AMERICAN LITERATURE - WAR AND POST-WAR The World War had a dominant effect upon American ideas, but much less upon American imagination. In the first three years of the conflict, when the United States was a noncombatant, a flood of European writing was discharged upon the country, and this was met by an equal outpouring of American writing upon European topics. Europe was analysed, explained, inspected, as never before in American history. Some of this writing was mere propaganda, but much of it, whatever its purpose, was a sincere attempt to understand the French, the British and the German mind. It is difficult to over-estimate the effect of this cosmopolitan reading upon the American public. The interest in foreign litera tures, already spreading rapidly in the transition period, was strengthened. Authors who had been national, like Rolland or Ibanez, became international.
The period of the war itself saw no more than a steady devel opment of the tendencies already mentioned, although the change in American perspective put an end to the lingering reputations of the old romantic school. Kipling and Stevenson disappeared as foreign influences. The atmosphere of war discussion was unfavourable to poetic themes, whether realistic or idealistic.
But the years immediately succeeding the war brought new de velopments, whose importance is only now becoming evident. There was, as after most wars, a sharp revival of nationalism. This nationalism, however, was of a special character, in that it reflected the inevitable contrast and comparison which resulted from a vast migration of Americans abroad and an almost equally great inroad of European ideas at home.
The new nationalism took several forms. In the remarkable series of works by Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (192o), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmitli (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), the provincial self-satisfaction of the prosperous, half-educated American, his decayed idealism, his aimless strenuosity, his perfunctory moral ity were more bitterly attacked than was deserved. Implied con trast with the proper attributes of a citizen of the world was the characteristic basis of these novels, in which respect they closely resemble the parallel work of H. G. Wells. Lewis's Babbitt is perhaps the most important work in fiction of the whole period.
The scene of Lewis's novels is prevailingly the Middle West, and it is the emergence of the Mississippi valley (and later of the Old South) as a social milieu stimulative of serious fiction that is a second characteristic of this post-war nationalism. The dis tinguishing feature in the novels, whether historical, like Herbert Quick's Vandermark's Folly (5922), or psychological, like Eliza beth Roberts' Time of Man (1926), or expressionistic, like Glen way Wescott's The Grandmothers (1927), or objective, like O. A. Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth (1927) is the self-consciousness of the authors as regards this middle America. They feel that it is the real America, as the New Englanders before them had felt of New England, and their novels of farm life are intended to be, and are, studies in typical American problems.
A third aspect of the contemporary nationalism is the increased interest in the American past. American history as a study for the general reader revived after a long eclipse with such books as were included in the "Chronicles of America" series. But in the decade since the war this interest has been greatly extended and has resulted in a rewriting of the biographies of most of America's famous men, and many fresh contributions to the truth about the American past. The social history of America is now being writ ten for the first time by such scholars as Allan Nevins, James Truslow Adams, Lewis Mumford, Charles Beard and Vernon Louis Parrington. (See particularly Main Currents in American Thought [1927], by Parrington; The Golden Day [1926], by Mumford; The Rise of American Civilization by Charles and Mary Beard.) Many important studies of America's past, like the Education of Henry Adams (1918) by the historian of that name, A Son of the Middle Border (1917) by Hamlin Garland, and The Mauve De cade (1926) by Thomas Beer, are so close to the field of psychological fiction as to be almost indistinguishable from it.
Naturalism.—Yet the chief change in American literature since the war has had little to do with either the war or national ism. It is a logical development of the revolt against Victorian conventions which began before 1910 and was international in its scope. One manifestation is the escape of sex. It is a mistake to suppose, as the first critics of the tendency thought, that sex was suppressed in 19th century literature. It was inhibited, but not so much by convention as by a lack of interest in its problems. The scientific training of several generations has had much to do with this change in attitude, but there is also the determination of the realists to get at new truths in human relationships, and the stimulus to all such desires resulting from the disillusions of war. Sex is not the dominant theme of important American literature in this period, but it is far more important and far more freely handled than ever before. The success of such books as Gertrude Atherton's Black Oxen (1923), Dreiser's American Tragedy (1925), Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, must be set down in part to their treatment of sex problems.
A truer conception of the change, however, is attained if such books are regarded as an offshoot of the interest which has created the new psychology in which American scientists have taken a prominent part. The problem has been to throw off all conven tions and inhibitions so as to uncover the springs of the human machine. This, of course, is a substitute for the earlier desire to find the nobler motives of mankind, and is by no means neces sarily an artistic advance. Yet the frank realism, and the minute study of normal, subnormal and abnormal phenomena which has resulted, have given rise to the halting but deeply moving sketches of Sherwood Anderson as surely as to the achievements of science. Inevitably this literature is thoroughly American for it is a study of actual Americans, whether apparently ordinary, as in the books just named, or extraordinary, as in the sonnet sequence, Two Lives (1925), of William Ellery Leonard. In the drama the same impulse has blended with an imaginative phantasy that gives it less conviction perhaps but more beauty, as in the impressive series of plays by Eugene O'Neill, particularly The Emperor _Tones (1921), Anna Christie (1922) and Strange Interlude (1928).
These interests are responsible for the appearance in American fiction of what the French in Zola's day called naturalism. The farm novels of the Middle West are prevailingly naturalistic in method. The desire to make a complete social, psychological and physical document is predominant in Theodore Dreiser. It is visible in such different writers as the story-tellers Fannie Hurst and Edna Ferber, in the carefully wrought backgrounds of Joseph Hergesheimer and in the studies of human appearance in Sher wood Anderson. It is visible also in the meticulous backgrounds of the sentimental and standardized cinema pictures of the time.
