SOURCE: Berthoff, Warner. “American Realism: A Grammar of Motives.” In The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884-1919, pp. 1-47. New York: The Free Press, 1965.

[In the following essay, Berthoff discusses the establishment of realism as the dominant mode of literary expression of the 1880s and 1890s and attempts to categorize the elements that comprise a realist work.]

THE EMERGENCE OF “REALISM”

The great collective event in American letters during the 1880s and 1890s was the securing of “realism” as the dominant standard of value. But, as the postulations preceding this chapter suggest, it was a peculiarly indefinite standard. One can more readily say what kinds of writing the new American realists were in revolt against than what exactly they wanted to create. In the way of causes and movements in the United States, the cause of realism appears more exclusively a summons to some broad preliminary moral reformation than, as in French realism with Flaubert and after, not only this but also a systematic searching out, reasoned and progressive, of fundamental issues of expression and form, producing in its wake new experiments—symbolism, naturalism, expressionism, surrealism—in continuous and mutually instructive succession. Insofar as it constituted a movement at all, American literary realism was concerned less with problems of artistic definition and discovery than with clearing the way to a more profitable exercise of individual ambition. (Perhaps that is why, as a standard, it has been so remarkably long-lived; why it was as much the watchword in 1919 as it had been in 1884; why, even in the 1950s and 1960s, the great run of talents in American writing remains committed with a positively inhibiting single-mindedness to the premise of realism, the work of capturing the special immediate air of American reality in the familiar American dialect.) Embracing the cause of realism was much like joining an insurgent campaign in American politics. You committed yourself to a radical attack upon existing offenses, to honesty and a clean sweep, to partisan feelings of evangelistic intensity, but not to any clear conception of the proper actual conduct of operations and certainly not to any coherent program of business. It was as if swearing allegiance to the name of the movement and wearing its colors in public guaranteed solutions to all the fundamental problems of policy which, presumably, the movement had been created to deal with. As a critical standard, “realism” could thus as easily provide a way of evading the full creative task as of defining and prosecuting it: so Henry James (who stands as the signal exception to these opening remarks) had understood as early as 1870 in studying Howells's groundbreaking work.

When we take note of everything in 1884 and the succeeding years that did in fact satisfy the prevailing demand for a convincingly detailed account of actual experience, we may well ask whether “realism” in American literature was anything more than a name, a borrowed label which happened to come so strongly into fashion (in an era not widely distinguished by searching critical discussion) that no one could avoid deferring to it. Popular entertainment aside, what was not “realistic” in the heyday of Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James? Documentary chronicles of city life and exotic legends of the remote and strange, horrific melodramas and placid genre sketches, works of social criticism and works of psychological analysis, novels written all in dialogue and novels in which the characters are barely capable of consecutive speech, prophecies of a transformed future and haunted daydreams of a visionary past—which is to say, Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes and Lafcadio Hearn's Chita: A Memory of Last Island, Ambrose Bierce's Can Such Things Be? and Sarah Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class and William James's The Principles of Psychology, Henry James's The Awkward Age and Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger—all could be identified as works of realism; all were in some degree conceived as such.

What do they all have in common? Not form, certainly, and not theme either, in any ordinary sense: to attempt to define American “realism” by classifying the particular books written in its name according to form and theme is to sink into a mire of inconsequential distinctions and details. But if we look instead to the fundamental motives to expression which direct these works, we come sooner to solid ground. We need to keep in mind the practical involvement of the work of writing, as of any art, with common life and history. For modern writers share in all the duplicity of behavior characteristic of an era which can fitfully remember the ideal of a life of high dedication and disinterested service but which increasingly measures virtue and achievement in terms of material success. Modern writers are as artisan-tradesmen, competing for shares in a market not less contingent and arbitrary than, broadly speaking, any other economic arena. But they are also prophets of consciousness in a fundamentally spiritual calling, willful instruments of moral reformation; producers of objects which like sacred objects strive in the making to become their own excuse for being and so to affect the rest of us not merely in our habitual behavior as consumers of marginal time but as seekers, in however limited a way, of a truly better life. In the 1880s the standard of realism was being raised in good part simply out of professional distaste for a polite literature that was rotten ripe with idealizing sentiment and genteel affectation. Life, even at its most ordinary, was simply more interesting than that—and what was the point of a book if it wasn't as seriously interesting as life? At the same time realism spoke also for graver dissatisfactions. More was at stake than the hostility (like Hawthorne's hostility a generation earlier to Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth and her works) of those who meant to say something worth saying toward those who had discovered the trick of the modern middle-class best seller. The irritation out of which literary realism developed in the United States was as much with prevailing conditions of social and economic life, with the latest forms of disorder and inequity (however they might masquerade as progress), as with the insipidness of other, feebler literary methods. That many realists were also populists, progressives, sentimental socialists is not surprising. But life and history do not give way easily to books and words. The same protest has to be made again and again; the underlying conditions seem unaffected, perhaps grow worse; the new generation, inheriting both its predecessor's work and the regular failure of that work to transform the conditions that prompted it, is summoned, if only to keep its self-respect, to a new and more resolute, though probably more desperate, effort. “Realism” in 1884 was thus also a standard of profound though often sublimated rebellion, a movement of spirit directed against particular and identifiable new formations of civil culture and quickened by particular and identifiable fears, hopes, tensions, excitements, animosities, secessions, and visions of the future; it tended, furthermore, to become more intensely so throughout the period under examination in this volume.

PRECEDENTS: THE RISE OF THE NOVEL

Formally the practice and general program of literary realism may be traced well back before our period. The writers of the '80s and '90s did not lack great precedents and supporting traditions. Throughout the eighteenth century, alongside neoclassical standards of decorum—formal propriety, dignified subject matter, correct diction, strictly reasoned design—there had coexisted an important body of popular writing which, precisely because it did lie beneath the notice of the principled criticism of that era, had been the freer to follow its own bent and develop its own methods for catching and holding attention. The novel in particular grew up in this popular limbo. Developed largely in response to vulgar as opposed to learned taste, the novel appealed to an audience already partial by settled habit to topical broadsides, to circumstantial chronicles of real events (including those biographies and journals of the soul's history that were the staple nourishment of the evangelical sects), and to the grossly sensational news, and newspapers, of the day.

Having thus begun with a strong footing in the observation of actual life, the novel has remained the chief genre for realism in modern literature. The actual in stories does not have to be the statistically ordinary. The reality documented by fiction, as by journalism, has been as often as not the strange, the exotic, the quaint, the sentimental, the sensational, even the thoroughly improbable. The novel has always more or less shamelessly appealed to vulgar curiosity and the bottomless human appetite for gossip and sensation. What subtler purposes its best practitioners have evolved have been superadded to that primitive appeal. This special alliance of the novel with the common consciousness operates formally too. For the novel lives by implying a certain parity of spirit between the reader on one hand and on the other the characters, the writer himself, or the mass of other readers in their legions. (The passive relation of mass audiences to actors, singers, film stars, and to one another in the presence of these, is fundamentally different.) The result is that, from the first, the more or less realistic novel has been the most egalitarian of serious literary modes, the one that has most directly lent itself to expressing the broad currents and undercurrents of popular feeling and has most nearly reproduced, in D. H. Lawrence's phrase, the common flow and recoil of our “sympathetic consciousness.” And it has been, as a consequence, the one most frequently brought under censorship. Deliberately or not, it has again and again appeared radically subversive of official standards of conduct and morality. Of course it is also conservative of such standards: the point is that its overriding concern for what the human creature really is and how moment by moment or year by year he feels and behaves, in his indestructible individuality, has given the novel—like gossip, like curiosity—a certain built-in indifference to ought and must and a corresponding power of interior resistance to official etiquette and certified moral precept. Maintaining its existence largely beneath the notice of respectable criticism (even in the 1880s Henry James could assume, as Hawthorne had assumed forty years earlier, a cultivated prejudice against the claims of storytelling to be an art), the genre of prose fiction, the representational narrative of consequential happenings, could be so much the more open and hospitable to unfranchised stirrings of feeling, to doubtful attitudes and anarchic states of mind. And when in recent generations there has been some widespread disturbance of human relationships and private morale—and when indeed has there not?—we can turn confidently to novels to find it vigorously and circumstantially, though not always coherently, not always appositely, expressed.

