penetrate beneath
the unlovely surface.
A quarter century later Colonel William Byrd, the first gentleman of
Virginia, wrote his graphic _History of the Dividing Line_, an account
of a boundary survey run between the colonies of Virginia and South
Carolina. As the survey leaves the seacoast behind and approaches the
frontier, the same characteristics appear that Madam Knight noted--a
rough and surly independence, a dislike of established law and order,
and a shiftless way of life that is content to subsist off the country.
“Lubberland,” Colonel Byrd called the Carolina backwoods where a new
race of poor whites was springing up--a rude decivilized existence that
bore heavily on the women and was heedless of the common amenities of
social life. In _Letters from an American Farmer_ (1773) written by
St. John de Crèvecœur, a cultivated Norman who established himself
in the colonies after serving in the French army under Montcalm, the
same sharp judgment is passed on the frontier. Crèvecœur was of the
romantic school of Rousseau and eloquent in praise of life lived close
to nature, yet even he discovers the frontier to be a blot on colonial
civilization, the abode of rude and lawless figures who precede by a
decade the sober army of occupation.
In the eighteenth century the testimony is clear that the
frontiersmen--or “borderers,” as they were commonly called--were rough
bumptious fellows who fled the settlements partly because of a dislike
of ordered and seemly ways. The colonial gentry, men like the Rev.
Timothy Dwight, held them in deep contempt and rejoiced when they
quitted the settlements and plunged deep into the wilderness beyond
the jurisdiction of church and state. Lawlessness, shiftlessness, a
passion like Jurgen’s to follow after their own wishes and their own
desires, seem to have been the characteristics of these rude men and
slatternly women, as the aristocratic eighteenth century judged them.
That is very far from the whole story, to be sure. Our later historians
have made clear that from this same leveling frontier issued the
spirit of American democracy, and that from these rough individualists
came the great movement of Jacksonianism that swept away the class
distinctions of an earlier century. Accepting so much, and recognizing
the part played by the frontier in shaping the institutions and the
psychology of America, it remains true, nevertheless, that the lot of
the backwoodsman was hard and the price he paid in civilization for his
freedom was great. The sod house of the Dakota plains was only a late
adaptation of the primitive huts that were strung along the earlier
frontier. What loneliness filled the hearts of the drab women who made
hoecakes and dressed deer skins, what rebellions at their lot stirred
dumbly within them, no record remains to tell and no literature has
cared to concern itself about.
It was not till the nineteenth century that authentic accounts of the
frontier, written by men who had come out of it, began to appear,
yet even then in too scant volume. In Longstreet’s _Georgia Scenes_,
Joseph G. Baldwin’s _Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi_, and Davy
Crockett’s _Autobiography_, the frontier is painted in homely colors
that time cannot fade. Their brisk pages seem to have been dipped
in the butternut dye-pot of the backwoods cabin. By far the most
significant of them is the braggart but naïvely truthful narrative
of the life of Cane-brake Davy who in his several removals followed
the advancing frontier the length of the State of Tennessee. Davy
would seem to have been the authentic backwoodsman, and the life of
the individual may be taken as a description of the genus. Restless,
assertive, unsocial, buoyantly optimistic and obsessed with the faith
that better land lay farther west, cultivating a bumptious wit that
was a defense mechanism against the meanness of daily life, he was
only an improvident child who fled instinctively from civilization.
As a full-length portrait of the Jacksonian leveler, in the days when
the great social revolution was establishing the principles of an
equalitarian democracy, the picture is of vast significance. But it
is incomplete. Concerning the wife and daughters who were dragged at
his heels in the successive removals, the narrative is silent. It is a
man’s tale, unenriched by the emotional experiences of a woman, and as
such it tells only half the story of the frontier.
The _Autobiography_ was the last pungent note of realism before the
romantic revolution swept over American literature; and it was not till
two generations later, when the war was over and the glories of the
Gilded Age were fading, that the frontier came to realistic expression
again in the works of Hamlin Garland. _Main-Travelled Roads_, the first
chapter in the tale of the Middle Border, is a prologue to _Giants in
the Earth_, telling the story of the prairie settlement in the idiom
of the generation that undertook the great adventure. In these brief
tales is compressed the harsh temper of the eighties, when the spirit
of revolt was running like wildfire across the prairies and the Middle
Border was arming for battle. For a decade or more the farmers’ affairs
had been out of kilter, and a note of discontent had begun to appear
in fiction. Before Garland, western life had been dealt with by Edward
Eggleston in _The Hoosier Schoolmaster_ and _The Circuit Rider_, and
more searchingly by Ed Howe in _The Story of a Country Town_--a drab
commentary on life in Atchison, Kansas, in the early eighties. But
it is in Joseph Kirkland’s _Zury, The Meanest Man in Spring County_
(1887), that a deep sense of the meanness of frontier life is first
adequately felt. The harsh constrictions of pioneer existence tightened
about Zury as a boy when his father was struggling with debt, turning a
naturally generous nature into a skinflint mortgage grabber. He early
learned that he must fight to survive, and as a result his life was
shut up in a narrow round of sordid accumulation. It was the poverty of
the frontier, in Kirkland’s eyes, that was the great hardship.
Hamlin Garland’s more adequate story of the Middle Border, beginning
militantly with _Main-Travelled Roads_ (1887-92) and flowering in the
idyllic saga of the Garlands and McClintocks (1914), is a chronicle
that grows more significant as the times it deals with draw further
into the past. Throughout his interpretation run two dominant notes:
the promise of future fulfillment when the prairies have been brought
under the plow--the Per Hansa note of pioneer optimism; and then
later, rising slowly into a ground swell, a note of discouragement
suggesting the utter futility of a laborious existence. Underlying
_Main-Travelled Roads_ is a mood of bitterness that springs from a deep
sense of failure--a mood that grew harsher with the economic depression
of the Middle Border in the eighties. The harvest was not fulfilling
the expectations of seed time, and the bow of promise was gone from
the prairie fields. The figures of bitter men and despondent women
fill his pages and darken the colors of his realism. It is the cost of
it all that depresses him--the toll exacted of human happiness. These
early studies of Garland’s strike the first note of the tragedy of
the frontier. Starkly objective, they are sociological sketches, the
militant expression of a rebellious mood that had been deepening since
the panic of 1873 burst the romantic bubble of frontier hopes. The
history of two decades of economic maladjustment, with their Granger
Populism, their passionate resentment at the favoritisms of government,
their blind striking out at the plutocracy that was visibly rising amid
the American democracy, is compressed within a few acrid tales that
proposed to tell the plain truth about life on the Middle Border farm.
