NEW STYLE
1. EMERGENT TYPES
_Ellen Glasgow_
Fiction, no less than life, has its broad flats and shallows from which
distinction emerges only now and then, when some superior veracity or
beauty or energy lifts a novelist or a novel above the mortal average.
Consider, for example, the work of Ellen Glasgow. In her representations
of contemporary Virginia she long stood with the local colorists,
practising with more grace than strength what has come to seem an older
style; in her heroic records of the Virginia of the Civil War and
Reconstruction she frequently fell into the orthodox monotone of the
historical romancers. By virtue of two noticeable qualities, however,
she has in her later books emerged from the level established by the
majority and has ranged herself with writers who seem newer and fresher
than her early models.
One quality is her sense for the texture of life, which imparts to _The
Miller of Old Church_ a thickness of atmosphere decisively above that of
most local color novels. She has admitted into her story various classes
of society which traditional Virginia fiction regularly neglects; she
has enriched her narrative with fresh and sweet descriptions of the soft
Virginia landscape; she has bound her plot together with the best of all
ligatures--intelligence. If certain of her characters--Abel Revercomb,
Reuben Merryweather, Betsey Bottom--seem at times a little too much like
certain of Thomas Hardy's rustics, still the resemblance is hardly
greater than that which actually exists between parts of rural Virginia
and rural Wessex; Miss Glasgow is at least as faithful to her scene as
if she had devoted herself solely to a chronicle of rich planters, poor
whites, and obeisant freedmen. Without any important sacrifice of
reality she has enlarged her material by lifting it toward the plane of
the pastoral and rounding it out with poetic abundance instead of
whittling it down with provincial shrewdness or weakening it with
village sentimentalism.
That she does not lack shrewdness appears from the evidences in _Life
and Gabriella_ and still more in _Virginia_ of her second distinctive
quality--a critical attitude toward the conventions of her locality. In
one Miss Glasgow exhibits a modern Virginia woman breaking her medieval
shell in New York; in the other she examines the subsequent career of a
typical Southern heroine launched into life with no equipment but
loveliness and innocence. Loveliness, Virginia finds, may fade and
innocence may become a nuisance if wisdom happens to be needed. She
fails to understand and eventually to "hold" her husband; she gives
herself so completely to her children that in the end she has nothing
left for herself and is tragically dispensable to them. _Virginia_ is at
once the most thorough and the most pathetic picture extant of the
American woman as Victorianism conceived and shaped and misfitted her.
But the book is much more than a tract for feminism to point to: it is
unexpectedly full and civilized, packed with observation, tinctured with
omen and irony.
_William Allen White_
If Miss Glasgow emerges considerably--though not immensely--above the
deadly levels of fiction, so does William Allen White. What lifts him is
his hearty, bubbling energy. He has the courage of all his convictions,
of all his sentiments, of all his laughter, of all his tears. He has a
multitude of right instincts and sound feelings, and he habitually
reverts to them in the intervals between his stricter hours of thought.
Such stricter hours he is far from lacking. They address themselves
especially to the task of showing why and how corruption works in
politics and of tracing those effects of private greed which ruin souls
and torture societies. The hero-villains of _A Certain Rich Man_ and of
_In the Heart of a Fool_ tread all the paths of selfishness and come to
hard ends in punishment for the offense of counting the head higher than
the heart.
These books being crowded with quite obvious doctrine it is fair to say
of them that they directly inculcate the life of simple human virtues
and services and accuse the grosser American standards of success. They
do this important thing within the limits of moralism, progressivism,
and optimism. John Barclay, the rich man, when his evil course is run,
hastily, unconvincingly divests himself of his spoils and loses his life
in an heroic accident. Thomas Van Dorn, the fool, finally arrives at
desolation because there has been no God in his heart, but he has no
more instructive background for a contrast to folly than the spectacle
of a nation entering the World War with what is here regarded as a vast
purgation, a magnificent assertion of the divinity in mankind. How such
a conclusion withers in the light and fire of time! Right instincts and
sound feelings are not, after all, enough for a novelist: somewhere in
his work there must appear an intelligence undiverted by even the
kindliest intentions; much as he must be of his world, he must be also
in some degree outside it as well as above it.
Yet to be of his world with such knowledge as Mr. White has of Kansas
gives him one kind of distinction if not a different kind. His two
longer narratives sweep epically down from the days of settlement to the
time when the frontier order disappeared under the pressure of change.
He has a moving erudition in the history and characters and motives and
humors of the small inland town; no one has ever known more about the
outward customs and behaviors of an American state than Mr. White. His
shorter stories not less than his novels are racy with actualities: he
has caught the dialect of his time and place with an ear that is
singularly exact; he has cut the costumes of his men and villages so
that hardly a wrinkle shows. In particular he understands the pathos of
boyhood, seen not so much, however, through the serious eyes of boys
themselves as through the eyes of reminiscent men reflecting upon young
joys and griefs that will shortly be left behind and upon little pomps
that can never come to anything. _The Court of Boyville_ is now
hilariously comic, now tenderly elegiac. None of Mr. White's
contemporaries has quite his power to shift from bursts of laughter to
sudden, agreeable tears. That flood of moods and words upon which he can
be swept beyond the full control of his analytical faculties is but a
symptom of the energy which, when he turns to narrative, sweeps him and
his readers out of pedestrian gaits.
_Ernest Poole_
By comparison the more critical Ernest Poole suffers from a deficiency
of both verve and humor. He began his career with the happy discovery of
a picturesque, untrodden neighborhood of New York City in _The Harbor_;
he consolidated his reputation with the thoughtful study of a troubled
father of troubling daughters in _His Family_; since then he has sounded
no new chords, strumming on his instrument as if magic had deserted him.
Perhaps it was not quite magic by which his work originally won its
hearing. There is something a little unmagical, a little mechanical,
about the fancy which personifies the harbor of New York and makes it
recur and reverberate throughout that first novel. The matter was
significant, but the manner seems only at times spontaneous and at times
only industrious. Intelligence, ideas, observations, perception--these
hold up well in _The Harbor_; it is poetry that flags, though poetry is
invoked to carry out the pattern. Over humor Mr. Poole has but moderate
power, as he has perhaps but moderate interest in it: his characters are
themselves either fiercely or sadly serious, and they are seen with an
eye which has not quite the forgiveness of laughter or the pity of
disillusion. Roger Gale in _His Family_ broods, mystified, over what
seems to him the drift of his daughters into the furious currents of a
new age. Yet they fall into three categories--with some American
reservations--of mother, nun, courtesan, about which there is nothing
new; and all the tragic elements of the book are almost equally ancient.
Without the spacious vision which sees eternities in hours _His Family_
contents itself too much with being a document upon a particular hour of
history. It has more kindliness than criticism.
Mr. Poole, one hates to have to say, is frequently rather less than
serious: he is earnest; at moments he is hardly better than merely
solemn. Nevertheless, _The Harbor_ and _His Family_--_His Family_ easily
the better of the two--are works of honest art and excellent documents
upon a generation. Mr. Poole feels the earth reeling beneath the
desperate feet of men; he sees the millions who are hopelessly
bewildered; he hears the cries of rage and fear coming from those who
foretell chaos; he catches the exaltation of those who imagine that
after so long a shadow the sunshine of freedom and justice will shortly
break upon them. With many generous expectations he waits for the
revolution which shall begin the healing of the world's wounds.
