Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
romantic tales of the Border were lies to him, whatever they may have
been to earlier generations; but he had yet to naturalize himself in
the realm of ideas, and analyze the experiences of his youth in the
light of current social liberalisms. He had begun that work in 1883
on his raw Dakota claim where his leisure hours were given to Taine’s
theory of literary determinism, and Henry George’s new gospel of
single-tax; and he carried it rapidly forward during three years of
eager reading. During those quiet months in Boston when he was making
himself at home in the world of contemporary thought, he sketched the
first of the stories of western life which later he gathered together
in _Main-Travelled Roads_ and _Prairie Folks_. “You’re the first actual
farmer in American fiction,” said his friend Kirkland, “now tell the
truth about it.” This handful of short stories, fierce in the repressed
passion of the writer’s heart, was Garland’s reply to the old romantic
myths of the West. In these acrid pages life is not bucolic, it does
not chew the cud of contentment “knee-deep in June,” but it is stained
with dust and sweat, lacerated by raw nerves, depressed by a sense of
economic failure.
Of the lives of these labor-burdened men and women he intended to tell
the whole truth. But, as he confessed later, he could not. “Even my
youthful zeal faltered in the midst of a revelation of the lives led by
the women on the farms of the middle border. Before the tragic futility
of their suffering, my pen refused to shed its ink. Over the hidden
chamber of their maternal agonies I drew the veil.” It was hard for
him to view it all with the calm detachment of the objective realist;
the Border life was too deeply and intimately personal to him, it had
marked him too harshly. And yet in the sense of conveying the spirit of
reality he succeeded greatly, and these earliest tales remain notable
work which later years have not forgotten. The subdued words of the
Prologue offer the fittest of commentaries on the spirit in which they
were done.
The Main-travelled road in the West (as everywhere) is hot and
dusty in summer, and desolate and drear with mud in fall and
spring, and in winter the winds sweep across it; but it does
sometimes cross a rich meadow where the songs of the larks and
bobolinks and blackbirds are tangled. Follow it far enough, it may
lead past a bend in the river where the water laughs eternally
over its shallows. Mainly it is long and weariful, and has a dull
little town at one end and a home of toil at the other. Like the
main-travelled road of life it is traversed by many classes of
people, but the poor and the weary predominate.
_Main-Travelled Roads_, in its harsh objectivity, belonged to the
earlier eighties, to the time when the spirit of unrest was still
obscurely fermenting in the western mind, before it had clarified in
definite agrarian movements and measures. It is clouded by doubt and
harassed by uncertainty. No hope offers a way out of the weary tangle.
Its psychology is that of the first mood of dejection that came with
the failure of western agriculture with its virgin fields, its new
machinery, and its specialized crops, to adjust itself to the new
capitalistic order. The simple agrarian mind had not learned to play
the new game. The sons of the Middle Border were children of the Gilded
Age as truly as Colonel Sellers or Commodore Vanderbilt; they were
plungers and speculators in land and crops; but they were no match for
the Main Street plungers and speculators; and when bankruptcy instead
of riches rewarded their hardships, they were embittered. Out of that
very natural bitterness sprang the movement of Populism that proposed
to take government out of the hands of Main Street and make it serve
agriculture. It was the understanding of this fact that made Howells
so sympathetic a critic of Garland. But he would encourage the artist
rather than the reformer.
... these stories are full of the bitter and burning dust, the foul
and trampled slush, of the common avenues of life, the life of the
men who hopelessly and cheerlessly make the wealth that enriches
the alien and the idler, and impoverishes the producer.
If any one is still at a loss to account for that uprising of the
farmers of the West which is the translation of the Peasants’ War
into modern and republican terms, let him read _Main-Travelled
Roads_, and he will begin to understand.... The stories are full of
those gaunt, grim, sordid, pathetic, ferocious figures, whom our
satirists find so easy to caricature as Hayseeds, and whose blind
groping for fairer conditions is so grotesque to the newspapers and
so menacing to the politicians. They feel that something is wrong,
and they know that the wrong is not theirs. The type caught in Mr.
Garland’s book is not pretty; it is ugly and often ridiculous; but
it is heart-breaking in its rude despair.[769]
Too soon, however, the will to remain objective weakened and his work
took on a different note. “Obscurely forming in my mind,” he says of
the year 1889, “were two great literary concepts--that truth was a
higher quality than beauty, and that to spread the reign of justice
should everywhere be the design and intent of the artist. The merely
beautiful in art seemed petty, and success at the cost of the happiness
of others a monstrous egotism.”[770] With this ethical conception of
art he returned in 1889 to the old home, after a six years’ absence,
to experience a poignant reaction to the change that had come over
the Border. “Another dry year was upon the land and the settlers were
deeply disheartened,” he wrote later. “The holiday spirit of eight
years before had entirely vanished. In its place was a sullen rebellion
against government and against God.”[771]
Every house I visited had its individual message of sordid struggle
and half-hidden despair.... All the gilding of farm life melted
away. The hard and bitter realities came back upon me in a flood.
