Chapter I: The Case Against the Puritans

The last fifteen years have seen a complete revolution in old American literary ideals. There has been a new efflorescence of poetry known as the “new poetry” movement. On the stage, after the attempts of William Vaughn Moody to renew the American drama, by fusing together realism and symbolism, Eugene O’Neill appeared and showed originality in his lyric dramatizations. In criticism, talents of the first order were revealed. The din of battles, the eagerness of controversies bear witness to the existence of an intensive, intellectual life in the United States to-day. Romanticism _versus_ classicism, progress _versus_ tradition, or, to speak the language of the country, radicalism _versus_ conservatism, waged a strenuous battle for their respective ideals. Messrs. Mencken, Van Doren, Rosenfeld, Van Wyck Brooks, Frank Harris, on the left wing, Paul Elmer More, the late Stuart P. Sherman, Irving Babbitt, W. C. Brownell, on the right, have made a sport of intellectual polemics and appreciation. American criticism is not content with gliding on the surface of authors or problems. It goes straight to moral problems and shows a keen intuition of technics.

This spiritual effervescence is well worth our attention. The literary nonconformist is a type not yet extinct in America. A revival of the protestant spirit and of critical examination has taken place in American literature. More faith and conviction have been spent in literary production than in the pulpit of the churches. The late Randolph Bourne was a typical example of the American literary radical, and Mr. Henry Mencken continues the tradition among us.

Even from the literary point of view, the American novel in the nineteenth century envied the rest of the world nothing. It produced excellent models of all kinds. The novel of adventure, the novel of manners have been stamped by Cooper and Hawthorne with the authentic seal of genius. More recently, Henry James showed himself a master of the psychological novel and an unparalleled artist. The vogue in America and abroad of the American “movies” could not be explained without the writings of Jack London. The short story, since Edgar Poe, had been a product copyrighted in America, while American humorists had won a worldwide reputation.

When all is told, if we make an inventory of the literary production in the world, as compared with that of the United States, in prose and verse, since, let us say, the advent of Baudelaire in France, we see that America, a so-called utilitarian country, has set, in more than one way, modern literary standards, with Poe, Whitman, Henry James. Meanwhile, in the realm of thought, American philosophy and psychology exerted a capital influence abroad. (A recent novel by M. Paul Bourget[1] still takes for granted all the doctrines professed by William James in his “Handbook of Psychology.”)

Let this be said in way of prelude, to make the readers of this volume well aware of the fact that the author does not accept without reserve all the criticisms hurled against American literature by modern American critics. The fertility and originality of American literature, in a country without literary traditions or institutions, are facts beyond all doubt. They fill one with optimism regarding the intellectual future of this great nation.

Yet, criticism is unleashed in the United States nowadays and it spares nothing. If the French are critical by birth, one would say, judging from the mass of evidence, that the modern American was born fussy. In a country where the standards of life change overnight, critical revaluations in literature are fatal. The American Hall of Fame could not escape the law of perpetual transformation. Until recently, the United States was the last country in the world which continued to take for granted the optimism of the eighteenth-century encyclopedists. Americans have not yet lost their faith in automatic progress. Despite the “fundamentalists” they have evolution in their blood. May I suggest, on the threshold of this book, that a European observer may be better located, ideally speaking, to render American literature full justice than even native critics? He has less illusions and also less prejudices. He views the literary revolution in the recent years in America as a result of the moral and social advance.

In the last twenty years a new class of writers has invaded American literature. The spirit of the pioneers never died in America. The young writers wanted to conquer new fields in an entirely new way. Their originality was a challenge to the old order. More than any other country since the War, literary America has struggled to find a new heaven and a new earth. Modern writers are conscientiously and deliberately insurgents. They turn a cold shoulder to traditions. In fact, they belong, socially, to a new class. Few of them are well-to-do bourgeois educated in expensive colleges and depending for their writing upon leisure and incomes. American literature is no longer the monopoly of gentlemen and scholars. The great majority of American writers to-day are self-made men, born from the people, without any blue blood and entirely democratic in their lives if not in their ideals. Most of them wear the chevrons not of the universities but of journalism. A great many, and the most noted among them, were reporters before becoming authors. This throws not a little light on their literary achievements. Most of them adhere to no church. The American literary “Who’s Who” includes indiscriminately all creeds, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and free thinkers. American literature has shunned respectability. It jumped from the right to the left and even to the extreme left. From aristocratic or bourgeois it became revolutionary and proletarian.

