Provincial types in American fiction

Front matter

PROVINCIAL ITPES IN AMERICAN FICTION

HO.n\CE SPENCER FISKE

CHAUrAUQUA HOME READING SERIES

Preface

The field of American fiction is so wide and so varied that only one phase of it has been touched upon in the present volume, — certain types of American provincial life as studied since the Civil War by authors in New England, the South, the Middle West, and the Far West. The literature of these sections of the country written since the Civil War is so embarrassingly rich that, with one exception, nothing of the flood of very recent fiction is included in the scope of this limited study. The effort of the writer has been to confine himself largely to what is rather indefinitely called " realistic " literature, and to emphasize the truth of characterization found in such fiction as has come to be generally recognized for its special significance and permanent value as a reflection of certain phases of our national life.

The present volume can, of course, be only suggestive, but if it succeeds in stimulating to an appreciative study and enjoyment of the dozen works of fiction considered, it will have largely accomplished its purpose.

In tracing the development of provincial character in any particular novel or story, it has seemed best to give iv Preface

as much as possible of the author's individuality of conception and flavor of style, rather than to indulge in long descriptive writing and cumbersome paraphrase, — in the hope that the peculiar charm of the author considered may stir a desire for more intimate acquaintance, and so lead on to a genuine appreciation of what is best in American fiction.

HORACE SPENCER FISKE.

Chicago, April, 1903.

Contents

HA.PTER PAGE

I. A Brief Survey of the Field i

II. "The Rise of Silas Lapham " by William Dean Howells 1 1

Chapter I

If, in the fiction written in America since the Civil War, there has not yet appeared the long-looked-for great " American " novel, there has nevertheless been written much that is a true and delightful reflection of genuine American character, particularly of that character as seen in the country and in those sections that have been least affected by the progress of a growing national unity. American literature may, in fact, be said to be made up of an aggregation of sectional literatures — -the literatures of New England, the South, the Middle West, and the Far West. This aggregation naturally lacks unity, but it is all American ; and perhaps at some time these diverse characteristics may be fused by some masterly writer of fiction into a harmonious whole, which shall, by its vast variety yet unifying American spirit, be recognized as the great American novel.

From the time of the production of" Rip Van Winkle " and "Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving, of the "Leatherstocking Tales" by James Fenimore Cooper, and of "The Scarlet Letter" and "The House of the Seven Gables" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, to the present, the men who have done the most effective literary work and shown us most vividly certain phases of American life have usually been those who wrought in somewhat circumscribed fields — fields that they personally knew and loved. And among the writers of so-called " realistic " fiction in America none has had a more distinct place as a leader or a wider recognition among readers than WilHam Dean Howells. Although born in the Middle West, Mr. Howells lived for a number of years in Boston, and notwithstanding his later life in New York, he is still recognized as distinctly and successfully a portrayer of New England character. Three of his finest achievements in fiction have to do almost entirely with New England life, — "A Modern Instance," "The Lady of the Aroostook," and " The Rise of Silas Lapham." These are all in what is known as his " earher " manner, before his literary art became so subtle, sociological, and photographic, and give in a remarkably real way various phases of that typical New England character which the world has come to believe combines in itself many of the elements of the American national mind. In the first-mentioned book Mr. Howells's characterization of Bartley Hubbard as the " smart " young newspaper man, who is reading law in 'Squire Gaylord's office, and who later wooes and wins and divorces Marcia, the 'Squire's daughter, is so masterly that at one time we can hardly help admiring the breeziness and audacity and acuteness of the character, and at another we are driven in repulsion from its cheapness and baseness and brutal cynicism. And when the old 'Squire — " Mr. F. J. Gaylord, of Equity, Equity County, Maine " — pleads in the Tecumseh court-house in his own daughter's behalf, and charges his son-in-law with perjury, the pathos and dramatic quahty of the scene go far to divert from Mr. Howells the oft-repeated charge that he is enamored of the commonplace.

