Until 1876 quiet emotion, Hellenic beauty, romance without passion. "Tannhäuser" suggests William Morris and The Earthly Paradise. Then came The Spagnioletto, a tense drama, which showed for the first time the latent embers in her Hebraic soul. It needed but a breath to kindle them and that breath came with reports of the Jewish massacres of 1879. No more of Hellenism. With Liebhaid in The Dance of Death, that most tense drama in American literature, she could cry out:
Henceforth fiery lyrics of denunciation, rallying cries, translations of Hebrew prophets, songs of encouragement and cheer, as "The Crowing of the Red Cock," "In Exile," "The New Ezekiel," "The Valley of Baca," and, most Hebraic of all, "The Banner of the Jew," with its ringing lines:
The fire was too intense for the frail, sensitive body. Suddenly, like Heine, she was on a "mattress grave," powerless, though never so eager, never so quivering with burning message. She died at thirty-eight.
No more impetuous and Hebraic lines in the literature of the period than hers. Often she achieved a distinction of phrase and an inevitableness of word and of rhythm denied to all but the truest of poets. No other American woman has surpassed her in passion, in genuineness of emotion, in pure lyric effect.
Other impassioned singers there have been. Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1855——) wrote of love with lyric abandon, but she mingled too much of sentimentality and all too much of posing and of tawdriness. Anne Reeve Aldrich (1866–1892) in Songs About Life, Love, and Death struck deeper notes, and Elizabeth Akers Allen (1832–1911), though she wrote exceedingly much in the key of the conventional mid-century sadness and longing, yet now and then sent forth lyrics that laid bare her woman's soul.
One may not dismiss so confidently Celia Thaxter, the poet of the Isles of Shoals. She was, to be sure, no dominating voice in the period, no poet with whom distinction of phrase and poetic melody were native and spontaneous. Rather was she of the Jean Ingelow type, feminine, domestic, tremulous with sentiment. In one area, however, she commanded: her poetry of the sea was autochthonic, and it sprang not from books, but from her life. Her childhood she had passed in the seclusion of the lighthouse keeper's home on White Island, a storm-beaten rock off the New Hampshire coast. For months at a time no visitors came save the sea gulls and the migrating birds. Her companion through all her young girlhood was the ocean. She grew to know intimately all its thousand moods, the sea gardens along the rocks at low tide, the ships that hovered like clouds on the horizon, the flowers in the rock crannies, the sandpipers that flitted before her on the beach. The birds that flew against the lantern of the lighthouse on migrating nights furnished the first tragedy of her life:
Many a May morning have I wandered about the rock at the foot of the tower, mourning over a little apron brimful of sparrows, swallows, thrushes, robins, fire-winged blackbirds, many-colored warblers and fly-catchers, beautifully clothed yellow-birds, nuthatches, catbirds, even the purple finch and scarlet tanager and golden oreole, and many more besides—enough to break the heart of a small child to think of![146]
No ordinary child, this lonely little islander. The lure of the sea possessed her, the terror of its storms, the beauty of its summer moods, the multitudinous variety of its voice. "Many a summer morning have I crept out of the still house before any one was awake, and, wrapping myself closely from the chill wind of dawn, climbed to the top of the high cliff called the Head to watch the sunrise." It was this communion with the sea that awoke the poet soul within her:
Ever I longed to speak these things that made life so sweet, to speak the wind, the cloud, the bird's flight, the sea's murmur. A vain longing! I might as well have sighed for the mighty pencil of Michel Angelo to wield in my impotent child's hand. Better to "hush and bless one's self with silence"; but ever the wish grew. Facing the July sunsets, deep red and golden through and through, or watching the summer northern lights—battalions of brilliant streamers, advancing and retreating, shooting upward to the zenith, and glowing like fiery veils before the stars; or when the fog bow spanned the silver mist of morning, or the earth and sea lay shimmering in a golden haze of noon; in storm or calm, by day or night, the manifold aspects of Nature held me and swayed all my thoughts until it was impossible to be silent any longer, and I was fain to mingle my voice with her myriad voices, only aspiring to be in accord with the Infinite harmony, however feeble and broken the notes might be.[147]
The first poem of hers to gain the ear of the public was "Land-Locked," accepted by Lowell and published in the Atlantic, March, 1861. Its closing stanzas ring with sincerity. It is the voice of every inland dweller whose youth has been spent by the sea:
About all her poetry of the sea there are genuineness and truth to experience. All of them are fragments of autobiography: "Off Shore," "The Wreck of the Pocahontas," "The Sandpiper," "Watching," "At the Breakers' Edge," "The Watch of Boon Island," "Leviathan"—all of them have in them the heart of the northern Atlantic. They are not deep like Whitman's mighty voicings, but they are the cry of one who knew and loved the sea better than any other American who has ever written about it.
Her prose study Among the Isles of Shoals, overflorid though it may be in places, is nevertheless one of the notable books of the period. Nowhere may one find so complete a picture of the northern ocean in all its moods and aspects. Its pictures of storm and wreck, its glimpses of the tense and hazardous life of dwellers by the ocean, its disclosings of the mystery and the subtle lure of the sea, stir one at times like the deeper notes of poetry.
One of the most perplexing of later poetic problems came in 1890 with the publication by Thomas Wentworth Higginson of the posthumous poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). The explanation by Higginson that the poet was a daughter of the treasurer of Amherst College, that she was a recluse "literally spending years without setting her foot beyond the doorstep and many more years during which her walks were strictly limited to her father's grounds," and that she had written "verses in great abundance," refusing, however, save in three or four instances, to allow any of them to be published, that she wrote "absolutely without thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer's own mind,"—all this aroused curiosity. At last one might see, perchance, a woman's soul.
The poems are disappointing. Critics have echoed Higginson, until Emily Dickinson has figured, often at length, in all the later histories and anthologies, but it is becoming clear that she was overrated. To compare her eccentric fragments with Blake's elfin wildness is ridiculous. They are mere conceits, vague jottings of a brooding mind; they are crudely wrought, and, like their author's letters, which were given to the public later, they are colorless and for the most part lifeless. They reveal little either of Emily Dickinson or of human life generally. They should have been allowed to perish as their author intended.
