AMERICAN LITERATURE - THE CHANGE TO REALISM: 1870-1900 In the two decades following the Civil War, which have come to be called the Gilded Age, the intellectual outlook was greatly changed. The traditional cosmos of the theologians was disinte grating and a new scientific and sceptical attitude was spreading. Of the current scepticisms perhaps Henry Adams (1838-1918) was the completest embodiment, and the story of the disillusion of the post-war generation is set down in The Education (1906), to which must be added his Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904)—an account of a strange Puritan quest for the Golden Age and one of the loveliest and most penetrating studies done by his generation of Americans.
In those turbid years polite literature, following the New Eng land school, turned away from life to seek beauty; and from this alienation came what has been called the "genteel tradition" of letters, that forbade any serious grappling with reality. With a few notable exceptions such as Whitman and Joaquin Miller, the poets shut themselves up in their ivory towers to practise their craft on odes and sonnets and ballads. Of this somewhat inef fective school were George Henry Boker (1823-9o), Bayard Taylor (1825-78), Richard Henry Stoddard (1825-1903), Ed mund Clarence Stedman (1833-1908) and Thomas Bailey Al drich (1836-1907). The most distinguished poet of the time was a Georgian, Sidney Lanier (1842-81), one of a group of southern poets that included Henry B. Timrod (1829-67), Paul Hamilton Hayne (183o-86) and John Bannister Tabb 1909). A brilliant musician, Lanier applied to the technique of verse a conception of quantitative values that he elaborated in The Science of English Verse (188o), and illustrated in the fresh rhythms of such poems as "The Marshes of Glynn." But the new literature of the Gilded Age began with the ap pearance of the local colour school and the rise of the short story. The irruption of the frontier upon the aristocratic domain of let ters was a death blow to the genteel tradition and bitterly re sented by its votaries. Yet nothing could stay its advance. Be ginning with Bret Harte (1839-19o2) it was to spread during the next score of years till it dominated nearly all American lit erature. Harte was a New Yorker who went to California soon after the "gold rush" of 1849. He delighted in the romance of the mining camp and after some experimentation he wrote The Luck of Roaring Camp, The Outcasts of Poker Flat, Tennessee's Part ner and The Heathen Chinee—the latter a humorous poem. They were published in 1868-69 and received with tremendous acclaim as the expression of an authentic America. The new vogue was established and the vagabond tale speedily developed into a con scious exploitation of local dialect, characters and setting—ro mantic at first but becoming increasingly realistic and drawing heavily on the tradition of frontier humour. It was the period of the final conquest of the West, of the slaughter of the vast buffalo herds, of the pony-express, of the last Indian fights—the final flaring up of the romance of the frontier before the frontier was to pass forever.
Against this background appeared Mark Twain (Samuel Lang horne Clemens, 1835-1910), the most original of the frontier school and the most representative writer of the Gilded Age. His audience had been prepared for him by a considerable group of whimsical humorists, including amongst others Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne, 1834-67) and Petroleum V. Nasby (David Ross Locke, 1833-88). He came from a slovenly Mis souri village on the banks of the great river that ran down to New Orleans, and after a few years as a Mississippi pilot he turned westward and joined the boisterous society of the Golden Gate. From such experiences he drew his materials for Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, with their rough humour, quizzical comment and flashes of imagination. Early in the '7os he settled at Hartford, Conn., underwent an un fortunate process of conventionalization, was caught in the mael strom of the Gilded Age, turned pessimistic, and divided his latest years between the romantic hero-worship of Joan of Arc, and the cynicism of The Mysterious Stranger.
The cult of the local may perhaps be reckoned an unconscious protest against the spread of an encompassing nationalism. The later decades of the 19th century were marked by bitter struggle between two Americas, an older agrarian order with sharp sectional differentiations, and a rising capitalistic order that was subduing all America to a drab industrial pattern. The crisis in the century-long struggle came in the bitter campaign of 1896, the outcome of which was the overthrow of the agrarian hosts and the removal of the last obstacle to a consolidating nationality and a common national literature. To gather up and preserve quaint local idiosyncrasies of manners and character and dialect before they were finally submerged, became therefore the business of the local colour school. The immense popularity of the short story provided a convenient literary form, and in the last quarter of the century the local dialect story carried everything before it. In New England Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) portrayed with delicate and loving touch the decayed gentility of the old towns, and Mary `Wilkins Freeman (1862-1930) described with sombre realism humble village types and the struggle of the older New England order with a masterful industrialism. In the South Thomas Nelson Page (1853-1922), of Virginia, heightened the ro mantic colour of the plantation tradition ; Joel Chandler Harris ,(1848-1908), of Georgia, in his "Uncle Remus" tales put into de lightful form ,the folk-lore of the negro ; George Washington Cable (1844-1925) portrayed the romantic Creole life of New Orleans; Charles Egbert Craddock (Mary Noailles Murfree, 1850-1922) drew the gaunt, primitive figures of Tennessee_ mountaineers; Octave Thanet (Alice French, 1850-1934) took for her field vil lage life in Arkansas; and Constance Fenimore Woolson (1848 94) , one of the pioneers of the group, dealt with the materials of several frontiers—the West of the lake region, Florida and the Appalachian mountain recesses of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.
