a resident of Washington, began writing fiction in 1886. Among her
stories are “Throckmorton” (1890), “Little Jarvis” (1890), a _Youth’s
Companion_ prize story, “Midshipman Paulding” (1891), “The Sprightly
Romance of Marsac” (1896), a lively story that won a New York _Herald_
prize of $3000, “The Lively Adventures of Gavin Hamilton” (1899), “The
House of Egremont” (1901), “Children of Destiny” (1903), and “The Great
Scoop” (1905). Her plots are sometimes slight and inconsequential, and
her narrative lacks reserve; but she shows skill in the management of
dialogue, and is a favourite writer.
Ellen Glasgow (born in Richmond in 1874) has found many readers with
her “Descendant” (1897), “Phases of an Inferior Planet” (1898),
“The Voice of the People” (1900), “The Battle-Ground” (1902),
and “The Deliverance” (1904). She does not manage to escape from
improbabilities, and some of her plots are desultory; yet on the whole
her work maintains a high average.
Mary Johnston (born at Buchanan, Virginia, in 1870) has realised the
possibilities of early Virginia history in her successful romances,
“Prisoners of Hope” (1898), published in England as “The Old Dominion,”
“To Have and to Hold” (1900), in England called “By Order of the
Company,” “Audrey” (1902), and “Sir Mortimer” (1904). She has a sure
touch, and her narrative moves rapidly.
But we have already exceeded the limits of our space. The work of
Margaret Sherwood, William A. White, Brand Whitlock, Will Payne,
Meredith Nicholson, George Barr McCutcheon, Jesse Lynch Williams, David
Graham Phillips, Mary R. Shipman Andrews, James B. Connolly, Nelson
Lloyd, George Cary Eggleston, William N. Harben, Justus Miles Forman,
and many others, excellent as much of it is, can only be referred to
summarily. The great number of promising writers of to-day is a matter
of congratulation.
=Retrospect and Conclusion.=--We have thus traced the American novel
from its first crude beginnings through a little more than a century of
healthy and constant growth. It took the American novelist some three
or four decades to learn to stand on his own feet; since he has learned
to walk he has required very little assistance from abroad. More and
more the possibilities of American life have attracted the writers of
prose fiction. In the earlier decades of the last century, as was the
case in Europe, the romance was the only fiction in demand; and the
romance has ever been the favourite of many readers who maintain that
the chief function of literature is to give reality through the alembic
of the imagination. Perhaps the creed of romanticism has never been
better put than by Mr. Julian Hawthorne:
The value of fiction lies in the fact that it can give us what
actual existence cannot; that it can resume in a chapter the
conclusions of a lifetime; that it can omit the trivial, the vague,
the redundant, and select the significant, the forcible, and the
characteristic; that it can satisfy expectation, expose error, and
vindicate human nature. Life, as we experience it, is too vast, its
relations are too complicated, its orbit too comprehensive, ever
to give us the impression of individual completeness and justice;
but the intuition of these things, though denied to sense, is
granted to faith, and we are authorised to embody that interior
conviction in romance.... And stories of imagination are truer
than transcripts of fact, because they include or postulate these,
and give a picture not only of the earth beneath our feet, but of
the sky above us, of the hope and freshness of the morning, of the
mystery and magic of the night. They draw the complete circle,
instead of mistrustfully confining themselves to the lower arc.[20]
Notwithstanding the attractiveness of this artistic creed, the ranks
of the out-and-out romancers have gradually thinned, as we have seen.
Professor Boyesen believed that Bret Harte was the last of these.
Slowly the realists, led by Howells and James, have gained ground, and
for the last twenty years have almost steadily held the field. Of late,
indeed, there have been some signs of a reaction; but it has as yet
taken no very pronounced form.
