A necessary concomitant of this tendency toward realism has been an increase in the number of “novels of the soil.” Writers have drawn what they knew best: Miss Woolson, the Lake region; Cable, Creole New Orleans; Ella Higginson and Emma Wolf, the Pacific coast; Allen, Kentucky; Miss Murfree, Tennessee; Fawcett and Bunner, New York; Henry B. Fuller and Miss Wyatt, Chicago; Miss Jewett and Mrs. Wilkins Freeman, New England. One reason why the “great American novel” has not yet been written is the very bigness of the country. No great personality has yet risen who can combine all the elements of our vast modern life into one harmonious structure. Meanwhile we have had most of the various sections of our country described in fiction by skilful hands. Types of a life that is passing away have been caught and preserved in a fiction which, though assuredly not immortal, is destined, we believe, to a long life.
Our critics have justly complained, however, of the limited range of our novelists. They are timid. They are content to paint a small canvas. They do not rise to great conceptions. They do not probe life to its depths; neither do they rise to the height of all its grandeur. This is, of course, only another way of saying that we have no supremely great novelists. But doubtless the mediocrity of our fiction is partly due to the disastrous effect of commercialism and professionalism on the novelist’s trade; though Mr. Whibley’s account of this (Blackwood’s, March, 1908) is exaggerated. Certainly our writers must be less eager for immediate and substantial rewards. Poeta nascitur, non fit; too many “made” writers are pouring out fiction to-day.
Our fiction possesses one characteristic which has often been commented upon—a general excellence of moral atmosphere. There is little American fiction that must be kept from the curious Young Person. Some critics allege that the obligation to write what anyone may be permitted to read has prevented American novelists from discussing those darker problems of sex-relations which confront us, and which should find expression in a literature adequately reflecting our intellectual and moral life; that missing any rigorous attack on these problems they find our fiction tame, insipid, wanting in vitality. But such an opinion carries with it its own condemnation. If our fiction lacks vitality, it is probably from other causes; at any rate Americans are generally content to leave matters of moral pathology to their moral surgeons, whose diagnoses and discussions are not expected to circulate promiscuously; and it is not likely that our novelists will consent to defile their pages for the sake of securing comprehensiveness in their pictures of life.
The short story has been brought by American writers to a high degree of perfection. Irving was its American father; and in the hands of Hawthorne, Poe, Fitz-James O’Brien, Edward Everett Hale, Miss Woolson, Brander Matthews, Miss Jewett, Stockton, Page, Mark Twain, Mrs. Freeman, and many others, it has become a highly flexible instrument, capable of subtle adaptations. The limitations of range and environment have made for great delicacy and precision in the minute portraits and the genres to be found in large numbers throughout our short stories.
Yet notwithstanding the increase in the number and the advance in quality of our short stories, the novel continues as popular as ever. The immense vogue of the novel in America has been commented upon many times. The “best sellers” are almost always novels; and so many novels of more than average excellence are produced every year that many really superior stories do not get the immediate hearing, at least, which they deserve. That this demand for novels will continue unabated for some time is altogether likely. That another form of literature will soon take its place is quite improbable.
Apparently we have no great living poets; for various reasons we have no dramatists of note; of novelists who are at least possibilities, we have several.
What will be the type of the American novel of the future? Probably it is rash to make any prediction; but one may venture to believe that the prevailing attitude of our future novelists will be that of a sane and optimistic realism. The morbid books like “The Jungle” do not wear well; and, while such books may have their use in promoting needed reforms, they do not constitute additions to literature and can, therefore, secure no permanent place. The pleasant paths of romance will always tempt bold and imaginative writers; but they will be more than ever restrained by the demand of enlightened readers that they shall not wander far from the probable, and shall present, clear and undistorted, the best there is in the actual present. That there are immense possibilities in the varied and complex life of to-day, few will doubt; that the great artists are to appear who will make the most of these opportunities we may assume with confidence.
III. THE POETS
English Influence on American Poetry.—If we accept the popular belief, and identify poets with makers of verse, it must be allowed that American poetry at its best—in the nineteenth century—is in a peculiar sense unoriginal and derivative. To be derivative, to have a traceable pedigree, may, indeed, be no disadvantage, either for a national or an individual genius. In their way, all modern literatures are derivative and unoriginal; not merely influenced by each other, but ultimately dependent for the sources of their inspiration upon the basal civilisations of Palestine and Greece. “We are all Greeks,” said Shelley. Milton might have said, “We are all Hebrews.” And our best American poets might have added, “We are all Englishmen.” Particular scenes on this continent, and the vast and ever growing extent of our territory, have both left their impress on our poets during the last five generations; they have touched the poetry of ten or twelve decades here and there with the undeniable stamp of reality, and given it now and then a largeness of range and freedom of atmosphere very proper to a nation whose sense of geography has been so elastic. Yet one can hardly say that our natural scenery has ever been really incarnate in our literature as a whole, or that a pervasive national spirit, a spirit at once large and precise, has entered fundamentally into our verse. What has been most effectual in our literature has been closely imitative, has followed at a little distance, yet step for step, the development of the English literature from which it sprang. This continuous imitation, now more superficial, now more indirect and elusive, has been the mainspring of our poetry even more than our prose, during the century just gone by.
American poetry, it is true, has probably been more plastic and mobile in its outer form than American prose, has been less steadily patterned after those literary standards in England which were bequeathed by the eighteenth century. The prose style of Irving betrays its descent from the essays of Addison; the style of Franklin was developed through conscious and painstaking emulation of the same models. Even fairly late in the eighteen hundreds, when perhaps only a trained ear can detect the lingering echoes of Pope and his school in our verse, the “Autocrat” of Wendell Holmes still retains an accent and a flavour from eighteenth-century, Ciceronian eloquence. No doubt the age of Pope and Johnson survived by many vestiges much longer in English prose than in English verse, for its habits of thought were more or less suited to argument and exposition in every time. Yet in the history of American letters it is easier to find parallels to Wordsworth and Shelley than to duplicate the prose rhapsodies—characteristic in nineteenth-century Europe—of De Quincey and Ruskin. To the transition in English literature that was marked by the appearance of “Lyrical Ballads” in 1798 our poetry was, in the main, more quickly responsive than our prose. None the less our prose, more conservative though it has been, less changeful in its manner of expression, has struck its roots far more deeply into our national being; and our verse, like the other fine arts, is still an exotic.