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[235]

Chapter 9: the Western influence

It is not a great many years since the mere suggestion of any Western achievement in literature would have called out such anecdotes as belonged to the time when Senator Blackburn and Colonel Pepper of whiskeymaking fame are said to have been talking about horses at Washington; and Representative Crane of Texas asked them, “Why do you not talk of something else? Of literature, for instance, to improve your minds? I like poets,” he said, “especially Emerson and Longfellow.” “Longfellow?” interrupted Colonel Pepper; “oh, yes, I know Longfellow; he is the best horse ever raised in Kentucky.” That was the point from which Western literature started; and its progress has been so recent that it is not possible, as it has been in our studies hitherto, to appeal to the verdict of time. Most of that progress, indeed, has been made during the past twenty years.


[236]

First writers.

Of the few voices which commanded marked attention before that time, Bret Harte went West from Albany before he came East again and left American shores forever. Mark Twain and Mr. Howells were born east of the Missouri, which comes nearer than anything else to being the middle dividing line between the Eastern and Western halves of the continent. It was not many years ago that one of the most highly educated of Americans asserted positively that this nation could never have a great literature because no people had ever possessed one unless living within easy reach of the ocean. Time has shown that a vast inland country has also its resources and its stimulus; as, indeed, Cooper long ago indicated by naming one of his earliest novels The Prairie. Such a field must of course develop physically before it develops intellectually; and commonly artistic development comes later still. Only a century ago three fourths of the continent was a trackless wilderness; yet its recent development has been so rapid that it is hard for us actually to realize what that utter vacancy of human life meant to those who first had experience of it. [237]

It is not yet fifty years since an Eastern traveler who had ventured as far as Kentucky brought back this tale of An Empty the early solitude there as it had Continent. been fifty years before that time. The first explorer, Daniel Boone, he told us, who died in 1820, used to travel absolutely alone for weeks together in the Kentucky forests with only his rifle for company. He could not take even a dog for fear of the Indians; and once he had to travel a hundred miles on a single meal. There were springs in the Licking Valley where twenty thousand buffaloes came and went, and whole Indian tribes followed their tracks. The Indians never once even saw Boone, for they did not suspect that any white man could be there; and he avoided their tracks and never saw them. After a while, there was another white explorer, Simon Kenton, whose coming into that region was unknown to Boone. They had approached the valley from opposite directions; each recognized by signs that there was a human being somewhere near, but. out of sight. Then began long hours of noiseless manceuvres on each side, spying, evading, listening, concealing, climbing, burrowing, each trying [238] to find out without self-betrayal who or of what race this stranger was; and such was their skill in concealment that it was fortyeight hours before either of them found out that the other was not an Indian or an enemy.

Fancy this loneliness, terrific and almost sublime, in the very heart of the continent, nay, far east of that,--for Kentucky itself is barely a quarter way across it. Consider that this was but little more than a century ago, and then think of that vast continent now settled, cultivated, organized, schooled, first divided into territories, then into states, counties, towns, villages, all filled with people who can read and write and look to the philanthropist for a public library. The superintendent of the census in 1890 announced officially that there was no longer any frontier line in the population map. The continent has been crossed, the first rough conquest of the wilderness has been accomplished. This is the region to which we are now to look for authors. All the great literary territories on the continent of Europe, Italy, Germany, France, Austro-Hungary, could be laid together in a small portion of it. The mere [239] size of a country is not a criterion of its productiveness in art, but it is reasonable to suppose that some of the vast energy hitherto employed in the task of opening the West will presently be spared from the toil of practical life, to give a good account of itself in literature.


Early writers about the West.

The first authors who came from the West to delight our young people at the East were. Audubon, the ornithologist, who had a way of interspersing between his bird sketches certain intermediate chapters called Episodes, usually personal narratives in the woods, beginning in 1831--and Timothy Flint, who wrote Ten years in the Valley of the Mississippi (1826), and also who wrote from Cincinnati to the London Athenaeum and had his books translated into French. These books, with those of Peter Parley (sometimes written by Hawthorne), gave a most vivid charm to the Western wilds and rivers.

