Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
of individualism will expand as it cannot now in unfertile soil; a
generous and unstinted culture will spread the spirit of kindliness
through society, and a new and nobler art and religion will go hand in
hand with the new fellowship.
Only too clearly Edward Bellamy was an incorrigible idealist. He looked
into the future with more confident eyes than most of us; he saw in
the East the quickening of a new day where we see only darkness. A
child of the Enlightenment, he put his trust in the natural goodness
of men. They are not inherently base and ignoble, but the victims of
an evil system that breeds what is base and ignoble. “The folly of
men, not their hard-heartedness, was the great cause of the world’s
poverty. It was not the crime of man, nor of any class of men, that
made the race so miserable, but a hideous, ghastly mistake, a colossal
world-darkening blunder.”[794] In an arid land shall we waste the
little store of water, or shall we regulate it strictly, that the
desert may be brought to bloom as a garden?
The labor of men, I explained, was the fertilizing stream which
alone rendered earth habitable. It was but a scanty stream at best,
and its use required to be regulated by a system which expended
every drop to the best advantage, if the world were to be supported
in abundance. But how far from any system was the actual practice!
Every man wasted the precious fluid as he wished, animated only
by the equal motives of saving his own crop and spoiling his
neighbor’s, that his might sell the better. What with greed and
what with spite, some fields were flooded while others were
parched, and half the water ran wholly to waste. In such a land,
though a few by strength or cunning might win the means of luxury,
the lot of the great mass must be poverty, and of the weak and
ignorant bitter want and perennial famine.
Let but the famine-stricken nation assume the function it had
neglected, and regulate for the common good the course of the
life-giving stream, and the earth would bloom like one garden, and
none of its children lack any good thing. I described the physical
felicity, mental enlightenment, and moral elevation which would
then attend the lives of all men. With fervency I spoke of that new
world, blessed with plenty, purified by justice and sweetened by
brotherly kindness, the world of which I had indeed but dreamed,
but which might so easily be made real. But when I had expected
now surely the faces around me to light up with emotions akin
to mine, they grew ever more dark, angry, and scornful. Instead
of enthusiasm, the ladies showed only aversion and dread, while
the men interrupted me with shouts of reprobation and contempt.
“Madman!” “Pestilent fellow!” “Fanatic!” “Enemy of society!” were
some of their cries, and the one who had before taken his eyeglass
to me exclaimed, “He says we are to have no more poor. Ha! ha!”
“Put the fellow out!” exclaimed the father of my betrothed, and
at the signal the men sprang from their chairs and advanced upon
me.[795]
Like Henry George’s noble study of social poverty, _Looking Backward_
is a suggestive document of a generation that saw its finer spirits
repelled by the vulgar individualism of the Gilded Age. In the long
run, no doubt, its influence was slight and the hopes of the Bellamy
Nationalists, like the hopes of the Single-taxers, were doomed to
disappointment. Nevertheless it remains as a testimony to the fact
that in a blatant world of preëmption, exploitation, and progress,
were some who were concerned for a juster social order than the Gilded
Age dreamed of--a true commonwealth that free men might build if they
would.[796]
Footnotes
[777] Allyn B. Forbes, _The Literary Quest for Utopia, 1880-1900_.
“Social Forces,” Vol. VI, No. 2, December, 1927.
[778] _Nationalist_, Vol. I, p. 18.
[779] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 1.
[780] _The Duke of Stockbridge_, Chapter II, pp. 22, 28.
[781] _Ibid._, Chapter XXVI, p. 349.
[782] _Equality_, Chapter XXII, p. 189.
[783] _Ibid._, p. 189.
[784] _Looking Backward_, Chapter XXVIII, p. 314.
[785] _Equality_, Chapter XXII.
[786] _Equality_, Chapter XXIII, p. 195.
[787] _Equality_, Chapter II, p. 21.
[788] _Ibid._, Chapter II, pp. 19, 20, 21, 22.
[789] _Ibid._, Chapter III, p. 26.
[790] _Looking Backward_, Chapter VI, p. 59.
[791] _Equality_, Chapter XI, p. 74.
[792] _Looking Backward_, Chapter XXIV.
[793] See _Equality_, Chapter XIII--“Private Capital Stolen from the
Social Fund.”
[794] _Looking Backward_, Chapter XXVIII, p. 328.
[795] _Ibid._, pp. 328-9.
[796] At this point was to come a second section entitled “After
Bellamy; ‘Naturalism’; Tourgée’s _Murvale Eastman_.”--_Publisher._
Chapter IV • The Darkening Skies of Letters
So late as 1893, in spite of the stark ugliness of Hamlin Garland’s
pictures of the Middle Border, American realism was still unlike in
temper those somber etchings, burnt into dark patterns by the caustic
acids of European experience, that came from the hands of Russian and
German and French naturalists--sketches that in their bitter gloom
seemed tragically untrue to the homelier experience of America. In
appraising such difference in temper Howells ascribed it to the gulf
that separated American well-being from the poverty and injustice of
European societies. American realism was hopeful because American
life was hopeful. The novelist in this singularly favored land must
reflect the temper of a people made kindly by an abundant prosperity
and democratic justice, and in the sincerity of his realism he will
necessarily concern himself with the “more smiling aspects of life,
which are the more American.” Whoever should strike a “note so
profoundly tragic in American fiction” as was struck in Dostoevsky’s
_Crime and Punishment_, he asserted in 1891, “would do a false and
mistaken thing.”[797] And in a later work he spoke casually of our “gay
American horizons”--surely the most romantic phrase ever applied to a
sad and joyless people by a professed realist.
