Читать книгу A History of American Literature Since 1870 - Fred Lewis Pattee - Страница 11

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The new age was to express itself in prose. The poetry of the earlier period, soft and lilting and romantic, no longer satisfied. It was effeminate in tone and subject, and the new West, virile and awake, defined a poet, as Wordsworth had defined him in 1815, as "a man speaking to men." America, in the sturdy vigor of manhood, wrestling with fierce realities, had passed the age of dreaming. It had now to deal with social problems, with plans on a vast scale for the bettering of human conditions, with the organization of cities and schools and systems of government. It was a busy, headlong, multitudinous age. Poetry, to interest it, must be sharp and incisive and winged with a message. It must be lyrical in length and spirit, and it must ring true. If it deal with social themes it must be perfect in characterization and touched with genuine pathos, like the folk songs of Riley and Drummond, or the vers de société of Bunner and Eugene Field. If it touch national themes, it must be strong and trumpet clear, like the odes of Lowell and Lanier. It must not spring from the far off and the forgot but from the life of the day and the hour, as sprung Whitman's Lincoln elegies, Joaquin Miller's "Columbus," and Stedman's war lyrics. Not many have there been who have brought message and thrill, but there have been enough to save the age from the taunt that it was a period without poets.

In a broad sense, no age has ever had more of poetry, for the message and the vision and thrill, which in older times came through epic and lyric and drama, have in the latter days come in full measure through the prose form which we call the novel. As a form it has been brought to highest perfection. It has been found to have scope enough to exercise the highest powers of a great poet, and allow him to sound all the depths and shallows of human life. It has been the preacher of the age, the theater, the minstrel, and the social student, the prophet and seer and reformer. It has been more than the epic of democracy; it has been horn-book as well and shepherd's calendar. It has been the literary form peculiarly fitted for a restless, observant, scientific age.

The influence of Dickens, who died in 1870, the opening year of the period, cannot be lightly passed over. It had been his task in the middle years of the century to democratise literature, and to create a reading public as Addison had done a century earlier, but Addison's public was London, the London that breakfasted late and went to the coffee house. Dickens created a reading public out of those who had never read books before, and the greater part of it was in America. His social novels with their break from all the conventions of fiction, their bold, free characterization, their dialect and their rollicking humor and their plentiful sentiment, were peculiarly fitted for appreciation in the new after-the-war atmosphere of the new land. Harte freely acknowledged his debt to him and at his death laid a "spray of Western pine" on his grave. The grotesque characters of the Dickens novels were not more grotesque than the actual inhabitants of the wild mining towns of the Sierras or the isolated mountain hamlets of the South, or of many out-of-the-way districts even in New England. The great revival of interest in Dickens brought about by his death precipitated the first wave of local color novels—the earliest work of Harte and Eggleston and Stockton and the author of Cape Cod Folks.

This first wave of Dickens-inspired work, however, soon expended itself, and it was followed by another wave of fiction even more significant. In the first process of rediscovering America, Harte, perhaps, or Clemens, or Cable, stumbled upon a tremendous fact which was destined to add real classics to American literature: America was full of border lands where the old régime had yielded to the new, and where indeed there was a true atmosphere of romance. The result was a type of fiction that was neither romantic nor realistic, but a blending of both methods, a romanticism of atmosphere and a realism of truth to the actual conditions and characters involved.

This condition worked itself out in a literary form that is seen now to be the most distinctive product of the period. The era may as truly be called the era of the short story as the Elizabethan period may be called the era of the drama and the early eighteenth century the era of the prose essay. The local color school which exploited the new-found nooks and corners of the West and South did its work almost wholly by means of this highly wrought and concentrated literary form. Not half a dozen novelists of the period have worked exclusively in the novel and romance forms of the mid-century type. A group of writers, including Harte, Clemens, Cable, Mrs. Cooke, Miss Jewett, Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman, Miss Brown, Miss Murfree, Harris, R. M. Johnston, Page, Stockton, Bierce, Garland, Miss King, Miss French, Miss Woolson, Deming, Bunner, Aldrich, have together created what is perhaps the best body of short stories in any language.

The period at its end tended to become journalistic. The enormous demand for fiction by the magazines and by the more ephemeral journals produced a great mass of hastily written and often ill considered work, but on the whole the literary quality of the fiction of the whole period, especially the short stories, has been high. Never has there been in any era so vast a flood of books and reading, and it may also be said that never before has there been so high an average of literary workmanship.