Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
the background of the small town. A world of dreams and loveliness:
adventures that await beyond the horizon; the glory of pigtails and
overalls. The democracy of the vacant lot: rivalry in marbles and
hand-springs--the leadership of the capable. Sincerer work than
Tarkington’s _Penrod_. Contrast with Garland’s _Son of the Middle
Border_, and Mark Twain’s _Tom Sawyer_.
_A Certain Rich Man_ (1909). His plunge into the problem novel. Theme:
fear of the economic city that draws the villager into its web. A
contrast between the two worlds and two social ideals--the friendly
democracy of the older America threatened by economic centralization.
_In the Heart of a Fool_ (1918). One of the last of the problem
novels. Theme--the invasion of the small town by industrialism and the
disintegration of village virtues. The story of an idealist who opposes
the ends of Main Street and his destruction by the herd. A suggestion
of Sinclair Lewis. The conclusion--the excellence of love and the
foolishness of selfishness. The background characters, studies in the
reaction of the older ideal to the new egoism.
Booth Tarkington: The Dean of American Middle-Class Letters
Possesses the virtues of cleverness, optimism, humor, respectability.
Honors all the Victorian taboos. Life is an agreeable experience--to
the successful, hence it is well to rise. His chief theme, middle-class
romance as exemplified in the “valley of democracy”: courtship of
nice young people through the agencies of parties and picnics. A
skillful writer, with a light touch, but his art destroyed by love of
popularity--a novel ends well that ends happily. A perennial sophomore,
purveyor of comfortable literature to middle-class America.[836]
_The Gentleman from Indiana_ (1899). A dramatization of the “good, dear
people” theme. The college man who goes back to his people to live and
work with them. A satisfying life results from merging individual life
in the common village life. A flabby and somewhat saccharine philosophy.
_Alice Adams_ (1921). The story of an instinctive actress and her
competitive struggle for social position and a man. A clever,
attractive, lovable girl defeated by her background--led into foolish
little deceits to keep up appearances--victim of middle-class
conventionality. Shabby parlors versus conservatories as settings for
proposals. The Adams family has fallen behind their acquaintances in
the business of rising in the world, and Alice sinks to a lower social
scale. An overrated book.
_The Midlander_ (1923). A contribution to booster literature and
an unconscious satire on the emptiness of the middle-class mind. A
real-estate venture and what came of it. The conception that “man
is a wealth-and-comfort-producing machine.” Supposed to be tragedy,
but the tragedy lies in preferring the imported to the domestic
article--choosing a New York girl instead of a local one. The suburb
thrives, the automobile business goes forward, and the gods of getting
on smile in the end.[837]
The other numerous titles of Tarkington signify nothing except to
lovers of comfortable literature. The clever Hoosier has ceased to be
an artist--the great failure in contemporary American fiction.
Dorothy Canfield (Fisher)
A clever dramatizer of the obvious: believes in the Woman Triumphant,
and discovers in the right education of children--particularly
girls--the solution of all problems. Two main themes:
1. A protest against the demands of “social life.” _The Squirrel
Cage_ (1912). A contribution to the problem novel. A William Morris
suggestion of the sufficiency of handicraft as an escape from social
demands. An arraignment of the American home where the father scarcely
knows the children and the mother is shut away from the outside world.
_The Bent Twig_ (1915). A study of university community life--the
struggle between plain living and high thinking--of social pleasure and
no thinking.
2. The defense of the village. The belief that community fellowship--a
gathering to watch a century plant bloom--breeds an artistic spirit
finer than old-world art and culture can offer. Especially a Vermont
town is ideal for the proper bringing up of children. _The Brimming
Cup_ (1920). A story of the right bringing up of children. _Rough Hewn_
(1922). The love of art and travel which leads inevitably to a Vermont
town and marriage. _Raw Material_ (1923). Sketches. The point of view
given in “Paul Meyer”--the folly of thinking that a normal girl should
prefer philology to matrimony.
II • The Realistic Small Town and the New Naturalism
The work of the younger intellectuals, more disciplined than the
muckrakers, with wider culture and severer standards. Concerned for
civilization, the things of the spirit, a free creative individualism,
rather than political liberalism. A searching criticism of the
triumphant middle class, its ideals and its habitat, the town and
city; the repressive tyrannies of its herd mind; the futility of
its materialism. Back of the novelists is a group of essayists,
young critics of established ways: Van Wyck Brooks, Ludwig Lewisohn,
Randolph Bourne, H. L. Mencken. They embody a reaction from: (1) The
acquisitive ideal of a machine civilization. (2) “The great illusion
of American civilization, the illusion of optimism”--the staple of
middle-class business morale. (3) The sentimentalism of “comfortable
literature,” that evades reality and weakens the intellectual fiber.
(4) The inhibitions of a Puritanism that has lost its sanctions. (5)
The White-Tarkington doctrine of the “beautiful people” and “folksy
village.”
The movement began with Masters’s _Spoon River Anthology_ (1915). An
earlier work is E. W. Howe’s _Story of a Country Town_ (1883):--stark,
grim, unrelieved, revealing the “smoldering discontent of an
inarticulate frontier.”
Zona Gale--The Transition from Romance to Realism
I. Friendship Village romance. _The Loves of Pelleas and Etarre_
(1907). Everyone is helpful, everyone loves, or wants to, or is unhappy
for lack of it. _Friendship Village_ (1908). A world where there is no
sorrow, or sickness, and where brotherly love rules. Of the “folksy”
school.
