Howard Pyle
1853-1911

American painter, illustrator, editor, and author of juvenile fiction and short stories.

The following entry presents an overview of Pyle's career through 1999. For further information on his life and works, see CLR, Volume 22.

INTRODUCTION

Among the most influential early American illustrators—particularly in his role as the founder of the Brandywine School, whose students included N. C. Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish—Pyle is best remembered as the author and illustrator of a series of historical adventure novels featuring such classic romantic figures as King Arthur and Robin Hood. Since the peak of his popularity at the end of the nineteenth century, several of Pyle's texts, including The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire (1883) and his quartet of King Arthur books, remain in print today nearly a hundred years after their respective releases. Credited with arranging the tenets of Pre-Raphaelite art to fit an American audience, Pyle's juvenile narratives reflect his own underlying moral convictions, advocating civilized society and often depicting personal and societal evolution in line with his own idealized beliefs as a Quaker. Today he is regarded as a pioneer in children's fiction for his innovations in total book design and his virtuosity as an evocative illustrator.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Born on March 5, 1853, in Wilmington, Delaware, Pyle was the oldest son of William and Margaret Churchman Painter Pyle. Although a self-described apathetic student, Pyle was nonetheless a gifted artist from his early childhood. Despite his apparent artistic talents, his parents nonetheless hoped he might show more academic inclinations, sending him to private schools in Wilmington, including a school under the direction of T. Clarkson Taylor as well as the Friend's School. Finally, after a lackluster academic career, his parents consented to Pyle moving to Philadelphia so that he might learn art under the tutelage of F. A. Van der Wielen. Upon his return to Wilmington in 1872, Pyle went to work for his father in the family's leather business, though Pyle continued to believe his future lay as an artist. In 1876 he observed the wild ponies of Assateague and Chincoteague Islands in Virginia. Inspired, he wrote and graphically recorded his impressions of his visit in an essay he titled "Chincoteague: The Island of Wild Ponies." At the prodding of his mother, he sent his article to Scribner's Monthly, who not only accepted his article, but encouraged him to come to New York to further pursue graphic illustration. After a second submission to St. Nicholas Magazine was also published, Pyle moved to New York at the age of twenty-three, earning a living as a freelance artist for most of the major magazines of the era, particularly those associated with the House of Harper which was responsible for such titles as Harper's Monthly, Harper's Weekly, and Young People. In 1881 Pyle returned to Wilmington and married Anne Poole, a singer, with whom he had seven children. That same year, he received his first literary illustration commissions in the form of two books targeted at young audiences—Yankee Doodle: An Old Friend in a New Dress and a reprint of Lord Alfred Tennyson's Lady of Shalott. For these publications, Pyle was asked to emulate the three pervading children's book artists of the era: Kate Greenaway, Randolph Caldecott, and Walter Crane. As American printers were unable to capture the graphic mastery of their European counterparts, both books proved unsuccessful commercially. Pyle was undiscouraged and released his first original children's book in 1883. The book, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, received strong reviews almost immediately, including one flattering appraisal by British artist William Morris. He continued to release children's books over the course of the next decade, though by 1894, Pyle became aware of the growing reliance upon the graphic arts in serialized publications, as well as the severe lack of qualified artists. He applied to teach at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, hoping to use the school as a platform for his burgeoning artistic philosophy, but was rejected. He instead turned to Philadelphia's Drexel University of Art, Science, and Philosophy where he taught for several years. By 1900 Pyle found the Drexel environment too restricting and sought to establish his own school near his home along the Brandywine River, which would charge no fee for instruction. However, Pyle was a relatively demanding instructor and required his students to live together in a communal structure. Students paid their own way (tuition excluded) and worked in the studios year-round from eight until five six days a week. And yet, based upon his well-regarded reputation as both illustrator and teacher, his emerging Brandywine School proved so popular that, by 1903, he was able to accept only three students from a pool of over three hundred applicants. Further, Pyle's school was among the few to openly accept women on equal footing with their male counterparts. Among his protégées Pyle exerted a wide influence, and several famous artists emerged from the Brandywine School, including N. C. Wyeth, Thornton Oakley, Frank Schoonover, Jessie Willcox Smith, and Maxfield Parrish. After a disastrous stint as artistic director for McClure's magazine, Pyle began to doubt his artistic inspiration for the first time. Seeking to explore new avenues, he began a new career as a muralist. In 1910 Pyle traveled to Italy with the intent of studying the Renaissance masters of mural works, although shortly before his departure he complained of ill health. Unfortunately, his health soon deteriorated and he was unable to return to the United States. Over the course of the year, his health continued to decline before he finally passed away on November 9, 1911, in Florence, Italy, from renal colic.

MAJOR WORKS

The most famous and well received of Pyle's original works was his first, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire. Pyle based the volume on Joseph Ritson's 1795 collection of Robin Hood ballads, but the overall presentation of the work has been acclaimed as a complete innovation in the field of children's book design. Pyle not only wrote the text and drew the illustrations, he designed every aspect of the book, with elaborate marginal detailing and calligraphic scrolls inserted into the illustrations, which were themselves adaptations of archaic woodcuts, just as the prose was an adaptation of archaic rhetoric. Pyle's historical research, his accuracy of detail, and his thorough familiarity with classical legends would become hallmarks of his artistic approach, but his total-design philosophy was most likely his most influential innovation. Pyle's Robin Hood stories are characterized by their human scope and moral flexibility, where Robin is selflessly heroic and the Sheriff of Nottingham is merely a flawed, selfish person, rather than a one-dimensional villain. It is evident from Pyle's several references to King Arthur in The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood that he was already considering the possibilities of recreating Arthurian legends for children. His next book, however, was his first volume of literary fairy tales, published in 1885. Entitled Pepper and Salt; or, Seasoning for Young Folk, this book contains original verse and illustrations as well as tales derived from Pyle's recollections of the folklore his mother read to him as a youth. Pyle had begun writing the humorous poems contained in this volume of fairy tales in 1883 and had decorated them with pen-and-ink illustrations. The stories included in Pepper and Salt had been published one by one in Harper's Young People in 1885. His next collection of literary fables, The Wonder Clock; or, Four and Twenty Marvellous Tales, Being One for Each Hour of the Day (1888), contains more sophisticated stories, but Pyle again relies on oral legend for his characters and plots. The book contains poems written for the volume by Pyle's sister Katharine. Although there are spirits and common folk in these tales, Pyle does not concentrate on these characters alone. Several stories contain personified animals, several involve kings and princesses, and a few contain princes. Most of the heroes are active young men with noble backgrounds. Published the same year as Wonder Clock, Otto of the Silver Hand represents Pyle's first novel and a much darker look at the Middle Ages. The novel is a grim depiction of chivalry in medieval Germany, following the life of the boy hero, Otto, who is caught in a familial power struggle and loses his hand through the treachery of his father. Otto—who retires to a monastery—eventually marries the daughter of his father's hated rival, which, for Pyle, symbolizes the coming of a new order, bringing together two youths who grew up in, but refused to accept, a barbaric society of ruthless killings, embracing instead the wise, peaceful teachings of the monks.

In 1892 Pyle produced another novel based on medieval life, Men of Iron. Set in the time of Henry IV, the book deals with a young boy's training for knighthood and his eventual betrothal to a young maiden of proper lineage. Pyle's story concerns a family left without honor as a result of the plot against the life of Henry IV. Although the hero's father, Lord Gilbert Reginald Falworth, was not involved in the conspiracy, he sympathized with the rebels and was left in disgrace when the plot failed. Thus, his son Myles is trained as a squire with little hope of gaining courtly favor. In 1889 Pyle sailed with his wife to Jamaica. Their children were left in the United States with their grandmother; the couple enjoyed a brief vacation until they received a cablegram explaining that seven-year-old Sellers had died unexpectedly. By the time Pyle and his wife were able to return to Wilmington, the boy had been buried. To relieve his grief, Pyle wrote The Garden behind the Moon: A Real Story of the Moon, published in 1895. This is a much more gentle book than Pyle's two medieval fictional tales. It has a fantasy plot concerning the boy David's journey behind the moon. While this story may seem a simple adventure tale, especially to very young children, its theme is the acceptance of death and it contains much of Pyle's philosophy concerning mankind, death, and reality. The land which Pyle creates in the moon garden is a wonderland: "behind the moon there lies the most wonderful, beautiful, never-to-be-forgotten garden that the mind can think of. In it live little children who play and romp, and laugh and sing, and are as merry and happy as the little white lambs in the green meadow in springtime." One of Pyle's final and most significant literary projects was his retelling of Arthurian legend, published in four volumes: The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1903), The Story of the Champions of the Round Table (1905), The Story of Sir Launcelot and His Companions (1907), and The Story of the Grail and the Passing of Arthur (1910). True to form, Pyle researched his subject extensively, drawing on Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, the Mabinogion, and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, among other sources, recreating both the historical era of Arthur and the appropriate prose and illustrative style. The tone, with regard to chivalry, is the most affirmative of all treatments of the era in Pyle's works.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Noted perhaps more for his artistic contributions than his storytelling ability, Pyle has emerged as one of the most significant figures in the field of children's book illustration for both his intricately designed harmony between text and image and his skillful mentorship of the Brandywine artists. Famed illustrator Norman Rockwell opined in a 1945 New Yorker interview that, "If I had my choice between an original Rembrandt and a good Howard Pyle, I would take Pyle every time." In his afterword to the 1986 edition of Pyle's The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, Frederick Karl has argued that the "quality of the Pyle illustrations, and the tradition from which they derive, blended two seemingly irreconcilable qualities: emphasis on detail and creation of a mysterious, atmospheric sense—an unrealistic dimension." His adaptation of Robin Hood has, in particular, received an enormous amount of praise for its stylized art and dynamic rendition of an already familiar tale. Author-illustrator Robert Lawson has characterized the book as "the most perfect of children's tales." Selma Lane has even suggested that Pyle's Robin Hood "represents the high water mark of American bookmaking." However, Pyle's prose has come under some criticism for its alleged lack of proper characterization beyond one-dimensional representations of a specific virtue or flaw. For example, Jill P. May has asserted that the protagonist in Otto of the Silver Hand "seems less a realistic character than a personification of divine forgiveness." Nonetheless, Pyle has remained as one of the pillars of American illustration, with many scholars crediting him with driving the standard of graphic quality in American publishing to new levels of excellence.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Author and Illustrator
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire (juvenile fiction) 1883

Pepper and Salt; or, Seasoning for Young Folk (juvenile fiction) 1885
Within the Capes (juvenile fiction) 1885
Otto of the Silver Hand (juvenile fiction) 1888
The Rose of Paradise (juvenile fiction) 1888
The Wonder Clock; or, Four and Twenty Marvellous Tales, Being One for Each Hour of the Day [with Katherine Pyle] (juvenile fiction) 1888
Men of Iron (juvenile fiction) 1892
A Modern Aladdin; or, The Wonderful Adventures of Oliver Munier (juvenile fiction) 1892
The Garden behind the Moon: A Real Story of the Moon (juvenile fiction) 1895
The Story of Jack Ballister's Fortunes (juvenile fiction) 1895
Twilight Land (juvenile fiction) 1895
The Price of Blood: An Extravaganza of New York Life in 1807 (juvenile fiction) 1899
Rejected of Men: A Story of Today (juvenile fiction) 1903
The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (juvenile fiction) 1903; republished as The Book of King Arthur, 1969
The Story of the Champions of the Round Table (juvenile fiction) 1905
Stolen Treasure (juvenile short stories) 1907
The Story of Sir Launcelot and His Companions (juvenile fiction) 1907
The Ruby of Kishmoor (juvenile fiction) 1908
The Story of the Grail and the Passing of Arthur (juvenile fiction) 1910; revised edition, edited by Gregory R. Suriano, 1994

Selected Works as Illustrator

Lady of Shalott [by Alfred Lord Tennyson] (juvenile poetry) 1881
Yankee Doodle: An Old Friend in a New Dress (juvenile poetry) 1881
Farm Ballads [by Will Carleton] (poetry) 1882
The One Hoss Shay [by Oliver Wendell Holmes] (poetry) 1892
The Novels and Tales of Robert Louis Stevenson. 3 vols. [by Robert Louis Stevenson] (novels and short stories) 1895
The Parasite: A Story [by Arthur Conan Doyle] (juvenile fiction) 1895
George Washington [by Woodrow Wilson] (juvenile history) 1897
The Buccaneers [by Don Seitz] (juvenile fiction) 1912

Other Works

Book of Pirates [edited by Merle Johnson] (juvenile fiction) 1891; republished as Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates, 1921
The Buccaneers and Marooners of America [editor] (short stories) 1891
The Swan Maiden [retold by Ellin Greene; illustrations by Robert Sauber] (picture book) 1994
Bearskin [illustrations by Trina Schart Hyman] (picture book) 1997
Howard Pyle: A Record of His Illustrations and Writings (artwork and prose) 2003

GENERAL COMMENTARY

Thornton Oakley (essay date May 1931)

SOURCE: Oakley, Thornton. "Howard Pyle." Horn Book Magazine 7, no. 2 (May 1931): 91-7.

[In the following essay, Oakley offers a tribute to Pyle's artistic talent and his impact on the world of illustration, lamenting the fact that many periodicals of Pyle's era have moved away from graphic illustration.]

I often wonder if he were still alive and in full mastery of his powers in what manner Howard Pyle would be adjusting the outpouring of his genius to the present opportunities for the art of illustration.

Howard Pyle died in 1911 before the calamity of the World War and before the subsequent economic upheavals destroyed that period when our major magazines were filled with the very highest of illustrative art. Much of Pyle's dynamic work was done expressly for the magazines and has not appeared in other form. I have often heard him say that he believed the major magazines were among the greatest media, if indeed they were not the greatest medium, for modern pictorial expression. They penetrate into every corner of the civilized world, are read by every sort of public. They carry the artist's message in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of copies throughout the lands, whereas but two generations or so ago, before the modern use of reproduction, a picture no matter how distinguished merely hung upon a gallery wall and was seen only by those who passed before it. Truly the modern magazine is almost unbelievable in its breadth of field, and offers opportunity of expression, the scope of which the illustrator is appreciatively aware.

It seemed in those pre-war days as though the field were established in our lives, firm beneath our culture as the very rocks of earth. Before us stretched the vision of major publications glowing through the years with ever increasing wealth of beauty. With what splendor and imagination did Howard Pyle adorn those pages that sang upon the newsstands of his day! Will days like those appear again? I fear not. All is change. Opportunities of other sorts will happen, call out even now, but the era of the sumptuous magazine of general interest is gone, I do believe, forever. The channels of outlet are today too specialized. But those pre-war years were an epoch in illustration when magazine illumination reached its dazzling peak. Each week, each month, we scanned the newsstands, grasping eagerly our Collier's, Century, Scribner's, Harpers, each filled with new pictorial messages of sheer and wondrous beauty.

But it was the work of Pyle for which we breathlessly awaited. What work other than his in those bygone days so thrilled and satisfied in force of imaginative splendor? Howard Pyle at the apex of his powers towered a master of masters. Romance, history, fantasy; love of life, delight in human character; whimsicality, mysticism, spirituality; and too, of course, the unerring understanding of the problem of the decoration of a page-all were his.

Alas, is it possible that that era has disappeared forever? The unbelievable has come to pass. The permanent has vanished. Economic costs and specialized demands have swept away that which we assumed would live on without end. We have learned, too, that the magazine, despite its huge editions, is heart-breakingly ephemeral. Quickly a man's creation on the pages of a periodical is lost, thrown into the waste, forgotten. Collier's circulation, even in those pre-war years, had reached a million, and yet only now after a ten years' search have I been able to add to my collection a certain copy that I wished containing one of Pyle's inimitable pirate fantasies. He who strives to unearth a Harpers Monthly of a year as recent as 1900 will find the task disheartening. Who now, save the enthusiast steeped in the history of illustration, knows, let us say, those two master series of H. P.'s—the one in Harpers Magazine, the other in the Century—"The Pilgrimage of Truth," and "The Travels of the Soul" ?

Today Harpers is unillustrated, no drawings adorn the pages of Scribner's Magazine. Do you who read this recall those extraordinary paintings by Pyle accompanying the text of "Sinbad on Burrator" in Scribner's for August, 1902? And the Century Magazine—that faultless monthly of Richard Watson Gilder and of his co-worker, who probably did more than any other man to bring to sheer perfection the physical presentation of page and type and illustration, Alexander W. Drake-the Century Magazine is no more.

Not all the witchery of Howard Pyle's inventions could bring to life that era that is gone.

What then today if he were living would Pyle be doing? Mural decoration? Probably to some extent. Turning often as he did in those later days of his career to illumination upon walls, Howard Pyle produced a number of mural studies which vividly display all his love for old-time atmosphere, his absorption in colonial history, his sense of drama in subjects full of strife. I refer, of course, to his panels in the Hudson County Court House in Jersey City depicting Hendryk Hudson and Peter Stuyvesant, and to his study of the Battle of Nashville in the State Capitol at Saint Paul.

But I question whether Howard Pyle ever would have been content to turn in any permanent way from that field in which he stood supreme, in which his brilliant talent was free to soar and conquer. I mean the field of ink and paper, the field where pictorial thought is expressed by the printing of inks, black or colored, upon the white leaves of magazine or book. For to this outlet few artists turn with native understanding. The richness of ink on paper; the relationship of line cut to type; the plotting of effects of headpieces, tailpieces and vignettes; the hand-printing of titles and the designing of initial letters; the consciousness of the beauty of correct proportion between the visual weight of drawing and of text and the margins of the paper-page—all these, combined with the main purpose of true pictorial illustration, the revelation of the wonder, mystery, glory, the divinity of human life, demand for their expression a type of genius that is rare indeed.

Howard Pyle had all of this. What figure more than he, throughout all the bygone years of illustrative art, knew the visual powers of ink and paper? The printed page slipped as a tool into his hand ready to obey its master. What craftsman does not know the joy that springs from the handling of that tool that perfectly obeys his wishes? I believe no happiness can be more full than that which fills the page-illuminator's soul as he grasps his paper and his ink.

Yes, it is the book, I ween, that still today would be Howard Pyle's method of expression. His type of magazine has vanished but the book remains. Fortunate mankind that this is so, for I am convinced that among all the media of artistic utterance none is superior to the book. Not a conglomeration of every sort of message as was the general magazine, it tells a tale of unity. It is not thrown into oblivion after one hasty reading (if it have true worth) but is cherished, loved, reread, reprinted after its originator has passed to dust. Permanent as things may be upon this earth, it outlives the generations. What more can an artistic soul require than that its dreams, its visions may go down the ages stirring in mankind to come pleasure, joy, hope, longing, aspiration, belief in the divine?

So, in these years of readjustment following the worldwide conflagration; in these years of perplexity and strange, new ways of life; in this age of tragic poverty and of flaunting wealth; in these times when materialism all but throttles the breath of man while at the self-same moment airplanes, wireless, radio lift his spirit into the realms among the stars—the books of Howard Pyle live on. Units indeed they are, for did he not create them in their entireties?—text as well as pictures? Truly they will never die, fraught as only books can be with beauty—beauty of the eye and beauty of the spirit.

Upon their pages rich in splendor, or at times with subtlety and intangible suggestion, at times again with unerring love and knowledge of historic periods and of characters, the pageantry of Howard Pyle's imagination passes before the reader's delighting eyes. Here are castles, realms of fay, that rivet the beholder spellbound. Here are revelations, answers to the questionings of the soul. Here is glamour of romance-flaming sands, dark oceans, black-browed visages, galleons blazing in the sun. Here, too, is all the spirit of those times when under the exalted Washington our nation came to birth. Will not Howard Pyle's portrayal of Revolutionary days live as long as art endures?

The works of Howard Pyle are unfailing inspiration to everyone who knows aught of illustration or of literature. They gleam as guiding stars among the shadows of doubtful ways.

I need not, I am sure, quote titles, but I must mention the delight that bubbles up inevitably within me whenever I stand before my shelves of writings and of drawings by him I so revered. Here throughout the years I have gathered a collection that could never be replaced. Here I find editions of every variation, both English and American. What joy to observe the slightest change in binding! And to handle these precious copies signed by H. P.'s own dear hand! This King Arthur is inscribed to me. (In all the world of books what volume can be found more rich in text and illustration?) It seems but yesterday its author took it from me when I, still a student raw and young, stammeringly asked if he would sign it. Bending for an instant o'er his desk, he quickly sketched for me upon the waiting fly-leaf a head of fantasy that overflows with all that wealth of imagery so individually his own. And here I have a box of H. P.'s letters, long hand, filled with personal thoughts and plans, and proofs, too, of his early drawings for the Century Magazine, especially pulled from the wooden blocks and signed by the engravers. Here is one, regal in color, stirring the heart in response to the adventure-"The Admiral came in his gig of state." Here, too, upon my walls hang original pen-drawings from the Wonder Clock, Pepper and Salt, A Modern Aladdin, and this superb full-page "Vivien" from King Arthur. As I gaze upon my treasures I seem to see their maker stand again before me as I looked upon him those many times, long gone now, down in his native Wilmington.

How vividly I see those nights within the studio when perched before us on his stool H. P. looked upon our elementary efforts and gave us help. The dome of his ample head shone in the yellow light. Shadows lay beneath his brows. About his mouth there played those lines of earnestness and humor we had learned to love so well.

For Howard Pyle was as absorbed in teaching as in all his other outlets of expression. Among the legacies he left the world none is more full of meaning than that group of workers which he sent forth into the illustration field. To them he handed on his torch of truth. Theirs now it is to keep afire its flame.

Susan E. Meyer (essay date 1983)

SOURCE: Meyer, Susan E. "Howard Pyle." In A Treasury of the Great Children's Book Illustrators, pp.211-31. New York, N.Y.: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1983.

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Lucien L. Agosta (essay date 1987)

SOURCE: Agosta, Lucien L. "Heroes and Adventurers: Popular Historical Fiction." In Howard Pyle, pp. 110-41. Boston, Mass.: Twayne Publishers, 1987.

[In the following essay, Agosta explores Pyle's series of historical adventure novels for young readers, including Otto of the Silver Hand, Men of Iron, Within the Capes, Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates, and The Ruby of Kishmoor, among others.]

The 1880s and 1890s saw a renewed interest in the historical romance rivaling the great popular enthusiasm for the works of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper in the first half of the century. H. S. Canby, an astute observer of turn-of-the-century America, notes that this "new American school of the historical romance rose over night, blossomed like the desert in April, and withered at the first touch of twentieth-century realism," but not before these romances became such significant "determinants of inner life" for contemporary readers that no one unfamiliar with them "will ever understand the America of that day."¹ So avid were readers for these romances that by 1900, according to F. L. Mott, five of the ten best-sellers on the Bookman's list were historical novels. "History," he notes, "was coming alive—the history of Rome and knighthood and the French Revolution and (best of all) the history of the American Revolution and the American pioneers—and how the American reading public loved it all!"² According to Canby, a rediscovery of American history did much to precipitate this fad, for as soon as the popular novelists began "to create a romantic Colonial America the intoxication began…. Suddenly we became aware of a past—our own—that seemed as good as Scott's, and much like it."³

Into this floodtide of historical romance flowed a tributary stream of nineteenth-century "boy literature," the product of what Gillian Avery calls "the late Victorian vogue for manly boys," a literature of historical adventure dedicated to the formation of the mens sana in corpore sano, the boy with "pluck." As Avery notes, "long before girls were allowed amusing books, boys had their Marryat and Ballantyne," Mayne Reid, Henty, Manville Fenn, and Westerman, as well as The Boy's Own Paper (1879–1963) with its adventure serials and cliff-hangers about warriors, pirates, heroes, and explorers.⁴

Ever a man of his time, Pyle launched a literary barque on the confluence of these two streams, producing historical adventure romances for adolescents, several involving knights and robber barons in medieval Europe and others involving pirates, planters, and merchants in colonial and early nineteenth-century America. Pyle's attitude toward adventure in these romances was essentially ambiguous: while he relished it as a vivifying intermission in the quotidian, he nevertheless saw it as undermining the steady regimen of work and duty he persistently championed in his fiction and in his personal life. In his adventure romances, however, he could unite the hegira with the antithetical hearth, the Odyssean with the Telemachean impulses, by allowing his heroes to follow for a brief time the dangerous and irresponsible siren call to adventure before returning to the cozy domestic world of obligation and accountability. Undoubtedly he thus recognized the essential function of the historical adventure novel as a safe way for the homebound into perilous and fascinating realms, a vicarious plunge into terror, risk, tension, and uncertainty without the loss of order, security, the familiar and predictable. As John G. Cawelti says of popular formula fiction in general, Pyle's adventure romances, especially his pirate tales, enable his audience "to explore in fantasy the boundary between the permitted and the forbidden and to experience in a carefully controlled way the possibility of stepping across this boundary," of indulging curiosity about actions feckless, unruly, or subversive "without endangering the cultural patterns that reject them."⁵ Though Pyle, aware of the rising tide of realism, attempted one novel in that vein, Rejected of Men, his heart and talents were clearly allied with Robert Louis Stevenson and the historical adventure romance.

In this chapter Otto of the Silver Hand and Men of Iron, both set in medieval Europe, receive primary consideration as the best of Pyle's historical adventures and the only ones that can claim a wide readership. They are both still in print, unlike the pirate romances discussed after them. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Pyle's only realist novel.

Otto of the Silver Hand (1888)

One of the first historical novels written for children by an American, Otto of the Silver Hand is set in the Middle Ages at the pivotal point when Rudolph of Hapsburg forges a federation of lawless German barons into a viable empire, thus transforming chaos into order, barbarism into civil accord. Eschewing the highly romanticized view of the Middle Ages then in vogue for a depiction closer to Twain's bleak but more precise vision in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), Pyle attempts in Otto a realistic portrayal of the medieval period as "a great black gulf in human history, a gulf of ignorance, of superstition, of cruelty, and of wickedness."⁶ Accordingly, he sets his story in an atmosphere of grim castles, ruthless baronial robbers, brutalized peasants, mutilation and sudden death, and intersecting cycles of revenge, but illuminates this "dreadful period in our world's history" with the sweet and ultimately triumphant presences of those "few good men and women here and there … who preserved and tenderly cared for the truths that the dear Christ taught, and lived and died for in Palestine so long ago" (2). In the best tradition of the historical novel Pyle allows his readers to penetrate the intimate life of the thirteenth century, to "in-dwell" there through an unsparing presentation of the historical data—human actions, manners, customs, details of daily living, habits of thought and language—that enflesh that world, rendering it paradoxically both alien and familiar to readers fixed in the present. In Otto of the Silver Hand, then, Pyle populates an accurately portrayed historical period with fictional characters and events to reflect the timeless opposition between good and evil, forgiveness and revenge, charitable reason and brutal coercion. The book is an influential one in the history of children's literature because, as Henry C. Pitz notes, it makes a "clean break" with the then "prevailing reluctance of writers to deal with brutality and evil in books for children," being published "at a time when, with only the fewest exceptions, children's authors timidly circled away from the bitterness of life or threw a veil over it."⁷

Otto of the Silver Hand is a thematic tension of opposites, a dialectic between light and darkness, order and anarchy. Its plot is filled with rapid, often violent action, packed with the "brute incident" Robert Louis Stevenson saw as a crucial element in all successful adventure romance. Raised by the gentle monks of St. Michaelsburg, twelve-year-old Otto is fetched home to the grim Castle Drachenhausen by his robber baron father, Conrad. After Baron Henry of Trutz-Drachen, ancestral foe of Otto's house, burns the castle in a raid and later severs Otto's right hand in retaliation for the murder of his kinsman by Otto's father, the two barons kill each other in a climactic purging of the old order of force and revenge. Otto, made a ward of the enlightened Emperor Rudolph, unites peaceful monastic values with the emperor's code of order and civility, restoring the fortunes of his house and marrying the daughter of his erstwhile enemy, his severed right hand replaced by a silver one emblematic of a new reign of peace and justice.

The polarity between civility and anarchy is clearly suggested in the novel's settings, the cold, dark robber Castles Drachenhausen and Trutz-Drachen contrasting with the Monastery of St. Michaelsburg and the emperor's bustling town of Nurnburg, centers of peace and prosperity. Called by Baron Conrad himself "a vile, rough place" (33), Castle Drachenhausen is surrounded by massive stone walls enclosing a bleak courtyard and "three great cheerless brick buildings, so forbidding that even the yellow sunlight could not light them into brightness" (4). Within is a cacophony of harsh sound, "the clash of armor, the ring of iron-shod hoofs, or the hoarse cry to arms" (28). The castle's watchtower, used to signal alarm and to summon the bandits to pillage, overlooks wild, impenetrable thickets and bare rocks where black swine feed "upon the refuse thrown out over the walls of the castle" (62). The castle chapel is now used only as a charnel and the worm-eaten old books belonging to its last, unremembered chaplain have long ago been lugged up to a loft to repose "among the mouldering things of the past" (61). This grim castle houses folk with "hard, rugged faces, seamed and weather-beaten" (59) and dominates "the wretched straw-thatched huts" and "vile hovels" of its dependent peasants, miserable serfs bound by chains of force and coercion to scratch out a meager subsistence while their wild, fierce children play "like foxes about their dens" (3-4).

