Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
contemplated the Middle Border--the barnyards where tired men did the
evening chores, the ungainly houses where tired women stood over hot
stoves, the fertile acres that produced more than the markets consumed.
It was a life without grace or beauty or homely charm--a treadmill
existence that got nowhere. If this were the Valley of Democracy
then the democracy was a mean thing and hopeless, and having himself
escaped from it he would do what he could to help others escape. In
the completeness of his disillusion the glamour of romance was swept
away and he proposed to set down in honest plain words the manner of
life lived by these Middle Border folk, and the sort of earnings won by
their toil. He would speak frankly out of the common bitter experience.
The way to truth was the way of realism.
To a later generation that never knew the pioneer hardships of the
Middle Border, Hamlin Garland seems strangely remote and old-fashioned;
yet his intellectual antecedents are both ancient and honorable. At
bottom he is an idealist of the old Jeffersonian breed, an earnest
soul devoid of humor, who loves beauty and is mightily concerned about
justice, and who, discovering little beauty and finding scant justice
in the world where fate first set him, turned rebel and threw in his
lot with the poor and the exploited. As a young man, consumed with a
desire to speak for his people, he espoused a somber realism, for only
by and through the truth could he hope to dislodge from men’s minds the
misconceptions that stood in the way of justice. The Middle Border had
no spokesman at the court of letters and if he could gain a hearing
there he must not betray his father’s household by glossing ungainly
reality; he must depict the life of the western farmer as it was lived
under the summer sun and the winter cold, what harvests were brought to
crib and what sort of wealth was finally gathered.
And yet in the light of his total work one hesitates to call Garland a
realist. Perhaps more justly he might be called a thwarted romantic,
and his early rebellious realism be traced to its source in a
passionate refusal to be denied the beauty that should be a portion of
any rational way of living; for when later he found himself in a land
of nobler horizons, unsoiled as yet by crude frontier exploitation,
when he looked out upon vast mountain ranges and felt the warm sun on
the gray plains, he discovered there the romance of his dreams and
fell to describing the strange splendors with the gusto of a naïve
romantic. _Main-Travelled Roads_ and _Prairie Folks_ are the protest
of one oppressed with the meanness of a world that takes such heavy
toll of human happiness; _Her Mountain Lover_ is the expression of
a frank romantic who glories in the nobility of nature’s noblemen;
and _The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop_ is a tale in which romance
is justified by ethics and the hero discovers in the protection of a
weaker race the deepest satisfactions of life. Beauty is excellent, but
beauty should walk hand in hand with service--not art for art’s sake,
but art subdued to the higher good of humanity.
Between these extremes of a stark realism and an ethical romanticism,
stand two books, separated by many years and great changes, that embody
in more finished form the theme which after all was the master passion
of Garland’s life--the Middle Border and the rebellions it bred. _Rose
of Dutcher’s Coolly_ is a full-length portrait of an idealist in revolt
against the narrowness of farm life, and _A Son of the Middle Border_
is an idyll of the past, autobiography done in mellower years when the
passions of youth have been subdued to less exigent demands. These
books, together with the sketches of _Main-Travelled Roads_ and the
militant critical theory of _Crumbling Idols_, contain pretty much the
whole of Hamlin Garland that after years have cared to remember--the
saga of the Middle Border in the days of its great rebellion when the
earlier hopes of boundless prosperity were turning to ashes in the
mouth.
The striking originality of Garland’s work, that sets it apart from
other studies of the local-color school, sprang from the sincerity of
his reaction to environment. His intellectual development followed the
needs of his ardent, inquisitive nature. After quitting the little
Academy at Osage, Iowa, he went forth in quest of an education that
should explain to him the meaning of life as he had known it. In this
search he was singularly fortunate. He was his own mentor and he took
what he needed. Boston had long been the Mecca of his dreams and when
he found himself there--having made a pious pilgrimage as Howells had
done a generation earlier--he threw himself upon his studies with
ascetic zeal. Fortunately he enrolled in the Boston Public Library
instead of at Harvard, and his formless radicalisms there found food
in plenty. Though he lived in Boston some ten years and made friends,
he never penetrated the inner literary sanctuary. A somewhat forlorn
outsider, unknown and unvouched for, he found no welcome as Howells and
Twain had found, and he never entered the pleasant circles where Holmes
and Lowell and Fields and Norton and Aldrich and Howells held sway.
