Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) | Page 7

again discovering some act of abnegation
such as giving up a lover because of the unsteadiness of his moral
principles or surrendering him to another woman to whom he seemed
for some reason or other to belong. In its realistic hours local color in
New England liked to examine the atrophy of the emotions which in
these stories often grows upon the celibate. One formula endlessly
repeated deals with the efforts of some acrid spinster--or wife long
widowed--to keep a young girl from marriage, generally out of
contempt for love as a trivial weakness; the conclusion usually makes
love victorious after a thunderbolt of revelation to the hinderer. There
are inquiries, too, into the repressions and obsessions of women whose
lives in this fashion or that have missed their flowering. Many of the
inquiries are sympathetic, tender, penetrating, but most of them incline
toward timidity and tameness. Their note is prevailingly the note of
elegy; they are seen through a trembling haze of reticence. It is as if
they had been made for readers of a vitality no more abundant than that
of their angular heroines.
It would be possible to make a picturesque, precious anthology of
stories dealing with the types and humors of New England. Different
writers would contribute different tones: Sarah Orne Jewett the tone of
faded gentility brooding over its miniature possessions in decaying
seaport towns or in idyllic villages a little further inland; Mary E.
Wilkins Freeman the tone of a stern honesty trained in isolated farms
and along high, exposed ridges where the wind seems to have gnarled
the dispositions of men and women as it has gnarled the apple trees and
where human stubbornness perpetually crops out through a covering of

kindliness as if in imitation of those granite ledges which everywhere
tend to break through the thin soil; Alice Brown the tone of a homely
accuracy touched with the fresh hues of a gently poetical temperament.
More detailed in actuality than the stories of other sections, these New
England plots do not fall so readily into formulas as do those of the
South and West; and yet they have their formulas: how a stubborn pride
worthy of some supreme cause holds an elderly Yankee to a petty,
obstinate course until grievous calamities ensue; how a rural wife,
neglected and overworked by her husband, rises in revolt against the
treadmill of her dull tasks and startles him into comprehension and
awkward consideration; how the remnant of some once prosperous
family puts into the labor of keeping up appearances an amount of
effort which, otherwise expended, might restore the family fortunes;
how neighbors lock horns in the ruthless litigation which in New
England corresponds to the vendettas of Kentucky and how they are
reconciled eventually by sentiment in one guise or another; how a
young girl--there are no Tom Joneses and few Hamlets in this womanly
universe--grows up bright and sensitive as a flower and suffers from the
hard, stiff frame of pious poverty; how a superb heroism springs out of
a narrow life, expressing itself in some act of pitiful surrender and
veiling the deed under an even more pitiful inarticulateness.
The cities of New England have been almost passed over by the local
colorists; Boston, the capital of the Puritans, has singularly to depend
upon the older Holmes or the visiting Howells of Ohio for its reputation
in fiction. Ever since Hawthorne, the romancers and novelists of his
native province have taken, one may say, to the fields, where they have
worked much in the mood of Rose Terry Cooke, who called her best
collection of stories Huckleberries to emphasize what she thought a
true resemblance between the crops and characters of New
England--"hardy, sweet yet spicy, defying storms of heat or cold with
calm persistence, clinging to a poor soil, barren pastures, gray and
rocky hillsides, yet drawing fruitful issues from scanty sources."
Alas that as time goes on the issues of such art seem less fruitful than
once they seemed; that even Mrs. Freeman's Pembroke, one of the best
novels of its class, lacks form and structure, and seems to encroach

upon caricature in its study of the progress and consequences of
Yankee pride. After a fecund generation of such stories Edith Wharton
in Ethan Frome has surpassed all her native rivals in tragic power and
distinction of language; Robert Frost has been able to distil the essence
of all of them in three slender books of verse; Edwin Arlington
Robinson in a few brief poems has created the wistful Tilbury Town
and has endowed it with pathos at once more haunting and more lasting
than that of any New England village chronicled in prose; it has
remained for the Pennsylvanian Joseph Hergesheimer in Java Head to
seize most artfully upon the