The peculiar strength and the peculiar weakness of Henry B. Fuller lie in his faithful habit of being a dilettante. A generation ago, when the aesthetic poets and critics were in bloom, Mr. Fuller in The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani and The Chatelaine of La Trinité played with sentimental pilgrimages in Italy or the Alps, packing his narratives with the most affectionate kind of archaeology and yet forever scrutinizing them with a Yankee smile. A little later, when Howells's followers had become more numerous, Mr. Fuller joined them with minute, accurate, amused representations of Chicago in The Cliff-Dwellers and With the Procession. Then, as if bored with longer flights, he settled himself to writing sharp-eyed stories concerning the life of art as conducted in Chicago—Under the Skylights—and of Americans traveling in Europe—From the Other Side, Waldo Trench and Others. After Spoon River Anthology Mr. Fuller took such hints from its method as he needed in the pungent dramatic sketches of Lines Long and Short. One of these sketches, called Postponement, has autobiography, it may be guessed, in its ironic, wistful record of a Midwestern American who all his life longed and planned to live in Europe but who found himself ready to gratify his desire only in the dread summer of 1914, when peace departed from the earth to stay away, he saw, at least as long as he could hope to live. There is the note of intimate experience, if not of autobiography, in these lucid words spoken about the hero of On the Stairs: "he wanted to be an artist and give himself out; he wanted to be a gentleman and hold himself in. An entangling, ruinous paradox."
Fate, if not fatalism, has kept Mr. Fuller, this dreamer about old lands, always resident in the noisiest city of the newest land and always less, it seems, than thoroughly expressive. Had there been more passion in his constitution he might, perhaps, have either detached himself from Chicago altogether or submerged himself in it to a point of reconciliation. But passion is precisely what Mr. Fuller seems to lack or to be chary of. He dwells above the furies. As one consequence his books, interesting as every one of them is, suffer from the absence of emphasis. His utterance comes in the tone of an intelligent drawl. Spiritually in exile, he lives somewhat unconcerned with the drama of existence surrounding him, as if his gaze were farther off. Yet though deficiency in passion has made Mr. Fuller an amateur, it has allowed him the longest tether in the exercise of a free, penetrating intelligence. He is not lightly jostled out of his equilibrium by petty irritations or swept off his feet by those torrents of ready emotion which sweep through popular fiction by their own momentum. Whenever, in A Daughter of the Middle Border, Hamlin Garland brings Mr. Fuller into his story, there is communicated the sense of a vivid intellect somehow keeping its counsel and yet throwing off rays of suggestion and illumination.
Without much question it is by his critical faculties that Mr. Fuller excels. He has the poetic energy to construct, but less frequently to create. Such endowments invite him to the composition of memoirs. He has, indeed, in On the Stairs, produced the memoirs, in the form of a novel, of a Chicagoan who could never adapt himself to his native habitat and who gradually sees the control of life slipping out of his hands to those of other, more potent, more decisive, less divided men. But suppose Mr. Fuller were to surrender the ironic veil of fiction behind which he has preferred to hide his own spiritual adventures! Suppose he were avowedly to write the history of the arts and letters in Chicago! Suppose he were, rather more confidingly, to trace the career of an actual, attentive dilettante in his thunderous town!
Mary Austin
Criticism perceives in Mary Austin the certain signs of a power which, for reasons not entirely clear, has as yet failed to express itself completely in forms of art. She herself prefers less to be judged by any of her numerous books than to be regarded as a figure laboring somewhat anonymously toward the development of a national culture founded at all points on national realities. Behind this preference is a personal experience which must be taken into account in any analysis of Mrs. Austin's work. Born in Illinois, she went at twenty to California, to live between the Sierra Nevada and the Mohave Desert. There she was soon spiritually acclimated to the wilderness, studied among the Indians the modes of aboriginal life, and in time came to bear the relation almost of a prophetess to the people among whom she lived. Her first book, The Land of Little Rain, interpreted the desert chiefly as landscape. Since then she has, it may be said, employed the desert as a measure of life, constantly bringing from it a sense for the primal springs of existence into all her comment upon human affairs. The Man Jesus examines the career of a desert-dweller who preached a desert-wisdom to a confused world. Her play The Arrow Maker exhibits the behavior and fortunes of a desert-seeress among her own people. Love and the Soul-Maker anatomizes love as a primal force struggling with and through civilization. From Paiute and Shoshone medicine men, the only poets Mrs. Austin knew during her formative years, she acquired that grounding in basic rhythms which led her to write free verse years before it became the fashion in sophisticated circles and persuaded her that American poetry cannot afford to overlook the experiments and successes of the first American poets in fitting expression to the actual conditions of the continent.
