Part 7 (1/2)

All the evidence seems to be in. Yet the verdict of the public seems not quite made up. It is clear that Mark Twain the writer of romance is gaining upon Mark Twain the humorist. The inexhaustible American appet.i.te for frontier types of humor seizes upon each new variety, crunches it with huge satisfaction, and then tosses it away. John Phoenix, Josh Billings, Jack Downing, Bill Arp, Petroleum V. Nasby, Artemus Ward, Bill Nye--these are already obsolescent names. If Clemens lacked something of Artemus Ward's whimsical delicacy and of Josh Billings's tested human wisdom, he surpa.s.sed all of his compet.i.tors in a certain rude, healthy masculinity, the humor of river and mining-camp and printing-office, where men speak without censors.h.i.+p. His country-men liked exaggeration, and he exaggerated; they liked irreverence, and he had turned iconoclast in ”Innocents Abroad.” As a professional humorist, he has paid the obligatory tax for his extravagance, over-emphasis, and undisciplined taste, but such faults are swiftly forgotten when one turns to Huckleberry Finn and the negro Jim and Pudd'nhead Wilson, when one feels Mark Twain's power in sheer description and episode, his magic in evoking landscape and atmosphere, his blazing scorn at injustice and cruelty, his contempt for quacks.

Bret Harte, another discoverer of the West, wears less well than Mark Twain as a personal figure, but has a sure place in the evolution of the American short story, and he did for the mining-camps of California what Clemens wrought for the Mississippi River: he became their profane poet.

Yet he was never really of them. He was the clever outsider, with a prospector's eye, looking for literary material, and finding a whole rich mine of it--a bigger and richer, in fact, than he was really qualified to work. But he located a golden vein of it with an instinct that did credit to his dash of Hebrew blood. Born in Albany, a teacher's son, brought up on books and in many cities, Harte emigrated to California in 1854 at the age of sixteen. He became in turn a drug-clerk, teacher, type-setter, editor, and even Secretary of the California Mint--his nearest approach, apparently, to the actual work of the mines. In 1868, while editor of ”The Overland Monthly,” he wrote the short story which was destined to make him famous in the East and to release him from California forever. It was ”The Luck of Roaring Camp.”

He had been writing romantic sketches in prose and verse for years; he had steeped himself in d.i.c.kens, like everybody else in the eighteen-sixties; and now he saw his pay-gravel s.h.i.+ning back into his own s.h.i.+ning eyes. It was a pocket, perhaps, rather than a lead, but Bret Harte worked to the end of his career this material furnished by the camps, this method of the short story. He never returned to California after his joyous exit in 1871. For a few years he tried living in New York, but from 1878 until his death in 1902 Bret Harte lived in Europe, still turning out California stories for an English and American public which insisted upon that particular pattern.

That the pattern was arbitrary, theatrical, sentimental, somewhat meretricious in design, in a word insincere like its inventor, has been repeated at due intervals ever since 1868. The charge is true; yet it is far from the whole truth concerning Bret Harte's artistry. In mastery of the technique of the short story he is fairly comparable with Poe, though less original, for it was Poe who formulated, when Bret Harte was a child of six, the well-known theory of the unity of effect of the brief tale. This unity Harte secured through a simplification, often an insulation, of his theme, the omission of quarreling details, an atmosphere none the less novel for its occasional theatricality, and characters cunningly modulated to the one note they were intended to strike. ”Tennessee's Partner,” ”The Outcast of Poker Flat,” and all the rest are triumphs of selective skill--as bright nuggets as ever glistened in the pan at the end of a hard day's labor. That they do not adequately represent the actual California of the fifties, as old Californians obstinately insist, is doubtless true, but it is beside the point. Here is no Tolstoi painting the soul of his race in a few pages: Harte is simply a disciple of Poe and d.i.c.kens, turning the Poe construction trick gracefully, with d.i.c.kensy characters and consistently romantic action.

The West has been rediscovered many a time since that decade which witnessed the first literary bonanza of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. It will continue to be discovered, in its fresh sources of appeal to the imagination, as long as Plains and Rockies and Coast endure, as long as there is any glow upon a distant horizon. It is not places that lose romantic interest: the immemorial English counties and the Bay of Naples offer themselves freely to the artist, generation after generation.

What is lost is the glamour of youth, the specific atmosphere of a given historical epoch. Colonel W. F. Cody (”Buffalo Bill”) has typified to millions of American boys the great period of the Plains, with its Indian fighting, its slaughter of buffaloes, its robbing of stage-coaches, its superb riders etched against the sky. But the Wild West was retreating, even in the days of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett.

The West of the cowboys, as Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister knew it and wrote of it in the eighties and nineties, has disappeared, though it lives on in fiction and on the screen.

Jack London, born in California in 1876, was forced to find his West in Alaska--and in alcohol. He was what he and his followers liked to call the virile or red-blooded type, responsive to the ”Call of the Wild,”

”living life naked and tensely.” In his talk Jack London was simple and boyish, with plenty of humor over his own literary and social foibles.

