History of American Literature Part 41

His strongest novels are _A Modern Instance_ (1882), _The Rise of Silas Lapham_ (1885), _The Minister's Charge_ (1886), _Indian Summer_ (1886), and _A Hazard of New Fortunes_ (1889). These belong to the middle period of his career. Before this, his mastery of character portrayal had not culminated, and later, his power of artistic selection and repression was not so strictly exercised.

_The Rise of Silas Lapham_ is a story of the home life and business career of a self-made merchant, who has the customary braggadocio and lack of culture, but who possesses a substantial integrity at the root of his nature. The little shortcomings in social polish, so keenly felt by his wife and daughters, as they rise to a position due to great wealth, the small questions of decorum, and the details of business take up a large part of the reader's attention; but they are treated with such ease, naturalness, repressed humor, refinement of art, and truth in sketching provincial types of character, that the story is a triumph of realistic creation. _A Modern Instance_ is not so pleasant a book, but the attention is firmly held by the strong, realistic presentation of the jealousy, the boredom, the temptations, and the dishonesty exhibited in a household of a commonplace, ill-mated pair. _Indian Summer_ begins well, proceeds well, and ends well. It may be a trifle more conventional than the two other novels just mentioned, but it is altogether delightful. The conversations display keen insight into the heart of the young, imaginative girl and of the older woman and man. _The Minister's Charge_ is thoroughly individual.

The young boy seems so close to his readers that every detail in his life becomes important. The other people are also full of real blood, while the background is skillfully arranged to heighten the effect of the characters.

_A Hazard of New Fortunes_ would be decidedly improved if many pages were omitted, but it is full of lifelike characters, and it sometimes approaches the dramatic, in a way unusual with Howells.

In his effort to present life without any misleading ideas of heroism, beauty, or idyllic sweetness, Howells sometimes goes so far toward the opposite extreme as to write stories that seem to be filled with commonplace women, humdrum lives, and men like Northwick in _The Quality of Mercy_, of whom one of the characters says:--

"He was a mere creature of circ.u.mstances like the rest of us! His environment made him rich, and his environment made him a rogue.

Sometimes I think there _was_ nothing to Northwick except what happened to him."

But in such work as the five novels enumerated, Howells shows decided ability in portraying attractive characters, in making their faults human and as interesting as their virtues, in causing ordinary life to yield variety of incident and amusing scenes, and, finally, in engaging his characters in homelike, natural, self-revealing conversations, which are often spiced with wit.

Howells does not always have a plot, that is, a beginning, a climax, and a solution of all the questions suggested. He has, of course, a story, but he does not find it necessary to present the entire life of his characters, if he can accurately portray them by one or more incidents. After that purpose is accomplished, the story often ceases before the reader feels that a real ending has been reached.

Howells rarely startles or thrills; he usually both interests and convinces his readers by a straightforward presentation of everyday, well-known scenes and people. The strongest point in his art is the easy, natural way in which he seems to be retailing faithfully the facts exactly as they happened, without any juggling or rearranging on his part. His characters are so clearly presented that they do not remain in dreary outline, but emerge fully in rounded form, as moving, speaking, feeling beings. His keen insight into human frailties, his delicate, pervading humor, his skill in handling conversations, and his delightfully clear, easy, natural, and familiar style make him a realist of high rank and a worthy teacher of young writers.

HENRY JAMES, 1843-1916

[Ill.u.s.tration: HENRY JAMES]

The name most closely a.s.sociated with Howells is that of Henry James, who was born in New York. William James (1842-1910) the noted psychologist, was an older brother. Henry James is called an "international novelist" because he lived mostly abroad and laid the scenes of his novels in both Europe and America. His sympathy with England in the European war caused him to become a British subject in 1915, eight months before his death in 1916.

Like Howells, James was a leader in modern realistic fiction. His work has been called the "quintessence of realism." But instead of selecting, as Howells does, the well-known types of the average people, James prefers to study the ordinary mind in extraordinary situations, surroundings, and combinations. For this reason, his characters, while realistically presented, rarely seem well-known and obvious types.

