It is very seldom in the history of literature that important developments take place without long preliminaries. From period to period new emphasis is placed on old ideas, and old forms are given the right of way in literary fashion. In the course of American literature, roughly speaking, the dominating forms of literature have been in succession: exposition and travel during the colonial period; poetry, satirical and epic, in the Revolutionary period; poetry in all its broader aspects during the first two thirds of the nineteenth century. After the Civil War for fifty years fiction came to the front; from about 1900 on a new emphasis was given to the stage and the playwright; at present the most striking fact in world literature is the broadening and deepening of the poetic currents again. Yet all of these forms are always existent. To speak of the rise of fiction, then, is simply to acknowledge the increased attention which for a period it demanded.

It is frequently said that America’s chief contribution to world literature has been the short story as developed since the Civil War. Yet in America the ground had been prepared for this development by many writers,—among them, as already mentioned in this history, Washington Irving with “The Sketch Book” in 1819 (see pp. 118–131), Hawthorne with “Twice-Told Tales” in 1838 (see pp. 240 and 243), Poe with his various contributions to periodical literature in the 1840’s (see pp. 185–187), Mark Twain with “The Jumping Frog” of 1867, Bret Harte with “The Luck of Roaring Camp” of 1870 and the great bulk of his subsequent contributions (see p. 381), and Thomas Bailey Aldrich with “Marjorie Daw” of 1873 and his other volumes of short stories. In the meanwhile the novel had had its consecutive history—from Brockden Brown beginning with 1798 (see pp. 100–109) to Cooper in 1820 (see pp. 141–157), William Gilmore Simms from 1833 (see p. 344), Hawthorne from 1850 on (see pp. 236–251), Mrs. Stowe from 1852 (see pp. 299–309), and Holmes from 1861 (see pp. 320, 321). And these writers of short and long fiction are only the outstanding story-tellers in America between the beginning of the century and the years just after the Civil War.

In a chapter such as this no exhaustive survey is possible, for it involves scores of writers and hundreds of books. The vital movement started with a fresh and vivid treatment of native American material, and it moved in a great sweeping curve from the West down past the Gulf up through the southeastern states into New England, across to the Middle West, and back into the Ohio valley until every part of the country was represented by its expositors. The course of this newer provincial fiction is suggested by the mention of Mark Twain’s “Jumping Frog” (1867, California), “The Luck of Roaring Camp” of Bret Harte (1870, California), G. W. Cable’s “Old Creole Days” (1879, Louisiana), “Nights with Uncle Remus,” by Joel Chandler Harris (1880, Georgia), “In the Tennessee Mountains,” by Charles Egbert Craddock (1884), “In old Virginia,” by Thomas Nelson Page (1887), “A New England Nun,” by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1891), “Main-Travelled Roads,” by Hamlin Garland (1891, the Middle West), “Flute and Violin,” by James Lane Allen (1891, the Ohio valley).

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (1837–)

The preËminent figure in the field of American fiction during the last half century has been William Dean Howells, a man who is widely representative of the broad literary development in the country and worthy of careful study as an artist and as a critic of life. Although he has been an Easterner by residence for nearly half a century, he is the greatest contribution of the West—or what was West in his youth—to Eastern life and thought.

