Chapter IV: • The Beginnings of Criticism (3)

It was the city that played havoc with our older fictional methods, as it played havoc with our traditional social philosophy. America was late in discovering the import of the huge Babbitt warrens it had been building with such fierce energy; but slowly the realities of the economic city rose to challenge the respectability of the romantic city. It was the discovery of this new lair of business that created the school of sociological fiction. The older city of literature had been a polite world wherein ladies and gentlemen drank tea and made love and talked proper scandal--a pleasant background of clubs and drawing-rooms, against which moved well-dressed figures. It was an echo of Thackeray--the world of the West End and Beacon Street and Fifth Avenue, too well-bred and prosperous to recognize slums or stockyards or stock-gambling. But with the nineties the old complacency was disturbed. A note of unrest crept into the current fiction. As the _protégés_ of Mr. Howells looked out upon their world in search of reality, they discovered that polite society was being undermined. Too many social climbers were thrusting themselves forward; too much vulgarity was displayed by the new-rich. The social primacy of the old families was being challenged by western pork-packers. Here was a rich field to harvest. _Le document humain_ was the latest cry of realism, and so under the inspiration of M. Paul Bourget a new crop of realism came to fruit--clever studies in feminine psychology--the last word in contemporary reality. The social climber was analyzed mercilessly, her shallow and silly ambitions revealed to the least petty maneuver; her blighting influence upon an idealistic husband or her stimulus to a money-grabbing mate, is traced shrewdly. Such are Boyesen’s _Mammon of Unrighteousness_, Robert Grant’s _Unleavened Bread_, and Edith Wharton’s _House of Mirth_--studies that were symptomatic of a generation disturbed by the consciousness of a vulgar plutocracy rising in its midst, and yet ignorant of the nature of the disease.

Nevertheless their vogue was brief. As economic unrest rose more menacingly upon the horizon of the new century, realism quickly tired of its Kate Van Schaaks and Selma Whites and Lily Barts, and turned away to prospect for a richer vein. Psychology was losing its fascination and social analysis was supplying a new inspiration; M. Bourget was yielding authority to Émile Zola. Even so whole-hearted a romantic as Mary Johnston was to turn from tales like _To Have and to Hold_ to write _Hagar_, a novel of suffrage propaganda. There was to be not less realism but more. The change may be summarized in the word _background_. The old individualism had unconsciously insulated its hero from economic contacts; he moved in a polite environment detached from the larger play of social forces. An individualism so wanting in sociological verity could make scant appeal to the new spirit of sociology. That old world is dead. With the rise of the philosophy of determinism came another mood. To the realism of environment that conceived of the individual as a pawn on the chessboard of society, M. Zola had given the name _naturalism_. It was realism wedded to a deterministic sociology--the first reaction of a generation awakening to the subjugating power of the mass, and bent on studying the resultant phenomena in the clear light of science. The change was no less than revolutionary. The new school thought in terms of group and class and movement, rather than in terms of individuals each nursing his petty hopes and fears. The individual counts for so little in the enveloping stream of social tendency. Let us have no more shoddy heroes, foolish little egoisms in an unreal world; but figures of men and women, encompassed by the great stream, carried along on a resistless current. If they prove to be little better than puppets the novelist is not to blame, but society that reduces them to impotency. So the emerging school abandoned Howells and James and followed Frank Norris into the camp of the naturalists. Their work might be bad art--as the critics love to reiterate--but it was the honest voice of a generation bewildered and adrift.

The discovery of environment led imperceptibly to another discovery--the economic basis of society; and this in turn led to the rejection of the polite city of older literature. Once the eyes of the novelist opened to the significance of the economic, the world of the spenders became less significant than the world of the makers, the drones became less interesting than the workers. If a novel were to be true to American life, it must adjust its perspectives to the facts of the great American game of money-chasing; it must shift its habitat from Fifth Avenue to Wall Street, from the club to the factory. So the business man entered the portals of fiction, no longer the stock figure in broadcloth and top-hat who discarded business with his dirty collar in order to shift into respectability; but bringing with him his talk of deals and squeeze-outs, playing the great game of exploitation at his mahogany desk--the central, dominating figure in a capitalistic world. He was subjected to acute analysis--his philosophy, his ethics, the machine of industrialism he was creating, the intricate system of exploitation that he had elaborated, the jungle city that was his lair where he fought his battles. The more acutely he was analyzed the clearer it became that here was a figure greater than kings or presidents--a figure that had taken our traditional American life in his hands and was reshaping it to his ends; and that if realism were to be true to its ideal it must paint him as he was without detraction and without glorification. So of necessity the younger novelists turned from polite society to economics, and fell to dramatizing the life of the city jungle where business men fought their fierce battles.

