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To-day we can begin to see the effect which the mighty exodus that followed the war had upon the East. It was little short of revolution. New England had taken the leading place in precipitating the struggle between the States, and she had done it for conscience' sake, and now, though she had won all she had asked, by a curious turn of fate she was repaid for her moral stand by the loss of her leadership and later almost of her identity, for the westward movement that followed the war was in New England a veritable exodus. There had always been emigration from the older States and it had gradually increased during the gold rush period and the Kansas-Nebraska excitement, but the tide had never been large enough to excite apprehension. Now, however, all in a moment the stream became a torrent which took away, as does all emigration from older lands, the most active and fearless and progressive spirits. Whole districts of farming land were deserted with all their buildings and improvements. New Hampshire in 1860 had a population of 326,073; in 1870 the population had shrunk to 318,300, and that despite the fact that all the cities and manufacturing towns in the State had grown greatly during the ten years, the increase consisting almost wholly of foreigners. According to Sanborn, "more than a million acres cultivated in 1850 had gone back to pasturage and woodland in 1900." All growth since the war has been confined to the cities and the larger manufacturing towns, and this growth and the supplying of the deficit caused by the emigration of the old stock have come from an ever-increasing influx of foreigners. Boston has all but lost its old identity. In Massachusetts in 1900 nearly one-half of the population was born of foreign parentage. New England in a single generation lost its scepter of power in the North, and that scepter gradually has been moving toward the new West.

And I think as I sit alone, While the night wind is falling around, Of a cold white gleaming stone And a long, lone, grassy mound.

The effect of the war upon American literature has been variously estimated. Stedman has been quoted often: "The Civil War was a general absorbent at the crisis when a second group of poets began to form. The conflict not only checked the rise of a new school, but was followed by a time of languor in which the songs of Apollo seemed trivial to those who had listened to the shout of Mars." It was Richardson's opinion that "little that was notable was added to the literature of the country by the Civil War of 1861.... The creative powers of our best authors seemed somewhat benumbed, though books and readers multiplied between 1861 and 1865." And Greenough White dismisses the matter with the remark that "after the war, Bryant, Longfellow, and Taylor, as if their power of original production was exhausted, turned to translation."

All this lacks perspective. Stedman views the matter from the true mid-century standpoint. Poetry to Stedman and Stoddard and Hayne and Aldrich and Taylor was an esoteric, beautiful thing to be worshiped and followed for itself alone like a goddess, a being from another sphere than ours, to devote one's soul to, "like the lady of Shalott," to quote Stevenson, "peering into a mirror with her back turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality." Keats had been the father of this group of poets which had been broken in upon rudely by the war, and it had been the message of Keats that life with its wretchedness and commonplaceness and struggle was to be escaped from by means of Poesy:

Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy.

But poetry is the voice of life; it is not an avenue by which to escape from life's problems. The poet springs from his times and voices his era because he must. If his era smothers him, then so much the less poet he. No war can check the rise of a new school of poets if the soul of that new age is one to be expressed in poetry.

What Stedman and the others failed to see was the new American soul which had been created by the war and which the new school, trained in the old conceptions of poetry, was powerless to voice. If the creative powers of the leading authors were numbed, if Bryant and Longfellow and Taylor felt that their power of original production was exhausted and so turned to translation, it was because they felt themselves powerless to take wing in the new atmosphere.

The North before the war had been aristocratic in its intellectual life, just as the South had been aristocratic in its social r?gime. Literature and oratory and scholarship had been accomplishments of the few. J. G. Holland estimated in 1870 that the lecturers in the widespread lyceum system when it was at its highest point, "those men who made the platform popular and useful and apparently indispensable, did not number more than twenty-five." The whole New England period was dominated by a handful of men. The Saturday Club, which contained the most of them, had, according to Barrett Wendell, twenty-six members "all typical Boston gentlemen of the Renaissance." Howells characterizes it as a "real aristocracy of intellect. To say Prescott, Motley, Parkman, Lowell, Norton, Higginson, Dana, Emerson, Channing, was to say patrician in the truest and often the best sense, if not the largest." It is significant that these were all Harvard men. The period was dominated by college men. In addition to the names mentioned by Howells, there might be added from the New England colleges, Webster, Ticknor, Everett, Bancroft, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, Parker, Clarke, Phillips, Sumner, Thoreau, Parsons, and Hale. Excepting Poe, who for a time was a student at the University of Virginia and at West Point, and Whittier, who was self-educated, and two women, Margaret Fuller and Mrs. Stowe, who lived in the period when colleges were open only for men, the list contains all the leading authors of the mid-period in America.

