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Outlines of English and American Literature
Some Recent Novelists (Realism)
by Long, William J.
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There is a difference between our earlier and later
fiction which becomes apparent when we compare specific examples. As a type
of the earlier novel take Cooper's The Spy or Longfellow's
Hyperion or Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables or
Simms's Katherine Walton or Cooke's The Virginia Comedians,
and read it in connection with a recent novel, such as Howells's Annie
Kilburn or Miss Jewett's Deephaven or Harold Frederick's
Illumination or James Lane Allen's The Reign of Law or Frank
Norris's The Octopus. Disregarding the important element of style,
we note that the earlier novels have a distant background in time or space;
that their chief interest lies in the story they have to tell; that they
take us far away from present reality into regions where people are more
impressive and sentiments more exalted than in our familiar, prosaic world.
The later novels interest us less by the story than by the analysis of
character; they deal with human life as it is here and now, not as we
imagine it to have been elsewhere or in a golden age. In a word, our later
novels are realistic in purpose, and in this respect they are in marked
contrast with our novels of an earlier age, which are nearly all of the
romantic kind. [Footnote: In the above comparison we have ignored a large
number of recent novels that are quite as romantic as any written before
the war. Romance is still, as in all past ages, more popular than realism:
witness the millions of readers of Lew Wallace, E. P. Roe and other modern
romancers.]
The realistic movement in American fiction began, as we have noted, with
the short-story writers; and presently the most talented of these writers,
having learned the value of real scenes and characters, turned to the novel
and produced works having the double interest of romance and realism; that
is, they told an old romantic tale of love or heroism and set it amid
scenes or characters that were typical of American life. Miss Jewett's
novels of northern village life, for example, are even finer than her short
stories in the same field. The same criticism applies to Miss Murfree with
her novels of mountaineer life in Tennessee, to James Lane Allen with his
novels of his native Kentucky, and to many another recent novelist who
tells a brave tale of his own people. We call these, in the conventional
way, novels of New England or the South or the West; in reality they are
novels of humanity, of the old unchanging tragedies or comedies of human
life, which seem more true or real to us because they appear in a familiar
setting.
There is another school of realism which subordinates the story element,
which avoids as untrue all unusual or heroic incidents and deals with
ordinary men or women; and of this school William Dean Howells is a
conspicuous example. Judging him by his novels alone it would be difficult
to determine his rank; but judging him by his high aim and distinguished
style (a style remarkable for its charm and purity in an age too much
influenced by newspaper slang and smartness) he is certainly one of the
best of our recent prose writers. Since his first modest volume appeared in
1860 he has published many poems, sketches of travel, appreciations of
literature, parlor comedies, novels,--an immense variety of writings; but
whatever one reads of his sixty-odd books, whether Venetian Life or
A Boys' Town, one has the impression of an author who lives for
literature, who puts forth no hasty or unworthy work, and who aims steadily
to be true to the best traditions of American letters.
In middle life Howells turned definitely to fiction and wrote, among
various other novels, A Woman's Reason, The Minister's
Charge, A Modern Instance and The Rise of Silas Lapham.
These are all realistic in that they deal frankly with contemporary life;
but in their plots and conventional endings they differ but little from the
typical romance. [Footnote: Several of Howells's earlier novels deal with
New England life, but superficially and without understanding. However
minutely they depict its manners or mannerisms they seldom dip beneath the
surface. If the reader wants not the body but the soul of New England, he
must go to some other fiction writer, to Sarah Orne Jewett, for example, or
to Rose Terry Cooke] Then Howells fell under the influence of Tolstoi and
other European realists, and his later novels, such as Annie
Kilburn, A Hazard of New Fortunes and The Quality of
Mercy, are rather aimless studies of the speech, dress, mannerisms and
inanities of American life with precious little of its ideals,--which are
the only things of consequence, since they alone endure. He appears here as
the photographer rather than the painter of American life, and his work has
the limited interest of another person's family album.
Another realist of a very different kind is Samuel L. Clemens (1835-1910),
who is more widely known by his pseudonym of Mark Twain. He grew up, he
tells us, in "a loafing, down-at-the-heels town in Missouri"; he was
educated "on the river," and in most of his work he attempted to deal with
the rough-and-ready life which he knew intimately at first hand. His
Life on the Mississippi, a vivid delineation of river scenes and
characters, is perhaps his best work, or at least the most true to his aim
and his experience. Roughing It is another volume from his store of
personal observation, this time in the western mining camps; but here his
realism goes as far astray from truth as any old romance in that it
exaggerates even the sensational elements of frontier life.
