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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/3410-0.txt b/3410-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c4c0739 --- /dev/null +++ b/3410-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,6359 @@ +The American Spirit in Literature, by Bliss Perry, presented by Project +Gutenberg + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost +no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it +under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this +eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + +Title: The American Spirit in Literature, A Chronicle of Great +Interpreters, Volume 34 in The Chronicles Of America Series +Author: Bliss Perry +Editor: Allen Johnson +Release Date: January 15, 2009 [EBook #3410] +Last Updated: February 7, 2013 +Language: English +Character set encoding: UTF-8 + +Produced by The James J. Kelly Library of St. Gregory's University, Alev +Akman, David Widger, and Robert Homa. + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN +LITERATURE *** + +The American Spirit in Literature +By Bliss Perry +A Chronicle of Great Interpreters + +Volume 34 of the +Chronicles of America Series +∴ +Allen Johnson, Editor +Assistant Editors +Gerhard R. Lomer +Charles W. Jefferys + +Abraham Lincoln Edition + + + +New Haven: Yale University Press +Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co. +London: Humphrey Milford +Oxford University Press +1918 + +Copyright, 1918 +by Yale University Press + + + + + + + + CONTENTS +Chapter Chapter title Page + Introduction +I. The Pioneers 1 +II. The First Colonial Literature 25 +III. The Third and Fourth Generation 43 +IV. The Revolution 66 +V. The Knickerbocker Group 86 +VI. The Transcendentalists 109 +VII. Romance, Poetry, and History 143 +VIII. Poe and Whitman 187 +IX. Union and Liberty 206 +X. A New Nation 234 + Bibliographical Note 269 + Index 273 + +THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE + +∴ +CHAPTER I. + +The Pioneers + +The United States of America has been from the beginning in a perpetual +change. The physical and mental restlessness of the American and the +temporary nature of many of his arrangements are largely due to the +experimental character of the exploration and development of this +continent. The new energies released by the settlement of the colonies +were indeed guided by stern determination, wise forethought, and +inventive skill; but no one has ever really known the outcome of the +experiment. It is a story of faith, of + + Effort, and expectation, and desire, + And something evermore about to be. + +An Alexander Hamilton may urge with passionate force the adoption of the +Constitution, without any firm conviction as to its permanence. The most +clear-sighted American of the Civil War period recognized this element +of uncertainty in our American adventure when he declared: "We are now +testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived and so +dedicated, can long endure." More than fifty years have passed since +that war rearmed the binding force of the Constitution and apparently +sealed the perpetuity of the Union. Yet the gigantic economic and social +changes now in progress are serving to show that the United States has +its full share of the anxieties which beset all human institutions in +this daily altering world. + +"We are but strangers in an inn, but passengers in a ship," said Roger +Williams. This sense of the transiency of human effort, the perishable +nature of human institutions, was quick in the consciousness of the +gentleman adventurers and sober Puritan citizens who emigrated from +England to the New World. It had been a familiar note in the poetry of +that Elizabethan period which had followed with such breathless interest +the exploration of America. It was a conception which could be shared +alike by a saint like John Cotton or a soldier of fortune like John +Smith. Men are tent-dwellers. Today they settle here, and tomorrow they +have struck camp and are gone. We are strangers and sojourners, as all +our fathers were. + +This instinct of the camper has stamped itself upon American life and +thought. Venturesomeness, physical and moral daring, resourcefulness in +emergencies, indifference to negligible details, wastefulness of +materials, boundless hope and confidence in the morrow, are +characteristics of the American. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say +that the "good American" has been he who has most resembled a good +camper. He has had robust health--unless or until he has abused it,--a +tolerant disposition, and an ability to apply his fingers or his brain +to many unrelated and unexpected tasks. He is disposed to blaze his own +trail. He has a touch of prodigality, and, withal, a knack of keeping +his tent or his affairs in better order than they seem. Above all, he +has been ever ready to break camp when he feels the impulse to wander. +He likes to be "foot-loose." If he does not build his roads as solidly +as the Roman roads were built, nor his houses like the English houses, +it is because he feels that he is here today and gone tomorrow. If he +has squandered the physical resources of his neighborhood, cutting the +forests recklessly, exhausting the soil, surrendering water power and +minerals into a few far-clutching fingers, he has done it because he +expects, like Voltaire's Signor Pococurante, "to have a new garden +tomorrow, built on a nobler plan." When New York State grew too crowded +for Cooper's Leather-Stocking, he shouldered his pack, whistled to his +dog, glanced at the sun, and struck a bee-line for the Mississippi. +Nothing could be more typical of the first three hundred years of +American history. + +The traits of the pioneer have thus been the characteristic traits of +the American in action. The memories of successive generations have +tended to stress these qualities to the neglect of others. Everyone who +has enjoyed the free life of the woods will confess that his own +judgment upon his casual summer associates turns, quite naturally and +almost exclusively, upon their characteristics as woodsmen. Out of the +woods, these gentlemen may be more or less admirable divines, pedants, +men of affairs; but the verdict of their companions in the forest is +based chiefly upon the single question of their adaptability to the +environment of the camp. Are they quick of eye and foot, skillful with +rod and gun, cheerful on rainy days, ready to do a little more than +their share of drudgery? If so, memory holds them. + +Some such unconscious selection as this has been at work in the +classification of our representative men. The building of the nation and +the literary expression of its purpose and ideals are tasks which have +called forth the strength of a great variety of individuals. Some of +these men have proved to be peculiarly fitted for a specific service, +irrespective of the question of their general intellectual powers, or +their rank as judged by the standard of European performance in the same +field. Thus the battle of New Orleans, in European eyes a mere bit of +frontier fighting, made Andrew Jackson a "hero" as indubitably as if he +had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. It gave him the Presidency. + +The analogy holds in literature. Certain expressions of American +sentiment or conviction have served to summarize or to clarify the +spirit of the nation. The authors of these productions have frequently +won the recognition and affection of their contemporaries by means of +prose and verse quite unsuited to sustain the test of severe critical +standards. Neither Longfellow's Excelsior nor Poe's Bells nor Whittier's +Maud Muller is among the best poems of the three writers in question, +yet there was something in each of these productions which caught the +fancy of a whole American generation. It expressed one phase of the +national mind in a given historical period. + +The historian of literature is bound to take account of this question of +literary vogue, as it is highly significant of the temper of successive +generations in any country. But it is of peculiar interest to the +student of the literature produced in the United States. Is this +literature "American," or is it "English literature in America," as +Professor Wendell and other scholars have preferred to call it? I should +be one of the last to minimize the enormous influence of England upon +the mind and the writing of all the English-speaking countries of the +globe. Yet it will be one of the purposes of the present book to +indicate the existence here, even in colonial times, of a point of view +differing from that of the mother country, and destined to differ +increasingly with the lapse of time. Since the formation of our Federal +Union, in particular, the books produced in the United States have +tended to exhibit certain characteristics which differentiate them from +the books produced in other English-speaking countries. We must beware, +of course, of what the late Charles Francis Adams once called the +"filiopietistic" fallacy. The "American" qualities of our literature +must be judged in connection with its conformity to universal standards +of excellence. Tested by any universal standard, The Scarlet Letter is a +notable romance. It has won a secure place among the literature written +by men of English blood and speech. Yet to overlook the peculiarly local +or provincial characteristics of this remarkable story is to miss the +secret of its inspiration. It could have been written only by a New +Englander, in the atmosphere of a certain epoch. + +Our task, then, in this rapid review of the chief interpreters of the +American spirit in literature, is a twofold one. We are primarily +concerned with a procession of men, each of whom is interesting as an +individual and as a writer. But we cannot watch the individuals long +without perceiving the general direction of their march, the ideas that +animate them, the common hopes and loyalties that make up the life of +their spirit. To become aware of these general tendencies is to +understand the "American" note in our national writing. + +Our historians have taught us that the history of the United States is +an evolution towards political unity. The separatist, particularist +movements are gradually thrust to one side. In literary history, +likewise, we best remember those authors who fall into line with what we +now perceive to have been the course of our literary development. The +erratic men and women, the "sports" of the great experiment, are +ultimately neglected by the critics, unless, like the leaders of +political insurrections, those writing men and women have raised a +notable standard of revolt. No doubt the apparently unique literary +specimens, if clearly understood in their origins and surroundings, +would be found rooted in the general laws of literary evolution. But +these laws are not easy to codify and we must avoid the temptation to +discover, in any particular period, more of unity than there actually +was. And we must always remember that there will be beautiful prose and +verse unrelated to the main national tendencies save as "the literature +of escape." We owe this lesson to the genius of Edgar Allan Poe. + +Let us test these principles by applying them to the earliest colonists. +The first book written on the soil of what is now the United States was +Captain John Smith's True Relation of the planting of the Virginia +colony in 1607. It was published in London in 1608. The Captain was a +typical Elizabethan adventurer, with a gift, like so many of his class, +for picturesque narrative. In what sense, if at all, may his writings on +American topics be classified as "American" literary productions? It is +clear that his experiences in the New World were only one phase of the +variegated life of this English soldier of fortune. But the American +imagination has persistently claimed him as representing something +peculiarly ours, namely, a kind of pioneer hardihood, resourcefulness, +leadership, which was essential to the exploration and conquest of the +wilderness. Most of Smith's companions were unfitted for the ordeal +which he survived. They perished miserably in the "starving time." But +he was of the stuff from which triumphant immigrants have ever been +made, and it is our recognition of the presence of these qualities in +the Captain which makes us think of his books dealing with America as if +they were "American books." There are other narratives by colonists +temporarily residing in the Virginia plantations which gratify our +historical curiosity, but which we no more consider a part of American +literature than the books written by Stevenson, Kipling, and Wells +during their casual visits to this country. But Captain Smith's True +Relation impresses us, like Mark Twain's Roughing It, with being somehow +true to type. In each of these books the possible unveracities in detail +are a confirmation of their representative American character. + +In other words, we have unconsciously formulated, in the course of +centuries, a general concept of "the