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CHILDREN'S STORIES
IN
AMERICAN LITERATURE
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
CHILDREN'S STORIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE,
1861-1896. One vol., I2mo . . . $1.25
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, CHILDREN'S STORIES
IN
AMERICAN LITERATURE
1861-1896
BY
HENRIETTA CHRISTIAN WRIGHT
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NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1909
COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER I PAGE
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 1824-1892, ... I
CHAPTER II
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD 1825 , . 19
CHAPTER III
EDWARD EGGLESTON 7837 . . ... .28
>N 7837 .
CHAPTER
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER- --1829 . . . 50
CHAPTER V
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN 1833 , .... 62
CHAPTER VI
BRET HARTE 1839 . 7 2
vi CONTENTS
CHAPTER VII PAGE
BAYARD TAYLOR 1825-1878, 84
CHAPTER VIII
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 1837 , 106
CHAPTER IX
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT 1849 , . . . .125
CHAPTER X
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS, 138
CHAPTER XI
LOUISA MAY ALdoft^-^a^SSSv ;. ; .'!::/: . . .179
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* * ***** *
THOMAS BAILEY ALDR{ci\^-6-VTV!-' ! . . .196
CHAPTER XIII
NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS, 210
CHAPTER XIV
GEORGE W. CABLE 1844 236
CONTENTS Vll
CHAPTER XV
JOHN FISKE 1842 , 251
CHAPTER XVI
MARK TWAIN 1835 , 26*,
CHAPTER I
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS
1824-1892
In a certain American classic there is a pict-
ure of a boy standing in the shadow of an old
warehouse and living, in imagination, a day
that belonged to another generation. The
boy was George William Curtis, and it was in
his charming book, Prue and /, that he em-
bodied this experience of his boyhood. In
the pages which describe the past glories of
Providence the author is picturing his native
city, and reproducing with an artist's touch
the atmosphere which surrounded his childish
days.
At that time Providence was sharing the
fate of many New England seaport towns
whose importance was passing away. The
old, red, steep-roofed brick storehouses were
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS
falling into ruins, the docks were crumbling
away, and the business part of the town was
almost deserted. In place of a fleet of great
East India merchant - vessels moored to the
big posts, there were only a few insignificant
sloops idly rocking with the tides. Instead of
the shouting and confusion of unlading, there
was but a group of idle old sailors gathered in
the warehouse doors.
But to the boy-dreamer who looked on, the
silence and shadow of the old stores seemed
like those of royal treasure-houses. There
were still to be seen piles of East India wares
-oriental stuffs, dyes, coffees, and spices whose
fragrance brought Arabia and China to the
senses. Occasionally a chance ship drifted in-
to the harbor, and for a few hours the Provi-
dence wharves lived their old life. Once when
this happened, young Curtis crept along the
edge of the dock after the unloading was over,
and at great risk leaned over and placed his
hand against the black hulk. And thus, he
records, he " touched Asia, Cape of Good
Hope, and the Happy Islands ; saw palm-
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS
groves, jungles, and Bengal tigers, and the
feet of Chinese fairies."
From the gloom of the old warehouses he
would very often go to the sunny fields that lay
upon the hills back of the town, and watch
some sea-bound ship, taking it for a type of
his fortunes, which should sail " stately and
successful to all the glorious ports of the fut-
ure." The picture is bright and beautiful with
the pure hopes of youth. It is good to know
that the dream of the boy was a prophecy of
the noble life it realized.
Providence was the home of young Curtis
until his sixth year, when, with his elder brother,
Burrill, he went for a time to school at Jamaica
Plain, near Boston. From some fragments of
description written many years afterward we
learn that this experience was a pleasant one.
The school \vas provided with large play-
grounds, play-hours were long and study-hours
short. Near by was a pond for boating and
fishing, and beyond the village were groves for
nutting and picnics. The master's wife always
took tea with the boys, and the master himself
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS
was a good-natured man with a great fondness
for playing practical jokes. Once when he
knocked at the dormitory door during an ex-
citing pillow-fight, the boys turned the joke
upon him by putting out the lights, and, pre-
tending that they thought him one of their
schoolmates, pounded him so unmercifully that
he was glad to rush from the room.
But there were serious moments, too, in
life. In one of these Curtis, then about seven,
arrayed himself in ministerial garb and solemn-
ly preached a sermon, from the landing of the
stairs, upon the consequences of evil-doing.
Perhaps it was from the text of this sermon
that he a little later wrote a treatise on murder,
which, he said, always started with Sabbath-
breaking ; the Sabbath-breaker became in turn
a user of profane language, then a thief, and so
went downward by easy gradations until he
committed murder. Such grave subjects, how-
ever, only occasionally depressed the spirits
of this happy flock of boys. Curtis said that
possibly they did not learn anything at this
school, but that they had plenty of good beef.
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 5
There was a very deep love and sympathy
between the Curtis brothers, and their life at
Jamaica Plain, and afterward when they re-
turned to Providence, is reflected in the work
of later years where the picture of the brother
is sketched with a loving hand.
While they were still very young boys they
heard in their school-room, at Providence, a
lecture by Emerson, who was then beginning
to be known as an essayist and lecturer. Into
these hearts, which had just left childhood, the
words of Emerson fell full of gracious inspi-
ration. He became their teacher of noble
thoughts, their leader into the realm of moral
beauty. Much as the page of chivalric days
looked up to his chosen knight, they revered
with boyish hero-worship the great teacher.
He gave them the best things that Puritanism
could bestow, and he became a far-reaching in-
fluence in their lives.
The Curtis family removed to New York in
1839, an d the Providence school-days came
to an end. But above all others Curtis al-
ways called Emerson his teacher ; another trib-
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS
ute to the master to whom American thought
owes so much.
The new home was in Washington Square,
then the upper part of the city, with the open
country not far away. The best-known people
of the day- -writers, artists, musicians, lovers of
all art found their way to the Curtis home.
This companionship, together with systematic
study, fostered rapid intellectual growth ; the
boys made progress, but city life did not en-
tirely please them. About this time the Com-
munity of Brook Farm was founded by the
men destined to be among the intellectual lead-
ers of America. Every member was pledged
to help with the manual labor, and to contrib-
ute his share toward the intellectual life. It
was a dream of the old Utopia, where life was
simple and happiness abounded. The Curtis
brothers begged their father to let them go
and share this ideal home, and he consented.
Although they went as boarders and did not
become actual members of the community, its
life was theirs. Here, where Emerson, Haw-
thorne, and Dana ploughed and hoed and
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS
planted, the two boys did their share. They
drove cows, raked hay, and pulled weeds in
the morning ; in the afternoon they studied
German, chemistry, and music ; in the evening
they danced or sang, had theatrical representa-
tions or talked philosophy.
Young Curtis absorbed the healthy atmos-
phere of this unconventional yet inspiring life,
as he breathed the air from the dewy meadows
and wild-rose hedges. It was a part of the
hope and aspiration of youth brought down
to actual touch, and he formed here more than
one abiding and uplifting friendship.
The charm of the life did not quite dissolve
when the brothers returned to New York, for
within a few months they \vere again in the
country as inmates of a farmhouse near Con-
cord. Here they did farm work, made their
own beds, cultivated a little garden, joined a
club of which Emerson and Hawthorne were
members, and, in fact, lived and did quite as
they pleased. It was camp life with some of
the discomforts left out and some privileges
added, and it was an idyllic existence for a
8 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS
youth who did not know just what he should
make of life, but who had determined that he
would make of it something noble.
While at Concord Curtis wrote two charm-
ing little stories that may be called a prelude
to his literary career. One of these tales is
that of the strange sights seen by a little girl
who possesses a pair of magic spectacles. It
is full of the poetic grace of a genuine folk-
story. In the chapter on Titbottom's Specta-
cles in Prue and /, the same motif is used.
Neither of the stories has ever been published.
His career was still undecided when, in his
twenty-second year, Curtis sailed for Europe
and a trip to the East. Although calling no
college his Alma Mater he was still the repre-
sentative cultivated young American of his day.
He was well read in the German, Italian, and
English classics, appreciated the best music,
was a student of aesthetics, and had an earnest
and intelligent interest in politics. He be-
lieved that America, as embodying the idea of
self-government of states, had a mission to the
world. In his soul he consecrated his best
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS
powers to the service of humanity, and he
was ready, when the moment came, to serve
it without thought of cost to himself. The
ocean travellers of those days took passage in
packet-ships, and Curtis was forty-six days in
crossing to France. He spent four years
abroad, making the usual tours. He kept a
diary, which became a record of charming in-
terest, but most of which remained unpub-
lished. During this time he sent letters to the
New York Tribune, devoted to the public
questions of the day. The fact that he chose
to write thus, while surrounded by the Old
World impressions, shows the trend of his
mind toward the higher political interests in
which he became a leader.
During this trip Curtis seems to have made
up his mind to a literary career. Soon after
his return he began to lecture, and a little
later went on the staff of the Tribune. The
Nile Notes of a Howadji is the record of
a trip up the Nile, and was the first book
that Curtis published. Like Longfellow's
Hyperion, it has more than a literary value
10 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS
as being the actual experience of one who
was to become prominent in American liter-
ature. In these chapters the author did not
aim at literal description. He was rather
the happy traveller transcribing for absent
friends the pictures of the lands they have so
often visited together in imagination.
He made himself story-teller to the fireside
group, and scene after scene was sketched with
faithful hand. To this young dreamer Egypt
still remained the land of wonder and inspira-
tion, though its temples lay in ruins and its peo-
ple had sunk to the lowest level of humanity.
There is a wondrous charm in his sympathy
with that great past, and in his appreciation of
the ideals of the race whose art and science
laid their mark ineffaceably upon the world.
The paintings in the pyramids and tombs of
the common people, illustrating the victories of
the kings, the occupations of the lower classes,
and even the games of the children, all pict-
ured in colors still fresh, had a wonderful fas-
cination for the young traveller. In gazing at
them he forgot the Egypt that he actually saw
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS II
and seemed to touch hands with a vanished
race.
It throws a bright light on the character
of the author to see him thus able to make
that old inspiration his own. Without the
Nile Notes we should never have known so
well the ambitions of his young manhood
when he was a dreamer of dreams. The chap-
ters on the every-day occurrences of the trips
are also full of interest, and touched with the
author's characteristic humor.
The natives called all travellers howadji
shopkeepers- -for such they conceived to be
the occupation of the wandering Europeans
and Americans who visited their land. To the
native imagination the howadji was a being
created to bestow bakshish, or alms, to buy
bits of mummy bones, or even whole mum-
mies, and to be cheated upon every occasion.
Curtis refused to be cheated, gave bakshish
only to the " miserable, old, and blind," and
struck his followers dumb by insisting upon
doing nothing for long hours but sit gazing
upon a pyramid or ruined temple.
12 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS
The journey up and down the Nile occu-
pied two months, and the record of it will
always be interesting as embodying the expe-
riences of the Nile traveller in 1848. The lit-
erary charm of the book is great, many of the
passages being in reality unrhymed poems of
peculiar beauty. This volume was published
in the spring of 1851, and was well received.
There was an English edition which received
many flattering notices, and this success con-
firmed the author in his determination to make
literature his profession.
Mr. Curtis's next book, A Howadji in
Syria, continued his journeyings in the East
through Syria and Palestine. It is written in
the style of the earlier work, and partakes of
the same charm.
His third book, Lotus-Eating, had origi-
nally appeared in the Tribune as a series of
letters written during a summer's journeyings
through the Berkshire Hills, at Newport, and
other sea-coast places, and at Niagara. This
book is in Curtis's most delicate vein. Lotus-
Eating was illustrated by Kensett, one of the
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 13
most popular artists of the day, and a warm
friend of the author. Both text and drawings
recall to-day the grace and beauty of some old
miniature in its quaint setting, a reflection of
another and more picturesque age.
The Potiphar Papers followed Lotus-Eat-
ing, and showed Curtis in the light of a
teacher of manners and morals to what was
called the best society. The Potiphar family
was a picture of the rich American without
cultivation, and with no other ambition than to
live in finer houses, have better horses, and
give more expensive dinners than the rest of
the \vorld. In a series of letters by Mr. and
Mrs. Potiphar and their friends the author
shows the folly of such silly ambitions.
But the book which brought Mr. Curtis the
most fame, both because of its artistic ex-
cellence and high literary value, is that charm-
ing idyll, Prue and I. In these pages the
hero is an old book-keeper who lives in a
humble way in an unfashionable street. But
the book-keeper counts himself rich because
of his many castles in Spain, whither he often
14 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS
travels, and about which he writes many de-
lightful descriptions. There are other char-
acters in the book who also own castles in
Spain. Titbottom, the under-book-keeper, and
Bourne, the millionnaire, share and share alike
in this wonderful property, which one is never
too poor to own, and never too rich not to de-
sire. Each one tells stories in which Moorish
palaces, marble fountains, moonlit balconies,
West Indian sunsets, and tropical flowers are
woven into an arabesque of color ; but some-
how all suggest a dreamy-eyed boy lying upon
a sunny hill-slope watching an East Indian
merchantman sail out of Providence harbor
and fade away into a dim horizon.
There is one sweet and touching chapter
called " My Cousin the Curate," in which Cur-
tis pays loving tribute to the character of his
brother Burrill. In the pages " Sea from
Shore' is found that charming description of
Providence in his youth, and " The Flying
Dutchman ' is the immortal legend trans-
formed anew. Throughout the book are
many pictures of the New York of forty years
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 1 5
ago ; what was then fashionable in manner,
dress, and appointment ; the favorite actor, the
most popular opera, the newest book, all are
gossiped about by the old book-keeper who
looks on. The descriptions, with their quaint
fancies and poetic rendering, are alike rich in
retrospective value.
Both the Potiphar Papers and Prue and
I appeared first serially in Putnam s Monthly,
of which Curtis was for a time associate editor.
Five years after the publication of his first
book Mr. Curtis took a position on Harper s
Magazine, and inaugurated the Easy Chair.
These delightful papers, which now are col-
lected in several volumes, included criticisms on
art, literature, music, social events, and similar
topics, and were a never-ending source of inter-
est and delight to his audience. Like that of
Holmes, in the Atlantic, it was a purely liter-
ary office, and it showed, as no other review
could, the wide intellectual sympathy of the
editor. The Easy Chair was conducted for
thirty-eight years by Mr. Curtis, being discon-
tinued at his death
16 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS
In 1863 Curtis accepted the position of
editor of Harper s Weekly. Perhaps no oth-
er American writer has ever been in such
peculiar touch with the people as was the
editor of the Weekly at this time. It was
not a purely literary sympathy, for from the
beginning his interest in public questions was
reflected in the editorial page. Whatever
vexing problem faced Congress, whatever
measure in relation to government or reform
was before the people, was used as a text by
the lay preacher of the Weekly. The most
unbounded respect was his, even from those
whose opinion differed from his own, while his
admirers learned to wait for the cool judgment
and the wise word which never failed. Mr.
Curtis was a strong friend of the anti-slavery
cause, and both before and during the war he
unflinchingly advocated its rights, though his
course cost him more than one personal friend.
During this period as a lecturer and delegate to
conventions he reflected the creed of the na-
tional party. He was nominated for Congress
and accepted the nomination, though he antic-
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS
ipated the defeat that awaited him in a State
where his party was weak. Throughout the
entire struggle he stood side by side with the
great reformers, one of the most interesting
figures of that stormy period.
Perhaps the public movement with which
Mr. Curtis's name will remain most closely
associated is the Civil Service Reform Com-
mission, of which he was the first president
and always the leading spirit. The object of
this commission was to obtain legal power to
advance all Government clerks and employees
by regular promotions, in place of the political
patronage which then obtained. This cam-
paign for purer public service was begun in
1871, and from that time Mr. Curtis's work
for it was unceasing, until the hopes of the
reformers were fulfilled by the passage of the
Civil Service Reform Law, which led the way
in time to the needed reform.
From the beginning of his literary career Mr.
Curtis had been known as a lecturer of singular
power. His lectures embraced a wide variety
of subjects, some of the most famous being
1 8 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS
those delivered before colleges and at the meet-
ings of the Chamber of Commerce in New
O
York. Seventeen of these addresses alone
were devoted to the civil service reform cause.
His orations on the " Reunion of the Army of
the Potomac ; " on " Wendell Phillips ; " " James
Russell Lowell;" "Burns;" "The Puritan
Principle ;" "The Duty of the American Citizen
to Politics," and other varied topics indicate the
wide scope of this work. The abiding affec-
tion which he had inspired in the people at
large made him one of the favorite orators at
many commemorations of national importance.
His orations and addresses are collected in thir-
teen volumes, and, with the Harper s Weekly
editorials, form a scholarly review of one of
the most interesting periods of American his-
tory.
Mr. Curtis's home was on Staten Island,
where he died, in 1893.
CHAPTER II
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
1825
The first recollections of Richard Henry
Stoddard, like those of so many of our Amer-
ican men of letters, are of the sea. He was
born at Hingham, Mass., a little seaport town,
where his ancestors had lived for generations,
and whence his father, Captain Stoddard,
sailed away in his ship one day never to return.
Somewhere between New York and the coast
of Norway the brave little brig in which
Captain Stoddard had invested all his fortune
went down. Perhaps it struck an iceberg,
or in the darkness of the northern sea mists
came into collision with another vessel ; no one
ever heard its fate, and the widow and father-
less children only knew that to them had come
that bitter portion which the sea gives to so
20 RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
many of its followers. For the first few years
of his life young Stoddard had hardly any set-
tled home, his mother moving from place to
place, whenever a chance of bettering her fort-
unes presented itself. For a year or two he
was at his grandfather's house at Hingham,
which was situated on a hill overlooking the
ocean, and below which was the graveyard
where generations of seafaring folk lay buried.
Among the memories which shine out from
these earliest years are those of the old church
at Hingham, where he solemnly sat in the old-
fashioned high-backed pew, and of the admir-
ing friends who, perhaps, on that same Sunday
afternoon, pressed round him while he gravely
recited one of Watts' s hymns or some other
of the pieces of which he had store. There is
also a remembrance of a trip to Boston in his
grandfather's schooner, an adventurous voyage
no doubt to the small seafarer. From Hing-
ham he went to live in several other New
England towns, never staying long in one
place, and settling at last in Boston, from
which place, in his tenth year, he removed
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD 21
to New York on his mother's second mar-
riage.
In all his sojournings he had never been
quite out of sight and sound of the sea, and it
was from this teacher no doubt that he learned
to be a worshipper of beauty. Years after-
ward, when he began to translate his thoughts
and emotions into verse, we find much of it
touched with that indefinable, haunting mys-
tery which is found only in the poetry of sea-
lovers. And this quality is no doubt a remi-
niscence of those childish impressions which
sank into his mind and became a part of it.
Stoddard's life in New York was varied in
experience, although he had for the first time a
settled home. The family was poor, and Stod-
dard went to school or became a bread-winner
alternately, as their fortunes ebbed or flowed.
At the age of fifteen he found himself con-
fronted with the fact that the boy who eats
bread and butter sometimes has to help pay for
it to the extent of all his small might, and young
as he was even then, he had no notion of
shirking his duty. He became first the office-
22 RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
boy to a firm of two young lawyers, who had
few clients, but who, nevertheless, advised him
to forget poetry and study law. He worked
for a time in a newspaper office ; then he be-
came book-keeper in a factory. For three or
four days he tried earnestly to become a black-
smith, and at last, after much shifting of scene,
he settled in a foundry and learned the trade
of iron-moulding.
But to his mind the actual boy neither
copied lawyers' briefs, nor handled an anvil,
nor moulded iron. For in that world which
he had created for himself he did nothing the
livelong day but think and write poetry.
Sometimes the poetry would be scribbled down
in the short noon recess, but oftener the hours
of the night were given to writing, rewriting,
correcting, and revising the verse which he
was sure must lead into the pleasant ways of
life at last.
Whatever odd moments he had that were
not given to writing poetry were spent in
reading it. Out of his small salary his moth-
er allowed him a little spending money, and
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD 23
with this he bought books. Usually they were
second - hand volumes, picked up on street-
stands, but occasionally a new book found its
way to the library, which grew year by year,
and was a mute record of the boy's ambitions.
In this way Stoddard became familiar with the
best English poetry, and so got an education
not then to be had in many schools.
After several books of manuscript poetry had
been filled and destroyed, for he seems to have
understood that this writing was only a train-
ing, he at last ventured to offer a poem to a
weekly magazine, which accepted it, and the
young poet actually saw himself in print.
About the same time he received some encour-
aging criticisms from the poet N. P. Willis,
who saw a little volume of his manuscript.
His most valuable acquaintance at this time
was Mrs. Kirkland, the editor of a magazine,
who not only praised the young poet, but
bought some of his work for her magazine.
Other successes followed, and finally Stoddard
had saved enough money to have a volume of
his poems published ; although he only sold
24 RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
one copy of these poems, which was published
under the title Footprints, it yet tended to
help him materially, for it brought him to the
notice of literary people. Like many another
poet, Stoddard owed much of his success to the
kindly and generous sympathy of older and
successful writers. This little volume led to
his being introduced to the best literary so-
ciety of New York, and that was of inesti-
mable value to the then unknown poet. In
1852, being then in his twenty-eighth year,
Stoddard published a second volume of poems,
and a year later, through the influence of Haw-
thorne, he obtained a position as clerk in the
Custom House, a place which brought him an
assured income, and yet gave leisure for his
literary work.
In this same year he published two dainty
volumes for children, Fairy Land and Town
and Country. They are full of delightful
humor and show the poet in one of his hap-
piest moods.
The life of Stoddard has been emphatically
that of the poet and student. His whole ca-
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD 25
reer has been colored by one ambition, the
highest that can govern any writer, to succeed
in his chosen calling and do honor to Ameri-
can literature. Besides his poems, which have
passed through many editions since the ap-
pearance of his first little volume, he has
been connected with various newspapers and
has been the editor of a magazine. Among
other things he has also edited Griswolds
Poets of America, TJie Female Poets of Amer-
ica, an edition of the Late English Poets, and
a collection of reminiscences of well-known
writers known as the Bric-a-Brac Series. Since
1880 he has been editor of the literary depart-
ment of the New York Mail and Express.
To all this miscellaneous work Stoddard has
brought the trained intellect and artistic per-
ception of the poet and student, and he has
stamped much of it with more than an ephem-
eral value. His work on the Mail and Ex-
press is a weekly review of the literary work
of the world, and is a good summary of the
intellectual field of the day.
Some of the finest examples of his poems
26 RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
are found in the collections, Songs of Sum-
mer, The King's Bell and The Book of the
East. Single examples, such as the Vanished
May, Up in the Trees, The Grape Gatherer,
Dead Leaves, show his sense of beauty, min-
gled with the old Greek love of the earth, in
perfect poetic union. In these moods he is
a true descendant of the early poet worship-
pers of nature. Wratislaw, the story of a lit-
tle hero prince, whose brave spirit wrought
noble deeds in the days when the Turk over-
ran Europe, is a beautiful specimen of the
poet's art in dealing with legendary subjects.
So also is his Masque of the Three Kings, in
which the old Bible Christmas Story is told
anew. A Wedding Under the Directory is a
quaint picture of a day, relived by another
generation. In 1876 Stoddard was asked for
a poem to celebrate the opening of the Cen-
tennial Exposition, and responded with his
Guests of the State, a noble composition, full
of that large sympathy, which made the occa-
sion a memorable one in the history of the
nation.
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD 2/
The fact that most impresses one in regard
to his work is his intense feeling for beauty.
And in this sense one can trace his literary
career from his earliest years. Such a nature
must have unconsciously been nurtured in
those exalted moods which are revealed only
to the poet born. Through all his best work
there is an undertone which is felt rather than
seen, and which hints of a deeper current un-
derneath.
Some of his most charming work appears in
transcriptions of the poetry of the East- -love-
songs of the Tartar and Arab, of the Persian
and the Sclav. With true poetic sympathy he
has wrought these pictures of Eastern life into
English verse that reveals all their own wild
force and fire.
Stoddard's life has been spent almost entire-
ly in New York. As he has devoted all his
talent to his chosen work, so he has reaped the
reward that comes from such high endeavor,
and won in its best sense the poet's fame.
CHAPTER III
EDWARD EGGLESTON
1837
In all the stories which relate to the settle-
ment of the United States none are more in-
teresting than those which tell of the experi-
ences of the pioneers who fought face to face
with the Indians in the valley of the Ohio.
From the time when Daniel Boone and his
companions followed Indian trails across the
Alleghenies and settled Kentucky, until far be-
yond the period of the Revolution, the history
of every settlement on the frontier was one of
bitter warfare with the red men. Before he
could build his house or prepare the land for
tilling, the frontiersman had to erect a block-
house to protect the settlement against his
wily foe, and very often this fort-like structure
was the home for weeks at a time of the entire
EDWARD EGGLESTON 29
community. Whether the pioneer felled trees,
broke up the new ground, sowed, tilled, or
gathered his crops he worked ever with his
rifle by his side. And the housewife, busy
with spinning, weaving, and other family cares,
never went to her door without an anxious
glance to see that no lurking enemy was near.
Very often, too, in spite of all precaution, the
smoke rising from his burning dwelling would
be the first warning that the settler would re-
ceive, and he would hasten home to find his
wife and children slaughtered or carried away
into captivity.
It required brave hearts to found homes on
the frontier, where even nature gave only in
return for hardest toil, and still braver ones
to work steadily on in the face of treacherous
Indian foes. But the pioneer of the Ohio Val-
ley did not know fear, and his record of honor-
able accomplishment has made him a famous
character in the story of his country.
An old block-house of this region, the first
that was erected on the Indiana side of the
Ohio, was built by Captain Craig, a noted
30 EDWARD EGGLESTON
pioneer, who won renown both as a fighter
against the Indians and as a leader in the lit-
tle band of settlers. It was men of this class,
resolute, brave, and self-sacrificing, which re-
deemed the Valley of the Ohio from nature
and the red man and made it habitable.
And although the struggle went on for
years, it ended at last in peace and prosperity
for the pioneers. The Indians retreated tow-
ard the Mississippi, thriving little villages
grew up around the old block - houses, and
the outlying country, rich in valuable timber
or meadow lands, was as free from danger as
the valleys of the Connecticut or Hudson.
In Vevay, Ind., one of these little villages,
about four miles from the old block-house,
was born on December 10, 1837, Edward
Eggleston, a grandson of Captain Craig. His
father, a descendant of a Virginia family which
had won honor in the Revolution, was a
prominent lawyer of Vevay, where the boy
lived until his third year. The family then re-
moved to the old Craig homestead, and in this
region, so rich in historic memories, young
EDWARD EGGLESTON 31
Eggleston spent six of the most impression-
able years of his life. As he was a delicate
boy, school life occupied a very small part of
his time, though books were always interesting
to him. He above all implored to be taught
to write, and almost as soon as he knew how
to write he began to express his own thoughts,
of which he had many. But the best education
he could have had for the work he was to do
was obtained from the still lingering pictur-
esqueness of Western life, which surrounded
him everywhere.
Life was still primitive enough in the Ohio
Valley, and the interests of the people were so
closely allied that they seemed almost like one
large family. If a man wished to build a house
or barn, he summoned his neighbors to what
was called " a raising," when all worked to
raise the building on its foundations. The
crop of corn was husked at a " bee," to \vhich
all the country lads and lasses came, and after
dividing into two companies, worked hard till
one or the other \von the race by husking the
last ear first. A supper in the farm-house
32 EDWARD EGGLESTON
kitchen and a dance in the barn would follow,
when the guests would separate, to meet per-
haps the next night at another "bee." Wood
was chopped, logs rolled from the forests to
the river, where they were floated down to
the sawmills, and every other kind of farm
work done in the same way. In the house-
holds the women had spinning and quilting
" bees," and, in fact, from the oldest to the
youngest, each member of the community felt
that he had its interests at heart.
While the frontier life had developed a cer-
tain class who were rough in manner and care-
less in morals, the greater part of the people
were Methodists, and were sincerely and en-
thusiastically devoted to their religion. In
those widely scattered communities churches
were almost unknown, and services were held
in the school-rooms or at private houses, as
might be most desirable. The ministers were
as a rule men of character and force, descend-
ants in the next generation of stalwart Indian
fighters and frontiersmen, and into their work
they put the same energy which their fathers
EDWARD EGGLESTON 33
and grandfathers had used in winning homes
in the wilderness.
These Methodist ministers were called cir-
cuit-riders ; they had no settled parish, but
each one had charge of from fifty to one hun-
dred parishes, which they were required to visit
as often as possible. With his saddle-bags and
rifle the circuit-rider would travel from village
to village, claiming hospitality from the fami-
lies under his care, who always welcomed him
gladly, placed their houses at his disposal, and if
the meeting was to be held in the school-house,
stood ready to guard him from the attacks of
any of the rough class who might try to inter-
fere with him. The circuit-rider was undoubt-
edly the greatest influence for good known to
the Ohio Valley, and his respect and esteem
were sought by all. He did his work well, in-
fusing into the daily life of his followers an
earnest desire for right-doing and a hunger for
spirituality which had a lasting effect upon
the characters of the builders of the Middle
West. One of Eggleston's first memories
must have been that of the circuit-rider riding
3
34 EDWARD EGGLESTON
up to the door of his grandfather's house and
dismounting, while the heads of the family
stood ready to welcome him with respectful
courtesy. And the mind-picture photographed
thus vividly was to be reproduced later and
form a unique contribution to American lit-
erature.
