A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

It was, therefore, but natural that her work should be both serious and ethical and that it should be touched with beauty. In John Ward, Preacher, she took as her theme the revolt of a soul against the infallibilities of a system of belief. It is not necessarily a religious novel or yet a purpose novel. The primary motif of Robert Elsmere is theological and doctrinal discussion. It is religious polemic made attractive by being cast into story form and as such it deserves the anathema of Crawford, but in Mrs. Deland's novel the human interest is paramount. Religion is the force that acts upon two lives, just as jealousy might have been taken or misdirected love or any other human dynamic, and the novel is the record of the reactions under the stress.

So with all her novels. The theme is the destruction or the redemption of a soul, the abasement or the rehabilitation of a character through some immaterial force applied from within. She deals with great ethical and sociological forces: heredity, as in her novelette The Hands of Esau; divorce, as in The Iron Woman; the compelling power of love, as in Sidney. Her primary aim is not, as with Crawford and Harte, simply to entertain; it is rather to expose the human soul to its own view, to show it its limitations and its dangers, that the soul may be purged through fear of what may be—the aim indeed of the Greek drama. Her equipment for the work was complete. To feminine tenderness and insight she added a depth of view and an analysis that is masculine. She was a poet too, but a poet with the severity of form and the moving realism of the short story writer. Two of her novels, The Awakening of Helena Richie and The Iron Woman, have not been surpassed in construction and in moving power by any other writer of the period.

Her Old Chester Tales also, with their central figure Dr. Lavendar, have the elements that make for permanence. They are really without time or place. Old Chester undoubtedly is in western Pennsylvania, the author's native town, but it might be New England as well. The tales deal with universal types and with universal motifs with a broadness and a sympathy and a literary art that raises them into the realm of the rarer classics. From them emerges the figure of Dr. Lavendar to place beside even Adams and Primrose. Place is not dwelt upon; humanity is all. They are not so much stories as fragments of actual life touched with the magic of poetry and of ethic vision. From that worldly social area of life presented to us by such latter-day novelists as Crawford and Edith Wharton and Robert Chambers they are as far removed as is a fashionable Newport yacht, with its club-centered men and cigarette-smoking women, from the simple little hamlet among the hills.

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: