A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

I

The earliest group to appear was made up of daughters of the Brahmins—Louisa M. Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Helen Hunt Jackson, and others—transition figures who clung to the old New England tradition, yet were touched by the new forces. The representative figure is Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Daughter and granddaughter of theologians and divinity professors, reared in the atmosphere of the Andover theological seminary of the earlier period, she was a daughter of her generation, a perfect sample of the culminating feminine product of two centuries of New England Puritanism—sensitive to the brink of physical collapse, intellectual, disquieted of soul, ridden of conscience, introspective. We know the type perfectly. Miss Jewett, Mrs. Freeman, Miss Brown, have drawn us scores of these women—the final legatees of Puritanism, daughters of Transcendentalists and abolitionists and religious wranglers.

Literature to this group of women was not only a heritage from the past, from great shadowy masters who were mere names and books, it was a home product in actual process of manufacture about their cradles. The mother of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps—Elizabeth Stuart—had published in 1851 Sunny-Side, a simple story of life in a country parsonage, that had sold one hundred thousand copies in one year. She had followed it with A Peep at Number Five, a book that places her with Mrs. Stowe as a pioneer depicter of New England life, and then, at the very opening of her career, she had died in 1852. "It was impossible to be her daughter and not to write. Rather, I should say, impossible to be their daughter and not to have something to say, and a pen to say it."[104] The daughter was publishing at thirteen; at nineteen she was the author of twelve Sunday-school books;[104] at twenty-four she had issued The Gates Ajar, which was to go through twenty editions the first year and to be translated into the principal European languages.

Gates Ajar is a significant book, significant beyond its real literary merit. It is a small book, an excited, over-intense book, yet as a document in the history of a period and a confession laying bare for an instant a woman's soul it commands attention. It is not a novel; it is a journal intime, an impassioned theological argument, a personal experience written with tears and read with tears by hundreds of thousands. It was the writer herself who had received the telegram telling that a loved one—not a brother as the book infers—had been shot in battle; it was her own life that had almost flickered out as the result of it; and it was she who had tried to square the teachings ingrained into her Puritan intellect with the desolation of her woman's heart.

It was peculiarly a New England book: only a New Englander of the old tradition can understand the full meaning of it, and yet it came at a moment when the whole nation was eager and ready for its message. The war had brought to tens of thousands what it had brought to this New England woman. In every house there was mourning, and the Puritan vision of the after life, unreasonable and lifeless, was inadequate for a nation that had been nourished upon sentimentalism. The heart of the people demanded something warm and sensible and convincing in place of the cold scriptural metaphors and abstractions. The new spirit that had been awakened by the war called for reality and concrete statement everywhere, and it found in the book, which made of heaven another earth—a glorified New England perhaps—with occupation and joys and friendships unchanged, a revelation with which it was in full accord. It brought comfort, for in every line of it was the intensity of conviction, of actual experience. It quivered with sympathy, it breathed reality from every page, and it seemed to break down the barriers until the two worlds were so near together that one might hold his breath to listen. The book, while it undoubtedly helped to prolong the sentimental era in America, nevertheless must be counted among the forces that brought to the new national period its fuller measure of toleration, its demand for reality, its wider sympathy.

All the author's later books bear the same marks of intensity, of subjectivity, of purpose: all of them are outpourings of herself. She is a special pleader shrilling against abuses, as in Loveliness, which excoriates vivisection, arguing for causes as in The Story of Avis and Doctor Zay, which take high ground concerning women, or preaching sermons as in A Singular Life, a vision of the ideal pastor and his church. The accumulated Puritanism within her gave to all her work dramatic tension. It is impossible to read her with calmness: one is shocked and grieved and harrowed; one is urged on every page to think, to feel, to rush forth and right some wrong, to condemn some evil or champion some cause.

Her world was largely a subjective one; to write she must be touched strongly on the side of her sympathy, she must have brought vividly into her vision some concrete case. Before she could write "The Tenth of January"—Atlantic, 1868—she must spend a month in the atmosphere of the tragedy, not to collect realistic details, but to feel for herself the horror that she would impart. Her aim was sentimental: the whole story centers about the fact that while the ruins of the fallen mill were burning there floated out of the flames the voices of imprisoned girls singing "Shall We Gather at the River?" In its fundamentals her work, all of it, is autobiographic. Womanlike, she denied the fact—"If there be one thing among the possibilities to which a truly civilized career is liable, more than another objectionable to the writer of these words, the creation of autobiography has long been that one,"[105] and yet her books, all of them, have been chapters out of her own spiritual life. She has felt rather than seen, she has pleaded rather than created. Rather than present a rounded picture of the life objectively about her, she has given analyses of her own New England soul.

She yielded, at last, in some degree, to the later tendencies of American literature, and drew with realistic faithfulness characters and characteristics in the little New England world that was hers—A Madonna of the Tubs, The Supply at St. Agatha's, Jack, the Fisherman, and a few others, yet even these are something more than stories, something more than pictures and interpretations. In Jack, the Fisherman, for instance, the temperance lesson stands out as sharply as if she had taken a text. The artist within her was dominated ever by the preacher; the novelist by the Puritan.