Meanwhile he paints the dissolving lineaments of the time in colors
which his own softness keeps from being very stern or very deep but
which are gentle and appealing.
_Henry B. Fuller_
The peculiar strength and the peculiar weakness of Henry B. Fuller lie
in his faithful habit of being a dilettante. A generation ago, when the
aesthetic poets and critics were in bloom, Mr. Fuller in _The Chevalier
of Pensieri-Vani_ and _The Chatelaine of La Trinité_ played with
sentimental pilgrimages in Italy or the Alps, packing his narratives
with the most affectionate kind of archaeology and yet forever
scrutinizing them with a Yankee smile. A little later, when Howells's
followers had become more numerous, Mr. Fuller joined them with minute,
accurate, amused representations of Chicago in _The Cliff-Dwellers_ and
_With the Procession_. Then, as if bored with longer flights, he settled
himself to writing sharp-eyed stories concerning the life of art as
conducted in Chicago--_Under the Skylights_--and of Americans traveling
in Europe--_From the Other Side, Waldo Trench and Others_. After _Spoon
River Anthology_ Mr. Fuller took such hints from its method as he
needed in the pungent dramatic sketches of _Lines Long and Short_. One
of these sketches, called _Postponement_, has autobiography, it may be
guessed, in its ironic, wistful record of a Midwestern American who all
his life longed and planned to live in Europe but who found himself
ready to gratify his desire only in the dread summer of 1914, when peace
departed from the earth to stay away, he saw, at least as long as he
could hope to live. There is the note of intimate experience, if not of
autobiography, in these lucid words spoken about the hero of _On the
Stairs_: "he wanted to be an artist and give himself out; he wanted to
be a gentleman and hold himself in. An entangling, ruinous paradox."
Fate, if not fatalism, has kept Mr. Fuller, this dreamer about old
lands, always resident in the noisiest city of the newest land and
always less, it seems, than thoroughly expressive. Had there been more
passion in his constitution he might, perhaps, have either detached
himself from Chicago altogether or submerged himself in it to a point of
reconciliation. But passion is precisely what Mr. Fuller seems to lack
or to be chary of. He dwells above the furies. As one consequence his
books, interesting as every one of them is, suffer from the absence of
emphasis. His utterance comes in the tone of an intelligent drawl.
Spiritually in exile, he lives somewhat unconcerned with the drama of
existence surrounding him, as if his gaze were farther off. Yet though
deficiency in passion has made Mr. Fuller an amateur, it has allowed him
the longest tether in the exercise of a free, penetrating intelligence.
He is not lightly jostled out of his equilibrium by petty irritations
or swept off his feet by those torrents of ready emotion which sweep
through popular fiction by their own momentum. Whenever, in _A Daughter
of the Middle Border_, Hamlin Garland brings Mr. Fuller into his story,
there is communicated the sense of a vivid intellect somehow keeping its
counsel and yet throwing off rays of suggestion and illumination.
Without much question it is by his critical faculties that Mr. Fuller
excels. He has the poetic energy to construct, but less frequently to
create. Such endowments invite him to the composition of memoirs. He
has, indeed, in _On the Stairs_, produced the memoirs, in the form of a
novel, of a Chicagoan who could never adapt himself to his native
habitat and who gradually sees the control of life slipping out of his
hands to those of other, more potent, more decisive, less divided men.
But suppose Mr. Fuller were to surrender the ironic veil of fiction
behind which he has preferred to hide his own spiritual adventures!
Suppose he were avowedly to write the history of the arts and letters in
Chicago! Suppose he were, rather more confidingly, to trace the career
of an actual, attentive dilettante in his thunderous town!
_Mary Austin_
Criticism perceives in Mary Austin the certain signs of a power which,
for reasons not entirely clear, has as yet failed to express itself
completely in forms of art. She herself prefers less to be judged by any
of her numerous books than to be regarded as a figure laboring somewhat
anonymously toward the development of a national culture founded at all
points on national realities. Behind this preference is a personal
experience which must be taken into account in any analysis of Mrs.
Austin's work. Born in Illinois, she went at twenty to California, to
live between the Sierra Nevada and the Mohave Desert. There she was soon
spiritually acclimated to the wilderness, studied among the Indians the
modes of aboriginal life, and in time came to bear the relation almost
of a prophetess to the people among whom she lived. Her first book, _The
Land of Little Rain_, interpreted the desert chiefly as landscape. Since
then she has, it may be said, employed the desert as a measure of life,
constantly bringing from it a sense for the primal springs of existence
into all her comment upon human affairs. _The Man Jesus_ examines the
career of a desert-dweller who preached a desert-wisdom to a confused
world. Her play _The Arrow Maker_ exhibits the behavior and fortunes of
a desert-seeress among her own people. _Love and the Soul-Maker_
anatomizes love as a primal force struggling with and through
civilization. From Paiute and Shoshone medicine men, the only poets Mrs.
Austin knew during her formative years, she acquired that grounding in
basic rhythms which led her to write free verse years before it became
the fashion in sophisticated circles and persuaded her that American
poetry cannot afford to overlook the experiments and successes of the
first American poets in fitting expression to the actual conditions of
the continent.
It has been of course a regular tradition among novelists in the United
States to weigh the "settlements" in a balance and to represent them as
lacking the hardy virtues of the backwoods. Mrs. Austin goes beyond this
naïve process. Whether she deals with the actual frontier--as in
_Isidro_ or _Lost Borders_ or _The Ford_--or with more crowded, more
complex regions--as in _The Woman of Genius_ or _26 Jayne Street_--she
keeps her particular frontier in mind not as an entity or a dogma but as
a symbol of the sources of human life and society. She creates, it
seems, out of depths of reflection and out of something even deeper than
reflection. She has observed the unconscious instincts of the individual
and the long memories of the race. The effect upon her novels of such
methods has been to widen their sympathies and to warm and lift their
style; it has also been to render them sometimes defective in structure
and sometimes obscure in meaning. If they are not glib, neither are they
always clean-cut or direct. Along with her generous intelligence she has
a good deal of the stubborn wilfulness of genius, and she has never
achieved a quite satisfactory fusion of the two qualities. She wears
something like the sibyl's robes and speaks with something like the
sibyl's strong accents, but the cool, hard discipline of the artist or
of the exact scholar only occasionally serves her. Much of her
significance lies in her promise. Faithful to her original vision, she
has moved steadily onward, growing, writing no book like its
predecessor, applying her wisdom continually to new knowledge, leaving
behind her a rich detritus which she will perhaps be willing to consider
detritus if it helps to nourish subsequent generations.
