and there, but the principal accusation which Mr. Lewis brings against his village–and indeed against all villages–is that of being dull. “It is contentment … the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dulness made God.”
Not dulness itself so much as dulness militant and prospering arouses this satirist. The whole world, he believes, is being leveled by the march of machines into one monotonous uniformity, before which all the individual colors and graces and prides and habits flee–or would flee if there were any asylum still uninvaded. Thus Mr. Lewis’s voice continues the opposition which Wordsworth raised to the coming of a railroad into his paradise among the Lakes and which Ruskin and Matthew Arnold and William Morris raised to the standardization of life which went on during their century. The American voice, however, speaks of American conditions. The villages of the Middle West, it asseverates, have been conquered and converted by the legions of mediocrity, and now, grown rich and vain, are setting out to carry the dingy banner, led by the booster’s calliope and the evangelist’s bass drum, farther than it has ever gone before–to make provincialism imperialistic; so that all the native and instinctive virtues, freedoms, powers must rally in their own defense.
Mr. Lewis hates such dulness–the village virus–as the saints hate sin. Indeed it is with a sort of new Puritanism that he and his contemporaries wage against the dull a war something like that which certain of their elders once waged against the bad. Only a satiric anger helped out by the sense of being on crusade could have sustained the author of _Main Street_ through the laborious compilation of those brilliant details which illustrate the complacency of Gopher Prairie and which seem less brilliant than laborious to bystanders not particularly concerned in his crusade. The question, of course, arises whether the ancient war upon stupidity is a better literary cause to fight in than the equally ancient war upon sin. Both narrow themselves to doctrinal contentions, apparently forgetting for the moment that either being virtuous or being intelligent is but a half–or thereabouts–of existence, and that the two qualities are hopelessly intertwined. There are thoughtful novelists who, as they do not condemn lapses of virtue too harshly, so also do not too harshly condemn deficiencies of intelligence, feeling that the common humanity of men and women is enough to make them fit for fiction. Mr. Lewis must be thought of as sitting in the seat of the scornful, with the satirists rather than with the poets, must be seen to recall the earlier, vexed, sardonic _Spoon River_ rather than the later, calmer, loftier.
Satire and moralism, however, have large rights in the domain of literature. Had Mr. Lewis lacked remarkable gifts he could never have written a book which got its vast popularity by assailing the populace. The reception of _Main Street_ is a memorable episode in literary history. Thousands doubtless read it merely to quarrel with it; other thousands to find out what all the world was talking about; still other thousands to rejoice in a satire which they thought to be at the expense of stupid people never once identified with themselves; but that thousands and hundreds of thousands read it is proof enough that complacency was not absolutely victorious and that the war was on.
_Zona Gale_
Before _Main Street_ Sinclair Lewis, though the author of such promising novels as _Our Mr. Wrenn_ and _The Job_, had been forced by the neglect of his more serious work to earn a living with the smarter set among American novelists, writing bright, colloquial, amusing chatter for popular magazines. If it seems a notable achievement for a temper like Mr. Masters’s to have helped pave the way to popularity for Mr. Lewis, it seems yet more notable to have performed a similar service for Zona Gale, who for something like a decade before _Spoon River Anthology_ had had a comfortable standing among the sweeter set. She was the inventor of Friendship Village, one of the sweetest of all the villages from Miss Mitford and Mrs. Gaskell down. Friendship lay ostensibly in the Middle West, but it actually stood–if one may be pardoned an appropriate metaphor–upon the confectionery shelf of the fiction shop, preserved in a thick syrup and set up where a tender light could strike across it at all hours. In story after story Miss Gale varied the same device: that of showing how childlike children are, how sisterly are sisters, how brotherly are brothers, how motherly are mothers, how fatherly are fathers, how grandmotherly and grandfatherly are grandmothers and grandfathers, and how loverly are all true lovers of whatever age, sex, color, or condition. But beneath the human kindness which had permitted Miss Gale to fall into this technique lay the sinews of a very subtle intelligence; and she needed only the encouragement of a changing public taste to be able to escape from her sugary preoccupations. Though the action of _Miss Lulu Bett_ takes place in a different village, called Warbleton, it might as well have been in Friendship–in Friendship seen during a mood when its creator had grown weary of the eternal saccharine. Now and then, she realized, some spirit even in Friendship must come to hate all those idyllic posturings; now and then in some narrow bosom there must flash up the fires of youth and revolution. It is so with Lulu Bett, dim drudge in the house of her silly sister and of her sister’s pompous husband: a breath of life catches at her and she follows it on a pitiful adventure which is all she has enough vitality to achieve but which is nevertheless real and vivid in a waste of dulness.
