Chapter XII (2)

Family life, in American plays and novels, 249.

Fiction, confusion between, and realism, in Howells’ work, 200, 201;
Cabell’s defense of, 205-207;
the craving for, 208.
_See_ Novel.

“Figures of Earth,” 209-212.

“Financier, The,” 71-73, 77, 79, 86-88, 105-108.

Firkins, Mr., 63.

“Flamboyant,” 278, 279, 279 _n._

Flaubert, Gustave, 23;
his “Madame Bovary,” vi, vii, 137, 138, 142-144, 206;
his “Bouvard and Pecuchet,” 129;
never lost sight of art, 153;
his influence on the American Novel, 281.

“Floating anxiety,” 19, 31, 146, 184.

Florian de Puysange, in “The High Place,” 224-231.

Frank, Waldo, 22;
Puritanism according to, 13-16;
dual personality in novels of, 254;
master of the minor dialogue, 255;
his novels, 255, 256.

“Free Air,” 128.

Free will, 116.

French novel, influence of the, on American novel, 23, 281.

Freud, Doctor, vi.

Freudism, and Puritanism, 31;
disquieting elements of, 32;
in the novels of Anderson, 156, 182, 188;
a literary rendering to, 184 _n._

Frost, Robert, a Puritan type of mind, 12.

“Fruit of the Tree, The,” 56.

Fuller, Margaret, an experience of, 142 _n._;
an example of suppression, 223.

Gale, Zona, 22;
the chronicler of American life in the small towns, 248;
her “Birth,” 248, 249;
her “Miss Lulu Bett,” 250-254.

Garland, Hamlin, on the case of realism _versus_ sentimentalism, 200
_n._

Gaultier, Jules de, his “Le Bovarysme,” vi.

“Gay Science,” 205, 220, 280.

“Genius, The,” 73, 77, 111-115, 195.

Glasgow, Ellen, 248.

“Golden Bowl, The,” 53.

Goncourts, the, influence of, on the American novel, 281.

Gopher Prairie, 135-144.

“Great American Novel, The,” 277.

Great War, the, 259, 266, 267, 275.

“Hand of the Potter, the,” 115.

“Happy ending,” the, 14.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, wrote the novel of manners, 4;
influence of Puritanism on, 12;
resemblances to Freudism in, 31, 32, 36-42;
attracted by problems of the inmost life, 32;
his life, 33;
his complex explained by his genealogy, 33;
the paganism of his imagination, 33, 34;
his women, 34, 38;
his conscience, 34;
haunted by the idea of crime and punishment, 34;
moral paradoxes of, 35;
as a psychologist, 36;
analysis of his “The Scarlet Letter,” 36-45;
his symbolism, 45, 46.

Hecht, Ben, 271-274.

Helvetius, 125.

Hemingway, George, 270.

Hergesheimer, Joseph, 22, 254.

Herrman, John, 270, 270 _n._

Hester Prynne, in “The Scarlet Letter,” 37-45.

“Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub,” 74, 97;
quotations from, 82-86.

“High Place, The,” 224-231.

Hilda, in “The Marble Faun,” 34, 38.

“Holiday, A,” 255.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, his “Elsie Venner,” 110 _n._

“Hoosier Holiday, A,” 74, 88-93, 95-97.

“House of Mirth, The,” 58, 59.

“House of the Seven Gables, The,” the character of Phœbe in, 34;
sin in, 34, 35;
the character of Clifford Pyncheon in, 38;
symbolism in, 45, 46.

Howells, William Dean, 22, 54;
his realism, 61, 62, 69;
his limitations, 62, 64;
divides society into two opposite classes, 63;
his moral system, 64-67;
his “A Modern Instance,” 64-66;
his “The Landlord at Lion’s Head,” 66, 67;
his ideals those of the sentimental middle class, 67-70;
and Dreiser, 126, 127;
the descent from, to Sherwood Anderson, 169 _n._;
confusion between realism and fiction in, 201.

Hugh McVey, in “Poor White,” 181, 182.

Humor, American, 48;
and irony, 224, 225.

“Humpty-Dumpty,” 271.

Hurstwood, in “Sister Carrie,” 103.

Huysmans, influence of, on the American novel, 281.

Idealism, American, buried in the grave of the Transcendentalists,
16;
is largely manufactured by women, 21;
dead in the American novel of to-day, 257;
and utilitarianism, 258, 259;
transcendental, 258, 259.

Imagination, the rights of, claimed and defended by Cabell, 200,
201,
206;
the expression of, 279.

Imperialism, pragmatic, 259;
mystic, 259.

Individual and social ethics, 124-127, 130, 136.

“Inevitable Equation, The,” 81, 97.

Inhibited, city of the, 184.

Inhibition, the danger in, vii, 280;
the tortures of, described, 191;
the problem of sexual, 191;
effects caused by, prevalent among Puritan writers of New England,
223;
in novels of Willa Cather, 238-248;
in novels of Zona Gale, 249, 250;
in novels of Floyd Dell, 254.

Inness, George, 18.

Instinct, as opposed to the social code, 124-127, 130, 136.

Intelligence test, the, 25.

Irene Olenska, in “The Age of Innocence,” 57.

Irony and humor, 224, 225.

Jaloux, Edmond, 246.

James, Henry, 22;
master of the psychological novel, 4, 47;
needed the European background, 47, 48;
his indictment of America, 48-50;
his first novels, 50;
his women, 50-52;
his novels a contribution to the study of inhibitions, 52;
in æsthetics, 53;
uses _appreciation_, 53;
invented the _monologue intérieur_, 53;
composed from the center outward, 53;
as an artist, 54.

James, William, 4, 17, 149;
his psychological theories, 26, 27, 186;
his attempt to reconcile idealism with utilitarianism, 258.

“Java Head,” 254, 255.

Jazz, 197 _n._

Jeff Durgin, in “The Landlord at Lion’s Head,” 66, 67.

Jennicot, in “The High Place,” 228-230.

“Jennie Gerhardt,” 73, 104, 105.

John Webster, in “Many Marriages,” 192-196.

Joyce, James, 22, 23, 27, 53, 282.

“Jurgen,” 208, 209, 215-220, 223, 224.

Kennaston, in “The Cream of the Jest,” 231-237.

Kennicott, in “Main Street,” 136-144.

“Kora in Hell,” 277 _n._

“Landlord at Lion’s Head, The,” 66, 67.

Lawrence, D. H., 23, 36, 282.

Lewis, Sinclair, 22;
his career, 128;
his “Free Air,” 128;
his “Mantrap,” 128;
his “Our Mr. Wren,” 129, 130;
his works inspired by feeling of conflict between social and
individual ethics, 130;
his “Main Street,” 135-144;
his “Babbitt,” 144-148;
his “Arrowsmith,” 148-150;
as an artist, 149, 150;
his language, 150;
his “Elmer Gantry,” 150-153.

Lily Bart, in “The House of Mirth,” 58, 59.

“Linda Condon,” 254, 255.

Lodge, Henry Cabot, 186 _n._

London, Jack, and “the movies,” 4;
his “Martin Eden,” 167;
(mentioned, 110).

“Lost Lady, A,” 239.

Love, as bio-chemistry, 111, 113, 117.

McAlmon, Robert, his career, 262;
his “Village,” 262-269;
his “The Portrait of a Generation,” 269.

“Madonna of the Future, The,” 150.

“Main Street,” 135-144.

Mallarmé, Stephane, 166 _n._

“Mantrap,” 128.

“Many Marriages,” 191-196.

“Marble Faun, The,” paganism in, 34;
the character of Hilda in, 34, 38;
amorality in, 35;
the character of Donatello in, 38;
symbolism, 45, 46.

“Marching Men,” 158, 159, 171-180.

