A History of American Literature

In all the material of this middle period the dominant feature is his praise of the elemental forces of nature. Nature itself for him was always dynamic. The sea and the forest at rest suggested to him their latent powers. His best scenes deal with storm, flood, and fire, and when occasionally he painted a calm background, as in the departure of “The Last Taschastas,” the burnished beauty of the setting is in strong contrast with the violence of the episode. In human experience he most admired the exertion of primitive strength. It is this which endeared the early pioneers to him. Man coping with nature thrilled him, but for human conflict he had little sympathy. His women were Amazonian in physique and character – a singularly consistent type, almost a recurrence of one woman of various complexions. In the judgment of Whitman – his Washington intimate of two years – he must have fallen from grace in his treatment of love. If he did not vie (to paraphrase Burroughs) “with the lascivious poets in painting it as the forbidden” passion, he did compete with the fleshly school in depicting all its charms. Yet even here in that strange concluding romance “Light” he struggled to overcome the sensuous with the spiritual element.

The form of all this mid-period work was quite conventional and, in view of the content, smacked strangely of the library and the drawing room. He ran as a rule to four-stressed lines, indulged in insistent riming, rarely missing a chance, and cast his stanzas into a jogging and seldom-varied rhythm. In their assault on the ear his verses have little delicacy of appeal. They blare at the reader like the brasses in an orchestral fortissimo. They clamor at him with the strident regularity of a Sousa march. This dominant measure accords well with the rude subject matter of his poems, – the march of the pioneer, the plod of oxen yoked to the prairie schooner, the roar of prairie fire or of the wind through the forest; and, with a difference, the hoof-beat of galloping horses or of stampeding buffalo. And it expresses the rhetorical magniloquence which is the natural fruit of life in a country of magnificent distances. At the same time Miller found a poetical justification for his style in the narrative rhythms of Scott and Byron and Coleridge, by whom he was often and evidently influenced. Until he was well past mid-career he was boyishly open to direct literary influences. He had no theory of prosody; his originality was inherent in the harmony between himself and his wild material; so he tried his hand at writing in the manner of this, that, and the other man.

In his final revisions, however, he was ruthless in rejecting his imitative passages and in his reduction of earlier work to what was unqualifiedly his own. This is best illustrated by what he did to “The Baroness of New York” before he had done with it. In its original form of 1877 it filled a whole volume, a poem – not a novel, as often erroneously stated – in two parts. The former is a sea-island romance of love and desertion after the manner of Scott; the sequel presents Adora in New York as the Baroness du Bois, where she lives in scornful indifference until the original lover turns up with a title of his own and carries her off in triumph; this second part is in the manner of Byron. When Miller included this poem in his collected edition of 1897, he dropped all the Byronic, metropolitan portion and reduced the rest to less than half – the fraction that was quite his own.

Such a revision was in the fullest sense the work of matured judgment. Miller was now in his last long period of picturesque retirement on “The Heights,” looking back over his prolific output of former years, recognizing the good in it, and depending upon the public to reject what had no right to a long life. At times he still wrote poem-stories located in settings of tumultuous abundance, but he supplemented these with more and more frequent short lyrics, and he studied continually to achieve that simplicity which is seldom the result of anything but perfected artistry. In 1902 he wrote:

Shall we ever have an American literature? Yes, when we leave sound and words to the winds. American science has swept time and space aside. American science dashes along at fifty, sixty miles an hour; but American literature still lumbers along in the old-fashioned English stage-coach at ten miles an hour; and sometimes with a red-coated outrider blowing a horn. We must leave all this behind us. We have not time for words. A man who uses a great, big, sounding word, when a short one will do, is to that extent a robber of time. A jewel that depends greatly on its setting is not a great jewel. When the Messiah of American literature comes, he will come singing, so far as may be, in words of one syllable.

In the main his hope now was to pass from objective poetry to “the vision of worlds beyond,” – a vision which he more nearly approached in “Sappho and Phaon” than in any other poem, and a vision for which the motive is stated in the second stanza of “Adios”:

Could I but teach man to believe —Could I but make small men to grow,To break frail spider-webs that weaveAbout their thews and bind them low;Could I but sing one song and slayGrim Doubt; I then could go my wayIn tranquil silence, glad, serene,And satisfied, from off the scene.But ah, this disbelief, this doubt,This doubt of God, this doubt of good, —The damned spot will not out.