Here was an occasion to arraign Warbleton as Mr. Lewis was then arraigning Gopher Prairie; Miss Gale, instead of heaping up a multitude of indictments, categorized and docketed, followed the path of indirection which–by a paradoxical axiom of art–is a shorter cut than the highway of exposition or anathema. Her story is as spare as the virgin frame of Lulu Bett; her style is staccato in its lucid brevity, like Lulu’s infrequent speeches; her eloquence is not that of a torrent of words and images but that of comic or ironic or tragic meaning packed in a syllable, a gesture, a dumb silence. Miss Gale riddles the tedious affectations of the Deacon household almost without a word of comment; none the less she exhibits them under a withering light. The daughter, she says, “was as primitive as pollen”–and biology rushes in to explain Di’s blind philanderings. “In the conversations of Dwight and Ina,” it is said of the husband and wife, “you saw the historical home forming in clots in the fluid wash of the community”–and anthropology holds the candle. Grandma Bett is, for the moment, the symbol of decrepit age, as Lulu is the symbol of bullied spinsterhood. Yet in the midst of applications so universal the American village is not forgotten, little as it is alluded to. If the Friendships are sweet and dainty, so are they–whether called Warbleton or something less satiric–dull and petty, and they fashion their Deacons no less than their Pelleases and Ettares. Thus hinting, Miss Gale, in her clear, flutelike way, joins the chorus in which others play upon noisier instruments.
_Floyd Dell_
The year which saw the appearance of _Main Street_ and _Miss Lulu Bett_ saw also that of _The Age of Innocence_, Edith Wharton’s acid delineation of the village of Manhattan in the genteel seventies, given over to the “innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience”; saw Mary Borden’s _The Romantic Woman_, with its cosmopolitan amusement at the village of Iroquois, otherwise Chicago; and saw Floyd Dell’s _Moon-Calf_, which, standing on the other side of controversy, lacks not only the disposition to sentimentalize the village but even the disposition to ridicule it.
Mr. Dell’s emancipation is the fruit of a revolutionary detachment from village standards which is too complete to have left traces of any such rupture as is implied in almost every paragraph of _Main Street_. _Moon-Calf_, recounting the adventures of a young poet in certain river counties and towns and villages of Illinois, touches without heat upon the spiritual and intellectual limitations of those neighborhoods. It settles no old scores. It relates an unconventional career without conventional reproaches and also without conventional heroics. Felix Fay dreams and blunders and suffers but he goes on growing like a tree, pushing his head up through one level of development after another until he stands above the minor annoyances of his immaturity and looks out over a broader world. He has a soul which is naturally socialist and yet he never loses himself in proclamations or statistics. He can be fresh and hopeful and yet learn from the remarkable old men he encounters. He lives and loves with an instinctive freedom and yet he holds himself equally secure from devastating extravagances and devastating repressions. Mr. Dell writes as if he had steadier nerves than most of the naturalists; as if he regarded their war upon the village as an ancient brawl which may now be assumed to have been as much settled as it ever will be. At least, it seems scarcely worth wrangling over. The spirit seeking to release itself from trivial conditions behaves most intelligently when it discreetly takes them into account and concerns itself with them only enough to escape entanglements. Mr. Dell leaves it to the moralists and the satirists to whip offenders, while he himself goes on to construct some monument of beauty upon the ground which moralism and satire are laboring to clear.
_Moon-Calf_ is very beautiful. Felix has a poetic gift sufficient to warm the record with fine verses and delicate susceptibilities upon which his adventures leave exquisite impressions. Even when his rebellion is at its highest pitch he wastes little energy in hating and so avoids the astringency and perturbation of a state of mind which is always perilous. To say Felix Fay is more or less to mean Floyd Dell, for the narrative is obviously autobiographic at many points. But were it entirely invention it would testify none the less to the affection with which this novelist feels his world and the lucidity with which he represents it. He has a genuine zest for human life, enjoying it, even when it invites mirth or anger, because of the form and color and movement which he perceives everywhere and particularly because of the solid texture of reality of which he is admirably aware. Hatred closes the eyes to a multitude of charms. If Mr. Dell suffered from it he could never have enriched his fabric as he has with so many circumstances chosen with an unargumentative hand; he could never have extracted so much drama out of dusty people. Had he been a sentimentalist he might have fallen into the soft processes of the local color school when it came to portraying the various communities through which Felix takes his way. Instead, the story is everywhere stiffened with intelligence. Felix has no adventures more exciting than his successive discoveries of new ideas. Even the women he loves fit into the pattern of his career as a thinking being, and he emerges, however moved, with a surer grasp of his expanding universe. That grasp would lack much of its confidence if Mr. Dell employed a style less masterly. As it is, he writes with a candid lucidity which everywhere lets in the light and with a grace which rounds off the edges that mark the pamphlet but not the work of art. He can be at once downright and graceful, at once sincere and impersonal, at once revolutionary and restrained, at once impassioned and reflective, at once enamored of truth and scrupulous for beauty.
