SOURCE: “The Writers' Search for Reality,” in The Gilded Age:Revised and Enlarged Edition, edited by H. Wayne Morgan, Syracuse University Press, 1970, pp. 223-37.

[In the following essay, Falk characterizes the Gilded Age as a time of great literary change, largely due to a break from Romanticism and a movement toward increased realism.]

The serious writers of any age are in search of reality, the real thing, the genuine article valid for their time. What make the difference between literary movements and periods are the special historical characteristics of the age and the particular literary form which embodies that reality and contemporaneity. In the Gilded Age literature increasingly expressed a vision of reality in the novel form, as distinguished from the “romance” of Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville. The decades following 1865 were a blend of the old and the new. The older established writers of the mid-century—Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Bryant, Holmes, and Hawthorne—were still powerful spokesmen of romanticism. Their voices merged with those of younger writers beginning to be heard. Of the early realists in fiction, three indelibly stamped the Gilded Age: Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James. Hawthorne's influence was strong in the early work of both Howells and James. Melville, by a strange and ironic commentary on the critical taste of the period, was relatively unknown. Poetry during the postwar decades was derivative, except for Emily Dickinson and Whitman, both of whom had to wait for the critical understanding of later generations. After 1890, a younger group of writers began to express in fiction a different and stronger variety of realism called naturalism which drew upon French and Russian fiction, native agrarian protest, and Populist ideas. Literature combined the inherited tendencies of romantic thought and expression with the newer methods of realism. This combination was further altered by the naturalistic mode of the nineties in the work of Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris.¹

Twentieth-century critics have emphasized the negative and corruptive factors of politics and society during The Gilded Age. It is difficult now to avoid certain of the preconceptions about that period of American culture which emerged during the 1920's and 1930's in the historical writings of Charles Beard, V. L. Parrington, Van Wyck Brooks, and others. These men saw the age as the source of economic and cultural disparities adversely affecting their own time. Rugged individualism, the “gospel of wealth,” the railroad barons and oil magnates, corrupt politicians, the uncontrolled exploitation of the material resources of the nation, the survival of the fittest were the elements they used to castigate the decades after the Civil War. Historians dismissed morals and manners as “genteel” and “innocent,” neo-Puritan in the general refusal to admit the facts of life. Victorian became a word to devaluate the taste and manners of The Gilded Age. To George Santayana “The Genteel Tradition” meant that American life then was characterized by a decadent Calvinism, merging with transcendental idealism and a kind of wishful idealism at odds with the pragmatic and materialistic forces of the nineteenth century. Others, like Edith Wharton in her novel The Age of Innocence (1920), dramatized the period's effeminate culture and hypocritical high-mindedness. She pictured the 1870's and 1880's as an orthodoxy of factitious purity and false delicacy which shielded wives and daughters from the reigning vulgarity and bad taste. Much of this pejorative criticism needs revaluation. We have proceeded far enough beyond the Menckenism of the twenties and the Marxianism of the thirties to see that some of this flagellation was motivated by the need to disparage the Gilded Age to justify the deficiencies of those later decades. We should go beyond the negative implications of such historical tags as “The Gilded Age,” “The Genteel Tradition,” and “The Age of Innocence.”²

Such phrases have only limited validity in accounting for the climate of ideas which helped produce Henry James, Howells, Mark Twain, Henry Adams, and Stephen Crane. Like all men of exceptional gifts they were both of their age and apart from it. James, the most truly original and talented artist of the period, was an American Victorian despite his distrust of much of the American scene and his rediscovery of Europe as a source of value. Howells, old-maidish and conservative to a later generation, was a literary radical in his own time. Henry Adams felt alienated from the politics of the Grant administration, yet he was clearly a product of the intellectual milieu in which positivism, science, and evolution were leading doctrines. The ideas of such original minds as William James, Chauncey Wright, John Fiske, and Charles Peirce were closely woven with the cultural texture of that generation. In short, the literary and intellectual accomplishments of the period were a subtle mingling of new ideas and ways of expression with the public tone and flavor of that much-belittled era of history.

Seeming to have exhausted the possibilities for analysis of Henry James and Mark Twain, criticism has recently turned to lesser writers such as Howells, John W. DeForest, Bret Harte, George W. Cable, and Edward Bellamy. These men had distinguished careers and popular followings, and it would be inappropriate to reassess the period without estimating their accomplishments. Talented and now neglected writers of regional fiction such as Edward Eggleston, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Joel Chandler Harris, Hamlin Garland, and Sarah Orne Jewett were also important. If we include those writers of the 1890's such as Harold Frederic, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris the literary portrait of the age takes on still larger proportions.

