Outlines of English and American Literature Part 55

_Parkman_. Life, by Fiske; by Farnham; by Sedgwick. Essays, by Fiske, in introduction to Parkman's works and in A Century of Science and Other Essays; by Vedder, in American Writers of To-day; by Whipple, in Recollections of Eminent Men.

CHAPTER IV

THE ALL-AMERICA PERIOD

Thou Mother with thy equal brood, Thou varied chain of different States, yet one ident.i.ty only, A special song before I go I'd sing o'er all the rest: For thee, the Future.

Whitman, "Thou Mother"

Some critics find little or no American literature of a distinctly national spirit prior to 1876, and they explain the lack of it on the a.s.sumption that Americans were too far apart and too much occupied with local or sectional interests for any author to represent the nation. It was even said at the time of the Centennial Exposition that our countrymen had never met, save on the battlefields of the Civil War, until the common interest in Jubilee Year drew men and women from the four quarters of America "around the old family altar at Philadelphia." Whatever exaggeration there may be in that fine poetic figure, it is certain that our literature, once confined to a few schools or centers, began in the decade after 1870 to be broadly representative of the whole country. Miller's _Songs of the Sierras_, Hay's _Pike-County Ballads_, Harte's _Tales of the Argonauts_, Cable's _Old Creole Days_, Mark Twain's _Tom Sawyer_, Miss Jewett's _Deephaven_, Stockton's _Rudder Grange_, Harris's _Uncle Remus_,--a host of surprising books suddenly appeared with the announcement that America was too large for any one man or literary school to be its spokesman. It is because of these new voices, coming from North, South, East or West and heard with delight by the whole nation, that we venture to call the years after 1876 the all-America period of our literature.

[Sidenote: CONTEMPORARY HISTORY]

We are still too near that period to make a history of it, for the simple reason that a true history implies distance and perspective. No historian could read, much less measure and compare, a tenth part of the books that have won recognition since 1876. In such works as he might select as typical he must be governed by his own taste or judgment; and the writer was never born who could by such personal standards forecast the judgment of time and of humanity. In a word, contemporary or "up-to-date" histories are vain attempts at the impossible; save in the unimportant matter of chronicling names or dates they are all alike untrustworthy. The student should bear in mind, therefore, that the following summary of our recent literature is based largely upon personal opinion; that it selects a few authors by way of ill.u.s.tration, omitting many others who may be of equal or greater importance. We are confronted by a host of books that serve the prime purpose of literature by giving pleasure; but what proportion of them are enduring books, or what few of them will be known to readers of the next century as the _Sketch Book_ and _Snow-Bound_ are known to us,--these are questions that only Father Time can answer.

THE SHORT STORY. The period after 1876 has been called the age of fiction, but "the short-story age" might be a better name for it, since the short story is apparently more popular than any other form of literature and since it has been developed here more abundantly than in any other land,--possibly because America offers such an immense and ever-surprising field to an author in search of a strange or picturesque tale. Readers of the short story demand life and variety, and here are all races and tribes and conditions of men, living in all kinds of "atmosphere" from the trapper's hut to the steel skysc.r.a.per and from the crowded city slums to the vast open places where one's companions.h.i.+p is with the hills or the stars. Hence a double tendency in our recent stories, to make them expressive of New World life and to make each story a reflection of some peculiar type of Americanism,--one of the many types that here meet in a common citizens.h.i.+p.

The truth of the above criticism may become evident by reviewing the history of the short story in America. Irving began with mere hints or outlines of stories (sketches he called them) and added a few legendary tales of the Dutch settlers on the Hudson. Then came Poe, dealing with the phantoms of his own brain rather than with human life or endeavor. Next appeared Hawthorne, who dealt largely in moral allegories and whose tales are always told in an atmosphere of mystery and twilight shadows. Finally, after the war, came a mult.i.tude of writers who insisted on dealing with our American life as it is, with miners, immigrants, money kings, mountaineers, planters, cowboys, woodsmen,--a host of varied characters, each speaking the speech and typifying the customs or ideals of his particular locality.