In The pioneers Cooper made us already conscious citizens of a great nation, and took our imagination as far as the Mississippi. Lewis and Clark carried us beyond the Mississippi (1814). About 1835 Oregon expeditions [240] were forming, and I remember when boys in New England used to peep through barn doors to admire the great wagons in which the emigrants were to travel. Then came Mrs. Kirkland's A New home, Who'll follow? (1839). Besides this we had Irving's Tour of the prairies (1835) and his Astoria the following year. The West was still a word for vast expeditions, for the picturesqueness and the uncertainty of Indian life, and not for the amenities of a civilized condition. Aspirants for literary fame were not long lacking, to be sure, but as most of their work was based upon reading rather than experience, it had nothing characteristically Western about it. Most of them turned instinctively, ere long, to the Atlantic coast for sympathy and bookstores, as the Atlantic states had looked to Europe.

I shall always remember with satisfaction the delight with which Elizabeth Whittier, the poet's far more brilliant and vivacious sister, used to tell the tale of how their mother was once called to their modest front door, about 1850, by two plump and lively maidens who inquired for her son. They were told that he was not at home. They [241] cheerfully announced that they would come in and wait for him; and on being told that he was in Boston and might not return that day, they said that it was of no manner of consequence; they had just arrived from Ohio, were themselves authors, and would come in and remain until he got back. So they came in and waited, and proved to be Alice and Phoebe Cary. They were brought up in an Ohio cabin, had no candles to read by, and so read in the evening by lighted rags in a saucer of lard. Their only books were the Bible, the history of the Jews, Charlotte Temple, and a novel called The black penitents, with the cover gone and the last page all lost, so they never knew what became of the penitents, or whether the people who tore the precious book to pieces had also repented. Their published poems were full of dirges and despair, but they were the merriest of visitors, perfectly at home, and, as the poet luckily returned the next day, they stayed as long as they pleased and filled the house with fun.

It is only indirectly, as we have shown, that Uncle Tom's cabin can be classed as a product of the West. It was written in the [242] East by an Eastern woman, though the materials were collected during a residence of nearly twenty years in the middle West.


The “humorists.”

The first definite intellectual product of the Great West was a swarm of “humorists,” political and otherwise, who were let loose over the land to set it laughing, sometimes in a good cause, sometimes in a bad one.

Nothing used to strike an American more, on his first visit to England thirty years ago, than the frequent discussion of American authors who were rarely quoted at home, except in stump-speeches, whose works had no place as yet in our literary collections, but who were still taken seriously among educated persons in England. The astonishment increased when he found the almanacs of “Josh Billings” reprinted in “Libraries of American humor,” and given an equal place with the writings of Holmes and Lowell. Finally he may have been driven to the extreme conclusion that there must be very little humor in England, where things were seriously published in book form, which here would never get beyond the corner of a newspaper. He found that the whole department [243] of American humor was created, so to speak, by the amazed curiosity of Englishmen. It was a phrase then rarely heard in the United States; and if we had such a thing among us, although it might cling to our garments, we were habitually as unconscious of it as are smokers of the perfume of their favorite weed. We have accepted the phrase now, and have consented to take a modest sort of pride in possessing “the American humorist.” This means that we are now content to let the reputation of our humor stand or fall by the quality of the American joke.


Artemus War.

