It may be that we are too much at ease in our Zion for a deeper probing of life than our fiction has found it agreeable to make. And yet we are a far soberer people than we were when Mr. Matthew Arnold complained of our lack of intellectual seriousness. The majority has proved its soundness in a number of instances since he wrote of us. We are less impatient of self-scrutiny. Our newly awakened social consciousness finds expression in many books of real significance, and it is inevitable that our fiction shall reflect this new sobriety.
Unfortunately, since the passing of our New England Olympians, literature as a vocation has had little real dignity among us; we have had remarkably few novelists who have settled themselves to the business of writing with any high or serious aim. Hawthorne as a brooding spirit has had no successor among our fictionists. Our work has been chiefly tentative, and all too often the experiments have been made with an eye on the publisher’s barometer. Literary gossip is heavy with reports of record-breaking rapidity of composition. A writer who can dictate is the envy of an adoring circle; another who “never revises” arouses even more poignant despair. The laborious Balzac tearing his proofs to pieces seems only a dingy and pitiable figure. Nobody knows the difference, and what’s a well-turned sentence more or less? I saw recently a newspaper editorial commenting derisively on a novelist’s confession that he was capable of only a thousand words a day, the point being that the average newspaper writer triples this output without fatigue. Newcomers in the field can hardly fail to be impressed by these rumors of novels knocked off in a month or three months, for which astonishing sums have been paid by generous magazine editors. We shall have better fiction as soon as ambitious writers realize that novel-writing is a high calling, and that success is to be won only by those who are willing to serve seven and yet seven other years in the hope of winning “the crown of time.”
In his happy characterization of Turgenieff and his relation to the younger French school of realists, Mr. James speaks of the “great back-garden of his Slav imagination and his Germanic culture, into which the door constantly stood open, and the grandsons of Balzac were not, I think, particularly free to accompany him.” I am further indebted to Mr. James for certain words uttered by M. Renan of the big Russian: “His conscience was not that of an individual to whom nature had been more or less generous; it was in some sort the conscience of a people. Before he was born he had lived for thousands of years; infinite successions of reveries had amassed themselves in the depths of his heart. No man has been as much as he the incarnation of a whole race: generations of ancestors, lost in the sleep of centuries, speechless, came through him to life and utterance.”
I make no apology for thrusting my tin dipper again into Mr. James’s bubbling well for an anecdote of Flaubert, derived from Edmond de Goncourt. Flaubert was missed one fine afternoon in a house where he and De Goncourt were guests, and was found to have undressed and gone to bed to think!
I shall not give comfort to the enemy by any admission that our novelists lack culture in the sense that Turgenieff and the great French masters possessed it. A matter of which I may complain with more propriety is their lack of “information” (and I hope this term is sufficiently delicate) touching the tasks and aims of America. We have been deluged with “big” novels that are “big” only in the publishers’ advertisements. New York has lately been the scene of many novels, but the New York adumbrated in most of them is only the metropolis as exposed to the awed gaze of provincial tourists from the rubber-neck wagon. Sex, lately discovered for exploitation, has resulted only in “arrangements” of garbage in pink and yellow, lightly sprinkled with musk.
As Rosinante stumbles over the range I am disposed to offer a few suggestions for the benefit of those who may ask where, then, lies the material about which our novelists are so deficient in “information.” No strong hand has yet been laid upon our industrial life. It has been pecked at and trifled with, but never treated with breadth or fulness. Here we have probably the most striking social contrasts the world has ever seen; racial mixtures of bewildering complexity, the whole flung against impressive backgrounds and lighted from a thousand angles. Pennsylvania is only slightly “spotted” on the literary map, and yet between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, nearly every possible phase and condition of life is represented. Great passions are at work in the fiery aisles of the steel mills that would have kindled Dostoiefsky’s imagination. A pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night marks a limitless field for the earnest fictionist. A Balzac would find innumerable subjects awaiting him in the streets of Wilkesbarre!
At this point I must bemoan the ill-fortune that has carried so many American fiction writers to foreign shores. If Hawthorne had never seen Italy, but had clung to Salem, I am disposed to think American literature would be the richer. If fate had not borne Mr. Howells to Venice, but had posted him on the Ohio during the mighty struggle of the ’60’s, and if Mr. James had been stationed at Chicago, close to the deep currents of national feeling, what a monumental library of vital fiction they might have given us! If Mrs. Wharton’s splendid gifts had been consecrated to the service of Pittsburgh rather than New York and Paris, how much greater might be our debt to her!
Business in itself is not interesting; business as it reacts upon character is immensely interesting. Mineral paint has proved to be an excellent preservative for The Rise of Silas Lapham, which remains our best novel of business. But if paint may be turned to account, why not cotton, wool, and the rest of the trade catalogue, every item with its own distinct genesis? In The Turmoil Mr. Tarkington staged, under a fitting canopy of factory smoke, a significant drama of the conflict between idealism and materialism.
Turning to our preoccupation with politics, we find another field that is all but fallow. Few novels of any real dignity may be tendered as exhibits in this department, and these are in a sense local—the comprehensive, the deeply searching, has yet to be done. Mr. Churchill’s Coniston, and Mr. Brand Whitlock’s The Thirteenth District are the happiest experiments I recall, though possibly there are others of equal importance. Yet politics is not only a matter of constant discussion in every quarter, but through and by politics many thousands solve the problem of existence. Alone of great national capitals Washington has never been made the scene of a novel of distinction. Years ago we had Mrs. Burnett’s Through One Administration, but it failed to establish itself as a classic. George Meredith would have found much in Washington life upon which to exercise his ironic powers.
With all our romantic longings it is little short of amazing that we are not more fecund in schemes for romantic drama and fiction. The stage, not to say the market, waits; but the settings are dingy from much use and the characters in threadbare costumes strut forth to speak old familiar lines. Again, there is an old superstition that we are a humorous people, and yet humor is curiously absent from recent fiction. “O. Henry” knew the way to the fountain of laughter, but contented himself with the shorter form; Huckleberry Finn seems destined to stand as our nearest approach to a novel of typical humor. We have had David Harums and Mrs. Wiggses a-plenty—kindly philosophers, often drawn with skill—but the results are character sketches, not novels.