It was these _post-bellum_ writers who invented the so-called story of local color (a story true to a certain place or a certain cla.s.s of men), which is America's most original contribution to the world's literature.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRET HARTE]

[Sidenote: BRET HARTE]

Francis Bret Harte (1839-1902) is generally credited with the invention of the local-color story; but he was probably indebted to earlier works of the same kind, notably to Longstreet's _Georgia Scenes_ (1836) and Baldwin's _Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi_ (1853). He had followed the "forty-niners" to California in a headlong search for gold when, finding himself amid the picturesque scenes and characters of the early mining camps, it suddenly occurred to him that he had before his eyes a literary gold mine such as no other modern romancer had discovered.

Thereupon he wrote "The Luck of Roaring Camp" (first published in _The Overland Monthly_, 1868), and followed it with "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" and "Tennessee's Partner."

These stories took the literary world by storm, and almost overnight Harte became a celebrity. Following up his advantage he proceeded to write some thirty volumes of the same general kind, which were widely read and promptly forgotten. Though he was plainly too sentimental and sensational, there was a sense of freshness or originality in his early stories and poems which made them wonderfully attractive. His first three tales were probably his best, and they are still worth reading,--not for their literary charm or truth but as interesting early examples of the local-color story.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GEORGE W. CABLE]

[Sidenote: CABLE]

The interest aroused by the mining-camp tales influenced other American writers to discover the neglected literary wealth of their several localities; but they were fortunately on guard against Harte's exaggerated sentimentality and related their stories with more art and more truth to nature. As a specific example read Cable's _Old Creole Days_ and _Madame Delphine_ with their exquisite pictures of life in the old French city of New Orleans. These are romances or creations of fancy, to be sure; but in their lifelike characters, their natural scenes and soft Creole dialect they are as realistic (that is, as true to a real type of American life) as anything that can be found in literature. They are, in fact, studies as well as stories, such minute and affectionate studies of old people, old names and old customs as the great French novelist Balzac made in preparation for his work. Though time holds its own secrets, one can hardly avoid the conviction that _Old Creole Days_ and _Madame Delphine_ are not books of a day but permanent additions to American fiction.

[Sidenote: TYPICAL STORY-WRITERS]

Cable was accompanied by so many other good writers that it would require a volume to do them justice. We name only, by way of indicating the wide variety that awaits the reader, the charming stories of Grace King and writers Kate Chopin dealing with plantation life; the New England stories, powerful or brilliant or somber, of Sarah Orne Jewett, Rose Terry Cooke and Mary E. Wilkins; the tender and cheery southern stories of Thomas Nelson Page; the impressive stories of mountaineer life by Mary Noailles Murfree (Charles Egbert Craddock); the humorous, _Alice-in-Wonderland_ kind of stories told by Frank Stockton; and a bewildering miscellany of other works, of which the names Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Hamlin Garland, Alice French (Octave Thanet), Rowland Robinson, Frank Norris and Henry C. Bunner are as a brief but inviting index.

It would be unjust at the present time to discriminate among these writers or to compare them with others, perhaps equally good, whom we have not named. Occasionally in the flood of short stories appears one that compels attention. Aldrich's "Marjorie Daw," Edward Everett Hale's "The Man without a Country," Stockton's "The Lady or the Tiger,"--each of these impresses us so forcibly by its delicate artistry or appeal to patriotism or whimsical ending that we hail it as a new cla.s.sic, forgetting that the term "cla.s.sic"

carries with it the implication of something old and proved, safe from change or criticism. Undoubtedly a few of our recent stories deserve the name; they will be more widely known a century hence than they are now, and may finally rank above "Rip Van Winkle" or "The Gold Bug" or "The Snow Image"; but until the perfect tale is sifted from the thousand that are almost perfect, every ambitious critic is free to make his own prophecy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARY E. WILKINS-FREEMAN]

SOME RECENT NOVELISTS. There is a difference between our earlier and later fiction which becomes apparent when we compare specific examples. As a type of the earlier novel take Cooper's _The Spy_ or Longfellow's _Hyperion_ or Hawthorne's _The House of the Seven Gables_ or Simms's _Katherine Walton_ or Cooke's _The Virginia Comedians_, and read it in connection with a recent novel, such as Howells's _Annie Kilburn_ or Miss Jewett's _Deephaven_ or Harold Frederick's _Illumination_ or James Lane Allen's _The Reign of Law_ or Frank Norris's _The Octopus_. Disregarding the important element of style, we note that the earlier novels have a distant background in time or s.p.a.ce; that their chief interest lies in the story they have to tell; that they take us far away from present reality into regions where people are more impressive and sentiments more exalted than in our familiar, prosaic world.