The Monastery of St. Michaelsburg, on the other hand, nestles on a gentle slope swept with vineyards and crowned with fruitful "field and garden and orchard." Within its white walls, "where the warm yellow sunlight slept," all is peaceful quietness (27). The monastery bell tower summons the community to prayer and overlooks placid, cultivated vistas. A haven for gentle and prosperous scholars, husbandmen, farmers, and vintners, the monastery treasures priceless illuminated manuscripts featuring pictures of angels caroling to poor peasants, awarding them precedence over kings in their worship of the Christ Child. This pointed contrast between benighted castle and enlightened monastic community prepares for the eventual triumph of civility in Pyle's understanding of progressive medieval history. Just as St. Michael (patron of the monastery) triumphs in the battle for Heaven over the dragon (totem of Castle Drachenhausen), so the order and harmony fostered in the monastery and the emperor's court at Nurn-burg will vanquish the brutal, anarchic sway of the lawless robber barons by novel's end.

These settings prepare the reader for the more significant contrast of deeds performed by the novel's central characters. Those associated with the monastery work toward a triumph over evil through suggestion and gentle persuasion, subtly, patiently in the face of numerous setbacks. The denizens of the castles, on the other hand, breed violence from violence, enmeshing themselves in a dense web of disaster, its deadly pattern woven from repeated cycles of outrage and reprisal unforgiven through generations. Baron Conrad, for example, recites a lamentable history to Abbot Otto while vowing revenge against his enemies: "their grandsire slew my father's grandsire; Baron Nicholas slew two of our kindred; and now this Baron Frederick gives me the foul wound and kills my dear wife through my body" (38). This legacy of woe leads to Conrad's cold-blooded murder of Baron Frederick, which in turn leads to Baron Henry's destruction of Castle Drachenhausen and mutilation of little Otto. The web of hatred and revenge grows so dense that at last both barons are enmeshed in it: coiled in each other's arms they drown together in a river, Baron Henry's retainers being so sated with the escalating violence that they at last decline to continue it after the death of their chief.

Such revenge and bloodshed are, however, ultimately not as durable as mercy and forgiveness, which transform violence and hatred into their opposites. Throughout the novel Otto, the embodiment of gentle kindness, remains physically the weakest character in Pyle's cast. Small and frail as a child, his quiet reserve leads many to think he is mentally deficient. Though conning his lessons quickly in the monastery, Otto gains the reputation even there of having "cracked-wits" like his mentor Brother John because their innocence and meek naiveté distinguish them from those in the world, much as does the "double-vision" of David and Hans Krout in The Garden behind the Moon (1895), characters Otto and Brother John prefigure. As an adult, too, Otto is "powerless," his silver hand preventing him from ever drawing a sword or striking a blow, a beneficent consequence of his mutilation. Yet it is "weak" Otto who prevails over his stronger contemporaries by novel's end. Otto's influence for good is subtle but continuous, initiating the regeneration of his rough father and inducing One-Eyed Hans, his father's lieutenant, to spare a watchman during the rescue at Trutz-Drachen. Moreover, Otto ends the vicious cycles of retribution by begging Emperor Rudolph not to avenge him on the Trutz-Drachens but instead to allow him eventually to marry Pauline, daughter of his late enemy, the wisdom of which Rudolph concedes. Otto's later position in the emperor's court is one of quiet mediation, his words "listened to and weighed by those who were high in Council, and even by the Emperor himself" (169). Otto's new family motto—"A silver hand is better than an iron hand"—becomes the motto for the new age he helps the emperor to forge.

This image of the hand serves as a central unifying element in the novel, figuring, for example, in Brother John's vision of the Angel Gabriel whose hand, "as white as silver," grasps "a green bough with blossoms, like those that grow on the thorn bush" (45), an obvious emblem for Otto's own silver hand from which peace flows to begin the transformation of his harsh, thorny world into a blossoming garden. Later, Baron Conrad's desire that Otto "shall live as his sires have lived before him, holding to his rights by the power and might of his right hand" (53) is ironically frustrated by Baron Henry, who tells Otto that with his severed hand he will never "be able to strike such a blow as thy father gave to Baron Frederick" (95). This unifying image figures in several of the work's full-page illustrations as well, most notably in the prison scene at Trutz-Drachen where Otto instinctively cradles his right hand to his breast moments before Baron Henry severs it (93) and in the concluding illustration where Otto kisses, in reconciliation and love, the right hand of Pauline, daughter of his mutilator (171). This repeated image further unifies a plot already adroit in its contrasting interplay of violence and peace, its careful building of suspense through delayed revelations of thematically significant incidents, and its remarkable clarity and richness.

Indebted to Dürer and the German woodcut tradition—so much so that an admiring Joseph Pennell thought it "very hard to tell where Dürer ends and Howard Pyle begins"—the pen-and-ink illustrations feature a bold but intricate line, a wealth of articulated detail so ordered as to render the overall compositions dramatically spare and powerful.⁸ These illustrations capture the thematic contrasts between the chaotic violence of the castle and the calm serenity of the monastery. Abbot Otto reading in his cell (29), for example, is an incarnation of quietude: the sand in the hourglass behind him seems barely to sift; his voluminous robes seem as monumental and immovable as the simple furniture of his cell; the man himself, intent upon his book, lives the interior and con-templative life of the mind. This stasis contrasts sharply with the following depiction of the wounding of Baron Conrad (35), the picture plane teeming with embroiled horses and men, their lances and swords arching in the background to complete the energetic swirl of the design. Across this circular composition cuts the strong diagonal lance of Baron Frederick to pierce Baron Conrad, prone at lower right, a dramatic and wholly successful focus on the illustration's central import against a superbly orchestrated backdrop of chaotic struggle. The following illustration marks a return to the quiet monastery (43), Brother John, his strange eyes wide open to his marvelous visions, holding Otto to his breast, the infant lulled into slumber by the droning of the hived bees in the background. These countering forces meet in the illustration depicting Otto's departure from the monastery (57), Brother John's simple, linear habit and innocent, open face at lower left contrasting with the convoluted figuration of the glinting chainmail worn by the scowling Baron and his men at upper right. Appropriately centered in the picture, Otto is destined to bridge the gap between these antithetical forces: he extends the charity and serenity of the monastery into the rough realm lying beyond monastic walls.

These full-page illustrations are complemented by a protocol of illuminated letters for each chapter, many with woodblock images from the danse macabre, and by tailpieces providing a central emblem for the chapters they close. In addition, chapter headpieces vie in beauty and fullness of conception with the full-page illustrations, within their small, carefully designed spaces distilling the essence of the chapters they introduce. The headpiece for the table of contents, for example, depicts a clarion angel heralding with trumpet the advent of peace, a branch of olive held in his right hand. The following headpiece for the foreword reveals the tenebrous nightmare world into which Otto is born, a world housing desperate peasants harried by the apocalyptic horsemen of unjust rule, war, and pestilence. Subsequent headpieces powerfully depict Death, hourglass in hand, tugging at the capes of the two barons before their fatal encounter (139, 149), and Emperor Rudolph seated in majesty, his right hand elevating a sword at which his nobles bow and his left hand dispensing a palm to a kneeling peasant (161). Behind him the clarion angel reappears, holding aloft a scale of justice. This headpiece summarizes the new order established at the conclusion of Otto of the Silver Hand, an order based essentially on the suppression of the "adventurer," that usually male character described by Paul Zweig as standing "outside the categories of duty and obligation," as occupying an "unsocialized space" where, "self-derived" and "self-determined," he follows his inner destiny regardless of the claims made on him by home or community. In the course of the novel the "adventurers," epitomized by the willful barons, are swept away, to be replaced by Zweig's "hero," incarnated in the Emperor Rudolph and in Otto himself, each of whom is an exemplar of right behavior, protecting his society's values and "sacrificing his personal needs for those of the community."⁹Otto of the Silver Hand thus depicts the domestication of the hero, the welcomed triumph of rule and governance, of law and social order over unrestrained freedom and the heedless exercise of individual power. Otto 's lawless robber-barons, however, swept by the river out to sea, emerge in subsequent reincarnations, often on pirate ships, to challenge again the rule of law in Pyle's later adventure romances.

Men of Iron (1892)

A historical novel like Otto of the Silver Hand, Men of Iron provides an accurate reconstruction of castle life in Henry IV's fifteenth-century England and sets into this precisely drawn, unromanticized portrait of the late Middle Ages a full complement of fictional characters and episodes. In Otto of the Silver Hand Pyle had been nearly as intent on chronicling the evolutionary progression in thirteenth-century Germany from lawless anarchy to social order as he was in delineating the fortunes of his main character. No such broad evolutionary social history informs Men of Iron. A bildungsroman, a more "private" history than that rendered in the earlier novel, Men of Iron features Myles Falworth's maturation to manhood, the channeling of his abundant energies toward socially constructive ends, and the eventual restoration of his family name and fortune through astute political maneuvering and Myles's skill at arms.

Roughly the first half of the novel, detailing Myles's childhood and youth, is modeled on Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), the best-seller by Thomas Hughes, responsible for a host of contemporary "school-book" imitations. The novel's second half, chronicling Myles's progression from insouciant adolescence to responsible manhood, is the quintessential adventure story, replete with battles, narrow escapes, and a love affair eventually consummated through marriage after numerous obstacles. Through the four main parts of the story threads the measured unfolding of Myles's family history, the gradual revelation of injustice done, the identity of the perpetrator, and the righting of old wrongs.

The novel opens with a brief historical introduction chronicling the ascent of Henry IV over the dethroned Edward II, "weak, wicked, and treacherous," and the subsequent plot against the new king that plummets many, including the innocent Falworths, into disfavor and ruin.¹⁰ The first chapter provides, with considerable psychological accuracy, the "bits and pieces" of the eight-year-old Myles's fragmented and impressionistic recollections of the murder before his eyes of Sir John Dale, a conspirator harbored briefly at Falworth Castle, and the later flight of the Falworths to sanctuary on the grounds of St. Mary's Priory, an oasis of peace similar to Otto's St. Michaelsburg. Myles's childhood there is an almost exact replica of Tom Brown's in the Vale of the White Horse: lads of indomitable pluck and mettle, Tom and Myles both play unselfconsciously with village boys of lower station, become adept at wrestling and the quarter-staff under the tutelage of grandfatherly household retainers, are introduced to the larger world at market-town fairs, and bid farewell to carefree childhood upon their departures for school.

The second section of the novel, detailing Myles's advent at Devlen Castle and his initial weeks there, continues this close imitation of Tom Brown's Schooldays. A fifteenth-century ancestor of the Browns, whom Hughes describes as "a fighting family," the pugnacious Myles battles his Flashman, Walter Blunt, no less than three times over the issue of fagging. Whereas Tom and his friend Scud East object, not to institutionally sanctioned fagging for the senior sixth-form boys, but to serving the fifth-form usurpers led by Flashman, the proud Myles objects to fagging in general, claiming that no shame "can be fouler than to do such menial service, saving for one's rightful Lord" (53). The "war of independence" waged by Tom Brown, East, and their cohorts, restricted to a few bedroom pranks against the older boys and an eventual refereed fistfight with Flashman, pales to a mere skirmish beside the quite serious campaign waged by Myles's "Knights of the Rose" against the senior bachelors led by Blunt. Myles doggedly pursues every opportunity to confront the enemy. In his first encounter with Blunt, the older boy nearly brains him with a thick wooden clog while the other bachelors hold him helpless on the floor. Myles's life is saved only by the timely intervention of Sir James Lee, supervisor of the castle squires. Myles's refusal to shake hands with Blunt soon leads to a second encounter where Myles is almost stabbed to death, though he manages, like Tom, to throw his enemy in a wrestling maneuver. Learning that Blunt and his henchmen lie in wait to slit his ears, Myles, dodging lethal cobbles, musters his "Knights" into combat with wooden staves, having been dissuaded by the castle smith from using "knives with blades a foot long, pointed and double-edged" (126). Finally, bleeding from the numerous injuries inflicted in a sword duel with Blunt, Myles manages to give his enemy a near-fatal head wound in a fight Pyle declines to detail, noting that combat "with a sharp-edged broadsword was not only brutal and debasing, but cruel and bloody as well" (135). In going further in his delineation of conflict and violence than even Hughes himself, whose paean to pugilism in Tom Brown's Schooldays is famous, Pyle strives for historical accuracy, his unsentimentalized picture of the Middle Ages being in many instances a dark one.

A psychologically complex character, the sixteen-year-old Myles is presented in this section of the novel as an honorable, attractive, but hypersensitive youth governed by hot-headed pride, quick to take offense and to come to blows. Admittedly, his foe, Walter Blunt, is a dangerous adversary indeed, unlike Flashman, who is merely annoying and nasty. But Myles is simply too avid for battle, extreme at times in seeking its occasions. This exaggerated pugnacity has its origins in Myles's natural propensity for action over debate as well as in his strong sense of alienation after learning from Sir James that his blind father is "an attainted outlaw" in great danger from a powerful foe (whom Myles intemperately declares he would kill on the spot). He also learns that the earl of Mackworth, in whose service he is enrolled, fears to come to his father's aid for political reasons. Thus Myles feels that he stands alone and must strike out at a host of enemies hedging him round. Sir James himself tells Myles that he can expect no open favor but must "live thine own life here and fight thine own way" (65). "I am friendless here," he later tells Sir James after his first encounter with Blunt, "and ye are all against me" (74). In thus showing the inner workings of his hero's mind, Pyle manages to maintain reader sympathy with a character prone to pride and violence, examples of which abound, leading Francis Gascoyne, Myles's Scud East, to chide him for constantly breeding trouble for himself and for being so foolish as "to come hither to this place, and then not submit to the ways thereof, as the rest of us do" (61).

Myles's head is filled with dangerous romantic claptrap and nearly homicidal notions of honor, a mindset Pyle himself seems perilously close to admiring. For example, after Blunt has ignominiously clobbered him with the clog, Myles screams, "I will have his life that struck me when I was down!" (73), and later he founds the "Knights of the Rose," a crypto-Arthurian group dedicated to righting those wrongs in the castle that even Myles's closest associates must ask him to specify. At one point Myles uses as a pretext for conflict with the bachelors their beating of the lazy and exasperating Robin Ingoldsby, whose head Myles himself soon threatens to crack open with a block of wood. In short, though his resistance to tyranny is more often right than otherwise, Myles's bellicose behavior is unattractive, even if Sir James, "with a deal of dry gusto" (141), does describe to the delighted earl of Mackworth his multiple and near-fatal encounters as if they were mere boyish high jinks. Though seeming at times troubled by Myles's bloody strategies for ending fagging, a "tyranny" eventually to become the time-honored rule in Britain's great public schools, Pyle nevertheless admires his hero for his "savage bull-dog tenacity" (127) in winning his "first great fight in life" (141).

The transition from boyhood to adolescence in the novel's third section shows Myles as a juvenile rendition of the reckless and irresponsible adventurer, taken up as a protégé by the earl's brother, Lord George, a soldier of fortune. At this stage Myles manifests what Paul Zweig sees as a principal activity of the adventurer: he imparts marvelous tales of the unknown to those "destined to exist within the circle of domestic realities."¹¹ Myles's auditors are the earl's daughter and niece, the Ladies Anne and Alice, whom Myles visits at considerable risk seven times in their privy garden, a sanctuary so jealously guarded that previous interlopers have been shot with a crossbow or deprived of their ears. On these visits Myles tells of the dangerous and alien world of his "boyish escapades" to girls who "hear little of such matters" (158) until the earl puts a stop to the clandestine meetings. When Myles's chivalrous letter to his "sworn lady," Alice, is subsequently intercepted, the earl makes him realize his selfishness in compromising the girl, telling him he is now "old enough to have some of the thoughts of a man, and to lay aside those of a boy" (180), advice later echoed by Sir James when he informs Myles of the earl's friendship and presents him with a war horse. The earl thus plays the same role of adult male intercessor in Myles's development that Dr. Arnold plays in Tom Brown's.

By far the longest section of the novel is devoted to Myles's gradual transformation from adolescent to man, from adventurer to hero, a section filled with historical information about medieval knighthood and ceremony and resolving the tension threading throughout the work concerning Myles's adjustment of his family's position in the world and the identity of the family nemesis, the powerful earl of Alban. After his knighting by the king (whereupon he is proclaimed by all a reincarnation of Sir Galahad), his overcoming of the most renowned of the French champions in his maiden tilt, and a six-month stint in France with Lord George (where his tested virtue emerges wholly triumphant), Myles returns to London for the final showdown with Alban. A thoroughly conscienceless adventurer and thus the antithesis of the now-heroic Myles, Alban is the poisoned fount of all the Falworth troubles and the enemy of Mack-worth as well. His climactic encounter with the young hero is invested with near-cosmic overtones: virtue versus vice; social responsibility versus selfish aggrandizement; honor and fair play versus malice and brutality. Myles's boyish avidity for violence has been so tamed that both before and after the battle he agonizes with Prior Edward over the ethics of killing an enemy like Alban in fair fight, obviously a difficult question for Pyle too, conditioned as he was by Quaker pacifism. Though the priest advises him that war and bloodshed, although cruel, are apparently placed in the world by God as an occasional means for bringing forth good from evil, Myles nevertheless spares Alban three times during their duel, a "false and foolish generosity," stemming from Myles's "impulsive youth" and his "romantic training in the artificial code of French chivalry" (317). The unchivalrous Alban does not reward this generosity, however, riding over Myles repeatedly when he is down, as he had done in the earlier blinding of Myles's father, and severely wounding him before being slain by Myles with a mace, the weapon Alban had murdered Sir John Dale with in the opening pages of the novel. Men of Iron culminates with the usual Pylean closure: the Falworth estates return to the family and Myles and the Lady Alice wed and live together happily, "for how else should the story end?" (329). Men of Iron thus supplies a model for maturation, much like those briefer ones Pyle would provide in the enfances of his Arthurian heroes. The novel assures its adolescent readers that if they have the necessary courage and pluck, they too, like Myles, can become "rich and happy and honored and beloved" after their "hard and noble fighting" (330). They can, in short, carve for themselves comfortable niches in the precarious adult world where they can live fruitful and productive lives.

The black-and-white halftone illustrations further suggest this thematic progression toward maturity. The pictures for the first three-quarters of the volume focus on Myles's dependence, isolation, and vulnerability, while those in the latter part show him in his full manhood, capable and independent. The first illustration after the frontispiece (28), for example, depicts Myles, small and alone in the foreground, kneeling to present his letter of petition to the powerful earl of Mackworth, who stands among his retainers. The illustration showing Myles held helpless on the ground, his head exposed to Blunt's murderous clog (70), reinforces the isolation and vulnerability of his early days at Devlen Castle. Other illustrations show him being called to account for his boyish actions by those older and wiser than himself (138, 170), and kneeling before King Henry to petition knighthood (216). Nowhere in the later illustrations is the adult Myles thus presented as vulnerable or suppliant. Instead, he stands forth boldly as an adult in his armor to receive Lady Alice's favor (250), walks in a newly attained equality with Prior Edward, his family benefactor (267), and resolutely denounces the earl of Alban before the king himself (308). Though thematically appropriate and often arrestingly composed and executed, the illustrations for Men of Iron do not share the imaginative pungency of Pyle's nimble pen-and-ink drawings, the reader's eye, according to Henry Pitz, traveling over these tipped-in gray halftone panels "without much temptation to linger and find long satisfactions."¹² No such criticism as the latter appends to the verbal text, however; Men of Iron remains one of Pyle's most popular books for adolescents.

Within the Capes (1885)

Published just two years after Robin Hood, Within the Capes establishes the pattern for many of Pyle's later adventure stories in its portrayal of a quiet Quaker jarred out of his pacific existence to face often violent adventures before returning to a calm and prosperous family life. The romance begins and ends with its octogenarian narrator's reflections on the two years during which more happened to him "than happens to most men in a lifetime," his adventures being a relatively brief interruption in a long life thoroughly "even and uneventful, excepting as to such small things as occur in [a] quiet Quaker neighborhood."¹³

The narrator, Tom Granger, recounts his adventures in the homely, artless, and digressive style appropriate for the ruminations of an old man. Hoping to preserve for posterity the story he has long been rehearsing orally, he writes to set the record straight, for he knows that things get so "monstrously twisted in passing from mouth to mouth" (2) that he fears being transformed over several generations into a posthumous pirate or murderer. Curiously, he writes of himself in third person, almost as if the young man whose early adventures he records is quite other than the garrulous, kindly old man whose life as a paterfamilias and pillar of his community is now drawing to a close. The "he" of his narrative is thus himself as other, outsider, an alien whose voyaging-out has placed him beyond the boundaries of the closed and landlocked society that eventually reclaims him after his adventuring days are done. This early alienation is a persistent theme in the novel. In the inland Quaker village of Eastcaster "little was known of the outside world" so that when Tom returns at novel's opening from a three-year cruise to the East Indies, he is looked upon "with a certain wariness, or shyness," his neighbors feeling "that he was not quite one of themselves" (26). Elihu Penrose is thus hesitant for Tom to marry his daughter, preferring that Patty choose someone "content to grow green in the same place that our fathers grew green before us" (31). When Tom returns a second time to Eastcaster after his later harrowing journey, he is thought to be "from foreign parts" (178), his long beard and graying hair so disguising him that even his closest friends fail to recognize him, believing him dead. An Ancient Mariner, he returns to hold his audience—Doctor White, his family, various neighbors, the reader—spellbound with the tale of his travels in the countries of the marvelous. Like Paul Zweig's archaic adventurers and ecstatic shamans, Tom Granger returns from the borders of death itself to name the unnameable for auditors stuck in conventional domestic routines; he "pushes back the essential ignorance" in which his neighbors live by "exposing a further reach of darkness to the clarity of words."¹⁴

As with most adventure tales, Tom's is essentially formulaic. Such formulas, according to Cawelti, "are at once highly ordered and conventional" though "permeated with the symbols of danger, uncertainty, violence and sex," allowing a reader to share in these "ultimate excitements," but in such a way that the reader's "basic sense of security and order is intensified rather than disrupted."¹⁵ In other words, though formulaic literature often deals with the hazardous and chaotic, its familiar, predictable structures fulfill conventional expectations and thus confirm existing cultural views concerning the nature of reality and morality. Within the Capes is actually an amalgam of diverse popular genres, a conflation of the fictional formulas underlying the sentimental romance, the historical novel, the high seas adventure, the robinsonade, the buried treasure saga, the mystery and detective novel. The work of a young man, Within the Capes nevertheless evinces an authorial maturity in its careful pacing, controlled and unflagging action, appropriate narrative voice, and complete construction of setting and incident. The novel is a tour de force, an artfully composed inventory of formulaic conventions. In Within the Capes Pyle shows himself master of the many genres comprising the vast popular literature of the late nineteenth century.

The romance is almost pure action, its exciting plot assuming primacy over theme and character motivation. In the first chapters Pyle draws on the conventions of the sentimental romance to tell of Tom Granger's springtime return to Eastcaster, his falling in love with Patty Penrose at Quaker meeting, and the exaggerated emotional ecstasies and upheavals he experiences as a young man in love. This pastoral idyll, leisurely in its descriptions of woodland walks and innocent, tentative courtship, is interrupted by Elihu Penrose's demand that Tom show himself capable of supporting a wife on at least $750 a year, a demand that plunges Tom into the demonic realm of trial and adventure. Lured by the high pay, he takes a berth against his conscience in a Quaker privateersman, the Nancy Hazlewood, fitted out in Philadelphia to intercept British shipping for plunder during the War of 1812. Here Pyle's interest in American history leads to an account of British harbor blockades, the inadequate state of the American navy, and the common practice on both sides of legalized piracy. The blockade of the Delaware River temporarily lifted, the ship sets sail ten days before ready under a mysterious Captain Knight, who, it soon appears, is mentally unfit for his post, coming on deck wearing a broad red waistscarf bulging with a brace of pistols while the doomed ship is foundering in heavy seas. Modeled on the popular sea epics of Captain Marryat and others, this absorbing high seas adventure involves a near-collision with a British man-of-war which looms out of a fog bank, a storm that causes the ill-prepared ship to founder, an insane captain who refuses to lower lifeboats or signal a rescue ship, and Tom's ensuing mutiny before the loss of the vessel, its copper hull rising higher and higher in Tom's subsequent nightmares as it sinks at the stern. Tom's archaic sense of honor remains intact through the crisis, Jack Baldwin, the first mate, having to tie him up and cast him into the lifeboat to prevent him from loyally perishing with the doomed crew. The ensuing lifeboat saga, anticipating Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" (1898) by more than a decade, is an unsentimental chronicle of weariness and privation, ending with the drowning in the surf of seventeen crewmen, only Tom and Jack surviving to be cast up on a lonely Caribbean island.

Pyle begins his subsequent robinsonade by attempting to differentiate it from the many he has obviously read, having Tom claim that "in real shipwreck," unlike fictional ones, "there is nothing either romantic or pleasant; neither is a desert island a cheerful place to dwell upon" (115). But for the loneliness and Tom's yearning for Patty, however, this island is not so bad, the two castaways immediately settling in to domesticate the wilds, much as Robinson Crusoe does in his colonial venture of transforming his island into a little bit of old England. Thus Tom and Jack spend their time hollowing a cave home in a sandhill, using the stoved-in lifeboat for a roof, and spending their idle moments in constructing a raft and in writing rescue notes enclosed in porpoise-skin bladders. One of these leads to their deliverance, but not before they feel the full effects of nature turned rabid in the consummately described fury of the hurricane of 1814, perhaps the eeriest and most evocative passage in the novel. The hurricane uncovers a treasure from the wreck of a Spanish bullion ship, and Tom and Jack leave the island wealthy men.

Just when it seems that Tom, having returned to Eastcaster, is set for life, however, Pyle gives his already crowded narrative a final adventurous twist. In any popular novel such as this one where plot is primary, pure coincidence is almost always a regular feature. Thus, Tom returns home on the eve of Patty's wedding to another man, who, after a confrontation with Tom, is discovered murdered the next day. From his prison cell Tom, with the help of the sloppy detective "Fatty" Doyle, discovers the true murderer through a process of deduction and ratiocination worthy of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, whose adventures first appeared in the 1890s. "Who would have thought," comments Will Gaines, Tom's Dr. Watson, "that such a quiet, dull-seeming fellow as you, Tom Granger, would have thought out all this for yourself!" (233-34). After the confession-suicide of the murderer, Tom is free to marry Patty and rejoin the community from which he has been alienated. He concludes his tale by comparing himself to a ship, "one time battered and buffeted with the bitter storms of trouble and despair, but now, full freighted with my cargo of years, safe at anchor in my peaceful haven Within the Capes " (266).

This final metaphor suggests, however, that Tom's absorption into the quiet Quaker community has per-haps not been as complete as he repeatedly avows. Though landlocked for over half a century in secluded Eastcaster, he continues to think of himself as a voyager, spends much of his time recounting (and vicariously reliving) his adventures, marks the gatepost of his home with a chiseled ship under full sail, and confesses to "a great longing" to revisit the scenes of his adventures, particularly the island of which he often dreams and now remembers even more vividly than when the memory of it was fresh (116). Indeed, the final act of his life is an imaginative re-creation of these old adventures through his memoir, which paradoxically excludes any details of his subsequent family life in Eastcaster, an indication, perhaps, that in spite of his disclaimers he considers those two years of adventure to have been the center and focus of his existence. This subtle tension seems ironically to subvert the novel's indirect, though dominant assertion—one which the narrator consistently affirms—that home is best, that a steady life of labor and duty, of tending one's garden, invariably leads to satisfaction and fulfillment.

The Rose of Paradise (1888)

In his first pirate book, The Rose of Paradise (serialized in Harper's Weekly, 1887) Pyle recounts the history of Captain John Mackra's bloody engagement in the Mozambique Channel with the infamous Edward England and his pirate crew, adding "many lesser and more detailed circumstances" to Charles Johnson's account in his standard work on pirates, one of many volumes dealing with buccaneers and corsairs in Pyle's personal library.¹⁶ Using his source only as a point of departure, Pyle invents an exciting plot revolving around England's theft of an enormous ruby, the Rose of Paradise, and Mackra's successful strategy for recovering it. The narrative features the suspenseful intrigues, violent clashes, narrow escapes, and providential coincidences characteristic of the adventure romance, the conventions of which Pyle had demonstrated mastery of in Within the Capes. Unlike the earlier work, however, The Rose of Paradise combines fast action and brute incident with skillful psychological portraiture, striking a balance between external event and internal character delineation.

