History of American Literature Part 37

In even as recent a period as the twenty years from 1880 to 1900, the population of Minnesota increased 124 per cent; Nebraska, 135 per cent; and Colorado, 177 per cent. This increase indicates something of the strenuous work necessary on the physical side to prepare comfortable permanent homes in the country, town, and city, and to plan and execute the other material adaptations necessary for progressive civilized life and trade. It is manifest that such a period of stress is not favorable to the development of literature. Although the population of California increased 60 per cent and that of the state of Washington 120 per cent between 1900 and 1910, the extreme stress, due to pioneer life and to rapid increase in population, has already abated in the vast majority of places throughout the West, which is rapidly becoming as stable as any other section of the country.

THE DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT.--In settling the West, everybody worked shoulder to shoulder. There were no privileged cla.s.ses to be excepted from the common toils and privations. All met on common ground, shared each other's troubles, and a.s.sisted each other in difficult work. All were outspoken and championed their own opinions without restraint. At few times in the history of the civilized world has the home been a more independent unit.

Never have pioneers been more self-reliant, more able to cope with difficulties, more determined to have their rights.

This democratic spirit is reflected in the works of western authors. It made Mark Twain the champion of the weak, the impartial upholder of justice to the Maid of Orleans, to a slave, or to a vivisected dog. It made him join the school of Cervantes and puncture the hypocrisy of pretension in cla.s.ses or individuals. The Clemens family had believed in the aristocracy of slavery, but the great democratic spirit of the West molded Mark Twain as a growing boy. All the characters of worth in the great stories of his young life are democratic. The son of the drunkard, the slave mother, the crowds on the steamboats, the far western pioneers, belong to the great democracy of man.

Abraham Lincoln owes his fame in oratory to this democratic spirit, to the feeling that prompted him to say, "With malice toward none; with charity for all." Bret Harte's world-famous short stories picture the rough mining camps. Eugene Field is a poet of that age of universal democracy, the age of childhood. The poetry of James Whitcomb Riley is popular because it speaks directly to the common human heart.

Although the West has already begun a period of greater repose, she has been fortunate to retain an Elizabethan enthusiasm and interest in many-sided life. This quality, so apparent in much of the work discussed in this chapter, is full of virile promise for the future.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 1809-1865

[Ill.u.s.tration: ABRAHAM LINCOLN]

Migrating from his birthplace in Kentucky, first to Indiana and then to Illinois, where he helped to clear the unbroken forest, Abraham Lincoln was one of America's greatest pioneers. Shackled by poverty and lack of education, his indomitable will first broke his own fetters and then those of the slave. History claims him as her own, but some of the plain, sincere, strong English that fell from his lips while he was making history demands attention as literature. Pa.s.sing by his great debates with Douglas (1858), not because they are unimportant, but because they belong more to the domain of politics and history, we come to his _Gettysburg Address_ (1863), which is one of the three greatest American orations. In England, Oxford University displays on its walls this _Address_ as a model to show students how much can be said simply and effectively in two hundred and sixty-nine words. Edward Everett, a graduate of Harvard, called the most eloquent man of his time, also spoke at Gettysburg, although few are to-day aware of this fact.

The question may well be asked, "How did Lincoln, who had less than one year's schooling, learn the secret of such speech?" The answer will be found in the fixity of purpose and the indomitable will of the pioneer.

When he was a boy, he seemed to realize that in order to succeed, he must talk and write plainly. As a lad, he used to practice telling things in such a way that the most ignorant person could understand them. In his youth he had only little sc.r.a.ps of paper or shingles on which to write, and so perforce learned the art of brevity. Only a few books were accessible to him, and he read and reread them until they became a part of him. The volumes that he thus absorbed were the _Bible_, _Aesop's Fables_, _Arabian Nights_, _Robinson Crusoe_, _The Pilgrim's Progress_, _Franklin's Autobiography_, Weems's _Life of Washington_, and two or three textbooks.

Without such good reading, which served to guide his practice in writing and speaking, he could never have been President. Later in life he read Shakespeare, especially _Macbeth_.

