by Frank Norris
Following this, and intimately connected with it in the idea of the responsibility of the novelist, are the paragraphs from his article in the December Critic:
“It is all very well to jeer at the People and at the People’s misunderstanding of the arts, but the fact is indisputable that no art that is not in the end understood by the people can live, or ever did live a single generation. In the larger view, in the last analysis, the People pronounce the final judgment. The People, despised of the artist, hooted, caricatured and vilified, are, after all, and in the main, the real seekers after truth. Who is it, after all, whose interest is liveliest in any given work of art? It is not now a question of aesthetic interest; that is the artists, the amateurs, the cognoscenti’s. It is a question of vital interest. Say what you will, Maggie Tulliver — for instance — is far more a living being for Mrs. Jones across the street than she is for your sensitive, fastidious, keenly critical artist, litterateur or critic. The People — Mrs. Jones and her neighbors — take the life history of these fictitious characters, these novels, to heart with a seriousness that the aesthetic cult have no conception of. The cult consider them almost solely from their artistic sides. The People take them into their innermost lives. Nor do the People discriminate. Omnivorous readers, as they are to-day, they make little distinction between Maggie Tulliver and the heroine of the last ‘popular novel.’ They do not stop to separate true from false. They do not care.
“How necessary it becomes, then, for those who, by the simple art of writing, can invade the hearts of thousands, whose novels are received with such measureless earnestness — how necessary it becomes for those who wield such power to use it rightfully. Is it not expedient to act fairly? Is it not, in Heaven’s name, essential that the people hear not a lie but Truth?” This is the strong utterance of a strong, valiant, manly man.
Frank Norris was a Phi Gamma Delta at the University of California. The learned and famed in literary art, and the wise in the refinements and forces that go to make up strong and beautiful character, have told for us, his lamenting Fiji brothers, how fully he realized in himself the glories of our beloved motto. The silver cord is loosed, and the golden bowl is broken. The spirit has returned unto God who gave it.
From: The Harvard Monthly, V. XXXII, No. 5, July 1901
“Two American Disciples of Zola”
By: G.H. Montague
Admirers of M. Zola and of the particular school for which he stands may find in the work of two very recent American novelists cause for considerable satisfaction. During the past three years, Mr. Frank Norris and Mr. Hervey White have been busy acclimatising in America the exaggerated and explicated realism which distinguished the Rougon-Macquart series. If Mr. Norris, through a course of thrilling studies in widely separate fields, has at last attained in this forthcoming trilogy to the dignity of “authentic naturalist,” then Mr. White, by a shorter course and through more humdrum scenes, has earned the equal title of realistic symbolist. The course of both writers has been bold and rapid: starting in studies widely removed from any opportunity for homiletic generalisation, they have progressed through what now appears a gradual elimination of immaturities, into the cult of free “naturalism”; and now they tell off their plots along the straight string of homily quite as devoutly as the author of Paris and La Fecondite.
In its larger aspect, the process of proselytism by which Mr. Norris and Mr. White were so rapidly changed into believers of the foreign faith is part of the present intellectual movement in which all branches of art are caught. However vague and tentative be its beliefs, this modernity of ours emphatically denies the unintelligent crassness of human experience; as best it can it strives to read some significance, however slight, into the mass of unworthy detail which we call life. Amid the jangling dissonance of nature, it listens for the motif, instead of gravely noting the fact of the confusion of sound and closing the record. When bliss is most passionate and triumph most showy, its sense is still alive to the dull threat of fate. In literature, this modernity betrayed itself in a revolt against the accumulation of dislocated incident: it sought first to attach values to the various bits of experience; and then to attain unity of atmosphere and sustained emotional mystery which should all the time keep the reader’s nerve nicely a-tingle; and finally to introduce the cosmic relation, by grouping all the characters about some definite social force and making each illustrate the various attributes of that force — causing them to succeed or fail according to the exigencies of the grand scheme. Just why this mighty symbolistic method should have found its first complete development at the hands of M. Zola does not here concern us. The significant fact is that it existed ready-made, against the time when intelligent English and Americans, tired of realism and reluctant to turn to romance, groped amid barren authenticated truth for a spiritual sign. Fifteen years ago, England fell upon such a time, and forthwith was treated to unwelcome ministrations of naturalism at the rude hands of Mr. George Moore and of Mr. George Gissing. Somewhat later, we in America have fallen into similar straits, and are now being nurtured — in rather inconsiderable numbers as yet, to be sure, — with a somewhat similar creed.