The remaining works of Mark Twain are, with one or two exceptions, of very
doubtful value. Their great popularity for a time was due largely to the
author's reputation as a humorist,--a strange reputation it begins to
appear, for he was at heart a pessimist, an iconoclast, a thrower of
stones, and with the exception of his earliest work, The Celebrated
Jumping Frog (1867), which reflected some rough fun or horseplay, it is
questionable whether the term "humorous" can properly be applied to any of
his books. Thus the blatant Innocents Abroad is not a work of humor
but of ridicule (a very different matter), which jeers at travelers who
profess admiration for the scenery or institutions of Europe,--an
admiration that was a sham to Mark Twain because he was incapable of
understanding it. So with the grotesque capers of A Connecticut Yankee
at King Arthur's Court, with the sneering spirit of The Man that
Corrupted Hadleyburg, with the labored attempts to be funny of
Adam's Diary and with other alleged humorous works; readers of the
next generation may ask not what we found to amuse us in such works but how
we could tolerate such crudity or cynicism or bad taste in the name of
American humor.
The most widely read of Mark Twain's works are Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn. The former, a glorification of a liar and his
dime-novel adventures, has enough descriptive power to make the story
readable, but hardly enough to disguise its sensationalism, its
lawlessness, its false standards of boy life and American life. In
Huckleberry Finn, a much better book, the author depicts the life of
the Middle West as seen by a homeless vagabond. With a runaway slave as a
companion the hero, Huck Finn, drifts down the Mississippi on a raft,
meeting with startling experiences at the hands of quacks and imposters of
every kind. One might suppose, if one took this picaresque record
seriously, that a large section of our country was peopled wholly by knaves
and fools. The adventures are again of a sensational kind; but the
characters are powerfully drawn, and the vivid pictures of the mighty river
by day or night are among the best examples of descriptive writing in our
literature.
Crane and Norris
Still another type of realism is suggested by the names Stephen Crane and
Frank Norris. These young writers, influenced by the French novelist Zola,
condemned the old romance as false and proclaimed, somewhat grandly at
first, that they would tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the
truth. Then they straightway forgot that health and moral sanity are the
truth of life, and proceeded to deal with degraded or degenerate characters
as if these were typical of humanity. Their earlier works are studies of
brutality, miscalled realism; but later Crane wrote his Red Badge of
Courage (a rather wildly imaginative story of the Civil War), and
Norris produced works of real power in The Octopus and The
Pit, one a prose epic of the railroad, the other of a grain of wheat
from the time it is sown in the ground until it becomes a matter of good
food or of crazy speculation. There is an impression of vastness, of
continental breadth and sweep, in these two novels which sets them apart
from all other fiction of the period.
The flood of dialect stories which appeared after 1876 may seem at first
glance to be mere variations of Bret Harte's local-color stories, but they
are something more and better than that. The best of them--such, for
example, as Page's In Ole Virginia or Rowland Robinson's Danvis
Folk--are written on the assumption that we can never understand a man,
that is, the soul of a man, unless we know the very language in which he
expresses his thought or feeling. These dialect stories, therefore, are
intimate studies of American life rather than of local speech or manners.
Harris
Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) is not our best writer of dialect stories
but only the happy and most fortunate man who wrote Uncle Remus
(1880), and wrote it, by the way, as part of his day's work as a newspaper
man, without a thought that it was a masterpiece, a work of genius. The
first charm of the book is that it fascinates children with its frolicsome
adventures of Brer Rabbit, Brer Tarrypin, Brer B'ar, Brer Fox and the
wonderful Tar Baby; the second, that it combines in a remarkable way a
primitive or universal with a local and intensely human interest. Thus,
almost everybody is interested in folklore, especially in the animal
stories which are part of the tradition of every primitive tribe; but
folklore, as commonly written, is not a branch of fiction but of science.
Before it can enter the golden door of literature it must find or create
some human character who interests us not by his stories but by his
humanity; and Harris furnished this character in the person of Uncle Remus,
a very lovable old plantation negro, drawn with absolute fidelity to life.
Other novelists have portrayed a negro in fiction, but Harris did a more
original work by creating his Brer Rabbit. In the adventures of this
happy-go-lucky creature, with his childishness and humor, we have the
symbol not of any one negro but of the whole race of negroes as the author
knew them intimately in a condition of servitude. The creation of these two
original characters, as real as Poor Richard or Natty Bumppo and far more
fascinating, is one of the most notable achievements of American fiction.
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