pioneer." Novelists, poets, and +historians have elaborated this conception. Nothing is more inevitable +than our reaching back to the beginning of the seventeenth century and +endeavoring to select, among the thousands of Englishmen who emigrated +or even thought of emigrating to this country, those who possessed the +genuine heart and sinew of the permanent settler. + +Oliver Cromwell, for instance, is said to have thought of emigrating +hither in 1637. If he had joined his friends John Cotton and Roger +Williams in New England, who can doubt that the personal characteristics +of "my brave Oliver" would today be identified with the "American" +qualities which we discover in 1637 on the shores of Massachusetts Bay? +And what an American settler Cromwell would have made! + +If we turn from physical and moral daring to the field of theological +and political speculation, it is easy today to select, among the +writings of the earliest colonists, certain radical utterances which +seem to presage the very temper of the late eighteenth century. Pastor +John Robinson's farewell address to the Pilgrims at Leyden in 1620 +contained the famous words: "The Lord has more truth yet to break forth +out of His holy Word. I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the +reformed churches, who are come to a period in religion.... Luther and +Calvin were great and shining lights in their times, yet they penetrated +not into the whole counsel of God." Now John Robinson, like Oliver +Cromwell, never set foot on American soil, but he is identified, none +the less, with the spirit of American liberalism in religion. + +In political discussion, the early emergence of that type of +independence familiar to the decade 1765-75 is equally striking. In a +letter written in 1818, John Adams insisted that "the principles and +feelings which produced the Revolution ought to be traced back for two +hundred years, and sought in the history of the country from the first +plantations in America." "I have always laughed," he declared in an +earlier letter, "at the affectation of representing American +independence as a novel idea, as a modern discovery, as a late +invention. The idea of it as a possible thing, as a probable event, nay +as a necessary and unavoidable measure, in case Great Britain should +assume an unconstitutional authority over us, has been familiar to +Americans from the first settlement of the country." + +There is, then, a predisposition, a latent or potential Americanism +which existed long before the United States came into being. Now that +our political unity has become a fact, the predisposition is certain to +be regarded by our own and by future generations as evidence of a state +of mind which made our separate national life inevitable. Yet to Thomas +Hutchinson, a sound historian and honest man, the last Royal Governor of +Massachusetts, a separate national life seemed in 1770 an unspeakable +error and calamity. + +The seventeenth-century colonists were predominantly English, in blood, +in traditions, and in impulses. Whether we look at Virginia or Plymouth +or at the other colonies that were planted in swift succession along the +seaboard, it is clear that we are dealing primarily with men of the +English race. Most of them would have declared, with as much emphasis as +Francis Hopkinson a century later, "We of America are in all respects +Englishmen." Professor Edward Channing thinks that it took a century of +exposure to colonial conditions to force the English in America away +from the traditions and ideals of those who continued to live in the old +land. But the student of literature must keep constantly in mind that +these English colonizers represented no single type of the national +character. There were many men of many minds even within the contracted +cabin of the Mayflower. The "sifted wheat" was by no means all of the +same variety. + +For Old England was never more torn by divergent thought and subversive +act than in the period between the death of Elizabeth in 1603 and the +Revolution of 1688. In this distracted time who could say what was +really "English"? Was it James the First or Raleigh? Archbishop Laud or +John Cotton? Charles the First or Cromwell? Charles the Second or +William Penn? Was it Churchman, Presbyterian, Independent, Separatist, +Quaker? One is tempted to say that the title of Ben Jonson's comedy +Every Man in his Humour became the standard of action for two whole +generations of Englishmen, and that there is no common denominator for +emigrants of such varied pattern as Smith and Sandys of Virginia, Morton +of Merrymount, John Winthrop, "Sir" Christopher Gardiner and Anne +Hutchinson of Boston, and Roger Williams of Providence. They seem as +miscellaneous as "Kitchener's Army." + +It is true that we can make certain distinctions. Virginia, as has often +been said, was more like a continuation of English society, while New +England represented a digression from English society. There were then, +as now, "stand-patters" and "progressives." It was the second class who, +while retaining very conservative notions about property, developed a +fearless intellectual radicalism which has written itself into the +history of the United States. But to the student of early American +literature all such generalizations are of limited value. He is dealing +with individual men, not with "Cavalier" or "Roundhead" as such. He has +learned from recent historians to distrust any such facile +classification of the first colonists. He knows by this time that there +were aristocrats in Massachusetts and commoners in Virginia; that the +Pilgrims of Plymouth were more tolerant than the Puritans of Boston, and +that Rhode Island was more tolerant than either. Yet useful as these +general statements may be, the interpreter of men of letters must always +go back of the racial type or the social system to the individual +person. He recognizes, as a truth for him, that theory of creative +evolution which holds that in the ascending progress of the race each +thinking person becomes a species by himself. + +While something is gained, then, by remembering that the racial +instincts and traditions of the first colonists were overwhelmingly +English, and that their political and ethical views were the product of +a turbulent and distraught time, it is even more important to note how +the physical situation of the colonists affected their intellectual and +moral, as well as their political problems. Among the emigrants from +England, as we have seen, there were great varieties of social status, +religious opinion, individual motive. But at least they all possessed +the physical courage and moral hardihood to risk the dangerous voyage, +the fearful hardships, and the vast uncertainties of the new life. To go +out at all, under the pressure of any motive, was to meet triumphantly a +searching test. It was in truth a "sifting," and though a few +picturesque rascals had the courage to go into exile while a few saints +may have been deterred, it is a truism to say that the pioneers were +made up of brave men and braver women. + +It cannot be asserted that their courage was the result of any single, +dominating motive, equally operative in all of the colonies. Mrs. +Hemans's familiar line about seeking "freedom to worship God" was +measurably true of the Pilgrims of Plymouth, about whom she was writing. +But the far more important Puritan emigration to Massachusetts under +Winthrop aimed not so much at "freedom" as at the establishment of a +theocracy according to the Scriptures. These men straightway denied +freedom of worship, not only to newcomers who sought to join them, but +to those members of their own company who developed independent ways of +thinking. The list of motives for emigration ran the whole gamut, from +missionary fervor for converting the savages, down through a commendable +desire for gain, to the perhaps no less praiseworthy wish to escape a +debtor's prison or the pillory. A few of the colonists were rich. Some +were beggars or indentured servants. Most of them belonged to the middle +class. John Harvard was the son of a butcher; Thomas Shepard, the son of +a grocer; Roger Williams, the son of a tailor. But all three were +university bred and were natural leaders of men. + +Once arrived in the wilderness, the pioneer life common to all of the +colonists began instantly to exert its slow, irresistible pressure upon +their minds and to mould them into certain ways of thinking and feeling. +Without some perception of these modes of thought and emotion a +knowledge of the spirit of our literature is impossible. Take, for +instance, the mere physical situation of the first colonists, encamped +on the very beach of the wide ocean with an illimitable forest in their +rear. Their provisions were scanty. They grew watchful of the strange +soil, of the new skies, of the unknown climate. Even upon the voyage +over, John Winthrop thought that "the declination of the pole star was +much, even to the view, beneath that it is in England," and that "the +new moon, when it first appeared, was much smaller than at any time he +had seen it in England." Here was a man evidently using his eyes with a +new interest in natural phenomena. Under these changed skies the mind +began gradually to change also. + +At first the colonists felt themselves an outpost of Europe, a forlorn +hope of the Protestant Reformation. "We shall be as a city upon a hill," +said Winthrop. "The eyes of all people are upon us." Their creed was +Calvinism, then in its third generation of dominion and a European +doctrine which was not merely theological but social and political. The +emigrant Englishmen were soon to discover that it contained a doctrine +of human rights based upon human needs. At the beginning of their novel +experience they were doubtless unaware of any alteration in their +theories. But they were facing a new situation, and that new situation +became an immense factor in their unconscious growth. Their intellectual +and moral problems shifted, as a boat shifts her ballast when the wind +blows from a new quarter. The John Cotton preaching in a shed in the new +Boston had come to "suffer a sea-change" from the John Cotton who had +been rector of St. Botolph's splendid church in Lincolnshire. The +"church without a bishop" and the "state without a king" became a +different church and state from the old, however loyally the ancient +forms and phrases were retained. + +If the political problems of equality which were latent in Calvinism now +began to take on a different meaning under the democratic conditions of +pioneer life, the inner, spiritual problems of that amazing creed were +intensified. "Fallen" human nature remained the same, whether in the +crowded cosmopolitan streets of Holland and London, or upon the desolate +shores of Cape Cod. But the moral strain of the old insoluble conflict +between "fixed fate" and "free will" was heightened by the physical +loneliness of the colonists. Each soul must fight its own unaided, +unending battle. In that moral solitude, as in the physical solitude of +the settlers upon the far northwestern prairies of a later epoch, many a +mind snapped. Unnatural tension was succeeded by unnatural crimes. But +for the stronger intellects New England Calvinism became a potent +spiritual gymnastic, where, as in the Swedish system of bodily training, +one lifts imaginary and ever-increasing weights with imaginary and +ever-increasing effort, flexor and extensor muscles pulling against one +another, driven by the will. Calvinism bred athletes as well as maniacs. + +The new situation, again, turned many of the theoretical speculations of +the colonists into practical issues. Here, for example, was the Indian. +Was he truly a child of God, possessing a soul, and, if so, had he +partaken of the sin of Adam? These questions perplexed the saintly Eliot +and the generous Roger Williams. But before many years the query as to +whether a Pequot warrior had a soul became suddenly less important than +the practical question as to whether the Pequot should be allowed any +further chances of taking the white man's scalp. On this last issue the +colonists were unanimous in the negative. + +It would be easy to multiply such instances of a gradual change of view. +But beneath all the changes and all the varieties of individual behavior +in the various colonies that began to dot the seaboard, certain +qualities demanded by the new surroundings are felt in colonial life and +in colonial writings. One of these is the instinct for order, or at +least that degree of order essential to the existence of a camp. It was +not in vain that John Smith sought to correct the early laxness at +Jamestown by the stern edict: "He that will not work, neither shall he +eat." Dutch and Quaker colonies taught the same inexorable maxim of +thrift. Soon there was work enough for all, at good wages, but the +lesson had been taught. It gave Franklin's Poor Richard mottoes their +flavor of homely, experienced truth. + +Order in daily life led straight to political order, just as the +equality and resourcefulness of the frontier, stimulated