Of a type the direct opposite was James Lane Allen, who was not inspired and who was not an improvisatore. To Allen fiction was an art learned with infinite patience. He was years in the mastering of it, years in which he studied literature with the abandonment of a Maupassant. He approached it deliberately; he made himself the most scholarly of the novelists of the period—graduate and graduate student of Transylvania University, first applicant for the degree of doctor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins, though he never found opportunity for residence, teacher for years of languages, and then professor of Latin and higher English at Bethany College, West Virginia.
The circumstances of his early life made a literary career difficult. He had been born on a small Kentucky plantation a few miles out of Lexington, miles that he walked daily while gaining his education. A college course for him meant toil and sacrifice. The war had brought poverty, and the death of the father imposed new burdens. Like Lanier, he was forced to teach schools when he would have studied at German universities, but, like Lanier, he somehow had caught a vision of literature that dominated him even through decades of seeming hopelessness. Few have had to fight longer for recognition and few have ever worked harder to master the art with which they were to make their appeal. Like Howells, he studied masters and read interminably, pursuing his work into the German and the French, writing constantly and rewriting and destroying. And the result, as with Howells, was no immaturities. His first book, Flute and Violin, published when he was forty-two, is by many regarded as his best work. To his earliest readers it seemed as if a new young writer had arrived to whom art was a spontaneous thing mastered without effort.
A study of the available fragments of Allen's work written earlier than the stories in this first volume reveals much. He began as a critic. In Northern journals after 1883 one may find many articles signed with his name: sharp criticisms of Henry James, appreciations of Heine and Keats, studies of the art of Balzac and his circle, letters on timely subjects which show the wideness of his reading and the gradual shaping of his art. He evolved his method deliberately after consideration of all that had been done in England and America and France. By no other writer of the period was the short story worked out with more care or with more knowledge of requirements.
Especially significant is an article entitled "Local Color" in the Critic of 1886. The time has come, he contended, when the writer of fiction must broaden the old conceptions of art. Now the novelist must be "in some measure a scientist; he must comprehend the natural pictorial environment of humanity in its manifold effects upon humanity, and he must make this knowledge available for literary presentation." Other requirements had become imperative:
From an artistic point of view, the aim of local color should be to make the picture of human life natural and beautiful, or dreary, or somber, or terrific, as the special character of the theme may demand; from a scientific point of view, the aim of local color is to make the picture of human life natural and—intelligible, by portraying those picturable potencies in nature that made it what it was and must go along with it to explain what it is. The novelist must encompass both aims.
He must also be a stylist. "The happiest use of local color," he declares, "will test to the uttermost one's taste and attainments as a language colorist." And again, "The utmost in the use of local color should result, when the writer chooses the most suitable of all colors that are characteristic; when he makes these available in the highest degree for artistic presentation; and when he attains and uses the perfection of coloring in style."
One makes another discovery as one works among these earlier fragments: Allen, like Howells, was a poet. His first contributions to the larger magazines—Harper's and the Atlantic—were poems, beautiful, serious, colorful.
After these preliminaries one is prepared to find work done with excess of care, with precision and balance, and, moreover, to find color in its literal sense, poetic atmosphere and poetic phrasing, scientific truth too, nature studied as Thoreau studied it, and Burroughs. The six stories in Flute and Violin stand by themselves in American literature. They are not perfect examples of the short story judged by the latest canons. They make often too much of the natural background, they lack in swiftness, and they do not culminate with dramatic force. They are poetic, at times almost lyrical. Open, for instance, A Kentucky Cardinal:
March has gone like its winds. The other night as I lay awake with that yearning which often beats within, there fell from the upper air the notes of the wild gander as he wedged his way onward by faith, not by sight, towards his distant bourn. I rose and, throwing open the shutters, strained eyes toward the unseen and unseeing explorer, startled, as a half-asleep soldier might be startled by the faint bugle-call of his commander, blown to him from the clouds. What far-off lands, streaked with mortal dawn, does he believe in? In what soft sylvan waters will he bury his tired breast? Always when I hear his voice, often when not, I too desire to be up and gone out of these earthly marshes where hunts the dark Fowler—gone to some vast, pure, open sea, where, one by one, my scattered kind, those whom I love and those who love me, will arrive in safety, there to be together.
One thinks of Thoreau—one thinks of him often as one reads Allen. Everywhere Nature, and Nature with the metaphysical light upon it. And connected with Nature always the tragedy of human life—beauty of landscape expressed in perfect beauty of language, but under it and behind it struggle and passion and pain. Nowhere else in the period such distinction of expression, such charm of literary atmosphere, combined with such deep soundings into the heart of human life. "The White Cowl" which appeared in the Century of 1888 and later "Sister Dolorosa" may be compared with no other American work later than "Ethan Brand."
In his first period Allen was distinctively a writer of short stories and sketches. His canvas was small, his plots single and uncomplicated, his backgrounds over-elaborate, impeding the movement of the plot and overshadowing the characters. His art began with landscape—his second book, much of the matter of which was written before the contents of the first, was wholly landscape, landscape idealized and made lyric. Then came John Gray, a preliminary sketch, and A Kentucky Cardinal and its sequel Aftermath, long and short stories, parables, humanity beginning to emerge from the vast cosmic nature spectacle and to dominate. Over everything beauty, yet through it all a strain of sadness, the sadness of youth repressed, of tragedy too soon.
The second period began in 1896 with the publication of Summer in Arcady. The novelist had moved permanently to New York City. He had gained a broader outlook; he had felt the new forces that were moving Thomas Hardy and the French novelists. His early work seemed to him now narrow and weak, mere exercises of a prentice hand. He would work with the novel now rather than with the short story; he would deal with broad canvas, with the great fundamental problems that complicate human life. His essay in the Atlantic of October, 1897, explains the new period in his work. Literature even into the mid-nineties had been feminine rather than masculine, he averred. The American novelists had aimed too much at refinement.
They sought the coverts where some of the more delicate elements of our national life escaped the lidless eye of publicity, and paid their delicate tributes to these; on the clumsy canvases of our tumultuous democracy they watched to see where some solitary being or group of beings described lines of living grace, and with grace they detached these and transferred them to the enduring canvases of letters; they found themselves impelled to look for the minute things of our humanity, and having gathered these, to polish them, carve them, compose them into minute structures with minutest elaboration ... polishing and adornment of the little things of life—little ideas, little emotions, little states of mind and shades of feeling, climaxes and dénouements, little comedies and tragedies played quite through or not quite played through by little men and women on the little stage of little playhouses.
So much for the past, for the feminine age to which his own earlier work had belonged. A new age had arisen; a masculine age, less delicate, less refined, less heedful of little things, a strenuous age, more passionate and virile, less shrinking and squeamish.