With few exceptions these names come from what Holmes denominates "the Brahmin caste of New England," a term which he uses to distinguish them from what he called "the homespun class"--"a few chosen families against the great multitude." "Their family names are always on some college catalogue or other." From 1830 to 1870 the creation of literature was very little in the hands of the masses; it was in the hands of these scholars, of this small and provincial "aristocracy of intellect." Holmes, who gloried in the fact that he lived in Boston, "the hub of the universe," on Beacon Street, "the sunny street that holds the sifted few," may be taken as a type of this aristocracy. It was a period of the limited circle of producers, and of mutual admiration within the circumference of that circle. Each member of the group took himself with great seriousness and was taken at his own valuation by the others. When the new democratic, after-the-war America, in the person of Mark Twain, came into the circle and in the true Western style made free with sacred personalities, he was received with frozen silence.

The school, on the whole, stood aloof from the civil and religious activities of its period. With the exception of Whittier, who was not a Brahmin, the larger figures of the era took interest in the great issues of their generation only when these issues had been forced into the field of their emotions. They were bookish men, and they were prone to look not into their hearts or into the heart of their epoch, but into their libraries. In 1856, when America was smoldering with what so soon was to burst out into a maelstrom of fire, Longfellow wrote in his journal, "Dined with Agassiz to meet Emerson and others. I was amused and annoyed to see how soon the conversation drifted off into politics. It was not till after dinner in the library that we got upon anything really interesting." The houses of the Brahmins had only eastern windows. The souls of the whole school lived in the old lands of culture, and they visited these lands as often as they could, and, returning, brought back whole libraries of books which they eagerly translated. Even Lowell, the most democratic American of the group, save Whittier, wrote from Paris in 1873, "In certain ways this side is more agreeable to my tastes than the other." And again the next year he wrote from Florence: "America is too busy, too troubled about many things, and Martha is only good to make puddings."

And with the thrill and rush of a new nation all about him, Stoddard could sit in his study turning out pretty Herrick-like trifles like this:

Why are red roses red? For roses once were white, Because the loving nightingales Sang on their thorns all night-- Sang till the blood they shed Had dyed the roses red.

America especially had been given to softness and sentimentalism. During the mid-century era, the period of Longfellow, the lusty new nation, which was developing a new hope for all mankind, had asked for bread and it had been given all too often "lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon." The oratory had been eloquent, sometimes grandiloquent. The prose, great areas of it, had been affected, embellished with a certain florid youngmanishness, a honey-gathering of phrases even to the point of bad taste, as when Lowell wrote of Milton: "A true Attic bee, he made boot on every lip where there was a taste of truly classic honey." It was the time when ornateness of figure and poeticalness of diction were regarded as essentials of style.

To understand what the Civil War destroyed and what it created, at least in the field of prose style, one should read the two orations delivered at the dedication of the Gettysburg battle-field. Here was the moment of transition between the old American literature and the new. Everett, the eloquent voice of New England, correct, polished, fervid, massing perfect periods to a climax, scholarly, sonorous of diction, studied of movement, finished, left the platform after his long effort, satisfied. The eyes of the few who could judge of oratory as a finished work of art had been upon him and he had stood the test. Then had come for a single moment the Man of the West, the plain man of the people, retiring, ungainly, untrained in the smooth school of art, voicing in simple words a simple message, wrung not from books but from the depths of a soul deeply stirred, and now, fifty years later, the oration of Everett can be found only by reference librarians, while the message of Lincoln is declaimed by every school-boy.

