A Manual of American Literature

by Unknown

Marion Harland.—Marion Harland is the pseudonym under which Mrs. Mary Virginia Terhune (born in 1831), a Virginian of New England ancestry, became known for a number of short stories, novels, and miscellaneous matter. Her fiction is of the romantic type, full of incident, and dealing with brave personages. Some of her stories are “Alone, a Tale of Southern Life and Manners” (1854), “The Hidden Path” (1855), “Moss-Side” (1857), “Miriam” (1860), “Nemesis” (1860), “Husks” (1863), “Sunnybank” (1866), “At Last” (1870), “Judith” (1883), and “A Gallant Fight” (1888). She has been editorially connected with a number of juvenile magazines.

Curtis, Willis, Holland.—George William Curtis belongs in the main, of course, with the essayists, where his life will be narrated. He was the author of “Prue and I” (1856), a series of papers written originally for Putnam’s, and together forming a slight story of charming domestic life, in which sentiment, fancy, and a broad optimistic philosophy are pervasive features; and of an unsuccessful novel, “Trumps” (1861), which he began in 1859 as a serial in Harper’s Weekly. In view of the broad experience of its author, his fondness for good novels, his discriminating taste, his facility in expression, this failure of “Trumps” was remarkable. The truth is that Curtis had not rightly estimated his powers. He could not manage an elaborate plot with skill, and he also made the same mistake that marred the work of many writers already noticed—he was too much concerned to point the moral. The general effect, as Mr. Cary points out,[14] is that “Trumps” becomes “a Sunday-school story, written by a man of rare gifts, some of which betray the elusive charm of genius, but still essentially of that class, producing, and apparently intended to produce, the impression that in the end virtue triumphs and vice comes to a miserable end.” In the long run, this is eternally true; but the great artists do not talk about it very much. A similar failure, though for different reasons, was the one novel written by the prolific Nathaniel P. Willis, “Paul Fane, or Parts of a Life Else Untold” (1857), an early and dull experiment in the field of international novels. It was a story whose general distortion of things amounted almost to caricature, since it was based on superficial rather than deep and careful observation of character. In the same year Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819–81) made his début in the field of fiction with “The Bay Path,” a story of the settlement of the Connecticut Valley, filled largely with historical characters, and generally faithful to the manners and thought of the age portrayed. A more ambitious story, “Miss Gilbert’s Career” (1860), is a realistic modern novel in which a characteristic Yankee community is described with great fidelity. His later novels, “Arthur Bonnicastle” (1873), “The Story of Sevenoaks” (1875), and “Nicholas Minturn” (1877), cannot on the whole be said to possess high literary merit; the author was avowedly a moralist, and the best that can be said of them is that they did no harm.

Major John William de Forest.—Major John William de Forest (born in 1826) began writing fiction with a very romantic and very poor novel called “Witching Times,” published serially in Putnam’s, 1856–57, and followed it with a number of works which made him one of the most popular novelists of the seventies—“Seacliff” (1859), “Miss Ravenel’s Conversion” (1867), a book out of his own experience, and his first in realistic vein, “Overland” (1871), “Kate Beaumont” (1872), “Honest John Vane” (1875), “Playing the Mischief” (1875), and many others. Of “Miss Ravenel’s Conversion” Mr. Howells has said: “It was one of the best American novels that I had known, and was of an advanced realism before realism was known by that name.”

Robert Lowell.—In 1858 appeared “The New Priest of Conception Bay,” in which the Rev. Robert Traill Spence Lowell (1816–91), an elder brother of James Russell Lowell, and an Episcopal clergyman, painted in bright and cheerful colours the rural life of Newfoundland with which he became familiar during his sojourn at Bay Roberts in 1843–47. No truer picture of the simple fisher folk of Newfoundland was ever produced—even to a delicate discrimination of dialects. Mr. Lowell’s reputation was not ill sustained by his later though less known books, “Antony Brade” (1874) and “A Story or Two from an Old Dutch Town” (1878), which dealt with the quaint life in the Dutch villages of eastern New York.

Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford.—Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford (born in 1835), a native of Maine who has passed most of her life in Massachusetts, made her reputation with a short story of Parisian life, “In a Cellar,” in The Atlantic in 1859. In “Sir Rohan’s Ghost” (1859), “The Amber Gods” (in The Atlantic, 1860), which gave her a considerable reputation, “Azarian,” (1864), and “A Thief in the Night” (1872), she produced sombre works vividly imaginative and intense in feeling. She was among the first to work the mine of ghostly romance. Her stories have never been very popular; her fondness for the sensuous and the splendid repels many readers. Yet for sheer and overwhelming intensity and for complete success in producing the effect sought, “A Thief in the Night” must be given a high place as a work of art.

Mrs. Miriam Coles Harris.—Mrs. Miriam Coles Harris (born in 1834), who has spent most of her life in and near New York City, wrote a number of stories popular in their day, some of them being still read. “Rutledge” (1860) and “The Sutherlands” (1862) were widely circulated. Her later stories include “A Perfect Adonis” (1875), “Phœbe” (1884), “Missy” (1885), and “An Utter Failure” (1890).

Theodore Winthrop.—Theodore Winthrop (1828–61) deserves more than passing mention, not so much for what he actually accomplished as for what his brief life gave promise of doing. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, a descendant of Governor John Winthrop of Connecticut and at twenty a graduate of Yale, he travelled much abroad, went to Panama in the employment of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, and afterward sojourned in California and Oregon, visiting also the island of Vancouver and some of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s stations. He was admitted to the bar in 1855, but became more fond of politics and literature than of law. For several years, he worked on his novels; but though one was accepted for publication, none appeared in his lifetime. At the opening of the war he went to the front with the Seventh New York Regiment, and fell, bravely fighting, at Great Bethel. His descriptions of his march to Washington, in The Atlantic Monthly, had attracted much attention, and after his death his novels appeared in rapid succession, “Cecil Dreeme” in 1861 and “John Brent” and “Edwin Brothertoft” in 1862. The first is a gruesome tale of life in New York, full of broad sweep and passion, immature but not devoid of power. “John Brent,” the best of his stories, is an imaginative tale into which he wove a record of his Western experiences; it “had the merit, in its day especially, of delineating Western scenes and characters with sympathy and skill, at a time when the West was almost virgin soil to literature.” “Edwin Brothertoft” is a melodramatic story of the American Revolution, at times crude in expression, but strong in plot and in its play of light and shade. Had Winthrop lived, our literature beyond question would have been far richer. He comprehended as did few others the deep throbbing life of America, not only in its externals but in its less obvious features; and abating his youthful “breeziness,” he would doubtless have reproduced some parts of that life on enduring canvas.

Fitz-James O’Brien.—Another brilliant writer whose career was cut short by the war was Fitz-James O’Brien (1828–62), a native of County Limerick, Ireland. He was educated at the University of Dublin; and after spending his inheritance of £8,000 in London, he came to America in 1852 and from that time on devoted himself to literature. In New York he became a prominent figure among the Bohemian set and won distinguished social and literary success. Besides much clever verse, he wrote for the magazines some marvellously ingenious tales, for example “The Diamond Lens,” “The Wondersmith,” “The Golden Ingot,” and “Mother of Pearl.” The reader is occasionally reminded of Poe and Hawthorne, but is more often led to wonder why O’Brien has so long lain in neglect; for some of his stories are powerful in a high degree. Like Winthrop, O’Brien in 1861 became a soldier in the Seventh New York Regiment and went to the front. On February 26, 1862 he was severely wounded in a skirmish, and in April he died. Nearly twenty years later, his friend William Winter edited “The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien” (1881).

The Civil War.—It is not surprising that the Civil War partially, at least, dried up the springs of literature and art in America. It was an epoch of concentration, of action; men had little time for reading novels or writing them; the newspaper any day might chronicle as sublimely heroic or as pathetic events as could be found in fiction. Comparatively few novels of distinction were written, therefore, during the war and the two or three years following it, the Reconstruction period. Some worthy novels which appeared in those years, for example Mrs. Stoddard’s “Morgesons,” failed of an appreciative audience.