_Main-Travelled Roads_ is as complete an expression of the mood of the
last years of the century--the outlook upon life, the economic and
political problems, the objective treatment of materials--as _Giants in
the Earth_ is an expression of the vastly different outlook and mood of
our own day.
* * * * *
For a generation before 1917, when the movement was brought to a
sudden stop, the mind of America was deeply concerned with problems of
sociology. The growing spirit of realism was absorbed in politics and
economics and concerned itself little with subjective analysis. The
intellectuals were busily examining the Constitution in the light of
its economic origins and interpreting American history in the light of
frontier experience. The novelists, reflecting the current interests,
were fascinated by the phenomena of industrialism and were studying
curiously the new race of captains of industry who were weaving a
strange pattern of life for America. The city had already come to dwarf
the country. Chicago bestrode the Middle Border like a colossus, and
the novelists found material for their realism in the cut-throat ways
of business men. Their stories--harsh and strident as the grinding
wheels on the overhead “Loop”--were set against a background of
sprawling cities hastening to grow big, where the battles of giants
were fought and where the _milieu_--a vast network of impersonal
forces--was more significant than the individual men and women who
were borne onward in the stream of tendency to submerge or rise as
chance determined. A note of stark determinism runs through much of
the work; but it was a determinism of environing forces--the objective
world of the machine--rather than of character, and in consequence the
deeper concern of fiction was sociological, the understanding of this
impersonal machine order and the subduing of it to democratic ends.
In such a world the farmer and the problems of the Middle Border were
become as old-fashioned as ox-carts.
Ten years later, when _Giants in the Earth_ was published, such
objective treatment of materials was no longer the vogue. Since the
war a revolutionary shift of interest has taken place, a shift from
the sociological to the psychological. It is no longer the world of
objective fact that obtrudes as the significant reality, but the
subtler world of emotional experience, the furtive inner life of
impulse and desire that Sherwood Anderson probes so curiously. The
change of theme was first marked, perhaps, by _Spoon River Anthology_,
with its mordant sketches of stunted and thwarted lives that Mr.
Masters professes to regard as the natural harvest of a sterile village
life. _Spoon River Anthology_ is bitter in its sardonic rebellion
against the genial optimisms of the “Valley of Democracy.” From the
epic thrust of expansion issued, as its natural progeny, a race of
abortive grotesques, starved figures which suggest to Mr. Masters the
cost in human values of severing the ties of kin and kind and throwing
aside like an old shoe the creative wealth of social experience. The
soil of the frontier village is too thin for men and women to strike
deep root and grow to generous stature.
Since the publication of _Spoon River Anthology_, concern for
psychological values has pretty much taken possession of our
literature. In the lovely pages of Willa Cather’s _O Pioneers!_ and
_My Ántonia_ there is revealed a warm sympathy with the emotional life
of pioneer women and a poignant understanding of their bleak lot.
But the analysis--as in Hamlin Garland’s work--draws back from the
threshold of final tragedy, pausing before it has penetrated to the
hidden core of futility. The waste of all finer values exacted by the
prairies is suggested by the queer figures of lonely immigrants who
fade in the uncongenial environment, but it is not thrust into the
foreground to dominate the scene. The vast stretches of the prairies
are there--stern, inhospitable, breeding a dumb homesickness in alien
hearts--where the red grass bends before the restless winds and the
forces of nature are not easily tamed; but in the end the prairie is
subdued and the scars it has laid on men’s lives are forgotten. Since
Willa Cather, others have dealt with the West--Ruth Suckow, Margaret
Wilson, and Herbert Quick, to name a few--yet in none of their work
is there the profound insight and imaginative grasp of the theme that
gives to _Giants in the Earth_ so great a sense of tragic reality.
In this creative return to the theme of the great American adventure
the causes of human failure lie deeper than politics or economics.
They are to be found in the impersonal forces of nature that are too
powerful for the human will to cope with; and in the hidden weakness
of fearful souls that cannot live when their roots have been pulled up
from the congenial home soil. For all his titanic labors, Per Hansa,
the viking, is struck down at last. There are few nobler passages in
our fiction--the more telling for its restraint--than the final scene
where, driven inexorably by circumstance, Per Hansa sets forth into the
February blizzard to fetch a minister to the bedside of his stricken
comrade. The note of determinism is there, subtle, pervasive. The Norns
of his fathers had decreed that it should be so--in the urgings of the
mystical Beret, in the dumb pleadings of the dying Hans Olsa and his
broken-hearted wife. Per Hansa the strong, the capable one who never
failed, who was cunning enough to outwit fate itself--Per Hansa would
go out into the storm and return with the minister who would point
the way to heaven to the troubled Hans Olsa. And so, driven by all
the imperatives of fate, he sets out, skis on his feet and others at
his back, to face the last great adventure. The blinding snow quickly
wraps him about, the cold grips his heart, and Per Hansa is seen no
more until on a soft May day, when the wheat is green in his fields and
the corn is ready for planting, he is found seated by a haystack, his
skis beside him and his face turned to the untrodden West. For all the
heroic labors of Per Hansa, for all the tragic loneliness of Beret, the
end is futility.
And Beret, the sick one, likewise is in the hands of the Norns. She had
sinned through love of Per Hansa, and in the long brooding hours on
the Dakota plains her mind gives way. She cannot rise to Per Hansa’s
delight in the newborn son. Peder Victorious--symbol of Per Hansa’s
buoyant faith--for her is only another evidence of sin. This dark land
of Dakota is marked by God’s displeasure, and life for her becomes
a silent struggle of renunciation and atonement. A primitive Norse
Calvinist, victimized by a brooding imagination that sees more devils
than vast hell can hold, she dwells “on the border of utter darkness”
where the forces of good and evil struggle for the human soul. Across
the gloomy Puritanism of her nature fall the shadows of an older and
darker faith, and in her nostalgia the old Northland superstitions
merge with the somber Northland religion to her undoing. The tragedy of
Beret works itself out in the tender corridors of her own heart and,
as Professor Commager has suggested, it is as universal as the tragedy
of Goethe’s Margarethe. In his portrayal of the “sick soul” of Beret
hungering for the far homeland the Norse artist has achieved a triumph.
