Читать книгу A History of American Literature Since 1870 - Fred Lewis Pattee - Страница 8

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The chief output of the new era was in the form of realistic fiction. America, shaken from narrow sectionalism and contemplation of Europe, woke up and discovered America. In a kind of astonishment she wandered from section to section of her own land, discovering everywhere peoples and manners and languages that were as strange to her even as foreign lands. Mark Twain and Harte and Miller opened to view the wild regions and wilder society of early California and the Sierra Nevadas; Eggleston pictured the primitive settlements of Indiana; Cable told the romance of the Creoles and of the picturesque descendants of the Acadians on the bayous of Louisiana; Page and Harris and F.H. Smith and others caught a vision of the romance of the old South; Allen told of Kentucky life; Miss French of the dwellers in the canebrakes of Arkansas; and Miss Murfree of a strange people in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. In twenty years every isolated neighborhood in America had had its chronicler and photographer.

The spirit of the New America was realistic. There had been dreaming and moonlight and mystery enough; now it wanted concrete reality. "Give us the people as they actually are. Give us their talk as they actually talk it," and the result was the age of dialect—dialect poetry, dialect fiction, dialect even to coarseness and profanity. The old school in the East stood aghast before what they termed this "Neo-Americanism," this coarse "new literature of the people." Holland in 1872 found "Truthful James" "deadly wearisome." He hoped that the poet had "found, as his readers have, sufficient amusement in the 'Heathen Chinee' and the 'Society upon the Stanislaus' and is ready for more serious work." From this wearisome stuff he then turned to review in highest terms Stoddard's Book of the East, a land which Stoddard had never visited save in dreams.

The reviewer of Maurice Thompson's Hoosier Mosaics four years later speaks of the author as a promising acquisition to "the invading Goths from over the mountains." Stedman viewed the new tide with depression of soul. In a letter to Taylor in 1873 he says:

Lars is a poem that will last, though not in the wretched, immediate fashion of this demoralized American period. Cultured as are Hay and Harte, they are almost equally responsible with "Josh Billings" and the Danbury News man for the present horrible degeneracy of the public taste—that is, the taste of the present generation of book-buyers.

I feel that this is not the complaint of a superannuated Roger de Coverley nor Colonel Newcome, for I am in the prime and vigor of active, noonday life, and at work right here in the metropolis. It is a clear-headed, wide-awake statement of a disgraceful fact. With it all I acknowledge, the demand for good books also increases and such works as Paine's Septembre, etc., have a large standard sale. But in poetry readers have tired of the past and don't see clearly how to shape a future; and so content themselves with going to some "Cave" or "Hole in the Wall" and applauding slang and nonsense, spiced with smut and profanity.[10]

This is an extreme statement of the conditions, but it was written by the most alert and clear-eyed critic of the period, one who, even while he deplored the conditions, was wise enough to recognize the strength of the movement and to ally himself with it. "Get hold of a dramatic American theme," he counsels Taylor, "merely for policy's sake. The people want Neo-Americanism; we must adopt their system and elevate it." Wise advice indeed, but Taylor had his own ideals. After the failure of The Masque of the Gods he wrote Aldrich: "If this public won't accept my better work, I must wait till a new one grows up. … I will go on trying to do intrinsically good things, and will not yield a hair's breadth for the sake of conciliating an ignorant public."[11]