Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
_background_. The old individualism had unconsciously insulated its
hero from economic contacts; he moved in a polite environment detached
from the larger play of social forces. An individualism so wanting
in sociological verity could make scant appeal to the new spirit of
sociology. That old world is dead. With the rise of the philosophy
of determinism came another mood. To the realism of environment that
conceived of the individual as a pawn on the chessboard of society,
M. Zola had given the name _naturalism_. It was realism wedded to a
deterministic sociology--the first reaction of a generation awakening
to the subjugating power of the mass, and bent on studying the
resultant phenomena in the clear light of science. The change was no
less than revolutionary. The new school thought in terms of group and
class and movement, rather than in terms of individuals each nursing
his petty hopes and fears. The individual counts for so little in the
enveloping stream of social tendency. Let us have no more shoddy
heroes, foolish little egoisms in an unreal world; but figures of
men and women, encompassed by the great stream, carried along on a
resistless current. If they prove to be little better than puppets the
novelist is not to blame, but society that reduces them to impotency.
So the emerging school abandoned Howells and James and followed Frank
Norris into the camp of the naturalists. Their work might be bad
art--as the critics love to reiterate--but it was the honest voice of a
generation bewildered and adrift.
The discovery of environment led imperceptibly to another
discovery--the economic basis of society; and this in turn led to the
rejection of the polite city of older literature. Once the eyes of the
novelist opened to the significance of the economic, the world of the
spenders became less significant than the world of the makers, the
drones became less interesting than the workers. If a novel were to be
true to American life, it must adjust its perspectives to the facts of
the great American game of money-chasing; it must shift its habitat
from Fifth Avenue to Wall Street, from the club to the factory. So the
business man entered the portals of fiction, no longer the stock figure
in broadcloth and top-hat who discarded business with his dirty collar
in order to shift into respectability; but bringing with him his talk
of deals and squeeze-outs, playing the great game of exploitation at
his mahogany desk--the central, dominating figure in a capitalistic
world. He was subjected to acute analysis--his philosophy, his ethics,
the machine of industrialism he was creating, the intricate system
of exploitation that he had elaborated, the jungle city that was his
lair where he fought his battles. The more acutely he was analyzed
the clearer it became that here was a figure greater than kings or
presidents--a figure that had taken our traditional American life in
his hands and was reshaping it to his ends; and that if realism were
to be true to its ideal it must paint him as he was without detraction
and without glorification. So of necessity the younger novelists turned
from polite society to economics, and fell to dramatizing the life of
the city jungle where business men fought their fierce battles.
The forerunner of the new school was a Norwegian-American, Hjalmar
Hjorth Boyesen. An essayist and philologist, for a number of years
professor of German at Columbia University, Boyesen began publishing
as early as 1874, and thereafter contributed freely to the several
fields of the essay, poetry, and fiction; but it was not until 1891
that he opened the new vein of realism which he worked industriously
the remaining four years of his life, the life brought to a premature
close in 1895. Three novels belong to this last phase of his work: _The
Mammon of Unrighteousness_ (1891), _The Golden Calf_ (1892), and _The
Social Strugglers_ (1893). The books made considerable stir upon their
publication, for they were the nearest approach to the Tolstoian type
of realism which till then had appeared in America. They contain in
germ many of the ideas which the later city realists were to amplify
and develop; but these ideas were still entangled in the mesh of the
current psychological realism and their sociological bearings obscured.
In consequence they largely failed of their purpose, and within a
decade they had fallen into oblivion. They are of interest today
chiefly as historical documents of the early nineties.
In the preface to _The Mammon of Unrighteousness_ Boyesen sets forth
his purpose thus:
My one endeavor in this book has been to depict persons and
conditions which are profoundly and typically American. I have
disregarded all romantic traditions, and simply asked myself in
every instance, not whether it was amusing but whether it was true
to the logic of reality--true in color and tone to the American
sky, the American soil, the American character.
This, very evidently, is the realism of _milieu_--an endeavor to catch
the reality of atmosphere; and as such it is of no great significance.
In his choice of “types,” moreover, he reflected the current taste.
The crude self-made millionaire who dimly conscious of failure founds
a university; the young idealist who fails because he is conscientious
and the young realist who succeeds because he has no scruples against
playing the game; and the aristocratic climber who marries to further
her social ambitions--these are the stock figures of the realism that
was to culminate in Robert Grant’s _Unleavened Bread_, nine years
later. But in the delineation of the character of Horace Larkin--the
hero of a book that does not realize its promise--the note of the
new realism is heard distinctly for the first time. The business
man frankly breaks with the old ethics and erects a new ethics in
conformity with his ambition; and it is the elaboration of the ethics
of the Will to Power that justifies one in regarding _The Mammon of
Unrighteousness_ as a first study in the new city realism.