When Felix Fay had escaped his original villages and had taken to the wider pursuit of freedom in Chicago there was another chapter of his career to be recorded; and that Mr. Dell sets down in _The Briary-Bush_, wherein Felix finds that the trail of freedom ends, for him, in madness and loneliness. From the first, though this moon-calf has steadily blundered toward detachment from the common order, some aching instinct has left him hungry for solid ground to stand on. The conflict troubles him. He can succeed in his immediate occupations but he cannot understand his powers or feel confident in his future. His world whirls round and round, menaces, eludes, threatens to vanish altogether. Thrown by dim forces into the arms of Rose-Ann, who seeks freedom no less restlessly than he, he is married, and the two begin their passionate experiment at a union which shall have no bonds but their common determination to be free. Charming slaves of liberty! Felix is at heart a Puritan and cannot take the world lightly, as it comes. His blunders bruise and wound him. He punishes himself for all his vagaries. Rose-Ann is not a Puritan, but she too has instincts that will not surrender, any more than Felix’s, to the doctrines which they both profess: jealousy sleeps within her, and potential motherhood. She and Felix come to feel that they have shirked life by their deliberate childlessness and that life has deserted them. Yet separation proves unendurable. So they resume marriage, vowing “not to be afraid of life or of any of the beautiful things life may bring.” Among these, of course, are to be children and a house.
Is this merely a return to their villages, merely domestic sentimentalism in a lovely guise? Mr. Dell has gone a little too deep to incur the full suspicion. He has got very near to the biological foundations of two lives, where, for the moment, he rests his case. There is more to come, however, in this spiritual history, whether Felix Fay knows it or not. Let the house be built and the children be born, and Felix and Rose-Ann, though citizens and parents, will still be individuals and will still have to find out whether these complicated threads of loyalty last better than the simple threads which broke. Felix, in discovering the lure of stability, has not necessarily completed the circle of his life. Freedom may allure him again.
_The Briary-Bush_, less varied than _Moon-Calf_, is decidedly profounder. It hovers over the dark waters of the unconscious on perhaps the surest wings an American novel has ever used. Though it has probed difficult natures and knows them thoroughly it does not flaunt its knowledge but brings it in only when it can throw some revealing light upon the outward perplexities of the lovers. Thus it gives depth and timbre to the story, and yet allows the characters to seem actual persons actually walking the world. At the same time, Mr. Dell does not possess a too vivid sense of externality. In both his novels all facts come through the mist of Felix’s habitual confusion, and in that mist they lose dramatic emphasis; muted, they are not able to break up the agreeable monotone in which the narrative is delivered. But underneath these surfaces, seen so poetically, there is a substantial bulk of human life, immemorial folkways powerfully contending with the new rebellion of reason.
_F. Scott Fitzgerald_
_Domesday Book_, _Poor White_, _The Anthology of Another Town_, _Main Street_, _Miss Lulu Bett_, _The Age of Innocence_, _The Romantic Woman_, and _Moon-Calf_ would make 1920 remarkable even if that year had not brought forth other novels of equal rank; if it had not brought forth James Branch Cabell’s richly symbolical romance _Figures of Earth_ and Upton Sinclair’s bitter indictment _100%_. And though most of these seem somber, there came along with them another novel in which were gaiety and high spirits and the fires of youth.
F. Scott Fitzgerald in _This Side of Paradise_ also had broken with the village. He wrote of his gilded boys and girls as if average decorum existed only to be shocked. But he made the curious discovery that undergraduates could have brains and still be interesting; that they need not give their lives entirely to games and adolescent politics; that they may have heard of Oscar Wilde as well as of Rudyard Kipling and of Rupert Brooke no less than of Alfred Noyes. Mr. Fitzgerald had indeed his element of scandal to tantalize the majority, who debated whether or not the rising generation could be as promiscuous in its behavior as he made out. It is the brains in the book, however, not the scandal, which finally count. His restless generation sparkles with inquiry and challenge. When its elders have let the world fall into chaos, why, youth questions, should it trust their counsels any longer? Mirth and wine and love are more pleasant than that hollow wisdom, and they may be quite as solid.
