Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) | Page 8

riches of loveliness that survive from the
hour when Massachusetts was at its noon of prosperity; and local color
of the orthodox tradition now persists in New England hardly anywhere
except around Cape Cod, of which Joseph C. Lincoln is the dry, quaint,
amusing laureate.
Through the influence, in important measure, of Howells and the
Atlantic Monthly the modes of fiction which were practised east of
Albany extended their example to other districts also: to northern New
York in Irving Bacheller; to Ohio in Mary S. Watts and Brand
Whitlock; to Indiana in Meredith Nicholson; to Wisconsin in Zona
Gale; to Iowa and Arkansas in Alice French ("Octave Thanet"); to
Kansas in William Allen White; to the Colorado mines in Mary
Hallock Foote; to the Virginias in Ellen Glasgow and Henry Sydnor
Harrison; to Georgia in Will N. Harben; and to other neighborhoods in
other neighborly chroniclers whose mere names could stretch out to a
point beyond which critical emphasis would be lost. New York City
clung to less tender and more incisive habits of fiction; that city's pace
for local color was set by the deft, bright Richard Harding Davis, Henry
Cuyler Bunner, Brander Matthews, O. Henry--all well known figures;
by the late Herman Knickerbocker Vielé, too little known, in whose
novels, such as The Last of the Knickerbockers, affectionate accuracy is
mated with smiling, graceful humor; and by David Gray, too little
known, whose Gallops, concerned with the horsy parish of St. Thomas
Equinus near New York City, contains the most amusing stories about
fashionable sports which this republic has brought forth. In the Middle
West Edgar Watson Howe and Hamlin Garland, and in the Far West
Frank Norris and Jack London, broke with the customary tendency by

turning away from pathos toward tragedy, and away from discreet
benevolence toward emphatic candor. The prevailing school of
naturalism has made its principal advance upon the passing school of
local color by a sacrifice of genial neighborliness; no less exact and
detailed in observation than their predecessors, the naturalists have
insisted upon bringing criticism in and measuring the most amiable
locality by wider standards. Here lies the essential point of difference
between the old style and the new.
It is by reference to this point that the credit--such as it is--of being
quite contemporary must be withheld from so earnest and varied a
novelist as Margaret Deland. That theological agonies like those in
John Ward, Preacher were actually suffered a generation back and that
the book is a valuable document upon the times cannot explain away
the fact that Mrs. Deland herself appears to have been partly
overwhelmed by the storm which sweeps the parish of her story. So in
her later novels which have essayed such problems as divorce, the
compulsions of love, the inevitable clash of parents and children, she
tugs at Gordian knots with the patient fingers of goodwill when one
slash with the intelligence would cut her difficulties away. Suppose it
possible, for instance, that the heroine of The Awakening of Helena
Richie could have been courageous enough to go to her lover to await
the death of her loathsome husband and then could have been so timid
as to undergo the perturbations over her conduct which almost break
her heart in Old Chester--suppose these contradictions might have
dwelt together in Helena, yet could Mrs. Deland not have noted and
anatomized them in a way to show that she saw the contradictions even
while recording them? Suppose that Elizabeth in The Iron Woman was
expected by her community to pay superfluously for an hour's blind
folly with a lifetime of unhappiness and did undertake so to pay for it,
yet could Mrs. Deland not have pointed out that the situation was
repugnant both to ordinary common sense and to the very code of
honor and stability which in the end persuades David and Elizabeth to
give each other up?
The conclusions of these novels, which to thousands of readers have
seemed stern and terrible, are in reality terrible chiefly because they are

soft--soft with a sentimentalism swathed in folds of piety. The customs
of Old Chester stifle its inhabitants, who take a kind of stolid joy in
their fetters; and Mrs. Deland, with all her understanding, does not
illuminate them. The movements of her imagination are cumbered by a
too narrow--however charming--cage. Her excellence belongs to the
hours when, not trying to transcend her little Pennsylvania universe,
she brings accuracy and shrewdness and felicity to the chronicles of
small beer in Old Chester Tales and Dr. Lavendar's People. These
strictures and this praise she earns by her adherence to the parochial
cult of local color.
2. ROMANCE
If naturalism was a reaction from the small beer of local color, so, in
another fashion, was the flare-up of romance