In the meanwhile, by way of a practical application of his ideals, Miller was attempting to lead his life sanely and, by an association that suggests the old Greek academy, to point the way for the younger generation of poets. In his final note to the 1902 edition he described himself as living on “a sort of hillside Bohemia.” No lessons were taught there except, by example, the lesson of living. Three or four “tenets or principles of life” were insisted upon: that man is good; that there is nothing ugly in nature; that man is immortal; that nature wastes no thing and no time; and that man should learn the lesson of economy. So in a way he returned to the simple conditions in which his earliest life had grounded his affections.

Miller naturally invites comparison with Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. The likeness starts with the simple origins of all three and with the rough-and-ready circumstances of their upbringing. It continues with their resultant sympathetic feeling for the common men and women who make up the mass of humankind. It is maintained in their conscious personal picturesqueness: Whitman gray-bearded, open-collared, wearing his hat indoors or out; Mark Twain in his white serge, regardless of season; and Miller with long hair, velvet jacket, and high boots, – evidence of the humanizing personal vanity in each which was quite apart from the genuine bigness of their characters. It follows in the high seriousness of all three. And it is confirmed in the fact of their early recognition in England and their less respectful reception at home (see pp. 293 and 367). Miller, like these others, was in the 70’s what the Old World chose to think the typical American ought to be. He was fresher to them than those other Americans whom their countrymen were eagerly describing as “the American Burns,” “the American Wordsworth,” “the American Scott,” and “the American Tennyson”; and to this degree – though he was not a representative of the prevailing American literature – he was actually a representative of the country itself and especially of the vast stretch from the Mississippi to the Pacific. For Miller and the America he knew best were both full of natural vigor, full of hope and faith, conscious of untold possibilities in the nearer and the remoter future, and, withal, relatively naïve and unformed.

BOOK LIST

Individual Authors

Edward Rowland Sill. Works. The Political Works of. 1906. 1 vol. His works appeared in book form originally as follows: The Hermitage and Other Poems, 1867; Venus of Milo, and Other Poems, 1883; Poems, 1887; The Hermitage, and Later Poems, 1889; Christmas in California: a Poem, 1898; Hermione, and Other Poems, 1899; Prose, 1900; Poems (Special Edition), 1902; Poems (Household Edition), 1906.

Biography and Criticism

The best biographical study is Edward Rowland Sill: his Life and Work, by W. B. Parker. 1915. See also Modern Poets and Christian Teaching (Gilder, Markham, Sill), by D. G. Downey. 1906.

Joaquin Miller. Works. Bear Edition. 1909–1910. 6 vols. A single-volume “complete” edition was published in 1892, 1897, and 1904. These appeared in book form originally as follows: Specimens, 1868; Joaquin et al., 1869; Pacific Poems, 1870; Songs of the Sierras, 1871; Songs of the Sunlands, 1873; Unwritten History: Life Amongst the Modocs (with Percival Mulford), 1874; The Ship in the Desert, 1875; First Families of the Sierras, 1875; Songs of the Desert, 1875; The One Fair Woman, 1876; The Baroness of New York, 1877; Songs of Italy, 1878; The Danites in the Sierras, 1881; Shadows of Shasta, 1881; Poems (Complete Edition), 1882; Forty-nine: a California Drama, 1882; ’49: or, the Gold-seekers of the Sierras, 1884; Memorie and Rime, 1884; The Destruction of Gotham, 1886; Songs of the Mexican Seas, 1887; In Classic Shades and Other Poems, 1890; The Building of the City Beautiful: a Poetic Romance, 1893; Songs of the Soul, 1896; Chants for the Boer, 1900; True Bear Stories, 1900; As It Was in the Beginning, 1903; Light: a Narrative Poem, 1907.

Biography and Criticism

There is no adequate biography or even biographical study. Of the historians of American literature only Churton Collins, C. F. Richardson, G. E. Woodberry, and F. L. Pattee (“American Literature since 1870”) accord Miller serious attention. The autobiographical preface to the Bear Edition and the same material scattered through the one-volume editions are the raw stuff for interpretation of Miller’s character and aim. These can be supplemented by his own article in the Independent on “What is Poetry?” See also Current Literature, Vol. XLVIII, p. 574.