The epic conquest of the continent must be read in the light of women’s
sufferings as well as in that of men’s endurance. In whichever light it
is read, it becomes something far more suggestive than a drab tale of
frontier poverty or a sordid tale of frontier exploitation; it becomes
vital and significant as life itself.
_Giants in the Earth_ is a great and beautiful book that suggests the
wealth of human potentialities brought to America year after year by
the peasant immigrants who pass through Ellis Island and scatter the
length and breadth of the land. Written in Norwegian, and stemming
from a rich old-world literary tradition, it is at the same time
deeply and vitally American. The very atmosphere of the Dakota plains
is in its pages, and it could have been written only by one to whom
the background was a familiar scene. The artist has lived with these
peasant folk; he is one of them, and he penetrates sympathetically to
the simple kindly hearts hidden to alien eyes by the unfamiliar folk
ways. To gather up and preserve in letters these diverse folk strains
before they are submerged and lost in the common American _mores_,
would seem to be a business that our fiction might undertake with
profit.
* * * * *
Ole Edvart Rölvaag is himself a viking of the Per Hansa strain. Born
of fisher folk, 22 April, 1876, on the island of Donna at the very
edge of the Arctic circle, he took his name, following a common
Norwegian custom, from the name of a cove on the shores of which he
was brought up. It is a land barren except for the gorse and heather,
and the long winter nights and the restless sea were certain to bring
the imagination under their somber spell. At the age of fourteen,
discouraged from further schooling by the family that contrasted him
unfavorably with a brilliant brother, he turned fisherman, and for
five years went off to the Lofoten Islands some two hundred miles away
for the winter catches. Distrustful of the future, he made his great
decision to come to America, landing in New York in 1896 with only a
railway ticket to South Dakota. In the great West, still turmoiled
by the agrarian upheaval of the nineties, he joined an uncle who had
provided him transportation money, tried his hand at farming, worked at
other jobs, and at the age of twenty-three, not having found himself,
he turned once more to the formal business of schooling. In the fall
of 1899 he entered Augustana College, a preparatory school in Canton,
South Dakota. From there he went to St. Olaf College, Northfield,
Minnesota, graduating in 1905 at the age of twenty-eight. After a year
at the University of Oslo in Norway, he joined the staff of St. Olaf
College, where he is now Professor of Norwegian Literature. In the
larger sense, however, his education has been got from life, which he
seems to have lived with a rich and daring intensity; and it is his
own venturesome experience, certainly, that finds expression in the
creative realism and brooding imagination of his work. Intellectually
and artistically he is of the excellent old-world culture. How greatly
his professional studies determined his literary technique only a
competent Norwegian critic can judge; yet it is worth while comparing
_Giants in the Earth_ with Johan Bojer’s _The Emigrants_--a work which,
when announced as being in preparation, dramatically influenced his own
novel.
The Short Story[844]
_Introduction._ With the ferment of the seventies and eighties a new
school of literature, that was effectively a denial of the genteel
tradition: it was effectively a popularization--a taking it out of the
severe realm of the _Atlantic Monthly_. It was an appeal to the middle
class. From Henry James to Hamlin Garland a steady shift from right to
left. This implied:
1. A shift from genteel to homely material.
2. A shift to realism from the earlier sentimentality. This genteel
tradition constantly cropping out anew--in Margaret Deland, in a
changed form in Zona Gale. It has been strongest in New England--from
Rose Terry Cooke through Sarah Orne Jewett to Mary Wilkins.
The short story commonly believed to be peculiarly representative of
our genius--the stripping-away of the superfluous and the love of
technical refinement. Derived from Poe and Hawthorne: both artists yet
far removed from the tendencies which have controlled the development
of the short story since.
_Theme._ The American short story has dealt largely with the two great
themes of all romance, love and adventure. The form constitutes the
great staple--is largely provided by women for women. The handling of
this love theme reveals the inevitable shift from the genteel tradition
to middle-class efficiency, and the spirit of the change is revealed
in the changing dress of the heroine. In the seventies, crinoline,
innumerable flounces of white muslin, lace parasols--no tan, no
freckles, but a gentle pallor. Such dress and such heroines will exude
sentiment. It will concern itself with atmosphere. Action brisk and
efficient will appear unladylike, almost vulgar. What a change when the
heroine clothes herself in a silk flour-sack--showing silk stockings,
bare arms and neck--cultivating tan and freckles, bobbing her hair,
going in for automobiles and golf and tennis! The older heroine dwelt
in a world of sentiment without sex; the present-day heroine lives in
a world of sex interest without sentiment. The more flounces in life
and literature, the less the animal is exposed. Hence action has
superseded sentiment--plot has superseded atmosphere. The hero becomes
a Hart, Schaffner and Marx young business man and the middle-class note
is struck loudly in the honk of the motor-car. The genteel tradition is
laid away with the flowers.
_Major Influences during the Sixties._ Through the fifties, and sixties
literature uncertain and halting. The style largely set by old-world
fashions. Three in particular:
1. Influence of Charlotte and Emily Bronte. A sort of sentimental and
mawkish passion. Stilted style, as in Harriet Beecher Stowe. This
fell in with the Irving note of the picturesque and was exploited in
_Godey’s Lady’s Book_.
2. Influence of Dickens. At its height in the fifties: an emphasis upon
the vulgar--plain and homely characters. Exploited in the _Atlantic_ by
Lowell. So Rose Terry Cooke in _Miss Lucinda_ (1861).
3. Influence of the French realistic movement: Balzac, Flaubert. Only a
faint beginning. Still a lot of romance stuff but given a local color
and garnished with humor.
_Counter Tendencies._ The inevitable development of the middle-class
city and the middle-class magazine, persistently affected by certain
throw-backs to an older American tradition. America is of the city
today, but day before yesterday it was still country, and in the
backgrounds of our minds is a country setting and love of simple
people. Three main tendencies:
1. The discovery of the local. The picturesqueness of the strange and
remote in character, manners, speech. The charm of dialect and interest
in out-of-the-way places. This a reaction from too much pavement
and the rubbing-down of individual differences from city contact.
