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dodkin, Toll p. 66. dogger. The N. E. D. does not explicitly point to Du. loan here (or B. would have mentioned it) but the etymological note ib. should make us pause before rejecting it altogether, Vercoullie e.g. being very categorical about it. See Toll p. 47. doily. See Skeat and the errata in his first Qo ed. where Du. origin is still believed in, notwithstanding the fact that the existence of a Mr. Doily is proved beyond doubt. But the N. E. D. ignores Du. origin quite. The Scand. dvejl is attributed to Du. origin (or 113.) by O. D. 8., Fa. to., 8eip, II, 91. doll. Skeat's suggestion in his first ed. that this the Du. dol ..~ whippingtop (quoted from Oudemans from Horae Belgicae V, 181, but cf. Verdam) is ignored by the N. E. D. in favour of the supposition (Skeat in his Errata) that it stands for Dorothea. Of course the usual Du. form is tol. If the origin suggested should ever be substantiated, we may think of dindle (cf. supra) possibly for tintelen as an analogon. doppers. Explained by the N. E. D. and others as from Du. doopers "erroneously shortened" as the N. E. D. notes, referring to the vowel "after dop vb." An amusing suggestion may be unearthed here from Mansvelt: ,,De naam komt naar men zegt van de wijze waarop die lieden hun haar snijden, namelijk langs den rand van een op her hoofd geplaatste dop of kom." p. 36. doper is also found. Dorderygh as well as Durdraght I find quoted fr. 1495 and 1416 resp. by Toll p. 54. dorp. F.-St. has some additional references. Compare: dorp-boores = dorpsboeren in Nares qu. fr. Chapman's Iliad, XI, 587 which I cannot verify: "All the dorp-bores with terror fled." doss. Following up the hint in the E. D. D., Dr. Bense thinks of the word as a loan from Du. The shortening of the vowel should have been explained. The Scand. daase (from Du. or mlG. Seip I, 87; Fa. To. etc.) have kept the long vowel. Sleydinge, Oost-Vlaanderen, ! 2/12/'28. H. LOGEblAN.

REALISM IN MODERN AMERICAN FICTION 1). I.

Introductory

Notes.

Even if we stretch the meaning of the word "literature" to its utmost we are bound to say that American literature is not more than a hundred and fifty years old. We have then gone back as far as the War of Independence and we shall certainly find enough printed matter to fill a voluminous bibliography. In the seventeenth century we shall find books 1) A Bibliography will be given at the end of the last part of this study.

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of exploration, descriptions of certain settlements and the customs of the people there and narratives of local events, such as the fights with the Indians. Most of these things were written by leading citizens, many of them still Englishmen by birth. Such purely practical information, however, formed but a very small part indeed of the mass of theological and moral treatises, which constituted the bulk of what was published. Many of these treatises must have been very popular in the settlers' homes. The most enthusiastic students, however, will never succeed in extracting from this dreary mass of calvinistic, puritanic, moralistic matter anything even remotely deserving the name of literature. This sort of writing went on far into the next century: what was printed continued to belong to these two classes: either simply practical information and records, or theological and moralistic tracts. It is not the object of the present paper to try to explain the various causes of American literary sterility at the time. Anyone acquainted with American history will find it easy to appreciate the two main causes: one simply sociological, namely the hard and never-ceasing struggle for life that the colonists experienced during the first century and later of their settlement in America, and, secondly, the spit'itual inheritance of New-England, which was absolutely and sternly puritanic. Whether the first settlers were all Puritans or not (those who went to Virginia for example were certainly not) does not matter in the least. The fact remains that the Puritan conception of life and consequently Puritan morals, were dominant. What was printed at the time proves this beyond doubt: there is nothing of the cavalier spirit here. Only books that could uplift in the good old meaning of the word, poetry and prose that could inspire the struggling settler in his hard life, were considered to be permissible. We must not forget that the early settlers in New-Engeland had brought these conceptions with them from England itself. They came from their old country at about the time of the Augustans, whose literature according to their ideas was simply an expression of Deism and Atheism. There is no doubt that even before the War of Independence the leisured and cultured classes enjoyed literature to a certain point. Richardson's Pamela was widely read; as early as in 1744 American editions of the book had appeared, Of course a book like this was probably read as much for its piety as for entertainment. Still, even such books were only temporary exceptions. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, after the Revolution, there are signs that some distinct change is coming into American literature, indicative of the growing self-consciousness, the stirring events of the time no doubt having an important part in this change. As might be expected: it was first in poetry that the former colony began to express its newly-won independence. Indeed, there is quite en outburst of readable verse, frantically patriotic in tone and, with a very few exceptions, absolutely neglected and forgotten to-day. In fiction it took a m u c h longer period before anything of importance appeared. In prose there is indeed nothing memorable from a literary point

