The man in the street: Papers on American topics

by Meredith Nicholson

III

It is impossible in a general view of our fiction to dissociate the novel from the short story, which, in a way, has sapped its vitality. An astonishing number of short stories have shown a grasp of the movement, energy, and color of American life, but writers who have succeeded in this field have seemed incapable of longer flight. And the originality possessed by a great number of short-story writers seems to be shared only meagrely by those who experiment with the novel. When some venturesome Martian explores the Library of Congress it may be that in the short-story division he will find the surest key to what American life has been. There are few American novels of any period that can tip the scale against the twenty best American short stories, chosen for sincerity and workmanship. It would seem that our creative talent is facile and true in miniature studies, but shrinks from an ampler canvas and a broader brush. Frank Norris’s The Pit and The Octopus continue to command respect from the fact that he had a panoramic sense that led him to exercise his fine talents upon a great and important theme.

We have had, to be sure, many examples of the business and political novel, but practically all of them have been struck from the same die. A “big” politician or a “big” man of business, his daughter, and a lover who brazenly sets himself up to correct the morals of the powerful parent, is a popular device. Young love must suffer, but it must not meet with frustration. In these experiments (if anything so rigidly prescribed may be said to contain any element of experiment) a little realism is sweetened with much romance. In the same way the quasi-historical novel for years followed a stereotyped formula: the lover was preferably a Northern spy within the Southern lines; the heroine, a daughter of the traditional aristocratic Southern family. Her shuddersome ride to seek General Lee’s pardon for the unfortunate officer condemned to be shot at daybreak was as inevitable as measles. The geography might be reversed occasionally to give a Northern girl a chance, but in any event her brother’s animosity toward the hero was always a pleasing factor. Another ancient formula lately revived with slight variations gives us a shaggy, elemental man brought by shipwreck or other means into contact with gentle womanhood. In his play The Great Divide William Vaughn Moody invested this device with dignity and power, but it would be interesting to see what trick might be performed with the same cards if the transformed hero should finally take his departure for the bright boulevards, while the heroine seized his bow and arrow and turned joyfully to the wilderness.

When our writers cease their futile experimenting and imitating, and wake up to the possibilities of American material we shall have fewer complaints of the impotence of the American novel. We are just a little impatient of the holding of the mirror up to nature, but nevertheless we do not like to be fooled all the time. And no one is quicker than an American to “get down to brass tacks,” when he realizes that he must come to it. Realism is the natural medium through which a democracy may “register” (to borrow a term from the screen-drama) its changing emotions, its hopes and failures. We are willing to take our recreations in imaginary kingdoms, but we are blessed with a healthy curiosity as to what really is happening among our teeming millions, and are not so blind as our foreign critics and the croakers at home would have us think as to what we do and feel and believe. But the realists must play the game straight. They must paint the wart on the sitter’s nose—though he refuse to pay for the portrait! Half-hearted dallying and sidling and compromising are not getting us anywhere. The flimsiest romance is preferable to dishonest realism. It is the meretricious stuff in the guise of realism that we are all anxious to delete from the catalogues.

Having thus, I hope, appeased the realists, who are an exacting phalanx, difficult to satisfy, I feel that it is only right, just, and proper to rally for a moment the scampering hosts of the romanticists. It is deplorable that Realism should be so roused to bloodthirstiness by any intrusion upon the landscape of Romanticism’s dainty frocks and fluttering ribbons. Before Realism was, Romance ruled in many kingdoms. If Romance had not been, Realism would not be. Let the Cossacks keep to their side of the river and behave like gentlemen! Others have said it who spoke with authority, and I shall not scruple to repeat that the story for the story’s sake is a perfectly decent, honorable, and praiseworthy thing. It is as old as human nature, and the desire for it will not perish till man has been recreated. Neither much argument about it, nor the limning against the gray Russian sky-line of the august figures of Dostoiefsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenieff will change the faith of the many who seek in fiction cheer and recreation.

Again, I beg, let us preserve a good temper as we ponder these matters. More and more we shall have true realism; but more and more let us hope for the true romance. Stevenson’s familiar contributions to the discussion are in the best vein of the cause he espouses; and although a New York newspaper referred to him the other day as the “Caledonian poseur,” his lantern-bearers continue to signal merrily from the heights and are not to be confused with Realism’s switch targets in the railroad yards in the valley. The lords of the high pale brow in classrooms and on the critical dais are much too contemptuous of Romance. Romance we must have, to the end of time, no matter how nobly Realism may achieve. With our predisposition as a healthy-minded and cheerful people toward tales of the night-rider and the scratch of the whip butt on the inn door, it is unfair to slap Romance on the wrist and post her off to bed like a naughty stepchild. Even the stern brow of the realist must relax at times.

Many people of discernment found pleasure in our Richard Carvels, Janice Merediths, and Hugh Wynnes. Miss Johnston’s To Have and to Hold and Lewis Rand are books one may enjoy without shame. The stickler for style need not be scornful of Mrs. Catherwood’s Lazarre and The Romance of Dollard. Out of Chicago came Mr. Henry Fuller’s charming exotic, The Chevalier of Piensieri-Vani. Monsieur Beaucaire and Miss Sherwood’s Daphne proved a while ago that all the cherries have not been shaken from the tree—only the trees in these cases, unfortunately, were not American. Surely one of these days a new Peter Pan will fly over an American greenwood. I should bless the hand that pressed upon me for reading to-night so diverting a skit as Mr. Vielé’s The Inn of the Silver Moon. I shall not even pause to argue with those who are plucking my coat-tails and whispering that these are mere trifles, too frivolous to be mentioned when the novel is the regular order of the conference. I am looking along the shelf for Stockton, the fanciful and whimsical. How pleasant it would be to meet Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine again, or to lodge for a day at another Squirrel Inn. And yet (O fame, thou fickle one!) when I asked a young lady the other day if she knew Stockton, she replied with emphasis that she did not; that “that old quaint stuff doesn’t go any more!”

Having handed Realism a ticket to Pittsburgh with generous stop-over privileges, I regret that I am unable to point Romance to any such promising terminus. But the realm of Romance is extra-territorial; Realism alone demands the surveyor’s certificate and abstracts of title. An Irish poet once assured me that fairies are to be found everywhere, and surely somewhere between Moosehead Lake and Puget Sound some lad is piping lustily on a new silver whistle where the deer come down to drink.