Parts of his _Second Inaugural Address_ (1865) show even better than his _Gettysburg Address_ the influence of the _Bible_ on his thought and style.

One reason why there is so much weak and ineffective prose written to-day is because books like the _Bible_ and _The Pilgrim's Progress_ are not read and reread as much as formerly. Of the North and the South, he says in his _Second Inaugural_:--

"Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same G.o.d; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just G.o.d's a.s.sistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered--that of neither has been answered fully....

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as G.o.d gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds...."

Absolute sincerity is the most striking quality in his masterpieces.

Simplicity and brevity are next in evidence; to these are sometimes added the pathos and intensity of a Hebrew prophet.

BRET HARTE, 1839-1902

LIFE.--The father of Bret Harte was professor of Greek in the Albany, New York, Female College, where his son, named Francis Bret, was born in 1839.

The boy never attended an inst.i.tution of learning higher than a common school. Fatherless at the age of fifteen, he went with his mother to California in 1854. Here he tried teaching school, mining, going on stages as an express messenger, printing, government service, and editing. Of his experience in California, he writes:--

"Here I was thrown among the strangest social conditions that the latter-day world has perhaps seen.... Amid rushing waters and wildwood freedom, an army of strong men, in red shirts and top-boots, were feverishly in search of the buried gold of earth.... It was a land of perfect freedom, limited only by the instinct and the habit of law which prevailed in the ma.s.s.... Strong pa.s.sions brought quick climaxes, all the better and worse forces of manhood being in unbridled play. To me it was like a strange, ever-varying panorama, so novel that it was difficult to grasp comprehensively."

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRET HARTE (From a painting by John Pettie, R. A.)]

Amid such surroundings he was educated for his life work, and his idealization of these experiences is what ent.i.tles him to a sure place in American literature.

After spending sixteen years in California, he returned in 1871 to the East, where he wrote and lectured; but these subsequent years are of comparatively small interest to the student of literature. In 1878 he went as consul to Crefeld in Germany. He was soon transferred from there to Glasgow, Scotland, the consulship of which he held until his removal by President Cleveland in 1885. These two sentences from William Black, the English novelist, may explain the presidential action: "Bret Harte was to have been back from Paris last night, but he is a wandering comet. The only place he is sure not to be found is at the Glasgow consulate." Bret Harte was something of a lion in a congenial English literary set, and he never returned to America. He continued to write until his death at Camberly, Surrey, in 1902. The tourist may find his grave in Frimley churchyard, England.

WORKS.--Bret Harte was a voluminous writer. His authorized publishers have issued twenty-eight volumes of his prose and one volume of his collected poems. While his _Plain Language from Truthful James_, known as his "Heathen Chinee" poem, was very popular, his short stories in prose are his masterpieces. The best of these were written before 1871, when he left California for the East. Much of his later work was a repet.i.tion of what he had done as well or better in his youth.

_The Overland Magazine_, a San Francisco periodical, which Bret Harte was editing, published in 1868 his own short story, _The Luck of Roaring Camp_.

This is our greatest short story of pioneer life. England recognized its greatness as quickly as did America. The first two sentences challenge our curiosity, and remind us of Poe's dictum concerning the writing of a story (p. 299):--

"There was commotion in Roaring Camp. It could not have been a fight, for in 1850 that was not novel enough to have called together the entire settlement."

We at once stand face to face with the characters of that mining camp. "The a.s.semblage numbered about a hundred men. One or two of these were actual fugitives from justice, some were criminal, and all were reckless." We shall remember "Kentuck" and Oakhurst and "Stumpy," christening the baby:--

"'I proclaim you Thomas Luck, according to the laws of the United States and the State of California, so help me G.o.d.' It was the first time that the name of the Deity had been otherwise uttered than profanely in the camp."

There are two sentences describing the situation of Roaring Camp:--

"The camp lay in a triangular valley between two hills and a river. The only outlet was a steep trail over the summit of a hill that faced the cabin, now illuminated by the rising moon."

