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.