Influential editors directed flourishing literary periodicals. Howells of the Atlantic Monthly, R. W. Gilder of the Century, G. W. Curtis of Harper's Weekly, and J. G. Holland of Scribner's were all tastemakers charged by later critics with perpetuating the canons of propriety. The literary essay was an art, and men like T. W. Higginson, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and H. H. Boyesen carried on the tradition of Lowell and O. W. Holmes. Criticism was slow to develop from conventional book reviews and provincial judgments, but in the hands of James, Howells, and a few liberal-minded men such as Thomas Perry, W. C. Brownell, and E. C. Stedman, it emerged as a literary genre, independent of didacticism. The best of this criticism helped to provide a rationale for the novel of realism.³

Popular and sentimental fiction also flourished, a sign of the generally low level of taste among the juvenile or somewhat-arrested-adult readers of boy-books, dime novels, romance, and the kind of fiction once described by Henry James as depending on “a ‘happy ending,’ on a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks.” There were “good” and “bad” boy or girl stories. Frances H. Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy was a best seller, making a snob-appeal to the American worship of titles. “Juveniles” varied in juvenility from Tom Sawyer, a book for adults about boys, to George Peck's The Story of a Bad Boy and his Pa and Harriet Stone's The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Foreign imports such as Stevenson's Treasure Island, Blackmore's Lorna Doone, Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, and Madame Spyri's Heidi all found eager readers, along with the adventure novels of Ouida, Rider Haggard, Marie Corelli, and Jules Verne. Native writers indulged in sermonizing and sensation, chivalry and romance, tears and laughter, westerns, and dime novels. The Reverend E. P. Roe struck a new vein of popularity in Barriers Burned Away, inspired by the great Chicago fire of 1871. Lew Wallace's Ben Hur established a vogue for historical romance in the nineties shared by F. Marion Crawford and others. Edward Westcott's David Harum made bad grammar and “hoss-sense” a highly lucrative product and a patriotic fashion for thousands of native readers in the 1890's.

But the most enduring juveniles of them all were the boy-success novels of Horatio Alger. They reflected a taste for mawkish sentiment, faith in hard work, no smoking, and obedience to elders as sure ways of acquiring a fortune. Alger wrote with incredible speed, turning out 109 books between 1868 and 1898, averaging about 50,000 words each and marketed at from ten cents to $1.50 Young readers apparently could not get enough of Alger's painting of the rainbow possibilities of wealth amid degradation and poverty. But farm boys were less impressed by his moralizing than by his fascinating and realistic details of street life in New York.

The Alger books were not merely an adolescent form of the gospel of wealth or a juvenile ethic of acquisitiveness. This interpretation of their historical role is a tempting, but easily exaggerated thesis. For the Alger hero, wealth and success were rewards for duty, patience, and resignation. But the emphasis upon luck and pluck placed the formula more clearly in the traditions of Protestant piety and romantic melodrama. Alger's own evangelical background combined with the popular romance of the period to produce his money-and-happiness endings. These rewards were not the result of struggle and competition, but gifts of providence, chance, virtue, and good fortune.⁴

To many later observers the Gilded Age was a “golden age” of business. The illusion of ever-increasing fortunes was a powerful incentive to divert attention from harsher realities. American innocence, for one thing, was too often mistaken for a virtue, while European experience was considered corrupt. It was flattering to regard the evolutionary philosophy of Darwin and Herbert Spencer as leading upward to infinite progress and development, particularly in material things. Not until later did critical spirits recognize that Social Darwinism contained the seeds of uncontrolled individualism and the worship of strength over equality and humanity. The inequities of a rising urban and industrial civilization were obscured in the general optimism and meliorism. National pride and nativism led to an unwarranted complacency with the dogmas of democracy. It was enough for patriotic spirits that the nation, a century before, had professed in political documents that all men were created equal. Obvious indications to the contrary were dismissed as exceptional; all would be well in the end. There was a western frontier, still waiting to be exploited, a place where men were men, out of the reach of oppressive institutions of church or state. The nation was unconcerned by approaching middle age with its responsibilities and troubling problems.

