A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

And as the shell upon the mountain height
Sings of the sea,
So do I ever, leagues and leagues away,—
So do I ever, wandering where I may,—
Sing, O my home! sing, O my home! of thee.

A lyric worthy of any anthology. Yet one quickly finds that it is not Eugene Field at all. He wrote it deliberately as a hoax, a practical joke on Modjeska, who all the rest of her life was obliged to deny the authorship which Field had cunningly fastened upon her. The case is typical. Like Riley, the man is making copy. He uses pathos and sentiment and the most sacred things as literary capital. One wonders where one can draw the line. Was he really sincere in his child lyrics and his bibliomaniac writings or was he cleverly playing a part?

In criticizing Field one must remember the essential immaturity of the man. His frequent artificiality and his lack of sincerity came from his boyishness and his high spirits. He looked at life from the angle of mischievous boyhood. Moreover, he wrote always at the high tension of the newspaper office, for a thing that had no memory, a column that had but one demand—more! It bred in him what may be denominated, perhaps, the ephemeral habit. He was all his life a man preëminently and predominatingly of the present moment, and thus he stands a type of the literary creator that was to follow him.

For Field more than any other writer of the period illustrates the way the old type of literary scholar was to be modified and changed by the newspaper. Every scrap of Field's voluminous product was written for immediate newspaper consumption. He patronized not at all the literary magazines, he wrote his books not at all with book intent—he made them up from newspaper fragments. He wrote always a timely thing to the people, a thing growing out of the present moment for the people to read, making palatable for them even Horace and the severer classics. He was thus one of the leading forces in what may be called that democratizing of literature for which the period so largely stands.

He has been given a place far beyond his real deserts. The sentiment of "Little Boy Blue" and the other child lyrics, the whimsical fun and high spirits of his comic verse, endeared him to the public that enjoyed Riley. Then his whimsical, Goldsmith-like personality helped his fame, as did also his death, since it followed so quickly his late discovery by the reading public that it gave the impression he had been removed like Keats at the very opening of his career. He must be rated, however, not for what he wrote, though a few pieces, like his child lyrics and his bibliomaniac ballads, will continue long in the anthologies, but for the influence he exerted. He was a pioneer in a peculiar province: he stands for the journalization of literature, a process that, if carried to its logical extreme, will make of the man of letters a mere newspaper reporter.

IV

In his own estimation Field was distinctively a Western poet; he gave to his poetry the name "Western verse"; and he refused the offers of Dana and others because he was not at all in sympathy with the Eastern ideals. To quote his biographer, he felt that Chicago "was as far East as he could make his home without coming within the influence of those social and literary conventions that have squeezed so much of genuine literary flavor out of our literature."[144]

What New York might have made of Field we may learn, perhaps, from the career of Henry Cuyler Bunner, for nearly twenty years the most brilliant poetic wit in the East. He, too, had approached literature from the journalistic entrance. At eighteen he had left school to begin an apprenticeship on the brilliant but short-lived Arcadian, and at twenty-two he was editor of the newly established Puck, a position that he held until his death at forty-one.

No man ever turned off verse and prose with more facility or in greater quantity. "The staff of the paper was very small, and little money could be spent for outside contributions; and there were many weeks when nearly half the whole number was written by Bunner."[145] Like Field, he could write a poem while the office boy, who had brought the order, stood waiting for the copy to carry back with him. For more than ten years he furnished nearly all the humorous verse for the periodical, besides numberless paragraphs, short stories, and editorials. But he was more fastidious than Field, inasmuch as he kept this journalistic material strictly unconnected with his name. It was a thing alone of the editorial office, no more to be mingled with his more literary product than Charles Lamb's India office books were to be brought into his Elia essays. The greater number of those who laughed over the verses of the whimsical "V. Hugo Dusenberry, professional poet," never once dreamed that he was H. C. Bunner, author of the exquisite lyrics in Airs from Arcady and Rowen, and the carefully wrought stories—French in their atmosphere and their artistic finish—Short Sixes and Love in Old Cloathes. The skilful parodies and timely renderings, the quips and puns—all the voluminous mélange, indeed, of the poetic Yorick—lie buried now in the files of Puck. Their creator refused to republish them, and we to-day can but yield to his wish and judge him only by that which he himself selected for permanence.

Judged by this, Bunner undoubtedly is our chief writer of vers de société, our laureate of the trivial. He is restrained, refined, faultless. He is of the artificial world, where fans flutter and dancers glide and youth is perennial. Triolets penciled in the program while the orchestra breathed its melody, epigrams over the tea-cups, conceits for a fan, amours de voyage, lines written on the menu, amoretti, valentines—these are his work, and no one has done them more daintily or with more skill of touch. Trifles they are, to be sure, yet Bunner, like every master of the form, makes of them more than trifles. A hint of tears there may be, the faintest breath of irony, the suspicion, vague as an intuition, of satire or facetiousness or philosophy, the high spirits and the carelessness of youth, yet a flash here and there into the deeps of life as, for instance, in "Betrothed" and "A Poem in the Programme," and "She was a Beauty in the Days when Madison was President."