Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
Predestination was an alien thought, the last expression of a world
depressed by Roman regimentation and degeneration. Augustine preached
that men are evil, and men are doomed. This old-world dogma was brought
to America, where regimentation was impossible. A free economics
created a free-will philosophy and psychology. The will to succeed.
This flowered in Emerson. Philosophical optimism. The world is good,
man is good: let him stand upon his instincts and there abide and the
whole world will come round to him. “Trust thyself.” Since Emerson’s
time a new world has been emerging. The old shadow is falling across
the American mind. Determinism is in the air.
_Complexity and American Determinism._ Complexity springs from:
1. Machine industrialism. The bigness of the economic machine dwarfs
the individual and creates a sense of impotency.
2. The great city reduces the individual to a unit. By machine methods
of transportation and quantity output individual differences are worn
away. We dress, live, think, work, play, alike. The _Saturday Evening
Post_ is fast regimenting the American mind. Standardization.
3. Centralization of wealth is creating a caste regimentation.
4. A mechanistic psychology. Behaviorism: stimulus and response; ducts
and glands. The individual conceived as a mechanism driven by instincts
and habits.
America today is the greatest, most complex machine the world has
ever known. Individualism is giving way to regimentation, caste,
standardization. Optimism is gone; pessimism is on the horizon. The
psychology of naturalism is being prepared.
Three American writers began an experiment in naturalism in the middle
nineties--Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Harold Frederic. The early
death of all three stopped the movement, which was speedily overwhelmed
by the romantic deluge and the muckraking zeal. Crane was tubercular
and died at twenty-nine; Norris was cut down in the early thirties;
Harold Frederic removed to England, where he died.
1 • Stephen Crane[801]
Stephen Crane was the genius of his generation. His work began with
_Maggie: A Girl of the Streets_ (1893). “It was the first bit of
naturalism in American letters ... an episodic bit of slum fiction
ending with the tragic quality of Greek drama.” “The first ironical
novel ever written by an American.” It was privately printed at first,
and not published until 1896. It is detached, objective, amoral,
dealing with a world without virtues but tyrannized by taboos. It is a
bit of life, beginning and ending casually. Here is the end:
In a room a woman sat at a table, eating like a fat monk in a
picture. A soiled, unshaven man pushed open the door and entered.
“Well,” said he, “Mag’s dead.”[802]
It is a world without virtue and yet one that uses the social taboo
to condemn Mag--the only pure one of the lot. The story was an attack
on everything that was respectable in American literature--a notable
achievement in a world of shoddy romanticism. It was an affront to
every instinct of the genteel tradition, and was rejected by a public
steeped in that same shoddy romanticism.
Crane’s next novel was the first great American war story--_The Red
Badge of Courage_ (1894). It was a _tour de force_, inspired by
Zola’s _Le débâcle_, but more by Tolstoi--_War and Peace_ and perhaps
_Sebastopol_. The individual is caught between the external war machine
and the inner instinct machine. There is a conflict of impulses--fear,
pride, the instinct of self-preservation, chiefly the fear of fear. The
hero is at the mercy of the crowd psychology and blind chance. Crane
follows Tolstoi in assuming that victories are accidents, the outcome
of a blind clash of unintelligent forces, rather than due to strategy
and generalship. The study is psychological--that of the fear of the
recruit, his feeling that he alone is marked as the target of the
enemy. The impression of helplessness is the same as in _Maggie_--both
are atoms among a host of other atoms.
_Short Stories._ The best are “The Blue Hotel,” “The Experiment in
Misery,” “The Open Boat.” The first is a story of social responsibility
and social guilt. The murder of the Swede is just part of the backwash
of a topsy-turvy life: the victim of things. “Every sin is the result
of a collaboration.” The second is a story of a “hobo”--down-and-outer,
who hears “the war of the city in his ear.” “The protest of the wretch
who feels the touch of the imperturbable granite wheels, and who then
cries with an impersonal eloquence, with a strength not from him,
giving voice to the wail of a whole section, a class, a people.”[803]
2 • Frank Norris[804]
The most stimulating and militant of our early naturalists--the only
one who wrote consciously with a definite creed. He had thought out a
naturalistic philosophy under the inspiration of Zola. “He was never
without a yellow paper-covered novel of Zola in his hand,” wrote his
brother of him. His two chief novels reveal the twin tendencies as
revealed in _Nana_ and _Le débâcle_: The study of the individual in
his reaction to environment, and the study of social forces and their
impact upon a group of related individuals.
_His Work._ Falls into three groups: (1) Romance--_Blix_, _Moran of the
Lady Letty_, (2) Naturalism--_McTeague_, _Vandover and the Brute_; (3)
_The Pit_ and _A Deal in Wheat_. Between the two latter groups stands
_The Octopus_. The dates of the earlier works uncertain. Commonly
believed that Norris began as a romantic and worked out of it slowly.
Another view that he wrote romances as a means of arriving, side by
side with his serious work. Thus he seems to have begun _McTeague_
about 1894--although it was not published till 1899.