Such was the general mood in 1870. But it was not the whole story. It established the socio-cultural background for the paradoxical character of Victorian realism. Literary and intellectual life, however, contained a direction and a purpose of its own. What was meant by realism in the fiction of that period? What did the best writers intend to accomplish? What theories and methods did they follow? In the major authors of the time, the disparate and often contradictory forces of the age formed a center which we can regard as the essence of literary realism.⁵

Realism as a literary phenomenon formed in the late 1860's as a protest against mid-century romantic attitudes and conventions. During the 1870's it was in a transitional and experimental stage, and by 1880, there was an authentic movement of realism in the novel; that decade produced the most characteristic writing of the period. After 1890 a different climate of ideas altered the character of realistic fiction when a new and younger generation, sometimes influenced by darker, deterministic philosophies, explored the naturalistic mode. But the gradual beginnings of realism around 1870 may be seen in the early stories of Henry James, in Howells' Italian sketches, De Forest's best novels, especially Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1868), Twain's Innocents Abroad, and Bret Harte's Tales of the Argonauts. A time of hesitation, the seventies was a decade of nationalism, and a merging of lingering romantic attitudes with newer realities. Henry James described the tone as “a romantic vision of the real.” The mood was one of hope and anticipation of the coming dispensation combined with considerable innocence about its form and nature. A spirit of progress, based in part on the lure of material improvement, helped America move on from the tragedy of war. Walt Whitman expressed this somewhat vague idealism: “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses.” Whitman was one of the few who sensed the dangers of materialistic expansion and the neglect of other ideals. The public mind in 1870 was impatient of restraints, unwilling to brood over the human condition. Three factors mainly preserved the illusion of effortless growth: mid-century idealism, positivistic science and evolution, and the buoyant optimism of an expanding nation.

William Dean Howells succeeded in 1871 to the editor's chair of the Atlantic Monthly, the leading national literary periodical.⁶ In this influential position, he was responsible for the persistence of certain earlier attitudes, but he was also sensitive to the fresh current of realism and contemporaneity apparent in the contributions he accepted for the magazine. His own fiction was at first a blend of “romance” with deft strokes of what he called “real life.” Howells was still a decade away from writing convincing studies of manners and social analysis, but his style was flexible and carried the conviction of a genuine artist who could skillfully record authentic dialogue and convincing characters.

The Atlantic in the 1870's moved cautiously away from classical moorings toward the fascinating and untried waters of Darwinian controversy, adding the word science to its subtitle in 1868. Appleton's Journal, edited by E. L. Youmans, the North American Review, the Popular Science Monthly, and other periodicals discussed new ideas emanating from Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, and Mill. Chauncey Wright, John W. Draper, John Fiske, and other spokesmen of the new science brought positivism and evolution to support a teleological compromise between religious orthodoxy and a naturalistic explanation of man's origin. Instead of God, they substituted the preexistence in the mind of moral reason and self-consciousness. William James urged that emotional and semiconscious states of mind were active elements of reality, emphasizing the validity of desire, feeling, love, aspiration and habit. From the concept of the spontaneous variation of species which William James derived from Darwinian thought, variations from the norm came about mysteriously. But once appearing, they could be evaluated in the direction of useful and valuable ends, thus supporting a conventional ethical system.

Such pragmatic relativism affected fiction, especially in the handling of character. The mind was no longer a static and unitary fact, but was changing and complex, subject to environmental conditions. The brave hero and the virtuous heroine of romantic fiction and literary tradition gave way to the ambiguous and the complex personality—Howells' young women with pretty faces and neurotic psyches, James's highly sensitive individuals, or De Forest's scheming coquettes.

The naturalistic implications of the new science were temporarily suspended in postwar idealism. Nervous critics complained that the novels of James and Howells lacked old-fashioned passion and were too ironic and analytical, too “realistic.” Daisy Miller was an outrage on American womanhood; Howells failed to create “noble” women. While there was still a reluctance to grapple with the more violent aspects of human perversity among the lower orders of society, there were important chinks in the façade of what Howells called “the large, cheerful average of health and success in America.” Strokes of non-genteel dialect, hill-country speech, and anti-romantic views appeared in the work of such local colorists as Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Freeman, and Constance Fenimore Woolson. Greater fidelity of language and verisimilitude informed the pages of Joel Chandler Harris and George Washington Cable in their sketches of Negroes and Creoles. In tentative ways realism entered select eastern circles and periodicals, where it mingled with tears and laughter, regional eccentricities, humor and sentiment.