Even the geographical positions were altered. American literature had, up to the most recent years, been largely manufactured in the eastern States, a country conservative by tradition. As opportunities for adventure became rare in the East, Boston, Philadelphia and even New York ceased to be literary Meccas. The new literature developed in the Middle West. This fact is not without its historical significance.

It marked a return of the American mind to the natural line of American migration, from frontier to frontier, across the continent. The writers took the path of the missionaries, the pioneers and the captains of industry, the path of the covered wagon.

This was a challenge to the ideals of their predecessors. Classic American writers leaned more on the East than on the West, more on Europe than on their own country. Their literary taste and ideals, if not always their programme, were European, or if you prefer, Victorian. The new literature is strictly indigenous. It is crude and in many ways primitive. It is no longer manufactured in drawing-rooms or in studios, but in immediate contact with life. The great American novel of the nineteenth century was exotic and retrospective. It was sentimental and romantic. Its ethical and social background was traditional. Sentimentality and romance, the search after the picturesque, have gone by the boards. They have passed to the “movies” or to the popular magazines, the latter almost as backward to-day as they used to be fifty years ago and as harmless. The novel of adventure has been extinct, as a _genre littéraire_ in America, since the death of Jack London. Even the social novel has suffered a radical change. It is no longer written from the outside, from the point of view of society, as in the days of Frank Norris or Upton Sinclair. It is now written from the inside, from the point of view of the individual. It is more psychological than social. In fact, while the American novel became more realistic, it also began to be beset by moral problems. It ceased to be an epic to become a satire. From this point of view, however, despite their cynicism, the new masters of American fiction show themselves true to the old ideal. Their books are fraught with idealism, with the spirit of reform and amelioration. Even when they fight Puritanism, the American literary insurgents show themselves more puritanic than the Puritans. They are haunted by the dream of a better world and of a better humanity.

The fact that the new literature in America is contemporary with the wave of pessimism which has marked the last twenty years is not a mere coincidence. The two events stand very much together in a relation of effect to cause. Pessimism in the United States to-day has not yet affected the external aspects of American life. It has not made the average American less buoyant and confident. The sunny side of American life is still there. And yet, it cannot be denied that the age of jazz is more gloomy than the age of Roosevelt. There is a great deal of dissatisfaction in America to-day. The restless trend of life, the mad pursuit of material ease, the desertion of the home, the speed mania, the get-rich-quick impulse, are no longer the privilege of the grown-up. The contagion of material welfare and luxury has reached the young. It has lured them and led them astray. Educators, clergymen, sociologists, and, unfortunately too, criminologists, are much worried by the spread of the new paganism, and the growth of juvenile delinquency. American homes and colleges are swamped to-day with precocious supermen and superwomen eager to live their lives, as the saying is, without knowing how, except by aping their elders, by procuring expensive motor cars and jewels, or by securing for themselves road-house privileges. Juvenile criminality is on the increase. There is an epidemic of suicide among the young and the standards of morality are not much higher among the mature at large. No wonder that the American élite should be clamoring for a revaluation of standards.

How can they win their fight? They are a handful in a mass of more than one hundred million people, led, the vast majority of them, by mob psychology and the tyranny of public opinion. This certainly is a pathetic and vexing problem. For a European observer the fight in the United States to-day is not so much that of good and evil, right and wrong. The economic and material standards of the average American are much higher than those in the Old World. The fight in America to-day is, at the bottom, that of the élite against the masses, the fight of quality _versus_ quantity. This problem lies far beyond the power of statistics. It cannot be coped with by economists or sociologists. It falls within the pale of the moralist, the mystic and the philosopher. A big nation, like a big army, cannot exist without a discipline and a strict subordination of the masses to their leaders. How can this be possible without setting limits to the rights of individual development? This problem is complicated in America by that of standards. How are the demands of the masses going to be gratified without a leveling down of the standards? Is not material comfort the most obvious and most accessible value for the greater number? And what has intellectual growth to do with material welfare?

A type of civilization is not easily changed. Only a Chinese general or a Nietzschean philosopher would dare to solve the problem of the masses by applying the remedy suggested, a long time ago, by the benign R. W. Emerson:

Earth crowded, cries “Too many men.”
My counsel is kill nine in ten.

