Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
moralistic to the sentimental, then to the idyllic, then to the
realistic; and the successive changes are sufficiently marked by three
writers, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins
Freeman. Seeking their materials remote from Boston, amidst the old
native stock pottering through the traditional round of life, they
discovered a world of angular figures that had grown knotty and gnarly
from a harsh climate and a meager soil. The stoic repressions that were
a heritage from Puritan ancestors had bred a hard race that any twist
of circumstance was likely to turn into grotesques. Calvinists have
always at hand a providential justification of any freakish outcome to
men’s struggles, and in piously denying freedom of the will they often
put the seal of God’s approval on their own willfulness. Mrs. Freeman’s
_Pembroke_ is not unlike _Winesburg, Ohio_, as a record of abortive
lives; and Sarah Orne Jewett, in spite of a Brahmin temperament that
chose to see the idyllic rather than the grotesque, could not overlook
what New England provided so abundantly. In _A Country Doctor_ a
visitor in the village of Oldsfield thus analyzed the New England
character:
... for intense, self-centred, smouldering volcanoes of humanity,
New England cannot be matched the world over. It’s like the regions
in Iceland that are full of geysers. I don’t know whether it is
the inheritance from those people who broke away from the old
countries, and who ought to be matched to tremendous circumstances
of life, but now and then there comes an amazingly explosive and
uncontrollable temperament that goes all to pieces from its own
conservation and accumulation of force. By and by you will all be
blown up,--you quiet descendants of the Pilgrims and Puritans, and
have let off your superfluous wickedness like blizzards; and when
the blizzards of each family have spent themselves you will grow
dull and sober, and all on a level, and be free from the troubles
of a transition state. Now, you’re neither a new country nor an
old one. You ought to see something of the older civilizations
to understand what peace of mind is. Unless some importation of
explosive material from the westward stirs them up, one century is
made the pattern for the next.[539]
They deal wholly with the past--these chronicles of a decaying New
England--concerning themselves with a “primitive and Biblical people”
who dwelt in quiet inland towns or about the lonely shores of the Maine
coast; yet always under the shadow of the meeting-house, with few
defenses betwixt them and the eternities. The age had traveled far
beyond them and they were left pottering about in their narrow Hebraic
world, unaware that science and industrialism were undermining the
foundations on which village and meeting-house rested. “In that handful
of houses,” said old Captain Littlepage in _The Country of the Pointed
Firs_, “they fancy that they comprehend the universe.” But if they
understood God’s plan of redemption they knew nothing of the ways of
capitalism. A certain romantic quaintness colors the realism of these
country tales and imparts a note of the idyllic. Harriet Beecher Stowe
first discovered the literary possibilities of decaying New England,
and in _Old-Town Folks_, _Poganuc People_, and _The Minister’s Wooing_,
she turned back to the days of its prime and sketched the scene with
a loving hand. But it was rather in _The Pearl of Orr’s Island_,
especially the first part before the heavy moralism that was always
entrapping her art had closed upon the tale, that she revealed its
possibilities to later writers. In a letter of July 5, 1889, Sarah Orne
Jewett suggests the source of her own more finished work:
I have been reading the beginning of _The Pearl of Orr’s Island_
and finding it just as clear and perfectly original and strong as
it seemed to me in my thirteenth or fourteenth year, when I read it
first. I never shall forget the exquisite flavor and reality that
it gave me.... It is classical--historical--anything you like to
say, if you can give it high praise enough.[540]
But Miss Jewett desired a more adequate realism and so she turned
curiously to consider the technique of the great continental realists
of the eighties. She read Zola and Flaubert, Tolstoi and Turgenev, and
oddly enough was persuaded that she had long been trying to do what
Tolstoi was doing. In a letter of 1888 she wrote:
That story of Tolstoi’s was such an excitement that I did not sleep
until almost morning. What a wonderful thing it is!... It startled
me because I was dimly feeling the same kind of motive (not the
same plan) in writing the “Gray Man.”... I have felt something of
what Tolstoi has been doing all the way along. I can tell you half
a dozen stories where I tried to say it, “Lady Terry,” “Beyond the
Toll-Gate,” and this “Gray Man.” Now and then it came clearer to
me. I never felt the soul of Tolstoi’s work until last night ...
but now I know what he means, and I know that I can dare to keep at
the work I sometimes have despaired about....[541]
Yet to later readers the tie that drew her to Tolstoi seems the
thinnest of gossamers. The roots of her character--and of her art--went
down too deep into Brahmin soil, she was too completely under the
critical sway of Lowell and Fields and Aldrich, for her to turn
naturalist. Her realism--if one may use the word--was as dainty and
refined as her own manners--bleached out to a fine maidenly purity.
