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school teacher, he first saw the Pacific Ocean in 1854, when his widowed mother moved her family to San Francisco. Here, as a lad of fifteen, he proved more interested in reading poetry and fiction than in sharing the adventurous existence which California offered to him. When he had to support himself, he set type, as Mark Twain was doing in Hannibal, or served behind the counter in a drug store, as O. Henry was to do twenty years later in Greensboro, or-possibly-turned an occasional shovelful of dirt on a mining claim. The details of his life are doubtful enough, let his biographers do what they can to clear up the uncertainties. But the general outlines, the significant facts, are obvious, and easily grasped.

It is certain, for instance, that Bret Harte lived in California more as an observer of events than as an active participator. He "knocked around" from one job to another, and found his most congenial employment on various newspapers and magazines where he acted as compositor, proof-reader, errand-boy, or editor. It is clear that like Mark Twain and O. Henry he gave much time to learning to write, albeit he was far more imitative in his early work than either of the two persons with whom he is often compared. Gradually he became known around San Francisco as something of a man of letters, and by 1863 had the satisfaction of seeing his Legend of Monte del Diablo in the Atlantic Monthly. It was during these years that he met Mark Twain, and gave him a position writing for the journal of which Harte at the time chanced to be editor. In 1868 he was chosen editor of the newly-established Overland Monthly. The second issue contained his Luck of Roaring Camp-and with the publication of that story Harte's fame spread from San Francisco to New York and London.

As if for good measure he followed this first great story with The Outcasts of Poker Flat and Tennessee's Partner, and by 1870 had become so much of a figure that the Atlantic offered him ten thousand dollars for a year's output. Accepting the offer eagerly, he at once left California, and journeyed back to the east from which he had come. He was never again to see the Golden Gate.

The rest of his story is peculiarly insipid. For seven years he remained in the vicinity of New York, writing. Then he went abroad on a consular appointment to Germany. From 1888 till his death in 1902 he lived in London, still writing assiduously, but never approaching the accomplishment of his first glorious outburst.

The significance of this accomplishment, which is fairly represented by the two stories printed in this volume, is not difficult to state, although the importance of the work under consideration is in no way commensurate with the brevity of the statement. For one thing, it is clear that Harte is perhaps the most important figure in the transition from the

dreamy romances of Irving and the otherworldly vignettes of Hawthorne, to the more realistic short stories of the present. Once he had written his tales of California, it was but a short step to O. Henry and The Four Million. Again, he enriched American fiction immensely by popularizing the element which for want of a more specific term one calls "local color." The provincialisms, the dialectical peculiarities, the entire flavor of a story like Tennessee's Partner-all this was relatively new in America, and proved as appealing as it was novel. Finally, when he was at his best, he was without any qualification a great artist, dealing with one of the most difficult and elusive of prose types, and developing such a technical mastery of the type that some few of his tales must be included in any catalogue of the world's greatest short stories. It is easy, therefore, to forgive him his sentimental proclivities, and to close one's eyes to the fact that California in the Golden Age may not have been exactly as Bret Harte pictured it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Harte's work is available in The Writings of Bret Harte, Standard Library Edition, Boston, 1896-1903, 20 vols. His poems are to be had in the one volume Household Edition, Boston. The only extensive biography is H. C. Merwin's Life of Bret Harte, Boston, 1911.

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
(1836-1907)

Aldrich was one of the large number of American men of letters who wrote with sufficient power to attain contemporary fame in both prose and verse without achieving great distinction in either. In the case of Aldrich, however, his further work as editor of the Atlantic Monthly raised him to a position well above that of an author like Bayard Taylor, but far from the height of Lowell. Occasionally, as in Marjorie Daw (p. 825), he produced a masterpiece of prose; and among the great body of his lyrics there are a few, such as the Longfellow (p. 1022). which rank among the best of their respective types. Again as with many of his countrymen, the man's character and personality were to his contemporaries integral parts of his literary equipment.

