Читать книгу A History of American Literature Since 1870 - Fred Lewis Pattee - Страница 47

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The novels of Eggleston have not the compression, the finish, the finesse of Harte's. Some of his works, notably The Hoosier Schoolmaster, were written at full speed with the press clattering behind the author. Often there is to the style a mawkish Sunday-school juvenile flavor. There is often a lack of art, of distinction, of constructive skill. But there are compensations even for such grave defects. There is a vividness of characterization and of description that can be compared even with that of Dickens; there is the ability to sketch a scene that clings to the memory in all its details. The trial scene in The Graysons is not surpassed for vividness and narrative power in any novel of the period. And, finally, there is a realism in background and atmosphere that makes the novels real sources of history.

The influence of Eggleston's work was enormous. He helped to create a new reading public, a public made up of those who, like himself, had had scruples against novel reading. He was an influence in the creating of a new and healthy realism in America. What Hay was to the new school of local color poets, Eggleston was to the new school of novelists. Harte was a romanticist; Eggleston was a realist. From Harte came the first conception of a new and powerful literature of the West. Eggleston was the directing hand that turned the current of this new literature into the channel of realism.