Marks, Percy, his “The Plastic Age,” 270 _n._

Martin, Doctor, psychologist, 28.

Masses and élite, in America, the feud between, 9, 10.

Masters, Edgar Lee, 18.

Mather, Cotton, his _Magnalia_, 10, 12.

Maupassant, Guy de, his influence on the American novel, 281.

Medical profession, the fakes of, satirized in “Arrowsmith,” 148.

Mencken, Henry, a literary radical, 4;
his magazine, 10;
his arraignment of Puritanism, 16;
his “The American Language,” 150.

“Mid-American Chants,” 155.

Middle West, 136.

Mid-Victorians, the, 74, 75, 126.

Milton, John, Puritanism the inspiration of his epic, 12.

Milton Daggett, in “Free Air,” 128.

“Miss Lulu Bett,” 250-254.

Mississippi River, the, 197.

“Modern Instance, A,” 64-66.

Molière, J. B., his M. Jourdain, 144.

_Monologue intérieur_, the, 53.

Moody, Mary, Emerson’s aunt, a _clairvoyante_, 223.

Moody, William Vaughn, a Puritan type of mind, 12.

“Mother complex,” 20, 21, 21 _n._, 69, 136.

“Movies,” 4, 14, 16 _n._, 20, 37;
psychoanalysis in, 184 _n._, 278.

Murger, H., his “Vie de Bohême,” 167.

“My Antonia,” 241-245.

“My First Thirty Years,” 270, 271.

“My Mortal Enemy,” 248 _n._

Myers, W. L., his “The Later Realism,” 258 _n._

Mysticism and eroticism, 191.

Nance McGregor, in “Marching Men,” 175-177.

Negro music, 197.

“New Englander, The,” 187-191.

New Orleans, 198, 199.

“New poetry,” 3.

“New Year’s Day,” 61 _n._

Nonconformists, American, 10.

Nordau, Max, his “Degeneracy,” 186 _n._

Novel, American, of the nineteenth century, 4, 7;
the recent change in, 7;
influence of the French novel on, 23, 281;
influence of the Russian novel on, 23, 281;
and the English novelists, 23, 282;
in 1900, 74;
drunkenness in, 187 _n._;
cynicism and crudity in, 257;
of adolescence, 262;
as a true representative of American conditions, 282, 283.

O’Higgins (Harvey) and Reede, their book on “The American Mind in
Action,” 18.

Ohio River, the, 197.

“Old Maid, The,” 61 _n._

“One of Ours,” 246-248.

O’Neill, Eugene, his “Desire Under the Elms,” 21 _n._;
drunkenness in his plays, 187 _n._;
stages a continuous monologue, 192 _n._

“Our America,” 256.

“Our Mr. Wren,” 129, 130.

Painting, the art of, 112, 113.

Palladino, Eusebia, 50 _n._

Pearl, in “The Scarlet Letter,” 34.

Personality, dissociation of, 27.

“Personality picture,” 28, 142, 156, 170, 221, 223.

Pessimism, in the United States, viii, ix, 8, 135;
in recent American literature, viii, ix, 257, 260.

Pirandello, 27.

Poe, Edgar Allan, the standard of the short story set by, 4;
the influence of Puritanism on, 12;
had an artistic conscience, 47;
haunted by the dead, 223.

Poictesme, the land of, 203-205, 209, 215, 221, 225.

Policeman, in the “movies,” 16 _n._

“Poor White,” 167, 181, 182.

“Portrait of a Generation, The,” 269.

“Post-Adolescence,” 269.

Pragmatism, 27, 149.

“Professor’s House, The,” 239, 240.

Proust, Marcel, 23, 27, 53, 276, 281.

Provincialism, 200 _n._

Psittacism, 184.

Psychoanalysis, vi, 30-32, 156, 169, 170, 182-187.

Psychology, experimental, study of, in America, 25.

Psychology, studies of morbid, 182-187.

