By 1870 the public had been surfeited with sugared conceits and
fine-spun delicacies. For almost twelve years, Whitman had stormed at
the affectations and over-refinements of the period but comparatively
few had listened. Yet an instinctive distaste for the prevailing
superficialities had been growing, and when the West began to express
itself in the raw accents of Mark Twain and Bret Harte, the people
turned to them with enthusiasm and no little relief. Mark Twain, a prose
Whitman, revealed the romantic Mississippi and the vast mid-West; Bret
Harte, beginning a new American fiction in 1868, ushered in the wild
humor and wilder poetry of California. It is still a question whether
Bret Harte or John Hay first discovered the literary importance of Pike
County narratives. Twain was positive that Hay was the pioneer;
documentary evidence points to Harte. But it is indisputable that Harte
developed—and even overdeveloped—the possibilities of his backgrounds,
whereas Hay after a few brilliant ballads, reverted to his early poetic
ideals and turned to the production of studied, polished and
undistinguished verse. Lacking the tremendous gusto of Mark Twain or
even the native accuracy of Hay, Bret Harte perfected a terse, dramatic
idiom. Less exuberant than his compeers, he became more skilful in
making his situations “effective”; he popularized dialect, sharpening
his outlines and intensifying the power of his prose. Harte’s was an
influence that found its echo in the Hoosier stories of Edward Eggleston
and made so vivid an impress on nineteenth century literature.
To the loose swagger of the West, two other men added their diverse
contributions. Edward Rowland Sill, cut short just as his work was
gaining headway and strength, brought to it a gentle radicalism, a calm
and cultured honesty; Joaquin Miller, rushing to the other extreme,
theatricalized and exaggerated all he touched. He shouted platitudes at
the top of his voice; his lines boomed with the pomposity of a brass
band; floods, fires, hurricanes, extravagantly blazing sunsets,
Amazonian women, the thunder of a herd of buffaloes—all were
unmercifully piled on. And yet, even in its most blatant _fortissimos_,
Miller’s poetry occasionally captured the lavish grandeur of his
surroundings, the splendor of the Sierras, the surge and spirit of the
Western world.
Now that the leadership of letters had passed from the East, all parts
of the country began to try their voices. The West continued to hold its
tuneful supremacy; the tradition of Harte and Hay was followed (softened
and sentimentalized) by Eugene Field and James Whitcomb Riley. In the
South, Irwin Russell was pioneering in negro dialect (1875), Sidney
Lanier fashioned his intricate harmonies (1879), and Madison Cawein was
beginning to create his tropical and over-luxuriant lyrics. A few years
later (in 1888) Russell brought out his faithfully-rendered _Dialect
Poems_ and the first phase of the American renascence had passed.