The later novels interest us less by the story than by the a.n.a.lysis of character; they deal with human life as it is here and now, not as we imagine it to have been elsewhere or in a golden age. In a word, our later novels are realistic in purpose, and in this respect they are in marked contrast with our novels of an earlier age, which are nearly all of the romantic kind. [Footnote: In the above comparison we have ignored a large number of recent novels that are quite as romantic as any written before the war. Romance is still, as in all past ages, more popular than realism: witness the millions of readers of Lew Wallace, E. P. Roe and other modern romancers.]

The realistic movement in American fiction began, as we have noted, with the short-story writers; and presently the most talented of these writers, having learned the value of real scenes and characters, turned to the novel and produced works having the double interest of romance and realism; that is, they told an old romantic tale of love or heroism and set it amid scenes or characters that were typical of American life. Miss Jewett's novels of northern village life, for example, are even finer than her short stories in the same field. The same criticism applies to Miss Murfree with her novels of mountaineer life in Tennessee, to James Lane Allen with his novels of his native Kentucky, and to many another recent novelist who tells a brave tale of his own people. We call these, in the conventional way, novels of New England or the South or the West; in reality they are novels of humanity, of the old unchanging tragedies or comedies of human life, which seem more true or real to us because they appear in a familiar setting.

There is another school of realism which subordinates the story element, which avoids as untrue all unusual or heroic incidents and deals with ordinary men or women; and of this school William Dean Howells is a conspicuous example. Judging him by his novels alone it would be difficult to determine his rank; but judging him by his high aim and distinguished style (a style remarkable for its charm and purity in an age too much influenced by newspaper slang and smartness) he is certainly one of the best of our recent prose writers. Since his first modest volume appeared in 1860 he has published many poems, sketches of travel, appreciations of literature, parlor comedies, novels,--an immense variety of writings; but whatever one reads of his sixty-odd books, whether _Venetian Life_ or _A Boys' Town_, one has the impression of an author who lives for literature, who puts forth no hasty or unworthy work, and who aims steadily to be true to the best traditions of American letters.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS]

In middle life Howells turned definitely to fiction and wrote, among various other novels, _A Woman's Reason_, _The Minister's Charge_, _A Modern Instance_ and _The Rise of Silas Lapham_.

These are all realistic in that they deal frankly with contemporary life; but in their plots and conventional endings they differ but little from the typical romance. [Footnote: Several of Howells's earlier novels deal with New England life, but superficially and without understanding. However minutely they depict its manners or mannerisms they seldom dip beneath the surface. If the reader wants not the body but the soul of New England, he must go to some other fiction writer, to Sarah Orne Jewett, for example, or to Rose Terry Cooke] Then Howells fell under the influence of Tolstoi and other European realists, and his later novels, such as _Annie Kilburn_, _A Hazard of New Fortunes_ and _The Quality of Mercy_, are rather aimless studies of the speech, dress, mannerisms and inanities of American life with precious little of its ideals,--which are the only things of consequence, since they alone endure. He appears here as the photographer rather than the painter of American life, and his work has the limited interest of another person's family alb.u.m.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARK TWAIN]

Another realist of a very different kind is Samuel L. Clemens (1835-1910), who is more widely known by his pseudonym of Mark Twain. He grew up, he tells us, in "a loafing, down-at-the-heels town in Missouri"; he was educated "on the river," and in most of his work he attempted to deal with the rough-and-ready life which he knew intimately at first hand. His _Life on the Mississippi_, a vivid delineation of river scenes and characters, is perhaps his best work, or at least the most true to his aim and his experience. _Roughing It_ is another volume from his store of personal observation, this time in the western mining camps; but here his realism goes as far astray from truth as any old romance in that it exaggerates even the sensational elements of frontier life.