From the old homestead the family removed
to Vevay on the death of Eggleston's father,
and here in his tenth year the boy began his
school life in the little school-house which has
become so familiar to his readers. The scenes
and incidents of this experience are retold in
that charming volume, A Hoosier School
Boy, with so loving and faithful a touch that
no one can doubt that they are the personal
memories of the chronicler. The ambitions of
these boys, whose greatest desire was to have
an education, their hopes and disappointments,
their misunderstandings with their teacher, and
their manly apologies, their schoolboy games
and plays, are all a part of Eggleston's own ex-
perience. The school-house is a memory, not
a creation, and into it really walked one day
EDWARD EGGLESTON 35
the veritable little Christopher Columbus, with
his tiny voice and thin legs, to shame all the
big boys by reading better than they. Little
Christopher Columbus did not know that his
biographer sat watching him with admiring
eyes, and no one dreamed that this episode was
afterward to be incorporated into that charm-
ing book. Eggleston's boyhood, like that of
Howells, was full of the energetic influence
of the young West, an influence which, after
building homes in the wilderness and bringing
civilization to take the place of savage condi-
tions, kept bravely to its work of developing
the frontier.
The youth of that period received only those
things for which he strived. Education, the
boon more desired than anything else, was
hard to obtain. The country schools were
either taught by old fogies, who ruled with
birch and rattan, or by young men, to whom
teaching meant only a means to livelihood
while preparing for some other work. Here
and there throughout the country were scat-
tered a few academies where the higher
36 EDWARD EGGLESTON
branches were taught, but only a few boys had
the means to avail themselves of the privilege.
The boy of the Ohio Valley fifty years ago
knew very early that his own will and strength
must win for him in the battle of life ; and
this knowledge brought into play the best
forces of his nature. Underneath the care-
lessness of boyhood generally lurked an earn-
est desire to become useful to his generation,
and to this ambition Eggleston was no excep-
tion.
Life meant much to him early, and at nine
years old the village school at Vevay knew no
better pupil than the delicate boy who had
already begun to learn that the patient endur-
ance of ill-health must be one of his greatest
teachers. A few weeks at school would be
followed by many months of sickness, but his
purpose never faltered. During one of these
periods of ill-health he was sent to stay for
some months in a backwoods district, where
life was still in the rudest stage. Shut off
from books, Eggleston gathered from this ex-
perience stores of valuable knowledge. Al
EDWARD EGGLESTON 37
though only twelve years old, he was a student
of human nature, and the unfamiliar scenes be-
came picture-stories of the lives of the rough
men by whom he was surrounded. Many
years after he reproduced the memories of these
days with a faithfulness which showed how
vividly they had impressed him. There is, in-
deed, in all his work the same charm that is
found in the poetry of Whittier, and which
makes so much of it seem like a translation of
the moods and feelings of boyhood.
Besides studying, Eggleston was always busy
writing. He was still a young boy when his
first contribution appeared. A country news-
paper had offered a prize for the best composi-
tion by a schoolboy under fifteen, and he re-
solved to obtain it if possible. He was not at
that time in school, but was acting as clerk for
a hardware merchant. The editor, however, as-
sured him that this would not debar him from
the competition. Thereafter every spare mo-
ment was given to the composition of an
essay on the given subject, and to Eggleston's
great joy he won the prize, although his em-
38 EDWARD EGGLESTON
ployer had from that day suspicions as to the
real value of a clerk with a literary turn of
mind.
Not very long after, being again at school,
he won high praise from his teacher for a lit-
tle essay on The Will, which, although full of
imitations of the writers he had been studying,
still showed much promise. At that time there
were no railroads connecting the East and
the West, and the newspapers and books from
the Atlantic coast were a long time in reach-
ing the frontier. There grew up, therefore,
in the Ohio Valley a little coterie of native
writers, who represented the best thought and
culture of the region. Their poetry, fiction,
and essays were gladly welcomed by the West-
ern newspapers, which often devoted pages to
this literature, and the writers thus gained
much local fame. The teacher who so kindly
encouraged young Eggleston was one of the
best known of these Western writers. Al-
though she found fault with every other sen-
tence of the little essay on The Will, she still
saw its merits, and to Eggleston, who had ad-
EDWARD EGGLESTON 39
mired her fame for years, her praise was very
sweet. It was a great inspiration to him at
the moment, and the faithful criticism which
she continued to give was of inestimable value
to the future novelist.
When he was seventeen Eggleston went to
Virginia to visit his father's relatives. Here
he had a year's experience of Southern planta-
tion life. This easy, luxurious existence was a
great contrast to life in the Ohio Valley, but,
although Eggleston appreciated it, his instincts
remained true to the wider freedom of the
country of his birth. He was destined to be
the chronicler of the true story of much of that
Western life, and nothing could ever detract
from its vital and enduring charm. One of
his Virginia uncles, who was rich and child-
less, wished to adopt him, but Eggleston re-
fused, and returned home richer for the ex-
perience and for the few months' training
from an excellent Virginia school, but still
devoted heart and soul to the interests of the
West.
A year later he was sent to Minnesota, in the
4O EDWARD EGGLESTON
hope that the climate might benefit his health,
which seemed completely broken. He was
threatened with consumption, and knowing
that he had but this chance for life, he threw
himself desperately into the rough frontier
work, which kept him out of doors continu-
ally. He drove oxen to break up new ground,
wading through the wet prairie grass at day-
break, and broiling under the noonday sun.
He felled trees, rolled logs, and acted as
chain-bearer for a party of surveyors. He
fought a troublesome cough and fever with the
same determination, and in a few months his
youth and pluck had turned the scale, and he
was on the road to health. He now set out
to walk from Minnesota to Kansas, and it is
a pity that he kept no journal of this expe-
rience.
A delicate boy travelling through the West-
ern frontier for over two hundred miles,
he must have met with many unique advent-
ures. He slept at night in hunters' cabins,
rough country taverns, little log -houses of
settlers, and sometimes out of doors under the
EDWARD EGGLESTON 41
shelter of friendly logs and ties. He lived on
the rude fare that supplied the wants of the
hardy backwoodsmen, and his companions
were oftenest tho?:- rough spirits who found in
the excitement of frontier life a congenial at-
mosphere. But the journey was accomplished,
though on reaching Kansas he was not al-
lowed to enter its borders because of the un-
settled state that society had been thrown into
by the political troubles. Turning eastward,
Eggleston resolved to travel home on foot.
When near the end of his journey his money
and strength both nearly gave out, and he was
indebted to two friendly strangers for the two
dollars necessary to reach home. He arrived
at the house of his nearest relatives in such a
tattered condition that the maid almost refused
him entrance, and his half-brother was for
some moments in doubt about allowing the
relationship. This experience ended Eggle-
ston's boyhood. The next year, being not yet
nineteen, he put into execution a long-cher-
ished plan. Knowing that his health would
never allow him to enter college, he put that
42 EDWARD EGGLESTON
wish aside, and filled with a desire to make
of life a noble achievement, he became that
ideal of the young West, a circuit-rider.
In entering the ministry Eggleston was ful-
filling the hope of his life. To one of his edu-
cation and training the Methodist minister
of the day represented the ideal of self-sacri-
fice and spiritual aspiration ; he was a soldier
of Christ, ready to fight, conquer or die, in
his Master's service, and to him the warfare
seemed glorious. Eggleston took up his new
duties as the youth of old assumed the honors
of knighthood. It was a solemn dedication of
his young life to the service of humanity and
the acceptance of a trust which he faithful-
ly fulfilled. The Methodism inherited and
shared by the generations to which Eggleston
belonged did for the West what Puritanism
accomplished for New England it made the
every-day life an impulse toward right-doing,
and in this it laid strong and deep the founda-
tions of noble character and loyal citizenship.
The republic owes much to this valiant army
of workers which Eggleston now joined, burn-
EDWARD EGGLESTON 43
ing with a desire to devote his whole feeble
strength to the common cause.
We can picture him thus, a delicate boy,
riding from place to place, be the weather what
it might, finding his home among the mem-
bers of his scattered flock, suffering discomfort
and often danger, anxious, yet fearing nothing
but that he might fail in his duty.
His first charge included a circuit of ten
places, which he visited at intervals. He car-
ried his wardrobe in his saddle-bags, and as
he never for one moment gave up his deter-
mination to become a scholar, nearly all the
time he spent on horseback was passed in read-
ing and study.
Much of Eggleston's experience as an itin-
erant Methodist minister is reproduced in The
Circuit Rider. The Ohio Valley in Eggle-
ston's youth was the border-land of town and
village life, all the great country westward
being occupied only by Indians or by rough
settlements of hunters, traders, and miners.
This place between, where the civilization of
the East met the wild life of the West, was the
44 EDWARD EGGLESTON
scene of The Circuit Rider, into whose pages
are wrought many striking incidents of those
successful times. The heroes of the book are
two youths, Kike and Morton, sons of valley
farmers. Both are turned from their wild
lives through the influence of one of those
Methodist ministers so familiar to their times,
and both renounce all worldly ambitions to
enter upon the life of the circuit-rider. The
story is touchingly in sympathy with the ex-
perience of the humble country folk who
figure in its pages. Their home life and their
spiritual struggles alike appeal to our interest ;
we are present at their merry corn-huskings
and apple-paring bees, at their prayer-meetings,
and camp-meetings. Each scene has the value
of local history, and nowhere in American
literature is there a more soul-stirring picture
than that which traces Kike awakening to the
high conception of a life of self-sacrifice.
Eggleston's own experience as a circuit-rider
came to an end after six months, as his health
broke down completely under the strain, and
he was obliged to return to Minnesota. The
EDWARD EGGLESTON 45
invigorating air and freedom from care again
worked their charm, and in a short time he
was once more engaged in preaching. His
work now was on the Minnesota frontier,
where the Indians still lingered, forming a
large part of the population. The white set-
tlements and Indian villages all along the
Minnesota River soon became familiar with
the face of the young preacher, who walked
from place to place shod in moccasins, and
who brought into their rough lives the only
refining and uplifting influence that they knew.
We can see the groups gathered round him
while he gives his word of advice or encour-
agement, the scene recalling an episode in the
career of Eliot, and reflecting a phase of Amer-
ican life that has forever passed away.
But Eggleston's fame as a preacher soon
made him in demand in the larger towns, and
less than two years after he entered the min-
istry he accepted a call to the city of St. Paul.
From this time his life was spent almost en-
tirely in cities. Owing to his poor health he
was often obliged to give up his duties as a
46 EDWARD EGGLESTON
minister and take up whatever work presented
itself as a means of support for his family.
He had in the meantime begun to write regu-
larly for various religious papers, and had suc-
cessfully accomplished some editorial work.
In 1870, when Eggleston was in his thirty-
fourth year, he accepted a position on The In-
dependent, and left the West for his new home
in Brooklyn. Although later years were again
devoted to preaching, this was the beginning
of an uninterrupted literary life, which has con-
tinued to the present day.
His first important book, and the one which
brought him instant recognition, was The
Hoosier Schoolmaster, which was written as
a serial for the periodical Hearth and Home.
Almost immediately after its publication in
book form it was issued in England, France,
Germany, and Denmark, and everywhere it
was received with the greatest favor. With
true artistic instinct, Eggleston had gone for
the material of his book to* the old familiar
life of his youth. The scenes which lingered
in his memory when touched by his trained
EDWARD EGGLESTON 47
hand became vivid pictures of new and peculiar
interest. This revelation of the picturesque-
ness of Western frontier life appealed to all,
and the vital humanity which throbbed through
its pages touched every heart.
This book which made Eggleston a novelist
showed him, also, the probable place for his
own contributions to American literature. He
became the novelist of the river frontier and
prairie life, which so fortunately for our liter-
ature lingered long enough to make its lasting
impression upon his youth. The titles of his
successive books show this life in many as-
pects. From the ideal reproductions of The
Hoosier Schoolmaster, and The Ho osier School-
boy, in which we walk hand in hand with child-
hood, through all the graver problems of adult
life we still follow the fortunes of the class
that Eggleston's art has made typical.
One of the most interesting of his books is
The Graysons, the story of a young law-stu-
dent who is accused of murder, and whose
acquittal is obtained by Abraham Lincoln who
pleads his cause. This introduction of Lin-
48 EDWARD EGGLESTON
coin into fiction was made by request, and the
incident is cleverly made to illustrate the keen-
ness and sagacity of the great statesman even
while an obscure lawyer in an obscurer Western
town.
Among Eggleston's juvenile works The
Schoolmaster s Stories for Boys and Girls,
Queer Stories for Boys and Girls, A First
Book in American History, and a large
amount of miscellaneous matter all indicate his
sympathy with the heart of childhood, and his
ability to enter into the questions and interests
which make up the child-world. They are
genuine boys and girls who walk through his
pages. Perhaps the book which shows Eggle-
ston at his best is The Circuit Rider, with
its fine insight into those spiritual problems
which interest all humanity. Roxy is another
delineation of character, which, in its story of
the struggle between right and wrong in the
human heart, suggests the old Puritanism of
New England.
Besides his novels Eggleston has accom-
plished a great deal of work on historical sub-
EDWARD EGGLESTON 49
jects, which has appeared in various magazines
and periodicals, and he has in preparation a
history of the United States to which he has
already devoted much time in research in the
great libraries of the world. Some school his-
tories and a good portion of miscellaneous
matter must also be included in his work.
His distinctive contribution to American liter-
ature is his reproduction of a phase of Ameri-
can life which has now passed away, but which
has a unique value for the student of history.
The latter years of Eggleston's life have
been spent mostly in New York, where he
now lives.
CHAPTER IV
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
1829
Charles Dudley Warner was born in Plain-
field, Mass., in that lovely and picturesque re-
gion which has become celebrated in Ameri-
can literature as the birthplace of William Cul-
len Bryant. The country has scarcely changed
since those early days when the boy Bryant
used to wander over its fields and hills and
hear in the neighboring forests the cries of the
wolves and bears which made their home there.
The Warner family belonged to the farmer
race, which at that time made up the larger
part of New England life. The father was a
man of fine tastes, having a good library and
being in frequent correspondence with people
in various parts of the country who were in-
terested in the public questions of the day.
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 51
But while Charles was still a very young child
his father died, and the family was broken up
for some years. The boy was taken to the
home of an aunt, who owned a homestead on
the Deerfield River, and it is here that his first
recollections centre. The lad's first school was
in one of those little school-houses which have
been described in the verses of Whittier and
Bryant, and his life may in every respect be
said to have corresponded to that so lovingly
portrayed in " The Barefoot Boy." This life
makes a boy healthful and manly, and the close
communion with nature fosters those poetic
impressions to which the young mind is so sus-
ceptible. Warner was happy in the care of his
aunt and an older cousin, but there was one
great drawback to this otherwise contented
life. At the Deerfield farm-house there were
no books except the Bible and one or two re-
ligious works, and to a book-loving boy this
was a great deprivation. The family held to
the strict observance of the New England Sab-
bath, which extended from six o'clock on Sat-
urday evening to six o'clock on Sunday even-
52 CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
ing, and though much of this time was occu-
pied with church-going, there were many hours
in which a book would have been a boon.
The imaginative child, however, has always a
little kingdom of his own to which he may re-
treat when disappointed with the actual world,
and in this fairy realm Warner spent many
a happy hour planning and dreaming of the
future. He was but repeating the experience
of so many other New England boys in whose
early days seems to have lain the best training
for the intellectual life.
But a lack of reading does not make a boy
poor when he has at command the fruits of
meadow, field, and wood ; when trout-streams
exist for him alone ; when sunny days and rainy
weather alike have their special joys, and when
nature is forever watching a chance to teach
him lessons of truth and beauty. The atmos-
phere of this quiet, uneventful life was an in-
fluence for good- -an influence which Warner
afterward gratefully appreciated.
Many a boy whose actual life has been
bounded by the narrow confines of farm life
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 53
has had his first glimpse of the world beyond
through the pages of a book. In Warner's
case this book was the Arabian Nights, which
his seat-mate brought to the little school-house
one day and hid amid the other boyish treas-
ures in his desk. A district school-teacher can-
not see all that happens in his restless king-
dom, and the urchin had more than one stolen
glance into the wonderful book while he was
supposed to be studying his spelling or doing
sums. And what an ideal world this was
which the young discoverer had thus sailed
into ! Here were genii, fairies, enchanted car-
pets, valleys of diamonds, and masquerading
pedlers who gave "old lamps for new." In
this realm, which the geographies so ignorantly
omitted to mention, farm work and even farm
pleasures had no place. All was glittering,
dazzling, beautiful ! Every day held new ad-
ventures, and one's intimate friends owned
miles of treasure - houses and inexhaustible
mines of wealth. When school was done War-
ner succeeded in borrowing this treasure, and
hurrying home, announced to his aunt and
54 CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
cousin that he had found " the most splendid
book in the world." Imagine his surprise and
disgust when these relatives, after an inspection
of the precious volume, said, gravely : " No,
you cannot read this, Charles, it is not true."
But the boy evidently thinking that in such
cases aunts and cousins were as fallible as
primary geographies, carried the book to the
barn and hid it in the hay, and there spent
many an hour devouring the enchanting tales.
Another book which he began at this time
was Cook's Voyages Around the World, the
second volume of which had drifted somehow
up to the old farm-house door. These two
books with the Bible were absolutely all that
Warner knew of the vast treasures of literature
while he remained at the Deerfield River farm.
But life broadened into wider channels when
in his twelfth year he was taken by his mother
to Cazenovia, N. Y., and placed in the acad-
emy there. The life at Deerfield had been
that of the river, and fields, and woods, but at
Cazenovia Warner became emphatically the
studious boy, to whom books and study meant
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 55
more than anything else in the world. At the
academy he was fortunate in his boy ac-
quaintances, and there he made friendships
which have lasted through his life. One of
his friends was the son of a bookseller, in
whose shop Warner was allowed to browse at
will. And here he learned to know Irving
and Cooper, Hawthorne, Prescott, and Bry-
ant, and the other writers who were found-
ing American literature. This education
which went on outside the academy was also
greatly stimulated by the talks and discussions
on literary matters between him and his com-
rades. And by and by, as always happens in
the case of boys who read and read, they all
began to write. Their first efforts took the
form of poetry, which somehow always seems
to the boyish mind the easiest thing to \vrite,
and thenceforth much of their interest in life
lay in listening to and criticising one another's
verses. One of these boys while still a youth
wrote that celebrated song of how
In their ragged regimentals
The old Continentals
56 CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
rallied to the defence of American liberty in
the stormy days of the Revolution.
Another has since become a famous scholar
in literature and the arts, whose name is known
to two continents. Warner himself, who soon
forsook poetry for prose, can date his literary
career from these days when his chief ambition
was to write and to write well. It was his
habit then and long afterward to walk up and
down his room while writing and repeat the
sentences over and over, changing and polish-
ing them until they sounded rhythmic. The
study of the best poetry of America and
England still went on steadily, and the boys
often played a guessing game as to author
and verse. Sometimes the giver of the verse
would slip in a couplet of his own, and then
laugh at the wild guesses which placed his ef-
fusions among the English classics.
One of the most luminous memories of
Warner's youth is that of a visit to Irving at
Sunnyside, whither he went under the guid-
ance of one of these early friends. The fa-
mous author received his young admirers kindly
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 57
and gave to Warner an ivy-leaf from the vine
which had grown from a slip plucked from the
cottage of Burns's " Bonnie Jean." Neither
giver nor receiver foresaw, then, the link that
was to be established later by Warner's biog-
raphy of America's first great man of letters.
In 1851 Warner was graduated from Hamil-
ton College, which he entered from Cazenovia
Academy, taking the first prize for English.
He had already become somewhat known to
the literary world through contributions to the
Knickerbocker and Putnams Magazine and
from occasional visits to New York, when he
became for a time a member of that Bohemian
world in which the younger generation of
writers lived.
But although he had made a good begin-
ning, literature was exchanged two years after
his graduation for the wild life of the Mexican
frontier, whither he went with a surveying
party in 1853. After this experience he stud-
ied law and practised it in Chicago for a few
years. But in 1866 he returned to his first
ambition, and became editor of the Hartford
58 CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
Press, which a year later was incorporated with
the C our ant. Warner made of this newspaper
one of the best-edited journals of its class, and
in its conduct won an enviable reputation as
an editor.
A year or two later he took his first journey
to Europe, and on his return contributed those
papers to the C our ant which in 1870 made
their appearance in book-form under the title
My Summer in a Garden. It is in this little
volume that Warner struck that vein of humor
which makes his work a delight to his large
audience.
Another book which added greatly to his
reputation at this time is that called Saunter-
ings, which contains his impressions of Europe
in this first journey. Very much of Warner's
work has for its background his journeyings in
Europe and at home. His Winter on the
Nile, In the Levant, and Notes of a Rounda-
bout Journey in Eiirope are among his most
delightful reminiscences of foreign travel,
while Studies in the South, Studies in the
Great West, and Our Italy, show his wide
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 59
familiarity with the scenes of his native land.
He is a sympathetic, cultivated traveller, by
whom new impressions of art and social life
are appreciated, but who, nevertheless, sees all
things through that half-humorous light which
delights American readers. He is never too
learned to extract fun out of a pyramid or cliff
dwelling, and, though an ardent patriot, he has
no hesitation in laughing at the foibles and
eccentricities of his countrymen. His charac-
terizations of foreign and home life possess all
the flavor and freshness of the mind which
looks at life from a new point of view. He is
the author of some charming essays, printed
as Back Log St 21 dies and As We Were Saying,
and he has published several successful novels.
If he is not a creator in the realm of art, he is
a keen observer and man of the world, deeply
interested in his fellow-travellers. His records
of his impressions, although thrown into the
form of novels, are valuable chiefly for their
sympathetic view of every-day life.
One of our author's most charming books
is that reminiscence of his childhood, Being a
60 CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
Boy. Here we have the actual life of the New
England boy sixty years ago. All the little
humble incidents of farm life, all the simple
pleasures, the delights of fishing and nutting,
of maple-sugar gathering, and the first party
are noted with a sincerity that makes the little
narrative genuine history. Whittier read this
book more than once, and said it was a page
out of his own life-story. Outside its literary
merit it is valuable as one more truthful pict-
ure of the simple life of New England ; a life
whose healthful duties and pleasures left wide
spaces for the soul to grow up to noble con-
ceptions of manhood.
Besides his other work Mr. Warner has
contributed a department to Harper s Maga-
zine, and has made some valuable additions
to the social science papers of the day. He
has also served on the commission for estab-
lishing prison reform, and he is well known as
a successful lecturer. Throughout his career
he has followed mainly the lines laid down for
himself in his student davs, and has bounded
j
his ambitions by the literary life. Since 1867
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 6 1
his home has been at Hartford. One of our
most successful humorists, he is also a strik-
ing example of those earnest toilers whose
work well supports the dignity of American
literature.
CHAPTER V
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
1833
Out of the many New England country
boys who dreamed day-dreams one came back
in manhood to his early home and confessed
that some of his dreams had come true. This
was not strange, for it is generally the youth-
ful day-dreamer whose after-life is fullest of
accomplishment. Nature, who is so wise a
teacher, sends in these dreams such a vision of
the future that the soul is even then eager to
press forward to its realization. Sometimes
this vision is obscured later by ambitions that
are ignoble ; in such cases it fades away and is
lost, like youth itself. But the larger number
of those who do the world's noblest work is
made up of men and women who received in
childhood some such revelation of the meaning
of life. If with the day-dream comes a sense
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN 63
of the beauty of nature of the melodies which
thrill through the songs of brook, and bird,
and forest aisle and a desire to reproduce
them, the boy is apt to become a poet. Such
a boy was Edmund Clarence Stedman, born
at Hartford, Ct, in 1833, being the son of a
merchant in comfortable circumstances.
When he was two years old Stedman was
taken to Norwich to live with a great-uncle,
and it was with this pretty village, with its elm-
shaded streets and old colonial mansions, and
with its outlying fields and pasture lands, that
his earliest associations are connected. In his
poem, The Freshet, there are many touches
which recall his boyhood, and which are in
a sense biographical. The pictures of the
group of boys standing on the bridge or wad-
ing through the alder thickets to the deep
channel, where they fished and swam, and of
the spring freshet when the river rolled on like
a flood, carrying cakes of ice, lumber, rails,
hay, and cattle along, are both scenes from
the actual experiences of the poet's youth.
Throughout all his work one hears, indeed,
64 EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
an ever-recurrent note that tells of early days ;
sometimes the note is sad and sometimes gay,
but always it is touched with that regret which
clings to the past.
The uncle with whom Stedman passed his
youth was an eminent lawyer and a man of
learning. Very careful attention was paid to
the boy's education, as well as to the home
life, which was carried on after the strictest
New England fashion. But Stedman, like
other New England boys, was all the better
for this discipline. It developed strength and
endurance of character, a manliness of temper,
and an indifference to the minor ills of life,
and this is invaluable training for any poet.
Stedman entered Yale at sixteen, and immedi-
ately became known as one of its cleverest
freshmen, though he rebelled often at the dis-
cipline. He was a brilliant member of the col-
lege literary circle and a contributor to the Yale
Literary Magazine, which bestowed a prize
upon him for a poem on Westminster Abbey.
But his record as a scholar did not blind the
college authorities to his faults, and in his
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN 65
junior year the faculty suspended him for
some boyish escapade, and he never returned.
Twenty years afterward, however, when Yale
had reason to be proud of his fame as a man of
letters, she called him to her halls and con-
ferred upon him his degree in the presence of
an assemblage called together to see him thus
honored both as man and poet.
The immediate result of his leaving college
was a determination to begin life for himself,
and at the age of nineteen he became editor of
the Norwich Tribune. The new venture was
at once successful. Two years later he took
charge of the Winsted Herald, and conducted
it so successfully that it speedily acquired the
fame of being one of the cleverest newspapers
published outside the great cities. But grati-
fying as this must have been, the young editor
sighed for new fields, and in 1852 he removed
to New York and became a contributor to
Harper s and Putnants Magazines, and a
short-lived periodical published under the name
of Vanity Fair. Stedman was now twenty-
one years old. He had married, and as his
5
66 EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
magazine work could not support him, he
returned to journalism. His first important
literary success, as in the case of Lowell and
Holmes, was based upon the publication of a
political poem.
The newspapers had just given to the world
the story of John Brown's capture of Harper's
Ferry, and North and South alike were bit-
terly excited over the event. This plain
farmer was the most humble of the anti-sla-
very leaders, yet his name was destined to be the
war-cry of the North for four years. He had,
with a force of men, marched to the fortress
of Harper's Ferry with the avowed purpose
of starting a military crusade against slavery.
The garrison, under the impression that a
large force was attacking, surrendered without
a struggle, and John Brown marched in and
took possession. The fort was retaken in a
few days, but the event produced the most ex-
traordinary agitation all over the country.
Every newspaper published an account of it,
and it was feared that the most serious results
would follow.
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN 6/
i
What should be done with John Brown him-
became a burning question, the South
clamoring for his death and the North de-
manding his acquittal. While his fate was still
under discussion there appeared in the New
York Tribune a remarkable poem, in which all
the feeling of the moment seemed crystallized.
Stedman was the author of this poem, and no
one but a true poet could so have entered into
the spirit of the old hero, to whom inaction
seemed a denial of principle.
"How John Brown Took Harper's Ferry'
is a ballad full of fire and force. Stedman's
power is shown in his fine appreciation of the
unselfish frenzy which possessed the old man
and led him to offer himself as a martyr in the
cause he had espoused. One of the most stir-
ring ballads produced by the war, it will always
iold a prominent place in the lyric poetry of
America. In less than two years after its pub-
lication the author found himself war corre-
spondent of the Tribune, following the fort-
unes of the Army of the Potomac in its first
campaign. The South had decided that the
68 EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
question of slavery must be settled by the
sword, and the country was in the midst of
civil war.
Another poem published in the Tribune
about the time of the John Brown episode
showed the versatile talent of the new poet.
This was "The Diamond Wedding," a satire
on the marriage of a young society girl to a
wealthy Cuban planter. A list of his gifts to
his promised bride appeared in the daily papers,
and sounded like a catalogue of the treasures
of Haroun-aL-Rashid. Stedman's poem struck
the popular fancy, which was also pleased by
the publication of a song on the charms of
" Lager Bier." Encouraged by this friendly
eulogy, he published a volume of poems under
the title Poems Lyric and Idyllic. It is in this
volume that "The Freshet' occurs, and also,
among several other good examples, the poem
" Penelope," in which the old Greek legend is
retold in beautiful verse, which not only showed
Stedman's mastery of blank verse, but also his
fine scholarship.
