Page:Men of Mark in America vol 2.djvu/21

 IDEALS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE XV purely American type, from Cooper 's " Leatherstocking Tales " to Mr. Wister's "Virginian," Mr. Garland's "Main Traveled Roads" and Mr. Norris' "The Pit," is explained by this deep respect for man as the maker of his own fortunes and the shaper of his own destiny. In such stories as "The Octopus" and "The Pit," which deal with the hard and brutal sides of American business life, it is not the stake but the game that attracts the writer and holds the reader; not the money which is won by the great combination, the bold, unscrupulous scheme, but the audacity of the plan, the intrepidity of its execution, the tireless energy of will, the relentless enforcement of purpose. The later novelists who are drawn more and more to deal with dramatic situations in struggles between employers and employees, with the plotting and counter-plotting of men who handle great enterprises, are recognizing more and more the human significance of these contemporary phases of business life and are discerning their epic qualities as new acts in the ancient drama of life. In these vast and often unscrupulous transactions there is the play of those elemental forces of character which, in the earlier times, made men adventurers, discoverers, leaders of armies, devastating or beneficent conquerors; and it is the recognition of this fact that makes purely commercial operations of increasing interest to dramatists and novel- ists. Materialistic as these operations must be, brutal as they often are, they are, nevertheless, tools and instruments and forces organized by men of great parts and are saturated with character. In many of these tales of action Nature plays a part so great as to constitute a distinct element in the drama. The vastness of the great mountain ranges of the far West; the stretch of prairies, blos- soming to the horizon under the soft skies of late spring in the central West; the cloistered depths of forests; the majestic flow of rivers of continental magnitude; the delicate beauty of the wild flowers in New England; the note of the mocking bird and the bursting of the cotton boll in the South; these aspects and phases of Nature in the new world were noted by the colonial recorders and have touched the