_Immigrants_
The newer stocks and neighborhoods in the United States have their
fictive records as well as the longer established ones, and there is
growing up a class of immigrant books which amounts almost to a separate
department of American literature. From Denmark, Germany,
Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, Russia, Rumania, Syria, Italy have come
passionate pilgrims who have set down, mostly in plain narratives, the
chronicles of their migration. As the first Americans contended with
nature and the savages, so these late arrivals contend with men and a
civilization no less hostile toward them; their writings continue, in a
way, the earliest American tradition of a concern with the risks and
contrivances by which pioneers cut their paths. Even when the immigrants
write fiction they tend to choose the same materials and thus to fall
into formulas, which are the more observable since the writers are the
survivors in the struggle and naturally tell about the successes rather
than the failures in the process of Americanization.
Not all the stocks, of course, are equally interested in fiction or
gifted at it: the Russian Jews have the most notable novels to their
credit. Though these are generally composed by men not born in this
country, in Yiddish, and so belong to the history of that most
international of literatures, certain of them, having been translated,
belong obviously as well as actually to the common treasure of the
nation. Shalom Aleichem's _Jewish Children_ and Leon Kobrin's _A
Lithuanian Village_ surely belong, though their scenes are laid in
Europe; as do Sholom Asch's vivid, moving novels _Mottke the
Vagabond_--concerned with the underworld of Poland--and _Uncle
Moses_--concerned with the New York Ghetto--the recent translations of
which are slowly bringing to a wider American public the evidence that a
really eminent novelist has hitherto been partly hidden by his alien
tongue.
There is no question whatever that the work of Abraham Cahan, Yiddish
scholar, journalist, novelist, belongs to the American nation. As far
back as the year in which Stephen Crane stirred many sensibilities with
his _Maggie_, the story of an Irish slum in Manhattan, Mr. Cahan
produced in _Yekl_ a book of similar and practically equal merit
concerning a Jewish slum in the same borough. But it and his later books
_The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories_ and _The White Terror and
the Red_ have been overwhelmed by novels by more familiar men dealing
with more familiar communities. The same has been true even of his
masterpiece, the most important of all immigrant novels, _The Rise of
David Levinsky_. It, too, records the making of an American, originally
a reader of Talmud in a Russian village and eventually the principal
figure in the cloak and suit trade in America. But it does more than
trace the career of Levinsky through his personal adventures: it traces
the evolution of a great industry and represents the transplanted
Russian Jews with affectionate exactness in all their modes of work and
play and love--another conquest of a larger Canaan. Here are fused
American hope and Russian honesty. At the end David, with all his New
World wealth, lacks the peace he might have had but for his sacrifice of
Old World integrity and faith. And yet the novel is very quiet in its
polemic. Its hero has gained in power; he is no dummy to hang maxims on.
Moving through a varied scene, gradually shedding the outward qualities
of his race, he remains always an individual, gnawed at by love in the
midst of his ambitions, subject to frailties which test his strength.
The fact that Mr. Cahan wrote _David Levinsky_ not in his mother-tongue
but in the language of his adopted country may be taken as a sign that
American literature no less than the American population is being
enlarged by the influx of fresh materials and methods. The methods of
the Yiddish writers are, as might be expected, those of Russian fiction
generally, though in this they were anticipated by the critical
arguments of Howells and Henry James and are rivaled by the majority of
the naturalistic novelists. Their materials, as might not be expected,
have a sort of primitive power by comparison with which the orthodox
native materials of fiction seem often pale and dusty. The older
Americans, settled into smug routines, lack the vitality, the industry
of the newcomers. They are less direct and more provincial; they are
bundled up in gentilities and petty habits; they hide behind
old-fashioned reticences which soften the drama of their lives. With the
newer stocks an ancient process begins again. Their affairs are
conducted on the plane of desperate subsistence. Struggling to survive
at all, they cry out in the language of hunger and death; almost naked
in the struggle, they speak nakedly about livelihood and birth and
death. Sooner or later the immigrants must be perceived to have added
precious elements of passion and candor to American fiction.
2. THE REVOLT FROM THE VILLAGE
_Edgar Lee Masters_
The newest style in American fiction dates from the appearance, in 1915,
of _Spoon River Anthology_, though it required five years for the
influence of that book to pass thoroughly over from poetry to prose. For
nearly half a century native literature had been faithful to the cult of
the village, celebrating its delicate merits with sentimental affection
and with unwearied interest digging into odd corners of the country for
persons and incidents illustrative of the essential goodness and heroism
which, so the doctrine ran, lie beneath unexciting surfaces. Certain
critical dispositions, aware of agrarian discontent or given to a
preference for cities, might now and then lay disrespectful hands upon
the life of the farm; but even these generally hesitated to touch the
village, sacred since Goldsmith in spite of Crabbe, sacred since
Washington Irving in spite of E.W. Howe.
The village seemed too cosy a microcosm to be disturbed. There it lay in
the mind's eye, neat, compact, organized, traditional: the white church
with tapering spire, the sober schoolhouse, the smithy of the ringing
anvil, the corner grocery, the cluster of friendly houses; the venerable
parson, the wise physician, the canny squire, the grasping landlord
softened or outwitted in the end; the village belle, gossip, atheist,
idiot; jovial fathers, gentle mothers, merry children; cool parlors,
shining kitchens, spacious barns, lavish gardens, fragrant summer dawns,
and comfortable winter evenings. These were elements not to be discarded
lightly, even by those who perceived that time was discarding many of
them as the industrial revolution went on planting ugly factories
alongside the prettiest brooks, bringing in droves of aliens who used
unfamiliar tongues and customs, and fouling the atmosphere with smoke
and gasoline. Mr. Howe in _The Story of a Country Town_ had long ago
made it cynically clear--to the few who read him--that villages which
prided themselves upon their pioneer energy might in fact be stagnant
backwaters or dusty centers of futility, where existence went round and
round while elsewhere the broad current moved away from them. Mark Twain
in _The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg_ had more recently put it bitterly
on record that villages which prided themselves upon their simple
virtues might from lack of temptation have become a hospitable soil for
meanness and falsehood, merely waiting for the proper seed. And Clarence
Darrow in his elegiac _Farmington_ had insisted that one village at
least had been the seat of as much restless longing as of simple bliss.
_Spoon River Anthology_ in its different dialect did little more than to
confirm these mordant, neglected testimonies.
That Mr. Masters was not neglected must be explained in part, of course,
by his different dialect. The Greek anthology had suggested to him
something which was, he said, "if less than verse, yet more than prose";
and he went, with the step of genius, beyond any "formal resuscitation
of the Greek epigrams, ironical and tender, satirical and sympathetic,
as casual experiments in unrelated themes," to an "epic rendition of
modern life" which suggests the novel in its largest aspects. An
admirable scheme occurred to him: he would imagine a graveyard such as
every American village has and would equip it with epitaphs of a
ruthless veracity such as no village ever saw put into words. The effect
was as if all the few honest epitaphs in the world had suddenly come
together in one place and sent up a shout of revelation.
