Chapter XVII: Shifting Currents of Fiction (1)

I

In 1870 American fiction ran in two currents: fiction of the _Atlantic_ type, read by the cultivated few, and fiction of Bonner's _New York Ledger_ type, read openly by the literate masses and surreptitiously by many others. There was also a very large class of readers that read no novels at all. Puritanism had frowned upon fiction, the church generally discountenanced it, and in many places prejudice ran deep. George Cary Eggleston in the biography of his brother has recorded his own experience:

It will scarcely be believed by many in the early years of the
twentieth century, that as late as the end of the third quarter
of the nineteenth, there still survived a bitter prejudice
against novels as demoralizing literature, and that even short
stories were looked upon with doubt and suspicion.... When
_The Hoosier Schoolmaster_ began to appear, a member of the
publishing house was sorely troubled. He had been a bitter and
vehement opponent of novels and novel reading. He had published
articles of his own in denunciation of fiction and in rebuke
of his friends in a great publishing house for putting forth
literature of that character. He now began to suspect that _The
Hoosier Schoolmaster_ was in fact a novel, and he was shocked
at the thought that it was appearing in a periodical published
by himself.... When the story was about to appear in book
form Edward wrote "A Novel" as a sub-title, and the publisher
referred to was again in a state of nervous agitation. He
could in no wise consent to proclaim himself as a publisher of
novels. In view of the large advance orders for the book he was
eager to publish the novel, but he could not reconcile himself
to the open admission that it was a novel.[153]

While _The Bread-Winners_ was running its anonymous course in the _Century_ in 1884, its author, now known to have been John Hay, felt called upon to issue an explanatory note:

I am engaged in business in which my standing would be
seriously compromised if it were known I had written a novel.
I am sure that my practical efficiency is not lessened by this
act, but I am equally sure that I could never recover from the
injury it would occasion me if known among my own colleagues.
For that positive reason, and for the negative one that I do
not care for publicity, I resolved to keep the knowledge of my
little venture in authorship restricted to as small a circle as
possible. Only two persons besides myself know who wrote _The
Bread-Winners_.

The final breaking down of this prejudice and the building up of the new clientele of readers that at length gave prose fiction its later enormous vogue is one of the most interesting phenomena of the period. The novel gained its present respectability as a literary form by what may be called an artifice. It came in disguised as moral instruction, as character-building studies of life, as historical narrative, as reform propaganda. _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, which had been read by thousands who had never opened a novel before, had begun the work. _The Hoosier Schoolmaster_ was allowed to appear in the columns of _Hearth and Home_ because it was a moral tale for children and because it was written by a minister whose motives no one could question. So with the works of the Rev. E. P. Roe, and the stories of Dr. J. G. Holland, who had gained an enormous following with his series of lay sermons published under the name of Timothy Titcomb.

Perhaps Dr. Holland, more than any other writer of the time, is responsible for this rehabilitation of the novel. He understood the common people. His own origin had been humble--the son of a mechanic of western Massachusetts, blessed with poverty, educated through his own efforts, enabled after a long struggle to take a medical diploma--educator, school teacher, superintendent of schools in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and finally, under Samuel Bowles, assistant editor of the Springfield, Massachusetts, _Republican_, which, largely through his efforts, arose to national importance. He was forty when the Timothy Titcomb letters entered upon their enormous popularity--it is estimated that nearly half a million copies of the series were sold first and last; he was fifty when he established _Scribner's Monthly_ and assumed its editorship.

_Scribner's_ under his direction became for the new period what the _Atlantic Monthly_ had been for the period before. He was a moralist, a plain man of the people, and he knew his clientele; he knew the average American reader that makes up the great democratic mass, the reader who had bought _The Wide, Wide World_, and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, and the _Titcomb Letters_. He gave them first of all a serial novel by the Rev. George MacDonald, and he printed at the close of the first volume of the _Monthly_ a letter from a reader, sample of thousands which had filled his mail. Here is an extract:

I know of no writings better calculated than his [MacDonald's]
to draw out what is noble and true in the reader, or call forth
fine feelings and high resolves. They give impulse to life. We
come away from reading one of his books stronger and better
prepared for our life-work. Is not this the surest test of
excellence in a book?

It was this purpose that inspired his own fiction, _Arthur Bonnicastle_, _Nicholas Minturn_, and the others, earnest, moral tales sprinkled freely with sentiment, wholesome, but not high in literary merit. No other man did so much to direct the period into the well-known channels which it took. His whole influence was democratic. He would publish literature for the people, and to him literature was a serious thing, the voice of life. The group of new authors which he gathered about him is comparable only with the group that James T. Fields gathered about himself in the earlier golden days of the _Atlantic_.

II

The period of moralizing fiction culminated with the work of the Rev. Edward Payson Roe, whose first novel, _Barriers Burned Away_ (1872), with its background of the great Chicago fire, and its tense moral atmosphere which skilfully concealed its sensationalism and its plentiful sentiment, became enormously popular. When its author died in 1888 his publishers estimated that 1,400,000 copies of all his novels had been sold, not counting pirated editions in many foreign languages, and the sale of the books has been steady up to the present time.

