dinner

to Whittier on his seventieth birthday in 1877 by the Whittier Atlantic Monthly brought together the literary family of that periodical in the service of comradeship and letters. On this occasion the venerable Ralph Waldo Emerson was there, and the dean of American poets, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as the sprightly Oliver Wendell Holmes. James Russell Lowell would probably have been present had not Hayes sent him to Madrid as Minister in accordance with the American tradition that diplomacy is one of the functions of men of letters. The speeches at the banquet were full of reminiscence over the glories of the past, until a false note uttered by Mark Twain brought dismay to both diners and speaker.

With the modesty that was always mingled with his naïve and pleasant vanities, Clemens felt that his invitation to the Whittier banquet marked his recogHe prepared with great

Mark
Twain

nition by the East.

pains and long premeditation a speech in which he placed himself in a miner's cabin in the Sierras and introduced the words of Holmes as well as those of Emerson and Longfellow into the mouths of uncouth mountain vagabonds. In his later years he republished the address, reverting to his earlier belief that it was both humorous and appropriate, but when he delivered it in Boston on December 17, 1877, it was received with a silence growing colder and more deadly every minute, as his audience resented what seemed to be deliberate insult to the dignity and good taste of its leaders. He went home in dismay that was lightened only by the fact that the immediate victims of his ill-timed humor either failed to hear it or were themselves more generous than their associates. To the end of his life he never knew the difference between humor that was in good taste and humor that was unprintable, and only the scrupulous editing of his wife saved him from himself.

Mark Twain was in 1877 just on the verge of recognition from America, with the Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) as his newest work, and with an English success that convinced New England of his importance. There is no truer

description of the great plains and mining camps in the last decade before the advent of the railroad than he wrote in Roughing It (1872). His travels carried him to Europe, while European adventures were still novel, and The Innocents Abroad (1869) and A Tramp Abroad (1880) brought him an expanding circle of readers who knew they liked him, but were not sure that he was literature. The vital humor of Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog (1865) continued to inspire his later writings, as well as his lectures on the lyceum circuit. Like the writers of the older generation, he told his story to audiences over all the country, and in 1872 he followed Artemus Ward to London, where his success was instant. New England was slow to admit him within its dignified circle. "The literary theories we ac

cepted were New England theories," wrote Howells, who sat at an Atlantic desk after 1866; "the criticism we valued was New England criticism, or, more strictly speaking, Boston theories, Boston criticism."

Whittier and his contemporaries had done their work, but it was not until the middle of the following decade that America recognized their successors. By The new the time E. C. Stedman wrote his "Twilight of writers the Poets" (1885) for the Century, new names had risen to the head of the American list, while the public was finding enjoyment in a wider range of letters. The first fifteen names on a list of immortals compiled by the Critic and Good Literature in 1884 included only four of the older group: Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, and the historian Bancroft, who was now in his old age revising his monumental History of the United States and admitting to his intimacy the young men who were to be leaders in Washington letters in the next generation: Hay, Henry Adams, Clarence King, and Lodge.

The remaining names of the first fifteen were Howells, Curtis, Aldrich, Harte, Stedman, White, Hale, Cable, James, Clemens, and Warner.

The men whose writings have since been accepted as the most expressive of the American character were recognized

by their contemporaries as their work appeared. Henry James, with The American (1876), stepped at once into leadership as an exponent "of contemporary American life in fiction," and held the position until his death. William Dean Howells, who stood above him on the Critic's list of 1884, was gaining power as he used it in The Lady of the Aroostook (1879) and A Modern Instance (1882), until his Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) became perhaps the most distinctive portrait of Eastern society in the decade. Clemens was accepted without question as the years advanced. Tom Sawyer was followed by its companion tale, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), which the Athenæum subsequently described as "one of the six greatest books ever written in America." His powers were steadily broadening, and The Prince and the Pauper (1881) and The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1895) revealed him in his broader sympathies, after he had outgrown the rôle of the professional humorist.

The themes of the American men of letters ran to portraiture and local color. "There is nothing definite in Transition American society for the dramatist to get hold in literature of," said a writer in the Atlantic in 1881, who had in mind the social uniformity dominant in the old American society. The lack of caste as a motive in fiction was filled in part by the appearance of the American girl as a novel species, untrammeled by social limitations and breezy with the expansiveness of the open country. Howells and Henry James used her with freedom, and the illustrators made out of her a definite literary type. The amazing popularity of General Lew Wallace's Ben Hur (1880) and F. Marion Crawford's Mr. Isaacs (1882) revealed the catholic tastes of a widening reading public.

The sharp change in the course of literary production was nowhere clearer than in literature for children. The moral tracts of the mid-century and the sensational romances which Ned Buntline manufactured and Nick Carter continued were gradually displaced by literature of a different stripe. Howard Pyle brought out The Merry Ad