Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
frontier, written by men who had come out of it, began to appear,
yet even then in too scant volume. In Longstreet’s _Georgia Scenes_,
Joseph G. Baldwin’s _Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi_, and Davy
Crockett’s _Autobiography_, the frontier is painted in homely colors
that time cannot fade. Their brisk pages seem to have been dipped
in the butternut dye-pot of the backwoods cabin. By far the most
significant of them is the braggart but naïvely truthful narrative
of the life of Cane-brake Davy who in his several removals followed
the advancing frontier the length of the State of Tennessee. Davy
would seem to have been the authentic backwoodsman, and the life of
the individual may be taken as a description of the genus. Restless,
assertive, unsocial, buoyantly optimistic and obsessed with the faith
that better land lay farther west, cultivating a bumptious wit that
was a defense mechanism against the meanness of daily life, he was
only an improvident child who fled instinctively from civilization.
As a full-length portrait of the Jacksonian leveler, in the days when
the great social revolution was establishing the principles of an
equalitarian democracy, the picture is of vast significance. But it
is incomplete. Concerning the wife and daughters who were dragged at
his heels in the successive removals, the narrative is silent. It is a
man’s tale, unenriched by the emotional experiences of a woman, and as
such it tells only half the story of the frontier.
The _Autobiography_ was the last pungent note of realism before the
romantic revolution swept over American literature; and it was not till
two generations later, when the war was over and the glories of the
Gilded Age were fading, that the frontier came to realistic expression
again in the works of Hamlin Garland. _Main-Travelled Roads_, the first
chapter in the tale of the Middle Border, is a prologue to _Giants in
the Earth_, telling the story of the prairie settlement in the idiom
of the generation that undertook the great adventure. In these brief
tales is compressed the harsh temper of the eighties, when the spirit
of revolt was running like wildfire across the prairies and the Middle
Border was arming for battle. For a decade or more the farmers’ affairs
had been out of kilter, and a note of discontent had begun to appear
in fiction. Before Garland, western life had been dealt with by Edward
Eggleston in _The Hoosier Schoolmaster_ and _The Circuit Rider_, and
more searchingly by Ed Howe in _The Story of a Country Town_--a drab
commentary on life in Atchison, Kansas, in the early eighties. But
it is in Joseph Kirkland’s _Zury, The Meanest Man in Spring County_
(1887), that a deep sense of the meanness of frontier life is first
adequately felt. The harsh constrictions of pioneer existence tightened
about Zury as a boy when his father was struggling with debt, turning a
naturally generous nature into a skinflint mortgage grabber. He early
learned that he must fight to survive, and as a result his life was
shut up in a narrow round of sordid accumulation. It was the poverty of
the frontier, in Kirkland’s eyes, that was the great hardship.
Hamlin Garland’s more adequate story of the Middle Border, beginning
militantly with _Main-Travelled Roads_ (1887-92) and flowering in the
idyllic saga of the Garlands and McClintocks (1914), is a chronicle
that grows more significant as the times it deals with draw further
into the past. Throughout his interpretation run two dominant notes:
the promise of future fulfillment when the prairies have been brought
under the plow--the Per Hansa note of pioneer optimism; and then
later, rising slowly into a ground swell, a note of discouragement
suggesting the utter futility of a laborious existence. Underlying
_Main-Travelled Roads_ is a mood of bitterness that springs from a deep
sense of failure--a mood that grew harsher with the economic depression
of the Middle Border in the eighties. The harvest was not fulfilling
the expectations of seed time, and the bow of promise was gone from
the prairie fields. The figures of bitter men and despondent women
fill his pages and darken the colors of his realism. It is the cost of
it all that depresses him--the toll exacted of human happiness. These
early studies of Garland’s strike the first note of the tragedy of
the frontier. Starkly objective, they are sociological sketches, the
militant expression of a rebellious mood that had been deepening since
the panic of 1873 burst the romantic bubble of frontier hopes. The
history of two decades of economic maladjustment, with their Granger
Populism, their passionate resentment at the favoritisms of government,
their blind striking out at the plutocracy that was visibly rising amid
the American democracy, is compressed within a few acrid tales that
proposed to tell the plain truth about life on the Middle Border farm.
_Main-Travelled Roads_ is as complete an expression of the mood of the
last years of the century--the outlook upon life, the economic and
political problems, the objective treatment of materials--as _Giants in
the Earth_ is an expression of the vastly different outlook and mood of
our own day.
