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    Contents

    Chapter 12—Literature for the Nation

    Delmer Davis

    Love stories, frivolous and exciting tales, and even that class of books called religious novels—books in which the author attaches to his story a moral lesson—are a curse to the readers. Religious sentiments may be woven all through a storybook, but, in most cases, Satan is but clothed in angel-robes, the more effectively to deceive and allure. None are so confirmed in right principles, none so secure from temptation, that they are safe in reading these stories. Messages to Young People, 272.WEGW 193.1

    In 1820, Sydney Smith, a critic in Great Britain for the Edinburgh Review, delivered a now much-quoted opinion concerning American culture and literature: “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” Although the pronouncement angered contemporary Americans and was, indeed, somewhat inaccurate, given the long and proud history of literacy and printing in the United States, there was a kernel of truth in Smith’s remark. America had not yet produced a single book that could be accurately categorized as great literary art.WEGW 193.2

    What Smith did not realize, however, was that already an epoch-making shift in American literary accomplishment had begun. Only a few months after Smith’s negative evaluation, the same Edinburgh Review printed a favorable notice regarding Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book. Between the publication of this important work and the end of World War I, nearly 100 years later, most of the important American authors lived and wrote, producing a legacy of art that still makes up the main body of content in most representative high school and college courses in American literature. Indeed, as the twentieth century draws to a close, it seems doubtful if American writers of the modern period, in spite of their numbers and their variety, will ever be judged as effective as their remarkable predecessors of the nineteenth century.WEGW 193.3

    In the first rank of American writers of the nineteenth century stand Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and Henry James—authors who have achieved justifiable fame both in this country and abroad. Even the second rank of nineteenth-century American writers includes such reputable artists as Henry Adams, William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Stephen Crane, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Dean Howells, Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Frank Norris, and John Greenleaf Whittier.WEGW 194.1

    Finally, almost at the midpoint of this remarkable century, within five years, some of the greatest American classics were published: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850); Emerson’s Representative Men (1850); Melville’s Moby Dick (1851); Thoreau’s Walden (1854); and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855).WEGW 194.2

    Nineteenth-century American literature can best be discussed in terms of two dominant artistic tendencies—romanticism and realism. The first of these artistic labels can be safely applied to American culture up through the Civil War. Writers of the romantic movement in America imitated European ideals, philosophical trends, and artistic forms, but in the best writers there was a unique American flavor added to the European brew. Perhaps the single most important unifying trait American romantic writers shared was an emphasis upon the imagination as man’s supreme guide to fulfillment and truth. For these writers the imagination was not a mere vehicle of escape or fantasy but instead a sure guide to the eternal realities that, most romantics agreed, resided in a world beyond and behind the surface material distractions of everyday existence. The earlier eighteenth-century emphasis on scientific rationalism seemed a bankrupt means of discovering truth, since clearly many problems of mankind were yet unsolved.WEGW 194.3

    Along with the emphasis on imagination came, of course, a similar reliance on emotion and personal expression of unique and individual feelings and perceptions. As a middle-class movement, moreover, romanticism took seriously the values of the common man, flaunted the standards of aristocratic conservatism in social ideas and artistic forms, found peculiar fascination with the mysterious and the strange, and carried on a love affair with medievalism and orientalism.WEGW 194.4

    Inevitably, many romantic writers rejected traditional Christianity. In place of man as fallen and a universe blighted by evil, the important romantic writers (Hawthorne and Melville were exceptions) tended to see humanity as basically good in an evolving universe where the only constant was motion and change—movement toward ever-greater fulfillment and perfection. Among American authors, this changing universe received particular emphasis, as witnessed by the prominence of nature in their choices of subject matter and resource materials. As Emerson noted in his “The American Scholar” (1837): “The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and, after the sunset, Night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows.”WEGW 195.1

    Although, of course, to most romantics, nature included much more than mere scenery or wilderness, one cannot ignore the central significance of the outdoors to American writers of the nineteenth century as a dominating metaphor for personal and cosmic meaning in such works as Walden, Leaves of Grass, Moby Dick, and Huckleberry Finn. The peculiar American emphasis on nature in nineteenth-century art was doubtless partially the result of the ever-present immediacy of wilderness in American life, given the key factor of a frontier, always in existence, even if always changing its locality, throughout the century.WEGW 195.2

