New Figures in Literature and Art: Iii. Hamlin Garland

IN 1894 there appeared in Chicago a little book on literary topics, the manner of whose manufacture bore the marks of a dilettante taste in book-making. Its title-page was printed in black and red, its paper simulated the sort known as English hand-made, the margins were broad, the edges were deckle, and the types at the end of each essay ran off in an ornamental cue. By the looks, it contained something in the way of literary appreciations that was probably “ precious,” possibly decadent. But the amusing fact was that its appearance was quite at variance with its contents. To harmonize with them, the book should have been printed on birch bark and bound in butternut homespun, and should have had for cover design a dynamite bomb, say, with sputtering fire-tipped fuse ; for the essays which it contained were so many explosions of literary Jingoism and anarchy. These were caused — not respect alone for our trope prevents our saying written— by Mr. Hamlin Garland, perhaps the freshest figure in contemporary literature. In an ill-ordered if forcible way, they presented his views of the duty of the coming American writer. This promising young author ought, he said, utterly to abjure all models and masters, all “ good ” English, falsely so called, all rhetorical rules, and be his own spontaneous, untrammeled self. He should be, in short, a literary anarchist. He ought also — although his spontaneous self, if untrammeled, might wish to do quite other things — to saturate himself with local color, and in a new American way and in a new American language celebrate the plain American people. He should be a literary Jingo, and bear ever on his shoulder a banner inscribed, “ Our literature — right or wrong.” And Mr. Garland was so sure that the coming American writer would be the anarchist he described that, with magnificent naïveté, he entitled his volume Crumbling Idols.

The coming American writer, unless it be in his salad days, will of course be nothing so absurd. He will do what the American writer who has come and gone did in his day. He will learn his art the best way he can, and treat whatever subject interests him, whether it be American cowboys or Persian kings. If he has an original mind, he will deal with his chosen topic in an original way ; and if he has not, he will imitate. This may sound dogmatic, but Mr. Garland has set the example.

But the author of Crumbling Idols is to be regarded as Touchstone regarded Audrey: he is our own, let us therefore make the best of him. We will confess, then, with apologies, that we have, we hope not unfairly, caricatured his essays somewhat. Forgetting their extravagance, their confused thought, their slipshod composition, let us examine them again in a more sympathetic temper, to discover if, after all, there may not be some good in them. If this is done, we think that the fundamental ideas of the book will prove to be so sound as to appear tame. They are these : that the writer who describes the life of which he is part, and which consequently he understands better than any other, is more apt to do meritorious work than he who tries to body forth a kind of life of which he knows nothing, and that — what is essentially the same thing, although differently said — he who gives himself over to a servile imitation of models will not produce living literature. Briefly, then, Mr. Garland’s message to the writer is this : Write of what you know. It is an excellent message, but the writer who has ears to hear has heard it many times before. It is unquestionably ancient in substance. We must resume the seat of the scorner — for whose comfortable ease we admit, in tbe present instance, a partiality — at least long enough to remark that it is to be found in all the mistaken rhetorics and volumes of criticism which Mr. Garland would like to have burned in the public squares, and that his discovery of so trite a truth hardly justified a cataclysm in celebration.

But if extravagant in manner and trite in substance, Crumbling Idols has for the critic the merit of revealing with considerable distinctness what manner of man is behind it. “ Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner,” said some wise Frenchman. Mr. Garland has need of being comprehended. And really, the book reveals a man who, if deficient in critical power and in culture, has certain admirable qualities. True, these are moral rather than literary, but they may mean much to the future of his art. There is revealed, for example, a splendid faith in America as a field for genuine literary art as opposed to literary exploitation, a deeply rooted interest in the common people and love for them, an enthusiastic devotion to what we must yet call his work rather than his art, and an almost Napoleonic self - confidence. He who has these qualities to reinforce a true literary gift — Mr. Garland has that — may hope, if not led by his own self-will and contempt of guidance into futile wanderings in wrong paths, to go far. Pondering these qualities, one begins to understand how the same author could produce so foolish a book as Crumbling Idols and so admirable a one as Main-Travelled Roads. When the facts of Mr. Garland’s life are also considered, the understanding will be complete.

