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. I Much the same thing may be said of Jack London (18761916), 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 courNo 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. tesan 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. H CHAPTER XII Henry James ENRY JAMES was born an American and died an Of ferred 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." 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, at the same moment, of the auburn head and eager talk of Swinburne, his cup for that day ran over. With the best of introductions to the Rome of Story, the London of Lord Houghton, the highest ambition of James was to establish "connections" of his own with a world in which everything so bristled with connections; and it is he who lets us know with what joy he found himself, on the occasion of his first visit to George Eliot, running for the doctor in her service, since thereby "a relation had been dramatically determined." But it is only in the light of his other ruling passion that we can rightly understand the force of his passion for Europe. Even more rooted was his love for art, the art of representation. All his pilgriming n London and elsewhere was by way of collecting a fund of material to draw upon "as soon as ever one should seriously get to work." And is it surprising that he should have been impressed with the greater eligibility of the foreign material; that his impressions of New York and Boston seemed to him "negative" or "thin" or "flat" beside the corresponding impressions of London? The old world was one which had been lived in and had taken on the expressive character of places long associated with human use. It was not simply the individual object of observation, but the "cross-references"; or, again, the association of one object with another and with the past, making up altogether a "composition." Whatever person or setting caught his attention, it was always because it "would fall into a picture or a scene." Of the heroine of The American, a young French woman of rank, the hero observed that she was "a kind of historical formation." And along with his material, James found abroad a favourable air in which to do his work. There he found those stimulating contacts, there he could observe from within those movements in the world of art, which were of such prime importance for his own development. Lambert Strether, in The Ambassadors, represents the deprivations of a man of letters, strikingly suggestive in many ways of James himself, condemned to labour in the provincial darkness of "Woollett, Massachusetts.' In all this our American author seems identified with anything but the American scene; and the case is not altered when we consider his stories on the side of form. His form is not American, nor his preoccupation with form. It is as VOL. III-7 strictly international as that of Poe. James was a profound admirer of Hawthorne; but so was he an admirer of Balzac and of George Sand, and it is probably to later models than any of these that he owes whatever is most characteristic in his technique. There is at any rate nothing here drawn from American sources rather than from European; nothing which we can claim as our production. Yet we have reasons for our claim upon him. This very passion for Europe, as he has exhibited it in himself and in so many of his creatures, this European "adventure" of Lambert Strether and Isabel Archer (of The Portrait of a Lady)— what more purely American product can be conceived? Even to the conscientiousness with which young James did his London sightseeing, mindful of his own feeble health, which threatened to cut it short, and above all mindful "that what he was doing, could he but put it through, would be intimately good for him!" Altogether his theme turned out to be quite as much American character as European setting. We must not forget how predominantly his novels, and how frequently his short stories, have for their subject Americans,-Americans abroad, or even Americans at home seen in the light of foreign observation. In this connection the novels in particular may be divided into three groups, falling chronologically into three periods. In the first period, extending from Roderick Hudson to The Bostonians, 1875 to 1885, the leading characters are invariably Americans, though the scene is half the time abroad. In the second period, from The Princess Casamassima to The Sacred Fount, 1885 to 1901, the novels confine themselves rather strictly to English society. In the third period, from The Wings of the Dove to the novels left unfinished at the author's death, 1902 to 1917, James returned to his engrossing, and by far his most interesting, theme of Americans in Paris or Venice or London. Not a very original contribution to literature is the American scene itself-the New York of Washington Square (1881), the Boston of The Europeans (1878) and The Bostonians; and none of these novels was included by James in the New York Edition. His American settings are but palely conceived; and his figures do not find here the proper background to bring them out and set off their special |