Part 15

_Mayo_, _Kimball_, _and Wise_.--William Starbuck Mayo (1812-95), a New York physician, travelled in the Barbary States, and on returning home wrote two popular novels, “Kaloolah, or Journeyings in the Djebel Kumri” (1849) and “The Berber, or The Mountaineer of the Atlas” (1850). The former purports to be the autobiography of Jonathan Romer, who, after numerous exciting adventures in the American woods, goes to Africa, has various hair’s-breadth escapes, fights with slave-traders and natives, and marries a beautiful dusky princess. In its satirical remarks on civilised usages it imitates “Gulliver.” “The Berber,” a story of more regular construction, is still enjoyable. It recounts events supposed to take place in Africa at the close of the seventeenth century, and like its predecessor contains minutely accurate descriptions of tropical scenery and animal life. Richard B. Kimball’s “St. Leger, or The Threads of Life” (1849), reprinted from _The Knickerbocker_, was a serious attempt to depict a mind in pursuit of truth in a story in which romantic adventure plays some part; but the characters are not strongly marked. Henry Augustus Wise (1819-69), son of a naval officer and himself a lieutenant in the Navy, saw the humorous and comic side of the seaman’s life, and chronicled his impressions in “Los Gringos, or An Inside View of Mexico and California” (1849), and still more successfully in his sprightly and sentimental “Tales for the Marines” (1855), in which all sorts of marvellous and amusing things happen.

=The Decade of 1850-60.=--It can hardly be said that the next decade, 1850-60, saw any great improvement in the quality of our fiction; but there is evident an increasing preference for realistic studies of home life, and a growing indifference to the highly wrought and more or less melodramatic romances which had delighted the readers of an earlier day. For many reasons, Americans desired to see themselves in fiction, doing their daily work, struggling with everyday temptations, yielding or conquering according to their native strength or weakness. There was a growing sense of the artistic--and moral or didactic--value of common life. The reaction against romance was inevitable, and was no doubt accelerated by the coming of railroads, telegraphs, Atlantic cables, and the controversy over slavery.

_Ik Marvel._--Significant, then, was the popularity, which has scarcely waned, of “Ik Marvel’s” two books, “Reveries of a Bachelor” (1850) and “Dream Life” (1851). The author, Donald G. Mitchell (born in 1822), was a product of Connecticut and a graduate of Yale, whose experience had been enriched by European travel. The pernicious influence of Carlyle upon Mitchell’s style is too evident; but the sentiment, or sentimentality, the enthusiasm, the tender pathos of these slight stories have appealed to thousands. In his “Dr. Johns” (1866), Mitchell brought the stern Calvinistic theology of New England into relief by contrasting it with French frivolity.

_Edward Everett Hale._--Edward Everett Hale’s literary activity has extended over something like sixty years. Born in Boston in 1822, and graduated from Harvard at seventeen, he became a journalist, story-teller, minister, historian, and antiquarian. His “Margaret Percival in America,” a religious novel, appeared in 1850, and he has since written others, “If, Yes, and Perhaps” (1868), “Ten Times One Is Ten” (1870), “In His Name” (1874), a truthful and glowing narrative of the Waldenses, “Philip Nolan’s Friends” (1876), the gallant hero of which, the Kentuckian Philip Nolan, was “the protomartyr to Mexican treachery,” “The Fortunes of Rachel” (1884), a slight but clever tale, and “East and West” (1892). But Dr. Hale is best known in literature by his short stories. “My Double and How He Undid Me,” published in _The Atlantic_ for September, 1859, was a clever and amusing piece which made a great hit and immortalised some of the bores of his parish. “The Man Without a Country” (_The Atlantic_, December, 1863) brought its author national reputation and has become a classic. It has been justly pronounced “the best sermon on patriotism ever written.” Speaking of sermons recalls the criticism often applied to Dr. Hale’s stories, that the moral is too obvious; in general, however, the moral cannot be called obtrusive and hardly interferes with the general effect of the story.

