A History of American Literature Since 1870

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Title: A History of American Literature Since 1870

Author: Fred Lewis Pattee

Release date: April 25, 2013 [eBook #42593]

Language: English

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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.

Some footnote anchors in the source refer to the same
footnote. In this eBook, those Footnote's numbers are: 86,
100, 104, 114, 118, 157, and 163.

A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870

FRED LEWIS PATTEE

Professor of the English Language and Literature in the Pennsylvania
State College. Author of "A History of American Literature,"
"The Poems of Philip Freneau," "The Foundations of
English Literature," etc.

[Illustration]

D. Appleton-Century Company
Incorporated
New York London

Printed in U. S. A.

TO DARTMOUTH COLLEGE
AND THE DARTMOUTH MEN
OF THE EIGHTIES, STUDENTS
AND PROFESSORS,
AMONG WHOM I FIRST
AWOKE TO THE MEANING
OF LITERATURE AND OF
LIFE, THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED
WITH FULL HEART.

PREFACE

American literature in the larger sense of the term began with Irving,
and, if we count _The Sketch Book_ as the beginning, the centennial
year of its birth is yet four years hence. It has been a custom,
especially among the writers of text-books, to divide this century
into periods, and all have agreed at one point: in the mid-thirties
undoubtedly there began a new and distinct literary movement. The names
given to this new age, which corresponded in a general way with the
Victorian Era in England, have been various. It has been called the Age
of Emerson, the Transcendental Period, the National Period, the Central
Period. National it certainly was not, but among the other names
there is little choice. Just as with the Victorian Era in England,
not much has been said as to when the period ended. There has been no
official closing, though it has been long evident that all the forces
that brought it about have long since expended themselves and that a
distinctively new period has not only begun but has already quite run
its course.

It has been our object to determine this new period and to study its
distinguishing characteristics. We have divided the literary history of
the century into three periods, denominating them as the Knickerbocker
Period, the New England Period, and the National Period, and we have
made the last to begin shortly after the close of the Civil War with
those new forces and new ideals and broadened views that grew out of
that mighty struggle.

The field is a new one: no other book and no chapter of a book has ever
attempted to handle it as a unit. It is an important one: it is our
first really national period, all-American, autochthonic. It was not
until after the war that our writers ceased to imitate and looked to
their own land for material and inspiration. The amount of its literary
product has been amazing. There have been single years in which have
been turned out more volumes than were produced during all of the
Knickerbocker Period. The quality of this output has been uniformly
high. In 1902 a writer in _Harper's Weekly_ while reviewing a book by
Stockton dared even to say: "He belonged to that great period between
1870 and 1890 which is as yet the greatest in our literary history,
whatever the greatness of any future time may be." The statement is
strong, but it is true. Despite Lowell's statement, it was not until
after the Civil War that America achieved in any degree her literary
independence. One can say of the period what one may not say of earlier
periods, that the great mass of its writings could have been produced
nowhere else but in the United States. They are redolent of the new
spirit of America: they are American literature.

In our study of this new national period we have considered only those
authors who did their first distinctive work before 1892. Of that large
group of writers born after the beginning of the period and borne into
their work by forces that had little connection with the great primal
impulses that came from the Civil War and the expansion period that
followed, we have said nothing. We have given the names of a few of
them at the close of chapter 17, but their work does not concern our
study. We have limited ourselves also by centering our attention upon
the three literary forms, poetry, fiction, and the essay. History we
have neglected largely for the reasons given at the opening of chapter
18, and the drama for the reason that before 1892 there was produced no
American drama of any literary value.

We would express here our thanks to the many librarians and assistants
who have cooperated toward the making of the book possible, and
especially would we tender our thanks to Professor R. W. Conover of the
Kansas Agricultural College who helped to prepare the index.

F. L. P.

State College, Pennsylvania,

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I THE SECOND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 3

II THE LAUGHTER OF THE WEST 25

III MARK TWAIN 45

IV BRET HARTE 63

V THE DISCOVERY OF PIKE COUNTY 83

VI JOAQUIN MILLER 99

VII THE TRANSITION POETS 116

VIII RISE OF THE NATURE WRITERS 137

IX WALT WHITMAN 163

X THE CLASSICAL REACTION 186

XI RECORDERS OF THE NEW ENGLAND DECLINE 220

XII THE NEW ROMANCE 244

XIII LATER POETS OF THE SOUTH 271

XIV THE ERA OF SOUTHERN THEMES AND WRITERS 294

XV THE LATER POETS 321

XVI THE TRIUMPH OF THE SHORT STORY 355

XVII SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION 385

XVIII THE ESSAYISTS 416

INDEX 441

A HISTORY OF
AMERICAN LITERATURE
SINCE 1870

CHAPTER I

THE SECOND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

We are beginning to realize that the Civil War marks a dividing line in
American history as sharp and definitive as that burned across French
history by the Revolution. That the South had been vastly affected
by the war was manifest from the first. The widespread destruction
of property, the collapse of the labor system, and the fall of the
social regime founded on negro slavery, had been so dramatic and so
revolutionary in their results that they had created everywhere a
feeling that the ultimate effects of the war were confined to the
conquered territory. Grady's phrase, "the new South," and later the
phrase, "the end of an era," passing everywhere current, served to
strengthen the impression. That the North had been equally affected,
that there also an old regime had perished and a new era been
inaugurated, was not so quickly realized. The change there had been
undramatic; it had been devoid of all those picturesque accompaniments
that had been so romantic and even sensational in the South; but with
the perspective of half a century we can see now that it had been no
less thoroughgoing and revolutionary.

The first effect of the war had come from the sudden shifting of vast
numbers of the population from a position of productiveness to one of
dependence. A people who knew only peace and who were totally untrained
even in the idea of war were called upon suddenly to furnish one of
the largest armies of modern times and to fight to an end the most
bitterly contested conflict of a century. First and last, upwards
of two millions of men, the most of them citizen volunteers, drawn
all of them from the most efficient productive class, were mustered
into the federal service alone. It changed in a moment the entire
equilibrium of American industrial life. This great unproductive army
had to be fed and clothed and armed and kept in an enormously wasteful
occupation. But the farms and the mills and the great transportation
systems had been drained of laborers to supply men for the regiments.
The wheatfields had no harvesters; the Mississippi the great commercial
outlet of the West, had been closed by the war, and the railroads were
insufficient to handle the burden.

The grappling with this mighty problem wrought a change in the North
that was a revolution in itself. The lack of laborers in the harvest
fields of the Middle West called for machinery, and the reaper and
the mowing machine for the first time sprang into widespread use; the
strain upon the railroads brought increased energy and efficiency and
capital to bear upon the problem of transportation, and it was swiftly
solved. Great meat-packing houses arose to meet the new conditions;
shoes had to be sent to the front in enormous numbers and to produce
them a new and marvelous machine was brought into use; clothing in
hitherto unheard-of quantities must be manufactured and sent speedily,
and to make it Howe's sewing machine was evolved. It was a period of
giant tasks thrust suddenly upon a people seemingly unprepared. The
vision of the country became all at once enlarged. Companies were
organized for colossal undertakings. Values and wealth arose by leaps
and bounds. Nothing seemed impossible.

