SOURCE: An introduction to Main-Travelled Roads by Hamlin Garland, edited by Thomas A. Bledsoe, Rinehart & Co., 1954, pp. ix-xl.

[Bledsoe is an American author, editor, and educator. In this excerpt, he comments on Garland's genesis as a fiction writer and his ultimate deterioration, but the critic upholds the artistic achievement of Main-Travelled Roads, maintaining that Garland "produced a handful of minor masterpieces" in his career.]

1

It would be easy to see in Hamlin Garland one of the minor tragedies of American literature. In the contrast between the bitter realism of Main-Travelled Roads and the complacent romanticizing of They of the High Trails, its later counterpart, there is a sense of a good man gone wrong that has the overtones of an American tragedy. Garland's rebellion was so intense and his conformity so ingenuous that one cannot help speculating on what might have happened had he not lost, as Howells wrote to Henry Fuller in 1904, the "simplicity of his ideal, such as it was when he had Main-Travelled Roads under his feet, and throbbed with his fine angry sympathy for 'the familiar and the low.'"

But it is idle to wonder. Garland reflects the large American tragedy of success and the deeper psychological tragedy of emotional conviction without intellectual stays; his literary defections are the inevitable result of his background and his character. He was, as H. L. Mencken once termed him, a stranger on Parnassus. A more fruitful attitude than regret for his decline is gratitude for the handful of minor masterpieces that were the by-product of his essentially nonliterary and highly moral indignation.

Hamlin Garland was born in West Salem, Wisconsin, in 1860. His father, Richard Garland, was a Maine man with an itch for the frontier that carried him to Wisconsin, to Iowa, and to Dakota, from which last outpost Hamlin, in 1884, deserted the prairie, mortgaging for two hundred dollars a homestead whose freezing nights "permanently chilled [his] enthusiasm for pioneering the plain." With this meager capital, young Garland set out for Boston, in the hope of training at Harvard for his chosen career of teaching. The Harvard lectures, however, were not open to a friendless young westerner with no further academic background than the amenities of the Osage, Iowa, Seminary, and he turned perforce to the Boston Public Library. This seemed to him a tragic deprivation: some of the most moving chapters of A Son of the Middle Border, his autobiographical account of the early years, record the loneliness and real heroism of his struggle. Friendless and half starving, he spent his days in the library and his nights "making detailed studies of the habits of the cockroaches" in his eight by ten room. Actually the desperate urgency of this winter was the best thing that could have happened to him; these bleak days were the catalyst for the brief years when he was vital and alive.

He grew steadily paler, thinner, and shabbier; but he grew also in wisdom, learning things neither Harvard nor the prairies would have taught him. From the limiting shore of an education circumscribed by the Osage Seminary and by desultory reading in Shakespeare, Milton, Taine, and Henry George, he plunged into the flood waters of contemporary intellectual controversy:

I read both day and night, grappling with Darwin, Spencer, Fiske, Helmholtz, and Haeckel—all the masters of evolution whose books I had not hitherto been able to open. . . . Among other proscribed books I read Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and without doubt that volume changed the world for me as it did for many others. . . . The spiritual significance of America was let loose on me.... Under the influence of Spencer I traced a parallel development of the Arts and found a measure of scientific peace. Under the inspiration of Whitman I pondered the significance of democracy and caught some part of its spiritual import. With Henry George as guide I discovered the main cause of poverty and suffering in the world.

It was a new world Hamlin Garland had discovered. It had no relation as yet to the prairie world he had left behind him; paradoxically, it was very much a part of the urban life of which he felt so little a part. It was the world of avant-garde radicalism, and Garland, grinding away in the gloomy reading room of the public library, became a working member of a group of whose existence he was as yet hardly aware—the radical intellectuals, the earnest young men and women with advanced views on art and society. That he himself was no intellectual, then or ever that all he read was only half-assimilated, was of no consequence. He had a fearsome positiveness, an absolute certainty of belief in all his views, no matter how recently won, no matter how soon to be lost. In the space of a winter he became an evolutionist, a Whitmanesque democrat, a single taxer, a disciple of the new realism. Alone and friendless as he still was, depending for recreation on free lectures at the Young Men's Union and rare trips to the theater where, from the peanut gallery, he watched his idol Edwin Booth, he had nonetheless arrived. It needed only circumstance—and this was soon to come—to catapult him into the center of Boston radicalism.

