Chapter 1

OLD STYLE

1. LOCAL COLOR

A study of the American novel of the twentieth century must first of all take stock of certain types of fiction which continue to persist, with varying degrees of vitality and significance, from the last quarter of the century preceding.

There is, to begin with, the type associated with the now moribund cult of local color, which originally had Bret Harte for its prophet, and which, beginning almost at once after the Civil War, gradually broadened out until it saw priests in every state and followers in every county. Obedient to the example of the prophet, most of the practitioners of the mode chose to be episodic rather than epic in their undertakings; the history of local color belongs primarily to the historian of the short story. Even when the local colorists essayed the novel they commonly did little more than to expand some episode into elaborate dimensions or to string beads of episode upon an obvious thread. Hardly one of them ever made any real advance, either in art or reputation, upon his earliest important volume: George Washington Cable, after more than forty years, is still on the whole best represented by his _Old Creole Days_; and so--to name only the chief among the survivors--after intervals not greatly shorter are Mary N. Murfree ("Charles Egbert Craddock") by _In the Tennessee Mountains_, Thomas Nelson Page by _In Ole Virginia_, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman by _A Humble Romance and Other Stories_, James Lane Allen by _Flute and Violin_, and Alice Brown by _Meadow-Grass_.

The eager popular demand for these brevities does not entirely account for the failure of the type to go beyond its first experimental stage. The defects of local color inhere in the constitution of the cult itself, which, as its name suggests, thought first of color and then of form, first of the piquant surfaces and then--if at all--of the stubborn deeps of human life. In a sense, the local colorists were all pioneers: they explored the older communities as solicitously as they did the new, but they most of them came earliest in some field or other and found--or thought--it necessary to clear the top of the soil before they sank shaft or spade into it. Moreover, they accepted almost without challenge the current inhibitions of gentility, reticence, cheerfulness. They confined themselves to the emotions and the ideas and the language, for the most part, of the respectable; they disregarded the stormier or stealthier behavior of mankind or veiled it with discreet periphrasis; they sweetened their narratives wherever possible with a brimming optimism nicely tinctured with amiable sentiments. Poetic justice prospered and happy endings were orthodox. To a remarkable extent the local colorists passed by the immediate problems of Americans--social, theological, political, economic; nor did they frequently rise above the local to the universal. They were, in short, ordinarily provincial, without, however, the rude durability or the homely truthfulness of provincialism at its best.

To reflect upon the achievements of this dwindling cult is to discover that it invented few memorable plots, devised almost no new styles, created little that was genuinely original in its modes of truth or beauty, and even added but the scantiest handful of characters to the great gallery of the imagination. What local color did was to fit obliging fiction to resisting fact in so many native regions that the entire country came in some degree to see itself through literary eyes and therefore in some degree to feel civilized by the sight. This is, indeed, one of the important processes of civilization. But in this case it was limited in its influence by the habits of vision which the local colorists had. They scrutinized their world at the instigation of benevolence rather than at that of intelligence; they felt it with friendship rather than with passion. And because of their limitations of intelligence and passion they fell naturally into routine ways and both saw and represented in accordance with this or that prevailing formula. Herein they were powerfully confirmed by the pressure of editors and a public who wanted each writer to continue in the channel of his happiest success and not to disappoint them by new departures. Not only did this result in confining individuals to a single channel each but it resulted in the convergence of all of them into a few broad and shallow streams.

An excellent example may be found in the flourishing cycle of stories which, while Bret Harte was celebrating California, grew up about the life of Southern plantations before the war. The mood of most of these was of course elegiac and the motive was to show how much splendor had perished in the downfall of the old régime. Over and over they repeated the same themes: how an irascible planter refuses to allow his daughter to marry the youth of her choice and how true love finds a way; how a beguiling Southern maiden has to choose between lovers and gives her hand and heart to him who is stoutest in his adherence to the Confederacy; how, now and then, love crosses the lines and a Confederate girl magnanimously, though only after a desperate struggle with herself, marries a Union officer who has saved the old plantation from a marauding band of Union soldiers; how a pair of ancient slaves cling to their duty during the appalling years and will not presume upon their freedom even when it comes; how the gentry, though menaced by a riffraff of poor whites, nevertheless hold their heads high and shine brightly through the gloom; how some former planter and everlasting colonel declines to be reconstructed by events and passes the remainder of his years as a courageous, bibulous, orgulous simulacrum of his once thriving self. Mr. Page's _In Ole Virginia_ and F. Hopkinson Smith's _Colonel Carter of Cartersville_ in a brief compass employ all these themes; and dozens of books which might be named play variations upon them without really enlarging or correcting them. All of them were kindly, humorous, sentimental, charming; almost all of them are steadily fading out like family photographs.

The South, however, did not restrict itself wholly to its plantation cycle. In New Orleans Mr. Cable daintily worked the lode which had been deposited there by a French and Spanish past and by the presence still of Creole elements in the population. Yet he too was elegiac, sentimental, pretty, even when his style was most deft and his representations most engaging. Quaintness was his second nature; romance was in his blood. Bras-Coupé, the great, proud, rebellious slave in _The Grandissimes_, belongs to the ancient lineage of those African princes who in many tales have been sold to chain and lash and have escaped from them by dying. The postures and graces and contrivances of Mr. Cable's Creoles are traditional to all the little aristocracies surviving, in fiction, from some more substantial day. Yet in spite of these conventions his better novels have a texture of genuine vividness and beauty. In their portrayal of the manners of New Orleans they have many points of quiet satire and censure that betray a critical intelligence working seriously behind them. That critical disposition in Mr. Cable led him to disagree with the majority of Southerners regarding the justice due the Negroes; and it helped persuade him to spend the remainder of his life in a distant region.

The incident is symptomatic. While slavery still existed, public opinion in the South had demanded that literature should exhibit the institution only under a rosy light; public opinion now demanded that the problem in its new guise should still be glossed over in the old way. In neither era, consequently, could an honest novelist freely follow his observations upon Southern life in general. The mind of the herd bore down upon him and crushed him into the accepted molds. It seems a curious irony that the Negroes who thus innocently limited the literature of their section should have been the subjects of a little body of narrative which bids fair to outlast all that local color hit upon in the South. Joel Chandler Harris is not, strictly speaking, a contemporary, but Uncle Remus is contemporary and perennial. His stories are grounded in the universal traits of simple souls; they are also the whimsical, incidental mirror of a particular race during a significant--though now extinct--phase of its career. They are at once as ancient and as fresh as folk-lore.

Besides the rich planters and their slaves one other class of human beings in the South especially attracted the attention of the local colorists--the mountaineers. Certain distant cousins of this backwoods stock had come into literature as "Pikes" or poor whites in the Far West with Bret Harte and in the Middle West with John Hay and Edward Eggleston; it remained for Charles Egbert Craddock in Tennessee and John Fox in Kentucky to discover the heroic and sentimental qualities of the breed among its highland fastnesses of the Great Smoky and Cumberland Mountains. Here again formulas sprang up and so stifled the free growth of observation that, though a multitude of stories has been written about the mountains, almost all of them may be resolved into themes as few in number as those which succeeded nearer Tidewater: how a stranger man comes into the mountains, loves the flower of all the native maidens, and clashes with the suspicions or jealousies of her neighborhood; how two clans have been worn away by a long vendetta until only one representative of each clan remains and the two forgive and forget among the ruins; how a band of highlanders defend themselves against the invading minions of a law made for the nation at large but hardly applicable to highland circumstances; how the mountain virtues in some way or other prove superior to the softer virtues--almost vices by comparison--of the world of plains and cities. These formulas, however, resulted from another cause than the popular complacency which hated to be disturbed in Virginia and Louisiana. The mountain people, inarticulate themselves, have uniformly been seen from the outside and therefore have been studied in their surface peculiarities more often than in their deeper traits of character. And, having once entered the realm of legend, they continue to be known by the half-dozen distinguishing features which in legend are always enough for any type.

In the North and West, of course, much the same process went on as in the South among the local colorists, conditioned by the same demands and pressures. Because the territory was wider, however, in the expanding sections, the types of character there were somewhat less likely to be confined to one locality than in the section which for a time had a ring drawn round it by its past and by the difficulty of emerging from it; and because the career of North and West was not definitely interrupted by the war, the types of fiction there have persisted longer than in the South, where a new order of life, after a generation of clinging memories, has moved toward popular heroes of a new variety.

The cowboy, for instance, legitimate successor to the miners and gamblers of Bret Harte, might derive from almost any one of the states and might range over prodigious areas; it is partly accident, of course, that he stands out so sharply among the numerous conditions of men produced by the new frontier. Except on very few occasions, as in Alfred Henry Lewis's racy Wolfville stories and in Frederick Remington's vivid pictures, in Andy Adams's more minute chronicle _The Log of a Cowboy_, in Owen Wister's more sentimental _The Virginian_, and in O. Henry's more diversified _Heart of the West_ and its fellows among his books, the cowboy has regularly moved on the plane of the sub-literary--in dime novels and, latterly, in moving pictures. He, like the mountaineer of the South, has himself been largely inarticulate except for his rude songs and ballads; formula and tradition caught him early and in fiction stiffened one of the most picturesque of human beings--a modern Centaur, an American Cossack, a Western picaro--into a stock figure who in a stock costume perpetually sits a bucking broncho, brandishes a six-shooter or swings a lariat, rounds up stampeding cattle, makes fierce war on Mexicans, Indians, and rival outfits, and ardently, humbly woos the ranchman's gentle daughter or the timorous school-ma'am. He still has no Homer, no Gogol, no Fenimore Cooper even, though he invites a master of some sort to take advantage of a thrilling opportunity.

The same fate of formula and tradition befell another type multiplied by the local novelists--the bad boy. His career may be said to have begun in New England, with Thomas Bailey Aldrich's reaction from the priggish manikins who infested the older "juveniles"; but Mark Twain took him up with such mastery that his subsequent habitat has usually been the Middle West, where a recognized lineage connects Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn with Mitch Miller and Penrod Schofield and their fellow-conspirators against the peace of villages. The bad boy, it must be noticed, is never really bad; he is simply mischievous. He serves as a natural outlet for the imagination of communities which are respectable but which lack reverence for solemn dignity. He can play the wildest pranks and still be innocent; he can have his adolescent fling and then settle down into a prudent maturity. Both the influence of Mark Twain and the local color tendency toward uniformity in type have held the bad boy to a path which, in view of his character, seems singularly narrow. In book after book he indulges in the same practical jokes upon parents, teachers, and all those in authority; brags, fibs, fights, plays truant, learns to swear and smoke, with the same devices and consequences; suffers from the same agonies of shyness, the same indifference to the female sex, the same awkward inclination toward particular little girls. For the most part, thanks to the formulas, he has been examined from the angle of adult irritation or amusement; only very recently--as by Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson--has he been credited with a life and passions more or less his own and therefore as fully rounded as his stage of development permits.

The American business man, with millions of imaginations daily turned upon him, rarely appears in that fiction which sprang from local color except as the canny trader of some small town or as the ruthless magnate of some glittering metropolis. _David Harum_ remains his rural avatar and _The Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son_ his most popular commentary. Doubtless the existence of this type in every community tends to warn off the searchers after local figures, who have preferred, in their fashion, to be monopolists when they could. Doubtless, also, the American business man has suffered from the critical light in which he has been studied by the reflective novelists. But though the higher grades of literature have refused to pay unstinted tribute and honor to men of wealth, the lower grades have paid almost as lavishly as life itself.

Multitudes of poor boys in popular fiction rise to affluence by the practice of the commercial virtues. To be self-made, the axiom tacitly runs, is to be well-made. Time was in the United States when the true hero had to start his career, unaided, from some lonely farm, from some widow's cottage, or from some city slum; and although, with the growth of luxury in the nation, readers have come to approve the heir who puts on overalls and works up in a few months from the bottom of the factory to the top, the standards of success are practically the same in all instances: sleepless industry, restless scheming, resistless will, coupled with a changeless probity in the domestic excellences. Nothing is more curious about the American business man of fiction than the sentimentality he displays in all matters of the heart. He may hold as robustly as he likes to the doctrine that business is business and that business and sympathy will not mix, but when put to the test he must always soften under the pleadings of distress and be malleable to the desires of mother, sweetheart, wife, or daughter. Even when a popular novelist sets out to be reflective--say, for example, Winston Churchill--he takes his hero up to the mountain of success and then conducts him down again to the valley of humiliation, made conscious that the love, after all, either of his family or of his society, is better than lucre. Theodore Dreiser's stubborn habit of presenting his rich men's will to power without abatement or apology has helped to keep him steadily suspected. The popular romancers have contrived to mingle passion for money and susceptibility to moralism somewhat upon the analogy of those lucky thaumaturgists who are able to eat their cake and have it too.

A similar mixture occurs in the politician of popular tradition. He hardly ever rises to the dimensions of statesmanship, and indeed rarely belongs to the Federal government at all: Washington has always been singularly neglected by the novelists. The American politician of fiction is essentially a local personage, the boss of ward or village. Customarily he holds no office himself but instead sits in some dusty den and dispenses injustice with an even hand. Candidates fear his influence and either truckle to him or advance against him with the weapons of reform--failing, as a rule, to accomplish anything. Aldermen and legislators are his creatures. His web is out in all directions: he holds this man's mortgage, knows that man's guilty secret, discovers the other's weakness and takes advantage of it. He is cynically illiterate and contemptuous of the respectable classes. If need be he can resort to outrageous violence to gain his ends. And yet, though the reflective novelists have all condemned him for half a century, he sits fast in ordinary fiction, where he is tolerated with the amused fatalism which in actual American life has allowed his lease to run so long. What justifies him is his success--his countrymen love success for its own sake--and his kind heart. Like Robin Hood he levies upon the plethoric rich for the deserving poor; and he yields to the tender entreaties of the widow and the orphan with amiable gestures.

The women characters evolved by the school of local color endure a serious restriction from the excessive interest taken by the novelists in the American young girl. Not only has she as a possible reader established the boundaries beyond which they might not go in speaking of sexual affairs but she has dominated the scene of their inventions with her glittering energy and her healthy bloodlessness. Some differences appear among the sections of the country as to what special phases of her character shall be here or there preferred: she is ordinarily most capricious in the Southern, most strenuous in the Western, most knowing in the New York, and most demure in the New England novels. Yet everywhere she considerably resembles a bright, cool, graceful boy pretending to be a woman. Coeducation and the scarcity of chaperons have made her self-possessed to a degree which mystifies readers not duly versed in American folkways. Though she plays at love-making almost from the cradle, she manages hardly ever to be scorched--a salamander, as one novelist suggests, sporting among the flames of life.

When native Victorianism was at its height, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, she inclined to piety as her mode of preservation; at the present moment she inclines to a romping optimism which frightens away both thought and passion. From _The Wide, Wide World_ to _Pollyanna_, however, she has taken habitual advantage of the reverence for the virgin which is one of the most pervasive elements in American popular opinion. That reverence has many charming and wholesome aspects; it has given young women a priceless freedom of movement in America without the penalty of being constantly suspected of sexual designs which they may not harbor. It must be remembered that the Daisy Millers who awaken unjust European gossip are understood at home, and that the understanding given them is a form of homage certainly no less honorable than the compliments of gallantry. In actual experience, however, girls grow up, whereas the popular fiction of the United States has done its best to keep them forever children. Nothing breaks the crystal shallows of their confidence. They are insolently secure in a world apparently made for them. The little difficulties which perturb their courtship are nine-tenths of them superficial and external matters, and the end comes as smoothly as a fairy tale's, before doubt has ever had an opportunity to shatter or passion the occasion to purge a spirit. From Hawthorne to the beginnings of naturalism there was hardly a single profound love story written in America. How could there be when green girls were the sole heroines and censors?

Among the older women created by the local color generation there were certain fashionable successes and social climbers in the large cities who have more complex fortunes than the young girls; but for the most part they are merely typical or conventional--as selfish as gold and as hard as agate. On somewhat humbler levels that generation--as Mary Austin has pointed out of American fiction at large--came nearer to reality by its representation of a type peculiar to the United States: the "woman" who is also a "lady"; that is, who combines in herself the functions both of the busy housewife and of the charming ornament of her society. The gradual reduction in America of the servant class has served to develop women who keep books and music beside them at their domestic tasks as pioneer farmers kept muskets near them in the fields. They devote to homely duties the time devoted by European ladies to love, intrigue, public affairs; they preserve, thanks to countless labor-saving devices, for more or less intellectual pursuits the strength which among European women is consumed by habitual drudgery. The combination of functions has probably done much to increase sexlessness and to decrease helplessness, and so to produce almost a new species of womanhood which is bound eventually to be of great moment in the national life. Local color, however, taking the species for granted, seems hardly to have been aware of its significant existence.

Only New England emphasized a distinct type: the old maid. She has been studied in that section as in no other quarter of the world. Expansion and emigration after the Civil War drew very heavily upon the declining Puritan stock; and naturally the young men left their native farms and villages more numerously than the young women, who remained behind and in many cases never married. Local fiction fell very largely into the hands of women--Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Alice Brown--who broke completely with the age-old tradition of ridiculing spinsters no longer young. In the little cycles which these story-tellers elaborated the old maid is likely to be the center of her episode, studied in her own career and not merely in that of households upon which she is some sort of parasite. The heroine of Mrs. Freeman's _A New England Nun_ is an illuminating instance: she has been betrothed to an absent, fortune-hunting lover for fourteen years, and now that he is back she finds herself full of consternation at his masculine habits and rejoices when he turns to another woman and leaves his first love to the felicity of her contented cell.

What in most literatures appears as a catastrophe appears in New England as a relief. Energy has run low in the calm veins of such women, and they have better things to do than to dwell upon the lives they might have led had marriage complicated them. Here genre painting reaches its apogee in American literature: quaint interiors scrupulously described; rounds of minute activity familiarly portrayed; skimpy moods analyzed with a delicate competence of touch. At the same time, New England literature was now too sentimental and now too realistic to allow all its old maids to remain perpetually sweet and passive. In its sentimental hours it liked to call up their younger days and to show them at the point which had decided or compelled their future loneliness--again and again discovering some act of abnegation such as giving up a lover because of the unsteadiness of his moral principles or surrendering him to another woman to whom he seemed for some reason or other to belong. In its realistic hours local color in New England liked to examine the atrophy of the emotions which in these stories often grows upon the celibate. One formula endlessly repeated deals with the efforts of some acrid spinster--or wife long widowed--to keep a young girl from marriage, generally out of contempt for love as a trivial weakness; the conclusion usually makes love victorious after a thunderbolt of revelation to the hinderer. There are inquiries, too, into the repressions and obsessions of women whose lives in this fashion or that have missed their flowering. Many of the inquiries are sympathetic, tender, penetrating, but most of them incline toward timidity and tameness. Their note is prevailingly the note of elegy; they are seen through a trembling haze of reticence. It is as if they had been made for readers of a vitality no more abundant than that of their angular heroines.

It would be possible to make a picturesque, precious anthology of stories dealing with the types and humors of New England. Different writers would contribute different tones: Sarah Orne Jewett the tone of faded gentility brooding over its miniature possessions in decaying seaport towns or in idyllic villages a little further inland; Mary E. Wilkins Freeman the tone of a stern honesty trained in isolated farms and along high, exposed ridges where the wind seems to have gnarled the dispositions of men and women as it has gnarled the apple trees and where human stubbornness perpetually crops out through a covering of kindliness as if in imitation of those granite ledges which everywhere tend to break through the thin soil; Alice Brown the tone of a homely accuracy touched with the fresh hues of a gently poetical temperament. More detailed in actuality than the stories of other sections, these New England plots do not fall so readily into formulas as do those of the South and West; and yet they have their formulas: how a stubborn pride worthy of some supreme cause holds an elderly Yankee to a petty, obstinate course until grievous calamities ensue; how a rural wife, neglected and overworked by her husband, rises in revolt against the treadmill of her dull tasks and startles him into comprehension and awkward consideration; how the remnant of some once prosperous family puts into the labor of keeping up appearances an amount of effort which, otherwise expended, might restore the family fortunes; how neighbors lock horns in the ruthless litigation which in New England corresponds to the vendettas of Kentucky and how they are reconciled eventually by sentiment in one guise or another; how a young girl--there are no Tom Joneses and few Hamlets in this womanly universe--grows up bright and sensitive as a flower and suffers from the hard, stiff frame of pious poverty; how a superb heroism springs out of a narrow life, expressing itself in some act of pitiful surrender and veiling the deed under an even more pitiful inarticulateness.

The cities of New England have been almost passed over by the local colorists; Boston, the capital of the Puritans, has singularly to depend upon the older Holmes or the visiting Howells of Ohio for its reputation in fiction. Ever since Hawthorne, the romancers and novelists of his native province have taken, one may say, to the fields, where they have worked much in the mood of Rose Terry Cooke, who called her best collection of stories _Huckleberries_ to emphasize what she thought a true resemblance between the crops and characters of New England--"hardy, sweet yet spicy, defying storms of heat or cold with calm persistence, clinging to a poor soil, barren pastures, gray and rocky hillsides, yet drawing fruitful issues from scanty sources."

Alas that as time goes on the issues of such art seem less fruitful than once they seemed; that even Mrs. Freeman's _Pembroke_, one of the best novels of its class, lacks form and structure, and seems to encroach upon caricature in its study of the progress and consequences of Yankee pride. After a fecund generation of such stories Edith Wharton in _Ethan Frome_ has surpassed all her native rivals in tragic power and distinction of language; Robert Frost has been able to distil the essence of all of them in three slender books of verse; Edwin Arlington Robinson in a few brief poems has created the wistful Tilbury Town and has endowed it with pathos at once more haunting and more lasting than that of any New England village chronicled in prose; it has remained for the Pennsylvanian Joseph Hergesheimer in _Java Head_ to seize most artfully upon the riches of loveliness that survive from the hour when Massachusetts was at its noon of prosperity; and local color of the orthodox tradition now persists in New England hardly anywhere except around Cape Cod, of which Joseph C. Lincoln is the dry, quaint, amusing laureate.

Through the influence, in important measure, of Howells and the _Atlantic Monthly_ the modes of fiction which were practised east of Albany extended their example to other districts also: to northern New York in Irving Bacheller; to Ohio in Mary S. Watts and Brand Whitlock; to Indiana in Meredith Nicholson; to Wisconsin in Zona Gale; to Iowa and Arkansas in Alice French ("Octave Thanet"); to Kansas in William Allen White; to the Colorado mines in Mary Hallock Foote; to the Virginias in Ellen Glasgow and Henry Sydnor Harrison; to Georgia in Will N. Harben; and to other neighborhoods in other neighborly chroniclers whose mere names could stretch out to a point beyond which critical emphasis would be lost. New York City clung to less tender and more incisive habits of fiction; that city's pace for local color was set by the deft, bright Richard Harding Davis, Henry Cuyler Bunner, Brander Matthews, O. Henry--all well known figures; by the late Herman Knickerbocker Vielé, too little known, in whose novels, such as _The Last of the Knickerbockers_, affectionate accuracy is mated with smiling, graceful humor; and by David Gray, too little known, whose _Gallops_, concerned with the horsy parish of St. Thomas Equinus near New York City, contains the most amusing stories about fashionable sports which this republic has brought forth. In the Middle West Edgar Watson Howe and Hamlin Garland, and in the Far West Frank Norris and Jack London, broke with the customary tendency by turning away from pathos toward tragedy, and away from discreet benevolence toward emphatic candor. The prevailing school of naturalism has made its principal advance upon the passing school of local color by a sacrifice of genial neighborliness; no less exact and detailed in observation than their predecessors, the naturalists have insisted upon bringing criticism in and measuring the most amiable locality by wider standards. Here lies the essential point of difference between the old style and the new.

It is by reference to this point that the credit--such as it is--of being quite contemporary must be withheld from so earnest and varied a novelist as Margaret Deland. That theological agonies like those in _John Ward, Preacher_ were actually suffered a generation back and that the book is a valuable document upon the times cannot explain away the fact that Mrs. Deland herself appears to have been partly overwhelmed by the storm which sweeps the parish of her story. So in her later novels which have essayed such problems as divorce, the compulsions of love, the inevitable clash of parents and children, she tugs at Gordian knots with the patient fingers of goodwill when one slash with the intelligence would cut her difficulties away. Suppose it possible, for instance, that the heroine of _The Awakening of Helena Richie_ could have been courageous enough to go to her lover to await the death of her loathsome husband and then could have been so timid as to undergo the perturbations over her conduct which almost break her heart in Old Chester--suppose these contradictions might have dwelt together in Helena, yet could Mrs. Deland not have noted and anatomized them in a way to show that she saw the contradictions even while recording them? Suppose that Elizabeth in _The Iron Woman_ was expected by her community to pay superfluously for an hour's blind folly with a lifetime of unhappiness and did undertake so to pay for it, yet could Mrs. Deland not have pointed out that the situation was repugnant both to ordinary common sense and to the very code of honor and stability which in the end persuades David and Elizabeth to give each other up?

The conclusions of these novels, which to thousands of readers have seemed stern and terrible, are in reality terrible chiefly because they are soft--soft with a sentimentalism swathed in folds of piety. The customs of Old Chester stifle its inhabitants, who take a kind of stolid joy in their fetters; and Mrs. Deland, with all her understanding, does not illuminate them. The movements of her imagination are cumbered by a too narrow--however charming--cage. Her excellence belongs to the hours when, not trying to transcend her little Pennsylvania universe, she brings accuracy and shrewdness and felicity to the chronicles of small beer in _Old Chester Tales_ and _Dr. Lavendar's People_. These strictures and this praise she earns by her adherence to the parochial cult of local color.

2. ROMANCE

If naturalism was a reaction from the small beer of local color, so, in another fashion, was the flare-up of romance which attended and succeeded the Spanish War. History was suddenly discovered to be wonderful no less than humble life; and so was adventure in the difficult quarters of the earth. That curious, that lush episode of fiction endowed American literature with a phalanx of "best sellers" some of which still continue to be sold, in diminished numbers; and it endowed the national tradition with a host of gallant personages and heroic incidents dug up out of old books or brought back from far quests by land or water. It remains, however, an episode; the rococo romancers did not last. Almost without exception they turned to other methods as the romantic mood faded out of the populace. Of those who had employed history for their substance only James Branch Cabell remained absolutely faithful, revising, strengthening, deepening his art with irony and beauty until it became an art exquisitely peculiar to himself.