In the West and on the middle border, a new and stronger literature of realism heralded a fresh beginning for an indigenous American literary style.⁷ Mark Twain and Bret Harte opened this campaign during the late 1860's with The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Condensed Novels. The tall tale, a special western kind of humor laced with exaggeration, laughter, and crudity characterized Twain's early writing. Innocents Abroad (1868) deflated romantic pretensions and struck a blow at romantic sentiment, flattering the American middlebrow tourist by looking at the Old World with a “show me—I’m from Missouri” attitude. Bret Harte imitated Dickens, Cooper, the Brontës, Dumas, with near-parody and burlesque. In 1870 The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Stories gave its author tremendous and immediate popularity. Harte mingled romantic and realistic elements in a paradoxical way which typified the era's transitional character. His stories were melodramatic and the philosophy behind them meretricious. His people were burlesque variations of the real thing, his style elegant and precious. But in skillful juxtaposition of East and West, in “fine” writing about degraded scenes and frontier scamps, in humor mixed with condescension, and in realism compounded with romance, Harte's volume summarized the 1870's. His Dickensian contrasts of frontier types, card sharks, and prostitutes possessing heroic traits of idealism and self-sacrifice, struck a responsive chord typical of the reigning social and cultural nexus.

Sentiment, artifice, decorum, and gentility, which editors and readers in polite eastern circles accepted, were affronted by the weapons of a frontier psychology bent on puncturing romance, effeminacy, and prudishness. The horse sense, misspellings, and earthy humor in the work of Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Bill Nye, and Artemus Ward were not quite realism, but were a powerful antidote to lingering romanticism. Harte parodied Whittier's “Maud Muller”; Mark Twain burlesqued Franklin's earnestness, Cooper's noble scouts and savages, and rebuked the culture-seekers. Yet in many ways even the most intransigent of these iconoclasts belonged to the genteel tradition. Rarely did they overstep the bounds of propriety in relations between the sexes. A generation which could be shocked by Whitman's “indecency” preferred Tom Sawyer's harmless flirtations with Becky Thatcher, or the conventional courtships of popular fiction. If Bret Harte went somewhat further in “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” it was overlooked or else disguised by the delicacy of his style. And Henry James's hinted adulteries in The American and The Portrait of a Lady went almost unnoticed, partly because of the readers' innocence, and partly because James concealed them behind the “fig-leaf” ambiguity of his impeccable prose.

The fiction of Howells and James chiefly revealed the gradual formation of a theory and, more importantly, a method of realism in literature. During the seventies their work was tentative and experimental, but showed a gradually evolving esthetic of the novel considerably in advance of critical theory. They had much in common, despite strong individual differences. They agreed that the writer's first responsibility was to illuminate character. Both were conscious of the need to describe an evolving American type. Almost simultaneously they discovered the jeune fille, the innocent but unconventional “heiress of all the ages,” whose self-conscious Americanism and pretty face were significantly revealing in a European situation. She was a product of national and regional conditions and the most interesting phenomenon of the novel of realism. Henry James developed the international possibilities of the young American woman in all her complexity—“shocking” independence of manner, idealism, pride, and democratic instincts. Howells treated the type in a variety of domestic situations. His Kitty Ellison (A Chance Acquaintance, 1873) was cut from the same cloth as James's Mary Garland (Roderick Hudson, 1875) or Euphemia de Mauves or Daisy Miller or Isabel Archer.

Howells differed from James in the importance he attached to the transatlantic novel as a vehicle of realism. He mainly stayed at home. “At my age,” he wrote his father in 1876, “one loses a great deal of indefineable, essential something, by living out of one's country, and I’m afraid to risk it.” He stood with American nativism, and his fiction was the story of the commonplace, of “poor Real life.”

The real dramatic encounter, for both novelists, was always between two or three persons—in short, “romance,” but romance controlled and delimited by a firm sense of stern realities. Their novels frequently left heroines in unresolved dilemmas. James especially preferred the inconclusive ending with a near-tragic, or at least a strong renunciatory gesture. Howells, sensitive to the growing scientism of the age, mingled love of New England country inns and picturesque surroundings with shrewd and subtle observation of the moods and whims of Puritan maidens who titillated, but did not quite offend, his lady readers.

As editor and critic, Howells was outspoken in championing truth, actuality, verisimilitude, and fidelity to real human motives. He admired the realists who stressed commonplace events—Trollope, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Turgenev. He praised the honesty of Mark Twain, De Forest, and Bret Harte, but disapproved of Dickens' theatricality and Zola's “bad French morality.” He avoided “the fetid explosions of the divorce trials” and overemphasis upon the master passion. His early realism was moderate, and he once said that he would never write a novel his own daughters could not read without embarrassment.

