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+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 ***
+
+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
+
+Copyright, 1918
+by Yale University Press
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                   CONTENTS
+Chapter         Chapter title                Page
+        Introduction
+I.      The Pioneers                            1
+II.     The First Colonial Literature          25
+III.    The Third and Fourth Generation        43
+IV.     The Revolution                         66
+V.      The Knickerbocker Group                86
+VI.     The Transcendentalists                109
+VII.    Romance, Poetry, and History          143
+VIII.   Poe and Whitman                       187
+IX.     Union and Liberty                     206
+X.      A New Nation                          234
+        Bibliographical Note                  269
+        Index                                 273
+
+THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE
+
+∴
+CHAPTER I.
+
+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.
+
+An 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 rearmed 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 soldier 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 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, ready 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 is 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 must 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 unity. 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 London 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. 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 field 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 as 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 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 varied 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 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 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
+university 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 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 nature 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 years 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 to 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 own 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 English 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 working 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+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 gallant 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,
+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 of 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 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,"
+that 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 would 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 with 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 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 many 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
+outpourings 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 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 lady, 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, upon 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. Cromwell 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.
+
+The 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 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. Old 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+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. Young 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, just 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
+was 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
+"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 Pepys'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 precision 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 Freedom 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
+length 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 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 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
+mentions 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 accepted 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 prose, 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 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 topics. 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 the
+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 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, like 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 Mercury or 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 in 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, and 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 of 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."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+The Revolution
+
+If we 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 of 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 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 ending 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 Springs. 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: "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. He 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 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. "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 was 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
+thinker, 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 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 repair; 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, 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 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 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 philosophical, 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 positions, 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 simply, 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+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 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 since 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 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 Whittier'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 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 about 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 light 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 Christmas,
+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
+narrative 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 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 of 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 tale
+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 the
+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 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 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. 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, 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, 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 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
+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 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+The Transcendentalists
+
+To understand 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 "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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+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 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, 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 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 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
+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 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, 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. 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 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.
+
+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 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.
+
+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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+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
+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 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 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 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; 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 "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 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 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 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
+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
+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, 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 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." "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 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+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 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 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."
+
+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), 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 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 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 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 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 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
+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, 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 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 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 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 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 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
+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, 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.
+
+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 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
+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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+An authoritative 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).
+
+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 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 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).
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+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.
+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.
+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.
+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.
+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; 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.
+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, 66 et 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.
+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.
+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.
+
+
+
+
+The Chronicles of America Series
+
+ 1. The Red Man's Continent
+    by Ellsworth Huntington
+ 2. The Spanish Conquerors
+    by Irving Berdine Richman
+ 3. Elizabethan Sea-Dogs
+    by William Charles Henry Wood
+ 4. The Crusaders of New France
+    by William Bennett Munro
+ 5. Pioneers of the Old South
+    by Mary Johnson
+ 6. The Fathers of New England
+    by Charles McLean Andrews
+ 7. Dutch and English on the Hudson
+    by Maud Wilder Goodwin
+ 8. The Quaker Colonies
+    by Sydney George Fisher
+ 9. Colonial Folkways
+    by Charles McLean Andrews
+10. 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 ***
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\ No newline at end of file
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+      The American Spirit in Literature, by Bliss Perry
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+    <div class="boilerplate">
+      <p class="boilerplate">
+        The American Spirit in Literature, by Bliss Perry, presented by Project
+        Gutenberg
+      </p>
+      <p class="boilerplate">
+        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
+      </p>
+      <p class="boilerplate">
+        Title: The American Spirit in Literature, A Chronicle of Great
+        Interpreters, Volume 34 in The Chronicles Of America Series <br />
+        Author: Bliss Perry<br /> Editor: Allen Johnson<br /> Release Date:
+        January 15, 2009 [EBook #3410]<br /> Last Updated: February 7, 2013<br />
+        Language: English<br /> Character set encoding: UTF-8
+      </p>
+      <p class="boilerplate">
+        Produced by The James J. Kelly Library of St. Gregory's University, Alev
+        Akman, David Widger, and Robert Homa.
+      </p>
+      <p class="boilerplate bold quad-space-bottom">
+        *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN
+        LITERATURE ***
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="titlepage">
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i" id="Page_i">i</a></span>
+      <h1>
+        The American Spirit in Literature
+      </h1>
+      <p class="author">
+        By Bliss Perry
+      </p>
+      <p class="book-subtitle">
+        A Chronicle of Great Interpreters
+      </p>
+      <p class="noindent">
+        Volume 34 of the<br /> Chronicles of America Series <br /> &there4;<br />
+        Allen Johnson, Editor<br /> Assistant Editors<br /> Gerhard R. Lomer <br />
+        Charles W. Jefferys
+      </p>
+      <p class="tiny">
+      </p>
+      <p class="noindent">
+        <i>Abraham Lincoln Edition</i><br /><br /><br /><br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="noindent small">
+        New Haven: Yale University Press<br /> Toronto: Glasgow, Brook &amp; Co.<br />
+        London: Humphrey Milford<br /> Oxford University Press<br /> 1918
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <p class="noindent center small">
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ii" id="Page_ii">ii</a></span>
+      Copyright, 1918<br /> by Yale University Press
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="Contents" id="Contents"></a> <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">iii</a></span> <br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      CONTENTS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <div class="start-of-book">
+      <p class="center">
+        <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">1</a></span> <a
+        name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"></a> <a name="chap01" id="chap01"></a>
+        THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE
+      </p>
+      <p class="center single-space-top">
+        <span class="xlarge">&there4;</span>
+      </p>
+      <h2>
+        <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER I.</a>
+      </h2>
+    </div>
+    <p class="chaptertitle">
+      The Pioneers
+    </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      <span class="smcap">The</span> 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
+    </p>
+    <p class="poem">
+      Effort, and expectation, and desire,<br /> And something evermore about to
+      be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">2</a></span> An
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_3" id="Page_3">3</a></span> soldier 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;unless or until he has abused it,&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">4</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">5</a></span> ready to
+      do a little more than their share of drudgery? If so, memory holds them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Excelsior</i> nor Poe's <i>Bells</i> nor
+      Whittier's <i>Maud Muller</i> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6"
+      id="Page_6">6</a></span> is 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7"
+      id="Page_7">7</a></span> must 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, <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our historians have taught us that the history of the United States is an
+      evolution towards political <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8"
+      id="Page_8">8</a></span> unity. 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>True Relation</i> of the planting of the Virginia
+      colony in 1607. It was published in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9"
+      id="Page_9">9</a></span> London 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. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">10</a></span>
+      But Captain Smith's <i>True Relation</i> impresses us, like Mark Twain's
+      <i>Roughing It</i>, with being somehow true to type. In each of these
+      books the possible unveracities in detail are a confirmation of their
+      representative American character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we turn from physical and moral daring to the <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_11" id="Page_11">11</a></span> field 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.&hellip; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_12" id="Page_12">12</a></span> as 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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">13</a></span>
+      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 <i>Mayflower</i>.
+      The "sifted wheat" was by no means all of the same variety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Every Man in his
+      Humour</i> became the standard of action for two whole generations of
+      Englishmen, and that there is no common denominator for emigrants of such
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">14</a></span> varied
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">15</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">16</a></span>
+      pioneers were made up of brave men and braver women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17"
+      id="Page_17">17</a></span> university bred and were natural leaders of
+      men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">18</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19"
+      id="Page_19">19</a></span> nature 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_20" id="Page_20">20</a></span> years 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Poor Richard</i> mottoes their flavor of homely, experienced
+      truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Order in daily life led straight to political order, just as the equality
+      and resourcefulness of the frontier, stimulated by isolation from Europe,
+      led <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">21</a></span> to
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22"
+      id="Page_22">22</a></span> own 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: "<em>Because the foundation of authority is
+      laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people.</em>" This high
+      discourse antedates the famous pamphlets on liberty by Milton. It is a
+      half-century earlier than Locke's <i>Treatise on Government</i>, a century
+      and a quarter earlier than Rousseau's <i>Contrat Social</i>, and it
+      precedes by one hundred and thirty-eight years the American Declaration of
+      Independence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">23</a></span> English
+      tenacity in safeguarding his hold upon his own portion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">24</a></span> working
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <div class="chapterhead">
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"></a> <a name="chap02" id="chap02"></a>
+      <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">25</a></span>
+      <br /><br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER II.</a>
+      </h2>
+    </div>
+    <p class="chaptertitle">
+      The First Colonial Literature
+    </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      <span class="smcap">The</span> 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 <i>True Relation</i>, 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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_26" id="Page_26">26</a></span> gallant 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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But other exiles in Virginia were skillful with the pen. William
+      Strachey's <i>True Reportory of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., vpon
+      and from the islands of the Bermudas</i> may or may not have given a hint
+      to Shakespeare for the storm-scene in <i>The Tempest</i>. In either case
+      it is admirable writing, flexible, sensitive, shrewdly observant.
+      Whitaker, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">27</a></span>
+      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 <i>Metamorphoses</i>.
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_28" id="Page_28">28</a></span> of 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Mayflower</i> and the well-to-do Puritan of the
+      Bay Colony both wrote their annals like gentlemen and scholars. Bradford's
+      <i>History of Plymouth Plantation</i> runs from 1620 to 1647. Winthrop's
+      diary, now printed as the <i>History of New England</i>, begins with his
+      voyage in 1630 and closes in the year of his death, 1649. As records of an
+      Anglo-Saxon <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">29</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The theory of government held by the dominant party of the first two
+      generations of New England pioneers has often been called a "theocracy,"
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">30</a></span> that 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 <i>The Minister's Black
+      Veil</i> and <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;the very
+      year of the founding of Harvard&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31"
+      id="Page_31">31</a></span> would 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 &hellip; 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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">32</a></span> with 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 r&ocirc;le of
+      Primate, and fate led him to persecute a man whose very name has become a
+      symbol of victorious tolerance, Roger Williams.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Williams, known today as a friend of Cromwell, Milton, and Sir Harry Vane,
+      had been exiled from <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">33</a></span>
+      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 <i>Bloody
+      Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience</i> calls forth Mr. Cotton's
+      <i>Bloody Tenet washed and made white in the Blood of the Lamb</i>; and
+      this in turn provokes the torrential flood of Williams's masterpiece, <i>The
+      Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, by Mr. Cotton's endeavor to wash it white in
+      the Blood of the Lamb</i>. 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
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">34</a></span> many 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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Paradise Lost</i>
+      or the <i>Divine Comedy</i>, 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 &aelig;sthetic 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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">35</a></span> outpourings
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Bay Psalm Book</i> (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 <i>Bay Psalm Book</i> 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 <i>Day of Doom</i> one must strip oneself quite free from
+      the twentieth century, and pretend to be sitting in the <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">36</a></span>
+      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 <i>Day
+      of Doom</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37"
+      id="Page_37">37</a></span> lady, 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 <i>The Simple Cobbler of Agawam</i> 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 <i>Sartor Resartus</i> is
+      "German." Like Charles Dickens's <i>American Notes</i>, 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_38" id="Page_38">38</a></span> upon 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39"
+      id="Page_39">39</a></span> Cromwell 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 <i>Narrative of the Troubles with the
+      Indians in New England</i>, bringing the history down to 1677. Under the
+      better known title of <i>Indian Wars</i>, this fervid and dramatic tale,
+      penned in a quiet parsonage, has stirred the pulses of every succeeding
+      generation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">40</a></span> The
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">41</a></span>
+      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 <i>Languishing
+      Commonwealth</i> 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. <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_42" id="Page_42">42</a></span> Old 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.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <div class="chapterhead">
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"></a> <a name="chap03" id="chap03"></a>
+      <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">43</a></span>
+      <br /><br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER III.</a>
+      </h2>
+    </div>
+    <p class="chaptertitle">
+      The Third and Fourth Generation
+    </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      <span class="smcap">When</span> 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&mdash;and a dancing-master. <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_44" id="Page_44">44</a></span> Young 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Beggars' Opera</i>, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45"
+      id="Page_45">45</a></span> just 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 <i>The Virginians</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">46</a></span> was
+      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 <i>Magnalia</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet he had certain elements of greatness. His tribal loyalty was perfect.
+      His ascetic devotion to his conception of religious truth was absolute.
+      His <i>Diary</i>, 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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">47</a></span> "Jewish old
+      clothes," such professional robings and personal plumage as makes it
+      difficult, save in the revealing <i>Diary</i>, to see the man himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The <i>Magnalia Christi Americana</i>, 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The <i>Diary</i> 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 <i>Diary</i>, and it ends in 1729, while Mather's closes in 1724.
+      As a picture of everyday happenings in New England, Sewall's <i>Diary</i>
+      is as far superior to Mather's as <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48"
+      id="Page_48">48</a></span> Pepys's <i>Diary</i> is to George Fox's <i>Journal</i>
+      in painting the England of the Restoration. Samuel Sewall was an admirably
+      solid figure, keen, forceful, honest. Most readers of his <i>Diary</i>
+      believe that he really was in luck when he was rejected by the Widow
+      Winthrop on that fateful November day when his eye noted&mdash;in spite of
+      his infatuation&mdash;that "her dress was not so clean as sometime it had
+      been. Jehovah Jireh!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story of Edwards's career has the simplicity and dignity of tragedy.
+      Born in a parsonage in the quiet Connecticut valley in 1703&mdash;the year
+      of John Wesley's birth&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_49" id="Page_49">49</a></span> precision and enthusiasm which
+      would have made him a great naturalist. At fourteen he begins his notes on
+      <i>The Mind</i> and on <i>Natural Science</i>. 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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_50" id="Page_50">50</a></span> <i>Freedom of the Will</i>. 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 <i>History of Redemption</i> 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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>God Glorified in Man's Dependence</i> and <i>The Reality of
+      Spiritual Life</i>, rather than to such discourses as the Enfield sermon,
+      <i>Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God</i>, 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
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">51</a></span> length
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet the <i>Farewell Sermon</i> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">52</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">53</a></span>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;an author,
+      by the way, whom he never mentions, even as he never <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_54" id="Page_54">54</a></span> mentions 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 <i>Pilgrim's Progress</i>.
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To catch the full spirit of that age, turn for an instant to the London of
+      1724&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55"
+      id="Page_55">55</a></span> accepted 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 <i>modus vivendi</i>
+      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&mdash;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 <i>Essay on Man</i>, counseling
+      acceptance of our mortal situation, is considered to be the last word of
+      human wisdom and of poetical elegance. In <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_56" id="Page_56">56</a></span> prose, the style of the <i>Spectator</i>
+      rules&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 medi&aelig;val 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">57</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_58" id="Page_58">58</a></span> topics. 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&mdash;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 <i>Edict of the King of Prussia against
+      England</i>, and his famous <i>Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a
+      Small One</i>. 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 <i>Autobiography</i>, charming as that classic production is,
+      have made but an imperfect acquaintance with <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_59" id="Page_59">59</a></span> the 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Union of the
+      Colonies</i>, 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;that is,
+      Scotch <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">60</a></span>
+      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." Cr&egrave;vec&oelig;ur's <i>Letters from an American
+      Farmer</i> 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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The merest glance at colonial journalism will confirm this estimate. The
+      <i>Boston News-Letter</i>, begun in 1704, was the first of the journals,
+      if we omit the single issue of <i>Publick Occurrences</i> 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, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61"
+      id="Page_61">61</a></span> like their paper, type, and even ink, were
+      found in London. The <i>New England Courant</i>, established in Boston in
+      1721 by James Franklin, is full of imitations of the <i>Tatler</i>, <i>Spectator</i>,
+      and <i>Guardian</i>. What is more, the <i>Courant</i> boasted of its
+      office collection of books, including Shakespeare, Milton, the <i>Spectator</i>,
+      and Swift's <i>Tale of a Tub</i>. &sup1; 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 <i>Courant</i>, for a brief period, into the hands of his brother
+      Benjamin, whose turn at a London apprenticeship was soon to come.