A necessary concomitant of this tendency toward realism has been an
increase in the number of “novels of the soil.” Writers have drawn
what they knew best: Miss Woolson, the Lake region; Cable, Creole
New Orleans; Ella Higginson and Emma Wolf, the Pacific coast; Allen,
Kentucky; Miss Murfree, Tennessee; Fawcett and Bunner, New York;
Henry B. Fuller and Miss Wyatt, Chicago; Miss Jewett and Mrs. Wilkins
Freeman, New England. One reason why the “great American novel” has
not yet been written is the very bigness of the country. No great
personality has yet risen who can combine all the elements of our
vast modern life into one harmonious structure. Meanwhile we have had
most of the various sections of our country described in fiction by
skilful hands. Types of a life that is passing away have been caught
and preserved in a fiction which, though assuredly not immortal, is
destined, we believe, to a long life.
Our critics have justly complained, however, of the limited range
of our novelists. They are timid. They are content to paint a small
canvas. They do not rise to great conceptions. They do not probe
life to its depths; neither do they rise to the height of all its
grandeur. This is, of course, only another way of saying that we have
no supremely great novelists. But doubtless the mediocrity of our
fiction is partly due to the disastrous effect of commercialism and
professionalism on the novelist’s trade; though Mr. Whibley’s account
of this (_Blackwood’s_, March, 1908) is exaggerated. Certainly our
writers must be less eager for immediate and substantial rewards.
_Poeta nascitur, non fit_; too many “made” writers are pouring out
fiction to-day.
Our fiction possesses one characteristic which has often been commented
upon--a general excellence of moral atmosphere. There is little
American fiction that must be kept from the curious Young Person.
Some critics allege that the obligation to write what anyone may be
permitted to read has prevented American novelists from discussing
those darker problems of sex-relations which confront us, and which
should find expression in a literature adequately reflecting our
intellectual and moral life; that missing any rigorous attack on these
problems they find our fiction tame, insipid, wanting in vitality.
But such an opinion carries with it its own condemnation. If our
fiction lacks vitality, it is probably from other causes; at any rate
Americans are generally content to leave matters of moral pathology
to their moral surgeons, whose diagnoses and discussions are not
expected to circulate promiscuously; and it is not likely that our
novelists will consent to defile their pages for the sake of securing
comprehensiveness in their pictures of life.
The short story has been brought by American writers to a high degree
of perfection. Irving was its American father; and in the hands of
Hawthorne, Poe, Fitz-James O’Brien, Edward Everett Hale, Miss Woolson,
Brander Matthews, Miss Jewett, Stockton, Page, Mark Twain, Mrs.
Freeman, and many others, it has become a highly flexible instrument,
capable of subtle adaptations. The limitations of range and environment
have made for great delicacy and precision in the minute portraits and
the _genres_ to be found in large numbers throughout our short stories.
Yet notwithstanding the increase in the number and the advance in
quality of our short stories, the novel continues as popular as ever.
The immense vogue of the novel in America has been commented upon many
times. The “best sellers” are almost always novels; and so many novels
of more than average excellence are produced every year that many
really superior stories do not get the immediate hearing, at least,
which they deserve. That this demand for novels will continue unabated
for some time is altogether likely. That another form of literature
will soon take its place is quite improbable.
Apparently we have no great living poets; for various reasons we have
no dramatists of note; of novelists who are at least possibilities, we
have several.
What will be the type of the American novel of the future? Probably
it is rash to make any prediction; but one may venture to believe
that the prevailing attitude of our future novelists will be that of
a sane and optimistic realism. The morbid books like “The Jungle” do
not wear well; and, while such books may have their use in promoting
needed reforms, they do not constitute additions to literature and can,
therefore, secure no permanent place. The pleasant paths of romance
will always tempt bold and imaginative writers; but they will be more
than ever restrained by the demand of enlightened readers that they
shall not wander far from the probable, and shall present, clear and
undistorted, the best there is in the actual present. That there are
immense possibilities in the varied and complex life of to-day, few
will doubt; that the great artists are to appear who will make the most
of these opportunities we may assume with confidence.