* * * * *
For a generation before 1917, when the movement was brought to a
sudden stop, the mind of America was deeply concerned with problems of
sociology. The growing spirit of realism was absorbed in politics and
economics and concerned itself little with subjective analysis. The
intellectuals were busily examining the Constitution in the light of
its economic origins and interpreting American history in the light of
frontier experience. The novelists, reflecting the current interests,
were fascinated by the phenomena of industrialism and were studying
curiously the new race of captains of industry who were weaving a
strange pattern of life for America. The city had already come to dwarf
the country. Chicago bestrode the Middle Border like a colossus, and
the novelists found material for their realism in the cut-throat ways
of business men. Their stories--harsh and strident as the grinding
wheels on the overhead “Loop”--were set against a background of
sprawling cities hastening to grow big, where the battles of giants
were fought and where the _milieu_--a vast network of impersonal
forces--was more significant than the individual men and women who
were borne onward in the stream of tendency to submerge or rise as
chance determined. A note of stark determinism runs through much of
the work; but it was a determinism of environing forces--the objective
world of the machine--rather than of character, and in consequence the
deeper concern of fiction was sociological, the understanding of this
impersonal machine order and the subduing of it to democratic ends.
In such a world the farmer and the problems of the Middle Border were
become as old-fashioned as ox-carts.
Ten years later, when _Giants in the Earth_ was published, such
objective treatment of materials was no longer the vogue. Since the
war a revolutionary shift of interest has taken place, a shift from
the sociological to the psychological. It is no longer the world of
objective fact that obtrudes as the significant reality, but the
subtler world of emotional experience, the furtive inner life of
impulse and desire that Sherwood Anderson probes so curiously. The
change of theme was first marked, perhaps, by _Spoon River Anthology_,
with its mordant sketches of stunted and thwarted lives that Mr.
Masters professes to regard as the natural harvest of a sterile village
life. _Spoon River Anthology_ is bitter in its sardonic rebellion
against the genial optimisms of the “Valley of Democracy.” From the
epic thrust of expansion issued, as its natural progeny, a race of
abortive grotesques, starved figures which suggest to Mr. Masters the
cost in human values of severing the ties of kin and kind and throwing
aside like an old shoe the creative wealth of social experience. The
soil of the frontier village is too thin for men and women to strike
deep root and grow to generous stature.
Since the publication of _Spoon River Anthology_, concern for
psychological values has pretty much taken possession of our
literature. In the lovely pages of Willa Cather’s _O Pioneers!_ and
_My Ántonia_ there is revealed a warm sympathy with the emotional life
of pioneer women and a poignant understanding of their bleak lot.
But the analysis--as in Hamlin Garland’s work--draws back from the
threshold of final tragedy, pausing before it has penetrated to the
hidden core of futility. The waste of all finer values exacted by the
prairies is suggested by the queer figures of lonely immigrants who
fade in the uncongenial environment, but it is not thrust into the
foreground to dominate the scene. The vast stretches of the prairies
are there--stern, inhospitable, breeding a dumb homesickness in alien
hearts--where the red grass bends before the restless winds and the
forces of nature are not easily tamed; but in the end the prairie is
subdued and the scars it has laid on men’s lives are forgotten. Since
Willa Cather, others have dealt with the West--Ruth Suckow, Margaret
Wilson, and Herbert Quick, to name a few--yet in none of their work
is there the profound insight and imaginative grasp of the theme that
gives to _Giants in the Earth_ so great a sense of tragic reality.
In this creative return to the theme of the great American adventure
the causes of human failure lie deeper than politics or economics.
They are to be found in the impersonal forces of nature that are too
powerful for the human will to cope with; and in the hidden weakness
of fearful souls that cannot live when their roots have been pulled up
from the congenial home soil. For all his titanic labors, Per Hansa,
the viking, is struck down at last. There are few nobler passages in
our fiction--the more telling for its restraint--than the final scene
where, driven inexorably by circumstance, Per Hansa sets forth into the
February blizzard to fetch a minister to the bedside of his stricken
comrade. The note of determinism is there, subtle, pervasive. The Norns
of his fathers had decreed that it should be so--in the urgings of the
mystical Beret, in the dumb pleadings of the dying Hans Olsa and his
broken-hearted wife. Per Hansa the strong, the capable one who never
failed, who was cunning enough to outwit fate itself--Per Hansa would
go out into the storm and return with the minister who would point
the way to heaven to the troubled Hans Olsa. And so, driven by all
the imperatives of fate, he sets out, skis on his feet and others at
his back, to face the last great adventure. The blinding snow quickly
wraps him about, the cold grips his heart, and Per Hansa is seen no
more until on a soft May day, when the wheat is green in his fields and
the corn is ready for planting, he is found seated by a haystack, his
skis beside him and his face turned to the untrodden West. For all the
heroic labors of Per Hansa, for all the tragic loneliness of Beret, the
end is futility.
And Beret, the sick one, likewise is in the hands of the Norns. She had
sinned through love of Per Hansa, and in the long brooding hours on
the Dakota plains her mind gives way. She cannot rise to Per Hansa’s
delight in the newborn son. Peder Victorious--symbol of Per Hansa’s
buoyant faith--for her is only another evidence of sin. This dark land
of Dakota is marked by God’s displeasure, and life for her becomes
a silent struggle of renunciation and atonement. A primitive Norse
Calvinist, victimized by a brooding imagination that sees more devils
than vast hell can hold, she dwells “on the border of utter darkness”
where the forces of good and evil struggle for the human soul. Across