Among Mrs. Wharton's novels are two—Ethan FromeandSummer—which unfold the tragedy of circumstances apparently as different as possible from those chronicled in the New York novels. Her fashionable New York and her rural New England, however, have something in common. In the desolate communities which witness the agonies of Ethan Frome and Charity Royall not only is there a stubborn village decorum but there are also the bitter compulsions of a helpless poverty which binds feet and wings as the most ruthless decorum cannot bind them, and which dulls all the hues of life to an unendurable dinginess. As a member of the class which spends prosperous vacations on the old soil of the Puritans Mrs. Wharton has surveyed the cramped lives of the native remnant with a pity springing from her knowledge of all the freedom and beauty and pleasure which they miss. She consequently brings into her narrative an outlook not to be found in any of the novelists who write of rural New England out of the erudition which comes of more intimate acquaintanceship. Without filing down her characters into types she contrives to lift them into universal figures of aspiration or disappointment.
InEthan Frome, losing from her clear voice for a moment the note of satire, she reaches her highest point of tragic passion. In the bleak life of Ethan Frome on his bleak hillside there blooms an exquisite love which during a few hours of rapture promises to transform his fate; but poverty clutches him, drives him to attempt suicide with the woman he loves, and then condemns him to one of the most appalling expiations in fiction—to a slavery in comparison with which his former life was almost freedom. Not since Hawthorne has a novelist built on the New England soil a tragedy of such elevation of mood as this. Freed from the bondage of local color, that myopic muse, Mrs. Wharton here handles her material not so much like a quarryman finding curious stones and calling out about them as like a sculptor setting up his finished work on a commanding hill.
It has regularly been by her novels that Mrs. Wharton has attracted the most attention, and yet her short stories are of a quite comparable excellence. About fifty of them altogether, they show her swift, ironical intelligence flashing its light into numerous corners of human life not large enough to warrant prolonged reports. She can go as far afield as to the ascetic ecstasies and agonies of medieval religion, inThe Hermit and the Wild Woman; or as to the horrible revenge of Duke Ercole of Vicenza, inThe Duchess at Prayer; or as to the murder and witchcraft of seventeenth-century Brittany, inKerfol.Kerfol,Afterward, andThe Lady's Maid's Bellare as good ghost stories as any written in many years.Bunner Sisters, an observant, tender narrative, concerns itself with the declining fortunes of two shopkeepers of Stuyvesant Square in New York's age of innocence.
For the most part, however, the locality and temper of Mrs. Wharton's briefer stories are not so remote as these from the center of her particular world, wherein subtle and sophisticated people stray in the crucial mazes of art or learning or love. Her artists and scholars are likely to be shown at some moment in which a passionate ideal is in conflict with a lower instinct toward profit or reputation, as when inThe Descent of Manan eminent scientist turns his feet ruinously into the wide green descent to "popular" science, or as when inThe Verdicta fashionable painter of talent encounters the work of an obscure genius and gives up his own career in the knowledge that at best he can never do but third-rate work. Some such stress of conflict marks almost all Mrs. Wharton's stories of love, which make up the overwhelming majority of her work. Love with her in but few cases runs the smooth course coincident with flawless matrimony. It cuts violently across the boundaries drawn by marriages of convenience, and it suffers tragic changes in the objects of its desire.
What opportunity has a free, wilful passion in the tight world Mrs. Wharton prefers to represent? Either its behavior must be furtive and hypocritical or else it must incur social disaster. Here again Mrs. Wharton will not be partizan. If in one story—such asThe Long Run—she seems to imply that there is no ignominy like that of failing love when it comes, yet in another—such asSouls Belated—she sets forth the costs and the entanglements that ensue when individuals take love into their own hands and defy society. Not love for itself but love as the most frequent and most personal of all the passions which bring the community into clashes with its members—this is the subject of Mrs. Wharton's curiosity and study. Her only positive conclusions about it, as reflected in her stories, seem to be that love cuts deepest in the deepest natures and yet that no one is quite so shallow as to love and recover from it without a scar. Divorce, according to her representations, can never be quite complete; one of her most amusing stories,The Other Two, recounts how the third husband of a woman whose first two husbands are still living gradually resolves her into her true constituency and finds nothing there but what one husband after another has made of her.
In stories like this Mrs. Wharton occasionally leaves the restraint of her ordinary manner to wear the keener colors of the satirist.Xingu, for instance, with its famous opening sentence—"Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone"—has the flash and glitter, and the agreeable artificiality, of polite comedy. Undine Spragg and the many futile women whom Mrs. Wharton enjoys ridiculing more than she gives evidence of enjoying anything else belong nearly as much to the menagerie of the satirist as to the novelist's gallery. It is only in these moments of satire that Mrs. Wharton reveals much about her disposition: her impatience with stupidity and affectation and muddy confusion of mind and purpose; her dislike of dinginess; her toleration of arrogance when it is high-bred. Such qualities do not help her, for all her spare, clean movement, to achieve the march or rush of narrative; such qualities, for all her satiric pungency, do not bring her into sympathy with the sturdy or burly or homely, or with the broader aspects of comedy. Lucidity, detachment, irony—these never desert her (though she wrote with the hysterical pen that hundreds used during the war). So great is her self-possession that she holds criticism at arm's length, somewhat as her chosen circles hold the barbarians. If she had a little less of this pride of dignity she might perhaps avoid her tendency to assign to decorum a larger power than it actually exercises, even in the societies about which she writes. Decorum, after all, is binding chiefly upon those who accept it without question but not upon passionate or logical rebels, who are always shattering it with some touch of violence or neglect; neither does it bind those who stand too securely to be shaken. For this reason the coils of circumstance and the pitfalls of inevitability with which Mrs. Wharton besets the careers of her characters are in part an illusion deftly employed for the sake of artistic effect. She multiplies them as romancers multiply adventures.
The illusion of reality in her work, however, almost never fails her, so alertly is her mind on the lookout to avoid vulgar or shoddy romantic elements. Compared to Henry James, her principal master in fiction, whom she resembles in respect to subjects and attitude, she lacks exuberance and richness of texture, but she has more intelligence than he. Compared to Jane Austen, the novelist among Anglo-Saxon women whom Mrs. Wharton most resembles, particularly as regards satire and decorum, she is the more impassioned of the two. It may seem at first thought a little strange to compare the vivid novels of the author ofThe House of Mirthwith the mouse-colored narratives of the author ofPride and Prejudice, for the twentieth century has added to all fiction many overtones not heard in the eighteenth. But of no other woman writer since Jane Austen can it be said quite so truthfully as of Mrs. Wharton that her natural, instinctive habitat is a true tower of irony.
Although most novelists with any historical or scholarly hankerings are satisfied to invent here a scene and there a plot and elsewhere an authority, James Branch Cabell has invented a whole province for his imagination to dwell in. He calls it Poictesme and sets it on the map of medieval Europe, but it has no more unity of time and place than has the multitudinous land ofThe Faerie Queene. Around the reigns of Dom Manuel, Count and Redeemer of Poictesme, epic hero ofFigures of Earth, father of the heroine inThe Soul of Melicent(later renamedDomnei), father of that Dorothy la Desirée whom Jurgen loved (with some other women), father also of that Count Emmerich who succeeded Manuel as ruler at Bellegarde and Storisende—around the reigns of Manuel and Emmerich the various sagas of Mr. Cabell principally revolve. Scandinavia, however, conveniently impinges upon their province, with Constantinople and Barbary, Massilia, Aquitaine, Navarre, Portugal, Rome, England, Paris, Alexandria, Arcadia, Olympus, Asgard, and the Jerusalems Old and New. As many ages of history likewise converge upon Poictesme in its ostensible thirteenth or fourteenth century, from the most mythological times only a little this side of Creation to the most contemporary America of Felix Kennaston who lives at comfortable Lichfield with two motors and with money in four banks but in his mind habitually bridges the gap by imagined excursions into Poictesme and the domains adjacent.
