My Contemporaries In Fiction Read online

  XII.--THE AMERICANS

  I suppose it will not be disputed that the glory of a nation'sliterature lies in the fact that it is national--that it reflects trulythe spirit and the life of the people with whom it is concerned, by whomit is written, and to whom it belongs. It will not be denied either thatthis final splendour has not yet descended on the literature of America.The happy and tonic optimism of Emerson is a gift which could hardlyhave been bestowed upon any man in an old country. It belongs to a landand a time of boundless aspiration and of untired youth, and in virtueof this possession Emerson is amongst the most characteristicallyAmerican of Americans. In the walks of fiction, with which alone we haveto deal in these pages, the Americans have been distinctively Englishin spirit and in method (until within recent years), even when they havedealt with themes chosen from their own surroundings. There is nowherein the world, and never was until now, and possibly never again will be,such another field for the born student of human nature as is affordedby the United States at this time. The world has never seen such anintimate mixture of racial elements as may be found there. A glanceat the Newspaper Directory shows the variety and extent of the foreignelements which, though in rapid process of absorption, are as yetundigested. Hundreds on hundreds on hundreds of journals minister tothe daily and weekly needs of Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Norwegians,Swedes, Russians, Hungarians. There are Polish newspapers, and Armenian,and Hebrew, and Erse and Gaelic. Sleepy old Spain is rubbingshoulders with the eager and energetic races of Maine and New York andMassachusetts. The negro element is everywhere, and the Chinese add aflavour of their own to the _olla podrida_. So far no American writersof fiction have seen America in the large. Bits of it have beenpresented with an admirable art; but as yet the continent awaits itsDickens, its Balzac, its Shakespeare, or its Zola.

  Mr. Bret Harte has made California his own, but it is not the Californiaof to-day. 'Gone is that camp, and wasted all its fire,' but the oldlife lives in some of its pages still, and will find students for a longtime to come. He has given us three, perhaps, of the best short storiesin the world, and a man who has done so much has a right to gratitudeand goodwill. Possibly there never was a writer who gave the world allthe essentials personal to his art so early, and yet so long survivedin the race for popularity. Bret Harte's first book was something likea revelation. In workmanship he reminds the reader of Dickens, but hissurroundings were wholly novel, and as delightful as they were strange.He bewitched the whole reading world with 'The Luck of Roaring Camp,'and 'The Outcasts of Poker Flat,' and ever since those days he has goneon with a tireless vivacity, telling the same stories over and overagain, showing us the same scenes and the same people with an apparentunconsciousness of the fact of repetition which is truly astonishing.The roads of dusty red and the scented pine groves come back in storyafter story, and Colonel Starbottle and Jack Folinsbee look likeimmortals. The vagabond with the melodious voice who did somethingvirtuous and went away warbling into the night is alive in new as in oldpages, in defiance of fatigue. Preternaturally murderous gamblers with aQuixotic eye to the point of honour, saintly blackguards with superhumansplendours of affection and loyalty revealed in the final paragraph oftheir history, go on and on in his pages with changeless aspect. Theoddest mixture of staleness and of freshness is to be found there. Sincehe first delighted us he has scarcely troubled himself once to finda new story, or a new type of character, or a new field for hisdescriptive powers. He took the Spanish mission into his stock-in-trade,and he has since made that as hackneyed as the rest. And yet thereremains this peculiarity about him--his latest stories, are prettynearly as good as his first. It would seem as if his interest had notflagged, as if the early impressions which impelled him to write werestill clear and urgent in his mind. He is amongst the most singular ofmodern literary phenomena. The zest with which he has told the same talefor so many years sets him apart. It is as if until the age, say, ofthirty he had been gifted with a brilliant faculty of observation, andhad then suddenly ceased to observe at all. There seems to have come atime when his musical box would hold no more tunes, and ever since thenhe has gone on repeating the old ones. The oddness is not so much inthe repetition as in the air of enjoyment and spontaneity worn by thegrinder. He at least is not fatigued, and to readers who live from handto mouth, and have no memories, there is no reason why he should evergrow fatiguing.

  Mr. Henry James is a gentleman who has taken a little more culture thanis good for the fibre of his character. He is certainly a man of manyattainments and of very considerable native faculty, but he staggersunder the weight of his own excellences. The weakness is common enoughin itself, but it is not common in combination with such powers as Mr.James possesses. He is vastly the superior of the common run of men,but he makes his own knowledge of that fact too clear. It is a littledifficult to see why so worshipful a person should take the trouble towrite at all, but it is open to the reader to conjecture that he wouldnot be at so much pains unless he were pushed by a compulsory sense ofhis own high merits. He feels that it would be a shame if such a manshould be wasted. I cannot say that I have ever received; from him anysupreme enlightenment as to the workings of that complex organ, thehuman heart, but I understand quite definitely that Mr. James knows allabout it, and could show many things if he were only interested enoughto make an effort He is the apostle of a well-bred boredom. He knows allabout society, and _bric-a-brac_, and pictures, and music, and naturallandscape, and foreign cities, and if he could feel a spice of interestin any earthly thing he could be charming. But his listless, easyair--of gentlemanly-giftedness fatigued--provokes and bores. He is likea man who suppresses a yawn to tell a story. He is a blend of genuinepower and native priggery, and his faults are the more annoying becauseof the virtues they obscure and spoil. He is big enough to know better.