What he was, after the intensity of these labors, Garland himself never really understood; but it is important that we see him, emerging stooped and hungry from the threshold of the Public Library, with success in Boston at hand. Once, speculating about the warmth with which Boston intellectuals received him, Garland surmised that "perhaps they were surprised at finding so much intelligence in a man from the Plains." A good deal of his charm was precisely his anomalous acquaintance with the current intellectual patter: this gawky westerner, with his awkward manners and rusty suit, was to be the season's literary curiosity. But the urgent honesty that kept him at his chores in the library combined with his natural friendliness to delight as well as startle his sophisticated new acquaintances; both his sincerity and his ingenuousness impressed them. He lectured with almost equal success on Edwin Booth, about whom he knew a good deal, and Victor Hugo, the Modern German Novel, and The Modern American Novel, about all of which, in varying degrees, he knew considerably less. His audiences considered him a rough diamond and were entranced by his vigor.

The sum of these paradoxes, is, in embryo, the author of Main-Travelled Roads. He had not thus far even thought of being a creative writer; his literary intentions were to write essays and perhaps a history of American literature. Nor, more importantly, despite his reading of Henry George, had the fundamental catalytic urge of moral indignation at the plight of the border people as yet overwhelmed him. But this is our man—ingenuous, half-educated, fearsomely earnest, spiritually, despite his apprenticeship to Herbert Spencer, one of Kingsley's muscular Christians. As a commentator in the Literary World [No. 27 (February 22, 1896)] subsequently described him:

We may mention, as a matter of curiosity, considering what some periods of Mr. Garland's life have been, that he uses neither tobacco or liquor in any form, and has never had any taste for the sort of life that too commonly, though not always, goes with cigars and beer.

In short, a moralist. In the overwhelming moral intensity of this lonely frequenter of the Boston Public Library we shall find a key to the whole man and a necessary ingredient of his best writing. It was exactly this earnestness that gave him his start in intellectual Boston.

2

One night, during one of the lectures at the Young Men's Union, he was so impressed by the speaker, Dr. Moses True Brown, that he ventured to congratulate him after the program. The form of his approval—acquaintance with several quotations from Darwin's Expression of the Emotions—so impressed Brown that he gave Garland a place first as a free student and subsequently as Instructor in Literature in his Boston School of Oratory. Success followed quickly. Mrs. Payne, a literary resident of Hyde Park, sponsored a series of lectures that netted him ninety dollars and, more important, the backing of Charles Hurd, the influential literary editor of the Transcript. He wrote a sketch, "The Western Corn Husking," which "included the mud and cold of the landscape as well as its bloom and charm," and sold it to the New American Magazine. His first published story, "Ten Years Dead," which combined the influence of Hawthorne with a foreshadowing of his own midwestern realism, appeared in Every Other Saturday in 1885. When he revisited Dakota in 1887 he could pass as a successful Professor of Literature and a man who had dabbled in writing.

It is easy to let Garland speak for himself. For one who has described himself [in a letter to the author—Bledsoe] as a "modest old fellow," he has had a remarkable penchant for self-revelation: two series of autobiographies occupied him during the last twenty-five years of his life. Certainly it would be hard to find a more moving description of his 1887 trip, and of a subsequent one in 1889 when his mother suffered a stroke, than his own in A Son of the Middle Border:

All that day I had studied the land. . . . The lack of color, of charm in the lives of the people anguished me. I wondered why I had never before noticed the futility of woman's life on the farm. I asked myself, "Why have these stern facts never been put into our literature as they have been used in Russia and England? Why has this land no story tellers like those who have made Massachusetts and New England illustrious? . . .

I perceived the town from the triple viewpoint of a former resident, a man from the city, and a reformer, and every minutest detail of dress, tone, and gesture revealed new meaning for me. Fancher and Gammon were feebler certainly, and a little more querulous with age, and their faded beards and rough hands gave pathetic evidence of the hard wear of wind and toil. At the moment nothing glozed over the essential tragic futility of their existence. . . .

Obscurely forming in my mind were two great literary concepts—that truth was a higher quality than beauty, and that to spread the reign of justice should everywhere be the design of the artist. The merely beautiful in art seemed petty, and success at the cost of the happiness of others a monstrous egotism. In the spirit of these ideals I returned to my small attic room in Jamaica Plain and set to work to put my new conceptions into some sort of literary form. . . .

