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.