A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

Why are red roses red?
For roses once were white,
Because the loving nightingales
Sang on their thorns all night—
Sang till the blood they shed
Had dyed the roses red.

It was a period when both Europe and America were too much dominated by what Boyesen called "the parlor poet," "who stands aloof from life, retiring into the close-curtained privacy of his study to ponder upon some abstract, bloodless, and sexless theme for the edification of a blasé, over-refined public with nerves that can no longer relish the soul-stirring passions and emotions of a healthy and active humanity." In Europe, the reaction from this type of work came with Millet, the peasant painter of France, with Tolstoy and the Russian realists, with Balzac and Flaubert in France, with Hardy in England, with Ibsen and Björnson in Norway, workers with whom art was life itself.

America especially had been given to softness and sentimentalism. During the mid-century era, the period of Longfellow, the lusty new nation, which was developing a new hope for all mankind, had asked for bread and it had been given all too often "lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon." The oratory had been eloquent, sometimes grandiloquent. The prose, great areas of it, had been affected, embellished with a certain florid youngmanishness, a honey-gathering of phrases even to the point of bad taste, as when Lowell wrote of Milton: "A true Attic bee, he made boot on every lip where there was a taste of truly classic honey." It was the time when ornateness of figure and poeticalness of diction were regarded as essentials of style.

To understand what the Civil War destroyed and what it created, at least in the field of prose style, one should read the two orations delivered at the dedication of the Gettysburg battle-field. Here was the moment of transition between the old American literature and the new. Everett, the eloquent voice of New England, correct, polished, fervid, massing perfect periods to a climax, scholarly, sonorous of diction, studied of movement, finished, left the platform after his long effort, satisfied. The eyes of the few who could judge of oratory as a finished work of art had been upon him and he had stood the test. Then had come for a single moment the Man of the West, the plain man of the people, retiring, ungainly, untrained in the smooth school of art, voicing in simple words a simple message, wrung not from books but from the depths of a soul deeply stirred, and now, fifty years later, the oration of Everett can be found only by reference librarians, while the message of Lincoln is declaimed by every school-boy.

The half-century since the war has stood for the rise of nationalism and of populism, not in the narrower political meanings of these words, but in the generic sense. The older group of writers had been narrowly provincial. Hawthorne wrote to Bridge shortly before the war: "At present we have no country.... The States are too various and too extended to form really one country. New England is really as large a lump of earth as my heart can take in."[9] The war shook America awake, it destroyed sectionalism, and revealed the nation to itself. It was satisfied no longer with theatrical effects without real feeling. After the tremendous reality of the war, it demanded genuineness and the truth of life. A new spirit—social, dramatic, intense—took the place of the old dreaming and sentiment and sadness. The people had awakened. The intellectual life of the nation no longer was to be in the hands of the aristocratic, scholarly few. Even while the war was in progress a bill had passed Congress appropriating vast areas of the public lands for the establishment in every State of a college for the people "to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life," and it is significant that Lincoln, the first great President of the people, signed the bill.

IV

The chief output of the new era was in the form of realistic fiction. America, shaken from narrow sectionalism and contemplation of Europe, woke up and discovered America. In a kind of astonishment she wandered from section to section of her own land, discovering everywhere peoples and manners and languages that were as strange to her even as foreign lands. Mark Twain and Harte and Miller opened to view the wild regions and wilder society of early California and the Sierra Nevadas; Eggleston pictured the primitive settlements of Indiana; Cable told the romance of the Creoles and of the picturesque descendants of the Acadians on the bayous of Louisiana; Page and Harris and F.H. Smith and others caught a vision of the romance of the old South; Allen told of Kentucky life; Miss French of the dwellers in the canebrakes of Arkansas; and Miss Murfree of a strange people in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. In twenty years every isolated neighborhood in America had had its chronicler and photographer.

The spirit of the New America was realistic. There had been dreaming and moonlight and mystery enough; now it wanted concrete reality. "Give us the people as they actually are. Give us their talk as they actually talk it," and the result was the age of dialect—dialect poetry, dialect fiction, dialect even to coarseness and profanity. The old school in the East stood aghast before what they termed this "Neo-Americanism," this coarse "new literature of the people." Holland in 1872 found "Truthful James" "deadly wearisome." He hoped that the poet had "found, as his readers have, sufficient amusement in the 'Heathen Chinee' and the 'Society upon the Stanislaus' and is ready for more serious work." From this wearisome stuff he then turned to review in highest terms Stoddard's Book of the East, a land which Stoddard had never visited save in dreams.

The reviewer of Maurice Thompson's Hoosier Mosaics four years later speaks of the author as a promising acquisition to "the invading Goths from over the mountains." Stedman viewed the new tide with depression of soul. In a letter to Taylor in 1873 he says:

Lars is a poem that will last, though not in the wretched, immediate fashion of this demoralized American period. Cultured as are Hay and Harte, they are almost equally responsible with "Josh Billings" and the Danbury News man for the present horrible degeneracy of the public taste—that is, the taste of the present generation of book-buyers.

I feel that this is not the complaint of a superannuated Roger de Coverley nor Colonel Newcome, for I am in the prime and vigor of active, noonday life, and at work right here in the metropolis. It is a clear-headed, wide-awake statement of a disgraceful fact. With it all I acknowledge, the demand for good books also increases and such works as Paine's Septembre, etc., have a large standard sale. But in poetry readers have tired of the past and don't see clearly how to shape a future; and so content themselves with going to some "Cave" or "Hole in the Wall" and applauding slang and nonsense, spiced with smut and profanity.[10]