Perhaps it is truer to call Mr. Tarkington's plots sophomoric than to call them adolescent. Indeed, the mark of the undergraduate almost covers them, especially of the undergraduate as he fondly imagines himself in his callow days and as he is foolishly instructed to regard himself by the more vinous and more hilarious of the old graduates who annually come back to a college to offer themselves—though this is not their conscious purpose—as an object lesson in the loud triviality peculiar and traditional to such hours of reunion. Adolescence, however, when left to itself, has other and very different hours which Mr. Tarkington shows almost no signs of comprehending.
The author of Penrod, of Penrod and Sam, and of Seventeen passes for an expert in youth; rarely has so persistent a reputation been so insecurely founded. What all these books primarily recall is the winks that adults exchange over the heads of children who are minding their own business, as the adults are not; the winks, moreover, of adults who have forgotten the inner concerns of adolescence and now observe only its surface awkwardnesses. Real adolescence, like any other age of man, has its own passions, its own poetry, its own tragedies and felicities; the adolescence of Mr. Tarkington's tales is almost nothing but farce—staged for outsiders. Not one of the characters is an individual; they are all little monsters—amusing monsters, it is true—dressed up to display the stock ambitions and the stock resentments and the stock affectations and the stock perturbations of the heart which attend the middle teens. The pranks of Penrod Schofield are merely those of Tom Sawyer repeated in another town, without the touches of poetry or of the informing imagination lent by Mark Twain. The sighs of "Silly Bill" Baxter—at first diverting, it is also true—are exorbitantly multiplied till reality drops out of the semblance. Calf-love does not always remain a joke merely because there are mature spectators to stand by nudging one another and roaring at the discomfort which love causes its least experienced victims. Those knowing asides which accompany these juvenile records have been mistaken too often for shrewd, even for profound, analyses of human nature. Actually they are only knowing, as sophomores are knowing with respect to their juniors by a few years. In contemporary American fiction Mr. Tarkington is the perennial sophomore.
If he may be said never to have outgrown Purdue and Princeton, so also may he be said never to have outgrown Indiana. In any larger sense, of course, he has not needed to. A novelist does not require a universe in which to find the universe, which lies folded, for the sufficiently perceptive eye, in any village. Thoreau and Emerson found it in Concord; Thomas Hardy in Wessex has watched the world move by without himself moving. But Mr. Tarkington has toward his native state the conscious attitude of the booster. Smile as he may at the too emphatic patriotism of this or that of her sons, he himself nevertheless expands under a similar stimulus. The impulse of Harkless to clasp all Carlow County to his broad breast obviously sprang from a mood which Mr. Tarkington himself had felt. And that impulse of that first novel has been repeated again and again in the later characters. In the Arena, fruit of Mr. Tarkington's term in the Indiana legislature, is a study in complacency. Setting out to take the world of politics as he finds it, he comes perilously near to ending on the note of approval for it as it stands—as good, on the whole, as any possible world. His satire, at least, is on the side of the established order. A certain soundness and rightness of feeling, a natural hearty democratic instinct, which appears in the novels, must not be allowed to mislead the analyst of his art. More than once, to his credit, he satirically recurs to the spectacle of those young Indianians who come back from their travels with a secret condescension, as did George Amberson Minafer: "His politeness was of a kind which democratic people found hard to bear. In a word, M. le Duc had returned from the gay life of the capital to show himself for a week among the loyal peasants belonging to the old chateau, and their quaint habits and costumes afforded him a mild amusement." Such passages, however, may be matched with irritating dozens in which Mr. Tarkington swallows Indiana whole.
That may have been an easier task than to perform a similar feat with the state to the east of Indiana, which has always been a sort of halfway house between East and West; or with that to the north, with its many alien mixtures; or with that to the south, the picturesque, diversified colony of Virginia; or with that to the west, which, thanks in large part to Chicago, is packed with savagery and genius. Indiana, at any rate till very recently, has had an indigenous population, not too daring or nomadic; it has been both prosperous and folksy, the apt home of pastorals, the agreeable habitat of a sentimental folk-poet like Riley, the natural begetter of a canny fabulist like George Ade. It has a tradition of realism in fiction, but that tradition descends from The Hoosier School-Master and it includes a full confidence in the folk and in the rural virtues—very different from that of E.W. Howe or Hamlin Garland or Edgar Lee Masters in states a little further outside the warm, cozy circle of the Hoosiers. Indiana has a tradition of romance, too. Did not Indianapolis publish When Knighthood Was in Flower and Alice of Old Vincennes? They are of the same vintage as Monsieur Beaucaire. And both romance and realism in Indiana have traditionally worn the same smooth surfaces, the same simple—not to say silly—faith in things-at-large: God's in His Indiana; all's right with the world. George Ade, being a satirist of genius, has stood out of all this; Theodore Dreiser, Indianian by birth but hopelessly a rebel, has stood out against it; but Booth Tarkington, trying to be Hoosier of Hoosiers, has given himself up to the romantic and sentimental elements of the Indiana literary tradition.