The war educated America. It educated first the millions of men who
were enrolled in the armies. With few exceptions the soldiers were
boys who had never before left their native neighborhoods. From the
provincial little round of the farm or the shop, all in a moment they
plunged into regions that to them were veritable foreign lands to
live in a world of excitement and stress, with ever-shifting scenes
and ever-deepening responsibilities, for three and four and even five
years. Whole armies of young men came from the remote hills of New
England. Massachusetts alone sent 159,000. The diffident country lad
was trained harshly in the roughest of classrooms. He was forced to
measure himself with men.

The whole nation was in the classroom of war. The imperious call
for leaders of every grade and in all ranks of activity developed
everywhere out of raw material captains of men, engineers, organizers,
business directors, financiers, inventors, directors of activities,
on a scale before undreamed of in America. It was a college course
in which were developed efficiency and self-reliance and wideness
of vision and courage and restless activity, and it produced a most
remarkable generation of men.

The armies in the field and those other armies that handled the
railroads and the mills and the finances and supplies, were sons all of
them of a race that had been doubly picked in the generations before,
for only the bravest and most virile in body and soul had dared to
break from their old-world surroundings and plunge into the untracked
West, and only the fittest of these had survived the rigors of pioneer
days. And the war schooled this remnant and widened their vision and
ground out of them the provincialism that had held them so long to
narrow horizons. It was not until 1865 that Emerson could write, "We
shall not again disparage America now we have seen what men it will
bear." But the chief difference between these men and the early men
that had so filled him with apprehension in the thirties and the
forties, was in the schooling which had come from the five years of
tension when the very life of the nation was in danger.

The disbanding of the armies was followed by a period of restlessness
such as America had never before known. The whole population was
restless. "War," says Emerson, "passes the power of all chemical
solvents, breaking up the old adhesions and allowing the atoms of
society to take a new order." The war had set in motion mighty forces
that did not stop when peace was declared. Men who had been trained
by the war for the organizing and directing of vast activities turned
quickly to new fields of effort. The railroads, which had been vastly
enlarged and enriched by the war, pushed everywhere now with marvelous
rapidity; great industries, like the new oil industry, sprang into
wealth and power. The West, lying vast and unbroken almost from the
farther bank of the Mississippi, burst into eager life, and the tide
of migration which even before the war had turned strongly toward
this empire of the plains quickly became a flood. Railroads were
pushed along the wild trails and over the Rocky Mountains. The first
transcontinental road was completed in 1868. The great buffalo herds
were exterminated in the late sixties and early seventies; millions of
acres of rich land were preempted and turned over to agriculture; the
greatest wheat and corn belts the world has ever known were brought
into production almost in a moment; bridges were flung over rivers
and canyons; vast cities of the plain arose as by magic. Everywhere
a new thrill was in the air. The Civil War had shaken America into
eager, restless life. Mark Twain, who was a part of it all, could say
in later days: "The eight years in America from 1860 to 1868 uprooted
institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people,
transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so
profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot
be measured short of two or three generations."[1]

To-day we can begin to see the effect which the mighty exodus that
followed the war had upon the East. It was little short of revolution.
New England had taken the leading place in precipitating the struggle
between the States, and she had done it for conscience' sake, and now,
though she had won all she had asked, by a curious turn of fate she
was repaid for her moral stand by the loss of her leadership and later
almost of her identity, for the westward movement that followed the war
was in New England a veritable exodus. There had always been emigration
from the older States and it had gradually increased during the gold
rush period and the Kansas-Nebraska excitement, but the tide had never
been large enough to excite apprehension. Now, however, all in a moment
the stream became a torrent which took away, as does all emigration
from older lands, the most active and fearless and progressive spirits.
Whole districts of farming land were deserted with all their buildings
and improvements. New Hampshire in 1860 had a population of 326,073;
in 1870 the population had shrunk to 318,300, and that despite the
fact that all the cities and manufacturing towns in the State had
grown greatly during the ten years, the increase consisting almost
wholly of foreigners. According to Sanborn, "more than a million
acres cultivated in 1850 had gone back to pasturage and woodland in
1900."[2] All growth since the war has been confined to the cities and
the larger manufacturing towns, and this growth and the supplying of
the deficit caused by the emigration of the old stock have come from an
ever-increasing influx of foreigners. Boston has all but lost its old
identity. In Massachusetts in 1900 nearly one-half of the population
was born of foreign parentage. New England in a single generation lost
its scepter of power in the North, and that scepter gradually has been
moving toward the new West.

But the change wrought by the war was far more than a rise of new
activities and a shifting of population. A totally new America grew
from the ashes of the great conflict. In 1860, North and South alike
were provincial and self-conscious. New York City was an enormously
overgrown village, and Boston and Philadelphia and Charleston were
almost as individual and as unlike one another as they had been in the
days of the Revolution. There had been nothing to fuse the sections
together and to bring them to a common vision. The drama of the
settlement had been fierce and piteous, but it had been a great series
of local episodes. The Revolution had not been a melting pot that
could fuse all the sections into a unity. The war which had begun in
New England had drifted southward and each battle, especially toward
the end, had been largely a local affair. Until 1860, there had been
no passion fierce enough to stir to the very center of their lives all
of the people, to melt them into a homogeneous mass, and to pour them
forth into the mold of a new individual soul among the nations. The
emphasis after 1870 was not upon the State but upon the _Nation_. As
early as 1867 a writer in the _North American Review_ declared that,
"The influence of our recent war in developing the 'National Sentiment'
of the people can hardly be overestimated."[3] Now there came national
banks, national securities, a national railroad, a national college
system,--everywhere a widening horizon. Provincialism was dying in
every part of the land.

Until 1860, America had been full of the discordant individuality of
youth. Its characteristics, all of them, had been characteristics of
that turbulent, unsettled period before character had hardened into its
final form. From 1820 to 1860 the nation was adolescent. In everything
at least that concerned its intellectual life it was imitative and
dependent. It was in its awkward era, and like every youth was uncouth
and sensitive and self-conscious. It asked eagerly of every foreign
visitor, "And what do you think of us?" and when the answer, as in
the case of Moore or Marryat or Dickens, was critical, it flew into a
passion. It was sentimental to silliness. As late as 1875 the editor
of _Scribner's_ declared that a large number of all the manuscripts
submitted to publishing houses and periodicals were declined because of
their sentimentality, and most of the published literature of the time,
he added, has "a vast deal of sentimentality sugared through it." That
was in 1875; a few years before that date Griswold had published his
_Female Poets of America_, and there had flourished the _Token_, the
_Forget-Me-Not_, and the _Amaranth_. Adolescence is always sad:

And I think as I sit alone,
While the night wind is falling around,
Of a cold white gleaming stone
And a long, lone, grassy mound.

The age had sighed and wept over _Charlotte Temple_, a romance which
went through edition after edition, and which, according to Higginson,
had a greater number of readers even in 1870 than any single one of the
Waverley Novels.