Stedman followed the fortunes of the army
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN 69
throughout the war, his letters to his journal
forming a valuable contribution to the war lit-
erature of the day. He saw the first famous
Battle of Bull Run, when the Northern army
was forced to retreat, and when it seemed for
the time that the war would be carried into
the North. A reminiscence of his experience
in camp and hospital, on march and battle-field,
is found in his long poem, "Alice of Mon-
mouth." But, although this poem possesses
passages of remarkable beauty, it does not show
Stedman at his highest reach. This is attained
in those shorter lyrics, which are so sponta-
neous, so full of natural poetry and so perfect
in art that they seem to spring unconsciously
from the soul. One cannot help regretting
that our poet has not given us a more generous
measure of them. One of the most perfect of
these lyrics, "The Doorstep," is full of that
tender regret which breathes through all the
poet's work a treasured memory of happy
youth. " Country Sleighing ' is another song
of nature, full of the dash and breezy story of
the country winter season. Again in " Holy-
7O EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
oke Valley' the poet still looks backward to
his boyhood, and gives, through the music of
poetry, one more bright picture of the past.
Among his other poems may be mentioned
the ode delivered before the graduating class
of Dartmouth College in 1873, called "The
Dartmouth Ode," and a beautiful and touch-
ing tribute to Horace Greeley, delivered at
the request of the Printers' Association at the
unveiling of the bust of Greeley in Greenwood
Cemetery. Among other poems of occasions
are the fine lines, " Gettysburg," delivered at
the reunion of the Army of the Potomac in
1871, and a monody on the death of Bryant,
delivered at the Century Club, New York.
Outside his poetry Stedman is known as a
most conscientious and scholarly editor of the
work of other writers and as a critic of origi-
nal and thoughtful mind. He has edited, in
conjunction with Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a
choice selection of the works of Landor, and
in 1875 he began the publication in Scribners
Magazine of a series of critical articles on the
poets and poetry of the Victorian Age, which
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN 71
forms one of the most valuable works of criti-
cism in our later literature. Following this
came a volume of essays, called " The Poets of
America," and one entitled "The Nature and
Elements of Poetry ' -a critical and imagina-
tive study. He has edited also The Library
of American Literature, and an anthology of
Victorian poetry, and made a scholarly trans-
lation of the Greek idyllic poets. In all his
literary productions Stedman shows not only
his fine poetic gift, but the sound literary
judgment and attainments of the scholar, and
his work forms a valuable contribution to Am-
erican letters.
Stedman has passed the greater part of his
life in New York, whither he returned soon
after the war, and where he has found oppor-
tunity not only to write books but to be a
successful business man.
CHAPTER VI
BRET HARTE
1839
One of the favorite stories told by the men
who had conquered Mexico and Peru was
that of a region of fabulous wealth, situated
somewhere in the region of the Sierra Madre
Mountains, and ruled by California, a white
queen of divine origin. There, it was said,
were hidden mines of unexhaustible treasures,
where emeralds, diamonds, and rubies were as
plentiful as gold and silver. There, also, the
rain and dew watered the most beautiful val-
leys in the world ; the climate was beneficent,
and it was suspected that there would be found
that magic fountain of life, for which the brave
De Leon had sought in vain. Many bands
of adventurers, bold of heart and full of hope,
roamed the valleys and toiled through the
BRET HARTE 73
mountain passes in search of this wealth, but
their effort was unrewarded. The mountains
kept their secret, and no glimpse of diamond
mine or wondrous fountain or beautiful queen
was ever revealed. At length the quest was
given up. The Spaniards built homes around
the missions established by the priests, and
with the help of the Indians they tilled the
soil, planted vineyards, and were content with
the plentiful annual harvests. Gradually little
villages grew up and the country became set-
tled. But it remained Spanish, many of the
inhabitants being descendants of those old ad-
venturers who had first come hither in search
of gold.
For three hundred years peace and content
reigned in the valleys ; then, in a moment, all
things were changed, as if by magic, by the
discovery of gold in the Sacramento Valley.
California had, by the treaty with Mexico,
which ended the Mexican War, become a part
of the United States. The news of the great
discovery had to be carried by sailing-vessel
around Cape Horn to the East, but no sooner
74 BRET HARTE
was it received than there began a wild rush
for the Pacific coast. These adventurers were
not dressed in doublet and hose, like the Span-
ish cavaliers, nor did they sail in those, gaily
decked vessels with which the old Greeks loved
to propitiate fortune. They came instead from
every class, and they travelled in any conceiv-
able conveyance that could be placed on wheels ;
many, indeed, went on foot, for the voyage was
long and expensive, and the overland route
was in the main preferred. Every country in
Europe sent emigrants to swell the numbers of
the gold-seekers, and soon the prairies and
plains of the West seemed alive with the wagon
trains, which kept close together from fear of
the Indians.
When the gold-fields were at last reached
they were soon taken possession of by the ad-
venturers, who had turned soldiers in a com-
mon cause. Their camp-fires gleamed from
valley, and hill, and mountain pass, and the en-
tire country was turned into a great camp.
Many of the towns of California had been
deserted in the first rush, and as the trades-
BRET HARTE 75
people, farmers, and mechanics were equally
engaged in the search for gold, all other busi-
ness was for the time being paralyzed. It be-
came almost impossible to buy the ordinary
articles of food and clothing, and any chance
vessel which was willing to dispose of its cargo
might do so at fabulous prices.
Wigwams, tents, brush-huts, and log-houses
served as dwellings for Americans, Mexicans,
Germans, Frenchmen, Austrians, Hollanders,
Chinese, and men of other nationalities, who
lived and worked side by side, shared one an-
other's hopes and disappointments and suc-
cesses, and made it apparent that in the miners'
camp at least all men were brothers.
During the early years of the California emi-
gration, when the first excitement had abated,
but while all the picturesque elements of the
life still remained, there came to the gold-fields
a bright boy, who had left his home in Albany,
N. Y., to better his fortunes in the West. This
was Francis Bret Harte, whose father had been
a teacher in an Albany seminary. The boy
himself tried teaching on his arrival, but the
76 BRET HARTE
attempt was unsuccessful, and he turned his
attention to mining. And here, because he
was a poet, he saw many things that escaped
the eyes of others. Here, where the cultivated
man of Oxford or Harvard University worked
with pick and pan beside the German peasant
and unlettered Chinese, he saw a new picture
of life, but still a true picture, because it re-
flected human nature. His finer sense grasped
the poetry, the courage, and the heroism that
often inspired this eager search for gold. He
understood how the hope of the common
laborer and the dream of the scholar might
spring from unselfishness, and he saw that here,
as on other fields, battles were lost nobly as
well as nobly won. He saw, too, that as years
went on all the foreign elements which made
up the California of that day would blend to
furnish a unique page of American history.
And because it is the office of literature to
record history, he believed that whoever should
preserve in prose and verse the every-day scenes
of that strange life would be doing valuable
work.
BRET HARTE 77
His life at the mines was hardly more suc-
cessful than had been his school-teaching ex-
perience, and by and by he became a compos-
itor in a printing-office. Soon afterward he
composed his first article in type without
previously writing it down, and so his literary
career began. A little later he entered the
office of the San Francisco Era, then an
important newspaper on the Pacific slope.
While in this position he published anony-
mously a few sketches of life on the frontier.
These stories, so full of the genuine flavor of
the mining-camp, attracted some attention, but
no one dreamed that they heralded a new voice
in American literature. Ten years after the
discovery of gold a magazine was organized in
California under the title The Overland Month-
ly, and Bret Harte was made its editor. In
the second issue of the magazine he published
his story, " The Luck of Roaring Camp,"
which showed how rich was the material that
lay in the life of the far West and revealed the
impress of a master hand in literary composi-
tion. In California, however, the story was
78 BRET HARTE
not very popular. There the people who read
at all found their enjoyment in the books and
magazines familiar to cultivated society. Into
the miners' camps came copies of The Edin-
burgh Review and Punch, but the true meaning
of the life of which they themselves formed a
part had not yet been presented to these eager
adventurers.
But in the East "The Luck of Roaring
Camp' was received with enthusiastic praise.
The Atlantic Monthly at once offered to buy
similar sketches from the author who had
not made himself known and other peri-
odicals and reviews spoke generous words in
favor of the young adventurer into this new
world of art. Bret Harte became famous al-
most in a day, and henceforth it was his task
to fulfil his boyish dream and put into literary
form those records of an experience that was
rapidly passing away. Sketches, stories, poems,
and novels followed closely upon one another.
He left no phase of this many-sided life un-
touched, and the series grew at last into a
faithful record of the most picturesque and
BRET HARTE 79
romantic episode of American history. What
diverse characters came to the writer's side and
claimed his attention as he wrote ! Sometimes
it was a miner who had failed in his quest ;
sometimes a Mexican ranchero with his light
heart and merry love-song ; sometimes a con-
vict who had escaped from prison and was
trying life anew in the freedom of the camps.
Often it would be a little child who would seem
to tell its story to this ever-listening ear,- -a
waif, perhaps, who had drifted into that wild
company, which yet kept its reverence for the
innocence of childhood. More than once the
hero of the occasion would be one of those
wild beasts who found their homes in the vast-
nesses of the mountain forests, a grizzly, watch-
ing with a dignified sense of his power the
incomprehensible antics of man, or a coyote
slinking along a dusty road. For each and
all the author became a faithful chronicler, and
because he had the true poet's insight he be-
came more than a mere chronicler. He lifted
all this motley assemblage forever out of the
common-place of their rough lives and showed
80 BRET HARTE
that each was still real man or woman and
genuine kin to his race. Only a great artist
could have done this. Only genius could have
so looked beneath the exterior and found there
the living signs of the brotherhood of man ;
the same genius which saw but a humbler
brother still in the ugly shape of Bruin, and
to whom the lazy coyote became only a " beg-
ging friar " living righteously upon the largess
of others.
As a background to his stories Bret Harte
paints in scenes of extraordinary natural beau-
ty. He shows us, under the sunlight or
wrapped in storms, still set in their own atmos-
phere of loneliness, the rude camps and settle-
ments, the rivers and canons, which are the
haunts of his characters. The writer is, in-
deed, the poet of nature as well as of the heart,
and can reach easily her varying moods.
Among the most interesting of the stories
which relate to child-life are " A Waif of the
Plains," the story of two children who were
separated from their party during the overland
march to California ; " The Christmas Gift that
BRET HARTE 8 1
Came to Rupert," the history of a drummer-
boy ; "Wan Lee," the life of a little Chinese
boy in San Francisco; "The Story of Mliss,"
a miner's child, and "The Queen of the Pirate
Island," a delightful conception, possible only
to that land of bold adventure and tempting
treasure. Perhaps it would not be out of the
way to include among these juvenile chronicles
the story of " A Boy's Dog " and the delightful
experience of " Baby Sylvester," a fascinating
bear cub, who was adopted by a young miner,
and fed on the only milk that ever reached the
settlement for which service Adams' Express
made special trips. He could play tag, roll down
hill, take the cork out of the syrup-bottle with
his teeth, dance, and shake hands, and when he
arrived at maturity he was still faithful to his
friends, and showed an ugly temper only to
such human beings as annoyed him.
Bret Harte's poems, like his prose, preserve
the varying conditions of early frontier life.
They include also many verses written during
the Civil War, among which "John Burns of
Gettysburg," "Caldwell of Springfield," "The
82 BRET HARTE
Reveille," and "How Are You, Sanitary?"
are the most notable. Here, too, is found
that exquisite little idyl, " Battle Bunny," the
story of a white rabbit which was scared from
its hiding-place and took refuge in a soldier's
bosom as the two armies faced each other be-
fore battle.
Some of his best verses are written in the
dialect of the camps, and are full of his own de-
lightful, distinctive pathos and humor. "Jim,"
" Dow's Flat," "Plain Language from Truth-
ful James," "Babes in the Wood," and "The
Hawk's Nest' are among those that thus re-
produce some characteristic incidents of the
wild life. His poem, "The Heathen Chinee,"
was not intended for publication, but was writ-
ten as a harmless skit for the amusement of
two or three comrades. When a sudden exi-
gency of the magazine dragged it from the
reluctant author's portfolio, from Maine to
California a delighted public laughed over it,
but Mr. Harte himself has always lamented
the fate that based so much of his literary
reputation on a bit of unfair doggerel.
BRET HARTE 83
Although he has spent years abroad, both as
United States Consul to different European
cities and as a traveller, Bret Harte's work re-
mains distinctly American. The collection of
stories now numbers nearly thirty volumes ;
most of the titles, as The Schoolmistress of
Red Gulch, Snow-Bound at Eagles, Two Men
of Sandy Bar, and Tennessee s Partner, indi-
cate the scene or nature of the sketch.
He is the historian of one of the most in-
teresting movements in the progress of the
United States a movement which began
while California was still a land of Mexican
traditions, of grain and cattle-raising, and ended
only when it took its place as one of the most
important States of the Union. No one but
an eye-witness could have written this history
faithfully, and American literature owes one of
its greatest debts to the man whose genius has
thus illuminated the pages of the nation's life.
CHAPTER VII
BAYARD TAYLOR
1825-1878
When William Penn stood under the trees
and made his famous treaty with the Indians
there was in his company a young Quaker,
whose descendants continued for generations
to be honored citizens of Pennsylvania. As
time went on the family mixed its Quaker
blood with that of some neighboring Ger-
man Lutherans. In the seventh generation
from the days of Penn its most famous off-
spring, Bayard Taylor, born at Kennett Square,
in 1825, was as nearly German as Quaker, and
it was the German blood, no doubt, which gave
his nature its strain of poetry and romance.
The Taylor family were simple farmers, and
the home life was plain, though the thrift of
both father and mother secured the children
BAYARD TAYLOR 85
every comfort. The mother's one desire was
that her children should become quiet, respect-
able members of a community that their name
had honored for generations. But to the
fourth child, Bayard, this ambition always
seemed narrow. His earliest memories of
himself were connected with longings to flit
as far beyond the home nest as possible.
At four years of age he became a reader of
books, passing in due time from Peter Parley
to Gibbon, and learning Scott and Campbell
by heart, as well as copying long extracts from
their works. Kennett Square possessed a pub-
lic library, volume after volume of which was
devoured by young Bayard. When he was
seven years old he set himself gravely to the
business of writing poetry, placing his own
verses with much satisfaction among his copied
extracts from the great poets.
Fond as he was of books, he was yet a genu-
ine child, \vho delighted in playing tricks, and
had a very real terror of a piece of lonely
woodland that he had to pass through on his
way to school.
86 BAYARD TAYLOR
He was an out-of-doors boy, too, and spent
hours in swamp and field making collections of
frogs and baby turtles, eggs, and mineralogical
specimens. Among his other interests was a
fondness for drawing. He illustrated his own
little manuscript book of verses, and made pict-
ures for the poems of his favorite authors.
But his chief passion was a desire to travel.
Books of travel and descriptions of foreign
lands were read and re-read and almost learned
by heart. When called upon to write compo-
sitions at school he invariably chose for his
theme some imaginary adventure in a strange
country, or some fanciful description of a re-
mote corner of the earth, whose name alone
was familiar to him. Long afterward, in
speaking of this desire of his childhood, he
said that he envied the birds their wings, and
would have given his life to make an ascent in
a balloon.
His father had no sympathy with these boy-
ish fancies. He intended to make a farmer
of Bayard, and he scolded vigorously over his
son's nonsensical ambitions. But farm service
BAYARD TAYLOR 87
and farm life were distasteful to the boy. He
often shirked his duties, and his mother fre-
quently set him small tasks about the house,
out of pity for his intense dislike of the work
of field or garden.
When he was fourteen Bayard was sent to
Unionville Academy, where he received his last
and best school training from a competent and
earnest teacher. He studied Latin, French,
and mathematics, and among the young coun-
trymen who came there for study he found two
or three friends whom he kept for life.
When he was fifteen, with two of these
friends he walked from Unionville to the
Brandywine, noted as the scene of one of the
famous battles of the Revolution. This little
journey, the first flight of the boy into the
world, made a deep impression upon him.
More than ever he longed to breathe the air of
wider skies, to learn the lessons taught by the
art and history of the past, and to offer to the
world's work some contribution, perhaps, which
should not be valueless. He wrote a brief, but
vivid, description of his little trip, which was
BAYARD TAYLOR
published in the Westchester Register, a local
paper of some repute. It was the first time
he had seen his name in print, and its appear-
ance thrilled him with hope.
A year later the Saturday Evening Post, of
Philadelphia, printed his first published poem,
"The Soliloquy of a Young Poet." Like
Longfellow, he himself had carried his first
offering surreptitiously to the newspaper office.
As he read that the verses of " Selim," his pen
name, had been accepted, he seemed to stand
on air.
There is no more attractive picture of am-
bitious and noble youth than we get of Bayard
Taylor at this moment. From childhood he
had dreamed dreams far beyond the imagina-
tion of ordinary children. He had read poetry
with his heart full of admiration for the men
who could turn life to such golden uses. He
gave the simple and innocent worship of his
young soul to the famous authors who had
taught him the meaning and riches of art. A
letter which he received from Dickens in reply
to one of his own brought him the greatest
BAYARD TAYLOR 89
joy, and any whisper from the great world be-
yond his own delighted him.
At seventeen he finished his course at
Unionville Academy and went back to the
farm. But in his heart he was devoted to the
literary life. From his own confessions we
know how he consecrated himself to this work,
cherishing a vision of high achievement and a
hope that in the great march of life he might
not be found laggard.
Winning his father's consent to his learning
the printer's trade, he worked for two years in
the office of The Village Record, of West-
chester. During this time he studied Spanish,
continued German, and wrote poems, which
appeared in Grahams Magazine. But Bayard
Taylor, while setting type in the office of The
Village Record, was in spirit far away from
the quiet Pennsylvania town, meditating voy-
ages of discovery into new worlds, and when
he published his first volume of poems, in the
early part of 1842, the venture was a bid not
so much for fame as for funds to start him on
his travels.
90 BAYARD TAYLOR
The little book, under the title Ximena ; or,
the Battle of Sierra Morena, and other Poems,
was published by subscription. He sent copies
to Lowell and Longfellow, whose approval
he coveted, signing himself their " stranger
friend." The book did not bring in money
enough for a European journey. But the poet
was young and strong and possessed indomit-
able perseverance. He had often walked the
thirty miles that lay between his home and
Philadelphia, and he felt that he could walk
through Europe. At any rate, he meant to
try it. After many disappointments he se-
cured two or three engagements to write news-
paper letters from abroad, receiving some pay
in advance, and with this, added to another
small store, he sailed for England, taking a
second-cabin passage in July, 1844.
Now began as interesting and romantic a
career as even our poet could have desired.
Two friends joined him in his pilgrimage.
Both were like Bayard Taylor himself, young,
strong, and ambitious. When they caught
sight of the Irish coast, after a voyage of
BAYARD TAYLOR 91
nearly four weeks, it seemed to them that
they had entered another world. Dressed in
student's cap and blouse, with knapsack on
back and pilgrim staff in hand, Bayard Taylor
made the tour of Europe. Like a true vagrant,
he wandered hither and thither as his fancy led
him. For six months he studied German in
Frankfort, living in the family of a burgher,
and sharing with them their feasts and holiday
merriment in true German fashion. Though
poor in purse, he was not too poor to recipro-
cate their many kindnesses to him and his
friends, and he tells a funny story of a Christ-
mas gift bestowed upon their kind hosts. It
was decided to make the worthy Germans a
present of a carpet, such luxuries being un-
known to the frugal household. The young
students laid it down at night after the family
had gone to bed, but in the morning they
were somewhat dismayed to find that the
housewife could not be induced to step upon
it. It required much argument to persuade
her that the gift was meant for service, and it
is likely that she would have abandoned her
92 BAYARD TAYLOR
sitting-room while the carpet remained had not
the donors insisted upon its use.
From his strain of German blood, perhaps,
Bayard Taylor took more kindly to German
life and thought than to any other. As he
journeyed through the old picturesque towns,
and wandered by the banks of the rivers, that
had been famous since the times of Caesar, he
felt fall upon him the spirit of romance and
mystery which seemed ever to brood over this
land. He loved the people with their simple
lives and solid intellectuality, and the legends
and stories which clustered around their moun-
tains and forests seemed to come to him like
reviving memories of his own experience.
In the spirit of the old wandering bards he
made his way through the sombre forests of
the Hartz Mountains, and rejoiced like a
young viking that he was able to ascend the
Brocken in a raging storm.
All this time he was studying hard at Ger-
man, preparing himself unknowingly for one
of the great labors of his life. All this time,
too, he was pressed for money. Travelling
BAYARD TAYLOR 93
through Austria, crossing the Alps, visiting
Italy, he found it always necessary to earn
his daily bread. Sometimes he lived on six
cents a day, and thought bread, and figs,
and roasted chestnuts sumptuous fare. Once
his shoes were so worn that they would not
bear him another step, and he had to wait five
days at an inn until a letter came with remit-
tances from his publishers. Again he was so
poor that he could take only deck passage on
the voyage from Italy to France, and made the
trip with his knapsack for a pillow, drenched
to the skin and suffering horribly from seasick-
ness.
But he accomplished his desire. When he
returned home, after a two-years' absence, he
found that his letters in the New York Tribune
and other papers had won him sufficient fame to
warrant their publication in book form. N. P.
Willis, the never-failing friend of young authors,
wrote a preface, and Views Afoot came out un-
der as pleasant auspices as could be desired,
and passed through six editions in one year.
The appearance of this book marked the be-
94 BAYARD TAYLOR
ginning of that larger literary life to which
Bayard Taylor aspired and which he attained.
A great and immediate satisfaction came to
him now through friendly letters from older
writers, who gave the book generous praise
and welcomed the young author cordially to
their guild. During a visit to Boston made
at this time Bayard Taylor was overwhelmed
with delight at the kind reception given him
by Longfellow and the other men whose
friendship he had always longed for. The pub-
lication of his poem, "The Norseman's Ride,"
a few months later brought him a letter from
Whittier, and marked the beginning of a
friendship which lasted through life.
After an unsuccessful attempt at publishing
a county newspaper in Pennsylvania, Bayard
Taylor decided to try his fortunes in New
York.
The city still retained many of the character-
istics which made it a congenial home for liter-
ary workers in the days when Irving and Bry-
ant, Cooper, Halleck, and Drake were winning
their fame.
BAYARD TAYLOR 95
The wealth and fashion still centred in the
lower part of the town in broad, old-fashioned
streets, whose houses were noted alike for their
culture and hospitality.
New York then, as now, led the newspaper
work of the country, and the younger writers
were glad of positions on the dailies and week-
lies. Bayard Taylor obtained a position on The
Literary World at five dollars a week, and
earned four dollars more by teaching in a girls'
school. But he had already won a fair start in
the literary field, and his friends looked on his
success as assured. Their faith was realized ;
within a year Taylor was advanced to a posi-
tion of twelve dollars a week on the Tribune,
while writing articles for magazines.
From this time Bayard Taylor's literary life
divides itself into that of traveller, newspaper
writer, lecturer, novelist and poet.
Scarcely had he won his place in New
York when he was sent by the Tribune to
California to visit the newly discovered gold
regions and report the life of the mining
camps. Bayard Taylor was the prince of those
96 BAYARD TAYLOR
literary free lances, the newspaper correspond-
ents, who start on adventures as wild and full
of danger as those encountered by knight or
soldier of old. Civilization owes much to
these men, always ready and full of pluck,
and who count danger of small moment in
pursuit of duty.
Bayard Taylor sailed from New York for
California by way of the Isthmus of Panama,
taking from June till August for the journey.
He immediately threw his lot in with the
miners, sharing their dangers and privations,
and became the poet of the California emigra-
tion as Bret Harte afterward became its histor-
ian. He slept often on the ground with his
saddle for a pillow, toiled through ravines, trav-
ersed forests, encountered Indians and wild
beasts. In Mexico, on his return, he had an
adventure with robbers.
But he had caught the spirit of that marvel-
lous outburst of energy which in a few years
transformed the thinly inhabited Pacific slope
into a region of towns and cities, whose aggre-
gated wealth was almost beyond credence. The
BAYARD TAYLOR 97
record of what he saw, published under the
title Eldorado; or, Adventures in the Path
of Empire, was a picturesque and valuable
contribution to the literature of the gold dis-
covery.
The next year found him again upon his
travels. This time he fulfilled an old dream
by visiting the Orient. His excellence as a
reporter of things comes from his power to
merge his own personality in that of the peo-
ple he met. As soon as he entered a foreign
land he ceased to be Bayard Taylor, American
traveller, and became Arab, Bedouin, or Turk,
as the case might be.
On the Nile it seemed he must have lived al-
ways in Egypt, and he was served by his boat-
men with peculiar reverence, as if they recog-
nize i in him a higher genius of their own race.
In Damascus he dressed in the Syrian costume
and smoked his pipe sitting cross-legged upon
the roof-top. In Constantinople he wore
even the Arab burnouse and turban, and was
addressed in Turkish when he went to his
bankers for money. At another time he was
98 BAYARD TAYLOR
denounced as an infidel by an Arab who saw
him drinking water on a fast-day. He himself
rejoiced in the strange Oriental life, whose cus-
toms and habits of thought appealed to him so
strongly. He called himself a worshipper of
the sun, and says that standing in an Eastern
garden of flowers he took off his hat to the god
of day like a veritable Parsee. In India he be-
came in spirit a Hindoo, and visited temples
and shrines like a devotee. Still loyal to the
mountain-tops, he climbed the highest point of
the Himalayas accessible in the winter season,
and drank in the solemn and majestic beauty of
that region of mystery.
Under orders from the Tribune, he crossed
Asia overland and joined the United States
squadron at Shanghai, where Commodore
Perry gave him the post of master's mate that
he might witness the opening of the ports of
Japan to the commerce of the world. Finally
he sailed from China for New York by way of
Cape Horn, reaching home two years and six
months after his departure.
Three years later he was again on his wan-
BAYARD TAYLOR 99
derings. After a short visit in Germany he
started for the north and travelled through
Sweden, Denmark, and Lapland. He travelled
hundreds of miles by reindeer, penetrating far
within the Arctic Circle that he might enjoy
that wonder of the north, " a day without a
sun. " A year after, he was in Greece breakfasting
on " honey from Hymettus," and began learning
Greek that he might better appreciate the mar-
vels of this land of beauty. In the same year he
visited Russia, returning to America in 1858.
After this, travelling occupied less of his
time, although he again made a tour of Europe,
and as a representative of the Tribune visited
Iceland during the celebration of its millennial
anniversary.
Iceland, the land of old memories and songs,
impressed him strongly. This little country,
which had preserved its national life for a
thousand years, had still the vigor of the old
viking days, when its sailors ventured without
compass or chart to the coasts of America, and
its poets sung its heroes' praises in verse that
has become classic.
5308
IOO BAYARD TAYLOR
Taylor's reputation had preceded him here,
and he was called the " American Skald ' by
the enthusiastic people.
As a lecturer, Bayard Taylor's fame was based
upon the widely diffused reports of his travels
which had appeared for years in newspapers,
magazines, and book form. He published
thousands of letters and eleven books of travel,
the most famous of these volumes including
A Journey to Central Africa ; The Lands of
the Saracen ; A Visit to India, China, and
Japan; Northern Travel, and Travels in
Greece and Russia.
Through these publications he had won a
name which, in the intervals of life at home
made him the most popular lecturer of his
day. He delivered hundreds of lectures on
his travels, his enormous capacity for hard
work making this possible even in the midst
of serious literary tasks. Moreover, he had
been building up gradually a reputation as a
novelist and poet. His first novel, Hannah
Thurston, is an American story of manners, the
characters of which are drawn from Pennsyl-
BAYARD TAYLOR IOI
vania life, although the scene is supposed to be
laid elsewhere. This novel was successful in
America, and appeared in German, Russian,
and Swedish translations ; but it is doubtful
whether its fame was not due more to the
author's popularity than to its own merit.
The second novel, John Godfrey s Fortunes,
was much more individual and characteristic.
In this were incorporated certain experiences
of the author's own literary life. There is a
certain vitality about these reminiscences that
will always make them agreeable reading. The
Story of Kennett, the third novel, is the most
interesting of all. It is largely a history of
the village life of the author's boyhood, into
which are woven many incidents of local his-
tory. The tricks which the Quaker boys play
upon their sober-minded father and the ac-
count of the runaway match were family
history, while the descriptions of scenery, the
thousand memories of boyhood, and the tender
handling of the subject all reveal the loyal
affection in which the author held the past
One other novel, Joseph and His Friend, with
IO2 BAYARD TAYLOR
some short stories contributed to The Atlantic
and other magazines, sums up Bayard Taylor's
work in fiction. While these novels were suc-
cessful in their day, they are perhaps the least
valuable of Bayard Taylor's work. His news-
paper letters and his books of travel alike are
full of that personal charm which made the
author one of the most popular men of his
day. They have, besides delightful touches of
color and light, a ready camaraderie, and a
genuine sentiment.
