college at Midway, Georgia, and in 1860 he was ready for graduation
with the highest honors of his class. Compared with the larger Northern
institutions, the college was pitifully primitive; Lanier in later
years could even call it "farcical," nevertheless it is doubtful if
any university could have done more for the young poet. It brought him
in contact with a man, James Woodrow of the department of science, a
man who was to become later the president of the University of South
Carolina and the author of the famous book, _An Examination of Certain
Recent Assaults on Physical Science_ (1873).

    "Such a man," says his biographer, "coming into the life of
    Lanier at a formative period, influenced him profoundly. He set
    his mind going in the direction which he afterwards followed
    with great zest, the value of science in modern life and its
    relation to poetry and religion. He also revealed to him the
    meaning of genuine scholarship."[124]

This influence it may have been which made Lanier in later years so
tolerant and so broad of view. The attraction between pupil and teacher
seems to have been mutual. Through Woodrow it was that Lanier received
his appointment as tutor in the college, a position which he held
during the year that followed.

It was a year of close study and of wide reading. Throughout his
undergraduate period he had read enormously: often in unusual books:
Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Jeremy Taylor, Keats's _Endymion_,
Chatterton, Christopher North, Tennyson, whose _Maud_ he learned by
heart, Carlyle, and a long list of others. "Without a doubt it was
Carlyle who first enkindled in Lanier a love of German literature and a
desire to know more of that language." He studied with eagerness. His
dream now was to enter a German university and do scholarly work as
Basil Gildersleeve had just done, and Thomas R. Price, two other young
men of the new South, but suddenly as he dreamed all his life plans
fell in ruins about him. The crash of war resounded in his ears. All in
a moment he found himself in an atmosphere of fierce excitement. The
college became an armed camp; Macon became a military center. Before
he had fairly realized it the young tutor, just turned twenty, had
enlisted in the first company to leave the State, and was marching away
to the front.

His career as a soldier need not detain us. It was varied and it was
four years long and it ended dramatically on the stormy night of
November 2, 1864, when the Federal cruiser _Santiago-de-Cuba_ picked
up the blockade runner _Lucy_ off Wilmington, North Carolina, and sent
her crew, among them signal officer Lanier, to Point Lookout prison. A
fellow prisoner and a close friend during the hard days that followed
was another Southern poet, John Bannister Tabb (1845-1909), whose brief
lyrics as we know them to-day possess beauty and finish and often
distinction.

Lanier was released in March, 1865, and after incredible hardships
succeeded in reaching his home in Macon more dead than alive to find
his mother dying of consumption. The poet's tendency to the disease
was congenital; the prison hardships and exposure had broken down his
physical vigor; and two years later while teaching a small country
school in Prattville, Alabama, as he was forced to do by the poverty
of the South and his own lack of money or profession, hemorrhages from
the lungs began, and the rest of his life, like Stevenson's under the
same conditions, was a fight with tuberculosis, a perpetual changing
from place to place that he might find some climate that would afford
relief. With unparalleled heroism he fought off the disease for fifteen
years, and under physical weakness that would have sent the average
man to his bed and his grave he made himself recognized as the leading
poetic voice of the new South, and one of the few poetic voices of his
era.

His life divides itself into three periods: the first one his time of
dreaming, as he himself styled it--his boyhood, ending with the call to
arms in 1861; the second his period of storm and stress, his period of
struggle and uncertainty and final adjustment, ending in 1873 with his
determination to devote his life to music and poetry; and finally the
seven or eight years in which eagerly and unremittingly, with failing
health and long periods of total incapacity, he wrote all those books
and poems for which he is now known.

Lanier's work more than that of any other writer of his time
illustrates the difference between the mid-century literature and that
of the later national period. He is distinctively a transition figure:
he heard both voices and he obeyed both. Until after the war he was
what Hayne and Timrod had been, and Taylor and Stoddard--a disciple
of Keats, a poet of merely sensuous beauty. But for the war he would
have been a Longfellow bringing from Germany _Hyperions_ and _Voices
of the Night_. The four vital years in the camps, on the blockade
runner, in the military prison, with their close contact with life
in its elemental conditions, was a university course far different
from any that he had dreamed of in his college days. It was this that
differentiates him from Hayne and Timrod and that brings him into our
period.

_Tiger Lilies_, his first published book (1867), is a document not only
in the life of Lanier but also in the transition period of the sixties.
It is a crude first novel full of a strange mixture of weakness and
strength. It has been likened to Longfellow's _Hyperion_, but the
likeness extends no further than this: _Tiger Lilies_ is the novel
transitional to the seventies as _Hyperion_ was transitional to the
romantic thirties and forties. In parts it belongs completely to the
older period. It opens with this outburst, not by Paul Fleming, but by
Paul Rübetsahl:

    "Himmel! Cospetto! Cielo! May our nests be built on the
    strongest and leafiest bough of the great tree Ygdrasil! May
    they be lined with love, soft and warm, and may the storms be
    kind to them: Amen and Amen!" said Paul Rübetsahl.

The first part is florid in the extreme and artificial, full of
literary affectations and conceits:

    On the last day of September, 1860, huntsman Dawn leapt out of
    the East, quickly ran to earth that old fox, Night, and sat
    down on the top of Smoky Mountain to draw breath, etc.

Its discussions of poetry, of music, of the meaning of art and of life
generally are all in the dream-world of German romance, and its chaotic
plot and its impossible characters and happenings are in full keeping.
But with part two the book comes suddenly to life. The hero enters the
war and all at once there is realism, passages like this as graphic
even as Whitman:

    The wounded increase. Here is a musket in the road: there is
    the languid hand that dropped it, pressing its fingers over a
    blue edged wound in the breast. Weary pressure, and vain--the
    blood flows steadily.

    More muskets, cartridge-boxes, belts, greasy haversacks, strew
    the ground.

    Here come the stretcher-bearers. They leave a dripping line of
    blood. "Walk easy as you kin, boys," comes from the blanket
    which the men are carrying by the corners. Easy walking is
    desirable when each step of your four carriers spurts out the
    blood afresh or grates the rough edges of a shot bone in your
    leg.

    The sound of a thousand voices, eager, hoarse, fierce, all
    speaking together yet differently, comes through the leaves
    of the undergrowth. A strange multitudinous noise accompanies
    it--a noise like the tremendous sibilation of a mile-long wave
    just before it breaks. It is the shuffling of two thousand feet
    as they march over dead leaves.

The novel is laid in the Tennessee Mountains in the same region that
was to figure a decade later in the stories of Charles Egbert Craddock.
The Great Smoky Mountains and Chilhowee Mountain--familiar names
now--form the background, but the author puts no individuality into the
landscape. It might be Germany. His mountaineers, however, are alive
and they are sharply characterized. Gorm Smallin and his brother Cain
are among the earliest figures in that vast gallery of realistically
portrayed local types that soon was to figure so prominently in
American literature. The chapter that records the desertion of Gorm and
his arraignment by his brother Cain is worthy of standing with the best
work of Charles Egbert Craddock or Octave Thanet. The prison scenes,
drawn from the author's own first-hand experience, are documents in the
history of the war. On every line is the stamp of reality. Here is a
bivouac scene:

    Cain Smallin sat, stiff backed upon the ground, sternly
    regarding his packed circle of biscuits in the skillet.

    "How do they come on, Cain? Most done?"...

    "Bully! Brownin' a little some of 'em. 'Bout ten minutes yit."

At that moment a shell that has buried itself in the ground explodes
in the midst of the group, literally burying the party and scattering
havoc. Cain Smallin, unhurt, digs himself from the ruins and scrapes
the dirt from his face.

    "Boys," said he, in a broken voice of indignant but mournful
    inquiry, "have any of ye seed the skillet?"

In the words of its preface, the book was a cry, "a faint cry, sent
from a region where there are few artists, to happier lands who own
many; calling on these last for more sunshine and less night in their
art.... There are those even here in the South who still love beautiful
things with sincere passion."

But necessity was upon the young dreamer. He was without a profession,
and he had married a wife. There was no refuge but his father's
profession, which always had been the last as well as the first resort
of young Southerners. His father's law firm was glad to employ him,
though it could offer but meager compensation. No more novels, no more
dreams of the scholar's life, of Heidelberg, and poetry. Until 1873
he was busy, like Cable during the same period, with his conveyances
and his bills of sale. The ambitious plan of a long poem of medieval
France, "The Jacquerie," he kept in his desk, a beautiful dream that
often he returned to. He wrote exquisite little songs for it:

          May the maiden,
          Violet-laden
        Out of the violet sea,
          Comes and hovers
          Over lovers,
        Over thee, Marie, and me,
          Over me and thee.

His poetic experiments of this period one may find at the back of the
definitive edition of his work. With Timrod and Hayne he was still
dreamy and imaginative, more prone to look at the beautiful than at
the harsher realities of humanity, yet even as he was dreaming over
his "Jacquerie" he was not oblivious to the problems of his own time.
He wrote dialect poems: "Jones's Private Argument," "Thar's More in
the Man than Thar Is in the Land," "Nine from Eight," and the like,
and published them in Southern papers. They deal with the Georgia
"Crackers" and with the social and financial conditions of the times,
and they were written in 1868, two years before the Pike County
balladry. In 1875 with his brother Clifford he published in _Scribner's
Monthly_ "The Power of Prayer; or, the First Steamboat up the Alabama,"
a negro dialect poem adapted undoubtedly from a similar episode
recounted in Mark Twain's _The Gilded Age_, yet original in tone and
realistically true. Had it been unsigned we should attribute it without
hesitation to Irwin Russell, who by many is believed to have been the
first to discover the literary possibilities of the negro, at least in
the field of poetic balladry. How like Russell is a stanza like this:

        It 'pear to me dis mornin' I kin smell de fust o' June.
        I 'clar', I b'lieve dat mockin'-bird could play de fiddle soon!
        Dem yonder town-bells sounds like dey was ringin' in de moon.

But Russell's first poem, "Uncle Cap Interviewed," appeared in
_Scribner's_ almost a year later. The Lanier brothers contributed to
the magazine at least one more dialect poem, "Uncle Jim's Baptist
Revival Hymn," a product as realistically true to the negro as anything
written later by Harris or Page:

                Sin's rooster's crowed, Ole Mahster's riz,
                  De sleepin'-time is pas';
                Wake up dem lazy Baptissis,
     _Chorus._    _Dey's mightily in de grass, grass,
                  Dey's mightily in de grass._

                De Meth'dis team's done hitched; O fool,
                  De day's a-breakin' fas';
                Gear up dat lean old Baptis' mule,
                  _Dey's mightily in de grass, grass,
                  Dey's mightily in de grass._ Etc.

Lanier was a pioneer in a rich field.

IV

The turning point came in 1873. The poet's physical condition had
become so alarming that he had been sent to spend the winter at San
Antonio, Texas. He found what least he was looking for. The German
Maennerchor of the city, an unusual circle of musicians, discovered him
and asked him to play to them the flute, an instrument that had been
his companion since boyhood. "To my utter astonishment," he wrote his
wife, "I was master of the instrument. Is not this most strange? Thou
knowest I had never learned it; and thou rememberest what a poor muddle
I made at Marietta in playing difficult passages; and I certainly have
not practised; and yet there I commanded and the blessed notes obeyed
me, and when I had finished, amid a storm of applause, Herr Thielepape
arose and ran to me and grasped my hand, and declared that he hat never
heert de flude accompany itself pefore."[125]

Judging from contemporary testimony, we are compelled to rate Lanier
as a musical genius. Though he never had had formal training in the
art, from his childhood music had been with him a consuming passion.
He had taken his flute to the war, he had smuggled it into the prison,
and he had moved all his life amid a chorus of exclamations over the
magic beauty of his improvisations. The masters were praising him now:
he would be a master himself. He would toil no longer at the task he
despised; he would live now for art. In November, 1873, he wrote to his
father:

    How can I settle myself down to be a third-rate struggling
    lawyer for the balance of my little life, as long as there is
    a certainty almost absolute that I can do something so much
    better? Several persons, from whose judgment in such matters
    there can be no appeal, have told me, for instance, that I am
    the greatest flute-player in the world; and several others,
    of equally authoritative judgment, have given me an almost
    equal encouragement to work with my pen. My dear father, think
    how, for twenty years, through poverty, through pain, through
    weariness, through sickness, through the uncongenial atmosphere
    of a farcical college and of a bare army and then of an
    exacting business life, through all the discouragement of being
    wholly unacquainted with literary people and literary ways--I
    say, think how, in spite of all these depressing circumstances,
    and of a thousand more which I could enumerate, these two
    figures of music and poetry have steadily kept in my heart so
    that I could not banish them. Does it not seem to you as to
    me, that I begin to have the right to enroll myself among the
    devotees of these two sublime arts, after having followed them
    so long and so humbly, and through so much bitterness?[126]

He gave himself first to music. So perfect was his mastery of his
instrument that he secured without difficulty the position of first
flute in Hamerik's Peabody Orchestra of Baltimore, and he played at
times even with Thomas's Orchestra of New York. It was the opinion of
Hamerik, himself a rare artist, that Lanier was a musician of highest
distinction:

    His human nature was like an enchanted instrument, a magic
    flute, or the lyre of Apollo, needing but a breath or a touch
    to send its beauty out into the world.... In his hands the
    flute no longer remained a mere material instrument, but was
    transformed into a voice that set heavenly harmonies into
    vibration. Its tones developed colors, warmth, and a low
    sweetness of unspeakable poetry--His playing appealed alike
    to the musically learned and to the unlearned--for he would
    magnetize the listener; but the artist felt in his performance
    the superiority of the momentary inspiration to all the rules
    and shifts of mere technical scholarship. His art was not only
    the art of art, but an art above art. I will never forget the
    impression he made on me when he played the flute concerta of
    Emil Hartman at a Peabody symphony concert, in 1878--his tall,
    handsome, manly presence, his flute breathing noble sorrows,
    noble joys, the orchestra softly responding. The audience was
    spellbound. Such distinction, such refinement! He stood the
    master, the genius.[127]

His first recognition as a poet came in 1875 with the publication of
"Corn" in _Lippincott's Magazine_. The poem caught the attention of
Taylor and brought to the poet the commission to furnish the words
for the Cantata to be sung at the Centennial Exposition. After that
commission Lanier was a national figure.

