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Transcriber's Note

This book often uses periods where we would expect to see commas.

Lifespans of people still living when this book was written were printed with a long dash (1831——) and that style has been retained here.

Footnote numbers in the source reset to "1" at the beginning of each chapter, and usually appeared at the bottom of the page that referenced them. In this eBook, there is just one sequence for all of the footnotes, and they appear at the end of the book, following the Index.

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A HISTORY OF
AMERICAN LITERATURE
SINCE 1870

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.

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]

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 régime 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 régime 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 preëmpted 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 cañons; 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 régime. 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 société,

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 blasé, 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 Björnson 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 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]

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 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.

[CHAPTER II]
THE LAUGHTER OF THE WEST

American literature from the first has been rich in humor. The incongruities of the new world—the picturesque gathering of peoples like the Puritans, the Indians, the cavaliers, the Dutch, the negroes and the later immigrants; the makeshifts of the frontier, the vastness and the richness of the land, the leveling effects of democracy, the freedom of life, and the independence of spirit—all have tended to produce a laughing people. The first really American book, Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York, was a broadly humorous production. The mid period of the nineteenth century was remarkably rich in humor. One has only to mention Paulding and Holmes and Saxe and Lowell and Seba Smith and B. P. Shillaber. Yet despite these names and dozens of others almost equally deserving, it must be acknowledged that until the Civil War period opened there had been no school of distinctly American humorists, original and nation-wide. The production had been sporadic and provincial, and it had been read by small circles. The most of it could be traced to older prototypes: Hood, Thackeray, Lamb, Douglas Jerrold, Dickens. The humor of America, "new birth of our new soil," had been discovered, but as yet it had had no national recognition and no great representative.

As late as 1866, a reviewer of "Artemus Ward" in the North American Review, published then in Boston, complained that humor in America had been a local product and that it had been largely imitative. It was time, he declared, for a new school of humorists who should be original in their methods and national in their scope. "They must not aim at copying anything; they should take a new form.... Let them seek to embody the wit and humor of all parts of the country, not only of one city where their paper is published; let them force Portland to disgorge her Jack Downings and New York her Orpheus C. Kerrs, for the benefit of all. Let them form a nucleus which will draw to itself all the waggery and wit of America."[14] It was the call of the new national spirit, and as if in reply there arose the new school—uncolleged for the most part, untrained by books, fresh, joyous, extravagant in its bursting young life—the first voice of the new era.

The group was born during the thirties and early forties, that second seedtime of American literature. Their birth dates fall within a period of ten years:

To the school also belonged several who were born outside of this magic ten years. There were Henry Wheeler Shaw, "Josh Billings," born in 1818; and Charles Henry Smith, "Bill Arp," born in 1823. At least three younger members must not be omitted: Robert Jones Burdette, 1844; Edgar Wilson Nye, "Bill Nye," 1850; and Opie Read, 1852.

I

In a broad way the school was a product of the Civil War. American humor had been an evolution of slow growth, and the war precipitated it. The election of Lincoln in 1860 was the beginning. Here was a man of the new West who had worked on flatboats on the Ohio, who had served as a soldier in a backwoods troop, who had ridden for years on a Western circuit, and in rough and ready political campaigns had withstood the heckling of men who had fought barehanded with the frontier and had won. The saddest man in American history, he stands as one of the greatest of American humorists. His laughter rings through the whole period of the war, man of sorrows though he was, and it was the Western laughter heard until now only along the great rivers and the frontier and the gold coast of the Pacific. He had learned it from contact with elemental men, men who passed for precisely what they were, men who were measured solely by the iron rule of what they could do; self-reliant men, healthy, huge-bodied, deep-lunged men to whom life was a joy. The humor that he brought to the East was nothing new in America, but the significant thing is that for the first time it was placed in the limelight. A peculiar combination it was, half shrewd wisdom, "hoss sense," as "Josh Billings" called it, the rest characterization which exposed as with a knife-cut the inner life as well as the outer, whimsical overstatement and understatement, droll incongruities told with all seriousness, and an irreverence born of the all-leveling democracy of the frontier.

"It was Lincoln's opinion that the finest wit and humor, the best jokes and anecdotes, emanated from the lower orders of the country people,"[15] and in this judgment he pointed out the very heart of the new literature that was germinating about him. Such life is genuine; it rests upon the foundations of nature itself. Lincoln, like the man of the new West that he was, delighted not so much in books as in actual contact with life. "Riding the circuit for many years and stopping at country taverns where were gathered the lawyers, jurymen, witnesses, and clients, they would sit up all night narrating to each other their life adventures; and the things which happened to an original people, in a new country, surrounded by novel conditions, and told with the descriptive power and exaggeration which characterized such men, supplied him with an exhaustless fund of anecdotes which could be made applicable for enforcing or refuting an argument better than all the invented stories of the world."[16]

It was the new humor of the West for the first time shown to the whole world. Lincoln, the man of the West, had met the polished East in the person of Douglas and had triumphed through very genuineness, and now he stood in the limelight of the Presidency, transacting the nation's business with anecdotes from the frontier circuits, meeting hostile critics with shrewd border philosophy, and reading aloud with unction, while battles were raging or election returns were in doubt, from "Artemus Ward," or "Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby," or The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi—favorites of his because they too were genuine, excerpts not from books but from life itself.

II

Glimpses there already had been of the new humor of the West. George W. Harris (1814–1868), steamboat captain on the Tennessee River, had created that true child of the West, "Sut Lovengood"; Augustus B. Longstreet (1790–1870) in Georgia Scenes had drawn inimitable sketches of the rude life of his region; and Joseph G. Baldwin (1815–1864), like Lincoln, himself a lawyer who had learned much on his frontier circuit, in his Flush Times had traced the evolution of a country barrister in a manner that even now, despite its echoes of Dickens, makes the book a notable one.

But the greatest of them all, the real father of the new school of humorists, the man who gave the East the first glimpse of the California type of humor, was George Horatio Derby (1823–1861), whose sketches over the signature "John Phœnix" began to appear in the early fifties. Undoubtedly it would amaze Derby could he return and read of himself as the father of the later school of humor. With him literary comedy was simply a means now and then of relaxation from the burdens of a strenuous profession. He had been graduated from West Point in 1846, had fought in the Mexican War, and later as an engineer had been entrusted by the government with important surveys and explorations in the far West and later in Florida, where he died at the age of thirty-eight of sunstroke. He was burdened all his life with heavy responsibilities and exacting demands upon his energies. He had little time for books, and his writings, what few he produced, were the result wholly of his own observations upon the picturesque life that he found about him in the West.

In his Phœnixiana, published in 1855, we find nearly all of the elements that were to be used by the new school of humorists. First, there is the solemn protestation of truthfulness followed by the story that on the face of it is impossible. "If the son of the reader ... should look confidingly into his parent's face, and inquire—'Is that true, Papa?' reply, oh, reader, unhesitatingly—'My son, it is.'" To make the story still more plausible he quotes "Truthful James." He may then proceed with a story like this:

He glanced over the first column [of Phœnix's Pictorial] when he was observed to grow black in the face. A bystander hastened to seize him by the collar, but it was too late. Exploding with mirth, he was scattered into a thousand fragments, one of which striking him probably inflicting some fatal injury, as he immediately expired, having barely time to remove his hat, and say in a feeble voice, "Give this to Phoenix." A large black tooth lies on the table before us, driven through the side of the office with fearful violence at the time of the explosion. We have enclosed it to his widow with a letter of condolence.

"Truthful James"—we think of Bret Harte, and we think of him again after passages like this: "An old villain with a bald head and spectacles punched me in the abdomen; I lost my breath, closed my eyes, and remembered nothing further."

Derby was the first conspicuous writer to use grotesque exaggerations deliberately and freely as a provocative of laughter. Irving and many others had made use of it, but in Phœnixiana it amounts to a mannerism. He tells the most astonishing impossibilities and then naïvely adds: "It is possible that the circumstances may have become slightly exaggerated. Of course, there can be no doubt of the truth of the main incidents." In true California style he makes use often of specific exaggeration. Two men trip over a rope in the dark "and then followed what, if published, would make two closely printed royal octavo pages of profanity." So popular was the Phœnix Herald that "we have now seven hundred and eighty-two Indians employed night and day in mixing adobe for the type molds."

The second characteristic of Derby's humor was its irreverence. To him nothing was sacred. The first practical joker, he averred, was Judas Iscariot: he sold his Master. Arcturus, he observed, was a star "which many years since a person named Job was asked if he could guide, and he acknowledged he couldn't do it." "David was a Jew—hence, the 'Harp of David' was a Jew's-harp."

He delights in the device of euphemistic statement used so freely by later humorists. The father of Joseph Bowers, he explains, was engaged in business as a malefactor in western New York, but was annoyed greatly by the prejudices of the bigoted settlers. He emigrated suddenly, however, with such precipitation in fact that "he took nothing with him of his large property but a single shirt, which he happened to have about him at the time he formed his resolution." Finally he "ended his career of usefulness by falling from a cart in which he had been standing, addressing a numerous audience, and in which fall he unfortunately broke his neck."

He abounds in true Yankee aphorisms—"when a man is going down, everybody lends him a kick," "Where impudence is wit, 'tis folly to reply." He uses unexpected comparisons and whimsical non sequiturs: he sails on "a Napa steam packet of four cat-power"; "the wind blew," he declared, "like well-watered roses." R. W. Emerson, he was informed, while traveling in upper Norway, "on the 21st of June, 1836, distinctly saw the sun in all its majesty shining at midnight!—in fact, all night. Emerson is not what you would call a superstitious man, by any means—but, he left."

It was Derby who wrote the first Pike County ballad. "Suddenly we hear approaching a train from Pike County, consisting of seven families, with forty-six wagons, each drawn by thirteen oxen." Elsewhere he has described the typical "Pike": "His hair is light, not a 'sable silvered,' but a yeller, gilded; you can see some of it sticking out of the top of his hat; his costume is the national costume of Arkansas, coat, waistcoat, and pantaloons of homespun cloth, dyed a brownish yellow, with a decoction of the bitter barked butternut—a pleasing alliteration; his countenance presents a determined, combined with a sanctimonious expression." "Now rises o'er the plains in mellifluous accents, the grand Pike County Chorus:

Oh, we'll soon be thar
In the land of gold,
Through the forest old,
O'er the mounting cold,
With spirits bold—
Oh, we come, we come,
And we'll soon be thar.
Gee up, Bolly! whoo, up, whoo haw!"

Not much was added to Western humor after Derby. Mark Twain's earliest manner had much in it that smacks of "Phœnix." The chapters entitled, "Phœnix Takes an Affectionate Leave of San Francisco," "Phœnix is on the Sea," and "Phœnix in San Diego" might have been taken from Roughing It. Just as truly the chapters, "Inauguration of the New Collector" and "Return of the Collector," "Thrilling and Frantic Excitement Among Office Seekers" might have been written by Orpheus C. Kerr. Yet despite such similarities, the later school did not necessarily filch from "Phœnix": they learned their art as he had learned it from contact with the new West. All drew from the same model.

III

For the new humor, which was to be the first product of the new period in American literature, was Western humor of the "John Phœnix" type. It came from three great seed places: the Mississippi and its rivers, the California coast, and, later, the camps of the Civil War. It was the humor of the gatherings of men under primitive conditions. It was often crude and coarse. It was elemental and boisterous and often profane. To the older school of poets and scholars in the East it seemed, as it began to fill all the papers and creep even into the standard magazines, like a veritable renaissance of vulgarity. "The worlds before and after the Deluge were not more different than our republics of letters before and after the war,"[17] wrote Stedman to William Winter in 1873, and the same year he wrote to Taylor in Europe, "The whole country, owing to contagion of our American newspaper 'exchange' system, is flooded, deluged, swamped, beneath a muddy tide of slang, vulgarity, inartistic bathers [sic], impertinence, and buffoonery that is not wit."[18]

Many of the new humorists had been born in the East, but all of them had been drilled either in the rough school of the West or in the armies during the war. Shaw had been a deckhand on an Ohio River steamer; Browne had been a tramp printer both in the East and the West, and had lived for a time in California; Clemens had been tramp printer, pilot on the Mississippi, and for five years miner and newspaper man on the Western coast; Webb and Nye and Newell had seen life in California; Locke had edited country papers in northern Ohio, and C. H. Smith, Landon, Bailey, Sweet, Lewis, and Burdette had been soldiers in the Civil War. All of them had been thrown together with men under circumstances that had stripped them and the life about them of all the veneer of convention and class distinction.