  It is likely enough that to Mr. James the fact of having been bred inthe United States has proved a disadvantage. To the robuster type ofman of letters, to the Dickens or Kipling kind of man, it would beimpossible to wish better luck than to be born into that bubblingpot-full of things. But Mr. James's over-accentuated refinement of mindhas received the very impetus of which it stood least in need. He hasgrown into a humorous disdain of vulgar emotions, partly because hefound them so rich about him. The figures which Bret Harte sees througha haze of romance are to him essentially coarse. The thought of Mr.James in association with Tennessee and Partner over a board suppliedwith hog, flapjack and forty-rod awakes a bewildering pity in the mind.An hour of Colonel Starbottle would soil him for a week. He is not madefor such contact. It is both curious and instructive to notice how thetoo-cultured sensitiveness of a man of genius has blinded him to thegreatest truth in the human life about him. Born into the one countrywhere romance is still a constant factor in the lives of men, heconceives romance to be dead. With stories worthy of a great writer'shandling transacting themselves on every hand, he is the firstelucidator of the principle that a story-teller's business is to have nostory. The vision of the sheet which was let down from Heaven to Peterwas seen in vain so far as he is concerned, but the story of that dreamholds an eternal truth for the real artist. Mr. James is not the onlyman whose best-nursed and most valued part has proved to be destructiveWith a little more strength he might have kept all his delicacies,and have been a man to thank God for. As it is, he is the victim of anintellectual foppery.

  Mr. W. D. Howells has something in common with Mr. James, but he is ofstronger stuff--not less essentially a gentleman, as his books revealhim, but more essentially a man. He has a sterling courage, and hasnever been afraid of his own opinions. His declaration that 'all thestories have been told' is one of the keys to his method as a novelistA work of fiction is something which enables him to show the impingementof character on character, with modifying effects of environment andcircumstance. His style is clean and sober, and his method is invariablydignified. He has deliberately allowed his critical prepossessions toexclude him from all chance of greatness, but within his self-s
etlimits he moves with a certain serene mastery, and his detail is finelyaccurate.

  Miss Mary Wilkins, who is a very much younger writer than any of thethree here dealt with, reminds an English reader both of George Eliotand Miss Mitford. 'Pembroke' is the best and completest of her books. Sofar as pure literary charm goes it would be difficult to amend her work,but the suggestion of character conveyed is surely too acidulated. Sucha set of stubborn, self-willed, and uncomfortable people as are gatheredtogether in these pages could hardly have lived in any single village inany quarter of the world. They are drawn with an air of truth which isnot easy to resist, but if they are really as accurately studied as theyseem to be Pembroke must be a place to fly from. It is conceivable thatthe members of such a congregation might be less intolerable to eachother than they seem to the foreign outsider, but the amelioratingeffects of usage must needs be strong indeed to make them fit to livewith. For the most part they are represented as well-meaning folk; butthey are exasperatingly individual, all over sore corners, eager tobe injured at their tenderest points, and implacable to the person whohurts them. In Pembroke a soreness of egotism afflicts everybody. Everycreature in the book is over-sensitive to slight and misunderstanding,and every creature is clumsy and careless in the infliction of pain. Itis a study in self-centred egotism. People who have an opportunityof knowing village life in the Eastern States proclaim the book amasterpiece of observation.

  Bret Harte, studying a form of life now extinct, which once (withcertain allowances made for the romantic tendency) flourished in theWest; Mr. Howells, taking micro-graphic studies of present-day life inthe great centre of American culture; Mr. James, with a clever, weary_persiflage_ skimming the face of society in refined cosmopolitancircles; and Miss Wilkins, observing the bitter humours of the Easternyokel, are none of them distinctively American either in feeling orexpression. Mr. Samuel L. Clemens--otherwise Mark Twain--stands instriking contrast to them all. He is not an artist in the sense in whichthe others are artists, but he is beyond compare the most distinctand individual of contemporary American writers. He started as a mereprofessional fun-maker, and he has not done with fun-making even yet,but he has developed in the course of years into a rough and readyphilosopher, and he has written two books which are in their own wayunique. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are the two best boys in the whole widerange of fiction, the most natural, genuine, and convincing. They belongto their own soil, and could have been born and bred nowhere else, butthey are no truer locally than universally. Mark Twain can be eloquentwhen the fancy takes him, but the medium he employs is the simplest andplainest American English. He thinks like an American, feels like anAmerican, is American blood and bones, heart and head. He is not theexponent of culture, but more than any man of his own day, exceptingWalt Whitman, he expresses the sterling, fearless, manly side of a greatdemocracy. Taking it in the main, it is admirable, and even lovable, ashe displays it. It has no reverence for things which in themselves arenot reverend, and since its point of view is not one from which allthings are visible it seems occasionally overbold and crude; but thecreed it expresses is manly, and clean, and wholesome, and the man wholives by it is a man to be admired. The point of view may be higher incourse of time, and the observer's horizon widened. The limitations ofthe mind which adopts the present standpoint may be found in 'A Yankeeat the Court of King Arthur.' Apart from its ethics, the book is amistake, for a jest which could have been elaborated to tedium in ascore of pages is stretched to spread through a bulky volume, and snapsinto pieces under that tension.

  The great war of North and South has been answerable for more fictionthan any other campaign of any age, and it has quite recently furnishedreason for the novel, 'The Red Badge of Courage,' by Mr. Stephen Crane,which is out of counting the truest picture of the sort the world hasseen. It seemed at first impossible to believe that it had been writtenby any but a veteran. It turns out that the author is quite a young man,and that he gathered everything by reading and by hearsay. Here againthe method is national and characteristic. After all these years ofnatural submission to British influence American writers are growingracy of their own soil.