I began to write, composing in the glow of a flaming conviction. With a delightful (and deceptive) sense of power, I graved with a heavy hand, as if upon brazen tablets, picture after picture of the plain. . . . "Give us charming love stories," pleaded the editors. "No, we've had enough of lies," I replied. "Other writers are telling the truth about the city . . . and it appears to me that the time has come to tell the truth about the barn yard's daily grind. . . . For me the mud and the sweat and the dust exist. They still form a large part of life on the farm, and I intend that they shall go into my stories in their proper proportions. ... "

I resumed my writing in a mood of bitter resentment, with full intention of telling the truth about western farm life, irrespective of the land-boomer or the politicians.

This is the Garland of Main-Travelled Roads. The moral indignation these visits aroused galvanized him into writing, in quick succession, the stories of this volume; significantly, the first of them, "Mrs. Ripley's Trip," was begun at the homestead in Dakota and based on a story told him by his mother. Shortly after his return to Boston, his resentment was further channelized. At a meeting of the Anti-Poverty League he volunteered as a speaker; a review of his harangue by his friend Chamberlain, the Listener of the Transcript, placed him "with one leap . . . [in] the limelight of conservative Boston's disapproval." He was now both a reformer and a writer; by 1888, when "Mrs. Ripley's Trip" appeared in Harper's Weekly, he had become an active propagandist for the single tax.

As a writer and an active campaigner, Garland became the literary spokesman for the discontented farmers of the Middle Border, whose bitterness was epitomized in the Populist revolt of the nineties. He met the prophet of San Francisco, Henry George, creator of the single tax, and became his personal as well as literary disciple; he was a protégé of B. O. Flower, the radical editor of the Arena, who suggested and published Main-Travelled Roads. In 1891, on a commission from the Arena, he toured the rebellious West and completed his Populist novel, A Spoil of Office; in the fall of this year he became a campaign speaker for the Peoples' Party of Iowa. For one who in 1885 had been friendless and half starving, the range of his acquaintances half a dozen years later among the social and intellectual radicals of the day is astonishing. In his travels for the Arena he met most of the Populist leaders, including such spectacular characters as Mary Ellen ("raise more hell and less corn") Lease, on whom the character of Ida Wilbur in A Spoil of Office is partly based; there is hardly a writer of social fiction in the period whom he did not know. William Dean Howells, the most eminent of them all, became his close friend and adviser; in his efforts to convert Howells to the single tax he was the link between Howells and Henry George. Our lonely frequenter of the Boston Public Library had become a public figure, a notorious realist and radical.

It is important, however, to remember the private motivations of this public man. Of no other prominent radical of the time can it be said that his rebellion was finally of so personal a character. Garland had a large gift for translating his private emotions into public abstractions; he could not help interpreting his bitterness over his mother's illness and poverty as a concern for universal Truth and Justice. It was not that he was dishonest; he simply never understood that he was rationalizing. Inevitably, five years later, when his mother was comfortably resettled in Wisconsin, when he had become established, moderately welloff, and accustomed to comfort and respectability, he must feel that not himself but the times had changed, and that in the western romances he had begun to write he was continuing the realism and regionalism of his earlier work.

The fact is that Garland's convictions, for all their facade of public proclamation, were always personal and emotional; our comparison of his theory and practice will suggest how little he understood the things he felt. Behind the successful reformer and realist stands the young man we saw on the steps of the Library, the ingenuous, half-educated moralist. Fundamentally he has changed remarkably little. His new sophistication is more apparent than real; his dedication to writing and the earnestness with which he advanced his theories of veritism (his term for realism) and local color are only a transmutation of his earlier vague determination to be a Professor and an essayist; and his characteristic moral fervor has now found a definite channel—indignation at the plight of the farmer, at the hardships he found his family and friends enduring.

It was the focusing of his resentment that was crucial for the author of Main-Travelled Roads. This fact Garland himself bitterly denied. He was at great pains to insist that his "reform notions were subordinate to . . . [his] desire to take honors as a novelist." It is significant that this misconception was not entirely window dressing for his later conservatism; in the years of his vitality his relations with two prominent editors indicate that to a considerable degree he believed it even then.

The editor who really liked Garland's most original work was B. O. Flower, who supported and publicized him indefatigably. But it was Richard Watson Gilder, the eminent and polite editor of the Century, whose praise, then and later, Garland really valued, despite the fact that the border stories Gilder printed were second-rate, while Flower bought his best work. When, for example, Garland submitted "A Prairie Heroine" to the Arena, Flower accepted it with this stipulation:

I note that you have cut out certain paragraphs of description with the fear, no doubt, that the editor would object to them. I hope you will restore the manuscript to its original form and return it. When I ask a man to write for me, I want him to utter his mind with perfect freedom.