One thing the group had in common: they were newspaper men; most of them had worked at the case; all of them at one time or another were connected with the press. The new humor was scattered by the newspapers that after the war spread themselves in incredible numbers over America. The exchange system, complained of by Stedman, became nation wide. The good things of one paper were seized upon by the others and sown broadcast. Humorous departments became more and more common, until staid old papers like the Boston Advertiser had yielded to the popular demand. The alarm voiced by Stedman in his letter to Taylor was taken up by the more conservative magazines. The humor of to-day is written for the multitude, complained the ponderous old North American Review, "that uncounted host which reads for its romance The Ledger and The Pirate of the Gulf. Common schools make us a nation of readers. But common schools, alas! do little to inculcate taste or discrimination in the choice of reading. The mass of the community has a coarse digestion.... It likes horse-laughs."[19] But it is useless to combat the spirit of the age.

The wave rolled on until it reached its height in the mid seventies. From journals with an incidental humorous column there had arisen the newspaper that was quoted everywhere and enormously subscribed for solely because of the funny man in charge. The Danbury News, the local paper of a small Connecticut city, swelled its subscription list to 40,000 because of its editor Bailey. The vogue of such a paper was not long. At different periods there arose and flourished and declined "Nasby's" Toledo Blade, "Lickshingle's" Oil City Derrick, Burdette's Burlington Hawkeye, "M. Quad's" Detroit Free Press, Peck's Sun, Sweet's Texas Siftings, Read's Arkansaw Traveller, and many others.

The greater part of this newspaper humor was as fleeting as the flying leaves upon which it was printed. It has disappeared never to be regathered. Even the small proportion of it that was put by its authors into book form has fared little better. From all the host of literary comedians that so shook the period with laughter not over four have taken anything even approaching a permanent place. These four are Browne, Locke, Nast, and Shaw.

IV

Charles Farrar Browne, "Artemus Ward," the first of the group to gain recognition, was born of Puritan ancestry in Waterville, Maine, in 1834. Forced by the death of his father in 1847 to rely upon his own efforts for support, he became a typesetter on the Skowhegan Clarion, and later, after a wandering career from office to office, served for three years in Boston as a compositor for Snow and Wilder, the publishers of Mrs. Partington's Carpet Bag. His connection with Shillaber, the editor of this paper, turned his mind to humorous composition, but it was not until after his second wander period in the South and West that he discovered the real bent of his powers. His career as a humorist may be said to have begun in 1857, when, after two years at Toledo, Ohio, he was called to the local editorship of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer and given freedom to inject into the dry news columns all the life and fun that he chose. He began now to write articles purporting to describe the struggles and experiences of one "Artemus Ward," an itinerant showman who was as full of homely wisdom and experience as he was lacking in book learning and refinement. The letters instantly struck a popular chord; they were copied widely. After serving three years on the Plain-Dealer their author was called to New York to become the editor of the brilliant but ill-starred comic magazine, Vanity Fair. The following year, 1861, he began to lecture, and in 1863 and 1864 he made a six-months' lecture tour of the Pacific Coast. The free, picturesque life of the new cities and the wild camps delighted him. In Virginia City he spent three marvelous weeks with Mark Twain, then a reporter on the local paper. Returning across the Plains, he visited the Mormons. The trip was the graduate course of the young humorist. Not until after his California training was he completely in command of his art. Then in 1866 at the height of his powers he went to London, where his success was instant and unprecedented. He was made an editor of Punch, he was discussed in all quarters, and his lectures night by night were attended by crowds. But the end was near. He died of quick consumption March 6, 1867.

The secret of Browne's success as a humorist lay, first of all, in the droll personality of the man. It was the opinion of Haweis, who heard him in London, that his "bursts of quaint humor could only live at all in that subtle atmosphere which Artemus Ward's presence created, and in which alone he was able to operate."[20] He made use of all the humorous devices of his favorite, John Phœnix, and to them he added what may be called the American manner of delivering humor: the setting forth with perfect gravity and even mournfulness his most telling jokes and then the assuming of a surprised or even a grieved expression when the audience laughed.

Furthermore, to Phœnix's devices he added cacography, the device of deliberate misspelling so much used by later humorists. He seems to have adopted it spontaneously as a matter of course. He was to take the character of an ignorant showman and naturally he must write as such a man would write. The misspelling of "Artemus Ward" has character in it. In his hands it becomes an art, and an art that helps make vivid the personality of the old showman. "Artemus Ward" is not a mere Dickens gargoyle: he is alive. Witness this:

If you say anything about my show say my snaiks is as harmliss as the new born Babe.

In the Brite Lexington of yooth, thar aint no sich word as fale.

"Too troo, too troo!" I answered; "it's a scanderlis fact."

He is not at all consistent in his spelling; he is as prodigal as nature and as careless. The mere uninspired cacographist misspells every word that it is possible to misspell, but Browne picks only key words. His art is displayed as much in the words he does not change as in those with which he makes free. He coins new words with telling effect. Of his wife he observes: "As a flap-jackist she has no equal. She wears the belt." And he makes free with older words in a way that is peculiarly his own: "Why this thusness."

The third element he added to the humor of Phœnix was a naïve drollery, a whimsical incongruity, that was peculiar to himself. He caught it from no one, and he imparted it to no one. It can be described only as "Artemus Ward." It lives even apart from his presence in much of the writing that he has left behind him. It is as useless to try to analyze it as it were to describe the odor of apples. One can only quote examples, as for instance this from his adventure "Among the Free Lovers":

The exsentric female then clutched me frantically by the arm and hollered:

"You air mine, O you air mine!"

"Scacely," I sed, endeverin to git loose from her. But she clung to me and sed:

"You air my Affinerty!"

"What upon arth is that?" I shouted.

"Dost thou not know?"

"No, I dostent!"

"Listin man & I'll tell ye!" sed the strange female; "for years I hav yearned for thee. I knowd thou wast in the world sumwhares, tho I didn't know whare. My hart sed he would cum and I took courage. He has cum—he's here—you air him—you air my Affinerty! O 'tis too mutch! too mutch!" and she sobbed agin.

"Yes," I anserd, "I think it is a darn sight too mutch!"

"Hast thou not yearned for me?" she yelled, ringin her hands like a female play acter.

"Not a yearn!" I bellerd at the top of my voice, throwin her away from me.

Whatever we may think of the quality of this, we must agree that it is original. If there is any trace of a prototype it is Dickens. The characters and the situation are heightened to grotesqueness, yet one must be abnormally keen in palate to detect any Dickens flavor in the style. It is "Artemus Ward" and only "Artemus Ward." All that he wrote he drew from life itself and from American life. It is as redolent of the new world as the bison or the Indian. He wrote only what had passed under his eye and he wrote only of persons. Unlike Mark Twain, he could cross the continent in the wild days of '64 and see nothing apparently but humanity.

The world of Charles Farrar Browne was the child's world of wonder. He was a case, as it were, of arrested development, a fragment of the myth-making age brought into the nineteenth century. His "Artemus Ward" was a latter-day knight-errant traveling from adventure to adventure. The world to him, even as to a child, was full of strange, half mythical beings: Shakers, Spiritualists, Octoroons, Free Lovers, Mormons, Champions of Woman's Rights, Office Seekers, "Seseshers," Princes, and heirs to Empires. The hero is tempted, imposed upon, assaulted, but he always comes out first best and turns with copious advice which is always moral and sensible and appropriate. To the woman who had claimed him as her affinity he speaks thus:

I'm a lawabiding man, and bleeve in good, old-fashioned institutions. I am marrid & my orfsprings resemble me, if I am a showman! I think your Affinity bizniss is cussed noncents, besides bein outrajusly wicked. Why don't you behave desunt like other folks? Go to work and earn a honist livin and not stay round here in this lazy, shiftless way, pizenin the moral atmosphere with your pestifrous idees! You wimin folks go back to your lawful husbands, if you've got any, and take orf them skanderlous gownds and trowsis, and dress respectful like other wimin. You men folks, cut orf them pirattercal wiskers, burn up them infurnel pamplits, put sum weskuts on, go to work choppin wood, splittin fence rales, or tillin the sile. I pored 4th. my indignashun in this way till I got out of breth, when I stopt.

This is not "Artemus Ward" talking; it is Charles Farrar Browne, and it is Browne who rebukes the Shakers, the Spiritualists, the Committee from the Woman's Rights Association, and the office-seekers about Lincoln, who gives advice to the Prince of Wales and Prince Napoleon, who stands by the flag when the mob destroys his show down among the "Seseshers," and who later addresses the draft rioters at Baldwinsville. Browne was indeed a moral showman. Every page of his work is free from profanity and vulgarity. He is never cheap, never tawdry, never unkind to anything save immorality and snobbishness. His New England ancestry and breeding may be felt in all he wrote. At heart he was a reformer. He once wrote: "Humorous writers have always done the most toward helping virtue on its pilgrimage, and the truth has found more aid from them than from all the grave polemists and solid writers that have ever spoken or written."

Beneath his kindly, whimsical exterior there was a spirit that could be blown into an indignation as fierce even as Mark Twain's. While he was local editor of the Plain-Dealer he burst out one day in this fiery editorial:

A writer in the Philadelphia Ledger has discovered that Edgar A. Poe was not a man of genius. We take it for granted that the writer has never read Poe. His lot in life was hard enough, God knows, and it is a pity the oyster-house critics, snobs, flunkeys, and literary nincompoops can't stop snarling over his grave. The biography of Poe by Griswold—which production for fiendish malignity is probably unequaled in the history of letters—should, it would seem, have sufficed. No stone marks the spot where poor Poe sleeps, and no friendly hand strews flowers upon his grave in summer-time, but countless thousands, all over the world, will read and admire his wildly beautiful pages until the end of time.[21]

This knightly spirit led him to warfare upon everything that was merely sentimental or insincere. He burlesqued the gushing love songs of the period, advertising in his program to render at appropriate intervals "Dearest, Whenest Thou Slumberest Dostest Thou Dreamest of Me?" and "Dear Mother, I've Come Home to Die by Request." He burlesqued the sensational novels of the day in Roberto, the Rover, and Moses, the Sassy. Only once did he ever read the Ledger, he avers, and that was after his first experience with New England rum:

On takin the secund glass I was seezed with a desire to break winders, & arter imbibin the third glass I knockt a small boy down, pickt his pocket of a New York Ledger, and wildly commenced readin Sylvanus Kobb's last Tail.

He is still read and still republished. There is a perennial charm about his work that raises it above the times that produced it, and that promises to make it permanent. His originality, his unfailing animal spirits which came of the abounding life of the new America, his quaint characterization which has added a new figure to the gallery of fiction, his Americanism, his vein of kindliness and pathos that underlies all that he wrote, his indignation at snobbery and all in the life of his day that was not genuine and pure, and finally the exquisite pathos of his later years, all combine to make him remembered.

