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Indianapolis (Indiana, United States) (search for this): chapter 10
inexplicable to those persons only who forget the sentimental traditions of our American literature and its frank appeal to the emotions of juvenility, actual and recollected. Riley's best holt as a poet was his memory of his own boyhood and his perception that the childmind lingers in every adult reader. Genius has often been called the gift of prolonged adolescence, and in this sense, surely, there was genius in the warm and gentle heart of this fortunate provincial who held that old Indianapolis was high Heaven's sole and only under-study. No one has ever had the audacity to say that of New York. We have had American drama for one hundred and fifty years, Representative American plays, edited by Arthur Hobson Quinn, N. Y., 1917. but much of it, like our popular fiction and poetry, has been subliterary, more interesting to the student of social life and national character than to literary criticism in the narrow sense of that term. Few of our best known literary men have wri
Nicaragua (Nicaragua) (search for this): chapter 10
was that at bottom every man is a brute. Each theory gave provender enough for a short-story writer to carry on his back, but is hardly adequate, by itself, for a very long voyage over human life. Joaquin (Cincinnatus Heine) Miller, who was born in 1841 and died in 1913, had even less of a formula for the West than Jack London. He was a word-painter of its landscapes, a rider over its surfaces. Cradled in a covered wagon pointing West, mingling with wild frontier life from Alaska to Nicaragua, miner, Indian fighter, hermit, poseur in London and Washington, then hermit again in California, the author of Songs of the Sierras at least knew his material. Byron, whom he adored and imitated, could have invented nothing more romantic than Joaquin's life; but though Joaquin inherited Scotch intensity, he had nothing of the close mental grip of the true Scot and nothing of his humor. Vast stretches of his poetry are empty; some of it is grandiose, elemental, and yet somehow artificial
Georgia (Georgia, United States) (search for this): chapter 10
Holmes until 1894. Compared with these men the younger writers of verse seemed overmatched. The National Ode for the Centennial celebration in 1876 was intrusted to Bayard Taylor, a hearty person, author of capital books of travel, plentiful verse, and a skilful translation of Faust. But an adequate National Ode was not in him. Sidney Lanier, who was writing in that year his Psalm of the West and was soon to compose The Marshes of Glynn, had far more of the divine fire. He was a bookish Georgia youth who had served with the Confederate army, and afterward, with broken health and in dire poverty, gave his brief life to music and poetry. He had rich capacities for both arts, but suffered in both from the lack of discipline and from an impetuous, restless imagination which drove him on to over-ambitious designs. Whatever the flaws in his affluent verse, it has grown constantly in popular favor, and he is, after Poe, the best known poet of the South. The late Edmund Clarence Stedm
Venice (Italy) (search for this): chapter 10
ost native New Englanders in their understanding of the type. They were William Dean Howells and Henry James. Mr. Howells, who, in his own words, can reasonably suppose that it is because of the mixture of Welsh, German, and Irish in me that I feel myself so typically American, came to the Holy Land at Boston as a passionate pilgrim from the West. A boy's town, My literary passions, and Years of my youth make clear the image of the young poet-journalist who returned from his four years in Venice and became assistant editor of The Atlantic monthly in 1866. In 1871 he succeeded Fields in the editorship, but it was not until after his resignation in 1881 that he could put his full strength into those realistic novels of contemporary New England which established his fame as a writer. A modern instance and The rise of Silas Lapham are perhaps the finest stories of this group; and the latter novel may prove to be Mr. Howells's chief visiting-card to posterity. We cannot here follow h
England (United Kingdom) (search for this): chapter 10
separated as the peoples of Northern and Southern Europe, an integral intellectual and spiritual activity which could express, in obedience to the laws of beauty and truth, the emotions stimulated by our national life. It has been assumed in the preceding chapters that American literature is something different from English literature written in America. Canadian and Australian literatures have indigenous qualities of their own, but typically they belong to the colonial literature of Great Britain. This can scarcely be said of the writings of Franklin and Jefferson, and it certainly cannot be said of the writings of Cooper, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Lowell, Lincoln, Mark Twain, and Mr. Howells. In the pages of these men and of hundreds of others less distinguished, there is a revelation of a new national type. That the full energies of this nation have been back of our books, giving them a range and vitality and unity commensurate with the national existence, no one