Born in 1836, Aldrich has set forth the pranks and friendships of his boyhood days in Portsmouth ("Rivermouth") in his autobiographical Story of a Bad Boy (1869). On the death of his father in 1852 he gave up his plans for college and tried banking in New York City, but in 1855 he turned definitely to literature as a profession, becoming associated in turn with the New York Evening Mirror, the Home Journal, and Every

Saturday, while from 1881 to 1890 he edited the Atlantic Monthly. After marrying and taking up his work in Boston, Aldrich lived for some time in the village of Ponkapog, but for two years, during the absence of Lowell, he occupied Elmwood (see p. 1020). Throughout his later life he wrote extensively, making himself known as short story writer, novelist, and lyric poet. He travelled widely, circling the globe twice, received honorary degrees from several American universities, and died in Boston on March 19, 1907.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Writings of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Riverside Edition, Boston, 1907, 9 vols., is the standard collected edition. Ferris Greenslet's The Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Boston, 1908, is an admirable biography.

NOTES

MARJORIE DAW

825. Published in the Atlantic Monthly and in book form (Marjorie Daw and Other People) in 1873. By 1885 seventeen editions of the volume had been printed. The story furnishes an almost perfect example of the surprise ending

an ending which is not generally anticipated by the reader but which on analysis proves to be the most logical of all that were possible. A modification of the type has been used with great success by later writers, notably O. Henry.

826. b. 2. Fidus Achates. Faithful Achates was the intimate companion of Æneas; hence the term means "faithful friend."

FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD
(1854-1909)

The inclusion of Marion Crawford in the present collection is incidentally an acknowledgment of his ability as a novelist, but principally an effort to set forth the literary ideals of a conservative romanticist of the past generation. There has been of late a good deal of question-begging discussion of "the triumph of realism" in poetry and fiction, by critics whose personal bias is selfevident. To offset this prejudice and to stimulate sounder thinking, the student will find Crawford's moderate statement of his views unusually valuable, as coming from an author of unquestioned_success.

Crawford was born in Italy in 1854, the son of an American sculptor, and was educated in the United States, England, Germany, and Italy. An enthusiastic student of Sanscrit, he spent some time in India during the seventies, and on his return to the United States he was advised by his uncle, Samuel Ward (a brother of Julia Ward Howe), to put some

of his experiences of life in India into the form of a novel. This he did, five years before the appearance of Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills, and the resulting volume, Mr. Isaacs (1882), was so immediately popular that Crawford devoted himself assiduously to fiction and became one of the most prolific of the American novelists. The latter part of his life was spent largely at Sorrento, on the Bay of Naples, where he enjoyed the prosperity that came from producing over forty volumes, chiefly of fiction. Having travelled extensively himself, he chose his settings from all over the world, but the books that are most admired are those dealing with the Italian life in which he was completely at home; of these the best are the Saracinesca series: Saracinesca (1887), Sant' Ilario (1889), Don Orsino (1892), and Corleone (1897).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Crawford's Complete Works are published by The Macmillan Company, N. Y., in 37 volumes, No biography of him has yet appeared. Several critical articles are listed in the C. H. A. L.

HENRY JAMES (1843-1916)

Whether James should be considered an American, by virtue of his American ancestry, birth, and early education, or an Englishman, by virtue of his long residence in London and naturalization as a British subject in 1915, is a question of some interest though of little importance. He belongs to both peoples; he was a man of unique AngloAmerican relationships; and, because of the high quality of his art, he was a member of the relatively small group of novelists who have come to assume international significance. Not everyone reads James's fiction with enthusiasm; his criticism, likewise, is too acute and subtle to find favor with the multitude. But despite the lack of popular applause which many persons of essentially smaller talents have succeeded in winning. James's position is as assured as is possible in the case of a man whose work must be viewed in the short perspective of half a century. It is already clear that as an analyst of human emotion, or, to use the wellknown phrase, as a psychological novelist, he belongs with George Eliot and Meredith. It is beyond cavil that in the architectonics of fiction James had few peers, and in English at least, no superiors. The great public may never read his books, but other novelists have turned to them with avidity, and have been eager to acknowledge his mastership. Furthermore, it is impossible to read a chapter of one of James's books without recog nizing and admiring his sheer intellectual power, a power which may at times serve

drag on his story-telling ability, but is ertheless one of the clearest marks of his nction.

