A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

Time enough has elapsed to enable us to consider the work of Warner apart from the charm of his personal presence, and it is seen now that his generation overestimated his work. He was in no sense an inspired soul; he had little to offer that was really new. He wrote like the practical editor of a daily paper, fluently, copiously, unhesitatingly. The style is that of the practised worker who dictates to his stenographer. There is lack of incisiveness, sharpness of outline, cohesion of thought. He lacks revision, flashes of insight, creative moments when the pen is forgotten. He wrote on many topics, but there are no passages that one is compelled to quote. He was a classicist who wrote with perfect coolness, just as others had written before him. His gentle spirit, his sentiment, his Puritan conscience, and a certain serenity of view that whispered of high character and perfect breeding, endeared him to his first readers. But his style of humor belonged only to his own generation—it was not embodied at all in a humorous character; and his ethical teachings seem trite now and conventional. His influence at a critical period of American literature entitles him to serious consideration, but he won for himself no permanent place. He will live longest, perhaps, in a few of his shorter pieces: Being a Boy, "How Spring Came in New England," "A-Hunting the Deer," and "Old Mountain Phelps."

There are those who would rate his novels above his essays, those indeed who would rate them even with the work of Howells. Not many, however. That his fiction has about it a certain power can not be denied. Its author had the journalistic sense of the value of contemporary events, as well as the journalistic faculty for gathering interesting facts. He had, too, what so many novelists lack, the power to trace by almost imperceptible processes the gradual growth of a character. A Little Journey in the World, for instance, is a study of degeneration, skilfully done. A woman who has been reared among humble yet ennobling surroundings removes to New York and marries a very rich man and we are shown how little by little all that is really fine at the heart of her life is eaten away though the surface remains as beautiful as ever. There is a naturalness about it that is charming, and there is evident everywhere an honesty of purpose and a depth of experience that are unusual, but one may not say more. The novels came from the critical impulse rather than from the creative. They are humanitarian documents rather than creations breathing the breath of life. They do not move us. To realize where they fail one has but to compare his chapters in The Gilded Age with Mark Twain's. It is like looking from a still-life picture on a parlor wall out upon an actual steamboat pulling showily up to a Mississippi wharf.

II

The opposite of Warner in every respect was Lafcadio Hearn, a figure more picturesque even than Joaquin Miller and more puzzling than Whitman. Instead of serene classicism, genius; instead of Puritan inflexibility and reverence for the respectable, tumultuous wanderings—a man without a country, without a religion, without anything fixed save a restless love of the beautiful—emotional, a bundle of nerves, moody, sudden, the gorgeous Gallic at eternal odds with the florid, beauty-loving Hellenic; a man forever homeless, yet forever pathetic with a nostalgia that finally broke his heart. His personality was a strangely elusive one, and his biography, especially in its earlier years, is as full of romantic conjecture as De Quincey's early life or Byron's. His very name was romantic. His father, member of an ancient Irish family, had accompanied his regiment as surgeon-major into the East, and while stationed at Corfu had become infatuated with a beautiful Grecian girl, Rosa Cerigote, and had married her. Lafcadio they named their son from the island where he was born, his mother's home, Leucadia, in modern Greek Lefcadia, the Ionian island of Sappho. Here he spent his babyhood, how much of it we do not know. Of his father, he has said nothing, and of his mother, only this hint in a later bit of impressionism—elusive, suggestive, characteristic:

I have memory of a place and a magical time, in which the sun and the moon were larger and brighter than now. Whether it was of this life or of some life before, I can not tell, but I know the sky was very much more blue, and nearer to the world—almost as it seems to become above the masts of a steamer steaming into the equatorial summer.... Each day there were new wonders and new pleasures for me, and all that country and time were softly ruled by one who thought only of ways to make me happy.... When day was done and there fell the great hush of the light before moonrise, she would tell me stories that made me tingle from head to foot with pleasure. I have never heard any other stories half so beautiful. And when the pleasure became too great, she would sing a weird little song which always brought sleep. At last there came a parting day; and she wept and told me of a charm she had given that I must never, never lose, because it would keep me young, and give me power to return. But I never returned. And the years went; and one day I knew I had lost the charm, and had become ridiculously old.

Was it the Ægean island of his birth or was it the West Indian island to which his father later was ordered with his regiment? We do not know. We know, however, that the mother lived for a time in Ireland, that another son was born, and then when the elder boy was seven she went away to Smyrna never to return. The rest is conjecture, save for the significant fact that both parents soon afterward married again.

The boy, unwelcome, forlorn, out of sympathy with his surroundings, was sent to live with his aunt in Ireland, then later was put to school in France in preparation for the priesthood. Two years in France, formative years in which he learned among a myriad of other things the fluent use of French, then in 1865 we find him in the Roman Catholic college at Durham, England, where came to him the first great tragedy of his life: an accident at play that left him blinded in one eye and partly blinded in the other. Soon afterwards came the break with his aunt—father and mother had passed out of his life—he refused to become a priest, refused to live longer in any paths save his own, and for the rest of his life he was a wanderer.

There is much in his life and temperament to suggest De Quincey. Hearn, too, for a vague period—two or three years it may have been—wandered in the lower strata of London, half dead with hunger and sickness, aflame with imagination, restless, ambitious. At nineteen we find him in New York, reading in the public library, eagerly, omnivorously, despite his feeble vision, then suddenly, how we do not know, he is in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he makes the whole city gasp with horror at the story he writes of a murder in one of their narrow streets, and secures a position on the Enquirer. In 1877 he has wandered as far south as New Orleans, where for the first time in his life he finds congenial atmosphere and where he supports himself by reporting for the Times-Democrat.

Now it was that his French schooling had its effect. The Creole patois delighted him; he compiled a book of Creole proverbs, Gombo Zhêbes he fantastically called it; and he fed his imagination with the old French past of the city, wandering as Cable had done among its ancient buildings, and, like Cable again, devouring its romantic old chronicles. French novels he read interminably, eagerly, especially the romantics—Hugo, Gautier, Baudelaire. How richly he read them we learn from his letters, most of all from those written in his later life to Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain and preserved in Elizabeth Bisland's third volume. Few have read more discerningly or have voiced their findings more brilliantly. This of Loti:

There is not much heart in Loti, but there is a fine brain.—To me Loti seems for a space to have looked into Nature's whole splendid burning fulgurant soul, and to have written under her very deepest and strongest inspiration. He was young. Then the color and the light faded, and only the worn-out blasé nerves remained; and the poet became—a little morbid modern affected Frenchman.