The Great Modern American Stories
An Anthology. Compiled and Edited with an Introduction by . New York: Boni and Liveright. 1920. 12mo, xx-+ 432 pp. $3.00.
THE twenty-four stories chosen by Mr. Howells for this anthology as ‘Great Modern American,’ date approximately from the Civil War. Half a dozen of the best of them, including Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘Circumstance’ and Henry James’s ‘A Passionate Pilgrim,’first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. But not one of them, we believe, could have appeared there, or in any other magazine, since 1914. The spirit of philosophic age, looking fondly back on an America more homespun, more slow-going, more genuinely native and local, than the strenuous post-war land we know, seems to haunt every page of this book. How conspicuous by their absence are the popular fiction writers who, to misquote James, romp through the ruins of literature in our monthly and weekly periodicals! How unlike the vulgar, conglomerate Fifth Avenue of to-day is T. B. Aldrich’s ’Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski’! How still more unlike a cheek-to-cheek Broadway and a Movie-Queen Harlem is ‘The LocustEaters’ ! In the Middle West, where Dreiser’s Henry Reifsneider searches for his lost Phœbe, in the New England of Sister Wisby and her deacon, Fords and telephones are unthinkable. Perhaps nothing could more clearly mark the moral and material and æsthetic limits of an era than an anthology of this kind.
The sober Puritan realism associated with Howells’s own work — it will be remembered that he always maintained its derivation from the French, remote as it seems from Flaubert or Zola — and that allied quality which the French call regionalism have obviously been prime factors in the selection of tales. Here, to illustrate America, North, South, East, and West, are Bret Harte, Mark Twain, G. W. Cable, Henry B. Fuller, Mary Wilkins Freeman, J. C. Harris, Ambrose Bierce, and others of lesser fame. Mr. Howells’s generous catholicity of taste is established;but so is his fine sense for all that is authentic and distinctive in our home products. From his charming reminiscent preface we get some impression why this old favorite has found a niche rather than that one; though we have no definite inkling of his reasons for omitting such a master of the short story as O. Henry, in favor of minor dignitaries like Landon Dashiell and Mrs. Wynne. On the whole, the volume is one which any American might be proud to send to a French intellectual friend as ‘typical’ — especially if some delicate and honest sketch by the novelist who dominated the era and led the realistic movement were appended.
The inquiring Gaul might possibly ask some embarrassing questions. Why did a writer who could produce ‘Told in the Poor-House’ give birth to ‘The Black Drop’? What has become of this Edith Wyatt, who long ago wrote one perfect volume of Chicago stories — why did she not develop into a novelist? And Hamlin Garland, the author of ‘The Return of a Private’— is he not among your greatest American writers? Garland’s story is indeed one of those timeless masterpieces that America may be very proud to claim. Its imaginative revelation of the inmost heart of a plain man of that plain West which Howells so loved is just as true for the returned private of 1919 as for him of 1865. ‘The Revolt of Mother’ has the same sort of living truth, drawing veracity from local color, but striking its roots deep and far. One can feel no misgivings for a literature that has produced such stories, though one may lament that the Dean of American letters will never speak to us, even as a benignant editor, again.
E. S. S.