It is striking out boldly for larger things—larger areas of adventure, larger spaces of history, with freer movements through both: it would have the wings of a bird in the air, and not the wings of a bird on a woman's hat. It reveals a disposition to place its scenery, its companies of players, and the logic of its dramas, not in rare, pale, half-lighted, dimly beheld backgrounds, but nearer to the footlights of the obvious. And if, finally, it has any one characteristic more discernible than another, it is the movement away from the summits of life downward towards the bases of life; from the heights of civilization to the primitive springs of action; from 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.
It was more than the analysis of a far-seeing critic: it was the call of a novelist to himself to abandon the small ideals and narrow field of his early art, and strike out into the main currents of the age.
Let us try for a while the literary virtues and the literary materials of less self-consciousness, of larger self-abandonment, and thus impart to our fiction the free, the uncaring, the tremendous fling and swing that are the very genius of our time and spirit.
Following this declaration came the three major novels, The Choir Invisible, which was his old short story John Gray enlarged and given "fling and swing," The Reign of Law, and The Mettle of the Pasture, novels of the type which he had denominated masculine, American, yet to be grouped with nothing else in American literature, their only analogues being found in England or France.
In all his work he had been, as he had promised in his essay on "Local Color," essentially scientific in spirit, but now he became direct, fearless, fundamental. Nature he made central now. The older art had made of it a background, a thing apart from humanity, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes indifferent, but Allen, like Hardy and his school, made of it now a ruling force, a dominating personality in the tragedy. The first title of Summer in Arcady as it ran serially in the Cosmopolitan was Butterflies: a Tale of Nature. Its theme was the compelling laws within human life: instincts, inheritances, physical forces that bind beyond power to escape. Man is not to be treated as apart from Nature but as inseparably a part of Nature, hurled on by forces that he does not understand, ruled all unknowingly by heredity, fighting senseless battles that, could he but know all, would reduce life to a succession of ironies: "If Daphne had but known, hidden away on one of those yellow sheets [on which her own runaway marriage had just been recorded, the last of a long series of such marriages] were the names of her own father and mother."
In these later novels one finds now fully developed an element that had been latent in all of his early work—a mystic symbolism that in many ways is peculiar to Allen. Summer in Arcady is built up around a parallelism that extends into every part of the story:
Can you consider a field of butterflies and not think of the blindly wandering, blindly loving, quickly passing human race? Can you observe two young people at play on the meadows of Life and Love without seeing in them a pair of these brief moths of the sun?
And The Reign of Law is a parable from beginning to end, a linking of man to Nature, a parallelism between human life and the life of the hemp of the Kentucky fields:
Ah! type, too, of our life, which also is earth-sown, earth-rooted; which must struggle upward, be cut down, rooted and broken, ere the separation take place between our dross and our worth—poor perishable shard and immortal fiber. Oh, the mystery, the mystery of that growth from the casting of the soul as a seed into the dark earth, until the time when, led through all natural changes and cleansed of weakness, it is borne from the field of its nativity for the long service.
All of his work is essentially timeless and placeless. He had had from the first little in common with the other short story writers of locality. Of dialect he has almost none; of the negro who so dominates Southern literature he shows only a glimpse in one or two of his earlier sketches. His background, to be sure, is always Kentucky and this background he describes with minuteness, but there is no attempt to portray personalities or types peculiar to the State. He is working rather in the realm of human life. Always is he tremendously serious. A lambent humor may play here and there over the tales, but everywhere is there the feeling of coming tragedy. Too much concerned he is, perhaps, with the conception of sex as the central problem of life—Summer in Arcady and The Mettle of the Pasture were greeted with storms of disapproval—but one feels that he is sincere, that he stands always on scientific grounds, and that he is telling what he conceives to be the undiminished truth about modern life.
And his solution, so far as he offers a solution, is free from bitterness or pessimism. He is superior to Hardy inasmuch as he is able to rise above the pagan standpoint and see the end of the suffering and the irony crowned with ultimate good. John Gray in The Choir Invisible summed up the philosophy of the author in sentences like these: "To lose faith in men, not in humanity; to see justice go down and not to believe in the triumph of injustice; for every wrong that you weakly deal another or another deals you to love more and more the fairness and beauty of what is right, and so to turn the ever-increasing love from the imperfection that is in us all to the Perfection that is above us all—the perfection that is God: this is one of the ideals of actual duty that you once said were to be as candles in my hand. Many a time this candle has gone out; but as quickly as I could snatch any torch—with your sacred name on my lips—it has been relighted."
The volume of his writings is small. He has worked always slowly, revising, rewriting, never satisfied. His earlier short stories are perhaps his most perfect work; his longer short stories, like A Kentucky Cardinal, his most charming; and his later novels like The Mettle of the Pasture, his most enduring, inasmuch as they contain the chief substance of what he had to say to his generation. His weakness has been a fondness for elaboration: in The Reign of Law a chapter is given to the life history of the hemp plant and to a parallelism between it and human life. The movement of his stories is constantly impeded by what is really extraneous material, endless descriptions of landscape, beautiful in itself but needless, and unnecessary episodes: a cougar "gaunt with famine and come for its kill" is creeping up to John Gray, who is weaponless, but before the final spring four pages about the habits of the animal—a chapter altogether for the adventure, and after it is all told it is "lumber" so far as the needs of the novel are concerned.
But there is a more fundamental weakness: his work on the whole is the product of a follower rather than a leader. He learned his art deliberately impelled not by a voice within which demanded expression but by a love for beautiful things and a dogged determination to win in the field that he had chosen for his life work. By interminable toil and patience, and by alertness to seize upon every new development in his art, he made himself at last a craftsman of marvelous skill, even of brilliancy. He was not a voice in the period; rather was he an artisan with a sure hand, a craftsman with exquisite skill.
The triumph of the short story came in the early nineties. In the September, 1891, issue of Harper's Monthly Mr. Howells, reviewing Garland's Main-Traveled Roads, commented on the fact that collections of stories from the magazines were competing on even terms with the novels:
We do not know how it has happened; we should not at all undertake to say; but it is probably attributable to a number of causes. It may be the prodigious popularity of Mr. Kipling which has broken down all prejudices against the form of his success. The vogue that Maupassant's tales in the original or in versions have enjoyed may have had something to do with it. Possibly the critical recognition of the American supremacy in this sort has helped. But however it has come about, it is certain that the result has come, and the publishers are fearlessly venturing volumes of short stories on every hand; and not only short stories by authors of established repute, but by new writers who would certainly not have found this way to the public some time ago.