Nothing but remarkable erudition in the antiquities as Cockaigne and Faery could possibly suffice for such adventures as Mr. Cabell's, and he has very remarkable erudition in all that concerns the regions which delight him. And where no authorities exist he merrily invents them, as in the case of his Nicolas of Caen, poet of Normandy, whose talesDizain des Reinesare said to furnish the source for the ten stories collected inChivalry, and whose largely lost masterpieceLe Roman de Lusignanserves as the basis forDomnei. One British critic and rival of Mr. Cabell has lately fretted over the unblushing anachronisms and confused geography of this parti-colored world. For less dull-witted scholars these are the very cream of the Cabellian jest.
The cream but not the substance, for Mr. Cabell has a profound creed of comedy rooted in that romance which is his regular habit. Romance, indeed, first exercised his imagination, in the early years of the century when in many minds he was associated with the decorative Howard Pyle and allowed his pen to move at the languid gait then characteristic of a dozen inferior romancers. Only gradually did his texture grow firmer, his tapestry richer; only gradually did his gaiety strengthen into irony. Although that irony was the progenitor of the comic spirit which now in his maturity dominates him, it has never shaken off the romantic elements which originally nourished it. Rather, romance and irony have grown up in his work side by side. His Poictesme is no less beautiful for having come to be a country of disillusion; nor has his increasing sense of the futility of desire robbed him of his old sense that desire is a glory while it lasts.
He allows John Charteris inBeyond Life—for the most part Mr. Cabell's mouthpiece—to set forth the doctrine that romance is the real demiurge, "the first and loveliest daughter of human vanity," whereby mankind is duped—and exalted. "No one on the preferable side of Bedlam wishes to be reminded of what we are in actuality, even were it possible, by any disastrous miracle, ever to dispel the mist which romance has evoked about all human doings." Therefore romance has created the "dynamic illusions" of chivalry and love and common sense and religion and art and patriotism and optimism, and therein "the ape reft of his tail and grown rusty at climbing" has clothed himself so long that as he beholds himself in the delusive mirrors he has for centuries held up to nature he believes he is somehow of cosmic importance. Poor and naked as this aspiring ape must seem to the eye of reason, asks Mr. Cabell, is there not something magnificent about his imaginings? Does the course of human life not singularly resemble the dance of puppets in the hands of a Supreme Romancer? How, then, may any one declare that romance has become antiquated or can ever cease to be indispensable to mortal character and mortal interest?
The difference between Mr. Cabell and the popular romancers who in all ages clutter the scene and for whom he has nothing but amused contempt is that they are unconscious dupes of the demiurge whereas he, aware of its ways and its devices, employs it almost as if it were some hippogriff bridled by him in Elysian pastures and respectfully entertained in a snug Virginian stable. His attitude toward romance suggests a cheerful despair: he despairs of ever finding anything truer than romance and so contents himself with Poictesme and its tributaries. The favorite themes of romance being relatively few, he has not troubled greatly to increase them; war and love in the main he finds enough.
Besides these, however, he has always been deeply occupied with one other theme—the plight of the poet in the world. That sturdy bruiser Dom Manuel, for instance, is at heart a poet who molds figures out of clay as his strongest passion, although the world, according to its custom, conspires against his instinct by interrupting him with love and war and business, and in the end hustles him away before he has had time to make anything more lovely or lasting than a reputation as a hero. In the amazing fantasyThe Cream of the JestMr. Cabell has embodied the visions of the romancer Felix Kennaston so substantially that Kennaston's diurnal walks in Lichfield seem hardly as real as those nightly ventures which under the guise of Horvendile he makes into the glowing land he has created. Nor are the two universes separated by any tight wall which the fancy must leap over: they flow with exquisite caprice one into another, as indeed they always do in the consciousness of a poet who, like Kennaston or Mr. Cabell, broods continually over the problem how best to perform his function: "to write perfectly of beautiful happenings."
Of all the fine places in the world where beautiful happenings come together, Mr. Cabell argues, incomparably the richest is in the consciousness of a poet who is also a scholar. There are to be found the precious hoarded memories of some thousands of years: high deeds and burning loves and eloquent words and surpassing tears and laughter. There, consequently, the romancer may well take his stand, distilling bright new dreams out of ancient beauty. And if he adds the heady tonic of an irony springing from a critical intelligence, so much the better. When Mr. Cabell wishes to represent several different epochs inThe Certain Hourhe chooses to tell ten stories of poets—real or imagined—as the persons in whom, by reason of their superior susceptibility, the color of their epochs may be most truthfully discovered; and when he wishes to decant his own wit and wisdom most genuinely the vessel he normally employs is a poet.
If the poets and warriors who make up the list of Mr. Cabell's heroes devote their lives almost wholly to love, it is for the reason that no other emotion interests him so much or seems to him to furnish so many beautiful happenings about which to write perfectly. Love, like art, is a species of creation, and the moods which attend it, though illusions, are miracles none the less. Of the two aspects of love which especially attract Mr. Cabell he has given the larger share of his attention to the extravagant worship of women ("domnei") developed out of chivalry—the worship which began by ascribing to the beloved the qualities of purity and perfection, of beauty and holiness, and ended by practically identifying her with the divine. This supernal folly reaches its apogee inDomnei, in the careers of Perion and Melicent who are so uplifted by ineffable desire that their souls ceaselessly reach out to each other though obstacles large as continents intervene. For Perion the most deadly battles are but thornpricks in the quest of Melicent; and such is Melicent's loyalty during the years of her longing that the possession of her most white body by Demetrios of Anatolia leaves her soul immaculate and almost unperturbed. In this tale love is canonized: throned on alabaster above all the vulgar gods it diffuses among its worshipers a crystal radiance in which mortal imperfections perish—or are at least forgotten during certain rapturous hours.
Ordinarily one cynical touch will break such pretty bubbles; but Mr. Cabell, himself a master of cynical touches and shrewdly anticipant of them, protects his invention with the competent armor of irony, and now and then—particularly in the felicitous tenson spoken by Perion and Demetrios concerning the charms of Melicent—brings mirth and beauty to an amalgam which bids fair to prove classic metal. A much larger share of this mirth appears inJurgen, which narrates with phallic candor the exploits of a middle-aged pawnbroker of Poictesme in pursuit of immortal desire. Of course he does not find it, for the sufficient reason that, as Mr. Cabell understands such matters, the ultimate magic of desire lies in the inaccessibility of the desired; and Jurgen, to whom all women in his amorous Cockaigne are as accessible as bread and butter, after his sly interval of rejuvenation comes back in the end to his wife and his humdrum duty with a definite relief. He may be no more in love with Dame Lisa than with his right hand, and yet both are considerably more necessary to his well-being, he discovers, than a number of more exciting things.
Love inJurgeninclines toward another aspect of the passion which Mr. Cabell has studied somewhat less than the chivalrous—the aspect of gallantry. "I have read," says John Charteris, "that the secret of gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that, among other requisites, the gallant person will always consider the world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is not distrustful—being thoroughly persuaded that God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational." These are the accents, set to slightly different rhythms, of a Congreve; and if there is anything as remarkable about Mr. Cabell as the fact that he has represented the chivalrous and the gallant attitudes toward love with nearly equal sympathy, it is the fact that in an era of militant naturalism and of renascent moralism he has blithely adhered to an affection for unconcerned worldliness and has airily played Congreve in the midst of all the clamorous, serious, disquisitive bassoons of the national orchestra.