by isolation +from Europe, led to political independence. The pioneer learned to make +things for himself instead of sending to London for them, and by and by +he grew as impatient of waiting for a political edict from London as he +would become in waiting for a London plough. "This year," wrote one +colonist, "ye will go to complain to the Parliament, and the next year +they will send to see how it is, and the third year the government is +changed." The time was coming when no more complaints would be sent. + +One of the most startling instances of this colonial instinct for +self-government is the case of Thomas Hooker. Trained in Emmanuel +College of the old Cambridge, he arrived in the new Cambridge in 1633. +He grew restless under its theocratic government, being, it was said, "a +person who when he was doing his Master's work would put a king into his +pocket." So he led the famous migration of 1636 from Massachusetts to +Hartford, and there helped to create a federation of independent towns +which made their own constitution without mentioning any king, and +became one of the corner-stones of American democracy. In May, 1638, +Hooker declared in a sermon before the General Court "that the choice of +public magistrates belongs unto the people by God's own allowance," and +"that they who have the power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is +in their power, also, to set the bounds and limitations of the power and +place into which they call them." The reason of this is: "Because the +foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the +people." This high discourse antedates the famous pamphlets on liberty +by Milton. It is a half-century earlier than Locke's Treatise on +Government, a century and a quarter earlier than Rousseau's Contrat +Social, and it precedes by one hundred and thirty-eight years the +American Declaration of Independence. + +But the slightest acquaintance with colonial writings will reveal the +fact that such political radicalism as Thomas Hooker's was accompanied +by an equally striking conservatism in other directions. One of these +conservative traits was the pioneer's respect for property, and +particularly for the land cleared by his own toil. Gladstone once spoke +of possession of the soil as the most important and most operative of +all social facts. Free-footed as the pioneer colonist was, he was +disinclined to part with his land without a substantial price for it. +The land at his disposal was practically illimitable, but he showed a +very English tenacity in safeguarding his hold upon his own portion. + +Very English, likewise, was his attachment to the old country as "home." +The lighter and the more serious writings of the colonists are alike in +their respect for the past. In the New England settlements, although not +at first in Virginia, there was respect for learning and for an educated +clergy. The colonists revered the Bible. They maintained a stubborn +regard for the Common Law of England. Even amid all the excitement of a +successful rebellion from the mother country, this Common Law still held +the Americans to the experience of the inescapable past. + +Indeed, as the reader of today lifts his eyes from the pages of the +books written in America during the seventeenth century, and tries to +meditate upon the general difference between them and the English books +written during the same period, he will be aware of the firmness with +which the conservative forces held on this side of the Atlantic. It was +only one hundred years from the Great Armada of 1588 to the flight of +James Second, the last of the Stuart Kings. With that Revolution of 1688 +the struggles characteristic of the seventeenth century in England came +to an end. A new working basis is found for thought, politics, society, +literature. But while those vast changes had been shaking England, two +generations of American colonists had cleared their forests, fought the +savages, organized their townships and their trade, put money in their +purses, and lived, though as yet hardly suspecting it, a life that was +beginning to differentiate them from the men of the Old World. We must +now glance at the various aspects of this isolated life of theirs, as it +is revealed in their books. + + + + +CHAPTER II. + +The First Colonial Literature + +The simplest and oldest group of colonial writings is made up of records +of exploration and adventure. They are like the letters written from +California in 1849 to the "folks back East." Addressed to home-keeping +Englishmen across the sea, they describe the new world, explain the +present situation of the colonists, and express their hopes for the +future. Captain John Smith's True Relation, already alluded to, is the +typical production of this class: a swift marching book, full of eager +energy, of bluff and breezy picturesqueness, and of triumphant instinct +for the main chance. Like most of the Elizabethans, he cannot help +poetizing in his prose. Cod-fishing is to him a "sport"; "and what sport +doth yeald a more pleasing content, and lesse hurt or charge then +angling with a hooke, and crossing the sweete ayre from Isle to Isle, +over the silent streams of a calme Sea?" But the gallant Captain is also +capable of very plain speech, Cromwellian in its simplicity, as when he +writes back to the London stockholders of the Virginia Company: "When +you send again, I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters, +husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of +trees' roots, well provided, than a thousand of such as we have." + +America was but an episode in the wide wanderings of Captain Smith, but +he owes his place in human memory today to the physical and mental +energy with which he met the demands of a new situation, and to the +vividness with which he dashed down in words whatever his eyes had seen. +Whether, in that agreeable passage about Pocahontas, he was guilty of +romancing a little, no one really knows, but the Captain, as the first +teller of this peculiarly American type of story, will continue to have +an indulgent audience. + +But other exiles in Virginia were skillful with the pen. William +Strachey's True Reportory of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., vpon +and from the islands of the Bermudas may or may not have given a hint to +Shakespeare for the storm-scene in The Tempest. In either case it is +admirable writing, flexible, sensitive, shrewdly observant. Whitaker, +the apostle of Virginia, mingles, like many a missionary of the present +day, the style of an exhorter with a keen discernment of the traits of +the savage mind. George Percy, fresh from Northumberland, tells in a +language as simple as Defoe's the piteous tale of five months of illness +and starvation, watched by "those wild and cruel Pagans." John Pory, of +"the strong potations," who thinks that "good company is the soul of +this life," nevertheless comforts himself in his solitude among the +"crystal rivers and odoriferous woods" by reflecting that he is escaping +envy and expense. George Sandys, scholar and poet, finds his solace +during a Virginia exile in continuing his translation of Ovid's +Metamorphoses. Colonel Norwood, an adventurer who belongs to a somewhat +later day, since he speaks of having "read Mr. Smith's travels," draws +the long bow of narrative quite as powerfully as the redoubtable Smith, +and far more smoothly, as witness his accounts of starvation on +shipboard and cannibalism on shore. This Colonel is an artist who would +have delighted Stevenson. + +All of these early tellers of Virginia tales were Englishmen, and most +of them returned to England, where their books were printed and their +remaining lives were passed. But far to the northeast of Virginia there +were two colonies of men who earned the right to say, in William +Bradford's quiet words, "It is not with us as with other men, whom small +things can discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish themselves +at home again." One was the colony of Pilgrims at Plymouth, headed by +Bradford himself. The other was the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay, +with John Winthrop as governor. + +Bradford and Winthrop have left journals which are more than chronicles +of adventure. They record the growth and government of a commonwealth. +Both Bradford and Winthrop were natural leaders of men, grave, +dignified, solid, endowed with a spirit that bred confidence. Each was +learned. Winthrop, a lawyer and man of property, had a higher social +standing than Bradford, who was one of the Separatists of Robinson's +flock at Leyden. But the Pilgrim of the Mayflower and the well-to-do +Puritan of the Bay Colony both wrote their annals like gentlemen and +scholars. Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation runs from 1620 to +1647. Winthrop's diary, now printed as the History of New England, +begins with his voyage in 1630 and closes in the year of his death, +1649. As records of an Anglo-Saxon experiment in self-government under +pioneer conditions these books are priceless; as human documents, they +illuminate the Puritan character; as for "literary" value in the narrow +sense of that word, neither Bradford nor Winthrop seems to have thought +of literary effect. Yet the leader of the Pilgrims has passages of grave +sweetness and charm, and his sketch of his associate, Elder Brewster, +will bear comparison with the best English biographical writing of that +century. Winthrop is perhaps more varied in tone, as he is in matter, +but he writes throughout as a ruler of men should write, with "decent +plainness and manly freedom." His best known pages, justly praised by +Tyler and other historians of American thought, contain his speech +before the General Court in 1645 on the nature of true liberty. No +paragraphs written in America previous to the Revolution would have +given more pleasure to Abraham Lincoln, but it is to be feared that +Lincoln never saw Governor Winthrop's book, though his own ancestor, +Samuel Lincoln of Hingham, lived under Winthrop's jurisdiction. + +The theory of government held by the dominant party of the first two +generations of New England pioneers has often been called a "theocracy," +that is to say, a government according to the Word of God as expounded +and enforced by the clergy. The experiment was doomed to ultimate +failure, for it ran counter to some of the noblest instincts of human +nature. But its administration was in the hands of able men. The power +of the clergy was well-nigh absolute. The political organization of the +township depended upon the ecclesiastical organization as long as the +right to vote was confined to church members. How sacrosanct and awful +was the position of the clergyman may be perceived from Hawthorne's The +Minister's Black Veil and The Scarlet Letter. + +Yet it must be said that men like Hooker and Cotton, Shepard and Norton, +had every instinct and capacity for leadership. With the notable +exception of Hooker, such men were aristocrats, holding John Winthrop's +opinion that "Democracy is, among most civil nations, accounted the +meanest and worst form of government." They were fiercely intolerant. +The precise reason for the Hooker migration from Cambridge to Hartford +in 1636--the very year of the founding of Harvard--was prudently +withheld, but it is now thought to be the instinct of escape from the +clerical architects of the Cambridge Platform. Yet no one would today +call Thomas Hooker a liberal in religion, pioneer in political liberty +though he proved to be. His extant sermons have the steady stroke of a +great hammer; smiting at the mind and heart. "Others because they have +felt the heavy hand of God ... upon these grounds they build their +hopes: 'I have had my hell in this life, and I hope to have heaven in +the world to come; I hope the worst is over.'" Not so, thunders the +preacher in reply: "Sodom and Gomorrah they burnt in brimstone and they +shall burn in hell." One of Hooker's successors has called him "a son of +thunder and a son of consolation by turns." The same may be said of +Thomas Shepard, another graduate of Emmanuel College in the old +Cambridge, who became the "soul-melting preacher" of the newer Cambridge +by the Charles. Pure, ravishing notes of spiritual devotion still sing +themselves in his pages. He is wholly Calvinist. He thinks "the truth is +a poor mean thing in itself" and that the human reason cannot be "the +last resolution of all doubts," which must be sought only in the written +Word of God. He holds it "a tough work, a wonderful hard matter to be +saved." "Jesus Christ is not got with a wet finger." Yet, like so many +mystics, he yearns to be "covered with God, as with a cloud," to be +"drowned, plunged, and swallowed up with God." One hundred years later +we shall find this same rhapsodic ecstasy in the meditations of Jonathan +Edwards. + +John Cotton, the third of the mighty men in the early Colonial pulpit, +owes his fame more to his social and political influence than to his +literary power. Yet even that was thought commanding. Trained, like +Hooker and Shepard, at Emmanuel