In contrast, "A Girl of Modern Tyre," ["A Stop-Over at Tyre"] a trite romance whose virtue in book form is a bleak ending in which an ill-considered marriage ruins a man's career, was printed by Gilder with the addition of the following paragraph:

Albert and Maud still live in the homestead in Tyre. In the five years that have elapsed since that party with Hartly he has been a hard worker as principal of the village school. His friends say he ought to be in a larger field of labor, and he has sweet dreams of doing something in the great splendid world, which he realizes at times is sweeping by him; but three little mouths have come into the world demanding bread, and three pairs of childish eyes hold him prisoner, though a willing one.

In these pathetic clichés, even in the days of his bitterest realism, his future is foreshadowed. For Garland they were the only possible result of Gilder's warning "not to leave beauty out of the picture"; when Howells, more perceptive but still misunderstanding the nature of Garland's talent, cautioned him not to forget "the rose," he was pointing the same way. Without moral indignation, banality was the only place Hamlin Garland could go.

3

The fact is that Garland took in not only himself but his most perceptive contemporaries; of all his intimates, only Henry Fuller, I think, really understood him. Garland's violent theories of regionalism and veritism, which so delighted Howells and horrified more conventional critics, had little to do with the real power of his best writing. His critical preachments created a sensation that, as far as his own work was concerned, was a fraud.

But the tumult was tremendous. Even after Garland's own retreat into romance, one critic replied to his "Sanity in Fiction" [in North American Review No. 176 (March 1903)], an article largely devoted to Howells, under the title "Insanity in Criticism" [James E. Rooth, Jr., in Critic No. 43 (August 1903)]. In the Atlantic Monthly [December 1895] a critic discussing Crumbling Idols, which was published in Chicago in 1894 by the enterprising new firm of Stone and Kimball, suggested that it "should have had for a cover design a dynamite bomb," instead of the peaceful wheat sheaf with which the art-minded publishers had decorated it. Edward Everett Hale, Jr., reviewing the same book [in Dial No. 17 (July 1, 1894)], remarked that Garland "is not persuasive; he is bellicose, obstreperous, blatant. Nobody could possibly agree with him, whatever he said." That this book, a turgid combination of Whitman, realism, and regionalism, should arouse such a furor (Walter Page, editor of the Forum, estimated that over a thousand editorials were written on its main thesis) is a tribute both to Garland's vigor and to the dissociation he was able to create between his theory and his practice.

When Howells, in 1910, after Garland's escape into themes which were, by his own description, "happily quite outside the controversial belt," begged him to "be true to the dream of thy youth—the dream of an absolute and unsparing veritism," he was expressing in fundamentally irrelevant terms his regret at the decay of Garland's writing. Even the dreariest of Garland's later romances have a regional and veritist purpose: "Marshall's Capture," perhaps the low point of the very low level of his later fiction, was based on a "true story," just as was "Mrs. Ripley's Trip."

The truth is that the indignant conservatives who attacked Main-Travelled Roads as a polemic were right. It is the quality of indignation that gives these stories their power. This is not to say that the stories are tracts, but that this quality is essential to Garland's curious creative process. Only when moved by violent moral indignation could Hamlin Garland discard the romantic clichés his fundamentally conventional cast of mind made natural for him. When he was indignant he suddenly became a man with an honest literary talent: he forgot formulas and plunged directly into what he had to say. It follows that his talent was for short stories and not for novels, since novels demand intellectual development as well as emotional intensity, and, for the same reason, for stories of situation rather than plot.

These assumptions exactly describe the stories of Main-Travelled Roads. They are stories of situation, inspired by moral indignation, concerned with typical situations familiar to the author. These are the invariable elements of Garland's best work; lacking them, it becomes banal. Local color, even an intense familiarity with his subject matter, is not enough; this is evidenced by the mediocre Border stories of the other collections, or by a story like "Old Sid's Christmas" (which appeared in Harper's Weekly in 1889, three months after the publication of "Under the Lion's Paw" in the same magazine), which is sentimental and nostalgic and was too bad even for Garland to reprint. These stories, none of which displays any resentment, are not only dull but artistically crude.

Conversely, in a later period, when the general level of his work had become complacent, noncontroversial, and utterly dreary, he became momentarily aroused over the plight of the American Indians and wrote about them a series of stories very nearly equal to his best work. He knew no more about the Indians than the cowboys and mountain people about whom he was then romanticizing so fatuously (he knew them all from personal experience, and fairly well), but the injustice of their treatment at the hands of the white man galvanized him momentarily into the peculiar tensions of his art. A story like "Outlaw" [later published as "The Story of Howling Wolf] would seem perfectly characteristic to a reader who knew Garland only from the six original stories of Main-Travelled Roads; "Marshall's Capture," which appeared in the same magazine eighteen months after "Outlaw," would seem the work of another man.

