Читать книгу A History of American Literature Since 1870 - Fred Lewis Pattee - Страница 43

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But even though the Pike County Ballads were not the first in the field, even though they were suggested by Harte's work, they were none the less valuable and influential. Hay wrote them from full experience. They rang true at every point as Harte's sometimes did not. Their author had lived from his third until his thirteenth year in full view of the Mississippi River; like Mark Twain he had played about the steamboat wharf, picking up the river slang and hearing the rude stories of the pilots and the deck hands. Warsaw, moreover, was on the trail of the Western immigration, a place where all the border types might be studied. Later, in Pittsfield, the county seat of Pike County, he saw the Pike at home untouched by contact with others—the Golyers, the Frys, the Shelbys, and all the other drinkers of "whisky-skins."

Hay has painted a picture not only of a few highly individualized types; he has drawn as well a background of conditions. He has made permanent one brief phase of middle Western history. It was this element of truth to nature—absolute realism—that gave the poems their vogue and that assured them permanence. Harte's ballads were read as something new and astonishing and theatric; they created a sensation, but they did not grip and convince. Hay's ballads were true to the heart of Western life.

The new literature of the period was influenced more by the Pike County Ballads than by the East and West Poems. The ballads were something new in literature, something certainly not Bostonian, certainly not English—something that could be described only as "Western," fresh, independent, as the Pike himself was new and independent among the types of humanity. John Hay was therefore a pioneer, a creator, a leader. His was one of those rare germinal minds that appear now and then to break into new regions and to scatter seed from which others are to reap the harvest.