Chapter IX: Part 9

_Mary Hallock Foote._--Born at Milton-on-the-Hudson, New York, in 1847, Mary Hallock early showed artistic talent and at sixteen began to study design in Cooper Institute, New York City. She was married in 1876 to Arthur D. Foote, a California mining engineer, and travelled extensively in the Southwest. Her varied experiences have been utilised with marked literary skill in a series of stories, the first of which was “The Led Horse Claim” (1883), in which the story of Romeo and Juliet was repeated in a California mining camp, though with a happy ending. “The Chosen Valley” (1892) is a study in contrasts, recounting an episode in the reclaiming by irrigation of the waste lands of the West. In 1894 appeared “Cœur d’Alene,” a love-story with a background in the labour troubles. She has also written “John Bowdoin’s Testimony” (1886), “The Last Assembly Ball” (1889), “In Exile” (1894), and “The Cup of Trembling” (1895). Her latest stories, “The Desert and the Sown” (1902), a study of ideal self-sacrifice, and “A Touch of Sun, and Other Stories” (1903), are hardly up to the level of her earlier work, which, in its vivid representation of wild Western life, entitles her to a place with Bret Harte.

_Wolcott Balestier._--The promise of the too short life of Charles Wolcott Balestier (1861-91) deserves record. He was born at Rochester, New York, studied at Cornell University and the University of Virginia, and became first the editor of _Tid-Bits_ and then the junior partner of Heinemann & Balestier, publishers of _The English Library_, an attempt to popularise British and American books on the Continent. His interest in literature was intense, and that he would have produced stories worth remembering, doubtless in the vein of Mr. Howells, whom he greatly admired, is evidenced by his few published works: “A Patent Philtre” (1884), “A Fair Device” (1884), “A Victorious Defeat” (1886), “A Common Story” (1891), “The Average Woman” (1892), three stories, with a memorial note by Henry James, and “Benefits Forgot” (1891), first published serially in _The Century_. With Mr. Kipling, his brother-in-law, he collaborated in “The Naulahka” (1892).

_Robert Grant._--Born in Boston (1852), Robert Grant graduated from Harvard in 1873 and became Ph.D. in 1876 and LL.B. in 1879. He has followed law and letters side by side. In 1893 he was appointed Judge of the Probate Court and the Court of Insolvency for Suffolk County, Massachusetts. He has written, among other things, “The Confessions of a Frivolous Girl” (1880), “An Average Man” (1884), “The Knave of Hearts” (1886), “The Reflections of a Married Man” (1892), “The Opinions of a Philosopher” (1893), “The Bachelor’s Christmas, and Other Stories” (1895), and “Unleavened Bread” (1900), his best known and most powerful story. Mr. Grant is a trenchant satirist of the foibles of certain aspirants to social prominence. Selma, in “Unleavened Bread,” is a veritable incarnation of ignoble social ambition.

_Henry Harland._--Henry Harland (1861-1905) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and was educated at the College of the City of New York, Harvard, Paris, and Rome. In 1886 he removed to London, where he became well known as the editor of _The Yellow Book_. His earlier stories, including “As It Was Written” (1885), a musician’s story, “Mrs. Peixada” (1886), “The Land of Love” (1887), “My Uncle Florimond” (1888), and others, were published as by “Sidney Luska”; they circulated widely but were later condemned by Harland himself as trashy. He later wrote “Mea Culpa” (1893), “Comedies and Errors” (1898), “The Cardinal’s Snuff-Box” (1900), which scored a decided success, and “My Lady Paramount” (1902). His brilliance and geniality are reflected in his works, but his vein was not an extensive one.

_Thomas Nelson Page._--One of the leading novelists of the South to-day is Thomas Nelson Page. Born in 1853 at Oakland, Virginia, he studied (1869-72) at Washington and Lee University and (1873-74) at the University of Virginia. After practising law for some years, he turned, like many other lawyers, to literature. “Marse Chan” (_The Century_, April, 1884) met with great favour, and was followed by other short stories, which were collected in 1887 under the title “In Ole Virginia.” The life in Virginia before and during the war was further presented in “Two Little Confederates” (1888), “On New Found River” (1891), “Elsket, and Other Stories” (1891), “The Burial of the Guns, and Other Stories” (1894), “Red Rock, a Chronicle of Reconstruction” (1898), “The Old Gentleman of the Black Stock” (1900), and “Gordon Keith” (1903). Mr. Page has a strong affection for the Old South, and vividly and powerfully delineates the life of the aristocracy and the negroes. While sympathetic, his descriptions of the system of slavery are free from bitterness and are entitled to consideration as truthful and convincing. Probably he has never surpassed his earlier short stories, which exhibit most distinctively the charm of his style; but “Red Rock,” at least, has demonstrated his ability to write successfully also on a larger scale.

_Thomas Allibone Janvier._--Thomas A. Janvier (born in 1849), a native of Philadelphia, became a New York journalist and then a writer of stories. He has been especially successful in depicting the Bohemian life of the metropolis. His “Color Studies: Four Stories” (1885), reprinted from _The Century_, narrate the struggles of a painter in New York; though slight, they are realistic and agreeable. Having made an exhaustive study of Mexico, he put his knowledge to good use in “The Aztec Treasure House: a Romance of Contemporaneous Antiquity” (1890), a successful romantic novel dealing with a legend of buried treasure and a story of wholesome flavour and sustained interest. He has also written “Stories of Old New Spain” (1895) and several others.

_Some New England Women._--Here may be grouped several gifted daughters of the Puritans, some of whom deserve more space than can be given them. Mrs. Jane Goodwin Austin (1831-94) wrote several readable historical romances of colonial New England. Among her works are “A Nameless Nobleman” (1881), “Dr. Le Baron and His Daughters” (1890), sequel to the first, “Standish of Standish” (1889), and “David Alden’s Daughter and Other Stories” (1892).

Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke (1827-92), a native of Connecticut, was known as a poet for many years before she began to write short stories. She published the following collections: “Happy Dodd” (1879), “Somebody’s Neighbours” (1881), “Root-Bound” (1885), “The Sphinx’s Children” (1886), and “Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills” (1891). “The Deacon’s Week” (1884) may count as her best story. In all her stories the humours of New England Yankee character are set forth with vigour and relish. She wrote a single novel, “Steadfast, the Story of a Saint and a Sinner” (1889), dealing with early New England church life, and ranking much above the average novel.

Mrs. Annie Trumbull Slosson, likewise of Connecticut, has shown skill in dialect stories, of which “Fishin’ Jimmy” (1889), “Seven Dreamers” (1890), “The Heresy of Mehetabel Clark” (1892), and “Dumb Foxglove, and Other Stories” (1898) may be mentioned. The grotesque elements of New England life especially appeal to her.

Mrs. Clara Louise Burnham (born at Newton, Massachusetts, in 1854) has lived in Chicago since childhood, but is fond of locating her scenes in New England. She has written many stories, among them “No Gentleman” (1881), “A Sane Lunatic” (1882), “Dearly Bought” (1884), “Next Door” (1886), “Young Maids and Old” (1888), “Miss Bagg’s Secretary” (1892), “Dr. Latimer” (1893), “The Wise Woman” (1895), “A West Point Wooing” (1899), and “The Right Princess” (1902).

Alice Brown (born in New Hampshire in 1857), after teaching school for several years, devoted herself to literature, and is now a member of the staff of _The Youth’s Companion_. She has written “Fools of Nature” (1887), “Meadow-Grass” (1895), short tales of New England village life, “The Day of His Youth” (1897), a story of disillusionment, “Tiverton Tales” (1899), “King’s End” (1901), “Margaret Warrener” (1901), “The Mannerings” (1903), and “High Noon” (1904). Her stories are skilfully constructed, and she writes with commendable restraint and dignity.

_Mary E. Wilkins Freeman._--The more sombre and less attractive aspects of New England village and country life have been presented with great success in the numerous stories of Mary E. Wilkins (since 1902 Mrs. Charles M. Freeman). Born at Randolph, Massachusetts, in 1862, she was educated at Mt. Holyoke Seminary, South Hadley, Mass. Her stories include “The Adventures of Ann” (1886), “A Humble Romance” (1887), “A New England Nun, and Other Stories” (1891), “Jane Field” (1892), her first novel, “Pembroke” (1894), generally considered her greatest work, and distinguished for beauty of style and truthful and delicate character-drawing, “Madelon” (1896), “Jerome, a Poor Man” (1897), by some ranked higher than “Pembroke” in that it has a stronger central interest, “Silence and Other Stories” (1898), which includes some of her best work, especially “Evelina’s Garden,” one of her most artistic tales, “The Love of Parson Lord” (1900), “The Heart’s Highway” (1900), a historical romance of Virginia in 1682, “The Portion of Labour” (1901), “Understudies” (1901), “Six Trees” (1903), “The Wind in the Rose Bush” (1903), “The Givers,” eight stories (1904), and several magazine stories. Her place is easily in the first rank of those who have delineated New England life.

_Harold Frederic._--Harold Frederic (1856-98) wrote a number of realistic stories, chiefly of country life in New York. A native of Utica, in that State, he began his career as proof-reader; at twenty-six he was editor of the Albany _Evening Journal_, and in 1884 he took charge of the foreign bureau of the New York _Times_, with headquarters in London. “Seth’s Brother’s Wife” (1887), first published serially in _Scribner’s_, minutely describes the prosaic round of farming life and country journalism and elections. “The Lawton Girl” (1890) gives us the turmoil of a small manufacturing town. “In the Valley” (1890) is a Mohawk Dutchman’s story of the Revolutionary struggle. “The Copperhead, and Other Stories of the North” (1893) and “Marséna, and Other Stories” (1894) are collections of Civil War stories, vigorous and daring. His best stories are “The Damnation of Theron Ware” (1896, published in England as “Illumination”), an absorbing study of the intellectual career of an earnest but narrow young Methodist minister and of the struggle of two religious ideals in his life, and “The Market-Place” (1899), a thoroughgoing study of the London Stock Exchange. His untimely death cut short a career of notable achievement and great promise.

_Archibald Clavering Gunter._--Archibald Clavering Gunter (1847-1907), a native of Liverpool who became a California mining and civil engineer, chemist, and stock-broker, at forty began to write novels which violated most of the literary canons, but which in plot and incident were of absorbing interest. It was his avowed rule to make something happen in every five hundred words. This explains why a million copies of his first novel, “Mr. Barnes of New York” (1887), have been sold. He wrote thirty-nine novels in all, the best of which, in addition to his first, are “Mr. Potter of Texas” (1888), “That Frenchman” (1889), “Jack Curzon” (1899), and “A Manufacturer’s Daughter” (1901). He also became well known as a playwright.

_Octave Thanet._--Octave Thanet is the well known pen name of Alice French (born at Andover, Massachusetts, in 1850), who has achieved enviable success in her short stories of life in Iowa and Arkansas, a field in which she has few rivals. These stories include “Knitters in the Sun” (1887), “Expiation” (1890), vigorous, truly coloured, and accurate in details, “Stories of a Western Town” (1893), Iowa sketches, “The Missionary Sheriff” (1897), and “The Heart of Toil” (1898), full of the pathos of an unequal struggle with economic forces. Miss French writes sympathetically, with her eyes on the men and women who furnish her with characters.

