Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
the gloomy Puritanism of her nature fall the shadows of an older and
darker faith, and in her nostalgia the old Northland superstitions
merge with the somber Northland religion to her undoing. The tragedy of
Beret works itself out in the tender corridors of her own heart and,
as Professor Commager has suggested, it is as universal as the tragedy
of Goethe’s Margarethe. In his portrayal of the “sick soul” of Beret
hungering for the far homeland the Norse artist has achieved a triumph.
The epic conquest of the continent must be read in the light of women’s
sufferings as well as in that of men’s endurance. In whichever light it
is read, it becomes something far more suggestive than a drab tale of
frontier poverty or a sordid tale of frontier exploitation; it becomes
vital and significant as life itself.
_Giants in the Earth_ is a great and beautiful book that suggests the
wealth of human potentialities brought to America year after year by
the peasant immigrants who pass through Ellis Island and scatter the
length and breadth of the land. Written in Norwegian, and stemming
from a rich old-world literary tradition, it is at the same time
deeply and vitally American. The very atmosphere of the Dakota plains
is in its pages, and it could have been written only by one to whom
the background was a familiar scene. The artist has lived with these
peasant folk; he is one of them, and he penetrates sympathetically to
the simple kindly hearts hidden to alien eyes by the unfamiliar folk
ways. To gather up and preserve in letters these diverse folk strains
before they are submerged and lost in the common American _mores_,
would seem to be a business that our fiction might undertake with
profit.
* * * * *
Ole Edvart Rölvaag is himself a viking of the Per Hansa strain. Born
of fisher folk, 22 April, 1876, on the island of Donna at the very
edge of the Arctic circle, he took his name, following a common
Norwegian custom, from the name of a cove on the shores of which he
was brought up. It is a land barren except for the gorse and heather,
and the long winter nights and the restless sea were certain to bring
the imagination under their somber spell. At the age of fourteen,
discouraged from further schooling by the family that contrasted him
unfavorably with a brilliant brother, he turned fisherman, and for
five years went off to the Lofoten Islands some two hundred miles away
for the winter catches. Distrustful of the future, he made his great
decision to come to America, landing in New York in 1896 with only a
railway ticket to South Dakota. In the great West, still turmoiled
by the agrarian upheaval of the nineties, he joined an uncle who had
provided him transportation money, tried his hand at farming, worked at
other jobs, and at the age of twenty-three, not having found himself,
he turned once more to the formal business of schooling. In the fall
of 1899 he entered Augustana College, a preparatory school in Canton,
South Dakota. From there he went to St. Olaf College, Northfield,
Minnesota, graduating in 1905 at the age of twenty-eight. After a year
at the University of Oslo in Norway, he joined the staff of St. Olaf
College, where he is now Professor of Norwegian Literature. In the
larger sense, however, his education has been got from life, which he
seems to have lived with a rich and daring intensity; and it is his
own venturesome experience, certainly, that finds expression in the
creative realism and brooding imagination of his work. Intellectually
and artistically he is of the excellent old-world culture. How greatly
his professional studies determined his literary technique only a
competent Norwegian critic can judge; yet it is worth while comparing
_Giants in the Earth_ with Johan Bojer’s _The Emigrants_--a work which,
when announced as being in preparation, dramatically influenced his own
novel.
The Short Story[844]
_Introduction._ With the ferment of the seventies and eighties a new
school of literature, that was effectively a denial of the genteel
tradition: it was effectively a popularization--a taking it out of the
severe realm of the _Atlantic Monthly_. It was an appeal to the middle
class. From Henry James to Hamlin Garland a steady shift from right to
left. This implied:
1. A shift from genteel to homely material.
2. A shift to realism from the earlier sentimentality. This genteel
tradition constantly cropping out anew--in Margaret Deland, in a
changed form in Zona Gale. It has been strongest in New England--from
Rose Terry Cooke through Sarah Orne Jewett to Mary Wilkins.
The short story commonly believed to be peculiarly representative of
our genius--the stripping-away of the superfluous and the love of
technical refinement. Derived from Poe and Hawthorne: both artists yet
far removed from the tendencies which have controlled the development
of the short story since.
_Theme._ The American short story has dealt largely with the two great
themes of all romance, love and adventure. The form constitutes the
great staple--is largely provided by women for women. The handling of
this love theme reveals the inevitable shift from the genteel tradition
to middle-class efficiency, and the spirit of the change is revealed
in the changing dress of the heroine. In the seventies, crinoline,
innumerable flounces of white muslin, lace parasols--no tan, no
freckles, but a gentle pallor. Such dress and such heroines will exude
sentiment. It will concern itself with atmosphere. Action brisk and
efficient will appear unladylike, almost vulgar. What a change when the
heroine clothes herself in a silk flour-sack--showing silk stockings,
bare arms and neck--cultivating tan and freckles, bobbing her hair,
going in for automobiles and golf and tennis! The older heroine dwelt
in a world of sentiment without sex; the present-day heroine lives in
a world of sex interest without sentiment. The more flounces in life
and literature, the less the animal is exposed. Hence action has
superseded sentiment--plot has superseded atmosphere. The hero becomes
a Hart, Schaffner and Marx young business man and the middle-class note
is struck loudly in the honk of the motor-car. The genteel tradition is
laid away with the flowers.
