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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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