So far as pure humor is concerned, there has never been a distinct boundary line between England and America. Nor can we say that what is called American humor belongs distinctively to the West. The early “humorists” were mostly of Eastern origin, though bred and emancipated in the Westthus Artemus Ward was from Maine, Josh Billings from Massachusetts, and Orpheus C. Kerr and Eli Perkins from New York. The prince among these jokers was Artemus Ward, who as a lecturer glided noiselessly upon the stage as if dressed for Hamlet, and looked as surprised as Hamlet [244] if the audience laughed. The stage was dark, and the performance was interrupted by himself at intervals, to look for an imaginary pianist and singer who never came, but who became as real to the audience as Jefferson's imaginary dog Schneider in Rip Van Winkle, for whom he was always vainly whistling. This unseen singer, we were told, would thrill every heart with his song, “Is it Raining, mother Dear, in South Boston?” or, “Mother, you are one of my parents,” and could, we were assured, “extract a fiver from the pocket of the hardest-hearted man in the audience.” This was the kind of platform humor which captured two continents, and substituted for the saying of M. Philarete Chasles in 1851: “All America has not produced a humorist,” the still more dangerous assumption that America produced nothing else.

The European popularity of this “American humor” was in part based, no doubt, upon the natural feeling of foreigners that something new is to be demanded of a new country, and this novelty is more naturally looked for, by the mass of readers, in costumes and externals than in the inward spirit. [245] Much of the welcome was given most readily to what may be called the Buffalo Bill spirit, and belonged to the tomahawk and blanket period. When a Swedish visitor to this country, some twenty years ago, was asked whether Frederika Bremer's novels, once received here with such enthusiasm, were still read in Sweden, he said “No;” and to the question as to what had taken their place he replied, “Bret Harte and Mark Twain.” It is undoubtedly these two men rather than any others among the Western humorists, in their opinion of whom Europe and America, for a time at least, most nearly united.


Bret Harte.

Apart from his characterization of such broadly humorous types as “Truthful James” and “Ah sin,” Bret Harte deserves to be remembered as the picturesque chronicler of life in California during the early gold-hunting days. His later work leads one to think that it was a lucky stroke of fortune which led the young native of New York with the quick eye and the clever pen, at precisely the right moment, into an uncultivated field. It was his lot, as was said by some critic, to remain for thirty years what is called a promising writer. He created, [246] at the very outset, four or five well-marked characters, and afterward published some thirty-six volumes without adding another. While his work was of narrow range, however, it belonged, at its best, to a respectable order of romantic fiction. It is not a little triumph to have created even four or five types of character, or to have produced three or four strong pieces of invention. Not much more, certainly, could have been expected of a writer who not long after his first success left the West, and, somewhat later, America, never to return. Such voluntary denationalization has been not uncommon among American writers. The most striking among recent instances is that of Henry James, a man of great powers, but of a well-nigh fatal instinct for superrefinement in life and art. So subtle and detached is his later method, that it has been said of him, not unfairly, “Even his cosmopolitanism has its limitations; to be truly cosmopolitan a man must be at home even in his own country.”


Mark Twain.

Over-refinement is not the fault with which Mark Twain can ever be accused; his reckless robustness, indeed, constitutes his main [247] strength. I myself was first introduced to Mark Twain's books in 1872 by an unimpeachable English authority-on a somewhat different line from Mr. Clemens,--namely, Charles Darwin. “What!” he said to me, “you have never read Mark Twain? I always keep his Jumping Frog on a chair by my bedside that I may turn to it in case of sleeplessness!” and however doubtful this form of compliment may appear, it was certainly something that it cheered the wakeful hours of so great a brain. It is not to be admitted, however, that Englishmen have ever been very discriminating critics of Mark Twain. As they have never demanded of him high literary qualities, they have never felt his occasional want of them nor been especially interested when he developed them. He has been to them like those absolutely recognized wits who fill a table with laughter or delight whenever they happen to ask for a bit of bread. That Mark Twain is one of the really great jesters of the world is doubted by no one; but it may be that he will be like many others of that class whose works stand in libraries, whose volumes open easily at one or two often-read pages, while [248] the rest of the well-bound volumes are left unopened. Yet one thing is certain. In what has been well called “the Odyssean story of the Mississippi” under the name of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain did something toward laying the foundation of an original Western literature. The whole local atmosphere, the tragic vividness with which heroic figures appear before us, rustic, even boyish, alive for a few hours, then disappearing with the same quiet abruptness in death; a whole family made interesting, even charming, to us, then vanishing mercilessly in a meaningless border feud: this is a distinct step forward in American literature, and cannot be put out of sight either by too ambitious efforts like his Joan of Arc or by free and easy journalistic extravaganzas like Innocents abroad.