_Theory._ His passion for truth more ardent--or more noisy--than
Crane’s: his objectivity less. The strong conviction of a deterministic
universe was on him, but he never quite attained the scientific
detachment. His nature large and eager. Like Zola he loved large
canvases. This induced him rather to the sociological than to the
individualistic study. _The Octopus_ more representative of his genius
than _McTeague_. Man in society, his theme: not mere men and women as
ends in themselves. This grew on him--the second phase. The novelist
must deal “with elemental forces, motives that stir whole nations.
These cannot be handled as abstractions in fiction.... The social
tendencies must be expressed by means of an analysis of the characters
of the men and women who compose that society, and the two must be
combined and manipulated to evolve the purpose--to find the value of
_x_.”[805] Above all, avoid propaganda.
Unskillfully treated, the story may dwindle down and degenerate
into mere special pleading, and the novelist becomes a polemicist,
a pamphleteer, forgetting that although his first consideration is
to prove his case, his _means_ must be living human beings, not
statistics, and that his tools are not figures, but pictures of
life as he sees it....
Consider the reverse--_Recondite_, for instance. The purpose for
which Zola wrote the book ran away with him. He really did care
more for the depopulation of France than he did for his work.
Result--sermons on the fruitfulness of women, special pleading,
a farrago of dry, dull incidents, overburdened and collapsing
under the weight of a theme that should have intruded only
indirectly.[806]
He never quite arrives at the amoral attitude. Ethical values
persist in intruding themselves, sometimes quite incidentally, as in
_McTeague_, but increasingly, as in _The Octopus_ and _The Pit_.
“McTeague”
Dedicated to Gates. The first considerable contribution to naturalism
by an American writer. His carefully written work over which he labored
five years.
_Theme._ A study in character disintegration that follows upon economic
pressure. The unmaking of a man and woman by the caprice of events.
The characters are simple. McTeague is heavy and stupid, slow in his
movements but a blind bull when aroused. Trina neat and pretty but
with unhappy potentialities in her thrift. In neither is there a
will-to-power strong enough to give strength of character.
_The Note of Determinism._ A world of chance that victimizes them.
The note struck by the lottery and the $5,000. By chance McTeague
became a dentist, met Trina, proposed. But the chance that was making
a man of him and a woman of Trina was preparing their downfall through
Marcus Schouler. The wrestling-match was the turning-point. The two
disintegrate together, each aggravating the weakness of the other. As
Trina’s neatness was pulling Mac up and making him self-respecting,
so her thrift grew into miserliness under pressure of his failure to
provide, and this embittered the essentially fair and generous nature
of Mac.
_Inner Drives._ Little sex in the book after the first complication.
Both Mac and Trina caught unexpectedly, yet handled differently. The
latter pure naturalism. “The Woman is awakened, and, starting from her
sleep, catches blindly at what first the newly awakened eyes light
upon. It is a spell, a witchery, ruled by chance alone, inexplicable--a
fairy queen enamored of a clown with ass’s ears.”[807] But in McTeague,
oddly enough, the same instinct is judged and pronounced evil. Norris
abandons the amoral attitude and argues that heritage from the lower
life is evil. It is the weeds that spring up and stifle, as in Sherwood
Anderson’s “Seeds.”
Below the fine fabric of all that was good in him ran the foul
stream of hereditary evil, like a sewer. The vices and sins of
his father and his father’s father, to the third and fourth and
five hundredth generation, tainted him. The evil of an entire race
flowed in his veins. Why should it be? He did not desire it. Was he
to blame?[808]
The entire handling of sex in Trina, from the first frightened yielding
to the later docile submission to Mac’s brutality, his sadism, is
admirably handled from the point of view of modern psychology. Norris
was not a psychologist but in this he succeeded surprisingly.
_Romantic Elements._ Yet even in this severe study Norris has yielded
to his romantic tendencies.
1. His patent effort to give dramatic unity to the whole through the
symbol of gold. An exaggeration that is almost Dickens-like, with its
warping singleness. The gold tooth, the $5,000, Trina’s twenty-dollar
gold pieces, the imaginary gold plate of Maria Macapa, the absurd
canary in the gilt cage, the discovery of the gold mine. The wonder is
that he didn’t give Trina gold hair instead of black.
2. The use of a minor action: Maria Macapa and old Zerkow. The same
pursuit of a phantom and the same outcome in murder. McTeague and Trina
are real; Maria and Zerkow are grotesques.
3. The use of foils: Old Grannis and Miss Baker. Justified in romantic
literature by contrast. The self-effacing, timid drawing together
contrasted with the brute directness of McTeague. They do not marry,
and preserve their dream world.
4. The use of the revenge motive: Marcus Schouler--the dramatic pursuit
into Death Valley and the end.
“Vandover and the Brute”
An unfinished work--but a huge and terrible torso.
_Theme._ Revealed in the title. The two natures of man and the
sloughing-off of the higher till the wolf is left. Done with a terrible
directness, till the naked man is on all fours, padding up and down in
his room. A grim and sordid theme but not quite achieved. The thing got
away from him. If he had chiseled it as he chiseled _McTeague_, holding
it off objective and amoral, it would have been a tremendous piece. But
it is insufficiently motivated.
_Determinism._ A study in will. Vandover set over against Charlie
Geary and Dolly Haight. The latter a victim of momentary weakness; the