The American Spirit in Literature, by Bliss Perry, presented by Project
Gutenberg
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost
no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The American Spirit in Literature, A Chronicle of Great
Interpreters, Volume 34 in The Chronicles Of America Series
Author: Bliss Perry
Editor: Allen Johnson
Release Date:
January 15, 2009 [EBook #3410]
Last Updated: February 7, 2013
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
Produced by The James J. Kelly Library of St. Gregory's University, Alev
Akman, David Widger, and Robert Homa.
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN
LITERATURE ***
i
The American Spirit in Literature
By Bliss Perry
A Chronicle of Great Interpreters
Volume 34 of the
Chronicles of America Series
∴
Allen Johnson, Editor
Assistant Editors
Gerhard R. Lomer
Charles W. Jefferys
Abraham Lincoln Edition
New Haven: Yale University Press
Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.
London: Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
1918
ii
Copyright, 1918
by Yale University Press
iii
CONTENTS
1
THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE
∴
The Pioneers
The United States of America has been from the
beginning in a perpetual change. The physical and mental restlessness of
the American and the temporary nature of many of his arrangements are
largely due to the experimental character of the exploration and
development of this continent. The new energies released by the settlement
of the colonies were indeed guided by stern determination, wise
forethought, and inventive skill; but no one has ever really known the
outcome of the experiment. It is a story of faith, of
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to
be.
2An
Alexander Hamilton may urge with passionate force the adoption of the
Constitution, without any firm conviction as to its permanence. The most
clear-sighted American of the Civil War period recognized this element of
uncertainty in our American adventure when he declared:﹃We are now
testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated,
can long endure.﹄More than fifty years have passed since that war
reaffirmed the binding force of the Constitution and apparently sealed the
perpetuity of the Union. Yet the gigantic economic and social changes now
in progress are serving to show that the United States has its full share
of the anxieties which beset all human institutions in this daily altering
world.
"We are but strangers in an inn, but passengers in a ship," said Roger
Williams. This sense of the transiency of human effort, the perishable
nature of human institutions, was quick in the consciousness of the
gentleman adventurers and sober Puritan citizens who emigrated from
England to the New World. It had been a familiar note in the poetry of
that Elizabethan period which had followed with such breathless interest
the exploration of America. It was a conception which could be shared
alike by a saint like John Cotton or a 3soldier of fortune like John Smith.
Men are tent-dwellers. Today they settle here, and tomorrow they have
struck camp and are gone. We are strangers and sojourners, as all our
fathers were.
This instinct of the camper has stamped itself upon American life and
thought. Venturesomeness, physical and moral daring, resourcefulness in
emergencies, indifference to negligible details, wastefulness of
materials, boundless hope and confidence in the morrow, are
characteristics of the American. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say
that the "good American" has been he who has most resembled a good camper.
He has had robust health—unless or until he has abused it,—a
tolerant disposition, and an ability to apply his fingers or his brain to
many unrelated and unexpected tasks. He is disposed to blaze his own
trail. He has a touch of prodigality, and, withal, a knack of keeping his
tent or his affairs in better order than they seem. Above all, he has been
ever ready to break camp when he feels the impulse to wander. He likes to
be "foot-loose." If he does not build his roads as solidly as the Roman
roads were built, nor his houses like the English houses, it is because he
feels that he is here today and gone tomorrow. If he has squandered the
physical 4
resources of his neighborhood, cutting the forests recklessly, exhausting
the soil, surrendering water power and minerals into a few far-clutching
fingers, he has done it because he expects, like Voltaire's Signor
Pococurante, "to have a new garden tomorrow, built on a nobler plan." When
New York State grew too crowded for Cooper's Leather-Stocking, he
shouldered his pack, whistled to his dog, glanced at the sun, and struck a
bee-line for the Mississippi. Nothing could be more typical of the first
three hundred years of American history.
The traits of the pioneer have thus been the characteristic traits of the
American in action. The memories of successive generations have tended to
stress these qualities to the neglect of others. Everyone who has enjoyed
the free life of the woods will confess that his own judgment upon his
casual summer associates turns, quite naturally and almost exclusively,
upon their characteristics as woodsmen. Out of the woods, these gentlemen
may be more or less admirable divines, pedants, men of affairs; but the
verdict of their companions in the forest is based chiefly upon the single
question of their adaptability to the environment of the camp. Are they
quick of eye and foot, skillful with rod and gun, cheerful on rainy days,
5ready to
do a little more than their share of drudgery? If so, memory holds them.
Some such unconscious selection as this has been at work in the
classification of our representative men. The building of the nation and
the literary expression of its purpose and ideals are tasks which have
called forth the strength of a great variety of individuals. Some of these
men have proved to be peculiarly fitted for a specific service,
irrespective of the question of their general intellectual powers, or
their rank as judged by the standard of European performance in the same
field. Thus the battle of New Orleans, in European eyes a mere bit of
frontier fighting, made Andrew Jackson a "hero" as indubitably as if he
had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. It gave him the Presidency.
The analogy holds in literature. Certain expressions of American sentiment
or conviction have served to summarize or to clarify the spirit of the
nation. The authors of these productions have frequently won the
recognition and affection of their contemporaries by means of prose and
verse quite unsuited to sustain the test of severe critical standards.
Neither Longfellow's Excelsior nor Poe's Bells nor
Whittier's Maud Muller 6is among the best poems of the three writers in
question, yet there was something in each of these productions which
caught the fancy of a whole American generation. It expressed one phase of
the national mind in a given historical period.
The historian of literature is bound to take account of this question of
literary vogue, as it is highly significant of the temper of successive
generations in any country. But it is of peculiar interest to the student
of the literature produced in the United States. Is this literature
"American," or is it "English literature in America," as Professor Wendell
and other scholars have preferred to call it? I should be one of the last
to minimize the enormous influence of England upon the mind and the
writing of all the English-speaking countries of the globe. Yet it will be
one of the purposes of the present book to indicate the existence here,
even in colonial times, of a point of view differing from that of the
mother country, and destined to differ increasingly with the lapse of
time. Since the formation of our Federal Union, in particular, the books
produced in the United States have tended to exhibit certain
characteristics which differentiate them from the books produced in other
English-speaking countries. We 7must beware, of course, of what the late Charles
Francis Adams once called the "filiopietistic" fallacy. The "American"
qualities of our literature must be judged in connection with its
conformity to universal standards of excellence. Tested by any universal
standard, The Scarlet Letter is a notable romance. It has won a
secure place among the literature written by men of English blood and
speech. Yet to overlook the peculiarly local or provincial characteristics
of this remarkable story is to miss the secret of its inspiration. It
could have been written only by a New Englander, in the atmosphere of a
certain epoch.
Our task, then, in this rapid review of the chief interpreters of the
American spirit in literature, is a twofold one. We are primarily
concerned with a procession of men, each of whom is interesting as an
individual and as a writer. But we cannot watch the individuals long
without perceiving the general direction of their march, the ideas that
animate them, the common hopes and loyalties that make up the life of
their spirit. To become aware of these general tendencies is to understand
the "American" note in our national writing.
Our historians have taught us that the history of the United States is an
evolution towards political 8unity. The separatist, particularist movements
are gradually thrust to one side. In literary history, likewise, we best
remember those authors who fall into line with what we now perceive to
have been the course of our literary development. The erratic men and
women, the "sports" of the great experiment, are ultimately neglected by
the critics, unless, like the leaders of political insurrections, those
writing men and women have raised a notable standard of revolt. No doubt
the apparently unique literary specimens, if clearly understood in their
origins and surroundings, would be found rooted in the general laws of
literary evolution. But these laws are not easy to codify and we must
avoid the temptation to discover, in any particular period, more of unity
than there actually was. And we must always remember that there will be
beautiful prose and verse unrelated to the main national tendencies save
as "the literature of escape." We owe this lesson to the genius of Edgar
Allan Poe.
Let us test these principles by applying them to the earliest colonists.
The first book written on the soil of what is now the United States was
Captain John Smith's True Relation of the planting of the Virginia
colony in 1607. It was published in 9London in 1608. The Captain was a typical
Elizabethan adventurer, with a gift, like so many of his class, for
picturesque narrative. In what sense, if at all, may his writings on
American topics be classified as "American" literary productions? It is
clear that his experiences in the New World were only one phase of the
variegated life of this English soldier of fortune. But the American
imagination has persistently claimed him as representing something
peculiarly ours, namely, a kind of pioneer hardihood, resourcefulness,
leadership, which was essential to the exploration and conquest of the
wilderness. Most of Smith's companions were unfitted for the ordeal which
he survived. They perished miserably in the "starving time." But he was of
the stuff from which triumphant immigrants have ever been made, and it is
our recognition of the presence of these qualities in the Captain which
makes us think of his books dealing with America as if they were﹃American
books.﹄There are other narratives by colonists temporarily residing in
the Virginia plantations which gratify our historical curiosity, but which
we no more consider a part of American literature than the books written
by Stevenson, Kipling, and Wells during their casual visits to this
country. 10
But Captain Smith's True Relation impresses us, like Mark Twain's
Roughing It, with being somehow true to type. In each of these
books the possible unveracities in detail are a confirmation of their
representative American character.
In other words, we have unconsciously formulated, in the course of
centuries, a general concept of "the pioneer." Novelists, poets, and
historians have elaborated this conception. Nothing is more inevitable
than our reaching back to the beginning of the seventeenth century and
endeavoring to select, among the thousands of Englishmen who emigrated or
even thought of emigrating to this country, those who possessed the
genuine heart and sinew of the permanent settler.
Oliver Cromwell, for instance, is said to have thought of emigrating
hither in 1637. If he had joined his friends John Cotton and Roger
Williams in New England, who can doubt that the personal characteristics
of "my brave Oliver" would today be identified with the "American"
qualities which we discover in 1637 on the shores of Massachusetts Bay?
And what an American settler Cromwell would have made!
If we turn from physical and moral daring to the 11field of theological and
political speculation, it is easy today to select, among the writings of
the earliest colonists, certain radical utterances which seem to presage
the very temper of the late eighteenth century. Pastor John Robinson's
farewell address to the Pilgrims at Leyden in 1620 contained the famous
words:﹃The Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His holy Word. I
cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the reformed churches, who are
come to a period in religion.… Luther and Calvin were great and
shining lights in their times, yet they penetrated not into the whole
counsel of God.﹄Now John Robinson, like Oliver Cromwell, never set foot
on American soil, but he is identified, none the less, with the spirit of
American liberalism in religion.
In political discussion, the early emergence of that type of independence
familiar to the decade 1765-75 is equally striking. In a letter written in
1818, John Adams insisted that﹃the principles and feelings which produced
the Revolution ought to be traced back for two hundred years, and sought
in the history of the country from the first plantations in America.﹄"I
have always laughed," he declared in an earlier letter, "at the
affectation of representing American independence 12as a novel idea, as a modern
discovery, as a late invention. The idea of it as a possible thing, as a
probable event, nay as a necessary and unavoidable measure, in case Great
Britain should assume an unconstitutional authority over us, has been
familiar to Americans from the first settlement of the country."
There is, then, a predisposition, a latent or potential Americanism which
existed long before the United States came into being. Now that our
political unity has become a fact, the predisposition is certain to be
regarded by our own and by future generations as evidence of a state of
mind which made our separate national life inevitable. Yet to Thomas
Hutchinson, a sound historian and honest man, the last Royal Governor of
Massachusetts, a separate national life seemed in 1770 an unspeakable
error and calamity.
The seventeenth-century colonists were predominantly English, in blood, in
traditions, and in impulses. Whether we look at Virginia or Plymouth or at
the other colonies that were planted in swift succession along the
seaboard, it is clear that we are dealing primarily with men of the
English race. Most of them would have declared, with as much emphasis as
Francis Hopkinson a 13
century later, "We of America are in all respects Englishmen." Professor
Edward Channing thinks that it took a century of exposure to colonial
conditions to force the English in America away from the traditions and
ideals of those who continued to live in the old land. But the student of
literature must keep constantly in mind that these English colonizers
represented no single type of the national character. There were many men
of many minds even within the contracted cabin of the Mayflower.
The "sifted wheat" was by no means all of the same variety.
For Old England was never more torn by divergent thought and subversive
act than in the period between the death of Elizabeth in 1603 and the
Revolution of 1688. In this distracted time who could say what was really
"English"? Was it James the First or Raleigh? Archbishop Laud or John
Cotton? Charles the First or Cromwell? Charles the Second or William Penn?
Was it Churchman, Presbyterian, Independent, Separatist, Quaker? One is
tempted to say that the title of Ben Jonson's comedy Every Man in his
Humour became the standard of action for two whole generations of
Englishmen, and that there is no common denominator for emigrants of such
14varied
pattern as Smith and Sandys of Virginia, Morton of Merrymount, John
Winthrop, "Sir" Christopher Gardiner and Anne Hutchinson of Boston, and
Roger Williams of Providence. They seem as miscellaneous as "Kitchener's
Army."
It is true that we can make certain distinctions. Virginia, as has often
been said, was more like a continuation of English society, while New
England represented a digression from English society. There were then, as
now, "stand-patters" and "progressives." It was the second class who,
while retaining very conservative notions about property, developed a
fearless intellectual radicalism which has written itself into the history
of the United States. But to the student of early American literature all
such generalizations are of limited value. He is dealing with individual
men, not with "Cavalier" or "Roundhead" as such. He has learned from
recent historians to distrust any such facile classification of the first
colonists. He knows by this time that there were aristocrats in
Massachusetts and commoners in Virginia; that the Pilgrims of Plymouth
were more tolerant than the Puritans of Boston, and that Rhode Island was
more tolerant than either. Yet useful as these general statements may be,
the interpreter 15
of men of letters must always go back of the racial type or the social
system to the individual person. He recognizes, as a truth for him, that
theory of creative evolution which holds that in the ascending progress of
the race each thinking person becomes a species by himself.
While something is gained, then, by remembering that the racial instincts
and traditions of the first colonists were overwhelmingly English, and
that their political and ethical views were the product of a turbulent and
distraught time, it is even more important to note how the physical
situation of the colonists affected their intellectual and moral, as well
as their political problems. Among the emigrants from England, as we have
seen, there were great varieties of social status, religious opinion,
individual motive. But at least they all possessed the physical courage
and moral hardihood to risk the dangerous voyage, the fearful hardships,
and the vast uncertainties of the new life. To go out at all, under the
pressure of any motive, was to meet triumphantly a searching test. It was
in truth a "sifting," and though a few picturesque rascals had the courage
to go into exile while a few saints may have been deterred, it is a truism
to say that the 16
pioneers were made up of brave men and braver women.
It cannot be asserted that their courage was the result of any single,
dominating motive, equally operative in all of the colonies. Mrs. Hemans's
familiar line about seeking "freedom to worship God" was measurably true
of the Pilgrims of Plymouth, about whom she was writing. But the far more
important Puritan emigration to Massachusetts under Winthrop aimed not so
much at "freedom" as at the establishment of a theocracy according to the
Scriptures. These men straightway denied freedom of worship, not only to
newcomers who sought to join them, but to those members of their own
company who developed independent ways of thinking. The list of motives
for emigration ran the whole gamut, from missionary fervor for converting
the savages, down through a commendable desire for gain, to the perhaps no
less praiseworthy wish to escape a debtor's prison or the pillory. A few
of the colonists were rich. Some were beggars or indentured servants. Most
of them belonged to the middle class. John Harvard was the son of a
butcher; Thomas Shepard, the son of a grocer; Roger Williams, the son of a
tailor. But all three were 17university bred and were natural leaders of
men.
Once arrived in the wilderness, the pioneer life common to all of the
colonists began instantly to exert its slow, irresistible pressure upon
their minds and to mould them into certain ways of thinking and feeling.
Without some perception of these modes of thought and emotion a knowledge
of the spirit of our literature is impossible. Take, for instance, the
mere physical situation of the first colonists, encamped on the very beach
of the wide ocean with an illimitable forest in their rear. Their
provisions were scanty. They grew watchful of the strange soil, of the new
skies, of the unknown climate. Even upon the voyage over, John Winthrop
thought that﹃the declination of the pole star was much, even to the view,
beneath that it is in England,﹄and that "the new moon, when it first
appeared, was much smaller than at any time he had seen it in England."
Here was a man evidently using his eyes with a new interest in natural
phenomena. Under these changed skies the mind began gradually to change
also.
At first the colonists felt themselves an outpost of Europe, a forlorn
hope of the Protestant Reformation. "We shall be as a city upon a hill,"
said 18
Winthrop. "The eyes of all people are upon us." Their creed was Calvinism,
then in its third generation of dominion and a European doctrine which was
not merely theological but social and political. The emigrant Englishmen
were soon to discover that it contained a doctrine of human rights based
upon human needs. At the beginning of their novel experience they were
doubtless unaware of any alteration in their theories. But they were
facing a new situation, and that new situation became an immense factor in
their unconscious growth. Their intellectual and moral problems shifted,
as a boat shifts her ballast when the wind blows from a new quarter. The
John Cotton preaching in a shed in the new Boston had come to﹃suffer a
sea-change﹄from the John Cotton who had been rector of St. Botolph's
splendid church in Lincolnshire. The "church without a bishop" and the
"state without a king" became a different church and state from the old,
however loyally the ancient forms and phrases were retained.
If the political problems of equality which were latent in Calvinism now
began to take on a different meaning under the democratic conditions of
pioneer life, the inner, spiritual problems of that amazing creed were
intensified. "Fallen" human 19nature remained the same, whether in the
crowded cosmopolitan streets of Holland and London, or upon the desolate
shores of Cape Cod. But the moral strain of the old insoluble conflict
between "fixed fate" and "free will" was heightened by the physical
loneliness of the colonists. Each soul must fight its own unaided,
unending battle. In that moral solitude, as in the physical solitude of
the settlers upon the far northwestern prairies of a later epoch, many a
mind snapped. Unnatural tension was succeeded by unnatural crimes. But for
the stronger intellects New England Calvinism became a potent spiritual
gymnastic, where, as in the Swedish system of bodily training, one lifts
imaginary and ever-increasing weights with imaginary and ever-increasing
effort, flexor and extensor muscles pulling against one another, driven by
the will. Calvinism bred athletes as well as maniacs.
The new situation, again, turned many of the theoretical speculations of
the colonists into practical issues. Here, for example, was the Indian.
Was he truly a child of God, possessing a soul, and, if so, had he
partaken of the sin of Adam? These questions perplexed the saintly Eliot
and the generous Roger Williams. But before many 20years the query as to whether a
Pequot warrior had a soul became suddenly less important than the
practical question as to whether the Pequot should be allowed any further
chances of taking the white man's scalp. On this last issue the colonists
were unanimous in the negative.
It would be easy to multiply such instances of a gradual change of view.
But beneath all the changes and all the varieties of individual behavior
in the various colonies that began to dot the seaboard, certain qualities
demanded by the new surroundings are felt in colonial life and in colonial
writings. One of these is the instinct for order, or at least that degree
of order essential to the existence of a camp. It was not in vain that
John Smith sought to correct the early laxness at Jamestown by the stern
edict: "He that will not work, neither shall he eat." Dutch and Quaker
colonies taught the same inexorable maxim of thrift. Soon there was work
enough for all, at good wages, but the lesson had been taught. It gave
Franklin's Poor Richard mottoes their flavor of homely, experienced
truth.
Order in daily life led straight to political order, just as the equality
and resourcefulness of the frontier, stimulated by isolation from Europe,
led 21to
political independence. The pioneer learned to make things for himself
instead of sending to London for them, and by and by he grew as impatient
of waiting for a political edict from London as he would become in waiting
for a London plough. "This year," wrote one colonist,﹃ye will go to
complain to the Parliament, and the next year they will send to see how it
is, and the third year the government is changed.﹄The time was coming
when no more complaints would be sent.
One of the most startling instances of this colonial instinct for
self-government is the case of Thomas Hooker. Trained in Emmanuel College
of the old Cambridge, he arrived in the new Cambridge in 1633. He grew
restless under its theocratic government, being, it was said, "a person
who when he was doing his Master's work would put a king into his pocket."
So he led the famous migration of 1636 from Massachusetts to Hartford, and
there helped to create a federation of independent towns which made their
own constitution without mentioning any king, and became one of the
corner-stones of American democracy. In May, 1638, Hooker declared in a
sermon before the General Court "that the choice of public magistrates
belongs unto the people by God's 22own allowance," and﹃that they who have the
power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in their power, also, to
set the bounds and limitations of the power and place into which they call
them.﹄The reason of this is:﹃Because the foundation of authority is
laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people.﹄This high
discourse antedates the famous pamphlets on liberty by Milton. It is a
half-century earlier than Locke's Treatise on Government, a century
and a quarter earlier than Rousseau's Contrat Social, and it
precedes by one hundred and thirty-eight years the American Declaration of
Independence.
But the slightest acquaintance with colonial writings will reveal the fact
that such political radicalism as Thomas Hooker's was accompanied by an
equally striking conservatism in other directions. One of these
conservative traits was the pioneer's respect for property, and
particularly for the land cleared by his own toil. Gladstone once spoke of
possession of the soil as the most important and most operative of all
social facts. Free-footed as the pioneer colonist was, he was disinclined
to part with his land without a substantial price for it. The land at his
disposal was practically illimitable, but he showed a very 23English
tenacity in safeguarding his hold upon his own portion.
Very English, likewise, was his attachment to the old country as "home."
The lighter and the more serious writings of the colonists are alike in
their respect for the past. In the New England settlements, although not
at first in Virginia, there was respect for learning and for an educated
clergy. The colonists revered the Bible. They maintained a stubborn regard
for the Common Law of England. Even amid all the excitement of a
successful rebellion from the mother country, this Common Law still held
the Americans to the experience of the inescapable past.
Indeed, as the reader of today lifts his eyes from the pages of the books
written in America during the seventeenth century, and tries to meditate
upon the general difference between them and the English books written
during the same period, he will be aware of the firmness with which the
conservative forces held on this side of the Atlantic. It was only one
hundred years from the Great Armada of 1588 to the flight of James Second,
the last of the Stuart Kings. With that Revolution of 1688 the struggles
characteristic of the seventeenth century in England came to an end. A new
24working
basis is found for thought, politics, society, literature. But while those
vast changes had been shaking England, two generations of American
colonists had cleared their forests, fought the savages, organized their
townships and their trade, put money in their purses, and lived, though as
yet hardly suspecting it, a life that was beginning to differentiate them
from the men of the Old World. We must now glance at the various aspects
of this isolated life of theirs, as it is revealed in their books.
25
The First Colonial Literature
The simplest and oldest group of colonial
writings is made up of records of exploration and adventure. They are like
the letters written from California in 1849 to the "folks back East."
Addressed to home-keeping Englishmen across the sea, they describe the new
world, explain the present situation of the colonists, and express their
hopes for the future. Captain John Smith's True Relation, already
alluded to, is the typical production of this class: a swift marching
book, full of eager energy, of bluff and breezy picturesqueness, and of
triumphant instinct for the main chance. Like most of the Elizabethans, he
cannot help poetizing in his prose. Cod-fishing is to him a "sport";﹃and
what sport doth yeald a more pleasing content, and lesse hurt or charge
then angling with a hooke, and crossing the sweete ayre from Isle to Isle,
over the silent streams of a calme Sea?﹄But the 26gallant Captain is also capable
of very plain speech, Cromwellian in its simplicity, as when he writes
back to the London stockholders of the Virginia Company: "When you send
again, I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters, husbandmen,
gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of trees' roots,
well provided, than a thousand of such as we have."
America was but an episode in the wide wanderings of Captain Smith, but he
owes his place in human memory today to the physical and mental energy
with which he met the demands of a new situation, and to the vividness
with which he dashed down in words whatever his eyes had seen. Whether, in
that agreeable passage about Pocahontas, he was guilty of romancing a
little, no one really knows, but the Captain, as the first teller of this
peculiarly American type of story, will continue to have an indulgent
audience.
But other exiles in Virginia were skillful with the pen. William
Strachey's True Reportory of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., vpon
and from the islands of the Bermudas may or may not have given a hint
to Shakespeare for the storm-scene in The Tempest. In either case
it is admirable writing, flexible, sensitive, shrewdly observant.
Whitaker, 27
the apostle of Virginia, mingles, like many a missionary of the present
day, the style of an exhorter with a keen discernment of the traits of the
savage mind. George Percy, fresh from Northumberland, tells in a language
as simple as Defoe's the piteous tale of five months of illness and
starvation, watched by "those wild and cruel Pagans." John Pory, of﹃the
strong potations,﹄who thinks that﹃good company is the soul of this
life,﹄nevertheless comforts himself in his solitude among the﹃crystal
rivers and odoriferous woods﹄by reflecting that he is escaping envy and
expense. George Sandys, scholar and poet, finds his solace during a
Virginia exile in continuing his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Colonel Norwood, an adventurer who belongs to a somewhat later day, since
he speaks of having "read Mr. Smith's travels," draws the long bow of
narrative quite as powerfully as the redoubtable Smith, and far more
smoothly, as witness his accounts of starvation on shipboard and
cannibalism on shore. This Colonel is an artist who would have delighted
Stevenson.
All of these early tellers of Virginia tales were Englishmen, and most of
them returned to England, where their books were printed and their
remaining lives were passed. But far to the northeast 28of Virginia there were two
colonies of men who earned the right to say, in William Bradford's quiet
words,﹃It is not with us as with other men, whom small things can
discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish themselves at home
again.﹄One was the colony of Pilgrims at Plymouth, headed by Bradford
himself. The other was the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay, with John
Winthrop as governor.
Bradford and Winthrop have left journals which are more than chronicles of
adventure. They record the growth and government of a commonwealth. Both
Bradford and Winthrop were natural leaders of men, grave, dignified,
solid, endowed with a spirit that bred confidence. Each was learned.
Winthrop, a lawyer and man of property, had a higher social standing than
Bradford, who was one of the Separatists of Robinson's flock at Leyden.
But the Pilgrim of the Mayflower and the well-to-do Puritan of the
Bay Colony both wrote their annals like gentlemen and scholars. Bradford's
History of Plymouth Plantation runs from 1620 to 1647. Winthrop's
diary, now printed as the History of New England, begins with his
voyage in 1630 and closes in the year of his death, 1649. As records of an
Anglo-Saxon 29
experiment in self-government under pioneer conditions these books are
priceless; as human documents, they illuminate the Puritan character; as
for "literary" value in the narrow sense of that word, neither Bradford
nor Winthrop seems to have thought of literary effect. Yet the leader of
the Pilgrims has passages of grave sweetness and charm, and his sketch of
his associate, Elder Brewster, will bear comparison with the best English
biographical writing of that century. Winthrop is perhaps more varied in
tone, as he is in matter, but he writes throughout as a ruler of men
should write, with "decent plainness and manly freedom." His best known
pages, justly praised by Tyler and other historians of American thought,
contain his speech before the General Court in 1645 on the nature of true
liberty. No paragraphs written in America previous to the Revolution would
have given more pleasure to Abraham Lincoln, but it is to be feared that
Lincoln never saw Governor Winthrop's book, though his own ancestor,
Samuel Lincoln of Hingham, lived under Winthrop's jurisdiction.
The theory of government held by the dominant party of the first two
generations of New England pioneers has often been called a "theocracy,"
30that is
to say, a government according to the Word of God as expounded and
enforced by the clergy. The experiment was doomed to ultimate failure, for
it ran counter to some of the noblest instincts of human nature. But its
administration was in the hands of able men. The power of the clergy was
well-nigh absolute. The political organization of the township depended
upon the ecclesiastical organization as long as the right to vote was
confined to church members. How sacrosanct and awful was the position of
the clergyman may be perceived from Hawthorne's The Minister's Black
Veil and The Scarlet Letter.
Yet it must be said that men like Hooker and Cotton, Shepard and Norton,
had every instinct and capacity for leadership. With the notable exception
of Hooker, such men were aristocrats, holding John Winthrop's opinion that
﹃Democracy is, among most civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst
form of government.﹄They were fiercely intolerant. The precise reason for
the Hooker migration from Cambridge to Hartford in 1636—the very
year of the founding of Harvard—was prudently withheld, but it is
now thought to be the instinct of escape from the clerical architects of
the Cambridge Platform. Yet no one 31would today call Thomas Hooker a liberal in
religion, pioneer in political liberty though he proved to be. His extant
sermons have the steady stroke of a great hammer; smiting at the mind and
heart.﹃Others because they have felt the heavy hand of God … upon
these grounds they build their hopes: 'I have had my hell in this life,
and I hope to have heaven in the world to come; I hope the worst is
over.'﹄Not so, thunders the preacher in reply:﹃Sodom and Gomorrah they
burnt in brimstone and they shall burn in hell.﹄One of Hooker's
successors has called him﹃a son of thunder and a son of consolation by
turns.﹄The same may be said of Thomas Shepard, another graduate of
Emmanuel College in the old Cambridge, who became the﹃soul-melting
preacher﹄of the newer Cambridge by the Charles. Pure, ravishing notes of
spiritual devotion still sing themselves in his pages. He is wholly
Calvinist. He thinks "the truth is a poor mean thing in itself" and that
the human reason cannot be "the last resolution of all doubts," which must
be sought only in the written Word of God. He holds it﹃a tough work, a
wonderful hard matter to be saved.﹄"Jesus Christ is not got with a wet
finger." Yet, like so many mystics, he yearns to be "covered 32with God, as
with a cloud," to be "drowned, plunged, and swallowed up with God." One
hundred years later we shall find this same rhapsodic ecstasy in the
meditations of Jonathan Edwards.
John Cotton, the third of the mighty men in the early Colonial pulpit,
owes his fame more to his social and political influence than to his
literary power. Yet even that was thought commanding. Trained, like Hooker
and Shepard, at Emmanuel College, and fresh from the rectorship of St.
Botolph's in the Lincolnshire Boston, John Cotton dominated that new
Boston which was named in his honor. He became the Pope of the theocracy;
a clever Pope and not an unkindly one. He seems to have shared some of the
opinions of Anne Hutchinson, though he﹃pronounced the sentence of
admonition﹄against her, says Winthrop, with much zeal and detestation of
her errors. Hawthorne, in one of his ironic moods, might have done justice
to this scene. Cotton was at heart too liberal for his rôle of
Primate, and fate led him to persecute a man whose very name has become a
symbol of victorious tolerance, Roger Williams.
Williams, known today as a friend of Cromwell, Milton, and Sir Harry Vane,
had been exiled from 33
Massachusetts for maintaining that the civil power had no jurisdiction
over conscience. This doctrine was fatal to the existence of a theocratic
state dominated by the church. John Cotton was perfectly logical in
"enlarging" Roger Williams into the wilderness, but he showed less than
his usual discretion in attacking the quick-tempered Welshman in
pamphlets. It was like asking Hotspur if he would kindly consent to fight.
Back and forth the books fly, for Williams loves this game. His Bloody
Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience calls forth Mr. Cotton's
Bloody Tenet washed and made white in the Blood of the Lamb; and
this in turn provokes the torrential flood of Williams's masterpiece, The
Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, by Mr. Cotton's endeavor to wash it white in
the Blood of the Lamb. There is glorious writing here, and its effect
cannot be suggested by quoting sentences. But there is one sentence in a
letter written by Williams in his old age to his fellow-townsmen of
Providence which points the whole moral of the terrible mistake made by
the men who sought spiritual liberty in America for themselves, only to
deny that same liberty to others. "I have only one motion and petition,"
begs this veteran pioneer who had forded many a swollen stream and built
34many a
rude bridge in the Plantations: "it is this, that after you have got over
the black brook of some soul bondage yourselves, you tear not down the
bridge after you."
It is for such wise and humane counsels as this that Roger Williams is
remembered. His opponents had mightier intellects than his, but the world
has long since decided against them. Colonial sermon literature is read
today chiefly by antiquarians who have no sympathy for the creed which
once gave it vitality. Its theology, like the theology of Paradise Lost
or the Divine Comedy, has sunk to the bottom of the black brook.
But we cannot judge fairly the contemporary effect of this pulpit
literature without remembering the passionate faith that made pulpit and
pews copartners in a supreme spiritual struggle. Historians properly
insist upon the æsthetic poverty of the New England Puritans; that
their rule of life cut them off from an enjoyment of the dramatic
literature of their race, then just closing its most splendid epoch; that
they had little poetry or music and no architecture and plastic art. But
we must never forget that to men of their creed the Sunday sermons and the
week-day "lectures" served as oratory, poetry, and drama. These 35outpourings
of the mind and heart of their spiritual leaders were the very stuff of
human passion in its intensest forms. Puritan churchgoers, passing hours
upon hours every week in rapt absorption with the noblest of all poetry
and prose in the pages of their chief book, the Bible, were at least as
sensitive to the beauty of words and the sweep of emotions as our
contemporaries upon whose book-shelves Spenser and Milton stand unread.
It is only by entering into the psychology of the period that we can
estimate its attitude towards the poetry written by the pioneers
themselves. The Bay Psalm Book (1640), the first book printed in
the colonies, is a wretched doggerel arrangement of the magnificent King
James Version of the Psalms, designed to be sung in churches. Few of the
New England churches could sing more than half-a-dozen tunes, and a
pitch-pipe was for a long time the only musical instrument allowed. Judged
as hymnology or poetry, the Bay Psalm Book provokes a smile. But
the men and women who used it as a handbook of devotion sang it with their
hearts aflame. In judging such a popular seventeenth-century poem as
Wigglesworth's Day of Doom one must strip oneself quite free from
the twentieth century, and pretend to be sitting in the 36
chimney-corner of a Puritan kitchen, reading aloud by that firelight
which, as Lowell once humorously suggested, may have added a﹃livelier
relish﹄to the poet's "premonitions of eternal combustion." Lowell could
afford to laugh about it, having crossed that particular black brook. But
for several generations the boys and girls of New England had read the Day
of Doom as if Mr. Wigglesworth, the gentle and somewhat sickly
minister of Malden, had veritably peeped into Hell. It is the present
fashion to underestimate the power of Wigglesworth's verse. At its best it
has a trampling, clattering shock like a charge of cavalry and a sound
like clanging steel. Mr. Kipling and other cunning ballad-makers have
imitated the peculiar rhyme structure chosen by the nervous little parson.
But no living poet can move his readers to the fascinated horror once felt
by the Puritans as they followed Wigglesworth's relentless gaze into the
future of the soul's destiny.
Historical curiosity may still linger, of course, over other verse-writers
of the period. Anne Bradstreet's poems, for instance, are not without
grace and womanly sweetness, in spite of their didactic themes and
portentous length. But this 37lady, born in England, the daughter of Governor
Dudley and later the wife of Governor Bradstreet, chose to imitate the
more fantastic of the moralizing poets of England and France. There is
little in her hundreds of pages which seems today the inevitable outcome
of her own experience in the New World. For readers who like roughly
mischievous satire, of a type initiated in England by Bishop Hall and
Donne, there is The Simple Cobbler of Agawam written by the roving
clergyman Nathaniel Ward. But he lived only a dozen years in
Massachusetts, and his satirical pictures are scarcely more "American"
than the satire upon German professors in Sartor Resartus is
"German." Like Charles Dickens's American Notes, Ward's give the
reaction of a born Englishman in the presence of the sights and the talk
and the personages of the transatlantic world.
Of all the colonial writings of the seventeenth century, those that have
lost least of their interest through the lapse of years are narratives of
struggles with the Indians. The image of the "bloody savage" has always
hovered in the background of the American imagination. Our boys and girls
have "played Indian" from the beginning, and the actual Indian is still
found, as for three hundred years past, 38upon the frontier fringe of our
civilization. Novelists like Cooper, historians like Parkman, poets like
Longfellow, have dealt with the rich material offered by the life of the
aborigines, but the long series begins with the scribbled story of
colonists. Here are comedy and tragedy, plain narratives of trading and
travel, missionary zeal and triumphs; then the inevitable alienation of
the two races and the doom of the native.
The "noble savage" note may be found in John Rolfe, the husband of
Pocahontas, with whom, poor fellow, his﹃best thoughts are so intangled
and enthralled.﹄Other Virginians, like Smith, Strachey, and Percy, show
close naturalistic observation, touched with the abounding Elizabethan
zest for novelties. To Alexander Whitaker, however, these﹃naked slaves of
the devil﹄were "not so simple as some have supposed." He yearned and
labored over their souls, as did John Eliot and Roger Williams and Daniel
Gookin of New England. In the Pequot War of 1637 the grim settlers
resolved to be rid of that tribe once for all, and the narratives of
Captain Edward Johnson and Captain John Mason, who led in the storming and
slaughter at the Indians' Mystic Fort, are as piously relentless as
anything in the Old Testament. 39Cromwell at Drogheda, not long after, had
soldiers no more merciless than these exterminating Puritans, who wished
to plough their fields henceforth in peace. A generation later the storm
broke again in King Philip's War. Its tales of massacre, captivity, and
single-handed fighting linger in the American imagination still. Typical
pamphlets are Mary Rowlandson's thrilling tale of the Lancaster massacre
and her subsequent captivity, and the loud-voiced Captain Church's
unvarnished description of King Philip's death. The King, shot down like a
wearied bull-moose in the deep swamp,﹃fell upon his face in the mud and
water, with his gun under him.﹄They﹃drew him through the mud to the
upland; and a doleful, great, naked dirty beast he looked like.﹄The head
brought only thirty shillings at Plymouth:﹃scanty reward and poor
encouragement,﹄thought Captain Church. William Hubbard, the minister of
Ipswich, wrote a comprehensive Narrative of the Troubles with the
Indians in New England, bringing the history down to 1677. Under the
better known title of Indian Wars, this fervid and dramatic tale,
penned in a quiet parsonage, has stirred the pulses of every succeeding
generation.