    Within the romantic period of American literature, probably the single most influential group of serious writers and artists congregated in the Boston and Concord area of Massachusetts in the 1830s and 1840s—the so-called transcendentalists. These intellectuals linked together many of the romantic emphases into a body of shared premises and beliefs. Led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the transcendentalists preached and wrote ideals that eventually came to dominate the goals, if not the practices, of educated American culture by the end of the century—the sanctity of individuality and self-reliance; the dignity of human labor; the mystical beauties and resources of nature; the horrors of materialism; the need of social and intellectual reform in education and race relations and in the relative place of women in society.WEGW 195.3

    Other than Emerson, Henry David Thoreau was perhaps the most artistically successful transcendentalist, and his work Walden is, at its deepest level, a compelling statement of transcendental idealism. Most important American writers of the nineteenth century were affected by transcendental ideas and reacted either positively, as in the cases of Whitman or Dickinson, or somewhat negatively, as in the cases of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, James, and Twain.WEGW 196.1

    One thing that Edgar Allan Poe found objectionable about transcendentalism (as well as about traditional Christianity) was didactic moralism—the willingness to make art a teacher. Heavily influenced by their religious heritage, the American public and most American writers were uncomfortable unless art instructed. Poe was uncharacteristic, then, in his theories of art, which elevated beauty as the supreme goal of poetry and devalued truth, grudgingly accepting it as an appropriate goal in imaginative and rational prose. Poe’s attacks on the transcendentalists and on the moralistic Longfellow are a matter of critical record. As for Emerson, he responded by labeling Poe as “the jingle man,” so empty did he find Poe’s poetry of anything but sound and melody.WEGW 196.2

    Hawthorne and Melville shared more fundamental objections to transcendentalism. Both authors were attracted to the idealism and the nature-centered ecstasies of the transcendental way, but neither writer could accept the ease with which transcendentalism (at least in its earliest phases) tended to explain away evil. To the transcendentalists, what seemed evil was, in reality, good—or, alternatively, the absence of good. In story after story as well as in all of his full-length novels, Hawthorne examined the problem of personal evil and its psychological effects. His characteristic “dark” tone is, indeed, a result of his compulsion to posit a world where evil is apparent and often ruinous to the human heart. His greatest work, The Scarlet Letter, is a memorable analysis of guilt, far less concerned with the adultery mirrored in the title than with the effects of secrecy, pride, and revenge on human relationships and the human spirit. Likewise, Melville’s Moby Dick traced the ambiguous relationship of apparent good and malevolent evil in a complex universe, with the whaling ship a microcosm of humanity’s voyage in search of meaning.WEGW 196.3

    Toward the end of the twentieth century, with the perspective of time to establish artistic worth, it is all too easy to give a false picture of nineteenth-century American literature and its influence on the contemporary audience. Telling the story of the great romantic writers is perhaps most valuable in establishing the seriousness of art and the continuous nature of America’s rich literary heritage, but the then-contemporary audience was immediately more affected by popular culture and best-selling authors little remembered today. As has often been the case, these nineteenth-century best-selling authors were often soon forgotten, while more serious authors with lasting artistic pretentions often failed to be appreciated by the immediate audience.WEGW 197.1

    Among the leading American romantic writers, for example, even Emerson was influential, first, only among the few, rather than among the many, with mediocre book sales in the 1830s and 1840s. Only as he became respectable and conservative (that is, when society caught up to his once-radical ideas) did his sales increase in the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, partly the result of his tireless and remunerative lecturing throughout most of the United States.WEGW 197.2

    Of the other great American romantics, Edgar Allan Poe, though widely reprinted in newspapers and magazines, never enjoyed best-selling status in his lifetime and ever was poverty-stricken; Herman Melville, after encouraging sales of his early travel fiction, turned philosophical and obscure and lost his audience in the 1850s, resulting in his being a forgotten figure for the last three decades of his life (only to be rediscovered in the twentieth century). Nathaniel Hawthorne finally achieved a wide readership with The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, but never was able to survive adequately on his writing income alone and, thus, was rather constantly employed as a civil servant.WEGW 197.3

    Henry David Thoreau was almost unknown outside of transcendental circles during his lifetime. Indeed, when his A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers had been out one year, in 1850, only 219 volumes had been sold, causing his publisher to send Thoreau the unsold books. This event resulted in Thoreau’s famous remark: “I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which I wrote myself.”WEGW 197.4

