A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

Now for the first time the young reporter found himself in a literary atmosphere. Poets and sketch-writers and humorists were everywhere. There was at least one flourishing literary journal, the Golden Era, and its luxuriously appointed office was the literary center of the Pacific Coast. "Joaquin Miller recalls from an old diary, kept by him then, having seen Adah Isaacs Menken, Prentice Mulford, Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mark Twain, Orpheus C. Kerr, Artemus Ward, Gilbert Densmore, W. S. Kendall, and Mrs. Hitchcock assembled there at one time."[31] Charles Henry Webb was just starting a literary weekly, the Californian, and when, a year later, Bret Harte was made its editor, Mark Twain was added to the contributing staff. It was the real beginning of his literary career. He received now helpful criticism. In a letter written in after years to Thomas Bailey Aldrich he says:

Bret Harte trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesqueness to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land.[32]

To the Californian and the Era he now contributed that series of sketches which later was drawn upon for material for his first published book. But the old restlessness was upon him again. He struck out into the Tuolumne Hills with Jim Gillis as a pocket miner and for months lived as he could in shacks and camps, panning between drenching showers worthless gravel, expecting every moment to find gold. He found no gold, but he found what was infinitely richer. In later years in a letter to Gillis he wrote:

It makes my heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days. Still it shouldn't, for right in the depths of their poverty and their pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming good fortune. You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal sojourn in the rain and mud of Angel's Camp—I mean that day we sat around the tavern and heard that chap tell about the frog and how they filled him with shot. And you remember how we quoted from the yarn and laughed over it out there on the hillside while you and dear old Stoker panned and washed. I jotted the story down in my note-book that day, and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen dollars for it—I was just that blind. But then we were so hard up. I published that story, and it became widely known in America, India, China, England, and the reputation it made for me has paid me thousands and thousands of dollars since.[33]

The publication in New York, May 1, 1867, of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches and the delivery a week later by the author of The Jumping Frog of a lecture on the Sandwich Islands marks the end of the period of preparation in Mark Twain's life. A new American author had arrived.

III

Send this Mississippi pilot, printer, adventurer, miner in rough camps of the Sierras, to Paris, Italy, Constantinople, and the Holy Land, and what will be his impressions? For an answer we must read The Innocents Abroad. It will be no Outre Mer, we are certain of that, and no Pencillings by the Way. Before a line of it was written an atmosphere had been created unique in American literature, for where, save in the California of 1867, was there ever optimism, nay, romanticism, that could reply instantly to the young reporter who asked to be sent on a Don Quixote pilgrimage to Europe and the Orient, "Go. Twelve hundred and fifty dollars will be paid for you before the vessel sails, and your only instructions are that you will continue to write at such times and from such places as you deem proper, and in the same style that heretofore secured you the favor of the readers of the Alta California"?

It was not to be a tour of Europe, as Longfellow and Willis and Taylor had made it, the pilgrimage of a devotee to holy shrines; it was to be a great picnic with sixty-seven in the picnic party. Moreover, the recorder of it was bound by his instructions to report it in the style that had won him California fame. It was to be a Western book, written by a Westerner from the Western standpoint, but this does not imply that his Western readers expected an illiterate production full of coarseness and rude wit. California had produced a school of poets and romancers; she had serious literary journals, and she was proud of them. The letters, if California was to set her stamp of approval upon them, must have literary charm; they must have, moreover, freshness and originality; and they must sparkle with that spirit of humor which already had begun to be recognized as a native product.

We open the book and linger a moment over the preface:

Notwithstanding it is only the record of a picnic, it has a purpose, which is, to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him. I make small pretence of showing any one how he ought to look at objects of interest beyond the sea—other books do that, and therefore, even if I were competent to do it, there is no need.

I offer no apologies for any departures from the usual style of travel-writing that may be charged against me—for I think I have seen with impartial eyes, and I am sure I have written at least honestly, whether wisely or not.