Читать книгу A History of American Literature Since 1870 - Fred Lewis Pattee - Страница 9

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The exploiting of new and strange regions, with their rough manners, their coarse humor, and their uncouth dialects, brought to the front the new, hard-fought, and hard-defended literary method called realism. For a generation the word was on every critic's pen both in America and abroad. No two seemed perfectly to agree what the term really meant, or what writers were to be classed as realists and what as romanticists. It is becoming clearer now: it was simply the new, young, vigorous tide which had set in against the decadent, dreamy softness that had ruled the mid years of the century.

The whole history of literature is but the story of an alternating current. A new, young school of innovators arises to declare the old forms lifeless and outworn. Wordsworth at the opening of the nineteenth century had protested against unreality and false sentiment—"a dressy literature, an exaggerated literature" as Bagehot expressed it—and he started the romantic revolt by proposing in his poems "to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men." Revolt always has begun with the cry "back to nature"; it is always the work of young men who have no reverence for the long-standing and the conventional; and it is always looked upon with horror by the older generations. Jeffrey, in reviewing the Lyrical Ballads, said that the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" was "beyond doubt the most illegible and unintelligible part of the publication. We can pretend to give no analysis or explanation of it." At last the revolt triumphs, and as the years go on its ideas in turn are hardened into rules of art. Then suddenly another group of daring young souls arises, and, setting its back upon the old, blazes out a new pathway toward what it considers to be truth and nature and art. This new school of revolt from the old and outworn we call always the new romantic movement. It is only the new generation pressing upon the old, and demanding a fresh statement of life in terms of truth to present conditions.

In America, and indeed in Europe as well, the early seventies called for this new statement of art. No more Hyperions, no more conceits and mere prettinesses, no more fine phrasing, no more castles in Spain, but life real and true, naked in its absolute faithfulness to facts. It was a revolt. If we call the age of Longfellow a romantic period, then this revolt of the seventies was a new romanticism, for romanticism always in broadest sense is a revolution against orthodoxy, against the old which has been so long established that it has lost its first vitality and become an obedience to the letter rather than to the spirit.

The new movement seemed to the Brahmins of the older school a veritable renaissance of vulgarity. Even Lowell, who had written the Biglow Papers, cried out against it. The new literature from the West and the South was the work of what Holmes had called "the homespun class," "the great multitude." It was written, almost all of it, by authors from no college. They had been educated at the printer's case, on the farm, in the mines, and along the frontiers. As compared with the roll of the Brahmins the list is significant: Whitman, Warner, Helen Jackson, Stockton, Shaw, Clemens, Piatt, Thaxter, Howells, Eggleston, Burroughs, F. H. Smith, Hay, Harte, Miller, Cable, Gilder, Allen, Harris, Jewett, Wilkins, Murfree, Riley, Page, Russell. The whole school thrilled with the new life of America, and they wrote often without models save as they took life itself as their model. Coarse and uncouth some parts of their work might be, but teeming it always was with the freshness, the vitality, and the vigor of a new soil and a newly awakened nation.