He was born in 1837 at Martins Ferry, Ohio,—the second of eight children. Perhaps the richness of his character is accounted for by the varied strains in his ancestry. On his father’s side his people were wholly Welsh except his English great-grandmother, and on his mother’s wholly German except his Irish grandfather. His mother he has described as the heart of the family, and his father as the soul. The family fortunes were in money ways unsuccessful. His father’s experience as a country editor took him from place to place in a succession of ventures which were harrassed by uncertain income and heavy debts. These were always paid, but only by dint of unceasing effort. The Howells family were, however, happy in their concord and in their daily enjoyment of the best that books could bring them. Unlike many another youth who has struggled into literary fame, William Dean found a ready sympathy with his ambitions at home. His experience was less like Whitman’s than Bryant’s. From childhood the printing office was his school and almost his only school, for the district teachers had little to offer a child of literary parentage “whose sense was open to every intimation of beauty.” Very early his desire for learning led him into what he called “self-conducted inquiries” in foreign languages; and with the help of a “sixteen-bladed grammar,” a nondescript polyglot affair, he acquired in turn a reading knowledge of Latin, Greek, Spanish, German, French, and Italian. In the meanwhile he was reading and assimilating the popular English favorites. It was typical of his experience that Longfellow led him to his first studies of the Spanish language, bringing him back to Spain, where he had traveled in fancy with Irving. Always he was writing, for his life was “filled with literature to bursting,” and always imitating—now Pope, now Heine, now Cervantes, now Shakespeare. As a printer on country journals he had the opportunity to place his own wares before the public, often composing in type without ever putting pen to paper. His father encouraged him to contribute to journals of larger circulation, and the experience naturally led him into professional journalism before he was of age. It led him also to Columbus, the state capital, where he reported the proceedings of the legislature and in time rose to the dignity of editorial writer. During these years of late youth and early manhood his aspirations were like Bret Harte’s, all in the direction of poetry, and his earliest book was a joint effort with James J. Piatt, “Poems of Two Friends,” 1859. This was a typical experience in literary history. Again and again at the period of a change to a new form or, better, a revived artistic form, the literary youth has started to write in the declining fashion of his day and has been carried over into the rising vogue. “Paradise Lost” was first conceived of as a five-act tragedy. “Amelia” and “Tom Jones” were preceded by twenty-odd unsuccessful comedies. “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” and “Marmion” and “The Lady of the Lake” were all preliminary to “Waverley” and the tide of novels that followed. In 1860 Howells had five poems in the Atlantic and had no expectation of writing fiction; and it was another full decade, after the publication of several volumes of sketches and travel observations, before he was fairly launched on his real career.

In Columbus he had come by 1860 to a full enjoyment of an eager, book-loving group. He was working enthusiastically as a journalist, but his knowledge of politics and statecraft did not bring him to any vivid sense of the social order. “What I wished to do always and evermore was to think and dream and talk literature, and literature only, whether in its form of prose or of verse, in fiction, or poetry, or criticism. I held it a higher happiness to stop at a street corner with a congenial young lawyer and enter upon a fond discussion of, say, De Quincey’s essays than to prove myself worthy the respect of any most eminent citizen who knew not or loved not De Quincey.” There was a succession of fellow-journalists with whom he could have this sort of pleasure, and there were houses in town where he could enjoy the finer pleasure of talking over with the girls the stories of Thackeray and George Eliot and Dickens and Charles Reade as they appeared in rapid sequence in book or serial form. “It is as if we did nothing then but read late novels and current serials which it was essential for us to know one another’s minds upon down to the instant; other things might wait, but these things were pressing.” During these years he developed a liking for the social amenities, of which an enjoyment of polite literature was a natural expression. Literature was an adornment of life and, as he saw it, was confined to an interpretation of individual experience.

With the presidential candidacy of Lincoln, Howells became one of his campaign biographers, and after the election and a period of anxious waiting he received the appointment as United States consul to Venice. Upon his return to this country he became an Easterner, settling happily in Boston as assistant editor and then as editor in chief of the Atlantic Monthly from 1866 to 1881. This was a fulfillment beyond his highest hopes. The great New England group were at the height of their fame, and his connection with the unrivaled literary periodical of America brought him into contact with them all. He was ready to begin his own work as a writer of novels.