_Margaret Deland._--One of the most popular of living novelists, and justly so, is Mrs. Margaret Deland. Born Margaretta Campbell, in 1857, in Manchester, now a part of Allegheny, Pennsylvania, then a village “of dignified houses, pleasant gardens, and meadows sloping to a picturesque river,” she was left an orphan at three and was cared for by an aunt. At sixteen, like Mrs. Foote, she entered a class in drawing and design in Cooper Institute, New York; she graduated at the head of her class, and won an appointment as instructor in design in the Girls’ Normal College, a post which she filled till 1880. Then she was married to Mr. Lorin F. Deland and went to Boston. Eight years later appeared her first novel, “John Ward, Preacher.” It is the story of the conflict of rigid Calvinism and modern liberalism, and it has been compared with Mrs. Ward’s “Robert Elsmere.” Two love-stories, one of which recalls Mrs. Gaskell’s “Cranford,” relieve the tragic gloom of the narrative. Ashurst is an idealised Manchester. In “Sidney” (1890) the author studies the question of the value of mortal sexual love; the problems of faith and doubt also recur. “The Story of a Child” (1892) delineates an uncontrolled imagination. “Mr. Tommy Dove, and Other Stories” (1893) is a collection including typical humour and pathos. “Philip and His Wife” (1894) has to do with an unhappy marriage. Her recent stories are “The Wisdom of Fools” (1898), “Old Chester Tales” (1899), “Dr. Lavendar’s People” (1904), and “The Awakening of Helena Richie” (1906). Big-hearted, shrewd Dr. Lavendar, who figures in her last two stories, is one of the most lovable characters in American fiction; and her latest books show a distinctly stronger grasp of life and greater narrative power.

_Mrs. Mary Hartwell Catherwood._--Mary Hartwell Catherwood (1847-1902) made a name for herself with some very successful historical romances of the French and Indian Wars and French Canadian and early Illinois life. “The Romance of Dollard” (1889), “The Lady of Fort St. John” (1891), “The White Islander” (1893), and “The Chase of Saint Castin, and Other Stories” (1894) are spirited narratives of battle and siege, of intrigue and jealousy, in which bold and noble characters play their parts well, and which contain vivid descriptions of scenery--in sunshine and storm. Of the early Middle West she wrote “Old Kaskaskia” (1893), “The Spirit of an Illinois Town” (1897), “Little Renault” (1897), “Spanish Peggy” (1899), “The Queen of the Swamp, and Other Plain Americans” (1899), and “Lazarre” (1901).

_Rowland E. Robinson._--The dialect and manners of Vermont are reproduced with remarkable fidelity by Rowland E. Robinson (1833-1900) in “Sam Lovel’s Camps” (1889), “Danvis Folks” (1894), and “Uncle ’Lisha’s Shop” (1897). These stories are among our most valuable transcripts of the life of Northern New England.

_Francis Hopkinson Smith._--F. Hopkinson Smith (born in Baltimore, 1838) had a varied career before he essayed the novel, at fifty-three. He began life as a clerk in some iron works; then, becoming an engineer and contractor, he took to building sea-walls and lighthouses, and afterwards became well known as an artist. In “Colonel Carter of Cartersville” (1891) he drew an alluring picture of the old _régime_ in the South. “A Gentleman Vagabond, and Some Others” (1895) are varied character stories. “Tom Grogan” (1896) and “Caleb West, Master Diver” (1898) draw upon Mr. Smith’s engineering experiences. He has also written “The Other Fellow” (1899), “The Fortunes of Oliver Horn” (1902), “The Under Dog” (1903), “Colonel Carter’s Christmas” (1904), “At Close Range” (1905), and “The Wood Fire in No. 3” (1905). If some of his persons are conventional and indistinct, others stand out as skilfully characterised and permanent figures in his literary gallery.

_James Lane Allen._--James Lane Allen has done for Kentucky what Mr. Page has done for Old Virginia and Miss Murfree for the Tennessee mountaineers. A native of Kentucky (born in 1849), he graduated from Transylvania University, at Lexington, Kentucky, and taught in schools and colleges for some years. Since 1884, however, he has devoted himself to literary work. Besides writing much for magazines he has published “Flute and Violin, and Other Kentucky Tales and Romances” (1891), “The Blue Grass Region, and Other Sketches” (1892), “John Gray” (1893), rewritten and enlarged into “The Choir Invisible” (1897), “A Kentucky Cardinal” (1894) and its sequel “Aftermath” (1895), “Summer in Arcady” (1896), “The Reign of Law” (1900), published in England as “The Increasing Purpose,” and “The Mettle of the Pasture” (1903). A tendency toward didacticism and a lack of spontaneity mar the latest works of Mr. Allen; he is at his best in his earlier works, in which he revels in the beauty of the Blue Grass region and writes in the spirit of a disciple of Thoreau and Audubon. The romanticist in him was gradually transformed into the objective realist. Yet in all his work there are elements of strength and poetic beauty. By a curious coincidence another Kentucky James Lane Allen (born in 1848) a graduate of Bethany College, in which the first Mr. Allen taught, and now a Chicago lawyer, has also written numerous magazine sketches and stories.

_Hamlin Garland._--The grim, dull life of the hard-worked farmer in the Middle West has been effectively recorded by Hamlin Garland. A native of La Crosse, Wisconsin (born in 1860), Mr. Garland saw at close range the life he was to describe, in Iowa, Illinois, and Dakota. His first book was a collection of six realistic stories, “Main-Travelled Roads” (1891), which gave him a reputation, and he has continued to write in similar vein, publishing “Prairie Folks” (1892), “A Little Norsk, or Ol’ Pap’s Flaxen” (1892), “A Spoil of Office” (1892), “Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly” (1895), his best novel, “The Eagle’s Heart” (1900), “Her Mountain Lover” (1901), and “Money Magic” (1907). Mr. Garland has for the most part wisely obeyed his own dictum, to write only of what one knows; and his later work shows a notable increase in vigour and grasp of the story-teller’s art.

_Henry Blake Fuller._--Henry B. Fuller (born in Chicago, 1857) was intended for a mercantile career, but preferred literature. “The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani” (1890), first published anonymously, was praised by Lowell and Norton. In 1892 appeared “The Chatelaine of La Trinité.” In “The Cliff-Dwellers” (1893), he turned from the romantic to a sure realism in a story of Chicago life. “With the Procession” followed in 1895, being in similar vein. These stories show skill in individualisation, intense earnestness, facility, and ability to make an old theme interesting. “His picture,” says Mr. Whibley, “is never overcharged; his draughtsmanship is always sincere.”

