The Idealistic Novels of Robert Herrick

D OBERT HERRICK'S principal contribution to American iliterature was made during what is generally considered an undistinguished period in fiction. Except for the emergence of Dreiser and Edith Wharton, and perhaps Ellen Glasgow, the first decade and a half of the present century is notable for the number of second-rate talents it produced. By 1903 Howells and Twain had done their important work, Garland and Fuller had, it seemed, written themselves out, and Crane and Norris were dead. Nearly a decade was to pass before Dreiser's reputation was established. In that interval Herrick wrote what Newton Arvin has described, perhaps too enthusiastically, as three of the most impressive novels in our literature:' The Common Lot (1904), The Memoirs of an American Citizen (I905), and Together (I908). They represent the crown of his achievement. Warmly saluted by Howells and by the forgotten journalistic critics of the day, they not only advanced him to the front rank of contemporary novelists, but were among the few novels of the period to help sustain the belief, here and abroad, that America could produce a serious and mature literature. Upon them for the most part rests what reputation Herrick has been allowed to retain, a reputation preserved mainly by social historians, who value the novels on grounds other than their artistic merit. It is not with this well-known trio, however, nor with the earlier or later realistic novels, that the present study is concerned. I hope to modify the critical acceptance of Herrick as a realist by calling attention to a division of his fiction which for the past thirty years has been generally disregarded. About a quarter of his work, Herrick once estimated, does not conform to the harsh lines of Real

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