_Alice Cary._--Alice Cary (1822-71), better known as a poet, wrote pleasantly appreciative sketches of her Ohio home under the title of “Clovernook, or Recollections of our Neighbourhood in the West” (1852); a second series of similar sketches was published in 1853. Her three novels, “Hagar” (1852), “Married, not Mated” (1856), and “The Bishop’s Son” (1857), were characterised by power of observation and by careful literary workmanship.

_The Warners._--Susan Warner (1819-1885), whose earlier work was done under the pen name of “Elizabeth Wetherell,” became well known through the publication (1850) of her first book “The Wide, Wide World.” This was a story of domestic life on the upper Hudson, which showed an exceptional power of description and of character study, and which secured very promptly wide acceptance on both sides of the Atlantic. With the single exception of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” it proved to be the most popular novel written up to that date in America, and it had the compliment of reproduction in a long series of unauthorised editions in Europe. “The Wide, Wide World” was followed by a series of stories, of which the most important were “Queechy” (1852), “The Hills of the Shatemuc” (1858), “Diana” (1859), “Wych Hazel” (1860), and “The Gold of Chickaree” (1861). She collaborated with her sister, Anna Bartlett Warner (born in 1820), in the production of “Dollars and Cents,” which was issued in 1853, and in some successful books for the young, “Mr. Rutherford’s Children,” etc.

_Harriet Beecher Stowe._--A diligent and painstaking writer of fiction for thirty years, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96) is to-day remembered only as the author of a single book, and that one almost her first. The daughter of Dr. Lyman Beecher of Connecticut, she was born into a remarkably gifted family and inherited the best that New England Puritan culture could give. At twenty-one she was married to Professor Calvin E. Stowe, then a teacher in the divinity school in Cincinnati. Here she had an opportunity of studying the workings of slavery, and as a result entered heart and soul into the anti-slavery movement. In the year in which Hawthorne published his “House of the Seven Gables,” Longfellow “The Golden Legend,” and Melville “Moby Dick,” she began in _The National Era_ a serial which aroused wide and bitter discussion. The next year (1852), “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” appeared in book form. Over three hundred thousand copies, according to the author, were sold within a year. The part played by the book in hastening the “irrepressible conflict” of the Civil War cannot be estimated. It is not hard to see blemishes in the story: tame description, careless and loose construction, the tone of the preacher; but these are rendered insignificant by the great merits of the book, its frequent touches of humour, its range and variety of characters, who are not merely types but are graphically individualised, its broad humanity, its fierce earnestness, its kindling emotion. These may not suffice to put the story among the great and enduring works of literature; but it will be long before America outgrows her fondness and admiration for it. Mrs. Stowe followed this book in 1856 with “Dred” (republished in 1866 as “Nina Gordon”), in which she continued to depict effectively the position of slavery with reference to the church and the law, and the defeat by mob violence of a high-minded slave-owner who sought to purify the unholy system. A more deliberate and carefully planned work than “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” it has generally been considered as inferior in power, though Harriet Martineau thought it superior. Old Tiff is one of the great creations of negro character. As a picture, in the main true, of old-fashioned Southern life, it has a lasting charm. In “The Minister’s Wooing” (1859), Mrs. Stowe turned to New England life at the beginning of the century, and dealt with the influence of the older Calvinism upon devout and sensitive minds. In artistic construction and effect it has been pronounced superior to all her other works; some of the characters, for example, Mary Scudder and Dr. Hopkins, are notably strong and impressive. Yet, like all her later works, it has been overshadowed by that one which was struck out in a white heat of passionate appeal. “The Pearl of Orr’s Island” (1861) is a quiet story of Puritan life on the Maine coast, insufficiently relieved by a few thrilling episodes. In “Agnes of Sorrento” (1862), the result of a visit to Europe, Mrs. Stowe turned to Italy in the days of Savonarola, but achieved even less success than George Eliot did in the next year with “Romola.” In 1863, the Stowes settled permanently at Hartford, Connecticut; and after the war they acquired a winter residence in Florida. The best of Mrs. Stowe’s numerous later books is probably “Oldtown Folks” (1869), dealing with life in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, about the year 1800, and portraying some very realistic characters. Such stories as “Pink and White Tyranny” (1871), “My Wife and I” (1871), and “We and Our Neighbours” (1875), in which she aimed to reform fashionable society, though successful in respect to sales, were from an artistic point of view decided failures. In “Sam Lawson’s Fireside Stories” (1871) and “Poganuc People” (1878), she returned to New England Yankees and the life she most successfully drew. On the whole it must be said that her reputation, while it lasts, will rest chiefly upon “Uncle Tom” and the New England stories.