For the next twenty years he was a thoroughly conventional artist, gaining satisfaction and giving pleasure through the exercise of his admirable technique. In this period he wrote always, to borrow an expression originally applied to Tennyson, as though a staid American matron had just left the room: a matron who had been nurtured on the reading which gave rise to his own literary passions—Goldsmith, Cervantes, Irving, Longfellow, Scott, Pope, Mrs. Stowe, Dickens, and Macaulay; a matron, in short, who was the Lady of the Aroostook at forty-five, the mother of a numerous family, and aggressively concerned that no book which fell into the hands of her daughters should cause the blush of shame to rise upon the maiden cheek. He wrote not only on an early experience in the life of this lady but on “A Modern Instance,” “A Woman’s Reason,” “Indian Summer,” and, best of them all, “The Rise of Silas Lapham.” He was giving ground to Mr. Crothers’s pale-gray pleasures as a reader in the time when, as he said: “I turned eagerly to some neutral tinted person who never had any adventure greater than missing the train to Dedham, and I ... analyzed his character, and agitated myself in the attempt to get at his feelings, and I ... verified his story by a careful reference to the railroad guide. I ... treated that neutral tinted person as a problem, and I ... noted all the delicate shades in the futility of his conduct. When, on any occasion that called for action, he did not know his own mind, I ... admired him for his resemblance to so many people who do not know their own minds. After studying the problem until I came to the last chapter ... I ... suddenly gave it up, and agreed with the writer that it had no solution.” Had nothing occurred to break the sequence, he was on the way to wasting his energy, as Henry James did, “in describing human rarities, or cases that are common enough only in the abnormal groups of men and women living on the fringe of the great society of active, healthy human beings.”

The books of this period, in other words, were all the work of a well-schooled, unprejudiced observer whose ambition was to make transcripts of life. “Venetian Life” and “Italian Journeys” were the first logical expression of his desire and his capacities—books of the same sort as “Bracebridge Hall” and “Outre-Mer” and “Views Afoot” and “Our Old Home” (see p. 269, note). “A Foregone Conclusion” and “A Fearful Responsibility” simply cross the narrow bridge between exposition and fiction but employ the same point of view and the same technique. Howells was interested in American character and in the nice distinctions between the different levels of culture. In “Silas Lapham,” his greatest novel written before 1890, the blunt Vermonter is set in contrast with certain Boston aristocrats. He amasses a fortune, becomes involved in speculation, in business injustice, and in ruin. But whatever Howells had to say then of social and economic forces, he said of powers as impersonal as gravitation. Business was business, and the man subjected to it was subjected to influences as capricious but as inevitable as the climate of New England.

More and more as a realist he devoted himself to the presentation of character at the expense of plot. “The art of fiction,” he wrote in his essay on Henry James in 1882, “has become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens or Thackeray. We could not suffer the confidential attitude of the latter now nor the mannerism of the former any more than we could endure the prolixity of Richardson or the coarseness of Fielding. These great men are of the past—they and their methods and interests; even Trollope and Reade are not of the present.” He dismissed moving accidents and dire catastrophes from the field of the new novel, substituting for fire and flood the slow smolder of individual resentment and a burst of feminine tears. With “April Hopes” of 1887 he deliberately wrote an unfinished story, following two young and evidently incompatible people to the marriage altar, but leaving their subsequent sacrifice to the imagination of the reader, who must imagine his own sequel or go without.

However, when he was past fifty he underwent a social conversion. And when he wrote his next book about his favorite characters, the Marches, he and they together risked “A Hazard of New Fortunes.” He and they were no longer content to play at life under comfortable and protected circumstances. They went down into the metropolis, competed with strange and uncouth people, and learned something about poverty and something about justice. In fact they learned what went into “Annie Kilburn” and “The Quality of Mercy” and “The World of Chance” and “A Traveler from Altruria” and “The Eye of a Needle,” learning it all through the new vision given by the belated reading of a great European. Writing from his heart of this conversion Mr. Howells says, in “My Literary Passions”:

This passage we can hardly overvaluate. Taken by itself, it is merely a punctuation point in one author’s autobiography, but seen against its background it records the epoch-marking fact that in the very years when America as one expression of itself was producing such native-born spokesmen as Whitman and Mark Twain and Joaquin Miller, it was also, in the spiritual successor to Longfellow and Lowell, making reverent acknowledgment, not to the splendors of an ancient civilization but to the newest iconoclasm in the Old World. It is not unworthy of comment that the influence of Tolstoy was exerted upon Howells after his removal to New York City, where he has been associated with the editorial staff of Harper’s Magazine ever since 1881, and that the experiences of the Marches in their hazard of new fortunes is apparently autobiographical. There was no violent change in the material or method of his fiction-writing. It was simply enriched with a new purpose. To his old power to portray the individual in his mental and emotional processes he added a criticism of the rÔle the individual played in society. He added a new consciousness of the institution of which the individual was always the creator, sometimes the beneficiary, and all too often the victim. His maturity as a man and as a writer secured him in his human and artistic equilibrium, and in this degree has distinguished him from younger authors who have written with the same convictions and purposes. He has written no novels as extreme as Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” which ends with a diatribe on socialism, although he has been a socialist; he has written nothing quite so insistent as Whitlock’s “The Turn of the Balance,” although he has been keenly aware of the difference between justice and the operation of the legal system. Every story has contained a recognition that life is infinitely complex, with a great deal of redeeming and a great deal of unintelligent and baffling good in it. Furthermore, he has written always out of his own experience and with all his old skill as a novelist, so that he has never done anything so clumsily commendable as Page’s “John Marvel, Assistant” or anything so clearly prepared for by painstaking study as Churchill’s “The Inside of the Cup.”