During the scant six years that followed, the years of his literary
life in which he wrote all that is distinctive in his poetry, he lived
in a whirlwind of activity, of study in the large libraries to which
he now had access, of music, of literary hack-work, or he lay totally
incapacitated by sickness that threatened always the speedy termination
of all. Poetry he could write only in moments stolen from more
imperative things. He compiled a guide book to Florida, he prepared
courses of lectures on Shakespeare for clubs of women, he delivered
two scholarly courses of lectures at Johns Hopkins University, and he
published four juveniles that adapted for boys the old romances of
chivalry. He wrote lyrics and songs, but his future as a poet must rest
on five poems: "Corn," the first significant poem from the new South;
"The Symphony," a latter-day ode to St. Cecilia; "The Psalm of the
West," which he intended should do for the centennial year what Taylor
had failed so lamentably to do in his Fourth of July ode; "The Marshes
of Glynn," a symphony without musical score; and, finally on his death
bed, held in life only by his imperious will, "Sunrise," his most
joyous and most inspired improvisation of all.

V

For Lanier was essentially an improvisatore. He left behind him no
really finished work: he is a poet of magnificent fragments. He was
too excited, too impetuous, to finish anything. Poetry was a thing of
rhapsodic outbursts, of tiptoe glimpses: his eager jottings for poems
made on the backs of envelopes, scraps of paper, anything that was
at hand, fill a volume. He may be likened to a child in a meadow of
daisies: he filled his hands, his arms, full of the marvelous things,
then threw them aside to gather more and ever more. There was no
time to arrange them, no time even to look at them twice. Ideas came
in flocks; he lived in a tumult of emotion. His letters quiver with
excitement as do those of no other American poet. "All day my soul hath
been cutting swiftly into the great space of the subtle, unspeakable
deep, driven by wind after wind of heavenly melody." "I cannot tell you
with what eagerness I devoured _Felix Holt_." "My heart was all a-cry."
"The fury of creation is on me to-day." "Lying in the music-waters,
I floated and flowed, my soul utterly bent and prostrate." "The very
inner spirit and essence of all wind-songs, bird-songs, passion-songs,
folk-songs, country-songs, sex-songs, soul-songs, and body-songs hath
blown me in quick gusts like the breath of passion and sailed me into a
sea of vast dreams." One may quote interminably.

Hamerik's characterization of his flute-playing may be taken as the key
to all his work: "The artist felt in his performance the superiority
of the _momentary inspiration_ to all the rules and shifts of mere
technical scholarship." It explains the unevenness of his work and its
lack of finish. He had no patience to return to a poem and labor upon
it. Other and more rapturous melodies were calling to him. It explains
his lack of constructive power: inspiration is a thing of rapturous
glimpses, not of long, patient coördinating effort. His poems are
chaotic in structure even to the point often of obscurity. "Corn," for
example, was intended to be a poem with a message, and that message
doubtless the superiority of corn over cotton as a crop for the new
South. But half the poem has only the vaguest connection with the
subject. One-third of it outlines the duties and privileges of the poet
soul. The message is not brought home: one has to labor to find it.
There is a succession of beautiful images expressed often with rare
melody and distinction, but inconsecutive even to vagueness.

His prose has the same characteristics. The lectures on the English
novel seem like the first draft of work rather than like a finished
product. He changes his plan as he proceeds. It was to be a study of
the novel as a literary form, but as he progresses he changes it into
a study of the development of personality in literature, and finally
ends it by devoting half his total space to a rhapsody upon George
Eliot. _The Science of English Verse_ has the same faults. He rides a
pet theory through chapters and dismisses really basic principles with
a paragraph. It is a book of magnificent, even at times of inspired
sections, but as a complete treatise it has no great value. The same
may be said of all his prose work: he had flashes of inspiration but
no consecutive message. The cause for it was partly pathological,
partly temperamental. He was first of all a musician, a genius, an
improvisatore.

That his conception of the poet's office was a broader and saner and
more modern one than that of most of his contemporaries was undoubtedly
true. In "Corn" he addresses thus the stalk that stands high above its
fellows:

        Still shalt thou type the poet-soul sublime
        That leads the vanward of his timid time
        And sings up cowards with commanding rime--
        Soul calm, like thee, yet fain, like thee, to grow
        By double increment, above, below;
        Soul homely, as thou art, yet rich in grace like thee,
        Teaching the yeomen selfless chivalry.

The poet then is not to be a mere dreamer of beauty, a dweller in the
clouds apart from the men of his time. He is to stand squarely on the
earth:

        Thou lift'st more stature than a mortal man's,
        Yet ever piercest downward in the mold
          And keepest hold
        Upon the reverend and steadfast earth
          That gave thee birth.

But despite his conception of the poet's office, Lanier himself is not
often a leader and a prophet. He had ceased to be Georgia-minded and
he had felt the national thrill that was making a new America, but it
was not his to be the strong voice of the new era. "The Psalm of the
West," which casts into poetic form certain vital episodes of American
history, has no message. One searches it in vain for any interpretation
of the soul of the great republic, or any forecasting of the future
years, or any passages expressing what America is to stand for among
the nations. It is a fragment, the introduction to what should have
been the poem.

In "The Symphony" more than elsewhere, perhaps, he is the poet of his
period. The poem is a cry against the materialism that Lanier felt was
crushing the higher things out of American life:

        "O Trade! O, Trade! Would thou wert dead!
        The Time needs heart--'t is tired of head:
        We're all for love," the violins said.

Each instrument in the orchestra joins in the argument. "A velvet flute
note" followed the passion of the violins, the reeds whispered, "the
bold straightforward horn" spoke out,

        And then the hautboy played and smiled
        And sang like any large-eyed child.

The solution of the problem was the same that Shelley had brought. Love
alone could master the evils of the time:

        Life! Life! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to west,
                    Love, love alone can pore
                    On thy dissolving score
                    Of harsh half-phrasings,
                      Blotted ere writ,
                    And double erasings
                      Of chords most fit.

And love was to come through music:

        Music is love in search of a word.

The poem is indeed a symphony. One feels that the poet is composing
rather than writing, that he is thinking in terms of orchestration,
balancing parts and instruments, and working out tone values. The same
is true of "The Marshes of Glynn" and "Sunrise": they are symphonies.

One must appreciate fully this musical basis of Lanier's art if one is
to understand him. He thought in musical forms. The best illustration,
perhaps, may be found in his Centennial Cantata. To the average man
the poem meant little. One must read it and reread it and study it if
one is to get any consecutive thought from it. But read after Lanier's
explanation, it becomes not only clear but illuminating:

    The principal matter over which the United States can
    legitimately exult is _its present existence as a Republic_,
    in spite of so much opposition from Nature and from man. I
    therefore made the refrain of the song--about which all its
    train of thought moves--concern itself wholly with the _Fact of
    existence_: the waves cry "_It shall not be_"; the powers of
    nature cry "It shall not _be_"; the wars, etc., utter the same
    cry. This Refrain is the key to the whole poem.

    A knowledge of the inability of music to represent any shades
    of meaning save those which are very intense, and very
    highly and sharply contrasted, led me to divide the poem
    into the eight paragraphs or movements which it presents,
    and make these vividly opposed to each other in sentiment.
    Thus the first movement is reflection, measured and sober:
    this suddenly changes into the _agitato_ of the second: this
    agitato, culminating in the unison shout "_No! It shall not
    be_," yields in the third movement to the _pianissimo_ and
    meager effect of the skeleton voices from Jamestown, etc.: this
    _pianissimo_ in the fourth movement is turned into a climax of
    the wars of armies and of faiths, again ending in the shout,
    "No!" etc.: the fifth movement opposes this with a _whispered_
    chorus--Huguenots whispering _Yea_, etc.: the sixth opposes
    again with loud exultation, "Now praise," etc.: the seventh
    opposes this with the single voice singing the Angels' song;
    and the last concludes the series of contrasts with a broad
    full chorus of measured and firm sentiment.

    The metrical forms were selected purely with reference to their
    descriptive nature: the four trochaic feet of the opening
    strophe measure off reflection, the next (Mayflower) strophe
    swings and yaws like a ship, the next I made outre and bizarre
    and bony simply by the device of interposing the line of two
    and a half trochees amongst the four trochee lines: the swift
    action of the Huguenot strophe of course required dactyls: and
    having thus kept the first part of the poem (which describes
    the time _before_ we were a real nation) in meters which are
    as it were exotic to our tongue, I now fall into the iambic
    meter--which is the genius of English words--as soon as the
    Nation becomes secure and firm.

    My business as member of the orchestra for three years having
    caused me to sit immediately in front of the bassoons, I had
    often been struck with the possibility of producing the ghostly
    effects of that part of the bassoon register so well known to
    students of Berlioz and Meyerbeer--by the use of the syllable
    _ee_ sung by a chorus. With this view I filled the ghostly
    Jamestown stanza with _ee_'s and would have put in more if I
    could have found them appropriate to the sense.[128]

No one can read this without thinking of Poe's "Philosophy of
Composition." It explains much of Lanier's work.

VI

Had Lanier lived a decade longer, had he had time and strength to
devote himself completely to his poetry, had his impetuous soul
had time to gain patience and poise, and divest itself of florid
extravagance and vague dithyramb, he might have gained a much higher
place as a poet. He was gaining in power: his last poem is his
greatest. He was laying plans that would, we feel sure, have worked
themselves out to high poetic achievement. For at least four books
of poetry he had already selected titles: _Hymns of the Mountains_,
_Hymns of the Marshes_, _Songs of Aldheim_, and _Poems on Agriculture_.
What they were to be we can judge only from "The Marshes of Glynn" and
"Sunrise."

In these two poems we have work that is timeless and essentially
placeless. There is a breadth and sweep about it that one finds only in
the greater poets:

              And invisible wings, fast fleeting, fast fleeting,
                Are beating
              The dark overhead as my heart beats--and steady and free
              Is the ebb-tide flowing from marsh to sea.

        Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
        Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
        From the weighing of fate and the sad discussions of sin,
        By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of
              Glynn.

        As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
        Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God:
        I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies
        In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the
              skies:
        By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod
        I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God:
        Oh, like the greatness of God is the greatness within
        The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.

The jottings that he made in his notebooks and the fragments of poems
that he noted down as the inspiration came to him remind us often of
Whitman. They have sweep and range:

    I fled in tears from the men's ungodly quarrel about God: I
    fled in tears to the woods, and laid me down on the earth; then
    somewhat like the beating of many hearts came up to me out of
    the ground, and I looked and my cheek lay close by a violet;
    then my heart took courage and I said:

        "I know that thou art the word of God, dear violet.
        And, oh, the ladder is not long that to my heaven leads!
        Measure the space a violet stands above the ground,
        'Tis no farther climbing that my soul and angels have to do than
              that!"

            I went to the church to find my Lord.
            They said He is here. He lives here.
            But I could not see him
            For the creed-tables and bonnet flowers.

Lanier is essentially a poet of unfulfilled promise. He seems always
about to do greater things than in reality he ever does. His lyrics
like "Evening Song," and "The Trees and the Master" and "The Song of
the Chattahoochee," have strains in them almost Shelley-like, but
there is always the fatal defect somewhere. Nothing is perfect. It
seems strange sometimes that one who could at moments go so far could
not go the whole way and remain long. He must hold his place among
the American poets by virtue of a few fragments. A few times was he
rapt into the pure ether of poetry, but he was allowed to catch only
fleeting glimpses.

VII

The period may be said to have produced in the South two inspired
poets, Lanier and Irwin Russell, and in many ways the two were alike.
Both were frail of body and sensitive of temperament, both were
passionately given to music and found their poetic field by means of
it, both were educated men, eager students of the older literatures,
both discovered the negro as poetic material, and both died when
their work was just beginning, Russell, like Keats, at the boyish
age of twenty-six. But Russell added what Lanier had no trace of, a
waywardness of character and a genius for goodfellowship that wrecked
him even earlier than it did Burns.

The life of Russell is associated with four cities: Port Gibson,
Mississippi, where he was born in 1853; St. Louis, where he spent the
earlier years of his life and where later he completed the course at
the Jesuit University; Port Gibson again, where he studied law and was
admitted to the bar; New York City, of which he was a resident from
January until July, 1879; and New Orleans, where he died in December
of the same year. His life was fitful and restless. He did little with
his profession, turning from it to learn the printer's trade, and then
after a few listless months, drifting into other things. He had dreams
of California and wandered on foot in its direction as far as Texas; he
attempted to run away to sea, and he spent much time on the river boats
making jovial friends of the captains and the pilots. His banjo assured
him of a welcome wherever he might go.