Perhaps that fact unconsciously determined his scornful rejection
of the Boston genteel in literature; at any rate his denial of the
sovereignty of the New England literary rulers left him free to follow
other masters who seemed to him more significant. In his bleak little
room his ear had caught the greater voices then sounding in Europe
and America. His masters were men of intellectual horizons unbounded
by Beacon Street and Harvard Square: Taine and Ibsen and Björnson,
Turgenev and Tolstoi, Zola and Millet, Darwin and Spencer and Fiske,
Walt Whitman and Henry George, and the later Howells with his deeper
sociological concern and graver realism. His three great masters came
finally to be Whitman, Spencer, and Henry George. To these greater
names should be added that of Edward Eggleston, who had been his
boyhood idol, and that of Joseph Kirkland, who did much to stimulate
and guide his earliest sketches. He did not absorb all these men had
to give. He could not stretch his provincial mind suddenly to compass
the intellectual realm of his masters. But something he got and that
something, woven into the fabric of his thinking, was to make him
free. It was the best school of the times, and from his studies Hamlin
Garland emerged an uncompromising radical, one of a group of eager
young men who gathered about B. O. Flower, and in the sympathetic pages
of the _Arena_ published their divers radicalisms to a hostile world.
He was ready to proclaim new social and literary creeds, ready to go
forth to do battle for democratic justice and a democratic art.
The gist of Garland’s new literary creed is set forth in _Crumbling
Idols_, written in the earliest years of the nineties, when Chicago was
preparing the setting for the World’s Fair, and gathered into book form
in 1894. It is realism modified by the local-color school, by French
impressionism, and by Whitman--intensely individualistic, ardently
social, and militantly democratic. It would sweep away every fetish of
great reputations and authoritative schools, and insist that the artist
confront the life that he knows and tell of it truthfully. Following
the French example he calls this iconoclastic realism, Veritism. “The
_theory_ of the veritist,” he says, “is, after all, a statement of his
passion for truth and for individual expression,” and he then goes on:
Art, I must insist, is an individual thing,--the question of one
man facing certain facts and telling his individual relations to
them. His first care must be to present his own concept. This is,
I believe, the essence of veritism. “Write of those things of
which you know most, and for which you care most. By so doing you
will be true to yourself, true to your locality, and true to your
time.”[767]
But Veritism in the hands of a disciple of Taine, Whitman, Henry
George, and Herbert Spencer must take on ethical values and serve the
common well-being. All art, he insists, is “sociologic,” and realism is
harsh because it is hopeful.
Because the fictionist of to-day sees a more beautiful and
peaceful future social life, and, in consequence, a more beautiful
and peaceful literary life, therefore he is encouraged to deal
truthfully and at close grapple with the facts of his immediate
present. His comment virtually amounts to satire or prophesy, or
both. Because he is sustained by love and faith in the future, he
can be mercilessly true. He strikes at thistles, because he knows
the unrotted seed of loveliness and peace needs but sun and the air
of freedom to rise to flower and fragrance.
The realist or veritist is really an optimist, a dreamer. He sees
life in terms of what it might be, as well as in terms of what it
is; but he writes of what is, and, at his best, suggests what is
to be, by contrast.... He aims to hasten the age of beauty and
peace by delineating the ugliness and warfare of the present; but
ever the converse of his picture rises in the mind of the reader.
He sighs for a lovelier life. He is tired of warfare and diseased
sexualism, and Poverty the mother of Envy. He is haggard with
sympathetic hunger, and weary with the struggle to maintain his
standing place on this planet, which he conceives was given to all
as the abode of peace. With his hate in his heart and this ideal
in his brain the modern man writes his stories of life. They are
not always pleasant, but they are generally true, and always they
provoke thought.[768]
It is an excellent self-portrait of the young realist of that early
time when all the rebellions of his blood cried out for expression--the
troubled years between 1887 and 1893 when the Border was rising and
the son of the Border found the flames of his discontent fanned by
many winds. From such roots came the most acrid tales that had as yet
fruited in American fiction. Few as were the stories of _Main-Travelled
Roads_ and _Prairie Folks_, they constitute a landmark in our literary
history, for they were the first authentic expression and protest of an
agrarian America then being submerged by the industrial revolution. No
other man in our literature had known so intimately the Middle Border
as Hamlin Garland--its restless swarmings from the old hive, never
pausing long enough to gather the honey of the new fields, its heedless
venturings for the reputed gold that lay beyond the farthest sunsets.
He had responded to the spell that kept the pioneer moving West; the
allurement of the untamed prairie, the poetry of dawn and twilight. But
the poignant spell had been broken for him by the drab realities that
lay between the dawn and the twilight--the crushing round of toil that
took such heavy toll of men’s development and women’s happiness. He was
familiar with the blight as well as the bloom of the frontier. He had
seen his uncle David McClintock broken by the Border--the great wistful
man with the soul of a musician; he had seen his mother fail under the
burden--the cheerful, uncomplaining wife, joining with her rich voice
in the pioneer’s song of “O’er the hills in legions, Boys!” And after
the disillusion of his final defeat on the bleak Dakota plains--by
1883 woodland and meadow were pretty much alienated from the public
domains and only plains and deserts and mountain valleys and forests
remained--his eyes were opened at last. “I clearly perceived,” he said
afterwards, “that our Song of Emigration had been, in effect, the hymn
of fugitives!” So he turned his face to the East to seek the land of
desire in Boston.
That chapter of his life was ended. He had learned that the old