Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
slow headway against the traditional order of thought; and if it had
not been aided by a changing economics it would have found few to
follow a line of reasoning that led to such unpleasant conclusions.
The mind of the artist is more susceptible to concrete social fact
than to abstract physical principle, and the swift centralizing of
economics in the eighties and the nineties provided the stimulus for
the extraordinary reversal of thought marked by the contrast between
Emerson and Theodore Dreiser. Emerson was the apotheosis of two
centuries of decentralization that destroyed the pessimism brought
to the new world by refugees from the old, and found its inevitable
expression in the exaltation of the individual, free and excellent, the
child of a beneficent order; whereas Dreiser was the first spokesman of
a later America once more falling within the shadow of the pessimism
that springs from every centralized society shut up within the portals
of a static economics; that dwarfs the individual and nullifies his
will, reducing him from a child of God to a serf. Oddly enough it was
in the West that the new spirit first expressed itself most adequately;
amidst a society that was taking its first steps away from the
traditional philosophy of the dispersion. Frank Norris in California,
Dreiser in Indiana, Sherwood Anderson in Ohio, Masters and Sandburg
and Vachel Lindsay in Illinois, were the spokesmen of the resentment
welling up in the American heart at the loss of the older freedom and
individual dignity.[798]
Footnotes
[797] _Criticism and Fiction_, p. 128.
[798] The manuscript ends here. The first section of this chapter
was to be “Edwin Markham and ‘The Man with the Hoe.’” The second
was to be on “The Rise of Naturalism: Stephen Crane; Frank Norris.”
The first item of the addenda gives material on this subject and on
the two authors. The third would have been “Fiction Discovers the
City.”--_Publisher._
Addenda
The material given here comes from various sources, as indicated
by the notes. The syllabus referred to is that for Professor
Parrington’s lectures at the University of Washington, _The
American Novel Since 1890_ (1925). The order here follows that of
the contents of this book.
Naturalism in American Fiction[799]
Naturalism originated in France. Term first used by Zola. Chief
example--Flaubert’s _Mme. Bovary_. Contrast between Zola and Flaubert
reveals two diverse tendencies of the movement--a sociological study of
background, with a multitude of characters dwarfed by the _milieu_; and
psychological study of individual character.
Naturalism a child of nineteenth-century thought--offspring of Darwin,
Marx, Comte, Taine. The scientific movement created a scientific
attitude of mind and emphasized the law of causation. From this
emerged two fruitful ideas: (1) biological determinism, (2) economic
determinism. So Zola and Flaubert. Influence of Claude Bernard--“We
take men from the hands of the physiologist solely ... to solve
scientifically the question of how men behave in society.”
The criteria of naturalism are:
1. Objectivity. Seek the truth in the spirit of the scientist. “We
naturalists, we men of science,” Zola says, accepting Bernard’s
position, “we must admit of nothing occult; men are but phenomena and
the conditions of phenomena.”
2. Frankness. A rejection of Victorian reticence. The total man and
woman must be studied--the deeper instincts, the endless impulses. The
three strongest instincts are fear, hunger, sex. In the life of the
ordinary person, the third is most critical, hence the naturalist makes
much of it.
3. An amoral attitude toward material. The naturalist is not a judge,
he holds no brief for any ethical standards. He records what happens.
He “must possess a knowledge of the mechanisms inherent in man, show
the machinery of his intellectual and sensory manifestations, under
the influence of heredity and environment, such as physiology shall
give them to us, and then finally, to exhibit man living in social
conditions, produced by himself, which he modifies daily and in the
heart of which he is undergoing constant transformation.” (Zola.) This
is difficult to accept. Puritanism.
4. A philosophy of determinism. This is the vital principle of
naturalism, setting it off from realism. The scientist has turned
philosopher. It is the residuum of much pondering over life and its
meaning, and may result from:
a. Sociological emphasis--study of heredity and environment.
b. A broader mechanistic philosophy--Flaubert, Dreiser.
c. Fatalism: a world of malignant chance--Hardy.
5. A bias toward pessimism in selecting details. A reaction from the
romantic conception of a purposive will.
Romance springs from the longings of a baffled and thwarted will,
creating a world as we should like it wherein to find refuge. But the
naturalist will tolerate no such refuge. He will envisage the truth,
and the truth that he sees is that the individual is impotent in the
face of things. Hence it is as the victim, the individual defeated by
the world, and made a sardonic jest of, that the naturalist chooses
to portray man. Always that conception creeps in. It is seen and felt
throughout the texture of the story--a fate lurking in the background
and visible to the reader--and at some dramatic moment the conviction
comes home to the victim and is crystallized in bitter words wrenched
from his baffled will. The business of the story is to lead him up to
this crystallization.
There are two main forms--(1) Life is a trap. (2) Life is mean. So
Strindberg’s Countess Julie: “Everything is wreckage, that drifts over
the water until it sinks, sinks.” So Ray Pearson in Sherwood Anderson’s
_Winesburg, Ohio_: “Tricked, by Gad, tricked by life and made a fool
of.” So D. H. Lawrence: “We are prostituted, oh, prostituted by life.”