The half-century since the war has stood for the rise of nationalism and of populism, not in the narrower political meanings of these words, but in the generic sense. The older group of writers had been narrowly provincial. Hawthorne wrote to Bridge shortly before the war: "At present we have no country.... The States are too various and too extended to form really one country. New England is really as large a lump of earth as my heart can take in." The war shook America awake, it destroyed sectionalism, and revealed the nation to itself. It was satisfied no longer with theatrical effects without real feeling. After the tremendous reality of the war, it demanded genuineness and the truth of life. A new spirit--social, dramatic, intense--took the place of the old dreaming and sentiment and sadness. The people had awakened. The intellectual life of the nation no longer was to be in the hands of the aristocratic, scholarly few. Even while the war was in progress a bill had passed Congress appropriating vast areas of the public lands for the establishment in every State of a college for the people "to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life," and it is significant that Lincoln, the first great President of the people, signed the bill.

The chief output of the new era was in the form of realistic fiction. America, shaken from narrow sectionalism and contemplation of Europe, woke up and discovered America. In a kind of astonishment she wandered from section to section of her own land, discovering everywhere peoples and manners and languages that were as strange to her even as foreign lands. Mark Twain and Harte and Miller opened to view the wild regions and wilder society of early California and the Sierra Nevadas; Eggleston pictured the primitive settlements of Indiana; Cable told the romance of the Creoles and of the picturesque descendants of the Acadians on the bayous of Louisiana; Page and Harris and F.H. Smith and others caught a vision of the romance of the old South; Allen told of Kentucky life; Miss French of the dwellers in the canebrakes of Arkansas; and Miss Murfree of a strange people in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. In twenty years every isolated neighborhood in America had had its chronicler and photographer.

The exploiting of new and strange regions, with their rough manners, their coarse humor, and their uncouth dialects, brought to the front the new, hard-fought, and hard-defended literary method called realism. For a generation the word was on every critic's pen both in America and abroad. No two seemed perfectly to agree what the term really meant, or what writers were to be classed as realists and what as romanticists. It is becoming clearer now: it was simply the new, young, vigorous tide which had set in against the decadent, dreamy softness that had ruled the mid years of the century.

All the West is coming East.... The Southern States will be similarly moved.... There will be a tremendous shaking up of the people, a great going to and fro in the land.... The nation is to be brought together as it has never been brought before during its history. In one hundred years of intense industry and marvelous development we have been so busy that we never have been able to look one another in the face, except four terrible years of Civil War.... This year around the old family altar at Philadelphia we expect to meet and embrace as brothers.

The Centennial quickened in every way the national life. It gave for the first time the feeling of unity, the realization that the vast West, the new South, and the uncouth frontier were a vital part of the family of the States. Lowell, so much of whose early heart and soul had been given to Europe, discovered America in this same Centennial year. In Cincinnati he was profoundly impressed with the "wonderful richness and comfort of the country and with the distinctive Americanism that is molding into one type of feature and habits so many races that had widely diverged from the same original stock.... These immense spaces tremulous with the young grain, trophies of individual, or at any rate unorganized, courage and energy, of the people and not of dynasties, were to me inexpressibly impressive and even touching.... The men who have done and are doing these things know how things should be done.... It was very interesting, also, to meet men from Kansas and Nevada and California, and to see how manly and intelligent they were, and especially what large heads they had. They had not the manners of Vere de Vere, perhaps, but they had an independence and self-respect which are the prime element of fine bearing." A little of a certain Brahmin condescension toward Westerners there may be here, but on the whole it rings true. The East was discovering the West and was respecting it.

In a broad sense, no age has ever had more of poetry, for the message and the vision and thrill, which in older times came through epic and lyric and drama, have in the latter days come in full measure through the prose form which we call the novel. As a form it has been brought to highest perfection. It has been found to have scope enough to exercise the highest powers of a great poet, and allow him to sound all the depths and shallows of human life. It has been the preacher of the age, the theater, the minstrel, and the social student, the prophet and seer and reformer. It has been more than the epic of democracy; it has been horn-book as well and shepherd's calendar. It has been the literary form peculiarly fitted for a restless, observant, scientific age.