Roe, like Holland, had sprung from the common people and had been largely self-educated. For a time he had attended Williams College, Massachusetts, he had enlisted for the war as the chaplain of a regiment, and after the war had settled down as pastor of the First Church at Highland Falls, New York. After nine years his health failed him and he betook himself to an out-of-doors life, fruit raising at Cornwall-on-Hudson, and his experience he embodied in several practical handbooks like _Success with Small Fruits_, first published serially in _Scribner's_. The last years of his life he gave to fiction, turning it out with facility and in quantity and always with the theory that he was thereby continuing his work as a pastor. "My books," he wrote, "are read by thousands; my voice reached at most but a few hundred. My object in writing, as in preaching, is to do good; and the question is, Which can I do best? I think with the pen, and I shall go on writing no matter what the critics say."[154]

That his novels are lacking in the higher elements of literary art, in structure and style and creative imagination, is apparent even to the uncritical, but that they are lacking in truth to life and power to move the reader no one can declare. At every point they are wholesome and manly. Roe's assertion that he worked with reverence in the fundamental stuff of life one must admit or else deny his contention that, "The chief evidence of life in a novel is the fact that it lives."[155] Surely it must be admitted that few novels of the period have shown more vitality.

His influence has been considerable. With Holland and his school he helped greatly in the building up of that mass of novel readers, mostly women it must be said, which by the middle of the eighties had reached such enormous proportions. He led readers on to Lew Wallace's _The Fair God_ and _Ben Hur_, and to the novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett, who added to the conventional devices of Holland and Roe--sentiment, sensation, love-centered interest culminating inevitably in marriage at the close of the story--literary art and a certain dramatic power. She was realistic in method,--her _That Lass o' Lowrie's_ (1877) reproduced the Lancashire dialect in all its uncouthness--but the atmosphere of her work was romantic. Her _Little Lord Fauntleroy_ (1886), unquestionably the most successful juvenile of the period, has been described as "a fairy tale of real life." All of her books, indeed, have this fairy tale basis. She has been exceedingly popular, but she cannot be counted among the original forces of the period. From her the current of popularity flowed on to F. Marion Crawford's cosmopolitan work, to Margaret Deland's strong problem novel _John Ward, Preacher_; then it swelled into a flood with _David Harum_ and the historical novels that made notable the nineties. At the close of the century fiction was read by all and in quantities that seem incredible.

III

In a chapter which traces the growth of the novel, in distinction from the growth of the sketch or the short story, F. Marion Crawford must be given a leading place. Of all American writers he devoted himself most fully to the major form of fiction. He wrote forty-five novels, and few sketches and short stories: he was a novelist and only a novelist. He appeared at the one moment when the type of fiction which he represented was most certain of wide recognition. His earliest book, _Mr. Isaacs_ (1882), dealt with a new, strange environment--India, five years before Kipling made it his background; it had a religious atmosphere--the mystic beliefs of the Orient; and it told a story with sentiment and with dramatic movement. _Zoroaster_, with its opening sentence, "The hall of the banquets was made ready for the feast in the palace of Babylon," appealed to an audience that had rated _Ben Hur_ among the greatest of novels.

But the earliest books of Crawford showed little of the main current of his work. No two novelists could differ more radically than he and Roe. To him the purpose-novel was a bastard thing unworthy the powers of a true artist.

Lessons, lectures, discussions, sermons, and didactics
generally belong to institutions set apart for especial
purposes and carefully avoided, after a certain age, by the
majority of those who wish to be amused. The purpose-novel
is an odious attempt to lecture people who hate lectures, to
preach to people who prefer their own church, and to teach
people who think they know enough already. It is an ambush, a
lying-in-wait for the unsuspecting public, a violation of the
social contract--and as such it ought to be either mercilessly
crushed or forced by law to bind itself in black and label
itself "Purpose" in very big letters.[156]

The office of the novel was, therefore, entertainment and only entertainment. He has been the chief exponent in America of art for art's sake. A novel, he maintained, is a little "pocket-stage" whose only office is to please.

The life and the training of Crawford gave him a viewpoint which was singularly different from that held by the short story writers who were so busily exploiting provincial little neighborhoods in all the remote nooks and corners of the land. His training had given him an outlook more cosmopolitan than even that of Henry James. He had been born at Bagni-di-Lucca, in Tuscany, son of Thomas Crawford the sculptor, and he had spent the first eleven years of his life in Rome. Later he had studied at Concord, New Hampshire; at Trinity College, Cambridge; at Karlsruhe, at Heidelberg; and finally at Rome, where he had specialized in the classics. In 1873 he was at Allahabad, India, connected with the _Indian Herald_, and later on, his health failing, he visited his uncle in New York, Samuel Ward, brother of Julia Ward Howe, and at his advice threw some of his Indian experiences into the form of fiction. The instant success of _Mr. Isaacs_ determined his career. After extensive travels in Turkey and elsewhere, he settled down in Italy in a picturesque villa overlooking the Bay of Naples, and there he spent the remaining years of his life, years of enormous literary productivity, and of growing popularity with readers both in America and in Europe.

No other American novelist has ever covered so much of territory. He wrote with first-hand knowledge of life in America, in England, in Germany, in Italy, in Constantinople, and India, and he wrote with scholarly accuracy historical novels dealing with times and places as diverse as Persia in the times of Zoroaster; as the second crusade--_Via Crucis_; as the era of Philip II in Spain--_In the Palace of the King_; as Venice in the Middle Ages--_Marietta, a Maid of Venice_; as early Arabia--_Kahled_; and as early Constantinople--_Arethusa_.

