A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

One thinks of Thoreau—one thinks of him often as one reads Allen. Everywhere Nature, and Nature with the metaphysical light upon it. And connected with Nature always the tragedy of human life—beauty of landscape expressed in perfect beauty of language, but under it and behind it struggle and passion and pain. Nowhere else in the period such distinction of expression, such charm of literary atmosphere, combined with such deep soundings into the heart of human life. "The White Cowl" which appeared in the Century of 1888 and later "Sister Dolorosa" may be compared with no other American work later than "Ethan Brand."

In his first period Allen was distinctively a writer of short stories and sketches. His canvas was small, his plots single and uncomplicated, his backgrounds over-elaborate, impeding the movement of the plot and overshadowing the characters. His art began with landscape—his second book, much of the matter of which was written before the contents of the first, was wholly landscape, landscape idealized and made lyric. Then came John Gray, a preliminary sketch, and A Kentucky Cardinal and its sequel Aftermath, long and short stories, parables, humanity beginning to emerge from the vast cosmic nature spectacle and to dominate. Over everything beauty, yet through it all a strain of sadness, the sadness of youth repressed, of tragedy too soon.

The second period began in 1896 with the publication of Summer in Arcady. The novelist had moved permanently to New York City. He had gained a broader outlook; he had felt the new forces that were moving Thomas Hardy and the French novelists. His early work seemed to him now narrow and weak, mere exercises of a prentice hand. He would work with the novel now rather than with the short story; he would deal with broad canvas, with the great fundamental problems that complicate human life. His essay in the Atlantic of October, 1897, explains the new period in his work. Literature even into the mid-nineties had been feminine rather than masculine, he averred. The American novelists had aimed too much at refinement.

They sought the coverts where some of the more delicate elements of our national life escaped the lidless eye of publicity, and paid their delicate tributes to these; on the clumsy canvases of our tumultuous democracy they watched to see where some solitary being or group of beings described lines of living grace, and with grace they detached these and transferred them to the enduring canvases of letters; they found themselves impelled to look for the minute things of our humanity, and having gathered these, to polish them, carve them, compose them into minute structures with minutest elaboration ... polishing and adornment of the little things of life—little ideas, little emotions, little states of mind and shades of feeling, climaxes and dénouements, little comedies and tragedies played quite through or not quite played through by little men and women on the little stage of little playhouses.

So much for the past, for the feminine age to which his own earlier work had belonged. A new age had arisen; a masculine age, less delicate, less refined, less heedful of little things, a strenuous age, more passionate and virile, less shrinking and squeamish.

It is striking out boldly for larger things—larger areas of adventure, larger spaces of history, with freer movements through both: it would have the wings of a bird in the air, and not the wings of a bird on a woman's hat. It reveals a disposition to place its scenery, its companies of players, and the logic of its dramas, not in rare, pale, half-lighted, dimly beheld backgrounds, but nearer to the footlights of the obvious. And if, finally, it has any one characteristic more discernible than another, it is the movement away from the summits of life downward towards the bases of life; from the heights of civilization to the primitive springs of action; from the thin-aired regions of consciousness which are ruled over by Tact to the underworld of consciousness where are situated the mighty workshops, and where toils on forever the cyclopean youth, Instinct.

It was more than the analysis of a far-seeing critic: it was the call of a novelist to himself to abandon the small ideals and narrow field of his early art, and strike out into the main currents of the age.

Let us try for a while the literary virtues and the literary materials of less self-consciousness, of larger self-abandonment, and thus impart to our fiction the free, the uncaring, the tremendous fling and swing that are the very genius of our time and spirit.

Following this declaration came the three major novels, The Choir Invisible, which was his old short story John Gray enlarged and given "fling and swing," The Reign of Law, and The Mettle of the Pasture, novels of the type which he had denominated masculine, American, yet to be grouped with nothing else in American literature, their only analogues being found in England or France.