After 1880, when he had resigned from the Atlantic editorship, Howells revealed a growing awareness of social and economic facts. He became a Christian socialist with strong sympathies for the working man, and admired Tolstoy's humanitarianism. Later critics charged him with old-maidish propensities, but Howells consciously avoided the sensational and abnormal in his reaction against the high drama and bold adventure of the mid-century romantic novel. Reticence remained part of his conscious creed of realism. He rested the theoretical case squarely on faithfulness to the common, average, middle-class experience of his time.⁸

Henry James's relation to realistic fiction diverged from that of Howells. Beginning in the 1870's at about the same point as his friend and contemporary, he rapidly moved toward the French school of Balzac, Flaubert, and Maupassant.⁹ Early European travel and exposure to the richer civilizations and traditions of the Old World saved him from some of the parochialism which affected Howells and other native novelists. In many reviews and essays of the seventies and early eighties, James worked out a wholly original and nearly impressionistic position in the conflicting debates between realism and idealism, or between didacticism and art-for-art's-sake, romance and reality, Anglo-Saxon decency and French license, and other literary dialectics. He admired the serious view of art and the technique in Daudet, Goncourt, and Balzac, while drawing back from “the rags, bad smells, and unclean furniture of the Gallic mind.” He praised and practiced Anglo-Saxon wholesomeness and idealism, but his artistic sense and cosmopolitan taste rebelled at the too-insistent didacticism of George Eliot.

The best European models guided James in the 1870's. He was flexible, subtle, discriminating in searching for a literary synthesis to satisfy his own sense of morality and idealism without violating honesty and realism. Like his generation, James was not ready for a naturalistic approach to life or fiction. Temperamentally, he could not accept it even in his late years when it had prevailed. His realism was the modified creed of Turgenev or Daudet, and his critical theories were influenced by the impressionism of Sainte-Beuve and Edmond Scherer.

James was a novelist of the highest stature in the great tradition of world literature, admired for experimental methods and an international point of view. Yet he shared the era's esthetic experiments along with some of its Victorian reticences and proprieties. He converted and transcended the limitations of the age through a steady preoccupation with the psychological springs of conduct, an unlimited respect for the potential of the human mind to survive against conventional attitudes and social tyrannies. In his vast curiosity over the techniques of fiction, the subtle, verbal solution to intellectual conflicts, and a strong carry-over into a more scientific age of certain transcendental and idealistic strains of thought, James was the leading realist of fiction during the 1870's. In Roderick Hudson, The American, and Daisy Miller he explored the theme of international contrast. In Isabel Archer, heroine of The Portrait of a Lady, he outlined the young American woman as a generic and symbolic figure of the time. He painted her not in the easy black-and-white contrast of romantic fiction, but in realistic and psychological colors which underlined her complexity.

The Portrait of a Lady (1881), one of his best long novels, marked the culmination of his early international phase. It was a tragedy of manners in a series of portraits, the heroine unifying the whole. The conception was derived from Turgenev, “the beautiful genius,” who with George Eliot, contended for the mastery of James's artistic conscience in this novel. It was his first full-length experiment with the method which became his special contribution to the novel form, the use of a central consciousness as an angle of narration to provide dramatic suspense and psychological complexity. Character was his supreme interest, revealed not through action or plot, but through depth and perspective as in a portrait in oils. Isabel Archer filled the center of the canvas, surrounded by satellites arranged in varying attitudes of love, admiration, friendly counsel, or hostility. Deterministic forces entered the situation to compromise her destiny. But the interplay of character and circumstance, equally distributed, produced the dramatic qualities of this externally unexciting story.

The 1880's brought “The Triumph of Realism” in the novel. Howells' A Modern Instance (1882) and The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) were his masterpieces. Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn (1885) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), the former his most sustained work of fiction. There the romancer and poet, the social critic, the humorist, cynic, realist, satirist, and the rich narrator of the American past were all suffused in the imaginative strength of the style and point of view, restricted to the mind and accent of a young narrator-hero. In the eighties James lived in England, produced two purely American novels, Washington Square (1880) and The Bostonians (1885), and turned out many skillful short stories and a collection of fine critical essays, Partial Portraits (1888).

These three major writers had reached a peak in their productive lives. Each in a different way found the moment propitious for fiction. Some of the earlier hesitations and uncertainties of the seventies coalesced to produce a coherence of thought and an atmosphere of literary ripeness. The earlier idealism had mellowed and blended into a more pragmatic tone. Intellectual America seemed more settled after nervous apprehension over Darwinism and evolution had quieted down. A new synthesis of conflicting ideas came into sight. The self-conscious nationalism of the earlier decade gave way to a new confidence. The quest for reality was deepened, but not yet darkened by the industrial conflicts and social upheavals of the nineties. Realism became less talked about and more successfully practiced in the mid-eighties.