The writing of poetry was never to him a serious occupation. He
composed with abandon when the mood was on him, he seldom revised, and
he cared little for the finished product save as it might please his
friends. One finds many evidences in his work that he learned his art
from Burns, whom he considered the greatest poet the world had ever
produced. He had saturated himself too with the English balladists and
the genuine old poets of the early periods. The poetry of his own time
angered him. In "The Hysteriad" (_Scribner's_, 16:759) he satirizes
with bitterness the contemporary product. "A poem of the period," he
said, "or a periodical poem, is a thing that is altogether emotional,
and is not intended to convey any idea in particular." To him poetry
meant something not esoteric and idealized, but something that lay very
close to the life of every day, something redolent of humanity, like
Burns's songs. He maintained that his own inspiration had come not at
all from other poets, but from actual contact with the material that he
made use of. His own words concerning the composition of his first poem
have a peculiar value. They are a part of the history of the period:

    You know I am something of a banjoist. Well, one evening I was
    sitting in our back yard in old Mississippi "twanging" on the
    banjo, when I heard the missis--our colored domestic, an old
    darkey of the Aunt Dinah pattern--singing one of the outlandish
    camp-meeting hymns of which the race is so fond. She was an
    extremely "'ligious" character and, although seized with the
    impulse to do so, I hesitated to take up the tune and finish
    it. I did so, however, in the dialect I have adopted, and
    which I then thought and still think is in strict conformity
    to their use of it, I proceeded, as one inspired, to compose
    verse after verse of the most absurd, extravagant, and, to
    her, irreverent rime ever before invented, all the while
    accompanying it on the banjo and imitating the fashion of the
    plantation negro.... I was then about sixteen and as I had soon
    after a like inclination to versify, was myself pleased with
    the performance, and it was accepted by a publisher, I have
    continued to work the vein indefinitely.[129]

To what extent the poet was indebted to the Pike balladry that had
preceded his first work, at least so far as wide publication in
Northern magazines was concerned, is not easily determined. It seems
extremely probable that he had seen it. Lanier, as has been shown, had
published negro dialect poetry in _Scribner's_ nearly a year before
Russell, but whoever was pioneer, the author of "Christmas-night
in the Quarters" was the one who first caught the attention of the
reading public and exerted the greatest influence upon the period. He
undoubtedly was the leading pioneer. Page and Gordon dedicated their
_Befo' de War_ "To Irwin Russell, who awoke the first echo," and Joel
Chandler Harris, manifestly an authority, declared that "Irwin Russell
was among the first--if not the very first--of Southern writers to
appreciate the literary possibilities of the negro character, and of
the unique relations existing between the two races before the war, and
was among the first to develop them."[130]

In the last year of his life Russell, encouraged by the reception of
his magazine poems, went to New York to make literature his profession.
Bunner, the editor of _Puck_, and Gilder and Robert Underwood Johnson
of the _Century_ staff, and others, recognized his ability, and gave
him every encouragement possible. One of the most prominent of the
poets of the older school, it may be remarked, also became interested
in him and urged him to drop the ephemeral type of verse to which he
had addicted himself and devote his talents to really serious work.
For a brief period he obeyed, with what success one may judge from the
poems at the end of his volume.

Success came too late. His friends were powerless to control his
wayward genius. His frail constitution gave way. From a bed of fever he
arose still half delirious, staggered to the docks, engaged to work his
way on a New Orleans boat as a coal-heaver, and in New Orleans secured
a position on the _Times_. But the end was near. To a member of the
_Times_ staff he opened his heart in words that might have come from
Poe:

    It has been the romance of a weak young man threaded in with
    the pure love of a mother, a beautiful girl who hoped to be my
    wife, and friends who believed in my future. I have watched
    them lose heart, lose faith, and again and again I have been so
    stung and startled that I have resolved to save myself in spite
    of myself.... I never shall.[131]

He died a few weeks later.

VIII

The value of Russell's work depends not so much upon the poetic
quality of it as upon the faithfulness and the skill with which he has
portrayed the negro. Within this narrow field he has had no superior.
Harris has summed it up thus:

    The most wonderful thing about the dialect poetry of Irwin
    Russell is his accurate conception of the negro character.
    The dialect is not always the best--it is often carelessly
    written--but the negro is there, the old-fashioned,
    unadulterated negro, who is still dear to the Southern heart.
    There is no straining after effect--indeed the poems produce
    their result by indirection; but I do not know where could be
    found to-day a happier or a more perfect representation of
    negro character.[132]

Russell is less romantic in his picture of the negro than are Page and
Harris. Once in a while he throws the mellow light over the old days,
as in "Mahsr John," where he represents the freed slave dwelling in
imagination upon the glories that he has once known, but he holds the
strain not long:

        I only has to shet my eyes, an' den it seems to me
        I sees him right afore me now, jes' like he use' to be,
        A-settin' on de gal'ry, lookin' awful big an' wise,
        Wid little niggers fannin' him to keep away de flies.

        He alluz wore de berry bes' ob planters' linen suits,
        An' kep' a nigger busy jes' a-blackin' ob his boots;
        De buckles on his galluses wuz made of solid gol',
        An' diamon's!--dey wuz in his shut as thick as it would hol'.

Page would have stopped after the old negro had ended his glorification
of the old days, but Russell hastens to bring the picture to
present-day conditions:

        Well, times is changed. De war it come an' sot de niggers free,
        An' now ol' Mahsr John ain't hardly wuf as much as me;
        He had to pay his debts, an' so his lan' is mos'ly gone--
        An' I declar' I's sorry fur my pore ol' Mahsr John.

It was essentially the later negro, the negro of the poet's own day,
that is represented in the poems. He has become a farmer for himself
now and tries sly tricks when he takes his cotton to market. Detected,
he is voluble in his explanations:

        Rocks in dat ar cotton! How de debbil kin dat be?
        I packed dat bale mys'f--hol' on a minute, le'--me--see--
        My stars! I mus' be crazy! Mahsr Johnny, dis is fine!
        I's gone an' hauled my brudder's cotton in, stead ob mine!

He sends his boy to work as waiter on the river boats and as he is
departing overwhelms him with advice:

        Dem niggers what runs on de ribber is mos'ly a mighty sharp set;
        Dey'd fin' out some way fur to beat you, ef you bet 'em de water
              wuz wet;
        You's got to watch out for dem fellers; dey'd cheat off de horns
              ob a cow.
        I knows 'em; I follered de ribber 'fore ebber I follered a plow.

He is inordinately fond of preaching, as witness "Half-way Doin's" and
"A Sermon for the Sisters." He delights to interpret the Scriptures,
and his exegesis is often full of local color:

        "Dar's gwine to be a' oberflow," said Noah, lookin' solemn--
        Fur Noah tuk the _Herald_, an' he read de ribber column--
        An' so he sot his hands to wuk a-cl'arin' timber-patches,
        An' 'lowed he's gwine to build a boat to beat the steamah
              _Natchez_.

All the characteristics of the negro are touched upon with the
certainty of perfect knowledge: his superstitions, his ignorance of
the world, his awe of legal terms, his humor, his simple trust in his
religion, his childlike attitude toward nature, his habit of addressing
sententious language to his beasts of burden as if they understood all
he said, his conceit, and his firm belief in immortality.

Russell was one of the pioneers of the new era which had as its most
marked characteristic the use of American themes and backgrounds and
absolute truth to American life. No section of the social era was too
lowly or unknown for him to take as material for his art. He could even
plan to write a negro novel with all of its characters negroes and
write the first chapters. Little, however, that he planned ever came to
completion. The thin volume of poems published after his death was but
a fragment of what he might have written under happier conditions. As
it is, he must, like Lanier, be treated as one of those brief excited
lives that are found ever at the opening of new romantic eras--Novalis,
Chatterton, Burns, Keats--poets who left behind only fragments of what
might have been, but who influenced enormously the writers that were to
be.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE. (1830-1886.) _Poems_, Boston, 1855; _Sonnets
  and Other Poems_, 1857; _Avolio: A Legend of the Island of Cos_,
  1860; _Legends and Lyrics_, Philadelphia, 1872; _The Mountain
  of the Lovers, with Poems of Nature and Tradition_, 1875; _Life
  of Robert Young Hayne_, 1878; _Life of Hugh Swinton Legare_,
  1878; Complete edition of the Poems with a sketch by Margaret J.
  Preston, 1882.

  HENRY TIMROD. (1829-1867.) _Poems_, Boston, 1860; Complete
  edition of the Poems with biographical introduction of 60 pages
  by Paul Hamilton Hayne, 1872; Poems of Henry Timrod, 1901.

  SIDNEY LANIER. (1842-1881.) _Tiger Lilies: a Novel_, 1867;
  _Florida: Its Scenery, Climate, and History_, 1876; _Poems_,
  1877; _The Boy's Froissart. Being Sir John Froissart's Chronicles
  of Adventure, Battle, and Custom in England, France, Spain, etc.
  Edited for Boys_, 1878; _The Science of English Verse_, 1880;
  _The Boy's King Arthur. Being Sir Thomas Malory's History of King
  Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. Edited for Boys_,
  1880; _The Boy's Mabinogion. Being the Earliest Welsh Tales of
  King Arthur in the Famous Red Book of Hergest. Edited for Boys_,
  1881; _The Boy's Percy. Being Old Ballads of War, Adventure, and
  Love, from Bishop, Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English
  Poetry. Edited for Boys_, 1882; _The English Novel and the
  Principles of Its Development_, 1883; _Poems of Sidney Lanier,
  Edited by His Wife_, with a Memorial by William Hayes Ward, 1884;
  Select Poems of Sidney Lanier, edited with an Introduction,
  Notes, and Bibliography, by Morgan Callaway, 1895; _Music and
  Poetry: Essays_, 1898; _Retrospects and Prospects: Descriptive
  and Historical Essays_, 1899; _Letters of Sidney Lanier_.
  Selections from His Correspondence 1866-1881, 1899; _Shakespeare
  and His Forerunners_, 1902; _Sidney Lanier_, by Edwin Mims, 1905.
  _Some Reminiscences and Early Letters of Sidney Lanier_, G. H.
  Clarke, 1907; _Poem Outlines_, 1908; _Synthesis and Analysis of
  the Poetry of Sidney Lanier_, C. C. Carroll, 1910.

  IRWIN RUSSELL. _Poems by Irwin Russell._ With an introduction by
  Joel Chandler Harris. New York. 1888.

CHAPTER XIV

THE ERA OF SOUTHERN THEMES AND WRITERS

Just as the West of Mark Twain, Harte, Miller, Eggleston, and others
had been central in the literature, especially in the fiction, of
the seventies, so the South became central in the eighties. Southern
writers like Cable, Lanier, and Russell began their distinctive
work not long after the opening of the Bret Harte period, yet it
was not until after _Old Creole Days_, 1879, the death of Russell
in the same year and of Lanier in 1881, and the publication of Miss
Woolson's _Rodman the Keeper_ and the first Uncle Remus book in 1880,
Johnston's _Dukesborough Tales_, 1883, and Craddock's _In the Tennessee
Mountains_, 1884, that what we may call the era of Southern themes and
Southern writers may be said fully to have taken possession of American
literature. By 1888 Albion W. Tourgee could write in the _Forum_, "It
cannot be denied that American fiction of to-day, whatever may be
its origin, is predominatingly Southern in type and character.... A
foreigner studying our current literature, without knowledge of our
history, and judging our civilization by our fiction, would undoubtedly
conclude that the South was the seat of intellectual empire in America
and the African the chief romantic element of our population."

The real cause of this outburst has not often been touched upon. The
sudden vogue of Southern themes and Southern writers came not, as some
have explained, from the fact that a distinctive Southern literature
had arisen, or that a peculiar school had sprung up in one section of
the country, just as, for instance, we may speak of the New England
school earlier in the century. Nor is it explained by the theory
that the close of the war brought a new feeling of individuality
to the South, a consciousness of its own self which was to find
expression in a group of writers, as England after the wars with
Spain found expression in the Elizabethans. It was not a merely local
manifestation. The term "Southern Literature," as now found in the
titles of an increasing number of books and studies, is misleading. If
the South, or any other section, is to produce a distinct literature
of its own, that section must possess not alone themes and writers,
but publishers as well, and widely circulated magazines of the type
of the _Atlantic_ and the _Century_ and _Harper's_. It must have also
critics and adequate critical standards, and, most important of all, it
must have a clientele, readers enough to dispose of its own literary
product. The South has had practically none of these save the literary
themes and the writers. The turn of the tide from Western material and
Western workers to material and workers from the South was a national
phenomenon. It was in reality more a thing of the North than it was of
the South. Without Northern publishers and magazines and criticism and
readers there would have been no Southern literature.

To illustrate with a concrete example: Richard Malcolm Johnston
published at Augusta, Georgia, in 1864, _Georgia Sketches by an Old
Man_. In 1871 he added more tales to the collection, published them
in the _Southern Magazine_ of Baltimore, issued them in book form
in the same city, with the title _Dukesborough Tales_, and a little
later put forth a second and enlarged edition. Yet Edward Eggleston
could say when Johnston as late as 1879 published his first story in
a Northern magazine, "Mr. Neelus Peeler's Conditions," in _Scribner's
Monthly_, that the reading public everywhere hailed his advent as that
of a new and promising young man who had sent in his first story.
It was not until the Harpers in 1883 issued a Northern edition of
the much-published _Dukesborough Tales_ that Johnston ceased to be a
producer of merely Southern literature.