This development in Pyle's adventure fiction corresponds with what Paul Zweig sees as a post-Renaissance de-emphasis on external action in the adventure story for an increasing interest in psychology or "the exploration of interior space." Claiming that in modern romance "the substance of adventure has been displaced inward," he argues that "the framework of great exploits" has come to matter less than "the interior rhythm which the adventurer imposed upon the world of his experience."¹⁷ Though The Rose of Paradise retains a full complement of "great exploits," it nevertheless manifests a new interest in internal motivation, Pyle's rounded characters being drawn with considerable psychological subtlety.

Its first-person narrator, Captain John Mackra, for example, is as careful to record his every feeling, reaction, and emotional state as he is to detail the actions that call forth these interior responses. The novel thus becomes as much a self-revelation as a tale of adventure, a chronicle of a mind under the stress of responsibility and duty, an intimate delineation of psychical nuance and coloration. All is transformed into matter for Mackra's self-reference and self-disclosure. Thus the naval conflict between Mackra and England becomes a counterpoint of external events and internal reflection, Mackra noting in the midst of battle, for instance, that this was the first time he had ever been under fire (83), seen a man killed in action (84), or observed the destructive force of a broadside (86). Witnessing these events, he chronicles all the shades of his "impatience and doubt and almost despair" (84). This swift interchange of outer impressions and the inner ones they evoke becomes the woof and warp of Mackra's chronicle. So intense at times is his introspection that he becomes an Odysseus adventuring on a dangerous sea of emotions, as when suspicion unjustly falls on him after the ruby is discovered missing. Striving to collect his thoughts "and to shape them into some sort of order," he is first possessed "with a most ungovernable fury," which gradually subsides into a strange calm. Before long, however, he becomes "consumed with anxiety" (174), this leading him into "the depths of gloomy despair" (176), from which he contemplates suicide before flinging himself on his knees in prayer, thereby recovering a certain peace of mind.

Mackra's internal disclosures do more than chart his inner voyagings, however. Taken in the aggregate, they provide an intimate psychological portrait of the hero of popular romance whose self-sacrifice and internal conquest of impulse and passion are as admirable as his extreme devotion to duty and his bravery in facing external trials. Throughout his narrative Mackra invariably shows himself to be modest, trusting, generous, resourceful, loyal, practical, and above all, selfless. Sacrificing his own needs for those of his community—according to Zweig a prime requisite for the hero—Mackra ventures his life to hold parley with the pirates, not so much in hopes of recovering the ruby and recouping his reputation as to secure the safety of his passengers and crew; he reasons that even if the pirates kill him, his death should satisfy their urge for revenge, thus deflecting their rancor from his shipmates. Later, though exiled and in disgrace himself, he finds England near death from a fever and nurses him, being so moved at finding the author of all his difficulties "prostrated, lying helpless, and deserted by all his kind" that he forgets his own troubles and thinks only of England's pitiable condition (213). Though Pyle shows Mackra to be a man above other men, he is careful not to turn him into a plaster saint. In his watch over England, Mackra later falls into an almost ungovernable rage at the sick man and must leave the hut to run "up and down, as one distracted" before being shown "what was right with more clearness" and resolving with difficulty not to desert "the poor and helpless wretch in his hour of need" (219). So imbued is Mackra with the primacy of duty and the necessity to live with honor that when all of his actions are misinterpreted by his superiors he feels he has nothing left to live for. Thus he tells the recovering England, who holds a pistol to his head, that since "I have lost my honor and all except my life through you … you might as well take that as the rest" (224). Indeed, so finely tuned is his honorable constitution that when he at last fathoms the full perfidy of Captain Leach, his passenger who first steals the ruby and then betrays the ship to the pirates, he feels a "great roaring" in his ears and a reeling of all things before fainting dead away (111). Again, when the board of inquiry at Bombay intimates its suspicions of him, he blanches and reels with vertigo, physically overcome (171).

No such delicacy disturbs the murderous pirate captain, Edward England, however. Deftly drawn, England is a Long John Silver, sharing with this antiheroic adventurer of Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883) a nature morally corrupt but nevertheless dangerously attractive because of his courage, intelligence, and occasional moral susceptibility. Though in nominal command of his pirate crew, he feels none of Mackra's fierce allegiance to them, knocking them about with blows and belaying pins; and they consequently feel none for him, eventually marooning him on the island of Mauritius where he is abandoned by all in his illness. The archetypal adventurer, England is an obvious foil for the heroic Mackra. Self-motivated and self-directed, he betrays the traitor Leach to his death and silently pockets the ruby for his personal enrichment. Yet, as in Captain Johnson's account, England's character is a chiaroscuro of good and evil. Though he will do nothing to endanger his own standing with the pirates, he nevertheless intercedes for Mackra on the pirate ship, and later, apparently recognizing Mackra's selflessness in nursing him, he grudgingly relinquishes the ruby. England's last act in the novel reveals his basic ambiguity, the retreating Mackra not being able to determine if the shot fired after him was meant to hurry him on or to murder him after a mercurial change of heart.

Certain of the minor characters, too, show this deftness of characterization, from the exasperatingly well-oiled and enterprising villain Leach to the popinjay Longways, whose humiliation at being posted as agent in such a bleak outpost as "King Coffee's" Juanna leads him into compensatory folly and self-importance. The delineation of the women characters, however, is not a success, they being given to fits of hysterical weeping and helpless hand-clasping. Mistress Pamela Boon, an imperiled Pauline, delivers her several lines in melodramatic, stilted tones and seems to be included in the work only to facilitate Pyle's usual matrimonial conclusion. The eight halftone illustrations, though excellently composed and executed, add little of substance to the tale's unfolding. Clearly, The Rose of Paradise, though plentifully leavened with action and suspense, is John Mackra's book. In the mannered but adept eighteenth-century style of his self-disclosure, Mackra reveals himself with an honesty, an ingenuousness, almost a naiveté that makes him one of the most engaging of Pyle's adventure heroes.

The Story of Jack Ballister's Fortunes (1895)

A lengthy historical adventure novel in fifty chapters, Jack Ballister's Fortunes offers a large cast of characters, an intricate plot, and a series of exciting adventures unfolding on two continents as well as on the high seas. Kidnapped from England and sold in Virginia as a "redemptioner" or indentured servant, Jack flees his brutal master to join Blackbeard's notorious pirates in North Carolina, later rescuing from them the captive heiress Eleanor Parker, whose grateful father champions Jack's rights to his inheritance in England. Pyle's most ambitious novel in this genre, Jack Ballister's Fortunes is a conflation of the formulas, themes, and fictional conventions used in his four previous adventure novels.

As in Otto of the Silver Hand, Pyle chooses as setting for this work a pivotal historical period in which order has not yet quelled anarchy, legality has yet to gain ascendancy over lawlessness. The early eighteenth-century American colonial period, as the introduction makes clear, was still characterized by a frontier morality, individual rights and the overarching sway of codified law not yet so firmly established as to prevent kidnapping or "man-stealing." In addition, pirates and buccaneers could still roam freely, often with the cooperation of colonial governments. The novel marks the end of such anarchy, chronicling the defeat of Blackbeard and his crew, that outlaw being "almost the last of the pirates who, with his banded men, was savage and powerful enough to come and go as he chose among the people whom he plundered."¹⁸Jack Ballister's Fortunes thus stems at least partially from Pyle's preoccupation with the nineteenth-century idea of progressive historical evolution, though the issue is not as central or as focused in this work as it is in Otto of the Silver Hand. Underlying both works, however, is a theme resonant with significance for Pyle's Anglo-American contemporaries then busily shouldering the "white man's burden," ostensibly to expedite the global replacement of barbarism with civility. By the conclusion of Jack Ballister's Fortunes Jack is able to marry Eleanor Parker and live a civilized life protected by law, apparently no longer having to fear that his children will be murdered by pirates, as his wife's brother had been, or spirited away for ransom, as had happened to Eleanor herself. Like Otto, Jack enters a new era at the end of his adventures.

More than a chronicle of broad social evolution, however, the novel also features Jack's individual maturation from reckless, willful adolescent to responsible adult, a theme underlying Pyle's earlier bildungsroman, Men of Iron. Jack's odyssey to manhood begins with his adoption at the age of sixteen by his unscrupulous and miserly uncle Hezekiah Tipton, who allows Jack "to go where he pleased and to do as he chose" (17), a harmful neglect resulting in Jack's living "an idle, aimless, useless life" (18). Thus ungoverned, Jack becomes selfish, disobedient, and manipulative, though his mean uncle deserves little better from him. Tipton's old housekeeper rightly complains, however, that Jack, always late for meals and tardy in performing the few chores she assigns him, thinks of nobody but himself (34). When Jack tries to extort twenty pounds from Tipton to buy a sailboat, threatening, if refused, to complain to his wealthy, aristocratic relative, Sir Henry Ballister, Tipton sells him as an indentured servant to a Captain Butts, ironically receiving rather than parting with the twenty pounds Jack had demanded. On board the Arundel Jack is befriended by the reformed pirate Christian Dred, a grandfatherly mentor for the lonely adolescent then "passing from boyhood into manhood" (109). When Jack's willful idleness later reasserts itself at the home of his American master, he is threatened with a beating to teach him "to stay at home and 'tend to [his] own work" (147). Caught truant, Jack resists a horse-whipping and runs away, falling in with Blackbeard's pirates, the romantic accounts of their pillage and plunder so captivating his boyish imagination that he yearns to join them on their violent raids (241). Jack's regeneration begins, however, when the kidnapped Eleanor Parker tries unsuccessfully to flee her pirate captors. His sympathy for her sufferings leads to a growing sense of responsibility, the correction of his romantic, juvenile view of the pirates, and his eventual rejection of their anarchic way of life. Thus, his decision to rescue Eleanor represents a major step in Jack's maturation, his passage into adult heroism involving a hazardous chase during which his accomplice, Christian Dred, is killed, leaving him to save the girl on his own. Acclaimed a hero on his return, Jack experiences the awkward and inchoate yearnings of first love, journeys to England to claim his fortune and to receive a gentleman's education, and at last returns to Virginia to marry, always for Pyle an event marking the arrival of full maturity. Thus, the evolution Pyle saw occurring in eighteenth-century American colonial society finds its individual parallel in Jack Ballister's progression from adolescence to adulthood.

In constructing this narrative of social and individual maturation, Pyle drew upon a variety of popular fictional formulas, certain of which he had previously employed in Within the Capes, most notably the sentimental romance, the historical novel, and the pirate adventure tale. The work is, however, most clearly indebted to Robert Louis Stevenson's bestseller, Kidnapped (1886), especially in its opening episodes. Jack Ballister's Fortunes diverges from its predecessor in the abducted Jack's completed voyage to the American colonies, David Balfour's voyage to the same destination having been aborted by shipwreck off the cost of Scotland. Kidnapping is a repeated motif in Pyle's novel, Jack, Eleanor Parker, the lawyer Burton, Colonel Parker's servant Robin, and certain lesser characters all falling victim at some point to that crime. The story of Jack's adventures in the colonies following his kidnapping includes, interestingly enough, many of the conventions popularized in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and in the ubiquitous nineteenth-century American slave narratives, including Jack's desolation in captivity and his hard ocean crossing, his dehumanizing sale at the auction block, his life on an outlying plantation, and his running away from the ill-treatment of a brutal master. Underlying this slave narrative is the Cinderella tale of Jack's descent into servitude and the final revelation of his true identity and proper worth. Pyle skillfully weaves these disparate genres and conventions into a rich narrative tapestry highlighting the central pirate adventure tale.

As in The Rose of Paradise, the pirate adventure in Jack Ballister's Fortunes is an admixture of history and romance, Pyle adhering closely to his source in Captain Charles Johnson's standard history of piracy for the large outlines of Blackbeard's life and death. The novel provides intimate portrayals of pirate life and character, Blackbeard emerging as a surly and unpredictable adventurer, congenitally incapable of living the quiet, domestic life he pledges himself to in accepting the king's pardon. No cardboard villain, Pyle's Blackbeard is brave and self-possessed, daring, resourceful, and articulate, a humanized version of the historical figure who by Pyle's time had become obscured in a dark halo of lurid legend. The Blackbeard in this work is a man, albeit wicked, and not the exaggerated demon incarnate depicted in popular histories as going about with plaited beard, blackened face, and flaming hempen punks thrust under his hat brim. Richard Parker, Blackbeard's collaborator in the abduction of Eleanor, on the other hand, is a stock character, a spoiled younger son given to cards and cockfighting, a handsome, well-educated cad who has frittered away his inheritance. Of the novel's villains, however, only Christian Dred, as his name implies, approaches the complexity of Stevenson's Long John Silver and Pyle's Ned England, all three scoundrels admitting to moments of moral susceptibility. Dred is certainly villainous enough: he masterminds many of Blackbeard's raids, betrays his pardon by returning to piracy, and murders Eleanor's brother during an attack on a ship. But at the same time he is inherently, ironically kind, befriending Jack on his voyage to the colonies, offering protection to him when he runs away from his master, and sacrificing his life to rescue Eleanor in propitiation for his earlier murder of her brother. Dred and Jack are clearly the most complex characters in the novel. Lieutenant Maynard and Eleanor's father, Colonel Parker, are one-dimensional heroic figures, and Eleanor herself is an exasperatingly passive ingenue.

The black-and-white oil illustrations for the work resemble in representational style those for The Garden behind the Moon, their strong visual designs reinforcing the semantic intentions of the text. In Pyle's depiction of the meeting of Blackbeard and Richard Parker to plot Eleanor's abduction, for example, each of the villains casts a huge, menacing shadow, their dark coronas of malice eventually blighting the happiness of many innocent people (122). In the portrayal of Jack's first significant encounter with Eleanor, by contrast, Pyle suggests a world of innocence and light by eliminating all shadows, though Jack seems tentative and ill at ease before Eleanor, self-assured and at home in her father's grand house (132). The concluding illustration depicts Jack and Eleanor, now young adults with their trials borne, standing on a terrace and looking out on a world newly opened to them (408). Thus, the novel concludes with the return of its central characters to normal, orderly lives after their exciting, often terrifying adventures in the demonic realm, a coda similarly employed in the four preceding historical adventure novels from which this work draws its themes and borrows many of its fictional conventions.

Stolen Treasure (1907); Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates (1921); The Ruby of Kishmoor (1908)

Jack Ballister's Fortunes, the last and longest of Pyle's full-length adventure novels, is succeeded by relatively short pirate fiction written for the magazines and by a culminating parody of the pirate adventure genre.

In the introduction to his 1891 edition of John Es-quemeling's Buccaneers and Marooners of America Pyle provides an apologia for his avid interest in pirate adventure, arguing that pirate tales fascinate because beneath "the accumulated debris of culture" there exists a "hidden ground-work of the old-time savage" ever receptive to deeds fierce, violent, and lawless.¹⁹ This "nether man that lies within us" (16), unsubdued by the veneer of culture, instinctively hungers for "constant alertness, constant danger, constant escape," for "blood and lust and flame and rapine," a hunger safely, if temporarily, appeased by pirate tales that give voice to our deep discontents with civilization and serve as conduits for the venting of a "hell of unbridled passions let loose to rend and tear" (17). Thus, according to Pyle, the pirate's "courage and daring, no matter how mad and ungodly, have always a redundancy of vim and life to recommend them" to the unregenerate creature raging in each of us (16). No less important, pirate tales satisfy our lust for wealth, the fancy reveling as much in sudden, often unscrupulous acquisitions of huge fortunes as in the courage and daring necessary to win them. And for the more intellectually inclined, pirate adventure allows valuable insights into "a mad, savage, unkempt phase of humanity" (25), the history of piracy being a cautionary "verisemblance of the degeneration, the quick disintegration of humanity the moment that the laws of God and man are lifted" (38). History, for Pyle, is always a two-way street: on the one hand, it chronicles a progressive social evolution (as charted in Otto of the Silver Hand and Jack Ballister's Fortunes ), and on the other, a regressive deterioration, a devolution (as in Pyle's account in the introduction to Esquemeling of the descent from officially chartered privateersman to buccaneer to marooner). Ever the didact, Pyle thus believed that there was "a profitable lesson to be learned in the history of such a human extreme of evil" as piracy, that wicked "rebound from civilization" (39). In addition, he saw pirate romance as a safety valve or escape hatch for civilized human beings: it satisfied in a socially acceptable way the primal, amoral human urge to lawless adventure at the same time that it reinforced the laws instituted to curb that urge.

Pyle's magazine pirate stories, miniaturizations of his longer pirate novels, usually feature the adventures of a young male hero, on the whole brave, good, honest, and dutiful, who shares, willingly or otherwise, certain lawless escapades with a courageous but conscienceless pirate adventurer before returning to the security of the domestic realm to uphold in his career and inevitable marriage the laws and restraints of his society. This hiatus in the young hero's otherwise orderly life is invariably described in the stories as a dream or nightmare, a descent into the demonic realm from which the hero eventually awakens. The formula for Pyle's pirate adventures, replete with incidents of anarchy and chaos, grants a reader vicarious participation in antisocial dangers, violence, and crime at the same time that it formally affirms societal values through its highly ordered and predictable structure. Pirate adventure thus provides its readers with a medium whereby they can imaginatively experience courageous lawlessness at the same time that they can reject it.

Of the four pirate stories by Pyle collected in Stolen Treasure, the first, "With the Buccaneers" (Harper's Round Table, June 1897), embodies this plot formula in the most spirited and straightforward way. Young Harry Mostyn escapes in 1665 from his large, prosperous family of sugar planters to join the pirate Henry Morgan, who promises to make a man of him. Under Morgan's tutelage, Harry witnesses cold-blooded murder, participates in the amazing capture of a heavily armed and manned Spanish flagship, is involved in a naval battle during which he risks death to save Morgan's ship, and engages in a dalliance with an exotic French girl before being peremptorily reclaimed by an older brother and then settling down as "a respectable and wealthy sugar merchant with an English wife and a fine family of children."²⁰ Harry's adventures amount to little more than a boisterous lark, a dreamlike interstice between periods of adherence to the approved social pattern affirmed by the story's end.

The three subsequent works in the collection offer variations and elaborations on this basic formula. In these works Pyle often relied upon incredible coincidence to mold his narrative structures into pleasing but highly improbable geometrical plot designs. The order of placement of the four stories in Stolen Treasure is thus determined, not by chronological publishing dates, but by increasingly daring variations on the formula underlying them all. In "Tom Chist and the Treasure-Box" (Harper's Round Table, March 1896), for example, Pyle makes his hero a foundling whose adventures culminate in the contrived but nevertheless satisfying revelation of his proper identity and high social position. One night observing Captain Kidd burying treasure by moonlight, Tom soon retraces the pirate's steps and acquires the fortune for himself, later journeying to consult Richard Chillingsworth, one of the wealthiest, most influential men in New York, about some papers found in the chest. In one of several plot contrivances straight from nineteenth-century melodrama, Tom suddenly discovers that Chillingsworth is none other than his uncle, whereupon he marries Chillingsworth's daughter and becomes "rich and great" (94), assuming his full position as a staunch upholder of mainstream values while Kidd continues to subvert them until his last frolic on the gallows. A similar quilt of coincidence and predictable formulaic patterning, "The Ghost of Captain Brand" (Harper's Weekly, 19 December 1896), the third work in the collection, details the adventures of Barnaby True, whose grandfather, the notorious pirate William Brand, had been assassinated by his protégé Jack Malyoe twenty years before the story begins. In Jamaica on business, Barnaby joins with Abram Dowling, a former associate of his grandfather, to avenge the murder and to secure the treasure. In an ensuing battle Malyoe suffers a fatal stroke after seeing the ghostly apparition of Captain Brand, who appears again later in the flashes of lightning of a storm off Staten Island on the eve of Barnaby's marriage to Malyoe's niece, Marjorie. One of the most interesting of the magazine pirate stories, "Captain Brand" introduces into the formula an ambiguity similar to that underlying Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898), the reader being unable to determine if Captain Brand is indeed dead and returns as a ghost, or if, alive, he has for twenty years been directing events to this conclusion, evidence for both interpretations being carefully planted in the text.

Another tale of the quasi-supernatural, this one with a rational explanation, "The Devil at New Hope" (Harper's Weekly, 18 December 1897), involves the return of the pirate and slave trader Obadiah Belford to New Hope to torment his respectable but pompous brother William. Reputed to be in league with the devil, Obadiah maliciously engineers the ruinous marriage of his brother's only child to a man he believes to be a runaway servant, or worse, but whom he presents as the second son of an earl. Possible only in popular formula fiction, Obadiah's impostor turns out to be the real thing, this irresponsible young aristocrat becoming so revolted by Obadiah's depravity that he returns to the paths of righteousness, following them with his wife all the way to an eventual peerage.

Certainly Pyle knew that the stories in Stolen Treasure were not great literature. Well-crafted and engagingly written potboilers, they provide vicarious adventure, exciting escape, wish fulfillment, a comforting predictability, and a confirmation of traditional values. They also furnish insights into turn-of-the-century popular literary taste, a taste apparently persisting well into the twentieth century, as is evidenced by the 1949 reissue of Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates, originally published in 1921. A posthumous compilation of pictures and prose selections from Pyle's pirate works, the Book of Pirates also reprints two interesting magazine stories, both "Blueskin the Pirate" (1890) and "Captain Scarfield" (1900) centering on the usual Pylean conflict between the sedate, civilized man of law and his alter ego, the lawless adventurer.²¹ In "Blueskin the Pirate," as in "The Devil at New Hope," the combatants are brothers, but in "Captain Scarfield" the conflict becomes internal, the central character being both a prominent, devoutly pacifist Quaker and a notably bloodthirsty pirate, as Captain Cooper a paragon of business integrity and domestic regularity in Philadelphia and as Captain Scarfield a murderous sea robber and keeper of a mulatto wife in the West Indies. Clearly influenced by Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), this short work offers a portrait of a man in whom "the separate entities of good and bad each had, in its turn, a perfect and distinct existence" (206). Indeed, Pyle posits Cooper/Scarfield as an emblem for civilized man: "Who," he asks, "within his inner consciousness, does not feel that same ferine, savage man struggling against the stern, adamantine bonds of morality and decorum? Were those bonds burst asunder, as it was with [Scarfield], might not the wild beast rush forth, as it had rushed forth in him, to rend and to tear?" (206-7). More than just a fictional embodiment of Pyle's historical, psychological, and anthropological theories of human nature, however, "Captain Scarfield" is also a classic Pylean adventure tale, complete with a dashing young hero, Lieutenant Mainwaring, who brings to an end Scarfield's depredations in the West Indies and eventually marries the pirate's wealthy young niece.

In these magazine stories Pyle explored the fictional possibilities of the popular pirate adventure genre he chose to work in, creating numerous variations on a common underlying formula and theme. In The Ruby of Kishmoor (1908; Harper's Monthly, August 1907) he demonstrates his complete command of this genre and bids farewell to it in a parody, much as he had earlier parodied the conventions of the sentimental romance in The Price of Blood. A slight and sensational tale, The Ruby of Kishmoor opens with a prologue recounting Captain Keitt's pirate theft of a great ruby, his subsequent murder, and the deaths of all but three of his original crew. This background established, the tale introduces Jonathan Rugg, a Philadelphia Quaker under whose "sedate and sober demeanor" lie hidden the most romantic aspirations for adventure and "unwonted excitement."²² On his first night in Jamaica, which Rugg finds an "extraordinary land of enchantment and unreality" (11), a mysterious veiled woman entrusts to his safekeeping a small ivory orb. First a little gentleman with one eye, then a foreigner with silver earrings, and finally a sea captain with a flattened nose try to murder Rugg on being shown this bauble, each of them being killed instead in their struggles with the astonished Quaker. The tale concludes with a horrified Rugg returning the ivory ball to the woman, who then identifies herself as the daughter of Captain Keitt and explains that she has been menaced by three treacherous pirates who had previously killed her father in order to acquire the fabulous Ruby of Kishmoor hidden in the ivory container. When she offers Rugg her ruby, her wealth, and her hand, he refuses all in alarm and hurries back to Pennsylvania to marry plain Martha Dobbs and to content himself "with such excitement as his mercantile profession and his extremely peaceful existence might afford" (73). The sale of a rope of pearls arriving mysteriously on his wedding day transforms him into one of the "leading merchants of his native town of Philadelphia" (74).

Pyle conceived of the tale as a joke, its humor emerging from the ironic contrast between Rugg's dogged Quaker earnestness and the extravagantly romantic adventures befalling him, their near-hallucinatory quality emphasized by Pyle's impressionistic portraits and vignettes in colored oils, which start out from their dark backgrounds as if suddenly illuminated by a flare. As in Pyle's other pirate stories and novels, the hero of The Ruby of Kishmoor yearns for adventure and escape, experiences it, and then returns to the security of the domestic realm. But Jonathan Rugg is anything but heroic, his feats being accomplished by accident rather than by skill or intention. The villains seem more like the Marx Brothers than bloodthirsty cutthroats, and the exotic Evaline Keitt is little more than a nineteeth-century music-hall houri. In this parody of the pirate-tale formula Pyle bids farewell to his earlier, more serious pirate works, most notably Within the Capes (with its confrontation of quiet Quaker with boisterous adventure) and The Rose of Paradise (with its focus on a magnificent stolen ruby hidden in a cocoon of yarn). A fast-paced, perfectly plotted, amusing burlesque, The Ruby of Kishmoor is an appropriate conclusion to Pyle's long fascination with the pirate adventure story.

Rejected of Men (1903)

In a 17 May 1891 letter William Dean Howells acknowledged receipt of an unfinished essay by Pyle on "immortality and infinity," commended him on the cogency of his speculative thought, and suggested that such abstruse subjects would appeal to a broader audience if they were "somehow dramatically presented" rather than abstractly dissected into "propositions and conclusions."²³ Pyle followed this advice in Rejected of Men, a philosophical novel highly praised by Howells for both content and method of presentation and featuring what Pyle himself termed his "radical opinions" concerning free will and divine providence, reason and faith, the divergent ways of God and man, and the gulf between rich and poor in the American class system. Though frequently revised and rewritten over a period of nine years, Rejected of Men does not succeed well as a novel, its abstract intellectual framework only incompletely camouflaged by a thin fictional overlay. Intended as a "realist" work in the Howellsian vein, the novel remains primarily a philosophical disquisition, its multiple "messages" assuming primacy over action, plot, and story. Even the portrayal of character and setting, the latter generally one of Pyle's strengths, remains superficial and sketchy rather than penetrating, curiously flat and two-dimensional in spite of occasional careful delineation and adroit "social realist" description, especially of the impoverished environment in which Christ and his disciples operate. Rejected of Men reveals Pyle's surprisingly radical theological speculations, partially drawn from his reading of Swedenborg, at the same time that it affirms his faith in Christianity, the novel's New Testament sequence and structure providing a traditional narrative frame for his religious unorthodoxy.

Rejected of Men delineates Christ's ministry and death as translated "from the ancient Hebrew habits of life into modern American."²⁴ Interesting for its Jamesian experiments with point of view, the novel is narrated by a late nineteenth-century New York "Pharisee" who presents his perspective on "the great events of sacred history" in order to vindicate the actions of his class in condemning Christ to death (vi). Noting that the Gospel accounts present Christ as the central figure around whom all men revolve, this narrator provides a reverse point of view, the perspective of the scribes, Pharisees, Levites, and certain Romans for whom Christ was neither dominant nor pivotal but merely a single integer in a large, complex society. This alternate perspective thrusts Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas, and the rich young man into the foreground, the novel's focal center, while Christ and his unsavory followers are transformed into dimly glimpsed and marginal figures operating in the background. In thus reversing the perspective informing the Christian Gospels, the narrator establishes the inevitability of Christ's condemnation by those scribes and Pharisees identified with the social and moral order challenged by the Messiah and his disciples.

As the narrator repeatedly avows, Christ is executed because he threatens the status quo. The reverse of Otto of the Silver Hand, which depicts a lawless and anarchic society groping toward order and legality, Rejected of Men portrays the decadence that can beset an established order incapable of change or regeneration, one which suppresses dissent and nonconformity and maintains an unjust division between the rich and the poor. In Otto and Men of Iron, in the pirate adventures as well, Pyle showed the undesirable consequences of renegade behavior and the necessity to curb "the nether man" through moral check and social restraint. In Rejected of Men, however, the social and moral order has grown so rigid as to be perpetuated for its own sake and not for the safeguarding of the rights of all. In depicting a social order ripe for revolution because contributing to the comfort and security only of the "Gilded Age" rich and powerful, the novel explores yet another aspect of the persistent dialectic in Pyle's fiction between chaos and order, license and law.