But neither in fiction nor tales of travel did
the author aspire to the greatest achievement
of his life. His boyish dream had been to
be a poet, a younger brother of Goethe, and
Shakespeare, and his best work is unquestion-
ably his verse. Unequal though he is, yet Bay-
ard Taylor possessed the true poet's gift. His
chief fault lay in over-production. He wrote
volume after volume of poetry which brought
him reputation but not critical approval. His
beauty-loving nature seemed to find poetry
everywhere, and to demand its expression.
Much of his verse passes before the eye like
BAYARD TAYLOR 103
sunlit pictures. This is especially true of the
Poems of the Orient. Here the traveller,
charmed by his surroundings, has turned poet,
and plucked from rose-garden and riverside a
glowing wreath of song. The very breath of
the Orient flows through these poems, which
express a genuine inspiration. " A Boat Song
of the Nile;" "An Arab Warrior;" " Kil-
imandjars ; or, a Russian Boy ; ' " Desert
Hymn to the Sun ; " u The Arab to the Palm,"
and "A Bedouin's Love-Song' indicate by
their titles the progress of the poet's pilgrim-
age through the lands whose romantic history
had haunted his youth. In these and other
ballads Bayard Taylor showed the temper of
the genuine lyrist. Among the shorter poems
" The Song of the Camp ' has won a place in
the heart of the people.
The longer poems embrace pastorals, trag-
edies, masques, and a drama. All show care-
ful workmanship, for Bayard Taylor always
approached his art with a feeling that it de-
manded the best that he could give. Many
descriptive passages unvaryingly of great beauty
IO4 BAYARD TAYLOR
are found scattered through this work, which
is pure and lofty in conception. Among these
longer poems "The Masque of the Gods" and
" Lars, a Pastoral of Norway," are perhaps the
most successful.
One of the great ambitions of Bayard Tay-
lor was achieved in his translation of Goethe's
Faust. To do this work he had for years
studied every available source of knowledge.
His familiarity with German was thorough,
his sympathy with German thought complete.
No man of his generation was so well equipped
for the work, and he succeeded in producing
a poetic, faithful, and spirited translation of
the great original.
One other ambition, the writing of the life
of Goethe, he was not allowed to accomplish.
When apparently only in the midst of his
career he died suddenly at Berlin, whither he
had been sent as Ambassador from the United
States. His early death was felt to be a
serious loss to American letters, as his accom-
plished work seemed to promise still higher
achievement.
BAYARD TAYLOR 10$
Bayard Taylor's American home was for
many years at Kennett Square, where he built
a charming manor-house, noted for its hospital-
ity as well as for the distinguished guests who
visited it. He had a social and loving nat-
ure, and easily won and kept the friendships
which he so dearly cherished. The poets
Stoddard and Stedman were his lifelong inti-
mates. His boyish desire to be admitted to
the circle of men of genius found its realiza-
tion in the place he held in the hearts of the
greatest men of his day.
His other and higher youthful hope to
perform nobly his part in life- -was also ful-
filled. No man could have been freer from
selfish and mean undertakings than was he.
Whether in his literary work or in his diplo-
matic service he was ever guided by one prin-
ciple that life and its gifts were to be put to
their best uses, and that the measure of noble
purpose was the measure of the man.
CHAPTER VIII
WILLIAN DEAN HOWELLS
1837
Perhaps the most faithful story of a boy's
life ever written is given to us in A Boys
Town, a transcription of the home history of
William Dean Howells, from his third to his
eleventh year. The " Boy's Town " was Hamil-
ton, O., whither the family had removed from
Martin's Ferry, the birthplace of our author,
and this picture of a Western town at that
period has thus a unique value.
The greatest charm of this book is found in
the utter absence of anything like an effort at
story-telling proper. There are no hair-breadth
escapes and few adventures, but one feels
throughout the genuineness of this revelation
of a boy's hopes and fears and ambitions.
The narrative is in the impersonal form, and yet
there is a fascinating camaraderie at once estab-
lished between author and reader. " When I
WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS IOJ
was a child ' is the note that sounds through-
out, and this magic suggestion colors the story
with that reality which children love far be-
yond anything else.
These child pictures show us the home-life
and the heart-life of the writer as nothing else
could. The family belonged to the well-to-do
portion of the community, the father being
perhaps better read than most of his neigh-
bors. Both father and mother were wise in
the best sense for their children's good. Of
fun and frolic there was plenty, but there
was also the firm counsel to check all selfish-
ness and mean ambitions, to nourish regard for
others, and above all to teach right doing be-
cause it was right. Reading between the lines
we see that this father and mother, with their
high conceptions of duty and their constant ex-
ample of earnest living must have moulded the
character of their children on broad and noble
lines.
There is a delightful little confession of how
the boy was once somewhat ashamed of his
father, because in the paper which he edited he
108 WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS
opposed the Mexican War. The leading people
of Hamilton were in favor of the war and the
children took sides in the issue. General Tay-
lor, the hero of the hour, was the hero of the
larger portion of the Hamilton boys, and How-
ells keenly felt the bitterness of unpopularity.
But a little later he appreciated his father's
bravery in battling day after day for a principle,
though it made his paper unpopular and af-
fected his business interests. When General
Taylor was nominated for President, the paper
strongly opposed his candidacy, because of his
well-known sympathy with the cause of slav-
ery. To favor the anti-slavery cause meant
often to lose one's friends and position, yet the
little paper became the organ of an anti-slav-
ery crusade. Long before election day Howells
had ceased to be ashamed of his father, and had
come to admire his stalwart independence and
his unselfish heroism in fighting for what he
considered right. Such an example as this
made home counsels a living creed and wrought
in the children of the family a desire to bend
life to high uses.
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
About this time Howells first heard the
Biglow Papers, which his father read aloud as
they came out in the Boston paper, and the
famous Hosea became an intimate in the
family, and there seems after this never to
have been even the slightest distrust of his
father's judgment.
From these pictures of home life we see the
Hamilton of Howells's childhood as the typical
Western town of the day which had not yet
quite outgrown the period of frontier life.
All around the town were log cabins, which
served as the outposts of the unbroken forests
beyond, and it was to the forests that the boys
looked for their inspiration when thinking of
the ambitions of later life. They were all de-
termined to be- -if not real Indians, since
nature had so cruelly denied that yet at least
Indian hunters and slayers. Periodically, there
were companies formed for the extermination
of the red man, and the highest joy was to
go off by themselves for a day's camping in
the woods, and try to forget that they were
the children of uninteresting, civilized white
1 10 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
people. Howells began school when he was
still very young, attending first a small private
school, and later the public school of the town.
Nothing occurred to him in his school-life of
such importance as the amazing discovery that
he could make poetry by rule. He found this
out one day as he was fumbling the leaves of
his grammar, and he accepted the statement
that poetry could be made by rule just as sol-
emnly and unequivocally as he would have
accepted a similar statement in regard to magic.
From this time he never ceased until he had
mastered the rules of prosody a word which,
in itself, must have sounded like an incanta-
tion. He wrote verses with the most inde-
fatigable zeal, and he had the uncommon joy
of being able to see them in print, for standing
upon a stool in his father's printing office, he
set up the type himself, and, no doubt, watched
the presses afterward with all the responsibility
of ownership. Verse-making, which had often
been tried before, now assumed a greater in-
terest, and before very long the young author
was busy upon a tragedy founded upon the
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS III
stern discipline of one of his school-teachers.
The teacher was to be the tyrant against whom
the boys were to revolt, much in the same way
as Spartacus and the gladiators revolted against
their Roman masters. The drama was finished,
but never acted by the school-boy company
selected for the parts. This, however, did not
discourage the young author, who still con-
tinued writing poetry.
A part of the family education consisted in
the father's reading aloud to the home circle in
the evening. In this way Howells became
acquainted with Moore's Lalla Rookh which
was the first poem he ever remembers. Dick-
ens's Christmas Stories, Scott's Lady of the
Lake, and some of the best English novels
became familiar to him at the same time. The
first books outside his school-books that he read
himself were Goldsmith's Histories of Greece
and Rome. A little later his father gave him
Don Quixote, and one of his literary ventures
was a romance founded upon the Conquest of
Granada as related in the pages of Irving, and
which he read over and over without tire.
112 WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS
In fact he was always reading, and from his
very young boyhood he may be said to have
been always writing ; whatever other occupa-
tion or share of active duty became his, seems
in his own mind to have been outside his real
mission, which was that of writing. In this he
persisted always, so that he may be said to have
grown up into authorship.
Outside the home and school life were the
never-ending and varied experiences of ordi-
nary boy life. There were muster and elec-
tion days, when the boys watched the soldiers
drill with solemn joy, and straightway inau-
gurated military companies among themselves.
There were Christmas holidays, which the
boys celebrated, for some reason unknown
to Eastern boys, with guns and pistols, fire-
crackers, and torpedoes. There were Easter-
day, when they cracked their colored eggs
together in a game of win and lose ; and April
fools' day; and the annual May party, when
the girls took the lead and the boys were
content to play a secondary part ; and Fourth
of July celebrated with processions and
WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS 113
speeches and the usual noise. What would
have seemed strange to a New England
boy was the absence of any Thanksgiving Day,
of which Howells did not even hear the name
in childhood. Occasionally travelling shows
and circuses came to Hamilton, and some-
times a theatre company, and at such a time
the Howells children, owing to their father's
newspaper connection, were fortunate in being
provided with tickets that lasted throughout
these short seasons of joy. Besides these
amusements there were nutting and shooting
in the forest, fishing in the Miami River,
swimming in the canal and canal basins, and
the summer and winter sports in due season,
many of which held still that flavor of wildness
which suggested the early frontier life.
When Howells was ten years old he left
school and began to learn the printer's trade in
his father's office, and not very long afterward
the family removed to Dayton ; A Boys Town
ends with an account of this removal, and a
pathetic little picture of how homesick How-
ells became for the old home. So homesick
8
114 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
indeed was he that there was nothing to do but
let him return there for a visit, a remedy which
cured him so effectually that he no sooner
reached Hamilton than he started back for
Dayton, possessed by a feeling even stronger
than homesickness, and that was mother-sick-
ness. At Dayton Howells and his elder
brother helped \vith the new paper which their
father had bought. They worked at the com-
positors' cases, and when it was sometimes
necessary would rise early in the morning and
help distribute the papers. Their education
was carried on by their father in the evening,
and he also superintended the reading in which
the boys now indulged on a somewhat larger
scale. One chief delight of the children at
this period was the number of travelling
theatre companies which visited Dayton ; very
often the best talent of the country was to be
found among the strollers, and it was in this
way that Howells became very well acquainted
with the Shakespearean drama, and with old
English comedy, as well as with the actors
and actresses who had attained, or were des-
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 115
tined to attain, an honorable celebrity. The
Dayton home was a happy one, where the in-
tellectual growth kept steady pace with the
physical. But financially the paper was not a
success, and the family was obliged to seek
another home.
Howells and his father walked from Dayton
to the new home, driving the cow and talking
philosophy. This period of his life is preserved
in Howells's charming book, One Year in a Log
Cabin. It is a delightful transcription of the
idyllic life of the woods. The little log cabin
was almost as primitive as those built by the
early settlers. The children helped the father
cover the walls with newspapers and glaze the
windows ; the great open fireplace, \vhere all
the cooking was done and where the bread was
baked in a Dutch oven set on the coals, was a
new and delightful joy to them ; so was the
unbroken forest, around which still clustered
memories of Indian warfare. At night these
memories, mixed with the Indian tales which
the boys read insatiably, made the bed-time
hour one to be dreaded.
Il6 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
With true American indifference to circum-
stances the family life went on in the same
grooves. The manner of earning the living
was different, but the study and reading con-
tinued, the father still acting as teacher. In
his book, My Literary Passions, Howells has
told us the books that charmed him above all
others as a boy. These were Goldsmith's His-
tory of Greece, Don Quixote, and Irving's Con-
quest of Granada. As he read these books he
was for the time being an Alcibiades or Don
Quixote as the case might be. So powerful
was his sympathy with all heroic deeds that in
reading Irving he could never decide whether
he were Moor or Spaniard. His boy friends
especially one who had worsted him in a
school-boy battle had infinite respect for his
knowledge of the ancients and referred to him
&
for information with a deference that must
have been soothing. He says that later he
rather liked the Romans better than the
Greeks, because they were less civilized, and
more, in fact, like boys.
For the want of space a large part of the
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 1 1/
family library still remained packed in barrels,
and rummaging in these one day Howells
came upon the poems of Longfellow. It was
his first introduction to that poet, who was
thereafter associated with the happy memories
of this forest home. A life so close to nature
left its own mark upon mind and soul, and this
is seen in that rare quality, the idealization of
childhood, which runs through the pages of
One Year in a Log Cabin.
This glimpse of frontier life seen through
eyes still young, has a charm like that of Long-
fellow's reminiscent poems of youth, or Whit-
tier's transcriptions of his boyhood, in which
the perfume of childhood still lingers around
the deeper experiences of the man.
The log-cabin life gave place to newspaper
work and another season in the printing office
at Columbus. Between sixteen and seventeen
a love for reading Shakespeare possessed
Howells, and with a young friend, also given
to verse making, he would spend afternoons
in the country while they alternately read the
tragedies and comedies of the great dramatist.
Il8 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
And so, although his education was desultory,
by the time he was twenty he was well read in
the English classics, and had besides a good
knowledge of American literature.
Before very long Howells became known as
one of the cleverest young newspaper writers
of the West. He also began to publish verses
in the newspapers. A trip down the Mississippi
to St. Louis gave him a new experience of life,
which he embodied in a poem, The Pilot's
Story, a picture out of the history of slave life.
This poem was published in the Atlantic
Monthly, in which other poems from time to
time appeared. About this time Howells pub-
lished a book of poems, in which were included
the verses of a young poet friend, and very
slowly he began to gain a reputation for good
verse making.
When Lincoln was nominated for President
Howells was asked by a Columbus publishing
house to write a life of the candidate. For
this he received one hundred and sixty dollars,
and he could conceive no better use for it than
to enlarge his knowledge of the world. He
WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS 119
accordingly made a trip to Montreal and Que-
bec, stopping, on his return, at Boston.
Here he became acquainted with James Rus-
sell Lowell, then editor of the Atlantic, with
Oliver Wendell Holmes, and with other writers
of note, who received the young author with
kindness, and whose encouragement at that
time was of the utmost value. In his twenty-
fifth year Howells received from President
Lincoln the appointment of United States
Consul to Venice, where he lived for the next
four years, making, in the meantime, trips to
other places of interest, and familiarizing him-
self with Italian literature. The result of this
experience is found in his charming book, Ve-
netian Life, which was published in London
in 1866, and in the volume, Italian Journeys,
published in New York a year later. These
two volumes mark the beginning of the serious
work of Mr. Howells's life. Although only
sketches of the every-day life of modern Italy,
they are yet full of that peculiar quality which
later was to stamp his fiction and give it a high
place in American literature.
120 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Upon his return to America Howells lived
for a short time in New York, and did work
for the Times, the Tribune, and the Nation,
But being offered the assistant editorship of the
Atlantic Monthly, he removed to Boston.
A pleasant summary of his experience as a
resident of Cambridge is found in his book,
Suburban Sketches.
He began his career as a novelist in 1871,
and assumed the editorship of the Atlantic a
year later. Since then his works have suc-
ceeded each other rapidly, his fame growing
steadily from year to year. While busy with
his novels he has found time to produce two
volumes of verse, which include his earlier
poems and those written since. In these po-
ems, many of which show the finest poetic feel-
ing, we have a new view of the successful
novelist. Here may be seen his early suscepti-
bility to natural scenes, as well as the more
emotional side of his character. Some of these
earlier poems are full of that reminiscent charm
in which the hope, the ideality, and the un-
accountable sadness of youth shine out with
WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS 121
tender grace. The later poems also are replete
with that susceptibility to feeling and impres-
sions which can find fit expression only in
verse. All his poetry may, in fact, be said to
be transcriptions of those moods of mind
which come and go like day-dreams, and which
yet show the author's mind in a clearer and
truer light.
Some papers on Italian literature, the con-
duct of the Editor's Study in Harper s Mag-
azine, and other miscellaneous work have run
side by side with the preparation of Mr. How-
ells's novels. Out of the numberless stories
told for the amusement of his children, he has
collected a dozen or so under the title Christ-
mas Every Day and Other Stories, and made
a most charming contribution to juvenile lit-
erature.
Howells's gift above all others is to take
the ordinary occurrences of life and make
them interesting. To him the commonplace
appeals as a very large part of actual life, and
he has found his inspiration in dealing with
mankind at large rather than with unusual per-
122 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
sonalities or incidents. His theory is that
character and experience are the result of
growth, and of that slow growth which is built
moment by moment and day by day. Human
life thus running on from hour to hour pre-
sents to him a picture of the real struggles,
conquests, or defeats of the soul in the com-
mon relations of life, and his long series of
novels are but histories of the battles won or
lost by people whose experiences are never ex-
traordinary but only such as are met by the
larger part of mankind. To him those rarer
idealizations which appeal to the genius of
Hawthorne or Poe are forced out of sight by
the actual contact with the many thousands
who march on monotonously day after day
and yet whose experience sums up the moral
achievements of the race.
This series of novels began with the publica-
tion of Their Wedding Journey in 1871, the
success of which determined Howells's career
as a novelist. This delightful little ending to
an old love story was followed by A Chance
Acquaintance, in which were incorporated some
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 123
charming impressions of Canadian travel.
None of the succeeding works has been cast
in quite so light a vein.
Throughout these character studies, which
now number many volumes, there runs the
earnest seriousness of the man who is in
sympathy with the aspiration, and yet whose
large charity can make him easily tolerate the
defects of mankind.
Sometimes the novel treats of the experience
of an individual and is the history of a com-
mercial success, as in The Rise of Silas Lap-
ham; or of an intellectual struggle, as in The
Ministers Charge ; or of a crime, as in The
Quality of Mercy ; very many of the later
works deal with those social questions which
are now under the consideration of every ear-
nest thinker.
In his A Traveller from Altruria Howells
has treated one of these questions with unspar-
ing hand. It is in these and similar books that
one sees the Americanism of the author and is
made to feel his interest in the highest welfare
of his native land.
124 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Mr. Howells has in The Mouse Trap and
Other Farces given us some delightfully hu-
morous situations treated with all the delicacy
of his art. In his Modern Italian Poets he has
embodied the experience of twenty years' study
of a century of Italian poetry, in a series of es-
says showing remarkable appreciation and in-
sight. Some miscellaneous work in lighter vein
shows still the genial fellowship which Howells
always establishes between himself and his read-
ers. With the exception of the different pe-
riods passed abroad, Mr. Howells has spent his
life since leaving Ohio in Boston and New
York, in which latter city he now lives.
The generous nature of the man is shown in
his wide intercourse with his fellow-men in all
grades of social life. His studies of human
nature reflect always his own point of view,
from which he sees man struggling ever with
difficulties and discouragements, yet pressing
patiently on toward higher levels.
CHAPTER IX
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
1849
In the year 1866, a little girl left her birth-
place in Manchester, England, and came to
America to live. Her new home was in East-
ern Tennessee, and thus her first impressions of
America were connected with great mountain
ridges reaching up to the sky, miles and miles
of unbroken forest, and an unending succes-
sion of wild flowers which decked wood and
stream with ever-changing beauty. These sur-
roundings made the child supremely happy,
for all her life she had longed for great out
of door spaces to breathe in, great trees to play
under, and flowers so plentiful that one could
not count them ; so the new home seemed
enchanting.
Manchester, where her life had been thereto-
fore spent, was one of the great manufacturing
126 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
cities of England, and all day long the smoke
from the tall factory chimneys hung over it and
shut out the sky, while the streets were given
up mainly to the dwellings of the operatives,
or buildings connected with the commercial
life of the place. Here and there, however,
were pleasant little squares and streets, where
the people of the better class lived, and one
of these squares had been the home of the
child, Frances Hodgson, who, until she came
to America, tried very hard to " make be-
lieve ' that the trees in an English square
represented a forest, that the clouds of smoke
were real clouds, and that the rose-bushes,
lilacs, and snowdrops of the garden opened
into vistas of tropical bloom.
Many years after, when this little girl had be-
come a woman and had children of her own, she
wrote a book in which she put many pictures
of this Manchester life; both the real world
and the dream world, in which, like all im-
aginative children, she often wandered. And
here we learn that, as far back as she could
remember, she was given to making up stories
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT I2/
-and, with the assistance of her dolls, acting
them in the privacy of the nursery about
everything that she heard or read, or that in
any way touched her own life.
This naturally led to writing the stones
down as soon as her little fingers could man-
age it, and she seems to have had a very droll
time in trying to procure the paper so neces-
sary for the work. Old exercise, or account
books, which still held a few pages untouched
by butchers' and grocers' accounts, were her
principal resource, and it was in one of these
she inscribed her first poem while she was still
such a little child that even the memory of
what it was about soon passed away from her.
Another poem, written on a Sunday evening
when the family were at church, she remem-
bers better. It was a stormy evening, and she
started out to write a sad poem about loneli-
ness, but her melancholy gave out at the end
of the first stanza, and with childish adapta-
bility she forthwith turned it into a funny
poem. It had enough cleverness to attract
some praise from her mother upon her return
128 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
from church, which so delighted the young
author that it laid a little seed of desire to do
still better things ; it is possible that it was
this very little seed which grew and bloomed
at last into some very beautiful flowers of
literature. At any rate, from this time the
writing of stories went on quite indefatigably ;
whether they won praise or blame the practice
must at least have been useful in developing a
power for sustained effort and a persistence
under difficulties, for outside the lack of paper
there was also the harsh and biting criticism
of two brothers, whose souls were devoted to
cricket and who thought themselves quite ill-
used in having a " romantic " sister.
But in her younger sister, Edith, and in a few
schoolmates, Frances found an audience which
would listen with delight to her tales, whether
written or told, from day to day in the intervals
of lessons. It is probable that these stories
showed little if any literary promise. They were
in the main tales of romantic lovers and sweet-
hearts, who bore a suspicious resemblance to
the heroes and heroines of Scott, Dickens, and
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT 129
the novels published in Blackwood's Mag-
azine ; but their composition made an agree-
able occupation for her active little mind,
and rendered her happy, and this was a great
deal.
After their removal to America, which was
brought about by the desire of the mother to
better the fortunes of her fatherless boys and
girls, Frances continued her story-telling and
story-writing, having still the sympathetic sister
as auditor. And one day when the two girls
were conjuring plans for helping the family
finances it suddenly occurred to the young
author to write a story and submit it for pub-
lication.
But this was a formidable task, for Frances
was absolutely sure that no editor would accept
a story not written on foolscap paper, and this
she neither possessed nor had the means of get-
ting. Where could she obtain the money to
buy this paper ? The sisters pondered and
pondered this difficult problem, and at last they
hit upon a joyful solution. Two little mulatto
girls whom they knew were making money
9
130 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
by gathering and selling the wild grapes which
grew in abundance in the neighboring woods.
Negotiations were entered upon with these
children, who promised to sell also the grapes
which Frances and her sister might gather. In
this way money was obtained for the foolscap
paper, and as that had been the most difficult
part of the business the story was soon dis-
patched to the magazine, with a modest note to
the editor telling him that the author's " object "
was " remuneration."
This venture was not entirely successful, the
editor of the magazine being willing to accept
the story but not to pay for it. Frances there-
fore asked for it back, and having still enough
grape money left to purchase the needed
stamps, she promptly dispatched it to another
editor. The story was a little romance of
English life, some of its scenes having actually
been written while the author still lived in
Manchester, and the new editor had some
doubts as to its originality. He therefore laid
a little trap for the young girl, and wrote to
say he would reserve judgment until he could
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT 13 1
see another story from the same hand. Fran-
ces replied with a new story that was Ameri-
can in character, and this versatility seemed to
convince the editor that he had really discov-
ered a new story-writer ; he sent thirty-five dol-
lars for the two tales, and the girl's life as a fully
fledged author began.
Other stories appeared rapidly during the
next few years, and the reputation thus gained
was greatly increased by the publication in 1872
of Surly Tims Trouble, a dialect story. A
year later the young author married and made
a trip to Europe. Perhaps the home of her
childhood thus revisited brought back early
scenes with new force ; perhaps the memory of
them had always lingered in the impressionable
heart, at any rate the first great success of the
author, now Frances Hodgson Burnett, came
with the publication of That Lass O* Lowries,
a story of Lancashire life. Years before, while
still a little girl " making believe" that her real
world was all that her dream world appeared,
she had noticed, with a child's sharp intuitions,
a certain factory girl who used sometimes to
132 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
wander into the square, and who somehow
seemed different from her companions. Al-
though this girl was never " made into a story '
yet her personality lingered in the child's con-
sciousness, and in later years stepped out from
the land of shadowy memories and became
the Joan Lowrie of the book. She was changed
from a millhand to a collier's daughter, and the
scene was laid in one of the English coal dis-
tricts. It was the love story, pure and sweet,
of this uneducated girl of the mines and the
young overseer, whose position both as regards
birth and education was far above her own.
And it was told with such sympathy, such
directness and force, that it appealed to its
audience as a real story of actual life. The
author had indeed long since ceased to " make
up stories." Her imagination had become in-
stead a magic lamp revealing to her the possi-
bilities and experiences of the lives that touched
her own. Sometimes a little glimpse would
suffice to show her what lay behind, sometimes
two or three scenes would arrange themselves
so vividly as to indicate the whole drama, but
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT 133
always at the bottom of the story could be seen
a foundation of truth.
In That Lass O' Lowries the colliers speak
that Lancashire dialect which Mrs. Burnett had
learned surreptitiously as a child, either by
listening to the factory people as they passed
the gates of the square in which she lived, or
by stolen visits to their homes in the back
streets. The dialect and its idioms had a fasci-
nation for her ; she and some of her little
friends learned it with much greater enthusi-
asm than they devoted to their French, and
when no one was listening they held long con-
versations and talked as the "back street' peo-
ple talked. It was an accomplishment that
served well in after years, and Mrs. Burnett's
power for the picturesque reproduction of
scenes unfamiliar to her readers is no doubt due
in some measure to her self-training of ear and
eye in her old life at Manchester.
Another interesting story of English life is
Hawortlis, in which the hero is one of those
dreamers of dreams, lucky enough to realize his
ambitions. One or two of the characters in
134 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
this book give Mrs. Burnett an opportunity
to indulge in that delightful sense of humor
which lights nearly all her work, and which
shows her keenly alive to the comedy of life.
Perhaps her touch is nowhere more faithful
than in her story of American life, Through
One Administration. And in A Fair Bar-
barian she shows an equal power of pictur-
ing the contrasts of American and English
life.
In her charming juvenile book, Piccino,
Mrs. Burnett tells how Little Lord Fauntle-
roy, her first phenomenally successful child's
book, "grew." It was really a life study
of her own little boy, whose sweet and merry
disposition, thoughtful sayings, and infantile
wisdom made him the delight of the house.
His odd little views of American and Eng-
lish life suggested to her the idea of a story
in which a little American boy should be
brought into contact with aristocratic English
life. How well she succeeded is evinced by
the enormous circulation of the book, which
went through edition after edition, and by its
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT 135
adaptation into one of the most successful
dramas of childhood.
Giovanni and the Others is in itself a col-
lection of beautiful stories of childhood, with
whose dreams and hopes Mrs. Burnett is
always in such loving sympathy.
An ideal child's book is Sara Crewe, the
story of a little orphan girl whose miseries are
turned to joys by fairy fortune. This small
heroine is one of the most fascinating of
the author's productions. She is so real, so
pathetic, so much a simple, ordinary little girl,
perplexed with the troubles that often visit the
young, yet bearing through it all that infinite
child faith in goodness and love.
Little St. Elizabeth, Piccino, and Two Little
Pilgrims Progress are also interpretations of
the child mind. In all her work it is this power
of sympathy which moves her to the highest ef-
forts of her art. In that charming autobiography
of her childhood, The One I Knew the Best
of All, the reader is struck by this note of sym-
pathy which sounds in her earliest recollections.
Whether at play in the garden, or perched upon
136 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
the shelf of the old " secretaire," reading tales
out of Blackwood, or listening to the factory
people in the back streets, or weaving romances
for the amusement of her little friends, the child
was always for the moment intensely alive to
the situations she had created. She lived thus
in many worlds, moved among many scenes
strange to her own experience, and learned
early that one of the best things in life is to
forget one's own self in the experiences of
others.
This power of self-forgetting, this art of wan-
dering through realms of thought unknown to
actual touch, are the chief factors that make
Mrs. Burnett's productions living characters,
whose interests fascinate, and whose fortunes
become for the time our own.
Mrs. Burnett calls Washington her home,
but she also lives much abroad. One great
sorrow of her life was the loss of her son Lio-
nel, the older brother of Little Lord Fauntle-
roy. Perhaps it is this which has touched some
of her work for children with a subtle sadness.
This has found its best expression, however,
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT 137
in the desire to give practical aid to the many
boys whose fortunes have been less fair than
those of her own sons, and who owe much to her
generous sympathy with their need. It is a
pleasant thought that this dark shadow should
have turned into the sunshine which has lighted
many young lives that without it would have
been shadowed too.
