A History of American Literature

In the field of realism which is concerned with a criticism of institutional life, Mrs. Deland wrote a memorable book in “John Ward, Preacher” (1888). This was the same year in which Mrs. Humphry Ward’s “Robert Elsmere” appeared. Both were indexes to the religious unrest of the whole Victorian period, – an unrest apparent in America since the rise of the Unitarians and the activities of the Transcendentalists, and recorded in such novels as Mrs. Stowe’s “Oldtown Folks” and Bayard Taylor’s “Hannah Thurston,” as well as in the underlying currents of Holmes’s Breakfast-Table series. The explicit story of John Ward is the tragic history of his love and marriage with Helen Jaffrey. The implicit story is based on the insufficiency of religious dogma detached from life. Mrs. Deland’s convictions resulted later in the genuine strength of her best single character, Dr. Lavendar, and in the subordinate religious motif of “The Iron Woman” (1910) (see p. 307). In recent years the narrative treatment of the problem to attract widest attention has been Churchill’s “The Inside of the Cup” (1913), a story which one is tempted to believe gained its reading more from its author’s reputation and the prevailing interest in the problem than from its artistic excellence. Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Ward wrote out of long experience in life; Mr. Churchill seems rather to have felt the need of introducing this theme into his many-volumed exposition of America and to have read up on the literature of the subject with the same thoroughness that characterized his preparation for more strictly historical stories.

The novels of economic life are far more numerous and more urgent in tone. One of the earliest was John Hay’s “The Breadwinners” (1883). It is significant that this appeared anonymously, the talented poet and politician preferring not to be known as a story-teller. The labor unrest of the early 80’s disturbed him. Desire for education seemed to result unfortunately, and with a very clear impatience Mr. Hay expounded the hardships of wealth in the midst of a labor uprising. To go to the root of the difficulty did not seem to occur to him. Shortly after this early industrial novel Mr. Howells was to attack the problem in a broader and deeper way (see pp. 418–421). And while Howells was still making his successive approaches a whole succession of younger men joined the assault. With many of them there was no such vital experience as their senior had passed through; they were rather writing as journalists and utilizing the novel, sometimes clumsily and often feverishly. Few have done work which could at all compare with that of Frank Norris (1870–1902). His interrupted trilogy – an epic of the wheat – fulfilled the promise of his early efforts, “Vendover and the Brute” and “McTeague,” and made his early death the occasion of a deep loss. Of these three novels “The Octopus” (1901) forms the story of a crop of wheat and deals with the war between the wheat-grower and the railroad trust; the second, “The Pit” (1903), is a story of the middleman; the third, “The Wolf” (never written), was to have dealt with the consumption in Europe. Norris’s aspiration was no less than that of his own character Presley, the poet. “He strove for the diapason, the great song which should embrace in itself a whole epoch, a complete era, the voice of an entire people…” With a great imaginative grasp he conceived of the wheat as an enormous, primitive force.

The Wheat that had killed Cressler, that had ingulfed Jadwin’s fortune and all but unseated reason itself; the Wheat that had intervened like a great torrent to drag her husband from her side and drown him in the roaring vortices of the Pit, had passed on, resistless, along its ordered and predetermined courses from West to East, like a vast Titanic flood, had passed, leaving Death and Ruin in its wake, but bearing Life and Prosperity to the crowded cities and centres of Europe.

The number and the temper of stories written without Norris’s breadth of vision or skill brought down on many of their authors the epithet of “muck-raker” in common with the sensational writers of magazine exposures. Among the saner and, consequently, more effective purpose novels the writings of Winston Churchill and Brand Whitlock have helped to offset the shrill cries of Upton Sinclair and Jack London.

The American novels which center about sex and the family have passed through rapid changes during the twentieth century. In 1902 Mr. Bliss Perry, discussing tendencies of American novelists in his “A Study of Prose Fiction,” declared that the American novel was free from equivocal morality, that “people who want the sex-novel, and want it prepared with any literary skill, have to import it from across the water,” and concluded with the confident assertion that while American fiction “may not be national, and may not be great, it will have at least the negative virtue of being clean.” A few pages later in the same chapter he made an observing comment of which he failed to see the implication when he noted that conversation between writers of fiction was likely to center about men like Turgenieff, and Tolstoi, Flaubert and Daudet, Björnson and D’Annunzio. The influence of these men was soon to be felt, both directly and through the medium of Englishmen from the generation of Hardy to that of Wells and Galsworthy. And within a dozen years it had extended so far that the National Institute of Arts and Letters went on record in warning and protest against the morbid insistency of an increasing number of younger writers. This wave was a symptom not only of a literary influence but, more deeply, of the world-wide attempt to re-estimate the rights and duties and privileges of womankind. There are few subjects on which people of recent years have done more thinking, and few on which they have arrived at less certain conclusions. With the collapse of the great “conspiracy of silence” that has surrounded certain aspects of personal and family life, it has been natural for the present generation to fall into the same errors into which Whitman had fallen. Naturally, too, the evil thinker seized on the occasion for evil speech. There has been every shade of expression from blatant wantonness to high-minded and self-respecting honesty. Thus we can account for Mr. Theodore Dreiser, who seems to feel that freedom of speech should be gratefully acknowledged by indulgence to the farthest extreme. And thus we can account for Mr. Ernest Poole, who, in “His Family,” has presented an extraordinarily fine summary of the broad and perplexing theme.

The English novel is nearing the end of its second century of influence. It is a constant in literature which will probably attract more readers than any other single form. Yet it will have its times of greater and lesser popularity, and it seems to have passed the height of a wave shortly after 1900. First the drama came forward with a new challenge to serious attention, and of late poetry has reëstablished itself as a living language.

BOOK LIST

General References

Besant, Sir Walter. The Art of Fiction. 1884.

Burton, Richard. Forces in Fiction. 1902.

Crawford, F. Marion. The Novel: what it is. 1903.

Cross, W. L. The Development of the English Novel. 1899.

Fiske, H. S. Provincial Types in American Fiction. 1903.

Garland, Hamlin. Crumbling Idols. 1894.

Howells, W. D. Criticism and Fiction. 1895.

Howells, W. D. Heroines of Fiction. 1901.

James, Henry. The Art of Fiction, in Partial Portraits.

James, Henry. The New Novel, in Notes on Novelists. 1914.

Lanier, Sidney. The English Novel. 1883.

Matthews, Brander. Aspects of Fiction. 1896.

Matthews, Brander. The Historical Novel and Other Essays. 1901.

Norris, Frank. The Responsibilities of the Novelist. 1901.

Pattee, F. L. American Literature since 1870, chaps. xi, xii, xvii. 1916.

Perry, Bliss. A Study of Prose Fiction, chap. xiii. 1902.

Phelps, W. L. Essays on Modern Novelists. (Howells, Mark Twain.) 1910.

Individual Works

The field is so extensive that no lists of works by the authors mentioned are included here. The novels selected for reading can be taken from the specific references in the text. All the works are in print and easily available.

Magazine Articles

The magazine articles on fiction are extremely numerous. From among those since 1900 the following are of special interest:

1900–1904. New Element in Modern Fiction. N. Boyce. Bookman, Vol. XIII, p. 149. April, 1901.

Novel and the Short Story. G. Atherton. Bookman, Vol. XVII, pp. 36–37. March, 1903.

Novel and the Theater. Nation, Vol. LXXII, pp. 210–211. March 14, 1901.

1905–1909. Confessions of a Best-Seller. Atlantic, Vol. CIV, pp. 577–585. November, 1909.

Convention of Romance. Bookman, Vol. XXVI, pp. 266–267. November, 1907.

Humor and the Heroine. Atlantic, Vol. XCV, pp. 852–854. June, 1905.

Mob Spirit in Literature. H. D. Sedgwick. Atlantic, Vol. XCVI, pp. 9–15. July, 1905.

Purpose Novel. F. T. Cooper. Bookman, Vol. XXII, pp. 131–132. October, 1905.

1910–1914. American and English Novelists. Nation, Vol. XCVIII, pp. 422–423. April 16, 1914.

American backgrounds for fiction:

Georgia. W. N. Harben. Bookman, Vol. XXXVIII, pp. 186–192. October, 1913.

North Carolina. T. Dixon. Bookman, Vol. XXXVIII, pp. 511–514. January, 1914.

Tennessee. M. T. Daviess. Bookman, Vol. XXXVIII, pp. 394–399. December, 1913.

North Country of New York. I. Bacheller. Bookman, Vol. XXXVIII, pp. 624–628. February, 1914.

Pennsylvania Dutch. H. R. Martin. Bookman, Vol. XXXVIII, pp. 244–247. November, 1913.

American Novel in England. G. Atherton. Bookman, Vol. XXX, pp. 633–640. February, 1910.

Recent Reflections of a Novel-Reader. Atlantic, Vol. CXII, pp. 689–701. November, 1913. Vol. CXIII, pp. 490–500. April, 1914.

Big Movements in Fiction. F. T. Cooper. Bookman, Vol. XXXIII, pp. 80–82. March, 1911.

Characters in Recent Fiction. M. Sherwood. Atlantic, Vol. CIX, pp. 672–684. May, 1912.

Fault-Findings of a Novel-Reader. Atlantic, Vol. CV, pp. 14–23. January, 1910.

Morality in Fiction and Some Recent Novels. F. T. Cooper. Bookman, Vol. XXXVIII, pp. 666–672. February, 1914.

Newest Woman. K. F. Gerould. Atlantic, Vol. CIX, pp. 606–611. May, 1912.

Relation of the Novel to the Present Social Unrest. Bookman, Vol. XL, pp. 276–303. November, 1914.

Art in Fiction. E. Phillpotts. Bookman, Vol. XXXI, pp. 17–18. March, 1910.

1915. American Style in American Fiction. F. F. Kelly. Bookman, Vol. XLI, pp. 299–302. May, 1915.

Free Fiction. H. S. Canby. Atlantic, Vol. CXVI, pp. 60–68. June, 1915.

Advance of the English Novel. W. L. Phelps. Bookman, Vol. XLII, pp. 128–134, 381–388, 389–396. October-December, 1915.

Literary Merchandise. G. Atherton. New Republic, Vol. III, pp. 223–224. July 3, 1915.

1916. New York of the Novelists: a New Pilgrimage. A. B. Maurice, Bookman, Vol. XLII, pp. 20–41, 165–192, 301–315, 436–452, 569–589, 696–713. September, 1915-February, 1916.

Realism and Recent American Fiction. H. W. Boynton. Nation, Vol. CII, pp. 380–382. April 6, 1916.

Russian View of American Literature. A. Yarmolinsky. Bookman, Vol. XLIV, pp. 44–48. September, 1916.

Recent Reflections of a Novel-Reader. Atlantic, Vol. CXVII, pp. 632–642. May, 1916.

Sex in Fiction. Nation, Vol. CI, p. 716. Dec. 16, 1915.

Woman’s Mastery of the Story. G. M. Stratton. Atlantic, Vol. CXVII, pp. 668–676. May, 1916.

1917. Analysis of Fiction in the United States, 1911–1916. F. E. Woodward. Bookman, Vol. XLV, pp. 187–191. April, 1917.

Apotheosis of the Worker in Modern Fiction. L. M. Field. Bookman, Vol. XLV, pp. 89–92. March, 1917.

New Orthodoxy in Fiction. L. M. Field. Bookman, Vol. XLV, pp. 175–178. April, 1917.

Outstanding Novels of the Year. H. W. Boynton. Nation, Vol. CV, pp. 599–601. Nov. 29, 1917.

Sixteen Years of Fiction. A. B. Maurice. Bookman, Vol. XLIV, pp. 484–492. January, 1917.

CHAPTER XXVIII

CONTEMPORARY DRAMA

From 1865 to 1900 the American drama occupied a place of so little artistic importance in American life that the literary historians have ignored it. There is no word about it in the substantial volumes by Richardson and Wendell, none in the ordinary run of textbooks, not a mention of playwright, producer, actor, or stage even in the four-hundred-odd pages of Pattee’s “American Literature since 1870.” This silence cannot, of course, be accounted for by any conspiracy among the historians; it must be acknowledged that in itself the period had almost no dramatic significance. Quinn’s collection of twenty-five “Representative American Plays” includes only three produced between these dates. The basic reason for this is that literary conditions did not induce or encourage play-writing in the English-speaking world on either side of the Atlantic. The greatest artistry was expressing itself in poetry, and in America no major poet but Longfellow attempted even “closet drama.” The greatest genius in story-telling was let loose in the channel of fiction, and many of the successful novels were given a second incarnation in play form. The names that stand out in stage history in these years are the names of controlling managers, like Lester Wallack and Augustin Daly, or of players, like Charlotte Cushman, Booth, Barrett, Jefferson, and Mansfield; and the writers of plays – encouraged by stage demands rather than by literary conditions – were the theatrical successors of Dunlap and Payne (see pp. 94–96) – men like Dion Boucicault (1822?–1890) with his hundred and twenty-four plays, and Bronson Howard (1842–1908) with his less numerous but no more distinguished array of stage successes. Side by side with these, and quite on a level with them, rose one eminent critic of stagecraft and the drama, William Winter (1836–1917).

With the last decade of the nineteenth century, however, a new generation of playwrights began to win recognition – men who knew literature in its relation to the other arts and who wrote plays out of the fullness of their experience and the depth of their convictions, hoping to reach the public with their plays but not concerned chiefly with immediate “box-office” returns. The movement started in England and on the Continent and – as we can now see – in America as well, but the traditional American neglect of American literature38 led the first alert critics on this side the Atlantic to lay all their emphasis on writers of other nationalities. Thus in 1905 James Huneker’s “Iconoclasts” discussed Norwegian, French, German, Russian, Italian, Belgian, and English dramatists. E. E. Hale’s “Dramatists of To-day” of the same year dealt with four from Huneker’s list, substituted one Frenchman, and added two Englishmen. This selection was quite defensible, for the significant contemporary plays which reached the stage came from these sources. But by 1910 the drift of things was suggested by the contents of Walter Pritchard Eaton’s “At the New Theatre and Others.” In this book, of twenty-three plays reviewed, ten were by American authors, and in the third section, composed of essays related to the theater, two of the chief units were discussions of Clyde Fitch and William Winter. And the dedication of Eaton’s book is perhaps the single item of greatest historical significance, for it gives due credit to Professor George P. Baker of Harvard as “Founder in that institution of a pioneer course for the study of dramatic composition” and as “inspiring leader in the movement for a better appreciation among educated men of the art of the practical theater.”

The field into which we are led is so broad and so near that in a brief excursion we can undertake only a rough classification of the main products and the soil in which they are growing. Such a classification may be found if we consider in turn first the better play written for a better theater, which began to appear about 1890, then the various new types of theater which grew from the people’s interest instead of from managerial enterprise, and, finally, the literary drama in poetry or prose which profits from the coöperation of actor and stage-manager, but can survive in print unaided.

“The movement for a better appreciation among educated men of the art of the practical theatre,” although led by one college professor, was itself a symptom of fresh developments in the art to which he addressed himself. Omitting – but not ignoring – the rise of the modern school of European dramatists in the 1890’s, we must be content for the moment to note that this decade brought into view in America several men who were more than show-makers, even though they were honestly occupied in making plays that the public would care to spend their money for. The significant facts about these playwrights are that they gave over the imitation and adaptation of French plays, returned to American dramatic material, and achieved results that are readable as well as actable. Their immediate forerunners were Steele MacKaye (1842–1894) and James A. Herne (1840–1901) – the former devotedly active as a teacher of budding players and as a student of stage technique, the latter the quiet realist of “Shore Acres” and other less-known plays of simple American life. Coming into their first prominence at this time were Augustus Thomas (1859-) and Clyde Fitch (1865–1909).

They both appeared as theatrical craftsmen of the new generation, and like their prototypes in America, Dunlap and Payne (see pp. 96–98), they wrote abundantly, for audiences rather than for readers, and with definite actors and actresses in mind as they devised situations and composed lines. Clyde Fitch in twenty years wrote and produced on the stage thirty-three plays and adapted and staged twenty-three more – an immense output. In the first ten years the most important were all built on historical themes: “Beau Brummel,” “Nathan Hale,” and “Barbara Frietchie.” It is easy to see and to say that in writing these he was carrying on the tradition of Bronson Howard with his Civil War melodramas, – a half truth, however, since “Beau Brummel” in no way fits the generalization, and other plays of the decade were on contemporary social life. In the second ten years the keynote was struck with “The Climbers,” a social satire on a shallow city woman and her two daughters whose social ambition deadens them to any fine impulses or natural emotions. In the long roster of Fitch’s successes a few constant traits are obvious. He built his stories well, set them carefully, combined the resources of the playwright who knows how to devise a “situation” with those of the stage-manager who knows how to present it, and cast his stories into simple, rapid-fire, clever dialogue. He took advantage of up-to-date material for the superficial dress of his plays, introducing the background of latest allusion, recently coined turns of phrase, the newest songs, the quips and turns of fashion. And he went beneath the surface to the undercurrents of human motive as in the wifely constancy in “The Stubbornness of Geraldine,” the jealousy of “The Girl with the Green Eyes,” and the weak mendacity of Becky in “The Truth.” Fitch was never profound, never sought to be; but he was deservedly popular, for he combined no little skill with an alert sense of human values in everyday life, and he brought an artistic conscience to his work. Because he was so successful his influence on other dramatists has been far-reaching; and those who have been neither too small nor too great to learn from him have learned no little on how to write a play.