_Stephen Crane and Frank Norris._--Stephen Crane (1870-1900), born in Newark, New Jersey, and educated at Lafayette College and Syracuse University, first entered journalism and won some distinction as a war correspondent of the New York _Journal_. His first story, dealing with slum life, was “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets” (1891), which, as Mr. Howells thinks, remains his best work. “The Red Badge of Courage” (1895), a thoroughly realistic study of the mind of a soldier in action at the battle of Chancellorsville, was altogether a remarkable achievement; it took the public by storm and brought the author a wide reputation, which was not sustained by his later work. He also wrote “George’s Mother” (1896), another slum story, “The Little Regiment” (1896), “Active Service” (1899), “The Monster, and Other Stories” (1899); and two collections of stories, “Wounds in the Rain” and “Whilomville Stories” (1900), tales of child life, which were published posthumously. His impressionism, though at times too little restrained, was often effective, and his highly coloured stories have found many admiring readers.

In the death of Frank Norris (1870-1902), another promising career was cut short. Norris managed to see a good deal of life. Born in Chicago, he studied art in Paris (1887-89) and literature at the University of California and Harvard. Like Crane he became a journalist. At the time of the Jameson Raid in South Africa he was the South African correspondent for a San Francisco paper and in 1898 did similar work in Cuba. He began publishing fiction as early as 1891 (“Yberville”), but it was not till 1899 that he became well known for “McTeague.” His later stories were thoroughly realistic. With “The Octopus” (1901) he began a trilogy which should form “an epic of the wheat.” In the first novel is described the growth of the wheat and the oppressive railroad monopoly encountered in its transportation. “The Pit” (1903) deals with the battles of the wheat speculators. “The Wolf,” unfinished, was to have dealt with the struggle for bread in a European famine-stricken community. “The story of the wheat was for him,” as Mr. Howells puts it, “the allegory of the industrial and financial America which is the real America.” The largeness of the scope of his undertaking and the robust courage and confidence with which he attacked it deserve our admiration. What he accomplished shows that he would have been equal to his task.

_Mrs. Ruth McEnery Stuart._--Mrs. Stuart has written highly amusing stories of negro life in the South. Born in the parish of Avoyelles, Louisiana, she was married in 1879 to Alfred O. Stuart, a cotton planter. Since 1885 she has lived in New York. Her stories include “The Golden Wedding, and Other Tales” (1893), “Carlotta’s Intended” (1894), “The Story of Babette” (1894), “Moriah’s Mourning” (1898), “Sonny” (1896), “Holly and Pizen” (1899), “The Woman’s Exchange” (1899), and “River’s Children” (1905). Writing in a natural and witty style, she has brought out with great skill the humour and pathos of the old plantation. She is a favourite contributor to the magazines.

_Paul Leicester Ford._--Paul Leicester Ford (1865-1902), whose most serious and permanently valuable work was done in the field of American history, was the author of some notable works of fiction. “The Honourable Peter Sterling and What People Thought of Him” (1894) introduces an ideally noble statesman whose integrity triumphs over the sordid corruption of politics. Some points in the book are said to have been suggested by the career of President Cleveland. “Janice Meredith” (1899) is a sentimental romance of the Revolutionary War, in which a fascinating love-story is projected on an accurate historical background. Of less importance, but still most readable, are “The Great K. & A. Train Robbery” (1897) and “The Story of an Untold Love” (1897).

_Edward Noyes Westcott._--Edward N. Westcott (1847-98), a banker of Syracuse, New York, was the author of a single book, which he was unable to get published in his lifetime, but which gave him posthumous fame. The hero of “David Harum” (1898) is a shrewd Central New York Yankee, a son of the soil who with characteristic energy rose to be a banker and successful man of affairs, and who retained all his amusing traits, including a weakness for trading horses--“an optimist who has wrung from the harsh conditions of life all that it can yield.” The other characters are rather wooden, but the delineation of David Harum is strong, vital, and hence lasting. The plot is weak, but the story is true to the phases of life it depicts.

_The Younger Generation._--Space forbids more than a mention of some of the other living writers. Owen Wister (born in Philadelphia, 1860) has become well known through “The Dragon of Wantley: His Tail” (1892) and “The Virginian” (1902), in which latter we have an exciting story of a Wyoming cowboy. The much-travelled Richard Harding Davis (also a Philadelphian, born in 1864) has written racy and characteristically humorous stories of New York club and street life in “Gallegher, and Other Stories” (1891), “Van Bibber, and Others” (1892), and “Episodes in Van Bibber’s Life” (1899). Of his other stories the best known are “The Princess Aline” (1895), “Soldiers of Fortune” (1897), in which a South American revolution figures prominently, “In the Fog” (1901), a clever London tale, “Ranson’s Folly” (1902), and “The Bar Sinister” (1904). Robert W. Chambers (born in Brooklyn, 1865) is well known both as an artist and a romancer, a weaver of strange and exciting plots. Among his best books are “The Red Republic” (1894), “A King and a Few Dukes” (1894), “The Haunts of Men” (1898), stories of American or Canadian life, “The Cambric Mask” (1899), “A Gay Conspiracy” (1900), which shows the influence of Anthony Hope’s “Prisoner of Zenda,” “Cardigan” (1901), and “Iole” (1905). Newton Booth Tarkington (born in 1869 in Indianapolis, a graduate of Princeton) won fame in 1899 with “The Gentleman from Indiana” and has followed this with “Monsieur Beaucaire” (1900), a romance laid in Bath in the eighteenth century, “The Two Vanrevels” (1902), “Cherry” (1903), “In the Arena” (1905), “The Conquest of Canaan” (1905), and “The Beautiful Lady” (1905). His later work shows a gain in power. Winston Churchill (born in 1871), a graduate of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, and now a resident of New Hampshire, published “The Celebrity” in 1898. “Richard Carvel” (1899) made him famous; it is a Revolutionary story of Maryland and London. He has since written “The Crisis” (1901), a substantial story of the Civil War, “Mr. Keegan’s Elopement” (1903), “The Crossing” (1904), and “Coniston” (1906), a New England story of love and politics. The mountaineer life of Kentucky furnishes John Fox, Jr., with the materials for his well told stories, “A Cumberland Vendetta, and Other Stories” (1896), “The Kentuckians” (1897), “The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come” (1903), and “A Knight of the Cumberland” (1906).

