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This book often uses periods where we would expect to see
commas.
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were printed with a long dash (1831----) and that style has
been retained here.
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of each chapter, and usually appeared at the bottom of the
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footnote. In this eBook, those Footnote's numbers are: 86,
100, 104, 114, 118, 157, and 163.
A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870
by
FRED LEWIS PATTEE
Professor of the English Language and Literature in the Pennsylvania
State College. Author of "A History of American Literature,"
"The Poems of Philip Freneau," "The Foundations of
English Literature," etc.
[Illustration]
D. Appleton-Century Company
Incorporated
New York London
Copyright, 1915, by
The Century Co.
All Rights Reserved, Including the
Right to Reproduce This Book, or
Portions Thereof, in Any Form.
Printed in U. S. A.
TO DARTMOUTH COLLEGE
AND THE DARTMOUTH MEN
OF THE EIGHTIES, STUDENTS
AND PROFESSORS,
AMONG WHOM I FIRST
AWOKE TO THE MEANING
OF LITERATURE AND OF
LIFE, THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED
WITH FULL HEART.
PREFACE
American literature in the larger sense of the term began with Irving,
and, if we count _The Sketch Book_ as the beginning, the centennial
year of its birth is yet four years hence. It has been a custom,
especially among the writers of text-books, to divide this century
into periods, and all have agreed at one point: in the mid-thirties
undoubtedly there began a new and distinct literary movement. The names
given to this new age, which corresponded in a general way with the
Victorian Era in England, have been various. It has been called the Age
of Emerson, the Transcendental Period, the National Period, the Central
Period. National it certainly was not, but among the other names
there is little choice. Just as with the Victorian Era in England,
not much has been said as to when the period ended. There has been no
official closing, though it has been long evident that all the forces
that brought it about have long since expended themselves and that a
distinctively new period has not only begun but has already quite run
its course.
It has been our object to determine this new period and to study its
distinguishing characteristics. We have divided the literary history of
the century into three periods, denominating them as the Knickerbocker
Period, the New England Period, and the National Period, and we have
made the last to begin shortly after the close of the Civil War with
those new forces and new ideals and broadened views that grew out of
that mighty struggle.
The field is a new one: no other book and no chapter of a book has ever
attempted to handle it as a unit. It is an important one: it is our
first really national period, all-American, autochthonic. It was not
until after the war that our writers ceased to imitate and looked to
their own land for material and inspiration. The amount of its literary
product has been amazing. There have been single years in which have
been turned out more volumes than were produced during all of the
Knickerbocker Period. The quality of this output has been uniformly
high. In 1902 a writer in _Harper's Weekly_ while reviewing a book by
Stockton dared even to say: "He belonged to that great period between
1870 and 1890 which is as yet the greatest in our literary history,
whatever the greatness of any future time may be." The statement is
strong, but it is true. Despite Lowell's statement, it was not until
after the Civil War that America achieved in any degree her literary
independence. One can say of the period what one may not say of earlier
periods, that the great mass of its writings could have been produced
nowhere else but in the United States. They are redolent of the new
spirit of America: they are American literature.
In our study of this new national period we have considered only those
authors who did their first distinctive work before 1892. Of that large
group of writers born after the beginning of the period and borne into
their work by forces that had little connection with the great primal
impulses that came from the Civil War and the expansion period that
followed, we have said nothing. We have given the names of a few of
them at the close of chapter 17, but their work does not concern our
study. We have limited ourselves also by centering our attention upon
the three literary forms, poetry, fiction, and the essay. History we
have neglected largely for the reasons given at the opening of chapter
18, and the drama for the reason that before 1892 there was produced no
American drama of any literary value.
We would express here our thanks to the many librarians and assistants
who have cooperated toward the making of the book possible, and
especially would we tender our thanks to Professor R. W. Conover of the
Kansas Agricultural College who helped to prepare the index.
F. L. P.
State College, Pennsylvania,
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE SECOND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 3
II THE LAUGHTER OF THE WEST 25
III MARK TWAIN 45
IV BRET HARTE 63
V THE DISCOVERY OF PIKE COUNTY 83
VI JOAQUIN MILLER 99
VII THE TRANSITION POETS 116
VIII RISE OF THE NATURE WRITERS 137
IX WALT WHITMAN 163
X THE CLASSICAL REACTION 186
XI RECORDERS OF THE NEW ENGLAND DECLINE 220
XII THE NEW ROMANCE 244
XIII LATER POETS OF THE SOUTH 271
XIV THE ERA OF SOUTHERN THEMES AND WRITERS 294
XV THE LATER POETS 321
XVI THE TRIUMPH OF THE SHORT STORY 355
XVII SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION 385
XVIII THE ESSAYISTS 416
INDEX 441
A HISTORY OF
AMERICAN LITERATURE
SINCE 1870
A HISTORY OF
AMERICAN LITERATURE
SINCE 1870
CHAPTER I
THE SECOND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA
I
We are beginning to realize that the Civil War marks a dividing line in
American history as sharp and definitive as that burned across French
history by the Revolution. That the South had been vastly affected
by the war was manifest from the first. The widespread destruction
of property, the collapse of the labor system, and the fall of the
social regime founded on negro slavery, had been so dramatic and so
revolutionary in their results that they had created everywhere a
feeling that the ultimate effects of the war were confined to the
conquered territory. Grady's phrase, "the new South," and later the
phrase, "the end of an era," passing everywhere current, served to
strengthen the impression. That the North had been equally affected,
that there also an old regime had perished and a new era been
inaugurated, was not so quickly realized. The change there had been
undramatic; it had been devoid of all those picturesque accompaniments
that had been so romantic and even sensational in the South; but with
the perspective of half a century we can see now that it had been no
less thoroughgoing and revolutionary.