V

Among the literary progeny of "Artemus Ward" the most noteworthy, perhaps, was "Petroleum V. Nasby," who became so familiar a figure during the war. The creator of this unique character was David Ross Locke, a native of the State of New York, and, like Browne, a wandering printer from early boyhood. When the "Artemus Ward" letters began to appear in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Locke was editor of the Bucyrus Journal, a few miles to the westward. Their success spurred him to imitation, but it was not until the firing upon Fort Sumter that he succeeded at all in attracting attention. Wingert's Corners, a small hamlet in Crawford County, Ohio, had petitioned the legislature to remove all negroes from the State. There was a humorous element in such a proposition from such a source. Why not give the bellicose little community an appropriate spokesman, a sort of "copperhead" "Artemus Ward," and have him declare it totally free and independent of the State? The result was a letter in the Findlay Jeffersonian, of which Locke was then the editor, dated "Wingert's Corners, March the 21, 1861," and signed "Petroleum V. Nasby." The "Nasby Letters" had begun. The little Ohio hamlet soon proved too small a field for the redoubtable Democrat, and to give free play to his love of slavery and untaxed whisky, his hatred of "niggers" and his self-seeking disloyalty, he was removed to "Confedrit X Roads (wich is in the Stait of Kentucky)," from which imaginary center letters continued to flow during the war and the reconstruction era that followed.

No humorist ever struck a more popular chord. The letters were republished week by week by the entire Northern press, and they were looked for by the reading public as eagerly as if they were reports of battles. The soldiers in the Federal armies read them with gusto, and Lincoln and Chase considered them a real source of strength to the Union cause.

Like most political satires, however, the letters do not wear well. They were too much colored by their times. To-day the atmosphere of prejudice in which they were written has vanished, and the most telling hits and timely jokes raise no smile. A generation has arisen which must have foot-notes if it is to read the letters. We wonder now what it was that could have so captivated the first readers.

"Nasby" has little of "Artemus Ward's" whimsical drollery; indeed, the old Democrat resembles the showman, his prototype, only in his rusticity, his ignorance of culture, and his defiance of the laws of spelling. One is Launcelot Gobbo, the other is Touchstone; one is a mere clown, the other a true humorist, as genuine as life itself is genuine. It is the duty of the clown to be a buffoon, to imitate and to come to grief. He essays all the parts of the acrobats only to roll ignominiously in the dust. Then to the amazement of the beholders he makes a leap that surpasses them all. "Nasby" at one time or another enters every sphere of the political life of his day and generally with small glory to himself. Through "influence" he becomes postmaster of "Confedrit X Roads," and through "influence" he loses his position.

The die is cast! The guilloteen hez fallen! I am no longer postmaster at Confedrit X Roads, wich is in the stait uv Kentucky. The place that knowd me wunst will know me no more forever; the paper wich Deekin Pogram takes will be handed out by a nigger; a nigger will hev the openin uv letters addressed to parties residin hereabouts containin remittances; a nigger will have the riflin uv letters adrest to lottery managers and extractin the sweets therfrom; a nigger will be—but I couldn't dwell upon the disgustin theme no longer.

This is mere clownishness, and yet no type of humor could have been more acceptable to the time that read it. The Revolutionary War had had its "McFingal," who loudly preached Toryism and as a reward was beaten about and even tarred and feathered. Periods of strife and prejudice always demand a clown, one who concentrates in a single personality the evils of the time. "Nasby" stands for blatant copperheadism, just as "McFingal" stands for Toryism, and as a result he delighted the multitude. His schemes and ideas and adventures were all exaggerated, and the persons he dealt with, like President Johnson and his circle, were heightened to the point of caricature. Magnified fifty diameters, the evil or the evil personage, like all things seen under the magnifying glass, becomes grotesque and startling. The people at first laugh and then they cry out, "Away with this thing; it is unendurable."

Refinement is not to be expected in political satires that came hot from a period of prejudice and war, but the coarseness of the "Nasby" letters goes beyond the bounds of toleration even in such writings. They smack of the coarseness of the armies of the period. They reek with whisky until one can almost smell it as one turns the pages. The uncouth spelling simply adds to the coarseness; it adds nothing to the reality of the characterization. There is an impression constantly that the writer is straining for comic effect. He who is capable of such diction as, "They can swear to each other's loyalty, which will reduce the cost of evidence to a mere nominal sum," would hardly be guilty of such spellings as "yeelded," "pekoolyer," and "vayloo," the last standing for "value."

The effect of the letters in forming sentiment in the North at critical periods was doubtless considerable, but such statements as the much-quoted one of George S. Boutwell at Cooper Union that the fall of the Confederacy was due to "three forces—the army, the navy, and the Nasby letters"—must be taken with caution as too much colored by the enthusiastic atmosphere in which it was spoken. Their enormous vogue, however, no one can question. East and West became one as they perused the remorseless logic of these patriotic satires. Strange as it may seem to-day, great numbers of the earlier readers had not a suspicion that "Nasby" of "Confedrit X Roads" was not as real a person even as "Jeff" Davis. According to Major Pond, "one meeting of the 'faithful' framed a resolution commending the fidelity to Democratic principles shown in the Nasby letters, but urging Mr. Nasby, for the sake of policy, not to be so outspoken."[22] In the presence of such testimony criticism must be silent. Realism can have no greater triumph than that.

VI

Periods of prejudice and passion tend always to develop satirists. The Civil War produced a whole school of them. There was "Bill Arp," the "Nasby" of the South, philosopher and optimist, who did so much to relieve Southern gloom during the reconstruction era; there was "Orpheus C. Kerr," who made ludicrous the office-seeking mania of the times; and, greatest of them all, including even "Nasby," there was Thomas Nast, who worked not with pen but with pencil.

No sketch of American humor can ignore Nast. His art was constructive and compelling. It led the public; it created a new humorous atmosphere, one distinctively original and distinctively American. Nast was the father of American caricature. It was he who first made effective the topical cartoon for a leader; who first portrayed an individual by some single trait or peculiarity of apparel; and who first made use of symbolic animals in caricature, as the Tammany tiger, the Democratic jackass, and the Republican elephant—all three of them creations of Nast. His work is peculiarly significant. He created a new reading public. Even the illiterate could read the cartoons during the war period and the Tweed ring days, and it was their reading that put an end to the evils portrayed. General Grant when asked, "Who is the foremost figure in civil life developed by the Rebellion?" replied instantly, "I think Thomas Nast. He did as much as any one man to preserve the Union and bring the war to an end."[23]

VII

In all the humorous writings of the period there was a deep undercurrent of wisdom. Ever since the days of Franklin, the typical American has been a maker of aphorisms quaintly expressed. The man who for years has wrestled with Nature on frontier or farm has evolved a philosophy of his own. American life has tended to produce unique individualities: "Sam Slicks," "Natty Bumppos," "Pudd'nhead Wilsons," "David Harums," and "Silas Laphams,"—men rich in self-gained wisdom, who talk in aphorisms like Lincoln's, "Don't swap horses when you are crossing a stream."

There has been evolved what may be called the American type of aphorism—the concentrated bit of wisdom, old it may be, but expressed in such a quaint and striking way as to bring surprise and laughter. The humor may come from the homeliness of the expression, or the unusual nature of the compared terms, or the ludicrous image brought suddenly to the mind. Examples are easily found: "Flattery is like kolone water, tew be smelt of, but not swallowed"; "It is better to be a young June bug than an old bird of paradise"; "The man who blows his own trumpet generally plays a solo"; and "A reasonable amount of fleas is good fer a dog—keeps him from broodin' over bein' a dog."

The leader of the latter-day proverbialists was Henry Wheeler Shaw, a native of Massachusetts, a student for a time at Hamilton College, and then for twenty years a deckhand, farmer, and auctioneer in Ohio. He was forty before he began to write. His "Essay on the Mule," 1859, found no favor. Rewritten the next year in phonetic spelling and submitted to a New York paper as "A Essa on the Muel, bi Josh Billings," it became quickly famous. The people of the early seventies wanted local color. the tang, as it were, of wild fruit,—life, fresh, genuine, and first-hand. They gave a languid approval to Holmes's Poet of the Breakfast Table, but bought enormous editions of Josh Billings' Farmers' Allmanax. The edition of 1870 sold 90,000 copies in three months; that of 1871 sold no fewer than 127,000.

The humor of "Josh Billings" is confined to his aphorisms. In his longer writings and indeed in his lectures, as we read them to-day, he is flat and insufferable. He has little of the high spirits and zest and lightness of "Phœnix" and "Ward": he began his humorous work too late in life for such effects; but he surpasses them all in seriousness and moral poise. That the times demanded misspelling and clownishness is to be deplored, for Shaw was a philosopher, broad and sane; how broad and sane one can see best in Uncle Esek's Wisdom, a column contributed for years to the Century Magazine, and, at the request of J. G. Holland, printed in ordinary spelling.

"With me everything must be put in two or three lines," he once declared, but his two or three lines are always as compressed as if written by Emerson. He deals for the most part with the moral side of life with a common sense as sane as Franklin's. So wide was the field of his work that one may find quotations from him on nearly every question that is concerned with conduct. His stamp is on all he wrote. One may quote from him at random and be sure of wisdom:

The best cure for rheumatism is to thank the Lord it ain't the gout.

Building air castles is a harmless business as long as you don't attempt to live in them.

Politeness haz won more viktorys than logick ever haz.

Jealousy is simply another name for self-love.

Faith was given to man to lengthen out his reason.

What the moral army needs just now is more rank and file and fewer brigadier generals.

VIII

The great tide of comic writings became fast and furious in the seventies. In 1872 no fewer than nine comic papers were established in New York alone: The Brickbat, The Cartoon, Frank Leslie's Budget of Fun, The Jolly Joker, Nick-nax, Merryman's Monthly, The Moon, The Phunny Fellow, The Thistle, and perhaps others. Some died after the first issue, some persisted longer. Every year saw its own crop of comics rise, flourish and die. In 1877 Puck was established, the first really successful comic paper in America; in 1881 appeared Judge; and in 1883 Life, the first to succeed without politics.

Very little of all this humorous product can be called literature; the greater part of it already has passed into oblivion; yet for all that the movement that produced it cannot be neglected by one who would study the period. The outburst of humor in the sixties and the seventies was indeed significant. Poor though the product may have been, it was American in background and spirit, and it was drawn from no models save life itself. For the first time America had a national literature in the broad sense of the word, original and colored by its own soil. The work of every one in the school was grounded in sincerity. The worker saw with his own eyes and he looked only for truth. He attacked sentimentality and gush and all that was affected and insincere. Born of the great moral awakening of the war, the humor had in it the Cervantes spirit. Nast, for instance, in his later years declared, "I have never allowed myself to attack anything I did not believe in my soul to be wrong and deserving of the worst fate that could befall it." The words are significant. The laughter of the period was not the mere crackling of thorns under a pot, not a mere fusillade of quips and puns; there was depth in it and purpose. It swept away weakness and wrongs. It purged America and brought sanity and health of soul. From the work of the humorists followed the second accomplishment of the period: those careful studies in prose and verse of real life in the various sections of America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY[24]

George Horatio Derby. (1823–1861.) Phœnixiana, or Sketches and Burlesques by John Phœnix, N. Y. 1855; The Squibob Papers, N. Y. 1859; Phœnixiana, or Sketches and Burlesques by John Phœnix. Introduction by John Kendrick Bangs. Illustrated by Kemble. N. Y. 1903.

Charles Farrar Browne. (1834–1867.) Artemus Ward, His Book. N. Y. 1862; Artemus Ward, His Travels. 1. Miscellaneous. 2. Among the Mormons, N. Y. 1865; Betsey Jane Ward. Hur Book of Goaks. N. Y. 1866; Artemus Ward in London and Other Papers. N. Y. 1867; Artemus Ward's Panorama as Exhibited in Egyptian Hall, London. Edited by his executors, T. W. Robertson and E. P. Hingston. N. Y. 1869; The Genial Showman, London, 1870; Artemus Ward, His Works Complete, with a biographical sketch by M. D. Landon. N. Y. 1875; The Complete Works of Artemus Ward. London. 1910.

David Ross Locke. (1833–1888.) Divers Views, Opinions, and Prophecies of Yours Trooly, Petroleum V. Nasby. 1865; Nasby Papers. With an Introduction by G. A. Sala. London. 1866; Swingin' Round the Cirkle. By Petroleum V. Nasby. His Ideas of Men, Politics, and Things, During 1866. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. Boston. 1867; Ekkoes from Kentucky. By Petroleum V. Nasby. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. Boston. 1868; The Struggles (Social, Financial, and Political) of Petroleum V. Nasby. With an Introduction by Charles Sumner. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. Boston. 1872; Nasby in Exile. Toledo. 1882.