40The
close of King Philip's War, 1676, coinciding as it does with Bacon's
Rebellion in Virginia, marks an era in the development of our independent
life. The events of that year, in the words of Professor Tyler,
"established two very considerable facts, namely, that English colonists
in America could be so provoked as to make physical resistance to the
authority of England, and, second, that English colonists in America
could, in the last resort, put down any combination of Indians that might
be formed against them. In other words, it was then made evident that
English colonists would certainly be safe in the new world, and also that
they would not always be colonists."
While the end of an historical or literary era cannot always be thus
conveniently indicated by a date, there is no doubt that the final quarter
of the seventeenth century witnessed deep changes in the outward life and
the inner temper of the colonists. The "first fine careless rapture" was
over. Only a few aged men could recall the memory of the first
settlements. Between the founding of Jamestown and the rebellion under the
leadership of Nathaniel Bacon almost seventy years had intervened, an
interval corresponding to that which separates us from the Mexican War.
Roger Williams 41
ended his much-enduring and beneficent life in the flourishing town of
Providence in 1684. He had already outlived Cotton and Hooker, Shepard and
Winthrop, by more than thirty years. Inevitably men began, toward the end
of the century, to take stock of the great venture of colonization, to
scrutinize their own history and present position, to ask searching
questions of themselves.﹃You have better food and raiment than was in
former times,﹄wrote the aged Roger Clark, in 1676;﹃but have you better
hearts than your forefathers had?﹄Thomas Walley's Languishing
Commonwealth maintains that﹃Faith is dead, and Love is cold, and Zeal
is gone.﹄Urian Oakes's election sermon of 1670 in Cambridge is a
condemnation of the prevalent worldliness and ostentation. This period of
critical inquiry and assessment, however, also gives grounds for just
pride. History, biography, eulogy, are flourishing. The reader is reminded
of that epoch, one hundred and fifty years later, when the deaths of John
Adams and of Thomas Jefferson, falling upon the same anniversary day, the
Fourth of July, 1826, stirred all Americans to a fresh recognition of the
services wrought by the Fathers of the Republic. So it was in the colonies
at the close of the seventeenth century. 42Old England, in one final
paroxysm of political disgust, cast out the last Stuart in 1688. That
Revolution marks, as we have seen, the close of a long and tragic struggle
which began in the autocratic theories of James the First and in the
absolutism of Charles. Almost every phase of that momentous conflict had
its reverberation across the Atlantic, as the history of the granting and
withdrawal of colonial charters witnesses abundantly. The American
pioneers were quite aware of what was going on in England, and they
praised God or grumbled, thriftily profited by the results or quietly
nullified them, as the case might be. But all the time, while England was
rocked to its foundations, the colonists struck steadily forward into
their own independent life.
43
The Third and Fourth Generation
When the eighteenth century opened, many signs
of change were in the air. The third generation of native-born Americans
was becoming secularized. The theocracy of New England had failed. In the
height of the tragic folly over the supposed "witchcraft" in Salem,
Increase Mather and his son Cotton had held up the hands of the judges in
their implacable work. But before five years had passed, Judge Sewall does
public penance in church for his share of the awful blunder, desiring﹃to
take the shame and blame of it.﹄Robert Calef's cool pamphlet exposing the
weakness of the prosecutors' case is indeed burned by Increase Mather in
the Harvard Yard, but the liberal party are soon to force Mather from the
Presidency and to refuse that office to his son. In the town of Boston,
once hermetically sealed against heresy, there are Baptist and Episcopal
churches—and a dancing-master. 44Young Benjamin Franklin, born in
1706, professes a high respect for the Mathers, but he does not go to
church, "Sunday being my studying day," and neither the clerical nor the
secular arm of Boston is long enough and strong enough to compel that
industrious apprentice into piety.
If such was the state of New England, the laxity of New York and Virginia
needs little evidence. Contemporary travelers found the New Yorkers
singularly attached to the things of this present world. Philadelphia was
prosperous and therewith content. Virginia was a paradise with no
forbidden fruit. Hugh Jones, writing of it in 1724, considers North
Carolina "the refuge of runaways," and South Carolina﹃the delight of
buccaneers and pirates,﹄but Virginia﹃the happy retreat of true Britons
and true Churchmen.﹄Unluckily these Virginians, well nourished﹃by the
plenty of the country,﹄have "contemptible notions of England!" We shall
hear from them again. In the meantime the witty William Byrd of Westover
describes for us his amusing survey of the Dismal Swamp, and his
excursions into North Carolina and to Governor Spotswood's iron mines,
where he reads aloud to the Widow Fleming, on a rainy autumn day, three
acts of the Beggars' Opera, 45just over from London. So runs the world away,
south of the Potomac. Thackeray paints it once for all, no doubt, in the
opening chapters of The Virginians.
To discover any ambitious literary effort in this period, we must turn
northward again. In the middle colonies, and especially in Philadelphia,
which had now outgrown Boston in population, there was a quickened
interest in education and science. But the New Englanders were still the
chief makers of books. Three great names will sufficiently represent the
age: Cotton Mather, a prodigy of learning whose eyes turn back fondly to
the provincial past; Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the most consummate
intellect of the eighteenth century; and Benjamin Franklin, certainly the
most perfect exponent of its many-sided life.
When Cotton Mather was graduated from Harvard in 1678, in his sixteenth
year, he was publicly complimented by President Oakes, in fulsome Latin,
as the grandson of Richard Mather and John Cotton. This atmosphere of
flattery, this consciousness of continuing in his own person the famous
local dynasty, surrounded and sustained him to the end. He had a less
commanding personality than his father Increase. His nervous sensibility
46was
excessive. His natural vanity was never subdued, though it was often
chastened by trial and bitter disappointment. But, like his father, he was
an omnivorous reader and a facile producer of books, carrying daily such
burdens of mental and spiritual excitement as would have crushed a normal
man. Increase Mather published some one hundred and fifty books and
pamphlets: Cotton Mather not less than four hundred. The Rev. John Norton,
in his sketch of John Cotton, remarks that﹃the hen, which brings not
forth without uncessant sitting night and day, is an apt emblem of
students.﹄Certainly the hen is an apt emblem of the "uncessant" sitter,
the credulous scratcher, the fussy cackler who produced the Magnalia.
Yet he had certain elements of greatness. His tribal loyalty was perfect.
His ascetic devotion to his conception of religious truth was absolute.
His Diary, which has recently been published in full, records his
concern for the chief political events in Europe in his day, no less than
his brooding solicitude for the welfare of his townspeople, and his agony
of spirit over the lapses of his wayward eldest son. A "sincere" man,
then, as Carlyle would say, at bottom; but overlaid with such 47﹃Jewish old
clothes,﹄such professional robings and personal plumage as makes it
difficult, save in the revealing Diary, to see the man himself.
The Magnalia Christi Americana, treating the history of New England
from 1620 to 1698, was published in a tall London folio of nearly 800
pages in 1702. It is divided into seven books, and proceeds, by methods
entirely unique, to tell of Pilgrim and Puritan divines and governors, of
Harvard College, of the churches of New England, of marvelous events, of
Indian wars; and in general to justify, as only a member of the Mather
dynasty could justify, the ways of God to Boston men. Hawthorne and
Whittier, Longfellow and Lowell knew this book well and found much honey
in the vast carcass. To have had four such readers and a biographer like
Barrett Wendell must be gratifying to Cotton Mather in Paradise.
The Diary of Mather's fellow-townsman Judge Samuel Sewall has been
read more generally in recent years than anything written by Mather
himself. It was begun in 1673, nine years earlier than the first entry in
Mather's Diary, and it ends in 1729, while Mather's closes in 1724.
As a picture of everyday happenings in New England, Sewall's Diary
is as far superior to Mather's as 48Pepys's Diary is to George Fox's Journal
in painting the England of the Restoration. Samuel Sewall was an admirably
solid figure, keen, forceful, honest. Most readers of his Diary
believe that he really was in luck when he was rejected by the Widow
Winthrop on that fateful November day when his eye noted—in spite of
his infatuation—that "her dress was not so clean as sometime it had
been. Jehovah Jireh!"
One pictures Cotton Mather as looking instinctively backward to the Heroic
Age of New England with pious nervous exaltation, and Samuel Sewall as
doing the day's work uprightly without taking anxious thought of either
past or future. But Jonathan Edwards is set apart from these and other
men. He is a lonely seeker after spiritual perfection, in quest of that
city "far on the world's rim," as Masefield says of it, the city whose
builder and maker is God.
The story of Edwards's career has the simplicity and dignity of tragedy.
Born in a parsonage in the quiet Connecticut valley in 1703—the year
of John Wesley's birth—he is writing at the age of ten to disprove
the doctrine of the materiality of the soul. At twelve he is studying﹃the
wondrous way of the working of the spider,﹄with a 49precision and enthusiasm which
would have made him a great naturalist. At fourteen he begins his notes on
The Mind and on Natural Science. He is graduated from Yale
in 1720, studies theology, and at twenty-four becomes the colleague of his
famous grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in the church at Northampton. He
marries the beautiful Sarah Pierrepont, whom he describes in his journal
in a prose rhapsody which, like his mystical rhapsodies on religion in the
same youthful period, glows with a clear unearthly beauty unmatched in any
English prose of that century. For twenty-three years he serves the
Northampton church, and his sermons win him the rank of the foremost
preacher in New England. John Wesley reads at Oxford his account of the
great revival of 1735. Whitefield comes to visit him at Northampton. Then,
in 1750, the ascetic preacher alienates his church over issues pertaining
to discipline and to the administration of the sacrament. He is dismissed.
He preaches his "farewell sermon," like Wesley, like Emerson, like Newman,
and many another still unborn. He removes to Stockbridge, then a hamlet in
the wilderness, preaches to the Indians, and writes treatises on theology
and metaphysics, among them the world-famous 50Freedom of the Will. In
1757, upon the death of his son-in-law, President Aaron Burr of Princeton,
Edwards is called to the vacant Presidency. He is reluctant to go, for
though he is only fifty-four, his health has never been robust, and he has
his great book on the History of Redemption still to write. But he
accepts, finds the smallpox raging in Princeton upon his arrival in
January, 1758, is inoculated, and dies of the disease in March—his
dreams unfulfilled, his life-work once more thwarted. Close by the tomb of
this saint is the tomb of his grandson, Aaron Burr, who killed Hamilton.
The literary reputation of Jonathan Edwards has turned, like the
vicissitudes of his life, upon factors that could not be foreseen. His
contemporary fame was chiefly as a preacher, and was due to sermons like
those upon God Glorified in Man's Dependence and The Reality of
Spiritual Life, rather than to such discourses as the Enfield sermon,
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which in our own day is the
best known of his deliverances. Legends have grown up around this terrific
Enfield sermon. Its fearful power over its immediate hearers cannot be
gainsaid, and it will long continue to be quoted as an example of the
51length
to which a Calvinistic logician of genius was compelled by his own scheme
to go. We still see the tall, sweet-faced man, worn by his daily twelve
hours of intense mental toil, leaning on one elbow in the pulpit and
reading from manuscript, without even raising his gentle voice, those
words which smote his congregation into spasms of terror and which seem to
us sheer blasphemy.
Yet the Farewell Sermon of 1750 gives a more characteristic view of
Edwards's mind and heart, and conveys an ineffaceable impression of his
nobility of soul. His diction, like Wordsworth's, is usually plain almost
to bareness; the formal framework of his discourses is obtruded; and he
hunts objections to their last hiding-place with wearisome pertinacity.
Yet his logic is incandescent. Steel sometimes burns to the touch like
this, in the bitter winters of New England, and one wonders whether
Edwards's brain was not of ice, so pitiless does it seem. His treatise
denying the freedom of the will has given him a European reputation
comparable with that enjoyed by Franklin in science and Jefferson in
political propaganda. It was really a polemic demonstrating the
sovereignty of God, rather than pure theology or metaphysics. Edwards goes
beyond 52
Augustine and Calvin in asserting the arbitrary will of the Most High and
in "denying to the human will any self-determining power." He has been
refuted by events and tendencies, such as the growth of historical
criticism and the widespread acceptance of the doctrine of evolution,
rather than by the might of any single antagonist. So, too, the Dred Scott
decision of Chief Justice Taney, holding that the slave was not a citizen,
was not so much answered by opponents as it was superseded by the
arbitrament of war. But the idealism of this lonely thinker has entered
deeply and permanently into the spiritual life of his countrymen, and he
will continue to be read by a few of those who still read Plato and Dante.
"My mother grieves," wrote Benjamin Franklin to his father in 1738,﹃that
one of her sons is an Arian, another an Arminian. What an Arminian or an
Arian is, I cannot say that I very well know. The truth is I make such
distinctions very little my study.﹄To understand Franklin's indifference
to such distinctions, we must realize how completely he represents the
secularizing tendencies of his age. What a drama of worldly adventure it
all was, this roving life of the tallow-chandler's son, who runs away from
home, walks the 53
streets of Philadelphia with the famous loaves of bread under his arm, is
diligent in business, slips over to London, where he gives lessons in
swimming and in total abstinence, slips back to Philadelphia and becomes
its leading citizen, fights the long battle of the American colonies in
London, sits in the Continental Congress, sails to Europe to arrange that
French Alliance which brought our Revolution to a successful issue, and
comes home at last, full of years and honors, to a bland and philosophical
exit from the stage!
He broke with every Puritan tradition. The Franklins were relatively late
comers to New England. They sprang from a long line of blacksmiths at
Ecton in Northamptonshire. The seat of the Washingtons was not far away,
and Franklin's latest biographer points out that the pink-coated huntsmen
of the Washington gentry may often have stopped at Ecton to have their
horses shod at the Franklin smithy. Benjamin's father came out in 1685,
more than fifty years after the most notable Puritan emigration. Young
Benjamin, born in 1706, was as untouched by the ardors of that elder
generation as he would have been by the visions of Dante—an author,
by the way, whom he never mentions, even as he never 54mentions Shakespeare. He had no
reverence for Puritan New England. To its moral beauty, its fine severity,
he was wholly blind. As a boy he thriftily sold his Pilgrim's Progress.
He became, in the new fashion of that day, a Deist. Like a true child of
the eighteenth century, his attitude toward the seventeenth was that of
amused or contemptuous superiority. Thackeray has somewhere a charming
phrase about his own love for the back seat of the stage-coach, the seat
which, in the old coaching days, gave one a view of the receding
landscape. Thackeray, like Burke before him, loved historical
associations, historical sentiment, the backward look over the long road
which humanity has traveled. But Franklin faced the other way. He would
have endorsed his friend Jefferson's scornful sentence,﹃The dead have no
rights.﹄He joined himself wholly to that eighteenth century in which his
own lot was cast, and, alike in his qualities and in his defects, he
became one of its most perfect representatives.
To catch the full spirit of that age, turn for an instant to the London of
1724—the year of Franklin's arrival. Thirty-six years have elapsed
since the glorious Revolution of 1688; the Whig principles, then
triumphant, have been tacitly 55accepted by both political parties; the
Jacobite revolt of 1715 has proved a fiasco; the country has accepted the
House of Hanover and a government by party leadership of the House of
Commons, and it does not care whether Sir Robert Walpole buys a few rotten
boroughs, so long as he maintains peace with Europe and prosperity at
home. England is weary of seventeenth century "enthusiasm," weary of
conflict, sick of idealism. She has found in the accepted Whig principles
a satisfactory compromise, a working theory of society, a modus vivendi
which nobody supposes is perfect but which will answer the prayer
appointed to be read in all the churches,﹃Grant us peace in our time, O
Lord.﹄The theories to which men gave their lives in the seventeenth
century seem ghostly in their unreality; but the prize turnips on Sir
Robert's Norfolk farm, and the wines in his cellar, and the offices at his
disposal—these are very real indeed. London merchants are making
money; the squire and the parson are tranquilly ruling the country
parishes; the philosophy of John Locke is everywhere triumphant. Mr. Pope
is the poet of the hour, and his Essay on Man, counseling
acceptance of our mortal situation, is considered to be the last word of
human wisdom and of poetical elegance. In 56prose, the style of the Spectator
rules—an admirable style, Franklin thought, and he imitated it
patiently until its ease and urbanity had become his own. And indeed, how
much of that London of the third decade of the century passed into the
mind of the inquisitive, roving, loose-living printer's apprentice from
Philadelphia! It taught him that the tangible world is the real world, and
that nothing succeeds like success; but it never even whispered to him
that sometimes nothing damns like success.
In his limitations, no less than in his power of assimilation, Franklin
was the representative man of his era. He had no artistic interests, no
liking for metaphysics after his brief devotion, in early manhood, to the
dialogues of Plato. He taught himself some Latin, but he came to believe
that the classics had little significance and that they should be
superseded by the modern languages. For the mediæval world he had no
patience or understanding. To these defects of his century we must add
some failings of his own. He was not always truthful. He had an indelible
streak of coarseness. His conception of the "art of virtue" was
mechanical. When Carlyle called Franklin the "father of all the Yankees,"
we must 57
remember that the Scotch prophet hated Yankees and believed that
Franklin's smooth, plausible, trader type of morality was only a broad way
to the everlasting bonfire.
But it is folly to linger over the limitations of the tallow-chandler's
son. The catalogue of his beneficent activity is a vast one. Balzac once
characterized him as the man who invented the lightning-rod, the hoax, and
the republic. His contributions to science have to do with electricity,
earthquakes, geology, meteorology, physics, chemistry, astronomy,
mathematics, navigation of air and water, agriculture, medicine, and
hygiene. In some of these fields he did pioneer work of lasting
significance. His teachings of thrift and prudence, as formulated in the
maxims of Poor Richard, gave him a world-wide reputation. He attacked war,
like Voltaire, not so much for its wickedness as for its folly, and
cheerfully gave up many years of a long life to the effort to promote a
better understanding among the nations of the world.
It is perhaps needless to add what all persons who love good writing know,
that Benjamin Franklin was a most delightful writer. His letters cover an
amusing and extraordinary variety of 58topics. He ranges from balloons
to summer hats, and from the advantages of deep ploughing to bifocal
glasses, which, by the way, he invented. He argues for sharp razors and
cold baths, and for fresh air in the sleeping-room. He discusses the
morals of the game of chess, the art of swimming, the evils of smoky
chimneys, the need of reformed spelling. Indeed, his passion for
improvement led him not only to try his hand upon an abridgment of the
Book of Common Prayer, but to go even so far as to propose seriously a new
rendering of the Lord's Prayer. His famous proposal for a new version of
the Bible, however, which Matthew Arnold solemnly held up to reprobation,
was only a joke which Matthew Arnold did not see—the new version of
Job being, in fact, a clever bit of political satire against party
leadership in England. Even more brilliant examples of his skill in
political satire are his imaginary Edict of the King of Prussia against
England, and his famous Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a
Small One. But I must not try to call the roll of all the good things
in Franklin's ten volumes. I will simply say that those who know Franklin
only in his Autobiography, charming as that classic production is,
have made but an imperfect acquaintance with 59the range, the vitality, the
vigor of this admirable craftsman who chose a style﹃smooth, clear, and
short,﹄and made it serve every purpose of his versatile and beneficent
mind.
When the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 startled the American colonies
out of their provincial sense of security and made them aware of their
real attitude toward the mother country, Franklin was in London. Eleven
years earlier, in 1754, he had offered a plan for the Union of the
Colonies, but this had not contemplated separation from England. It
was rather what we should call a scheme for imperial federation under the
British Crown. We may use his word union, however, in a different field
from that of politics. How much union of sentiment, of mental and moral
life, of literary, educational, and scientific endeavor, was there in the
colonies when the hour of self-examination came? Only the briefest summary
may be attempted here.
As to race, these men of the third and fourth generation since the
planting of the colonies were by no means so purely English as the first
settlers. The 1,600,000 colonists in 1760 were mingled of many stocks, the
largest non-English elements being German and Scotch-Irish—that is,
Scotch 60
who had settled for a while in Ulster before emigrating to America.﹃About
one-third of the colonists in 1760,﹄says Professor Channing,﹃were born
outside of America.﹄Crèvecœur's Letters from an American
Farmer thus defined the Americans:﹃They are a mixture of English,
Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous
breed that race now called Americans has arisen.﹄The Atlantic seaboard,
with a narrow strip inland, was fairly well covered by local communities,
differing in blood, in religion, in political organization—a
congeries of separate experiments or young utopias, waiting for that most
utopian experiment of all, a federal union. But the dominant language of
the "promiscuous breed" was English, and in the few real centers of
intellectual life the English tradition was almost absolute.
The merest glance at colonial journalism will confirm this estimate. The
Boston News-Letter, begun in 1704, was the first of the journals,
if we omit the single issue of Publick Occurrences in the same town
in 1690. By 1765 there were nearly fifty colonial newspapers and several
magazines. Their influence made for union, in Franklin's sense of that
word, and their literary models, 61like their paper, type, and even ink, were
found in London. The New England Courant, established in Boston in
1721 by James Franklin, is full of imitations of the Tatler, Spectator,
and Guardian. What is more, the Courant boasted of its
office collection of books, including Shakespeare, Milton, the Spectator,
and Swift's Tale of a Tub. ¹ This was in 1722. If we remember
that no allusion to Shakespeare has been discovered in the colonial
literature of the seventeenth century, and scarcely an allusion to the
Puritan poet Milton, and that the Harvard College Library in 1723 had
nothing of Addison, Steele, Bolingbroke, Dryden, Pope, and Swift, and had
only recently obtained copies of Milton and Shakespeare, we can appreciate
the value of James Franklin's apprenticeship in London. Perhaps we can
even forgive him for that attack upon the Mathers which threw the conduct
of the Courant, for a brief period, into the hands of his brother
Benjamin, whose turn at a London apprenticeship was soon to come.
¹ Cook, E. C. Literary
Influences in Colonial Newspapers, 1704-1750. N. Y., 1912.
If we follow this younger brother to Philadelphia and to Bradford's American
Mercuryor62
to Franklin's own Pennsylvania Gazette, or if we study the Gazettes
of Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, the impression is still the
same. The literary news is still chiefly from London, from two months to a
year late. London books are imported and reprinted. Franklin reprints Pamela,
and his Library Company of Philadelphia has two copies of Paradise Lost
for circulation in 1741, whereas there had been no copy of that work in
the great library of Cotton Mather. American journalism then, as now, owed
its vitality to a secular spirit of curiosity about the actual world. It
followed England as its model, but it was beginning to develop a temper of
its own.
Colonial education and colonial science were likewise chiefly indebted to
London, but by 1751 Franklin's papers on electricity began to repay the
loan. A university club in New York in 1745 could have had but fifteen
members at most, for these were all the "academics" in town. Yet Harvard
had then been sending forth her graduates for more than a century. William
and Mary was founded in 1693, Yale in 1701, Princeton in 1746, King's (now
Columbia) in 1754, the University of Pennsylvania in 1755, and Brown in
1764. These colonial colleges were mainly 63in the hands of clergymen. They
tended to reproduce a type of scholarship based upon the ancient
languages. The curriculum varied but little in the different colonies, and
this fact helped to produce a feeling of fellowship among all members of
the republic of letters. The men who debated the Stamp Act were, with a
few striking exceptions, men trained in Latin and Greek, familiar with the
great outlines of human history, accustomed to the discipline of academic
disputation. They knew the ideas and the vocabulary of cultivated Europe
and were conscious of no provincial inferiority. In the study of the
physical sciences, likewise, the colonials were but little behind the
mother country. The Royal Society had its distinguished members here. The
Mathers, the Dudleys, John Winthrop of Connecticut, John Bartram, James
Logan, James Godfrey, Cadwallader Colden, and above all, Franklin himself,
were winning the respect of European students, and were teaching Americans
to use their eyes and their minds not merely upon the records of the past
but in searching out the inexhaustible meanings of the present. There is
no more fascinating story than that of the beginnings of American science
in and outside of the colleges, 64and this movement, like the influence of
journalism and of the higher education, counted for colonial union.
Professor Tyler, our foremost literary student of the period, summarizes
the characteristics of colonial literature in these words:﹃Before the
year 1765, we find in this country, not one American people, but many
American peoples.… No cohesive principle prevailed, no centralizing
life; each little nation was working out its own destiny in its own
fashion.﹄But he adds that with that year the colonial isolation came to
an end, and that the student must thereafter﹃deal with the literature of
one multitudinous people, variegated, indeed, in personal traits, but
single in its commanding ideas and in its national destinies.﹄It is easy
to be wise after the event. Yet there was living in London in 1765, as the
agent for Pennsylvania, a shrewd and bland Colonial—an honorary M.A.
from both Harvard and Yale, a D.C.L. of Oxford and an LL.D. of St. Andrews—who
was by no means sure that the Stamp Act meant the end of Colonialism. And
Franklin's uncertainty was shared by Washington. When the tall Virginian
took command of the Continental Army as late as 1775, he "abhorred the
idea 65of
independence." Nevertheless John Jay, writing the second number of the Federalist
in 1787, only twelve years later, could say: "Providence has been pleased
to give this one connected country to one united people; a people
descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing
the same religion, attached to the same principles of government."
66
The Revolution
Ifwe turn, however, to the literature produced
in America between the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 and the adoption
of the Constitution in 1787, we perceive that it is a literature of
discord and passion. Its spirit is not that of "one united people."
Washington could indeed declare in his Farewell Address of 1796,
"With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners,
habits, and political principles"; yet no one knew better than Washington
upon what a slender thread this political unity had often hung, and how
impossible it had been to foresee the end from the beginning.
It is idle to look in the writings of the Revolutionary period for the
literature of beauty, for a quiet harmonious unfolding of the deeper
secrets of life. It was a time of swift and pitiless change, of action
rather than reflection, of the turning 67of many separate currents into
one headlong stream. "We must, indeed, all hang together," runs Franklin's
well-known witticism in Independence Hall,﹃or, most assuredly, we shall
all hang separately.﹄Excellently spoken, Doctor! And that homely, cheery,
daring sentence gives the keynote of much of the Revolutionary writing
that has survived. It may be heard in the state papers of Samuel Adams,
the oratory of Patrick Henry, the pamphlets of Thomas Paine, the satires
of Freneau and Trumbull, and in the subtle, insinuating, thrilling
paragraphs of Thomas Jefferson.
We can only glance in passing at the literature of the Lost Cause, the
Loyalist or "Tory" pleadings for allegiance to Britain. It was written by
able and honest men, like Boucher and Odell, Seabury, Leonard and
Galloway. They distrusted what Seabury called﹃our sovereign Lord the
Mob.﹄They represented, in John Adams's opinion, nearly one-third of the
people of the colonies, and recent students believe that this estimate was
too low. In some colonies the Loyalists were clearly in the majority. In
all they were a menacing element, made up of the conservative, the
prosperous, the well-educated, with a mixture, of course, of mere placemen
and tuft-hunters. They 68
composed weighty pamphlets, eloquent sermons, and sparkling satire in
praise of the old order of things. When their cause was lost forever, they
wrote gossipy letters from their exile in London or pathetic verses in
their new home in Nova Scotia and Ontario. Their place in our national
life and literature has never been filled, and their talents and virtues
are never likely to receive adequate recognition. They took the wrong fork
of the road.
There were gentle spirits, too, in this period, endowed with delicate
literary gifts, but quite unsuited for the clash of controversy—members,
in Crèvecœur's touching words, of the﹃secret communion among
good men throughout the world.﹄"I am a lover of peace, what must I do?"
asks Crèvecœur in his Letters from an American Farmer.
﹃I was happy before this unfortunate Revolution. I feel that I am no
longer so, therefore I regret the change. My heart sometimes seems tired
with beating, it wants rest like my eyelids, which feel oppressed with so
many watchings.﹄Crèvecœur, an immigrant from Normandy, was
certainly no weakling, but he felt that the great idyllic American
adventure—which he described so captivatingly in his chapter
entitled What is an American—was 69ending tragically in civil war.
Another white-souled itinerant of that day was John Woolman of New Jersey,
whose Journal, praised by Charles Lamb and Channing and edited by
Whittier, is finding more readers in the twentieth century than it won in
the nineteenth. "A man unlettered," said Whittier,﹃but with natural
refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart enters
into his language.﹄Woolman died at fifty-two in far-away York, England,
whither he had gone to attend a meeting of the Society of Friends.
The three tall volumes of the Princeton edition of the poems of Philip
Freneau bear the sub-title, "Poet of the American Revolution." But our
Revolution, in truth, never had an adequate poet. The prose-men, such as
Jefferson, rose nearer the height of the great argument than did the men
of rhyme. Here and there the struggle inspired a brisk ballad like Francis
Hopkinson's Battle of the Kegs, a Hudibrastic satire like
Trumbull's McFingal, or a patriotic song like Timothy Dwight's Columbia.
Freneau painted from his own experience the horrors of the British
prison-ship, and celebrated, in cadences learned from Gray and Collins,
the valor of the men who fell at Eutaw 70Springs. There was patriotic
verse in extraordinary profusion, but its literary value is slight, and it
reveals few moods of the American mind that are not more perfectly
conveyed through oratory, the pamphlet, and the political essay. The
immediate models of this Revolutionary verse were the minor British bards
of the eighteenth century, a century greatly given to verse-writing, but
endowed by Heaven with the "prose-reason" mainly. The reader of Burton E.
Stevenson's collection of Poems of American History can easily
compare the contemporary verse inspired by the events of the Revolution
with the modern verse upon the same historic themes. He will see how
slenderly equipped for song were most of the later eighteenth-century
Americans and how unfavorable to poetry was the tone of that hour.
Freneau himself suffered, throughout his long career, from the depressing
indifference of his public to the true spirit of poetry.﹃An old college
mate of mine,﹄said James Madison—who was by tradition Freneau's
room-mate at Princeton in the class of 1771—"a poet and man of
literary and refined tastes, knowing nothing of the world." When but three
years out of college, the cautious Madison wrote to another friend: 71﹃Poetry wit
and Criticism Romances Plays &c captivated me much: but I begin to
discover that they deserve but a moderate portion of a mortal's Time and
that something more substantial more durable more profitable befits our
riper age.﹄Madison was then at the ripe age of twenty-three! Professor
Pattee, Freneau's editor, quotes these words to illustrate the﹃common
sense﹄atmosphere of the age which proved fatal to Freneau's development.
Yet the sturdy young New Yorker, of Huguenot descent, is a charming
figure, and his later malevolence was shown only to his political foes.
After leaving Princeton he tries teaching, the law, the newspaper, the
sea; he is aflame with patriotic zeal; he writes, like most American
poets, far too much for his own reputation. As the editor of the National
Gazette in Philadelphia, he becomes involved in the bitter quarrel
between his chief, Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. His attachment to
the cause of the French Revolution makes him publish baseless attacks upon
Washington. By and by he retires to a New Jersey farm, still toying with
journalism, still composing verses. He turns patriotic poet once more in
the War of 1812; but the public has now forgotten him. 72He lives on
in poverty and seclusion, and in his eightieth year loses his way in a
snowstorm and perishes miserably—this in 1832, the year of the death
of the great Sir Walter Scott, who once had complimented Freneau by
borrowing one of his best lines of poetry.
It is in the orations and pamphlets and state papers inspired by the
Revolutionary agitation that we find the most satisfactory expression of
the thought and feeling of that generation. Its typical literature is
civic rather than æsthetic, a sort of writing which has been
incidental to the accomplishing of some political, social, or moral
purpose, and which scarcely regards itself as literature at all. James
Otis's argument against the Writs of Assistance in Massachusetts in 1761,
and Patrick Henry's speech in the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1765,
mark epochs in the emotional life of these communities. They were reported
imperfectly or not at all, but they can no more be ignored in an
assessment of our national experience than editorials, sermons, or
conversations which have expressed the deepest feelings of a day and then
have perished beyond resurrection.
Yet if natural orators like Otis and Henry be denied a strictly "literary"
rating because their 73
surviving words are obviously inadequate to account for the popular effect
of their speeches, it is still possible to measure the efficiency of the
pamphleteer. When John Adams tells us that﹃James Otis was Isaiah and
Ezekiel united,﹄we must take his word for the impression which Otis's
oratory left upon his mind. But John Adams's own writings fill ten stout
volumes which invite our judgment. The "truculent and sarcastic splendor"
of his hyperboles need not blind us to his real literary excellencies,
such as clearness, candor, vigor of phrase, freshness of idea. A testy,
rugged, "difficult" person was John Adams, but he grew mellower with age,
and his latest letters and journals are full of whimsical charm.
John Adams's cousin Samuel was not precisely a charming person. Bigoted,
tireless, secretive, this cunning manipulator of political passions
followed many tortuous paths. His ability for adroit misstatement of an
adversary's position has been equaled but once in our history. But to the
casual reader of his four volumes, Samuel Adams seems ever to be breathing
the liberal air of the town-meeting: everything is as plainly obvious as a
good citizen can make it. He has, too, the large utterance of the European
liberalism of his day. 74
"Resolved," read his Resolutions of the House of Representatives of
Massachusetts in 1765,﹃that there are certain essential rights of the
British constitution of government which are founded in the law of God and
nature and are the common rights of mankind.﹄In his statement of the
Rights of the Colonists (1772) we are assured that﹃among the natural
rights of the colonists are these, First, a right to Life; secondly to
Liberty; thirdly to Property.… All men have a Right to remain in a
State of Nature as long as they please.… When Men enter into
Society, it is by voluntary consent.﹄Jean-Jacques himself could not be
more bland, nor at heart more fiercely demagogic.
"Tom" Paine would have been no match for "Sam" Adams in a town-meeting,
but he was an even greater pamphleteer. He had arrived from England in
1774, at the age of thirty-eight, having hitherto failed in most of his
endeavors for a livelihood. "Rebellious Staymaker; unkempt," says Carlyle;
but General Charles Lee noted that there was "genius in his eyes," and he
bore a letter of introduction from Franklin commending him as an
"ingenious, worthy young man," which obtained for him a position on the Pennsylvania
Magazine. Before he had been a year on American soil, Paine 75was writing
the most famous pamphlet of our political literature, Common Sense,
which appeared in January, 1776.﹃A style hitherto unknown on this side of
the Atlantic,﹄wrote Edmund Randolph. Yet this style of familiar talk to
the crowd had been used seventy years earlier by Defoe and Swift, and it
was to be employed again by a gaunt American frontiersman who was born in
1809, the year of Thomas Paine's death. The Crisis, a series of
thirteen pamphlets, of which the first was issued in December, 1776,
seemed to justify the contemporary opinion that the﹃American cause owed
as much to the pen of Paine as to the sword of Washington.﹄Paine, who was
now serving in the army, might have heard his own words,﹃These are the
times that try men's souls,﹄read aloud, by Washington's orders, to the
ragged troops just before they crossed the Delaware to win the victory of
Trenton. The best known productions of Paine's subsequent career, The
Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, were written in Europe,
but they were read throughout America. The reputation of the﹃rebellious
Staymaker﹄has suffered from certain grimy habits and from the ridiculous
charge of atheism. He was no more an atheist than Franklin or Jefferson.
In no sense an original 76thinker, he could impart to outworn shreds of
deistic controversy and to shallow generalizations about democracy a
personal fervor which transformed them and made his pages gay and bold and
clear as a trumpet.
Clear and bold and gay was Alexander Hamilton likewise; and his literary
services to the Revolution are less likely to be underestimated than
Thomas Paine's. They began with that boyish speech in "the Fields" of New
York City in 1774 and with The Farmer Refuted, a reply to Samuel
Seabury's Westchester Farmer. They were continued in extraordinary
letters, written during Hamilton's military career, upon the defects of
the Articles of Confederation and of the finances of the Confederation.
Hamilton contributed but little to the actual structure of the new
Constitution, but as a debater he fought magnificently and triumphantly
for its adoption by the Convention of the State of New York in 1788.
Together with Jay and Madison he defended the fundamental principles of
the Federal Union in the remarkable series of papers known as the Federalist.
These eighty-five papers, appearing over the signature "Publius" in two
New York newspapers between October, 1787, and April, 1788, owed their
conception 77
largely to Hamilton, who wrote more than half of them himself. In manner
they are not unlike the substantial Whig literature of England, and in
political theory they have little in common with the Revolutionary
literature which we have been considering. The reasoning is close, the
style vigorous but neither warmed by passion nor colored by the individual
emotions of the author. The Federalist remains a classic example of
the civic quality of our post-Revolutionary American political writing,
broadly social in its outlook, well informed as to the past, confident—but
not reckless—of the future. Many Americans still read it who would
be shocked by Tom Paine and bored with Edmund Burke. It has none of the
literary genius of either of those writers, but its formative influence
upon successive generations of political thinking has been steadying and
sound.
In fact, our citizen literature cannot be understood aright if one fails
to observe that its effect has often turned, not upon mere verbal skill,
but upon the weight of character behind the words. Thus the grave and
reserved George Washington says of the Constitution of 1787: "Let us raise
a standard to which the wise and the honest can 78repair; the event is in the hand
of God." The whole personality of the great Virginian is back of that
simple, perfect sentence. It brings us to our feet, like a national
anthem.
One American, no doubt our most gifted man of letters of that century,
passed most of the Revolutionary period abroad, in the service of his
country. Benjamin Franklin was fifty-nine in the year of the Stamp Act.