During this decade the short story reached its highest level. In February, 1892, the Atlantic Monthly in a review of current collections of short stories by Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, James Lane Allen, Octave Thanet, Hamlin Garland, Richard Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Rose Terry Cooke, George A. Hibbard, William Douglas O'Connor, Clinton Ross, Thomas A. Janvier, H. C. Bunner, Brander Matthews, and Frank R. Stockton, remarked of the form that "in America it is the most vital as well as the most distinctive part of literature. In fact, it flourishes so amply that this very prosperity nullifies most of the apologies for the American novel." But even within the limits of the decade of its fullest success came the decline. The enormous vogue of the form resulted in the journalization of it. O. Henry with his methods helped greatly to devitalize and cheapen it. With him the short story became fictional vaudeville. Everywhere a straining for effect, a search for the piquant and the startling. He is theatric, stagy, smart, ultra modern. Instead of attempts at truth a succession of smart hits: "The wind out of the mountains was singing like a jew's-harp in a pile of old tomato-cans by the railroad track"; "A bullet-headed man Smith was, with an oblique, dead eye and the mustache of a cocktail mixer," etc. He is flippant, insincere, with an eye to the last sentence which must startle the reader until he gasps. After O. Henry the swift decline of the short story, the inclusion of it in correspondence courses, and the reign of machine-made art.
But during the decade of the high tide came some of the strongest work in American literature. It was the period of the earlier and better work of Hamlin Garland and Alice French, of Richard Harding Davis and Ambrose Bierce, of Mrs. Deland and F. H. Smith, with Garland, perhaps, the most distinctive worker. Garland began as an iconoclast, a leader of the later phase of realism—depressed realism after the Russian and the French types. His little book of essays, Crumbling Idols, breezy and irreverent, with its cry for a new Americanism in our literature, new truth, new realism, was the voice of the new generation after Harte and Howells, the school inspired by Ibsen, Hardy, Tolstoy, Maupassant. The Middle West was his background and he knew it with completeness. He had been born in a Wisconsin "coulé" on a ragged, half-broken farm, and before he was eleven he had migrated with his parents westward, three different times. His boyhood had followed the middle western border. The father was of Maine Yankee stock, full of the restlessness and eagerness of his generation. In his son's record he stands out in almost epic proportions.
Hour after hour we pushed westward, the heads of our tired horses hanging ever lower, and on my mother's face the shadow deepened, but my father's voice calling to his team lost nothing of its edge. He was in his element. He loved this shelterless sweep of sod. This westward march delighted him. I think he would have gladly kept on until he reached the Rocky Mountains.[152]
He had stopped this time in Iowa and had begun once again the tremendous task of making a farm out of the virgin prairie. The boy took his full share of work. Speaking of himself in the third person, he says: "In the autumn that followed his eleventh birthday he plowed for seventy days, overturning nearly one hundred and fifty acres of stubble." At fifteen he was head farmer and took a man's place on the reaper, at the threshing, and in all of the farm work. Education came to him as he could get it. He attended the winter sessions of the district school and he read all the books that the neighborhood afforded. By rarest good fortune his father subscribed for the new Hearth and Home in which the serial The Hoosier Schoolmaster was running, and in the boy's own words in later years the story was a "milestone in his literary progress as it was in the development of distinctive Western fiction."
His later struggles toward culture, his graduation in 1881 from Cedar Valley Seminary, Osage, Iowa, his school teaching in Illinois and Dakota, his experience as a settler during the Dakota land "boom" of 1883, his Howells-like journey to Boston the following year, and his years of life there as teacher and eager student, must be passed over swiftly. He haunted the Boston public library and read enormously, he became impressed with the theories of the new French school of "Veritists," and he soon began to write, first photographic sketches of Middle-Western life—corn and wheat raising, rural customs, and the like—then after a long period he returned West for his first vacation. At Chicago he visited Joseph Kirkland (1830–1894), author of Zury: the Meanest Man in Spring County (1887), a book of crude yet strong pictures of Western life, and the call was another milestone in his literary life.
The result of that vacation was three books of short stories, their author's most distinctive work, Main-Traveled Roads, Prairie Folks, and Other Main-Traveled Roads. His own account of the matter is worthy of quotation:
The entire series was the result of a summer-vacation visit to my old home in Iowa, to my father's farm in Dakota, and, last of all, to my birthplace in Wisconsin. This happened in 1887. I was living at the time in Boston, and had not seen the West for several years, and my return to the scenes of my boyhood started me upon a series of stories delineative of farm and village life as I knew it and had lived it. I wrote busily during the two years that followed, and in this revised definitive edition of Main-Traveled Roads and its companion volume, Other Main-Traveled Roads (compiled from other volumes which now go out of print), the reader will find all of the short stories which came from my pen between 1887 and 1889.
It remains to say that, though conditions have changed somewhat since that time, yet for the hired man and the renter farm life in the West is still a stern round of drudgery. My pages present it—not as the summer boarder or the young lady novelist sees it—but as the working farmer endures it.
After the years at Boston the life of his native region had taken on for him a totally new aspect. He saw it now as Howard saw it in "Up the Coulé," the grinding toil of it, the brutality and hopelessness and horror of it, and it filled him with fierce anger. He wrote with full heart and with an earnestness that was terrible, and he had the courage of his convictions. Will Hannan takes Agnes from the hell into which she has married and bears her into his own new home of love and helpfulness and there is no apology, and again the same theme in later tales. There is the grimness and harshness and unsparing fidelity to fact, however unpleasant, that one finds in the Russian realists, but there is another element added to it: the fervor and faith of the reformer. Such a story as "Under the Lion's Paw," for instance, does not leave one, like Ibsen and Hardy, in despair and darkness; it arouses rather to anger and the desire to take action harsh and immediate. There is no dodging of facts. All the dirt and coarseness of farm life come into the picture and often dominate it. The author is not writing poetry; despite his Prairie Songs he is no poet. Howard is visiting home after a long absence:
It was humble enough—a small white story-and-a-half structure, with a wing set in the midst of a few locust trees; a small drab-colored barn with a sagging ridge-pole; a barnyard full of mud, in which a few cows were standing, fighting the flies and waiting to be milked. An old man was pumping water at the well; the pigs were squealing from a pen near by; a child was crying....
As he waited, he could hear a woman's fretful voice, and the impatient jerk and jar of kitchen things, indicative of ill-temper or worry. The longer he stood absorbing this farm-scene, with all its sordidness, dullness, triviality, and its endless drudgeries, the lower his heart sank. All the joy of the home-coming was gone, when the figure arose from the cow and approached the gate, and put the pail of milk down on the platform by the pump.
"Good-evening," said Howard, out of the dusk.
Grant stared a moment. "Good-evening."
Howard knew the voice, though it was older and deeper and more sullen. "Don't you know me, Grant? I am Howard."
The man approached him, gazing intently at his face. "You are?" after a pause. "Well, I'm glad to see you, but I can't shake hands. That damned cow has laid down in the mud."
But the most pitiful pictures are those of the women. Lucretia Burns is a type:
She had no shawl or hat and no shoes, for it was still muddy in the little yard, where the cattle stood patiently fighting the flies and mosquitoes swarming into their skins, already wet with blood. The evening was oppressive with its heat, and a ring of just-seen thunder-heads gave premonitions of an approaching storm.
She arose from the cow's side at last, and, taking her pails of foaming milk, staggered toward the gate. The two pails hung from her lean arms, her bare feet slipped on the filthy ground, her greasy and faded calico dress showed her tired and swollen ankles, and the mosquitoes swarmed mercilessly on her neck and bedded themselves in her colorless hair.