III. THE POETS
=English Influence on American Poetry.=--If we accept the popular
belief, and identify poets with makers of verse, it must be allowed
that American poetry at its best--in the nineteenth century--is in a
peculiar sense unoriginal and derivative. To be derivative, to have
a traceable pedigree, may, indeed, be no disadvantage, either for a
national or an individual genius. In their way, all modern literatures
are derivative and unoriginal; not merely influenced by each other,
but ultimately dependent for the sources of their inspiration upon the
basal civilisations of Palestine and Greece. “We are all Greeks,” said
Shelley. Milton might have said, “We are all Hebrews.” And our best
American poets might have added, “_We_ are all Englishmen.” Particular
scenes on this continent, and the vast and ever growing extent of our
territory, have both left their impress on our poets during the last
five generations; they have touched the poetry of ten or twelve decades
here and there with the undeniable stamp of reality, and given it now
and then a largeness of range and freedom of atmosphere very proper
to a nation whose sense of geography has been so elastic. Yet one can
hardly say that our natural scenery has ever been really incarnate
in our literature as a whole, or that a pervasive national spirit,
a spirit at once large and precise, has entered fundamentally into
our verse. What has been most effectual in our literature has been
closely imitative, has followed at a little distance, yet step for
step, the development of the English literature from which it sprang.
This continuous imitation, now more superficial, now more indirect
and elusive, has been the mainspring of our poetry even more than our
prose, during the century just gone by.
American poetry, it is true, has probably been more plastic and mobile
in its outer form than American prose, has been less steadily patterned
after those literary standards in England which were bequeathed by the
eighteenth century. The prose style of Irving betrays its descent from
the essays of Addison; the style of Franklin was developed through
conscious and painstaking emulation of the same models. Even fairly
late in the eighteen hundreds, when perhaps only a trained ear can
detect the lingering echoes of Pope and his school in our verse, the
“Autocrat” of Wendell Holmes still retains an accent and a flavour from
eighteenth-century, Ciceronian eloquence. No doubt the age of Pope
and Johnson survived by many vestiges much longer in English prose
than in English verse, for its habits of thought were more or less
suited to argument and exposition in every time. Yet in the history
of American letters it is easier to find parallels to Wordsworth and
Shelley than to duplicate the prose rhapsodies--characteristic in
nineteenth-century Europe--of De Quincey and Ruskin. To the transition
in English literature that was marked by the appearance of “Lyrical
Ballads” in 1798 our poetry was, in the main, more quickly responsive
than our prose. None the less our prose, more conservative though it
has been, less changeful in its manner of expression, has struck its
roots far more deeply into our national being; and our verse, like the
other fine arts, is still an exotic.
For our lack of a national art, a national poetry, a superficial reason
is often assigned: in the conditions of a new country, in the struggle
for existence, in the development of agriculture and commerce, in the
assimilation of foreign races, there has been very little time for
the nourishment of letters, very little of that leisure which the
Greeks called _scholé_, and which is indispensable for a productive
scholarship and for the flourishing of imagination. Yet we have had,
or have taken, sufficient leisure to write and publish an immense
amount of verse, judged merely by its bulk. Scarcely an American author
can be mentioned in the nineteenth century that did not try his hand
at metrical composition. The truth is, rather, that we have seldom
approached the art of poetry with enough seriousness; that, having
rebelled against the Puritan’s unkindly conception of life, we have
nevertheless to some extent acquiesced in his belittling estimate
of imaginative art; that we have failed to recognise in the poet a
necessary servant of the commonwealth, a leader worthy of a high and
severe training. Our versifiers have rushed into print before they
were ripe, and they have praised each other’s work too easily; while
the standards set by the public taste have been readily met when the
rhymers succeeded in being “patriotic.” Real patriotism demands such an
admission.
Not that our poets have been wholly without a philosophy of criticism;
though it is significant that the most subtle and sympathetic
understanding of the poetic temperament, of its function as well
as its perils, is to be found, not in the writings of any maker of
verses but in those of a novelist, Hawthorne--for example, in “The
House of Seven Gables” and “The Great Stone Face.” Yet Bryant read,
meditated, and wrote upon the art of poetry; Poe thought somewhat, if
not deeply, upon it; Lanier made a worthy contribution to the science
of meter; Longfellow was conversant with the literature of criticism;
and Emerson’s stimulating essay on “The Poet,” while it may not
have been the sort of medicine that our men of letters most needed,
has doubtless exerted a wholesome influence. In Poe’s day, several
magazines were discussing the principles of imaginative composition.