Likewise, a concern for the average man (only the typical provides a basis for a generalized moral) characterizes only his best work. The most obvious paradox in his later romances is his effort to imbue these unique adventures with a general and "sociologic" (one of his favorite words) significance. Nor is moral indignation alone sufficient: the querulous and ignorant Jeremiads of the later autobiographies are the dull complaints of a provincial moralist in a world he never made and wants no part of.

4

The first edition of Main-Travelled Roads . . . was published by the Arena Publishing Company in 1891 and contained six stories. Four of these had appeared in Harper's Weekly and the Arena; two others, "Up the Coulé" and "A Branch Road," appeared here for the first time. The foreword and dedication characterize the spirit of the book; it was indeed, as Garland later described it, a volume with a "message of acrid accusation." Time has not diminished the power of this indictment; these stories remain a minor classic of American Fiction. Their portrayal of man's struggles against the forces of nature and an unjust society is as moving today as when Main-Travelled Roads aroused a furious clamor against its brutalization of what editors liked to regard as the noblest of vocations, tilling the soil of the American prairie.

Perhaps the word which best describes the spirit which informs these stories is guilt. For Garland it was guilt of a very personal kind, guilt over the plight of his family, and especially of his mother. Like many another nineteenth-century moralist who survived to view with horror the twentieth century's concern with sex and frustration, he was beset by complexes which are the commonplaces of the psychiatrist's couch. Chief among these was the violence of his affection for his mother and the depth of the sense of guilt which leaving or neglecting her caused him. In Main-Travelled Roads this appears most directly in the most powerful and in a sense most autobiographical of the stories, "Up the Coulé." Compare Howard's feeling on first seeing the little town again with Garland's on seeing Fancher and Gammon; consider Howard's—and Garland's—emotions on seeing his mother: "This was his mother—the woman who bore him, the being who had taken her life in her hand for him; and he, in his excited and pleasurable life, had neglected her!"

It appears again, transmuted, in Will Hannan's reparation to Agnes, in "A Branch Road," where Garland's guilt over the plight of a prairie mother leads him, for one of the very few times in all his fiction, to endorse breaking the moral code, as Will carries Agnes into a materially improved but illicit future. It is evident in "The Return of a Private"—the private is Garland's father—where the mother occupies an equal share of a stage that might this once have been the father's, in Mrs. Ripley's and Mrs. Haskin's hardships, in the drudgeries which Julia Peterson not only has grown up with but is moving toward in her escape with Rob.

To be aware of this is to be reminded of the private and personal character of Garland's stories of the average man; it also helps us to identify the importance of accurate reporting in them. Garland is by no means simply a reporter, but in all his best work there is an unmistakable sense of authenticity.

The reader of these border stories who is familiar with the details of Garland's life is constantly discovering incidents and people taken directly from the author's experience, but no such biographical acquaintance is needed to validate the reality of these pictures. The home from which Will rescues Agnes in "A Branch Road," the slop and mud of the farmyard or the details of the party in "Up the Coulé," the driving weariness of the plowing in "Among the Corn-Rows": in such characteristic episodes we do not need to be convinced that Garland has told us what midwestern farm life in the eighties was really like. We know that this is how it was, and share the author's bitterness at the emptiness and drudgery of these lives.

We share, too, his sense of the beauty of the Dakota prairies, of the definite hills and abrupt coulés of Wisconsin, of the good fellowship and human decency of Stephen Council and Old Widder Gray. We share, that is, his sense of the basic paradox which animates each of these stories and around which centers the indignation which enabled him to project them: the conflict between Good—man's better nature, the simple beauties of the land—and Evil, the injustice of society, the grasping selfishness that speculation fosters, the bitterness of the struggle with nature which injustice necessitates. In all these stories the large drama between Good and Evil—both with capital letters—is played out.

This struggle is not, to be sure, without its ambivalences. In part Garland belongs to an old and honored tradition; in the long controversy over nature and society he is philosophically in the primitivists' camp. It was this traditional distrust of urban society that Henry Fuller noted in "The Downfall of Abner Joyce," a satire on Garland to which we will return: "Abner, on his return to the town, found its unpleasant precincts more crowded than ever with matters of doubtful propriety." This attitude appears frequently in Garland's own work; in the city portion of Jason Edwards, for example, where all the premises have an effluvium of evil; in a verse like this one from Boy Life on the Prairie:

With heart grown weary of the heat
And hungry for the breath
Of field and farm, with eager feet
I trod the pavement dry as death
Through city streets where crime is born
And sudden—lo, a ridge of corn!