Spoon River (Ohio, United States) (search for this): chapter 10
and song. But the new generation believes that it has made a discovery in reverting to sensations rather than thought, to the naive reproduction of retinal and muscular impressions, as if this were the end of the matter. The self-conscious, self-defending side of the new poetic impulse may soon pass, as it did in the case of Wordsworth and of Victor Hugo. Whatever happens, we have already had fresh and exquisite revelations of natural beauty, and, in volumes like North of Boston and A Spoon River Anthology, judgments of life that run very deep. American fiction seems just now, on the contrary, to be marking time and not to be getting noticeably forward. Few names unknown ten years ago have won wide recognition in the domain of the novel. The short story has made little technical advance since the first successes of 0. Henry, though the talent of many observers has dealt with new material offered by the racial characteristics of European immigrants and by new phases of commer
Calaveras (California, United States) (search for this): chapter 10
nt from Virginia, the youth had lived from his fourth until his eighteenth year on the banks of the Mississippi. He had learned the printer's trade, had wandered east and back again, had served for four years as a river-pilot on the Mississippi, and had tried to enter the Confederate army. Then came the six crowded years, chiefly as newspaper reporter, in the boom times of Nevada and California. His fame began with the publication in New York in 1867 of The celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. A newspaper now sent him to Europe to record what he sees with his own eyes. He did so in Innocents abroad, and his countrymen shouted with laughter. This, then, was Europe after all-another fake until this shrewd river-pilot who signed himself Mark Twain took its soundings! Then came a series of far greater books-Roughing it, Life on the Mississippi, The Gilded age (in collaboration), and Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn --books that make our American Odyssey, rich in the spirit o
Concord (Massachusetts, United States) (search for this): chapter 10
more generalized types of story-writing, and that he has never in his long career written an insincere, a slovenly, or an infelicitous page. My literary friends and acquaintance gives the most charming picture ever drawn of the elder Cambridge, Concord, and Boston men who ruled over our literature when young Howells came out of the West, and My Mark Twain is his memorable portrait of another type of sovereign, perhaps the dynasty that will rule the future. Although Henry James, like Mr. Howmatter, to any locality save possibly London, anything more than a visiting mind. His grandfather was an Irish merchant in Albany. His father, Henry James, was a philosopher and wit, a man of comfortable fortune, who lived at times in Newport, Concord, and Boston, but who was residing in New York when his son Henry was born in 1843. No child was ever made the subject of a more complete theory of deracination. Transplanted from city to city, from country to country, without a family or a vot
Europe (search for this): chapter 10
echnical advance since the first successes of 0. Henry, though the talent of many observers has dealt with new material offered by the racial characteristics of European immigrants and by new phases of commerce and industry. The enormous commercial demand of the five-cent weeklies for short stories of a few easily recognized patre, as this book has attempted to trace it, has been to obtain from a mixed population dwelling in sections as widely separated as the peoples of Northern and Southern Europe, an integral intellectual and spiritual activity which could express, in obedience to the laws of beauty and truth, the emotions stimulated by our national liught back whole libraries of books which they eagerly translated. But even if Longfellow and his friends had been nothing more than translators and diffusers of European culture, their task would have been justified. They kept the ideals of civilization from perishing in this new soil. Through those eastern windows came in, and
Wisconsin (Wisconsin, United States) (search for this): chapter 10
oaquin's life; but though Joaquin inherited Scotch intensity, he had nothing of the close mental grip of the true Scot and nothing of his humor. Vast stretches of his poetry are empty; some of it is grandiose, elemental, and yet somehow artificial, as even the Grand Canyon itself looks at certain times. John Muir, another immigrant Scot who reached California in 1868, had far more stuff in him than Joaquin Miller. He had studied geology, botany, and chemistry at the new University of Wisconsin, and then for years turned explorer of forests, peaks, and glaciers, not writing, at first, except in his Journal, but forever absorbing and worshiping sublimity and beauty with no thought of literary schemes. Yet his every-day talk about his favorite trees and glaciers had more of the glow of poetry in it than any talk I have ever heard from men of letters, and his books and Journal will long perpetuate this thrilling sense of personal contact with wild, clean, uplifted things — blossoms
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