AMERICAN LITERATURE - THE TWENTIETH CENTURY A survey of American literature from 1900 on must deal chiefly with movements and tendencies rather than with master pieces, schools and types. There are two reasons for this. We are still too close to our contemporaries to discriminate with even that reasonable probability of rightness which may be expected where time and taste have sifted the long-lived from the short. But an even stronger deterrent to dogmatic judgments is the nature of the period itself. In economical structure, in education, in social evolution, in politics, as well as in literature and the arts, the last three decades have abounded with change, in the United States even more than in other parts of the world. They wit nessed the break-up of American self-sufficiency after the Span ish-American War; they saw the transformation of a country mainly agricultural into one predominantly industrial; they de veloped in their course a new capitalistic democracy, and a re vival of nationalistic spirit, and they conclude with a sophistica tion of urban life different from any earlier culture in the history of the United States. In short, these three decades have been years of rapid transition toward a new social, moral, intellectual and economic order. But they are more than transitional. We have definitely entered upon a new epoch. An outline of American literature in this period must therefore be first of all a sketch of change and transition.
It is clear that the '9os of the last century in America as in England were not the beginnings, as was fondly supposed, of a new literary period, but rather the final efflorescence of an old trunk. The brilliant, mannered writing of the short story, the new-art magazines, such as The Chap-Book, the widespread imita tion of the romantic elegance of Robert Louis Stevenson and the romantic virility of Rudyard Kipling, were of little significance for the immediate future of American literature. Only Jack Lon don, with his stories of primitive, instinctive characters pursuing violent lives, expresses ideals of strenuosity with less subtlety than Kipling but with vigour in books like The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea Wolf (1904) .
The late '9os and early 19oos were years of almost feverish writing. The American short story had reached a high pitch of technical skill and was finding a ready market in the new maga zines which, like McClure's, were spreading to new classes of readers. The cult of local colour was being exploited for popular interest in narratives rich in dialect and local custom, but, if ro mantic, overcharged with sentiment, and, if realistic, specializing, like the stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman, in regional peculiarities. Satire was beginning in journalism with Peter Finley Dunne's dia logues of Mr. Dooley and the fables of George Ade, but was ab sent from formal literature and the stage. Poetry was limited to the ambitious, but rather academic, work of scholars like William Vaughan Moody, or to "magazine verse"—highly finished but con ventional lyrics, brief and usually empty. Only one form of literary endeavour reached the magnitude of a school—historical romance.
The vast circulation, the great praise, the supposed significance of the historical romance in the America of the '9os and early 19oos are proofs that we are dealing with the end, not the begin ning, of a period. Winston Churchill's Richard Carvel, Booth Tarkington's Monsieur Beaucaire, Paul Leicester Ford's Janice Meredith—these names echo but faintly now. They were stories in the direct tradition of Scott, Bulwer-Lytton, Dumas and the contemporary Stevenson. They were literary, with that slightly archaic style which is so offensive when its date is out ; they were imbued with a thin romantic idealism, and while the hero made his own way in American fashion, there was little else American, or indeed contemporary, about them, except the frequent use of romantic scenes from early American history, which was a sign of the nationalism that accompanied the successes of the Spanish American War. This vast literature of "best sellers" was read by most of the educated population of the country. It was the feeble conclusion of the great romantic movement of the 19th century.
There were forerunners of change before the end of the first decade. The vigorous cycle of Frank Norris, The Octopus (1901), The Pit (1903), which dealt especially with the struggles between the producers and the new power of concentrated money, had wheat as its main theme, and these books, in spite of a tincture of romantic melodrama, were contemporary literature is a sense that the historical romance was not. Theodore Dreiser also had begun with Sister Carrie (i 9oo) the attack upon American reti cence which was later to result in the freeing of sex as a permis sible dominant theme in literature. But his books, in spite of their subjects drawn from an unromantic democracy, were infected with a romantic megalomania, so that his would-be epics, The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1917) were akin in spirit, if not in mood, to the more elegant, but scarcely less unreal romances of colonial life which had been loved by the populace. The influence of his more realistic books, such as Jennie Gerhardt (191 1), was thrown powerfully upon the side of naturalism in fiction. Stephen Crane, another experimenter in realism, was more noticed for the vivid ness with which his trenchant style endowed themes that had been merely romantic before than for the honest realism of his mood. His Red Badge of Courage (1895) was a tour de force that dates with the early brilliant stories of Kipling, and survives as a mas terpiece of achievement in anti-romance rather than as a turning point in American literature.
Indeed, the causes for the great change in literary taste, which began in America about 1910 and was established by 1912, must be sought outside American literature. Among the intellectuals, where it began, it was due to a wide and earnest reading of the great anti-romantics of Europe—Bernard Shaw, whose attack upon the conventions of 19th century manners and morals and thinking made iconoclasm fashionable; the Russian novelists (fit tingly introduced to American readers by William Dean Howells, last survivor of the first realistic period), who gave examples of a powerful fiction treating of people, like ourselves, unheroic, unpicturesque ; and Ibsen, whose iconoclasm preceded Shaw's and was far more dogmatic. It was Europe that gave the literary stimulus to the new literature of loth century America; but the stimulus was not simply literary.
In the first decade of the loth century, the term "social con science" first came into general use. A rapid increase in concen trated wealth, the creation of trusts, the closing of the American frontier, began to put an economic pressure that was not tempor ary upon the American, and brought him into a closer economic sympathy with Europe. Money as a power, the workers as a class, democracy as an economic factor, entered into the American con sciousness. Roosevelt and Bryan made these ideas articulate; Upton Sinclair in his story of the meat industry, The Jungle (1906), gave concrete evidence; later the new English writers, H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy, especially, who dealt with the modern world as a complex in which the fate of men and women was determined by their environment, began to be widely read. Socialism, which had been dismissed in American universities of the '9os as played out, began to be discussed actively and a sturdy individualist, like William Graham Sumner, found that he had lived beyond his time and was unheard.
The immediate effect of all this social unrest was literary un rest. Romanticism seemed out of date. The new interest in classes created a new interest in individuals from those classes. The or dinary man in a commonplace environment entered American literature, not as a minor, but as a major character.
All this was intensified by the scientific education which since the last decades of the 19th century had been permeating all American schools and colleges. Experimental science, upon which the industrial advance of the period was based, produced in liter ature a realist attitude and a willingness to seek interest in the humble, the mean and the vicious. This partial realization of the scientific attitude through general education was the great factor in the change of literary taste.