_John T. Trowbridge._--One of the most popular of writers for boys is John Townsend Trowbridge (born in 1827). Educated in the common schools, he learned Latin, Greek, and French by himself, taught school, worked a year on an Illinois farm, and then settled down to writing in New York City. Some of his books are “Father Brighthopes” (1853), “Burrcliff” (1853), “Martin Merrivale” (1854), “Neighbour Jackwood” (1857), a famous anti-slavery novel, perhaps a good second to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in influence and popularity, “Cudjo’s Cave” (1864), and “Coupon Bonds, and Other Stories” (1871). He has been a prolific writer of healthful and finished stories for boys. John Burroughs has well said of him: “He knows the heart of a boy and the heart of a man, and has laid them both open in his books.”

_John Esten Cooke._--A romancer of the old school was John Esten Cooke (1830-86), a younger brother of Philip Pendleton Cooke. A native of Virginia, he found inspiration in the romantic history of that State, drawing many of his characters from life. His first important publication was “Leather Stocking and Silk, or Hunter John Myers and His Times” (1854); his best story proved to be “The Virginia Comedians, or Old Days in the Old Dominion” (1854), which deals with the period just preceding the Revolution, and which, with its youthful enthusiasm and interesting descriptions of colonial manners, has been called by some critics the best novel written in the South down to the Civil War. After serving in the Confederate army, Cooke sought to utilise his military experiences in several dramatic stories; but his reputation had been made, and his day had gone by.

_Maria S. Cummins._--In “The Lamplighter” (1854), Maria S. Cummins (1827-66) achieved a success comparable to that of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Ben Hur.” In “Mabel Vaughan” (1857) she produced probably a better book. Both of her stories, however, while in the main true delineations of girl and home life, are too evidently written with a didactic aim, and are at times laboured and diffuse. Her other stories, “El Fureidis” (1860), a story of Palestine, and “Haunted Hearts” (1864), are now entirely forgotten.

_Mrs. Ann Sophia Stephens._--Mrs. Ann Sophia Stephens (1813-86) was in the fifties and sixties an immensely popular novelist. She was the daughter of John Winterbotham, an English woollen manufacturer who had come to America, and was born at Humphreysville, Connecticut. In 1831, she married Edward Stephens, a publisher, and began in 1835 to edit _The Portland Magazine_, founded by her husband. Later, she edited _The Ladies’ Companion_ and became an associate editor of _Graham’s_ and _Peterson’s_, to which she contributed over twenty serials. Her first elaborate novel, “Fashion and Famine” (1854), had a very large circulation and was three times translated into French. A novel of affected intensity, it contained some excellent delineation of character. Among her other works were “Zana, or The Heiress of Clare Hall” (1854), republished as “The Heiress of Greenhurst,” “The Old Homestead” (1855), “Sibyl Chase” (1862), “The Rejected Wife” (1863), “Married in Haste” (1870), “The Reigning Belle” (1872), and “Norton’s Rest” (1877). She was attentive to details and wrote in a condensed and forcible style.

_Marion Harland._--Marion Harland is the pseudonym under which Mrs. Mary Virginia Terhune (born in 1831), a Virginian of New England ancestry, became known for a number of short stories, novels, and miscellaneous matter. Her fiction is of the romantic type, full of incident, and dealing with brave personages. Some of her stories are “Alone, a Tale of Southern Life and Manners” (1854), “The Hidden Path” (1855), “Moss-Side” (1857), “Miriam” (1860), “Nemesis” (1860), “Husks” (1863), “Sunnybank” (1866), “At Last” (1870), “Judith” (1883), and “A Gallant Fight” (1888). She has been editorially connected with a number of juvenile magazines.