The heart of his work undoubtedly is made up of the fifteen novels that deal with life in Rome and its environs: _Saracinesca_, _Sant' Ilario_, _Don Orsino_, _Taquisara_, _Corleone_, _Casa Braccio_, _A Roman Singer_, _Marzio's Crucifix_, _Heart of Rome_, _Cecilia_, _Whosoever Shall Offend_, _Pietro Ghisleri_, _To Leeward_, _A Lady of Rome_, and _The White Sister_. The novels deal almost exclusively with the middle and higher classes of Rome, classes of which most Americans know nothing at all, for, to quote from the opening chapter of _To Leeward_:

There are two Romes. There is the Rome of the intelligent
foreigner, consisting of excavations, monuments, tramways,
hotels, typhoid fever, incense, and wax candles; and there
is the Rome within, a city of antique customs, good and bad,
a town full of aristocratic prejudices, of intrigues, of
religion, of old-fashioned honor and new-fashioned scandal, of
happiness and unhappiness, of just people and unjust.

It is this other half Rome, unknown to the casual tourist, unknown to any not native born and Romanist in faith, that he has shown us, as Howells attempted to show the social life of Boston and New England, and as Cable sought to enter the heart of Creole New Orleans. With what success? Those who know most of Roman life have spoken with praise. He has given to his aristocracy perhaps too much of charm, they say; too much of inflexible will, it may be; too much of fire and fury; yet on the whole he has been true to the complex life he has sought to reproduce, truer, perhaps, than Howells has been to Boston or Cable to New Orleans, for he has worked from the inside as one native born, as one reared in the society he describes, even to the detail of accepting its religious belief. One may well believe it, for everywhere in the novels is the perfection of naturalness, the atmosphere of reality.

With his seven stories of American life, _An American Politician_ and the others, he is less convincing. He wrote as a foreigner, as an observer of the outward with no fullness of sympathy, no depth of knowledge. He was European in viewpoint and in experience, and he knew better the European background--Germany as in _Greifenstein_ and _The Cigarette-Maker's Romance_, or England as in _The Tale of a Lonely Parish_, or even Constantinople as in _Paul Patoff_.

He wins us first with his worldliness, his vast knowledge of the surfaces of life in all lands. He is full of cosmopolitan comparisons, wisdom from everywhere, modern instances from Stamboul and Allahabad and Rome. To read him is like walking through foreign scenes with a fully informed guide, a marvelous guide, indeed, a patrician, a polished man of the world. Everywhere in his work an atmosphere of good breeding--charming people of culture and wideness of experience: diplomats, artists, statesmen, noblemen, gentlemen of the world and ladies indeed. There is no coarseness, no dialect, no uncouth characters. We are in the world of wealth, of old-established institutions, of traditions and social laws that are inflexible. In the telling of the tale he has but a single purpose:

We are not poets, because we can not be. We are not genuine
playwriters for many reasons; chiefly, perhaps, because we are
not clever enough, since a successful play is incomparably
more lucrative than a successful novel. We are not preachers,
and few of us would be admitted to the pulpit. We are not,
as a class, teachers or professors, nor lawyers, nor men of
business. We are nothing more than public amusers. Unless we
choose we need not be anything less. Let us, then, accept our
position cheerfully, and do the best we can to fulfil our
mission, without attempting to dignify it with titles too
imposing for it to bear, and without degrading it by bringing
its productions down even a little way, from the lowest level
of high comedy to the highest level of buffoonery.[157]

From this standpoint he has succeeded to the full. He has told his stories well; he holds his reader's interest to the end. Slight though his stories may often be in development, they are ingenious always in construction and they are cumulative in interest. He has undoubted dramatic power, sparkling dialogue, thrust and parry, whole novels like _Saracinesca_, for instance, that might be transferred to the stage with scarcely an alteration. His characters and episodes appeal to him always from the dramatic side. The novel, indeed, as he defines it is a species of drama:

It may fairly be claimed that humanity has, within the past
hundred years, found the way of carrying a theater in its
pocket; and so long as humanity remains what it is, it will
delight in taking out its pocket-stage and watching the antics
of the actors, who are so like itself and yet so much more
interesting. Perhaps that is, after all, the best answer to
the question, "What is a novel?" It is, or ought to be, a
pocket-stage. Scenery, light, shade, the actors themselves, are
made of words, and nothing but words, more or less cleverly
put together. A play is good in proportion as it represents
the more dramatic, passionate, romantic, or humorous sides of
real life. A novel is excellent according to the degree in
which it produces the illusions of a good play--but it must not
be forgotten that the play is the thing, and that illusion is
eminently necessary to success.[157]

Often he overdoes this dramatic element and becomes melodramatic; we lose the impression of real life and feel an atmosphere of staginess, that exaggeration of effect which thrills for a moment and then disgusts.