But even as it sighed over its _Charlotte Temple_ and its _Rosebud_
and its _Lamplighter_, it longed for better things. It had caught a
glimpse, through Irving and Willis and Longfellow and others, of the
culture of older lands. America had entered its first reading age. In
1844 Emerson spoke of "our immense reading and that reading chiefly
confined to the productions of the English press." In its eagerness
for culture it enlarged its area of books and absorbed edition after
edition of translations from the German and Spanish and French. It
established everywhere the lyceum, and for a generation America sat
like an eager school-girl at the feet of masters--Emerson and Beecher
and Taylor and Curtis and Phillips and Gough.

But adolescent youth is the period, too, of spiritual awakenings, of
religious strugglings, and of the questioning and testing of all
that is established. For a period America doubted all things. It read
dangerous and unusual books--Fourier, St. Simon, Swedenborg, Jouffroy,
Cousin. It challenged the dogmas of the Church. It worked over for
itself all the fundamentals of religion. A reviewer in the first volume
of _Scribner's_ remarks of the fall books that, as usual, theology has
the best of it. "Our poets write theology, our novels are theological
... even our statesmen cannot write without treating theology."[4] The
forties and fifties struggled with sensitive conscience over the great
problems of right and wrong, of altruism and selfish ambition. The age
was full of dreams; it longed to right the wrongs of the weak and the
oppressed; to go forth as champions of freedom and abstract right; and
at last it fought it out with agony and sweat of blood in the midnight
when the stars had hid themselves seemingly forever.

The Civil War was the _Sturm und Drang_ of adolescent America, the
Gethsemane through which every earnest young life must pass ere he find
his soul. He fails to understand the spirit of our land who misses this
great fact: America discovered itself while fighting with itself in a
struggle for things that are not material at all, but are spiritual and
eternal. The difference between the America of 1850 and that of 1870
is the difference between the youth of sixteen and the man of thirty.
Before the war the bands of America had played "Annie Laurie" and
"Drink to Me only with Thine Eyes"; after the war they played "Rally
round the Flag" and "Mine Eyes have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the
Lord."

III

The effect of the war upon American literature has been variously
estimated. Stedman has been quoted often: "The Civil War was a general
absorbent at the crisis when a second group of poets began to form. The
conflict not only checked the rise of a new school, but was followed by
a time of languor in which the songs of Apollo seemed trivial to those
who had listened to the shout of Mars."[5] It was Richardson's opinion
that "little that was notable was added to the literature of the
country by the Civil War of 1861.... The creative powers of our best
authors seemed somewhat benumbed, though books and readers multiplied
between 1861 and 1865."[6] And Greenough White dismisses the matter
with the remark that "after the war, Bryant, Longfellow, and Taylor,
as if their power of original production was exhausted, turned to
translation."[7]

All this lacks perspective. Stedman views the matter from the true
mid-century standpoint. Poetry to Stedman and Stoddard and Hayne and
Aldrich and Taylor was an esoteric, beautiful thing to be worshiped
and followed for itself alone like a goddess, a being from another
sphere than ours, to devote one's soul to, "like the lady of Shalott,"
to quote Stevenson, "peering into a mirror with her back turned on all
the bustle and glamour of reality." Keats had been the father of this
group of poets which had been broken in upon rudely by the war, and
it had been the message of Keats that life with its wretchedness and
commonplaceness and struggle was to be escaped from by means of Poesy:

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy.

But poetry is the voice of life; it is not an avenue by which to escape
from life's problems. The poet springs from his times and voices his
era because he must. If his era smothers him, then so much the less
poet he. No war can check the rise of a new school of poets if the soul
of that new age is one to be expressed in poetry.

What Stedman and the others failed to see was the new American soul
which had been created by the war and which the new school, trained in
the old conceptions of poetry, was powerless to voice. If the creative
powers of the leading authors were numbed, if Bryant and Longfellow and
Taylor felt that their power of original production was exhausted and
so turned to translation, it was because they felt themselves powerless
to take wing in the new atmosphere.

The North before the war had been aristocratic in its intellectual
life, just as the South had been aristocratic in its social regime.
Literature and oratory and scholarship had been accomplishments of
the few. J. G. Holland estimated in 1870 that the lecturers in the
widespread lyceum system when it was at its highest point, "those men
who made the platform popular and useful and apparently indispensable,
did not number more than twenty-five." The whole New England period
was dominated by a handful of men. The Saturday Club, which contained
the most of them, had, according to Barrett Wendell, twenty-six
members "all typical Boston gentlemen of the Renaissance." Howells
characterizes it as a "real aristocracy of intellect. To say Prescott,
Motley, Parkman, Lowell, Norton, Higginson, Dana, Emerson, Channing,
was to say patrician in the truest and often the best sense, if not the
largest." It is significant that these were all Harvard men. The period
was dominated by college men. In addition to the names mentioned by
Howells, there might be added from the New England colleges, Webster,
Ticknor, Everett, Bancroft, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, Parker,
Clarke, Phillips, Sumner, Thoreau, Parsons, and Hale. Excepting Poe,
who for a time was a student at the University of Virginia and at West
Point, and Whittier, who was self-educated, and two women, Margaret
Fuller and Mrs. Stowe, who lived in the period when colleges were
open only for men, the list contains all the leading authors of the
mid-period in America.

With few exceptions these names come from what Holmes denominates "the
Brahmin caste of New England," a term which he uses to distinguish
them from what he called "the homespun class"--"a few chosen families
against the great multitude." "Their family names are always on
some college catalogue or other." From 1830 to 1870 the creation of
literature was very little in the hands of the masses; it was in the
hands of these scholars, of this small and provincial "aristocracy of
intellect." Holmes, who gloried in the fact that he lived in Boston,
"the hub of the universe," on Beacon Street, "the sunny street that
holds the sifted few," may be taken as a type of this aristocracy.
It was a period of the limited circle of producers, and of mutual
admiration within the circumference of that circle. Each member of
the group took himself with great seriousness and was taken at his
own valuation by the others. When the new democratic, after-the-war
America, in the person of Mark Twain, came into the circle and in the
true Western style made free with sacred personalities, he was received
with frozen silence.

The school, on the whole, stood aloof from the civil and religious
activities of its period. With the exception of Whittier, who was not
a Brahmin, the larger figures of the era took interest in the great
issues of their generation only when these issues had been forced into
the field of their emotions. They were bookish men, and they were prone
to look not into their hearts or into the heart of their epoch, but
into their libraries. In 1856, when America was smoldering with what
so soon was to burst out into a maelstrom of fire, Longfellow wrote
in his journal, "Dined with Agassiz to meet Emerson and others. I was
amused and annoyed to see how soon the conversation drifted off into
politics. It was not till after dinner in the library that we got upon
anything really interesting."[8] The houses of the Brahmins had only
eastern windows. The souls of the whole school lived in the old lands
of culture, and they visited these lands as often as they could, and,
returning, brought back whole libraries of books which they eagerly
translated. Even Lowell, the most democratic American of the group,
save Whittier, wrote from Paris in 1873, "In certain ways this side is
more agreeable to my tastes than the other." And again the next year
he wrote from Florence: "America is too busy, too troubled about many
things, and Martha is only good to make puddings."

