Norris unquestionably lacked knowledge of many of the most fundamental areas of human life. He was too insistently modern. Like the mere journalist, he was obsessed with but a single thought: the value of the present moment. He lacked a sense of the past, personal background, inner life, power to weigh and balance and compare, and, lacking these, he lacked the elements that make for the literature of permanence.
Henry Harland's (1861–1905) earliest work, As It Was Written (1885), Mrs. Peixada, and The Yoke of the Thora (1887), written under the pen name "Sidney Luska," presented certain phases of Jewish life and character in New York with a grim power that seemed promising, but his later work was decadent. Harold Frederic was a more substantial figure. A typical American, self-made and self-educated, climbing by rapid stages from the positions of farm hand, photographer, and proof-reader to the editorship of influential papers like the Albany Journal, at twenty-eight he was the European representative of the New York Times and an international correspondent of rare power. Novel-writing he took up as a recreation. His earliest work, which appeared in Scribner's Magazine, Seth's Brother's Wife (1887), was a novel of New York farm life, Garland-like in its depressing realism. Later stories like In the Valley and The Copperhead dealt with a background of the Civil War. His greatest success came with The Damnation of Theron Ware, published in England with the title Illumination, a remarkable book especially in its earlier chapters, full of vigor and truth. Undoubtedly he possessed the rare gift of story-telling, and had he, like Crawford, devoted himself wholly to the art, he might have done work to compare with any other written during the period. But he was a journalist with newspaper standards, he worked in haste, he lacked repose and the sense of values, and as a result a republication of his novels has not been called for. He is to be ranked with Crane and Norris as a meteor of brilliance rather than a fixed light.
VI
The new realism was short lived. Even while its propaganda like Crumbling Idols and The Responsibilities of the Novelist were spreading the news that Walter Scott was dead and that the god of things as they are had come in his power, a new romantic period already had begun. Maurice Thompson, one of the most clear-eyed critics of the period, wrote in May, 1900:
Just how deep and powerful the present distinct movement toward a romantic revival may be no one can tell. Many facts, however, point to a veering of popular interest from the fiction of character analysis and social problems to the historical novel and the romance of heroic adventure. We have had a period of intense, not to say morbid, introversion directed mainly upon diseases of the social, domestic, political, and religious life of the world. It may be that, like all other currents of interest when turned upon insoluble problems, this rush of inquiry, this strain of exploitation, has about run its course.... Great commercial interest seems to be turned or turning from the world of commonplace life and the story of the analysis of crime and filth to the historical romance, the story of heroism, and the tale of adventure. People seem to be interested as never before in the interpretation of history. It may be that signs in the air of great world changes have set all minds more or less to feeling out for precedents and examples by which to measure the future's probabilities.[158]
The causes of this later wave of romanticism, a wave that was wider than America, have been variously estimated. Harold Frederic suggested Blackmore as the possible fountain head. "Was it Lorna Doone, I wonder, that changed the drift in historical fiction? The book, after it was once introduced to public attention by that comic accident which no one can blame Mr. Blackmore for grinding his teeth over, achieved, as it deserved, one of the great successes of our time—and great successes set men thinking."[159] Paul Leicester Ford, himself an historian and a notable producer of historical romance, was inclined to another explanation: "At the present moment [1897] there seems a revival of interest in American history, and the novelist has been quickly responsive to it."[160] The English critic E. A. Bennett offered still another solution: "America is a land of crazes. In other words, it is simple: no derision is implied.... And America is also a land of sentimentalism. It is this deep-seated quality which, perhaps, accounts for the vogue of history in American fiction. The themes of the historical novel are so remote, ideas about them exist so nebulously in the mind, that a writer may safely use the most bare-faced distortions to pamper the fancy without offending that natural and racial shrewdness which would bestir itself if a means of verification were at hand. The extraordinary notion still obtains that human nature was different 'in those days'; that the good old times were, somehow, 'pretty,' and governed by fates poetically just."[161]
Ford undoubtedly was right in assigning the immediate outburst at the close of the century to a new interest in American history. The war with Spain brought about a burst of patriotism and of martial feeling that made the swashbuckling romance and the episode from the American Revolution seem peculiarly appropriate. But the war was by no means the only cause. The reaction had come earlier, a reaction from the excess of reality that had come with the eighties. The influence of Stevenson must not be overlooked, Stevenson who, type of his age, had sickened early of the realistic, the analytic, the problematic.
"I do desire a book of adventure," Stevenson had written to Henley as early as 1884, "a romance—and no man will get or write me one. Dumas I have read and re-read too often; Scott, too, and I am short. I want to hear swords clash. I want a book to begin in a good way; a book, I guess, like Treasure Island.... Oh, my sighings after romance, or even Skeltery, and O! the weary age which will produce me neither!
"'Chapter I
"'The night was damp and cloudy, the ways foul. The single horseman, cloaked and booted, who pursued his way across Willesden Common, had not met a traveler, when the sound of wheels....'
"'Chapter II
"'"Yes, sir," said the old pilot, "she must have dropped into the bay a little afore dawn. A queer craft she looks."
"'"She shows no colors," returned the young gentleman, musingly.
"'"They're a-lowering of a quarter-boat, Mr. Mark," resumed the old salt. "We shall soon know more of her."
"'"Aye," replied the young gentleman called Mark, "and here, Mr. Seadrift, comes your sweet daughter Nancy tripping down the cliff."
"'"God bless her kind heart, sir," ejaculated old Seadrift.'"
Be the cause what it may, for a time historical romance was the dominant literary form in America. In 1902, Bliss Perry, editor of the Atlantic, could write of "the present passion for historical novels." To what extent they were a passion may be learned from the records of publishers. By the summer of 1901, Ford's Janice Meredith had sold 275,000 copies, Mary Johnston's To Have and to Hold, 285,000, and Churchill's The Crisis, 320,000, and his Richard Carvel, 420,000.[162] One might give equally large figures for such favorites as Charles Major's When Knighthood Was in Flower, Tarkington's Monsieur Beaucaire, Mitchell's Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker, Thompson's Alice of Old Vincennes, and very many others, foreign as well as American.
The novels fall into two classes: those in which the historical element is made emphatic and those which are pure romances. Of the former class Paul Leicester Ford's Janice Meredith is, perhaps, the best type; of the latter, Mitchell's Hugh Wynne. Ford was first of all a historian, a bibliographer, a tireless delver among historical sources. He had been educated in his father's library, which contained the finest collection of Americana in the world, and at twelve we find him publishing on his own press a genealogy of Webster of his own compilation. His later bibliographical and historical work centered about the American Revolution. When he turned to fiction it was as a historian, a specialist who would exploit real historical characters and real areas of American life. The Honorable Peter Stirling was a study of ward politics with the young Grover Cleveland as the central figure. It was an accurate picture, vigorous and truthful, and even though a fiction it is a valuable historical document. So it was with Janice Meredith, a historian's day-dream over his Americana. It presents an accurate picture of the social conditions of its time. Many of its characters are revolutionary leaders: Washington is a central figure—"The true George Washington," presented with all his failings as well as with all his excellences.