Conventional readers had the thrill of being shocked and of finding an
opportunity to defend the customary reticences; ironical readers had the
delight of coming upon a host of witnesses to the contrast which irony
perpetually observes between appearance and reality; readers militant
for the "truth" discovered an occasion to demand that pious fictions
should be done away with and the naked facts exposed to the sanative
glare of noon. And all these readers, most of them unconsciously no
doubt, shared the fearful joy of sitting down at an almost incomparably
abundant feast of scandal. Where now were the mild decencies of
Tiverton, of Old Chester, of Friendship Village? The roofs and walls of
Spoon River were gone and the passers-by saw into every bedroom; the
closets were open and all the skeletons rattled undenied; brains and
breasts had unlocked themselves and set their most private treasures out
for the most public gaze.
It was the scandal and not the poetry of _Spoon River_, criticism may
suspect, which particularly spread its fame. Mr. Masters used an
especial candor in affairs of sex, an instinct which, secretive
everywhere, has rarely ever been so much so as in the American villages
of fiction, where love ordinarily exhibited itself in none but the
chastest phases, as if it knew no savage vagaries, transgressed no
ordinances, shook no souls out of the approved routines. Reaction from
too much sweet drove Mr. Masters naturally to too much sour; sex in
Spoon River slinks and festers, as if it were an instinct which had not
been schooled--however imperfectly--by thousands of years of human
society to some modification of its rages and some civil direction of
its restless power. But here, as with the other aspects of behavior in
his village, he showed himself impatient, indeed violent, toward all
subterfuges. There is filth, he said in effect, behind whited
sepulchers; drag it into the light and such illusions will no longer
trick the uninstructed into paying honor where no honor appertains and
will no longer beckon the deluded to an imitation of careers which are
actually unworthy.
Spoon River has not even the outward comeliness which the village of
tradition should possess: it is slack and shabby. Nor is its decay
chronicled in any mood of tender pathos. What strikes its chronicler
most is the general demoralization of the town. Except for a few saints
and poets, whom he acclaims with a lyric ardor, the population is sunk
in greed and hypocrisy and--as if this were actually the worst of
all--complacent apathy. Spiritually it dwindles and rots; externally it
clings to a pitiless decorum which veils its faults and almost makes it
overlook them, so great has the breach come to be between its practices
and its professions. Again and again its poet goes back to the heroic
founders of Spoon River, back to the days which nurtured Lincoln, whose
shadow lies mighty, beneficent, too often unheeded, over the degenerate
sons and daughters of a smaller day; and from an older, robuster
integrity Mr. Masters takes a standard by which he morosely measures the
purposelessness and furtiveness and supineness and dulness of the
village which has forgotten its true ancestors.
Anger like his springs from a poetic elevation of spirit; toward the end
_Spoon River Anthology_ rises to a mystical vision of human life by
comparison with which the scavenging epitaphs of the first half seem,
though witty, yet insolent and trivial. It is perhaps not necessary to
point out that the numerous poets and novelists who have learned a
lesson from the book have learned it less powerfully from the difficult
later pages than from those in which the text is easiest.
Mr. Masters himself has not always remembered the harder and better
lesson. During a half dozen years he has published more than a half
dozen books which have all inherited the credit of the _Anthology_ but
which all betray the turbulent, nervous habit of experimentation which
makes up a large share of his literary character. There comes to mind
the figure of a blind-folded Apollo, eager and lusty, who continually
runs forward on the trail of poetry and truth but who, because of his
blindfoldedness, only now and then strikes the central track. Five of
Mr. Masters's later books are collections of miscellaneous verse; during
the fruitful year 1920 he undertook two longer flights of fiction. In
_Mitch Miller_ he attempted in prose to write a new _Tom Sawyer_ for the
Spoon River district; in _Domesday Book_ he applied the method of _The
Ring and the Book_ to the material of Starved Rock. The impulse of the
first must have been much the same as Mark Twain's: a desire to catch in
a stouter net than memory itself the recollections of boyhood which
haunt disillusioned men. But as Mr. Masters is immensely less boylike
than Mark Twain, elegy and argument thrust themselves into the chronicle
of Mitch and Skeet, with an occasional tincture of a fierce hatred felt
toward the politics and theology of Spoon River. A story of boyhood,
that lithe, muscular age, cannot carry such a burden of doctrine. The
narrative is tangled in a snarl of moods. Its movement is often thick,
its wings often gummed and heavy.
The same qualities may be noted in _Domesday Book_. Its scheme and
machinery are promising: a philosophical coroner, holding his inquest
over the body of a girl found mysteriously dead, undertakes to trace the
mystery not only to its immediate cause but up to its primary source and
out to its remotest consequences. At times the tale means to be an
allegory of America during the troubled, roiled, destroying years of the
war; at times it means to be a "census spiritual" of American society.
Elenor Murray, in her birth and love and sufferings and desperate end,
is represented as pure nature, "essential genius," acting out its fated
processes in a world of futile or corrupting inhibitions. But Mr.
Masters has less skill at portraying the sheer genius of an individual
than at arraigning the inhibitions of the individual's society. When he
steps down from his watch-tower of irony he can hate as no other
American poet does. His hates, however, do not always pass into poetry;
they too frequently remain hard, sullen masses of animosity not fused
with his narrative but standing out from it and adding an unmistakable
personal rhythm to the rough beat of his verse. So, too, do his heaps of
turgid learning and his scientific speculations often remain undigested.
A good many of his characters are cut to fit the narrative plan, not
chosen from reality to make up the narrative. The total effect is often
crude and heavy; and yet beneath these uncompleted surfaces are the
sinews of enormous power: a greedy gusto for life, a wide imaginative
experience, tumultuous uprushes; of emotion and expression, an acute if
undisciplined intelligence, great masses of the veritable stuff of
existence out of which great novels are made.
_Sherwood Anderson_
_Spoon River Anthology_ has called forth a smaller number of deliberate
imitations than might have been expected, and even they have utilized
its method with a difference. Sherwood Anderson, for example, in
_Winesburg, Ohio_ speaks in accents and rhythms obstinately his own,
though his book is, in effect, the _Anthology_ "transprosed." Instead of
inventing Winesburg immediately after Spoon River became famous he began
his career more regularly, with the novels _Windy McPherson's Son_ and
_Marching Men_, in which he employed what has become the formula of
revolt for recent naturalism. In both stories a superior youth, of
rebellious energy and somewhat inarticulate ambition, detaches himself
in disgust from his native village and makes his way to the city in
search of that wealth which is the only thing the village has ever
taught him to desire though it is unable to gratify his desires itself;
and in both the youth, turned man, finds himself sickening with his
prize in his hands and looks about him for some clue to the meaning of
the mad world in which he has succeeded without satisfaction. Sam
McPherson, after a futile excursion through the proletariat in search of
the peace which he has heard accompanies honest toil, settles down to
the task of bringing up some children he has adopted and thus of forcing
himself "back into the ranks of life." Beaut McGregor, refusing a
handsome future at the bar, sets out to organize the workers of Chicago
into marching men who drill in the streets and squares at night that
they may be prepared for action if only they can find some sort of goal
to march upon.