“Characters” are bred in isolated places. This the dominant note in
the short story from 1870 to 1900: to follow it from Bret Harte on is
almost to write a history of the short story. It does not dominate the
longer story. Constance Fenimore Woolson.
2. The discovery of “human interest.” The feeling that men in the
rough--with the bark on--may prove more interesting than the products
of an artificial civilization. This had been spread by Dickens and by
certain of the _Atlantic_ writers.
3. The growing interest in realism. At first confused with the
commonplace--so Pattee in his comment on Rose Terry Cooke’s _Miss
Lucinda_. A good deal of this earlier work is only another form of
romance--little affected by the rising French movement. Realism was
to come slowly and late. All three of these made against the genteel
tradition.
_Henry James._ His position peculiar. From his youth _déraciné_--his
father hated American vulgarity, American journalism, and would not
permit his son to take root. He grew up with an aristocratic conception
of civilization--his sole interest lay in such civilization, and the
manners of the polite society of that civilization. No other American
has so hated and feared contamination from the vulgar. He was thus the
last flower of the Genteel Tradition, transplanted to an environment
more congenial. As the middle-class became more clamorous, he withdrew
to the Continent, to England, where the older ideas still lingered.
There in the spirit of the realist he wrote with refined art and
persistent detachment--even to a punctilious and princely refinement.
As Mr. Howells says, “To enjoy his work, to feel its rare excellence,
both in conception and expression, is a brevet of intellectual good
form.”
_His World._ Always that of the spender, of assured position. His main
interest lies in women; their refinement appeals to his refinement--no
flappers or vulgarians but elegantly gowned women who never did the
family washing. He is concerned with that which is dearest to the heart
of aristocracy--standards of excellence. And in this he was true to his
conception of civilization, for civilization begins after a competence
has been assured. Those who are struggling to acquire have not the
leisure, the inclination, for civilization. Hence _Daisy Miller_ is a
type of much of his work--the contrast between civilized Europe and
uncivilized America, the one with standards of culture and manners
and the other vulgarian. And his interest in American women results
from the fact that they alone in America care for civilization and are
painfully seeking to achieve it.
_His Realism._ The beginnings of the movement which has been called
psychological realism, concerning itself with motives and processes of
thought--the inner life. Developed by Bourget and far more fully by
Dorothy Richardson in such a book as _Pilgrimage_, the inner life of
Miriam Henderson in many volumes. Far removed from later psychological
fiction founded on Freudian theory--as in D. H. Lawrence, Sherwood
Anderson. Again the genteel tradition dealing with people who in the
main have genteel impulses only. James held in horror this later
naturalism--it was merely vulgarian.
_The Spirit of the Local._ Into this prim world with its incipient
realism came the note of the Far West: Mark Twain and Bret Harte, who
set a new style--the romantic, picturesque, human-interest story. This
is a part of the Pike County idea of literature--a native rogue-tale
but with touches of sentiment and shortened to effective form. This
followed by Eggleston’s _Hoosier Schoolmaster_ (1871) and this in turn
by the flood of local work of the eighties. The most notable the work
of Charles Egbert Craddock, Joel Chandler Harris, Sarah Orne Jewett,
and Mary Wilkins. The first discovered the hill people, the second
discovered the Negro--his primitive folk-poetry. In the work of the
last, a struggle between the genteel tradition and realism--and the
final triumph of the latter.
A Chapter in American Liberalism[845]
Liberals whose hair is growing thin and the lines of whose figures are
no longer what they were, are likely to find themselves today in the
unhappy predicament of being treated as mourners at their own funerals.
When they pluck up heart to assert that they are not yet authentic
corpses, but living men with brains in their heads, they are pretty
certain to be gently chided and led back to the comfortable armchair
that befits senility. Their counsel is smiled at as the chatter of a
belated post-Victorian generation that knew not Freud, and if they
must go abroad they are bidden take the air in the garden where other
old-fashioned plants--mostly of the family _Democratici_--are still
preserved. It is not pleasant for them. It is hard to be dispossessed
by one’s own heirs, and especially hard when those heirs, in the
cheerful ignorance of youth, forget to acknowledge any obligations
to a hard-working generation that laid by a very substantial body of
intellectual wealth, the income from which the heirs are spending
without even a “Thank you.” If therefore the middle-aged liberal
occasionally grows irritable and indulges in caustic comment on the
wisdom of talkative young men it may be set down as the prerogative of
the armchair age and lightly forgiven.
Yet in sober fact there are the solidest reasons for such irritation.
The younger liberals who love to tweak the nose of democracy are
too much enamored of what they find in their own mirrors. They are
indisputably clever, they are spouting geysers of smart and cynical
talk, they have far outrun their fathers in the free handling
of ancient tribal totems--but they are afflicted with the short
perspective of youth that finds a vanishing-point at the end of its
own nose. There is no past for them beyond yesterday. They are having
so good a time playing with ideas that it does not occur to them to
question the validity of their intellectual processes or to inquire
into the origins of the ideas they have adopted so blithely. Gaily
engaged in smashing _bourgeois_ idols, the young intellectuals are too
busy to realize that it was the older generation that provided them
with a hammer and pointed out the idols to be smashed. It is the way of
youth.
Middle-aged liberals--let it be said by way of defense--at least know
their history. They were brought up in a great age of liberalism--an
age worthy to stand beside the golden forties of last century--and
they went to school to excellent teachers. Darwin, Spencer, Mill, Karl
Marx, Haeckel, Taine, William James, Henry George, were masters of
which no school in any age need feel ashamed; nor were such tutors and
undermasters as Ruskin, William Morris, Matthew Arnold, Lester Ward,
Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, to be dismissed as incompetent. To the
solution of the vexing problems entailed by industrialism--in America
as well as in Europe--was brought all the knowledge that had been
accumulating for a century. It was a time of reëvaluations when much
substantial thinking was done; when the flood of light that came with
the doctrine of biological evolution lay brilliant on the intellectual
landscape and the dullest mind caught some of the reflection. Few of
the young scholars attended the lectures of Friedrich Nietzsche, and
behavioristic psychology had not yet got into the curriculum; but Ladd
and James were inquiring curiously into the mechanism of the brain, and
animal psychology was preparing the way for the later Freudians. It was
the end of an age perhaps, the rich afterglow of the Enlightenment, but
the going down of the sun was marked by sunset skies that gave promise
of other and greater dawns.