InThe Cords of VanityRobert Townsend goes gathering roses and tasting lips almost as if the second Charles were still the lawful ruler of his obedient province of Virginia; and inThe Rivet in Grandfather's NeckRudolph Musgrave, that quaint figure whittled out of chivalry and dressed up in amiable heroics, is plainly contrasted with the glib rogue of genius John Charteris, who, elsewhere in Mr. Cabell's books generally the chorus, here enters the plot and exhibits a sorry gallantry in action. Poictesme, these novels indicate, is not the only country Mr. Cabell knows; he knows also how to feel at home, when he cares to, in the mimic universe of Lichfield and Fairhaven, where gay ribbons perpetually flutter, and where eyes and hands perpetually invite, and where love runs a deft, dainty, fickle course in all weathers.
That Felix Kennaston inhabits Lichfield in the flesh and in the spirit elopes into Poictesme may be taken, after a fashion, as allegory with an autobiographical foundation:The Cream of the Jestis, on the whole, the essence of Cabell. The book suggests, moreover, a critical position—which is, that gallantry and Virginia have so far been regrettably sacrificed to chivalry and Poictesme in the career of Mr. Cabell's imagination. Not only the symmetry expected of that career demands something different; so does its success with the gallantries of Lichfield. In spite of all Mr. Cabell's accumulation of erudite allusions the atmosphere of his Poictesme often turns thin and leaves his characters gasping for vital breath; nor does he entirely restore it by multiplying symbols as he does inJurgenandFigures of Earthuntil the background of his narrative is studded with rich images and piquant chimeras that perplex more than they illuminate—and sometimes bore. These chivalric loves beating their heads against the cold moon are, after all, follies, however supernal; they are as brief as they are bright; in the end even the greedy Jurgen turns back to honest salt from too much sugar.
Now in gallantry as Mr. Cabell conceives and represents it there is always the salt of prudence, of satire, of comedy; and his gifts in this direction are too great to be neglected. The comic spirit, let it be remembered, has led Mr. Cabell from the softness and sweetness which in spots disfigured his earlier romances—such asThe Line of Love and Chivalry—before he recently revised them; it has happily kept in hand the wild wings of his later love stories; now it deserves to have its way unburdened, at least occasionally. While it almost had its way in Jurgen, where it behaved like a huge organ bursting into uproarious laughter, it still had to carry the burden of much learning. It would be freer of such delectable plunder could it once burst into uproar in the midst of Virginia. Mr. Cabell has singled out two very dissimilar poets for particular compliment: Marlowe and Congreve. As regards the still more particular compliment of imitation, however, he has done Congreve rather less than justice.
When Willa Cather dedicated her first novel,O Pioneers!, to the memory of Sarah Orne Jewett, she pointed out a link of natural piety binding her to a literary ancestor now rarely credited with descendants so robust. The link holds even yet in respect to the clear outlines and fresh colors and simple devices of Miss Cather's art; in respect to the body and range of her work it never really held. The thin, fine gentility which Miss Jewett celebrates is no further away from the rich vigor of Miss Cather's pioneers than is the kindly sentiment of the older woman from the native passion of the younger. Miss Jewett wrote of the shadows of memorable events. Once upon a time, her stories all remind us, there was an heroic cast to New England. In Miss Jewett's time only the echoes of those Homeric days made any noise in the world—at least for her ears and the ears of most of her literary contemporaries. Unmindful of the roar of industrial New England she kept to the milder regions of her section and wrote elegies upon the epigones.
In Miss Cather's quarter of the country there were still heroes during the days she has written about, still pioneers. The sod and swamps of her Nebraska prairies defy the hands of labor almost as obstinately as did the stones and forests of old New England. Her Americans, like all the Agamemnons back of Miss Jewett's world, are fresh from Europe, locked in a mortal conflict with nature. If now and then the older among them grow faint at remembering Bohemia or France or Scandinavia, this is not the predominant mood of their communities. They ride powerfully forward on a wave of confident energy, as if human life had more dawns than sunsets in it. For the most part her pioneers are unreflective creatures, driven by some inner force which they do not comprehend: they are, that is perhaps no more than to say, primitive and epic in their dispositions.
Is it by virtue of a literary descent from the New England school that Miss Cather depends so frequently upon women as protagonists? Alexandra Bergson inO Pioneers!, Thea Kronborg inThe Song of the Lark, Ántonia Shimerda inMy Ántonia—around these as girls and women the actions primarily revolve. It is not, however, as other Helens or Gudruns that they affect their universes; they are not the darlings of heroes but heroes themselves. Alexandra drags her dull brothers after her and establishes the family fortunes; Ántonia, less positive and more pathetic, still holds the center of her retired stage by her rich, warm, deep goodness; Thea, a genius in her own right, outgrows her Colorado birthplace and becomes a famous singer with all the fierce energy of a pioneer who happens to be an instinctive artist rather than an instinctive manager, like Alexandra, or an instinctive mother, like Ántonia. And is it because women are here protagonists that neither wars, as among the ancients, nor machines, as among the moderns, promote the principal activities of the characters? Less the actions than the moods of these novels have the epic air. Narrow as Miss Cather's scene may be, she fills it with a spaciousness and candor of personality that quite transcends the gnarled eccentricity and timid inhibitions of the local colorists. Passion blows through her chosen characters like a free, wholesome, if often devastating wind; it does not, as with Miss Jewett and her contemporaries, lurk in furtive corners or hide itself altogether. And as these passions are most commonly the passions of home-keeping women, they lie nearer to the core of human existence than if they arose out of the complexities of a wider region.
Something more than Miss Cather's own experience first upon the frontier and then among artists and musicians has held her almost entirely to those two worlds as the favored realms of her imagination. In them, rather than in bourgeois conditions, she finds the theme most congenial to her interest and to her powers. That theme is the struggle of some elect individual to outgrow the restrictions laid upon him—or more frequently her—by numbing circumstances. The early, somewhat inconsequentialAlexander's Bridgetouches this theme, though Bartley Alexander, like the bridge he is building, fails under the strain, largely by reason of a flawed simplicity and a divided energy. Pioneers and artists, in Miss Cather's understanding of their natures, are practically equals in single-mindedness; at least they work much by themselves, contending with definite though ruthless obstacles and looking forward, if they win, to a freedom which cannot be achieved in the routine of crowded communities. To become too much involved, for her characters, is to lose their quality. There is Marie Tovesky, inO Pioneers!, whom nothing more preventable than her beauty and gaiety drags into a confused status and so on to catastrophe. Ántonia, tricked into a false relation by her scoundrel lover, and Alexandra, nagged at by her stodgy family because her suitor is poor, suffer temporary eclipses from which only their superb health of character finally extricates them. Thea Kronborg, troubled by the swarming sensations of her first year in Chicago, has to find her true self again in that marvelous desert canyon in Arizona where hot sun and bright, cold water and dim memories of the cliff-dwelling Ancient People detach her from the stupid faces which have haunted and unnerved her.
Miss Cather would not belong to her generation if she did not resent the trespasses which the world regularly commits upon pioneers and artists. For all the superb vitality of her frontier, it faces—and she knows it faces—the degradation of its wild freedom and beauty by clumsy towns, obese vulgarity, the uniform of a monotonous standardization. Her heroic days endure but a brief period before extinction comes. Then her high-hearted pioneers survive half as curiosities in a new order; and their spirits, transmitted to the artists who are their legitimate successors, take up the old struggle in a new guise. In the short story calledThe Sculptor's Funeralshe lifts her voice in swift anger and inA Gold Slippershe lowers it to satirical contempt against the dull souls who either misread distinction or crassly overlook it.