These novels ache with the sense of a dumb confusion in America; with a
consciousness "of how men, coming out of Europe and given millions of
square miles of black fertile land mines and forests, have failed in the
challenge given them by fate and have produced out of the stately order
of nature only the sordid disorder of man." Out of this ache of
confusion comes no lucidity. Sam McPherson is not sure but that he will
find parenthood as petty as business was brutal; Beaut McGregor sets his
men to marching and their orderly step resounds through the final
chapters of his career as here recorded, but no one knows what will come
of it--they advance and wheel and retreat as blindly as any horde of
peasants bound for a war about which they do not know the causes, in a
distant country of which they have never heard the name. Mr. Anderson
worked in his first books as if he were assembling documents on the eve
of revolution. Village peace and stability have departed; ancient
customs break or fade; the leaven of change stirs the lump.
From such arguments he turned aside to follow Mr. Masters into verse
with _Mid-American Chants_ and into scandal with _Winesburg, Ohio_. But
touching scandal with beauty as his predecessor touched it with irony,
Mr. Anderson constantly transmutes it. The young man who here sets out
to make his fortune has not greatly hated Winesburg, and the imminence
of his departure throws a vaguely golden mist over the village, which is
seen in considerable measure through his generous if inexperienced eyes.
A newspaper reporter, he directs his principal curiosity towards items
of life outside the commonplace and thus offers Mr. Anderson the
occasion to explore the moral and spiritual hinterlands of men and women
who outwardly walk paths strict enough.
If the life of the tribe is unadventurous, he seems to say, there is
still the individual, who, perhaps all the more because of the rigid
decorums forced upon him, may adventure with secret desires through
pathless space. Only, the pressure of too many inhibitions can distort
human spirits into grotesque forms. The inhabitants of Winesburg tend
toward the grotesque, now this organ of the soul enlarged beyond all
symmetry, now that wasted away in a desperate disuse. They see visions
which in some wider world might become wholesome realities or might be
dispelled by the light but which in Winesburg must lurk about till they
master and madden with the strength which the darkness gives them.
Religion, deprived in Winesburg of poetry, fritters its time away over
Pharisaic ordinances or evaporates in cloudy dreams; sex, deprived of
spontaneity, settles into fleshly habit or tortures its victim with the
malice of a thwarted devil; heroism of deed or thought either withers
into melancholy inaction or else protects itself with a sullen or
ridiculous bravado.
Yet even among such pitiful surroundings Mr. Anderson walks tenderly. He
honors youth, he feels beauty, he understands virtue, he trusts wisdom,
when he comes upon them. He broods over his creatures with affection,
though he makes no luxury of illusions. Much as he has detached himself
from the cult of the village, he still cherishes the memories of some
specific Winesburg. Much as he has detached himself from the hazy
national optimism of an elder style in American thinking, he still
cherishes a confidence in particular persons. _Winesburg, Ohio_ springs
from the more intimate regions of his mind and is consequently more
humane and less doctrinaire than his earlier novels. It has a similar
superiority over the book he wrote for 1920, _Poor White_, which returns
to the device of a bewildered strong man rising from a dull obscurity,
successful but unsatisfied. At the same time _Poor White_ proceeds from
an imagination which had been warmed with the creation of Winesburg and
its people and is richer, fuller, deeper than the angular sagas of
McPherson and McGregor. It does not yet show that Mr. Anderson can
construct a large plot or that his vision comes with a steady gleam; it
shows, rather, that he is still fumbling in the confusion of current
life to get hold of something true and simple and to make it clear.
Perhaps he tried in _Poor White_ to manipulate a larger bulk than he is
yet ready for. Perhaps because he was aware of that he has worked in his
latest book, _The Triumph of the Egg_, with a variety of brief themes
and has excelled even _Winesburg_ in both poetry and truth. At least it
is certain that he keeps on advancing in his art. Although life has not
hardened for him, and he sees it still flowing or whirling, he steadily
sharpens his outlines and perfects the fierce intensity of his style.
Will his wisdom ever catch up with his passion and his observation? In
each successive book he has revealed himself as still hot with the fever
of his day's experiences. He has yet to show that he can go through the
confusion of new spiritual adventures and then set them down,
remembering, in tranquillity.
_E.W. Howe_
With _The Anthology of Another Town_ E.W. Howe, obviously on the
suggestion of Spoon River, returned to the caustic analysis of American
village life which he may be said to have inaugurated in _The Story of a
Country Town_ almost forty years before. Then he had been young enough
to feel it necessary to invent romantic embroideries for his grim tale,
somewhat as Emily Brontë under somewhat similar circumstances has done
for _Wuthering Heights_--the novel which Mr. Howe's story most
resembles. But all his inventions were stern, full of a powerful
dissatisfaction, merciless toward the idyllic versions of country life
which sweetened the decade of the eighties. Even among the pioneers whom
Mr. Masters idealizes there were, according to the older man, slackness
and shabbiness, and at the first opportunity to take their ease in the
new world they had won from nature they sank down, too nerveless for
passion or violence, into the easy vices: idleness, whining, gossip,
drunkenness, sodden inutility. Against such qualities Mr. Howe has from
the first proceeded with the doctrines of another Franklin, but of a
Franklin without whimsical persuasions or elegant graces. Having
apparently come to the conclusion that he was a failure as a novelist
because he made no great stir with his experiments in that trade, he
confined himself to more or less orthodox journalism for a generation,
and then, retiring, founded his organ of "indignation and
information"--_E.W. Howe's Monthly_--and began to pour forth the stream
of aphoristic honesty which makes him easily first among the rural
sages.
In no sense, of course, does he assume the cosmopolitan and
international attitude which most of the naturalists assume:
"Provincialism," he curtly says, "is the best thing in the world." Nor
is he in any of the casual senses a radical: "In everything in which man
is interested, the world knows what is best for him.... Millions of men
have lived millions of years, and tried everything." Neither has he any
patience with speculation for its own sake: "There are no mysteries.
Where does the wind come from? It doesn't matter: we know the habits of
wind after it arrives." As to politics: "The people are always worsted
in an election." As to altruism: "The long and the short of it is,
whoever catches the fool first is entitled to shear him." As to love:
"We cannot permit love to run riot; we must build fences around it, as
we do around pigs." As to money: "In theory, it is not respectable to be
rich. In fact, poverty is a disgrace." As to literature: "Poets are
prophets whose prophesying never comes true." As to prudence: "Trying to
live a spiritual life in a material world is the greatest folly I know
anything about." As to persistent hopefulness: "Pessimism is always
nearer the truth than optimism."
When the author of such aphorisms undertook to write another anthology
about another town he naturally avoided the mystical elevation of Spoon
River as well as its verse; he used the irony of a disillusioned man and
the directness of a bullet. His scheme was not to assemble epitaphs for
the dead of the village but to tell crisp anecdotes of the living. He
had no iniquities in the human order to assail, since he believes that
the order is just and that it rarely hurts any one who does not deserve
to be hurt by reason of some avoidable imbecility. He made no specialty
of scandal; he did not inquire curiously into the byways of sex; he let
pathology alone. He appears in the book to be--as he is in the flesh--a
wise old man letting his memory run through the town and recalling bits
of decent, illuminating gossip. He is willing to tell a fantastic yarn
with a dry face or to tuck a tragedy in a sentence; to repeat some
village legend in his own low tones or to puncture some village bubble
with a cynical inquiry.