> understand James's fiction, one should in mind the story of his life, especially concerns that process of denationalizato which he was early and intentionally ected by his father. The materials for a story are at hand in his own autoraphical volumes, A Small Boy and Others 3), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), The Middle Years (1917). If to these adds The Letters of Henry James (1920, ls.), and supplements the entire group by Letters of William James (1921, 2 vols.), will have clearly in mind the main out

of his story, though one may still be ed by some phases of James's developt.

ne should remember, in considering es's life, that he was the son of Henry es, Senior, a distinguished American lar and metaphysician, whose essays lent ity to the pages of the Atlantic and th American Review long before his son's story appeared in the former journal. should remember, too, that it was part he elder James's system to bring up his in such a fashion that they should pe, if possible, the provincialisms of their ve land. Consequently, though the boy born in New York, his early education derived in more than half a dozen cenof European culture, and closed-oddly gh-with a period of study in the Har1 Law School. Kept out of the Civil by ill health, James took to writing, under the friendly encouragement of wells had succeeded by 1868 in publishing umber of stories in the Atlantic and the xy. In 1869, and again in 1872-73, he e extended trips to Europe, and found he civilization of the old world the quinence of something generally lacking in United States. In 1875 he definitely doned all attempts to live in the United es, and began what was to prove a anent residence in London. "Live all can; it's a mistake not to," he makes of his characters say in The Ambassadors. as in pursuit of this goal of a full, vivid, lectual life, that James abandoned AmerFor Europe.

any years before his death he had thus ally expatriated himself, though not till United States, after the sinking of the tania, failed at once to declare war, did es make the final gesture by renouncing citizenship, and becoming a subject of George. Immediately on completion is act he received from his sovereign the er of Merit, only to die in London in 1916. ring his last forty years, James had been ssantly active in his chosen calling. The Is which he published during this period vels, tales, plays, and critical essays,so numerous, and the changes between

his early and later manners of writing are so striking, that it is difficult to make any brief statement about his aims and achievements which will not be misleading. Yet wherever one turns in James's fiction-the most important phase of his work-one realizes that he was an observer of life, not a man of action, and that the particular thing which most interested him was the analysis of human motives. He left the United States, in part at least, to find social centers where the physical needs of man were cared for so automatically, where the struggle against the forces of nature had been over for so many years, and where the routine of life was so well established, that he could study without distraction the comedies and tragedies of the human soul. His novels and tales are his varied and fascinating accounts of this study.

The student who wishes to become familiar with James's work, especially as it is best represented in the novels, should by all means begin with his earlier publications, say, for instance, The American (1877), and The Europeans (1878). In the former James takes Christopher Newman to Europe, where, as he later put it, he is "insidiously beguiled and cruelly wronged, . . . the point being in especial that he should suffer at the hands of persons pretending to represent the highest possible civilization, and to be of an order in every way superior to his own." In The Europeans the situation is reversed, and two visitors from England serve as foils to set off some of the American traits which James considered least worthy.

With the publication of these two books, James appeared as virtually the creator of what has since been called the "international novel." An International Episode (1879), Daisy Miller (1879), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881) continue in the same spacious field, and illustrate James's all-absorbing interest in analyzing and depicting human character. Indeed, his picturing of Isabel Archer, "heroine" of the last book, is so deft, so subtle, and so plausible, that one hesitates not to call the story which shapes itself around her, James's best novel.

By the time one has read these five books, one may well go on to The Princess Cassamassima (1886), The Aspern Papers (1888), The Tragic Muse (1890), or even, perhaps, The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904). In the last two one finds oneself baffled by the mannerisms of style and method which became more and more obvious as James grew older. To say that his later style is involved almost to the point of being ridiculous, is hardly to overstate the matter. Here, for instance, are three sentences, culled from the Preface (1909) to the volume containing a revised form of The Real Thing, which account for the origin of the story and illustrate James's stylistic peculiarities:

"In like manner my much-loved friend George du Maurier had spoken to me of a call from a strange and striking couple desirous to propose themselves as artist's models for his weekly 'social' illustrations to Punch, and the acceptance of whose services would have entailed the dismissal of an undistinguished but highly expert pair, also husband and wife, who had come to him from far back on the irregular day and whom, thanks to a happy, and to that extent lucrative, appearance of 'type' on the part of each, he had reproduced, to the best effect, in a thousand drawing-room attitudes and combinations. Exceedingly modest members of society, they earned their bread by looking and, with the aid of supplied toggery, dressing, greater favourites of fortune to the life; or, otherwise expressed, by skilfully feigning a virtue not in the least native to them. Here meanwhile were their so handsome proposed, so anxious, so almost haggard competitors, originally, by every sign, of the best condition and estate, but overtaken by reverses even while conforming impeccably to the standard of superficial 'smartness' and pleading with well-bred ease and the right light tone, not to say with feverish gaiety, that (as in the interest of art itself) they at least should n't have to 'make believe.'

The fact of course is that James became so concerned with the minute and subtle shades, gradations, and differentiations, in his analysis of human conduct, that he failed to hold himself to the major task of telling the story, or even to the relatively simple one of writing so that the ordinary reader could understand him. One wishes, while reading The Ambassadors, as one does while reading Joseph Conrad's Arrow of Gold, that the author had forgotten himself occasionally, forgotten his concern with the soul-stuff of his characters, and given free rein to his genius for absorbing narrative. Had he been able to make this one concession to the frailty of his readers, he would have found few novelists, the world over, entitled to stand beside him. Carl Van Doren's summary puts the case so well that the last four sentences must be quoted as they stand: "He is the creator of a world immensely beautiful in its own right: a world of international proportions, peopled by charming human beings who live graceful lives in settings lovely almost beyond description; a world which vibrates with the finest instincts and sentiments and trembles at vulgarity and ugliness; a world full of works of art and learning and intelligence, a world infinitely refined, a world perfectly civilized. In real life the danger to such a world is that it may be overwhelmed by some burly rush of actuality from without. In literature the danger is that such a world will gradually fade out as dreams fade, and as the old romances of feudalism have already faded. Elaborate systems of decorum pass away; it

is only the simpler manners of men which live forever." (The American Novel, N. Y. 1921; p. 220.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EDITIONS. The New York Edition of James's novels and tales, N. Y. 19071917, 26 vols., is the best collected edition. For this he wrote the famous prefaces which not only explain the origins of the various works, but-what is more important-set forth in extenso James's critical theories.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL ARTICLES. There is as yet no adequate life of James. Joseph Warren Beach's The Method of Henry James, New Haven, 1918, is an admirable book with which to begin the study of James's novels. An essay by Howells, Mr. Henry James's Later Work, published originally in the North American Review for January, 1903, and reprinted in April, 1916, and one by Joseph Conrad, Henry James: An Appreciation, published in the same journal in January, 1905, and also reprinted in April, 1916, are especially interesting because of their authorship. For other suggestions, consult the C. H. A. L. James's own autobiographical works have been listed in the preceding account of his life.

NOTES

THE REAL THING

842. Here printed in its original (1893) form. An interesting illustration of James's fondness for revising his own work may be had by comparing a few paragraphs of this version with the 1909 text in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, New York Edition, vol. xviii, p. 305.

JOHN BURROUGHS (1837-1921)

Burroughs' long life was given wholeheartedly to the study of that Nature which he did so much to present to American writers. Born in Roxbury, New York, in 1837, he grew up on a farm, with but little formal education, and with-apparently-few opportunities for outgrowing the somewhat restricted life to which fate seemed to have devoted him. He tried his hand at schoolteaching, held a government clerkship in Washington (where he met Walt Whitman and came to know him intimately) from 1864 to 1873, was a national bank examiner from 1873 to 1884, and in 1884 retired to his home at West Park, New York. There he spent the rest of his life, "devoting his time to literature and fruit culture," as he modestly put it. He died in 1921.