The first effect of the war had come from the sudden shifting of vast
numbers of the population from a position of productiveness to one of
dependence. A people who knew only peace and who were totally untrained
even in the idea of war were called upon suddenly to furnish one of
the largest armies of modern times and to fight to an end the most
bitterly contested conflict of a century. First and last, upwards
of two millions of men, the most of them citizen volunteers, drawn
all of them from the most efficient productive class, were mustered
into the federal service alone. It changed in a moment the entire
equilibrium of American industrial life. This great unproductive army
had to be fed and clothed and armed and kept in an enormously wasteful
occupation. But the farms and the mills and the great transportation
systems had been drained of laborers to supply men for the regiments.
The wheatfields had no harvesters; the Mississippi the great commercial
outlet of the West, had been closed by the war, and the railroads were
insufficient to handle the burden.
The grappling with this mighty problem wrought a change in the North
that was a revolution in itself. The lack of laborers in the harvest
fields of the Middle West called for machinery, and the reaper and
the mowing machine for the first time sprang into widespread use; the
strain upon the railroads brought increased energy and efficiency and
capital to bear upon the problem of transportation, and it was swiftly
solved. Great meat-packing houses arose to meet the new conditions;
shoes had to be sent to the front in enormous numbers and to produce
them a new and marvelous machine was brought into use; clothing in
hitherto unheard-of quantities must be manufactured and sent speedily,
and to make it Howe's sewing machine was evolved. It was a period of
giant tasks thrust suddenly upon a people seemingly unprepared. The
vision of the country became all at once enlarged. Companies were
organized for colossal undertakings. Values and wealth arose by leaps
and bounds. Nothing seemed impossible.
The war educated America. It educated first the millions of men who
were enrolled in the armies. With few exceptions the soldiers were
boys who had never before left their native neighborhoods. From the
provincial little round of the farm or the shop, all in a moment they
plunged into regions that to them were veritable foreign lands to
live in a world of excitement and stress, with ever-shifting scenes
and ever-deepening responsibilities, for three and four and even five
years. Whole armies of young men came from the remote hills of New
England. Massachusetts alone sent 159,000. The diffident country lad
was trained harshly in the roughest of classrooms. He was forced to
measure himself with men.
The whole nation was in the classroom of war. The imperious call
for leaders of every grade and in all ranks of activity developed
everywhere out of raw material captains of men, engineers, organizers,
business directors, financiers, inventors, directors of activities,
on a scale before undreamed of in America. It was a college course
in which were developed efficiency and self-reliance and wideness
of vision and courage and restless activity, and it produced a most
remarkable generation of men.
The armies in the field and those other armies that handled the
railroads and the mills and the finances and supplies, were sons all of
them of a race that had been doubly picked in the generations before,
for only the bravest and most virile in body and soul had dared to
break from their old-world surroundings and plunge into the untracked
West, and only the fittest of these had survived the rigors of pioneer
days. And the war schooled this remnant and widened their vision and
ground out of them the provincialism that had held them so long to
narrow horizons. It was not until 1865 that Emerson could write, "We
shall not again disparage America now we have seen what men it will
bear." But the chief difference between these men and the early men
that had so filled him with apprehension in the thirties and the
forties, was in the schooling which had come from the five years of
tension when the very life of the nation was in danger.
The disbanding of the armies was followed by a period of restlessness
such as America had never before known. The whole population was
restless. "War," says Emerson, "passes the power of all chemical
solvents, breaking up the old adhesions and allowing the atoms of
society to take a new order." The war had set in motion mighty forces
that did not stop when peace was declared. Men who had been trained
by the war for the organizing and directing of vast activities turned
quickly to new fields of effort. The railroads, which had been vastly
enlarged and enriched by the war, pushed everywhere now with marvelous
rapidity; great industries, like the new oil industry, sprang into
wealth and power. The West, lying vast and unbroken almost from the
farther bank of the Mississippi, burst into eager life, and the tide
of migration which even before the war had turned strongly toward
this empire of the plains quickly became a flood. Railroads were
pushed along the wild trails and over the Rocky Mountains. The first
transcontinental road was completed in 1868. The great buffalo herds
were exterminated in the late sixties and early seventies; millions of
acres of rich land were preempted and turned over to agriculture; the
greatest wheat and corn belts the world has ever known were brought
into production almost in a moment; bridges were flung over rivers
and canyons; vast cities of the plain arose as by magic. Everywhere
a new thrill was in the air. The Civil War had shaken America into
eager, restless life. Mark Twain, who was a part of it all, could say
in later days: "The eight years in America from 1860 to 1868 uprooted
institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people,
transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so
profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot
be measured short of two or three generations."[1]
To-day we can begin to see the effect which the mighty exodus that
followed the war had upon the East. It was little short of revolution.
New England had taken the leading place in precipitating the struggle
between the States, and she had done it for conscience' sake, and now,
though she had won all she had asked, by a curious turn of fate she
was repaid for her moral stand by the loss of her leadership and later
almost of her identity, for the westward movement that followed the war
was in New England a veritable exodus. There had always been emigration
from the older States and it had gradually increased during the gold
rush period and the Kansas-Nebraska excitement, but the tide had never
been large enough to excite apprehension. Now, however, all in a moment
the stream became a torrent which took away, as does all emigration
from older lands, the most active and fearless and progressive spirits.