As Mr. Harry Thurston Peck, the editor of The Bookman, remarks of " The Lady of the Aroostook," it would be difficult to find in American realistic fiction a more happily developed and delightful story than that of Lydia Blood, the provincial New England girl, who, reared in the grim and almost joyless rural community of South Bradfield in the hills of Northern Massachusetts, shows herself on board the saihng vessel Aroostook to be, unconsciously to herself, but very charmingly to her exclusively male companions, a genuine " lady," — though to the eye of the European critic such a middle-class provincial type could hardly come under the designation of " a lady " at all. And in Venice itself, under the well-meant but embarrassing surveillance of her half-Europeanized aunt, Lydia is as easily the true and selfpossessed and irresistible " lady " as she was under the eyes of the chivalrous old sea-captain Jenness, the vulgar and drunken Hicks, or the hypercritical and cynical Staniford. Mr. Howells has given to this unique story a distinctly provincial setting, his opening and closing chapters bringing before the mind with almost perfect art the characteristic figures of fussy but undemonstrative Aunt Maria, Deacon Latham, the domesticated and uncertain old grandfather, Ezra Perkins, the dumb and formal driver of the yellow Concord coach, besides the picture of the "blue-cold" meeting-house, the savage desolation of the snow-hidden hills, the graveyard, as animated as the rest of the village, the sheet-iron stove in the parlor, the horsehair furniture, and the pea-green lamp with the red woolen wick that lights up this typical New England village with an immortal glow.

But the most distinctively and broadly national figure that

Mr. Howells has drawn is probably that in " Silas Lapham," — the character of the paint manufacturer, that typical product of the American nouveaux 7'iches, who has struggled out and up from the bleak Vermont hills into a prosperous and expanding business in Boston, and who yet hangs suspended above the precipice of social failure when he pitifully discovers that his hard-earned money cannot buy him position or friendships or culture. Here are the braggadocio of the self-made man who is praising his creator and is yet self-depreciative, the shrewd and refreshing humor, the instinctive generosity and genuine nobility, the undying energy and sure eye to the main chance, and the merciless conscientiousness that pursues even to self-ruin — these are all here, united in a Yankee nature that stirs one's sense of the ridiculous, the pathetic, and the positively heroic. And much of this is felt even in the first few pages of " The Rise of Silas Lapham," through the subtle and vivid power of the novelist, — in that memorable interview with Bartley Hubbard, who seems unerringly to penetrate every weak little vanity of the boastful and self-centered man, and draw from him without reserve the wearisome minutiae of a commonplace life.

Another convincing study of a rural type under urban conditions is found in " The Minister's Charge," in which, through the unwilling agency of a Boston preacher, Lemuel Barker, a raw New England boy from Willoughby Pastures, smitten with the egotism of literary creation, comes to the city bent on publishing a poem ; and by strangely connected causes the poor boy is driven on from one emergency to another, through love and poverty and ambition and shame and self-sacrifice, to an apparently impotent end. And with him are involved such strongly provincial types as his first sweetheart, Statira Dudley, her garrulous and insuppressible companion, 'Manda Grier, and his strong-minded, self-forgetting, bloomer-wearing old mother.

Among the many writers who have attempted to set forth the salient characteristics of the provincial New England type, few can be ranked above Miss Wilkins, whose realistic art has a sure and sympathetic touch for the grim, gaunt, indomitable figures that move through the fields and remoter villages of the Puritan's country. In her " Humble Romance," her " New England Nun and Other Stories," and her more ambitious work, " Pembroke," she has given faithful and vivid pictures of rural and community life, — in fact, they are often so closely drawn as to be almost painful in their embodiment of merciless conscience, unrelenting will, joyless religious life, a certain moral intolerance, and a lack of the sweet and lovable and beautiful. Will and conscience dominate some of her stories like passions, and they sometimes run to tragic and grotesque excesses in their rnanifestations, which may be true enough and characteristic enough, but which make us exclaim at times, " Why this eternal round of unrelieved rigidity and self-imposed tragedy and misery ? " But here and there, in truth to life also, are the lighter touches of humor and charity and intense but undemonstrative love.