    Walt Whitman continuously reformed and reissued his innovative and somewhat shocking Leaves of Grass after the 1855 edition, but he lost money on most of the editions until his very old age. And Emily Dickinson, as most readers know, was the least known of all her contemporary artists, publishing only seven poems during her lifetime, all anonymously, with no edition of her poems appearing until after her death.WEGW 198.1

    Instead, the writers of immediate fame and wide audience in nineteenth-century America were individuals whose names today are almost unknown—people like Fanny Forrester, Fanny Fern, Marion Harland, Mary Jane Holmes, Laura Jean Libbey, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Susan Warner. All these writers shared two aspects: they were practitioners of fiction, and they were women. Both aspects deserve some elaboration.WEGW 198.2

    As far as popular American culture is concerned, the nineteenth century might well be best remembered as the age when fiction became morally and aesthetically acceptable and dominated book sales. At the end of the eighteenth century, even though foreign novels had been widely sold in this country for 50 years, many critics were still condemning fiction because they believed that such reading degraded morals and weakened the intellect. According to typical comments of the times, the reading of fiction “pollutes the imaginations” and gives youth “false ideas of life.” Moreover, “it renders the ordinary affairs of life insipid.” An article entitled “Novel Reading a Cause of Female Depravity” was issued in America several times around the turn of the nineteenth century, and in 1803 the main commencement oration at Harvard was an attack against “the dangers of fiction.”WEGW 198.3

    As a result of such criticism, the first half of the nineteenth century saw writers of fiction caught in a dilemma—how to please the growing insatiable appetites for fiction in the reading audience while yet elevating a much-criticized form to moral and aesthetic respectability. The route that many American writers chose was one that was already reaping handsome rewards in Western Europe: claim that fiction was indeed truth (the story had actually happened) and/or moralize and instruct the audience so that the story could be justified as a teaching vehicle.WEGW 198.4

    When one examines the history of the modern English novel, one is little surprised that many of the popular fiction writers of the nineteenth century in America were women. In the eighteenth century, Samuel Richardson had been perhaps the most accomplished and successful creator of fiction for a largely feminine audience. Richardson is often credited with establishing the general pattern for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century popular novel—plots revolving around everyday womanly concerns such as manners, fashions, romantic emotions, and marriage. The subject matter of fiction, then, was something women knew much about, and the fact that fiction was widely considered a second-rate art form made the sexist male artists of that former generation quite willing to allow female authors to meet the public’s demands.WEGW 199.1

    Women writers and men writing for women tended to follow Richardson’s formulas for success rather closely for well over 100 years—fair-haired maidens beset by romantic male seducers, with the novels ending either in marriage (if the heroine had managed in virtuously taming the male) or in death (if the heroine had foolishly given into the seducer’s villainous attentions prior to marriage). In either case the plot patterns gave themselves to inevitable moralizing—lesson books for the young women readers on how to or how not to conduct one’s love life.WEGW 199.2

    Included in the novels was a heavy dose of sentiment—reveling in the emotions of the main characters with minute descriptions of how each individual felt during the crisis points of the story. These emotional trips were extremely crucial to the popularity and eventual moral acceptability of the novel during the romantic period. As one historian of the popular book observes: “Sentimentalism was a grand thing; it allowed you to philander with your feelings and yet preserve a clear conscience, for, though it heightened the emotions, it had a moral purpose, such as the preservation of female virtue.”WEGW 199.3

    Today, historians of popular American fiction prior to the Civil War have accurately labeled the period as the era of the sentimental novel. During this time American novelists managed to compete successfully with pirated European works (a lack of international copyright laws made it difficult for any American author to be published, since foreign works could be printed without any royalties to their authors) and to pander to the tastes of a vast number of readers—again, most of them women—in novels, periodical fiction, and those large, yearly, expensively decorated annuals, the gift books.WEGW 199.4

    Women preferred popular fiction to other literary forms because women were central to the stories and were generally portrayed as moral influences, the backbone of the family, given to Christian faith and courage—attributes that in these narratives usually result in material rewards of nice homes and middle-class security.WEGW 200.1

    Statistics reveal the influence of such reading on nineteenth-century American women. James D. Hart in The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste traces the development of fictional success:WEGW 200.2