His father, who is a farmer, was born in Maine, and is of Scotch Presbyterian ancestry. He was one of the earlier settlers of Wisconsin, in which State Mr. Garland was born in 1860. On the farm in Wisconsin, and on others which his father consecutively bought in Iowa and Dakota, he spent his boyhood and young-manhood, and obtained that intimate knowledge of Western agricultural life which is so great an element in the strength of his best writings. His education was obtained in the country schools and a Western seminary. He was ambitious to write, and when the time came to start for himself he journeyed to Boston, and for several years worked and studied to that end with notable singleness of purpose. He never wrote a line merely for money, but with fine conscientiousness wrote always that which he wished to write, regardless of the market. In 1891 he published Main-Travelled Roads, and at one stroke established a reputation.

The simple record is significant of courage, persistence, and ability. On the one hand it explains and makes pardonable the manifest deficiencies in his knowledge and taste, and on the other the strong grip he has upon the realities of certain phases of American life. The Scotch Presbyterian strain in him perhaps accounts for his fondness for controversy and for radical reform. Nor is it difficult to guess at a reason for a less excellent quality perceptible in his writings, and influencing all his literary theories, — a certain introverted pride, namely, the mark of which is to exaggerate rudeness, and simultaneously to send forth offensive challenges to the spectator to deny that “ a man ’s a man for a’ that.”

Self-willed and contemptuous of those better trained than himself, courageous and strongly intelligent, with one sound principle of composition and many mistaken ones, his literary future depends upon which qualities, which theories, finally obtain the mastery. An examination of his books, the faults and the merits of which it is now possible to understand, will perhaps reveal a tendency in one way or the other. His more important works are seven. MainTravelled Roads appeared, as has been said, in 1891. During the next year he published three books, — two of them political novels, A Spoil of Office and A Member of the Third House, and the other a volume of sketches, Prairie Folks. In 1893, a novel, A Little Norsk, and a book of verses, Prairie Songs, were printed. Crumbling Idols is dated 1894. Of these, the melodramatic Member of the Third House commemorates an unhappy excursion into the province of the drama ; Prairie Folks and A Little Norsk repeat the essential qualities of Main-Travelled Roads, and of Prairie Songs Mr. Garland says, in the preface, that he does not expect it to be taken to represent his larger work : all these may be neglected. Main-Travelled Roads, A Spoil of Office, and Crumbling Idols may be regarded as typical.

Main-Travelled Roads, his first and best book, has faults enough. It is partly his lack of training, partly his scorn of refinements, which make the sturdy, homespun style, generally so effective, always rough, and often perversely incorrect. The same reasons may serve to account for the sometimes unnecessarily frank, sometimes even brutal realism. His own personality explains the prejudiced point of view : the sketches are only too plainly biased by the anger at circumstances felt by a young man, ambitious of the intellectual life, who is forced into hard, uncongenial physical labor. They are written, as it were, as if their author yet felt the pain of cold hands rasped by the husking, the sting of mingled sweat and dust which the threshing brings to the eyes. Tt is difficult to escape the conviction that, in some measure, Mr. Garland has without adequate warrant read into the minds of others the same fierce hatred for the discomforts of the life which he, with his artistic temperament, was bound to feel. The controversial note is also subtly struck in the sketches; the reader has an uneasy, ever-present feeling that they are written not so much for him as at him. “ Here is a pretty state of affairs,” they seem to say between all their lines, “ for which our author holds you personally responsible. What are you going to do about it ? ” When an argument is thus suggested, the reader loses faith a little. Instinctively he puts himself on his guard, and warns himself that these are the adduced examples of a controversialist, and may accordingly be overcolored. In the work of a less obviously sincere writer, of a writer with less knowledge of his subject and less native power, these faults would work sad havoc. The best proof of the solid merit of Main-Travelled Roads is that, in spite of all, it convinces the reader, willy-nilly, of its general fidelity to fact, and lifts him off his critical feet by its sheer brute force. It is his highest achievement, and, ominously, also his first. It shows strikingly what may be done by strong native talent working with the help of a single sound formula for effective composition ; for here most emphatically Mr. Garland has written of what he knows. The book is unique in American literature; passionate, vivid, written with absolute certainty of touch, native and virile as the red man.