+    </p>
+    <div class="footer">
+      <p class="footer">
+        <a id="footer_61-1" name="footer_61-1"></a> &sup1; Cook, E.&nbsp;C. <i>Literary
+        Influences in Colonial Newspapers, 1704-1750</i>. N.&nbsp;Y., 1912.
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      If we follow this younger brother to Philadelphia and to Bradford's <i>American
+      Mercury</i> or <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">62</a></span>
+      to Franklin's own <i>Pennsylvania Gazette</i>, or if we study the <i>Gazettes</i>
+      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 <i>Pamela</i>,
+      and his Library Company of Philadelphia has two copies of <i>Paradise Lost</i>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_63" id="Page_63">63</a></span> in 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, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64"
+      id="Page_64">64</a></span> and this movement, like the influence of
+      journalism and of the higher education, counted for colonial union.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.&hellip; 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&mdash;an honorary M.A.
+      from both Harvard and Yale, a D.C.L. of Oxford and an LL.D. of St. Andrews&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">65</a></span> of
+      independence." Nevertheless John Jay, writing the second number of the <i>Federalist</i>
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <div class="chapterhead">
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"></a> <a name="chap04" id="chap04"></a>
+      <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">66</a></span>
+      <br /><br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER IV.</a>
+      </h2>
+    </div>
+    <p class="chaptertitle">
+      The Revolution
+    </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      <span class="smcap">If</span> we 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 <i>Farewell Address</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_67" id="Page_67">67</a></span> of 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">68</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were gentle spirits, too, in this period, endowed with delicate
+      literary gifts, but quite unsuited for the clash of controversy&mdash;members,
+      in Cr&egrave;vec&oelig;ur's touching words, of the "secret communion among
+      good men throughout the world." "I am a lover of peace, what must I do?"
+      asks Cr&egrave;vec&oelig;ur in his <i>Letters from an American Farmer</i>.
+      "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." Cr&egrave;vec&oelig;ur, an immigrant from Normandy, was
+      certainly no weakling, but he felt that the great idyllic American
+      adventure&mdash;which he described so captivatingly in his chapter
+      entitled <i>What is an American</i>&mdash;was <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_69" id="Page_69">69</a></span> ending tragically in civil war.
+      Another white-souled itinerant of that day was John Woolman of New Jersey,
+      whose <i>Journal</i>, 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Battle of the Kegs</i>, a Hudibrastic satire like
+      Trumbull's <i>McFingal</i>, or a patriotic song like Timothy Dwight's <i>Columbia</i>.
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_70" id="Page_70">70</a></span> Springs. 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 <i>Poems of American History</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;who was by tradition Freneau's
+      room-mate at Princeton in the class of 1771&mdash;"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: <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">71</a></span> "Poetry wit
+      and Criticism Romances Plays &amp;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 <i>National
+      Gazette</i> 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. <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">72</a></span> He lives on
+      in poverty and seclusion, and in his eightieth year loses his way in a
+      snowstorm and perishes miserably&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &aelig;sthetic, 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet if natural orators like Otis and Henry be denied a strictly "literary"
+      rating because their <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">73</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">74</a></span>
+      "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.&hellip; All men have a Right to remain in a
+      State of Nature as long as they please.&hellip; When Men enter into
+      Society, it is by voluntary consent." Jean-Jacques himself could not be
+      more bland, nor at heart more fiercely demagogic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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 <i>Pennsylvania
+      Magazine</i>. Before he had been a year on American soil, Paine <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">75</a></span> was writing
+      the most famous pamphlet of our political literature, <i>Common Sense</i>,
+      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. <i>The Crisis</i>, 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, <i>The
+      Rights of Man</i> and <i>The Age of Reason</i>, 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76"
+      id="Page_76">76</a></span> thinker, 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>The Farmer Refuted</i>, a reply to Samuel
+      Seabury's <i>Westchester Farmer</i>. 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 <i>Federalist</i>.
+      These eighty-five papers, appearing over the signature "Publius" in two
+      New York newspapers between October, 1787, and April, 1788, owed their
+      conception <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">77</a></span>
+      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 <i>Federalist</i> 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&mdash;but
+      not reckless&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_78" id="Page_78">78</a></span> repair; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">79</a></span>
+      and affection by your sincere friend, George Washington."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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"&mdash;Monticello&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">80</a></span>
+      was born, the principle of entailed property and that of church
+      establishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, <i>A
+      Summary View of the Rights of British America</i> which had been published
+      in England by Burke, himself a judge of good writing and sound politics.
+      Jefferson had also prepared in 1775 the <i>Address of the Virginia House
+      of Burgesses</i>. 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">81</a></span>
+      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&mdash;charges which have been repeated at intervals ever since&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Its method is the simplest. The preamble is <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_82" id="Page_82">82</a></span> philosophical, 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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has long been the fashion, among a certain school of half-hearted
+      Americans&mdash;and unless I am mistaken, the teaching has increased
+      during the last decades&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_83" id="Page_83">83</a></span> positions, 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"&mdash;"anti-republicans,"
+      as he goes on to define them&mdash;"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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">84</a></span> simply,
+      in Lincoln's phrase, one of "the standard maxims of free society" which no
+      democracy can safely disregard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">85</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <div class="chapterhead">
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"></a> <a name="chap05" id="chap05"></a>
+      <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">86</a></span>
+      <br /><br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER V.</a>
+      </h2>
+    </div>
+    <p class="chaptertitle">
+      The Knickerbocker Group
+    </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      <span class="smcap">The</span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the first of August, Everett commemorated the career of the two
+      Revolutionary leaders, and on the following day a greater than Everett,
+      Daniel <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">87</a></span>
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was this merely the "tall talk" then so characteristic of American oratory
+      and soon to be satirized in <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>? Or was it prompted
+      by a deep and true instinct for the significance of the vast changes that
+      had come over American life <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88"
+      id="Page_88">88</a></span> since 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&mdash;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 <i>The
+      North American Review</i>. British critics in <i>The Edinburgh</i> and <i>The
+      Quarterly</i>, 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.&hellip; 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?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sydney Smith's question "Who reads an American book?" has outlived all of
+      his own clever <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">89</a></span>
+      volumes. Even while he was asking it, London was eagerly reading Irving's
+      <i>Sketch Book</i>. In 1821 came Fenimore Cooper's <i>Spy</i> and Bryant's
+      <i>Poems</i>, 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 <i>The Last of the
+      Mohicans</i>. 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 <i>Tamerlane and Other Poems</i> which he
+      was to publish in Boston in the following year. Holmes was a Harvard
+      undergraduate. Garrison had just printed <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_90" id="Page_90">90</a></span> Whittier's first published poem
+      in the Newburyport <i>Free Press</i>. 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Picture of New York</i>. 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">91</a></span>
+      Hudson River. In 1804 he went abroad for his health, returned and helped
+      to write the light social satire of the <i>Salmagundi Papers</i>, and
+      became, after the publication of the <i>Knickerbocker History</i>, 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. <i>The Sketch Book</i>, <i>Bracebridge
+      Hall</i>, and <i>Tales of a Traveler</i> are the best known productions of
+      Irving's fruitful residence in England. The <i>Life of Columbus</i>, the
+      <i>Conquest of Granada</i>, and <i>The Alhambra</i> represent his first
+      sojourn in Spain. After his return to America he became fascinated with
+      the Great West, made the travels described in his <i>Tour of the Prairies</i>,
+      and told the story of roving trappers and the fur trade in <i>Captain
+      Bonneville</i> and <i>Astoria</i>. 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_92" id="Page_92">92</a></span> about 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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">93</a></span> light in an
+      era marked by bitterness and obscuration. It was a triumph of character as
+      well as of literary skill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Rip van Winkle</i> and <i>The Legend of
+      Sleepy Hollow</i> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_94" id="Page_94">94</a></span> Christmas, it becomes again a
+      perfect medium. Hawthorne adopted it for <i>Our Old Home</i>, 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;the New York Dutchman&mdash;and local
+      legends, like that of Rip van Winkle; he used the framework of the <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">95</a></span> narrative
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Readers of Sir Walter Scott's <i>Journal</i> 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. <i>The
+      Last of the Mohicans</i>, then just published, threatened to eclipse the
+      fame of <i>Ivanhoe</i>. 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">96</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, <i>Atala</i> and <i>Ren&eacute;</i>, the mystery and enchantment
+      of our dark forests and endless rivers. But Chateaubriand, like Brockden
+      Brown, is feverish. A taint <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97"
+      id="Page_97">97</a></span> of old-world eroticism and despair hovers like
+      a miasma over his magnificent panorama of the wilderness. Cooper, like
+      Scott, is masculine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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." <i>Precaution</i>
+      (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 <i>The Spy</i>, one of the finest of his novels, which was
+      instantly welcomed in England and translated in France. Then came, in
+      swift succession, <i>The Pioneers</i>, the first Leather-Stocking <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">98</a></span> tale in order
+      of composition, and <i>The Pilot</i>, to show that Scott's <i>Pirate</i>
+      was written by a landsman! <i>Lionel Lincoln</i> and <i>The Last of the
+      Mohicans</i> followed. The next seven years were spent in Europe, mainly
+      in France, where <i>The Prairie</i> and <i>The Red Rover</i> 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 <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two generations have passed since then, and Cooper's place in our
+      literature remains secure. To have written our first historical novel, <i>The
+      Spy</i>, our first sea-story, <i>The Pilot,</i> and to have created <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">99</a></span> the
+      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 <i>The
+      Deerslayer</i>, then <i>The Last of the Mohicans</i>, <i>The Pathfinder</i>,
+      <i>The Pioneers</i>, and ending with the vast darkening horizon of <i>The
+      Prairie</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">100</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;an ungraceful
+      creature perhaps, but indubitably big, as many a hunter has suddenly <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">101</a></span> realized
+      when he has come unexpectedly upon a moose that whirled to face him in the
+      twilight silence of a northern wood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Evening Post</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bryant had a right to his cold-weather mind. He came from Mayflower stock.
+      His father, Dr. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">102</a></span>
+      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.&nbsp;E. Churned. Seven in the evening a son born."
+      Two days later the November wind shifted. "Nov. 5, 1794. Clear, wind N.&nbsp;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, <i>The
+      Embargo</i>, 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, <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">103</a></span> he
+      composed the first draft of <i>Thanatopsis</i>. He was seventeen, and he
+      had been reading Blair's <i>Grave</i> 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 <i>North
+      American Review</i>, where they were published in September, 1817.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the meantime the young man had studied law, though with dislike of it,
+      and with the confession that he sometimes read <i>The Lyrical Ballads</i>
+      when he might have been reading Blackstone. One December afternoon in
+      1815, he was walking from Cummington to Plainfield&mdash;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 <i>To a Waterfowl</i>. 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bryant's ensuing career revealed the steady purpose, <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_104" id="Page_104">104</a></span> the stoicism, the reticence
+      of the Puritan. It was highly successful, judged even by material
+      standards. <i>Thanatopsis</i> had been instantly regarded in 1817 as the
+      finest poem yet produced in America. The author was invited to contribute
+      to the <i>North American Review</i> 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, <i>The Ages</i>, 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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_105" id="Page_105">105</a></span> 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.&hellip; 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 <i>The
+      Embargo</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although Bryant's poetry has never roused any vociferous excitement, it
+      has enduring qualities. The spiritual preoccupations of many a voiceless
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">106</a></span>
+      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 <i>Thanatopsis</i>, <i>To a Waterfowl</i>,
+      <i>The Rivulet</i>, <i>A Forest Hymn</i>, <i>An Evening Revery</i>, <i>The
+      Crowded Street</i>, <i>The Flood of Years</i>. 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 <i>The Flood of Years</i>
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A picture of the Knickerbocker era is not complete <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_107" id="Page_107">107</a></span> 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.&nbsp;P.
+      Willis and Morris and Woodworth. Some of these are today only
+      "single-poem" men, like Payne, the author of <i>Home Sweet Home</i>, just
+      as Key, the author of <i>The Star-Spangled Banner</i>, is today a
+      "single-poem" man of an earlier generation. Their names will be found in
+      such limbos of the dead as Griswold's <i>Poets and Poetry of America</i>
+      and Poe's <i>Literati</i>. 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108"
+      id="Page_108">108</a></span> century sets them apart from their forgotten
+      contemporaries. They are two of the unluckiest&mdash;and yet luckiest&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <div class="chapterhead">
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"></a> <a name="chap06" id="chap06"></a>
+      <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">109</a></span>
+      <br /><br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER VI.</a>
+      </h2>
+    </div>
+    <p class="chaptertitle">
+      The Transcendentalists
+    </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      <span class="smcap">To</span> understand 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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_110" id="Page_110">110</a></span> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">111</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">112</a></span>
+      lectures in 1820, after his return from Germany, gives a vivid picture of
+      the new thirst for foreign culture. <i>The North American Review</i> 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 <i>A National Literature</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">113</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">114</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">115</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now turn to some of the New England men. Dr. C.&nbsp;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:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="noindent">
+        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.&hellip; 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 <span
+        class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">116</a></span> 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.
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">117</a></span>
+      mind contemning the phenomenal world.&hellip; The understanding can make
+      nothing of it. 'Tis all nonsense. The Reason affirms its absolute verity.&hellip;
+      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.'"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One more quotation must suffice. It is from a poem by a forgotten
+      Transcendentalist, F.&nbsp;G. Tuckerman.
+    </p>
+    <div class="poem1">
+      <p class="poem1">
+        No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead;
+      </p>
+      <p class="poem1">
+        But, leaving straining thought and stammering word,
+      </p>
+      <p class="poem1">
+        Across the barren azure pass to God;
+      </p>
+      <p class="poem1">
+        Shooting the void in silence, like a bird&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p class="poem1">
+        A bird that shuts his wings for better speed!
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">118</a></span>
+      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 medi&aelig;val mysticism, and to the English Platonists;
+      touched throughout by the French Revolutionary <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_119" id="Page_119">119</a></span> theories, by the Romantic
+      spirit, by the new zeal for science and pseudo-science, and by the unrest
+      of a fermenting age.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">120</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;eloquent,
+      liberal, fond of books and music, highly honored by his <i>alma mater</i>
+      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&mdash;one
+      of them feebleminded&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_121" id="Page_121">121</a></span> "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 <i>Journals</i>, 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">122</a></span> 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 <i>Journal</i> 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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">123</a></span> 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&mdash;a new utterance of a new man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This book, the now famous <i>Nature</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1837 he delivered the well-known Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard on
+      <i>The American Scholar</i>. 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">124</a></span>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_125" id="Page_125">125</a></span> 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 <i>alma mater</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Journal</i>, which he called his savings-bank, because from
+      this source he drew most of the material for his books. The <i>Journal</i>
+      has recently been printed, in ten volumes. No American writing rewards the
+      reader more richly. It must be remembered that Emerson's <i>Essays</i>,
+      the first volume of which appeared in 1841, and the last volumes after his
+      death in 1882, represent <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126"
+      id="Page_126">126</a></span> practically three stages of composition:
+      first the detached thoughts of the <i>Journal</i>; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &aelig;sthetic 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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">127</a></span> the West";
+      he rated it a wholesome, vivifying force in our national thought and life.
+      The <i>Journal</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Manners</i>, <i>Farming</i>, <i>Books</i>,
+      <i>Eloquence</i>, <i>Old Age</i>, 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 <i>Life and
+      Letters in New England</i>, <i>New England Reformers</i>, <i>Politics</i>,
+      and the successive entries in his <i>Journal</i> 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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">128</a></span> Englishmen
+      in his <i>English Traits</i>. But the great essays, no doubt, are those
+      like <i>Self-Reliance</i>, <i>Compensation</i>, <i>The Over-Soul</i>, <i>Fate</i>,
+      <i>Power</i>, <i>Culture</i>, <i>Worship</i>, and <i>Illusions</i>. These
+      will puzzle no one who has read carefully that first book on <i>Nature</i>.
+      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&mdash;always a
+      stumbling-block to Philistines&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">129</a></span>
+      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 <i>Bacchus</i> than any American poem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_130" id="Page_130">130</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_131" id="Page_131">131</a></span> into his rightful place of
+      mastership. In his lifetime he printed only two books, <i>A Week on the
+      Concord and Merrimac Rivers</i>&mdash;which was even more completely
+      neglected by the public than Emerson's <i>Nature</i>&mdash;and <i>Walden</i>,
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132"
+      id="Page_132">132</a></span> realize the gospel of Transcendentalism in
+      his own inner life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ten years passed. The young man gave up <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_133" id="Page_133">133</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">134</a></span> 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 <i>Journal</i>, from which&mdash;and here again he followed Emerson's
+      example&mdash;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 <i>Ethan Brand</i>,
+      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 <i>Journal</i>, 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 <i>Walden</i>: "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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">135</a></span>
+      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 <i>Journals</i>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Walden</i>, "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, <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">136</a></span> 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
+      <i>Dial</i>, 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, <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_137" id="Page_137">137</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Slavery in Massachusetts</i>, which Garrison had published
+      in the <i>Liberator</i> in 1854. And now the death upon the scaffold of
+      the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">138</a></span>
+      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.&hellip; I hear a good many pretend that they are going
+      to die.&hellip; 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.&hellip; 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139"
+      id="Page_139">139</a></span> correspondence, has not heard from himself
+      this long time."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140"
+      id="Page_140">140</a></span> 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 <i>Little Women</i>. "A tedious archangel," was Emerson's
+      verdict, and it is likely to stand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret Fuller, though sketched by Hawthorne, analyzed by Emerson, and
+      painted at full length by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, is now a fading
+      figure&mdash;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 <i>Dial</i>, 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 <i>New York Tribune</i> under
+      Horace Greeley. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">141</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_142" id="Page_142">142</a></span> Ellery Channing. There was a
+      sunny side of the whole movement, as T.&nbsp;W. Higginson and F.&nbsp;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.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <div class="chapterhead">
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"></a> <a name="chap07" id="chap07"></a>
+      <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">143</a></span>
+      <br /><br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER VII.</a>
+      </h2>
+    </div>
+    <p class="chaptertitle">
+      Romance, Poetry, and History
+    </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      <span class="smcap">Moving</span> in and out of the Transcendentalist
+      circles, in that great generation preceding the Civil War, were a company
+      of other men&mdash;romancers, poets, essayists, historians&mdash;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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">144</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Newgate Calendar</i>, <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_145" id="Page_145">145</a></span> 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, <i>Twice-Told Tales</i>, 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 <i>Mosses from an Old Manse</i>, 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, <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>,
+      published in 1850. He was now forty-six. In 1851, he published <i>The
+      House of the Seven Gables</i>, <i>The Wonder-Book</i>, and <i>The
+      Snow-Image, and Other Tales</i>. In 1852 came <i>The</i> <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">146</a></span> <i>Blithedale
+      Romance</i>, 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, <i>The
+      Marble Faun</i>. 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, 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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_147" id="Page_147">147</a></span> readers, hover about his
+      charming stories for children; to have missed <i>The Wonder-Book</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_148" id="Page_148">148</a></span> 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 <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> 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 <i>The Ambitious
+      Guest</i>, <i>The Gentle Boy</i>, <i>Young Goodman Brown</i>, <i>The Snow
+      Image</i>, <i>The Great Stone Face</i>, <i>Drowne's Wooden Image</i>, <i>Rappacini's
+      Daughter</i>, 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">149</a></span> <i>The
+      Scarlet Letter</i>, 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&mdash;differing so widely from the
+      respect of Latin countries for the priest&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_150" id="Page_150">150</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The legacy of guilt is likewise the theme of <i>The House of the Seven
+      Gables</i>, which Hawthorne himself was inclined to think a better book
+      than <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>. 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 Ph&oelig;be for the latest
+      descendant of the Maules. In <i>The Blithedale Romance</i> Hawthorne stood
+      for once, perhaps, too near his material to allow the rich atmospheric
+      effects which he prefers, and in spite of the unforgetable <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">151</a></span> portrait
+      of Zenobia and powerful passages of realistic description, the book is not
+      quite focussed. In <i>The Marble Faun</i> 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 <i>The Marble Faun</i>,
+      like <i>Childe Harold</i>, a glorified guide-book to the Eternal City.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152"
+      id="Page_152">152</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Mayflower</i> 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 <i>Sketch
+      Book</i>, 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, <i>Hyperion</i>
+      and <i>Outre-mer</i>, Irvingesque romances of European travel. Then came,
+      after ten years of teaching and the death <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_153" id="Page_153">153</a></span> of his young wife, the sudden
+      impulse to write poetry, and he produced, "softly excited, I know not
+      why," <i>The Reaper and the Flowers, a Psalm of Death</i>. From that
+      December morning in 1838 until his death in 1882 he was Longfellow the
+      Poet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">154</a></span> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_155" id="Page_155">155</a></span> 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&mdash;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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Longfellow's poetic service to his countrymen has thus become a national
+      asset, and not merely because in his three best known narrative poems, <i>Evangeline</i>,
+      <i>Hiawatha</i>, and <i>The Courtship of Miles Standish</i>, he selected
+      his themes from our own history. <i>The Building of the Ship</i>, 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." <i>The Skeleton in Armor</i>,
+      <i>A Ballad of the French Fleet</i>, <i>Paul Revere's Ride</i>, <i>The
+      Wreck of the Hesperus</i>, are ballads that stir men still. For all of his
+      skill in story-telling in verse&mdash;witness the <i>Tales of a Wayside
+      Inn</i>&mdash;Longfellow was not by nature a dramatist, and his trilogy
+      now published under the title of <i>Christus</i>, <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_156" id="Page_156">156</a></span> made up of <i>The Divine
+      Tragedy</i>, <i>The Golden Legend</i>, and <i>New England Tragedies</i>,
+      added little to a reputation won in other fields. His sonnets,
+      particularly those upon <i>Chaucer</i>, <i>Milton</i>, <i>The Divina
+      Commedia</i>, <i>A Nameless Grave</i>, <i>Felton</i>, <i>Sumner</i>, <i>Nature</i>,
+      <i>My Books</i>, are among the imperishable treasures of the English
+      language. In descriptive pieces like <i>Keramos</i> and <i>The Hanging of
+      the Crane</i>, in such personal and occasional verses as <i>The Herons of
+      Elmwood</i>, <i>The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz</i>, and the noble <i>Morituri
+      Salutamus</i> 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, <i>The Psalm of Life</i> and <i>Excelsior</i>, 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 <i>Maidenhood</i>, <i>The
+      Rainy Day</i>, <i>The Bridge</i>, <i>The Day is Done</i>, verses whose
+      simplicity lent themselves temptingly to parody. Yet such poems as <i>The
+      Belfry of Bruges</i>, <i>Seaweed</i>, <i>The Fire of Driftwood</i>, <i>The
+      Arsenal at Springfield</i>, <i>My Lost Youth</i>, <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_157" id="Page_157">157</a></span> <i>The Children's Hour</i>,
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">158</a></span>
+      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 <i>Snow-Bound</i>. 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 <i>The
+      Barefoot Boy</i>, <i>School-Days</i>, <i>Snow-Bound</i>, <i>Ramoth Hill</i>,
+      and <i>Telling the Bees</i>. It was a chance <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_159" id="Page_159">159</a></span> 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 <i>Exile's Departure</i> to William
+      Lloyd Garrison, then twenty, and the editor of the <i>Newburyport Free
+      Press</i>. 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160"
+      id="Page_160">160</a></span> 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 <i>Massachusetts
+      to Virginia</i>, and, more nobly still, poems embodying what Wordsworth
+      called "the sensation and image of country and the human race."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">161</a></span>
+      prophetic exaltation. In 1847 came the first general collection of his
+      poems, and here were to be found not merely controversial verses, but
+      spirited <i>Songs of Labor</i>, 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When <i>The Atlantic Monthly</i> 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 <i>Tritemius</i>,
+      and <i>Skipper Ireson's Ride</i>. Characteristic productions of this
+      period are <i>My Psalm</i>, <i>Cobbler Keezar's Vision</i>, <i>Andrew
+      Rykman's Prayer</i>, <i>The Eternal Goodness</i>&mdash;poems grave, sweet,
+      and tender. But it was not until the publication of <i>Snow-Bound</i> in
+      1866 that Whittier's <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">162</a></span>
+      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 <i>Snow-Bound</i>,
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163"
+      id="Page_163">163</a></span> 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"&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">164</a></span> 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&mdash;<i>The
+      Last Leaf</i>, in truth, of New England's richest springtime.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "No, my friends," he had said in <i>The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table</i>,
+      "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.
+    </p>
+    <p class="poem">
+      Know old Cambridge? Hope you do.&mdash;<br /> Born there? Don't say so! I
+      was, too.<br /> <span class="big-word-space"> &bull; &bull; &bull; &bull;
+      &bull; &bull; &bull; &bull;</span><br /> Nicest place that was ever seen&mdash;<br />
+      Colleges red and Common green.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he wrote, in scores of passages of filial devotion, concerning the
+      village of his boyhood and the city of <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_165" id="Page_165">165</a></span> 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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166"
+      id="Page_166">166</a></span> wisdom, but his native verse-making talent is
+      as completely revealed in <i>Old Ironsides</i>, published when he was
+      twenty-one, and in <i>The Last Leaf</i>, 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&mdash;except toward Calvinism and
+      Homeopathy. In some of the tricks of his prose style he is like a kindlier
+      Sterne. His knack for <i>vers de soci&eacute;t&eacute;</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">167</a></span> 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 <i>Atlantic
+      Monthly</i>, persuaded him to write <i>The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table</i>.
+      It was the public's luck also, for whoever had been so unfortunate as not
+      to be born in Boston could now listen&mdash;as if across the table&mdash;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 <i>The Autocrat</i>. 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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_168" id="Page_168">168</a></span> <i>Our Hundred Days</i>. <i>The
+      Professor at the Breakfast Table</i> and <i>The Poet at the Breakfast
+      Table</i> are less successful variations of <i>The Autocrat</i>. Neither
+      professors nor poets are at their best at this meal. Holmes wrote three
+      novels&mdash;of which <i>Elsie Venner</i>, a somewhat too medical story,
+      is the best remembered&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_169" id="Page_169">169</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Divinity School Address</i>. He studied law, turned
+      Abolitionist, wrote poetry, married the beautiful and transcendental <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">170</a></span> 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 <i>The Biglow Papers</i> (First Series), <i>A Fable for
+      Critics</i>, and <i>The Vision of Sir Launfal</i>. 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 <i>The Atlantic</i>, and helped his friend Charles
+      Eliot Norton edit <i>The North American Review</i>. The Civil War inspired
+      a second series of <i>Biglow Papers</i> and the magnificent <i>Commemoration
+      Ode</i> of 1865. Then came volume after volume of literary essays, such as
+      <i>Among My Books</i> and <i>My Study Windows</i>, 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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_171" id="Page_171">171</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_172" id="Page_172">172</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Biglow Papers</i> and the
+      <i>Commemoration Ode</i> that he has most moved his countrymen. The
+      effectiveness of <i>The Present Crisis</i> and <i>Sir Launfal</i>, and of
+      the <i>Memorial Odes</i>, particularly the <i>Ode to Agassiz</i>, 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 <i>The Changeling</i>, <i>The First
+      Snow-Fall</i>, <i>After the Burial</i>, have touched many hearts. <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">173</a></span> 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 <i>Biglow Papers</i>, he had a theme and a
+      method precisely suited to his temperament. No American has approached
+      Lowell's success in this difficult <i>genre</i>: 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">174</a></span> 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 <i>Sunthin' in the
+      Pastoral Line</i>, <i>Cambridge Thirty Years Ago</i>, and <i>My Garden
+      Acquaintance</i>. Yet he watched men as keenly as he did "laylocks" and
+      bobolinks, and no shrewder American essay has been written than his <i>On
+      a Certain Condescension in Foreigners</i>. 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">175</a></span>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_176" id="Page_176">176</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Library of American Biography</i>,
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">177</a></span>
+      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 <i>History of the
+      United States</i>, 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">178</a></span> 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 <i>History of Spanish Literature</i> and whose own
+      <i>Life and Letters</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Autobiography</i> had impressed
+      him, and to make himself "an historian in the best sense of the term." He
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">179</a></span>
+      studied arduously in Europe, with the help of secretaries, and by 1826,
+      after a long hesitation, decided upon a <i>History of the Reign of
+      Ferdinand and Isabella</i>. 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&mdash;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 <i>Conquest
+      of Mexico</i>, the <i>Conquest of Peru</i>, and finally to his unfinished
+      <i>History of the Reign of Philip II</i>. 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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_180" id="Page_180">180</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His young friend Motley, of <i>Dutch Republic</i> 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 G&ouml;ttingen 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 <i>Rise of the Dutch
+      Republic</i>. 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181"
+      id="Page_181">181</a></span> a dynasty. Between 1860 and 1868 he produced
+      the four volumes of the <i>History of the United Netherlands</i>. 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 <i>The Life and Death of John of
+      Barneveld</i>. His <i>Letters</i>, 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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">182</a></span> 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 <i>The Autocrat</i>, after all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">183</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Old
+      French War</i>, 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">184</a></span>
+      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, <i>The Oregon
+      Trail</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>The Conspiracy of Pontiac</i>, 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&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">185</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;<i>The Pioneers of France</i>, <i>The Jesuits in North
+      America</i>, <i>La Salle</i>, <i>The Old R&eacute;gime</i>, <i>Frontenac</i>,
+      <i>Montcalm and Wolfe</i>, <i>A Half-Century of Conflict</i>&mdash;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&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_186" id="Page_186">186</a></span> and Motley, and precisely
+      adapted to the pictorial and narrative powers of the soldier-minded,
+      soldier-hearted author.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The quality which Parkman admired most in men&mdash;though he never seems
+      to have loved men deeply, even his own heroes&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <div class="chapterhead">
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"></a> <a name="chap08" id="chap08"></a>
+      <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">187</a></span>
+      <br /><br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER VIII.</a>
+      </h2>
+    </div>
+    <p class="chaptertitle">
+      Poe and Whitman
+    </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      <span class="smcap">Enter</span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188"
+      id="Page_188">188</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A child of strolling players, Poe happened to be born in Boston, but he
+      hated "Frog-Pondium"&mdash;his favorite name for the city of his nativity&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">189</a></span>
+      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, <i>Tamerlane</i>,
+      was published. In 1829 he was in Fortress Monroe, and published <i>Al
+      Aaraf</i> 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 <i>To Helen</i>, <i>Israfel</i>,
+      and <i>The City in the Sea</i>. That is enough to have in one's knapsack
+      at the age of twenty-two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">190</a></span>
+      New York: "We are both in excellent spirits.&hellip; 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 <i>Literary Messenger</i>, 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.&nbsp;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">191</a></span>
+      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&mdash;to be consistent in anything. My life
+      has been <i>whim</i>&mdash;impulse&mdash;passion&mdash;a longing for
+      solitude&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;the rhythmical creation of beauty. Poetry should be brief,
+      indefinite, and musical. Its chief instrument is sound. <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">192</a></span> 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 <i>To Helen</i>,
+      <i>Israfel</i>, <i>The Haunted Palace</i>, <i>Annabel Lee</i>, the theme,
+      the tone, the melody all weave their magic spell; it is like listening to
+      a lute-player in a dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That the device often turns into a trick is equally true. In <i>The Bells</i>
+      and <i>The Raven</i> we detect the prestidigitator. It is jugglery, though
+      such juggling as only a master-musician can perform. In <i>Ulalume</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poe's theory of the art of the short story is <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_193" id="Page_193">193</a></span> 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 <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> 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 <i>Ligeia</i>,
+      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 <i>The Cask of Amontillado</i>,
+      the theme of mysterious intrigue in <i>The Assignation</i>. 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. <i>The Gold Bug</i> is the best known of these, <i>The Purloined
+      Letter</i> the most perfect, <i>The</i> <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_194" id="Page_194">194</a></span> <i>Murders in the Rue Morgue</i>
+      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 <i>The Black Cat</i> is the
+      most fearful and <i>William Wilson</i> the most subtle; and there are
+      landscape sketches and fantasies and extravaganzas, most of these poor
+      stuff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195"
+      id="Page_195">195</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have sometimes imagined Poe, with four other <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_196" id="Page_196">196</a></span> 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 <i>The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows</i>. 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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197"
+      id="Page_197">197</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Canticle to the Sun</i>. 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 <i>Leaves of Grass</i>. Like St. Francis, and
+      like his own immediate master, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman is a mystic.
+      He cannot argue the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">198</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">199</a></span>
+      Dutch ancestry, in 1819. Lowell, W.&nbsp;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"&mdash;as he was called, to distinguish him from his father,
+      Walter&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Democratic
+      Review</i>, 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 <i>The
+      Brooklyn Eagle</i> and wandered south to New Orleans. By and by he drifted
+      back <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">200</a></span>
+      to New York, tried lecturing, worked at the carpenter's trade with his
+      father, and brooded over a book&mdash;"a book of new things."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the famous <i>Leaves of Grass</i>. He set the type himself, in a
+      Brooklyn printing-office, and printed about eight hundred copies. The book
+      had a portrait of the author&mdash;a meditative, gray-bearded poet in
+      workman's clothes&mdash;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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">201</a></span>
+      to spend his strength as an army hospital nurse. He wrote <i>Drum Taps</i>
+      and other magnificent poems about the War, culminating in his threnody on
+      Lincoln's death, <i>When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloomed</i>.
+      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.&nbsp;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">202</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first obstacle to the popular acceptance of Walt Whitman is the
+      formlessness or alleged formlessness of <i>Leaves of Grass</i>. 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">203</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gospel or burden of <i>Leaves of Grass</i> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_204" id="Page_204">204</a></span> 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 <i>By Blue
+      Ontario's Shore</i>. 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 <i>Pioneers, O Pioneers</i>. Yet this new America is
+      subtly related to the past; and in Whitman's later poems, such as <i>Passage
+      to India</i>, 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205"
+      id="Page_205">205</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <div class="chapterhead">
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"></a> <a name="chap09" id="chap09"></a>
+      <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">206</a></span>
+      <br /><br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER IX.</a>
+      </h2>
+    </div>
+    <p class="chaptertitle">
+      Union and Liberty
+    </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      "<span class="smcap">There</span> 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&mdash;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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;not even <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">207</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To appreciate the significance of this theme we must remind ourselves
+      again of what many persons <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208"
+      id="Page_208">208</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209"
+      id="Page_209">209</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">210</a></span> 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&mdash;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.&hellip;
+      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&mdash;he has lived upon it; <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_211" id="Page_211">211</a></span> 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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Webster himself thundered, at the close of his reply to Hayne in
+      1830, "Union <em>and</em> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_212" id="Page_212">212</a></span> with Webster's whole
+      development of political thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">213</a></span>
+      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 "<em>is</em>," 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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_214" id="Page_214">214</a></span> 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 <i>status quo</i>,
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">215</a></span> in his
+      private <i>Journal</i>: "<em>I will not obey it, by God!</em>" So said
+      hundreds of thousands of obscure men in the North, but Webster did not or
+      could not hear them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_216" id="Page_216">216</a></span> 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 <i>Journal and
+      Correspondence</i> and the <i>Life and Letters</i> 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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">217</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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 <i>The Liberator</i> on January 1, 1831: "I am in earnest&mdash;I will
+      not retreat a single inch&mdash;<i>And I will be heard</i>." 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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_218" id="Page_218">218</a></span> in the world if its
+      production were entrusted to the moderate type of man, and the files of <i>The
+      Liberator</i>, 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 <i>New York Tribune</i>, 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219"
+      id="Page_219">219</a></span> "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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Uncle
+      Tom's Cabin</i>. 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">220</a></span>
+      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&mdash;for
+      the Professor was a "feckless body"&mdash;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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i>, 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221"
+      id="Page_221">221</a></span> 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 <i>dies ir&oelig;</i> 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 <em>not</em> 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 <i>The National Era</i> without attracting
+      much attention, and was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222"
+      id="Page_222">222</a></span> 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 <i>Index</i> in
+      Italy, as being subversive of established authority. Millions of copies
+      were sold in Europe, and <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i>, more than any other
+      cause, held the English working men in sympathy with the North in the
+      English cotton crisis of our Civil War.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">223</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Stowe lived to write many another novel and short story, among them
+      <i>Dred</i>, <i>The Minister's Wooing</i>, <i>Oldtown Folks</i>, <i>Oldtown
+      Fireside Stories</i>. 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_224" id="Page_224">224</a></span> 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 <i>Dixie</i> as well as
+      in their antagonists who chanted <i>John Brown's Body</i> and <i>The
+      Battle Hymn of the Republic</i>; 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&mdash;Edward Everett Hale's <i>Man Without a Country</i>&mdash;than
+      by most of the poets who attempted to glorify that theme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">225</a></span>
+      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
+      <i>The Star-Spangled Banner</i> fully express what we feel while we are
+      trying to sing it, as the <i>Marseillaise</i>, 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.&nbsp;H.
+      Brownell, Read, Stedman, and other men are still full of fire. Yet Mrs.
+      Howe's <i>Battle Hymn</i>, 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 <i>Reply
+      to Hayne</i> thirty years before, the idea of union made "simple,
+      sensuous, passionate." No American <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226"
+      id="Page_226">226</a></span> poem has had a more dramatic and intense life
+      in the quick breathing imagination of men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">227</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>The Bible</i>, <i>&AElig;esop's
+      Fables</i>, <i>Pilgrim's Progress</i>, <i>Robinson Crusoe</i>, 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">228</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">229</a></span> 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. <em>I admit that
+      it was.</em>"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">230</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Gettysburg Address</i> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_231" id="Page_231">231</a></span> the occasion in two hours as
+      you did in two minutes." Today the <i>Address</i> reads as if Lincoln knew
+      that it would ultimately be stamped in bronze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;he
+      had it the night before he was assassinated&mdash;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."
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">232</a></span>
+      "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&mdash;right and wrong&mdash;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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">233</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <div class="chapterhead">
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"></a> <a name="chap10" id="chap10"></a>
+      <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">234</a></span>
+      <br /><br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER X.</a>
+      </h2>
+    </div>
+    <p class="chaptertitle">
+      A New Nation
+    </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      <span class="smcap">The</span> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235"
+      id="Page_235">235</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One result of the Civil War was picturesquely set forth in Emerson's <i>Journal</i>.
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">236</a></span>
+      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&mdash;to build transcontinental
+      railroads, to organize great industries, and to create new states.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>History of American
+      Literature since 1870</i>, 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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">237</a></span> 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 <i>Roughing It</i>. 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 <i>The
+      Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County</i>. A newspaper now sent him
+      to Europe to record "what he sees with his own eyes." He did so in <i>Innocents
+      Abroad</i>, and his countrymen shouted with laughter. This, then, was
+      "Europe" after all&mdash;another "fake" until this shrewd river-pilot who
+      signed himself "Mark Twain" took its soundings! Then came a series of far
+      greater books&mdash;<i>Roughing It</i>, <i>Life on the Mississippi</i>, <i>The
+      Gilded Age</i> (in collaboration), <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238"
+      id="Page_238">238</a></span> and <i>Tom Sawyer</i> and <i>Huckleberry Finn</i>&mdash;books
+      that make our American <i>Odyssey</i>, 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&mdash;and an equally passionate hater
+      of evil. Read <i>The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg</i> and <i>The
+      Mysterious Stranger</i>. In his last years, torn by private sorrows, he
+      turned as black a philosophical pessimist as we have bred. He died at
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">239</a></span> 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 <i>Works</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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 <i>Innocents
+      Abroad</i>. 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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_240" id="Page_240">240</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;his
+      nearest approach, apparently, to the actual work of the mines. In 1868,
+      while editor of <i>The Overland Monthly</i>, he wrote the short <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">241</a></span> story
+      which was destined to make him famous in the East and to release him from
+      California forever. It was <i>The Luck of Roaring Camp</i>. 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">242</a></span> 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. <i>Tennessee's Partner</i>,
+      <i>The Outcast of Poker Flat</i>, and all the rest are triumphs of
+      selective skill&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_243" id="Page_243">243</a></span> 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.&nbsp;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jack London, born in California in 1876, was forced to find his West in
+      Alaska&mdash;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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">244</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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 <i>Songs of the
+      Sierras</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Muir, another immigrant Scot who reached California in 1868, had far
+      more stuff in him than Joaquin Miller. He had studied geology, botany,
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">245</a></span> 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 <i>Journal</i>, 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 <i>Journal</i>
+      will long perpetuate this thrilling sense of personal contact with wild,
+      clean, uplifted things&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_246" id="Page_246">246</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The romance of the Spanish and French civilization of New Orleans, as
+      revealed in Mr. Cable's fascinating <i>Old Creole Days</i>, 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247"
+      id="Page_247">247</a></span> 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.&nbsp;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the impulse spread far beyond the South. Early in the seventies Edward
+      Eggleston wrote <i>The Hoosier Schoolmaster</i> and <i>The Circuit Rider</i>,
+      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 <i>The Old
+      Swimmin' Hole</i> and rejoiced <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248"
+      id="Page_248">248</a></span> <i>When the Frost is on the Punkin</i>. It
+      was the era of Denman Thompson's plays, <i>Joshua Whitcomb</i> and <i>The
+      Old Homestead</i>. 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 <i>Ramona</i>, 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 <i>Chinese Ghosts</i> and <i>Chita</i>. 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">249</a></span>
+      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&mdash;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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">250</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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." <i>A Boy's Town</i>, <i>My Literary
+      Passions</i>, and <i>Years of my Youth</i> make clear the image of the
+      young poet-journalist who returned from his four years in Venice and
+      became assistant editor of <i>The Atlantic Monthly</i> 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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">251</a></span> realistic
+      novels of contemporary New England which established his fame as a writer.
+      <i>A Modern Instance</i> and <i>The Rise of Silas Lapham</i> 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 <i>A Hazard of
+      New Fortunes</i>, 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. <i>My Literary Friends and
+      Acquaintance</i> 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 <i>My Mark Twain</i> is his
+      memorable portrait of another type of sovereign, perhaps the dynasty that
+      will rule the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although Henry James, like Mr. Howells, wrote at one time acute studies of
+      New England character, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252"
+      id="Page_252">252</a></span> 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 <i>American
+      Scene</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">253</a></span>
+      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 <i>A Passionate Pilgrim</i> and <i>Roderick
+      Hudson</i> 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 <i>nuances</i> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_254" id="Page_254">254</a></span> 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&mdash;though Henry James found
+      his Japan and Orinoco and Madagascar all in London town!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255"
+      id="Page_255">255</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>National Ode</i> 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 <i>Faust</i>. But an adequate <i>National Ode</i> was not
+      in him. Sidney Lanier, who was writing in that year his <i>Psalm of the
+      West</i> and was soon to compose <i>The Marshes of Glynn</i>, 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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">256</a></span> 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 <i>American Anthology</i> 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 <i>Life
+      and Letters</i> 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 <i>Letters</i>, likewise, give
+      an intimate picture of literary New York from the seventies to the
+      present. Through his editorship of <i>Scribner's Monthly</i> and <i>The
+      Century Magazine</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The most perfect poetic craftsman of the <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_257" id="Page_257">257</a></span> period&mdash;and, many think,
+      our one faultless worker in verse&mdash;was Thomas Bailey Aldrich. His
+      first volume of juvenile verse had appeared in 1855, the year of
+      Whittier's <i>Barefoot Boy</i> and Whitman's <i>Leaves of Grass</i>. 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 <i>Atlantic</i>. 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;to mention but half a dozen
+      distinguished names out of a larger company&mdash;and to suggest that
+      James Whitcomb <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">258</a></span>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259"
+      id="Page_259">259</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have had American drama for one hundred and fifty years, &sup1; 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,
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">260</a></span> and
+      in experiment with dramatic production, particularly with motion pictures
+      and the out-of-doors pageant. At no time since <i>The Prince of Parthia</i>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <div class="footer">
+      <p class="footer">
+        <a id="footer_260-1" name="footer_260-1"></a> &sup1; <i>Representative
+        American Plays</i>, edited by Arthur Hobson Quinn, N.&nbsp;Y., 1917.
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      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 na&iuml;ve reproduction of retinal and muscular
+      impressions, as if this were the end of the matter. <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_261" id="Page_261">261</a></span> 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 <i>North of Boston</i> and <i>A Spoon River Anthology</i>,
+      judgments of life that run very deep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262"
+      id="Page_262">262</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is one plant in our own garden, however, whose flourishing state
+      will be denied by nobody&mdash;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 &sup1; 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.
+    </p>
+    <div class="footer">
+      <p class="footer">
+        <a id="footer_262-2" name="footer_262-2"></a> &sup1; "Back to Nature,"
+        by H.&nbsp;S. Canby, <i>Yale Review</i>, July, 1917.
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      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. <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">263</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264"
+      id="Page_264">264</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <hr class="break" />
+    <p>
+      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 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">265</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the effort toward an expression of a peculiarly complex national
+      experience has been the problem of our literary past, the literary problem
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">266</a></span> 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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_267" id="Page_267">267</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <div class="chapterhead">
+      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012"></a> <a name="bibliography"
+      id="bibliography"></a> <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269"
+      id="Page_269">269</a></span> <br /><br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        <a href="#Contents">BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE</a>
+      </h2>
+    </div>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      <span class="smcap">An</span> authoritative account of American Literature
+      to the close of the Revolution is given in M.&nbsp;C. Tyler's <i>History
+      of American Literature during the Colonial Time</i>, 2 volumes (1878) and
+      <i>Literary History of the American Revolution</i>, 2 volumes (1897). For
+      a general survey see Barrett Wendell, <i>A Literary History of America</i>
+      (1900), W.&nbsp;P. Trent, <i>American Literature</i> (1903), G.&nbsp;E.
+      Woodberry, <i>America in Literature</i> (1903), W.&nbsp;C. Bronson, <i>A
+      Short History of American Literature</i> (1903), with an excellent
+      bibliography, W.&nbsp;B. Cairns, <i>History of American Literature</i>
+      (1912), W.&nbsp;P. Trent and J. Erskine, <i>Great American Writers</i>
+      (1912), and W. Riley, <i>American Thought</i> (1915). The most recent and
+      authoritative account is to be found in <i>The Cambridge History of
+      American Literature</i>, 3 volumes edited by Trent, Erskine, Sherman, and
+      Van Doren.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The best collection of American prose and verse is E.&nbsp;C. Stedman and
+      E.&nbsp;M. Hutchinson's <i>Library of American Literature</i>, 11 volumes
+      (1888-1890). For verse alone, see E.&nbsp;C. Stedman, <i>An American
+      Anthology</i> (1900), and W.&nbsp;C. Bronson, <i>American Poems, 1625-1892</i>
+      (1912). For criticism of leading authors, note W.&nbsp;C. Brownell, <i>American
+      Prose Masters</i> (1909), and Stedman, <i>Poets of America</i> (1885).
+    </p>
+    <p class="tiny">
+    </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">270</a></span> <i>Chapters
+      1-3.</i> Note W. Bradford, <i>Journal</i> (1898), J. Winthrop, <i>Journal</i>
+      (1825, 1826), also <i>Life and Letters</i> by R.&nbsp;C. Winthrop, 2
+      volumes (1863), G.&nbsp;L. Walker, <i>Thomas Hooker</i> (1891), O.&nbsp;S.
+      Straus, <i>Roger Williams</i> (1894), Cotton Mather, <i>Diary</i>, 2
+      volumes (1911, 1912), also his <i>Life</i> by Barrett Wendell (1891),
+      Samuel Sewall, <i>Diary</i>, 3 volumes (1878). For Jonathan Edwards, see
+      <i>Works</i>, 4 volumes (1852), his <i>Life</i> by A.&nbsp;V.&nbsp;G.
+      Allen (1889), <i>Selected Sermons</i> edited by H.&nbsp;N. Gardiner
+      (1904). The most recent edition of Franklin's <i>Works</i> is edited by A.&nbsp;H.
+      Smyth, 10 volumes (1907).
+    </p>
+    <p class="tiny">
+    </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      <i>Chapter 4.</i> Samuel Adams, <i>Works</i>, 4 volumes (1904), John
+      Adams, <i>Works</i>, 10 volumes (1856), Thomas Paine, <i>Life</i> by M.&nbsp;D.
+      Conway, 2 volumes (1892), <i>Works</i> edited by Conway, 4 volumes (1895),
+      Philip Freneau, <i>Poems</i>, 3 volumes (Princeton edition, 1902), Thomas
+      Jefferson, <i>Works</i> edited by P.&nbsp;L. Ford, 10 volumes (1892-1898),
+      J. Woolman, <i>Journal</i> (edited by Whittier, 1871, and also in <i>Everyman's
+      Library</i>), <i>The Federalist</i> (edited by H.&nbsp;C. Lodge, 1888).
+    </p>
+    <p class="tiny">
+    </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      <i>Chapter 5.</i> Washington Irving, <i>Works</i>, 40 volumes (1891-1897),
+      also his <i>Life and Letters</i> by P.&nbsp;M. Irving, 4 volumes
+      (1862-1864). Fenimore Cooper, <i>Works</i>, 32 volumes (1896), <i>Life</i>
+      by T.&nbsp;R. Lounsbury (1883). Brockden Brown, <i>Works</i>, 6 volumes,
+      (1887). W.&nbsp;C. Bryant, <i>Poems</i>, 2 volumes (1883), <i>Prose</i>, 2
+      volumes (1884), and his <i>Life</i> by John Bigelow (1890).
+    </p>
+    <p class="tiny">
+    </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      <i>Chapter 6.</i> H.&nbsp;C. Goddard, <i>Studies in New England
+      Transcendentalism</i> (1908). R.&nbsp;W. Emerson, <i>Works</i>, 12 <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">271</a></span> volumes
+      (Centenary edition, 1903), <i>Journal</i>, 10 volumes (1909-1914), his <i>Life</i>
+      by J.&nbsp;E. Cabot, 2 volumes (1887), by R. Garnett (1887), by G.&nbsp;E.
+      Woodberry (1905); see also <i>Ralph Waldo Emerson</i>, a critical study by
+      O.&nbsp;W. Firkins (1915). H.&nbsp;D. Thoreau, <i>Works</i>, 20 volumes
+      (Walden edition including <i>Journals</i>, 1906), <i>Life</i> by F.&nbsp;B.
+      Sanborn (1917), also <i>Thoreau, A Critical Study</i> by Mark van Doren
+      (1916). Note also Lindsay Swift, <i>Brook Farm</i> (1900), and <i>The Dial</i>,
+      reprint by the Rowfant Club (1902).
+    </p>
+    <p class="tiny">
+    </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      <i>Chapter 7.</i> Hawthorne, <i>Works</i>, 12 volumes (1882), <i>Life</i>
+      by G.&nbsp;E. Woodberry (1902). Longfellow, <i>Works</i>, 11 volumes
+      (1886), <i>Life</i> by Samuel Longfellow, 3 volumes (1891). Whittier, <i>Works</i>,
+      7 volumes (1892), <i>Life</i> by S.&nbsp;T. Pickard, 2 volumes (1894).
+      Holmes, <i>Works</i>, 13 volumes (1892), <i>Life</i> by J.&nbsp;T. Morse,
+      Jr. (1896). Lowell, <i>Works</i>, 11 volumes (1890), <i>Life</i> by Ferris
+      Greenslet (1905), <i>Letters</i> edited by C.&nbsp;E. Norton, 2 volumes
+      (1893). For the historians, note H.&nbsp;B. Adams, <i>Life and Writings of
+      Jared Sparks</i>, 2 volumes (1893). M.&nbsp;A. DeW. Howe, <i>Life and
+      Letters of George Bancroft</i>, 2 volumes (1908), G.&nbsp;S. Hillard, <i>Life,
+      Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor</i>, 2 volumes (1876), George
+      Ticknor, <i>Life of Prescott</i> (1863), also Rollo Ogden, <i>Life of
+      Prescott</i> (1904), G.&nbsp;W. Curtis, <i>Correspondence of J.&nbsp;L.
+      Motley</i>, 2 volumes (1889), Francis Parkman, <i>Works</i>, 12 volumes
+      (1865-1898), <i>Life</i> by C.&nbsp;H. Farnham (1900), J.&nbsp;F. Jameson,
+      <i>History of Historical Writing in America</i> (1891).
+    </p>
+    <p class="tiny">
+    </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      <i>Chapter 8.</i> Poe, <i>Works</i>, 10 volumes (Stedman-Woodberry
+      edition, 1894-1895), also 17 volumes (Virginia <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_272" id="Page_272">272</a></span> edition, J.&nbsp;A. Harrison,
+      1902), <i>Life</i> by G.&nbsp;E. Woodberry, 2 volumes (1909). Whitman, <i>Leaves
+      of Grass</i> and <i>Complete Prose Works</i> (Small, Maynard and Co.)
+      (1897, 1898), also John Burroughs, <i>A Study of Whitman</i> (1896).
+    </p>
+    <p class="tiny">
+    </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      <i>Chapter 9.</i> C. Schurz, <i>Life of Henry Clay</i>, 2 volumes (1887).
+      Daniel Webster, <i>Works</i>, 6 volumes (1851), <i>Life</i> by H.&nbsp;C.
+      Lodge (1883). Rufus Choate, <i>Works</i>, 2 volumes (1862). Wendell
+      Phillips, <i>Speeches, Lectures, and Letters</i>, 2 volumes (1892). W.&nbsp;L.
+      Garrison, <i>The Story of his Life Told by his Children</i>, 4 volumes
+      (1885-1889). Harriet Beecher Stowe, <i>Works</i>, 17 volumes (1897), <i>Life</i>
+      by C.&nbsp;E. Stowe (1889). Abraham Lincoln, <i>Works</i>, 2 volumes
+      (edited by Nicolay and Hay, 1894).
+    </p>
+    <p class="tiny">
+    </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      <i>Chapter 10</i>. For an excellent bibliography of the New National
+      Period, see F.&nbsp;L. Pattee, <i>A History of American Literature since
+      1870</i> (1916).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For further bibliographical information the reader is referred to the
+      articles on American authors in <i>The Encyclop&oelig;dia Britannica</i>
+      and in <i>The Warner Library</i> (volume 30, <i>The Student's Course</i>,
+      N.&nbsp;Y., 1917).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <div class="chapterhead">
+      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014"></a> <a name="index" id="index"></a>
+      <br /><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">273</a></span>
+      <br /><br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        <a href="#Contents">INDEX</a>
+      </h2>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      A
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      Adams, C.&nbsp;F, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.<br /> Adams, John, opinion of
+      American independence, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>-<a href="#Page_12">12</a>;
+      as a writer, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.<br /> Adams, Samuel, <a
+      href="#Page_73">73</a>-<a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>.<br />
+      <i>After the Burial</i>, Lowell, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br /> <i>Agassiz,
+      Fiftieth Birthday of</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>Age
+      of Reason</i>, Paine, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.<br /> <i>Ages, The</i>,
+      Bryant, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.<br /> Alcott, Bronson, <a
+      href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_140">140</a>.<br /> Aldrich, T.&nbsp;B., <a href="#Page_256">256</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br /> <i>Alhambra, The</i>, Irving, <a
+      href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br /> Allen, J.&nbsp;L., <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br />
+      <i>American Anthology</i>, Stedman, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.<br />
+      American characteristics, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>-<a href="#Page_5">5</a>.<br />
+      American colonies, literature in the 17th century, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_42">42</a>; journalism, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_62">62</a>; education, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_63">63</a>; science, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_64">64</a>; bibliography of the literature, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_270">270</a>.<br /> American colonists, predominantly English,
+      <a href="#Page_12">12</a>-<a href="#Page_25">25</a>; motives for
+      emigration, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>; moulded by pioneer life, <a
+      href="#Page_17">17</a>-<a href="#Page_23">23</a>; in 1760, <a
+      href="#Page_59">59</a>-<a href="#Page_60">60</a>.<br /> "American idea," <a
+      href="#Page_206">206</a>-<a href="#Page_207">207</a>.<br /> American life
+      since the Civil War, <a href="#Page_234">234</a> <i>et seq</i>.<br />
+      American literature, the term, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.<br /> <i>American
+      Mercury</i>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>.<br /> <i>American Scholar, The</i>,
+      Emerson, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>.<br /> Ames, Fisher, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.<br />
+      <i>Among my Books</i>, Lowell, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.<br /> <i>Andrew
+      Rykman's Prayer</i>, Whittier, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br /> <i>Annabel
+      Lee</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br /> Anthologies, American, <a
+      href="#Page_269">269</a>.<br /> <i>Arsenal at Springfield, The</i>,
+      Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>Assignation, The</i>,
+      Poe, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.<br /> <i>Astoria</i>, Irving, <a
+      href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br /> <i>Atala</i>, Ch&acirc;teaubriand, <a
+      href="#Page_96">96</a>.<br /> <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br /> <i>Autobiography</i>,
+      Franklin, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>-<a href="#Page_59">59</a>.<br /> <i>Autocrat
+      of the Breakfast Table, The</i>, Holmes, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_167">167</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      B
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      <i>Bacchus</i>, Emerson, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.<br /> <i>Ballad of
+      the French Fleet, A</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br />
+      Bancroft, George, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_177">177</a>-<a href="#Page_178">178</a>.<br /> <i>Barefoot
+      Boy, The</i>, Whittier, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.<br /> Bartol, C.&nbsp;A.,
+      <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.<br /> <i>Battle Hymn of the Republic</i>,
+      Howe, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.<br /> <i>Battle
+      of the Kegs, The</i>, Hopkinson, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.<br /> <i>Bay
+      Psalm Book</i>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.<br /> Beecher, H.&nbsp;W., <a
+      href="#Page_216">216</a>-<a href="#Page_217">217</a>.<br /> <i>Belfry of
+      Bruges, The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>Bells,
+      The</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>-<a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br /> <i>Biglow Papers, The</i>, Lowell, <a
+      href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>.<br />
+      <i>Black Cat, The</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.<br /> Blaine, J.&nbsp;G.,
+      quoted, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.<br /> <i>Blithedale Romance, The</i>,
+      Hawthorne, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>-<a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_150">150</a>-<a href="#Page_151">151</a>.<br /> <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">274</a></span> <i>Boston
+      News-Letter</i>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.<br /> <i>Boy's Town, A</i>,
+      Howells, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.<br /> <i>Bracebridge Hall</i>,
+      Irving, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br /> Bradford, William, <a
+      href="#Page_28">28</a>.<br /> Bradstreet, Anne, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_37">37</a>.<br /> <i>Bridge, The</i>, Longfellow, <a
+      href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> Briggs, C.&nbsp;F., quoted, <a
+      href="#Page_190">190</a>.<br /> Brook Farm, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_143">143</a>.<br /> <i>Brooklyn Eagle, The</i>, <a
+      href="#Page_199">199</a>.<br /> Brown, Alice, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.<br /> Brown University, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br />
+      Brownell, H.&nbsp;H., <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.<br /> Brownson, Orestes,
+      <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br /> Bryant, W.&nbsp;C., one of the
+      Knickerbocker Group, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>; personal appearance, <a
+      href="#Page_101">101</a>; life and, writings, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_106">106</a>; died (1878), <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br />
+      "Buffalo Bill," <i>see</i> Cody, W.&nbsp;F. <br /> <i>Building of the Ship,
+      The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br /> Burroughs, John, <a
+      href="#Page_262">262</a>.<br /> <i>By Blue Ontario's Shore</i>, Whitman, <a
+      href="#Page_204">204</a>.<br /> Byrd, William, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      C
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      Cable, G.&nbsp;W., <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.<br /> Calef, Robert, <a
+      href="#Page_43">43</a>.<br /> Calhoun, J.&nbsp;C., <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.<br />
+      Calvinism in New England, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>-<a href="#Page_19">19</a>.<br />
+      <i>Cambridge Thirty Years Ago</i>, Lowell, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.<br />
+      <i>Captain Bonneville</i>, Irving, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br />
+      Carlyle, Thomas, quoted, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.<br /> <i>Cask of
+      Amontillado, The</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.<br /> Cavell,
+      Edith, quoted, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.<br /> Cawein, Madison, <a
+      href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br /> <i>Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
+      County, The</i>, Clemens, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>.<br /> <i>Century
+      Magazine</i>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.<br /> <i>Changeling, The</i>,
+      Lowell, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br /> Channing, Edward, <a
+      href="#Page_13">13</a>.<br /> Channing, W. E., <a href="#Page_112">112</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_142">142</a>.<br /> Ch&acirc;teaubriand, Vicomte de, <a
+      href="#Page_96">96</a>-<a href="#Page_97">97</a>.<br /> <i>Children's Hour,
+      The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.<br /> <i>Chita, Hearn</i>,
+      <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br /> <i>Chinese Ghosts</i>, Hearn, <a
+      href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br /> Choate, Rufus, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.<br />
+      Church, Captain, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.<br /> <i>Circuit Rider, The</i>,
+      Eggleston, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br /> <i>City in the Sea, The</i>,
+      Poe, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>.<br /> Clark, Roger, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>.<br />
+      Clarke, J.&nbsp;F., <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br /> Clay, Henry, <a
+      href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>-<a href="#Page_211">211</a>.<br />
+      Clemens, S.&nbsp;L. (Mark Twain), attacks Cooper's novels, <a
+      href="#Page_99">99</a>; quoted, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>; life and
+      writings, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>-<a href="#Page_240">240</a>;
+      typically American, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /> <i>Cobbler Keezar's
+      Vision</i>, Whittier, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br /> Cody, W.&nbsp;F.
+      (Buffalo Bill), <a href="#Page_243">243</a>.<br /> <i>Columbus, Life of</i>,
+      Irving, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br /> <i>Commemoration Ode</i>, Lowell,
+      <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br /> <i>Common
+      Sense</i>, Paine, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.<br /> <i>Conquest of Granada</i>,
+      Irving, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br /> <i>Conquest of Mexico</i>,
+      Prescott, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>.<br /> <i>Conquest of Peru</i>,
+      Prescott, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>.<br /> <i>Conspiracy of Pontiac, The</i>,
+      Parkman, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>.<br /> Cooke, Rose Terry, <a
+      href="#Page_249">249</a>.<br /> Cooper, J.&nbsp;F., <a href="#Page_95">95</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /> Cotton, John,
+      <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.<br /> <i>Courtship of
+      Miles Standish</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br />
+      "Craddock, C.&nbsp;E.," <i>see</i> Murfree, Mary N.<br /> Cranch, C.&nbsp;P.,
+      <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br /> <i>Crisis, The</i>, Paine, <a
+      href="#Page_75">75</a>.<br /> <i>Cristus</i>, Longfellow, <a
+      href="#Page_155">155</a>-<a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> Cromwell,
+      Oliver, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.<br /> Crothers, S.&nbsp;M., <a
+      href="#Page_262">262</a>-<a href="#Page_263">263</a>.<br /> <i>Crowded
+      Street, The</i>, Bryant, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.<br /> Curtis, G.&nbsp;W.,
+      <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      D
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      Dana, C.&nbsp;A., <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br /> <i>Day is Done, The</i>,
+      Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>Day of Doom, The</i>,
+      Wigglesworth, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>-<a href="#Page_36">36</a>.<br /> <i>Deerslayer,
+      The</i>, Cooper, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.<br /> <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_275" id="Page_275">275</a></span> <i>Democratic Review</i>, <a
+      href="#Page_199">199</a>.<br /> <i>Dial</i>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_140">140</a>.<br /> Drake, J.&nbsp;R., <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br />
+      Drama, American, in the 20th century, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_260">260</a>.<br /> <i>Dred</i>, Stowe, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.<br />
+      <i>Drum Taps</i>, Whitman, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.<br /> Dwight,
+      Timothy, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      E
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      <i>Edict of the King of Prussia against England</i>, Franklin, <a
+      href="#Page_58">58</a>.<br /> <i>Edinburgh Review, The</i>, <a
+      href="#Page_88">88</a>.<br /> Edwards, Jonathan, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>-<a href="#Page_52">52</a>.<br />
+      Eggleston, Edward, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br /> Eliot, John, <a
+      href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br /> <i>Elsie Venner</i>,
+      Holmes, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br /> <i>Embargo, The</i>, Bryant, <a
+      href="#Page_102">102</a>.<br /> Emerson, R.&nbsp;W., in 1826, <a
+      href="#Page_89">89</a>; a Transcendentalist, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_117">117</a>; quoted, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_117">117</a>; life and writings, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_130">130</a>; died (1882), <a href="#Page_255">255</a>;
+      typically American, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>; argues for American
+      books, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.<br /> England in the 17th century, <a
+      href="#Page_13">13</a>.<br /> <i>English Traits</i>, Emerson, <a
+      href="#Page_128">128</a>.<br /> <i>Essay on Man</i>, Pope, <a
+      href="#Page_55">55</a>.<br /> <i>Essays</i>, Emerson, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.<br />
+      Essays of the 20th century, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>-<a href="#Page_263">263</a>.<br />
+      <i>Eternal Goodness, The</i>, Whittier, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br />
+      <i>Ethan Brand</i>, Hawthorne, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>.<br /> <i>Evangeline</i>,
+      Longfellow, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br /> <i>Evening Revery, An</i>,
+      Bryant, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.<br /> Everett, Edward, Oration at
+      Cambridge (1826), <a href="#Page_86">86</a>; quoted, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>;
+      lectures, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>-<a href="#Page_112">112</a>;
+      estimate of, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>; quoted, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>.<br />
+      <i>Excelsior</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>-<a href="#Page_6">6</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>Exiles' Departure</i>, Whittier, <a
+      href="#Page_159">159</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      F
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      <i>Fable for Critics</i>, Lowell, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.<br /> <i>Fall
+      of the House of Usher, The</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.<br /> <i>Farewell
+      Address</i>, Washington, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>.<br /> <i>Farewell
+      Sermon</i>, Edwards, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.<br /> <i>Farmer Refuted,
+      The</i>, Hamilton, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>.<br /> Faust (translation),
+      Taylor, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br /> <i>Federalist</i>, <a
+      href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>.<br />
+      <i>Ferdinand and Isabella, History of the Reign of</i>, Prescott, <a
+      href="#Page_179">179</a>.<br /> Fiction of the 20th century, <a
+      href="#Page_261">261</a>-<a href="#Page_262">262</a>.<br /> <i>Fire of
+      Driftwood, The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>First
+      Snowfall, The</i>, Lowell, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br /> <i>Flood of
+      Years, The</i>, Bryant, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.<br /> <i>Forest Hymn,
+      A</i>, Bryant, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.<br /> Franklin, Benjamin, born
+      (1706), <a href="#Page_44">44</a>; attitude toward church, <a
+      href="#Page_44">44</a>; exponent of New England life, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>;
+      life and writings, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>-<a href="#Page_59">59</a>;
+      conducts <i>Courant</i>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>; activity in
+      Philadelphia, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>-<a href="#Page_62">62</a>. letter
+      from Washington to, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>-<a href="#Page_79">79</a>;
+      typically American, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /> Freeman, Mary
+      Wilkins, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.<br />
+      Freneau, Philip, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_72">72</a>.<br /> <i>Frontenac</i>, Parkman, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.<br />
+      Frost, Robert, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>.<br /> Fugitive slave act, <a
+      href="#Page_144">144</a>.<br /> Fuller, Margaret, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_140">140</a>-<a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      G
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      Garrison, W.&nbsp;L., <a href="#Page_89">89</a>-<a href="#Page_90">90</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>-<a href="#Page_218">218</a>.<br />
+      <i>Gettysburg Address</i>, Lincoln, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_231">231</a>.<br /> <i>Gilded Age, The</i>, Clemens, <a
+      href="#Page_237">237</a>-<a href="#Page_238">238</a>.<br /> <i>God
+      Glorified in Man's Dependence</i>, Edwards, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.<br />
+      <i>Gold Bug, The</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.<br /> Gookin,
+      Daniel, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br /> Greeley, Horace, <a
+      href="#Page_217">217</a>-<a href="#Page_218">218</a>.<br /> Greenslet,
+      Ferris, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      H
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      Hale, E.&nbsp;E., <a href="#Page_224">224</a>.<br /> <i>Half-Century of
+      Conflict, A</i>, Parkman, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.<br /> Halleck,
+      Fitz-Greene, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br /> Hamilton, Alexander, <a
+      href="#Page_76">76</a>-<a href="#Page_77">77</a>.<br /> <i>Hanging of the
+      Crane, The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">276</a></span> Harris, J.&nbsp;C.,
+      <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.<br /> Harte, Bret, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_242">242</a>.<br /> Harvard, John, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.<br />
+      Harvard College, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br /> <i>Haunted Palace, The</i>,
+      Poe, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br /> Hawthorne, Nathaniel, in 1826, <a
+      href="#Page_89">89</a>; opinion of Bryant, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>;
+      opinion of Transcendentalism, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>; life and
+      writings, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>-<a href="#Page_152">152</a>;
+      typically American, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /> Hayne, Paul, <a
+      href="#Page_225">225</a>.<br /> <i>Hazard of New Fortunes, A</i>, Howells,
+      <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.<br /> Hearn, Lafcadio, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br />
+      Hecker, Father, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br /> Henry, Patrick, <a
+      href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>.<br /> <i>Herons of
+      Elmwood, The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>Hiawatha</i>,
+      Longfellow, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br /> Higginson, T.&nbsp;W., <a
+      href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>.<br /> Holmes, O.&nbsp;W.,
+      in 1826, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>; attitude toward Transcendentalism, <a
+      href="#Page_143">143</a>; life and writings, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_168">168</a>; died (1894), <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br />
+      <i>Home Sweet Home</i>, Payne, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br /> Hooker,
+      Thomas, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>-<a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_30">30</a>-<a href="#Page_31">31</a>.<br /> <i>Hoosier
+      Schoolmaster, The</i>, Eggleston, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br /> <i>House
+      of the Seven Gables, The</i>, Hawthorne, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_150">150</a>.<br /> Hovey, Richard, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br />
+      Howells, W.&nbsp;D., <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>-<a href="#Page_251">251</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /> Hubbard, William, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.<br />
+      <i>Huckleberry Finn</i>, Clemens, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.<br />
+      Humorists, American, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>.<br /> Hutchinson, Anne,
+      <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.<br /> Hutchinson, Thomas, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.<br />
+      <i>Hyperion</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      <i>Indian Wars</i>, Hubbard, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.<br /> Indians, in
+      literature, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>-<a href="#Page_40">40</a>; Thoreau's
+      notes on, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.<br /> <i>Innocents Abroad</i>,
+      Clemens, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>.<br />
+      Irving, Washington, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_95">95</a>.<br /> <i>Israfel</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      J
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      Jackson, Andrew, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.<br /> Jackson, Helen Hunt, <a
+      href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br /> James, Henry, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_251">251</a>-<a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br /> Jay, John,
+      <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.<br /> Jefferson, Thomas, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /> <i>Jesuits in
+      North America, The</i>, Parkman, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.<br /> Jewett,
+      Sarah Orne, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.<br />
+      <i>John of Barneveld, Life and Death of</i>, Motley, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>.<br />
+      Johnson, Edward, Captain, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br /> <i>Joshua
+      Whitcomb</i>, Thompson, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br /> <i>Journal</i>,
+      Emerson, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.<br /> <i>Journal</i>,
+      Thoreau, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.<br /> <i>Journal</i>,
+      Woolman, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.<br /> <i>Journal and Correspondence</i>,
+      Longfellow, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.<br /> Journalism, in the colonies,
+      <a href="#Page_60">60</a>-<a href="#Page_62">62</a>; in 20th century, <a
+      href="#Page_263">263</a>-<a href="#Page_264">264</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      K
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      Kemble, Fanny, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>-<a href="#Page_246">246</a>.<br />
+      Kennedy, J.&nbsp;P., <a href="#Page_245">245</a>.<br /> King, Grace, <a
+      href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br /> King, Starr, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>.<br />
+      King Philip's War, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>-<a href="#Page_40">40</a>.<br />
+      King's College (Columbia), <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br /> Knickerbocker
+      group of writers, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>; works by, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      L
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      <i>Languishing Commonwealth</i>, Walley, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>.<br />
+      Lanier, Sidney, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>-<a href="#Page_256">256</a>.<br />
+      <i>La Salle</i>, Parkman, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.<br /> <i>Last Leaf,
+      The</i>, Holmes, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.<br /> <i>Last of the
+      Mohicans, The</i>, Cooper, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.<br /> <i>Leather-Stocking Tales</i>, Cooper, <a
+      href="#Page_97">97</a>-<a href="#Page_99">99</a>.<br /> <i>Leaves of Grass</i>,
+      Whitman, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_202">202</a>-<a href="#Page_203">203</a>.<br /> <i>Letters</i>,
+      Motley, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>.<br /> <i>Letters from an American
+      Farmer</i>, Cr&egrave;vec&oelig;ur, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_68">68</a>.<br /> <i>Liberator, The</i>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.<br /> <i>Library
+      of American Biography</i>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>.<br /> <i>Life on
+      the Mississippi</i>, Clemens, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>.<br /> <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">277</a></span> <i>Ligeia</i>,
+      Poe, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.<br /> Lincoln, Abraham, recognizes
+      uncertainty in the nation, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>; would have approved
+      Winthrop, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>; address at Cooper Union (1860), <a
+      href="#Page_104">104</a>-<a href="#Page_105">105</a>; quoted, <a
+      href="#Page_155">155</a>; as a writer of liberty, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>;
+      character and writings, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>-<a href="#Page_233">233</a>;
+      typically American, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /> <i>Lionel Lincoln</i>,
+      Cooper, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.<br /> <i>Literati</i>, Pope, <a
+      href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br /> <i>Little Women</i>, Alcott, <a
+      href="#Page_140">140</a>.<br /> London, Jack, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_244">244</a>.<br /> London in 1724, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_56">56</a>.<br /> Longfellow, H.&nbsp;W., in 1826, <a
+      href="#Page_89">89</a>; attitude toward Transcendentalism, <a
+      href="#Page_143">143</a>; life and writings, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_157">157</a>; died (1882), <a href="#Page_255">255</a>;
+      disparagement of, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.<br /> Longstreet, A.&nbsp;B.,
+      <a href="#Page_245">245</a>.<br /> Louisiana Purchase, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.<br />
+      Lowell, J.&nbsp;R., in 1826, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>; attitude toward
+      Transcendentalism, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>; life and writings, <a
+      href="#Page_168">168</a>-<a href="#Page_174">174</a>; died (1891), <a
+      href="#Page_255">255</a>; typically American, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br />
+      <i>Luck of Roaring Camp, The</i>, Harte, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>.<br />
+      Lyceum system, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      M
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      <i>McFingal</i>, Trumbull, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.<br /> Magazines, in
+      colonies, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>-<a href="#Page_61">61</a>; in 20th
+      century, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>-<a href="#Page_264">264</a>.<br /> <i>Magnalia
+      Christi Americana</i>, Mather, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_47">47</a>.<br /> <i>Maidenhood</i>, Longfellow, <a
+      href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, The</i>,
+      Clemens, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.<br /> <i>Man Without a Country</i>,
+      Hale, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>.<br /> <i>Marble Faun, The</i>,
+      Hawthorne, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>.<br />
+      <i>Marshes of Glynn, The</i>, Lanier, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br /> <i>Martin
+      Chuzzlewit</i>, Dickens, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.<br /> Mason, John,
+      Captain, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br /> <i>Massachusetts to Virginia</i>,
+      Whittier, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>.<br /> Mather, Cotton, <a
+      href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>-<a href="#Page_48">48</a>;
+      diary, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>-<a href="#Page_47">47</a>.<br /> Mather,
+      Increase, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.<br /> <i>Maud Muller</i>, Whittier, <a
+      href="#Page_5">5</a>-<a href="#Page_6">6</a>.<br /> <i>Memorial Odes</i>,
+      Lowell, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br /> Miller, C.&nbsp;H. (Joaquin), <a
+      href="#Page_244">244</a>.<br /> <i>Minister's Black Veil, The</i>,
+      Hawthorne, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.<br /> <i>Minister's Wooing, The</i>,
+      Stowe, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.<br /> <i>Modern Instance, A</i>,
+      Howells, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.<br /> <i>Montcalm and Wolfe</i>,
+      Parkman, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.<br /> Moody, W.&nbsp;V., <a
+      href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br /> <i>Morituri Salutamus</i>, Longfellow, <a
+      href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> Morris, G.&nbsp;P., <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br />
+      <i>Mosses from an Old Manse</i>, Hawthorne, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br />
+      Motley, J.&nbsp;L., <a href="#Page_143">143</a>-<a href="#Page_144">144</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_182">182</a>.<br /> Muir, John, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_245">245</a>.<br /> <i>Murders in the Rue Morgue, The</i>, Poe,
+      <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.<br /> Murfree, Mary N. (C.&nbsp;E. Craddock),
+      <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br /> <i>My Garden Acquaintance</i>, Lowell,
+      <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.<br /> <i>My Literary Friends and Acquaintances</i>,
+      Howells, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.<br /> <i>My Literary Passions</i>,
+      Howells, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.<br /> <i>My Lost Youth</i>,
+      Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>My Mark Twain</i>,
+      Howells, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.<br /> <i>My Psalm, Whittier</i>, <a
+      href="#Page_160">160</a>.<br /> <i>My Study Windows</i>, Lowell, <a
+      href="#Page_170">170</a>.<br /> <i>Mysterious Stranger, The</i>, Clemens,
+      <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      N
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      <i>National Gazette</i>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.<br /> <i>National
+      Literature</i>, Channing, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>.<br /> <i>National
+      Ode</i>, Taylor, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br /> <i>Nature</i>, Emerson,
+      <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_131">131</a>.<br /> Nature-writing, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>.<br />
+      <i>Netherlands, History of the United</i>, Motley, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>.<br />
+      New England, a digression from English society, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>;
+      at the beginning of 18th century, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_44">44</a>; characteristics of the people of, <a
+      href="#Page_109">109</a>-<a href="#Page_111">111</a>; <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_278" id="Page_278">278</a></span> in last quarter of 19th
+      century, <a href="#Page_248">248</a> <i>et seq</i>.<br /> <i>New England,
+      History of</i>, Winthrop, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>-<a href="#Page_29">29</a>.<br />
+      <i>New England Courant</i>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>.<br /> New National
+      period in American literature, <a href="#Page_234">234</a> <i>et seq</i>.;
+      bibliography, <a href="#Page_272">272</a>.<br /> New York at beginning of
+      18th century, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.<br /> <i>New York Tribune</i>, <a
+      href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.<br /> <i>Newburyport
+      Free Press</i>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>.<br />
+      Newspapers, in colonies, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>-<a href="#Page_61">61</a>;
+      in 20th century, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>-<a href="#Page_264">264</a>.<br />
+      <i>North American Review</i>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.<br /> North Carolina in 1724, <a
+      href="#Page_44">44</a>.<br /> <i>North of Boston</i>, Frost, <a
+      href="#Page_261">261</a>.<br /> Norwood, Colonel, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      O
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      Oakes, Urian, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>.<br /> <i>Old Creole Days</i>,
+      Cable, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.<br /> <i>Old Homestead, The</i>,
+      Thompson, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br /> <i>Old Ironsides</i>, Holmes,
+      <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.<br /> Old Manse, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_146">145</a>.<br /> <i>Old R&eacute;gime,
+      The</i>, Parkman, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.<br /> <i>Old Swimmin' Hole,
+      The</i>, Riley, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br /> <i>Oldtown Fireside
+      Stories</i>, Stowe, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.<br /> <i>Oldtown Folks</i>,
+      Stowe, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.<br /> Olmsted, F.&nbsp;L., <a
+      href="#Page_246">246</a>.<br /> <i>On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners</i>,
+      Lowell, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.<br /> Oratory in America, <a
+      href="#Page_208">208</a> <i>et seq</i>.<br /> <i>Oregon Trail, The</i>,
+      Parkman, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>.<br /> Otis, James, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.<br /> <i>Our Hundred Days</i>, Holmes, <a
+      href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br /> <i>Outcast of Poker Flat, The</i>, Harte,
+      <a href="#Page_242">242</a>.<br /> <i>Outre-mer</i>, Longfellow, <a
+      href="#Page_152">152</a>.<br /> <i>Overland Monthly</i>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      P
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      Page, T.&nbsp; N., <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br />
+      Paine, Thomas, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>-<a href="#Page_76">76</a>.<br />
+      Parker, Theodore, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>.<br /> Parkman,
+      Francis, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>-<a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>-<a href="#Page_186">186</a>.<br />
+      <i>Passage to India</i>, Whitman, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.<br /> <i>Passionate
+      Pilgrim, A</i>, James, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.<br /> <i>Pathfinder,
+      The</i>, Cooper, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.<br /> Pattee, F.&nbsp;L., <a
+      href="#Page_236">236</a>.<br /> <i>Paul Revere's Ride</i>, Longfellow, <a
+      href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br /> Paulding, J.&nbsp;K., <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br />
+      Payne, J.&nbsp;H., <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br /> Pennsylvania,
+      University of, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br /> <i>Pennsylvania Gazette</i>,
+      <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br /> <i>Pennsylvania Magazine</i>, <a
+      href="#Page_74">74</a>.<br /> Pequot War (1637), <a href="#Page_38">38</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_39">39</a>.<br /> Percy, George, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br /> Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.<br />
+      <i>Philip II, History of the Reign of</i>, Prescott, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>.<br />
+      Phillips, Wendell, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_216">216</a>.<br /> <i>Picture of New York</i>, Mitchill, <a
+      href="#Page_90">90</a>.<br /> <i>Pilot, The</i>, Cooper, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.<br />
+      <i>Pioneers, O Pioneers</i>, Whitman, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.<br /> <i>Pioneers,
+      The</i>, Cooper, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>-<a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_99">99</a>.<br /> <i>Pioneers of France, The</i>, Parkman, <a
+      href="#Page_185">185</a>.<br /> <i>Pirate, The</i>, Scot, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.<br />
+      <i>Plymouth Plantation, History of</i>, Bradford, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_29">29</a>.<br /> Poe, E.&nbsp;A., "literature of escape," <a
+      href="#Page_8">8</a>; in 1826, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>; in New York, <a
+      href="#Page_108">108</a>; life and writings, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_196">196</a>.<br /> <i>Poet at the Breakfast Table, The</i>,
+      Holmes, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br /> Poetry, Revolutionary verse, <a
+      href="#Page_69">69</a>-<a href="#Page_72">72</a>; of freedom, <a
+      href="#Page_223">223</a> <i>et seq</i>.; of the 20th century, <a
+      href="#Page_260">260</a>-<a href="#Page_261">261</a>.<br /> <i>Poets and
+      Poetry of America</i>, Griswold, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br /> <i>Poor
+      Richard</i>, Franklin, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.<br />
+      Pory, John, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.<br /> <i>Prairie, The</i>, Cooper,
+      <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.<br /> <i>Precaution</i>,
+      Cooper, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>.<br /> Prescott, W.&nbsp;H., <a
+      href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>-<a href="#Page_144">144</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_180">180</a>.<br /> <i>Present Crisis, The</i>, Lowell, <a
+      href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br /> <i>Prince of Parthia, The</i>, <a
+      href="#Page_260">260</a>.<br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279"
+      id="Page_279">279</a></span> <i>Professor at the Breakfast Table, The</i>,
+      Holmes, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br /> <i>Psalm of Life, The</i>,
+      Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>Psalm of the West</i>,
+      Lanier, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br /> <i>Publick Occurrences</i>, <a
+      href="#Page_60">60</a>.<br /> Puritans, The, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_35">35</a>.<br /> <i>Purloined Letter, The</i>, Poe, <a
+      href="#Page_193">193</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      Q
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      <i>Quarterly, The</i>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      R
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      <i>Rainy Day, The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>Ramona</i>,
+      Jackson, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br /> <i>Ramoth Hill</i>, Whittier,
+      <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.<br /> <i>Raven, The</i>, Poe, <a
+      href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br /> Read, T.&nbsp;B., <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.<br />
+      <i>Reality of Spiritual Life, The</i>, Edwards, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.<br />
+      <i>Reaper and the Flowers, The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.<br />
+      <i>Red Rover, The</i>, Cooper, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.<br /> Religious
+      freedom in the colonies, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.<br /> <i>Ren&eacute;</i>,
+      Ch&acirc;teaubriand, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>.<br /> Repplier, Agnes, <a
+      href="#Page_262">262</a>.<br /> Revolution, influence upon literature, <a
+      href="#Page_66">66</a> <i>et seq</i>.; bibliography, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>.<br />
+      <i>Rights of Man, The</i>, Paine, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.<br /> Riley,
+      J.&nbsp;W., <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_259">259</a>.<br /> Ripley, George, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br />
+      <i>Rise of Silas Lapham, The</i>, Howells, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.<br />
+      <i>Rise of the Dutch Republic</i>, Motley, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>.<br />
+      <i>Rivulet, The</i>, Bryant, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.<br /> Robinson,
+      John, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.<br /> <i>Roderick Hudson</i>, James, <a
+      href="#Page_253">253</a>.<br /> Rolfe, John, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br />
+      Romanticism in American literature, <a href="#Page_187">187</a> <i>et seq</i>.
+      Roosevelt, Theodore, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>.<br /> <i>Roughing It</i>,
+      Clemens, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>.<br />
+      Rowlandson, Mary, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.<br /> <i>Rules for Reducing a
+      Great Empire to a Small One</i>, Franklin, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>.<br />
+      Russell, Irwin, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      <h3>
+        S
+      </h3>
+      Salem "witchcraft," <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.<br /> <i>Salmagundi Papers</i>,
+      Irving and Paulding, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br /> Sanborn, F.&nbsp;B.,
+      <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.<br /> Sandys, George, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.<br />
+      <i>Scarlet Letter, The</i>, Hawthorne, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_150">150</a>.<br /> <i>School-Days</i>, Whittier, <a
+      href="#Page_158">158</a>.<br /> Scott, Sir Walter, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.<br />
+      <i>Scribner's Monthly</i>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.<br /> Scudder,
+      Horace, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.<br /> <i>Seaweed</i>, Longfellow, <a
+      href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> Sewell, Samuel, Judge, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_48">48</a>.<br /> Shepard, Thomas, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_31">31</a>-<a href="#Page_32">32</a>.<br /> Short story,
+      the, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>-<a href="#Page_262">262</a>.<br /> Sill,
+      E.&nbsp;R., <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br /> Simms, W.&nbsp;G., <a
+      href="#Page_245">245</a>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.<br /> <i>Simple
+      Cobbler of Agawam, The</i>, Ward, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.<br /> <i>Sinners
+      in the Hands of an Angry God</i>, Edwards, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.<br />
+      <i>Skeleton in Armor, The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br />
+      <i>Sketch Book</i>, Irving, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br />
+      <i>Skipper Ireson's Ride</i>, Whittier, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br />
+      Slavery, influence on literature, <a href="#Page_207">207</a> <i>et seq</i>.
+      <i>Slavery in Massachusetts</i>, Thoreau, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.<br />
+      Smith, F.&nbsp;H., <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br /> Smith, John, <a
+      href="#Page_8">8</a>-<a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br /> Smith, Sydney, quoted, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_89">89</a>.<br /> <i>Snow-Bound</i>, Whittier, <a
+      href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>-<a href="#Page_162">162</a>.<br />
+      <i>Snow-Image and Other Tales, The</i>, Hawthorne, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br />
+      <i>Songs of Labor</i>, Whittier, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br /> South
+      Carolina in 1724, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.<br /> South, The, in American
+      literature, 245 <i>et seq</i>. Sparks, Jared, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>.<br />
+      Spofford, Harriet Prescott, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.<br /> <i>Spoon
+      River Anthology</i>, Masters, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>.<br /> <i>Spy,
+      The</i>, Cooper, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_98">98</a>.<br /> Stamp Act (1765), <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.<br />
+      <i>Star-Spangled Banner, The</i>, Key, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_225">225</a>.<br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280"
+      id="Page_280">280</a></span> Stedman, E.&nbsp;C., <a href="#Page_225">225</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.<br /> Stowe, Harriet Beecher, <a
+      href="#Page_219">219</a>-<a href="#Page_223">223</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.<br />
+      Strachey, William, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br />
+      <i>Summary View of the Rights of British America, A</i>, Jefferson, <a
+      href="#Page_80">80</a>.<br /> Sumner, Charles, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.<br />
+      <i>Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line</i>, Lowell, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      T
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      <i>Tales of a Traveler</i>, Irving, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br /> <i>Tales
+      of a Wayside Inn</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br /> <i>Tamerlane
+      and Other Poems</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.<br /> Taylor, Bayard,
+      <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br /> <i>Telling the Bees</i>, Whittier, <a
+      href="#Page_158">158</a>.<br /> <i>Tennessee's Partner</i>, Harte, <a
+      href="#Page_242">242</a>.<br /> <i>Thanatopsis</i>, Bryant, <a
+      href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.<br />
+      Thomas, Edith, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br /> Thompson, Denman, <a
+      href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br /> Thoreau, H.&nbsp;D., representative of New
+      England thought, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>; life and writings, <a
+      href="#Page_130">130</a>-<a href="#Page_139">139</a>; nature-writing, <a
+      href="#Page_262">262</a>; typically American, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br />
+      Ticknor, George, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.<br /> Timrod,
+      Henry, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.<br /> <i>To Helen</i>, Poe, <a
+      href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br /> <i>Tom Sawyer</i>,
+      Clemens, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.<br /> <i>Tour of the Prairies</i>,
+      Irving, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br /> Transcendentalism, <a
+      href="#Page_111">111</a> <i>et seq.</i>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>;
+      bibliography, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>-<a href="#Page_271">271</a>.<br />
+      <i>Tritemius</i>, Whittier, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br /> <i>True
+      Relation</i>, Smith, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>-<a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_25">25</a>-<a href="#Page_26">26</a>.<br /> <i>True Repertory
+      of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt. vpon and from the Islands of the
+      Bermudas</i>, Strachey, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.<br /> Tuckerman, F.&nbsp;G.,
+      quoted, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.<br /> Twain, Mark, <i>see</i> Clemens,
+      S.&nbsp;L.<br /> <i>Twice-Told Tales</i>, Hawthorne, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.<br />
+      Tyler, Professor, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      U
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      <i>Ulalume</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br /> <i>Uncle Tom's
+      Cabin</i>, Stowe, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_223">223</a>.<br /> <i>Union of the Colonies</i>, Franklin, <a
+      href="#Page_59">59</a>.<br /> Unitarianism, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_113">113</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      V
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      Verplanck, J.&nbsp;C., <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br /> Very, Jones, <a
+      href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br /> Virginia, a continuation of English
+      society, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>; in 1724, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.<br />
+      <i>Virginia House of Burgesses, Address of the</i>, Jefferson, <a
+      href="#Page_80">80</a>.<br /> <i>Virginians, The</i>, Thackeray, <a
+      href="#Page_45">45</a>.<br /> <i>Vision of Sir Launfal, The</i>, Lowell, <a
+      href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      W
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      <i>Walden</i>, Thoreau, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.<br /> Walley, Thomas, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>.<br />
+      Warner, C.&nbsp;D., <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.<br /> Washington, George, <a
+      href="#Page_64">64</a>-<a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_77">77</a>-<a href="#Page_78">78</a>.<br /> <i>Waterfowl, To
+      a</i>, Bryant, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.<br />
+      Webster, Daniel, eulogy for Adams and Jefferson, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_87">87</a>; civic note in oratory of, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>;
+      criticism of Clay, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>; his oratory, <a
+      href="#Page_211">211</a>-<a href="#Page_215">215</a>.<br /> <i>Week on the
+      Concord and Merrimac Rivers, A</i>, Thoreau, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.<br />
+      Wendell, Barrett, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.<br /> West, The, in American
+      literature, <a href="#Page_237">237</a> <i>et seq</i>.<br /> <i>Westchester
+      Farmer, The</i>, Seabury, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>.<br /> <i>When Lilacs
+      last in the Dooryard Bloomed</i>, Whitman, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.<br />
+      <i>When the Frost is on the Punkin</i>, Riley, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br />
+      Whitaker, Alexander, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>-<a href="#Page_27">27</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br /> Whitman, Walt, in 1826, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>;
+      in New York, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>; life and writings, <a
+      href="#Page_196">196</a>-<a href="#Page_205">205</a>; died (1892), <a
+      href="#Page_255">255</a>; typically American, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>;
+      argues for American books, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.<br /> Whittier, J.&nbsp;G.,
+      in 1826, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>; attitude towards Transcendentalism, <a
+      href="#Page_143">143</a>; life and writings, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>-<a
+      href="#Page_164">164</a>; died (1892), <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br />
+      William and Mary College, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br /> <i>William
+      Wilson</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.<br /> <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_281" id="Page_281">281</a></span> Williams, Roger, <a
+      href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_32">32</a>-<a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_40">40</a>-<a href="#Page_41">41</a>.<br /> Willis, N.&nbsp;P.,
+      <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br /> Winthrop, John, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>-<a href="#Page_29">29</a>.<br />
+      Wirt, William, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>.<br /> Wister, Owen, <a
+      href="#Page_243">243</a>.<br /> <i>Wonder-Book, The</i>, Hawthorne, <a
+      href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>.<br /> Woodberry,
+      George, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br /> Woodworth, Samuel, <a
+      href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br /> Woolman, John, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.<br />
+      <i>Wreck of the Hesperus, The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br />
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      Y
+    </h3>
+    <div class="indexfont">
+      Yale University, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br /> <i>Years of my Youth</i>,
+      Howells, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.<br />
+    </div>
+    <hr />
+    <div class="chapterhead">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <a href="#Contents">The Chronicles of America Series</a>
+    </h2>
+    <ol>
+      <li>
+        The Red Man's Continent<br /> by Ellsworth Huntington
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Spanish Conquerors<br /> by Irving Berdine Richman
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        Elizabethan Sea-Dogs<br /> by William Charles Henry Wood
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Crusaders of New France<br /> by William Bennett Munro
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        Pioneers of the Old South<br /> by Mary Johnson
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Fathers of New England<br /> by Charles McLean Andrews
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        Dutch and English on the Hudson<br /> by Maud Wilder Goodwin
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Quaker Colonies<br /> by Sydney George Fisher
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        Colonial Folkways<br /> by Charles McLean Andrews
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Conquest of New France<br /> by George McKinnon Wrong
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Eve of the Revolution<br /> by Carl Lotus Becker
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        Washington and His Comrades in Arms<br /> by George McKinnon Wrong
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Fathers of the Constitution<br /> by Max Farrand
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        Washington and His Colleagues<br /> by Henry Jones Ford
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        Jefferson and his Colleagues<br /> by Allen Johnson
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        John Marshall and the Constitution<br /> by Edward Samuel Corwin
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Fight for a Free Sea<br /> by Ralph Delahaye Paine
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        Pioneers of the Old Southwest<br /> by Constance Lindsay Skinner
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Old Northwest<br /> by Frederic Austin Ogg
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Reign of Andrew Jackson<br /> by Frederic Austin Ogg
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Paths of Inland Commerce<br /> by Archer Butler Hulbert
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        Adventurers of Oregon<br /> by Constance Lindsay Skinner
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Spanish Borderlands<br /> by Herbert Eugene Bolton
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        Texas and the Mexican War<br /> by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Forty-Niners<br /> by Stewart Edward White
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Passing of the Frontier<br /> by Emerson Hough
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Cotton Kingdom<br /> by William E. Dodd
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Anti-Slavery Crusade<br /> by Jesse Macy
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        Abraham Lincoln and the Union<br /> by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Day of the Confederacy<br /> by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        Captains of the Civil War<br /> by William Charles Henry Wood
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Sequel of Appomattox<br /> by Walter Lynwood Fleming
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The American Spirit in Education<br /> by Edwin E. Slosson
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        <span class="smcap">The American Spirit in Literature<br /> by Bliss
+        Perry</span>
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        Our Foreigners<br /> by Samuel Peter Orth
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Old Merchant Marine<br /> by Ralph Delahaye Paine
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Age of Invention<br /> by Holland Thompson
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Railroad Builders<br /> by John Moody
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Age of Big Business<br /> by Burton Jesse Hendrick
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Armies of Labor<br /> by Samuel Peter Orth
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Masters of Capital<br /> by John Moody
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The New South<br /> by Holland Thompson
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Boss and the Machine<br /> by Samuel Peter Orth
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Cleveland Era<br /> by Henry Jones Ford
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Agrarian Crusade<br /> by Solon Justus Buck
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Path of Empire<br /> by Carl Russell Fish
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        Theodore Roosevelt and His Times<br /> by Harold Howland
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        Woodrow Wilson and the World War<br /> by Charles Seymour
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Canadian Dominion<br /> by Oscar D. Skelton
+      </li>
+      <li>
+        The Hispanic Nations of the New World<br /> by William R. Shepherd
+      </li>
+    </ol>
+    <hr />
+    <div class="chapterhead">
+      <br /> <br /><br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        Transcriber's Notes
+      </h2>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <h3>
+        Introduction:
+      </h3>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>Detailed Notes Section</i> of these
+      notes. The spelling of some index entries were changed to match the
+      spelling used in the text. The <i>Detailed Notes Section</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      Detailed Notes Section:
+    </h3>
+    <div class="notes">
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <h4>
+        A Note on Centuries
+      </h4>
+      <p class="noindent">
+        Throughout the <i>Chronicles of America</i> 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.
+      </p>
+      <ul>
+        <li>
+          <a href="#Page_55">Page 55</a>: England is weary of seventeenth
+          century "enthusiasm,"
+        </li>
+        <li>
+          <a href="#Page_85">Page 85</a>: the immense nineteenth century
+          audience
+        </li>
+        <li>
+          <a href="#Page_90">Page 90</a>: nineteenth century England
+        </li>
+        <li>
+          <a href="#Page_93">Page 93</a>: other eighteenth century tradition,
+        </li>
+        <li>
+          <a href="#Page_138">Page 138</a>: twentieth century America can see
+        </li>
+        <li>
+          <a href="#Page_166">Page 166</a>: resembled such a typical eighteenth
+          century figure
+        </li>
+        <li>
+          <a href="#Page_182">Page 182</a>: a nineteenth century historian
+        </li>
+      </ul>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <h4>
+        Chapter II
+      </h4>
+      <p class="noindent">
+        &bull; <a href="#Page_36">Page 36</a>:<br /> 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.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <h4>
+        Chapter IV
+      </h4>
+      <p class="noindent">
+        &bull; <a href="#Page_72">Page 72</a>:<br /> 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."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <h4>
+        Chapter V
+      </h4>
+      <p class="noindent">
+        &bull; <a href="#Page_98">Page 90</a>:<br /> 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.<br /> &bull; <a href="#Page_98">Page
+        98</a>:<br /> 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.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <h4>
+        Chapter VI
+      </h4>
+      <p class="noindent">
+        &bull; <a href="#Page_133">Page 133</a>:<br /> Poll-tax is hyphenated and
+        split between two lines for spacing. We kept the hyphen.<br /> &bull; <a
+        href="#Page_137">Page 137</a>:<br /> Wolf-like is hyphenated and split
+        between two lines for spacing. We kept the hyphen.<br /> &bull; <a
+        href="#Page_138">Page 138</a>:<br /> Post-office is hyphenated and split
+        between two lines for spacing. We kept the hyphen.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <h4>
+        Chapter VII
+      </h4>
+      <p class="noindent">
+        &bull; <a href="#Page_145">Page 145</a>:<br /> On Page 145, Hawthorne's
+        <i>The Snow-Image</i> contained a hyphen, but the same title on page 148
+        did not have a hyphen: <i>The Snow Image.</i> <br /> &bull; <a
+        href="#Page_153">Page 153</a>:<br /> 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. <br />
+        &bull; <a href="#Page_172">Page 172</a>:<br /> <i>The First Snow-Fall</i>
+        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, <i>The First Snow-Fall</i>. <br />
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <h4>
+        Chapter IX
+      </h4>
+      <p class="noindent">
+        &bull; <a href="#Page_208">Page 208</a>:<br /> Epoch-making is hyphenated
+        and split between two lines for spacing. On page 184, the hyphen was
+        used, so we retained it here.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <h4>
+        Index
+      </h4>
+      <p class="noindent">
+        &bull; <a href="#Page_276">Page 276</a>:<br /> Changed the acute accent
+        to a grave accent in the spelling of Cr&egrave;vec&oelig;ur to match the
+        text in index entry: <i>Letters from an American Farmer</i>, Cr&eacute;vec&oelig;ur,
+        60, 68. <br /> &bull; <a href="#Page_276">Page 276</a>:<br /> Change
+        Leatherstocking to Leather-Stocking in index entry "Leather-Stocking
+        Tales, Cooper,"<br /> &bull; <a href="#Page_278">Page 278</a>:<br />
+        Change Oake to Oakes in index entry "Oake, Urian."<br /> &bull; <a
+        href="#Page_280">Page 280</a>:<br /> Change Twicetold to Twice-Told in
+        index entry "Twice-Told Tales, Hawthorne."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <hr />
+    <div class="boilerplate">
+      <p class="boilerplate bold double-space-top">
+        *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN
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+Project Gutenberg's The American Spirit in Literature,, by Bliss Perry
+
+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
+
+Posting Date: January 15, 2009 [EBook #3410]
+Release Date: September, 2002
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE, ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The James J. Kelly Library of St. Gregory's
+University, and Alev Akman
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE,
+
+A CHRONICLE OF GREAT INTERPRETERS
+
+By Bliss Perry
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+     I. THE PIONEERS
+
+     II. THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE
+
+     III. THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION
+
+     IV. THE REVOLUTION
+
+     V. THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP
+
+     VI. THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS
+
+     VII. ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY
+
+     VIII. POE AND WHITMAN
+
+     IX. UNION AND LIBERTY
+
+     X. A NEW NATION
+
+     BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+
+
+
+THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. 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.
+
+An 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 rearmed 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 soldier 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 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, ready 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" is 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 must 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 unity. 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 London 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. 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 field 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 as 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 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 varied 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 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 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
+university 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 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 nature 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 years 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 to 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 own 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 English 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 working 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.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. 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. Codfishing 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 gallant 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,
+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 north east of 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 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,"
+that 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 would 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 with 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 role 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 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 many 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 aesthetic 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 outpourings 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 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 lady, 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, upon 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. Cromwell 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. The
+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 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. Old 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.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. 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. Young 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," just 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
+was 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
+"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 Pepys'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 precision 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 "Freedom 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
+length 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 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 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
+mentions 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 accepted 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 prose, 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 mediaeval 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 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 topics. 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 the 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 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."
+Crevecoeur'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, like 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." * 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.
+
+     * 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 Mercury" or 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 in 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, and 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 of 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."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. THE REVOLUTION
+
+If we 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 of 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 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 Crevecoeur's touching words, of the "secret
+communion among good men throughout the world." "I am a lover of peace,
+what must I do?" asks Crevecoeur 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." Crevecoeur, 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 ending tragically in civil war. Another
+whitesouled 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 Springs. 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 roommate 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: "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. He 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 aesthetic, 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 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. "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 was 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
+thinker, 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 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 repair; 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, 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 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 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 philosophical, 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 positions, 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 simply, 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 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.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. 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 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 since 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 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 Whittier'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 treetops 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 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 about 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 light 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 Christmas,
+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 narrative 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 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 "Rene," the mystery and
+enchantment of our dark forests and endless rivers. But Chateaubriand,
+like Brockden Brown, is feverish. A taint of 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
+tale 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 stouthearted 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 the
+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 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
+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. 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, 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, 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 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
+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 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 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.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS
+
+To understand 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 mediaeval mysticism, and to the English Platonists; touched
+throughout by the French Revolutionary 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 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 "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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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 aesthetic 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 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 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 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, antisocial, anti-Christian" are the terms applied to
+him by one of his most penetrating critics. Yet I should prefer to say
+"un-scientific," "unsocial," 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 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 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 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 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 polltax, 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
+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 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 byproducts 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 note books, 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, 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,
+wolflike, 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 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 postoffice.
+You may depend upon it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the
+greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive 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 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. 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 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.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. 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 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," 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 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 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 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.
+
+"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 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 Phoebe 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 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 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
+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. 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 folklore 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 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," 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," "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. 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 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 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 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
+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 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 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 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 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 societe 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.
+
+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 "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 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
+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
+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, 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 SnowFall," "After the Burial," have touched many hearts.
+
+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
+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.
+
+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 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.
+
+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. 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 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 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 Gottingen 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 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 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, 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 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 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 Regime," "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 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 but at Walden,
+these were something which our later Greeks of the New England Athens
+esteemed as foolishness.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. 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, 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 deadbeat.
+
+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 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 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
+overwrought 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 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. 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 showpieces 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
+typesetting, 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 ferryboats, 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 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 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 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 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 trancelike 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 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 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.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. 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
+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 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 epochmaking 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 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 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; 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 "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 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 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 irae 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 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 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," "Aesop'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
+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 would 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 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, 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 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." "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 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.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X. 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 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 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."
+
+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 ), 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 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 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 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 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 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
+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
+1918, 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, 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 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 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 "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 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 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
+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, 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. 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 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
+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
+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 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 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 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 understudy." No one has ever had the audacity to say that of New
+York.
+
+We have had American drama for one hundred and fifty years, * 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, 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.
+
+     * "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 naive reproduction
+of retinal and muscular impressions, as if this were the end of the
+matter.
+
+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 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 * 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.
+
+     * "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. 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 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 schoolchildren 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 motions stimulated by our national
+life. It has been assumed in the preceding chapters that 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 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+An authoritative 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). 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, 1900, 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 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 edition, J. A. Harrison, 1900,)
+"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," 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 Encyclopaedia Britannica" and in
+"The Warner Library" (volume 30, "The Student's Course," N. Y., 1917).
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The American Spirit in Literature,, by Bliss Perry
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+Title: The American Spirit in Literature,
+A Chronicle of Great Interpreters
+
+Author: Bliss Perry
+
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+THIS BOOK, VOLUME 34 IN THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA SERIES, ALLEN
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+
+THIS BOOK, VOLUME 34 IN THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA SERIES, ALLEN
+JOHNSON, EDITOR, WAS DONATED TO PROJECT GUTENBERG BY THE JAMES J.
+KELLY LIBRARY OF ST. GREGORY'S UNIVERSITY; THANKS TO ALEV AKMAN.
+
+
+
+
+
+The American Spirit in Literature,
+A Chronicle of Great Interpreters
+
+BY BLISS PERRY
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+I. THE PIONEERS
+
+II. THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE
+
+III. THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION
+
+IV. THE REVOLUTION
+
+V. THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP
+
+VI. THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS
+
+VII. ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY
+
+VIII. POE AND WHITMAN
+
+IX. UNION AND LIBERTY
+
+X. A NEW NATION
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE
+
+CHAPTER I. 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.
+
+An 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 rearmed
+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 soldier 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
+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, ready 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" is 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 must 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 unity. 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
+London 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.
+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 field 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 as 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
+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 varied 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 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 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 university 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 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
+nature 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 years 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 to 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 own
+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
+English 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 working 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.
+
+CHAPTER II. 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. Codfishing 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 gallant 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, 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 north east
+of 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 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," that 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 would 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 with 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 role 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 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 many 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 aesthetic 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 outpourings 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
+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 lady,
+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, upon 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. Cromwell 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. The 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 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. Old 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.
+
+CHAPTER III. 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. Young
+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," just 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 was
+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 "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
+Pepys'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 precision 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 "Freedom 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 length 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 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 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 mentions 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 accepted 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 prose, 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 mediaeval 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 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
+topics. 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 the 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 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." Crevecoeur'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, like 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."* 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.
+
+* 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 Mercury" or 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 in 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, and 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 of 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."
+
+CHAPTER IV. THE REVOLUTION
+
+If we 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 of 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 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 Crevecoeur's touching words, of the
+"secret communion among good men throughout the world." "I am a
+lover of peace, what must I do?" asks Crevecoeur 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." Crevecoeur, 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 ending tragically in civil
+war. Another whitesouled 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 Springs. 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 roommate 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: "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. He
+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 aesthetic, 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 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. "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 was 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
+thinker, 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 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 repair; 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, 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 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 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 philosophical,
+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 positions, 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 simply, 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 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.
+
+CHAPTER V. 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 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
+since 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 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 Whittier'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 treetops 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 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 about 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 light 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 Christmas, 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 narrative 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 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 "Rene," the mystery and enchantment of our dark
+forests
+and endless rivers. But Chateaubriand, like Brockden Brown, is
+feverish. A taint of 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 tale 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
+stouthearted 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 the 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
+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 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. 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+CHAPTER VI. THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS
+
+To understand 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 mediaeval mysticism, and to the English Platonists; touched
+throughout by the French Revolutionary 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 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 "born to be educated."
+Arid 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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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 aesthetic 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 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
+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 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, antisocial,
+anti-Christian" are the terms applied to him by one of his most
+penetrating critics. Yet I should prefer to say "un-scientific,"
+"unsocial," 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 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 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 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 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 polltax, 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 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 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 byproducts 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 note
+books, 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, 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,
+wolflike, 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
+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 postoffice. You may
+depend upon it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the
+greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive
+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 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. 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 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.
+
+CHAPTER VII. 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 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," 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 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 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 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.
+
+"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 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 Phoebe 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 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 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 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. 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 folklore 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 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," 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," "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. 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 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
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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 societe 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.
+
+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 "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
+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 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 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, 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 SnowFall," "After the Burial," have
+touched many hearts.
+
+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 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.
+
+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
+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.
+
+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. 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 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 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 Gottingen 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 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 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, 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 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
+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 Regime," "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 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 but at
+Walden, these were something which our later Greeks of the New
+England Athens esteemed as foolishness.
+
+CHAPTER VIII. 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, 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 deadbeat.
+
+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 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 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 overwrought 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 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. 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 showpieces 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
+typesetting, 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 ferryboats, 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 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 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
+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 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 trancelike
+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 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
+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.
+
+CHAPTER IX. 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 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 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
+epochmaking 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 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 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; 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 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, 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
+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 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, 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
+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 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 "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 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 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 irae 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 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
+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," "Aesop'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 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 would 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 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, 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
+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." "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 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.
+
+CHAPTER X. 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 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 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."
+
+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 ), 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 1918, 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, 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 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 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 "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 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 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 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, 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.
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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 understudy." No
+one has ever had the audacity to say that of New York.
+
+We have had American drama for one hundred and fifty years,* 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, 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.
+
+* "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 naive
+reproduction of retinal and muscular impressions, as if this were
+the end of the matter.
+
+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 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* 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.
+
+* "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. 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 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
+schoolchildren 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 motions stimulated by our national life. It has been
+assumed in the preceding chapters that 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 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 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.
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+An authoritative 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). 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, 1900,
+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 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 edition, J. A. Harrison,
+1900, "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," 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 Encyclopaedia
+Britannica" and in "The Warner Library" (volume 30, "The
+Student's Course," N. Y., 1917).
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's American Spirit in Literature, by Bliss Perry
+
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