Howells in his novel, _A Woman's Reason_, has given us a view of this
American worship of Europe during this period. Says Lord Rainford,
who has been only in Boston and Newport: "I find your people--your
best people, I suppose they are--very nice, very intelligent, very
pleasant--only talk about Europe. They talk about London, and about
Paris, and about Rome; there seems to be quite a passion for Italy;
but they don't seem interested in their own country. I can't make it
out.... They always seem to have been reading the _Fortnightly_, and
the _Saturday Review_, and the _Spectator_, and the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_, and the last French and English books. It's very odd."

Europe colors the whole epoch. Following Irving's _Sketch Book_,
a small library was written by eager souls to whom Europe was a
wonderland and a dream. Longfellow's _Outre Mer_ and _Hyperion_,
Tuckerman's _Italian Sketch Book_, Willis's _Pencillings by the Way_,
Cooper's _Gleanings in Europe_, Sanderson's _Sketches of Paris_,
Sprague's _Letters from Europe_, Colton's _Four Years in Great
Britain_, Taylor's _Views Afoot_, Bryant's _Letters of a Traveller_,
Curtis's _Nile Notes of a Howadji_, Greeley's _Glances at Europe_, Mrs.
Stowe's _Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands_, Norton's _Notes of Travel
and Study in Italy_, Hawthorne's _Our Old Home_, Calvert's _Scenes and
Thoughts in Europe_, and, after the war, Howells's _Venetian Life_, and
Hay's _Castilian Days_ are only the better-known books of the list.
"Our people," complained Emerson, "have their intellectual culture from
one country and their duties from another," and it was so until after
the Civil War had given to America a vision of her own self. _Innocents
Abroad_ was the first American book about Europe that stood squarely on
its own feet and told what it saw without sentimentality or romantic
colorings or yieldings to the conventional. After _Innocents Abroad_
there were no more rhapsodies of Europe.

America was a new land with a new message and new problems and a
new hope for mankind--a hope as great as that which had fired the
imagination of Europe during the years of the French Revolution, yet
American writers of the mid-century were content to look into their
books and echo worn old themes of other lands. The Holmes who in
his youth had written _Old Ironsides_ was content now with _vers de
societe_,

I'm a florist in verse, and what _would_ people say
If I came to a banquet without my bouquet?

And with the thrill and rush of a new nation all about him, Stoddard
could sit in his study turning out pretty Herrick-like trifles like
this:

Why are red roses red?
For roses once were white,
Because the loving nightingales
Sang on their thorns all night--
Sang till the blood they shed
Had dyed the roses red.

It was a period when both Europe and America were too much dominated
by what Boyesen called "the parlor poet," "who stands aloof from life,
retiring into the close-curtained privacy of his study to ponder upon
some abstract, bloodless, and sexless theme for the edification of a
_blase_, over-refined public with nerves that can no longer relish the
soul-stirring passions and emotions of a healthy and active humanity."
In Europe, the reaction from this type of work came with Millet, the
peasant painter of France, with Tolstoy and the Russian realists, with
Balzac and Flaubert in France, with Hardy in England, with Ibsen and
Bjornson in Norway, workers with whom art was life itself.

America especially had been given to softness and sentimentalism.
During the mid-century era, the period of Longfellow, the lusty new
nation, which was developing a new hope for all mankind, had asked for
bread and it had been given all too often "lucent syrops tinct with
cinnamon." The oratory had been eloquent, sometimes grandiloquent. The
prose, great areas of it, had been affected, embellished with a certain
florid youngmanishness, a honey-gathering of phrases even to the point
of bad taste, as when Lowell wrote of Milton: "A true Attic bee, he
made boot on every lip where there was a taste of truly classic honey."
It was the time when ornateness of figure and poeticalness of diction
were regarded as essentials of style.

To understand what the Civil War destroyed and what it created, at
least in the field of prose style, one should read the two orations
delivered at the dedication of the Gettysburg battle-field. Here was
the moment of transition between the old American literature and the
new. Everett, the eloquent voice of New England, correct, polished,
fervid, massing perfect periods to a climax, scholarly, sonorous of
diction, studied of movement, finished, left the platform after his
long effort, satisfied. The eyes of the few who could judge of oratory
as a finished work of art had been upon him and he had stood the test.
Then had come for a single moment the Man of the West, the plain man of
the people, retiring, ungainly, untrained in the smooth school of art,
voicing in simple words a simple message, wrung not from books but from
the depths of a soul deeply stirred, and now, fifty years later, the
oration of Everett can be found only by reference librarians, while the
message of Lincoln is declaimed by every school-boy.

The half-century since the war has stood for the rise of nationalism
and of populism, not in the narrower political meanings of these
words, but in the generic sense. The older group of writers had been
narrowly provincial. Hawthorne wrote to Bridge shortly before the war:
"At present we have no country.... The States are too various and too
extended to form really one country. New England is really as large a
lump of earth as my heart can take in."[9] The war shook America awake,
it destroyed sectionalism, and revealed the nation to itself. It was
satisfied no longer with theatrical effects without real feeling. After
the tremendous reality of the war, it demanded genuineness and the
truth of life. A new spirit--social, dramatic, intense--took the place
of the old dreaming and sentiment and sadness. The people had awakened.
The intellectual life of the nation no longer was to be in the hands of
the aristocratic, scholarly few. Even while the war was in progress a
bill had passed Congress appropriating vast areas of the public lands
for the establishment in every State of a college for the people "to
promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes
in the several pursuits and professions of life," and it is significant
that Lincoln, the first great President of the people, signed the bill.

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]

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.

The new period began in the early seventies. The years of the war and
the years immediately following it were fallow so far as significant
literary output was concerned. "Literature is at a standstill in
America, paralyzed by the Civil War," wrote Stedman in 1864, and at a
later time he added, "For ten years the new generation read nothing
but newspapers." The old group was still producing voluminously, but
their work was done. They had been borne into an era in which they
could have no part, and they contented themselves with reechoings of
the old music and with translations. In 1871 _The London School Board
Chronicle_ could declare that, "The most gifted of American singers are
not great as creators of home-bred poetry, but as translators," and
then add without reservation that the best translations in the English
language had been made in America. It was the statement of a literal
fact. Within a single period of six years, from 1867 to 1872, there
appeared Longfellow's _Divina Commedia_, C. E. Norton's _Vita Nuova_,
T. W. Parsons' _Inferno_, Bryant's _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, Taylor's
_Faust_ and C. P. Cranch's _Aeneid_.

It was the period of swan songs. Emerson's _Terminus_ came in 1866;
_Last Poems_ of the Cary sisters, Longfellow's _Aftermath_ and
Whittier's _Hazel Blossoms_ appeared in 1874; and Holmes's _The Iron
Gate_ was published in 1880. Lowell, the youngest of the group, alone
seemed to have been awakened by the war. His real message to America,
the national odes and the essays on Democracy which will make his name
permanent in literature, came after 1865, and so falls into the new
period.