The belated and gradual development in America of the cult of Zola is not without significance. Twenty years ago, in Le Roman Experimental, M. Zola first formulated his method: in the next five years Mr. George Moore and Mr. George Gissing in England had both professed the same creed; and under his direct impulse Mr. Moore had produced A Mummer s Wife and Confessions of a Young Man, and Mr. Gissing had written
The Unclassed. This literary descente en Angleterre of the early eighties was essentially a French invasion: Mr. Moore’s delight in symbolism and allegory and the combination of moral and physiological forces is unmistakably French; and Mr. Gissing’s plodding studies of the tragic commonplaces of English middle-class life are confessedly essays in the naturalism of M. Zola. So sudden an invasion upon literary convention could have been accomplished only by writers too far removed from English tradition to be typical Englishmen: the mode of thought that has penetrated Esther
Waters and The Whirlpool has always, in some sort, been unrelated to the organic forces of English life. In America, however, by a process of natural intellectual growth, an indigenous kind of naturalism has been evolved from the realism that during the last generation has characterised every serious piece of American fiction. What this naturalism is and how it naturally arose out of present literary conditions may best be seen in the writings of Mr. Hervey White and Mr. Frank Norris.
II.
Mr. White’s first serious venture in fiction was a prodigy of persistent and diligent realism. By its title, Differences suggests an effort to be symbolistic of the problem of class distinctions; but the immense minuteness of observation which Mr. White lavished on an unconvincing narrative quite hid whatever significance he intended it to have as an allegory. Genevieve Radcliffe, an heiress of considerable expectations engaged in settlement work in Chicago, encounters among her “cases” one John Wade, — a singularly intelligent workingman, for one without the advantages of education, now straitened by unemployment and crushed by the death of his wife. With the reluctant assistance of her priggish fiancé, Miss Radcliffe gets employment for Wade, and in her settlement work spends long evenings at his poor tenement with him and with his children. Finally, Wade comes to regard her as something more than a mere Lady Bountiful and confesses his love. Miss Radcliffe, meantime, has changed her notions of one’s duty to society, has decided to forego her fortune and to earn her own living; and now she forsakes the unappreciative worldling to whom she was betrothed, and accepts Wade. Her family and friends discredit her and even her associates in the settlement-house disapprove; but she resolutely becomes a workingman’s wife. And so she goes to live with Wade on Goose Island, in the middle of Chicago River: where, beneath the shadow of a vast and leaky gasometer, amid the poisons of water and air and clouds of pestilent insects, in tropical heat and polar cold and fevers and pl
eurisies and rheums, the story had transacted itself. It was Mr. White’s opportunity to analyse a subtile change of heart, to use Miss Radcliffe as the symbol of the wiping out of social differences, and in grand and masterly fashion to contrast life in polite society with life among the laboring people. Had he thoroughly learned the naturalistic formula, he would have struck the line of social cleavage and sent it crackling, piercing, and breaking whoever came in its way. Throughout the novel, this purpose plainly tantalised him: but at the last he missed it, and, swamped by his material, floundered miserably in a bog of smart phrases and unliterary observation.