At such moments she enlists in the crusade against dulness which has recently succeeded the hereditary crusade of American literature against wickedness. But from too complete an absorption in that transient war she is saved by the same strength which has lifted her above the more trivial concerns of local color. The older school uncritically delighted in all the village singularities it could discover; the newer school no less uncritically condemns and ridicules all the village conventionalities. Miss Cather has seldom swung far either to the right or to the left in this controversy. She has, apparently, few revenges to take upon the communities in which she lived during her expanding youth. An eye bent too relentlessly upon dulness could have found it in Alexandra Bergson, with her slow, unimaginative thrift; or in Ántonia Shimerda, who is a "hired girl" during the days of her tenderest beauty and the hard-worked mother of many children on a distant farm to the end of the story. Miss Cather, almost alone among her peers in this decade, understands that human character for its own sake has a claim upon human interest, surprisingly irrespective of the moral or intellectual qualities which of course condition and shape it.
"Her secret?" says Harsanyi of Thea Kronborg inThe Song of the Lark. "It is every artist's secret … passion. It is an open secret, and perfectly safe. Like heroism, it is inimitable in cheap materials." In these words Miss Cather furnishes an admirable commentary upon the strong yet subtle art which she herself practises. Fiction habitually strives to reproduce passion and heroism and in all but chosen instances falls below the realities because it has not truly comprehended them or because it tries to copy them in cheap materials. It is not Miss Cather's lucid intelligence alone, though that too is indispensable, which has kept her from these ordinary blunders of the novelist: she herself has the energy which enables her to feel passion and the honesty which enables her to reproduce it. Something of the large tolerance which she must have felt in Whitman before she borrowed from him the title ofO Pioneers!breathes in all her work. Like him she has tasted the savor of abounding health; like him she has exulted in the sense of vast distances, the rapture of the green earth rolling through space, the consciousness of past and future striking hands in the radiant present; like him she enjoys "powerful uneducated persons" both as the means to a higher type and as ends honorable in themselves. At the same time she does not let herself run on in the ungirt dithyrambs of Whitman or into his followers' glorification of sheer bulk and impetus. Taste and intelligence hold her passion in hand. It is her distinction that she combines the merits of those oddly matched progenitors, Miss Jewett and Walt Whitman: she has the delicate tact to paint what she sees with clean, quiet strokes; and she has the strength to look past casual surfaces to the passionate center of her characters.
The passion of the artist, the heroism of the pioneer—these are the human qualities Miss Cather knows best. Compared with her artists the artists of most of her contemporaries seem imitated in cheap materials. They suffer, they rebel, they gesticulate, they pose, they fail through success, they succeed through failure; but only now and then do they have the breathing, authentic reality of Miss Cather's painters and musicians. Musicians she knows best among artists—perhaps has been most interested in them and has associated most with them because of the heroic vitality which a virtuoso must have to achieve any real eminence. The poet may languish over verses in his garret, the painter or sculptor over work conceived and executed in a shy privacy; but the great singer must be an athlete and an actor, training for months and years for the sake of a few hours of triumph before a throbbing audience. It is, therefore, not upon the revolt of Thea Kronborg from her Colorado village that Miss Cather lays her chief stress but upon the girl's hard, unspeculative, daemonic integrity. She lifts herself from alien conditions hardly knowing what she does, almost as a powerful animal shoulders its instinctive way through scratching underbrush to food and water. Thea may be checked and delayed by all sorts of human complications but her deeper nature never loses the sense of its proper direction. Ambition with her is hardly more than the passion of self-preservation in a potent spirit.
That Miss Cather no less truly understands the quieter attributes of heroism is made evident by the career of Ántonia Shimerda—of Miss Cather's heroines the most appealing. Ántonia exhibits the ordinary instincts of self-preservation hardly at all. She is gentle and confiding; service to others is the very breath of her being. Yet so deep and strong is the current of motherhood which runs in her that it extricates her from the level of mediocrity as passion itself might fail to do. Goodness, so often negative and annoying, amounts in her to an heroic effluence which imparts the glory of reality to all it touches. "She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize as universal and true…. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last…. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races." It is not easy even to say things so illuminating about a human being; it is all but impossible to create one with such sympathetic art that words like these at the end confirm and interpret an impression already made.
My Ántonia, followingO Pioneers!andThe Song of the Lark, holds out a promise for future development that the work of but two or three other established American novelists holds out. Miss Cather's recent volume of short storiesYouth and the Bright Medusa, striking though it is, represents, it may be hoped, but an interlude in her brilliant progress. Such passion as hers only rests itself in brief tales and satire; then it properly takes wing again to larger regions of the imagination. Vigorous as it is, its further course cannot easily be foreseen; it has not the kind of promise that can be discounted by confident expectations. Her art, however, to judge it by its past career, can be expected to move in the direction of firmer structure and clearer outline. After all she has written but three novels and it is not to be wondered at that they all have about them certain of the graceful angularities of an art not yet complete.O Pioneers!contains really two stories;The Song of the Lark, though Miss Cather cut away an entire section at the end, does not maintain itself throughout at the full pitch of interest; the introduction toMy Ántoniais largely superfluous. Having freed herself from the bondage of "plot" as she has freed herself from an inheritance of the softer sentiments, Miss Cather has learned that the ultimate interest of fiction inheres in character. It is a question whether she can ever reach the highest point of which she shows signs of being capable unless she makes up her mind that it is as important to find the precise form for the representation of a memorable character as it is to find the precise word for the expression of a memorable idea. At present she pleads that if she must sacrifice something she would rather it were form than reality. If she desires sufficiently she can have both.
Joseph Hergesheimer employs his creative strategy over the precarious terrain of the decorative arts, some of his work lying on each side of the dim line which separates the most consummate artifice of which the hands of talent are capable from the essential art which springs naturally from the instincts of genius. On the side of artifice, certainly, lie several of the shorter stories inGold and IronandThe Happy End, for which, he declares, his grocer is as responsible as any one; and on the side of art, no less certainly, lie at leastJava Head, in which artifice, though apparent now and then, repeatedly surrenders the field to an art which is admirably authentic, andLinda Condon, nearly the most beautiful American novel since Hawthorne and Henry James.
Standing thus in a middle ground between art and artifice Mr. Hergesheimer stands also in a middle ground between the unrelieved realism of the newer school of American fiction and the genteel moralism of the older. "I had been spared," he says with regard to moralism, "the dreary and impertinent duty of improving the world; the whole discharge of my responsibility was contained in the imperative obligation to see with relative truth, to put down the colors and scents and emotions of existence." And with regard to realism: "If I could put on paper an apple tree rosy with blossom, someone else might discuss the economy of the apples."
Mr. Hergesheimer does not, of course, merely blunder into beauty; his methods are far from being accidental; by deliberate aims and principles he holds himself close to the regions of the decorative. He likes the rococo and the Victorian, ornament without any obvious utility, grace without any busy function. He refuses to feel confident that the passing of elegant privilege need be a benefit: "A maze of clipped box, old emerald sod, represented a timeless striving for superiority, for, at least, the illusion of triumph over the littorals of slime; and their destruction in waves of hysteria, sentimentality, and envy was immeasurably disastrous." For himself he clings sturdily, ardently, to loveliness wherever he finds it—preferring, however, its richer, its elaborated forms.