Horace Larkin, like Herrick’s Van Harrington, is a Nietzschean who
learned his ethics not from the German philosopher, but from the world
of cut-throat business. It is the flower of the competitive system. The
old pretense that business is an uplifting and civilizing agency--that
trade breaks down barriers and carries in its shipments the gospel of
fraternity and good will--is flung out on the scrap heap. Horace Larkin
is no smug hypocrite. He faces the facts frankly; he will not deceive
others any more than himself.
He was a beast of prey, asserting his right of survival; nothing
more. If he succumbed to sentiment (and it is far easier to succumb
to it than to resist it) he would merely be eliminating himself
from the battle of existence as a potent and considerable force,
and consigning himself to the rear ranks. And he felt in every
fibre of his being that he was born for leadership.[676]
... nobody has a right to sacrifice himself to anybody else. If he
does he simply eliminates himself from the struggle for existence,
proves his unfitness to survive. It is natural for every strong man
to try to make every other life tributary to his own; but the man
who consents to make his life tributary to somebody else’s is from
Nature’s point of view a weak man.... She may allow him to exist
in a small way; but what is existence without predominance?...
The man who is in advance of the morality of his age is, for
practical purposes, a fool. It is no use quarreling with Fate; and
in the United States the average man is the Fate that rules us and
determines our place in the world.[677]
“The majority of our politicians are a low-lived lot, and many of
them corrupt. But they have the courage to be American--crudely and
uncompromisingly American--and that is, in my eyes, a virtue which
is not to be lightly rated.”
“And may I ask, Mr. Larkin, what do you mean by being American?”
“Being frankly, ably, enterprisingly plebeian. It is the plebeian
after all, who shall inherit the earth--”
“I beg your pardon. According to the Bible it is the meek.”
“I must differ with the Bible, then; for the meek, in my
experience, if they inherit anything, never manage to keep it.
It passes, sooner or later, into the hands of the strong, the
self-assertive, the grasping. But these, as you will admit, are
plebeian characteristics. A universally prosperous, comfortable,
impudent, and enterprising mob--that is the goal toward which
we are steering; and in my opinion it is a good and desirable
one.”[678]
This is a note that is to be heard more insistently as the new realism
went further in its probing. Armed with this conviction Horace Larkin
set forth as a conqueror, and it only adds to the dramatic fitness
of things that in his rise he came across a will to power stronger,
cleverer, than his own. Kate Van Schaak climbs upon his back to
rise with him; she buys him with her money and social position, and
having made the deal she realizes on the investment. She is mistress
henceforth, and the Nietzschean smiles at the irony of the situation.
In the third work Boyesen fails to maintain the level of _The Mammon
of Unrighteousness. Social Strugglers_ is simpler, more dramatic,
better told. It carries the reader forward more easily. But it belongs
with such novels of social analysis as Charles Dudley Warner’s _The
Golden House_--mildly critical of the vulgarizing influence of the
new-rich, mildly sympathetic with the slum workers--rather than to the
new realism. The heroine--daughter of a new-rich family that has come
to New York to climb socially--awakens to the realization of parting
ways: one the path of luxury which the four hundred travel, the other
the path of service which leads to the slums and settlement work. It is
a sentimental awakening, not an intellectual, induced by the hero, who
on the fringe of the four hundred is mildly discontented with the ways
of luxury. The vague idealism of the latter has been stirred by the
Toynbee Hall experiment in London, and the persuasiveness of the lover
rather than the conclusions of the thinker carries Maud Bulkley away
from her conventional moorings.
The movement of the book is little clogged with sociological
discussions; there is too little, indeed, to justify the conclusion.
Only once does Philip Warburton lift the curtain upon the idealism
which ostensibly is the determining factor in his life.
“I frankly confess that I am something of a red. I think the world
is out of gear, and I can perfectly well conceive of a civilization
far better than ours, without yet proposing any radical amendment
to human nature....”
There was to Maud something so wholly unexpected in this ebullition
that she scarcely knew what to say. She had never philosophized
concerning life and its problems; nay, she had never suspected that
to a person who had money enough, and the access to good society,
it could present any problems whatever. She knew that some terribly
disreputable, shaggy, and wild-faced foreigners came here from
Europe and proposed to turn our admirable civilization upside down;
but that a gentleman of Warburton’s culture and social standing
could sympathize with such criminals had never occurred to her as a
remote possibility....
After this disturbing introduction Warburton proceeds to disclose what
being “a red” means to him in the way of social revolutions:
“Have you ever heard of a London experiment known as Toynbee Hall?”
he asked....
“Yes: it’s a place in the slums, where young men of good family go
to live; isn’t that it?”
“Yes; and, do you know, that is to me the most beautiful modern