Northern stories

2.3. Smoke Bellew not only admires life in the North.
Smoke Bellew not only admires life in the North. He is jealous of everyone who can live a simple and natural life. He envies not only people, but also animals that do not know the complexity of human relationships and experiences. "My calling is here, " he says, turning to his dog .
The strengthening of Rousseauist tendencies in late London was the result of the deep spiritual drama that he was going through at that time. Moving away from the labor and socialist movement, with which he was associated all his life, London became entangled in contradictions. Unity with nature, life in its bosom seemed to him the best way out. He himself tried to live like this in recent years. Hence the desire to get away from all painful questions, to run away from oneself and find oblivion in nature - such is the source of his Rousseauism.
What brings London closer to Cooper is the attitude towards the Indians, the “Indian theme” that is presented in their work. True, in London's stories there is not that strength and depth, there is not that elegy that Cooper sounds when he talks about the Indians. The death of the "last of the Mohicans" is not felt by him as sharply and tragically as Cooper perceived it. However, there is every reason to assert that London, too, well understood the tragic situation of the Indians, doomed to destruction, and sympathized with them.
There is a well-known similarity between the positive characters of writers. In both Cooper and London, they approach the ideal of the "natural man." They are honest, disinterested, love exploits and adventures. However, London's heroes are more modern than a few. old fashioned natty Bumpo . They are distinguished by greater determination and stronger willpower than the heroes of Fenimore Cooper.
Comparing London with Bret Garth, it should be noted that they do not have the time difference that separated London from Cooper. Cooper died in 1851, but the Leatherstocking novels are mostly set in the second half of the 18th century. Thus, the difference in time between them and the northern stories is one hundred years.
As for Bret Hart, who died in 1902, he was not only a predecessor but a contemporary of London. His works, which first saw the light in the late 60s, continued to be created in the 70s, 80s and 90s, that is, already at the time when the literary activity of London began. The fame of Bret Hart is based mainly on his California stories, although, in addition to them, he wrote novels, plays, journalism.
Like northern stories, Bret Hart's Californian writings are filled with many faces. Like London, it recreates a colorful picture of a mining civilization.
In Bret Garth, as in London, the heroes of stories are brave, freedom-loving people, alien to self-interest. As in the Northern stories, in the California stories we see the romantic opposition of California to the bourgeois world. Here there is no place for petty-bourgeois conventions and prejudices; official morality is met with a hostile attitude.
But, pointing out the elements of similarity among writers, one cannot but notice at the same time that, compared with Bret Garth, London reflected a later stage in the development of the frontier . The California stories are from the 50s and 60s, while the London stories are from the late 90s. The Bret Garth stories are set in the Far West and California, and London is on the northern tip of the American continent. In the history of American literature, London was the first to use the "Northern" theme so widely, legitimize it, give it the rights of citizenship. Before him, there were only a few episodic works about the North. Such, for example, was the story "A Courageous Woman" by F. Norris . But it was based more on the imagination of the writer than on real facts. There was no real image of the North in it. The latter served only as a conditional literary background for the extraordinary adventures of the heroes.
In London, the North is not fictional, but real, real. And it is shown with brilliant skill and expressiveness. London with good reason can be called the singer of the North and the founder of the "northern" theme. Following him, many writers turned to this topic, developing it in the spirit of northern stories.
The range of London's work is much wider than that of Bret Hart, who was limited mainly to one "Californian" theme. Compared to the Californian ones, the subjects of northern stories are also wider. We will not find the "Indian" theme in Bret Garth. The theme of the struggle with nature is also little developed in him . But nevertheless, London, like Bret Hart, does not rise in northern stories about great social generalizations, does not reveal the sharpness of the contradictions of American reality. In this respect, the northern stories are similar not only to the stories of Bret Hart, but also to the works of another contemporary of London, O'Henry. Although the best works of O'Henry are imbued with genuine humanism, he avoided dealing with such issues as the class struggle, the exploitation of workers, the ruin of farmers, the growth of monopolies, etc. In many of his stories, sharp corners of social contradictions are deliberately smoothed out. He has a lot of short stories with a traditional "happy ending". purely entertaining..