To have spent one’s youth in such a school was a liberal education.
The mind opened of its own will. Intellectual horizons were daily
widening and the new perspectives ran out into cosmic spaces. The cold
from those outer spaces had not yet chilled the enthusiasms that were
a heritage from the Enlightenment, and the social idealism begotten by
the democratic nature school still looked confidently to the future.
They were ardent democrats--the young liberals of the nineties--and
none doubted the finality or sufficiency of the democratic principle,
any more than Mill or Spencer had doubted it. All their history and
all their biology justified it, and the business of the times was to
make it prevail in the sphere of economics as it prevailed in the
realm of the political. The cure for the evils of democracy was held
to be more democracy, and when industrialism had been brought under
its sway--when America had become an economic democracy--a just and
humane civilization would be on the threshold of possibility. To the
achievement of that great purpose the young liberals devoted themselves
and the accomplishments of the next score of years were the work of
their hands. Certain intellectuals had been democrats--Paine and
Jefferson and Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman and Melville--but they
were few in comparison with the skeptical Whigs who professed democracy
only to bind its hands. The Republican party had not been democratic
since former days--and as Henry Adams said in 1880, it was accounted
foolishness to believe in it in 1880. Autocracy was a toy to distract
the voting man from the business of money-getting.
It was from such a school--richer in intellectual content, one might
argue, than any the younger liberals have frequented--that the ferment
of twenty years ago issued; a school dedicated to the ideals of the
Enlightenment and bent on carrying through the unfulfilled program
of democracy. Democratic aspirations had been thwarted hitherto by
the uncontrolled play of the acquisitive instinct; the immediate
problem of democracy was the control of that instinct in the common
interest. Economics had controlled the political state to its narrow
and selfish advantage; it was for the political state to resume its
sovereignty and extend its control over economics. So in the spirit of
the Enlightenment the current liberalism dedicated itself to history
and sociology, accepting as its immediate and particular business a
reëxamination of the American past in order to forecast an ampler
democratic future. It must trace the rise of political power in America
in order to understand how that power had fallen into the unsocial
hands of economics. The problem was difficult. American political
history had been grossly distorted by partisan interpretation and
political theory had been dissipated by an arid constitutionalism. The
speculative thinker had long been dispossessed by the eulogist and
the lawyer, both of whom had subsisted on a thin gruel of patriotic
myths. Even the social historians, though dealing in materials rich in
suggestion, had been diffident in the matter of interpretation, without
which history is no more than the dry bones of chronicle. Inheriting
no adequate philosophy of historical evolution, the young school of
historians must first provide themselves with one, in the light of
which the American past should take on meaning, and the partisan
struggles, hitherto meaningless, should fall into comprehensible
patterns.
That necessary work was to engage them for years, but in the meanwhile,
as critical realists, their immediate business was with facts and the
interpretation of facts. John Fiske a few years before had essayed to
interpret the rise of democracy in America by analogy from biological
evolution, tracing the source of American democracy to the New England
town meeting, which he explained as a resurgence of ancient Teutonic
folk-ways. The theory was tenuous and it was not till Professor Turner
drew attention to the creative influence of the frontier on American
life that the historians were provided with a suggestive working
hypothesis. Before that hypothesis could be adequately explored,
however, and brought into just relations to a comprehensive philosophy
of history, the rise of liberalism was well under way, marked by a
rich ferment of thought that made the early years of the new century
singularly stimulating. That ferment resulted from pouring into the
vial of native experience the reagent of European theory--examining the
ways of American industrialism in the light of continental socialism;
and the result was an awakening of popular interest in social control
of economics, a widespread desire to bring an expanding industrialism
into subjection to a rational democratic program, that was to provide
abundant fuel to the social unrest that had burst forth in sporadic
flames for a generation. The great movement of liberalism that took
possession of the American mind after the turn of the century--a
movement not unworthy to be compared with the ferment of the eighteen
forties--was the spontaneous reaction of an America still only half
urbanized, still clinging to ideals and ways of an older simpler
America, to an industrialism that was driving its plowshare through
the length and breadth of the familiar scene, turning under the rude
furrows what before had been growing familiarly there. It was the first
reaction of America to the revolutionary change that followed upon the
exhaustion of the frontier--an attempt to secure through the political
state the freedoms that before had come from unpreëmpted opportunity.
For a quarter of a century following the great westward expansion
of the late sixties America had been drifting heedlessly towards a
different social order. The shambling frontier democracy that had
sufficed an earlier time was visibly breaking down in presence of the
imperious power of a centralizing capitalism. The railways were a
dramatic embodiment of the new machine civilization that was running
head on into a primitive social organism fashioned by the old domestic
economy, and the disruptions and confusions were a warning that the
country was in for vast changes. New masters, new ways. The rule of the
captain of industry had come. The farmers had long been in ugly mood,
but their great rebellion was put down in 1896, and never again could
they hope to wrest sovereignty from capitalism. The formal adoption
of the gold standard in 1900 served notice to the world that America
had put away its democratic agrarianism, that a shambling Jacksonian
individualism had had its day, and that henceforth the destiny of the
country lay in the hands of its business men. Capitalism was master
of the country and though for the present it was content to use the
political machinery of democracy it was driving towards an objective
that was the negation of democracy.
The immediate reaction to so broad a shift in the course of manifest
destiny was a growing uneasiness amongst the middle class--small
business and professional men--who looked with fear upon the program
of the captains of industry. Industrialization brought its jars and
upsets. The little fish did not enjoy being swallowed by the big, and
as they watched the movement of economic centralization encroaching
on the field of competition they saw the doors of opportunity closing
to them. It was to this great body of _petite bourgeoisie_ that
members of the lesser intellectuals--journalists, sociologists,
reformers--were to make appeal. The work was begun dramatically with
the spectacularly advertised _Frenzied Finance_, written by Thomas W.