This first wave of Dickens-inspired work, however, soon expended itself, and it was followed by another wave of fiction even more significant. In the first process of rediscovering America, Harte, perhaps, or Clemens, or Cable, stumbled upon a tremendous fact which was destined to add real classics to American literature: America was full of border lands where the old r?gime had yielded to the new, and where indeed there was a true atmosphere of romance. The result was a type of fiction that was neither romantic nor realistic, but a blending of both methods, a romanticism of atmosphere and a realism of truth to the actual conditions and characters involved.

This condition worked itself out in a literary form that is seen now to be the most distinctive product of the period. The era may as truly be called the era of the short story as the Elizabethan period may be called the era of the drama and the early eighteenth century the era of the prose essay. The local color school which exploited the new-found nooks and corners of the West and South did its work almost wholly by means of this highly wrought and concentrated literary form. Not half a dozen novelists of the period have worked exclusively in the novel and romance forms of the mid-century type. A group of writers, including Harte, Clemens, Cable, Mrs. Cooke, Miss Jewett, Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman, Miss Brown, Miss Murfree, Harris, R. M. Johnston, Page, Stockton, Bierce, Garland, Miss King, Miss French, Miss Woolson, Deming, Bunner, Aldrich, have together created what is perhaps the best body of short stories in any language.

The period at its end tended to become journalistic. The enormous demand for fiction by the magazines and by the more ephemeral journals produced a great mass of hastily written and often ill considered work, but on the whole the literary quality of the fiction of the whole period, especially the short stories, has been high. Never has there been in any era so vast a flood of books and reading, and it may also be said that never before has there been so high an average of literary workmanship.

THE LAUGHTER OF THE WEST

The group was born during the thirties and early forties, that second seedtime of American literature. Their birth dates fall within a period of ten years:

To the school also belonged several who were born outside of this magic ten years. There were Henry Wheeler Shaw, "Josh Billings," born in 1818; and Charles Henry Smith, "Bill Arp," born in 1823. At least three younger members must not be omitted: Robert Jones Burdette, 1844; Edgar Wilson Nye, "Bill Nye," 1850; and Opie Read, 1852.

In a broad way the school was a product of the Civil War. American humor had been an evolution of slow growth, and the war precipitated it. The election of Lincoln in 1860 was the beginning. Here was a man of the new West who had worked on flatboats on the Ohio, who had served as a soldier in a backwoods troop, who had ridden for years on a Western circuit, and in rough and ready political campaigns had withstood the heckling of men who had fought barehanded with the frontier and had won. The saddest man in American history, he stands as one of the greatest of American humorists. His laughter rings through the whole period of the war, man of sorrows though he was, and it was the Western laughter heard until now only along the great rivers and the frontier and the gold coast of the Pacific. He had learned it from contact with elemental men, men who passed for precisely what they were, men who were measured solely by the iron rule of what they could do; self-reliant men, healthy, huge-bodied, deep-lunged men to whom life was a joy. The humor that he brought to the East was nothing new in America, but the significant thing is that for the first time it was placed in the limelight. A peculiar combination it was, half shrewd wisdom, "hoss sense," as "Josh Billings" called it, the rest characterization which exposed as with a knife-cut the inner life as well as the outer, whimsical overstatement and understatement, droll incongruities told with all seriousness, and an irreverence born of the all-leveling democracy of the frontier.

"It was Lincoln's opinion that the finest wit and humor, the best jokes and anecdotes, emanated from the lower orders of the country people," and in this judgment he pointed out the very heart of the new literature that was germinating about him. Such life is genuine; it rests upon the foundations of nature itself. Lincoln, like the man of the new West that he was, delighted not so much in books as in actual contact with life. "Riding the circuit for many years and stopping at country taverns where were gathered the lawyers, jurymen, witnesses, and clients, they would sit up all night narrating to each other their life adventures; and the things which happened to an original people, in a new country, surrounded by novel conditions, and told with the descriptive power and exaggeration which characterized such men, supplied him with an exhaustless fund of anecdotes which could be made applicable for enforcing or refuting an argument better than all the invented stories of the world."

