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+Project Gutenberg's American Spirit in Literature, by Bliss Perry
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+Title: The American Spirit in Literature,
+A Chronicle of Great Interpreters
+
+Author: Bliss Perry
+
+Official Release Date: September, 2002  [Etext #3410]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
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+Project Gutenberg's American Spirit in Literature, by Bliss Perry
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+THIS BOOK, VOLUME 34 IN THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA SERIES, ALLEN
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+KELLY LIBRARY OF ST. GREGORY'S UNIVERSITY; THANKS TO ALEV AKMAN.
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+
+THIS BOOK, VOLUME 34 IN THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA SERIES, ALLEN
+JOHNSON, EDITOR, WAS DONATED TO PROJECT GUTENBERG BY THE JAMES J.
+KELLY LIBRARY OF ST. GREGORY'S UNIVERSITY; THANKS TO ALEV AKMAN.
+
+
+
+
+
+The American Spirit in Literature,
+A Chronicle of Great Interpreters
+
+BY BLISS PERRY
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+I. THE PIONEERS
+
+II. THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE
+
+III. THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION
+
+IV. THE REVOLUTION
+
+V. THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP
+
+VI. THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS
+
+VII. ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY
+
+VIII. POE AND WHITMAN
+
+IX. UNION AND LIBERTY
+
+X. A NEW NATION
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE
+
+CHAPTER I. THE PIONEERS
+
+The United States of America has been from the beginning in a
+perpetual change. The physical and mental restlessness of the
+American and the temporary nature of many of his arrangements
+are largely due to the experimental character of the exploration
+and development of this continent. The new energies released by
+the settlement of the colonies were indeed guided by stern
+determination, wise forethought, and inventive skill; but no one
+has ever really known the outcome of the experiment. It is a
+story of faith, of 
+  
+   Effort, and expectation, and desire,
+   And something evermore about to be.
+
+An Alexander Hamilton may urge with passionate force the adoption
+of the Constitution, without any firm conviction as to its
+permanence. The most clear-sighted American of the Civil War
+period recognized this element of uncertainty in our American
+adventure when he declared: "We are now testing whether this
+nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long
+endure." More than fifty years have passed since that war rearmed
+the binding force of the Constitution and apparently sealed the
+perpetuity of the Union. Yet the gigantic economic and social
+changes now in progress are serving to show that the United
+States has its full share of the anxieties which beset all human
+institutions in this daily altering world.
+
+"We are but strangers in an inn, but passengers in a ship," said
+Roger Williams. This sense of the transiency of human effort, the
+perishable nature of human institutions, was quick in the
+consciousness of the gentleman adventurers and sober Puritan
+citizens who emigrated from England to the New World. It had been
+a familiar note in the poetry of that Elizabethan period which
+had followed with such breathless interest the exploration of
+America. It was a conception which could be shared alike by a
+saint like John Cotton or a soldier of fortune like John Smith.
+Men are tent-dwellers. Today they settle here, and tomorrow they
+have struck camp and are gone. We are strangers and sojourners,
+as all our fathers were.
+
+This instinct of the camper has stamped itself upon American life
+and thought. Venturesomeness, physical and moral daring,
+resourcefulness in emergencies, indifference to negligible
+details, wastefulness of materials, boundless hope and confidence
+in the morrow, are characteristics of the American. It is
+scarcely an exaggeration to say that the "good American" has been
+he who has most resembled a good camper. He has had robust
+health--unless or until he has abused it,--a tolerant
+disposition, and an ability to apply his fingers or his brain to
+many unrelated and unexpected tasks. He is disposed to blaze his
+own trail. He has a touch of prodigality, and, withal, a knack of
+keeping his tent or his affairs in better order than they seem.
+Above all, he has been ever ready to break camp when he feels the
+impulse to wander. He likes to be "foot-loose." If he does not
+build his roads as solidly as the Roman roads were built, nor his
+houses like the English houses, it is because he feels that he is
+here today and gone tomorrow. If he has squandered the physical
+resources of his neighborhood, cutting the forests recklessly,
+exhausting the soil, surrendering water power and minerals into a
+few far-clutching fingers, he has done it because he expects,
+like Voltaire's Signor Pococurante, "to have a new garden
+tomorrow, built on a nobler plan." When New York State grew too
+crowded for Cooper's Leather-Stocking, he shouldered his pack,
+whistled to his dog, glanced at the sun, and struck a bee-line
+for the Mississippi. Nothing could be more typical of the first
+three hundred years of American history.
+
+The traits of the pioneer have thus been the characteristic
+traits of the American in action. The memories of successive
+generations have tended to stress these qualities to the neglect
+of others. Everyone who has enjoyed the free life of the woods
+will confess that his own judgment upon his casual summer
+associates turns, quite naturally and almost exclusively, upon
+their characteristics as woodsmen. Out of the woods, these
+gentlemen may be more or less admirable divines, pedants, men of
+affairs; but the verdict of their companions in the forest is
+based chiefly upon the single question of their adaptability to
+the environment of the camp. Are they quick of eye and foot,
+skillful with rod and gun, cheerful on rainy days, ready to do a
+little more than their share of drudgery? If so, memory holds
+them.
+
+Some such unconscious selection as this has been at work in the
+classification of our representative men. The building of the
+nation and the literary expression of its purpose and ideals are
+tasks which have called forth the strength of a great variety of
+individuals. Some of these men have proved to be peculiarly
+fitted for a specific service, irrespective of the question of
+their general intellectual powers, or their rank as judged by the
+standard of European performance in the same field. Thus the
+battle of New Orleans, in European eyes a mere bit of frontier
+fighting, made Andrew Jackson a "hero" as indubitably as if he
+had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. It gave him the Presidency.
+
+The analogy holds in literature. Certain expressions of American
+sentiment or conviction have served to summarize or to clarify
+the spirit of the nation. The authors of these productions have
+frequently won the recognition and affection of their
+contemporaries by means of prose and verse quite unsuited to
+sustain the test of severe critical standards. Neither
+Longfellow's "Excelsior" nor Poe's "Bells" nor Whittier's "Maud
+Muller" is among the best poems of the three writers in question,
+yet there was something in each of these productions which caught
+the fancy of a whole American generation. It expressed one phase
+of the national mind in a given historical period.
+
+The historian of literature is bound to take account of this
+question of literary vogue, as it is highly significant of the
+temper of successive generations in any country. But it is of
+peculiar interest to the student of the literature produced in
+the United States. Is this literature "American," or is it
+"English literature in America," as Professor Wendell and other
+scholars have preferred to call it? I should be one of the last
+to minimize the enormous influence of England upon the mind and
+the writing of all the English-speaking countries of the globe.
+Yet it will be one of the purposes of the present book to
+indicate the existence here, even in colonial times, of a point
+of view differing from that of the mother country, and destined
+to differ increasingly with the lapse of time. Since the
+formation of our Federal Union, in particular, the books produced
+in the United States have tended to exhibit certain
+characteristics which differentiate them from the books produced
+in other English speaking countries. We must beware, of course,
+of what the late Charles Francis Adams once called the
+"filiopietistic" fallacy. The "American" qualities of our
+literature must be judged in connection with its conformity to
+universal standards of excellence. Tested by any universal
+standard, "The Scarlet Letter" is a notable romance. It has won a
+secure place among the literature written by men of English blood
+and speech. Yet to overlook the peculiarly local or provincial
+characteristics of this remarkable story is to miss the secret of
+its inspiration. It could have been written only by a New
+Englander, in the atmosphere of a certain epoch.
+
+Our task, then, in this rapid review of the chief interpreters of
+the American spirit in literature, is a twofold one. We are
+primarily concerned with a procession of men, each of whom is
+interesting as an individual and as a writer. But we cannot watch
+the individuals long without perceiving the general direction of
+their march, the ideas that animate them, the common hopes and
+loyalties that make up the life of their spirit. To become aware
+of these general tendencies is to understand the "American" note
+in our national writing.
+
+Our historians have taught us that the history of the United
+States is an evolution towards political unity. The separatist,
+particularist movements are gradually thrust to one side. In
+literary history, likewise, we best remember those authors who
+fall into line with what we now perceive to have been the course
+of our literary development. The erratic men and women, the
+"sports" of the great experiment, are ultimately neglected by the
+critics, unless, like the leaders of political insurrections,
+those writing men and women have raised a notable standard of
+revolt. No doubt the apparently unique literary specimens, if
+clearly understood in their origins and surroundings, would be
+found rooted in the general laws of literary evolution. But these
+laws are not easy to codify and we must avoid the temptation to
+discover, in any particular period, more of unity than there
+actually was. And we must always remember that there will be
+beautiful prose and verse unrelated to the main national
+tendencies save as "the literature of escape." We owe this lesson
+to the genius of Edgar Allan Poe.
+
+Let us test these principles by applying them to the earliest
+colonists. The first book written on the soil of what is now the
+United States was Captain John Smith's "True Relation" of the
+planting of the Virginia colony in 1607. It was published in
+London in 1608. The Captain was a typical Elizabethan adventurer,
+with a gift, like so many of his class, for picturesque
+narrative. In what sense, if at all, may his writings on American
+topics be classified as "American" literary productions? It is
+clear that his experiences in the New World were only one phase
+of the variegated life of this English soldier of fortune. But
+the American imagination has persistently claimed him as
+representing something peculiarly ours, namely, a kind of pioneer
+hardihood, resourcefulness, leadership, which was essential to
+the exploration and conquest of the wilderness. Most of Smith's
+companions were unfitted for the ordeal which he survived. They
+perished miserably in the "starving time." But he was of the
+stuff from which triumphant immigrants have ever been made, and
+it is our recognition of the presence of these qualities in the
+Captain which makes us think of his books dealing with America as
+if they were "American books." There are other narratives by
+colonists temporarily residing in the Virginia plantations which
+gratify our historical curiosity, but which we no more consider a
+part of American literature than the books written by Stevenson,
+Kipling, and Wells during their casual visits to this country.
+But Captain Smith's "True Relation" impresses us, like Mark
+Twain's "Roughing It," with being somehow true to type. In each
+of these books the possible unveracities in detail are a
+confirmation of their representative American character.
+
+In other words, we have unconsciously formulated, in the course
+of centuries, a general concept of "the pioneer." Novelists,
+poets, and historians have elaborated this conception. Nothing is
+more inevitable than our reaching back to the beginning of the
+seventeenth century and endeavoring to select, among the
+thousands of Englishmen who emigrated or even thought of
+emigrating to this country, those who possessed the genuine heart
+and sinew of the permanent settler.
+
+Oliver Cromwell, for instance, is said to have thought of
+emigrating hither in 1637. If he had joined his friends John
+Cotton and Roger Williams in New England, who can doubt that the
+personal characteristics of "my brave Oliver" would today be
+identified with the "American" qualities which we discover in
+1637 on the shores of Massachusetts Bay? And what an American
+settler Cromwell would have made!
+
+If we turn from physical and moral daring to the field of
+theological and political speculation, it is easy today to
+select, among the writings of the earliest colonists, certain
+radical utterances which seem to presage the very temper of the
+late eighteenth century. Pastor John Robinson's farewell address
+to the Pilgrims at Leyden in 1620 contained the famous words:
+"The Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His holy Word.
+I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the reformed
+churches, who are come to a period in religion. . . . Luther and
+Calvin were great and shining lights in their times, yet they
+penetrated not into the whole counsel of God." Now John Robinson,
+like Oliver Cromwell, never set foot on American soil, but he is
+identified, none the less, with the spirit of American liberalism
+in religion.
+
+In political discussion, the early emergence of that type of
+independence familiar to the decade 1765-75 is equally striking.
+In a letter written in 1818, John Adams insisted that "the
+principles and feelings which produced the Revolution ought to be
+traced back for two hundred years, and sought in the history of
+the country from the first plantations in America." "I have
+always laughed," he declared in an earlier letter, "at the
+affectation of representing American independence as a novel
+idea, as a modern discovery, as a late invention. The idea of it
+as a possible thing, as a probable event, nay as a necessary and
+unavoidable measure, in case Great Britain should assume an
+unconstitutional authority over us, has been familiar to
+Americans from the first settlement of the country."
+
+There is, then, a predisposition, a latent or potential
+Americanism which existed long before the United States came into
+being. Now that our political unity has become a fact, the
+predisposition is certain to be regarded by our own and by future
+generations as evidence of a state of mind which made our
+separate national life inevitable. Yet to Thomas Hutchinson, a
+sound historian and honest man, the last Royal Governor of
+Massachusetts, a separate national life seemed in 1770 an
+unspeakable error and calamity.
+
+The seventeenth-century colonists were predominantly English, in
+blood, in traditions, and in impulses. Whether we look at
+Virginia or Plymouth or at the other colonies that were planted
+in swift succession along the seaboard, it is clear that we are
+dealing primarily with men of the English race. Most of them
+would have declared, with as much emphasis as Francis Hopkinson a
+century later, "We of America are in all respects Englishmen."
+Professor Edward Channing thinks that it took a century of
+exposure to colonial conditions to force the English in America
+away from the traditions and ideals of those who continued to
+live in the old land. But the student of literature must keep
+constantly in mind that these English colonizers represented no
+single type of the national character. There were many men of
+many minds even within the contracted cabin of the Mayflower. The
+"sifted wheat" was by no means all of the same variety.
+
+For Old England was never more torn by divergent thought and
+subversive act than in the period between the death of Elizabeth
+in 1603 and the Revolution of 1688. In this distracted time who
+could say what was really "English"? Was it James the First or
+Raleigh? Archbishop Laud or John Cotton? Charles the First or
+Cromwell? Charles the Second or William Penn? Was it Churchman,
+Presbyterian, Independent, Separatist, Quaker? One is tempted to
+say that the title of Ben Jonson's comedy "Every Man in his
+Humour" became the standard of action for two whole generations
+of Englishmen, and that there is no common denominator for
+emigrants of such varied pattern as Smith and Sandys of Virginia,
+Morton of Merrymount, John Winthrop, "Sir" Christopher Gardiner
+and Anne Hutchinson of Boston, and Roger Williams of Providence.
+They seem as miscellaneous as "Kitchener's Army."
+
+It is true that we can make certain distinctions. Virginia, as
+has often been said, was more like a continuation of English
+society, while New England represented a digression from English
+society. There were then, as now, "stand-patters" and
+"progressives." It was the second class who, while retaining very
+conservative notions about property, developed a fearless
+intellectual radicalism which has written itself into the history
+of the United States. But to the student of early American
+literature all such generalizations are of limited value. He is
+dealing with individual men, not with "Cavalier" or "Roundhead"
+as such. He has learned from recent historians to distrust any
+such facile classification of the first colonists. He knows by
+this time that there were aristocrats in Massachusetts and
+commoners in Virginia; that the Pilgrims of Plymouth were more
+tolerant than the Puritans of Boston, and that Rhode Island was
+more tolerant than either. Yet useful as these general
+statements may be, the interpreter of men of letters must always
+go back of the racial type or the social system to the individual
+person. He recognizes, as a truth for him, that theory of
+creative evolution which holds that in the ascending progress of
+the race each thinking person becomes a species by himself.
+
+While something is gained, then, by remembering that the racial
+instincts and traditions of the first colonists were
+overwhelmingly English, and that their political and ethical
+views were the product of a turbulent and distraught time, it is
+even more important to note how the physical situation of the
+colonists affected their intellectual and moral, as well as their
+political problems. Among the emigrants from England, as we have
+seen, there were great varieties of social status, religious
+opinion, individual motive. But at least they all possessed the
+physical courage and moral hardihood to risk the dangerous
+voyage, the fearful hardships, and the vast uncertainties of the
+new life. To go out at all, under the pressure of any motive, was
+to meet triumphantly a searching test. It was in truth a
+"sifting," and though a few picturesque rascals had the courage
+to go into exile while a few saints may have been deterred, it is
+a truism to say that the pioneers were made up of brave men and
+braver women.
+
+It cannot be asserted that their courage was the result of any
+single, dominating motive, equally operative in all of the
+colonies. Mrs. Hemans's familiar line about seeking "freedom to
+worship God" was measurably true of the Pilgrims of Plymouth,
+about whom she was writing. But the far more important Puritan
+emigration to Massachusetts under Winthrop aimed not so much at
+"freedom" as at the establishment of a theocracy according to the
+Scriptures. These men straightway denied freedom of worship, not
+only to newcomers who sought to join them, but to those members
+of their own company who developed independent ways of thinking.
+The list of motives for emigration ran the whole gamut, from
+missionary fervor for converting the savages, down through a
+commendable desire for gain, to the perhaps no less praiseworthy
+wish to escape a debtor's prison or the pillory. A few of the
+colonists were rich. Some were beggars or indentured servants.
+Most of them belonged to the middle class. John Harvard was the
+son of a butcher; Thomas Shepard, the son of a grocer; Roger
+Williams, the son of a tailor. But all three were university bred
+and were natural leaders of men.
+
+Once arrived in the wilderness, the pioneer life common to all of
+the colonists began instantly to exert its slow, irresistible
+pressure upon their minds and to mould them into certain ways of
+thinking and feeling. Without some perception of these modes of
+thought and emotion a knowledge of the spirit of our literature
+is impossible. Take, for instance, the mere physical situation of
+the first colonists, encamped on the very beach of the wide ocean
+with an illimitable forest in their rear. Their provisions were
+scanty. They grew watchful of the strange soil, of the new skies,
+of the unknown climate. Even upon the voyage over, John Winthrop
+thought that "the declination of the pole star was much, even to
+the view, beneath that it is in England," and that "the new moon,
+when it first appeared, was much smaller than at any time he had
+seen it in England." Here was a man evidently using his eyes with
+a new interest in natural phenomena. Under these changed skies
+the mind began gradually to change also.
+
+At first the colonists felt themselves an outpost of Europe, a
+forlorn hope of the Protestant Reformation. "We shall be as a
+city upon a hill," said Winthrop. "The eyes of all people are
+upon us." Their creed was Calvinism, then in its third generation
+of dominion and a European doctrine which was not merely
+theological but social and political. The emigrant Englishmen
+were soon to discover that it contained a doctrine of human
+rights based upon human needs. At the beginning of their novel
+experience they were doubtless unaware of any alteration in their
+theories. But they were facing a new situation, and that new
+situation became an immense factor in their unconscious growth.
+Their intellectual and moral problems shifted, as a boat shifts
+her ballast when the wind blows from a new quarter. The John
+Cotton preaching in a shed in the new Boston had come to "suffer
+a sea-change" from the John Cotton who had been rector of St.
+Botolph's splendid church in Lincolnshire. The "church without a
+bishop" and the "state without a king" became a different church
+and state from the old, however loyally the ancient forms and
+phrases were retained.
+
+If the political problems of equality which were latent in
+Calvinism now began to take on a different meaning under the
+democratic conditions of pioneer life, the inner, spiritual
+problems of that amazing creed were intensified. "Fallen" human
+nature remained the same, whether in the crowded cosmopolitan
+streets of Holland and London, or upon the desolate shores of
+Cape Cod. But the moral strain of the old insoluble conflict
+between "fixed fate" and "free will" was heightened by the
+physical loneliness of the colonists. Each soul must fight its
+own unaided, unending battle. In that moral solitude, as in the
+physical solitude of the settlers upon the far northwestern
+prairies of a later epoch, many a mind snapped. Unnatural tension
+was succeeded by unnatural crimes. But for the stronger
+intellects New England Calvinism became a potent spiritual
+gymnastic, where, as in the Swedish system of bodily training,
+one lifts imaginary and ever-increasing weights with imaginary
+and ever-increasing effort, flexor and extensor muscles pulling
+against one another, driven by the will. Calvinism bred athletes
+as well as maniacs.
+
+The new situation, again, turned many of the theoretical
+speculations of the colonists into practical issues. Here, for
+example, was the Indian. Was he truly a child of God, possessing
+a soul, and, if so, had he partaken of the sin of Adam? These
+questions perplexed the saintly Eliot and the generous Roger
+Williams. But before many years the query as to whether a Pequot
+warrior had a soul became suddenly less important than the
+practical question as to whether the Pequot should be allowed any
+further chances of taking the white man's scalp. On this last
+issue the colonists were unanimous in the negative.
+
+It would be easy to multiply such instances of a gradual change
+of view. But beneath all the changes and all the varieties of
+individual behavior in the various colonies that began to dot the
+seaboard, certain qualities demanded by the new surroundings are
+felt in colonial life and in colonial writings. One of these is
+the instinct for order, or at least that degree of order
+essential to the existence of a camp. It was not in vain that
+John Smith sought to correct the early laxness at Jamestown by
+the stern edict: "He that will not work, neither shall he eat."
+Dutch and Quaker colonies taught the same inexorable maxim of
+thrift. Soon there was work enough for all, at good wages, but
+the lesson had been taught. It gave Franklin's "Poor Richard"
+mottoes their flavor of homely, experienced truth.
+
+Order in daily life led straight to political order, just as the
+equality and resourcefulness of the frontier, stimulated by
+isolation from Europe, led to political independence. The pioneer
+learned to make things for himself instead of sending to London
+for them, and by and by he grew as impatient of waiting for a
+political edict from London as he would become in waiting for a
+London plough. "This year," wrote one colonist, "ye will go to
+complain to the Parliament, and the next year they will send to
+see how it is, and the third year the government is changed." The
+time was coming when no more complaints would be sent.
+
+One of the most startling instances of this colonial instinct for
+self-government is the case of Thomas Hooker. Trained in Emmanuel
+College of the old Cambridge, he arrived in the new Cambridge in
+1633. He grew restless under its theocratic government, being, it
+was said, "a person who when he was doing his Master's work,
+would put a king into his pocket." So he led the famous migration
+of 1636 from Massachusetts to Hartford, and there helped to
+create a federation of independent towns which made their own
+constitution without mentioning any king, and became one of the
+corner-stones of American democracy. In May, 1638, Hooker
+declared in a sermon before the General Court "that the choice of
+public magistrates belongs unto the people by God's own
+allowance," and "that they who have the power to appoint officers
+and magistrates, it is in their power, also, to set the bounds
+and limitations of the power and place into which they call
+them." The reason of this is: "Because the foundation of
+authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people."
+This high discourse antedates the famous pamphlets on liberty by
+Milton. It is a half-century earlier than Locke's "Treatise on
+Government," a century and a quarter earlier than Rousseau's
+"Contrat Social," and it precedes by one hundred and thirty-eight
+years the American Declaration of Independence.
+
+But the slightest acquaintance with colonial writings will reveal
+the fact that such political radicalism as Thomas Hooker's was
+accompanied by an equally striking conservatism in other
+directions. One of these conservative traits was the pioneer's
+respect for property, and particularly for the land cleared by
+his own toil. Gladstone once spoke of possession of the soil as
+the most important and most operative of all social facts.
+Free-footed as the pioneer colonist was, he was disinclined to
+part with his land without a substantial price for it. The land
+at his disposal was practically illimitable, but he showed a very
+English tenacity in safeguarding his hold upon his own portion.
+
+Very English, likewise, was his attachment to the old country as
+"home." The lighter and the more serious writings of the
+colonists are alike in their respect for the past. In the New
+England settlements, although not at first in Virginia, there was
+respect for learning and for an educated clergy. The colonists
+revered the Bible. They maintained a stubborn regard for the
+Common Law of England. Even amid all the excitement of a
+successful rebellion from the mother country, this Common Law
+still held the Americans to the experience of the inescapable
+past.
+
+Indeed, as the reader of today lifts his eyes from the pages of
+the books written in America during the seventeenth century, and
+tries to meditate upon the general difference between them and
+the English books written during the same period, he will be
+aware of the firmness with which the conservative forces held on
+this side of the Atlantic. It was only one hundred years from the
+Great Armada of 1588 to the flight of James Second, the last of
+the Stuart Kings. With that Revolution of 1688 the struggles
+characteristic of the seventeenth century in England came to an
+end. A new working basis is found for thought, politics, society,
+literature. But while those vast changes had been shaking
+England, two generations of American colonists had cleared their
+forests, fought the savages, organized their townships and their
+trade, put money in their purses, and lived, though as yet hardly
+suspecting it, a life that was beginning to differentiate them
+from the men of the Old World. We must now glance at the various
+aspects of this isolated life of theirs, as it is revealed in
+their books.
+
+CHAPTER II. THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE
+
+The simplest and oldest group of colonial writings is made up of
+records of exploration and adventure. They are like the letters
+written from California in 1849 to the "folks back East."
+Addressed to home-keeping Englishmen across the sea, they
+describe the new world, explain the present situation of the
+colonists, and express their hopes for the future. Captain John
+Smith's "True Relation," already alluded to, is the typical
+production of this class: a swift marching book, full of eager
+energy, of bluff and breezy picturesqueness, and of triumphant
+instinct for the main chance. Like most of the Elizabethans, he
+cannot help poetizing in his prose. Codfishing is to him a
+"sport"; "and what sport doth yeald a more pleasing content, and
+lesse hurt or charge then angling with a hooke, and crossing the
+sweete ayre from Isle to Isle, over the silent streams of a calme
+Sea?" But the gallant Captain is also capable of very plain
+speech, Cromwellian in its simplicity, as when he writes back to
+the London stockholders of the Virginia Company: "When you send
+again, I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters,
+husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and
+diggers up of trees' roots, well provided, than a thousand of
+such as we have."
+
+America was but an episode in the wide wanderings of Captain
+Smith, but he owes his place in human memory today to the
+physical and mental energy with which he met the demands of a new
+situation, and to the vividness with which he dashed down in
+words whatever his eyes had seen. Whether, in that agreeable
+passage about Pocahontas, he was guilty of romancing a little, no
+one really knows, but the Captain, as the first teller of this
+peculiarly American type of story, will continue to have an
+indulgent audience.
+
+But other exiles in Virginia were skillful with the pen. William
+Strachey's "True Reportory of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt.,
+vpon and from the islands of the Bermudas" may or may not have
+given a hint to Shakespeare for the storm-scene in "The Tempest."
+In either case it is admirable writing, flexible, sensitive,
+shrewdly observant. Whitaker, the apostle of Virginia, mingles,
+like many a missionary of the present day, the style of an
+exhorter with a keen discernment of the traits of the savage
+mind. George Percy, fresh from Northumberland, tells in a
+language as simple as Defoe's the piteous tale of five months of
+illness and starvation, watched by "those wild and cruel Pagans."
+John Pory, of "the strong potations," who thinks that "good
+company is the soul of this life," nevertheless comforts himself
+in his solitude among the "crystal rivers and odoriferous woods"
+by reflecting that he is escaping envy and expense. George
+Sandys, scholar and poet, finds his solace during a Virginia
+exile in continuing his translation of Ovid's "Metamorphoses."
+Colonel Norwood, an adventurer who belongs to a somewhat later
+day, since he speaks of having "read Mr. Smith's travels," draws
+the long bow of narrative quite as powerfully as the redoubtable
+Smith, and far more smoothly, as witness his accounts of
+starvation on shipboard and cannibalism on shore. This Colonel is
+an artist who would have delighted Stevenson.
+
+All of these early tellers of Virginia tales were Englishmen, and
+most of them returned to England, where their books were printed
+and their remaining lives were passed. But far to the north east
+of Virginia there were two colonies of men who earned the right
+to say, in William Bradford's quiet words, "It is not with us as
+with other men, whom small things can discourage, or small
+discontentments cause to wish themselves at home again." One was
+the colony of Pilgrims at Plymouth, headed by Bradford himself.
+The other was the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay, with John
+Winthrop as governor.
+
+Bradford and Winthrop have left journals which are more than
+chronicles of adventure. They record the growth and government of
+a commonwealth. Both Bradford and Winthrop were natural leaders
+of men, grave, dignified, solid, endowed with a spirit that bred
+confidence. Each was learned. Winthrop, a lawyer and man of
+property, had a higher social standing than Bradford, who was one
+of the Separatists of Robinson's flock at Leyden. But the Pilgrim
+of the Mayflower and the well-to-do Puritan of the Bay Colony
+both wrote their annals like gentlemen and scholars. Bradford's
+"History of Plymouth Plantation" runs from 1620 to 1647.
+Winthrop's diary, now printed as the "History of New England,"
+begins with his voyage in 1630 and closes in the year of his
+death, 1649. As records of an Anglo-Saxon experiment in
+self-government under pioneer conditions these books are
+priceless; as human documents, they illuminate the Puritan
+character; as for "literary" value in the narrow sense of that
+word, neither Bradford nor Winthrop seems to have thought of
+literary effect. Yet the leader of the Pilgrims has passages of
+grave sweetness and charm, and his sketch of his associate, Elder
+Brewster, will bear comparison with the best English biographical
+writing of that century. Winthrop is perhaps more varied in tone,
+as he is in matter, but he writes throughout as a ruler of men
+should write, with "decent plainness and manly freedom." His best
+known pages, justly praised by Tyler and other historians of
+American thought, contain his speech before the General Court in
+1645 on the nature of true liberty. No paragraphs written in
+America previous to the Revolution would have given more pleasure
+to Abraham Lincoln, but it is to be feared that Lincoln never saw
+Governor Winthrop's book, though his own ancestor, Samuel Lincoln
+of Hingham, lived under Winthrop's jurisdiction.
+
+The theory of government held by the dominant party of the first
+two generations of New England pioneers has often been called a
+"theocracy," that is to say, a government according to the Word
+of God as expounded and enforced by the clergy. The experiment
+was
+doomed to ultimate failure, for it ran counter to some of the
+noblest instincts of human nature. But its administration was in
+the hands of able men. The power of the clergy was well-nigh
+absolute. The political organization of the township depended
+upon the ecclesiastical organization as long as the right to vote
+was confined to church members. How sacrosanct and awful was the
+position of the clergyman may be perceived from Hawthorne's "The
+Minister's Black Veil" and "The Scarlet Letter."
+
+Yet it must be said that men like Hooker and Cotton, Shepard and
+Norton, had every instinct and capacity for leadership. With the
+notable exception of Hooker, such men were aristocrats, holding
+John Winthrop's opinion that "Democracy is, among most civil
+nations, accounted the meanest and worst form of government."
+They were fiercely intolerant. The precise reason for the Hooker
+migration from Cambridge to Hartford in 1636--the very year of
+the founding of Harvard--was prudently withheld, but it is now
+thought to be the instinct of escape from the clerical architects
+of the Cambridge Platform. Yet no one would today call Thomas
+Hooker a liberal in religion, pioneer in political liberty though
+he proved to be. His extant sermons have the steady stroke of a
+great hammer; smiting at the mind and heart. "Others because they
+have felt the heavy hand of God . . . upon these grounds they
+build their hopes: 'I have had my hell in this life, and I hope
+to have heaven in the world to come; I hope the worst is over.'"
+Not so, thunders the preacher in reply: "Sodom and Gomorrah they
+burnt in brimstone and they shall burn in hell." One of Hooker's
+successors has called him "a son of thunder and a son of
+consolation by turns." The same may be said of Thomas Shepard,
+another graduate of Emmanuel College in the old Cambridge, who
+became the "soul-melting preacher" of the newer Cambridge by the
+Charles. Pure, ravishing notes of spiritual devotion still sing
+themselves in his pages. He is wholly Calvinist. He thinks "the
+truth is a poor mean thing in itself" and that the human reason
+cannot be "the last resolution of all doubts," which must be
+sought only in the written Word of God. He holds it "a tough
+work, a wonderful hard matter to be saved." "Jesus Christ is not
+got with a wet finger." Yet, like so many mystics, he yearns to
+be "covered with God, as with a cloud," to be "drowned, plunged,
+and swallowed up with God." One hundred years later we shall find
+this same rhapsodic ecstasy in the meditations of Jonathan
+Edwards.
+
+John Cotton, the third of the mighty men in the early Colonial
+pulpit, owes his fame more to his social and political influence
+than to his literary power. Yet even that was thought commanding.
+Trained, like Hooker and Shepard, at Emmanuel College, and fresh
+from the rectorship of St. Botolph's in the Lincolnshire Boston,
+John Cotton dominated that new Boston which was named in his
+honor. He became the Pope of the theocracy; a clever Pope and not
+an unkindly one. He seems to have shared some of the opinions of
+Anne Hutchinson, though he "pronounced the sentence of
+admonition" against her, says Winthrop, with much zeal and
+detestation of her errors. Hawthorne, in one of his ironic moods,
+might have done justice to this scene. Cotton was at heart too
+liberal for his role of Primate, and fate led him to persecute a
+man whose very name has become a symbol of victorious tolerance,
+Roger Williams.
+
+Williams, known today as a friend of Cromwell, Milton, and Sir
+Harry Vane, had been exiled from Massachusetts for maintaining
+that the civil power had no jurisdiction over conscience. This
+doctrine was fatal to the existence of a theocratic state
+dominated by the church. John Cotton was perfectly logical in
+"enlarging" Roger Williams into the wilderness, but he showed
+less than his usual discretion in attacking the quick-tempered
+Welshman in pamphlets. It was like asking Hotspur if he would
+kindly consent to fight. Back and forth the books fly, for
+Williams loves this game. His "Bloody Tenet of Persecution for
+Cause of Conscience" calls forth Mr. Cotton's "Bloody Tenet
+washed and made white in the Blood of the Lamb;" and this in turn
+provokes the torrential flood of Williams's masterpiece, "The
+Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, by Mr. Cotton's endeavor to wash it
+white in the Blood of the Lamb." There is glorious writing here,
+and its effect cannot be suggested by quoting sentences. But
+there is one sentence in a letter written by Williams in his old
+age to his fellow-townsmen of Providence which points the whole
+moral of the terrible mistake made by the men who sought
+spiritual liberty in America for themselves, only to deny that
+same liberty to others. "I have only one motion and petition,"
+begs this veteran pioneer who had forded many a swollen stream
+and built many a rude bridge in the Plantations: "it is this,
+that after you have got over the black brook of some soul bondage
+yourselves, you tear not down the bridge after you."
+
+It is for such wise and humane counsels as this that Roger
+Williams is remembered. His opponents had mightier intellects
+than his, but the world has long since decided against them.
+Colonial sermon literature is read today chiefly by antiquarians
+who have no sympathy for the creed which once gave it vitality.
+Its theology, like the theology of "Paradise Lost or the Divine
+Comedy," has sunk to the bottom of the black brook. But we cannot
+judge fairly the contemporary effect of this pulpit literature
+without remembering the passionate faith that made pulpit and
+pews copartners in a supreme spiritual struggle. Historians
+properly insist upon the aesthetic poverty of the New England
+Puritans; that their rule of life cut them off from an enjoyment
+of the dramatic literature of their race, then just closing its
+most splendid epoch; that they had little poetry or music and no
+architecture and plastic art. But we must never forget that to
+men of their creed the Sunday sermons and the week-day "lectures"
+served as oratory, poetry, and drama. These outpourings of the
+mind and heart of their spiritual leaders were the very stuff of
+human passion in its intensest forms. Puritan churchgoers,
+passing hours upon hours every week in rapt absorption with the
+noblest of all poetry and prose in the pages of their chief book,
+the Bible, were at least as sensitive to the beauty of words and
+the sweep of emotions as our contemporaries upon whose
+book-shelves Spenser and Milton stand unread.