Whole districts of farming land were deserted with all their buildings
and improvements. New Hampshire in 1860 had a population of 326,073;
in 1870 the population had shrunk to 318,300, and that despite the
fact that all the cities and manufacturing towns in the State had
grown greatly during the ten years, the increase consisting almost
wholly of foreigners. According to Sanborn, "more than a million
acres cultivated in 1850 had gone back to pasturage and woodland in
1900."[2] All growth since the war has been confined to the cities and
the larger manufacturing towns, and this growth and the supplying of
the deficit caused by the emigration of the old stock have come from an
ever-increasing influx of foreigners. Boston has all but lost its old
identity. In Massachusetts in 1900 nearly one-half of the population
was born of foreign parentage. New England in a single generation lost
its scepter of power in the North, and that scepter gradually has been
moving toward the new West.
II
But the change wrought by the war was far more than a rise of new
activities and a shifting of population. A totally new America grew
from the ashes of the great conflict. In 1860, North and South alike
were provincial and self-conscious. New York City was an enormously
overgrown village, and Boston and Philadelphia and Charleston were
almost as individual and as unlike one another as they had been in the
days of the Revolution. There had been nothing to fuse the sections
together and to bring them to a common vision. The drama of the
settlement had been fierce and piteous, but it had been a great series
of local episodes. The Revolution had not been a melting pot that
could fuse all the sections into a unity. The war which had begun in
New England had drifted southward and each battle, especially toward
the end, had been largely a local affair. Until 1860, there had been
no passion fierce enough to stir to the very center of their lives all
of the people, to melt them into a homogeneous mass, and to pour them
forth into the mold of a new individual soul among the nations. The
emphasis after 1870 was not upon the State but upon the _Nation_. As
early as 1867 a writer in the _North American Review_ declared that,
"The influence of our recent war in developing the 'National Sentiment'
of the people can hardly be overestimated."[3] Now there came national
banks, national securities, a national railroad, a national college
system,--everywhere a widening horizon. Provincialism was dying in
every part of the land.
Until 1860, America had been full of the discordant individuality of
youth. Its characteristics, all of them, had been characteristics of
that turbulent, unsettled period before character had hardened into its
final form. From 1820 to 1860 the nation was adolescent. In everything
at least that concerned its intellectual life it was imitative and
dependent. It was in its awkward era, and like every youth was uncouth
and sensitive and self-conscious. It asked eagerly of every foreign
visitor, "And what do you think of us?" and when the answer, as in
the case of Moore or Marryat or Dickens, was critical, it flew into a
passion. It was sentimental to silliness. As late as 1875 the editor
of _Scribner's_ declared that a large number of all the manuscripts
submitted to publishing houses and periodicals were declined because of
their sentimentality, and most of the published literature of the time,
he added, has "a vast deal of sentimentality sugared through it." That
was in 1875; a few years before that date Griswold had published his
_Female Poets of America_, and there had flourished the _Token_, the
_Forget-Me-Not_, and the _Amaranth_. Adolescence is always sad:
And I think as I sit alone,
While the night wind is falling around,
Of a cold white gleaming stone
And a long, lone, grassy mound.
The age had sighed and wept over _Charlotte Temple_, a romance which
went through edition after edition, and which, according to Higginson,
had a greater number of readers even in 1870 than any single one of the
Waverley Novels.
But even as it sighed over its _Charlotte Temple_ and its _Rosebud_
and its _Lamplighter_, it longed for better things. It had caught a
glimpse, through Irving and Willis and Longfellow and others, of the
culture of older lands. America had entered its first reading age. In
1844 Emerson spoke of "our immense reading and that reading chiefly
confined to the productions of the English press." In its eagerness
for culture it enlarged its area of books and absorbed edition after
edition of translations from the German and Spanish and French. It
established everywhere the lyceum, and for a generation America sat
like an eager school-girl at the feet of masters--Emerson and Beecher
and Taylor and Curtis and Phillips and Gough.
But adolescent youth is the period, too, of spiritual awakenings, of
religious strugglings, and of the questioning and testing of all
that is established. For a period America doubted all things. It read
dangerous and unusual books--Fourier, St. Simon, Swedenborg, Jouffroy,
Cousin. It challenged the dogmas of the Church. It worked over for
itself all the fundamentals of religion. A reviewer in the first volume
of _Scribner's_ remarks of the fall books that, as usual, theology has
the best of it. "Our poets write theology, our novels are theological
... even our statesmen cannot write without treating theology."[4] The
forties and fifties struggled with sensitive conscience over the great
problems of right and wrong, of altruism and selfish ambition. The age
was full of dreams; it longed to right the wrongs of the weak and the
oppressed; to go forth as champions of freedom and abstract right; and
at last it fought it out with agony and sweat of blood in the midnight
when the stars had hid themselves seemingly forever.
The Civil War was the _Sturm und Drang_ of adolescent America, the
Gethsemane through which every earnest young life must pass ere he find
his soul. He fails to understand the spirit of our land who misses this
great fact: America discovered itself while fighting with itself in a
struggle for things that are not material at all, but are spiritual and
eternal. The difference between the America of 1850 and that of 1870
is the difference between the youth of sixteen and the man of thirty.
Before the war the bands of America had played "Annie Laurie" and
"Drink to Me only with Thine Eyes"; after the war they played "Rally
round the Flag" and "Mine Eyes have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the
Lord."