Publicity in America, 146-148.

Puritan ethics, and Dreiser’s, 125.

Puritanism, the good points of, 11-13;
the bad points of, 13;
the revolt against, 13;
according to Waldo Frank, 13-16;
the decadence of, 15;
Mencken’s arraignment of, 16;
intellectual energies thwarted by, 18;
inhibitions of, 18-20, 22;
and psychoanalysis, 31;
and James Branch Cabell, 201.
_See_ Inhibition.

Radicalism, intellectual and literary, birth of, 260.

Radicals, American, 10, 11.

Rascoe, Burton, 273 _n._

Realism, of Howells, 61, 62, 201;
and fiction, confusion between, 200, 201;
_versus_ sentimentalism, 200 _n._;
fictitious, 201;
in psychology, 201;
revolt against, 201;
banned by Cabell, 206, 207;
of Willa Cather, 246;
static, 246;
optimistic, 248;
later, 258, 258 _n._, 270, 271.

“Reef, The,” 56.

Representative men, revaluation of, 19 _n._

Responsibility for Crime, 110 _n._, 116, 118, 119.

“Revisionists,” 259.

“Revolt against the village,” 200 _n._

Rimbaud, Arthur, 266.

“Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck, The,” 237.

Robinson, a Puritan type of mind, 12.

“Roderick Hudson,” 50.

Romantic evasion, 207.

Romanticism, a psychological disease, vii;
M. Seillères, study of, 130 _n._;
and Puritanism, 200;
of Cabell, 205, 206.

Rousseau, J. J., 125.

“Runaway, The,” 254.

Russian novelists, their vogue in America, 23, 281.

Saint Pierre, 239, 240.

Sargent, John Singer, 18.

“Scarlet Letter, The,” paganism in, 34;
the character of Pearl in, 34;
amorality in, 35;
the purpose of, 36;
analysis of, 37-45.

Seillères, Eugene, his study of romanticism, 130 _n._

Self, the, 27-29;
dissociation and reunification of, 170.

Selves, three, 127, 186.

Sensibility, analysis of pathological forms of, 182-187.

Sentimentalism, and the realistic novel, 200;
_versus_ realism, 200 _n._

Sex problems, 59, 60, 95, 102-105, 111-115.

Sexual inhibition, the problem of, 191.

Shaw, G. B., his “Man and Superman,” 111.

Silas Lapham, 69, 70.

Sin, in Hawthorne, 34, 35.

“Sister Carrie,” 73, 102-104.

Social code, and instinct, 124-127, 130, 136.

Socialism, 135.

“Song of the Lark,” 240, 241.

“Soul-fear,” 19, 31, 146, 184.

“Spark, The,” 56 _n._

Standardization, vii, 282.

Standards, American, 9.

Stein, Gertrude, 165 _n._

Stendhal, his “Le rouge et noir,” 116.

“Story Teller’s Story, A,” quoted, 160, 161.

Strenuous life, America the land of, 186, 186 _n._

Style, of American fiction writers, 202, 203.

Subconscious, the, 26, 181.

Suggestive language, the, 165 _n._

“Summer,” 60, 61.

Superman, the, of Dreiser, 85, 93-95, 105, 111;
imagined by Emerson, 222.

Suppression. _See_ Inhibition.

“Tar,” 155, 155 _n._, 157 _n._, 162 _n._

Tartuffe, 151

Tchekhov, A. P., 23.

Thea Kronburg, in “Song of the Lark,” 240, 241.

Thoreau, Henry David, a Puritan type of mind, 12;
disguises himself, 223.

“Titan, The,” 71-73, 108-111.

Transcendental idealism, 258, 259.

Transcendentalists, the, 16, 222.

“Traveller at Forty, A,” 98, 101.

“Triumph of the Egg, The,” 167, 187-191, 193.

Twain, Mark, 68, 261;
voted for American philistinism, 49;
and the Mississippi and the Ohio, 197;
his “The Mysterious Stranger,” 224.