The cause of the Southern tone which American literature took on during
the eighties lies in the single fact that the South had the literary
material. The California gold, rich as it was when first discovered
by the East, was quickly exhausted. There were no deep mines; it was
surface gold, pockets and startling nuggets. Suddenly it was discovered
that the South was a field infinitely richer, and the tide turned.
Nowhere else were to be found such a variety of picturesque types
of humanity: negroes, crackers, creoles, mountaineers, moonshiners,
and all those incongruous elements that had resulted from the great
social upheaval of 1861-1865. Behind it in an increasingly romantic
perspective lay the old régime destroyed by the war; nearer was the
war itself, most heroic of struggles; and still nearer was the tragedy
of reconstruction with its carpet-bagger, its freed slaves, and its
Klu-Klux terror. Never before in America, even in California, had there
been such richness of literary material. That a group of Southern-born
writers should have arisen to deal with it was inevitable. Who else
_could_ have dealt with it, especially in the new era that demanded
reality and absolute genuineness? No Northerner could have revealed,
for instance, the heart of the old plantation negro. Miss Woolson's
stories of the South, brilliant as they are, are in a different world
from those of Joel Chandler Harris.

The writers themselves made no claim that they were producing a
Southern literature. They had, all of them, been touched by the new
after-the-war spirit, and their outlook was nation wide. Cable in
an address at Oxford, Mississippi, in June, 1882, pleaded for home
subjects as a basis for literature, but for home subjects treated in
a spirit of the broadest nationality: "Only let them be written," he
urged, "to and for the whole nation and you shall put your own State
not the less but the more in your debt."[133] He declared himself to
be not at all in favor of the popular new phrase "the new South"; he
would change it, he said, to "the _no_ South." Lanier, as we have seen,
was American in the broadest sense, and Joel Chandler Harris could say:
"What does it matter whether I am a Northerner or Southerner if I am
true to truth and true to that larger truth, my own true self? My idea
is that truth is more important than sectionalism and that literature
that can be labeled Northern, Southern, Western, Eastern, is not worth
labeling."[134]

It was the voice of the new spirit of the new age.

That the enormous vogue of the Bret Harte and the _Pike County Ballads_
literature of the early seventies could have passed unnoticed even in
the remotest sections of America seems improbable, but to attempt to
trace the influence it exerted on the group of Southern writers that
sprang up shortly after it had made its appearance is useless and
worse than useless. Not for a moment must it be forgotten that this
earlier Western outburst was not a local evolution that succeeded in
attracting the attention of the nation; it was rather the first result
of a condition which was general and nation wide. It was the new
after-the-war demand for life and reality and democracy, and it broke
out first in the West because the West at that moment had material
which was peculiarly fitted to make an appeal. Had the West at that
crisis had no writers ready to exploit this material, the outburst
undoubtedly would have come from the South. Cable and Lanier and
Johnston and Russell would have written very much as they did write had
Bret Harte and Mark Twain and Edward Eggleston never lived.

There were influences and conditions in the South that were peculiarly
favorable to the production of the type of literature demanded by
the time. Georgia in particular offered congenial soil. The middle
region of the State was the most democratic part of the South. It
had been settled by a sturdy race which separation from the more
aristocratic areas had rendered peculiarly individual. At one extreme
was the mountain cracker, a type which had been made peculiar only
by isolation, at the other were such remarkable men as Alexander H.
Stephens, Atticus G. Haygood, Benjamin H. Hill, John B. Gordon, and
Henry W. Grady. The social system was peculiar. Relations between
master and slave were far different from those found on the larger
plantations where overseers were employed. The negroes were known
personally; they were a part of the family. Relations like those
described so delightfully by Joel Chandler Harris were common. "There
was no selling," as Johnston expressed it; "black and white children
grew up together. Servants descended from father to son." The result
of this democracy was a natural tendency toward the new realistic type
of localized literature. While the rest of the South had been romantic
and little inclined to use its own backgrounds and its own local types
of character, Georgia had been producing since the mid years of the
century studies of its own peculiar types and institutions.

As early as 1835 had appeared _Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents,
etc., in the First Half Century of the Republic. By a Native Georgian_,
from the pen of Augustus B. Longstreet, graduate of Yale, lawyer,
preacher, college president. It was republished in New York in 1840
and from that day it has never been out of print. A realistic, brutal
series of sketches it is, full of ear-chewing fights, cruel gougings,
horse-racings, horse-swaps, coarse practical jokes, and all the
barbarous diversions of a primitive people in a primitive time. Its
author apologizes in his preface for the ephemeral character of the
book: the stories and sketches, he explains, are "nothing more than
fanciful combinations of real incidents and characters." Yet few books
of its decade have had more vitality. The author worked first hand
in the materials of the life that he himself had seen about him. It
is true at every point. Its author, a generation ahead of his times,
summed up in one phrase the new realism that was to come: "real people
and real incidents in fanciful combinations."

Associated with Longstreet in this earlier realistic period of Georgia
were Oliver Hillhouse Prince (1787-1837), who contributed to _Georgia
Scenes_ "The Militia Drill," a sketch read perhaps by Thomas Hardy
before he wrote his _Trumpet-Major_, and William Tappan Thompson
(1812-1882), whose _Major Jones's Chronicles_ appeared in book form in
Philadelphia in 1840.

There was another element in Georgia during the earlier period which
had strong influence upon the later group of writers, and allowed it to
produce not only Richard Malcolm Johnston and Joel Chandler Harris and
"Bill Arp," but poets like Ticknor and Lanier as well. In the cities
and larger towns of the State there was an atmosphere of culture unique
in the South. Harry Stillwell Edwards would account for it by calling
attention to an element usually overlooked:

    In the late thirties--1839 to be exact--Wesleyan Female College
    came into being at Macon--the first chartered college for
    women in the world, and soon began to turn out large classes
    of highly educated and accomplished graduates. The majority of
    these came from Georgia, but the whole South has always been
    represented in Wesleyan. Without going into this subject, I
    wish to state as my personal opinion that Georgia's literary
    development, which is undoubtedly more extensive than that of
    other Southern States, is due to the intellectual and spiritual
    soil or environment produced by this College in the fifty
    years of its existence previous to 1890. You will understand
    how this can be true though the mothers of the State's best
    known writers may not have been graduates. In my youth, every
    girl associate I had was of this college. Its atmosphere was
    everywhere apparent. To-day its graduates lead all over the
    State.[135]

One may trace these elements--the Longstreet realism at the one
extreme and the Macon College influence at the other--in all the
later Georgia writers. We have found how Lanier in his earlier work
alternated between broad cracker sketches and dialect ballads and the
more elegant forms of prose and poetry. Even a poem as rhapsodic as his
"Corn" contains within it a realistic picture of the thriftless Georgia
planter. It was from the blending of these two streams of influence
that there came some of the strongest literature of the new period.

II

The link between Longstreet and the younger Georgia writers is to be
found in Richard Malcolm Johnston. Chronologically--he was born in
1822--he belongs to the earlier group, the generation of Lowell and
Story, Boker and Read and Edward Everett Hale, and he seems to have
been touched not at all by the literary influences that had so strongly
exerted themselves upon the writers of the seventies. He was reared
on a central Georgia plantation with all the surroundings of the old
régime; he had been educated in the type of rural school so graphically
described in his earlier sketches and then later at Mercer College,
from which he was graduated in 1841; he gave the vigorous years of his
life to the law and then to teaching; and after he was sixty years of
age began seriously to devote himself to the profession of literature.

As early as 1857 he had begun writing sketches of provincial life
after the Longstreet pattern. His first piece, "The Goose Pond School"
was followed at long intervals by others in the same vein, written,
the greater part of them, after his removal to Baltimore partly to
assist his friend Turnbull, the editor of the _Southern Magazine_,
who had asked for his help, and partly "to subdue as far as possible
the feeling of homesickness for my native region. It never occurred
to me that they were of any sort of value. Yet when a collection of
them, nine in all, was printed by Mr. Turnbull, who about that time
ended publication of his magazine, and when a copy of this collection
fell into the hands of Henry M. Alden, of _Harper's Magazine_, whose
acquaintance I had lately made, he expressed much surprise that I had
not received any pecuniary compensation, and added that he would have
readily accepted them if they had been offered to him. Several things
he said about them that surprised and gratified me much. I then set
into the pursuit of that kind of work."[136]

Johnston owed his introduction to Northern readers almost wholly to
Lanier, who also was an exile in Baltimore. His influence it was that
induced Gilder to accept for _Scribner's Monthly_ the first of the
_Dukesborough Tales_ to be published in the North. He did far more
than this: he gave him constructive criticism; he pointed out to him
weaknesses which might be tolerated in a pioneer like Longstreet, but
not in the work of a later artist. Certain phases of his sketches he
found exceedingly strong: "The story strikes me as exquisitely funny,
and your reproduction of the modes of thought and of speech among
the rural Georgians is really wonderful."[137] There were, however,
frequent "verbal lapses" which were almost fatal, "the action of the
story does not move fast enough," and the catastrophe is clumsily
handled. "I will try to see you in a day or two and do this" [read the
manuscript aloud to him with running criticisms]. It was an opportunity
that few authors ever get; and Johnston was wise enough to make the
fullest use of it. Through Lanier it was that Alden became acquainted
with his work and that the enlarged _Dukesborough Tales_ was taken over
by the Harpers, and it was only after the Northern issue of this book
in 1883 that its author took a place among the writers of the period.
During the following fifteen years he wrote voluminously.

Lanier's criticism touches with skill the strength and the weakness of
Johnston as a writer of fiction. Like Longstreet, he was preëminently
a maker of sketches. In his novels like _Old Mark Langston_ and
_Widow Guthrie_ he failed dismally. Local color there is and humor
and characterization, but in all that pertains to plot management the
novels are feeble. The center and soul of his art was the Georgia
environment. "As long as the people in my stories have no fixed
surroundings, they are nowhere to me; I cannot get along with them at
all." There is little of story, little of action, little consideration
of the deeper passions and motives of life: there is rather an artless
presentation of the archaic provincial types and surroundings that he
had known in his boyhood. Even within this restricted area his range
was narrow. He seemed to be attracted, as was Longstreet, by the
eccentric and the exceptional. As he looked back into his earlier years
it was only the highly individualized characters and surroundings that
stood out in his memory, and he peopled his stories largely with these.
Like Lincoln he had traveled a primitive legal circuit in primitive
days and he had had unique experiences highly laughable. His range of
characters also is small. There is little of the negro in his work: he
deals almost wholly with the class of middle Georgia common people that
are but one step removed from the mountain cracker of Harris and Harbin.

Johnston was to the Southern movement what Eggleston was to the
Western. The two have many points of resemblance. Both were humorists,
both worked in the crude materials of early American life, and both
seem to have evolved their methods and their literary ideals very
largely from themselves. Neither was an artist. They will live largely
because of their fidelity to a vanished area of American life.

Joel Chandler Harris also continued the tradition of Longstreet and
worked in the materials of Georgia life with little suggestion from
without. There are few instances of a more spontaneous lapsing into
literary expression. He had been reared in an environment as unliterary
as Mark Twain's. Longstreet and Johnston, Russell and Lanier, were all
college men, but Harris's school education ended when he was twelve,
and the episode that ended it, a most unusual one, he has described
thus:

    One day while Joe Maxwell was sitting in the post-office
    looking over the Milledgeville papers, his eye fell on an
    advertisement that interested him greatly. It seemed to bring
    the whole world nearer to him. The advertisement set forth the
    fact that on next Tuesday the first number of the _Countryman_,
    a weekly paper, would be published. It would be modeled after
    Mr. Addison's little paper, the _Spectator_, Mr. Goldsmith's
    little paper, the _Bee_, and Mr. Johnson's little paper, the
    _Ram_-_bler_. It would be edited by J. A. Turner, and it would
    be issued on the plantation of the editor, nine miles from
    Hillsborough. Joe read this advertisement over a dozen times,
    and it was with a great deal of impatience that he waited for
    the next Tuesday to come.

    But the day did come, and with it came the first issue of the
    _Countryman_. Joe read it from beginning to end, advertisements
    and all, and he thought it the most entertaining little
    paper he had ever seen. Among the interesting things was an
    announcement by the editor that he wanted a boy to learn the
    printing business. Joe borrowed pen and ink and some paper from
    the friendly postmaster, and wrote a letter to the editor,
    saying that he would be glad to learn the printing business.
    The letter was no doubt an awkward one, but it served its
    purpose, for when the editor of the _Countryman_ came to
    Hillsborough he hunted Joe up, and told him to get ready to go
    to the plantation....

    [The office] was a very small affair; the type was old and
    worn, and the hand-press--a Washington No. 2--had seen
    considerable service.... He quickly mastered the boxes of the
    printer's case, and before many days was able to set type
    swiftly enough to be of considerable help to Mr. Snelson, who
    was foreman, compositor, and pressman. The one queer feature
    about the _Countryman_ was the fact that it was the only
    plantation newspaper that has ever been published, the nearest
    post-office being nine miles away. It might be supposed that
    such a newspaper would be a failure; but the _Countryman_
    was a success from the start, and at one time it reached a
    circulation of nearly two thousand copies. The editor was a
    very original writer.