PRECEDENTS: STYLE AND TRUTHFULNESS

This major popular tradition in modern letters has also been instinctively hospitable to plain speaking and the free use of common idiom: Howells's crude formula about the “language of unaffected people everywhere” points to this alliance. There is a realism of style and treatment as well as of subject matter, as admirers of Mark Twain, but not less of Henry James, do not have to be reminded. Here again the writers of 1880-1920 could draw on a solid inheritance. The first great manifesto of English Romanticism, Wordsworth's preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), is among other things a plea against affected diction and for the plain style; and disciples of Wordsworth's poetics could look back to the studied plainness of expression in Crabbe and in Cowper (both admired by Edwin Arlington Robinson), in Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, and even to the ruggedly conversational style of Donne and certain contemporaries and of Shakespeare himself, for earlier precedent. In America, where a taste for seventeenth-century colloquial particularity in style had survived more hardily than in England, in part because supported by the dominant Puritan concern for plain and honest witness, such recent masters as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman had all promoted the voice of the natural man, speaking from direct personal experience and the self's inmost conviction, as the right basis for effective style, the surest means of securing that “veracity” of utterance which all the leading figures of their generation especially prized. It is worth remarking that all of these mid-nineteenth-century writers had sensed the presence of this natural veracity in the forms of popular humor and comic journalism, much of it in dialect, that Mark Twain was soon to exploit.

Indeed what there was of a theoretical program for “realism” in the '80s and '90s makes no essential advance over that of 1830-1860.¹ That earlier program is simply extended to the writing of novels and stories. Emerson's famous preference in “The American Scholar” (Howells quotes the passage in Criticism and Fiction, to justify realism) for the “common,” the “familiar,” the “low,” and his request to be shown the meaning of the simplest, plainest things in life, defined for more than his own generation the attitude of the democratic, New World man of letters. What the corresponding forms might be Emerson had broadly suggested in sentences like the following: “Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing. All great actions are simple, and all great pictures are.” Whitman above all others sanctified for the younger writers who had opened their ears to him the general program of realism—the rendering of things as they actually appear, and in the language of natural feeling, the familiar dialects of a nation of free men—for he above all suggested that it need not result in any narrowing or compromising of the spiritual imagination: quite the contrary. So for writers as different as Robinson and Ezra Pound, Whitman could become one of the few durable native folk heroes of the new era, and one of the few American forerunners whose work did not have to be rejected out of hand.

THE RESISTANCE TO REALISM

Why then was realism a matter of controversy in the '80s? That it was scarcely needs demonstration. “Victorian” or “Second Empire” or “Gilded Age” hypocrisy is still notorious (and was first made so by the great nineteenth-century rebels against it, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Whitman, Zola, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Meredith, Hardy), but it is difficult now to imagine the hostility aroused in the high-minded by only a small degree of common candor in books. Wrapping up unpleasant facts in a thoroughly “moral” plot did not remove objections. Howells got into trouble for dealing with adultery and divorce in A Modern Instance (1882), Mark Twain for using bad grammar and natural morals in Huckleberry Finn (1884), Jacob Riis for documenting with actual cases his statement of how the “other half” really lives (1890). Even “Daisy Miller” was refused by the American editor to whom it was first offered. “Let only the truth be told, and not all the truth” (emphasis added)—so said Joseph Kirkland, a self-styled devotee of the new realism, in a Dial article in 1893. It would be wrong to attribute the resistance to realism entirely to prudes and Philistines. True, the audience for fiction was predominantly middle class and female, and most editors and publishers self-approvingly catered to the assumed tastes of that audience. Yet the double standard of a man like James Russell Lowell, who loved Chaucer and Fielding but doubted that they should continue to be widely circulated in unexpurgated form, was not altogether irrational. Men of worldly tolerance and of principle truly believed that essential standards of social order were giving way before their eyes—and could best be defended by literary censorship. That such men invariably reversed the logic of cause and effect, blaming literary realism for the decline of religion and morality and the instability of social relationships, does not lessen the seriousness of their concern. These views are chronic in modern culture and are held in subtler but nevertheless recognizable form by very discriminating minds. When Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who edited the Atlantic Monthly from 1881 to 1890, leveled a verse attack upon realism and “Zolaism,” it was in metaphors that a later literary moralist, T. S. Eliot, still found appropriate to his more sophisticated but not dissimilar concerns in the 1920s and 1930s: “For have we not the old gods overthrown / And set up strangest idols?”²

Such views are an expression of fear; and the fear that some book, some unsolicited work of compelling frankness and emotional directness, will contribute to social and moral disorder is rooted in the deeper fear that the predicted disaster has already occurred. It is a shock response to some profound actual disturbance in the presumably settled order of things. Both the heavy shroud of middle-class parochialism under which serious literature labored, and the slow, faltering, frustrated rebellion against it which is so largely the social meaning of American literary history between the 1880s and the 1920s, derive from a common source: the constant and mounting disorder of common American life in the years between the Civil War and the First World War. Extraordinary changes, radical transformations, were taking place; the very foundations of life as supposedly established in the New World republic were being put in doubt.³ It must be left to historians of another kind to describe all these changes—the rise of the industrial city and the mass society; the accelerating material complication and the impersonality of civil life; the cycles of financial and agricultural depression and of labor unrest, coinciding with what was understood by contemporaries as the closing of the frontier and the filling out of the national domain; the continual displacement of population from country to city and suburb and from region to region, East to West or South to North; the steady flooding in of immigrants without experience of the older Anglo-American traditions of culture and polity, their own traditions being wrenched and eroded in the process; the prolonged national advance in wealth and population; the corresponding redistribution of political power and authority; and above all the ruthlessly disruptive incursions of capitalist enterprise, competitive and unrestricted, upon the organism of society and upon the continuities (such as they have ever been in America) of social behavior and expectation. Our concern here is with imaginative literature—and therefore with the contingent sphere of feeling, attitude, sensibility, opinion, sentiment, thought. The anxious human intelligence, seeing its own age as more problematical than any previous age can possibly appear to it, and its future more open to doubt, commonly underrates (though increasingly with good reason) the staying power of fundamental social usage and behavior. Yet around 1890 and after, the rate and degree of historical change did seem unprecedented to an extreme. The result, even for those who could somehow imagine it all as triumphant progress, was a crisis in consciousness and civil commitment that is of the first importance to any understanding of the literature of the period.

THE CITY AND DEMOCRACY

Different dates were suggested as marking the critical moment of change. To a character in Henry Blake Fuller's With the Procession (1895) the year 1876, a year marked by labor riots and agrarian insurgence following the Panic of '73 and, incidentally, by the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, was the turning point: “the ending of [America's] minority and the assumption of full manhood with all its perplexities and cares.” To Henry Adams the coincidence in 1893 of another great Exposition, at Chicago, and another shocking financial panic particularly concentrated impressions of the meaning of the era: of a “breach of continuity,” a “rupture of historical sequence.” The choice of such dates and moments is usually arbitrary. Nearly any other would serve as well. But what it was impossible for contemporary observers not to agree upon was that the patterns and the extremities of change were most vividly displayed in the crucible of the suddenly overgrown modern city.

“The nineteenth century is a century of cities,” declares the temptress Isabel, herself a city woman, in Harold Frederic's upcountry novel, Seth's Brother's Wife (1887); “they have given their own twist to the progress of the Age.” Metropolitan disorder and violence are the burden of no small percentage of the novels written in the three decades after 1885. Of the passages inspired by the Haymarket Square riot of 1886, Robert Herrick's brief description in One Woman's Life (1913) is fairly representative, except perhaps in being satirical in tone: Chicago on the night of the Anarchist bombing is a place of fear and street panic, and the organized counter violence of good citizens, defending order and privilege through management of law courts and newspapers and the hypocrisies of respectable opinion, is rather more shocking than the bombing itself. The signs of the times, above all the heterogeneous massing of men into cities, were such that more than a few writers of the period—decent men and women, charitable, naturally tolerant—had come to doubt representative democracy as a system of government. Xenophobia was a factor in these fears and doubts, which lay deeper than rational assessment and which infected politically radical as well as conservative opinion, the Populist Ignatius Donnelly (see Caesar's Column, 1891) as well as Aldrich (who in a poem on immigration entitled “Unguarded Gates” issued his eloquent warning against making America the “cesspool of Europe” in the name of “Liberty, white Goddess”).⁴

Could the older ideals of the American republic, the vision of a new and more equitable order of the ages, continue to flourish under the new conditions? Among all the strange new breeds of voters and office holders and fortune-makers, were the freedom and stability necessary to the common pursuit of virtue and happiness still jointly possible? These questions were hardly new for committed observers of American life, but they were taking on immensely greater urgency in the '80s and '90s, and the weight of literate opinion was on the side of a negative answer. “I think as Mr. Arnold does, and as Mr. Lowell did,” Sarah Jewett wrote in her quiet, definite way, in 1884, “that the mistake of our time is in being governed by the ignorant mass of opinion, instead of by thinkers and men who know something.” Other writers, more sympathetic to the expansion of social democracy, were more particularly alarmed at the larger, the national, course of its development, the unregenerate barbarity of its opening ventures on the stage of great-power imperialism. The Spanish-American War and the snatching of the Philippines produced something like a solid anti-imperialist front among men of letters. Indeed, the force and eloquence of the attacks upon American policy and what it represented in the life of the nation, launched by Fuller (in verse) in The New Flag, by Mark Twain in “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” by William James in his letters to the Boston Transcript and William Graham Sumner in “The Conquest of the United States by Spain,” by the derisive satire of Finley Peter Dunne's “Mr. Dooley” and the noble indignation of William Vaughan Moody's “Ode in Time of Hesitation”—all backed by the energies of outraged idealism—might well lead us to depressing conclusions about the decline of outspokenness and effective dissent in our literary life if we did not also happen to remember that this attack had no noticeable effect on policy and little enough on general opinion.