To Ma Westcott: “Life is duty. It is a lie.” This pressure may come
from without--_milieu_--or from within--imperious desires--but the
outcome is usually hopeless sorrow--sometimes stolid resignation,
sometimes fierce protest, but with no other end than annihilation. An
exception is Maugham’s _Of Human Bondage_.
6. A bias in selection of characters. The naturalist commonly chooses
one of three types:
a. Characters of marked physique and small intellectual
activity--persons of strong animal drives. They range all the way
from morons like Norris’s McTeague, Zola’s Nana, and Dreiser’s Jennie
Gerhardt to natures like Hardy’s Tess, and Sallie in _Of Human Bondage_.
b. Characters of excited, neurotic temperament, at the mercy of
moods, driven by forces that they do not stop to analyze. Such are
Strindberg’s Countess Julie, Sue, Emma Bovary, and the hero in _Of
Human Bondage_. Sometimes this is aggravated by some physical defect,
like a club-foot.
c. An occasional use of a strong character whose will is broken. Thus
Hardy’s Jude and the doctor in Strindberg’s _By the Open Sea_. But such
are comparatively infrequent.
Naturalism is pessimistic realism, with a philosophy that sets man
in a mechanical world and conceives of him as victimized by that
world. _Certain unconscious exaggerations of naturalism._ Since men
are victimized either by outer forces--the _milieu_--or by inner
drives--impulses and instincts--the naturalist from much brooding is
subject to certain temptations:
1. From concern over a devastating _milieu_ he may end in desiring
to change that _milieu_ to the end that men may achieve happiness.
Hence he tends to lose his objectivity and scientific detachment,
and becomes a partisan to a cause. Such was the fate of Zola. The
philosopher of naturalism, in practice he abandoned his principles and
became a reformer, attacking the church, the capitalistic order, etc.
His _J’accuse_ letter is characteristic of this. _Nana_, almost alone,
preserves the naturalistic attitude. This was the failure of the first
group of American naturalists--Frank Norris, Robert Herrick, Jack
London.
2. From much study of inner drives of low-grade characters the
naturalist is in danger of creating grotesques. Behavioristic
psychology may prove to be a further temptation, in creating a “sex
complex.” So Masters’s _Spoon River Anthology_, Sherwood Anderson,
D. H. Lawrence, Frank Norris. Most common in the later American
naturalists. So Brander Matthews.
3. From much emphasis on animal impulses the naturalist may turn man
into an animal. Men are more than sex-driven creatures--the city is
more than the slums. There are sewers, but why not accept the sewer
without messing over its contents as they flow to disintegration? This
is the commonest objection to naturalism. So Meredith: “The naturalist
sees the hog in nature, and takes nature for the hog.” It is certainly
an overcorrection--a reaction against the complacent optimism of
romanticism--against too much shutting of the eyes to slums and filth
and sewers. To a mechanist like Dreiser, who traces life and conduct
back to chemistry, or to the behaviorist, who traces it to ducts
and glands, it is rational. The charge may be true of Zola, of De
Maupassant, of Anderson, of Lawrence, but it is not true of Hardy, of
Maugham.
_Naturalism and the Conception of Tragedy._ Naturalistic books are
almost inevitably tragedies, but the philosophy of naturalism that
underlies them has played havoc with the Aristotelian conception of
tragedy. As Ludwig Lewisohn says, it has “rendered the traditional
principle of tragedy wholly archaic.” According to the Aristotelian
tradition, tragedy results when an essentially noble character
of heroic proportions transgresses an immutable moral law by a
self-originating will and suffers the punishment dealt by poetic
justice. So Macbeth, Othello, Lear, Hamlet. But this assumes two
things: (1) an eternally changeless moral law; (2) the existence of a
purposive will. Both of these the naturalist refuses to accept. Compare
Hardy.
It became clear that the self-originating element in human action
is small. The individual acts in harmony with his character,
which is largely the result of complex and uncontrollable causes.
It became even clearer that among the totality of moral values
an absolute validity can be assigned to a few only. Hence the
basic conception of tragic guilt was undermined from within and
from without. The transgression of an immutable moral law by a
self-originating will was seen to be an essentially meaningless
conception, since neither eternally changeless moral law nor
an uncaused volition is to be found in the universe that we
perceive.[800]
The tragedy of naturalism lies in the disintegration and the pity or
irony with which we contemplate man and his fate in the world.
_Naturalism and the Traditional American Temper._ The two most
characteristic qualities of the American temper are Puritanism and
optimism--the belief in the supremacy of the moral law, and the
conviction that this is a good world that man shapes to his will. This
is to be explained historically: the former is traditionally English,
the latter a product of new-world economics--a decentralized society.
Pessimistic determinism results inevitably from the sense of social
pressure on the individual. Social complexity entails a feeling of
coercive regimentation by forces too strong to contend against. These
forces are both internal and external: environment or the social
machine; heredity or the physical machine. The most complete dwarfing
of the individual will and significance takes place in the most crowded
societies, producing a corresponding philosophy and psychology. So the
fatalism of the Orient and the dream of Nirvana. The first widespread
philosophy of determinism among English people was spread by Calvinism.