S. Weir Mitchell.—Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell (born in 1830) is a distinguished physician of many-sided fame. A native of Virginia, he studied at the University of Pennsylvania and the Jefferson Medical College, from which he was graduated in 1850. He began writing fiction during the Civil War, and in July, 1866, contributed to The Atlantic a remarkable story, “The Case of George Dedlow.” But it was not until about 1880 that he began to devote himself more seriously to literature. He has written “Hephzibah Guinness” (1880), three stories of Quaker life in Philadelphia; “In War Time” (1885); “Roland Blake” (1886), the earlier part of which deals with the Civil War; “Far in the Forest” (1889), a story of character influence, the scene of which takes place in the forest of Pennsylvania before the Revolutionary War; “Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker” (1897), a story of Philadelphia during the War of Independence, which ranks among the few great American novels; “The Adventures of François” (1898), a romance of the French Revolution, the hero being a light-hearted little waif who has some strange adventures; “The Autobiography of a Quack” (1900), a study of the mind of a professional medical knave; “Constance Trescot” (1905), a study of an unusual character, skilfully handled, the scene being Paris in the sixties; and “A Diplomatic Adventure” (1906). Dr. Mitchell’s interest in problems of abnormal psychology has led him to treat some themes which in the hands of any but a born story-teller would have resulted in merely sensational novels. His stories all show keen powers of analysis and character-drawing and a kindly and wholesome optimism.
Beecher and Higginson.—Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87), amid the many activities of a busy clerical and journalistic life, found time to write one novel, “Norwood, or Village Life in New England” (1867), in which occur descriptive and narrative passages rich in insight and humour. There is only a slight plot; the movement is leisurely; we are chiefly interested in the characters, who include the usual personages to be found in a village and some curious and amusing people as well. The book is partly autobiographical, with a vein of romance running through it. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (born in 1823) is chiefly known as an essayist, but wrote one capital story, “Malbone, an Oldport Romance” (1869), which deserves wider reading as a subtle study of temperament; the scene is obviously Newport, Rhode Island. It “is largely a transcript from actual life, the chief character being drawn from the same friend of Higginson, William Hurlbert, who figures as Densdreth in Winthrop’s ‘Cecil Dreeme.’”[15] In “Madame Delia’s Expectations” (The Atlantic, January, 1871, reprinted in “Oldport Days,” 1873), Colonel Higginson showed that he could tell a short story well.
Mark Twain.—The literary productions of Mr. Clemens will be recorded elsewhere; here a few words may be said of his place as a writer of fiction. In technique, it cannot be maintained that he stands high; his narrative wanders whither it listeth, blameless of compact construction or climax; his style is not free from faults. Yet in spite of these defects his name has become “a household word in all places where the English language is spoken, and in many where it is not.” He has created two characters—Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn—who will live long as humorously conceived but true American boys. Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Connecticut Yankee may fade into oblivion, but it seems unlikely that the heroes of Mark Twain’s most typical books will soon be allowed to withdraw from our group of favourites. Moreover, Mr. Clemens has enshrined the Mississippi River of his youth in a kind of homely, virile prose-poetry; he has recorded, in narrative which Mr. Thompson rightly calls “firm and vigorous,” the impression which the great river made upon his youthful mind. Nowhere else shall we find such descriptions of Mississippi River life in the fifties. Artistically defective his work is indeed; but to it cannot be denied the qualities of eloquence, naturalness, and sincerity. The work, like the man, is genuine.
Bret Harte.—The stirring, primitive, lawless life of early California found its painter in Francis Bret Harte, who early dropped his first name from his literary signature. He was a native of Albany, New York (1839), his ancestors being English, German, and Hebrew. His father, a teacher of Greek, died when the son was but a child. Receiving only a common-school education, Harte went with his family in 1854 to California, which for five years had been the Mecca of the gold-hunter and the gambler. At first he tried teaching and mining, gaining from either business little more than experience, of which he was to make good use in later years. In 1857 he became a compositor for the San Francisco Golden Era. Some of his unsigned sketches attracted the notice of the editor, who ordered him to exchange his composing-stick for a writer’s desk in the office. He later joined the staff of The Californian, to which he contributed the clever parodies on contemporary writers of fiction later published (1867) as “Condensed Novels.” From 1864 till 1870, he was secretary of the United States Branch Mint; during this time he wrote much of his best poetry. When The Overland Monthly was projected in 1868, no other name than Harte’s was considered for the editorship. Mr. Noah Brooks has told how he and Harte agreed to write each a short story for the first number, and how Harte with his usual fastidiousness about words was unable to finish his in time. When it did appear, however, “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and the story which followed it, “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” made Harte famous; the latter story is generally considered the most perfect of his works. In 1870, Mr. Harte was appointed professor of recent literature in the University of California; but in the following year he resigned this post, settled in New York, and devoted himself to lecturing and to writing, especially for The Atlantic Monthly. In 1878, he was appointed United States consul at Crefeld, Germany; from 1880 till 1885 he held a similar post at Glasgow. From 1885 until his death, in 1902, Harte lived in London, busily engaged in literary work. His best-known works are “Mrs. Skagg’s Husbands” (1872), “Tales of the Argonauts, and Other Stories” (1875), “Gabriel Conroy,” his only long novel (1876), “Drift from Two Shores” (1878), “The Twins of Table Mountain” (1879), “Flip; and Found at Blazing Star” (1882), “In the Carquinez Woods” (1883), effectively expressing the wonder and mystery of the forest, “On the Frontier” (1884), “Maruja” (1885), a melodramatic novel, “Snow-Bound at Eagle’s” (1886), “A Millionaire of Rough and Ready” (1887), “The Crusade of the Excelsior” (1887), “A Phyllis of the Sierras” (1888), “The Argonauts of North Liberty” (1888), “A Sappho of Green Springs” (1891), “Colonel Starbottle’s Client and Some Other People” (1892), “Sally Dows” (1893), “A Protégée of Jack Hamlin’s” (1894), “The Three Partners” (1897), “Under the Redwoods” (1901). Throughout his life, it will be seen, he continued to write of the old California days, of a régime which has long since passed away, but which he immortalised.
