Hamlin Garland: A Life

5. The Earnest Apprentice, 1886-87

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'..,·.One important consequence of his decision to inaugurate a career as a professional lecturer is that Garland began to study literature even more intensely. In addition to borrowing books from the Boston Public Library, he was an avid reader of newspapers and magazines, from which he gleaned not only the latest discussions about literature but also the hottest literary gossip, for in the 1880s writers were celebrities, and newspapers tracked their movements with a devotion that matches our own fascination with Hollywood personalities. Late in 1885 he began to organize his lectures and notes into a larger scheme that he entitled “The Evolution of American Thought.” The title indicates his debt to Spencer and Taine as Garland developed lectures that he hoped eventually to publish as a book. He would revise and expand the lectures as his reading led him from one book to another—and as he gained experience testing the lectures on his audiences. Although the lectures today exist only in fragments , such titles as “The Colonial Phase,” “The Revolutionary Age,” “First Age of the Republic,” and “The Literature of Democracy” suggest that Garland saw American literature as developing in parallel to political changes, from homogeneity of monarchy to heterogeneity of democracy—a schema that today underlies many college American literature textbooks.1 Like other evolutionary critics, Garland saw literature developing according to changes in social conditions—as inevitable “progress ” from the simple to the complex, in Spencer’s view, as responding to changes in race, environment, and epoch, in Taine’s system. His extensive reading in evolution had taught him that everything changes; there are no absolutes in life or in art. Literature, like life 78 the earnest apprentice itself, was evolving, and if an artist is to reflect the conditions of one’s time and place, to express the “truth,” he or she must look to the present, not to the past. When he looked at contemporary literature, Garland therefore found that Whitman and the local colorists were at the head of the writers best expressing contemporary life. In his “Whitman” chapter , he explains that Leaves of Grass “is the spirit and prophecy of the modern, the incarnate spirit of democracy.” Whitman’s poetry embodies “the supreme movement of the age,” which “has been the rise of the people, the growth of the average personality and the widening of sympathy.”2 He especially values Whitman’s emphasis on the common man and common experience that served to unify Americans. The local-color movement, which included such writers as Bret Harte, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and George Washington Cable, was the other vital element in literature. In a country as large, diverse, and complex as the United States, only writers who attempted to describe particular regions could portray a particular area with accuracy. Garland had arrived at a core principle that was to inform all of his subsequent work: in accordance with natural law, the true artist depicts common life with fidelity to experience. With the zeal of an eager convert, Garland began to correspond with those writers who best expressed the principles he was advocating in his lectures. Often, he wrote for information for use in his lectures, but he also sought confirmation of his judgments, for he was keenly aware that he lacked an academic pedigree. To his earliest enthusiasm, Edwin Booth, he enclosed “a very scanty and incoherent synopsis of a lecture” and summarized his thesis: “All writers are sooner or later dependent upon an artist of expression, whether they get a complete hearing or not. That is: voice and action can not be written, they are only indicated, and upon the degree of their expressiveness are the authors ranked.” He explained that he intended to apply what he had learned about expression from Darwin, Spencer, and Mantegazza to Booth’s performances, “analyzing the voice, cadences, rate, force, etc.” And then he concluded, “if you are interested, I should be pleased to put into your hand sketches of my work and methods of study.”3 the earnest apprentice 79 Garland was nothing if not intrepid: here he was, at age twenty- five, presuming to critique the performance of America’s greatest tragedian—and then sending the critique to the actor for comment. Small wonder that, as soon as he mailed the letter, he had second thoughts about the wisdom of his action. He...