MATERIAL SUCCESS, MORAL PANIC

Among writers, there were doubts and fears most of all about the quality of life in the new age.

There was no denying, of course, the material success of the emerging conditions of industrial society or the approval these conditions met with among considerable masses of the population. Among those for whom it represented the chance for a new start, on the newest American frontier, the modern city exerted a magnetic attraction. It seemed a place not of chaos and impending barbarism but, at least at first, of opportunity and renewal, of a richer and freer existence. Like democracy itself, the city could oppress fearfully—but it could also liberate. The consent of the majority to expansion and change is not to be disregarded. The hopes of Dreiser's Gerhardt family, moving into Cleveland, are characteristic:

If only they could all get work and do right. Here was no evidence of any of their recent troubles, no acquaintances who could suggest by their mere presence the troubles of the past. All was business, all activity. The very turning of the corner seemed to rid one of old times and crimes. It was as if a new world existed in every block.

These hopes, we notice, are built upon a very considerable “if.” And in the novel they are only partially, ambiguously, fulfilled. Dreiser himself, further along in Jennie Gerhardt (1911), expresses in his ponderous, shrewd, detailed way the darker aspect of modern city life and its crushing pressures upon individuals. He pleads with us to withhold judgment against the sinning protagonists of his story:

We live in an age in which the impact of materialized forces is well-nigh irresistible; the spiritual nature is overwhelmed by the shock. The tremendous and complicated development of our material civilization, the multiplicity and variety of our social forms, the depth, subtlety, and sophistry of our imaginative impressions, gathered, remultiplied, and disseminated by such agencies as the railroad, the express and the post-office, the telephone, the telegraph, the newspaper, and, in short, the whole machinery of social intercourse—these elements of existence combine to produce what may be termed a kaleidoscopic glitter, a dazzling and confusing phantasmagoria of life that wearies and stultifies the mental and moral nature. It induces a sort of intellectual fatigue through which we see the ranks of the victims of insomnia, melancholia, and insanity constantly recruited.

“Take a man who was born in 1860, and who is to die with the century—what would be his idea of life?” The question is asked in Fuller's With the Procession, and the answer given is a curious one. “Contention, bickering, discontent, chronic irritation”: the indictment expresses not so much any clear judgment of social disorder as a kind of inward frustration at its effects upon individual persons, even the most privileged. Few, apart from a fringe of radical polemicists, had reached the point of roundly criticizing the fundamental norms and laws of modern business society,⁵ but almost every serious writer of the period testified in one way or another to a profound and epidemic crisis in private morale. “Why do we go mad? Why do we kill ourselves?” Fuller asked in another Chicago novel, The Cliff-Dwellers (1893). “Why is there more insanity and more self-murder to-day than ever before?” His answer is abstract, but it carries something of that authority of historical insight with which in the same year, in a paper entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner (speaking, he thought, at the fateful moment of its disappearance) redirected for a whole generation the study of the national past—and coincidentally helped to formulate the folklore of his own time.

It is because [Fuller continued], under existing conditions, the relief that comes from action is so largely shut off. How has humanity contrived to endure so well the countless ills of countless ages? Because society has been, in general, loose-knit, so that each unit in it has had room for some individual play. What so increases and intensifies the agonies of to-day? The fact that society has a closer and denser texture than ever before; its finespun meshes bind us and strangle us. Indignation ferments without vent; injury awaits with a wearing impatience the slow and formal infliction of a corporate punishment; self-consciousness paralyzes the quick and free action that is the surest and sometimes the only relief.

Life was chaotic and formless but also constricted, oppressive, indifferently hurtful in its thickening complexity. The conditions governing ordinary social conduct—the conditions, generally speaking, of the culture of liberal democracy—were changing, had changed beyond recall; the safety valves of free land and open yet self-sufficient community were gone; the long dream of freedom was darkening into nightmares of imprisonment and strangulation. What have the prospects of life come to, the middle-aged Carl Linstrum muses in Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913), for those who like himself had gone in search of a wider opportunity out of the drabness of countryside and village into the richer culture of cities:

Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here [back “home”] you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we get our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.

To how many Americans would this reckoning apply? (Its truth, of course, is not literal or statistical but prophetic, a divination of tendency.) For the rich and those confidently in pursuit of the new wealth, for those who lived openly according to the “main American formula,” as Henry James described it in The American Scene, which is “to make so much money that … you don't ‘mind’ anything”; or, at the other extreme, for that larger class of persons not yet in possession of the commonest fruits of opportunity and abundance, with nowhere to go but up, it would be mainly irrelevant, though not entirely so. But for the proto-“American” middle classes—from whose ranks serious writers and their readers alike are almost exclusively recruited—it was very nearly the whole prospective truth. What does the analytic observer see about him, James asked, “if not a vast social order in which the parties to certain relations are all the while marvelously, inscrutably, desperately ‘bearing’ each other?” What does life amount to for those condemned to live under the “American pressure”—able neither to escape from it nor to surrender to it nor yet to find “a working basis” within it—but a “necessary vicious circle of gross mutual endurance?” Where the “rule of the bank-book” is absolute, who can escape paying?

THE CONDITION-OF-AMERICA QUESTION

Novelists cannot set to work without becoming moralists, although those who make moral instruction their whole purpose rarely go on being read. The particular ways of human behavior are their enabling subject, and to observe social manners and note down the revealing gestures of personal conduct is to offer them for judgment. Furthermore, simply to put these data into the form of a story, with its establishment and resolution of possible courses of action and its fictive assertion of some serial rhythm of cause and effect, is to be discovered in possession of a definite view of life. Around the behavior of men and women and the assumed prospects of American life, in the fiction of the '80s and '90s, a whole new popular mythology full of moral judgment and insinuation was building up, and its message was not a flattering one.

A representative work of 1894, Howells's A Traveler from Altruria, is a case in point. As a critique of fundamental society Howells's contribution to the vogue of Utopian fiction is superficial. At times it appears that the critical issue facing modern democracy is the servant problem—the setting is a New England summer resort—and the Altrurian alternatives of “neighborhood and brotherhood” are dreamlike and wishful in conception. Yet in this book we find the following views of American life casually and freely set down, as if beyond argument: that we live now more than ever as two nations, with the separation of classes, rich and poor, genteel and common, widening rather than narrowing; that the settled attitude of those on top toward those beneath is fear and distrust; that only the poor know how to live for one another in charity and true community; that the manufacture of shoddy is sound business principle and the random despoiling of the national estate the plain duty of good providers; that hypocrisy and cant are the accepted language of social preferment (one well-heeled vacationer speaks soberly of the “incivism” of the poor); that ministers of the gospel are as likely to embrace such hypocrisy as are cynical plutocrats; that nobody at all, neither rich nor middling nor poor, really believes in education and liberal culture; that—an interesting emphasis—above the working classes nobody in America is really well (“you must pity our upper classes, too,” the ingenuous Mrs. Makely explains to the Altrurian); and finally that nobody thinks anything can be done to change any of these conditions except “a lot of crazy hayseeds”: it is the era of the Populist Revolt. Honest, generous, sharp eyed if mild mannered, Howells was from first to last an astute observer of the characteristic folkways of the middle classes. One of his insistent topics—“themes” would be too positive a word—is the coldness of the moneyed and leisured toward people not of their own kind. Howells himself could see no solution to the human troubles of his time. But he could not be complacent about what was forcibly brought to his attention, and he was ashamed of complacency in others. Among all the motives to realism and plain-speaking near the turn of the century, democratic compassion and shame or anger at its being withheld have no small place. The sense of a generalized failure in feeling and sympathy, of a very conspiracy of restraint against ordinary human responsiveness: nothing lies closer to the heart of early modern American writing. Only with this in mind can the enormous importance of a figure like Dreiser in the years after 1900 be fully understood.