See the historians above mentioned and the following review articles: Academy, Vol. II, p. 301; Vol. LIII, p. 181; Arena, Vol. XII, p. 86; Vol. IX, p. 553; Vol. XXXVII, p. 271; Current Opinion, Vol. LIV, p. 318; Dial, Vol. LIV, p. 165; Fraser’s, Vol. LXXXIV, p. 346; Godey’s, Vol. XCIV, p. 52; Lippincott’s, Vol. XXXVIII, p. 106; Munsey’s, Vol. IX, p. 308; Nation, Vol. XXVII, p. 336; Vol. XIII, p. 196; Vol. XVIII, p. 77; Vol. XCVI, pp. 169, 187, 230, 544.

TOPICS AND PROBLEMS

Compare the use of California and California life by Sill with use of the same material by Joaquin Miller or Bret Harte or Mark Twain.

Compare Sill’s “Hermitage” with Robert Frost’s “A Boy’s Will.” What is the likeness in the general drift of the two and what are the essential differences in the treatments of the theme?

Read W. B. Parker’s “Life of Sill” with especial reference to Sill’s letters and the degree to which they reveal his humor and his seriousness. Note poems which correspond in spirit or in content with given letters.

Compare the treatment of primitive Western life and adventure by Miller with use of the same material by Mark Twain or Bret Harte.

Read Miller for evidences of literary influence upon him of Scott or Byron or Coleridge or Browning.

Read Miller’s “Song of the South” and his explanatory remarks on it and compare Longfellow’s treatment of the Mississippi; or compare Masters’s preface to his volume “Toward the Gulf” and his poems on the same subject.

Note the insistence of Miller on the idea that life is power and in his later poems the increasing respect for reflection.

Compare Miller’s “Columbus” with Lowell’s “Columbus” and Lanier’s “Sonnets on Columbus.”

CHAPTER XXVII

THE RISE OF FICTION; WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

It is very seldom in the history of literature that important developments take place without long preliminaries. From period to period new emphasis is placed on old ideas, and old forms are given the right of way in literary fashion. In the course of American literature, roughly speaking, the dominating forms of literature have been in succession: exposition and travel during the colonial period; poetry, satirical and epic, in the Revolutionary period; poetry in all its broader aspects during the first two thirds of the nineteenth century. After the Civil War for fifty years fiction came to the front; from about 1900 on a new emphasis was given to the stage and the playwright; at present the most striking fact in world literature is the broadening and deepening of the poetic currents again. Yet all of these forms are always existent. To speak of the rise of fiction, then, is simply to acknowledge the increased attention which for a period it demanded.

It is frequently said that America’s chief contribution to world literature has been the short story as developed since the Civil War. Yet in America the ground had been prepared for this development by many writers, – among them, as already mentioned in this history, Washington Irving with “The Sketch Book” in 1819 (see pp. 118–131), Hawthorne with “Twice-Told Tales” in 1838 (see pp. 240 and 243), Poe with his various contributions to periodical literature in the 1840’s (see pp. 185–187), Mark Twain with “The Jumping Frog” of 1867, Bret Harte with “The Luck of Roaring Camp” of 1870 and the great bulk of his subsequent contributions (see p. 381), and Thomas Bailey Aldrich with “Marjorie Daw” of 1873 and his other volumes of short stories. In the meanwhile the novel had had its consecutive history – from Brockden Brown beginning with 1798 (see pp. 100–109) to Cooper in 1820 (see pp. 141–157), William Gilmore Simms from 1833 (see p. 344), Hawthorne from 1850 on (see pp. 236–251), Mrs. Stowe from 1852 (see pp. 299–309), and Holmes from 1861 (see pp. 320, 321). And these writers of short and long fiction are only the outstanding story-tellers in America between the beginning of the century and the years just after the Civil War.