Most of the feminine poets of the later generation have been over-literary. There is grace and finish in the work of Louise Imogen Guiney (1861——), but nowhere in all her carefully selected final volume, Happy Ending, are there lines that suddenly send the pulses into quicker beat and haunt the memory. It is beautiful, but it is of a piece with ten thousand other beautiful pieces; there is nothing to compel the reader, nothing to lead him into fresh fields. Of all too many of the later feminine poets may we say this: of Ina Donna Coolbrith, for instance, and Helen Gray Cone (1859——), Dora Read Goodale (1866——), Katharine Lee Bates (1859——).
Only one other feminine singer has done work that compels attention, Edith Matilda Thomas (1854——). Only by birth and rearing was she of Ohio. To read her poems is to be transported into that no-man's land which so many poets have called Arcady. She is more Greek than American. She has reacted little upon her time, and she might be dismissed with mere mention were there not in many of her poems a lyric distinction that has been rare in American poetry. A fragment from her work will make this clearer than exposition. Here, for instance, are the opening stanzas of "Syrinx":
Unlooked-for music indeed from the banks of the Ohio. Her muse was remote, unimpassioned, classical, yet no lyrist of the period has had more of the divine poetic gift of expression. She seems curiously out of place in the headlong West in those stormy closing years of the nineteenth century.
Belated singers of the mid-century music were Richard Watson Gilder (1844–1909), Edward Roland Sill (1841–1887), George E. Woodberry (1855——), and Henry Van Dyke (1852——), all of them poets like Miss Thomas, who were remote from their era, workers in art and beauty rather than voices and leaders.
One may pause long with Gilder. No other man of his generation did so much to turn the direction of the period and to determine its nature. As managing editor of Scribner's Monthly from the first number to the last, and then after the death of Holland, editor of the Century Magazine, he exerted for twenty-eight years an influence upon American letters that cannot be overestimated. In a way he is the central literary figure of the period, even more so than Dr. Holland. More than any one else he was responsible for the revolution in magazine management for which the period stands, and more than any one else he helped to gather the new school of novelists and short story writers and poets that made the era distinctive. He was the James T. Fields of the national period.
He was first of all an editor, then he was a humanitarian, active in all movements for city betterment, then he was a poet. Beginning with The New Day in 1875, he issued many small volumes of delicate verse, mystical often in tone, always serious, always artistic. That he knew the divine commission of the poet he revealed in his volume The Celestial Passion, 1878:
But he himself seemed not bound by this ideal of the poet. His carefully wrought verses add little that is new, and little that may be understood by those for whom a poet should sing. They lack substance, the Zeitgeist, masculinity. Stedman could say that they are "marked by the mystical beauty, intense emotion, and psychological emotion of the elect illuminati," but the criticism, even were it true, was condemnatory. Gilder's definition did not mention the "elect illuminati."
It is depressing to think that this most virile of men, who was the tireless leader of his generation in so many beneficent fields of activity, must be judged in the coming periods solely by this volume of poems. For classic poetry was not his life-work, not his enthusiasm, not himself—it was a rarely furnished room in the heart of his home, rather, where at times he might retire from the tumult and enjoy the beauty he had gathered in the realms of gold. He was not a poet, singing inevitable lines, spontaneous and inspired. His poems lacked lyric distinction, that compelling quality that sinks a poem into the reader's soul, and, lacking it, they have little hope for permanence. They are finished always and coldly beautiful, but finish and beauty are not enough. So it is with George E. Woodberry's polished work, and Father Tabb's. It is not vital with the life of an epoch, it is not the voice of a soul deeply stirred with a new and compelling message. All too often it has come from deliberate effort; it is a mere performance.
With the work of Edward Rowland Sill one must be less positive. Here we find conflict, reaction, spontaneous expression. He was by no means a voice of his era, a robust shouter like Whitman and Miller: he was a gentle, retiring soul who felt out of place in his generation. Seriousness had come to him as a birthright. Behind him were long lines of Connecticut Puritans. He was frail, moreover, of physique, with a shrinking that was almost feminine from all that was discordant and assertive. After his graduation at Yale, the poet of his class, in 1861, he was unable to settle upon a profession. He attempted theology, and then, disillusioned, for bare support he drifted into teaching. Year after year passed with the problem unsettled, until he awoke to find that teaching was to be his life-work. He had hidden among the children in the schoolroom, and the things he had dreamed over had passed him by. His external biography is largely a list of schools and positions. At forty-six he died.
Poetry to Sill was a peculiarly personal thing, almost as much so as it was to Emily Dickinson. He was not eager to publish, and much that he did send to the magazines bore other names than his own. He wrote, as Thoreau wrote his journal, with simple directness for himself and the gods, and as a result we have in his work the inner history of a human soul. There is no artificiality, no sentimental vaporings, no posing for effect. It is not art; it is life.
Here is poetry of struggle, poetry not of the spirit of an epoch but of the life of an individual at odds with the epoch, introspective, personal. One thinks of Clough, who also was a teacher, a gentle soul oppressed with doubts and fears, a struggler in the darkness of the late nineteenth century. But Sill was less masculine than Clough. His doubtings are gentle and half apologetic. Never is he bitter or excited or impetuous. To such robust climaxes as "Say not the Struggle Naught Availeth" he is incapable of rising: he broods, but he is resigned. He exhorts himself deliberately to cheerfulness and faith and to heights of manhood where all that is low may fall away. Erotic passion has no part in his work. He has deliberately conquered it:
No poet has shrunk more sensitively from the realistic, material age of which he was a part than Sill. His poems deal with the realm of the spirit rather than with the tangible. They are without time and place and material basis. One may illustrate with the poems he wrote for Yale gatherings. They are colorless: change but the name and they would apply as well to Harvard or Princeton. Read in connection with Hovey's dramatic, intensely individual Dartmouth poems and they seem like beautiful clouds. They are serious, often over-serious, they have no trace of humor, they deal with the soul life of one upon whom the darkness threatens constantly to fall.