CHAPTER X
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
One of the functions of literature is to re-
cord the story of the home life of a nation. In
the United States this life has developed under
very varied conditions, and the stories of East,
West, and South all differ widely from one an-
other. New England society was made up of
different elements from those which composed
that of the Southern plantation or the Western
mining camp ; yet the picture of each com-
munity is interesting and valuable.
Among the most interesting of these stories
of social conditions are those relating to the
South. Here many different pictures are pre-
sented, and American literature has been fortu-
nate in being able to have them transcribed at
first hand.
This has been done by the men and women
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS 139
whose memories go back beyond the war, and
yet who were still young when the South be-
gan that great effort of rebuilding, which has
made its recent history one of such splendid
achievement. These stories of the South be-
fore and immediately after the war could only
have been written by Southerners. Every
word and incident, every scene and finished
picture, is full of that child love which only the
native born can feel ; the same love which sac-
rificed all in the dark days of the war, and
which still cherishes with passionate devotion
the memory of the past.
Under such inspiration the literature of the
new South comes to us full of tender meaning.
Its writers give to us the recollections that are
most sacred to them, and we have in them not
only a picture of Southern life, but a revelation
of the heart. All the broken, childish memo-
ries of plantation songs, folk-lore tales, and
negro superstitions that floated in the mind for
years are here crystallized into form, and make
a record of vital and enduring value.
Much of this literature has been thrown into
140 THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
the form of the short story, and among the most
delightful of these writers is Colonel Richard
Malcolm Johnston, the historian of the " crack-
ers," or poor white people of middle Georgia.
Colonel Johnston was born in Hancock County,
Ga., in 1822. His father was a large planter,
and his earliest years were spent upon the farm.
This life differed in many ways from the usual
life of the plantations. Usually the poor
whites of the South were looked down upon
and despised because of their ignorance, pov-
erty, and shiftlessness. But in the regions of
middle Georgia the conditions were different.
The poor white was still ignorant and shiftless,
he was often lazy, and he was never very suc-
cessful, but in some way he managed to make
himself respected. The life of the planters
here was very simple. Their children played
with those of their poor neighbors and negroes,
and in this happy community of interests young
Richard spent the most impressionable years
of his life. His intimates were the little black
and white children, who, though different in
birth, knew as well as he the secrets of wood
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS 14!
and stream. With them he set traps, fished,
played games, went to mill, and shared his holi-
day joys and presents. When some wandering
master would open a school for a few \veeks in
the neighborhood, Richard would attend hand
in hand \vith the little " crackers." Together
they struggled over reading, writing, and arith-
metic, and when the teacher was surly and un-
just, as often happened, they endured together
his harshness and cruelty.
In this atmosphere the boy learned to know
the fine elements of character that often lay
beneath the rough exterior of his poorer neigh-
bors ; here too he imbibed that sweet and broad
humanity which breathes through all his work
and makes it seem the presentation of a nat-
ure exceptionally noble.
In his series of stories called The Dukes-
borough Tales, Colonel Johnston has described
one of those country temples of learning so
familiar to his childhood. The Goose Pond
School is a memory of one of those ill-condi-
tioned creatures who, under the pretence of
teaching, made miserable the lives of the ten
142 THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
or twenty children committed to their charge.
Happily this specimen of instructor was rare,
even in Colonel Johnston's youth, when cor-
poral punishment was thought so essential to
good discipline. This story, containing so
much tenderness and sympathy, is a revelation
of the heart of the boy who treasured it so
many years. The picture of the little hero
struggling with injustice, disgraced in the sight
of his mates, and yet enduring it all bravely
for the sake of his mother, shines out in the
bright lights which the author loves to throw
upon the character of the humble u cracker."
Another reminiscence of youth is found in
The Early Majority of Mr. Thomas Watts^
the scene of which is laid in Powelton, whither
Colonel Johnston's family had removed. Pow-
elton had an excellent school conducted by a
staff of New England teachers. Boys and
girls sat together and learned the same lessons,
and Richard Malcolm Johnston was one of
the most promising pupils, and began here the
serious study for that ripe scholarship which
he attained. The types of character which
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS 143
abounded in Powelton have passed into litera-
ture, The Dukesborough J^ales being but so
many transcriptions of the different personali-
ties found in this little hamlet of one hundred
and fifty inhabitants. It is evident that the
boy who was studying mathematics and Latin
so diligently, \vho was first on the playground
and the leader of all boyish escapades, was be-
yond this a student of his fellow-beings. The
Dukesborough Tales could only have been
written by one familiar from childhood with
the originals. For beside the art which gives
them a high place in literary composition, they
are full of the flavor of the soil.
From Powelton Johnston went to college,
and after he was graduated studied law. For
ten years he practised in the circuits of north-
ern and middle Georgia, travelling from court
to court, much in the same way that the cir-
cuit preachers of the West discharged their
duties. It was an experience full of charm for
the young lawyer who always found human
nature so interesting. Many funny incidents
relieved the monotony of the law business,
144 THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
while constant companionship with the coun-
try people made a valuable study for their
future historian. The circuit lawyer, like the
circuit rider, has now passed away ; but his
picturesque figure is preserved in the records
of Colonel Johnston's memory, and his like-
ness, traced amid his unique surroundings, has
found a permanent place in our literature.
In 1851, in his thirtieth year, Colonel John-
ston accepted the professorship of belles lettres
in the State University of Maryland. Four
years later he started a boys' school at his
plantation, where he endeavored to put in prac-
tice certain ideas which he held of broader edu-
cation. He was over fifty years old when he
began writing those stories of Georgia life
which have made him one of the leading writers
of the South.
But his whole life had been really an education
for this work. He had had a soldier's training
in the field of fiction the practical experience,
and the hand to hand touch with the life he
described. All his characters are genuine. He
lived with them as boy and man, and he knew
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS 145
their hearts as only such a close compan-
ion could. This absolute fidelity to nature,
combined with the finest artistic perception,
makes of these stories genre pictures of rare
value. They are, moreover, touched by that
homely love which shows the artist native
born.
Almost with the first presentation of this
life Colonel Johnston became famous. His
stories succeeded each other rapidly, and the
several collections of them have an assured
place. The Dukesborough Tales ; Mr. Absa-
lom Billingsbee and Other Georgia Folk;
Two Gray Tourists, and others of the series
alike illustrate the author's happy gift for
producing unique and picturesque character
studies.
Besides his work in fiction, Colonel John-
ston has written, in conjunction with a friend,
a history of English literature ; he is also the
author of a life of Alexander Stephens, a biog-
raphy of great value. His genial personality
pervades all his work, and makes the kindly
humor, the generous heartiness, and the exqui-
IO
146 THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
site sympathy but a reflection of his own rare
nature.
Among the children who walked the streets
of New Orleans immediately after the war,
and noted the changes that were rapidly trans-
forming the old city, was one bright-eyed girl
who was destined to become one of its most
interesting historians. Born of mixed Irish
and Southern blood, she had inherited from
both races the qualities that go to make up
the story-teller. The everyday, yet constantly
changing scenes of her childhood were pict-
uresque and wonderfully interesting, for New
Orleans, above all others, was the city of con-
trasts.
In the French quarters still dwelt the aris-
tocratic Creole families, descendants of the
original settlers, who had retained for genera-
tions the traditions of the French race. In
the business portion could be seen the typical
Irish and Yankee face mingling with the
Southern American. Along the wharves and
in the market the Italian emigrants vended
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS 147
their wares, and everywhere swarmed the
negro, the birthright of the old city, since the
beginning of slavery.
Long after the girl had reached woman-
hood, the recollections of home and street and
school still remained vivid, and ever more and
more they began to weave stones in her mind.
At first she was hardly conscious of this, it
seemed so much like the old pictures of her
childhood which had come and gone at will ;
but by and by the characters in the stories be-
gan to say and do things quite independently,
as if they were real people, and at last, because
they seemed to insist upon it, they were written
down.
They were none of them exactly true stories,
being nearly all made up of different scenes
fitted in together, but they were exact pictures
of the life of New Orleans as the author had
seen it, and in this they had a value all their
own.
Lying close beside these impressions were
others of maturer years, spent in the country
districts of Arkansas, among those village types
148 THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
which are as curious and interesting in their
way as the typical New England villagers.
And presently, these unique personalities
stepped out from the shadowy fields of mem-
ory, and also began weaving stories about
themselves. As in the case of the others,
they were not exactly true stories, yet they
were all things that actually happened, or
might have happened, in the lives of the Ar-
kansas country folk, and they verified the old
adage that no life can really be, or seem to be,
humdrum, if but the proper observer appears
to record it.
It was inevitable that these stories should
also be written do\vn, and gradually they
began to appear in the different periodicals.
They were well liked, and by the time they
had grown into bulk for a volume, their au-
thor, Mrs. Ruth McEnery Stuart, had won a
name as one of the most interesting local his-
torians of the South.
The stories which deal with the street
scenes of New Orleans and with old plan-
tation life are full of color and picturesque
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS 149
effect, and they are all vividly true to
life.
Whether Mrs. Stuart is describing an Ital-
ian fruit vender's booth, as in Camelia Riccardo,
or the little bare hut of an old negro, as in
Duke s Christmas, each touch is faithful to the
life ; there is, moreover, in the tales of negro
life that same subtle blending of humor and
pathos which characterizes the race itself, and
makes of the little sketches genuine life history.
A Golden Wedding, a story of a man and
his wife who were separated before the war
and only re-united in old age, is one of those
pathetic memories of slavery transcribed with
a loving sympathy which wins the heart, while
the author is equally ready to enter into a rela-
tion of the violent flirtations of the Widder
Johnsing or the desperate courtship vijessekiah
Brown. Not the least valuable thing about
these stories is their reminiscent suggestion of
many phases of negro life that must inevitably
soon pass away. The bits of local color, the
poetic yet crude imagination, the careless jollity
and the childlike abandon of spirits all belong
150 THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
to the negro as he was before the war, when
he was an irresponsible, fun-loving, yet often
pathetic figure. With responsibility, educa-
tion, and the dignity of freedom, the old life
must at last pass, and it has been a task full
of rich result to thus preserve the old planta-
tion traditions of this picturesque race.
In her delineations of Arkansas country life
Mrs. Stuart is equally happy. Perhaps she
reaches the highest point in her work in The
Woman s Exchange of Simpkinsville, wherein
is told with tender reverence the story of a
man who devoted his life to science, never
dreamed of fame, who died unknown, and yet
who left behind him a finished work so beau-
tiful in scope that it placed his name high in
the list of those who labor for the world's good.
Bud Zundfs Mail, and Christmas Geese must
also be reckoned among the best of these stories
of Arkansas life.
In her stories of negro life Mrs. Stuart's work
has a distinctive note not found in that of any
other Southern writer. The picture is always
taken from the negro's point of view, and thus
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
reflects many interesting side lights. The pathos
and humor, tragedy and childlike lighthearted-
ness are always presented in natural proportions
in these sketches of the experiences of the
race whose history has been so unique, and
shining through them all is ever seen that sub-
tle sympathy with the situation which is the
mark of the Southern blood. The chronicler is
always the foster child of the cabin who brings
her gift of art and lays it with loving grace
into the black hands whose tender ministry
formed her earliest recollection.
Mrs. Stuart's third book, Babette, is the
story of a little Creole girl who was stolen
from her parents and who grew to womanhood
before she was restored to her family. This
little story contains many charming features
necessarily absent from Mrs. Stuart's other
work. The description of the Mardi Gras,
and of the miserable Italian settlement where
Babette lived with the old woman who stole
her, the little pictures of Creole family life, and
the local setting, are all vivid reproductions
of the scenes familiar to the New Orleans of
152 THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
the author's youth. Of less artistic value than
the other work, the romance of Babette is yet
warm with the colors of youth, pluck, and fine
ambition.
Among her other juvenile \vork, Solomon
Crows Christmas Pocket, a Christmas tale
with a picturesque little negro for the hero, will
always hold a high place. Lady Quackelina,
the history of a duck whose eggs were ex-
changed, and who, to her great consternation,
hatched out twenty small guineas, is another of
this author's happy conceits.
Quackelina had the good fortune, however,
to have her legitimate children restored to her,
as they were wandering away from their foster-
mother, the guinea-hen. The little odd turns
of thought peculiar to ducks and guinea-hens
are here translated by Mrs. Stuart with the
felicity that shows her facile talent at its best.
The Two Tims, another Christmas story, is
full of that subtle pathos which clings to all
her studies of negro character. Old Tim, the
grandfather, is rich in the possession of a banjo
that was " born white " and had been played on
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS 153
with " note music' by its former master. The
relation of how old Tim came to share this
priceless treasure with young Tim makes up
the story, which is one of the sweetest and
tenderest to be found in the author's work.
Other stories of children, some miscellaneous
matter that has appeared in periodicals, and
several delicate, beautiful studies of Arkansas
folk-life, comprise the rest of Mrs. Stuart's con-
tribution to literature, while her pen is still
busy with the preparation of other work.
No one can tell just when that delightful
relative, Brer Rabbit, entered upon the career
which has made him famous. It is more than
probable that under different aliases he figured
in the household life of nations so old that they
might be styled the great-great or even fairy
grandmothers of the American Union. Of this
we are not quite sure. But we know that the
African, to whose simple mind the whole ani-
mal creation seemed big and little brothers,
guarded Brer Rabbit's claims with loving fidel-
ity. They enshrined his deeds in their unwrit-
154 THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
ten history, and when the days of slavery began
they brought him with them across the sea and
gave him a place of honor in their humble
cabins. Here for generations the story of his
adventures delighted the children of the South,
and we can never be sufficiently grateful to
Joel Chandler Harris for giving it literary form.
This prince of biographers learned the story
of his hero from the lips of the old colored
uncles and mammies who were the historians
of the plantation. Learned scholars have since
that time tried to find the sources of this curi-
ous history, but they have not been very suc-
cessful. They only know that through the
changes of centuries, during which time the
African lost his nationality and language, he
has kept these legends and superstitions in his
heart.
These folk-lore tales which thus cling to the
mind of a race are as much a part of it as its
physical characteristics ; they are often the
only records of its early history, and as they
drift down the stream of time they become
valuable mementoes of the far-off days of
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS 155
a people's beginning. The American slave
guarded the legend which was still cherished
by his brother in Africa, but the memory of
its meaning had long since faded from his
mind. But Mr. Harris, by collecting these
stories, has still done valuable work for the
scholar, while to literature he has added new
treasures.
Joel Chandler Harris, like Colonel John-
ston, is a native of Georgia. He was born at
Eatonton in 1 848, and as a very young child
he confesses to a desperate ambition to write
something that might appear in print. This
innocent desire he expressed so freely that his
fellow-townspeople could not help becoming
interested in its fulfilment. A boy who
wished to write was a phenomenon in Eaton-
ton, where the juvenile mind inclined to less
ambitious pleasures, and young Harris was
looked at by his associates very much as they
would have regarded an Arctic traveller, or a
visitor from Japan. Still he was a genuine
boy, and outside of his inclination toward litera-
ture, his companions had no cause to distrust
1 56 THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
the ambition which was as distinctly toward
fun as they could desire. Harris was the
leader in boyish escapades and adventures, and
none the less a true leader because his mind
sometimes took flights far beyond the horizon
of daily life.
His wish to write was fostered by a little
incident which thrilled his soul with delight
A " real editor," who had learned somehow of
the boy's aspirations, gravely presented him
one day with a copy of his paper. Harris felt
as if he had received his commission, and what
romance of the future he wove around this
trifling circumstance only the imagination
of boyhood can understand.
When he was fourteen life seemed to shape
itself toward the attainment of his desire. A
paper called The Coimtryman was started on
the Turner plantation, near his home, and an
apprentice to learn printing was desired.
Harris saw the advertisement, and flew to
the office, where his eagerness and his un-
qualified promise to devote himself to the
work secured him the engagement.
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS 157
Now began an ideal existence for the boy,
who by this time had grown into a student.
Books were rare in the Harris home, but at
the Turner plantation there was a valuable pri-
vate library, and to this the young apprentice
had free access. He read like one who was
reading for a prize ; and in this flight into
the intellectual world it seemed that his spirit
was finding its true element. His childish
ambition to write something for print now
appeared to him to have a meaning ; it was
with joy that he applied himself to the practi-
cal details of his work, feeling it a means to a
higher end.
The printing office was in the woods, where
came many uninvited visitors with tempting
offers of recreation. Blue jays swung in the
trees and scoffed at work ; woodpeckers ham-
mered upon the roof ; squirrels played upon
the w T indow-sill and pretended that the gather-
ing of winter stores was no part of their exist-
ence. What boy could withstand such temp-
tations ? Harris could not. He was in the
main a faithful apprentice, but many an hour
158 THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
was spent in the wood haunts of these wild
children of the forest. Here he learned wood
lore and became skilled in the interpretation
of bird song and squirrel chatter ; here it
seems he must have become familiar with
those fascinating, human-like traits of animal
character which he has transcribed so faith-
fully in his work.
This shows that he was a student of other
things than books, and presently his mind took
another and still wider outlook. He associated
much with the country people who lived in the
neighborhood, and very often accompanied
them in fishing trips and hunting expeditions
to the mountains. Without knowing it he
now became a student of human nature, and
thus gained the knowledge that could best fit
him for a literary career. The picturesque side
of this life appealed to him as well as the
deeper meaning which lay beneath its com-
monplace ambitions and struggles ; no phase
of it seemed uninteresting, and the insight and
experience so acquired became potent factors
in his education. Study from books still went
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS 159
on ; by the light of his knot-wood fire he
spent long hours over history, biography, and
poetry. The widest knowledge forms the best
training for the specialist, and unconsciously
Harris was receiving that liberal education
which makes his Uncle Remits Stories such
minute and faithful revelations of animal char-
acter that it seems Brer Rabbit himself must
have been the scribe.
The war put an end to this happy existence.
The Turner plantation lay along the route of
Sherman's march to the sea, and the printing-
office went out of existence. Harris, however,
kept firm hold of his purpose, and almost im-
mediately after the close of the war entered the
office of the Savannah News as associate edi-
tor. He had determined to devote himself to
newspaper work, and for this he trained himself
as thoroughly as opportunity offered. It was
characteristic of his mind that his chosen call-
ing should seem an end in itself and not merely
an introduction to the literary life. His editor-
ial work was from the beginning conscientious
and scholarly. It was the outcome of a brain
l6o THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
which saw clearly the accomplishment that
might lie in this field, and from first to last it
thrills with the fine purpose and masterful en-
ergy of the ideal newspaper editor.
After he had become editor of the Atlanta
Constitution, Harris conceived one day the
idea of transcribing one or two of those folk-
lore stories which he had heard so frequently
from the lips of the negroes. The result took
the form of the first two of the Uncle Remus
Stories, and as an experiment he printed them
in his paper. The reception they met sur-
prised him. Uncle Remus seemed at once to
step into the place which the ages had pre-
pared for him. His chronicle, like other long-
neglected fragments of old-world lore, had
been drawn at last into the great stream of
literature, and had become history. Scholars
recognized the value of this new gift to folk-
lore literature, and welcomed each succeeding
story with delight, while the popular taste
made of Uncle Remus a favorite hero.
By the time the stories had grown into a
volume, critic and laymen alike appreciated
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS l6l
the debt that American literature owes the
South for the preservation of these charming
legends. Mr. Harris's gift as a writer has
made of these stones almost perfect pieces of
art. The skill with which he effaces himself,
and makes Uncle Remus the real narrator is
marvellous. This old time, consequential, but
delightful product of plantation life, dominates
the series, and relates the adventures of Brer
Rabbit with all the respect of the genuine
historian for a favorite character. Interwoven
with the legends are those innumerable reflec-
tions of the negro character which show their
jollity and homely wisdom in the most charm-
ing light. We might have learned from some
other source why the guinea - fowls are
speckled, but only Uncle Remus himself
could have woven into the narrative those
threads of shining recollection which show the
very warp and woof of the author's brain.
Brother Foxs Fish Trap ; The Moon in the
Mill Pond ; and Why Mr. Possum Loves
Peace, are other expressions of the African's
appreciation of the animal cunning which he
l62 THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
himself largely possesses. Equally full of the
personal element is the delightful Story of the
Little Rabbits, an irresistible appeal to the
child-mind, which sees in all young things a
likeness to itself. Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Bear,
and How Brer Rabbit Found His Match at
Last, are among the most fascinating advent-
ures of our hero, who retains his place in the
reader's heart even though overmastered by
cunning greater than his own.
These stones have all now been successfully
produced in book form. Mr. Harris consid-
ered their preparation as incidental, and em-
phatically pronounces his work to be that of
journalism. But he has created an artistic suc-
cess that our literature could not well spare.
The personal history of F. Hopkinson
Smith, one of the most popular of Southern
writers, is the story of pluck. Long before
he ever thought of writing he had laid his life
o o
out on other lines, and had wrested success
out of many disheartenments. Mr. Smith
says that the secret of his success in painting,
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS 163
writing, and civil engineering, is the result of
the severe application of his motto work,
work, work, and that indomitable persever-
ance has alone made accomplishment possible.
He was born in Baltimore, in 1838, of an
old Virginia family, and his early years were
spent in that atmosphere of refinement and
good living which obtained in the Southern
home. He was an active boy, fond of fun,
and a leader in the amusements which cheered
the open-hearted hospitality of the family life.
The old-fashioned house was dominated by
the spirit of his mother, a remarkable woman,
to whom everybody turned for advice, and
who was called " the oracle ' by relatives and
friends alike. The mother and son were com-
panions and comrades, in the fine sense of the
word. To her he turned for sympathy in his
boyish interests, and it was her beneficent in-
fluence which shaped the ambitions of his man-
hood. He took lessons in drawing from an
old artist, giving up his Saturday holidays to
learning the secrets of the art he loved so well.
Drawing, reading, and study, however, all gave
164 THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
place occasionally to pure fun, when he would
play practical jokes upon the old-time watch-
men who had charge of the Baltimore streets,
or lead his companions in the mischievous
escapades which originated in his own fertile
brain.
Hopkinson was prepared for Princeton Col-
lege by the time he was sixteen, but a change
in the family fortunes made it necessary for
him to abandon a college career and he entered
a hardware store as a shipping clerk, at a salary
of one dollar a week. After various experi-
ences in business life Mr. Smith became a con-
tractor, and furnished material for the con-
struction of government buildings along the
coast. And not very long after he became a
civil engineer. Mr. Smith did not take a
course at any school of technology to fit him
for his new duties. His art was entirely self-
taught, but he had a background of practical
experience that made invaluable training.
His first work in his new profession was to
build a stone ice-breaker around the light-house
at Bridgeport, Conn. Since then Mr. Smith
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS 165
has built light - houses, sea-walls, life-saving
stations, and other government coast buildings,
his field of work ranging from end to end of
the Atlantic seaboard. The work of which he
is most proud is the Race Rock Light-house
off New London. He was six years in build-
ing this light-house, the situation being so diffi-
cult to conquer that more than once it seemed
that it must be abandoned. The foundation
had to be laid far beneath the waves, and often
storm and sea combined to undo the patient
efforts of months. Mr. Smith almost lived on
the rock with his men, and when a terrific
storm would arise and the structure was in
danger he only became more resolute, though
he knew the work of a whole year might be
swept away in a single night. He says that
the Race Rock Light-house made him ; out of
this effort had come a faith in the power of
persistent effort which nothing could ever ef-
face. One of Mr. Smith's most interesting
pieces of engineering, was the laying of the
foundation of the statue of Liberty enlighten-
ing the world in New York Harbor,
l66 THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
During these busy years of active, practical
out-of-door life Mr. Smith was busy at spare
moments with pencil and brush. Gradually
he won for himself a reputation for his water-
color drawings, and for fifteen years he spent
every August in the White Mountains study-
ing from nature. Travel in the West Indies,
Mexico, and Europe, completed his education
for the life of the artist. Of late years he has
spent nearly every summer in Venice, whose
picturesque beauty he has reproduced over and
over again with faithful touch.
His literary life is an outgrowth of his work
as an artist. During the publication of a re-
production in book form of a series of his
water-color drawings the publisher wrote and
asked Mr. Smith if he could not supply some
brief descriptions of the points illustrated.
In compliance with this request the artist wrote
the sketch The CJmrch of San Pablo ; which
formed the initial number of the series of in-
teresting sketches published under the title
Well-worn Roads, the author's first book.
During the ten years following its appearance,
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS 167
Mr. Smith has won an honest fame for artistic
literary production. Much of his work has
been descriptive of the places which he has vis-
ited, but in the domain of fiction he has also
been a successful adventurer. True to the in-
stinct of the Southern writer, Mr. Smith has
given us as his masterpiece one of those rare
pictures which illustrate life in the South.
From memory and experience he gathered the
elements which made up the character of a
Southern gentleman of the old school, and pre-
sented, in Colonel Carter of Carter sville, a pict-
ure so faithful that it is worthy of rank as a
family portrait. The motive of the story re-
volves around the continual difficulties which
beset the old gentleman because he cannot re-
member that what is bought must be paid for.
The book abounds in graceful and humorous
situations, and the character of Colonel Carter,
always honorable and high minded, shines
luminous to the end. The success of the book
led to its dramatization ; and its success as a
piece of artistic light comedy has abundantly
illustrated its dramatic possibilities.
1 68 THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
Mr. Smith has not, however, confined him-
self to the representation of Southern life.
Tom Grogan, next to Colonel Carter, his most
important work, is a spirited and valuable piece
of portraiture, whose original was found among
the force employed in building the sea-wall
around Governor's Island. Here, among his
gang of laborers, the author found the cheer-
ful, capable Irishwoman who is the heroine of
the book. The story is full of the sympathy
with human nature which Mr. Smith's expe-
rience as a leader and director of other men's
actions has so largely developed.
Like Joel Chandler Harris, Mr. Smith con'
siders his literary career as almost incidental
He says that he is a civil engineer, who is
lucky enough to find time to devote to litera-
ture and painting. But the character of his
work shows the temper of the true artist, who
serves art for its own sake, and who is willing to
bring to the service his most earnest devotion.
No part of the South shows more interest-
ing social conditions than the region of the
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS 169
Tennessee Mountains. Here, where for so
many years the settlers were remote from the
rest of the world, they developed tastes and in-
terests widely different from those of Southern
city and plantation life.
The daily life of these people was simple in
the extreme. While the East was building
great manufacturing and commercial interests,
the South developing the luxurious life of the
plantation, and the West pouring its resistless
energy into the mining of gold and silver, the
dwellers of the Tennessee Mountains still kept
to the primitive habits of early frontier life.
The men hunted, fished, and tilled the soil only
as strict necessity required. The women wove
and spun, the mothers and daughters perform-
ing all the household duties. The girls were
taught only the simplest home tasks, while
each boy was trained into such a knowledge
of wood lore, hunting, and shooting as would
have delighted the heart of Daniel Boone.
The life in the main was that of a commu-
nity whose interests are one. No one was rich,
yet in these little homes, barely furnished and
I/O THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
unattractive, no one thought himself poor.
Hospitality abounded, and each gave to the
other's need with a generosity that knew no
touch of either patronage or shame.
But however simple it may be, the life of
every people is full of events which make up
home histories and heart histories ; there came a
day when the Tennessee Mountains found their
chronicler, and as seemed most right, the chron-
icle was written by one who was mountain born.
This was Mary Noailles Murfree, who was
born at Grantlands, the family home near Mur-
freesboro, named after her ancestor, Colonel
Murfree, of Revolutionary fame. Miss Mur-
free made her studies of Tennessee life from
nature. Her childhood was spent among the
people whose humble lives she describes with
the loving fidelity of a native historian. Though
well-born and tenderly reared, her heart, edu-
cated by contact with these mountaineers, re-
sponded generously to their unaffected worth.
She saw that here survived a race which still
held many traditions of the young days of
the republic, when communities were welded
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS 1 71
together by common interests, and where sim-
plicity of living very often bred largeness of
nature.
Under the often uncouth exterior of these
men and women she found the most generous
hospitality, the delicacy of sincere good fellow-
ship, and the inborn self-respect that made the
mountaineers genuine lords of the soil. She
saw, too, the finer graces that lay like bloom
upon these rough lives. In her lovely sketch
of girlhood The Star in the Valley one
sees the flower-like innocence and charm of
the young heroine shining out amid her sordid
surroundings, while her story of self-sacrifice
appeals to the heart.
Again and again this note of human sym-
pathy, sweet as a wild bird's song, and with as
legitimate a place in the great harmonies of
life, thrills through these vivid transcriptions.
Sketch after sketch presented itself to the
author's mind, was written down and pub-
lished, and in 1884, a volume of the stories
appeared under the title, In the Tennessee
Mountains.
1/2 THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
Miss Murfree's work appeared from the
beginning under the pseudonym, Charles Eg-
bert Craddock, and she had won fame long
before her personality was discovered. All
her stones, now numbering several volumes,
have been published under her pen name.