And right here comes the chief indictment against him: he works without deep emotion, without tenderness, without altruism, without the higher reaches of imagination. He has no social or moral purpose, as Howells had. He sees the body but not the soul, society rather than life in its deeper currents, a society marvelously complex in its requirements and its accouterments, its conventions and traditions, but he looks little below the superficial, the temporal, the merely worldly. He is inferior to Howells inasmuch as he lacks poetry, he lacks humor, he lacks heart. He is inferior to James and George Meredith inasmuch as he had no power of introspection and no distinctive style. He had no passion--he never becomes enthusiastic even about his native Italy; he had little love for nature--the city engrosses him, not trees and mountains and lakes. He writes of the human spectacle and is content if he bring amusement for the present moment.

He was, therefore, one more influence in the journalization of the novel. He wrote rapidly and easily, and his style is clear and natural, but it is also without distinction. His pictures are vividly drawn and his stories are exceedingly readable--journalistic excellences, but there is nothing of inspiration about them, no breath of genius, no touch of literature in the stricter sense of that word. Like every skilful journalistic writer, he has the power to visualize his scene, to paint characters with vividness, and to make essentials stand out. Notably was this true of his historical fiction. Characters like Philip II. and Eleanor, Queen of France, he can make real men and women that move and convince. He has created a marvelous gallery of characters, taking his forty-five novels together, complex and varied beyond that produced by any other American novelist, and there are surprisingly few repetitions. He stands undoubtedly as the most brilliant of the American writers of fiction, the most cosmopolitan, the most entertaining. His galaxy of Roman novels, especially the _Saracinesca_ group, bids fair to outlive many novels that contain deeper studies of human life and that are more inspired products of literary art.

IV

The direct opposite of F. Marion Crawford, in literary belief, as in background and object, was Margaretta Wade Deland, who came into literary prominence at the close of the eighties. Unlike Crawford, she was a poet, a realist, a depicter of life within a narrow provincial area, and, moreover, a worker in the finer materials of life, the problems of the soul.

The essentials of her biography are few. She was born and reared at Manchester, a little Pennsylvania village, now swallowed up by the great manufacturing city of Allegheny; she went at sixteen to New York to study drawing and design at Cooper Institute; and after her graduation she became instructor in design at the Girls' Normal College, New York City. In 1880 she was married to Lorin F. Deland and removed to Boston, where she has since resided. In 1886 she issued her first book--a collection of poems entitled _An Old Garden_, and two years later _John Ward, Preacher_, a novel that attracted instant and widespread attention because of its likeness in theme to _Robert Elsmere_, then at the height of its enormous vogue. Since that time she has published four other major novels: _Sidney_, _Philip and His Wife_, _The Awakening of Helena Richie_, and _The Iron Woman_, and many short stories, notably the collections entitled _The Wisdom of Fools_, _Old Chester Tales_, and _Dr. Lavendar's People_.

By nature and early environment Mrs. Deland was serious and contemplative. The little Pennsylvania town, later to be immortalized as Old Chester, during her childhood was a place of traditions, a bit of antiquity amid the newness about it, of well-bred old English and Scotch and Irish families with deep religious prejudices and with narrow yet wholesome and kindly ideals. She was reared in a religious atmosphere--her father was a Presbyterian and her mother an Episcopalian, the combination so disastrous in _John Ward, Preacher_. She lived amid books, all of which she might read save only the novels, a prohibition that proved to be a good one, for when at last she was led to write fiction of her own, she went about it with no conventional preconceptions. It made for freshness, for originality, of concentration upon life rather than upon form and the tradition of the elders. It was an environment that cultivated the poet as well as the Puritan within her, the sensitiveness for Nature, the deeps of love and life that were to find expression in a note like this, recorded in her first volume:

O distant Christ, the crowded, darkening years
Drift slow between thy gracious face and me:
My hungry heart leans back to look for thee,
But finds the way set thick with doubts and fears.

My groping hands would touch thy garment's hem,
Would find some token thou art walking near;
Instead, they clasp but empty darkness drear,
And no diviner hands reach out to them.

My straining eyes, O Christ, but long to mark
A shadow of thy presence, dim and sweet,
Or far-off light to guide my wandering feet,
Or hope for hands prayer-beating 'gainst the dark.

It was, therefore, but natural that her work should be both serious and ethical and that it should be touched with beauty. In _John Ward, Preacher_, she took as her theme the revolt of a soul against the infallibilities of a system of belief. It is not necessarily a religious novel or yet a purpose novel. The primary _motif_ of _Robert Elsmere_ is theological and doctrinal discussion. It is religious polemic made attractive by being cast into story form and as such it deserves the anathema of Crawford, but in Mrs. Deland's novel the human interest is paramount. Religion is the force that acts upon two lives, just as jealousy might have been taken or misdirected love or any other human dynamic, and the novel is the record of the reactions under the stress.

So with all her novels. The theme is the destruction or the redemption of a soul, the abasement or the rehabilitation of a character through some immaterial force applied from within. She deals with great ethical and sociological forces: heredity, as in her novelette _The Hands of Esau_; divorce, as in _The Iron Woman_; the compelling power of love, as in _Sidney_. Her primary aim is not, as with Crawford and Harte, simply to entertain; it is rather to expose the human soul to its own view, to show it its limitations and its dangers, that the soul may be purged through fear of what may be--the aim indeed of the Greek drama. Her equipment for the work was complete. To feminine tenderness and insight she added a depth of view and an analysis that is masculine. She was a poet too, but a poet with the severity of form and the moving realism of the short story writer. Two of her novels, _The Awakening of Helena Richie_ and _The Iron Woman_, have not been surpassed in construction and in moving power by any other writer of the period.