His books are very uneven, but he wrote many a hard-muscled, clean-cut page. If the Bret Harte theory of the West was that each man is at bottom, a sentimentalist, Jack London's formula was that at bottom every man is a brute. Each theory gave provender enough for a short-story writer to carry on his back, but is hardly adequate, by itself, for a very long voyage over human life.

”Joaquin” (Cincinnatus Heine) Miller, who was born in 1841 and died in 1918, had even less of a formula for the West than Jack London. He was a word-painter of its landscapes, a rider over its surfaces. Cradled ”in a covered wagon pointing West,” mingling with wild frontier life from Alaska to Nicaragua, miner, Indian fighter, hermit, poseur in London and Was.h.i.+ngton, then hermit again in California, the author of ”Songs of the Sierras” at least knew his material. Byron, whom he adored and imitated, could have invented nothing more romantic than Joaquin's life; but though Joaquin inherited Scotch intensity, he had nothing of the close mental grip of the true Scot and nothing of his humor. Vast stretches of his poetry are empty; some of it is grandiose, elemental, and yet somehow artificial, as even the Grand Canyon itself looks at certain times.

John Muir, another immigrant Scot who reached California in 1868, had far more stuff in him than Joaquin Miller. He had studied geology, botany, and chemistry at the new University of Wisconsin, and then for years turned explorer of forests, peaks, and glaciers, not writing, at first, except in his ”Journal,” but forever absorbing and wors.h.i.+ping sublimity and beauty with no thought of literary schemes. Yet his every-day talk about his favorite trees and glaciers had more of the glow of poetry in it than any talk I have ever heard from men of letters, and his books and ”Journal” will long perpetuate this thrilling sense of personal contact with wild, clean, uplifted things--blossoms in giant tree-tops and snow-eddies blowing round the shoulders of Alaskan peaks. Here is a West as far above Jack London's and Frank Norris's as the snow-line is higher than the jungle.

The rediscovery of the South was not so much an exploration of fresh or forgotten geographical territory, as it was a new perception of the romantic human material offered by a peculiar civilization. Political and social causes had long kept the South in isolation. A few writers like Wirt, Kennedy, Longstreet, Simms, had described various aspects of its life with grace or vivacity, but the best picture of colonial Virginia had been drawn, after all, by Thackeray, who had merely read about it in books. Visitors like f.a.n.n.y Kemble and Frederick Law Olmsted sketched the South of the mid-nineteenth century more vividly than did the sons of the soil. There was no real literary public in the South for a native writer like Simms. He was as dependent upon New York and the Northern market as a Virginian tobacco-planter of 1740 had been upon London. But within a dozen years after the close of the War and culminating in the eighteen-nineties, there came a rich and varied harvest of Southern writing, notably in the field of fiction. The public for these stories, it is true, was still largely in the North and West, and it was the magazines and publis.h.i.+ng-houses of New York and Boston that gave the Southern authors their chief stimulus and support. It was one of the happy proofs of the solidarity of the new nation.

The romance of the Spanish and French civilization of New Orleans, as revealed in Mr. Cable's fascinating ”Old Creole Days,” was recognized, not as something merely provincial in its significance, but as contributing to the infinitely variegated pattern of our national life.

Irwin Russell, Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas Nelson Page portrayed in verse and prose the humorous, pathetic, unique traits of the Southern negro, a type hitherto chiefly sketched in caricature or by strangers.

Page, Hopkinson Smith, Grace King, and a score of other artists began to draw affectionate pictures of the vanished Southern mansion of plantation days, when all the women were beautiful and all the men were brave, when the very horses were more spirited and the dogs lazier and the honeysuckles sweeter and the moonlight more entrancing than today.

Miss Murfree (”C. E. Craddock”) charmed city-dwellers and country-folk alike by her novels of the Tennessee mountains. James Lane Allen painted lovingly the hemp-fields and pastures of Kentucky. American magazines of the decade from 1880 to 1890 show the complete triumph of dialect and local color, and this movement, so full of interest to students of the immense divergence of American types, owed much of its vitality to the talent of Southern writers.

But the impulse spread far beyond the South. Early in the seventies Edward Eggleston wrote ”The Hoosier Schoolmaster” and ”The Circuit Rider,” faithful and moving presentations of genuine pioneer types which were destined to pa.s.s with the frontier settlements. Soon James Whitcomb Riley was to sing of the next generation of Hoosiers, who frequented ”The Old Swimmin' Hole” and rejoiced ”When the Frost is on the Punkin.”

It was the era of Denman Thompson's plays, ”Joshua Whitcomb” and ”The Old Homestead.” Both the homely and the exotic marched under this banner of local color: Hamlin Garland presented Iowa barnyards and cornfields, Helen Hunt Jackson dreamed the romance of the Mission Indian in ”Ramona,” and Lafcadio Hearn, Irish and Greek by blood, resident of New Orleans and not yet an adopted citizen of j.a.pan, tantalized American readers with his ”Chinese Ghosts” and ”Chita.” A fascinating period it seems, as one looks back upon it, and it lasted until about the end of the century, when the suddenly discovered commercial value of the historical novel and the ensuing compet.i.tion in best sellers misled many a fine artistic talent and coa.r.s.ened the public taste. The New South then played the literary market as recklessly as the New West.