Garland knew the rigors of farm life too well, however, to buy this romantic notion whole hog, and he is at constant pains to show that nature is a hard taskmaster. All the stories in [Main-Travelled Roads] develop this hardship at one point or another, and such treatments, along with his announced intention to give the mud and sweat and dust of farm life their due place in literature, added to the clamor Main-Travelled Roads produced and to his subsequent reputation as a realistic critic of the rigors of prairie existence. That he was the latter should not, however, blind us to the fact that nature for Garland was beneficent as well as demanding. At times in his stories her arbitrary cataclysms are the final cause of human disaster: in "Under the Lion's Paw" it is four years of grasshoppers that drive Haskins penniless out of Kansas; in Jason Edwards it is a hailstorm that leads to Jason's ruin and death. But such catastrophes are characteristically the final blows that bring down an already ruined structure. Both Haskins and Edwards are had by the land speculators—Haskins, driven on to Kansas in the first place by the high price of unoccupied land, comes back to be trapped by Butler; Edwards, having left the city for the free West, is already ruined by the speculators when a heart attack gives him release.

In all of these stories, that is, those who willingly traffic in inhumanity are the villains, and in all of them the conflict between Justice and Injustice is displayed, either on stage or in the wings. Sometimes, as in "A Branch-Road," it is at first peripheral, the outcome of an ordinary lover's quarrel; sometimes, as in "Under the Lion's Paw," the conflict is a dramatized sermon on Henry George's single tax and the evils of unearned increment; sometimes, as in "Up the Coulé," the depth of Garland's own guilt and the final hopelessness of the average western farmer unite in a bitter indictment. But always Garland reflects a romantic moralism which was much a part of his times and much at odds with the scientific realism he thought he believed in. It is also much at odds with the spirit which, in Crane, in Norris, in Dreiser, was to animate his younger contemporaries.

Because of this it is important to realize that Garland was no naturalist, nor even one of the writers of the nineties who most nearly practiced the formula of naturalism. A capsule definition of naturalism is difficult—if for no other reason than because naturalism existed as much by the violation of its precepts as the practice of them—but a basic tenet was certainly a belief in determinism, a conviction of the importance of forces rather than individuals, a certainty that individual moral responsibility was not important because in the end individuals were not important.

Hamlin Garland's people provide an interesting variant on this theme. He was well schooled in the importance of the social machine and the hopelessness of individuals caught in its meshes. But he never wrote without a sense of individual responsibility. Butler is no less responsible and no less personally evil because he profits by an iniquitous social scheme; Grant McLane's tragedy is his own moral responsibility as much as Howard's: it is not merely that he has been trapped by circumstance but that, as Laura cries out, he has accepted it. It is against the back-drop of the American Dream of the right and responsibility of every man to be free, to succeed, that Garland's tragedies display themselves. A belief in this dream, and an indignation against whatever frustrates it, informs his writing as it does not that of his naturalistic contemporaries. For all the hopelessness of some of these stories, Hamlin Garland's world, unlike Stephen Crane's, for example, remains an optimistic one. For Crane the universe was indifferent, which for practical purposes meant hostile; for Garland, in spite of the muck and sweat of the farmyard, the universe was friendly if only man would make it so. Thus Crane's Maggie goes down alone to inevitable death; Garland's Agnes Dingman is led by Will into new life.

And so Garland wrote these indignant—and nostalgic—stories of the middle border; and five years later, when his mother had been safely returned to Wisconsin and he no longer had intense personal reminders that society was still making it hard for the good and poor man, he moved further west and began to write heroic romances about the cowboy and the highlander, epic figures in the westward expansion of the American Dream.

Of all the stories in Main-Travelled Roads, "Among the Corn-Rows" perhaps most delicately illustrates the tensions of Garland's moral universe. It is significant that this story has frequently been reprinted without the first section, the account of Rob's life on the Dakota prairie that gives it its framework. Without this preface the story seems a prairie idyll, but Garland, for all his sense of the beauty and heroism of the country, could not write it simply as that. What excited his creativeness was the conflict between beauty and the social system which would inevitably warp the innocent hopes of Julia's escape into the frustrations of Mrs. Ripley's trip. This insight is adumbrated through Rob's life in Dakota, where the beauty of the landscape and the friendliness of the homesteaders cannot conceal the loneliness and drudgery for which a prairie wife is destined, and through the tyranny of Julia's father, a tyranny which reflects a society in which inhumanity is justified as a means of survival. The beauty and hope are there—but in the America of the eighties, Hamlin Garland tells us, they are being frustrated by a society which denies the fulfillment which is Rob's and Julia's by right.