Her _Old Chester Tales_ also, with their central figure Dr. Lavendar, have the elements that make for permanence. They are really without time or place. Old Chester undoubtedly is in western Pennsylvania, the author's native town, but it might be New England as well. The tales deal with universal types and with universal _motifs_ with a broadness and a sympathy and a literary art that raises them into the realm of the rarer classics. From them emerges the figure of Dr. Lavendar to place beside even Adams and Primrose. Place is not dwelt upon; humanity is all. They are not so much stories as fragments of actual life touched with the magic of poetry and of ethic vision. From that worldly social area of life presented to us by such latter-day novelists as Crawford and Edith Wharton and Robert Chambers they are as far removed as is a fashionable Newport yacht, with its club-centered men and cigarette-smoking women, from the simple little hamlet among the hills.

V

During the closing years of the century there came into American literature, suddenly and unheralded, a group of young men, journalists for the most part, who for a time seemed to promise revolution. They brought in with a rush enthusiasm, vigor, vitality; they had no reverence for old forms or old ideals; they wrote with fierceness and cocksureness books like Garland's _Crumbling Idols_ and Norris's _The Responsibilities of the Novelist_, which called shrilly for Truth, TRUTH: "Is it not, in Heaven's name, essential that the people hear not a lie, but the Truth? If the novel were not one of the most important factors of life; if it were not the completest expression of our civilization; if its influence were not greater than all the pulpits, than all the newspapers between the oceans, it would not be so important that its message should be true." They would produce a new American literature, one stripped of prudishness and convention; they would go down among the People and tell them the plain God's Truth as Zola defined Truth, for the People were hungry for it. "In the larger view, in the last analysis, the People pronounce the final judgment. The People, despised of the artist, hooted, caricatured, and vilified, are, after all, and in the main, the real seekers after Truth." The group was a passing phenomenon. Many of its members were dead before they had done more than outline their work: Wolcott Balestier and Stephen Crane at thirty, Frank Norris at thirty-two, Henry Harland and Harold Frederic in the early forties, and the others, like R. H. Davis, for instance, turned at length to historical romance and other conventional fields.

The impetus undoubtedly came from the enormous and sudden vogue of Kipling. Balestier was his brother-in-law and had collaborated with him in writing _The Naulahka_. Then he had written the novel _Benefits Forgot_, a work of remarkable promise, but remarkable only for its promise. The vigor and directness and picturing power of the young Kipling were qualities that appealed strongly to young men of journalistic training. Like him, they were cosmopolitans and had seen unusual areas of life. Crane had represented his paper in the Greco-Turkish War and in the Cuban campaign, Norris had been in the South African War, Richard Harding Davis had been at all the storm centers of his time, Frederic was the European correspondent of the New York _Times_, and Harland became at length editor of the London _Yellow Book_.

The genius of the group undoubtedly was Stephen Crane (1871-1900). He was frail of physique, neurotic, intense, full of a vibrant energy that drove him too fiercely. He was naturally lyrical, romantic, impulsively creative, but his training made him, as it made most of the group, a realist--a depressed realist after Zola. His earliest work was his best, _Maggie, a Girl of the Streets_, a grim and brutal picture of the darker strata of New York City--his most distinctive creation. But he had no patience, no time, for collecting material. He was too eager, too much under the dominance of moods, to investigate, and his later novel, _The Red Badge of Courage_, which purports to be a realistic story of army life in the Civil War, is based upon a kind of manufactured realism that is the product not of observation or of gathered data, but of an excessively active imagination. When he died, though he was but thirty, he had done his work. Despite his lyrical power and his undoubted imagination, his place is not large.

For Frank Norris (1870-1902) more may be said, though undoubtedly he has been judged by his contemporaries more by what he dreamed of doing and what, perhaps, he might have done had he lived than by his actual accomplishment. He had had unusual training for the epic task he set himself. He had been born in Chicago and had spent there the first fifteen years of his life, he had been educated in the San Francisco high school, at the University of California, and at Harvard, then for a year or two he had studied art in Paris. Later he was war correspondent of the San Francisco _Chronicle_, then editor of the San Francisco _Wave_, then special war correspondent for _McClure's Magazine_ during the Spanish War.

When he began to write fiction, and he began early, he was an ardent disciple of Zola, a realist of the latter-day type, a teller of the Truth as Zola conceived of the Truth. "Mere literature" was a thing outworn, graces of style and gentleness of theme belonged to the effeminate past. A masculine age had come to which nothing was common or unclean provided it were but the Truth. Like Crane, he was eager, excited, dominated by his theme until it became his whole life. He could work only in major key, in _fortissimo_, with themes continent-wide presented with the Kipling vigor and swing.

In his earlier work, _Vandover and the Brute_, _McTeague_, and the like, he swung to the extreme of his theory. To tell the truth was to tell with microscopic detail the repulsive things of physical life. There are stories of his that reek with foul odors and jangle repulsively upon the eye and the ear. The short fiction "A Man's Woman" is an advance even upon Zola. It is Truth, but it is the truth about the processes of the sewer and the physiological facts about starvation:

The tent was full of foul smells: the smell of drugs and of
moldy gunpowder, the smell of dirty rags, of unwashed bodies,
the smell of stale smoke, of scorching sealskin, of soaked and
rotting canvas that exhaled from the tent cover--every smell
but that of food.