Let us glance back to ”the abandoned farm of literature,” as a witty New Yorker once characterized New England. The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a decline in the direct influence of that province over the country as a whole. Its strength sapped by the emigration of its more vigorous sons, its typical inst.i.tutions sagging under the weight of immense immigrations from Europe, its political importance growing more and more negligible, that ancient promontory of ideas has continued to lose its relative literary significance. In one field of literature only has New England maintained its rank since the Civil War, and that is in the local short story. Here women have distinguished themselves beyond the proved capacity of New England men.

Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke, women of democratic humor, were the pioneers; then came Harriet Prescott Spofford and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, women with nerves; and finally the three artists who have written, out of the material offered by a decadent New England, as perfect short stories as France or Russia can produce--Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown. These gifted writers portrayed, with varying technique and with singular differences in their instinctive choice of material, the dominant qualities of an isolated, in-bred race, still proud in its decline; still inquisitive and acquisitive, versatile yet stubborn, with thrift pa.s.sing over into avarice, and mental power degenerating into smartness; cold and hard under long repression of emotion, yet capable of pa.s.sion and fanaticism; at worst, a mere trader, a crank, a grim recluse; at best, endowed with an austere physical and moral beauty. Miss Jewett preferred to touch graciously the sunnier slopes of this provincial temperament, to linger in its ancient dignities and serenities. Miss Brown has shown the pathos of its thwarted desires, its hunger for a beauty and a happiness denied.

Mary Wilkins Freeman revealed its fundamental tragedies of will.

Two of the best known writers of New England fiction in this period were not natives of the soil, though they surpa.s.sed most native New Englanders in their understanding of the type. They were William Dean Howells and Henry James. Mr. Howells, who, in his own words, ”can reasonably suppose that it is because of the mixture of Welsh, German, and Irish in me that I feel myself so typically American,” came to ”the Holy Land at Boston” as a ”pa.s.sionate pilgrim from the West.” ”A Boy's Town,” ”My Literary Pa.s.sions,” and ”Years of my Youth” make clear the image of the young poet-journalist who returned from his four years in Venice and became a.s.sistant editor of ”The Atlantic Monthly” in 1866. In 1871 he succeeded Fields in the editors.h.i.+p, but it was not until after his resignation in 1881 that he could put his full strength into those realistic novels of contemporary New England which established his fame as a writer. ”A Modern Instance” and ”The Rise of Silas Lapham” are perhaps the finest stories of this group; and the latter novel may prove to be Mr. Howells's chief ”visiting-card to posterity.” We cannot here follow him to New York and to a new phase of novel writing, begun with ”A Hazard of New Fortunes,” nor can we discuss the now antiquated debate upon realism which was waged in the eighteen-eighties over the books of Howells and James. We must content ourselves with saying that a knowledge of Mr. Howells's work is essential to the student of the American provincial novel, as it is also to the student of our more generalized types of story-writing, and that he has never in his long career written an insincere, a slovenly, or an infelicitous page. ”My Literary Friends and Acquaintance” gives the most charming picture ever drawn of the elder Cambridge, Concord, and Boston men who ruled over our literature when young Howells came out of the West, and ”My Mark Twain”

is his memorable portrait of another type of sovereign, perhaps the dynasty that will rule the future.

Although Henry James, like Mr. Howells, wrote at one time acute studies of New England character, he was never, in his relations to that section, or, for that matter, to any locality save possibly London, anything more than a ”visiting mind.” His grandfather was an Irish merchant in Albany. His father, Henry James, was a philosopher and wit, a man of comfortable fortune, who lived at times in Newport, Concord, and Boston, but who was residing in New York when his son Henry was born in 1843. No child was ever made the subject of a more complete theory of deracination. Transplanted from city to city, from country to country, without a family or a voting-place, without college or church or creed or profession or responsibility of any kind save to his own exigent ideals of truth and beauty, Henry James came to be the very pattern of a cosmopolitan. Avoiding his native country for nearly thirty years and then returning for a few months to write some intricate pages about that ”American Scene” which he understood far less truly than the average immigrant, he died in 1916 in London, having just renounced his American citizens.h.i.+p and become a British subject in order to show his sympathy with the Empire, then at war. It was the sole evidence of political emotion in a lifetime of seventy-three years. American writing men are justly proud, nevertheless, of this expatriated craftsman. The American is inclined to admire good workmans.h.i.+p of any kind, as far as he can understand the mechanism of it. The task of really understanding Henry James has been left chiefly to clever women and to a few critics, but ever since ”A Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim” and ”Roderick Hudson” appeared in, 1875, it has been recognized that here was a master, in his own fas.h.i.+on.