More than ten millions have been killed, within the last ten years, in Christian warfare, and _quality_ does not seem to have won yet over quantity. The polemics around the War have not solved but intensified the feud between the American élite and the masses. Immediately after the armistice of 1918, American radicals undertook a revaluation of war responsibilities. The American intelligentsia had never put its heart into the struggle. Conscientious objectors swarmed on all sides. The present economic, political and intellectual chaos through the world is largely the work of American nonconformists. They spared nothing to reverse the guilts, to confuse the origin and the issues of the war. The result of their efforts was an immense disarray of the world’s conscience. The actual misunderstandings about debts and reparations, the aloofness of the United States and their retirement within a narrow and obsolete Monroeism, the Americano-phobia abroad can be credited mostly to the exertions of American radicals. After they had lost their temper with Europe they began their intellectual civil war at home. Their target-practicing became suicidal. The glories of the American Hall of Fame were lampooned in broad daylight. American institutions and ideals were challenged. There was an orgy of self-exterminating criticism. While radical newspapers and magazines wasted much ink to blacken the lamb and to bleach the wolf, in international relations, critics at home, like Mr. Mencken, turned their ire against their own country. The “Magnalia Christi Americana” of Cotton Mather became the “Americana” of the _American Mercury_. In Mr. Mencken’s amusing magazine American glories and reputations were mowed down like daisies on a lawn. The churches, the colleges, the Federal Government were dealt with, at first hand and without much respect, and then appeared the indictment of American civilization as a whole by the thirty intellectuals. The confidence of the world in the United States and of the United States in themselves must still be very great, if one judges by the quick and informal dismissal into oblivion of this bulky indictment.

As a result of all this, there seem to be two United States to-day warring with each other. On the one hand we still have the “Land of God,” a nation just as proud of itself to-day as it was in the best days of the Roosevelt administration. And then there are the discontented and self-criticizing United States, a land where every article of the old creed is contradicted by self-disparaging critics. Between the two, on a sort of No Man’s Land, wander not a few erratic souls in quest of an ideal. The late Henry Adams was their model.

The upheaval against optimism and conformity is pretty general to-day among the thinking classes in the United States. Protests, inquiries and criticisms appear on all sides. If we believe them, American citizens have been cheated of their rights to happiness as promised in the American Constitution. But the fight among them is not so much with the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as with the official scapegoat, Puritanism.

As a collective and national state of mind, Puritanism can be traced far back in American traditions and literature. Before indicting it, we must not fail to see its good points, and it had many. Far from being in itself adverse to all æsthetics, as its American critics would have us believe, Puritanism was in the past a literary incentive of the first order. Its tragic conception of life is much more artistic than the dull optimism of the masses. No art is possible without pessimism. Art in its essence is a challenge to life. Puritanism was the only moral and religious system, outside Catholicism, which invented a mythology and a symbolism in the modern times. It inspired the immortal epic of Milton. It gave their quaint flavor even to Jonathan Edwards’ sermons and the “Magnalia” of Cotton Mather. No true road to salvation can ignore the pits of human wickedness. The fantastic elements in Hawthorne and Poe were largely borrowed from the demonology of the Puritan divines. Puritanism believed in the devil. It was a tremendous source of religious emotions. It fed the sense of the supernatural which is to-day practically extinct in the American churches. It favored the growth of mysticism and of the poetic faculties. It enhanced the love of solitude. It shunned comfort and emphasized the military and rugged aspects of life. It was friendly to nature and not adverse to the call of the wild. It pondered over the ominous problems of life, death, grace and responsibility. It inclined toward simple life, intimacy with the humble and familiar aspects of life. This Puritan type of mind has been illustrated by some of the most intellectual leaders of America, Emerson, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, William Vaughn Moody, Robert Frost, Robinson. Puritanism was a synonym for restraint, poverty, abnegation, depth of conscience and thought, qualities sorely needed in our present state of civilization. We owe to it the sense of the Infinite in the humblest objects and amidst the most trivial circumstances of our life, what Maeterlinck called, after Emerson, the sense of “the familiar sublime.” And let us not forget those forms of inhibited irony which gave birth to American humor.

On the other hand, it is true, the toll levied by Puritanism on human happiness has been ominous. For the average mind it meant intellectual consumption and asphyxiation. Puritan asceticism was an enemy of everything beautiful. Puritan institutions, the Puritan spirit of prohibition and constraint, have been justly denounced by modern critics as the chief obstacle to a rational and acceptable conception of life. Puritanism showed an admirable knowledge of the truest sides of existence and of its responsibilities, but it did not see all its sides. It perceived only and denounced flesh and the devil. It was suspicious of all the happy instincts and denied some essential human cravings.

