A History of American Literature Since 1870. Fred Lewis Pattee
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 reëchoings 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 Æneid.
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]