If the fault of Differences be described as unorganised realism, Mr. White’s latest novel, Quicksand, might be captiously called exaggerated and over-organised naturalism. Into an engulfing moral quagmire — the cumulative effect of sin — Mr. White has turned every bit of his material: selfishness and avarice and vanity and vice are introduced into the slough; and into this quicksand every member of the Hinckley family is dragged, struggling and vainly resisting, and sunk beneath its ooze. The first step in the quicksand is the sin of two innocent schoolmates in a quiet New Hampshire village; then comes the removal of the family to Iowa, and the deeper entanglements which the attempt to conceal the family shame incur; and finally, the gradual extinguishing of the family on the Kansas prairie — their loveless lives slowly and dismally sinking beneath the verge. It is essentially the story of the moral paralysis which creeps upon a family hidebound in conduct and religion, and slowly dying at the heart. In theme and in treatment it suggests a one-volume narrative of some American Rougon-Macquart family, — a Yankee version of La Terre done in humdrum drab.
The striking similarity of Mr. White’s writings and of those famous studies of M. Zola is shown in tricks of description even more than in method and structure. The curiously close attention to detail and the intimate sensuous appeal that distinguish M. Zola’s realistic descriptions are characteristic also of Mr. White. A rarer trick of expression, which makes glorious the close of Nana and La Bete Humaine, and which has escaped most realists, is the delicate touch of idealisation. This touch is what distinguishes the symbol from the crass fact, — the art of naturalism from the photography of realism. In the pathetic description of old age creeping upon the self-sacrificing Mary, which closes Quicksand, this essentially poetic temper is shown in fine measure:
But there were times of the full harvest moon when Mary returned to her girlhood. She would slip away from Libbie those nights, and running on the saffron wide plains would turn her face up to the moon; and its light would give youthfulness to her, even youth’s love and its tears. Then she saw Hiram again, felt his strength clasping her closely. . . . Then it was she stretched out her hands, and ran toward the light of the moon, the youth-love tremulous on her face. She ran and ran, calling, “Hiram!” Ran till her breath was gone from her; and her tears, clouding out the fair moon, would leave her an old woman, weeping, quivering in helpless heap on dead grass, the night-breeze wisping her hair on her sallowed cheek, withered and ghastly.
Between the sweet symbolism of this singing passage — the latest of Mr. White’s published writings — and the plebeian smear of unredeemed realism which characterised his first book, considerable evidences of progress are discerned. Mr. White still looks at nature through his temperament and sees there the horrid reality of hard, uncomfortable mediocrity. But he happily has not fallen into the error of that other “naturalist,” Mr. George Gissing, and observed life with acuteness solely to support preconceived ideas. Though he carries home the tragedy of the monotonous and the commonplace, he by no means is destitute of ideal charm. And if Quicksand be earnest of his future promise, his later novels may be awaited as salutary studies of American middle-class life.
III.
For several reasons the reputation of Mr. Frank Norris bulks larger than that of Mr. White in the public eye. First of all, in three short years — Mr. Norris was graduated from Harvard in i895 — he has written four notable books and begun a trilogy. Instead of confining himself to humdrum commonplace life, he has in each book concerned himself with different setting and characters: in Mo ran of the Lady Letty he traversed the glowing South Seas; in McTeague he penetrated the sordid littleness of the San Francisco slums, to the verge of a land where civilisation sloughs off from man without a struggle; in A Man’s Woman he travelled in the mysterious, frozen North; and now in his trilogy he purposes to follow the course of the wheat-crop from the time of its sowing as seed in California to the time of its consumption as bread in a village of Western Europe. With the glamour of his brilliant scenes, Mr. Norris finds more favor than can Mr. White with his gray moods and dull, melancholy gloom; — by the same token, indeed, Mr. George Moore is preferred over his fellow in literary belief, Mr. George Gissing. For though Mr. Norris now writes homiletic novels, he has not, like Mr. White, despaired of the people he puts in his books. He is too patriotic a citizen, too sincere a believer in the possibilities of the abounding West, to dot its prairies with decaying families. It is because he is so ready and bustling in his search for setting, so crisp in his narration, and so essentially optimistic in his application of the naturalistic formula, that he is now so widely esteemed.