In adapting the methods of the English novel of manners to the American scene and by applying his keen sense of emerging national types, Howells made his finest contribution to realistic fiction. Character was still his primary interest, but a growing concern for social problems gave his work in the middle 1880's range and a new depth. In A Modern Instance a steady accumulation of circumstantial detail and environmental forces were marshaled to break up the marriage of Bartley Hubbard and his wife, Marcia Gaylord. The story's naturalistic, even deterministic direction, however, was somewhat weakened by a certain quality of ethical righteousness at odds with the main plot. Howells was more successful in integrating idealism with reality and circumstances in The Rise of Silas Lapham by placing within the main character a conflict of mind and a combination of moral weakness and social conscience. Silas Lapham was the first self-made businessman to be handled with psychological complexity against a detailed background. It was a muted but convincing portrait, drawn with a mixture of satire and sympathy after the manner of Jane Austen and with touches which recalled Balzac. From Europe, James described Howells as “the great American naturalist,” but warned against a tendency toward certain “romantic phantoms and factitious glosses” in his novels. Howells called James the shaper of a new fiction, derived from Hawthorne and the milder realism of George Eliot and Daudet, rather than that of Zola.

James's own fiction failed to show significant technical advances beyond The Portrait of a Lady. His work in the eighties moved toward the social fiction of Balzac and Zola, but his true forte was not to be the novel of sociology or determinism. Washington Square and The Bostonians applied realistic methods to the American scene, but were not his best work. James failed to find in native conditions a coherence or tradition which did justice to his gift for psychological writing. Both novels were concerned with the realism of spectacle and documentary detail, containing multiple characters and descriptions of places and social conditions. Neither was favorably reviewed, and discouragement over their reception turned James away from the American scene. He omitted them from a later collected edition. Indignation in Boston over the brilliant satire on feminine suffragists and bluestockings in The Bostonians affected his own evaluation of the novel, and he turned to an English setting in his next long work, The Princess Casamassima (1886). This account of London underground socialists and anarchists and his next work about the London world of the theater and of politics, The Tragic Muse (1889), completed the cycle of his long novels of social significance. Their enduring qualities lay in skillful psychological portraiture rather than representation of sociological phenomena and naturalistic documentation. Hyacinth Robinson and Miriam Rooth were rounded literary portraits whose destinies were partially controlled by the different worlds that shaped them.

Mark Twain's relation to the Gilded Age has baffled criticism ever since 1920, when Van Wyck Brooks developed his “genius-thwarted-by-commercialism-and-Puritanism” thesis in The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920).¹⁰ Brooks's denigration of the culture which blunted Mark Twain's idealism and turned his satire into crude humor and vulgarity was echoed by later critics and blended with Marxist criticism of the 1930's. Mark Twain was typical of the age whose name he coined. He mirrored its puzzling contradictions and cross-currents, and shared Colonel Sellers' dream of sudden wealth. Money was the theme of many of his stories, but unlike Horatio Alger's his endings were often bitter. He was defensive about art, Europe, age, tradition, culture, and bookishness; yet he was one of the era's most cosmopolitan travelers. He possessed broad humanitarian sympathies and reformist tendencies, but condemned the human race as selfish, cynical, brutal, and deterministic. He was full of ribaldry and profanity,¹¹ yet he was one of the most sensitive and “exquisite” of men. He detested “novels, poetry, and theology,” but defended the authenticity of local color and regional fiction which could be written only by a man who had years of “unconscious absorption” and prepared himself to report the soul of a nation, its life, speech, and thought.

He was not at home in philosophy or in theoretical criticism; his standards were reality, fact, verisimilitude. He did not write from any conscious theory of the novel. Mark Twain was a conscious literary artist, not a spontaneous genius, but he did not believe in schools or doctrinaire definitions of realism. His was a special blend of realism, born of experience and frontier skepticism, schooled by such hard disciplines as the printing office of a newspaper or the pilot house of a Mississippi steamboat. Travel made him conscious of personal limitations and threw him back upon the main affirmation of his life, faith in individual dignity and worth. In two books of the early 1880's, Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn, Twain achieved an equilibrium of the varying elements of his nature and talents.¹² It was not the middle zone between romance and naturalism sought by Howells, nor the special “ideal reality” of James, but a balance between the youthful, frontier humorist and the aging misanthropist of the 1890's. In these books he successfully expressed his strain of idealism and love of accurate dialects and local places and people. He could not hold the balance long. A Connecticut Yankee, for all its brilliance and bitter satire, exhibited less of the control and sustained writing skill that marked the two earlier masterpieces.¹³