“Twelve Men,” 72, 74, 98.

Undine Spragg, in “The Custom of the Country,” 56.

Utilitarianism, and idealism, 258, 259.

Vechten, Carl van, 279 _n._

Vildrac, Charles, his “Paquebot Tenacity,” 21 _n._

“Village,” 262-269.

Wendell, Barrett, 187 _n._

Wharton, Edith, 22;
specialized in the society novel, 54;
her process, 55;
not introspective, 55;
indifferent to social and political problems, 56;
her satire of American life and society, 56;
her “The Custom of the Country,” 56;
her “The Age of Innocence,” 57;
the spiritual and moral indigence of her characters, 57-59;
her psychological insight, 59;
on the relation of the sexes, 59, 60;
her psychoanalysis, 60, 61;
her “Summer” and “Ethan Frome,” 60, 61;
her article on “The Great American Novel,” 200 _n._

“What Maisie Knew,” 52.

Whistler, J. A. M., 18.

Whitman, Walt, a standard set by, 4;
the United States a cornucopia to, 49;
his influence on Dreiser, 154;
his influence on Anderson, 154, 155;
his “I Walt Whitman, a Cosmos,” 195;
his changes, 223.

Will, function of the, 118.

Williams, William Carlos, one of founders of “Contact,” 262;
his “The Great American Novel,” 277, 278;
his idea of American art of the future, 278;
on imagination, 279.

Wilson, Edmund, on Henry James’ typical American virgin, 52 _n._

“Windy McPherson’s Son,” 156-158, 168-171.

“Winesburg, Ohio,” 158, 182-187.

“Wings of the Dove, The,” 52, 53.

“Wish-fulfillment,” 14.

Words, physical characteristics of, 165, 166, 166 _n._

Young America, in quest of a new ideal, 280, 281.

Zola, Émile, 23;
essay by James on, 54 _n._;
his influence on the American novel, 281.

FOOTNOTES

[1] _Nos actes nous suivent._

[2] In this survey of the case against the Puritan the author does not claim to adhere to a literal rendering of the views of the different critics. Many of the comments and examples are his own.

[3] A foreigner who goes to the American “movies” would not contradict Mr. Mencken on this point. The policeman, as a _deus ex machina_, to wind up a plot and bring in a happy ending, has no rival on the American screen except perhaps the young girl, acting as Salvation Nell. A squad of police rushing to the scene of a row or of an assault, provided it arrives on the psychological moment, is sure to raise the enthusiasm of the audience to the limit. Moral rescue by the police is the most popular form of the Aristotelian _catharsis_ in America.

[4] The “leavings aside” of Theodore Dreiser in this indictment are frequent enough to call for a fairer balance of the whole account when all is told. I refer the reader, for a retort on this point, to the first pages of this chapter, where I take the liberty to be much more optimistic concerning the intellectual capital of America.

[5] Messrs. Harvey O’Higgins and Reede.

[6] A revaluation of most of the great American representative men and women has taken place in the United States recently, in the light of _ex professo_ Freudism and psychoanalysis. See the books of Crutch on Edgar Poe, Van Wyck Brooks on Mark Twain, Anthony on Margaret Fuller, Wood on Amy Lowell, etc., etc. This is another aspect of the intellectual revolt in America to-day.

[7] This example is the author’s.

[8] This mother complex is one of the most difficult American idiosyncrasies for the European to understand. The sublimation of instincts in America reaches its limits in married life when the wife becomes in familiar appellation “mother.” This American complex has no equivalent in the Old World.