Yet for all his acceptance and tolerance of the village he is far from
helping to continue the sentimental traditions concerning it. The common
sense which he considers the basis of all philosophy--"If it isn't
common sense, it isn't philosophy"--he has the gift of expounding in a
language which is piercingly individual. It strips his village of
trivial local color and reduces it to the simplest terms--making it out
a more or less fortuitous congregation of human beings of whom some work
and some play, some behave themselves and some do not, some consequently
prosper and some fail, some are happy and some are miserable. His
village is not dainty, like a poem, for the reason that he believes no
village ever was; at least he has never seen one like that.
Downrightness like his is death to mere pretty notions about tribes and
towns quite as truly as are the positive indictments brought against
them by Mr. Masters and Mr. Anderson. If Mr. Howe is less vivid than
those two, because he distrusts passion and poetry, he is also quieter
and surer. "I am not an Agnostic; I _know_.... I have lived a long time,
and my real problems have always been simple."
_Sinclair Lewis_
_Spoon River Anthology_ was a collection of poems, _Winesburg, Ohio_ was
a collection of short stories, _The Anthology of Another Town_ was a
collection of anecdotes. It remained for a novel in the customary form,
Sinclair Lewis's _Main Street_, to bring to hundreds of thousands the
protest against the village which these books brought to thousands.
Mr. Lewis, like Mr. Masters, clearly has revenges to take upon the
narrow community in which he grew up, nourished, no doubt, on the
complacency native to such neighborhoods and yet increasingly resentful.
Less poetical than his predecessor, the younger novelist went further in
both his specifications and his generalizations. Instead of brooding
closely, ironically, profoundly, under the black wings of the thought of
death, Mr. Lewis satisfies himself with a slashing portrait of Gopher
Prairie done to the life with the fingers of ridicule. He has
photographic gifts of accuracy; he has all the arts of mimicry; he has a
tireless gusto in his pursuit of the tedious commonplace. Each item of
his evidence is convincing, and the accumulation is irresistible. No
other American small town has been drawn with such exactness of detail
in any other American novel. Various elements of scandal crop out here
and there, but the principal accusation which Mr. Lewis brings against
his village--and indeed against all villages--is that of being dull. "It
is contentment ... the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful
of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as
the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is
slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dulness made God."
Not dulness itself so much as dulness militant and prospering arouses
this satirist. The whole world, he believes, is being leveled by the
march of machines into one monotonous uniformity, before which all the
individual colors and graces and prides and habits flee--or would flee
if there were any asylum still uninvaded. Thus Mr. Lewis's voice
continues the opposition which Wordsworth raised to the coming of a
railroad into his paradise among the Lakes and which Ruskin and Matthew
Arnold and William Morris raised to the standardization of life which
went on during their century. The American voice, however, speaks of
American conditions. The villages of the Middle West, it asseverates,
have been conquered and converted by the legions of mediocrity, and now,
grown rich and vain, are setting out to carry the dingy banner, led by
the booster's calliope and the evangelist's bass drum, farther than it
has ever gone before--to make provincialism imperialistic; so that all
the native and instinctive virtues, freedoms, powers must rally in their
own defense.
Mr. Lewis hates such dulness--the village virus--as the saints hate sin.
Indeed it is with a sort of new Puritanism that he and his
contemporaries wage against the dull a war something like that which
certain of their elders once waged against the bad. Only a satiric anger
helped out by the sense of being on crusade could have sustained the
author of _Main Street_ through the laborious compilation of those
brilliant details which illustrate the complacency of Gopher Prairie and
which seem less brilliant than laborious to bystanders not particularly
concerned in his crusade. The question, of course, arises whether the
ancient war upon stupidity is a better literary cause to fight in than
the equally ancient war upon sin. Both narrow themselves to doctrinal
contentions, apparently forgetting for the moment that either being
virtuous or being intelligent is but a half--or thereabouts--of
existence, and that the two qualities are hopelessly intertwined. There
are thoughtful novelists who, as they do not condemn lapses of virtue
too harshly, so also do not too harshly condemn deficiencies of
intelligence, feeling that the common humanity of men and women is
enough to make them fit for fiction. Mr. Lewis must be thought of as
sitting in the seat of the scornful, with the satirists rather than with
the poets, must be seen to recall the earlier, vexed, sardonic _Spoon
River_ rather than the later, calmer, loftier.
Satire and moralism, however, have large rights in the domain of
literature. Had Mr. Lewis lacked remarkable gifts he could never have
written a book which got its vast popularity by assailing the populace.
The reception of _Main Street_ is a memorable episode in literary
history. Thousands doubtless read it merely to quarrel with it; other
thousands to find out what all the world was talking about; still other
thousands to rejoice in a satire which they thought to be at the
expense of stupid people never once identified with themselves; but that
thousands and hundreds of thousands read it is proof enough that
complacency was not absolutely victorious and that the war was on.
_Zona Gale_
Before _Main Street_ Sinclair Lewis, though the author of such promising
novels as _Our Mr. Wrenn_ and _The Job_, had been forced by the neglect
of his more serious work to earn a living with the smarter set among
American novelists, writing bright, colloquial, amusing chatter for
popular magazines. If it seems a notable achievement for a temper like
Mr. Masters's to have helped pave the way to popularity for Mr. Lewis,
it seems yet more notable to have performed a similar service for Zona
Gale, who for something like a decade before _Spoon River Anthology_ had
had a comfortable standing among the sweeter set. She was the inventor
of Friendship Village, one of the sweetest of all the villages from Miss
Mitford and Mrs. Gaskell down. Friendship lay ostensibly in the Middle
West, but it actually stood--if one may be pardoned an appropriate
metaphor--upon the confectionery shelf of the fiction shop, preserved in
a thick syrup and set up where a tender light could strike across it at
all hours. In story after story Miss Gale varied the same device: that
of showing how childlike children are, how sisterly are sisters, how
brotherly are brothers, how motherly are mothers, how fatherly are
fathers, how grandmotherly and grandfatherly are grandmothers and
grandfathers, and how loverly are all true lovers of whatever age, sex,
color, or condition. But beneath the human kindness which had permitted
Miss Gale to fall into this technique lay the sinews of a very subtle
intelligence; and she needed only the encouragement of a changing public
taste to be able to escape from her sugary preoccupations. Though the
action of _Miss Lulu Bett_ takes place in a different village, called
Warbleton, it might as well have been in Friendship--in Friendship seen
during a mood when its creator had grown weary of the eternal
saccharine. Now and then, she realized, some spirit even in Friendship
must come to hate all those idyllic posturings; now and then in some
narrow bosom there must flash up the fires of youth and revolution. It
is so with Lulu Bett, dim drudge in the house of her silly sister and of
her sister's pompous husband: a breath of life catches at her and she
follows it on a pitiful adventure which is all she has enough vitality
to achieve but which is nevertheless real and vivid in a waste of
dulness.
