I
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.