Nature was as beautiful as ever. The soaring sky was filled with
shining clouds, the tinkle of the bobolink’s fairy bells rose from
the meadow, a mystical sheen was on the odorous grass and waving
grain, but no splendor of cloud, no grace of sunset, could conceal
the poverty of these people; on the contrary, they brought out,
with a more intolerable poignancy, the gracelessness of these
homes, and the sordid quality of the mechanical routine of these
lives. I perceived beautiful youth becoming bowed and bent. I saw
lovely girlhood wasting away into thin and hopeless age. Some of
the women I had known had withered into querulous and complaining
spinsterhood, and I heard ambitious youth cursing the bondage of
the farm. “Of such pain and futility are the lives of the average
man and woman of both city and country composed,” I acknowledged to
myself with candor, “Why lie about it?”[772]
In such a mood the call of social justice was too insistent to be
denied. “With William Morris and Henry George I exclaimed, ‘Nature
is not to blame. Man’s laws are to blame’!” And so the young man of
twenty-nine threw himself into the agrarian cause. He took the platform
with Mary Ellen Lease and was glad of the farmers’ approval of the
new doctrine of less corn and more hell. Under the urging of his
friend Flower he planned to put the Populist movement into fiction and
wrote _A Spoil of Office_. The familiar Iowa backgrounds are in the
story--the harsh lives and bent weary figures of men and women--but
there is also an idealized heroine who suggests what life may become
when injustice is done away with and the blighting toil is lessened--a
figure who, as Grange lecturer and Farmers’ Alliance speaker, may
have been suggested by Mary Ellen Lease. Much inferior as it is to
_Main-Travelled Roads_--a social tract rather than a work of art--we
cannot well spare it from our Middle Border literature, for it has
captured and preserves for later times the spirit of the passionate
uprising of the farmers, and it recalls the vast hopes that fermented
in that revolt--not well grounded, perhaps, but warm and human. “The
heart and center of this movement,” says Ida Wilbur, “is a demand for
justice, not for ourselves alone, but for the toiling poor wherever
found.... It is no longer a question of legislating for the farmer; it
is a question of the abolition of industrial slavery.”[773] There are
echoes of an older and simpler America in these pages, of discontents
that were put down but not removed--Jacksonianisms, Greenbackisms,
anti-monopolistic crusades. Yet they look forward to a time when beauty
and well-being shall be the common portion of those who do the work
of the world. The way, alas, is “long and weary, and thousands and
millions of us must die on the road, I am afraid,” says the heroine;
but go forward they must, along other paths than the path of capitalism.
Less significant is _Jason Edwards: An Average Man_ (1891), that is an
elaboration of the note, “The air is full of revolt against things as
they are.” It is a single-tax reply to the question of a young girl,
“Are there any happy people in the world--any working people, I mean?
Are they all cross and tired and worried and full of care, as we are
here?” The story is two chapters in the life of a workingman--his
struggle in Boston as a mechanic, and his struggle in Minnesota,
whither he flees for a refuge on a homestead. Defeat awaits him in
the end, and the conclusion is an illustration of Henry George’s
thesis that poverty is the entail of land rent. In this and in other
studies done under the influence of B. O. Flower, whose appetite for
reform literature was insatiable, Hamlin Garland had ceased to be an
objective realist and turned propagandist, bringing down on his head
the criticisms of conservative readers. One of his friends went so far
as to expostulate over the folly of his course. “It is a mistake for
you to be associated with cranks like Henry George and writers like
Whitman,” he said. “It is a mistake to be published in the _Arena_.
Your book should have been brought out by one of the old established
firms. If you will fling away your radical notions and consent to amuse
the governing classes, you will succeed.”[774]
It is the agrarian background of Garland’s mind that makes him seem
old-fashioned to a generation that has forgotten the agrarian roots
of our past growth. He was so deeply colored by this earlier native
America that he never outgrew it; and when the Populistic revolt had
died down, when this last organized agrarian rebellion against the
exploiting middle class had become only an episode in our history,
he had outlived his day. He was too deeply stirred by Whitman’s
romantic faith in democracy, too narrowly a disciple of Henry George’s
Jeffersonian economics, to fit into an industrializing America. Despite
his discipleship to European realism he refused to go with the group
of young left-wing naturalists who were boldly venturing on new ways
of fiction. He would not follow the path of naturalism. Of Norris’s
_McTeague_ he said, “What avail is this study of sad lives? for it
does not even lead to a notion of social betterment.”[775] He could
not bring himself to accept the major criteria of naturalism as they
were exemplified in the work of Zola and Strindberg and Hauptmann.
A native Jeffersonian, inspired by Whitman and instructed by Henry
George and Herbert Spencer, would reject the somber, mechanistic
background of naturalist thought. He had learned his science of the
Victorian evolutionists, with their grandiose conception of a far-flung
beneficent progress from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and
the backgrounds of his mind were radiant with promise. Neither a