Famous Authors (Men)

by E. F. Harkins

But did Garland take any part in such experiences? He did, indeed. "I ploughed seventy acres of land when I was ten years old," he says, "and more each year after that. I was so small that I had to reach up to catch hold of the handles of the plough, but I did it. I can remember well how I felt when I started out for my first ploughing in the spring. My muscles were then tender, my feet sank down into the soil, throwing my weight on the ankles and the tendons of the feet. By the end of the first day I was almost ready to drop with pain, but I had to go on. And how my bones did ache the next morning when I was called to go to work! I worked right along, however, going to school in the winter until I was fifteen."

But not all the work was at the plough. With his brother Frank he worked out on the prairies, sometimes herding cattle, sometimes scouting for the neighbors. Indeed, somewhere, we believe, the author has said that almost half his life has been spent in the meadows and on horseback. Many recollections of these days are to be found in "Prairie Songs," which book, in fact, is almost a complete reflection of his boyhood days. And on the prairies, too, he met the grangers,—we use the word in its dignified sense—"those incessant toilers who experience, in all its bareness, the rough and bitter side of the great 'main-travelled road.'"

But the school in which he got the bulk of his education was Cedarville Academy, in Mitchell County, just a little westward from his home. There he made a special study of history and English composition; and there, for the first time in his life, he had the use of a library. He was graduated from the academy at the age of twenty-one. The following two years he spent teaching and lecturing in the East.

The list of the subjects of his lectures show us the breadth of mind which he had reached just as he entered citizenhood; it attests, too, his remarkable intellectual energy and his sympathy with his times. These are some of the literary topics: The Transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau; The Balladists, with readings from Whittier, Longfellow and Holmes; Walt Whitman, the Prophet of the New Age; The Epic of the Age, the Novel, the American Novel; Americanism in the Novel, with reference to William Dean Howells and Henry James; The Pioneers, Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller; Some Representative Names, Joseph Kirkland, E. W. Howe, George W. Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, Miss Murfree, Miss Baylor, Miss Wilkins, Miss Jewett, Rose Terry Cooke; the City in Fiction and the Drama; The Future of Poetry and Fiction; The Art of Edwin Booth; Shakespeare and Browning.

There is something truly Western in the fact that Garland was attracted to Dakota by the land boom of 1883. He soon learned, however, that the boom was not for him; indeed, his only profit from it was experience.

In 1884, consequently, he took up the study of English literature in the Boston Public Library. He had intended to take a course in literature and oratory at some college, preliminary to returning to the West to teach. But it is significant of his mental make-up that he found college methods "too scholastic and too dry," and, in general, opposed to his own convictions. This brings to mind what a man who met him early in the nineties said: "It would be impossible for any conventional critic to kill Mr. Garland with scholarly criticism; he has a buoyancy of indifference to obstacles as free as a cyclone from one of his own Iowa prairies; he would joyously tell the most learned professors of Harvard College that the universities as at present conducted in America are the bulwarks of conservatism and the foes of progress; the people who hear him talk about realism and naturalism and truth usually confess an exhilaration at 'finding someone now-a-days' who believes the things he does believe with most consuming fervor."

Naturally his unconventional method of studying English literature had an unusual result. To quote from remarks that he made in Boston a few years ago: "The whole perspective of English literature changed with me. Chaucer was no longer great simply because someone had said that he was; Crabbe was not dry because some professor of English literature had said so. I went into the philosophic development of English literature from the earliest myth, through the drama—which, by the way, I found to be a continuous chain, and not a miracle—up to distinctively modern literature. Throughout, I gave to my reading a modern man's comments. If I didn't like an author's work I didn't try to like it. So, you see, after all, my work in the library was mainly a process fitting me for teaching."

But all the time, as a matter of fact, he was moving farther away from the teacher's desk. As he studied American literature it occurred to him that the Western side of it might be still further developed. That side certainly lacked anything corresponding to his fresh and deep impressions of it. It was only a step from the thought to the deed.