To borrow an antithesis remarked by a brilliant critic in the work of Amy Lowell, Mr. Hergesheimer seems at times as much concerned with the stuffs as with the stuff of life. His landscapes, his interiors, his costumes he sets forth with a profusion of exquisite details which gives his texture the semblance of brocade—always gorgeous but now and then a little stiff with its splendors of silk and gold. An admitted personal inclination to "the extremes of luxury" struggles in Mr. Hergesheimer with an artistic passion for "words as disarmingly simple as the leaves of spring—as simple and as lovely in pure color—about the common experience of life and death"; and more than anything else this conflict explains the presence in all but his finest work of occasional heavy elements which weight it down and the presence in his most popular narratives of a constant lift of beauty and lucidity which will not let them sag into the average.
One comes tolerably close to the secret of Mr. Hergesheimer's career by perceiving that, with an admirable style of which he is both conscious and—very properly—proud, he has looked luxuriously through the world for subjects which his style will fit. Particularly has he emancipated himself from bondage to nook and corner. The small inland towns ofThe Lay Anthony, the blue Virginia valleys ofMountain Blood, the evolving Pennsylvania iron districts ofThe Three Black Pennys, the antique Massachusetts ofJava Head, the fashionable hotels and houses ofLinda Condon, the scattered exotic localities of the short stories—in all these Mr. Hergesheimer is at home with the cool insouciance of genius, at home as he could not be without an erudition founded in the keenest observation and research.
At the same time, he has not satisfied himself with the bursting catalogues of some types of naturalism. "The individuality of places and hours absorbed me … the perception of the inanimate moods of place…. Certainly houses and night and hills were often more vivid to me than the people in or out of them." He has loved the scenes wherein his events are transacted; he has brooded over their moods, their significances. Neither pantheistic, however, nor very speculative, Mr. Hergesheimer does not endow places with a half-divine, a half-satanic sentience; instead he works more nearly in the fashion of his master Turgenev, or of Flaubert, scrutinizing the surfaces of landscapes and cities and human habitations until they gradually reveal what—for the particular observer—is the essence of their charm or horror, and come, obedient to the evoking imagination, into the picture.
Substantial as Mr. Hergesheimer makes his scene by a masterful handling of locality, he goes still further, adds still another dimension, by his equally masterful handling of the past as an element in his microcosm. "There was at least this to be said for what I had, in writing, laid back in point of time—no one had charged me with an historical novel," he boasts. Readers in general hardly notice how large a use of history appears in, for instance,The Three Black PennysandJava Head. The one goes as far back as to colonial Pennsylvania for the beginning of its chronicle and the other as far as to Salem in the days of the first clipper ship; and yet by no paraphernalia of languid airs or archaic idioms or strutting heroics does either of the novels fall into the orthodox historical tradition. They have the vivid, multiplied detail of a contemporary record. And this is the more notable for the reason that the characters in each of them stand against the background of a highly technical profession—that of iron-making through three generations, that of shipping under sail to all the quarters of the earth. The wharves of Mr. Hergesheimer's Salem, the furnaces of his Myrtle Forge, are thick with accurate, pungent, delightful facts.
If he has explored the past in a deliberate hunt for picturesque images of actuality with which to incrust his narrative, and has at times—particularly inThe Three Black Pennys—given it an exaggerated patina, nevertheless he has refused to yield himself to the mere spell of the past and has regularly subdued its "colors and scents and emotions" to his own purposes. His materials may be rococo, but not his use of them. The conflict between his personal preference for luxury and his artistic passion for austerity shows itself in his methods with history: though the historical periods which interest him are bounded, one may say, by the minuet and the music-box, he permits the least possible contagion of prettiness to invade his plots. They are fresh and passionate, simple and real, however elaborate their trappings. With the fullest intellectual sophistication, Mr. Hergesheimer has artistically the courage of naïveté. He subtracts nothing from the common realities of human character when he displays it in some past age, but preserves it intact. The charming erudition of his surfaces is added to reality, not substituted for it.
Without question the particular triumph of these novels is the women who appear in them. Decorative art in fiction has perhaps never gone farther than with Taou Yuen, the marvelous Manchu woman brought home from Shanghai to Salem as wife of a Yankee skipper inJava Head. She may be taken as focus and symbol of Mr. Hergesheimer's luxurious inclinations. By her bewildering complexity of costume, by her intricate ceremonial observances, by the impenetrability of her outward demeanor, she belongs rather to art than to life—an Oriental Galatea radiantly adorned but not wholly metamorphosed from her native marble. Only at intervals does some glimpse or other come of the tender flesh shut up in her magnificent garments or of the tender spirit schooled by flawless, immemorial discipline to an absolute decorum. That such glimpses come just preserves her from appearing a mere figure of tapestry, a fine mechanical toy. The Salem which before her arrival seems quaintly formal enough immediately thereafter seems by contrast raw and new, and her beauty glitters like a precious gem in some plain man's house.
Much the same effect, on a less vivid scale, is produced inThe Three Black Pennysby the presence on the Pennsylvania frontier—it is almost that—of Ludowika Winscombe, who has always lived at Court and who brings new fragrances, new dainty rites, into the forest; and inMountain Bloodby the presence among the Appalachian highlands of that ivory, icy meretrix Meta Beggs who plans to drive the best possible bargain for her virgin favors. Meta carries the decorative traits of Mr. Hergesheimer's women to the point at which they suggest the marionette too much; by his methods, of course, he habitually runs the risk of leaving the flesh and blood out of his women. He leaves out, at least, with no fluttering compunctions, any special concern for the simpler biological aspects of the sex: "It was not what the woman had in common with a rabbit that was important, but her difference. On one hand that difference was moral, but on the other aesthetic; and I had been absorbed by the latter." "I couldn't get it into my head that loveliness, which had a trick of staying in the mind at points of death when all service was forgotten, was rightly considered to be of less importance than the sweat of some kitchen drudge."
Such robust doctrine is a long way from the customary sentimentalism of novelists about maids, wives, mothers, and widows. Indeed, Mr. Hergesheimer, like Poe before him, inclines very definitely toward beauty rather than toward humanity, where distinctions may be drawn between them. In Linda Condon, however, his most remarkable creation, he has brought humanity and beauty together in an intimate fusion. Less exotic than Taou Yuen, Linda, with her straight black bang and her extravagant simplicity of taste, is no less exquisite. And like Taou Yuen she affords Mr. Hergesheimer the opportunity he most desires—"to realize that sharp sense of beauty which came from a firm, delicate consciousness of certain high pretensions, valors, maintained in the face of imminent destruction…. In that category none was sharper than the charm of a woman, soon to perish, in a vanity of array as momentary and iridescent as a May-fly." It is as the poet musing upon the fleet passage of beauty rather than as the satirist mocking at the vanity of human wishes that Mr. Hergesheimer traces the career of Linda Condon; but both poet and satirist meet in his masterpiece.
A woman as lovely as a lyric, she is almost as insensible as a steel blade or a bright star. The true marvel is that beauty so cold can provoke such conflagrations. Granted—and certain subtle women decline to grant it—that Linda with her shining emptiness could have kindled the passion she kindles in the story, what must be the blackness of her discovery that when her beauty goes she will have left none of the generous affection which, had she herself given it through life, she might by this time have earned in quantities sufficient to endow and compensate her for old age! Mr. Hergesheimer does not soften the blow when it comes—he even adds to her agony the clear consciousness that she cannot feel her plight as more passionate natures might. But he allows her, at the last, an intimation of immortality. From her unresponding beauty, she sees, her sculptor lover has caught a madness eventually sublimated to a Platonic vision which, partially forgetful of her as an individual, has made him and his works great. Without, in the common way, modeling her at all, he has snared the essence of her spirit and has set it—as such mortal things go—everlastingly in bronze.