However, an “Art of Poetry” like Timrod’s (published in _The Atlantic
Monthly_ for September, 1905) could lie for forty years in manuscript,
without exciting any strong suspicion of its value; and in the long run
there has been an amazing disproportion between the slender thread of
fundamental tradition and sound critical theory on the one hand, and
the swollen and rapid stream of naïve, uncultivated verse, gathering
from every quarter, on the other. Whatever English poets furnished the
models, the imitation was largely on the surface. First Pope and his
successors in England, then Wordsworth and Coleridge, then Shelley and
Keats, and Scott and Bryon, and subsequently Tennyson,--all had in turn
their American devotees. But there seems to have been relatively little
understanding like that of Bryant and Timrod for the conscious theory
underlying the “experiments” in “Lyrical Ballads,” or for the ideal
demands which Shelley laid upon poetry and poets; nor did cisatlantic
readers of Lord Byron much concern themselves about that Longinus whom
he studied “o’er a bottle,” or for the structural frame upon which was
reared Tennyson’s “Palace of Art.”
=Characteristics of the Period.=--Of course in the following pages
we shall deal as briefly as possible with those American poets in
the last century who are touched to any great extent by strictures
like these; for a history of literature is bound to treat as far as
may be of writers that have made a wise use of tradition, and whose
native insight has enabled them to train their genius in accordance
with universal canons of art, and with a due appreciation of masterly
technique. Meanwhile we may attempt to summarise the characteristics
of the poetical era under consideration, and, in particular, of
the earlier rather than the latter half of that era. The nearer we
advance toward our own day, the wiser it is to refrain from general
characterisation.
1. The relation between English literature and American in the initial
twenty or thirty years of the last century has already been suggested.
Aside from that, or very often through that, the influence of Rousseau
was paramount. The doctrine that upheld the innocence of “man in a
state of nature,” and maintained the equality of all individuals,
and the feeling, half pantheistic, for an external nature opposed to
civilisation, since they entered into the vital tissue of our national
thought,--and though they are at bottom contrary to science and all
demonstrable experience--are among the very conditions, so to speak,
of much of our poetry. From these sources, for example, it came about
that while in actual practice we despised and maltreated that “natural
man” the cruel Indian, we idealised him in poetical effusions; just as
Fenimore Cooper, treading in the footsteps of Chateaubriand, idealised
him in prose.
2. Our earlier poets, that is, immediately after the Revolution, but
again, and especially, after the War of 1812 had confirmed our sense
of national solidarity, are much given to the utterance of their
patriotism; albeit only a few out of many more or less pretentious or
tasteful efforts have survived. Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner” (1814),
conceived at the close of the second war, antedates “The American Flag”
(1819) of Drake by but five years; these two, with Hopkinson’s “Hail
Columbia” (1798), and “America” (1832), the well-known hymn by S. F.
Smith, whatever their relative or absolute merits as literature, remain
our most cherished national poems.
3. However frequent or insistent the note of patriotism, the general
temper of American poets has not been strongly optimistic. As one
glances over a long list of the subjects chosen for treatment, a
leaning toward the more sombre and melancholy elements and aspects
of life becomes more and more apparent. Nor is this leaning confined
to the multitude. Exceptions like Walt Whitman to the contrary
notwithstanding, it is characteristic, in the main, of the leaders,
whenever they escape from common or inherited themes, and give rein
to their own personalities. That joy which is the well-spring of
Wordsworth’s vitality is greatly diminished in even his nearest
American counterpart, Bryant; assuredly it is not akin to the subdued
sadness of Longfellow, though this be not strictly “akin to pain.”