Thomas Nast. (1840–1902.) Thomas Nast. His Period and His Pictures. By Albert Bigelow Paine. 1904; Life and Letters of Thomas Nast, Albert Bigelow Paine, 1910.

Henry Wheeler Shaw. Josh Billings: His Sayings. New York. 1865; Josh Billings on Ice and Other Things. N. Y. 1868; Josh Billings' Farmers' Allmanax for the Year 1870. N. Y. 1870; Old Probabilities; Contained in One Volume. Farmers' Allmanax 1870–1880. N. Y. 1879; Josh Billings' Old Farmers' Allmanax, 1870–1879. N. Y. 1902; Complete Comic Writings of Josh Billings with biographical introduction. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. N. Y.; Life of Henry W. Shaw, by F. B. Smith. 1883.

[CHAPTER III]
MARK TWAIN

With Mark Twain, American literature became for the first time really national. He was the first man of letters of any distinction to be born west of the Mississippi. He spent his boyhood and young manhood near the heart of the continent, along the great river during the vital era when it was the boundary line between known and unknown America, and when it resounded from end to end with the shouts and the confusion of the first great migration from the East; he lived for six thrilling years in the camps and the boom towns and the excited cities of Nevada and California; and then, at thirty-one, a raw product of the raw West, he turned his face to the Atlantic Coast, married a rare soul from one of the refined families of New York State, and settled down to a literary career in New England, with books and culture and trips abroad, until in his old age Oxford University could confer upon him—"Tom Sawyer," whose schooling in the ragged river town had ended before he was twelve—the degree that had come to America only as borne by two or three of the Brahmins of New England. Only America, and America at a certain period, could produce a paradox like that.

Mark Twain interpreted the West from the standpoint of a native. The group of humorists who had first brought to the East the Western spirit and the new laughter had all of them been reared in the older sections. John Phœnix and Artemus Ward and Josh Billings were born in New England, and Nasby and many of the others were natives of New York State. All of them in late boyhood had gone West as to a wonderland and had breathed the new atmosphere as something strange and exhilarating, but Mark Twain was native born. He was himself a part of the West; he removed from it so as to see it in true perspective, and so became its best interpreter. Hawthorne had once expressed a wish to see some part of America "where the damned shadow of Europe has never fallen." Mark Twain spent his life until he was thirty in such unshadowed places. When he wrote he wrote without a thought of other writings; it was as if the West itself was dictating its autobiography.

I

The father of Mark Twain, John Clemens, a dreamer and an idealist, had left Virginia with his young wife early in the twenties to join the restless tide that even then was setting strongly westward. Their first settlement was at Gainsborough, Tennessee, where was born their first son, Orion, but they remained there not long. Indeed, like all emigrants of their type, they remained nowhere long. During the next ten or eleven years five other children were born to them at four different stations along the line of their westward progress. When the fifth child arrived, to be christened Samuel Langhorne, they were living at Florida, Missouri, a squalid little hamlet fifty miles west of the Mississippi. That was November 30, 1835. Four years later they made what proved to be their last move, settling at Hannibal, Missouri, a small river town about a hundred miles above St. Louis. Here it was that the future Mark Twain spent the next fourteen years, those formative years between four and eighteen that determine so greatly the bent of the later life.

The Hannibal of the forties and the fifties was hardly a town one would pick deliberately for the education of a great man of letters. It lay just a few miles above the northern line of Pike County—that Pike County, Missouri, that gave name to the shiftless, hand-to-mouth, ague-shaken type of humanity later to be celebrated so widely as the Pike. Hannibal was not a Pike community, but it was typically southwestern in its somnolent, slave-holding, care-free atmosphere. The one thing that forever rescued it from the commonplace was the River, the tremendous Mississippi, source of endless dreams and romance. Mark Twain has given us a picture, perfect as an etching, of this river and the little town that nestled beside it:

After all these years I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer's morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so; one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores, with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall, chins on breast, hats slouched over their faces, asleep—with shingle shavings enough around to show what broke them down; a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk, doing a good business in water-melon rinds and seeds; two or three lonely little freight piles scattered around the "levee"; a pile of "skids" on the slope of the stone-paved wharf, and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow of them; two or three wood flats at the head of the wharf, but nobody to listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them; the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense forest away on the other side; the "point" above the town, and the "point" below, bounding the river glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one. Presently a film of dark smoke appears above one of these remote "points"; instantly a negro drayman, famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up the cry, "S-t-e-a-m boat a-comin'!" and the scene changes! The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatter of drays follows, every house and store pours out a human contribution, and all in a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving. Drays, carts, men, boys, all go hurrying to a common center, the wharf. Assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon the coming boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time.... The furnace doors are open and the fires glaring bravely; the upper decks are black with passengers; the captain stands by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all; great volumes of the blackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys—a husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch pine just before arriving at a town; the crew are grouped on the forecastle; the broad stage is run far out over the port bow, and an envied deck-hand stands picturesquely on the end of it with a coil of rope in his hand; the pent steam is screaming through the gage-cocks; the captain lifts his hand, a bell rings, the wheels stop; then they turn back, churning the water to foam, and the steamer is at rest. Then such a scramble as there is to get aboard, and to get ashore, and to take in freight, and to discharge freight, all at one and the same time; and such a yelling and cursing as the mates facilitate it all with! Ten minutes later the steamer is under way again, with no flag on the jack-staff and no black smoke issuing from the chimneys. After ten more minutes the town is dead again, and the town drunkard asleep by the skids once more.[25]

It was the romance of this river, the vastness and the mystery of it, the great unknown world which lay beyond those "points" where all things disappeared, that made of the boy a restless soul, a dreamer and an idealist—that made of him indeed the Mark Twain of the later years. His books nowhere rise into the pure serene of literature unless touched at some point by this magic stream that flowed so marvelously through his boyhood. The two discoverers of the Mississippi were De Soto and Mark Twain.

The first crisis in the boy's life came in his twelfth year, when the death of his father sent him as an apprentice to a country newspaper office, that most practical and most exacting of all training schools for youth. Two years on the Missouri Courier, four years on the Hannibal Journal, then the restlessness of his clan sent him wandering into the East even as it had sent Artemus Ward and Nasby into the West. For fifteen months he served as compositor in New York City and Philadelphia, then a great homesickness for the river came upon him. From boyhood it had been his dream to be the pilot of a Mississippi steamboat; all other professions seemed flat and lifeless compared with that satisfying and boundless field of action; and it is not strange that in April, 1857, we find him installed as Horace Bixby's "cub" at the beginning of a new career.

During the next four years he gave himself heart and soul to the almost superhuman task of committing to memory every sandbar and point and landmark in twelve hundred miles of a shifting, treacherous river. The difficulties he has explained fully in his book. It was a college course of four years, and no man ever had a better one. To quote his own words:

In that brief, sharp schooling I got personally and familiarly acquainted with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history. When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before—met him on the river.[26]

It taught him far more than this. The pilot of a great Mississippi boat was a man with peculiar responsibilities. The lives of the passengers and the safety of the cargo were absolutely in his hands. His authority was above even the captain's. Only picked men of courage and judgment with a self-reliance that never wavered in any crisis were fit material for pilots. To quote Horace Bixby, the most noted of them all:

There were no signal lights along the shore in those days, and no searchlights on the vessels; everything was blind, and on a dark, misty night in a river full of snags and shifting sand-bars and changing shores, a pilot's judgment had to be founded on absolute certainty.[27]

Under such conditions men were valued only for what they actually could do. There was no entrance into the inner circle of masters of the river save through genuineness and real efficiency. Sentimentalizing and boasting and sham died instantly in that stern atmosphere. To live for four years in daily contact with such men taught one coarseness of speech and an appalling fluency in the use of profanity, but it taught one at the same time to look with supreme contempt upon inefficiency and pretense.

The "cub" became at length a pilot, to be entrusted after a time with some of the finest boats on the river. He became very efficient in his hard-learned profession so conspicuously so that he won the commendation even of Bixby, who could say in later years, "Sam Clemens never had an accident either as a steersman or as a pilot, except once when he got aground for a few hours in the bagasse (cane) smoke, with no damage to any one."[28] But the war put a sudden end to the piloting. The river was closed, and in April, 1861, he went reluctantly back to Hannibal. "I loved the profession far better than any I have ever followed since," he declared in his later years, "and I took a measureless pride in it." It is very possible that but for the war and the change which it wrought upon the river, Mark Twain might have passed his whole life as a Mississippi pilot.

II

After a few weeks in a self-recruited troop that fell to pieces before it could join the Confederate army, the late pilot, now twenty-six years old, started by stage coach across the Plains with his brother Orion, who had just been appointed secretary to the new Governor of Nevada. It was Mark Twain's entry upon what, in college terms, may be called his graduate course. It was six years long and it covered one of the most picturesque eras in the history of Western America.

For a few restive months he remained at Carson City as his brother's assistant, then in characteristic fashion he broke away to join the excited tide of gold seekers that was surging through all the mountains of Nevada. During the next year he lived in mining camps with prospectors and eager claim-holders. Luck, however, seemed against him; at least it promised him little as a miner, and when the Virginia City Enterprise, to which he had contributed letters, offered him a position on its staff of reporters, he jumped at the opportunity.

Now for two years he lived at the very heart of the mining regions of the West, in Virginia City, the home of the Comstock lode, then at its highest boom. Everything about him—the newness and rawness of things, the peculiar social conditions, the atmosphere of recklessness and excitement, the money that flowed everywhere in fabulous quantities—everything was unique. Even the situation of the city was remarkable. Hingston, who visited it with Artemus Ward while Mark Twain was still a member of the Enterprise staff, speaks of it as "perched up on the side of Mt. Davidson some five or six thousand feet above sea level, with a magnificent view before us of the desert.... Nothing but arid rocks and sandy plains sprinkled with sage brush. No village for full two hundred miles, and any number of the worst type of Indians—the Goshoots—agreeably besprinkling the path."[29] Artemus Ward estimated its population at twelve thousand. He was impressed by its wildness, "its splendid streets paved with silver ore," "its unadulterated cussedness," its vigilance committee "which hangs the more vicious of the pestiferous crowd," and its fabulous output of silver which is "melted down into bricks the size of common house bricks, then loaded into huge wagons, each drawn by eight and twelve mules, and sent off to San Francisco."[30]

It was indeed a strange area of life that passed before the young Mississippi pilot. For two winters he was sent down to report the new legislature of the just-organized territory, and it was while engaged in this picturesque gala task that he sent back his letters signed for the first time Mark Twain. That was the winter of 1863. It was time now for him to seek a wider field. Accordingly, the following May he went down to San Francisco, where at length he found employment on the Morning Call.

Now for the first time the young reporter found himself in a literary atmosphere. Poets and sketch-writers and humorists were everywhere. There was at least one flourishing literary journal, the Golden Era, and its luxuriously appointed office was the literary center of the Pacific Coast. "Joaquin Miller recalls from an old diary, kept by him then, having seen Adah Isaacs Menken, Prentice Mulford, Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mark Twain, Orpheus C. Kerr, Artemus Ward, Gilbert Densmore, W. S. Kendall, and Mrs. Hitchcock assembled there at one time."[31] Charles Henry Webb was just starting a literary weekly, the Californian, and when, a year later, Bret Harte was made its editor, Mark Twain was added to the contributing staff. It was the real beginning of his literary career. He received now helpful criticism. In a letter written in after years to Thomas Bailey Aldrich he says:

Bret Harte trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesqueness to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land.[32]

To the Californian and the Era he now contributed that series of sketches which later was drawn upon for material for his first published book. But the old restlessness was upon him again. He struck out into the Tuolumne Hills with Jim Gillis as a pocket miner and for months lived as he could in shacks and camps, panning between drenching showers worthless gravel, expecting every moment to find gold. He found no gold, but he found what was infinitely richer. In later years in a letter to Gillis he wrote:

It makes my heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days. Still it shouldn't, for right in the depths of their poverty and their pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming good fortune. You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal sojourn in the rain and mud of Angel's Camp—I mean that day we sat around the tavern and heard that chap tell about the frog and how they filled him with shot. And you remember how we quoted from the yarn and laughed over it out there on the hillside while you and dear old Stoker panned and washed. I jotted the story down in my note-book that day, and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen dollars for it—I was just that blind. But then we were so hard up. I published that story, and it became widely known in America, India, China, England, and the reputation it made for me has paid me thousands and thousands of dollars since.[33]

The publication in New York, May 1, 1867, of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches and the delivery a week later by the author of The Jumping Frog of a lecture on the Sandwich Islands marks the end of the period of preparation in Mark Twain's life. A new American author had arrived.