Many of Miss Wilkins's people are so "set," as the Yankees themselves would say, that they almost pass the bounds of the reader's patience ; and, as in " Pembroke," a young man will sooner give up the girl he loves than go back on a rashly spoken word, — a father will sooner see his daughter go through a long life unmarried and embittered than suffer himself to speak a word of apology for a hot-tempered outbreak. This idolatry of self-esteem and self-will is most vividly shown in the dominating spirit of Deborah Thayer in "Pembroke" — a veritable she- Puritan, who stands before us thin-lipped, insistent, unforgiving. And her son, Barney Thayer, is like unto herself — as "set" and as hopelessly stubborn. With his new house all but finished, with an attractive and loyal woman, Charlotte Barnard, ready to marry him, he comes for almost the last of many visits to woo his sweetheart. But on that fatal night his will clashes with the equally imperious will of his prospective father-in-law, Cephas Barnard; the old man orders him from the house, and Barney Thayer vows never to cross the threshold again, — " I never will, by the Lord Almighty." The door slams after him, but his sweetheart, Charlotte, eagerly follows him, calling his name ; yet he does not even turn his head. And through long years he kept his stubborn word, the new house occupied only by the ghost of a thwarted love, and the lives of himself and the woman he loved dragging on in needless misery and daily bitterness.

Yet underneath all this apparent rigidness of nature is glowing in the book the intense flame of passion that will not be put out, and in its scorching effect even the grim stiffness of Deborah Thayer suffers. For her own daughter, Rebecca, when thwarted by her mother in her strong love for William Berry, secretly yields to his passion ; and as the languid, pining girl is submitting to the fitting of a new dress, which is being made by her mother as a sort of consoling gift, the truth that she has loved not wisely but too well is only too evident. Her mother orders her from the house even in the midst of a snow-storm — she is more relentless than the fury of the storm itself. Later, after Rebecca's forced marriage and the birth of her dead child, her mother seems ignorant of her existence ; and no one ventures to mention Rebecca's name in her presence.

The reader is sometimes tempted to inquire if there is really blood in the veins of some of these people presented by the pitiless art of Miss Wilkins. Mr. Barrie's " Auld Lichts," grim as they are, are softly human in comparison with some of these New England types. But in extenuation it must be said that characters like Deborah Thayer are often religious in their motives and action, and confuse their own will with the imagined will of the God of all. And this is pathetically illustrated in the punishment of her invalid son, Ephraim, which resulted so unexpectedly in his death. His mother was doing it, she thought, for his present and eternal good.

A kindlier, sweeter phase of New England life is seen in the satisfying art of the books written by Sarah Orne Jewett, who, for subtle sympathy with her characters, an appreciation of their finer, higher qualities, and a medium of expression Greek-like in its simplicity and serenity, must take a very high place in the portrayal of provincial New England types. In " Country By-Ways," " Tales of New England," and " A Country Doctor," and especially in " A Marsh Island" and " Deephaven," Miss Jewett has done very much to preserve in permanent literary form the quaint and beautiful traits of rural New England. As one recalls the people in " A Marsh Island," the exquisite and lovable figure of Doris Owen emerges in the dawnlight of that memorable morning when she made her trembling and heroic way to Westmarket to confess her love and dissuade her angry lover from embarking for the Banks. And there is Doris's dear old father with the touch of sentiment and imagination and love of nature, and the tireless and ambitious mother, and Jim Fales, and the jealous but virile and constant Dan Lester, — a group of rural figures made all the more interesting by the unique background of quiet beauty and color that Miss Jewett knows how to draw so easily and so effectively.