By 1894 Howells had come to the point where he wished to present his social thesis as a thesis, and he did so in “A Traveler from Altruria,” which is not a novel at all but a series of conversations on the nature of American life as contrasted with life in an ideal state. Mr. Homos from Altruria (Mr. Man from Other Land) is the traveler who gets his first impressions of America by visiting a conservative novelist, Mr. Twelvemough, at a summer resort in which the hotel furnishes “a sort of microcosm of the American republic.” Here, in addition to the host, are an enlightened banker, a complacent manufacturer, an intolerant professor of economics, a lawyer, a minister, and a society woman “who as a cultivated American woman ... was necessarily quite ignorant of her own country, geographically, politically and historically”; and here also are the hotel keeper, the baggage porter, a set of college-girl waitresses, and a surrounding population of “natives,” as the summer resorter invidiously describes the inhabitants whom he doesn’t quite dare to call peasants. In the earlier part of the essay the social cleavages are embarrassingly revealed,—the ignominy of being a manual laborer or, worse still, a domestic servant, and the consequent struggle to escape from toil and all the conditions that surround it. This leads quickly to a study of the economic situation in a republic where every man is for himself.

When pinned by embarrassing questions the defenders of the American faith take refuge in what they regard as the static quality of human nature, but are further embarrassed by the Altrurian’s innocent surprise at their tactics. He does not understand that it is in human nature for the first-come to be first served, or for every man to be for himself, or for a man “to squeeze his brother man when he gets him in his grip,” or for employers to take it out of objecting employees in any way they can. To Mr. Twelvemough it is a matter of doubt as to whether the traveler is ironically astute or innocently simple in his implication that even human nature is subject to development.

The latter two thirds of the book are a composite indictment of an economic system which permits slavery in everything but name and which extols the rights of the individual only as they apply to the property holder. This culminates with the concluding lecture by the Altrurian—an “account of his own country, which grew more and more incredible as he went on, and implied every insulting criticism of ours.” The book concludes:

These are the convictions which dominate in all the later works. On the whole it is a significant fact that novels of so radical a thesis have attracted so little opposition. Never was an iconoclast received with such unintelligent tolerance. The suavity of his manner, the continued appearance of his books of travel and observation, the recurrence (as in “The Kentons”) to his old type of work or the resort (as in the long unpublished “Leatherwood God”) to fresh woods and pastures new, and all the while the humorous presentation of his favorite characters, particularly the bumptious young business man and the whimsically incoherent American woman, beguile his readers into a blind and bland assumption of Mr. Howells’s harmlessness. Possibly because they have been less skillful and more explicit, novel after novel from younger hands has excited criticism and the healthy opposition which prove that the truth has struck home. Perhaps his largest influence being indirectly exerted, his lack of sensationalism or sentimentalism debar him from the “best-seller” class; but for fifty years he has been consistently followed by the best-reading class, and no novelist of the newer generation has been unconscious of his work.