College, and fresh from the rectorship +of St. Botolph's in the Lincolnshire Boston, John Cotton dominated that +new Boston which was named in his honor. He became the Pope of the +theocracy; a clever Pope and not an unkindly one. He seems to have +shared some of the opinions of Anne Hutchinson, though he "pronounced +the sentence of admonition" against her, says Winthrop, with much zeal +and detestation of her errors. Hawthorne, in one of his ironic moods, +might have done justice to this scene. Cotton was at heart too liberal +for his rôle of Primate, and fate led him to persecute a man whose very +name has become a symbol of victorious tolerance, Roger Williams. + +Williams, known today as a friend of Cromwell, Milton, and Sir Harry +Vane, had been exiled from Massachusetts for maintaining that the civil +power had no jurisdiction over conscience. This doctrine was fatal to +the existence of a theocratic state dominated by the church. John Cotton +was perfectly logical in "enlarging" Roger Williams into the wilderness, +but he showed less than his usual discretion in attacking the +quick-tempered Welshman in pamphlets. It was like asking Hotspur if he +would kindly consent to fight. Back and forth the books fly, for +Williams loves this game. His Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of +Conscience calls forth Mr. Cotton's Bloody Tenet washed and made white +in the Blood of the Lamb; and this in turn provokes the torrential flood +of Williams's masterpiece, The Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, by Mr. +Cotton's endeavor to wash it white in the Blood of the Lamb. There is +glorious writing here, and its effect cannot be suggested by quoting +sentences. But there is one sentence in a letter written by Williams in +his old age to his fellow-townsmen of Providence which points the whole +moral of the terrible mistake made by the men who sought spiritual +liberty in America for themselves, only to deny that same liberty to +others. "I have only one motion and petition," begs this veteran pioneer +who had forded many a swollen stream and built many a rude bridge in the +Plantations: "it is this, that after you have got over the black brook +of some soul bondage yourselves, you tear not down the bridge after +you." + +It is for such wise and humane counsels as this that Roger Williams is +remembered. His opponents had mightier intellects than his, but the +world has long since decided against them. Colonial sermon literature is +read today chiefly by antiquarians who have no sympathy for the creed +which once gave it vitality. Its theology, like the theology of Paradise +Lost or the Divine Comedy, has sunk to the bottom of the black brook. +But we cannot judge fairly the contemporary effect of this pulpit +literature without remembering the passionate faith that made pulpit and +pews copartners in a supreme spiritual struggle. Historians properly +insist upon the æsthetic poverty of the New England Puritans; that their +rule of life cut them off from an enjoyment of the dramatic literature +of their race, then just closing its most splendid epoch; that they had +little poetry or music and no architecture and plastic art. But we must +never forget that to men of their creed the Sunday sermons and the +week-day "lectures" served as oratory, poetry, and drama. These +outpourings of the mind and heart of their spiritual leaders were the +very stuff of human passion in its intensest forms. Puritan churchgoers, +passing hours upon hours every week in rapt absorption with the noblest +of all poetry and prose in the pages of their chief book, the Bible, +were at least as sensitive to the beauty of words and the sweep of +emotions as our contemporaries upon whose book-shelves Spenser and +Milton stand unread. + +It is only by entering into the psychology of the period that we can +estimate its attitude towards the poetry written by the pioneers +themselves. The Bay Psalm Book (1640), the first book printed in the +colonies, is a wretched doggerel arrangement of the magnificent King +James Version of the Psalms, designed to be sung in churches. Few of the +New England churches could sing more than half-a-dozen tunes, and a +pitch-pipe was for a long time the only musical instrument allowed. +Judged as hymnology or poetry, the Bay Psalm Book provokes a smile. But +the men and women who used it as a handbook of devotion sang it with +their hearts aflame. In judging such a popular seventeenth-century poem +as Wigglesworth's Day of Doom one must strip oneself quite free from the +twentieth century, and pretend to be sitting in the chimney-corner of a +Puritan kitchen, reading aloud by that firelight which, as Lowell once +humorously suggested, may have added a "livelier relish" to the poet's +"premonitions of eternal combustion." Lowell could afford to laugh about +it, having crossed that particular black brook. But for several +generations the boys and girls of New England had read the Day of Doom +as if Mr. Wigglesworth, the gentle and somewhat sickly minister of +Malden, had veritably peeped into Hell. It is the present fashion to +underestimate the power of Wigglesworth's verse. At its best it has a +trampling, clattering shock like a charge of cavalry and a sound like +clanging steel. Mr. Kipling and other cunning ballad-makers have +imitated the peculiar rhyme structure chosen by the nervous little +parson. But no living poet can move his readers to the fascinated horror +once felt by the Puritans as they followed Wigglesworth's relentless +gaze into the future of the soul's destiny. + +Historical curiosity may still linger, of course, over other +verse-writers of the period. Anne Bradstreet's poems, for instance, are +not without grace and womanly sweetness, in spite of their didactic +themes and portentous length. But this lady, born in England, the +daughter of Governor Dudley and later the wife of Governor Bradstreet, +chose to imitate the more fantastic of the moralizing poets of England +and France. There is little in her hundreds of pages which seems today +the inevitable outcome of her own experience in the New World. For +readers who like roughly mischievous satire, of a type initiated in +England by Bishop Hall and Donne, there is The Simple Cobbler of Agawam +written by the roving clergyman Nathaniel Ward. But he lived only a +dozen years in Massachusetts, and his satirical pictures are scarcely +more "American" than the satire upon German professors in Sartor +Resartus is "German." Like Charles Dickens's American Notes, Ward's give +the reaction of a born Englishman in the presence of the sights and the +talk and the personages of the transatlantic world. + +Of all the colonial writings of the seventeenth century, those that have +lost least of their interest through the lapse of years are narratives +of struggles with the Indians. The image of the "bloody savage" has +always hovered in the background of the American imagination. Our boys +and girls have "played Indian" from the beginning, and the actual Indian +is still found, as for three hundred years past, upon the frontier +fringe of our civilization. Novelists like Cooper, historians like +Parkman, poets like Longfellow, have dealt with the rich material +offered by the life of the aborigines, but the long series begins with +the scribbled story of colonists. Here are comedy and tragedy, plain +narratives of trading and travel, missionary zeal and triumphs; then the +inevitable alienation of the two races and the doom of the native. + +The "noble savage" note may be found in John Rolfe, the husband of +Pocahontas, with whom, poor fellow, his "best thoughts are so intangled +and enthralled." Other Virginians, like Smith, Strachey, and Percy, show +close naturalistic observation, touched with the abounding Elizabethan +zest for novelties. To Alexander Whitaker, however, these "naked slaves +of the devil" were "not so simple as some have supposed." He yearned and +labored over their souls, as did John Eliot and Roger Williams and +Daniel Gookin of New England. In the Pequot War of 1637 the grim +settlers resolved to be rid of that tribe once for all, and the +narratives of Captain Edward Johnson and Captain John Mason, who led in +the storming and slaughter at the Indians' Mystic Fort, are as piously +relentless as anything in the Old Testament. Cromwell at Drogheda, not +long after, had soldiers no more merciless than these exterminating +Puritans, who wished to plough their fields henceforth in peace. A +generation later the storm broke again in King Philip's War. Its tales +of massacre, captivity, and single-handed fighting linger in the +American imagination still. Typical pamphlets are Mary Rowlandson's +thrilling tale of the Lancaster massacre and her subsequent captivity, +and the loud-voiced Captain Church's unvarnished description of King +Philip's death. The King, shot down like a wearied bull-moose in the +deep swamp, "fell upon his face in the mud and water, with his gun under +him." They "drew him through the mud to the upland; and a doleful, +great, naked dirty beast he looked like." The head brought only thirty +shillings at Plymouth: "scanty reward and poor encouragement," thought +Captain Church. William Hubbard, the minister of Ipswich, wrote a +comprehensive Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England, +bringing the history down to 1677. Under the better known title of +Indian Wars, this fervid and dramatic tale, penned in a quiet parsonage, +has stirred the pulses of every succeeding generation. + +The close of King Philip's War, 1676, coinciding as it does with Bacon's +Rebellion in Virginia, marks an era in the development of our +independent life. The events of that year, in the words of Professor +Tyler, "established two very considerable facts, namely, that English +colonists in America could be so provoked as to make physical resistance +to the authority of England, and, second, that English colonists in +America could, in the last resort, put down any combination of Indians +that might be formed against them. In other words, it was then made +evident that English colonists would certainly be safe in the new world, +and also that they would not always be colonists." + +While the end of an historical or literary era cannot always be thus +conveniently indicated by a date, there is no doubt that the final +quarter of the seventeenth century witnessed deep changes in the outward +life and the inner temper of the colonists. The "first fine careless +rapture" was over. Only a few aged men could recall the memory of the +first settlements. Between the founding of Jamestown and the rebellion +under the leadership of Nathaniel Bacon almost seventy years had +intervened, an interval corresponding to that which separates us from +the Mexican War. Roger Williams ended his much-enduring and beneficent +life in the flourishing town of Providence in 1684. He had already +outlived Cotton and Hooker, Shepard and Winthrop, by more than thirty +years. Inevitably men began, toward the end of the century, to take +stock of the great venture of colonization, to scrutinize their own +history and present position, to ask searching questions of themselves. +"You have better food and raiment than was in former times," wrote the +aged Roger Clark, in 1676; "but have you better hearts than your +forefathers had?" Thomas Walley's Languishing Commonwealth maintains +that "Faith is dead, and Love is cold, and Zeal is gone." Urian Oakes's +election sermon of 1670 in Cambridge is a condemnation of the prevalent +worldliness and ostentation. This period of critical inquiry and +assessment, however, also gives grounds for just pride. History, +biography, eulogy, are flourishing. The reader is reminded of that +epoch, one hundred and fifty years later, when the deaths of John Adams +and of Thomas Jefferson, falling upon the same anniversary day, the +Fourth of July, 1826, stirred all Americans to a fresh recognition of +the services wrought by the Fathers of the Republic. So it was in the +colonies at the close of the seventeenth century. Old England, in one +final paroxysm of political disgust, cast out the last Stuart in 1688. +That Revolution marks, as we have seen, the close of a long and tragic +struggle which began in the autocratic theories of James the First and +in the absolutism of Charles. Almost every phase of that momentous +conflict had its reverberation across the Atlantic, as the history of +the granting and withdrawal of colonial charters witnesses abundantly. +The American pioneers were quite aware of what was going on in England, +and they praised God or grumbled, thriftily profited by the results or +quietly nullified them, as the case might be. But all the time, while +England was rocked to its foundations, the colonists struck steadily +forward into their own independent life. + + + + +CHAPTER III. + +The Third and Fourth Generation + +When the eighteenth century opened, many signs of change were in the +air. The third generation of native-born Americans was becoming +secularized. The theocracy of New England had failed. In the height of +the tragic folly over the supposed "witchcraft" in Salem, Increase +Mather and his son Cotton had held up the hands of the judges in their +implacable work. But before five years had passed, Judge Sewall does +public penance in church for his share of the awful blunder, desiring +"to take the shame and blame of it." Robert Calef's cool pamphlet +exposing the weakness of the prosecutors' case is indeed burned by +Increase Mather in the Harvard Yard, but the liberal party are soon to +force Mather from the Presidency and to refuse that office to his son. +In the town of Boston, once hermetically sealed against heresy, there +are Baptist and Episcopal churches--and a dancing-master. Young Benjamin +Franklin, born in 1706, professes a high respect for the Mathers, but he +does not go to church, "Sunday being my studying day," and neither the +clerical nor the secular arm of Boston is long enough and strong enough +to compel that industrious apprentice into piety. + +If such was the state of New England, the laxity of New York and +Virginia needs little evidence. Contemporary travelers found the New +Yorkers singularly attached to the things of this present world. +Philadelphia was prosperous and therewith content. Virginia was a +paradise with no forbidden fruit. Hugh Jones, writing of it in 1724, +considers North Carolina "the refuge of runaways," and South Carolina +"the delight of buccaneers and pirates," but Virginia "the happy retreat +of true Britons and true Churchmen." Unluckily these Virginians, well +nourished "by the plenty of the country," have "contemptible notions of +England!" We shall hear from them again. In the meantime the witty +William Byrd of Westover describes for us his amusing survey of the +Dismal Swamp, and his excursions into North Carolina and to Governor +Spotswood's iron mines, where he reads aloud to the Widow Fleming, on a +rainy autumn day, three acts of the Beggars' Opera, just over from +London. So runs the world away, south of the Potomac. Thackeray paints +it once for all, no doubt, in the opening chapters of The Virginians. + +To discover any ambitious literary effort in this period, we must turn +northward again. In the middle colonies, and especially in Philadelphia, +which had now outgrown Boston in population, there was a quickened +interest in education and science. But the New Englanders were still the +chief makers of books. Three great names will sufficiently represent the +age: Cotton Mather, a prodigy of learning whose eyes turn back fondly to +the provincial past; Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the most consummate +intellect of the eighteenth century; and Benjamin Franklin, certainly +the most perfect exponent of its many-sided life. + +When Cotton Mather was graduated from Harvard in 1678, in his sixteenth +year, he was publicly complimented by President Oakes, in fulsome Latin, +as the grandson of Richard Mather and John Cotton. This atmosphere of +flattery, this consciousness of continuing in his own person the famous +local dynasty, surrounded and sustained him to the end. He had a less +commanding personality than his father Increase. His nervous sensibility +was excessive. His natural vanity was never subdued, though it was often +chastened by trial and bitter disappointment. But, like his father, he +was an omnivorous reader and a facile producer of books, carrying daily +such burdens of mental and spiritual excitement as would have crushed a +normal man. Increase Mather published some one hundred and fifty books +and pamphlets: Cotton Mather not less than four hundred. The Rev. John +Norton, in his sketch of John Cotton, remarks that "the hen, which +brings not forth without uncessant sitting night and day, is an apt +emblem of students." Certainly the hen is an apt emblem of the +"uncessant" sitter, the credulous scratcher, the fussy cackler who +produced the Magnalia. + +Yet he had certain elements of greatness. His tribal loyalty was +perfect. His ascetic devotion to his conception of religious truth was +absolute. His Diary, which has recently been published in full, records +his concern for the chief political events in Europe in his day, no less +than his brooding solicitude for the welfare of his townspeople, and his +agony of spirit over the lapses of his wayward eldest son. A "sincere" +man, then, as Carlyle would say, at bottom; but overlaid with such +"Jewish old clothes," such professional robings and personal plumage as +makes it difficult, save in the revealing Diary, to see the man himself. + +The Magnalia Christi Americana, treating the history of New England from +1620 to 1698, was published in a tall London folio of nearly 800 pages +in 1702. It is divided into seven books, and proceeds, by methods +entirely unique, to tell of Pilgrim and Puritan divines and governors, +of Harvard College, of the churches of New England, of marvelous events, +of Indian wars; and in general to justify, as only a member of the +Mather dynasty could justify, the ways of God to Boston men. Hawthorne +and Whittier, Longfellow and Lowell knew this book well and found much +honey in the vast carcass. To have had four such readers and a +biographer like Barrett Wendell must be gratifying to Cotton Mather in +Paradise. + +The Diary of Mather's fellow-townsman Judge Samuel Sewall has been read +more generally in recent years than anything written by Mather himself. +It was begun in 1673, nine years earlier than the first entry in +Mather's Diary, and it ends in 1729, while Mather's closes in 1724. As a +picture of everyday happenings in New England, Sewall's Diary is as far +superior to Mather's as Pepys's Diary is to George Fox's Journal in +painting the England of the Restoration. Samuel Sewall was an admirably +solid figure, keen, forceful, honest. Most readers of his Diary believe +that he really was in luck when he was rejected by the Widow Winthrop on +that fateful November day when his eye noted--in spite of his +infatuation--that "her dress was not so clean as sometime it had been. +Jehovah Jireh!" + +One pictures Cotton Mather as looking instinctively backward to the +Heroic Age of New England with pious nervous exaltation, and Samuel +Sewall as doing the day's work uprightly without taking anxious thought +of either past or future. But Jonathan Edwards is set apart from these +and other men. He is a lonely seeker after spiritual perfection, in +quest of that city "far on the world's rim," as Masefield says of it, +the city whose builder and maker is God. + +The story of Edwards's career has the simplicity and dignity of tragedy. +Born in a parsonage in the quiet Connecticut valley in 1703--the year of +John Wesley's birth--he is writing at the age of ten to disprove the +doctrine of the materiality of the soul. At twelve he is studying "the +wondrous way of the working of the spider," with a precision and +enthusiasm which would have made him a great naturalist. At fourteen he +begins his notes on The Mind and on Natural Science. He is graduated +from Yale in 1720, studies theology, and at twenty-four becomes the +colleague of his famous grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in the church at +Northampton. He marries the beautiful Sarah Pierrepont, whom he +describes in his journal in a prose rhapsody which, like his mystical +rhapsodies on religion in the same youthful period, glows with a clear +unearthly beauty unmatched in any English prose of that century. For +twenty-three years he serves the Northampton church, and his sermons win +him the rank of the foremost preacher in New England. John Wesley reads +at Oxford his account of the great revival of 1735. Whitefield comes to +visit him at Northampton. Then, in 1750, the ascetic preacher alienates +his church over issues pertaining to discipline and to the +administration of the sacrament. He is dismissed. He preaches his +"farewell sermon," like Wesley, like Emerson, like Newman, and many +another still unborn. He removes to Stockbridge, then a hamlet in the +wilderness, preaches to the Indians, and writes treatises on theology +and metaphysics, among them the world-famous Freedom of the Will. In +1757, upon the death of his son-in-law, President Aaron Burr of +Princeton, Edwards is called to the vacant Presidency. He is reluctant +to go, for though he is only fifty-four, his health has never been +robust, and he has his great book on the History of Redemption still to +write. But he accepts, finds the smallpox raging in Princeton upon his +arrival in January, 1758, is inoculated, and dies of the disease in +March--his dreams unfulfilled, his life-work once more thwarted. Close +by the tomb of this saint is the tomb of his grandson, Aaron Burr, who +killed Hamilton. + +The literary reputation of Jonathan Edwards has turned, like the +vicissitudes of his life, upon factors that could not be foreseen. His +contemporary fame was chiefly as a preacher, and was due to sermons like +those upon God Glorified in Man's Dependence and The Reality of +Spiritual Life, rather than to such discourses as the Enfield sermon, +Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which in our own day is the best +known of his deliverances. Legends have grown up around this terrific +Enfield sermon. Its fearful power over its immediate hearers cannot be +gainsaid, and it will long continue to be quoted as an example of the +length to which a Calvinistic logician of genius was compelled by his +own scheme to go. We still see the tall, sweet-faced man, worn by his +daily twelve hours of intense mental toil, leaning on one elbow in the +pulpit and reading from manuscript, without even raising his gentle +voice, those words which smote his congregation into spasms of terror +and which seem to us sheer blasphemy. + +Yet the Farewell Sermon of 1750 gives a more characteristic view of +Edwards's mind and heart, and conveys an ineffaceable impression of his +nobility of soul. His diction, like Wordsworth's, is usually plain +almost to bareness; the formal framework of his discourses is obtruded; +and he hunts objections to their last hiding-place with wearisome +pertinacity. Yet his logic is incandescent. Steel sometimes burns to the +touch like this, in the bitter winters of New England, and one wonders +whether Edwards's brain was not of ice, so pitiless does it seem. His +treatise denying the freedom of the will has given him a European +reputation comparable with that enjoyed by Franklin in science and +Jefferson in political propaganda. It was really a polemic demonstrating +the sovereignty of God, rather than pure theology or metaphysics. +Edwards goes beyond Augustine and Calvin in asserting the arbitrary will +of the Most High and in "denying to the human will any self-determining +power." He has been refuted by events and tendencies, such as the growth +of historical criticism and the widespread acceptance of the doctrine of +evolution, rather than by the might of any single antagonist. So, too, +the Dred Scott decision of Chief Justice Taney, holding that the slave +was not a citizen, was not so much answered by opponents as it was +superseded by the arbitrament of war. But the idealism of this lonely +thinker has entered deeply and permanently into the spiritual life of +his countrymen, and he will continue to be read by a few of those who +still read Plato and Dante. + +"My mother grieves," wrote Benjamin Franklin to his father in 1738, +"that one of her sons is an Arian, another an Arminian. What an Arminian +or an Arian is, I cannot say that I very well know. The truth is I make +such distinctions very little my study." To understand Franklin's +indifference to such distinctions, we must realize how completely he +represents the secularizing tendencies of his age. What a drama of +worldly adventure it all was, this roving life of the tallow-chandler's +son, who runs away from home, walks the streets of Philadelphia with the +famous loaves of bread under his arm, is diligent in business, slips +over to London, where he gives lessons in swimming and in total +abstinence, slips back to Philadelphia and becomes its leading citizen, +fights the long battle of the American colonies in London, sits in the +Continental Congress, sails to Europe to arrange that French Alliance +which brought our Revolution to a successful issue, and comes home at +last, full of years and honors, to a bland and philosophical exit from +the stage! + +He broke with every Puritan tradition. The Franklins were relatively +late comers to New England. They sprang from a long line of blacksmiths +at Ecton in Northamptonshire. The seat of the Washingtons was not far +away, and Franklin's latest biographer points out that the pink-coated +huntsmen of the Washington gentry may often have stopped at Ecton to +have their horses shod at the Franklin smithy. Benjamin's father came +out in 1685, more than fifty years after the most notable Puritan +emigration. Young Benjamin, born in 1706, was as untouched by the ardors +of that elder generation as he would have been by the visions of +Dante--an author, by the way, whom he never mentions, even as he never +mentions Shakespeare. He had no reverence for Puritan New England. To +its moral beauty, its