Poe would have approved of the introduction of this bit of description, for it heightens the pathetic effect and focuses attention upon the mother.

Even that "steep trail" is so artistically introduced that she

"... might have seen it from the rude bunk whereon she lay,--seen it winding like a silver thread until it was lost in the stars above....

Within an hour she had climbed, as it were, that rugged road that led to the stars, and so pa.s.sed out of Roaring Camp, its sin and shame, forever."

Bret Harte in a few words relates how these miners reared the child, how they were unconsciously influenced by it, and how one day an expressman rushed into an adjacent village saying:--

"They've a street up there in 'Roaring,' that would lay over any street in Red Dog. They've got vines and flowers round their houses, and they wash themselves twice a day."

He had, as we have seen, something of the remarkable technique of which Poe was a master. The influence of d.i.c.kens, especially his sentimentalism, is often apparent in Harte's work. Some have accused him of caricature or exaggeration, but these terms, when applied to his best work, signify little except the use of emphasis and selection, of which Homer and Shakespeare freely availed themselves. The author of _The Luck of Roaring Camp_, _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_, and _Tennessee's Partner_ seemed to know almost instinctively what he must emphasize or neglect in order to give his readers a vivid impression of the California argonauts. He mingles humor and pathos, realism and idealism, in a masterly way. No other author has had the necessary dramatic touch to endow those times with such a powerful romantic appeal to our imagination. No one else has rescued them from the oblivion which usually overtakes all transitory stages of human development.

Bret Harte's pages afford us the rare privilege of again communing with genuine primitive feeling, with eternal human qualities, not deflected or warped by convention. He gives us the literature of democracy. In self-forgetfulness, sympathy, love for his kind, Tennessee's partner in his unkempt dress is the peer of any wearer of the broadcloth.

Bret Harte's best work is as bracing, as tonic, as instinct with the spirit of vigorous youth, as the mountain air which has never before been breathed. Woodberry well says: "He created lasting pictures of human life, some of which have the eternal outline and pose of a Theocritean idyl. The supreme nature of his gift is shown by the fact that he had no rival and left no successor. His work is as unique as that of Poe or Hawthorne."

[Footnote: Woodberry: _America in Literature_.]

EUGENE FIELD, 1850-1895

THE POET LAUREATE OF CHILDREN.--Eugene Field was born in St. Louis in 1850.

Of this western group of authors he was the only member who went to college. He completed the junior year at the University of Missouri, but did not graduate. At the age of twenty-three he began newspaper work there, and he continued this work in various places until his death in Chicago in 1895. For the last twelve years of his life he was connected with the Chicago _Daily News_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EUGENE FIELD]

He wrote many poems and prose tales, but the work by which he will probably live in literature is his poetry for children. For his t.i.tle of poet-laureate of children, he has had few worthy compet.i.tors. His _Little Boy Blue_ will be read as long as there are parents who have lost a child.

"What a world of little people was left unrepresented in the realms of poetry until Eugene Field came!" exclaimed a noted teacher. Children listen almost breathlessly to the story of the duel between "the gingham dog and the calico cat," and to the ballad of "The Rock-a-By Lady from Hushaby Street," and the dreams which she brings:--

"There is one little dream of a big sugar plum, And lo! thick and fast the other dreams come Of popguns that bang, and tin tops that hum, And a trumpet that bloweth!"

He loved children, and any one else who loves them, whether old or young, will enjoy reading his poems of childhood. Who, for instance, will admit that he does not like the story of _Wynken, Blynken, and Nod_?

"Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night Sailed off in a wooden shoe-- Sailed on a river of crystal light, Into a sea of dew.

'Where are you going, and what do you wish?'

The old moon asked the three.

'We have come to fish for the herring fish That live in this beautiful sea; Nets of silver and gold have we!'

Said Wynken, Blynken, And Nod.

"The old moon laughed and sang a song, As they rocked in the wooden shoe, And the wind that sped them all night long Ruffled the waves of dew."