[9] The author of this book had a first-hand impression of the power of the American woman as a censor when, in a certain city of the West, an Association of Christian Mothers interfered to stop the production of Charles Vildrac’s “Paquebot Tenacity.” Vildrac’s play, for the un-Puritan critic, is a most moral play. It dramatizes the problem of free will. It stages the conflict between a strong and a weak man, both of them in the hands of Fate. The American “mothers” did not see these moral issues. They were only concerned with a dialogue between one of the characters and a maid around a bottle of champagne. The suppression in New York City more recently of “The Captive,” a Freudian play of the first order, marked another triumph for the “motherly complex.” Eugene O’Neill’s Ibsenian drama “Desire under the Elms” was interdicted in Los Angeles lately by the same “complex.” Meanwhile nude exhibitions which could hardly be tolerated even in Montmartre are allowed to proceed along every “gay White Way” throughout the United States.

[10] Is not this a reason, among others, why the American business man stays “at his desk” until a late age, when the average European has gone into retirement a long time before? Work for the latter is only a makeshift in order to enjoy life better. For the American it is life itself.

[11] J. Laumonnier, “Le Freudisme,” p. 8. Cf. _Ibid._, p. 113, an essay on comparative psychology of peoples--based on Freudism. The Anglo-Saxons are apparently distinguished by a particular aptitude for inhibition and repression.

[12] Since this was written there has been an important revival of Hawthorne criticism like the chapter in Mrs. L. L. Hazard’s “The Frontier in American Literature,” and the book of Lloyd Morris, “The Rebellious Puritan: Portrait of Mr. Hawthorne”; “Nathaniel Hawthorne, A Study in Solitude” by Herbert Gorman. These critical studies support very well the interpretation of Hawthorne presented in this volume.

[13] I take the liberty to coin this adjective in memory of Eusebia Palladino, the famous medium.

[14] Edmund Wilson in the _New Republic_, March 16, 1927. Sarcastic Mr. Wilson sums up the spiritual failure and the sentimental starvation of the typical American virgin in Henry James’ novels as follows: “She goes on eating marrons glacés in a hotel parlor with her father and sister, all her life,” a life fortunately short enough to bring to a quick close this original form of Dantesque torture.

[15] And yet Puritanism did not prevent Henry James from writing the most sensible and most appreciative essay on Émile Zola in his “Notes on Novelists.”

[16] “The Old Maid,” “New Year’s Day,” “The Spark,” “False Dawn.”

[17] “The Old Maid” and “New Year’s Day” by the same author go very deep, too, in the analysis of subconscious emotions and their influence on moral and social behavior.

[18] “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub,” II.

[19] “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub.”

[20] “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub.”

[21] “The Financier.”

[22] “A Hoosier Holiday.”

[23] “A Hoosier Holiday.”

[24] This account of Dreiser’s Darwinian philosophy is being written just at the moment when the great French statesman, Georges Clemenceau, in the eighty-sixth year of his career, prints his “Au soir de la pensée.” That this great man, who knew men and life as very few did, can adhere to a philosophical creed literally in accord with that of Theodore Dreiser as presented in these pages, may well lead the reader to believe that, after all, there must be some truth in Darwinism as a hypothesis to explain the essential features of our modern social system.

[25] A more awkward and clumsy way to express one’s self in writing than this passage cannot be easily imagined, and there are, unfortunately, too many passages like this one in Dreiser’s books. This pseudo-scientific jargon could be endured in Haeckel but it is difficult to be, at the same time, a bio-chemist and an artist. This groping through mysticism, science or triviality, toward literary expression seems to be the curse of the new American writers.

[26] “A Hoosier Holiday.”

[27] Did not the Catholic Church have something similar to say on the subject, with its dogma of the Communion of Saints and the atonement for the wicked by the good?

[28] The lesson of the Dutch masters has been learned very early by American realists. Thirty years ago, in his preface to “A Hoosier Schoolmaster,” Edward Eggleston attributed his vocation as a novelist to the reading of Taine’s book on Dutch painters.