Howells's observations on this great matter were not new in American writing. They had been made with some frequency before; they are still being made. Perhaps no one has ever felt the paradox of democratic cold-heartedness and the national disgrace of it more keenly than Whitman, who in Democratic Vistas (1871) had noted that just in proportion as industrial democracy takes fair pride in the wonderful amelioration of life for the fortunate many, it seems to lose sympathy with the remnant (never so small as the majority chooses to think); it “looks with suspicious, ill-satisfied eye upon the very poor, the ignorant, and on those out of business.” Howells by 1894 was hardly less disturbed by the evidences about him, but for all his instinctive personal optimism he was inclined to read them more fatalistically than was Whitman. In the decade of Turner's “Frontier” address and Brooks Adams's The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895), even Howells seemed to feel the massive development of industrial civilization not as free and progressive but as determined and catastrophic. Characteristically, the most honest and perceptive spokesman in Altruria is also the richest, the banker; and it was into his mouth that Howells put his own visionary analysis of where America now stood in the sweep of history. Formerly, the banker explains,

if a man got out of work, he turned his hand to something else; if a man failed in business, he started in again from some other direction; as a last resort, in both cases, he went West, preempted a quarter section of public land, and grew up with the country. Now the country is grown up; the public land is gone; business is full on all sides, and the hand that turned itself to something else has lost its cunning. The struggle for life has changed from a free fight to an encounter of disciplined forces, and the free fighters that are left get ground to pieces between organized labor and organized capital.

A public crisis of confidence concerning America's civil destiny, a private crisis of spirit and moral security for her middling and literate classes: so the writing of the period defines its historical co-ordinates. And if anything was clear to those who faced this double crisis directly, it was that the older attitudes and assumptions about progress, self-help, equal opportunity, manifest destiny, and the imminence of general happiness would no longer serve. At least, they could no longer go unexamined. In fact, where social and literary radical-realists could join forces most wholeheartedly was just in the attack on accepted notions, on the idées reçues of the general public consciousness. The very writing of a book was becoming, for the rising generation, a bid for freedom of mind and thought.⁶ It is typical of the period that the tragic last section of Ellen Glasgow's first novel, The Descendant (1897), written at the outset of her long, decent, unequal struggle in fiction against illusion and barrenness, should begin with an epigraph from Ibsen (one of the master spirits of European realism to whom the younger Americans were learning to appeal):

It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that walks in us. It is all sorts of dead ideals and life-less old beliefs. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them. … And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.

The passage is clearly equivocal, a call to revolt but also a prediction of failure. But anything less desperate would not have done justice to the conditions of feeling and understanding within which American realism bore its witness between 1884 and 1919. The literature of this period, we may say, is a record of rebelliousness and liberation yet also of despair—at the human cost, and perhaps the ultimate futility, of the effort involved.

“THE WAY WE LIVE NOW”

In politics the response to these evidences of change and disorder made of the quarter-century between 1890 and the First World War a forcing bed of democratic theory and experiment. That response is broadcast throughout the civil history of the period. We find it in agrarian Populism; in the Progressivism of city and statehouse reformers; in the minority “insurgency” within the major parties but also in the slow creation of a stabler party machinery through a system of ward and precinct loyalties embracing the new urban masses; in campaigns, backed by a vigorous exposé journalism, for “good government”; in the establishment of settlement houses and the new realism of social workers; in new philosophies of education and nurture (John Dewey's The School and Society was published in 1899); in the opinions of certain distinguished “dissenters” in the judiciary, notably Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Louis Brandeis; in doctrines of “new democracy” or “new freedom” or “new nationalism”; in journals of opinion like The New Republic and The Masses; and in redefinitions of the very “spirit of American government” (the title of J. Allen Smith's influential book of 1907) or of the historic “promise of American life” (the title of Herbert Croly's of 1909). The same kind of response to the same conditions is conspicuous in the mass of realistic fiction of the time. As a consequence, most of this work belongs to the history of opinion rather than to the record of creative literature. Novels like Hamlin Garland's A Spoil of Office (1892), Paul Leicester Ford's The Honorable Peter Stirling (1894), Brand Whitlock's The Thirteenth District (1902), David Graham Phillips's The Plum Tree (1905) and even his Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917), Winston Churchill's Mr. Crewe's Career (1908), and Ernest Poole's The Harbor (1915) have gone the way, to oblivion, of most topical writing and editorializing. Their interest is merely documentary, what they document being, of course, the queer organism of middle-class anxiety rather more than actual social relations.

The distinction such a judgment rests on, between art and document, cannot be drawn hard and fast. In fact the testimony of these topical studies of contemporary life is confirmed by the more scrupulously fashioned novels of the period; by (their very titles, however, suggest their more deeply imagined response) Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905) and Henry James's posthumous The Ivory Tower (1917). The first concern in either case is the classic concern of the realistic novel: “the way we live now.” And the point to make here is that both the novels written as tracts for the times and those fashioned out of the fullest ambition to master the subtler difficulties of the art of fiction and of truthful representation tell, on the face of it, the same melancholy story: of the corruption of public conscience and private spirit by the scarcely questioned values of an anarchically acquisitive society. But perhaps one significant distinction in fundamental argument between these two classes of performance may be offered. Where the competent general run of tracts and romances for the times tends to show how the salient conditions of contemporary life essentially determine the lives of individual men, the work whose power to command attention has survived the period of its making is more likely to suggest what it is that, given these inescapable conditions, individual men may still do or be within them. This distinction is not one between philosophical determinists (who were in the majority, up and down the scale of talent, in that era of scientific positivism and Darwinian analogy) and their philosophical opponents. It comes closer to the kind of distinction Henry James made in his preface to The Spoils of Poynton, between “fixed fools” and “free spirits”; between real “character,” capable of emergence and change, and false, though perhaps materially triumphant, semblances of it. The finer the novelist's art, the more the characters will be seen to give form to their own history. And if any American author was convincingly optimistic and encouraging about the future of American lives, at least to the point of keeping his imagination open to that future's finer possibilities, it was Henry James. There is a nice irony in saying so, considering how much discussion of James's fiction by both disparagers and partisans has assumed his indifference to the larger historical world of his times, or his resignation from it. But to read through the mass of his work, particularly in his extraordinary last decade, is to find him a wonderfully persistent and undiscourageable moralist of human freedom and thus (so Eliot and Pound proclaimed him in 1918) an American novelist to the core.

The way we live now: there is an attractive concern in the writing of the period to bring its audience up to date, to deliver in fresh and full measure the news of the outlook for individual lives.⁷ The most common species of serious fiction all through these decades is the life history: the novel or story (or verse narrative, as with Edwin Arlington Robinson) tracing through to its melancholy end the career of some exemplary single figure—a man of affairs corrupted into wrong-doing; a poor boy or girl of special personal promise overborne in the struggle to make a decent life; a potentially beautiful soul, a woman's as often as not, victimized by the narrowness and rigidity of its choices. In the process, the pieties and institutions of domestic life come off at least as badly as the larger public ones. We meet egoistic husbands and polluted ministers as frequently as covetous business men; right and left the pretensions of individual pillars of society to virtue and respect are violently put in doubt. Marriage especially, in one novel after another, gets a bad name: in Fuller's, in Edith Wharton's, in Robert Herrick's, in Dreiser's and Ellen Glasgow's. At best it is a state to be suffered and endured. Even where the “unpleasant” social facts of divorce and broken engagements are admitted into the field of action, the outlook for those involved is just as bleak (see James's acrid “Julia Bride” of 1908). Metaphors of shackles and imprisonment, of cash appraisal and spiritual deprivation, are frequent and insistent for every phase of domestic relations.

The testimony of women concerning life's prospects is especially severe. The figure of the sunny, freeborn American girl of the magazine fiction of the '70s and '80s, flattered by Twain and Howells and still to be apotheosized by Henry James, no longer seems adequate to the reality of common existence. One of the significant developments in American writing around the turn of the century is the share of serious work, mainly in the novel and short story, contributed by women writers, and their newly articulate and resolutely candid point of view—and the point of view of their heroines: Mrs. Freeman's and Miss Jewett's nuns, widows, and spinsters; Kate Chopin's young matron in The Awakening (1899); Edith Wharton's innumerable hostages to social propriety; Gertrude Stein's Anna and Lena in Three Lives (1909); or, for that matter, heroines as different as Henry Adams's Esther (1884) and Stephen Crane's Maggie (1893)—offers a powerful and comprehensive indictment of the official creed of equal opportunity and generally diffused happiness in the land of the free. The plight of women speaks pathetically for the plight of all. No claim of progress can contradict it, and certainly no celebration of the beauty of wayside and disregarded virtue, virtue in hiding. A literature of shattered dreams and lost illusions: it is the predictable counterpart of that adventurous coming-of-age which, toward the end of our period, Van Wyck Brooks hopefully defined the times as preparing. And, though in such a literature there is always exhilaration that at last the truth is being told, this exhilaration invariably is overscored by the dreariness and sadness of much of the telling.