Lawson, and appearing as a series in _McClure’s Magazine_ in 1903. The
immense popular success of the venture proved that the fire was ready
for the fat, and at once a host of volunteer writers fell to feeding
the flames. The new ten-cent magazines provided the necessary vehicle
of publicity, and enterprising editors were soon increasing their
circulations with every issue. As it became evident how popular was the
chord that had been struck, more competent workmen joined themselves to
the group of journalists: novelists--a growing army of them--essayists,
historians, political scientists, philosophers, a host of heavy-armed
troops that moved forward in a frontal attack on the strongholds of the
new plutocracy. Few writers in the years between 1903 and 1917 escaped
being drawn into the movement--an incorrigible romantic perhaps, like
the young James Branch Cabell, or a cool patrician like Edith Wharton;
and with such popular novelists as Winston Churchill, Robert Herrick,
Ernest Poole, David Graham Phillips, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London
embellishing the rising liberalism with dramatic heroes and villains,
and dressing their salads with the wickedness of Big Business; with
such political leaders as Bob La Follette and Theodore Roosevelt and
Woodrow Wilson beating up the remotest villages for recruits; with such
scholars as Thorstein Veblen, Charles A. Beard, and John Dewey, and
such lawyers as Louis Brandeis, Frank P. Walsh, and Samuel Untermyer,
the movement gathered such momentum and quickened such a ferment as
had not been known before in the lands since the days of the Abolition
controversy. The mind and conscience of America were stirred to their
lowest sluggish stratum, and a democratic renaissance was all aglow on
the eastern horizon.
At the core it was a critical realistic movement that spread quietly
amongst intellectuals, but the nebulous tail of the comet blazed across
the sky for all to wonder at: and it was the tail rather than the core
that aroused the greatest immediate interest. Lincoln Steffens, Charles
Edward Russell, Ida Tarbell, Gustavus Myers, and Upton Sinclair were
read eagerly because they dealt with themes that many were interested
in--the political machine, watered stock, Standard Oil, the making of
great fortunes, and the like--and they invested their exposures with
the dramatic interest of a detective story. Up to 1910 it was largely
a muckraking movement--to borrow President Roosevelt’s picturesque
phrase; a time of brisk housecleaning that searched out old cobwebs
and disturbed the dust that lay thick on the antiquated furniture.
The Gilded Age had been slovenly and such a housecleaning was long
overdue. There was a vast amount of nosing about to discover bad
smells, and to sensitive noses the bad smells seemed to be everywhere.
Evidently some hidden cesspool was fouling American life, and as the
inquisitive plumbers tested the household drains they came upon the
source of infection--not one cesspool but many, under every city hall
and beneath every state capitol--dug secretly by politicians in the pay
of respectable business men. It was these cesspools that were poisoning
the national household, and there would be no health in America till
they were filled in and no others dug.
It was a dramatic discovery and when the corruption of American
politics was laid on the threshold of business--like a bastard on the
doorsteps of the father--a tremendous disturbance resulted. There was
a great fluttering and clamor amongst the bats and owls, an ominous
creaking of the machine as the wrenches were thrown into the well-oiled
wheels, and a fierce sullen anger at the hue and cry set up. To many
honest Americans the years between 1903 and 1910 were abusive and
scurrilous beyond decency, years when no man and no business, however
honorable, was safe from the pillory; when wholesale exposure had grown
profitable to sensation-mongers, and great reputations were lynched
by vigilantes and reputable corporations laid under indictment at the
bar of public opinion. Respectable citizens did not like to have their
goodly city held up to the world as “corrupt and contented”; they did
not like to have their municipal housekeeping brought into public
disrepute no matter how sluttish it might be. It was not pleasant for
members of great families to read a cynical history of the origins of
their fortunes, or for railway presidents seeking political favors to
find on the newsstand a realistic account of the bad scandals that had
smirched their roads. It was worse than unpleasant, it was hurtful to
business. And so quietly, and as speedily as could be done decently,
the movement was brought to a stop by pressure put on the magazines
that lent themselves to such harmful disclosures. Then followed a
campaign of education. Responding to judicious instruction, conducted
in the columns of the most respectable newspapers, the American public
was soon brought to understand that it was not the muck that was
harmful, but the indiscretion of those who commented in print on the
bad smells. It was reckoned a notable triumph for sober and patriotic
good sense.
So after a few years of amazing activity the muckraking movement came
to a stop. But not before it had done its work; not before the American
middle class had been indoctrinated in the elementary principles of
political realism and had rediscovered the social conscience lost
since the days of the Civil War. Many a totem had been thrown down by
the irreverent hands of the muckrakers, and many a fetish held up to
ridicule, and plutocracy in America would not recover its peace of
mind until at great cost the totems should be set up again and the
fetishes reanointed with the oil of sanctity. The substantial result
of the movement was the instruction it afforded in the close kinship
between business and politics--a lesson greatly needed by a people long
fed on romantic unrealities. It did not crystallize for the popular
mind in the broad principle of economic determinism; that remained
for certain of the intellectuals to apply to American experience.
But with its sordid object--service--it punished the flabby optimism
of the Gilded Age, with its object-lessons in business politics; it
revealed the hidden hand that was pulling the strings of the political
puppets; it tarnished the gilding that had been carefully laid on
our callous exploitation, and it brought under common suspicion the
captain of industry who had risen as a national hero from the muck of
individualism. It was a sharp guerilla attack on the sacred American
System, but behind the thin skirmish-line lay a volunteer army that was
making ready to deploy for a general engagement with plutocracy.