III
The effect of the war upon American literature has been variously
estimated. Stedman has been quoted often: "The Civil War was a general
absorbent at the crisis when a second group of poets began to form. The
conflict not only checked the rise of a new school, but was followed by
a time of languor in which the songs of Apollo seemed trivial to those
who had listened to the shout of Mars."[5] It was Richardson's opinion
that "little that was notable was added to the literature of the
country by the Civil War of 1861.... The creative powers of our best
authors seemed somewhat benumbed, though books and readers multiplied
between 1861 and 1865."[6] And Greenough White dismisses the matter
with the remark that "after the war, Bryant, Longfellow, and Taylor,
as if their power of original production was exhausted, turned to
translation."[7]
All this lacks perspective. Stedman views the matter from the true
mid-century standpoint. Poetry to Stedman and Stoddard and Hayne and
Aldrich and Taylor was an esoteric, beautiful thing to be worshiped
and followed for itself alone like a goddess, a being from another
sphere than ours, to devote one's soul to, "like the lady of Shalott,"
to quote Stevenson, "peering into a mirror with her back turned on all
the bustle and glamour of reality." Keats had been the father of this
group of poets which had been broken in upon rudely by the war, and
it had been the message of Keats that life with its wretchedness and
commonplaceness and struggle was to be escaped from by means of Poesy:
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy.
But poetry is the voice of life; it is not an avenue by which to escape
from life's problems. The poet springs from his times and voices his
era because he must. If his era smothers him, then so much the less
poet he. No war can check the rise of a new school of poets if the soul
of that new age is one to be expressed in poetry.
What Stedman and the others failed to see was the new American soul
which had been created by the war and which the new school, trained in
the old conceptions of poetry, was powerless to voice. If the creative
powers of the leading authors were numbed, if Bryant and Longfellow and
Taylor felt that their power of original production was exhausted and
so turned to translation, it was because they felt themselves powerless
to take wing in the new atmosphere.
The North before the war had been aristocratic in its intellectual
life, just as the South had been aristocratic in its social regime.
Literature and oratory and scholarship had been accomplishments of
the few. J. G. Holland estimated in 1870 that the lecturers in the
widespread lyceum system when it was at its highest point, "those men
who made the platform popular and useful and apparently indispensable,
did not number more than twenty-five." The whole New England period
was dominated by a handful of men. The Saturday Club, which contained
the most of them, had, according to Barrett Wendell, twenty-six
members "all typical Boston gentlemen of the Renaissance." Howells
characterizes it as a "real aristocracy of intellect. To say Prescott,
Motley, Parkman, Lowell, Norton, Higginson, Dana, Emerson, Channing,
was to say patrician in the truest and often the best sense, if not the
largest." It is significant that these were all Harvard men. The period
was dominated by college men. In addition to the names mentioned by
Howells, there might be added from the New England colleges, Webster,
Ticknor, Everett, Bancroft, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, Parker,
Clarke, Phillips, Sumner, Thoreau, Parsons, and Hale. Excepting Poe,
who for a time was a student at the University of Virginia and at West
Point, and Whittier, who was self-educated, and two women, Margaret
Fuller and Mrs. Stowe, who lived in the period when colleges were
open only for men, the list contains all the leading authors of the
mid-period in America.
With few exceptions these names come from what Holmes denominates "the
Brahmin caste of New England," a term which he uses to distinguish
them from what he called "the homespun class"--"a few chosen families
against the great multitude." "Their family names are always on
some college catalogue or other." From 1830 to 1870 the creation of
literature was very little in the hands of the masses; it was in the
hands of these scholars, of this small and provincial "aristocracy of
intellect." Holmes, who gloried in the fact that he lived in Boston,
"the hub of the universe," on Beacon Street, "the sunny street that
holds the sifted few," may be taken as a type of this aristocracy.
It was a period of the limited circle of producers, and of mutual
admiration within the circumference of that circle. Each member of
the group took himself with great seriousness and was taken at his
own valuation by the others. When the new democratic, after-the-war
America, in the person of Mark Twain, came into the circle and in the
true Western style made free with sacred personalities, he was received
with frozen silence.
The school, on the whole, stood aloof from the civil and religious
activities of its period. With the exception of Whittier, who was not
a Brahmin, the larger figures of the era took interest in the great
issues of their generation only when these issues had been forced into
the field of their emotions. They were bookish men, and they were prone
to look not into their hearts or into the heart of their epoch, but
into their libraries. In 1856, when America was smoldering with what
so soon was to burst out into a maelstrom of fire, Longfellow wrote
in his journal, "Dined with Agassiz to meet Emerson and others. I was
amused and annoyed to see how soon the conversation drifted off into
politics. It was not till after dinner in the library that we got upon
anything really interesting."[8] The houses of the Brahmins had only
eastern windows. The souls of the whole school lived in the old lands
of culture, and they visited these lands as often as they could, and,
returning, brought back whole libraries of books which they eagerly
translated. Even Lowell, the most democratic American of the group,
save Whittier, wrote from Paris in 1873, "In certain ways this side is
more agreeable to my tastes than the other." And again the next year
he wrote from Florence: "America is too busy, too troubled about many
things, and Martha is only good to make puddings."
Howells in his novel, _A Woman's Reason_, has given us a view of this
American worship of Europe during this period. Says Lord Rainford,
who has been only in Boston and Newport: "I find your people--your
best people, I suppose they are--very nice, very intelligent, very
pleasant--only talk about Europe. They talk about London, and about
Paris, and about Rome; there seems to be quite a passion for Italy;
but they don't seem interested in their own country. I can't make it
out.... They always seem to have been reading the _Fortnightly_, and
the _Saturday Review_, and the _Spectator_, and the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_, and the last French and English books. It's very odd."
Europe colors the whole epoch. Following Irving's _Sketch Book_,
a small library was written by eager souls to whom Europe was a
wonderland and a dream. Longfellow's _Outre Mer_ and _Hyperion_,
Tuckerman's _Italian Sketch Book_, Willis's _Pencillings by the Way_,
Cooper's _Gleanings in Europe_, Sanderson's _Sketches of Paris_,
Sprague's _Letters from Europe_, Colton's _Four Years in Great
Britain_, Taylor's _Views Afoot_, Bryant's _Letters of a Traveller_,
Curtis's _Nile Notes of a Howadji_, Greeley's _Glances at Europe_, Mrs.