    “In 1835 when publishers divided their stock into 16 categories, 64 new novels and tales were issued, while poetry, history, and biography together numbered only 61 new works. Nearly half of these novels were by Americans, about as many as had appeared in the decade from 1810 to 1820. From 1820 to 1830 Americans issued 109 different fictional works of their own and then, with the period of the novel firmly established, they more than tripled this number from 1830 to 1840. From 1840 to 1850 they really hit their stride and issued almost 1,000 different novels and tales. With the growth of the middle-class reading public, the book business had become big business. Only $2.5 million worth of books were manufactured in this country in 1820; by 1850 the value of book publications was set at $12.5 million.”WEGW 200.3

    It is estimated that all of Hawthorne’s novels written during the 1850s, and Melville’s three novels of the same period, together with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Emerson’s Representative Men, sold fewer copies in this decade, 1850-1860, than did just one popular sentimental novel by a woman, such as Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World or Maria S. Cummins’ The Lamplighter, a book that sold 40,000 copies in eight weeks.WEGW 200.4

    Women writing for women or men writing for women, then, became the central success formula for most American fiction prior to the Civil War and, indeed, long after. Many male authors continued to scorn the novel for this very reason, showing, of course, their prejudice against women as well as their lack of artistic foresight. Those male writers who insisted on trying to accomplish serious artistic purposes in fiction were torn by consciences that continued to belittle their own attempts and that rued the success of their female counterparts. Hawthorne’s angry outburst in the early 1850s is well known: “America is now wholly given over to a ... mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash—and should be ashamed of myself if I did.”WEGW 200.5

    For the most part, the sentimental domestic novel steered clear of social issues and politics. In doing so, however, as Ann B. Douglas has noted, the sentimental novelists did not abdicate total responsibility for society. Instead, the novelists’ compulsive concern with the family and domesticity can be seen as in a sense putting their narratives at the core of American social experience. Indeed, according to Douglas, sentimental novelists marched under the banner of moralistic religion, and in many cases these writers were daughters or wives of ministers, encouraged by these mentors to sanctify the audience through the pages of fiction, since the pulpit was losing some of its clout.WEGW 201.1

    This alliance of the religious establishment with the world of fiction resulted inevitably in the social and moral acceptability of novel reading. As John Waller has pointed out, even such a conservative group as the Methodists, who railed against fiction in their religious publications early in the nineteenth century, had accepted the novel as a worthwhile artistic and moral force by the last part of the same century.WEGW 201.2

    In the 1850s one extraordinary novel managed to combine the sentimental formula and expected didactic moralism with a plot that centered on an inflammatory social issue—slavery. The novel was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, daughter of one minister, sister to three, and wife to another, rapidly became one of the most influential women of her time. Mrs. Stowe’s novel was a clever blend of then-prevalent racial stereotypes, including a Yankee villain and paternalistic and kind slaveowners, to say nothing of noble Blacks.WEGW 201.3

    The book sold 305,000 copies in one year, what one authority suggests would have been equivalent to a 3 million-copy best-seller in 1947. It was extremely popular in Europe and was widely translated. Against Mrs. Stowe’s wishes, the book was dramatized almost immediately, eventually turning into the most popular American play of its time, with “Tom shows” appearing continuously all over America for more than another half century.WEGW 201.4

    The literary weaknesses of the book are all too obvious to later generations—sentimentalism, melodrama, and preachy moralism—but these faults are the faults of almost all popular fiction before the Civil War. What is clear, however, is that this book had an important effect on immediate political events—one of the few books in American history to create an immediate widespread impact on national affairs. When President Lincoln met Mrs. Stowe during the Civil War, he asked, “Is this the little woman whose book made such a great war?”WEGW 202.1

    What was true in the case of popular fiction was true also for popular poetry during the nineteenth century—that is, those poets whom we regard today as most accomplished were not the popular favorites of the then-contemporary audience. Poe, Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson had comparatively few readers in their own times, albeit those readers were often highly influential and discerning. The popular audience readily acknowledged that poetry was a more sophisticated art form and more difficult to read than fiction. Inevitably, it was also less read and was less popular, even though readily accessable to the audience, since newspapers and periodicals used poetry for “filler,” often reprinting poems without the author’s permission.WEGW 202.2

    The most popular poets shared certain traits with the popular novelists of the times—tendencies towards sentimentality, moralism, didactic religiosity, and home-centeredness. Because their sales were more limited, however, few poets commanded the audience of the highly successful writers of fiction. Among the exceptions was Mrs. Lydia H. Sigourney, who produced some 65 volumes of verse and prose. Her poetry has been characterized as teaching “generalized ethical lessons, praising sobriety, patience, honesty, submissiveness, and other bourgeois virtues.”WEGW 202.3

    Better known today than Mrs. Sigourney and certainly more respected in his own lifetime, even if less popular, was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow was unquestionably the most influential American poet during the nineteenth century, here and abroad. It is interesting to note that Longfellow’s most popular poems were those that conformed most to the sentimental fictional formula of his day—narratives (but in verse) that included plenty of melodrama, emotional release, and moralizing, such as The Song of Hiawatha, Evangeline, and The Courtship of Miles Standish. His more artistically pretentious works, such as The Golden Legend, were not popular successes.WEGW 202.4

    Longfellow’s fellow New Englanders, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell, also serious poets, achieved considerable popular appeal in their own times. Whittier’s “Snow-Bound,“ a poem of family, with sentimental appeal, won a large audience just after the Civil War.WEGW 203.1

    The orgy of emotionalism and sentimentalism in both popular and serious American art during the romantic period was bound to run its course eventually. The reaction that set in is today commonly called the period of realism in American letters. As with the earlier American romantics, realists in this country were heavily influenced by European examples. These American artists experimented with “scientific” approaches to writing.WEGW 203.2

    The chief American theorist of realism, William Dean Howells, for years the influential editor of the Atlantic Monthly, characterized realism as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” “Truthful” to Howells and his fellow realists, however, meant true to observational experience. Life became to the writer what the laboratory was to the scientist. Careful observation and record-keeping could result in truth or in “real” life on the fictional page. The goal was objectivity, honesty, openness, and elimination of personal bias.WEGW 203.3

    In fiction these tendencies resulted in an emphasis on common, but complex and mixed-motived, characters; on plots that resembled life sequences; and on a lack of didactic moralizing, letting the story speak for itself and erasing the sense of the author’s manipulation. Realists also tended to be more frank and less judgmental about sex, crime, and violence in their works.WEGW 203.4

    It is easy to see that realism in many ways seemed to be the exact reverse of popular sentimental fiction. It is no wonder that readers, long comfortable with formula sentimentality, found the new realism mundane or repulsive. Most of the “pure” realists of the nineteenth century never achieved a wide audience in their own lifetimes. William Dean Howells and Henry James always had publishers for their works, but neither writer could survive merely on incomes from realistic fiction. Their works were too sophisticated, too lacking in the expected plots and emotions of romantic feeling, too empty of lesson preaching, for the general audience.WEGW 203.5

    The case of Stephen Crane and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is here instructive. In the 1890s Crane, a realist (some would say naturalist), had difficulty finding a publisher for his first novel. The reason was that the story—a frank and grisly portrayal of Bowery life and seduction into prostitution—failed to moralize explicitly about the central character, Maggie, and her weakness in falling prey to temptation.WEGW 204.1

    Today readers can clearly see the plot is implicitly moral in that Maggie ends her own life as a result of her sin, death still being the only escape outside of marriage from seduction in the American novel. Contemporary publishers, however, were horrified by Crane’s refusal to do what scores of women authors had done for decades when they wrote stories of women seduced—that is, the publishers missed the explicit preaching of lessons. Comparatively devoid of didacticism, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets saw official publication only after Crane’s Red Badge of Courage became something of a success.WEGW 204.2

    The only American artist who successfully tied popular romance with realistic tendencies and artistic greatness and gained a wide readership was Mark Twain. Twain, who was a master of playing all sides at once, is perhaps the foremost American example of an immediately popular writer whose artistic reputation has continuously increased as the decades have passed. Like Shakespeare, he was able to appeal both to the then-present audience as well as to artistic posterity. However, as discerning readers readily admit, Twain’s books often attack sentimentalism while at the same time being sentimental. The satire of popular sentimental tastes in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is priceless, but the plot solution is as hopelessly romantic and implausible as the worst examples from then-contemporary women writers, although some would say that Twain did this intentionally in order to enrich the satire.WEGW 204.3

    Twain’s rejection of traditional Christianity, and indeed, all religions, was somewhat typical of the realistic writers of the times. Many would be more circumspect than he (although even Twain disallowed publication of what he considered to be his most radical views), but most shared, to some extent, Twain’s view of a mechanistic universe, determined by chance, biology, and chemistry, devoid of divinity, and somewhat accidental in its direction.WEGW 204.4

    The realists could not accept the mystical certainties of the romantic authors or their optimistic evaluation of man’s capacity for good. On the other hand, it was just as difficult for them to accept the Christian explanation of man’s fall into sin. To the realist, evolutionary science seemed to posit a world of continuous progression, although as a result of the bloody battles that only the fittest could survive. The evolutionist’s world was without a personal Creator and contrary to the biblical record, a record most people read as being mythical and poetic, lacking scientific validation.WEGW 205.1

    While realists such as Henry James and William Dean Howells, together with their younger friends, such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Jack London, attempted to reform American fiction along more serious, less sentimental lines during the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s, truly popular American fiction was still being produced in the sentimental vein, although somewhat modified from the pre-Civil War era.WEGW 205.2

    Oddly enough, even while Howells trumpeted realism in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, romance writing reached its zenith in American letters. In this period, however, it was the historical and religious romance that carried the day—sentiment carried back into the stories of the legendary and religious past by such authors as Francis Marion Crawford (Don Orsino, 1892) and Lew Wallace (Ben Hur, 1880). Wallace mixed sentiment, the past, and religion into a highly successful formula whereby there was something for every reader—excitement, romance, quasi-historical fact, and faith. Such novels widened the novel-reading public to include large numbers of men.WEGW 205.3

    But in truth, men and boys had already been a part of the novel-reading public for years, especially with the success of the dime novels. This genre, first issued in this country at the beginning of the Civil War, established a tradition of inexpensive adventure and romance stories, easily available, directed primarily at the male audience.WEGW 205.4

    Today, the label “dime novel” carries with it connotations of the cheap in every way—financially and artistically, as well as morally. In truth, however, a dime was worth considerably more in the last half of the nineteenth century than today. What the dime novel represented was an innovative publishing measure, paperback short fiction issued outside of the traditional periodical and book format. The dime novel traded heavily on Western themes (Buffalo Bill, Deadwood Dick) and on crime stories (Cap Collier), but in reality, in spite of its reputation and its being almost universally criticized by religious and artistic authorities, the dime novel was never more immoral than its female sentimental novel counterpart. Both types of fiction adhered to strict, Sunday school morality in the disposal of good and evil characters. According to one critic, “if heroes swore, it was ‘by the horns of Gabriel,’ for profane oaths never sullied the lips that knew neither liquor nor tobacco. If a man gambled, one knew instantly he was a scoundrel.... Death frequently threatened the heroines, but never a fate worse than death.” The dime novel saw its end when the electronic media replaced the written words with even more captivating images, and, perhaps, more equivocal morality.WEGW 206.1

    American readers read more than just American authors during the nineteenth century. It would be misleading to ignore the large audience in this country for European literature. In almost every case, however, the popular writers from abroad, even when serious artists, were those who best met the American taste for sentiment, romance, adventure, and didactic moralism—writers such as Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Alexandre Dumas, and Victor Hugo.WEGW 206.2

    It should also be remembered that American tastes in literature and reading were largely without formal educational molding throughout a large portion of the nineteenth century. The study of the ancient languages centered on the classics of Homer, Virgil, Cicero, and Horace, but often failed to emphasize anything but linguistic competence. As far as English literature is concerned, even the most prestigious universities were reluctant to instruct students about artists of their own native tongue until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Until then, the formal study of English or American literature was included only as a tool to improve writing or grammatical competence.WEGW 206.3

    In 1876 Harvard appointed its first full-time professor of English, but American writers were not treated in separate college or university literature courses with any regularity until after 1900. Given this lack of formal educational recognition for serious literature in the native tongue, popular sentimental literature continued to dominate public tastes through the early part of the twentieth century.WEGW 207.1

    By World War I, however, the realistic reaction against sentimentality and romance would affect large portions of the American reading public. Writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, and F. Scott Fitzgerald found a large and ready audience. Even poetry would undergo a revolution, with Whitman, at last widely read, becoming a profound stylistic influence on poets such as Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, and Ezra Pound.WEGW 207.2

    But in spite of widespread acceptance of realistic premises in our own time and of the influence of complex, mind-boggling poets, one cannot help being aware that certain nineteenth-century American literary forces are still very much alive today, whether in the sentimental pages of Harlequin romances or the steamy escapism of video soap operas. Even the artistic sublimities of the transcendentalists’ views of nature find a modern echo in the ecological mysticism of environmentalists of today. Finally, the greatest of the American writers from the past century will continue to live in their works of art that focus our attention on the glories of nature, the ambiguities of good and evil, the complexities of man and his relationship to society, and the questions of man’s origin and destiny.WEGW 207.3

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