His claim to remembrance comes not from lyrical inspiration, for he was not lyrically gifted. He lacked what Gilder and Woodberry lacked. Once in a while he made a stanza that approaches lyric distinction, as, perhaps, in this final one of "A Foolish Wish":
But not often lines so inevitable. His power came largely from the beauty and purity of his own personality. His own conception of a poem was, that "coming from a pure and rich nature, it shall leave us purer and richer than it found us." Judged by such a standard, Sill holds a high place among the poets. Nothing that he has written but leaves us purer and richer of soul and more serious before the problems of life. Eight or ten of his lyrics for a long time undoubtedly will hold their place among the very highest pieces of American reflective poetry.
It was the opinion of Edmund Gosse that the period was notably deficient in serious verse.[148] No statement could be more wide of the mark; the period has abounded in serious poetry and its quality has been high. To consider in detail this mass of poetry, however, were to exceed our limits. We can only single out one here and there a little more notable than the others—John Boyle O'Reilly (1844–1890), for instance, with his Celtic fancy and his graphic power to depict life in the Southern Seas; Maurice Francis Egan (1852——) and Lloyd Mifflin (1846——), makers of beautiful and thoughtful sonnets; S. Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), a poet of rare distinction as well as a novelist; Frank Dempster Sherman (1860–1916), maker of madrigals and joyous lyrics; Charles Warren Stoddard (1825–1903), whose songs have a lyric quality that is distinctive, and Abram Joseph Ryan (1839–1886), a beautiful and heroic soul, who had he written but a single lyric would occupy a high place among American poets. His "The Conquered Banner" was the voice of a people:
The two most prominent younger poets of the South were Robert Burns Wilson (1850–1916) and Madison Cawein (1865–1914), both residents of Kentucky, one at Frankfort, the other at Louisville, and both contemplative Nature poets who voiced but little the spirit of their period. Of the two, Wilson undoubtedly was the most inspired singer, as Cawein was the most careful observer of Nature.
Of Wilson we may say that he was a later Thomas Buchanan Read, a devotee of art, a painter of landscapes and portraits, whose work was seen in many distinctive galleries, and in addition to this a poet—most pictorial of poets, whose stanzas seem like inscriptions for his paintings. When the lyrics "When Evening Cometh On" and "June Days" appeared in Harper's in 1885, it was felt that a new singer had come. There was distinction in the lines, there was restraint, there was more than promise, there was already fulfilment. One feels a quality in a stanza like this that he may not explain:
It has somehow the singing quality that may not be learned, that may not be taught. Finer still when there is joined with it graphic power that arrests and pleases the eye, and pathos that grips hard the heart, as in a lyric like this:
Wilson's poetic product was small, but it stands distinctive.
The work of Cawein has been far more widely trumpeted. He had the good fortune to attract the attention of Howells with his first book and to be commended by him persistently and with no uncertain voice. "There is much that is expressive of the new land," Howells wrote in "The Editor's Study," "as well as of the young life in its richly sensuous, boldly achieved pieces of color. In him one is sensible (or seems so) of something different from the beautiful as literary New England or literary New York conceived it. He is a fresh strain."[149] He deplored the gorgeous excesses of the poems and the touches for merely decorative effect, but he defended them as the natural exuberance of extreme youth. With time they would disappear: undoubtedly a great poet had arisen. Thus encouraged, Cawein began upon a poetic career that in single-hearted devotion to the lyric muse has been equaled only by Clinton Scollard. Before his death he had issued more than twenty volumes of lyrics and his collected work had been published in five thick volumes.
The final estimate of the poet cannot yet be written. It is too soon, but even now one may venture certain predictions. Cawein wrote enormously too much, and he wrote all too often with merely literary intent. He was not a lyrist born: he had little ear for music, and he blended meters and made rimes seemingly with the eye alone. One can not feel that a passage like this, for instance, sang itself spontaneously:
There is a straining constantly for the unusual in epithet, a seeking for a picturing adjective that shall give verisimilitude in an utterly new way. "The songs have all been sung," he would seem to argue, "but the picturing adjectives have not all been used and the striking conceits." One might open at random for an illustration:
"It is as if we had another Keats," says Howells, and in saying it he touches the fatal weakness of the poet. There is lack of virility in great parts of his work, there is lack of definiteness and of vigor. He tells nothing new and he adds nothing to the old by his telling. Even Baskerville can say, "There is little or no Southern, not to say Kentucky, atmosphere in Mr. Cawein's poetry. His flowers and birds and rocks and trees do not appear to us as objects of the rich, warm Southern nature. He frequently mentions the whole register of flowers and birds in his poetry—almost, we might say, drags them into his descriptions by force—but he has not created a warm, genial, Southern poetic atmosphere in which they may thrive."[150]
Nevertheless, it is only in his Nature poetry that he is at all convincing. He can paint a summer noon, or a summer shower, and he can detail minutely the flowers and the mosses and the birds in an old fence corner or an old garden. Pictures like this have, undoubtedly, a certain kind of value:
Always is he heavy with adjectives, profuse, gorgeous; always is he dreamy and remote. One turns page after page of the thick volumes of the collected lyrics to find some simple human bit that came hot from the heart of a poet, some stanza that compels quotation, but one gets lost at length in the maze of sweetness. If any of his poems are to outlast their generation it will be some of the Nature pieces, but landscape studies, flower songs, and pretty conceits about bees and birds are thin material of which to make enduring poetry.
With Richard Hovey (1864–1900), representative of the poets of the second generation of the National period, our survey closes. Hovey was a later Lanier, excited, impetuous, possessed by poetry until it ruled all his thinking. Like Lanier, he was Gallic of temperament rather than Teutonic. He read enormously—the Elizabethans, Tennyson, Whitman, the pre-Raphaelites, Dobson, Kipling, and later, in France, Paul Verlaine, Maeterlinck, Stéphane Mallarmé, and all the later symbolists. After his college course at Dartmouth he was, at brief intervals, theological student, newspaper reporter, actor, lecturer in Alcott's Concord school of philosophy, and in his last year, like Lanier, professor of literature in one of the larger universities—Barnard College, New York—yet his one profession all his life long was poetry. His facility was marvelous. He wrote an elegy of purest Greek type and he added a canto to Don Juan; he wrote Arthurian masques and dramas and then rollicking Bohemian songs and vers de société.