Stowe's _Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands_, Norton's _Notes of Travel
and Study in Italy_, Hawthorne's _Our Old Home_, Calvert's _Scenes and
Thoughts in Europe_, and, after the war, Howells's _Venetian Life_, and
Hay's _Castilian Days_ are only the better-known books of the list.
"Our people," complained Emerson, "have their intellectual culture from
one country and their duties from another," and it was so until after
the Civil War had given to America a vision of her own self. _Innocents
Abroad_ was the first American book about Europe that stood squarely on
its own feet and told what it saw without sentimentality or romantic
colorings or yieldings to the conventional. After _Innocents Abroad_
there were no more rhapsodies of Europe.
America was a new land with a new message and new problems and a
new hope for mankind--a hope as great as that which had fired the
imagination of Europe during the years of the French Revolution, yet
American writers of the mid-century were content to look into their
books and echo worn old themes of other lands. The Holmes who in
his youth had written _Old Ironsides_ was content now with _vers de
societe_,
I'm a florist in verse, and what _would_ people say
If I came to a banquet without my bouquet?
And with the thrill and rush of a new nation all about him, Stoddard
could sit in his study turning out pretty Herrick-like trifles like
this:
Why are red roses red?
For roses once were white,
Because the loving nightingales
Sang on their thorns all night--
Sang till the blood they shed
Had dyed the roses red.
It was a period when both Europe and America were too much dominated
by what Boyesen called "the parlor poet," "who stands aloof from life,
retiring into the close-curtained privacy of his study to ponder upon
some abstract, bloodless, and sexless theme for the edification of a
_blase_, over-refined public with nerves that can no longer relish the
soul-stirring passions and emotions of a healthy and active humanity."
In Europe, the reaction from this type of work came with Millet, the
peasant painter of France, with Tolstoy and the Russian realists, with
Balzac and Flaubert in France, with Hardy in England, with Ibsen and
Bjornson in Norway, workers with whom art was life itself.
America especially had been given to softness and sentimentalism.
During the mid-century era, the period of Longfellow, the lusty new
nation, which was developing a new hope for all mankind, had asked for
bread and it had been given all too often "lucent syrops tinct with
cinnamon." The oratory had been eloquent, sometimes grandiloquent. The
prose, great areas of it, had been affected, embellished with a certain
florid youngmanishness, a honey-gathering of phrases even to the point
of bad taste, as when Lowell wrote of Milton: "A true Attic bee, he
made boot on every lip where there was a taste of truly classic honey."
It was the time when ornateness of figure and poeticalness of diction
were regarded as essentials of style.
To understand what the Civil War destroyed and what it created, at
least in the field of prose style, one should read the two orations
delivered at the dedication of the Gettysburg battle-field. Here was
the moment of transition between the old American literature and the
new. Everett, the eloquent voice of New England, correct, polished,
fervid, massing perfect periods to a climax, scholarly, sonorous of
diction, studied of movement, finished, left the platform after his
long effort, satisfied. The eyes of the few who could judge of oratory
as a finished work of art had been upon him and he had stood the test.
Then had come for a single moment the Man of the West, the plain man of
the people, retiring, ungainly, untrained in the smooth school of art,
voicing in simple words a simple message, wrung not from books but from
the depths of a soul deeply stirred, and now, fifty years later, the
oration of Everett can be found only by reference librarians, while the
message of Lincoln is declaimed by every school-boy.
The half-century since the war has stood for the rise of nationalism
and of populism, not in the narrower political meanings of these
words, but in the generic sense. The older group of writers had been
narrowly provincial. Hawthorne wrote to Bridge shortly before the war:
"At present we have no country.... The States are too various and too
extended to form really one country. New England is really as large a
lump of earth as my heart can take in."[9] The war shook America awake,
it destroyed sectionalism, and revealed the nation to itself. It was
satisfied no longer with theatrical effects without real feeling. After
the tremendous reality of the war, it demanded genuineness and the
truth of life. A new spirit--social, dramatic, intense--took the place
of the old dreaming and sentiment and sadness. The people had awakened.
The intellectual life of the nation no longer was to be in the hands of
the aristocratic, scholarly few. Even while the war was in progress a
bill had passed Congress appropriating vast areas of the public lands
for the establishment in every State of a college for the people "to
promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes
in the several pursuits and professions of life," and it is significant
that Lincoln, the first great President of the people, signed the bill.
IV
The chief output of the new era was in the form of realistic fiction.
America, shaken from narrow sectionalism and contemplation of Europe,
woke up and discovered America. In a kind of astonishment she wandered
from section to section of her own land, discovering everywhere
peoples and manners and languages that were as strange to her even as
foreign lands. Mark Twain and Harte and Miller opened to view the wild
regions and wilder society of early California and the Sierra Nevadas;
Eggleston pictured the primitive settlements of Indiana; Cable told
the romance of the Creoles and of the picturesque descendants of the
Acadians on the bayous of Louisiana; Page and Harris and F.H. Smith
and others caught a vision of the romance of the old South; Allen
told of Kentucky life; Miss French of the dwellers in the canebrakes
of Arkansas; and Miss Murfree of a strange people in the Great Smoky
Mountains of Tennessee. In twenty years every isolated neighborhood in
America had had its chronicler and photographer.
The spirit of the New America was realistic. There had been dreaming
and moonlight and mystery enough; now it wanted concrete reality.
"Give us the people as they actually are. Give us their talk as they
actually talk it," and the result was the age of dialect--dialect
poetry, dialect fiction, dialect even to coarseness and profanity.
