Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) | Page 5

Doubtless, also, the American business man has suffered from the
critical light in which he has been studied by the reflective novelists.
But though the higher grades of literature have refused to pay unstinted
tribute and honor to men of wealth, the lower grades have paid almost
as lavishly as life itself.
Multitudes of poor boys in popular fiction rise to affluence by the
practice of the commercial virtues. To be self-made, the axiom tacitly
runs, is to be well-made. Time was in the United States when the true
hero had to start his career, unaided, from some lonely farm, from some
widow's cottage, or from some city slum; and although, with the
growth of luxury in the nation, readers have come to approve the heir
who puts on overalls and works up in a few months from the bottom of
the factory to the top, the standards of success are practically the same
in all instances: sleepless industry, restless scheming, resistless will,
coupled with a changeless probity in the domestic excellences. Nothing
is more curious about the American business man of fiction than the
sentimentality he displays in all matters of the heart. He may hold as
robustly as he likes to the doctrine that business is business and that
business and sympathy will not mix, but when put to the test he must
always soften under the pleadings of distress and be malleable to the
desires of mother, sweetheart, wife, or daughter. Even when a popular
novelist sets out to be reflective--say, for example, Winston
Churchill--he takes his hero up to the mountain of success and then
conducts him down again to the valley of humiliation, made conscious
that the love, after all, either of his family or of his society, is better
than lucre. Theodore Dreiser's stubborn habit of presenting his rich
men's will to power without abatement or apology has helped to keep
him steadily suspected. The popular romancers have contrived to

mingle passion for money and susceptibility to moralism somewhat
upon the analogy of those lucky thaumaturgists who are able to eat
their cake and have it too.
A similar mixture occurs in the politician of popular tradition. He
hardly ever rises to the dimensions of statesmanship, and indeed rarely
belongs to the Federal government at all: Washington has always been
singularly neglected by the novelists. The American politician of
fiction is essentially a local personage, the boss of ward or village.
Customarily he holds no office himself but instead sits in some dusty
den and dispenses injustice with an even hand. Candidates fear his
influence and either truckle to him or advance against him with the
weapons of reform--failing, as a rule, to accomplish anything.
Aldermen and legislators are his creatures. His web is out in all
directions: he holds this man's mortgage, knows that man's guilty secret,
discovers the other's weakness and takes advantage of it. He is
cynically illiterate and contemptuous of the respectable classes. If need
be he can resort to outrageous violence to gain his ends. And yet,
though the reflective novelists have all condemned him for half a
century, he sits fast in ordinary fiction, where he is tolerated with the
amused fatalism which in actual American life has allowed his lease to
run so long. What justifies him is his success--his countrymen love
success for its own sake--and his kind heart. Like Robin Hood he levies
upon the plethoric rich for the deserving poor; and he yields to the
tender entreaties of the widow and the orphan with amiable gestures.
The women characters evolved by the school of local color endure a
serious restriction from the excessive interest taken by the novelists in
the American young girl. Not only has she as a possible reader
established the boundaries beyond which they might not go in speaking
of sexual affairs but she has dominated the scene of their inventions
with her glittering energy and her healthy bloodlessness. Some
differences appear among the sections of the country as to what special
phases of her character shall be here or there preferred: she is ordinarily
most capricious in the Southern, most strenuous in the Western, most
knowing in the New York, and most demure in the New England
novels. Yet everywhere she considerably resembles a bright, cool,

graceful boy pretending to be a woman. Coeducation and the scarcity
of chaperons have made her self-possessed to a degree which mystifies
readers not duly versed in American folkways. Though she plays at
love-making almost from the cradle, she manages hardly ever to be
scorched--a salamander, as one novelist suggests, sporting among the
flames of life.
When native Victorianism was at its height, in the third quarter of the
nineteenth century, she inclined to piety as her mode of preservation; at
the present moment she inclines