Henry James (1843–1916), whose work in some respects has been comparable to that of Howells, was a writer of so distinct an individuality that he has been the subject of much criticism and no little amiable controversy. Born in New York of literary parentage, educated in the university towns of Europe, and resident most of his life abroad, he developed into an international novelist, chiefly interested in the various shades of the contrasting cultures in the Old World and the New. Of his subject matter one story is about as good an example as another, for James was remarkably consistent. The backgrounds are almost always intercontinental or transatlantic. The characters belong to the leisure class. The episodes, where they exist, are adventures of the mind. In the earlier stories, such as “The American” (1877), plot is more eventful and definitive and style is more lucid than in the later ones. In these James seemed to be so fascinated with his intricate discriminations of feeling that he confined himself largely to psychological analysis in a style which became increasingly obscured by subtle indirections. Thus “The Awkward Age” (1899) is a narrative in ten short “books” centering about the marriage and non-marriage of two London girls. Aggie, who has been brought up in the fashion of Richard Feverel translated into feminine terms, is married off to a wealthy and decent man twice her age, and after a short experience turns out to be altogether unfitted for his degree of sophistication. Nanda, wise from the beginning, fails to win the most attractive man of the lot, and in the end is adopted and carried off to the country by a charming old Victorian gentleman. Nothing objective happens. The tale is told in ten long conversations, each entitled for one of the chief characters and occupying most of one of the books. All the characters talk with circuitous elusiveness, and all employ the same idiom, with the single exception of Aggie in her first two appearances, when she is supposed to be hopelessly ingenuous. In his attitude toward these people James put himself in a somewhat equivocal position. With their general social and spiritual insufficiency he had no patience. They represent the world of “Vanity Fair” and “The Newcomes” done down to date. But at the time he betrayed a lurking admiration for them, their ways, and their attitude toward life. Like the rest of his stories, “The Awkward Age” has little to do with the world of affairs in any group aspect. It is like a piece of Swiss carving on ivory. It has the same marvelous minuteness of detail, the same inutility, the same remote and attenuated relationship to any deep emotional experience or vigorous human endeavor. Unless one is devoted to the gospel of art for art’s sake, one cannot appreciate the good of this sort of endeavor. In his narrowly limited field Mr. James is a master. For more than forty years and in more than thirty volumes he did the thing that he elected to without compromise in behalf of popularity. Yet admire him as much as they may, most readers turn from him with relief to the literature of activity and of the normal, healthy human beings who are seldom to be encountered in the pages of Henry James.

Before mentioning in detail the types of American realistic novel which have followed on the work of Mr. Howells, something should be said about the very considerable output of romantic fiction of which he has been strangely intolerant; for it is strange that a man of his gentle generosity should be so insistent on the wrongness of an artistic point of view which is complementary to his own, though different from it. Distinctions between romance and realism often lead into a dangerous “no man’s land,” and discussions of the term are harder to close than to begin. However, Sir Walter Raleigh’s contention that the essence of romance lies in remoteness and the glamour of unfamiliarity—though not inclusive of all romance—will serve as an index for grouping here.

In 1879, 1880, and 1882 three men, the first of whom is still producing, set out on long careers of popularity. They were George W. Cable (1844- ), Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908), and F. Marion Crawford (1854–1909). Mr. Cable’s contribution has been the interpretation of the elusive and fascinating character of the New Orleans creole. Cable was bred in the river port when the old part of the city was less like the decaying heart of a mushroom than it is to-day. He grew up in an understanding of the courtly, high-spirited gentry of this exotic people, not studying either the people or their traditions for the sake of writing them up. He felt the beauty, but no less the futility, of their life. He was in no hurry to write for publication, but when he did so his fame was soon made. His subsequent departure from the South and his settling in New England seemed to many critics to be an abandonment of the richest field that life had to offer him. It was said for years, until it became one of the literary commonplaces, that Mr. Cable would never again rise to the level of “Old Creole Days” (1879), “The Grandissimes” (1880), or “Madame Delphine” (1881). The fourteen volumes of the next third of a century seemed to fulfill this dreary prophecy. Yet all the time the South was the home of his imagination, and with 1918 he gave the lie to all his Jeremiahs. The “Lovers of Louisiana” has quite as fine a touch as the works of nearly forty years ago. Mr. Cable sees the old charm in this life of an echoing past and the same fatuousness. At this distance into the twentieth century he leads his old characters and their children by new paths into the future, but he presents the graces of their obsolescent life in the familiar narrative style of his early successes—a style as fleeting yet as distinctive as the aroma of old lace.

