Читать книгу A History of American Literature Since 1870 - Fred Lewis Pattee - Страница 40

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The new era of vulgarity in literature, complained of by Stedman, came as a revolt against mid-century tendencies. The movement was not confined to America. In the early seventies, as we have seen, Millet and his Breton peasants for a time took possession of French art; Hardy with his Wessex natives caught the ear of England; Björnson made the discovery that in the Scandinavian peasant lay the only survival of the old Norse spirit; and the Russians Tourgenieff and Tolstoy cast aside the old mythology and told with minuteness the life of the peasant and the serf. Everywhere there was a swing toward the wild and unconventional, even toward the coarse and repulsive. The effeminacy of early Tennysonianism, the cloying sweetness of the mid-century annual, Keatsism, Hyperionism, Heineism, had culminated in reaction. There was a craving for the acrid tang of uncultivated things in borderlands and fields unsown.

In America had sprung up a group of humorists who had filled the newspapers and magazines of the era with that masculine laughter which was echoing along the Mississippi and the Ohio and the gold camps of the Sierras. They were pioneers; they were looking for incongruities and exaggerations, and quite by accident they discovered a new American type, the Pike—strange creature to inspire a new literature.