A history of American literature since 1870

Front matter

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Preface

jA-merifTTi literature in the larger sense of the term began with Irving, ai. 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 fluch 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 ;.dS ever attempted to handle it as a unit. It is an important on-': it is our first really national period, all-American, autochthonic. It was not until after the war tliat 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

PREFACE

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. A¥e 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

CHAPTEB PAGE

I THE SECOND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 3

,_ II THE LAUGHTER OF THE WEST 25

Chapter I The Second Discovery Of America I

We are beginning to realize that the Civil War marks a dividing line in American history as sharp and definitive as that burned across French history by the Revolution. That the South had been vastly affected by the war was manifest from the fii-st. 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 modem 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 caiions; 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. ' ' ^

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

1 The Oilded Age, uniform edition, 200.

and woodland in 1900." ^ 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. ' ' ^ Now there came national banks, national securities, a national railroad, a national college sj^stem, — 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 char-

2 Sanborn's New Hampshire, 317.

3 North American Review, 104:301.

aeteristies 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 Scrihner'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 Rosehud 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." * 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."^ It was Richardson's opinion that "little that was notable was added to the literature of the country by

4 Scribner's Monthly, i : 220. 6 Poets of America, 437.

the Civil "War of 1861. . . . The creative powers of our best authors seemed somewhat benumbed, though books and readers multiplied between 1861 and 1865."^ 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. ' ' ^

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 accom-

6 Primer of American Literature, revised edition, 77.

7 Philosophy of American Literature, 65.

plishments 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 Puller 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. Wlien 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 reallj^ interesting. ' ' ^ 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 hy the Way, Cooper's Gleanings in Europe, Sanderson's Sketches of Paris, Sprague's Letters from Europe, Colton's Four Years in

8 Longfellow's Henry Wadstvorth Longfellota, ii -. 308.

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 TJioughts 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 Bjomson in Norway, workers with whom art was life itself.