W. D. Howells.

The first Western writer really recognized as taking the position of a literary leader at the East was, of course, Mr. Howells, who came East in 1860 and has always remained. The peculiar charm of Howells's prose style has, doubtless, had its effect in disarming criticism. He rarely fails to give pleasure by the mere process of writing, and [249] this is much, to begin with; just as, when we are listening to conversation, a musical voice gratifies us almost more than wit or wisdom. Mr. Howells is without an equal among his English-speaking contemporaries as to some of the most attractive literary graces. Unless it be in Mr. James, he has no rival for half-tints, for modulations, forsubtile phrases that touch the edge of an assertion and yet stop short of it. He is like a skater who executes a hundred graceful curves within the limits of a pool a few yards square. Miss Austen, the novelist, once described her art as a little bit of ivory, on which she produced small effect after much labor. She underrated her own skill, as the comparison in some respects underrates that of Howells; but his field is the little bit of ivory.

This is attributing to him only what he has been careful to claim for himself. He describes his methods very frankly, and his first literary principle has been to look away from great passions, and to elevate the commonplace instead by minute touches. Not only does he prefer this, but he does not hesitate to tell us sometimes, half jestingly, that it is the only thing to do. He says, “As in literature [250] the true artist will shun the use of even real events if they are of an improbable character, so the sincere observer of man will not desire to look upon his heroic or occasional phases, but will seek him in his habitual moods of vacancy and tiresomeness.” He may not mean to lay this down as a canon of universal authority, but he accepts it himself; and is apt to state his own views too much as the decision of a court. He accepts it with the risk involved of a too-limited and microscopic range. That he has fully escaped this peril is due to the fact that his method went, after all, deeper than he admitted: he was not merely a good-natured observer, like Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman, but he had theories and purposes, something to protest against, and something to assert.

He is often classed with Mr. James as representing the international school of novelists; yet in reality they belong to widely different subdivisions. After all, Mr. James has permanently set up his easel in Europe, Mr. Howells in America; and the latter has been, from the beginning, far less anxious to compare Americans with Europeans than with one another. He is international only [251] if we adopt Mr. Emerson's saying that Europe stretches to the Alleghanies. As a native of Ohio, transplanted to Massachusetts, he never can forego the interest implied in this double point of view. The Europeanized American, and, if we may so say, the Americanized American, are the typical figures that re-appear in his books. Even in The Lady of the Aroostook, although the voyagers reach the other side at last, the real contrast is found on board ship; and, although he allows his heroine to have been reared in a New England village, he cannot forego the satisfaction of having given her California for a birthplace. Mr. James writes “international episodes” : Mr. Howells writes inter-oceanic episodes; his best scenes imply a dialogue between the Atlantic and Pacific slopes.

In one sense the novels of Mr. Howells have, like those of many other writers of Western origin, proved a disappointment. Instead of bringing with them a largeness, as of the prairies, the genius finally developed has been that of the miniature artist. One must step back a century and read what Hazlitt wrote of Clarissa Harlowe to find the precise criticism for such work. “Clarissa,” [252] says Hazlitt, “is too interesting by half. She is interesting in her ruffles, in her gloves, her samplers, her aunts and uncles. She is interesting in all that is uninteresting.” 1 It is not unusual to find such superfine developments of art attempted in rough, new countries; but they cannot be said to represent the life of which they may be, by reaction, the outcome. There have been of late decided manifestations of an instinct toward the direct expression of the Western spirit.


Local types.