The forerunner of the new school was a Norwegian-American, Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen. An essayist and philologist, for a number of years professor of German at Columbia University, Boyesen began publishing as early as 1874, and thereafter contributed freely to the several fields of the essay, poetry, and fiction; but it was not until 1891 that he opened the new vein of realism which he worked industriously the remaining four years of his life, the life brought to a premature close in 1895. Three novels belong to this last phase of his work: _The Mammon of Unrighteousness_ (1891), _The Golden Calf_ (1892), and _The Social Strugglers_ (1893). The books made considerable stir upon their publication, for they were the nearest approach to the Tolstoian type of realism which till then had appeared in America. They contain in germ many of the ideas which the later city realists were to amplify and develop; but these ideas were still entangled in the mesh of the current psychological realism and their sociological bearings obscured. In consequence they largely failed of their purpose, and within a decade they had fallen into oblivion. They are of interest today chiefly as historical documents of the early nineties.

In the preface to _The Mammon of Unrighteousness_ Boyesen sets forth his purpose thus:

My one endeavor in this book has been to depict persons and
conditions which are profoundly and typically American. I have
disregarded all romantic traditions, and simply asked myself in
every instance, not whether it was amusing but whether it was true
to the logic of reality--true in color and tone to the American
sky, the American soil, the American character.

This, very evidently, is the realism of _milieu_--an endeavor to catch the reality of atmosphere; and as such it is of no great significance. In his choice of “types,” moreover, he reflected the current taste. The crude self-made millionaire who dimly conscious of failure founds a university; the young idealist who fails because he is conscientious and the young realist who succeeds because he has no scruples against playing the game; and the aristocratic climber who marries to further her social ambitions--these are the stock figures of the realism that was to culminate in Robert Grant’s _Unleavened Bread_, nine years later. But in the delineation of the character of Horace Larkin--the hero of a book that does not realize its promise--the note of the new realism is heard distinctly for the first time. The business man frankly breaks with the old ethics and erects a new ethics in conformity with his ambition; and it is the elaboration of the ethics of the Will to Power that justifies one in regarding _The Mammon of Unrighteousness_ as a first study in the new city realism.

Horace Larkin, like Herrick’s Van Harrington, is a Nietzschean who learned his ethics not from the German philosopher, but from the world of cut-throat business. It is the flower of the competitive system. The old pretense that business is an uplifting and civilizing agency--that trade breaks down barriers and carries in its shipments the gospel of fraternity and good will--is flung out on the scrap heap. Horace Larkin is no smug hypocrite. He faces the facts frankly; he will not deceive others any more than himself.

He was a beast of prey, asserting his right of survival; nothing
more. If he succumbed to sentiment (and it is far easier to succumb
to it than to resist it) he would merely be eliminating himself
from the battle of existence as a potent and considerable force,
and consigning himself to the rear ranks. And he felt in every
fibre of his being that he was born for leadership.[676]

... nobody has a right to sacrifice himself to anybody else. If he
does he simply eliminates himself from the struggle for existence,
proves his unfitness to survive. It is natural for every strong man
to try to make every other life tributary to his own; but the man
who consents to make his life tributary to somebody else’s is from
Nature’s point of view a weak man.... She may allow him to exist
in a small way; but what is existence without predominance?...
The man who is in advance of the morality of his age is, for
practical purposes, a fool. It is no use quarreling with Fate; and
in the United States the average man is the Fate that rules us and
determines our place in the world.[677]

“The majority of our politicians are a low-lived lot, and many of
them corrupt. But they have the courage to be American--crudely and
uncompromisingly American--and that is, in my eyes, a virtue which
is not to be lightly rated.”

“And may I ask, Mr. Larkin, what do you mean by being American?”

“Being frankly, ably, enterprisingly plebeian. It is the plebeian
after all, who shall inherit the earth--”

“I beg your pardon. According to the Bible it is the meek.”

“I must differ with the Bible, then; for the meek, in my
experience, if they inherit anything, never manage to keep it.
It passes, sooner or later, into the hands of the strong, the
self-assertive, the grasping. But these, as you will admit, are
plebeian characteristics. A universally prosperous, comfortable,
impudent, and enterprising mob--that is the goal toward which
we are steering; and in my opinion it is a good and desirable
one.”[678]

This is a note that is to be heard more insistently as the new realism went further in its probing. Armed with this conviction Horace Larkin set forth as a conqueror, and it only adds to the dramatic fitness of things that in his rise he came across a will to power stronger, cleverer, than his own. Kate Van Schaak climbs upon his back to rise with him; she buys him with her money and social position, and having made the deal she realizes on the investment. She is mistress henceforth, and the Nietzschean smiles at the irony of the situation.