His facility was his weakness. Like Lanier he was too excited, too given to improvisation and the blending of meters. His dramatic interludes like The Quest of Merlin and Taliesin are marvelous in their workmanship, their mastery of all the intricacies of prosody, but they come near to being void of human interest. Lanier dominated his first poem The Laurel and there are echoes of Whitman and others in his later work. He matured slowly. At his death he had arrived at a point where there was promise of creative work of highest distinction. He was breaking from his Bohemianism and his excited Swinburnian music and was touching his time. His definition of poetry makes his early death seem like a tragedy. Of the poet he wrote, "It is not his mission to write elegant canzonettas for the delectation of the Sybaritic dilettanti, but to comfort the sorrowful and hearten the despairing, to champion the oppressed and declare to humanity its inalienable rights, to lay open to the world the heart of man, all its heights and depths, all its glooms and glories, to reveal the beauty in things and breathe into his fellows a love of it and so a love of Him whose manifestation it is.... In the appointed work of every people, the poets have been the leaders and pioneers."[151]
His most finished work is his elegy on the death of Thomas William Parsons, Seaward, which at times has a lyric quality that brings it into the company even of Adonais and Thyrsis. One is tempted to quote more than a single stanza:
His most spontaneous and original outbursts are doubtless his Dartmouth lyrics—a series distinctive among college poetry, worthy of a place beside Dr. Holmes's Harvard lyrics—and his rollicking convivial songs that have in them the very soul of good fellowship. There is in all he wrote a Whitman-like masculinity. He could make even so conventional a thing as a sonnet a thing to stir the blood with:
He is the singer of men—of Western men, red-blooded and free—the very opposite of Cawein. He wrote songs to be sung in barrack rooms and at college reunions—songs of comradeship and masculine joy:
And again this
His Launcelot and Guenevere cycle, which was to be complete in nine dramas, only four of which he lived to finish, though undoubtedly the best was yet to come, has in it enough of strength to make for itself, fragment as it is, a high place in our literature. The dramas are in different key from Tennyson's. In the Idyls of the King the old legend is domesticated and the table round is turned into a tea table. Hovey in his Marriage of Guenevere and The Birth of Galahad puts virile power into his knights, makes of Launcelot the hero of the cycle, and gives to Guenevere a reality that is Shakespearian. Few indeed have been the poets of the younger school who have dared to plan on so grand a scale or to venture to offer something new in a field that has been so thoroughly exploited.
Will Carleton. (1845–1912.) Poems, 1871; Farm Ballads, 1873; Farm Legends, 1875; Young Folks' Centennial Rhymes, 1876; Farm Festivals, 1881; City Ballads, 1885; City Legends, 1889; City Festivals, 1892; Rhymes of Our Planet, 1895; The Old Infant, and Similar Stories, 1896; Songs of Two Centuries, 1902; Poems for Young Americans, 1906; In Old School Days, 1907; Drifted In, 1907.
John James Piatt. (1835–1917.) Poems of Two Friends [with Howells], 1859; The Nests at Washington [with Sarah Morgan Piatt], 1864; Poems in Sunshine and Firelight, 1866; Western Windows and Other Poems, 1869; Landmarks and Other Poems, 1871; Poems of House and Home, 1879; Penciled Fly-Leaves [prose], 1880; Idyls and Lyrics of the Ohio Valley, 1884; The Children Out of Doors [with Mrs. Piatt], 1885; At the Holy Well, 1887; A Book of Gold, 1889; Little New-World Idyls, 1893; The Ghost's Entry and Other Poems, 1895.
James Whitcomb Riley. (1849–1916.) The Old Swimmin'-Hole, 1883; The Boss Girl and Other Sketches, 1886; Afterwhiles, 1887; Pipes o' Pan at Zekesbury, 1889; Rhymes of Childhood Days, 1890; An Old Sweetheart of Mine, 1891; Old Fashioned Roses, 1891; Neighborly Poems on Friendship, Grief, and Farm Life, 1891; Flying Islands of the Night, 1892; Poems Here at Home, 1893; Poems and Yarns [with Edgar Wilson Nye], 1893; Green Fields and Running Brooks, 1893; Armazindy, 1894; The Child World, 1896; Rubaiyat of Doc Sifers, 1897; Poems and Prose Sketches, Homestead Edition, 10 vols., 1897; Child Rhymes, 1898; Love-Lyrics, 1899; Farm Rhymes, 1901; Book of Joyous Children, 1902; A Defective Santa Claus, 1904; His Pa's Romance, 1904; Out to Old Aunt Mary's, 1904; Songs o' Cheer, 1905; While the Heart Beats Young, 1906; Morning, 1907; The Raggedy Man, 1907; The Little Orphant Annie Book, 1908; The Boys of the Old Glee Club, 1908; Songs of Summer, 1908; Old Schoolday Romances, 1909; The Girl I Loved, 1910; Sequire Hawkins's Story, 1910; When She Was About Sixteen, 1911; The Lockerbie Book, 1911; Down Round the River and Other Poems, 1911; A Summer's Day and Other Poems, 1911; When the Frost Is on the Punkin and Other Poems, 1911; All the Year Round, 1912; Knee Deep in June and Other Poems, 1912; The Prayer Perfect and Other Poems, 1912; Good-bye, Jim, 1913; A Song of Long Ago, 1913; He and I, 1913; When My Dreams Come True, 1913; The Rose, 1913; Her Beautiful Eyes, 1913; Away, 1913; Do They Miss Me? 1913; The Riley Baby Book, 1913; Biographical Edition of the Works of James Whitcomb Riley. Complete Works. 1913.
