A History of American Literature Since 1870. Fred Lewis Pattee
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 régime, 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 société 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 régime 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