The old school in the East stood aghast before what they termed this
"Neo-Americanism," this coarse "new literature of the people." Holland
in 1872 found "Truthful James" "deadly wearisome." He hoped that the
poet had "found, as his readers have, sufficient amusement in the
'Heathen Chinee' and the 'Society upon the Stanislaus' and is ready for
more serious work." From this wearisome stuff he then turned to review
in highest terms Stoddard's _Book of the East_, a land which Stoddard
had never visited save in dreams.
The reviewer of Maurice Thompson's _Hoosier Mosaics_ four years later
speaks of the author as a promising acquisition to "the invading Goths
from over the mountains." Stedman viewed the new tide with depression
of soul. In a letter to Taylor in 1873 he says:
_Lars_ is a poem that will _last_, though not in the wretched,
immediate _fashion_ of this demoralized American period.
Cultured as are Hay and Harte, they are almost equally
responsible with "Josh Billings" and the _Danbury News_ man for
the present _horrible_ degeneracy of the public taste--that is,
the taste of the present generation of book-buyers.
I feel that this is not the complaint of a superannuated
Roger de Coverley nor Colonel Newcome, for I am in the prime
and vigor of active, noonday life, and at work right here in
the metropolis. It is a clear-headed, wide-awake statement
of a disgraceful fact. With it all I acknowledge, the demand
for good books also increases and such works as Paine's
_Septembre_, etc., have a large standard sale. But in poetry
readers have tired of the past and don't see clearly how to
shape a future; and so content themselves with going to some
"Cave" or "Hole in the Wall" and applauding slang and nonsense,
spiced with smut and profanity.[10]
This is an extreme statement of the conditions, but it was written by
the most alert and clear-eyed critic of the period, one who, even while
he deplored the conditions, was wise enough to recognize the strength
of the movement and to ally himself with it. "Get hold of a dramatic
American theme," he counsels Taylor, "merely for policy's sake. The
people want Neo-Americanism; we must adopt their system and elevate
it." Wise advice indeed, but Taylor had his own ideals. After the
failure of _The Masque of the Gods_ he wrote Aldrich: "If this public
won't accept my better work, I must wait till a new one grows up.... I
will go on trying to do intrinsically good things, and will not yield a
hair's breadth for the sake of conciliating an ignorant public."[11]
V
The exploiting of new and strange regions, with their rough manners,
their coarse humor, and their uncouth dialects, brought to the front
the new, hard-fought, and hard-defended literary method called realism.
For a generation the word was on every critic's pen both in America and
abroad. No two seemed perfectly to agree what the term really meant, or
what writers were to be classed as realists and what as romanticists.
It is becoming clearer now: it was simply the new, young, vigorous tide
which had set in against the decadent, dreamy softness that had ruled
the mid years of the century.
The whole history of literature is but the story of an alternating
current. A new, young school of innovators arises to declare the old
forms lifeless and outworn. Wordsworth at the opening of the nineteenth
century had protested against unreality and false sentiment--"a dressy
literature, an exaggerated literature" as Bagehot expressed it--and
he started the romantic revolt by proposing in his poems "to choose
incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe
them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language
really used by men." Revolt always has begun with the cry "back to
nature"; it is always the work of young men who have no reverence
for the long-standing and the conventional; and it is always looked
upon with horror by the older generations. Jeffrey, in reviewing the
_Lyrical Ballads_, said that the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality"
was "beyond doubt the most illegible and unintelligible part of the
publication. We can pretend to give no analysis or explanation of it."
At last the revolt triumphs, and as the years go on its ideas in turn
are hardened into rules of art. Then suddenly another group of daring
young souls arises, and, setting its back upon the old, blazes out a
new pathway toward what it considers to be truth and nature and art.
This new school of revolt from the old and outworn we call always the
new romantic movement. It is only the new generation pressing upon
the old, and demanding a fresh statement of life in terms of truth to
present conditions.
In America, and indeed in Europe as well, the early seventies called
for this new statement of art. No more _Hyperions_, no more conceits
and mere prettinesses, no more fine phrasing, no more castles in Spain,
but life real and true, naked in its absolute faithfulness to facts. It
was a revolt. If we call the age of Longfellow a romantic period, then
this revolt of the seventies was a _new_ romanticism, for romanticism
always in broadest sense is a revolution against orthodoxy, against
the old which has been so long established that it has lost its first
vitality and become an obedience to the letter rather than to the
spirit.
The new movement seemed to the Brahmins of the older school a veritable
renaissance of vulgarity. Even Lowell, who had written the _Biglow
Papers_, cried out against it. The new literature from the West and the
South was the work of what Holmes had called "the homespun class," "the
great multitude." It was written, almost all of it, by authors from no
college. They had been educated at the printer's case, on the farm,
in the mines, and along the frontiers. As compared with the roll of
the Brahmins the list is significant: Whitman, Warner, Helen Jackson,
Stockton, Shaw, Clemens, Piatt, Thaxter, Howells, Eggleston, Burroughs,
F. H. Smith, Hay, Harte, Miller, Cable, Gilder, Allen, Harris, Jewett,
Wilkins, Murfree, Riley, Page, Russell. The whole school thrilled with
the new life of America, and they wrote often without models save as
they took life itself as their model. Coarse and uncouth some parts of
their work might be, but teeming it always was with the freshness, the
vitality, and the vigor of a new soil and a newly awakened nation.