With the flood of light thrown upon the fundamental law by the
historians, the movement of liberalism passed quickly through
successive phases of thought. After the first startled surprise it
set about the necessary business of acquainting the American people
with its findings in the confident belief that a democratic electorate
would speedily democratize the instrument. Of this first stage the
late Professor J. Allen Smith’s _The Spirit of American Government_
(1907) was the most adequate expression, a work that greatly influenced
the program of the rising Progressive Party. But changes came swiftly
and within half a dozen years the movement had passed from political
programs to economic, concerned not so greatly with political democracy
as with economic democracy. Of this second phase Professor Beard’s
notable study, _An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution_ (1913),
was the greatest intellectual achievement. Underlying this significant
work was a philosophy of politics that set it sharply apart from
preceding studies--a philosophy that unsympathetic readers were quick
to attribute to Karl Marx, but that in reality derived from sources
far earlier and for Americans at least far more respectable. The
current conception of the political state as determined in its form
and activities by economic groups is no modern Marxian perversion of
political theory; it goes back to Aristotle, it underlay the thinking
of Harrington and Locke and the seventeenth-century English school,
it shaped the conclusions of Madison and Hamilton and John Adams, it
ran through all the discussions of the Constitutional Convention, and
it reappeared in the arguments of Webster and Calhoun. It was the
main-traveled road of political thought until a new highway was laid
out by French engineers, who, disliking the bog of economics, surveyed
another route by way of romantic equalitarianism. The logic of the
engineers was excellent, but the drift of politics is little influenced
by logic, and abstract equalitarianism proved to be poor material for
highway construction. In divorcing political theory from contact with
sobering reality it gave it over to a treacherous romanticism. In
seeking to avoid the bog of economics it ran into an arid desert.
To get back once more on the main-traveled road, to put away all
profitless romanticisms and turn realist, taking up again the method
of economic interpretation unused in America since the days of Webster
and Calhoun, became therefore the business of the second phase of
liberalism to which Professor Beard applied himself. The earlier
group of liberals were ill equipped to wage successful war against
plutocracy. Immersed in the traditional equalitarian philosophy, they
underestimated the strength of the enemies of democracy. They did
not realize what legions of Swiss Guards property can summon to its
defense. They were still romantic idealists tilting at windmills,
and it was to bring them to a sobering sense of reality that _The
Economic Interpretation of the Constitution_ was written. If property
is the master force in every society one cannot understand American
institutional development until one has come to understand the part
property played in shaping the fundamental law. Interpreted thus the
myths that had gathered about the Constitution fell away of themselves
and the document was revealed as English rather than French, the
judicious expression of substantial eighteenth-century realism that
accepted the property basis of political action, was skeptical of
romantic idealisms, and was more careful to protect title-deeds to
legal holdings than to claim unsurveyed principalities in Utopia. If
therefore liberalism were to accomplish any substantial results it
must approach its problems in the same realistic spirit, recognizing
the masterful ambitions of property, recruiting democratic forces to
overmaster the Swiss Guards, leveling the strongholds that property had
erected within the organic law, and taking care that no new strongholds
should rise. The problem confronting liberalism was the problem of the
subjection of property to social justice.
Yet interesting as was the muckraking tail of the comet, far more
significant was the core--the substantial body of knowledge gathered by
the scholars and flung into the scale of public opinion. The realities
of the American past had been covered deep with layers of patriotic
myths, provided in simpler days when the young Republic, suffering
from a natural inferiority complex, was building up a defense against
the acrid criticism of Tory Europe. Those myths had long since served
their purpose and had become a convenient refuge for the bats and owls
of the night; it was time to strip them away and apply to the past
objective standards of scholarship, and to interpret it in the light
of an adequate philosophy of history. To this work, so essential to
any intelligent understanding of the American experiment, a group of
historians and political scientists turned with competent skill, and
the solid results of their labor remained after the popular ferment
subsided, as a foundation for later liberals to build on.
The journalistic muckrakers had demonstrated that America was not in
fact the equalitarian democracy it professed to be, and the scholars
supplemented their work by tracing to its historical source the
weakness of the democratic principle in governmental practice. America
had never been a democracy for the sufficient reason that too many
handicaps had been imposed upon the majority will. The democratic
principle had been bound with withes like Samson and had become a
plaything for the Philistines. From the beginning--the scholars
discovered--democracy and property had been at bitter odds; the
struggle invaded the Constitutional Convention, it gave form to the
party alignment between Hamilton and Jefferson, Jackson and Clay, and
then during the slavery struggle, sinking underground like a lost
river, it nevertheless had determined party conflicts down to the
present. In this ceaseless conflict between the man and the dollar,
between democracy and property, the reasons for persistent triumph of
property were sought in the provisions of the organic law, and from
a critical study of the Constitution came a discovery that struck
home like a submarine torpedo--the discovery that the drift toward
plutocracy was not a drift away from the spirit of the Constitution,
but an inevitable unfolding from its premises; that instead of having
been conceived by the fathers as a democratic instrument, it had been
conceived in a spirit designedly hostile to democracy; that it was, in
fact, a carefully formulated expression of eighteenth-century property
consciousness, erected as a defense against the democratic spirit that
had got out of hand during the Revolution, and that the much-praised
system of checks and balances was designed and intended for no other
end than a check on the political power of the majority--a power
acutely feared by the property consciousness of the times.
It was a startling discovery that profoundly stirred the liberal
mind of the early years of the century; yet the really surprising
thing is that it should have come as a surprise. It is not easy to
understand today why since Civil War days intelligent Americans
should so strangely have confused the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution, and have come to accept them as complementary
statements of the democratic purpose of America. Their unlikeness is
unmistakable: the one a classical statement of French humanitarian
democracy, the other an organic law designed to safeguard the minority
under republican rule. The confusion must be charged in part to the
lawyers who had taken over the custodianship of the Constitution, and
in part to the florid romantic temper of the middle nineteenth century.
When the fierce slavery struggle fell into the past, whatever honest
realism had risen from the passions of the times was buried with the
dead issue. The militant attacks on the Constitution so common in
Abolitionist circles after 1835, and the criticism of the Declaration
that was a part of the southern argument, were both forgotten, and with
the Union reëstablished by force of arms, the idealistic cult of the
fundamental law entered on a second youth. In the blowsy Gilded Age
the old myths walked the land again, wrapped in battle-torn flags and
appealing to the blood shed on southern battlefields. It was not till
the advent of a generation unblinded by the passions of civil war that
the Constitution again was examined critically, and the earlier charge
of the Abolitionists that it was designed to serve property rather
than men, was heard once more. But this time with far greater weight
of evidence behind it. As the historians dug amongst the contemporary
records they came upon a mass of fact the Abolitionists had been
unaware of. The evidence was written so plainly, in such explicit and
incontrovertible words--not only in _Elliott’s Debates_, but in the
minutes of the several State Conventions, in contemporary letters
and memoirs, in newspapers and pamphlets and polite literature--that
it seemed incredible that honest men could have erred so greatly in
confusing the Constitution with the Declaration.