5

The question with which Garland's critics have chiefly concerned themselves is the explanation of his change from the realism of Main-Travelled Roads and Jason Edwards to the conventional romanticizing of such later novels as Hesper and The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop. Carl Van Doren, making the first serious attack on this problem in the Nation in 1921 [No. 113 (Nov. 23)], viewed this long flirtation with romance as the result of Garland's being misled by the false light of local color, and saw in A Son of the Middle Border and A Daughter of the Middle Border a return to the frontier in which "memory, parent of art, has at once sweetened and enlarged the scene." Although the querulous trend of Garland's subsequent autobiographies has since made it impossible to view this period, as Van Doren then could, as his greatest, the notion that A Son of the Middle Border is his best work has remained a popular one.

A contrast between A Son of the Middle Border and Main-Travelled Roads is fruitful. In my own view the autobiography is inferior to the stories, being both more uneven and less original, but such an evaluative comparison of works in disparate forms is of less value than the insights these separate outgrowths of the same period in the author's life can give into the qualities of his work.

A Son of the Middle Border is in a sense the reverse of the coin. Its power derives from its reconsideration of the material which gave rise to the stories and from its partial recapture of the mood in which they were created. It has the wider range of tone to be expected from a book which is the retrospect of later years: it is sometimes nostalgic ("Oh those blessed days, those entrancing nights! How fine they were then, and how mellow they are now!"); sometimes indignant ("Fling away my convictions! It were as easy to do that as to cast out my bones."); sometimes apologetic ("Alas! Each day made me more and more the dissenter." "I do not defend this mood, I merely report it.") It is weakest in the opening nostalgic account of his early childhood and the closing sentimental story of the trip that meant family reunion. In the long intervening section, which carries him from the hardships of a farm boyhood to the climax of his rebellion, it recaptures vicariously a good deal of the power of the days of his vitality; it is one of the genuinely significant American autobiographies, and an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the time. But it never approaches the intensity of Main-Travelled Roads.

This fact has been denied. H. L. Mencken, [in Prejudices: First Series, 1919], for example, who properly pegged Garland as a Puritan and a moralist (seduced into literature under false pretenses, was Mencken's explanation), considered A Son of the Middle Border his best book because it was a significant, naive record of fact, though lacking in beauty. Main-Travelled Roads he dismissed as a tract; we call these stories art, he maintained, only because American criticism always mistakes a poignant document for art. In this opinion Mencken has had considerable, if less violent, company. The notion that Garland is only a reporter, that these stories are valuable chiefly as documents, has had wide currency.

The trouble with this explanation is, as they used to say on the middle border, that it won't wash. When Henry James received Garland pleasantly on a visit to England and spoke well of his work, James was recognizing the qualities Mencken denied: not merely beauty—and there is a good deal of beauty—but art. It is impossible to examine any of these stories carefully without coming away impressed with the very considerable literary skill that is operating in them.

Part of this, it is true, is the result of Garland's native gift for reportage. He seems, for one thing, to have had almost total recall of the most minute particulars of prairie life. In his description of the threshing and the dinner in "A Branch Road," of the party in "Up the Coulé," the sense of authentic detail is unmistakable. He also had a well nigh perfect ear for the patterns of border speech, a talent that is evidenced on every page. But these abilities, or something like them, are a part of the equipment of any writer of consequence; what matters is that Garland had the skill to select from and order these materials in an artistically effective way.

I have already noted that Garland was a master of situation rather than of plot. He had also, however, a genuine talent for ordering his situations to produce a cumulative result, and for developing each of them in a thoroughly convincing way. "The Return of a Private" is one of the simplest illustrations of this. It is divided into three major scenes: the veterans' return to La Crosse, the wife's loneliness and the dinner at Widder Gray's, and the reunion. These episodes are as sharply separated as the scenes of a play, and each of them is developed in the most careful detail. In the first the hardship and aloneness, the companionship and mutual consideration of men returning from war is sharply etched; the second is a marvelously convincing picture of a Sunday dinner in the West; the third moves surely from the uncertainty of first meeting to the fulfillment of being at last at home. But none of these scenes is static: they build cumulatively on each other and are cumulatively developed within themselves. We pick up the father as a returning fragment of a dispersed army and leave him bidding a temporary goodbye to his neighbors in his own country; we see the wife in her loneliness and desertion and follow her into a companionship which is a foretaste of her life after her husband's return: the reunion begins in the most painful strangeness and ends in ecstatic security.