Joel Chandler Harris, like George W. Cable, did his work in presenting the life of a vanishing race—the antebellum negro. He finished off his formal education, which ended when he was twelve, with the schooling of the printing shop, and passed from this into journalistic work with a succession of papers, of which the Atlanta Constitution is best known. Boy life on the plantation gave him his material in the folklore of the negro, and a chance bit of substituting gave him his very casual start as the creator of “Uncle Remus.” Northern readers were quick to recognize that Harris had given a habitation and a name to the narrative stuff that folklorists had already begun to collect and collate. The material goes back to the farthest sources of human tradition, but “Uncle Remus” was a new story-teller with a gift amounting to little short of genius. So his stories have the double charm of recording the lore of the negro and of revealing his humor, his transparent deceitfulness, his love of parade, his superstition, his basic religious feeling, and his pathos. Harris seemed to draw his material from a bottomless spring. Starting with “Uncle Remus: his Songs and Sayings” in 1881, Harris produced six other volumes in the next ten years and brought the total to fourteen in folk stories alone before his death in 1908. As the aptest of criticisms on his own work, one of his admirers has well quoted Harris’s comment on a book of Mark Twain: “It is history, it is romance, it is life. Here we behold a human character stripped of all tiresome details; we see people growing and living; we laugh at their humor, share their griefs, and, in the midst of it all, behold, we are taught the lesson of honesty, justice and mercy.”

The fluent romance of Marion Crawford is of a different and a lower order. He was a sort of professional cosmopolitan,—American by birth, educated largely abroad, widely traveled, and resident for most of his maturity on the Bay of Naples. He could turn off romances of Persia, of Constantinople, of Arabia, of medieval Venice, of Rome, and of England with about equal success. He had no great artistic purpose, admitting complacently that he was not great enough to be a poet or clever enough to be a successful playwright. He had no ethical purpose. He had not even a high ideal of craftsmanship, putting out eight volumes in 1903 and 1904 alone. He deserves mention as a prolific and self-respecting entertainer who converted his knowledge of the world into a salable commodity and established a large market for his superficial romances.

With the turn of the century—almost two decades after the dÉbuts of Cable, Harris, and Crawford—a new interest began to spread from the collegians to the reading public as a whole, the same influences which were producing as leaders in the scholastic field Von Holst, Channing, McMaster, Hart, Jameson, and McLaughlin—masters of American history—extending to the people at large. In 1897 appeared Weir Mitchell’s “Hugh Wynne.” In the spring of 1898 came the war with Spain. In 1899 Ford’s “Janice Meredith” and Churchill’s “Richard Carvel” were published; in 1900, Mary Johnston’s “To Have and to Hold”; and in 1901 Churchill’s “The Crisis”—four novels which by the end of the latter year had reached a combined sale of 1,200,000 copies. For a little while the vogue of the historical romance passed all recent precedent. The natural zest for stories of olden days was reËnforced by the revival of national feeling, and the popular authors of the moment reaped a golden harvest from the public, whom they at once charmed and instructed.

In the meanwhile, however, the describers and critics of contemporary American life were by no means on the wane. In the shifting currents of fiction various types of realism have come to the surface and are conspicuous in the tide. They all fall under the definition formulated by Mr. Perry: the sort of fiction that “does not shrink from the commonplace or from the unpleasant in its effort to depict things as they are and life as it is”; but within this definition they may be separated into two main classes. The first is the type that begins and ends with portrayal of human life, deals with the individual, and aims only to please. The second is written with the intent of pronouncing a criticism on the ways of men as they live together, presents its characters against a social and institutional background, and aims to influence the opinions of its readers. The difference between the two is, of course, the difference between the earlier and the later novels of Mr. Howells. In his later studies Mr. Howells is always dealing unaggressively but searchingly with the problem of economic justice, but this is only one of three broad fields. All modern problem and purpose novels are devoted, simply or complexly, to the market—property; the altar—religion; and the hearthstone—domestic life. This classification, which is useful only as long as it is employed cautiously for a general guide, leads to a cross-survey of recent fiction by kinds rather than by individual authors.