In looking at the recent Western contributions altogether, however, we perceive one marked feature they have in common with the Eastern. The labors of many authors, in all parts of our vast country, are gradually putting on record a wide range of local types. As a rule, to be sure, it is the less educated classes which are more easily drawn, though these may not necessarily or always be the best worth drawing. Hence we are acquiring a most valuable gallery of more or less rustic groups spread over the continent, while the traditions of polish and refinement are ignored for want either of personal experience or of [253] skill. Unluckily, the writer who has succeeded with village life always wishes to deal with more artificial society. It is as inevitable as the yearning of every clever amateur comedian to act Hamlet. Bret Harte and many of his successors handle admirably the types they knew in early life, but the moment they attempt to delineate a highly-bred woman the curtain rises on a creaking doll in starched petticoats. Few, indeed, of our early Western authors could venture to portray, what would seem not so impossible, an everyday gentleman or lady. For the East, on the other hand, Miss Jewett has been able to produce types of the old New England gentry, dwelling perhaps in the quietest of country towns, yet incapable of any act which is not dignified or gracious; and Miss Viola Roseboro has depicted such figures as that of the old Southern lady, living in a cheap New York boarding-house, toiling her life away to pay her brother's or her father's debts, and yet so exquisite in all her ways that the very page which describes her seems to exhale a delicate odor as of faded jasmine.2

But Western literature is assuming an aspect [254] of larger development than any mere interpretation of the local type. The wondrous “transitory city” created by the Chicago Exposition made an era in Western life, and in the standing of that region before the world. For the first time, we all asked ourselves, not “Is this the wild West?” but “Is not this America?” and from that moment, it would seem, the West began to find direct expression in literature. Howells can never represent it; he came East too soon and too reverentially. But we find it in a book like Main-Travelled Roads by Hamlin Garland, where the vigor of characterization carries one away from the first moment to the last, and the figures seem absolutely real. Mr. Garland's pictures of life in the middle West are sombre, but not morbid. In one respect his work and that of Frank Norris present an odd paradox. Each of these writers set out with the stated intention of breaking away from the literary traditions of the East. They did, so far as the Eastern states of North America are concerned; but they did not hesitate to go still farther east, to France and Russia, for their-models. Mr. Garland's earlier tales have much of the ironical compactness [255] of de Maupassant, and Mr. Norris's novels could not have been written but by a worshiper of Zola. It cannot be expected that the spirit of the West will find perfect expression under such a method. If America cannot find utterance in terms of England, she certainly cannot in terms of France. There are certain racial prescriptions of taste and style which cannot be safely ignored. Apart from the question of method, the substance of Mr. Norris's books is of exceptional power, and his early death deprived not only the West, but the whole country, of one who promised more even than he had accomplished. Mr. Norris's last story, The pit, dealt with Chicago as a great financial centre. The work of Mr. H. B. Fuller has had to do rather with its civic and social life; The Cliff-dwellers is the most striking of his stories, and bids fair to stand as the best analysis of the life of the “sky-scraper” and the department store, that is, the life of the ordinary prosperous dweller in a great American city.

How trifling may seem the total amount of this literary exhibit beside the gigantic enterprises, the daring achievements, the [256] great inventions which make the chronicle of the vast interior! An Easterner traveling in the West may well be amazed, not at any ostentation of vanity on the part of Western hosts, but at their wonderful humility over an achievement so vast as the material conquest of a continent. How easily all else must seem to them secondary; so that it may look like a trivial matter, as the Western editor said, to “make culture hum.” But when we turn our eyes backward, we see that in all nations the laurels of literature have endured beyond these external displays of power. They outlive cities, state-houses and statesmen. One may quote those fine lines of the once famous poem, Festus:--

Homer is gone, and where is Troy and where
The rival cities seven? His song outlasts
Town, tower and god, all that then was, save Heaven.

It may be that Mr. Norris's book will live when the tremendous operations of the wheat pit are forgotten; or if not that book, some other. Life is more important than art, but art is its noblest record.

1 Hazlitt's Lectures on English poets.

2 See Book and heart.

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