But the greatest of them all, the real father of the new school of humorists, the man who gave the East the first glimpse of the California type of humor, was George Horatio Derby , whose sketches over the signature "John Phoenix" began to appear in the early fifties. Undoubtedly it would amaze Derby could he return and read of himself as the father of the later school of humor. With him literary comedy was simply a means now and then of relaxation from the burdens of a strenuous profession. He had been graduated from West Point in 1846, had fought in the Mexican War, and later as an engineer had been entrusted by the government with important surveys and explorations in the far West and later in Florida, where he died at the age of thirty-eight of sunstroke. He was burdened all his life with heavy responsibilities and exacting demands upon his energies. He had little time for books, and his writings, what few he produced, were the result wholly of his own observations upon the picturesque life that he found about him in the West.

He glanced over the first column when he was observed to grow black in the face. A bystander hastened to seize him by the collar, but it was too late. Exploding with mirth, he was scattered into a thousand fragments, one of which striking him probably inflicting some fatal injury, as he immediately expired, having barely time to remove his hat, and say in a feeble voice, "Give this to Phoenix." A large black tooth lies on the table before us, driven through the side of the office with fearful violence at the time of the explosion. We have enclosed it to his widow with a letter of condolence.

He delights in the device of euphemistic statement used so freely by later humorists. The father of Joseph Bowers, he explains, was engaged in business as a malefactor in western New York, but was annoyed greatly by the prejudices of the bigoted settlers. He emigrated suddenly, however, with such precipitation in fact that "he took nothing with him of his large property but a single shirt, which he happened to have about him at the time he formed his resolution." Finally he "ended his career of usefulness by falling from a cart in which he had been standing, addressing a numerous audience, and in which fall he unfortunately broke his neck."

Oh, we'll soon be thar In the land of gold, Through the forest old, O'er the mounting cold, With spirits bold-- Oh, we come, we come, And we'll soon be thar. Gee up, Bolly! whoo, up, whoo haw!"

Io ho un'opinione migliore del bue. Mi pare impossibile che, stando sempre con l'uomo, a lavorare con lui, non abbia capito qualche cosa di quello che succede. Quando dalla sua stalla ha visto partire i figliuoli maggiori di casa, tutti insieme, e i rimasti li ha veduti guardarsi fra loro, cos? seri, deve avere indovinato che qualche cosa di nuovo stava succedendo nel podere, in tutti i poderi della fattoria. E quando son venuti a tirar fuori dalla stalla anche lui e lo hanno portato alla stazione, dove c'erano altri buoi e altri contadini, deve aver cominciato a capire che il nuovo era anche grande, per gli uomini e per i loro animali.

Poi c'era stato il lungo, lento viaggio in treno--buoi, cavalli, soldati: per la strada, all'incontro con altri treni, quando i soldati si salutavano vociando, anche ad essi veniva fatto di muggire con i musi sporgenti dalle aperture di quella stalla stretta e bassa che si moveva. Cos? fino al confine, quanti incontri con buoi sconosciuti, ma che dovevano trovarsi l? tutti per la stessa ragione! I grandi buoi candidi della Val di Chiana, i potenti cornuti del Senese guardavano con curiosit? i pi? piccoli compagni rossastri del Piemonte; le razze romagnole scoprivano per la prima volta le razze friulane. Anche nei duri crani bovini deve essere entrata un'idea nuova, pi? vasta, della loro specie: di essere molti, assai pi? di quanti potevano figurarsi mentre erano vissuti nelle loro stalle disperse; e differenti tra loro, ma, cos? differenti, simili, fratelli.

Che non sien proprio capaci i buoi di sentire l'orgoglio di esser tanti, e tutti buoi d'Italia?

L'Italia, detta dai giovenchi, ? qui....