NOSTALGIA AND PROPHECY

In these circumstances, where could anxious spirits and free imaginations turn for relief? A conspicuous feature of the period is the network of reserve loyalties and counterattachments surrounding, and constraining, the central mode of critical realism. In most of the work so far mentioned, though the world it deals with is increasingly dominated by the industrial city, the older, narrower, simpler America persists as an active presence: the America of camp meeting and backyard neighborhood, of small farming and small shopkeeping, the “more or less handmade habitat” of regional tradition.⁸ What this other, older society offers in contrast is a standard that exerts attraction as if in direct ratio to the certainty of its disappearance. From 1884 and earlier to 1919 and well after, there is a continuing and much-publicized “revolt” against the life of village and countryside, but there is also a powerful current of visionary nostalgia running, however ambiguously, in its favor. A way of life that has been willingly sacrificed by those who have come out from it returns insistently to mind in a glow of idealization as the whole grim character of the adopted new order of society reveals itself. A chief element in the crisis of spirit among the literate classes and consequently in all the literature of American realism is a haunting sense of loss, as at some irreversible falling away from a golden time. “Local color” writing especially is suffused with this feeling. Of course much local-color or regional fiction—and there was a remarkable quantity of it in the late nineteenth century—was condescending or satirical, as in the pillorying of upcountry Methodism in Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896); or it chose to emphasize the quaintness of its subjects, as even Howells was inclined to do in describing, sympathetically enough, the manners of country people. The point is that good work of this kind is rarely single in attitude. And it is just in the most acutely observed and unidealized local-color writing that this sense of loss is strongest: in Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs (1898), in Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1915), in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919). The harsh actualities of the vanishing older order are freely admitted, but the counterforce of an inexhaustible nostalgia holds this recognition in balance. Criticism, celebration, and lamentation go side by side. If there is a single formal genre that is native and peculiar to the American imagination in literature, it is perhaps the circumstantial elegy (even Owen Wister's wild West, in The Virginian of 1902, is treated elegiacally), the detailed narrative lament for a disappearing, though perhaps only recently and precariously established, order of life.

In much of this work the lament rises to a ritual intensity, as if the spirit's gravest concern and uttermost destiny were in question. This we may take, historically, as another vivid symptom of that irrepressible evangelicalism which lies at the heart of the older structure of American consciousness. Realism, we find, is not at all inconsistent with vision and prophecy. Even business novels, city novels, novels of sociological demonstration were likely to define their subjects in the language of scripture and gospel. Certain titles of the period are representative: Boyesen's The Mammon of Unrighteousness (1891) and The Golden Calf (1892), Robert Grant's Unleavened Bread (1900), Mrs. Freeman's The Portion of Labor (1901), William Allen White's A Certain Rich Man (1909). The same rhetoric was commonplace in movements of political reform—“crusades” they are usually called in the United States. (John Jay Chapman accurately defined American socialism, around 1900, as “a religious reaction going on in an age which thinks in terms of money.”) Even the marginal countertradition of religious unbelief relied upon this durable language. The raised evangelical voice that has never ceased to ring out across the American scene, lamenting, exhorting, prophesying, has had no more influential continuator than Colonel Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899), the “great agnostic,” who personified the fight for intellectual freedom for a whole generation of dissident spirits.

ALTERNATIVES, ESCAPES

The deeper the sentiment of rebellion and innovation, the greater the need for traditional ways of expression: that appears to be a relevant formula for the mind's reaction to disturbance and change. At the end of the nineteenth century, the countermovements in an increasingly commercial and materialistic culture still tended to the formation of quasi-religious cults and sects. There was the cult of Bohemianism, and the accessory cults of the far away or long ago, the esoteric, the theosophic and occulto-cabalistic, all features of the '90s in particular. There was the cult of aestheticism—“art for art's sake” being art specifically not for the competition of the popular market. There was the aesthetic religiosity of incense, stained glass, music, and ritual (the instruments, among others, of poor Theron Ware's apostasy); Henry Adams wickedly labeled it the “religious Bohemianism” of “bric-a-brac and sermons.”⁹ There was, in another direction, the cult of “vagabondia,” popularized in the poems of Richard Hovey and the Canadian Bliss Carman and exploited by Jack London, and the even heartier cult of the “strenuous life,” endorsed between 1901 and 1909 by the White House itself. And there were the many, untraceable, homemade cults of fashionable decadents like Edgar Saltus (1855-1921) or of inspired autodidacts like Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901) and General Homer Lea (1876-1912)—devoted to promoting the “philosophy of disenchantment” or to demonstrating cryptographically that Bacon wrote Shakespeare or to proving that the long “day of the Saxon” was at an end—all of whom operated according to the grand American tradition that every man should be his own prophet and lawgiver and if possible his neighbor's as well.

In the fiction of the day there was also (not surprisingly) a vigorous reaction against realism or at least a blurring of its fundamental loyalty to democratic unaffectedness and plain-speaking. The years around 1900 saw a profitable revival of “romantic” costume melodrama—a commodity which in fact had hardly been displaced by the vogue of realism. A skillful manufacturer of such merchandise like the best-selling F. Marion Crawford (1854-1909) could make a fortune producing it through the '80s and '90s. The champions of realism were annoyed, however, not so much by the huge sales of these books as by the evidence thus offered of the obduracy of public, and publishing-house, taste. The place of best sellers in literary history is a tricky problem. In any modern period, a certain large class of books can be found, bearing some resemblance to serious work, which nevertheless are “so disconnected”—the description is Henry James's—“from almost any consideration with which an artistic product is at any point concerned, any effect of presentation, any prescription of form, composition, proportion, taste, art,” as to be fundamentally undiscussable, yet which evidently are pitched to the prevailing taste of the literate classes, and which, moreover, are somehow representative of the time's main bearings. It may possibly come about that in the very long run scholarship will find more interest and value in such books—even in Janice Meredith (1899), in The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1902), in The Winning of Barbara Worth (1911)—than is conceivable in our nearer view, just as we would look kindly now on popular trash that happened to be contemporary with Shakespeare, or with Vergil and Homer if we could find it: the further back the better. A more important point to raise, however, is that serious writers of the time were tempted by this revival of costume romance; Sarah Jewett's The Tory Lover (1901), Edith Wharton's The Valley of Decision (1902), Gertrude Atherton's The Conqueror (1902), and Stephen Crane's The O'Ruddy (1903) are all products of it.

Also, by 1900 the fashion of realism had itself settled into grooves of popular formula. The kind of writer who in an earlier day would have imitated Scott or G. P. R. James could now safely follow after Howells or Stephen Crane. Like any fresh impulse in the arts, realism could be made into a commodity and sold on the great public as unabashedly as Graustark or the old plantation. There was costume romance; there was also costume realism; and a competent market craftsman like Booth Tarkington saw no reason not to begin his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Magnificent Ambersons (1918), with a twenty-page table of articles of middle-class consumption and ostentation from a period carefully chosen to coincide with the childhoods of middle-aged readers.¹⁰ A little reluctantly one must include the gifted O. Henry in this category of pseudorealists. In the first half or two-thirds of more than a few of his stories he can still strike us as a skillful and observant fabulist of the way life commonly goes, particularly the lives of ordinary men and women in a mass society, only to throw away our interest with a trick ending that does not so much falsify the dramatic situation as simply abandon it.

NEW SUBJECTS, NEW OPPORTUNITIES

But for the more deeply ambitious writer, the man (or woman) who might want to do something more than make a saleable job of it, the need to take greater risks, to make some bolder strike for expressive freedom, remained and intensified. So also did the sense of a unique opportunity. As realism in these years represents a critical response to the era's multiplying social confusions, so it also involves the capturing of a whole new set of literary subjects and occasions that were being criminally neglected by the complacent professionalism of the day. A heady confidence in the opportunities for individual writers and artists is not a bit less characteristic of the years between 1884 and 1919—the “confident years,” Van Wyck Brooks could reasonably call them—than disgust with most of their actual developments or pessimism about their prevailing drift.

The new subjects were chiefly those presented by the new order, or disorder, of society and by the toll it exacted from men and women caught up in it. For every kind of fictional realism—moral realism, psychological realism, social and circumstantial realism—there was material and to spare. Let some of it be noted. In general society, the drastic discipline of the modern economic process and the striving for success at the expense of more humane loyalties. In private life, the strain on personal conduct and personal relationships and all the extraordinary new manifestations of social mobility: freedom of career- and fortune-making, sexual freedom, divorce and breach of contract, chronic waste of capacities, chronic frustration of powers, spiritual liberation indistinguishable from spiritual unemployment. And in personal consciousness, there was worse yet: the fear of an increasingly uncertain future, the sense of injustice in worldly rewards and punishments, and the morality-shattering intimations (backed by popularized nineteenth-century philosophies of evolution and determinism) as to the probable working out of life's natural appetites and laws.