A last major phenomenon is the sophistication of America and particularly of the literature coming from New York and Chicago. This is a natural concomitant of America's share in world wealth and world leadership, and of its recent hospitality to foreign ideas. Sophistication is a rhetorical rather than a literary term, but in this instance it is used to describe a taste for wit, for pointed satire, for cynicism, for the subtleties of social contact when given the ease and lightness of literary form.
On the stage it has led to fantastic satires and the admirable setting of the otherwise banal musical comedy; in the novel it is responsible for the witty brilliance of Thornton Wilder (The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 1927), the philosophic dialogues of John Erskine, the most noteworthy of which was The Private Life of Helen of Troy (1925), and the exquisite artificiality of Elinor Wylie's Jennifer Lorn (1923) ; in poetry it can be seen in the in tellectualism of Amy Lowell and T. S. Eliot (The Wasteland, 1922), although other stronger influences enter here, and in the sharp-cut lyrics by Elinor Wylie (Black Armor, 1923) ; in the essay in the trenchant iconoclasm of H. L. Mencken, an ardent conservative appealing to realists weary of naivete, progress and sentiment through his Prejudices (1919 seq.) and his organ, The American Mercury.
Most striking of all is the welcome which a sophisticated America has given to experimental literature, as Christopher Mor ley's Thunder on the Left (1925) or John dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer (1925). Even such poetry of experimental technique as Edward Estlin Cummings' Tulips and Chimneys (1923) and such plays as John Howard Lawson's Processional (192 5) have been widely discussed.
These new currents in literature, and particularly the increasing interest in everyday life as a theme and in new forms of literary expression, have naturally brought with them a new vigour of criticism, signalized by the appearance of a new generation of critics who, like Van Wyck Brooks, apply scientific theories to American literature, or like H. L. Mencken, clear away the rub bish of old conventions for the benefit of a new realist middle class, or like Stuart P. Sherman, come out from the universities to apply their knowledge of the continuous stream of literature to the interpretation of new things. The founding of the new Dial in 192o, of The Literary Review of The New York Evening Post in 192o, afterwards carried on as The Saturday Review of Literature from 1924, and the appearance in 1925 of Books, the literary supplement of The New York Tribune, are indicative of the new interest in critical opinion.
Various literary manifestations of the period do not readily fit into the categories and tendencies described above, although doubtless in 20 years they will easily indicate their relationship. The work of James Branch Cabell, beginning as pure romance, and becoming with Jurgen (1919) and its successors more and more ironical, philosophic and symbolic, is an instance. In gen eral, Cabell clearly belongs to the generation of the 191os that wearied of moral conventions sugared over with sentiment and attacked the mores of the 19th century. His almost fantastic playing with eroticism is in part at least mere rebellion against the censorship that had been imposed upon 19th century popular literature. But his elaborate mediaevalism is quite as clearly a survival from the period of romance, and his elaborate literary backgrounds represent a devotion to style for its own sake quite distinct from the tendencies of the time, and not to be confused with the sophisticated elegance of the young writers of the late 1920S. His cult is due in part to his sometimes witty eroticism, in part to his position as an authentic man of letters in a jour nalistic era, who writes only for the instructed. He is perhaps best understood as a survival from the '9os. Interesting compar isons can be made between Cabell and those earlier philosopher phantasists of America, Hawthorne, Melville and Poe.
The worldwide success of the American cinema picture is a literary phenomenon, even though the scenarios are seldom liter ature. In substance, the stories belong almost exclusively to the type made popular 3o years earlier in the heroic romance, or to even more primitive forms of realistic melodrama. This is merely to say that the millions are a generation at least behind the thousands in their literary tastes, and crave certain fundamental emotional reactions without reference to time or taste. In other respects, however, cinema pictures are strictly contemporary. Like the short story, they have developed a technique so skilful and so stereotyped that there is no escape for a story once it enters the machine. Like the modern automobile, they represent great efficiency of appeal at small cost to the intellect, gained by careful standardization of emotional reactions.
Finally, the reading habits of the American public were in this period definitely altered. They read more magazines and more magazine material in their newspapers. The wide public of semi literate readers became more critical of their fare, and while it cannot be said that they demanded better substance, they did re quire a more competent form. The general level of American writing, whether in books, periodicals or the press, was decidedly raised. "Fine writing," diffuseness, mere rhetoric, crudity of ex pression, became rarer in publications of general circulation. Only vulgarity increased.
As for the more literate public who read books, their tastes and interests notably broadened. They were capable of buying nearly 200,000 copies of Will Durant's Story of Philosophy (1926), which was really a story of philosophers. They read more and more foreign books in translation, were intensely interested in problems of psychology and social development raised by such books as James Harvey Robinson's The Mind in the Making (1921), demanded biography, in which they liked the new satirical note, and in general proved that the craving for self-education, al ways strong in America, was manifesting itself more widely than ever before. Magazines like The American Mercury and the rein vigorated Harper's of 1925 were devoted to this new intellectual ization of the American reader. Publishers' lists were notably broader, and sales of non-fiction books increased.
From another point of view it was a period of anti-idealism in literature. The efforts of critics like H. L. Mencken, the tone of the realistic and satiric novel and play, the course of historical and scientific writing, even the poetry of the epoch, were all as pre dominantly set toward a realist's view of the universe as 19th century American literature was turned toward idealism.
In any case it is probable that the two latter decades of the period represent the real beginning of America's coming of age in arts and letters. Like the New England renaissance of the 184os, they follow upon a period- of rapid economic progress, and al though the industrial reorganization of the United States has prob ably postponed the period of complete literary expression, we may expect some interesting sequels to the vitality now manifested in every department of American literature except poetry.
(H. S. C.)