Mary Johnston was as faithful, but her fidelity had less growth in it. Originally attracted to the heroic legend of colonial Virginia, she has since so far departed from it as to produce in the _Long Roll_ and _Cease Firing_ a wide panorama of the Civil War, in other books to study the historic plight and current unrest of women, and here and there to show an observant consciousness of the changing world; but her imagination long ago sank its deepest roots into the traditions of the Old Dominion. She brings to them, however, no fresh interpretations, as satisfied as any medieval romancer to ring harmonious changes on ancient themes, enlarging them, perhaps, with something spacious in her language and liberal in her sentiments, yet transmitting her material rather as a singer than as a poet, agreeably rather than creatively.

As Miss Johnston leans upon history for her favorite staff, so James Lane Allen leans upon "Nature." He is not, indeed, innocent of history. His Kentucky is always conscious of its chivalric past, and his most popular romance, _The Choir Invisible_, has its scene laid in and near the Lexington of the eighteenth century. Nor is he innocent of the devices of local color. His earliest collection of tales--_Flute and Violin_--and his ingratiating comment upon it--_The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky_--once for all established the character which his chosen district has in the world of the imagination. But from the first he held principles of art which would not allow him to consider either history or local color as ends in themselves. He believed they must be employed, when employed, as elements contributory to some general effect of beauty or of meaning. He has built up beauty with the most deliberate hands, and he has sought to express the highest meanings in his art, seeking to look through the "thin-aired regions of consciousness which are ruled over by Tact to the underworld of consciousness where are situated the mighty workshops, and where toils on forever the cyclopean youth, Instinct."

In this important program, however, he has constantly been handicapped by his orthodoxies. John Gray, in _The Choir Invisible_, loving a woman who though in love with him is bound in marriage to another, engages himself to a young girl, shortly afterward to find that his real love is free again; yet with a high gesture of sacrifice he holds to his engagement and enters upon a union of duty which is sure to make two, and possibly three, persons unhappy instead of one, though all of them are equally guiltless. Mr. Allen approves of this immoral arithmetic with a sentimentalism which has drawn rains of tears down thoughtless cheeks. So in _The Reign of Law_ he exhibits a youth extricating himself from an obsolete theology with sufferings which can be explained only on the ground that the theology was too strong ever to have been escaped or the youth too weak ever to have rebelled. And in _Aftermath_, sequel to _A Kentucky Cardinal_, the author sentimentally and quite needlessly stacks the cards against his hero and lets his heroine die, to bring, as he might say, "the eternal note of sadness in." All this to show how "Nature" holds men in her powerful hands and tortures them when they struggle to follow the mind to liberty! To prove a thesis so profoundly true and tragic Mr. Allen can do no more than borrow the tricks of melodrama.

Just how melodramatic his sentimentalism forces him to be has often been overlooked because of his diction and his pictures. Though he tends to the mellifluous and the saccharine he has in his better pages a dewy, luminous style, with words choicely picked out and cadences delicately manipulated. By comparison most of the local colorists of his period seem homespun and most of the romancers a little tawdry. His method is the mosaicist's, working self-consciously in fine materials. Movement with him never leaps nor flows; in fact, it seems to dawdle when, too often, he forgets to be vigilant in the interests of simplicity; it is languid with scrupulous hesitations and accumulations. As to his pictures, they come from a Kentucky glorified. When he says that in June there "the warm-eyed, bronzed, foot-stamping young bucks forsake their plowshares in the green rows, their reapers among the yellow beards; and the bouncing, laughing, round-breasted girls arrange their ribbons and their vows," Mr. Allen is remembering Theocritus, the _Pervigilium Veneris_, and the silver ages of literature no less than his own state and his own day. He uses local color habitually to ennoble it, and but for his extravagant taste for sweetness he might have achieved pastorals of an imperishable sort.

Even as it is, the _Kentucky Cardinal-Aftermath_ story has all the quaint grace of pressed flowers and remembered valentines, and _Summer in Arcady_, his masterpiece, has at once rich passion and spare form. Here Mr. Allen is at his best, representing young love springing up fiercely, exuberantly, against a lovely background congenial to the human mood. He has not known, however, how to keep up that difficult equilibrium between artifice and simplicity which the idyl demands. His later books tend to be turgid, oppressive, cloying with sentimentalism and amorous obsessions in their graver moments, and in their lighter moments to fall flat from a lack of the true sinews of comedy.

Of a temper as different as possible from Mr. Allen's was Edgar Saltus, just dead, who stood alone and decadent in a country which the _fin de siècle_ scarcely touched with its graceful, graceless maladies. He began his career, after a penetrating study of Balzac, with _The Philosophy of Disenchantment_ and _The Anatomy of Negation_, erudite, witty challenges to illusion, deriving primarily from Hartmann and Schopenhauer but enriching their arguments with much inquisitive learning in current French philosophers and poets. Erudition, however, was not Saltus's sole equipment: his pessimism came, in part, from his literary masters but in part also from a temperament which steadily followed its own impulses and arrived at its own destinations. Cynical, deracinated, he turned from his speculative doubts to the positive realities of sense, becoming the historian of love and loveliness in sumptuous, perverse phases. In _Mary Magdalen_ he dressed up a traditional courtesan in the splendors of purple and gold and perfumed her with many quaint, dangerous essences more exciting than her later career as penitent; in _Imperial Purple_ he undertook a chronicle of the Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Heliogabolus, exhibiting them in the most splendid of all their extravagances and sins; in _Historia Amoris_ he followed the maddening trail of love and in _The Lords of the Ghostland_ the saddening trail of faith through the annals of mankind.