Mr. Augustus Thomas has lived in the atmosphere of the theater from boyhood. He began writing plays at fourteen, was directing an amateur company at seventeen, and had his first New York success in his twenty-eighth year. Since 1887 he has been a professional playwright; he has nearly fifty productions to his credit, and he is now art director of the Charles Frohman interests. His first widely known works were the plays of states: “Alabama” (1891), “In Mizzoura” (1893), and “Arizona” (1899) – plays which exerted the same general appeal as “Shenandoah” and “Barbara Frietchie.” As a practical man of the theater he adapted and worked over material, dramatizing novels of Mrs. Burnett, Hopkinson Smith, and Townsend. His attractive “Oliver Goldsmith” was built not only around the character of that whimsical man of letters but included as its own best portion an act out of the hero’s play “The Good-Natured Man.” With the kind of adaptability which belongs equally to the practical man of the theater and to the enterprising journalist, he undertook in time the type of play that deals with questions or problems of modern interest. The same current of speculation that led Mark Twain to write his essay on “Mental Telepathy” and Hamlin Garland his book on “The Shadow World” accounts for Thomas’s “The Witching Hour” (1907), which interweaves the strands of hereditary influence and mental suggestion; and he contributed his word on the complex problems of the modern family in “As a Man Thinks” (1911). Up to 1917 he had written and adapted forty-six plays, of which eleven had been published after their production, but his work of real distinction belongs to the period opening with “The Witching Hour.” In his later plays he has coupled his highly developed ability to tell a story with a vital feeling for the positive values in life. In “The Harvest Moon” he makes a playwright-character say, “I would willingly give the rest of my life to go back and take from my plays every word that has made men less happy, less hopeful, less kind.” And in “The Witching Hour” he declares through Jack Brookfield the text of that and succeeding plays, “You’re a child of the everlasting God and nothing on the earth or under it can harm you in the slightest degree” – a text which, said of the soul, is immortally true.

In a short chapter it is impossible to discuss in detail any other of the play-writers who have done with less applause but with no less devotion the kind of writing represented by the best of Fitch and Thomas; and it would be invidious to attempt a mere list of the others, as if a mention of their names would be a sop to their pride. The case must rest here with the statement that these two men were the leaders of an increasing group and that the desire to compose more skillful and more worthy plays was paralleled by a revival of respect for the modern drama and the modern stage. This leads to the middle section of our survey, and turns from the drama itself to the fifteen-year struggle for possession of the American stage – the actual “boards” on which the plays could be presented. It is as dramatic as any play, this story of the conflict between intelligent idealism, – whether in playwright, actor or theatergoer, and commercial greed, – and it is far from concluded, though a happy dénouement seems to be in sight.

The first step has already been mentioned: the development of a student attitude toward the contemporary play and its production. Professor Baker at Harvard and Professor Matthews at Columbia were looked at by some with wonder and by others with amused doubt when they began as teachers to divide their attention between the ancient and the modern stage. Yet as the study progressed their students became not only intelligent theatergoers but constructive contributors, as critics and creators, to the literature of the stage; and then in the natural order of events the whole student body came to realize that the older drama should be reduced to its proper place and restored to it; that it was an interesting chapter in literary and social history because it was not a closed chapter, but a preliminary to the events of the present. At the same time modest but important beginnings were being made in the education of the actor, and men like Franklin Sargent, President of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, opened the way to a professional training for actors that would compare with the training demanded of and by the singer, painter, or sculptor. These beginnings were full of promise, but the promise was to be long held in abeyance by the machinations of the theatrical syndicate.