Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 01.djvu/542

AMERICAN LITERATURE. been recognized by the critics that Longfellow's nenius was at first overestimated; but critical depreciation has probably been carried too far, and it seems quite likely that the best loved of American poets will continue to rank not far below the greatest of his contemporaries. Much the same thing may be said of Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858) has lost little or nothing of its popu- larity. As a poet also. Holmes, though he may most fairly be called the laureate of Boston, still has a hold upon the heart of the nation, and he should perhaps be better known as a novelist than he is; for his Elsie Venner (1861) is a striking book.

James Russell Lowell, by his Fahle for Critics and the first series of The Biglow Papers (1848), had proved himself to be our greatest poetical humorist and satirist before the Civil War be- gan. That cataclysm inspired him to write his great odes, and later he became easily the first of American critics and letter-writers, and one of the first of American publicists. He is too near us for a proper estimate to be made of his rank in our literature, but it would appear that his fame as humorist, essayist, and epistolary master is secure. Secure, too, seems the fame of those admirable historians William H. Prescott and John Lothrop Motley, although the former's works have suffered through the discoveries of modern investigators. Their Junior, Francis Parkman, is, however, generally regarded as their superior, his great series of histories dealing with the struggle between French and English for the mastery of the New World beingas fascinating and at the same time as scientifically thorough as any other modern historical compositions.

All the writers treated in the immediately foregoing paragraphs won at least a partial recognition before the Civil War. Their fame has not, however, entirely cast in the shade such writers as Richard Henry Dana, Jr., author of Two Years Before the Mast (1840), and Herman Melville, whose 'lypee (1846), Omoo (1847), and Moby Dick (1851), are among the best books of adventure in our literatiire. Nor is the work of Bayard Taylor, Donald G. Mitchell, Richard Grant White, James T. Fields, Thomas Went- worth Higginson, and Charles Eliot Norton, to be omitted even in so brief a sketch as the present. Mention should be made also of George William Curtis. E. P. Whipple, and the two Southern poets, Paul H. Hayne and Henry Tim- rod, as well as of the worthy Philadelphia dra- matist and poet, George Henry Poker. Two other WTiters who emerged before the Civil War have attained positions only just below the highest. One, Mjs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, stirred the sympathies of the civilized world by her pathetic story of American slavery, Uiiele Tom's Cabin (1852); the other, Walt Whitman, by his Leaves of Grass (1855-83) poetically expressed the democratic ideal in a way that appealed pro- foundly to European readers, and has won him quite a large circle of devotees at home. The most noteworthy name in the decade to which the Civil War beh)ngs is that of Samuel L. Clemens, who, over the ])seudonym of "Mark Twain," won a world-wide reputation as a hvi- morist and writer of fiction. With him ap- peared a numl)er of authors whose later and more mature work has made them known throughout the country. One of the most im- portant books of the decade was The Man With- out a Country (1863), by Edward Everett Hale. Appearing at a time when the feelings of the nation were so divided, it did much to strengthen a spirit of loyalty to the Union. Two other writers, who first came to notice in the sixties, were cut off in what promised to be most fruit- ful careers — Theodore Winthrop, the novelist, whose John Brent (1862) was full of racy vigor, and Sidney Lanier, regarded by some critics as the most important American poet of the last forty years.

Since 1870, the number of publications has been constantly and rapidlj' increasing, and two dominant types have appeared — the local short story and an exaggerated form of the romantic novel. As the Middle and Western States became more settled, a new type of literature arose, which was especially adapted to the new conditions. As early as 1868 a magazine. The Overland Monthly, had been established in San Francisco; and in it appeared the vivid, racy, unconventional story. The Luck of Roaring Camp, by Bret Harte. From the appearance of this tale may be dated the vogue of the short story dealing with the local conditions in various sections of the United States. Following Bret Harte, a score of writers appeared all over ^ the country, each depicting the life and man- ners of his own particular section. For the most part, they emphasized local conditions by employing the dialect peculiar to their division of the country. Among the more successful of these dialect writers were Joel Chandler Harris, with his Uncle Remus stories; Edward Eggles- ton, the author of The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), and other tales of the Middle West; G. W. Cable, who so skillfully depicted the French Creole life of New Orleans; and Mary Noailles Murfree, better known under her pseu- ■ donym "Charles Egbert Craddock," whose novels fl of the mountain whites of Tennessee, Kentucky, ■ North Carolina and Georgia first attracted the attention of the country to these peculiar people. But although the majority of short-story writers used dialect forms, there were a number who adhered to more conventional styles of ex- pression, depending upon their power of charac- terization and the enumeration of salient details M to give the necessary semblance of reality. Among these were Harold Frederic, who dealt " with the crude life of West-Central New York; Hamlin Garland, who wrote of the North-West; James Lane Allen, who depicted the people of Kentucky; and Mary E. Wilkins, who with de- served success wrote her vignettes of the narrow- er life of New England. F. R. Stockton drew with much quaint humor some familiar and very characteristic American types in Rudder Grange; and Ernest Seton-Thompson described the lives of wild animals by the original and interesting metliod of looking at their environment from their own standpoint.

Besides these writers there were a few successful authors whose works cannot be classified under any one division. First of these is General Lew Wallace, whose Ben Hur (1880), a tale of the early days of Christianity, was immensely popular. It was a forerunner of the reaction against the short dialect story; for just as the psychological novel had given place to the story, so it in turn was to be superseded b3' the unalloyed romance. A prolific and interesting writer was Francis Marion Crawford, who was an exponent of the theory that a novel should be