VI
The new period began in the early seventies. The years of the war and
the years immediately following it were fallow so far as significant
literary output was concerned. "Literature is at a standstill in
America, paralyzed by the Civil War," wrote Stedman in 1864, and at a
later time he added, "For ten years the new generation read nothing
but newspapers." The old group was still producing voluminously, but
their work was done. They had been borne into an era in which they
could have no part, and they contented themselves with reechoings of
the old music and with translations. In 1871 _The London School Board
Chronicle_ could declare that, "The most gifted of American singers are
not great as creators of home-bred poetry, but as translators," and
then add without reservation that the best translations in the English
language had been made in America. It was the statement of a literal
fact. Within a single period of six years, from 1867 to 1872, there
appeared Longfellow's _Divina Commedia_, C. E. Norton's _Vita Nuova_,
T. W. Parsons' _Inferno_, Bryant's _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, Taylor's
_Faust_ and C. P. Cranch's _Aeneid_.
It was the period of swan songs. Emerson's _Terminus_ came in 1866;
_Last Poems_ of the Cary sisters, Longfellow's _Aftermath_ and
Whittier's _Hazel Blossoms_ appeared in 1874; and Holmes's _The Iron
Gate_ was published in 1880. Lowell, the youngest of the group, alone
seemed to have been awakened by the war. His real message to America,
the national odes and the essays on Democracy which will make his name
permanent in literature, came after 1865, and so falls into the new
period.
The decade from 1868 is in every respect the most vital and significant
one in the history of America. The tremendous strides which were then
made in the settlement of the West, the enormous increase of railroads
and steamships and telegraphs, the organization of nation-wide
corporations like those dealing with petroleum and steel and coal--all
these we have already mentioned. America had thrown aside its
provincialism and had become a great neighborhood, and in 1876 North,
South, East, and West gathered in a great family jubilee. _Scribner's
Monthly_ in 1875 commented feelingly upon the fact:
All the West is coming East.... The Southern States will be
similarly moved.... There will be a tremendous shaking up
of the people, a great going to and fro in the land.... The
nation is to be brought together as it has never been brought
before during its history. In one hundred years of intense
industry and marvelous development we have been so busy that we
never have been able to look one another in the face, except
four terrible years of Civil War.... This year around the old
family altar at Philadelphia we expect to meet and embrace as
brothers.[12]
The Centennial quickened in every way the national life. It gave for
the first time the feeling of unity, the realization that the vast
West, the new South, and the uncouth frontier were a vital part of the
family of the States. Lowell, so much of whose early heart and soul had
been given to Europe, discovered America in this same Centennial year.
In Cincinnati he was profoundly impressed with the "wonderful richness
and comfort of the country and with the distinctive Americanism that
is molding into one type of feature and habits so many races that had
widely diverged from the same original stock.... These immense spaces
tremulous with the young grain, trophies of individual, or at any rate
unorganized, courage and energy, of the people and not of dynasties,
were to me inexpressibly impressive and even touching.... The men
who have done and are doing these things know how things should be
done.... It was very interesting, also, to meet men from Kansas and
Nevada and California, and to see how manly and intelligent they were,
and especially what large heads they had. They had not the manners of
Vere de Vere, perhaps, but they had an independence and self-respect
which are the prime element of fine bearing."[13] A little of a certain
Brahmin condescension toward Westerners there may be here, but on
the whole it rings true. The East was discovering the West and was
respecting it.
And now all of a sudden this Neo-Americanism burst forth into
literature. There is a similarity almost startling between the
thirties that saw the outburst of the mid-century school and the vital
seventies that arose in reaction against it. The first era had started
with Emerson's glorification of the American scholar, the second had
glorified the man of action. The earlier period was speculative,
sermonic, dithyrambic, eloquent; the new America which now arose was
cold, dispassionate, scientific, tolerant. Both had arisen in storm
and doubt and in protest against the old. Both touched the people, the
earlier era through the sentiments, the later through the analytical
and the dramatic faculties. In the thirties had arisen _Godey's Lady's
Book_; in the seventies _Scribner's Monthly_.
So far as literature was concerned the era may be said really to
have commenced in 1869 with _Innocents Abroad_, the first book from
which there breathed the new wild spirit of revolt. In 1870 came
Harte's _Luck of Roaring Camp_, thrilling with the new strange life
of the gold coast and the Sierra Nevada, and Warner's _My Summer in
a Garden_, a transition book fresh and delightful. Then in 1871 had
begun the deluge: Burroughs's _Wake-Robin_, with its new gospel of
nature; Eggleston's _Hoosier Schoolmaster_, fresh with uncouth humor
and the strangeness of the frontier; Harte's _East and West Poems_;
Hay's _Pike County Ballads_, crude poems from the heart of the people;
Howells's first novel, _Their Wedding Journey_, a careful analysis of
actual social conditions; Miller's _Songs of the Sierras_; Carleton's
_Poems_; King's _Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada_, a book of travel
glorifying not Europe but a picturesque section of America; and the
completed version of Leland's _Hans Breitmann's Ballads_, a book which
had waited fourteen years for a publisher who had the courage to bring
it out. In 1873 came Celia Thaxter's _Poems_, Aldrich's _Marjorie
Daw_, H. H.'s _Saxe Holm Stories_, Wallace's _Fair God_ and O'Reilly's
_Songs of the Southern Seas_; in 1875 James's _Passionate Pilgrim_,
Thompson's _Hoosier Mosaics_, Gilder's _The New Day_, Lanier's _Poems_,
Catherwood's _A Woman in Armor_, Woolson's _Castle Nowhere_ and
Irwin Russell's first poem in _Scribner's_; in 1877 Burnett's _That
Lass o' Lowrie's_ and Jewett's _Deephaven_; in 1878 Craddock's _The
Dancing Party at Harrison's Cove_ in the _Atlantic Monthly_, Richard
M. Johnston's _Life of Stephens_; in 1879 Cable's _Old Creole Days_,
Tourgee's _Figs and Thistles_, Stockton's _Rudder Grange_, and John
Muir's _Studies in the Sierras_, in _Scribner's_. All the elements of
the new era had appeared before 1880.