The titles of the books- -Where the Battle
was Fought ; Down the Ravine ; The Proph-
et of the Great Smoky Mountains ; In the
Cloiids ; The Story of Keedon Bluffs ; The
Despot of Bloomsedge Cove; and His Fallen
Star, all show their local setting, and are in-
teresting as being stones of the home life of a
people still in the primitive stage of its exist-
ence. The Tennessee mountaineer will lose
his individuality with the advancing tide of
modern social life ; but his unique personality
will be preserved by Miss Murfree's art, and
will furnish one more picturesque element in
the history of American life.
During the Civil War the Army of North-
ern Virginia was encamped for t\vo winters
not very far from the home of Thomas
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS 1/3
Nelson Page, then a boy of eight years. On
either side the plantation ran the two prin-
cipal roads leading to Richmond, and it
was known throughout the country-side that
the army under Grant would probably pass
that way when on its road to the Southern
capital.
Much of the storm and stress of the actual
struggle went on in this region, and the younger
generation received an impression of the war
only possible to eye-witnesses. Thomas Nel-
son Page was born of an old Virginia family
which had been distinguished since colonial
days. His great-grandfather on his father's
side had been the friend of Thomas Jefferson
and one of the leading patriots of the Revolu-
tion, while from his mother he was descended
from General Thomas Nelson, one of the
signers of the Declaration of Independence.
The boy's own father was a major in the army
of General Lee. As in many other Southern
homes of the day, nearly every incident of life
on the Page domain centred in some way
around the war. The children knew little else
174 THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
besides the talk of battle and campaign, and
they were so young that their memories hard-
ly went back beyond the dark days in \vhose
shadow they were living.
Young Page received thus in childhood those
impressions which sank so indelibly in his
mind that when revived in after-years they were
still fresh and vivid. He knew all the discom-
fort that beset a neighborhood over which ar-
mies marched backward and forward, and he
shared in the excitement which filled every
heart when the news of Grant's advance \vas
alternately reported and denied. Much of the
actual horrors of war were also known by the
boy, who became familiar with stories of defeat,
of prison life, and of death, long before the age
when children more happily placed learn of
these things. These stories, told by fugitives,
flying from the Northern Army, by soldiers
home on furlough, or wounded and dying far
from home, found their way to his ears and be-
came a part of his life. It was natural that
when he had become a man the memory of
those childish days should prompt him to write
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS 1 75
down some of the experiences which still lin-
gered in his recollection.
His first published story, Marse Chan, was
written after reading a letter which had been
taken from the pocket of a dead Confederate
soldier. This letter, which was from the
soldier's sweetheart, expressed one of those
touching incidents furnished by the war, and
which Mr. Page used to such good effect that
the story is considered by some the best piece
of fiction born of the struggle.
The success of this story upon its appear-
ance in the Century Magazine made its author
famous. He received letters from all over the
United States and from many places in Europe
congratulating him upon the pathetic and faith-
ful picture he had drawn.
In this story the author struck a note which
vibrated with the tumult of the actual struggle
between North and South during the Civil
War. Marse Chan is the hero of the humble
negro who is made his chronicler, and the tale
is told with all the passion of hopeless sorrow.
In this story Mr. Page deviated somewhat
176 THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
from the custom of other Southern writers.
Their work mainly lay with the conditions pre-
ceding or following the war. But the author
of Marse Chan, following the lines of his first
story, has very largely chronicled the heart-
history of the war itself. When, as in the case
of Marse Chan and Meh Lady, the story is
told by some faithful, devoted slave, the effect
is indescribably pathetic. All the bitter feeling
that raged between the two sections seems to
fade away in the presence of a love so loyal and
so unselfish.
Marse Chan was followed by other stories
of equal interest, the series being embodied in
book -form in 1887 and entitled In Old Vir-
ginia.
The next year appeared that charming lit-
tle juvenile, Two Little Confederates, a story
of pluck, adventure, and boyish heroism, for
which the events of the war served as a back-
ground, and into which were woven many
vivid pictures of the life of the period.
A series of essays The Old South still fur-
ther vindicated Mr. Page's claim to recognition.
THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
These essays, treating an old subject from a new
point of view, are full of that delightful color
which tinges all the author's work. They are,
moreover, examples of admirable workman-
ship, showing an artistic perception and a mas-
tery of form.
On New Found River, Pastime Stories, to-
gether with other material not collected in
book-form, have, with their appearance, won
still higher fame for their author.
Since the publication of his first volume,
Fhtte and Violin, in 1891, James Lane Allen,
the historian of the blue-grass country, has con-
tinued to present, one after another, charming
pictures of his native State.
Fhite and Violin is a story of the early days of
Kentucky, when the " dark and bloody ground "
was one of the outposts of American civiliza-
tion. This little tale of two native musicians,
one an old parson and the other a lame boy,
shines with a tender light across the background
of bloodshed and ruin which darkened the early
annals of frontier life. Equally sweet and true
12
1/8 THE SOUTHERN STORY WRITERS
to the finer sides of life are the stories of Sister
Dolorosa and the White Cowl, published in
the same volume. In A Kentucky Cardinal
and In Arcadia Mr. Allen has transcribed his
love for nature into two pretty romances, he
being a naturalist in the same degree that he
is a novelist. His descriptions of Kentucky
wild flowers, birds, fields, and roads are so true
to nature that they might be inserted in treat-
ises on natural science.
The literary world of to-day knows no voice
truer and sweeter than that of this poet of his
native fields and woods.
Among Southern writers in other fields Miss
Grace King, Miss Sarah Eliott, Miss Molly
Elliot Seawell, and others, following the lines
of Southern thought, have presented its social
life from many points of view. Thus expressed
by the able and sympathetic artists, Southern
fiction forms one of the most interesting move-
ments of American literature.
CHAPTER XI
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
18331888
Louisa May Alcott, though born in German-
town, Pa., was by inheritance a child of New
England, of which her father and mother were
both natives. At the time of her birth her
father had charge of a school, which, two years
later, he gave up and returned to Boston, re-
moving in turn to Concord when Louisa was
eight years of age.
All the world has read in Little Women the
chronicle of that happy childhood passed in
the shadow of the Concord elms ; and the
experiences of the sisters Beth, Meg, Amy,
and Jo, have won a place in American lit-
erature which the child-heart will never will-
ingly let go. Undoubtedly the liveliest and
brightest of the merry group of girls was
Louisa herself, whose wit made stock out of
180 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
household calamities, and whose ambition made
defeat but an incentive to fresh endeavor.
Two generations of children have now thrilled
with delight over the recitals which have made
that home-history, a great part of which is
autobiographical, one of the most sympathetic
revelations of childhood ever given to the
world. For above and beyond the tale of
merry adventure or mad escapade, there
thrills that reminiscent quality to which the
heart of childhood ever responds. Jo toiling
from cellar to garret in her childish yet serious
masquerade of Pilgrim's Progress, or Beth per-
plexed with tender pity over the mystery
of death, are alike typical of the genuine
thoughts of the child, and the youthful reader
is often living over his own experiences when
perusing this fascinating record. This unique
charm, which is necessarily absent in great
works of imagination, will no doubt give the
story of Louisa Alcott's early days a permanent
place in literature, as it has already accorded it
a fame which rivals the classic renown of Rob-
inson Crusoe and Robin Hood.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT iSl
The happy life of the Alcott girls at Con-
cord was shared by the children of Emerson,
Hawthorne, Channing, and other prominent
men of letters whose homes were then in
that quiet village. Mr. Alcott was his chil-
dren's teacher, and very often he was their most
genial play-fellow. Their mother, a woman of
noble nature and rare force of character, was
their tender friend as well as their loving ad-
viser. All the children kept diaries, and in
Louisa's is recorded many of her struggles with
a rather tempestuous nature, and many earnest
resolves to be a " good child." Scattered here
and there through the pages of the diary are
found little notes from her mother, commend-
ing some special act of obedience or self-re-
straint, praises dear to the child's heart, whose
highest ambition was to be dutiful.
To the Alcott children, books of course
were familiar. Before she could read, Louisa
played with books, building houses of histories
and bridges of dictionaries. Even then she
was possessed with a desire to write, and in-
scribed strange characters in the blank pages
1 82 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
of Plutarch and Bacon. When the time for
lessons and reading actually began, the chil-
dren all became omnivorous readers, Louisa
devouring novels, histories, poetry, and fairy
stories with unappeasable appetite.
Being a New England child she was also
taught to sew, becoming so skilful in this ac-
complishment that she set up a doll's dress-
making establishment, which became famous
for its select styles, and was patronized by all
the children in the neighborhood.
The Concord house had a large garden and
barn attached, both of which were a delight to
the children. In the garden their father gave
them practical lessons in botany and in the
study of nature, and in the barn they held
meetings, discussed books, and acted plays.
Once they found a little robin lying cold and
starved on the garden-walk. They warmed and
fed the pretty thing, and Louisa, full of tender
pity, celebrated the event in her first poem,
The Robin. The verses pleased her mother,
whose praise was very sweet to the eight-year-
old child. From this time she frequently w*- -te
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT 183
verses inspired by the circumstances of her
childish life. Her prose efforts were always
more ambitious ; dramas and tales of heroic
adventure were the only things thought worthy
her pen, and the plays were undoubtedly a
success. They were acted in the barn, and for
the time being the real Cinderella walked be-
fore the eyes of the audience, and the brave
prince truly waked the Sleeping Beauty with
a kiss.
By the time she was eleven years old Louisa,
though so famous among the children of her
set as an author of lively plays, was stor-
ing her mind with good literature. She read
Plutarch's lives and Scott's novels, Goldsmith,
the life of Martin Luther, and the English
poets outside the daily lessons, and the daily
household tasks, for the Alcotts were poor, and
the girls had each her special work.
Between eleven and fifteen Louisa passed
the years at Fruitlands, a little settlement that
Mr. Alcott had founded near Concord. It
was during this time that the children learned
that in the coming years their mother must
1 84 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
look to them for help in the support of the
family, and bravely they set themselves to the
task. Louisa in particular was inspired by a
passion to be her mother's helper. Her whole
soul was devoted to this object, and every
scheme which presented itself to her mind had
this end in view. For herself she cared as lit-
tle as it was possible. One only little wish and
ambition did she have, and that was to possess
a little room of her very own where she might
retire and " think her thoughts' without inter-
ruption, and do such work as came to her.
In one of those sweet correspondences which
the old diary has preserved she confessed this
desire to her mother. In an answering note
we learn that the overworked and overworried
mother found time and means somehow to ac-
complish this desire, and the little room, with
work-basket and desk by the window, and a
door that opened into the garden, made glad
the heart of the unselfish child. About this
time Emerson presented her with Goethe's
Correspondence with a Child, a book that
fired her imagination and introduced what she
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT 185
has termed the " romantic period " of her youth.
She was fifteen, and it suddenly occurred to
her that it would be an interesting thing to
have such a friendship with Emerson as existed
between Goethe and the child Bettina. She
took to writing letters, which, however, were
never sent ; she wandered around by moonlight,
and sat at midnight under the trees looking at
the stars. Presently, however, her New Eng-
land common-sense came to the rescue. She
realized that her poetry was nonsense, and that
she, in fact, had been very silly to try and wor-
ship as a romantic hero one whose friendship
had from earliest years led her soul into noble
paths.
When Louisa was eighteen her serious ambi-
tion was to write plays and become a success-
ful actress. Her sisters had entire confidence
in her ability to do both, and much labor was
spent over the production and enacting of
lurid dramas. It was a great event when the
manager of a Boston theatre actually consented
to bring out one of these plays, called 7/$l
Rival Prima Donnas, although from some mis-
1 86 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
take of the management it was never produced.
Later, a farce called Nat Bachelor s Pleasure
Trip was produced at the Howard Athenaeum
and was fairly approved by the public and
press.
During these early days of playwriting the
Alcott girls were striving in every way to share
the burden of the family expenses. Louisa
sewed, taught, and wrote, but none of these
things paid very well. The family poverty
was a real and very distressing fact, and no
way seemed to open toward a successful fight
against it.
By the time she was twenty-two, however,
Louisa had decided that her talent lay in the
way of authorship. She at that time published
her first book, a little volume of tales that she
had written for Emerson's daughter Ellen, and
which came out under the title, Floiver Fables.
This book contained some pretty fancies and
showed some talent, but it is now only valua-
ble as marking the beginning of a successful
career.
Many short stories and poems had by this
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT 1 87
time found their way to different papers and
periodicals, and for the next seven years her
pen was busy, though the remuneration she re-
ceived was not entirely gratifying.
But the pleasure which this success brought
was saddened by the fatal illness of " Beth,"
Louisa's favorite sister. After two years' suf-
fering " Beth's" gentle spirit slipped away,
leaving a place forever desolate in "Jo's" faith-
ful heart. The old, revered friends, Emerson
and Thoreau, helped to carry the little, worn-
out body to its last resting-place in Sleepy
Hollow, and Louisa wrote in her diary that she
knew what death meant.
In 1 86 1 Miss Alcott published her novel
Moods, the most ambitious work she had yet
attempted, and one on which she placed many
fond hopes. But although Moods represented
all the ideality and poetry of life as it then
appeared to the young author, it was not a
great success. She had toiled faithfully over
its composition, and had wrought into it many
of her own girlish dreams, but the heroine was
not real, and many of the situations were artifi-
1 88 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
cial. The defect lay in the author's own gift,
which did not reach out to work of a purely
imaginative character.
Miss Alcott was bitterly disappointed over
the meagre success of Moods, which she attrib-
uted to the many changes she had made in it,
through the advice of the different publishers
who had rejected it. In spite of the fame that
her other books brought, Moods always held a
warm place in her heart. Her true work for
literature was indicated by an experience which
widened her mind and expanded her sympa-
thies as no girlish day-dreams could ever do.
This was her life as a hospital nurse at the
front during the early days of the Civil War.
The Alcotts had no sons to devote to the
cause of the Union, but they sent their bravest
and brightest one, the daughter whom the
father so proudly called " Duty's faithful child,"
to serve her country in its hour of need. Miss
Alcott was detailed to the Georgetown hos-
pital, and here she entered heart and soul into
her duties. The hospital was poorly equipped,
and both patients and nurses suffered from
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT 189
bad air, impure water, and damp rooms, but all
put thoughts of self in the background, and
kept as cheery and bright as possible. The
new nurse was a great favorite with the soldiers,
who appreciated her fun and laughter, her un-
failing devotion, and the womanly tenderness
which never found her too tired to write mes-
sages to their far-off friends.
Though often worn out, she never omitted
her own home letters, which were faithful tran-
scriptions of the daily hospital life. All its sad-
ness and pathos appealed to her, and its humor-
ous side, for it had one, found a response in her
merry heart. Her experience here ended after
six weeks, owing to a serious attack of typhoid
fever. The bad air and drainage of the hospital
had done their work, and Miss Alcott returned
to Concord, where she was for many months
an invalid. She never entirely recovered this
shock to her health, and the invalidism from
which she suffered in her last years in reality
dated from this time.
Upon the suggestion of a friend she resolved
to throw her experience at Georgetown into lit-
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
erary form, and wrote the first three of her
Hospital Sketches. These immediately at-
tracted so much attention that the series grew
into a book which was published in 1865.
This work, so full of real life, of the beauty of
heroism, patience, and duty, brought Miss Al-
cott her first taste of fame. Eminent men,
among them Charles Sumner, wrote congratu-
lating her upon her success, and she found her-
self lionized by a public that was grateful for
this glimpse of life at the front. About this
time Miss Alcott published in the Atlantic
Monthly her beautiful poem, Thoreaus Flute,
a tribute to the character of that noble poet,
and the most perfect piece of verse that the
author ever made. A new and abridged edi-
tion of Moods appeared also, and owing to the
popularity of Hospital Sketches, won a gratify-
ing success. From this time Miss Alcott had
no difficulty in finding a market for her wares.
Her short stories and sketches were eagerly ac-
cepted by the best magazines and papers, and
she even had some difficulty in keeping up
with the demand for them.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
In 1865 Miss Alcott made her first visit to
Europe. She started as companion to an in-
valid lady, as her means did not allow her to
make the trip otherwise, but later she joined
her own friends and completed her visit in
their company. This was a delightful experi-
ence, restful and health-giving to the hard-
working author. It was her first real holiday
and she enjoyed it with that fresh, buoyant
spirit that was so characteristic of her. Upon
her return a Boston publisher asked her for a
book for girls, and from this demand, which
she feared at first she could not comply with,
grew her famous story Little Women. The
full power and beauty of this story was un-
suspected by the author, and she was dazzled
by the brilliant success which followed.
Thinking that she was merely writing down
the merry life of a happy family of girls, she
was in reality making a transcription of typi-
cal New England girlhood, and putting the
touches to a picture of rare value. All the
best in New England blood and manners fil-
ters through the pages of this book. Pure
192 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
living, noble thinking, high ideals here find
a place and reflect the girlhood which was
blessed by the friendship of Emerson, Haw-
thorne, Thoreau, and other of her father's asso-
ciates, and which was guarded so tenderly by
that father himself.
This book, which may be said to have
heralded a new literature for children, was
hailed with acclamation by the young audience
for whom it was written. The publishers were
busy keeping up the demand for the books,
and Miss Alcott began to receive letters from
all over the country demanding another vol-
ume. England, France, Holland, and Ger-
many brought out rapid editions, and by the
time the second volume was ready Miss Al-
cott's name was a household word wherever
children read books.
This height, so unexpectedly but justly won,
Miss Alcott never lost. For nearly twenty
years longer the children of the land gave her
the first place in their affections, while each
successive book seemed to them a personal
gift from the author. She was the friend and
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT 193
ideal of thousands of boys and girls who never
saw her, but who felt, beyond a doubt, that
their interests were known, and their hopes
and ambitions dear to her. Far beyond what
the author ever dreamed, these sweet and true
stories of young life influenced the generation
to which they appealed. Beyond what she
had hoped, the little lessons of duty and noble
living learned in the old house at Concord
brought rich and noble harvest to far wider
fields.
The home life of the family was at this time
very happy. The eldest daughter, " Meg," was
married and had two charming children, the
" Demi " and " Daisy " of Little Men, though
both babies were in reality boys. The young-
est daughter, " Amy," was making progress in
the study of art, and " Jo ' herself was happy
because she could earn money to make the oth-
ers happy. Soon after the publication of Little
Women she went abroad with her sister May,
the "Amy* of Little Women, remaining four
years ; work as well as travel occupied the
time. The day she arrived home her father
13
194 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
met her at the dock, with a red placard pinned
in the carriage window, announcing the publi-
cation of Little Men. Like its forerunner, it
scored a great success. The other numbers of
the Little Women series grew rapidly, O Id-
Fashioned Girl, Eight Cousins, and Rose in
Bloom being perhaps the favorites next to the
initial volumes. The Spinning Wheel series,
Aunt Jo s Scrap-Bag series, and Lulus Li-
brary three volumes for small children ap-
peared as the years went on.
Miss Alcott was also the author of a novel
called A Modern Mephistopheles, published
anonymously in the No Name series. One of
her best-known books, Work, is founded on
the incidents of her own experience in her girl-
hood days, when money was scarce in the Al-
cott family, and the young daughters were
striving in every way to lift the burden from
father and mother.
Her sister May married and died abroad,
leaving her baby-girl to Miss Alcott, and to
this little niece she gave henceforth a mother's
love. Her own mother and father were ever
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT 195
her dearest care, and her greatest happiness lay
in the knowledge that she had relieved their
old age from want.
Miss Alcott died after a short illness in Bos-
ton in 1888.
Time had given to her the reward she would
have chosen above all others the knowledge
that her work brought not only success, but
that it carried its own message of life's great
intention to each young heart that it reached.
CHAPTER XII
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
1836
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, poet and novelist,
was born at Portsmouth in 1836. Like many
other New England seaports, Portsmouth, at
the time of the poet's birth, had long ceased to
be a wealthy and important town. No longer
East India merchantmen, Mediterranean trad-
ing-vessels, English and French ships, or great
whalers came up to its docks to leave their
cargoes and sail away again to the distant lands
whose names were so familiar to the inhabi-
tants of the old town. That was the Ports-
mouth of the past which had shown such fine
fighting qualities during the Revolution, and
whose oldest inhabitants still remembered how
their hardy little town did brave coast duty in
the War of 1812. The Portsmouth of Aldrich's
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 197
youth was a quiet, sleepy place, which seemed
to be glad of a chance to spend its old age
quietly, and whose disused wharves and crum-
bling warehouses attested a long and honorable
career, though, like other earthly things, it had
come to an end.
In this quaint old town the better class still
dwelt in the family mansions built in the eigh-
teenth century ; the fisher-folk lived in a sepa-
rate part of the town, and they still flocked to
the wharves on the rare occasions of the ap-
pearance of a new sail in the harbor, in the
hope that here at last were tidings of some
husband or brother who had been lost sight of
for many a day. The actual interests of the
place still centred around the sea, though the
fleets which came in sight of the beautiful har-
bor, one of the finest in the world, seldom
dropped anchor there. But the atmosphere
was full of the romance and mystery of the
ocean. Old sailors who could tell tales of ship-
wreck and bold privateering still haunted the
wharves on sunny afternoons, and could be
found available for story-telling in their cosey
198 THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
little cabins on stormy winter days. The ex-
pressions which the children heard in the streets,
and often at home, in regard to the wealth, the
local news, and world at large were often nauti-
cal relics of life on the quarter-deck riveted into
the common New England speech. " Nor'east-
ers' and " sea-fogs," "a squally fore-and-aft
sky," and a proper lack of respect for long-
shoremen known as " butter-fingered land lub-
bers," were localisms familiar to all ears. The
boys were all "messmates," and every one
looked forward to owning a three-masted ship,
for the sea, of course, was the only proper thea-
tre of action for a Portsmouth boy.
Ardent lover of his native town as he grew
to be, Aldrich in his very young childhood
had a vague dream of Portsmouth and all
the rest of New England as a barren waste
o
inhabited by red Indians and poor-spirited
whites who lived mainly in log huts. He
imbibed this comical notion from a residence
in New Orleans, whither he was taken while
yet an infant, and where he lived for some
years. In his charming Story of a Bad Boy,
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
a biography of his childhood, he has told us
how surprised he was to find that civilized
and even respectable people lived at the North,
his old nurse Chloe having always taught him
that a "Yankee" was a being to be despised,
utterly. Being taken to Portsmouth however
to attend school, he soon became appreciative
of the fine qualities of his stately white-haired
grandfather, in whose family he lived, while his
life at school opened up new vistas of delight.
He had a very healthy and happy boyhood,
many incidents of which are transcribed with
grateful affection in the pages of the Bad Boy.
It is essentially the story of a New England
boy of the generation which had escaped the
sterner discipline of an older day. Still care-
ful of the training of mind and character, the
Puritanism of New England had in Aldrich's
youth lost many of its unlovely characteristics.
There was less gloom and formality, and, ex-
cept in the observance of Sunday, many of
the usages of early times had passed away.
Sunday was still, however, strictly kept. Al-
drich gives an amusing description of that day
2OO THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
on which his grandfather no longer appeared
any relation to him, and when boyish sports,
Robinson Crusoe and the Arabian Nights,
o
were exchanged for three sermons a day and a
visit to the family burying-ground.
With this exception, at school and at home,
his life was full of healthful duties and pleas-
ures. He describes particularly his delight in
the first snow-storm which he saw in Ports-
mouth after his return from New Orleans, and
how he stood by the window for hours watch-
ing the unfamiliar, beautiful scene. He made
good progress at school, learning mathematics
and Latin in the thorough New England fash-
ion. He had a host of boy friends, as healthy
and fortunate as himself. He was a prominent
member of a flourishing secret society formed
for the perpetration of dark and mysterious
deeds ; once he and the other members of the
society cleaned some old rusty cannon which
adorned the wharves, fired them off with a
slow fuse at midnight, and awakened all the
inhabitants under the impression that the town
was being bombarded.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 2OI
He owned a part of a boat and used to
cruise among the islands off the harbor, and
once he experienced the bitterness which
many dwellers by the sea know, in seeing a
young companion drift out forever from sight
in the face of a great storm which destroyed
twelve sail of an outgoing fishing-fleet before
its fury abated.
Perhaps the dearest of his boyish treasures
was his pony, Gypsy, who was " pretty and
knew it, and passionately fond of dress ; ' who
loved boys, and would have nothing to do with
girls ; who could " let down bars, lift up latches,
draw bolts, and turn all sorts of buttons ; ' who
once ate six custard pies that had been placed
to cool, and enjoyed the wickedness of the feat
as much as did her young master. She was an
affectionate creature, too, and used to steal off
whenever she could and go to the Temple
grammar-school, which her master attended,
and wait for him with her forefeet on the sec-
ond step. Aldrich's first composition was de-
voted to the praise of the horse, a tribute to
Gypsy, and when his school-days were over he
202 THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
was only consoled at parting from her by his
grandfather's solemn promise to sell her to a
circus, for Gypsy had histrionic talent and could
"waltz, fire a pistol, lie down dead, wink one
eye," and do other tricks worthy of admiration.
In her larger sphere she became the belle of
the circus-ring, and performed wonders on the
tan-bark.
When Aldrich was fifteen his father died
suddenly in New Orleans. This changed the
boy's life materially, as a college career had to
be given up and some means of livelihood se-
cured. At this juncture an uncle offered him
a situation in his business-house in New York,
and it was thought best that he should accept
this position. In the last glimpse which he
gives us of himself in the Story of a Bad Boy
he says that his uncle insisted upon his taking
the offer at once, being haunted by the dread
that if left to himself the boy might turn out
a poet.
This hint carries us to the beginning of Al-
drich's literary career. As in the case of many
other poets, this calling was not self-chosen
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 2O3
The boy's ambition was to become a Harvard
student, and it was only a sense of duty and an
unselfish wish to save his grandfather further
care that led him to consent to a business life.
But in the end his choice wrought well for him.
Denied the means of carrying on his studies
as he would have liked, he became his own
teacher. In the intervals of work he read and
studied, and because he was a poet born he
composed verses. Almost before he knew
it this last occupation engrossed more and
more of his time. The fancies which at first
chased through his brain, the creatures of
an hour's recreation, came at last to take up
their abode there and to demand serious at-
tention.
In this regard Aldrich's gift shows that it
springs from true poetic inspiration. Even in
his earliest verses there is evidence that behind
the imagination and fancy lay the sense of the
poet's mission to reveal in the form of art the
beauty and harmony unseen by the common
eye.
It is to be presumed that the young poet
204 THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
kept these aspirations very carefully from
the knowledge of his uncle, who certainly
could find no fault with the manner in
which his nephew's office duties were per-
formed.
By the time he was eighteen Aldrich had
prepared for the press a small volume of poems,
which he published under the title, The Bells.
Before he was nineteen he had written the Bal-
lad of Babie Bell, that exquisite monody of
babyhood which brought him instant recogni-
tion as a poet of more than ordinary promise.
The Ballad of Babie Bell and other poems
appeared in book form in 1858. Aldrich
was then twenty-two years old. He had se-
cured a position as publisher's reader, and
had contributed poems, essays, sketches, and
stories to Putnanis, the Knickerbocker, Har-
per s, and the Atlantic Monthly. In news-
paper work he was connected with the New
York Evening Mirror, the Home Journal, the
Saturday Press, and other prominent news-
papers of that date. The literary life lay before
him. Other volumes of poems were issued,
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 205
each showing the poet's true insight. From
1865 to 1874 he was editor of Every Saturday,
and the following year he went abroad on a
vacation justly earned.
He visited England and Ireland, France,
Germany, Italy, and Austria. To each place
he brought the sympathy of a finely attuned
nature, and from each he seemed to carry away
some experience that broadened his intellectual
outlook. The itinerary of this journey was
published afterward in the Atlantic Monthly
in a charming series called From Ponkapog to
Pesth.
Aldrich was later made editor of the Atlan-
tic Monthly, a position which he held for a
number of years. In American poetry this au-
thor has created a school of his own. The
peculiar temper of his gift was shown in the
Ballad of Babie Bell, in which the fragrant
grace and innocence of babyhood seems to
have been revealed to the poet in as pure a
vision as ever came to a knight of the Holy
Grail. This story of the death of a child, in
which death is made so beautiful and child-
206 THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
hood so holy, indicated that fineness of per-
ception which is Aldrich's most striking char-
acteristic.
All his conceits and fancies, his illustrations
of life and character, both of his lighter and
graver hours, reveal that delicate, inward vision
which make his work so distinctive. His sub-
jects are as varied as his own vagrant fancies,
which seem to find all places in earth and air
welcome and habitable. Sometimes it is a
monk of the Middle Ages whose sin and re-
pentance he incorporates in charming verse as
in Friar Jerome s Beautiful Book. Again it
is the old Hebrew story of Judith, or the
Roman legend of Ara-Coeli, telling how the
little waxen bambino found its way back alone
in the storm and darkness to the convent
from which it had been stolen.
An Indian maiden whose memory had be-
come legendary long before the discovery of
America ; an old Greek coin bearing the coined
head of Minerva ; a castle of feudal days with
arches crumbling to dust and drawbridge fall-
ing, each claims his fancy, and is by him woven
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 2OJ
into the graceful and beautiful fabric of his
verse.
