Compare the treatment of primitive Western life and adventure by Miller with use of the same material by Mark Twain or Bret Harte. Read Miller for evidences of literary influence upon him of Scott or Byron or Coleridge, or Browning. Read Miller's "Song of the South" and his explanatory remarks on it and compare Longfellow's treatment of the Mississippi; or compare Masters's preface to his volume "Toward the Gulf” and his poems on the same subject. Note the insistence of Miller on the idea that life is power and in his later poems the increasing respect for reflection. ९९ Compare Miller's Columbus with Lowell's "Columbus" and Lanier's "Sonnets on Columbus." CHAPTER XXVII THE RISE OF FICTION; WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS It is very seldom in the history of literature that important developments take place without long preliminaries. From period to period new emphasis is placed on old ideas, and old forms are given the right of way in literary fashion. In the course of American literature, roughly speaking, the dominating forms of literature have been in succession: exposition and travel during the colonial period; poetry, satirical and epic, in the Revolutionary period; poetry in all its broader aspects during the first two thirds of the nineteenth century. After the Civil War for fifty years fiction came to the front; from about 1900 on a new emphasis was given to the stage and the playwright; at present the most striking fact in world literature is the broadening and deepening of the poetic currents again. Yet all of these forms are always existent. To speak of the rise of fiction, then, is simply to acknowledge the increased attention which for a period it demanded. It is frequently said that America's chief contribution to world literature has been the short story as developed since the Civil War. Yet in America the ground had been prepared for this development by many writers, among them, as already mentioned in this history, Washington Irving with "The Sketch Book" in 1819 (see pp. 118-131), Hawthorne with "Twice-Told Tales " in 1837 (see pp. 240 and 243), Poe with his various contributions to periodical literature in the 1840's (see pp. 185-187), Mark Twain with "The Jumping Frog" of 1867, Bret Harte with "The Luck of Roaring Camp" of 1870 and the great bulk of his subsequent contributions (see p. 381), and Thomas Bailey Aldrich with "Marjorie Daw" of 1873 and his other volumes of short stories. In the meanwhile the novel had had its consecutive history—from Brockden Brown beginning with 1798 (see pp. 100-109) to Cooper in 1820 (see pp. 141-157), William Gilmore Simms from 1833 (see p. 344), Hawthorne from 1850 on (see pp. 236-251), Mrs. Stowe from 1852 (see pp. 299-309), and Holmes from 1861 (see pp. 320, 321). And these writers of short and long fiction are only the outstanding story-tellers in America between the beginning of the century and the years just after the Civil War. In a chapter such as this no exhaustive survey is possible, for it involves scores of writers and hundreds of books. The vital movement started with a fresh and vivid treatment of native American material, and it moved in a great sweeping curve from the West down past the Gulf up through the southeastern states into New England, across to the Middle West, and back into the Ohio valley until every part of the country was represented by its expositors. The course of this newer provincial fiction is suggested by the mention of Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog" (1867, California), "The Luck of Roaring Camp" of Bret Harte (1870, California), G. W. Cable's "Old Creole Days" (1879, Louisiana), Harris's "Uncle Remus his Songs and his Sayings" (1880, Georgia), “In the Tennessee Mountains," by Charles Egbert Craddock (1884), "In Ole Virginia," by Thomas Nelson Page (1887), "A New England Nun," by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1891), "MainTraveled Roads," by Hamlin Garland (1891, the Middle West), "Flute and Violin," by James Lane Allen (1891, the Ohio valley). WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (1837-1920) The preeminent figure in the field of American fiction during the last half century has been William Dean Howells, a man who is widely representative of the broad literary development in the country and worthy of careful study as an artist and as a critic of life. Although he has been an Easterner by residence for nearly half a century, he is the greatest contribution of the West—or what was West in his youth to Eastern life and thought. - He was born in 1837 at Martins Ferry, Ohio, — the second of eight children. Perhaps the richness of his character is accounted for by the varied strains in his ancestry. On his father's side his people were wholly Welsh except his English great-grandmother, and on his mother's wholly German except his Irish grandfather. His mother he has described as the heart of the family, and his father as the soul. The family fortunes were in money ways unsuccessful. His father's experience as a country editor took him from place to place in a succession of ventures which were harrassed by uncertain income and heavy debts. These were always paid, but only by dint of unceasing effort. The Howells family were, however, happy in their concord and in their daily enjoyment of the best that books could bring them. Unlike many another youth who has struggled into literary fame, William Dean found a ready sympathy with his ambitions at home. His experience was less like Whitman's than Bryant's. From childhood the printing office was his school and almost his only school, for the district teachers had little to offer a child of literary parentage "whose sense was open to every intimation of beauty." Very early his desire for learning led him into what he called "self-conducted inquiries" in foreign languages; and with the help of a "sixteen-bladed grammar," a nondescript polyglot affair, he acquired in turn a reading knowledge of Latin, Greek, Spanish, German, French, and Italian. In the meanwhile he was reading and assimilating the popular English favorites. It was typical of his experience that Longfellow led him to his first studies of the Spanish language, bringing him back to Spain, where he had traveled in fancy with Irving. Always he was writing, for his life was "filled with literature to bursting," and always imitating-now Pope, now Heine, now Cervantes, now Shakespeare. |