Mark Twain belongs to world literature but he was a village iconoclast with the gift of laughter and a strain of eternal youth and innocence which have especially endeared him to Americans. In his one undoubted literary masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, he raised the rural American past to the level of myth and gave a symbolic quality to the Mississippi River and the Midwest frontier. Miraculously, and seemingly without a conscious theory of fiction, he explored the dramatic potential of a narrating center by endowing the vernacular hero with a conflict between his natural idealism and the hereditary training of the established slave culture of prewar America. Huck thus symbolized the nation's tragic divisions. Mark Twain was also the source of a genuine American idiom in which native humor, dialect, and speech rhythms created a literary style free of British mannerism. He remained part of the Gilded Age, but transformed its commonplace experience and even adolescent emotion into enduring literature. Youth and innocence helped shape his mind, but a powerful presentiment of reality and truth marked his genius.

In the late 1880's, literature began to reflect social and cultural changes. Civil unrest and labor strife increased, signaling intensified class conflict. The great popularity of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1887) testified to growing concern over an unbalanced economy. Collectivist protest, which novelists had disregarded as unfit for genteel consumption, entered into the mainstream of realism around 1890 in the works of Howells, Hamlin Garland, and Stephen Crane. Deeply affected by the “civic murder” of the Chicago anarchists convicted after the Haymarket affair in Chicago in 1886 and strengthened by his reading of Tolstoy, Howells changed his private stance from passive humanitarianism to active protest. In A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), A Traveler from Altruria (1894), and other novels he displayed a highly developed social conscience in behalf of the working class. His personal philosophy veered sharply in the direction of government control of key industries such as utilities. Garland's Main Travelled Roads (1891) voiced the silent suffering of agrarian life, made poignant by the first-hand experience of his family in Wisconsin and the Dakotas. And Stephen Crane, in Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893), reported with the dispassionate pen of a journalist and the irony of an artist how poverty and drunkenness drove the daughter of a Bowery family in lower New York to prostitution and suicide.

The naturalistic mode in fiction was in its early phase during the nineties, but its concern with social problems of the lower orders of society and its economic determinism dominated fiction well into the next century. Frank Norris' McTeague (1899) was the first full-blown naturalistic novel in America, using some of Zola's methods in a San Francisco setting. McTeague and The Octopus (1901) embodied Norris' special combination of Populist folklore, violence, and melodrama. His powerful prose style, a mingling of scientific documentation and the excessive use of reiterated symbols of natural forces, gave his writing its special quality and identified it with the 1890's. The decade was deeply divided between the new realism of economic protest and a resurgence of romantic interest in brute strength and Darwinian muscle. Norris had lofty notions of the novel as a pulpit from which to preach Truth to The People, and to demonstrate “whole congeries of forces, social tendencies, and race impulses.” He felt it should contain violence, vast scenic effects, murder, bloodshed and “variations from the type of normal life” which he associated with the realism of Howells and his followers.¹⁴

War, poverty, shipwreck, and violence also provided the material for much of Stephen Crane's writing. As a journalist and reporter for a newspaper syndicate, Crane reported two wars, traveled much of the world, and wrote of first-hand experience in a distinctive style beyond reportage. Crane believed in immediacy of experience for the writer, yet paradoxically his masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), was about a war he never saw. This account of a raw recruit facing battle conditions in the Civil War was a brilliant imaginative reconstruction of war scenes and a profound study in the psychology of cowardice, fear, and bravery. But Crane's technical accomplishments, impressionistic style, and symbolic devices were equally innovative. Myth and metaphor contributed largely to the meaning of The Red Badge. The story has suggested to some critics a search for self-identity by a young knight questing through perilous adventures for a holy grail of ancient myth. Much of this mythic ritual was contained in imagery with religious undertones and symbolic colors, and in abstract landscapes and allegorical figures. Like Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn, Crane discovered much of the meaning and ironic complexity of his novel in careful handling of the limited point of view of his young and innocent hero.¹⁵

In this same decade Henry James turned to writing plays for the London theatre, an experience which taught him new techniques for fiction. In What Maisie Knew, The Turn of the Screw, and The Sacred Fount, all written in the late 1890's, he used a limited angle of narration to gain dramatic irony and suspense. Only after 1900 did he theorize about a “center of consciousness” in the prefaces to his novels. Both Mark Twain and Stephen Crane followed the course he charted in using a controlled center of narration, to be the single most important discovery of the twentieth-century novel.