Here was an occasion to arraign Warbleton as Mr. Lewis was then
arraigning Gopher Prairie; Miss Gale, instead of heaping up a multitude
of indictments, categorized and docketed, followed the path of
indirection which--by a paradoxical axiom of art--is a shorter cut than
the highway of exposition or anathema. Her story is as spare as the
virgin frame of Lulu Bett; her style is staccato in its lucid brevity,
like Lulu's infrequent speeches; her eloquence is not that of a torrent
of words and images but that of comic or ironic or tragic meaning packed
in a syllable, a gesture, a dumb silence. Miss Gale riddles the tedious
affectations of the Deacon household almost without a word of comment;
none the less she exhibits them under a withering light. The daughter,
she says, "was as primitive as pollen"--and biology rushes in to explain
Di's blind philanderings. "In the conversations of Dwight and Ina," it
is said of the husband and wife, "you saw the historical home forming in
clots in the fluid wash of the community"--and anthropology holds the
candle. Grandma Bett is, for the moment, the symbol of decrepit age, as
Lulu is the symbol of bullied spinsterhood. Yet in the midst of
applications so universal the American village is not forgotten, little
as it is alluded to. If the Friendships are sweet and dainty, so are
they--whether called Warbleton or something less satiric--dull and
petty, and they fashion their Deacons no less than their Pelleases and
Ettares. Thus hinting, Miss Gale, in her clear, flutelike way, joins the
chorus in which others play upon noisier instruments.
_Floyd Dell_
The year which saw the appearance of _Main Street_ and _Miss Lulu Bett_
saw also that of _The Age of Innocence_, Edith Wharton's acid
delineation of the village of Manhattan in the genteel seventies, given
over to the "innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the
heart against experience"; saw Mary Borden's _The Romantic Woman_, with
its cosmopolitan amusement at the village of Iroquois, otherwise
Chicago; and saw Floyd Dell's _Moon-Calf_, which, standing on the other
side of controversy, lacks not only the disposition to sentimentalize
the village but even the disposition to ridicule it.
Mr. Dell's emancipation is the fruit of a revolutionary detachment from
village standards which is too complete to have left traces of any such
rupture as is implied in almost every paragraph of _Main Street_.
_Moon-Calf_, recounting the adventures of a young poet in certain river
counties and towns and villages of Illinois, touches without heat upon
the spiritual and intellectual limitations of those neighborhoods. It
settles no old scores. It relates an unconventional career without
conventional reproaches and also without conventional heroics. Felix Fay
dreams and blunders and suffers but he goes on growing like a tree,
pushing his head up through one level of development after another until
he stands above the minor annoyances of his immaturity and looks out
over a broader world. He has a soul which is naturally socialist and yet
he never loses himself in proclamations or statistics. He can be fresh
and hopeful and yet learn from the remarkable old men he encounters. He
lives and loves with an instinctive freedom and yet he holds himself
equally secure from devastating extravagances and devastating
repressions. Mr. Dell writes as if he had steadier nerves than most of
the naturalists; as if he regarded their war upon the village as an
ancient brawl which may now be assumed to have been as much settled as
it ever will be. At least, it seems scarcely worth wrangling over. The
spirit seeking to release itself from trivial conditions behaves most
intelligently when it discreetly takes them into account and concerns
itself with them only enough to escape entanglements. Mr. Dell leaves it
to the moralists and the satirists to whip offenders, while he himself
goes on to construct some monument of beauty upon the ground which
moralism and satire are laboring to clear.
_Moon-Calf_ is very beautiful. Felix has a poetic gift sufficient to
warm the record with fine verses and delicate susceptibilities upon
which his adventures leave exquisite impressions. Even when his
rebellion is at its highest pitch he wastes little energy in hating and
so avoids the astringency and perturbation of a state of mind which is
always perilous. To say Felix Fay is more or less to mean Floyd Dell,
for the narrative is obviously autobiographic at many points. But were
it entirely invention it would testify none the less to the affection
with which this novelist feels his world and the lucidity with which he
represents it. He has a genuine zest for human life, enjoying it, even
when it invites mirth or anger, because of the form and color and
movement which he perceives everywhere and particularly because of the
solid texture of reality of which he is admirably aware. Hatred closes
the eyes to a multitude of charms. If Mr. Dell suffered from it he
could never have enriched his fabric as he has with so many
circumstances chosen with an unargumentative hand; he could never have
extracted so much drama out of dusty people. Had he been a
sentimentalist he might have fallen into the soft processes of the local
color school when it came to portraying the various communities through
which Felix takes his way. Instead, the story is everywhere stiffened
with intelligence. Felix has no adventures more exciting than his
successive discoveries of new ideas. Even the women he loves fit into
the pattern of his career as a thinking being, and he emerges, however
moved, with a surer grasp of his expanding universe. That grasp would
lack much of its confidence if Mr. Dell employed a style less masterly.
As it is, he writes with a candid lucidity which everywhere lets in the
light and with a grace which rounds off the edges that mark the pamphlet
but not the work of art. He can be at once downright and graceful, at
once sincere and impersonal, at once revolutionary and restrained, at
once impassioned and reflective, at once enamored of truth and
scrupulous for beauty.
When Felix Fay had escaped his original villages and had taken to the
wider pursuit of freedom in Chicago there was another chapter of his
career to be recorded; and that Mr. Dell sets down in _The Briary-Bush_,
wherein Felix finds that the trail of freedom ends, for him, in madness
and loneliness. From the first, though this moon-calf has steadily
blundered toward detachment from the common order, some aching instinct
has left him hungry for solid ground to stand on. The conflict troubles
him. He can succeed in his immediate occupations but he cannot
understand his powers or feel confident in his future. His world whirls
round and round, menaces, eludes, threatens to vanish altogether. Thrown
by dim forces into the arms of Rose-Ann, who seeks freedom no less
restlessly than he, he is married, and the two begin their passionate
experiment at a union which shall have no bonds but their common
determination to be free. Charming slaves of liberty! Felix is at heart
a Puritan and cannot take the world lightly, as it comes. His blunders
bruise and wound him. He punishes himself for all his vagaries. Rose-Ann
is not a Puritan, but she too has instincts that will not surrender, any
more than Felix's, to the doctrines which they both profess: jealousy
sleeps within her, and potential motherhood. She and Felix come to feel
that they have shirked life by their deliberate childlessness and that
life has deserted them. Yet separation proves unendurable. So they
resume marriage, vowing "not to be afraid of life or of any of the
beautiful things life may bring." Among these, of course, are to be
children and a house.
Is this merely a return to their villages, merely domestic
sentimentalism in a lovely guise? Mr. Dell has gone a little too deep to
incur the full suspicion. He has got very near to the biological
foundations of two lives, where, for the moment, he rests his case.
There is more to come, however, in this spiritual history, whether
Felix Fay knows it or not. Let the house be built and the children be
born, and Felix and Rose-Ann, though citizens and parents, will still be
individuals and will still have to find out whether these complicated
threads of loyalty last better than the simple threads which broke.
Felix, in discovering the lure of stability, has not necessarily
completed the circle of his life. Freedom may allure him again.