The decade from 1868 is in every respect the most vital and significant
one in the history of America. The tremendous strides which were then
made in the settlement of the West, the enormous increase of railroads
and steamships and telegraphs, the organization of nation-wide
corporations like those dealing with petroleum and steel and coal--all
these we have already mentioned. America had thrown aside its
provincialism and had become a great neighborhood, and in 1876 North,
South, East, and West gathered in a great family jubilee. _Scribner's
Monthly_ in 1875 commented feelingly upon the fact:

All the West is coming East.... The Southern States will be
similarly moved.... There will be a tremendous shaking up
of the people, a great going to and fro in the land.... The
nation is to be brought together as it has never been brought
before during its history. In one hundred years of intense
industry and marvelous development we have been so busy that we
never have been able to look one another in the face, except
four terrible years of Civil War.... This year around the old
family altar at Philadelphia we expect to meet and embrace as
brothers.[12]

The Centennial quickened in every way the national life. It gave for
the first time the feeling of unity, the realization that the vast
West, the new South, and the uncouth frontier were a vital part of the
family of the States. Lowell, so much of whose early heart and soul had
been given to Europe, discovered America in this same Centennial year.
In Cincinnati he was profoundly impressed with the "wonderful richness
and comfort of the country and with the distinctive Americanism that
is molding into one type of feature and habits so many races that had
widely diverged from the same original stock.... These immense spaces
tremulous with the young grain, trophies of individual, or at any rate
unorganized, courage and energy, of the people and not of dynasties,
were to me inexpressibly impressive and even touching.... The men
who have done and are doing these things know how things should be
done.... It was very interesting, also, to meet men from Kansas and
Nevada and California, and to see how manly and intelligent they were,
and especially what large heads they had. They had not the manners of
Vere de Vere, perhaps, but they had an independence and self-respect
which are the prime element of fine bearing."[13] A little of a certain
Brahmin condescension toward Westerners there may be here, but on
the whole it rings true. The East was discovering the West and was
respecting it.

And now all of a sudden this Neo-Americanism burst forth into
literature. There is a similarity almost startling between the
thirties that saw the outburst of the mid-century school and the vital
seventies that arose in reaction against it. The first era had started
with Emerson's glorification of the American scholar, the second had
glorified the man of action. The earlier period was speculative,
sermonic, dithyrambic, eloquent; the new America which now arose was
cold, dispassionate, scientific, tolerant. Both had arisen in storm
and doubt and in protest against the old. Both touched the people, the
earlier era through the sentiments, the later through the analytical
and the dramatic faculties. In the thirties had arisen _Godey's Lady's
Book_; in the seventies _Scribner's Monthly_.

So far as literature was concerned the era may be said really to
have commenced in 1869 with _Innocents Abroad_, the first book from
which there breathed the new wild spirit of revolt. In 1870 came
Harte's _Luck of Roaring Camp_, thrilling with the new strange life
of the gold coast and the Sierra Nevada, and Warner's _My Summer in
a Garden_, a transition book fresh and delightful. Then in 1871 had
begun the deluge: Burroughs's _Wake-Robin_, with its new gospel of
nature; Eggleston's _Hoosier Schoolmaster_, fresh with uncouth humor
and the strangeness of the frontier; Harte's _East and West Poems_;
Hay's _Pike County Ballads_, crude poems from the heart of the people;
Howells's first novel, _Their Wedding Journey_, a careful analysis of
actual social conditions; Miller's _Songs of the Sierras_; Carleton's
_Poems_; King's _Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada_, a book of travel
glorifying not Europe but a picturesque section of America; and the
completed version of Leland's _Hans Breitmann's Ballads_, a book which
had waited fourteen years for a publisher who had the courage to bring
it out. In 1873 came Celia Thaxter's _Poems_, Aldrich's _Marjorie
Daw_, H. H.'s _Saxe Holm Stories_, Wallace's _Fair God_ and O'Reilly's
_Songs of the Southern Seas_; in 1875 James's _Passionate Pilgrim_,
Thompson's _Hoosier Mosaics_, Gilder's _The New Day_, Lanier's _Poems_,
Catherwood's _A Woman in Armor_, Woolson's _Castle Nowhere_ and
Irwin Russell's first poem in _Scribner's_; in 1877 Burnett's _That
Lass o' Lowrie's_ and Jewett's _Deephaven_; in 1878 Craddock's _The
Dancing Party at Harrison's Cove_ in the _Atlantic Monthly_, Richard
M. Johnston's _Life of Stephens_; in 1879 Cable's _Old Creole Days_,
Tourgee's _Figs and Thistles_, Stockton's _Rudder Grange_, and John
Muir's _Studies in the Sierras_, in _Scribner's_. All the elements of
the new era had appeared before 1880.

The old traditions were breaking. In 1874 the editorial chair of
the _Atlantic Monthly_, the exclusive organ of the old New England
regime, was given to a Westerner. In 1873 came the resurgence of
Whitman. The earlier school had ignored him, or had tolerated him
because of Emerson, but now with the new discovery of America he also
was discovered, and hailed as a pioneer. The new school of revolt in
England--Rossetti, Swinburne, Symonds--declared him a real voice, free
and individual, the voice of all the people. Thoreau also came into his
true place. His own generation had misunderstood him, compared him with
Emerson, and neglected him. Only two of his books had been published
during his lifetime and one of these had sold fewer than three hundred
copies. Now he too was discovered. In the words of Burroughs, "His
fame has increased steadily since his death in 1862, as it was bound to
do. It was little more than in the bud at that time, and its full leaf
and flowering are not yet."

VII

The new age was to express itself in prose. The poetry of the earlier
period, soft and lilting and romantic, no longer satisfied. It was
effeminate in tone and subject, and the new West, virile and awake,
defined a poet, as Wordsworth had defined him in 1815, as "a man
speaking to men." America, in the sturdy vigor of manhood, wrestling
with fierce realities, had passed the age of dreaming. It had now to
deal with social problems, with plans on a vast scale for the bettering
of human conditions, with the organization of cities and schools
and systems of government. It was a busy, headlong, multitudinous
age. Poetry, to interest it, must be sharp and incisive and winged
with a message. It must be lyrical in length and spirit, and it
must ring true. If it deal with social themes it must be perfect in
characterization and touched with genuine pathos, like the folk songs
of Riley and Drummond, or the _vers de societe_ of Bunner and Eugene
Field. If it touch national themes, it must be strong and trumpet
clear, like the odes of Lowell and Lanier. It must not spring from
the far off and the forgot but from the life of the day and the hour,
as sprung Whitman's Lincoln elegies, Joaquin Miller's "Columbus," and
Stedman's war lyrics. Not many have there been who have brought message
and thrill, but there have been enough to save the age from the taunt
that it was a period without poets.