III

Send this Mississippi pilot, printer, adventurer, miner in rough camps of the Sierras, to Paris, Italy, Constantinople, and the Holy Land, and what will be his impressions? For an answer we must read The Innocents Abroad. It will be no Outre Mer, we are certain of that, and no Pencillings by the Way. Before a line of it was written an atmosphere had been created unique in American literature, for where, save in the California of 1867, was there ever optimism, nay, romanticism, that could reply instantly to the young reporter who asked to be sent on a Don Quixote pilgrimage to Europe and the Orient, "Go. Twelve hundred and fifty dollars will be paid for you before the vessel sails, and your only instructions are that you will continue to write at such times and from such places as you deem proper, and in the same style that heretofore secured you the favor of the readers of the Alta California"?

It was not to be a tour of Europe, as Longfellow and Willis and Taylor had made it, the pilgrimage of a devotee to holy shrines; it was to be a great picnic with sixty-seven in the picnic party. Moreover, the recorder of it was bound by his instructions to report it in the style that had won him California fame. It was to be a Western book, written by a Westerner from the Western standpoint, but this does not imply that his Western readers expected an illiterate production full of coarseness and rude wit. California had produced a school of poets and romancers; she had serious literary journals, and she was proud of them. The letters, if California was to set her stamp of approval upon them, must have literary charm; they must have, moreover, freshness and originality; and they must sparkle with that spirit of humor which already had begun to be recognized as a native product.

We open the book and linger a moment over the preface:

Notwithstanding it is only the record of a picnic, it has a purpose, which is, to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him. I make small pretence of showing any one how he ought to look at objects of interest beyond the sea—other books do that, and therefore, even if I were competent to do it, there is no need.

I offer no apologies for any departures from the usual style of travel-writing that may be charged against me—for I think I have seen with impartial eyes, and I am sure I have written at least honestly, whether wisely or not.

Let us read the book straight through. We are impressed with the fact that, despite the supposition of its first readers, it is not primarily a humorous work. It is a genuine book of travels. It is first of all an honest record, even as its author averred. In the second place it is the book of a young man, a young man on a lark and full of the highest spirits. The world is good—it is a good show, though it is full of absurdities and of humbugs that should be exposed. The old stock jokes of the grand tour—the lack of soap, the charge for candles, the meeting of supposed foreigners who break unexpectedly into the best of English, and all the well-known others—were new to the public then and they came with freshness. Then it is the book of one who saw, even as he claimed, with his own eyes. This genuine American, with his training on the river and the wild frontier where men and things are what they are, no more and no less, will be impressed only with genuineness. He will describe things precisely as he sees them. Gibraltar "is pushed out into the sea on the end of a flat, narrow strip of land, and is suggestive of a 'gob' of mud on the end of a shingle"; of the Coliseum: "everybody recognizes at once that 'looped and windowed' bandbox with a side bitten out"; and of a famous river: "It is popular to admire the Arno. It is a great historical creek with four feet in the channel and some scows floating around. It would be a very passable river if they would pump some water into it." That was not written for a joke: it was the way the Arno honestly impressed the former Mississippi pilot.

He is not always critical. Genuineness and real worth never fail to impress him. Often he stands before a landscape, a city, a cathedral, as enthusiastic as any of the older school of travelers. The book is full of vivid descriptions, some of them almost poetic in their spirit and diction. But things must be what they pretend to be, or they will disgust him. Everywhere there is scorn for the mere echoer of the enthusiasm of others. He will not gush over an unworthy thing even if he knows the whole world has gushed over it. Da Vinci's "Last Supper," painted on a dilapidated wall and stained and scarred and dimmed, may once have been beautiful, he admits, but it is not so now. The pilgrims who stand before it "able to speak only in catchy ejaculations of rapture" fill him with wrath. "How can they see what is not visible?" The work of the old masters fills him always with indignation. They painted not Hebrews in their scriptural pieces, but Italians. "Their nauseous adulation of princely patrons was more prominent to me and claimed my attention more than the charms of color." "Raphael pictured such infernal villains as Catherine and Marie de Medicis seated in heaven conversing familiarly with the Virgin Mary and the angels (to say nothing of higher personages), and yet my friends abuse me because I am a little prejudiced against the old masters."

Here we have a note that was to become more and more emphatic in Mark Twain's work with every year he lived: his indignation at oppression and insincerity. The cathedrals of Italy lost their beauty for him when he saw the misery of the population. He stood before the Grand Duomo of Florence. "Like all other men I fell down and worshiped it, but when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking, too suggestive, and I said 'O sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye? Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church?' Three hundred happy, comfortable priests are employed in that cathedral."

Everywhere he strikes out at sentimentality. When he learns how Abelard deliberately sacrificed Héloïse to his own selfish ideals, he bursts out: "The tons of sentiment I have wasted on that unprincipled humbug in my ignorance! I shall throttle down my emotions hereafter, about this sort of people, until I have read them up and know whether they are entitled to any tearful attentions or not." He is eager to see a French "grissette," but having seen one, bursts out in true Artemus Ward fashion: "Aroint thee, wench! I sorrow for the vagabond student of the Latin Quarter now, even more than formerly I envied him. Thus topples to the earth another idol of my infancy." The story of Petrarch's love for Laura only fills him with pity for the outrageously treated "Mr. Laura," the unknown husband of the heroine, who bore the burden but got none of the glory, and when they tell the thrilling legend of the old medieval castle, he makes only the comment, "Splendid legend—splendid lie—drive on!"

It was a blow at the whole school of American travel writers; it marked the passing of an era. Bret Harte in the first volume of the Overland Monthly (1868), was the first to outline the Western standpoint:

The days of sentimental journeyings are over. The dear old book of travel ... is a thing of the past. Sentimental musings on foreign scenes are just now restricted to the private diaries of young and impressible ladies and clergymen with affections of the bronchial tubes.... A race of good humored, engaging iconoclasts seem to have precipitated themselves upon the old altars of mankind, and like their predecessors of the eighth century, have paid particular attention to the holy church. Mr. Howells has slashed one or two sacred pictorial canvases with his polished rapier; Mr. Swift has made one or two neat long shots with a rifled Parrott, and Mr. Mark Twain has used brickbats on stained glass windows with damaging effect. And those gentlemen have certainly brought down a heap of rubbish.[34]

It was the voice of the new West and of the new era. With The Innocents Abroad begins the new period in American literature. The book is full of the new after-the-war Americanism that did its own thinking, that saw with its own eyes, that put a halo upon nothing save genuineness and substantial worth. It must not be forgotten that America even in the new seventies was still mawkish with sentimentality. The very year The Innocents Abroad appeared, Gates Ajar sold twenty editions. Mark Twain came into the age like the Goths into Rome. Stand on the solid earth, he cried. Look with your own eyes. Worship nothing but truth and genuineness. Europe is no better than America. Como is beautiful, but it is not so beautiful as Tahoe. Why this eternal glorification of things simply and solely because it is the conventional thing to glorify them? "The critic," he wrote in later years to Andrew Lang, "has actually imposed upon the world the superstition that a painting by Raphael is more valuable to the civilizations of the earth than is a chromo; and the august opera more than the hurdy gurdy and the villagers' singing society; and the Latin classics than Kipling's far-reaching bugle note; and Jonathan Edwards than the Salvation Army."[35] The new American democracy was speaking. To the man who for four years had learned in the school of Horace Bixby there was no high and no low save as measured, not by appearances or by tradition, but by intrinsic worth.

IV

It has been customary in libraries to place the earlier works of Mark Twain on the same shelf as those of Artemus Ward and Josh Billings. To the thousands who laughed at him as he lectured from year to year he was a mere maker of fun. The public that bought such enormous editions of The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It bought them as books to laugh over. What shall we say to-day of Mark Twain's humor? A generation has arisen to whom he is but a tradition and a set of books; what is the verdict of this generation?

First of all, it is necessary that we examine the man himself. Nature seems to have forced him into the ranks of the comedians. From his mother he inherited a drawl that was inexpressibly funny; he had a laughable personality, and a laughable angle from which he looked at life. He could no more help provoking mirth than he could help being himself. Moreover, he had been thrown during his formative years into a veritable training school for humorists. On the river and in the mines and the raw towns and cities of the West, he had lived in a gale of high spirits, of loud laughter, of practical jokes, and droll stories that had gone the rough round of the boats or the camps. His humor, therefore, was an echo of the laughter of elemental men who have been flung into conditions full of incongruities and strange contrasts. It is the humor of exaggeration run wild, of youthful high spirits, of rough practical jokes, of understatement, of irreverence, and gross absurdity.

But the personality of Mark Twain no longer can give life to his humor; the atmosphere in which it first appeared has gone forever; the man himself is becoming a mere legend, shadowy and more and more distorted; his humor must be judged now like that of Cervantes and Shakespeare, apart from author and times. How does it stand the test? Not at all well. There are the high spirits of the new West in it—that element has not evaporated—and there is in it a personal touch, a drollery that was his individual contribution to humor. There was a certain drawl in his pen as well as in his tongue. It is this alone that saves much of his humorous work from flatness. Concerning The Jumping Frog, for instance, Haweis asks in true British way, "What, I should like to know, is the fun of saying that a frog who has been caused to swallow a quantity of shot cannot jump so high as he could before?" The answer is that there is no fun save in the way the story is told; in other words, save in the incomparable drawl of Mark Twain's pen. One can only illustrate:

The feller ... give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate, "Well, I don't see no pints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."

"May be you don't," Smiley says. "May be you understand frogs, and may be you don't understand 'em; may be you've had experience, and may be you ain't, only a amature, as it were. Any ways I've got my opinion, and I'll risk forty dollars that he can out-jump any frog in Calaveras county."

And the feller studied a minute, and then says, kinder sad like, "Well, I'm only a stranger here, and I ain't got no frog; but if I had a frog, I'd bet you!"

Or take this episode from The Innocents Abroad where he tells of his sensations one night as a boy upon awakening and finding the body of a murdered man on the floor of his room:

I went away from there. I do not say that I went away in any sort of a hurry, but I simply went—that is sufficient. I went out at the window, and I carried the sash along with me. I did not need the sash, but it was handier to take it than it was to leave it, and so I took it. I was not scared, but I was considerably agitated.

All this and the hundreds of pages like it in The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It and the later books is excellent drollery, but had Mark Twain written nothing else than this he would be as dead now as an author as even "Doesticks." His drollery is best in the work that lies nearest to the source of his first inspiration. As the Western days faded from his memory, his comedy became more and more forced, until it could reach at last the inane flatness of Adam's Diary and flatter still, Eve's Diary.

The humor that lives, however, is not drollery; it must be embodied in a humorous character like Falstaff, for instance, or Don Quixote. The most of Mark Twain's fun comes from exaggerated situations with no attempt at characterization, and therein lies his weakness as a humorist. Huckleberry Finn and Colonel Sellers come the nearest to being humorous creations, but Huckleberry Finn is but a bit of genre, the eternal bad boy in a Pike County costume, and Colonel Sellers is but a preliminary study toward a character, a shadowy figure that we feel constantly to be on the point of jumping into greatness without ever actually arriving. Narrowly as he may have missed the mark in these two characters, Mark Twain cannot be classed with the great humorists.

