Classics and Commercials

In 1895, about a month after the humiliating jeers and boos that greeted his play Guy Domville, Henry James made an entry in his notebooks that epitomizes the plight of most of the American novelists discussed in Henry Nash Smith’s new book. “The idea of a poor man, the artist, the man of letters, who all his life is trying—if only to get a living—to do something vulgar, to take the measure of the huge, flat foot of the public: isn’t there a little story in it possibly…?”

The story turned out to be “The Next Time,” in which a young novelist, Ray Limbert, pathetically declares, “I want to sell…. I must cultivate the market—it’s a science like another…. I haven’t been obvious—I must be obvious. I haven’t been popular—I must be popular. It’s another art—or perhaps it isn’t art at all. It’s something else; we must find out what it is.” Ray is said to be a genius whose work won’t sell, and he has the additional misfortune of having as a mother-in-law a novelist named Mrs. Highmore who can’t fail to sell even when she tries to make her work “what she called subtle.”

Democracy and the Novel is an investigation of the reactions of the great American novelists—Hawthorne, Melville, James, Mark Twain, Howells, etc.—to the Mrs. Highmores who came to dominate popular literary culture. Smith also includes a chapter on Henry Ward Beecher, whose Norwood was to a crippling, but exorbitantly successful, degree shaped by the popular taste of the 1870s and 1880s.

“A d…d mob of scribbling women” was Hawthorne’s famous phrase for those who by 1850 had cornered the market in popular fiction. Their books were selling “by the 100,000,” he complained, and “I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash—I should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed.” He is referring specifically to Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter, published in 1854, which sold 40,000 copies in the first eight weeks. Such figures were unprecedented. Cooper, whose most successful books never sold more than 10,000 copies within the year of their publication, and Hawthorne, who was happy when The Scarlet Letter sold 5,000 copies in the first six months, had never imagined for themselves the success that greeted The Lamplighter or Susan B. Warner’s The Wide, Wide World, which sold half a million copies in the United States alone between 1850 and the end of the century. A good account of these sentimental-domestic novels can be found in James Hart’s The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste, published nearly thirty years ago. “The main characters,” Hart writes, “were women—women who overcame all sorts of dilemmas through Christian fortitude and faith that eventually establishes them securely in prosperous middle-class homes, tangible symbols of an eventual call to heavenly mansions.”

The implication is that women writers, indeed women generally, are responsible for that alliance between Puritan ethics and capitalistic enterprise which is noted in Santayana’s important essay of 1911, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy.” “The American Will,” he observes, “inhabits the skyscraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion. The one is the sphere of the American man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman. The one is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition.”

Santayana’s essay perpetuates the mythology that in culture and “intellect,” masculine “aggressive enterprise” actually disdains the hot pursuit of success within a system of established value, which characterizes masculine enterprise in other spheres. Instead it takes the form of a lonely and often profitless challenge, while feminine passivity reaps the profit of a subtle or devious conformity. Even in such recent work as Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture, women are so emphatically consigned to the role of cultural conformists and are so synchronized with conventional beliefs that her discussion proceeds to explore the social and economic determinates of cultural taste without any further inquiry into the complex sexual identity of a given author or the sexual undercurrents which in any society help to shape both popular literature and the appetite for it.

One brilliant exception is Leslie Fiedler, which may explain why I found myself looking back at his Love and Death in the American Novel while reading Henry Nash Smith’s more conventional account of some of the writers Fiedler discusses. Reading Fiedler is like being lured away from a genial official tour guide by a sly fellow who promises to show you the secrets of the town. Smith remarks, for instance, that “the cultural horizon” of the classic American writers of the last century “was dominated by the towering eminences of Scott and Dickens”—as if that is supposed to take care of that. Fiedler explains that the death of Little Nell in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop caused a public orgy of weeping in America equal to that which greeted the death of Little Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He then goes on to explain this phenomenon by observing that “as the thrill of seduction was expurgated from popular fiction and the threat of rape removed, death was more and more demanded; the titillation provided once by peering through the keyhole at the nubile maiden struggling for her honor was, somewhat perversely, replaced by the ambiguous pleasure of standing over the snow-white deathbed of the virgin child.”

Smith stays within the critical and interpretative scruples of Santayana’s great essay. The genteel tradition and the kinds of fiction it endorsed presupposed that “the world was,” in Santayana’s words, “a safe place, watched over by a kindly God, who exacted nothing but cheerfulness and good-will from his children; and the American flag was a sort of rainbow in the sky, promising that all storms were over. Or if storms came, such as the Civil War, they would not be harder to weather than was necessary to test the national spirit and raise it to a new efficiency.” Efficiency required a realistic assessment of opportunities, even while a naïve belief in the earthly and heavenly rewards for efficiency called for an idealistic theory of art, the creation of images of beauty, nobility, and corrective suffering designed to encourage emulation. Hawthorne’s “the truth of the human heart” was antipathetic to such a value system because it necessitated an introspection that might reveal horror and madness as easily as sweetness and light.

In his introduction Smith asks “why a book is needed to say in many words what Santayana says elegantly in so few,” and he mistakenly replies that Santayana “is interested in nothing American before the Civil War except Emerson.” In fact, Santayana’s essay goes to considerable pains to locate the roots of the genteel tradition in a pre-Civil War admixture of Calvinism and Transcendentalism, and it has a paragraph on Poe, whom Smith does not discuss, and Hawthorne, as well as Emerson, which ends with the percipient observation that “in their persons they escaped the mediocrity of the genteel tradition, but they supplied nothing to supplant it in other minds.”

What then did the classic American writers try to “supply,” and why didn’t the general public want it? These are the central questions Smith sets out to answer. He notes the distinctively different ways in which these writers resisted or complied with “the demands of the new middlebrow audience” and he tries to show how “without exception their work was visibly influenced by the struggle.” Hawthorne, for example, was more diffident toward his readers than his outbursts about “scribbling women” would suggest. Melville, who had fewer illusions about appealing to a mass audience, tried in his own writing actually to conspire against that audience by using a strategy he credits to Hawthorne’s sketches.

They are, Melville wrote, “directly calculated to deceive—egregiously deceive—the superficial skimmer of pages.” Howells, even while espousing a new realism, made compromises to the genteel tradition that were nearly debilitating, and his friend Mark Twain illustrates, to a degree that continues to perplex interpreters, what Santayana meant when he said that American humorists “only half escape the genteel tradition; their humor would lose its savor if they wholly escaped it. They point out what contradicts it in the facts; but not in order to abandon the genteel tradition, for they have nothing to put in its place.” Of Henry James, Smith’s interpretation confirms the further observation of Santayana that he succeeded “by turning the genteel American tradition, as he turns everything else, into a subject-matter for analysis.”

Possibly the best chapter in the book is given to a discussion of the career of Henry Ward Beecher, the author in 1867 of Norwood, a novel which has been called “a textbook of the genteel tradition.” “No one before him,” Smith observes, “and probably no one since, has been the recognized spokesman for so large a segment of the American people,” but the price, which Beecher was quite willing to pay, is that he “cannot write a serious work of fiction because the conventions of the novel as they were delivered to him by a decadent and vulgarized high culture cannot be reconciled with his genuine interest in the common people of his New England village.”

It was saddening that Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, and Henry James did not have the support of the literary traditions and assumptions made available only by what has been written since. People have learned how to appreciate the American masterpieces of the nineteenth century by virtue of having had to accommodate themselves to the difficult texts of the twentieth, and also because the questions about reality, language, the nature of narrative, and the structure of personality which made Hawthorne and Melville seem radical and essentially isolated in their own time are now familiar.

Heroically, without even the encouragement of coteries like those that sustained Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, the early masters of American literature were and still are difficult because there was little to guide them in what they set out to do to the novel in English. Smith remarks appropriately that Melville’s “rapid development as a writer during the four years between Omoo and Moby-Dick… had plunged him into a difficulty that was technical rather than substantive and doctrinal: the question of whether a novel could appropriately concern itself with ultimate social and intellectual issues, or whether it was by definition required to be simply what the English call ‘a good read.”‘

Despite such general expressions of sympathy, Smith reads the classics of American literature with an often rueful frustration that they are not more accessible than they prove, or were intended, to be. Faced, for example, with the notorious complexities in Melville, he can make the refreshing but I’m afraid irrelevant observation that “Melville seems to me to be making an excessive demand on the reader.” What else—even in the best literary situation—has any great writer ever done? If Smith had reversed his subtitle and called his book Resistance to Popularity in American Classics, he would have seen Melville, Hawthorne, and James in a more rewarding perspective. It is unfortunate that these writers could not address themselves to a more durable audience, but it is hard to imagine how they might have expected a much larger one.

Because of sentimental confusions about this matter, much criticism, even while honoring the American writers of the last century, has nevertheless been unable adequately to define their daring and originality or their essential difficulty. One of the most ambitious attempts was F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance in 1941, a remarkably enduring celebration of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Whitman. However, the book prompted a reminder from Perry Miller, Matthiessen’s colleague at Harvard, that these writers were not, in their own time, encouraged to think of themselves as part of a triumphant American renaissance. Instead, according to Miller, they were “crushed before the juggernaut of the novel,” by which he meant the popular novel of sentiment and adventure.

Smith, by contrast, does not get excited either to panegyric or lamentation over the literary careers of the last century. Hawthorne and Melville were not, after all, competing for the same popular audience, one that bought the works of such luminaries as Caroline Lee Hentz, author of The Planter’s Northern Bride, or Augusta Jane Evans, author of Beulah.^*

Smith explains the popularity of such writers as Hentz and Evans as a matter of social history:

During the thirty years preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, the dominance of the older patrician culture was challenged and its masculine and aristocratic values were supplanted by the leveling influences exerted by rapid increases in population and wealth, by the spread of free public schools, by the evangelical movement, and especially by the cultural influence of women, who for the first time were gaining enough leisure to have time to read, and enough education to enjoy, and produce books.

In this spreading enthusiasm for genteel, sentimental, and uplifting fiction, Smith argues, Hawthorne and especially Melville were bound to have a hard time.

That indeed is how American classics may appear when viewed, as they are in this and in nearly all other studies of classic American fiction, almost exclusively within the narrow boundaries of American popular literature and social history. What Smith fails to do however is to place the great American novelists alongside the English writers of the last two centuries—who were popular on both sides of the Atlantic. The sentimental and domestic novel of which Hawthorne complained—written by the “mob of scribbling women”—lagged by a half century in America behind its English Richardsonian counterpart, but in both countries the vogue for this sort of fiction was putting some serious novelists in the shadows. Already in the 1760s Smollett was lamenting that English fiction was “a branch of business…now engrossed by female authors who merely publish for the propagation of virtue.” So it was not only trends in American taste for fiction from which the classic American writers stood apart, and we can see how unique their achievement in fiction was when we recall that at exactly the time when popular novels in the United States were being written in emulation of lapsed styles in the mother country, Hawthorne and Melville were initiating many of the innovations later to be incorporated in the modernist movement of the next century.

Smith is a discerning critic, and his earlier book, Virgin Land, has earned him a distinguished place in American literary studies. Few can equal him today in the practice of judicious, historical criticism. But a historicism that works well enough with Beecher or Howells or even Mark Twain can also be a hindrance to an appreciation of Hawthorne, Melville, and James, writers whose own relation to the genius of others, however remote in time and place, seems more immediate and revealing and fresh than their relation to historical or social circumstances. For example, Smith’s report that there is in Hawthorne “a distinction between mere perception of an event or object and insight into the spiritual truth behind it” will correspond to what many will find in The Scarlet Letter or in reverberant short pieces like “The Wives of the Dead.” But such neat critical discriminations are not likely to account sufficiently for the complexities of Hawthorne or of classical American literature generally. The excitement of reading Hawthorne is less in discovering such distinctions than in seeing how the responsibility for them is almost imperceptibly shifted from the author or the reader and made instead to seem inescapably a part of the nature of language itself.

Hawthorne thus shows us, to use his eloquent phrase, “what prisoners we are” of all that we take to be most natural; he proceeds in a way that is at once so natural and so inconclusive that we are incapable of differentiating between inner and outer experience. It only coarsens what Hawthorne does to say that he “obliterates…ordinary assumptions about what is actual and what is imaginary,” since his own sinuous effort is to make us feel what it is like to be in the gap between these possibilities. His language hints at a transparency between alternate states, even while reminding us that it is an obstruction to it.

Smith is impatient with those who find in the American classics what Lawrence called, apropos his own writing, “the struggle for verbal consciousness.” “It should not be left out of art,” Lawrence says. “It is a very great part of life. It is not superimposition of theory. It is the passionate struggle into conscious being.” Smith chastises other critics who try, on rhetorical and philosophical grounds, to defend passages in Moby-Dick that strike him as “unclear or contradictory.” In a phrase that has unfortunate implications for his own conception of the workings of language he says they do not “discover a usable meaning in Melville’s tormented prose.”

Consistent with this is the assertion that Moby-Dick “cannot be transplanted to the twentieth century,” and neither can Hawthorne. Though Smith’s own freer critical instincts suggest possibilities to the contrary, he argues that Hawthorne “did not intend anything so extreme” as “a fictive world without God, that is to say without an intelligible order.”

The author of “The Maypole of Merrymount” would have some trouble accommodating himself to this formulation. It is obvious there and elsewhere in Hawthorne that his idea of “intelligible order” had to do not with God but with human conceptions of Him and with embodiments of these in the artifices not only of theology but of literary forms, like allegory and pastoral. Part of the grandeur and pathos of Hawthorne is that he did not ask anybody’s God to disappear so that he might more freely invent fictions. Instead, he wrote in such a way as to make us know what it is we cannot know, and that includes both God and the order of things. Reading his stories we find intelligible order is always being deferred, we are always expecting that more than one kind of order will emerge.

In his insistence on “usable meanings” Smith adopts T.S. Eliot’s unfortunate but still revered idea of an “objective correlative”—Eliot’s argument that emotions in literature, such as Hamlet’s, are illegitimate when they are “in excess of the facts as they appear.” But this standard offers too comfortable a haven for any critic seeking to understand Melville or Hawthorne, much less Shakespeare. The idea of “objective correlative” encourages a fussy discomfort with the creative possibilities of writing and a search for “facts” to explain why a given style is as it is. If “the facts as they appear,” whatever that might mean, do not seem to account for the rhetorical excursions of Hamlet or Ahab, then the critic must search for “facts” that do not appear. Above all, rhetoric must be rooted in “facts” or in “history.” Much of the time, notably in the essays on Melville, Hawthorne, and James, Smith proceeds in obedience to Eliot’s theory. Thus, after some interesting discussions of nineteenth-century notions of monomania, he writes that

over a period of time Ahab made the White Whale the focus of exasperations that had accumulated in him as a widely if not universally shared human experience. In this interpretation (which I think Melville clearly intended) the insanity consists in a cognitive change that focuses hostility and resentment previously directed against life and the universe in general, on the single tangible and accessible adversary.

Whether Melville “intended” this reading, along with many others, needn’t be a matter of speculation since he directly proposes it in a magnificent passage in which Ishmael says that Ahab “piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”

Of course what strikes us here isn’t a clarification of motive but the violence of hyperbole in which the explanation is couched. Sentences of this kind induce wonder and excitement to a point transcending rational meanings. This could be an instance in which, according to Smith’s general complaint, Melville is “making an excessive demand on the reader,” for the reason that “we are not given enough fictional substance concerning Ahab’s prior experience to account for his state of mind when he meets the White Whale.”

The mistake here is to assume that “fictional substance” consists of data and facts that can justify a style. What is wrong with the assumption is that the most obvious and powerful “fictional substance,” the substance that can be said to hit you in the face, are the sounds that come off the page, and it can and has been demonstrated that the language in Shakespeare or Melville, in Hawthorne or James, nearly always creates its own justifications for being as it is and not otherwise.

Necessarily, Melville, as Smith disarmingly puts it, is “of two minds” about Ahab’s madness, just as Shakespeare cannot be supposed wholly the partisan of a vain old man in his eighties who in the first scene asks a stupid question of his daughters and then wanders around in a storm telling the wind what to do. But can we not be sure in most such instances that decisions about personal conduct or even about degrees of sanity are perhaps secondary in the author’s mind to certain other considerations that he wants us to care about? The very nature of the heroic demand on life is that it gets excessive; it can often appear to be crazy because there are no objects equivalent to its demands, whether it be a whale, a girl, or a child’s sled.

The best analyses in Smith’s book occur in discussions of writers, like Howells and Beecher, who were concerned to deal with the social realities that engaged the reading public and whose language and imagination were hobbled in the attempt to do so. Much of the time Smith asks language to yield confirmations of what can already be known to a social historian. He proceeds as if at some point in a work the words are supposed to refer us to a final authority for whatever excesses they have been guilty of at some other point. Only rarely is it conceded that language, as we learn from reading “The Turn of the Screw” or The Golden Bowl, can create realities that are the more forceful for being transitory and elusive of verification. When Melville asks at one point in Moby-Dick “if such a furious trope may stand” he is being tactical.

A similar strategy is at work almost everywhere in Hawthorne, and finds its fullest development in Henry James. By virtue of it, the question of the power of language itself is brought to its very surface and made part of a shared experience of writer and reader. It is the glory of our classic writers that they were the first to show the modern world why great literature was to become rewardingly difficult, a part of what might properly be called the resistance in modern art to popularity.