Nowhere is his touch more sensitive than in
his appreciation of nature, as known to New
England, where ice-storms and sleet and hail,
fogs and bleak winds all become a part of the
poet's consciousness and teach their own lessons
of courage and endurance. New England
wild flowers and summer fields have also their
tribute from their own poet, who sings their
praises in TJie Blue Bells of New England and
who acknowledges no enchantment so binding
as that of the May of his native land. The Sis-
ters Tragedy and the beautiful Monody on the
Death of Wendell Phillips are also among the
notable poems. Wyndham Towers, the most
ambitious of the later poems, is a legend of the
days of Elizabeth, which reappears in the reign
of Charles the Second. This story of two cour-
tiers of Elizabeth, who were brothers and rivals,
and whose fate remained a mystery for over a
century, is told by Aldrich in charming verse,
characterized by his own peculiar graces of
touch. Unguarded Gates, a collection of his
2O8 THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
latest poems, contains many beautiful specimens
that reveal the master's mind, still alive to all
those subtle varying moods of thought, which
make his work so distinctive.
In prose Aldrich has produced more than
one novel of character, true to the old New
England traditions which moulded the thought
of the Puritans, and artistic in execution. His
prose, like his poetry, possesses the undefinable
quality which sets it apart from other contem-
porary work. Among his novels, Prudence
Palfrey and the Stillwater Tragedy are the
best, while of his shorter stones, Marjorie Daw
ranks easily first, both in point of literary excel-
lence and from the will-o'-the-wisp remoteness
which marks its relationship to the genuine
fairy-brood.
In some ways the fancy of Aldrich very
nearly approaches that of Hawthorne. Above
all other New England writers these two pos-
sess the charm which unlocks that realm of
fancy wherein wandered Spenser and Shake-
speare, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats. This
wonder-world is not always open, even to poets ;
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 2OQ
whoever enters it must wear the badge of the
elfin crew which wanders invisible at will, and
which only kindred sight can discover. Al-
drich, true knight of this goodly fellowship
has visited their haunts more than once. That
he was well received is evinced by the secrets
he has brought back and which he has woven
with the poet's cunning into his art.
14
CHAPTER XIII
NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS
In New England, as well as in the South
and West, the novelists of to-day have pressed
their own surroundings into the service of art.
The pictures they have given us are thus true
to nature. They illustrate the quiet hours of
the nation's life, the hours in which it truly
grows and fulfils the purpose of its being, and
the pictures are therefore very valuable. Most
of this fiction is thrown into the form of short
stories, and these are contributed by so many
different authors that we are able to get many
points of view.
The material here used is perhaps not so
picturesque as that offered to the writers of the
South and West ; New England, except in its
earliest days, has never been the land of ro-
mance ; but here the progress of those ideas
that make a country's greatness has gone
NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS 211
steadily on. The writers of to-day still reflect
the thought and manners that were moulded
under the influence of the great men of the
past. The genius of Hawthorne and the spirit
of Emerson made a permanent impression
upon American art and life, and the children
of their own blood have not forgotten their
lessons. Thus we find New England fiction
largely dealing with the moral life of the peo-
ple. Character sketches, stories of temptation,
defeat and victory, battles lost and won by the
soul, form the motifs of these tales ; and al-
though New England to-day can claim no
great novelist, yet its artistic purpose is as pure
and elevated as when it laid the foundations of
American literature.
Interwoven with these stones are many pict-
ures of manners and home surroundings which
make an atmosphere of reality. This atmos-
phere, changing with every age, as the con-
ditions of life change, has been so reflected in
the work of to-day, as to make it in itself a
mirror of the every-day history of the people.
And this has its value also.
212 NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS
Perhaps the work of no woman writer so
intimately connects the spirit of the New
England of the past with that of to-day as
does that of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. Mrs.
Howe has always been an advocate of ideas.
Life has seemed to her a mission of service ;
although not a Puritan by descent, she has
fought nobly in the cause of Puritanism, the
cause of justice and humanity. Though her
anti-slavery and philanthropic work, and her
advocacy of woman suffrage have occupied
much more of her time than her literary life,
yet her writings belong eminently to the his-
tory of American literature. They represent
very strongly the ideas which the republic has
always sought to maintain, and in one case
their author embodied in verse the spirit of
the nation in one of its greatest hours. That
poem, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, was
a song and a prophecy of liberty in its highest
sense. It was a reminder of the part that
America had elected to play in the great
drama of national life. Wherever its words
fell they stirred the soul to such noble re-
NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS 213
spouse, that it became the war-cry of the na-
tion. It was sung in schools, and incorporated
in the services of the Church ; under its inspi-
ration the Union forces marched on to victory,
and the republic may be said to have achieved
the great intention of its existence to the beat
of its triumphant measures.
The air to which the song is set was heard
originally in the South. A visitor from the
North, present at a colored meeting, was struck
by the vigor and swing which characterized the
singing of this tune, and on his return wrote
down the melody. The popular war song
John Browns Body was afterward written to
this music. During a visit to Washington in
the first year of the war, Mrs. Howe went one
day to see a review of the troops ; the drill was
interrupted by a movement on the part of
the enemy, and the sight of the troops filing
back to cantonments fired Mrs. Howe's heart ;
she began singing John Browns Body as the
men marched past, and the inspiration of the
Battle Hymn of the Republic came to her
in that moment ; the next morning at dawn
214 NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS
she rose and wrote the words of the most
famous song of the war.
Mrs. Howe was born in New York in 1819.
Her father, Samuel Ward, was a man of wealth
and prominent in public affairs. The family
mansion near Bowling Green, then a fashion-
able neighborhood, was noted for its hospital-
ity, and the children were accustomed to meet-
ing the many famous men and women who
found their way to New York. Julia \vas the
fourth child, and was considered remarkably
clever even in this family of bright children.
She began to write poetry while still a very
little girl, and since she was a born leader, she
insisted that her younger sisters should also
write poetry. Many childish scenes of despair
occurred before this resolution was set aside,
but Julia still retained her faculty for leadership.
Whatever she believed was so vital to her that
she seemed impelled to impress others with the
same view. This characteristic, broadened and
strengthened by favorable circumstances, en-
abled its possessor in later life to accomplish a
noble work for humanity.
NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS 21$
At the time of Mrs. Howe's childhood New
York was the home of that brilliant circle of
poets, essayists, and scholars who followed in
the footsteps of Irving and made the culture of
the day a noble foundation for its future liter-
ary life. Some of these men had been among
the first Americans who made pilgrimages to
the old world in search of the higher culti-
vated artistic life denied them at home. Many
of them had given to European society its first
glimpse of the best social life of the new world,
and in more than one instance the nature and
charm of their talents were appreciated abroad
as well as at home. New York was still a
small city. The fashionable streets were found
in neighborhoods not far from the Battery,
and the social life, though dignified, was in
many respects very simple. Old - fashioned
stages and family carriages were the means of
conveyance beyond the city limits along the
shady country roads which led toward Boston
and Albany, and which are now known as the
Bowery and the Western Boulevard. Much
picturesqueness characterized the houses, many
2l6 NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS
of which were built in the old Dutch fashion,
and surrounded by large, luxuriant flower gar-
dens. Christmas, Thanksgiving, the Fourth
of July, and above all the Dutch New-Year's-
Day, were still dignified festivals, honored and
enjoyed by all classes alike.
In this atmosphere of ease and unostenta-
tious wealth, of cultivation and thought, Julia
Ward grew to womanhood. By the time she
was seventeen she was an acceptable contribu-
tor to the leading magazines of the day, and at
the time of her marriage with Dr. Howe, in her
twenty-fourth year, she had laid the founda-
tion of a successful literary career.
After a visit to Europe Dr. Howe and his
wife, with their baby daughter, lived for a short
time at the Institution for the Blind near Bos-
ton, of which Dr. Howe was director. Dr.
Howe had already won fame for his successful
attempt to educate the blind deaf-mute Laura
Bridgman, and his noble work for the blind
continued to engage his interest. He remained
director of the institution all his life, residing
for many years at a charming country place
NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS 21?
called "Green Peace." Mrs. Howe, from the
time of her removal to Massachusetts, became
identified with the political and social move-
ments in which that State always led. One
of her children speaks of her as having been a
" Bostonian of the Bostonians," from the be-
ginning of her married life. It is certain that
her own nature responded warmly to the pro-
gressive New England spirit, and that her
talents and earnestness won her a high place in
the band of men and women who represented
New England thought.
In 1853 Mrs. Howe published her first vol-
ume of poems under the title Passion Flowers.
Although brought out anonymously the au-
thorship was at once accorded to Mrs. Howe
by Emerson, Longfellow, and other poets,
who recognized in the verse her own fertile
fancy. In the following year another volume,
which was largely an appeal for the freedom of
the Southern slaves, appeared under the title
Words for the Hour.
From this moment Mrs. Howe's literary life
became identified with the anti-slavery cause.
2l8 NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS
Poems, articles, editorials, and lectures all
spoke the same word for humanity, and the
author became known as one of the leaders in
the cause. The Battle Hymn of the Re-
public only added another laurel to the fame
she had already won as a tireless, fearless, and
able advocate for the freedom of the slave.
When the war was over Mrs. Howe's pen
still wrought for large issues. Well known as
a lecturer, her efforts now were directed to
questions of character, ethics, and the purpose
of life. She was still a leader in the intel-
lectual world, and the most eminent men of
New England cherished her friendship.
Almost from the beginning of the move-
ment Mrs. Howe has been a champion of the
woman suffrage cause. She has been one of
the workers who have done much for the
broader education of women and opened to
them wider spheres of usefulness. But her
spirit is too large to be confined closely to
one interest. The world has been her field of
action, and whenever the word was needed
there it has been spoken. In 1867, when the
NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS 2 19
Greek inhabitants of the island of Crete re-
volted from the Turkish Government, Mrs.
Howe and her husband crossed the Atlantic,
carrying money and supplies to the brave little
band of rebels. In 1872 she was in London
trying to bring about a woman's peace con-
gress, having for its object the abolition of war
among civilized nations.
When the republic of Santo Domingo desired
to be annexed to the United States, Dr. Howe
was one of the commissioners appointed by
the United States to inquire into the feasibility
of the plan. Dr. and Mrs. Howe passed two
winters in the island, living at one time in one
of those large marble houses which the natives
call "palaces," and making journeys of in-
spection as to the wealth and resources of the
country. Their house was guarded by native
soldiers, and wherever they went the inhabi-
tants vied with one another in offers of hospi-
tality and friendship. It was Mrs. Howe who
revealed to these simple people to what stature
womanhood might gro\v. Her gracious influ-
ence seemed to represent to them the blessings
22O NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS
that might flow from a union with the great
republic, and it was into her sympathetic ear
they poured the story of their disappointment
when their dream of a larger national life came
to an end.
In later years Mrs. Howe's interests have
been very closely connected with the New
England Woman's Club, an outgrowth of her
brain, devoted to the broader advancement of
women. This last project connects her ideals
closely with those of her young womanhood,
when in all and above all she conceived life to
be but the instrument for the working out of
noble purposes.
Her place in American literature is repre-
sentative. While the mass of her work is of
necessity ephemeral, it is yet of invaluable
character. Whenever, during her career, the
nation has stood in danger from foes within
or without, she has come to the front with her
pen and the influence of her noble personality.
So greatly has she wrought in this regard that
the history of her literary career would be the
history of the causes which have affected the
NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS 221
national life for the last fifty years. No merely
artistic gift, however great, could have won for
her this place.
Louise Chandler Moulton, poet and prose
writer, was born at Pomfret, Conn., in 1835.
Around her childhood still lingered the tra-
ditions of old New England life, and her
education was almost as strict as that of her
Puritan ancestors. Louise was taught her
catechism and the duty of going to church
three times on Sunday, to do her little stint of
sewing, and to listen respectfully while her
great grandmother read her extracts from the
Greek philosophers in the original. She was
also taught that it was sinful to read novels and
to dance, or to play backgammon. She was
an only child, and as she had a loving little
heart, the affection her parents lavished upon
her made the home atmosphere most sweet
and sunny. Like many another New Eng-
land child she often forgot the terrors inspired
by catechism and sermon to find pleasure in
the world which she created out of her own
222 NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS
fancy. This world of imagination was in her
case peopled by creatures so real that they
formed an actual part of her life. Often the
same characters occupied her attention for
months, and she would hurry away from lesson
and task to live through hours of emotion and
experience with these children of her brain.
Once she spent a \vhole summer watching these
imaginary characters act what she called a
" Spanish drama." As soon as she appeared in
the garden they would flock around her and go
through the parts which they seemed them-
selves to create ; if they came to grief, she was
genuinely moved, and once, when one of them
died, she was utterly overcome. Outside these
fancies the voices of nature awakened many
curious thoughts.
The wind whistling through a certain key-
hole seemed to her distant bugle notes, or the
wailing of lost souls, while the tones of rain and
sleet had each alike its own weird interpreta-
tions. It is from such imaginative children
that the New England poets have sprung, and
when she was about seven years old the little
NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS 223
day dreamer began to put her thoughts into
verse. Very curious bits of doggerel must
have been the result of these moments of in-
spiration, but they no doubt expressed in some
queer fashion the fancies teeming in the rest-
less little brain. When she was fifteen Louise's
first printed verses appeared in a Norwich
newspaper, and three years later a volume enti-
tled This, That, and the Other, appeared. In
this were included the stories, poems, and
sketches which had been printed in various
magazines and papers, and which had won for
the young author considerable reputation. The
book was kindly reviewed by Edmund Clar-
ence Stedman and other critics, and the author
almost immediately took the position she has
since held as one of the most sympathetic of
New England writers. In her prose work
Mrs. Moulton has dealt with those studies
of character which have such a charm for
New England writers, and in the portrayal
of which she has been strikingly successful.
Her stories and novels have appeared in book
form under the titles This, That, and the
224 NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS
Other, Jono Clifford, and Some Women s
Hearts.
Some charming books for children, written
primarily for the amusement of her own little
daughter, show Mrs. Moulton's talent in an-
other light. These tales Bedtime Stories;
More Bedtime Stories ; New Bedtime Stories,
and Firelight Stories have won a wide hear-
ing.
But it is by her poetry that Mrs. Moulton
will be longest remembered. Her poems are
full of melody, of light, and color ; they are
charged with an intense feeling for nature,
whose moods they reproduce with exquisite
fidelity ; they are, in most instances, singularly
perfect in form, while the beauty of certain
single lines stands unchallenged. But above
all they are the songs of one who sings spon-
taneously and naturally, to whom the outside
world and the life of the soul have alike re-
vealed themselves in music. In them is found
the true expression of the author's gift as one
of the best lyric poets of America. Some
single poems, as The House of Death ; How
NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS 225
Long ; In Pace ; and Left Behind, have won
a wide fame. Her poetry has been published
in two volumes, Swallow Flights, and Other
Poems.
Another writer of the same generation as
Mrs. Moulton is Harriet Prescott Spofford,
daughter of Joseph N. Prescott, a descendant
of one of the families which have made New
England famous. Miss Prescott's first work
marked her at once as a unique personality.
Hitherto the fiction of New England had been
stamped with a distinct moral purpose around
which the tale was woven. But in the brilliant
and dramatic novels Azarian, Sir Rohan's
Ghost, The Amber Gods, and in the short
stories which belong to the same period, this
author seems to have created an art peculiarly
her own, for above all other things they ap-
pealed to the sense of beauty. The language
in which they were written was new to readers
of fiction, and they were carried along by it
as by beautiful music. This gift of expression,
chastened later to a severer beauty, so inten-
226 NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS
sified the charm of the story, itself always dra-
matic, that it seemed on first reading the
author must have sacrificed the purpose of the
true story-teller. But stripped of their luxu-
rious dress the stories would still remain genu-
ine experiences of life in New England, though
seen from a point of view seldom attained.
The poetic faculty so apparent in her prose
has made Mrs. Spofford's verse equally felici-
tous. Her mood in her earlier and perhaps
most successful work was an alien one to
New England fiction, full of a tropical beauty,
and dominated by a rare imaginative faculty,
and it will probably give her contributions a
permanent place among New England writers.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps has, in her stories
and novels, dealt almost entirely with questions
of conscience and morality. She came of a line
of theologians whose lives were spent in discuss-
ing and teaching the principles of puritanism,
and much of their seriousness of purpose be-
came her inheritance. Her first story appeared
in the YoutJis Companion in 1857, before she
NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS 22/
was fourteen, and five years later Harpers
Magazine published her story, u A Sacrifice
Consumed," one of the first stories called forth
by the war. The year following she began
writing the book which made her famous, and
which appeared in 1868 under the title The
Gates Ajar.
In this story the author, for the first time in
American literature, showed how completely
the old puritan idea of the hereafter had
passed away. In its place had come a belief
in the unfailing love of God, and a hope of
the blessedness of the future life. The book
brought comfort and help to thousands who
had outgrown the gloomy creed of their an-
cestors, and \vhose hearts were still mourning
the loss of friends who had fallen in the war.
But although the book achieved a remark-
able success the author did not follow it with
others of a similar character. She began in-
stead the publication of a series of short stories
dealing wholly with the problems of human
life. Many of these stories are so sad, that
they seem to show life only as a tragedy, but
228 NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS
the author's purpose was to preach the truth
in order that good might come of it. These
stories, published later under the title Men,
Women, and Ghosts, were followed by The
Story of Avis, a novel of remarkable force.
Like her other works, The Story of A vis is a
sermon thrown into the form of fiction, but
the artistic sense of the author is shown also
in this book as in no other. If Miss Phelps
had not written fiction she would still have
become a poet ; few writers possess such in-
sight, and fewer still are governed by the sense
of beauty that dominates all her work. Her
fiction is full of beautiful lines showing the
finest sense of color, while her volume of Po-
etic Studies illustrates how far her poetic in-
stinct might have reached had her art been
confined to verse-making.
The Story of Avis is full of color and
rhythm, and is one of the best instances of
how far words may be made to reproduce the
lights and shades of the world of nature. These
two characteristics, the moral purpose and the
sense of beauty, have dominated all the au-
NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS 22Q
thor's works. Although her later works, Dr.
Zay, Beyond the Gates, and others have been
eminently successful, yet she reaches her high-
est point in such short stories as A Madonna
of the Tubs, The Lady of Shalott, Cloth of
Gold, and Jack. In these powerful tales,
which read like poems, both characters and
background are sketched in such fine lines as
to place them among the best American fic-
tion. The tragedy of common life which has
always appealed to the author, and which has
been her most successful theme, has never
been more artistically treated. Miss Phelps
was born in Boston, but her girlhood was
spent in the old town of Andover, where her
father was a professor of theology. She stud-
ied mathematics and the classics at the An-
dover Female Seminary, one of the celebrated
schools of the day, and, like all the youth of
her generation, she was taught that one of the
chief duties of man was to brood over the
theological problems that had puzzled her
puritan ancestors. She has lived the great-
er part of her life in Andover. In 1888
23O NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS
she was married to the writer, Herbert D.
Ward.
Lingering to-day among old New England
villages and country sides are many character-
istics of other days. For, while society has
been progressive, the people have kept many
quaint habits of thought and speech, much in
the same manner as they have preserved in
their garrets the furniture and costumes of
their ancestors. Thus, the men and women
found in village and farm-house seem often
survivals of another generation, and the story
of their simple lives is full of interest. In
another generation, perhaps, these types will
have passed away, and the individuality which
has stamped New England life from its be-
ginning will be lost.
Mary E. Wilkins has preserved in her
sketches of this life many of its unique char-
acteristics, and has studied detail so carefully
that her work has a distinct value in the liter-
ature of American social life.
No feature in the apparently humdrum ex-
NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS 231
istence of these people has seemed to Miss
Wilkins uninteresting. She makes us sym-
pathize with their little ambitions and humble
denials and sacrifices, until we feel we have
entered into close relationship with their lives.
We realize the misfortune of the poor old lady
who could not afford a front door, and see the
utter demoralization that follows when a lone
spinster loses her pet cat, her only companion
and friend. There is a sermon preached in
the story of the old woman who earned her
living by making patchwork quilts and who,
through a mistake, put the pieces that be-
longed to one neighbor into the quilt intended
for another. The author's gift, as a genuine
story-teller, makes the work alive with human
feeling, and gives to these uneventful tales the
charm of romance. Her power for present-
ing a picture is equally great. We see the old
farm-house kitchens, the sunniest and brightest
parts of the home, and have glimpses, much
like those that come to the occupants them-
selves, of the prim "front rooms' that are so
seldom used. We see, too, the orchards, mead-
232 NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS
ows, and fields rich with harvests or lying
bare under the winter skies ; every detail of
farm and village life comes before us vividly
as if photographed ; the farmer's wife busy in
the kitchen, the farmer himself sowing or har-
vesting, their son donning his Sunday clothes
for a visit to his sweetheart, or their daughter
up in her bedroom trying on the sheeny silk
which she is soon to wear as a bride, are all
careful copies of the originals whose personal-
ity supplies the human interest in these unique
surroundings.
From the first appearance of the stories in
various magazines and periodicals Miss Wilkins
was recognized as a writer whose work must
bear a permanent value. This New England
life, with its limitations and often unlovely
characteristics, was yet a survival of the old
puritanism, though the spirit of the past had
been in many instances subverted. Much of
the hardness and unresponsiveness of these
people were an inheritance as legitimate as
their stern sense of justice and love of truth.
Miss Wilkins, by seizing the salient points, has
NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS 233
given to their characters just that balance be-
tween the old and the new New England
which really exists, though time must speed-
ily destroy it.
The short stories and sketches of Miss
Wilkins have been published in two volumes,
under the titles : A Humble Romance and A
New England Nun, each book taking its
name from the leading story. A Humble
Romance is, perhaps, the best of the short
stories. The descriptions of the tin pedler
vending his wares is like a scene from Dickens,
while the human interest of the story is traced
with the finest art.
Besides her short stories, Miss Wilkins has
published two novels, Jane Field and Pem-
broke, the first a charming love-story and the
second a tragic study of the unlovely side of
rustic character, relieved by the sweet and
steadfast faith of a young girl. Some charm-
ing stories for children show Miss Wilkins's
talent in a new light. Of these Young Lu-
cretia, which gives the title to the book, is
a fair example of the author's insight into the
234 NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS
ambitions and interests of the child mind.
Young Lucretia, who had never had a birth-
day or Christmas present, and who lives with
some old aunts who have long since forgotten
that they ever were children, is a quaint little
picture of the old puritan up-bringing joined
to the usages of modern life. We sympathize
with the poor little heroine when she has
to wear dresses made out of her aunts' cast-off
garments, and we do not blame her for sur-
reptitiously conveying some packages to the
school -house Christmas-tree, so the children
may not think she is utterly without presents.
It was a sweet thought to leave the little
maiden glowing in the happiness of a new-
fashioned dress, with her heart throbbing over
the thoughts of a real Christmas party, and
with her two eyes " shining softly, like stars,"
as she gazes from the dusky fireplace into the
face of the kindly visitor who has brought this
gladness.
Among Miss Wilkins's other work she has
given us one reflection from those dark days
of the Salem witchcraft. This she has embod-
NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS 235
ied in her play, Giles Corey, Yeoman, in which
all the relentless spirit of persecution is
pitilessly portrayed. Giles Corey is a study,
full of dramatic force, and dominated by the
tragic elements that underlay many phases of
puritan character. Miss Wilkins has made in
this play another claim to her rank as the
greatest power in New England fiction to-day,
and as the author whose artistic realism em-
bodies the highest purpose of modern literary
art.
CHAPTER XIV
GEORGE W. CABLE
1844
George W. Cable was born in New Orleans,
where his childhood, youth, and early manhood
were spent. The New Orleans of his child-
hood a city of shrubs and flowering trees,
of vegetable gardens surrounded by palisade
fences, of handsome old-fashioned houses, un-
paved streets, and empty, marshy lots is to
him a pleasant memory. Through the streets
he wandered, with his head full of day-dreams,
and when not busy with study or play, formu-
lated a plan of life entirely different from that
he actually lived. A conscientious pupil and
omnivorous reader, his early ambitions were
still far away from such leanings ; long before
he had mastered his geography he had deter-
mined upon a career of adventure, and it was a
GEORGE W. CABLE 237
bitter disappointment to him to learn that his
favorite romance, Paul Jones, the Son of the
Sea, was not true. Yet even the names of for-
eign countries had a fascination for him, while
the masts of the ships clustered at the docks
were an inspiration. Even the ballast, which
consisted sometimes of stone from Spain, had
such an interest that it led to an attempt at
studying geology.
Naturally the wharves had a great attraction
for such a boy, and thither he used to go with
his brother, day after day, to watch the vessels
come in and depart, and to weave stories about
their voyages. Once when a revenue cutter
anchored across the river the two boys, though
poor in pocket-money, paid their way over the
ferry in order that they might sit down upon a
stump of drift-wood and inspect her at leisure.
Good fortune sent an official in their way,
who, amused by their interest, invited them on
board, and allowed them to inspect the various
quarters, and to hover with delight over the
sailors' lockers, where the thread, needles, and
other outfittings suggested all the delights of
238 GEORGE W. CABLE
sea life. The fact that he could not really
travel turned his attention, perhaps, to the lit-
erature of travel and he began writing a story
of two Spanish brothers who, in by-gone days,
had made a voyage from Spain to the Carib-
bean Sea. This narrative was intended to em-
body all the wild and romantic tales that the
young author had dreamed out, but only one
chapter was ever written, though it was prom-
ised a place in a school paper of which Cable
had been chosen editor because he wrote a
good hand. Much serious work went on hand
in hand with these day-dreams and longings.
Before he was ten he had read Hume's His-
tory of England, and had set to work to mem-
orize the Declaration of Independence. At
all times he would rather study than play, and
Burns, Scott, Cooper, Shakespeare, and the
Bible were read and re-read in the intervals of
school work.
When he was fourteen his father died, and
Cable was obliged to leave school and earn his
living. He found employment in a customs
warehouse, his special work being to put
GEORGE W. CABLE 239
brands on the different articles. This prosaic
work had, however, a certain charm for him,
and as he marked the silks and spices from the
East, the delft from Holland, olives from
Spain, linens from England, and calicoes from
France, he took many imaginary voyages to
those countries. The interest of the student
was still strong within him, and every possible
opportunity for study was embraced.
When he was nineteen he entered the
Fourth Mississippi Cavalry and served for the
remainder of the war, carrying his Latin gram-
mar and reader all through the campaign.
The war over Cable went back to commer-
cial life ; no idea of a literary career came to
him, though from time to time he wrote news-
paper articles upon various subjects, and at one
time was a regular contributor to the New
Orleans Picayune. But a student of the best
fiction and of literary style, gifted with poetic
imagination and an intense feeling for hu-
manity, Cable found after a time the im-
pulse for story-telling strong upon him. This
was augmented by reading in some old news-
240 GEORGE W. CABLE
papers various accounts of the life of New
Orleans in its early days. The social life,
perhaps, of no other American city had so
picturesque a beginning. The old French fam-
ilies never became Americanized even after
the union of Louisiana with the United States.
They kept their family traditions and social
usages, regarding the Yankees who came to
make their home there as intruders. All the
old French love of gayety, of gentle breeding,
and of refined living made New Orleans a city
of which the social life was the leading feature.
The Creoles, the descendants of the early
French settlers, remained French for many
generations, even speaking English as foreign-
ers, long after Louisiana had begun to send
representatives to Congress.
Many charming episodes of this early life
were preserved in the old newspapers which
came into Cable's hands from time to time, and
inevitably the long past scenes were re-lived
in his imagination. Just as inevitably the time
came when certain incidents and characters
wove themselves so distinctly into stones that
GEORGE W. CABLE 24!
they had to be written down, and when Cable
had so transcribed three short stories his work
as the portrayer of the old French life of
Louisiana had begun.
One of these stories, Sieur George, was
published in Scribners Monthly. Being a
venture into new fields its novelty no less
than its art appealed to Northern readers, and
when another story, Jean -ah Poquelin ap-
peared some time later the author felt from the
wealth of friendly criticism that his choice of
material had been a wise one. Other stories
were written, the series being published finally
in a book called Old Creole Days. The suc-
cess of this little volume showed how truly the
author had entered into the spirit of those old
days, which had become but a memory. His
next work naturally dealt with the same period
in a fuller and more picturesque degree.
Having in view a picture of strong lights
and shadows, yet one true to life, Cable chose
for his subject one of the old representative
families of New Orleans, and throwing in as a
background one of the many tragedies that
242 GEORGE W. CABLE
shadowed the history of slavery, he presented
a vivid and picturesque creation of historic
value. All the domestic and social events
which would go to make up the history of
a wealthy and influential Creole family were
pressed into service, while underneath ran,
like a moral, the reflected purpose of a life
far different from that of the present day.