If Mr. Hergesheimer offers Linda in the end only the hard comfort of a perception come at largely through her intellect, still as far as the art of his novel is concerned he has immensely gained by his refusal to make any trivial concession to natural weaknesses. His latest conclusion is his best.The Lay Anthonyends in accident,Mountain Bloodin melodrama;The Three Black Pennys, more successful than its predecessors, fades out like the Penny line;Java Headturns sharply away from its central theme, almost as ifHamletshould concern itself during a final scene with Horatio's personal perplexities. Now the conclusions of a novelist are on the whole the test of his judgment and his honesty; and it promises much for fiction that Mr. Hergesheimer has advanced so steadily in this respect through his seven books.
He has advanced, too, in his use of decoration, which reached its most sumptuous inJava Headand which inLinda Condonhappily began to show a more austere control. The question which criticism asks is whether Mr. Hergesheimer has not gone as far as a practitioner of the decorative arts can go, and whether he ought not, during the remainder of the eminent career which awaits him, to work rather in the direction marked byLinda Condonthan in that marked byJava Head. The rumor that his friends advise him to become a "period novelist" must disquiet his admirers—even those among them who cannot think him likely to act upon advice so dangerous to his art. Doubtless he could go on and write anotherSalammbô,but he does not need to: he has already writtenJava Head. When a novelist has reached the limits of decoration there still stretches out before him the endless road—which Mr. Hergesheimer has given evidence that he can travel—of the interpretation and elucidation of human character and its devious fortunes in the world.
Ellen Glasgow
Fiction, no less than life, has its broad flats and shallows from which distinction emerges only now and then, when some superior veracity or beauty or energy lifts a novelist or a novel above the mortal average. Consider, for example, the work of Ellen Glasgow. In her representations of contemporary Virginia she long stood with the local colorists, practising with more grace than strength what has come to seem an older style; in her heroic records of the Virginia of the Civil War and Reconstruction she frequently fell into the orthodox monotone of the historical romancers. By virtue of two noticeable qualities, however, she has in her later books emerged from the level established by the majority and has ranged herself with writers who seem newer and fresher than her early models.
One quality is her sense for the texture of life, which imparts toThe Miller of Old Churcha thickness of atmosphere decisively above that of most local color novels. She has admitted into her story various classes of society which traditional Virginia fiction regularly neglects; she has enriched her narrative with fresh and sweet descriptions of the soft Virginia landscape; she has bound her plot together with the best of all ligatures—intelligence. If certain of her characters—Abel Revercomb, Reuben Merryweather, Betsey Bottom—seem at times a little too much like certain of Thomas Hardy's rustics, still the resemblance is hardly greater than that which actually exists between parts of rural Virginia and rural Wessex; Miss Glasgow is at least as faithful to her scene as if she had devoted herself solely to a chronicle of rich planters, poor whites, and obeisant freedmen. Without any important sacrifice of reality she has enlarged her material by lifting it toward the plane of the pastoral and rounding it out with poetic abundance instead of whittling it down with provincial shrewdness or weakening it with village sentimentalism.
That she does not lack shrewdness appears from the evidences inLife and Gabriellaand still more inVirginiaof her second distinctive quality—a critical attitude toward the conventions of her locality. In one Miss Glasgow exhibits a modern Virginia woman breaking her medieval shell in New York; in the other she examines the subsequent career of a typical Southern heroine launched into life with no equipment but loveliness and innocence. Loveliness, Virginia finds, may fade and innocence may become a nuisance if wisdom happens to be needed. She fails to understand and eventually to "hold" her husband; she gives herself so completely to her children that in the end she has nothing left for herself and is tragically dispensable to them.Virginiais at once the most thorough and the most pathetic picture extant of the American woman as Victorianism conceived and shaped and misfitted her. But the book is much more than a tract for feminism to point to: it is unexpectedly full and civilized, packed with observation, tinctured with omen and irony.
William Allen White
If Miss Glasgow emerges considerably—though not immensely—above the deadly levels of fiction, so does William Allen White. What lifts him is his hearty, bubbling energy. He has the courage of all his convictions, of all his sentiments, of all his laughter, of all his tears. He has a multitude of right instincts and sound feelings, and he habitually reverts to them in the intervals between his stricter hours of thought. Such stricter hours he is far from lacking. They address themselves especially to the task of showing why and how corruption works in politics and of tracing those effects of private greed which ruin souls and torture societies. The hero-villains ofA Certain Rich Manand ofIn the Heart of a Fooltread all the paths of selfishness and come to hard ends in punishment for the offense of counting the head higher than the heart.
These books being crowded with quite obvious doctrine it is fair to say of them that they directly inculcate the life of simple human virtues and services and accuse the grosser American standards of success. They do this important thing within the limits of moralism, progressivism, and optimism. John Barclay, the rich man, when his evil course is run, hastily, unconvincingly divests himself of his spoils and loses his life in an heroic accident. Thomas Van Dorn, the fool, finally arrives at desolation because there has been no God in his heart, but he has no more instructive background for a contrast to folly than the spectacle of a nation entering the World War with what is here regarded as a vast purgation, a magnificent assertion of the divinity in mankind. How such a conclusion withers in the light and fire of time! Right instincts and sound feelings are not, after all, enough for a novelist: somewhere in his work there must appear an intelligence undiverted by even the kindliest intentions; much as he must be of his world, he must be also in some degree outside it as well as above it.
Yet to be of his world with such knowledge as Mr. White has of Kansas gives him one kind of distinction if not a different kind. His two longer narratives sweep epically down from the days of settlement to the time when the frontier order disappeared under the pressure of change. He has a moving erudition in the history and characters and motives and humors of the small inland town; no one has ever known more about the outward customs and behaviors of an American state than Mr. White. His shorter stories not less than his novels are racy with actualities: he has caught the dialect of his time and place with an ear that is singularly exact; he has cut the costumes of his men and villages so that hardly a wrinkle shows. In particular he understands the pathos of boyhood, seen not so much, however, through the serious eyes of boys themselves as through the eyes of reminiscent men reflecting upon young joys and griefs that will shortly be left behind and upon little pomps that can never come to anything.The Court of Boyvilleis now hilariously comic, now tenderly elegiac. None of Mr. White's contemporaries has quite his power to shift from bursts of laughter to sudden, agreeable tears. That flood of moods and words upon which he can be swept beyond the full control of his analytical faculties is but a symptom of the energy which, when he turns to narrative, sweeps him and his readers out of pedestrian gaits.
Ernest Poole
By comparison the more critical Ernest Poole suffers from a deficiency of both verve and humor. He began his career with the happy discovery of a picturesque, untrodden neighborhood of New York City inThe Harbor; he consolidated his reputation with the thoughtful study of a troubled father of troubling daughters inHis Family; since then he has sounded no new chords, strumming on his instrument as if magic had deserted him. Perhaps it was not quite magic by which his work originally won its hearing. There is something a little unmagical, a little mechanical, about the fancy which personifies the harbor of New York and makes it recur and reverberate throughout that first novel. The matter was significant, but the manner seems only at times spontaneous and at times only industrious. Intelligence, ideas, observations, perception—these hold up well inThe Harbor; it is poetry that flags, though poetry is invoked to carry out the pattern. Over humor Mr. Poole has but moderate power, as he has perhaps but moderate interest in it: his characters are themselves either fiercely or sadly serious, and they are seen with an eye which has not quite the forgiveness of laughter or the pity of disillusion. Roger Gale inHis Familybroods, mystified, over what seems to him the drift of his daughters into the furious currents of a new age. Yet they fall into three categories—with some American reservations—of mother, nun, courtesan, about which there is nothing new; and all the tragic elements of the book are almost equally ancient. Without the spacious vision which sees eternities in hoursHis Familycontents itself too much with being a document upon a particular hour of history. It has more kindliness than criticism.
