in the national consciousness, and if it founded no new legends it deepened o d ones. Romance did not have the field entirely during these years, for there was also a strong naturalistic trend, which dated from the eighties, when Henry James had seemed too foreign and Howells too hopeful. In 1883 Edgar Watson Howe, of Kansas, had published The Story of a Country Town, a book almost painfully overlooked and yet worthy to be mentioned with Wuthering Heights or Moby Dick for power and terror. Unlike those two it lacks locality, as if the bare, sunburned Kansas plain had no real depth, no mystery in itself, and could find no native motif but the smoldering discontent of that inarticulate frontier. Sternest, grimmest of American novels, it moves with the cold tread and the hard diction of a saga. No shallow mind could have conceived the blind, black, impossible passion of Joe Erring or have conducted it to the purgation and tranquillity which succeeds the catastrophe. Plainly, the author had deliberately hardened his heart against the too facile views of contemporary novelists. It is this stiffening of the conscience which goes with all the later naturalistic writers in America; they are polemic haters of the national optimism. Howe's early experiment was followed, not imitated, by a brilliant group of writers undoubtedly nearer to Zola than to Howells: Hamlin Garland, best in short stories, who stressed the sordid facts of Middle Western farm life and who spoke for the group in his volume of essays Crumbling Idols (1894); Henry Blake Fuller, who wrote The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani (1890) under the ægis of Charles Eliot Norton and then the realistic novel of Chicago, The CliffDwellers (1893); Harold Frederic, who after his lucid and accurate romance of the Mohawk, In the Valley (1890), followed Ambrose Bierce with energetic Civil War stories and later made a sensation with The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) and The Market-Place (1899); and the notable pair who promised much but died young, Stephen Crane (1871-1900) and Frank Norris (1870-1902). Crane was a genius who intensely admired Tolstoy and somewhat febrilely aimed at absolute truthfulness in his fiction. Maggie A Girl of the Streets (1896), written when he I See Book III, Chap. VI. 2 Ibid. Stephen Crane; Frank Norris 93 was but twenty-one, gave a horrible picture of a degenerate Irish family in New York and the tragedy of its eldest daughter; its violent plain speaking seemed very new when it appeared. Crane's great success, however, attended The Red Badge of Courage An Episode of the American Civil War (1895), a reconstruction, by a man who at the time of writing knew war only from books, of the mental states of a recruit when first under fire. A greater war has made the theme widely familiar, but Crane's performance still seems more than an amazingly clever tour de force; it is a real feat of the imagination. Norris had larger aims than Crane and on the whole achieved more, though no one of his books excels the Red Badge. He was one of the least sectional of American novelists, with a vision of his native land which attached him to the movement, then under discussion, to "continentalize" American literature by breaking up the parochial habits of the local colour school. He had a certain epic disposition, tended to vast plans, and conceived trilogies. His "Epic of the Wheat"-The Octopus (1901), The Pit (1903), and The Wolf (never written)-he thought of as the history of the cosmic spirit of wheat moving from the place of its production in California to the place of its consumption in Europe. Another trilogy to which he meant to give years of work would have centred about the battle of Gettysburg, one part for each day, and would have sought to present what Norris considered the American spirit as his Epic of the Wheat presented an impersonal force of nature. Such conceptions explain his grandiose manner and the passion of his naturalism, which he was even willing to call romanticism provided he could mean by it the search for truths deeper than the surface truths of orthodox realism. He had a strong vein of mysticism; he habitually occupied himself with "elemental " elemental" emotions. His heroes are nearly all violent men, wilful, passionate, combative; his heroines-thick-haired, large-armed women-are endowed with a rich and deep, if slow, vitality. Love in Norris's world is the mating of vikings and valkyries. Love, however, is not his sole concern. The Pacific and California novels, Moran of the Lady Letty (1898), Blix (1899), McTeague (1899), A Man's Woman (1900), as well as The Octopus, are full of ardently detailed actualities; The Pit is a valuable representation of a "corner" on the Chicago Board of Trade. In all these his eagerness to be truthful gave