Mrs. Gertrude Franklin Atherton (born in San Francisco, 1857) has made a wide reputation with her stories of early California life; some critics declare, however, that they do not accurately represent the California of old days. The first of them was “The Doomswoman” (1892). Other novels are “A Whirl Asunder” (1895), “Patience Sparhawk and Her Times” (1897), “The Californians” (1898), “American Wives and English Husbands” (1898), and “The Conqueror” (1902), which is based on the life of Alexander Hamilton. Mrs. Kate Douglas Wiggin (born in Philadelphia in 1857 and married to Samuel B. Wiggin in 1880) has written charming juvenile stories, “The Birds’ Christmas Carol” (1888), “The Story of Patsy” (1889), and “Timothy’s Quest” (1890), besides some stories of travel, such as “A Cathedral Courtship” (1893) and “Penelope’s Progress” (1898). Her husband died in 1889, and in 1895 she was married to George C. Riggs.

Irving Bacheller (born in 1859), a New York journalist, attracted attention by his stories, “The Master of Silence” (1890) and “The Still House of O’Darrow” (1894). His “Eben Holden” (1900), a novel of northern New York, was very successful. He has since written “Darrel of the Blessed Isles” (1903) and “Vergilius” (1904). Robert Herrick (born in 1868), a Harvard graduate and now a Chicago University professor, has written searching studies of American society in “The Gospel of Freedom” (1898), “The Web of Life” (1900), “The Real World” (1901), and “The Common Lot” (1904). He is something of a pessimist, but not unwholesome.

Edith Wharton (born in New York in 1862) began her literary career with short stories of the metropolitan society with which she had been familiar from birth: “The Greater Inclination” (1899), eight stories, “A Gift from the Grave” (1900), and “Crucial Instances” (1901). In “The Valley of Decision” (1902), “Sanctuary” (1903), and “The House of Mirth” (1905), she deals with scenes and characters of deep human interest but not easily managed; and she acquits herself with credit. Lily Bart is distinctly individualised and is worthy to be compared with Becky Sharp and Gwendolen Harleth.

Upton Sinclair (born in Baltimore, 1878), after writing a number of novels, produced in “Manassas” (1904) a thrilling romantic novel of the years just preceding the Civil War. “The Jungle” (1906), though much better known, is artistically far inferior to it. The creed of socialism is professed by both Mr. Sinclair and Jack London (born in San Francisco in 1876). London left the University of California to go to the Klondike, afterward went to Japan, and has since tramped through America and Canada for sociological study. In his best works, “The Son of the Wolf” (1900), “The Call of the Wild” (1903), and “The Sea Wolf” (1904), he has chosen to depict the tragedies of the animal world and the elemental passions in man.

Three Virginia women novelists have won distinction in recent years.

Molly Elliot Seawell (born in Gloucester County, Virginia, in 1860), a resident of Washington, began writing fiction in 1886. Among her stories are “Throckmorton” (1890), “Little Jarvis” (1890), a _Youth’s Companion_ prize story, “Midshipman Paulding” (1891), “The Sprightly Romance of Marsac” (1896), a lively story that won a New York _Herald_ prize of $3000, “The Lively Adventures of Gavin Hamilton” (1899), “The House of Egremont” (1901), “Children of Destiny” (1903), and “The Great Scoop” (1905). Her plots are sometimes slight and inconsequential, and her narrative lacks reserve; but she shows skill in the management of dialogue, and is a favourite writer.

Ellen Glasgow (born in Richmond in 1874) has found many readers with her “Descendant” (1897), “Phases of an Inferior Planet” (1898), “The Voice of the People” (1900), “The Battle-Ground” (1902), and “The Deliverance” (1904). She does not manage to escape from improbabilities, and some of her plots are desultory; yet on the whole her work maintains a high average.

Mary Johnston (born at Buchanan, Virginia, in 1870) has realised the possibilities of early Virginia history in her successful romances, “Prisoners of Hope” (1898), published in England as “The Old Dominion,” “To Have and to Hold” (1900), in England called “By Order of the Company,” “Audrey” (1902), and “Sir Mortimer” (1904). She has a sure touch, and her narrative moves rapidly.

But we have already exceeded the limits of our space. The work of Margaret Sherwood, William A. White, Brand Whitlock, Will Payne, Meredith Nicholson, George Barr McCutcheon, Jesse Lynch Williams, David Graham Phillips, Mary R. Shipman Andrews, James B. Connolly, Nelson Lloyd, George Cary Eggleston, William N. Harben, Justus Miles Forman, and many others, excellent as much of it is, can only be referred to summarily. The great number of promising writers of to-day is a matter of congratulation.

