that seemed to him to be the curses of our modern civilization and to put poetry, music, and all the means of æsthetic and spiritual enjoyment beyond our reach. These views, however, are not didactically set forth. On the contrary, there is little American verse more refined and airily imaginative than Lanier's, and none, except Poe's, more melodious. His poems are gospels even more in their form than in their substance. The Symphony is not only a glorification of art; it is itself a glorified example of art, in which the violins and the flute and the clarionet are made to speak almost in their own tones, complaining of the deadly blight of Trade, and singing the praises of the music-master, unselfish Love. Corn is the hymn of the higher life of culture. The Ballad of the Trees and the Master and The Marshes of Glynn are religion set to music.

Lanier was a constant experimenter, and though he was permitted to accomplish little, he essayed much. The Revenge of Hamish, in which he went outside of America for a subject, as Timrod did in Katie, is a narrative poem in long swinging lines-a powerful, almost tear-compelling ballad. The Psalm of the West is an ambitious song of the New World and the American Republic, from the voyage of Columbus to the reunion of North and South. There are several good poems in the negro dialect; and there are some exquisite lyrics, of which perhaps the best are The Song of the Chattahoochee and Evening Song. But the incomplete Hymns of the Marshes, upon which he worked feverishly almost to the hour of his death, indubitably reveal the poet at his highest and best. The pictures of the live oaks with their "little green leaves," of the glimmering marsh, "a limpid labyrinth of dreams," of the rising sun and the flooding sea, are all drawn by the hand of a master. It must be admitted, too, that even after Poe and Tennyson and Swinburne he has wrested new melodies

from words.

Yet we are often made to feel that in applying so cunningly his theories of "tone-color" and harmony he has been led too far from spontaneity and has substituted artificial conceits for the fresh imagery of inspiration. In his devotion to the two arts of music and verse, he has lost sight of the boundaries of each, and has tried to secure, with language, effects which should be attempted with music only. In spite, however, of partial and perhaps inevitable failure, we shall long remember him for his high ideals, for the religious and even heroic consecration of his life to art under most discouraging conditions, and for the undeniable beauty of much that he left behind.

CHAPTER IX

PROSE AND POETRY IN THE WEST

Literature in the West-between the Ohio River, let us say, and the Pacific Ocean-has not followed the same course of development as in the South. It scarcely made a beginning until well after the Civil War; perhaps no book published in this region before 1867 is worth recording to-day. Moreover, it is different in character. Prose and poetry have from the outset existed side by side, with a perceptible leaning toward prose as the more natural form of expression. The prose which we shall find supplanting the poetry of the South is still in a measure poetic; the poetry of the West often tends to employ the free and homely idioms of prose. The western literature in its entirety is a novel product, quite without traditions, as new as the surroundings and the society which it reflects. That which Walt Whitman expressly stood for-sheer democracy, the levelling of class distinctions and the uncompromising assertion of the individual-finds here a natural emphasis. College men are very decidedly in the minority. Farming, mining, lumbering, trapping, scouting, at the highest journalism and local law or politics, furnished the education of the western pioneer. Many a western "man of letters" has ploughed corn, "punched" cattle, sluiced gold, or travelled about the country with a pedler's cart. Men of culture from the East found their way to the West, but not in sufficient numbers to change materially the character of its early literature. Prestige was from the first disregarded, culture often held in scorn. It is manifest that a literature of this type

must be gauged by somewhat altered standards. Yet it seems not unlikely that it is precisely this which the future will select as the most vital and characteristic literary product of the close of the nineteenth century in the United States.

One of the veterans of this western school, who, though long famous, has but lately been conceded the dignified position that is his due, is Samuel Langhorne Clemens, universally known as 66 'Mark Twain." He was born in Missouri in 1835.

1835

Avoiding with considerable success even a common S. L. Clemens, school education, he got his first literary training, like Franklin, Taylor, Whitman, and Howells, at the printer's case. For a while he was a tramp printer and for a while a pilot on the Mississippi. In 1861 he went to Nevada, where he became an editor of the Virginia City Enterprise. He engaged in mining, too; and pushing still farther west, pursued both mining and newspaper work in California. In 1866 he visited the Hawaiian Islands, and finding upon his return that his humorous sketches in the San Francisco newspapers had given him a local fame, he began lecturing. In 1867 he went east, published The Jumping Frog and Other Sketches, and then made the European tour which resulted in the book that won him a national fame, Innocents Abroad (1869). Since then he has pursued a steady literary career, and the names of his many books are so familiar as scarcely to require recording. He has also travelled and lectured extensively, especially of late years, successfully laboring, with a heroism that reminds one of Sir Walter Scott, to remove a debt incurred by the failure of a publishing house which he founded. His permanent home is now at Hartford, Connec

ticut.

Mr. Clemens's best works connect themselves directly with his early experiences in the West. Roughing It (1872), for example, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and Life on

the Mississippi (1883), are chapters out of the very heart of that life to which he had lived as closely as a man may live. This is their first claim to excellence. Their second claim lies in the emphasis which they lay upon one of the most characteristic phases of that life, namely, its rough humor. Mark Twain, indeed, will always be known as a humorist. A single serious work, like his Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, cannot make against this estimate. He, more than any other one person, has given late American humor the distinctive name it enjoys. Unfortunately, this very quality, which insured his popularity, brought also for a time the severest criticism. The humor is a little coarse for the readers of an age that shrinks from Rabelais and Swift. It might have passed in the days of Irving; it was pretty sure to be challenged after the delicate wit of Lowell and Holmes. Moreover, it possesses some unpleasant American characteristics. Innocents Abroad, for example, has in it not a little of that irreverence which Americans often betray in the presence of sacred old world scenes and institutions. But there is always one thing in its favor. There is little torturing of the fancy, as in some of our minor humorists, to make every sentence yield a laugh. The humor is of the most genuine kind-spontaneous and irresistible. A man could not stand before the public so many years as Mark Twain has done, bearing the most difficult of reputations to sustain, if humor were not of his very essence. Besides, his humor has mostly a purpose beyond the flash of wit. Pure drollery carried Artemus Ward into a deserved reputation. But Twain goes beyond pure fooling. Even Innocents Abroad, by no means his best book, has served a good end by turning to ridicule the sham enthusiasm of the routine tourist and the innocence of the over-gullible. It is true, Twain likes to disclaim any such object. "Anybody who seeks a moral in this story," he said of Huckleberry Finn, “will be