+
+It is only by entering into the psychology of the period that we
+can estimate its attitude towards the poetry written by the
+pioneers themselves. The "Bay Psalm Book" (1640), the first book
+printed in the colonies, is a wretched doggerel arrangement of
+the magnificent King James Version of the Psalms, designed to be
+sung in churches. Few of the New England churches could sing more
+than half-a-dozen tunes, and a pitch-pipe was for a long time the
+only musical instrument allowed. Judged as hymnology or poetry,
+the Bay "Psalm Book" provokes a smile. But the men and women who
+used it as a handbook of devotion sang it with their hearts
+aflame. In judging such a popular seventeenth-century poem as
+Wigglesworth's "Day of Doom" one must strip oneself quite free
+from the twentieth century, and pretend to be sitting in the
+chimney-corner of a Puritan kitchen, reading aloud by that
+firelight which, as Lowell once humorously suggested, may have
+added a "livelier relish" to the poet's "premonitions of eternal
+combustion." Lowell could afford to laugh about it, having
+crossed that particular black brook. But for several generations
+the boys and girls of New England had read the "Day of Doom" as
+if Mr. Wigglesworth, the gentle and somewhat sickly minister of
+Malden, had veritably peeped into Hell. It is the present fashion
+to underestimate the power of Wigglesworth's verse. At its best
+it has a trampling, clattering shock like a charge of cavalry and
+a sound like clanging steel. Mr. Kipling and other cunning
+ballad-makers have imitated the peculiar rhyme structure chosen
+by the nervous little parson. But no living poet can move his
+readers to the fascinated horror once felt by the Puritans as
+they followed Wigglesworth's relentless gaze into the future of
+the soul's destiny.
+
+Historical curiosity may still linger, of course, over other
+verse-writers of the period. Anne Bradstreet's poems, for
+instance, are not without grace and womanly sweetness, in spite
+of their didactic themes and portentous length. But this lady,
+born in England, the daughter of Governor Dudley and later the
+wife of Governor Bradstreet, chose to imitate the more fantastic
+of the moralizing poets of England and France. There is little in
+her hundreds of pages which seems today the inevitable outcome of
+her own experience in the New World. For readers who like roughly
+mischievous satire, of a type initiated in England by Bishop Hall
+and Donne, there is "The Simple Cobbler of Agawam" written by the
+roving clergyman Nathaniel Ward. But he lived only a dozen years
+in Massachusetts, and his satirical pictures are scarcely more
+"American" than the satire upon German professors in "Sartor
+Resartus" is "German." Like Charles Dickens's "American Notes,"
+Ward's give the reaction of a born Englishman in the presence of
+the sights and the talk and the personages of the transatlantic
+world.
+
+Of all the colonial writings of the seventeenth century, those
+that have lost least of their interest through the lapse of years
+are narratives of struggles with the Indians. The image of the
+"bloody savage" has always hovered in the background of the
+American imagination. Our boys and girls have "played Indian"
+from the beginning, and the actual Indian is still found, as for
+three hundred years past, upon the frontier fringe of our
+civilization. Novelists like Cooper, historians like Parkman,
+poets like Longfellow, have dealt with the rich material offered
+by the life of the aborigines, but the long series begins with
+the scribbled story of colonists. Here are comedy and tragedy,
+plain narratives of trading and travel, missionary zeal and
+triumphs; then the inevitable alienation of the two races and the
+doom of the native.
+
+The "noble savage" note may be found in John Rolfe, the husband
+of Pocahontas, with whom, poor fellow, his "best thoughts are so
+intangled and enthralled." Other Virginians, like Smith,
+Strachey, and Percy, show close naturalistic observation, touched
+with the abounding Elizabethan zest for novelties. To Alexander
+Whitaker, however, these "naked slaves of the devil" were "not so
+simple as some have supposed." He yearned and labored over their
+souls, as did John Eliot and Roger Williams and Daniel Gookin of
+New England. In the Pequot War of 1637 the grim settlers resolved
+to be rid of that tribe once for all, and the narratives of
+Captain Edward Johnson and Captain John Mason, who led in the
+storming and slaughter at the Indians' Mystic Fort, are as
+piously relentless as anything in the Old Testament. Cromwell at
+Drogheda, not long after, had soldiers no more merciless than
+these exterminating Puritans, who wished to plough their fields
+henceforth in peace. A generation later the storm broke again in
+King Philip's War. Its tales of massacre, captivity, and
+single-handed fighting linger in the American imagination still.
+Typical pamphlets are Mary Rowlandson's thrilling tale of the
+Lancaster massacre and her subsequent captivity, and the
+loud-voiced Captain Church's unvarnished description of King
+Philip's death. The King, shot down like a wearied bull-moose in
+the deep swamp, "fell upon his face in the mud and water, with
+his gun under him." They "drew him through the mud to the upland;
+and a doleful, great, naked dirty beast he looked like." The head
+brought only thirty shillings at Plymouth: "scanty reward and
+poor encouragement," thought Captain Church. William Hubbard, the
+minister of Ipswich, wrote a comprehensive "Narrative of the
+Troubles with the Indians in New England," bringing the history
+down to 1677. Under the better known title of "Indian Wars," this
+fervid and dramatic tale, penned in a quiet parsonage, has
+stirred the pulses of every succeeding generation. The close of
+King Philip's War, 1676, coinciding as it does with Bacon's
+Rebellion in Virginia, marks an era in the development of our
+independent life. The events of that year, in the words of
+Professor Tyler, "established two very considerable facts,
+namely, that English colonists in America could be so provoked as
+to make physical resistance to the authority of England, and,
+second, that English colonists in America could, in the last
+resort, put down any combination of Indians that might be formed
+against them. In other words, it was then made evident that
+English colonists would certainly be safe in the new world, and
+also that they would not always be colonists."
+
+While the end of an historical or literary era cannot always be
+thus conveniently indicated by a date, there is no doubt that the
+final quarter of the seventeenth century witnessed deep changes
+in the outward life and the inner temper of the colonists. The
+"first fine careless rapture" was over. Only a few aged men could
+recall the memory of the first settlements. Between the founding
+of Jamestown and the rebellion under the leadership of Nathaniel
+Bacon almost seventy years had intervened, an interval
+corresponding to that which separates us from the Mexican War.
+Roger Williams ended his much-enduring and beneficent life in the
+flourishing town of Providence in 1684. He had already outlived
+Cotton and Hooker, Shepard and Winthrop, by more than thirty
+years. Inevitably men began, toward the end of the century, to
+take stock of the great venture of colonization, to scrutinize
+their own history and present position, to ask searching
+questions of themselves. "You have better food and raiment than
+was in former times," wrote the aged Roger Clark, in 1676; "but
+have you better hearts than your forefathers had?" Thomas
+Walley's "Languishing Commonwealth" maintains that "Faith is
+dead, and Love is cold, and Zeal is gone." Urian Oakes's election
+sermon of 1670 in Cambridge is a condemnation of the prevalent
+worldliness and ostentation. This period of critical inquiry and
+assessment, however, also gives grounds for just pride. History,
+biography, eulogy, are flourishing. The reader is reminded of
+that epoch, one hundred and fifty years later, when the deaths of
+John Adams and of Thomas Jefferson, falling upon the same
+anniversary day, the Fourth of July, 1826, stirred all Americans
+to a fresh recognition of the services wrought by the Fathers of
+the Republic. So it was in the colonies at the close of the
+seventeenth century. Old England, in one final paroxysm of
+political disgust, cast out the last Stuart in 1688. That
+Revolution marks, as we have seen, the close of a long and tragic
+struggle which began in the autocratic theories of James the
+First and in the absolutism of Charles. Almost every phase of
+that momentous conflict had its reverberation across the
+Atlantic, as the history of the granting and withdrawal of
+colonial charters witnesses abundantly. The American pioneers
+were quite aware of what was going on in England, and they
+praised God or grumbled, thriftily profited by the results or
+quietly nullified them, as the case might be. But all the time,
+while England was rocked to its foundations, the colonists struck
+steadily forward into their own independent life.
+
+CHAPTER III. THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION
+
+When the eighteenth century opened, many signs of change were in
+the air. The third generation of native-born Americans was
+becoming secularized. The theocracy of New England had failed. In
+the height of the tragic folly over the supposed "witchcraft" in
+Salem, Increase Mather and his son Cotton had held up the hands
+of the judges in their implacable work. But before five years had
+passed, Judge Sewall does public penance in church for his share
+of the awful blunder, desiring "to take the shame and blame of
+it." Robert Calef's cool pamphlet exposing the weakness of the
+prosecutors' case is indeed burned by Increase Mather in the
+Harvard Yard, but the liberal party are soon to force Mather from
+the Presidency and to refuse that office to his son. In the town
+of Boston, once hermetically sealed against heresy, there are
+Baptist and Episcopal churches--and a dancing-master. Young
+Benjamin Franklin, born in 1706, professes a high respect for the
+Mathers, but he does not go to church, "Sunday being my studying
+day," and neither the clerical nor the secular arm of Boston is
+long enough and strong enough to compel that industrious
+apprentice into piety.
+
+If such was the state of New England, the laxity of New York and
+Virginia needs little evidence. Contemporary travelers found the
+New Yorkers singularly attached to the things of this present
+world. Philadelphia was prosperous and therewith content.
+Virginia was a paradise with no forbidden fruit. Hugh Jones,
+writing of it in 1724, considers North Carolina "the refuge of
+runaways," and South Carolina "the delight of buccaneers and
+pirates," but Virginia "the happy retreat of true Britons and
+true Churchmen." Unluckily these Virginians, well nourished "by
+the plenty of the country," have "contemptible notions of
+England!" We shall hear from them again. In the meantime the
+witty William Byrd of Westover describes for us his amusing
+survey of the Dismal Swamp, and his excursions into North
+Carolina and to Governor Spotswood's iron mines, where he reads
+aloud to the Widow Fleming, on a rainy autumn day, three acts of
+the "Beggars' Opera," just over from London. So runs the world
+away, south of the Potomac. Thackeray paints it once for all, no
+doubt, in the opening chapters of "The Virginians."
+
+To discover any ambitious literary effort in this period, we must
+turn northward again. In the middle colonies, and especially in
+Philadelphia, which had now outgrown Boston in population, there
+was a quickened interest in education and science. But the New
+Englanders were still the chief makers of books. Three great
+names will sufficiently represent the age: Cotton Mather, a
+prodigy of learning whose eyes turn back fondly to the provincial
+past; Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the most consummate intellect of
+the eighteenth century; and Benjamin Franklin, certainly the most
+perfect exponent of its many-sided life.
+
+When Cotton Mather was graduated from Harvard in 1678, in his
+sixteenth year, he was publicly complimented by President Oakes,
+in fulsome Latin, as the grandson of Richard Mather and John
+Cotton. This atmosphere of flattery, this consciousness of
+continuing in his own person the famous local dynasty, surrounded
+and sustained him to the end. He had a less commanding
+personality than his father Increase. His nervous sensibility was
+excessive. His natural vanity was never subdued, though it was
+often chastened by trial and bitter disappointment. But, like his
+father, he was an omnivorous reader and a facile producer of
+books, carrying daily such burdens of mental and spiritual
+excitement as would have crushed a normal man. Increase Mather
+published some one hundred and fifty books and pamphlets: Cotton
+Mather not less than four hundred. The Rev. John Norton, in his
+sketch of John Cotton, remarks that "the hen, which brings not
+forth without uncessant sitting night and day, is an apt emblem
+of students." Certainly the hen is an apt emblem of the
+"uncessant" sitter, the credulous scratcher, the fussy cackler
+who produced the "Magnalia."
+
+Yet he had certain elements of greatness. His tribal loyalty was
+perfect. His ascetic devotion to his conception of religious
+truth was absolute. His Diary, which has recently been published
+in full, records his concern for the chief political events in
+Europe in his day, no less than his brooding solicitude for the
+welfare of his townspeople, and his agony of spirit over the
+lapses of his wayward eldest son. A "sincere" man, then, as
+Carlyle would say, at bottom; but overlaid with such "Jewish old
+clothes," such professional robings and personal plumage as makes
+it difficult, save in the revealing "Diary," to see the man
+himself.
+
+The "Magnalia Christi Americana," treating the history of New
+England from 1620 to 1698, was published in a tall London folio
+of nearly 800 pages in 1702. It is divided into seven books, and
+proceeds, by methods entirely unique, to tell of Pilgrim and
+Puritan divines and governors, of Harvard College, of the
+churches of New England, of marvelous events, of Indian wars; and
+in general to justify, as only a member of the Mather dynasty
+could justify, the ways of God to Boston men. Hawthorne and
+Whittier, Longfellow and Lowell knew this book well and found
+much honey in the vast carcass. To have had four such readers and
+a biographer like Barrett Wendell must be gratifying to Cotton
+Mather in Paradise.
+
+The "Diary" of Mather's fellow-townsman Judge Samuel Sewall has
+been read more generally in recent years than anything written by
+Mather himself. It was begun in 1673, nine years earlier than the
+first entry in Mather's "Diary," and it ends in 1729, while
+Mather's closes in 1724. As a picture of everyday happenings in
+New England, Sewall's "Diary" is as far superior to Mather's as
+Pepys's "Diary" is to George Fox's "Journal" in painting the
+England of the Restoration. Samuel Sewall was an admirably solid
+figure, keen, forceful, honest. Most readers of his "Diary"
+believe that he really was in luck when he was rejected by the
+Widow Winthrop on that fateful November day when his eye
+noted--in spite of his infatuation--that "her dress was not so
+clean as sometime it had been. Jehovah Jireh!"
+
+One pictures Cotton Mather as looking instinctively backward to
+the Heroic Age of New England with pious nervous exaltation, and
+Samuel Sewall as doing the day's work uprightly without taking
+anxious thought of either past or future. But Jonathan Edwards is
+set apart from these and other men. He is a lonely seeker after
+spiritual perfection, in quest of that city "far on the world's
+rim," as Masefield says of it, the city whose builder and maker
+is God.
+
+The story of Edwards's career has the simplicity and dignity of
+tragedy. Born in a parsonage in the quiet Connecticut valley in
+1703--the year of John Wesley's birth--he is writing at the age
+of ten to disprove the doctrine of the materiality of the soul.
+At twelve he is studying "the wondrous way of the working of the
+spider," with a precision and enthusiasm which would have made
+him a great naturalist. At fourteen he begins his notes on "The
+Mind" and on "Natural Science." He is graduated from Yale in
+1720, studies theology, and at twenty-four becomes the colleague
+of his famous grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in the church at
+Northampton. He marries the beautiful Sarah Pierrepont, whom he
+describes in his journal in a prose rhapsody which, like his
+mystical rhapsodies on religion in the same youthful period,
+glows with a clear unearthly beauty unmatched in any English
+prose of that century. For twenty-three years he serves the
+Northampton church, and his sermons win him the rank of the
+foremost preacher in New England. John Wesley reads at Oxford his
+account of the great revival of 1735. Whitefield comes to visit
+him at Northampton. Then, in 1750, the ascetic preacher alienates
+his church over issues pertaining to discipline and to the
+administration of the sacrament. He is dismissed. He preaches his
+"farewell sermon," like Wesley, like Emerson, like Newman, and
+many another still unborn. He removes to Stockbridge, then a
+hamlet in the wilderness, preaches to the Indians, and writes
+treatises on theology and metaphysics, among them the world
+famous "Freedom of the Will." In 1757, upon the death of his
+son-in-law, President Aaron Burr of Princeton, Edwards is called
+to the vacant Presidency. He is reluctant to go, for though he is
+only fifty-four, his health has never been robust, and he has his
+great book on the "History of Redemption" still to write. But he
+accepts, finds the smallpox raging in Princeton upon his arrival
+in January, 1758, is inoculated, and dies of the disease in
+March--his dreams unfulfilled, his life-work once more thwarted.
+Close by the tomb of this saint is the tomb of his grandson,
+Aaron Burr, who killed Hamilton.
+
+The literary reputation of Jonathan Edwards has turned, like the
+vicissitudes of his life, upon factors that could not be
+foreseen. His contemporary fame was chiefly as a preacher, and
+was due to sermons like those upon "God Glorified in Man's
+Dependence" and "The Reality of Spiritual Life," rather than to
+such discourses as the Enfield sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of
+an Angry God," which in our own day is the best known of his
+deliverances. Legends have grown up around this terrific Enfield
+sermon. Its fearful power over its immediate hearers cannot be
+gainsaid, and it will long continue to be quoted as an example of
+the length to which a Calvinistic logician of genius was
+compelled by his own scheme to go. We still see the tall,
+sweet-faced man, worn by his daily twelve hours of intense mental
+toil, leaning on one elbow in the pulpit and reading from
+manuscript, without even raising his gentle voice, those words
+which smote his congregation into spasms of terror and which seem
+to us sheer blasphemy.
+
+Yet the "Farewell Sermon of 1750" gives a more characteristic
+view of Edwards's mind and heart, and conveys an ineffaceable
+impression of his nobility of soul. His diction, like
+Wordsworth's, is usually plain almost to bareness; the formal
+framework of his discourses is obtruded; and he hunts objections
+to their last hiding place with wearisome pertinacity. Yet his
+logic is incandescent. Steel sometimes burns to the touch like
+this, in the bitter winters of New England, and one wonders
+whether Edwards's brain was not of ice, so pitiless does it seem.
+His treatise denying the freedom of the will has given him a
+European reputation comparable with that enjoyed by Franklin in
+science and Jefferson in political propaganda. It was really a
+polemic demonstrating the sovereignty of God, rather than pure
+theology or metaphysics. Edwards goes beyond Augustine and Calvin
+in asserting the arbitrary will of the Most High and in "denying
+to the human will any self-determining power." He has been
+refuted by events and tendencies, such as the growth of
+historical criticism and the widespread acceptance of the
+doctrine of evolution, rather than by the might of any single
+antagonist. So, too, the Dred Scott decision of Chief Justice
+Taney, holding that the slave was not a citizen, was not so much
+answered by opponents as it was superseded by the arbitrament of
+war. But the idealism of this lonely thinker has entered deeply
+and permanently into the spiritual life of his countrymen, and he
+will continue to be read by a few of those who still read Plato
+and Dante.
+
+"My mother grieves," wrote Benjamin Franklin to his father in
+1738, "that one of her sons is an Arian, another an Arminian.
+What an Arminian or an Arian is, I cannot say that I very well
+know. The truth is I make such distinctions very little my
+study." To understand Franklin's indifference to such
+distinctions, we must realize how completely he represents the
+secularizing tendencies of his age. What a drama of worldly
+adventure it all was, this roving life of the tallow-chandler's
+son, who runs away from home, walks the streets of Philadelphia
+with the famous loaves of bread under his arm, is diligent in
+business, slips over to London, where he gives lessons in
+swimming and in total abstinence, slips back to Philadelphia and
+becomes its leading citizen, fights the long battle of the
+American colonies in London, sits in the Continental Congress,
+sails to Europe to arrange that French Alliance which brought our
+Revolution to a successful issue, and comes home at last, full of
+years and honors, to a bland and philosophical exit from the
+stage!
+
+He broke with every Puritan tradition. The Franklins were
+relatively late comers to New England. They sprang from a long
+line of blacksmiths at Ecton in Northamptonshire. The seat of the
+Washingtons was not far away, and Franklin's latest biographer
+points out that the pink-coated huntsmen of the Washington gentry
+may often have stopped at Ecton to have their horses shod at the
+Franklin smithy. Benjamin's father came out in 1685, more than
+fifty years after the most notable Puritan emigration. Young
+Benjamin, born in 1706, was as untouched by the ardors of that
+elder generation as he would have been by the visions of
+Dante--an author, by the way, whom he never mentions, even as he
+never mentions Shakespeare. He had no reverence for Puritan New
+England. To its moral beauty, its fine severity, he was wholly
+blind. As a boy he thriftily sold his Pilgrim's "Progress." He
+became, in the new fashion of that day, a Deist. Like a true
+child of the eighteenth century, his attitude toward the
+seventeenth was that of amused or contemptuous superiority.
+Thackeray has somewhere a charming phrase about his own love for
+the back seat of the stage-coach, the seat which, in the old
+coaching days, gave one a view of the receding landscape.
+Thackeray, like Burke before him, loved historical associations,
+historical sentiment, the backward look over the long road which
+humanity has traveled. But Franklin faced the other way. He would
+have endorsed his friend Jefferson's scornful sentence, "The dead
+have no rights." He joined himself wholly to that eighteenth
+century in which his own lot was cast, and, alike in his
+qualities and in his defects, he became one of its most perfect
+representatives.
+
+To catch the full spirit of that age, turn for an instant to the
+London of 1724--the year of Franklin's arrival. Thirty-six years
+have elapsed since the glorious Revolution of 1688; the Whig
+principles, then triumphant, have been tacitly accepted by both
+political parties; the Jacobite revolt of 1715 has proved a
+fiasco; the country has accepted the House of Hanover and a
+government by party leadership of the House of Commons, and it
+does not care whether Sir Robert Walpole buys a few rotten
+boroughs, so long as he maintains peace with Europe and
+prosperity at home. England is weary of seventeenth century
+"enthusiasm," weary of conflict, sick of idealism. She has found
+in the accepted Whig principles a satisfactory compromise, a
+working theory of society, a modus vivendi which nobody supposes
+is perfect but which will answer the prayer appointed to be read
+in all the churches, "Grant us peace in our time, O Lord." The
+theories to which men gave their lives in the seventeenth century
+seem ghostly in their unreality; but the prize turnips on Sir
+Robert's Norfolk farm, and the wines in his cellar, and the
+offices at his disposal--these are very real indeed. London
+merchants are making money; the squire and the parson are
+tranquilly ruling the country parishes; the philosophy of John
+Locke is everywhere triumphant. Mr. Pope is the poet of the hour,
+and his "Essay on Man," counseling acceptance of our mortal
+situation, is considered to be the last word of human wisdom and
+of poetical elegance. In prose, the style of the "Spectator"
+rules--an admirable style, Franklin thought, and he imitated it
+patiently until its ease and urbanity had become his own. And
+indeed, how much of that London of the third decade of the
+century passed into the mind of the inquisitive, roving,
+loose-living printer's apprentice from Philadelphia! It taught
+him that the tangible world is the real world, and that nothing
+succeeds like success; but it never even whispered to him that
+sometimes nothing damns like success.
+
+In his limitations, no less than in his power of assimilation,
+Franklin was the representative man of his era. He had no
+artistic interests, no liking for metaphysics after his brief
+devotion, in early manhood, to the dialogues of Plato. He taught
+himself some Latin, but he came to believe that the classics had
+little significance and that they should be superseded by the
+modern languages. For the mediaeval world he had no patience or
+understanding. To these defects of his century we must add some
+failings of his own. He was not always truthful. He had an
+indelible streak of coarseness. His conception of the "art of
+virtue" was mechanical. When Carlyle called Franklin the "father
+of all the Yankees," we must remember that the Scotch prophet
+hated Yankees and believed that Franklin's smooth, plausible,
+trader type of morality was only a broad way to the everlasting
+bonfire.
+
+But it is folly to linger over the limitations of the tallow-
+chandler's son. The catalogue of his beneficent activity is a
+vast one. Balzac once characterized him as the man who invented
+the lightning-rod, the hoax, and the republic. His contributions
+to science have to do with electricity, earthquakes, geology,
+meteorology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics,
+navigation of air and water, agriculture, medicine, and hygiene.
+In some of these fields he did pioneer work of lasting
+significance. His teachings of thrift and prudence, as formulated
+in the maxims of Poor Richard, gave him a world-wide reputation.
+He attacked war, like Voltaire, not so much for its wickedness as
+for its folly, and cheerfully gave up many years of a long life
+to the effort to promote a better understanding among the nations
+of the world.
+
+It is perhaps needless to add what all persons who love good
+writing know, that Benjamin Franklin was a most delightful
+writer. His letters cover an amusing and extraordinary variety of
+topics. He ranges from balloons to summer hats, and from the
+advantages of deep ploughing to bifocal glasses, which, by the
+way, he invented. He argues for sharp razors and cold baths, and
+for fresh air in the sleeping-room. He discusses the morals of
+the game of chess, the art of swimming, the evils of smoky
+chimneys, the need of reformed spelling. Indeed, his passion for
+improvement led him not only to try his hand upon an abridgment
+of the Book of Common Prayer, but to go even so far as to propose
+seriously a new rendering of the Lord's Prayer. His famous
+proposal for a new version of the Bible, however, which Matthew
+Arnold solemnly held up to reprobation, was only a joke which
+Matthew Arnold did not see-the new version of Job being, in fact,
+a clever bit of political satire against party leadership in
+England. Even more brilliant examples of his skill in political
+satire are his imaginary "Edict of the King of Prussia against
+England," and his famous "Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a
+Small One."But I must not try to call the roll of all the good
+things in Franklin's ten volumes. I will simply say that those
+who know Franklin only in his "Autobiography," charming as that
+classic production is, have made but an imperfect acquaintance
+with the range, the vitality, the vigor of this admirable
+craftsman who chose a style "smooth, clear, and short," and made
+it serve every purpose of his versatile and beneficent mind.
+
+When the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 startled the American
+colonies out of their provincial sense of security and made them
+aware of their real attitude toward the mother country, Franklin
+was in London. Eleven years earlier, in 1754, he had offered a
+plan for the "Union of the Colonies," but this had not
+contemplated separation from England. It was rather what we
+should call a scheme for imperial federation under the British
+Crown. We may use his word union, however, in a different field
+from that of politics. How much union of sentiment, of mental and
+moral life, of literary, educational, and scientific endeavor,
+was there in the colonies when the hour of self-examination came?
+Only the briefest summary may be attempted here. As to race,
+these men of the third and fourth generation since the planting
+of the colonies were by no means so purely English as the first
+settlers. The 1,600,000 colonists in 1760 were mingled of many
+stocks, the largest non-English elements being German and
+Scotch-Irish--that is, Scotch who had settled for a while in
+Ulster before emigrating to America. "About one-third of the
+colonists in 1760," says Professor Channing, "were born outside
+of America." Crevecoeur's "Letters from an American Farmer" thus
+defined the Americans: "They are a mixture of English, Scotch,
+Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous
+breed that race now called Americans has arisen." The Atlantic
+seaboard, with a narrow strip inland, was fairly well covered by
+local communities, differing in blood, in religion, in political
+organization--a congeries of separate experiments or young
+utopias, waiting for that most utopian experiment of all, a
+federal union. But the dominant language of the "promiscuous
+breed" was English, and in the few real centers of intellectual
+life the English tradition was almost absolute.
+
+The merest glance at colonial journalism will confirm this
+estimate. The "Boston News-Letter," begun in 1704, was the first
+of the journals, if we omit the single issue of "Publick
+Occurrences" in the same town in 1690. By 1765 there were nearly
+fifty colonial newspapers and several magazines. Their influence
+made for union, in Franklin's sense of that word, and their
+literary models, like their paper, type, and even ink, were found
+in London. The "New England Courant," established in Boston in
+1721 by James Franklin, is full of imitations of the "Tatler,"
+"Spectator," and "Guardian." What is more, the "Courant" boasted
+of its office collection of books, including Shakespeare, Milton,
+the "Spectator," and Swift's "Tale of a Tub."* This was in 1722.
+If we remember that no allusion to Shakespeare has been
+discovered in the colonial literature of the seventeenth century,
+and scarcely an allusion to the Puritan poet Milton, and that the
+Harvard College Library in 1723 had nothing of Addison, Steele,
+Bolingbroke, Dryden, Pope, and Swift, and had only recently
+obtained copies of Milton and Shakespeare, we can appreciate the
+value of James Franklin's apprenticeship in London. Perhaps we
+can even forgive him for that attack upon the Mathers which threw
+the conduct of the "Courant," for a brief period, into the hands
+of his brother Benjamin, whose turn at a London apprenticeship
+was soon to come.
+
+* Cook, E. C. "Literary Influences in Colonial Newspapers,
+1704-1750." N. Y., 1912.
+
+If we follow this younger brother to Philadelphia and to
+Bradford's "American Mercury" or to Franklin's own "Pennsylvania
+Gazette," or if we study the "Gazettes" of Maryland, Virginia,
+and South Carolina, the impression is still the same. The
+literary news is still chiefly from London, from two months to a
+year late. London books are imported and reprinted. Franklin
+reprints Pamela, and his Library Company of Philadelphia has two
+copies of "Paradise Lost "for circulation in 1741, whereas there
+had been no copy of that work in the great library of Cotton
+Mather. American journalism then, as now, owed its vitality to a
+secular spirit of curiosity about the actual world. It followed
+England as its model, but it was beginning to develop a temper of
+its own.
+
+Colonial education and colonial science were likewise chiefly
+indebted to London, but by 1751 Franklin's papers on electricity
+began to repay the loan. A university club in New York in 1745
+could have had but fifteen members at most, for these were all
+the "academics" in town. Yet Harvard had then been sending forth
+her graduates for more than a century. William and Mary was
+founded in 1693, Yale in 1701, Princeton in 1746, King's (now
+Columbia) in 1754, the University of Pennsylvania in 1755, and
+Brown in 1764. These colonial colleges were mainly in the hands
+of clergymen. They tended to reproduce a type of scholarship
+based upon the ancient languages. The curriculum varied but
+little in the different colonies, and this fact helped to produce
+a feeling of fellowship among all members of the republic of
+letters. The men who debated the Stamp Act were, with a few
+striking exceptions, men trained in Latin and Greek, familiar
+with the great outlines of human history, accustomed to the
+discipline of academic disputation. They knew the ideas and the
+vocabulary of cultivated Europe and were conscious of no
+provincial inferiority. In the study of the physical sciences,
+likewise, the colonials were but little behind the mother
+country. The Royal Society had its distinguished members here.
+The Mathers, the Dudleys, John Winthrop of Connecticut, John
+Bartram, James Logan, James Godfrey, Cadwallader Colden, and
+above all, Franklin himself, were winning the respect of European
+students, and were teaching Americans to use their eyes and their
+minds not merely upon the records of the past but in searching
+out the inexhaustible meanings of the present. There is no more
+fascinating story than that of the beginnings of American science
+in and outside of the colleges, and this movement, like the
+influence of journalism and of the higher education, counted for
+colonial union.
+
+Professor Tyler, our foremost literary student of the period,
+summarizes the characteristics of colonial literature in these
+words: "Before the year 1765, we find in this country, not one
+American people, but many American peoples . . . . No cohesive
+principle prevailed, no centralizing life; each little nation was
+working out its own destiny in its own fashion." But he adds that
+with that year the colonial isolation came to an end, and that
+the student must thereafter "deal with the literature of one
+multitudinous people, variegated, indeed, in personal traits, but
+single in its commanding ideas and in its national destinies." It
+is easy to be wise after the event. Yet there was living in
+London in 1765, as the agent for Pennsylvania, a shrewd and bland
+Colonial--an honorary M. A. from both Harvard and Yale, a D.C.L.
+of Oxford and an LL.D. of St. Andrews who was by no means sure
+that the Stamp Act meant the end of Colonialism. And Franklin's
+uncertainty was shared by Washington. When the tall Virginian
+took command of the Continental Army as late as 1775, he
+"abhorred the idea of independence." Nevertheless John Jay,
+writing the second number of the "Federalist" in 1787, only
+twelve years later, could say: "Providence has been pleased to
+give this one connected country to one united people; a people
+descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language,
+professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of
+government."
+
+CHAPTER IV. THE REVOLUTION
+
+If we turn, however, to the literature produced in America
+between the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 and the adoption of
+the Constitution in 1787, we perceive that it is a literature of
+discord and passion. Its spirit is not that of "one united
+people." Washington could indeed declare in his "Farewell
+Address" of 1796, "With slight shades of difference, you have the
+same religion, manners, habits, and political principles"; yet no
+one knew better than Washington upon what a slender thread this
+political unity had often hung, and how impossible it had been to
+foresee the end from the beginning.
+
+It is idle to look in the writings of the Revolutionary period
+for the literature of beauty, for a quiet harmonious unfolding of
+the deeper secrets of life. It was a time of swift and pitiless
+change, of action rather than reflection, of the turning of many
+separate currents into one headlong stream. "We must, indeed, all
+hang together," runs Franklin's well-known witticism in
+Independence Hall, "or, most assuredly, we shall all hang
+separately." Excellently spoken, Doctor! And that homely, cheery,
+daring sentence gives the keynote of much of the Revolutionary
+writing that has survived. It may be heard in the state papers of
+Samuel Adams, the oratory of Patrick Henry, the pamphlets of
+Thomas Paine, the satires of Freneau and Trumbull, and in the
+subtle, insinuating, thrilling paragraphs of Thomas Jefferson.
+
+We can only glance in passing at the literature of the Lost
+Cause, the Loyalist or "Tory" pleadings for allegiance to
+Britain. It was written by able and honest men, like Boucher and
+Odell, Seabury, Leonard and Galloway. They distrusted what
+Seabury called "our sovereign Lord the Mob." They represented, in
+John Adams's opinion, nearly one-third of the people of the
+colonies, and recent students believe that this estimate was too
+low. In some colonies the Loyalists were clearly in the majority.
+In all they were a menacing element, made up of the conservative,
+the prosperous, the well-educated, with a mixture, of course, of
+mere placemen and tuft-hunters. They composed weighty pamphlets,
+eloquent sermons, and sparkling satire in praise of the old order
+of things. When their cause was lost forever, they wrote gossipy
+letters from their exile in London or pathetic verses in their
+new home in Nova Scotia and Ontario. Their place in our national
+life and literature has never been filled, and their talents and
+virtues are never likely to receive adequate recognition. They
+took the wrong fork of the road.
+
+There were gentle spirits, too, in this period, endowed with
+delicate literary gifts, but quite unsuited for the clash of
+controversy--members, in Crevecoeur's touching words, of the
+"secret communion among good men throughout the world." "I am a
+lover of peace, what must I do?" asks Crevecoeur in his "Letters
+from an American Farmer." "I was happy before this unfortunate
+Revolution. I feel that I am no longer so, therefore I regret the
+change. My heart sometimes seems tired with beating, it wants
+rest like my eyelids, which feel oppressed with so many
+watchings." Crevecoeur, an immigrant from Normandy, was certainly
+no weakling, but he felt that the great idyllic American
+adventure which he described so captivatingly in his chapter
+entitled "What is an American"--was ending tragically in civil
+war. Another whitesouled itinerant of that day was John Woolman
+of New Jersey, whose "Journal," praised by Charles Lamb and
+Channing and edited by Whittier, is finding more readers in the
+twentieth century than it won in the nineteenth. "A man
+unlettered," said Whittier, "but with natural refinement and
+delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart enters into
+his language." Woolman died at fifty-two in far-away York,
+England, whither he had gone to attend a meeting of the Society
+of Friends.