fine severity, he was wholly blind. As a boy he +thriftily sold his Pilgrim's Progress. He became, in the new fashion of +that day, a Deist. Like a true child of the eighteenth century, his +attitude toward the seventeenth was that of amused or contemptuous +superiority. Thackeray has somewhere a charming phrase about his own +love for the back seat of the stage-coach, the seat which, in the old +coaching days, gave one a view of the receding landscape. Thackeray, +like Burke before him, loved historical associations, historical +sentiment, the backward look over the long road which humanity has +traveled. But Franklin faced the other way. He would have endorsed his +friend Jefferson's scornful sentence, "The dead have no rights." He +joined himself wholly to that eighteenth century in which his own lot +was cast, and, alike in his qualities and in his defects, he became one +of its most perfect representatives. + +To catch the full spirit of that age, turn for an instant to the London +of 1724--the year of Franklin's arrival. Thirty-six years have elapsed +since the glorious Revolution of 1688; the Whig principles, then +triumphant, have been tacitly accepted by both political parties; the +Jacobite revolt of 1715 has proved a fiasco; the country has accepted +the House of Hanover and a government by party leadership of the House +of Commons, and it does not care whether Sir Robert Walpole buys a few +rotten boroughs, so long as he maintains peace with Europe and +prosperity at home. England is weary of seventeenth century +"enthusiasm," weary of conflict, sick of idealism. She has found in the +accepted Whig principles a satisfactory compromise, a working theory of +society, a modus vivendi which nobody supposes is perfect but which will +answer the prayer appointed to be read in all the churches, "Grant us +peace in our time, O Lord." The theories to which men gave their lives +in the seventeenth century seem ghostly in their unreality; but the +prize turnips on Sir Robert's Norfolk farm, and the wines in his cellar, +and the offices at his disposal--these are very real indeed. London +merchants are making money; the squire and the parson are tranquilly +ruling the country parishes; the philosophy of John Locke is everywhere +triumphant. Mr. Pope is the poet of the hour, and his Essay on Man, +counseling acceptance of our mortal situation, is considered to be the +last word of human wisdom and of poetical elegance. In prose, the style +of the Spectator rules--an admirable style, Franklin thought, and he +imitated it patiently until its ease and urbanity had become his own. +And indeed, how much of that London of the third decade of the century +passed into the mind of the inquisitive, roving, loose-living printer's +apprentice from Philadelphia! It taught him that the tangible world is +the real world, and that nothing succeeds like success; but it never +even whispered to him that sometimes nothing damns like success. + +In his limitations, no less than in his power of assimilation, Franklin +was the representative man of his era. He had no artistic interests, no +liking for metaphysics after his brief devotion, in early manhood, to +the dialogues of Plato. He taught himself some Latin, but he came to +believe that the classics had little significance and that they should +be superseded by the modern languages. For the mediæval world he had no +patience or understanding. To these defects of his century we must add +some failings of his own. He was not always truthful. He had an +indelible streak of coarseness. His conception of the "art of virtue" +was mechanical. When Carlyle called Franklin the "father of all the +Yankees," we must remember that the Scotch prophet hated Yankees and +believed that Franklin's smooth, plausible, trader type of morality was +only a broad way to the everlasting bonfire. + +But it is folly to linger over the limitations of the tallow-chandler's +son. The catalogue of his beneficent activity is a vast one. Balzac once +characterized him as the man who invented the lightning-rod, the hoax, +and the republic. His contributions to science have to do with +electricity, earthquakes, geology, meteorology, physics, chemistry, +astronomy, mathematics, navigation of air and water, agriculture, +medicine, and hygiene. In some of these fields he did pioneer work of +lasting significance. His teachings of thrift and prudence, as +formulated in the maxims of Poor Richard, gave him a world-wide +reputation. He attacked war, like Voltaire, not so much for its +wickedness as for its folly, and cheerfully gave up many years of a long +life to the effort to promote a better understanding among the nations +of the world. + +It is perhaps needless to add what all persons who love good writing +know, that Benjamin Franklin was a most delightful writer. His letters +cover an amusing and extraordinary variety of topics. He ranges from +balloons to summer hats, and from the advantages of deep ploughing to +bifocal glasses, which, by the way, he invented. He argues for sharp +razors and cold baths, and for fresh air in the sleeping-room. He +discusses the morals of the game of chess, the art of swimming, the +evils of smoky chimneys, the need of reformed spelling. Indeed, his +passion for improvement led him not only to try his hand upon an +abridgment of the Book of Common Prayer, but to go even so far as to +propose seriously a new rendering of the Lord's Prayer. His famous +proposal for a new version of the Bible, however, which Matthew Arnold +solemnly held up to reprobation, was only a joke which Matthew Arnold +did not see--the new version of Job being, in fact, a clever bit of +political satire against party leadership in England. Even more +brilliant examples of his skill in political satire are his imaginary +Edict of the King of Prussia against England, and his famous Rules for +Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One. But I must not try to call the +roll of all the good things in Franklin's ten volumes. I will simply say +that those who know Franklin only in his Autobiography, charming as that +classic production is, have made but an imperfect acquaintance with the +range, the vitality, the vigor of this admirable craftsman who chose a +style "smooth, clear, and short," and made it serve every purpose of his +versatile and beneficent mind. + +When the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 startled the American colonies +out of their provincial sense of security and made them aware of their +real attitude toward the mother country, Franklin was in London. Eleven +years earlier, in 1754, he had offered a plan for the Union of the +Colonies, but this had not contemplated separation from England. It was +rather what we should call a scheme for imperial federation under the +British Crown. We may use his word union, however, in a different field +from that of politics. How much union of sentiment, of mental and moral +life, of literary, educational, and scientific endeavor, was there in +the colonies when the hour of self-examination came? Only the briefest +summary may be attempted here. + +As to race, these men of the third and fourth generation since the +planting of the colonies were by no means so purely English as the first +settlers. The 1,600,000 colonists in 1760 were mingled of many stocks, +the largest non-English elements being German and Scotch-Irish--that is, +Scotch who had settled for a while in Ulster before emigrating to +America. "About one-third of the colonists in 1760," says Professor +Channing, "were born outside of America." Crèvecœur's Letters from an +American Farmer thus defined the Americans: "They are a mixture of +English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this +promiscuous breed that race now called Americans has arisen." The +Atlantic seaboard, with a narrow strip inland, was fairly well covered +by local communities, differing in blood, in religion, in political +organization--a congeries of separate experiments or young utopias, +waiting for that most utopian experiment of all, a federal union. But +the dominant language of the "promiscuous breed" was English, and in the +few real centers of intellectual life the English tradition was almost +absolute. + +The merest glance at colonial journalism will confirm this estimate. The +Boston News-Letter, begun in 1704, was the first of the journals, if we +omit the single issue of Publick Occurrences in the same town in 1690. +By 1765 there were nearly fifty colonial newspapers and several +magazines. Their influence made for union, in Franklin's sense of that +word, and their literary models, like their paper, type, and even ink, +were found in London. The New England Courant, established in Boston in +1721 by James Franklin, is full of imitations of the Tatler, Spectator, +and Guardian. What is more, the Courant boasted of its office collection +of books, including Shakespeare, Milton, the Spectator, and Swift's Tale +of a Tub. ¹ This was in 1722. If we remember that no allusion to +Shakespeare has been discovered in the colonial literature of the +seventeenth century, and scarcely an allusion to the Puritan poet +Milton, and that the Harvard College Library in 1723 had nothing of +Addison, Steele, Bolingbroke, Dryden, Pope, and Swift, and had only +recently obtained copies of Milton and Shakespeare, we can appreciate +the value of James Franklin's apprenticeship in London. Perhaps we can +even forgive him for that attack upon the Mathers which threw the +conduct of the Courant, for a brief period, into the hands of his +brother Benjamin, whose turn at a London apprenticeship was soon to +come. + +¹ Cook, E. C. Literary Influences in Colonial Newspapers, 1704-1750. +N. Y., 1912. + +If we follow this younger brother to Philadelphia and to Bradford's +American Mercury or to Franklin's own Pennsylvania Gazette, or if we +study the Gazettes of Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, the +impression is still the same. The literary news is still chiefly from +London, from two months to a year late. London books are imported and +reprinted. Franklin reprints Pamela, and his Library Company of +Philadelphia has two copies of Paradise Lost for circulation in 1741, +whereas there had been no copy of that work in the great library of +Cotton Mather. American journalism then, as now, owed its vitality to a +secular spirit of curiosity about the actual world. It followed England +as its model, but it was beginning to develop a temper of its own. + +Colonial education and colonial science were likewise chiefly indebted +to London, but by 1751 Franklin's papers on electricity began to repay +the loan. A university club in New York in 1745 could have had but +fifteen members at most, for these were all the "academics" in town. Yet +Harvard had then been sending forth her graduates for more than a +century. William and Mary was founded in 1693, Yale in 1701, Princeton +in 1746, King's (now Columbia) in 1754, the University of Pennsylvania +in 1755, and Brown in 1764. These colonial colleges were mainly in the +hands of clergymen. They tended to reproduce a type of scholarship based +upon the ancient languages. The curriculum varied but little in the +different colonies, and this fact helped to produce a feeling of +fellowship among all members of the republic of letters. The men who +debated the Stamp Act were, with a few striking exceptions, men trained +in Latin and Greek, familiar with the great outlines of human history, +accustomed to the discipline of academic disputation. They knew the +ideas and the vocabulary of cultivated Europe and were conscious of no +provincial inferiority. In the study of the physical sciences, likewise, +the colonials were but little behind the mother country. The Royal +Society had its distinguished members here. The Mathers, the Dudleys, +John Winthrop of Connecticut, John Bartram, James Logan, James Godfrey, +Cadwallader Colden, and above all, Franklin himself, were winning the +respect of European students, and were teaching Americans to use their +eyes and their minds not merely upon the records of the past but in +searching out the inexhaustible meanings of the present. There is no +more fascinating story than that of the beginnings of American science +in and outside of the colleges, and this movement, like the influence of +journalism and of the higher education, counted for colonial union. + +Professor Tyler, our foremost literary student of the period, summarizes +the characteristics of colonial literature in these words: "Before the +year 1765, we find in this country, not one American people, but many +American peoples.... No cohesive principle prevailed, no centralizing +life; each little nation was working out its own destiny in its own +fashion." But he adds that with that year the colonial isolation came to +an end, and that the student must thereafter "deal with the literature +of one multitudinous people, variegated, indeed, in personal traits, but +single in its commanding ideas and in its national destinies." It is +easy to be wise after the event. Yet there was living in London in 1765, +as the agent for