Cable supplied the tragic element of this
novel in the story of the negro Bras Coupg,
who resisted authority because he had been a
chief in Africa and whose sad fate had been
discussed for generations around plantation
firesides. But this sombre side of the picture
was relieved by many charming episodes. All
the grace and exquisite gentleness of breeding
for which Creole men and women were cele-
brated, made this picture of old Creole life of
rare value. The Grandissimes, whose family
name gave the title to the book, became a fa-
miliar word as the story of their lives appeared
from month to month in the magazine through
which it was running as a serial. Although
The Grandissimes was a work of fiction, it
GEORGE W. CABLE 243
created an intense interest in the period which
it described. Northern readers were especially
charmed by a view of the luxurious and peace-
ful life that went on in Louisiana while the
English Colonies were fighting the Indians,
redeeming the soil, and finally winning their
independence as a nation. During all this time
the French in Louisiana, both on plantations
and in cities, were reverencing their king, hold-
ing to the traditions of their ancestors, and op-
posing in the end as bitterly as possible the
idea of annexation to the United States.
The Creoles were pleasure - lovers. They
had beautiful houses surrounded by large gar-
dens, and their fete days were numerous and
strictly observed. Much of their enjoyment
was of the simplest kind. The birthday of a
relative, or the christening of a child was made
the occasion for a celebration to which all the
many branches of the family were invited, and
where merrymaking went on from morning
till night. Many striking scenes in The Gran-
dissimes illustrate this feature of Creole life.
There is also obvious throughout the book, a
244 GEORGE W. CABLE
comical reflection of the resentment felt by
one member of the family, because France had
sold Louisiana to the United States. This in-
dividual, Raoul Innerarity by name, even went
so far as to paint a large picture showing
Louisiana, in the shape of a badly drawn fe-
male figure, " rif-using to hantre de h-Union."
Other touches throughout the book show the
feeling that existed, while many charming pict-
ures of home-life abound.
The Grandissimes made Cable famous.
Although it elicited much adverse criticism
from readers who denied its truthfulness as a
picture of old Creole days, it yet must be
considered as one of the best works of fiction
produced by a Southern writer. It has been
followed by innumerable transcriptions of
Southern life from other hands, but to the
author of The Grandissimes must always re-
main the credit of being the pioneer in this
fascinating world of romance.
Mr. Cable's second book, Dr. Sevier, deals
with the period of the war, though it is not
a war story. The hero, Dr. Sevier, is a noble
GEORGE W. CABLE 245
character, whose forgetfulness of self and ab-
sorption in duty form the theme of the moral
which runs through the book. A love-story,
and the struggle of a man with misfortune,
some echoes of war times, and many scenes of
New Orleans life in 1863 and 64 are also wo-
ven into the story, which, although it lacks the
picturesque charm of The Grandissimes, is yet
valuable as a chronicle of many real events.
When England took Canada from France,
and the Acadians \vere driven away from
Nova Scotia by the English, they naturally
sought refuge in the American colonies which
still remained French. Many of them found
homes in the West Indies, but many more fled
to the lowlands of Louisiana, and gathering
together friends and family formed themselves
into little homesteads. Gradually a primitive
agricultural community arose which differed in
almost every respect from the plantation
life of Louisiana, although the Acadians re-
mained loyally French.
They were never very wealthy, they were
seldom slave-owners, their wives and daughters
246 GEORGE W. CABLE
still performed the household work, and their
children, as a rule, could neither read nor write.
But they had kept a certain simplicity of char-
acter and an ideal of life that made them in
the main truthful, loving, and self-respecting.
Sometimes their little villages dotted the prairie
lands, joining one another by straggling houses
and homesteads along the high roads. Some-
times they gathered in little hamlets along the
outskirts of the great plantations, the men and
women earning their livelihood in the cotton
and sugar fields. Very often they were found
in the swamp lands and cities adapting them-
selves to new conditions. But always they
remained separate in habit and life from the
Creole.
To one of these little Acadian settlements
which had grown up on the Louisiana prairies
Mr. Cable went for the inspiration of his third
novel, Bonaventure. The hero, Bonaventure,
was an orphan boy who was being brought up
by the village cure. This old priest, pious, lov-
ing, and beneficent, saw in Bonaventure a soul
that would be sure to work largely for good or
GEORGE W. CABLE 247
evil, and he watched over the child with zeal-
ous care. The story tells how Bonaventure,
in the first trial of his life yielded to tempta-
tion, how he repented and by self-sacrifice
wrought out his punishment, and how he final-
ly became the great hope of the Acadians by
becoming a teacher and bringing to their chil-
dren the gift of education. The story has
three divisions, the separate scenes of which il-
lustrate the life of the prairies, the plantations,
and the swamps of Louisiana. In each the
local color is true and effective, the scenes and
incidents being in many instances studies
which the author made while visiting the re-
gions as an official of the government.
This little story, in which the Acadian was
introduced into literature for the first time
since the publication of Longfellow's Evange-
line, shows Mr. Cable at his best as a story-
teller pure and simple. One of his most
successful books, it is also one in which he
has incorporated most conspicuously his own
large faith in the possibility for good which lies
in every human soul.
248 GEORGE W. CABLE
During the production of these three novels
Mr. Cable had also been busy at other literary
work. Much of this has been devoted to a
study of Louisiana and New Orleans from
a historical point of view. Searching among
old records and historical documents, news-
papers, and Government reports, he sifted out
the material for a series of brilliant articles,
since published in book form under the title,
The Creoles of Louisiana. Here he pictured
the growth and life of the old colony, in poetic
yet truthful words, which made the record read
like romance, although it was genuine history.
Other historical articles, as New Orleans Be-
fore the Capture, and some Encyclopaedia
articles, further illustrate the author's power
for picturesque effect in dealing with facts,
while his Strange Trite Stories of Louisiana,
edited from original documents, show how well
his art can make truth reveal itself in all the
fascinating colors of romance. Madame Del-
phine, another story of creole life ; and John
March, Southerner, a story of the time im-
mediately following the Civil War, and the
GEORGE W. CABLE 249
scene of which is laid partly in the South and
partly in the North, completes the list of Mr.
Cable's novels.
His work, which first revealed the possi-
bilities for literature that lay in the old-time
Southern life, created a new field in American
fiction. Not only are his stories valuable
reminiscences of other days, but they are full
of an uplifting faith in man and in the power
of goodness to adjust the many evils that
deface human institutions.
Outside of his other literary work, Mr.
Cable has been an aggressive worker in the
field of practical politics, writing many essays
upon the questions which affect the state and
municipal government of the Southern States.
He is also well known as a lecturer and critic
upon literary art, and in recent years he has
become one of the most popular platform
readers, commanding large audiences wherever
he appeared.
His home has been for many years at
Northampton, Mass., from which place as a
centre he directs many interests outside his
2 SO GEORGE W. CABLE
own life. Among these may be included a
number of Home Culture Clubs, which bring
him into touch with thousands to whom his
help and advice are an inspiration.
CHAPTER XV
JOHN FISKE
1842
In history and philosophy the work of the
past generation of American writers has been
supplemented by that of John Fiske, an orig-
inal thinker whose writings reveal much of the
vital significance of scientific thought.
John Fiske was born at Middletown, Conn.,
where he lived during boyhood. His grand-
father's home, in which he was bred, was a typi-
cal New England household, and he was care-
fully trained in all the precepts of good conduct.
One of his first memories dates from the time
when he listened gravely to the discussions that
were frequent in the home on religion, politics,
and morals. From these conversations it was,
perhaps, that he very early pondered over ques-
tions of right and wrong, and settled the pres-
252 JOHN FISKE
tige of all the kings and queens of the world
which he had learned in chronological order by
classifying them as " good" or " bad." When
moral questions L-ecame too hard for him to
decide he would refer them to some older head,
being firm in the conviction that grown people
knew everything. Thus he once astonished
the cook by asking her if Heliogabalus was
good or bad, and he not infrequently puzzled
other people by his persistent effort after in-
formation.
Fiske cannot remember when he learned to
read, but he was studying Latin at six, and at
seven was reading Caesar. Goldsmiths His-
tory of Greece, and the History of the Jews, by
Josephus, were read before he was nine years
old, with the whole of Shakespeare, some parts
of Paradise Lost, and Bunyaris Pilgrims
Progress, the last a special delight because
here were argued those questions of right and
wrong which always fascinated him.
Notwithstanding this serious bent of his
mind Fiske had a healthy boy's love of play
and out-of-door life. And in this New Eng-
JOHN FISKE 253
land home he had also certain duties which he
performed faithfully. Apart from his love of
reading, and his faculty for asking startling
questions, he seemed on the outside an ordi-
nary boy. Yet from his earliest years he was
a thinker. Just as Emerson in his boyhood
pondered over the meaning and uses of life, so
Fiske puzzled over moral questions and the
duty of man to the race.
Side by side with this seriousness lay his in-
exhaustible thirst for knowledge. To satisfy
this he read and re-read every book that he could
lay hold of. History especially delighted him.
By the time he was eleven he knew his Frois-
sart as only such a boy could. In the lively
company of that goodly poet he visited the
court of Edward III. and saw the tournaments
and pageants, the knightly deeds and historic
spectacles of the age of chivalry. Feudal cas-
tles, royal hunts, the clang of armor, and the
shouts of battle filled eye and ear while he
wandered through those fascinating pages,
though outside the snow might be lying on
quiet New England fields, or the sun shining
254 JOHN FISKE
on scenes so commonplace that they seemed
part of another world.
With equal delight he followed Gibbon
through his story of the fall of Rome, once the
mistress of the world, and whose armies and
law-makers had moulded the modern nations
out of the savages who lived on the banks of
the Seine, the Rhone, and the Thames.
The works of Robertson and Prescott were
also a never-ending source of pleasure. Some
idea of the extent of his general reading may
be gathered from the fact that at this time he
compiled from memory a chronological table
extending from the age of Homer to the year
1820, and filling sixty pages of a large blank-
book.
Two years later he studied men from Hor-
ace and Sallust, Cicero and Juvenal, and other
Latin writers, and as he had been studying
Greek for four years he began a course of the
Greek philosophers, poets, and historians.
In the meantime there came a desire to
write. By the time he was fourteen this had
formulated itself into the intention to write a
JOHN FISKE 255
work OL the philosophy of history. This idea
did not seem in the least unusual, to him, and
he was puzzled to find that the minister, to
whom he confided his plan, did not sympathize
with him as enthusiastically as he had ex-
pected. Soon after this Fiske began a course
of scientific study, taking up geology, zoology,
botany, and kindred subjects. By the time he
was ready to enter Harvard he had also taken
a course in mathematics, had studied navigation
and surveying, was reading French, Italian, and
Portuguese, and keeping his diary in Spanish.
Few young men could boast of such a men-
tal equipment as Fiske's when he entered Har-
vard in his nineteenth year. But great as was
the knowledge he had absorbed from books,
the development of his mind had been still
greater. Although in the main unconscious of
it, he had become a profound thinker ; while
engaged in tracing the world's intellectual
progress through ancient and modern times he
had gathered the self-poise, and command of
material which made him, later, one of the in-
tellectual forces of his generation.
256 JOHN FISKE
While at Harvard Fiske took a two-years 5
law course, intending to practise for a living ;
but he had been moulding his life on other
lines, and he found it impossible to ignore this
fact. Every detail of a lawyer's business was
distasteful to him, and after a short trial he
gave up his office and turned to the literary life.
He had already become known as a writer for
reviews and other periodicals, and although his
friends thought it unwise for him to place
dependence upon literature, his success soon
proved that his choice had been a wise one.
In nearly every case Fiske's books have been
the outgrowth of lectures delivered in colleges
and other educational institutions, or in public
halls. His work has been on two distinct lines,
history and philosophy ; in the first he now
stands as an acknowledged authority ; in the
second he is known as a brilliant expositor of
Spencer and Darwin, and as a thinker who has
himself made a distinct contribution to the
theory of evolution.
In one of his early books, Myths and Myth
Makers, Fiske relaxed somewhat from his
JOHN FISKE 257
severer studies to trace in some charming
chapters the history of various popular super-
stitions and legends. While the book shows
the hand of the scholar, it also shows the light
fancy which he could bring to play upon his
subject; the gift of the story-teller is ap-
parent here, as many of the fairy stories which
charm children to-day are traced back to an
origin older than the first records of written
history. In pleasant fashion we are here taught
that many popular heroes who have figured in
the folk-lore of England, France, Germany,
and other countries, were, after all, but wander-
ing free lances, whose real home was far away
in Asia, in those fertile table-lands where man
first learned to till the soil and raise herds.
When that old Aryan race, the mother of the
greater part of the world to-day, began to
migrate it carried along with it those heroes.
Since that time they have been veritable gyp-
sies, taking up their abode here, there, and
everywhere, but keeping always close to their
blood relations, so that whoever hears the
story of their adventures knows that the
17
258 JOHN FISKE
writer is of the old mother - race, and that
he is but retelling the tales that his kindred
have listened to for thousands of years.
Fiske's most important historical work is his
Discovery of America. In the intervals of
other work he was for a period of thirty years
going over the ground necessary to the ac-
complishment of this great task.
Beginning with Ancient America, he traced
the history and achievements of the tribes
which existed ages ago on the American Con-
tinent, and whose ruined temples, fortifications,
and dwellings were a marvel to the European
discoverers. The author's wide knowledge of
universal history and of prehistoric times en-
abled him to illuminate his work with many
pictures of wonderful interest. Thus in de-
scribing the Eskimo, probably the first white
race of America, he brings in also the story
of the cave-dwellers of Europe, from whom the
Eskimo are supposed to be descended. In
doing this he presents a vivid picture of those
curious people who lived in caves above the
shores of inland lakes, who hunted the mam-
JOHN FISKE 259
moth and mastodon, and left behind them
many carefully drawn sketches of their war-
riors and hunters.
These chapters are followed by others of
equal interest, in which we trace the story
of the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians, of the
Pueblo Indians, and the tribes of the plains ;
then we have accounts of the old stories
which claim that the Chinese were the first
discoverers of America, these being followed
by the tales of the Irish adventurers, and of
the vikings. There is also a summary of
the fanciful stories which floated over Eu-
rope long before the days of Columbus, in
which philosophers, travellers, poets, and
witches alike prophesied the existence of
another continent far beyond the confines of
the Western Sea. We have also a descrip-
tion of the state of Europe during this time
when men \vere searching for Cathay and
its inexhaustible mines of wealth, or carrying
on the Crusades, or searching for the Indies
over new routes, on which they supposed if
the world were round they would have to
26o JOHN FISKE
sail uphill and down-hill to reach the other
side.
With the same fertility of resource the story
is carried down through the voyages of Colum-
bus and the other explorers, the conquest of
Peru and Mexico, and the colonization of the
New World and its subsequent history until
1806, when Lewis and Clarke crossed the Rocky
Mountains by following Indian trails, to survey
the new territory just bought from France by
the Government of the United States. This
work, which is in reality a summary ot the
world's progress in scientific thought, shows
the author's conception of the sphere of his-
torical writing. There is a mastery of detail
which makes it an invaluable guide for the
student, and a philosophical breadth that is
equally instructive to those who like to trace
the events of history to their moral sources.
Another valuable work is the Beginnings of
New England, which was elaborated from a
course of lectures delivered at Washington
University, St. Louis. This book has a pecul-
iar interest for American literature, as it con-
JOHN FISKE 261
tains a history of the growth of the idea of
popular government from the earliest times to
the verge of the American Revolution. Com-
paring the rule of the ancient world with that
of the modern, the author shows how the
idea of popular government first arose, how it
took root in the Anglo-Saxon race, formed the
charter of English liberty, and finally was em-
bodied in distinct form in the English colonies
of the New World. The story of the Puritan
settlement of New England, of the warfare with
the Indians, the founding of Harvard College,
and the growth of civil institutions, is followed
by a recital of the troubles with the mother
country, the tyranny of Andros and his over-
throw as the last royal governor. This work,
dominated by Fiske's masterly style, forms a
preface to the American Revolution, a brilliant
and learned history of the causes that led to the
revolt, and in a series of luminous pictures takes
us successively through the scenes of the French
Alliance, Valley Forge, the war on the frontier
and ocean, the treason of Arnold, and the final
victory at Yorktown. Some of the finest ex-
262 JOHN FISKE
amples of the author's work as a literary artist
are found in this book. He shows here, too,
that genius for characterization which marks
the true historian. Nowhere in historical com-
position are shown more striking descriptive
powers than where he draws the comparison
between the character of Benedict Arnold and
the common soldier of the Revolution, who
held the honor of his country sacred, and who
counted personal loss as nothing in the accom-
plishment of a holy trust.
The Critical Period of American History
follows naturally, taking up the period from
the end of the Revolution to the inauguration
of Washington. The Revolution had left the
colonies free from British rule, but there was
still no bond of union between them. Each
State was independent of every other, and it
seemed for a time that although they had
fought side by side for freedom, jealousies and
misunderstandings would now keep them far
apart. The wisest men of the age saw the need
of a general government to which all should be
equally bound, and for many years their efforts
JOHN FISKE 26
were directed toward this end. Fiske relates
the story of this critical period, during which it
seemed sometimes that the States were drifting
toward anarchy, so impossible was it for them
to decide upon a concerted plan of action.
Finally, however, after a succession of leagues,
conventions, and federations, the States, one by
one, accepted the Constitution as it was laid
before the Legislature of Pennsylvania by
Franklin, and the United States took their
place as a nation. This work is one of the most
important contributions ever made to the his-
tory of the United States, and, like the author's
other work, it is dignified in diction, lucid in
style, and abounds with a wealth of material
that makes it serve as a text-book for the stu-
dent as well as a volume for the general reader.
In American Political Ideas Fiske traces
the growth of American political life from the
primitive town-meeting of the early settlers to
the rise of great civil institutions. The book
has a particular interest as showing how the
Anglo-Saxon race through all its wanderings
has still kept to its early traditions.
264 JOHN FISKE
Apart from his historical work the genius
of Fiske has found its best expression in his
philosophical writings. His Cosmic Philoso-
phy, the earliest of his philosophical works,
embodied the discoveries of Darwin and the
other great evolutionists. In this as in all his
works Fiske has consistently persevered in
preaching the doctrine that moral ideas under-
lie all great scientific discoveries, and that evo-
lution is the means used to develop the race
spiritually. In his Destiny of Man and The
Idea of God, this idea is illustrated by argu-
ments so forcible, and by so clear an insight,
as to give the author high rank as a teacher of
spiritual truths.
CHAPTER XVI
MARK TWAIN
(Samuel L. Clemens)
1835
Among the writers who have added greatly
to American literature by transcribing the
humor that lies in the American nature, the
one who has won distinction under the pen
name of Mark Twain perhaps ranks first.
Samuel L. Clemens was born in Florida,
Mo., in 1835, but while very young his family
removed to Hannibal, on the banks of the
Mississippi, where his childhood was spent.
The Hannibal of that day was a typical river
town of the West, whose existence depended
upon the traffic brought to it by the passage
of the steamboats up and down the Mississippi.
This river was then the great highway between
the States of the Middle West and New Or-
266 MARK TWAIN
leans, the depot to which was taken much of
the produce from the farms and plantations
along its banks. All the towns and villages
along the Mississippi, from New Orleans up-
ward for hundreds of miles, depended largely
upon the river for means of communication
with the rest of the world ; the flat - boats,
keel-boats, rafts, and steamers that passed in
endless succession up and down were, as a rule,
manned by men from the river towns, and it
was the height of every boy's ambition to be
a steamboat captain, or failing that, a pilot,
deck-hand, or even cabin-boy.
In his book Life on the Mississippi Mark
Twain has given us a sketch of the typical boy
of his early days, who only knew real happi-
ness during the short time occupied by the lad-
ing and unlading of the freight from the two
steamboats that passed daily by Hannibal. He
says that the town was really awake only dur-
ing these two intervals, and that after the last
boat had steamed away again, Hannibal went
to sleep and slept until time for the appearance
of the next day's boat.
MARK TWAIN
Like the other boys of the village, Samuel
Clemens desired above all other things to be a
pilot on one of the steamers that plied be-
tween St. Louis and New Orleans. But as
his family objected to this occupation for him
he was apprenticed, at the age of thirteen, to
a printer; after learning his trade he visited
various cities and worked at the printer's case
in St. Louis, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New
York, and many smaller towns. But dissatis-
fied with this life he finally returned West and
fulfilled the ambition of his boyhood by be-
coming a pilot on the Mississippi.
Life on the Mississippi is full of the detail
that characterized the lives of the boatmen of
that day, and it contains, besides, many pict-
uresque illustrations of a phase of American
society that was confined to that period and
place alone.
It is therefore a genuine bit of local history
from the pen of a native historian, and it has
its own place in any study of American social
life. Not the least amusing and interesting of
these sketches is the one describing what a
268 MARK TWAIN
river pilot had to learn in the days of Mr.
Clemens's youth.
The boys of Hannibal had supposed that
the least intelligent of them could readily
learn to be a pilot in a few hours it seemed
so easy just to steer in and out of the docks,
to keep clear of other boats, and to guide up
or down mid-stream. But the youthful adven-
turer who actually stood beside the pilot at
the wheel, taking his first lesson in river navi-
gation, found that learning to steer was not so
easy.
Mark Twain says that the pilot on his boat
was expected to know every bend and point
on the Mississippi River for fifteen hundred
miles and how they looked in daylight, at dusk,
and at night ; how their shapes might change
as the river twisted and turned ; how they
looked when the shadows hung around them
on moonlit nights ; how to tell them from the
shadows themselves, and how to feel their pres-
ence when the blackness was so great that no
man could see anything a yard ahead. The
pilot was also supposed to know the depth
MARK TWAIN 269
and width of the river at every point ; to be
acquainted with every rock, snag, and bar, isl-
and, and reach ; to know every plantation be-
tween St. Louis and New Orleans, and thus
be able to land any travelling planter at his
own door. But intricate as this knowledge
seemed, Mark Twain was able at last to
master it, and he became one of the best
pilots on the river. He was able also to store
his mind full of pictures of river life, and
when he reproduced them many years after-
ward in Life on the Mississippi, the reader
was able to see again the busy life of those
long past days. Incorporated into the pilot's
story are also many interesting accounts of in-
cidents and persons in some \vay identified
with the region. The visit of Charles Dick-
ens and of Mrs. Trollope, an account of the
Mardi Gras, some old Indian legends, and a
visit to Mr. Cable, who had just published
The Grandissimes, brings the narrative down
to the present day and summarizes the develop-
ment of that part of the West and South.
In his twenty-sixth year Mark Twain ceased
2JO MARK TWAIN
to be a pilot, and for the next few years be-
came a wanderer, visiting Nevada, California,
and other Western States, the Sandwich Islands,
and finally New York, where he published his
first book under the name that has won him
fame, and which was taken from the old river
measurement, " Mark twain." The principal
story of this first book, The Jumping Frog
and Other Stories, had previously appeared
in a newspaper, and with the other sketches
had won for the author some reputation.
He had during his travels been clerk, news-
paper reporter, editor, and lecturer, being
sometimes successful and often unsuccessful.
Now, with a desire to see more of life he sailed
for Europe. Two years later appeared an ac-
count of his European journey in the book en-
titled The Innocents Abroad. It was this book
which in a few months made the author famous
wherever the English language was spoken.
Professedly a book of travel it was in reality
a burlesque on books of travel. From first to
last the pages \vere full of comical descriptions
of all that travellers had hitherto revered.
MARK TWAIN
Historical cities, palaces, museums, works of
art, even the very rivers and mountains that had
helped to make history were by this irreverent
scribe made to take on lights and colors so hu-
morous that it seemed as if the author had dis-
covered a new Europe. The Innocents Abroad
experienced a success accorded to few books.
It had an immense sale, and so universal was
the appreciation of it that even the mention of
the author's name would evoke a smile. In
his next two books, Roughing It and The
Gilded Age, Mr. Clemens portrayed Ameri-
can life on the plains, and as represented by the
character of Colonel Sellers, one of those im-
practical enthusiasts whose schemes for making
money without work forms the background for
a character sketch so vivid that, thrown into
dramatic form, it has proved one of the most
successful of modern plays of its class.
But Mark Twain's love of humor and his
indescribable faculty for seeing the funny side
of everything are closely balanced by his pow-
er as a student of human nature and by his
genius for the pathetic. His first works be-
2/2 MARK TWAIN
longed strictly to the domain of humorous
literature, but his later work has shown the
serious side of his nature and his attainment
both as a student of books and of men. A
striking example of this is found in some of his
juvenile works where are strongly seen the ten-
der sympathy of the man with all the impracti-
cal and romantic schemes of boyhood, and the
fine vision which sees in the ambition of the
child the impulse that often leads to noble
manhood.
In one of these juveniles, The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn, the author has taken for
his hero a typical boy who belonged to Han-
nibal as it was in Mr. Clemens's youth. This
boy is made to do all the things that the young
Samuel Clemens and his friends wanted to do
and could not. He runs away from home,
lives on the Mississippi for days on a raft, and
has all the adventures that were dreamed of by
the boys whose horizon was bounded by the
great river that was at once their pride and
their despair. Huckleberry Finn, outside its
romance, is also a careful study of types that
MARK TWAIN 273
abounded in the West. Negro dialect and
backwoods speech, the manners of the river
boatmen and the customs of the lower class of
Missouri landsmen, are all woven into the
story with the nicest art and serve to make it
a delineation of high artistic value.
In another book, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry
Finn appears as the friend of the hero, and
hand in hand these two boys walk through
the pages of an ideal boys' book, one in which
pluck, manliness, and heroism form the motive
for the action, at once simple, natural, and
sincere. These two books, with Life on the
Mississippi, are studies that American litera-
ture is much the richer for. They are distinct
from other sketches of social life in dealing
with a class that had hitherto been unchron-
icled, and they place the author among the
valued contributors to the history of American
social customs.
A book that departs entirely from this view
of life is The Prince and the Pauper, a study
of life in the days of the young King Edward
VI. of England. In this book Mr. Clemens
18
274 MARK TWAIN
takes for his theme a subject which he says
may be history, or only legend or tradition, and
adds that the events chronicled may have hap-
pened or may not have happened, but at any
rate they could have happened. Thereupon
he spins a pretty story about Edward VI. and
the little pauper, Tom Canty, who by the
simple expedient of exchanging clothes with
each other set the whole kingdom by the ears
and nearly lost Edward his crown.
Many pictures out of English history are
woven into this story in a way that shows
the careful research of the student. London
in the early part of the sixteenth century,
with its palaces and wretched beggars' hovels,
with its famous Tower full of prisoners of
noble birth, and its military parades and street
fights between apprentices and serving-men,
passes before the eye like a panorama, while
the picture of the little king, who, clothed in
rags and mistaken for a beggar, still de-
mands homage from every one, is startlingly
true to the age when royalty was considered a
divine right and the king's person a sacred
MARK TWAIN 2/5
thing. The story, which takes the unhappy
Edward over many rough ways and in much
strange company, in which he travels with beg-
gars, thieves, and outcasts, is full of many
pathetic incidents which illustrate the society
of the day. A few brief descriptions here and
there show the author at his best as a lover
of his kind and the possessor of broad and no-
ble sympathies.
Another book of which old English scenes
form the inspiration is A Connecticut Yankee
in King Arthur s Court. Here the author
takes for his hero a typical Connecticut Yan-
kee of the nineteenth century, and transports
him back to the days of the Round Table.
The hero's adventures with King Arthur and
Lancelot, his contempt for the usages of chiv-
alry, and his disgust at the ignorance of the
knights of the Round Table, are amusingly
detailed by the hero himself, who by his knowl-
edge of modern science outdoes the magic of
Merlin, introduces telephones and bicycles into
the country, starts factories, schools, and poly-
technic institutions, and is only kept from mak-
2/6 MARK TWAIN
ing a modern nation of ancient Britain by the
discovery that the people themselves do not
want these changes, that they are content with
their own ignorance and Merlin's magic, and
that progress, as known to Yankeeland, is a
thing they will have nothing of.
Pudd'n-Head Wilson is another story of
American life strong in conception and vig-
orous in handling. In some ways this book
shows Mark Twain at his highest point, as the
keen observer and critic who can read the emo-
tions of the soul and out of the study build up
one of those characters in whose delineation
modern fiction is so successful. Tom Sawyer,
the boy, and Pudd'n-Head Wilson, the man,
alike belong to the American novels that will
live. In these, as in all his later work, though
the humor is always present it is the graver
side of life that claims attention and shows the
author as the careful student of character.
Mark Twain's latest book, The Personal
Recollections of Joan of Arc, is a beautiful
chronicle of the brave maid of Orleans whose
story has touched the world for hundreds of
MARK TWAIN
years. Mr. Clemens spent a year in Paris
getting material for this work ; he became a
frequenter of libraries and a student of old
records and memoirs, pursuing his study with
all the zeal of the historian. His industry was
rewarded by the production of a beautiful his-
torical romance, in which the character of Joan
shines fair and true amid the actual surround-
ings that girt her short life. Nowhere in his
work is more apparent his reverence for wom-
anhood and his appreciation of fine charac-
ter than in this tender portrait of the young
girl whose tragic fate he made his theme.
Mr. Clemens's home is in Hartford, Conn.,
where he has lived for many years. Outside
his literary career he is known as a lecturer of
singular success, and within and far beyond the
home circle he is cherished for those fine graces
of character and that sympathetically affection-
ate nature which have won him innumerable
friends.
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