In a chapter such as this no exhaustive survey is possible, for it involves scores of writers and hundreds of books. The vital movement started with a fresh and vivid treatment of native American material, and it moved in a great sweeping curve from the West down past the Gulf up through the southeastern states into New England, across to the Middle West, and back into the Ohio valley until every part of the country was represented by its expositors. The course of this newer provincial fiction is suggested by the mention of Mark Twain’s “Jumping Frog” (1867, California), “The Luck of Roaring Camp” of Bret Harte (1870, California), G. W. Cable’s “Old Creole Days” (1879, Louisiana), “Nights with Uncle Remus,” by Joel Chandler Harris (1880, Georgia), “In the Tennessee Mountains,” by Charles Egbert Craddock (1884), “In old Virginia,” by Thomas Nelson Page (1887), “A New England Nun,” by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1891), “Main-Travelled Roads,” by Hamlin Garland (1891, the Middle West), “Flute and Violin,” by James Lane Allen (1891, the Ohio valley).

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (1837–)

The preëminent figure in the field of American fiction during the last half century has been William Dean Howells, a man who is widely representative of the broad literary development in the country and worthy of careful study as an artist and as a critic of life. Although he has been an Easterner by residence for nearly half a century, he is the greatest contribution of the West – or what was West in his youth – to Eastern life and thought.

He was born in 1837 at Martins Ferry, Ohio, – the second of eight children. Perhaps the richness of his character is accounted for by the varied strains in his ancestry. On his father’s side his people were wholly Welsh except his English great-grandmother, and on his mother’s wholly German except his Irish grandfather. His mother he has described as the heart of the family, and his father as the soul. The family fortunes were in money ways unsuccessful. His father’s experience as a country editor took him from place to place in a succession of ventures which were harrassed by uncertain income and heavy debts. These were always paid, but only by dint of unceasing effort. The Howells family were, however, happy in their concord and in their daily enjoyment of the best that books could bring them. Unlike many another youth who has struggled into literary fame, William Dean found a ready sympathy with his ambitions at home. His experience was less like Whitman’s than Bryant’s. From childhood the printing office was his school and almost his only school, for the district teachers had little to offer a child of literary parentage “whose sense was open to every intimation of beauty.” Very early his desire for learning led him into what he called “self-conducted inquiries” in foreign languages; and with the help of a “sixteen-bladed grammar,” a nondescript polyglot affair, he acquired in turn a reading knowledge of Latin, Greek, Spanish, German, French, and Italian. In the meanwhile he was reading and assimilating the popular English favorites. It was typical of his experience that Longfellow led him to his first studies of the Spanish language, bringing him back to Spain, where he had traveled in fancy with Irving. Always he was writing, for his life was “filled with literature to bursting,” and always imitating – now Pope, now Heine, now Cervantes, now Shakespeare.

As a printer on country journals he had the opportunity to place his own wares before the public, often composing in type without ever putting pen to paper. His father encouraged him to contribute to journals of larger circulation, and the experience naturally led him into professional journalism before he was of age. It led him also to Columbus, the state capital, where he reported the proceedings of the legislature and in time rose to the dignity of editorial writer. During these years of late youth and early manhood his aspirations were like Bret Harte’s, all in the direction of poetry, and his earliest book was a joint effort with James J. Piatt, “Poems of Two Friends,” 1859. This was a typical experience in literary history. Again and again at the period of a change to a new form or, better, a revived artistic form, the literary youth has started to write in the declining fashion of his day and has been carried over into the rising vogue. “Paradise Lost” was first conceived of as a five-act tragedy. “Amelia” and “Tom Jones” were preceded by twenty-odd unsuccessful comedies. “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” and “Marmion” and “The Lady of the Lake” were all preliminary to “Waverley” and the tide of novels that followed. In 1860 Howells had five poems in the Atlantic and had no expectation of writing fiction; and it was another full decade, after the publication of several volumes of sketches and travel observations, before he was fairly launched on his real career.

In Columbus he had come by 1860 to a full enjoyment of an eager, book-loving group. He was working enthusiastically as a journalist, but his knowledge of politics and statecraft did not bring him to any vivid sense of the social order. “What I wished to do always and evermore was to think and dream and talk literature, and literature only, whether in its form of prose or of verse, in fiction, or poetry, or criticism. I held it a higher happiness to stop at a street corner with a congenial young lawyer and enter upon a fond discussion of, say, De Quincey’s essays than to prove myself worthy the respect of any most eminent citizen who knew not or loved not De Quincey.” There was a succession of fellow-journalists with whom he could have this sort of pleasure, and there were houses in town where he could enjoy the finer pleasure of talking over with the girls the stories of Thackeray and George Eliot and Dickens and Charles Reade as they appeared in rapid sequence in book or serial form. “It is as if we did nothing then but read late novels and current serials which it was essential for us to know one another’s minds upon down to the instant; other things might wait, but these things were pressing.” During these years he developed a liking for the social amenities, of which an enjoyment of polite literature was a natural expression. Literature was an adornment of life and, as he saw it, was confined to an interpretation of individual experience.