Norris a large energy, particularly in scenes of action, but his speed and vividness are not matched by his body and meaning. Much the same thing may be said of Jack London (1876– 1916), one or two of whose novels will likely outlast his short stories, important as they were in his best days, and close kin as his stories and novels are in subjects, style, and temper. Norris's "elemental" in London became "abysmal" passions. He carried the cult of "red-blood" to its logical, if not ridiculous, extreme. And yet he has a sort of Wild-Irish power that will not go unnoted. John Barleycorn (1913) is an amazingly candid confession of London's own struggles with alcohol. Martin Eden (1909), also autobiographical, though assumed names appear in it, recounts the terrific labours by which in three years London made himself from a common sailor into a popular author. The Sea-Wolf (1904) reveals at its fullest his appetite for cold ferocity in its record of the words and deeds of Wolf Larsen, a Nietzschean, Herculean, Satanic ship captain, whose incredible strength terminates credibly in sudden paralysis and impotence. Most popular of all, and best equipped for survival, is The Call of the Wild (1903), the story of a dog stolen from civilization to draw a sledge in Alaska, eventually to escape from human control and go back to the wild as leader of a pack of wolves. As in most animal tales, the narrative is sentimentalized, but there runs through it, along with its deadly perils and adventures, an effective sensitiveness to the Alaskan wastes, a robust, moving, genuine current of poetry. A real, however narrow, gulf separates London from such colleagued naturalists as Richard Harding Davis, better in short stories than in novels, and often romantic, or even from David Graham Phillips (1867-1911), whose bitter war upon society and "Society" culminated in the two volumes of Susan Lenox (1917), the only extended portrait of an American courtesan No one of them all had quite London's boyish energy, quite his romantic audacity in naturalism. And the tendency of fiction is just at present away from the world of "elemental" excitement to more civil phases of life, a newer form of realism having succeeded alike the episode of naturalism and the I See Book III, Chap. vi. 2 Ibid. Contemporary Tendencies 95 At the same time antithetical episode of historical romance. there are still novels of many types: domestic and sentimental romances; tales of wild adventure; stories written to exploit a single character in the tradition of F. Hopkinson Smith's' Colonel Carter of Cartersville (1891), Edward Noyes Westcott's David Harum (1898), and Owen Wister's The Virginian (1905); a few records of exotic life at the ends of the earth; narratives, nicely skirting salaciousness, of "fast" New York; affectionate, idealized portrayals, as in the work of James Lane Allen for Kentucky, of particular states or neighbourhoods. But no tendency quite so clearly prevails as romance in the thirties, sentimentalism in the fifties, realism in the eighties, or naturalism at the turn of the century. 1 See Book III, Chap. VI. HE Η CHAPTER XII Henry James ENRY JAMES was born an American and died an Englishman. He might never have formally transferred his allegiance had it not been for the War and our long delay in espousing the Allied cause. He became a British subject in July, 1915. The transfer had, however, been virtually made many decades earlier. Of the two ruling passions of James, one was surely his passion for "Europe." Of this infatuation the reader will find the most explicit record in his fragmentary book of reminiscences, The Middle Years (1917), record and whimsical apology which may well serve the needs of other Americans pleading indulgence for the same offence. James loved Europe, as do all "passionate pilgrims," for the thick-crowding literary and historical associations which made it seem more alive than the more bustling scene this side the water. Going to breakfast in London was an adventure, being not, as at Harvard, merely one of the incidents of boarding, but a social function, calling up "the ghosts of Byron and Sheridan and Scott and Moore and Lockhart and Rogers and tutti quanti." In America, James had never so taken breakfast except once with a Boston lady frankly reminiscent of London, and once with Howells fresh from his Venetian post, and so "all in the Venetian manner." Everybody in Victorian London had, as he calls it, references-that is, associations, appeal to the historic imagination; and, as he humorously confesses, "a reference was then, to my mind, whether in a person or an object, the most becoming ornament possible. It was "with bated breath" that he approached the paintings of Titian in the old National Gallery; and when, in the presence of the Bacchus and Ariadne, he became aware, |