Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) | Page 4

and Louisiana. The mountain people, inarticulate themselves,
have uniformly been seen from the outside and therefore have been
studied in their surface peculiarities more often than in their deeper
traits of character. And, having once entered the realm of legend, they
continue to be known by the half-dozen distinguishing features which
in legend are always enough for any type.
In the North and West, of course, much the same process went on as in
the South among the local colorists, conditioned by the same demands
and pressures. Because the territory was wider, however, in the
expanding sections, the types of character there were somewhat less
likely to be confined to one locality than in the section which for a time
had a ring drawn round it by its past and by the difficulty of emerging
from it; and because the career of North and West was not definitely
interrupted by the war, the types of fiction there have persisted longer
than in the South, where a new order of life, after a generation of
clinging memories, has moved toward popular heroes of a new variety.
The cowboy, for instance, legitimate successor to the miners and
gamblers of Bret Harte, might derive from almost any one of the states
and might range over prodigious areas; it is partly accident, of course,
that he stands out so sharply among the numerous conditions of men
produced by the new frontier. Except on very few occasions, as in
Alfred Henry Lewis's racy Wolfville stories and in Frederick
Remington's vivid pictures, in Andy Adams's more minute chronicle
The Log of a Cowboy, in Owen Wister's more sentimental The
Virginian, and in O. Henry's more diversified Heart of the West and its
fellows among his books, the cowboy has regularly moved on the plane
of the sub-literary--in dime novels and, latterly, in moving pictures. He,
like the mountaineer of the South, has himself been largely inarticulate
except for his rude songs and ballads; formula and tradition caught him

early and in fiction stiffened one of the most picturesque of human
beings--a modern Centaur, an American Cossack, a Western
picaro--into a stock figure who in a stock costume perpetually sits a
bucking broncho, brandishes a six-shooter or swings a lariat, rounds up
stampeding cattle, makes fierce war on Mexicans, Indians, and rival
outfits, and ardently, humbly woos the ranchman's gentle daughter or
the timorous school-ma'am. He still has no Homer, no Gogol, no
Fenimore Cooper even, though he invites a master of some sort to take
advantage of a thrilling opportunity.
The same fate of formula and tradition befell another type multiplied
by the local novelists--the bad boy. His career may be said to have
begun in New England, with Thomas Bailey Aldrich's reaction from
the priggish manikins who infested the older "juveniles"; but Mark
Twain took him up with such mastery that his subsequent habitat has
usually been the Middle West, where a recognized lineage connects
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn with Mitch Miller and Penrod
Schofield and their fellow-conspirators against the peace of villages.
The bad boy, it must be noticed, is never really bad; he is simply
mischievous. He serves as a natural outlet for the imagination of
communities which are respectable but which lack reverence for
solemn dignity. He can play the wildest pranks and still be innocent; he
can have his adolescent fling and then settle down into a prudent
maturity. Both the influence of Mark Twain and the local color
tendency toward uniformity in type have held the bad boy to a path
which, in view of his character, seems singularly narrow. In book after
book he indulges in the same practical jokes upon parents, teachers, and
all those in authority; brags, fibs, fights, plays truant, learns to swear
and smoke, with the same devices and consequences; suffers from the
same agonies of shyness, the same indifference to the female sex, the
same awkward inclination toward particular little girls. For the most
part, thanks to the formulas, he has been examined from the angle of
adult irritation or amusement; only very recently--as by Edgar Lee
Masters and Sherwood Anderson--has he been credited with a life and
passions more or less his own and therefore as fully rounded as his
stage of development permits.

The American business man, with millions of imaginations daily turned
upon him, rarely appears in that fiction which sprang from local color
except as the canny trader of some small town or as the ruthless
magnate of some glittering metropolis. David Harum remains his rural
avatar and The Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son his most
popular commentary. Doubtless the existence of this type in every
community tends to warn off the searchers after local figures, who have
preferred, in their fashion, to be monopolists when they could.