The American novels which center about sex and the family have passed through rapid changes during the twentieth century. In 1902 Mr. Bliss Perry, discussing tendencies of American novelists in his “A Study of Prose Fiction,” declared that the American novel was free from equivocal morality, that “people who want the sex-novel, and want it prepared with any literary skill, have to import it from across the water,” and concluded with the confident assertion that while American fiction “may not be national, and may not be great, it will have at least the negative virtue of being clean.” A few pages later in the same chapter he made an observing comment of which he failed to see the implication when he noted that conversation between writers of fiction was likely to center about men like Turgenieff, and Tolstoi, Flaubert and Daudet, Björnson and D’Annunzio. The influence of these men was soon to be felt, both directly and through the medium of Englishmen from the generation of Hardy to that of Wells and Galsworthy. And within a dozen years it had extended so far that the National Institute of Arts and Letters went on record in warning and protest against the morbid insistency of an increasing number of younger writers. This wave was a symptom not only of a literary influence but, more deeply, of the world-wide attempt to re-estimate the rights and duties and privileges of womankind. There are few subjects on which people of recent years have done more thinking, and few on which they have arrived at less certain conclusions. With the collapse of the great “conspiracy of silence” that has surrounded certain aspects of personal and family life, it has been natural for the present generation to fall into the same errors into which Whitman had fallen. Naturally, too, the evil thinker seized on the occasion for evil speech. There has been every shade of expression from blatant wantonness to high-minded and self-respecting honesty. Thus we can account for Mr. Theodore Dreiser, who seems to feel that freedom of speech should be gratefully acknowledged by indulgence to the farthest extreme. And thus we can account for Mr. Ernest Poole, who, in “His Family,” has presented an extraordinarily fine summary of the broad and perplexing theme.
The English novel is nearing the end of its second century of influence. It is a constant in literature which will probably attract more readers than any other single form. Yet it will have its times of greater and lesser popularity, and it seems to have passed the height of a wave shortly after 1900. First the drama came forward with a new challenge to serious attention, and of late poetry has reëstablished itself as a living language.
BOOK LIST
General References
Besant, Sir Walter. The Art of Fiction. 1884.
Burton, Richard. Forces in Fiction. 1902.
Crawford, F. Marion. The Novel: what it is. 1903.
Cross, W. L. The Development of the English Novel. 1899.
Fiske, H. S. Provincial Types in American Fiction. 1903.
Garland, Hamlin. Crumbling Idols. 1894.