Mr. Poole, one hates to have to say, is frequently rather less than serious: he is earnest; at moments he is hardly better than merely solemn. Nevertheless,The HarborandHis Family—His Familyeasily the better of the two—are works of honest art and excellent documents upon a generation. Mr. Poole feels the earth reeling beneath the desperate feet of men; he sees the millions who are hopelessly bewildered; he hears the cries of rage and fear coming from those who foretell chaos; he catches the exaltation of those who imagine that after so long a shadow the sunshine of freedom and justice will shortly break upon them. With many generous expectations he waits for the revolution which shall begin the healing of the world's wounds. Meanwhile he paints the dissolving lineaments of the time in colors which his own softness keeps from being very stern or very deep but which are gentle and appealing.
Henry B. Fuller
The peculiar strength and the peculiar weakness of Henry B. Fuller lie in his faithful habit of being a dilettante. A generation ago, when the aesthetic poets and critics were in bloom, Mr. Fuller inThe Chevalier of Pensieri-VaniandThe Chatelaine of La Trinitéplayed with sentimental pilgrimages in Italy or the Alps, packing his narratives with the most affectionate kind of archaeology and yet forever scrutinizing them with a Yankee smile. A little later, when Howells's followers had become more numerous, Mr. Fuller joined them with minute, accurate, amused representations of Chicago inThe Cliff-DwellersandWith the Procession. Then, as if bored with longer flights, he settled himself to writing sharp-eyed stories concerning the life of art as conducted in Chicago—Under the Skylights—and of Americans traveling in Europe—From the Other Side, Waldo Trench and Others. AfterSpoon River AnthologyMr. Fuller took such hints from its method as he needed in the pungent dramatic sketches ofLines Long and Short. One of these sketches, calledPostponement, has autobiography, it may be guessed, in its ironic, wistful record of a Midwestern American who all his life longed and planned to live in Europe but who found himself ready to gratify his desire only in the dread summer of 1914, when peace departed from the earth to stay away, he saw, at least as long as he could hope to live. There is the note of intimate experience, if not of autobiography, in these lucid words spoken about the hero ofOn the Stairs: "he wanted to be an artist and give himself out; he wanted to be a gentleman and hold himself in. An entangling, ruinous paradox."
Fate, if not fatalism, has kept Mr. Fuller, this dreamer about old lands, always resident in the noisiest city of the newest land and always less, it seems, than thoroughly expressive. Had there been more passion in his constitution he might, perhaps, have either detached himself from Chicago altogether or submerged himself in it to a point of reconciliation. But passion is precisely what Mr. Fuller seems to lack or to be chary of. He dwells above the furies. As one consequence his books, interesting as every one of them is, suffer from the absence of emphasis. His utterance comes in the tone of an intelligent drawl. Spiritually in exile, he lives somewhat unconcerned with the drama of existence surrounding him, as if his gaze were farther off. Yet though deficiency in passion has made Mr. Fuller an amateur, it has allowed him the longest tether in the exercise of a free, penetrating intelligence. He is not lightly jostled out of his equilibrium by petty irritations or swept off his feet by those torrents of ready emotion which sweep through popular fiction by their own momentum. Whenever, inA Daughter of the Middle Border, Hamlin Garland brings Mr. Fuller into his story, there is communicated the sense of a vivid intellect somehow keeping its counsel and yet throwing off rays of suggestion and illumination.
Without much question it is by his critical faculties that Mr. Fuller excels. He has the poetic energy to construct, but less frequently to create. Such endowments invite him to the composition of memoirs. He has, indeed, inOn the Stairs, produced the memoirs, in the form of a novel, of a Chicagoan who could never adapt himself to his native habitat and who gradually sees the control of life slipping out of his hands to those of other, more potent, more decisive, less divided men. But suppose Mr. Fuller were to surrender the ironic veil of fiction behind which he has preferred to hide his own spiritual adventures! Suppose he were avowedly to write the history of the arts and letters in Chicago! Suppose he were, rather more confidingly, to trace the career of an actual, attentive dilettante in his thunderous town!
Mary Austin
Criticism perceives in Mary Austin the certain signs of a power which, for reasons not entirely clear, has as yet failed to express itself completely in forms of art. She herself prefers less to be judged by any of her numerous books than to be regarded as a figure laboring somewhat anonymously toward the development of a national culture founded at all points on national realities. Behind this preference is a personal experience which must be taken into account in any analysis of Mrs. Austin's work. Born in Illinois, she went at twenty to California, to live between the Sierra Nevada and the Mohave Desert. There she was soon spiritually acclimated to the wilderness, studied among the Indians the modes of aboriginal life, and in time came to bear the relation almost of a prophetess to the people among whom she lived. Her first book,The Land of Little Rain, interpreted the desert chiefly as landscape. Since then she has, it may be said, employed the desert as a measure of life, constantly bringing from it a sense for the primal springs of existence into all her comment upon human affairs.The Man Jesusexamines the career of a desert-dweller who preached a desert-wisdom to a confused world. Her playThe Arrow Makerexhibits the behavior and fortunes of a desert-seeress among her own people.Love and the Soul-Makeranatomizes love as a primal force struggling with and through civilization. From Paiute and Shoshone medicine men, the only poets Mrs. Austin knew during her formative years, she acquired that grounding in basic rhythms which led her to write free verse years before it became the fashion in sophisticated circles and persuaded her that American poetry cannot afford to overlook the experiments and successes of the first American poets in fitting expression to the actual conditions of the continent.
It has been of course a regular tradition among novelists in the United States to weigh the "settlements" in a balance and to represent them as lacking the hardy virtues of the backwoods. Mrs. Austin goes beyond this naïve process. Whether she deals with the actual frontier—as inIsidroorLost BordersorThe Ford—or with more crowded, more complex regions—as inThe Woman of Geniusor26 Jayne Street—she keeps her particular frontier in mind not as an entity or a dogma but as a symbol of the sources of human life and society. She creates, it seems, out of depths of reflection and out of something even deeper than reflection. She has observed the unconscious instincts of the individual and the long memories of the race. The effect upon her novels of such methods has been to widen their sympathies and to warm and lift their style; it has also been to render them sometimes defective in structure and sometimes obscure in meaning. If they are not glib, neither are they always clean-cut or direct. Along with her generous intelligence she has a good deal of the stubborn wilfulness of genius, and she has never achieved a quite satisfactory fusion of the two qualities. She wears something like the sibyl's robes and speaks with something like the sibyl's strong accents, but the cool, hard discipline of the artist or of the exact scholar only occasionally serves her. Much of her significance lies in her promise. Faithful to her original vision, she has moved steadily onward, growing, writing no book like its predecessor, applying her wisdom continually to new knowledge, leaving behind her a rich detritus which she will perhaps be willing to consider detritus if it helps to nourish subsequent generations.
Immigrants
The newer stocks and neighborhoods in the United States have their fictive records as well as the longer established ones, and there is growing up a class of immigrant books which amounts almost to a separate department of American literature. From Denmark, Germany, Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, Russia, Rumania, Syria, Italy have come passionate pilgrims who have set down, mostly in plain narratives, the chronicles of their migration. As the first Americans contended with nature and the savages, so these late arrivals contend with men and a civilization no less hostile toward them; their writings continue, in a way, the earliest American tradition of a concern with the risks and contrivances by which pioneers cut their paths. Even when the immigrants write fiction they tend to choose the same materials and thus to fall into formulas, which are the more observable since the writers are the survivors in the struggle and naturally tell about the successes rather than the failures in the process of Americanization.