But while Howells was thus summing up the achievements of American
realism and somewhat overconfidently forecasting its future temper, he
was in fact writing the history of a past phase. Already the clouds
were gathering upon our “gay” horizons, and the current optimisms were
finding less food to feed on. The economics of this happy America were
coming to be regarded by vast numbers as a class economics, forecasting
a less democratic future. Young men born in the early seventies, when
Mr. Howells was entering upon his new realistic studies, were coming
to intellectual maturity in a very different age; a new science and
a consolidating economics were creating a somber temper that was
eventually to produce in _An American Tragedy_, a story not greatly
unlike that Russian tale which Mr. Howells, a short generation before,
had pronounced impossible to American experience. Stephen Crane and
Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser were the intellectual children of
the nineties, and their art was a reflection of that sober period of
American disillusion.
The artist, of course, in his creative work is only mediately
influenced by the current science and philosophy; yet even in his
aloofness from the specific problems of the laboratory and the study
he can scarcely escape the pervasive influence of the _Zeitgeist_.
And so, after Hamlin Garland, the realistic novel again took a new
course from the shifting winds of scientific doctrine. The generation
that succeeded the rebellious son of the Middle Border came too late
to maturity to share his faith in the benevolent universe of Herbert
Spencer, and got little comfort from a promised Utopia that only
awaited the enactment of certain statutory laws--laws that would
assure economic justice to all--to lay open its hospitable realm.
Far-reaching changes were coming over the temper of scientific
thought. The conclusions of the physical sciences were ravaging the
orderly preserves of biological evolution, with its cardinal doctrine
of organic growth and historical continuity; the hurrying march of
scientific investigation was leaving far behind the benevolent universe
conceived of by Victorian thinkers and was coming out upon higher and
bleaker tablelands of speculation. The universe that unfolded itself to
chemistry and physics was vaster and colder than biological evolution
with its doctrine of the conservation of energy, had imagined--a
vibrating mechanism shot through with energy, that revealed itself in
action and reaction, impersonal, amoral, dwarfing all the gods dreamed
of hitherto; a universe in which the generations of men have shrunk to
a pin-point in limitless space and all teleological hopes and fears
become the emptiest of futilities. It was the conception of determinism
that after long denial was at last coming to wide acceptance--a
conception that underlay the thinking of such diverse men as Comte and
Spencer and Marx, a conception implicit in the doctrine of continuity,
in the law of causality, in the Marxian law of concentration; and now
disencumbered of its teleological wrappings, disillusioned with the
doctrine of progress, it was to shape the new intellectual attitude
towards life.
In presence of such an extraordinary intellectual revolution the old
anthropomorphisms of metaphysics and ethics were doomed, and from
the revelations of physics and chemistry and psychology must come
an endeavor after a fresh evaluation of man’s duty and destiny in a
universe of immeasurable energy. An ethics that should square with the
new data of science must take its departure from the bleak fact of a
depersonalized universe, wherein man is but a single form of imprisoned
energy, localized for a brief instant and rising to momentary
consciousness in the eternal flux, about and through whom flows
the energy of an unprobed universe. As this mechanistic conception
found lodgment in minds prepared by a mechanical economics, the last
remaining vestiges of the old French romanticism were swept away; a
benevolent, egocentric universe was become unthinkable; progress was no
longer the inherent law of matter and of life; but instead, everywhere
change, disintegration and reintegration, a ceaseless and purposeless
flux to what final end the human mind could not forecast. Thus at a
stroke the benevolent cosmos of the fathers, wherein for generations
men had been providing themselves with sure refuges, was swept away;
and with its passing passed the old faiths--faith in freedom of the
will, in a purposive providence, in a universe that had been long in
travail to bring forth man, its last and dearest offspring for whom all
things work together for good. And with the decay of the traditional
faiths the younger generation was left to wander as best it might upon
the bleak tablelands of impersonal energy. Spencer’s “ultimate of
ultimates,” the Permanence of Force, that follows the law of evolution
and dissolution, had given way to Faraday’s electro-energy that is
indifferent to purpose.
The intellectual backgrounds were thus preparing for a gloomier realism
than Howells’s or Garland’s, a realism that took its departure from two
postulates: that men are physical beings who can do no other than obey
the laws of a physical universe; and that in the vast indifferentism of
nature they are inconsequential pawns in a game that to human reason
has no meaning or rules. To assume that fate which rules human destiny
is malignant, is to assume a cosmic interest in man which finds no
justification in science; Man at best is only an inconsequential atom
in a mechanical flux, or at worst, as Jurgen puts it picturesquely,
only a bubble in fermenting swill. Such a conception, of course, made