With the clarification of its philosophy the inflowing waters of
liberalism reached flood-tide; the movement would either recede or pass
over into radicalism. On the whole it followed the latter course,
and the years immediately preceding 1917 were years when American
intellectuals were immersing themselves in European collectivistic
philosophies--in Marxianism, Fabianism, Syndicalism, Guild Socialism.
New leaders were rising, philosophical analysts like Thorstein Veblen
who were mordant critics of American economics. The influence of
socialism was fast sweeping away the last shreds of political and
social romanticism that so long had confused American thinking. The
doctrine of economic determinism was spreading widely, and in the light
of that doctrine the deep significance of the industrial revolution
was revealing itself for the first time to thoughtful Americans. In
its reaction to industrialism America had reached the point Chartist
England had reached in the eighteen-forties and Marxian Germany in the
eighteen-seventies. That was before a mechanistic science had laid its
heavy discouragements on the drafters of democratic programs. Accepting
the principle of economic determinism, liberalism still clung to its
older democratic teleology, convinced that somehow economic determinism
would turn out to be a fairy godmother to the proletariat and that
from the imperious drift of industrial expansion must eventually issue
social justice. Armed with this faith liberalism threw itself into
the work of cleaning the Augean stables, and its reward came in the
achievements of President Wilson’s first administration.
Then the war intervened and the green fields shriveled in an afternoon.
With the cynicism that came with post-war days the democratic
liberalism of 1917 was thrown away like an empty whiskey-flask. Clever
young men began to make merry over democracy. It was preposterous, they
said, to concern oneself about social justice; nobody wants social
justice. The first want of every man, as John Adams remarked a hundred
years ago, is his dinner, and the second his girl. Out of the muck of
the war had come a great discovery--so it was reported--the discovery
that psychology as well as economics has its word to say on politics.
From the army intelligence tests the moron emerged as a singular
commentary on our American democracy, and with the discovery of the
moron the democratic principle was in for a slashing attack. Almost
overnight an army of enemies was marshaled against it. The eugenist
with his isolated germ theory flouted the perfectional psychology of
John Locke, with its emphasis on environment as the determining factor
in social evolution--a psychology on which the whole idealistic
interpretation was founded; the beardless philosopher discovered
Nietzsche and in his pages found the fit master of the moron--the
biological aristocrat who is the flower that every civilization
struggles to produce; the satirist discovered the flatulent reality
that is middle-class America and was eager to thrust his jibes at the
complacent denizens of the Valley of Democracy. Only the behaviorist,
with his insistence on the plasticity of the new-born child, offers
some shreds of comfort to the democrat; but he quickly takes them away
again with his simplification of conduct to imperious drives that
stamp men as primitive animals. If the mass--the raw materials of
democracy--never rises much above sex appeals and belly needs, surely
it is poor stuff to try to work up into an excellent civilization, and
the dreams of the social idealist who forecasts a glorious democratic
future are about as substantial as moonshine. It is a discouraging
essay. Yet it is perhaps conceivable that our current philosophy--the
brilliant coruscations of our younger intelligentsia--may indeed not
prove to be the last word in social philosophy. Perhaps--is this
_lèse-majesté_--when our youngest liberals have themselves come to
the armchair age they will be smiled at in turn by sons who are still
cleverer and who will find their wisdom as foolish as the wisdom of
1917 seems to them today. But that lies on the knees of the gods.
Footnotes
[812] Lecture notes.--_Publisher._
[813] See J. Allen Smith, _The Spirit of American Government_; W. A.
White, _The Old Order Changeth_.
[814] Representative books are: C. A. Beard, _An Economic
Interpretation of the Constitution_ (1913) and _The Economic Basis of
Politics_ (1922); Walter Lippmann, _Public Opinion_ (1922).
[815] See Bertrand Russell, _Proposed Roads to Freedom_ (1919); Richard
Roberts, _The Unfinished Programme of Democracy_ (1920).
[816] From the syllabus.--_Publisher._
[817] From the syllabus.--_Publisher._
[818] From the syllabus.--_Publisher._
[819] Lecture notes.--_Publisher._
[820] _Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub_, New York, 1920, p. 1.
[821] _The Financier_, New York, c. 1912, p. 250.
[822] _Ibid._, p. 409.
[823] _Ibid._, p. 479.
[824] _The Financier_, p. 432.
[825] _Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub_, p. 87.
[826] When this was written of course _The American Tragedy_, _A Book
about Myself_, Dreiser’s poems, _Moods Cadenced and Declaimed_, and his
further books of travel had not been published.--_Publisher._
[827] Randolph Bourne, _History of a Literary Radical_, p. 203.
[828] _The Financier_, p. 660.
[829] Stuart P. Sherman, _On Contemporary Literature_, New York, 1923,
p. 94. In the syllabus Professor Parrington says: “The most intelligent
estimates of Dreiser are in Randolph Bourne, _History of a Literary
Radical_; H. L. Mencken, _Prefaces_; and Carl Van Doren, _Contemporary
American Novelists_. All other commentators are stupid.”
[830] Published as Number Five of _University of Washington Chapbooks_,
1927.--_Publisher._
[831] The notes that follow are from the syllabus.--_Publisher._
[832] Cabell omitted, as there is a fuller discussion of him
given.--_Publisher._
[833] From the syllabus.--_Publisher._
[834] For a statement of the reaction of a young intellectual to the
war, see Randolph Bourne, _Untimely Papers_, 1919.
[835] For a criticism of Nicholson, see Randolph Bourne, _The History
of a Literary Radical_, p. 128.
[836] See Mr. Cabell’s criticism in _Beyond Life_, pp. 301-307.
[837] For a review see the _Nation_, March 19, 1924.
[838] Sinclair Lewis omitted, as fuller material has been
given.--_Publisher._
[839] From the third section in the syllabus, which deals with “A New
Romance.”--_Publisher._
[840] See Cabell’s review of _Messer Marco Polo_ in _Straws and
Prayer-Books_, pp. 52-59. The writer’s full name is Brian Oswald
Donn-Byrne.
[841] For a striking characterization of Hergesheimer, see _The
Bookman_, May, 1922 For an appreciation, see Cabell, _Straws and
Prayer-Books_, pp. 195-221.