So profound is the disparity between rich and poor in the novel's version of late nineteenth-century America that the two classes cannot even speak to each other, a point made repeatedly by the narrator and by various characters in the novel, including Bishop Caiaphas, his son-in-law the rich young man Henry Gilderman, and his lawyer, Judah Inkerman, who notes that the poor "neither think nor feel" as do the rich, nor do they have "the same sort of logical or moral ballast to keep them steady" (233). While the rich buy Rembrandts, rare books, and fine horses, build fancy houses, attend posh parties, dine at club, and lose small fortunes at cards and the races, the poor labor and in their off-hours traipse about the countryside after itinerant preachers like the Baptist and Christ himself. On the evening that Christ undergoes his agony and arrest in the public park, Gilderman attends an extravagant anniversary party and later wins several thousand dollars at poker. Thus, concludes the narrator, a gulf, "not wide but as profound as infinity, separates the rich man from the poor man, and there is no earthly means of crossing it" (235). Certainly no bridge is constructed during the course of the novel. A pervading sense of fatalistic futility thus permeates the work, stemming not solely from the hopelessness of class relations but also from the apparent inability of the novel's fated characters to exercise any free will or moral choice. Part of the Pharisee narrator's exculpation of his class for Christ's murder, for example, originates in his belief that all must "fulfill the destiny that Providence has assigned": "If we were made virtuous," he contends, "we must under normal conditions be virtuous; if we were made vicious we must be vicious; and there the matter ends" (viii). This pervading fatalism seems more than a meretricious excuse invented by the narrator to escape culpability, however. The actions of Bishop Caiaphas, too, seem predetermined, as do those of Henry Gilderman, described as locked by his enormous wealth "into a shell of circumstances from which there is no escape" (63-64).

Almost as dispiriting as this sense of fatalism in the novel is the narrator's seeming pessimism concerning the ability of nearly all but the reeking, ragged, and uneducated poor to place themselves in a proper relationship with God. In his "interludes" the Pharisee twice halts the narrative progression to deliver himself of abstract metaphysical tracts, one concerning the necessity for most people to substitute a white-robed, visionary spirit for the inconvenient flesh-and-blood reality of Christ and the second concerning the universal propensity to worship a humanly created image of God rather than God himself. These tendencies stem from the frequently noted divergence between the ways of God and man, for God "does not shape His events as we would have them shaped; He shapes them exactly different" (204), making it difficult indeed for most to understand, let alone accept, God's will. As the narrator remarks concerning his initial rejection of the teachings of the uncouth Baptist, "it cannot be possible that [God] expects us, scribes and pharisees, whom He has endowed with intelligence and reason, to accept that which was so unintelligent and so unreasonable" (41). The novel's theological pessimism climaxes in the inability of Gilderman, a sensitive, honest, sincere man, to follow Christ's radical command to give up everything in exchange for eternal life. "God have mercy on us all!" the narrator prays, for in Christ's "dreadful" command "lies the secret of heaven and of earth and of all that is and of all that is to come, and yet not one of us dares to open the gates of heavenly happiness. The world seems so near and that other supreme good so very remote" (181).

Contrary to Pyle's expectations, Rejected of Men did not cause any great literary stir or controversy when, after numerous rejections, it was finally published by Harper's in 1903. Though the novel has some fine passages, most notably the eerie, dispassionate account of the raising of Lazarus, it nevertheless fails as both fiction and philosophical text. Wooden and unattractive characters, cardboard settings by and large, and a plot lacking in tension or particular interest damage the work as a novel, and its "realist" manner seems uncongenial to a writer notable for his romances. In addition, the philosophical/theological ideas, resonant with sincerity and an almost painful earnestness, do little to establish Pyle as an original thinker, though they convincingly demonstrate the difficulties of being a Christian in the modern world. Pyle himself seemed to recognize the incongruity of Rejected of Men in his oeuvre. In a letter to his publisher about the work he aptly compared himself to a light comedian who suddenly startles his audience with a serious discussion of the tragic aspects of life.²⁵Rejected of Men was a brief, dead-end departure from the lively adolescent and children's fiction on which Pyle's literary reputation mainly rests.

Notes

1. H. S. Canby, The Age of Confidence: Life in the Nineties (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934), 191, 199.

2. F. L. Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 213, 211.

3. Canby, Age of Confidence, 200.

4. Gillian Avery, Childhood's Pattern (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1975), 194, 166.

5. John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 35-36.

6. Otto of the Silver Hand (1888; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1967), 1; hereafter page references to this edition, cited in parentheses in the text.

7. Pitz, Pyle, 82, 84.

8. Quoted in Abbott, Pyle, 118.

9. Paul Zweig, The Adventurer (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 34-36.

10. Men of Iron (New York: Harper & Row, 1919), 1; hereafter page references to this edition cited in parentheses in the text.

11. Zweig, Adventurer, 91.

12. Pitz, Pyle, 87.

13. Within the Capes (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1899), 1, 257; hereafter page references to this edition cited in parentheses in the text.

14. Zweig, Adventurer, 89, 91.

15. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, 16.

16. The Rose of Paradise (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1888), 1; hereafter page references to this edition cited in parentheses in the text. Captain Charles Johnson (Daniel Defoe), A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (facsimile reprint, 1724 ed.; New York: Garland Publishing, 1972).

17. Zweig, Adventurer, 246, 227.

18. The Story of Jack Ballister's Fortunes (New York: Century Co., 1895), 365; hereafter page references to this edition cited in parentheses in the text.

19. The Buccaneers and Marooners of America (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891), 15; hereafter page references cited in the text.

20. Stolen Treasure (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907), 42; hereafter page references cited in the text.

21. Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates, comp. Merle Johnson (New York: Harper & Row, 1921; reprint, 1949). "Blueskin the Pirate" and "Captain Scarfield" originally appeared in The Northwestern Miller. Hereafter page references to the Book of Pirates cited in the text.

22. The Ruby of Kishmoor (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1908), 8-9; hereafter page references cited in the text.

23. Quoted in Abbott, Pyle, 188.

24. Rejected of Men (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903), v; hereafter page references cited in the text.

25. Abbott, Pyle, 194.

Lee Kingman (essay date 1989)

SOURCE: Kingman, Lee. "Pyle, Howard." In Twentieth-Century Children's Writers, Third Edition, edited by Tracy Chevalier, pp. 1110-111. Chicago, Ill.: St. James Press, 1989.

[In the following essay, Kingman argues that Pyle initiated a new standard for American children's book illustration and acknowledges Pyle's virtuosity as an author, calling him "a giant in American literature for children."]

Howard Pyle must be considered a giant in American literature for children. An innovative, vastly productive artist-writer-teacher, he was a modest man totally concerned with inspiring good artists and creating good books. But the term giant just might have appealed to him as a description, for his imagination was tuned in to the days of good knights and evil villains, heroes and dragons, magic stools and clever magicians, beautiful maidens and wicked queens, good boys, foolish men, and, surely among them, giants. And of course, King Arthur and Robin Hood.

In his 58 years he accomplished an amazing amount of enduring work. His importance as an artist as well as writer must be mentioned here for several reasons. First, his work spanned a period of vital change in children's books. It began in an era when moralistic stories had themes of illness, suffering, and death, and were usually illustrated by inept saccharine pictures; standards for writing and illustrating were low. It ended with his work, both words and pictures, having produced the highest standards for others to follow. The author-artist Robert Lawson, writing in Illustrators of Children's Books, 1744–1945, stated, "It is small wonder that the clean-cut, healthy, joyous work of Howard Pyle came to … children … like a fresh breeze flooding a fetid sickroom." Second, his illustration and stories intertwined and enhanced each other, growing equally from his concept of the subject undertaken, even though, to an extent rarely equalled by any other author-artist, each element is strong enough to stand alone. Third, any piece of artwork takes a great deal of time to produce. Thus to research, absorb, recreate, and retell the Robin Hood ballads and the vast lore of King Arthur was a gigantic, time-consuming task. He was a truly prodigious worker.

Although he could easily "see things in image-terms or in the continuity of words," as Henry C. Pitz describes his dual abilities, he was a deliberate craftsman. He actually experimented with various writing styles to achieve the effect of the archaic speech of Robin Hood's days and yet have it understandable to children. Reading it aloud today, now that we are even used to you taking the place of thee-and-thou in versions of the Bible, it sounds more unreal than ever to hear, "Now will I go too, for fain would I draw a string for the bright eyes of my lass, for so goodly a prize as that," or hear Pauline ask poor little Otto about his mother, "And didst thou never see her?" Such is his thoroughness in setting scene, delineating character, and sweeping all action forward in a dynamic plot—particularly in his own stories such as Otto of the Silver Hand, Men of Iron and his pirate tales—that one quickly accepts the language as another rich element of his writing skill.

Although The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883) was his first book to be published, Pepper and Salt and The Wonder Clock contained stories and fables Pyle had written and illustrated for children's magazines. Twilight Land was more influenced by Eastern folktales. While at first he borrowed and retold old tales in different guises ("The Salt of Life" is the well-known Catskin motif of universal folklore), so steeped was he in folk and fairy lore that eventually he could turn his own rich imagination out into these forms to perfection, just as Andersen did. The Garden behind the Moon, a long allegorical fantasy, is less derivative than his short stories and it contains such strong beautiful prose that it makes him a classic writer of fantasy.

With the grim sad story of medieval revenge, Otto of the Silver Hand, and that of 15th-century adventure, Men of Iron, and in his tales of Robin Hood and King Arthur, Pyle achieved new heights in literature for children: he gave them an immediate sense of their past, complete with authentic convincing details, replete with drama and pageantry, and taut with adventure.

Elizabeth Nesbitt, commenting on Pyle in A Critical History of Children's Literature, mentioned that the era in which Pyle developed his work has been called the Golden Age of children's literature and that "It is difficult to do justice to his contribution to the shining quality of that era. The magnitude and diversity of his work elude definition."

Verlyn Klinkenborg (essay date July 1994)

SOURCE: Klinkenborg, Verlyn. "Pyle and Rockwell—Totally American, Yet Not at All Alike." Smithsonian 25, no. 4 (July 1994): 88-95.

[In the following essay, Klinkenborg relates the comparative legacies of American illustrators Norman Rockwell and Howard Pyle, particularly with regards to Pyle's influence upon Rockwell's body of work.]

In 1911 Norman Rockwell was enrolled at the Art Students' League in Manhattan, studying under a teacher named George Bridgeman. Rockwell was 17. Bridgeman taught a class in academic drawing, but in some ways he was an unacademic man. "His hair was always rumpled, his clothes always mussed and untidy," Rockwell wrote nearly half a century later; he "wore suspenders and smoked big black cigars" and was fond of chalking red lines on nude models to make an anatomical point. In early November that year, Bridgeman came to class "tipsy and with tears in his eyes." Howard Pyle, he announced—the greatest American illustrator of his time—had just died in Florence, Italy, at age 58.

"We were mourners," said Rockwell of himself and his friends at the Art Students' League that winter. "After class was over, Chris, the janitor, would bring Mr. Bridgeman a beer and he'd sit and talk to a few of us…. The model would put on her clothes behind the screen and then come out and sit with us, lacing her shoes or adjusting her hat. The light would gray down until it was almost dark in the classroom. And Mr. Bridgeman would tell us about Howard Pyle…."

When Pyle had gone to New York from Wilmington, Delaware, in 1876, he too had taken classes at the Art Students' League—a life class and later a com-position class, which turned after-hours into a social club. That group had included William Chase and Edwin Austin Abbey, Pyle's only American peer as an illustrator, who died three months before Pyle, in England. But there was more for Rockwell to mourn in 1911 than the deaths of Abbey and Pyle. "The golden age of illustration was dying," he wrote.

Still a teenager, Rockwell couldn't have imagined that he would one day be as revered as Pyle had been. Now, in an exhibition entitled "Howard Pyle and Norman Rockwell: Lasting Legacies," opening this month at the Norman Rockwell Museum at Stock-bridge, Massachusetts, the paintings and drawings of these master illustrators—the giants of their respective generations—will hang side by side. The show provides an opportunity for us to reflect on the great impact their works have had on our ideas of who we are—our history, myth and popular culture. Jointly organized with the Delaware Art Museum, "Lasting Legacies" will move there later this year (November 18-February 19, 1995) after closing in Stockbridge on October 23.

In many ways, it was Pyle who made it possible for Rockwell to succeed as an illustrator in his own day. The two men never met, but Pyle had endowed the illustrator's profession with a seriousness of artistic purpose and a commitment to historical accuracy that was deeply inspiring to Rockwell. "To us," Rockwell wrote, "it was an ennobling profession. We sat in the lunchroom at the League questioning a model who had posed for Howard Pyle. How did he begin a painting? What kind of paints did he use? Did he make preliminary sketches?"

Many men and women, some of them just a few years older than Rockwell, could have answered his questions. They had studied with Pyle, a profoundly admired teacher, and they passed on his legacy to their students. But it's interesting to note that Rockwell, usually so self-effacing in his autobiography, disinherits Pyle's direct artistic descendants and proclaims himself the true heir. "Pyle's pupils lacked his sense of mission, his sincerity," he wrote in Norman Rockwell: My Adventures as an Illustrator. "When Pyle had to paint a Spanish galleon he hunted through old books until he had learned what a galleon actually looked like. N. C. Wyeth, one of Pyle's successors, painted his idea of a galleon, more romantic perhaps but lacking the authority and the research of a galleon by Pyle." When his studio in Arlington, Vermont, burned in the summer of 1943, Rockwell lamented the loss of a set of Pyle's prints and the clothing and artifacts he had acquired in his own search for authenticity.

In terms of reproduction techniques, Pyle and Rockwell belong to such different eras that it's hard to compare them without first factoring out those differences. "The manner in which an illustrator approaches his work," one scholar has written, "is largely governed by the means available to reproduce it." Most of Pyle's illustrations were done for books and for Harper's Monthly Magazine, a relatively expensive journal for an educated middle-class audience. The majority of Rockwell's most popular illustrations were done as covers for the Saturday Evening Post, a mass periodical with a vastly greater circulation than any of the magazines Pyle worked for and a vastly different readership. When Pyle began his career, the technique of reproducing an illustration had been almost unchanged since the 16th century. An artist's work was carved onto boxwood blocks by highly skilled wood engravers, and then inked, proofed, corrected, inked again and finally printed in black and white. Not long after that, Pyle's work was printed with the new halftone process, a photomechanical means of reproducing tonal values in black and white, invented in 1881. Rockwell also lived through a significant technological transition; he was asked by the Saturday Evening Post to inaugurate the shift from two-color printing to four-color printing on the cover of its February 6, 1926, issue, a shift that allowed illustrators far greater latitude in their use of color.

Rockwell created only one painting with a direct reference to Howard Pyle. Called A Family Tree, it appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post on October 24, 1959. At the foot of the family tree, galleons sail and burn, and a treasure chest lies on a deserted beach. Rockwell "put the initials H. P. on the chest as an acknowledgment of my steal of the galleons from Howard Pyle." Unlike most of his Post covers, whose lack of ambiguity is their virtue, A Family Tree can be read in two directions. Read downward, it's the wishful daydream of a modern, freckle-faced, very Rockwellian boy, the kind Rockwell said he painted a thousand times. Read upward, it's an optimistic, melting-pot history of American development, a history from which every tension—between races, between regions, between sexes, between generations—has been banished with only these faces left behind as quizzical icons.

"One of the most difficult problems in painting magazine covers," Rockwell wrote, "is thinking up ideas which a majority of the readers will understand."When Rockwell first began working for the Post, he would appear in the offices of George Lorimer, the editor, and act out his ideas—small, self-contained, instantaneous narratives, immediately accessible to literate and illiterate viewers alike. Rockwell often agonized over his ideas. While he was painting A Family Tree he kept a journal of sorts, which was published as the last chapter of My Adventures as an Illustrator when it appeared in 1960.

The journal records Rockwell's hectic schedule—along with A Family Tree he was working on several ads, the cover of the Boy Scout Handbook and a color sketch for a mural—and it also reveals his almost unappeasable insecurity. While he worked, Rockwell listened attentively to the criticisms of visitors. Among them was Erik Erikson, his psychoanalyst at the Austin Riggs Center in Stockbridge, who commented, "The pirate troubles me. Do you think you ought to start off the family with him, a cutthroat, a barbarian?" Erikson's question spurred endless soul-searching by Rockwell. Should he replace the pirate with a Pilgrim? Maybe a Puritan? "The Puritan is more reasonable," he mused; "I don't want to start the family with a vicious criminal." He rubbed out the pirate and galleons. Two days later, while shaving, he realized the Puritan was wrong, too. The next day he decided that it would be a "jolly buccaneer," and he made a drawing. Unfortunately, his business manager dropped by. Rockwell had to ask. "I don't like it," was the reply. "He doesn't look like a seafaring man at all." Returning to the pirate, Rockwell wrote in his journal, "… how can a man be so confused and still manage to make a living?" By this time Rockwell had painted more than 300 Post covers—his first appeared in 1916, his last in 1963—and yet each one seems to have been sent off in a panic, a small hurricane of "fainthearted thoughts."

To the end of his life Rockwell tried to square the sentimental character of his paintings with the harsher realities of existence. Whenever he tried to justify himself, he was likely to mention "my Dickensian view of people," for which a painting like Christmas Trio (1923) might stand as evidence. It shows three musicians in 19th-century costume framed against a circular landscape intersected by the familiar black borders of the Saturday Evening Post cover layout. Like the ships in A Family Tree, the rooftops and pinnacles behind the musicians are purely ornamental, providing only the faintest suggestion of context. Only in their costume, and in the general rosiness of their disposition, do they suggest Dickens characters. There is no room in Rockwell for the world of Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend. Yet Dickens' novels, like Howard Pyle's paintings, are distinguished above all by an insistence on the resonance between person and place, a resonance that is as often tragic or violent as it is comic.

"I Paint Life as I Would Like it to Be"

Since the 1940s, Rockwell has occupied a unique and isolated position in American art, above comparison with other artists if you're one kind of viewer, beneath comparison if you're another. "The view of life I communicate in my pictures," Rockwell wrote, "excludes the sordid and ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be." With its constantly discriminating light, his work feeds a special hunger for clarity in the viewer, an appetite of the eye. But the visual transparency of these paintings is an inducement to believe that what they depict is reality, when, in fact, each of them is a complex construction. Oddly, Rockwell has never received much credit for his imagination because no one believed he was using it.

Rockwell's pictures include his public; we are his subjects. We look on and we're caught in the gaze of Rockwell's characters, who watch us look on. But Rockwell's paintings exclude his public, too. We're not invited to imagine our way into them because they tell us so plainly and emphatically what they're about. Once we understand the joke or the sentiment, all that remains is the visual inspection of the painting's details. No matter how satisfying that can be, it has the effect of distancing the viewer from the world Rockwell set out to depict, the world as he would have liked it to be. "People like to think that Rockwell painted Middle America," says Tom Sgouros, an artist, illustrator, and professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. "The truth is, Norman Rockwell invented Middle America."

Howard Pyle was so utterly different from Rockwell that it makes you wonder about the ways artistic inspiration is smuggled across the generations. Like Rockwell, Pyle's character was thoroughly American. Like Rockwell, he was driven by his work. But there wasn't a particle of insecurity in Pyle's constitution; only an intense, almost spiritual devotion to the life of his imagination, which went unimpeded by the profusion of business and family concerns surrounding him. Thornton Oakley, one of Pyle's students, described a familiar scene from the Pyle household at their rented summer home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. "On the stairway landing I found my teacher at his easel working at a canvas for his series 'Travels of the Soul,' his young children cavorting about his knees, a model posed nearby in costume to give him some detail of texture, Mrs. Pyle sitting beside him reading aloud, for his correction, proofs from King Arthur, he making comments for her notation."

Pyle lived in Wilmington for all but four years of his life—the three years he spent establishing himself as an illustrator in New York City (1876–79) and the last year, which was spent in Italy. During his lifetime, he produced more than 3,000 illustrations, most of them set in the Middle Ages, in Colonial, Revolutionary or mid-19th-century America, or among the pirates of the Caribbean. He wrote nearly a hundred illustrated magazine articles, illustrated scores of articles by other authors and provided illustrations for well over a hundred books, including works by Woodrow Wilson, Francis Parkman, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was, besides, the author of 19 volumes of his own, among them such beloved children's books as The Wonder Clock, Otto of the Silver Hand, Pepper & Salt and The Garden behind the Moon. Pyle's retelling of The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, based on Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1775) and Joseph Ritson's collection of ballads, was published in 1883 with his own pen-and-ink illustrations and is still regarded as the classic version of that tale. All in all, the dimensions of Pyle's career were larger than he may have allowed himself to imagine. "Do you know an American magazine called Harper's Monthly?" Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo, in the early 1880s. "There are things in it which strike me dumb with admiration, including … sketches of a Quaker town in the olden days by Howard Pyle."

For a generation of illustrators, Pyle was also the pre-eminent teacher in the United States. Beginning in 1894, he taught at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and Industry in Philadelphia. For five important, idyllic summers at the turn of the century, he conducted a summer class at Chadds Ford, unpaid. The distinction between art and illustration—something that worried Rockwell all his life—was essentially meaningless to Pyle. "It seems to me," Pyle wrote to W. M. R. French, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, "that the great art of the world is constructed upon a line almost identical with that of book and magazine illustration…. My objective … in teaching my pupils is that they should be fitted for any kind of art." In 1925 N. C. Wyeth wrote, "I can see him now, the soft overhead light faintly modeling his large, generous features, his massive forehead and deep-set eyes, the breadth between the eyes and the prominent cheek bones. Breaking the tense silence, he would talk in a soft, hushed voice, of art, its relation to life, his aspirations, his aspirations for us." Pyle's voice was not always so hushed. "Either you are color-blind, or else you are a genius," he is reported to have said to Thornton Oakley. He also had an enthusiasm that his students never forgot. "Look on this," he told them. "Study it, absorb it. Never again will it be the same. If you see it tomorrow the light will be different and you will be different. This moment is unique."

Pyle looked like a banker—in one of his few self-portraits he wears a heavy dark suit and rather stern pincenez glasses—but the exterior merely camouflaged his imaginative exuberance. In his pen-and-ink illustrations you can feel his love of the line and the weight of ink, whether the subject is Robin Hood standing over a vanquished Guy of Gisbourne, or a swan bearing a prince on its back in The Wonder Clock. These illustrations recall Durer and Holbein, but they also suggest some of Pyle's near-contemporaries—Frederick Sandys, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Arthur Boyd Houghton. Sometimes Pyle used an almost medieval organization of space, compressing the landscape and folding it into the surface plane. But even in pen and ink, where he sometimes veered close to pure decoration, Pyle was the great enemy of abstraction. The relation between the human figures and the world in which they occur is always a particular one in his drawings.

Pyle began his historical paintings from the same premise as Rockwell did: he believed in the sufficiency of the painting itself. "It shall not require any text to explain it," he wrote in 1897 to Henry Cabot Lodge, whose Story of the Revolution he was illustrating, "but should explain itself and all the circumstances belonging to it." Yet Pyle's paintings create an entirely different kind of pictorial drama from Rockwell's, partly because they're based on a different sense of historical accuracy. In The Battle of Bunker Hill (1898), done for Lodge's book, Pyle has carefully researched the British military costumes, the topography, even the weather. But he has also asked himself from what perspective accuracy is meaningful. In Pyle's paintings, history means a sweep of time against a landscape. He seizes a moment in the Battle of Bunker Hill, but he does not still the battle. Instead, he incorporates the viewer's perspective, making us feel as though we are walking downhill toward the British flank, calf-deep in early summer grass. Pyle's paintings include us without disrupting the action: no one detects our presence, if you will. "This moment is unique," Pyle said, and the viewer can't help but notice the way his subjects are absorbed in the moment.

When he was profiled by Rufus Jarman in the New Yorker in 1945, Norman Rockwell said, "If I had my choice between an original Rembrandt and a good Howard Pyle, I would take Pyle every time." There is more than a little of the illustrator's defensiveness in that quotation. But it's also a reminder that when Pyle was painting, the chasm between fine art and illustration was not as wide as it became in Rockwell's day. It's always a complex balancing act, trying to decide how much the character of a painter's work is determined by the circumstances in which he painted.

When Rockwell was at his peak, the cover of the Saturday Evening Post was America's waiting room, filled with his contemporaries, for whom history was the present. When Pyle was at his peak, his eye looked almost exclusively to the past, to a place where his passionate imagination was assisted by his love of historical research. "I have lived so long in our American past," Pyle once wrote, "that it is like a certain part of my life. My imagination dwells in it and at times when I sit in my studio at work I forget the present and see the characters and things of these old days moving about me."

TITLE COMMENTARY

THE MERRY ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD OF GREAT RENOWN IN NOTTINGHAMSHIRE (1883)

Jill P. May (essay date winter 1986–1987)

SOURCE: May, Jill P. "The Hero's Woods: Pyle's Robin Hood and the Female Reader." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 11, no. 4 (winter 1986–1987): 197-200.

[In the following essay, May characterizes The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood as a story of jovial brotherhood—one that appeals equally to boys and girls—and praises the absence of "sex roles" in Pyle's text.]

Legend tells me that, when Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his Treasure Island, he honored his stepson's request that he leave out all women, in order to create a real pirate story. That does not set well with me: a woman, I was once a girl who, like Stevenson's stepson, also sought adventure in drama, in going to another place. But the children's literature of my youth showed me that the places girls usually get to go are not so very far from the stove or the nursery, while boys get to be shipwrecked, to live as bandits in the forest, or to float down the river with a faithful friend.

I spent my childhood dreaming of forests. I was sure that the woods of my Wisconsin home were perfect for my dreams of Pocahontas; I pretended I was a swamp girl abandoned and left on my own initiative as I explored our swampy marshland. But what literature supported my dreams? Where were the classical girls' stories with heroines living alone in a pastoral world? I grew up before Scott O'Dell started writing, and Wendy of Peter Pan was no one I wanted to be. I soon found that females who moved into exciting pastoral places never appeared in my books, that I had to be satisfied with Jo in Little Women as my ideal of a spirited heroine leaving home.

Consequently, my adventurous blood and my appreciation for the glories of the forest drew me into Howard Pyle's kingdom of Robin Hood, a bandit of great renown who not only ruled his forest, but who made life as an outlaw seem real, who knew how to find his forest dwelling and who understood the pleasures of a pastoral landscape. The fact that Maid Marian was simply mentioned as Robin's favorite girl whom he dreamed about before becoming an outlaw did not bother me. As a young adventurer used to playing with boys, I could make Robin's world a part of mine, much as Howard Pyle had done.

As a youth Pyle had been introduced to the Robin Hood materials collected by Ritson. As a fledgling artist looking for material, he wrote his mother that he wanted to write stories of Robin Hood for St. Nicholas Magazine, because "Children are apt to know of Robin Hood without any clear ideas upon his particular adventures" (Abbott 31). Seven years later, his The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood was published in book form. Concerning Pyle's feat of pulling together his earlier Robin Hood drawings originally published with the serialized stories, Estelle Jussim comments, "Strictly speaking, since the illustrations for Robin Hood were designed for periodical publication first, can one say that Pyle was truly illustrating a book? Perhaps not in the modern sense, although … he did a magnificent job…."

Indeed, it hardly seems possible that Pyle could have lost sight of his forest, of his "merry men," or of his overall mood when writing the various Robin Hood stories. The woods are too firmly established, the adventures too formulated to be mere accident. How did Pyle establish a woods, found only by Robin and his fellows, that lasted in the hearts of real boys and at least in one case, real girls, for years to come?

The reader must begin with Pyle's "Preface" in order to understand that this American author was both systematically developing a very real setting and conjuring a mystical woods. Pyle wrote:

Here you will find a hundred dull, sober, jogging places, all tricked out with flowers and what not, till no one would know them in their fanciful dress … wherein no chill mists press upon our spirits, and no rain falls but what rolls off our backs … where flowers bloom forever and birds are always singing … and ale and beer and wine (such as muddle no wits) flow like water in a brook.

                                        (viii)

Already Pyle has told the reader what it is that makes his woods a ritualistic place which glorifies the pastoral life: Pyle's woods will be full of tricks performed by nature and by Robin's band, it will have perfect weather, and it will resound with feasting. By the end of the first half of The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Pyle has established his forest. It is this part of the book which Pyle used to set the mood and action. And it is this part which inspires boys to play at being Robin Hood.

Robin Hood is a strong male leader in this book. He is not bothered with women (though he promises not to harm them), and he is not subject to anyone else's dictates (though he claims loyalty to the king). Yet, his role as leader does not evolve from his ability to win fights. Prior to Robin's adventure out of the forest to visit London, he has been involved in four battle scenes with another man, and in each our hero loses. What makes Robin a leader is his "good sweet nature" and his ability to create a world so serene that neither the weather nor the men under his rule sour into rage or battle. All the fighting happens outside of Robin's realm.