V

There are three Mark Twains: there is Mark Twain, the droll comedian, who wrote for the masses and made them laugh; there is Mark Twain, the indignant protester, who arose ever and anon to true eloquence in his denunciation of tyranny and pretense; and there is Mark Twain, the romancer, who in his boyhood had dreamed by the great river and who later caught the romance of a period in American life. The masterpiece of the first is The Jumping Frog, of the second The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg, and of the third Life on the Mississippi and Roughing It.

It is this third Mark Twain that still lives and that will continue to live in American literature. He saw with distinctness a unique area of American life. As the brief and picturesque era faded away he caught the sunset glory of it and embodied it in romance—the steamboat days on the river in the slavery era, the old régime in the South, the barbarism of the Plains, the great buffalo herds, the wild camps in the gold fields of Nevada and California. In half a dozen books: Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, The Gilded Age (a few chapters of it), Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Pudd'nhead Wilson, he has done work that can never be done again. The world that these books depict has vanished as completely as the Bagdad of Haroun al Raschid. Not only has he told the story of this vanished world, illustrating it with descriptions and characterizations that are like Flemish portraits, but he has caught and held the spirit of it, and he has thrown over it all the nameless glow of romance. It is as golden a land that he leads us through as any we may find in Scott, and yet it was drawn from the life with painstaking care. Scott and Bulwer and Cooper angered Mark Twain. They were careless of facts, they were sentimental, they misinterpreted the spirit of the times they depicted and the men and women who lived in them, but these six books of Mark Twain may be placed among the source books of American history. Nowhere else can one catch so truly certain phases of the spirit of the mid-nineteenth century West. Over every page of them may be written those words from the preface of The Innocents Abroad, "I am sure I have written at least honestly, whether wisely or not."

The books are six chapters of autobiography. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are recollections of that boyhood by the river after so long a time had elapsed that the day-dreams and boyish imaginings were recorded as real happenings; Life on the Mississippi records that romantic adventure of his young manhood as he recalled it in later days when the old piloting era had vanished like a dream of boyhood; The Gilded Age, a book of glorious fragments, has in it his uncle James Lampton drawn from life and renamed Colonel Sellers; Roughing It bubbles over with the joy and the high spirits and the excitement of those marvelous days when the author and the West were young together; and Pudd'nhead Wilson gives the tragedy of slavery as it passed before his boyish eyes. These books and The Innocents Abroad are Mark Twain's contribution to the library of American classics. The rest of his enormously large output, despite brilliant passages here and there, does not greatly matter.

They are not artistic books. The author had little skill in construction. He excelled in brilliant dashes, not in long-continued effort. He was his own Colonel Sellers, restless, idealistic, Quixotic. What he did he did with his whole soul without restraint or sense of proportion. There is in all he wrote a lack of refinement, kept at a minimum, to be sure, by his wife, who for years was his editor and severest critic, but likely at any moment to crop out. His books, all of them, are monotones, a running series of episodes and descriptions all of the same value, never reaching dramatic climax. The episodes themselves, however, are told with graphic intensity; some of them are gems well-nigh perfect. Here is a picture of the famous pony express of the Plains:

The pony-rider was usually a little bit of a man, brimful of spirit and endurance. No matter what time of the day or night his watch came on, and no matter whether it was winter or summer, raining, snowing, hailing, or sleeting, or whether his "beat" was a level straight road or a crazy trail over mountain crags and precipices, or whether it led through peaceful regions that swarmed with hostile Indians, he must be always ready to leap into the saddle and be off like the wind. He rode fifty miles without stopping, by daylight, moonlight, starlight, or through the blackness of darkness—just as it happened. He rode a splendid horse that was born for a racer and fed and lodged like a gentleman; kept him at his utmost speed for ten miles, and then, as he came crashing up to the station where stood two men holding fast a fresh, impatient steed, the transfer of rider and mailbag was made in the twinkling of an eye, and away flew the eager pair and were out of sight before the spectator could hardly get the ghost of a look.

We had had a consuming desire, from the beginning, to see a pony-rider, but somehow or other all that had passed us and all that met us managed to streak by in the night, and so we heard only a whiz and a hail, and the swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could get our heads out of the windows. But now we were expecting one along every moment, and we would see him in broad daylight. Presently the driver exclaims:

"Here he comes!"

Every neck is stretched further, and every eye strained wider. Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves. Well, I should think so! In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling—sweeping toward us nearer and nearer—growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply defined—nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear—another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider's hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm.

The steamboat race and the explosion in chapter four of The Gilded Age have few equals in any language for mere picturing power. He deals largely with the out-of-doors. His canvases are bounded only by the horizon: the Mississippi, the great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, Mono Lake, the Alkali Deserts, and the Sierras—he has handled a continent. Only Joaquin Miller and John Muir have used canvases as vast. Huckleberry Finn's floating journey down the river on his raft has in it something of the spirit of The Odyssey and Pilgrim's Progress and Don Quixote. Had Mark Twain's constructive skill and his ability to trace the growth of a human soul been equal to his picturing power, his Defoe-like command of detail and situation, and his mastery of phrase and of narrative, he might have said the last word in American fiction. He was a product of his section and of his education. College and university would have made of him an artist like Holmes, brilliant, refined, and messageless. It would have robbed him of the very fountain-head of his power. It was his to work not from books but from life itself, to teach truth and genuineness of life, to turn the eyes of America from the romance of Europe to her own romantic past.

VI

If Artemus Ward is Touchstone, Mark Twain is Lear's Fool. He was a knightly soul, sensitive and serious, a nineteenth-century knight errant who would protect the weak of the whole world and right their wrongs. The genuineness and honesty that had been ground into his soul on the river and in the mines where a man was a man only when he could show true manliness, were a part of his knightly equipment. When financial disaster came to him, as it had come to Scott, through no fault of his own, he refused to repudiate the debt as he might have done with no discredit to himself, and, though old age was upon him, he set out to earn by his own efforts the whole enormous amount. And he discharged the debt to the full. He had, moreover, the true knight's soul of romance. The Morte d'Arthur and the chronicles of Joan of Arc, his favorite reading, contained the atmosphere that he loved. He fain would have given his generation "pure literature," but they bade him back to his cap and bells. Richardson, as late as 1886, classed him with the purveyors of "rude and clownish merriment" and advised him to "make hay while the sun shines."[36]

So he jested and capered while his heart was heavy with personal sorrows that came thick upon him as the years went by, and with the baseness and weakness and misery of humanity as the spectacle passed under his keen observation. Yet in it all he was true to himself. That sentence in the preface tells the whole story: "I have written at least honestly." His own generation bought his books for the fun in them; their children are finding now that their fathers bought not, as they supposed, clownish ephemeræ, but true literature, the classics of the period.

And yet—strange paradox!—it was the cap and bells that made Mark Twain and that hastened the coming of the new period in American literature. The cap and bells it was that made him known in every hamlet and in every household of America, north and south and east and west, and in all lands across all oceans. Only Cooper and Mrs. Stowe of all our American authors are known so widely. This popularity it was that gave wings to the first all-American literature and that inspired a new school of American writers. After Mark Twain American literature was no longer confined to Boston and its environs; it was as wide as the continent itself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mark Twain. (1835–1910.) The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, 1867; The Innocents Abroad, 1869; Roughing It, 1872; The Gilded Age (with C. D. Warner), 1873; Old Times on the Mississippi (Atlantic Monthly), 1875; Tom Sawyer, 1876; Life on the Mississippi, in book form, 1882; Huckleberry Finn, 1884; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889; Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894; Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, 1896; Following the Equator, 1897; Christian Science, 1907; Writings of Mark Twain, 25 vols., 1910; My Mark Twain, by W. D. Howells, 1911; Mark Twain, a Biography, by Albert Bigelow Paine, 1912.

[CHAPTER IV]
BRET HARTE

In his Chronological Outlines of American Literature, Whitcomb mentions only thirteen American novels published during the seven years before 1870: Taylor's Hannah Thurston, John Godfrey's Fortunes, and Story of Kennett; Trowbridge's The Three Scouts; Donald G. Mitchell's Doctor Johns; Holmes's The Guardian Angel; Lanier's Tiger-Lilies, the transition novel of the decade as we shall see later in our study of Lanier; Louisa M. Alcott's Little Women; Beecher's Norwood; Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar; Higginson's Malbone; Aldrich's Story of a Bad Boy; and Mrs. Stowe's Oldtown Folks. To study the list is to realize the condition of American fiction during the sixties. It lacked incisiveness and construction and definite color; it droned and it preached.

Before pronouncing the decade the feeblest period in American fiction since the early twenties of the century, let us examine the most lauded novel written in America between 1860 and 1870, Elsie Venner (1861). Strictly speaking, it is not a novel at all: it is another Autocrat volume, chatty, discursive, brilliant. The Brahmins, sons and grandsons of ministers, might enter the law, medicine, teaching, literature, the lyceum lecture field—they never ceased to preach. New England for two centuries was a vast pulpit and American literature during a whole period was written on sermon paper. "The real aim of the story," the Autocrat naïvely observes in his preface, "was to test the doctrine of 'original sin' and human responsibility." He is in no hurry, however. We read four chapters before we learn even the heroine's name. A novel can reasonably be expected to center about its title character: Elsie Venner speaks seventeen times during the story, and eleven of these utterances are delivered from her death-bed at the close of the book. There is no growth in character, no gradual moving of events to a culmination, no clear picture even of the central figure. Elsie is a mere case: the book, so far as she is concerned, is the record of a clinic. But even the clinic is not suffered to move uninterruptedly. Digressions are as frequent as even in the Autocrat papers. A widow is introduced for no apparent reason, studied for a chapter, and then dropped from the narrative. We never feel like one who has lost himself for a time in the life of another in a new world under new skies; we feel rather like one who is being personally conducted through New England by a skilful guide. Note this partial prospectus of what he has to show: Newburyport, Portsmouth, Portland, caste in New England, rural schools, Northampton and Mt. Holyoke, mountain vegetation, rattlesnakes in Massachusetts, the New England mansion house, school compositions, the old type of meeting house, varieties of school girls, the old-time India merchant, oysters in New England, hired help, colonial chimneys, young ladies' seminaries, the hemlock tree. The topics are interesting ones and they are brilliantly treated, often at length, but in a novel, even one written by Dr. Holmes, such things are "lumber." The novel is typical of the fiction of the era. It is discursive, loosely constructed, vague in its characterization, and lacking in cumulative force.

It is significant that the magazines of the period had very little use for the native product. Between 1864 and 1870, Harper's Magazine alone published no fewer than ten long serials by English novelists: Denis Duval by Thackeray; The Small House at Allington by Trollope; Our Mutual Friend by Dickens; The Unkind Word, Woman's Kingdom, and A Brave Lady by Dinah Mulock Craik; Armadale by Wilkie Collins; My Enemy's Daughter by Justin M'Carthy; Anteros by the Author of Guy Livingstone [G. A. Lawrence]; and Anne Furness by the Author of Mabel's Progress [Mrs. T. A. Trollope]. Even the Atlantic Monthly left its New England group of producers to publish Charles Reade's Griffith Gaunt in twelve instalments. In 1871 Scribner's Monthly began the prospectus of its second volume with this announcement:

Our contributors are among the best who write in the English language. George MacDonald—"the best of living story-writers"—will continue his beautiful story, entitled Wilfred Cumbermede, throughout the volume. We have the refusal of all Hans Christian Andersen's stories at the hand of his best translator, Mr. Horace E. Scudder. We have engaged the pen of Miss Thackeray, now regarded as the finest story-writer among the gifted women of Great Britain—not even excepting George Eliot. Mrs. Oliphant has written especially for us an exquisitely characteristic story, etc.