=Retrospect and Conclusion.=--We have thus traced the American novel from its first crude beginnings through a little more than a century of healthy and constant growth. It took the American novelist some three or four decades to learn to stand on his own feet; since he has learned to walk he has required very little assistance from abroad. More and more the possibilities of American life have attracted the writers of prose fiction. In the earlier decades of the last century, as was the case in Europe, the romance was the only fiction in demand; and the romance has ever been the favourite of many readers who maintain that the chief function of literature is to give reality through the alembic of the imagination. Perhaps the creed of romanticism has never been better put than by Mr. Julian Hawthorne:

The value of fiction lies in the fact that it can give us what
actual existence cannot; that it can resume in a chapter the
conclusions of a lifetime; that it can omit the trivial, the vague,
the redundant, and select the significant, the forcible, and the
characteristic; that it can satisfy expectation, expose error, and
vindicate human nature. Life, as we experience it, is too vast, its
relations are too complicated, its orbit too comprehensive, ever
to give us the impression of individual completeness and justice;
but the intuition of these things, though denied to sense, is
granted to faith, and we are authorised to embody that interior
conviction in romance.... And stories of imagination are truer
than transcripts of fact, because they include or postulate these,
and give a picture not only of the earth beneath our feet, but of
the sky above us, of the hope and freshness of the morning, of the
mystery and magic of the night. They draw the complete circle,
instead of mistrustfully confining themselves to the lower arc.[20]

Notwithstanding the attractiveness of this artistic creed, the ranks of the out-and-out romancers have gradually thinned, as we have seen. Professor Boyesen believed that Bret Harte was the last of these. Slowly the realists, led by Howells and James, have gained ground, and for the last twenty years have almost steadily held the field. Of late, indeed, there have been some signs of a reaction; but it has as yet taken no very pronounced form.

A necessary concomitant of this tendency toward realism has been an increase in the number of “novels of the soil.” Writers have drawn what they knew best: Miss Woolson, the Lake region; Cable, Creole New Orleans; Ella Higginson and Emma Wolf, the Pacific coast; Allen, Kentucky; Miss Murfree, Tennessee; Fawcett and Bunner, New York; Henry B. Fuller and Miss Wyatt, Chicago; Miss Jewett and Mrs. Wilkins Freeman, New England. One reason why the “great American novel” has not yet been written is the very bigness of the country. No great personality has yet risen who can combine all the elements of our vast modern life into one harmonious structure. Meanwhile we have had most of the various sections of our country described in fiction by skilful hands. Types of a life that is passing away have been caught and preserved in a fiction which, though assuredly not immortal, is destined, we believe, to a long life.

Our critics have justly complained, however, of the limited range of our novelists. They are timid. They are content to paint a small canvas. They do not rise to great conceptions. They do not probe life to its depths; neither do they rise to the height of all its grandeur. This is, of course, only another way of saying that we have no supremely great novelists. But doubtless the mediocrity of our fiction is partly due to the disastrous effect of commercialism and professionalism on the novelist’s trade; though Mr. Whibley’s account of this (_Blackwood’s_, March, 1908) is exaggerated. Certainly our writers must be less eager for immediate and substantial rewards. _Poeta nascitur, non fit_; too many “made” writers are pouring out fiction to-day.

Our fiction possesses one characteristic which has often been commented upon--a general excellence of moral atmosphere. There is little American fiction that must be kept from the curious Young Person. Some critics allege that the obligation to write what anyone may be permitted to read has prevented American novelists from discussing those darker problems of sex-relations which confront us, and which should find expression in a literature adequately reflecting our intellectual and moral life; that missing any rigorous attack on these problems they find our fiction tame, insipid, wanting in vitality. But such an opinion carries with it its own condemnation. If our fiction lacks vitality, it is probably from other causes; at any rate Americans are generally content to leave matters of moral pathology to their moral surgeons, whose diagnoses and discussions are not expected to circulate promiscuously; and it is not likely that our novelists will consent to defile their pages for the sake of securing comprehensiveness in their pictures of life.

The short story has been brought by American writers to a high degree of perfection. Irving was its American father; and in the hands of Hawthorne, Poe, Fitz-James O’Brien, Edward Everett Hale, Miss Woolson, Brander Matthews, Miss Jewett, Stockton, Page, Mark Twain, Mrs. Freeman, and many others, it has become a highly flexible instrument, capable of subtle adaptations. The limitations of range and environment have made for great delicacy and precision in the minute portraits and the _genres_ to be found in large numbers throughout our short stories.

Yet notwithstanding the increase in the number and the advance in quality of our short stories, the novel continues as popular as ever. The immense vogue of the novel in America has been commented upon many times. The “best sellers” are almost always novels; and so many novels of more than average excellence are produced every year that many really superior stories do not get the immediate hearing, at least, which they deserve. That this demand for novels will continue unabated for some time is altogether likely. That another form of literature will soon take its place is quite improbable.

Apparently we have no great living poets; for various reasons we have no dramatists of note; of novelists who are at least possibilities, we have several.

What will be the type of the American novel of the future? Probably it is rash to make any prediction; but one may venture to believe that the prevailing attitude of our future novelists will be that of a sane and optimistic realism. The morbid books like “The Jungle” do not wear well; and, while such books may have their use in promoting needed reforms, they do not constitute additions to literature and can, therefore, secure no permanent place. The pleasant paths of romance will always tempt bold and imaginative writers; but they will be more than ever restrained by the demand of enlightened readers that they shall not wander far from the probable, and shall present, clear and undistorted, the best there is in the actual present. That there are immense possibilities in the varied and complex life of to-day, few will doubt; that the great artists are to appear who will make the most of these opportunities we may assume with confidence.

III. THE POETS

=English Influence on American Poetry.=--If we accept the popular belief, and identify poets with makers of verse, it must be allowed that American poetry at its best--in the nineteenth century--is in a peculiar sense unoriginal and derivative. To be derivative, to have a traceable pedigree, may, indeed, be no disadvantage, either for a national or an individual genius. In their way, all modern literatures are derivative and unoriginal; not merely influenced by each other, but ultimately dependent for the sources of their inspiration upon the basal civilisations of Palestine and Greece. “We are all Greeks,” said Shelley. Milton might have said, “We are all Hebrews.” And our best American poets might have added, “_We_ are all Englishmen.” Particular scenes on this continent, and the vast and ever growing extent of our territory, have both left their impress on our poets during the last five generations; they have touched the poetry of ten or twelve decades here and there with the undeniable stamp of reality, and given it now and then a largeness of range and freedom of atmosphere very proper to a nation whose sense of geography has been so elastic. Yet one can hardly say that our natural scenery has ever been really incarnate in our literature as a whole, or that a pervasive national spirit, a spirit at once large and precise, has entered fundamentally into our verse. What has been most effectual in our literature has been closely imitative, has followed at a little distance, yet step for step, the development of the English literature from which it sprang. This continuous imitation, now more superficial, now more indirect and elusive, has been the mainspring of our poetry even more than our prose, during the century just gone by.