_This Side of Paradise_ comes to no conclusion; it ends in weariness and smoke, though at last Amory believes he has found himself in the midst of a wilderness of uncertainties. Yet how vivid a document the book is upon a whirling time, and how beguiling an entertainment! The narrative flares up now into delightful verse and now into glittering comic dialogue. It shifts from passion to farce, from satire to lustrous beauty, from impudent knowingness to pathetic youthful humility. It is both alive and lively. Few things more significantly illustrate the moving tide of which the revolt from the village is a symptom than the presence of such unrest as this among these bright barbarians. The traditions which once might have governed them no longer hold. They break the patterns one by one and follow their wild desires. And as they play among the ruins of the old, they reason randomly about the new, laughing.
_Dorothy Canfield_
If Floyd Dell seems in _The Briary-Bush_ to hint at the human necessity to turn back by and by from freedom, Dorothy Canfield in _The Brimming Cup_ pretty clearly argues for that necessity. Doubtless it is to go too far to claim, as certain of her critics do, that she had made a counter-attack upon the assailants of the village and the established order, but it is sure that she gave comfort to many spirits disturbed by the radical outbursts of 1920. Already in _The Squirrel Cage_ and _The Bent Twig_ she had shown an affectionate knowledge of the ways of households in small communities; and in _Hillsboro People_ she had added another hardy, kindly neighborhood to the American array of villages in fiction. _The Brimming Cup_ sounded a deeper note than any she had yet struck. Suppose, the novel says, there were a woman who had been trained in the wide world but was now living in a distant village; suppose she had heard and felt the tumult of the age and had begun to question the reality of her contentment; suppose, to make the conflict as dramatic as possible, she should find herself tempted by a new love to give up the settled companionship of her husband and the heavy burden of her children to seek joy in a thrilling passion.
Here Dorothy Canfield had an admirable theme and she rose to it with power, but she permitted herself so easy a solution that her argument stumbles lamentably. The lover who disrupts the warm circle of Marise’s life is after all only a selfish bounder, a mere villain; stirred as she is by the promises he holds out of rapture and of luxury, she would be simply foolish not to comprehend, as in the end she does, that she must lose far more than she could gain by the exchange she contemplates. Surely this is no argument in favor of loyalty as against love: it is only a defense of loyalty, which does not need it, as against a fleeting instability; and so it is hardly half as significant as it might have been had the conflict been squarely met, great love contending with great loyalty. Yet while the novel thus falls short of what it might have undertaken it has numerous excellences. It is eloquent and passionate and, very often, wise. Rarely have a mother’s relations with her children been so subtly represented; rarely have the manners of a New England township been more convincingly portrayed. The setting glows among its green hills and valleys, its snow and flowers. There are minor characters that stand up vividly in the memory, like persons known face to face. The atmosphere is at once tense with desire and spacious with understanding. Though the materials come from an old tradition they have been heated with the fires of the scrutinizing mind which burn beneath the newer novelists.
_1921_
That memorable year of fiction which saw so many superior books produced saw them successful beyond any reasonable expectation; and it is scarcely to be wondered at that the year following–with which this chronicle does not undertake to deal–should have responded to such encouragement. If Dorothy Canfield challenged the tendency, Booth Tarkington saw it and ventured _Alice Adams_. Sherwood Anderson in _The Triumph of the Egg_ and Floyd Dell in _The Briary-Bush_ proceeded to other triumphs. Half a dozen competent novelists followed naturalism into the “exposure” of small towns or cramped lives: particularly C. Kay Scott with the hard, crisp _Blind Mice_ and Charles G. Norris, rival of his brother Frank Norris in veracity if not in fire, with _Brass_. John Dos Passos in _Three Soldiers_, the most controverted novel of the year, dealt brilliantly with the unheroic aspects of the American Expeditionary Force. Evelyn Scott in _The Narrow House_ and Ben Hecht in _Erik Dorn_ attempted, as Waldo Frank had already done in _The Dark Mother_ and as some others now did less notably, to find a more elastic, a more impressionistic technique, breaking up the “gray paragraph” and quickening the tempo of their narratives. At the same time romance once more showed its perennial face, suggesting that the future does not belong to naturalism entirely. Donn Byrne in _Messer Marco Polo_ played in a bright Gaelic way with the story of Marco Polo and his quest for Golden Bells, the daughter of Kubla Khan. Robert Nathan wrote, in _Autumn_, an all but perfect native idyl, grounded well enough in local color, as suggestive of the soil as an old farmers’ almanac, and yet touched with the universal fingers of the pastoral. If American fiction cannot long escape the village, at least here is a village of a sort hardly thinkable before the revolt began. No matter what a flood of angry truth _Spoon River Anthology_ let in, beauty survives. Many waters cannot quench beauty. What truth extinguishes is the weaker flames.