The direct opposite of F. Marion Crawford, in literary belief, as in background and object, was Margaretta Wade Deland, who came into literary prominence at the close of the eighties. Unlike Crawford, she was a poet, a realist, a depicter of life within a narrow provincial area, and, moreover, a worker in the finer materials of life, the problems of the soul.
The essentials of her biography are few. She was born and reared at Manchester, a little Pennsylvania village, now swallowed up by the great manufacturing city of Allegheny; she went at sixteen to New York to study drawing and design at Cooper Institute; and after her graduation she became instructor in design at the Girls' Normal College, New York City. In 1880 she was married to Lorin F. Deland and removed to Boston, where she has since resided. In 1886 she issued her first book—a collection of poems entitled An Old Garden, and two years later John Ward, Preacher, a novel that attracted instant and widespread attention because of its likeness in theme to Robert Elsmere, then at the height of its enormous vogue. Since that time she has published four other major novels: Sidney, Philip and His Wife, The Awakening of Helena Richie, and The Iron Woman, and many short stories, notably the collections entitled The Wisdom of Fools, Old Chester Tales, and Dr. Lavendar's People.
By nature and early environment Mrs. Deland was serious and contemplative. The little Pennsylvania town, later to be immortalized as Old Chester, during her childhood was a place of traditions, a bit of antiquity amid the newness about it, of well-bred old English and Scotch and Irish families with deep religious prejudices and with narrow yet wholesome and kindly ideals. She was reared in a religious atmosphere—her father was a Presbyterian and her mother an Episcopalian, the combination so disastrous in John Ward, Preacher. She lived amid books, all of which she might read save only the novels, a prohibition that proved to be a good one, for when at last she was led to write fiction of her own, she went about it with no conventional preconceptions. It made for freshness, for originality, of concentration upon life rather than upon form and the tradition of the elders. It was an environment that cultivated the poet as well as the Puritan within her, the sensitiveness for Nature, the deeps of love and life that were to find expression in a note like this, recorded in her first volume:
It was, therefore, but natural that her work should be both serious and ethical and that it should be touched with beauty. In John Ward, Preacher, she took as her theme the revolt of a soul against the infallibilities of a system of belief. It is not necessarily a religious novel or yet a purpose novel. The primary motif of Robert Elsmere is theological and doctrinal discussion. It is religious polemic made attractive by being cast into story form and as such it deserves the anathema of Crawford, but in Mrs. Deland's novel the human interest is paramount. Religion is the force that acts upon two lives, just as jealousy might have been taken or misdirected love or any other human dynamic, and the novel is the record of the reactions under the stress.
So with all her novels. The theme is the destruction or the redemption of a soul, the abasement or the rehabilitation of a character through some immaterial force applied from within. She deals with great ethical and sociological forces: heredity, as in her novelette The Hands of Esau; divorce, as in The Iron Woman; the compelling power of love, as in Sidney. Her primary aim is not, as with Crawford and Harte, simply to entertain; it is rather to expose the human soul to its own view, to show it its limitations and its dangers, that the soul may be purged through fear of what may be—the aim indeed of the Greek drama. Her equipment for the work was complete. To feminine tenderness and insight she added a depth of view and an analysis that is masculine. She was a poet too, but a poet with the severity of form and the moving realism of the short story writer. Two of her novels, The Awakening of Helena Richie and The Iron Woman, have not been surpassed in construction and in moving power by any other writer of the period.
Her Old Chester Tales also, with their central figure Dr. Lavendar, have the elements that make for permanence. They are really without time or place. Old Chester undoubtedly is in western Pennsylvania, the author's native town, but it might be New England as well. The tales deal with universal types and with universal motifs with a broadness and a sympathy and a literary art that raises them into the realm of the rarer classics. From them emerges the figure of Dr. Lavendar to place beside even Adams and Primrose. Place is not dwelt upon; humanity is all. They are not so much stories as fragments of actual life touched with the magic of poetry and of ethic vision. From that worldly social area of life presented to us by such latter-day novelists as Crawford and Edith Wharton and Robert Chambers they are as far removed as is a fashionable Newport yacht, with its club-centered men and cigarette-smoking women, from the simple little hamlet among the hills.
During the closing years of the century there came into American literature, suddenly and unheralded, a group of young men, journalists for the most part, who for a time seemed to promise revolution. They brought in with a rush enthusiasm, vigor, vitality; they had no reverence for old forms or old ideals; they wrote with fierceness and cocksureness books like Garland's Crumbling Idols and Norris's The Responsibilities of the Novelist, which called shrilly for Truth, Truth: "Is it not, in Heaven's name, essential that the people hear not a lie, but the Truth? If the novel were not one of the most important factors of life; if it were not the completest expression of our civilization; if its influence were not greater than all the pulpits, than all the newspapers between the oceans, it would not be so important that its message should be true." They would produce a new American literature, one stripped of prudishness and convention; they would go down among the People and tell them the plain God's Truth as Zola defined Truth, for the People were hungry for it. "In the larger view, in the last analysis, the People pronounce the final judgment. The People, despised of the artist, hooted, caricatured, and vilified, are, after all, and in the main, the real seekers after Truth." The group was a passing phenomenon. Many of its members were dead before they had done more than outline their work: Wolcott Balestier and Stephen Crane at thirty, Frank Norris at thirty-two, Henry Harland and Harold Frederic in the early forties, and the others, like R. H. Davis, for instance, turned at length to historical romance and other conventional fields.
The impetus undoubtedly came from the enormous and sudden vogue of Kipling. Balestier was his brother-in-law and had collaborated with him in writing The Naulahka. Then he had written the novel Benefits Forgot, a work of remarkable promise, but remarkable only for its promise. The vigor and directness and picturing power of the young Kipling were qualities that appealed strongly to young men of journalistic training. Like him, they were cosmopolitans and had seen unusual areas of life. Crane had represented his paper in the Greco-Turkish War and in the Cuban campaign, Norris had been in the South African War, Richard Harding Davis had been at all the storm centers of his time, Frederic was the European correspondent of the New York Times, and Harland became at length editor of the London Yellow Book.
The genius of the group undoubtedly was Stephen Crane (1871–1900). He was frail of physique, neurotic, intense, full of a vibrant energy that drove him too fiercely. He was naturally lyrical, romantic, impulsively creative, but his training made him, as it made most of the group, a realist—a depressed realist after Zola. His earliest work was his best, Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, a grim and brutal picture of the darker strata of New York City—his most distinctive creation. But he had no patience, no time, for collecting material. He was too eager, too much under the dominance of moods, to investigate, and his later novel, The Red Badge of Courage, which purports to be a realistic story of army life in the Civil War, is based upon a kind of manufactured realism that is the product not of observation or of gathered data, but of an excessively active imagination. When he died, though he was but thirty, he had done his work. Despite his lyrical power and his undoubted imagination, his place is not large.
For Frank Norris (1870–1902) more may be said, though undoubtedly he has been judged by his contemporaries more by what he dreamed of doing and what, perhaps, he might have done had he lived than by his actual accomplishment. He had had unusual training for the epic task he set himself. He had been born in Chicago and had spent there the first fifteen years of his life, he had been educated in the San Francisco high school, at the University of California, and at Harvard, then for a year or two he had studied art in Paris. Later he was war correspondent of the San Francisco Chronicle, then editor of the San Francisco Wave, then special war correspondent for McClure's Magazine during the Spanish War.