Eugene Field. (1850–1896.) Tribune Primer, 1882; Culture's Garland, Being Memoranda of the Gradual Rise of Literature, Art, Music, and Society in Chicago and Other Western Ganglia, 1887; A Little Book of Western Verse, 1889, 1890; A Little Book of Profitable Tales, 1889, 1890; With Trumpet and Drum, 1892; Second Book of Verse, 1893; Echoes from the Sabine Farm [with Roswell M. Field], 1893; The Holy Cross and Other Tales, 1893; Love Songs of Childhood, 1894; The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, The House, Songs and Other Verse, Second Book of Tales, published posthumously in the Sabine edition; The Works of Eugene Field. Sabine Edition. Ten vols. 1896. The Poems of Eugene Field, Complete Editions. One volume. 1910. Eugene Field, A Study in Heredity and Contradictions. Slason Thompson. Two volumes. 1901.
Henry Cuyler Bunner. (1855–1896.) A Woman of Honor, 1883; Airs from Arcady, and Elsewhere, 1884; In Partnership: Studies in Story-telling [with James Brander Matthews], 1884; Midge, 1886; Story of a New York House, 1887; Short Sixes: Stories to Be Read While the Candle Burns, 1890; Zadoc Pine, and Other Stories, 1891; Rowen: Second-Crop Songs, 1892; Made in France: French Tales Told with a U. S. Twist, 1893; More Short Sixes, 1895; Love in Old Cloathes, and Other Stories, 1896.
Emma Lazarus. (1849–1887.) Poems and Translations, 1866; Admetus, 1871; Alide: a Romance, 1874; The Spagnoletto: a Play, 1876; Heine's Poems and Ballads [a translation], 1881; Songs of a Semite, 1882; Poems of Emma Lazarus, 1888.
Celia Thaxter. (1836–1894.) Poems, 1872; Among the Isles of Shoals, 1873; Drift-weed: Poems, 1878; Poems for Children, 1883; The Cruise of the Mystery, and Other Poems, 1886; An Island Garden, 1894; Poems, Appledore Edition. Edited by Sarah Orne Jewett, 1896; Letters of Celia Thaxter, 1895.
Edith M. Thomas. (1854——.) A New Year's Masque, 1884; The Round Year, 1886; Lyrics and Sonnets, 1887; The Inverted Torch, 1890; Fair Shadow Land, 1893; In Sunshine Land, 1894; In the Young World, 1895; Winter Swallow; with Other Verse, 1896; Dancers and Other Legends and Lyrics, 1903; Cassia, and Other Verse, 1905; Children of Christmas, and Others, 1907; Guest at the Gate, 1909.
Richard Watson Gilder. (1844–1909.) The New Day, 1875; The Celestial Passion, 1878; Lyrics, 1878; The Poet and His Master, and Other Poems, 1878; Lyrics and Other Poems, 1885; Poems, 1887; Two Worlds, and Other Poems, 1891; Great Remembrance, and Other Poems, 1893; Five Books of Song, 1894; For the Country, 1897; In Palestine and Other Poems, 1898; Poems and Inscriptions, 1901; A Christmas Wreath, 1903; In the Heights, 1905; Book of Music, 1906; Fire Divine, 1907; Poems, Household Edition, 1908; Lincoln the Leader, 1909; Grover Cleveland, 1910.
Edward Roland Sill. (1841–1887.) 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; The Life of Edward Rowland Sill, by W. B. Parker, 1915.
Robert Burns Wilson. (1850–1916.) Life and Love, 1887; Chant of a Woodland Spirit, 1894; The Shadows of the Trees, 1898; Until the Day Break [a novel], 1900.
Madison Julius Cawein. (1865–1914.) Blooms of the Berry, 1887; The Triumph of Music and Other Lyrics, 1888; Accolon of Gaul and Other Poems, 1889; Lyrics and Idyls, 1890; Days and Dreams, 1891; Poems of Nature and Love, 1893; Intuitions of the Beautiful, 1895; White Snake and Other Poems, from the German, 1895; Garden of Dreams, 1896; Undertones, 1896; Shapes and Shadows, 1898; Myth and Romance, a Book of Verses, 1899; One Day and Another, 1901; Weeds by the Wall, 1901; A Voice on the Wind and Other Poems, 1902; Vale of Tempe; Poems, 1905; In Prose and Verse, 1906; Poems, 5 volumes, 1908; Shadow Garden [a Phantasy] and Other Plays, 1910; So Many Ways, 1911.
Richard Hovey. (1864–1900.) The Laurel: an Ode, 1889; Launcelot and Guenevere: a Poem in Dramas, 1891; Seaward: an Elegy on the Death of Thomas William Parsons, 1893; Songs from Vagabondia [with Bliss Carman], 1894; More Songs from Vagabondia [with Bliss Carman], 1896; The Quest of Merlin, 1898; The Marriage of Guenevere, 1898; The Birth of Galahad, 1898; Along the Trail: Book of Lyrics, 1898; Last Songs from Vagabondia [with Bliss Carman], 1900; Taliesin, 1900; Along the Trail, 1907; Launcelot and Guenevere: a Poem in Dramas, 5 vols., 1907; To the End of the Trail, 1908.
Voluminous as may seem the poetry of the period when viewed by itself, it sinks into insignificance when viewed against the mass of prose that was contemporaneous with it. Overwhelmingly was it an age of prose fiction. He who explores it emerges with the impression that he has been threading a jungle chaotic and interminable. To chart it, to find law and tendency in it, seems at first impossible. For a generation or more every writer seems to have had laid upon him a necessity for narration. Never before such widespread eagerness to din tales into the ears of a world.
It was an age of brief fiction—this fact impresses one first of all. The jungle growth was short. Not half a dozen writers in the whole enormous group confined themselves to novels of length; the most distinctive fictional volumes of the period: The Luck of Roaring Camp, Old Creole Days, In the Tennessee Mountains, Nights with Uncle Remus, In Ole Virginia, A New England Nun, Deephaven, Main-Traveled Roads, Flute and Violin, and the like, were collections of tales. One may venture to call the period the age of the short story, or more accurately, perhaps, the age of short-breathed work. Everywhere literature in small parcels. In January, 1872, the North American Review, guardian of the old traditions, thought the conditions serious enough to call for earnest protest:
A new danger has recently shown itself.... The great demand on all sides is for short books, short articles, short sketches; no elaborate essays, no complete monographs, are wanted ... condensed thought, brief expression, the laconian method everywhere.... The volume sinks into an article, the article dwindles to an item to conciliate the demands of the public.
That this shortness of unit was a sign of weakness, we to-day by no means concede. It was rather a sign of originality, the symptom of a growing disregard for British methods and British opinion. The English genius always has been inclined to ponderousness—to great, slow-moving novels, to elaborate essays that get leisurely under way, to romances that in parts are treatises and in parts are histories, everywhere to solidity and deliberateness of gait. The North American Review protest was a British protest; it was the protest of conservatism against what to-day we can see was the new spirit of America. The American people from the first had been less phlegmatic, less conservative, than the English. There were climatic influences, it may be; there was surely a spirit of intensity everywhere that made for short efforts. The task of subduing in a single century a raw continent produced a people intolerant of the leisurely and the long drawn out. Poe perceived the tendency early. In a letter to Professor Charles Anthon he wrote:
Before quitting the Messenger I saw, or fancied I saw, through a long and dim vista the brilliant field for ambition which a magazine of bold and noble aims presented to him who should successfully establish it in America. I perceived that the country, from its very constitution, could not fail of affording in a few years a larger proportionate amount of readers than any upon earth. I perceived that the whole energetic, busy spirit of the age tended wholly to magazine literature—to the curt, the terse, the well timed and the readily diffused, in preference to the old forms of verbose and ponderous and inaccessible.
This far-sightedness made of Poe the father of the American type of short story. Irving undoubtedly had sown the earliest seeds, but Irving was an essayist and a sketch-writer rather than a maker of short stories in the modern sense. It was Poe's work to add art to the sketch—plot structure, unity of impression, verisimilitude of details, matter-of-factness, finesse—and, like Hawthorne, to throw over it the atmosphere of his own peculiar personality. That he evolved the form deliberately can not be doubted. In his oft-quoted review of Hawthorne's tales he laid down what may be considered as the first rules for short story writing ever formulated. His theories that all art is short-breathed, that a long poem is a tour de force against nature, and that the unit of measure in fiction is the amount that may be read with undiminished pleasure at a single sitting, are too well known to dwell upon.
But the short story of the mid-century, even in its best specimens, was an imperfect thing. In Hawthorne's tales the quality of the sketch or the essay is always discernible. All of Poe's tales, and Hawthorne's as well, lack vigor of characterization, sharpness of outline, swiftness of movement. "The Gold Bug," for instance, has its climax in the middle, is faulty in dialect, is utterly deficient in local color, and is worked out with characters as lifeless as mere symbols.
The vogue of the form was increased enormously by the annuals which figured so largely in the literary history of the mid-century, by the increasing numbers of literary pages in weekly newspapers, and by the growing influence of the magazines. The first volume of the Atlantic Monthly (1857) had an average of three stories in each number. But increase in quantity increased but little the quality. The short story of the annual was, for the most part, sentimental and over-romantic. Even the best work of the magazines is colorless and ineffective when judged by modern standards. Undoubtedly the best stories after Poe and Hawthorne and before Harte are Fitz-James O'Brien's "Diamond Lens," 1858, and "What Was It?" 1859, Edward Everett Hale's "The Man Without a Country," 1863, and "The Brick Moon," 1869, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson's "The Haunted Window," 1867. Well wrought they are for the most part, unusual in theme, and telling in effect, yet are they open nevertheless to the same criticisms which we have passed upon Poe.
The short story in its later form dates from Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp." Harte added reality, sharpness of outline, vividness of setting, vigor of characterization. The new period demanded actuality. The writer must speak with authority; he must have been a part of what he describes; he must have seen with his own eyes and he must reproduce with a verisimilitude that grips the reader and hastens him on as if he himself were a participant in the action. There must be at every point sense of actuality, and, moreover, strangeness—new and unheard-of types of humanity, uncouth dialects, peculiar environments. It was far more concentrated than the mid-century work, but it was much more given to general description and background effects and impressionistic characterization.
In the mid-eighties came the perfecting of the form, the molding of the short story into a finished work of art. Now was demanded compression, nervous rapidity of movement, sharpness of characterization, singleness of impression, culmination, finesse—a studied artistry that may be compared with even the best work of the French school of the same period. Stories like those of Aldrich, Stockton, Bunner, Garland, Allen, Bierce, Grace King, Mrs. Chopin, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris, from the standpoint of mere art at least, come near to perfection.
The decline of the short story, its degeneration into a journalistic form, the substitution all too often of smartness, paradox, sensation, for truth—all this is a modern instance outside the limits prescribed for our study.
After Harte and the early local-colorists the next to develop the short story was Frank R. Stockton. No writer of the period has been more variously estimated and labeled. By some critics he has been rated as a mere humorist, by others as a novelist, by still others as a writer of whimsicalities in a class by himself.
It is undoubtedly true that his personality was so interfused with his writings that the generation who knew and loved him were too kind in their judgments. Behind his every story they saw the genial, whimsical creator and they laughed even before they began to read. But a new generation has arrived to whom Stockton is but a name and a set of books, and it is becoming more and more evident now that very much that he wrote was ephemeral. To this generation he is known as the author of a single short story, or perhaps three or four short stories, of a type that has its own peculiar flavor.
Stockton was born in Philadelphia in 1834, was educated in the high school there, and then, at the request of his father, learned the trade of wood engraving. But his inclinations were literary, and he was soon an editorial worker on his brother's newspaper. Later he joined the staff of Hearth and Home in New York, then became connected with the new Scribner's Monthly, and finally became assistant editor of St. Nicholas.
The wide popularity of his stories induced him at length to withdraw from editorial work to devote his whole time to his writings. He became exceedingly productive: after his fiftieth year he published no fewer than thirty volumes.
To understand Stockton's contribution to the period one must bear in mind that he adopted early the juvenile story as his form of expression, and that his first book, Ting-a-ling Stories, appeared four years after Alice in Wonderland. When, at the age of forty-eight he gained general recognition with his The Lady, or the Tiger? he had published nine books, eight of them juveniles. The fact is important. He approached literature by the Wonderland gate and he never wandered far from that magic entrance. After his short stories had made him famous he continued to write juveniles, adapting them, however, to his new audience of adult readers. He may be summed up as a maker of grown-up juveniles, a teller, as it were, of the adventures of an adult Alice in Wonderland.
All of his distinctive work was short. Rudder Grange, which first made him at all known, was a series of sketches, the humorous adventures of a newly married couple, the humor consisting largely of incongruous situations. Even his so-called novels, like The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine and its sequel The Dusantes, are but a series of episodes joined together as loosely as Alice's well-known adventures. Plot there is really none. Characterization, however, there is to a degree: the two women do carry their provincial Yankee personalities and the atmosphere of their little home village into whatever amazing environment they may find themselves, but one can not say more.
There seems on the author's part a constant endeavor in all of his work to invent incongruous situation and preposterous suggestion, and a determination to present this topsy-turvy world gravely and seriously as if it were the most commonplace thing in the world. He makes it plausible by the Defoe method of multiplying minor details and little realistic touches until the reader is thrown completely off his guard. For instance, in the novel The Dusantes the coach in which the party is traveling is overtaken by night in the high mountains and before morning is completely buried by a great snow storm. The following day, after they had hollowed out a room for themselves in the snow, this adventure befalls them:
I heard a low crunching sound on one side of me, and, turning my head, I saw in the wall of my excavation opposite to the stage coach and at a distance of four or five feet from the ground an irregular hole in the snow, about a foot in diameter, from which protruded the head of a man. This head was wrapped, with the exception of the face, in a brown woolen comforter. The features were those of a man of about fifty, a little sallow and thin, without beard, whiskers, or mustache, although the cheeks and chin were darkened with a recent growth.
The astounding apparition of this head projecting itself from the snow wall of my cabin utterly paralyzed me, so that I neither moved nor spoke, but remained crouching by the fire, my eyes fixed upon the head. It smiled a little, and then spoke.
"Could you lend me a small iron pot?" it said.
Another coach, it seems, had likewise been snowed under, and the chief occupant had tried to tunnel his way out for help, with the result as recorded. The passage is typical. It illustrates a mannerism that mars all his work. He is not telling a culminating story: he is adding incongruity to incongruity for merely humorous effect, and after a time the reader tires. It seems at length as if he were straining at every point to bring in something totally unexpected and preposterous. In short compass the device succeeded, but incongruity may not rule longer than the moment.
It is to Stockton's short stories, then, that we are to look for his distinctive work. Of one story we need say little. The sensation it made has few parallels in the history of the period and the influence it excited was undoubtedly great. Aldrich several years earlier had told a story which depended for its effect upon a startling closing sentence, but Marjorie Daw attracted little attention as compared with the tremendous vogue of The Lady, or the Tiger? It was a step in the direction of more elaborate art. It began to be realized that the short story writer had the reader at his mercy. It was recognized that it was a part of his art to startle, to perplex, to tantalize, to lead into hidden pitfalls, yet always in a way to please and to stimulate. From Marjorie Daw and The Lady, or the Tiger? it was but a step to the jugglery of O. Henry.
None of Stockton's other short stories ever reached the vogue of this lucky hit, but many of them surpass it in all the requisites of art. "Negative Gravity," "The Transferred Ghost," "The Remarkable Wreck of the Thomas Hyke," and "The Late Mrs. Null" may be cited as examples. In all of them the art consists in perfect naturalness, in an exquisite simplicity of style, and in topsy-turvyness made within short compass completely plausible. We are led into a world of negative gravity where everything goes completely by opposites. In "The Transferred Ghost" we are gravely assured that Mr. Hinckman, at the point of death, has a ghost appointed to haunt his late residence. He does not die, however, and as a result the poor ghost is haunted by the living Mr. Hinckman until it is nearly frightened out of its existence. And so skilful is the author that the story becomes convincing.
Very much of the success of the work depends upon the element that we call style. Stockton indeed is one of the half dozen prose writers of the period to whom may be applied the now old-fashioned term stylist. There is grace and character in his every sentence, a dignity despite the whimsical content that never descends to vulgarity or to what James has termed "newspaperese." Always is he clear, always is he simple—his early experience with juveniles taught him that—and always is he perfectly natural. Moreover, to all this he adds a delightfully colloquial attitude toward his reader—a familiar personal tone at times that is like nothing so much as Charles Lamb.
He was an anomaly in the period. In an age of localized fiction he produced work as unlocalized as is Carroll's Through the Looking Glass; instead of using dialect and curious provincial types, he dealt always with refined gentle folk amid surroundings that seem to have little to do with the actual solid earth; in a period that demanded reality and fullness of life he wrote little that touches any of the real problems of his time or that has in it anything to grip or even to move the reader: even his murders are gentle affairs. There are no moments of real emotion: all is opéra bouffe; all is cheery and whimsically conceived.
That there was knowledge of the human heart behind his quaint creations undoubtedly is true. The Lady, or the Tiger? is founded on a subtle study of humanity, yet even as one says it he is forced to admit that it added little to the real substance of the period. He was content to be a mere entertainer, aware undoubtedly that the entertainment that delights one generation all too often is obsolete in the next.
The appearance of "Monsieur Motte" in the New Princeton Review of January, 1886, marks another step in the development of the short story. It was as distinctively French in its atmosphere and its art as if it had been a translation from Maupassant, yet it was as originally and peculiarly American as even Madame Delphine, which in so many ways it resembles. Its English, which is Gallic in idiom and in incisive brevity; its atmosphere quivering with passion; its characters whimsical, impulsive, exquisite of manners; its dainty suggestions of femininity, as in the case of the little Creole maiden Marie Modeste or the stately Madame Lareveillère; its hints of a rich and tragic background, and its startling "Marjorie Daw" culmination—there is no Monsieur Motte; Monsieur Motte is only the pathetic négresse Marcélite—all this was French, but the background was old Creole New Orleans, and it was drawn by one who professed herself a severe realist, or, to quote her own words, "I am not a romanticist, I am a realist à la mode de la Nouvelle-Orleans. I have never written a line that was not realistic, but our life, our circumstances, the heroism of the men and women that surrounded my early horizon—all that was romantic. I had a mind very sensitive to romantic impressions, but critical as to their expression."