James was the first American to succeed in the realistic short story, that is, the story stripped of the supernatural and romantic elements used by Hawthorne and Poe. James selects neither a commonplace nor a dramatic situation, but chooses some difficult and out-of-the-way theme, and clears it up with his keen, subtle, impressionistic art. _A Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim_, _The Madonna of the Future_, and _The Lesson of the Master_ are short stories that show his abstruse, unusual subject matter and his a.n.a.lytical methods.

He was a very prolific writer. He published as many as three volumes in twelve months. Year after year, with few exceptions, he brought out either a novel, a book of essays, or a volume of short stories. His most interesting novels are _Roderick Hudson_ (1875), _Daisy Miller: A Study_ (1878), _The Portrait of a Lady_ (1881), and _The Princess Casama.s.sima_ (1886).

_Daisy Miller_ is a brilliant study of the Italian experiences of an American girl of the unconventionally independent type. She is beautiful, frank, original, but whimsical, shallow, and headstrong. One minute she attracts, the next moment she repels. One feels baffled and provoked, but is held to the book by the spell of a writer who is clever, intellectual, a master of style, and a skilled scientist in dissecting human character. In _Roderick Hudson_ and _The Portrait of a Lady_, the characters are much more interesting, the situations are larger, the human emotion deeper, and the books richer from every point of view. These novels also show Americans in European surroundings. Isabel Archer and Ralph Touchet in _The Portrait of a Lady_ have qualities that deeply stir the admiration and emotions.

Every scene in which these characters appear adds to the pleasure in being able to know and love them, even though they are merely characters in a book.

Only a few such persons as these, so rich in the qualities of the heart, appear in James's novels. He has portrayed a greater variety of men and women than any other American writer, but they usually interest him for some other quality than their power to love and suffer. He is tempted to regard life from the intellectual viewpoint, as a problem, a game, and a panorama. He does not, like Hawthorne, enter into the sanctuary and become the hero, laying the lash of remorse upon his back. James stands off, a disinterested onlooker, and exhibits his characters critically, accurately, minutely, as they take their parts in the procession or game. Brilliant and faultless as the portraits are, they too frequently appear cold, pitiless renditions of life, often of life too trivial to seem worthy the searching study that he gives it. Ralph Touchet, Roderick Hudson, Isabel Archer, and Miss Light are sufficient to prove the tremendous power possessed by James to present the emotional side of life. Both in theory and practice, however, he usually prefers to remain the disinterested, impartial, detached spectator.

Like Howells, James does not depend upon a plot. There is little action in his works. The interest is psychological, and a chance word, an encounter on the street, even a look, may serve to change an att.i.tude of mind and affect the outcome.

The popular impression that James is impossible to understand and that he uses words to obscure his meaning is, of course, false, although in his later novels his style is extremely involved and often difficult to follow.

In such works as _The Wings of a Dove_ (1902) and _The Golden Bowl_ (1904), for example, there are long and intricate psychological explanations, which are most abstruse and confusing. It is this later work which has given rise to the common saying that William James wrote psychology like a novelist, and Henry James, novels like a psychologist.

Judged by his best work, however, such as _The Portrait of a Lady_ and _Roderick Hudson_, Henry James must be acknowledged a master of English style. His keen a.n.a.lytical mind is reflected in a brilliant, highly polished, and impressively incisive style. In a few perfectly selected words the subtlest thoughts are clearly revealed. In these masterpieces, the reader is constantly delighted by the artist's skill, which leads ever deeper into human motives after it would seem that the heart and mind could disclose no further secrets. Such skill shows a mastery of language rarely surpa.s.sed in fiction. At his best, James has a fineness and sureness of touch, and a command of perfectly fitting words, as well as elegance and grace in style.

MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN, 1862-

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN]

Mary Eleanor Wilkins (Mrs. Freeman), known for her realistic stories of the provincial New Englander, was born in Randolph, Ma.s.sachusetts. With humor to see the little eccentricities of the people among whom she lived and a sympathetic understanding of their heroic qualities, she has created real men and women,--farmers, school teachers, prim spinsters, clergymen, stern Roman matrons,--all unmistakable types of New England village life. Her unfailing ability to transplant the reader into rock-ribbed, snow-clad New England, with its many fond a.s.sociations for most Americans, is proof of her power as an artist. Her art is subtle, and it commands both attention and admiration, as she reveals every slight move in a simple plot and with extraordinary deftness of touch brings out the most delicate shadings that differentiate her characters.

Her style is easy and clear, and is pervaded by a fine sense of humor. Her short stories are her most artistic work, especially those in the two volumes, _A New England Nun_, and _Silence and Other Tales_; but she can also tell a long story well, as is shown in _Pembroke_, which combines at their best all her qualities as a novelist.

She is distinctly a realist of Howells's school, presenting the daily rounds of the life which she knew intimately, and making complete stories of such meager material as the subterfuges which two poor but proud sisters practiced in order to make one black silk dress, owned in partnership, appear as if each really possessed "a gala dress." She takes stolid, practical characters, who have seemingly nothing attractive in their composition, and by her sympathetic treatment causes them to appeal strongly to human hearts. She discovers heroic qualities in apparently commonplace homes and families, and finds humorous or pathetic possibilities in men and women whom most writers would consider very unpromising. Miss Wilkins knows that in rural New England romantic things do happen, tragedies do occur, and heroes and heroines do appear in unexpected quarters to meet emergencies, and she occasionally transfers such events to her pages, thereby enlivening them without sacrificing the reality of her pictures. But the triumph of her art consists in her facile handling of simple incidents and everyday men and women and her power to carry them without a hint of sentimentality to a natural, artistic, effective climax, heightened usually by a touch of either humor or pathos.

WALT WHITMAN, 1819-1892

[Ill.u.s.tration: WALT. WHITMAN]

Life.--Suffolk County, Long Island, in which is situated the village of West Hills, where Walt Whitman was born in 1819, was in some ways the most remarkable eastern county in the United States. Hemmed in on a narrow strip of land by the ocean on one side and Long Island Sound on the other, the inhabitants saw little of the world unless they led a seafaring life. Many of the well-to-do farmers, as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, never took a land journey of more than twenty miles from home. Because of such restricted environment, the people of Suffolk County were rather insular in early days, yet the average grade of intelligence was high, for some of England's most progressive blood had settled there in the first half of the seventeenth century.

Nowhere else in this country, not even at the West, was there a greater feeling of independence and a more complete exercise of individuality.

There was a certainty about life and opinions, a feeling of relationship with everybody, a defiance of convention, that made Suffolk County the fit birthplace of a man who was destined to trample poetic conventions under his feet and to sing the song of democracy. In Walt Whitman's young days, all sorts and conditions of men on Long Island met familiarly on equal terms. The farmer, the blacksmith, the carpenter, the mason, the woodchopper, the sailor, the clergyman, the teacher, the young college student home on his vacation,--all mingled as naturally as members of a family. No human being felt himself inferior to any one else, so long as the moral proprieties were observed. Nowhere else did there exist a more perfect democracy of conscious equals. Although Whitman's family moved to Brooklyn before he was five years old, he returned to visit relatives, and later taught school at various places on Long Island and edited a paper at Huntington, near his birthplace. In various ways Suffolk County was responsible for the most vital part of his early training. In his poem, _There Was a Child Went Forth_, he tells how nature educated him in his island home. In his prose work, _Specimen Days and Collect_, which all who are interested in his autobiography should read, he says, "The successive growth stages of my infancy, childhood, youth, and manhood were all pa.s.s'd on Long Island, which I sometimes feel as if I had incorporated."

