Читать книгу A History of American Literature Since 1870 - Fred Lewis Pattee - Страница 10

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The new period began in the early seventies. The years of the war and the years immediately following it were fallow so far as significant literary output was concerned. "Literature is at a standstill in America, paralyzed by the Civil War," wrote Stedman in 1864, and at a later time he added, "For ten years the new generation read nothing but newspapers." The old group was still producing voluminously, but their work was done. They had been borne into an era in which they could have no part, and they contented themselves with reëchoings of the old music and with translations. In 1871 The London School Board Chronicle could declare that, "The most gifted of American singers are not great as creators of home-bred poetry, but as translators," and then add without reservation that the best translations in the English language had been made in America. It was the statement of a literal fact. Within a single period of six years, from 1867 to 1872, there appeared Longfellow's Divina Commedia, C. E. Norton's Vita Nuova, T. W. Parsons' Inferno, Bryant's Iliad and Odyssey, Taylor's Faust and C. P. Cranch's Æneid.

It was the period of swan songs. Emerson's Terminus came in 1866; Last Poems of the Cary sisters, Longfellow's Aftermath and Whittier's Hazel Blossoms appeared in 1874; and Holmes's The Iron Gate was published in 1880. Lowell, the youngest of the group, alone seemed to have been awakened by the war. His real message to America, the national odes and the essays on Democracy which will make his name permanent in literature, came after 1865, and so falls into the new period.

The decade from 1868 is in every respect the most vital and significant one in the history of America. The tremendous strides which were then made in the settlement of the West, the enormous increase of railroads and steamships and telegraphs, the organization of nation-wide corporations like those dealing with petroleum and steel and coal—all these we have already mentioned. America had thrown aside its provincialism and had become a great neighborhood, and in 1876 North, South, East, and West gathered in a great family jubilee. Scribner's Monthly in 1875 commented feelingly upon the fact:

All the West is coming East. … The Southern States will be similarly moved. … There will be a tremendous shaking up of the people, a great going to and fro in the land. … The nation is to be brought together as it has never been brought before during its history. In one hundred years of intense industry and marvelous development we have been so busy that we never have been able to look one another in the face, except four terrible years of Civil War. … This year around the old family altar at Philadelphia we expect to meet and embrace as brothers.[12]

The Centennial quickened in every way the national life. It gave for the first time the feeling of unity, the realization that the vast West, the new South, and the uncouth frontier were a vital part of the family of the States. Lowell, so much of whose early heart and soul had been given to Europe, discovered America in this same Centennial year. In Cincinnati he was profoundly impressed with the "wonderful richness and comfort of the country and with the distinctive Americanism that is molding into one type of feature and habits so many races that had widely diverged from the same original stock. … These immense spaces tremulous with the young grain, trophies of individual, or at any rate unorganized, courage and energy, of the people and not of dynasties, were to me inexpressibly impressive and even touching. … The men who have done and are doing these things know how things should be done. … It was very interesting, also, to meet men from Kansas and Nevada and California, and to see how manly and intelligent they were, and especially what large heads they had. They had not the manners of Vere de Vere, perhaps, but they had an independence and self-respect which are the prime element of fine bearing."[13] A little of a certain Brahmin condescension toward Westerners there may be here, but on the whole it rings true. The East was discovering the West and was respecting it.

And now all of a sudden this Neo-Americanism burst forth into literature. There is a similarity almost startling between the thirties that saw the outburst of the mid-century school and the vital seventies that arose in reaction against it. The first era had started with Emerson's glorification of the American scholar, the second had glorified the man of action. The earlier period was speculative, sermonic, dithyrambic, eloquent; the new America which now arose was cold, dispassionate, scientific, tolerant. Both had arisen in storm and doubt and in protest against the old. Both touched the people, the earlier era through the sentiments, the later through the analytical and the dramatic faculties. In the thirties had arisen Godey's Lady's Book; in the seventies Scribner's Monthly.

So far as literature was concerned the era may be said really to have commenced in 1869 with Innocents Abroad, the first book from which there breathed the new wild spirit of revolt. In 1870 came Harte's Luck of Roaring Camp, thrilling with the new strange life of the gold coast and the Sierra Nevada, and Warner's My Summer in a Garden, a transition book fresh and delightful. Then in 1871 had begun the deluge: Burroughs's Wake-Robin, with its new gospel of nature; Eggleston's Hoosier Schoolmaster, fresh with uncouth humor and the strangeness of the frontier; Harte's East and West Poems; Hay's Pike County Ballads, crude poems from the heart of the people; Howells's first novel, Their Wedding Journey, a careful analysis of actual social conditions; Miller's Songs of the Sierras; Carleton's Poems; King's Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, a book of travel glorifying not Europe but a picturesque section of America; and the completed version of Leland's Hans Breitmann's Ballads, a book which had waited fourteen years for a publisher who had the courage to bring it out. In 1873 came Celia Thaxter's Poems, Aldrich's Marjorie Daw, H. H.'s Saxe Holm Stories, Wallace's Fair God and O'Reilly's Songs of the Southern Seas; in 1875 James's Passionate Pilgrim, Thompson's Hoosier Mosaics, Gilder's The New Day, Lanier's Poems, Catherwood's A Woman in Armor, Woolson's Castle Nowhere and Irwin Russell's first poem in Scribner's; in 1877 Burnett's That Lass o' Lowrie's and Jewett's Deephaven; in 1878 Craddock's The Dancing Party at Harrison's Cove in the Atlantic Monthly, Richard M. Johnston's Life of Stephens; in 1879 Cable's Old Creole Days, Tourgee's Figs and Thistles, Stockton's Rudder Grange, and John Muir's Studies in the Sierras, in Scribner's. All the elements of the new era had appeared before 1880.

The old traditions were breaking. In 1874 the editorial chair of the Atlantic Monthly, the exclusive organ of the old New England régime, was given to a Westerner. In 1873 came the resurgence of Whitman. The earlier school had ignored him, or had tolerated him because of Emerson, but now with the new discovery of America he also was discovered, and hailed as a pioneer. The new school of revolt in England—Rossetti, Swinburne, Symonds—declared him a real voice, free and individual, the voice of all the people. Thoreau also came into his true place. His own generation had misunderstood him, compared him with Emerson, and neglected him. Only two of his books had been published during his lifetime and one of these had sold fewer than three hundred copies. Now he too was discovered. In the words of Burroughs, "His fame has increased steadily since his death in 1862, as it was bound to do. It was little more than in the bud at that time, and its full leaf and flowering are not yet."