Not all the stocks, of course, are equally interested in fiction or gifted at it: the Russian Jews have the most notable novels to their credit. Though these are generally composed by men not born in this country, in Yiddish, and so belong to the history of that most international of literatures, certain of them, having been translated, belong obviously as well as actually to the common treasure of the nation. Shalom Aleichem'sJewish Childrenand Leon Kobrin'sA Lithuanian Villagesurely belong, though their scenes are laid in Europe; as do Sholom Asch's vivid, moving novelsMottke the Vagabond—concerned with the underworld of Poland—andUncle Moses—concerned with the New York Ghetto—the recent translations of which are slowly bringing to a wider American public the evidence that a really eminent novelist has hitherto been partly hidden by his alien tongue.
There is no question whatever that the work of Abraham Cahan, Yiddish scholar, journalist, novelist, belongs to the American nation. As far back as the year in which Stephen Crane stirred many sensibilities with hisMaggie, the story of an Irish slum in Manhattan, Mr. Cahan produced inYekla book of similar and practically equal merit concerning a Jewish slum in the same borough. But it and his later booksThe Imported Bridegroom and Other StoriesandThe White Terror and the Redhave been overwhelmed by novels by more familiar men dealing with more familiar communities. The same has been true even of his masterpiece, the most important of all immigrant novels,The Rise of David Levinsky. It, too, records the making of an American, originally a reader of Talmud in a Russian village and eventually the principal figure in the cloak and suit trade in America. But it does more than trace the career of Levinsky through his personal adventures: it traces the evolution of a great industry and represents the transplanted Russian Jews with affectionate exactness in all their modes of work and play and love—another conquest of a larger Canaan. Here are fused American hope and Russian honesty. At the end David, with all his New World wealth, lacks the peace he might have had but for his sacrifice of Old World integrity and faith. And yet the novel is very quiet in its polemic. Its hero has gained in power; he is no dummy to hang maxims on. Moving through a varied scene, gradually shedding the outward qualities of his race, he remains always an individual, gnawed at by love in the midst of his ambitions, subject to frailties which test his strength.
The fact that Mr. Cahan wroteDavid Levinskynot in his mother-tongue but in the language of his adopted country may be taken as a sign that American literature no less than the American population is being enlarged by the influx of fresh materials and methods. The methods of the Yiddish writers are, as might be expected, those of Russian fiction generally, though in this they were anticipated by the critical arguments of Howells and Henry James and are rivaled by the majority of the naturalistic novelists. Their materials, as might not be expected, have a sort of primitive power by comparison with which the orthodox native materials of fiction seem often pale and dusty. The older Americans, settled into smug routines, lack the vitality, the industry of the newcomers. They are less direct and more provincial; they are bundled up in gentilities and petty habits; they hide behind old-fashioned reticences which soften the drama of their lives. With the newer stocks an ancient process begins again. Their affairs are conducted on the plane of desperate subsistence. Struggling to survive at all, they cry out in the language of hunger and death; almost naked in the struggle, they speak nakedly about livelihood and birth and death. Sooner or later the immigrants must be perceived to have added precious elements of passion and candor to American fiction.
Edgar Lee Masters
The newest style in American fiction dates from the appearance, in 1915, ofSpoon River Anthology, though it required five years for the influence of that book to pass thoroughly over from poetry to prose. For nearly half a century native literature had been faithful to the cult of the village, celebrating its delicate merits with sentimental affection and with unwearied interest digging into odd corners of the country for persons and incidents illustrative of the essential goodness and heroism which, so the doctrine ran, lie beneath unexciting surfaces. Certain critical dispositions, aware of agrarian discontent or given to a preference for cities, might now and then lay disrespectful hands upon the life of the farm; but even these generally hesitated to touch the village, sacred since Goldsmith in spite of Crabbe, sacred since Washington Irving in spite of E.W. Howe.
The village seemed too cosy a microcosm to be disturbed. There it lay in the mind's eye, neat, compact, organized, traditional: the white church with tapering spire, the sober schoolhouse, the smithy of the ringing anvil, the corner grocery, the cluster of friendly houses; the venerable parson, the wise physician, the canny squire, the grasping landlord softened or outwitted in the end; the village belle, gossip, atheist, idiot; jovial fathers, gentle mothers, merry children; cool parlors, shining kitchens, spacious barns, lavish gardens, fragrant summer dawns, and comfortable winter evenings. These were elements not to be discarded lightly, even by those who perceived that time was discarding many of them as the industrial revolution went on planting ugly factories alongside the prettiest brooks, bringing in droves of aliens who used unfamiliar tongues and customs, and fouling the atmosphere with smoke and gasoline. Mr. Howe inThe Story of a Country Townhad long ago made it cynically clear—to the few who read him—that villages which prided themselves upon their pioneer energy might in fact be stagnant backwaters or dusty centers of futility, where existence went round and round while elsewhere the broad current moved away from them. Mark Twain inThe Man That Corrupted Hadleyburghad more recently put it bitterly on record that villages which prided themselves upon their simple virtues might from lack of temptation have become a hospitable soil for meanness and falsehood, merely waiting for the proper seed. And Clarence Darrow in his elegiacFarmingtonhad insisted that one village at least had been the seat of as much restless longing as of simple bliss.Spoon River Anthologyin its different dialect did little more than to confirm these mordant, neglected testimonies.
That Mr. Masters was not neglected must be explained in part, of course, by his different dialect. The Greek anthology had suggested to him something which was, he said, "if less than verse, yet more than prose"; and he went, with the step of genius, beyond any "formal resuscitation of the Greek epigrams, ironical and tender, satirical and sympathetic, as casual experiments in unrelated themes," to an "epic rendition of modern life" which suggests the novel in its largest aspects. An admirable scheme occurred to him: he would imagine a graveyard such as every American village has and would equip it with epitaphs of a ruthless veracity such as no village ever saw put into words. The effect was as if all the few honest epitaphs in the world had suddenly come together in one place and sent up a shout of revelation.
Conventional readers had the thrill of being shocked and of finding an opportunity to defend the customary reticences; ironical readers had the delight of coming upon a host of witnesses to the contrast which irony perpetually observes between appearance and reality; readers militant for the "truth" discovered an occasion to demand that pious fictions should be done away with and the naked facts exposed to the sanative glare of noon. And all these readers, most of them unconsciously no doubt, shared the fearful joy of sitting down at an almost incomparably abundant feast of scandal. Where now were the mild decencies of Tiverton, of Old Chester, of Friendship Village? The roofs and walls of Spoon River were gone and the passers-by saw into every bedroom; the closets were open and all the skeletons rattled undenied; brains and breasts had unlocked themselves and set their most private treasures out for the most public gaze.
It was the scandal and not the poetry ofSpoon River, criticism may suspect, which particularly spread its fame. Mr. Masters used an especial candor in affairs of sex, an instinct which, secretive everywhere, has rarely ever been so much so as in the American villages of fiction, where love ordinarily exhibited itself in none but the chastest phases, as if it knew no savage vagaries, transgressed no ordinances, shook no souls out of the approved routines. Reaction from too much sweet drove Mr. Masters naturally to too much sour; sex in Spoon River slinks and festers, as if it were an instinct which had not been schooled—however imperfectly—by thousands of years of human society to some modification of its rages and some civil direction of its restless power. But here, as with the other aspects of behavior in his village, he showed himself impatient, indeed violent, toward all subterfuges. There is filth, he said in effect, behind whited sepulchers; drag it into the light and such illusions will no longer trick the uninstructed into paying honor where no honor appertains and will no longer beckon the deluded to an imitation of careers which are actually unworthy.