_On the Plantation: a Story of a Georgia Boy's Adventures during the
War_ is the record, slightly disguised--Joe Maxwell is Joe Harris, and
Hillsborough is Eatonton--of the four years in the boy's life that made
of him the Joel Chandler Harris that we know to-day. It was his college
course, and it was a marvelously complete one. He became a part of the
great plantation; he shared its rude festivities; he came closely in
contact with the old-time type of plantation negro; and, more important
still, he discovered his employer's great library and was directed in
his reading by Mrs. Turner, who took pains with the diffident young
lad. In time he became himself a contributor to the paper, secretly
at first, then openly with the editor's approval. The end of the war
and with it the end of the old plantation régime, ended also the
_Countryman_ and sent Harris into wider fields.

For a time he worked at Macon, home of Lanier, then at New Orleans,
where Cable in the intervals of office work was dreaming over the
old French and Spanish records, then for a time he was editor of
the Forsyth, Georgia, _Advertiser_. The force and originality of
his editorials attracted at length the attention of W. T. Thompson,
author of the Georgia classic, _Major Jones's Courtship_, and in 1871
he secured him for his own paper, the _Savannah News_. Five years
later, Harris went over to the _Atlanta Constitution_ and during the
twenty-five years that followed his life was a vital part of that
journal's history.

One must approach the literary work of Harris always with full
realization that he was first of all a journalist. During the greater
part of his life he gave the best of every day unreservedly to the
making of his paper. Literary fame came to him almost by accident.
To fill the inexorable columns of his paper he threw in what came
easiest for him to write and he thought no more about it. Then one
day he looked up from his desk to find himself hailed as a rising
man of letters. It amazed him; he never half believed it; he never
got accustomed to it. Years later in the full noon of his success
he could say: "People insist on considering me a literary man when
I am a journalist and nothing else. I have no literary training
and know nothing at all of what is termed literary art. I have had
no opportunity to nourish any serious literary ambition, and the
probability is that if such an opportunity had presented itself I would
have refused to take advantage of it." Never once did he seek for
publication; never once did he send a manuscript to any publisher or
magazine that had not earnestly begged for it; never once did he write
a line with merely literary intent.

His first recognition by the literary world came through a bit of mere
journalism. The story is told best in the words of Harry Stillwell
Edwards:

    About 1880, Sam Small of Atlanta, Georgia, on the local staff
    of the _Constitution_, began writing negro sketches, using "Old
    Si" or "Uncle Si" as his vehicle, and soon made the character
    famous. Small, however, was very dissipated, and frequently
    the Sunday morning Old Si contribution failed to appear. Joel
    Chandler Harris, the paragrapher for the _Constitution_ as
    he had been for the _Savannah News_, was called on to supply
    something in place of the missing Si sketches and began with
    "Uncle Remus." His first contributions were not folk lore,
    but local. He soon drifted into the folk lore, however, and
    recognizing the beauty and perfection of his work, people
    generally who remembered the stories of their childhood,
    wrote out for him the main points and sent them. I, myself,
    contributed probably a dozen of the adventures of Brer Rabbit
    as I had heard them. This service he afterwards acknowledged
    in a graceful card of thanks. Uncle Remus became, soon, the
    mouthpiece of the generation, so far as animal legends are
    concerned.

The stories at once attracted attention in the North. The _New York
Evening Post_ and the _Springfield Republican_ in particular made much
of them. As a direct result, _Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings; The
Folk-lore of the old Plantation_, appeared in 1880 and its author
quickly found himself a national and indeed an international personage.

The really vital work of Harris lies in two fields: sketches of
the old-time negro and sketches of the mountain cracker of the
later period. It is upon the first that his permanence as a writer
must depend. He worked in negro folk lore, in that vast field of
animal stories which seems to be a part of the childhood of races,
but it is not his folk lore, valuable as it may be, that gives him
distinction. Ethnological and philological societies have done the
work more scientifically. Many of the animal legends in common use
among the slaves of the South were already in print before he began to
write.[138] What he did was to paint a picture, minutely accurate, of
the negro whom he had known intimately on the plantation of Mr. Turner
at the transition moment when the old was passing into the new. With
a thousand almost imperceptible touches he has made a picture that is
complete and that is alive. The childish ignorance of the race and yet
its subtle cunning, its quaint humor, its pathos, its philosophy, its
conceit, its mendacity and yet its depth of character, its quickness at
repartee--nothing has been omitted. The story teller is more valuable
than his story: he is recording unconsciously to himself his own soul
and the soul of his race. Brer Rabbit after all is but a negro in
thinnest disguise, one does not have to see Frost's marvelous drawings
to realize that. The rabbit's helplessness typifies the helplessness
of the negro, and yet Brer Rabbit always wins. Suavity and duplicity
and shifty tricks are the only defense the weak may have. His ruses are
the ruses of a childlike mind. Clumsy in the extreme and founded on
what seems like the absolute stupidity of Brer Fox and Brer Wolf and
the others who are beguiled, these ruses always succeed. The helpless
little creature is surrounded on all sides by brutality and superior
force; they seemingly overcome him, but in the end they are defeated
and always by force of superior cunning and skilful mendacity at the
supreme moment. It is the very essence of the child story--the giant
killed by Jack, the wolf powerless to overcome Little Red Riding Hood,
and all the others--for the negro himself was but a child.

Page uses the negro as an accessory. The pathos of the black race
adds pathos to the story of the destroyed white régime. Harris rose
superior to Page in that he made the negro not the background for a
white aristocracy, but a living creature valuable for himself alone;
and he rose superior to Russell inasmuch as he embodied the result of
his studies not in a type but in a single negro personality to which he
gave the breath of life. Harris's negro is the type plus the personal
equation of an individual--Uncle Remus, one of the few original
characters which America has added to the world's gallery.

It is worthy of note too that he interpreted with the same patience
and thoroughness the music and the poetry of the negro. Russell was
a lyrist with the gift of intuition and improvisation; Harris was a
deliberate recorder. The songs he wrote are not literary adaptations,
nor are they framed after the conventional minstrel pattern. They are
reproductions. In his first introduction to _Uncle Remus, His Songs and
His Sayings_ he wrote:

    As to the songs, the reader is warned that it will be found
    difficult to make them conform to the ordinary rules of
    versification, nor is it intended that they should so conform.
    They are written, and are intended to be read, solely in
    reference to the regular invariable recurrence of the cæsura,
    as, for instance, the first stanza of the Revival Hymn:

        Oh, whar | shill we go | w'en de great | day comes |
        Wid de blow | in' er de trumpits | en de bang | in' er de drums |
        Hoy man | y po' sin | ers 'll be kotch'd | out late |
        En fine | no latch | ter de gold | en gate |

    In other words, the songs depend for their melody and rhythm
    upon the musical quality of _time_, and not upon long or short,
    accented or unaccented, syllables. I am persuaded that this
    fact led Mr. Sidney Lanier, who is thoroughly familiar with
    the metrical peculiarities of negro songs, into the exhaustive
    investigation which has resulted in the publication of his
    scholarly treatise on The Science of English Verse.

Nowhere else does one come so completely into the feeling of negro
music as in Harris. In "The Night Before Christmas," in _Nights with
Uncle Remus_, a latter-day "Sir Roger de Coverley Paper," we feel the
tone of it:

    His voice was strong and powerful, and sweet, and its range
    was as astonishing as its volume. More than this, the melody
    to which he tuned it, and which was caught up by a hundred
    voices almost as sweet and as powerful as his own, was charged
    with a mysterious and pathetic tenderness. The fine company
    of men and women at the big house--men and women who had made
    the tour of all the capitals of Europe--listened with swelling
    hearts and with tears in their eyes as the song rose and fell
    upon the air--at one moment a tempest of melody, at another a
    heart-breaking strain breathed softly and sweetly to the gentle
    winds. The song that the little boy and the fine company heard
    was something like this--ridiculous enough when put in cold
    type, but powerful and thrilling when joined to the melody with
    which the negroes had invested it:

        De big Owl holler en cry fer his mate,
            My honey, my love!
        Oh, don't stay long! oh, don't stay late!
            My honey, my love!
        Hit ain't so mighty fur ter de good-by gate,
            My honey, my love!
        Whar we all got ter go w'en we sing out de night,
            My honey, my love!
        My honey, my love, my heart's delight--
            My honey, my love!

IV

With the success of the first Uncle Remus book there came the greatest
flood of dialect literature that America has ever known. The years
1883 and 1884 mark the high tide of this peculiar outbreak, and to
Georgia more than to any other locality may be traced the primal cause.
In 1883 came what may be called the resurgence of the cracker, that
Southeastern variety of the Pike which now came to the North as a new
discovery. The leading characteristics of the type were thus set forth
by Harris in his story of "Mingo":

    Slow in manner and speech, shiftless in appearance, hospitable
    but suspicious toward strangers, unprogressive, toughly
    enduring the poor, hard conditions of their lives, and
    oppressed with the melancholy silences of the vast, shaggy
    mountain solitudes among which they dwell. The women are lank,
    sallow, dirty. They rub snuff, smoke pipes--even the young
    girls--and are great at the frying pan; full of a complaining
    patience and a sullen fidelity.

Again America became excited over a new Pike County type. Johnston's
_Dukesborough Tales_ were issued for the first time in the North;
Harris's "At Teague Poteet's, a Sketch of the Hog Mountain Range,"
appeared in the June _Century_, and Charles Egbert Craddock's story
of the same mountains, "The Harnt that Walks Chilhowee," came out the
same month in the _Atlantic_. That was in 1883. The next year appeared
Harris's _Mingo_, and Craddock's _In the Tennessee Mountains_. Then the
flood gates of dialect were loosened. The _Century_ published Page's
story "Mars Chan," which it had been holding for four years, a story
told entirely in the negro dialect. The new and mysterious Craddock,
who was found now to be Miss Mary N. Murfree, created a widespread
sensation. In 1883 appeared James Whitcomb Riley's first book _The Old
Swimmin'-Hole and 'Leven More Poems_ and Mary Hallock Foote's _The
Led-Horse Claim_; in 1887 came Octave Thanet's _Knitters in the Sun_,
dialect tales of the Arkansas canebrakes, and shortly afterwards Hamlin
Garland's studies of farm life in the middle West. The eighties stand
for the complete triumph of dialect and of local color.

Henry James, viewing the phenomenon from his English standpoint,
offered an explanation that is worthy of note: "Nothing is more
striking," he wrote, "than the invasive part played by the element of
dialect in the subject-matter of the American fictions of the day.
Nothing like it, probably--nothing like any such predominance--exists
in English, in French, in German work of the same order. It is a part,
in its way, to all appearance, of the great general wave of curiosity
on the subject of the soul aboundingly _not_ civilized that has lately
begun to well over the Anglo-Saxon globe and that has borne Mr. Rudyard
Kipling, say, so supremely high on its crest."

Harris's work with the Georgia cracker, though small in quantity, is
of permanent value. Unlike Craddock, he was upon his native ground
and he worked with sympathy. He had not the artistic distinction and
the ideality of Page, but he was able to bring his reader nearer to
the material in which he worked. Page was romantic and his standpoint
was essentially aristocratic; Harris was realistic and democratic. He
worked close always to the fundamentals of human life and his creations
have always the seeming spontaneousness of nature itself.

As a writer Harris must be summed up as being essentially fragmentary.
His literary output was the work of a man who could write only in
the odd moments stolen from an exacting profession. It is work done
by snatches. He left no long masterpiece; his novels like _Gabriel
Tolliver_ and the rest are full of delightful fragments, but they
are rambling and incoherent. Of _Plantation Pageants_ its author
himself could say, "Glancing back over its pages, it seems to be but a
patchwork of memories and fancies, a confused dream of old times." With
his Brer Rabbit sketches, however, this criticism does not hold. By
their very nature they are fragmentary; there was no call for continued
effort or for constructive power; the only demand was for a consistent
personality that should emerge from the final collection and dominate
it, and this demand he met to the full.

No summary of Harris's work can be better than his own comment once
uttered upon _Huckleberry Finn_: "It is history, it is romance, it
is life. Here we behold a human character stripped of all tiresome
details; we see people growing and living; we laugh at their humor,
share their griefs, and, in the midst of it all, behold we are taught
the lesson of honesty, justice, and mercy." To no one could this
verdict apply more conspicuously than to the creator of Uncle Remus and
of Teague Poteet.

V

To the Georgia group belongs in reality Mary Noailles Murfree, better
known as Charles Egbert Craddock. Tennessee, her native State--she was
born at Murfreesboro in 1850--was of Georgia settlement. On one side
of the border as on the other one found a certain wild independence
and originality and crude democracy, the same that voiced itself in
Longstreet and Thompson, and later in Johnston and Harris. Moreover,
the mountains of the Craddock tales lie along the Georgia border and
their inhabitants are the same people who figured in Longstreet's
"Gander Pulling" and furnished Gorm Smallin and Teague Poteet for
Lanier and Harris.

During the seventeen years of her later childhood and youth, or from
1856 to 1873, Miss Murfree lived at Nashville, Tennessee, where her
father had an extensive legal practice, and then until 1882 she made
her home at St. Louis, Missouri. She was, therefore, unlike Johnston
and Harris, metropolitan in training and in point of view. Lameness
and a certain frailness of physique caused by a fever debarred her
from the activities of childhood and drove her in upon herself for
entertainment. She was precocious and she read enormously, pursuing her
studies even into the French and the Italian. Later she attended the
academy at Nashville and then a seminary at Philadelphia, and, on her
return home, even began the study of law in her father's library.