He wrote novels, too, of contemporary life, but they are his least notable achievements. His personages in none of these novels manage to convince; his plots are melodrama; his worldly wisdom has smirks and postures in it; his style, now sharp now sagging, is unequal. Saltus could not, it seems, dispense with antiquity and remoteness in his books. Only when buried in the deep world of ancient story or when ranging through the widest field of time did he become most himself. Then he invited no comparisons with familiar actualities and could assemble the most magnificent glories according to his whims and could drape them in the most gorgeous stuffs. What especially touched his imagination was the spectacle of imperial Rome as interpreted to him by French decadence: that lust for power and sensation, those incredible temples, palaces, feasts, revelries, blasphemies, butcheries. Commencing with a beauty which knew no bounds, he moved on to lust or satiety or impotence for his theme; in the end he brought little but a glittering ferocity to that cold chronicle of the czars from Ivan to Catherine, _The Imperial Orgy_. His phrases never failed him, flashing like gems or snakes and clasping his exuberant materials in almost the only discipline they ever had. Wit withheld him from utter lusciousness. Though he employed Corinthian cadences and diction, he kept continually checking them with the cynic twist of some deft colloquialism. To venture into his microcosm is to bid farewell to all that is simple and kindly; it is, however, to discover the terrible beauty that lurks behind corruption, malevolent though delirious.

Romance of the traditionary sort, it is plain, has lately lost its vogue in the United States and is being neglected as at almost no other period since Fenimore Cooper established its principal native modes. The ancient romantic matters of the Settlement and the Revolution flourish almost solely in tales for boys. There is of course still a matter of the Frontier, but it is another frontier: the Canadian North and Northwest, Alaska, the islands of the South Seas, latterly the battle fields of France, and always the trails of American exploration wherever they may chance to lead. The performers upon such themes--the Rex Beaches, the Emerson Houghs, the Randall Parrishes, the Zane Greys, the James Oliver Curwoods--march ordinarily under the noisy banner of "red blood" and derive from Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, those generous boys of naturalism whose temperaments carried them again and again into the territories of vivid danger. Criticism notes in the later annalists of "red blood" their spasmodic energy, their considerable technical knowledge, their stereotyped characters, their recurrent formulas, their uncritical, Rooseveltian opinions, their enormous popularity, their almost complete lack of distinction in style or attitude, and passes by without further obligation than to point out that Stewart Edward White probably deserves to stand first among them by virtue of a certain substantial range and panoramic faithfulness to the life of the lumbermen represented in his most successful book, _The Blazed Trail_.

This phase of life deserves particular emphasis for the reason that there has recently been growing up among the lumber-camps from the Bay of Fundy to Puget Sound the legend of a mythical hero named Paul Bunyan who is the only personage of the sort yet invented and elaborated by the ordinary run of men in any American calling. Paul is less a patron saint of the loggers than an autochthonous Munchausen, whose fame has been extended almost entirely by word of mouth among lumbermen resting from their work and vying with one another to see who could tell the most stupendous yarn about Paul's prowess and achievements. The process resembles that which in the folk everywhere has evolved enormous legends about favorite heroes; the legend concerning Paul, however, is essentially native in its accurate geography, in its passion for grotesque exaggeration, in its hilarious metaphors, in its dry, drawling, straight-faced narrative method. Exaggeration such as that in some of these stories verges upon genius. When Paul goes West he carelessly lets his pick drag behind him and cuts out the Grand Canyon of the Colorado; he raises corn in Kansas prodigious enough to suck the Mississippi dry and stop navigation; he builds a hotel so high that he has "the last seven stories put on hinges so's they could be swung back for to let the moon go by"; he achieves such feats of eating and drinking and working and fighting and loving as make Hercules himself seem a pallid fellow who should have gone upon the rowdy American frontier to learn the great ways of adventure. Though it is true that the legend has been developing for many years without adequate literary use of it having yet been made, it lies ready for romance to handle; and no discussion of contemporary American fiction can go deeper than the surfaces without at least mentioning that hilarious chapbook _Paul Bunyan Comes West_.

That romance is just now being slighted appears from the lamentable hiatus into which the fame of Charles D. Stewart has lately fallen. His _Partners of Providence_ suffers from the inevitable comparison with _Tom Sawyer_ and _Huckleberry Finn_ which it cannot stand, though it continues the saga of the Mississippi with sympathy and knowledge; but _The Fugitive Blacksmith_ has a flavor which few comparisons and no neglect can spoil. Its protagonist, wrongly accused of a murder which he by mischance finds it difficult to explain, takes to his heels and lives by his mechanic wits among the villages of the lower Mississippi through a diversity of adventures which puts his story among the little masterpieces of the picaresque. Though it is clumsily garnished with irrelevant things, it stands out above them, racy, rememberable. The blacksmith has an ingenuity as varied as his experiences. Whereas other picaroes cheat or fight or love their ways, this hero uses his dexterity at unaccustomed trades until it is little less than intoxicating to see him rise to each emergency. He is a proletarian Odysseus, and his history is a quaint _Odyssey_ of the roving artisan.

The matter of the Civil War, though very large in the American memory, has in literature not quite reached a parity with the older matters of the Settlement, the Revolution, and the Frontier, principally, no doubt, because there has been only one period--and that a brief one--of historical romance since the war. In connection with this matter, however, there has been created the legend which at present is surely the most potent of all the legendary elements dear to the American imagination.

