History of American Literature Part 40

SUGGESTED READINGS

Lincoln.--_The Gettysburg Address_, part of the _Second Inaugural Address_.

Harte.--_Tennessee's Partner_, and _How Santa Claus came to Simpson's Bar_.

Harte's two greatest stories, _The Luck of Roaring Camp_ and _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_, should be read in mature years. These stories may all be found in the single volume, ent.i.tled _The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Stories_. (Riverside Aldine Press Series.)

Field.--_Little Boy Blue_, _The Duel_, _Krinken_, _Wynken, Blynken, and Nod_, _The Rock-a-By Lady_. These poems may all be found in Burt and Cable's _The Eugene Field Book_.

Riley.--_When the Frost is on the Punkin, The Clover, The First Bluebird, Ike Walton's Prayer, A Life Lesson, Away, Griggsby's Station, Little Mahala Ashcraft, Our Hired Girl, Little Orphant Annie._ These poems may be found in the three volumes, ent.i.tled _Neighborly Poems_, _Afterwhiles_, and _Rhymes of Childhood_.

Mark Twain.--_Life on the Mississippi_, Chaps. VIII., IX., XIII. _Roughing It_, Chap. II. If the first two chapters of _The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_ and _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ are read, the time will probably be found to finish the books. For specimens of his humor at its best, read _Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar_, printed at the beginning of the twenty-one chapters of _Pudd'nhead Wilson_. His humor depending on incongruity is well shown in _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court_. _The Prince and the Pauper_ is a fascinating story of sixteenth-century England.

QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

Why does Oxford University display on its walls _The Gettysburg Address_ of Lincoln? What books helped mold his style?

What period of our development do Bret Harte's stories ill.u.s.trate? What are some special characteristics of his short stories? Does he belong to the school of Poe or Hawthorne? Which one of our great short story writers has the most humor,--Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, or Harte? Which one of them do you enjoy the most?

Why is Eugene Field called the poet-laureate of children? Which of his poems indicated for reading do you prefer? What are the most striking qualities of his verse?

Point out the chief characteristics of Riley's verse. What lines please you most for their humor, references to rural life, optimism, kindly spirit, and pathos? Why is he so widely popular?

Which of Mark Twain's works are most valuable to the student of American literature and history? In what sense is he a historian? What phases of western development does he describe? Give instances (_a_) of his humor which depends on incongruity, (_b_) of his philosophical humor, (_c_) of his hatred of hypocrisy, and (_d_) of his solicitude for the weak. Why is he said to belong to the school of Cervantes? What specially impresses you about Mark Twain's style?

CHAPTER VII

THE EASTERN REALISTS

FROM ROMANTICISM TOWARD REALISM.--The enormous circulation of magazines in the United States has furnished a wide market for the writers of fiction.

Magazines have especially stimulated the production of short stories, which show how much technique their authors have learned from Poe. The increased attention paid to fiction has led to a careful study of its guiding principles and to the formation of new rules for the practice of the art.

When we look back at the best work of earlier writers of American fiction, we shall find that it is nearly all romantic. In the eighteenth century, Charles Brockden Brown wrote in conformity to the principles of early romanticism, and combined the elements of strangeness and terror in his tales. The modified romanticism persisting through the greater part of the nineteenth century demanded that the _unusual_ should at least be retained in fiction as a dominating factor. Irving's _Rip Van Winkle_ has the older element of the impossible, and _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_ shows fascinating combinations of the unusual. Cooper achieved his greatest success in presenting the Indians and the stalwart figure of the pioneer against the mysterious forest as a background. Hawthorne occasionally availed himself of the older romantic materials, as in _The Snow Image_, Rappaccini's Daughter_, and _Young Goodman Brown_, but he was more often attracted by the newer elements, the strange and the unusual, as in _The Scarlet Letter_ and _The House of the Seven Gables_. Poe followed with a combination of all the romantic materials,--the supernatural, the terrible, and the unusual. Bret Harte applied his magnifying gla.s.s to unusual crises in the strange lives of the western pioneers. By a skillful use of light and shadow, Mark Twain heightened the effect of the strange scenes through which he pa.s.sed in his young days. Almost all the southern writers, from Simms to Cable and Harris, loved to throw strong lights on unusual characters and romantic situations.

The question which the romanticists, or idealists, as they were often called in later times, had accustomed themselves to ask, was, "Have these characters or incidents the unusual beauty or ugliness or goodness necessary to make an impression and to hold the attention?" The masters of the new eastern school of fiction took a different view, and asked, "Is our matter absolutely true to life?"

REALISM IN FICTION.--The two greatest representatives of the new school of realism in fiction are William D. Howells and Henry James. Both have set forth in special essays the realist's art of fiction. The growing interest in democracy was the moving force in realism. In that realist's textbook, Criticism and Fiction (1891), Howells says of the aristocratic spirit in literature:--

"It is averse to the ma.s.s of men; it consents to know them only in some conventionalized and artificial guise.... Democracy in literature is the reverse of all this. It wishes to know and to tell the truth, confident that consolation and delight are there; it does not care to paint the marvelous and impossible for the vulgar many, or to sentimentalize and falsify the actual for the vulgar few."

"Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material," says Howells. He sometimes insists on considering "honesty" and "realism" as synonymous terms. His primary object is not merely to amuse by a pleasant story or to startle by a horrible one. His object is to reflect life as he finds it, not only unusual or exceptional life. He believes that it is false to real life to overemphasize certain facts, to overlook the trivial, and to make all life dramatic. He says that the realist in fiction "cannot look upon human life and declare this thing or that thing unworthy of notice, any more than the scientist can declare a fact of the material world beneath the dignity of his inquiry."

Howells recognizes the great importance of the spirit of romanticism, and says that it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century

"... making the same fight against effete cla.s.sicism which realism is making to-day against effete romanticism.... The romantic of that day and the real of this are in certain degree the same. Romanticism then sought, as realism seeks now, to widen the bounds of sympathy, to level every barrier against aesthetic freedom, to escape from the paralysis of tradition. It exhausted itself in this impulse; and it remained for realism to a.s.sert that fidelity to experience and probability of motive are essential conditions of a great imaginative literature."

Henry James in his essay, _The Art of Fiction_, denies that the novelist is less concerned than the historian about the quest for truth. He says, "The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it _does_ compete with life. When it ceases to compete as the canvas of the painter competes, it will have arrived at a very strange pa.s.s." To the intending novelist he says:--

"All life belongs to you, and don't listen either to those who would shut you up into corners of it and tell you that it is only here and there that art inhabits, or to those who would persuade you that this heavenly messenger wings her way outside of life altogether, breathing a superfine air and turning away her head from the truth of things."

It must not be supposed that Howells and James were the original founders of the realistic school, any more than Wordsworth, Coleridge, and their a.s.sociates were the originators of the romantic school. History has not yet discovered the first realist or the first romanticist. Both schools have from time to time been needed to hold each other in check. Howells makes no claim to being considered the first realist. He distinctly says that Jane Austen (1775-1817) had treated material with entire truthfulness. Henry James might have discovered that Fielding had preceded him in writing, "It is our business to discharge the part of a faithful historian, and to describe human nature as it is, not as we would wish it to be."

An occasional revolt against extreme romanticism is needed to bring literature closer to everyday life. The tendency of the followers of any school is to push its conclusions to such an extreme that reaction necessarily sets in. Some turned to seek for the soul of reality in the uninteresting commonplace. Others learned from Shakespeare the necessity of looking at life from the combined point of view of the realist and the romanticist, and they discovered that the great dramatist's romantic pictures sometimes convey a truer idea of life than the most literal ones of the painstaking realist. Critics have pointed out that the original _History of Dr. Faustus_ furnished Marlowe with a realistic account of Helen of Troy's hair, eyes, "pleasant round face," lips, "neck, white like a swan," general figure, and purple velvet gown, but that his two romantic lines:--

"Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"

enable any imaginative person to realize her fascination better than pages of realistic description. But we must not forget that it was an achievement for the writers of this group to insist that truth must be the foundation for all pictures of life, to demonstrate that even the pillars of romanticism must rest on a firm basis in a world of reality, and to teach the philosophy of realism to a school of younger writers.

By no means all of the eastern fiction, however, is realistic. THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH (1836-1907), for instance, wrote in a romantic vein _The Story of a Bad Boy_, which ranks among the best boys' stories produced in the last half of the nineteenth century. There were many other writers of romantic fiction, but the majority of them at least felt the restraining influence of the realistic school.

REALISM IN POETRY.--One eastern poet, Walt Whitman, took a step beyond any preceding American poet in endeavoring to paint with realistic touches the democracy of life. He defined the poet as the indicator of the path between reality and the soul. He thus proclaims his realistic creed:--

"I will not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. I will have nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely what it is. Let who may exalt or startle or fascinate or soothe, I will have purposes as health or heat or snow has and be as regardless of observation. You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with me."

The subject of his verse is the realities of democracy. No other great American poet had indulged in realism as extreme as this:--

"The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market, I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and break-down."

Whitman says boldly:--

"And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpa.s.ses any statue."

He discarded ordinary poetic meter, because it seemed to lack the rhythm of nature. It is, however, very easy for a poet to cross the line between realism and idealism, and we sometimes find adherents of the two schools disagreeing whether Whitman was more realist or idealist in some of his work, for instance, in a line or verse unit, like this, when he says:--

"That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world."

[Ill.u.s.tration: IDENt.i.tY (Drawing by Elihu Vedder)]

The fact that not all the later eastern poets were realistic needs emphasis. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, perhaps the most noted successor of New England's famous group, was frequently an exquisite romantic artist, or painter in miniature, as these eight lines which const.i.tute the whole of his poem, _Ident.i.ty_, show:--

"Somewhere--in desolate wind-swept s.p.a.ce-- In Twilight-land--in No-man's-land-- Two hurrying Shapes met face to face, And bade each other stand.

"And who are you?' cried one, agape, Shuddering in the gloaming light.

'I know not,' said the second Shape, 'I only died last night!'"

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, 1837-1920

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS]

The foremost leader of realism in modern American fiction, the man who influenced more young writers than any other novelist of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was William Dean Howells, who was born in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, in 1837. He never went to college, but obtained valuable training as a printer and editor in various newspaper offices in Ohio. He was for many years editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_ and an editorial contributor to the _New York Nation_ and _Harper's Magazine_. In these capacities, as well as by his fiction, he reached a wide public.

Later he turned his attention mainly to the writing of novels. So many of their scenes are laid in New England that he is often claimed as a New England writer.