Like Mark Twain, Walt Whitman received from the schools only a common education but from life he had an uncommon training. His chief education came from a.s.sociating with all sorts and conditions of people. In Brooklyn he worked as a printer, carpenter, and editor. His closest friends were the pilots and deck hands of ferry boats, the drivers of New York City omnibuses, factory hands, and sailors. After he had become well known, he was unconventional enough to sit with a street car driver in front of a grocery store in a crowded city and eat a watermelon. When people smiled, he said, "They can have the laugh--we have the melon."

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHITMAN AT THE AGE OF THIRTY-SIX]

His Suffolk County life might have left him democratic but insular; but he traveled widely and gained cosmopolitan experience. In 1848 he went leisurely to New Orleans, where he edited a newspaper, but in a short time he journeyed north along the Mississippi, traveled in Canada, and finally returned to New York, having completed a trip of eight thousand miles.

After his return, he seems to have worked with his father in Brooklyn for about three years, building and selling houses. He was then also engaged on a collection of poems, which, in 1855, he published under the t.i.tle of _Leaves of Gra.s.s_. From this time he was known as an author.

In 1862 he went South to nurse his brother, who was wounded in the Civil War. For nearly three years, the poet served as a volunteer nurse in the army hospitals in Washington and its vicinity. Few good Samaritans have performed better service. He estimated that he attended on the field and in the hospital eighty thousand of the sick and wounded. In after days many a soldier testified that his recovery was aided by Whitman's kindly ministrations. Finally, however, his own iron const.i.tution gave way under this strain.

When the war closed, he was given a government clerkship in Washington, but was dismissed in 1865, because of hostility aroused by his _Leaves of Gra.s.s_. He soon received another appointment, however, which he held until 1873, when a stroke of paralysis forced him to relinquish his position. He went to Camden, New Jersey, where he lived the life of a semi-invalid during the rest of his existence, writing as his health would permit. He died in 1892, and was buried in Harleigh Cemetery, near Camden.

POETRY.--Whitman gave to the world in 1855 the first edition of the poems, which he called _Leaves of Gra.s.s_. His favorite expression, "words simple as gra.s.s," and his line:--

"I believe a leaf of gra.s.s is no less than the journey-work of the stars,"

give a clue to the idea which prompted the choice of such an unusual t.i.tle.

He continued to add to these poems during the rest of his life, and he published in 1892 the tenth edition of _Leaves of Gra.s.s_, in a volume containing four hundred and twenty-two closely printed octavo pages.

Whitman intended _Leaves of Gra.s.s_ to be a realistic epic of American democracy. He tried to sing this song as he heard it echoed in the life of man and man's companion, Nature. While many of Whitman's poems have the most dissimilar t.i.tles, and record experiences as unlike as his early life on Long Island, his dressing of wounds during the Civil War, his comradeship with the democratic ma.s.s, his almost Homeric communion with the sea, and his memories of Lincoln, yet according to his scheme, all of this verse was necessary to const.i.tute a complete song of democracy. His poem, _I Hear America Singing_, shows the variety that he wished to give to his democratic songs:--

"I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong, The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work, The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck, The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands, The woodcutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown, The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else."

His ambition was to put human life in America "freely, fully, and truly on record."

His longest and one of his most typical poems in this collection is called _Song of Myself_, in which he paints himself as a representative member of the democratic ma.s.s. He says:--

"Agonies are one of my changes of garments, I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person, My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.

Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced."

In these four lines, he states simply what must be the moving impulse of a democratic government if it is to survive. Here is the spirit that is to-day growing among us, the spirit that forbids child labor, cares for orphans, enacts model tenement laws, strives to regenerate the slum districts, and is increasing the altruistic activities of clubs and churches throughout the country. But these verses will not submit to iambic or trochaic scansion, and their form is as strange as a democratic government was a century and a half ago to the monarchies of Europe. Place these lines beside the following couplet from Pope:--

"Self-love and Reason to one end aspire, Pain their aversion, Pleasure their desire."

Here the scansion is regular, the verse polished, the thought undemocratic.