The number of more or less successful portrayers of provincial types in American fiction defies even enumeration. The most effective have, however, been unsatisfied with depicting the mere idiosyncrasies of a region heavily propped by dialect and have gone on to the interpretation of life as it might express itself anywhere under similar conditions. Thus the “Old Chester” of Mrs. Margaret Deland (1857- ) is a study of isolated conservatisms thrown into relief by the wise sanity of Dr. Lavendar. Old Chester, we are told, is in Pennsylvania. It might be in any state or country where narrow respectability could intrench itself. It is an American Cranford. In the “Old Chester Tales” (1898) “The Promises of Dorothea” involve her utterly respectable elopement with Mr. King, whose worst offense in the eyes of her guardian maiden aunts is that he has lived abroad for many years. The implied departure from Old Chester customs is sufficient condemnation. “Good for the Soul” culminates with the doctor’s sensible advice to Elizabeth Day, who, at the end of twelve years of happy marriage, is oppressed by the memory of a Bohemian girlhood of which her husband is ignorant. “Suppose,” said the doctor, “I hadn’t found her a good woman, should I have told her to hold her tongue?” “The Child’s Mother” is the story of an unregenerate whose baby Dr. Lavendar keeps away from her by a process we should call blackmail if it were not practiced by a saint. Wide and varied as her output is, Mrs. Deland has nowhere shown her artistry more finely than in the two Dr. Lavendar volumes.

The comments of Edith Wharton (1862- ) on American life are from the cosmopolitan point of view and present a series of pictures of the American woman which for harshness of uncharity are difficult to parallel. As a matter of fact America is so vast and varied that there is no national type of woman. Mrs. Wharton’s women are representative of one stratum just as Christy’s pictorial girls are. They are the product of indulgence which makes them hard, capricious, and completely selfish. Lily Bart of “The House of Mirth” (1905) begins high in the social scale, compromises reluctantly with moneyed ambition, and in one instance after another defeats herself by delay and equivocation in a declining series of “affairs.” More approachable than irreproachable, she suffers from the social beclouding of her reputation and, in the end, as a consequence of her low standards but her lack of shamelessness she succumbs to the circumstances that created her and arrives at a miserable death. Undine Spragg, in “The Custom of the Country” (1913), first married and divorced in a Western town is then brought to New York, introduced into society and “made” by her good looks and her brazen ambition. She wrecks the life of her second husband, a refined gentleman, and then as a result of much foreign residence marries a Frenchman of family. From him she runs away, finally to remarry Moffatt, who, throughout the story, has been her familiar spirit, subtly revealing his intimacy of feeling, and increasing his hold upon her as he rises in the money world. The title gives the cue to the story as a whole and to its several parts. By nature Undine is coarse-grained, showy, and selfish; by upbringing she becomes incorrigible. Her first and last husband is one of her own kind—sufficiently so that he is capable of resuming with her after her streaky, intermediate career. The second is broken on her overweening selfishness; the third, by virtue of his ancient family tradition, is able to save himself though not to mold or modify her. At the end, with Moffatt and all his immense wealth, she is still confronted by “the custom of the country.” Because of her divorces “she could never be an ambassador’s wife; and as she advanced to welcome her first guest she said to herself that it was the one part she was really made for.” This is the Wharton formula: none of her women really triumphs. Lily Bart’s downfall is one with her death. She had breathed the stifling atmosphere from her city childhood; what seemed to save Undine was the initial vigor of her Western youth, but even she could not successfully defy the ways of the world.