[29] This theory of conscience can prepare the reader for Dreiser’s views on crime and the criminal in “An American Tragedy.” It took bio-chemistry a long time to become a substitute for the Puritan doctrine of responsibility in the American novel. The first step in this direction after that of Hawthorne was taken by Oliver Wendell Holmes in the sixteenth chapter of “Elsie Venner.” There, good Dr. Holmes mobilized a college professor to demonstrate “the limitations of human responsibilities” from a scientific standpoint and present the criminal as a sick person not to be hanged or electrocuted, but preached to and cured, if possible, if not pensioned.

[30] The French philosopher and historian, M. Eugene Seillères, renewed entirely the study of romanticism in Europe by viewing it as what he calls _l’impérialisme mystique_, the imperialistic tendency toward individual supremacy. If we applied his definition to America, this country would stand as essentially unromantic, _i.e._, as the one which gives the individual the least chance for self-expansion beyond certain set limits. Hence the triumph of realism and middle-class standards in American literature. In the last fifteen or twenty years, on the other hand, the “revolt against the village” may well be interpreted as the sign of a new romantic upheaval among us, if we accept Mr. Seillères’ definitions.

[31] “Main Street.”

[32] _Ibid._

[33] Margaret Fuller in her “Memoirs” has told similar experiences, as when she thought herself to be a whirling dervish and fell inanimate on the floor after performing like one of them.

[34] Let me refer the reader for instance to Jim Blausser’s speech to his countrymen assembled to try to “boost” Gopher Prairie, and Doctor Pickerbaugh’s orations in “Arrowsmith.”

[35] Let the reader turn to “Tar” in particular for a vivid impression of Anderson’s primitivism. Beauty and the Beast fight there at close hand. One marvels how a would-be artist could save his soul from disgrace out of such a muddy and zoölogical chaos.

[36] The “dance before the mirror,” as the French playwright François de Curel called it.

[37] In fact very little respect of any sort. For the desecration in particular of the myth of birth, I refer the reader to the orgiastic chapters in “Tar,” contrasting the birth of the little pigs with that of a human being. The scene is almost epic in its coarse nakedness.

[38] “A Story Teller’s Story.”

[39] Anderson has told her story in “Tar.”

[40] A lesson which Anderson, as some of his critics tell, probably learned from Gertrude Stein, a virtuoso of the suggestive language to an extreme which the disciple has not yet followed, fortunately for us. Miss Stein’s story of an American family is a quarry where many curious gravels can be found, but no statues.

[41] Stephane Mallarmé, a pioneer of modern æsthetics, was himself a victim of a similar spell. At the end of his career he replaced inspiration by throwing haphazard words in black on white. He originated a new process of composition in which words produced their effect by sheer magic, like those Japanese paper-balls which blossom out into a display of flowers when placed in a glass of water.

[42] Is not this proletarian appeal the main sign of difference between the old and the new order of things in American literature? Passing from William Dean Howells to Sherwood Anderson is like descending the social ladder several rungs. No more well-to-do bourgeois, Laphams or Kentons. Now Middle Western literature takes us down to the ground floor and sometimes to the basement of democracy.

[43] In French _les refoulés_.

[44] This celebrated moving picture from the German studios has lately put psychoanalysis on the screen and made it intelligible to the masses. “Winesburg, Ohio” is not the only book of its kind which gives a literary rendering to Freudism. It is contemporary of and well in keeping with Pirandello’s plays, Eugene O’Neill’s drama and the newest French plays by Lenormand, Sarment, Cromelynck, and others.

[45] _L’énergie américaine, l’énergie anglo-saxonne_, such was for the last half a century the slogan of almost all the French travelers to the United States. Did not a French consul write, a few years before the War, a book called “La supériorité des Anglo-Saxons,” based on the same views? These critics knew only the surface of city life in America. They ignored Winesburg and, of course, had not read Sherwood Anderson. Decadence or, as Max Nordau called it in a sensational book “Degeneracy,” has become a current topic in the books of the younger American writers. Most of them could be inscribed with George Cabot Lodge’s saying that: “We are a dying race, as every race must be of which the men are, as men and not accumulators, third rate.” Such a statement certainly calls for a serious qualification but it may prove useful as a “damper” against the professional panegyrists abroad and the megalomaniacs at home.