_McTeague_ is a brutal book: it gets hold of one's imagination and haunts it like an odor from a morgue. So with certain scenes from _Vandover and the Brute_. One sees for weeks the ghastly face of that drowning Jew who, after the wreck of the steamer, was beaten off again and again until his mashed fingers could no longer gain a hold. True to life it undoubtedly is, but to what end?

Norris's master work was to be his trilogy, the epic of the wheat, the allegory of financial and industrial America. He explained his purpose in the preface to _The Pit_:

These novels, while forming a series, will be in no way
connected with each other save by their relation to (1) the
production, (2) the distribution, (3) the consumption of
American wheat. When complete they will form the story of a
crop of wheat from the time of its sowing as seed in California
to the time of its consumption as bread in a village of Western
Europe.

The first novel, _The Octopus_, deals with the war between the
wheat grower and the Railroad Trust; the second, _The Pit_, is
the fictitious narrative of a "deal" in the Chicago wheat pit;
while the third, _The Wolf_, will probably have for its pivotal
episode the relieving of a famine in an old world community.

He lived to complete only the first two, and it is upon these two that his place as a novelist must depend. They represent his maturer work, his final manner, and they undoubtedly show what would have been his product had he been spared to complete his work.

The two books impress one first with their vastness of theme. The whole continent seems to be in them. They have an untamed power, an elemental quality, an unconfined sweep that is Russian in its quality. They are epics, epics of a new continent with its untold richness in corn and wheat, its enmeshing railroads, its teeming cities of the plain, its restless human types--new birth of our new soil. The excitement and the enthusiasm of the novelist flow from every page. To read long is to be filled with the trembling eagerness of the wheat pit and the railroad yard. The style is headlong, excited, illuminated hotly with Hugo-like adjectives. Through it all runs a symbolism that at times takes full control. The railroad dominates _The Octopus_, the wheat _The Pit_ as fully as the hemp dominates Allen's _Reign of Law_. The books are allegories. The Western farmer is in the grip of an octopus-like monster, the railroad, that is strangling him. The ghastly horror of the locomotive that plows at full speed through a flock of sheep is symbolic of his helplessness.

To the right and left, all the width of the right of way,
the little bodies had been flung; backs were snapped against
the fence-posts; brains knocked out. Caught in the barbs of
the wire, wedged in, the bodies hung suspended. Under foot
it was terrible; the black blood, winking in the starlight,
seeped down into the clay between the ties with a long sucking
murmur.... Abruptly, Presley saw again in his imagination the
galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its
single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon;
but saw it now as the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible,
flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of
the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path; the
leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil,
the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the Monster, the
Colossus, the Octopus.

Garland in such pictures as "Under the Lion's Paw" tends to arouse his reader to mutiny, to the cry "This thing must stop!" Norris fills him with shuddering horror and leaves him unnerved.

Tremendous energy the novels undoubtedly have and truth too, so far as it goes. They have imaginative power of no inferior type and an ardor that is contagious. It was worth while to have written them: they picture for all time a unique phase of American life, but it is no great loss to our literature that the two were not expanded into a long series. In the higher sense of the word they are not literature; they are remarkably well done newspaper "stories." Like most of the work of his group of writers, they are journalistic in pitch and in intent: stirring narratives, picturesque presentings of unusual material, timely studies in dynamic style. But literary art is founded upon restraint, reserve, poise. These stories lack finish, concentration, and even, at times, good taste. Everywhere full organ, everywhere tenseness, everywhere excitement. A terrible directness there is, but it tends no whither and it comes to no terminus of conclusion.

Norris unquestionably lacked knowledge of many of the most fundamental areas of human life. He was too insistently modern. Like the mere journalist, he was obsessed with but a single thought: the value of the present moment. He lacked a sense of the past, personal background, inner life, power to weigh and balance and compare, and, lacking these, he lacked the elements that make for the literature of permanence.

Henry Harland's (1861-1905) earliest work, _As It Was Written_ (1885), _Mrs. Peixada_, and _The Yoke of the Thora_ (1887), written under the pen name "Sidney Luska," presented certain phases of Jewish life and character in New York with a grim power that seemed promising, but his later work was decadent. Harold Frederic was a more substantial figure. A typical American, self-made and self-educated, climbing by rapid stages from the positions of farm hand, photographer, and proof-reader to the editorship of influential papers like the Albany _Journal_, at twenty-eight he was the European representative of the New York _Times_ and an international correspondent of rare power. Novel-writing he took up as a recreation. His earliest work, which appeared in _Scribner's Magazine_, _Seth's Brother's Wife_ (1887), was a novel of New York farm life, Garland-like in its depressing realism. Later stories like _In the Valley_ and _The Copperhead_ dealt with a background of the Civil War. His greatest success came with _The Damnation of Theron Ware_, published in England with the title _Illumination_, a remarkable book especially in its earlier chapters, full of vigor and truth. Undoubtedly he possessed the rare gift of story-telling, and had he, like Crawford, devoted himself wholly to the art, he might have done work to compare with any other written during the period. But he was a journalist with newspaper standards, he worked in haste, he lacked repose and the sense of values, and as a result a republication of his novels has not been called for. He is to be ranked with Crane and Norris as a meteor of brilliance rather than a fixed light.