It is appropriate to return for a moment to Crumbling Idols. In that volume, Mr. Garland, with an appearance of infallibility a pope might envy, predicts the future of American fiction. He declares it will not — with the air of one who says it shall not — be national, but local. Each writer will — that is to say, shall — tell what he knows of the special life into which he is born. Thus, each rural county, each village and small city, each huge metropolis, will have its peculiar literature. There will be no “ overtopping personality.” As to the last, there is no way of knowing; but something very similar to the local literatures which he describes is certainly springing up all over our country. The writer, the overtopping personality, who can comprehend the whole nation is not yet arisen among us. It is interesting to note that this prophecy of Mr. Garland’s, thus found to be supported by fact, is based upon the one sound dictum, “ Write of what you know,” which is discoverable in his literary philosophy. It is also interesting — although the fact may lack significance — to observe that the prediction was written after the publication of A Spoil of Office.

In theme this book — the pun in the title is pitiable — is magnificent. He who will embody in a noble fiction, as Mr. Garland has here tried to do, the career of a Western farm-hand, from the time of his early struggles for an education to the time of his election to the national legislature, will achieve, as nearly as any one, the great American novel. No career could be more typically American. None needs for its description a wider range of intimate knowledge of American life, a greater degree or maturity of literary power. There the theme lies, obvious, tempting, impossible, awaiting, like Arthur’s sword, the hand of the master. Mr. Garland has attempted it. He would better have emulated the temerity of angels. There is no need to say he has failed. That he should do so was inevitable. He is too young, too immature in his art, too limited in his knowledge of life, to treat well so all embracing a topic. By his own theory, he should not have undertaken the task. He rails at those authors who write of foreign lands of which, as he says, their knowledge can be only that of tourists. But one may be a tourist in his own country. Mr. Garland knows no more of Washington than the American traveler of an observing habit knows of London, no more of politicians than the traveler of Englishmen. He can write of them only from the outside. As in other instances he has illustrated by his success the value of the one literary truth he has perceived clearly, Write of what you know, so here he illustrates it by his failure. And, with singular accuracy of coincidence, the work begins to grow bad at the exact point where the author’s knowledge of his subject begins to grow less. It opens buoyantly and successfully, with the easy mastery of detail and the strength of handling so conspicuous in Main-Travelled Roads. But when he ceases to deal with the familiar farm, the academy, the life and politics of the county-seat, and tries to carry his hero with as firm and competent a hand into the national legislature at Washington, his sureness of touch vanishes, he begins to be at a loss, he unmistakably fumbles. Denunciation takes the place of delineation. Losing interest in a plot and in characters he can no longer bring bravely off, he yields to his controversial instincts, and makes of his hero — whom he starts with a very distinct personality — a characterless mouthpiece for vague charges of corruption in the “ regular parties,” for appeals to the farmers to rise, and for expositions of the beauties of “ populism ” and woman suffrage. Plot and characters dissolve, and at the end the book has no firmer consistency than the weak reveries of a political visionary.

What is the conclusion to be drawn? Four years ago Mr. Garland produced a strong work of fiction. Then, the next year, departing from the sound formula which made the excellence of that, volume, he wrote two novels which were distinctly inferior. The same year, however, saw a return to the sound method, and simultaneously a second success. The following year, a fiction still in the same manner was less good, indeed, but yet immeasurably better than the two failures. In view of these facts, is not the conclusion obvious that if Mr. Garland owes his successes to the one principle which he shares with the models and masters that he despises, and his failures to methods for which they give no warrant, other principles of good composition which they teach may also prove, on trial, to be valuable ? We hold it for true that the fundamental principles of the art of fiction are based on unchanging elements in human nature, and that the principles of the effective use of words are as firmly based upon the nature of language. True originality will consist, then, in the original application of these principles, not in foolish rebellion against them. As Mr. Garland is a natural writer, he obeys many of them unconsciously, and succeeds in proportion to his obedience. If he grasps these truths, he will some day write the strong novel which his talent justifies us in expecting. He has, as our examination of his work has seemed to us to show, a tendency to be constant to one true formula for fiction, no tendency to obey the rules of language further than as a natural writer he is compelled to do. But the years bring wisdom, it is said. He is young, and there is hope.