American poetry, it is true, has probably been more plastic and mobile in its outer form than American prose, has been less steadily patterned after those literary standards in England which were bequeathed by the eighteenth century. The prose style of Irving betrays its descent from the essays of Addison; the style of Franklin was developed through conscious and painstaking emulation of the same models. Even fairly late in the eighteen hundreds, when perhaps only a trained ear can detect the lingering echoes of Pope and his school in our verse, the “Autocrat” of Wendell Holmes still retains an accent and a flavour from eighteenth-century, Ciceronian eloquence. No doubt the age of Pope and Johnson survived by many vestiges much longer in English prose than in English verse, for its habits of thought were more or less suited to argument and exposition in every time. Yet in the history of American letters it is easier to find parallels to Wordsworth and Shelley than to duplicate the prose rhapsodies--characteristic in nineteenth-century Europe--of De Quincey and Ruskin. To the transition in English literature that was marked by the appearance of “Lyrical Ballads” in 1798 our poetry was, in the main, more quickly responsive than our prose. None the less our prose, more conservative though it has been, less changeful in its manner of expression, has struck its roots far more deeply into our national being; and our verse, like the other fine arts, is still an exotic.

For our lack of a national art, a national poetry, a superficial reason is often assigned: in the conditions of a new country, in the struggle for existence, in the development of agriculture and commerce, in the assimilation of foreign races, there has been very little time for the nourishment of letters, very little of that leisure which the Greeks called _scholé_, and which is indispensable for a productive scholarship and for the flourishing of imagination. Yet we have had, or have taken, sufficient leisure to write and publish an immense amount of verse, judged merely by its bulk. Scarcely an American author can be mentioned in the nineteenth century that did not try his hand at metrical composition. The truth is, rather, that we have seldom approached the art of poetry with enough seriousness; that, having rebelled against the Puritan’s unkindly conception of life, we have nevertheless to some extent acquiesced in his belittling estimate of imaginative art; that we have failed to recognise in the poet a necessary servant of the commonwealth, a leader worthy of a high and severe training. Our versifiers have rushed into print before they were ripe, and they have praised each other’s work too easily; while the standards set by the public taste have been readily met when the rhymers succeeded in being “patriotic.” Real patriotism demands such an admission.

Not that our poets have been wholly without a philosophy of criticism; though it is significant that the most subtle and sympathetic understanding of the poetic temperament, of its function as well as its perils, is to be found, not in the writings of any maker of verses but in those of a novelist, Hawthorne--for example, in “The House of Seven Gables” and “The Great Stone Face.” Yet Bryant read, meditated, and wrote upon the art of poetry; Poe thought somewhat, if not deeply, upon it; Lanier made a worthy contribution to the science of meter; Longfellow was conversant with the literature of criticism; and Emerson’s stimulating essay on “The Poet,” while it may not have been the sort of medicine that our men of letters most needed, has doubtless exerted a wholesome influence. In Poe’s day, several magazines were discussing the principles of imaginative composition. However, an “Art of Poetry” like Timrod’s (published in _The Atlantic Monthly_ for September, 1905) could lie for forty years in manuscript, without exciting any strong suspicion of its value; and in the long run there has been an amazing disproportion between the slender thread of fundamental tradition and sound critical theory on the one hand, and the swollen and rapid stream of naïve, uncultivated verse, gathering from every quarter, on the other. Whatever English poets furnished the models, the imitation was largely on the surface. First Pope and his successors in England, then Wordsworth and Coleridge, then Shelley and Keats, and Scott and Bryon, and subsequently Tennyson,--all had in turn their American devotees. But there seems to have been relatively little understanding like that of Bryant and Timrod for the conscious theory underlying the “experiments” in “Lyrical Ballads,” or for the ideal demands which Shelley laid upon poetry and poets; nor did cisatlantic readers of Lord Byron much concern themselves about that Longinus whom he studied “o’er a bottle,” or for the structural frame upon which was reared Tennyson’s “Palace of Art.”

=Characteristics of the Period.=--Of course in the following pages we shall deal as briefly as possible with those American poets in the last century who are touched to any great extent by strictures like these; for a history of literature is bound to treat as far as may be of writers that have made a wise use of tradition, and whose native insight has enabled them to train their genius in accordance with universal canons of art, and with a due appreciation of masterly technique. Meanwhile we may attempt to summarise the characteristics of the poetical era under consideration, and, in particular, of the earlier rather than the latter half of that era. The nearer we advance toward our own day, the wiser it is to refrain from general characterisation.

1. The relation between English literature and American in the initial twenty or thirty years of the last century has already been suggested. Aside from that, or very often through that, the influence of Rousseau was paramount. The doctrine that upheld the innocence of “man in a state of nature,” and maintained the equality of all individuals, and the feeling, half pantheistic, for an external nature opposed to civilisation, since they entered into the vital tissue of our national thought,--and though they are at bottom contrary to science and all demonstrable experience--are among the very conditions, so to speak, of much of our poetry. From these sources, for example, it came about that while in actual practice we despised and maltreated that “natural man” the cruel Indian, we idealised him in poetical effusions; just as Fenimore Cooper, treading in the footsteps of Chateaubriand, idealised him in prose.