Abraham Lincoln is, strictly speaking, more than a legend; he has become a cult. Immediately after his death he lived in the national mind for a time as primarily a martyr; then emphasis shifted to his humor and a whole literature of waggish tales and retorts and apologues assembled around his name; then he passed into a more sentimental zone and endless stories were multiplied about his natural piety and his habit of pardoning innocent offenders. Out of the efflorescence of all these aspects of legend which accompanied the centenary of his birth there has since seemed to be emerging--though the older aspects still persist as well--a conception of him as a figure at once lofty and familiar, at once sad and witty, at once Olympian and human. Among poets of all grades of opinion Lincoln is the chief native hero: Edwin Arlington Robinson has best expressed in words as firm as bronze the Master's reputation for lonely pride and forgiving laughter; John Gould Fletcher, with an eloquence found nowhere else in his work, likens Lincoln to a tree so mighty that its branches reach the heavens and its roots the primal rock and nations of men may rest in its shade; Edgar Lee Masters, whose work is full of the shadow and light of Lincoln, has made his most moving lyric an epitaph upon Ann Rutledge, the girl Lincoln loved and lost; and Vachel Lindsay, in Lincoln's own Springfield, during the World War thought of him as so stirred even in death by the horrors which then alarmed the universe that he could not sleep but walked up and down the midnight streets, mourning and brooding. It is precisely thus, in other ages, that saints are said to appear at difficult moments, to quiet the waves or turn the arrow aside. Without these more vulgar manifestations Lincoln nevertheless lives as the founder of every cult lives, in the echoes of his voice on many tongues and in the vibrations of his voice in many affections.

The novelists, unfortunately, fall behind the poets in the beauty and wisdom with which they celebrate the figure of Lincoln, though they have produced scores of volumes associated with it, upon the life not only of Lincoln himself but of his mother, of his children, of this or that friend or neighbor. Of the various novels--from Winston Churchill's _The Crisis_ to Irving Bacheller's _A Man for the Ages_--which have sought to mingle the right proportions of rural shrewdness and honorable dignity, no one has yet been equal to the magnitude of its theme. They have followed the customary paths of the historical romance without seeming to realize that in a theme so spacious they could learn from the methods of Plato with Socrates, of Shakespeare with his kingly heroes, of the biographers of Francis of Assisi with their gracious saint.

Few literary tasks are harder than the task of the critic holding a steady course through the welter of novels which make a tumult in the world and trying to indicate those which have some genuine significance as works of art or intelligence or as documents upon the time. How shall he dispose, for example, of such beguilers of the millions as Gene Stratton Porter, who piles sentimentalism upon "Nature" till the soft heap defies analysis, and Harold Bell Wright, who cannily mixes sentimentalism with valor and prudence till the resultant blend tempts appetites uncounted? Popularity has its arts no less than excellence; and so has it its own kind of seriousness. Much as the advertiser and the salesman have done to market tons of Mrs. Porter and Mr. Wright, they could not have done it without the assistance furnished them by the fact that their authors believe and feel the things they write. They throb with all the popular impulses; they laugh when the multitude laughs and weep when it weeps; and they have the gift--which is really rare not common--of calling the multitude's attention to their books in which is displayed, as in a consoling mirror, the sweet, rosy, empty features of banality.

How shall the patient critic dispose of Robert W. Chambers, who, possessing in a high degree the qualities of narrative, of costume, of dramatic effectiveness, of satire even (as witness _Iole_), has drifted with the fashions for a generation and has latterly allowed himself to decline to the manufacture of literary sillibub in the guise of novels about the smart set and Bohemia? How shall the stern critic dispose of Gertrude Atherton, who knows so much about California, New York, and the international scene but who somehow fails to transmute her materials to any lasting metal and leaves the impression of a vexed aristocrat scolding the age without either convincing it or convicting it of very serious deficiencies? How shall the accurate critic dispose of Frank Harris, who was born in Ireland and who had the most conspicuous part of his career in England, but who is a naturalized American citizen and who has written in _The Bomb_ a vivid and intelligent novel dealing with the Chicago "anarchists" of 1886? How shall the conscientious critic dispose of the Owen Johnsons and the Rupert Hugheses and the Gouverneur Morrises and the George Barr McCutcheons with all their energy and information and good intentions and yet with their fatal lack of true distinction?

How shall the tolerant critic dispose of the writers of detective stories whose name is legion and whose art is to fine fiction as arithmetic to calculus--particularly Arthur Reeve, inventor of that Craig Kennedy who with endless ingenuity solves problem after problem by the introduction of scientific and pseudoscientific novelties? How shall the puzzled critic dispose of Alice Duer Miller and her light, bright stories of fashionable life; of Edward Lucas White and his vast panoramas of South America and the ancient world; of Katherine Fullerton Gerould, with her grim tales and her petulant conservatism; of those energetic successors of O. Henry, Edna Ferber and Fanny Hurst; of the late Charles Emmet Van Loan, with his intimate knowledge of sport; of the schools and swarms of men and women who write short stories for the most part but who occasionally essay a novel? How shall the worried critic dispose of the more or less professional humorists who have created characters and localities: Irvin S. Cobb, who, capable of better things, prefers the paths of the grotesque and rolls his bulk through current literature laughing at his own misadventures; Finley Peter Dunne, inventor of that Mr. Dooley who makes it clear that the American tradition which invented Poor Richard is still alive; Ring W. Lardner, master of the racy vernacular of the almost illiterate; George Ade, easily first of his class, fabulist and satirist?

Perhaps it is best for the baffled critic to leave all of them to time and, singling out the ten living novelists who seem to him most distinguished or significant, to study them one by one, adding some account of the school of fiction just now predominant.