refined and delicate. In the country at large popular success, in England as well as in America, was won by Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903), in Hans Breitmann’s Ballads (1871), humorous poems in the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect. Born in Philadelphia, he spent the greater part of his mature life abroad and wrote numerous works on diverse topics, but his reputation is chiefly connected with his books on gypsy life and lore. Another foreign resident who deserves mention was William Wetmore Story (1819–1895), the sculptor, of Massachusetts, connected with the Boston group, whose verse and prose gave him the rank of a litterateur. The South again entered into literature with the work of Sidney Lanier (1842–1881), in succession to Henry Timrod (1829–1867) and Paul Hamilton Hayne (1830–1886), who find a place rather by the affection in which they are held at the South than by positive merit. Lanier showed originality and a true poetic gift, but his talents were little effectual. From the West humorous poetry was produced by Francis Bret Harte (1839–1902), born in Albany, in The Heathen Chinee (1870) and similar verse, but he is better remembered as the artistic narrator of western mining life in his numerous stories and novels. Verse of a similar kind also first brought into literary notice John Hay (1838–1905), in Pike County Ballads (1871), who also wrote in prose; but his reputation was rather won as a statesman in the closing years of his life. Minor poets of less distinction but with a vein superior to that of the earlier period, more excellent in workmanship and more coloured with imagination and mood, arose in all parts, of whom the most notable are Julia Ward Howe (born 1819), in Boston, the venerable friend of many good causes, Henry Howard Brownell (1820–1872) of Rhode Island, author of the most vigorous and realistic poetry of the Civil War, War Lyrics (1866), Edward Rowland Sill (1841–1887), born in Connecticut but associated with California, Henry Van Dyke (born 1852), in New York, better known by his prose in tale and essay, Silas Weir Mitchell (born 1830), in Philadelphia, whose repute as a novelist has overshadowed his admirable verse, Eugene Field (1850–1895) of Chicago, James Whitcomb Riley (born 1853) of Indiana, both distinguished for their humorous and childhood verse, and Joaquin Miller (born 1841) of Oregon, whose first work, Songs of the Sierras (1871), had in it much of the spirit of the wild land, the colour of the desert, the free, adventurous character of the filibuster, all strangely mixed with pseudo-Byronic passions.
Apart from all these, whether minor or major poets, stands Walt Whitman (1819–1892), whose Leaves of Grass (1855) first appeared. before the war, but whose fame is associated rather with its successive editions and its companion volumes, and definitely dated, perhaps, from 1867. He received attention Whitman.in England, as did Miller, on an assumption that his works expressed the new and original America, the unknown democracy, and he has had some vogue in Germany mainly owing to his naturalism. His own countrymen, however, steadily refuse to accept him as representative of themselves, and his naturalism is uninteresting to them, while on the other hand a group apparently increasing in critical authority treat his work as significant. It is, in general, only by those few fine lyrics which have found a place in all anthologies of American verse that he is well known and highly valued in his own land.
The chief field of literary activity has been found in the novel, and nowhere has the change been so marked as here. The romantic treatment of the novel practically disappeared, and in its place came the realistic or analytic treatment, rendering manners by minute strokes of observation or The later novel.dissecting motives psychologically. This amounted to a substitution of the French art of fiction, in some of its forms, for the English tradition of broad ideality and historical picturesqueness. The protagonist of the reform was William Dean Howells (born 1837), a cultivated literary scholar, and a various writer of essays, travel sketches, poetry and plays, editor of many magazines and books, whose career in letters has been more laborious and miscellaneous than any other contemporary, but whose main work has been the long series of novels that he has put forth almost annually throughout the period. He not only wrote fiction, but he endeavoured to make known to Americans fiction as it was practised in other lands, Russia, Italy, Spain, and to bring the art that was dearest to him into line with the standard of the European world. He was an apostle of the realistic school, and directed his teaching to the advocacy of the novel of observation, which records life in its conditions and attempts to realize what is in the daily lives and experience of man rather than what belongs to adventure, imagination or the dreaming part of life. Of his works, The Lady of the Aroostook (1879), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889), are characteristic examples. He won a popular vogue, and if it is now less than it was, it is because after a score of years tastes and fashions change. The conscientiousness of his art continues the tradition of American writers in that respect, and he is master of an affable style. His work, including all its phases, is the most important body of work done in his generation. Henry James (born 1843), who mainly resided abroad, is his compeer, and in a similar way has followed French initiative. He also has been a various writer of criticism and travel and the occasional essay; but his equally long series of novels sustains his reputation. He has developed the psychological treatment of fiction, and of his work The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Princess Casamassima (1886) and The Tragic Muse (1890) are characteristic. He has had less vogue owing to both matter and style, but in certain respects his power, more intellectual than that of Howells, has greater artistic elements, while the society with which he deals is more complex. He is really a cosmopolitan writer and has no other connexion with America than the accident of birth. A third novelist, also a foreign resident, Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909), falls into the same category. A prolific novelist, in the beaten track of story-telling, he has always a story to tell and excellent narrative power. The work regarded as most important from his hand is Saracinesca (1887) and its sequels; but his subjects are cosmopolitan, his talent is personal, and he has no effectual connexion with his own country. The romantic tradition of the older time was continued by Lew Wallace (1827–1905) of Indiana, a distinguished general and diplomat, in his Mexican tale, The Fair God (1873), and his oriental romances, Ben Hur (1880), one of the most widely circulated of American books, and The Prince of India (1893). A mode of the novel which was wholly unique was practised by Francis Richard Stockton (1834–1902) in his droll tales, of which Rudder Grange (1879) is the best known.
The principal minor product of the novel lay in the provincial tale. The new methods easily lent themselves to the portraiture of local conditions, types and colour. Every part of the country had its writers who recorded its traits in this way. For New England Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe described the older life in Old Town Folks (1869), and was succeeded by Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) and Mary Eleanor Wilkins (born 1862). The West was notably treated by Edward Eggleston (1837–1902) in The Hoosier School Master (1871), Mary Hallock Foote (born 1847) in Led-Horse Claim (1883) and Hamlin Garland (born 1860) in Main Travelled Roads (1891). The South was represented by Mary Noailles Murfree [“Charles Egbert Craddock”] (born 1850) in In the Tennessee Mountains (1884) and its successors, by Thomas Nelson Page (born 1853) in Marse Chan (1887) and other tales of the reconstruction in Virginia, and with most literary grace by George Washington Cable (born 1844), whose novels of Louisiana are remarkable for their poetic charm. The list is sufficiently illustrative of the general movement, which made what was called the dialect novel supreme for the season. This was succeeded by a revival of the historical novel in local fields, of which Winston Churchill (born 1871) in Richard Carvel (1899) is the leading exponent, and together with it the sword and dagger tale of the Dumas type, the special contemporary plot invented by Anthony Hope, and romance in its utmost forms of adventure and extravagance, came in like a flood at the close of the Spanish War. There were during the period from 1870 to 1900 many other writers of fiction, who often proceeded in conventional and time-honoured ways to tell their tale, but none of them is especially significant for the general view or as showing any tendencies of an original sort. The pietistic novel, for
