Read and discuss his utterances on poetry and the poet, noting especially “The Song of the Banner at Daybreak” and “As I sat by Blue Ontario’s Shore.”

Read and discuss Whitman’s utterances on war and nationalism.

Read for an estimate of his feeling for the beauties of nature.

CHAPTER XXV
THE WEST AND MARK TWAIN

There is a valid parallel between the beginnings of American literature and the early stages of its development in the West, for in both instances it followed on the wave of pioneer settlement. The earliest writers came from the East and were only temporary sojourners in the new country, Bret Harte and Mark Twain corresponding in different degrees to colonists like John Smith and Nathaniel Ward. A more permanent allegiance developed in a second group who lived out their lives in the land of their adoption, such, for example, as Joaquin Miller and Increase Mather. And the final stage is fulfilled by those whose whole lives belonged to the maturing frontier, like most of the second generation. The parallel exists too in the fact that the early authors wrote usually with one eye on the older community, eager for approval and half resentful of criticism—an attitude of West toward East which still survives in the timider element along the chain from London to New York to Chicago to San Francisco to Honolulu. The obvious contrasts between the motives for settlement, the character of the settlers, and the nature of their writings only serve to emphasize the underlying similarities. Manners change, but human nature changes so much more slowly that it seems almost a constant.

Bret Harte (1839–1902) is the outstanding writer who lived for a while in the far West, turned it to literary account, failed in any deep sense either to sympathize with its spirit or to represent it, and left it permanently and with apparent relief. He was an Eastern town-bred boy of cultured parentage who aspired to become a poet. At eighteen he went to California where, before he was twenty-one, he saw life as tutor, express messenger, typesetter, teacher, and drug clerk. During half of the next fourteen years in San Francisco he was secretary of the California mint, and during all of them he was primarily interested in authorship. He wrote for periodicals East and West and had a manuscript accepted by the Atlantic as early as 1863. With the founding of the Overland Monthly in 1868 he became editor, and with the publication of “The Luck of Roaring Camp” in the second number he jumped into fabulous popularity. In 1871 he went to New York, and in 1878 he went abroad, where he lived till his death in complete estrangement from all his old associates. These latter facts deserve mention only as they stress the lightness of his contact with the West. He found fresh material there which he used with great narrative adroitness, contributing definitely to the progress of short-story technique. But his tales are deftly melodramatic, built on a sort of paradox formula, and greatly indebted in detail and mannerisms to the example of Charles Dickens. Harte was beyond any question a good craftsman; his wares would still find a ready magazine market, for they would be modern in execution, but there is no soul in what he wrote. He was a reporter with a gift for rapid-moving, close-knit narrative. He was greatly interested in facts, but very little concerned with the truth. He wrote some clever stories, but he seems like a trinket shop at the foot of Pike’s Peak as Mark Twain looms above him.

The life of Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835–1910) probably touches American life at more points than that of any other author. The first half has been very definitely written into his books, and the whole has been told with his help in one of the best of American biographies.[34] It involves indirectly his Virginia parentage and the pioneer experiences of his father and mother in the Tennessee mountains; his own residence in the Mississippi valley and on both seacoasts; his activities as printer, river-pilot, journalist, lecturer, and publisher; his friendships with all sorts and conditions of men from California miners to the crowned heads of Europe; the joys and sorrows of a beautiful family life; the making and losing of several fortunes; and an old age crowded with honors and popularity, yet overshadowed by a tragic cloud of doubts and griefs.

His parents, who had been dissatisfied with their attempted settlement in a Tennessee mountain town, left it in 1835 with four children for Florida, Missouri, allured to the move by the optimism of a relative, as it worked on their own pioneer restlessness. The conditions they left are vividly described in the first eleven chapters of “The Gilded Age.” In a little town of twenty-one dwellings the boy was born in the autumn of 1835. When he was four years old the family moved to Hannibal, a river town. Sam Clemens was an irresponsible, dreamy, rather fragile child, a problem to parents and teachers and given to associating with the boys presented in “Tom Sawyer,” the most notable of whom was Tom Blankenship, the original of “Huckleberry Finn.” His father, consistently unsuccessful, was made justice of the peace and finally was elected clerk of the circuit court, only to die in 1847 from exposure in the campaign. For the next ten years young Clemens was engaged in the printing business, first under his brother Orion on a Hannibal journal (see “My First Literary Venture,” in “Sketches, New and Old,” pp. 110–114); then during fifteen months in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, and next in Keokuk, Illinois, and Cincinnati, Ohio.

Finally, in April, 1857, he began to “learn the river” from Horace Bixby, pilot of the Paul Jones. His experience on the river, the basis for “Life on the Mississippi,” was early marked by the tragic destruction of the Pennsylvania, on which his younger brother, Henry, suffered a fearful death, the first of the personal sorrows which were deeply scored into his life. His career as pilot was ended by the closing of river traffic in the spring of 1861, but it gave him, with many other bequests, his pen name, derived from one of the calls used in sounding the depth of the ever-shifting channel. Piloting during war times did not appeal to him. “I am not very anxious to get up into a glass perch and be shot at by either side. I’ll go home and reflect on the matter.” And after reflection he chose the better part of valor and stayed on land. In the next three months there followed his amusing adventures recorded in “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed” (see “The American Claimant,” pp. 243–265); and in July, 1861, he went with his brother Orion to serve with J. W. Nye, territorial governor of Nevada. The life of the next months went into “Roughing It,” first at Carson City, then at Humboldt, until, in August, 1862, he began his journalistic work in California on The Virginia City Enterprise. At twenty-five he had secured his first view of the country from coast to coast and all down the central artery, he had been schooled in the exacting discipline of the printer’s trade (see pp. 47, 48) and in the still more rigorous responsibilities of river piloting, and he had begun to write for a living. Two more steps remained in the growth of his acquaintance with the external world, and these followed after five years of shifting fortunes on California newspapers. The first was his trip to Honolulu as correspondent for the Sacramento Union, on the new steamer Ajax, and the second, in 1867, was his trip to the Holy Land on the steamship Quaker City for the tour which was to be immortalized in “Innocents Abroad,” first as a series of newspaper letters and then in book form.