For such a woman, especially in the seventies, literature as a
profession was inevitable. She began to write early and some of her
apprentice papers, signed even then with the pen name Charles E.
Craddock, found publication, notably a few sketches and tales in the
weekly _Appleton's Journal_. It was conventional work and it promised
little. Between a sketch like "Taking the Blue Ribbon at the Fair"
and "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove," which appeared in the May
issue of the _Atlantic_, 1878, there is a gulf that even yet has not
been fully explained. Undoubtedly the early models that influenced her
were George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Bret Harte, but she has preserved
little of her transition work. She came unheralded with her art fully
matured. Whoever may have been her early masters, she was from the
first autochthonic in style and material and in the atmosphere that
she threw over all that she wrote. There was a newness to her work, a
tang of the wild and elemental in the dialect, a convincing quality to
the backgrounds painted in sentences like "An early moon was riding,
clear and full, over this wild spur of the Alleghanies," that excited
wide comment. It was not until 1884, however, that the new author may
be said definitely to have arrived, for it was not until then that her
stories were given the dignity of book form.

With the publication of _In the Tennessee Mountains_ came one of the
most dramatic happenings that ever gave wings to a new book. Charles
Egbert Craddock visited the _Atlantic_ office and, to the amazement
of Aldrich and Howells and Dr. Holmes, he was a woman. The sensation,
coming as it did from the center of the old New England tradition, gave
the book at once an international fame and made Charles Egbert Craddock
a name as widely known as Dr. Holmes. She followed her early success
with a long series of Tennessee mountain novels. Six of them--_The
Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains_, _In the Clouds_, _The Despot
of Broomsedge Cove_, _His Vanished Star_, _The Mystery of Witchface
Mountain_, and _The Juggler_--first appeared serially in the Atlantic,
and, for a time at least, it seemed as if her work had taken its place
among the American classics.

VI

Criticism of the Craddock novels must begin always with the statement
that their author was not a native of the region with which she
dealt. She had been born into an old Southern family with wealth
and traditions, and she had been reared in a city amid culture and
a Southern social régime. The Tennessee mountains she knew only as
a summer visitor may know them. For fifteen summers she went to the
little mountain town of Beersheba, prototype undoubtedly of the "New
Helvetia Springs" of her novels, and from there made excursions into
the wilder regions. She saw the mountains with the eyes of the city
vacationist: she was impressed with their wildness, their summer moods
with light and shadow, their loneliness and their remote spurs and
coves and ragged gaps. She saw them with the picture sense of the
artist and she described them with a wealth of coloring that reminds
one of Ruskin. In every chapter, often many times repeated, gorgeous
paintings like these:

    A subtle amethystine mist had gradually overlaid the slopes
    of the T'other Mounting, mellowing the brilliant tints of the
    variegated foliage to a delicious hazy sheen of mosaics; but
    about the base the air seemed dun-colored, though transparent;
    seen through it, even the red of the crowded trees was but
    a somber sort of magnificence, and the great masses of gray
    rocks, jutting out among them here and there, wore a darkly
    frowning aspect. Along the summit there was a blaze of scarlet
    and gold in the full glory of the sunshine; the topmost cliffs
    caught its rays, and gave them back in unexpected gleams of
    green or grayish-yellow, as of mosses, or vines, or huckleberry
    bushes, nourished in the heart of the deep fissures.

    Mink, trotting along the red clay road, came suddenly upon the
    banks of the Scolacutta River, riotous with the late floods,
    fringed with the papaw and the ivy bush. Beyond its steely
    glint he could see the sun-flooded summit of Chilhowee, a
    bronze green, above the intermediate ranges: behind him was
    the Great Smoky, all unfamiliar viewed from an unaccustomed
    standpoint, massive, solemn, of dusky hue; white and amber
    clouds were slowly settling on the bald. There had been a
    shower among the mountains, and a great rainbow, showing now
    only green and rose and yellow, threw a splendid slant of
    translucent color on the purple slope. In such an environment
    the little rickety wooden mill--with its dilapidated leaking
    race, with its motionless wheel moss-grown, with its tottering
    supports throbbing in the rush of the water which rose around
    them, with a loitering dozen or more mountaineers about the
    door--might seem a feeble expression of humanity. To Mink the
    scene was the acme of excitement and interest.

A picture of summer it is for the most part painted lavishly with
adjectives, and presented with impressionistic rather than realistic
effect. Every detail is intensified. The mountains of eastern Tennessee
are only moderate ridges, yet in the Craddock tales they take on
the proportions of the Canadian Rockies or the Alps. The peak that
dominates _In the Clouds_ seems to soar like a Mont Blanc:

    In the semblance of the cumulus-cloud from which it takes
    its name, charged with the portent of the storm, the massive
    peak of Thunderhead towers preëminent among the summits of
    the Great Smoky Mountains, unique, impressive, most subtly
    significant. What strange attraction of the earth laid hold
    on this vagrant cloud-form? What unexplained permanence of
    destiny solidified it and fixed it forever in the foundations
    of the range? Kindred thunderheads of the air lift above the
    horizon, lure, loiter, lean on its shoulder with similitudes
    and contrasts. Then with all the buoyant liberties of cloudage
    they rise--rise!... Sometimes it was purple against the azure
    heavens; or gray and sharp of outline on faint green spaces of
    the sky; or misty, immaterial, beset with clouds, as if the
    clans had gathered to claim the changeling.

Always the scenery dominates the book. It is significant that all of
her early titles have in them the name of a locality,--the setting
is the chief thing: Lost Creek, Big Injun Mounting, Harrison's Cove,
Chilhowee, the Great Smoky Mountains, Broomsedge Cove, Keedon Bluffs.
In stories like _The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain_ the background
becomes supreme: the human element seems to have been added afterwards
by a sort of necessity; the central character is the great witch-face
on the mountain.

It reminds one of Hardy, and then one remembers that when "The Dancin'
Party at Harrison's Cove" appeared in the _Atlantic_, _The Return of
the Native_ had for three months been running as a serial in _Harper's
Monthly_, and that, somewhat later, _In the "Stranger-People's"
Country_ and _Wessex Folk_ ran for months parallel in the same
magazine. It is impossible not to think of Hardy as one reads _Where
the Battle Was Fought_, 1884. The battle-field dominates the book as
completely as does Egdon Heath _The Return of the Native_, and it
dominates it in the same symbolic way:

    By wintry daylight the battle-field is still more ghastly. Gray
    with the pallid crab-grass which so eagerly usurps the place of
    the last summer's crops, it stretches out on every side to meet
    the bending sky. The armies that successively encamped upon it
    did not leave a tree for miles, but here and there thickets
    have sprung up since the war, and bare and black they intensify
    the gloom of the landscape. The turf in these segregated spots
    is never turned. Beneath the branches are rows of empty,
    yawning graves, where the bodies of soldiers were temporarily
    buried. Here, most often, their spirits walk, and no hire can
    induce the hardiest plowman to break the ground. Thus the owner
    of the land is fain to concede these acres to his ghostly
    tenants, who pay no rent. A great brick house, dismantled and
    desolate, rises starkly above the dismantled desolation of the
    plain.

The title of the book--_Where the Battle Was Fought_--makes the
battle-field central in the tragedy, and so it is with the short
stories "'Way Down in Lonesome Cove" and "Drifting Down Lost Creek."
Nature is always cognizant of the human tragedy enacted before it and
always makes itself felt. In _The Juggler_, Tubal Cain Sims believes
that murder has been done:

    "He sighed an' groaned like suthin' in agony. An' then he says,
    so painful, 'But the one who lives--oh, what can I do--the
    one who lives!'" He paused abruptly to mark the petrified
    astonishment on the group of faces growing white in the closing
    dusk.

    An owl began to hoot in the bosky recesses far up the slope.
    At the sound, carrying far in the twilight stillness, a hound
    bayed from the door of the little cabin in the Cove, by the
    river. A light, stellular in the gloom that hung about the
    lower levels, suddenly sprung up in the window. A tremulous
    elongated reflection shimmered in the shallows.

But such effects in her work are fitful: one feels them strongly at
times, then forgets them in the long stretches of dialect conversation
and description seemingly introduced for its own sake. Of the art that
could make of Egdon Heath a constantly felt, implacable, malignant
presence that harried and compelled its dwellers until the reader at
last must shake himself awake as from a nightmare, of this she knew
little. She worked by means of brilliant sketches; she relied upon
her picturing power to carry the story, and as a result the effect is
scattered.

In her characterization she had all the defects of Scott: she worked
largely with externals. She had an eye for groups posed artistically
against a picturesque background as in that marvelous opening picture
in "'Way Down on Lonesome Cove." She expended the greatest of care
on costume, features, habits of carriage and posture, tricks of
expression, individual oddities, but she seldom went deeper. We see
her characters distinctly; not often do we feel them. In her major
personages, like the Prophet, the Despot, the Juggler, we have little
sympathetic interest, and it is impossible to believe that they were
much more than picturesque specimens even to the author herself. To
get upon the heart of the reader a character must first have been upon
the heart of his creator. Here and there undoubtedly she did feel the
thrill of comprehension as she created, a few times so keenly indeed
that she could forget her art, her note book, and her audience. The one
thing that seems to have touched her heart as she journeyed through the
summer valleys and into the remote coves seems to have been the pitiful
loneliness and heart-hunger of the women. Could she have done for all
of her characters what she did for Celia Shaw and Madeline and Dorinda
and a few other feminine souls, the final verdict upon her work might
have been far different from what it must be now.

Her stories necessarily are woven from scanty materials. In the tale
of a scattered and primitive mountain community there can be little
complication of plot. The movement of the story must be slow, as slow
indeed as the round of life in the coves and the lonesome valleys.
But in her long-drawn narratives often there is no movement at all.
She elaborates details with tediousness and records interminable
conversations, and breaks the thread to insert whole chapters of
description, as in Chapter VI of _The Juggler_, which records the
doings at a mountain revival meeting seemingly for the mere sake of
the local color. Nearly all of her longer novels lack in constructive
power. Like Harte, whom in so many ways she resembled, she could deal
strongly with picturesque moments and people, but she lacked the
ability to trace the growth of character or the slow transforming power
of a passion or an ideal or a sin.

Her style was peculiarly her own; in this she was strong. It is worthy
of note that in an age rendered styleless by the newspaper and the
public school she was able to be individual to the extent that one may
identify any page of her writings by the style alone. It is not always
admirable: there is a Southern floridness about it, a fondness for
stately epithet that one does not find in Harris or in others of the
Georgia group. She can write that the search light made "a rayonnant
halo in the dim glooms of the riparian midnight," and she can follow
the jocose observation of a woman washing dishes with this tremendous
sentence: "'What fur?' demanded the lord of the house, whose sense of
humor was too blunted by his speculations, and a haunting anxiety,
and a troublous eagerness to discuss the question of his discovery,
to perceive aught of the ludicrous in the lightsome metaphor with
which his weighty spouse had characterized her dissatisfaction with
the ordering of events." It may be interesting to know that the
woman vouchsafed no reply. Rather, "she wheezed one more line of her
matutinal hymn in a dolorous cadence and with breathy interstices
between the spondees."

She is at her best when describing some lonely valley among the ridges,
or the moonlight as it plays fitfully over some scene of mountain
lawlessness, or some remote cabin "deep among the wooded spurs." In
such work she creates an atmosphere all her own. Few other writers have
so made landscape felt. One may choose illustrations almost at random:

    On a certain steep and savage slope of the Great Smoky
    Mountains, the primeval wilderness for many miles is unbroken
    save for one meager clearing.

    Deep among the wooded spurs Lonesome Cove nestles, sequestered
    from the world. Naught emigrates from thence except an
    importunate stream that forces its way through a rocky gap, and
    so to freedom beyond. No stranger intrudes; only the moon looks
    in once in a while. The roaring wind may explore its solitudes;
    and it is but the vertical sun that strikes to the heart of the
    little basin, because of the massive mountains that wall it
    round and serve to isolate it.

    The night wind rose. The stars all seemed to have burst from
    their moorings and were wildly adrift in the sky. There was a
    broken tumult of billowy clouds, and the moon tossed hopelessly
    among them, a lunar wreck, sometimes on her beam ends,
    sometimes half submerged, once more gallantly struggling to
    the surface, and again sunk. The bare boughs of the trees beat
    together in a dirgelike monotone.

Nowhere is she commonplace; nowhere does she come down from the
stately plane that she reaches always with her opening paragraph. Even
her dialect is individual. Doubtless other writers have handled the
mountain speech more correctly, doubtless there is as much of Charles
Egbert Craddock in the curious forms and perversions as there is of
the Tennessee mountaineers, yet no one has ever used dialect more
convincingly than she or more effectively. She has made it a part of
her style.

The story of Charles Egbert Craddock is a story of gradual decline. _In
the Tennessee Mountains_ was received with a universality of approval
comparable only with that accorded to _The Luck of Roaring Camp_.
In her second venture, _Where the Battle Was Fought_, she attempted
to break from the narrow limits of her first success and to write a
Hardy-like novel of the section of Southern life in which she herself
belonged, but it failed. From all sides came the demand that she return
again to her own peculiar domain. And she returned with _The Prophet of
the Great Smoky Mountains_. It was praised, but with the praise came
a note of dissatisfaction, a note that became more and more dominant
with every novel that followed. Her first short stories had appealed
because of their freshness and the strangeness of their setting.
Moreover, since they were the first work of a young writer they were a
promise of better things to come. But the promise was not fulfilled.
After _The Juggler_, her last attempt on a large scale to create a
great Tennessee-mountains novel, she took the advice of many of her
critics and left the narrow field that she had cultivated so carefully.
She wrote historical romances and novels of contemporary life, but the
freshness of her early work was gone. After 1897 she produced nothing
that had not been done better by other writers.