To practise an art which is genuinely characteristic of some section of the folk anywhere is to do what may be important and is sure to be interesting. But Mr. Tarkington no more displays the naïveté of a true folk-novelist than he displays the serene vision that can lift a novelist above the accidents of his particular time and place. This Indianian constantly appears, by his allusions, to be a citizen of the world. He knows Europe; he knows New York. Again and again, particularly in the superb opening chapters of The Magnificent Ambersons, he rises above the local prejudices of his special parish and observes with a finely critical eye. But whenever he comes to a crisis in the building of a plot or in the truthful representation of a character he sags down to the level of Indiana sentimentality. George Minafer departs from the Hoosier average by being a snob; time—and Mr. Tarkington's plot—drags the cub back to normality. Bibbs Sheridan departs from the Hoosier average by being a poet; time—and Mr. Tarkington's plot—drags the cub back to normality. Both processes are the same. Perhaps Mr. Tarkington would not deliberately say that snobbery and poetry are equivalent offenses, but he does not particularly distinguish. Sympathize as he may with these two aberrant youths, he knows no other solution than in the end to reduce them to the ranks. He accepts, that is, the casual Hoosier valuation, not with pity because so many of the creative hopes of youth come to naught or with regret that the flock in the end so frequently prevails over individual talent, but with a sort of exultant hurrah at seeing all the wandering sheep brought back in the last chapter and tucked safely away in the good old Hoosier fold.
Viewed critically this attitude of Mr. Tarkington's is of course not even a compliment to Indiana, any more than it is a compliment to women to take always the high chivalrous tone toward them, as if they were flawless creatures; any more than it is a compliment to the poor to assume that they are all virtuous or to the rich to assume that they are all malefactors of a tyrannical disposition. If Indiana plays microcosm to Mr. Tarkington's art, he owes it to his state to find more there than he has found—or has cared to set down; he owes it to his state now and then to quarrel with the dominant majority, for majorities occasionally go wrong, as well as men; he owes it to his state to give up his method of starting his narrative himself and then calling in popular sentimentalism to advise him how to bring it to an end.
According to all the codes of the more serious kinds of fiction, the unwillingness—or the inability—to conduct a plot to its legitimate ending implies some weakness in the artistic character; and this weakness has been Mr. Tarkington's principal defect. Nor does it in any way appear that he excuses himself by citing the immemorial license of the romancer. Mr. Tarkington apparently believes in his own conclusions. Now this causes the more regret for the reason that he has what is next best to character in a novelist—that is, knack. He has the knack of romance when he wants to employ it: a light, allusive manner; a sufficient acquaintance with certain charming historical epochs and the "properties" thereto pertaining—frills, ruffs, rapiers, insinuation; a considerable expertness in the ways of the "world"; gay colors, swift moods, the note of tender elegy. He has also the knack of satire, which he employs more frequently than romance. With what a rapid, joyous, accurate eye he has surveyed the processes of culture in "the Midland town"! How quickly he catches the first gesture of affectation and how deftly he sets it forth, entertained and entertaining! From the chuckling exordium of The Magnificent Ambersons it is but a step to The Age of Innocence and Main Street. Little reflective as he has allowed himself to be, he has by shrewd observation alone succeeded in writing not a few chapters which have texture, substance, "thickness." He has movement, he has energy, he has invention, he has good temper, he has the leisure to write as well as he can if he wishes to. And, unlike those dozens of living American writers who once each wrote one good book and then lapsed into dull oblivion or duller repetition, he has traveled a long way from the methods of his greener days.
Why then does he continue to trifle with his thread-bare adolescents, as if he were afraid to write candidly about his coevals? Why does he drift with the sentimental tide and make propaganda for provincial complacency? He must know better. He can do better.
February 1921.
POSTSCRIPT.—He has done better. Almost as if to prove a somewhat somber critic in the wrong and to show that newer novelists have no monopoly of the new style of seriousness, Mr. Tarkington has in Alice Adams held himself veracious to the end and has produced a genuinely significant book. Alice is, indeed, less strictly a tragic figure than she appears to be. Desire, in any of the deeper senses, she shows no signs of feeling; what she loves in Russell is but incidentally himself and actually his assured position and his assured prosperity. So considered, her machinations to enchant and hold him have a comic aspect; one touch more of exaggeration and she would pass over to join those sorry ladies of the world of farce who take a larger visible hand in wooing than human customs happen to approve. But Mr. Tarkington withholds that one touch more of exaggeration. He understands that Alice's instinct to win a husband is an instinct as powerful as any that she has and is all that she has been taught by her society to have. In his handling she becomes important; her struggle, without the aid of guardian dowager or beguiling dot, becomes increasingly pathetic as the narrative advances; and her eventual failure, though signalized merely by her resolution to desert the inhospitable circles of privilege for the wider universe of work, carries with it the sting of tragedy.