The problem for writers was to find the forms for exploiting these disturbing opportunities and not to be paralyzed by them. The general standard of realism was clearer in suggesting what traditional forms would not serve than in indicating what new ones might. Also, the same broad impulses that were making descriptive realists out of most aspiring novelists and story-tellers had coincidentally produced a formidable rival to imaginative literature itself in the enterprising, fact-devouring, image-squandering newspaper journalism of the day. (There is a parallel in the challenge to painting posed by the emergence of photography.) It is possible, in fact, to decide that, between the run of competent realistic novelists and the run of good free-lance journalists around 1900, the work of the latter is the more satisfactory. Surer of the possible usefulness of their writing, the better interpretive reporters—Jacob Riis and Lincoln Steffens, Herbert Croly and, later, Walter Lippmann—were, if anything, imaginatively freer to follow their inquiry where it led. They might at first approach the phenomena of city life and business civilization with the usual high-minded assumptions about right and wrong, fair and foul; they remained to continue the study as objectively as any social scientist. They learned to write about the actual machinery of modern society with the sympathetic enthusiasm of field anthropologists (another new breed of realistic observer more resourcefully imaginative than most old-style men of letters).

Such writers were perhaps the first to see the new order of common life from the point of view of its “new men,” its managers and agents, as well as of its victims; from the point of view, that is, of those for whom the culture of the modern city was all challenge, excitement, and opportunity. Following this course, not a few journalists, including some of the best-known “muckrakers,” eventually became outright propagandists for the system of great capital wealth and concentrated business power. The more reflective, like Steffens, Croly, and Lippmann, broke through to discoveries and interpretations that contributed substantially to that inner reform of Progressive political thought which brought it forward into the nationalizing era of the New Deal and the Second World War. That is a story for political historians; the point here is that the novelists who addressed themselves to the same lively materials—Phillips, Herrick, Churchill, and, among younger men, Upton Sinclair and Ernest Poole—tended for all their show of disturbing new facts and impressions to remain mired in melodrama and sentiment and in increasingly irrelevant prejudices as to what at any moment might best be done. It is characteristic of their kind of rebelliousness to wander off into schemes for mind-cure (Herrick) or perhaps total abstinence (Sinclair) and pitch their reformer's standard there. The result is that they remain interesting now chiefly for the poignant insights they offer into the persistent frustrations and fantasies of cultivated middle-class feeling. In the historical drama of their times they figure as victims rather than as interpreters and prophets. But they do thus freshly remind us that the victimization of ordinary insulated men of principle and right feeling is a prime element in the historical transformations of our difficult century.

For the ambitious American writer, let it be said again, there was no “question of the opportunities”—to borrow the title of the first of Henry James's “American Letters” of 1898. What he was doing with these opportunities or could ever learn to do was another matter. One glaring case of a great unexploited subject, James pointed out, was the American business tycoon. Here was a figure “whom the novelist and the dramatist have scarce yet seriously touched” (James did not rate his own early romance, The American, very high in this respect); and we may use James's example here as a lesson for literary history, an indication of what turns art may have to take to get its peculiar kind of hold on the conspicuous features of actual life and common knowledge. The American business man of the grander sort, James went on, would make a splendid subject, in both his public and his private life:

an obscure, but not less often an epic, hero, seamed all over with the wounds of the market and the dangers of the field, launched into action and passion by the immensity and complexity of the general struggle, a boundless ferocity of battle—driven above all by the extraordinary, the unique relation in which he for the most part stands to the life of his lawful, his immitigable womankind, the wives and daughters who float, who splash on the surface and ride the waves, his terrific link with civilization, his social substitutes and representatives, while, like a diver for shipwrecked treasures, he gasps in the depths and breathes through an air-tube.

Clearly there is insight and point of view enough in this breathtaking prospectus for a dozen good novels. Yet it must be asked: who did, in the next twenty years, grasp the type of the man of great affairs in anything like the manner James outlines? Herrick, in novels like his Memoirs of an American Citizen (1905), tried as hard as anyone, but the combination he worked by of journalistic detail and soap-opera plotting was not equal to the task. Dreiser made a bolder attempt in his Cowperwood trilogy, of which the first two volumes, The Financier and The Titan, came out in 1912 and 1914; yet in comparison with his moving chronicles of the insulted and injured of modern city life, with Jennie Gerhardt above all, there is a fundamental implausibility about these books, which surrender too much to private fantasies of power and affluence. Perhaps Thorstein Veblen, mixing analysis and caricature, came nearer to succeeding than any novelist, particularly in the highly novelistic matter of the businessman's “terrific link with civilization” through those vultures of conspicuous consumption, his womenfolk, whose strange habits of life are so persuasively defined in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Veblen saw as deeply into the character of contemporary life as any writer of his time and, with his ironic tableaux of business civilization and the moral types who flourish in it, broke much of the ground later occupied by social fabulists like Sinclair Lewis and John Dos Passos, Fitzgerald and Nathanael West.

No writer, however, communicated the paradoxical sense of the businessman as epic hero more picturesquely than Henry James himself, through Adam Verver of The Golden Bowl—but it has become a commonplace of critical opinion that James failed to imagine this character in the round and with regard to the plain gross data of getting and spending which (so the insistent metaphor of ownership reminds us) remain the shaping principle of his being. In this respect the characters in the unfinished Ivory Tower are more solidly built up. But perhaps the job of “doing” the American businessman was impossible. The breed itself was “unreal,” unimaginable, precisely not rooted in the common humane life of feeling and behavior upon which the notations of fiction depend.¹¹ Perhaps only outright fantasy could capture so fantastic a social phenomenon—and it may well be that the most fully achieved image of the business tycoon in American literature (the one best fitting the wonderful wildness of James's metaphors) is the looming ghost figure at the climax of “The Jolly Corner” (1909), who has no women and, except in the fearful masquerade of his evening dress, no link to civilization at all but is a pure demon of hallucination.

THE PRESTIGE OF INTELLECT: PRAGMATISM, EXPERIMENT, SCIENCE

If “The Jolly Corner” is thus, among other things, a brilliantly inventive response to a particular challenge from contemporary life, the very expertness that brings it off, merging ghost story with social and psychological fable, makes it a thoroughly characteristic production of the “confident years.” So in a sense was the whole of James's remarkable later career. His increasingly freehanded and original exploitation of the opportunities of his craft became, for young men like Pound and Eliot after 1910, a critical rallying point, a demonstration that an English-speaking writer could indeed take full and heroic part in the great modernist renaissance of art and thought. It was in technique, experiment, new work addressed and original performance carried through, more than in any particular set of themes and arguments, that the creative confidence of these years most typically expressed itself.

A factor as nebulous yet fundamental as intellectual morale, even in a relatively brief period, is difficult to discuss with precision.¹² But what seems more and more to distinguish the larger scene of literature and thought around the turn of the century is precisely its broad confidence in the efficacy of the mind's effort—the imaginative, formal effort of writers and artists; the systematic, principled effort of political theorists, social engineers, community educators and planners; the exploratory and synthesizing effort of scholars and scientists. Various effects of this confidence can be listed: the founding of new universities and the systematizing of new intellectual disciplines like sociology and anthropology; the multiplication of professional societies and scholarly journals; the forwarding of such great collective enterprises as The Cambridge Modern History and A New English Dictionary, among which, in the United States, the Encyclopedia of Social Reform (1897; revised 1908), edited by W. D. P. Bliss, deserves mention. But perhaps a better way, in a volume of literary history, is simply to recall some of the works of disciplined inquiry and scholarship published during this era—Holmes's The Common Law (1881), Professor Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1883-1898), Woodrow Wilson's Congressional Government (1885), Henry Charles Lea's A History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages (1888), William James's The Principles of Psychology (1890), Henry Adam's A History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889-1891), Captain Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 (1890), Berenson's Italian Painters of the Renaissance (1894-1907), Brooks Adams's The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895), Josiah Royce's The World and the Individual (1900-1901), Edward Eggleston's The Transit of Civilization (1901), Santayana's The Life of Reason (1905-1906), William Graham Sumner's Folkways (1907), H. O. Taylor's The Medieval Mind (1911), Breasted's The Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912), Ernest Fenollosa's Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (1912), Veblen's The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (1914), H. L. Mencken's The American Language (1919)—and ask whether a comparable list can be drawn up for any other era in American letters.