In the third work Boyesen fails to maintain the level of _The Mammon of Unrighteousness. Social Strugglers_ is simpler, more dramatic, better told. It carries the reader forward more easily. But it belongs with such novels of social analysis as Charles Dudley Warner’s _The Golden House_--mildly critical of the vulgarizing influence of the new-rich, mildly sympathetic with the slum workers--rather than to the new realism. The heroine--daughter of a new-rich family that has come to New York to climb socially--awakens to the realization of parting ways: one the path of luxury which the four hundred travel, the other the path of service which leads to the slums and settlement work. It is a sentimental awakening, not an intellectual, induced by the hero, who on the fringe of the four hundred is mildly discontented with the ways of luxury. The vague idealism of the latter has been stirred by the Toynbee Hall experiment in London, and the persuasiveness of the lover rather than the conclusions of the thinker carries Maud Bulkley away from her conventional moorings.

The movement of the book is little clogged with sociological discussions; there is too little, indeed, to justify the conclusion. Only once does Philip Warburton lift the curtain upon the idealism which ostensibly is the determining factor in his life.

“I frankly confess that I am something of a red. I think the world
is out of gear, and I can perfectly well conceive of a civilization
far better than ours, without yet proposing any radical amendment
to human nature....”

There was to Maud something so wholly unexpected in this ebullition
that she scarcely knew what to say. She had never philosophized
concerning life and its problems; nay, she had never suspected that
to a person who had money enough, and the access to good society,
it could present any problems whatever. She knew that some terribly
disreputable, shaggy, and wild-faced foreigners came here from
Europe and proposed to turn our admirable civilization upside down;
but that a gentleman of Warburton’s culture and social standing
could sympathize with such criminals had never occurred to her as a
remote possibility....

After this disturbing introduction Warburton proceeds to disclose what being “a red” means to him in the way of social revolutions:

“Have you ever heard of a London experiment known as Toynbee Hall?”
he asked....

“Yes: it’s a place in the slums, where young men of good family go
to live; isn’t that it?”

“Yes; and, do you know, that is to me the most beautiful modern
instance of a real desire to help the poor and helpless--to lift
the world to a higher level. It is what I should like to do
myself--and what I shall hope some day to do....”

“Then you really think it a misfortune to be rich?” she
ejaculated....

“Yes, if wealth entails the loss of human sympathies, as in nine
cases out of ten it seems to do, I regard it as a misfortune.
If it means, as in this country it seems to mean, the loss of
vital contact with humanity, the contraction of one’s mental and
spiritual horizon, a callous insensibility to social wrongs and
individual sorrows, a brutal induration in creature comforts and
mere animal well-being, the loss of that divine discontent and
noble aspiration which alone makes us human--if it means this
or any part of it, it is the greatest calamity which can befall
a man. And it is because Christ foresaw that these were the
natural effects of great wealth, and the security and ease which
it engenders, that he declared that it was easier for a camel to
pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the
kingdom of heaven.”[679]

That is all. There is no dramatic justification of Warburton’s views; they are without motive and foundation. _Social Strugglers_ does not advance far along the path of the new realism.

As the years drew nearer the new century, the business man usurped an ever larger place in American fiction; the romance which had been sought in the deeds of 1776 was now discovered in the achievements of enterprise. It was the unconscious testimony of literature to the hold which business had got on the imagination of Americans. In the golden days of the “full dinner-pail,” following the great victory of ’96, the Captain of Industry reached the apogee of his fame. The voice of detraction had not yet been lifted against him; the muckraker had not yet set forth on his devastating career. To young reporters on city papers looking ambitiously towards fiction as the goal of success, what could offer greater appeal than the unwritten romance of Wall Street and the Stock Exchange? They had described it for the daily news columns, they had seen it extolled on the editorial page, why not dramatize it in fiction? Here was the real interest of America--the only reality that signified; yet the novelists had stupidly overlooked it, because they lacked the journalist’s sense of news values, his _flair_.