In a broad sense, no age has ever had more of poetry, for the message
and the vision and thrill, which in older times came through epic and
lyric and drama, have in the latter days come in full measure through
the prose form which we call the novel. As a form it has been brought
to highest perfection. It has been found to have scope enough to
exercise the highest powers of a great poet, and allow him to sound all
the depths and shallows of human life. It has been the preacher of the
age, the theater, the minstrel, and the social student, the prophet
and seer and reformer. It has been more than the epic of democracy; it
has been horn-book as well and shepherd's calendar. It has been the
literary form peculiarly fitted for a restless, observant, scientific
age.

The influence of Dickens, who died in 1870, the opening year of the
period, cannot be lightly passed over. It had been his task in the
middle years of the century to democratise literature, and to create
a reading public as Addison had done a century earlier, but Addison's
public was London, the London that breakfasted late and went to the
coffee house. Dickens created a reading public out of those who had
never read books before, and the greater part of it was in America. His
social novels with their break from all the conventions of fiction,
their bold, free characterization, their dialect and their rollicking
humor and their plentiful sentiment, were peculiarly fitted for
appreciation in the new after-the-war atmosphere of the new land. Harte
freely acknowledged his debt to him and at his death laid a "spray of
Western pine" on his grave. The grotesque characters of the Dickens
novels were not more grotesque than the actual inhabitants of the
wild mining towns of the Sierras or the isolated mountain hamlets of
the South, or of many out-of-the-way districts even in New England.
The great revival of interest in Dickens brought about by his death
precipitated the first wave of local color novels--the earliest work of
Harte and Eggleston and Stockton and the author of _Cape Cod Folks_.

This first wave of Dickens-inspired work, however, soon expended
itself, and it was followed by another wave of fiction even more
significant. In the first process of rediscovering America, Harte,
perhaps, or Clemens, or Cable, stumbled upon a tremendous fact which
was destined to add real classics to American literature: America was
full of border lands where the old regime had yielded to the new, and
where indeed there was a true atmosphere of romance. The result was a
type of fiction that was neither romantic nor realistic, but a blending
of both methods, a romanticism of atmosphere and a realism of truth to
the actual conditions and characters involved.

This condition worked itself out in a literary form that is seen now
to be the most distinctive product of the period. The era may as truly
be called the era of the short story as the Elizabethan period may be
called the era of the drama and the early eighteenth century the era of
the prose essay. The local color school which exploited the new-found
nooks and corners of the West and South did its work almost wholly by
means of this highly wrought and concentrated literary form. Not half a
dozen novelists of the period have worked exclusively in the novel and
romance forms of the mid-century type. A group of writers, including
Harte, Clemens, Cable, Mrs. Cooke, Miss Jewett, Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman,
Miss Brown, Miss Murfree, Harris, R. M. Johnston, Page, Stockton,
Bierce, Garland, Miss King, Miss French, Miss Woolson, Deming, Bunner,
Aldrich, have together created what is perhaps the best body of short
stories in any language.

The period at its end tended to become journalistic. The enormous
demand for fiction by the magazines and by the more ephemeral journals
produced a great mass of hastily written and often ill considered work,
but on the whole the literary quality of the fiction of the whole
period, especially the short stories, has been high. Never has there
been in any era so vast a flood of books and reading, and it may also
be said that never before has there been so high an average of literary
workmanship.

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:

1833. David Ross Locke, "Petroleum V. Nasby."
1834. Charles Farrar Browne, "Artemus Ward."
1834. Charles Henry Webb, "John Paul."
1835. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, "Mark Twain."
1836. Robert Henry Newell, "Orpheus C. Kerr."
1839. Melvin DeLancy Landon, "Eli Perkins."
1841. Thomas Nast.
1841. Charles Heber Clark, "Max Adler."
1841. James Montgomery Bailey, "The Danbury News Man."
1841. Alexander Edwin Sweet.
1842. Charles Bertrand Lewis, "M. Quad."

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.

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.

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 Phoenix" 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 _Phoenixiana_, 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 Phoenix'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 _Phoenixiana_ it amounts to
a mannerism. He tells the most astonishing impossibilities and then
naively 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 Phoenix _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 "Phoenix." The chapters entitled,
"Phoenix Takes an Affectionate Leave of San Francisco," "Phoenix is
on the Sea," and "Phoenix 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 "Phoenix": 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 Phoenix" 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.

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 Phoenix, 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 Phoenix'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 Phoenix was a naive
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.

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.

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 "Phoenix" 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.) _Phoenixiana, or Sketches and
Burlesques by John Phoenix_, N. Y. 1855; _The Squibob Papers_,
N. Y. 1859; _Phoenixiana, or Sketches and Burlesques by John
Phoenix_. 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 Phoenix 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.

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.

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 Heloise 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.

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.

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 regime 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.

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 ephemerae, 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 naively 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.

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 preeminently a man
of the East and preeminently 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.

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.

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.

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:

His first wife, a delicate, pretty little woman, had suffered
keenly and secretly from the jealous suspicions of her husband,
until one day he invited the whole Bar to his house to expose
her infidelity. On arriving, the party found the shy, _petite_
creature quietly engaged in her household duties and retired
abashed and discomfited. But the sensitive woman did not easily
recover from her shock of this extraordinary outrage. It was
with difficulty she regained her equanimity sufficiently to
release her lover from the closet in which he was concealed and
escape with him. She left a boy of three years to comfort her
bereaved husband. The old man's present wife had been his cook.
She was large, loyal, and aggressive.

His characters are exceptions and his situations are theatric, yet for
all that he cannot be ignored. He caught the spirit of the early mining
camps and with it the romantic atmosphere of the old Spanish Colonial
civilization that was swept away by the Anglo-Saxon rush for gold. His
name cannot fail to go down with the era he recorded, and to identify
oneself forever with an era, even though that era be a brief and
restricted one, is no small achievement. He is the writer of the epic
of the gold rush of the middle century in America, and whatever the
quality of that epic may be, it can never be forgotten. He said in 1868:

It may not have been an heroic era; it may have been a
hard, ugly, unworked, vulgar and lawless era; but of such
are heroes and aristocracies born. Three hundred years, and
what a glamor shall hang about it!... A thousand years, and
a new Virgil sings the American Aeneid with the episode of
Jason and the California golden fleece, and the historians
tell us it is a myth! Laugh, my pioneer friends, but your
great-great-great-great-grandchildren shall weep reverential
tears. History, as was said of martyrdom, is "mean in the
making" but how heroic it becomes in the perspective of five
centuries![48]

And in many ways his work is really of epic strength. He dealt with
elemental men, often with veritable demigods, as Yuba Bill. His
canvases are as broad as those even of Mark Twain. His human drama is
played before a truly Western background. While Tennessee is being
tried for his life, "Above all this, etched on the dark firmament, rose
the Sierra, remote and passionless, crowned with remoter passionless
stars." At moments of crisis the narrative always moves with power. The
wolves and the fire in the story _In the Carquinez Woods_ are intensely
vivid and lurid in their presentation. The ride from Simpson's Bar is
told with the graphic thrill of an eye-witness, and the description of
the snow-storm at the opening of _Gabriel Conroy_ reminds one of Thomas
Hardy.