In Miss Jewett's " Deephaven " we have a collection of short sketches and stories that show her art at its highest, and so realistic as to lead many readers to suppose that " Deephaven " is a veritable New England seaport known to themselves. Miss Jewett, however, in her preface, disclaims any close identity in her characterizations, and denies that " Deephaven " is on the actual map of New England. The two Boston girls who spent that memorable summer in the quaint old Brandon house at Deephaven make delightfully fresh and interesting figures amid the decayed aristocracy and retired sea-captains and talkative widows and sedate spinsters of the inactive but charming old seaport. The optimistic and humorous Mrs. Kew,wife of the lighthouse keeper, the reminiscent "Widow Jim," w^ho could make rugs and preside at funerals, and had "faculty"; the pipe-smoking, story-telling old sea-captains, like Captain Isaac Horn ; Captain Lant, who, though now devoted to farming, had to take " a day's fishing every hand's turn, to keep the old hulk clear of barnacles;" the lame, red-shirted " Danny," with his cat and hospital stories ; and the visionary Captain Sands, who had a sort of marine museum and was a specialist in weather and the mysteries of telepathy, — some of these types seem done from the life, and over them all is a misty light of remoteness and tradition that softens and endears.

Another volume that is redolent of New England sea air is " Caleb West, Master Diver," which was written out of the actual experiences of the author, F. Hopkinson Smith, who, as is generally known, is a marine engineer and architect, as well as a painter, lecturer, and novelist. The book is alive with struggle against wind and wave, with a sense of the truly heroic in the daily achievements of such honest and noble types as Captain Joe and Caleb West — two as real men as often walk in the pages of a novel. They are rough, weather-beaten men, but not coarse — and their work as builders of submarine structures is a definitely shaping influence that accounts for iron in the blood and a splendid self-reliance. And their moral make-ups are as wholesome and invigorating as the sea air in which they work and live. Aunty Bell's kitchen is a place to eat in and to be happy in, and her husband's gospel of compassion and forgiveness for the " hoodooed " but sweetnatured Betty, the master diver's young wife, has in it a touch of the divine. The " Pocomokian," Major Slocomb, from the South, is suggestive of that even more delightful character. Colonel Carter of Cartersville, — a type of inconsequential, shiftless, but chivalric and engagingly social, qualities that Mr. Smith has a peculiar aptitude in depicting.

New England has proved a rich theme for portrayers of provincial character, as we have already seen, and a long list of fiction writers covering this particular field might easily be made out ; but it is sufficient for our present purpose to mention only a few of the more conspicuous, like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps-Ward, who excels in the emotional lO Provincial Types in New England

force of her intense characters ; Thomas Bailey Aldrich, whose " Stillwater Tragedy " presents with great vividness and charm the life of a New England factory town ; Sally Pratt McLean, with her minutely finished portraits of " Cape Cod Folks " ; and Arlo Bates, whose " Diary of a Saint " presents, in striking contrast to the title, one of the most intense local dramas in New England life.

Although New York and Pennsylvania have not been so prolific a field as New England in furnishing provincial literary types, the former state found in Harold Frederic a sympathetic interpreter of his native valley of the Mohawk, and he produced a unique series of local novels in " Seth's Brother's Wife," " In the Valley," " The Lawton Girl," and " The Damnation of Theron Ware." Rebecca Harding Davis has written several tales with a Pennsylvania background, and Margaret Deland made a village in Allegheny County the scene of "John Ward, Preacher."

Chapter II "the Rise Of Silas Lapham " By William Dean Howells

Perhaps the most virile and typically American character created by Mr. Howells is that of Silas Lapham, the paint manufacturer, who struggled up the ladder of material prosperity out of the hills of Northern Vermont, expanded into a great business in Boston, where for the sake of his two daughters he made a pathetic effort to achieve something of a social position, and then through others' dishonesty, his own speculation, and an unrelenting conscientiousness, collapsed financially, and was obliged to return to his starting-point in the little Vermont town of hard beginnings.

