Friday, 15 November 2019

'A man must be moved by something higher than money, by something higher than hope of praise; he must have a sleepless love in his heart urging him to re-create in the image the life he has loved'

The Theory of the Veritist | Hamlin Garland

In the last past post, we’d just stepped into the pearly gates of Hamlin’s heaven. Now let’s get into the labyrinthine meadows and meandering pathways that lead us by default, into the garden of spices ensconced within Hamlin’s pearly gates!

As we’ve stated earlier on, the best wine is served the last! Ain’t it? And here you are served! Come thou literary soul, partake of the choicest of wines from off the cellars of Hamlin’s heaven! Right here! right now!!

Eternity is yours! Entirely!!

Indeed, restating one sentence from our past post yet again: Hamlin proves a real invigorating read, enriching our sensibilities, fine-tuning our literary focus, rejuvenating our literary hearts and pervading our literary souls to the core!

This post would then be in continuation of Hamlin and his charm! Here he speaks extensively on his delightful theory of art – that he calls Veritism!
Here goes Hamlin -

THE secret of every lasting success in art and literature lies, I believe, in a powerful, sincere, emotional concept of life first, and, second, in the acquired power to convey that concept to others. This leads necessarily to individuality in authorship, and to freedom from past models.

This theory of the veritist is, after all, a statement of his passion for truth and for individual expression. The passion does not spring from theory; the theory rises from the love of the verities, which seems to increase day by day all over the Western world.

The veritist, therefore, must not be taken to be dogmatic, only so far as he is personally concerned. He is occupied in stating his sincere convictions, believing that only in that way is the cause of truth advanced.

He addresses himself to the mind prepared to listen. He destroys by displacement not by attacking directly.

It is a settled conviction with me that each locality must produce its own literary record, each special phase of life utter its own voice.


There is no other way for a true local expression to embody itself. The sun of truth strikes each part of the earth at a little different angle; it is this angle which gives life and infinite variety to literature. It is the subtle differences which life presents in California and Oregon, for example, which will produce, and justify, a Pacific-Coast literature.

In all that I have written upon local literature, I have told the truth as I saw it. That others did not see it in the same light, was to be expected. And in writing upon PacificCoast literature, undoubtedly I shall once more be stating the cause of veritism; For the question of Pacific-Coast literature is really the question of genuine American iterature. The same principles apply to all sections of the land.


The mere fact that a writer happens to live in California or Oregon will not make him a part of that literature, any more than Stevenson's life in Samoa will make him a Samoan author. A nation, in the early part of its literary history, is likely to sweep together all that can, by any construction, be called its literature; but as it grows rich in real utterances, it eliminates one after the other all those writings which its clearer judgment perceives to be exotics.

Veritism, as I understand it, puts aside all models, even living writers.

Whatever he may do unconsciously, the artist must consciously stand alone before nature and before life. Nature and life have changed since Miller and Harte wrote. The California of to-day is quite different. The creative writer to-day, if true to himself, finds himself interested in other subjects, and finds himself believing in a different treatment of even the same material.

‘Being a farmer by birth and a novelist by occupation’, I saw most clearly the literary possibilities of the farmer's life in the valleys of California and in the stupendous forests of Oregon.

I saw children moving along to school in the shadow of the most splendid mountains; I saw a youth plowing, behind him rose a row of palms, against which he stood like a figure of bronze in relief; I saw young men and maidens walking down aisles of green and crimson pepper-trees, and the aisles led to blue silhouetted mountains;

I saw men herding cattle where the sun beat with hot radiance, and strange cacti held out wild arms; I saw children playing about cabins, setting at defiance the illimitable width and sunless depths of the Oregon forests, and I thought,

‘Perhaps one of these is the novelist or painter of the future’.

Perhaps the future poet of these spaces is plowing somewhere like that, because it must be that from the splendor and dramatic contrast of such scenes the poet will rise. He always has, and he always will. His feet will be on the soil like Whittier's, and like Miller’s;

His song will differ from theirs because he will be an individual soul, and because his time and his environment will not be the same.

Why should the Western artists and poets look away to Greece and Rome and Persia for themes? I have met Western people who were writing blank-verse tragedies of the Middle Ages and painting pictures of sirens and cherubs, and still considered themselves Western writers and Western artists!

The reason is not hard to find. They had not risen to the perception of the significant and beautiful in their own environment, or they were looking for effects, without regard to their sincere conviction. They were poets of books, not of life.

This insincerity is fatal to any great work of art. A man must be moved by something higher than money, by something higher than hope of praise; he must have a sleepless love in his heart urging him to re-create in the image the life he has loved.

He must be burdened and without rest until he has given birth to his conception. He will not be questioned when he comes; he will be known as a product of some one time and place, a voice speaking the love of his heart.