The feebleness of the period was understood even at the time. Charles Eliot Norton wrote Lowell in 1874: "There is not much in the magazine [Atlantic] that is likely to be read twice save by its writers, and this is what the great public likes. There must be a revival of letters in America, if literature as an art is not to become extinct. You should hear Godkin express himself in private on this topic."[37]

No wonder that the book-reviewer of Harper's Magazine for May, 1870, with nothing better before him than Miss Van Kortland, Anonymous; Hedged In, by Miss Phelps; and Askaros Kassis, by DeLeon, should have begun his review, "We are so weary of depending on England, France, and Germany for fiction, and so hungry for some genuine American romance, that we are not inclined to read very critically the three characteristic American novels which lie on our table." No wonder that when Harte's The Luck of Roaring Camp in the Overland Monthly was read in the Atlantic office, Fields sent by return mail a request "upon the most flattering terms" for another story like it, and that the same mail brought also papers and reviews "welcoming the little foundling of California literature with an enthusiasm that half frightened its author."[38]

The new American fiction began with Bret Harte.

I

To turn from Mark Twain to Bret Harte is like turning from the great river on a summer night, fragrant and star-lit, to the glamour and unreality of the city theater. No contrast could be more striking. Francis Brett Harte, born August 25, 1839, was preëminently a man of the East and preëminently also a man of the city. He was born at Albany, New York, he spent his childhood in Providence, Rhode Island, in Philadelphia, in Lowell, Massachusetts, in Boston and other places, and the formative years between nine and eighteen he passed in Brooklyn and New York City. He lived all his young life in an atmosphere of culture. His father, a Union College man, a scholar, and a teacher who knew French and Spanish and Italian, Latin and Greek, had accumulated a large and well-selected library in which the boy, frail and sensitive, too frail in his early years to attend school, spent much of his childhood, reading Shakespeare and Froissart at six and Charles Dickens at seven. His mother, a woman of culture, directed his reading, and criticized with discernment his earliest attempts at poetry. It was the training school for a poet, a Bryant or a Longfellow, who should look to the older art for models and be inspired with the dream that had sent Irving and Willis and Taylor as pilgrims to the holy lands of literature across the sea.

The turning point in Harte's life came in 1854, when he was in his fifteenth year. His biographer, Merwin, tells the story:

In 1853 his mother [who had been a widow for nine years] went to California with a party of relatives and friends, in order to make her home there with her elder son, Henry. She had intended to take with her the other two children, Margaret and Francis Brett; but as the daughter was in school, she left the two behind for a few months, and they followed in February, 1854. They traveled by the Nicaragua route, and after a long, tiresome, but uneventful journey, landed safely in San Francisco.[39]

The mother must have remarried shortly after her arrival in California, for two sentences later on the biographer records that "They went the next morning to Oakland across the Bay, where their mother and her second husband, Colonel Andrew Williams, were living."

The young poet had been transplanted into new and strange soil and he took root slowly. During the next year, making his home with his mother at Oakland, he attempted to teach school and then to serve as an apothecary's assistant, but he made little headway in either profession. His heart was far away from the rough, new land that he had entered. He wrote poems and stories and sketches and sent them to the Eastern magazines; he read interminably, and dreamed of literature just as Aldrich and Timrod and Hayne and Stedman and Stoddard were even then dreaming of it on the other side of the continent.

The next two years of his life, despite the efforts of his biographers, are vague and conjectural. It was his wander period. He began as tutor in a private family in Humboldt County, then, according to Charles Warren Stoddard, "he was an express messenger in the mountains when the office was the target of every lawless rifle in the territory; he was glutted with adventurous experiences."[40] Not for long, however. He seems to have spent the rest of the two years—prosaic anticlimax!—as a type-setter on the Humboldt Times and the Northern California, as a teacher in the town of Union, and as a drug clerk. That he ever was a miner is gravely to be doubted. He had small taste for roughing it and little sympathy with the typical California life of the times. He was a poet, rather, a man of the city, a reader of romance, how wide and attentive a reader we may judge from Condensed Novels which he soon after began to contribute to the San Francisco press.

The events in his life during the next fourteen years in San Francisco are quickly summarized. For the greater part of it he was connected with the Golden Era, first as a type-setter and later as an editor and contributor. In 1862 he was married. Two years later he was appointed Secretary of the California Mint, an office that allowed him abundant time for literary work. He was connected with Webb's brilliant and short-lived Californian, first as contributor and later as editor, and in 1868, when the Overland Monthly, which was to be the Atlantic of Western America, was founded, he was made the editor. The Luck of Roaring Camp in the second number and Plain Language from Truthful James in the September, 1870, number, brought him a popularity that in suddenness and extent had had no precedent in America, save in the case of Mrs. Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin. The enormous applause intoxicated him; California became too narrow and provincial; and in 1871 he left it, joyous as one who is returning home after long exile.

II

If we may trust Harte's own statement, made, it must be remembered, in the retrospect of later years, he set out deliberately to add a new province to American literature. During the period between 1862 and 1867, he wrote, according to his own statement, "The Society upon the Stanislaus and The Story of M'liss—the first a dialectical poem, the second a California romance—his first efforts toward indicating a peculiarly characteristic Western American literature. He would like to offer these facts as evidence of his very early, half-boyish, but very enthusiastic belief in such a possibility—a belief which never deserted him, and which, a few years later, from the better known pages of the Overland Monthly, he was able to demonstrate to a larger and more cosmopolitan audience in the story of The Luck of Roaring Camp, and the poem of The Heathen Chinee."[41]

But the poem and the romance were not his first efforts toward a peculiarly characteristic Western American literature. His first vision of the literary possibilities of the region had been inspired by Irving, and he wrote in the Sketch Book manner during the greater part of his seventeen years upon the Pacific Coast. Behind the California of the gold and the excitement lay three hundred years of an old Spanish civilization. What Irving had done for the Hudson why could he not do for the Mission lands and the Spanish occupation, "that glorious Indian summer of California history, around which so much poetical haze still lingers—that bland, indolent autumn of Spanish rule, so soon to be followed by the wintry storms of Mexican independence and the reviving springs of American conquest"?[42] It was a vision worthy of a Hawthorne. That it possessed him for years and was abandoned with reluctance is evident to one who examines his early work.

He voiced it in The Angelus, Heard at the Mission Dolores, 1868, in the same volume of the Overland Monthly that contained The Luck of Roaring Camp:

Borne on the swell of your long waves receding,
I touch the further Past—
I see the dying glow of Spanish glory,
The sunset dream and last.

Before me rise the dome-shaped Mission towers;
The white Presidio;
The swart commander in his leathern jerkin,
The priest in stole of snow.

Once more I see Portata's cross uplifting
Above the setting sun;
And past the headland, northward, slowly drifting
The freighted galleon.

It must not be forgotten that his Legend of Monte del Diablo, a careful Irvingesque romance, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly as early as 1863. During the same period he wrote The Right Eye of the Commander, The Legend of Devil's Point, The Adventure of Padre Viventio, and many short pieces, enough, indeed, to make up a volume the size of The Sketch Book.

Despite its echoes of Irving, it is significant work. Harte was the first to catch sight of a whole vast field of American romance. Again and again he recurs to it in his later poetry and prose; notably in Concepcion de Arguello and its prose version on page 191 of the first volume of the Overland Monthly, A Convert of the Mission, The Story of a Mine, In the Carquinez Woods, and in Gabriel Conroy, that chaotic book which has in it the materials for the greatest of American romances. Whenever he touches this old Spanish land he throws over it the mellow Washington Irving glow that had so thrilled him in his earlier years, and he writes with power. The Spanish part of Gabriel Conroy is exquisite; its atmosphere is faultless:

If there was a spot on earth of which the usual dead monotony of the California seasons seemed a perfectly consistent and natural expression, that spot was the ancient and time-honored pueblo and Mission of the blessed St. Anthony. The changeless, cloudless, expressionless skies of the summer seemed to symbolize that aristocratic conservatism which expelled all innovation and was its distinguishing mark....

As he drew rein in the court-yard of the first large adobe dwelling, and received the grave welcome of a strange but kindly face, he saw around him everywhere the past unchanged. The sun shone as brightly and fiercely on the long red tiles of the low roofs, that looked as if they had been thatched with longitudinal slips of cinnamon, even as it had shone for the last hundred years; the gaunt wolf-like dogs ran out and barked at him as their fathers and mothers had barked at the preceding stranger of twenty years before. There were the few wild, half-broken mustangs tethered by strong riatas before the veranda of the long low Fonda, with the sunlight glittering on their silver trappings; there were the broad, blank expanses of whitewashed adobe wall, as barren and guiltless of record as the uneventful days, as monotonous and expressionless as the staring sky above; there were the white, dome-shaped towers of the Mission rising above the green of olives and pear trees, twisted, gnarled and knotted with the rheumatism of age. ... The steamers that crept slowly up the darkening coast line were something remote, unreal, and phantasmal; since the Philippine galleon had left its bleached and broken ribs in the sand in 1640, no vessel had, in the memory of man, dropped anchor in the open roadstead below the curving Point of Pines.

Meager and fragmentary as these Spanish sketches are, they nevertheless opened the way for a new school of American romance.

III

Harte's first story with other than a legendary theme was M'liss, written for the Golden Era sometime before 1867. For the student of his literary art it is the most important of all his writings, especially important because of the revision which he made of it later after he had evolved his final manner. It is transition work. The backgrounds are traced in with Irving-like care; the character of the schoolmaster is done with artistic restraint and certainty of touch. M'liss is exquisitely handled. There is nothing better in all his work than this study of the fiery, jealous little heart of the neglected child. It is not necessarily a California story; it could have happened as well even in New England. It is not genre work, not mere exploiting of local oddities; it is worked out in life itself, and it strikes the universal human chord that brings it into the realm of true art.

But even in the earlier version of the story there are false notes. The names of the characters strike us as unusual: M'liss, McSnagley, Morpher, Clytemnestra, Kerg, Aristides, Cellerstina. We feel that the author is straining for the unusual; and we feel it more when the Rev. Joshua McSnagley comes upon the scene:

The reverend gentleman was glad to see him. Moreover, he observed that the master was looking "peartish," and hoped he had got over the "neuralgy" and "rheumatiz." He himself had been troubled with the dumb "ager" since last conference. But he had learned to "rastle and pray." Pausing a moment to enable the master to write his certain method of curing the dumb "ager" upon the book and volume of his brain, Mr. McSnagley proceeded to inquire after Sister Morpher. "She is an adornment to Christewanity, and has a likely growin' young family," added Mr. McSnagley.

Somehow it does not ring true. The author is thinking of the effect he hopes to produce. He must fill his reader with wonder. "A saintly Raphael-face, with blond beard and soft blue eyes, belonging to the biggest scamp in the diggings, turned toward the child and whispered, 'Stick to it, M'liss.'" That sentence is the key to the author's later manner. "Life in California is a paradox," he seems everywhere to say, "just look at this."

The transition from F. B. Harte the poet and romancer to Bret Harte the paradox maker and showman came through Dickens. It was the Dickens era in America. The great novelist had made his second tour of the country between November, 1867, and April, 1868, and his journeyings had been a triumphal progress. All classes everywhere were reading his books, and great numbers knew them literally by heart. Dickens wrote home from Washington, "Mr. Secretary Staunton (War Minister) was here.... He is acquainted with the minutest details of my books. Give him a passage anywhere and he will instantly cap it and go on with the context.... Never went to sleep at night without first reading something from my books which were always with him."[43] The same could have been said of Harte himself. Says Pemberton, "His knowledge of his [Dickens's] books was unrivaled.... He could have passed Charles Calverley's famous Pickwick Examination Paper with honors."[44] Everybody knew his Dickens; for a generation men could not speak of the man with moderation. Even a critic like Moncure D. Conway could say of Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop: "To this day I cannot help suspecting the sanity of any one who does not concede that they are the two best novels ever written."[45] The death of Dickens in 1870 let loose all over America a flood of eulogy and increased enormously the already great sales of his books.