It seems impossible now, so little do we share the broad faith in applied intellect embodied in these works, to over-rate its generative power and stimulus. Beside it the fin-de-siècle vogue of cosmic pessimism appears shallow and theatrical. Always, with particular works, we need to look beneath theme and stated attitude (though not ignoring them) and observe the governing method, the imaginative sweep, the play of executive intelligence, the reasoned authority of the design. The composed argument may turn out bleak and despairing in its conclusions, yet it may involve the most invigorating display of intellectual mastery. The literature of neo-Darwinist determinism is typical. Fears that the system of evolution must deny mankind any real freedom to act or power to control are widely expressed; they represent one of the deeply characteristic positions of argument in the writing of the period. Yet nothing opposes such fears so forcibly as the vivid impression created in one book after another of the human mind's power to thread its way through labyrinths of data, not omitting the formidable evidences of its own bondage to irreversible laws of nature, and come to ordered and usable conclusions. In every case a distinction has to be made between the burden of the findings and the temper and energy of the inquiry.

The philosophy that, in the United States, most nearly expresses this manifold confidence in the creative mind's sufficient capacity is pragmatism, in particular the open-minded, affirmative pragmatism associated with the thought, and voice, of William James. Has innovation in philosophy ever quite so directly given aid and comfort to innovation in the arts, and with less inclination to dominate and dogmatize? All students of the anni mirabiles, for the arts, of the earlier twentieth century are bound to discover at some point the enabling presence of two underlying attitudes, in close conjunction: on the one hand that free, opportunistic outlook on all contingencies of life and thought which is at the heart of pragmatism and, on the other, a corresponding appetite for technical experiment and invention, an undaunted readiness to line out new work and then get it done. This alliance deserves fuller investigation than is possible here. Certain results, however, seem clear enough. The rough pragmatic test of truth, accepting operative performance as a sufficient verification, served as a morally inspiring warranty that truths did exist and could be established and acted upon—and that the evident pluralism and inconsistency of particular truths and of particular forms of truth ought only to delight the healthy-minded, the true bearers of civilization. Against the continuing erosion of traditional culture and belief, pragmatism could give men of letters a new courage, as well (for it was first of all a critique of knowledge) as a surer basis in reason. The pragmatic intelligence looked doubt in the eye and glared it down, in calculated offense. It asserted against the specter of intellectual paralysis a “will to believe” embodied in the whole nature of man; against the observed chaos of the phenomenal world a countervailing appetite for the sheer vital abundance and variety of experience. So, in an essay that Whitehead later singled out as a turning point in philosophy comparable (as a symptom if not as an influence) to Descartes' Discourse on Method, we find William James ungrudgingly demonstrating that no such entity as human “consciousness” really “exists”—and then proceeding to make the flooding succession of particular conscious events, and the tracing of that succession, as heroically preoccupying to the reflective intelligence as any Promethean or Faustean myth of human power.

A further point. Whatever the exact terms of their conjunction, it is clear that pragmatism in philosophy and free experiment in the arts were both beneficiaries of the enormous contemporary prestige of science. This prestige was never higher than around the turn of the century. For many humanists and men of letters, of course, all science appeared to pose a wholly unprecedented threat—to the arts, to the habit of faith, to civilization itself. Even among persons not irretrievably committed to received doctrines of religion or, equally, to the doctrinaire attack upon religion—persons for whom the widely publicized “warfare” between science and theology (solemnly recorded in President White's bulky History of 1896) was largely a sham—the scientific intellect and the humanist-poetic imagination were thought to be deeply opposed: rivals for the mind's allegiance, dark and light angels of humankind's conceivable destiny. But that view (renewed in our day in the bugbear of “the two cultures”) is plainly sentimental, and the writers and artists who knew their own minds had little sympathy with it. Industrial, technological, bureaucratic complication was another matter, of course, and took a heavy toll in waste and demoralization with every new incursion upon the received fabric of life. But scientific inquiry—what could it be but profoundly inspiring to creative minds? In its technical excitements, its discipline, its extravagant success, it had become the great contemporary example of that disturbing faith long known to mystics and poets (and renewed in the emergence of European symbolism): that the world belongs to those who find the right words or formulas for it, who learn to speak most purely and efficiently its intricate secret language.

FREEDOM

For writers with the wit or nerve not to be intimidated, the astonishing advances of scientific inquiry served as both model and moral support. The intrinsic realism of the scientific concern with nature shored up the cause of realism in the arts. Equally important, the sciences provided, with regard to form and workmanship, operative analogies of great authority. Certain minimal standards of performance in literature and the arts became easier to enforce: precision, thoroughness, economy of statement, elegance (in the mathematician's sense) of formulation, mastery of technique, conceptual seriousness and point. Coincidentally the old and clouded Romantic commandments to originality and sincerity were redefined and restored to use—an enterprise central to the opening critical efforts of Eliot and Pound, for all their distaste for “Romanticism.” Pound's critical injunctions, of purest 1910-1912 vintage, are typical. “Consider the way of the scientists,” he advised the poets of his time, “rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap. The scientist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until he has discovered something. He begins by learning what has been discovered already. He goes from that point onward.” A first corollary of this for the writer was the command to apprentice himself as if without any mental reservation whatsoever—so much for merely personal sincerity—to the long technical tradition of his craft: that is the chastening implication of Eliot's influential essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917). A rather different corollary, expressing more directly the practical confidence of the time, was the stimulating notion that no achievement could be proved impossible to a mind that had liberated itself from ignorance and prejudice and taken command of its proper tools; that no authority living or dead could say what might not be “discovered” if an effort, any effort, was properly made. Pound's schoolmasterish edict that poems should be at least as well written as good prose was meant to clear the way for a deeper ambition: that the craft of poetry become once again at least as intelligent, as freely exploratory, as capable of interior discipline, and thus in its way as greatly influential, as the craft of science.

A pragmatist à outrance, Pound became a major critical force in the decade after 1910 by playing to the hilt a classic role in Anglo-American letters: the role of the revolutionary moralist-adventurer recodifying fundamental law (upon a new gathering of precedents) and redefining the history of that law's descent and present continuance. By an assertive and yet critically tactful personal effort Pound arbitrarily dragooned most of the best new work of his time into the cause of modernism and coincidentally manufactured a tradition—“platform” would be nearer the mark—for it to campaign upon. His principled quirkiness, broadcast in letters, pamphlets, manifestoes, and editorial sorties, makes his whole career fascinating as a rendezvous of historical symptoms. In all this effort his essential Americanness is hardly to be questioned. Pretending, as Whitman had seemed to, to dismiss all the past as wholly outmoded, irrelevant to one's present duty, is not greatly different from pretending to swallow that past whole by means of an efficient selection of exemplary instances. It may be taken as a tribute to the integrity of Pound's lifework that the reason and logic of its various undertakings so persistently mirror the reason and logic of so many familiar positions and attitudes of the American consciousness. “Life is action, the use of one's powers. As to use them to their height is our joy and duty, so it is the one end that justifies itself”—if we put forward this well-known affirmation of Justice Holmes's, with its matter-of-fact verbal heroics and also its considerable moral ambiguity, to represent the spirit in which the durable work of 1884-1919 got accomplished, we must grant that it expresses fairly directly Ezra Pound's infectious passion for the making, and “justifying,” of works of art. Who else, we may ask, reveals so distinctly in the pattern of his “life and contacts” the lines of development that in Anglo-American letters join the '80s and '90s to 1912, and 1912 to the ebullition of the 1920s?

Characteristically, it is Pound himself—writing in The Little Review about Henry James—who, at the very end of our period, gives us a clue to perhaps its deepest and most persistent common motive. (There is a lesson in this, the cogency of the insight of one master of his art into the work of another, for the writing of literary history in general: that beyond anything else it is accomplished art that makes for representativeness and that only the very best work and very best workmen of any period can be relied on for accurate insight into its historical meaning.) “What I have not heard,” Pound complained, “is any word of the major James”—and, ignoring arguments about the opaqueness of the master's later style, he proceeded to say who this major James really was:

the hater of tyranny; book after early book against oppression, against all the sordid petty personal crushing oppression, the domination of modern life; not worked out in the diagrams of Greek tragedy, not labelled “epos” or “Aeschylus.” The outbursts in The Tragic Muse, the whole of The Turn of the Screw, human liberty, personal liberty, the rights of the individual against all sorts of intangible bondage.¹³

Criticism of James, and in general American criticism of modern literature, has not notably followed this remarkable lead. Yet Pound's striking judgment has a ring of fresh and rather heroic truth about it. Such authority as it carries is drawn in no small part from the moment of its formulation. The second decade of the twentieth century had human liberation on the brain, and the unnerving crisis of the First World War gave a hysterical edge to that fixation, the etiology of which involves, at the least, the whole span of history surveyed in this volume. Touch and go from the start, the long struggle which American realism most consistently bears witness to was, at its core, a struggle for freedom of mind and development against whatever might stand in the way. And the evident fact by 1920 was that this struggle was hardly closer to resolution than it had been in 1880. The indictment of the whole drift or slide of modern civilization implicit in Pound's early work and elaborated in Veblen's and Randolph Bourne's contains little not specifically anticipated by Henry George and others in the '80s or, for that matter, by Democratic Vistas in 1871 (and by Carlyle and Ruskin in England). There is only a geometrical accumulation of new ills to take account of—the First World War being, of course, a particular disaster—and a corresponding intensification of shame and outrage.