When he returned from France in 1785 he was seventy-nine, but he was still
writing as admirably as ever when he died at eighty-four. We cannot
dismiss this singular, varied, and fascinating American better than by
quoting the letter which George Washington wrote to him in September,
1789. It has the dignity and formality of the eighteenth century, but it
is warm with tested friendship and it glows with deep human feeling: "If
to be venerated for benevolence, if to be admired for talents, if to be
esteemed for patriotism, if to be beloved for philanthropy, can gratify
the human mind, you must have the pleasing consolation to know that you
have not lived in vain. And I flatter myself that it will not be ranked
among the least grateful occurrences of your life to be assured, that, so
long as I retain my memory, you will be recollected with respect,
veneration, 79
and affection by your sincere friend, George Washington."
There remains another Virginian, the symbol of the Revolutionary age, the
author of words more widely known around the globe than any other words
penned by an American. "Thomas Jefferson," writes the latest of his
successors in the Presidency,﹃was not a man of the people, but he was a
man of such singular insight that he saw that all the roots of generous
power come from the people.﹄On his father's side Jefferson came from
sound yeoman stock, in which Welsh blood ran. His mother was a Virginia
Randolph. Born in Albemarle County, near the "little mountain"—Monticello—where
he built a mansion for his bride and where he lies buried, the tall,
strong, red-haired, gray-eyed, gifted boy was reputed the best shot, the
best rider, the best fiddle-player in the county. He studied hard at
William and Mary over his Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, but
he also frequented the best society of the little capital. He learned to
call himself a Deist and to theorize about ideal commonwealths. There was
already in him that latent radicalism which made him strike down, as soon
as he had the power, two of the fundamental principles of the society into
which he 80
was born, the principle of entailed property and that of church
establishment.
Such was the youth of twenty-two who was thrilled in 1765 by the Stamp
Act. In the ten years of passionate discussion which followed, two things
became clear: first, that there had long existed among the colonists very
radical theoretical notions of political freedom; and second, that there
was everywhere a spirit of practical conservatism. Jefferson illustrates
the union of these two tendencies.
He took his seat in the Continental Congress in June, 1775. He was only
thirty-two, but he had already written, in the summer of 1774, A
Summary View of the Rights of British America which had been published
in England by Burke, himself a judge of good writing and sound politics.
Jefferson had also prepared in 1775 the Address of the Virginia House
of Burgesses. For these reasons he was placed at the head of the
Committee for drafting the Declaration of Independence. We need not linger
over the familiar circumstances of its composition. Everybody knows how
Franklin and Adams made a few verbal alterations in the first draft, how
the committee of five then reported it to the Congress, which proceeded to
cut out 81
about one-fourth of the matter, while Franklin tried to comfort the
writhing author with his cheerful story about the sign of John Thompson
the hatter. Forty-seven years afterwards, in reply to the charge of lack
of originality brought against the Declaration by Timothy Pickering and
John Adams—charges which have been repeated at intervals ever since—Jefferson
replied philosophically:﹃Whether I gathered my ideas from reading or
reflection I do not know. I know only that I turned neither to book nor
pamphlet while writing it. I did not consider it as any part of my charge
to invent new ideas altogether and to offer no sentiment which had ever
been expressed before.﹄O wise young man, and fundamentally Anglo-Saxon
young man, to turn his back, in that crisis, to the devil of mere
cleverness, and stick to recognized facts and accepted sentiments! But his
pen retains its cunning in spite of him; and the drop of hot Welsh blood
tells; and the cosmopolitan reading and thinking tell; and they transform
what Pickering called a﹃commonplace compilation, its sentiments hackneyed
in Congress for two years before,﹄into an immortal manifesto to mankind.
Its method is the simplest. The preamble is 82philosophical, dealing with
"self-evident" truths. Today the men who dislike or doubt these truths
dismiss the preamble as "theoretical," or, to use another term of
derogation favored by reactionaries, "French." But if the preamble be
French and philosophical, the specific charges against the King are very
English and practical. Here are certain facts, presented no doubt with
consummate rhetorical skill, but facts, undeniably. The Anglo-Saxon in
Jefferson is basal, racial; the turn for academic philosophizing after the
French fashion is personal, acquired; but the range and sweep and enduring
vitality of this matchless state paper lie in its illumination of stubborn
facts by general principles, its decent respect to the opinions of
mankind, its stately and noble utterance of national sentiments and
national reasons to a "candid world."
It has long been the fashion, among a certain school of half-hearted
Americans—and unless I am mistaken, the teaching has increased
during the last decades—to minimize the value of Jefferson's
"self-evident truths." Rufus Choate, himself a consummate rhetorician,
sneered at those "glittering generalities," and countless college-bred
men, some of them occupying the highest 83positions, have echoed the
sneer. The essence of the objection to Jefferson's platform lies of course
in his phrase, "all men are created equal," with the subsidiary phrase
about governments﹃deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed.﹄Editors and congressmen and even college professors have
proclaimed themselves unable to assent to these phrases of the
Declaration, and unable even to understand them. These objectors belong
partly, I think, in Jefferson's category of "nervous persons"—"anti-republicans,"
as he goes on to define them—"whose languid fibres have more analogy
with a passive than an active state of things." Other objectors to the
phrase "all men are created equal" have had an obvious personal or
political motive for refusing assent to the proposition. But﹃no
intelligent man,﹄says one of Jefferson's biographers, "has ever
misconstrued it [the Declaration] except intentionally."
Nobody would claim today that Thomas Jefferson's statement of the
sentiments and reasons for the independence of the thirteen British
colonies in 1776 was an adequate handbook of political wisdom, fit for all
the exigencies of contemporary American democracy. It is not that. It is
84simply,
in Lincoln's phrase, one of "the standard maxims of free society" which no
democracy can safely disregard.
Jefferson's long life, so varied, so flexible, so responsive to the touch
of popular forces, illustrates the process by which the Virginia mind of
1743 became the nationalized, unionized mind of 1826. It is needless here
to dwell upon the traits of his personal character: his sweetness of
spirit, his stout-heartedness in disaster, his scorn of money, his love
for the intellectual life. "I have no ambition to govern men," he wrote to
Edward Rutledge. He was far happier talking about Greek and Anglo-Saxon
with Daniel Webster before the fire-place of Monticello than he ever was
in the presidential chair. His correspondence was enormous. His writings
fill twenty volumes. In his theories of education he was fifty years ahead
of his time; in his absolute trust in humanity he was generations ahead of
it. "I am not one of those who fear the people," he declared proudly. It
is because of this touching faith, this invincible and matchless ardor,
that Jefferson is today remembered. He foreshadowed Lincoln. His belief in
the inarticulate common people is rewarded by their obstinate fidelity to
his name as a type and 85
symbol.﹃I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society
but the people themselves,﹄wrote Jefferson, and with the people
themselves is the depository of his fame.
86
The Knickerbocker Group
The Fourth of July orator for 1826 in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, was Edward Everett. Although only thirty-two he
was already a distinguished speaker. In the course of his oration he
apostrophized John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as venerable survivors of
that momentous day, fifty years earlier, which had witnessed our
Declaration of Independence. But even as Everett was speaking, the aged
author of the Declaration breathed his last at Monticello, and in the
afternoon of that same day Adams died also, murmuring, it is said, with
his latest breath, and as if with the whimsical obstinacy of an old man
who hated to be beaten by his ancient rival,﹃Thomas Jefferson still
lives.﹄But Jefferson was already gone.
On the first of August, Everett commemorated the career of the two
Revolutionary leaders, and on the following day a greater than Everett,
Daniel 87
Webster, pronounced the famous eulogy in Faneuil Hall. Never were the
thoughts and emotions of a whole country more adequately voiced than in
this commemorative oratory. Its pulse was high with national pride over
the accomplishments of half a century. "I ask," Everett declared,﹃whether
more has not been done to extend the domain of civilization, in fifty
years, since the Declaration of Independence, than would have been done in
five centuries of continued colonial subjection?﹄Webster asserted in his
peroration: "It cannot be denied, but by those who would dispute against
the sun, that with America, and in America, a new era commences in human
affairs. This era is distinguished by free representative governments, by
entire religious liberty, by improved systems of national intercourse, by
a newly awakened and an unconquerable spirit of free enquiry, and by a
diffusion of knowledge through the community such as has been before
altogether unknown and unheard of."
Was this merely the "tall talk" then so characteristic of American oratory
and soon to be satirized in Martin Chuzzlewit? Or was it prompted
by a deep and true instinct for the significance of the vast changes that
had come over American life 88since 1776? The external changes were familiar
enough to Webster's auditors: the opening of seemingly illimitable
territory through the Louisiana Purchase, the development of roads,
canals, and manufactures; a rapid increase in wealth and population; a
shifting of political power due to the rise of the new West—in a
word, the evidences of irrepressible national energy. But this energy was
inadequately expressed by the national literature. The more cultivated
Americans were quite aware of this deficiency. It was confessed by the
pessimistic Fisher Ames and by the ardent young men who in 1815 founded The
North American Review. British critics in The Edinburgh and The
Quarterly, commenting upon recent works of travel in America, pointed
out the literary poverty of the American soil. Sydney Smith, by no means
the most offensive of these critics, declared in 1820: "During the thirty
or forty years of their independence they have done absolutely nothing for
the sciences, for the arts, for literature.… In the four quarters
of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or
looks at an American picture or statue?"
Sydney Smith's question "Who reads an American book?" has outlived all of
his own clever 89
volumes. Even while he was asking it, London was eagerly reading Irving's
Sketch Book. In 1821 came Fenimore Cooper's Spy and Bryant's
Poems, and by 1826, when Webster was announcing in his rolling
orotund that Adams and Jefferson were no more, the London and Paris
booksellers were covering their stalls with Cooper's The Last of the
Mohicans. Irving, Cooper, and Bryant are thus the pioneers in a new
phase of American literary activity, often called, for convenience in
labeling, the Knickerbocker Group because of the identification of these
men with New York. And close behind these leaders come a younger company,
destined likewise, in the shy boyish words of Hawthorne, one of the
number, "to write books that would be read in England." For by 1826
Hawthorne and Longfellow were out of college and were trying to learn to
write. Ticknor, Prescott, and Bancroft, somewhat older men, were settling
to their great tasks. Emerson was entering upon his duties as a minister.
Edgar Allan Poe, at that University of Virginia which Jefferson had just
founded, was doubtless revising Tamerlane and Other Poems which he
was to publish in Boston in the following year. Holmes was a Harvard
undergraduate. Garrison had just printed 90Whittier's first published poem
in the Newburyport Free Press. Walt Whitman was a barefooted boy on
Long Island, and Lowell, likewise seven years of age, was watching the
birds in the tree-tops of Elmwood. But it was Washington Irving who showed
all of these men that nineteenth century England would be interested in
American books.
The very word Knickerbocker is one evidence of the vitality of Irving's
happy imaginings. In 1809 he had invented a mythical Dutch historian of
New York named Diedrich Knickerbocker and fathered upon him a witty parody
of Dr. Mitchill's grave Picture of New York. To read Irving's
chapters today is to witness one of the rarest and most agreeable of
phenomena, namely, the actual beginning of a legend which the world is
unwilling to let die. The book made Sir Walter Scott's sides ache with
laughter, and reminded him of the humor of Swift and Sterne. But certain
New Yorkers were slow to see the joke.
Irving was himself a New Yorker, born just at the close of the Revolution,
of a Scotch father and English mother. His youth was pleasantly idle, with
a little random education, much theater-going, and plentiful rambles with
a gun along the 91
Hudson River. In 1804 he went abroad for his health, returned and helped
to write the light social satire of the Salmagundi Papers, and
became, after the publication of the Knickerbocker History, a local
celebrity. Sailing for England in 1815 on business, he stayed until 1832
as a roving man of letters in England and Spain and then as Secretary of
the American Legation in London. The Sketch Book, Bracebridge
Hall, and Tales of a Traveler are the best known productions of
Irving's fruitful residence in England. The Life of Columbus, the
Conquest of Granada, and The Alhambra represent his first
sojourn in Spain. After his return to America he became fascinated with
the Great West, made the travels described in his Tour of the Prairies,
and told the story of roving trappers and the fur trade in Captain
Bonneville and Astoria. For four years he returned to Spain as
American Minister. In his last tranquil years at Sunnyside on the Hudson,
where he died in 1859, he wrote graceful lives of Goldsmith and of
Washington.
Such a glance at the shelf containing Irving's books suggests but little
of that personal quality to which he owes his significance as an
interpreter of America to the Old World. This son of a narrow, hard,
Scotch dealer in cutlery, this drifter 92about town when New York was
only a big slovenly village, this light-hearted scribbler of satire and
sentiment, was a gentleman born. His boyhood and youth were passed in that
period of Post-Revolutionary reaction which exhibits the United States in
some of its most unlovely aspects. Historians like Henry Adams and
McMaster have painted in detail the low estate of education, religion, and
art as the new century began. The bitter feeling of the nascent nation
toward Great Britain was intensified by the War of 1812. The Napoleonic
Wars had threatened to break the last threads of our friendship for
France, and suspicion of the Holy Alliance led to an era of national
self-assertion of which the Monroe Doctrine was only one expression. The
raw Jacksonism of the West seemed to be gaining upon the older
civilizations represented by Virginia and Massachusetts. The self-made
type of man began to pose as the genuine American. And at this moment came
forward a man of natural lucidity and serenity of mind, of perfect poise
and good temper, who knew both Europe and America and felt that they ought
to know one another better and to like one another more. That was Irving's
service as an international mediator. He diffused sweetness and 93light in an
era marked by bitterness and obscuration. It was a triumph of character as
well as of literary skill.
But the skill was very noticeable also. Irving's prose is not that of the
Defoe-Swift-Franklin-Paine type of plain talk to the crowd. It is rather
an inheritance from that other eighteenth century tradition, the
conversation of the select circle. Its accents were heard in Steele and
Addison and were continued in Goldsmith, Sterne, Cowper, and Charles Lamb.
Among Irving's successors, George William Curtis and Charles Dudley Warner
and William Dean Howells have been masters of it likewise. It is mellow
human talk, delicate, regardful, capable of exquisite modulation. With
instinctive artistic taste, Irving used this old and sound style upon
fresh American material. In Rip van Winkle and The Legend of
Sleepy Hollow he portrayed his native valley of the Hudson, and for a
hundred years connoisseurs of style have perceived the exquisite fitness
of the language to the images and ideas which Irving desired to convey. To
render the Far West of that epoch this style is perhaps not "big" and
broad enough, but when used as Irving uses it in describing Stratford and
Westminster Abbey and an Old English 94Christmas, it becomes again a
perfect medium. Hawthorne adopted it for Our Old Home, and
Englishmen recognized it at once as a part of their own inheritance,
enriched, like certain wines, by the voyage across the Atlantic and home
again. Irving wrote of England, Mr. Warner once said, as Englishmen would
have liked to write about it. When he described the Alhambra and Granada
and the Moors, it was the style, rich both in physical sensation and in
dreamlike reverie, which revealed to the world the quick American
appreciation of foreign scenes and characters. Its key is sympathy.
Irving's popularity has endured in England. It suffered during the middle
of the century in his own country, for the strongest New England authors
taught the public to demand more thought and passion than were in Irving's
nature. Possibly the nervous, journalistic style of the twentieth century
allows too scanty leisure of mind for the full enjoyment of the
Knickerbocker flavor. Yet such changes as these in literary fashion
scarcely affect the permanent service of Irving to our literature. He
immortalized a local type—the New York Dutchman—and local
legends, like that of Rip van Winkle; he used the framework of the 95narrative
essay to create something almost like the perfected short story of Poe and
Hawthorne; he wrote prose with unfailing charm in an age when charm was
lacking; and, if he had no message, it should be remembered that some of
the most useful ambassadors have had none save to reveal, with delicacy
and tact and humorous kindness, the truth that foreign persons have
feelings precisely like our own.
Readers of Sir Walter Scott's Journal may remember his account of
an evening party in Paris in 1826 where he met Fenimore Cooper, then in
the height of his European reputation.﹃So the Scotch and American lions
took the field together,﹄wrote Sir Walter, who loved to be generous. The
Last of the Mohicans, then just published, threatened to eclipse the
fame of Ivanhoe. Cooper, born in 1789, was eighteen years younger
than the Wizard of the North, and was more deeply indebted to him than he
knew. For it was Scott who had created the immense nineteenth century
audience for prose fiction, and who had evolved a kind of formula for the
novel, ready for Cooper's use. Both men were natural story-tellers. Scott
had the richer mind and the more fully developed historical imagination.
Both were out-of-doors 96
men, lovers of manly adventure and of natural beauty. But the American had
the good fortune to be able to utilize in his books his personal
experiences of forest and sea and to reveal to Europe the real romance of
the American wilderness.
That Cooper was the first to perceive the artistic possibilities of this
romance, no one would claim. Brockden Brown, a Quaker youth of
Philadelphia, a disciple of the English Godwin, had tried his hand at the
very end of the eighteenth century upon American variations of the Gothic
romance then popular in England. Brown had a keen eye for the values of
the American landscape and even of the American Indian. He had a knack for
passages of ghastly power, as his descriptions of maniacs, murderers,
sleep-walkers, and solitaries abundantly prove. But he had read too much
and lived too little to rival the masters of the art of fiction. And there
was a traveled Frenchman, Chateaubriand, surely an expert in the art of
eloquent prose, who had transferred to the pages of his American Indian
stories, Atala and René, the mystery and enchantment
of our dark forests and endless rivers. But Chateaubriand, like Brockden
Brown, is feverish. A taint 97of old-world eroticism and despair hovers like
a miasma over his magnificent panorama of the wilderness. Cooper, like
Scott, is masculine.
He was a Knickerbocker only by adoption. Born in New Jersey, his childhood
was spent in the then remote settlement of Cooperstown in Central New
York. He had a little schooling at Albany, and a brief and inglorious
career at Yale with the class of 1806. He went to sea for two years, and
then served for three years in the United States Navy upon Lakes Ontario
and Champlain, the very scene of some of his best stories. In 1811 he
married, resigned from the Navy, and settled upon a little estate in
Westchester County, near New York. Until the age of thirty, he was not in
the least a bookman, but a healthy man of action. Then, as the well-known
anecdote goes, he exclaims to his wife, after reading a stupid English
novel, "I believe I could write a better story myself." Precaution
(1820) was the result, but whether it was better than the unknown English
book, no one can now say. It was bad enough. Yet the next year Cooper
published The Spy, one of the finest of his novels, which was
instantly welcomed in England and translated in France. Then came, in
swift succession, The Pioneers, the first Leather-Stocking 98tale in order
of composition, and The Pilot, to show that Scott's Pirate
was written by a landsman! Lionel Lincoln and The Last of the
Mohicans followed. The next seven years were spent in Europe, mainly
in France, where The Prairie and The Red Rover were written.
Cooper now looked back upon his countrymen with eyes of critical
detachment, and made ready to tell them some of their faults. He came home
to Cooperstown in 1833, the year after Irving's return to America. He had
won, deservedly, a great fame, which he proceeded to imperil by his
combativeness with his neighbors and his harsh strictures upon the
national character, due mainly to his lofty conception of the ideal
America. He continued to spin yarns of sea and shore, and to write naval
history. The tide of fashion set against him in the eighteen-forties when
Bulwer and Dickens rode into favor, but the stout-hearted old pioneer
could afford to bide his time. He died in 1851, just as Mrs. Stowe was
writing Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Two generations have passed since then, and Cooper's place in our
literature remains secure. To have written our first historical novel, The
Spy, our first sea-story, The Pilot, and to have created 99the
Leather-Stocking series, is glory enough. In his perception of masculine
character, Cooper ranks with Fielding. His sailors, his scouts and spies,
his good and bad Indians, are as veritable human figures as Squire
Western. Long Tom Coffin, Harvey Birch, Hawk-Eye, and Chingachgook are
physically and morally true to life itself. Read the Leather-Stocking
books in the order of the events described, beginning with The
Deerslayer, then The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder,
The Pioneers, and ending with the vast darkening horizon of The
Prairie and the death of the trapper, and one will feel how natural
and inevitable are the fates of the personages and the alterations in the
life of the frontier. These books vary in their poetic quality and in the
degree of their realism, but to watch the evolution of the leading figure
is to see human life in its actual texture.
Clever persons and pedantic persons have united to find fault with certain
elements of Cooper's art. Mark Twain, in one of his least inspired
moments, selected Cooper's novels for attack. Every grammar school teacher
is ready to point out that his style is often prolix and his sentences are
sometimes ungrammatical. Amateurs even criticize Cooper's seamanship,
although it seemed 100
impeccable to Admiral Mahan. No doubt one must admit the﹃helplessness,
propriety, and incapacity﹄of most of Cooper's women, and the dreadfulness
of his bores, particularly the Scotchmen, the doctors, and the
naturalists. Like Sir Walter, Cooper seems to have taken but little pains
in the deliberate planning of his plots. Frequently he accepts a
ready-made formula of villain and hero, predicament and escape, renewed
crisis and rescue, mystification and explanation, worthy of a third-rate
novelist. His salvation lies in his genius for action, the beauty and
grandeur of his landscapes, the primitive veracity of his children of
nature.
Cooper was an elemental man, and he comprehended, by means of something
deeper than mere artistic instinct, the feelings of elemental humanity in
the presence of the wide ocean or of the deep woods. He is as healthy and
sane as Fielding, and he possesses an additional quality which all of the
purely English novelists lack. It was the result of his youthful sojourn
in the wilderness. Let us call it the survival in him of an aboriginal
imagination. Cooper reminds one somehow of a moose—an ungraceful
creature perhaps, but indubitably big, as many a hunter has suddenly 101 realized
when he has come unexpectedly upon a moose that whirled to face him in the
twilight silence of a northern wood.
Something of this far-off and gigantic primitivism inheres also in the
poetry of William Cullen Bryant. His portrait, with the sweeping white
beard and the dark folds of the cloak, suggests the Bard as the Druids
might have known him. But in the eighteen-thirties and forties, Mr.
Bryant's alert, clean-shaven face, and energetic gait as he strode down
Broadway to the Evening Post office, suggested little more than a
vigorous and somewhat radical editor of an increasingly prosperous
Democratic newspaper. There was nothing of the Fringed Gentian or Yellow
Violet about him. Like so many of the Knickerbockers, Bryant was an
immigrant to New York; in fact, none of her adopted men of letters have
represented so perfectly the inherited traits of the New England Puritan.
To understand his long and honorable public life it is necessary to know
something of the city of his choice, but to enter into the spirit of his
poetry one must go back to the hills of western Massachusetts.
Bryant had a right to his cold-weather mind. He came from Mayflower stock.
His father, Dr. 102
Peter Bryant of Cummington, was a sound country physician, with liberal
preferences in theology, Federalist views in politics, and a library of
seven hundred volumes, rich in poetry. The poet's mother records his birth
in her diary in terse words which have the true Spartan tang: "Nov. 3,
1794. Stormy, wind N. E. Churned. Seven in the evening a son born."
Two days later the November wind shifted.﹃Nov. 5, 1794. Clear, wind N. W.
Made Austin a coat. Sat up all day. Went into the kitchen.﹄The baby, it
appears, had an abnormally large head and was dipped, day after day, in
rude hydropathy, into an icy spring. A precocious childhood was followed
by a stern, somewhat unhappy, but aspiring boyhood. The little fellow,
lying prone with his brothers before the firelight of the kitchen, reading
English poetry from his father's library, used to pray that he too might
become a poet. At thirteen he produced a satire on Jefferson, The
Embargo, which his proud Federalist father printed at Boston in 1808.
The youth had nearly one year at Williams College, over the mountain
ranges to the west. He wished to continue his education at Yale, but his
father had no money for this greater venture, and the son remained at
home. There, in the autumn of 1811, on the bleak hills, 103 he
composed the first draft of Thanatopsis. He was seventeen, and he
had been reading Blair's Grave and the poems of the consumptive
Henry Kirke White. He hid his verses in a drawer, and five years later his
father found them, shed tears over them, and sent them to the North
American Review, where they were published in September, 1817.
In the meantime the young man had studied law, though with dislike of it,
and with the confession that he sometimes read The Lyrical Ballads
when he might have been reading Blackstone. One December afternoon in
1815, he was walking from Cummington to Plainfield—aged twenty-one,
and looking for a place in which to settle as a lawyer. Across the vivid
sunset flew a black duck, as solitary and homeless as himself. The bird
seemed an image of his own soul, "lone wandering but not lost." Before he
slept that night he had composed the poem To a Waterfowl. No more
authentic inspiration ever visited a poet, and though Bryant wrote verse
for more than sixty years after that crimson sky had paled into chill
December twilight, his lines never again vibrated with such communicative
passion.
Bryant's ensuing career revealed the steady purpose, 104 the stoicism, the reticence
of the Puritan. It was highly successful, judged even by material
standards. Thanatopsis had been instantly regarded in 1817 as the
finest poem yet produced in America. The author was invited to contribute
to the North American Review an essay on American poetry, and this,
like all of Bryant's prose work, was admirably written. He delivered his
Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem, The Ages, in 1821, the year of
Emerson's graduation. After a brief practice of the law in Great
Barrington, he entered in 1826 into the unpromising field of journalism in
New York. While other young Knickerbockers wasted their literary strength
on trifles and dissipated their moral energies, Bryant held steadily to
his daily task. His life in town was sternly ascetic, but he allowed
himself long walks in the country, and he continued to meditate a somewhat
thankless Muse. In 1832 he visited his brothers on the Illinois prairies,
and stopped one day to chat with a "tall awkward uncouth lad" of racy
conversational powers, who was leading his company of volunteers into the
Black Hawk War. The two men were destined to meet again in 1860, when
Bryant presided at that Cooper Union address of Lincoln's which revealed
to New York and to the country that 105 the former captain of
volunteers was now a king of men. Lincoln was embarrassed on that
occasion, it is said, by Bryant's fastidious, dignified presence. Not so
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had seen the poet in Rome, two years before.
"There was a weary look in his face," wrote Hawthorne,﹃as if he were
tired of seeing things and doing things.… He uttered neither
passion nor poetry, but excellent good sense, and accurate information, on
whatever subject transpired; a very pleasant man to associate with, but
rather cold, I should imagine, if one should seek to touch his heart with
one's own.﹄Such was the impression Bryant made upon less gifted men than
Hawthorne, as he lived out his long and useful life in the Knickerbocker
city. Toward the close of it he was in great demand for public occasions;
and it was after delivering a speech dedicating a statue to Mazzini in
Central Park in 1878, when Bryant was eighty-four, that a fit of dizziness
caused a fall which proved fatal to the venerable poet. It was just
seventy years since Dr. Peter Bryant had published his boy's verses on The
Embargo.
Although Bryant's poetry has never roused any vociferous excitement, it
has enduring qualities. The spiritual preoccupations of many a voiceless
106
generation of New England Puritans found a tongue at last in this
late-born son of theirs. The determining mood of his best poems, from
boyhood to old age, was precisely that thought of transiency,﹃the eternal
flow of things,﹄which colored the imaginations of the first colonists.
This is the central motive of Thanatopsis, To a Waterfowl,
The Rivulet, A Forest Hymn, An Evening Revery, The
Crowded Street, The Flood of Years. All of these tell the same
story of endless change and of endless abiding, of varying eddies in the
same mighty stream of human existence. Bryant faced the thought as calmly,
as majestically, at seventeen as when he wrote The Flood of Years
at eighty-two. He is a master of description, though he has slight gift
for narrative or drama, and he rarely sounds the clear lyric note. But
everywhere in his verse there is that cold purity of the winter hills in
Western Massachusetts, something austere and elemental which reaches
kindred spirits below the surface on which intellect and passion have
their play, something more primitive, indeed, than human intellect or
passion and belonging to another mode of being, something "rock-ribbed and
ancient as the sun."
A picture of the Knickerbocker era is not complete 107 without its portraits of the
minor figures in the literary life of New York up to the time of the Civil
War. But the scope of the present volume does not permit sketches of
Paulding and Verplanck, of Halleck and his friend Drake, of N. P.
Willis and Morris and Woodworth. Some of these are today only
"single-poem" men, like Payne, the author of Home Sweet Home, just
as Key, the author of The Star-Spangled Banner, is today a
"single-poem" man of an earlier generation. Their names will be found in
such limbos of the dead as Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America
and Poe's Literati. They knew "the town" in their day, and pleased
its very easily pleased taste. The short-lived literary magazines of the
eighteen-forties gave them their hour of glory. As representatives of
passing phases of the literary history of New York their careers are not
without sentimental interest, but few of them spoke to or for the country
as a whole. Two figures, indeed, stand out in sharp contrast with those
habitual strollers on Broadway and frequenters of literary gatherings,
though each of them was for a while a part of Knickerbocker New York. To
all appearances they were only two more Bohemians like the rest, but the
curiosity of the twentieth 108 century sets them apart from their forgotten
contemporaries. They are two of the unluckiest—and yet luckiest—authors
who ever tried to sell a manuscript along Broadway. One of them is Edgar
Allan Poe and the other is Walt Whitman. They shall have a chapter to
themselves.
But before turning to that chapter, we must look back to New England once
more and observe the blossoming-time of its ancient commonwealths. During
the thirty years preceding the Civil War New England awoke to a new life
of the spirit. So varied and rich was her literary productiveness in this
era that it still remains her greatest period, and so completely did New
England writers of this epoch voice the ideals of the nation that the
great majority of Americans, even today, regard these New Englanders as
the truest literary exponents of the mind and soul of the United States.
We must take a look at them.
109
The Transcendentalists
Tounderstand the literary leadership of New
England during the thirty years immediately preceding the Civil War it is
necessary to recall the characteristics of a somewhat isolated and
peculiar people. The mental and moral traits of the New England colonists,
already glanced at in an earlier chapter, had suffered little essential
modification in two hundred years. The original racial stock was still
dominant. As compared with the middle and southern colonies, there was
relatively little immigration, and this was easily assimilated. The
physical remoteness of New England from other sections of the country, and
the stubborn loyalty with which its inhabitants maintained their own
standards of life, alike contributed to their sense of separateness. It is
true, of course, that their mode of thinking and feeling had undergone
certain changes. They were among the 110 earliest theorists of
political independence from Great Britain, and had done their share, and
more, in the Revolution. The rigors of their early creed had somewhat
relaxed, as we have seen, by the end of the seventeenth century, and
throughout the eighteenth there was a gradual progress toward religious
liberalism. The population steadily increased, and New England's
unremitting struggle with a not too friendly soil, her hardihood upon the
seas, and her keenness in trade, became proverbial throughout the country.
Her seaport towns were wealthy. The general standards of living remained
frugal, but extreme poverty was rare. Her people still made, as in the
earliest days of the colonies, silent and unquestioned sacrifices for
education, and her chief seats of learning, Harvard and Yale, remained the
foremost educational centers of America. But there was still scant leisure
for the quest of beauty, and slender material reward for any practitioner
of the fine arts. Oratory alone, among the arts of expression, commanded
popular interest and applause. Daniel Webster's audiences at Plymouth in
1820 and at Bunker Hill in 1825 were not inferior to similar audiences of
today in intelligence and in responsiveness. Perhaps they were superior.
Appreciation 111
of the spoken word was natural to men trained by generations of thoughtful
listening to "painful" preaching and by participation in the discussions
of town-meeting. Yet appreciation of secular literature was rare, and
interest in the other arts was almost non-existent.
Then, beginning in the eighteen-twenties, and developing rapidly after
1830, came a change, a change so startling as to warrant the term of﹃the
Renascence of New England.﹄No single cause is sufficient to account for
this "new birth." It is a good illustration of that law of﹃tension and
release,﹄which the late Professor Shaler liked to demonstrate in all
organic life. A long period of strain was followed by an age of expansion,
freedom, release of energy. As far as the mental life of New England was
concerned, something of the new stimulus was due directly to the influence
of Europe. Just as the wandering scholars from Italy had brought the New
Learning, which was a revival of the old learning, into England in the
sixteenth century, so now young New England college men like Edward
Everett and George Ticknor brought home from the Continent the riches of
German and French scholarship. Emerson's description of the impression
made by Everett's 112
lectures in 1820, after his return from Germany, gives a vivid picture of
the new thirst for foreign culture. The North American Review and
other periodicals, while persistently urging the need of a distinctively
national literature, insisted also upon the value of a deeper knowledge of
the literature of the Continent. This was the burden of Channing's once
famous article on A National Literature in 1823: it was a plea for
an independent American school of writers, but these writers should know
the best that Europe had to teach.
The purely literary movement was connected, as the great name of Channing
suggests, with a new sense of freedom in philosophy and religion.
Calvinism had mainly done its work in New England. It had bred an
extraordinary type of men and women, it had helped to lay some of the
permanent foundations of our democracy, and it was still destined to have
a long life in the new West and in the South. But in that stern section of
the country where its influence had been most marked there was now an
increasingly sharp reaction against its determinism and its pessimism.
Early in the nineteenth century the most ancient and influential churches
in Boston and the leading professors at Harvard had accepted the new form
113 of
religious liberalism known as Unitarianism. The movement spread throughout
Eastern Massachusetts and made its way to other States. Orthodox and
liberal Congregational churches split apart, and when Channing preached
the ordination sermon for Jared Sparks in Baltimore in 1819, the word
Unitarian, accepted by the liberals with some misgiving, became the
recognized motto of the new creed. It is only with its literary influence
that we are here concerned, yet that literary influence became so potent
that there is scarcely a New England writer of the first rank, from Bryant
onward, who remained untouched by it.
The most interesting and peculiar phase of the new liberalism has little
directly to do with the specific tenets of theological Unitarianism, and
in fact marked a revolt against the more prosaic and conventional pattern
of English and American Unitarian thought. But this movement, known as
Transcendentalism, would have been impossible without a preliminary and
liberalizing stirring of the soil. It was a fascinating moment of release
for some of the most brilliant and radical minds of New England. Its
foremost representative in our literature was Ralph Waldo Emerson, as its
chief 114
exponents in England were Coleridge and Carlyle. We must understand its
meaning if we would perceive the quality of much of the most noble and
beautiful writing produced in New England during the Golden Age.
What then is the significance of the word Transcendental? Disregarding for
the moment the technical development of this term as used by German and
English philosophers, it meant for Emerson and his friends simply this:
whatever transcends or goes beyond the experience of the senses. It
stressed intuition rather than sensation, direct perception of ultimate
truth rather than the processes of logic. It believed in man's ability to
apprehend the absolute ideas of Truth, Rectitude, Goodness. It resembled
the Inner Light of the Quaker, though the Quaker traced this to a
supernatural illumination of the Holy Spirit, while the Transcendentalist
believed that a vision of the eternal realities was a natural endowment of
the human mind. It had only to be trusted. Stated in this form, it is
evident that we have here a very ancient doctrine, well known in the
literature of India and of Greece. It has been held by countless persons
who have never heard of the word Transcendentalism. We need 115 go no
further back than Alexander Pope, a Roman Catholic, whom we find
declaring:﹃I am so certain of the soul's being immortal that I seem to
feel it within me, as it were by intuition.﹄Pope's friend Swift, a dean
of the Church of England and assuredly no Transcendentalist, defined
vision as seeing the things that are invisible.
Now turn to some of the New England men. Dr. C. A. Bartol, a disciple
of Emerson, maintained that﹃the mistake is to make the everlasting things
subjects of argument instead of sight.﹄Theodore Parker declared to his
congregation:
From the primitive facts of consciousness given by the power of
instinctive intuition, I endeavored to deduce the true notion of God, of
justice and futurity.… I found most help in the works of Immanuel
Kant, one of the profoundest thinkers of the world, though one of the
worst writers, even in Germany; if he did not always furnish conclusions
I could rest in, he yet gave me the true method, and put me on the right
road. I found certain great primal Intuitions of Human Nature, which
depend on no logical process of demonstration, but are rather facts of
consciousness given by the instinctive action of human nature itself. I
will mention only the three most important which pertain to Religion. 1.
The Instinctive Intuition of the Divine, the consciousness that there is
a God. 2. The Instinctive Intuition of the Just and Right, a
consciousness that there is a Moral Law, independent 116 of our
will, which we ought to keep. 3. The Instinctive Intuition of the
Immortal, a consciousness that the Essential Element of man, the
principle of Individuality, never dies.
This passage dates from 1859, and readers of Bergson may like to compare
it with the contemporary Frenchman's saying: "The analytical faculties can
give us no realities."
Let us next hear Emerson himself, first in an early letter to his brother
Edward:﹃Do you draw the distinction of Milton, Coleridge, and the Germans
between Reason and Understanding? I think it a philosophy itself, and,
like all truth, very practical. Reason is the highest faculty of the soul,
what we mean often by the soul itself: it never reasons, never proves, it
simply perceives, it is vision. The understanding toils all the time,
compares, contrives, adds, argues; near-sighted, but strong-sighted,
dwelling in the present, the expedient, the customary.﹄And in 1833, after
he had left the Unitarian pulpit, Emerson made in his diary this curious
attempt to reconcile the scriptural language of his ancestral profession
to the new vocabulary of Transcendentalism: "Jesus Christ was a minister
of the pure Reason. The beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount are all
utterances of the 117
mind contemning the phenomenal world.… The understanding can make
nothing of it. 'Tis all nonsense. The Reason affirms its absolute verity.…
St. Paul marks the distinction by the terms natural man and spiritual man.
When Novalis says, 'It is the instinct of the Understanding to contradict
the Reason,' he only translates into a scientific formula the doctrine of
St. Paul, 'The Carnal Mind is enmity against God.'"
One more quotation must suffice. It is from a poem by a forgotten
Transcendentalist, F. G. Tuckerman.