The children were quarreling at the well, and the sound of blows could be heard. Calves were querulously calling for their milk, and little turkeys, lost in a tangle of grass, were piping plaintively.
It was a pitifully worn, almost tragic face—long, thin, sallow, hollow-eyed. The mouth had long since lost the power to shape itself into a kiss, and had a droop at the corners which seemed to announce a breaking-down at any moment into a despairing wail. The collarless neck and sharp shoulders showed painfully.
It is the tragic world of Mary E. Wilkins—her obstinate, elemental, undemonstrative rustics moved into a new setting. As in her work, simplicity, crude force, the power of one who for a moment has forgotten art and gives the feeling of actual life, verisimilitude that convinces and compels. The little group of stories is work sent hot from a man's heart, and they are alive as are few other stories of the period, and they will live. They are part of the deeper history of a section and an era.
This element of purpose is found in all of Garland's work. Nowhere is he a mere teller of tales. The Scotch and Yankee elements within him made of him a preacher, a man with a message. The narrow field of his first success could not long be worked, and, like the true son of a pioneer, he began to follow his old neighbors in their further migrations westward. His later work took the form of novels, many of them dealing with the extreme West and all of them saturated with purpose. His Captain of the Gray Horse Troop, for instance, attempted for the Indian what Ramona tried to do. It is a powerful study of the wrongs done a race, and, moreover, it is a novel. Still later the native mysticism of his race showed itself in such novels as The Tyranny of the Dark, The Shadow World, Victor Ollnee's Discipline—spiritualistic propaganda.
With the novel he has not fully succeeded. He lacks power of construction and ability for extended effort. The short story "A Branch Road" in Main-Traveled Roads has a gripping power, but the same theme treated at novel length in Moccasin Ranch becomes too much an exploiting of background. There is a sense of dilution, a loss of effect. The author's first fine edge of anger, of conviction, of complete possession by his material, is gone, and we have the feeling that he has become a professional man of letters, an exploiter of what he considers to be salable material. His best long novel is Rose of Dutcher's Coolly. Money Magic has a certain sense of power connected with it, but it lacks the final touch of actual life. Unlike The Rise of Silas Lapham, with which it may be compared, it leaves us unsatisfied. The quivering sense of reality that one finds in Main-Traveled Roads is not there. It is a performance, a brilliant picture made deliberately and coldly by a man in his study, whereas a story like "Among the Corn Rows" reads as if it had taken possession of its author, and had been written with a burst of creative enthusiasm. One late fragment of Garland's must not be overlooked, his A Son of the Middle Border, a part of which has appeared in serial form. It is an autobiography, and it is more: it is a document in the history of the Middle West. It has a value above all his novels, above all else that he has written, saving always those tense short stories of his first inspiration.
The Western stories of Alice French antedated by several years Garland's first work and perhaps had an influence upon it. Her strong story "The Bishop's Vagabond" appeared in the Atlantic as early as 1884 and her collection Knitters in the Sun by Octave Thanet came out in 1887. Her work, however, has not the originality and the sharpness of outline of Garland's and it has failed to hold the high place that was at first assigned to it. She is to be classed with Miss Woolson rather than with Mrs. Wilkins Freeman, with Miss Murfree rather than with Harris. She was not a native of the regions she chose as her literary field, but she entered them with curiosity and studied their peculiarities carefully with open note-book for Northern readers.
Her father and her brothers were extensive manufacturers, and contact with their work gave her a knowledge of labor conditions and of economic problems that enabled her in the early eighties to contribute to the Atlantic and other magazines able papers, such as "The Indoor Pauper" and "Contented Masses," papers widely commented upon for their brilliancy and breadth of view. But the success won everywhere by the feminine short story writers tempted her from these economic studies, and for a time she wrote local color tales with variety of background—Canada, Florida, Iowa. Then, with ample means at her disposal, she built at Clover Bend, Arkansas, a summer home on the banks of the Black River, and, like Miss Murfree, became interested in the crude social conditions about her, so different from those of her native New England or her adopted Iowa city of Davenport. Stories like "Whitsun Harp, Regulator" and "Ma' Bowlin'" followed, then the fine studies entitled "Plantation Life in Arkansas" and "Town Life in Arkansas."
These earlier stories are often dramatic, even melodramatic, and they abound in sentiment. Sometimes a character stands out with sharpness, but more often the tale impresses one as a performance rather than a bit of actual life. The intense feeling that Garland, who wrote as if his material came from out his own bitter heart, throws into his stories she does not have. She stands as an outsider and looks on with interest and takes notes, often graphic notes, then displays her material as an exhibitor sets forth his curious collection.
More and more the sociological specialist and the reformer took control of her pen. Even her short stories are not free from special pleading: "Convict Number 49," for instance, is not so much a story as a tract for the times. In her novels the problem dominates. The Man of the Hour and The Lion's Share treat phases of the labor problem, and By Inheritance is a study of the negro question with an attempted solution. The story, despite dramatic intensity at times and lavish sentiment, fails often to interest the reader unless he be a sociologist or a reformer. Already she holds her place by reason of a few of her earlier short stories, and it would seem that even these are now losing the place that once undoubtedly was theirs.
More convincing, though perhaps they have had smaller influence upon their time, have been the Vermont stories of Rowland E. Robinson, which are genuine at every point and full of subtle humor, and the Adirondack stories of Philander Deming, which began to appear in the Atlantic in the mid-seventies. Both men have written out of their own lives with full hearts, and both have added to their material a touch of originality that has made it distinctive.
In tracing the development of the short story to the end of the century one must pause at the exquisite work of H. C. Bunner, who undoubtedly did much toward bringing the form to mechanical perfection. His volume entitled Made in France: French Tales with a U. S. Twist, suggests one secret of his art. He had a conciseness, a brilliancy of effect, an epigrammatic touch, that suggest the best qualities of French style. In his volumes Short Sixes and More Short Sixes he is at his best—humorous, artistic, effective, and in addition he touches at times the deeper strata of human life and becomes an interpreter and a leader.
French in effect also is Ambrose Bierce, who in his earlier work displayed a power to move his readers that is little found outside of Poe. Reserve he has, a directness that at times is disconcerting, originality of a peculiar type, and a command of many of the subtlest elements of the story-telling art, but lacking sincerity, he fails of permanent appeal. He writes for effect, for startling climax, for an insidious attack upon his reader's nerves, and often, as in his collection entitled In the Midst of Life, he works his will. But he is not true, he works not in human life as it is actually lived, but in a Poe-like life that exists only in his own imaginings. In his later years journalism took the fine edge from his art and adverse criticism of his work turned him into something like a literary anarchist who criticized with bitterness all things established. A few of his novels may be studied with profit as models of their kind, but the greater part of his writings despite their brilliancy can not hope for permanence.