The art of Dickens was peculiar. He had found in the lower strata of the population of London, that vast settling pool of Great Britain, a society made up of many sharply individualized personalities, abnormalities in body and soul, results of the peculiar inflexible characteristics of the English race and their hard and fast social distinctions. From fragments of this lower London Dickens built him a world of his own and peopled it with composite creations such as one finds nowhere save in the folklore of a primitive people—creatures as strange as their names, Quilp, Scrooge, Cratchit, Squeers, Snagsby. So tremendously did he believe in them, that we believe in them ourselves. So overflowing was he with high spirits and boisterous laughter that before we realize it we have surrendered completely and are living hilariously not in a land of actual men and women, but in the world that never was and never can be save in the books of Dickens. He never analyzed, he never sought the heart of things, or got at all below the surface of his characters; he was content simply to exhibit his marvelous creations with all their ludicrous incongruities, and the show is so entertaining and the showman exhibits it with such zest, such joyous abandon, that we stand like children and lose ourselves in wonder and enjoyment.

We can see now that the time was ripe for a California Dickens. There was a prepared audience—the whole nation was reading the great novelist of the people. California, moreover, was in the fierce light of the gold excitement—anything that came from it would find eager readers. It was a veritable Dickens land, more full of strange types than even the slums of London: Pikes, Greasers, Yankees, Chinese, gamblers, adventurers from all the wild places of the world, desperadoes, soldiers of fortune, restless seekers for excitement and gold. Everything was ready. Harte doubtless blundered into his success; doubtless he did not reason about the matter at all, yet the result remains the same: he came at the precise moment with the precise form of literature that the world was most sure to accept. It came about as the most natural thing in the world. Saturated with Dickens as he had been from his childhood, it is not strange that this motley society and its amazing surroundings should have appealed to him from the objective and the picturesque side; it is not strange that, even as did Dickens, he should have selected types and heightened them and peopled a new world with them; it is not strange that he should have given these types Dickens-like names: Miggles, McCorkle, Culpepper Starbottle, Calhoun Bungstarter, Fagg, Twinkler, Rattler, Mixer, Stubbs, Nibbles. His work is redolent of Dickens. Sometimes we seem to be reading a clever parody after the fashion of the Condensed Novels, as for instance this from The Romance of Madrono Hollow:

There was not much to hear. The hat was saying to the ribbons that it was a fine night, and remarking generally upon the clear outline of the Sierras against the blue-black sky. The ribbons, it so appeared, had admired this all the way home, and asked the hat if it had ever seen anything half so lovely as the moonlight on the summit? The hat never had; it recalled some lovely nights in the South in Alabama ("in the South in Ahlabahm" was the way the old man had heard it), but then there were other things that made the night seem so pleasant. The ribbons could not possibly conceive what the hat could be thinking about. At this point there was a pause, of which Mr. Folinsbee availed himself to walk very grimly and craunchingly down the gravel walk toward the gate. Then the hat was lifted, and disappeared in the shadow, and Mr. Folinsbee confronted only the half-foolish, half-mischievous, but wholly pretty face of his daughter.

M'liss is full of such echoes. A little later than M'liss, when he was required to furnish the Overland with a distinctly Californian story, he set about examining his field precisely as Dickens would have done. "What are some of the most unusual phases of this unique epoch?" he asked himself. During a short period women and children were rare in the remote mining districts. What would result if a baby were born in one of the roughest and most masculine of the camps? It is not hard to conjecture how Dickens would have handled the problem; The Luck of Roaring Camp is Harte's solution. The situation and the characters are both unique. They would have been impossible in any other place or at any other moment in the world's history. So with all of Harte's later stories: undoubtedly there may have been a Roaring Camp and undoubtedly there were Cherokee Sals and Kentucks, undoubtedly the gold rush developed here and there Jack Hamlins and Tennessees and Uncle Billys and Yuba Bills. The weakness of Harte is that he takes these and peoples California with them. Like Dickens, he selects a few picturesque and grotesque exceptions and makes of them a whole social system.

Harte had nothing of the earnestness and the sincerity of the older master; after a time he outgrew his manner, and evolved a style of his own—compressed, rapid, picturesque; but this early point of view he never changed. He sought ever for the startling and the dramatic and he elaborated the outside of it with care. He studied the map of California for picturesque names, just as Dickens studied the street signs of London. He passed by the common materials of human life to exhibit the strange phenomena of one single accidental moment in a corner of America.

Once he had begun, however, there was no possibility of stopping. The people demanded work like The Luck of Roaring Camp and would accept nothing else. It is pathetic to see him during the early years of his great fame, trying to impress upon the reading public that he is a poet after the old definition of the word. The Atlantic had paid him $10,000 to write for a year work like The Luck of Roaring Camp. He gave four stories, and he gave also five careful poems of the Longfellow-Whittier type. By 1873 he had put forth no fewer than fourteen books, nine of them being poems or collections of his poetry. In vain. The public ordered him back to the mines and camps that even then were as obsolete as the pony express across the Plains.

Despite his biographers, the latter part of his life is full of mystery. After seven years of literary work in New York City, he went in 1878 as consul to Crefeld, Germany. Two years later he was transferred to Glasgow, Scotland, where he remained for five years. The rest of his life he spent in London, writing year after year new books of California stories. He never returned to America; he was estranged from his family; he seemed to wish to sever himself entirely from all that had to do with his earlier life. He died May 5, 1902, and was buried in Frimby churchyard, in Surrey.

IV

A novelist must rise or fall with his characters. What of Harte? First of all we must observe that he makes no attempts at character development. Each personage introduced is the same at the close of the story as at the opening. He has no fully studied character: we have a burning moment, a flashlight glimpse—intense, paradoxical, startling, then no more. We never see the person again. The name may appear in later sketches, but it never designates the same man. Colonel Starbottle is consistent from story to story only in make-up, in stage "business," and the well known "gags"—as, for instance, a succession of phrases qualified by the adjective "blank." "Yuba Bill" is Harte's synonym for stage driver, "Jack Hamlin" for gambler. We have a feeling constantly that the characters are brought in simply to excite wonder. Gabriel Conroy devotes his life for years to the finding of his sister Grace. He leaves his wife to search for her; he can think of nothing else; yet when at length he does find her among the witnesses in a courtroom he takes it as a mere commonplace. A moment later, however, when told that his wife, for whom we know he cares nothing at all, has given birth to a son, he falls headlong in a swoon.

His characters may perhaps be true to facts; he may be able to give the prototype in every case; and yet we are not convinced. The stories told by the college freshman at home during his first Christmas vacation may all be true, and yet they may give a very false idea of college life in its entirety. So it is with Harte. The very year that he landed in California a procession of one thousand children, each child with a flower in his hand, marched one day in San Francisco. The Luck of Roaring Camp gives no such impression. In all save the remotest camps there were churches and worshipers, yet who would suspect it from Harte's tales? California has never accepted Harte's picture of its life, just as the South has never accepted Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is not fair to picture an era simply by dwelling on its exceptions and its grotesque possibilities. Art must rest upon the whole truth, not upon half truths.

The truth is that the man had no deep and abiding philosophy of life; he had indeed no philosophy at all. In the words of his discerning biographer, Merwin,

There was a want of background, both intellectual and moral, in his nature. He was an observer, not a thinker, and his genius was shown only as he lived in the life of others. Even his poetry is dramatic, not lyric. It was very seldom that Bret Harte, in his tales or elsewhere, advanced any abstract sentiment or idea; he was concerned only with the concrete; and it is noticeable that when he does venture to lay down a general principle, it fails to bear the impress of real conviction. The note of sincerity is wanting.[46]

The fact that his rascals in a crisis often do deeds of sublime heroism must not deceive us, despite the author's protestations of a great moral purpose underlying his work.

Without claiming to be a religious man or a moralist, but simply as an artist, he shall reverently and humbly conform to the rules laid down by a Great Poet who created the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, whose works have lasted eighteen hundred years, and will remain when the present writer and his generation are forgotten. And he is conscious of uttering no original doctrine in this, but of only voicing the beliefs of a few of his literary brethren happily living, and one gloriously dead, who never made proclamation of this from the housetops.[47]

This is insincere to the point of bathos. We feel like saying, "Bah!" Harte makes his villains heroes at the crisis simply to add finesse to his tale. He is dealing with paradoxes; he is working for his reader's wonder. If in a moment where pity is expected, woman is harsh and man tender; if the reputed good man is a rascal at the supreme test, and the reputed rascal proves suddenly to be a saint, it adds to the effectiveness of the tale.

Everywhere there is the atmosphere of the theater. The painted backgrounds are marvels of skill. There are vast color effects, and picturesque tableaux. There is a theatric quality about the heroines; we can see the make-up upon their faces. Too often they talk the stagiest of stage talk as in the first parting scene between Grace Conroy and Arthur Poinset. The end is always a drop-curtain effect. Even Tennessee's Partner must have its appropriate curtain. We can imagine a double curtain for The Outcasts of Poker Flat: the first tableau showing the two dead women in the snow, the second the inscription over the body of Oakhurst, the gambler. Instead of closing the book with a long breath as after looking at a quivering section of human life, we say, "How strange! What brilliant work!" and we feel like clapping our hands for a tableau of all the cast, the spot light, and the quick curtain.

Bret Harte had no real affection for the West; he never again visited it; he never even wrote to the friends he had left there. With Mark Twain it was greatly different. The West to him was home; he loved it; he recorded its deepest life with sympathy. To Harte it was simply a source of literary material. He skimmed its surface and found only the melodramatic and the sensational.

V

And yet after all the real strength of Bret Harte came from his contact with this Western soil. Irving and Dickens and the early models that had so molded him served only to teach him his trade; the breath of life in his works all came from the new life of the West. It would be impossible for one to live during seventeen years of his early life in an atmosphere like that of the west coast and not be transformed by it. Taking his work altogether there is in it far more of California than there is of Dickens or of all the others of the older writers. Only a few things of the life of the West seem to have impressed him. He lived fifteen years in San Francisco yet we see almost nothing of that city in his work; the dramatic career of the Vigilantes he touched upon almost not at all. He selected the remote mining camps for his field and yet he seems to have been impressed by very few of the types that were found in them. Only a few of them ring true at every point, Yuba Bill the stage driver is one. We feel that he was drawn by a master who has actually lived with his model. Yuba Bill is the typical man of the region and the period—masterful, self-reliant, full of a humor that is elemental. There is no prolonged study of him. We see him for a tense moment as the stage swings up to the station, and then he is gone. He is as devoid of sentimentality as even Horace Bixby. The company have been shouting "Miggles!" at the dark cabin but have got no reply save from what proves later to have been a parrot:

"Extraordinary echo," said the Judge.

"Extraordinary d—d skunk!" roared the driver contemptuously. "Come out of that, Miggles, and show yourself. Be a man."

Miggles, however, did not appear.

Yuba Bill hesitated no longer. Taking a heavy stone from the road, he battered down the gate, and with the expressman entered the enclosure....

"Do you know this Miggles?" asked the Judge of Yuba Bill.

"No, nor don't want to," said Bill shortly.

"But, my dear sir," expostulated the Judge, as he thought of the barred gate.

"Lookee here," said Yuba Bill, with fine irony, "hadn't you better go back and sit in the coach till yer introduced? I'm going in," and he pushed open the door of the building.

That rings true. If one were obliged to ride at night over a wild, road-agent-infested trail there is no character in all fiction whom we would more gladly have for driver than Yuba Bill. We would like to see more of him than the brief glimpses allowed us by his creator.

The humor in Harte is largely Western humor. There is the true California ring in such conversations, for instance, as those in the earlier pages of Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy. It is an atmosphere rather than a series of hits. One finds it in The Outcasts of Poker Flat:

A few of the committee had urged hanging him [Oakhurst] as a possible example, and a sure method of reimbursing themselves from his pockets of the sums he had won from them. "It's agin justice," said Jim Wheeler, "to let this yer young man from Roaring Camp—an entire stranger—carry away our money." But a crude sentiment of equity residing in the breasts of those who had been fortunate enough to win from Mr. Oakhurst overruled this narrower local prejudice.

This atmosphere of humor shimmers through all of the stories. There is never uproarious merriment, but there is constant humor. The conjugal troubles of the "old man" in How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar are thus touched upon: