Kitabı oku: «A History of American Literature», sayfa 30

In 1879, 1880, and 1882 three men, the first of whom is still producing, set out on long careers of popularity. They were George W. Cable (1844- ), Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908), and F. Marion Crawford (1854–1909). Mr. Cable’s contribution has been the interpretation of the elusive and fascinating character of the New Orleans creole. Cable was bred in the river port when the old part of the city was less like the decaying heart of a mushroom than it is to-day. He grew up in an understanding of the courtly, high-spirited gentry of this exotic people, not studying either the people or their traditions for the sake of writing them up. He felt the beauty, but no less the futility, of their life. He was in no hurry to write for publication, but when he did so his fame was soon made. His subsequent departure from the South and his settling in New England seemed to many critics to be an abandonment of the richest field that life had to offer him. It was said for years, until it became one of the literary commonplaces, that Mr. Cable would never again rise to the level of “Old Creole Days” (1879), “The Grandissimes” (1880), or “Madame Delphine” (1881). The fourteen volumes of the next third of a century seemed to fulfill this dreary prophecy. Yet all the time the South was the home of his imagination, and with 1918 he gave the lie to all his Jeremiahs. The “Lovers of Louisiana” has quite as fine a touch as the works of nearly forty years ago. Mr. Cable sees the old charm in this life of an echoing past and the same fatuousness. At this distance into the twentieth century he leads his old characters and their children by new paths into the future, but he presents the graces of their obsolescent life in the familiar narrative style of his early successes – a style as fleeting yet as distinctive as the aroma of old lace.

Joel Chandler Harris, like George W. Cable, did his work in presenting the life of a vanishing race – the antebellum negro. He finished off his formal education, which ended when he was twelve, with the schooling of the printing shop, and passed from this into journalistic work with a succession of papers, of which the Atlanta Constitution is best known. Boy life on the plantation gave him his material in the folklore of the negro, and a chance bit of substituting gave him his very casual start as the creator of “Uncle Remus.” Northern readers were quick to recognize that Harris had given a habitation and a name to the narrative stuff that folklorists had already begun to collect and collate. The material goes back to the farthest sources of human tradition, but “Uncle Remus” was a new story-teller with a gift amounting to little short of genius. So his stories have the double charm of recording the lore of the negro and of revealing his humor, his transparent deceitfulness, his love of parade, his superstition, his basic religious feeling, and his pathos. Harris seemed to draw his material from a bottomless spring. Starting with “Uncle Remus: his Songs and Sayings” in 1881, Harris produced six other volumes in the next ten years and brought the total to fourteen in folk stories alone before his death in 1908. As the aptest of criticisms on his own work, one of his admirers has well quoted Harris’s comment on a book of Mark Twain: “It is history, it is romance, it is life. Here we behold a human character stripped of all tiresome details; we see people growing and living; we laugh at their humor, share their griefs, and, in the midst of it all, behold, we are taught the lesson of honesty, justice and mercy.”

The fluent romance of Marion Crawford is of a different and a lower order. He was a sort of professional cosmopolitan, – American by birth, educated largely abroad, widely traveled, and resident for most of his maturity on the Bay of Naples. He could turn off romances of Persia, of Constantinople, of Arabia, of medieval Venice, of Rome, and of England with about equal success. He had no great artistic purpose, admitting complacently that he was not great enough to be a poet or clever enough to be a successful playwright. He had no ethical purpose. He had not even a high ideal of craftsmanship, putting out eight volumes in 1903 and 1904 alone. He deserves mention as a prolific and self-respecting entertainer who converted his knowledge of the world into a salable commodity and established a large market for his superficial romances.

With the turn of the century – almost two decades after the débuts of Cable, Harris, and Crawford – a new interest began to spread from the collegians to the reading public as a whole, the same influences which were producing as leaders in the scholastic field Von Holst, Channing, McMaster, Hart, Jameson, and McLaughlin – masters of American history – extending to the people at large. In 1897 appeared Weir Mitchell’s “Hugh Wynne.” In the spring of 1898 came the war with Spain. In 1899 Ford’s “Janice Meredith” and Churchill’s “Richard Carvel” were published; in 1900, Mary Johnston’s “To Have and to Hold”; and in 1901 Churchill’s “The Crisis” – four novels which by the end of the latter year had reached a combined sale of 1,200,000 copies. For a little while the vogue of the historical romance passed all recent precedent. The natural zest for stories of olden days was reënforced by the revival of national feeling, and the popular authors of the moment reaped a golden harvest from the public, whom they at once charmed and instructed.