With the presidential candidacy of Lincoln, Howells became one of his campaign biographers, and after the election and a period of anxious waiting he received the appointment as United States consul to Venice. Upon his return to this country he became an Easterner, settling happily in Boston as assistant editor and then as editor in chief of the Atlantic Monthly from 1866 to 1881. This was a fulfillment beyond his highest hopes. The great New England group were at the height of their fame, and his connection with the unrivaled literary periodical of America brought him into contact with them all. He was ready to begin his own work as a writer of novels.

For the next twenty years he was a thoroughly conventional artist, gaining satisfaction and giving pleasure through the exercise of his admirable technique. In this period he wrote always, to borrow an expression originally applied to Tennyson, as though a staid American matron had just left the room: a matron who had been nurtured on the reading which gave rise to his own literary passions – Goldsmith, Cervantes, Irving, Longfellow, Scott, Pope, Mrs. Stowe, Dickens, and Macaulay; a matron, in short, who was the Lady of the Aroostook at forty-five, the mother of a numerous family, and aggressively concerned that no book which fell into the hands of her daughters should cause the blush of shame to rise upon the maiden cheek. He wrote not only on an early experience in the life of this lady but on “A Modern Instance,” “A Woman’s Reason,” “Indian Summer,” and, best of them all, “The Rise of Silas Lapham.” He was giving ground to Mr. Crothers’s pale-gray pleasures as a reader in the time when, as he said: “I turned eagerly to some neutral tinted person who never had any adventure greater than missing the train to Dedham, and I … analyzed his character, and agitated myself in the attempt to get at his feelings, and I … verified his story by a careful reference to the railroad guide. I … treated that neutral tinted person as a problem, and I … noted all the delicate shades in the futility of his conduct. When, on any occasion that called for action, he did not know his own mind, I … admired him for his resemblance to so many people who do not know their own minds. After studying the problem until I came to the last chapter … I … suddenly gave it up, and agreed with the writer that it had no solution.” Had nothing occurred to break the sequence, he was on the way to wasting his energy, as Henry James did, “in describing human rarities, or cases that are common enough only in the abnormal groups of men and women living on the fringe of the great society of active, healthy human beings.”

The books of this period, in other words, were all the work of a well-schooled, unprejudiced observer whose ambition was to make transcripts of life. “Venetian Life” and “Italian Journeys” were the first logical expression of his desire and his capacities – books of the same sort as “Bracebridge Hall” and “Outre-Mer” and “Views Afoot” and “Our Old Home” (see p. 269, note). “A Foregone Conclusion” and “A Fearful Responsibility” simply cross the narrow bridge between exposition and fiction but employ the same point of view and the same technique. Howells was interested in American character and in the nice distinctions between the different levels of culture. In “Silas Lapham,” his greatest novel written before 1890, the blunt Vermonter is set in contrast with certain Boston aristocrats. He amasses a fortune, becomes involved in speculation, in business injustice, and in ruin. But whatever Howells had to say then of social and economic forces, he said of powers as impersonal as gravitation. Business was business, and the man subjected to it was subjected to influences as capricious but as inevitable as the climate of New England.

More and more as a realist he devoted himself to the presentation of character at the expense of plot. “The art of fiction,” he wrote in his essay on Henry James in 1882, “has become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens or Thackeray. We could not suffer the confidential attitude of the latter now nor the mannerism of the former any more than we could endure the prolixity of Richardson or the coarseness of Fielding. These great men are of the past – they and their methods and interests; even Trollope and Reade are not of the present.” He dismissed moving accidents and dire catastrophes from the field of the new novel, substituting for fire and flood the slow smolder of individual resentment and a burst of feminine tears. With “April Hopes” of 1887 he deliberately wrote an unfinished story, following two young and evidently incompatible people to the marriage altar, but leaving their subsequent sacrifice to the imagination of the reader, who must imagine his own sequel or go without.