The lovers who wander down the aisles of orange or lemon or pepper trees will not marvel at blooms and shrubs. Their presence and perfume will be familiar and lovely, not strange. The stark lines of the fir and the broadsword-thrust of the banana-leaf will not attract their surprised look. All will be as friendly and grateful as the maple or the Lombardy poplar to the Iowa school-boy.

A new literature will come with the generation just coming to manhood and womanhood on the Coast. If rightly educated, their eyes will turn naturally to the wheat-fields, the forests, the lanes of orange-trees, the ranges of unsurpassed mountains. They will try to express in the novel, the drama, in painting and in song, the love and interest they take in the things close at hand.

This literature will not deal with crime and abnormities, nor with deceased persons. It will deal, I believe, with the wholesome love of honest men for honest women, with the heroism of labor, the comradeship of men, a drama of average types of character, infinitely varied, but always characteristic.

In this literature will be the shadows of mountain-islands, the sweep of dun plains, and dark-blue mountain-ranges silhouetted against a burning yellow sky.

It will deal with mighty forests and with man's brave war against the gloom and silence. It will have in it types of vanishing races, and prophecies of coming citizens. It will have the perfume of the orange and lemon trees, the purple dapple of spicy pepper-tree fruit, the grace of drooping, fern-like acacia leaves.

And in the midst of these sights and sounds, moving to and fro in the shadow of these mountains, and feeling the presence of this sea, will be men and women working out the drama of life in a new way, thinking new thoughts, building a happier, sunnier order of things, perhaps, where the laborer will face the winter always without fear and without despondency.

The observer, the independent investigator of facts, could hardly be said to have existed. Tradition, the organized conceptions of the race, reigned over the individual, and men did not think. The Scriptures had said it all. There was no room for science.

It is not my purpose to write the history of the development of literature. I have drifted farther into the general subject than I intended. I am merely preparing the way for some more or less valuable ideas upon the future of American fiction.

Evolutionists explain the past by means of laws operative in the present, by survivals of change. In an analogous way, we may infer (broadly, of course) the future of society, and therefore its art, from changes just beginning to manifest themselves. The developed future is always prophesied in the struggling embryos of the present. In the mold of the present are the swelling acorns of future forests.

Fiction already commands the present in the form of the novel of life. It already outranks verse and the drama as a medium, of expression. It is so flexible, admits of so many points of view, and comprehends so much (uniting painting and rhythm to the drama and the pure narrative), that it has come to be the highest form of expression in Russia, Germany, Norway, and France. It occupies with easy tolerance the high seats in the synagogue, and felicitates the other arts on having got in, or rather stayed in at all. At its best it certainly is the most modern and unconventional of arts.

Taking it as it stands to-day in America, the novel not only shows its relation to the past and the present, but it holds within itself prophecies of impending change. No other medium of art expression is so sensitive to demand. Change is sure. What will it be ?

We are about to enter the dark. We need a light. This flaming thought from Whitman will do for the search-light of the profound deeps : All that the past was not, the future will be.

If the past was bond, the future will be free. If the past was feudalistic, the future will be democratic. If the past ignored and trampled upon women, the future will place them side by side with men. If the child of the past was ignored, the future will cherish him, And fiction will embody these facts.

If the past was dark and battleful and bloody and barbarous, the future will be peaceful and sunny. If the past celebrated lust and greed and love of power, the future will celebrate continence and humility and altruism. If the past was the history of a few titled personalities riding high on obscure waves of nameless, suffering humanity, the future will be the day of high average personality, the abolition of all privilege, the peaceful walking together of brethren, equals before nature and before the law. And fiction will celebrate this life.

One of these central elements of unchanging power, always manifest in every really great literature, is sincerity in method. This produces contemporaneousness. The great writers of the past did not write "for all time," not even for the future. They mainly were occupied in interesting some portion of their fellow-men. Shakespeare had no care and little thought of the eighteenth century in his writing. 

The fiction of the future will not be romantic in any such sense as Scott or Hugo was romantic, because to do that would be to re-live the past, which is impossible; to imitate models, which is fatal. Reader and writer will both be wanting. The element of originality follows from the power of the element of sincerity. "All original art," says Taine, "is self-regulative."

It does not imitate. It does not follow models. It stands before life, and is accountant to life and self only. Therefore, the fiction of the future must be original, and therefore selfregulative.

The fiction of the past dealt largely with types, often with abstractions or caricatures. It studied men in heroic attitudes. It concerned itself mainly with love and war. It did not study men intimately, except in vicious or criminal moods.

As fiction has come to deal more and more with men and less with abstractions, it will be safe to infer that this will continue. Eugene Veron covered the ground fully when he said, "We care no longer for gods or heroes; we care for men." This is true of veritism, whose power and influence augment daily; even the romance writers feel its influence, and are abandoning their swiftly running love-stories for studies of character.

Like the romantic school of painting, they are affected by the influence they fear.