In the new West of the Middle Border where the prairies begin, the studies in local colour inclined less to the picturesque and more to the drab realistic. The work was begun by Edward Eggleston (1837-1902), whose Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871) and The Circuit Rider (1874) aspired to be faithful chronicles of life on the Indiana frontier. The scene thus depicted with a crude veracity was re-drawn in romantic colours in the next generation by James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916), the poet laureate of the middle West in the days just preceding the invasion of indus trialism, whose folk verse was recited at every parlour gathering for a generation. A mood of the Middle Border more akin to that of Eggleston than of Riley is revealed in the early stories of Ham lin Garland (1860-194o) . A product of the prairie frontier from Wisconsin to North Dakota, he was caught by the spirit of rebel lion that surged up in the great Populistic movement of the '8os and '9os, and in Main Travelled Roads (1891) and later tales, including Rose of Dutcher's Coolly (1895), he painted grim, real istic sketches of farm life. Garland was the first farm-bred writer to deal honestly with his materials. In his view the prairie farmer suffered from unjust exploitation at the hands of the city, and he threw himself ardently into the cause of agrarianism. After the defeat of 1896 he turned to other fields, and eventually in The Son of the Middle Border (1918) he wrote a lovely idyll of farm life in which the harsh colours of the earlier stories are sub dued to softer tones, without losing their veracity.
While the short story was drifting uncertainly from romance to realism the novel was following the same course. Two tenden cies were at work in American life during those years of transition that determined the content and form of fiction—the rise of so ciology and the attitude of scientific detachment ; and from these tendencies came a new type of sociological-realistic novel that dealt in a critical spirit with the political and social phenomena of the times. The new attitude was revealed in a long series of novels that, beginning with The Gilded Age (18 73) by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner (1829-190o), rose eventually to a flood that involved almost all fiction between 1903 and 1917. The con quest of American life by industrialism brought forth abundant protests, and the history of the times is written fairly adequately in those sociological studies. Albion W. Tourgee (1838-1905) dealt with reconstruction in the South in a series of novels the best known of which is A Fool's Errand (1879), and later por trayed socialism sympathetically in Murvale Eastman (1890). As a result of the political corruption of the '7os Henry Adams in Democracy (188o) drew pessimistic conclusions from the Ameri can experiment in government, and as an aftermath of the great strikes of the same years John Hay (1838-1905) directed a some what ill-natured attack on the rising labour movement in The Bread-Winners In Edward Bellamy (1850-98) made a wide appeal with his Marxian Utopia, Looking Backward, and nine years later supplemented it with Equality, an excellent Marxian tract in story form. In the '9os the sociological novel multiplied rapidly, preparing the way for the later "muck-raking movement" that went hand in hand with the Progressive move ment in politics. To this group belonged Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, a transplanted Norwegian scholar, who combined in his novels keen social analysis and suggestions of the realistic technique of Zola.
The most popular novelist of the period was F. Marion Craw ford (1854-1909), who lived mostly in Italy and whose influence was thrown strongly on the side of romanticism; but certainly the greatest figures were William Dean Howells (1837-192o) and Henry James (1843-1916), who were the first deliberate and conscious American realists to achieve a finished technique. Neither of them was a follower or imitator of European realism, but each created a method that suited his individual temperament. Howells was an Ohio boy who during the Civil War immersed himself in Italian culture, and soon after his return settled in Cambridge, Mass., where his art was given shape by the "genteel tradition" of letters still regnant there. His technique developed in the late '7os and bore many of the marks of his Brahman en vironment—a refined craftsmanship, a lambent humour, a genial optimism, and a nice care for the truthful portrayal of externals. In his minute studies of New England manners, such as A Modern Instance (1882), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and April Hopes (1887), the talk skims gracefully over the surface of life without revealing the deeper emotions. In the late '8os he came under the influence of Tolstoi, and this with his removal to New York brought a subtle change in mood with no corresponding change in technique. An awakening interest in social problems darkened his skies, and in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889) he wrote what is probably his greatest novel. During these years he was tireless in advocacy of realism, and Criticism and Fiction (1891) sums up his later theory. Though he had become concerned over social problems he never adopted the current forms of so ciological fiction, but chose to embody his protests against indus trialism in charming Utopian romances. A Traveller from Al truria (1894) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907) are marked by an urbanity that almost draws the sting of his criti cism. Howells wrote abundantly in many forms—the travel sketch and critical comment in particular—and his total work amounts almost to a library.
The writings of Henry James touched American life only slightly, and then the world of polite manners rather than of daily actuality. An intellectual cosmopolitan, he spent much of his life in Europe, slowly drifting back to that rich civilization which his emigrant ancestors had left behind. For years he suf fered from a certain cultural nostalgia, a "relish for the element of accumulation in the human pictLre and for the infinite super positions of history." Always the American backgrounds seemed to him thin and unsatisfying. In his earlier years he dwelt be tween two worlds, but when after years of London life he found himself at last at home in the scene, his art arrived at a rich maturity in such work as The Ambassadors (1903) . A long alien ation limited his understanding of his native land, and when he es, sayed, as in The Bostonians (1886), to depict the American scene, the effect was somewhat thin and skeleton-like, worlds removed from the actual.
Meanwhile fresh movements in fiction were getting under way —movements that belong rather to the new century. At the age of 20 Stephen Crane (1871-190o) wrote Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a brilliant sketch of slum life, and soon afterwards The Red Badge of Courage, a forerunner of later impressionistic work. In the middle '9os Frank Norris (187o-1902), under the influence of Zola, wrote two searching studies of character degeneration, McTeague and Vandover and the Brute, before turning to socio logical fiction in The Octopus (190I ). During these years the more classical forms of literature still lingered in the familiar fields. In poetry Madison Cawein 1914) continued the Victorian nature tradition, and Richard Hovey (1864-190o) poured out vigorous Swinburnian verse. In drama Clyde Fitch (1865-1909) produced a number of clever society plays, and in the essay Agnes Repplier (1858– ), more French than Ameri can in spirit, created a distinguished form of criticism. On the whole American literature was waiting for the coming of new forces to free it from dependence on Old-World models and make it native and adequate. .