No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead;
But, leaving straining thought and stammering word,
Across the barren azure pass to God;
Shooting the void in silence, like a bird—
A bird that shuts his wings for better speed!
It is obvious that this "contemning the phenomenal world," this﹃revulsion
against the intellect as the sole source of truth,﹄is highly dangerous to
second-class minds. If one habitually prints the words Insight, Instinct,
Intuition, Consciousness with capitals, and relegates equally useful words
like senses, experience, fact, logic to lower-case type, one may do it
because he is 118
a Carlyle or an Emerson, but the chances are that he is neither.
Transcendentalism, like all idealistic movements, had its﹃lunatic
fringe,﹄its camp-followers of excitable, unstable visionaries. The very
name, like the name Methodist, was probably bestowed upon it in mockery,
and this whole perturbation of staid New England had its humorous side.
Witness the career of Bronson Alcott. It is also true that the glorious
affirmations of these seers can be neither proved nor disproved. They made
no examination and they sought no validation of consciousness. An explorer
in search of the North Pole must bring back proofs of his journey, but
when a Transcendentalist affirms that he has reached the far heights of
human experience and even caught sight of the gods sitting on their
thrones, you and I are obliged to take his word for it. Sometimes we hear
such a man gladly, but it depends upon the man, not upon the
trustworthiness of the method. Finally it should be observed that the
Transcendental movement was an exceedingly complex one, being both
literary, philosophic, and religious; related also to the subtle thought
of the Orient, to mediæval mysticism, and to the English Platonists;
touched throughout by the French Revolutionary 119 theories, by the Romantic
spirit, by the new zeal for science and pseudo-science, and by the unrest
of a fermenting age.
Our present concern is with the impact of this cosmopolitan current upon
the mind and character of a few New England writers. Channing and Theodore
Parker, Margaret Fuller and Alcott, Thoreau and Emerson, are all
representative of the best thought and the noblest ethical impulses of
their generation. Let us choose first the greatest name: a sunward-gazing
spirit, and, it may be, one of the very Sun-Gods.
The pilgrim to Concord who stops for a moment in the village library to
study French's statue of Emerson will notice the asymmetrical face. On one
side it is the face of a keen Yankee farmer, but seen from the other side
it is the countenance of a seer, a world's man. This contrast between the
parochial Emerson and the greater Emerson interprets many a puzzle in his
career. Half a mile beyond the village green to the north, close to the
"rude bridge" of the famous Concord fight in 1775, is the Old Manse, once
tenanted and described by Hawthorne. It was built by Emerson's
grandfather, a patriot chaplain in the Revolution, who died of camp-fever
at Ticonderoga. His 120
widow married Dr. Ezra Ripley, and here Ralph Waldo Emerson and his
brothers passed many a summer in their childhood. Half a mile east of the
village, on the Cambridge turnpike, is Emerson's own house, still
sheltered by the pines which Thoreau helped him to plant in 1838. Within
the house everything is unchanged: here are the worn books, pen and
inkstand, the favorite pictures upon the wall. Over the ridge to the north
lies the Sleepy Hollow cemetery where the poet rests, with the gravestones
of Hawthorne and the Alcotts, Thoreau and William James close by.
But although Concord is the Emerson shrine, he was born in Boston, in
1803. His father, named William like the grandfather, was also, like the
Emerson ancestors for many generations, a clergyman—eloquent,
liberal, fond of books and music, highly honored by his alma mater
Harvard and by the town of Boston, where he ministered to the First
Church. His premature death in 1811 left his widow with five sons—one
of them feebleminded—and a daughter to struggle hard with poverty.
With her husband's sister, the Calvinistic "Aunt Mary Moody" Emerson, she
held, however, that these orphaned boys had been 121 "born to be educated." And
educated the "eager blushing boys" were, at the Boston Latin School and at
Harvard College, on a regimen of﹃toil and want and truth and mutual
faith.﹄There are many worse systems of pedagogy than this. Ralph was
thought less persistent than his steady older brother William, and far
less brilliant than his gifted, short-lived younger brothers, Edward and
Charles. He had an undistinguished career at Harvard, where he was
graduated in 1821, ranking thirtieth in a class of fifty-nine. Lovers of
irony like to remember that he was the seventh choice of his classmates
for the position of class poet. After some desultory teaching to help his
brothers, he passed irregularly through the Divinity School, his studies
often interrupted by serious ill-health. "If they had examined me," he
said afterward of the kindly professors in the Divinity School,﹃they
never would have passed me.﹄But approve him they did, in 1826, and he
entered decorously upon the profession of his ancestors, as associate
minister of the Second Church in Boston. His Journals, which are a
priceless record of his inner life, at this and later periods, reveal the
rigid self-scrutiny, the tender idealism, with which he began his
ministerial career.
122 But
as a scheme of life for Ralph Waldo Emerson this vocation would not
satisfy. The sexton of the Second Church thought that the young man was
not at his best at funerals. Father Taylor, the eccentric Methodist, whom
Emerson assisted at a sailor's Bethel near Long Wharf, considered him﹃one
of the sweetest souls God ever made,﹄but as ignorant of the principles of
the New Testament as Balaam's ass was of Hebrew grammar. By and by came an
open difference with his congregation over the question of administering
the Communion. "I am not interested in it," Emerson admitted, and he wrote
in his Journal the noble words:﹃It is my desire, in the office of
a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole
heart.﹄His resignation was accepted in 1832. His young wife had died of
consumption in the same year. He now sailed for Italy, France, and
England, a memorable journey which gave him an acquaintance with Landor,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle, but which was even more significant in
sending him, as he says, back to himself, to the resources of his own
nature. "When shows break up," wrote Whitman afterward,﹃what but oneself
is sure?﹄In 1834 and 1835 we find Emerson occupying a room 123 in the Old
Manse at Concord, strolling in the quiet fields, lecturing or preaching if
he were invited to do so, but chiefly absorbed in a little book which he
was beginning to write—a new utterance of a new man.
This book, the now famous Nature of 1836, contains the essence of
Emerson's message to his generation. It is a prose essay, but written in
the ecstatic mood of a poet. The theme of its meditation is the soul as
related to Nature and to God. The soul is primal; Nature, in all its
bountiful and beautiful commodities, exists for the training of the soul;
it is the soul's shadow. And every soul has immediate access to Deity.
Thus the utility and beauty and discipline of Nature lift the soul
Godward. The typical sentence of the book is this: "The sun shines today
also"; that is to say: the world is still alive and fair; let us lift up
our hearts! Only a few Americans of 1836 bought this singular volume, but
Emerson went serenely forward. He had found his path.
In 1837 he delivered the well-known Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard on
The American Scholar. Emerson was now thirty-four; he had married a
second time, had bought a house of his own in Concord, and purposed to
make a living by 124
lecturing and writing. His address in Cambridge, though it contained no
reference to himself, was after all a justification of the way of life he
had chosen: a declaration of intellectual independence for himself and his
countrymen, an exhortation of self-trust to the individual thinking man.
﹃If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts and there
abide, the huge world will come round to him.﹄Such advice to cut loose
from the moorings of the past was not unknown in Phi Beta Kappa orations,
though it had never been so brilliantly phrased; but when Emerson applied
precisely the same doctrine, in 1838, to the graduating class at the
Harvard Divinity School, he roused a storm of disapproval.﹃A tempest in
our washbowl,﹄he wrote coolly to Carlyle, but it was more than that. The
great sentence of the Divinity School address,﹃God is, not was; he
speaketh, not spake,﹄was the emphasis of a superb rhetorician upon the
immediacy of the soul's access to God. It has been the burden of a
thousand prophets in all religions. The young priests of the Divinity
School, their eyes wearied with Hebrew and Greek, seem to have enjoyed
Emerson's injunction to turn away from past records and historical
authorities and to drink from the living fountain 125 of the divine within
themselves; but to the professors, "the stern old war-gods," this relative
belittlement of historical Christianity seemed blasphemy. A generation
passed before Emerson was again welcomed by his alma mater.
The reader who has mastered those three utterances by the Concord
Transcendentalist in 1836, 1837, and 1838 has the key to Emerson. He was a
seer, not a system-maker. The constitution of his mind forbade formal,
consecutive, logical thought. He was not a philosopher in the accepted
sense, though he was always philosophizing, nor a metaphysician in spite
of his curious searchings in the realm of metaphysics. He sauntered in
books as he sauntered by Walden Pond, in quest of what interested him; he
"fished in Montaigne," he said, as he fished in Plato and Goethe. He
basketed the day's luck, good or bad as it might be, into the pages of his
private Journal, which he called his savings-bank, because from
this source he drew most of the material for his books. The Journal
has recently been printed, in ten volumes. No American writing rewards the
reader more richly. It must be remembered that Emerson's Essays,
the first volume of which appeared in 1841, and the last volumes after his
death in 1882, represent 126 practically three stages of composition:
first the detached thoughts of the Journal; second, the
rearrangement of this material for use upon the lecture platform; and
finally, the essays in their present form. The oral method thus
predominates: a series of oracular thoughts has been shaped for oratorical
utterance, not oratorical in the bombastic, popular American sense, but
cunningly designed, by a master of rhetoric, to capture the ear and then
the mind of the auditor.
Emerson's work as a lecturer coincided with the rise of that Lyceum system
which brought most of the American authors, for more than a generation,
into intimate contact with the public, and which proved an important
factor in the æsthetic and moral cultivation of our people. No
lecturer could have had a more auspicious influence than Emerson, with his
quiet dignity, his serene spiritual presence, his tonic and often
electrifying force. But if he gave his audiences precious gifts, he also
learned much from them. For thirty years his lecturing trips to the West
brought him, more widely than any New England man of letters, into contact
with the new, virile America of the great Mississippi valley. Unlike many
of his friends, he was not repelled by the "Jacksonism of 127 the West";
he rated it a wholesome, vivifying force in our national thought and life.
The Journal reveals the essential soundness of his Americanism.
Though surrounded all his life by reformers, he was himself scarcely a
reformer, save upon the single issue of anti-slavery. Perhaps he was at
bottom too much of a radical to be swept off his feet by any reform.
To our generation, of course, Emerson presents himself as an author of
books, and primarily as an essayist, rather than as a winning, entrancing
speaker. His essays have a greater variety of tone than is commonly
recognized. Many of them, like Manners, Farming, Books,
Eloquence, Old Age, exhibit a shrewd prudential wisdom, a
sort of Yankee instinct for "the milk in the pan," that reminds one of Ben
Franklin. Like most of the greater New England writers, he could be, on
occasion, an admirable local historian. See his essays on Life and
Letters in New England, New England Reformers, Politics,
and the successive entries in his Journal relating to Daniel
Webster. He had the happiest gift of portraiture, as is witnessed by his
sketches of Montaigne, of Napoleon, of Socrates (in the essay on Plato),
of his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, of Thoreau, and of various types of 128 Englishmen
in his English Traits. But the great essays, no doubt, are those
like Self-Reliance, Compensation, The Over-Soul, Fate,
Power, Culture, Worship, and Illusions. These
will puzzle no one who has read carefully that first book on Nature.
They all preach the gospel of intuition, instinctive trust in the
Universe, faith in the ecstatic moment of vision into the things that are
unseen by the physical eye. Self-reliance, as Emerson's son has pointed
out, means really God-reliance; the Over-Soul—always a
stumbling-block to Philistines—means that high spiritual life into
which all men may enter and in which they share the life of Deity. Emerson
is stern enough in expounding the laws of compensation that run through
the universe, but to him the chief law is the law of the ever-ascending,
victorious soul.
This radiant optimism permeates his poems. By temperament a singer as well
as a seer and sayer, Emerson was nevertheless deficient in the singing
voice. He composed no one great poem, his verse presents no ideas that are
not found in his prose. In metre and rhyme he is harsh and willful. Yet he
has marvelous single phrases and cadences. He ejaculates transports and
ecstasies, and though he cannot organize and construct in verse, he is
129
capable here and there of the true miracle of transforming fact and
thought into true beauty. Aldrich used to say that he would rather have
written Emerson's Bacchus than any American poem.
That the pure, high, and tonic mind of Emerson was universal in its survey
of human forces, no one would claim. Certain limitations in interest and
sympathy are obvious.﹃That horrid burden and impediment of the soul which
the churches call sin,﹄to use John Morley's words, occupied his attention
but little. Like a mountain climber in a perilous pass, he preferred to
look up rather than down. He does not stress particularly those old human
words, service and sacrifice.﹃Anti-scientific, anti-social,
anti-Christian﹄are the terms applied to him by one of his most
penetrating critics. Yet I should prefer to say "un-scientific,"
"un-social," and "non-Christian," in the sense in which Plato and Isaiah
are non-Christian. Perhaps it would be still nearer the truth to say, as
Mrs. Lincoln said of her husband, "He was not a technical Christian." He
tends to underestimate institutions of every kind; history, except as a
storehouse of anecdote, and culture as a steady mental discipline. This is
the price he pays for his transcendental 130 insistence upon the supreme
value of the Now, the moment of insight. But after all these limitations
are properly set down, the personality of Ralph Waldo Emerson remains a
priceless possession to his countrymen. The austere serenity of his life,
and the perfection with which he represents the highest type of his
province and his era, will ultimately become blended with the thought of
his true Americanism. A democrat and liberator, like Lincoln, he seems
also destined like Lincoln to become increasingly a world's figure, a
friend and guide to aspiring spirits everywhere. Differences of race and
creed are negligible in the presence of such superb confidence in God and
the soul.
Citizens of Concord in May, 1862, hearing that Henry Thoreau, the
eccentric bachelor, had just died of consumption in his mother's house on
Main Street, in his forty-fifth year, would have smiled cannily at the
notion that after fifty years their townsman's literary works would be
published in a sumptuous twenty-volume edition, and that critics in his
own country and in Europe would rank him with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet
that is precisely what has happened. Our literature has no more curious
story than the evolution of this local crank 131 into his rightful place of
mastership. In his lifetime he printed only two books, A Week on the
Concord and Merrimac Rivers—which was even more completely
neglected by the public than Emerson's Nature—and Walden,
now one of the classics, but only beginning to be talked about when its
shy, proud author penned his last line and died with the words "moose" and
"Indian" on his lips.
Thoreau, like all thinkers who reach below the surface of human life,
means many different things to men of various temperaments. Collectors of
human novelties, like Stevenson, rejoice in his uniqueness of flavor;
critics, like Lowell, place him, not without impatient rigor. To some
readers he is primarily a naturalist, an observer, of the White of
Selborne school; to others an elemental man, a lover of the wild, a hermit
of the woods. He has been called the poet-naturalist, to indicate that his
powers of observation were accompanied, like Wordsworth's, by a gift of
emotional interpretation of the meaning of phenomena. Lovers of literature
celebrate his sheer force and penetration of phrase. But to the student of
American thought Thoreau's prime value lies in the courage and consistency
with which he endeavored to 132 realize the gospel of Transcendentalism in
his own inner life.
Lovers of racial traits like to remember that Thoreau's grandfather was an
immigrant Frenchman from the island of Jersey, and that his grandmother
was Scotch and Quaker. His father made lead pencils and ground plumbago in
his own house in Concord. The mother was from New Hampshire. It was a
high-minded family. All the four children taught school and were good
talkers. Henry, born in 1817, was duly baptized by good Dr. Ripley of the
Old Manse, studied Greek and Latin, and was graduated at Harvard in 1837,
the year of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa address. Even in college the young
man was a trifle difficult. "Cold and unimpressible," wrote a classmate.
﹃The touch of his hand was moist and indifferent. He did not care for
people.﹄"An unfavorable opinion has been entertained of his disposition
to exert himself," wrote President Quincy confidentially to Emerson in
1837, although the kindly President, a year later, in recommending Thoreau
as a school-teacher, certified that "his rank was high as a scholar in all
the branches and his morals and general conduct unexceptionable and
exemplary."
Ten years passed. The young man gave up 133 school-keeping, thinking it a
loss of time. He learned pencil-making, surveying, and farm work, and
found that by manual labor for six weeks in the year he could meet all the
expenses of living. He haunted the woods and pastures, explored rivers and
ponds, built the famous hut on Emerson's wood-lot with the famous axe
borrowed from Alcott, was put in jail for refusal to pay his poll-tax,
and, to sum up much in little, "signed off" from social obligations.﹃I,
Henry D. Thoreau, have signed off, and do not hold myself responsible to
your multifarious uncivil chaos named Civil Government.﹄When his college
class held its tenth reunion in 1847, and each man was asked to send to
the secretary a record of achievement, Thoreau wrote:﹃My steadiest
employment, if such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top of my
condition and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven or on earth.﹄There
is the motto of Transcendentalism, stamped upon a single coin.
For "to be ready for whatever may turn up" is Thoreau's racier, homelier
version of Emerson's "endless seeker"; and Thoreau, more easily than
Emerson, could venture to stake everything upon the quest. The elder man
had announced the programme, but by 1847 he was himself almost 134 what
Thoreau would call a "committed man," with family and household
responsibilities, with a living to earn, and bound, like every
professional writer and speaker, to have some measure of regard for his
public. But Thoreau was ready to travel lightly and alone. If he should
fail in the great adventure for spiritual perfection, it was his own
affair. He had no intimates, no confidant save the multitudinous pages of
his Journal, from which—and here again he followed Emerson's
example—his future books were to be compiled. Many of his most loyal
admirers will admit that such a quest is bound, by the very conditions of
the problem, to be futile. Hawthorne allegorized it in Ethan Brand,
and his quaint illustration of the folly of romantic expansion of the self
apart from the common interests of human kind is the picture of a dog
chasing its own tail. "It is time now that I begin to live," notes Thoreau
in the Journal, and he continued to say it in a hundred different
ways until the end of all his journalizing, but he never quite captured
the fugitive felicity. The haunting pathos of his own allegory has moved
every reader of Walden:﹃I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and
a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail.﹄Precisely what he meant it is
now impossible 135
to say, but surely he betrays a doubt in the ultimate efficacy of his own
system of life. He bends doggedly to the trail, for Henry Thoreau is no
quitter, but the trail leads nowhere, and in the latest volumes of the Journals
he seems to realize that he has been pursuing a phantom. He dived
fearlessly and deep into himself, but somehow he failed to grasp that
pearl of great price which all the transcendental prophets assured him was
to be had at the cost of diving.
This is not to say that this austere and strenuous athlete came up quite
empty-handed. Far from it. The by-products of his toil were enough to have
enriched many lesser men, and they have given Thoreau a secure fame. From
his boyhood he longed to make himself a writer, and an admirable writer he
became. "For along time," he says in Walden,﹃I was reporter to a
journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never seen fit to
print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I
got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their
reward.﹄Like so many solitaries, he experienced the joy of intense,
long-continued effort in composition, and he was artist enough to know
that his pages, carefully assembled from his notebooks, 136 had
pungency, form, atmosphere. No man of his day, not even Lowell the﹃last
of the bookmen,﹄abandoned himself more unreservedly to the delight of
reading. Thoreau was an accomplished scholar in the Greek and Roman
classics, as his translations attest. He had some acquaintance with
several modern languages, and at one time possessed the best collection of
books on Oriental literature to be found in America. He was drenched in
the English poetry of the seventeenth century. His critical essays in the
Dial, his letters and the bookish allusions throughout his
writings, are evidence of rich harvesting in the records of the past. He
left some three thousand manuscript pages of notes on the American
Indians, whose history and character had fascinated him from boyhood. Even
his antiquarian hobbies gave him durable satisfaction. Then, too, he had
deep delight in his life-long studies in natural history, in his
meticulous measurements of river currents, in his notes upon the annual
flowering of plants and the migration of birds. The more thoroughly
trained naturalists of our own day detect him now and again in error as to
his birds and plants, just as specialists in Maine woodcraft discover that
he made amusing, and for him unaccountable, 137 blunders when he climbed
Katahdin. But if he was not impeccable as a naturalist or woodsman, who
has ever had more fun out of his enthusiasm than Thoreau, and who has ever
stimulated as many men and women in the happy use of their eyes? He would
have had slight patience with much of the sentimental nature study of our
generation, and certainly an intellectual contempt for much that we read
and write about the call of the wild; but no reader of his books can
escape his infection for the freedom of the woods, for the stark and
elemental in nature. Thoreau's passion for this aspect of life may have
been selfish, wolf-like, but it is still communicative.
Once, toward the close of his too brief life, Thoreau "signed on" again to
an American ideal, and no man could have signed more nobly. It was the
cause of Freedom, as represented by John Brown of Harper's Ferry. The
French and Scotch blood in the furtive hermit suddenly grew hot. Instead
of renouncing in disgust the "uncivil chaos called Civil Government,"
Thoreau challenged it to a fight. Indeed he had already thrown down the
gauntlet in Slavery in Massachusetts, which Garrison had published
in the Liberator in 1854. And now the death upon the scaffold of
the 138
old fanatic of Ossawatomie changed Thoreau into a complete citizen,
arguing the case and glorifying to his neighbors the dead hero.﹃It seems
as if no man had ever died in America before; for in order to die you must
first have lived.… I hear a good many pretend that they are going
to die.… Nonsense! I'll defy them to do it. They haven't got life
enough in them. They'll deliquesce like fungi, and keep a hundred
eulogists mopping the spot where they left off. Only half a dozen or so
have died since the world began.﹄Such passages as this reveal a very
different Thoreau from the Thoreau who is supposed to have spent his days
in the company of swamp-blackbirds and woodchucks. He had, in fact, one of
the highest qualifications for human society, an absolute honesty of mind.
"We select granite," he says, "for the underpinning of our houses and
barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an
underpinning of granite truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our sills are
rotten.… In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more
constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend upon it,
that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters,
proud of his extensive 139 correspondence, has not heard from himself
this long time."
This hard, basic individualism was for Thoreau the foundation of all
enduring social relations, and the dullest observer of twentieth century
America can see that Thoreau's doctrine is needed as much as ever. His
sharp-edged personality provokes curiosity and pricks the reader into
dissent or emulation as the case may be, but its chief ethical value to
our generation lies in the fact that here was a Transcendentalist who
stressed, not the life of the senses, though he was well aware of their
seductiveness, but the stubborn energy of the will.
The scope of the present book prevents more than a glimpse at the other
members of the New England Transcendental group. They are a very mixed
company, noble, whimsical, queer, impossible. "The good Alcott," wrote
Carlyle,﹃with his long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn temples
and mild radiant eyes; all bent on saving the world by a return to acorns
and the golden age; he comes before one like a venerable Don Quixote, whom
nobody can laugh at without loving.﹄These words paint a whole company, as
well as a single man. The good Alcott still awaits an adequate biographer.
Connecticut Yankee, peddler 140 in the South, school-teacher in Boston and
elsewhere, he descended upon Concord, flitted to the queer community of
Fruitlands, was starved back to Concord, inspired and bored the patient
Emerson, talked endlessly, wrote ineffective books, and had at last his
apotheosis in the Concord School of Philosophy, but was chiefly known for
the twenty years before his death in 1888 as the father of the Louisa
Alcott who wrote Little Women. "A tedious archangel," was Emerson's
verdict, and it is likely to stand.
Margaret Fuller, though sketched by Hawthorne, analyzed by Emerson, and
painted at full length by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, is now a fading
figure—a remarkable woman, no doubt, one of the first of American
feminists, suggesting George Eliot in her physical unattractiveness, her
clear brain, her touch of sensuousness. She was an early-ripe,
over-crammed scholar in the classics and in modern European languages. She
did loyal, unpaid work as the editor of the Dial, which from 1840
to 1844 was the organ of Transcendentalism. She joined the community at
Brook Farm, whose story has been so well told by Lindsay Swift. For a
while she served as literary editor of the New York Tribune under
Horace Greeley. 141
Then she went abroad, touched Rousseau's manuscripts at Paris with
trembling, adoring fingers, made a secret marriage in Italy with the young
Marquis Ossoli, and perished by shipwreck, with her husband and child, off
Fire Island in 1850.
Theodore Parker, like Alcott and "Margaret," an admirable Greek scholar,
an idealist and reformer, still lives in Chadwick's biography, in Colonel
Higginson's delightful essay, and in the memories of a few liberal
Bostonians who remember his tremendous sermons on the platform of the old
Music Hall. He was a Lexington farmer's son, with the temperament of a
blacksmith, with enormous, restless energy, a good hater, a passionate
lover of all excellent things save meekness. He died at fifty, worn out,
in Italy.
But while these three figures were, after Emerson and Thoreau, the most
representative of the group, the student of the Transcendental period will
be equally interested in watching its influence upon many other types of
young men: upon future journalists and publicists like George William
Curtis, Charles A. Dana, and George Ripley; upon religionists like Orestes
Brownson, Father Hecker, and James Freeman Clarke; and upon poets like
Jones Very, Christopher P. Cranch, and 142 Ellery Channing. There was a
sunny side of the whole movement, as T. W. Higginson and F. B.
Sanborn, two of the latest survivors of the ferment, loved to emphasize in
their talk and in their books; and it was shadowed also by tragedy and the
pathos of unfulfilled desires. But as one looks back at it, in the
perspective of three-quarters of a century, it seems chiefly something
touchingly fine. For all these men and women tried to hitch their wagon to
a star.
143
Romance, Poetry, and History
Moving in and out of the Transcendentalist
circles, in that great generation preceding the Civil War, were a company
of other men—romancers, poets, essayists, historians—who
shared in the intellectual liberalism of the age, but who were more purely
artists in prose and verse than they were seekers after the unattainable.
Hawthorne, for example, sojourned at Concord and at Brook Farm with some
of the most extreme types of transcendental extravagance. The movement
interested him artistically and he utilized it in his romances, but
personally he maintained an attitude of cool detachment from it.
Longfellow was too much of an artist to lose his head over philosophical
abstractions; Whittier, at his best, had a too genuine poetic instinct for
the concrete; and Lowell and Holmes had the saving gift of humor.
Cultivated Boston gentlemen like Prescott, Motley, and 144 Parkman
preferred to keep their feet on the solid earth and write admirable
histories. So the mellow years went by. Most of the widely-read American
books were being produced within twenty miles of the Boston State House.
The slavery issue kept growling, far away, but it was only now and then,
as in the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, that it was
brought sharply home to the North. The "golden forties" were as truly
golden for New England as for idle California. There was wealth, leisure,
books, a glow of harvest-time in the air, though the spirit of the writers
is the spirit of youth.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, our greatest writer of pure romance, was Puritan by
inheritance and temperament, though not in doctrine or in sympathy. His
literary affiliations were with the English and German Romanticists, and
he possessed, for professional use, the ideas and vocabulary of his
transcendental friends. Born in Salem in 1804, he was descended from Judge
Hawthorne of Salem Witchcraft fame, and from a long line of sea-faring
ancestors. He inherited a morbid solitariness, redeemed in some measure by
a physical endowment of rare strength and beauty. He read Spenser,
Rousseau, and the Newgate Calendar, 145 was graduated at Bowdoin,
with Longfellow, in the class of 1825, and returned to Salem for thirteen
brooding lonely years in which he tried to teach himself the art of
story-writing. His earliest tales, like Irving's, are essays in which
characters emerge; he is absorbed in finding a setting for a preconceived
"moral"; he is in love with allegory and parable. His own words about his
first collection of stories, Twice-Told Tales, have often been
quoted:﹃They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired
a shade.﹄Yet they are for the most part exquisitely written. After a
couple of years in the Boston Custom-House, and a residence at the
socialistic community of Brook Farm, Hawthorne made the happiest of
marriages to Sophia Peabody, and for nearly four years dwelt in the Old
Manse at Concord. He described it in one of the ripest of his essays, the
Preface to Mosses from an Old Manse, his second collection of
stories. After three years in the Custom-House at Salem, his dismissal in
1849 gave him leisure to produce his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter,
published in 1850. He was now forty-six. In 1851, he published The
House of the Seven Gables, The Wonder-Book, and The
Snow-Image, and Other Tales. In 1852 came The 146 Blithedale
Romance, a rich ironical story drawn from his Brook Farm experience.
Four years in the American Consulate at Liverpool and three subsequent
years of residence upon the Continent saw no literary harvest except
carefully filled notebooks and the deeply imaginative moral romance, The
Marble Faun. Hawthorne returned home in 1860 and settled in the
Wayside at Concord, busying himself with a new, and, as was destined, a
never completed story about the elixir of immortality. But his vitality
was ebbing, and in May, 1864, he passed away in his sleep. He rests under
the pines in Sleepy Hollow, near the Alcotts and the Emersons.
It is difficult for contemporary Americans to assess the value of such a
man, who evidently did nothing except to write a few books. His rare,
delicate genius was scarcely touched by passing events. Not many of his
countrymen really love his writings, as they love, for instance the
writings of Dickens or Thackeray or Stevenson. Everyone reads, at some
time of his life, The Scarlet Letter, and trembles at its
passionate indictment of the sin of concealment, at its agonized
admonition, "Be true! Be true!" Perhaps the happiest memories of
Hawthorne's readers, as of Kipling's 147 readers, hover about his
charming stories for children; to have missed The Wonder-Book is
like having grown old without ever catching the sweetness of the green
world at dawn. But our public has learned to enjoy a wholly different kind
of style, taught by the daily journals, a nervous, graphic, sensational,
physical style, fit for describing an automobile, a department store, a
steamship, a lynching party. It is the style of our day, and judged by it
Hawthorne, who wrote with severity, conscience, and good taste, seems
somewhat old-fashioned, like Irving or Addison. He is perhaps too
completely a New Englander to be understood by men of other stock, and has
never, like Poe and Whitman, excited strong interest among European minds.
Yet no American is surer, generation after generation, of finding a fit
audience. Hawthorne's genius was meditative rather than dramatic. His
artistic material was moral rather than physical; he brooded over the soul
of man as affected by this and that condition and situation. The child of
a new analytical age, he thought out with rigid accuracy the precise
circumstances surrounding each one of his cases and modifying it. Many of
his sketches and short stories and most of his 148 romances deal with historical
facts, moods, and atmospheres, and he knew the past of New England as few
men have ever known it. There is solid historical and psychological stuff
as the foundation of his air-castles. His latent radicalism furnished him
with a touchstone of criticism as he interpreted the moral standards of
ancient communities; no reader of The Scarlet Letter can forget
Hawthorne's implicit condemnation of the unimaginative harshness of the
Puritans. His own judgment upon the deep matters of the human conscience
was stern enough, but it was a universalized judgment, and by no means the
result of a Calvinism which he hated. Over-fond as he was in his earlier
tales of elaborate, fanciful, decorative treatment of themes that promised
to point a moral, in his finest short stories, such as The Ambitious
Guest, The Gentle Boy, Young Goodman Brown, The Snow
Image, The Great Stone Face, Drowne's Wooden Image, Rappacini's
Daughter, the moral, if there be one, is not obtruded. He loves
physical symbols for mental and moral states, and was poet and
Transcendentalist enough to retain his youthful affection for parables;
but his true field as a story-teller is the erring, questing, aspiring,
shadowed human heart.
149 The
Scarlet Letter, for instance, is a study of a universal theme, the
problem of concealed sin, punishment, redemption. Only the setting is
provincial. The story cannot be rightly estimated, it is true, without
remembering the Puritan reverence for physical purity, the Puritan
reverence for the magistrate-minister—differing so widely from the
respect of Latin countries for the priest—the Puritan preoccupation
with the life of the soul, or, as more narrowly construed by Calvinism,
the problem of evil. The word Adultery, although suggestively enough
present in one of the finest symbolical titles ever devised by a romancer,
does not once occur in the book. The sins dealt with are hypocrisy and
revenge. Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne, and Roger Chillingworth are
developing, suffering, living creatures, caught inextricably in the toils
of a moral situation. By an incomparable succession of pictures Hawthorne
exhibits the travail of their souls. In the greatest scene of all, that
between Hester and Arthur in the forest, the Puritan framework of the
story gives way beneath the weight of human passion, and we seem on the
verge of another and perhaps larger solution than was actually worked out
by the logic of succeeding events. But though the 150 book has been called
Christless, prayerless, hopeless, no mature person ever reads it without a
deepened sense of the impotence of all mechanistic theories of sin, and a
new vision of the intense reality of spiritual things. "The law we broke,"
in Dimmesdale's ghostly words, was a more subtle law than can be graven on
tables of stone and numbered as the Seventh Commandment.
The legacy of guilt is likewise the theme of The House of the Seven
Gables, which Hawthorne himself was inclined to think a better book
than The Scarlet Letter. Certainly this story of old Salem is
impeccably written and its subtle handling of tone and atmosphere is
beyond dispute. An ancestral curse, the visitation of the sins of the
fathers upon the children, the gradual decay of a once sound stock, are
motives that Ibsen might have developed. But the Norseman would have
failed to rival Hawthorne's delicate manipulation of his shadows, and the
no less masterly deftness of the ultimate mediation of a dark inheritance
through the love of the light-hearted Phœbe for the latest
descendant of the Maules. In The Blithedale Romance Hawthorne stood
for once, perhaps, too near his material to allow the rich atmospheric
effects which he prefers, and in spite of the unforgetable 151 portrait
of Zenobia and powerful passages of realistic description, the book is not
quite focussed. In The Marble Faun Hawthorne comes into his own
again. Its central problem is one of those dark insoluble ones that he
loves: the influence of a crime upon the development of a soul. Donatello,
the Faun, is a charming young creature of the natural sunshine until his
love for the somber Miriam tempts him to the commission of murder: then
begins the growth of his mind and character. Perhaps the haunting power of
the main theme of the book has contributed less to its fame than the
felicity of its descriptions of Rome and Italy. For Hawthorne possessed,
like Byron, in spite of his defective training in the appreciation of the
arts, a gift of romantic discernment which makes The Marble Faun,
like Childe Harold, a glorified guide-book to the Eternal City.
All of Hawthorne's books, in short, have a central core of psychological
romance, and a rich surface finish of description. His style, at its best,
has a subdued splendor of coloring which is only less wonderful than the
spiritual perceptions with which this magician was endowed. The gloom
which haunts many of his pages, as I have said elsewhere, is the long
shadow cast by our mortal 152 destiny upon a sensitive soul. The mystery is
our mystery, perceived, and not created, by that finely endowed mind and
heart. The shadow is our shadow; the gleams of insight, the soft radiance
of truth and beauty, are his own.
A college classmate of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow summed up the Portland
boy's character in one sentence:﹃It appeared easy for him to avoid the
unworthy.﹄Born in 1807, of Mayflower stock that had distinguished
itself for bravery and uprightness, the youth was graduated from Bowdoin
at eighteen. Like his classmate Hawthorne, he had been a wide and secretly
ambitious reader, and had followed the successive numbers of Irving's Sketch
Book, he tells us, "with ever increasing wonder and delight." His
college offered him in 1826 a professorship of the modern languages, and
he spent three happy years in Europe in preparation. He taught
successfully at Bowdoin for five or six years, and for eighteen years,
1836 to 1854, served as George Ticknor's successor at Harvard, ultimately
surrendering the chair to Lowell. He early published two prose volumes, Hyperion
and Outre-mer, Irvingesque romances of European travel. Then came,
after ten years of teaching and the death 153 of his young wife, the sudden
impulse to write poetry, and he produced,﹃softly excited, I know not
why,﹄The Reaper and the Flowers, a Psalm of Death. From that
December morning in 1838 until his death in 1882 he was Longfellow the
Poet.
His outward life, like Hawthorne's, was barren of dramatic incident, save
the one tragic accident by which his second wife, the mother of his
children, perished before his eyes in 1861. He bore the calamity with the
quiet courage of his race and breeding. But otherwise his days ran softly
and gently, enriched with books and friendships, sheltered from the storms
of circumstance. He had leisure to grow ripe, to remember, and to dream.
But he never secluded himself, like Tennyson, from normal contacts with
his fellowmen. The owner of the Craigie House was a good neighbor,
approachable and deferential. He was even interested in local Cambridge
politics. On the larger political issues of his day his Americanism was
sound and loyal. "It is disheartening," he wrote in his Cambridge journal
for 1851,﹃to see how little sympathy there is in the hearts of the young
men here for freedom and great ideas.﹄But his own sympathy never wavered.
154 His
linguistic talent helped him to penetrate the secrets of alien ways of
thought and speech. He understood Italy and Spain, Holland and France and
Germany. He had studied them on the lips of their living men and women and
in the books where soldier and historian, priest and poet, had inscribed
the record of five hundred years. From the Revival of Learning to the
middle of the nineteenth century, Longfellow knew the soul of Europe as
few men have known it, and he helped to translate Europe to America. His
intellectual receptivity, his quick eye for color and costume and
landscape, his ear for folk-lore and ballad, his own ripe mastery of
words, made him the most resourceful of international interpreters. And
this lover of children, walking in quiet ways, this refined and courteous
host and gentleman, scholar and poet, exemplified without
self-advertisement the richer qualities of his own people. When Couper's
statue of Longfellow was dedicated in Washington, Hamilton Mabie said:
"His freedom from the sophistication of a more experienced country; his
simplicity, due in large measure to the absence of social
self-consciousness; his tranquil and deep-seated optimism, which is the
effluence of an unexhausted soil; his 155 happy and confident
expectation, born of a sense of tremendous national vitality; his love of
simple things in normal relations to world-wide interests of the mind; his
courage in interpreting those deeper experiences which craftsmen who know
art but who do not know life call commonplaces; the unaffected and
beautiful democracy of his spirit—these are the delicate flowers of
our new world, and as much a part of it as its stretches of wilderness and
the continental roll of its rivers."