The best discussion of one interesting phase of Burroughs' life, his changing attitude towards the problems which the scien

tific study of life was emphasizing, is Norman Foerster's chapter on Burroughs, in his Nature in American Literature, N. Y. 1923. But throughout the entire five decades of his literary productivity, and despite the many variations in his philosophical outlook, he remained unaltered in his love of the outdoor world and his ability to interpret it to others. As early as 1867, in his Notes on Walt Whitman (which he subsequently expanded into Walt Whitman: a Study, 1896) he had written the following self-revealing sentences: "From childhood I was familiar with the homely facts of the barn, and of cattle and horses; the sugar making in the maple woods in early spring; the work of the corn-field, hay-field, potato-field; the delicious fall months with their pigeon and squirrel shooting; threshing of buckwheat, gathering of apples, and burning of fallows; in short, everything that smacked of, and led to, the open air and its exhilarations. I belonged, as I may say, to them; and my substance and taste, as they grew, assimilated them as truly as my body did its food. I loved a few books much; but I loved Nature, in all those material examples and subtle expressions, with a love passing all the books of the world."

To the end of his days Burroughs continued to live in this same intimate relationship with the world of Nature, and his great contribution to American literature consists of a long series of volumes by the aid of which others may enjoy what Burroughs knew so intimately.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burroughs' most important writings are available in The Collected Works of John Burroughs, Boston, 1922, 12 vols. His best known single works are Wake Robin, Boston, 1871, in which he first appeared as the sympathetic interpreter of Nature; Birds and Poets, Boston, 1877, a similar collection of descriptive essays; Locusts and Wild Honey, Boston, 1879; Whitman: A Study, New York, 1896; Literary Values, Boston, 1904; Accepting the Universe, Boston, 1910; The Summit of the Years, Boston, 1913; and The Last Harvest, Boston, 1922. My Boyhood: An Autobiography, N. Y. 1922, is the best source of information about his early life; Clifton Johnson's John Burroughs Talks, Boston, 1922, is valuable for the light it throws on his personality and ideals during his later years.

NOTES BIRDS'-NESTS

857. This essay, from the Atlantic Monthly for June, 1869, shows Burroughs in a characteristic rôle at the very beginning of his literary career.

SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS (1835-1910)

("MARK TWAIN”)

The student who finds himself interested in the astonishing phenomenon which the world knows as Mark Twain, should begin his reading with Albert B. Paine's admirable Mark Twain: A Biography (N. Y. 1912, 3 vols.); second, he might turn to Mark Twain's Letters (N. Y. 1917, 2 vols.), edited by the same competent critic. Mary Lawton's A Life-time with Mark Twain (N. Y. 1925) should perhaps come next; and by the time one has completed the pleasant task of reading these three works, one will be in a position to enjoy with intelligence the twenty-five volumes of Mark Twain's collected works, and to estimate more or less for oneself his significance in American literature, and will be in reasonably sure possession of the chief facts concerning Clemens's picturesque personality and equally picturesque career.

Picturesque: the adjective is perhaps the first that comes to mind as one thinks over Mark Twain's seventy-five years of adventurous life. He was picturesque to look at, with his white clothes, white hair and moustache, deep-set, blue eyes, and rolling, slouching gait a combination of personal attributes that made him a marked man in any group. The most striking fact concerning his psychological make-up has also its picturesque interest: he was at once pessimist and optimist, a confirmed cynic, and an incurable idealist. As regards the here and now, the race of human beings as he saw it all around him, he saw little occasion for hopefulness; he knew too well our manifold shortcomings, our hypocrisies and self-deceptions. "Poor old Methuselah," he exclaimed in a characteristic outburst, "how ever could he have endured so many years of human existence." Yet only the most superficial of readers would be content to find in this, or in the scores of similar remarks that lie scattered throughout his writing, Mark Twain's final verdict on life. To turn the pages of Joan of Arc, or of the essay In Defence of Harriet Shelley, is to realize that the habitual note of cynicism is but a sort of protective armor, and that Clemens, as surely as his contemporary Walt Whitman, knew that truth and honor and unselfishness and purity were still to be found in human hearts, though often concealed beneath the most unpromising of exteriors. He knew the race of men as few Americans have ever known it. Towards the close of his life, when his whole outlook was embittered by painful illness, and when his ideally happy family life had been shattered by the death of his wife and three children, he published The Mysterious Stranger, an almost Swiftian attack on the entire scheme of things. But one should always remember the circumstances under which this indictment was drawn; "the real Mark Twain" was

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