It can seem most impressive now, this intellectual struggle for freedom, where the residual confidence it rises from is shadowed if not wholly put in check by an apprehension of what may most deeply oppose it—the apprehension recorded in the air of fatality surrounding Edith Wharton's or Theodore Dreiser's best characters, for example, or in the much-publicized “imagination of disaster” claimed by Henry James. By contrast, the progressive hopefulness characteristic of the period often seems shallow and brittle, and the literature directly expressing it lacks weight. The very slant of Pound's terms for defining what was “major” in James's achievement—terms denoting only resistance and opposition and a wholly individualistic conception of “liberty”—is open to obvious objection and may suggest where this common imaginative effort of American realism fell short. Let it succeed, let human liberation come: what then? Then must follow that deeper and (because endless) more savagely taxing struggle which, it may be argued, all the remarkable historical privilege and immunity framing the long American settlement for its favored members had been postponing for generation upon generation (the generation of the Civil War partially excepted)—the struggle not for freedom but with freedom; the struggle to find a decent and manageable footing for human life and work (including the work of art) within the mass secular society and ungoverned technological order of modern times.

But it would be misleading to end this survey of tendencies on a note solely of reproof and alarm. The actual creativity of the period in view deserves full credit. If the realist impulse in American literature, following its chief motives, came to a kind of dead end morally, it got there only after an impressive forward progress. The literary life in the United States around 1880 was more soddenly parochial and unambitious that it had been for half a century; and the actual broadening of taste and practice during the next forty years, the breaking down of arbitrary and irrelevant barriers to honest work, the increasing intelligence of critical judgment, the deepening capacity to express actual feeling, the renewed openness (as in the 1830s and 1840s) to Europe and the major intellectual currents of the times are all beyond dispute. By 1919, in fact, the traditionally dependent relation of American to English and European letters was on the point once again of becoming more than a little reciprocal. What the best American writers would accomplish now was no longer interesting merely as an index to the precise degree of American provinciality; in the work of Eliot and Pound, O'Neill and Dos Passos, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway—the inheritors of “realism”—modern American letters began, so to speak, to make regular payments on its immense foreign debt.

Notes

1. If anything there is a certain dilution and simplification. Few late nineteenth-century American realists shared the complex philosophic concerns of Emerson's generation: the sophisticated anxiety about style as an index to true knowledge; the moral reverence, in the face of religious breakdown, for truthfulness of expression as an end in itself. Henry James is the possible exception—and the degree of James's awareness of the philosophic implications of his fictional method is a matter sharply debated. The question opens down into the very foundations of specifically American literary tradition. An introductory chapter organized in another way might well take as its major theme the general indifference of American writers in this later period, compared to those of 1830-1860, to the cognitive aspect of form and style—there is nothing in American literature, for example, like the fundamental critique of “realism” indicated in Meredith's “Prelude” to The Egoist and in his Essay on Comedy—and it might also look ahead to the reaction against this indifference among our best twentieth-century poets.

2. The lines are in Aldrich's poem, “At the Funeral of a Minor Poet.” Of Eliot's After Strange Gods (1934) one ought in fairness to say that it marks an extreme point of personal reaction against the tendencies of the age. His later tracts, The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Toward a Definition of Culture, are more acutely reasoned. But the grounding of his thought in polite opinion of the '80s and '90s is always worth noting.

3. A more systematic analysis of the social background of American literature would surely show that disorder and disruptive change have been not merely the special burden of certain critical periods but something closer to the norm of the whole national history. Thus the greater service of certain books which first draw notice for their allegedly sensational treatment of some accidental condition of violence is that they more trenchantly define this persisting norm.

4. Even Henry James can be shocking on such matters, as when, in The American Scene (1907), surrounded in New York by Jews, Italians, Armenians, and who could say what else, he registers the considered opinion that “there is no claim to brotherhood with aliens in the first grossness of their alienism.” James rallies grandly, however; his imagination takes the decisive step—not only into compassion but into simple historical truth—as he asks: “Who and what is an alien, when it comes to that, in a country peopled from the first under the jealous eye of history?—peopled, that is, by migrations at once extremely recent, perfectly traceable and urgently required.” James has been accused of lacking sociological awareness, but he saw in the plainest way that you cannot have an unrestrained, undirected business civilization without a correspondingly full dose of its characteristic social maladies.

5. These few, however, had a direct influence upon public opinion. In the wake of Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879) came the Single-Tax movement; in the wake of Edward Bellamy's Utopian romance, Looking Backward (1888), the Nationalist Party. Laurence Gronlund's The Co-Operative Commonwealth (1884), which pushed Howells toward a kind of sentimental socialism, became the bible of a private co-operative movement. Henry Demarest Lloyd's Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894) set the pattern of Progressivism's subsequent attack on monopoly and legislative corruption. In the next decade, the writings of Daniel DeLeon and Morris Hillquit provided their respective Socialist factions with up-to-date primers for political agitation.

6. Turner's “Frontier” address and, twenty years later, Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), shared in this more-than-scholarly motivation. Each seemed to convey a double implication: an indictment of the purblind, illusion-mongering clerkery of the historical profession and also a kind of prescription for the future well-being of American democratic virtue.

7. The degree to which this purpose renewed the original efforts of Emerson, defining “prospects,” and Thoreau, discoursing on “economy,” made it more or less inevitable that the good writers of half a century later would have to find their practical models almost anywhere except in these direct spiritual precursors. Precisely as the spirit of that earlier protestation was still alive and richly pertinent, the letter of it had to be changed. On the other hand, a history of American painting or music or architecture around 1900 and after, particularly as it centered on figures like John Sloan (1871-1951), or Charles Ives (1874-1956), or Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) and Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959), would show Emerson and Thoreau, and also Whitman, as acknowledged prophets of the new age.

8. The phrase is in the foreword by Harry B. Wehle to B. Cowdrey and H. W. Williams, William Sidney Mount (New York, 1944), where it is used to make a point about the importance of traditions of handicraft and independent artisanship for the fine arts in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A number of realist novels point up the coexistence of these two orders of economic life, the artisan-individual and the corporative-monopolistic, drawing a contrast between the older self-made men of wealth and position, honestly successful marketers of some intrinsically superior product or skill, and the newer breed who deal in paper values and executive-suite mergers. Consider Augustus Kane and his sons in Jennie Gerhardt or old Brainard and his successors in The Cliff-Dwellers. A late novel by Brand Whitlock, J. Hardin and Son (1923), is about the defeat of the older merchant-artisan by the rising generation and its systematic production of shoddy. The resemblance to Veblen's categories of producer and profit-taker, engineer (good) and financier (bad), is worth noting.

9. The phrase occurs in his novel Esther (1884), before he had begun to feel seriously, through its arts and the commitment of various friends, the fuller and deeper attraction of the Catholic Middle Ages. Aesthetic religiosity and spiritualism were nowhere more intense around the turn of the century than among the “Gallo-Roman” expatriate colonies in Rome and Florence, ancient tempting grounds of many a demobilized Puritan conscience.

10. In his first success, The Gentleman from Indiana (1899), Tarkington made a somewhat more forthright attempt to deal with the prevailing conditions of actual society and mounted a blunt, though perfectly conventional, attack on political corruption at the county level.

11. Dreiser himself advanced the view that the American financier was not a human being at all but a kind of animal force or, more precisely, “a highly specialized machine for the accomplishment of some end which Nature has in view” but which is unimaginable to men: see “The American Financier,” Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life (1919).

12. In civil life, some positive estimate of its effective energy is possible, in terms of particular laws, policies, debates, issues, and reforms. The general confidence of the years preceding the First World War as to the efficacy of “progressive” political action is a matter of record. So, too, is the excessively prolonged reaction against this active optimism, a reaction that is still painfully working itself out.

13. The passage is characteristic of Pound: a valuable general perception sharpened by intense moral commitment but worked out through an oddly inconvenient selection of examples.