In the first few pages of the novel, by means of a newspaper interview, the author has depicted, with a vivid thoroughness and a humorous touch, the laborious and self-made career of the central figure of the story. Bartley Hubbard, a shrewd and cynical newspaper man, is writing what he calls the " Solid Men of Boston " series for The Eveftts, and he desires to include the millionaire paint manufacturer in the list. As Bartley waits expectantly, with his note-book on his lap, Lapham, absorbed in his business correspondence, suddenly swings in his swivel-chair, so as to face his interviewer, and asks, with characteristic humor,

I a Provincial Types in New England

" So you want my life, death, and Christian sufferings, do you, young man ? " Bartley's reply, " Your money or your life," suggests to Lapham the rather pungent comment, " I guess you wouldn't want my life without the money." Bartley, however, insists that he doesn't want Lapham's money without his life, but adds significantly, *' You're just one million times more interesting to the public than if you hadn't a dollar." And thereupon, while he waited for Lapham to continue, Bartley jotted down this graphic individual sketch in his note-book : " In personal appearance Silas Lapham is a fine type of the successful American. He has a square, bold chin, only partially concealed by the short reddish-gray beard, growing to the edges of his firmly closing lips. His nose is short and straight ; his forehead good, but broad rather than high ; his eyes blue, and wath a light in them that is kindly or sharp according to his mood. He is of medium height, and fills an average arm-chair with a solid bulk. . . . His head droops somewhat from a short neck which does not trouble itself to rise far from a pair of massive shoulders."

When Lapham expressed a doubt as to where the interviewer wanted him to begin, Bartley rather pleased his victim by remarking, "Might begin with your birth ; that's where most of us begin." Lapham gives the information that he was born some fifty-five years before, pretty well up under the Canadian line, but " I was bound to be an American citizen of some sort, from the word Go ! " " Parents poor, of course," suggested Bartley. " Any barefoot business ? Early deprivations of any kind, that would encourage the youthful reader to go and do likewise ? Orphan myself, you know." But the abiding sense of the hard seriousness of his early struggles stirred the quiet

" The Rise of Silas Laphani " 13

self-respect of Lapham to say that, if the interviewer regarded Lapham's early life as a joke, the interview was at an end. The unabashed Bartley only wrote in his note-book how Lapham's parents "taught their children the simple virtues of the Old Testament and Poor Richard's Almanac."

When Lapham again grew reminiscent he felt a lump in his throat at the tender thought of his mother's assiduous care and heroic self-sacrifice for her boys : " She was a little, frail thing, not bigger than a good-sized intermediate schoolgirl ; but she did the whole work of a family of boys, and boarded the hired men besides. She cooked, swept, washed, ironed, made, and mended from daylight till dark, — and from dark till daylight, I was going to say ; for I don't know how she got any time for sleep." He recalls how she always found time, too, to go to church, to teach her boys to read the Bible, and to " misunderstand it in the old way." " She was good. But it ain't her on her knees in church that comes back to me so much like the sight of an angel as her on her knees before me at night, washing my poor, dirty little feet, that I'd run bare in all day, and making me decent for bed. ... I can feel her hands on my feet yet ! " Whereupon Bartley, the unsentimental, looked down at Silas's No. 10 boots and gently whistled through his teeth.

Lapham's suggestion that he would like to paint his mother's hard and stunted life for the modern women who complain of their empty existence is a cue to the interviewer to swing his subject over to the matter of the mineral paint that has proved the foundation of Lapham's present fortune. The latter eagerly relates how his father found the deposit of mineral paint in a hole made by the upturned roots of a tree that had blown down. But the country at that time was too poor for paint, and Silas's father had no facilities for putting it on the market. So that the paint-mine got to be a kind of joke with the Lapham family. Finally all the other boys went West and took up land, while Silas stayed by the farm, " not because the paint-mine was on it, but because the old house was — and the graves." Even Silas himself went off, to try Texas, but after three months of it he found that Vermont was " good enough " for him. He married the school-teacher in Lumberville, and together they ran the hotel. His wife urged him to "paint up," till at last he yielded, and together they drove out to the farm and brought back " a bushel of the stuff." " I tried it crude, and I tried it burnt ; and I liked it. . . . There wa'n't any painter by trade in the village, and I mixed it myself. Well, sir, that tavern's got that coat of paint on it yet." When Silas Lapham got the first coat on, his sympathetic and filial memory called up the picture of his old father who had failed, and in recounting the incident to his interviewer Silas sadly remarked, " I've noticed that most things get along too late for most people." He recalled how his wife Persis came out from the kitchen with her sleeves rolled up and sat down beside him on the trestle, and how he asked, " What do you think, Persis ? " " And says she, ' Well, you hain't got a paint-mine, Silas Lapham ; you've got a ^<?/^-mine.' " As a memorial to his father, Silas wanted to call the paint the " Nehemiah Lapham Mineral Paint," but finding the name too long he had stamped on every barrel, keg, bottle, and package, big or little, the initials and figures '* N. L. f. 1835, S. L. t. 1855," which being interpreted read, "Father found it in 1835, and I tried it in 1855."