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of view before Irving's stories. We need hardly recall here the merits of Irving's work; he was the first great American prose-writer, deservedly called the father of American letters, whose graceful style and gentle wit set an example to his countrymen. He deliberately avoided writing anything we might term a novel, as he did not wish to be called a rival of Scott, yet, he certainly influenced the novelists that came after him, and in the history of American fiction his name is of infinitely more importance than that of Charles Brockden Brown, "the first American novelist". It seems a little strange that it was forty years after the Revolution before the first novel of any importance dealing with that period was published. James Fenimore Cooper published his novel The Spy in 1821. The book made him famous at once. However unequal this much-maligned author appears in his novels, of which he has written more than thirty, he will for ever be known as the first novelist of note, who, though almost inevitably under the influence of Scott, may be truly and safely called American, since he took the material for his best-known works form his native country, while his robust style can certainly not be called imitative of foreign products. In his LeatherstocMng Tales he created some figures, notably those of Nathanial Bumbo and Chincachgook, absolutely new in the fiction of the world, who haveremained familiar up to our day. The influence these tales exerted universally cannot easily be expressed. In literature Cooper was like his hero a pioneer and pathfinder; it was not only in the description of the mysterious forests of America that he excelled, hut with such a book as The Pilot he gave to America its first novel of the sea, which he knew so well from intimate personal experience. Yet even with Cooper as a notable asset the American novel cannot be said to have reached anything like the level which European fiction had attained by that time. When all has been said that can be said in favour of his achievements we must still admit that Cooper's fame is principally due to the humble status of the literature of his country; that he is only great as an American novelist and that even his best work cannot stand comparison with any of the masterpieces of Scott and other English or European novelists. In fact it appears that the novel was not particularly congenial to the American mind of the time; a remartable fact when we compare its enormous popularity in Europa. A form of prose which has always seemed better suited to the American mood is the short story-or the novelette, in which America has excelled from the beginning, with Irving's stories, until the present day. We are therefore not astonished to see that only about a quarter of a century after the publication of The Last oI the Mohicans there again appeared a novel of real and lasting importance, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), which is so short that we might as well classify it with the short story or novelette. Another fashion in English literature finds its imitation here, but Hawthorne certainly shows some features already which, if not exactly typically American, may yet be said to be un-English. There is a certain rebellious tone in his books against the Puritan tradition