The remaining works of Mark Twain are, with one or two exceptions, of very doubtful value. Their great popularity for a time was due largely to the author's reputation as a humorist,--a strange reputation it begins to appear, for he was at heart a pessimist, an iconoclast, a thrower of stones, and with the exception of his earliest work, _The Celebrated Jumping Frog_ (1867), which reflected some rough fun or horseplay, it is questionable whether the term "humorous" can properly be applied to any of his books. Thus the blatant _Innocents Abroad_ is not a work of humor but of ridicule (a very different matter), which jeers at travelers who profess admiration for the scenery or inst.i.tutions of Europe,--an admiration that was a sham to Mark Twain because he was incapable of understanding it. So with the grotesque capers of _A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court_, with the sneering spirit of _The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg_, with the labored attempts to be funny of _Adam's Diary_ and with other alleged humorous works; readers of the next generation may ask not what we found to amuse us in such works but how we could tolerate such crudity or cynicism or bad taste in the name of American humor.

The most widely read of Mark Twain's works are _Tom Sawyer_ and _Huckleberry Finn_. The former, a glorification of a liar and his dime-novel adventures, has enough descriptive power to make the story readable, but hardly enough to disguise its sensationalism, its lawlessness, its false standards of boy life and American life. In _Huckleberry Finn_, a much better book, the author depicts the life of the Middle West as seen by a homeless vagabond. With a runaway slave as a companion the hero, Huck Finn, drifts down the Mississippi on a raft, meeting with startling experiences at the hands of quacks and imposters of every kind. One might suppose, if one took this picaresque record seriously, that a large section of our country was peopled wholly by knaves and fools. The adventures are again of a sensational kind; but the characters are powerfully drawn, and the vivid pictures of the mighty river by day or night are among the best examples of descriptive writing in our literature.

[Sidenote: CRANE AND NORRIS]

Still another type of realism is suggested by the names Stephen Crane and Frank Norris. These young writers, influenced by the French novelist Zola, condemned the old romance as false and proclaimed, somewhat grandly at first, that they would tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Then they straightway forgot that health and moral sanity are the truth of life, and proceeded to deal with degraded or degenerate characters as if these were typical of humanity. Their earlier works are studies of brutality, miscalled realism; but later Crane wrote his _Red Badge of Courage_ (a rather wildly imaginative story of the Civil War), and Norris produced works of real power in _The Octopus_ and _The Pit_, one a prose epic of the railroad, the other of a grain of wheat from the time it is sown in the ground until it becomes a matter of good food or of crazy speculation. There is an impression of vastness, of continental breadth and sweep, in these two novels which sets them apart from all other fiction of the period.

The flood of dialect stories which appeared after 1876 may seem at first glance to be mere variations of Bret Harte's local-color stories, but they are something more and better than that. The best of them--such, for example, as Page's _In Ole Virginia_ or Rowland Robinson's _Danvis Folk_--are written on the a.s.sumption that we can never understand a man, that is, the soul of a man, unless we know the very language in which he expresses his thought or feeling. These dialect stories, therefore, are intimate studies of American life rather than of local speech or manners.

[Sidenote: HARRIS]

Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) is not our best writer of dialect stories but only the happy and most fortunate man who wrote _Uncle Remus_ (1880), and wrote it, by the way, as part of his day's work as a newspaper man, without a thought that it was a masterpiece, a work of genius. The first charm of the book is that it fascinates children with its frolicsome adventures of Brer Rabbit, Brer Tarrypin, Brer B'ar, Brer Fox and the wonderful Tar Baby; the second, that it combines in a remarkable way a primitive or universal with a local and intensely human interest. Thus, almost everybody is interested in folklore, especially in the animal stories which are part of the tradition of every primitive tribe; but folklore, as commonly written, is not a branch of fiction but of science.