But Mr. Norris’ greatest claim to distinction lies in the significance of his complete adoption of the naturalistic formula. Mr. George Moore, the only English writer who approximates in his writings the consistent dramatic method of M. Zola, is by temperament and training almost a Frenchman. That a writer so intensely American as Mr. Norris — so intimately in sympathy with the people he describes and for whom he writes — should be the first writer in English to cast in the rigid trilogic mould his message to a public still suspicious of M. Zola and his school, is truly a notable fact. The process by which so representative an American readily fell into the manner of so foreign a master, and the fitness of his mode to American conditions, is surely deserving of consideration.
McTeague, Mr. Norris’ first famous novel, marks the first appearance in his strong realistic writings of the naturalistic bias. The central figure is the heavy, sluggish dentist, McTeague, immensely strong, docile and stupid. Into his vegetating existence comes Marcus Schouler, the excitable, loud-talking political heeler, with his pretty blue-eyed little cousin Trina. Upon this tiny young girl, with the marvellous heaped coils of black hair, the dentist bestows an animal love. With chivalrous rococo Marcus gives up Trina, the dentist marries her; and then, in an overwhelming presentation of the modern curse of money, the theme of the book begins to work itself out. For money McTeague murders Trina, and roams through the mining camps, an outlaw with a price upon his head. For the reward, Marcus Schouler pursues him alone into the desert, arrests him, and then discovers that there they must perish. Even the minor characters of the story are haunted by the desire for money: the language of the slums is in terms of money. One by one the great curse drags them down to destruction; and the book ends with Marcus dead and McTeague handcuffed to the dead body, while all about them are the vast, measureless leagues of Death Valley.
McTeague thus appears to be a novel of powerful, relentless reality, qualified only by the tendency to emphasise avarice at the expense of the true proportions of fact. In description and objective narration, Mr. Moore depends for effect on sheer realism — on minute and relentlessly accurate transcription of detailed appearances and events. In characterisation, however, and in the general progress of his plot, he selects the dominant traits of each person and connects them with his great theme; and in narration repeatedly emphasises the traits and the theme together. Such a manner of treatment is not consistent, nor always effective for dramatic action. It betrays, however, the conscientious attempt to modify authentic, miscellaneous material by a temperament and a purpose; — such an effort to bring into compass and to interpret the significant aspect of life as really constitutes the aim of naturalism. In The Octopus, this promise of comprehensive conception and masterly elaboration of theme ha
s been abundantly sustained.
The Octopus, like La Bete Humaine, is essentially a poem of the railway. The unity of subject and movement which constitutes a creation of naturalistic art is found by Mr. Norris in the struggle between the wheat-growers of the San Joaquin Valley and the Southern Pacific Railway. This unity, which really is an ideal fancy of the brain and finally separates Mr. Norris’ writings from realism, is sustained with extraordinary ability throughout the novel. All the personages of the drama are in one way or another involved with the railroad: sturdy Magnus Derrick, proprietor of the great Los Muertos ranch and honored by his neighbors as “the Governor,” and Lyman Derrick, his ambitious, unscrupulous son; Annixter, the gnarled, warm-hearted ranchman, and Dyke, the desperate, black-listed engineer; — all are caught in the clutches of the octopus. The burden of iniquitous freight rates oppressed them all, like a yoke of iron. It beggared Magnus, and after he had wrecked his honor attempting to do evil that good might come, it drove him to insanity. It enticed Lyman into its toils, to pluck from him his manhood and his honesty, and to poison him beyond redemption. It hounded Dyke from his employment and made of him a highwayman. It cast forth Mrs. Hooven, Derrick’s tenant, to starve to death upon the city streets; and it drove her daughter to prostitution. It slew Annixter at the very moment when he had at last achieved by painful effort his salvation, and had resolved to do right and to live for others. At the order of the railroad, men perished, were shot down in the very noon pf life. Was there no outlook for the future, no hope? one asks. Mr. Norris answers: