Literature and Middlebrow Idealism

...the last third was a concession to what he knew, consciously or not, would appeal to the middlebrows...

...Thou wilt not, glorious Eye of Hope—ever looking to the ends?be veiled or mourn because the ways are rough through which God sends universal blessing...

...Countless other novelists "dramatized" Beecher's thesis and also sold well...

...Most of his contemporaries, though, considered him un-American and incomprehensible...

...His other major novels, The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes, displayed the same weakness...

...for Ahab's evil was monomaniacally reflected and dramatized in the whale...

...Why not a straight answer (like Ahab's), instead of placing the white whale somewhere between one and 100 on the scale of good and evil...

...At the center of much of the 19th-century literary maneuvering was William Dean Howells, an editor of the Atlantic Monthly as well as a successful novelist, who never committed himself to artistic bravery...

...Indeed, he was pleased to sell 5,000 copies of this novel that is now mandatory reading in every American literature course...

...Returning full-time to fiction, James now wrote as he pleased—a fact more fortunate for us than it was for him...

...The beginning and middle were true to the moral vision he too frequently suppressed...

...Probably Twain's best, and certainly his most successful work was Life on the Mississippi, which suffered from none of the overwrought pessimism evident in The Mysterious Stranger...

...Melville did not provide the answers—Moby Dick's "meaning" corresponds to the idiosyncrasies of the reader...

...Did the "A" signify adulteress or angel...

...After succumbing to editors' demands that he accomodate popular tastes in his early fiction—an example being the happy ending of The Europeans—he spent six years trying in vain to succeed as a playwright, a task he was temperamentally unsuited for...

...Yes and no...

...Smith convincingly demonstrates that Howells did not dare to come to the sticking-point in A Modern Instance, potentially his best novel...

...Had the novel been published during his lifetime, he might have experienced the same unpopularity as Hawthorne and Melville...

...Meanwhile, those who posthumously would be looked upon as the classic American authors were barely able to make a living at their craft...

...Reviewed by Harvey Curtis Webster Professor emeritus, Louisville University...

...and the American flag was a sort of rainbow in the sky, promising that all storms were over...

...Smith proves beyond doubt that 19th-century middlebrows were the nemeses of serious literature, and a glance at any recent best-sellers' list confirms that their modern-day counterparts continue in the vanguard of bad taste (consider Marilyn French's The Woman's Room and Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds...

...Melville, who was influenced by Hawthorne's vision of moral ambiguity, suffered too...

...As George Santayana put it, most Americans of the period thought that "The world...

...But he did appreciate others who lived up to the full strength of their convictions...

...Twain, on the other hand, showed signs of compromising to meet the expectations of middlebrow taste...

...author, "On a Darkling Plain," "Afterthe Trauma" Although he calls it, with excessive modesty, "a handful of essays" that do not approach either "the majestic scope" of Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought or "the depth of Matthiessen's definitive treatment" in The American Renaissance, Henry Nash Smith's Democracy and the Novel probably constitutes the most seminal book on American literature to be published in the last two decades...

...The Gilded Age, an aberration...

...The middlebrow audience, Smith submits, ushered the United States into the contemptible Gilded Age...

...Was Moby Dick evil or not...

...Smith's fully-substantiated thesis holds that the American Dream (called idealism) in the 19th century was, and remains to a large extent today, a mishmash of phony sentimentality and good intentions—a watered down version of Emersonian transcendentalism—that the best writers contradicted, some bravely and some timorously...

...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...

...In Huckleberry Finn, the evils of "sivilization" were faithfully underscored until the last silly, but to many Americans pleasing, chapters...

...Was Hester Prynne heroine or villain...

...Mardi was perplexing...

...Thus, long before it had become fashionable to do so, he publicly commended Stephen Crane, Thomas Hardy and, of course, James...

...An exception was Edith Wharton who, unbeknown to James, diverted part of her book royalties to his account...

...Henry James was not so lucky...

...Smith knows as much as anyone about the culture in which Hawthorne, Melville, Twain and Henry James wrote, and no one has read as closely as he has the works these men forged into art against a hostile background...

...And, while many intelligent people deprecate them, the novels of a CP Snow and the short stories of an Irwin Shaw at least do not flatter human nature or give us false hope- Conditions for art in America may still be difficult, but they are unquestionably better than in the period Henry Nash Smith dissects in Democracy and the Novel...

...Was Ahab mad...

...was a safe place, watched over by a kindly God, who exacted nothing but cheerfulness and goodwill from his children...

...even The Portrait of a Lady was thought to contain too many psychological details...

...Hawthorne, the first challenger of Beecherism, fared worst because of the moral ambiguity of The Scarlet Letter...

...Nevertheless, good novels and collections of short stories—The Human Factor by Graham Greene, say, or John Cheever's Collected Stories—do sell well by commercial standards...

...The Mysterious Stranger, published after his death, told what Twain thought and felt without any sentimentality...

...This attitude, though certainly incompatible with reality, was embodied in the majority of what Smith calls the middlebrow novels of the mid-19th century...

...This, plus magazine serializations he despised, enabled James to survive...

...A genteel novel by the period's precursor of Billy Graham, Norwood overrode American Calvinism and established the tradition of superoptimism reflected in such passages as "Shine on, Sun...

...Twain was an anomaly among American authors of his day: Although his writing enjoyed some popularity among the middlebrows (at a cost to his literary reputation), it was also strong enough to survive him...

...Democracy and the Novel should become a classic: It is well-written, scholarly, urbane, wise—and it even offers hope to those who expect more of American literature than it has thus far produced...

...Henry Ward Beecher's bestseller, Norwood, is a notable example...

...The Connecticut Yankee could be regarded as a hero...

...This left the Beecher-conditioned audience only that unsatisfactory skeptical hero, Ish-mael...

...Typee and Omoo were proper stuff...

...Critical recognition for the psychological depth he had added to traditional realism finally came in the decade before his death, too late for him to care a great deal anymore...

...In it he recounted the real romance of the boy-man he once was, snagged only by the natural force of the river and meeting each setback with humor...

...but Moby Dick (and even worse, Pierre) seemed unfaithful to the American Dream...