This is a great deal more than reporting; it is narrative art of a rather high order, built on a careful and complex (even in one of the most simply developed of the stories) arrangement which moves steadily toward the resolution. And this order always directly serves the theme; Garland makes full use of his intimate knowledge of midwestern life, but he never lets it get the better of him. Unlike the reporter, he uses detail not merely to make what happened vivid, but to flesh out a theme—the germ which moral indignation planted—by incidents which may or may not have happened but undeniably could have. Unlike the tract writer, he is not concerned simply with the moral; he develops his idea with the most credible realistic detail, detail so rich it has a life and significance of its own. And so, in "The Return of a Private," he uses an incident from his own family history to protest the lot of the average western farmer, in a story which remains an artistically effective fiction.

The same sort of balance between inner theme and external reality is to be found in his characters. Were he either a reporter or a preacher, we could expect his people to be types. Since he is something of both, as well as something more—an artist—they are at once individual and typical. The Ripley s represent countless elderly farm couples, but at the same time they are individuals in their own right: the skill with which Garland portrays their hostility and love, their indifference and sympathy, the whole ambivalence of their long intimacy, can only be described as art. Similarly, Grant McLane is both a symbol and a memorable character; Haskins is a classic victim of the evils the single tax would remedy, and at the same time a man whom the chance sight of his daughter stays in the act of murder.

How Garland came by this skill—these, his best stories, are almost the first thing he ever wrote—remains a mystery. His exercise of it requires the presence of a deeply felt theme, always a theme of protest; somehow this intensity prompts him to enter chronology at the psychologically correct moment, to move surely through a skil fully developed sequence of themes, and to end when resolution has been achieved. He utilizes surprisingly subtle effects. Consider the frame of "Under the Lion's Paw," whose theme is the evils of unearned increment, a sermon on the single tax. The story opens with "the last of autumn and the first day of winter coming together," in a magnificent picture of late fall plowing. Haskins appears in the dark and snow and mud; he enters the warmth and light of the farm kitchen—a step into the security Council's kindness and generosity are to bring him. It ends on a well-stocked farm in the brightness of an autumn afternoon, with only the fall plowing remaining before the Haskins are to take the trip home (a ritual act for the frontiersman) they have earned. We leave Haskins, triumphant over nature which had seemed so hostile just three years before, but defeated by the evil Butler represents, "seated dumbly on the sunny pile of sheaves, his head sunk into his hands." In this identity of seasons, in the contrast of barrenness and plenty, of darkness and light, an artistry is at work which subtly reinforces the theme—that not nature but man's iniquity is the primal evil.

One other aspect of Garland's art deserves mention—his attempt to make Main-Travelled Roads a coherent and unified book, not simply a collection of related stories. To this end he utilized the dedication, the opening epigraph, and a series of epigraphs at the head of each story. He arranged the stories purposefully. "A Branch Road," which opens the book, is a story of young love; "Mrs. Ripley's Trip," which closes it, concerns the ashes of an old one. "Up the Coulé", the second story, deals with a young man who, unlike Will Hannan, returned home too late. "Among the Corn-Rows" offers relief from the grimness of the preceding story, and "The Return of a Private" renews the mood of somberness. "Under the Lion's Paw" is a commentary on the "daily running fight against the injustice of his fellow-men" with which "The Return of a Private" ends. In the whole book, in short, Garland made a conscious effort to follow the method he systematically used in the stories—to develop theme through a planned sequence of scenes. And, to a considerable extent, he succeeded. Read straight through like a novel, the book is more powerful than any of the individual stories.

Hamlin Garland's was not a major talent. His career as a writer of consequence was one of the briefest in American letters; it was also one of the most paradoxical. At the time he was doing his best and most honest work he was conducting a questionable flirtation with Richard Watson Gilder and furnishing him with second-rate and acceptable stories. With B. O. Flower, editor of the Arena, he was at once doing his finest work, stories of violent protest of the here and now, and dabbling in psychography. But these things are not the final issue. Whatever the reason, and in whatever way, Hamlin Garland produced a handful of minor masterpieces, of which Main-Travelled Roads is the finest. For them he deserves to be remembered, and I think will be, as an artist who, for a brief time at least, knew his craft and practiced it honestly.