One may close the survey with Richard Harding Davis, who may be taken as the typical figure of the last years of the century. Davis was a journalist, peculiarly and essentially a journalist. He began his career in a newspaper office and all that he did was colored by the newspaper atmosphere. Literature to him was a thing to be dashed off with facility, to be read with excitement, and to be thrown aside. The art of making it he learned as one learns any other profession, by careful study and painstaking thoroughness, and having mastered it he became a literary practitioner, expert in all branches.
"Gallagher" was his first story, and it was a brilliant production, undoubtedly his best. Then followed the Van Bibber stories, facile studies of the idle rich area of New York life of which the author was a mere spectator, remarkable only for the influence they exerted on younger writers. Of the rest of his voluminous output little need be said. It is ephemeral, it was made to supply the demand of the time for amusement. With O. Henry, Edward W. Townsend of the "Chimmie Fadden" stories, and others, its author debauched the short story and made it the mere thing of a day, a bit of journalism to be thrown aside with the paper that contained it. On the mechanical side one may find but little fault. As a performance it is often brilliant, full of dash and spirit and excessive modernness, but it lacks all the elements that make for permanence—beauty of style, distinction of phrase, and, most of all, fidelity to the deeper truths of life. It imparts to its reader little save a momentary titillation and the demand for more. It deals only with the superficial and the coarsely attractive, and we feel it is so because of its author's limitations, because he knows little of the deeps of character, of sacrifice, of love in the genuine sense, of the fundamental stuff of which all great literature has been woven. He is the maker of extravaganzas, of Zenda romances, of preposterous combinations like A Soldier of Fortune, which is true neither to human nature nor to any possibility of terrestrial geography; he is a special correspondent with facile pen who tells nothing new and nothing authoritative—a man of the mere to-day, and with the mere to-day he will be forgotten. Were he but an isolated case such criticism were unnecessary; he might be omitted from our study; but he is the type of a whole school, a school indeed that bids fair to exert enormous influence upon the literature, especially upon the fiction, of the period that is to come.
Thus the fiction of the period has expressed itself prevailingly in short-breathed work. Compared with the fiction of France or England or Russia, with the major work of Balzac or Thackeray or Tolstoy, it has been a thing of seeming fragments. Instead of writing "the great American novel," which was so eagerly looked for during all the period, its novelists have preferred to cultivate small social areas and to treat even these by means of brief sketches.
The reasons are obvious. American life during the period was so heterogeneous, so scattered, that it has been impossible to comprehend any large part of it in a single study. The novelist who would express himself prevailingly in the larger units of fiction, like Henry James, for instance, or F. Marion Crawford, has been forced to take his topics from European life. The result has been narrowness, cameos instead of canvases, short stories rather than novels. In a period that over enormous areas was transforming thousands of discordant elements into what was ultimately to be a unity, nothing else was possible. Short stories were almost imperative. He who would deal with crude characters in a bare environment can not prolong his story without danger of attenuation. The failure of Miss Murfree, and indeed of nearly all of the short story writers when they attempted to expand their compressed and carefully wrought tales into novels, has already been dwelt upon.
But shortness of unit is not a fault. The brevity of the form, revealing as it does with painful conspicuousness all inferior elements, has resulted in an excellence of workmanship that has made the American short story the best art form of its kind to be found in any literature. The richness of the materials used has also raised the quality of the output. The picturesqueness of American life during the period has made possible themes of absorbing interest and unusual vividness of picturing, and the elemental men and passions found in new and isolated areas have furnished abundance of material for characterization. Until the vast field of American life becomes more unified and American society becomes less a matter of provincial varieties, the short story will continue to be the unit of American fiction.
Frank Richard Stockton. (1834–1902.) Ting-a-ling Stories, 1869; Roundabout Papers, 1872; The Home, 1872; What Might Have Been Expected, 1874; Tales Out of School, 1875; Rudder Grange, 1879; A Jolly Fellowship, 1880; The Floating Prince, 1881; The Story of Viteau, 1884; The Lady, or the Tiger? and Other Stories, 1884; The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine, 1886; A Christmas Wreck and Other Stories, 1886; The Late Mrs. Null, 1886; The Hundredth Man, 1887; The Bee Man of Orne, 1887; The Dusantes, 1888; Amos Kilbright, 1888; Personally Conducted, 1889; The Great War Syndicate, 1889; Ardis Claverden, 1890; Stories of Three Burglars, 1890; The Merry Chanter, 1890; The Squirrel Inn, 1891; The House of Martha, 1891; Rudder Grangers Abroad, 1891; The Clocks of Rondaine, 1892; The Watch-Maker's Wife, 1893; Pomona's Travels, 1894; The Adventures of Captain Horn, 1895; Mrs. Cliff's Yacht, 1896; Stories of New Jersey, 1896; A Story-Teller's Pack, 1897; The Great Stone of Sardis, 1898; The Girl at Cobhurst, 1898; Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coast, 1898; The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander, 1899; The Associate Hermits, 1899; A Bicycle of Cathay, 1900; Afield and Afloat, 1900; The Novels and Stories of Frank R. Stockton, Shenandoah Edition, 18 vols., 1900; Kate Bonnet, 1902.
Grace King. (1852——.) Monsieur Motte, 1888; Earthlings [in Lippincott's Magazine]; Tales of a Time and Place, 1892; Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, 'Sieur de Bienville [Makers of American Series], 1892; Balcony Stories, 1893; History of Louisiana [with J. R. Ficklen], 1894; New Orleans, the Place and the People, 1895; De Soto and His Men in the Land of Florida, 1898; Stories from Louisiana History [with J. R. Ficklen], 1905.
Kate Chopin. (1801–1904.) At Fault, a Novel, 1890; Bayou Folk, 1894; A Night in Acadie and Other Stories, 1897; The Awakening, a Novel, 1899.
James Lane Allen. (1849——.) Flute and Violin, and Other Kentucky Tales and Romances, 1891; The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky, 1892; John Gray: a Kentucky Tale of the Olden Time, 1893; A Kentucky Cardinal: a Story, 1894; Aftermath: Part Two of a Kentucky Cardinal, 1895; Summer in Arcady: a Tale of Nature, 1896; The Choir Invisible, 1897; The Reign of Law: a Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields, 1900; The Mettle of the Pasture, 1903; The Bride of the Mistletoe, 1909; The Doctor's Christmas Eve, 1910; A Heroine in Bronze, 1912.