The search for reality, begun in the 1870's with the mild and tentative realism of local-color writers and the early travel fiction of Howells and Mark Twain, gradually evolved into the complex novel of psychological and sociological significance during the eighties and nineties. This evolution brought new insights and methods that made Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, and the late major novels of Henry James masterpieces of American fiction, and placed them among the great novels in the English language.

Notes

1. Among recent works see: Larzer Ziff, The American 1890's: The Life and Times of a Lost Generation (New York: Viking Press, 1966); Warner Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884-1919 (New York: Free Press, 1965); Jay Martin, Harvests of Change: American Literature, 1865-1914 (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1967); Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1954).

2. In 1922 James M. Barrie warned younger critics: “Don’t forget to speak scornfully of the Victorian age. There will be a time for meekness when you seek to better it.” See “Courage,” Rectorial Addresses, St. Andrews, May 3, 1922.

3. Sinclair Lewis was amusing but unfair in saying later that criticism in the Gilded Age was “a chill and insignificant activity pursued by jealous spinsters, ex-baseball reporters, and acid professors.” Why Sinclair Lewis Got the Nobel Prize (New York, 1930), 20.

4. Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes (New York: Macmillan, 1947), estimates the total sale of Alger books at about 16 million copies, but figures are debatable; see also Frank Gruber, Horatio Alger, Jr.: A Biography and Bibliography (Los Angeles: Grover Jones, 1961); and John W. Tebbel, From Rags to Riches: Horatio Alger, Jr. and the American Dream (New York: Macmillan, 1963).

5. Robert Falk, The Victorian Mode in American Fiction, 1865-1885 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1965).

6. The literature on Howells is abundant, but see especially: E. H. Cady's two-volume biography, The Road to Realism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1956), and The Realist at War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1958); H. N. Smith and W. M. Gibson, eds., The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William Dean Howells, 1872-1901, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960); George N. Bennett, William Dean Howells: The Development of a Novelist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959); Clara M. Kirk, William Dean Howells: Traveller From Altruria, 1889-1894 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1962); Robert L. Hough, The Quiet Rebel: William Dean Howells as Social Commentator (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1959); and Kermit Vanderbilt, The Achievement of William Dean Howells (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

7. Martin, Harvests of Change, covers regional literature well. Jean Holloway, Hamlin Garland: A Biography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1960), goes beyond its title. See also William Randel, Edward Eggleston (New York: Twayne, 1963); Clyde E. Henson, Joseph Kirkland (New York: Twayne, 1962); James F. Light, John William De Forest (New York: Twayne, 1965).

8. See Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism; and Clara Marburg Kirk, W. D. Howells and Art in His Time (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1965).

9. The literature on James is enormous, and the first three volumes of Leon Edel's biography of James are indispensable. F. O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), and the same author's The James Family (New York: Knopf, 1947), are useful. Percy Lubbock, ed., Letters of Henry James, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner's, 1920), contains primary material.

10. Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), is an excellent biography. Louis J. Budd, Mark Twain: Social Philosopher (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), analyzes Clemens' attitude toward various public issues. Gladys C. Bellamy, Mark Twain as a Literary Artist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), is an excellent book. The old authorized life by Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, 3 vols. (New York: Harper, 1912), is pedestrian but has valuable raw material. The most perceptive personal account in many ways remains William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain (New York: Harper, 1910).

11. In 1877 he wrote Howells: “Delicacy—a sad false delicacy—robs literature of the two best things among its belongings. Family circle narrative and obscene stories.” A. B. Paine, ed., Mark Twain's Letters, 2 vols. (New York: Harper, 1917), I, 310.

12. See Walter Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1950).

13. See Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain's Fable of Progress: Political and Economic Ideas in ‘A Connecticut Yankee’ (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1964); and the same author's Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).

14. See Lars Ahnebrink, The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), for background. Franklin Walker, Frank Norris: A Biography (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1932), remains the standard biography, but is outdated and thin. Warren French, Frank Norris (New York: Twayne, 1962), is a good brief account. Ernest Marchand, Frank Norris: A Study (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1942), is still useful. So is Donald Pizer, The Novels of Frank Norris (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966).

15. The newest biography is R. W. Stallman, Stephen Crane: A Biography (New York: Braziller, 1968). Lillian Gilkes, Cora Crane (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), is important. R. W. Stallman and Lillian Gilkes, eds., Stephen Crane: Letters (New York: New York University Press, 1960), is a basic primary source. See also: Donald B. Gibson, The Fiction of Stephen Crane (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968); Eric Salomon, Stephen Crane: From Parody to Realism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966).