4. On the other hand, the noblest American poetry has not been tragic.
Tragedy and serious epic have been attempted, but, as in the case of
Dwight, Barlow, and so many others, largely as academic exercitations,
savouring of the desk and the library. With our national life they have
had no essential connection. A central motive in our history like the
death of Lincoln still awaits the imagination of a master-dramatist.
5. Though few have devoted their entire lives to it, most of our poets
have begun the profession betimes, conceiving very often in haste,
and publishing in their immaturity. The painful advice of Horace has
not been to our liking. With the examples of Milton, Wordsworth, and
Tennyson continually before us, we have yet failed to profit by
their insistence upon generous preparation, meticulous technique, and
laborious delay in publication. We have realised the brevity of life
more fully than the length of art.
6. Our respect for the “practical” and for “common sense” is allied to
a fondness shown in our poetry for common, everyday subjects. Here,
of course, we have succeeded better in the comic than in the serious
vein. To treat of homely topics so as to invest their essential dignity
with the light of imagination--in painting the world about us, to “add
the gleam”--was the task set for himself by an English mystic. It
is a dangerous trade for men whose talk is of oxen. Homely minds on
homely matters are prone to slip into the trivial or the pathetic. Even
Longfellow cannot be freed from the charge of too much attention to the
obvious commonplace, and, as a versifier at least, of too much love for
the merely sentimental. For adequate imaginative handling of themes
that are serious, complete, and of sufficient magnitude to produce the
loftier effects of great literary art, we are in general forced to go
to our best prose fiction.
7. So long as Puritan ideals, however modified and softened, continued
to dominate any considerable part of American education, that is, up
to a point somewhere within the past twenty-five years, our poetry
has tended to be obviously didactic. Not only clerical but secular
poets have seemed to regard themselves as direct teachers of morality.
In satirical writers,--Freneau, Halleck,--or in literature that by
virtue of its kind is pietistic, such a tendency is altogether normal
and effective. But in supposedly imaginative poems such as “The
Vision of Sir Launfal,” though the basic moral order of the universe
doubtless ought to be inherent, it just as certainly ought to contrive
its own effect, without the adventitious aid of sermonising. To the
present writer, much of the best--not of course the very best--in
American poetry loses in ethical as well as æsthetic value through
the intrusion of argument and exhortation on the subject of conduct
or belief. The finest work of Holmes, for instance, “The Chambered
Nautilus,” may be thought to lose in this way. The spirit of the
United States is a prosaic spirit, hence our verse, when it is at all
substantial, rarely lacks some element or other from the style of the
forensic orator.
8. On the other hand, since we can make no pretence to the possession
of a tragic drama, and none to a truly national epic, it may safely
be affirmed that our poetry has risen to its greatest heights in
meditative and religious lyric; in meditative verse on nature, that
is, such “nature-poetry” as assumes the Divine immanence throughout
the world of objective reality--in Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”; and in the
religious lyric, that is, in a few of our hymns.
_The Earlier Poets._--We commence this survey of American poetry at
the date to which the sections adapted from Tyler have conducted the
literature as a whole, namely, the year 1784. The chief poets of the
Revolutionary period, Barlow, Dwight, Trumbull, and Freneau, all lived
well on into the next century, Barlow, in fact, being the only one of
these who did not survive the War of 1812.
In Barlow’s day, heroics were the fashion. His _magnum opus_, a rhymed
epic on the discovery of America, had already taken shape in manuscript
as early as 1781; in 1787 it appeared as “The Vision of Columbus”; by
1807 it had grown into the ponderous “Columbiad.” It is an uninspired,
pseudo-classical narrative, schematically and metrically correct, but
organically lifeless, full of the “printer’s devil personification” so
characteristic of its time. With gratuitous industry, as it supplies
all the lineage of personified abstractions like “Discord,” so it
begins the history of America at Creation, fetches the story down
through colonial times to the Revolution, and includes in its sweep a
glance at events yet to come. Similarly in his mock-heroic, “The Hasty
Pudding” (1793), which is touched with fancy and is in every way more
attractive than his “Columbiad,” Barlow commences with the growth and
harvesting of the maize which is to furnish the flour.