VII

The new age was to express itself in prose. The poetry of the earlier period, soft and lilting and romantic, no longer satisfied. It was effeminate in tone and subject, and the new West, virile and awake, defined a poet, as Wordsworth had defined him in 1815, as "a man speaking to men." America, in the sturdy vigor of manhood, wrestling with fierce realities, had passed the age of dreaming. It had now to deal with social problems, with plans on a vast scale for the bettering of human conditions, with the organization of cities and schools and systems of government. It was a busy, headlong, multitudinous age. Poetry, to interest it, must be sharp and incisive and winged with a message. It must be lyrical in length and spirit, and it must ring true. If it deal with social themes it must be perfect in characterization and touched with genuine pathos, like the folk songs of Riley and Drummond, or the vers de société of Bunner and Eugene Field. If it touch national themes, it must be strong and trumpet clear, like the odes of Lowell and Lanier. It must not spring from the far off and the forgot but from the life of the day and the hour, as sprung Whitman's Lincoln elegies, Joaquin Miller's "Columbus," and Stedman's war lyrics. Not many have there been who have brought message and thrill, but there have been enough to save the age from the taunt that it was a period without poets.

In a broad sense, no age has ever had more of poetry, for the message and the vision and thrill, which in older times came through epic and lyric and drama, have in the latter days come in full measure through the prose form which we call the novel. As a form it has been brought to highest perfection. It has been found to have scope enough to exercise the highest powers of a great poet, and allow him to sound all the depths and shallows of human life. It has been the preacher of the age, the theater, the minstrel, and the social student, the prophet and seer and reformer. It has been more than the epic of democracy; it has been horn-book as well and shepherd's calendar. It has been the literary form peculiarly fitted for a restless, observant, scientific age.

The influence of Dickens, who died in 1870, the opening year of the period, cannot be lightly passed over. It had been his task in the middle years of the century to democratise literature, and to create a reading public as Addison had done a century earlier, but Addison's public was London, the London that breakfasted late and went to the coffee house. Dickens created a reading public out of those who had never read books before, and the greater part of it was in America. His social novels with their break from all the conventions of fiction, their bold, free characterization, their dialect and their rollicking humor and their plentiful sentiment, were peculiarly fitted for appreciation in the new after-the-war atmosphere of the new land. Harte freely acknowledged his debt to him and at his death laid a "spray of Western pine" on his grave. The grotesque characters of the Dickens novels were not more grotesque than the actual inhabitants of the wild mining towns of the Sierras or the isolated mountain hamlets of the South, or of many out-of-the-way districts even in New England. The great revival of interest in Dickens brought about by his death precipitated the first wave of local color novels—the earliest work of Harte and Eggleston and Stockton and the author of Cape Cod Folks.

This first wave of Dickens-inspired work, however, soon expended itself, and it was followed by another wave of fiction even more significant. In the first process of rediscovering America, Harte, perhaps, or Clemens, or Cable, stumbled upon a tremendous fact which was destined to add real classics to American literature: America was full of border lands where the old régime had yielded to the new, and where indeed there was a true atmosphere of romance. The result was a type of fiction that was neither romantic nor realistic, but a blending of both methods, a romanticism of atmosphere and a realism of truth to the actual conditions and characters involved.

This condition worked itself out in a literary form that is seen now to be the most distinctive product of the period. The era may as truly be called the era of the short story as the Elizabethan period may be called the era of the drama and the early eighteenth century the era of the prose essay. The local color school which exploited the new-found nooks and corners of the West and South did its work almost wholly by means of this highly wrought and concentrated literary form. Not half a dozen novelists of the period have worked exclusively in the novel and romance forms of the mid-century type. A group of writers, including Harte, Clemens, Cable, Mrs. Cooke, Miss Jewett, Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman, Miss Brown, Miss Murfree, Harris, R. M. Johnston, Page, Stockton, Bierce, Garland, Miss King, Miss French, Miss Woolson, Deming, Bunner, Aldrich, have together created what is perhaps the best body of short stories in any language.

The period at its end tended to become journalistic. The enormous demand for fiction by the magazines and by the more ephemeral journals produced a great mass of hastily written and often ill considered work, but on the whole the literary quality of the fiction of the whole period, especially the short stories, has been high. Never has there been in any era so vast a flood of books and reading, and it may also be said that never before has there been so high an average of literary workmanship.

[CHAPTER II]
THE LAUGHTER OF THE WEST

American literature from the first has been rich in humor. The incongruities of the new world—the picturesque gathering of peoples like the Puritans, the Indians, the cavaliers, the Dutch, the negroes and the later immigrants; the makeshifts of the frontier, the vastness and the richness of the land, the leveling effects of democracy, the freedom of life, and the independence of spirit—all have tended to produce a laughing people. The first really American book, Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York, was a broadly humorous production. The mid period of the nineteenth century was remarkably rich in humor. One has only to mention Paulding and Holmes and Saxe and Lowell and Seba Smith and B. P. Shillaber. Yet despite these names and dozens of others almost equally deserving, it must be acknowledged that until the Civil War period opened there had been no school of distinctly American humorists, original and nation-wide. The production had been sporadic and provincial, and it had been read by small circles. The most of it could be traced to older prototypes: Hood, Thackeray, Lamb, Douglas Jerrold, Dickens. The humor of America, "new birth of our new soil," had been discovered, but as yet it had had no national recognition and no great representative.

As late as 1866, a reviewer of "Artemus Ward" in the North American Review, published then in Boston, complained that humor in America had been a local product and that it had been largely imitative. It was time, he declared, for a new school of humorists who should be original in their methods and national in their scope. "They must not aim at copying anything; they should take a new form.... Let them seek to embody the wit and humor of all parts of the country, not only of one city where their paper is published; let them force Portland to disgorge her Jack Downings and New York her Orpheus C. Kerrs, for the benefit of all. Let them form a nucleus which will draw to itself all the waggery and wit of America."[14] It was the call of the new national spirit, and as if in reply there arose the new school—uncolleged for the most part, untrained by books, fresh, joyous, extravagant in its bursting young life—the first voice of the new era.

The group was born during the thirties and early forties, that second seedtime of American literature. Their birth dates fall within a period of ten years:

1833.David Ross Locke, "Petroleum V. Nasby."
1834.Charles Farrar Browne, "Artemus Ward."
1834.Charles Henry Webb, "John Paul."
1835.Samuel Langhorne Clemens, "Mark Twain."
1836.Robert Henry Newell, "Orpheus C. Kerr."
1839.Melvin DeLancy Landon, "Eli Perkins."
1841.Thomas Nast.
1841.Charles Heber Clark, "Max Adler."
1841.James Montgomery Bailey, "The Danbury News Man."
1841.Alexander Edwin Sweet.
1842.Charles Bertrand Lewis, "M. Quad."

To the school also belonged several who were born outside of this magic ten years. There were Henry Wheeler Shaw, "Josh Billings," born in 1818; and Charles Henry Smith, "Bill Arp," born in 1823. At least three younger members must not be omitted: Robert Jones Burdette, 1844; Edgar Wilson Nye, "Bill Nye," 1850; and Opie Read, 1852.