Hence the present revolt against it. The critics of Puritanism in America to-day are legion. The anti-Puritan spirit forms the substratum of contemporary American literature. It is only fair to Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell and others to try to show, in way of preamble, that their plea against Puritan hypocrisy is supported by most of the up-to-date critics who handle a pen in the United States to-day. To review them all would be a long task. I shall deal only in this chapter with the most noted, like Messrs. Waldo Frank, Henry Mencken, Theodore Dreiser and a few others.

Waldo Frank (in “Our America”) views Puritanism as a sort of moral and mystic utilitarianism based on the repression of natural instincts. As a religious and a practical expansionist (the one is not to be separated from the other), the Puritan sacrificed moral growth to physical hegemony. To conquer the continent and intensify his energies he surrounded himself on all sides with restraints. Neurosis was the result, but the Puritan charged it to the account of the Prince of Darkness and the invisible powers. He wanted to reach salvation by a short cut and did not hesitate to do violence to human nature. When they attack Puritanism the new insurgents do not aim at windmills. They see it as a practical influence still at work in American society to-day. It gives them the key to American behavior. According to them, the average American is a victim of puritanic repressions since childhood. The system of American education is hostile to what modern psychologists call “wish-fulfillment.” The American is active, expansive, a progressionist and a doer in regard to matter. He shows a virile conscience in his conduct toward the physical universe. On the contrary, in regard to spiritual life, he dodges the facts and shrinks within himself. His physical courage is undeniable, but he is mentally and morally a coward. Read an American novel, attend a play or a “movie.” All begins well. Human problems are not ignored but, at the end, Puritan cowardice interferes to twist the facts and hide them in an enforced “happy ending.” The American is a wonderful mechanical engineer. When he cannot subdue reality by machinery, he resorts to plots and schemes of his own. He tries to gamble and speculate. Hence American ideology. When he has confused the issues the American gives it up and he passes his problems to his church, his lodge, his newspaper, or, preferably, to his wife, not to forget the mind reader and the palmist. Optimism at all costs is a necessity for the business man as well as for the pioneer. Expansion lives on assumptions, on foregone conclusions and hopes supported by haphazard calculation.

According to Waldo Frank, Puritanism was tantamount to a religious decadence. It was essentially irreligious. Not the meek in spirit but the shrewd and the valiant were the elect of Puritanism. From the very beginnings of colonization in America, Puritan idealism and commercial imperialism went hand in hand. The decadence began at the epoch of the Reformation. While all Europe was advancing along intellectual, artistic and literary paths, the Puritan bartered his soul for earthly possessions. Spiritual energies turned material. Physical exertions for power paralyzed higher aspirations. The individual as such no longer counted. Expansion was all and the building of an empire. Even the notion of a personal God disappeared. The _genius loci_ replaced Providence. _Magnalia Christi_ became _Magnalia Christi Americana_.[2]

That one of the most fervent forms of mysticism should have decayed into being only a craving for material prosperity is the paradox and the curse of Puritanism. America, we are told, is teeming to-day with all the riches of this earth. From the top of a mountain the Tempter would be proud to show it to Him who said that His kingdom did not belong to this world. From the heights of the ideal, however, America looks like a desert. Let her confess her sins, her emptiness, her impurities. Let America repent and convert herself! Let her find a way to salvation by giving up the Puritan ideals! Thus speaks the new Zarathustra with an intensity of conviction and a zeal which betrays the prophet and the idealist. Such an indictment takes us very far away from the days of optimism, from Emerson, Whitman, William James and Theodore Roosevelt. American idealism was buried in the grave of the Transcendentalists. As for American energy it floundered in the quagmire described by Theodore Dreiser in “An American Tragedy.”

After Waldo Frank let us hear Mr. Henry Mencken, than whom no better expert for smashing the Puritan can be found (in “Puritanism as a Literary Force”). According to him, except in the course of brief escapades, the average American translates all values and even beauty in terms of right and wrong. He is at the bottom a policeman and a judge, a fanatic of the law.[3]

Americans do not hesitate to sacrifice beauty and passion to respectability. If an American writer dared to follow the example of either Zola or Balzac in their descriptions of American society, they would be sent to the penitentiary for life. One of the most active forces at work to keep up American civilization is a belief in the universal presence of sin and the need of inquisition to uphold the moral code. Readers familiar with Mr. Mencken’s writings will remember with what fertility of imagination and keenness of wit he illustrated his views on the subject. The richer the Puritan became the more tyrannical he showed himself. His wealth made him intolerant and oppressive. Now that he was assured of his salvation, he turned his energies to convert the world outside by campaigns, crusades and so forth. He tried to make the world safe for righteousness and morality by compulsion, prohibitions and blue laws.