_Curtis_, _Willis_, _Holland_.--George William Curtis belongs in the main, of course, with the essayists, where his life will be narrated. He was the author of “Prue and I” (1856), a series of papers written originally for _Putnam’s_, and together forming a slight story of charming domestic life, in which sentiment, fancy, and a broad optimistic philosophy are pervasive features; and of an unsuccessful novel, “Trumps” (1861), which he began in 1859 as a serial in _Harper’s Weekly_. In view of the broad experience of its author, his fondness for good novels, his discriminating taste, his facility in expression, this failure of “Trumps” was remarkable. The truth is that Curtis had not rightly estimated his powers. He could not manage an elaborate plot with skill, and he also made the same mistake that marred the work of many writers already noticed--he was too much concerned to point the moral. The general effect, as Mr. Cary points out,[14] is that “Trumps” becomes “a Sunday-school story, written by a man of rare gifts, some of which betray the elusive charm of genius, but still essentially of that class, producing, and apparently intended to produce, the impression that in the end virtue triumphs and vice comes to a miserable end.” In the long run, this is eternally true; but the great artists do not talk about it very much. A similar failure, though for different reasons, was the one novel written by the prolific Nathaniel P. Willis, “Paul Fane, or Parts of a Life Else Untold” (1857), an early and dull experiment in the field of international novels. It was a story whose general distortion of things amounted almost to caricature, since it was based on superficial rather than deep and careful observation of character. In the same year Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819-81) made his _début_ in the field of fiction with “The Bay Path,” a story of the settlement of the Connecticut Valley, filled largely with historical characters, and generally faithful to the manners and thought of the age portrayed. A more ambitious story, “Miss Gilbert’s Career” (1860), is a realistic modern novel in which a characteristic Yankee community is described with great fidelity. His later novels, “Arthur Bonnicastle” (1873), “The Story of Sevenoaks” (1875), and “Nicholas Minturn” (1877), cannot on the whole be said to possess high literary merit; the author was avowedly a moralist, and the best that can be said of them is that they did no harm.

_Major John William de Forest._--Major John William de Forest (born in 1826) began writing fiction with a very romantic and very poor novel called “Witching Times,” published serially in _Putnam’s_, 1856-57, and followed it with a number of works which made him one of the most popular novelists of the seventies--“Seacliff” (1859), “Miss Ravenel’s Conversion” (1867), a book out of his own experience, and his first in realistic vein, “Overland” (1871), “Kate Beaumont” (1872), “Honest John Vane” (1875), “Playing the Mischief” (1875), and many others. Of “Miss Ravenel’s Conversion” Mr. Howells has said: “It was one of the best American novels that I had known, and was of an advanced realism before realism was known by that name.”

_Robert Lowell._--In 1858 appeared “The New Priest of Conception Bay,” in which the Rev. Robert Traill Spence Lowell (1816-91), an elder brother of James Russell Lowell, and an Episcopal clergyman, painted in bright and cheerful colours the rural life of Newfoundland with which he became familiar during his sojourn at Bay Roberts in 1843-47. No truer picture of the simple fisher folk of Newfoundland was ever produced--even to a delicate discrimination of dialects. Mr. Lowell’s reputation was not ill sustained by his later though less known books, “Antony Brade” (1874) and “A Story or Two from an Old Dutch Town” (1878), which dealt with the quaint life in the Dutch villages of eastern New York.

_Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford._--Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford (born in 1835), a native of Maine who has passed most of her life in Massachusetts, made her reputation with a short story of Parisian life, “In a Cellar,” in _The Atlantic_ in 1859. In “Sir Rohan’s Ghost” (1859), “The Amber Gods” (in _The Atlantic_, 1860), which gave her a considerable reputation, “Azarian,” (1864), and “A Thief in the Night” (1872), she produced sombre works vividly imaginative and intense in feeling. She was among the first to work the mine of ghostly romance. Her stories have never been very popular; her fondness for the sensuous and the splendid repels many readers. Yet for sheer and overwhelming intensity and for complete success in producing the effect sought, “A Thief in the Night” must be given a high place as a work of art.