It was Harte’s rare privilege to be the first to work in a mine which has yielded rich ores to many since his day; to write of an elemental, half-savage life in which convention was all but unknown, and the background of which was the rugged simplicity and majesty of the Sierras. “His actual discovery,” says Mr. Logan, “was Nature in an aspect always grand, sometimes awful, at a moment when her primeval solitude was invaded by a host that had cast human relationships behind, and came surging towards an unknown land, all under the sway of a devouring passion—the thirst for gold.” He had his own way (possibly influenced by Dickens) of presenting these rough scenes. He did not idealise this primitive life; he did not as a rule weave it into romance (even Mr. Boyesen cites only “Gabriel Conroy” as a romantic novel); he did not seek to interpret it or to make it symbolise religious or moral ideas. To him it was a very real world; and with true eye and sure touch he sought to portray it impartially, as it was; the reader might draw his own moral—if he happened to need one. It is this unerring instinct of the artist that places Harte in the ranks of the greater story-tellers.
His powers, however, had their limitations. He found himself unable to sustain interest in a long story. “Gabriel Conroy,” though it contains interesting scenes and some of his best characters, is quite without unity—a bundle of impressions in which the same characters are presented hardly twice alike. He has been criticised, too, for endowing otherwise worthless characters with some marked virtue; but perhaps it is only fair to say, with Mr. Logan, that “the virtue is generally a primitive one, and is rarely either inconsistent or improbable.”
In his later years, Harte did little to increase his reputation. The same characters, the same types, appear again and again; but there is no added source of interest, no maturer observation of men and manners. His reputation continues to rest on the score of early tales, terse and full of energy, with which he dazzled and delighted the reading public of the later sixties and the seventies.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward.—It is of course a far cry from Harte to Mrs. Phelps Ward, who came into notice in the East in the same year in which The Overland was started. Mrs. Ward was born at Andover, Massachusetts, and was the daughter of Professor Austin Phelps of Andover Theological Seminary. In 1888 she was married to the Rev. Herbert D. Ward. She is the author of a long list of kindly and readable stories, none of which quite attains to distinction in point of quality, but several of which have been popular and influential. Beginning with “The Gates Ajar” (1868), half novel, half threnody, she continued with “The Silent Partner” (1870), “The Story of Avis” (1877), a favourite with many, “An Old Maid’s Paradise” (1879) and its sequel “Burglars in Paradise” (1886), “Friends, a Duet” (1881), “Doctor Zay” (1882), “Beyond the Gates” (1883), which elaborates the idea of her first story, “A Singular Life” (1894), her best book, and “The Man in the Case” (1906). Her plots, sometimes conventional, are never complicated and are skilfully managed; and her women characters are generally true to life. Of her men, for example Emanuel Bayard, so much cannot be said. She collaborated with her husband in writing two or three novels which were not very successful.
Constance Fenimore Woolson.—A grandniece of Fenimore Cooper, Miss Woolson (1848–94) has taken a place among women novelists scarcely less honourable than that held by her kinsman among American novelists in general. Born at Claremont, New Hampshire, she was educated in Cleveland, Ohio, and at a French school in New York City. After her father’s death in 1869, she spent her summers at Cooperstown, New York, or on the Great Lakes, and her winters in the South. Her first literary effort, “The Happy Valley” (Harper’s, July, 1870) met with immediate approval. From then till her death, she contributed regularly to Harper’s. She published “The Old Stone House” (1873), “Castle Nowhere; Lake Country Sketches” (1875), “Rodman the Keeper; Southern Sketches” (1880), “Anne” (1882), “For the Major” (1883), “East Angels” (1886), her most elaborate and perhaps her best novel, dealing with ante-bellum Georgia coast life, “Jupiter Lights” (1889), and “Horace Chase” (1894), by many preferred to any of her other works. Possessing decided gifts as a novelist, she had a high standard of excellence. Some of her plots are intricate, but all are skilfully worked out. Charles Dudley Warner spoke of her as one of the first in America to bring the short story as a social study to its present degree of excellence. Her best work should have more than a merely ephemeral life.
Henry James, Jr.—A subject of contention among critics, having an ardent if not a large following, but standing for something like caviare to the general public, Henry James is to-day one of the most striking figures among American novelists. He was born in New York, April 15, 1843, the son of Henry James the theologian, and a younger brother of William James the psychologist. His family was Irish on the father’s side and Scotch on the mother’s. He has told us of his early years and of how, while the other boys were at their games, he used to sit on the hearth-rug studying Punch and learning about the life which John Leech’s pictures suggested to him. At eleven he was sent abroad and spent six years in England, France, and Switzerland, deeply interested in European culture, art, and social tradition. On his return, his family made their home at Newport, Rhode Island. In 1862 he entered the Harvard Law School, but found more pleasure in the lectures of James Russell Lowell on literature than in the reading of law. Soon after leaving Cambridge, having succeeded with some early ventures in The Galaxy and other magazines, he began to devote himself wholly to literature. Since 1869 he has lived abroad, chiefly in Paris, London, and Italy. His life has been a quiet, uneventful study of men and women, of books, of places.