2. Our earlier poets, that is, immediately after the Revolution, but again, and especially, after the War of 1812 had confirmed our sense of national solidarity, are much given to the utterance of their patriotism; albeit only a few out of many more or less pretentious or tasteful efforts have survived. Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner” (1814), conceived at the close of the second war, antedates “The American Flag” (1819) of Drake by but five years; these two, with Hopkinson’s “Hail Columbia” (1798), and “America” (1832), the well-known hymn by S. F. Smith, whatever their relative or absolute merits as literature, remain our most cherished national poems.

3. However frequent or insistent the note of patriotism, the general temper of American poets has not been strongly optimistic. As one glances over a long list of the subjects chosen for treatment, a leaning toward the more sombre and melancholy elements and aspects of life becomes more and more apparent. Nor is this leaning confined to the multitude. Exceptions like Walt Whitman to the contrary notwithstanding, it is characteristic, in the main, of the leaders, whenever they escape from common or inherited themes, and give rein to their own personalities. That joy which is the well-spring of Wordsworth’s vitality is greatly diminished in even his nearest American counterpart, Bryant; assuredly it is not akin to the subdued sadness of Longfellow, though this be not strictly “akin to pain.”

4. On the other hand, the noblest American poetry has not been tragic. Tragedy and serious epic have been attempted, but, as in the case of Dwight, Barlow, and so many others, largely as academic exercitations, savouring of the desk and the library. With our national life they have had no essential connection. A central motive in our history like the death of Lincoln still awaits the imagination of a master-dramatist.

5. Though few have devoted their entire lives to it, most of our poets have begun the profession betimes, conceiving very often in haste, and publishing in their immaturity. The painful advice of Horace has not been to our liking. With the examples of Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson continually before us, we have yet failed to profit by their insistence upon generous preparation, meticulous technique, and laborious delay in publication. We have realised the brevity of life more fully than the length of art.

6. Our respect for the “practical” and for “common sense” is allied to a fondness shown in our poetry for common, everyday subjects. Here, of course, we have succeeded better in the comic than in the serious vein. To treat of homely topics so as to invest their essential dignity with the light of imagination--in painting the world about us, to “add the gleam”--was the task set for himself by an English mystic. It is a dangerous trade for men whose talk is of oxen. Homely minds on homely matters are prone to slip into the trivial or the pathetic. Even Longfellow cannot be freed from the charge of too much attention to the obvious commonplace, and, as a versifier at least, of too much love for the merely sentimental. For adequate imaginative handling of themes that are serious, complete, and of sufficient magnitude to produce the loftier effects of great literary art, we are in general forced to go to our best prose fiction.

7. So long as Puritan ideals, however modified and softened, continued to dominate any considerable part of American education, that is, up to a point somewhere within the past twenty-five years, our poetry has tended to be obviously didactic. Not only clerical but secular poets have seemed to regard themselves as direct teachers of morality. In satirical writers,--Freneau, Halleck,--or in literature that by virtue of its kind is pietistic, such a tendency is altogether normal and effective. But in supposedly imaginative poems such as “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” though the basic moral order of the universe doubtless ought to be inherent, it just as certainly ought to contrive its own effect, without the adventitious aid of sermonising. To the present writer, much of the best--not of course the very best--in American poetry loses in ethical as well as æsthetic value through the intrusion of argument and exhortation on the subject of conduct or belief. The finest work of Holmes, for instance, “The Chambered Nautilus,” may be thought to lose in this way. The spirit of the United States is a prosaic spirit, hence our verse, when it is at all substantial, rarely lacks some element or other from the style of the forensic orator.

8. On the other hand, since we can make no pretence to the possession of a tragic drama, and none to a truly national epic, it may safely be affirmed that our poetry has risen to its greatest heights in meditative and religious lyric; in meditative verse on nature, that is, such “nature-poetry” as assumes the Divine immanence throughout the world of objective reality--in Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”; and in the religious lyric, that is, in a few of our hymns.

_The Earlier Poets._--We commence this survey of American poetry at the date to which the sections adapted from Tyler have conducted the literature as a whole, namely, the year 1784. The chief poets of the Revolutionary period, Barlow, Dwight, Trumbull, and Freneau, all lived well on into the next century, Barlow, in fact, being the only one of these who did not survive the War of 1812.

In Barlow’s day, heroics were the fashion. His _magnum opus_, a rhymed epic on the discovery of America, had already taken shape in manuscript as early as 1781; in 1787 it appeared as “The Vision of Columbus”; by 1807 it had grown into the ponderous “Columbiad.” It is an uninspired, pseudo-classical narrative, schematically and metrically correct, but organically lifeless, full of the “printer’s devil personification” so characteristic of its time. With gratuitous industry, as it supplies all the lineage of personified abstractions like “Discord,” so it begins the history of America at Creation, fetches the story down through colonial times to the Revolution, and includes in its sweep a glance at events yet to come. Similarly in his mock-heroic, “The Hasty Pudding” (1793), which is touched with fancy and is in every way more attractive than his “Columbiad,” Barlow commences with the growth and harvesting of the maize which is to furnish the flour.

Dwight, who was at first a tutor, but from 1795 until his death, in 1817, president, of Yale College, in 1785 brought forth a Biblical epic entitled “The Conquest of Canaan,” in which the narrative of Exodus is diversified by allusions to heroes in the American War of Independence, and by a tale of romantic love superadded. Dwight was a diligent reader of Pope and Goldsmith, but he did not confine his interest to the eighteenth century; he knew the enchantment of the poets’ poet, Spenser; and like Thomson he could at times, as in “Greenfield Hill,” look with his own eyes at things about him. He was a friend of Trumbull, Humphreys, and Barlow; on occasion he penned a bitter invective. But as a writer he will be remembered for his noble hymn, whose second stanza commences,

I love Thy Church, O God,

which is the key-note of his life.

Trumbull, though he lived to a great age (1750-1831), had completed his remarkable mock-heroic, “M’Fingal,” prior to 1784; hence at this point he interests us chiefly on account of his friendship with Dwight and Barlow, and his effect on later satirists.