When he began to write fiction, and he began early, he was an ardent disciple of Zola, a realist of the latter-day type, a teller of the Truth as Zola conceived of the Truth. "Mere literature" was a thing outworn, graces of style and gentleness of theme belonged to the effeminate past. A masculine age had come to which nothing was common or unclean provided it were but the Truth. Like Crane, he was eager, excited, dominated by his theme until it became his whole life. He could work only in major key, in fortissimo, with themes continent-wide presented with the Kipling vigor and swing.
In his earlier work, Vandover and the Brute, McTeague, and the like, he swung to the extreme of his theory. To tell the truth was to tell with microscopic detail the repulsive things of physical life. There are stories of his that reek with foul odors and jangle repulsively upon the eye and the ear. The short fiction "A Man's Woman" is an advance even upon Zola. It is Truth, but it is the truth about the processes of the sewer and the physiological facts about starvation:
The tent was full of foul smells: the smell of drugs and of moldy gunpowder, the smell of dirty rags, of unwashed bodies, the smell of stale smoke, of scorching sealskin, of soaked and rotting canvas that exhaled from the tent cover—every smell but that of food.
McTeague is a brutal book: it gets hold of one's imagination and haunts it like an odor from a morgue. So with certain scenes from Vandover and the Brute. One sees for weeks the ghastly face of that drowning Jew who, after the wreck of the steamer, was beaten off again and again until his mashed fingers could no longer gain a hold. True to life it undoubtedly is, but to what end?
Norris's master work was to be his trilogy, the epic of the wheat, the allegory of financial and industrial America. He explained his purpose in the preface to The Pit:
These novels, while forming a series, will be in no way connected with each other save by their relation to (1) the production, (2) the distribution, (3) the consumption of American wheat. When complete they will form the story of a crop of wheat from the time of its sowing as seed in California to the time of its consumption as bread in a village of Western Europe.
The first novel, The Octopus, deals with the war between the wheat grower and the Railroad Trust; the second, The Pit, is the fictitious narrative of a "deal" in the Chicago wheat pit; while the third, The Wolf, will probably have for its pivotal episode the relieving of a famine in an old world community.
He lived to complete only the first two, and it is upon these two that his place as a novelist must depend. They represent his maturer work, his final manner, and they undoubtedly show what would have been his product had he been spared to complete his work.
The two books impress one first with their vastness of theme. The whole continent seems to be in them. They have an untamed power, an elemental quality, an unconfined sweep that is Russian in its quality. They are epics, epics of a new continent with its untold richness in corn and wheat, its enmeshing railroads, its teeming cities of the plain, its restless human types—new birth of our new soil. The excitement and the enthusiasm of the novelist flow from every page. To read long is to be filled with the trembling eagerness of the wheat pit and the railroad yard. The style is headlong, excited, illuminated hotly with Hugo-like adjectives. Through it all runs a symbolism that at times takes full control. The railroad dominates The Octopus, the wheat The Pit as fully as the hemp dominates Allen's Reign of Law. The books are allegories. The Western farmer is in the grip of an octopus-like monster, the railroad, that is strangling him. The ghastly horror of the locomotive that plows at full speed through a flock of sheep is symbolic of his helplessness.
To the right and left, all the width of the right of way, the little bodies had been flung; backs were snapped against the fence-posts; brains knocked out. Caught in the barbs of the wire, wedged in, the bodies hung suspended. Under foot it was terrible; the black blood, winking in the starlight, seeped down into the clay between the ties with a long sucking murmur.... Abruptly, Presley saw again in his imagination the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon; but saw it now as the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path; the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the Monster, the Colossus, the Octopus.
Garland in such pictures as "Under the Lion's Paw" tends to arouse his reader to mutiny, to the cry "This thing must stop!" Norris fills him with shuddering horror and leaves him unnerved.
Tremendous energy the novels undoubtedly have and truth too, so far as it goes. They have imaginative power of no inferior type and an ardor that is contagious. It was worth while to have written them: they picture for all time a unique phase of American life, but it is no great loss to our literature that the two were not expanded into a long series. In the higher sense of the word they are not literature; they are remarkably well done newspaper "stories." Like most of the work of his group of writers, they are journalistic in pitch and in intent: stirring narratives, picturesque presentings of unusual material, timely studies in dynamic style. But literary art is founded upon restraint, reserve, poise. These stories lack finish, concentration, and even, at times, good taste. Everywhere full organ, everywhere tenseness, everywhere excitement. A terrible directness there is, but it tends no whither and it comes to no terminus of conclusion.
Norris unquestionably lacked knowledge of many of the most fundamental areas of human life. He was too insistently modern. Like the mere journalist, he was obsessed with but a single thought: the value of the present moment. He lacked a sense of the past, personal background, inner life, power to weigh and balance and compare, and, lacking these, he lacked the elements that make for the literature of permanence.
Henry Harland's (1861–1905) earliest work, As It Was Written (1885), Mrs. Peixada, and The Yoke of the Thora (1887), written under the pen name "Sidney Luska," presented certain phases of Jewish life and character in New York with a grim power that seemed promising, but his later work was decadent. Harold Frederic was a more substantial figure. A typical American, self-made and self-educated, climbing by rapid stages from the positions of farm hand, photographer, and proof-reader to the editorship of influential papers like the Albany Journal, at twenty-eight he was the European representative of the New York Times and an international correspondent of rare power. Novel-writing he took up as a recreation. His earliest work, which appeared in Scribner's Magazine, Seth's Brother's Wife (1887), was a novel of New York farm life, Garland-like in its depressing realism. Later stories like In the Valley and The Copperhead dealt with a background of the Civil War. His greatest success came with The Damnation of Theron Ware, published in England with the title Illumination, a remarkable book especially in its earlier chapters, full of vigor and truth. Undoubtedly he possessed the rare gift of story-telling, and had he, like Crawford, devoted himself wholly to the art, he might have done work to compare with any other written during the period. But he was a journalist with newspaper standards, he worked in haste, he lacked repose and the sense of values, and as a result a republication of his novels has not been called for. He is to be ranked with Crane and Norris as a meteor of brilliance rather than a fixed light.
The new realism was short lived. Even while its propaganda like Crumbling Idols and The Responsibilities of the Novelist were spreading the news that Walter Scott was dead and that the god of things as they are had come in his power, a new romantic period already had begun. Maurice Thompson, one of the most clear-eyed critics of the period, wrote in May, 1900:
Just how deep and powerful the present distinct movement toward a romantic revival may be no one can tell. Many facts, however, point to a veering of popular interest from the fiction of character analysis and social problems to the historical novel and the romance of heroic adventure. We have had a period of intense, not to say morbid, introversion directed mainly upon diseases of the social, domestic, political, and religious life of the world. It may be that, like all other currents of interest when turned upon insoluble problems, this rush of inquiry, this strain of exploitation, has about run its course.... Great commercial interest seems to be turned or turning from the world of commonplace life and the story of the analysis of crime and filth to the historical romance, the story of heroism, and the tale of adventure. People seem to be interested as never before in the interpretation of history. It may be that signs in the air of great world changes have set all minds more or less to feeling out for precedents and examples by which to measure the future's probabilities.[158]
The causes of this later wave of romanticism, a wave that was wider than America, have been variously estimated. Harold Frederic suggested Blackmore as the possible fountain head. "Was it Lorna Doone, I wonder, that changed the drift in historical fiction? The book, after it was once introduced to public attention by that comic accident which no one can blame Mr. Blackmore for grinding his teeth over, achieved, as it deserved, one of the great successes of our time—and great successes set men thinking."[159] Paul Leicester Ford, himself an historian and a notable producer of historical romance, was inclined to another explanation: "At the present moment [1897] there seems a revival of interest in American history, and the novelist has been quickly responsive to it."[160] The English critic E. A. Bennett offered still another solution: "America is a land of crazes. In other words, it is simple: no derision is implied.... And America is also a land of sentimentalism. It is this deep-seated quality which, perhaps, accounts for the vogue of history in American fiction. The themes of the historical novel are so remote, ideas about them exist so nebulously in the mind, that a writer may safely use the most bare-faced distortions to pamper the fancy without offending that natural and racial shrewdness which would bestir itself if a means of verification were at hand. The extraordinary notion still obtains that human nature was different 'in those days'; that the good old times were, somehow, 'pretty,' and governed by fates poetically just."[161]
Ford undoubtedly was right in assigning the immediate outburst at the close of the century to a new interest in American history. The war with Spain brought about a burst of patriotism and of martial feeling that made the swashbuckling romance and the episode from the American Revolution seem peculiarly appropriate. But the war was by no means the only cause. The reaction had come earlier, a reaction from the excess of reality that had come with the eighties. The influence of Stevenson must not be overlooked, Stevenson who, type of his age, had sickened early of the realistic, the analytic, the problematic.
"I do desire a book of adventure," Stevenson had written to Henley as early as 1884, "a romance—and no man will get or write me one. Dumas I have read and re-read too often; Scott, too, and I am short. I want to hear swords clash. I want a book to begin in a good way; a book, I guess, like Treasure Island.... Oh, my sighings after romance, or even Skeltery, and O! the weary age which will produce me neither!
"'Chapter I
"'The night was damp and cloudy, the ways foul. The single horseman, cloaked and booted, who pursued his way across Willesden Common, had not met a traveler, when the sound of wheels....'
"'Chapter II
"'"Yes, sir," said the old pilot, "she must have dropped into the bay a little afore dawn. A queer craft she looks."
"'"She shows no colors," returned the young gentleman, musingly.
"'"They're a-lowering of a quarter-boat, Mr. Mark," resumed the old salt. "We shall soon know more of her."
"'"Aye," replied the young gentleman called Mark, "and here, Mr. Seadrift, comes your sweet daughter Nancy tripping down the cliff."
"'"God bless her kind heart, sir," ejaculated old Seadrift.'"
Be the cause what it may, for a time historical romance was the dominant literary form in America. In 1902, Bliss Perry, editor of the Atlantic, could write of "the present passion for historical novels." To what extent they were a passion may be learned from the records of publishers. By the summer of 1901, Ford's Janice Meredith had sold 275,000 copies, Mary Johnston's To Have and to Hold, 285,000, and Churchill's The Crisis, 320,000, and his Richard Carvel, 420,000.[162] One might give equally large figures for such favorites as Charles Major's When Knighthood Was in Flower, Tarkington's Monsieur Beaucaire, Mitchell's Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker, Thompson's Alice of Old Vincennes, and very many others, foreign as well as American.
The novels fall into two classes: those in which the historical element is made emphatic and those which are pure romances. Of the former class Paul Leicester Ford's Janice Meredith is, perhaps, the best type; of the latter, Mitchell's Hugh Wynne. Ford was first of all a historian, a bibliographer, a tireless delver among historical sources. He had been educated in his father's library, which contained the finest collection of Americana in the world, and at twelve we find him publishing on his own press a genealogy of Webster of his own compilation. His later bibliographical and historical work centered about the American Revolution. When he turned to fiction it was as a historian, a specialist who would exploit real historical characters and real areas of American life. The Honorable Peter Stirling was a study of ward politics with the young Grover Cleveland as the central figure. It was an accurate picture, vigorous and truthful, and even though a fiction it is a valuable historical document. So it was with Janice Meredith, a historian's day-dream over his Americana. It presents an accurate picture of the social conditions of its time. Many of its characters are revolutionary leaders: Washington is a central figure—"The true George Washington," presented with all his failings as well as with all his excellences.
It was natural that Ford should make much of the material that he knew so thoroughly: he brought it in sometimes for its own sake rather than for the sake of the story. Undoubtedly he falsified history by making his real personages, like Washington and Franklin, take part in conversations that never occurred and do things that strictly never were done, but it is equally true that he has given us the best conception that is now possible of how it must have felt to live in the days of the Revolution. His chief excellences were his vigor and vivacity, and his Norris-like mastery of details. He was a realist enamoured of truth who extended his realism into the domain of romance. His faults all centered about his undoubted deficiency in literary art: he lacked constructive power and distinction of style. His stories are the diversions of a professional historian, brilliant but without promise of permanence.
Typical of the second variety of historical romance is the work of Silas Weir Mitchell, poet, romancer, artist, and historian. Dr. Mitchell was of Philadelphia as Dr. Holmes was of Boston, and like Dr. Holmes he gave his most vigorous years completely to his profession. He was fifty-three and one of the leading world specialists on nervous diseases when he wrote his first full novel, In War Time. His own explanation, given in later years to a gathering of University of Pennsylvania men, has often been quoted:
When success in my profession gave me the freedom of long summer holidays, the despotism of my habits of work would have made entire idleness mere ennui. I turned to what, except for stern need, would have been my lifelong work from youth—literature—bored by idleness, wrote my first novel.
The confession in the latter sentence is significant. Poetry all his life was to him an exalted thing, as it was, indeed, to Stoddard and the other poets of beauty. In later years he published many volumes of it and contributed it to the magazines, but never for money. It explains much in his work. No other novelist of the period has so filled his fiction with quoted lyrics and with lyrical prose. It is here that he differs from writers like Ford and Norris: he would produce literature.
His list of work is a varied one. His first long novel and also his last dealt with the Civil War, in which he had served three years as a surgeon. Then, like Dr. Holmes, he wrote pathological studies on which he brought to bear his vast medical knowledge, novels like Dr. North and His Friends and Constance Trescott; he wrote brilliant tales of French life, like The Adventures of François, Dr. Mitchell's favorite among his novels, and A Diplomatic Adventure; he wrote idyllic studies of Nature like When All the Woods Are Green, and Far in the Forest, and, best of all, the historical romances Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker, and The Red City.
These novels more than any others written during the period are products of an exact and extensive knowledge of the materials of which they are woven. We feel at every point that we are in the hands of an expert, the ablest neurologist of his generation, who has seen intimately vast areas of life of which the average reader knows nothing. His analysis of a character has the exactness of a clinic and he adds to it, moreover, an imaginative power that makes us see as well as know and feel. He is skilful in characterization. "Character," he once wrote, "is best delineated by occasional broad touches, without much explanatory comment, without excess of minute description. If I fail to characterize, I fail in novel writing." He has not failed. Octavia Blake in the novel Roland Blake is drawn with peculiar skill; so is Lucretia Hunter in Circumstance, so is Constance Trescott, that study of over-devotion. Always is he best in his studies of femininity, doubtless because women had played so large a part in his medical practice.
With few exceptions his characters are from the higher classes, "gentlefolk," he has called them in his novel Dr. North, and he has made them alive, as Howells was unable to do, and even James. He has discussed the point himself: "Nor can I tell why some men can not create gentlefolk. It is not knowledge, nor is it the being in or of their world that gives this power. Thackeray had it; so had Trollope; Dickens never; nor, in my mind, was George Eliot always happy in this respect; and of the living I shall say nothing."[163] We feel this quality most strongly in his historical novels. He knew intimately his background, Old Philadelphia with its exclusive aristocracy, and he has been able to transport his reader into the very atmosphere of old Second Street, in the days when it contained the most distinctive social set in America. He was a part of it; he wrote as if he were writing his own family history, lovingly, reverently. He was writing romance, but he was writing it as one who is on sacred historical ground where error of fact or of inference is unpardonable. He has himself outlined the work of the historical romancer:
Suppose I have a story to tell and wish to evolve character amid the scenery and events of an historical episode. Suppose, for instance, the story to lie largely in a great city. For years I must study the topography, dress, manners, and family histories; must be able in mind to visit this or that house; know where to call, whom I shall see, the hours of meals, the diet, games, etc. I must know what people say on meeting and parting. Then I must read letters, diaries, and so on, to get the speech forms and to enable me, if it be autobiography, to command the written style of the day. Most men who write thus of another time try to give the effect of actuality by an excessive use of archaic forms. Only enough should be used to keep from time to time some touch of this past, and not so much as to distract incessantly by needless reminders. It is an art, and, like all good art effects, it escapes complete analysis.
Then as to the use of historical characters. These must naturally influence the fate of your puppets; they must never be themselves the most prominent personages of your story.[163]
He presents his material with skill: he is a story-teller; his plots move strongly and always by means not of explanations but of the self-development of his characters. Even his most minor figures form a distinct part of the movement. His style has more of distinction than has any other of the later romancers. He brought to his work the older ideals of literary form and expression, and he wrought not with the haste of the journalist and special correspondent, but with the leisure of the deliberate man of letters. Without question he is as large a figure in his period as Dr. Holmes was in his, and there are those who would rank him as the greater of the two. That he has not been given a more commanding place is due undoubtedly to his great fame as a medical expert. The physician has overshadowed the author.
The enormous quantity and richness of the fiction of the period make impossible extended criticism of any save those who were leaders or innovators. Many did most excellent work, work indeed in some cases that seems to point to permanence, yet since they brought nothing new either in material or in method we need not dwell long upon them.
No type of fiction, for instance, was more abundant all through the period than that which we have called the E. P. Roe type, and the most voluminous producer of it undoubtedly was Captain, later General, Charles King, who created no fewer than fifty-five novels of the half-sensational, half-sentimental type which we associate with the name of Roe. With his wide knowledge of army life, especially as lived in the frontier camps of the West after the Civil War, he was able to give his work a verisimilitude that added greatly to their popularity. The love story was skilfully blended with what seemed to be real history. The frontier stories of Mary Hallock Foote, wife of a civil engineer whose work called him into the mining camps of Colorado and Idaho, have the same characteristics. Their author, a clever illustrator, was able to extend her art to her descriptions of the primitive regions and savage humanity of the frontier, and for a time she was compared even with Bret Harte. But not for long. Her books, save for their novelty of setting, have no characteristics that are not conventional. Better is the work of Clara Louise Burnham. There is in her fiction more of imaginative power and more command of the subtleties of style, but even her best efforts fall far short of distinction.
Of the romancers of the period the leader for a time unquestionably was Julian Hawthorne, only son of the greatest of American romancers. In his earlier days he devoted himself to themes worthy of the Hawthorne name and treated them in what fairly may be called the Hawthorne manner. His novels, like Bressant and Archibald Malmaison, were hailed everywhere as remarkably promising work and there were many who predicted for him a place second only to his father's. But the man lacked seriousness, conscience, depth of life, knowledge of the human heart. After a short period of worthy endeavor he turned to the sensational and the trivial, and became a yellow journalist. No literary career seemingly so promising has ever failed more dismally.
Stronger romancers by far have been Blanche Willis Howard, Frederick J. Stimson, and Arthur Sherburne Hardy. Few American women have been more brilliant than Miss Howard. Her One Summer has a sprightliness and a humor about it that are perennial, and her Breton romance Guenn is among the greatest romances of the period in either England or America. The spirit of true romance breathes from it; and it came alive from its creator's heart and life. So far does it surpass all her other work that she is rated more and more now as a single-work artist. She passed her last years away from America in Stuttgart, where her husband, Herr von Teuffel, was acting as court physician to the king of Würtemberg. Hardy also was a romancer, a stylist of the French type, brilliant, finished. Few have ever brought to fiction a mind more keenly alert and more analytical. He was a mathematician of note, a writer of treatises on least squares and quarternions. But he was a poet as well and a romancer. His But yet a Woman has an atmosphere about it that is rarely found in literature in English. His Passe Rose is the most idealistic of all the historical romances: it moves like a prose poem. Stimson too had artistic imagination, grace of style of the old type joined to the freshness and vigor of the new period. It is to be regretted that he chose to devote himself to the law and write legal treatises that are everywhere recognized as authoritative rather than to do highly distinctive work in the more creative field of prose romance. None of these writers may be said to have added anything really new to the province in which they worked and so may be dismissed with a brief comment. They worked in old material with old methods and largely with old ideals, and though they worked often with surpassing skill, they were followers rather than leaders.
Several novels made much stir in the day of their first appearance, Bellamy's Looking Backward, for instance, John Hay's The Bread-Winners (1884), and Fuller's The Cliff Dwellers, that picture of Chicago life that for a time was thought to be as promising as Frank Norris's realistic work. Robert Grant's humorous and sprightly studies of society and life were also at various times much discussed, but all of them are seen now to have been written for their own generation alone. With every decade almost there comes a newness that for a time is supposed to put into eclipse even the fixed stars. A quarter of a century, however, tells the story. The Norwegian scholar and poet and novelist Boyesen, who did what Howells really did not do, take Tolstoy as his master, was thought for two decades to be of highest rank, but to-day his work, save for certain sections of his critical studies, is no longer read.
Even F. Hopkinson Smith is too near just at present for us to prophesy with confidence, yet it is hard to believe that his Colonel Carter is to be forgotten, and there are other parts of his work, like Tom Grogan and Caleb West, books that centered about his profession of lighthouse architect, that seem now like permanent additions to American fiction. There was a breeziness about his style, a cosmopolitanism, a sense of knowledge and authority that is most convincing. Some of his short stories, like those for instance in At Close Range—"A Night Out," to be still more specific—have a picturing power, a perfect naturalness, an accuracy of diction, that mark them as triumphs of realism in its best sense. Like Dr. Mitchell, he came late to literature, but when he did come he came strongly, laden with a wealth of materials, and he has left behind him a handful at least of novels and studies that bid fair to endure long.
Of the younger group of novelists, those writers born in the sixties and early seventies and publishing their first novels during the first decade of the new century, we shall say little. The new spirit of nationality that came in the seventies did not furnish the impulse that produced the work of this second generation of the period. It is a school of novelists distinct and by itself. We may only call the roll of its leaders, arranging it, perhaps, in the order of seniority: Gertrude Franklin Atherton (1859——), Bliss Perry (1860——), Owen Wister (1860——), John Fox, Jr. (1863——), Holman F. Day (1865——), Robert W. Chambers (1865——), Meredith Nicholson (1866——), David Graham Philips (1867–1911), Robert Herrick (1868——), Newton Booth Tarkington (1869——), Mary Johnston (1870——), Edith Wharton (——), Alice Hegan Rice (1870——), Winston Churchill (1871——), Stewart Edward White (1873——), Ellen Anderson Glasgow (1874——), Jack London (1876–1916). The earlier work of some of these writers falls under classifications which we have already discussed, as for instance Churchill's Richard Carvel, Mary Johnston's Prisoners of Hope, Chambers's Cardigan, and Wister's The Virginian. Of the great mass of the fiction of the group, however, and of a still younger group we shall say nothing. It was not inspired by the impulse that in the sixties and the seventies produced the National Period.
Josiah Gilbert Holland. (1819–1881.) History of Western Massachusetts, 1855; The Bay Path, 1857; Bitter-Sweet [a poem], 1858; Letters to Young People, 1858; Gold Foil, 1859; Miss Gilbert's Career, 1860; Lessons in Life, 1861; Letter to the Joneses, 1863; Plain Talks on Familiar Subjects, 1865; Life of Lincoln, 1865; Kathrina [a poem], 1867; The Marble Prophecy, 1872; Arthur Bonnicastle, 1873; Garnered Sheaves, 1873; Mistress of the Manse, 1874; Seven Oaks, 1875; Nicholas Minturn, 1877; Every-Day Topics (two series), 1870, 1882.
Edward Payson Roe. (1838–1888.) Barriers Burned Away, 1872; What Can She Do? 1873; The Opening of a Chestnut Burr, 1874; From Jest to Earnest, 1875; Near to Nature's Heart, 1876; A Knight of the Nineteenth Century, 1877; A Face Illumined, 1878; A Day of Fate, 1880; Without a Home, 1881; His Somber Rivals, 1883; An Unexpected Result, 1883; Nature's Serial Story, 1884; A Young Girl's Wooing, 1884; Driven Back to Eden, 1885; An Original Belle, 1885; He Fell in Love with His Wife, 1886; The Earth Trembled, 1887; Found, yet Lost, 1888; Miss Lou, 1888; E. P. Roe: Reminiscences of His Life. By his sister, Mary A. Roe, 1899.
Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett. (1849——.) That Lass o' Lowrie's, 1877; Surly Tim, 1877; Haworth's, 1879; Louisiana, 1880; A Fair Barbarian, 1881; Through One Administration, 1883; Little Lord Fauntleroy, 1886; Editha's Burglar, 1888; Sara Crewe, 1888; The Pretty Sister of José, 1889; Little Saint Elizabeth, 1890; Giovanni and the Other, 1892; The One I Knew Best of All [autobiography], 1893; Two Little Pilgrims' Progress, 1895; A Lady of Quality, 1896; His Grace of Osmonde, 1897; In Connection with the De-Willoughby Claim, 1899; The Making of a Marchioness, 1901; The Methods of Lady Walderhurst, 1902; In the Closed Room, 1904; A Little Princess: Being the Whole Story of Sara Crewe, 1905; Dawn of a To-morrow, 1906; Earlier Stories, first and second series, 1906; Queen Silver-Bell, 1906; Racketty-Packetty House, 1906; The Shuttle, 1907; Cozy Lion, 1907; Good Wolf, 1908; Spring Cleaning; as Told by Queen Crosspatch, 1908; Land of the Blue Flower, 1909; Baby Crusoe and His Man Saturday, 1909; Secret Garden, 1911; My Robin, 1912; T. Tembaron, 1913.
Francis Marion Crawford. (1854–1909.) Mr. Isaacs, 1882; Doctor Claudius, 1883; A Roman Singer, To Leeward, and An American Politician, 1884; Zoroaster, 1885; A Tale of a Lonely Parish, 1886; Marzio's Crucifix, Paul Patoff, and Saracinesca, 1887; With the Immortals, 1888; Greifenstein and Sant' Ilario, 1889; The Cigarette-maker's Romance, 1890; Kahled and The Witch of Prague, 1891; The Three Fates, The Children of the King, and Don Orsino, 1892; Marion Darche, Pietro Ghisleri, and The Novel: What It Is, 1893; Katherine Lauderdale, Love in Idleness, The Ralstons, Casa Braccio, and Adam Johnstone's Son, 1894; Taquisara, and Corleone, 1896; Ave Roma Immortalis, 1898; Via Crucis, 1899; In the Palace of the King, Southern Italy and Sicily, and The Rulers of the South, 1900; Marietta, a Maid of Venice, 1901; Cecilia, A Story of Modern Rome, 1902; The Heart of Rome, and Man Overboard, 1903; Whosoever Shall Offend, 1904; Fair Margaret and Salve Venetia, 1905; A Lady of Rome, 1906; Arethusa and The Little City of Hope, 1907; The Primadonna and The Diva's Ruby, 1908; The White Sister, 1909.
Margaretta Wade Deland. (1857——.) The Old Garden and Other Verses, 1886; John Ward, Preacher, 1888; Florida Days, 1889; Sidney, 1890; Story of a Child, 1892; Mr. Tommy Dove, and Other Stories, 1893; Philip and His Wife, 1894; The Wisdom of Fools, 1897; Old Chester Tales, 1898; Dr. Lavendar's People, 1903; The Common Way, 1904; The Awakening of Helena Ritchie, 1906; An Encore, 1907; R. J. Mother and Some Other People, 1908; Where the Laborers Are Few, 1909; The Way of Peace, 1910; The Iron Woman, 1911; The Voice, 1912; Partners, 1913; The Hands of Esau, 1914.
Stephen Crane. (1871–1900.) The Black Riders and Other Lines, 1895; The Red Badge of Courage: Episode of the American Civil War, 1895; Maggie: a Girl of the Streets, 1896; George's Mother, 1896; The Little Regiment, and Other Episodes of the American Civil War, 1896; The Third Violet, 1897; The Open Boat, and Other Tales of Adventure, 1898; The Monster and Other Stories, 1899; Active Service: a Novel, 1899; War Is Kind, 1899; Whilomville Stories, 1900; Great Battles of the World, 1900; Wounds in the Rain: War Stories, 1900.
Frank Norris. (1870–1902.) Moran of "The Lady Letty," 1898; Blix, 1899; McTeague: a Story of San Francisco, 1899; A Man's Woman, 1900; The Octopus: a Story of California, 1901; The Pit: a Story of Chicago, 1902; A Deal in Wheat, and Other Stories, 1903; Complete Works. Golden Gate Edition. Seven Volumes, 1903; Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other Literary Essays, 1903; Vandover and the Brute.
Harold Frederic. (1856–1898.) Seth's Brother's Wife: a Study of Life in the Greater New York, 1887; The Lawton Girl, 1890; In the Valley, 1891; Young Emperor William II. of Germany, 1891; The New Exodus: a Study of Israel in Russia, 1892; The Return of O'Mahony, 1892; The Copperhead, 1893; Marsena, and Other Stories of the War Time, 1894; Mrs. Albert Grundy: Observations in Philistia, 1896; The Damnation of Theron Ware, 1896; March Hares, 1896; The Deserter and Other Stories: a Book of Two Wars, 1898; Gloria Mundi, 1899; The Market-Place, 1899.
Paul Leicester Ford. (1865–1902.) Who Was the Mother of Franklin's Son? 1889; The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him, 1894; The True George Washington, 1896; The Great K. and A. Robbery, 1897; The Story of an Untold Love, 1897; Tattle Tales of Cupid, 1898; Janice Meredith: a Story of the American Revolution, 1899; The Many-sided Franklin, 1899; Wanted: a Match-maker, 1900; A House Party, 1901; Wanted: a Chaperon, 1902; A Checked Love Affair; and the Cortelyou Feud, 1903; Love Finds a Way, 1904; Thomas Jefferson, 1904. His bibliographies and edited work not listed.
Silas Weir Mitchell. (1829–1914.) Hephzibah Guiness, 1880; Thee and You, 1880; A Draft on the Bank of Spain, 1880; In War Time, 1882; The Hill of Stones and Other Poems, 1883; Roland Blake, 1886; Far in the Forest, 1889; The Cup of Youth and Other Poems, 1889; The Psalm of Death and Other Poems, 1890; Characteristics, 1892; Francis Blake: a Tragedy of the Sea, 1892; The Mother and Other Poems, 1892; Mr. Kris Kringle: a Christmas Tale, 1893; Philip Vernon: a Tale in Prose and Verse, 1895; When All the Woods Are Green: a Novel, 1894; Madeira's Party, 1895; Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker, 1897; Adventures of Francois, Foundling, Thief, Juggler, and Fencing Master, During the French Revolution, 1898; Autobiography of a Quack, 1900; Dr. North and His Friends, 1900; The Wager and Other Poems, 1900; Circumstance, 1901; A Comedy of Conscience, 1903; Little Stories, 1903; New Samaria and The Summer of St. Martin, 1904; The Youth of Washington, 1904; Constance Trescott, 1905; A Diplomatic Adventure, 1905; The Red City: a Novel of the Second Administration of President Washington, 1907; John Sherwood, Ironmaster, 1910; The Guillotine Club and Other Stories, 1910; Westways, 1913. His many medical works not listed.
Charles King. (1844——.) The Colonel's Daughter; or, Winning His Spurs, 1883; Marion's Faith, 1886; The Deserter, 1887; From the Ranks, 1887; A War-Time Wooing, 1888; Between the Lines, 1889; Sunset Pass, 1889; Laramie; or, the Queen of Bedlam: a Story of the Sioux War of 1876, 1889; Starlight Ranch, and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier, 1890; The Colonel's Christmas Dinner, 1890; Campaigning with Crook and Stories of Army Life, 1890; Trials of a Staff Officer, 1891; Two Soldiers, 1891; Dunraven Ranch, 1891; Captain Blake, 1891; Foes in Ambush, 1893; A Soldier's Secret: a Story of the Sioux War of 1890, 1893; Waring's Peril, 1894; Initial Experience and Other Stories, 1894; Cadet Days: a Story of West Point, 1894; Under Fire, 1895; Story of Fort Frayne, 1895; Rancho del Muerlo, 1895; Captain Close, 1895; Sergeant Crœsus, 1895; An Army Wife, 1896; A Garrison Tangle, 1896; A Tame Surrender: a Story of the Chicago Strike, 1896; Trooper Ross, 1896; Trumpeter Fred: a Story of the Plains, 1896; Warrior Gap: a Story of the Sioux Outbreak of 1868, 1897; Ray's Recruit, 1898; The General's Double: a Story of the Army of the Potomac, 1898; A Wounded Name, 1898; Trooper Galahad, 1899; From School to Battlefield, 1899; In Spite of Foes, 1901; From the Ranks, 1901; Norman Holt: a Story of the Army of the Cumberland, 1901; Ray's Daughter: a Story of Manila, 1901; Conquering Corps Badge and Other Stories of the Philippines, 1902; The Iron Brigade, 1902; Way Out West, 1902; An Apache Princess, 1903; A Daughter of the Sioux, 1903; Comrades in Arms, 1904; A Knight of Columbia, 1904; A Medal of Honor, 1905; Famous and Decisive Battles of the World, 1905; A Soldier's Trial: an Episode of the Canteen Crusade, 1905; Farther Story of Lieutenant Sandy Ray, 1906; Tonio, Son of the Sierras, 1906; Captured: a Story of Sandy Bay, 1907; The Rock of Chicamauga, 1907; To the Front, 1908; Lanier of the Cavalry, 1909; The True Ulysses S. Grant, 1914.
Mary Hallock Foote. (1847——.) The Led-Horse Claim: Romance of a Mining Camp, 1883; John Bodewin's Testimony, 1885; The Last Assembly Ball, 1886; The Chosen Valley, 1892; Cœur d'Alene, 1894; In Exile and Other Stories, 1894; The Cup of Trembling and Other Stories, 1895; Little Fig-tree Stories, 1899; The Prodigal, 1900; The Desert and The Sown, 1902; A Touch of Sin and Other Stories, 1903; Royal Americans, 1910; Picked Company: a Novel, 1912.
Clara Louise Burnham. (1854——.) No Gentleman, 1881; A Sane Lunatic, 1882; Dearly Bought, 1884; Next Door, 1886; Young Maids and Old, 1888; The Mistress of Beech Knoll, 1890; Miss Bragg's Secretary, 1892; Dr. Latimer, 1893; Sweet Clover, 1894; The Wise Woman, 1895; Miss Archer Archer, 1897; A Great Love, 1898; A West Point Wooing, 1899; Miss Prichard's Wedding Trip, 1901; The Right Princess, 1902; Jewel, 1903; Jewel's Story Book, 1904; The Opened Shutters, 1906; The Leaven of Love, 1908; Clever Betsey, 1910; The Inner Flame, 1912.
Julian Hawthorne. (1846——.) Bressant, 1873; Idolatry, 1874; Saxon Studies, 1875; Garth, 1877; Mrs. Gainsborough's Diamonds, 1878; Archibald Malmaison, 1879; Sebastian Strome, 1880; Fortune's Fool, 1883; Dust: a Novel, 1883; Beatrix Randolph, 1883; Prince Saroni's Wife, 1884; Noble Blood, 1884; Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife: a Biography, 1885; Love—or a Name, 1885; Sinfire, 1886; The Trial of Gideon, 1886; John Parmelee's Curse, 1886; Confessions and Criticisms, 1887; five novels from the Diary of Inspector Byrnes: The Tragic Mystery, The Great Bank Robbery, An American Penman, Section 558, 1887, and Another's Crime, 1888; The Professor's Sister: a Romance; A Miser of Second Avenue, 1888; A Dream and a Forgetting, 1888; David Poindexter's Disappearance, 1888; Kildhurin's Oak, 1889; Constance, 1889; Pauline, 1890; A Stage Friend, 1890; American Literature: an Elementary Textbook [with Leonard Lemmon], 1891; Humors of the Fair, 1893; Six Cent Sam's, 1893; The Golden Fleece: a Romance, 1896; A Fool of Nature, 1896; Love Is a Spirit, 1896; A History of the United States, 1898; Hawthorne and His Circle, 1903; The Secret of Solomon, 1909; Lovers in Heaven, 1910; The Subterranean Brotherhood, 1914.
Blanche Willis Howard, Mrs. von Teuffel. (1847–1898.) One Summer, 1877; One Year Abroad, 1877; Aunt Serena, 1881; Guenn: a Wave of the Breton Coast, 1884; The Open Door, 1891; A Fellowe and His Wife [with W. Sharp], 1892; A Battle and a Boy, 1892; No Heroes, 1893; Seven on the Highways, 1897; Dionysius, the Weaver's Heart's Dearest, 1899; The Garden of Eden, 1900.
Edward Bellamy. (1850–1898.) Six to One: a Nantucket Idyl, 1878; Dr. Heidenhoff's Process, 1880; Miss Luddington's Sister: a Romance of Immortality, 1884; Looking Backward, 2000–1881, 1888; Equality, 1897; A Blindman's World, and Other Stories, 1898; The Duke of Stockbridge: a Romance of Shay's Rebellion, 1900.
Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen. (1848–1895.) Gunnar, 1874; A Norseman's Pilgrimage, 1875; Tales from Two Hemispheres, 1876; Falconberg, 1879; Goethe and Schiller: Their Lives and Works, 1879; Queen Titania, 1881; Ilka on the Hill-Top, 1881; Idyls of Norway and Other Poems, 1882; A Daughter of the Philistines, 1883; The Story of Norway, 1886; The Modern Vikings, 1887; Vagabond Tales, 1889; The Light of Her Countenance, 1889; The Mammon of Unrighteousness, 1891; Essays on German Literature, 1892; Boyhood in Norway, 1892; The Golden Calf: a Novel, 1892; Social Strugglers, 1893; Commentary on the Writings of Henrik Ibsen, 1894; Literary and Social Silhouettes, 1894; Essays on Scandinavian Literature, 1895.
Arthur Sherburne Hardy. (1847——.) Francesca of Rimini: a Poem, 1878; But Yet a Woman, 1883; The Wind of Destiny, 1886; Passe Rose, 1889; Life and Letters of Joseph Hardy Neesima, 1891; Songs of Two, 1900; His Daughter First, 1903; Aurélie, 1912; Diane and Her Friends, 1914. His mathematical works not listed.
Robert Grant. (1852——.) The Little Tin Gods-on-Wheels; or, Society in Our Modern Athens, 1879; The Confessions of a Frivolous Girl, 1880; The Lambs: a Tragedy, 1882; An Average Man, 1884; Face to Face, 1886; The Knave of Hearts: a Fairy Story, 1886; A Romantic Young Lady, 1886; Jack Hall, 1887; Jack in the Bush; or, a Summer on a Salmon River, 1888; The Carletons, 1891; Mrs. Harold Stagg, 1891; The Reflections of a Married Man, 1892; The Opinions of a Philosopher, 1893; The Art of Living, 1895; A Bachelor's Christmas, 1895; The North Shore of Massachusetts, 1896; Search-Light Letters, 1899; Unleavened Bread, 1900; The Undercurrent, 1904; The Orchid, 1905; Law-breakers and Other Stories, 1906; The Chippendales, 1909; Confessions of a Grandfather, 1912.
Frederick Jesup Stimson, "J. S. of Dale." (1855——.) Rollo's Journey to Cambridge, 1879; Guerndale, an Old Story, 1882; The Crime of Henry Vane, 1884; The Sentimental Calendar, 1886; First Harvests, 1888; Mrs. Knollys and Other Stories, 1894; Pirate Gold, 1896; King Noanett: a Story of Old Virginia and Massachusetts Bay, 1896; Jethro Bacon of Sandwich, 1902; In Cure of Her Soul, 1906. His law publications not listed.
Henry Blake Fuller. (1857——.) The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani, 1891; The Chatelaine of La Trinité, 1892; The Cliff-Dwellers, 1893; With the Procession, 1895; The Puppet-Booth: Twelve Plays, 1896; From the Other Side: Stories of Transatlantic Travel, 1898; The Last Refuge: a Sicilian Romance, 1900; Under the Skylights, 1901; Waldo Trench and Others: Stories of Americans in Italy, 1908.
Francis Hopkinson Smith. (1838–1915.) Old Lines in New Black and White, 1885; Well-Worn Roads, 1886; A White Umbrella in Mexico, 1889; A Book of the Tile Club, 1890; Col. Carter of Cartersville, 1891; A Day at Laguerre's, 1892; American Illustrators, 1892; A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others, 1895; Tom Grogan, 1896; Gondola Days, 1897; Venice of To-day, 1897; Caleb West, 1898; The Other Fellow, 1899; The Fortunes of Oliver Horn, 1902; The Under Dog, 1903; Col. Carter's Christmas, 1904; At Close Range, 1905; The Wood Fire in Number 3, 1905; The Tides of Barnegat, 1906; The Veiled Lady, 1907; The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman, 1907; Peter, 1908; Forty Minutes Late, 1909; Kennedy Square, 1911; The Arm-Chair at the Inn, 1912; In Thackeray's London, 1913; In Dickens's London, 1914.
In forms other than fiction and poetry the period was also voluminous. The greater part of our historical writings has been produced since 1870 and the same is true of our biography. Literary quality, however, has suffered. Emphasis has been placed upon material rather than upon graces of style; upon matter, but little upon manner. Never before have historian and biographer been so tireless in their search for sources: the Battles and Leaders of the Civil War is a veritable library of materials; the Life of Lincoln by Nicolay and Hay contains one million five hundred thousand words. It is as long as Bancroft's whole history of the United States, it is twice as long as Green's History of the English People, and it contains three hundred thousand words more than Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It has been a development from the spirit of the era: the demand for actuality. Never before such eagerness to uncover new facts, to present documents, to be realistically true, but it has been at the expense of literary style. A few books, like General Grant's Memoirs and Captain Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power upon History, have had the power of simplicity, the impelling force that comes from consciousness only of the message to be delivered. But all too often the material has been presented in a colorless, journalistic form that bars it forever from consideration as literature in the higher sense of that term. The most of it, even the life of Lincoln, is to be placed in the same category as scientific writings and all those other prose forms that are concerned only with the presenting of positive knowledge. Parkman seems to have been the last historian who was able to present his material with literary distinction.
The essay has been voluminous all through the period, but it too has changed its tone. More than any other literary form it has been the medium through which we may trace the transition from the old period to the new. American literature had begun with the essay, and we have seen how the form, designated by the name of sketch, grew in the hands of Irving and Hawthorne and Poe into what in the period of the seventies became recognized as a distinct literary form with the name of short story.
The literary essay is a classical form: to flourish, it needs the atmosphere of old culture and established social traditions; it must work in the materials of classic literature; it is leisurely in method, discursive, gently sentimental. It was the dominating form, it will be remembered, in the classical age of Addison, the age of manners and mind. It was peculiarly fitted, too, to be the literary vehicle of the later classical age in America, the Europe-centered period of Irving and Emerson and Willis and Holmes. The early pilgrims to the holy land of the Old World sent back their impressions and dreamings in the form of essays: Longfellow's Outre-Mer, for example, and Willis's Pencillings by the Way. On the same shelf with The Sketch Book belong Willis's Letters from Under a Bridge, Dana's The Idle Man, Donald G. Mitchell's Reveries of a Bachelor, Curtis's Prue and I, and a great mass of similar work, enough indeed to give color and even name to its period. This shelf more than any other marks the extent of England's dominion over the literature of the first three quarters of the nineteenth century: it was the most distinctive product of our classical age. Until America has a rich background of her own with old culture and traditions, with venerable native classics from which to quote, and a long vista of romantic history down which to look, her contemplative and strictly literary essays must necessarily be redolent of the atmosphere of other lands.
The National Period, with its new breath of all-Americanism, its new romantic spirit, its youthful exuberance, and its self-realization, has been, therefore, not a period in which the essay of the old type could find congenial soil. Instead of the Irving sketch there has been the vivid, sharply cut short story; instead of the contemplative, dreamy study of personalities and institutions—Irving's "The Broken Heart," Longfellow's "Père la Chaise"—there have been incisive, analytical, clearly cut special studies, like Woodrow Wilson's Mere Literature and Other Essays; instead of the delightful, discursive personal tattle of a Charles Lamb and a Dr. Holmes there has been the colorless editorial essay, all force and facts, or the undistinctive, business-like special article, prosiest of all prose.
The transition figure in the history of the American essay was Charles Dudley Warner, the last of the contemplative Sketch Book essayists, and, with Higginson, Burroughs, Maurice Thompson, and others, a leading influence in the bringing in of the new freshness and naturalness and journalistic abandon that gave character to the prose of the later period. He was a New Englander, one of that small belated group born in the twenties—Mitchell, Hale, Higginson, Norton, for example—that found itself in a Janus-like position between the old school of Emerson and Longfellow and the new school of non-New Englanders—Harte, Hay, Howells, Mark Twain. Warner was peculiarly a transition figure. He could collaborate with Mark Twain on that most distinctively latter-day novel The Gilded Age, and be classed by his generation with the humorists of the Burdette, Josh Billings group, yet at the death of George William Curtis he could be chosen as without question the only logical heir to the Editor's Easy Chair department of Harper's Magazine.
Warner was born in 1829, the birth year of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and his birthplace was a farm in western Massachusetts, where his ancestors for generations had been sturdy Puritan yeomen. The atmosphere of this home and the round of its life he has described with autobiographic pen in Being a Boy, the most valuable of all his studies. Concerning the rest of his life one needs only to record that he was graduated from Hamilton College in 1851 and from the law department of the University of Pennsylvania in 1857, and that after four years of legal practice in Chicago he was invited by his classmate, Senator J. R. Hawley, to remove to Hartford, Connecticut, to become associate editor of the paper that was soon merged with the Hartford Courant. To this paper either as its editor or as a contributor he gave the best years of his life. He used his vacations for foreign travel, at one time spending a year and a half abroad, and in his later years he saw much of his own land, but always he traveled pen in hand, ready to embody every observation and sentiment in a letter for the readers at home. Travel letters of the older type they were, such as Taylor wrote home from Germany and Curtis sent from the Nile and the Levant, gently sentimental, humorous in a pervasive way, perfectly natural, unconscious of style.
Warner was forty and a confirmed journalist before he published anything in book form, and even this first volume was not written with book intent. He had contributed a rambling series of papers to the Courant, a sort of humorous echo of Greeley's What I Know about Farming, careless, newspapery, funny in a chuckling sort of way, and perfectly unconventional and free from effort. Naturalness was its main charm. The period was ready for out-of-doors themes simply presented, and it found an enthusiastic circle of readers who demanded its publication in book form. Henry Ward Beecher was among them and as an inducement he promised an introductory letter. The result was My Summer in a Garden, 1870, a book that sprang into wide popularity and that undoubtedly was one of the formative influences of the new period. He followed it with Backlog Studies, a series of sketches of the Donald G. Mitchell variety, and then with various travel books like Saunterings and My Winter on the Nile. Late in life he published novels, A Little Journey in the World, The Golden House, and others dealing with phases of life in New York City, and he served as editor of several important series of books, notably The American Men of Letters Series of biographies, to which he himself contributed the life of Irving.
Time enough has elapsed to enable us to consider the work of Warner apart from the charm of his personal presence, and it is seen now that his generation overestimated his work. He was in no sense an inspired soul; he had little to offer that was really new. He wrote like the practical editor of a daily paper, fluently, copiously, unhesitatingly. The style is that of the practised worker who dictates to his stenographer. There is lack of incisiveness, sharpness of outline, cohesion of thought. He lacks revision, flashes of insight, creative moments when the pen is forgotten. He wrote on many topics, but there are no passages that one is compelled to quote. He was a classicist who wrote with perfect coolness, just as others had written before him. His gentle spirit, his sentiment, his Puritan conscience, and a certain serenity of view that whispered of high character and perfect breeding, endeared him to his first readers. But his style of humor belonged only to his own generation—it was not embodied at all in a humorous character; and his ethical teachings seem trite now and conventional. His influence at a critical period of American literature entitles him to serious consideration, but he won for himself no permanent place. He will live longest, perhaps, in a few of his shorter pieces: Being a Boy, "How Spring Came in New England," "A-Hunting the Deer," and "Old Mountain Phelps."
There are those who would rate his novels above his essays, those indeed who would rate them even with the work of Howells. Not many, however. That his fiction has about it a certain power can not be denied. Its author had the journalistic sense of the value of contemporary events, as well as the journalistic faculty for gathering interesting facts. He had, too, what so many novelists lack, the power to trace by almost imperceptible processes the gradual growth of a character. A Little Journey in the World, for instance, is a study of degeneration, skilfully done. A woman who has been reared among humble yet ennobling surroundings removes to New York and marries a very rich man and we are shown how little by little all that is really fine at the heart of her life is eaten away though the surface remains as beautiful as ever. There is a naturalness about it that is charming, and there is evident everywhere an honesty of purpose and a depth of experience that are unusual, but one may not say more. The novels came from the critical impulse rather than from the creative. They are humanitarian documents rather than creations breathing the breath of life. They do not move us. To realize where they fail one has but to compare his chapters in The Gilded Age with Mark Twain's. It is like looking from a still-life picture on a parlor wall out upon an actual steamboat pulling showily up to a Mississippi wharf.