Her failure came not, as many have believed, from the poverty of her
materials and the narrowness of her field. Thomas Hardy deliberately
had chosen for his novels a region and a people just as primitive.
A great novel should concern itself with the common fundamentals of
humanity, and these fundamentals, he believed, may be studied with more
of accuracy in the isolated places where the conventions of polite
society have not prevented natural expression. Or, to quote Hardy's own
words:

    Social environment operates upon character in a way that is
    oftener than not prejudicial to vigorous portraiture by making
    the exteriors of men their screen rather than their index, as
    with untutored mankind. Contrasts are disguised by the crust of
    conventionality, picturesqueness obliterated, and a subjective
    system of description necessitated for the differentiation of
    character. In the one case the author's word has to be taken as
    to the nerves and muscles of his figures; in the other they can
    be seen as in an écorché.[139]

The failure of Charles Egbert Craddock came rather from her inability
to work with large masses of material and coördinate it and shape it
into a culminating force. She was picturesque rather than penetrating,
melodramatic rather than simple, a showman rather than a discerning
interpreter of the inner meanings of life. She could make vivid
sketches of a moment or of a group or a landscape, but she could not
build up touch by touch a consistent and compelling human character.
Her genius was fitted to express itself in the short story and the
sketch, and she devoted the golden years of her productive life to the
making of elaborate novels. A little story like "'Way Down on Lonesome
Cove" is worth the whole of the _The Juggler_ or _In the Clouds_. The
short stories with which she won her first fame must stand as her
highest achievement.

VII

Later members of the Georgia group, Sarah Barnwell Elliott, Harry
Stillwell Edwards, and William Nathaniel Harben, have continued the
tradition of Longstreet and have dealt more or less realistically with
the humbler life of their region. Miss Elliott with her _The Durket
Sperrit_ entered the domain of Charles Egbert Craddock and gave a
new version of the mountain dialect. A comparison of this novel with
_The Juggler_, which appeared the same year, is illuminating. The two
writers seem to be complements of each other, the one strong where the
other is weak. The story lacks the atmosphere, the poetic dignity,
the sense of mystery and of mountain majesty so notable in the elder
novelist, but it surpasses her in characterization and in sympathy.
The people are tremendously alive. The tyrannical old woman about
whom the tale centers, with her narrow ideals and her haughty "Durket
sperrit," dominates every page as Egdon Heath dominates _The Return
of the Native_. She is felt during every moment of the story and so is
the pathetic little mountain waif in the earlier chapters of _Jerry_.
Miss Elliott's distinctive work is limited to these two books. Had she
had the courage to work out with clearness the central tragedy of _The
Durket Sperrit_, the deliberate disgracing of Hannah by her discarded
lover, the book might take its place among the few great novels of the
period.

Edwards inclined more toward the old Georgia type of human-nature
sketch. His best work is to be found in his short studies in black
and white after the Johnston pattern. Indeed, his first story, "Elder
Brown's Backslide," _Harper's Monthly_, 1885, without his name would
have been regarded as a Dukesborough Tale. He has written two novels,
one of which, _Sons and Fathers_, was awarded the $10,000 prize offered
by the _Chicago Record_ for a mystery story, but he is not a novelist.
He is humorous and picturesque and often he is for a moment the master
of pathos, but he has added nothing new and nothing commandingly
distinctive.

VIII

Constance Fenimore Woolson's _Rodman the Keeper_, 1880, undoubtedly
was a strong force in the new Southern revival. During the eighties
Miss Woolson was regarded as the most promising of the younger writers.
She was a grand niece of Cooper, a fact made much of, and she had
written short stories of unusual brilliance, her collection, _Castle
Nowhere_, indeed, ranking as a pioneer book in a new field. Again was
she destined to be a pioneer. In 1873 the frail health of her mother
sent her into the South and for six years she made her home in Florida,
spending her summers in the mountains of North Carolina, Virginia,
South Carolina, and Georgia. During the rest of her life her stories
were studies of Southern life and Southern conditions. Only _Anne_ of
her novels and two late collections of Italian tales may be noted as
exceptions.

It was in _Rodman the Keeper_, a collection of her magazine stories of
the late seventies, that the North found its first adequate picture of
the territory over which had been fought the Civil War. The Tourgee
novels, which had created a real sensation, were political documents,
but here were studies carefully wrought by one who did not take sides.
It showed the desolation wrought by the armies during the four years,
the pathos of broken homes and ruined plantations, the rankling
bitterness, especially in the hearts of women, the helpless pride of
the survivors, and the curious differences between the Northern and
the Southern temperaments. It was careful work. Contemporary opinion
seemed to be voiced by the Boston _Literary World_: The stories "more
thoroughly represent the South than anything of the kind that has been
written since the war."

Necessarily the standpoint was that of an observer from without. There
was no dialect in the tales, there were no revealings of the heart of
Southern life as in Harris and Page and the others who had arisen from
the material they used, but there was beauty and pathos and a careful
realism that carried conviction. A sketch like "Felipe," for example,
is a prose idyl, "Up the Blue Ridge" is the Craddock region seen with
Northern eyes, and the story that gives the title to the book catches
the spirit of the defeated South as few writers not Southern born have
ever done.

For a time Miss Woolson held a commanding place among the novelists
of the period. After her untimely death in 1894 Stedman wrote that
she "was one of the leading women in the American literature of the
century," and again, "No woman of rarer personal qualities, or with
more decided gifts as a novelist, figured in her own generation of
American writers." But time has not sustained this contemporary
verdict. Her ambitious novel _Anne_, over which she toiled for three
years, brilliant as it may be in parts, has not held its place. And
her short stories, rare though they may have been in the day of their
newness, are not to be compared with the perfect art of such later
writers as Miss King and Mrs. Chopin. She must take her place as one
of the pioneers of the period who discovered a field and prepared an
audience for writers who were to follow.

IX

The appearance of Page's _In Ole Virginia_, 1887, marks the culmination
of the period of Southern themes. The sensation caused by _The Quick
or the Dead?_ by Amélie Rives (later Princess Troubetzkoy) in 1888
need only be referred to. It had little significance either local or
otherwise. The younger writers, born for the most part at a later date,
like John Fox, Jr., Mary Johnston, and Ellen Glasgow, belong to another
period.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

  RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON. (1822-1898.) _The English Classics_,
  1860; _Georgia Sketches, by an Old Man_, 1864; _Dukesborough
  Tales_, 1871, 1874, 1883, 1892; _English Literature_ (with
  William Hand Browne), 1872; _Life of Alexander H. Stephens_ (with
  William Hand Browne), 1878; _Old Mark Langston, a Tale of Duke's
  Creek_, 1883; _Mr. Absalom Billingslea and Other Georgia Folk_,
  1888; _Ogeechee Cross Firings_, 1889; _The Primes and Their
  Neighbors_, 1891; _Studies Literary and Scientific_, 1891; _Mr.
  Billy Downs and His Likes_, 1892; _Mr. Fortner's Marital Claims
  and Other Stories_, 1892; _Two Gray Tourists_, 1893; _Widow
  Guthrie_, 1893; _Little Ike Templin and Other Stories_, 1894;
  _Old Times in Middle Georgia_, 1897; _Pearce Amerson's Will_,
  1898.

  JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS. (1848-1908.) _Uncle Remus, His Songs and
  His Sayings_, 1880; _Nights with Uncle Remus, Myths and Legends
  of the Old Plantation_, 1883; _Mingo and Other Sketches in Black
  and White_, 1884; _Story of Aaron_, 1885; _Free Joe and Other
  Georgian Sketches_, 1887; _Daddy Jake the Runaway, and Short
  Stories Told After Dark_, 1889; _Balaam and His Master, and Other
  Sketches and Stories_, 1891; _On the Plantation, a Story of a
  Georgia Boy's Adventures During the War_, 1892; _Uncle Remus
  and His Friends_, 1892; _Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer
  Country_, 1894; _Mr. Rabbit at Home_, 1895; _Sister Jane, Her
  Friends and Acquaintances_, 1896; _Georgia from the Invasion
  of De Soto to Recent Times_, 1896; _Stories of Georgia_, 1896;
  _Aaron in the Wildwoods_, 1897; _Tales of the Home Folks in
  Peace and War_, 1898; _Chronicles of Aunt Minerva Ann_, 1899;
  _Plantation Pageants_, 1899; _On the Wing of Occasions_, 1900;
  _Gabriel Tolliver, a Story of Reconstruction_, 1902; _Making
  of a Statesman, and Other Stories_, 1902; _Wally Wanderoon_,
  1903; _Little Union Scout_, 1904; _Tar Baby and Other Rimes of
  Uncle Remus_, 1904; _Told by Uncle Remus; New Stories of the Old
  Plantation_, 1905.

  CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON. (1840-1894.) _The Old Stone House_,
  1873; _Castle Nowhere_, 1875; _Lake-Country Sketches_, 1875;
  _Rodman the Keeper_, 1880; _Anne_, 1882; _East Angels_, 1886;
  _Jupiter Lights_, 1889; _Horace Chase, a Novel_, 1894; _The
  Front Yard and Other Italian Stories_, 1895; _Dorothy, and Other
  Italian Stories_, 1896; _Mentone, Cairo, and Corfu_, 1896.

  CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK. (1850-----.) _In the Tennessee
  Mountains_, 1884; _Where the Battle Was Fought_, 1885; _Down the
  Ravine_, 1885; _The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains_, 1885;
  _In the Clouds_, 1886; _The Story of Keedon Bluffs_, 1887; _The
  Despot of Broomsedge Cove_, 1888; _In the "Stranger People's"
  Country_, 1891; _His Vanished Star_, 1894; _The Phantoms of the
  Footbridge_, 1895; _The Mystery of Witchface Mountain_, 1895;
  _The Juggler_, 1897; _The Young Mountaineers_, 1897; _The Story
  of Old Fort Louden_, 1899; _The Bushwhackers and Other Stories_,
  1899; _The Champion_, 1902; _A Specter of Power_, 1903; _Storm
  Center_, 1905; _The Frontiersman_, 1905; _The Amulet_, 1906;
  _The Windfall_, 1907; _The Fair Mississippian_, 1908; _Ordeal--A
  Mountain Story of Tennessee_, 1912; _Raid of the Guerrilla_,
  1912; _The Story of Duciehurst_, 1914.

  SARAH BARNWELL ELLIOTT. _The Felmeres_, 1880; _A Simple Heart_,
  1886; _Jerry_, 1890; _John Paget_, 1893; _The Durket Sperret_,
  1897; _An Incident and Other Happenings_, 1899; _Sam Houston_,
  1900; _The Making of Jane_, 1901; _His Majesty's Service and
  Other Plays_.

  HARRY STILLWELL EDWARDS. (1855-----.) _Two Runaways and Other
  Stories_, 1889; _Sons and Fathers_, 1896; _The Marbeau Cousins_,
  1898; _His Defense, and Other Stories_, 1898.

CHAPTER XV

THE LATER POETS

Although prose forms, especially the novel and the short story,
dominated the period, yet the amount of poetry published from 1860 to
1899 surpasses, in mere bulk at least, all that had been produced in
America before that date. In quality also it is notable. Stedman's _An
American Anthology_ has 773 pages of selections, and of this space 462
pages, or almost two-thirds, are given to the poets who made their
first appearance during these forty years. Very many whom he mentions
were only incidentally poets. A surprising number of those who are
known to-day only as novelists or short story writers began their
career with a volume and in some cases with several volumes of verse.
Few indeed have been the writers who have not contributed poetical
material. Among the poets are to be numbered writers as inseparably
connected with prose as Thoreau, Burroughs, Howells, Mrs. Stuart
Phelps Ward, S. Weir Mitchell, Miss Woolson, Lew Wallace, Mrs. Wilkins
Freeman, Harris, Page, Mrs. Cooke, Ambrose Bierce, Alice Brown, Hamlin
Garland, and A. S. Hardy.

Those who may be counted as the distinctive poets of the era, the third
generation of poets in America, make not a long list if only those be
taken who have done new and distinctive work. Not many names need be
added to the following twenty-five whose first significant collections
were published during the twenty years following 1870:

    1870. Bret Harte. _Plain Language from Truthful James._
    1871. John Hay. _Pike County Ballads._
    1871. Joaquin Miller. _Songs of the Sierras._
    1871. Will Carleton. _Poems._
    1872. Celia Thaxter. _Poems._
    1873. John Boyle O'Reilly. _Songs of the Southern Seas._
    1875. Richard Watson Gilder. _The New Day._
    1877. Sidney Lanier. _Poems._
    1881. Ina Coolbrith. _A Perfect Day and Other Poems._
    1882. John Bannister Tabb. _Poems._
    1883. James Whitcomb Riley. _The Old Swimmin'-Hole._
    1883. George Edward Woodberry. _The North Shore Watch._
    1884. Edith M. Thomas. _A New Year's Masque._
    1884. Henry Cuyler Bunner. _Airs from Arcady._
    1884. Louise Imogen Guiney. _Songs at the Start._
    1886. Clinton Scollard. _With Reed and Lyre._
    1887. Eugene Field. _Culture's Garland._
    1887. Madison Cawein. _Blooms of the Berry._
    1887. Robert Burns Wilson. _Life and Love._
    1888. Irwin Russell. _Dialect Poems._
    1889. Richard Hovey. _The Laurel: an Ode._

John James Piatt, Emma Lazarus, Emily Dickinson, and E. R Sill, whose
first volumes fall outside of the twenty-years period, complete the
number.