VI

The new realism was short lived. Even while its propaganda like _Crumbling Idols_ and _The Responsibilities of the Novelist_ were spreading the news that Walter Scott was dead and that the god of things as they are had come in his power, a new romantic period already had begun. Maurice Thompson, one of the most clear-eyed critics of the period, wrote in May, 1900:

Just how deep and powerful the present distinct movement toward
a romantic revival may be no one can tell. Many facts, however,
point to a veering of popular interest from the fiction of
character analysis and social problems to the historical novel
and the romance of heroic adventure. We have had a period of
intense, not to say morbid, introversion directed mainly upon
diseases of the social, domestic, political, and religious
life of the world. It may be that, like all other currents
of interest when turned upon insoluble problems, this rush
of inquiry, this strain of exploitation, has about run its
course.... Great commercial interest seems to be turned or
turning from the world of commonplace life and the story of
the analysis of crime and filth to the historical romance, the
story of heroism, and the tale of adventure. People seem to be
interested as never before in the interpretation of history.
It may be that signs in the air of great world changes have
set all minds more or less to feeling out for precedents and
examples by which to measure the future's probabilities.[158]

The causes of this later wave of romanticism, a wave that was wider than America, have been variously estimated. Harold Frederic suggested Blackmore as the possible fountain head. "Was it _Lorna Doone_, I wonder, that changed the drift in historical fiction? The book, after it was once introduced to public attention by that comic accident which no one can blame Mr. Blackmore for grinding his teeth over, achieved, as it deserved, one of the great successes of our time--and great successes set men thinking."[159] Paul Leicester Ford, himself an historian and a notable producer of historical romance, was inclined to another explanation: "At the present moment [1897] there seems a revival of interest in American history, and the novelist has been quickly responsive to it."[160] The English critic E. A. Bennett offered still another solution: "America is a land of crazes. In other words, it is simple: no derision is implied.... And America is also a land of sentimentalism. It is this deep-seated quality which, perhaps, accounts for the vogue of history in American fiction. The themes of the historical novel are so remote, ideas about them exist so nebulously in the mind, that a writer may safely use the most bare-faced distortions to pamper the fancy without offending that natural and racial shrewdness which would bestir itself if a means of verification were at hand. The extraordinary notion still obtains that human nature was different 'in those days'; that the good old times were, somehow, 'pretty,' and governed by fates poetically just."[161]

Ford undoubtedly was right in assigning the immediate outburst at the close of the century to a new interest in American history. The war with Spain brought about a burst of patriotism and of martial feeling that made the swashbuckling romance and the episode from the American Revolution seem peculiarly appropriate. But the war was by no means the only cause. The reaction had come earlier, a reaction from the excess of reality that had come with the eighties. The influence of Stevenson must not be overlooked, Stevenson who, type of his age, had sickened early of the realistic, the analytic, the problematic.

"I do desire a book of adventure," Stevenson had written to
Henley as early as 1884, "a romance--and no man will get or
write me one. Dumas I have read and re-read too often; Scott,
too, and I am short. I want to hear swords clash. I want a
book to begin in a good way; a book, I guess, like _Treasure
Island_.... Oh, my sighings after romance, or even Skeltery,
and O! the weary age which will produce me neither!

"'CHAPTER I

"'The night was damp and cloudy, the ways foul. The single
horseman, cloaked and booted, who pursued his way across
Willesden Common, had not met a traveler, when the sound of
wheels....'

"'CHAPTER II

"'"Yes, sir," said the old pilot, "she must have dropped into
the bay a little afore dawn. A queer craft she looks."

"'"She shows no colors," returned the young gentleman, musingly.

"'"They're a-lowering of a quarter-boat, Mr. Mark," resumed the
old salt. "We shall soon know more of her."

"'"Aye," replied the young gentleman called Mark, "and here,
Mr. Seadrift, comes your sweet daughter Nancy tripping down the
cliff."

"'"God bless her kind heart, sir," ejaculated old Seadrift.'"

Be the cause what it may, for a time historical romance was the dominant literary form in America. In 1902, Bliss Perry, editor of the _Atlantic_, could write of "the present passion for historical novels." To what extent they were a passion may be learned from the records of publishers. By the summer of 1901, Ford's _Janice Meredith_ had sold 275,000 copies, Mary Johnston's _To Have and to Hold_, 285,000, and Churchill's _The Crisis_, 320,000, and his _Richard Carvel_, 420,000.[162] One might give equally large figures for such favorites as Charles Major's _When Knighthood Was in Flower_, Tarkington's _Monsieur Beaucaire_, Mitchell's _Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker_, Thompson's _Alice of Old Vincennes_, and very many others, foreign as well as American.

The novels fall into two classes: those in which the historical element is made emphatic and those which are pure romances. Of the former class Paul Leicester Ford's _Janice Meredith_ is, perhaps, the best type; of the latter, Mitchell's _Hugh Wynne_. Ford was first of all a historian, a bibliographer, a tireless delver among historical sources. He had been educated in his father's library, which contained the finest collection of Americana in the world, and at twelve we find him publishing on his own press a genealogy of Webster of his own compilation. His later bibliographical and historical work centered about the American Revolution. When he turned to fiction it was as a historian, a specialist who would exploit real historical characters and real areas of American life. _The Honorable Peter Stirling_ was a study of ward politics with the young Grover Cleveland as the central figure. It was an accurate picture, vigorous and truthful, and even though a fiction it is a valuable historical document. So it was with _Janice Meredith_, a historian's day-dream over his Americana. It presents an accurate picture of the social conditions of its time. Many of its characters are revolutionary leaders: Washington is a central figure--"The true George Washington," presented with all his failings as well as with all his excellences.