Longfellow's poetic service to his countrymen has thus become a national
asset, and not merely because in his three best known narrative poems, Evangeline,
Hiawatha, and The Courtship of Miles Standish, he selected
his themes from our own history. The Building of the Ship, written
with full faith in the troubled year of 1849, is a national anthem.﹃It is
a wonderful gift,﹄said Lincoln, as he listened to it, his eyes filled
with tears, "to be able to stir men like that." The Skeleton in Armor,
A Ballad of the French Fleet, Paul Revere's Ride, The
Wreck of the Hesperus, are ballads that stir men still. For all of his
skill in story-telling in verse—witness the Tales of a Wayside
Inn—Longfellow was not by nature a dramatist, and his trilogy
now published under the title of Christus, 156 made up of The Divine
Tragedy, The Golden Legend, and New England Tragedies,
added little to a reputation won in other fields. His sonnets,
particularly those upon Chaucer, Milton, The Divina
Commedia, A Nameless Grave, Felton, Sumner, Nature,
My Books, are among the imperishable treasures of the English
language. In descriptive pieces like Keramos and The Hanging of
the Crane, in such personal and occasional verses as The Herons of
Elmwood, The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz, and the noble Morituri
Salutamus written for his classmates in 1875, he exhibits his
tenderness of affection and all the ripeness of his technical skill. But
it was as a lyric poet, after all, that he won and held his immense
audience throughout the English-speaking world. Two of the most popular of
all his early pieces, The Psalm of Life and Excelsior, have
paid the price of a too apt adjustment to the ethical mood of an earnest
moment in our national life. We have passed beyond them. And many readers
may have outgrown their youthful pleasure in Maidenhood, The
Rainy Day, The Bridge, The Day is Done, verses whose
simplicity lent themselves temptingly to parody. Yet such poems as The
Belfry of Bruges, Seaweed, The Fire of Driftwood, The
Arsenal at Springfield, My Lost Youth, 157 The Children's Hour,
and many another lyric, lose nothing with the lapse of time. There is
fortunately infinite room for personal preference in this whole matter of
poetry, but the confession of a lack of regard for Longfellow's verse must
often be recognized as a confession of a lessening love for what is
simple, graceful, and refined. The current of contemporary American taste,
especially among consciously clever, half-trained persons, seems to be
running against Longfellow. How soon the tide may turn, no one can say.
Meanwhile he has his tranquil place in the Poet's Corner of Westminster
Abbey. The Abbey must be a pleasant spot to wait in, for the Portland boy.
Oddly enough, some of the over-sophisticated and under-experienced people
who affect to patronize Longfellow assume toward John Greenleaf Whittier
an air of deference. This attitude would amuse the Quaker poet. One can
almost see his dark eyes twinkle and the grim lips tighten in that silent
laughter in which the old man so much resembled Cooper's Leather-Stocking.
Whittier knew that his friend Longfellow was a better artist than himself,
and he also knew, by intimate experience as a maker of public opinion, how
variable are its judgments.
158
Whittier represents a stock different from that of the Longfellows, but
equally American, equally thoroughbred: the Essex County Quaker farmer of
Massachusetts. The homestead in which he was born in 1807, at East
Haverhill, had been built by his great-great-grandfather in 1688. Mount
Vernon in Virginia and the Craigie House in Cambridge are newer than this
by two generations. The house has been restored to the precise aspect it
had in Whittier's boyhood: and the garden, lawn, and brook, even the
door-stone and bridle-post and the barn across the road are witnesses to
the fidelity of the descriptions in Snow-Bound. The neighborhood is
still a lonely one. The youth grew up in seclusion, yet in contact with a
few great ideas, chief among them Liberty. "My father," he said,﹃was an
old-fashioned Democrat, and really believed in the Preamble of the Bill of
Rights which reaffirmed the Declaration of Independence.﹄The taciturn
father transmitted to his sons a hatred of kingcraft and priestcraft, the
inward moral freedom of the Quaker touched with humanitarian passion. The
spirit of a boyhood in this homestead is veraciously told in The
Barefoot Boy, School-Days, Snow-Bound, Ramoth Hill,
and Telling the Bees. It was a chance 159 copy of Burns that revealed
to the farmer lad his own desire and capacity for verse-writing. When he
was nineteen, his sister sent his Exile's Departure to William
Lloyd Garrison, then twenty, and the editor of the Newburyport Free
Press. The neighbors liked it, and the tall frail author was rewarded
with a term at the Haverhill Academy, where he paid his way, in old Essex
County fashion, by making shoes.
He had little more formal schooling than this, was too poor to enter
college, but had what he modestly called a "knack at rhyming," and much
facility in prose. He turned to journalism and politics, for which he
possessed a notable instinct. For a while he thought he had﹃done with
poetry and literature.﹄Then in 1833, at twenty-six, came Garrison's
stirring letter bidding him enlist in the cause of Anti-Slavery. He obeyed
the call, not knowing that this new allegiance to the service of humanity
was to transform him from a facile local verse-writer into a national
poet. It was the ancient miracle of losing one's life and finding it. For
the immediate sacrifice was very real to a youth trained in quietism and
non-resistance, and well aware, as a Whig journalist, of the ostracism
visited upon the active 160 Abolitionists. Whittier entered the fight
with absolute courage and with the shrewdest practical judgment of weapons
and tactics. He forgot himself. He turned aside from those pleasant fields
of New England legend and history to which he was destined to return after
his warfare was accomplished. He had read the prose of Milton and of
Burke. He perceived that negro emancipation in the United States was only
a single and immediate phase of a universal movement of liberalism. The
thought kindled his imagination. He wrote, at white heat, political and
social verse that glowed with humanitarian passion: lyrics in praise of
fellow-workers, salutes to the dead, campaign songs, hymns, satires
against the clergy and the capitalists, superb sectional poems like Massachusetts
to Virginia, and, more nobly still, poems embodying what Wordsworth
called "the sensation and image of country and the human race."
Whittier had now "found himself" as a poet. It is true that his style
remained diffuse and his ear faulty, but his countrymen, then as now
uncritical of artistic form, overlooked the blemishes of his verse, and
thought only of his vibrant emotion, his scorn of cowardice and evil, his
161
prophetic exaltation. In 1847 came the first general collection of his
poems, and here were to be found not merely controversial verses, but
spirited Songs of Labor, pictures of the lovely Merrimac
countryside, legends written in the mood of Hawthorne or Longfellow, and
bright bits of foreign lore and fancy. For though Whittier never went
abroad, his quiet life at Amesbury gave him leisure for varied reading,
and he followed contemporary European politics with the closest interest.
He emerged more and more from the atmosphere of faction and section, and,
though he retained to the last his Quaker creed, he held its simple tenets
in such undogmatic and winning fashion that his hymns are sung today in
all the churches.
When The Atlantic Monthly was established in 1857, Whittier was
fifty. He took his place among the contributors to the new magazine not as
a controversialist but as a man of letters, with such poems as Tritemius,
and Skipper Ireson's Ride. Characteristic productions of this
period are My Psalm, Cobbler Keezar's Vision, Andrew
Rykman's Prayer, The Eternal Goodness—poems grave, sweet,
and tender. But it was not until the publication of Snow-Bound in
1866 that Whittier's 162
work touched its widest popularity. He had never married, and the deaths
of his mother and sister Elizabeth set him brooding, in the desolate
Amesbury house, over memories of his birthplace, six miles away in East
Haverhill. The homestead had gone out of the hands of the Whittiers, and
the poet, nearing sixty, set himself to compose an idyll descriptive of
the vanished past. No artist could have a theme more perfectly adapted to
his mood and to his powers. There are no novel ideas in Snow-Bound,
nor is there any need of them, but the thousands of annual pilgrims to the
old farmhouse can bear witness to the touching intimacy, the homely charm,
the unerring rightness of feeling with which Whittier's genius recreated
his own lost youth and painted for all time a true New England hearthside.
Whittier was still to write nearly two hundred more poems, for he lived to
be eighty-five, and he composed until the last. But his creative period
was now over. He rejoiced in the friendly recognition of his work that
came to him from every section of a reunited country. His personal friends
were loyal in their devotion. He followed the intricacies of American
politics with the keen 163 zest of a veteran in that game, for in his
time he had made and unmade governors and senators.﹃The greatest
politician I have ever met,﹄said James G. Blaine, who had certainly met
many. He had an income from his poems far in excess of his needs, but
retained the absolute simplicity of his earlier habits. When his
publishers first proposed the notable public dinner in honor of his
seventieth birthday he demurred, explaining to a member of his family that
he did not want the bother of "buying a new pair of pants"—a petty
anecdote, but somehow refreshing. So the rustic, shrewd, gentle old man
waited for the end. He had known what it means to toil, to fight, to
renounce, to eat his bread in tears, and to see some of his dreams come
true. We have had, and shall have, more accomplished craftsmen in verse,
but we have never bred a more genuine man than Whittier, nor one who had
more kinship with the saints.
A few days before Whittier's death, he wrote an affectionate poem in
celebration of the eighty-third birthday of his old friend of the Saturday
Club, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. This was in 1892. The little Doctor,
rather lonely in his latest years, composed some tender obituary verses
164 at
Whittier's passing. He had already performed the same office for Lowell.
He lingered himself until the autumn of 1894, in his eighty-sixth year—The
Last Leaf, in truth, of New England's richest springtime.
"No, my friends," he had said in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,
﹃I go (always, other things being equal) for the man who inherits family
traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five
generations.﹄The Doctor came naturally by his preference for a﹃man of
family,﹄being one himself. He was a descendant of Anne Bradstreet, the
poetess. "Dorothy Q.," whom he had made the most picturesque of the
Quincys, was his great-grandmother. Wendell Phillips was his cousin. His
father, the Rev. Abiel Holmes, a Yale graduate, was the minister of the
First Church in Cambridge, and it was in its "gambrel-roofed" parsonage
that Oliver Wendell was born in 1809.
Know old Cambridge? Hope you do.—
Born there? Don't say so! I
was, too.
• • • •
• • • •
Nicest place that was ever seen—
Colleges red and Common green.
So he wrote, in scores of passages of filial devotion, concerning the
village of his boyhood and the city of 165 Boston. His best-known prose
sentence is: "Boston State House is the hub of the Solar System." It is
easy to smile, as indeed he did himself, at such fond provinciality, but
the fact remains that our literature as a whole sadly needs this richness
of local atmosphere. A nation of restless immigrants, here today and
"moved on" tomorrow, has the fibres of its imagination uprooted, and its
artists in their eager quest of "local color" purchase brilliancy at the
cost of thinness of tone, poverty of association. Philadelphia and Boston,
almost alone among the larger American cities, yield the sense of
intimacy, or what the Autocrat would call "the cumulative humanities."
Young Holmes became the pet and the glory of his class of 1829 at Harvard.
It was only in 1838 that their reunions began, but thereafter they held
fifty-six meetings, of which Holmes attended fifty and wrote poems for
forty-three. Many of "the Boys" whom he celebrated became famous in their
own right, but they remain "the Boys" to all lovers of Holmes's verses.
His own career as a poet had begun during his single year in the Law
School. His later years brought him some additional skill in polishing his
lines and a riper human 166 wisdom, but his native verse-making talent is
as completely revealed in Old Ironsides, published when he was
twenty-one, and in The Last Leaf, composed a year or two later, as
in anything he was to write during the next half-century. In many respects
he was a curious survival of the cumulative humanities of the eighteenth
century. He might have been, like good Dr. Arbuthnot, an ornament of the
Augustan age. He shared with the English Augustans a liking for the rhymed
couplet, an instinctive social sense, a feeling for the presence of an
imaginary audience of congenial listeners. One still catches the﹃Hear!
Hear!﹄between his clever lines. In many of the traits of his mind this
"Yankee Frenchman" resembled such a typical eighteenth century figure as
Voltaire. Like Voltaire, he was tolerant—except toward Calvinism and
Homeopathy. In some of the tricks of his prose style he is like a kindlier
Sterne. His knack for vers de société was caught from
Horace, but he would not have been a child of his own age without the
additional gift of rhetoric and eloquence which is to be seen in his
patriotic poems and his hymns. For Holmes possessed, in spite of all his
limitations in poetic range, true devotion, patriotism, humor, and pathos.
167 His
poetry was in the best sense of the word "occasional," and his prose was
only an incidental or accidental harvest of a long career in which his
chief duty was that of a professor of anatomy in the Harvard Medical
School. He had studied in Paris under sound teachers, and after some years
of private practice won the appointment which he held, as active and
emeritus professor, for forty-seven years. He was a faithful, clear, and
amusing lecturer, and printed two or three notable medical essays, but his
chief Boston reputation, in the eighteen-fifties, was that of a wit and
diner-out and writer of verses for occasions. Then came his great hour of
good luck in 1857, when Lowell, the editor of the newly-established Atlantic
Monthly, persuaded him to write The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.
It was the public's luck also, for whoever had been so unfortunate as not
to be born in Boston could now listen—as if across the table—to
Boston's best talker. Few volumes of essays during the last sixty years
have given more pleasure to a greater variety of readers than is yielded
by The Autocrat. It gave the Doctor a reputation in England which
he naturally prized, and which contributed to his triumphal English
progress, many years later, recorded pleasantly in 168 Our Hundred Days. The
Professor at the Breakfast Table and The Poet at the Breakfast
Table are less successful variations of The Autocrat. Neither
professors nor poets are at their best at this meal. Holmes wrote three
novels—of which Elsie Venner, a somewhat too medical story,
is the best remembered—memoirs of his friends Emerson and Motley,
and many miscellaneous essays. His life was exceptionally happy, and his
cheery good opinion of himself is still contagious. To pronounce the words
Doctor Holmes in any company of intelligent Americans is the prologue to a
smile of recognition, comprehension, sympathy. The word Goldsmith has now
lost, alas, this provocative quality; the word Stevenson still possesses
it. The little Doctor, who died in the same year as Stevenson, belonged
like him to the genial race of friends of mankind, and a few of his poems,
and some gay warm-hearted pages of his prose, will long preserve his
memory. But the Boston which he loved has vanished as utterly as Sam
Johnson's London.
James Russell Lowell was ten years younger than Holmes, and though he died
three years before the Doctor, he seems, for other reasons than those of
chronology, to belong more nearly to the 169 present. Although by birth as
much of a New England Brahmin as Holmes, and in his later years as much of
a Boston and Cambridge idol, he nevertheless touched our universal
American life on many sides, represented us worthily in foreign diplomacy,
argued the case of Democracy with convincing power, and embodied, as more
perfect artists like Hawthorne and Longfellow could never have done, the
subtleties and potencies of the national temperament. He deserves and
reveals the closest scrutiny, but his personality is difficult to put on
paper. Horace Scudder wrote his biography with careful competence, and
Ferris Greenslet has made him the subject of a brilliant critical study.
Yet readers differ widely in their assessment of the value of his prose
and verse, and in their understanding of his personality.
The external facts of his career are easy to trace and must be set down
here with brevity. A minister's son, and descended from a very old and
distinguished family, he was born at Elmwood in Cambridge in 1819. After a
somewhat turbulent course, he was graduated from Harvard in 1838, the year
of Emerson's Divinity School Address. He studied law, turned
Abolitionist, wrote poetry, married the beautiful and transcendental 170 Maria
White, and did magazine work in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He was
thought by his friends in the eighteen-fifties to be﹃the most
Shakespearian﹄man in America. When he was ten years out of college, in
1848, he published The Biglow Papers (First Series), A Fable for
Critics, and The Vision of Sir Launfal. After a long visit to
Europe and the death of his wife, he gave some brilliant Lowell Institute
lectures in Boston, and was appointed Longfellow's successor at Harvard.
He went to Europe again to prepare himself, and after entering upon his
work as a teacher made a happy second marriage, served for four years as
the first editor of The Atlantic, and helped his friend Charles
Eliot Norton edit The North American Review. The Civil War inspired
a second series of Biglow Papers and the magnificent Commemoration
Ode of 1865. Then came volume after volume of literary essays, such as
Among My Books and My Study Windows, and an occasional book
of verse. Again he made a long sojourn in Europe, resigned his Harvard
professorship, and in 1877 was appointed Minister to Spain. After three
years he was transferred to the most important post in our diplomatic
service, London. He performed his duties with 171 extraordinary skill and
success until 1885, when he was relieved. His last years were spent in
Elmwood, the Cambridge house where he was born, and he was still writing,
in almost as rich a vein as ever, when the end came in 1891.
Here was certainly a full and varied life, responsive to many personal
moods and many tides of public feeling. Lowell drew intellectual stimulus
from enormously wide reading in classical and modern literatures.
Puritanically earnest by inheritance, he seems also to have inherited a
strain of levity which he could not always control, and, through his
mother's family, a dash of mysticism sometimes resembling second sight.
His physical and mental powers were not always in the happiest mutual
adjustment: he became easily the prey of moods and fancies, and knew the
alternations from wild gaiety of spirits to black despair. The firm moral
consistency of Puritanism was always his, yet his playful remark about
belonging in a hospital for incurable children had a measure of truth in
it also.
Both his poetry and his prose reveal a nature never quite integrated into
wholeness of structure, into harmony with itself. His writing, at its
best, is noble and delightful, full of human charm, 172 but it is difficult for him
to master a certain waywardness and to sustain any note steadily. This
temperamental flaw does not affect the winsomeness of his letters, unless
to add to it. It is lost to view, often, in the sincerity and pathos of
his lyrics, but it is felt in most of his longer efforts in prose, and
accounts for a certain dissatisfaction which many grateful and loyal
readers nevertheless feel in his criticism. Lowell was more richly endowed
by nature and by breadth of reading than Matthew Arnold, for instance, but
in the actual performance of the critical function he was surpassed in
method by Arnold and perhaps in inerrant perception, in a limited field,
by Poe.
It was as a poet, however, that he first won his place in our literature,
and it is by means of certain passages in the Biglow Papers and the
Commemoration Ode that he has most moved his countrymen. The
effectiveness of The Present Crisis and Sir Launfal, and of
the Memorial Odes, particularly the Ode to Agassiz, is
likewise due to the passion, sweetness, and splendor of certain strophes,
rather than to the perfection of these poems as artistic wholes. Lowell's
personal lyrics of sorrow, such as The Changeling, The First
Snow-Fall, After the Burial, have touched many hearts. 173 His later
lyrics are more subtle, weighted with thought, tinged with autumnal
melancholy. He was a most fertile composer, and, like all the men of his
time and group, produced too much. Yet his patriotic verse was so
admirable in feeling and is still so inspiring to his readers that one
cannot wish it less in quantity; and in the field of political satire,
such as the two series of Biglow Papers, he had a theme and a
method precisely suited to his temperament. No American has approached
Lowell's success in this difficult genre: the swift transitions
from rural Yankee humor to splendid scorn of evil and to noblest idealism
reveal the full powers of one of our most gifted men. The preacher lurked
in this Puritan from first to last, and the war against Mexico and the
Civil War stirred him to the depths.
His prose, likewise, is a school of loyalty. There was much of Europe in
his learning, as his memorable Dante essay shows, and the traditions of
great English literature were the daily companions of his mind. He was
bookish, as a bookman should be, and sometimes the very richness and
whimsicality of his bookish fancies marred the simplicity and good taste
of his pages. But the fundamental texture of his thought and feeling 174 was
American, and his most characteristic style has the raciness of our soil.
Nature lovers like to point out the freshness and delicacy of his reaction
to the New England scene. Thoreau himself, whom Lowell did not like, was
not more veracious an observer than the author of Sunthin' in the
Pastoral Line, Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, and My Garden
Acquaintance. Yet he watched men as keenly as he did "laylocks" and
bobolinks, and no shrewder American essay has been written than his On
a Certain Condescension in Foreigners. Wit and humor and wisdom made
him one of the best talkers of his generation. These qualities pervade his
essays and his letters, and the latter in particular reveal those ardors
and fidelities of friendship which men like Emerson and Thoreau longed
after without ever quite experiencing. Lowell's cosmopolitan reputation,
which was greatly enhanced in the last decade of his life, seemed to his
old associates of the Saturday Club only a fit recognition of the
learning, wit, and fine imagination which had been familiar to them from
the first. To hold the old friends throughout his lifetime, and to win
fresh ones of a new generation through his books, is perhaps the greatest
of Lowell's personal felicities.
175
While there are no other names in the literature of New England quite
comparable with those that have just been discussed, it should be
remembered that the immediate effectiveness and popularity of these
representative poets and prose writers were dependent upon the existence
of an intelligent and responsive reading public. The lectures of Emerson,
the speeches of Webster, the stories of Hawthorne, the political verse of
Whittier and Lowell, presupposed a keen, reflecting audience, mentally and
morally exigent. The spread of the Lyceum system along the line of
westward emigration from New England as far as the Mississippi is one
tangible evidence of the high level of popular intelligence. That there
was much of the superficial and the spread-eagle in the American life of
the eighteen-forties is apparent enough without the amusing comments of
such English travellers as Dickens, Miss Martineau, and Captain Basil
Hall. But there was also genuine intellectual curiosity and a general
reading habit which are evidenced not only by a steady growth of
newspapers and magazines but also by the demand for substantial books.
Biography and history began to be widely read, and it was natural that the
most notable productiveness in historical 176 writing should manifest
itself in that section of the country where there were libraries, wealth,
leisure for the pursuits of scholarship, a sense of intimate concern with
the great issues of the past, and a diffusion of intellectual tastes
throughout the community. It was no accident that Sparks and Ticknor,
Bancroft and Prescott, Motley and Parkman, were Massachusetts men.
Jared Sparks, it is true, inherited neither wealth nor leisure. He was a
furious, unwearied toiler in the field of our national history. Born in
1789, by profession a Unitarian minister, he began collecting the papers
of George Washington by 1825. John Marshall, the great jurist, had
published his five-volume life of his fellow Virginian a score of years
earlier. But Sparks proceeded to write another biography of Washington and
to edit his writings. He also edited a Library of American Biography,
wrote lives of Franklin and Gouverneur Morris, was professor of history
and President of Harvard, and lived to be seventy-seven. As editor of the
writings of Franklin and Washington, he took what we now consider
unpardonable liberties in altering the text, and this error of judgment
has somewhat clouded his just reputation as a pioneer in historical
research.
177
George Bancroft, who was born in 1800, and died, a horseback-riding sage,
at ninety-one, inherited from his clergyman father a taste for history. He
studied in Germany after leaving Harvard, turned schoolmaster, Democratic
politician and office-holder, served as Secretary of the Navy, Minister to
England and then to the German Empire, and won distinction in each of his
avocations, though the real passion of his life was his History of the
United States, which he succeeded in bringing down to the adoption of
the Constitution. The first volume, which appeared in 1834, reads today
like a stump speech by a sturdy Democratic orator of the Jacksonian
period. But there was solid stuff in it, nevertheless, and as Bancroft
proceeded, decade after decade, he discarded some of his rhetoric and
philosophy of democracy and utilized increasingly the vast stores of
documents which his energy and his high political positions had made it
possible for him to obtain. Late in life he condensed his ten great
volumes to six. Posterity will doubtless condense these in turn, as
posterity has a way of doing, but Bancroft the historian realized his own
youthful ambition with a completeness rare in the history of human effort
and performed a monumental service to his country.
178 He
was less of an artist, however, than Prescott, the eldest and in some ways
the finest figure of the well-known Prescott-Motley-Parkman group of
Boston historians. All of these men, together with their friend George
Ticknor, who wrote the History of Spanish Literature and whose own
Life and Letters pictures a whole generation, had the professional
advantages of inherited wealth, and the opportunity to make deliberate
choice of a historical field which offered freshness and picturesqueness
of theme. All were tireless workers in spite of every physical handicap;
all enjoyed social security and the rich reward of full recognition by
their contemporaries. They had their world as in their time, as Chaucer
makes the Wife of Bath say of herself, and it was a pleasant world to live
in.
Grandson of "Prescott the Brave" of Bunker Hill, and son of the rich Judge
Prescott of Salem, William Hickling Prescott was born in 1796, and was
graduated from Harvard in 1814. An accident in college destroyed the sight
of one eye, and left him but a precarious use of the other. Nevertheless
he resolved to emulate Gibbon, whose Autobiography had impressed
him, and to make himself "an historian in the best sense of the term." He
179
studied arduously in Europe, with the help of secretaries, and by 1826,
after a long hesitation, decided upon a History of the Reign of
Ferdinand and Isabella. In ten years the three volumes were finished.
﹃Pursuing the work in this quiet, leisurely way, without over-exertion or
fatigue,﹄wrote Prescott,﹃or any sense of obligation to complete it in a
given time, I have found it a continual source of pleasure.﹄It was
published at his own expense on Christmas Day, 1837, and met with
instantaneous success.﹃My market and my reputation rest principally with
England,﹄he wrote in 1838—a curious footnote, by the way, to
Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa Address of the year before. But America joined
with England, in praising the new book. Then Prescott turned to the Conquest
of Mexico, the Conquest of Peru, and finally to his unfinished
History of the Reign of Philip II. He had, as Dean Milman wrote
him, "the judgment to choose noble subjects." He wrote with serenity and
dignity, with fine balance and proportion. Some of the Spanish documents
upon which he relied have been proved less trustworthy than he thought,
but this unsuspected defect in his materials scarcely impaired the skill
with which this unhasting, unresting 180 painter filled his great
canvases. They need retouching, perhaps, but the younger historians are
incompetent for the task. Prescott died in 1859, in the same year as
Irving, and he already seems quite as remote from the present hour.
His young friend Motley, of Dutch Republic fame, was another Boston
Brahmin, born in the year of Prescott's graduation from college. He
attended George Bancroft's school, went to Harvard in due course, where he
knew Holmes, Sumner, and Wendell Phillips, and at Göttingen became a
warm friend of a dog-lover and duelist named Bismarck. Young Motley wrote
a couple of unsuccessful novels, dabbled in diplomacy, politics, and
review-writing, and finally, encouraged by Prescott, settled down upon
Dutch history, went to Europe to work up his material in 1851, and, after
five years, scored an immense triumph with his Rise of the Dutch
Republic. He was a brilliant partisan, hating Spaniards and
Calvinists, and wrote all the better for this bias. He was an admirable
sketcher of historical portraits, and had Macaulay's skill in composing
special chapters devoted to the tendencies and qualities of an epoch or to
the characteristics of 181 a dynasty. Between 1860 and 1868 he produced
the four volumes of the History of the United Netherlands. During
the Civil War he served usefully as American minister to Vienna, and in
1869 was appointed minister to London. Both of these appointments ended
unhappily for him. Dr. Holmes, his loyal admirer and biographer, does not
conceal the fact that a steadier, less excitable type of public servant
might have handled both the Vienna situation and the London situation
without incurring a recall. Motley continued to live in England, where his
daughters had married, and where, in spite of his ardent Americanism, he
felt socially at home. His last book was The Life and Death of John of
Barneveld. His Letters, edited after his death in 1877 by
George William Curtis, give a fascinating picture of English life among
the cultivated and leisurely classes. The Boston merchant's son was a
high-hearted gentleman, and his cosmopolitan experiences used to make his
stay-at-home friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, feel rather dull and
provincial in comparison. Both were Sons of Liberty, but Motley had had
the luck to find in "brave little Holland" a subject which captivated the
interest of Europe and gave the historian international fame. He 182 had more
eloquence than the Doctor, and a far more varied range of prose, but there
may be here and there a Yankee guesser about the taste of future
generations who will bet on The Autocrat, after all.
The character and career of Francis Parkman afford curious material to the
student of New England's golden age. In the seventy years of his heroic
life, from 1823 to 1893, all the characteristic forces of the age reached
their culmination and decline, and his own personality indicates some of
the violent reactions produced by the over-strain of Transcendentalism.
For here was a descendant of John Cotton, and a clergyman's son, who
detested Puritanism and the clergy; who, coming to manhood in the
eighteen-forties, hated the very words Transcendentalism, Philosophy,
Religion, Reform; an inheritor of property, trained at Harvard, and an
Overseer and Fellow of his University, who disliked the ideals of culture
and refinement; a member of the Saturday Club who was bored with literary
talk and literary people; a staunch American who despised democracy as
thoroughly as Alexander Hamilton, and thought suffrage a failure; a
nineteenth century historian who cared nothing for philosophy, science,
183 or
the larger lessons of history itself; a fascinating realistic writer who
admired Scott, Byron, and Cooper for their tales of action, and despised
Wordsworth and Thoreau as effeminate sentimentalists who were preoccupied
with themselves. In Parkman "the wheel has come full circle," and a
movement that began with expansion of self ended in hard Spartan
repression, even in inhibition of emotion.
Becoming "enamoured of the woods" at sixteen, Parkman chose his life work
at eighteen, and he was a man who could say proudly:﹃I have not yet
abandoned any plan which I ever formed.﹄"Before the end of the sophomore
year," he wrote in his autobiography, "my various schemes had crystallized
into a plan of writing the story of what was then known as the Old
French War, that is, the war that ended in the conquest of Canada, for
here, as it seemed to me, the forest drama was more stirring and the
forest stage more thronged with appropriate actors than in any other
passage of our history. It was not till some years later that I enlarged
the plan to include the whole course of the American conflict between
France and England, or, in other words, the history of the American
forest: for this 184
was the light in which I regarded it. My theme fascinated me, and I was
haunted with wilderness images day and night." To understand﹃the history
of the American forest﹄young Parkman devoted his college vacations to
long trips in the wilderness, and in 1846, two years after graduation, he
made the epoch-making journey described in his first book, The Oregon
Trail.
The Conspiracy of Pontiac, a highly-colored narrative in two
volumes appearing in 1851, marks the first stage of his historical
writing. Then came the tragedy of shattered health, and for fourteen years
Parkman fought for life and sanity, and produced practically nothing. He
had had to struggle from his college days with an obscure disorder of the
brain, aggravated by the hardships of his Oregon Trail journey, and by
ill-considered efforts to harden his bodily frame by over-exertion. His
disease took many forms—insomnia, arthritis, weakness of sight,
incapacity for sustained thought. His biographer Farnham says that﹃he
never saw a perfectly well day during his entire literary career.﹄Even
when aided by secretaries and copyists, six lines a day was often the
limit of his production. His own Stoic words about the limitations of his
eyesight are 185
characteristic:﹃By reading for one minute, and then resting for an equal
time, this alternate process may gradually be continued for about half an
hour. Then, after a sufficient interval, it may be repeated, often three
or four times in the course of the day. By this means nearly the whole of
the volume now offered has been composed.﹄There is no more piteous or
inspiring story of a fight against odds in the history of literature.
For after his fortieth year the enemy gave way a little, and book after
book somehow got itself written. There they stand upon the shelves, a
dozen of them—The Pioneers of France, The Jesuits in North
America, La Salle, The Old Régime, Frontenac,
Montcalm and Wolfe, A Half-Century of Conflict—the
boy's dream realized, the man's long warfare accomplished. The history of
the forest, as Parkman saw it, was a pageant with the dark wilderness for
a background, and, for the actors, taciturn savages, black-robed Jesuits,
intrepid explorers, soldiers of France—all struggling for a vast
prize, all changing, passing, with a pomp and color unknown to wearied
Europe. It was a superb theme, better after all for an American than the
themes chosen by Prescott and Ticknor 186 and Motley, and precisely
adapted to the pictorial and narrative powers of the soldier-minded,
soldier-hearted author.
The quality which Parkman admired most in men—though he never seems
to have loved men deeply, even his own heroes—was strength of will.
That was the secret of his own power, and the sign, it must be added, of
the limitations of this group of historians who came at the close of the
golden age. Whatever a New England will can accomplish was wrought
manfully by such admirable men as Prescott and Parkman. Trained
intelligence, deliberate selection of subject, skillful cultivation of
appropriate story-telling and picture-painting style, all these were
theirs. But the "wild ecstasy" that thrilled the young Emerson as he
crossed the bare Common at sunset, the "supernal beauty" of which Poe
dreamed in the Fordham cottage, the bay horse and hound and turtle-dove
which Thoreau lost long ago and could not find in his hut at Walden, these
were something which our later Greeks of the New England Athens esteemed
as foolishness.
187
Poe and Whitman
Enter now two egotists, who have little in
common save their egotism, two outsiders who upset most of the
conventional American rules for winning the literary race, two men of
genius, in short, about whom we are still quarreling, and whose
distinctive quality is more accurately perceived in Europe than it has
ever been in the United States.
Both Poe and Whitman were Romanticists by temperament. Both shared in the
tradition and influence of European Romanticism. But they were also late
comers, and they were caught in the more morbid and extravagant phases of
the great European movement while its current was beginning to ebb. Their
acquaintance with its literature was mainly at second-hand and through the
medium of British and American periodicals. Poe, who was older than
Whitman by ten years, 188 was fifteen when Byron died, in 1824. He was
untouched by the nobler mood of Byron, though his verse was colored by the
influence of Byron, Moore, and Shelley. His prose models were De Quincey,
Disraeli, and Bulwer. Yet he owed more to Coleridge than to any of the
Romantics. He was himself a sort of Coleridge without the piety, with the
same keen penetrating critical intelligence, the same lovely
opium-shadowed dreams, and, alas, with something of the same reputation as
a dead-beat.
A child of strolling players, Poe happened to be born in Boston, but he
hated "Frog-Pondium"—his favorite name for the city of his nativity—as
much as Whistler hated his native town of Lowell. His father died early of
tuberculosis, and his mother, after a pitiful struggle with disease and
poverty, soon followed her husband to the grave. The boy, by physical
inheritance a neurasthenic, though with marked bodily activity in youth,
was adopted by the Allans, a kindly family in Richmond, Virginia. Poe
liked to think of himself as a Southerner. He was sent to school in
England, and in 1826, at seventeen, he attended for nearly a year the
newly founded University of Virginia. He was a dark, short, bow-legged
boy, with the 189
face of his own Roderick Usher. He made a good record in French and Latin,
read, wrote and recited poetry, tramped on the Ragged Mountains, and did
not notably exceed his companions in drinking and gambling. But his Scotch
foster-father disapproved of his conduct and withdrew him from the
University. A period of wandering followed. He enlisted in the army and
was stationed in Boston in 1827, when his first volume, Tamerlane,
was published. In 1829 he was in Fortress Monroe, and published Al
Aaraf at Baltimore. He entered West Point in 1830, and was surely,
except Whistler, the strangest of all possible cadets. When he was
dismissed in 1831, he had written the marvellous lines To Helen, Israfel,
and The City in the Sea. That is enough to have in one's knapsack
at the age of twenty-two.
In the eighteen years from 1831 to 1849, when Poe's unhappy life came to
an end in a Baltimore hospital, his literary activity was chiefly that of
a journalist, critic, and short story writer. He lived in Baltimore,
Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York. Authors who now exploit their fat
bargains with their publishers may have forgotten that letter which Poe
wrote back to Philadelphia the morning after he arrived with his
child-wife in 190
New York:﹃We are both in excellent spirits.… We have now got four
dollars and a half left. To-morrow I am going to try and borrow three
dollars, so that I may have a fortnight to go upon.﹄When the child-wife
died in the shabby cottage at Fordham, her wasted body was covered with
the old army overcoat which Poe had brought from West Point. If Poe met
some of the tests of practical life inadequately, it must be remembered
that his health failed at twenty-five, that he was pitiably poor, and that
the slightest indulgence in drink set his over-wrought nerves jangling.
Ferguson, the former office-boy of the Literary Messenger, judged
this man of letters with an office-boy's firm and experienced eye:﹃Mr.
Poe was a fine gentleman when he was sober. He was ever kind and courtly,
and at such times everyone liked him. But when he was drinking he was
about one of the most disagreeable men I have ever met.﹄"I am sorry for
him," wrote C. F. Briggs to Lowell.﹃He has some good points, but
taken altogether, he is badly made up.﹄"Badly made up," no doubt, both in
body and mind, but all respectable and prosperous Pharisees should be
reminded that Poe did not make himself; or rather, that he could not make
himself 191
over. Very few men can. Given Poe's temperament, and the problem is
insoluble. He wrote to Lowell in 1844:﹃I have been too deeply conscious
of the mutability and evanescence of temporal things to give any
continuous effort to anything—to be consistent in anything. My life
has been whim—impulse—passion—a longing for
solitude—a scorn of all things present in an earnest desire for the
future.﹄It is the pathetic confession of a dreamer. Yet this dreamer was
also a keen analyzer, a tireless creator of beautiful things. In them he
sought and found a refuge from actuality. The marvel of his career is, as
I have said elsewhere, that this solitary, embittered craftsman, out of
such hopeless material as negations and abstractions, shadows and
superstitions, out of disordered fancies and dreams of physical horror and
strange crime, should have wrought structures of imperishable beauty.
Let us notice the critical instinct which he brought to the task of
creation. His theory of verse is simple, in fact too simple to account for
all of the facts. The aim of poetry, according to Poe, is not truth but
pleasure—the rhythmical creation of beauty. Poetry should be brief,
indefinite, and musical. Its chief instrument is sound. 192 A certain
quaintness or grotesqueness of tone is a means for satisfying the thirst
for supernal beauty. Hence the musical lyric is to Poe the only true type
of poetry; a long poem does not exist. Readers who respond more readily to
auditory than to visual or motor stimulus are therefore Poe's chosen
audience. For them he executes, like Paganini, marvels upon his single
string. He has easily recognizable devices: the dominant note, the
refrain, the "repetend," that is to say the phrase which echoes, with some
variation, a phrase or line already used. In such poems as To Helen,
Israfel, The Haunted Palace, Annabel Lee, the theme,
the tone, the melody all weave their magic spell; it is like listening to
a lute-player in a dream.
That the device often turns into a trick is equally true. In The Bells
and The Raven we detect the prestidigitator. It is jugglery, though
such juggling as only a master-musician can perform. In Ulalume and
other show-pieces the wires get crossed and the charm snaps, scattering
tinsel fragments of nonsense verse. Such are the dangers of the technical
temperament unenriched by wide and deep contact with human feeling.
Poe's theory of the art of the short story is 193 now familiar enough. The
power of a tale, he thought, turned chiefly if not solely upon its unity,
its harmony of effect. This is illustrated in all of his finest stories.
In The Fall of the House of Usher the theme is Fear; the opening
sentence strikes the key and the closing sentence contains the climax. In
the whole composition every sentence is modulated to the one end in view.
The autumn landscape tones with the melancholy house; the somber chamber
frames the cadaverous face of Roderick Usher; the face is an index of the
tumultuous agitation of a mind wrestling with the grim phantom Fear and
awaiting the cumulative horror of the final moment. In Ligeia,
which Poe sometimes thought the best of all his tales, the theme is the
ceaseless life of the will, the potency of the spirit of the beloved and
departed woman. The unity of effect is absolute, the workmanship
consummate. So with the theme of revenge in The Cask of Amontillado,
the theme of mysterious intrigue in The Assignation. In Poe's
detective stories, or tales of ratiocination as he preferred to call them,
he takes to pieces for our amusement a puzzle which he has cunningly put
together. The Gold Bug is the best known of these, The Purloined
Letter the most perfect, The 194 Murders in the Rue Morgue
the most sensational. Then there are the tales upon scientific subjects or
displaying the pretence of scientific knowledge, where the narrator loves
to pose as a man without imagination and with "habits of rigid thought."
And there are tales of conscience, of which The Black Cat is the
most fearful and William Wilson the most subtle; and there are
landscape sketches and fantasies and extravaganzas, most of these poor
stuff.
It is ungrateful and perhaps unnecessary to dwell upon Poe's limitations.
His scornful glance caught certain aspects of the human drama with
camera-like precision. Other aspects of life, and nobler, he never seemed
to perceive. The human comedy sometimes moved him to laughter, but his
humor is impish and his wit malign. His imagination fled from the
daylight; he dwelt in the twilight among the tombs. He closed his eyes to
dream, and could not see the green sunlit earth, seed-time and harvest,
man going forth to his toil and returning to his hearthstone, the America
that laughs as it labors. He wore upon his finger the magic ring and the
genii did his bidding. But we could wish that the palaces they reared for
him were not in such a 195 somber land, with such infernal lights
gleaming in their windows, and crowded with such horror-haunted forms. We
could wish that his imagination dealt less often with those primitive
terrors that belong to the childhood of our race. Yet when his spell is
upon us we lapse back by a sort of atavism into primal savagery and
shudder with a recrudescence of long forgotten fears. No doubt Poe was
ignorant of life, in the highest sense. He was caged in by his ignorance,
Yet he had beautiful dusky wings that bruised themselves against his
prison.
Poe was a tireless critic of his own work, and both his standards of
workmanship and his critical precepts have been of great service to his
careless countrymen. He turned out between four and five short stories a
year, was poorly paid for them, and indeed found difficulty in selling
them at all. Yet he was constantly correcting them for the better. His
best poems were likewise his latest. He was tantalized with the desire for
artistic perfection. He became the pathbreaker for a long file of men in
France, Italy, England, and America. He found the way and they brought
back the glory and the cash.
I have sometimes imagined Poe, with four other 196 men and one woman, seated at
a dinner-table laid for six, and talking of their art and of themselves.
What would the others think of Poe? I fancy that Thackeray would chat with
him courteously, but would not greatly care for him. George Eliot,
woman-like, would pity him. Hawthorne would watch him with those
inscrutable eyes and understand him better than the rest. But Stevenson
would be immensely interested; he would begin an essay on Poe before he
went to sleep. And Mr. Kipling would look sharply at him: he has seen that
man before, in The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows. All of them would
find in him something to praise, a great deal to marvel at, and perhaps
not much to love. And the sensitive, shabby, lonely Poe—what would
he think of them? He might not care much for the other guests, but I think
he would say to himself with a thrill of pride: "I belong at this table."
And he does.
Walt Whitman, whom his friend O'Connor dubbed the "good gray poet," offers
a bizarre contrast to Edgar Allan Poe. There was nothing distinctively
American about Poe except his ingenuity; he had no interest in American
history or in American ideas; he was a timeless, placeless embodiment of
technical artistry. But Whitman 197 had a passion for his native soil; he was
hypnotized by the word America; he spent much of his mature life in
brooding over the question,﹃What, after all, is an American, and what
should an American poet be in our age of science and democracy?﹄It is
true that he was as untypical as Poe of the average citizen of﹃these
states.﹄His personality is unique. In many respects he still baffles our
curiosity. He repels many of his countrymen without arousing the pity
which adds to their romantic interest in Poe. Whatever our literary
students may feel, and whatever foreign critics may assert, it must be
acknowledged that to the vast majority of American men and women﹃good old
Walt﹄is still an outsider.
Let us try to see first the type of mind with which we are dealing. It is
fundamentally religious, perceiving the unity and kinship and glory of all
created things. It is this passion of worship which inspired St. Francis
of Assisi's Canticle to the Sun. It cries,﹃Benedicite, Omnia opera
Domini: All ye Green Things upon the Earth, bless ye the Lord!﹄That is
the real motto for Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Like St. Francis, and
like his own immediate master, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman is a mystic.
He cannot argue the 198
ultimate questions; he asserts them. Instead of marshaling and sifting the
proofs for immortality, he chants "I know I am deathless." Like Emerson
again, Whitman shares that peculiarly American type of mysticism known as
Transcendentalism, but he came at the end of this movement instead of at
the beginning of it. In his Romanticism, likewise, he is an end of an era
figure. His affiliations with Victor Hugo are significant; and a volume of
Scott's poems which he owned at the age of sixteen became his
"inexhaustible mine and treasury for more than sixty years." Finally, and
quite as uncompromisingly as Emerson, Thoreau, and Poe, Whitman is an
individualist. He represents the assertive, Jacksonian period of our
national existence. In a thousand similes he makes a declaration of
independence for the separate person, the "single man" of Emerson's Phi
Beta Kappa address. "I wear my hat as I please, indoors and out."
Sometimes this is mere swagger. Sometimes it is superb.
So much for the type. Let us turn next to the story of Whitman's life. It
must here be told in the briefest fashion, for Whitman's own prose and
poetry relate the essentials of his biography. He was born on Long Island,
of New England and 199
Dutch ancestry, in 1819. Lowell, W. W. Story, and Charles A. Dana
were born in that year, as was also George Eliot. Whitman's father was a
carpenter, who "leaned to the Quakers." There were many children. When
little "Walt"—as he was called, to distinguish him from his father,
Walter—was four, the family moved to Brooklyn. The boy had scanty
schooling, and by the time he was twenty had tried type-setting, teaching,
and editing a country newspaper on Long Island. He was a big, dark-haired
fellow, sensitive, emotional, extraordinarily impressible.
The next sixteen years were full of happy vagrancy. At twenty-two he was
editing a paper in New York, and furnishing short stories to the Democratic
Review, a literary journal which numbered Bryant, Longfellow,
Whittier, Poe, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among its contributors. He wrote a
novel on temperance, "mostly in the reading-room of Tammany Hall," and
tried here and there an experiment in free verse. He was in love with the
pavements of New York and the Brooklyn ferry-boats, in love with Italian
opera and with long tramps over Long Island. He left his position on The
Brooklyn Eagle and wandered south to New Orleans. By and by he drifted
back 200
to New York, tried lecturing, worked at the carpenter's trade with his
father, and brooded over a book—"a book of new things."
This was the famous Leaves of Grass. He set the type himself, in a
Brooklyn printing-office, and printed about eight hundred copies. The book
had a portrait of the author—a meditative, gray-bearded poet in
workman's clothes—and a confused preface on America as a field for
the true poet. Then followed the new gospel, "I celebrate myself," chanted
in long lines of free verse, whose patterns perplexed contemporary
readers. For the most part it was passionate speech rather than song, a
rhapsodical declamation in hybrid rhythms. Very few people bought the book
or pretended to understand what it was all about. Some were startled by
the frank sexuality of certain poems. But Emerson wrote to Whitman from
Concord: "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that
America has yet contributed."
Until the Civil War was half over, Whitman remained in Brooklyn, patiently
composing new poems for successive printings of his book. Then he went to
the front to care for a wounded brother, and finally settled down in a
Washington garret 201
to spend his strength as an army hospital nurse. He wrote Drum Taps
and other magnificent poems about the War, culminating in his threnody on
Lincoln's death, When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloomed.
Swinburne called this﹃the most sonorous nocturn ever chanted in the
church of the world.﹄After the war had ended, Whitman stayed on in
Washington as a government clerk, and saw much of John Burroughs and W. D.
O'Connor. John Hay was a staunch friend. Some of the best known poets and
critics of England and the Continent now began to recognize his genius.
But his health had been permanently shattered by his heroic service as a
nurse, and in 1873 he suffered a paralytic stroke which forced him to
resign his position in Washington and remove to his brother's home in
Camden, New Jersey.
He was only fifty-four, but his best work was already done, and his
remaining years, until his death in 1892, were those of patient and serene
invalidism. He wrote some fascinating prose in this final period, and his
cluttered chamber in Camden became the shrine of many a literary pilgrim,
among them some of the foremost men of letters of this country and of
Europe. He was 202
cared for by loyal friends. Occasionally he appeared in public, a
magnificent gray figure of a man. And then, at seventy-three, the﹃Dark
mother always gliding near﹄enfolded him.
There are puzzling things in the physical and moral constitution of Walt
Whitman, and the obstinate questions involved in his theory of poetry and
in his actual poetical performance are still far from solution. But a few
points concerning him are by this time fairly clear. They must be swiftly
summarized.
The first obstacle to the popular acceptance of Walt Whitman is the
formlessness or alleged formlessness of Leaves of Grass. This is a
highly technical question, involving a more accurate notation than has
thus far been made of the patterns and tunes of free verse and of
emotional prose. Whitman's "new and national declamatory expression," as
he termed it, cannot receive a final technical valuation until we have
made more scientific progress in the analysis of rhythms. As regards the
contents of his verse, it is plain that he included much material unfused
and untransformed by emotion. These elements foreign to the nature of
poetry clog many of his lines. The enumerated objects in his catalogue or
inventory 203
poems often remain inert objects only. Like many mystics, he was
hypnotized by external phenomena, and he often fails to communicate to his
reader the trance-like emotion which he himself experienced. This
imperfect transfusion of his material is a far more significant defect in
Whitman's poetry than the relatively few passages of unashamed sexuality
which shocked the American public in 1855.
The gospel or burden of Leaves of Grass is no more difficult of
comprehension than the general drift of Emerson's essays, which helped to
inspire it. The starting-point of the book is a mystical illumination
regarding the unity and blessedness of the universe, an insight passing
understanding, but based upon the revelatory experience of love. In the
light of this experience, all created things are recognized as divine. The
starting-point and center of the Whitman world is the individual man, the
"strong person," imperturbable in mind, athletic in body, unconquerable,
and immortal. Such individuals meet in comradeship, and pass together
along the open roads of the world. No one is excluded because of his
poverty or his sins; there is room in the ideal America for everybody
except the doubter and sceptic. Whitman does 204 not linger over the smaller
groups of human society, like the family. He is not a fireside poet. He
passes directly from his strong persons, meeting freely on the open road,
to his conception of "these States." One of his typical visions of the
breadth and depth and height of America will be found in By Blue
Ontario's Shore. In this and in many similar rhapsodies Whitman holds
obstinately to what may be termed the three points of his national creed.
The first is the newness of America, and its expression is in his
well-known chant of Pioneers, O Pioneers. Yet this new America is
subtly related to the past; and in Whitman's later poems, such as Passage
to India, the spiritual kinship of orient and occident is emphasized.
The second article of the creed is the unity of America. Here he voices
the conceptions of Hamilton, Clay, Webster, and Lincoln. In spite of all
diversity in external aspects the republic is "one and indivisible." This
unity, in Whitman's view, was cemented forever by the issue of the Civil
War. Lincoln, the "Captain," dies indeed on the deck of the "victor ship,"
but the ship comes into the harbor "with object won." Third and finally,
Whitman insists upon the solidarity of America with all countries of the
globe. Particularly in his 205 yearning and thoughtful old age, the poet
perceived that humanity has but one heart and that it should have but one
will. No American poet has ever prophesied so directly and powerfully
concerning the final issue involved in that World War which he did not
live to see.
Whitman, like Poe, had defects of character and defects of art. His life
and work raise many problems which will long continue to fascinate and to
baffle the critics. But after all of them have had their say, it will
remain true that he was a seer and a prophet, far in advance of his own
time, like Lincoln, and like Lincoln, an inspired interpreter of the soul
of this republic.
206
Union and Liberty
"There is what I call the American idea,"
declared Theodore Parker in the Anti-Slavery Convention of 1850. "This
idea demands, as the proximate organization thereof, a democracy—that
is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people;
of course, a government on the principle of eternal justice, the
unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake, I will call it the idea of
Freedom."
These are noble words, and they are thought to have suggested a familiar
phrase of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, thirteen years later. Yet students
of literature, no less than students of politics, recognize the difficulty
of summarizing in words a national "idea." Precisely what was the Greek
"idea"? What is today the French "idea"? No single formula is adequate to
express such a complex of fact, theories, moods—not even 207 the famous
"Liberty, Fraternity, Equality." The existence of a truly national life
and literature presupposes a certain degree of unity, an integration of
race, language, political institutions, and social ideals. It is obvious
that this problem of national integration meets peculiar obstacles in the
United States. Divergencies of race, tradition, and social theory, and
clashing interests of different sections have been felt from the beginning
of the nation's life. There was well-nigh complete solidarity in the
single province of New England during a portion of the seventeenth
century, and under the leadership of the great Virginians there was
sufficient national fusion to make the Revolution successful. But early in
the nineteenth century, the opening of the new West, and the increasing
economic importance of Slavery as a peculiar institution of the South,
provoked again the ominous question of the possibility of an enduring
Union. From 1820 until the end of the Civil War, it was the chief
political issue of the United States. The aim of the present chapter is to
show how the theme of Union and Liberty affected our literature.
To appreciate the significance of this theme we must remind ourselves
again of what many persons 208 have called the civic note in our national
writing. Franklin exemplified it in his day. It is far removed from the
pure literary art of a Poe, a Hawthorne, a Henry James. It aims at action
rather than beauty. It seeks to persuade, to convince, to bring things to
pass. We shall observe it in the oratory of Clay and Webster, as they
pleaded for compromise; in the editorials of Garrison, a foe to compromise
and like Calhoun an advocate, if necessary, of disunion; in the
epoch-making novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe; in the speeches of Wendell
Phillips, in verse white-hot with political passion, and sermons blazing
with the fury of attack and defense of principles dear to the human heart.
We must glance, at least, at the lyrics produced by the war itself, and
finally, we shall observe how Abraham Lincoln, the inheritor of the ideas
of Jefferson, Clay, and Webster, perceives and maintains, in the noblest
tones of our civic speech, the sole conditions of our continuance as a
nation.
Let us begin with oratory, an American habit, and, as many besides Dickens
have thought, an American defect. We cannot argue that question adequately
here. It is sufficient to say that in the pioneer stages of our existence
oratory was necessary 209 as a stimulus to communal thought and
feeling. The speeches of Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams were as essential
to our winning independence as the sessions of statesmen and the armed
conflicts in the field. And in that new West which came so swiftly and
dramatically into existence at the close of the Revolution, the orator
came to be regarded as the normal type of intellectual leadership. The
stump grew more potent than schoolhouse and church and bench.
The very pattern, and, if one likes, the tragic victim of this
glorification of oratory was Henry Clay, "Harry of the West," the glamour
of whose name and the wonderful tones of whose voice became for a while a
part of the political system of the United States. Union and Liberty were
the master-passions of Clay's life, but the greater of these was Union.
The half-educated young immigrant from Virginia hazarded his career at the
outset by championing Anti-Slavery in the Kentucky Constitutional
Convention; the last notable act of his life was his successful
management, at the age of seventy-three, of the futile Compromise of 1850.
All his life long he fought for national issues; for the War of 1812, for
a protective tariff and an "American system," for the Missouri 210 Compromise
of 1820 as a measure for national safety; and he had plead generously for
the young South American republics and for struggling Greece. He had
become the perpetual candidate of his party for the Presidency, and had
gone down again and again in unforeseen and heart-rending defeat. Yet he
could say honorably:﹃If any one desires to know the leading and paramount
object of my public life, the preservation of this union will furnish him
the key.﹄One could wish that the speeches of this fascinating American
were more readable today. They seem thin, facile, full of phrases—such
adroit phrases as would catch the ear of a listening, applauding audience.
Straight, hard thinking was not the road to political preferment in Clay's
day. Calhoun had that power, as Lincoln had it. Webster had the capacity
for it, although he was too indolent to employ his great gifts steadily.
Yet it was Webster who analyzed kindly and a little sadly, for he was
talking during Clay's last illness and just before his own, his old
rival's defect in literary quality: "He was never a man of books.…
I could never imagine him sitting comfortably in his library and reading
quietly out of the great books of the past. He has been too fond of
excitement—he has lived upon it; 211 he has been too fond of
company, not enough alone; and has had few resources within himself." Were
the limitations of a typical oratorical temperament ever touched more
unerringly than in these words?
When Webster himself thundered, at the close of his reply to Hayne in
1830, "Union and Liberty, now and forever, one and inseparable,"
the words sank deeper into the consciousness of the American people than
any similar sentiment uttered by Henry Clay. For Webster's was the richer,
fuller nature, nurtured by "the great books of the past," brooding, as
Lincoln was to brood later, over the seemingly insoluble problem of
preserving a union of States half slave, half free. On the fateful seventh
of March, 1850, Webster, like Clay, cast the immense weight of his
personality and prestige upon the side of compromise. It was the ruin of
his political fortune, for the mood of the North was changing, and the
South preferred other candidates for the Presidency. Yet the worst that
can fairly be said against that speech today is that it lacked moral
imagination to visualize, as Mrs. Stowe was soon to visualize, the human
results of slavery. As a plea for the transcendent necessity of
maintaining the old Union it was consistent 212 with Webster's whole
development of political thought.
What were the secrets of that power that held Webster's hearers literally
spellbound, and made the North think of him, after that alienation of
1850, as a fallen angel? No one can say fully, for we touch here the
mysteries of personality and of the spoken word. But enough survives from
the Webster legend, from his correspondence and political and legal
oratory, to bring us into the presence of a superman. The dark Titan face,
painted by such masters as Carlyle, Hawthorne, and Emerson; the magical
voice, remembered now but by a few old men; the bodily presence, with its
leonine suggestion of sleepy power only half put forth—these aided
Webster to awe men or allure them into personal idolatry. Yet outside of
New England he was admired rather than loved. There is still universal
recognition of the mental capacity of this foremost lawyer and foremost
statesman of his time. He was unsurpassed in his skill for direct, simple,
limpid statement; but he could rise at will to a high Roman stateliness of
diction, a splendid sonorousness of cadence. His greatest public
appearances were in the Dartmouth College Case before the Supreme Court,
the Plymouth, 213
Bunker Hill, and Adams-Jefferson commemorative orations, the Reply to
Hayne, and the Seventh of March speeches in the Senate. Though he
exhibited in his private life something of the prodigal recklessness of
the pioneer, his mental operations were conservative, constructive. His
lifelong antagonist Calhoun declared that﹃The United States are not a
nation.﹄Webster, in opposition to this theory of a confederation of
states, devoted his superb talents to the demonstration of the thesis that
the United States "is," not "are." Thus he came to be known as
the typical expounder of the Constitution. When he reached, in 1850, the
turning-point of his career, his countrymen knew by heart his personal and
political history, the New Hampshire boyhood and education, the rise to
mastery at the New England bar, the service in the House of
Representatives and the Senate and as Secretary of State. His speeches
were already in the schoolbooks, and for twenty years boys had been
declaiming his arguments against nullification. He had helped to teach
America to think and to feel. Indeed it was through his oratory that many
of his fellow-citizens had gained their highest conception of the beauty,
the potency, and the dignity of human 214 speech. And in truth he never
exhibited his logical power and demonstrative skill more superbly than in
the plea of the seventh of March for the preservation of the status quo,
for the avoidance of mutual recrimination between North and South, for
obedience to the law of the land. It was his supreme effort to reconcile
an irreconcilable situation.
It failed, as we know. Whittier, Emerson, Theodore Parker, and indeed most
of the voters of New England, believed that Webster had bartered his
private convictions in the hope of securing the Presidential nomination in
1852. They assailed him savagely, and Webster died, a broken man, in the
autumn of the Presidential year.﹃I have given my life to law and
politics,﹄he wrote to Professor Silliman.﹃Law is uncertain and politics
are utterly vain.﹄The dispassionate judgment of the present hour frees
him from the charge of conscious treachery to principle. He was rather a
martyr to his own conception of the obligations imposed by nationality.
When these obligations run counter to human realities, the theories of
statesmen must give way. Emerson could not refute that logic of Webster's
argument for the Fugitive Slave Law, but he could at least record 215 in his
private Journal: "I will not obey it, by God!" So said
hundreds of thousands of obscure men in the North, but Webster did not or
could not hear them.
While no other orator of that period was so richly endowed as Daniel
Webster, the struggle for Union and Liberty enlisted on both sides many
eloquent men. John C. Calhoun's acute, ingenious, masterly political
theorizing can still be studied in speeches that have lost little of their
effectiveness through the lapse of time. The years have dealt roughly with
Edward Everett, once thought to be the pattern of oratorical gifts and
graces. In commemorative oratory, indeed, he ranked with Webster, but the
dust is settling upon his learned and ornate pages. Rufus Choate, another
conservative Whig in politics, and a leader, like Wirt and Pinkney, at the
bar, had an exotic, almost Oriental fancy, a gorgeousness of diction, and
an intensity of emotion unrivaled among his contemporaries. His Dartmouth
College eulogy of Webster in 1853 shows him at his best. The Anti-Slavery
orators, on the other hand, had the advantage of a specific moral issue in
which they led the attack. Wendell Phillips was the most polished, the
most consummate in his air of informality, 216 and his example did much to
puncture the American tradition of high-flown oratory. He was an expert in
virulent denunciation, passionately unfair beneath his mask of
conversational decorum, an aristocratic demagogue. He is still distrusted
and hated by the Brahmin class of his own city, still adored by the
children and grandchildren of slaves. Charles Sumner, like Edward Everett,
seems sinking into popular oblivion, in spite of the statues and portraits
and massive volumes of erudite and caustic and high-minded orations. He
may be seen at his best in such books as Longfellow's Journal and
Correspondence and the Life and Letters of George Ticknor.
There one has a pleasant picture of a booklover, traveler, and friend. But
in his public speech he was arrogant, unsympathetic, domineering.﹃Sumner
is my idea of a bishop,﹄said Lincoln tentatively. There are bishops and
bishops, however, and if Henry Ward Beecher, whom Lincoln and hosts of
other Americans admired, had only belonged to the Church of England, what
an admirable Victorian bishop he might have made! Perhaps his best service
to the cause of union was rendered by his speeches in England, where he
fairly mobbed the mob and won them by his wit, courage, and by 217 his appeal
to the instinct of fair play. Beecher's oratory, in and out of the pulpit,
was temperamental, sentimental in the better sense, and admirably human in
all its instincts. He had an immense following, not only in political and
humanitarian fields, but as a lovable type of the everyday American who
can say undisputed things not only solemnly, if need be, but by preference
with an infectious smile. The people who loved Mr. Beecher are the people
who understand Mr. Bryan.
Foremost among the journalists of the great debate were William Lloyd
Garrison and Horace Greeley. Garrison was a perfect example of the
successful journalist as described by Zola—the man who keeps on
pounding at a single idea until he has driven it into the head of the
public. Everyone knows at least the sentence from his salutatory editorial
in The Liberator on January 1, 1831:﹃I am in earnest—I will
not retreat a single inch—And I will be heard.﹄He kept this
vow, and he also kept the accompanying and highly characteristic promise:
﹃I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this
subject, I do not wish to think, or write, or speak, with moderation.﹄But
there would be little political literature 218 in the world if its
production were entrusted to the moderate type of man, and the files of The
Liberator, though certainly harsh and full of all uncharitableness
towards slave-owners, make excellent reading for the twentieth century
American who perceives that in spite of the triumph of emancipation, in
which Garrison had his fair share of glory, many aspects of our
race-problem remain unsolved. Horace Greeley, the founder and editor of
the New York Tribune, was a farmer's boy who learned early to speak
and write the vocabulary of the plain people. Always interested in new
ideas, even in Transcendentalism and Fourierism, his courage and energy
and journalistic vigor gave him leadership in the later phases of the
movement for enfranchisement. He did not hesitate to offer unasked advice
to Lincoln on many occasions, and Lincoln enriched our literature by his
replies. Greeley had his share of faults and fatuities, but in his best
days he had an impressively loyal following among both rural and city-bred
readers of his paper, and he remains one of the best examples of that
obsolescent personal journalism which is destined to disappear under
modern conditions of newspaper production. Readers really used to care for
"what Greeley said" and 219 "Dana said" and "Sam Bowles said," and all of
these men, with scores of others, have left their stamp upon the phrases
and the tone of our political writing.
In the concrete issue of Slavery, however, it must be admitted that the
most remarkable literary victory was scored, not by any orator or
journalist, but by an almost unknown little woman, the author of Uncle
Tom's Cabin. No American novel has had so curious a history and so
great or so immediate an influence in this country and in Europe. In spite
of all that has been written about it, its author's purpose is still
widely misunderstood, particularly in the South, and the controversy over
this one epoch-making novel has tended to obscure the literary reputation
which Mrs. Stowe won by her other books.
Harriet Beecher, the daughter and the sister of famous clergymen, was born
in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1811. For seventeen years, from 1832 to
1849, she lived in the border city of Cincinnati, within sight of slave
territory, and in daily contact with victims of the slave system. While
her sympathies, like those of her father Lyman Beecher, were anti-slavery,
she was not an Abolitionist in the Garrisonian sense of that word. At
twenty-five 220
she had married a widowed professor, Calvin Stowe, to whom she bore many
children. She had written a few sketches of New England life, and her
family thought her a woman of genius. Such was the situation in the winter
of 1849-1850, when the Stowes migrated to Brunswick, Maine, where the
husband had been appointed to a chair at Bowdoin. Pitiably poor, and
distracted by household cares which she had to face single-handed—for
the Professor was a "feckless body"—Mrs. Stowe nevertheless could
not be indifferent to the national crisis over the Fugitive Slave Law. She
had seen its working. When her sister-in-law wrote to her:﹃If I could use
a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole
nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is,﹄Mrs. Stowe exclaimed: "God
helping me, I will write something; I will if I live."
Uncle Tom's Cabin, begun in the spring of 1850, was a woman's
answer to Webster's seventh of March speech. Its object was plainly stated
to be "to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race; to show, their
wrongs and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as to
defeat and do away the good effects of all that can be attempted for them,
by their best friends under 221 it." The book was permeated with what we now
call the 1848 anti-aristocratic sentiment, the direct heritage of the
French Revolution.﹃There is a dies irœ coming on, sooner or
later,﹄admits St. Clare in the story.﹃The same thing is working, in
Europe, in England, and in this country.﹄There was no sectional hostility
in Mrs. Stowe's heart.﹃The people of the free states have defended,
encouraged, and participated [in slavery]; and are more guilty for it,
before God, than the South, in that they have not the apology of
education or custom. If the mothers of the free states had all felt as
they should in times past, the sons of the free states would not have been
the holders, and proverbially the hardest masters, of slaves; the sons of
the free states would not have connived at the extension of slavery in our
national body.﹄"Your book is going to be the great pacificator," wrote a
friend of Mrs. Stowe; "it will unite North and South." But the distinctly
Christian and fraternal intention of the book was swiftly forgotten in the
storm of controversy that followed its appearance. It had been written
hastily, fervidly, in the intervals of domestic toil at Brunswick, had
been printed as a serial in The National Era without attracting
much attention, and was 222 issued in book form in March, 1852. Its
sudden and amazing success was not confined to this country. The story ran
in three Paris newspapers at once, was promptly dramatized, and has held
the stage in France ever since. It was placed upon the Index in
Italy, as being subversive of established authority. Millions of copies
were sold in Europe, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, more than any other
cause, held the English working men in sympathy with the North in the
English cotton crisis of our Civil War.
It is easy to see the faults of this masterpiece and impossible not to
recognize its excellencies.﹃If our art has not scope enough to include a
book of this kind,﹄said Madame George Sand,﹃we had better stretch the
terms of our art a little.﹄For the book proved to be, as its author had
hoped, a "living dramatic reality." Topsy, Chloe, Sam and Andy, Miss
Ophelia and Legree are alive. Mrs. St. Clare might have been one of
Balzac's indolent, sensuous women. Uncle Tom himself is a bit too good to
be true, and readers no longer weep over the death of little Eva—nor,
for that matter, over the death of Dickens's little Nell. There is some
melodrama, some religiosity, and there are some absurd recognition scenes
at the 223
close. Nevertheless with an instinctive genius which Zola would have
envied, Mrs. Stowe embodies in men and women the vast and ominous system
of slavery. All the tragic forces of necessity, blindness, sacrifice, and
retribution are here: neither Shelby, nor Eliza, nor the tall Kentuckian
who aids her, nor John Bird, nor Uncle Tom himself in the final act of his
drama, can help himself. For good or evil they are the products and
results of the system; and yet they have and they give the illusion of
volition.
Mrs. Stowe lived to write many another novel and short story, among them
Dred, The Minister's Wooing, Oldtown Folks, Oldtown
Fireside Stories. In the local short story she deserves the honors due
to one of the pioneers, and her keen affectionate observation, her humor,
and her humanity, would have given her a literary reputation quite
independent of her masterpiece. But she is likely to pay the penalty of
that astounding success, and to go down to posterity as the author of a
single book. She would not mind this fate.
The poetry of the idea of Freedom and of the sectional struggle which was
necessary before that idea could be realized in national policy is on the
whole not commensurate with the significance of 224 the issue itself. Any
collection of American political verse produced during this period
exhibits spirited and sincere writing, but the combination of mature
literary art and impressive general ideas is comparatively rare. There are
single poems of Whittier, Lowell, and Whitman which meet every test of
effective political and social verse, but the main body of poetry, both
sectional and national, written during the thirty years ending with 1865
lacks breadth, power, imaginative daring. The continental spaciousness and
energy which foreign critics thought they discovered in Whitman is not
characteristic of our poetry as a whole. Victor Hugo and Shelley and
Swinburne have written far more magnificent republican poetry than ours.
The passion for freedom has been very real upon this side of the Atlantic;
it pulsed in the local loyalty of the men who sang Dixie as well as
in their antagonists who chanted John Brown's Body and The
Battle Hymn of the Republic; but this passion has not yet lifted and
ennobled any notable mass of American verse. Even the sentiment of union
was more adequately voiced in editorials and sermons and orations, even in
a short story—Edward Everett Hale's Man Without a Country—than
by most of the poets who attempted to glorify that theme.
225
Nevertheless the verse of these thirty years is rich in provincial and
sectional loyalties. It has earnestness and pathos. We have, indeed, no
adequate national anthem, even yet, for neither the words nor the music of
The Star-Spangled Banner fully express what we feel while we are
trying to sing it, as the Marseillaise, for example, does express
the very spirit of revolutionary republicanism. But in true pioneer
fashion we get along with a makeshift until something better turns up. The
lyric and narrative verse of the Civil War itself was great in quantity,
and not more inferior in quality than the war verse of other nations has
often proved to be when read after the immediate occasion for it has
passed. Single lyrics by Timrod and Paul Hayne, Boker, H. H.
Brownell, Read, Stedman, and other men are still full of fire. Yet Mrs.
Howe's Battle Hymn, scribbled hastily in the gray dawn,
interpreted, as no other lyric of the war quite succeeded in interpreting,
the mystical glory of sacrifice for Freedom. Soldiers sang it in camp;
women read it with tears; children repeated it in school, vaguely but
truly perceiving in it, as their fathers had perceived in Webster's Reply
to Hayne thirty years before, the idea of union made﹃simple,
sensuous, passionate.﹄No American 226 poem has had a more dramatic and intense life
in the quick breathing imagination of men.
More and more, however, the instinct of our people is turning to the words
of Abraham Lincoln as the truest embodiment in language, as his life was
the truest embodiment in action, of our national ideal. It is a curious
reversal of contemporary judgments that thus discovers in the homely
phrases of a frontier lawyer the most perfect literary expression of the
deeper spirit of his time.﹃How knoweth this man letters, having never
learned?﹄asked the critical East. The answer is that he had learned in a
better school than the East afforded. The story of Lincoln's life is
happily too familiar to need retelling here, but some of the elements in
his growth in the mastery of speech may at least be summarized.
Lincoln had a slow, tireless mind, capable of intense concentration. It
was characteristic of him that he rarely took notes when trying a law
case, saying that the notes distracted his attention. When his partner
Herndon was asked when Lincoln had found time to study out the
constitutional history of the United States, Herndon expressed the opinion
that it was when Lincoln was lying on his back on the office sofa,
apparently 227
watching the flies upon the ceiling. This combination of bodily repose
with intense mental and spiritual activity is familiar to those who have
studied the biography of some of the great mystics. Walter Pater pointed
it out in the case of Wordsworth.
In recalling the poverty and restriction of Lincoln's boyhood and his
infrequent contact with schoolhouses, it is well to remember that he
managed nevertheless to read every book within twenty miles of him. These
were not many, it is true, but they included The Bible, Æesop's
Fables, Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and, a
little later, Burns and Shakespeare. Better food than this for the mind of
a boy has never been found. Then he came to the history of his own country
since the Declaration of Independence and mastered it.﹃I am tolerably
well acquainted with the history of the country,﹄he remarked in his
Chicago speech of 1858; and in the Cooper Union speech of 1860 he
exhibited a familiarity with the theory and history of the Constitution
which amazed the young lawyers who prepared an annotated edition of the
address. "He has wit, facts, dates," said Douglas, in extenuation of his
own disinclination to enter upon the famous joint debates, and, when
Douglas 228
returned to Washington after the debates were over, he confessed to the
young Henry Watterson that﹃he is the greatest debater I have ever met,
either here or anywhere else.﹄Douglas had won the senatorship and could
afford to be generous, but he knew well enough that his opponent's facts
and dates had been unanswerable. Lincoln's mental grip, indeed, was the
grip of a born wrestler. "I've got him," he had exclaimed toward the end
of the first debate, and the Protean Little Giant, as Douglas was called,
had turned and twisted in vain, caught by﹃that long-armed creature from
Illinois.﹄He could indeed win the election of 1858, but he had been
forced into an interpretation of the Dred Scott decision which cost him
the Presidency in 1860.
Lincoln's keen interest in words and definitions, his patience in
searching the dictionary, is known to every student of his life. Part of
his singular discrimination in the use of language is due to his legal
training, but his style was never professionalized. Neither did it have
anything of that frontier glibness and banality which was the curse of
popular oratory in the West and South. Words were weapons in the hands of
this self-taught fighter for ideas: he kept their edges sharp, and 229 could if
necessary use them with deadly accuracy. He framed the "Freeport dilemma"
for the unwary feet of Douglas as cunningly as a fox-hunter lays his trap.
"Gentlemen," he had said of an earlier effort, "Judge Douglas informed you
that this speech of mine was probably carefully prepared. I admit that
it was."
The story, too, was a weapon of attack and defense for this master
fabulist. Sometimes it was a readier mode of argument than any syllogism;
sometimes it gave him, like the traditional diplomatist's pinch of snuff,
an excuse for pausing while he studied his adversary or made up his own
mind; sometimes, with the instinct of a poetic soul, he invented a parable
and gravely gave it a historic setting "over in Sangamon County." For
although upon his intellectual side the man was a subtle and severe
logician, on his emotional side he was a lover of the concrete and human.
He was always, like John Bunyan, dreaming and seeing "a man" who
symbolized something apposite to the occasion. Thus even his invented
stories aided his marvelous capacity for statement, for specific
illustration of a general law. Lincoln's destiny was to be that of an
explainer, at first to a local audience in store or tavern or courtroom,
230 then
to upturned serious faces of Illinois farmers who wished to hear national
issues made clear to them, then to a listening nation in the agony of
civil war, and ultimately to a world which looks to Lincoln as an exponent
and interpreter of the essence of democracy.
As the audience increased, the style took on beauty and breadth, as if the
man's soul were looking through wider and wider windows at the world. But
it always remained the simplest of styles. In an offhand reply to a
serenade by an Indiana regiment, or in answering a visiting deputation of
clergymen at the White House, Lincoln could summarize and clarify a
complicated national situation with an ease and orderliness and
fascination that are the despair of professional historians. He never
wasted a word. "Go to work is the only cure for your case," he wrote to
John D. Johnston. There are ten words in that sentence and none of over
four letters. The Gettysburg Address contains but two hundred and
seventy words, in ten sentences. "It is a flat failure," said Lincoln
despondently; but Edward Everett, who had delivered "the" oration of that
day, wrote to the President: "I should be glad if I could flatter myself
that I came as near to the central idea of 231 the occasion in two hours as
you did in two minutes." Today the Address reads as if Lincoln knew
that it would ultimately be stamped in bronze.
Yet the real test of Lincoln's supremacy in our distinctly civic
literature lies not so much in his skill in the manipulation of language,
consummate as that was, but rather in those large elements of his nature
which enabled him to perceive the true quality and ideal of American
citizenship and its significance to the world. There was melancholy in
that nature, else there had been a less rich humor; there was mysticism
and a sense of religion which steadily deepened as his responsibilities
increased. There was friendliness, magnanimity, pity for the sorrowful,
patience for the slow of brain and heart, and an expectation for the
future of humanity which may best be described in the old phrase﹃waiting
for the Kingdom of God.﹄His recurrent dream of the ship coming into port
under full sail, which preluded many important events in his own life—he
had it the night before he was assassinated—is significant not only
of that triumph of a free nation which he helped to make possible, but
also of the victory of what he loved to call "the whole family of man."
232
"That is the real issue," he had declared in closing the debates with
Douglas; "that is the issue that will continue in this country when these
poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the
eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout
the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from
the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the
common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings."
For this representative Anglo-Saxon man, developed under purely American
conditions, maturing slowly, keeping close to facts, dying, like the old
English saint, while he was "still learning," had none of the typical
hardness and selfishness of the Anglo-Saxon. A brooder and idealist, he
was one of those﹃prophetic souls of the wide world dreaming on things to
come,﹄with sympathies and imagination that reached out beyond the
immediate urgencies of his race and nation to comprehend the universal
task and discipline of the sons of men. In true fraternity and democracy
this Westerner was not only far in advance of his own day, but he is also
far in advance of ours which raises statues to his memory. Yet he was used
233 to
loneliness and to the long view, and even across the welter of the World
War of the twentieth century Lincoln would be tall enough to see that ship
coming into the harbor under full sail.
234
A New Nation
The changes that have come over the inner
spirit and the outward expression of American life since Lincoln's day are
enough to startle the curiosity of the dullest observer. Yet they have
been accomplished within the lifetime of a single man of letters. The
author of one of the many campaign biographies of Lincoln in 1860 was
William Dean Howells, then an Ohio journalist of twenty-three. In 1917, at
the age of eighty, Mr. Howells is still adding to his long row of charming
and memorable books. Every phase of American writing since the middle of
the last century has fallen under the keen and kindly scrutiny of this
loyal follower of the art of literature. As producer, editor, critic, and
friend of the foremost writers of his epoch, Mr. Howells has known the
books of our new national era as no one else could have known them. Some
future historian of the period may 235 piece together, from no other sources than
Mr. Howells's writings, an unrivaled picture of our book-making during
more than sixty years. All that the present historian can attempt is to
sketch with bungling fingers a few men and a few tendencies which seem to
characterize the age.
One result of the Civil War was picturesquely set forth in Emerson's Journal.
The War had unrolled a map of the Union, he said, and hung it in every
man's house. There was a universal shifting of attention, if not always
from the province or section to the image of the nation itself, at least a
shift of focus from one section to another. The clash of arms had meant
many other things besides the triumph of Union and the freedom of the
slaves. It had brought men from every state into rude jostling contact
with one another and had developed a new social and human curiosity. It
may serve as another illustration of Professor Shaler's law of tension and
release. The one overshadowing issue which had absorbed so much thought
and imagination and energy had suddenly disappeared. Other shadows were to
gather, of course. Reconstruction of the South was one of them, and the
vast economic and industrial changes that followed the opening of the New
West were to 236
bring fresh problems almost as intricate as the question of slavery had
been. But for the moment no one thought of these things. The South
accepted defeat as superbly as she had fought, and began to plough once
more. The jubilant North went back to work—to build transcontinental
railroads, to organize great industries, and to create new states.
The significant American literature of the first decade after the close of
the War is not in the books dealing directly with themes involved in the
War itself. It is rather the literature of this new release of energy, the
new curiosity as to hitherto unknown sections, the new humor and romance.
Fred Lewis Pattee, the author of an admirable History of American
Literature since 1870, uses scarcely too strong a phrase when he
entitles this period "The Second Discovery of America"; and he quotes
effectively from Mark Twain, who was himself one of these discoverers:
"The eight years in America from 1860 to 1868 uprooted institutions that
were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the
social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire
national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or
three generations."
237 Let
us begin with the West, and with that joyous stage-coach journey of young
Samuel L. Clemens across the plains to Nevada in 1861, which he describes
in Roughing It. Who was this Argonaut of the new era, and what
makes him representative of his countrymen in the epoch of release? Born
in Missouri in 1835, the son of an impractical emigrant from Virginia, the
youth had lived from his fourth until his eighteenth year on the banks of
the Mississippi. He had learned the printer's trade, had wandered east and
back again, had served for four years as a river-pilot on the Mississippi,
and had tried to enter the Confederate army. Then came the six crowded
years, chiefly as newspaper reporter, in the boom times of Nevada and
California. His fame began with the publication in New York in 1867 of The
Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. A newspaper now sent him
to Europe to record "what he sees with his own eyes." He did so in Innocents
Abroad, and his countrymen shouted with laughter. This, then, was
"Europe" after all—another "fake" until this shrewd river-pilot who
signed himself "Mark Twain" took its soundings! Then came a series of far
greater books—Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, The
Gilded Age (in collaboration), 238 and Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn—books
that make our American Odyssey, rich in the spirit of romance and
revealing the magic of the great river as no other pages can ever do
again. Gradually Mark Twain became a public character; he retrieved on the
lecture platform the loss of a fortune earned by his books; he enjoyed his
honorary D. Litt. from Oxford University. Every reader of American
periodicals came to recognize the photographs of that thick shock of hair,
those heavy eyebrows, the gallant drooping little figure, the striking
clothes, the inevitable cigar: all these things seemed to go with the part
of professional humorist, to be like the caressing drawl of Mark's voice.
The force of advertisement could no further go. But at bottom he was far
other than a mere maker of boisterous jokes for people with frontier
preferences in humor. He was a passionate, chivalric lover of things fair
and good, although too honest to pretend to see beauty and goodness where
he could not personally detect them—and an equally passionate hater
of evil. Read The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg and The
Mysterious Stranger. In his last years, torn by private sorrows, he
turned as black a philosophical pessimist as we have bred. He died at
239 his
new country seat in Connecticut in 1910. Mr. Paine has written his life in
three great volumes, and there is a twenty-five volume edition of his Works.
All the evidence seems to be in. Yet the verdict of the public seems not
quite made up. It is clear that Mark Twain the writer of romance is
gaining upon Mark Twain the humorist. The inexhaustible American appetite
for frontier types of humor seizes upon each new variety, crunches it with
huge satisfaction, and then tosses it away. John Phoenix, Josh Billings,
Jack Downing, Bill Arp, Petroleum V. Nasby, Artemus Ward, Bill Nye—these
are already obsolescent names. If Clemens lacked something of Artemus
Ward's whimsical delicacy and of Josh Billings's tested human wisdom, he
surpassed all of his competitors in a certain rude, healthy masculinity,
the humor of river and mining-camp and printing-office, where men speak
without censorship. His country-men liked exaggeration, and he
exaggerated; they liked irreverence, and he had turned iconoclast in Innocents
Abroad. As a professional humorist, he has paid the obligatory tax for
his extravagance, over-emphasis, and undisciplined taste, but such faults
are swiftly forgotten when one turns 240 to Huckleberry Finn and the
negro Jim and Pudd'nhead Wilson, when one feels Mark Twain's power in
sheer description and episode, his magic in evoking landscape and
atmosphere, his blazing scorn at injustice and cruelty, his contempt for
quacks.
Bret Harte, another discoverer of the West, wears less well than Mark
Twain as a personal figure, but has a sure place in the evolution of the
American short story, and he did for the mining-camps of California what
Clemens wrought for the Mississippi River: he became their profane poet.
Yet he was never really of them. He was the clever outsider, with a
prospector's eye, looking for literary material, and finding a whole rich
mine of it—a bigger and richer, in fact, than he was really
qualified to work. But he located a golden vein of it with an instinct
that did credit to his dash of Hebrew blood. Born in Albany, a teacher's
son, brought up on books and in many cities, Harte emigrated to California
in 1854 at the age of sixteen. He became in turn a drug-clerk, teacher,
type-setter, editor, and even Secretary of the California Mint—his
nearest approach, apparently, to the actual work of the mines. In 1868,
while editor of The Overland Monthly, he wrote the short 241 story
which was destined to make him famous in the East and to release him from
California forever. It was The Luck of Roaring Camp. He had been
writing romantic sketches in prose and verse for years; he had steeped
himself in Dickens, like everybody else in the eighteen-sixties; and now
he saw his pay-gravel shining back into his own shining eyes. It was a
pocket, perhaps, rather than a lead, but Bret Harte worked to the end of
his career this material furnished by the camps, this method of the short
story. He never returned to California after his joyous exit in 1871. For
a few years he tried living in New York, but from 1878 until his death in
1902 Bret Harte lived in Europe, still turning out California stories for
an English and American public which insisted upon that particular
pattern.
That the pattern was arbitrary, theatrical, sentimental, somewhat
meretricious in design, in a word insincere like its inventor, has been
repeated at due intervals ever since 1868. The charge is true; yet it is
far from the whole truth concerning Bret Harte's artistry. In mastery of
the technique of the short story he is fairly comparable with Poe, though
less original, for it was Poe who formulated, when Bret Harte was a child
242 of
six, the well-known theory of the unity of effect of the brief tale. This
unity Harte secured through a simplification, often an insulation, of his
theme, the omission of quarreling details, an atmosphere none the less
novel for its occasional theatricality, and characters cunningly modulated
to the one note they were intended to strike. Tennessee's Partner,
The Outcast of Poker Flat, and all the rest are triumphs of
selective skill—as bright nuggets as ever glistened in the pan at
the end of a hard day's labor. That they do not adequately represent the
actual California of the fifties, as old Californians obstinately insist,
is doubtless true, but it is beside the point. Here is no Tolstoi painting
the soul of his race in a few pages: Harte is simply a disciple of Poe and
Dickens, turning the Poe construction trick gracefully, with Dickensy
characters and consistently romantic action.
The West has been rediscovered many a time since that decade which
witnessed the first literary bonanza of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. It will
continue to be discovered, in its fresh sources of appeal to the
imagination, as long as Plains and Rockies and Coast endure, as long as
there is any glow upon a distant horizon. It is 243 not places that lose romantic
interest: the immemorial English counties and the Bay of Naples offer
themselves freely to the artist, generation after generation. What is lost
is the glamour of youth, the specific atmosphere of a given historical
epoch. Colonel W. F. Cody ("Buffalo Bill") has typified to millions
of American boys the great period of the Plains, with its Indian fighting,
its slaughter of buffaloes, its robbing of stage-coaches, its superb
riders etched against the sky. But the Wild West was retreating, even in
the days of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. The West of the cowboys, as
Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister knew it and wrote of it in the eighties
and nineties, has disappeared, though it lives on in fiction and on the
screen.
Jack London, born in California in 1876, was forced to find his West in
Alaska—and in alcohol. He was what he and his followers liked to
call the virile or red-blooded type, responsive to the "Call of the Wild,"
"living life naked and tensely." In his talk Jack London was simple and
boyish, with plenty of humor over his own literary and social foibles. His
books are very uneven, but he wrote many a hard-muscled, clean-cut page.
If the Bret Harte theory of the West was that each man is at 244 bottom a
sentimentalist, Jack London's formula was that at bottom every man is a
brute. Each theory gave provender enough for a short-story writer to carry
on his back, but is hardly adequate, by itself, for a very long voyage
over human life.
"Joaquin" (Cincinnatus Heine) Miller, who was born in 1841 and died in
1913, had even less of a formula for the West than Jack London. He was a
word-painter of its landscapes, a rider over its surfaces. Cradled﹃in a
covered wagon pointing West,﹄mingling with wild frontier life from Alaska
to Nicaragua, miner, Indian fighter, hermit, poseur in London and
Washington, then hermit again in California, the author of Songs of the
Sierras at least knew his material. Byron, whom he adored and
imitated, could have invented nothing more romantic than Joaquin's life;
but though Joaquin inherited Scotch intensity, he had nothing of the close
mental grip of the true Scot and nothing of his humor. Vast stretches of
his poetry are empty; some of it is grandiose, elemental, and yet somehow
artificial, as even the Grand Canyon itself looks at certain times.
John Muir, another immigrant Scot who reached California in 1868, had far
more stuff in him than Joaquin Miller. He had studied geology, botany,
245 and
chemistry at the new University of Wisconsin, and then for years turned
explorer of forests, peaks, and glaciers, not writing, at first, except in
his Journal, but forever absorbing and worshiping sublimity and
beauty with no thought of literary schemes. Yet his every-day talk about
his favorite trees and glaciers had more of the glow of poetry in it than
any talk I have ever heard from men of letters, and his books and Journal
will long perpetuate this thrilling sense of personal contact with wild,
clean, uplifted things—blossoms in giant tree-tops and snow-eddies
blowing round the shoulders of Alaskan peaks. Here is a West as far above
Jack London's and Frank Norris's as the snow-line is higher than the
jungle.
The rediscovery of the South was not so much an exploration of fresh or
forgotten geographical territory, as it was a new perception of the
romantic human material offered by a peculiar civilization. Political and
social causes had long kept the South in isolation. A few writers like
Wirt, Kennedy, Longstreet, Simms, had described various aspects of its
life with grace or vivacity, but the best picture of colonial Virginia had
been drawn, after all, by Thackeray, who had merely read about it in
books. Visitors like Fanny Kemble and 246 Frederick Law Olmsted
sketched the South of the mid-nineteenth century more vividly than did the
sons of the soil. There was no real literary public in the South for a
native writer like Simms. He was as dependent upon New York and the
Northern market as a Virginian tobacco-planter of 1740 had been upon
London. But within a dozen years after the close of the War and
culminating in the eighteen-nineties, there came a rich and varied harvest
of Southern writing, notably in the field of fiction. The public for these
stories, it is true, was still largely in the North and West, and it was
the magazines and publishing-houses of New York and Boston that gave the
Southern authors their chief stimulus and support. It was one of the happy
proofs of the solidarity of the new nation.
The romance of the Spanish and French civilization of New Orleans, as
revealed in Mr. Cable's fascinating Old Creole Days, was
recognized, not as something merely provincial in its significance, but as
contributing to the infinitely variegated pattern of our national life.
Irwin Russell, Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas Nelson Page portrayed in
verse and prose the humorous, pathetic, unique traits of the Southern
negro, a type hitherto 247 chiefly sketched in caricature or by
strangers. Page, Hopkinson Smith, Grace King, and a score of other artists
began to draw affectionate pictures of the vanished Southern mansion of
plantation days, when all the women were beautiful and all the men were
brave, when the very horses were more spirited and the dogs lazier and the
honeysuckles sweeter and the moonlight more entrancing than today. Miss
Murfree ("C. E. Craddock") charmed city-dwellers and country-folk
alike by her novels of the Tennessee mountains. James Lane Allen painted
lovingly the hemp-fields and pastures of Kentucky. American magazines of
the decade from 1880 to 1890 show the complete triumph of dialect and
local color, and this movement, so full of interest to students of the
immense divergence of American types, owed much of its vitality to the
talent of Southern writers.
But the impulse spread far beyond the South. Early in the seventies Edward
Eggleston wrote The Hoosier Schoolmaster and The Circuit Rider,
faithful and moving presentations of genuine pioneer types which were
destined to pass with the frontier settlements. Soon James Whitcomb Riley
was to sing of the next generation of Hoosiers, who frequented The Old
Swimmin' Hole and rejoiced 248 When the Frost is on the Punkin. It
was the era of Denman Thompson's plays, Joshua Whitcomb and The
Old Homestead. Both the homely and the exotic marched under this
banner of local color: Hamlin Garland presented Iowa barnyards and
cornfields, Helen Hunt Jackson dreamed the romance of the Mission Indian
in Ramona, and Lafcadio Hearn, Irish and Greek by blood, resident
of New Orleans and not yet an adopted citizen of Japan, tantalized
American readers with his Chinese Ghosts and Chita. A
fascinating period it seems, as one looks back upon it, and it lasted
until about the end of the century, when the suddenly discovered
commercial value of the historical novel and the ensuing competition in
best sellers misled many a fine artistic talent and coarsened the public
taste. The New South then played the literary market as recklessly as the
New West.
Let us glance back to "the abandoned farm of literature," as a witty New
Yorker once characterized New England. The last quarter of the nineteenth
century witnessed a decline in the direct influence of that province over
the country as a whole. Its strength sapped by the emigration of its more
vigorous sons, its typical institutions sagging under the weight of
immense immigrations 249
from Europe, its political importance growing more and more negligible,
that ancient promontory of ideas has continued to lose its relative
literary significance. In one field of literature only has New England
maintained its rank since the Civil War, and that is in the local short
story. Here women have distinguished themselves beyond the proved capacity
of New England men. Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke, women of democratic
humor, were the pioneers; then came Harriet Prescott Spofford and
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, women with nerves; and finally the three artists
who have written, out of the material offered by a decadent New England,
as perfect short stories as France or Russia can produce—Sarah Orne
Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown. These gifted writers
portrayed, with varying technique and with singular differences in their
instinctive choice of material, the dominant qualities of an isolated,
in-bred race, still proud in its decline; still inquisitive and
acquisitive, versatile yet stubborn, with thrift passing over into
avarice, and mental power degenerating into smartness; cold and hard under
long repression of emotion, yet capable of passion and fanaticism; at
worst, a mere trader, a crank, a grim recluse; at best, endowed 250 with an
austere physical and moral beauty. Miss Jewett preferred to touch
graciously the sunnier slopes of this provincial temperament, to linger in
its ancient dignities and serenities. Miss Brown has shown the pathos of
its thwarted desires, its hunger for a beauty and a happiness denied. Mary
Wilkins Freeman revealed its fundamental tragedies of will.
Two of the best known writers of New England fiction in this period were
not natives of the soil, though they surpassed most native New Englanders
in their understanding of the type. They were William Dean Howells and
Henry James. Mr. Howells, who, in his own words,﹃can reasonably suppose
that it is because of the mixture of Welsh, German, and Irish in me that I
feel myself so typically American,﹄came to "the Holy Land at Boston" as a
"passionate pilgrim from the West." A Boy's Town, My Literary
Passions, and Years of my Youth make clear the image of the
young poet-journalist who returned from his four years in Venice and
became assistant editor of The Atlantic Monthly in 1866. In 1871 he
succeeded Fields in the editorship, but it was not until after his
resignation in 1881 that he could put his full strength into those 251 realistic
novels of contemporary New England which established his fame as a writer.
A Modern Instance and The Rise of Silas Lapham are perhaps
the finest stories of this group; and the latter novel may prove to be Mr.
Howells's chief "visiting-card to posterity." We cannot here follow him to
New York and to a new phase of novel writing, begun with A Hazard of
New Fortunes, nor can we discuss the now antiquated debate upon
realism which was waged in the eighteen-eighties over the books of Howells
and James. We must content ourselves with saying that a knowledge of Mr.
Howells's work is essential to the student of the American provincial
novel, as it is also to the student of our more generalized types of
story-writing, and that he has never in his long career written an
insincere, a slovenly, or an infelicitous page. My Literary Friends and
Acquaintance gives the most charming picture ever drawn of the elder
Cambridge, Concord, and Boston men who ruled over our literature when
young Howells came out of the West, and My Mark Twain is his
memorable portrait of another type of sovereign, perhaps the dynasty that
will rule the future.
Although Henry James, like Mr. Howells, wrote at one time acute studies of
New England character, 252 he was never, in his relations to that
section, or, for that matter, to any locality save possibly London,
anything more than a "visiting mind." His grandfather was an Irish
merchant in Albany. His father, Henry James, was a philosopher and wit, a
man of comfortable fortune, who lived at times in Newport, Concord, and
Boston, but who was residing in New York when his son Henry was born in
1843. No child was ever made the subject of a more complete theory of
deracination. Transplanted from city to city, from country to country,
without a family or a voting-place, without college or church or creed or
profession or responsibility of any kind save to his own exigent ideals of
truth and beauty, Henry James came to be the very pattern of a
cosmopolitan. Avoiding his native country for nearly thirty years and then
returning for a few months to write some intricate pages about that American
Scene which he understood far less truly than the average immigrant,
he died in 1916 in London, having just renounced his American citizenship
and become a British subject in order to show his sympathy with the
Empire, then at war. It was the sole evidence of political emotion in a
lifetime of seventy-three years.
253
American writing men are justly proud, nevertheless, of this expatriated
craftsman. The American is inclined to admire good workmanship of any
kind, as far as he can understand the mechanism of it. The task of really
understanding Henry James has been left chiefly to clever women and to a
few critics, but ever since A Passionate Pilgrim and Roderick
Hudson appeared in 1875, it has been recognized that here was a
master, in his own fashion. What that fashion is may now be known by
anyone who will take the pains to read the author's prefaces to the New
York edition of his revised works. Never, not even in the Paris which
James loved, has an artist put his intentions and his self-criticism more
definitively upon paper. The secret of Henry James is told plainly enough
here: a specially equipped intelligence, a freedom from normal
responsibilities, a consuming desire to create beautiful things, and, as
life unfolded its complexities and nuances before his vision, an
increasing passion to seek the beauty which lies entangled and betrayed, a
beauty often adumbrated rather than made plastic, stories that must be
hinted at rather than told, raptures that exist for the initiated only.
The much discussed early and middle and later manners 254 of James are only various
campaigns of this one questing spirit, changing his procedure as the
elusive object of his search hid itself by this or that device of
protective coloration or swift escape. It is as if a collector of rare
butterflies had one method of capturing them in Madagascar, another for
the Orinoco, and still another for Japan—though Henry James found
his Japan and Orinoco and Madagascar all in London town!
No one who ever had the pleasure of hearing him discourse about the art of
fiction can forget the absolute seriousness of his professional devotion;
it was as though a shy celebrant were to turn and explain, with mystical
intensity and a mystic's involution and reversal of all the values of
vulgar speech, the ceremonial of some strange, high altar. His own power
as a creative artist was not always commensurate with his intellectual
endowment or with his desire after beauty, and his frank contempt for the
masses of men made it difficult for him to write English. He preferred, as
did Browning, who would have liked to reach the masses, a dialect of his
own, and he used it increasingly after he was fifty. It was a dialect
capable of infinite gradations of tone, endless refinements of expression.
In his threescore books there are 255 delicious poignant moments where the spirit
of life itself flutters like a wild creature, half-caught, half-escaping.
It is for the beauty and thrill of these moments that the pages of Henry
James will continue to be cherished by a few thousand readers scattered
throughout the Republic to which he was ever an alien.
No poet of the new era has won the national recognition enjoyed by the
veterans. It will be recalled that Bryant survived until 1878, Longfellow
and Emerson until 1882, Lowell until 1891, Whittier and Whitman until
1892, and Holmes until 1894. Compared with these men the younger writers
of verse seemed overmatched. The National Ode for the Centennial
celebration in 1876 was intrusted to Bayard Taylor, a hearty person,
author of capital books of travel, plentiful verse, and a skilful
translation of Faust. But an adequate National Ode was not
in him. Sidney Lanier, who was writing in that year his Psalm of the
West and was soon to compose The Marshes of Glynn, had far more
of the divine fire. He was a bookish Georgia youth who had served with the
Confederate army, and afterward, with broken health and in dire poverty,
gave his brief life to music and poetry. He had rich capacities for 256 both arts,
but suffered in both from the lack of discipline and from an impetuous,
restless imagination which drove him on to over-ambitious designs.
Whatever the flaws in his affluent verse, it has grown constantly in
popular favor, and he is, after Poe, the best known poet of the South. The
late Edmund Clarence Stedman, whose American Anthology and critical
articles upon American poets did so much to enhance the reputation of
other men, was himself a maker of ringing lyrics and spirited narrative
verse. His later days were given increasingly to criticism, and his Life
and Letters is a storehouse of material bearing upon the growth of New
York as a literary market-place during half a century. Richard Watson
Gilder was another admirably fine figure, poet, editor, and leader of
public opinion in many a noble cause. His Letters, likewise, give
an intimate picture of literary New York from the seventies to the
present. Through his editorship of Scribner's Monthly and The
Century Magazine his sound influence made itself felt upon writers in
every section. His own lyric vein had an opaline intensity of fire, but in
spite of its glow his verse sometimes refused to sing.
The most perfect poetic craftsman of the 257 period—and, many think,
our one faultless worker in verse—was Thomas Bailey Aldrich. His
first volume of juvenile verse had appeared in 1855, the year of
Whittier's Barefoot Boy and Whitman's Leaves of Grass. By
1865 his poems were printed in the then well-known Blue and Gold edition,
by Ticknor and Fields. In 1881 he succeeded Howells in the editorship of
the Atlantic. Aldrich had a versatile talent that turned easily to
adroit prose tales, but his heart was in the filing of his verses. Nothing
so daintily perfect as his lighter pieces has been produced on this side
of the Atlantic, and the deeper notes and occasional darker questionings
of his later verse are embodied in lines of impeccable workmanship. Aloof
from the social and political conflicts of his day, he gave himself to the
fastidious creation of beautiful lines, believing that the beautiful line
is the surest road to Arcady, and that Herrick, whom he idolized, had
shown the way.
To some readers of these pages it may seem like profanation to pass over
poets like Sill, George Woodberry, Edith Thomas, Richard Hovey, William
Vaughn Moody, Madison Cawein—to mention but half a dozen
distinguished names out of a larger company—and to suggest that
James Whitcomb 258
Riley, more completely than any American poet since Longfellow, succeeded
in expressing the actual poetic feelings of the men and women who composed
his immense audience. Riley, like Aldrich, went to school to Herrick,
Keats, Tennyson, and Longfellow, but when he began writing newspaper verse
in his native Indiana he was guided by two impulses which gave
individuality to his work.﹃I was always trying to write of the kind of
people I knew, and especially to write verse that I could read just as if
it were spoken for the first time.﹄The first impulse kept him close to
the wholesome Hoosier soil. The second is an anticipation of Robert
Frost's theory of speech tones as the basis of verse, as well as a revival
of the bardic practice of reciting one's own poems. For Riley had much of
the actor and platform-artist in him, and comprehended that poetry might
be made again a spoken art, directed to the ear rather than to the eye.
His vogue, which at his death in 1915 far surpassed that of any living
American poet, is inexplicable to those persons only who forget the
sentimental traditions of our American literature and its frank appeal to
the emotions of juvenility, actual and recollected. Riley's best "holt" as
a poet was his memory of 259 his own boyhood and his perception that the
child-mind lingers in every adult reader. Genius has often been called the
gift of prolonged adolescence, and in this sense, surely, there was genius
in the warm and gentle heart of this fortunate provincial who held that
"old Indianapolis" was "high Heaven's sole and only under-study." No one
has ever had the audacity to say that of New York.
We have had American drama for one hundred and fifty years, ¹ but
much of it, like our popular fiction and poetry, has been subliterary,
more interesting to the student of social life and national character than
to literary criticism in the narrow sense of that term. Few of our best
known literary men have written for the stage. The public has preferred
melodrama to poetic tragedy, although perhaps the greatest successes have
been scored by plays which are comedies of manners rather than melodrama,
and character studies of various American types, built up around the known
capabilities of a particular actor. The twentieth century has witnessed a
marked activity in play-writing, in the technical study of the drama,
260 and
in experiment with dramatic production, particularly with motion pictures
and the out-of-doors pageant. At no time since The Prince of Parthia
was first acted in Philadelphia in 1767 has such a large percentage of
Americans been artistically and commercially interested in the drama, but
as to the literary results of the new movement it is too soon to speak.
¹ Representative
American Plays, edited by Arthur Hobson Quinn, N. Y., 1917.
Nor is it possible to forecast the effect of a still more striking
movement of contemporary taste, the revival of interest in poetry and the
experimentation with new poetical forms. Such revival and experiment have
often, in the past, been the preludes of great epochs of poetical
production. Living Americans have certainly never seen such a widespread
demand for contemporary verse, such technical curiosity as to the possible
forms of poetry, or such variety of bold innovation. Imagism itself is
hardly as novel as its contemporary advocates appear to maintain, and free
verse goes back far in our English speech and song. But the new generation
believes that it has made a discovery in reverting to sensations rather
than thought, to the naïve reproduction of retinal and muscular
impressions, as if this were the end of the matter. 261 The self-conscious,
self-defending side of the new poetic impulse may soon pass, as it did in
the case of Wordsworth and of Victor Hugo. Whatever happens, we have
already had fresh and exquisite revelations of natural beauty, and, in
volumes like North of Boston and A Spoon River Anthology,
judgments of life that run very deep.
American fiction seems just now, on the contrary, to be marking time and
not to be getting noticeably forward. Few names unknown ten years ago have
won wide recognition in the domain of the novel. The short story has made
little technical advance since the first successes of "O. Henry," though
the talent of many observers has dealt with new material offered by the
racial characteristics of European immigrants and by new phases of
commerce and industry. The enormous commercial demand of the five-cent
weeklies for short stories of a few easily recognized patterns has
resulted too often in a substitution of stencil-plate generalized types
instead of delicately and powerfully imagined individual characters. Short
stories have been assembled, like Ford cars, with amazing mechanical
expertness, but with little artistic advance in design. The same temporary
arrest of progress has 262 been noted in France and England, however,
where different causes have been at work. No one can tell, in truth, what
makes some plants in the literary garden wither at the same moment that
others are outgrowing their borders.
There is one plant in our own garden, however, whose flourishing state
will be denied by nobody—namely, that kind of nature-writing
identified with Thoreau and practised by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Starr
King, John Burroughs, John Muir, Clarence King, Bradford Torrey, Theodore
Roosevelt, William J. Long, Thompson-Seton, Stewart Edward White, and many
others. Their books represent, Professor Canby ¹ believes, the
adventures of the American subconsciousness, the promptings of forgotten
memories, a racial tradition of contact with the wilderness, and hence one
of the most genuinely American traits of our literature.
¹ "Back to Nature,"
by H. S. Canby, Yale Review, July, 1917.
Other forms of essay writing, surely, have seemed in our own generation
less distinctive of our peculiar quality. While admirable biographical and
critical studies appear from time to time, and here and there a whimsical
or trenchant discursive essay like those of Miss Repplier or Dr. 263 Crothers,
no one would claim that we approach France or even England in the field of
criticism, literary history, memoirs, the bookish essay, and biography. We
may have race-memories of a pine-tree which help us to write vigorously
and poetically about it, but we write less vitally as soon as we enter the
library door. A Frenchman does not, for he is better trained to perceive
the continuity and integrity of race-consciousness, in the whole field of
its manifestation. He does not feel, as many Americans do, that they are
turning their back on life when they turn to books.
Perhaps the truth is that although we are a reading people we are not yet
a book-loving people. The American newspaper and magazine have been
successful in making their readers fancy that newspaper and magazine are
an equivalent for books. Popular orators and popular preachers confirm
this impression, and colleges and universities have often emphasized a
vocational choice of books—in other words, books that are not books
at all, but treatises. It is not, of course, that American journalism,
whether of the daily or monthly sort, has consciously set itself to
supplant the habit of book-reading. A thousand social and economic factors
enter into such a problem. But 264 few observers will question the assertion
that the influence of the American magazine, ever since its great period
of national literary service in the eighties and nineties, has been more
marked in the field of conduct and of artistic taste than in the
stimulation of a critical literary judgment. An American schoolhouse of
today owes its improvement in appearance over the schoolhouse of fifty
years ago largely to the popular diffusion, through the illustrated
magazines, of better standards of artistic taste. But whether the judgment
of school-teachers and school-children upon a piece of literature is any
better than it was in the red schoolhouse of fifty years ago is a
disputable question.
But we must stop guessing, or we shall never have done. The fundamental
problem of our literature, as this book has attempted to trace it, has
been to obtain from a mixed population dwelling in sections as widely
separated as the peoples of Northern and Southern Europe, an integral
intellectual and spiritual activity which could express, in obedience to
the laws of beauty and truth, the emotions stimulated by our national
life. It has been assumed in the preceding chapters that 265 American
literature is something different from English literature written in
America. Canadian and Australian literatures have indigenous qualities of
their own, but typically they belong to the colonial literature of Great
Britain. This can scarcely be said of the writings of Franklin and
Jefferson, and it certainly cannot be said of the writings of Cooper,
Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Lowell, Lincoln, Mark Twain, and Mr.
Howells. In the pages of these men and of hundreds of others less
distinguished, there is a revelation of a new national type. That the full
energies of this nation have been back of our books, giving them a range
and vitality and unity commensurate with the national existence, no one
would claim. There are other spheres of effort in which American character
has been more adequately expressed than in words. Nevertheless the books
are here, in spite of every defect in national discipline, every flaw in
national character; and they deserve the closest attention from all those
who are trying to understand the American mind.
If the effort toward an expression of a peculiarly complex national
experience has been the problem of our literary past, the literary problem
266 of
the future is the expression of the adjustment of American ideals to the
standards of civilization. "Patriotism," said the martyred Edith Cavell
just before her death, "is not enough." Nationality and the instincts of
national separatism now seem essential to the preservation of the
political units of the world-state, precisely as a healthy individualism
must be the basis of all enduring social fellowship. Yet it is clear that
civilization is a larger, more ultimate term than nationality. Chauvinism
is nowhere more repellent than in the things of the mind. It is difficult
for some Americans to think internationally even in political affairs—to
construe our national policy and duty in terms of obligation to
civilization. Nevertheless the task must be faced, and we are slowly
realizing it.
In the field of literature, likewise, Americanism is not a final word
either of blame or praise. It is a word of useful characterization. Only
American books, and not books written in English in America, can
adequately represent our national contribution to the world's thinking and
feeling. So argued Emerson and Whitman, long ago. But the younger of these
two poets came to realize in his old age that 267 the New World and the Old
World are fundamentally one. The literature of the New World will
inevitably have an accent of its own, but it must speak the
mother-language of civilization, share in its culture, accept its
discipline.
It has been said disparagingly of Longfellow and his friends:﹃The houses
of the Brahmins had only eastern windows. The souls of the whole school
lived in the old lands of culture, and they visited these lands as often
as they could, and, returning, brought back whole libraries of books which
they eagerly translated.﹄But even if Longfellow and his friends had been
nothing more than translators and diffusers of European culture, their
task would have been justified. They kept the ideals of civilization from
perishing in this new soil. Through those eastern windows came in, and
still comes in, the sunlight to illumine the American spirit. To decry the
literatures of the Orient and of Greece and Rome as something now outgrown
by America, is simply to close the eastern windows, to narrow our
conception of civilization to merely national and contemporaneous terms.
It is as provincial to attempt this restriction in literature as it would
be in world-politics. We must have all the windows open in our American
writing, free access to ideas, knowledge of universal standards,
perception of universal law.
269
Anauthoritative account of American Literature
to the close of the Revolution is given in M. C. Tyler's History
of American Literature during the Colonial Time, 2 volumes (1878) and
Literary History of the American Revolution, 2 volumes (1897). For
a general survey see Barrett Wendell, A Literary History of America
(1900), W. P. Trent, American Literature (1903), G. E.
Woodberry, America in Literature (1903), W. C. Bronson, A
Short History of American Literature (1903), with an excellent
bibliography, W. B. Cairns, History of American Literature
(1912), W. P. Trent and J. Erskine, Great American Writers
(1912), and W. Riley, American Thought (1915). The most recent and
authoritative account is to be found in The Cambridge History of
American Literature, 3 volumes edited by Trent, Erskine, Sherman, and
Van Doren.
The best collection of American prose and verse is E. C. Stedman and
E. M. Hutchinson's Library of American Literature, 11 volumes
(1888-1890). For verse alone, see E. C. Stedman, An American
Anthology (1900), and W. C. Bronson, American Poems, 1625-1892
(1912). For criticism of leading authors, note W. C. Brownell, American
Prose Masters (1909), and Stedman, Poets of America (1885).
270 Chapters
1-3. Note W. Bradford, Journal (1898), J. Winthrop, Journal
(1825, 1826), also Life and Letters by R. C. Winthrop, 2
volumes (1863), G. L. Walker, Thomas Hooker (1891), O. S.
Straus, Roger Williams (1894), Cotton Mather, Diary, 2
volumes (1911, 1912), also his Life by Barrett Wendell (1891),
Samuel Sewall, Diary, 3 volumes (1878). For Jonathan Edwards, see
Works, 4 volumes (1852), his Life by A. V. G.
Allen (1889), Selected Sermons edited by H. N. Gardiner
(1904). The most recent edition of Franklin's Works is edited by A. H.
Smyth, 10 volumes (1907).
Chapter 4. Samuel Adams, Works, 4 volumes (1904), John
Adams, Works, 10 volumes (1856), Thomas Paine, Life by M. D.
Conway, 2 volumes (1892), Works edited by Conway, 4 volumes (1895),
Philip Freneau, Poems, 3 volumes (Princeton edition, 1902), Thomas
Jefferson, Works edited by P. L. Ford, 10 volumes (1892-1898),
J. Woolman, Journal (edited by Whittier, 1871, and also in Everyman's
Library), The Federalist (edited by H. C. Lodge, 1888).
Chapter 5. Washington Irving, Works, 40 volumes (1891-1897),
also his Life and Letters by P. M. Irving, 4 volumes
(1862-1864). Fenimore Cooper, Works, 32 volumes (1896), Life
by T. R. Lounsbury (1883). Brockden Brown, Works, 6 volumes,
(1887). W. C. Bryant, Poems, 2 volumes (1883), Prose, 2
volumes (1884), and his Life by John Bigelow (1890).
Chapter 6. H. C. Goddard, Studies in New England
Transcendentalism (1908). R. W. Emerson, Works, 12 271 volumes
(Centenary edition, 1903), Journal, 10 volumes (1909-1914), his Life
by J. E. Cabot, 2 volumes (1887), by R. Garnett (1887), by G. E.
Woodberry (1905); see also Ralph Waldo Emerson, a critical study by
O. W. Firkins (1915). H. D. Thoreau, Works, 20 volumes
(Walden edition including Journals, 1906), Life by F. B.
Sanborn (1917), also Thoreau, A Critical Study by Mark van Doren
(1916). Note also Lindsay Swift, Brook Farm (1900), and The Dial,
reprint by the Rowfant Club (1902).
Chapter 7. Hawthorne, Works, 12 volumes (1882), Life
by G. E. Woodberry (1902). Longfellow, Works, 11 volumes
(1886), Life by Samuel Longfellow, 3 volumes (1891). Whittier, Works,
7 volumes (1892), Life by S. T. Pickard, 2 volumes (1894).
Holmes, Works, 13 volumes (1892), Life by J. T. Morse,
Jr. (1896). Lowell, Works, 11 volumes (1890), Life by Ferris
Greenslet (1905), Letters edited by C. E. Norton, 2 volumes
(1893). For the historians, note H. B. Adams, Life and Writings of
Jared Sparks, 2 volumes (1893). M. A. DeW. Howe, Life and
Letters of George Bancroft, 2 volumes (1908), G. S. Hillard, Life,
Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor, 2 volumes (1876), George
Ticknor, Life of Prescott (1863), also Rollo Ogden, Life of
Prescott (1904), G. W. Curtis, Correspondence of J. L.
Motley, 2 volumes (1889), Francis Parkman, Works, 12 volumes
(1865-1898), Life by C. H. Farnham (1900), J. F. Jameson,
History of Historical Writing in America (1891).
Chapter 8. Poe, Works, 10 volumes (Stedman-Woodberry
edition, 1894-1895), also 17 volumes (Virginia 272 edition, J. A. Harrison,
1902), Life by G. E. Woodberry, 2 volumes (1909). Whitman, Leaves
of Grass and Complete Prose Works (Small, Maynard and Co.)
(1897, 1898), also John Burroughs, A Study of Whitman (1896).
Chapter 9. C. Schurz, Life of Henry Clay, 2 volumes (1887).
Daniel Webster, Works, 6 volumes (1851), Life by H. C.
Lodge (1883). Rufus Choate, Works, 2 volumes (1862). Wendell
Phillips, Speeches, Lectures, and Letters, 2 volumes (1892). W. L.
Garrison, The Story of his Life Told by his Children, 4 volumes
(1885-1889). Harriet Beecher Stowe, Works, 17 volumes (1897), Life
by C. E. Stowe (1889). Abraham Lincoln, Works, 2 volumes
(edited by Nicolay and Hay, 1894).
Chapter 10. For an excellent bibliography of the New National
Period, see F. L. Pattee, A History of American Literature since
1870 (1916).
For further bibliographical information the reader is referred to the
articles on American authors in The Encyclopœdia Britannica
and in The Warner Library (volume 30, The Student's Course,
N. Y., 1917).
273
A
Adams, C. F, 7.
Adams, John, opinion of
American independence, 11-12;
as a writer, 73.
Adams, Samuel, 73-74, 209.
After the Burial, Lowell, 172.
Agassiz,
Fiftieth Birthday of, Longfellow, 156.
Age
of Reason, Paine, 75.
Ages, The,
Bryant, 104.
Alcott, Bronson, 118, 119, 139-140.
Aldrich, T. B., 256-257.
Alhambra, The, Irving, 91.
Allen, J. L., 247.
American Anthology, Stedman, 256.
American characteristics, 3-5.
American colonies, literature in the 17th century, 25-42; journalism, 60-62; education, 62-63; science, 63-64; bibliography of the literature, 269-270.
American colonists, predominantly English,
12-25; motives for
emigration, 16; moulded by pioneer life, 17-23; in 1760, 59-60.
"American idea," 206-207.
American life
since the Civil War, 234 et seq.
American literature, the term, 6.
American
Mercury, 61.
American Scholar, The,
Emerson, 123.
Ames, Fisher, 88.
Among my Books, Lowell, 170.
Andrew
Rykman's Prayer, Whittier, 161.
Annabel
Lee, Poe, 192.
Anthologies, American, 269.
Arsenal at Springfield, The,
Longfellow, 156.
Assignation, The,
Poe, 193.
Astoria, Irving, 91.
Atala, Châteaubriand, 96.
Atlantic Monthly, 161,
167, 170, 250, 257.
Autobiography,
Franklin, 58-59.
Autocrat
of the Breakfast Table, The, Holmes, 164, 167.
B
Bacchus, Emerson, 129.
Ballad of
the French Fleet, A, Longfellow, 155.
Bancroft, George, 89, 176,
177-178.
Barefoot
Boy, The, Whittier, 158.
Bartol, C. A.,
115.
Battle Hymn of the Republic,
Howe, 224, 225.
Battle
of the Kegs, The, Hopkinson, 69.
Bay
Psalm Book, 35.
Beecher, H. W., 216-217.
Belfry of
Bruges, The, Longfellow, 156.
Bells,
The, Poe, 5-6, 192.
Biglow Papers, The, Lowell, 170, 172, 173.
Black Cat, The, Poe, 194.
Blaine, J. G.,
quoted, 163.
Blithedale Romance, The,
Hawthorne, 145-146, 150-151.
274 Boston
News-Letter, 60.
Boy's Town, A,
Howells, 250.
Bracebridge Hall,
Irving, 91.
Bradford, William, 28.
Bradstreet, Anne, 36-37.
Bridge, The, Longfellow, 156.
Briggs, C. F., quoted, 190.
Brook Farm, 140, 143.
Brooklyn Eagle, The, 199.
Brown, Alice, 249,
250.
Brown University, 62.
Brownell, H. H., 225.
Brownson, Orestes,
141.
Bryant, W. C., one of the
Knickerbocker Group, 89; personal appearance, 101; life and, writings, 101-106; died (1878), 255.
"Buffalo Bill," see Cody, W. F.
Building of the Ship,
The, Longfellow, 155.
Burroughs, John, 262.
By Blue Ontario's Shore, Whitman, 204.
Byrd, William, 44.
C
Cable, G. W., 246.
Calef, Robert, 43.
Calhoun, J. C., 215.
Calvinism in New England, 18-19.
Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, Lowell, 174.
Captain Bonneville, Irving, 91.
Carlyle, Thomas, quoted, 139.
Cask of
Amontillado, The, Poe, 193.
Cavell,
Edith, quoted, 266.
Cawein, Madison, 257.
Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County, The, Clemens, 237.
Century
Magazine, 256.
Changeling, The,
Lowell, 172.
Channing, Edward, 13.
Channing, W. E., 112,
113, 119, 142.
Châteaubriand, Vicomte de, 96-97.
Children's Hour,
The, Longfellow, 157.
Chita, Hearn,
248.
Chinese Ghosts, Hearn, 248.
Choate, Rufus, 215.
Church, Captain, 39.
Circuit Rider, The,
Eggleston, 247.
City in the Sea, The,
Poe, 189.
Clark, Roger, 41.
Clarke, J. F., 141.
Clay, Henry, 208, 209-211.
Clemens, S. L. (Mark Twain), attacks Cooper's novels, 99; quoted, 236; life and
writings, 237-240;
typically American, 265.
Cobbler Keezar's
Vision, Whittier, 161.
Cody, W. F.
(Buffalo Bill), 243.
Columbus, Life of,
Irving, 91.
Commemoration Ode, Lowell,
170, 172.
Common
Sense, Paine, 75.
Conquest of Granada,
Irving, 91.
Conquest of Mexico,
Prescott, 179.
Conquest of Peru,
Prescott, 179.
Conspiracy of Pontiac, The,
Parkman, 184.
Cooke, Rose Terry, 249.
Cooper, J. F., 95-101, 265.
Cotton, John,
18, 32.
Courtship of
Miles Standish, Longfellow, 155.
"Craddock, C. E.," see Murfree, Mary N.
Cranch, C. P.,
141.
Crisis, The, Paine, 75.
Cristus, Longfellow, 155-156.
Cromwell,
Oliver, 10.
Crothers, S. M., 262-263.
Crowded
Street, The, Bryant, 106.
Curtis, G. W.,
93, 141, 181.
D
Dana, C. A., 141.
Day is Done, The,
Longfellow, 156.
Day of Doom, The,
Wigglesworth, 35-36.
Deerslayer,
The, Cooper, 99.
275 Democratic Review, 199.
Dial, 136,
140.
Drake, J. R., 107.
Drama, American, in the 20th century, 259-260.
Dred, Stowe, 223.
Drum Taps, Whitman, 201.
Dwight,
Timothy, 69.
E
Edict of the King of Prussia against England, Franklin, 58.
Edinburgh Review, The, 88.
Edwards, Jonathan, 32,
45, 48-52.
Eggleston, Edward, 247.
Eliot, John, 19, 38.
Elsie Venner,
Holmes, 168.
Embargo, The, Bryant, 102.
Emerson, R. W., in 1826, 89; a Transcendentalist, 113-117; quoted, 116-117; life and writings, 119-130; died (1882), 255;
typically American, 265; argues for American
books, 266.
England in the 17th century, 13.
English Traits, Emerson, 128.
Essay on Man, Pope, 55.
Essays, Emerson, 125-126, 127, 128.
Essays of the 20th century, 262-263.
Eternal Goodness, The, Whittier, 161.
Ethan Brand, Hawthorne, 134.
Evangeline,
Longfellow, 155.
Evening Revery, An,
Bryant, 106.
Everett, Edward, Oration at
Cambridge (1826), 86; quoted, 87;
lectures, 111-112;
estimate of, 215; quoted, 230.
Excelsior, Longfellow, 5-6,
156.
Exiles' Departure, Whittier, 159.
F
Fable for Critics, Lowell, 170.
Fall
of the House of Usher, The, Poe, 193.
Farewell
Address, Washington, 66.
Farewell
Sermon, Edwards, 51.
Farmer Refuted,
The, Hamilton, 76.
Faust (translation),
Taylor, 255.
Federalist, 65, 76, 77.
Ferdinand and Isabella, History of the Reign of, Prescott, 179.
Fiction of the 20th century, 261-262.
Fire of
Driftwood, The, Longfellow, 156.
First
Snowfall, The, Lowell, 172.
Flood of
Years, The, Bryant, 106.
Forest Hymn,
A, Bryant, 106.
Franklin, Benjamin, born
(1706), 44; attitude toward church, 44; exponent of New England life, 45;
life and writings, 52-59;
conducts Courant, 61; activity in
Philadelphia, 61-62. letter
from Washington to, 78-79;
typically American, 265.
Freeman, Mary
Wilkins, 249, 250.
Freneau, Philip, 69, 70-72.
Frontenac, Parkman, 185.
Frost, Robert, 258.
Fugitive slave act, 144.
Fuller, Margaret, 119,
140-141.
G
Garrison, W. L., 89-90,
137, 159, 208, 217-218.
Gettysburg Address, Lincoln, 230-231.
Gilded Age, The, Clemens, 237-238.
God
Glorified in Man's Dependence, Edwards, 50.
Gold Bug, The, Poe, 193.
Gookin,
Daniel, 38.
Greeley, Horace, 217-218.
Greenslet,
Ferris, 169.
H
Hale, E. E., 224.
Half-Century of
Conflict, A, Parkman, 185.
Halleck,
Fitz-Greene, 107.
Hamilton, Alexander, 76-77.
Hanging of the
Crane, The, Longfellow, 156.
276 Harris, J. C.,
246.
Harte, Bret, 240-242.
Harvard, John, 16.
Harvard College, 62.
Haunted Palace, The,
Poe, 192.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, in 1826, 89; opinion of Bryant, 105;
opinion of Transcendentalism, 143; life and
writings, 144-152;
typically American, 265.
Hayne, Paul, 225.
Hazard of New Fortunes, A, Howells,
251.
Hearn, Lafcadio, 248.
Hecker, Father, 141.
Henry, Patrick, 72, 209.
Herons of
Elmwood, The, Longfellow, 156.
Hiawatha,
Longfellow, 155.
Higginson, T. W., 142, 262.
Holmes, O. W.,
in 1826, 89; attitude toward Transcendentalism, 143; life and writings, 163-168; died (1894), 255.
Home Sweet Home, Payne, 107.
Hooker,
Thomas, 21-22, 30-31.
Hoosier
Schoolmaster, The, Eggleston, 247.
House
of the Seven Gables, The, Hawthorne, 145, 150.
Hovey, Richard, 257.
Howells, W. D., 93, 234-235, 250-251,
265.
Hubbard, William, 39.
Huckleberry Finn, Clemens, 238.
Humorists, American, 239.
Hutchinson, Anne,
32.
Hutchinson, Thomas, 12.
Hyperion, Longfellow, 152.
I
Indian Wars, Hubbard, 39.
Indians, in
literature, 37-40; Thoreau's
notes on, 136.
Innocents Abroad,
Clemens, 237, 239.
Irving, Washington, 89, 90-95.
Israfel, Poe, 189,
192.
J
Jackson, Andrew, 5.
Jackson, Helen Hunt, 248.
James, Henry, 250,
251-255.
Jay, John,
65.
Jefferson, Thomas, 79-85, 265.
Jesuits in
North America, The, Parkman, 185.
Jewett,
Sarah Orne, 249, 250.
John of Barneveld, Life and Death of, Motley, 181.
Johnson, Edward, Captain, 38.
Joshua
Whitcomb, Thompson, 248.
Journal,
Emerson, 122, 125, 127, 235.
Journal,
Thoreau, 134, 135.
Journal,
Woolman, 69.
Journal and Correspondence,
Longfellow, 216.
Journalism, in the colonies,
60-62; in 20th century, 263-264.
K
Kemble, Fanny, 245-246.
Kennedy, J. P., 245.
King, Grace, 247.
King, Starr, 262.
King Philip's War, 39-40.
King's College (Columbia), 62.
Knickerbocker
group of writers, 89; works by, 270.
L
Languishing Commonwealth, Walley, 41.
Lanier, Sidney, 255-256.
La Salle, Parkman, 185.
Last Leaf,
The, Holmes, 166.
Last of the
Mohicans, The, Cooper, 89, 98,
99.
Leather-Stocking Tales, Cooper, 97-99.
Leaves of Grass,
Whitman, 197, 200, 202-203.
Letters,
Motley, 181.
Letters from an American
Farmer, Crèvecœur, 60, 68.
Liberator, The, 137,
217, 218.
Library
of American Biography, 176.
Life on
the Mississippi, Clemens, 237.
277 Ligeia,
Poe, 193.
Lincoln, Abraham, recognizes
uncertainty in the nation, 2; would have approved
Winthrop, 29; address at Cooper Union (1860), 104-105; quoted, 155; as a writer of liberty, 208;
character and writings, 226-233;
typically American, 265.
Lionel Lincoln,
Cooper, 98.
Literati, Pope, 107.
Little Women, Alcott, 140.
London, Jack, 243-244.
London in 1724, 54-56.
Longfellow, H. W., in 1826, 89; attitude toward Transcendentalism, 143; life and writings, 152-157; died (1882), 255;
disparagement of, 267.
Longstreet, A. B.,
245.
Louisiana Purchase, 88.
Lowell, J. R., in 1826, 90; attitude toward
Transcendentalism, 143; life and writings, 168-174; died (1891), 255; typically American, 265.
Luck of Roaring Camp, The, Harte, 241.
Lyceum system, 175.
M
McFingal, Trumbull, 69.
Magazines, in
colonies, 60-61; in 20th
century, 263-264.
Magnalia
Christi Americana, Mather, 46, 47.
Maidenhood, Longfellow, 156.
Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, The,
Clemens, 238.
Man Without a Country,
Hale, 224.
Marble Faun, The,
Hawthorne, 146, 151.
Marshes of Glynn, The, Lanier, 255.
Martin
Chuzzlewit, Dickens, 87.
Mason, John,
Captain, 38.
Massachusetts to Virginia,
Whittier, 160.
Mather, Cotton, 43, 45-48;
diary, 46-47.
Mather,
Increase, 43.
Maud Muller, Whittier, 5-6.
Memorial Odes,
Lowell, 172.
Miller, C. H. (Joaquin), 244.
Minister's Black Veil, The,
Hawthorne, 30.
Minister's Wooing, The,
Stowe, 223.
Modern Instance, A,
Howells, 251.
Montcalm and Wolfe,
Parkman, 185.
Moody, W. V., 257.
Morituri Salutamus, Longfellow, 156.
Morris, G. P., 107.
Mosses from an Old Manse, Hawthorne, 145.
Motley, J. L., 143-144,
176, 180-182.
Muir, John, 244-245.
Murders in the Rue Morgue, The, Poe,
194.
Murfree, Mary N. (C. E. Craddock),
247.
My Garden Acquaintance, Lowell,
174.
My Literary Friends and Acquaintances,
Howells, 251.
My Literary Passions,
Howells, 250.
My Lost Youth,
Longfellow, 156.
My Mark Twain,
Howells, 251.
My Psalm, Whittier, 160.
My Study Windows, Lowell, 170.
Mysterious Stranger, The, Clemens,
238.
N
National Gazette, 71.
National
Literature, Channing, 112.
National
Ode, Taylor, 255.
Nature, Emerson,
123, 128, 131.
Nature-writing, 262.
Netherlands, History of the United, Motley, 181.
New England, a digression from English society, 14;
at the beginning of 18th century, 43-44; characteristics of the people of, 109-111; 278 in last quarter of 19th
century, 248 et seq.
New England,
History of, Winthrop, 28-29.
New England Courant, 61.
New National
period in American literature, 234 et seq.;
bibliography, 272.
New York at beginning of
18th century, 44.
New York Tribune, 140, 218.
Newburyport
Free Press, 90, 159.
Newspapers, in colonies, 60-61;
in 20th century, 263-264.
North American Review, 88, 103, 104, 112,
170.
North Carolina in 1724, 44.
North of Boston, Frost, 261.
Norwood, Colonel, 27.
O
Oakes, Urian, 41.
Old Creole Days,
Cable, 246.
Old Homestead, The,
Thompson, 248.
Old Ironsides, Holmes,
166.
Old Manse, 119,
120, 145.
Old Régime,
The, Parkman, 185.
Old Swimmin' Hole,
The, Riley, 247.
Oldtown Fireside
Stories, Stowe, 223.
Oldtown Folks,
Stowe, 223.
Olmsted, F. L., 246.
On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners,
Lowell, 174.
Oratory in America, 208 et seq.
Oregon Trail, The,
Parkman, 184.
Otis, James, 72,
73.
Our Hundred Days, Holmes, 168.
Outcast of Poker Flat, The, Harte,
242.
Outre-mer, Longfellow, 152.
Overland Monthly, 240.
P
Page, T. N., 246, 247.
Paine, Thomas, 74-76.
Parker, Theodore, 115, 119,
141, 209.
Parkman,
Francis, 143-144, 176, 182-186.
Passage to India, Whitman, 204.
Passionate
Pilgrim, A, James, 253.
Pathfinder,
The, Cooper, 99.
Pattee, F. L., 236.
Paul Revere's Ride, Longfellow, 155.
Paulding, J. K., 107.
Payne, J. H., 107.
Pennsylvania,
University of, 62.
Pennsylvania Gazette,
62.
Pennsylvania Magazine, 74.
Pequot War (1637), 38-39.
Percy, George, 27, 38.
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 249.
Philip II, History of the Reign of, Prescott, 179.
Phillips, Wendell, 208, 215-216.
Picture of New York, Mitchill, 90.
Pilot, The, Cooper, 98.
Pioneers, O Pioneers, Whitman, 204.
Pioneers,
The, Cooper, 97-98, 99.
Pioneers of France, The, Parkman, 185.
Pirate, The, Scot, 98.
Plymouth Plantation, History of, Bradford, 28-29.
Poe, E. A., "literature of escape," 8; in 1826, 89; in New York, 108; life and writings, 187-196.
Poet at the Breakfast Table, The,
Holmes, 168.
Poetry, Revolutionary verse, 69-72; of freedom, 223 et seq.; of the 20th century, 260-261.
Poets and
Poetry of America, Griswold, 107.
Poor
Richard, Franklin, 20, 57.
Pory, John, 27.
Prairie, The, Cooper,
98, 99.
Precaution,
Cooper, 97.
Prescott, W. H., 89, 143-144,
176, 178-180.
Present Crisis, The, Lowell, 172.
Prince of Parthia, The, 260.
279 Professor at the Breakfast Table, The,
Holmes, 168.
Psalm of Life, The,
Longfellow, 156.
Psalm of the West,
Lanier, 255.
Publick Occurrences, 60.
Puritans, The, 34-35.
Purloined Letter, The, Poe, 193.
Q
Quarterly, The, 88.
R
Rainy Day, The, Longfellow, 156.
Ramona,
Jackson, 248.
Ramoth Hill, Whittier,
138.
Raven, The, Poe, 192.
Read, T. B., 225.
Reality of Spiritual Life, The, Edwards, 50.
Reaper and the Flowers, The, Longfellow, 153.
Red Rover, The, Cooper, 98.
Religious
freedom in the colonies, 16.
René,
Châteaubriand, 96.
Repplier, Agnes, 262.
Revolution, influence upon literature, 66et seq.; bibliography, 270.
Rights of Man, The, Paine, 75.
Riley,
J. W., 247, 257-259.
Ripley, George, 141.
Rise of Silas Lapham, The, Howells, 251.
Rise of the Dutch Republic, Motley, 180.
Rivulet, The, Bryant, 106.
Robinson,
John, 11.
Roderick Hudson, James, 253.
Rolfe, John, 38.
Romanticism in American literature, 187 et seq.
Roosevelt, Theodore, 243.
Roughing It,
Clemens, 10, 237.
Rowlandson, Mary, 39.
Rules for Reducing a
Great Empire to a Small One, Franklin, 58.
Russell, Irwin, 246.
S
Salem "witchcraft," 43.
Salmagundi Papers,
Irving and Paulding, 91.
Sanborn, F. B.,
142.
Sandys, George, 27.
Scarlet Letter, The, Hawthorne, 7, 30, 145, 146,
148, 149-150.
School-Days, Whittier, 158.
Scott, Sir Walter, 95.
Scribner's Monthly, 256.
Scudder,
Horace, 169.
Seaweed, Longfellow, 156.
Sewell, Samuel, Judge, 47-48.
Shepard, Thomas, 16,
31-32.
Short story,
the, 261-262.
Sill,
E. R., 257.
Simms, W. G., 245, 246.
Simple
Cobbler of Agawam, The, Ward, 37.
Sinners
in the Hands of an Angry God, Edwards, 50.
Skeleton in Armor, The, Longfellow, 155.
Sketch Book, Irving, 89, 91.
Skipper Ireson's Ride, Whittier, 161.
Slavery, influence on literature, 207 et seq.
Slavery in Massachusetts, Thoreau, 137.
Smith, F. H., 247.
Smith, John, 8-10, 20,
38.
Smith, Sydney, quoted, 88-89.
Snow-Bound, Whittier, 158, 161-162.
Snow-Image and Other Tales, The, Hawthorne, 145.
Songs of Labor, Whittier, 161.
South
Carolina in 1724, 44.
South, The, in American
literature, 245 et seq. Sparks, Jared, 176.
Spofford, Harriet Prescott, 249.
Spoon
River Anthology, Masters, 261.
Spy,
The, Cooper, 89, 97, 98.
Stamp Act (1765), 59.
Star-Spangled Banner, The, Key, 107, 225.
280 Stedman, E. C., 225,
256.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 219-223, 249.
Strachey, William, 26, 38.
Summary View of the Rights of British America, A, Jefferson, 80.
Sumner, Charles, 216.
Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line, Lowell, 174.
T
Tales of a Traveler, Irving, 91.
Tales
of a Wayside Inn, Longfellow, 155.
Tamerlane
and Other Poems, Poe, 89.
Taylor, Bayard,
255.
Telling the Bees, Whittier, 158.
Tennessee's Partner, Harte, 242.
Thanatopsis, Bryant, 103, 104, 106.
Thomas, Edith, 257.
Thompson, Denman, 248.
Thoreau, H. D., representative of New
England thought, 119; life and writings, 130-139; nature-writing, 262; typically American, 265.
Ticknor, George, 89, 111,
178, 216.
Timrod,
Henry, 225.
To Helen, Poe, 189, 192.
Tom Sawyer,
Clemens, 238.
Tour of the Prairies,
Irving, 91.
Transcendentalism, 111 et seq., 218;
bibliography, 270-271.
Tritemius, Whittier, 161.
True
Relation, Smith, 8-10, 25-26.
True Repertory
of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt. vpon and from the Islands of the
Bermudas, Strachey, 26.
Tuckerman, F. G.,
quoted, 117.
Twain, Mark, see Clemens,
S. L.
Twice-Told Tales, Hawthorne, 148.
Tyler, Professor, 64.
U
Ulalume, Poe, 192.
Uncle Tom's
Cabin, Stowe, 98, 208,
219, 220-223.
Union of the Colonies, Franklin, 59.
Unitarianism, 112-113.
V
Verplanck, J. C., 107.
Very, Jones, 141.
Virginia, a continuation of English
society, 14; in 1724, 44.
Virginia House of Burgesses, Address of the, Jefferson, 80.
Virginians, The, Thackeray, 45.
Vision of Sir Launfal, The, Lowell, 170, 172.
W
Walden, Thoreau, 131, 134,
135.
Walley, Thomas, 41.
Warner, C. D., 93.
Washington, George, 64-65, 66,
77-78.
Waterfowl, To
a, Bryant, 103, 106.
Webster, Daniel, eulogy for Adams and Jefferson, 86-87; civic note in oratory of, 208;
criticism of Clay, 210; his oratory, 211-215.
Week on the
Concord and Merrimac Rivers, A, Thoreau, 131.
Wendell, Barrett, 6.
West, The, in American
literature, 237 et seq.
Westchester
Farmer, The, Seabury, 76.
When Lilacs
last in the Dooryard Bloomed, Whitman, 201.
When the Frost is on the Punkin, Riley, 248.
Whitaker, Alexander, 26-27,
38.
Whitman, Walt, in 1826, 90;
in New York, 108; life and writings, 196-205; died (1892), 255; typically American, 265;
argues for American books, 266.
Whittier, J. G.,
in 1826, 90; attitude towards Transcendentalism, 143; life and writings, 157-164; died (1892), 255.
William and Mary College, 62.
William
Wilson, Poe, 194.
281 Williams, Roger, 2, 16, 19,
32-34, 38,
40-41.
Willis, N. P.,
107.
Winthrop, John, 17,
18, 28-29.
Wirt, William, 245.
Wister, Owen, 243.
Wonder-Book, The, Hawthorne, 145, 147.
Woodberry,
George, 257.
Woodworth, Samuel, 107.
Woolman, John, 69.
Wreck of the Hesperus, The, Longfellow, 155.
Y
Yale University, 62.
Years of my Youth,
Howells, 250.
(一)
The Red Man's Continent
by Ellsworth Huntington
(二)
The Spanish Conquerors
by Irving Berdine Richman
(三)
Elizabethan Sea-Dogs
by William Charles Henry Wood
(四)
The Crusaders of New France
by William Bennett Munro
(五)
Pioneers of the Old South
by Mary Johnson
(六)
The Fathers of New England
by Charles McLean Andrews
(七)
Dutch and English on the Hudson
by Maud Wilder Goodwin
(八)
The Quaker Colonies
by Sydney George Fisher
(九)
Colonial Folkways
by Charles McLean Andrews
(十)
The Conquest of New France
by George McKinnon Wrong
(11)
The Eve of the Revolution
by Carl Lotus Becker
(12)
Washington and His Comrades in Arms
by George McKinnon Wrong
(13)
The Fathers of the Constitution
by Max Farrand
(14)
Washington and His Colleagues
by Henry Jones Ford
(15)
Jefferson and his Colleagues
by Allen Johnson
(16)
John Marshall and the Constitution
by Edward Samuel Corwin
(17)
The Fight for a Free Sea
by Ralph Delahaye Paine
(18)
Pioneers of the Old Southwest
by Constance Lindsay Skinner
(19)
The Old Northwest
by Frederic Austin Ogg
(20)
The Reign of Andrew Jackson
by Frederic Austin Ogg
(21)
The Paths of Inland Commerce
by Archer Butler Hulbert
(22)
Adventurers of Oregon
by Constance Lindsay Skinner
(23)
The Spanish Borderlands
by Herbert Eugene Bolton
(24)
Texas and the Mexican War
by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
(25)
The Forty-Niners
by Stewart Edward White
(26)
The Passing of the Frontier
by Emerson Hough
(27)
The Cotton Kingdom
by William E. Dodd
(28)
The Anti-Slavery Crusade
by Jesse Macy
(29)
Abraham Lincoln and the Union
by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
(30)
The Day of the Confederacy
by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
(31)
Captains of the Civil War
by William Charles Henry Wood
(32)
The Sequel of Appomattox
by Walter Lynwood Fleming
(33)
The American Spirit in Education
by Edwin E. Slosson
(34)
The American Spirit in Literature
by Bliss
Perry
(35)
Our Foreigners
by Samuel Peter Orth
(36)
The Old Merchant Marine
by Ralph Delahaye Paine
(37)
The Age of Invention
by Holland Thompson
(38)
The Railroad Builders
by John Moody
(39)
The Age of Big Business
by Burton Jesse Hendrick
(40)
The Armies of Labor
by Samuel Peter Orth
(41)
The Masters of Capital
by John Moody
(42)
The New South
by Holland Thompson
(43)
The Boss and the Machine
by Samuel Peter Orth
(44)
The Cleveland Era
by Henry Jones Ford
(45)
The Agrarian Crusade
by Solon Justus Buck
(46)
The Path of Empire
by Carl Russell Fish
(47)
Theodore Roosevelt and His Times
by Harold Howland
(48)
Woodrow Wilson and the World War
by Charles Seymour
(49)
The Canadian Dominion
by Oscar D. Skelton
(50)
The Hispanic Nations of the New World
by William R. Shepherd
Transcriber's Notes
Introduction:
The Chronicles of America Series has two similar editions of each volume
in the series. One version is the Abraham Lincoln edition of the series, a
premium version which includes full-page pictures. A textbook edition was
also produced, which does not contain the pictures and captions associated
with the pictures, but is otherwise the same book. This book was produced
to match the textbook edition of the book.
We have retained the original punctuation and spelling in the book, but
there are a few exceptions. Obvious errors were corrected--and all of
these changes can be found in the Detailed Notes Section of these
notes. The spelling of some index entries were changed to match the
spelling used in the text. The Detailed Notes Section also includes
issues that have come up during transcription. One common issue is that
words are sometimes split into two lines for spacing purposes in the
original text. These words are hyphenated in the physical book, but there
is a question sometimes as to whether the hyphen should be retained in
transcription. The reasons behind some of these decisions are itemized.
Detailed Notes Section:
A Note on Centuries
Throughout the Chronicles of America series, most authors have
chosen to hyphenate "seventeenth-century customs" but not hyphenate
"customs in the seventeenth century." In the latter case, seventeenth
century is the object of a preposition, while in the former case,
seventeenth-century is an adjective. This book somewhat adheres to that
standard. Below is a list of phrases in this text which ought to have
the hyphen, but do not, and hence, do not adhere to the standard
previously outlined. None of these clauses were changed in
transcription.
●
Page 55: England is weary of seventeenth
century "enthusiasm,"
●
Page 85: the immense nineteenth century
audience
●
Page 90: nineteenth century England
●
Page 93: other eighteenth century tradition,
●
Page 138: twentieth century America can see
●
Page 166: resembled such a typical eighteenth
century figure
●
Page 182: a nineteenth century historian
Chapter II
• Page 36:
Under-estimate is hyphenated
and split between two lines for spacing in the sentence: "It is the
present fashion to under-estimate the power of Wigglesworth's verse."
There is one other occurrence of underestimate and there is one
occurrence of underestimated, both spelled without the hyphen.
Chapter IV
• Page 72:
State-papers is hyphenated
and split between two lines for spacing in the clause:﹃orations and
pamphlets and state-papers inspired by.﹄On page 67, state papers is
written as two words and on page 82, state paper is written as two
words. While state-papers can only be transcribed as "state-papers" or
"statepapers," "state papers" is the only option consistent with the
author's other usage of the phrase. The word was transcribed "state
papers."
Chapter V
• Page 90:
Tree-tops is hyphenated and
split between two lines for spacing in the clause﹃watching the birds in
the treetops of Elmwood.﹄On page 245, tree-tops was spelled with a
hyphen, so we kept the hyphen here.
• Page
98:
Stout-hearted is hyphenated and split between two lines in
the clause:﹃the stout-hearted old pioneer could afford to bide his
time.﹄On page 84, a variation of the word includes the hyphen:﹃his
stout-heartedness in disaster.﹄Therefore, we retained the hyphen.
Chapter VI
• Page 133:
Poll-tax is hyphenated and
split between two lines for spacing. We kept the hyphen.
• Page 137:
Wolf-like is hyphenated and split
between two lines for spacing. We kept the hyphen.
• Page 138:
Post-office is hyphenated and split
between two lines for spacing. We kept the hyphen.
Chapter VII
• Page 145:
On Page 145, Hawthorne's
The Snow-Image contained a hyphen, but the same title on page 148
did not have a hyphen: The Snow Image.
• Page 153:
Fellow-men was hyphenated and split
between two lines for spacing. There was no other usage of the word in
the book. We transcribed the word without the hyphen, fellowmen.
• Page 172:
The First Snow-Fall
was hyphenated and split between two lines for spacing. There was no
other usage of that title in the book. We transcribed the word with the
hyphen, The First Snow-Fall.
Chapter IX
• Page 208:
Epoch-making is hyphenated
and split between two lines for spacing. On page 184, the hyphen was
used, so we retained it here.
Index
• Page 276:
Changed the acute accent
to a grave accent in the spelling of Crèvecœur to match the
text in index entry: Letters from an American Farmer, Crévecœur,
60, 68.
• Page 276:
Change
Leatherstocking to Leather-Stocking in index entry "Leather-Stocking
Tales, Cooper,"
• Page 278:
Change Oake to Oakes in index entry "Oake, Urian."
• Page 280:
Change Twicetold to Twice-Told in
index entry "Twice-Told Tales, Hawthorne."
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN
LITERATURE ***
***** This file should be named 3410-h.htm or 3410-h.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
https://www.gutenberg.org/3/4/1/3410/
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions
will be renamed.
Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one
owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and
you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission
and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the
General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and
distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the
Project Gutenberg™ concept and
trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be
used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific
permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook,
complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly
any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances
and research. They may be modified and printed and given away—you
may do practically anything with public domain eBooks.
Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially
commercial redistribution.
*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU
DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or
any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg™ License (available with this file or online at
https://gutenberg.org/license).
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the
terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all
copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used
on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree
to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that
you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works even
without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph
1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg™
electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help
preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™ electronic
works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in
the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you
from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating
derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project
Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the
Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting free access to electronic
works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™ works in compliance
with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg™
name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of
this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached
full Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it without charge
with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no representations
concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the
United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any
work on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost
no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating
that it is posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can
be copied and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying
any fees or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a
work with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on
the work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs
1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
posted with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and
distribution must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and
any additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg ™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format other
than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ web site
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to
the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of
obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original﹃Plain
Vanilla ASCII﹄or other form. Any alternate format must include the full
Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing access
to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works provided
that
* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from the
use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method you
already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed to the
owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has agreed to
donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid within 60 days
following each date on which you prepare (or are legally required to
prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly
marked as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, "Information about
donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies you
in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he does not
agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™ License. You
must require such a user to return or destroy all copies of the works
possessed in a physical medium and discontinue all use of and all access
to other copies of Project Gutenberg ™ works.
* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set forth
in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from both the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael Hart, the
owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation
as set forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg™ collection.
Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, and
the medium on which they may be stored, may contain "Defects," such as,
but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data,
transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual property
infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a computer
virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by your
equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES: Except for the﹃Right of
Replacement or Refund﹄described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal fees.
You agree that you have no remedies for negligence, strict liability,
breach of warranty or breach of contract except those provided in
Paragraph F3. You agree that the Foundation, the trademark owner, and
any distributor under this agreement will not be liable to you for
actual, direct, indirect, consequential, punitive or incidental damages
even if you give notice of the possibility of such damage.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND: If you discover a defect
in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a written
explanation to the person you received the work from. If you received
the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with your
written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with the
defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', with no
other warranties of any kind, express or implied, including but not
limited to warranties of merchantibility or fitness for any purpose.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY: You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or
any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg ™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg's™
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3
and 4 and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the state
of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal Revenue
Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification number is
64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
https://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at 809
North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact
information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official page
at https://pglaf.org.
For additional contact information:
Dr. Gregory B. Newby
Chief Executive and Director
gbnewby@pglaf.org
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations where
we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To send
donations or determine the status of compliance for any particular
state visit https://pglaf.org.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make any
statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from outside
the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other ways
including including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic
works.
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg™
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S. unless
a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily keep eBooks
in compliance with any particular paper edition.
Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
https://www.gutenberg.org
This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.