_The Briary-Bush_, less varied than _Moon-Calf_, is decidedly
profounder. It hovers over the dark waters of the unconscious on perhaps
the surest wings an American novel has ever used. Though it has probed
difficult natures and knows them thoroughly it does not flaunt its
knowledge but brings it in only when it can throw some revealing light
upon the outward perplexities of the lovers. Thus it gives depth and
timbre to the story, and yet allows the characters to seem actual
persons actually walking the world. At the same time, Mr. Dell does not
possess a too vivid sense of externality. In both his novels all facts
come through the mist of Felix's habitual confusion, and in that mist
they lose dramatic emphasis; muted, they are not able to break up the
agreeable monotone in which the narrative is delivered. But underneath
these surfaces, seen so poetically, there is a substantial bulk of human
life, immemorial folkways powerfully contending with the new rebellion
of reason.
_F. Scott Fitzgerald_
_Domesday Book_, _Poor White_, _The Anthology of Another Town_, _Main
Street_, _Miss Lulu Bett_, _The Age of Innocence_, _The Romantic Woman_,
and _Moon-Calf_ would make 1920 remarkable even if that year had not
brought forth other novels of equal rank; if it had not brought forth
James Branch Cabell's richly symbolical romance _Figures of Earth_ and
Upton Sinclair's bitter indictment _100%_. And though most of these seem
somber, there came along with them another novel in which were gaiety
and high spirits and the fires of youth.
F. Scott Fitzgerald in _This Side of Paradise_ also had broken with the
village. He wrote of his gilded boys and girls as if average decorum
existed only to be shocked. But he made the curious discovery that
undergraduates could have brains and still be interesting; that they
need not give their lives entirely to games and adolescent politics;
that they may have heard of Oscar Wilde as well as of Rudyard Kipling
and of Rupert Brooke no less than of Alfred Noyes. Mr. Fitzgerald had
indeed his element of scandal to tantalize the majority, who debated
whether or not the rising generation could be as promiscuous in its
behavior as he made out. It is the brains in the book, however, not the
scandal, which finally count. His restless generation sparkles with
inquiry and challenge. When its elders have let the world fall into
chaos, why, youth questions, should it trust their counsels any longer?
Mirth and wine and love are more pleasant than that hollow wisdom, and
they may be quite as solid.
_This Side of Paradise_ comes to no conclusion; it ends in weariness and
smoke, though at last Amory believes he has found himself in the midst
of a wilderness of uncertainties. Yet how vivid a document the book is
upon a whirling time, and how beguiling an entertainment! The narrative
flares up now into delightful verse and now into glittering comic
dialogue. It shifts from passion to farce, from satire to lustrous
beauty, from impudent knowingness to pathetic youthful humility. It is
both alive and lively. Few things more significantly illustrate the
moving tide of which the revolt from the village is a symptom than the
presence of such unrest as this among these bright barbarians. The
traditions which once might have governed them no longer hold. They
break the patterns one by one and follow their wild desires. And as they
play among the ruins of the old, they reason randomly about the new,
laughing.
_Dorothy Canfield_
If Floyd Dell seems in _The Briary-Bush_ to hint at the human necessity
to turn back by and by from freedom, Dorothy Canfield in _The Brimming
Cup_ pretty clearly argues for that necessity. Doubtless it is to go too
far to claim, as certain of her critics do, that she had made a
counter-attack upon the assailants of the village and the established
order, but it is sure that she gave comfort to many spirits disturbed
by the radical outbursts of 1920. Already in _The Squirrel Cage_ and
_The Bent Twig_ she had shown an affectionate knowledge of the ways of
households in small communities; and in _Hillsboro People_ she had added
another hardy, kindly neighborhood to the American array of villages in
fiction. _The Brimming Cup_ sounded a deeper note than any she had yet
struck. Suppose, the novel says, there were a woman who had been trained
in the wide world but was now living in a distant village; suppose she
had heard and felt the tumult of the age and had begun to question the
reality of her contentment; suppose, to make the conflict as dramatic as
possible, she should find herself tempted by a new love to give up the
settled companionship of her husband and the heavy burden of her
children to seek joy in a thrilling passion.
Here Dorothy Canfield had an admirable theme and she rose to it with
power, but she permitted herself so easy a solution that her argument
stumbles lamentably. The lover who disrupts the warm circle of Marise's
life is after all only a selfish bounder, a mere villain; stirred as she
is by the promises he holds out of rapture and of luxury, she would be
simply foolish not to comprehend, as in the end she does, that she must
lose far more than she could gain by the exchange she contemplates.
Surely this is no argument in favor of loyalty as against love: it is
only a defense of loyalty, which does not need it, as against a fleeting
instability; and so it is hardly half as significant as it might have
been had the conflict been squarely met, great love contending with
great loyalty. Yet while the novel thus falls short of what it might
have undertaken it has numerous excellences. It is eloquent and
passionate and, very often, wise. Rarely have a mother's relations with
her children been so subtly represented; rarely have the manners of a
New England township been more convincingly portrayed. The setting glows
among its green hills and valleys, its snow and flowers. There are minor
characters that stand up vividly in the memory, like persons known face
to face. The atmosphere is at once tense with desire and spacious with
understanding. Though the materials come from an old tradition they have
been heated with the fires of the scrutinizing mind which burn beneath
the newer novelists.
_1921_
That memorable year of fiction which saw so many superior books produced
saw them successful beyond any reasonable expectation; and it is
scarcely to be wondered at that the year following--with which this
chronicle does not undertake to deal--should have responded to such
encouragement. If Dorothy Canfield challenged the tendency, Booth
Tarkington saw it and ventured _Alice Adams_. Sherwood Anderson in _The
Triumph of the Egg_ and Floyd Dell in _The Briary-Bush_ proceeded to
other triumphs. Half a dozen competent novelists followed naturalism
into the "exposure" of small towns or cramped lives: particularly C.
Kay Scott with the hard, crisp _Blind Mice_ and Charles G. Norris, rival
of his brother Frank Norris in veracity if not in fire, with _Brass_.
John Dos Passos in _Three Soldiers_, the most controverted novel of the
year, dealt brilliantly with the unheroic aspects of the American
Expeditionary Force. Evelyn Scott in _The Narrow House_ and Ben Hecht in
_Erik Dorn_ attempted, as Waldo Frank had already done in _The Dark
Mother_ and as some others now did less notably, to find a more elastic,
a more impressionistic technique, breaking up the "gray paragraph" and
quickening the tempo of their narratives. At the same time romance once
more showed its perennial face, suggesting that the future does not
belong to naturalism entirely. Donn Byrne in _Messer Marco Polo_ played
in a bright Gaelic way with the story of Marco Polo and his quest for
Golden Bells, the daughter of Kubla Khan. Robert Nathan wrote, in
_Autumn_, an all but perfect native idyl, grounded well enough in local
color, as suggestive of the soil as an old farmers' almanac, and yet
touched with the universal fingers of the pastoral. If American fiction
cannot long escape the village, at least here is a village of a sort
hardly thinkable before the revolt began. No matter what a flood of
angry truth _Spoon River Anthology_ let in, beauty survives. Many waters
cannot quench beauty. What truth extinguishes is the weaker flames.