In the meanwhile, however, the describers and critics of contemporary American life were by no means on the wane. In the shifting currents of fiction various types of realism have come to the surface and are conspicuous in the tide. They all fall under the definition formulated by Mr. Perry: the sort of fiction that “does not shrink from the commonplace or from the unpleasant in its effort to depict things as they are and life as it is”; but within this definition they may be separated into two main classes. The first is the type that begins and ends with portrayal of human life, deals with the individual, and aims only to please. The second is written with the intent of pronouncing a criticism on the ways of men as they live together, presents its characters against a social and institutional background, and aims to influence the opinions of its readers. The difference between the two is, of course, the difference between the earlier and the later novels of Mr. Howells. In his later studies Mr. Howells is always dealing unaggressively but searchingly with the problem of economic justice, but this is only one of three broad fields. All modern problem and purpose novels are devoted, simply or complexly, to the market – property; the altar – religion; and the hearthstone – domestic life. This classification, which is useful only as long as it is employed cautiously for a general guide, leads to a cross-survey of recent fiction by kinds rather than by individual authors.

The number of more or less successful portrayers of provincial types in American fiction defies even enumeration. The most effective have, however, been unsatisfied with depicting the mere idiosyncrasies of a region heavily propped by dialect and have gone on to the interpretation of life as it might express itself anywhere under similar conditions. Thus the “Old Chester” of Mrs. Margaret Deland (1857-) is a study of isolated conservatisms thrown into relief by the wise sanity of Dr. Lavendar. Old Chester, we are told, is in Pennsylvania. It might be in any state or country where narrow respectability could intrench itself. It is an American Cranford. In the “Old Chester Tales” (1898) “The Promises of Dorothea” involve her utterly respectable elopement with Mr. King, whose worst offense in the eyes of her guardian maiden aunts is that he has lived abroad for many years. The implied departure from Old Chester customs is sufficient condemnation. “Good for the Soul” culminates with the doctor’s sensible advice to Elizabeth Day, who, at the end of twelve years of happy marriage, is oppressed by the memory of a Bohemian girlhood of which her husband is ignorant. “Suppose,” said the doctor, “I hadn’t found her a good woman, should I have told her to hold her tongue?” “The Child’s Mother” is the story of an unregenerate whose baby Dr. Lavendar keeps away from her by a process we should call blackmail if it were not practiced by a saint. Wide and varied as her output is, Mrs. Deland has nowhere shown her artistry more finely than in the two Dr. Lavendar volumes.

The comments of Edith Wharton (1862-) on American life are from the cosmopolitan point of view and present a series of pictures of the American woman which for harshness of uncharity are difficult to parallel. As a matter of fact America is so vast and varied that there is no national type of woman. Mrs. Wharton’s women are representative of one stratum just as Christy’s pictorial girls are. They are the product of indulgence which makes them hard, capricious, and completely selfish. Lily Bart of “The House of Mirth” (1905) begins high in the social scale, compromises reluctantly with moneyed ambition, and in one instance after another defeats herself by delay and equivocation in a declining series of “affairs.” More approachable than irreproachable, she suffers from the social beclouding of her reputation and, in the end, as a consequence of her low standards but her lack of shamelessness she succumbs to the circumstances that created her and arrives at a miserable death. Undine Spragg, in “The Custom of the Country” (1913), first married and divorced in a Western town is then brought to New York, introduced into society and “made” by her good looks and her brazen ambition. She wrecks the life of her second husband, a refined gentleman, and then as a result of much foreign residence marries a Frenchman of family. From him she runs away, finally to remarry Moffatt, who, throughout the story, has been her familiar spirit, subtly revealing his intimacy of feeling, and increasing his hold upon her as he rises in the money world. The title gives the cue to the story as a whole and to its several parts. By nature Undine is coarse-grained, showy, and selfish; by upbringing she becomes incorrigible. Her first and last husband is one of her own kind – sufficiently so that he is capable of resuming with her after her streaky, intermediate career. The second is broken on her overweening selfishness; the third, by virtue of his ancient family tradition, is able to save himself though not to mold or modify her. At the end, with Moffatt and all his immense wealth, she is still confronted by “the custom of the country.” Because of her divorces “she could never be an ambassador’s wife; and as she advanced to welcome her first guest she said to herself that it was the one part she was really made for.” This is the Wharton formula: none of her women really triumphs. Lily Bart’s downfall is one with her death. She had breathed the stifling atmosphere from her city childhood; what seemed to save Undine was the initial vigor of her Western youth, but even she could not successfully defy the ways of the world.