Hamlin Garland (1860- ) in 1891 achieved with his “Main-Traveled Roads” as quickly earned a reputation as Cable and Harris had done with their first volumes. The son of a sturdy Western pioneer, he had passed a boyhood of incessant toil before breaking away to earn his own schooling, which culminated with several years of self-directed study in Boston. A vacation return in 1887 to Wisconsin, Dakota, and Iowa revealed to him the story-stuff of his early life, and during the next two years he wrote the realistic studies which won him his first recognition. In them, he explained later, he tried to embody the stern truth. “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.” To the reader of Mr. Garland’s work as a whole it is evident that the richest part of his life was over with the writing of this book and “A Spoil of Office” (1892) and “Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly” (1895). With the adoption of city life his interests became diffuse and miscellaneous, as his writing did also. The almost startling strength of “A Son of the Middle Border” (1918) reËnforces this conviction, for this late piece of autobiography is the story of the author’s first thirty-three years and owes its fine power to the fact that in composing it Mr. Garland renewed his youth like the eagle’s. What he propounded in his booklet of essays, “Crumbling Idols” (1894), he illustrated in his stories up to that time. In them he made his best contribution to American literature, except for this recent reminiscent volume. In almost every quarter of the country similar expositions of American life were multiplied and to such an extent that Mrs. Deland, Mrs. Wharton, and Mr. Garland are chosen simply as illustrations of an output which would require volumes for full treatment.

In the field of realism which is concerned with a criticism of institutional life, Mrs. Deland wrote a memorable book in “John Ward, Preacher” (1888). This was the same year in which Mrs. Humphry Ward’s “Robert Elsmere” appeared. Both were indexes to the religious unrest of the whole Victorian period,—an unrest apparent in America since the rise of the Unitarians and the activities of the Transcendentalists, and recorded in such novels as Mrs. Stowe’s “Oldtown Folks” and Bayard Taylor’s “Hannah Thurston,” as well as in the underlying currents of Holmes’s Breakfast-Table series. The explicit story of John Ward is the tragic history of his love and marriage with Helen Jaffrey. The implicit story is based on the insufficiency of religious dogma detached from life. Mrs. Deland’s convictions resulted later in the genuine strength of her best single character, Dr. Lavendar, and in the subordinate religious motif of “The Iron Woman” (1910) (see p. 307). In recent years the narrative treatment of the problem to attract widest attention has been Churchill’s “The Inside of the Cup” (1913), a story which one is tempted to believe gained its reading more from its author’s reputation and the prevailing interest in the problem than from its artistic excellence. Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Ward wrote out of long experience in life; Mr. Churchill seems rather to have felt the need of introducing this theme into his many-volumed exposition of America and to have read up on the literature of the subject with the same thoroughness that characterized his preparation for more strictly historical stories.

The novels of economic life are far more numerous and more urgent in tone. One of the earliest was John Hay’s “The Breadwinners” (1883). It is significant that this appeared anonymously, the talented poet and politician preferring not to be known as a story-teller. The labor unrest of the early 80’s disturbed him. Desire for education seemed to result unfortunately, and with a very clear impatience Mr. Hay expounded the hardships of wealth in the midst of a labor uprising. To go to the root of the difficulty did not seem to occur to him. Shortly after this early industrial novel Mr. Howells was to attack the problem in a broader and deeper way (see pp. 418–421). And while Howells was still making his successive approaches a whole succession of younger men joined the assault. With many of them there was no such vital experience as their senior had passed through; they were rather writing as journalists and utilizing the novel, sometimes clumsily and often feverishly. Few have done work which could at all compare with that of Frank Norris (1870–1902). His interrupted trilogy—an epic of the wheat—fulfilled the promise of his early efforts, “Vendover and the Brute” and “McTeague,” and made his early death the occasion of a deep loss. Of these three novels “The Octopus” (1901) forms the story of a crop of wheat and deals with the war between the wheat-grower and the railroad trust; the second, “The Pit” (1903), is a story of the middleman; the third, “The Wolf” (never written), was to have dealt with the consumption in Europe. Norris’s aspiration was no less than that of his own character Presley, the poet. “He strove for the diapason, the great song which should embrace in itself a whole epoch, a complete era, the voice of an entire people....” With a great imaginative grasp he conceived of the wheat as an enormous, primitive force.

The Wheat that had killed Cressler, that had ingulfed Jadwin’s fortune and all but unseated reason itself; the Wheat that had intervened like a great torrent to drag her husband from her side and drown him in the roaring vortices of the Pit, had passed on, resistless, along its ordered and predetermined courses from West to East, like a vast Titanic flood, had passed, leaving Death and Ruin in its wake, but bearing Life and Prosperity to the crowded cities and centres of Europe.