The old traditions were breaking. In 1874 the editorial chair of
the _Atlantic Monthly_, the exclusive organ of the old New England
regime, was given to a Westerner. In 1873 came the resurgence of
Whitman. The earlier school had ignored him, or had tolerated him
because of Emerson, but now with the new discovery of America he also
was discovered, and hailed as a pioneer. The new school of revolt in
England--Rossetti, Swinburne, Symonds--declared him a real voice, free
and individual, the voice of all the people. Thoreau also came into his
true place. His own generation had misunderstood him, compared him with
Emerson, and neglected him. Only two of his books had been published
during his lifetime and one of these had sold fewer than three hundred
copies. Now he too was discovered. In the words of Burroughs, "His
fame has increased steadily since his death in 1862, as it was bound to
do. It was little more than in the bud at that time, and its full leaf
and flowering are not yet."
VII
The new age was to express itself in prose. The poetry of the earlier
period, soft and lilting and romantic, no longer satisfied. It was
effeminate in tone and subject, and the new West, virile and awake,
defined a poet, as Wordsworth had defined him in 1815, as "a man
speaking to men." America, in the sturdy vigor of manhood, wrestling
with fierce realities, had passed the age of dreaming. It had now to
deal with social problems, with plans on a vast scale for the bettering
of human conditions, with the organization of cities and schools
and systems of government. It was a busy, headlong, multitudinous
age. Poetry, to interest it, must be sharp and incisive and winged
with a message. It must be lyrical in length and spirit, and it
must ring true. If it deal with social themes it must be perfect in
characterization and touched with genuine pathos, like the folk songs
of Riley and Drummond, or the _vers de societe_ of Bunner and Eugene
Field. If it touch national themes, it must be strong and trumpet
clear, like the odes of Lowell and Lanier. It must not spring from
the far off and the forgot but from the life of the day and the hour,
as sprung Whitman's Lincoln elegies, Joaquin Miller's "Columbus," and
Stedman's war lyrics. Not many have there been who have brought message
and thrill, but there have been enough to save the age from the taunt
that it was a period without poets.
In a broad sense, no age has ever had more of poetry, for the message
and the vision and thrill, which in older times came through epic and
lyric and drama, have in the latter days come in full measure through
the prose form which we call the novel. As a form it has been brought
to highest perfection. It has been found to have scope enough to
exercise the highest powers of a great poet, and allow him to sound all
the depths and shallows of human life. It has been the preacher of the
age, the theater, the minstrel, and the social student, the prophet
and seer and reformer. It has been more than the epic of democracy; it
has been horn-book as well and shepherd's calendar. It has been the
literary form peculiarly fitted for a restless, observant, scientific
age.
The influence of Dickens, who died in 1870, the opening year of the
period, cannot be lightly passed over. It had been his task in the
middle years of the century to democratise literature, and to create
a reading public as Addison had done a century earlier, but Addison's
public was London, the London that breakfasted late and went to the
coffee house. Dickens created a reading public out of those who had
never read books before, and the greater part of it was in America. His
social novels with their break from all the conventions of fiction,
their bold, free characterization, their dialect and their rollicking
humor and their plentiful sentiment, were peculiarly fitted for
appreciation in the new after-the-war atmosphere of the new land. Harte
freely acknowledged his debt to him and at his death laid a "spray of
Western pine" on his grave. The grotesque characters of the Dickens
novels were not more grotesque than the actual inhabitants of the
wild mining towns of the Sierras or the isolated mountain hamlets of
the South, or of many out-of-the-way districts even in New England.
The great revival of interest in Dickens brought about by his death
precipitated the first wave of local color novels--the earliest work of
Harte and Eggleston and Stockton and the author of _Cape Cod Folks_.
This first wave of Dickens-inspired work, however, soon expended
itself, and it was followed by another wave of fiction even more
significant. In the first process of rediscovering America, Harte,
perhaps, or Clemens, or Cable, stumbled upon a tremendous fact which
was destined to add real classics to American literature: America was
full of border lands where the old regime had yielded to the new, and
where indeed there was a true atmosphere of romance. The result was a
type of fiction that was neither romantic nor realistic, but a blending
of both methods, a romanticism of atmosphere and a realism of truth to
the actual conditions and characters involved.
This condition worked itself out in a literary form that is seen now
to be the most distinctive product of the period. The era may as truly
be called the era of the short story as the Elizabethan period may be
called the era of the drama and the early eighteenth century the era of
the prose essay. The local color school which exploited the new-found
nooks and corners of the West and South did its work almost wholly by
means of this highly wrought and concentrated literary form. Not half a
dozen novelists of the period have worked exclusively in the novel and
romance forms of the mid-century type. A group of writers, including
Harte, Clemens, Cable, Mrs. Cooke, Miss Jewett, Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman,
Miss Brown, Miss Murfree, Harris, R. M. Johnston, Page, Stockton,
Bierce, Garland, Miss King, Miss French, Miss Woolson, Deming, Bunner,
Aldrich, have together created what is perhaps the best body of short
stories in any language.
The period at its end tended to become journalistic. The enormous
demand for fiction by the magazines and by the more ephemeral journals
produced a great mass of hastily written and often ill considered work,
but on the whole the literary quality of the fiction of the whole
period, especially the short stories, has been high. Never has there
been in any era so vast a flood of books and reading, and it may also
be said that never before has there been so high an average of literary
workmanship.