In _The Country of the Pointed Firs_--a story that Willa Cather would
destine for immortality in the select company of _Huckleberry Finn_
and _The Scarlet Letter_--she discovers an innate gentility, or at
least gentleness, in the simple fisherfolk of the Maine village, and
she suggests as its source a primitive environment supplemented by
an encompassing religion. Nowhere does she paint in the smutch of
vulgarity, for in these eddies of New England life she discovers no
vulgarity either of mind or manners. But in the cities it is different.
There she found evidence in plenty of what she called the “cheap side
of life,” and she attributed it to the increasing material well-being
of the country. Of the new middle class she held a low opinion--
Their grandparents or even their own parents went hungry and ill
clothed, and it will take some time for these people to have their
fling, to eat all they want and to wear fine raiment, and flaunt
authority. They must get to a state, and by slow stages too, where
there is going to be something fit for education.... The trouble is
to us old-fashioned New Englanders that “the cheap streak” so often
spoils what there is of good inheritance, and the wrong side of our
great material prosperity is seen almost everywhere.[542]
There spoke the Brahmin. That this “cheap streak” should have spread
so far through American life, that the vulgar middle class should have
taken over the rule of the country, gave her concern. To one brought
up on Carlyle and Lowell and Arnold the ways of the plutocracy were
abhorrent, and she clung the more tenaciously to the land of her
memories, where the gentry ruled, where the plain people respected
themselves and their betters, and where vulgar display was unknown. “I
think as Mr. Arnold does,” she wrote in 1884, “and as Mr. Lowell did,
that the mistake of our time is in being governed by the ignorant mass
of opinion, instead of by thinkers and men who know something.”[543]
Though she disliked and distrusted the America that was submerging
the old landmarks, she was as ignorant as her Maine fisherfolk of the
social forces that were blotting out the world of her fathers, and
she clung with pathetic futility to such fragments of the old order
as remained. Like Lowell in his later years her heart was given to a
Brahmin democracy where gentlemen ruled and where “the best traditions
of culture and manners, from some divine inborn instinct toward what is
simplest and purest,” were held in universal respect.
What Miss Jewett with her love of the idyllic did not see--the grim and
stark ugliness that resulted from the long Puritan repression--Mary
Wilkins Freeman was to make the very warp of her work. She did not come
of Brahmin stock. Bred up in the narrow village world of New England,
she was a part of that world and she knew it as Miss Jewett could not.
The decay of a social order was all about her in her youth. The more
ambitious were drifting to the cities or to the new West, and those
who remained were deeply marked by the constricting round of duties.
Catastrophe seems always to be lying in wait for the characters that
fill her meager pages. They are either timid and querulous, or fiercely
“sot,” yet in either case happiness has a way of slipping through their
fingers. There was too little of the wine of paganism in their veins
for them to enjoy what life offers. They held themselves in with too
tight a rein. The New England conventions were always building higher
the dams of their emotions until they broke and the roily waters
rushed out in a wasting flood. Potential disaster peeps out of every
page of her stories. _Pembroke_ is an extraordinary collection of
mean and petty and tragic lives, besotted with stubborn willfulness,
without grace or comeliness, extracting no pleasant flavors from the
crushed grapes of life. In that narrow world daily existence demands an
unending struggle and the pinching meanness breeds miserly instincts
and dour ways. _A Humble Romance_ is a stark bit of sordid futility,
and in many another of her short stories Mrs. Freeman etched in the
familiar scene with a mordant pen. Drawn with realistic strokes the
picture of New England in decay is not so lovely as Miss Jewett found
it to be.
Realizing poignantly what was happening in the home of Puritanism, Mrs.
Freeman turned eventually to deal with the problem of industrialism
that was subduing New England to its will. _The Portion of Labor_
picks up the theme where it had been dropped a generation before by
Miss Phelps, and attempts in realistic manner to portray the life of
the New England villager in the shoe factory. It is a tract rather
than a story, and it finds no difficulty in reconciling industrialism
with morality. It revives the old Puritan ethics of work--preached by
Richard Baxter to his Kidderminster weavers two hundred and fifty years
before; it discovers in discipline of character the great end of life;
and it accepts the factory as a necessary instrument of civilization.
It is the Cinderella story of a village girl who, refusing a chance to
be sent to Vassar, enters a shoe factory, becomes a proletarian leader,
engineers a strike, gains a wider vision of the function of labor,
accepts the principle of exploitation, and is rewarded by marriage into
the exploiting class. In her girlhood she was a radical in an untaught
way, and from her valedictory essay at the High School Commencement to
her organization of the factory workers she boldly attacked the factory
owners. With the machine itself she had no quarrel. This is how she
felt when she took her place for the first time in the mill:
Scared she was not; she was fairly exultant. All at once she
entered a vast room in which eager men were already at the machines
with frantic zeal, as if they were driving labor herself. When she
felt the vibration of the floor under her feet, when she saw people
spring to their stations of toil, as if springing to guns in a
battle, she realized the might and grandeur of it all. Suddenly it
seemed to her that the greatest thing in the whole world was work
and that this was one of the greatest forms of work--to cover the
feet of progress of the travellers of the earth from the cradle to