Pennsylvania, a shrewd and bland Colonial--an honorary +M.A. from both Harvard and Yale, a D.C.L. of Oxford and an LL.D. of St. +Andrews--who was by no means sure that the Stamp Act meant the end of +Colonialism. And Franklin's uncertainty was shared by Washington. When +the tall Virginian took command of the Continental Army as late as 1775, +he "abhorred the idea of independence." Nevertheless John Jay, writing +the second number of the Federalist in 1787, only twelve years later, +could say: "Providence has been pleased to give this one connected +country to one united people; a people descended from the same +ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, +attached to the same principles of government." + + + + +CHAPTER IV. + +The Revolution + +If we turn, however, to the literature produced in America between the +passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 and the adoption of the Constitution in +1787, we perceive that it is a literature of discord and passion. Its +spirit is not that of "one united people." Washington could indeed +declare in his Farewell Address of 1796, "With slight shades of +difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political +principles"; yet no one knew better than Washington upon what a slender +thread this political unity had often hung, and how impossible it had +been to foresee the end from the beginning. + +It is idle to look in the writings of the Revolutionary period for the +literature of beauty, for a quiet harmonious unfolding of the deeper +secrets of life. It was a time of swift and pitiless change, of action +rather than reflection, of the turning of many separate currents into +one headlong stream. "We must, indeed, all hang together," runs +Franklin's well-known witticism in Independence Hall, "or, most +assuredly, we shall all hang separately." Excellently spoken, Doctor! +And that homely, cheery, daring sentence gives the keynote of much of +the Revolutionary writing that has survived. It may be heard in the +state papers of Samuel Adams, the oratory of Patrick Henry, the +pamphlets of Thomas Paine, the satires of Freneau and Trumbull, and in +the subtle, insinuating, thrilling paragraphs of Thomas Jefferson. + +We can only glance in passing at the literature of the Lost Cause, the +Loyalist or "Tory" pleadings for allegiance to Britain. It was written +by able and honest men, like Boucher and Odell, Seabury, Leonard and +Galloway. They distrusted what Seabury called "our sovereign Lord the +Mob." They represented, in John Adams's opinion, nearly one-third of the +people of the colonies, and recent students believe that this estimate +was too low. In some colonies the Loyalists were clearly in the +majority. In all they were a menacing element, made up of the +conservative, the prosperous, the well-educated, with a mixture, of +course, of mere placemen and tuft-hunters. They composed weighty +pamphlets, eloquent sermons, and sparkling satire in praise of the old +order of things. When their cause was lost forever, they wrote gossipy +letters from their exile in London or pathetic verses in their new home +in Nova Scotia and Ontario. Their place in our national life and +literature has never been filled, and their talents and virtues are +never likely to receive adequate recognition. They took the wrong fork +of the road. + +There were gentle spirits, too, in this period, endowed with delicate +literary gifts, but quite unsuited for the clash of +controversy--members, in Crèvecœur's touching words, of the "secret +communion among good men throughout the world." "I am a lover of peace, +what must I do?" asks Crèvecœur in his Letters from an American Farmer. +"I was happy before this unfortunate Revolution. I feel that I am no +longer so, therefore I regret the change. My heart sometimes seems tired +with beating, it wants rest like my eyelids, which feel oppressed with +so many watchings." Crèvecœur, an immigrant from Normandy, was certainly +no weakling, but he felt that the great idyllic American +adventure--which he described so captivatingly in his chapter entitled +What is an American--was ending tragically in civil war. Another +white-souled itinerant of that day was John Woolman of New Jersey, whose +Journal, praised by Charles Lamb and Channing and edited by Whittier, is +finding more readers in the twentieth century than it won in the +nineteenth. "A man unlettered," said Whittier, "but with natural +refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart +enters into his language." Woolman died at fifty-two in far-away York, +England, whither he had gone to attend a meeting of the Society of +Friends. + +The three tall volumes of the Princeton edition of the poems of Philip +Freneau bear the sub-title, "Poet of the American Revolution." But our +Revolution, in truth, never had an adequate poet. The prose-men, such as +Jefferson, rose nearer the height of the great argument than did the men +of rhyme. Here and there the struggle inspired a brisk ballad like +Francis Hopkinson's Battle of the Kegs, a Hudibrastic satire like +Trumbull's McFingal, or a patriotic song like Timothy Dwight's Columbia. +Freneau painted from his own experience the horrors of the British +prison-ship, and celebrated, in cadences learned from Gray and Collins, +the valor of the men who fell at Eutaw Springs. There was patriotic +verse in extraordinary profusion, but its literary value is slight, and +it reveals few moods of the American mind that are not more perfectly +conveyed through oratory, the pamphlet, and the political essay. The +immediate models of this Revolutionary verse were the minor British +bards of the eighteenth century, a century greatly given to +verse-writing, but endowed by Heaven with the "prose-reason" mainly. The +reader of Burton E. Stevenson's collection of Poems of American History +can easily compare the contemporary verse inspired by the events of the +Revolution with the modern verse upon the same historic themes. He will +see how slenderly equipped for song were most of the later +eighteenth-century Americans and how unfavorable to poetry was the tone +of that hour. + +Freneau himself suffered, throughout his long career, from the +depressing indifference of his public to the true spirit of poetry. "An +old college mate of mine," said James Madison--who was by tradition +Freneau's room-mate at Princeton in the class of 1771--"a poet and man +of literary and refined tastes, knowing nothing of the world." When but +three years out of college, the cautious Madison wrote to another +friend: "Poetry wit and Criticism Romances Plays &c captivated me much: +but I begin to discover that they deserve but a moderate portion of a +mortal's Time and that something more substantial more durable more +profitable befits our riper age." Madison was then at the ripe age of +twenty-three! Professor Pattee, Freneau's editor, quotes these words to +illustrate the "common sense" atmosphere of the age which proved fatal +to Freneau's development. Yet the sturdy young New Yorker, of Huguenot +descent, is a charming figure, and his later malevolence was shown only +to his political foes. After leaving Princeton he tries teaching, the +law, the newspaper, the sea; he is aflame with patriotic zeal; he +writes, like most American poets, far too much for his own reputation. +As the editor of the National Gazette in Philadelphia, he becomes +involved in the bitter quarrel between his chief, Jefferson, and +Alexander Hamilton. His attachment to the cause of the French Revolution +makes him publish baseless attacks upon Washington. By and by he retires +to a New Jersey farm, still toying with journalism, still composing +verses. He turns patriotic poet once more in the War of 1812; but the +public has now forgotten him. He lives on in poverty and seclusion, and +in his eightieth year loses his way in a snowstorm and perishes +miserably--this in 1832, the year of the death of the great Sir Walter +Scott, who once had complimented Freneau by borrowing one of his best +lines of poetry. + +It is in the orations and pamphlets and state papers inspired by the +Revolutionary agitation that we find the most satisfactory expression of +the thought and feeling of that generation. Its typical literature is +civic rather than æsthetic, a sort of writing which has been incidental +to the accomplishing of some political, social, or moral purpose, and +which scarcely regards itself as literature at all. James Otis's +argument against the Writs of Assistance in Massachusetts in 1761, and +Patrick Henry's speech in the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1765, mark +epochs in the emotional life of these communities. They were reported +imperfectly or not at all, but they can no more be ignored in an +assessment of our national experience than editorials, sermons, or +conversations which have expressed the deepest feelings of a day and +then have perished beyond resurrection. + +Yet if natural orators like Otis and Henry be denied a strictly +"literary" rating because their surviving words are obviously inadequate +to account for the popular effect of their speeches, it is still +possible to measure the efficiency of the pamphleteer. When John Adams +tells us that "James Otis was Isaiah and Ezekiel united," we must take +his word for the impression which Otis's oratory left upon his mind. But +John Adams's own writings fill ten stout volumes which invite our +judgment. The "truculent and sarcastic splendor" of his hyperboles need +not blind us to his real literary excellencies, such as clearness, +candor, vigor of phrase, freshness of idea. A testy, rugged, "difficult" +person was John Adams, but he grew mellower with age, and his latest +letters and journals are full of whimsical charm. + +John Adams's cousin Samuel was not precisely a charming person. Bigoted, +tireless, secretive, this cunning manipulator of political passions +followed many tortuous paths. His ability for adroit misstatement of an +adversary's position has been equaled but once in our history. But to +the casual reader of his four volumes, Samuel Adams seems ever to be +breathing the liberal air of the town-meeting: everything is as plainly +obvious as a good citizen can make it. He has, too, the large utterance +of the European liberalism of his day. "Resolved," read his Resolutions +of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts in 1765, "that there +are certain essential rights of the British constitution of government +which are founded in the law of God and nature and are the common rights +of mankind." In his statement of the Rights of the Colonists (1772) we +are assured that "among the natural rights of the colonists are these, +First, a right to Life; secondly to Liberty; thirdly to Property.... All +men have a Right to remain in a State of Nature as long as they +please.... When Men enter into Society, it is by voluntary consent." +Jean-Jacques himself could not be more bland, nor at heart more fiercely +demagogic. + +"Tom" Paine would have been no match for "Sam" Adams in a town-meeting, +but he was an even greater pamphleteer. He had arrived from England in +1774, at the age of thirty-eight, having hitherto failed in most of his +endeavors for a livelihood. "Rebellious Staymaker; unkempt," says +Carlyle; but General Charles Lee noted that there was "genius in his +eyes," and he bore a letter of introduction from Franklin commending him +as an "ingenious, worthy young man," which obtained for him a position +on the Pennsylvania Magazine. Before he had been a year on American +soil, Paine was writing the most famous pamphlet of our political +literature, Common Sense, which appeared in January, 1776. "A style +hitherto unknown on this side of the Atlantic," wrote Edmund Randolph. +Yet this style of familiar talk to the crowd had been used seventy years +earlier by Defoe and Swift, and it was to be employed again by a gaunt +American frontiersman who was born in 1809, the year of Thomas Paine's +death. The Crisis, a series of thirteen pamphlets, of which the first +was issued in December, 1776, seemed to justify the contemporary opinion +that the "American cause owed as much to the pen of Paine as to the +sword of Washington." Paine, who was now serving in the army, might have +heard his own words, "These are the times that try men's souls," read +aloud, by Washington's orders, to the ragged troops just before they +crossed the Delaware to win the victory of Trenton. The best known +productions of Paine's subsequent career, The Rights of Man and The Age +of Reason, were written in Europe, but they were read throughout +America. The reputation of the "rebellious Staymaker" has suffered from +certain grimy habits and from the ridiculous charge of atheism. He was +no more an atheist than Franklin or Jefferson. In no sense an original +thinker, he could impart to outworn shreds of deistic controversy and to +shallow generalizations about democracy a personal fervor which +transformed them and made his pages gay and bold and clear as a trumpet. + +Clear and bold and gay was Alexander Hamilton likewise; and his literary +services to the Revolution