The novels of Bulwer, Scott, and Hugo, are, after all, mixed with aristocratic influence, though Hugo had much more of what might be called the modern spirit, even in his socalled historical studies.

It is safe to say that the fiction of the future will grow more democratic in outlook and more individualistic in method. Impressionism, in its deeper sense, means the statement of one's own individual perception of life and nature, guided by devotion to truth.

Second to this great principle is the law that each impression must be worked out faithfully on separate canvases, each work of art complete in itself. Literalism, the book that can be quoted in bits, is like a picture that can be cut into pieces.

It lacks unity.

The higher art would seem to be the art that perceives and states the relations of things, giving atmosphere and relative values as they appeal to the sight.

The realist or veritist is really an optimist, a dreamer. He sees life in terms of what it might be, as well as in terms of what it is; but he writes of what is, and, at his best, suggests what is to be, by contrast. He aims to be perfectly truthful in his delineation of his relation to life, but there is a tone, a color, which comes unconsciously into his utterance, like the sobbing stir of the muted violins beneath the frank, clear song of the clarionet; and this tone is one of sorrow that the good time moves so slowly in its approach.

He aims to hasten the age of beauty and peace by delineating the ugliness and warfare of the present; but ever the converse of his picture rises in the mind of the reader. He sighs for a lovelier life. He is tired of warfare and diseased sexualism, and Poverty the mother of Envy.

Students may be taught to believe they believe, but the great masses of American readers want the modern comment. They want the past colored to suit their ideas of life, that is, the readers of romance;

On higher planes 'of reading they want sincere delineation of modern life and thought, and Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dante, Milton, are fading away into mere names, books we should read but seldom do.

We have but to examine the ground closely, and we see the green shoots of the coming harvest beneath our very feet. We have but to examine closely the most naive and local of our novels, and the coming literature will be foreshadowed there. The local novelist seems to be the corning woman ! Local color is the royal robe.

LOCAL color in fiction is demonstrably the life of  fiction. It is the native element, the differentiating element. It corresponds to the endless and vital charm of individual peculiarity. It is the differences which interest us; the similarities do not please, do not forever stimulate and feed as do the differences. Literature would die of dry rot if it chronicled the similarities only, or even largely.

Every great moving literature to-day is full of local color. It is this element which puts the Norwegian and Russian almost at the very summit of modern novel writing, and It is the comparative lack of this distinctive flavor which makes the English and French take a lower place in truth and sincerity.

Everywhere all over the modern European world, men are writing novels and dramas as naturally as the grass or corn or flax grows. The Provencal, the Hun, the Catalonian, the Norwegian, is getting a hearing. This literature is not the literature of scholars; it is the literature of lovers and doers; of men who love the modern and who have not been educated to despise common things. These men are speaking a new word. They are not hunting themes, they are struggling to express.

Conventional criticism does not hamper or confine them. They are rooted in the soil. They stand among the corn-fields and they digi in the peat-bogs. They concern themselves with modern and very present words and themes, and they have brought a new word which is to divide in half the domain of beauty.

They have made art the re-creation of the beautiful and the significant. Mere beauty no longer suffices. Beauty is the world-old aristocrat who has taken for mate this mighty young plebeian Significance. Their child is to be the most human and humane literature ever seen.

It has taken the United States longer to achieve independence of English critics than it took to free itself from old-world political and economic rule. Its political freedom was won, not by its gentlemen and scholars, but by its yeomanry; and in the same way our national literature will come in its fulness when the common American rises spontaneously to the expression of his concept of life.

The fatal blight upon most American art has been, and is to-day, its imitative quality, which has kept it characterless and factitious, a forced rose-culture rather than the free flowering of native plants.  

Our writers despised or feared the home market. They rested their immortality upon the ‘universal theme’, which was a theme of no interest to the public and of small interest to themselves.

As the reader will see, I am using local color to mean something more than a forced study of the picturesque scenery of a State.

Local color in a novel means that it has such quality of texture and back-ground that it could not have been written in any other place or by any one else than a native.

It means a statement of life as indigenous as the plant-growth.

It means that the picturesque shall not be seen by the author, that every tree and bird and mountain shall be dear and companionable and necessary, not picturesque; the tourist cannot write the local novel.

From this it follows that local color must not be put in for the sake of local color. It must go in, it will go in, because the writer naturally carries it with, him half unconsciously, or conscious only of its significance, its interest to him. He must not stop to think whether it will interest the reader or not. He must be loyal to himself, and put it in because he loves it. If he is an artist, he will make his reader feel it through his own emotion.

And as noted critic Scupin Richards rightly avers, Hamlin is for real the pied piper who has you tied tighter, wound around his charmed magic casements – his words!

How trueeey!!!

And he, one hopes, would sure give the likes of an Arnold or a Dryden a run for their money!

Hail Hamlin - the pied piper who vouches to veritism and to local colour!

image: amazondotcom, Goscinny & Uderzo’s Obelix, and this blogger's!

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