For the greater part these later poets were children of the new era who
with Whitman voiced their own hearts and looked at the life close about
them with their own eyes. The more individual of them, the leading
innovators who most impressed themselves upon their times--Whitman,
Hay and Harte, Miller, Lanier and Russell--we have already considered.
They rose above conventions and rules and looked only at life; they
stood for the new Americanism of the period, and they had the courage
that dared in a critical and fastidious age to break away into what
seemed like crude and unpoetic regions. Not many of them could go to
the extremes of Whitman, or even of Harte and Hay. Some would voice the
new message of the times in the old key and the old forms; others would
adopt the new fashions but change not at all the old themes and the old
sentiments.

Of the latter class Will Carleton perhaps is the typical
representative. By birth and training he belonged to the Western group
of innovators represented by Mark Twain and Eggleston and Miller. He
had been born in a log cabin in Michigan and he had spent all of his
boyhood on a small, secluded farm. He had broken from his environment
at twenty, had gained a college degree, and following the lead of
his inclination had become a journalist, first in Detroit, then in
Chicago, Boston, and New York. From journalism, especially in the
seventies, it was but a step to literature. He would be a poet, and led
by the spirit of his period he turned for material to the homely life
of his boyhood. He would make no realistic picture--no man was ever
less fitted than he to reproduce the external features of a scene or a
region--he would touch the sentiments and the emotions. "Betsey and I
Are Out," published in the _Toledo Blade_ in 1871, was the beginning.
Then in 1873 came _Farm Ballads_, with such popular favorites as "Over
the Hills to the Poor-House" and "Gone with a Handsomer Man," a thin
book that sold forty thousand copies in eighteen months. No poet since
Longfellow had so appealed to the common people. At his death in 1912
there had been sold of his various collections more than six hundred
thousand copies.

His poetry as we read it to-day has in it little of distinction; it
is crude, for the most part, and conventional. It made its appeal
largely because of its kindly sympathy, its homeliness, and its lavish
sentiment. The poet played upon the chords of memory and home and
childhood, the message of the earlier Longfellow cast into a heavily
stressed and swinging melody that found a prepared audience. With E. P.
Roe, his counterpart in prose, Will Carleton is largely responsible for
prolonging the age of sentiment.

A singer of a different type was John James Piatt, born in Indiana in
1835 and joint author with W. D. Howells of _Poems of Two Friends_,
1859. He was a classicist who caught the new vision and sought to
compromise. Everywhere in his work a blending of the new and the old:
the Western spirit that would voice the new notes of the Wabash rather
than echo the old music of the Thames, that syren melody that had been
the undoing of Taylor and Stoddard. In an early review of Stedman,
Piatt had found, as he characteristically termed it, "a too frequent
betrayal of Tennyson's floating musk in his singing-garments," and
he had noted as his chief strength that "his representative subjects
are American."[140] In making the criticism he touched upon his own
weakness and his own strength. In all his volumes conventional work
like "Rose and Root," "The Sunshine of Shadows," and "The Unheard"
alternates with more original poems, native in theme and to a degree
native in spirit, like "The Mower in Ohio," "The Pioneer's Chimney,"
"Fires in Illinois," and "Riding to Vote." There is no dialect, no
straining for realistic effect, no sentimentality. In all that makes
for art the poems have little for criticism: they are classical and
finished and beautiful. But they lack life. There is nothing about them
that grips the reader's heart, nothing that fixes itself in the memory,
no single line that has distinction of phrase. Even in the Western
poems like "The Mower in Ohio" there is no sharpness, no atmosphere,
no feeling of reality. It is art rather than life; it is a conscious
effort to make a poem. The case is typical. With the criticism one may
sweep away once for all great areas of the poetry of the time.

Far stronger are the vigorous lyrics of Maurice Thompson, whose work is
to be found in so many literary fields of the period. His poetry, small
in quantity, has a spirit of its own that is distinctive. It is tonic
with the out-of-doors and it is masculine. One stanza from the poem "At
Lincoln's Grave," delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard in
1893, voices the new Western soul:

        His humor, born of virile opulence,
        Stung like a pungent sap or wild-fruit zest,
        And satisfied a universal sense
        Of manliness, the strongest and the best;
        A soft Kentucky strain was in his voice,
        And the Ohio's deeper boom was there,
        With some wild accents of old Wabash days,
            And winds of Illinois;
        And when he spoke he took us unaware,
        With his high courage and unselfish ways.

II

The successor of Carleton is James Whitcomb Riley of Indiana, the
leading producer during the later period of platform and newspaper
balladry. The early life of Riley was urban rather than rural. His
father was a lawyer at Greenfield, a typical Western county seat, and
after sending the boy to the village school he sought to turn him to
his own profession. But there was a stratum of the wayward and the
unconventional in Riley even from the first. The professions and the
ordinary occupations open to youth did not appeal to the imaginative
lad. He learned the trade of sign-painting and then for a year traveled
with a patent medicine "doctor" as advertising agent. Following
this picturesque experience came three or four years as a traveling
entertainer with a congenial troupe, then desultory newspaper work,
and finally, from 1877 to 1885, a steady position on the Indianapolis
_Journal_. His recognition as a poet came in the mid eighties, and
following it came a long period on the lecture circuit, reading his own
productions, at one time working in conjunction with Eugene Field and
Edgar W. Nye,--"Bill Nye."

His earliest work seems to have been declamatory and journalistic in
origin. "I was always trying to write of the kind of people I knew
and especially to write verse that I could read just as if it were
being spoken for the first time." And again, "I always took naturally
to anything theatrical."[141] For years the newspaper was his only
medium. He contributed to most of the Indiana journals with pseudonyms
ranging all the way from "Edyrn" to "Jay Whitt" and "Benjamin F.
Johnson of Boone," and it was while writing under the last of these
for the Indianapolis _Journal_ that he first became known beyond the
confines of Indiana. The device of printing poems that ostensibly were
contributed by a crude farmer from a back country was not particularly
original. Lowell had used it and Artemus Ward. Moreover, the fiction of
accompanying these poems with editorial comment and specimen letters
from the author was as old at least as _The Biglow Papers_, but there
was a Western, Pike County freshness about the Benjamin F. Johnson
material. The first poem in the series, for instance, was accompanied
by material like this:

    Mr. Johnson thoughtfully informs us that he is "no edjucated
    man," but that he has, "from childhood up tel old enugh to
    vote, allus wrote more or less poetry, as many of an albun in
    the neghborhood can testify." Again, he says that he writes
    "from the hart out"; and there is a touch of genuine pathos in
    the frank avowal, "Thare is times when I write the tears rolls
    down my cheeks."

The poems that followed,--"Thoughts fer the Discuraged Farmer," "When
the Frost is on the Punkin," "Wortermelon Time," and the others--were
written primarily as humorous exercises just as Browne had written
his first Artemus Ward contributions. There is a histrionic element
about them that must not be overlooked. The author is playing a part.
Riley, we know, had, at least in his youth, very little sympathy with
farm life and very little knowledge of it: he was simply impersonating
an ignorant old farmer. The dialect does not ring true. There never
has been a time, for instance, when "ministratin'" for ministering,
"familiously" for familiarly, "resignated" for resigned, and "when the
army broke out" for when the war broke out, have been used in Indiana
save by those with whom they are individual peculiarities. He is simply
reporting the ignorance of one old man in the Artemus Ward fashion.
Dialect with him is the record of a town man's mimicry of country
crudeness. It is conventional rather than realistic. It is a humorous
device like A. Ward's cacography. The first Johnson annotation will
illustrate:

    Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone County, who considers the _Journal_
    a "very valubul" newspaper, writes to inclose us an original
    poem, desiring that we kindly accept it for publication, as
    "many neghbors and friends is astin' him to have the same
    struck off."

He issued the series at his own expense in 1883 with the title _The
Old Swimmin'-Hole and 'Leven More Poems by Benj. F. Johnson, of
Boone_, and he continued the masquerade until after the publication
of _Afterwhiles_ in 1887. After the great vogue of this later volume
he began to publish voluminously until his final collected edition
numbered fourteen volumes.

Riley not only inherited Will Carleton's public entire, but he added
to it very considerably. He too dealt freely in sentiment and he too
wrote always with vocal interpretation in mind. Undoubtedly the wide
vogue of his poems has come largely from this element. People have
always enjoyed hearing the poems read with an appropriate acting out
of the part more than they have enjoyed reading them for themselves.
The poems, more over, appeared in what may be called the old homestead
period in America. Denman Thompson first brought out his _Joshua
Whitcomb_ in 1875 and his _The Old Homestead_ in 1886. Riley found a
public doubly prepared. He revived old memories--the word "old" is
almost a mannerism with him: "The Old Swimmin'-Hole," "Old Fashioned
Roses," "The Old Hay-Mow," "The Old Trundle Bed," "Out to Old Aunt
Mary's," "The Boys of the Old Glee Club," "An Old Sweetheart of Mine,"
etc. Especially did he appeal to those whose childhood had been spent
in the country.

Finally, he added to Carleton's devices a metrical facility and a
jigging melody that is perhaps his most original contribution to the
period. More than any one else Riley is responsible for the modern
newspaper type of ballad that is to poetry what ragtime is to music.
There is a fatal facility to such a melody as,

        Old wortermelon time is a-comin' round again,
          And there ain't no man a-livin' any tickleder'n me,
            Fer the way I hanker after wortermelons is a sin--
          Which is the why and wharefore, as you can plainly see.

Or this,

        I ain't, ner don't p'tend to be,
        Much posted on philosofy;
        But thare is times, when all alone,
        I work out idees of my own.
        And of these same thare is a few
        I'd like to jest refer to you--
        Pervidin' that you don't object
        To listen clos't and rickollect.

In his preference for native themes and homely, unliterary treatment of
seemingly unpoetic material he continued the work of the Pike County
balladists. As the _Nation_, reviewing his _Old Fashioned Roses_,
expressed it, he finds pleasure in "some of the coarser California
flavors." His own standards for poetry he has given clearly, and they
are in full accord with the spirit of the period:

        The poems here at home!--Who'll write 'em down,
        Jes' as they air--in Country and in Town?--
        Sowed thick as clods is 'crost the fields and lanes,
        Er these-'ere little hop-toads when it rains!--
        Who'll "voice" 'em? as I heerd a feller say
        'At speechified on Freedom, t'other day,
        And soared the Eagle tel' it 'peared to me,
        She wasn't bigger'n a bumblebee!

        What We want, as I sense it, in the line
        O' poetry is somepin' Yours and Mine--
        Somepin' with live-stock in it, and outdoors,
        And old crick-bottoms, snags, and sycamores:
        Putt weeds in--pizen-vines, and underbresh,
        As well as Johnny-jump-ups, all so fresh
        And sassy-like!--and groun'-squir'ls,--yes, and "We,"
        As sayin' is,--"We, Us and Company!"

But one cannot be sure of him. He is an entertainer, an actor, a
mimicker. Does his material really come "from the hart out" or is he
giving, what one always suspects, only excellent vaudeville? Even in
his most pathetic moments we catch for an instant, or we feel that we
do, a glimpse of the suave face of the platform entertainer.

Once in a while his childhood lyrics ring true. A little note of true
pathos like this from _Poems Here at Home_ is worth a library of _The
Flying Islands of the Night_ and of his other voluminous echoes of
_Alice in Wonderland_:

        Let me come in where you sit weeping,--aye,
        Let me, who have not any child to die,
        Weep with you for the little one whose love
            I have known nothing of.

        The little arms that slowly, slowly loosed
        Their pressure round your neck; the hands you used
        To kiss.--Such arms--such hands I never knew.
            May I not weep with you?

        Fain would I be of service--say some thing,
        Between the tears, that would be comforting,--
        But ah! so sadder than yourselves am I,
            Who have no child to die.

Despite his enormous vogue, Riley must be dismissed as artificial and,
on the whole, insincere. He seems always to be striving for effect--he
is an entertainer who knows his audience and who is never for a moment
dull. He has little of insight, little knowledge of the deeps of life
and the human soul, little of message, and he wrote enormously too
much. He must be rated finally as a comedian, a sentimentalist, an
entertainer.

His influence has been great. A whole school of imitators has sprung
up about him, the most of whom have perished with the papers to which
they have contributed. The strongest of them all undoubtedly was
Sam Walter Foss (1858-1911) whose _Back Country Poems_ were genuine
and distinctive. Drummond's _Habitant_ ballads, which rank with the
strongest dialect poetry of the century, belong to Canadian rather
than American literature. Stedman's praise of them is none too high:
"Most of us are content if we sing an old thing in a new way, or a new
thing in an old way. Dr. Drummond has achieved the truest of lyrical
successes; that of singing new songs, and in a new way. His poems are
idyls as true as those of Theocritus or Burns or our own poet of _The
Biglow Papers_."[142]

Greatly different from Riley, yet greatly like him in many ways, was
Eugene Field, in whom the lawlessness of the West and the culture of
the East met in strange confusion. Though of Western origin--he was
born at St. Louis in 1850--he spent the formative years of his life
between six and nineteen with his father's relatives at Amherst,
Massachusetts. He completed a year at Williams College, then, called
West by the death of his father, whose law practice at St. Louis had
been distinctive, he was put by his guardian into Knox College. After
a year he was transferred to the University of Missouri, but coming
of age at the close of his junior year, and his share of his father's
estate becoming available, he decided in the spring of 1872 to leave