Pyle describes Robin's fights as "merry" adventures or "lusty" encounters. He begins by describing the weather and the greenwood forest, the birds singing in the trees, the peacefulness of Robin and his men in their glen. He allows Robin to venture out on his own, always reminding the reader that Robin is carrying his trusty horn just in case he can't handle his problems by himself. Once Robin sees and talks to his opponent, he challenges him to hand-to-hand combat—a not very wise decision, since he has never won in the past—and a fight ensues. Pyle tells the reader each time that Robin fought well, and then he has Robin use his trusty horn to call reinforcements. Once Robin is saved, he commends his opponent, identifies himself, and asks his adversary to join his forces. Little John demands that Robin further prove himself in a shooting match before he joins forces, but all the others ask for instant acceptance into the clan. Once the offer to join is accepted, the merry men return to the glen and feast in celebration. These repeated actions create a routine for the band of robbers, one that is adventurous but predictable and one that is episodic.

Pyle used more than a pattern of episodes in his stories; he ritualistically employed words in the woodland scenes to establish the romantic setting as both real and symbolic. In the scenes depicting Robin's cudgel battles, for example, Pyle used the words "lusty," "tough," "stout" to describe all the opponents except Robin's cousin Will Scarlet. In the episodes of the first three defeats Pyle described Robin and his men as full of mirth and laughter. All the victorious fighters except Little John tell Robin that they have heard of his adventures. The Tinker joins Robin because he professes to love "a merry life," and he continues, "and I love thee, good master, though thou didst thwack my ribs and cheat me into the bargain" (22). Young Will Scarlet says he has been seeking Robin Hood so that he might join his band, and adds, "I make my vow, had I known who thou wert, I would never have dared to lift hand against thee this day. I trust I did thee no harm" (95). When Friar Tuck finds out that it is Robin Hood he has defeated, he apologizes, saying, "I ha'ft heard thy name both sung and spoken of, but I never thought to meet thee in battle. I crave thy forgiveness, and do wonder not that I found so stout a man against me" (141). All, then, profess to be familiar with the early folk ballads which are the storehouse of Robin's activities.

On the practical side, Pyle has shown Robin's band as a united group of "lusty" fellows. In the case of the four battles, each of the victors is surrounded by Robin's men, so inevitably they must join the band if they hope to live. Probably the Tinker's comment that Robin is a "slyer man than I" (22) is more honest. Yet it is a quick comment, never played upon in later encounters. The word "sly" is not one which Pyle uses when describing this band of robbers. Repeatedly he describes them as "merry," "sweet," "gay" and "stout" fellows, implying that they are fun-loving, fair playing, honest men. Even the robbing scenes are described as fair, with Robin playing host at "robbing feasts."

One such scene is described as so pleasant that the "guests" forgot their troubles and "laughed aloud again and again" (165). Indeed, those who rob in Sherwood forest do it in a ritualistic fashion. They only entertain those wealthy enough to have many riches to forfeit, and they always follow feasting with business matters. They never blindfold those they rob, yet their glen cannot be found by men of law. Only the truly baptized members of Robin's band can wander freely about the woods to return home at the end of their journey.

In fact, Pyle used language and scene to establish Robin Hood as the shepherd of his flock, the savior of the innocent who, once tested and found worthy, are feasted and welcomed into a life free of stress. He carefully created a pastoral scene which supports the antics of a male clan that closely resembles the best of comradeship, of the macho sense of fair play, trickery, and verbal and physical confrontation. Much like children of nature, Robin and his band live in harmony, forced only to while their idle hours away or to seek out adventure. If threatened, these men retreat into the forest. They are symbols of both pastoral freedom and fair play. J. W. Walker calls Robin Hood "the English ideal of the Middle Ages at its best and sweetest," and explains that Robin displayed the "simple and manly courtesy" typical of the English countryman who remains "sportsman to the backbone, gentle to all, servile to none" (xi).

Pyle's continual use of "merry" when describing the woods and the outlaws implies more than laughter. It implies a natural system kept in check by a code of honor and good weather. Furthermore, the scenes of Robin's adventures in the woods occur most often in May or early autumn; they never occur in winter. Robin's men are never seen as hungry, cold thieves. There is no real social bite to their thieving. These merry men are fun-loving boys who somehow keep the larder stocked. And, though Robin Hood talks of adventuring to "find sport," there are not many scenes of robbing feasts. But that does not mean that there is not a good deal of eating to be done. Like all growing boys who play hard, Robin loves to eat. Thus, while traveling on the outskirts of his forest, Robin says, "I would that I had somewhat to eat. Methinks a good loaf of white bread, with a piece of snow-white cheese, washed down with a draught of humming ale, were a feast for a king" (98). This is a meal of peasant fare. The feasts in the glen sport much more hearty meals. Usually those outlaws not involved in Robin's venture have been hunting and have returned "with a brace of fat does" which are roasted over an open fire. Food and drink give the woods a congenial tone of partying and frolic. For dessert, Robin and his men turn to storytelling and ballad singing. Thus, when the bread, cheese and ale have been consumed Robin opens up the ritualistic entreaty for song, and is answered with a polite acceptance which contains its own entreaty for the merriment to continue. Pyle writes:

"Now," quoth Robin, "I do feel myself another man, and would fain enjoy something pleasant before going farther upon our journey. I do bethink me, Will, that thou didst use to have a pretty voice, and one that tuned sweetly upon a song. Prythee, give us one ere we journey farther."

"Truly, I do not mind turning a tune," answered Will Scarlet; "but I would not sing alone."

"Nay others will follow. Strike up, lad," quoth Robin.

"In that case, 't is well," said Will Scarlet.

                                                    (99)

When Robin is lazing about on a bright day with his followers in the glen under the greenwood tree, storytelling abounds, especially from Will Scathelock, who is "as full of tales and legends as an egg is of meat" (115). The men are described as "being carried away by the tale of knightly daring and noble sacrifice" (116). Fighting, singing and eating seem to be the major occupations of Robin and his men. The woods have weather that holds "the freshness of the dawn … and the song of the small birds" (128), causing Robin to seek adventure. Almost all of his adventures bring new recruits who are able singers and heavy eaters.

When Robin first sees Friar Tuck seated "with his broad back against the rugged trunk of the willow tree … half hidden by the soft ferns around him" he is eating "a great pasty compounded of juicy meats of divers kinds made savory with tender young onions, both meat and onions being mingled with a good rich gravy," and he is washing it down with "a great bottle of Malmsley." The good friar, once he has finished eating, talks himself into singing in the ritualistic manner so often used by Robin in earlier scenes. Watching the scene, Robin thinks that "this is the merriest feast, the merriest wight, the merriest place, and the merriest sight in all merry England" (130-131). Pyle's repeated reference to scenes as "merry" creates an atmosphere of play which supports his romantic interpretation of Sherwood forest.

Discussing the elements found in an all male romanticized scene of fair play and perpetual youth, Northrop Frye says:

In literature this phase presents a pastoral and Arcadian world, generally a pleasant wooded landscape, full of glades, shaded valleys, murmuring brooks, the moon, and other images closely linked with the female or maternal aspect of sexual imagery … It is often a world of magic or desirable law, and it tends to center on a youthful hero still overshadowed by parents, surrounded by youthful companions … The archetype of erotic innocence is [displayed in] … the love of two boys for each other.

                                                   (200)

Robin's own followers constantly express love for him, and Robin in turn leads them into a fantasy world of youth and freedom where there are no adult concerns. Yet, they are overshadowed by knowing that they do not wish to offend their royal "father," the real ruler of those forests where they play.

This, then, could be the forest of my childhood dreams. It is a romantic place where nature is gentle and supportive. If the forest is symbolic of women, and of gentler sex, then the image Pyle provides of it is a positive one. Certainly Robin Hood could not have lived without his murmuring brooks, shaded glades, and moonlit parties.

But while it might be the forest, which makes the adventure possible, as a child I certainly did not wish to be identified with a forest. My nurturing strain was not so strong that I preferred to be Mother Earth. Rather, I wanted to wander with the band of young male rascals who were allowed to playfully hit each other, to climb trees and shoot at deer, to plan parties and to laze around in the shade singing songs and telling stories.

I do not contend that Pyle would have welcomed me into his forest. His sympathies, I am afraid, were closer to Frye's interpretation of the forest scene. His own lifestyle supported a growing macho clan, much like the one depicted in The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. Pyle established an art school in Wilmington. The great master did not want monetary rewards for his teachings, but he did ask for spiritual support from his followers. Almost all of Pyle's art students were male, and almost all wrote glowing interpretations of the Wilmington experience. One student, John Vandercook, wrote:

Many jolly evenings did we spend before his crackling log fires, eating nuts, telling stories or, best of all listening to his reminiscences or stories…. How can I tell in words the life of the thirty or more who lived in these historic, picturesque, rolling hills … I loved it. And here the teacher kept his class intact for five glorious summers. Who of us does not count those as golden days?

                                                    (17)

Yet, I do not think that Pyle's world will invite boys alone. I refuse to believe that all the real adventurers into the Arcadian woods need be boys. Rather, my own childhood experience tells me that one can see the adventurers as asexual, as those typical early adolescents not yet interested in erotica.

What might I have seen about Pyle's woods as a child that enthralled me enough to pique my return as an adult? Why would Robin Hood appeal to me more than the heroines found in J. M. Barrie's woods?

In Pyle there are no sex roles to suffer. Pyle's cook is asked to join the band after he has proven himself in battle with Little John. No real mention of his cooking skills is made. Instead Little John proclaims, "thou art the very best swordsman that ever mine eyes beheld…. What sayst thou, jolly Cook, wilt thou go with me to Sherwood Forest and join with Robin Hood's band? Thou shalt live a merry life within the woodlands, and seven score good companions shalt thou have, one of whom is mine own self" (73). The true balladeer is the only person who enters Robin's glade without a fight. And he is also the only one to marry. Yet, he is accepted into the band. Robin says, "Truly I do feel my heart go out toward thee with great love," and Allan a Dale answers Robin's emotions with a kiss on the hand. Still, it would never have occurred to me as a youth that this was a display of erotic innocence. Youngsters of both sexes are prone to throwing their arms about each other's shoulders and striding down the road as companions in adventure, and with no concern that they might be thought of as anything other than friends and comrades.

Such a hero as Robin is much closer to my heart than either of Barrie's two female heroines in Peter Pan. A child dreaming romantically of Pocahontas and the uncivilized U.S. eastern woods, I had no time for Barrie's description of Tiger Lily as a "lovely creature" or his use of broken English as an interpretation of "Indian talk." A child who dreamed of high adventure in the swamps, I could not respond to Wendy's games of playing mother at tea parties or her constant cooking, darning, cleaning, and harping. It was hard enough to take Jo's constant self-effacing outbreaks in Little Women, let alone remember that the farthest place she ever went to was New York City, a place easily located on any globe. Pyle's elusive romantic woods full of adventure without fear of growing up and facing adult responsibility were much more appealing.

And so, though not a boy at all, I chose to travel into the greenwood that Pyle established, to watch the birds sing, see the people pass on their way to the market, watch Robin's band save their leader in yet another fight, and finally sit in the dark after a busy day in Sherwood Forest, watching "crackling fires in the woodlands" with everyone enjoying "a jolly feast in welcome to the new members of the band," listening to "songs and jesting and laughter that echoed through the deeper and more silent nooks of the forest" (111) until I was too tired from the fresh air and adventure to stay awake one more moment. Then, just like all the rest, I would seek my couch and fall asleep. Is it any wonder that this hero's woods can beckon a girl as easily as a boy?

References

Abbott, Charles D. Howard Pyle: A Chronicle. New York: Harper, 1925.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957.

Jussim, Estelle. Visual Communication and the Graphic Artist: Photographic Technologies in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Bowker, 1974.

Pyle, Howard. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire. New York: Dover, 1968.

Walker, J. W. The True History of Robin Hood. Yorkshire: E. P. Publishing, 1973.

Taimi M. Ranta (essay date 1987)

SOURCE: Ranta, Taimi M. "Howard Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood: The Quintessential Children's Story." In Touchstones: Reflections on Children's Literature, Volume Two: Fairy Tales, Fables, Myths, Legends, and Poetry, edited by Perry Nodelman, pp. 213-20. West Lafayette, Ind.: ChLA Publishers, 1987.

[In the following essay, Ranta contends that Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood represents many of the "quintessential" ideals of superior children's literature, asserting that the volume "embodies all of the significant ingredients of a successful story, regardless of a reader's age."]

If Bennett A. Brockman correctly defines children's literature as "imaginative literature marketed to children and designed for their amusement as well as their edification," then The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood stands at the apex of children's literature; indeed, the author-illustrator Robert Lawson once called it "the most perfect of children's books." It embodies all of the significant ingredients of a successful story, regardless of a reader's age. The language befitting the characters of twelfth-century England, the pastoral setting, and the lyrical tone all elicit the involvement of a reader or listener. The theme of good triumphing over evil helps the story fuse into a memorable work of fiction. Moreover, Pyle's picturesque, detailed illustrations add special texture and fabric to the story; Selma Lane writes, "There are lovers of fine books who feel Pyle's Robin Hood represents the highwater mark of American bookmaking."

The folk hero Robin Hood has been celebrated in popular tales and ballads as far back as the Middle Ages. From this reservoir of unrelated, often conflicting ballads, Pyle, in his own words, "snipped, clipped and tied together again in a score of knots" stories in a loose episodic sequence which nevertheless forms an artistic whole. The book has ten parts, each with two or three chapters containing numerous single episodes of Robin Hood's indefatigable courage, unmatched skill at archery, and daring deeds in his quest for justice for the poor. They depict Robin Hood, the unifying element, progressing merrily through life from the time he becomes an outlaw in the Prologue until his death in the Epilogue. While the order of most of the episodes in the cycle could be shifted without disturbing the sense of wholeness, there is some progression because additional characters are added as the story unfolds who then are involved in later episodes. Also, some sense of chronology is achieved by the succession of kings: Henry II, Richard I, and John. The underlying theme of the cycle is the glaring gap between legal and social justice which Robin Hood personally accepts as his life's challenge.

Born in 1853, Howard Pyle had his first success at the age of twenty-three, when Scribner's Monthlybought an illustrated story about the annual wild pony roundup on the island of Chincoteague. That same year, 1876, Pyle moved to New York City and took a job with Harper's, one of the great magazines of the day. He worked as their visual idea man, his rough sketches being developed by more experienced staff members. But Pyle was dissatisfied with this work, so he spent several weeks working on a melodramatic sketch, "Wreck in the Offing," which publisher Henry Harper reproduced as a double page showpiece in the magazine. As a result, Pyle soon became the most popular and sought-after magazine illustrator in America.

Following this artistic and commercial success, Pyle left New York and returned to his home in Wilmington, Delaware, where he founded the Brandywine School of Illustrators. His school assisted the development of some of America's most renowned illustrators and painters, including N. C. Wyeth, Violet Oakley, Jessie Willcox Smith, Maxfield Parrish, and Frank Schoonover. Pyle, meanwhile, devoted his free time to working on his epic masterpiece, the retelling and illustrating of The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood.

Although Pyle also completed the text and illustrations for such widely known books as The Wonder Clock, The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, and Otto of the Silver Hand, his work on The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood is his main gift to American Literature. Indeed, his Robin Hood is one of the all-time quixotic heroes, at once Sir Lancelot, Cyrano de Bergerac, Don Quixote, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer—a Medieval English hero with surprising resemblances to the romantic outlaws of legendary America.

The opening sentences of the prologue to The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood lyrically sets the stage for this hero:

In merry England in the times of old, when good King Henry the Second ruled the land, there lived within the green glades Sherwood Forest, near Nottingham Town, a famous outlaw whose name was Robin Hood. No archer ever lived that could speed a gray goose shaft with such skill and cunning as his nor were there ever such yeomen as the seven-score merry men that roamed with him through the greenwood shades. Right merrily they dwelt within the depths of Sherwood Forest, suffering neither care nor want.

                                       (1)

It is Robin Hood's skill as an archer that first gets him into trouble with King Henry, and begins the action. At the age of eighteen, Robin unwittingly kills one of the King's deer, reason enough to cause him trouble. But when he kills one of the King's lackies in the dispute that follows, not only does it make him an outlaw, it fills his heart with despair:

Robin Hood ran through the greenwood. Gone was all the joy and brightness from everything, for his heart was sick within him, and it was borne in upon his soul that he had slain a man … (but) even in his trouble, he remembered the old saw that, "What is done is done; and the egg cracked cannot be cured.

                                          (4)

The Sheriff of Nottingham pledges to bring Robin to justice for this dastardly deed done against the King and against the existing order of things—and also, against himself, for the man Robin slew was a relative of the Sheriff. Robin is mortified by his own deed.

And so he came to dwell in the greenwood that was to be his home for many a year to come, never again to see the happy days with the lads and lasses of sweet Locksley Town; for he was outlawed, not only because he had killed a man, but also because he had poached upon the King's deer, and two hundred pounds were set upon his head, as a reward for whoever would bring him to the court of the King.

                                          (4)

Many outcasts from the King's favor gather around Robin and choose him as their leader. They live by a code that deems they help poor people treated unjustly because of the exorbitant taxes, rents and fines levied by the King. In reprisal, Robin levies a toll upon any abbot, knight, or esquire who travels through Sherwood Forest.

In most children's books, there are one or two characters who stand out as memorable; in The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, there are several imposing characters: "… Robin Hood lay hidden in Sherwood Forest for a year, and in that time there gathered around him many others like himself, cast out from other folk for this cause and for that … all, for one cause or another, had come to Sherwood to escape wrong and oppression" (4). Among this "legion of damned" synonymous with Robin Hood in the annals of classic literature: Little John, Will Stutely, Will Scarlet, Arthur a Bland, Allan a Dale, and Friar Tuck. Each is distinctly drawn—what E. M. Forster called "round characters" as opposed to "flat characters." Their exploits make up the body of the story, in connecting episodes that tell of their merry outrages against the King, the Sheriff of Nottingham, and the existing social order.

Pyle's vigorous illustrations etch the main participants and events in the story into a reader's mind. These illustrations are detailed black and white pen and ink drawings, including many animated full-page plates with decorative borders that reflect Pyle's keen interest in nature, many delightful vignettes and head-and tail-pieces, and many illuminated initial letters. Each illustration enhances character and action, much like a wordpicture. The ones of the merry Friar carrying Robin across the water on his back and of Robin on the log bridge looking down at the tall stranger struggling in the water up to his neck among the lily pads reflect the good humor that permeates the stories. Another illustration renders Robin as a Sir Lancelot-like warrior, standing next to a tree with his archery accoutrements strapped to his svelte body. It is a strong yet poetic figure, one which admirably expresses the romance of a warrior steadfast in his resolve to do battle against the forces of evil.

The language that makes up the story is in perfect harmony with the pictures, and often makes pictures itself:

The day was bright and jocund, and the morning dew still lay upon the grass. Under the greenwood tree sat Robin Hood; on one side was Will Scarlet, lying at full length upon his back, gazing into the clear sky, with hands clasped behind his head; upon the other side sat Little John, fashioning a cudgel out of stout crab-tree limb.

                                           (115)

This passage offers a vivid word-picture of this merry band of men relaxing in the idyllic setting of Sherwood Forest on a sultry day, a sort of "laid back" period of peace and restoration before striding forth once again to do battle against the foes who are opposed to better life for all of the people in the King's domain.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then parody may be the sincerest revelation of the importance of a work of fiction. Even before Pyle adapted them, stories of Robin Hood had been popular enough to parody. Mark Twain, for instance, showed how the fabled adventures of Robin Hood were grist for the individual drives of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn against the constrictures and hypocrisy of small town midwestern life. Although Tom and Huck are equipped with rapscallion qualities, they also manifest some of the positive values Robin Hood represents when they confront oppression. In Chapter Eight of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain writes of Tom roaming through a glen and having illusions of Robin Hood, a scene of childhood fantasy that expresses the need of young people to escape from the literal world of adults:

He (Tom) said cautiously—to an imaginary company: "Hold, my merry men! Keep hid till I blow."

Now appeared Joe Harper, as airily clad and elaborately armed as Tom. Tom called: "Hold! Who comes here into Sherwood Forest without my pass?"

"Guy of Guisborne wants no man's pass. Who art thou that—that—"

"Dares to hold such language," said Tom, prompting—for they talked "by the book," from memory …

As Twain wrote, Tom and his merry band of young friends "would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than the President of the United States forever." High praise indeed by one of America's greatest writers for the ever-appealing Robin Hood material that Pyle would recreate a few years later.

If, as Tom Sawyer seems to do, one considers Robin Hood's exploits as a drive against social and political evil, then it is easy to see connections between the Robin Hood legend and the infamous outlaws who played an intricate part in the settling of the American West. Although most outlaws were involved in their lawless deeds for personal gain, there was a quixotic aura about the actions of some of these legendary personas. History and folklore tell us that some outlaws sensed a calling to aid people who were being coerced by powerful political elements. History tells us that Jesse James and "Billy the Kid" were in opposition to those who would pervert justice for their own personal gain, just as Robin Hood, in the twelfth century, was opposed to King Henry the Second and his repressive reign. In the case of Jesse James, and his brother Frank James, there is historical evidence that they returned to Missouri from the Civil War and discovered their home state overrun by predators of all sorts: carpetbaggers, greedy landowners, and Unionists. Much of this is conjecture, but it is worth considering when discussing the significance of the Robin Hood legend in the American consciousness—a significance implied in Twain's work and stated forcefully by Pyle.

Like all quixotic heroes in literature, Pyle's Robin Hood seems confronted by almost insurmountable forces in his drive for truth and justice. Although the King is the power behind those human forces, the personification of evil for Robin Hood is manifested in the person of Guy of Gisbourne. Robin had heard of Guy of Guisbourne and all his infamous deeds; when he actually meets him in Sherwood Forest, all of the tribulations that have beset Robin seem present in this man:

… he pushed the cowl back from his head and showed a knit brow, a hooked nose, and a pair of fierce, restless, black eyes, which altogether made Robin think of a hawk as he looked on his face. But beside this there was something about the lines on the stranger's face, and his thin cruel mouth, and the hard glare of his eyes, that made one's flesh creep to look upon.

                                           (257)

Following this stark characterization is a fight in which Robin Hood slays Guy of Gisbourne. Afterwards Robin becomes an ally to King Richard of the Lion's Heart. A favorite of the King, Robin Hood rises in rank to become chief of the yeomen, eventually regaining his rightful heritage as the Earl of Huntingdon. As in many movies and TV shows that express key elements of the American consciousness, one good man and his friends can eventually win out over corrupt, powerful forces.

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood is still significant reading for children. The prose is such that it would interest even young readers who may not be accustomed to such a florid style; and the simplicity, gaiety, and morality of the story make this an incomparable book for teachers who wish to introduce their students to a classic milestone of children's literature. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood is tasty enough to be palatable in and of itself but also complex enough to be a steppingstone to many other great books in world literature.

Nevertheless, teachers may be bewildered by the number of collections of Robin Hood stories that are available, even editions of the Pyle version. A recent Children's Catalog (1981) lists both Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire and his Some Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire, which was adapted by Pyle himself from his longer work; it contains only twelve of the original twenty-two stories, and some of these Pyle shortened or condensed for easier reading, without losing the spirit of his masterpiece of epic retelling. Nevertheless, the Dover edition of The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood is the best choice, for it is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the work originally published by Charles Scribner's in 1883. It includes Pyle's delightful borders for large full-page plates, his pleasing vignettes, and his decorative initial letters, all of which are such an integral part of the total illustration, and all of which were removed in the mutilated and still available 1946 edition. In the Brandywine Edition that Scribner's Sons issued in 1983 to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Pyle's work is intruded upon by additional illustrations by former Pyle pupils. Many school versions are cheap substitutions that cheat the students out of a true experience of Pyle's work.

Children should become aware of the living, changing nature of language instead of thinking of it as a static entity; and teachers should use carefully selected pieces of choice literature to develop awareness of these changes. In my own teaching, Pyle's version of the Robin Hood stories has been a key example of such changes, specifically for the Middle English flavoring that Pyle sought to capture.

Yet students today are attuned to the greater dependence of our English upon word order for meaning than was the language of Robin Hood's day. So, Pyle's text may sound somewhat foreign to modern ears and be slower to read than recently published adventure fiction. But since the sometimes archaic language is part of the book's charm and authenticity, it lends itself to reading aloud, at least in part, by the teacher and by better readers in a fifth or sixth grade class. Many of the children will know Robin Hood as a hero, but usually only through screen renditions, lesser versions, or hearsay. Expressive oral reading will convey the spirit of the Pyle version and recreate some of the flavor of the original oral tradition from which the stories stem. I often follow my own presentation of Pyle's version to upper elementary or middle school children, and also to college students in children's literature classes, with a short presentation of ballads, first some that Pyle used as source material and then other folk and literary ballads, including some modern ones.

I often hear the lament, "Where have all our heroes gone?" Robin Hood is the very definition of the hero for children. He embodies the basic characteristics of the epic hero, those of courage, justice, and control. A book recommended for teaching should always say something important to students at that phase of their lives, and not be assigned merely to prepare them for some future goal in literary experience. Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood does both. It in-volves the students in the exploits of an ageless hero of the people and leads them into the study of the ageless heroes like King Arthur, Beowulf, and Odysseus.

In summary, the study of The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood provides children with (1) the pleasure of reading a rollicking good adventure story, (2) an introduction to one of the great traditional folk cycles in English literature, (3) an opportunity to weigh values of courage, justice, honor, and loyalty without didactic overtones, (4) some awareness of how their mother tongue has evolved over the centuries, and (5) a natural steppingstone to other great literary experiences.

Writing some years ago in A Critical History of Children's Literature, Ruth Hill Viguers said, "Many fine books that deserve to be read generation after generation may be lost in the confusion of pendantry, technology, and good intentions that confounds the mid-century." They plague us even more in the late twentieth century. This must not happen to Pyle's Robin Hood. Children should be encouraged to follow the Piper when Pyle himself in his preface says, "And now I lift the curtain that hangs between here and No-man's-land. Will you come with me, sweet Reader? I thank you. Give me your hand."

In his introduction to the first edition of that same text on the history of children's literature, Henry Steele Commager quotes the great author-artist Howard Pyle himself: "My ambition in days gone by was to write a really notable adult book, but now I am glad that I have made literary friends of the children rather than the older folk. In one's mature years one forgets the books one reads but the stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown into the rubbish-heap of things that are outgrown and outlived." The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood does leave an indelible impression, Mr. Pyle.

References

Abbot, Charles D. Howard Pyle: A Chronicle (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1925).

Brockman, Bennett A. "Robin Hood and the Invention of Children's Literature," Children's Literature 10 (1982): 1-17.

Cech, John. "Pyle's Robin Hood: Still Merry After All These Years," Children's Literature Association Quarterly 8 (Summer 1983): 11-14, 34.

Lanes, Selma. "The Brandywine Legacy," Portfolio (May/June 1981): 70-77.

Lawson, Robert. "Howard Pyle and His Times," Illustrations of Children's Books. Compiled by Bertha E. Mahoney and others. Boston: Horn Book, 1947.

Meigs, Cornelia, Anne Eaton, Elizabeth Nesbitt, and Ruth Hill Viguers. A Critical History of Children's Literature. Rev. Ed. New York: Macmillan, 1969.

Pyle, Howard. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire. New York: Dover Publications, 1968.

―――――――. Some Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1954.

Steckmesser, Kent L. "Robin Hood and the American Outlaw: A Note on History and Folklore." Journal of American Folklore (April/June 1966): 348-355.

Julie Nelson Couch (essay date May 1999)

SOURCE: Couch, Julie Nelson. "Childe Hood: The Infantilization of Medieval Legend." In Parentheses: Papers in Medieval Studies 1 (May 1999): 128-44.

[In the following essay, Couch utilizes Pyle's text in The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood to act as an example of the infantilization of characters featured in stories for children set in Medieval periods.]

In Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw, Stephen Knight offers a prime pattern for teaching Robin Hood. Knight lays out a detailed history and scrutinizes the generic, ideological and political dimensions of Robin Hood representations. I would like to share yet another pattern for bringing Robin Hood to the literature classroom. What I will attempt briefly here is to situate the Robin Hood legend within a particular historical construction of the medieval past, drawing on recent work in reception theory.¹ I will attend to what I regard as infantilization of the medieval past by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary scholars—their representation of medieval people and medieval literature as childish and/or childlike. I see a crucial relationship between such infantilization and the prominence of medieval legend in modern children's literature. This relationship, I suggest, explains a striking generic collision between historical fiction and the boys' book in Howard Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood.

Infantilization itself arose from a collision of sorts—a historical collision at the intersection of nationalism, the theory of evolution, and the common perception of old tales as the reading of childhood. Thomas Percy was one of the first eighteenth-century antiquarians to 'apologize' for taking old 'childish' poems seriously; he justified their usefulness by placing them within an evolutionary paradigm of progress. By arranging a collection of poems in chronological order, Percy intended to illustrate "the gradual improvements of the English language and poetry from the earliest ages down to the present" (I. 3). Use of an evolutionary model necessarily demotes earlier peoples—Percy calls them "gross and ignorant minds,"—or at best, in the nationalistic mode, renders them less highly developed versions of present learned, literary selves: the "old, simple bards," though they lived in "rude, ignorant times" and used a "barbaric, unpolished language," nevertheless composed truly English poems (as opposed to French derivatives) that "display great descriptive and inventive powers" (III. 340, 352, 354, 358, 363).

Percy's condescending glance toward early literature paralleled a scholarly conception of the past as the nation's childhood, an idea enabled by the logical extension of evolutionary thinking to history and also by the deep-seated feeling among learned men that the old tales were essentially children's stories. Samuel Johnson explicitly linked childhood with the medieval past when he asserted that romances and legends are "children's literature" because they come from a time when "learning was in its infancy" and people were "on the footing of children." As Walter Scott put it, the tales of old show us "the National muse in her cradle" (in Johnston 33, 96).

This scientific, psychological, and nationalistic picture of a nation developing from a primitive childhood to an enlightened adulthood dignified antiquarian interest in ballads long considered cheap entertainment for children and the lower classes. Chapbooks, in which rewritings of early romances and ballads enjoyed prolonged popularity, were, as George Crabbe versifies, "the Peasant's joys, when placed at ease, / Half his delighted offspring mount his knees" (in Johnston 28).² According to Joseph Addison in No. 417 of The Spectator, the old medieval "Legends and Fables, [and] antiquated Romances" were the "Tradition of Nurses and Old Women," the stories of childhood.

The 'gentrifying' of the material by such collectors as Percy and Joseph Ritson did not take the ballads out of the nursery; rather, it entrenched them anew in juvenility as writers utilized Percy's and Ritson's printed collections of medieval tales and the evolutionary concept of English history to write historical fiction.

American historical fiction in the late nineteenth century reveals how the notion of an infantile Middle Ages permeated fictional conceptions. Mark Twain's 1889 novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, is a prime example of fictionalized evolutionary history that infantilizes the past. When Hank Morgan, a head superintendent in an arms factory, finds himself in a sixth-century Malorian Camelot, he sees himself as a "man among children, a master intelligence among intellectual moles" who has been given the great opportunity to "sail in and grow up with the country" (54, 50). To Hank, King Arthur and his retinue are like babes in a nursery, "childlike and innocent," ignorant and gullible (18). After a lifetime of contrasting their superstitions and simplicity to his nineteenth-century scientific and mechanical knowledge, Hank finally brings the pinnacle of his civilization to the past—high-tech weaponry—and subsequently brings about mass destruction. The infantilization of the past then metamorphoses into a romanticization of the past, a self-reflexive move that regularly attended infantilization. By the end of the book, we find Hank back in his own century yearning for the purity and innocence of the medieval world—a world now figured in the image of a mother and child (his medieval family) and placed against an empty "civilized" nineteenth century.

Infantilized, romanticized history not only affected historical fiction; it also mutated into a primitivist view of childhood in a new genre brought forth by the burgeoning market of children's literature. Thomas Bailey Aldrich's 1869 Story of a Bad Boy was recognized by contemporaries as introducing a new generic paradigm: a boys' book, in which a boys' world is constructed "that is antagonistic to the world of adults" because boys are like 'natural savages'—wild and uncivilized—who resist the constraining civilization of adulthood, its work and responsibility. Henry Cabot Lodge compared boys to primitives who lived during the "boyhood of the race." Like A Connecticut Yankee, the boys' book romanticizes an imagined 'childhood' and effects an "elegiac tone," mourning the inevitable loss of boyhood "innocence," a concept that subsumes the great freedom of a boy's life and the particular camaraderie of the boy-world, a group organized around its own rites and rituals distinct from those of adult authority (Crowley 385-87).

A boys' world invades Sherwood Forest in Howard Pyle's 1883 elegant and popular rendition of the Robin Hood legend for children, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. Knight notes that Pyle's Robin Hood followed upon a long succession of Robin Hood books written specifically for the children's market. He suggests that Pyle's book solidified Robin Hood as part of the heritage movement in English education, a movement that supplied a masculine, pastoral English past as the student's romanticized dose of history (201-7).

Although Pyle's medieval world is definitely a masculine one, its masculinity is that of schoolboys. Fusing the infantilization of the medieval past with the romanticization of childhood, Pyle enacts a 'primitive' boys' world in which Robin Hood and his men become boys whose freedom and merry savagery is antagonistic to an 'adult' world of work and organized violence. Here the medieval past becomes a nostalgic Peter-Pan fantasy world.³

Pyle's medieval escapism presents a psychological paradigm of romantic, free, fun-loving childhood that persistently opposes a somber, confining, and violent adulthood—a lush picture of innocent, boyish outlaws prevailing easily against the rage and cowardice of their cardboard cut-out adversaries. While the sheriff fumes, whines, and wheedles to ensnare Robin Hood, the "outlaws" laughingly use pranks and disguises to outwit him.⁴

Tricks are natural to this medieval past because it is a past that is played. In the preface, Pyle explicitly sets up history as a performance, as pageantry, a domain where historical characters may frolic like children; he announces that the reader will find "good, sober folks of real history so frisk and caper in gay colors and motley, that you would not know them but for the names tagged to them" (vii). His characters from history will enter in disguise, ready to play history as a child's game for a child's pleasure. The framed illustrations supplement this presentation of the legend: the decorative border around each picture gives the sensation that one is peering into another world that is set upon a stage. The same sets—Nottingham towers or Sherwood oaks—often fill out the backdrop.

Pyle welcomes the young reader to share in these merry delights and is quick to show serious "adult" readers the door:

You who so plod amid serious things that you feel it shame to give yourself up even for a few short moments to mirth and joyousness in the land of Fancy; you who think that life hath nought to do with innocent laughter that can harm no one; these pages are not for you. Clap to the leaves and go no farther than this …

#x00A0;                                      (vii)

Adult readers are summarily dismissed from this boys' world in which adult characters, typecast as humorless bullies, make easy targets for the boys' tricks. However, in the prologue and epilogue, adults take on a more ominous role as villains who spur Robin's flight into the merry forest of childhood and then force his sad return to adulthood and civilization. In the prologue, Robin appears as a youth tripping merrily to Nottingham for an archery contest who is pulled up short by foresters who mock him severely for his youth. Using the issue of age as the medium for their maliciousness, they call him "little lad" and belittle his bow and arrows. The mocking continues in this vein: "Why, boy, thy mother's milk is yet scarce dry upon thy lips, and yet thou pratest of standing up with good stout men at Nottingham butts" (2).⁵ Pyle represents an enmity not so much between oppressors and oppressed (the leitmotif of many Robin Hood texts) as between troublemaking adults (given to violence and greed), and merry-minded youth (given to sportsmanship and camaraderie). These adults force Robin to murder one of them and thus drive him into outlawry. The murder goes against the grain of his youthful goodness, making him sick at heart (4); as an outlaw, Robin diligently avoids use of deadly force, preferring pranks and equitable theft.

The conscious rejection of violence and rage, figured as adult traits, in favor of schoolboy sportsmanship appears explicitly in Robin's recruitment of Little John, an incident that rounds out the prologue. As in the seventeenth-century ballad, Robin Hood and Little John meet on a bridge and challenge each other to a bout of quarterstaff. Laughing at his own ducking at Little John's hands, Robin proceeds to check John's rage with joviality at every step, re-training him to be a "merry man." When Will Scarlet jokes that this fellow called John Little should be renamed Little John, John becomes angry and threatens Will, but is told by Robin to "bottle thine anger" (9). By the time they have dragged Little John through a mock christening complete with pouring ale over his head, John has learned to be merry; "at first he was of a mind to be angry, but found he could not because the others were so merry; so he, too, laughed with the rest" (10). Here the metaphorical return to childhood has been made explicit; Little John is the "fair infant," the "bonny babe," whom the "merry boys" christen and clothe anew (9-10).⁶ In similar fashion, a number of other adults who have been working for the authorities or who have simply been carrying out their trade desert their livelihoods at the drop of a hat to join Robin. Upon his invitation to join, the tanner makes clear the contrast between merry outlawry and adult work: "Hey for a merry life! And hey for the life I love! Away with tanbark and filthy vats and foul cowhides!" (87). No sense of obligation to family or community appears to mar the easy and valued regression into the forest and childhood.

The description of the merry, boyish life in the woods runs like a refrain from the beginning to the end of the book. As the narrator and Robin tell us over and over:

Right merrily they dwelt within the depths of Sherwood Forest, suffering neither care nor want, but passing the time in merry games of archery or bouts of cudgel play, living upon the King's venison, washed down with draughts of ale of October brewing.

                                                     (1)

The realities of real work and real oppression are pushed into an idyllic background of this toy landscape for boys, a landscape characterized by the centrality of a school boy morality and masculinity. Women are rarely seen in the novel, and if seen not heard. Maid Marian appears as a mere thought of "bright eyes" in Robin's mind before he is outlawed and is then never heard of again (2). Other women are simply part of the scenery. "The voice of the busy housewife," for example, fills the air along with the "drowsy drone" of the bee and "the crow of a distant cock" (89). The wedding of Allan a Dale and Ellen becomes a boys' game of outwitting the bishop; Ellen only looks forlorn and happy by turns and never speaks (143-54). In general, feminine qualities are curtly checked and contrasted against the "manliness" of the boys. Robin is at first quite offended by the "dainty" walk and gestures of his nephew Will Gamwell (89-90).

As in the boys' book, idyllic youth in Robin Hood is gendered masculine. Homosocial camaraderie dominates, obscuring or even opposing conventional "adult" heterosexual relationships.⁷ Women, as part of the adult world, are mere buxom lasses in the background; in the foreground the boys fight, love, kiss, and embrace one another in joyful, tearful reunions and partings. The dying Robin Hood lies in Little John's "loving arms" and his men send up "a great loud sound of wailing" (295). Using the homosocial potency of the boys' book, Pyle renders the medieval past and its child reader not only childlike but also misogynistic.

Adult enemies become a real threat again as the narrative approaches its conclusion, expelling Robin from the forest of innocence. The process begins when Robin is driven to commit a second murder by the hardened Guy of Gisborne. The epitome of violent authority—a hired murderer—Guy, wearing dead animals and a "thin cruel mouth," contrasts with the peaceful, mirthful Robin.⁸ When Little John believes that Guy has killed Robin, he cries out at the disparity:

who is there that hath not heard of thee and cursed thee for thy vile deeds of blood and rapine? Is it by such a hand as thine that the gentlest heart that ever beat is stilled in death?

                                       (267)

Robin must kill the murderous outlaw or be killed, and so the obligations of adulthood commence, marked first by violence and then by the constricting machinations of authorities. In the next episode, King Richard, who can be as good a sport as Robin in the rough give-and-take of the forest games, pardons Robin on the condition that he go into the service of the king. When this seemingly innocuous agreement is made, Allan a Dale sings a song of death that foreshadows the end of Robin and his merry life in the forest (283-84). Robin then follows the king into years of war—the violent trope of adulthood (287).

The epilogue marks Robin's definitive exit from merry childhood. In fact, the narrator offers a soft warning to his reader about the end of "merry doings":

I will not bid you follow me further … for that which comes hereafter speaks of the breaking up of things, and shows how joys and pleasures that are dead and gone can never be set upon their feet to walk again.

                                        (289)

The epilogue then continues with the sense of loss that is characteristic of the boys' book. In a prolonged scene of nostalgia, Robin returns from the wars after King Richard's death and rides over his old stomping grounds, now quiet. He experiences a "great onging" for the old times that is met with the "wild cry of yearning, of joy, and yet of grief" of Little John and his other men who come running at the sound of his old horn (290-91). They mean to return to their old way of life but the attempt is short-lived; King John and the sheriff send troops of men to take them, and a changed Robin cannot simply hide until the danger is over:

Now had Robin Hood been as peaceful as of old, everything might have ended in smoke, as other such ventures had always done before; but he had fought for years under King Richard, and was changed from what he used to be. It galled his pride to thus flee away before those sent against him

and so Robin meets his enemies in a "bloody fight" (292). Though Robin and his men win the day, the change to violent adulthood has gone through to completion, and Robin dies soon after.

Pyle cements the link between the medieval past and childhood and in doing so, situates history and legend within the nineteenth-century romanticization of childhood. Pyle's Robin Hood helped establish the scholarly paradigm of progress in the popular imagination. That nationalistic, progressive view shaped the teaching of history in the nineteenth century and continues to shape history represented today by educators, writers, and film makers. In teaching the later manifestations of the Robin Hood legend, we can show students how the construction of readers and the construction of concepts in other venues of culture, such as the concept of evolution or the romanticized view of childhood, intersect to affect receptions of history and literature. For many students today, Robin Hood is still a child's fanciful story and the Middle Ages are simply a time of thrilling boyhood adventures.

Notes

1. Reception theory allows one to recognize the interpretative filters that have been placed over our reception of the past by earlier constructors of history. It also recognizes changing audience expectations that make certain generic collisions possible, collisions which result in new conceptions of history in new generic forms. See Frantzen 22, 56, 59.

2. Crabbe did not separate his own childhood delight in reading the old legends from the peasant's children's delight; in another poem, he fondly remembers the days when he "Winged round the globe with Rowland or Sir Guy" (in Johnston 28).

3. Before Pyle's novel, English writers had linked the innocent, pastoral Robin Hood of the heritage movement to the idea of childhood. For example, to Leigh Hunt's 1820 Ballads of Robin Hood was appended the subtitle For Children in the second edition of 1855 (See Knight 159, 164-67). One can see that a self-reflexive motion underlies the notion that the yearning for a simple, non-urban past belongs to the idealized time of innocent, 'pre-civilized' childhood.

4. The sheriff is the prime example of the adult bully. Whether he is sending his gang to beat up one of Robin's outnumbered men, running away from Robin and his men, or gnawing his "nether lip" while Little John counts out his purse—"every clink of the bright money was a drop of blood from his veins"—the sheriff serves as the butt of all jokes, Pyle's moral exemplar of cowardice, "greed and guile" (36, 43, 55-56). King Henry is also portrayed as a poor sport; his wrath toward Robin for beating his foremost archers in a contest drives him to break his promise to the queen to pardon Robin Hood, instead chasing Robin all over the country. In contrast, when Robin wins he shares his grand prize with the king's archers and compliments their skill (229-34).

5. Like the foresters, the sheriff tries to take advantage of Robin's youth when Robin is in the disguise of a butcher-cum-spendthrift prodigal, but Robin exposes his deviousness: "thou, with thy gray hairs and one foot in the grave, wouldst trade upon the folly of a wild youth" (52).

6. The mock christening of Little John, the "pretty sweet babe" does occur in the ballad, but Pyle has added the frequent exchanges of John's angry fits and their corrective: Robin's sidesplitting laughter (see Dobson 166-70).

7. The one adult heterosexual relationship that is dramatized in the novel is that of the king and queen, a relationship which proves almost fatal to Robin Hood.

8. Guy has heard that Robin "hath never let blood in his life, saving when he first came to the forest" (257-59).

Works Cited

Addison, Joseph, Richard Steele, and others. The Spectator. Ed. Donald F. Bond. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. 5 vols.

Crowley, John W. "Little Women and the Boy Book." The New England Quarterly. 58.3 (Sept. 1985) 384-99.

Dobson, R. B. and J. Taylor. Rhymes of Robin Hood. London: W. and J. Mackay Limited, 1976.

Frantzen, Allen. Desire for Origins. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

Johnston, Arthur. Enchanted Ground: The Study of the Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century. London: Athlone Press, 1964.

Knight, Stephen. Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.

Nolle-Fischer, Karen. "Selling Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee." Revue Française D'Études Americaines. 8.17 (May 1983). 265-81.

Percy, Thomas. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. London: J. Dodsley, 1765. 3 vols.

Pyle, Howard. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. New York: Dover, 1968.

Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. New York: Washington Square Press, 1969.

OTTO OF THE SILVER HAND (1888)

Jill P. May (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: May, Jill P. "Otto of the Silver Hand." In Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Volume 2, edited by Kirk H. Beetz and Suzanne Niemeyer, pp. 995-1000. Washington, D.C.: Beacham Publishing, 1990.

[In the following essay, May provides a critical overview of Pyle's Otto of the Silver Hand, examining the book's setting, characters, symbolism, and religious subtext.]

About the Author

Howard Pyle was born on March 5, 1853, in Wilmington, Delaware. He attended high school at Taylor Academy and then studied art in Philadelphia for three years before returning home to work as a clerk in his father's business. In October 1876, Pyle moved to New York City, where he worked for two years as an illustrator and writer. Pyle then returned to Wilmington, where he wrote and illustrated books for young adults. Born a Quaker, Pyle later adopted the Swedenborg religion, and many of his stories, such as Otto of the Silver Hand and The Garden behind the Moon, reflect his religious beliefs. He died on November 9, 1911, in Florence, Italy.

Pyle's first published stories appeared in St. Nicholas magazine. Thirteen of his fables were published while he was in New York, but he soon found writing for children's magazines unprofitable. Deciding to attempt bigger projects, he began planning a book about Robin Hood. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood met with extreme popularity. Pyle's second book, Pepper & Salt, containing stories that had been published in St. Nicholas, proved equally popular. Pyle's greatest contribution to literature for young people was his four-volume Arthurian series. The first Arthurian series written for a youthful audience, it established the pattern for all subsequent fantasy series based on the legend of King Arthur.

Neither the Arthurian series nor The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood has ever been out of print. Otto of the Silver Hand is also in print currently, and these works continue to entertain young readers. But Pyle's strong reputation derives from his illustrations as well as from his writing. He illustrated adult books by other authors, earning a reputation as the foremost illustrator of the early twentieth century.

Overview

Otto of the Silver Hand was one of the first historical novels for young adults to present the realities behind the chivalric ideal. Pyle reveals the prevalence of cruelty and vengefulness in medieval society. The lesson that chivalry was not always glorious does not, however, overshadow the high sense of adventure found in the story. The story's unflinching portrayal of the unpleasant aspects of medieval life may shock some young readers, but its well-organized and exciting plot makes for entertaining reading.

Otto of the Silver Hand grew out of Pyle's research of the chivalric world in preparation for writing his Arthurian series. As he examined elements of the Arthurian tradition, Pyle became distressed with the knights' wickedness. He had hoped to write a glorious account of King Arthur's realm, but found it impossible to ignore the harshness of medieval society. Ultimately, Pyle wrote Otto of the Silver Hand to demonstrate the brutality of the era and to suggest that history is different from legend. His dramatic illustrations breathe life into the story, making it more believable.

Setting

The story takes place in Germany during the thirteenth century. Pyle calls this period a time "of ignorance, of superstition, of cruelty, and of wickedness." He paints scenes of two settings that conflict directly with one another: the chaotic world of the castle and the orderly world of the monastery. At the castle, Baron Conrad's world, people are boisterous and aggressive. The Baron himself robs those travelers who dare to traverse the wild and dangerous area outside the castle's stronghold. The castle's lookout lives in Melchior Tower with his family, far away from the castle's gentry, and rings a huge alarm bell to alert the Baron when potential victims have wandered into the area. In contrast, the monastery is surrounded by vineyards, gardens, and well-kept fields. Sunlight streams into the courtyard, and peacefulness prevails. Although they prefer to live in isolation from the rest of the world, the monks seek to help passersby rather than do them harm. Within these two worlds, Otto, the Baron's son, grows to manhood. He takes the values of the monastery to heart and, in doing so, proves that he differs from the residents in his father's castle.

Themes and Characters

Otto, the main character of the story, is an innocent twelve-year-old when the most dramatic action of the novel occurs. The son of Baron and Baroness Conrad, Otto has grown up at a monastery, sheltered from the lawless, rough environment at his father's castle. Baron Conrad, a robber baron, plunders, steals, and wages war for a living. His gentle wife begs him to give up his thievery, but the Baron, who takes pride in his role as leader, warrior, and provider, refuses her request. When the Baron returns home from a rampage critically wounded, his wife swoons, goes into childbirth, and dies. Although the grief-stricken Baron honors his wife's last request and gives up robbing, he does not forgive his enemy, the Baron Frederick, who injured him, indirectly causing the death of Baroness Conrad. Baron Conrad later kills Baron Frederick, thus incurring the wrath of Baron Frederick's nephew, Baron Henry. Pyle complicates Baron Conrad's character, making him a thief and murderer who is nonetheless loved and respected by his wife, son, and compatriots. Arrogant and spiteful, the Baron is also sensitive and loving, and in the end, he bravely gives his life for the safety of his son and his men. The Baroness, meanwhile, never fully develops as a character, but does serve as a reminder of what the Baron has lost by continuing his ungodly ways.

Otto reflects his mother's gentle concern and serves as a warning voice calling out for the Baron's repentance. After his wife's death, the Baron takes the infant Otto to the Monastery of St. Michaelsburg so that Otto can grow up in a stable, safe environment. Otto, described as a small, pale, emotional boy, is happy at the monastery, where he occupies his time reading and dreaming with his dear friend, Brother John. Brother John, a simple, slow-witted man who sees visions of angels, becomes Otto's caretaker and friend. Otto accepts John's stories as truths, and in this way represents humankind's ability to believe in miracles.

Otto eventually leaves the monastery and returns to his father's castle. While there, he spends long hours with old Ursela, his mother's servant, listening to stories about his past and discovering what his father is really like. Yet, when asked if he hates his father, Otto declares that he does not. A pensive, gentle boy with a tender heart, Otto seems less a realistic character than a personification of divine forgiveness. Otto's constant goodness and gentleness separate him from everyone else in the real world, and he becomes symbolic of Christian spirituality.

The two main characters who live in the monastery also represent spiritual reflection, acceptance, and forgiveness. Abbot Otto, who is Baroness Conrad's uncle, functions as Otto's spiritual father. A man of great inner strength and love, the Abbot provides a contrast to Baron Conrad. The Abbot loves books, and he introduces Otto to "wonderful and beautiful volumes" filled with illustrations of religious scenes and people. He also protects Otto and, at the end of the story, escorts him to the court of the kind Haps-burg ruler, Emperor Rudolph. Brother John, the simpleton who daydreams and wanders the monastery, is also innocent, and remains childlike because he does not need to face the outside world. Otto, on the other hand, would like to believe Brother John's stories and to remain in the peaceful shelter, but is instead forced to leave the monastery and to change.

Another significant character is One-eyed Hans, the Baron Conrad's strong-arm. He rides at the Baron's side and, when Otto is kidnapped by Baron Henry, spies in enemy territory to discover where Otto is being held. Otto's rescue depends upon Hans, not his father, and it is Hans who returns Otto to the monastery at his father's bidding. Hans represents the knights of olden times who would kill and maim for the glory of their lords regardless of moral concerns.

Otto meets another important character, Pauline, Baron Henry's daughter, during his captivity. Pauline, who visits the boy out of curiosity, becomes enchanted by his stories, just as Otto was enchanted by Brother John's stories. Because Otto agrees to return and marry Pauline when they are both grown, she agrees to help him escape by sending a message to Baron Conrad, telling him where Otto is. Though it is unclear whether the message is ever delivered, Otto keeps his word, and the two are reunited at the book's end.

Literary Qualities

Otto of the Silver Hand is simply written. The characters become involved in a cliffhanging adventure as the drama moves forward at a swift pace. Although the book was written more than one hundred years ago, its language remains appropriate for younger audiences. It contains the elements necessary for successful historical fiction: realistic events, a clearly defined and historically accurate setting, and characters who act appropriately for the setting and the time.

Pyle incorporates symbolism within a realistic story to give his writing an extra dimension. For example, after Otto loses his right hand, it is replaced by a hand of "pure silver, and the hard, cold fingers never closed," and the book ends with the words, "Better a hand of silver than a hand of iron." Otto's silver hand clearly symbolizes that he has brought parity and beauty to a land that was once ruled by the iron fists of violent men such as his father.

The complete format of Otto of the Silver Hand is noteworthy. Pyle's striking full-page black-and-white illustrations add realism and drama to the story. While some of the characters never fully develop in the story, they came alive in the illustrated scenes. Some chapters begin with allegorical illustrations: the chapter in which Otto is kidnapped opens with a drawing of a human figure that represents terror, and the chapter in which Otto is saved from Baron Henry opens with a drawing of an angel visiting Otto in his cell. These illustrations underscore the religious implications of the story. The combination of realistic and symbolic illustrations reaffirms Pyle's use of these elements in the text.

Social Sensitivity

Otto of the Silver Hand depicts the ultimate victory of good over evil, but it does not have a traditional happy ending. By the end of the story, both of Otto's parents are dead, most of his father's followers have died, and Otto has lost his hand. Yet peace has been restored to a land once dominated by violence. Pyle's descriptions of violence in the story are quite vivid, though he refrains from providing details about Otto's maiming. He does, however, attempt to offer his readers some solace in the face of this violence, depicting the monk's way of life as peaceful and virtuous. Pyle shows the importance of kindness and spirituality without resorting to doctrinaire discussions of specific religious beliefs.

BOOK OF PIRATES (1891)

Susan F. Beegel (essay date fall 1993)

SOURCE: Beegel, Susan F. "Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates and Male Taciturnity in Hemingway's 'A Day's Wait.'" Studies in Short Fiction 30, no. 4 (fall 1993): 535-41.

[In the following essay, Beegel explores how Pyle's Book of Pirates influenced the manifestation of male stoicism in Ernest Hemingway's short story "A Day's Wait."]

    Beyond the long arm of the Law,
    Close to a shipping road,
    Pirates in their island lairs
    Observe the pirate code.
                         —W. H. Auden, "Islands"

The plot of "A Day's Wait" is deceptively simple. A young boy with influenza hears that his temperature is 102 degrees and mistakes the Fahrenheit reading for Centigrade, in which a temperature of 44 degrees is invariably fatal. The boy, called Schatz, spends a day bravely waiting to die before his father discovers and corrects his mistake. Many critics believe that this is all "A Day's Wait" is about, that the discovery of the boy's mistake is the climax of this story, an O. Henry-like "Wow!" at the end that resolves things rather too neatly.¹ Other critics have read Schatz as a miniature code hero, a brave little man holding tight onto himself in the face of death, an innocent version of dissipated Harry in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," staring at death at the foot of the bed.² This is true as far as it goes, and gives real pathos to Schatz's stoic behavior, but it is also a rather unquestioning "boys' book" idea of courage and of this complex short story.

My purpose in this essay is to suggest that the revelation of the Fahrenheit/Centigrade mistake does not resolve the central misunderstanding in "A Day's Wait." Further, I believe that the story actually questions the very values of male stoicism and taciturnity that it seems to extol. Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates, the boy's book read by father to son in "A Day's Wait," provides a hitherto neglected allusive subtext that supports these observations, commenting ironically on the story's larger actions.

At the story's conclusion, the father/narrator reveals what he and we as readers have missed: his son has been in mortal terror from the earliest moments of "A Day's Wait." The superficial reason why—the Fahrenheit/Centigrade confusion—is inadequate to explain the story's central problem, Schatz's silent endurance, and the father's blindness to a child's fear.

Look at the multiple levels of misunderstanding inherent in just three lines of a dialogue initiated by Schatz with "You don't have stay in here with me, Papa, if it bothers you" (437; my emphasis). This is male taciturnity, the code of remaining silent about deeply felt emotions, carried to extremes. Why? Because "it" is death. Simply translated, the boy is saying: "You don't have to stay in here with me, Papa, if my dying bothers you." When we remember that Schatz is addressing this sentence to a father who is calmly reading Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates and apparently waiting for him to die, this simple statement takes on disturbing dimensions. It becomes a question: "Does my dying bother you? Why don't you seem to be bothered? Don't you love me?" At the same time, Schatz offers to release his father from the necessity of being "bothered," from the extreme demands an emotional deathbed scene would doubtless make on their mutual stoicism.

The father, pleasurably occupied with the boy's book, gives this honest answer: "It doesn't bother me" (437; my emphasis). For the father, "it" means "staying with you." Simply translated: "Staying with you when you're sick doesn't bother me." That's a profession of loyalty and love, but Schatz, for whom "it" means death, hears his father say "Your dying doesn't bother me."

Too secure in his father's love to accept this "reading," Schatz assumes a misunderstanding and revises the tense of his speech to address not his present mild illness but his impending death: "No, I mean you don't have to stay in here if it's going to bother you" (437; my emphasis). Translation: "You don't have to stay in here when I start to die if my dying bothers you." Again, the boy seeks reassurance that his father is bothered by his death while offering to release him from that bother.

The obtuse father's response is potentially shattering. Believing that the boy is light-headed with fever, the father does not respond, but simply gives Schatz some pills and leaves on a hunting trip. For the child, his father's departure has only two possible interpretations, and neither is comforting. The exit either means "your dying doesn't bother me, so I'm going hunting" (corroborating the worst interpretation of the father's earlier remark), or it means "your dying does bother me, so I'm taking advantage of your offer and leaving" (corroborating Schatz's worst fear about his illness).³

Hemingway, with his belief in the power of concrete language, knew well how to marry signifier and signified. "Bread is a fine word and still means bread," he would write in an early draft of Death in the Afternoon, "wheat means wheat, and cold means cold …" (Beegel 56). In "A Day's Wait," the misunderstanding between father and son results from a culpable failure to make meaning, a failure the more poignant as this confessional short story's father-narrator is presumably Nick Adams, a writer by profession.⁴ The road to aporia here is paved with indefinite pronoun reference—those shifty "its," signifying nothing, or anything.

The values of "code heroism," of stoic male behavior and taciturnity, are directly responsible for the linguistic and emotional isolation of father and son, for their apparent inability to pronounce words like "love" and "death." It is at this juncture that Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates comes into play as an important allusive subtext. The father's choice of the pirate book for distracting and entertaining his feverish child is painfully ironic. Chapter Three of that book, "With the Buccaneers," the story of a boy's first confrontation with death, has some interesting parallels with "A Day's Wait." To date, no critic has examined them.⁵

A plantation owner's son, 16-year-old Harry Mostyn, runs away from home to seek adventure with pirate captain Henry Morgan. The boy accompanies Morgan and a handful of desperados on a cutting-out expedition. They seize a Spanish galleon and endeavor to sail the treasure-laden ship out of a heavily defended harbor. On the way, Morgan engages in desperate combat with a Spanish galley. The Spaniards concentrate all of their musket fire on the pirates' helmsman, and when the helmsman falls, fatally wounded, Morgan roars for someone to seize the wheel and keep the pirate ship from falling off the wind. Our boy-hero obliges:

In the first moment of this effort [Harry] had reckoned of nothing but carrying out his captain's designs. He thought neither of cannon balls nor of bullets. But now … he came suddenly back to himself to find the galleries of the galley aflame with musket shots, and to become aware with the most horrible sinking of the spirits that all the shots therefrom were intended for him. He cast his eyes about him in despair, but no one came to ease him of his task, which, having undertaken, he had too much spirit to resign from carrying through to the end, though he was very well aware that the very next instant might mean his sudden and violent death. His ears hummed and rang, and his brain swam light as a feather.

                            (95; my emphasis)⁶

Thanks to Harry's courage, the pirate ship remains on course, ramming and sinking the enemy galley.

And now … that all danger was past and gone, there were plenty to come running to help our hero at the wheel. As for Captain Morgan … he fetches the young helmsman a clap on the back. 'Well, Master Harry,' says he, 'and did I not tell you I would make a man of you?' Whereat our poor Harry fell a-laughing, but with a sad catch in his voice, for his hands trembled as with an ague, and were as cold as ice. As for his emotions, God knows he was nearer crying than laughing, if Captain Morgan had but known it.

                            (96; my emphasis)

In this story Henry Morgan becomes a kind of savage surrogate father to young Harry Mostyn, introducing the boy to the world of piracy and to codes of behavior requiring a man to stand to the wheel in a hail of fire and shrug off his fear with no more comment than a forced laugh.

The father in "A Day's Wait" reads aloud to Schatz from Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates twice, both before and after the hunt. As Schatz struggles to confront death bravely, his father is, all unwittingly, catechizing him on courage, urging him to remain stoic and silent. Twice the father stops reading, thinking "I could see he was not following what I was reading …" (437, 438), when in fact Schatz is following what his father is reading, following the pirate code of stoicism in the face of death as strictly as he can. We can sense Schatz's hurt when his father tells him to "Just take it easy" (438; my emphasis). The son believes his father is telling him to take death easy, which is exactly what he has been trying to do. From Schatz's point of view, his father obviously has not appreciated his courageous behavior.

There is additional irony in the father's sitting at the foot of the bed and reading to himself from Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates when he thinks he sees that Schatz is not following. The father becomes so engrossed in the boy's book account of young Harry's fictional courage that he overlooks the genuine courage of his own young son. Easily distracted by accounts of Spanish galleons and piratical doings, the "childish" father unintentionally exposes his own Schatz (Schatz is a German endearment meaning "my treasure"⁷) to an appearance of cruel paternal indifference.

At the end of "With the Buccaneers," Harry Mostyn's real father sends for him. A gentleman plantation owner, the real father is half "distracted" by his boy's part in the "terrible bloody and murthering business" of piracy (97-98). It is a children's book conclusion, in which young Harry, having undergone a frightening adventure and proved his courage and manliness, is returned safely to the fold of parental love and protection, rescued from the dark fatherhood of Captain Morgan.

"A Day's Wait" seems to have an equally comfortable conclusion. When the boy's confusion about temperature is at last revealed, the boy is restored to the familiar father who treasures and reassures him: "You poor Schatz … Poor old Schatz. It's like miles and kilometers. You aren't going to die" (439). He is rescued, in effect, from the dark father who catechized him with pirate stories about being a man and taking death easy, who said things to a sick child that seemed to mean "Your dying doesn't bother me."

Yet despite relief and reconciliation, Schatz's "gaze at the foot of the bed relax[es] slowly" (439). Staring fixedly at the foot of the bed, he is not only staring at the place where death lurked like the hallucinatory hyena that rests its head on the foot of Harry's cot in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," but also at the place where his father sat reading Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates, and then at the emptiness left when his father abandoned him to go hunting, leaving the boy as alone in his wait for death as a pirate's victim marooned on a desert isle. None of these concepts—his own mortality, the piratical code of masculine behavior, his isolation from paternal consolation—is easy for "a very sick and miserable boy of nine years" to shake, and the extent of his trauma is made plain when, the next day, he cries "very easily at little things that were of no importance" (439).

"The boys' books [have] a lot to answer for," asserts Jonathan Raban in Hunting Mr. Heartbreak: A Discovery of America. He goes on to deliver a powerful indictment of masculine ideals as espoused by American literature in general, and by Ernest Hemingway in particular:

American men of my own and Red's generation had been raised on a kind of tribal literature that was a more suitable preparation for life as an Apache brave than it was for husband-and fatherhood in the average American suburb. From the moment they could read, their teachers had fed them with Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Hemingway. Out of school, they were suckled on the mythology of the western and the romance of the frontier. Their ideal of American masculinity was pitched somewhere between the characters of Buck Rogers, Harry Morgan, and Huckleberry Finn. Real life, according to these books and movies, always happened out of doors. It was essentially solitary. It was dangerous. It called for self-reliance above all other human qualities. Woodcraft and seamanship would stand you in far better stead than, say, the capacity to express affection. The books and movies heroized the rejection of the domestic life….

                                      (345)

Complaints like Raban's are made possible by critics who read "A Day's Wait" as though it were a child's pirate story, or who exclude "A Day's Wait" and other investigations of parenting from the Hemingway canon.⁸ In truth, "A Day's Wait" indicts Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates and similar boys' books as poor models for American manhood, and questions the very ideals of masculinity Hemingway is most thought to valorize. Rejecting both Raban's "tribal literature" and its ethos of solitary self-reliance, "A Day's Wait" elects instead to heroize the domestic and explore the painful cost of failing to express affection.

Notes

1. In "Up and Down: Making Connections in 'A Day's Wait,'" Linda Gajdusek provides a useful overview of the short story's interpretive criticism and concludes that it has "failed to attract much serious attention" because it offers "such an easy, seemingly trivial amusement" (291). George Monteiro has given serious attention to the "O. Henry ending" criticism by exploring the indebtedness of "A Day's Wait" to O. Henry's 1907 short story "The Last Leaf," about a girl desperately ill with pneumonia.

2. Arthur Waldhorn calls Schatz "a Lilliputian model of an exemplary hero" (71). Joseph De-Falco refers to the boy's "victory over the inner forces of the self" (54). And Wirt Williams refers to Schatz's "triumph" over "overwhelming catastrophe" (104).

3. Sheldon Norman Grebstein remarks that in "A Day's Wait," Hemingway "handles a potentially sentimental situation without expressing feeling in overt terms and without calling directly upon the reader's sense of pathos. We surmise the father's love and concern for his sick son not from any declaration of it in exposition or dialogue but rather from a series of observations, gestures and dramatic metaphors" (9-10). This masculine taciturnity is, of course, the soul of the Hemingway style. But Grebstein might have gone on to note that "A Day's Wait" is also profoundly critical of its own style. The child's terrifying misunderstanding occurs precisely because father and son handle "a potentially sentimental situation without expressing feeling in overt terms" and fail to "read" their observations of one another's gestures and dramatic metaphors.

4. Although Philip Young chose not to include "A Day's Wait" in his 1972 collection, The Nick Adams Stories, most critics have followed Carlos Baker's identification of the story's unnamed narrator as Nick Adams (Baker 134). Paul Smith's A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway provides the most compelling reason for siding with Baker—in the manuscripts of "Fathers and Sons," Nick Adams's boy is called "Schatz" (304).

5. Virtually all critics of "A Day's Wait" have commented on the role of Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates in the story, but no one has addressed the actual contents of the popular boys' book that so engrosses Schatz's father. Among Hemingway scholars, only Sheridan Baker seems to have looked into Pyle—but his emphasis is the book's slight influence on To Have and Have Not:

In Harry Morgan, Hemingway will blend something of his friend Captain Joe Russell of Key West with some of the glamour of Howard Pyle's [sic] Book of Pirates—though it mentions Morgan only once, in passing—which Hemingway had recently been reading to one of his sons, if we may take the data of "A Day's Wait" as factual.

                                (102)

6. Pyle, a gifted artist who trained later illustrators including N. C. Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish, emphasizes the moment with a line drawing that shows the terrified boy crouched at the wheel while Captain Morgan glowers down at him from the galleon's elevated quarterdeck.

7. In "Hemingway's 'A Day's Wait,'" Patrick J. Mahony points out that "There is verbal play here in the sense that Schatz, which is the German word for 'treasure,' is at a remove from pirates."

8. Of this story's critics, only Joseph Flora has noted the uncharacteristic emphasis in "A Day's Wait" on "the warm, the normal, the familial" and on the narrator's "gentleness as a father … not afraid of his softer, or feminine side" (219). Yet Flora goes on to contend that the narrator's gentleness "does not conflict with his more traditionally masculine role as a hunter" (219), whereas I would argue that the narrator's abandonment of Schatz for a clumsy solo hunt in icy woods establishes just such a conflict. By introducing piratical values into the child's sickroom, the hunter-father unwittingly creates a frightening reversal of the Stevensonian "land of counterpane."

Works Cited

Auden, W. H. "Islands." Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Vintage, 1991. 564-65.

Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1972.

Baker, Sheridan. Ernest Hemingway: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Holt, 1967.

Beegel, Susan F. Hemingway's Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript Examples. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1988.

DeFalco, Joseph. The Hero in Hemingway's Short Stories. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1963.

Flora, Joseph. Hemingway's Nick Adams. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1982.

Gajdusek, Linda. "Up and Down: Making Connections in 'A Day's Wait.'" Hemingway's Neglected Short Fiction: New Perspectives. Ed. Susan F. Beegel. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1992.

Grebstein, Sheldon Norman. Hemingway's Craft. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1973.

Hemingway, Ernest. "A Day's Wait." The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Scribner's, 1938. 436-39.

―――――――. The Nick Adams Stories. Ed. Philip Young. New York: Scribner's, 1972.

Mahony, Patrick J. "Hemingway's 'A Day's Wait.'" The Explicator 27.3 (1968). Item 18.

Monteiro, George. "Hemingway, O. Henry, and the Surprise Ending." Prairie Schooner 47 (1973): 296-302.

Pyle, Howard. Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates: Fiction, Fact, & Fancy concerning the Buccaneers & Marooners of the Spanish Main. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1921.

Raban, Jonathan. Hunting Mr. Heartbreak: A Discovery of America. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Smith, Paul. A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. "The Land of Counterpane." A Child's Garden of Verses. 1885. Harmondsworth, UK: Puffin, 1975. 33.

Waldhorn, Arthur. A Reader's Guide to Ernest Hemingway. New York: Farrar, 1972.

Williams, Wirt. The Tragic Art of Ernest Hemingway. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981.

MEN OF IRON (1892)

Thomas Mallon (essay date 26 March 1990)

SOURCE: Mallon, Thomas. "Past Present." Nation 250, no. 12 (26 March 1990): 427-28.

[In the following essay, Mallon discusses the impact that Pyle's Men of Iron had on him as a younger reader and notes how, despite the book's Medieval setting. the text reflected Mallon's own childhood in several respects.]

Men of Iron, by the novelist and illustrator Howard Pyle (1853–1911), belongs to that category of book known today as the young adult novel, as well as to that more exclusive class of books whose value lies almost totally in being reread rather than read. Men of Iron is listed as my favorite book in my 1963 sixth-grade autograph album (John Glenn was my "hero"), and I recently reread it, at a remove of twenty-seven years.

It is the story of Myles Falworth, an inexhaustibly gung-ho lad of the fifteenth century who is out to become a knight not only for the glory of it but also to avenge his blind father, who was once unfairly implicated in a plot against Henry IV and forced to live a much-reduced life in exile and danger. Myles is more than brash; he's "hungry for brawling." In fact, he's a hair-trigger jerk—but that's only on rereading. To Pyle in 1892, and no doubt to me in 1962, he was a noble fellow whose challenge to the not terribly villainous "bachelors" of the Earl of Mackworth's retinue is a triumph of gutsiness exceeded only by his later, climactic tilts with the Sieur de la Montaigne and the Earl of Alban.

The plot is actually quite complicated, but I'm sure I paid it little heed, rehearsing a lifetime ability to derive atmospheric pleasure from detective novels and spy movies whose stories I'm not terribly intent on following. Rereading Pyle also convinces me that my visual sense, at the age of 11, was as undeveloped as my sequential one: The illustrations to Men of Iron, done by the author himself—a man who ran an art school at Chadds Ford and taught Maxfield Parrish—evoke no memories at all. While I can't see how the book could have helped me to "grow," rereading it has a marvelous capacity for making me shrink. Back among school-children in the wholesome cold war suburbs, I stand before myself "as a living child."

Pyle's fifteenth century was not, I realize, a fantasy realm into which I was eager to escape but a parallel universe in which I was guaranteed to find my way around. Before he is knighted Myles must make a vigil "in the chapel, watching his armor, thinking such wonderful thoughts, and dreaming such wonderful wide-eyed dreams." Back in 1962–63 I looked forward to preparation for confirmation as a matter of high seriousness and romance: getting an additional name, being made a soldier of God, being slapped by a bishop—all that not so different from being dubbed by a monarch. In colloquy with Prior Edward, Myles wrestles with the notion of a just war, something about which the good priests of the Rockville Centre diocese, living in the shadow of Cardinal Spellman, Vicar of the Armed Forces, could easily reassure one.

The fall of 1962 found me in a classroom with my first male teacher, after six years with gentle young women, most of whom would probably have gone to law school if they'd come of age a decade later. This first male was something of a martinet—a Korean War veteran, perhaps—and suddenly the happy world of class plays and show-and-tell began to resemble Parris Island. I had always been able to count on the chin-chucking love of the women, but now here was a man who dealt in respect and contempt. I made the cut into the realm of favorites by being an eager-to-please little whiz, just as the boys in Men of Iron struggle up the ranks from squire to bachelor to knight.

Like a Victorian theologian making typological connections between the Old and New Testaments, Pyle made sure his pubescent reading public saw the links between their world and the medieval one he was recreating: "No doubt it was as hard then as it is now for the mother to see the nestling thrust from the nest to shift for itself." This is not, however, to say that the author, who helped in the 1904 campaign of Teddy Roosevelt, didn't think there had been, since Myles's day, a falling off from the strenuous life: "Men's bodies in those days were tougher and more seasoned to hardships of weather than they are in these our times. Myles thought no more of the burning iron plates that incased him than a modern soldier thinks of his dress uniform in warm weather." I probably guessed that there had been a further falling off in the decades leading to my birth.

Pyle's set speeches tend to resemble those of the teacher or priest who wishes to be a sport but can never quite bring himself to proffer confidences without condescension. The chapter openings that generalize about a "boy's life" (the name of that most boring of magazines) have an obligatory, underimagined air, and his prose sometimes wears his research about as lightly as a suit of armor: "The huge cylindrical tilting helm was so constructed in front as to slope at an angle in all directions to one point. That point was the center of a cross formed by two iron bands welded to the steel-face plates of the helm where it was weakened by the opening slit of the occularium, or peephole." But I'm sure I knew how to skim, and probably leaped over such passages in just the way I'd learned to bound to the Philco, during commercials, for a Ring Ding. I would have considered the "good parts" to be not all the jousting and fighting at the pel but the small moments providing that new readerly pleasure, recognition. Already embarked on a sheepish lifetime of looking at my shoes in awestruck moments, I must have been reassured to find that during an interview with the formidable Earl of Mackworth, Myles—exactly the sort of person who would have passed me over in a choose-up—does just what I'd be doing: "Upon the ground at his feet were four pebbles, and he noticed how they almost made a square, and would do so if he pushed one of them with his toe, and then it seemed strange to him that he should think of such a little foolish thing at that dreadful time."

The smallness of such detail probably seemed to me a species of subtlety, a quality akin to another one rarely found in the books I'd read up to that time: moral ambiguity. Myles knows that the Earl of Mackworth has his own agenda, and that his own early preferment is something of a setup. Significantly, when he at last gets the chance to avenge his father, Myles can "not but confess in his own mind that the King had many rational, perhaps just, grounds for grievance against such an ardent opponent as the blind Lord had shown himself to be." My friends and I were all, I think, a bit guiltily ambivalent toward our own fathers. We knew that they'd been soldiers twenty years before. (We never played cowboys and Indians; it was still, in 1962, Americans and Jerries.) How did those fathers, who'd fought the real thing, become so diminished, get shrunk into white collars so they could ship out each morning in convoys of Long Island Rail Road cars? In some unacknowledged way this bothered us, and Myles's filial disloyalty, however mental and momentary, must have seemed intriguing.

I was a late bloomer, not much aware of any schoolboy eros, but the descriptions of Myles strike me now as less formulaic than ogling: He's "a bonny lad, with brown face, curling hair, a square, strong chin, and a pair of merry laughing blue eyes; his shoulders were broad; his chest was thick of girth; his muscles and thews were as tough as oak." Myles and Gascoyne walk with "their arms … wound across one another's shoulders, after the manner, as a certain great writer says, of boys and lovers." Gascoyne receives not only Myles's "love-gift" of a dagger but, more important to Pyle, his secrets: "I think that there is nothing so flattering to one's soul as to be made the confidant of a stronger nature."

When my crushes did come, they would in fact take this subservient form endorsed by the author; but I doubt I filed this passage for future reference, because the feature of Pyle's Americanized Merrie England that would have appealed to me most strongly is the importance of Making It. Pyle's critical biographer, Lucien L. Agosta, has not failed to notice the Horatio Algerism involved in Myles's rise, and anyone who reads Men of Iron —published in a year my sixth-grade brain would have remembered as that of Grover Cleveland's comeback—will recognize it, for all its touches of fortune, as a handbook for careerists. The right mixture of pluck and cheek will be rewarded. After hearing the Earl of Mackworth's plans for him, Myles tells Gascoyne "of the wonderful new life that had thus suddenly opened before him, with its golden future of limitless hopes, of dazzling possibilities, of heroic ambitions." I was still a kid, but so was the President, and his family had come from Ireland, too.

Lucien L. Agosta (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: Agosta, Lucien L. "Men of Iron." In Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Volume 2, edited by Kirk H. Beetz and Suzanne Niemeyer, pp. 892-900. Washington, D.C.: Beacham Publishing, 1990.

[In the following essay, Agosta offers a critical overview of Men of Iron, characterizing the text as a prototypical story of personal evolution for its lead character, Myles Falworth.]

About the Author

Howard Pyle was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on March 5, 1853. Showing considerable artistic ability at a young age, he was allowed to leave school at sixteen to pursue private art studies in Philadelphia. He placed his first illustrated article in Scribner's magazine in 1876, and, encouraged by this early success, moved to New York City to study and work. There Pyle vacillated between careers in art and in literature, eventually solving his dilemma by becoming both an illustrator and a writer. After establishing himself with Harpers, Scribner's and other major publishing houses during his three years in New York, Pyle returned to Wilmington in 1879, where he lived—a devoted family man and industrious artist, teacher, and writer—until the year before his death in 1911. These thirty years saw a remarkable outpouring of illustrations, articles, and books. His works in prose and pictures concerning colonial America helped a nation torn apart by civil war to rediscover its common roots, and his illustrations for the historical works of Woodrow Wilson and Henry Cabot Lodge provided a vision of early American costume, character, and events. Pyle's keen interest in history also manifested itself in works on piracy and on medieval life. In addition, he wrote several adult romances, thrillers, and tales of adventure, as well as a realistic novel, Rejected of Men (1903).

Pyle's reputation as a writer now rests, however, on his illustrated works for young people, works that occupy a permanent position in the canon of juvenile literature. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood and Pyle's four-volume Arthuriad—The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, The Story of the Champions of the Round Table, The Story of Sir Launcelot and His Companions, and The Story of the Grail and the Passing of Arthur —offer the best indication of his considerable skill as storyteller and illustrator. He refashions these traditional tales, imbuing them with exuberance, an infectious good humor, and a generosity of spirit, revitalizing their ancient heroes for the delight of later generations of young readers. Pyle was also instrumental in the nineteenth-century revival of the folktale, producing three volumes of lively stories. Pepper & Salt, The Wonder Clock, and Twilight Land are characterized by a tendency toward moral instruction tempered by playful whimsy and a witty, colloquial narration. Pyle, along with his contemporary Mark Twain, wrote some of the best historical novels for young people, including Otto of the Silver Hand and Men of Iron, both set in medieval Europe, and The Story of Jack Ballister's Fortunes, set in colonial America. These classic works, many of which have never been out of print, constitute an enduring legacy.

Wishing to share his expertise as an artist and illustrator with the next generation, Pyle began his teaching career in 1894 at Drexel Institute's School of Illustration, commuting several days a week to Philadelphia. After resigning from Drexel in 1900, he opened his own school in his studios in Wilmington. His aim as a teacher was to foster a truly American art no longer slavishly dependent upon European models. During his sixteen-year teaching career, Pyle instructed a whole generation of American illustrators, among them such luminaries as Maxfield Parrish, Jessie Willcox Smith, and N. C. Wyeth. At the end of his career, he turned his attention to mural painting and left Wilmington in 1910 to study in Italy, where he died on November 9, 1911, in Florence.

An important art educator, Howard Pyle is called the "Father of American Illustration" for his role in elevating American illustration to a position of world eminence. In addition, he is recognized as a classic American writer for young people, a significant figure in the "Golden Age of Children's Literature."

Overview

Men of Iron tells the story of Myles Falworth's maturation from rough-and-tumble boyhood through reckless, high-spirited adolescence to responsible manhood. The novel celebrates boyhood, with its youthful high jinks and scrapes with authority, its fierce loyalties and bitter rivalries, its hero worship, its secret societies and hide-outs. In this action-filled, fast-paced narrative, Myles achieves maturity only after he learns to channel his abundant youthful energies towards socially constructive ends and to employ his bravery, physical strength, and mental agility in a worthy cause. Myles's story is the story of every young person: his success in negotiating the formidable obstacles and trials that he must confront assures young readers that if they face their trials with the necessary courage and determination, they, too, can carve for themselves comfortable places in the adult world, where they can live productive and satisfying lives.

The novel also offers a colorful and engaging historical account of the accession of Henry IV to the English throne and the attendant social and political changes in fifteenth-century France and England. Pyle is especially adroit at providing information concerning the elaborate customs, ceremonies, weapons, and protocols supporting late-medieval knighthood.

Finally, Men of Iron is a classic adventure story, brimming with episodes of danger, intrigue, and battle, and informed with youthful energy and high spirits. It makes for exciting and informative reading.

Setting

The novels opens in 1400, only a few months after Richard II has been dethroned and Henry IV has succeeded him as king of England. Unjustly implicated in a plot against Henry, the blind Baron Falworth, Myles's father, flees his ancestral home at Falworth Castle for Crosbey-Holt, an obscure, strawthatched farmhouse on the grounds of St. Mary's Priory. The first quarter of the novel features the country fairs, monastic routines, and quiet peasant farm life of rural medieval England. At sixteen, Myles leaves this idyllic English countryside for Devlen Castle, seat of the powerful Earl of Mackworth. Pyle provides a detailed picture of medieval castle life, its cramped living areas and spacious public rooms, its cold discomforts and splendid pageantry. Made a knight in 1411, Myles goes on a brief expedition to France before returning to London. There he defeats his ancestral enemy before turning his back on the frivolity and political intrigue of the London court for a quiet married life at Falworth Castle, his reclaimed baronial estate. The novel, then, affords a panoramic sweep of rural, castle, and court life in medieval England.

Themes and Characters

The characters in Men of Iron divide into two groups. The novel focuses on those characters belonging to the boy-world, including Myles Falworth and the other squires and bachelors gathered at Devlen Castle to train for knighthood. The second group of characters consists of those remote adults who regulate castle life and are responsible for training the boys in their charge. These adults operate largely behind the scenes, the boys often remaining puzzled by their actions and motives. During the course of the novel, however, these two groups gradually converge as Myles and his cohorts mature and gain admittance into the adult-world. At the end of the novel, Myles recognizes how the adults surrounding him have been watchful and concerned while allowing him repeated opportunities to prove himself and to grow in mind, spirit, and body.

Myles Falworth, the central character in the novel, is a lad of spirit, pluck, and mettle, an acknowledged leader in the boy-world. Bold and outspoken, he is also generous and openhearted, winning firm friends and admirers as well as enemies among his peers at Devlen Castle. Myles faces a difficult position at the castle: his father, Baron Falworth, is in exile, unjustly accused of treason, and Myles's patron and kinsman, the powerful Earl of Mackworth, can show him no open favor. Not understanding that the Earl is in a delicate position for harboring the son of an accused traitor, Myles denounces the Earl for cowardice in not declaring the Baron's innocence before the King. Feeling isolated and friendless, Myles is quick to imagine slights and often fights before thinking. He leads a rebellion among the younger boys against the senior bachelors, organizes a secret club based on romantic Arthurian notions of honor and chivalry, and engages in serious and bloody battles with his bitter rival, Walter Blunt. In addition, Myles foolishly trespasses in the ladies' garden to visit the Earl's daughter and his ward, the Lady Alice, an infraction of castle rules few others have dared.

Though hotheaded and often heedless, Myles remains ever honorable, admirable, and attractive. He counters boyish recklessness and excesses with skill, bravery, and dedication to his tasks, earning the regard of the Earl, who champions him secretly, eventually arranging for Myles's knighting by the King himself. Once Myles has transformed himself into a serious, levelheaded, virtuous knight and has earned the respect of the adult-world, he is able to defeat his family's enemy and regain his good name, titles, and possessions. He reaches his full maturity when he marries Lady Alice and returns to his estates to live "rich and happy and honored and beloved after all his hard and noble fighting."

Other central characters in the novel's boy-world include Myles's first and truest friend, Francis Gascoyne, and Myles's foe, Walter Blunt. Francis shows little of Myles's ambition, initiative, or prowess, but he remains good-hearted and ever faithful. An ordinary boy, Francis is an engaging confidant and supporter for Myles and at times serves as a refining influence on Myles's "ruder and more uncouth character." Walter Blunt, on the other hand, proves a bitter foe for Myles. A treacherous bully, Blunt forces the younger boys to perform menial tasks for him and his fellow bachelors. When Myles first resists his tyranny, Blunt almost brains him with a heavy wooden clog after the other bachelors gang up on Myles and hold him down. The more Myles resists Blunt, the more dangerous Blunt becomes. In a one-on-one unarmed fight, for example, Blunt almost stabs Myles with a knife he has concealed. On other occasions, he plots to slit Myles's ears, a dishonorable punishment reserved for thieves and poachers, and tries to stone Myles and his allies. Finally, Myles accepts Blunt's challenge to a duel with broadswords, defeating Blunt after a bloody fight.

Three characters in the novel serve as direct emissaries between the boy-world and the adult realm. Diccon Bowman, an old family retainer, trains Myles in the use of the various weapons a knight must wield. Diccon also trains Myles in wrestling, a peasant skill that serves him well in his later combat with Blunt. Diccon's grandfatherly influence on Myles ends when he takes his young charge to Devlen Castle. There Myles falls under the influence of Sir James Lee, a curmudgeonly old soldier in charge of training the squires and bachelors. Sir James appears cold and stern and is known for his bitter temper, but it is also he who reports Myles's escapades to an amused Earl and who affectionately claims Myles as his son after the younger man's first successful tilt as a knight. The third mentor in Myles's life is Lord George Beaumont, the Earl's younger brother. A soldier of fortune, Lord George puts the finishing touches on Myles's evolution, providing him with appropriate dress and introducing him to an aristocratic set of young men, including the madcap Prince of Wales, eventually Henry V. Myles becomes the Prince's favorite. These three tutors are instrumental in Myles's move from boyhood to full maturation.

The characters belonging strictly to the adult-world are remote and inscrutable for much of the novel. The narrative's conclusion reveals how significant a role they play behind the scenes. The Earl of Mack-worth is a determining force in Myles's life, though to all appearances he takes no notice of the boy at all. Formidable and forbidding, the Earl has a thin face, deep-set eyes, bushy eyebrows, a hawk nose, and an iron-gray beard. When Myles first sues for acceptance at Devlen Castle, the Earl pretends that it is a nuisance to be bedeviled by such poor suppliants. Though Myles denounces the Earl for not championing his father, the Earl is his secret friend, acting behind the scenes to provide him with appropriate training and equipment. Through adroit political maneuvering, Mackworth arranges for the King himself to knight Myles and arranges for Myles to defeat his family's enemy, the powerful Earl of Alban. Mackworth's championing of Myles is not entirely disinterested, however, for Alban is a dangerous po-litical rival and one of Henry IV's favorites. Alban proves a treacherous foe indeed, attempting to blind and maim Myles in the same underhanded way that he blinded Myles's father in an earlier tournament. Although Mackworth is more astute than Francis Gascoyne could ever be, a similarity exists in the friendships they both offer Myles. The Earl of Alban correlates directly with Blunt in that he is as vicious as Blunt shows every promise of becoming. These parallels between Myles's boyhood alliances and foes and those of his early adulthood provide an effective symmetry between the boy-world and the adult realm in the novel.

This dialectic between the adolescent and adult worlds is characteristic of maturation narratives such as Men of Iron. The successful negotiation of the maturation process is understandably a central thematic concern of many novels for young people. In Men of Iron, Pyle presents childhood and adolescence as periods fraught with trials, troubles, and dilemmas but relieved by joy and optimism. Like most maturation novels, it promises its youthful readers that if they confront their trials and difficulties with honesty, courage, and resourcefulness, they can be assured of winning kindly helpers and a secure place in the adult world.

Another major theme in the novel involves the necessity of fighting against oppression. Myles fights against the tyranny of Walter Blunt and the senior boys, even when the fight is difficult and dangerous. When Myles grows up and engages in a life-and-death struggle with the Earl of Alban, his spiritual advisor assures him that often bloodshed is necessary to achieve justice. The novel thus addresses the difficult theme of the place of war and violence in the world, and admits their necessity when no other way to right serious wrongs exists.

Literary Qualities

Men of Iron offers an engrossing plot predicated on two formulas familiar in literature for young people. Roughly the first half of the novel features a "school story," the adventures of a young boy moving from the security of home into an initially alien environment to acquire an education. This part of the novel—modeled on Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), the best seller by Thomas Hughes that established the genre—features the trials and occasional joys of a central character who must establish his position in his peers' social order as well as accommodate the demands placed on him by adults. The tensions within and between the two worlds of peers and adults provide the central plot interest of the school story, producing in Men of Iron a plot replete with exciting, fast-paced action and adventure as well as subtle psychological insight into character and motive.

The plot of Men of Iron unfolds in an appropriate and compelling sequence. The first section of the novel provides the bits and pieces of the eight-year-old Myles's fragmented and impressionistic recollections of his early boyhood. The second section details Myles's arrival at Devlen Castle and his initial weeks there, during which he must fight for a place in the social hierarchy of the boy-world. The transition from boyhood to reckless adolescence concerns the third section of the plot, and the fourth section portrays Myles's gradual passage from adolescence to full manhood. Pyle handles the maturation of his central character with subtlety and convincing psychological accuracy, making for an absorbing and highly readable plot. Although the novel chronicles the maturation of one particular boy, it is clearly meant to reflect the rewards and difficulties faced by all engaged in the passage from childhood to adulthood.

The novel also provides a reliable reconstruction of castle life in Henry IV's fifteenth-century England. The precisely drawn, unromanticized portrait of the late Middle Ages includes historical information about medieval knighthood and ceremony. In addition, the novel provides some insight into the political intrigue surrounding the dethroning of Richard II and the accession of Henry IV, and briefly chronicles the English ventures into France during this period, as well as the tensions between Henry IV and his son, the Prince of Wales.

Pyle tells his story in a cordial, engaging authorial voice, beautifully crafted sentences, and a highly readable style. Although some of his phrasing is deliberately archaic so as to capture the sound, texture, and tone of fifteenth-century English, these archaisms present only minor difficulties for the modern reader. Pyle's own black-and-white illustrations for the volume aid the reader in envisioning medieval costume, setting, and events.

Social Sensitivity

Written one hundred years ago, Men of Iron is clearly a "boy's novel," conceived as such and pointedly addressing this audience. Few women appear in the novel, except for Myles's mother, who weeps at his departure for Devlen Castle, and the Ladies Anne and Alice, who spend their lives sequestered in the Earl of Mackworth's private quarters, hungering for tales of bold adventure told them by Myles when he steals into their privy garden. Men of Iron is hardly an exemplar of gender-balancing in audience appeal or in narrative concerns, but readers must remember that the book depicts a time when views regarding the position and occupation of women were narrow indeed.

The violence in the novel is another issue of potential concern. Myles's conflict with Walter Blunt is no boyish skirmish: Blunt attempts to kill Myles with a wooden clog, a dagger, stones, and a broadsword. Pyle declines to detail the broadsword duel between Myles and Blunt, indicating that "fisticuffs of nowadays are brutal and debasing enough, but a fight with a sharp-edged broadsword was not only brutal and debasing, but cruel and bloody as well." As an adult, Myles agonizes over his bloody battle with the Earl of Alban, consulting Prior Edward over the ethics of killing an enemy in fair fight. The priest hesitantly advises him, both before and after the duel, that war and bloodshed, though cruel and ever to be avoided, are apparently placed in the world by God as an occasional means of bringing forth good from evil. Pyle's treatment of violence is sensitive and deliberate, and he never includes violence gratuitously.

THE STORY OF KING ARTHUR AND HIS KNIGHTS (1903)

Frederick R. Karl (essay date 1986)

SOURCE: Karl, Frederick R. "Afterword." In The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, pp. 383-93. New York, N.Y.: Signet Classic, 1986.

[In the following afterword to Pyle's The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, Karl denotes how Pyle recontextualized the familiar legend of King Arthur to create a necessary and appropriate hero for the times in which he wrote.]

Howard Pyle's version of the King Arthur legend [The Story of King Arthur and His Knights ] is testimony to its enduring qualities as a story that can fascinate the reader of any era. Beneath all the epical and ornate trappings medieval authors loaded on King Arthur and his entourage is the story itself; and whatever spiritual or mystical meaning more recent writers gave to it—for example, Tennyson and William Morris in the previous century—what we recall in its retelling are the story elements. And Pyle was, after all, an American contemporary of Tennyson and Morris and those other middle-to-late Victorians, for whom narrative, plot, and story counted as much as moral weight.

The exact derivation of King Arthur is difficult to determine. Like many of the episodes developed around him, he is shrouded, veiled, disguised. What is curious, however, is that in the earliest references to what may have been Arthur, in the Battle of Badon, mentioned in 540, he is associated with Jesus Christ. In that reference, in which he is unnamed but fits the Arthur figure, he carries the cross on his shoulders. A few years after that, in 600, the Welsh poem Gododdin refers to a mightly warrior, and Arthur begins to be set as the most able of the mighty. We are, of course, deep into legend or myth-making; but that association with Jesus will remain in most versions, not the least in Pyle's. By 800, Nennius, the Welsh writer and alleged author of Historia Britonum, moves the Arthurian legend along, describing him as a Celtic warrior who fought twelve triumphant battles against Saxon invaders. By this time, Arthur was becoming fixed in legend and myth as a great king, a mighty warrior, and a figure somehow connected with the founder of Christianity. His background may have been Welsh or Irish, even Cornish; all three regions often blend into creating him.

By 1135, the time of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia, Arthur was a full-blown figure who had emerged from the mists of pre-history into history. Geoffrey's Historia, one of the most important of early medieval documents, chronicles the kings of Britain; Shakespeare would draw heavily on it for his history plays almost five hundred years later. In his history, Geoffrey creates a coherent picture of Arthur as a national hero who became the conqueror of what was then known as Western Europe. His qualities as a great warrior are stressed, as are his powers as a leader of men wielding considerable moral suasion. The early versions of a legend are translated into a historical figure who stands, somehow, for the best Britain can offer: the kind of legend-making that nearly every country encourages in order to provide heroes for its young people and to suggest moral coherence at the top, which can then sift down to the populace.

Wace's Roman de Brut (drawing on Geoffrey of Mon-mouth) in 1155, the Brut of Layamon (1200), and, most of all, Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval (in the latter twelfth century) shaped the Arthur story toward the form we know it in today. All three emphasized the legendary features, while incorporating them into a medieval court with chivalric ideals. The associa-tion of Arthur with chivalry begins at this time—Arthur not only as a national hero, but as the leader of a group of knights at court, the Camelot and earthly paradise ideal. Further, Chrétien introduced the earliest extant version of the quest for the Holy Grail. With this, we have an unmistakable infusion of Christian tradition into Arthur's deeds and into medieval romance, into court life itself. We see, here in the twelfth century, the merging of combined legend, history, and Christian morality tale. The Grail story, of considerable interest in itself, demonstrates how Christian tales—the Grail as the chalice of the Last Supper—were assimilated into Irish myths and even occult practices. In this version of the tale, only the purest of the knights—in some retellings Parsifal, in others Galahad—could attempt to retrieve it. By regaining it, the holy knight demonstrated that the Arthurian court went well beyond its secular function to save the state—that it served a divine function as well as being the earthly manifestation of God's ultimate will. With these developments, the Arthurian legend becomes very textured, but the story line remains clear, almost transparent.

On the continent, an offshoot of the Arthurian story was developed in the Tristram and Isolde episode. This was the work of two German poets, Wolfram Von Eschenbach and Gottfried Von Strassburg, who left the main body of Arthurian material behind in order to pursue this particular aspect. It is a curious development in that the Tristram and Isolde episode reveals how deeply flawed was the Arthurian court and how disruptive were incidents like Tristram's obsession with Isolde when she was engaged to marry King Mark, his uncle. Their so-called fatal love—in most versions, they are both dead at the conclusion of their passion—was representative of several other fatal loves at the court which ultimately undermined the ethical and moral ideals on which Arthur had shaped the Round Table. It also demonstrated how the story was evolving into the need to find someone, Parsifal or Galahad, to redeem the original ideal.

In many respects, as we see the Arthurian legend develop, the court is identified with an earthly paradise; and the heroic national hero, Arthur, is perceived as the one who redeems for mankind the originally lost Eden. This new Eden is called Camelot, and many of us can recall how Camelot—with a celebrated musical play of that name in mind in the 1960s—was linked to President John F. Kennedy and his "court." The idea, apparently, was to associate the legendary idea of an earthly Eden with the new administration and to see in the young president a national hero on the lines of Arthur. Of course, the entire parallel, in which legend is turned to political ends, is misplaced, since Arthur originally premised his courtly chivalric ideal on fidelity, and the Kennedy circle was riven from top to bottom with marital and other infidelities. Yet even here the enduring nature of the legend is visible, although this was the last time to date that the Camelot designation was attempted politically.

Returning to medieval England: the Arthur story grew and fed each new generation. We see versions of it appearing successively in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (in the later fourteenth century), one of the masterpieces of chivalric romance. In that version of the tale, the centerpiece is not the court itself, but an individual knight. We are now moving away from legend and religious or moral tale toward something like the pre-novel, although the emphasis remains on values that uphold the ideals of chastity, obedience, devotion to a lady: the basic Christian ingredients of knighthood. Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, which originated in the later fifteenth century and was probably written in prison, brought the pieces together. Malory wrote what he called The Book of King Arthur and His Noble Knights of the Round Table; the title of Morte d'Arthur was given by William Caxton, who printed the work in 1485. It is made up of eight distinct romances, which rarely touch, and these tales became the basis for most Arthurian narratives.

If we slip to the nineteenth century, when Pyle entered the Arthurian world as both teller and illustrator, we see a resurgence of interest in the king and his court. The most famous example is, of course, Tennyson, with his Idylls of the King, which in the writing and ordering occupied him for fifty-five years—from his youth in 1833 into his old age. But Tennyson was not the only Victorian possessed by Arthur—we find Swinburne, William Morris, and in America a little later, Edwin Arlington Robinson. The latter's Tristram, in 1928, in fact, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The impetus for this outburst of Arthurian fervor, which also gripped Pyle—his book was published in 1903—was surely Tennyson; and the question that arises is why at this time Arthur, his court, his legendary qualities, and chivalric romance itself should have become so important for several major poets as well as for Pyle, an illustrator and neither a novelist nor a poet.

In earlier periods, Arthur represented moral and ethical ideals which helped define the larger culture. The major development of the Arthurian story takes place, after all, during an intensely religious age, when Arthur and his exploits could be fitted into a divine plan. Despite the rich trappings of his court and its obvious fondness for luxury, a religious ideal held the group together. The knight's devotion to his lady—in theory, if not always in practice—was suggestive of the worship of Mary, the mother of Jesus; and the knight himself was a knight of the church, so to speak—an emissary of God in his earthly guise. However, as the story of Arthur passed into the nineteenth century, the spiritual qualities of the original story were no longer reflected in the workings of the society. Victorian England, from which the American Pyle derived many of his values, was a secular society, despite the lip service it paid to matters of faith and to organized religion. Tennyson himself had spoken in In Memoriam, his great interpretive elegy, of the necessity of faith as a dam to hold back a godless, mechanistic society. The Arthurian ideal of court, knights, and national hero was now to be offered as a bulwark against a society which in its practices seemed to sneer at everything Arthur represented.

Tennyson is the key figure here, for other Arthurians as well as for Pyle. Tennyson dedicated the Idylls to the memory of Prince Albert, Victoria's husband and Prince Consort who had died in 1861, after four of the idylls had appeared. Albert was clearly associated with Arthur in Tennyson's mind, and the court around Victoria in some way with Camelot. The series of stories that eventually made up the Idylls suggested a high moral function and demonstrated that Arthur, updated, could serve as the basis for a national epic of moral and ethical values. So palpable was the linkage to the contemporary scene that Swinburne, in 1872, called Tennyson's work "The Morte d'Albert, or Idylls of the Prince Consort." While Albert would be less meaningful to Pyle's American audience than to Tennyson's English readers, nevertheless the American illustrator used the story for one moral lesson after another; and the relationship to national political and social issues is also indirectly present.

Pyle's retelling of some of the tales of course stresses the role of Arthur. Fully half of the book is taken up with the coming of Arthur, his development, and the establishment of the Round Table. In some respects, Pyle uses that first half as a kind of Bildungsroman, the popular nineteenth-century literary form concerned with the training, formation, or development of a young person, usually a young man, in which the author presents him in his infancy and leaves him as he finds his social niche. The genre, whether in David Copperfield in England or Huckleberry Finn in America, was very appealing because it gave the author a frame of reference for both individual and social values. It was an inclusive form and allowed for commentary on moral and ethical questions as well as on those of survival: testing discipline, obedience, and duty. Pyle is clearly writing in this tradition, inasmuch as the first half is the most effective part of his book—the one that most clearly engages the reader.

Pyle is also working to create a national hero, someone who can become the basis of a national epic—what Tennyson had also been doing. For Pyle, writing in America in the early twentieth century, that emerging national hero would be Theodore Roosevelt, the hero of the Spanish-American War and president of the United States from 1901 on. But Pyle's purpose goes even further than the vaunting of an individual: he is defining leadership, duty, ethical values, and here the Arthurian legend serves well. In the received legend, Arthur remains noble and ethical even as the Round Table that he created and presided over begins to disintegrate around him. Pyle tells of one such tale in which Morgana le Fay uses beautiful Vivien as a mode of seducing Merlin and, through that, acquiring power over Arthur, her half-brother—in the process even seeking the means to have him killed. But the divisions in the Round Table went further, for its ideal paradoxically undermined its very basis. The question is whether any institution that has such noble purposes and hopes of perfection can be realistic and practical given the vagaries of human motives and needs. Arthur's conception of a society of the future—a utopia of sorts—has been seriously faulted by generations of readers for failing to take into account emotional needs that fall outside the ideal. Certainly, one area in which Tennyson and Pyle see failure is that which involves sex and sexual attraction.

Pyle was a good American Victorian in that he drew a sharp line in women between what Freud would himself call the "whore" and the "madonna," the vamp and the virgin. In the episodes that Pyle chooses to relate, of the many he could have told, nearly every male-female relationship involves a scheming woman. The most notorious of these is, of course, that of Sir Pellias and his humiliating obsession with Lady Ettard; but more central to the overall pattern is Vivien's seduction of Merlin and, behind that, Morgana le Fay conspiring against Arthur. Some of these women, in their presentation here, are cut from the same mold as Shakespeare's Goneril and Regan; and the value system on which they are based has evolved from the idea of woman as Eve: troublesome, seductive, corruptive. The Victorian ambiguity toward the female, at least in this aspect, is clearly present.

Even in the one story that Pyle does not develop here, that of Arthur and his Lady Guinevere, we do not see the outcome of their marriage. We observe them only in the blush of their relationship, although Guinevere is beginning to show some of the imperiousness and self-serving quality that will later create such divisiveness. One of the tragic events in the Arthur legend is, of course, Guinevere's illicit affair with Sir Lancelot of the Lake, Arthur's most trustworthy knight. His passion for the queen along with his guilt over broken loyalty to his sire creates a situation which is intolerable for the stability of the Round Table. Paralleling that illicit affair is Tristram's with Isolde, the intended of his uncle, Mark. Such deviations from ethical and moral behavior create the rents in the Table and begin its disintegration; but Pyle does not touch upon them here.

We observe, then, that his purpose—since this is a book aimed at young people—is to extract certain dimensions of the Arthur legend: its high ideals of knighthood, involving service and duty; its chivalric aspects, especially in its situating woman on a pedestal as a virgin queen or, opposite to that, as vamp and seducer; its homage to loyalty, honor, courage—perhaps before all else; its emphasis on a strong, fearless leader who controls the stability of the group; and, finally, the need to use, not misuse, the wisdom given one, for on that depends the welfare not only of the individual but of the entire society. Pyle has, clearly, turned the Arthurian legend into a tale for his times, for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, when the values of the Gilded Age and the Robber Barons were directly antithetical to every ideal supported by Arthur and his knights. In the morass of corruption, greed, and self-seeking that made up this period of historical America, a leader was needed; and for many, Teddy Roosevelt, with his bluster, muscularity, and big stick, would be the man to clean out the Augean stables. The parallel to Arthur, while not made directly, is there: only a "pure" leader embracing the Christian ethic can transform a corrupt, chaotic situation into a working society.

Given these assumptions, it is curious Pyle gives us so little sense of the society beyond the knights themselves. We have few glimpses of peasants, serfs, or craftsmen, those backup or supportive elements that had to be available in order for the knights and their entourages to function. Horses need shoes; food has to be grown, distributed, cooked; clothes have to be fitted from patterns; the material itself must be selected; someone must sew it; and so on. All of these activities for such large numbers of knights, ladies, and serving people would have required a small army of backup people. In addition to their absence, we also note the absence of any other nonknight life, such as people who form themselves into villages or even into small farming communities. There is no dimensionality, no backgrounding; and thus there is little novelistic sense. None of this is offered as a criticism of Pyle, for it is a feature of the Arthurian tale: the knights and their ladies become a kind of self-enclosed society in virtually every version from Malory through Tennyson and Pyle. But what we can question is why Pyle—as an American outside the main tradition of Arthurian tellers—was not more novelistic. That is, why did he eschew those details of background and people which would have made Arthur and his Table into novel, not into fairy tale?

The reason for his omission of such elements can be found, possibly, in the kind of tale he wanted to tell. That it was for young people is not a sufficient explanation, since novelistic features would be of interest to them. First of all, he needed to create a magical frame of reference—the tale in his hands is saturated with details that defy realistic portrayal. Magic meets us at every turn, and, if not magic, then some supranatural effect. Pyle works that line exhaustively: superstition, mystical events, magic potions, of course, but also the magic sword, Excalibur, and its sheath, and the wondrous castle created by Merlin. In the central Arthur segment, the wizard Merlin is essential—without him, Arthur could not survive; and Merlin takes on the quality of a half-pagan deity, one of those anthropomorphical God figures we associate with Homeric epic. Within such a frame of reference, in which Arthur is not the creation of a rational or probable society, with Merlin the wizard as a central architect, the form called for a nonrealistic portrayal: a society which functioned as a return to an earthly paradise. The unreality of it, the very magic of it, would have been deflated by "real" people, such as the backup forces that would have sustained this large group.

Further, Pyle intended this tale to be accompanied by illustrations, and the presence of functional illustrations throws the story into another dimension: it is not just a "story"; it is an illustrated story, and we must take that into account. The illustrations owe a good deal to a certain style that derived from Pre-Raphaelite painting, a mid-nineteenth-century English movement in which detail of observation and a certain unworldly or unreal aspect dominate. The quality of the Pyle illustrations, and the tradition from which they derive, blended two seemingly irreconcilable qualities: emphasis on detail and creation of a mysterious, atmospheric sense—an unrealistic dimension.

This brings us to a third point, Pyle's insistence on beauty. The unreality of the illustrations helps us to observe that everyone was almost flawless. Physical beauty abounds, and perhaps that is another reason why Pyle omitted the service people. Their ordinary appearance or physical unevenness would have diverted us from the beauty of the mortals moving through the tale. Physical beauty here is stressed as a manifest of spiritual beauty; but wherever ugliness does exist, it lives deep within people's hearts and souls, festering behind the lovely exterior. All the women are dazzling, the men handsome, comely, spirited, the horses magnificent creatures, the pavilions architecturally striking, the furnishings as brilliant as the people using them, the food ambrosial, the wine a nectar of the gods. All of this helps support the sense of the ideal—this is the way it would be if we could only return to the earthly paradise. The Eden we hold in our memories is like this, a Golden Age in the mists of history. All that excludes us is our inability to reach for such ideals, our reluctance to hold to the ethical and moral issues that would return us there in the face of a corruptive and deceitful society.

This is what Pyle is striving for, and even his utilization of an artificial medieval-Victorian vocabulary is an effort to give that other-worldly dimension to his tale. That deliberately archaic mode, not at all the American English of the early twentieth century, is the Art Deco language of an earthly Eden held in memory. We can see why Pyle thrust off most other considerations in pursuing only the ideal. Sir Galahad's pursuit of the Holy Grail, a tale Pyle does not include here, was the centerpiece of this idealistic venture, the realization of a spiritual ideal as man rises from the bestiality of his ordinary impulses into a higher zone. Galahad's mission, like Arthur's earlier, is no less than to triumph over the wasteland of human making and extract the Round Table from the morass into which it was beginning to sink.

THE SWAN MAIDEN (1994)

Marcia Hupp (review date January 1995)

SOURCE: Hupp, Marcia. Review of The Swan Maiden, by Howard Pyle, retold by Ellin Greene, illustrated by Robert Sauber. School Library Journal 41, no. 1 (January 1995): 92.

K-Gr. 3—[The Swan Maiden is a] fairy tale that resounds with familiar motifs. The youngest of three princes eludes the enchantment that overcomes his brothers and discovers the thief of the king's golden pears—a beautiful maiden bewitched in the body of a swan. Falling in love at first sight, the prince flies off on her back to confront a three-eyed witch and perform three "impossible" tasks (with the maiden's help), releasing her from the spell. Greene's retelling varies only minimally from the original. However, Sauber's paintings have a cigar-box sentimentality, are murky in color, awkward in form, and wanting in imagination. Where Pyle's maiden sits powerfully astride the pear tree's trunk, her white gown billowing around her, Sauber's beams giddily down from the tree top, looking for all the world like a Victorian saloon painting. Text and illustrations neither add nor pay homage to Pyle's version. As he was, indeed, "one of America's foremost writers and illustrators for children," and as the tale is still available in The Wonder Clock (Peter Smith, 1966), this current interpretation seems misguided and superfluous.

BEARSKIN (1997)

Susan Pine (review date August 1997)

SOURCE: Pine, Susan. Review of Bearskin, by Howard Pyle, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman. School Library Journal 43, no. 8 (August 1997): 139.

K-Gr. 4—With its fairy-tale, biblical, and mythological motifs. Pyle's Bearskin from The Wonder Clock is a classic. His language is rich and descriptive and his story full of humor and goodness rewarded. When a wise man foretells that the miller's son will marry the king's daughter, the king orders his chief forester to kill the miller's baby. The forester's wife has him substitute the heart of a rabbit as proof of the murder and then sets the baby adrift in a basket. A bear, bereft from the death of her cubs, raises him on her rich milk. The boy grows up, slays a three-headed dragon, outwits the king's steward, and marries the princess (all with the help of the bear). Hyman's richly detailed paintings, in India ink and acrylics, set the story in its medieval world and feature a cast of multicultural characters. They expand and play with the tongue-in-check mood of the text. One illustration shows the hero, with the devil-may-care attitude of one who is young and self-assured, and the stern-faced she-bear, clutching two fish in her paws, ever the mother-provider. The princess is clever and beautiful with a truly magnificent mane of hair. The paintings are bordered and adorned with folkloric motifs. A choice selection for reading aloud and storytelling.

Ann A. Flowers (review date September-October 1997)

SOURCE: Flowers, Ann A. Review of Bearskin, by Howard Pyle, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman. Horn Book Magazine 73, no. 5 (September-October 1997): 588.

Bearskin, the first story in Howard Pyle's book of literary fairy tales, The Wonder Clock, is an agreeable tale incorporating several familiar mythic and folkloric elements. As the result of a wise man's prediction that a miner's baby will marry the princess, her father the king orders the baby's death, but the child is set adrift in a basket by a compassionate huntsman. Found and nurtured by a she-bear, Bearskin grows to be immensely brave and strong. He rescues his princess from a dragon and manages, by guile, to marry her. Howard Pyle was one of the greatest and most famous of nineteenth-century American children's illustrators, but his illustrations for Bearskin, though striking, are few and rather stilted. Hyman's many lively paintings not only add a sense of the progression of the tale and provide remarkably clear characterization but also seem to marry Pyle's mannered and rather archaic literary style to a more contemporary context. Hyman has chosen to present her characters multi-ethnically—Bearskin himself is clearly of Asian origin, the princess has a black mother and a white father, and even the she-bear has a very human aspect. Although this could have seemed like p.c. overload, the world we are shown is a place of such harmony and unity that anyone would be happy to dwell in it.

Additional coverage of Pyle's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 57; Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vols. 2, 4; Children's Literature Review, Vol. 22; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 109, 137; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 42, 188; Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series, Vol. 13; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, Eds. 1, 2; St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers; Something about the Author, Vols. 16, 100; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 81; and Writers for Children.

FURTHER READING

Criticism

Elzea, Rowland. "Introduction." In Howard Pyle, pp. 1-5. Toronto, Canada: Peacock Press-Bantam Book, 1975.

Relates Pyle's legacy as illustrator, writer, and educator.

May, Jill P. "Howard Pyle's The Story of King Arthur and His Knights: A Backwards Look at Chivalry." In Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children's Literature, Volume Two: Fairy Tales, Fables, Myths, Legends, and Poetry, edited by Perry Nodelman, pp. 221-28. West Lafayette, Ind.: ChLA Publishers, 1987.

Analysis of the role of chivalry in The Story of King Arthur and His Knights.

Nesbitt, Elizabeth. "A New Era: Howard Pyle." In A Critical History of Children's Literature, edited by Cornelia Meigs, pp. 299-312. New York, N.Y.: Macmillan Company, 1953.

Offers an overview of Pyle's contribution to American illustration.

Pitz, Henry C. The Brandywine Tradition. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969, 252 p.

Book-length examination of the history and legacy of Pyle's Brandywine School.

Powell, Kirsten H. "Cowboy Knights and Prairie Madonnas: American Illustrations of the Plains and Pre-Raphaelite Art." Great Plains Quarterly 5, no. 1 (winter 1985): 39-52.

Reviews the American interpretation of Western imagery, including Pyle's role in the application of Pre-Raphaelite techniques to the Western genre.