By analysis a man from Boston showed that the ore contained seventy-five per cent of the peroxide of iron, and the scientific phrase was pronounced by Lapham with a sort of reverent satisfaction, being accented as if it were spelled " purr-ox-<?y<?^/. " Silas enthusiastically related how the expert sat down and told him that he had a paint that would drive every other mineral paint out of the market. " ' Why,' says he, ' it'll drive 'em right into the Back Bay ! That paint has got hydraulic cement in it, and it can stand fire and water and acids. When you've got your arrangements for burning it properly, you're going to have a paint that will stand like the everlasting hills, in every climate under the sun.'" And then, after Lapham himself had indulged in a eulogy of the manifold virtues of his paint, detailing how it could be used on the inside of a cistern, or a bath-tub, or a steamboiler, or on the outside of a brick wall, or a railroad car, or a steamboat deck, the newspaper man naively suggested, " Never tried it on the human conscience, I suppose." To which Lapham gravely replied, " I guess you want to keep that as free from paint as you can, if you want much use of it. I never cared to try any of it on mine."

On shelves over his office desk Lapham pointed out with peculiar pride the finest grade of his paint put up in flawless glass jars, with the different tints showing through ; and Bartley read on one of the labels, ''The Persis Brand," which Lapham said, with much satisfaction, he had put on the market in honor of his wife on her last birthday. In his grateful pride over the stanch cooperation of his wife in their early struggles to succeed with the paint, Lapham reminded his interviewer how he used to say.

" It wa'n't the seventy-five per cent of purr-ox-eyed of iron in the 07'e that made that paint go ; it was the seventy-five per cent of purr-ox-eyed of iron in her.'^

Lapham's esthetic sense could find nothing wrong in covering the scenery with advertisements of his paint, and, as he told Hubbard, he never could see anything so very sacred about a big rock that it wouldn't do to put mineral paint on it in three colors. " I wish some of the people that talk about the landscape, and write about it, had to bu'st one of them rocks out of the landscape with powder, or dig a hole to bury it in, as we used to have to do up on the farm ; I guess they'd sing a little different tune about the profanation of scenery." On Lapham's insisting that the landscape was made for man, and not man for the landscape, his interviewer ironically remarked, " Yes, it was made for the stove-polish man and the kidney-cure man;" and when Silas, in his attempt to resume his narrative, asked where he was, Bartley softly suggested, "decorating the landscape."

But the Civil War proved too much for the mineral paint, and Lapham's wife, seeing a providence in the failure to sell it, recognized that he had a country worth fighting for, " Well, sir, I went. I knew she meant business. It might kill her to have me go, but it would kill her sure if I stayed." And the fruit of his going was a ball in his leg, which he called his " thermometer." His return from the war was the beginning of wider operations in the paint business, and, much against his will but with his wife's urgent advice, he took a partner with capital, who knew nothing about paint ; and in a year or two the partner withdrew with, as Bartley suggested, " the experience." This episode, as Bartley surmised, was the sore spot in

"The Rise of Silas Lapham " ly

Silas's memory, and was to have a ruinous significance in his later hfe. But as he went on, Lapham's enthusiasm over his paint grew unbounded, — his paint was almost his religion. " You pass a ton of that paint dry through a blast-furnace, and you'll get a quarter of a ton of pigiron. I believe in my paint. I believe it's a blessing to the world. When folks come in, and kind of smell round, and ask me what I mix it with, I always say, ' Well, in the first place, I mix it with Faith, and after that I grind it up with the best quality of boiled linseed oil that money will buy.' "