Читать книгу A History of American Literature Since 1870 - Fred Lewis Pattee - Страница 31

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In his Chronological Outlines of American Literature, Whitcomb mentions only thirteen American novels published during the seven years before 1870: Taylor's Hannah Thurston, John Godfrey's Fortunes, and Story of Kennett; Trowbridge's The Three Scouts; Donald G. Mitchell's Doctor Johns; Holmes's The Guardian Angel; Lanier's Tiger-Lilies, the transition novel of the decade as we shall see later in our study of Lanier; Louisa M. Alcott's Little Women; Beecher's Norwood; Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar; Higginson's Malbone; Aldrich's Story of a Bad Boy; and Mrs. Stowe's Oldtown Folks. To study the list is to realize the condition of American fiction during the sixties. It lacked incisiveness and construction and definite color; it droned and it preached.

Before pronouncing the decade the feeblest period in American fiction since the early twenties of the century, let us examine the most lauded novel written in America between 1860 and 1870, Elsie Venner (1861). Strictly speaking, it is not a novel at all: it is another Autocrat volume, chatty, discursive, brilliant. The Brahmins, sons and grandsons of ministers, might enter the law, medicine, teaching, literature, the lyceum lecture field—they never ceased to preach. New England for two centuries was a vast pulpit and American literature during a whole period was written on sermon paper. "The real aim of the story," the Autocrat naïvely observes in his preface, "was to test the doctrine of 'original sin' and human responsibility." He is in no hurry, however. We read four chapters before we learn even the heroine's name. A novel can reasonably be expected to center about its title character: Elsie Venner speaks seventeen times during the story, and eleven of these utterances are delivered from her death-bed at the close of the book. There is no growth in character, no gradual moving of events to a culmination, no clear picture even of the central figure. Elsie is a mere case: the book, so far as she is concerned, is the record of a clinic. But even the clinic is not suffered to move uninterruptedly. Digressions are as frequent as even in the Autocrat papers. A widow is introduced for no apparent reason, studied for a chapter, and then dropped from the narrative. We never feel like one who has lost himself for a time in the life of another in a new world under new skies; we feel rather like one who is being personally conducted through New England by a skilful guide. Note this partial prospectus of what he has to show: Newburyport, Portsmouth, Portland, caste in New England, rural schools, Northampton and Mt. Holyoke, mountain vegetation, rattlesnakes in Massachusetts, the New England mansion house, school compositions, the old type of meeting house, varieties of school girls, the old-time India merchant, oysters in New England, hired help, colonial chimneys, young ladies' seminaries, the hemlock tree. The topics are interesting ones and they are brilliantly treated, often at length, but in a novel, even one written by Dr. Holmes, such things are "lumber." The novel is typical of the fiction of the era. It is discursive, loosely constructed, vague in its characterization, and lacking in cumulative force.

It is significant that the magazines of the period had very little use for the native product. Between 1864 and 1870, Harper's Magazine alone published no fewer than ten long serials by English novelists: Denis Duval by Thackeray; The Small House at Allington by Trollope; Our Mutual Friend by Dickens; The Unkind Word, Woman's Kingdom, and A Brave Lady by Dinah Mulock Craik; Armadale by Wilkie Collins; My Enemy's Daughter by Justin M'Carthy; Anteros by the Author of Guy Livingstone [G. A. Lawrence]; and Anne Furness by the Author of Mabel's Progress [Mrs. T. A. Trollope]. Even the Atlantic Monthly left its New England group of producers to publish Charles Reade's Griffith Gaunt in twelve instalments. In 1871 Scribner's Monthly began the prospectus of its second volume with this announcement:

Our contributors are among the best who write in the English language. George MacDonald—"the best of living story-writers"—will continue his beautiful story, entitled Wilfred Cumbermede, throughout the volume. We have the refusal of all Hans Christian Andersen's stories at the hand of his best translator, Mr. Horace E. Scudder. We have engaged the pen of Miss Thackeray, now regarded as the finest story-writer among the gifted women of Great Britain—not even excepting George Eliot. Mrs. Oliphant has written especially for us an exquisitely characteristic story, etc.

The feebleness of the period was understood even at the time. Charles Eliot Norton wrote Lowell in 1874: "There is not much in the magazine [Atlantic] that is likely to be read twice save by its writers, and this is what the great public likes. There must be a revival of letters in America, if literature as an art is not to become extinct. You should hear Godkin express himself in private on this topic."[37]

No wonder that the book-reviewer of Harper's Magazine for May, 1870, with nothing better before him than Miss Van Kortland, Anonymous; Hedged In, by Miss Phelps; and Askaros Kassis, by DeLeon, should have begun his review, "We are so weary of depending on England, France, and Germany for fiction, and so hungry for some genuine American romance, that we are not inclined to read very critically the three characteristic American novels which lie on our table." No wonder that when Harte's The Luck of Roaring Camp in the Overland Monthly was read in the Atlantic office, Fields sent by return mail a request "upon the most flattering terms" for another story like it, and that the same mail brought also papers and reviews "welcoming the little foundling of California literature with an enthusiasm that half frightened its author."[38]

The new American fiction began with Bret Harte.