_Major Influences during the Sixties._ Through the fifties, and sixties
literature uncertain and halting. The style largely set by old-world
fashions. Three in particular:
1. Influence of Charlotte and Emily Bronte. A sort of sentimental and
mawkish passion. Stilted style, as in Harriet Beecher Stowe. This
fell in with the Irving note of the picturesque and was exploited in
_Godey’s Lady’s Book_.
2. Influence of Dickens. At its height in the fifties: an emphasis upon
the vulgar--plain and homely characters. Exploited in the _Atlantic_ by
Lowell. So Rose Terry Cooke in _Miss Lucinda_ (1861).
3. Influence of the French realistic movement: Balzac, Flaubert. Only a
faint beginning. Still a lot of romance stuff but given a local color
and garnished with humor.
_Counter Tendencies._ The inevitable development of the middle-class
city and the middle-class magazine, persistently affected by certain
throw-backs to an older American tradition. America is of the city
today, but day before yesterday it was still country, and in the
backgrounds of our minds is a country setting and love of simple
people. Three main tendencies:
1. The discovery of the local. The picturesqueness of the strange and
remote in character, manners, speech. The charm of dialect and interest
in out-of-the-way places. This a reaction from too much pavement
and the rubbing-down of individual differences from city contact.
“Characters” are bred in isolated places. This the dominant note in
the short story from 1870 to 1900: to follow it from Bret Harte on is
almost to write a history of the short story. It does not dominate the
longer story. Constance Fenimore Woolson.
2. The discovery of “human interest.” The feeling that men in the
rough--with the bark on--may prove more interesting than the products
of an artificial civilization. This had been spread by Dickens and by
certain of the _Atlantic_ writers.
3. The growing interest in realism. At first confused with the
commonplace--so Pattee in his comment on Rose Terry Cooke’s _Miss
Lucinda_. A good deal of this earlier work is only another form of
romance--little affected by the rising French movement. Realism was
to come slowly and late. All three of these made against the genteel
tradition.
_Henry James._ His position peculiar. From his youth _déraciné_--his
father hated American vulgarity, American journalism, and would not
permit his son to take root. He grew up with an aristocratic conception
of civilization--his sole interest lay in such civilization, and the
manners of the polite society of that civilization. No other American
has so hated and feared contamination from the vulgar. He was thus the
last flower of the Genteel Tradition, transplanted to an environment
more congenial. As the middle-class became more clamorous, he withdrew
to the Continent, to England, where the older ideas still lingered.
There in the spirit of the realist he wrote with refined art and
persistent detachment--even to a punctilious and princely refinement.
As Mr. Howells says, “To enjoy his work, to feel its rare excellence,
both in conception and expression, is a brevet of intellectual good
form.”
_His World._ Always that of the spender, of assured position. His main
interest lies in women; their refinement appeals to his refinement--no
flappers or vulgarians but elegantly gowned women who never did the
family washing. He is concerned with that which is dearest to the heart
of aristocracy--standards of excellence. And in this he was true to his
conception of civilization, for civilization begins after a competence
has been assured. Those who are struggling to acquire have not the
leisure, the inclination, for civilization. Hence _Daisy Miller_ is a
type of much of his work--the contrast between civilized Europe and
uncivilized America, the one with standards of culture and manners
and the other vulgarian. And his interest in American women results
from the fact that they alone in America care for civilization and are
painfully seeking to achieve it.
_His Realism._ The beginnings of the movement which has been called
psychological realism, concerning itself with motives and processes of
thought--the inner life. Developed by Bourget and far more fully by
Dorothy Richardson in such a book as _Pilgrimage_, the inner life of
Miriam Henderson in many volumes. Far removed from later psychological
fiction founded on Freudian theory--as in D. H. Lawrence, Sherwood
Anderson. Again the genteel tradition dealing with people who in the
main have genteel impulses only. James held in horror this later
naturalism--it was merely vulgarian.
_The Spirit of the Local._ Into this prim world with its incipient
realism came the note of the Far West: Mark Twain and Bret Harte, who
set a new style--the romantic, picturesque, human-interest story. This
is a part of the Pike County idea of literature--a native rogue-tale
but with touches of sentiment and shortened to effective form. This
followed by Eggleston’s _Hoosier Schoolmaster_ (1871) and this in turn
by the flood of local work of the eighties. The most notable the work
of Charles Egbert Craddock, Joel Chandler Harris, Sarah Orne Jewett,
and Mary Wilkins. The first discovered the hill people, the second
discovered the Negro--his primitive folk-poetry. In the work of the
last, a struggle between the genteel tradition and realism--and the
final triumph of the latter.
A Chapter in American Liberalism[845]
Liberals whose hair is growing thin and the lines of whose figures are