History of American Literature Part 38

Who does not wish to complete this story to find out what became of the children? Who does not like Krinken?

"Krinken was a little child,-- It was summer when he smiled."

Field could write exquisitely beautiful verse. His tender heart had felt the pathos of life, and he knew how to set this pathos to music. He was naturally a humorist, and his humor often caused him to take a right angle turn in the midst of serious thoughts. Parents have for nearly a quarter of a century used the combination of humor and pathos in his poem, The _Little Peach_, to keep their children from eating green fruit:--

"A little peach in the orchard grew,-- A little peach of emerald hue; Warmed by the sun and wet by the dew, It grew.

"John took a bite and Sue a chew, And then the trouble began to brew,-- Trouble the doctor couldn't subdue.

Too true!

"Under the turf where the daisies grew They planted John and his sister Sue, And their little souls to the angels flew,-- Boo hoo!"

Time is not likely to rob Eugene Field of the fame of having written _The Canterbury Tales of Childhood_.

JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY, 1853-1916

[Ill.u.s.tration: JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY]

The poet of our time who has most widely voiced the everyday feeling of democracy, of the man on the farm, in the workshop, and in his home circle, is James Whitcomb Riley. His popularity with this generation suggests the part which the ballad makers played in developing a love for verse before Shakespeare came.

He was born in the little country town of Greenfield, twenty miles east of Indianapolis. Like Bret Harte and Mark Twain, Riley had only a common school education. He became a sign painter, and traveled widely, first painting advertis.e.m.e.nts for patent medicines and then for the leading business firms in the various towns he visited. After this, he did work on newspapers and became a traveling lecturer, and reader of his own poems.

Much of his poetry charms us with its presentation of rural life. In _The Old Swimmin'-Hole and 'Leven More Poems_ (1883), it is a delight to accompany him

"When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock,"

or when

"The summer winds is sniffin' round the bloomin' locus' trees, And the clover in the pastur' is a big day fer the bees,"

or again, in _Neighborly Poems_ (1891), as he listens to _The First Bluebird_ singing with

"A breezy, treesy, beesy hum, Too sweet fer anything!"

We welcome him as the champion of a new democratic flower. In his poem, _The Clover_, he says:--

"But what is the lily and all of the rest Of the flowers, to a man with a hart in his brest That was dipped brimmin' full of the honey and dew Of the sweet clover-blossoms his babyhood knew?"

Like Eugene Field, Riley loved children. His _Rhymes of Childhood_ (1890) contains such favorites as _The Raggedy Man_, _Our Hired Girl_, _Little Orphant Annie_, with its bewitching warning about the "_Gobble-uns_," and the pathetic _Little Mahala Ashcraft_.

But no matter whether his verses take us to the farm, to the child, to the inner circle of the home, or to a neighborly gathering, their first characteristic is simplicity. Some of his best verse entered the homes of the common people more easily because it was written in the Hoosier dialect. He is a democratic poet, and the common people listen to him. In _Afterwhiles_ (1887), he says:--

"The tanned face, garlanded with mirth, It hath the kingliest smile on earth-- The swart brow, diamonded with sweat, Hath never need of coronet."

In like vein are his lines from _Griggsby's Station_:--

"Le's go a-visitin' back to Griggsby's Station-- Back where the latch string's a-hangin' from the door, And ever' neighbor 'round the place is dear as a relation-- Back where we ust to be so happy and so pore!"

In lines like the following from _Afterwhiles_, there is a rare mingling of pathos and hope and kindly optimism:--

"I cannot say, and I will not say That he is dead.--He is just away!

"With a cheery smile and a wave of the hand, He has wandered into an unknown land,

"And left us dreaming how very fair It needs must be, since he lingers there."

The charitable optimism of his lines:--

"I would sing of love that lives On the errors it forgives,"

has touched many human hearts.

Furthermore, he has unusual humor, which is as delightful and as pervasive as the odor of his clover fields. Humor drives home to us the application of the optimistic philosophy in these lines:--

"When a man's jest glad plum through, G.o.d's pleased with him, same as you."

"When G.o.d sorts out the weather and sends rain, W'y, rain's my choice."

In poems like _Griggsby's Station_ he shows his power in making a subject pathetic and humorous at the same time.