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which still dominated American thought; a sort of heathenish joy in life for life's own sake. And there is also, notwithstanding the constant and excessive use of the so-called supernatural in his stories, a strong impulse towards realism. These two things: a falling away from Puritan tradition and an impulse towards realism and truth we can now find in an ever greater measure in the work of the next novelists of note. Not only with a man like Henry James, the impressionist, whom we might as well call an Englishman, or a European do we notice it, but also in the work of such a genuine American as Mark Twain was, with whose wit there is now and then mixed a tone of bitterness about the life and thought of his compatriots. William Dean Howells (1837--1920), now almost forgotten, but once one of the most widely read authors of the second half of last century, even wanted to keep himself to the facts of life and to avoid all sentimentality and cant, in which he was successful to a certain degree. However, with all these authors actual realism war still out ot the question. There were too many subjects which were " t a b o o " with them. With the best will in the world they could not escape the atmosphere of namby-pamby romanticism which, with a very few exceptions, (we think of course of Walt Whitman) the literature of the country breathed. The best novelists of that time must be counted among the clearest and most independent thinkers of their country, and they therefore well understood the weakness of the foundation on which the literature of their country was built; yet they themselves were still too deeply rooted in convention and tradition, and at the same time, as we nave seen before, too much dependent on the influence of the England of Queen Victoria to break away. While in Europe realism and naturalism had already produced their finest fruits, authors in America kept to all sorts of conventions that impeded any free development in literature. Truth without reticence, realism and naturalism, may be said to have made their first appearance in American fiction with the publication of Dreiser's Sister Carrie. Under the direct influence of Zola facts are set down in this novel as they must have appeared to the author, without bias of any kind. But before discussing this important novelist, with the consideration of whom we have practically come to contemporary literature, we must first draw attention to one or two American writers, who in many respects are the pioneers and forerunners of modern tendencies. There is first of all Stephen Crane, whose novel The Red Badge o! Courage, dealing with the civil war, sounds a strickingly modern note in so far as war and the life of the soldier are not at all presented with the old glitter of glory and fame, but rather as a sordid affair with little of beauty and heroism in it. Such a typically modern feature as the admittance of fear in the soldier which perhaps forms the most salient change in our present day war literature will already be found in Crane's story. Such things are of course directly derived from Tolstoy, Crane's much admired master. As a whole the book is of too little importance, however, to deserve more than passing attention. This must also be said of Maggie, A girl ot the Street,

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by the same author in which an attempt is made to describe realistically the life of a girl whose drunken parents maltreat her and drive her onto the streets. In neither of these two books do we find anything in the way of plot or language or style that is of any interest. On the contrary it is all barren and rather silly. But the fact remains that from a historical point of view they mark the beginning of important changes in American literature. Had Crane grown to maturity he might have become the first great realistic fiction-writer of his country. The same may be said of the better-known Frank Norris, his contemporary and a kindred spirit. Norris's talent, however, was certainly more promising. His two best novels The Octopus (1901) and The Pit (1903) may even to-day be read with some measure of enjoyment. In fact they are not so very much inferior to the fiction that had gone before. In truthfulness they rank higher than anything so far written by American prose-writers. His realism is principally sociological, as it is especcially social questions that interest him, and The Octopus and The Pit are the first American realistic social novels; a subdivision of literature which soon after was to become such an important feature in the fiction of the States. How consciously Norris embraced realism may at once be gathered from the following, passage on one of the first pages of the book: Presley, the hero of the tale, wants to write poetry, poetry of the West, " t h a t world's frontier of romance, where a new race, a new people - - hardy, brave, and passionate were building an empire; . . . . the valleys, the plain and the mountain; the ranch, the range, and the mine . . . . " Yet he feels that this romantic picture is not the entire truth; that there are things which spoil its harmony. A n d : " t o be true - - and it was the first article of his creed to be unflinchingly true - - he could not ignore it. All the noble poetry of the ranch - - the valley - - seemed in his mind to be marred and disfigured by the presence of certain immovable facts." There is then first and foremost this railway business, a huge concern, the "Octopus" of the title, only bent on making profits, regardless of the welfare of the farmers, on whom it lives and thrives. Thus the hero, searching for the True Romance of the West at the end only finds grain rates and unjust railway tariffs. In The Pit, another aspect of the same subject is treated in a similar manner. Only, in this book the capitalist, the financier, is the real protagonist. Old-fashioned romanticism is not absent in either of these novels; nor is sentimentalism. The story of Ang61e and Vanamee in the Octopus shows these tendencies to an even ridiculous degree; it is a poor mixture of shallow mysticism and sentimentalism. In fact all the love affairs which are freely 9 used to lend interest to both stories, are treated in a conventional manner, not different from the way in which such things are described in the older fiction. Yet even here we may sometimes hear a note which seems to indicate that Norris might one day have come to apply the realistic method, with which he knew how to describe social conditions, to all the other fields of human interest. But, just as in the case of Crane, his early death Cut him off before his most promising talent had reached anything like maturity. -

London.

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A. PERDECK.