Hamlin Garland. (1860——.) Main-Traveled Roads: Six Mississippi Valley Stories, 1891; Jason Edwards: an Average Man, 1892; Little Norsk; or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen, 1892; Member of the Third House: a Dramatic Story, 1892; A Spoil of Office: a Story of the Modern West, 1892; Prairie Folks: or, Pioneer Life on the Western Prairies, in Nine Stories, 1893; Prairie Songs, 1893; Crumbling Idols: Essays on Art, Dealing Chiefly with Literature, Painting, and the Drama, 1894; Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, 1895; Wayside Courtships, 1897; Ulysses S. Grant, His Life and Character, 1898; The Spirit of Sweetwater, 1898; Boy Life on the Prairie, 1899; The Trail of the Gold-Seekers: Record of Travel in Prose and Verse, 1899; The Eagle's Heart, 1900; Her Mountain Lover, 1901; The Captain of the Grayhorse Troop, 1902; Hesper, 1903; The Light of the Star, 1904; The Tyranny of the Dark, 1905; Witch's Gold: New Version of the Spirit of Stillwater, 1906; Money Magic, 1907; The Long Trail, 1907; The Shadow World, 1908; Moccasin Ranch, a Story of Dakota, 1909; collected edition, ten volumes, 1909; Cavanagh, Forest Ranger, 1910; Other Main-Traveled Roads, 1910; Victor Ollnee's Discipline, 1911.
Alice French, "Octave Thanet." (1850——.) Knitters in the Sun, 1887; Expiation, 1890; We All, 1891; Otto the Knight and Other Trans-Mississippi Stories, 1891; Stories of a Western Town, 1892; Adventures in Photography, 1893; The Missionary Sheriff: Incidents in the Life of a Plain Man Who Tried to Do His Duty, 1897; The Book of True Lovers, 1897; The Heart of Toil, 1898; A Slave to Duty and Other Women, 1898; A Captured Dream and Other Stories, 1899; The Man of the Hour, 1905; The Lion's Share, 1907; By Inheritance, 1910; Stories That End Well, 1911; A Step on the Stair, 1913.
Rowland Evans Robinson. (1833–1900.) Uncle Lisha's Shop: Life in a Corner of Yankeeland, 1887; Sam Lovel's Camp: Uncle Lisha's Friends Under Bark and Canvas, 1889; Vermont: a Study in Independence, 1892; Danvis Folks, 1894; In New England Woods and Fields, 1896; Uncle Lisha's Outing, 1897; Hero of Ticonderoga, 1898; A Danvis Pioneer, 1900; Sam Lovel's Boy, 1901; In the Greenwood, 1904; Hunting Without a Gun and Other Papers, 1905; Out of Bondage and Other Stories, 1905.
Philander Deming. (1829——.) Adirondack Stories, 1880, 1886; Tompkins and Other Folks: Stories of the Hudson and the Adirondacks, 1885.
Ambrose Bierce. (1842–1914.) Cobwebs from an Empty Skull, 1874; The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter [with Gustav Adolph Danzinger], 1892; Tales of Soldiers and Civilians [later changed to In the Midst of Life], 1892; Black Beetles in Amber, 1895; Can Such Things Be? 1894; Fantastic Fables, 1899; Shapes of Clay, 1903; The Cynic's Word Book, 1906; Son of the Gods and a Horseman in the Sky, 1907; The Shadow on the Dial and Other Essays, 1909; Write It Right: Little Blacklist of Literary Faults, 1909; Collected Works. Twelve Volumes. 1909-12.
Richard Harding Davis. (1864–1916.) Gallagher and Other Stories, 1891; Stories for Boys, 1891; Van Bibber and Others, 1892; The West from a Car Window, 1892; Rulers of the Mediterranean, 1894; Exiles and Other Stories, 1894; Our English Cousins, 1894; Princess Aline, 1895; About Paris, 1895; Cinderella and Other Stories, 1896; Three Gringos in Venezuela and Central America, 1896; Cuba in War Time, 1897; Soldiers of Fortune, 1897; A Year from a Reporter's Notebook, 1898; The King's Jackal, 1898; The Lion and the Unicorn, 1899; Novels and Stories, six volumes, 1899; With Both Armies in South Africa, 1900; In the Fog, 1901; Captain Macklin, 1902; Ranson's Folly, 1902; The Bar Sinister, 1904; Miss Civilization: a Comedy, 1905; Real Soldiers of Fortune, 1906; Farces, 1906; The Scarlet Car, 1907; The Congo and Coasts of Africa, 1907; Vera, the Medium, 1908; White Mice, 1909; Once upon a Time, 1910; The Dictator, a Farce, 1910; Galloper, a Comedy, 1910; The Consul, 1911; The Man Who Could not Lose, 1911; The Red Cross Girl, 1912; The Lost Road, 1913; With the Allies, 1914.
In 1870 American fiction ran in two currents: fiction of the Atlantic type, read by the cultivated few, and fiction of Bonner's New York Ledger type, read openly by the literate masses and surreptitiously by many others. There was also a very large class of readers that read no novels at all. Puritanism had frowned upon fiction, the church generally discountenanced it, and in many places prejudice ran deep. George Cary Eggleston in the biography of his brother has recorded his own experience:
It will scarcely be believed by many in the early years of the twentieth century, that as late as the end of the third quarter of the nineteenth, there still survived a bitter prejudice against novels as demoralizing literature, and that even short stories were looked upon with doubt and suspicion.... When The Hoosier Schoolmaster began to appear, a member of the publishing house was sorely troubled. He had been a bitter and vehement opponent of novels and novel reading. He had published articles of his own in denunciation of fiction and in rebuke of his friends in a great publishing house for putting forth literature of that character. He now began to suspect that The Hoosier Schoolmaster was in fact a novel, and he was shocked at the thought that it was appearing in a periodical published by himself.... When the story was about to appear in book form Edward wrote "A Novel" as a sub-title, and the publisher referred to was again in a state of nervous agitation. He could in no wise consent to proclaim himself as a publisher of novels. In view of the large advance orders for the book he was eager to publish the novel, but he could not reconcile himself to the open admission that it was a novel.[153]
While The Bread-Winners was running its anonymous course in the Century in 1884, its author, now known to have been John Hay, felt called upon to issue an explanatory note:
I am engaged in business in which my standing would be seriously compromised if it were known I had written a novel. I am sure that my practical efficiency is not lessened by this act, but I am equally sure that I could never recover from the injury it would occasion me if known among my own colleagues. For that positive reason, and for the negative one that I do not care for publicity, I resolved to keep the knowledge of my little venture in authorship restricted to as small a circle as possible. Only two persons besides myself know who wrote The Bread-Winners.
The final breaking down of this prejudice and the building up of the new clientele of readers that at length gave prose fiction its later enormous vogue is one of the most interesting phenomena of the period. The novel gained its present respectability as a literary form by what may be called an artifice. It came in disguised as moral instruction, as character-building studies of life, as historical narrative, as reform propaganda. Uncle Tom's Cabin, which had been read by thousands who had never opened a novel before, had begun the work. The Hoosier Schoolmaster was allowed to appear in the columns of Hearth and Home because it was a moral tale for children and because it was written by a minister whose motives no one could question. So with the works of the Rev. E. P. Roe, and the stories of Dr. J. G. Holland, who had gained an enormous following with his series of lay sermons published under the name of Timothy Titcomb.