Finally, Harte was the parent of the modern form of the short story.
It was he who started Kipling and Cable and Thomas Nelson Page. Few
indeed have surpassed him in the mechanics of this most difficult of
arts. According to his own belief, the form is an American product. We
can do no better than to quote from his essay on _The Rise of the Short
Story_. It traces the evolution of a peculiarly American addition to
literature.

But while the American literary imagination was still under
the influence of English tradition, an unexpected factor was
developing to diminish its power. It was _humor_, of a quality
as distinct and original as the country and civilization
in which it was developed. It was first noticeable in the
anecdote or "story," and, after the fashion of such beginnings,
was orally transmitted. It was common in the bar-rooms, the
gatherings in the "country store," and finally at public
meetings in the mouths of "stump orators." Arguments were
clinched and political principles illustrated by "a funny
story." It invaded even the camp meeting and pulpit. It at
last received the currency of the public press. But wherever
met it was so distinctly original and novel, so individual
and characteristic, that it was at once known and appreciated
abroad as "an American story." Crude at first, it received
a literary polish in the press, but its dominant quality
remained. It was concise and condense, yet suggestive. It was
delightfully extravagant, or a miracle of under-statement.
It voiced not only the dialect, but the habits of thought of
a people or locality. It gave a new interest to slang. From
a paragraph of a dozen lines it grew into half a column, but
always retaining its conciseness and felicity of statement. It
was a foe to prolixity of any kind; it admitted no fine writing
nor affectation of style. It went directly to the point. It was
burdened by no conscientiousness; it was often irreverent; it
was devoid of all moral responsibility, but it was original!
By degrees it developed character with its incident, often,
in a few lines, gave a striking photograph of a community
or a section, but always reached its conclusion without an
unnecessary word. It became--and still exists as--an essential
feature of newspaper literature. It was the parent of the
American "short story."[49]

Harte has described the genesis of his own art. It sprang from the
Western humor and was developed by the circumstances that surrounded
him. Many of his short stories are models. They contain not a
superfluous word; they handle a single incident with graphic power;
they close without moral or comment. The form came as a natural
evolution from his limitations and powers. With him the story must of
necessity be brief. He who depicts the one good deed in a wicked life
must of necessity use a small canvas. At one moment in his career Jack
Hamlin or Mother Shipton or Sandy does a truly heroic deed, but the
author must not extend his inquiries too far. To make a novel with
Mother Shipton as heroine would be intolerable.

Harte was unable to hold himself long to any one effort. Like Byron, he
must bring down his quarry at a single spring; he had no patience to
pursue it at length. _Gabriel Conroy_ is at the same time the best and
the worst American novel of the century. It is the best in its wealth
of truly American material and in the brilliant passages that strew its
pages; it is the worse in that it utterly fails in its construction,
and that it builds up its characters wholly from the outside. Its
hero, moreover, changes his personality completely three times during
the story, and its heroine is first an uneducated Pike maiden of the
Southwest, then a Spanish senorita:

Features small, and perfectly modeled; the outline of the small
face was a perfect oval, but the complection was of burnished
copper.... The imperious habit of command; an almost despotic
control of a hundred servants; a certain barbaric contempt
for the unlimited revenues at her disposal that prompted the
act, became her wonderfully. In her impatience the quick blood
glanced through her bronzed cheek, her little slipper tapped
the floor imperiously and her eyes flashed in the darkness.

Later we learn that she had been adopted into this Spanish family
after her lover had abandoned her in the earlier chapters, and had
been given her complexion by means of a vegetable stain. But there is
still another lightning change. At the end of the book she becomes a
Pike again and weakly marries the unrepentant rascal who earlier had
betrayed her. In the words of Artemus Ward, "it is too much." It is not
even good melodrama, for in melodrama the villain is punished at the
end.

Bret Harte was the artist of impulse, the painter of single burning
moments, the flashlight photographer who caught in lurid detail one
dramatic episode in the life of a man or a community and left the rest
in darkness.

VII

In his later years Harte's backgrounds became less sharp in outline.
His methods grew more romantic; his atmospheres more mellow and golden.
The old Spanish dream of the days of his early art possessed him again,
and he added to his gallery of real creations--M'liss, Yuba Bill, Jack
Hamlin, Tennessee's Partner--one that perhaps is the strongest of
them all, Enriquez Saltillo, the last of a fading race. Nothing Harte
ever did will surpass that creation of his old age. In _Chu Chu_,
_The Devotion of Enriquez_, and _The Passing of Enriquez_ we have the
fitting close of the work of the romancer of the west coast. For once
at least he saw into the heart of a man. Listen to Enriquez as he makes
his defense:

Then they say, "Dry up, and sell out"; and the great bankers
say, "Name your own price for your stock, and resign." And
I say, "There is not gold enough in your bank, in your San
Francisco, in the mines of California, that shall buy a Spanish
gentleman. When I leave, I leave the stock at my back; I shall
take it, nevarre!" Then the banker he say, "And you will go
and blab, I suppose?" And then, Pancho, I smile, I pick up my
mustache--so! and I say: "Pardon, senor, you haf mistake. The
Saltillo haf for three hundred year no stain, no blot upon him.
Eet is not now--the last of the race--who shall confess that
he haf sit at a board of disgrace and dishonor!" And then it
is that the band begin to play, and the animals stand on their
hind legs and waltz, and behold, the row he haf begin.

It is the atmosphere of romance, for the mine which had caused all the
trouble had been in the family three hundred years and it had become
a part of the family itself. When it passed into the hands of the new
regime, when his wife, who also was of the new regime, deserted him,
then passed Enriquez. The earth that for three hundred years had borne
his fathers opened at the earthquake and took him to herself. It was
the conception of a true romancer. The work of Bret Harte opened and
closed with a vision of romance, a vision worthy even of a Hawthorne.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BRET HARTE. (1839-1902.) _The Lost Galleon and Other Tales_
[Poems], 1867; _Condensed Novels and Other Papers_, 1867; _The
Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches_, 1870; _Plain Language
from Truthful James_, 1870; _The Pliocene Skull_, 1871; _Poems_,
1871; _East and West Poems_, 1871; _The Heathen Chinee and Other
Poems_, 1871; _Poetical Works_, 1872; _Mrs. Skagg's Husbands_,
1873; _M'liss: An Idyl of Red Mountain_, 1873; _Echoes of the
Foot-Hills_ [Poems], 1875; _Tales of the Argonauts_, 1875;
_Gabriel Conroy_, 1876; _Two Men of Sandy Bar_, 1876; _Thankful
Blossom_, 1877; _The Story of a Mine_, 1878; _Drift from Two
Shores_, 1878; _The Twins of Table Mountain_, 1879; Works in
five volumes, 1882; _Flip, and Found at Blazing Star_, 1882; _In
the Carquinez Woods_, 1884; _On the Frontier_, 1884; _Maruja_,
1885; _By Shore and Sedge_, 1885; _Snow Bound at Eagle's_, 1885;
_A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready_, 1887; _The Crusade of the
Excelsior_, 1887; _The Argonauts of North Liberty_, 1888; _A
Phyllis of the Sierras_, 1888; _Cressy_, 1889; _The Heritage of
Dedlow Marsh_, 1889; _A Waif of the Plains_, 1890; _A Ward of the
Golden Gate_, 1890; _A Sappho of Green Springs_, 1891; _Colonel
Starbottle's Client_, 1892; _A First Family of Tasajara_,
1892; _Susy: a Story of the Plains_, 1893; _Sally Dows and
Other Stories_, 1893; _A Protege of Jack Hamlin's_, 1894; _The
Bell-Ringer of Angel's_, 1894; _In a Hollow of the Hills_, 1895;
_Clarence_, 1895; _Barker's Luck_, 1896; _Three Partners_, 1897;
_Tales of Trail and Town_, 1898; _Stories in Light and Shadow_,
1898; _Mr. Jack Hamlin's Meditation_, 1899; _From Sandhill to
Pine_, 1900; _Under the Redwoods_, 1901; _Openings in the Old
Trail_, 1902; _Life of Bret Harte_, by T. Edgar Pemberton, 1903;
_Bret Harte_, by Henry W. Boynton, 1905; _The Life of Bret Harte
with Some Account of the California Pioneers_, by Henry Childs
Merwin, 1911.

