Hamlin Garland is Western in every sense of that broad term. To him the West has been birthplace, playground, battlefield. Not only as a writer but also as a man he takes that far-seeing, keen, sincere, unconventional view of things in general that distinguishes the thoroughbred Westerner. Like Jim Matteson, the hero of his latest novel, he sympathizes with the elements. He might appear to be at home in an Eastern drawing-room, but we think that he would prefer to live in his own country. There might be some dissent from the opinion that he is the foremost of our Western novelists; but there can hardly be any dissent from the opinion that he occupies an unique place in American literature, The West has been his birthplace and his playground. He was born in the beautiful La Crosse Valley, Wisconsin, in September, 1860. His parents were of Scotch Presbyterian stock, which fact, together with his early environment, must account for his radical and aggressive mental outfit. Seven years after his birth the family moved to Winneshiek County, Iowa, a spot typical of the primeval West; and it was "A farm in the valley. Over the mountains swept jagged, gray, angry, sprawling clouds, sending a freezing, thin drizzle of rain, as they passed, upon a man following a plough. The horses had a sullen and weary look, and their manes and tails streamed sideways in the blast. The ploughman, clad in a ragged gray coat, with uncouth, muddy boots upon his feet, walked with his head inclined toward the sleet to shield his face from the cold and sting of it. The soil rolled away, black and sticky, with a dull sheen upon it. Near by, a boy with tears on his cheeks was watching cattle, a dog seated near, his back to the gale." But did Garland take any part in such experiences? He did, indeed. "I ploughed seventy acres of land when I was ten years old," he says, "and more each year after that. I was so small that I had to reach up to catch hold of the handles of the plough, but I did it. I can remember well how I felt when I started out for my first ploughing in the spring. My muscles were then tender, my feet sank down into the soil, throwing my weight on the ankles and the tendons of the feet. By the end of the first day I was almost ready to drop with pain, but I had to go on. And how my bones did ache the next morning when I was called to go to work! I worked right along, however, going to school in the winter until I was fifteen." But not all the work was at the plough. With his brother Frank he worked out on the prairies, sometimes herding cattle, sometimes scouting for the neighbors. Indeed, But the school in which he got the bulk of his education was Cedarville Academy, in Mitchell County, just a little westward from his home. There he made a special study of history and English composition; and there, for the first time in his life, he had the use of a library. He was graduated from the academy at the age of twenty-one. The following two years he The list of the subjects of his lectures show us the breadth of mind which he had reached just as he entered citizenhood; it attests, too, his remarkable intellectual energy and his sympathy with his times. These are some of the literary topics: The Transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau; The Balladists, with readings from Whittier, Longfellow and Holmes; Walt Whitman, the Prophet of the New Age; The Epic of the Age, the Novel, the American Novel; Americanism in the Novel, with reference to William Dean Howells and Henry James; The Pioneers, Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller; Some Representative Names, Joseph Kirkland, E. W. Howe, George W. Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, Miss Murfree, Miss Baylor, Miss Wilkins, Miss Jewett, Rose Terry Cooke; the City in Fiction and the Drama; The Future of There is something truly Western in the fact that Garland was attracted to Dakota by the land boom of 1883. He soon learned, however, that the boom was not for him; indeed, his only profit from it was experience. In 1884, consequently, he took up the study of English literature in the Boston Public Library. He had intended to take a course in literature and oratory at some college, preliminary to returning to the West to teach. But it is significant of his mental make-up that he found college methods "too scholastic and too dry," and, in general, opposed to his own convictions. This brings to mind what a man who met him early in the nineties said: "It would be impossible for any conventional critic to kill Mr. Garland with scholarly criticism; Naturally his unconventional method of studying English literature had an unusual result. To quote from remarks that he made in Boston a few years ago: "The whole perspective of English literature changed with me. Chaucer was no longer great simply because someone had said that he was; Crabbe was not dry because some professor of English literature had But all the time, as a matter of fact, he was moving farther away from the teacher's desk. As he studied American literature it occurred to him that the Western side of it might be still further developed. That side certainly lacked anything corresponding to his fresh and deep impressions of it. It was only a step from the thought to the deed. Harper's Weekly published his first poem, "Lost in the Norther," a description of a man lost in a blizzard, and paid him twenty-five dollars for it. With characteristic generosity, he spent the money on his parents, buying a copy of Grant's "Memoirs" for his father and a silk dress for his mother. His mother, too, by the way, received half the money paid for his first bit of fiction. This is the story that Garland told in Washington five or six years ago: "I had been studying in Boston for several years, when I went out to Dakota to visit my parents. The night after I arrived I was talking with mother about old times and old friends. She told me how one family had gone to New York for a visit and had returned only too happily to their Western home. As she told the story the pathos of it struck me. I went into another room and began to write. The story was one of the best chapters of This first book is "Main-Travelled Roads," which by some is still regarded as his best book. During the past ten years he has been almost restlessly busy with novels, poems, essays, and plays, in For if there be anything magnificently unconventional in American literature it is such works as "A Spoil of Office" and "Crumbling Idols." "I am," said Garland, in a letter written in 1891, "an impressionist, perhaps, rather than a realist. I believe, with Monet, that the artist should be self-centred, and should paint life as he sees it. If the other fellow doesn't see the violet shadows on the road, so much the worse for him. A whole new world of color is opening to the eyes of the present generation, exemplifying again that all beauty, all mystery, is under our spread hand—waiting to be grasped. I believe, also, that there is the same wealth of color-mystery in the facts of our daily lives, and that within a single decade a race of dramatists and novelists will demonstrate the The decade has come and gone, but the new race of dramatists and novelists is still absent. Mr. Garland is even now far ahead of the crowd. He once described his manner of working to Mr. Walter Blackburn Harte, another radical, but not so fortunate, thinker. He said that he never writes under pressure. "I work precisely as some painters do. I have unfinished pictures lying around my workshop. After breakfast each morning I go into my writing-room, and whichever picture chimes in with my mood, after a glance around, claims me for that morning. I work on it as long as I find great pleasure in it, and I stop the moment I am conscious of it becoming a grind. If I have any power left, I turn to something else; if not, I quit and turn to recreation—reading, study; or I go Mr. Garland was married a few years ago to Miss Zuleme Taft, of Chicago, who has achieved some fame as a sculptor. |