Perhaps Dr. Holland, more than any other writer of the time, is responsible for this rehabilitation of the novel. He understood the common people. His own origin had been humble—the son of a mechanic of western Massachusetts, blessed with poverty, educated through his own efforts, enabled after a long struggle to take a medical diploma—educator, school teacher, superintendent of schools in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and finally, under Samuel Bowles, assistant editor of the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican, which, largely through his efforts, arose to national importance. He was forty when the Timothy Titcomb letters entered upon their enormous popularity—it is estimated that nearly half a million copies of the series were sold first and last; he was fifty when he established Scribner's Monthly and assumed its editorship.
Scribner's under his direction became for the new period what the Atlantic Monthly had been for the period before. He was a moralist, a plain man of the people, and he knew his clientele; he knew the average American reader that makes up the great democratic mass, the reader who had bought The Wide, Wide World, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the Titcomb Letters. He gave them first of all a serial novel by the Rev. George MacDonald, and he printed at the close of the first volume of the Monthly a letter from a reader, sample of thousands which had filled his mail. Here is an extract:
I know of no writings better calculated than his [MacDonald's] to draw out what is noble and true in the reader, or call forth fine feelings and high resolves. They give impulse to life. We come away from reading one of his books stronger and better prepared for our life-work. Is not this the surest test of excellence in a book?
It was this purpose that inspired his own fiction, Arthur Bonnicastle, Nicholas Minturn, and the others, earnest, moral tales sprinkled freely with sentiment, wholesome, but not high in literary merit. No other man did so much to direct the period into the well-known channels which it took. His whole influence was democratic. He would publish literature for the people, and to him literature was a serious thing, the voice of life. The group of new authors which he gathered about him is comparable only with the group that James T. Fields gathered about himself in the earlier golden days of the Atlantic.
The period of moralizing fiction culminated with the work of the Rev. Edward Payson Roe, whose first novel, Barriers Burned Away (1872), with its background of the great Chicago fire, and its tense moral atmosphere which skilfully concealed its sensationalism and its plentiful sentiment, became enormously popular. When its author died in 1888 his publishers estimated that 1,400,000 copies of all his novels had been sold, not counting pirated editions in many foreign languages, and the sale of the books has been steady up to the present time.
Roe, like Holland, had sprung from the common people and had been largely self-educated. For a time he had attended Williams College, Massachusetts, he had enlisted for the war as the chaplain of a regiment, and after the war had settled down as pastor of the First Church at Highland Falls, New York. After nine years his health failed him and he betook himself to an out-of-doors life, fruit raising at Cornwall-on-Hudson, and his experience he embodied in several practical handbooks like Success with Small Fruits, first published serially in Scribner's. The last years of his life he gave to fiction, turning it out with facility and in quantity and always with the theory that he was thereby continuing his work as a pastor. "My books," he wrote, "are read by thousands; my voice reached at most but a few hundred. My object in writing, as in preaching, is to do good; and the question is, Which can I do best? I think with the pen, and I shall go on writing no matter what the critics say."[154]
That his novels are lacking in the higher elements of literary art, in structure and style and creative imagination, is apparent even to the uncritical, but that they are lacking in truth to life and power to move the reader no one can declare. At every point they are wholesome and manly. Roe's assertion that he worked with reverence in the fundamental stuff of life one must admit or else deny his contention that, "The chief evidence of life in a novel is the fact that it lives."[155] Surely it must be admitted that few novels of the period have shown more vitality.
His influence has been considerable. With Holland and his school he helped greatly in the building up of that mass of novel readers, mostly women it must be said, which by the middle of the eighties had reached such enormous proportions. He led readers on to Lew Wallace's The Fair God and Ben Hur, and to the novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett, who added to the conventional devices of Holland and Roe—sentiment, sensation, love-centered interest culminating inevitably in marriage at the close of the story—literary art and a certain dramatic power. She was realistic in method,—her That Lass o' Lowrie's (1877) reproduced the Lancashire dialect in all its uncouthness—but the atmosphere of her work was romantic. Her Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), unquestionably the most successful juvenile of the period, has been described as "a fairy tale of real life." All of her books, indeed, have this fairy tale basis. She has been exceedingly popular, but she cannot be counted among the original forces of the period. From her the current of popularity flowed on to F. Marion Crawford's cosmopolitan work, to Margaret Deland's strong problem novel John Ward, Preacher; then it swelled into a flood with David Harum and the historical novels that made notable the nineties. At the close of the century fiction was read by all and in quantities that seem incredible.
In a chapter which traces the growth of the novel, in distinction from the growth of the sketch or the short story, F. Marion Crawford must be given a leading place. Of all American writers he devoted himself most fully to the major form of fiction. He wrote forty-five novels, and few sketches and short stories: he was a novelist and only a novelist. He appeared at the one moment when the type of fiction which he represented was most certain of wide recognition. His earliest book, Mr. Isaacs (1882), dealt with a new, strange environment—India, five years before Kipling made it his background; it had a religious atmosphere—the mystic beliefs of the Orient; and it told a story with sentiment and with dramatic movement. Zoroaster, with its opening sentence, "The hall of the banquets was made ready for the feast in the palace of Babylon," appealed to an audience that had rated Ben Hur among the greatest of novels.
But the earliest books of Crawford showed little of the main current of his work. No two novelists could differ more radically than he and Roe. To him the purpose-novel was a bastard thing unworthy the powers of a true artist.
Lessons, lectures, discussions, sermons, and didactics generally belong to institutions set apart for especial purposes and carefully avoided, after a certain age, by the majority of those who wish to be amused. The purpose-novel is an odious attempt to lecture people who hate lectures, to preach to people who prefer their own church, and to teach people who think they know enough already. It is an ambush, a lying-in-wait for the unsuspecting public, a violation of the social contract—and as such it ought to be either mercilessly crushed or forced by law to bind itself in black and label itself "Purpose" in very big letters.[156]
The office of the novel was, therefore, entertainment and only entertainment. He has been the chief exponent in America of art for art's sake. A novel, he maintained, is a little "pocket-stage" whose only office is to please.
The life and the training of Crawford gave him a viewpoint which was singularly different from that held by the short story writers who were so busily exploiting provincial little neighborhoods in all the remote nooks and corners of the land. His training had given him an outlook more cosmopolitan than even that of Henry James. He had been born at Bagni-di-Lucca, in Tuscany, son of Thomas Crawford the sculptor, and he had spent the first eleven years of his life in Rome. Later he had studied at Concord, New Hampshire; at Trinity College, Cambridge; at Karlsruhe, at Heidelberg; and finally at Rome, where he had specialized in the classics. In 1873 he was at Allahabad, India, connected with the Indian Herald, and later on, his health failing, he visited his uncle in New York, Samuel Ward, brother of Julia Ward Howe, and at his advice threw some of his Indian experiences into the form of fiction. The instant success of Mr. Isaacs determined his career. After extensive travels in Turkey and elsewhere, he settled down in Italy in a picturesque villa overlooking the Bay of Naples, and there he spent the remaining years of his life, years of enormous literary productivity, and of growing popularity with readers both in America and in Europe.
No other American novelist has ever covered so much of territory. He wrote with first-hand knowledge of life in America, in England, in Germany, in Italy, in Constantinople, and India, and he wrote with scholarly accuracy historical novels dealing with times and places as diverse as Persia in the times of Zoroaster; as the second crusade—Via Crucis; as the era of Philip II in Spain—In the Palace of the King; as Venice in the Middle Ages—Marietta, a Maid of Venice; as early Arabia—Kahled; and as early Constantinople—Arethusa.
The heart of his work undoubtedly is made up of the fifteen novels that deal with life in Rome and its environs: Saracinesca, Sant' Ilario, Don Orsino, Taquisara, Corleone, Casa Braccio, A Roman Singer, Marzio's Crucifix, Heart of Rome, Cecilia, Whosoever Shall Offend, Pietro Ghisleri, To Leeward, A Lady of Rome, and The White Sister. The novels deal almost exclusively with the middle and higher classes of Rome, classes of which most Americans know nothing at all, for, to quote from the opening chapter of To Leeward:
There are two Romes. There is the Rome of the intelligent foreigner, consisting of excavations, monuments, tramways, hotels, typhoid fever, incense, and wax candles; and there is the Rome within, a city of antique customs, good and bad, a town full of aristocratic prejudices, of intrigues, of religion, of old-fashioned honor and new-fashioned scandal, of happiness and unhappiness, of just people and unjust.
It is this other half Rome, unknown to the casual tourist, unknown to any not native born and Romanist in faith, that he has shown us, as Howells attempted to show the social life of Boston and New England, and as Cable sought to enter the heart of Creole New Orleans. With what success? Those who know most of Roman life have spoken with praise. He has given to his aristocracy perhaps too much of charm, they say; too much of inflexible will, it may be; too much of fire and fury; yet on the whole he has been true to the complex life he has sought to reproduce, truer, perhaps, than Howells has been to Boston or Cable to New Orleans, for he has worked from the inside as one native born, as one reared in the society he describes, even to the detail of accepting its religious belief. One may well believe it, for everywhere in the novels is the perfection of naturalness, the atmosphere of reality.
With his seven stories of American life, An American Politician and the others, he is less convincing. He wrote as a foreigner, as an observer of the outward with no fullness of sympathy, no depth of knowledge. He was European in viewpoint and in experience, and he knew better the European background—Germany as in Greifenstein and The Cigarette-Maker's Romance, or England as in The Tale of a Lonely Parish, or even Constantinople as in Paul Patoff.
He wins us first with his worldliness, his vast knowledge of the surfaces of life in all lands. He is full of cosmopolitan comparisons, wisdom from everywhere, modern instances from Stamboul and Allahabad and Rome. To read him is like walking through foreign scenes with a fully informed guide, a marvelous guide, indeed, a patrician, a polished man of the world. Everywhere in his work an atmosphere of good breeding—charming people of culture and wideness of experience: diplomats, artists, statesmen, noblemen, gentlemen of the world and ladies indeed. There is no coarseness, no dialect, no uncouth characters. We are in the world of wealth, of old-established institutions, of traditions and social laws that are inflexible. In the telling of the tale he has but a single purpose:
We are not poets, because we can not be. We are not genuine playwriters for many reasons; chiefly, perhaps, because we are not clever enough, since a successful play is incomparably more lucrative than a successful novel. We are not preachers, and few of us would be admitted to the pulpit. We are not, as a class, teachers or professors, nor lawyers, nor men of business. We are nothing more than public amusers. Unless we choose we need not be anything less. Let us, then, accept our position cheerfully, and do the best we can to fulfil our mission, without attempting to dignify it with titles too imposing for it to bear, and without degrading it by bringing its productions down even a little way, from the lowest level of high comedy to the highest level of buffoonery.[157]
From this standpoint he has succeeded to the full. He has told his stories well; he holds his reader's interest to the end. Slight though his stories may often be in development, they are ingenious always in construction and they are cumulative in interest. He has undoubted dramatic power, sparkling dialogue, thrust and parry, whole novels like Saracinesca, for instance, that might be transferred to the stage with scarcely an alteration. His characters and episodes appeal to him always from the dramatic side. The novel, indeed, as he defines it is a species of drama:
It may fairly be claimed that humanity has, within the past hundred years, found the way of carrying a theater in its pocket; and so long as humanity remains what it is, it will delight in taking out its pocket-stage and watching the antics of the actors, who are so like itself and yet so much more interesting. Perhaps that is, after all, the best answer to the question, "What is a novel?" It is, or ought to be, a pocket-stage. Scenery, light, shade, the actors themselves, are made of words, and nothing but words, more or less cleverly put together. A play is good in proportion as it represents the more dramatic, passionate, romantic, or humorous sides of real life. A novel is excellent according to the degree in which it produces the illusions of a good play—but it must not be forgotten that the play is the thing, and that illusion is eminently necessary to success.[157]
Often he overdoes this dramatic element and becomes melodramatic; we lose the impression of real life and feel an atmosphere of staginess, that exaggeration of effect which thrills for a moment and then disgusts.
And right here comes the chief indictment against him: he works without deep emotion, without tenderness, without altruism, without the higher reaches of imagination. He has no social or moral purpose, as Howells had. He sees the body but not the soul, society rather than life in its deeper currents, a society marvelously complex in its requirements and its accouterments, its conventions and traditions, but he looks little below the superficial, the temporal, the merely worldly. He is inferior to Howells inasmuch as he lacks poetry, he lacks humor, he lacks heart. He is inferior to James and George Meredith inasmuch as he had no power of introspection and no distinctive style. He had no passion—he never becomes enthusiastic even about his native Italy; he had little love for nature—the city engrosses him, not trees and mountains and lakes. He writes of the human spectacle and is content if he bring amusement for the present moment.
He was, therefore, one more influence in the journalization of the novel. He wrote rapidly and easily, and his style is clear and natural, but it is also without distinction. His pictures are vividly drawn and his stories are exceedingly readable—journalistic excellences, but there is nothing of inspiration about them, no breath of genius, no touch of literature in the stricter sense of that word. Like every skilful journalistic writer, he has the power to visualize his scene, to paint characters with vividness, and to make essentials stand out. Notably was this true of his historical fiction. Characters like Philip II. and Eleanor, Queen of France, he can make real men and women that move and convince. He has created a marvelous gallery of characters, taking his forty-five novels together, complex and varied beyond that produced by any other American novelist, and there are surprisingly few repetitions. He stands undoubtedly as the most brilliant of the American writers of fiction, the most cosmopolitan, the most entertaining. His galaxy of Roman novels, especially the Saracinesca group, bids fair to outlive many novels that contain deeper studies of human life and that are more inspired products of literary art.