It has been of course a regular tradition among novelists in the United States to weigh the "settlements" in a balance and to represent them as lacking the hardy virtues of the backwoods. Mrs. Austin goes beyond this naïve process. Whether she deals with the actual frontier—as in Isidro or Lost Borders or The Ford—or with more crowded, more complex regions—as in The Woman of Genius or 26 Jayne Street—she keeps her particular frontier in mind not as an entity or a dogma but as a symbol of the sources of human life and society. She creates, it seems, out of depths of reflection and out of something even deeper than reflection. She has observed the unconscious instincts of the individual and the long memories of the race. The effect upon her novels of such methods has been to widen their sympathies and to warm and lift their style; it has also been to render them sometimes defective in structure and sometimes obscure in meaning. If they are not glib, neither are they always clean-cut or direct. Along with her generous intelligence she has a good deal of the stubborn wilfulness of genius, and she has never achieved a quite satisfactory fusion of the two qualities. She wears something like the sibyl's robes and speaks with something like the sibyl's strong accents, but the cool, hard discipline of the artist or of the exact scholar only occasionally serves her. Much of her significance lies in her promise. Faithful to her original vision, she has moved steadily onward, growing, writing no book like its predecessor, applying her wisdom continually to new knowledge, leaving behind her a rich detritus which she will perhaps be willing to consider detritus if it helps to nourish subsequent generations.
Immigrants
The newer stocks and neighborhoods in the United States have their fictive records as well as the longer established ones, and there is growing up a class of immigrant books which amounts almost to a separate department of American literature. From Denmark, Germany, Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, Russia, Rumania, Syria, Italy have come passionate pilgrims who have set down, mostly in plain narratives, the chronicles of their migration. As the first Americans contended with nature and the savages, so these late arrivals contend with men and a civilization no less hostile toward them; their writings continue, in a way, the earliest American tradition of a concern with the risks and contrivances by which pioneers cut their paths. Even when the immigrants write fiction they tend to choose the same materials and thus to fall into formulas, which are the more observable since the writers are the survivors in the struggle and naturally tell about the successes rather than the failures in the process of Americanization.
Not all the stocks, of course, are equally interested in fiction or gifted at it: the Russian Jews have the most notable novels to their credit. Though these are generally composed by men not born in this country, in Yiddish, and so belong to the history of that most international of literatures, certain of them, having been translated, belong obviously as well as actually to the common treasure of the nation. Shalom Aleichem's Jewish Children and Leon Kobrin's A Lithuanian Village surely belong, though their scenes are laid in Europe; as do Sholom Asch's vivid, moving novels Mottke the Vagabond—concerned with the underworld of Poland—and Uncle Moses—concerned with the New York Ghetto—the recent translations of which are slowly bringing to a wider American public the evidence that a really eminent novelist has hitherto been partly hidden by his alien tongue.
There is no question whatever that the work of Abraham Cahan, Yiddish scholar, journalist, novelist, belongs to the American nation. As far back as the year in which Stephen Crane stirred many sensibilities with his Maggie, the story of an Irish slum in Manhattan, Mr. Cahan produced in Yekl a book of similar and practically equal merit concerning a Jewish slum in the same borough. But it and his later books The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories and The White Terror and the Red have been overwhelmed by novels by more familiar men dealing with more familiar communities. The same has been true even of his masterpiece, the most important of all immigrant novels, The Rise of David Levinsky. It, too, records the making of an American, originally a reader of Talmud in a Russian village and eventually the principal figure in the cloak and suit trade in America. But it does more than trace the career of Levinsky through his personal adventures: it traces the evolution of a great industry and represents the transplanted Russian Jews with affectionate exactness in all their modes of work and play and love—another conquest of a larger Canaan. Here are fused American hope and Russian honesty. At the end David, with all his New World wealth, lacks the peace he might have had but for his sacrifice of Old World integrity and faith. And yet the novel is very quiet in its polemic. Its hero has gained in power; he is no dummy to hang maxims on. Moving through a varied scene, gradually shedding the outward qualities of his race, he remains always an individual, gnawed at by love in the midst of his ambitions, subject to frailties which test his strength.