American Literature

IN The Great Tradition (Macmillan, $2.50), Granville Hicks has written the first really valuable detailed history of the full sweep of our literature from the Civil War to the present. He has done it by virtue of abandoning completely the usual formless handbook method of literary history which consists in viewing the literature of any period simply as a chronological series of authors, and has achieved a consistently held focus of interpretation by analyzing all the various authors in terms of their relation to the basic forces emerging in American life.

Mr. Hicks has a clear-sighted knowledge of what those forces are; he indicates repeatedly the revolution that is being wrought in our life by the full consequences of industrialization. He believes that the author who is to create any adequate picture of that life must be aware not simply of his materials but of their significance; understanding not only the thoughts and feelings of his characters, but also the springs of their conduct as they are conditioned by society; not merely observing the one scene of their background, but also realizing its relation to the country as a whole; in brief, the artist must be able to interpret the meaning of the economic forces that have produced him.

For such interpretation the most satisfactory literary form is, in Mr. Hicks’s view, the realistic social novel; and its development, therefore, is what he chiefly regards as the great tradition. In an excellent introductory chapter he evaluates the rich heritage bestowed by the generation of Emerson and Melville, at the same time indicating the rapid changes which were transforming most of the conditions of life which those writers knew. He then proceeds to deal with the successive stages of the effort to write books representative of post-Civil War experience. His main course leads him from the regionalism of the seventies arid eighties and the honest if limited realism of Howells through the novels of the muckrakers and social reformers to the present day; that is to say, through a steadily mounting tradition of criticism and protest and revolt from Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris through Upton Sinclair and John Dos Bassos.

By means of his Marxian principles of analysis Mr. Hicks has articulated a logical pattern out of what ordinarily appears on the surface to be the chaotic welter of our literature during the past seventy years. As a result he has again and again been able to throw seemingly unconnected elements into vital relationship, and his judgments of individual authors take on greater significance by being related to a sustained point of view. Sometimes, however, his insistence on economic factors leads him to estimate a work by the elements that went into it rather than by the result, as when the serious but somewhat mechanically theoretical novels of Dos Passos are made to seem more important than the much more richly human work of Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson. And his preoccupation with the world which the authors represent causes him steadily to underestimate the value of the qualities of the individual spirit that are expressed by the poets. However, on the whole, he has ably exercised the most important function of the critic in giving form and shape to the body of material he discusses, and thus enabling us to test the validity of his definitions.

F. O. MATTHIESSEN