A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

With Harte the problem is simpler. He wrote from the first all varieties of humorous verse: broad farce like the "Ballad of the Emeu" and the "California Madrigal"; rollicking parodies like "The Tale of a Pony," "The Willows. After Edgar A. Poe," and "The Lost Tails of Miletus"; extravaganzas like "The Stage-Driver's Story" and "To the Pliocene Skull." His Pike verses are in full accord with the greater part of all he wrote both in verse and prose. They are precisely what we should expect from the author of the California Pike tales. That he was in one small part of his work an echo of Hay is exceedingly unlikely. If the Pike County Ballads were, as Mark Twain averred, first published in "obscure Western backwoods journals" before "The Heathen Chinee" had appeared, the chances that Harte saw them are so small that it is hardly worth taking the time to consider them, especially when it is further averred that they "were not widely copied." At present the advantage is all with Harte; at present he may be hailed as the father of the Pike balladry and so of the realistic school of poetry in America. The question is not closed, however, nor will it be until the letters and journals of John Hay have been finally given to the world.

III

But even though the Pike County Ballads were not the first in the field, even though they were suggested by Harte's work, they were none the less valuable and influential. Hay wrote them from full experience. They rang true at every point as Harte's sometimes did not. Their author had lived from his third until his thirteenth year in full view of the Mississippi River; like Mark Twain he had played about the steamboat wharf, picking up the river slang and hearing the rude stories of the pilots and the deck hands. Warsaw, moreover, was on the trail of the Western immigration, a place where all the border types might be studied. Later, in Pittsfield, the county seat of Pike County, he saw the Pike at home untouched by contact with others—the Golyers, the Frys, the Shelbys, and all the other drinkers of "whisky-skins."

Hay has painted a picture not only of a few highly individualized types; he has drawn as well a background of conditions. He has made permanent one brief phase of middle Western history. It was this element of truth to nature—absolute realism—that gave the poems their vogue and that assured them permanence. Harte's ballads were read as something new and astonishing and theatric; they created a sensation, but they did not grip and convince. Hay's ballads were true to the heart of Western life.

The new literature of the period was influenced more by the Pike County Ballads than by the East and West Poems. The ballads were something new in literature, something certainly not Bostonian, certainly not English—something that could be described only as "Western," fresh, independent, as the Pike himself was new and independent among the types of humanity. John Hay was therefore a pioneer, a creator, a leader. His was one of those rare germinal minds that appear now and then to break into new regions and to scatter seed from which others are to reap the harvest.

IV

In the same remarkable year in which appeared East and West Poems and Pike County Ballads and so many other notable first volumes, there began in Hearth and Home Edward Eggleston's study of early Indiana life, entitled The Hoosier Schoolmaster. Crude as the novel is in its plot and hasty as it is in style and finish, it nevertheless must be numbered as the third leading influence upon the literature of the period.

The extent to which it was influenced by Harte cannot be determined. The brother and biographer of the novelist insists that "the quickening influence that led to the writing of the story" was the reading of Taine's Art in the Netherlands. He further records that his brother one day said to him:

"I am going to write a three-number story founded upon your experiences at Ricker's Ridge, and call it The Hoosier Schoolmaster." Then he set forth his theory of art—that the artist, whether with pen or brush, who would do his best work, must choose his subjects from the life that he knows. He cited the Dutch painters and justified his choice of what seemed an unliterary theme, involving rude characters and a strange dialect perversion, by reference to Lowell's success with The Biglow Papers.[58]