Albert J. Beveridge says of Riley, "The aristocrat may make verses whose perfect art renders them immortal, like Horace, or state high truths in austere beauty, like Arnold. But only the brother of the common man can tell what the common heart longs for and feels, and only he lives in the understanding and affection of the millions."

SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, 1835-1910

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARK TWAIN]

LIFE IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY.--The author who is known in every village of the United States by the pen name of Mark Twain, which is the river phrase for two fathoms of water, was born in Florida, Missouri, in 1835. He says of his birthplace: "The village contained a hundred people, and I increased the population by one per cent. It is more than the best man in history ever did for any other town." When he was two and a half years old, the family moved to Hannibal on the Mississippi, thirty miles away.

The most impressionable years of his boyhood were spent in Hannibal, which he calls "a loafing, down-at-the-heels, slave-holding Mississippi town." He attended only a common school, a picture of which is given in _The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_. Even this schooling ceased at the age of twelve, when his father died. Like Benjamin Franklin and W. D. Howells, the boy then became a printer, and followed this trade in various places for nearly eight years, traveling east as far as the City of New York. He next became a "cub," or under pilot, on the Mississippi River. After an eighteen months' apprenticeship, he was an excellent pilot, and he received two hundred and fifty dollars a month for his services. He says of these days: "Time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed--and hoped--that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my mission was ended. But by and by the war came, commerce was suspended, my occupation was gone." For an inimitable account of these days, the first twenty-one chapters of his _Life on the Mississippi_ (1883) should be read.

"... in that brief, sharp schooling, I got personally and familiarly acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history. The fact is daily borne in upon me, that the average sh.o.r.e employment requires as much as forty years to equip a man with this sort of education.... 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." [Footnote: _Life on the Mississippi_, Chapter XVIII.]

No other work in American literature or history can take the place of this book and of his three great stories (pp. 359-361), which bring us face to face with life in the great Mississippi Valley in the middle of the nineteenth century.

LIFE IN THE FAR WEST.--In 1861 he went to Nevada as private secretary to his brother, who had been appointed secretary of that territory. Mark Twain intended to stay there but a short time. He says, "I little thought that I would not see the end of that three-month pleasure excursion for six or seven uncommonly long years."

The account of his experiences in our far West is given in the volume called _Roughing It_ (1871). This book should be read as a chapter in the early history of that section. The trip from St. Joseph to Nevada by stage, the outlaws, murders, sagebrush, jacka.s.s rabbits, coyotes, mining camps,--all the varied life of the time--is thrown distinctly on the screen in the pages of _Roughing It_. While in the West, he caught the mining fever, but he soon became a newspaper reporter and editor, and in this capacity he discovered the gold mine of his genius as a writer. The experience of these years was only second in importance to his remarkable life in the Mississippi Valley. No other American writer has received such a variety of training in the university of human nature.

LATER LIFE.--In 1867, he supplemented his purely American training with a trip to Europe, Egypt, and the Holy Land. The story of his journey is given in _The Innocents Abroad_ (1869), the work which first made him known in every part of the United States. _A Tramp Abroad_ (1880), and _Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World_ (1897), are records of other foreign travels. While they are largely autobiographical, and show in an unusually entertaining way how he became one of the most cosmopolitan of our authors, these works are less important than those which throb with the heart beats of that American life of which he was a part in his younger days.

In 1884 he became a partner in the publishing house of Charles L. Webster and Co. This firm incurred risks against his advice, and failed. The failure not only swallowed up every cent that he had saved, but left him, past sixty, staggering under a load of debt that would have been a despair to most young men. Like Sir Walter Scott in a similar misfortune, Mark Twain made it a point of honor to a.s.sume the whole debt. He lectured, he wrote, he traveled, till finally, unlike Scott, he was able to pay off the last penny of the firm's indebtedness. His life thus set a standard of honor to Americans, which is to them a legacy the peer of any left by any author to his nation.

After his early pioneer days, his American homes were chiefly in New England. For many years he lived in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1908 he went to a new home at Redding, Connecticut. His last years were saddened by the death of his daughter and his wife. His death in 1910 made plain the fact that few American authors had won a more secure place in the affections of all cla.s.ses.