Of the abundant crop of fiction which resulted from this discovery, no more characteristic examples need be sought than _The Short Line War_ (1899) and _Calumet “K”_ (1901), written in collaboration by Samuel Merwin and H. K. Webster. Their popular success was immediate and maintained surprisingly. The former ran to six editions, the last in 1909; the latter, to twelve editions, the last so late as 1915. They are brisk stories, all action stripped of descriptive superfluities, with plenty of newspaper punch: dramatizations of hustle and bluff and the tricks of a cut-throat game. Charlie Bannon, hero of _Calumet “K”_, is the boss who does things, who is on the job, who takes long shots and “makes good”--a “movie” hero of efficiency. He has no time nor inclination to think, possesses no philosophy, asks no questions and is troubled by no doubts or scruples; his fertile brain and cool nerve make him a first-class fighting man, and he fights as the good soldier should on orders from above. The hero of _The Short Line War_, Jim Weeks, is another Bannon with the same fertile brain, cool nerve, calm tenacity of purpose, quick decisiveness, and the same lack of intellectual interests. In war it is sound strategy to strike quick and hard; and the Captain of Industry, let it be clearly known, is a war captain. To play the game hard, to beat the other fellow by whatever means serve, that is the ideal of a competitive _bourgeoisie_: not to be too nice about the law, for everybody knows that the law is the chief weapon of the strong; not to cherish foolish idealisms, for everybody knows that success alone pays. No more heartless, brutal, anarchistic books could be conceived--a mad philosophy for a mad world.

The broad movement towards a realistic portrayal of the economic city produced its eddies and minor currents, which at times brought such a commotion of the waters as to appear like the main current. Such was the flood of political novels which came with the new century and lasted well upwards of a decade. These were a by-product of the muckraking movement--a part of the propaganda of the group of young insurgents within the Republican party who were bent on rescuing the party from control of the old bosses, and who prepared the way for the more significant movement of Progressivism which followed. Such studies as Francis Churchill Williams’s _J. Devlin--Boss_ (1901), and Elliott Flower’s _The Spoilsmen_ (1903), were early examples; and Winston Churchill’s _Coniston_ and _Mr. Crewe’s Career_ were probably the most notable. They were journalistic for the most part, _exposés_ of the “Boss” and the evils of the political machine. The “Boss” is painted in various guises, as brutal, cunning, thoroughly vicious, or as a man who plays the game with the same unsocial conscience that marks the capitalist. Most frequently Lincoln Steffens is followed and the human side of the “Boss” is “played up” equally with his political cunning. It is the characteristic journalistic touch--a bit cheap but immensely effective. As the movement of naturalism gained headway it became increasingly apparent that the “Boss” was only a part of the “System,” and the political novel merged in the economic. These brisk studies constitute, however, a suggestive episode in our history--the literary echo of our political history between the years 1900 and 1910.

Little in the way of social analysis was to be expected from a group of clever journalists. They were reporters of fact, transcribers of externals. They note the social unrest, but it is little more than an undertone of the chorus of prosperity--a snarl of inconsequential criticism. It is the sting of a troublesome mosquito that is brushed off by the Captain of Industry who is too busy with big projects to bother about insects. Such is Will Payne’s _Mr. Salt_ (1903)--a sympathetic study of a coal-baron who is caught in the panic of ’93 but pulls out and rises higher. To provide dramatic contrast there is the ineffective idealist who is growly and surly--“The whole thing is rotten--the whole business scheme. It’s just a gold brick game operated by Salt and his kind. I’d like to stick a fuse to it and touch it off.”[680] It is feeble enough--this protest. The rebel joins wildly in the great strike, is struck down by the hand of the law, rebels and strikes again and gets nowhere. Only a bitter, ineffective hate rankles in his heart, while Salt goes on triumphantly to greater power and a sort of moral regeneration through love--a regeneration that does not interfere with his keeping the title-deeds to his loot. An earlier study--_The Money Captain_ (1898)--seemed to give promise of honester work than this. It is the story of a struggle between a corrupt gas-magnate and an enterprising editor whose _exposé_ puts the magnate afoul of the law as interpreted by the magnate’s judges, and who is saved from disaster by the timely death of the “duke.” At the end is a touch of prophecy, quite startling in its forecast. These money-kings with their strong prehensile fingers are the spawn of a common plebeian America; the world of the makers is vulgarly democratic; but there follows the age of the spenders, and that shall be finely, altruistically aristocratic. The death of the hero “expunged from his fortune that color of greedy vulgarity and left its gold untarnished.”

Dexter, for all his success, was a figure in the common democratic
foreground of business; he was intimately and solely of the great
everyday warp and woof of toil. He bore all his fruit at once--when
he died. An heirship was required to give the fortune value....