As a disciple of Zola and Balzac, and an extreme realist in his descriptions of American society, Theodore Dreiser has not yet been jailed for life, so far as we know. However, he enjoyed enough scraps with the censor to have personal reasons for venting his feelings concerning the Puritan. The author of “Sister Carrie” is not a professional humorist, and yet he can hardly control himself when he contemplates the American scene as ordained by Puritanism. I quote freely from his essay on “Life, Art in America,” in “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub.” Theodore Dreiser cannot refrain from chuckling, he tells us, when he sees more than one hundred millions of his countrymen loaded with a wealth which passes the imagination of the most enthusiastic miser and unable to count among themselves a sculptor, a poet, a singer, a novelist, an actor, a musician of the first rank. For two centuries America enjoyed an amazing prosperity. Her land is stuffed with mines, with oil and coal. It is full of beautiful mountains, of large valleys and rivers. There are facilities of all sorts for trade and for travel. And yet, with all her prosperity, America hardly counts an artist or a thinker of mark. Where are we to find, leaving aside Emerson and William James,[4] the American Spencer, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, or Kant? Has America any historian to compare with Macaulay, Grote or Gibbon? Has she any novelist like Maupassant or Flaubert? Where is the American equivalent of Crooks, Roentgen, Pasteur? Is there an American critic with the depth and forcibleness of Taine, Sainte-Beuve or the De Goncourts? Has America a playwright like Ibsen, Tchekhov, Shaw, Hauptmann or Brieux? Where are her Coquelins, Sonnenthals, Forbes-Robertsons and Bernhardts? America has produced only one poet since Whitman, Edgar Lee Masters. American painting can marshal Whistler, Inness and Sargent, but two out of the three migrated abroad. America has plenty of inventors, some of them remarkable, but this has nothing to do with art and the freeing of the mind.

Such is Theodore Dreiser’s arraignment of American culture. Puritanism thwarted intellectual energies. It is its fault if this country of wonderful technicians remained in a state of childhood in regard to higher mental achievements. On one hand the American grasps the physical world with the might of a Titan, on the other he revels in platitudes about brotherly love, purity, virtue, truth, etc., and under the cover of these platitudes he unleashes the Comstocks against independent writers.

There are some professional psychologists among the critics of Puritanism to-day. In a recent book entitled “The American Mind in Action” two of them[5] made a methodical study of puritanic inhibitions. They selected, to illustrate their case, personalities such as Emerson, Lincoln, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Comstock, Barnum, Franklin, Longfellow and Margaret Fuller.[6]

According to these authors the Puritan repression of natural instincts is a danger and a failure. It breeds hypocrisy and poisons the soul. Puritanism is responsible for most of the mental tortures which have been dramatized by American novelists in particular. The scientific name for these tortures is “floating anxiety” or “soul-fear.” They explain the transformation of Puritanism into imperialistic expansion. Everything is good for the Puritan if it takes him away from himself, from his fears, and his remorses. Hence his worship for action, for prosperity and success at all cost. American energy, viewed from this angle, is nothing but a substitute for scruples. If we believe this theory, the darings of the modern business man, his pluck, his boasting spirit of enterprise are only means to get rid of fright. A business man’s courage resembles that of the “Chocolate Soldier” in Bernard Shaw’s comedy. It is a derivative of fear, a _flight_ straight ahead toward the enemy, because there is no hope left behind. The American continent was conquered by religious misanthropists who vented their bad feelings by starting an onslaught on the Indians and other inferior races. The wrath of Miles Standish when he finds himself rebuked by Priscilla in his courtship and his subsequent offensive on the Redskin explains this point of view.[7] How different America would be if the Virginian Cavalier had won over the Puritan! But the contrary happened. Natural conditions and economic forces made Puritanism the sole form of national ethics in the United States. So much the worse! This state of blind repression and of anxious insecurity have made Puritanism the only form of thinking in America. Notwithstanding the diversion of affairs or the relaxation of sports, travel and amusement, soul-fear cannot be eschewed.

