Cable was accompanied by so many other good writers that it would require a volume to do them justice. We name only, by way of indicating the wide variety that awaits the reader, the charming stories of Grace King and writers Kate Chopin dealing with plantation life; the New England stories, powerful or brilliant or somber, of Sarah Orne Jewett, Rose Terry Cooke and Mary E. Wilkins; the tender and cheery southern stories of Thomas Nelson Page; the impressive stories of mountaineer life by Mary Noailles Murfree (Charles Egbert Craddock); the humorous, Alice-in-Wonderland kind of stories told by Frank Stockton; and a bewildering miscellany of other works, of which the names Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Hamlin Garland, Alice French (Octave Thanet), Rowland Robinson, Frank Norris and Henry C. Bunner are as a brief but inviting index.
It would be unjust at the present time to discriminate among these writers or to compare them with others, perhaps equally good, whom we have not named. Occasionally in the flood of short stories appears one that compels attention. Aldrich's "Marjorie Daw," Edward Everett Hale's "The Man without a Country," Stockton's "The Lady or the Tiger,"—each of these impresses us so forcibly by its delicate artistry or appeal to patriotism or whimsical ending that we hail it as a new classic, forgetting that the term "classic" carries with it the implication of something old and proved, safe from change or criticism. Undoubtedly a few of our recent stories deserve the name; they will be more widely known a century hence than they are now, and may finally rank above "Rip Van Winkle" or "The Gold Bug" or "The Snow Image"; but until the perfect tale is sifted from the thousand that are almost perfect, every ambitious critic is free to make his own prophecy.
[Illustration: MARY E. WILKINS-FREEMAN]
SOME RECENT NOVELISTS. There is a difference between our earlier and later fiction which becomes apparent when we compare specific examples. As a type of the earlier novel take Cooper's The Spy or Longfellow's Hyperion or Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables or Simms's Katherine Walton or Cooke's The Virginia Comedians, and read it in connection with a recent novel, such as Howells's Annie Kilburn or Miss Jewett's Deephaven or Harold Frederick's Illumination or James Lane Allen's The Reign of Law or Frank Norris's The Octopus. Disregarding the important element of style, we note that the earlier novels have a distant background in time or space; that their chief interest lies in the story they have to tell; that they take us far away from present reality into regions where people are more impressive and sentiments more exalted than in our familiar, prosaic world. The later novels interest us less by the story than by the analysis of character; they deal with human life as it is here and now, not as we imagine it to have been elsewhere or in a golden age. In a word, our later novels are realistic in purpose, and in this respect they are in marked contrast with our novels of an earlier age, which are nearly all of the romantic kind. [Footnote: In the above comparison we have ignored a large number of recent novels that are quite as romantic as any written before the war. Romance is still, as in all past ages, more popular than realism: witness the millions of readers of Lew Wallace, E. P. Roe and other modern romancers.]
The realistic movement in American fiction began, as we have noted, with the short-story writers; and presently the most talented of these writers, having learned the value of real scenes and characters, turned to the novel and produced works having the double interest of romance and realism; that is, they told an old romantic tale of love or heroism and set it amid scenes or characters that were typical of American life. Miss Jewett's novels of northern village life, for example, are even finer than her short stories in the same field. The same criticism applies to Miss Murfree with her novels of mountaineer life in Tennessee, to James Lane Allen with his novels of his native Kentucky, and to many another recent novelist who tells a brave tale of his own people. We call these, in the conventional way, novels of New England or the South or the West; in reality they are novels of humanity, of the old unchanging tragedies or comedies of human life, which seem more true or real to us because they appear in a familiar setting.
There is another school of realism which subordinates the story element, which avoids as untrue all unusual or heroic incidents and deals with ordinary men or women; and of this school William Dean Howells is a conspicuous example. Judging him by his novels alone it would be difficult to determine his rank; but judging him by his high aim and distinguished style (a style remarkable for its charm and purity in an age too much influenced by newspaper slang and smartness) he is certainly one of the best of our recent prose writers. Since his first modest volume appeared in 1860 he has published many poems, sketches of travel, appreciations of literature, parlor comedies, novels,—an immense variety of writings; but whatever one reads of his sixty-odd books, whether Venetian Life or A Boys' Town, one has the impression of an author who lives for literature, who puts forth no hasty or unworthy work, and who aims steadily to be true to the best traditions of American letters.
[Illustration: WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS]
In middle life Howells turned definitely to fiction and wrote, among various other novels, A Woman's Reason, The Minister's Charge, A Modern Instance and The Rise of Silas Lapham. These are all realistic in that they deal frankly with contemporary life; but in their plots and conventional endings they differ but little from the typical romance. [Footnote: Several of Howells's earlier novels deal with New England life, but superficially and without understanding. However minutely they depict its manners or mannerisms they seldom dip beneath the surface. If the reader wants not the body but the soul of New England, he must go to some other fiction writer, to Sarah Orne Jewett, for example, or to Rose Terry Cooke] Then Howells fell under the influence of Tolstoi and other European realists, and his later novels, such as Annie Kilburn, A Hazard of New Fortunes and The Quality of Mercy, are rather aimless studies of the speech, dress, mannerisms and inanities of American life with precious little of its ideals,—which are the only things of consequence, since they alone endure. He appears here as the photographer rather than the painter of American life, and his work has the limited interest of another person's family album.
[Illustration: MARK TWAIN]
Another realist of a very different kind is Samuel L. Clemens (1835-1910), who is more widely known by his pseudonym of Mark Twain. He grew up, he tells us, in "a loafing, down-at-the-heels town in Missouri"; he was educated "on the river," and in most of his work he attempted to deal with the rough-and-ready life which he knew intimately at first hand. His Life on the Mississippi, a vivid delineation of river scenes and characters, is perhaps his best work, or at least the most true to his aim and his experience. Roughing It is another volume from his store of personal observation, this time in the western mining camps; but here his realism goes as far astray from truth as any old romance in that it exaggerates even the sensational elements of frontier life.