In a way it was fine and beautiful--all that huge accumulation of
pillage coming to the white, firm hands of this pretty, amiable
capable, goodhearted woman. The sudden substitution of her graceful
and gracious figure for the swart and iron figure of the duke was
like an apt transformation scene, prophetic of the future.[681]

These earlier books are mere preliminary sketches--first studies in economic backgrounds, hesitating between admiration and censure--satisfied to exploit the “human interest” in the dour figure of the money-grabber. The clever newspaper men did not know enough to do better, more realistic work; they saw the daily activities of business but they understood little of economics, less of sociology. And the new realism was soon to yield itself captive to sociology--to inscribe the name of Zola boldly on its pennant and go forth to conquer. It was Frank Norris who wrote the pronunciamiento of the new school, boldly, magnificently, with immense faith in the finality of his own conclusions. _The Responsibilities of the Novelist_ was to become the textbook of the young naturalists.

Footnotes

[621] See Charles Edward Russell, _The Story of Wendell Phillips_, p. 53.

[622] Quoted in Martyn, _Wendell Phillips: The Agitator_, p. 372.

[623] See _Speeches_, Second Series, p. 139.

[624] Quoted in Martyn, _op. cit._, pp. 412-413.

[625] _Speeches_, Second Series, p. 176.

[626] _Ibid._, p. 167.

[627] _Ibid._, pp. 152-153.

[628] _Ibid._, p. 154.

[629] See _Ibid._, pp. 356-359.

[630] See _Ibid._, p. 347.

[631] Edward Cary, _George William Curtis_, p. 78.

[632] See _Ibid._, pp. 25-26.

[633] See _Ibid._, pp. 180-181.

[634] See _Harper’s Weekly_, Sept. 20, 1873.

[635] _Orations and Addresses_, “Machine Politics and the Remedy,” Vol. II, pp. 157-159.

[636] See _Ibid._, p. 160.

[637] J. H. Wilson, _The Life of Charles A. Dana_, p. 466.

[638] Ogden, _Life and Letters of Edwin Lawrence Godkin_, Vol. I, p. 11.

[639] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 17.

[640] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 140.

[641] _Nation_, July 8, 1915, p. 47.

[642] _On Liberty_, Chapter I.

[643] “Aristocratic Opinions of Democracy,” in _Problems of Modern Democracy_, pp. 25-26, 30-31.

[644] Ogden, _op. cit._, Vol. II, p. 48.

[645] _Nation_, January 30, 1873, p. 68.

[646] See “Public Opinion and the Currency,” _Ibid._, February 27, 1873; “The Political Situation in 1896,” in _Problems of Modern Democracy_.

[647] See “On Gold and Silver,” _Ibid._, July 6, 1876.

[648] _Ibid._, May 25, 1876.

[649] _Ibid._, June 1, 1876.

[650] “The Issue of the Campaign,” _Ibid._, July 2, 1896.

[651] “The Platform of Revolution,” _Ibid._, July 16, 1896.

[652] _Ibid._, January 19, 1893.

[653] _Ibid._, April 10, 1873.

[654] “The Watered Stock Hallucination,” _Ibid._, October 9, 1873.

[655] “Prosperity’s Advance Orator,” _Ibid._, June 18, 1896.

[656] “The Chicago Platform,” _Ibid._, July 16, 1896.

[657] “The Platform of Revolution,” _Ibid._, July 23, 1896.

[658] Ogden, _op. cit._, Vol. II, pp. 238-239.

[659] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 199.

[660] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 217.

[661] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 243.

[662] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 237.

[663] Vol. II, Chapter 13, p. 128.

[664] Chapter 4, p. 78.

[665] Vol. II, pp. 58-59.

[666] In his original scheme Professor Parrington included Tourgée’s _A Fool’s Errand_, but the text shows that he decided against its inclusion.--_Publisher._

[667] William Roscoe Thayer, _Life and Letters of John Hay_, Vol. II, pp. 5-6.

[668] Chapter V.

[669] Thayer, _op. cit._, Vol. I., pp. 6-7.

[670] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 15.

[671] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 321.

[672] _Ibid._, p. 414.

[673] _Ibid._, p. 426.

[674] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 256.

[675] In his plan Professor Parrington included here H. F. Keenan’s _The Money-Makers_, but apparently he decided against its inclusion.--_Publisher._

[676] Chapter XXXI.

[677] Chapter XXXVI.

[678] Chapter XXXIII.

[679] Chapter VII.

[680] Chapter IX.

[681] _The Money Captain_, Chapter 22.

Part Two: New Patterns of Thought