Questi che, a drappelli, a plotoni, a battaglioni, stanno passando il ponte di Visinale, vanno a morir per l'Italia. Non ridete dell'idea di sacrificio che mi fa pensoso al loro passaggio. ? un'idea ohe doveva avere qualche mio antenato preistorico di quattro o cinquemila anni fa. I nostri antenati mediterranei non erano in origine divoratori di buoi come i tedeschi carnivori; erano agricoltori; nel bue vedevano il compagno di lavoro, non la vittima indispensabile al loro appetito. Quando lo ammazzavano, sentivano di sacrificarlo. E lo sacrificavano infatti agli dei. Cos? la povera bestia moriva s?, ma per uno scopo pi? nobile che non fosse proprio quello di riempir la pancia ai suoi uccisori: questi non facevano che utilizzare un avanzo di ci? che gli dei avevano avuto.

Non ? una macelleria ma un sacrifizio di buoi questo che noi facciamo ora, per preparare il rancio a centinaia di migliaia di soldati. Sacrifizio appare anche per la quantit? straordinaria dei capi che si abbattono. Noi prepariamo il pasto quotidiano di carne a contadini che in pace, nei loro campi, non dovevano mangiar tanta carne per essere forti contadini. Ma il contadino, trasformandosi in soldato, ha bisogno che anche il suo nutrimento si trasformi; e le energie vive che questa vita di fatica e di pericolo gli consuma, le ristora il buon pezzo di carne che ogni giorno gli arriva nella gavetta di brodo. Si sacrifica il contadino; ? giusto che si sacrifichi il suo animale. L'animale si sacrifica all'uomo, ma tutti e due si sacrificano a qualche cosa che vale pi? di qualunque vita animale, di uomo, di eroe. Qualche cosa che vive mentre noi moriamo e che ? come il riflesso eterno delle nostre vite passeggere: la Patria.

O Italia, che ai tuoi poeti apparisti santa nella pace campestre, Italia di Virgilio, di Garibaldi e del Pascoli, come ti riconosco qui, oggi, a batter l'Austria con le tue dure fanterie di contadini, dietro cui marciano, incolonnati come animali di battaglia, i loro buoi, al sacrifizio!

....Vissero nei campi i forti antichi popoli: l'aratro il solco eterno disegn? di Roma: l'Italia, detta dai giovenchi, ? qui.

Buoi e profughi.

Anche questo nuovo lembo di Friuli che abbiamo riaggiunto all'altro, il Friuli di Gorizia al Friuli di Udine, ? paese di campi, di contadini e di buoi. Le case coloniche punteggiano di bianco il verde chiaro del piano, il verde scuro dei colli. Biade e viti al piano, viti e boschetti in collina, e in colle e in piano alberi da frutto come in poche altre parti di Italia: quando ci arrivammo, a giugno, pareva che i soldati non bastassero a finire le ciliege, tante ce n'erano.

Anche contadini ce n'erano. Non tutti, ch? gli uomini fino ai quarantacinque anni se li era portati via l'Austria a fare i soldati in Galizia; c'erano solamente i vecchi, le donne, i ragazzi. Ma insomma le campagne non erano vuote: le stalle avevano i loro buoi, i cortili i loro polli. Sarebbe stata una bella cosa se si fossero potuti lasciar tutti dove erano, far la guerra senza disturbarli dalle loro occupazioni pacifiche.

Ma un esercito ha bisogno di molto spazio tutto per s?; e poi gli Austriaci avevano subito cominciato a tirar a granata sopra quelle case, sopra quella povera gente che si ostinava ad abitarci.

Codesti Friulani erano stati fino dal giorno avanti sudditi austriaci, e, quantunque italiani, avevano anche obbedite pazientemente agli antichi padroni. Sapevano che i nostri soldati non avrebbero loro fatto male; s'illudevano che anche gli Austriaci non si sarebbero vendicati su loro da lontano, a cannonate cieche.

Invece le granate arrivavano, dappertutto. E tuttavia i contadini non si movevano. Restavano l?, cos? intontiti che non avevano nemmeno paura. Se una casa era sfondata da un 305, si riparavano in un'altra. Non potevano credere che l'Austria facesse la guerra anche a loro.

Quando si ? dovuto dar l'ordine di sgombero, hanno obbedito con l'animo straziato. Che importava loro aver salve le vite, se le case rimanevano esposte alla rabbia del nemico?

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