[Illustration: HARRIET BEECHER STOWE]
[Sidenote: TALES OF THE SEA]
The mid-century produced some very good sea stories, and in these we see the influence of Cooper, who was the first to use the ocean successfully as a scene of romantic interest. Dana's Two Years before the Mast (1840) was immensely popular when our fathers were boys. It contained, moreover, such realistic pictures of sailor life that it was studied by aspirants for the British and American navies in the days when the flag rippled proudly over the beautiful old sailing ships. This excellent book is largely a record of personal experience; but in the tales of Herman Melville (1819-1891) we have the added elements of imagination and adventure. Typee, White Jacket, Moby Dick,—these are capital tales of the deep, the last-named especially.
Typee (a story well known to Stevenson, evidently) is remarkable for its graphic pictures of sailor life afloat and ashore in the Marquesas Islands, a new field in those days. The narrative is continued in White Jacket, which tells of the return from the South Pacific aboard a man-of-war. In Moby Dick we have the real experience of a sailorman and whaler (Melville himself) and the fictitious wanderings of a stout captain, a primeval kind of person, who is at times an interesting lunatic and again a ranting philosopher. In the latter we have an echo of Carlyle, who was making a stir in America in 1850, and who affected Melville so strongly that the latter soon lost his bluff, hearty, sailor fashion of writing, which everybody liked, and assumed a crotchety style that nobody cared to read.
[Sidenote: FROM ROMANCE TO REALISM]
A few other novels of the period are interesting as showing the sudden change from romance to realism, a change for which the war was partly responsible, and which will be examined more closely in the following chapter. John Esten Cooke (1830-1886) may serve as a concrete example of the two types of fiction. In his earlier romances, notably in Leather Stocking and Silk and The Virginia Comedians (1854), he aimed to do for the Cavalier society of the South what Hawthorne was doing for the old Puritan régime in New England; but his later stories, such as Surrey of Eagle's Nest, are chiefly notable for their realistic pictures of the great war.
[Illustration: JOHN ESTEN COOKE]
The change from romance to realism is more openly apparent in Theodore Winthrop and Edward Eggleston, whose novels deal frankly with pioneers of the Middle West; not such pioneers as Cooper had imagined in The Prairie, but such plain men and women as one might meet anywhere beyond the Alleghenies in 1850. Winthrop's John Brent (1862) and Eggleston's The Hoosier Schoolmaster and The Circuit Rider (1874) are so true to a real phase of American life that a thoughtful reader must wonder why they are not better known. They are certainly refreshing to one who tires of our present so-called realism with its abnormal or degenerate characters.
More widely read than any of the novelists just mentioned are certain others who appeared in answer to the increasing demand of young people for a good story. It is doubtful if any American writer great or small has given more pleasure to young readers than Louisa M. Alcott with her Little Women (1868) and other stories for girls, or John T. Trowbridge, author of Cudjo's Cave, Jack Hazard, A Chance for Himself and several other juveniles that once numbered their boy readers by tens of thousands.
[Illustration: LOUISA M. ALCOTT]