_Mrs. Miriam Coles Harris._--Mrs. Miriam Coles Harris (born in 1834), who has spent most of her life in and near New York City, wrote a number of stories popular in their day, some of them being still read. “Rutledge” (1860) and “The Sutherlands” (1862) were widely circulated. Her later stories include “A Perfect Adonis” (1875), “Phœbe” (1884), “Missy” (1885), and “An Utter Failure” (1890).

_Theodore Winthrop._--Theodore Winthrop (1828-61) deserves more than passing mention, not so much for what he actually accomplished as for what his brief life gave promise of doing. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, a descendant of Governor John Winthrop of Connecticut and at twenty a graduate of Yale, he travelled much abroad, went to Panama in the employment of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, and afterward sojourned in California and Oregon, visiting also the island of Vancouver and some of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s stations. He was admitted to the bar in 1855, but became more fond of politics and literature than of law. For several years, he worked on his novels; but though one was accepted for publication, none appeared in his lifetime. At the opening of the war he went to the front with the Seventh New York Regiment, and fell, bravely fighting, at Great Bethel. His descriptions of his march to Washington, in _The Atlantic Monthly_, had attracted much attention, and after his death his novels appeared in rapid succession, “Cecil Dreeme” in 1861 and “John Brent” and “Edwin Brothertoft” in 1862. The first is a gruesome tale of life in New York, full of broad sweep and passion, immature but not devoid of power. “John Brent,” the best of his stories, is an imaginative tale into which he wove a record of his Western experiences; it “had the merit, in its day especially, of delineating Western scenes and characters with sympathy and skill, at a time when the West was almost virgin soil to literature.” “Edwin Brothertoft” is a melodramatic story of the American Revolution, at times crude in expression, but strong in plot and in its play of light and shade. Had Winthrop lived, our literature beyond question would have been far richer. He comprehended as did few others the deep throbbing life of America, not only in its externals but in its less obvious features; and abating his youthful “breeziness,” he would doubtless have reproduced some parts of that life on enduring canvas.

_Fitz-James O’Brien._--Another brilliant writer whose career was cut short by the war was Fitz-James O’Brien (1828-62), a native of County Limerick, Ireland. He was educated at the University of Dublin; and after spending his inheritance of £8,000 in London, he came to America in 1852 and from that time on devoted himself to literature. In New York he became a prominent figure among the Bohemian set and won distinguished social and literary success. Besides much clever verse, he wrote for the magazines some marvellously ingenious tales, for example “The Diamond Lens,” “The Wondersmith,” “The Golden Ingot,” and “Mother of Pearl.” The reader is occasionally reminded of Poe and Hawthorne, but is more often led to wonder why O’Brien has so long lain in neglect; for some of his stories are powerful in a high degree. Like Winthrop, O’Brien in 1861 became a soldier in the Seventh New York Regiment and went to the front. On February 26, 1862 he was severely wounded in a skirmish, and in April he died. Nearly twenty years later, his friend William Winter edited “The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien” (1881).

=The Civil War.=--It is not surprising that the Civil War partially, at least, dried up the springs of literature and art in America. It was an epoch of concentration, of action; men had little time for reading novels or writing them; the newspaper any day might chronicle as sublimely heroic or as pathetic events as could be found in fiction. Comparatively few novels of distinction were written, therefore, during the war and the two or three years following it, the Reconstruction period. Some worthy novels which appeared in those years, for example Mrs. Stoddard’s “Morgesons,” failed of an appreciative audience.

The close of the war marked the beginning of a new era in American fiction. As Mr. Morse points out, people no longer cared for stories about the Indians and about the Revolution. The Indians had retreated into that world of romance with which the modern world, ignorant of “Nick of the Woods,” associates them; the Revolution was ancient history by the side of the more terrible conflict just ended, and a quarter of a century must elapse before the earlier war would make a background for fiction. Romance, which, as we have seen, had already begun to lose favour, must now yield to realism; there must be pictures of life at home, in the market-place, in the fields, in the teeming cities; there must be greater skill in handling the narrative so as to make it a transcript from daily life. The lover of romance will doubtless deplore this tendency; but it was inevitable, and it has dictated the path of fiction almost to the present day.