[46] The part played by drunkenness in recent American fiction is appalling. In the good old days drinking used to be poetic and it was still Horatian in the way the late Barrett Wendell presented it in a famous essay. Since prohibition, it has become a narcotic and a dope. The triumph of drunkenness as a _deus ex machina_ in modern American literature will be found in Eugene O’Neill’s plays, although the fact that we pass our time on his stage mostly among sailors, may be taken as an extenuating circumstance.

[47] Eugene O’Neill, in “Emperor Jones,” succeeded in the _tour de force_ of staging a continuous monologue, but he was clever enough to use a tom-tom for a diversion from beginning to end. We miss this diversion in “Many Marriages.”

[48] “Many Marriages,” 217.

[49] From Rousseau to jazz seems a very long way, and yet does not the modern American, so fond of dancing to the tune of a Paul Whiteman orchestra, in some gorgeous palace, unconsciously pay homage to the primitive instincts so dear to the author of “Dark Laughter”? What a piquant contrast, not only in shade but in ideals, that both the black man and the Puritan should live within the same frontiers and that the latter should borrow from the former one of his favorite forms of self-expression.

[50] Hamlin Garland, in his “Crumbling Idols” (1894) frankly put the case of realism _versus_ sentimentalism before the public. He quoted Mistral and the French Felibres, as well as Taine and the critic Veron in support of his plea for what he called _provincialism_. Realism triumphed in American fiction until Mrs. Wharton published her article on “The Great American Novel” in the _Yale Review_ for July, 1927. She protested against what she called the “twelve-mile limit” and the narrow horizons of “the village pump.” That the “revolt against the village” will lead to an entire change of orientation in present-day American fiction and possibly to a new flight “beyond the horizon” in the next few years may soon become an easy and necessary prophecy.

[51] Let me refer the reader on this point to “The Outlook for American Prose” by Joseph Warren Beach (The University of Chicago Press).

[52] And needless to say, in an entirely different spirit from the “Connecticut Yankee” by Mark Twain, who showed himself a gross Philistine in regard to medieval lore.

[53] Author of “La Vie secrète,” “Les Choses Voient,” etc.

[54] We owe that expression to Mrs. Gertrude Atherton, a much talented novelist and a specialist of women’s psychology in the United States.

[55] In her latest short novel, “My Mortal Enemy,” Miss Cather has brought the tragedy of moral repression to its most crucial point. She tells the story of a woman who was looked upon as a rather peevish and vain person by those who knew her and who, at the end, frees her truest self in a pathetic prayer before going to die alone on a cliff above the sea.

[56] This “later realism” has been studied through modern English fiction by Professor W. L. Myers in his book “The Later Realism” (Chicago University Press), a masterpiece of searching criticism.

[57] In his novel called “What Happens” John Herrman gives us a pitiless and depressing document about the habits of college students of both sexes. If this be a faithful painting, American youth would then seem to have but two ideals--Vice and Alcohol. I leave the full responsibility of this verdict to the author. A similar, but more optimistic and moralizing representation, will be found in Mr. Percy Marks’ novel, “The Plastic Age,” The Century Company, New York.

[58] Mr. Burton Rascoe.

[59] See in Chapter II my exposé of “behaviorism.”

[60] Mr. Ernest Boyd in his “Portraits Real and Imaginary.”

[61] To which we should add his amusing “Kora in Hell.”

[62] The advent of “flamboyant” will be found in the books of Messrs. Carl van Vechten, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway who take their revenge on dullness with firecrackers, bull fights and champagne. Out of the gloom of realistic fiction the sun rises beyond the horizon of the “village pump” through the pages of “Firecrackers,” “The Great Gatsby,” and Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.” The return to art for art’s sake may free the American novel from the shackles of pessimism. Let us hope so.