Hamlin Garland (1860-) in 1891 achieved with his “Main-Traveled Roads” as quickly earned a reputation as Cable and Harris had done with their first volumes. The son of a sturdy Western pioneer, he had passed a boyhood of incessant toil before breaking away to earn his own schooling, which culminated with several years of self-directed study in Boston. A vacation return in 1887 to Wisconsin, Dakota, and Iowa revealed to him the story-stuff of his early life, and during the next two years he wrote the realistic studies which won him his first recognition. In them, he explained later, he tried to embody the stern truth. “Though conditions have changed somewhat since that time, yet for the hired man and the renter farm life in the West is still a stern round of drudgery. My pages present it – not as the summer boarder or the young lady novelist sees it – but as the working farmer endures it.” To the reader of Mr. Garland’s work as a whole it is evident that the richest part of his life was over with the writing of this book and “A Spoil of Office” (1892) and “Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly” (1895). With the adoption of city life his interests became diffuse and miscellaneous, as his writing did also. The almost startling strength of “A Son of the Middle Border” (1918) reënforces this conviction, for this late piece of autobiography is the story of the author’s first thirty-three years and owes its fine power to the fact that in composing it Mr. Garland renewed his youth like the eagle’s. What he propounded in his booklet of essays, “Crumbling Idols” (1894), he illustrated in his stories up to that time. In them he made his best contribution to American literature, except for this recent reminiscent volume. In almost every quarter of the country similar expositions of American life were multiplied and to such an extent that Mrs. Deland, Mrs. Wharton, and Mr. Garland are chosen simply as illustrations of an output which would require volumes for full treatment.

In the field of realism which is concerned with a criticism of institutional life, Mrs. Deland wrote a memorable book in “John Ward, Preacher” (1888). This was the same year in which Mrs. Humphry Ward’s “Robert Elsmere” appeared. Both were indexes to the religious unrest of the whole Victorian period, – an unrest apparent in America since the rise of the Unitarians and the activities of the Transcendentalists, and recorded in such novels as Mrs. Stowe’s “Oldtown Folks” and Bayard Taylor’s “Hannah Thurston,” as well as in the underlying currents of Holmes’s Breakfast-Table series. The explicit story of John Ward is the tragic history of his love and marriage with Helen Jaffrey. The implicit story is based on the insufficiency of religious dogma detached from life. Mrs. Deland’s convictions resulted later in the genuine strength of her best single character, Dr. Lavendar, and in the subordinate religious motif of “The Iron Woman” (1910) (see p. 307). In recent years the narrative treatment of the problem to attract widest attention has been Churchill’s “The Inside of the Cup” (1913), a story which one is tempted to believe gained its reading more from its author’s reputation and the prevailing interest in the problem than from its artistic excellence. Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Ward wrote out of long experience in life; Mr. Churchill seems rather to have felt the need of introducing this theme into his many-volumed exposition of America and to have read up on the literature of the subject with the same thoroughness that characterized his preparation for more strictly historical stories.