+
+The three tall volumes of the Princeton edition of the poems of
+Philip Freneau bear the sub-title, "Poet of the American
+Revolution." But our Revolution, in truth, never had an adequate
+poet. The prose-men, such as Jefferson, rose nearer the height of
+the great argument than did the men of rhyme. Here and there the
+struggle inspired a brisk ballad like Francis Hopkinson's "Battle
+of the Kegs," a Hudibrastic satire like Trumbull's "McFingal," or
+a patriotic song like Timothy Dwight's "Columbia." Freneau
+painted from his own experience the horrors of the British
+prison-ship, and celebrated, in cadences learned from Gray and
+Collins, the valor of the men who fell at Eutaw Springs. There
+was patriotic verse in extraordinary profusion, but its literary
+value is slight, and it reveals few moods of the American mind
+that are not more perfectly conveyed through oratory, the
+pamphlet, and the political essay. The immediate models of this
+Revolutionary verse were the minor British bards of the
+eighteenth century, a century greatly given to verse-writing, but
+endowed by Heaven with the "prose-reason" mainly. The reader of
+Burton E. Stevenson's collection of "Poems of American History"
+can easily compare the contemporary verse inspired by the events
+of the Revolution with the modern verse upon the same historic
+themes. He will see how slenderly equipped for song were most of
+the later eighteenth-century Americans and how unfavorable to
+poetry was the tone of that hour.
+
+Freneau himself suffered, throughout his long career, from the
+depressing indifference of his public to the true spirit of
+poetry. "An old college mate of mine," said James Madison--who
+was by tradition Freneau's roommate at Princeton in the class of
+1771--"a poet and man of literary and refined tastes, knowing
+nothing of the world." When but three years out of college, the
+cautious Madison wrote to another friend: "Poetry wit and
+Criticism Romances Plays &c captivated me much: but I begin to
+discover that they deserve but a moderate portion of a mortal's
+Time and that something more substantial more durable more
+profitable befits our riper age." Madison was then at the ripe
+age of twenty-three! Professor Pattee, Freneau's editor, quotes
+these words to illustrate the "common sense" atmosphere of the
+age which proved fatal to Freneau's development. Yet the sturdy
+young New Yorker, of Huguenot descent, is a charming figure, and
+his later malevolence was shown only to his political foes. After
+leaving Princeton he tries teaching, the law, the newspaper, the
+sea; he is aflame with patriotic zeal; he writes, like most
+American poets, far too much for his own reputation. As the
+editor of the "National Gazette" in Philadelphia, he becomes
+involved in the bitter quarrel between his chief, Jefferson, and
+Alexander Hamilton. His attachment to the cause of the French
+Revolution makes him publish baseless attacks upon Washington. By
+and by he retires to a New Jersey farm, still toying with
+journalism, still composing verses. He turns patriotic poet once
+more in the War of 1812; but the public has now forgotten him. He
+lives on in poverty and seclusion, and in his eightieth year
+loses his way in a snowstorm and perishes miserably--this in
+1832, the year of the death of the great Sir Walter Scott, who
+once had complimented Freneau by borrowing one of his best lines
+of poetry.
+
+It is in the orations and pamphlets and state papers inspired by
+the Revolutionary agitation that we find the most satisfactory
+expression of the thought and feeling of that generation. Its
+typical literature is civic rather than aesthetic, a sort of
+writing which has been incidental to the accomplishing of some
+political, social, or moral purpose, and which scarcely regards
+itself as literature at all. James Otis's argument against the
+Writs of Assistance in Massachusetts in 1761, and Patrick Henry's
+speech in the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1765, mark epochs in
+the emotional life of these communities. They were reported
+imperfectly or not at all, but they can no more be ignored in an
+assessment of our national experience than editorials, sermons,
+or conversations which have expressed the deepest feelings of a
+day and then have perished beyond resurrection.
+
+Yet if natural orators like Otis and Henry be denied a strictly
+"literary" rating because their surviving words are obviously
+inadequate to account for the popular effect of their speeches,
+it is still possible to measure the efficiency of the
+pamphleteer. When John Adams tells us that "James Otis was Isaiah
+and Ezekiel united," we must take his word for the impression
+which Otis's oratory left upon his mind. But John Adams's own
+writings fill ten stout volumes which invite our judgment. The
+"truculent and sarcastic splendor" of his hyperboles need not
+blind us to his real literary excellencies, such as clearness,
+candor, vigor of phrase, freshness of idea. A testy, rugged,
+"difficult" person was John Adams, but he grew mellower with age,
+and his latest letters and journals are full of whimsical charm.
+
+John Adams's cousin Samuel was not precisely a charming person.
+Bigoted, tireless, secretive, this cunning manipulator of
+political passions followed many tortuous paths. His ability for
+adroit misstatement of an adversary's position has been equaled
+but once in our history. But to the casual reader of his four
+volumes, Samuel Adams seems ever to be breathing the liberal air
+of the town-meeting: everything is as plainly obvious as a good
+citizen can make it. He has, too, the large utterance of the
+European liberalism of his day. "Resolved," read his Resolutions
+of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts in 1765, "that
+there are certain essential rights of the British constitution of
+government which are founded in the law of God and nature and are
+the common rights of mankind." In his statement of the Rights of
+the Colonists (1772) we are assured that "among the natural
+rights of the colonists are these, First, a right to Life;
+secondly to Liberty; thirdly to Property .... All men have a
+Right to remain in a State of Nature as long as they please . . .
+. When Men enter into Society, it is by voluntary consent."
+Jean-Jacques himself could not be more bland, nor at heart more
+fiercely demagogic.
+
+"Tom" Paine would have been no match for "Sam" Adams in a
+town-meeting, but he was an even greater pamphleteer. He had
+arrived from England in 1774, at the age of thirty-eight, having
+hitherto failed in most of his endeavors for a livelihood.
+"Rebellious Staymaker; unkempt," says Carlyle; but General
+Charles Lee noted that there was "genius in his eyes," and he
+bore a letter of introduction from Franklin commending him as an
+"ingenious, worthy young man," which obtained for him a position
+on the "Pennsylvania Magazine." Before he had been a year on
+American soil, Paine was writing the most famous pamphlet of our
+political literature, "Common Sense," which appeared in January,
+1776. "A style hitherto unknown on this side of the Atlantic,"
+wrote Edmund Randolph. Yet this style of familiar talk to the
+crowd had been used seventy years earlier by Defoe and Swift, and
+it was to be employed again by a gaunt American frontiersman who
+was born in 1809, the year of Thomas Paine's death. "The Crisis,"
+a series of thirteen pamphlets, of which the first was issued in
+December, 1776, seemed to justify the contemporary opinion that
+the "American cause owed as much to the pen of Paine as to the
+sword of Washington. "Paine, who was now serving in the army,
+might have heard his own words, "These are the times that try
+men's souls," read aloud, by Washington's orders, to the ragged
+troops just before they crossed the Delaware to win the victory
+of Trenton. The best known productions of Paine's subsequent
+career, "The Rights of Man" and "The Age of Reason," were written
+in Europe, but they were read throughout America. The reputation
+of the "rebellious Staymaker" has suffered from certain grimy
+habits and from the ridiculous charge of atheism. He was no more
+an atheist than Franklin or Jefferson. In no sense an original
+thinker, he could impart to outworn shreds of deistic controversy
+and to shallow generalizations about democracy a personal fervor
+which transformed them and made his pages gay and bold and clear
+as a trumpet.
+
+Clear and bold and gay was Alexander Hamilton likewise; and his
+literary services to the Revolution are less likely to be
+underestimated than Thomas Paine's. They began with that boyish
+speech in "the Fields" of New York City in 1774 and with "The
+Farmer Refuted," a reply to Samuel Seabury's "Westchester
+Farmer." They were continued in extraordinary letters, written
+during Hamilton's military career, upon the defects of the
+Articles of Confederation and of the finances of the
+Confederation. Hamilton contributed but little to the actual
+structure of the new Constitution, but as a debater he fought
+magnificently and triumphantly for its adoption by the Convention
+of the State of New York in 1788. Together with Jay and Madison
+he defended the fundamental principles of the Federal Union in
+the remarkable series of papers known as the "Federalist." These
+eighty-five papers, appearing over the signature "Publius" in two
+New York newspapers between October, 1787, and April, 1788, owed
+their conception largely to Hamilton, who wrote more than half of
+them himself. In manner they are not unlike the substantial Whig
+literature of England, and in political theory they have little
+in common with the Revolutionary literature which we have been
+considering. The reasoning is close, the style vigorous but
+neither warmed by passion nor colored by the individual emotions
+of the author. The "Federalist" remains a classic example of the
+civic quality of our post-Revolutionary American political
+writing, broadly social in its outlook, well informed as to the
+past, confident--but not reckless--of the future. Many Americans
+still read it who would be shocked by Tom Paine and bored with
+Edmund Burke. It has none of the literary genius of either of
+those writers, but its formative influence upon successive
+generations of political thinking has been steadying and sound.
+
+In fact, our citizen literature cannot be understood aright if
+one fails to observe that its effect has often turned, not upon
+mere verbal skill, but upon the weight of character behind the
+words. Thus the grave and reserved George Washington says of the
+Constitution of 1787: "Let us raise a standard to which the wise
+and the honest can repair; the event is in the hand of God." The
+whole personality of the great Virginian is back of that simple,
+perfect sentence. It brings us to our feet, like a national
+anthem.
+
+One American, no doubt our most gifted man of letters of that
+century, passed most of the Revolutionary period abroad, in the
+service of his country. Benjamin Franklin was fifty-nine in the
+year of the Stamp Act. When he returned from France in 1785 he
+was seventy-nine, but he was still writing as admirably as ever
+when he died at eighty-four. We cannot dismiss this singular,
+varied, and fascinating American better than by quoting the
+letter which George Washington wrote to him in September, 1789.
+It has the dignity and formality of the eighteenth century, but
+it is warm with tested friendship and it glows with deep human
+feeling: "If to be venerated for benevolence, if to be admired
+for talents, if to be esteemed for patriotism, if to be beloved
+for philanthropy, can gratify the human mind, you must have the
+pleasing consolation to know that you have not lived in vain. And
+I flatter myself that it will not be ranked among the least
+grateful occurrences of your life to be assured, that, so long as
+I retain my memory, you will be recollected with respect,
+veneration, and affection by your sincere friend, George
+Washington."
+
+There remains another Virginian, the symbol of the Revolutionary
+age, the author of words more widely known around the globe than
+any other words penned by an American. "Thomas Jefferson," writes
+the latest of his successors in the Presidency, "was not a man of
+the people, but he was a man of such singular insight that he saw
+that all the roots of generous power come from the people." On
+his father's side Jefferson came from sound yeoman stock, in
+which Welsh blood ran. His mother was a Virginia Randolph. Born
+in Albemarle County, near the "little
+mountain"--Monticello--where he built a mansion for his bride and
+where he lies buried, the tall, strong, red-haired, gray-eyed,
+gifted boy was reputed the best shot, the best rider, the best
+fiddle-player in the county. He studied hard at William and Mary
+over his Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, but he also
+frequented the best society of the little capital. He learned to
+call himself a Deist and to theorize about ideal commonwealths.
+There was already in him that latent radicalism which made him
+strike down, as soon as he had the power, two of the fundamental
+principles of the society into which he was born, the principle
+of entailed property and that of church establishment.
+
+Such was the youth of twenty-two who was thrilled in 1765 by the
+Stamp Act. In the ten years of passionate discussion which
+followed, two things became clear: first, that there had long
+existed among the colonists very radical theoretical notions of
+political freedom; and second, that there was everywhere a spirit
+of practical conservatism. Jefferson illustrates the union of
+these two tendencies.
+
+He took his seat in the Continental Congress in June, 1775. He
+was only thirty-two, but he had already written, in the summer of
+1774, "A Summary View of the Rights of British America" which had
+been published in England by Burke, himself a judge of good
+writing and sound politics. Jefferson had also prepared in 1775
+the "Address of the Virginia House of Burgesses." For these
+reasons he was placed at the head of the Committee for drafting
+the Declaration of Independence. We need not linger over the
+familiar circumstances of its composition. Everybody knows how
+Franklin and Adams made a few verbal alterations in the first
+draft, how the committee of five then reported it to the
+Congress, which proceeded to cut out about one-fourth of the
+matter, while Franklin tried to comfort the writhing author with
+his cheerful story about the sign of John Thompson the hatter.
+Forty-seven years afterwards, in reply to the charge of lack of
+originality brought against the Declaration by Timothy Pickering
+and John Adams--charges which have been repeated at intervals
+ever since--Jefferson replied philosophically: "Whether I
+gathered my ideas from reading or reflection I do not know. I
+know only that I turned neither to book nor pamphlet while
+writing it. I did not consider it as any part of my charge to
+invent new ideas altogether and to offer no sentiment which had
+ever been expressed before." O wise young man, and fundamentally
+Anglo-Saxon young man, to turn his back, in that crisis, to the
+devil of mere cleverness, and stick to recognized facts and
+accepted sentiments! But his pen retains its cunning in spite of
+him; and the drop of hot Welsh blood tells; and the cosmopolitan
+reading and thinking tell; and they transform what Pickering
+called a "commonplace compilation, its sentiments hackneyed in
+Congress for two years before," into an immortal manifesto to
+mankind.
+
+Its method is the simplest. The preamble is philosophical,
+dealing with "self-evident" truths. Today the men who dislike or
+doubt these truths dismiss the preamble as "theoretical," or, to
+use another term of derogation favored by reactionaries,
+"French." But if the preamble be French and philosophical, the
+specific charges against the King are very English and practical.
+Here are certain facts, presented no doubt with consummate
+rhetorical skill, but facts, undeniably. The Anglo-Saxon in
+Jefferson is basal, racial; the turn for academic philosophizing
+after the French fashion is personal, acquired; but the range and
+sweep and enduring vitality of this matchless state paper lie in
+its illumination of stubborn facts by general principles, its
+decent respect to the opinions of mankind, its stately and noble
+utterance of national sentiments and national reasons to a
+"candid world."
+
+It has long been the fashion, among a certain school of
+half-hearted Americans--and unless I am mistaken, the teaching
+has increased during the last decades--to minimize the value of
+Jefferson's "self-evident truths." Rufus Choate, himself a
+consummate rhetorician, sneered at those "glittering
+generalities," and countless college-bred men, some of them
+occupying the highest positions, have echoed the sneer. The
+essence of the objection to Jefferson's platform lies of course
+in his phrase, "all men are created equal," with the subsidiary
+phrase about governments "deriving their just powers from the
+consent of the governed." Editors and congressmen and even
+college professors have proclaimed themselves unable to assent to
+these phrases of the Declaration, and unable even to understand
+them. These objectors belong partly, I think, in Jefferson's
+category of "nervous persons"--"anti-republicans," as he goes on
+to define them--"whose languid fibres have more analogy with a
+passive than an active state of things." Other objectors to the
+phrase "all men are created equal" have had an obvious personal
+or political motive for refusing assent to the proposition. But
+"no intelligent man," says one of Jefferson's biographers, "has
+ever misconstrued it [the Declaration] except intentionally."
+
+Nobody would claim today that Thomas Jefferson's statement of the
+sentiments and reasons for the independence of the thirteen
+British colonies in 1776 was an adequate handbook of political
+wisdom, fit for all the exigencies of contemporary American
+democracy. It is not that. It is simply, in Lincoln's phrase, one
+of "the standard maxims of free society" which no democracy can
+safely disregard.
+
+Jefferson's long life, so varied, so flexible, so responsive to
+the touch of popular forces, illustrates the process by which the
+Virginia mind of 1743 became the nationalized, unionized mind of
+1826. It is needless here to dwell upon the traits of his
+personal character: his sweetness of spirit, his
+stout-heartedness in disaster, his scorn of money, his love for
+the intellectual life. "I have no ambition to govern men," he
+wrote to Edward Rutledge. He was far happier talking about Greek
+and Anglo-Saxon with Daniel Webster before the fire-place of
+Monticello than he ever was in the presidential chair. His
+correspondence was enormous. His writings fill twenty volumes. In
+his theories of education he was fifty years ahead of his time;
+in his absolute trust in humanity he was generations ahead of it.
+"I am not one of those who fear the people," he declared proudly.
+It is because of this touching faith, this invincible and
+matchless ardor, that Jefferson is today remembered. He
+foreshadowed Lincoln. His belief in the inarticulate common
+people is rewarded by their obstinate fidelity to his name as a
+type and symbol. "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate
+powers of society but the people themselves," wrote Jefferson,
+and with the people themselves is the depository of his fame.
+
+CHAPTER V. THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP
+
+The Fourth of July orator for 1826 in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
+was Edward Everett. Although only thirty-two he was already a
+distinguished speaker. In the course of his oration he
+apostrophized John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as venerable
+survivors of that momentous day, fifty years earlier, which had
+witnessed our Declaration of Independence. But even as Everett
+was speaking, the aged author of the Declaration breathed his
+last at Monticello, and in the afternoon of that same day Adams
+died also, murmuring, it is said, with his latest breath, and as
+if with the whimsical obstinacy of an old man who hated to be
+beaten by his ancient rival, "Thomas Jefferson still lives." But
+Jefferson was already gone.
+
+On the first of August, Everett commemorated the career of the
+two Revolutionary leaders, and on the following day a greater
+than Everett, Daniel Webster, pronounced the famous eulogy in
+Faneuil Hall. Never were the thoughts and emotions of a whole
+country more adequately voiced than in this commemorative
+oratory. Its pulse was high with national pride over the
+accomplishments of half a century. "I ask," Everett declared,
+"whether more has not been done to extend the domain of
+civilization, in fifty years, since the Declaration of
+Independence, than would have been done in five centuries of
+continued colonial subjection?" Webster asserted in his
+peroration: "It cannot be denied, but by those who would dispute
+against the sun, that with America, and in America, a new era
+commences in human affairs. This era is distinguished by free
+representative governments, by entire religious liberty, by
+improved systems of national intercourse, by a newly awakened and
+an unconquerable spirit of free enquiry, and by a diffusion of
+knowledge through the community such as has been before
+altogether unknown and unheard of."
+
+Was this merely the "tall talk" then so characteristic of
+American oratory and soon to be satirized in "Martin Chuzzlewit"?
+Or was it prompted by a deep and true instinct for the
+significance of the vast changes that had come over American life
+since 1776? The external changes were familiar enough to
+Webster's auditors: the opening of seemingly illimitable
+territory through the Louisiana Purchase, the development of
+roads, canals, and manufactures; a rapid increase in wealth and
+population; a shifting of political power due to the rise of the
+new West--in a word, the evidences of irrepressible national
+energy. But this energy was inadequately expressed by the
+national literature. The more cultivated Americans were quite
+aware of this deficiency. It was confessed by the pessimistic
+Fisher Ames and by the ardent young men who in 1815 founded "The
+North American Review." British critics in "The Edinburgh" and
+"The Quarterly," commenting upon recent works of travel in
+America, pointed out the literary poverty of the American soil.
+Sydney Smith, by no means the most offensive of these critics,
+declared in 1820: "During the thirty or forty years of their
+independence they have done absolutely nothing for the sciences,
+for the arts, for literature . . . . In the four quarters of the
+globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play?
+or looks at an American picture or statue?"
+
+Sydney Smith's question "Who reads an American book?" has
+outlived all of his own clever volumes. Even while he was asking
+it, London was eagerly reading Irving's "Sketch Book." In 1821
+came Fenimore Cooper's Spy and Bryant's "Poems," and by 1826,
+when Webster was announcing in his rolling orotund that Adams and
+Jefferson were no more, the London and Paris booksellers were
+covering their stalls with Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans."
+Irving, Cooper, and Bryant are thus the pioneers in a new phase
+of American literary activity, often called, for convenience in
+labeling, the Knickerbocker Group because of the identification
+of these men with New York. And close behind these leaders come a
+younger company, destined likewise, in the shy boyish words of
+Hawthorne, one of the number, "to write books that would be read
+in England." For by 1826 Hawthorne and Longfellow were out of
+college and were trying to learn to write. Ticknor, Prescott, and
+Bancroft, somewhat older men, were settling to their great tasks.
+Emerson was entering upon his duties as a minister. Edgar Allan
+Poe, at that University of Virginia which Jefferson had just
+founded, was doubtless revising "Tamerlane and Other Poems" which
+he was to publish in Boston in the following year. Holmes was a
+Harvard undergraduate. Garrison had just printed Whittier's first
+published poem in the Newburyport "Free Press." Walt Whitman was
+a barefooted boy on Long Island, and Lowell, likewise seven years
+of age, was watching the birds in the treetops of Elmwood. But it
+was Washington Irving who showed all of these men that nineteenth
+century England would be interested in American books.
+
+The very word Knickerbocker is one evidence of the vitality of
+Irving's happy imaginings. In 1809 he had invented a mythical
+Dutch historian of New York named Diedrich Knickerbocker and
+fathered upon him a witty parody of Dr. Mitchill's grave "Picture
+of New York." To read Irving's chapters today is to witness one
+of the rarest and most agreeable of phenomena, namely, the actual
+beginning of a legend which the world is unwilling to let die.
+The book made Sir Walter Scott's sides ache with laughter, and
+reminded him of the humor of Swift and Sterne. But certain New
+Yorkers were slow to see the joke.
+
+Irving was himself a New Yorker, born just at the close of the
+Revolution, of a Scotch father and English mother. His youth was
+pleasantly idle, with a little random education, much
+theater-going, and plentiful rambles with a gun along the Hudson
+River. In 1804 he went abroad for his health, returned and helped
+to write the light social satire of the "Salmagundi Papers," and
+became, after the publication of the "Knickerbocker History," a
+local celebrity. Sailing for England in 1815 on business, he
+stayed until 1832 as a roving man of letters in England and Spain
+and then as Secretary of the American Legation in London. "The
+Sketch Book," "Bracebridge Hall," and "Tales of a Traveler" are
+the best known productions of Irving's fruitful residence in
+England. The "Life of Columbus," the "Conquest of Granada," and
+"The Alhambra" represent his first sojourn in Spain. After his
+return to America he became fascinated with the Great West, made
+the travels described in his "Tour of the Prairies," and told the
+story of roving trappers and the fur trade in "Captain
+Bonneville" and "Astoria." For four years he returned to Spain as
+American Minister. In his last tranquil years at Sunnyside on the
+Hudson, where he died in 1859, he wrote graceful lives of
+Goldsmith and of Washington.
+
+Such a glance at the shelf containing Irving's books suggests but
+little of that personal quality to which he owes his significance
+as an interpreter of America to the Old World. This son of a
+narrow, hard, Scotch dealer in cutlery, this drifter about town
+when New York was only a big slovenly village, this light-hearted
+scribbler of satire and sentiment, was a gentleman born. His
+boyhood and youth were passed in that period of
+Post-Revolutionary reaction which exhibits the United States in
+some of its most unlovely aspects. Historians like Henry Adams
+and McMaster have painted in detail the low estate of education,
+religion, and art as the new century began. The bitter feeling of
+the nascent nation toward Great Britain was intensified by the
+War of 1812. The Napoleonic Wars had threatened to break the last
+threads of our friendship for France, and suspicion of the Holy
+Alliance led to an era of national self-assertion of which the
+Monroe Doctrine was only one expression. The raw Jacksonism of
+the West seemed to be gaining upon the older civilizations
+represented by Virginia and Massachusetts. The self-made type of
+man began to pose as the genuine American. And at this moment
+came forward a man of natural lucidity and serenity of mind, of
+perfect poise and good temper, who knew both Europe and America
+and felt that they ought to know one another better and to like
+one another more. That was Irving's service as an international
+mediator. He diffused sweetness and light in an era marked by
+bitterness and obscuration. It was a triumph of character as well
+as of literary skill.
+
+But the skill was very noticeable also. Irving's prose is not
+that of the Defoe-Swift-Franklin-Paine type of plain talk to the
+crowd. It is rather an inheritance from that other eighteenth
+century tradition, the conversation of the select circle. Its
+accents were heard in Steele and Addison and were continued in
+Goldsmith, Sterne, Cowper, and Charles Lamb. Among Irving's
+successors, George William Curtis and Charles Dudley Warner and
+William Dean Howells have been masters of it likewise. It is
+mellow human talk, delicate, regardful, capable of exquisite
+modulation. With instinctive artistic taste, Irving used this old
+and sound style upon fresh American material. In "Rip van Winkle"
+and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" he portrayed his native valley
+of the Hudson, and for a hundred years connoisseurs of style have
+perceived the exquisite fitness of the language to the images and
+ideas which Irving desired to convey. To render the Far West of
+that epoch this style is perhaps not "big" and broad enough, but
+when used as Irving uses it in describing Stratford and
+Westminster Abbey and an Old English Christmas, it becomes again
+a perfect medium. Hawthorne adopted it for "Our Old Home," and
+Englishmen recognized it at once as a part of their own
+inheritance, enriched, like certain wines, by the voyage across
+the Atlantic and home again. Irving wrote of England, Mr. Warner
+once said, as Englishmen would have liked to write about it. When
+he described the Alhambra and Granada and the Moors, it was the
+style, rich both in physical sensation and in dreamlike reverie,
+which revealed to the world the quick American appreciation of
+foreign scenes and characters. Its key is sympathy.
+
+Irving's popularity has endured in England. It suffered during
+the middle of the century in his own country, for the strongest
+New England authors taught the public to demand more thought and
+passion than were in Irving's nature. Possibly the nervous,
+journalistic style of the twentieth century allows too scanty
+leisure of mind for the full enjoyment of the Knickerbocker
+flavor. Yet such changes as these in literary fashion scarcely
+affect the permanent service of Irving to our literature. He
+immortalized a local type--the New York Dutchman--and local
+legends, like that of Rip van Winkle; he used the framework of
+the narrative essay to create something almost like the perfected
+short story of Poe and Hawthorne; he wrote prose with unfailing
+charm in an age when charm was lacking; and, if he had no
+message, it should be remembered that some of the most useful
+ambassadors have had none save to reveal, with delicacy and tact
+and humorous kindness, the truth that foreign persons have
+feelings precisely like our own.
+
+Readers of Sir Walter Scott's "Journal" may remember his account
+of an evening party in Paris in 1826 where he met Fenimore
+Cooper, then in the height of his European reputation. "So the
+Scotch and American lions took the field together," wrote Sir
+Walter, who loved to be generous. "The Last of the Mohicans,"
+then just published, threatened to eclipse the fame of "Ivanhoe."
+Cooper, born in 1789, was eighteen years younger than the Wizard
+of the North, and was more deeply indebted to him than he knew.
+For it was Scott who had created the immense nineteenth century
+audience for prose fiction, and who had evolved a kind of formula
+for the novel, ready for Cooper's use. Both men were natural
+story-tellers. Scott had the richer mind and the more fully
+developed historical imagination. Both were out-of-doors men,
+lovers of manly adventure and of natural beauty. But the American
+had the good fortune to be able to utilize in his books his
+personal experiences of forest and sea and to reveal to Europe
+the real romance of the American wilderness.
+
+That Cooper was the first to perceive the artistic possibilities
+of this romance, no one would claim. Brockden Brown, a Quaker
+youth of Philadelphia, a disciple of the English Godwin, had
+tried his hand at the very end of the eighteenth century upon
+American variations of the Gothic romance then popular in
+England. Brown had a keen eye for the values of the American
+landscape and even of the American Indian. He had a knack for
+passages of ghastly power, as his descriptions of maniacs,
+murderers, sleep-walkers, and solitaries abundantly prove. But he
+had read too much and lived too little to rival the masters of
+the art of fiction. And there was a traveled Frenchman,
+Chateaubriand, surely an expert in the art of eloquent prose, who
+had transferred to the pages of his American Indian stories,
+"Atala" and "Rene," the mystery and enchantment of our dark
+forests
+and endless rivers. But Chateaubriand, like Brockden Brown, is
+feverish. A taint of old-world eroticism and despair hovers like
+a miasma over his magnificent panorama of the wilderness. Cooper,
+like Scott, is masculine.
+
+He was a Knickerbocker only by adoption. Born in New Jersey, his
+childhood was spent in the then remote settlement of Cooperstown
+in Central New York. He had a little schooling at Albany, and a
+brief and inglorious career at Yale with the class of 1806. He
+went to sea for two years, and then served for three years in the
+United States Navy upon Lakes Ontario and Champlain, the very
+scene of some of his best stories. In 1811 he married, resigned
+from the Navy, and settled upon a little estate in Westchester
+County, near New York. Until the age of thirty, he was not in the
+least a bookman, but a healthy, man of action. Then, as the
+well-known anecdote goes, he exclaims to his wife, after reading
+a stupid English novel, "I believe I could write a better story
+myself." "Precaution" (1820) was the result, but whether it was
+better than the unknown English book, no one can now say. It was
+bad enough. Yet the next year Cooper published "The Spy," one of
+the finest of his novels, which was instantly welcomed in England
+and translated in France. Then came, in swift succession, "The
+Pioneers," the first Leather-Stocking tale in order of
+composition, and "The Pilot," to show that Scott's "Pirate" was
+written by a landsman! "Lionel Lincoln" and "The Last of the
+Mohicans" followed. The next seven years were spent in Europe,
+mainly in France, where "The Prairie" and "The Red Rover" were
+written. Cooper now looked back upon his countrymen with eyes of
+critical detachment, and made ready to tell them some of their
+faults. He came home to Cooperstown in 1833, the year after
+Irving's return to America. He had won, deservedly, a great fame,
+which he proceeded to imperil by his combativeness with his
+neighbors and his harsh strictures upon the national character,
+due mainly to his lofty conception of the ideal America. He
+continued to spin yarns of sea and shore, and to write naval
+history. The tide of fashion set against him in the
+eighteen-forties when Bulwer and Dickens rode into favor, but the
+stouthearted old pioneer could afford to bide his time. He died
+in 1851, just as Mrs. Stowe was writing "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
+
+Two generations have passed since then, and Cooper's place in our
+literature remains secure. To have written our first historical
+novel, "The Spy," our first sea-story, "The Pilot," and to have
+created the Leather-Stocking series, is glory enough. In his
+perception of masculine character, Cooper ranks with Fielding.
+His sailors, his scouts and spies, his good and bad Indians, are
+as veritable human figures as Squire Western. Long Tom Coffin,
+Harvey Birch, Hawk-Eye, and Chingachgook are physically and
+morally true to life itself. Read the Leather-Stocking books in
+the order of the events described, beginning with "The
+Deerslayer," then "The Last of the Mohicans," "The Pathfinder,"
+"The Pioneers", and ending with the vast darkening horizon of
+"The Prairie" and the death of the trapper, and one will feel how
+natural and inevitable are the fates of the personages and the
+alterations in the life of the frontier. These books vary in
+their poetic quality and in the degree of their realism, but to
+watch the evolution of the leading figure is to see human life in
+its actual texture.
+
+Clever persons and pedantic persons have united to find fault
+with certain elements of Cooper's art. Mark Twain, in one of his
+least inspired moments, selected Cooper's novels for attack.
+Every grammar school teacher is ready to point out that his style
+is often prolix and his sentences are sometimes ungrammatical.
+Amateurs even criticize Cooper's seamanship, although it seemed
+impeccable to Admiral Mahan. No doubt one must admit the
+"helplessness, propriety, and incapacity" of most of Cooper's
+women, and the dreadfulness of his bores, particularly the
+Scotchmen, the doctors, and the naturalists. Like Sir Walter,
+Cooper seems to have taken but little pains in the deliberate
+planning of his plots. Frequently he accepts a ready-made formula
+of villain and hero, predicament and escape, renewed crisis and
+rescue, mystification and explanation, worthy of a third-rate
+novelist. His salvation lies in his genius for action, the beauty
+and grandeur of his landscapes, the primitive veracity of his
+children of nature. Cooper was an elemental man, and he
+comprehended, by means of something deeper than mere artistic
+instinct, the feelings of elemental humanity in the presence of
+the wide ocean or of the deep woods. He is as healthy and sane as
+Fielding, and he possesses an additional quality which all of the
+purely English novelists lack. It was the result of his youthful
+sojourn in the wilderness. Let us call it the survival in him of
+an aboriginal imagination. Cooper reminds one somehow of a
+moose--an ungraceful creature perhaps, but indubitably big, as
+many a hunter has suddenly realized when he has come unexpectedly
+upon a moose that whirled to face him in the twilight silence of
+a northern wood.
+
+Something of this far-off and gigantic primitivism inheres also
+in the poetry of William Cullen Bryant. His portrait, with the
+sweeping white beard and the dark folds of the cloak, suggests
+the Bard as the Druids might have known him. But in the
+eighteen-thirties and forties, Mr. Bryant's alert, clean-shaven
+face, and energetic gait as he strode down Broadway to the
+"Evening Post" office, suggested little more than a vigorous and
+somewhat radical editor of an increasingly prosperous Democratic
+newspaper. There was nothing of the Fringed Gentian or Yellow
+Violet about him. Like so many of the Knickerbockers, Bryant was
+an immigrant to New York; in fact, none of her adopted men of
+letters have represented so perfectly the inherited traits of the
+New England Puritan. To understand his long, and honorable public
+life it is necessary to know something of the city of his choice,
+but to enter into the spirit of his poetry one must go back to
+the hills of western Massachusetts.
+
+Bryant had a right to his cold-weather mind. He came from
+Mayflower stock. His father, Dr. Peter Bryant of Cummington, was
+a sound country physician, with liberal preferences in theology,
+Federalist views in politics, and a library of seven hundred
+volumes, rich in poetry. The poet's mother records his birth in
+her diary in terse words which have the true Spartan tang: "Nov.
+3, 1794. Stormy, wind N. E. Churned. Seven in the evening a son
+born." Two days later the November wind shifted. "Nov. 5, 1794.
+Clear, wind N. W. Made Austin a coat. Sat up all day. Went into
+the kitchen." The baby, it appears, had an abnormally large head
+and was dipped, day after day, in rude hydropathy, into an icy
+spring. A precocious childhood was followed by a stern, somewhat
+unhappy, but aspiring boyhood. The little fellow, lying prone
+with his brothers before the firelight of the kitchen, reading
+English poetry from his father's library, used to pray that he
+too might become a poet. At thirteen he produced a satire on
+Jefferson, "The Embargo," which his proud Federalist father
+printed
+at Boston in 1808. The youth had nearly one year at Williams
+College, over the mountain ranges to the west. He wished to
+continue his education at Yale, but his father had no money for
+this greater venture, and the son remained at home. There, in the
+autumn of 1811, on the bleak hills, he composed the first draft
+of "Thanatopsis." He was seventeen, and he had been reading
+Blair's "Grave" and the poems of the consumptive Henry Kirke
+White.
+He hid his verses in a drawer, and five years later his father
+found them, shed tears over them, and sent them to the "North
+American Review," where they were published in September, 1817.
+
+In the meantime the young man had studied law, though with
+dislike of it, and with the confession that he sometimes read
+"The Lyrical Ballads" when he might have been reading Blackstone.
+One December afternoon in 1815, he was walking from Cummington to
+Plainfield--aged twenty-one, and looking for a place in which to
+settle as a lawyer. Across the vivid sunset flew a black duck, as
+solitary and homeless as himself. The bird seemed an image of his
+own soul, "lone wandering but not lost." Before he slept that
+night he had composed the poem "To a Waterfowl." No more
+authentic inspiration ever visited a poet, and though Bryant
+wrote verse for more than sixty years after that crimson sky had
+paled into chill December twilight, his lines never again
+vibrated with such communicative passion.
+
+Bryant's ensuing career revealed the steady purpose, the
+stoicism, the reticence of the Puritan. It was highly successful,
+judged even by material standards. "Thanatopsis" had been
+instantly regarded in 1817 as the finest poem yet produced in
+America. The author was invited to contribute to the "North
+American Review" an essay on American poetry, and this, like all
+of Bryant's prose work, was admirably written. He delivered his
+Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem, "The Ages," in 1821, the year of
+Emerson's graduation. After a brief practice of the law in Great
+Barrington, he entered in 1826 into the unpromising field of
+journalism in New York. While other young Knickerbockers wasted
+their literary strength on trifles and dissipated their moral
+energies, Bryant held steadily to his daily task. His life in
+town was sternly ascetic, but he allowed himself long walks in
+the country, and he continued to meditate a somewhat thankless
+Muse. In 1832 he visited his brothers on the Illinois prairies,
+and stopped one day to chat with a "tall awkward uncouth lad" of
+racy conversational powers, who was leading his company of
+volunteers into the Black Hawk War. The two men were destined to
+meet again in 1860, when Bryant presided at that Cooper Union
+address of Lincoln's which revealed to New York and to the
+country that the former captain of volunteers was now a king of
+men. Lincoln was embarrassed on that occasion, it is said, by
+Bryant's fastidious, dignified presence. Not so Nathaniel
+Hawthorne, who had seen the poet in Rome, two years before.
+"There was a weary look in his face," wrote Hawthorne, "as if he
+were tired of seeing things and doing things. . . .He uttered
+neither passion nor poetry, but excellent good sense, and
+accurate information, on whatever subject transpired; a very
+pleasant man to associate with, but rather cold, I should
+imagine, if one should seek to touch his heart with one's own."
+Such was the impression Bryant made upon less gifted men than
+Hawthorne, as he lived out his long and useful life in the
+Knickerbocker city. Toward the close of it he was in great demand
+for public occasions; and it was after delivering a speech
+dedicating a statue to Mazzini in Central Park in 1878, when
+Bryant was eighty-four, that a fit of dizziness caused a fall
+which proved fatal to the venerable poet. It was just seventy
+years since Dr. Peter Bryant had published his boy's verses on
+"The Embargo."
+
+Although Bryant's poetry has never roused any vociferous
+excitement, it has enduring qualities. The spiritual
+preoccupations of many a voiceless generation of New England
+Puritans found a tongue at last in this late-born son of theirs.
+The determining mood of his best poems, from boyhood to old age,
+was precisely that thought of transiency, "the eternal flow of
+things," which colored the imaginations of the first colonists.
+This is the central motive of "Thanatopsis," "To a Waterfowl,"
+"The Rivulet," "A Forest Hymn," "An Evening Revery," "The Crowded
+Street," "The Flood of Years." All of these tell the same story
+of endless change and of endless abiding, of varying eddies in
+the same mighty stream of human existence. Bryant faced the
+thought as calmly, as majestically, at seventeen as when he wrote
+"The Flood of Years" at eighty-two. He is a master of
+description, though he has slight gift for narrative or drama,
+and he rarely sounds the clear lyric note. But everywhere in his
+verse there is that cold purity of the winter hills in Western
+Massachusetts, something austere and elemental which reaches
+kindred spirits below the surface on which intellect and passion
+have their play, something more primitive, indeed, than human
+intellect or passion and belonging to another mode of being,
+something "rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun."
+
+A picture of the Knickerbocker era is not complete without its
+portraits of the minor figures in the literary life of New York
+up to the time of the Civil War. But the scope of the present
+volume does not permit sketches of Paulding and Verplanck, of
+Halleck and his friend Drake, of N. P. Willis and Morris and
+Woodworth. Some of these are today only "single-poem" men, like
+Payne, the author of "Home Sweet Home," just as Key, the author
+of "The Star-Spangled Banner," is today a "single-poem" man of an
+earlier generation. Their names will be found in such limbos of
+the dead as Griswold's "Poets and Poetry of America" and Poe's
+"Literati." They knew "the town" in their day, and pleased its
+very easily pleased taste. The short-lived literary magazines of
+the eighteen-forties gave them their hour of glory. As
+representatives of passing phases of the literary history of New
+York their careers are not without sentimental interest, but few
+of them spoke to or for the country as a whole. Two figures,
+indeed, stand out in sharp contrast with those habitual strollers
+on Broadway and frequenters of literary gatherings, though each
+of them was for a while a part of Knickerbocker New York. To all
+appearances they were only two more Bohemians like the rest, but
+the curiosity of the twentieth century sets them apart from their
+forgotten contemporaries. They are two of the unluckiest--and yet
+luckiest--authors who ever tried to sell a manuscript along
+Broadway. One of them is Edgar Allan Poe and the other is Walt
+Whitman. They shall have a chapter to themselves.
+
+But before turning to that chapter, we must look back to New
+England once more and observe the blossoming-time of its ancient
+commonwealths. During the thirty years preceding the Civil War
+New England awoke to a new life of the spirit. So varied and rich
+was her literary productiveness in this era that it still remains
+her greatest period, and so completely did New England writers of
+this epoch voice the ideals of the nation that the great majority
+of Americans, even today, regard these New Englanders as the
+truest literary exponents of the mind and soul of the United
+States. We must take a look at them.
+
+CHAPTER VI. THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS
+
+To understand the literary leadership of New England during the
+thirty years immediately preceding the Civil War it is necessary
+to recall the characteristics of a somewhat isolated and peculiar
+people. The mental and moral traits of the New England colonists,
+already glanced at in an earlier chapter, had suffered little
+essential modification in two hundred years. The original racial
+stock was still dominant. As compared with the middle and
+southern colonies, there was relatively little immigration, and
+this was easily assimilated. The physical remoteness of New
+England from other sections of the country, and the stubborn
+loyalty with which its inhabitants maintained their own standards
+of life, alike contributed to their sense of separateness. It is
+true, of course, that their mode of thinking and feeling had
+undergone certain changes. They were among the earliest theorists
+of political independence from Great Britain, and had done their
+share, and more, in the Revolution. The rigors of their early
+creed had somewhat relaxed, as we have seen, by the end of the
+seventeenth century, and throughout the eighteenth there was a
+gradual progress toward religious liberalism. The population
+steadily increased, and New England's unremitting struggle with a
+not too friendly soil, her hardihood upon the seas, and her
+keenness in trade, became proverbial throughout the country. Her
+seaport towns were wealthy. The general standards of living
+remained frugal, but extreme poverty was rare. Her people still
+made, as in the earliest days of the colonies, silent and
+unquestioned sacrifices for education, and her chief seats of
+learning, Harvard and Yale, remained the foremost educational
+centers of America. But there was still scant leisure for the
+quest of beauty, and slender material reward for any practitioner
+of the fine arts. Oratory alone, among the arts of expression,
+commanded popular interest and applause. Daniel Webster's
+audiences at Plymouth in 1820 and at Bunker Hill in 1825 were not
+inferior to similar audiences of today in intelligence and in
+responsiveness. Perhaps they were superior. Appreciation of the
+spoken word was natural to men trained by generations of
+thoughtful listening to "painful" preaching and by participation
+in the discussions of town-meeting. Yet appreciation of secular
+literature was rare, and interest in the other arts was almost
+non-existent.
+
+Then, beginning in the eighteen-twenties, and developing rapidly
+after 1830, came a change, a change so startling as to warrant
+the term of "the Renascence of New England." No single cause is
+sufficient to account for this "new birth." It is a good
+illustration of that law of "tension and release," which the late
+Professor Shaler liked to demonstrate in all organic life. A long
+period of strain was followed by an age of expansion, freedom,
+release of energy. As far as the mental life of New England was
+concerned, something of the new stimulus was due directly to the
+influence of Europe. Just as the wandering scholars from Italy
+had brought the New Learning, which was a revival of the old
+learning, into England in the sixteenth century, so now young New
+England college men like Edward Everett and George Ticknor
+brought home from the Continent the riches of German and French
+scholarship. Emerson's description of the impression made by
+Everett's lectures in 1820, after his return from Germany, gives
+a vivid picture of the new thirst for foreign culture. "The North
+American Review" and other periodicals, while persistently urging
+the need of a distinctively national literature, insisted also
+upon the value of a deeper knowledge of the literature of the
+Continent. This was the burden of Channing's once famous article
+on "A National Literature" in 1823: it was a plea for an
+independent American school of writers, but these writers should
+know the best that Europe had to teach.
+
+The purely literary movement was connected, as the great name of
+Channing suggests, with a new sense of freedom in philosophy and
+religion. Calvinism had mainly done its work in New England. It
+had bred an extraordinary type of men and women, it had, helped
+to lay some of the permanent foundations of our democracy, and it
+was still destined to have a long life in the new West and in the
+South. But in that stern section of the country where its
+influence had been most marked there was now an increasingly
+sharp reaction against its determinism and its pessimism. Early
+in the nineteenth century the most ancient and influential
+churches in Boston and the leading professors at Harvard had
+accepted the new form of religious liberalism known as
+Unitarianism. The movement spread throughout Eastern
+Massachusetts and made its way to other States. Orthodox and
+liberal Congregational churches split apart, and when Channing
+preached the ordination sermon for Jared Sparks in Baltimore in
+1819, the word Unitarian, accepted by the liberals with some
+misgiving, became the recognized motto of the new creed. It is
+only with its literary influence that we are here concerned, yet
+that literary influence became so potent that there is scarcely a
+New England writer of the first rank, from Bryant onward, who
+remained untouched by it.
+
+The most interesting and peculiar phase of the new liberalism has
+little directly to do with the specific tenets of theological
+Unitarianism, and in fact marked a revolt against the more
+prosaic and conventional pattern of English and American
+Unitarian thought. But this movement, known as Transcendentalism,
+would have been impossible without a preliminary and liberalizing
+stirring of the soil. It was a fascinating moment of release for
+some of the most brilliant and radical minds of New England. Its
+foremost representative in our literature was Ralph Waldo
+Emerson, as its chief exponents in England were Coleridge and
+Carlyle. We must understand its meaning if we would perceive the
+quality of much of the most noble and beautiful writing produced
+in New England during the Golden Age.
+
+What then is the significance of the word Transcendental?
+Disregarding for the moment the technical development of this
+term as used by German and English philosophers, it meant for
+Emerson and his friends simply this: whatever transcends or goes
+beyond the experience of the senses. It stressed intuition rather
+than sensation, direct perception of ultimate truth rather than
+the processes of logic. It believed in man's ability to apprehend
+the absolute ideas of Truth, Rectitude, Goodness. It resembled
+the Inner Light of the Quaker, though the Quaker traced this to a
+supernatural illumination of the Holy Spirit, while the
+Transcendentalist believed that a vision of the eternal realities
+was a natural endowment of the human mind. It had only to be
+trusted. Stated in this form, it is evident that we have here a
+very ancient doctrine, well known in the literature of India and
+of Greece. It has been held by countless persons who have never
+heard of the word Transcendentalism. We need go no further back
+than Alexander Pope, a Roman Catholic, whom we find declaring: "I
+am so certain of the soul's being immortal that I seem to feel it
+within me, as it were by intuition." Pope's friend Swift, a dean
+of the Church of England and assuredly no Transcendentalist,
+defined vision as seeing the things that are invisible.
+
+Now turn to some of the New England men. Dr. C. A. Bartol, a
+disciple of Emerson, maintained that "the mistake is to make the
+everlasting things subjects of argument instead of sight."
+Theodore Parker declared to his congregation:
+
+"From the primitive facts of consciousness given by the power of
+instinctive intuition, I endeavored to deduce the true notion of
+God, of justice and futurity . . . . I found most help in the
+works of Immanuel Kant, one of the profoundest thinkers of the
+world, though one of the worst writers, even in Germany; if he
+did not always furnish conclusions I could rest in, he yet gave
+me the true method, and put me on the right road. I found certain
+great primal Intuitions of Human Nature, which depend on no
+logical process of demonstration, but are rather facts of
+consciousness given by the instinctive action of human nature
+itself. I will mention only the three most important which
+pertain to Religion. 1. The Instinctive Intuition of the Divine,
+the consciousness that there is a God. 2. The Instinctive
+Intuition of the Just and Right, a consciousness that there is a
+Moral Law, independent of our will, which we ought to keep. 3.
+The Instinctive Intuition of the Immortal, a consciousness that
+the Essential Element of man, the principle of Individuality,
+never dies."
+
+This passage dates from 1859, and readers of Bergson may like to
+compare it with the contemporary Frenchman's saying: "The
+analytical faculties can give us no realities."
+
+Let us next hear Emerson himself, first in an early letter to his
+brother Edward: "Do you draw the distinction of Milton,
+Coleridge, and the Germans between Reason and Understanding? I
+think it a philosophy itself, and, like all truth, very
+practical. Reason is the highest faculty of the soul, what we
+mean often by the soul itself: it never reasons, never proves, it
+simply perceives, it is vision. The understanding toils all the
+time, compares, contrives, adds, argues; near-sighted, but
+strong-sighted, dwelling in the present, the expedient, the
+customary." And in 1833, after he had left the Unitarian pulpit,
+Emerson made in his diary this curious attempt to reconcile the
+scriptural language of his ancestral profession to the new
+vocabulary of Transcendentalism: "Jesus Christ was a minister of
+the pure Reason. The beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount are
+all utterances of the mind contemning the phenomenal world . . .
+. The understanding can make nothing of it. 'Tis all nonsense.
+The Reason affirms its absolute verity . . . . St. Paul marks the
+distinction by the terms natural man and spiritual man. When
+Novalis says, 'It is the instinct of the Understanding to
+contradict the Reason,' he only translates into a scientific
+formula the doctrine of St. Paul, 'The Carnal Mind is enmity
+against God.'"
+
+One more quotation must suffice. It is from a poem by a forgotten
+Transcendentalist, F. G. Tuckerman.
+
+"No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead;
+But, leaving straining thought and stammering word,
+Across the barren azure pass to God;
+Shooting the void in silence, like a bird--
+A bird that shuts his wings for better speed!"
+
+It is obvious that this "contemning the phenomenal world," this
+"revulsion against the intellect as the sole source of truth," is
+highly dangerous to second-class minds. If one habitually prints
+the words Insight, Instinct, Intuition, Consciousness with
+capitals, and relegates equally useful words like senses,
+experience, fact, logic to lower-case type, one may do it because
+he is a Carlyle or an Emerson, but the chances are that he is
+neither. Transcendentalism, like all idealistic movements, had
+its "lunatic fringe," its camp-followers of excitable, unstable
+visionaries. The very name, like the name Methodist, was probably
+bestowed upon it in mockery, and this whole perturbation of staid
+New England had its humorous side. Witness the career of Bronson
+Alcott. It is also true that the glorious affirmations of these
+seers can be neither proved nor disproved. They made no
+examination and they sought no validation of consciousness. An
+explorer in search of the North Pole must bring back proofs of
+his journey, but when a Transcendentalist affirms that he has
+reached the far heights of human experience and even caught sight
+of the gods sitting on their thrones, you and I are obliged to
+take his word for it. Sometimes we hear such a man gladly, but it
+depends upon the man, not upon the trustworthiness of the method.
+Finally it should be observed that the Transcendental movement
+was an exceedingly complex one, being both literary, philosophic,
+and religious; related also to the subtle thought of the Orient,
+to mediaeval mysticism, and to the English Platonists; touched
+throughout by the French Revolutionary theories, by the Romantic
+spirit, by the new zeal for science and pseudo-science, and by
+the unrest of a fermenting age.
+
+Our present concern is with the impact of this cosmopolitan
+current upon the mind and character of a few New England writers.
+Channing and Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller and Alcott, Thoreau
+and Emerson, are all representative of the best thought and the
+noblest ethical impulses of their generation. Let us choose first
+the greatest name: a sunward-gazing spirit, and, it may be, one
+of the very Sun-Gods.
+
+The pilgrim to Concord who stops for a moment in the village
+library to study French's statue of Emerson will notice the
+asymmetrical face. On one side it is the face of a keen Yankee
+farmer, but seen from the other side it is the countenance of a
+seer, a world's man. This contrast between the parochial Emerson
+and the greater Emerson interprets many a puzzle in his career.
+Half a mile beyond the village green to the north, close to the
+"rude bridge" of the famous Concord fight in 1775, is the Old
+Manse, once tenanted and described by Hawthorne. It was built by
+Emerson's grandfather, a patriot chaplain in the Revolution, who
+died of camp-fever at Ticonderoga. His widow married Dr. Ezra
+Ripley, and here Ralph Waldo Emerson and his brothers passed many
+a summer in their childhood. Half a mile east of the village, on
+the Cambridge turnpike, is Emerson's own house, still sheltered
+by the pines which Thoreau helped him to plant in 1838. Within
+the house everything is unchanged: here are the worn books, pen
+and inkstand, the favorite pictures upon the wall. Over the ridge
+to the north lies the Sleepy Hollow cemetery where the poet
+rests, with the gravestones of Hawthorne and the Alcotts, Thoreau
+and William James close by.
+
+But although Concord is the Emerson shrine, he was born in
+Boston, in 1803. His father, named William like the grandfather,
+was also, like the Emerson ancestors for many generations, a
+clergyman--eloquent, liberal, fond of books and music, highly
+honored by his alma mater Harvard and by the town of Boston,
+where he ministered to the First Church. His premature death in
+1811 left his widow with five sons--one of them feebleminded--and
+a daughter to struggle hard with poverty. With her husband's
+sister, the Calvinistic "Aunt Mary Moody" Emerson, she held,
+however, that these orphaned boys had been "born to be educated."
+Arid educated the "eager blushing boys" were, at the Boston Latin
+School and at Harvard College, on a regimen of "toil and want and
+truth and mutual faith." There are many worse systems of pedagogy
+than this. Ralph was thought less persistent than his steady
+older brother William, and far less brilliant than his gifted,
+short-lived younger brothers, Edward and Charles. He had an
+undistinguished career at Harvard, where he was graduated in
+1821, ranking thirtieth in a class of fifty-nine. Lovers of irony
+like to remember that he was the seventh choice of his classmates
+for the position of class poet. After some desultory teaching to
+help his brothers, he passed irregularly through the Divinity
+School, his studies often interrupted by serious ill-health. "If
+they had examined me," he said afterward of the kindly professors
+in the Divinity School, "they never would have passed me." But
+approve him they did, in 1826, and he entered decorously upon the
+profession of his ancestors, as associate minister of the Second
+Church in Boston. His "Journals," which are a priceless record of
+his inner life, at this and later periods, reveal the rigid
+self-scrutiny, the tender idealism, with which he began his
+ministerial career.
+
+But as a scheme of life for Ralph Waldo Emerson this vocation
+would not satisfy. The sexton of the Second Church thought that
+the young man was not at his best at funerals. Father Taylor, the
+eccentric Methodist, whom Emerson assisted at a sailor's Bethel
+near Long Wharf, considered him "one of the sweetest souls God
+ever made," but as ignorant of the principles of the New
+Testament as Balaam's ass was of Hebrew grammar. By and by came
+an open difference with his congregation over the question of
+administering the Communion. "I am not interested in it," Emerson
+admitted, and he wrote in his "Journal" the noble words: "It is
+my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing
+which I cannot do with my whole heart." His resignation was
+accepted in 1832. His young wife had died of consumption in the
+same year. He now sailed for Italy, France, and England, a
+memorable journey which gave him an acquaintance with Landor,
+Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle, but which was even more
+significant in sending him, as he says, back to himself, to the
+resources of his own nature. "When shows break up," wrote Whitman
+afterward, "what but oneself is sure?" In 1834 and 1835 we find
+Emerson occupying a room in the Old Manse at Concord, strolling
+in the quiet fields, lecturing or preaching if he were invited to
+do so, but chiefly absorbed in a little book which he was
+beginning to write--a new utterance of a new man.
+
+This book, the now famous "Nature" of 1836, contains the essence
+of Emerson's message to his generation. It is a prose essay, but
+written in the ecstatic mood of a poet. The theme of its
+meditation is the soul as related to Nature and to God. The soul
+is primal; Nature, in all its bountiful and beautiful
+commodities, exists for the training of the soul; it is the
+soul's shadow. And every soul has immediate access to Deity. Thus
+the utility and beauty and discipline of Nature lift the soul
+Godward. The typical sentence of the book is this: "The sun
+shines today also"; that is to say: the world is still alive and
+fair; let us lift up our hearts! Only a few Americans of 1836
+bought this singular volume, but Emerson went serenely forward.
+He had found his path.
+
+In 1837 he delivered the well-known Phi Beta Kappa oration at
+Harvard on "The American Scholar." Emerson was now thirty-four;
+he had married a second time, had bought a house of his own in
+Concord, and purposed to make a living by lecturing and writing.
+His address in Cambridge, though it contained no reference to
+himself, was after all a justification of the way of life he had
+chosen: a declaration of intellectual independence for himself
+and his countrymen, an exhortation of self-trust to the
+individual thinking man. "If the single man plant himself
+indomitably on his instincts and there abide, the huge world will
+come round to him." Such advice to cut loose from the moorings of
+the past was not unknown in Phi Beta Kappa orations, though it
+had never been so brilliantly phrased; but when Emerson applied
+precisely the same doctrine, in 1838, to the graduating class at
+the Harvard Divinity School, he roused a storm of disapproval. "A
+tempest in our washbowl," he wrote coolly to Carlyle, but it was
+more than that. The great sentence of the Divinity School
+address, "God is, not was; he speaketh, not spake," was the
+emphasis of a superb rhetorician upon the immediacy of the soul's
+access to God. It has been the burden of a thousand prophets in
+all religions. The young priests of the Divinity School, their
+eyes wearied with Hebrew and Greek, seem to have enjoyed
+Emerson's injunction to turn away from past records and
+historical authorities and to drink from the living fountain of
+the divine within themselves; but to the professors, "the stern
+old war-gods," this relative belittlement of historical
+Christianity seemed blasphemy. A generation passed before Emerson
+was again welcomed by his alma mater.
+
+The reader who has mastered those three utterances by the Concord
+Transcendentalist in 1836, 1837, and 1838 has the key to Emerson.
+He was a seer, not a system-maker. The constitution of his mind
+forbade formal, consecutive, logical thought. He was not a
+philosopher in the accepted sense, though he was always
+philosophizing, nor a metaphysician in spite of his curious
+searchings in the realm of metaphysics. He sauntered in books as
+he sauntered by Walden Pond, in quest of what interested him; he
+"fished in Montaigne," he said, as he fished in Plato and Goethe.
+He basketed the day's luck, good or bad as it might be, into the
+pages of his private "Journal," which he called his savings-bank,
+because from this source he drew most of the material for his
+books. The "Journal" has recently been printed, in ten volumes.
+No American writing rewards the reader more richly. It must be
+remembered that Emerson's "Essays," the first volume of which
+appeared in 1841, and the last volumes after his death in 1882,
+represent practically three stages of composition: first the
+detached thoughts of the "Journal;" second, the rearrangement of
+this material for use upon the lecture platform; and finally, the
+essays in their present form. The oral method thus predominates:
+a series of oracular thoughts has been shaped for oratorical
+utterance, not oratorical in the bombastic, popular American
+sense, but cunningly designed, by a master of rhetoric, to
+capture the ear and then the mind of the auditor.
+
+Emerson's work as a lecturer coincided with the rise of that
+Lyceum system which brought most of the American authors, for
+more than a generation, into intimate contact with the public,
+and which proved an important factor in the aesthetic and moral
+cultivation of our people. No lecturer could have had a more
+auspicious influence than Emerson, with his quiet dignity, his
+serene spiritual presence, his tonic and often electrifying
+force. But if he gave his audiences precious gifts, he also
+learned much from them. For thirty years his lecturing trips to
+the West brought him, more widely than any New England man of
+letters, into contact with the new, virile America of the great
+Mississippi valley. Unlike many of his friends, he was not
+repelled by the "Jacksonism of the West"; he rated it a
+wholesome, vivifying force in our national thought and life. The
+"Journal" reveals the essential soundness of his Americanism.
+Though surrounded all his life by reformers, he was himself
+scarcely a reformer, save upon the single issue of anti-slavery.
+Perhaps he was at bottom too much of a radical to be swept off
+his feet by any reform.
+
+To our generation, of course, Emerson presents himself as an
+author of books, and primarily as an essayist, rather than as a
+winning, entrancing speaker. His essays have a greater variety of
+tone than is commonly recognized. Many of them, like "Manners,"
+"Farming," "Books," "Eloquence," "Old Age," exhibit a shrewd
+prudential wisdom, a sort of Yankee instinct for "the milk in the
+pan," that reminds one of Ben Franklin. Like most of the greater
+New England writers, he could be, on occasion, an admirable local
+historian. See his essays on "Life and Letters in New England,"
+"New England Reformers," "Politics," and the successive entries
+in his "Journal" relating to Daniel Webster. He had the happiest
+gift of portraiture, as is witnessed by his sketches of
+Montaigne, of Napoleon, of Socrates (in the essay on Plato), of
+his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, of Thoreau, and of various types of
+Englishmen in his "English Traits." But the great essays, no
+doubt, are those like "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," "The
+Over-Soul," "Fate," "Power," "Culture," "Worship," and
+"Illusions." These will puzzle no one who has read carefully that
+first book on "Nature." They all preach the gospel of intuition,
+instinctive trust in the Universe, faith in the ecstatic moment
+of vision into the things that are unseen by the physical eye.
+Self-reliance, as Emerson's son has pointed out, means really
+God-reliance; the Over-Soul--always a stumbling-block to
+Philistines--means that high spiritual life into which all men
+may enter and in which they share the life of Deity. Emerson is
+stern enough in expounding the laws of compensation that run
+through the universe, but to him the chief law is the law of the
+ever-ascending, victorious soul.
+
+This radiant optimism permeates his poems. By temperament a
+singer as well as a seer and sayer, Emerson was nevertheless
+deficient in the singing voice. He composed no one great poem,
+his verse presents no ideas that are not found in his prose. In
+metre and rhyme he is harsh and willful. Yet he has marvelous
+single phrases and cadences. He ejaculates transports and
+ecstasies, and though he cannot organize and construct in verse,
+he is capable here and there of the true miracle of transforming
+fact and thought into true beauty. Aldrich used to say that he
+would rather have written Emerson's "Bacchus" than any American
+poem.
+
+That the pure, high, and tonic mind of Emerson was universal in
+its survey of human forces, no one would claim. Certain
+limitations in interest and sympathy are obvious. "That horrid
+burden and impediment of the soul which the churches call sin,"
+to use John Morley's words, occupied his attention but little.
+Like a mountain climber in a perilous pass, he preferred to look
+up rather than down. He does not stress particularly those old
+human words, service and sacrifice. "Anti-scientific, antisocial,
+anti-Christian" are the terms applied to him by one of his most
+penetrating critics. Yet I should prefer to say "un-scientific,"
+"unsocial," and "non-Christian," in the sense in which Plato and
+Isaiah are non-Christian. Perhaps it would be still nearer the
+truth to say, as Mrs. Lincoln said of her husband, "He was not a
+technical Christian." He tends to underestimate institutions of
+every kind; history, except as a storehouse of anecdote, and
+culture as a steady mental discipline. This is the price he pays
+for his transcendental insistence upon the supreme value of the
+Now, the moment of insight. But after all these limitations are
+properly set down, the personality of Ralph Waldo Emerson remains
+a priceless possession to his countrymen. The austere serenity of
+his life, and the perfection with which he represents the highest
+type of his province and his era, will ultimately become blended
+with the thought of his true Americanism. A democrat and
+liberator, like Lincoln, he seems also destined like Lincoln to
+become increasingly a world's figure, a friend and guide to
+aspiring spirits everywhere. Differences of race and creed are
+negligible in the presence of such superb confidence in God and
+the soul.
+
+Citizens of Concord in May, 1862, hearing that Henry Thoreau, the
+eccentric bachelor, had just died of consumption in his mother's
+house on Main Street, in his forty-fifth year, would have smiled
+cannily at the notion that after fifty years their townsman's
+literary works would be published in a sumptuous twenty-volume
+edition, and that critics in his own country and in Europe would
+rank him with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet that is precisely what has
+happened. Our literature has no more curious story than the
+evolution of this local crank into his rightful place of
+mastership. In his lifetime he printed only two books, "A Week on
+the Concord and Merrimac Rivers"--which was even more completely
+neglected by the public than Emerson's "Nature"--and "Walden,"
+now one of the classics, but only beginning to be talked about
+when its shy, proud author penned his last line and died with the
+words "moose" and "Indian" on his lips.
+
+Thoreau, like all thinkers who reach below the surface of human
+life, means many different things to men of various temperaments.
+Collectors of human novelties, like Stevenson, rejoice in his
+uniqueness of flavor; critics, like Lowell, place him, not
+without impatient rigor. To some readers he is primarily a
+naturalist, an observer, of the White of Selborne school; to
+others an elemental man, a lover of the wild, a hermit of the
+woods. He has been called the poet-naturalist, to indicate that
+his powers of observation were accompanied, like Wordsworth's, by
+a gift of emotional interpretation of the meaning of phenomena.
+Lovers of literature celebrate his sheer force and penetration of
+phrase. But to the student of American thought Thoreau's prime
+value lies in the courage and consistency with which he
+endeavored to realize the gospel of Transcendentalism in his own
+inner life.
+
+Lovers of racial traits like to remember that Thoreau's
+grandfather was an immigrant Frenchman from the island of Jersey,
+and that his grandmother was Scotch and Quaker. His father made
+lead pencils and ground plumbago in his own house in Concord. The
+mother was from New Hampshire. It was a high-minded family. All
+the four children taught school and were good talkers. Henry,
+born in 1817, was duly baptized by good Dr. Ripley of the Old
+Manse, studied Greek and Latin, and was graduated at Harvard in
+1837, the year of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa address. Even in
+college the young man was a trifle difficult. "Cold and
+unimpressible," wrote a classmate. "The touch of his hand was
+moist and indifferent. He did not care for people." "An
+unfavorable opinion has been entertained of his disposition to
+exert himself," wrote President Quincy confidentially to Emerson
+in 1837, although the kindly President, a year later, in
+recommending Thoreau as a school-teacher, certified that "his
+rank was high as a scholar in all the branches and his morals and
+general conduct unexceptionable and exemplary."
+
+Ten years passed. The young man gave up school-keeping, thinking
+it a loss of time. He learned pencil-making, surveying, and farm
+work, and found that by manual labor for six weeks in the year he
+could meet all the expenses of living. He haunted the woods and
+pastures, explored rivers and ponds, built the famous hut on
+Emerson's wood-lot with the famous axe borrowed from Alcott, was
+put in jail for refusal to pay his polltax, and, to sum up much
+in little, "signed off" from social obligations. "I, Henry D.
+Thoreau, have signed off, and do not hold myself responsible to
+your multifarious uncivil chaos named Civil Government." When his
+college class held its tenth reunion in 1847, and each man was
+asked to send to the secretary a record of achievement, Thoreau
+wrote: "My steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to
+keep myself at the top of my condition and ready for whatever may
+turn up in heaven or on earth." There is the motto of
+Transcendentalism, stamped upon a single coin.
+
+For "to be ready for whatever may turn up" is Thoreau's racier,
+homelier version of Emerson's "endless seeker"; and Thoreau, more
+easily than Emerson, could venture to stake everything upon the
+quest. The elder man had announced the programme, but by 1847 he
+was himself almost what Thoreau would call a "committed man,"
+with family and household responsibilities, with a living to
+earn, and bound, like every professional writer and speaker, to
+have some measure of regard for his public. But Thoreau was ready
+to travel lightly and alone. If he should fail in the great
+adventure for spiritual perfection, it was his own affair. He had
+no intimates, no confidant save the multitudinous pages of his
+"Journal," from which--and here again he followed Emerson's
+example--his future books were to be compiled. Many of his most
+loyal admirers will admit that such a quest is bound, by the very
+conditions of the problem, to be futile. Hawthorne allegorized it
+in "Ethan Brand," and his quaint illustration of the folly of
+romantic expansion of the self apart from the common interests of
+human kind is the picture of a dog chasing its own tail. "It is
+time now that I begin to live," notes Thoreau in the "Journal,"
+and he continued to say it in a hundred different ways until the
+end of all his journalizing, but he never quite captured the
+fugitive felicity. The haunting pathos of his own allegory has
+moved every reader of "Walden:" "I long ago lost a hound, a bay
+horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail." Precisely
+what he meant it is now impossible to say, but surely he betrays
+a doubt in the ultimate efficacy of his own system of life. He
+bends doggedly to the trail, for Henry Thoreau is no quitter, but
+the trail leads nowhere, and in the latest volumes of the
+"Journals" he seems to realize that he has been pursuing a
+phantom. He dived fearlessly and deep into himself, but somehow
+he failed to grasp that pearl of great price which all the
+transcendental prophets assured him was to be had at the cost of
+diving.
+
+This is not to say that this austere and strenuous athlete came
+up quite empty-handed. Far from it. The byproducts of his toil
+were enough to have enriched many lesser men, and they have given
+Thoreau a secure fame. From his boyhood he longed to make himself
+a writer, and an admirable writer he became. "For along time," he
+says in "Walden," "I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide
+circulation, whose editor has never seen fit to print the bulk of
+my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only
+my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their
+reward." Like so many solitaries, he experienced the joy of
+intense, long-continued effort in composition, and he was artist
+enough to know that his pages, carefully assembled from his note
+books, had pungency, form, atmosphere. No man of his day, not
+even Lowell the "last of the bookmen," abandoned himself more
+unreservedly to the delight of reading. Thoreau was an
+accomplished scholar in the Greek and Roman classics, as his
+translations attest. He had some acquaintance with several modern
+languages, and at one time possessed the best collection of books
+on Oriental literature to be found in America. He was drenched in
+the English poetry of the seventeenth century. His critical
+essays in the "Dial," his letters and the bookish allusions
+throughout his writings, are evidence of rich harvesting in the
+records of the past. He left some three thousand manuscript pages
+of notes on the American Indians, whose history and character had
+fascinated him from boyhood. Even his antiquarian hobbies gave
+him durable satisfaction. Then, too, he had deep delight in his
+life-long studies in natural history, in his meticulous
+measurements of river currents, in his notes upon the annual
+flowering of plants and the migration of birds. The more
+thoroughly trained naturalists of our own day detect him now and
+again in error as to his birds and plants, just as specialists in
+Maine woodcraft discover that he made amusing, and for him
+unaccountable, blunders when he climbed Katahdin. But if he was
+not impeccable as a naturalist or woodsman, who has ever had more
+fun out of his enthusiasm than Thoreau, and who has ever
+stimulated as many men and women in the happy use of their eyes?
+He would have had slight patience with much of the sentimental
+nature study of our generation, and certainly an intellectual
+contempt for much that we read and write about the call of the
+wild; but no reader of his books can escape his infection for the
+freedom of the woods, for the stark and elemental in nature.
+Thoreau's passion for this aspect of life may have been selfish,
+wolflike, but it is still communicative.
+
+Once, toward the close of his too brief life, Thoreau "signed on"
+again to an American ideal, and no man could have signed more
+nobly. It was the cause of Freedom, as represented by John Brown
+of Harper's Ferry. The French and Scotch blood in the furtive
+hermit suddenly grew hot. Instead of renouncing in disgust the
+"uncivil chaos called Civil Government," Thoreau challenged it to
+a fight. Indeed he had already thrown down the gauntlet in
+"Slavery in Massachusetts," which Garrison had published in the
+"Liberator" in 1854. And now the death upon the scaffold of the
+old fanatic of Ossawatomie changed Thoreau into a complete
+citizen, arguing the case and glorifying to his neighbors the
+dead hero. "It seems as if no man had ever died in America
+before; for in order to die you must first have lived . . . . I
+hear a good many pretend that they are going to die . . . .
+Nonsense! I'll defy them to do it. They haven't got life enough
+in them. They'll deliquesce like fungi, and keep a hundred
+eulogists mopping the spot where they left off. Only half a dozen
+or so have died since the world began." Such passages as this
+reveal a very different Thoreau from the Thoreau who is supposed
+to have spent his days in the company of swamp-blackbirds and
+woodchucks. He had, in fact, one of the highest qualifications
+for human society, an absolute honesty of mind. "We select
+granite," he says, "for the underpinning of our houses and barns;
+we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an
+underpinning of granite truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our
+sills are rotten . . . . In proportion as our inward life fails,
+we go more constantly and desperately to the postoffice. You may
+depend upon it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the
+greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive
+correspondence, has not heard from himself this long time."
+
+This hard, basic individualism was for Thoreau the foundation of
+all enduring social relations, and the dullest observer of
+twentieth century America can see that Thoreau's doctrine is
+needed as much as ever. His sharp-edged personality provokes
+curiosity and pricks the reader into dissent or emulation as the
+case may be, but its chief ethical value to our generation lies
+in the fact that here was a Transcendentalist who stressed, not
+the life of the senses, though he was well aware of their
+seductiveness, but the stubborn energy of the will.
+
+The scope of the present book prevents more than a glimpse at the
+other members of the New England Transcendental group. They are a
+very mixed company, noble, whimsical, queer, impossible. "The
+good Alcott," wrote Carlyle, "with his long, lean face and
+figure, with his gray worn temples and mild radiant eyes; all
+bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden
+age; he comes before one like a venerable Don Quixote, whom
+nobody can laugh at without loving." These words paint a whole
+company, as well as a single man. The good Alcott still awaits an
+adequate biographer. Connecticut Yankee, peddler in the South,
+school-teacher in Boston and elsewhere, he descended upon
+Concord, flitted to the queer community of Fruitlands, was
+starved back to Concord, inspired and bored the patient Emerson,
+talked endlessly, wrote ineffective books, and had at last his
+apotheosis in the Concord School of Philosophy, but was chiefly
+known for the twenty years before his death in 1888 as the father
+of the Louisa Alcott who wrote "Little Women." "A tedious
+archangel," was Emerson's verdict, and it is likely to stand.
+
+Margaret Fuller, though sketched by Hawthorne, analyzed by
+Emerson, and painted at full length by Thomas Wentworth
+Higginson, is now a fading figure--a remarkable woman, no doubt,
+one of the first of American feminists, suggesting George Eliot
+in her physical unattractiveness, her clear brain, her touch of
+sensuousness. She was an early-ripe, over-crammed scholar in the
+classics and in modern European languages. She did loyal, unpaid
+work as the editor of the "Dial," which from 1840 to 1844 was the
+organ of Transcendentalism. She joined the community at Brook
+Farm, whose story has been so well told by Lindsay Swift. For a
+while she served as literary editor of the "New York Tribune"
+under Horace Greeley. Then she went abroad, touched Rousseau's
+manuscripts at Paris with trembling, adoring fingers, made a
+secret marriage in Italy with the young Marquis Ossoli, and
+perished by shipwreck, with her husband and child, off Fire
+Island in 1850.
+
+Theodore Parker, like Alcott and "Margaret," an admirable Greek
+scholar, an idealist and reformer, still lives in Chadwick's
+biography, in Colonel Higginson's delightful essay, and in the
+memories of a few liberal Bostonians who remember his tremendous
+sermons on the platform of the old Music Hall. He was a Lexington
+farmer's son, with the temperament of a blacksmith, with
+enormous, restless energy, a good hater, a passionate lover of
+all excellent things save meekness. He died at fifty, worn out,
+in Italy.
+
+But while these three figures were, after Emerson and Thoreau,
+the most representative of the group, the student of the
+Transcendental period will be equally interested in watching its
+influence upon many other types of young men: upon future
+journalists and publicists like George William Curtis, Charles A.
+Dana, and George Ripley; upon religionists like Orestes Brownson,
+Father Hecker, and James Freeman Clarke; and upon poets like
+Jones Very, Christopher. P. Cranch, and Ellery Channing. There
+was a sunny side of the whole movement, as T. W. Higginson and F.
+B. Sanborn, two of the latest survivors of the ferment, loved to
+emphasize in their talk and in their books; and it was shadowed
+also by tragedy and the pathos of unfulfilled desires. But as one
+looks back at it, in the perspective of three-quarters of a
+century, it seems chiefly something touchingly fine. For all
+these men and women tried to hitch their wagon to a star.
+
+CHAPTER VII. ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY
+
+Moving in and out of the Transcendentalist circles, in that great
+generation preceding the Civil War, were a company of other
+men--romancers, poets, essayists, historians--who shared in the
+intellectual liberalism of the age, but who were more purely
+artists in prose and verse than they were seekers after the
+unattainable. Hawthorne, for example, sojourned at Concord and at
+Brook Farm with some of the most extreme types of transcendental
+extravagance. The movement interested him artistically and he
+utilized it in his romances, but personally he maintained an
+attitude of cool detachment from it. Longfellow was too much of
+an artist to lose his head over philosophical abstractions;
+Whittier, at his best, had a too genuine poetic instinct for the
+concrete; and Lowell and Holmes had the saving gift of humor.
+Cultivated Boston gentlemen like Prescott, Motley, and Parkman
+preferred to keep their feet on the solid earth and write
+admirable histories. So the mellow years went by. Most of the
+widely-read American books were being produced within twenty
+miles of the Boston State House. The slavery issue kept growling,
+far away, but it was only now and then, as in the enforcement of
+the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, that it was brought sharply home
+to the North. The "golden forties" were as truly golden for New
+England as for idle California. There was wealth, leisure, books,
+a glow of harvest-time in the air, though the spirit of the
+writers is the spirit of youth.
+
+Nathaniel Hawthorne, our greatest writer of pure romance, was
+Puritan by inheritance and temperament, though not in doctrine or
+in sympathy. His literary affiliations were with the English and
+German Romanticists, and he possessed, for professional use, the
+ideas and vocabulary of his transcendental friends. Born in Salem
+in 1804, he was descended from Judge Hawthorne of Salem
+Witchcraft fame, and from a long line of sea-faring ancestors. He
+inherited a morbid solitariness, redeemed in some measure by a
+physical endowment of rare strength and beauty. He read Spenser,
+Rousseau, and the "Newgate Calendar," was graduated at Bowdoin,
+with Longfellow, in the class of 1825, and returned to Salem for
+thirteen brooding lonely years in which he tried to teach himself
+the art of story-writing. His earliest tales, like Irving's, are
+essays in which characters emerge; he is absorbed in finding a
+setting for a preconceived "moral"; he is in love with allegory
+and parable. His own words about his first collection of stories,
+"Twice-Told Tales," have often been quoted: "They have the pale
+tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade." Yet they
+are for the most part exquisitely written. After a couple of
+years in the Boston Custom-House, and a residence at the
+socialistic community of Brook Farm, Hawthorne made the happiest
+of marriages to Sophia Peabody, and for nearly four years dwelt
+in the Old Manse at Concord. He described it in one of the ripest
+of his essays, the Preface to "Mosses from an Old Manse," his
+second collection of stories. After three years in the
+Custom-House at Salem, his dismissal in 1849 gave him leisure to
+produce his masterpiece, "The Scarlet Letter," published in 1850.
+He was now forty-six. In 1851, he published "The House of the
+Seven Gables," "The Wonder-Book," and "The Snow Image, and Other
+Tales." In 1852 came "The Blithedale Romance," a rich ironical
+story drawn from his Brook Farm experience. Four years in the
+American Consulate at Liverpool and three subsequent years of
+residence upon the Continent saw no literary harvest except
+carefully filled notebooks and the deeply imaginative moral
+romance, "The Marble Faun." Hawthorne returned home in 1860 and
+settled in the Wayside at Concord, busying himself with a new,
+and, as was destined, a never completed story about the elixir of
+immortality. But his vitality was ebbing, and in May, 1864, he
+passed away in his sleep. He rests under the pines in Sleepy
+Hollow, near the Alcotts and the Emersons.
+
+It is difficult for contemporary Americans to assess the value of
+such a man, who evidently did nothing except to write a few
+books. His rare, delicate genius was scarcely touched by passing
+events. Not many of his countrymen really love his writings, as
+they love, for instance the writings of Dickens or Thackeray or
+Stevenson. Everyone reads, at some time of his life, "The Scarlet
+Letter," and trembles at its passionate indictment of the sin of
+concealment, at its agonized admonition, "Be true! Be true!"
+Perhaps the happiest memories of Hawthorne's readers, as of
+Kipling's readers, hover about his charming stories for children;
+to have missed "The Wonder-Book" is like having grown old without
+ever catching the sweetness of the green world at dawn. But our
+public has learned to enjoy a wholly different kind of style,
+taught by the daily journals, a nervous, graphic, sensational,
+physical style fit for describing an automobile, a department
+store, a steamship, a lynching party. It is the style of our day,
+and judged by it Hawthorne, who wrote with severity, conscience,
+and good taste, seems somewhat old-fashioned, like Irving or
+Addison. He is perhaps too completely a New Englander to be
+understood by men of other stock, and has never, like Poe and
+Whitman, excited strong interest among European minds.
+
+Yet no American is surer, generation after generation, of finding
+a fit audience. Hawthorne's genius was meditative rather than
+dramatic. His artistic material was moral rather than physical;
+he brooded over the soul of man as affected by this and that
+condition and situation. The child of a new analytical age, he
+thought out with rigid accuracy the precise circumstances
+surrounding each one of his cases and modifying it. Many of his
+sketches and short stories and most of his romances deal with
+historical facts, moods, and atmospheres, and he knew the past of
+New England as few men have ever known it. There is solid
+historical and psychological stuff as the foundation of his
+air-castles. His latent radicalism furnished him with a
+touchstone of criticism as he interpreted the moral standards of
+ancient communities; no reader of "The Scarlet Letter" can forget
+Hawthorne's implicit condemnation of the unimaginative harshness
+of the Puritans. His own judgment upon the deep matters of the
+human conscience was stern enough, but it was a universalized
+judgment, and by no means the result of a Calvinism which he
+hated. Over-fond as he was in his earlier tales of elaborate,
+fanciful, decorative treatment of themes that promised to point a
+moral, in his finest short stories, such as "The Ambitious
+Guest," "The Gentle Boy," "Young Goodman Brown," "The Snow
+Image,"
+"The Great Stone Face," "Drowne's Wooden Image," "Rappacini's
+Daughter," the moral, if there be one, is not obtruded. He loves
+physical symbols for mental and moral states, and was poet and
+Transcendentalist enough to retain his youthful affection for
+parables; but his true field as a story-teller is the erring,
+questing, aspiring, shadowed human heart.
+
+"The Scarlet Letter," for instance, is a study of a universal
+theme, the problem of concealed sin, punishment, redemption. Only
+the setting is provincial. The story cannot be rightly estimated,
+it is true, without remembering the Puritan reverence for
+physical purity, the Puritan reverence for the
+magistrate-minister--differing so widely from the respect of
+Latin countries for the priest--the Puritan preoccupation with
+the
+life of the soul, or, as more narrowly construed by Calvinism,
+the problem of evil. The word Adultery, although suggestively
+enough present in one of the finest symbolical titles ever
+devised by a romancer, does not once occur in the book. The sins
+dealt with are hypocrisy and revenge. Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester
+Prynne, and Roger Chillingworth are developing, suffering, living
+creatures, caught inextricably in the toils of a moral situation.
+By an incomparable succession of pictures Hawthorne exhibits the
+travail of their souls. In the greatest scene of all, that
+between Hester and Arthur in the forest, the Puritan framework of
+the story gives way beneath the weight of human passion, and we
+seem on the verge of another and perhaps larger solution than was
+actually worked out by the logic of succeeding events. But
+though the book has been called Christless, prayerless, hopeless,
+no mature person ever reads it without a deepened sense of the
+impotence of all mechanistic theories of sin, and a new vision of
+the intense reality of spiritual things. "The law we broke," in
+Dimmesdale's ghostly words, was a more subtle law than can be
+graven on tables of stone and numbered as the Seventh
+Commandment.
+
+The legacy of guilt is likewise the theme of "The House of the
+Seven Gables," which Hawthorne himself was inclined to think a
+better book than "The Scarlet Letter." Certainly this story of
+old Salem is impeccably written and its subtle handling of tone
+and atmosphere is beyond dispute. An ancestral curse, the
+visitation of the sins of the fathers upon the children, the
+gradual decay of a once sound stock, are motives that Ibsen might
+have developed. But the Norseman would have failed to rival
+Hawthorne's delicate manipulation of his shadows, and the no less
+masterly deftness of the ultimate mediation of a dark inheritance
+through the love of the light-hearted Phoebe for the latest
+descendant of the Maules. In "The Blithedale Romance" Hawthorne
+stood for once, perhaps, too near his material to allow the rich
+atmospheric effects which he prefers, and in spite of the
+unforgetable portrait of Zenobia and powerful passages of
+realistic description, the book is not quite focussed. In "The
+Marble Faun" Hawthorne comes into his own again. Its central
+problem is one of those dark insoluble ones that he loves: the
+influence of a crime upon the development of a soul. Donatello,
+the Faun, is a charming young creature of the natural sunshine
+until his love for the somber Miriam tempts him to the commission
+of murder: then begins the growth of his mind and character.
+Perhaps the haunting power of the main theme of the book has
+contributed less to its fame than the felicity of its
+descriptions of Rome and Italy. For Hawthorne possessed, like
+Byron, in spite of his defective training in the appreciation of
+the arts, a gift of romantic discernment which makes "The Marble
+Faun," like "Childe Harold," a glorified guide-book to the
+Eternal City.
+
+All of Hawthorne's books, in short, have a central core of
+psychological romance, and a rich surface finish of description.
+His style, at its best, has a subdued splendor of coloring which
+is only less wonderful than the spiritual perceptions with which
+this magician was endowed. The gloom which haunts many of his
+pages, as I have said elsewhere, is the long shadow cast by our
+mortal destiny upon a sensitive soul. The mystery is our mystery,
+perceived, and not created, by that finely endowed mind and
+heart. The shadow is our shadow; the gleams of insight, the soft
+radiance of truth and beauty, are his own.
+
+A college classmate of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow summed up the
+Portland boy's character in one sentence: "It appeared easy for
+him to avoid the unworthy." Born in 1807, of Mayflower stock that
+had distinguished itself for bravery and uprightness, the youth
+was graduated from Bowdoin at eighteen. Like his classmate
+Hawthorne, he had been a wide and secretly ambitious reader, and
+had followed the successive numbers of Irving's "Sketch Book," he
+tells us, "with ever increasing wonder and delight." His college
+offered him in 1826 a professorship of the modern languages, and
+he spent three happy years in Europe in preparation. He taught
+successfully at Bowdoin for five or six years, and for eighteen
+years, 1836 to 1854, served as George Ticknor's successor at
+Harvard, ultimately surrendering the chair to Lowell. He early
+published two prose volumes, "Hyperion" and "Outre-mer,"
+Irvingesque romances of European travel. Then came, after ten
+years of teaching and the death of his young wife, the sudden
+impulse to write poetry, and he produced, "softly excited, I know
+not why," "The Reaper and the Flowers, a Psalm of Death." From
+that December morning in 1838 until his death in 1882 he was
+Longfellow the Poet.
+
+His outward life, like Hawthorne's, was barren of dramatic
+incident, save the one tragic accident by which his second wife,
+the mother of his children, perished before his eyes in 1861. He
+bore the calamity with the quiet courage of his race and
+breeding. But otherwise his days ran softly and gently, enriched
+with books and friendships, sheltered from the storms of
+circumstance. He had leisure to grow ripe, to remember, and to
+dream. But he never secluded himself, like Tennyson, from normal
+contacts with his fellowmen. The owner of the Craigie House was a
+good neighbor, approachable and deferential. He was even
+interested in local Cambridge politics. On the larger political
+issues of his day his Americanism was sound and loyal. "It is
+disheartening," he wrote in his Cambridge journal for 1851, "to
+see how little sympathy there is in the hearts of the young men
+here for freedom and great ideas." But his own sympathy never
+wavered. His linguistic talent helped him to penetrate the
+secrets of alien ways of thought and speech. He understood Italy
+and Spain, Holland and France and Germany. He had studied them on
+the lips of their living men and women and in the books where
+soldier and historian, priest and poet, had inscribed the record
+of five hundred years. From the Revival of Learning to the middle
+of the nineteenth century, Longfellow knew the soul of Europe as
+few men have known it, and he helped to translate Europe to
+America. His intellectual receptivity, his quick eye for color
+and costume and landscape, his ear for folklore and ballad, his
+own ripe mastery of words, made him the most resourceful of
+international interpreters. And this lover of children, walking
+in quiet ways, this refined and courteous host and gentleman,
+scholar and poet, exemplified without self-advertisement the
+richer qualities of his own people. When Couper's statue of
+Longfellow was dedicated in Washington, Hamilton Mabie said: "His
+freedom from the sophistication of a more experienced country;
+his simplicity, due in large measure to the absence of social
+self-consciousness; his tranquil and deep-seated optimism, which
+is the effluence of an unexhausted soil; his happy and confident
+expectation, born of a sense of tremendous national vitality; his
+love of simple things in normal relations to world-wide interests
+of the mind; his courage in interpreting those deeper experiences
+which craftsmen who know art but who do not know life call
+commonplaces; the unaffected and beautiful democracy of his
+spirit--these are the delicate flowers of our new world, and as
+much a part of it as its stretches of wilderness and the
+continental roll of its rivers."
+
+Longfellow's poetic service to his countrymen has thus become a
+national asset, and not merely because in his three best known
+narrative poems, "Evangeline," "Hiawatha," and "The Courtship of
+Miles Standish," he selected his themes from our own history.
+"The Building of the Ship," written with full faith in the
+troubled year of 1849, is a national anthem. "It is a wonderful
+gift," said Lincoln, as he listened to it, his eyes filled with
+tears, "to be able to stir men like that." "The Skeleton in
+Armor," "A Ballad of the French Fleet," "Paul Revere's Ride,"
+"The Wreck of the Hesperus," are ballads that stir men still. For
+all of his skill in story-telling in verse--witness the "Tales of
+a Wayside Inn"--Longfellow was not by nature a dramatist, and his
+trilogy now published under the title of "Christus," made up of
+"The Divine Tragedy," "The Golden Legend," and "New England
+Tragedies," added little to a reputation won in other fields. His
+sonnets, particularly those upon "Chaucer," "Milton," "The Divina
+Commedia," "A Nameless Grave," "Felton," "Sumner," "Nature," "My
+Books," are among the imperishable treasures of the English
+language. In descriptive pieces like "Keramos" and "The Hanging
+of the Crane," in such personal and occasional verses as "The
+Herons of Elmwood," "The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz," and the
+noble "Morituri Salutamus" written for his classmates in 1875, he
+exhibits his tenderness of affection and all the ripeness of his
+technical skill. But it was as a lyric poet, after all, that he
+won and held his immense audience throughout the English-speaking
+world. Two of the most popular of all his early pieces, "The
+Psalm of Life" and "Excelsior," have paid the price of a too apt
+adjustment to the ethical mood of an earnest moment in our
+national life. We have passed beyond them. And many readers may
+have outgrown their youthful pleasure in "Maidenhood," "The Rainy
+Day," "The Bridge," "The Day is Done," verses whose simplicity
+lent themselves temptingly to parody. Yet such poems as "The
+Belfry of Bruges," "Seaweed," "The Fire of Driftwood," "The
+Arsenal at Springfield," "My Lost Youth," "The Children's Hour,"
+and many another lyric, lose nothing with the lapse of time.
+There is fortunately infinite room for personal preference in
+this whole matter of poetry, but the confession of a lack of
+regard for Longfellow's verse must often be recognized as a
+confession of a lessening love for what is simple, graceful, and
+refined. The current of contemporary American taste, especially
+among consciously clever, half-trained persons, seems to be
+running against Longfellow. How soon the tide may turn, no one
+can say. Meanwhile he has his tranquil place in the Poet's Corner
+of Westminster Abbey. The Abbey must be a pleasant spot to wait
+in, for the Portland boy.
+
+Oddly enough, some of the over-sophisticated and
+under-experienced people who affect to patronize Longfellow
+assume toward John Greenleaf Whittier an air of deference. This
+attitude would amuse the Quaker poet. One can almost see his dark
+eyes twinkle and the grim lips tighten in that silent laughter in
+which the old man so much resembled Cooper's Leather-Stocking.
+Whittier knew that his friend Longfellow was a better artist than
+himself, and he also knew, by intimate experience as a maker of
+public opinion, how variable are its judgments. Whittier
+represents a stock different from that of the Longfellows, but
+equally American, equally thoroughbred: the Essex County Quaker
+farmer of Massachusetts. The homestead in which he was born in
+1807, at East Haverhill, had been built by his
+great-great-grandfather in 1688. Mount Vernon in Virginia and the
+Craigie House in Cambridge are newer than this by two
+generations. The house has been restored to the precise aspect it
+had in Whittier's boyhood: and the garden, lawn, and brook, even
+the door-stone and bridle-post and the barn across the road are
+witnesses to the fidelity of the descriptions in "Snow-Bound."
+The neighborhood is still a lonely one. The youth grew up in
+seclusion, yet in contact with a few great ideas, chief among
+them Liberty. "My father," he said, "was an old-fashioned
+Democrat, and really believed in the Preamble of the Bill of
+Rights which reaffirmed the Declaration of Independence." The
+taciturn father transmitted to his sons a hatred of kingcraft and
+priestcraft, the inward moral freedom of the Quaker touched with
+humanitarian passion. The spirit of a boyhood in this homestead
+is veraciously told in "The Barefoot Boy," "School-Days,"
+"Snow-Bound," "Ramoth Hill," and "Telling the Bees." It was a
+chance copy of Burns that revealed to the farmer lad his own
+desire and capacity for verse-writing. When he was nineteen, his
+sister sent his "Exile's Departure" to William Lloyd Garrison,
+then twenty, and the editor of the "Newburyport Free Press." The
+neighbors liked it, and the tall frail author was rewarded with a
+term at the Haverhill Academy, where he paid his way, in old
+Essex County fashion, by making shoes.
+
+He had little more formal schooling than this, was too poor to
+enter college, but had what he modestly called a "knack at
+rhyming," and much facility in prose. He turned to journalism and
+politics, for which he possessed a notable instinct. For a while
+he thought he had "done with poetry and literature." Then in
+1833, at twenty-six, came Garrison's stirring letter bidding him
+enlist in the cause of Anti-Slavery. He obeyed the call, not
+knowing that this new allegiance to the service of humanity was
+to transform him from a facile local verse-writer into a national
+poet. It was the ancient miracle of losing one's life and finding
+it. For the immediate sacrifice was very real to a youth trained
+in quietism and non-resistance, and well aware, as a Whig
+journalist, of the ostracism visited upon the active
+Abolitionists. Whittier entered the fight with absolute courage
+and with the shrewdest practical judgment of weapons and tactics.
+He forgot himself. He turned aside from those pleasant fields of
+New England legend and history to which he was destined to return
+after his warfare was accomplished. He had read the prose of
+Milton and of Burke. He perceived that negro emancipation in the
+United States was only a single and immediate phase of a
+universal movement of liberalism. The thought kindled his
+imagination. He wrote, at white heat, political and social verse
+that glowed with humanitarian passion: lyrics in praise of
+fellow-workers, salutes to the dead, campaign songs, hymns,
+satires against the clergy and the capitalists, superb sectional
+poems like "Massachusetts to Virginia," and, more nobly still,
+poems embodying what Wordsworth called "the sensation and image
+of country and the human race."
+
+Whittier had now "found himself" as a poet. It is true that his
+style remained diffuse and his ear faulty, but his countrymen,
+then as now uncritical of artistic form, overlooked the blemishes
+of his verse, and thought only of his vibrant emotion, his scorn
+of cowardice and evil, his prophetic exaltation. In 1847 came the
+first general collection of his poems, and here were to be found
+not merely controversial verses, but spirited "Songs of Labor,"
+pictures of the lovely Merrimac countryside, legends written in
+the mood of Hawthorne or Longfellow, and bright bits of foreign
+lore and fancy. For though Whittier never went abroad, his quiet
+life at Amesbury gave him leisure for varied reading, and he
+followed contemporary European politics with the closest
+interest. He emerged more and more from the atmosphere of faction
+and section, and, though he retained to the last his Quaker
+creed, he held its simple tenets in such undogmatic and winning
+fashion that his hymns are sung today in all the churches.
+
+When "The Atlantic Monthly" was established in 1857, Whittier was
+fifty. He took his place among the contributors to the new
+magazine not as a controversialist but as a man of letters, with
+such poems as "Tritemius," and "Skipper Ireson's Ride."
+Characteristic productions of this period are "My Psalm,"
+"Cobbler Keezar's Vision," "Andrew Rykman's Prayer," "The Eternal
+Goodness"--poems grave, sweet, and tender. But it was not until
+the publication of "Snow-Bound" in 1866 that Whittier's work
+touched its widest popularity. He had never married, and the
+deaths of his mother and sister Elizabeth set him brooding, in
+the desolate Amesbury house, over memories of his birthplace, six
+miles away in East Haverhill. The homestead had gone out of the
+hands of the Whittiers, and the poet, nearing sixty, set himself
+to compose an idyll descriptive of the vanished past. No artist
+could have a theme more perfectly adapted to his mood and to his
+powers. There are no novel ideas in "Snow-Bound," nor is there
+any need of them, but the thousands of annual pilgrims to the old
+farmhouse can bear witness to the touching intimacy, the homely
+charm, the unerring rightness of feeling with which Whittier's
+genius recreated his own lost youth and painted for all time a
+true New England hearthside.
+
+Whittier was still to write nearly two hundred more poems, for he
+lived to be eighty-five, and he composed until the last. But his
+creative period was now over. He rejoiced in the friendly
+recognition of his work that came to him from every section of a
+reunited country. His personal friends were loyal in their
+devotion. He followed the intricacies of American politics with
+the keen zest of a veteran in that game, for in his time he had
+made and unmade governors and senators. "The greatest politician
+I have ever met," said James G. Blaine, who had certainly met
+many. He had an income from his poems far in excess of his needs,
+but retained the absolute simplicity of his earlier habits. When
+his publishers first proposed the notable public dinner in honor
+of his seventieth birthday he demurred, explaining to a member of
+his family that he did not want the bother of "buying a new pair
+of pants"--a petty anecdote, but somehow refreshing. So the
+rustic, shrewd, gentle old man waited for the end. He had known
+what it means to toil, to fight, to renounce, to eat his bread in
+tears, and to see some of his dreams come true. We have had, and
+shall have, more accomplished craftsmen in verse, but we have
+never bred a more genuine man than Whittier, nor one who had more
+kinship with the saints.
+
+A few days before Whittier's death, he wrote an affectionate poem
+in celebration of the eighty-third birthday of his old friend of
+the Saturday Club, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. This was in 1892.
+The little Doctor, rather lonely in his latest years, composed
+some tender obituary verses at Whittier's passing. He had already
+performed the same office for Lowell. He lingered himself until
+the autumn of 1894, in his eighty-sixth year--"The Last Leaf," in
+truth, of New England's richest springtime.
+
+"No, my friends," he had said in "The Autocrat of the Breakfast
+Table," "I go (always, other things being equal) for the man who
+inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at
+least four or five generations." The Doctor came naturally by his
+preference for a "man of family," being one himself. He was a
+descendant of Anne Bradstreet, the poetess. "Dorothy Q.," whom he
+had made the most picturesque of the Quincys, was his
+great-grandmother. Wendell Phillips was his cousin. His father,
+the Rev. Abiel Holmes, a Yale graduate, was the minister of the
+First Church in Cambridge, and it was in its "gambrel-roofed"
+parsonage that Oliver Wendell was born in 1809.
+
+"Know old Cambridge? Hope you do--
+Born there? Don't say so! I was, too.
+Nicest place that was ever seen--
+Colleges red and Common green."
+
+So he wrote, in scores of passages of filial devotion, concerning
+the village of his boyhood and the city of Boston. His best-known
+prose sentence is: "Boston State House is the hub of the Solar
+System." It is easy to smile, as indeed he did himself, at such
+fond provinciality, but the fact remains that our literature as a
+whole sadly needs this richness of local atmosphere. A nation of
+restless immigrants, here today and "moved on" tomorrow, has the
+fibres of its imagination uprooted, and its artists in their
+eager quest of "local color" purchase brilliancy at the cost of
+thinness of tone, poverty of association. Philadelphia and
+Boston, almost alone among the larger American cities, yield the
+sense of intimacy, or what the Autocrat would call "the
+cumulative humanities. "
+
+Young Holmes became the pet and the glory of his class of 1829 at
+Harvard. It was only in 1838 that their reunions began, but
+thereafter they held fifty-six meetings, of which Holmes attended
+fifty and wrote poems for forty-three. Many of "the Boys" whom he
+celebrated became famous in their own right, but they remain "the
+Boys" to all lovers of Holmes's verses. His own career as a poet
+had begun during his single year in the Law School. His later
+years brought him some additional skill in polishing his lines
+and a riper human wisdom, but his native verse-making talent is
+as completely revealed in "Old Ironsides," published when he was
+twenty-one, and in "The Last Leaf," composed a year or two later,
+as in anything he was to write during the next half-century. In
+many respects he was a curious survival of the cumulative
+humanities of the eighteenth century. He might have been, like
+good Dr. Arbuthnot, an ornament of the Augustan age. He shared
+with the English Augustans a liking for the rhymed couplet, an
+instinctive social sense, a feeling for the presence of an
+imaginary audience of congenial listeners. One still catches the
+"Hear! Hear!" between his clever lines. In many of the traits of
+his mind this "Yankee Frenchman" resembled such a typical
+eighteenth century figure as Voltaire. Like Voltaire, he was
+tolerant--except toward Calvinism and Homeopathy. In some of the
+tricks of his prose style he is like a kindlier Sterne. His knack
+for vers de societe was caught from Horace, but he would not have
+been a child of his own age without the additional gift of
+rhetoric and eloquence which is to be seen in his patriotic poems
+and his hymns. For Holmes possessed, in spite of all his
+limitations in poetic range, true devotion, patriotism, humor,
+and pathos.
+
+His poetry was in the best sense of the word "occasional," and
+his prose was only an incidental or accidental harvest of a long
+career in which his chief duty was that of a professor of anatomy
+in the Harvard Medical School. He had studied in Paris under
+sound teachers, and after some years of private practice won the
+appointment which he held, as active and emeritus professor, for
+forty-seven years. He was a faithful, clear, and amusing
+lecturer, and printed two or three notable medical essays, but
+his chief Boston reputation, in the eighteen-fifties, was that of
+a wit and diner-out and writer of verses for occasions. Then came
+his great hour of good luck in 1857, when Lowell, the editor of
+the newly-established "Atlantic Monthly," persuaded him to write
+"The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." It was the public's luck
+also, for whoever had been so unfortunate as not to be born in
+Boston could now listen--as if across the table--to Boston's best
+talker. Few volumes of essays during the last sixty years have
+given more pleasure to a greater variety of readers than is
+yielded by "The Autocrat." It gave the Doctor a reputation in
+England which he naturally prized, and which contributed to his
+triumphal English progress, many years later, recorded pleasantly
+in "Our Hundred Days." "The Professor at the Breakfast Table" and
+"The Poet at the Breakfast Table" are less successful variations
+of "The Autocrat." Neither professors nor poets are at their best
+at this meal. Holmes wrote three novels--of which "Elsie Venner,"
+a somewhat too medical story, is the best remembered--memoirs of
+his friends Emerson and Motley, and many miscellaneous essays.
+His life was exceptionally happy, and his cheery good opinion of
+himself is still contagious. To pronounce the words Doctor Holmes
+in any company of intelligent Americans is the prologue to a
+smile of recognition, comprehension, sympathy. The word Goldsmith
+has now lost, alas, this provocative quality; the word Stevenson
+still possesses it. The little Doctor, who died in the same year
+as Stevenson, belonged like him to the genial race of friends of
+mankind, and a few of his poems, and some gay warm-hearted pages
+of his prose, will long preserve his memory. But the Boston which
+he loved has vanished as utterly as Sam Johnson's London.
+
+James Russell Lowell was ten years younger than Holmes, and
+though he died three years before the Doctor, he seems, for other
+reasons than those of chronology, to belong more nearly to the
+present. Although by birth as much of a New England Brahmin as
+Holmes, and in his later years as much of a Boston and Cambridge
+idol, he nevertheless touched our universal American life on many
+sides, represented us worthily in foreign diplomacy, argued the
+case of Democracy with convincing power, and embodied, as more
+perfect artists like Hawthorne and Longfellow could never have
+done, the subtleties and potencies of the national temperament.
+He deserves and reveals the closest scrutiny, but his personality
+is difficult to put on paper. Horace Scudder wrote his biography
+with careful competence, and Ferris Greenslet has made him the
+subject of a brilliant critical study. Yet readers differ widely
+in their assessment of the value of his prose and verse, and in
+their understanding of his personality.
+
+The external facts of his career are easy to trace and must be
+set down here with brevity. A minister's son, and descended from
+a very old and distinguished family, he was born at Elmwood in
+Cambridge in 1819. After a somewhat turbulent course, he was
+graduated from Harvard in 1838, the year of Emerson's "Divinity
+School Address." He studied law, turned Abolitionist, wrote
+poetry, married the beautiful and transcendental Maria White, and
+did magazine work in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He was
+thought by his friends in the eighteen-fifties to be "the most
+Shakespearian" man in America. When he was ten years out of
+college, in 1848, he published "The Biglow Papers" (First
+Series), "A Fable for Critics," and "The Vision of Sir Launfal."
+After a long visit to Europe and the death of his wife, he gave
+some brilliant Lowell Institute lectures in Boston, and was
+appointed Longfellow's successor at Harvard. He went to Europe
+again to prepare himself, and after entering upon his work as a
+teacher made a happy second marriage, served for four years as
+the first editor of "The Atlantic," and helped his friend Charles
+Eliot Norton edit "The North American Review." The Civil War
+inspired a second series of "Biglow Papers" and the magnificent
+"Commemoration Ode" of 1865. Then came volume after volume of
+literary essays, such as "Among My Books" and "My Study Windows,"
+and an occasional book of verse. Again he made a long sojourn in
+Europe, resigned his Harvard professorship, and in 1877 was
+appointed Minister to Spain. After three years he was transferred
+to the most important post in our diplomatic service, London. He
+performed his duties with extraordinary skill and success until
+1885, when he was relieved. His last years were spent in Elmwood,
+the Cambridge house where he was born, and he was still writing,
+in almost as rich a vein as ever, when the end came in 1891.
+
+Here was certainly a full and varied life, responsive to many
+personal moods and many tides of public feeling. Lowell drew
+intellectual stimulus from enormously wide reading in classical
+and modern literatures. Puritanically earnest by inheritance, he
+seems also to have inherited a strain of levity which he could
+not always control, and, through his mother's family, a dash of
+mysticism sometimes resembling second sight. His physical and
+mental powers were not always in the happiest mutual adjustment:
+he became easily the prey of moods and fancies, and knew the
+alternations from wild gaiety of spirits to black despair. The
+firm moral consistency of Puritanism was always his, yet his
+playful remark about belonging in a hospital for incurable
+children had a measure of truth in it also.
+
+Both his poetry and his prose reveal a nature never quite
+integrated into wholeness of structure, into harmony with itself.
+His writing, at its best, is noble and delightful, full of human
+charm, but it is difficult for him to master a certain
+waywardness and to sustain any note steadily. This temperamental
+flaw does not affect the winsomeness of his letters, unless to
+add to it. It is lost to view, often, in the sincerity and pathos
+of his lyrics, but it is felt in most of his longer efforts in
+prose, and accounts for a certain dissatisfaction which many
+grateful and loyal readers nevertheless feel in his criticism.
+Lowell was more richly endowed by nature and by breadth of
+reading than Matthew Arnold, for instance, but in the actual
+performance of the critical function he was surpassed in method
+by Arnold and perhaps in inerrant perception, in a limited field,
+by Poe.
+
+It was as a poet, however, that he first won his place in our
+literature, and it is by means of certain passages in the "Biglow
+Papers" and the "Commemoration Ode" that he has most moved his
+countrymen. The effectiveness of The "Present Crisis" and "Sir
+Launfal," and of the "Memorial Odes," particularly the "Ode to
+Agassiz," is likewise due to the passion, sweetness, and splendor
+of certain strophes, rather than to the perfection of these poems
+as artistic wholes. Lowell's personal lyrics of sorrow, such as
+"The Changeling," "The First SnowFall," "After the Burial," have
+touched many hearts.
+
+His later lyrics are more subtle, weighted with thought, tinged
+with autumnal melancholy. He was a most fertile composer, and,
+like all the men of his time and group, produced too much. Yet
+his patriotic verse was so admirable in feeling and is still so
+inspiring to his readers that one cannot wish it less in
+quantity; and in the field of political satire, such as the two
+series of "Biglow Papers," he had a theme and a method precisely
+suited to his temperament. No American has approached Lowell's
+success in this difficult genre: the swift transitions from rural
+Yankee humor to splendid scorn of evil and to noblest idealism
+reveal the full powers of one of our most gifted men. The
+preacher lurked in this Puritan from first to last, and the war
+against Mexico and the Civil War stirred him to the depths.
+
+His prose, likewise, is a school of loyalty. There was much of
+Europe in his learning, as his memorable Dante essay shows, and
+the traditions of great English literature were the daily
+companions of his mind. He was bookish, as a bookman should be,
+and sometimes the very richness and whimsicality of his bookish
+fancies marred the simplicity and good taste of his pages. But
+the fundamental texture of his thought and feeling was American,
+and his most characteristic style has the raciness of our soil.
+Nature lovers like to point out the freshness and delicacy of his
+reaction to the New England scene. Thoreau himself, whom Lowell
+did not like, was not more veracious an observer than the author
+of "Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line," "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago,"
+and "My Garden Acquaintance." Yet he watched men as keenly as he
+did "laylocks" and bobolinks, and no shrewder American essay has
+been written than his "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners."
+Wit and humor and wisdom made him one of the best talkers of his
+generation. These qualities pervade his essays and his letters,
+and the latter in particular reveal those ardors and fidelities
+of friendship which men like Emerson and Thoreau longed after
+without ever quite experiencing. Lowell's cosmopolitan
+reputation, which was greatly enhanced in the last decade of his
+life, seemed to his old associates of the Saturday Club only a
+fit recognition of the learning, wit, and fine imagination which
+had been familiar to them from the first. To hold the old friends
+throughout his lifetime, and to win fresh ones of a new
+generation through his books, is perhaps the greatest of Lowell's
+personal felicities.
+
+While there are no other names in the literature of New England
+quite comparable with those that have just been discussed, it
+should be remembered that the immediate effectiveness and
+popularity of these representative poets and prose writers were
+dependent upon the existence of an intelligent and responsive
+reading public. The lectures of Emerson, the speeches of Webster,
+the stories of Hawthorne, the political verse of Whittier and
+Lowell, presupposed a keen, reflecting audience, mentally and
+morally exigent. The spread of the Lyceum system along the line
+of westward emigration from New England as far as the Mississippi
+is one tangible evidence of the high level of popular
+intelligence. That there was much of the superficial and the
+spread-eagle in the American life of the eighteen-forties is
+apparent enough without the amusing comments of such English
+travellers as Dickens, Miss Martineau, and Captain Basil Hall.
+But there was also genuine intellectual curiosity and a general
+reading habit which are evidenced not only by a steady growth of
+newspapers and magazines but also by the demand for substantial
+books. Biography and history began to be widely read, and it was
+natural that the most notable productiveness in historical
+writing should manifest itself in that section of the country
+where there were libraries, wealth, leisure for the pursuits of
+scholarship, a sense of intimate concern with the great issues
+of the past, and a diffusion of intellectual tastes throughout
+the community. It was no accident that Sparks and Ticknor,
+Bancroft and Prescott, Motley and Parkman, were Massachusetts
+men.
+
+Jared Sparks, it is true, inherited neither wealth nor leisure.
+He was a furious, unwearied toiler in the field of our national
+history. Born in 1789, by profession a Unitarian minister, he
+began collecting the papers of George Washington by 1825. John
+Marshall, the great jurist, had published his five-volume life of
+his fellow Virginian a score of years earlier. But Sparks
+proceeded to write another biography of Washington and to edit
+his writings. He also edited a "Library of American Biography,"
+wrote lives of Franklin and Gouverneur Morris, was professor of
+history and President of Harvard, and lived to be seventy-seven.
+As editor of the writings of Franklin and Washington, he took
+what we now consider unpardonable liberties in altering the text,
+and this error of judgment has somewhat clouded his just
+reputation as a pioneer in historical research.
+
+George Bancroft, who was born in 1800, and died, a
+horseback-riding sage, at ninety-one, inherited from his
+clergyman father a taste for history. He studied in Germany after
+leaving Harvard, turned schoolmaster, Democratic politician and
+office-holder, served as Secretary of the Navy, Minister to
+England and then to the German Empire, and won distinction in
+each of his avocations, though the real passion of his life was
+his "History of the United States," which he succeeded in
+bringing down to the adoption of the Constitution. The first
+volume, which appeared in 1834, reads today like a stump speech
+by a sturdy Democratic orator of the Jacksonian period. But there
+was solid stuff in it, nevertheless, and as Bancroft proceeded,
+decade after decade, he discarded some of his rhetoric and
+philosophy of democracy and utilized increasingly the vast stores
+of documents which his energy and his high political positions
+had made it possible for him to obtain. Late in life he condensed
+his ten great volumes to six. Posterity will doubtless condense
+these in turn, as posterity has a way of doing, but Bancroft the
+historian realized his own youthful ambition with a completeness
+rare in the history of human effort and performed a monumental
+service to his country. He was less of an artist, however, than
+Prescott, the eldest and in some ways the finest figure of the
+well-known Prescott-Motley-Parkman group of Boston historians.
+All of these men, together with their friend George Ticknor, who
+wrote the "History of Spanish Literature" and whose own "Life and
+Letters" pictures a whole generation, had the professional
+advantages of inherited wealth, and the opportunity to make
+deliberate choice of a historical field which offered freshness
+and picturesqueness of theme. All were tireless workers in spite
+of every physical handicap; all enjoyed social security and the
+rich reward of full recognition by their contemporaries. They had
+their world as in their time, as Chaucer makes the Wife of Bath
+say of herself, and it was a pleasant world to live in.
+
+Grandson of "Prescott the Brave" of Bunker Hill, and son of the
+rich Judge Prescott of Salem, William Hickling Prescott was born
+in 1796, and was graduated from Harvard in 1814. An accident in
+college destroyed the sight of one eye, and left him but a
+precarious use of the other. Nevertheless he resolved to emulate
+Gibbon, whose "Autobiography" had impressed him, and to make
+himself "an historian in the best sense of the term." He studied
+arduously in Europe, with the help of secretaries, and by 1826,
+after a long hesitation, decided upon a "History of the Reign of
+Ferdinand and Isabella." In ten years the three volumes were
+finished. "Pursuing the work in this quiet, leisurely way,
+without over-exertion or fatigue," wrote Prescott, "or any sense
+of obligation to complete it in a given time, I have found it a
+continual source of pleasure." It was published at his own
+expense on Christmas Day, 1837, and met with instantaneous
+success. "My market and my reputation rest principally with
+England," he wrote in 1838--a curious footnote, by the way, to
+Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa Address of the year before. But America
+joined with England, in praising the new book. Then Prescott
+turned to the "Conquest of Mexico," the "Conquest of Peru," and
+finally to his unfinished "History of the Reign of Philip II." He
+had, as Dean Milman wrote him, "the judgment to choose noble
+subjects." He wrote with serenity and dignity, with fine balance
+and proportion. Some of the Spanish documents upon which he
+relied have been proved less trustworthy than he thought, but
+this unsuspected defect in his materials scarcely impaired the
+skill with which this unhasting, unresting painter filled his
+great canvases. They need retouching, perhaps, but the younger
+historians are incompetent for the task. Prescott died in 1859,
+in the same year as Irving, and he already seems quite as remote
+from the present hour.
+
+His young friend Motley, of "Dutch Republic" fame, was another
+Boston Brahmin, born in the year of Prescott's graduation from
+college. He attended George Bancroft's school, went to Harvard in
+due course, where he knew Holmes, Sumner, and Wendell Phillips,
+and at Gottingen became a warm friend of a dog-lover and duelist
+named Bismarck. Young Motley wrote a couple of unsuccessful
+novels, dabbled in diplomacy, politics, and review-writing, and
+finally, encouraged by Prescott, settled down upon Dutch history,
+went to Europe to work up his material in 1851, and, after five
+years, scored an immense triumph with his "Rise of the Dutch
+Republic." He was a brilliant partisan, hating Spaniards and
+Calvinists; and wrote all the better for this bias. He was an
+admirable sketcher of historical portraits, and had Macaulay's
+skill in composing special chapters devoted to the tendencies and
+qualities of an epoch or to the characteristics of a dynasty.
+Between 1860 and 1868 he produced the four volumes of the
+"History of the United Netherlands." During the Civil War he
+served usefully as American minister to Vienna, and in 1869 was
+appointed minister to London. Both of these appointments ended
+unhappily for him. Dr. Holmes, his loyal admirer and biographer,
+does not conceal the fact that a steadier, less excitable type of
+public servant might have handled both the Vienna situation and
+the London situation without incurring a recall. Motley continued
+to live in England, where his daughters had married, and where,
+in spite of his ardent Americanism, he felt socially at home. His
+last book was "The Life and Death of John of Barneveld." His
+"Letters," edited after his death in 1877 by George William
+Curtis, give a fascinating picture of English life among the
+cultivated and leisurely classes. The Boston merchant's son was a
+high-hearted gentleman, and his cosmopolitan experiences used to
+make his stay-at-home friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, feel rather
+dull and provincial in comparison. Both were Sons of Liberty, but
+Motley had had the luck to find in "brave little Holland" a
+subject which captivated the interest of Europe and gave the
+historian international fame. He had more eloquence than the
+Doctor, and a far more varied range of prose, but there may be
+here and there a Yankee guesser about the taste of future
+generations who will bet on "The Autocrat," after all.
+
+The character and career of Francis Parkman afford curious
+material to the student of New England's golden age. In the
+seventy years of his heroic life, from 1823 to 1893, all the
+characteristic forces of the age reached their culmination and
+decline, and his own personality indicates some of the violent
+reactions produced by the over-strain of Transcendentalism. For
+here was a descendant of John Cotton, and a clergyman's son, who
+detested Puritanism and the clergy; who, coming to manhood in the
+eighteen-forties, hated the very words Transcendentalism,
+Philosophy, Religion, Reform; an inheritor of property, trained
+at Harvard, and an Overseer and Fellow of his University, who
+disliked the ideals of culture and refinement; a member of the
+Saturday Club who was bored with literary talk and literary
+people; a staunch American who despised democracy as thoroughly
+as Alexander Hamilton, and thought suffrage a failure; a
+nineteenth century historian who cared nothing for philosophy,
+science, or the larger lessons of history itself; a fascinating
+realistic writer who admired Scott, Byron, and Cooper for their
+tales of action, and despised Wordsworth and Thoreau as
+effeminate sentimentalists who were preoccupied with themselves.
+In Parkman "the wheel has come full circle," and a movement that
+began with expansion of self ended in hard Spartan repression,
+even in inhibition of emotion.
+
+Becoming "enamoured of the woods" at sixteen, Parkman chose his
+life work at eighteen, and he was a man who could say proudly: "I
+have not yet abandoned any plan which I ever formed." "Before the
+end of the sophomore year," he wrote in his autobiography, "my
+various schemes had crystallized into a plan of writing the story
+of what was then known as the 'Old French War,' that is, the war
+that ended in the conquest of Canada, for here, as it seemed to
+me, the forest drama was more stirring and the forest stage more
+thronged with appropriate actors than in any other passage of our
+history. It was not till some years later that I enlarged the
+plan to include the whole course of the American conflict between
+France and England, or, in other words, the history of the
+American forest: for this was the light in which I regarded it.
+My theme fascinated me, and I was haunted with wilderness images
+day and night." To understand "the history of the American
+forest" young Parkman devoted his college vacations to long trips
+in the wilderness, and in 1846, two years after graduation, he
+made the epoch-making journey described in his first book, "The
+Oregon Trail."
+
+"The Conspiracy of Pontiac," a highly-colored narrative in two
+volumes appearing in 1851, marks the first stage of his
+historical writing. Then came the tragedy of shattered health,
+and for fourteen years Parkman fought for life and sanity, and
+produced practically nothing. He had had to struggle from his
+college days with an obscure disorder of the brain, aggravated by
+the hardships of his Oregon Trail journey, and by ill-considered
+efforts to harden his bodily frame by over-exertion. His disease
+took many forms--insomnia, arthritis, weakness of sight,
+incapacity for sustained thought. His biographer Farnham says
+that "he never saw a perfectly well day during his entire
+literary career." Even when aided by secretaries and copyists,
+six lines a day was often the limit of his production. His own
+Stoic words about the limitations of his eyesight are
+characteristic: "By reading for one minute, and then resting for
+an equal time, this alternate process may gradually be continued
+for about half an hour. Then, after a sufficient interval, it may
+be repeated, often three or four times in the course of the day.
+By this means nearly the whole of the volume now offered has been
+composed." There is no more piteous or inspiring story of a fight
+against odds in the history of literature.
+
+For after his fortieth year the enemy gave way a little, and book
+after book somehow got itself written. There they stand upon the
+shelves, a dozen of them--"The Pioneers of France," "The Jesuits
+in North America," "La Salle," "The Old Regime," "Frontenac,"
+"Montcalm and Wolfe," "A Half-Century of Conflict"--the boy's
+dream realized, the man's long warfare accomplished. The history
+of the forest, as Parkman saw it, was a pageant with the dark
+wilderness for a background, and, for the actors, taciturn
+savages, black-robed Jesuits, intrepid explorers, soldiers of
+France--all struggling for a vast prize, all changing, passing,
+with a pomp and color unknown to wearied Europe. It was a superb
+theme, better after all for an American than the themes chosen by
+Prescott and Ticknor and Motley, and precisely adapted to the
+pictorial and narrative powers of the soldier-minded, soldier-
+hearted author.
+
+The quality which Parkman admired most in men--though he never
+seems to have loved men deeply, even his own heroes--was strength
+of will. That was the secret of his own power, and the sign, it
+must be added, of the limitations of this group of historians who
+came at the close of the golden age. Whatever a New England will
+can accomplish was wrought manfully by such admirable men as
+Prescott and Parkman. Trained intelligence, deliberate selection
+of subject, skillful cultivation of appropriate story-telling and
+picture-painting style, all these were theirs. But the "wild
+ecstasy" that thrilled the young Emerson as he crossed the bare
+Common at sunset, the "supernal beauty" of which Poe dreamed in
+the Fordham cottage, the bay horse and hound and turtle-dove
+which Thoreau lost long ago and could not find in his but at
+Walden, these were something which our later Greeks of the New
+England Athens esteemed as foolishness.
+
+CHAPTER VIII. POE AND WHITMAN
+
+Enter now two egotists, who have little in common save their
+egotism, two outsiders who upset most of the conventional
+American rules for winning the literary race, two men of genius,
+in short, about whom we are still quarreling, and whose
+distinctive quality is more accurately perceived in Europe than
+it has ever been in the United States.
+
+Both Poe and Whitman were Romanticists by temperament. Both
+shared in the tradition and influence of European Romanticism.
+But they were also late comers, and they were caught in the more
+morbid and extravagant phases of the great European movement
+while its current was beginning to ebb. Their acquaintance with
+its literature was mainly at second-hand and through the medium
+of British and American periodicals. Poe, who was older than
+Whitman by ten years, was fifteen when Byron died, in 1824. He
+was untouched by the nobler mood of Byron, though his verse was
+colored by the influence of Byron, Moore, and Shelley. His prose
+models were De Quincey, Disraeli, and Bulwer. Yet he owed more to
+Coleridge than to any of the Romantics. He was himself a sort of
+Coleridge without the piety, with the same keen penetrating
+critical intelligence, the same lovely opium-shadowed dreams,
+and, alas, with something of the same reputation as a deadbeat.
+
+A child of strolling players, Poe happened to be born in Boston,
+but he hated "Frog-Pondium"--his favorite name for the city of
+his nativity--as much as Whistler hated his native town of
+Lowell. His father died early of tuberculosis, and his mother,
+after a pitiful struggle with disease and poverty, soon followed
+her husband to the grave. The boy, by physical inheritance a
+neurasthenic, though with marked bodily activity in youth, was
+adopted by the Allans, a kindly family in Richmond, Virginia. Poe
+liked to think of himself as a Southerner. He was sent to school
+in England, and in 1826, at seventeen, he attended for nearly a
+year the newly founded University of Virginia. He was a dark,
+short, bow-legged boy, with the face of his own Roderick Usher.
+He made a good record in French and Latin, read, wrote and
+recited poetry, tramped on the Ragged Mountains, and did not
+notably exceed his companions in drinking and gambling. But his
+Scotch foster-father disapproved of his conduct and withdrew him
+from the University. A period of wandering followed. He enlisted
+in the army and was stationed in Boston in 1827, when his first
+volume, "Tamerlane," was published. In 1829 he was in Fortress
+Monroe, and published "Al Aaraf" at Baltimore. He entered West
+Point in 1830, and was surely, except Whistler, the strangest of
+all possible cadets. When he was dismissed in 1831, he had
+written the marvellous lines "To Helen," "Israfel," and "The City
+in the Sea." That is enough to have in one's knapsack at the age
+of twenty-two.
+
+In the eighteen years from 1831 to 1849, when Poe's unhappy life
+came to an end in a Baltimore hospital, his literary activity was
+chiefly that of a journalist, critic, and short story writer. He
+lived in Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York. Authors
+who now exploit their fat bargains with their publishers may have
+forgotten that letter which Poe wrote back to Philadelphia the
+morning after he arrived with his child-wife in New York: "We are
+both in excellent spirits . . . . We have now got four dollars
+and a half left. To-morrow I am going to try and borrow three
+dollars, so that I may have a fortnight to go upon." When the
+child-wife died in the shabby cottage at Fordham, her wasted body
+was covered with the old army overcoat which Poe had brought from
+West Point. If Poe met some of the tests of practical life
+inadequately, it must be remembered that his health failed at
+twenty-five, that he was pitiably poor, and that the slightest
+indulgence in drink set his overwrought nerves jangling.
+Ferguson, the former office-boy of the "Literary Messenger,"
+judged this man of letters with an office-boy's firm and
+experienced eye: "Mr. Poe was a fine gentleman when he was sober.
+He was ever kind and courtly, and at such times everyone liked
+him. But when he was drinking he was about one of the most
+disagreeable men I have ever met." "I am sorry for him," wrote C.
+F. Briggs to Lowell. "He has some good points, but taken
+altogether, he is badly made up." "Badly made up," no doubt, both
+in body and mind, but all respectable and prosperous Pharisees
+should be reminded that Poe did not make himself; or rather, that
+he could not make himself over. Very few men can. Given Poe's
+temperament, and the problem is insoluble. He wrote to Lowell in
+1844: "I have been too deeply conscious of the mutability and
+evanescence of temporal things to give any continuous effort to
+anything--to be consistent in anything. My life has been
+WHIM--impulse--passion--a longing for solitude--a scorn of all
+things present in an earnest desire for the future." It is the
+pathetic confession of a dreamer. Yet this dreamer was also a
+keen analyzer, a tireless creator of beautiful things. In them he
+sought and found a refuge from actuality. The marvel of his
+career is, as I have said elsewhere, that this solitary,
+embittered craftsman, out of such hopeless material as negations
+and abstractions, shadows and superstitions, out of disordered
+fancies and dreams of physical horror and strange crime, should
+have wrought structures of imperishable beauty.
+
+Let us notice the critical instinct which he brought to the task
+of creation. His theory of verse is simple, in fact too simple to
+account for all of the facts. The aim of poetry, according to
+Poe, is not truth but pleasure--the rhythmical creation of
+beauty. Poetry should be brief, indefinite, and musical. Its
+chief instrument is sound. A certain quaintness or grotesqueness
+of tone is a means for satisfying the thirst for supernal beauty.
+Hence the musical lyric is to Poe the only true type of poetry; a
+long poem does not exist. Readers who respond more readily to
+auditory than to visual or motor stimulus are therefore Poe's
+chosen audience. For them he executes, like Paganini, marvels
+upon his single string. He has easily recognizable devices: the
+dominant note, the refrain, the "repetend," that is to say the
+phrase which echoes, with some variation, a phrase or line
+already used. In such poems as "To Helen," "Israfel," "The
+Haunted Palace," "Annabel Lee," the theme, the tone, the melody
+all weave their magic spell; it is like listening to a
+lute-player in a dream.
+
+That the device often turns into a trick is equally true. In "The
+Bells" and "The Raven" we detect the prestidigitator. It is
+jugglery, though such juggling as only a master-musician can
+perform. In "Ulalume" and other showpieces the wires get crossed
+and the charm snaps, scattering tinsel fragments of nonsense
+verse. Such are the dangers of the technical temperament
+unenriched by wide and deep contact with human feeling.
+
+Poe's theory of the art of the short story is now familiar
+enough. The power of a tale, he thought, turned chiefly if not
+solely upon its unity, its harmony of effect. This is illustrated
+in all of his finest stories. In "The Fall of the House of Usher"
+the theme is Fear; the opening sentence strikes the key and the
+closing sentence contains the climax. In the whole composition
+every sentence is modulated to the one end in view. The autumn
+landscape tones with the melancholy house; the somber chamber
+frames the cadaverous face of Roderick Usher; the face is an
+index of the tumultuous agitation of a mind wrestling with the
+grim phantom Fear and awaiting the cumulative horror of the final
+moment. In "Ligeia," which Poe sometimes thought the best of all
+his tales, the theme is the ceaseless life of the will, the
+potency of the spirit of the beloved and departed woman. The
+unity of effect is absolute, the workmanship consummate. So with
+the theme of revenge in "The Cask of Amontillado," the theme of
+mysterious intrigue in "The Assignation." In Poe's detective
+stories, or tales of ratiocination as he preferred to call them,
+he takes to pieces for our amusement a puzzle which he has
+cunningly put together. "The Gold Bug" is the best known of
+these, "The Purloined Letter" the most perfect, "The Murders in
+the Rue Morgue" the most sensational. Then there are the tales
+upon scientific subjects or displaying the pretence of scientific
+knowledge, where the narrator loves to pose as a man without
+imagination and with "habits of rigid thought." And there are
+tales of conscience, of which "The Black Cat" is the most fearful
+and "William Wilson" the most subtle; and there are landscape
+sketches and fantasies and extravaganzas, most of these poor
+stuff.
+
+It is ungrateful and perhaps unnecessary to dwell upon Poe's
+limitations. His scornful glance caught certain aspects of the
+human drama with camera-like precision. Other aspects of life,
+and nobler, he never seemed to perceive. The human comedy
+sometimes moved him to laughter, but his humor is impish and his
+wit malign. His imagination fled from the daylight; he dwelt in
+the twilight among the tombs. He closed his eyes to dream, and
+could not see the green sunlit earth, seed-time and harvest, man
+going forth to his toil and returning to his hearthstone, the
+America that laughs as it labors. He wore upon his finger the
+magic ring and the genii did his bidding. But we could wish that
+the palaces they reared for him were not in such a somber land,
+with such infernal lights gleaming in their windows, and crowded
+with such horror-haunted forms. We could wish that his
+imagination dealt less often with those primitive terrors that
+belong to the childhood of our race. Yet when his spell is upon
+us we lapse back by a sort of atavism into primal savagery and
+shudder with a recrudescence of long forgotten fears. No doubt
+Poe was ignorant of life, in the highest sense. He was caged in
+by his ignorance, Yet he had beautiful dusky wings that bruised
+themselves against his prison.
+
+Poe was a tireless critic of his own work, and both his standards
+of workmanship and his critical precepts have been of great
+service to his careless countrymen. He turned out between four
+and five short stories a year, was poorly paid for them, and
+indeed found difficulty in selling them at all. Yet he was
+constantly correcting them for the better. His best poems were
+likewise his latest. He was tantalized with the desire for
+artistic perfection. He became the pathbreaker for a long file of
+men in France, Italy, England, and America. He found the way and
+they brought back the glory and the cash.
+
+I have sometimes imagined Poe, with four other men and one woman,
+seated at a dinner-table laid for six, and talking of their art
+and of themselves. What would the others think of Poe? I fancy
+that Thackeray would chat with him courteously, but would not
+greatly care for him. George Eliot, woman-like, would pity him.
+Hawthorne would watch him with those inscrutable eyes and
+understand him better than the rest. But Stevenson would be
+immensely interested; he would begin an essay on Poe before he
+went to sleep. And Mr. Kipling would look sharply at him: he has
+seen that man before, in "The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows." All of
+them would find in him something to praise, a great deal to
+marvel at, and perhaps not much to love. And the sensitive,
+shabby, lonely Poe--what would he think of them? He might not
+care much for the other guests, but I think he would say to
+himself with a thrill of pride: "I belong at this table." And he
+does.
+
+Walt Whitman, whom his friend O'Connor dubbed the "good gray
+poet," offers a bizarre contrast to Edgar Allan Poe. There was
+nothing distinctively American about Poe except his ingenuity; he
+had no interest in American history or in American ideas; he was
+a timeless, placeless embodiment of technical artistry. But
+Whitman had a passion for his native soil; he was hypnotized by
+the word America; he spent much of his mature life in brooding
+over the question, "What, after all, is an American, and what
+should an American poet be in our age of science and democracy?"
+It is true that he was as untypical as Poe of the average citizen
+of "these states." His personality is unique. In many respects he
+still baffles our curiosity. He repels many of his countrymen
+without arousing the pity which adds to their romantic interest
+in Poe. Whatever our literary students may feel, and whatever
+foreign critics may assert, it must be acknowledged that to the
+vast majority of American men and women "good old Walt" is still
+an outsider.
+
+Let us try to see first the type of mind with which we are
+dealing. It is fundamentally religious, perceiving the unity and
+kinship and glory of all created things. It is this passion of
+worship which inspired St. Francis of Assisi's "Canticle to the
+Sun." It cries, "Benedicite, Omnia opera Domini: All ye Green
+Things upon the Earth, bless ye the Lord!" That is the real motto
+for Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." Like St. Francis, and like his
+own immediate master, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman is a mystic.
+He cannot argue the ultimate questions; he asserts them. Instead
+of marshaling and sifting the proofs for immortality, he chants
+"I know I am deathless." Like Emerson again, Whitman shares that
+peculiarly American type of mysticism known as Transcendentalism,
+but he came at the end of this movement instead of at the
+beginning of it. In his Romanticism, likewise, he is an end of an
+era figure. His affiliations with Victor Hugo are significant;
+and a volume of Scott's poems which he owned at the age of
+sixteen became his "inexhaustible mine and treasury for more than
+sixty years." Finally, and quite as uncompromisingly as Emerson,
+Thoreau, and Poe, Whitman is an individualist. He represents the
+assertive, Jacksonian period of our national existence. In a
+thousand similes he makes a declaration of independence for the
+separate person, the "single man" of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa
+address. "I wear my hat as I please, indoors and out." Sometimes
+this is mere swagger. Sometimes it is superb.
+
+So much for the type. Let us turn next to the story of Whitman's
+life. It must here be told in the briefest fashion, for Whitman's
+own prose and poetry relate the essentials of his biography. He
+was born on Long Island, of New England and Dutch ancestry, in
+1819. Lowell, W. W. Story, and Charles A. Dana were born in that
+year, as was also George Eliot. Whitman's father was a carpenter,
+who "leaned to the Quakers." There were many children. When
+little "Walt"--as he was called, to distinguish him from his
+father, Walter--was four, the family moved to Brooklyn. The boy
+had scanty schooling, and by the time he was twenty had tried
+typesetting, teaching, and editing a country newspaper on Long
+Island. He was a big, dark-haired fellow, sensitive, emotional,
+extraordinarily impressible.
+
+The next sixteen years were full of happy vagrancy. At twenty-two
+he was editing a paper in New York, and furnishing short stories
+to the "Democratic Review," a literary journal which numbered
+Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among
+its contributors. He wrote a novel on temperance, "mostly in the
+reading-room of Tammany Hall," and tried here and there an
+experiment in free verse. He was in love with the pavements of
+New York and the Brooklyn ferryboats, in love with Italian opera
+and with long tramps over Long Island. He left his position on
+"The Brooklyn Eagle" and wandered south to New Orleans. By and by
+he drifted back to New York, tried lecturing, worked at the
+carpenter's trade with his father, and brooded over a book--"a
+book of new things."
+
+This was the famous "Leaves of Grass." He set the type himself,
+in a Brooklyn printing-office, and printed about eight hundred
+copies. The book had a portrait of the author--a meditative,
+gray-bearded poet in workman's clothes--and a confused preface on
+America as a field for the true poet. Then followed the new
+gospel, "I celebrate myself," chanted in long lines of free
+verse, whose patterns perplexed contemporary readers. For the
+most part it was passionate speech rather than song, a
+rhapsodical declamation in hybrid rhythms. Very few people bought
+the book or pretended to understand what it was all about. Some
+were startled by the frank sexuality of certain poems. But
+Emerson wrote to Whitman from Concord: "I find it the most
+extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet
+contributed."
+
+Until the Civil War was half over, Whitman remained in Brooklyn,
+patiently composing new poems for successive printings of his
+book. Then he went to the front to care for a wounded brother,
+and finally settled down in a Washington garret to spend his
+strength as an army hospital nurse. He wrote "Drum Taps" and
+other magnificent poems about the War, culminating in his
+threnody on Lincoln's death, "When Lilacs last in the Dooryard
+Bloomed." Swinburne called this "the most sonorous nocturn ever
+chanted in the church of the world." After the war had ended,
+Whitman stayed on in Washington as a government clerk, and saw
+much of John Burroughs and W. D. O'Connor. John Hay was a staunch
+friend. Some of the best known poets and critics of England and
+the Continent now began to recognize his genius. But his health
+had been permanently shattered by his heroic service as a nurse,
+and in 1873 he suffered a paralytic stroke which forced him to
+resign his position in Washington and remove to his brother's
+home in Camden, New Jersey.
+
+He was only fifty-four, but his best work was already done, and
+his remaining years, until his death in 1892, were those of
+patient and serene invalidism. He wrote some fascinating prose in
+this final period, and his cluttered chamber in Camden became the
+shrine of many a literary pilgrim, among them some of the
+foremost men of letters of this country and of Europe. He was
+cared for by loyal friends. Occasionally he appeared in public, a
+magnificent gray figure of a man. And then, at seventy-three, the
+"Dark mother always gliding near" enfolded him.
+
+There are puzzling things in the physical and moral constitution
+of Walt Whitman, and the obstinate questions involved in his
+theory of poetry and in his actual poetical performance are still
+far from solution. But a few points concerning him are by this
+time fairly clear. They must be swiftly summarized.
+
+The first obstacle to the popular acceptance of Walt Whitman is
+the formlessness or alleged formlessness of "Leaves of Grass."
+This is a highly technical question, involving a more accurate
+notation than has thus far been made of the patterns and tunes of
+free verse and of emotional prose. Whitman's "new and national
+declamatory expression," as he termed it, cannot receive a final
+technical valuation until we have made more scientific progress
+in the analysis of rhythms. As regards the contents of his verse,
+it is plain that he included much material unfused and
+untransformed by emotion. These elements foreign to the nature of
+poetry clog many of his lines. The enumerated objects in his
+catalogue or inventory poems often remain inert objects only.
+Like many mystics, he was hypnotized by external phenomena, and
+he often fails to communicate to his reader the trancelike
+emotion which he himself experienced. This imperfect transfusion
+of his material is a far more significant defect in Whitman's
+poetry than the relatively few passages of unashamed sexuality
+which shocked the American public in 1855.
+
+The gospel or burden of "Leaves of Grass" is no more difficult of
+comprehension than the general drift of Emerson's essays, which
+helped to inspire it. The starting point of the book is a
+mystical illumination regarding the unity and blessedness of the
+universe, an insight passing understanding, but based upon the
+revelatory experience of love. In the light of this experience,
+all created things are recognized as divine. The starting-point
+and center of the Whitman world is the individual man, the
+"strong person," imperturbable in mind, athletic in body,
+unconquerable, and immortal. Such individuals meet in
+comradeship, and pass together along the open roads of the world.
+No one is excluded because of his poverty or his sins; there is
+room in the ideal America for everybody except the doubter and
+sceptic. Whitman does not linger over the smaller groups of human
+society, like the family. He is not a fireside poet. He passes
+directly from his strong persons, meeting freely on the open
+road, to his conception of "these States." One of his typical
+visions of the breadth and depth and height of America will be
+found in "By Blue Ontario's Shore." In this and in many similar
+rhapsodies Whitman holds obstinately to what may be termed the
+three points of his national creed. The first is the newness of
+America, and its expression is in his well-known chant of
+"Pioneers, O Pioneers." Yet this new America is subtly related to
+the past; and in Whitman's later poems, such as "Passage to
+India," the spiritual kinship of orient and occident is
+emphasized. The second article of the creed is the unity of
+America. Here he voices the conceptions of Hamilton, Clay,
+Webster, and Lincoln. In spite of all diversity in external
+aspects the republic is "one and indivisible." This unity, in
+Whitman's view, was cemented forever by the issue of the Civil
+War. Lincoln, the "Captain," dies indeed on the deck of the
+"victor ship," but the ship comes into the harbor "with object
+won." Third and finally, Whitman insists upon the solidarity of
+America with all countries of the globe. Particularly in his
+yearning and thoughtful old age, the poet perceived that humanity
+has but one heart and that it should have but one will. No
+American poet has ever prophesied so directly and powerfully
+concerning the final issue involved in that World War which he
+did not live to see.
+
+Whitman, like Poe, had defects of character and defects of art.
+His life and work raise many problems which will long continue to
+fascinate and to baffle the critics. But after all of them have
+had their say, it will remain true that he was a seer and a
+prophet, far in advance of his own time, like Lincoln, and like
+Lincoln, an inspired interpreter of the soul of this republic.
+
+CHAPTER IX. UNION AND LIBERTY
+
+"There is what I call the American idea," declared Theodore
+Parker in the Anti-Slavery Convention of 1850. "This idea
+demands, as the proximate organization thereof, a democracy--that
+is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all
+the people; of course, a government on the principle of eternal
+justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake, I will
+call it the idea of Freedom."
+
+These are noble words, and they are thought to have suggested a
+familiar phrase of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, thirteen years
+later. Yet students of literature, no less than students of
+politics, recognize the difficulty of summarizing in words a
+national "idea." Precisely what was the Greek "idea"? What is
+today the French "idea"? No single formula is adequate to express
+such a complex of fact, theories, moods--not even the famous
+"Liberty, Fraternity, Equality." The existence of a truly
+national life and literature presupposes a certain degree of
+unity, an integration of race, language, political institutions,
+and social ideals. It is obvious that this problem of national
+integration meets peculiar obstacles in the United States.
+Divergencies of race, tradition, and social theory, and clashing
+interests of different sections have been felt from the beginning
+of the nation's life. There was well-nigh complete solidarity in
+the single province of New England during a portion of the
+seventeenth century, and under the leadership of the great
+Virginians there was sufficient national fusion to make the
+Revolution successful. But early in the nineteenth century, the
+opening of the new West, and the increasing economic importance
+of Slavery as a peculiar institution of the South, provoked again
+the ominous question of the possibility of an enduring Union.
+>From 1820 until the end of the Civil War, it was the chief
+political issue of the United States. The aim of the present
+chapter is to show how the theme of Union and Liberty affected
+our literature.
+
+To appreciate the significance of this theme we must remind
+ourselves again of what many persons have called the civic note
+in our national writing. Franklin exemplified it in his day. It
+is far removed from the pure literary art of a Poe, a Hawthorne,
+a Henry James. It aims at action rather than beauty. It seeks to
+persuade, to convince, to bring things to pass. We shall observe
+it in the oratory of Clay and Webster, as they pleaded for
+compromise; in the editorials of Garrison, a foe to compromise
+and like Calhoun an advocate, if necessary, of disunion; in the
+epochmaking novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe; in the speeches of
+Wendell Phillips, in verse white-hot with political passion, and
+sermons blazing with the fury of attack and defense of principles
+dear to the human heart. We must glance, at least, at the lyrics
+produced by the war itself, and finally, we shall observe how
+Abraham Lincoln, the inheritor of the ideas of Jefferson, Clay,
+and Webster, perceives and maintains, in the noblest tones of our
+civic speech, the sole conditions of our continuance as a nation.
+
+Let us begin with oratory, an American habit, and, as many
+besides Dickens have thought, an American defect. We cannot argue
+that question adequately here. It is sufficient to say that in
+the pioneer stages of our existence oratory was necessary as a
+stimulus to communal thought and feeling. The speeches of Patrick
+Henry and Samuel Adams were as essential to our winning
+independence as the sessions of statesmen and the armed conflicts
+in the field. And in that new West which came so swiftly and
+dramatically into existence at the close of the Revolution, the
+orator came to be regarded as the normal type of intellectual
+leadership. The stump grew more potent than schoolhouse and
+church and bench.
+
+The very pattern, and, if one likes, the tragic victim of this
+glorification of oratory was Henry Clay, "Harry of the West," the
+glamour of whose name and the wonderful tones of whose voice
+became for a while a part of the political system of the United
+States. Union and Liberty were the master-passions of Clay's
+life, but the greater of these was Union. The half-educated young
+immigrant from Virginia hazarded his career at the outset by
+championing Anti-Slavery in the Kentucky Constitutional
+Convention; the last notable act of his life was his successful
+management, at the age of seventy-three, of the futile Compromise
+of 1850. All his life long he fought for national issues; for the
+War of 1812, for a protective tariff and an "American system,"
+for the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as a measure for national
+safety; and he had plead generously for the young South American
+republics and for struggling Greece. He had become the perpetual
+candidate of his party for the Presidency, and had gone down
+again and again in unforeseen and heart-rending defeat. Yet he
+could say honorably: "If any one desires to know the leading and
+paramount object of my public life, the preservation of this
+union will furnish him the key." One could wish that the speeches
+of this fascinating American were more readable today. They seem
+thin, facile, full of phrases--such adroit phrases as would catch
+the ear of a listening, applauding audience. Straight, hard
+thinking was not the road to political preferment in Clay's day.
+Calhoun had that power, as Lincoln had it. Webster had the
+capacity for it, although he was too indolent to employ his great
+gifts steadily. Yet it was Webster who analyzed kindly and a
+little sadly, for he was talking during Clay's last illness and
+just before his own, his old rival's defect in literary quality:
+"He was never a man of books . . . . I could never imagine him
+sitting comfortably in his library and reading quietly out of the
+great books of the past. He has been too fond of excitement--he
+has lived upon it; he has been too fond of company, not enough
+alone; and has had few resources within himself." Were the
+limitations of a typical oratorical temperament ever touched more
+unerringly than in these words?
+
+When Webster himself thundered, at the close of his reply to
+Hayne in 1830, "Union AND Liberty, now and forever, one and
+inseparable," the words sank deeper into the consciousness of the
+American people than any similar sentiment uttered by Henry Clay.
+For Webster's was the richer, fuller nature, nurtured by "the
+great books of the past," brooding, as Lincoln was to brood
+later, over the seemingly insoluble problem of preserving a union
+of States half slave, half free. On the fateful seventh of March,
+1850, Webster, like Clay, cast the immense weight of his
+personality and prestige upon the side of compromise. It was the
+ruin of his political fortune, for the mood of the North was
+changing, and the South preferred other candidates for the
+Presidency. Yet the worst that can fairly be said against that
+speech today is that it lacked moral imagination to visualize, as
+Mrs. Stowe was soon to visualize, the human results of slavery.
+As a plea for the transcendent necessity of maintaining the old
+Union it was consistent with Webster's whole development of
+political thought.
+
+What were the secrets of that power that held Webster's hearers
+literally spellbound, and made the North think of him, after that
+alienation of 1850, as a fallen angel? No one can say fully, for
+we touch here the mysteries of personality and of the spoken
+word. But enough survives from the Webster legend, from his
+correspondence and political and legal oratory, to bring us into
+the presence of a superman. The dark Titan face, painted by such
+masters as Carlyle, Hawthorne, and Emerson; the magical voice,
+remembered now but by a few old men; the bodily presence, with
+its leonine suggestion of sleepy power only half put forth--these
+aided Webster to awe men or allure them into personal idolatry.
+Yet outside of New England he was admired rather than loved.
+There is still universal recognition of the mental capacity of
+this foremost lawyer and foremost statesman of his time. He was
+unsurpassed in his skill for direct, simple, limpid statement;
+but he could rise at will to a high Roman stateliness of diction,
+a splendid sonorousness of cadence. His greatest public
+appearances were in the Dartmouth College Case before the Supreme
+Court, the Plymouth, Bunker Hill, and Adams-Jefferson
+commemorative orations, the Reply to Hayne, and the Seventh of
+March speeches in the Senate. Though he exhibited in his private
+life something of the prodigal recklessness of the pioneer, his
+mental operations were conservative, constructive. His lifelong
+antagonist Calhoun declared that "The United States are not a
+nation." Webster, in opposition to this theory of a confederation
+of states, devoted his superb talents to the demonstration of the
+thesis that the United States "IS," not "are." Thus he came to be
+known as the typical expounder of the Constitution. When he
+reached, in 1850, the turning point of his career, his countrymen
+knew by heart his personal and political history, the New
+Hampshire boyhood and education, the rise to mastery at the New
+England bar, the service in the House of Representatives and the
+Senate and as Secretary of State. His speeches were already in
+the schoolbooks, and for twenty years boys had been declaiming
+his arguments against nullification. He had helped to teach
+America to think and to feel. Indeed it was through his oratory
+that many of his fellow-citizens had gained their highest
+conception of the beauty, the potency, and the dignity of human
+speech. And in truth he never exhibited his logical power and
+demonstrative skill more superbly than in the plea of the seventh
+of March for the preservation of the status quo, for the
+avoidance of mutual recrimination between North and South, for
+obedience to the law of the land. It was his supreme effort to
+reconcile an irreconcilable situation.
+
+It failed, as we know. Whittier, Emerson, Theodore Parker, and
+indeed most of the voters of New England, believed that Webster
+had bartered his private convictions in the hope of securing the
+Presidential nomination in 1852. They assailed him savagely, and
+Webster died, a broken man, in the autumn of the Presidential
+year. "I have given my life to law and politics," he wrote to
+Professor Silliman. "Law is uncertain and politics are utterly
+vain." The dispassionate judgment of the present hour frees him
+from the charge of conscious treachery to principle. He was
+rather a martyr to his own conception of the obligations imposed
+by nationality. When these obligations run counter to human
+realities, the theories of statesmen must give way. Emerson could
+not refute that logic of Webster's argument for the Fugitive
+Slave Law, but he could at least record in his private Journal:
+"I WILL NOT OBEY IT, BY GOD!" So said hundreds of thousands of
+obscure men in the North, but Webster did not or could not hear
+them.
+
+While no other orator of that period was so richly endowed as
+Daniel Webster, the struggle for Union and Liberty enlisted on
+both sides many eloquent men. John C. Calhoun's acute, ingenious,
+masterly political theorizing can still be studied in speeches
+that have lost little of their effectiveness through the lapse of
+time. The years have dealt roughly with Edward Everett, once
+thought to be the pattern of oratorical gifts and graces. In
+commemorative oratory, indeed, he ranked with Webster, but the
+dust is settling upon his learned and ornate pages. Rufus Choate,
+another conservative Whig in politics, and a leader, like Wirt
+and Pinkney, at the bar, had an exotic, almost Oriental fancy, a
+gorgeousness of diction, and an intensity of emotion unrivaled
+among his contemporaries. His Dartmouth College eulogy of Webster
+in 1853 shows him at his best. The Anti-Slavery orators, on the
+other hand, had the advantage of a specific moral issue in which
+they led the attack. Wendell Phillips was the most polished, the
+most consummate in his air of informality, and his example did
+much to puncture the American tradition of high-flown oratory. He
+was an expert in virulent denunciation, passionately unfair
+beneath his mask of conversational decorum, an aristocratic
+demagogue. He is still distrusted and hated by the Brahmin class
+of his own city, still adored by the children and grandchildren
+of slaves. Charles Sumner, like Edward Everett, seems sinking
+into popular oblivion, in spite of the statues and portraits and
+massive volumes of erudite and caustic and high-minded orations.
+He may be seen at his best in such books as Longfellow's "Journal
+and Correspondence" and the "Life and Letters" of George Ticknor.
+There one has a pleasant picture of a booklover, traveler, and
+friend. But in his public speech he was arrogant, unsympathetic,
+domineering. "Sumner is my idea of a bishop," said Lincoln
+tentatively. There are bishops and bishops, however, and if Henry
+Ward Beecher, whom Lincoln and hosts of other Americans admired,
+had only belonged to the Church of England, what an admirable
+Victorian bishop he might have made! Perhaps his best service to
+the cause of union was rendered by his speeches in England, where
+he fairly mobbed the mob and won them by his wit, courage, and by
+his appeal to the instinct of fair play. Beecher's oratory, in
+and out of the pulpit, was temperamental, sentimental in the
+better sense, and admirably human in all its instincts. He had an
+immense following, not only in political and humanitarian fields,
+but as a lovable type of the everyday American who can say
+undisputed things not only solemnly, if need be, but by
+preference with an infectious smile. The people who loved Mr.
+Beecher are the people who understand Mr. Bryan.
+
+Foremost among the journalists of the great debate were William
+Lloyd Garrison and Horace Greeley. Garrison was a perfect example
+of the successful journalist as described by Zola--the man who
+keeps on pounding at a single idea until he has driven it into
+the head of the public. Everyone knows at least the sentence from
+his salutatory editorial in "The Liberator" on January 1, 1831:
+"I am in earnest--I will not retreat a single inch--AND I WILL BE
+HEARD." He kept this vow, and he also kept the accompanying and
+highly characteristic promise: "I will be as harsh as truth and
+as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to
+think, or write, or speak, with moderation." But there would be
+little political literature in the world if its production were
+entrusted to the moderate type of man, and the files of "The
+Liberator," though certainly harsh and full of all
+uncharitableness towards slave-owners, make excellent reading for
+the twentieth century American who perceives that in spite of the
+triumph of emancipation, in which Garrison had his fair share of
+glory, many aspects of our race-problem remain unsolved. Horace
+Greeley, the founder and editor of the "New York Tribune" was a
+farmer's boy who learned early to speak and write the vocabulary
+of the plain people. Always interested in new ideas, even in
+Transcendentalism and Fourierism, his courage and energy and
+journalistic vigor gave him leadership in the later phases of the
+movement for enfranchisement. He did not hesitate to offer
+unasked advice to Lincoln on many occasions, and Lincoln enriched
+our literature by his replies. Greeley had his share of faults
+and fatuities, but in his best days he had an impressively loyal
+following among both rural and city-bred readers of his paper,
+and he remains one of the best examples of that obsolescent
+personal journalism which is destined to disappear under modern
+conditions of newspaper production. Readers really used to care
+for "what Greeley said" and "Dana said" and "Sam Bowles said,"
+and all of these men, with scores of others, have left their
+stamp upon the phrases and the tone of our political writing.
+
+In the concrete issue of Slavery, however, it must be admitted
+that the most remarkable literary victory was scored, not by any
+orator or journalist, but by an almost unknown little woman, the
+author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." No American novel has had so
+curious a history and so great or so immediate an influence in
+this country and in Europe. In spite of all that has been written
+about it, its author's purpose is still widely misunderstood,
+particularly in the South, and the controversy over this one
+epoch-making novel has tended to obscure the literary reputation
+which Mrs. Stowe won by her other books.
+
+Harriet Beecher, the daughter and the sister of famous clergymen,
+was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1811. For seventeen
+years, from 1832 to 1849, she lived in the border city of
+Cincinnati, within sight of slave territory, and in daily contact
+with victims of the slave system. While her sympathies, like
+those of her father Lyman Beecher, were anti-slavery, she was not
+an Abolitionist in the Garrisonian sense of that word. At twenty
+five she had married a widowed professor, Calvin Stowe, to whom
+she bore many children. She had written a few sketches of New
+England life, and her family thought her a woman of genius. Such
+was the situation in the winter of 1849-1850, when the Stowes
+migrated to Brunswick, Maine, where the husband had been
+appointed to a chair at Bowdoin. Pitiably poor, and distracted by
+household cares which she had to face single-handed--for the
+Professor was a "feckless body"--Mrs. Stowe nevertheless could
+not be indifferent to the national crisis over the Fugitive Slave
+Law. She had seen its working. When her sister-in-law wrote to
+her: "If I could use a pen as you can, I would write something
+that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing
+slavery is," Mrs. Stowe exclaimed: "God helping me, I will write
+something; I will if I live."
+
+"Uncle Tom's Cabin," begun in the spring of 1850, was a woman's
+answer to Webster's seventh of March speech. Its object was
+plainly stated to be "to awaken sympathy and feeling for the
+African race; to show, their wrongs and sorrows, under a system
+so necessarily cruel and unjust as to defeat and do away the good
+effects of all that can be attempted for them, by their best
+friends under it." The book was permeated with what we now call
+the 1848 anti-aristocratic sentiment, the direct heritage of the
+French Revolution. "There is a dies irae coming on, sooner or
+later," admits St. Clare in the story. "The same thing is
+working, in Europe, in England, and in this country." There was
+no sectional hostility in Mrs. Stowe's heart. "The people of the
+free states have defended, encouraged, and participated [in
+slavery]; and are more guilty for it, before God, than the South,
+in that they have NOT the apology of education or custom. If the
+mothers of the free states had all felt as they should in times
+past, the sons of the free states would not have been the
+holders, and proverbially the hardest masters, of slaves; the
+sons of the free states would not have connived at the extension
+of slavery in our national body." "Your book is going to be the
+great pacificator," wrote a friend of Mrs. Stowe; "it will unite
+North and South." But the distinctly Christian and fraternal
+intention of the book was swiftly forgotten in the storm of
+controversy that followed its appearance. It had been written
+hastily, fervidly, in the intervals of domestic toil at
+Brunswick, had been printed as a serial in "The National Era"
+without attracting much attention, and was issued in book form in
+March, 1852. Its sudden and amazing success was not confined to
+this country. The story ran in three Paris newspapers at once,
+was promptly dramatized, and has held the stage in France ever
+since. It was placed upon the "Index" in Italy, as being
+subversive of established authority. Millions of copies were sold
+in Europe, and "Uncle Tom's Cabin," more than any other cause,
+held the English working men in sympathy with the North in the
+English cotton crisis of our Civil War.
+
+It is easy to see the faults of this masterpiece and impossible
+not to recognize its excellencies. "If our art has not scope
+enough to include a book of this kind," said Madame George Sand,
+"we had better stretch the terms of our art a little." For the
+book proved to be, as its author had hoped, a "living dramatic
+reality." Topsy, Chloe, Sam and Andy, Miss Ophelia and Legree are
+alive. Mrs. St. Clare might have been one of Balzac's indolent,
+sensuous women. Uncle Tom himself is a bit too good to be true,
+and readers no longer weep over the death of little Eva--nor, for
+that matter, over the death of Dickens's little Nell. There is
+some melodrama, some religiosity, and there are some absurd
+recognition scenes at the close. Nevertheless with an instinctive
+genius which Zola would have envied, Mrs. Stowe embodies in men
+and women the vast and ominous system of slavery. All the tragic
+forces of necessity, blindness, sacrifice, and retribution are
+here: neither Shelby, nor Eliza, nor the tall Kentuckian who aids
+her, nor John Bird, nor Uncle Tom himself in the final act of his
+drama, can help himself. For good or evil they are the products
+and results of the system; and yet they have and they give the
+illusion of volition.
+
+Mrs. Stowe lived to write many another novel and short story,
+among them "Dred," "The Minister's Wooing," "Oldtown Folks,"
+"Oldtown Fireside Stories." In the local short story she deserves
+the honors due to one of the pioneers, and her keen affectionate
+observation, her humor, and her humanity, would have given her a
+literary reputation quite independent of her masterpiece. But she
+is likely to pay the penalty of that astounding success, and to
+go down to posterity as the author of a single book. She would
+not mind this fate.
+
+The poetry of the idea of Freedom and of the sectional struggle
+which was necessary before that idea could be realized in
+national policy is on the whole not commensurate with the
+significance of the issue itself. Any collection of American
+political verse produced during this period exhibits spirited and
+sincere writing, but the combination of mature literary art and
+impressive general ideas is comparatively rare. There are single
+poems of Whittier, Lowell, and Whitman which meet every test of
+effective political and social verse, but the main body of
+poetry, both sectional and national, written during the thirty
+years ending with 1865 lacks breadth, power, imaginative daring.
+The continental spaciousness and energy which foreign critics
+thought they discovered in Whitman is not characteristic of our
+poetry as a whole. Victor Hugo and Shelley and Swinburne have
+written far more magnificent republican poetry than ours. The
+passion for freedom has been very real upon this side of the
+Atlantic; it pulsed in the local loyalty of the men who sang
+"Dixie" as well as in their antagonists who chanted "John Brown's
+Body" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic;" but this passion has
+not yet lifted and ennobled any notable mass of American verse.
+Even the sentiment of union was more adequately voiced in
+editorials and sermons and orations, even in a short
+story--Edward Everett Hale's "Man Without a Country"--than by
+most
+of the poets who attempted to glorify that theme.
+
+Nevertheless the verse of these thirty years is rich in
+provincial and sectional loyalties. It has earnestness and
+pathos. We have, indeed, no adequate national anthem, even yet,
+for neither the words nor the music of "The Star-Spangled Banner"
+fully express what we feel while we are trying to sing it, as the
+"Marseillaise," for example, does express the very spirit of
+revolutionary republicanism. But in true pioneer fashion we get
+along with a makeshift until something better turns up. The lyric
+and narrative verse of the Civil War itself was great in
+quantity, and not more inferior in quality than the war verse of
+other nations has often proved to be when read after the
+immediate occasion for it has passed. Single lyrics by Timrod and
+Paul Hayne, Boker, H. H. Brownell, Read, Stedman, and other men
+are still full of fire. Yet Mrs. Howe's "Battle Hymn," scribbled
+hastily in the gray dawn, interpreted, as no other lyric of the
+war quite succeeded in interpreting, the mystical glory of
+sacrifice for Freedom. Soldiers sang it in camp; women read it
+with tears; children repeated it in school, vaguely but truly
+perceiving in it, as their fathers had perceived in Webster's
+"Reply to Hayne" thirty years before, the idea of union made
+"simple, sensuous, passionate." No American poem has had a more
+dramatic and intense life in the quick breathing imagination of
+men.
+
+More and more, however, the instinct of our people is turning to
+the words of Abraham Lincoln as the truest embodiment in
+language, as his life was the truest embodiment in action, of our
+national ideal. It is a curious reversal of contemporary
+judgments that thus discovers in the homely phrases of a frontier
+lawyer the most perfect literary expression of the deeper spirit
+of his time. "How knoweth this man letters, having never
+learned?" asked the critical East. The answer is that he had
+learned in a better school than the East afforded. The story of
+Lincoln's life is happily too familiar to need retelling here,
+but some of the elements in his growth in the mastery of speech
+may at least be summarized.
+
+Lincoln had a slow, tireless mind, capable of intense
+concentration. It was characteristic of him that he rarely took
+notes when trying a law case, saying that the notes distracted
+his attention. When his partner Herndon was asked when Lincoln
+had found time to study out the constitutional history of the
+United States, Herndon expressed the opinion that it was when
+Lincoln was lying on his back on the office sofa, apparently
+watching the flies upon the ceiling. This combination of bodily
+repose with intense mental and spiritual activity is familiar to
+those who have studied the biography of some of the great
+mystics. Walter Pater pointed it out in the case of Wordsworth.
+
+In recalling the poverty and restriction of Lincoln's boyhood and
+his infrequent contact with schoolhouses, it is well to remember
+that he managed nevertheless to read every book within twenty
+miles of him. These were not many, it is true, but they included
+"The Bible," "Aesop's Fables," "Pilgrim's Progress," "Robinson
+Crusoe," and, a little later, Burns and Shakespeare. Better food
+than this for the mind of a boy has never been found. Then he
+came to the history of his own country since the Declaration of
+Independence and mastered it. "I am tolerably well acquainted
+with the history of the country," he remarked in his Chicago
+speech of 1858; and in the Cooper Union speech of 1860 he
+exhibited a familiarity with the theory and history of the
+Constitution which amazed the young lawyers who prepared an
+annotated edition of the address. "He has wit, facts, dates,"
+said Douglas, in extenuation of his own disinclination to enter
+upon the famous joint debates, and, when Douglas returned to
+Washington after the debates were over, he confessed to the young
+Henry Watterson that "he is the greatest debater I have ever met,
+either here or anywhere else." Douglas had won the senatorship
+and could afford to be generous, but he knew well enough that his
+opponent's facts and dates had been unanswerable. Lincoln's
+mental grip, indeed, was the grip of a born wrestler. "I've got
+him," he had exclaimed toward the end of the first debate, and
+the Protean Little Giant, as Douglas was called, had turned and
+twisted in vain, caught by "that long-armed creature from
+Illinois." He would indeed win the election of 1858, but he had
+been forced into an interpretation of the Dred Scott decision
+which cost him the Presidency in 1860.
+
+Lincoln's keen interest in words and definitions, his patience in
+searching the dictionary, is known to every student of his life.
+Part of his singular discrimination in the use of language is due
+to his legal training, but his style was never professionalized.
+Neither did it have anything of that frontier glibness and
+banality which was the curse of popular oratory in the West and
+South. Words were weapons in the hands of this self-taught
+fighter for ideas: he kept their edges sharp, and could if
+necessary use them with deadly accuracy. He framed the "Freeport
+dilemma" for the unwary feet of Douglas as cunningly as a
+fox-hunter lays his trap. "Gentlemen," he had said of an earlier
+effort, "Judge Douglas informed you that this speech of mine was
+probably carefully prepared. I ADMIT THAT IT WAS."
+
+The story, too, was a weapon of attack and defense for this
+master fabulist. Sometimes it was a readier mode of argument than
+any syllogism; sometimes it gave him, like the traditional
+diplomatist's pinch of snuff, an excuse for pausing while he
+studied his adversary or made up his own mind; sometimes, with
+the instinct of a poetic soul, he invented a parable and gravely
+gave it a historic setting "over in Sangamon County." For
+although upon his intellectual side the man was a subtle and
+severe logician, on his emotional side he was a lover of the
+concrete and human. He was always, like John Bunyan, dreaming and
+seeing "a man" who symbolized something apposite to the occasion.
+Thus even his invented stories aided his marvelous capacity for
+statement, for specific illustration of a general law. Lincoln's
+destiny was to be that of an explainer, at first to a local
+audience in store or tavern or courtroom, then to upturned
+serious faces of Illinois farmers who wished to hear national
+issues made clear to them, then to a listening nation in the
+agony of civil war, and ultimately to a world which looks to
+Lincoln as an exponent and interpreter of the essence of
+democracy.
+
+As the audience increased, the style took on beauty and breadth,
+as if the man's soul were looking through wider and wider windows
+at the world. But it always remained the simplest of styles. In
+an offhand reply to a serenade by an Indiana regiment, or in
+answering a visiting deputation of clergymen at the White House,
+Lincoln could summarize and clarify a complicated national
+situation with an ease and orderliness and fascination that are
+the despair of professional historians. He never wasted a word.
+"Go to work is the only cure for your case," he wrote to John D.
+Johnston. There are ten words in that sentence and none of over
+four letters. The "Gettysburg Address" contains but two hundred
+and seventy words, in ten sentences. "It is a flat failure," said
+Lincoln despondently; but Edward Everett, who had delivered "the"
+oration of that day, wrote to the President: "I should be glad if
+I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of
+the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes." Today the
+"Address" reads as if Lincoln knew that it would ultimately be
+stamped in bronze.
+
+Yet the real test of Lincoln's supremacy in our distinctly civic
+literature lies not so much in his skill in the manipulation of
+language, consummate as that was, but rather in those large
+elements of his nature which enabled him to perceive the true
+quality and ideal of American citizenship and its significance to
+the world. There was melancholy in that nature, else there had
+been a less rich humor; there was mysticism and a sense of
+religion which steadily deepened as his responsibilities
+increased. There was friendliness, magnanimity, pity for the
+sorrowful, patience for the slow of brain and heart, and an
+expectation for the future of humanity which may best be
+described in the old phrase "waiting for the Kingdom of God." His
+recurrent dream of the ship coming into port under full sail,
+which preluded many important events in his own life--he had it
+the night before he was assassinated--is significant not only of
+that triumph of a free nation which he helped to make possible,
+but also of the victory of what he loved to call "the whole
+family of man." "That is the real issue," he had declared in
+closing the debates with Douglas; "that is the issue that will
+continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas
+and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between
+these two principles--right and wrong--throughout the world. They
+are the two principles that have stood face to face from the
+beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is
+the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of
+kings."
+
+For this representative Anglo-Saxon man, developed under purely
+American conditions, maturing slowly, keeping close to facts,
+dying, like the old English saint, while he was "still learning,"
+had none of the typical hardness and selfishness of the
+Anglo-Saxon. A brooder and idealist, he was one of those
+"prophetic souls of the wide world dreaming on things to come,"
+with sympathies and imagination that reached out beyond the
+immediate urgencies of his race and nation to comprehend the
+universal task and discipline of the sons of men. In true
+fraternity and democracy this Westerner was not only far in
+advance of his own day, but he is also far in advance of ours
+which raises statues to his memory. Yet he was used to loneliness
+and to the long view, and even across the welter of the World War
+of the twentieth century Lincoln would be tall enough to see that
+ship coming into the harbor under full sail.
+
+CHAPTER X. A NEW NATION
+
+The changes that have come over the inner spirit and the outward
+expression of American life since Lincoln's day are enough to
+startle the curiosity of the dullest observer. Yet they have been
+accomplished within the lifetime of a single man of letters. The
+author of one of the many campaign biographies of Lincoln in 1860
+was William Dean Howells, then an Ohio journalist of
+twenty-three. In 1917, at the age of eighty, Mr. Howells is still
+adding to his long row of charming and memorable books. Every
+phase of American writing since the middle of the last century
+has fallen under the keen and kindly scrutiny of this loyal
+follower of the art of literature. As producer, editor, critic,
+and friend of the foremost writers of his epoch, Mr. Howells has
+known the books of our new national era as no one else could have
+known them. Some future historian of the period may piece
+together, from no other sources than Mr. Howells's writings, an
+unrivaled picture of our book-making during more than sixty
+years. All that the present historian can attempt is to sketch
+with bungling fingers a few men and a few tendencies which seem
+to characterize the age.
+
+One result of the Civil War was picturesquely set forth in
+Emerson's "Journal." The War had unrolled a map of the Union, he
+said, and hung it in every man's house. There was a universal
+shifting of attention, if not always from the province or section
+to the image of the nation itself, at least a shift of focus from
+one section to another. The clash of arms had meant many other
+things besides the triumph of Union and the freedom of the
+slaves. It had brought men from every state into rude jostling
+contact with one another and had developed a new social and human
+curiosity. It may serve as another illustration of Professor
+Shaler's law of tension and release. The one overshadowing issue
+which had absorbed so much thought and imagination and energy had
+suddenly disappeared. Other shadows were to gather, of course.
+Reconstruction of the South was one of them, and the vast
+economic and industrial changes that followed the opening of the
+New West were to bring fresh problems almost as intricate as the
+question of slavery had been. But for the moment no one thought
+of these things. The South accepted defeat as superbly as she had
+fought, and began to plough once more. The jubilant North went
+back to work--to build transcontinental railroads, to organize
+great industries, and to create new states.
+
+The significant American literature of the first decade after the
+close of the War is not in the books dealing directly with themes
+involved in the War itself. It is rather the literature of this
+new release of energy, the new curiosity as to hitherto unknown
+sections, the new humor and romance. Fred Lewis Pattee, the
+author of an admirable "History of American Literature since
+1870," uses scarcely too strong a phrase when he entitles this
+period "The Second Discovery of America"; and he quotes
+effectively from Mark Twain, who was himself one of these
+discoverers: "The eight years in America from 1860 to 1868
+uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the
+politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the
+country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national
+character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or
+three generations."
+
+Let us begin with the West, and with that joyous stage-coach
+journey of young Samuel L. Clemens across the plains to Nevada in
+1861, which he describes in "Roughing It." Who was this Argonaut
+of the new era, and what makes him representative of his
+countrymen in the epoch of release? Born in Missouri in 1835, the
+son of an impractical emigrant from Virginia, the youth had lived
+from his fourth until his eighteenth year on the banks of the
+Mississippi. He had learned the printer's trade, had wandered
+east and back again, had served for four years as a river-pilot
+on the Mississippi, and had tried to enter the Confederate army.
+Then came the six crowded years, chiefly as newspaper reporter,
+in the boom times of Nevada and California. His fame began with
+the publication in New York in 1867 of "The Celebrated Jumping
+Frog of Calaveras County." A newspaper now sent him to Europe to
+record "what he sees with his own eyes." He did so in "Innocents
+Abroad," and his countrymen shouted with laughter. This, then,
+was "Europe" after all--another "fake" until this shrewd river
+pilot who signed himself "Mark Twain" took its soundings! Then
+came a series of far greater books--"Roughing It," "Life on the
+Mississippi," "The Gilded Age (in collaboration ), and "Tom
+Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn"--books that make our American
+"Odyssey", rich in the spirit of romance and revealing the magic
+of the great river as no other pages can ever do again. Gradually
+Mark Twain became a public character; he retrieved on the lecture
+platform the loss of a fortune earned by his books; he enjoyed
+his honorary D. Litt. from Oxford University. Every reader of
+American periodicals came to recognize the photographs of that
+thick shock of hair, those heavy eyebrows, the gallant drooping
+little figure, the striking clothes, the inevitable cigar: all
+these things seemed to go with the part of professional humorist,
+to be like the caressing drawl of Mark's voice. The force of
+advertisement could no further go. But at bottom he was far other
+than a mere maker of boisterous jokes for people with frontier
+preferences in humor. He was a passionate, chivalric lover of
+things fair and good, although too honest to pretend to see
+beauty and goodness where he could not personally detect
+them--and
+an equally passionate hater of evil. Read "The Man Who Corrupted
+Hadleyburg" and "The Mysterious Stranger." In his last years,
+torn by private sorrows, he turned as black a philosophical
+pessimist as we have bred. He died at his new country seat in
+Connecticut in 1910. Mr. Paine has written his life in three
+great volumes, and there is a twenty-five volume edition of his
+"Works."
+
+All the evidence seems to be in. Yet the verdict of the public
+seems not quite made up. It is clear that Mark Twain the writer
+of romance is gaining upon Mark Twain the humorist. The
+inexhaustible American appetite for frontier types of humor
+seizes upon each new variety, crunches it with huge satisfaction,
+and then tosses it away. John Phoenix, Josh Billings, Jack
+Downing, Bill Arp, Petroleum V. Nasby, Artemus Ward, Bill Nye--
+these are already obsolescent names. If Clemens lacked something
+of Artemus Ward's whimsical delicacy and of Josh Billings's
+tested human wisdom, he surpassed all of his competitors in a
+certain rude, healthy masculinity, the humor of river and
+mining-camp and printing-office, where men speak without
+censorship. His country-men liked exaggeration, and he
+exaggerated; they liked irreverence, and he had turned iconoclast
+in "Innocents Abroad." As a professional humorist, he has paid
+the obligatory tax for his extravagance, over-emphasis, and
+undisciplined taste, but such faults are swiftly forgotten when
+one turns to Huckleberry Finn and the negro Jim and Pudd'nhead
+Wilson, when one feels Mark Twain's power in sheer description
+and episode, his magic in evoking landscape and atmosphere, his
+blazing scorn at injustice and cruelty, his contempt for quacks.
+
+Bret Harte, another discoverer of the West, wears less well than
+Mark Twain as a personal figure, but has a sure place in the
+evolution of the American short story, and he did for the
+mining-camps of California what Clemens wrought for the
+Mississippi River: he became their profane poet. Yet he was never
+really of them. He was the clever outsider, with a prospector's
+eye, looking for literary material, and finding a whole rich mine
+of it--a bigger and richer, in fact, than he was really qualified
+to work. But he located a golden vein of it with an instinct that
+did credit to his dash of Hebrew blood. Born in Albany, a
+teacher's son, brought up on books and in many cities, Harte
+emigrated to California in 1854 at the age of sixteen. He became
+in turn a drug-clerk, teacher, type-setter, editor, and even
+Secretary of the California Mint--his nearest approach,
+apparently, to the actual work of the mines. In 1868, while
+editor of "The Overland Monthly," he wrote the short story which
+was destined to make him famous in the East and to release him
+from California forever. It was "The Luck of Roaring Camp." He
+had been writing romantic sketches in prose and verse for years;
+he had steeped himself in Dickens, like everybody else in the
+eighteen-sixties; and now he saw his pay-gravel shining back into
+his own shining eyes. It was a pocket, perhaps, rather than a
+lead, but Bret Harte worked to the end of his career this
+material furnished by the camps, this method of the short story.
+He never returned to California after his joyous exit in 1871.
+For a few years he tried living in New York, but from 1878 until
+his death in 1902 Bret Harte lived in Europe, still turning out
+California stories for an English and American public which
+insisted upon that particular pattern.
+
+That the pattern was arbitrary, theatrical, sentimental, somewhat
+meretricious in design, in a word insincere like its inventor,
+has been repeated at due intervals ever since 1868. The charge is
+true; yet it is far from the whole truth concerning Bret Harte's
+artistry. In mastery of the technique of the short story he is
+fairly comparable with Poe, though less original, for it was Poe
+who formulated, when Bret Harte was a child of six, the
+well-known theory of the unity of effect of the brief tale. This
+unity Harte secured through a simplification, often an
+insulation, of his theme, the omission of quarreling details, an
+atmosphere none the less novel for its occasional theatricality,
+and characters cunningly modulated to the one note they were
+intended to strike. "Tennessee's Partner," "The Outcast of Poker
+Flat," and all the rest are triumphs of selective skill--as
+bright nuggets as ever glistened in the pan at the end of a hard
+day's labor. That they do not adequately represent the actual
+California of the fifties, as old Californians obstinately
+insist, is doubtless true, but it is beside the point. Here is no
+Tolstoi painting the soul of his race in a few pages: Harte is
+simply a disciple of Poe and Dickens, turning the Poe
+construction trick gracefully, with Dickensy characters and
+consistently romantic action.
+
+The West has been rediscovered many a time since that decade
+which witnessed the first literary bonanza of Mark Twain and Bret
+Harte. It will continue to be discovered, in its fresh sources of
+appeal to the imagination, as long as Plains and Rockies and
+Coast endure, as long as there is any glow upon a distant
+horizon. It is not places that lose romantic interest: the
+immemorial English counties and the Bay of Naples offer
+themselves freely to the artist, generation after generation.
+What is lost is the glamour of youth, the specific atmosphere of
+a given historical epoch. Colonel W. F. Cody ("Buffalo Bill") has
+typified to millions of American boys the great period of the
+Plains, with its Indian fighting, its slaughter of buffaloes, its
+robbing of stage-coaches, its superb riders etched against the
+sky. But the Wild West was retreating, even in the days of Daniel
+Boone and Davy Crockett. The West of the cowboys, as Theodore
+Roosevelt and Owen Wister knew it and wrote of it in the eighties
+and nineties, has disappeared, though it lives on in fiction and
+on the screen.
+
+Jack London, born in California in 1876, was forced to find his
+West in Alaska--and in alcohol. He was what he and his followers
+liked to call the virile or red-blooded type, responsive to the
+"Call of the Wild," "living life naked and tensely." In his talk
+Jack London was simple and boyish, with plenty of humor over his
+own literary and social foibles. His books are very uneven, but
+he wrote many a hard-muscled, clean-cut page. If the Bret Harte
+theory of the West was that each man is at bottom, a
+sentimentalist, Jack London's formula was that at bottom every
+man is a brute. Each theory gave provender enough for a
+short-story writer to carry on his back, but is hardly adequate,
+by itself, for a very long voyage over human life.
+
+"Joaquin" (Cincinnatus Heine) Miller, who was born in 1841 and
+died in 1918, had even less of a formula for the West than Jack
+London. He was a word-painter of its landscapes, a rider over its
+surfaces. Cradled "in a covered wagon pointing West," mingling
+with wild frontier life from Alaska to Nicaragua, miner, Indian
+fighter, hermit, poseur in London and Washington, then hermit
+again in California, the author of "Songs of the Sierras" at
+least knew his material. Byron, whom he adored and imitated,
+could have invented nothing more romantic than Joaquin's life;
+but though Joaquin inherited Scotch intensity, he had nothing of
+the close mental grip of the true Scot and nothing of his humor.
+Vast stretches of his poetry are empty; some of it is grandiose,
+elemental, and yet somehow artificial, as even the Grand Canyon
+itself looks at certain times.
+
+John Muir, another immigrant Scot who reached California in 1868,
+had far more stuff in him than Joaquin Miller. He had studied
+geology, botany, and chemistry at the new University of
+Wisconsin, and then for years turned explorer of forests, peaks,
+and glaciers, not writing, at first, except in his "Journal," but
+forever absorbing and worshiping sublimity and beauty with no
+thought of literary schemes. Yet his every-day talk about his
+favorite trees and glaciers had more of the glow of poetry in it
+than any talk I have ever heard from men of letters, and his
+books and "Journal" will long perpetuate this thrilling sense of
+personal contact with wild, clean, uplifted things--blossoms in
+giant tree-tops and snow-eddies blowing round the shoulders of
+Alaskan peaks. Here is a West as far above Jack London's and
+Frank Norris's as the snow-line is higher than the jungle.
+
+The rediscovery of the South was not so much an exploration of
+fresh or forgotten geographical territory, as it was a new
+perception of the romantic human material offered by a peculiar
+civilization. Political and social causes had long kept the South
+in isolation. A few writers like Wirt, Kennedy, Longstreet,
+Simms, had described various aspects of its life with grace or
+vivacity, but the best picture of colonial Virginia had been
+drawn, after all, by Thackeray, who had merely read about it in
+books. Visitors like Fanny Kemble and Frederick Law Olmsted
+sketched the South of the mid-nineteenth century more vividly
+than did the sons of the soil. There was no real literary public
+in the South for a native writer like Simms. He was as dependent
+upon New York and the Northern market as a Virginian
+tobacco-planter of 1740 had been upon London. But within a dozen
+years after the close of the War and culminating in the
+eighteen-nineties, there came a rich and varied harvest of
+Southern writing, notably in the field of fiction. The public for
+these stories, it is true, was still largely in the North and
+West, and it was the magazines and publishing-houses of New York
+and Boston that gave the Southern authors their chief stimulus
+and support. It was one of the happy proofs of the solidarity of
+the new nation.
+
+The romance of the Spanish and French civilization of New
+Orleans, as revealed in Mr. Cable's fascinating "Old Creole
+Days," was recognized, not as something merely provincial in its
+significance, but as contributing to the infinitely variegated
+pattern of our national life. Irwin Russell, Joel Chandler
+Harris, and Thomas Nelson Page portrayed in verse and prose the
+humorous, pathetic, unique traits of the Southern negro, a type
+hitherto chiefly sketched in caricature or by strangers. Page,
+Hopkinson Smith, Grace King, and a score of other artists began
+to draw affectionate pictures of the vanished Southern mansion of
+plantation days, when all the women were beautiful and all the
+men were brave, when the very horses were more spirited and the
+dogs lazier and the honeysuckles sweeter and the moonlight more
+entrancing than today. Miss Murfree ("C. E. Craddock") charmed
+city-dwellers and country-folk alike by her novels of the
+Tennessee mountains. James Lane Allen painted lovingly the
+hemp-fields and pastures of Kentucky. American magazines of the
+decade from 1880 to 1890 show the complete triumph of dialect and
+local color, and this movement, so full of interest to students
+of the immense divergence of American types, owed much of its
+vitality to the talent of Southern writers.
+
+But the impulse spread far beyond the South. Early in the
+seventies Edward Eggleston wrote "The Hoosier Schoolmaster" and
+"The Circuit Rider," faithful and moving presentations of genuine
+pioneer types which were destined to pass with the frontier
+settlements. Soon James Whitcomb Riley was to sing of the next
+generation of Hoosiers, who frequented "The Old Swimmin' Hole"
+and rejoiced "When the Frost is on the Punkin." It was the era of
+Denman Thompson's plays, "Joshua Whitcomb" and "The Old
+Homestead." Both the homely and the exotic marched under this
+banner of local color: Hamlin Garland presented Iowa barnyards
+and cornfields, Helen Hunt Jackson dreamed the romance of the
+Mission Indian in "Ramona," and Lafcadio Hearn, Irish and Greek
+by blood, resident of New Orleans and not yet an adopted citizen
+of Japan, tantalized American readers with his "Chinese Ghosts"
+and "Chita." A fascinating period it seems, as one looks back
+upon it, and it lasted until about the end of the century, when
+the suddenly discovered commercial value of the historical novel
+and the ensuing competition in best sellers misled many a fine
+artistic talent and coarsened the public taste. The New South
+then played the literary market as recklessly as the New West.
+
+Let us glance back to "the abandoned farm of literature," as a
+witty New Yorker once characterized New England. The last quarter
+of the nineteenth century witnessed a decline in the direct
+influence of that province over the country as a whole. Its
+strength sapped by the emigration of its more vigorous sons, its
+typical institutions sagging under the weight of immense
+immigrations from Europe, its political importance growing more
+and more negligible, that ancient promontory of ideas has
+continued to lose its relative literary significance. In one
+field of literature only has New England maintained its rank
+since the Civil War, and that is in the local short story. Here
+women have distinguished themselves beyond the proved capacity of
+New England men. Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke, women of
+democratic humor, were the pioneers; then came Harriet Prescott
+Spofford and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, women with nerves; and
+finally the three artists who have written, out of the material
+offered by a decadent New England, as perfect short stories as
+France or Russia can produce--Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins
+Freeman, and Alice Brown. These gifted writers portrayed, with
+varying technique and with singular differences in their
+instinctive choice of material, the dominant qualities of an
+isolated, in-bred race, still proud in its decline; still
+inquisitive and acquisitive, versatile yet stubborn, with thrift
+passing over into avarice, and mental power degenerating into
+smartness; cold and hard under long repression of emotion, yet
+capable of passion and fanaticism; at worst, a mere trader, a
+crank, a grim recluse; at best, endowed with an austere physical
+and moral beauty. Miss Jewett preferred to touch graciously the
+sunnier slopes of this provincial temperament, to linger in its
+ancient dignities and serenities. Miss Brown has shown the pathos
+of its thwarted desires, its hunger for a beauty and a happiness
+denied. Mary Wilkins Freeman revealed its fundamental tragedies
+of will.
+
+Two of the best known writers of New England fiction in this
+period were not natives of the soil, though they surpassed most
+native New Englanders in their understanding of the type. They
+were William Dean Howells and Henry James. Mr. Howells, who, in
+his own words, "can reasonably suppose that it is because of the
+mixture of Welsh, German, and Irish in me that I feel myself so
+typically American," came to "the Holy Land at Boston" as a
+"passionate pilgrim from the West." "A Boy's Town," "My Literary
+Passions," and "Years of my Youth" make clear the image of the
+young poet-journalist who returned from his four years in Venice
+and became assistant editor of "The Atlantic Monthly" in 1866. In
+1871 he succeeded Fields in the editorship, but it was not until
+after his resignation in 1881 that he could put his full strength
+into those realistic novels of contemporary New England which
+established his fame as a writer. "A Modern Instance" and "The
+Rise of Silas Lapham" are perhaps the finest stories of this
+group; and the latter novel may prove to be Mr. Howells's chief
+"visiting-card to posterity." We cannot here follow him to New
+York and to a new phase of novel writing, begun with "A Hazard of
+New Fortunes," nor can we discuss the now antiquated debate upon
+realism which was waged in the eighteen-eighties over the books
+of Howells and James. We must content ourselves with saying that
+a knowledge of Mr. Howells's work is essential to the student of
+the American provincial novel, as it is also to the student of
+our more generalized types of story-writing, and that he has
+never in his long career written an insincere, a slovenly, or an
+infelicitous page. "My Literary Friends and Acquaintance" gives
+the most charming picture ever drawn of the elder Cambridge,
+Concord, and Boston men who ruled over our literature when young
+Howells came out of the West, and "My Mark Twain" is his
+memorable portrait of another type of sovereign, perhaps the
+dynasty that will rule the future.
+
+Although Henry James, like Mr. Howells, wrote at one time acute
+studies of New England character, he was never, in his relations
+to that section, or, for that matter, to any locality save
+possibly London, anything more than a "visiting mind." His
+grandfather was an Irish merchant in Albany. His father, Henry
+James, was a philosopher and wit, a man of comfortable fortune,
+who lived at times in Newport, Concord, and Boston, but who was
+residing in New York when his son Henry was born in 1843. No
+child was ever made the subject of a more complete theory of
+deracination. Transplanted from city to city, from country to
+country, without a family or a voting-place, without college or
+church or creed or profession or responsibility of any kind save
+to his own exigent ideals of truth and beauty, Henry James came
+to be the very pattern of a cosmopolitan. Avoiding his native
+country for nearly thirty years and then returning for a few
+months to write some intricate pages about that "American Scene"
+which he understood far less truly than the average immigrant, he
+died in 1916 in London, having just renounced his American
+citizenship and become a British subject in order to show his
+sympathy with the Empire, then at war. It was the sole evidence
+of political emotion in a lifetime of seventy-three years.
+American writing men are justly proud, nevertheless, of this
+expatriated craftsman. The American is inclined to admire good
+workmanship of any kind, as far as he can understand the
+mechanism of it. The task of really understanding Henry James has
+been left chiefly to clever women and to a few critics, but ever
+since "A Passionate Pilgrim" and "Roderick Hudson" appeared in,
+1875, it has been recognized that here was a master, in his own
+fashion. What that fashion is may now be known by anyone who will
+take the pains to read the author's prefaces to the New York
+edition of his revised works. Never, not even in the Paris which
+James loved, has an artist put his intentions and his
+self-criticism more definitively upon paper. The secret of Henry
+James is told plainly enough here: a specially equipped
+intelligence, a freedom from normal responsibilities, a consuming
+desire to create beautiful things, and, as life unfolded its
+complexities and nuances before his vision, an increasing passion
+to seek the beauty which lies entangled and betrayed, a beauty
+often adumbrated rather than made plastic, stories that must be
+hinted at rather than told, raptures that exist for the initiated
+only. The much discussed early and middle and later manners of
+James are only various campaigns of this one questing spirit,
+changing his procedure as the elusive object of his search hid
+itself by this or that device of protective coloration or swift
+escape. It is as if a collector of rare butterflies had one
+method of capturing them in Madagascar, another for the Orinoco,
+and still another for Japan--though Henry James found his
+Japan--and Orinoco and Madagascar all in London town!
+
+No one who ever had the pleasure of hearing him discourse about
+the art of fiction can forget the absolute seriousness of his
+professional devotion; it was as though a shy celebrant were to
+turn and explain, with mystical intensity and a mystic's
+involution and reversal of all the values of vulgar speech, the
+ceremonial of some strange, high altar. His own power as a
+creative artist was not always commensurate with his intellectual
+endowment or with his desire after beauty, and his frank contempt
+for the masses of men made it difficult for him to write English.
+He preferred, as did Browning, who would have liked to reach the
+masses, a dialect of his own, and he used it increasingly after
+he was fifty. It was a dialect capable of infinite gradations of
+tone, endless refinements of expression. In his threescore books
+there are delicious poignant moments where the spirit of life
+itself flutters like a wild creature, half-caught, half-escaping.
+It is for the beauty and thrill of these moments that the pages
+of Henry James will continue to be cherished by a few thousand
+readers scattered throughout the Republic to which he was ever an
+alien.
+
+No poet of the new era has won the national recognition enjoyed
+by the veterans. It will be recalled that Bryant survived until
+1878, Longfellow and Emerson until 1882, Lowell until 1891,
+Whittier and Whitman until 1892, and Holmes until 1894. Compared
+with these men the younger writers of verse seemed overmatched.
+The "National Ode" for the Centennial celebration in 1876 was
+intrusted to Bayard Taylor, a hearty person, author of capital
+books of travel, plentiful verse, and a skilful translation of
+"Faust." But an adequate "National Ode" was not in him. Sidney
+Lanier, who was writing in that year his "Psalm of the West" and
+was soon to compose "The Marshes of Glynn," had far more of the
+divine fire. He was a bookish Georgia youth who had served with
+the Confederate army, and afterward, with broken health and in
+dire poverty, gave his brief life to music and poetry. He had
+rich capacities for both arts, but suffered in both from the lack
+of discipline and from an impetuous, restless imagination which
+drove him on to over-ambitious designs. Whatever the flaws in his
+affluent verse, it has grown constantly in popular favor, and he
+is, after Poe, the best known poet of the South. The late Edmund
+Clarence Stedman, whose "American Anthology" and critical
+articles upon American poets did so much to enhance the
+reputation of other men, was himself a maker of ringing lyrics
+and spirited narrative verse. His later days were given
+increasingly to criticism, and his "Life and Letters" is a
+storehouse of material bearing upon the growth of New York as a
+literary market-place during half a century. Richard Watson
+Gilder was another admirably fine figure, poet, editor, and
+leader of public opinion in many a noble cause. His "Letters,"
+likewise, give an intimate picture of literary New York from the
+seventies to the present. Through his editorship of "Scribner's
+Monthly" and "The Century Magazine" his sound influence made
+itself felt upon writers in every section. His own lyric vein had
+an opaline intensity of fire, but in spite of its glow his verse
+sometimes refused to sing.
+
+The most perfect poetic craftsman of the period--and, many think,
+our one faultless worker in verse--was Thomas Bailey Aldrich. His
+first volume of juvenile verse had appeared in 1855, the year of
+Whittier's "Barefoot Boy" and Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." By
+1865 his poems were printed in the then well-known Blue and Gold
+edition, by Ticknor and Fields. In 1881 he succeeded Howells in
+the editorship of the "Atlantic." Aldrich had a versatile talent
+that turned easily to adroit prose tales, but his heart was in
+the filing of his verses. Nothing so daintily perfect as his
+lighter pieces has been produced on this side of the Atlantic,
+and the deeper notes and occasional darker questionings of his
+later verse are embodied in lines of impeccable workmanship.
+Aloof from the social and political conflicts of his day, he gave
+himself to the fastidious creation of beautiful lines, believing
+that the beautiful line is the surest road to Arcady, and that
+Herrick, whom he idolized, had shown the way.
+
+To some readers of these pages it may seem like profanation to
+pass over poets like Sill, George Woodberry, Edith Thomas,
+Richard Hovey, William Vaughn Moody, Madison Cawein--to mention
+but half a dozen distinguished names out of a larger company--and
+to suggest that James Whitcomb Riley, more completely than any
+American poet since Longfellow, succeeded in expressing the
+actual poetic feelings of the men and women who composed his
+immense audience. Riley, like Aldrich, went to school to Herrick,
+Keats, Tennyson, and Longfellow, but when he began writing
+newspaper verse in his native Indiana he was guided by two
+impulses which gave individuality to his work. "I was always
+trying to write of the kind of people I knew, and especially to
+write verse that I could read just as if it were spoken for the
+first time." The first impulse kept him close to the wholesome
+Hoosier soil. The second is an anticipation of Robert Frost's
+theory of speech tones as the basis of verse, as well as a
+revival of the bardic practice of reciting one's own poems. For
+Riley had much of the actor and platform-artist in him, and
+comprehended that poetry might be made again a spoken art,
+directed to the ear rather than to the eye. His vogue, which at
+his death in 1915 far surpassed that of any living American poet,
+is inexplicable to those persons only who forget the sentimental
+traditions of our American literature and its frank appeal to the
+emotions of juvenility, actual and recollected. Riley's best
+"holt" as a poet was his memory of his own boyhood and his
+perception that the child-mind lingers in every adult reader.
+Genius has often been called the gift of prolonged adolescence,
+and in this sense, surely, there was genius in the warm and
+gentle heart of this fortunate provincial who held that "old
+Indianapolis" was "high Heaven's sole and only understudy." No
+one has ever had the audacity to say that of New York.
+
+We have had American drama for one hundred and fifty years,* but
+much of it, like our popular fiction and poetry, has been
+subliterary, more interesting to the student of social life and
+national character than to literary criticism in the narrow sense
+of that term. Few of our best known literary men have written for
+the stage. The public has preferred melodrama to poetic tragedy,
+although perhaps the greatest successes have been scored by plays
+which are comedies of manners rather than melodrama, and
+character studies of various American types, built up around the
+known capabilities of a particular actor. The twentieth century
+has witnessed a marked activity in play-writing, in the technical
+study of the drama, and in experiment with dramatic production,
+particularly with motion pictures and the out-of-doors pageant.
+At no time since "The Prince of Parthia" was first acted in
+Philadelphia in 1767 has such a large percentage of Americans
+been artistically and commercially interested in the drama, but
+as to the literary results of the new movement it is too soon to
+speak.
+
+* "Representative American Plays," edited by Arthur Hobson Quinn,
+N. Y., 1917.
+
+Nor is it possible to forecast the effect of a still more
+striking movement of contemporary taste, the revival of interest
+in poetry and the experimentation with new poetical forms. Such
+revival and experiment have often, in the past, been the preludes
+of great epochs of poetical production. Living Americans have
+certainly never seen such a widespread demand for contemporary
+verse, such technical curiosity as to the possible forms of
+poetry, or such variety of bold innovation. Imagism itself is
+hardly as novel as its contemporary advocates appear to maintain;
+and free verse goes back far in our English speech and song. But
+the new generation believes that it has made a discovery in
+reverting to sensations rather than thought, to the naive
+reproduction of retinal and muscular impressions, as if this were
+the end of the matter.
+
+The self-conscious, self-defending side of the new poetic impulse
+may soon pass, as it did in the case of Wordsworth and of Victor
+Hugo. Whatever happens, we have already had fresh and exquisite
+revelations of natural beauty, and, in volumes like "North of
+Boston" and "A Spoon River Anthology," judgments of life that run
+very deep.
+
+American fiction seems just now, on the contrary, to be marking
+time and not to be getting noticeably forward. Few names unknown
+ten years ago have won wide recognition in the domain of the
+novel. The short story has made little technical advance since
+the first successes of "O. Henry," though the talent of many
+observers has dealt with new material offered by the racial
+characteristics of European immigrants and by new phases of
+commerce and industry. The enormous commercial demand of the
+five-cent weeklies for short stories of a few easily recognized
+patterns has resulted too often in a substitution of
+stencil-plate generalized types instead of delicately and
+powerfully imagined individual characters. Short stories have
+been assembled, like Ford cars, with amazing mechanical
+expertness, but with little artistic advance in design. The same
+temporary arrest of progress has been noted in France and
+England, however, where different causes have been at work. No
+one can tell, in truth, what makes some plants in the literary
+garden wither at the same moment that others are outgrowing their
+borders.
+
+There is one plant in our own garden, however, whose flourishing
+state will be denied by nobody--namely, that kind of
+nature-writing identified with Thoreau and practised by Thomas
+Wentworth Higginson, Starr King, John Burroughs, John Muir,
+Clarence King, Bradford Torrey, Theodore Roosevelt, William J.
+Long, Thompson-Seton, Stewart Edward White, and many others.
+Their books represent, Professor Canby* believes, the adventures
+of the American subconsciousness, the promptings of forgotten
+memories, a racial tradition of contact with the wilderness, and
+hence one of the most genuinely American traits of our
+literature.
+
+* "Back to Nature," by H. S. Canby, "Yale Review," July, 1917.
+
+Other forms of essay writing, surely, have seemed in our own
+generation less distinctive of our peculiar quality. While
+admirable biographical and critical studies appear from time to
+time, and here and there a whimsical or trenchant discursive
+essay like those of Miss Repplier or Dr. Crothers, no one would
+claim that we approach France or even England in the field of
+criticism, literary history, memoirs, the bookish essay, and
+biography. We may have race-memories of a pine-tree which help us
+to write vigorously and poetically about it, but we write less
+vitally as soon as we enter the library door. A Frenchman does
+not, for he is better trained to perceive the continuity and
+integrity of race-consciousness, in the whole field of its
+manifestation. He does not feel, as many Americans do, that they
+are turning their back on life when they turn to books.
+
+Perhaps the truth is that although we are a reading people we are
+not yet a book-loving people. The American newspaper and magazine
+have been successful in making their readers fancy that newspaper
+and magazine are an equivalent for books. Popular orators and
+popular preachers confirm this impression, and colleges and
+universities have often emphasized a vocational choice of
+books--in other words, books that are not books at all, but
+treatises. It is not, of course, that American journalism,
+whether of the daily or monthly sort, has consciously set itself
+to supplant the habit of book-reading. A thousand social and
+economic factors enter into such a problem. But few observers
+will question the assertion that the influence of the American
+magazine, ever since its great period of national literary
+service in the eighties and nineties, has been more marked in
+the field of conduct and of artistic taste than in the
+stimulation of a critical literary judgment: An American
+schoolhouse of today owes its improvement in appearance over the
+schoolhouse of fifty years ago largely to the popular diffusion,
+through the illustrated magazines, of better standards of
+artistic taste. But--whether the judgment of school-teachers and
+schoolchildren upon a piece of literature is any better than it
+was in the red schoolhouse of fifty years ago is a disputable
+question.
+
+But we must stop guessing, or we shall never have done. The
+fundamental problem of our literature, as this book has attempted
+to trace it, has been to obtain from a mixed population dwelling
+in sections as widely separated as the peoples of Northern and
+Southern Europe, an integral intellectual and spiritual activity
+which could express, in obedience to the laws of beauty and
+truth, the motions stimulated by our national life. It has been
+assumed in the preceding chapters that American literature is
+something different from English literature written in America.
+Canadian and Australian literatures have indigenous qualities of
+their own, but typically they belong to the colonial literature
+of Great Britain. This can scarcely be said of the writings of
+Franklin and Jefferson, and it certainly cannot be said of the
+writings of Cooper, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Lowell,
+Lincoln, Mark Twain, and Mr. Howells. In the pages of these men
+and of hundreds of others less distinguished, there is a
+revelation of a new national type. That the full energies of this
+nation have been back of our books, giving them a range and
+vitality and unity commensurate with the national existence, no
+one would claim. There are other spheres of effort in which
+American character has been more adequately expressed than in
+words. Nevertheless the books are here, in spite of every defect
+in national discipline, every flaw in national character; and
+they deserve the closest attention from all those who are trying
+to understand the American mind.
+
+If the effort toward an expression of a peculiarly complex
+national experience has been the problem of our literary past,
+the literary problem of the future is the expression of the
+adjustment of American ideals to the standards of civilization.
+"Patriotism," said the martyred Edith Cavell just before her
+death, "is not enough." Nationality and the instincts of national
+separatism now seem essential to the preservation of the
+political units of the world-state, precisely as a healthy
+individualism must be the basis of all enduring social
+fellowship. Yet it is clear that civilization is a larger, more
+ultimate term than nationality. Chauvinism is nowhere more
+repellent than in the things of the mind. It is difficult for
+some Americans to think internationally even in political
+affairs--to construe our national policy and duty in terms of
+obligation to civilization. Nevertheless the task must be faced,
+and we are slowly realizing it.
+
+In the field of literature, likewise, Americanism is not a final
+word either of blame or praise. It is a word of useful
+characterization. Only American books, and not books written in
+English in America, can adequately represent our national
+contribution to the world's thinking and feeling. So argued
+Emerson and Whitman, long ago. But the younger of these two poets
+came to realize in his old age that the New World and the Old
+World are fundamentally one. The literature of the New World will
+inevitably have an accent of its own, but it must speak the
+mother-language of civilization, share in its culture, accept its
+discipline.
+
+It has been said disparagingly of Longfellow and his friends:
+"The houses of the Brahmins had only eastern windows. The souls
+of the whole school lived in the old lands of culture, and they
+visited these lands as often as they could, and, returning,
+brought back whole libraries of books which they eagerly
+translated." But even if Longfellow and his friends had been
+nothing more than translators and diffusers of European culture,
+their task would have been justified. They kept the ideals of
+civilization from perishing in this new soil. Through those
+eastern windows came in, and still comes in, the sunlight to
+illumine the American spirit. To decry the literatures of the
+Orient and of Greece and Rome as something now outgrown by
+America, is simply to close the eastern windows, to narrow our
+conception of civilization to merely national and contemporaneous
+terms. It is as provincial to attempt this restriction in
+literature as it would be in world-politics. We must have all the
+windows open in our American writing, free access to ideas,
+knowledge of universal standards, perception of universal law.
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+An authoritative account of American Literature to the close of
+the Revolution is given in M. C. Tyler's "History of American
+Literature during the Colonial Time," 2 volumes (1878) and
+"Literary History of the American Revolution," 2 volumes (1897).
+For a general survey see Barrett Wendell, "A Literary History of
+America" (1900), W. P. Trent, "American Literature" (1903), G. E.
+Woodberry, "America in Literature" (1903), W. C. Bronson, "A
+Short History of American Literature" (1903), with an excellent
+bibliography, W. B. Cairns, "History of American Literature"
+(1912), W. P. Trent and J. Erskine, "Great American Writers"
+(1912), and W. Riley, "American Thought" (1915). The most recent
+and authoritative account is to be found in "The Cambridge
+History of American Literature," 3 volumes edited by Trent,
+Erskine, Sherman, and Van Doren.
+
+The best collection of American prose and verse is E. C. Stedman
+and E. M. Hutchinson's "Library of American Literature," 11
+volumes (1888-1890). For verse alone, see E. C. Stedman, "An
+American Anthology" (1900), and W. C. Bronson, "American Poems,"
+1625-1892 (1912). For criticism of leading authors, note W. C.
+Brownell, "American Prose Masters" (1909), and Stedman, "Poets of
+America" (1885). Chapters 1-3. Note W. Bradford, "Journal"
+(1898), J. Winthrop, "Journal" (1825, 1826), also "Life and
+Letters" by R. C. Winthrop, 2 volumes (1863), G. L. Walker,
+"Thomas Hooker" (1891), O. S. Straus, "Roger Williams" (1894),
+Cotton Mather, "Diary," 2 volumes (1911, 1912), also his "Life"
+by Barrett Wendell (1891), Samuel Sewall, "Diary," 3 volumes
+(1878). For Jonathan Edwards, see "Works," 4 volumes (1852), his
+"Life" by A. V. G. Allen (1889), "Selected Sermons" edited by H.
+N. Gardiner (1904). The most recent edition of Franklin's "Works"
+is edited by A. H. Smyth, 10 volumes (1907).
+
+Chapter 4. Samuel Adams, "Works," 4 volumes (1904), John Adams,
+"Works," 10 volumes (1856), Thomas Paine, "Life" by M. D. Conway,
+2 volumes (1892), "Works" edited by Conway, 4 volumes (1895),
+Philip Freneau, "Poems," 3 volumes (Princeton edition, 1900,
+Thomas Jefferson, "Works" edited by P. L. Ford, 10 volumes
+(1892-1898), J. Woolman, "Journal" (edited by Whittier, 1871, and
+also in "Everyman's Library"), "The Federalist" (edited by H. C.
+Lodge, 1888).
+
+Chapter 5. Washington Irving, "Works," 40 volumes (1891-1897),
+also his "Life and Letters" by P. M. Irving, 4 volumes
+(1862-1864). Fenimore Cooper, "Works," 32 volumes (1896), "Life"
+by T. R. Lounsbury (1883). Brockden Brown, "Works," 6 volumes,
+(1887). W. C. Bryant, "Poems," 2 volumes (1883), "Prose," 2
+volumes (1884), and his "Life" by John Bigelow (1890).
+
+Chapter 6. H. C. Goddard, "Studies in New England
+Transcendentalism" (1908). R. W. Emerson, "Works," 12 volumes
+(Centenary edition, 1903), "Journal," 10 volumes (1909-1914), his
+"Life" by J. E. Cabot, 2 volumes (1887), by R. Garnett (1887), by
+G. E. Woodberry (1905); see also "Ralph Waldo Emerson," a
+critical study by O. W. Firkins (1915). H. D. Thoreau, "Works,"
+20 volumes (Walden edition including "Journals," 1906), "Life" by
+F. B. Sanborn (1917), also "Thoreau, A Critical Study" by Mark
+van Doren (1916). Note also Lindsay Swift, "Brook Farm" (1900),
+and "The Dial," reprint by the Rowfant Club (1902).
+
+Chapter 7. Hawthorne, "Works," 12 volumes (1882), "Life" by G. E.
+Woodberry (1902). Longfellow, "Works," 11 volumes (1886), "Life"
+by Samuel Longfellow, 3 volumes (1891). Whittier, "Works," 7
+volumes (1892), "Life" by S. T. Pickard, 2 volumes (1894).
+Holmes, "Works" 13 volumes (1892), "Life" by J. T. Morse, Jr.
+(1896). Lowell, "Works," 11 volumes (1890), "Life" by Ferris
+Greenslet (1905), "Letters" edited by C. E. Norton, 2 volumes
+(1893). For the historians, note H. B. Adams, "Life and Writings
+of Jared Sparks," 2 volumes (1893). M. A. DeW. Howe, "Life and
+Letters of George Bancroft," 2 volumes (1908), G. S. Hillard,
+"Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor," 2 volumes
+(1876), George Ticknor, "Life of Prescott" (1863), also Rollo
+Ogden, "Life of Prescott"(1904), G. W. Curtis, "Correspondence of
+J. L. Motley," 2 volumes (1889), Francis Parkman, "Works," 12
+volumes (1865-1898), "Life" by C. H. Farnham (1900), J. F.
+Jameson, "History of Historical Writing in America" (1891).
+
+Chapter 8. Poe, "Works," 10 volumes (Stedman-Woodberry edition,
+1894-1895), also 17 volumes (Virginia edition, J. A. Harrison,
+1900, "Life" by G. E. Woodberry, 2 volumes (1909). Whitman,
+"Leaves of Grass" and "Complete Prose Works" (Small, Maynard and
+Co.) (1897, 1898), also John Burroughs, "A Study of Whitman"
+(1896).
+
+Chapter 9. C. Schurz, "Life of Henry Clay," 2 volumes (1887).
+Daniel Webster, "Works," 6 volumes (1851), "Life" by H. C. Lodge
+(1883). Rufus Choate, "Works," volumes (1862). Wendell Phillips,
+"Speeches, Lectures, and Letters," 2 volumes (1892). W. L.
+Garrison, "The Story of his Life Told by his Children," 4 volumes
+(1885-1889). Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Works," 17 volumes (1897),
+"Life" by C. E. Stowe (1889). Abraham Lincoln, "Works," 2 volumes
+(edited by Nicolay and Hay, 1894).
+
+Chapter 10. For an excellent bibliography of the New National
+Period, see F. L. Pattee, "A History of American Literature since
+1870" (1916).
+
+For further bibliographical information the reader is referred to
+the articles on American authors in "The Encyclopaedia
+Britannica" and in "The Warner Library" (volume 30, "The
+Student's Course," N. Y., 1917).
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's American Spirit in Literature, by Bliss Perry
+
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