[CHAPTER XVIII]
THE ESSAYISTS
In forms other than fiction and poetry the period was also voluminous. The greater part of our historical writings has been produced since 1870 and the same is true of our biography. Literary quality, however, has suffered. Emphasis has been placed upon material rather than upon graces of style; upon matter, but little upon manner. Never before have historian and biographer been so tireless in their search for sources: the Battles and Leaders of the Civil War is a veritable library of materials; the Life of Lincoln by Nicolay and Hay contains one million five hundred thousand words. It is as long as Bancroft's whole history of the United States, it is twice as long as Green's History of the English People, and it contains three hundred thousand words more than Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It has been a development from the spirit of the era: the demand for actuality. Never before such eagerness to uncover new facts, to present documents, to be realistically true, but it has been at the expense of literary style. A few books, like General Grant's Memoirs and Captain Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power upon History, have had the power of simplicity, the impelling force that comes from consciousness only of the message to be delivered. But all too often the material has been presented in a colorless, journalistic form that bars it forever from consideration as literature in the higher sense of that term. The most of it, even the life of Lincoln, is to be placed in the same category as scientific writings and all those other prose forms that are concerned only with the presenting of positive knowledge. Parkman seems to have been the last historian who was able to present his material with literary distinction.
The essay has been voluminous all through the period, but it too has changed its tone. More than any other literary form it has been the medium through which we may trace the transition from the old period to the new. American literature had begun with the essay, and we have seen how the form, designated by the name of sketch, grew in the hands of Irving and Hawthorne and Poe into what in the period of the seventies became recognized as a distinct literary form with the name of short story.
The literary essay is a classical form: to flourish, it needs the atmosphere of old culture and established social traditions; it must work in the materials of classic literature; it is leisurely in method, discursive, gently sentimental. It was the dominating form, it will be remembered, in the classical age of Addison, the age of manners and mind. It was peculiarly fitted, too, to be the literary vehicle of the later classical age in America, the Europe-centered period of Irving and Emerson and Willis and Holmes. The early pilgrims to the holy land of the Old World sent back their impressions and dreamings in the form of essays: Longfellow's Outre-Mer, for example, and Willis's Pencillings by the Way. On the same shelf with The Sketch Book belong Willis's Letters from Under a Bridge, Dana's The Idle Man, Donald G. Mitchell's Reveries of a Bachelor, Curtis's Prue and I, and a great mass of similar work, enough indeed to give color and even name to its period. This shelf more than any other marks the extent of England's dominion over the literature of the first three quarters of the nineteenth century: it was the most distinctive product of our classical age. Until America has a rich background of her own with old culture and traditions, with venerable native classics from which to quote, and a long vista of romantic history down which to look, her contemplative and strictly literary essays must necessarily be redolent of the atmosphere of other lands.
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.