The novels of economic life are far more numerous and more urgent in tone. One of the earliest was John Hay’s “The Breadwinners” (1883). It is significant that this appeared anonymously, the talented poet and politician preferring not to be known as a story-teller. The labor unrest of the early 80’s disturbed him. Desire for education seemed to result unfortunately, and with a very clear impatience Mr. Hay expounded the hardships of wealth in the midst of a labor uprising. To go to the root of the difficulty did not seem to occur to him. Shortly after this early industrial novel Mr. Howells was to attack the problem in a broader and deeper way (see pp. 418–421). And while Howells was still making his successive approaches a whole succession of younger men joined the assault. With many of them there was no such vital experience as their senior had passed through; they were rather writing as journalists and utilizing the novel, sometimes clumsily and often feverishly. Few have done work which could at all compare with that of Frank Norris (1870–1902). His interrupted trilogy – an epic of the wheat – fulfilled the promise of his early efforts, “Vendover and the Brute” and “McTeague,” and made his early death the occasion of a deep loss. Of these three novels “The Octopus” (1901) forms the story of a crop of wheat and deals with the war between the wheat-grower and the railroad trust; the second, “The Pit” (1903), is a story of the middleman; the third, “The Wolf” (never written), was to have dealt with the consumption in Europe. Norris’s aspiration was no less than that of his own character Presley, the poet. “He strove for the diapason, the great song which should embrace in itself a whole epoch, a complete era, the voice of an entire people…” With a great imaginative grasp he conceived of the wheat as an enormous, primitive force.

The Wheat that had killed Cressler, that had ingulfed Jadwin’s fortune and all but unseated reason itself; the Wheat that had intervened like a great torrent to drag her husband from her side and drown him in the roaring vortices of the Pit, had passed on, resistless, along its ordered and predetermined courses from West to East, like a vast Titanic flood, had passed, leaving Death and Ruin in its wake, but bearing Life and Prosperity to the crowded cities and centres of Europe.

The number and the temper of stories written without Norris’s breadth of vision or skill brought down on many of their authors the epithet of “muck-raker” in common with the sensational writers of magazine exposures. Among the saner and, consequently, more effective purpose novels the writings of Winston Churchill and Brand Whitlock have helped to offset the shrill cries of Upton Sinclair and Jack London.

The American novels which center about sex and the family have passed through rapid changes during the twentieth century. In 1902 Mr. Bliss Perry, discussing tendencies of American novelists in his “A Study of Prose Fiction,” declared that the American novel was free from equivocal morality, that “people who want the sex-novel, and want it prepared with any literary skill, have to import it from across the water,” and concluded with the confident assertion that while American fiction “may not be national, and may not be great, it will have at least the negative virtue of being clean.” A few pages later in the same chapter he made an observing comment of which he failed to see the implication when he noted that conversation between writers of fiction was likely to center about men like Turgenieff, and Tolstoi, Flaubert and Daudet, Björnson and D’Annunzio. The influence of these men was soon to be felt, both directly and through the medium of Englishmen from the generation of Hardy to that of Wells and Galsworthy. And within a dozen years it had extended so far that the National Institute of Arts and Letters went on record in warning and protest against the morbid insistency of an increasing number of younger writers. This wave was a symptom not only of a literary influence but, more deeply, of the world-wide attempt to re-estimate the rights and duties and privileges of womankind. There are few subjects on which people of recent years have done more thinking, and few on which they have arrived at less certain conclusions. With the collapse of the great “conspiracy of silence” that has surrounded certain aspects of personal and family life, it has been natural for the present generation to fall into the same errors into which Whitman had fallen. Naturally, too, the evil thinker seized on the occasion for evil speech. There has been every shade of expression from blatant wantonness to high-minded and self-respecting honesty. Thus we can account for Mr. Theodore Dreiser, who seems to feel that freedom of speech should be gratefully acknowledged by indulgence to the farthest extreme. And thus we can account for Mr. Ernest Poole, who, in “His Family,” has presented an extraordinarily fine summary of the broad and perplexing theme.

The English novel is nearing the end of its second century of influence. It is a constant in literature which will probably attract more readers than any other single form. Yet it will have its times of greater and lesser popularity, and it seems to have passed the height of a wave shortly after 1900. First the drama came forward with a new challenge to serious attention, and of late poetry has reëstablished itself as a living language.