The American worries about health, hygiene. He worries about success. These are signs that the spiritual life is absent. Angry with himself, and with others, the disillusioned Puritan becomes a raider and an inquisitor. He wants to prohibit to others that happiness which is denied to him. He fears his own fear; he distrusts his emotions. He is afraid to surrender to nature which he regards as corrupt. And yet, without emotions there is no art or literature possible. An example of the Puritan inhibition, and of its effects on art, is Whistler painting, with all his soul, the portrait of his mother and calling it informally “Arrangement in black and white” for fear that he would betray his inner feelings. False pride, _amour-propre_ and bluff are the ransoms for Puritanism.

Another American complex, if we believe our critics, is the “mother complex,” the American complex _par excellence_. The sublimation of instincts in the American woman produced the so-called “motherly feeling.” It triumphs in American magazines and in the “movies.” The sentimental appeal to the motherly feeling is the surest and shortest way to arouse the emotions of the American crowds.[8]

American idealism is largely manufactured by women. It is to women that the average American owes his ideals and ethical or literary standards. It is woman who inspires, supervises and censors art and literature in the United States; it is she who makes them aseptic, consumptive and tawdry.[9]

In business the American is a real “he-man” but, when he must face moral issues, he surrenders to his mate. He tamed the physical universe with machinery and became a leader of material civilization. He can well solve mechanical problems, but ethics, philosophy and gay science are beyond his pale. And this is why the typical American to-day is so idealistic, so practical too, so inventive and so little of a philosopher and of an artist. He is anxious, restless, assured of himself on the surface but, in reality, very sensitive to criticism. Nobody is more able than he to attain the goal of his ambitions and nobody is more unhappy and helpless when he has reached it.[10]

Such is the survey of American ethics and psychology made by some of the best-known American critics. In this book it is meant to compare their views with those of the most noted among American novelists to-day. Floating anxiety, soul fear, Freudian complexes and inhibitions throw a great deal of light on the contemporary novel. The case against the Puritan has been pressed by modern American novelists to the limit of pathos.

The massive, clumsy, but forcible and convincing Theodore Dreiser, the genial and yet embittered Sinclair Lewis, the mystic and intuitive Sherwood Anderson, the ironic and quixotic James Branch Cabell, accompanied by a galaxy of talented writers like Willa Cather, Zona Gale, Floyd Dell, Joseph Hergesheimer, Waldo Frank,--all of them, since Hawthorne, through Henry James, William Dean Howells and Edith Wharton, show themselves obsessed by the problems of Puritan inhibitions and their influence on human conduct. More recently still, a host of younger writers has appeared in American fiction, all of them fascinated by the question of psychological behavior. The wanderings of Ulysses, in James Joyce’s Freudian epic, through the mazes of subconsciousness, had many American followers. Several of them have been included in this volume.

This book has no pretensions at being complete and it is not ashamed of being systematic. It deals chiefly with those American writers who explored the field of psychology and psychoanalysis and it happens to include most of the greatest. All writers of American fiction to-day could not be marshaled in line but the most famous are here. The author is not a professional pessimist, but it is not his fault if the good half-dozen of original talents to-day, in American literature, are adepts in disillusion. There is no reason to be dismayed by this fact. Great art has always been pessimistic; the more pessimistic, it seems, the greater. The fact that an optimistic country like America has a gloomy literature to-day must not be a deterrent. Art, in its highest forms, is not a mere imitation of life. It is rather a reaction and a protest against it. It lives and works in the sphere of aspirations.

The later generation of American writers is bent toward introspection and realism. In art these writers want truth. Between them and the past there is a gap. The time seems past for descriptive and objective literature. Subjectivism prevails. Novelists to-day want to share the lives of their characters. This new method of literary expression has been called in France _monologue intérieur_. The intimacy between reality and fiction has never been closer than now. The new writers also are revolutionists and iconoclasts. They swore allegiance to no master. Among foreign influences the Russian seems to be particularly prevalent with them. The American novel to-day would not be what it is without Dostoievski, Andreiev or Tchekhov. Neither does it deny its debt to Balzac, Flaubert, Zola or Marcel Proust. D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce also sponsored it.

In ethics and sociology the aloofness of the newcomers is complete. Psychology, not morals, is their chief interest. They are indifferent to rhetorics. The questions of style are alien to them. The password nowadays is spontaneous and original expression. Any means to this end is style.

Let us now, from Hawthorne to James Branch Cabell and others, begin our journey through the field of American fiction.