The writer was Grace Elizabeth King, daughter of a prominent barrister of New Orleans, herself with a strain of Creole blood, educated at the fashionable Creole pension of the Mesdames Cenas—the Institute St. Denis of "Monsieur Motte" and "Pupasse"—bilingual like all the circle in which she moved, and later a resident for some two years in France—no wonder that from her stories breathes a Gallic atmosphere such as we find in no other work of the period. Three more episodes, each a complete short story—"On the Plantation," "The Drama of an Evening," and "The Marriage of Marie Modeste"—she added to her first story, bits of art that Flaubert would have delighted in, and issued them in 1888 under the title Monsieur Motte. She followed it with Earthlings, which she has never republished, from Lippincott's Magazine, and with other stories and sketches contributed to Harper's and the Century that later appeared as Tales of a Time and Place and Balcony Stories.
The impulse to write fiction came to Miss King from a conviction that Cable had done scant justice to the real Creoles of Louisiana. She would depict those exclusive circles of old Creole life that she herself had known in her early childhood, circles almost exclusively French with just a touch, perhaps, of Spanish. She would differ from Cable as Sarah Orne Jewett differs from Mary E. Wilkins Freeman in her pictures of New England life. Her sketches, therefore, are more minutely drawn, more gentle, more suggestive of the richness and beauty of a vanished age that was Parisian and Bourbon in its brilliancy. She excels in her pictures of old Mesdames, relics of the old régime, drawn by the lightest of touches and suggestions until they are intensely alive, like Bon Maman or like Madame Josephine in "A Delicate Affair." A hint or a suggestion is made to do the work of a page of analysis. Note a passage like this:
She played her game of solitaire rapidly, impatiently, and always won; for she never hesitated to cheat and get out of a tight place, or into a favorable one, cheating with the quickness of a flash, and forgetting it the moment afterward.
Mr. Horace was as old as she, but he looked much younger, although his dress and appearance betrayed no evidence of an effort in that direction. Whenever his friend cheated, he would invariably call her attention to it; and as usual she would shrug her shoulders and say, "Bah! Lose a game for a card!" and pursue the conversation.
All her feminine creations are Gallic, like Marie Modeste, or, better still, the vividly drawn Misette in Earthlings, volatile, lovable—impossible. She is always at her best while depicting these whimsical, impracticable, tropic femininites; she makes them not so bewitching as does Cable, but she makes them more real and more intensely alive.
Her earlier stories are the best, judged merely as short stories. As she continued her work she discovered more and more the wealth of romantic material in the annals of the old city, especially in the studies of Charles Gayarré (1805–1895), greatest of Southern historians. The influence of his work upon her becomes increasingly evident. Her stories grew into sketches. Balcony Stories are not so much stories as they are realistic sketches of social conditions in New Orleans after the Reconstruction. More and more she wrote studies in Creole atmospheres, impressions of picturesque places and persons after the manner of Hearn, until at length she abandoned fiction altogether to devote herself to history. In the period when historical fiction for a time ruled everything, she wrote history itself in a manner that was as graphic and as picturesque as fiction. Perhaps nothing that she has written has in it more of vitality than her history of New Orleans and its people. It is possible that her final place is to be with the historians rather than with the makers of fiction.
In the technique of the short story she was surpassed by a later worker in Louisiana materials, Kate Chopin (1851–1904), some of whose work is equal to the best that has been produced in France or even in America. She wrote but little, two volumes of stories, notably Bayou Folks, containing all that is now accessible of her shorter work. Many of her sketches and stories have never been republished from the magazines.
The strength of Mrs. Chopin's work came partly from the strangeness of her material—she told of the Grand Pré Acadians in the canebrakes of central Louisiana—and from her intimate knowledge of her field, but it came more from what may be described as a native aptitude for narration amounting almost to genius. She was of Celtic temperament—her father was a Galway County Irishman and her mother was of mingled French and old Virginian stock. Educated in the Convent of the Sacred Heart at St. Louis, married at nineteen to a New Orleans cotton factor, spending fourteen years in Louisiana, the last four of them in the remote hamlet of Cloutiersville in Natchitoches Parish, "a rambling little French village of one street, with the Catholic church at one end, and our plantation at the other, and the Red River flowing through everybody's backyard," left a widow at thirty-five with six children—all this had little to do with the making of literature. Indeed, until her return to St. Louis a year after her bereavement, she had never even thought of writing. She began almost by chance, and, succeeding from the first, she wrote story after story almost without effort and wholly without study of narrative art. For a decade her work was in all of the Northern magazines, then five years before her death, discouraged by the reception of her novel The Awakening, she became silent.
No writer of the period was more spontaneously and inevitably a story teller. There is an ease and a naturalness about her work that comes from more than mere art. She seldom gave to a story more than a single sitting, and she rarely revised her work, yet in compression of style, in forbearance, in the massing of materials, and in artistry she ranks with even the masters of the period. A story like "Desireé's Baby," with its inevitableness and its culminating sentence that stops for an instant the reader's heart, is well-nigh perfect. She was emotional, she was minutely realistic, and, unlike Grace King, used dialect sometimes in profusion; she was dramatic and even at times melodramatic, yet never was she commonplace or ineffective. She had command at times of a pervasive humor and a pathos that gripped the reader before he was aware, for behind all was the woman herself. She wrote as Dickens wrote, with abandonment, with her whole self. There is art in her work, but there is more than art. One may read again and again such bits of human life as "Madame Celestin's Divorce": it is the art that is independent of time and place, the art indeed that is universal.