Before it can enter the golden door of literature it must find or create some human character who interests us not by his stories but by his humanity; and Harris furnished this character in the person of Uncle Remus, a very lovable old plantation negro, drawn with absolute fidelity to life.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS]

Other novelists have portrayed a negro in fiction, but Harris did a more original work by creating his Brer Rabbit. In the adventures of this happy-go-lucky creature, with his childishness and humor, we have the symbol not of any one negro but of the whole race of negroes as the author knew them intimately in a condition of servitude. The creation of these two original characters, as real as Poor Richard or Natty b.u.mppo and far more fascinating, is one of the most notable achievements of American fiction.

[Sidenote: PROBLEM NOVELS]

Aside from the realistic movement, our recent fiction is like a river flowing sluggishly over hidden bowlders: the surface is so broken by whirlpools, eddies and aimless flotsam that it is difficult to determine the main current. Here our attention is attracted by clever stories of "society in the making," there by somber problem-novels dealing with city slums, lonely farms, department stores, political rings, business corruption, religious creeds, social injustice,--with every conceivable matter that can furnish a novelist not with a story but with a cry for reform. The propaganda novel is evidently a favorite in America; but whether it has any real influence in reforming abuses, as the novels of d.i.c.kens led to better schools and prisons in England, is yet to be determined.

Occasionally appears a reform novel great enough to make us forget the reform, such as Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_ (1884). This famous story began as an attempt to plead the cause of the oppressed Indian, to do for him what _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was supposed to have done for the negro; it ended in an idyllic story so well told that readers forgot to cry, "Lo, the poor Indian," as the author intended. At the present time _Ramona_ is not cla.s.sed with the problem-novels but with the most readable of American romances.

[Sidenote: POPULAR ROMANCES]

While the new realistic novel occupied the attention of critics the old romance had, as usual, an immensely larger number of readers. Moral romances with a happy ending have always been popular, and of these E. P.

Roe furnished an abundance. His _Barriers Burned Away_, _A Face Illumined_, _Opening of a Chestnut Burr_ and _Nature's Serial Story_ depict American characters in an American landscape, and have a wholesome atmosphere of manliness and cleanness that makes them eminently "safe" reading. Unfortunately they are melodramatic and sentimental, and critics commonly sneer or jeer at them; but that is not a rational criticism. Romances that won instant welcome from a host of readers and that are still widely known after half a century have at least "the power to live"; and vitality, the quality that makes a character or a story endure, is always one of the marks of a good romance.

Another romancer untouched by the zeal for realism was Marion Crawford, who in a very interesting essay, _The Novel_, proclaimed with some show of reason that the novel was simply a "pocket theater," a convenient stage whereon the reader could enjoy by himself any comedy or tragedy that pleased him. That Crawford lived abroad the greater part of his life and was familiar with society in a dozen countries may explain the fact that his forty-odd novels are nearly all of the social kind. His Roman novels, _Saracinesca_, _Sant' Ilario_ and a dozen others, are perhaps his best work. They are good stories; they take us among cultured foreign people and give us glimpses of a life that is hidden from most travelers; but they are superficial and leave the impression that the author was a man without much heart, that he missed the deeper meanings of life because he had little interest in them. His characters are as puppets that are sent through a play for our amus.e.m.e.nt and for no other reason. In this, however, he remained steadily true to his own ideal of fiction as a convenient subst.i.tute for the theater. Moreover, he was a good workman; his stories were for the most part well composed and very well written.

More popular even than the romances of Roe and Crawford are the stories with a background of Colonial or Revolutionary history, a type to which America has ever given hearty welcome. Ford's _Janice Meredith_, Mitch.e.l.l's _Hugh Wynne_, Mary Johnston's _To Have and to Hold_, Maurice Thompson's _Alice of Old Vincennes_, Churchill's _Richard Carvel_,--the reader can add to the list of recent historical romances almost indefinitely; but no critic can now declare which shall be called great among them. To the same interesting group of writers belong Lew Wallace, whose enormously popular _Ben Hur_ has obscured his better story, _The Fair G.o.d_, and Mary Hartwell Catherwood, whose _Lady of Fort St. John_ and other stirring tales of the Northwest have the same savage wilderness background against which Parkman wrote his histories.