Dorothy Canfield

( Originally Published 1921 )

If Floyd Dell seems in The Briary-Bush to hint at the human necessity to turn back by and by from freedom, Dorothy Canfield in The Brimming Cup pretty clearly argues for that necessity. Doubtless it is to go too far to claim, as certain of her critics do, that she had made a counter-attack upon the assailants of the village and the established order, but it is sure that she gave comfort to many spirits disturbed by the radical outbursts of 1920. Already in The Squirrel Cage and The Bent Twig she had shown an affectionate knowledge of the ways of households in small communities; and in Hillsboro People she had added another hardy, kindly neighborhood to the American array of villages in fiction. The Brimming Cup sounded a deeper note than any she had yet struck. Suppose, the novel says, there were a woman who had been trained in the wide world but was now living in a distant village; suppose she had heard and felt the tumult of the age and had begun to question the reality of her contentment; suppose, to make the conflict as dramatic as possible, she should find herself tempted by a new love to give up the settled companionship of her husband and the heavy burden of her children to seek joy in a thrilling passion.

Here Dorothy Canfield had an admirable theme and she rose to it with power, but she permitted herself so easy a solution that her argument stumbles lamentably. The lover who disrupts the warm circle of Marise's life is after all only a selfish bounder, a mere villain; stirred as she is by the promises he holds out of rapture and of luxury, she would be simply foolish not to comprehend, as in the end she does, that she must lose far more than she could gain by the exchange she con-templates. Surely this is no argument in favor of loyalty as against love: it is only a defense of loyalty, which does not need it, as against a fleeting instability ; and so it is hardly half as significant as it might have been had the conflict been squarely met, great love contending with great loyalty. Yet while the novel thus falls short of what it might have undertaken it has numerous excellences. It is eloquent and passion-ate and, very often, wise. Rarely have a mother's relations with her children been so subtly represented; rarely have the manners of a New England township been more convincingly portrayed. The setting glows among its green hills and valleys, its snow and flowers. There are minor characters that stand up vividly in the memory, like persons known face to face. The atmosphere is at once tense with desire and spacious with understanding. Though the materials come from an old tradition they have been heated with the fires of the scrutinizing mind which burn beneath the newer novelists.

That memorable year of fiction which saw so many superior books produced saw them successful beyond any reasonable expectation; and it is scarcely to be wondered at that the year following—with which this chronicle does not undertake to deal—should have responded to such encouragement. If Dorothy Canfield challenged the tendency, Booth Tarkington saw it and ventured Alice Adams. Sherwood Anderson in The Triumph of the Egg and Floyd Dell in The Briary-Bush proceeded to other triumphs. Half a dozen competent novelists followed naturalism into the "exposure" of small towns or cramped lives : particularly C. Kay Scott with the hard, crisp Blind Mice and Charles G. Norris, rival of his brother Frank Norris in veracity if not in fire, with Brass. John Dos Passos in Three Soldiers, the most controverted novel of the year, dealt brilliantly with the unheroic aspects of the American Expeditionary Force. Evelyn Scott in The Narrow House and Ben Hecht in Erik Dorn attempted, as Waldo Frank had already done in The Dark Mother and as some others now did less notably, to find a more elastic, a more impressionistic technique, breaking up the "gray paragraph" and quickening the tempo of their narratives. At the same time romance once more showed its perennial face, suggesting that the future does not belong to naturalism entirely. Donn Byrne in Messer Marco Polo played in a bright Gaelic way with the story of Marco Polo and his quest for Golden Bells, the daughter of Kubla Khan. Robert Nathan wrote, in Autumn, an all but perfect native idyl, grounded well enough in local color, as suggestive of the soil as an old farmers' almanac, and yet touched with the universal fingers of the pastoral. If American fiction cannot long escape the village, at least here is a village of a sort hardly thinkable before the revolt began. No matter what a flood of angry truth Spoon River Anthology let in, beauty survives. Many waters cannot quench beauty. What truth extinguishes is the weaker flames.