CHAPTER V

THE DISCOVERY OF PIKE COUNTY

The new era of vulgarity in literature, complained of by Stedman,
came as a revolt against mid-century tendencies. The movement was not
confined to America. In the early seventies, as we have seen, Millet
and his Breton peasants for a time took possession of French art;
Hardy with his Wessex natives caught the ear of England; Bjornson made
the discovery that in the Scandinavian peasant lay the only survival
of the old Norse spirit; and the Russians Tourgenieff and Tolstoy
cast aside the old mythology and told with minuteness the life of the
peasant and the serf. Everywhere there was a swing toward the wild and
unconventional, even toward the coarse and repulsive. The effeminacy of
early Tennysonianism, the cloying sweetness of the mid-century annual,
Keatsism, _Hyperionism_, Heineism, had culminated in reaction. There
was a craving for the acrid tang of uncultivated things in borderlands
and fields unsown.

In America had sprung up a group of humorists who had filled the
newspapers and magazines of the era with that masculine laughter which
was echoing along the Mississippi and the Ohio and the gold camps of
the Sierras. They were pioneers; they were looking for incongruities
and exaggerations, and quite by accident they discovered a new American
type, the Pike,--strange creature to inspire a new literature.

America has evolved four types, perhaps five, that are unique "new
birth of our new soil": the Yankee of the Hosea Biglow and Sam Lawson
variety; the frontiersman and scout exemplified in Leather Stocking;
the Southern "darky" as depicted by Russell, Harris, Page, and others;
the circuit rider of the frontier period; and the Pike.

"A Pike," says Bayard Taylor, "in the California dialect, is
a native of Missouri, Arkansas, Northern Texas, or Southern
Illinois. The first emigrants that came over the plains were
from Pike County, Missouri; but as the phrase, 'a Pike County
man,' was altogether too long for this short life of ours, it
was soon abbreviated into 'a Pike.' Besides, the emigrants from
the aforementioned localities belonged evidently to the same
_genus_, and the epithet 'Western' was by no means sufficiently
descriptive.... He is the Anglo-Saxon relapsed into
semi-barbarism. He is long, lathy, and sallow; he expectorates
vehemently; he takes naturally to whisky; he has the 'shakes'
his life long at home, though he generally manages to get rid
of them in California; he has little respect for the rights of
others; he distrusts men in 'store clothes,' but venerates the
memory of Andrew Jackson."[50]

Although he had not yet been named, the Pike had already figured in
American literature. George W. Harris had published in 1867 _Sut
Lovengood's Yarns_, a true piece of Pike literature; Longstreet had
drawn the type with fidelity in _Georgia Scenes_, Baldwin's _Flush
Times_, and the sketches of such ephemeral writers as Madison Tensas,
Sol Smith, T. W. Lane, T. A. Burke, and J. L. McConnel, the author of
_Western Characters_, had drawn the first broad outlines. In all this
work he was simply the crude, uncouth Westerner, the antithesis of the
man of the East.

The first to discover him in his California phase and to affix to
him for the first time in any book of moment the name Pike was "John
Phoenix" who in _Phoenixiana_ drew, as we have seen, a sketch which has
scarcely been improved upon by later writers. It was not until 1871,
however, that the name Pike and the peculiar type denoted by the name
became at all known to the reading public.

The instant and enormous vogue of Pike literature came almost by
accident. Bret Harte late in the sixties had dashed off in a happy
moment a humorous account of an attempt made by two California gamblers
to fleece an innocent Chinaman who turned out to be anything but
innocent. He had entitled the poem "Plain Language from Truthful James"
and had thrown it aside as a trifle. Some months later during the last
exciting moments before going to press with an edition of the _Overland
Monthly_ it was discovered that the form was one page short. There
was nothing ready but this poem, and with misgivings Harte inserted
it. The result was nothing less than amazing. It proved to be the
most notable page in the history of the magazine. The poem captured
the East completely; it was copied and quoted and laughed at in every
corner of the country. It swept through England and beyond. _The Luck
of Roaring Camp_ and the two or three strong pieces that followed it
had given Harte a certain vogue in the East, but now he swiftly became
not only a national, but an international figure. The fame of the
"Heathen Chinee," as the poem was now called, brought out of obscurity
other poems written by Harte during his editorial days, among them
"The Society upon the Stanislaus," and it gave wings to other verses
that he now wrote in the "Heathen Chinee" meter and stanza--"Dow's
Flat" and "Penelope." Quickly there were added "Jim," "Chiquita," "In
the Tunnel," and "Cicely," all of them dealing not with the "heathen
Chinee" of his first great strike, but with that other picturesque
figure of early California, the Pike.

It was _gold_,--in the quartz,
And it ran all alike;
And I reckon five oughts
Was the worth of that strike;
And that house with the coopilow's his'n,--which the same isn't
bad for a Pike.

These poems with others were published in 1871 with the title _East and
West Poems_. The Pike County pieces in the volume number altogether
seven; John Hay's _Pike County Ballads_, which came out in book form at
almost the same moment, numbered six--thirteen rather remarkable poems
when one considers the furore that they created and the vast influence
they exerted upon their times.

For a decade and more Pike County colored American literature. In 1871
J. G. Holland summed up the situation:

The "Pike" ... has produced a strange and startling sensation
in recent literature.... With great celerity he has darted
through the columns of our newspapers, the pages of our
magazines, while quiet, well-behaved contributors have stood
one side and let him have his own wild way. And it began to
seem, at one time, as if the ordinary, decent virtues of
civilized society could stand no chance in comparison with the
picturesque heroism of this savage in dialect.[51]

Much of Harte's fiction deals with this type. Save for Yuba Bill, who
was evidently a Northerner, the New Orleans gamblers like Oakhurst and
Jack Hamlin, and the Spanish and Mexican natives, his characters were
prevailingly Pikes. The dialect in all of his work is dominate

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