It was natural that Ford should make much of the material that he knew so thoroughly: he brought it in sometimes for its own sake rather than for the sake of the story. Undoubtedly he falsified history by making his real personages, like Washington and Franklin, take part in conversations that never occurred and do things that strictly never were done, but it is equally true that he has given us the best conception that is now possible of how it must have felt to live in the days of the Revolution. His chief excellences were his vigor and vivacity, and his Norris-like mastery of details. He was a realist enamoured of truth who extended his realism into the domain of romance. His faults all centered about his undoubted deficiency in literary art: he lacked constructive power and distinction of style. His stories are the diversions of a professional historian, brilliant but without promise of permanence.

Typical of the second variety of historical romance is the work of Silas Weir Mitchell, poet, romancer, artist, and historian. Dr. Mitchell was of Philadelphia as Dr. Holmes was of Boston, and like Dr. Holmes he gave his most vigorous years completely to his profession. He was fifty-three and one of the leading world specialists on nervous diseases when he wrote his first full novel, _In War Time_. His own explanation, given in later years to a gathering of University of Pennsylvania men, has often been quoted:

When success in my profession gave me the freedom of long
summer holidays, the despotism of my habits of work would
have made entire idleness mere _ennui_. I turned to what,
except for stern need, would have been my lifelong work from
youth--literature--bored by idleness, wrote my first novel.

The confession in the latter sentence is significant. Poetry all his life was to him an exalted thing, as it was, indeed, to Stoddard and the other poets of beauty. In later years he published many volumes of it and contributed it to the magazines, but never for money. It explains much in his work. No other novelist of the period has so filled his fiction with quoted lyrics and with lyrical prose. It is here that he differs from writers like Ford and Norris: he would produce literature.

His list of work is a varied one. His first long novel and also his last dealt with the Civil War, in which he had served three years as a surgeon. Then, like Dr. Holmes, he wrote pathological studies on which he brought to bear his vast medical knowledge, novels like _Dr. North and His Friends_ and _Constance Trescott_; he wrote brilliant tales of French life, like _The Adventures of François_, Dr. Mitchell's favorite among his novels, and _A Diplomatic Adventure_; he wrote idyllic studies of Nature like _When All the Woods Are Green_, and _Far in the Forest_, and, best of all, the historical romances _Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker_, and _The Red City_.

These novels more than any others written during the period are products of an exact and extensive knowledge of the materials of which they are woven. We feel at every point that we are in the hands of an expert, the ablest neurologist of his generation, who has seen intimately vast areas of life of which the average reader knows nothing. His analysis of a character has the exactness of a clinic and he adds to it, moreover, an imaginative power that makes us see as well as know and feel. He is skilful in characterization. "Character," he once wrote, "is best delineated by occasional broad touches, without much explanatory comment, without excess of minute description. If I fail to characterize, I fail in novel writing." He has not failed. Octavia Blake in the novel _Roland Blake_ is drawn with peculiar skill; so is Lucretia Hunter in _Circumstance_, so is Constance Trescott, that study of over-devotion. Always is he best in his studies of femininity, doubtless because women had played so large a part in his medical practice.

With few exceptions his characters are from the higher classes, "gentlefolk," he has called them in his novel _Dr. North_, and he has made them alive, as Howells was unable to do, and even James. He has discussed the point himself: "Nor can I tell why some men can not create gentlefolk. It is not knowledge, nor is it the being in or of their world that gives this power. Thackeray had it; so had Trollope; Dickens never; nor, in my mind, was George Eliot always happy in this respect; and of the living I shall say nothing."[163] We feel this quality most strongly in his historical novels. He knew intimately his background, Old Philadelphia with its exclusive aristocracy, and he has been able to transport his reader into the very atmosphere of old Second Street, in the days when it contained the most distinctive social set in America. He was a part of it; he wrote as if he were writing his own family history, lovingly, reverently. He was writing romance, but he was writing it as one who is on sacred historical ground where error of fact or of inference is unpardonable. He has himself outlined the work of the historical romancer:

Suppose I have a story to tell and wish to evolve character
amid the scenery and events of an historical episode. Suppose,
for instance, the story to lie largely in a great city. For
years I must study the topography, dress, manners, and family
histories; must be able in mind to visit this or that house;
know where to call, whom I shall see, the hours of meals, the
diet, games, etc. I must know what people say on meeting and
parting. Then I must read letters, diaries, and so on, to get
the speech forms and to enable me, if it be autobiography,
to command the written style of the day. Most men who write
thus of another time try to give the effect of actuality by
an excessive use of archaic forms. Only enough should be used
to keep from time to time some touch of this past, and not so
much as to distract incessantly by needless reminders. It is
an art, and, like all good art effects, it escapes complete
analysis.

Then as to the use of historical characters. These must
naturally influence the fate of your puppets; they must never
be themselves the most prominent personages of your story.[163]