II. The shift to realism. _Miss Lulu Bett_ (1920). A homely village
tragedy of the repressed soul that rebels under the irritation of
domestic pin-pricks. Plebeian characters, thin, cheap, tiresome; set in
a shoddy world and rubbing each other’s nerves. Deacon Dwight a sadist;
Miss Lulu a grotesque. Treated from the outside in contrast with
Sherwood Anderson’s method. _Faint Perfume_ (1923). A glorification of
martyrdom. The conviction that life is hard, and the excellence of the
economy of pain. A partial return to the _Friendship Village_ note, but
like _Miss Lulu Bett_ in the picture of a self-worshiping family.[838]
Donn Byrne[839]
American born but Irish bred. His early work, _The Stranger’s Banquet_
(1919), half problem novel--industrialism--which offered little scope
for the Celtic wistfulness in which he conceives romance to lie.
_Messer Marco Polo_ (1921). The romance of distant times and places,
of unfamiliar backgrounds and lovely worlds: medieval Venice and its
pageantry; a far quest over burning sands; the loveliness of little
Golden Bells at the court of Kubla Khan; the ardor of love that tangles
itself in religion. A wistfulness and beauty of phrase that remind
one of Synge’s _Riders to the Sea_. The loveliest romance of recent
years.[840]
_The Wind That Bloweth_ (1922). A rich fabric--Gaelic folk; the woman
of the boulevard; the white sun-baked road to Damascus; the fire of
revolution; the crack of cordage as the ship rounds the Horn--a saga of
the unquiet heart.
_The Changeling_ (1923). Short stories of quaint places, forgotten
people; the Bible and love of Ireland. Done with excellent
craftsmanship.
_Blind Raftery_ (1924). A tale of a blind harpist in Dean Swift’s
Ireland and of his wife, Hilaria, who sings the song of the women of
the streets in Cadiz. Life teaches them a philosophy expressed by
the harpist in these words: “We sit a little while by ourselves in
an apart, dark place, and we learn truths, of how certain things one
believes to be good are but vulgar selfish things, and how certain
things the small think evil are but futile accidents. And we learn to
be kind; such wisdom comes when we are dead. And those who have never
died in life ... are pleasant shallow people, soulless as seals.”
Robert Nathan
Began like Donn Byrne with a problem study--_Peter Kindred_ (1919). A
dual personality cut asunder and embodied in two characters: David the
romantic fades out of the story, and Peter becomes a modern, absorbed
in eugenics. A background of Phillips Exeter and Harvard.
_Autumn_ (1921). An idyll of loneliness, with a commentary on
materialism, done in simple, wistful language.
1. Mr. Jeminy, a village philosopher, disciple of Boëthius and St.
Francis, half pagan and yet Christian. Troubled over the poverty of the
world that does not amass “love, peace, the quiet of the heart, the
work of one’s hand.”
2. A village background. Mr. Jeminy wished to teach the children the
secret of happiness instead of the folly of plus and minus, and was
turned out of his school. An echo of _Main Street_ in its commentary
on village narrowness, hardness, gossip. A frigid Puritanism that
disapproves Mr. Jeminy for speaking disrespectfully of God and denies
happiness to Mrs. Wicket who is under God’s sentence of unhappiness.
3. A note of determinism. A world of grotesques--all are hemmed in
and cramped, longing for fresh experience and strange adventures, all
are unhappy. So Aaron Bade with his flute and his “awkward thoughts
and clumsy feelings.” Margaret Bade with her conviction, “Life is so
much spilt milk”; Farmer Barly with his commentary, “Folks are queer
crotchets”; Anna Barly with her yearning for the “white wonder of life”
and the trap. An indictment of New England for its destruction of
natural happiness and the simple joy of life.
4. A profound irony. The end of Mr. Jeminy’s hopefulness is
disillusion. “Here within this circle of hills, is to be found faith,
virtue, passion, and good sense. In this valley youth is not without
courage, or age without wisdom.” The outcome disproves this faith. Of
his many pupils, “Not one is tidy of mind, or humble of heart. Not one
has learned to be happy in poverty, or gentle in good fortune.” Life as
a whole is futile. The dead alone can ask God the meaning of life. “But
for us, who remain, it has no meaning.” The tale is Robert Frost done
in prose--compare “Mending Wall.”
_The Puppet Master_ (1923). The most graceful fantasy in American
literature. Papa Jonas, the puppet creator and master, watches the
love of Annabelle Lee, a rag doll with shoe-button eyes, and Mr.
Aristotle, a red-nosed, philosopher-clown puppet; and of Mary Holly and
Christopher Lane, the poet. The theme is love--“Love is a man’s soul:
it does not grow like his hopes, it does not break like his heart....
But love goes by after a while.” Papa Jonas is Mr. Jeminy, converted
to the Stoic philosophy but lacking love. The note of determinism
persists, but the Stoic attitude overcomes. “Yes,” he said slowly, “one
must make the best of what one has.”
Joseph Hergesheimer: a Sophisticated Romantic
Began as a painter. After fourteen years’ apprenticeship was accepted
by the _Saturday Evening Post_, and began a career in popularity that
rivals Tarkington’s. Possesses the virtues and vices of the _Post_
school. In earlier work a colorist, painting statuesques against
artfully arranged backgrounds; a connoisseur of fabrics and poses and
nature settings--nearly as “much concerned with the stuffs as with the
stuff of life.” In _Cytherea_ the setting a sophisticated manipulation