are less likely to be underestimated than +Thomas Paine's. They began with that boyish speech in "the Fields" of +New York City in 1774 and with The Farmer Refuted, a reply to Samuel +Seabury's Westchester Farmer. They were continued in extraordinary +letters, written during Hamilton's military career, upon the defects of +the Articles of Confederation and of the finances of the Confederation. +Hamilton contributed but little to the actual structure of the new +Constitution, but as a debater he fought magnificently and triumphantly +for its adoption by the Convention of the State of New York in 1788. +Together with Jay and Madison he defended the fundamental principles of +the Federal Union in the remarkable series of papers known as the +Federalist. These eighty-five papers, appearing over the signature +"Publius" in two New York newspapers between October, 1787, and April, +1788, owed their conception largely to Hamilton, who wrote more than +half of them himself. In manner they are not unlike the substantial Whig +literature of England, and in political theory they have little in +common with the Revolutionary literature which we have been considering. +The reasoning is close, the style vigorous but neither warmed by passion +nor colored by the individual emotions of the author. The Federalist +remains a classic example of the civic quality of our post-Revolutionary +American political writing, broadly social in its outlook, well informed +as to the past, confident--but not reckless--of the future. Many +Americans still read it who would be shocked by Tom Paine and bored with +Edmund Burke. It has none of the literary genius of either of those +writers, but its formative influence upon successive generations of +political thinking has been steadying and sound. + +In fact, our citizen literature cannot be understood aright if one fails +to observe that its effect has often turned, not upon mere verbal skill, +but upon the weight of character behind the words. Thus the grave and +reserved George Washington says of the Constitution of 1787: "Let us +raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair; the event +is in the hand of God." The whole personality of the great Virginian is +back of that simple, perfect sentence. It brings us to our feet, like a +national anthem. + +One American, no doubt our most gifted man of letters of that century, +passed most of the Revolutionary period abroad, in the service of his +country. Benjamin Franklin was fifty-nine in the year of the Stamp Act. +When he returned from France in 1785 he was seventy-nine, but he was +still writing as admirably as ever when he died at eighty-four. We +cannot dismiss this singular, varied, and fascinating American better +than by quoting the letter which George Washington wrote to him in +September, 1789. It has the dignity and formality of the eighteenth +century, but it is warm with tested friendship and it glows with deep +human feeling: "If to be venerated for benevolence, if to be admired for +talents, if to be esteemed for patriotism, if to be beloved for +philanthropy, can gratify the human mind, you must have the pleasing +consolation to know that you have not lived in vain. And I flatter +myself that it will not be ranked among the least grateful occurrences +of your life to be assured, that, so long as I retain my memory, you +will be recollected with respect, veneration, and affection by your +sincere friend, George Washington." + +There remains another Virginian, the symbol of the Revolutionary age, +the author of words more widely known around the globe than any other +words penned by an American. "Thomas Jefferson," writes the latest of +his successors in the Presidency, "was not a man of the people, but he +was a man of such singular insight that he saw that all the roots of +generous power come from the people." On his father's side Jefferson +came from sound yeoman stock, in which Welsh blood ran. His mother was a +Virginia Randolph. Born in Albemarle County, near the "little +mountain"--Monticello--where he built a mansion for his bride and where +he lies buried, the tall, strong, red-haired, gray-eyed, gifted boy was +reputed the best shot, the best rider, the best fiddle-player in the +county. He studied hard at William and Mary over his Greek, Latin, +French, Italian, and Spanish, but he also frequented the best society of +the little capital. He learned to call himself a Deist and to theorize +about ideal commonwealths. There was already in him that latent +radicalism which made him strike down, as soon as he had the power, two +of the fundamental principles of the society into which he was born, the +principle of entailed property and that of church establishment. + +Such was the youth of twenty-two who was thrilled in 1765 by the Stamp +Act. In the ten years of passionate discussion which followed, two +things became clear: first, that there had long existed among the +colonists very radical theoretical notions of political freedom; and +second, that there was everywhere a spirit of practical conservatism. +Jefferson illustrates the union of these two tendencies. + +He took his seat in the Continental Congress in June, 1775. He was only +thirty-two, but he had already written, in the summer of 1774, A Summary +View of the Rights of British America which had been published in +England by Burke, himself a judge of good writing and sound politics. +Jefferson had also prepared in 1775 the Address of the Virginia House of +Burgesses. For these reasons he was placed at the head of the Committee +for drafting the Declaration of Independence. We need not linger over +the familiar circumstances of its composition. Everybody knows how +Franklin and Adams made a few verbal alterations in the first draft, how +the committee of five then reported it to the Congress, which proceeded +to cut out about one-fourth of the matter, while Franklin tried to +comfort the writhing author with his cheerful story about the sign of +John Thompson the hatter. Forty-seven years afterwards, in reply to the +charge of lack of originality brought against the Declaration by Timothy +Pickering and John Adams--charges which have been repeated at intervals +ever since--Jefferson replied philosophically: "Whether I gathered my +ideas from reading or reflection I do not know. I know only that I +turned neither to book nor pamphlet while writing it. I did not consider +it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer +no sentiment which had ever been expressed before." O wise young man, +and fundamentally Anglo-Saxon young man, to turn his back, in that +crisis, to the devil of mere cleverness, and stick to recognized facts +and accepted sentiments! But his pen retains its cunning in spite of +him; and the drop of hot Welsh blood tells; and the cosmopolitan reading +and thinking tell; and they transform what Pickering called a +"commonplace compilation, its sentiments hackneyed in Congress for two +years before," into an immortal manifesto to mankind. + +Its method is the simplest. The preamble is philosophical, dealing with +"self-evident" truths. Today the men who dislike or doubt these truths +dismiss the preamble as "theoretical," or, to use another term of +derogation favored by reactionaries, "French." But if the preamble be +French and philosophical, the specific charges against the King are very +English and practical. Here are certain facts, presented no doubt with +consummate rhetorical skill, but facts, undeniably. The Anglo-Saxon in +Jefferson is basal, racial; the turn for academic philosophizing after +the French fashion is personal, acquired; but the range and sweep and +enduring vitality of this matchless state paper lie in its illumination +of stubborn facts by general principles, its decent respect to the +opinions of mankind, its stately and noble utterance of national +sentiments and national reasons to a "candid world." + +It has long been the fashion, among a certain school of half-hearted +Americans--and unless I am mistaken, the teaching has increased during +the last decades--to minimize the value of Jefferson's "self-evident +truths." Rufus Choate, himself a consummate rhetorician, sneered at +those "glittering generalities," and countless college-bred men, some of +them occupying the highest positions, have echoed the sneer. The essence +of the objection to Jefferson's platform lies of course in his phrase, +"all men are created equal," with the subsidiary phrase about +governments "deriving their just powers from the consent of the +governed." Editors and congressmen and even college professors have +proclaimed themselves unable to assent to these phrases of the +Declaration, and unable even to understand them. These objectors belong +partly, I think, in Jefferson's category of "nervous +persons"--"anti-republicans," as he goes on to define them--"whose +languid fibres have more analogy with a passive than an active state of +things." Other objectors to the phrase "all men are created equal" have +had an obvious personal or political motive for refusing assent to the +proposition. But "no intelligent man," says one of Jefferson's +biographers, "has ever misconstrued it [the Declaration] except +intentionally." + +Nobody would claim today that Thomas Jefferson's statement of the +sentiments and reasons for the independence of the thirteen British +colonies in 1776 was an adequate handbook of political wisdom, fit for +all the exigencies of contemporary American democracy. It is not that. +It is simply, in Lincoln's phrase, one of "the standard maxims of free +society" which no democracy can safely disregard. + +Jefferson's long life, so varied, so flexible, so responsive to the +touch of popular forces, illustrates the process by which the Virginia +mind of 1743 became the nationalized, unionized mind of 1826. It is +needless here to dwell upon the traits of his personal character: his +sweetness of spirit, his stout-heartedness in disaster, his scorn of +money, his love for the intellectual life. "I have no ambition to govern +men," he wrote to Edward Rutledge. He was far happier talking about +Greek and Anglo-Saxon with Daniel Webster before the fire-place of +Monticello than he ever was in the presidential chair. His +correspondence was enormous. His writings fill twenty volumes. In his +theories of education he was fifty years ahead of his time; in his +absolute trust in humanity he was generations ahead of it. "I am not one +of those who fear the people," he declared proudly. It is because of +this touching faith, this invincible and matchless ardor, that Jefferson +is today remembered. He foreshadowed Lincoln. His belief in the +inarticulate common people is rewarded by their obstinate fidelity to +his name as a type and symbol. "I know of no safe depository of the +ultimate powers of society but the people themselves," wrote Jefferson, +and with the people themselves is the depository of his fame. + + + + +CHAPTER V. + +The Knickerbocker Group + +The Fourth of July orator for 1826 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was +Edward Everett. Although only thirty-two he was already a distinguished +speaker. In the course of his oration he apostrophized John Adams and +Thomas Jefferson as venerable survivors of that momentous day, fifty +years earlier, which had witnessed our Declaration of Independence. But +even as Everett was speaking, the aged author of the Declaration +breathed his last at Monticello, and in the afternoon of that same day +Adams died also, murmuring, it is said, with his latest breath, and as +if with the whimsical obstinacy of an old man who hated to be beaten by +his ancient rival, "Thomas Jefferson still lives." But Jefferson was +already gone. + +On the first of August, Everett commemorated the career of the two +Revolutionary leaders, and on the following day a greater than Everett, +Daniel Webster, pronounced the famous eulogy in Faneuil Hall. Never were +the thoughts and emotions of a whole country more adequately voiced than +in this commemorative oratory. Its pulse was high with national pride +over the accomplishments of half a century. "I ask," Everett declared, +"whether more has not been done to extend the domain of civilization, in +fifty years, since the Declaration of Independence, than would have been +done in five centuries of continued colonial subjection?" Webster +asserted in his peroration: "It cannot be denied, but by those who would +dispute against the sun, that with America, and in America, a new era +commences in human affairs. This era is distinguished by free +representative governments, by entire religious liberty, by improved +systems of national intercourse, by a newly awakened and an +unconquerable spirit of free enquiry, and by a diffusion of knowledge +through the community such as has been before altogether unknown and +unheard of." + +Was this merely the "tall talk" then so characteristic of American +oratory and soon to be satirized in Martin Chuzzlewit? Or was it +prompted by a deep and true instinct for the significance of the vast +changes that had come over American life since 1776? The external +changes were familiar enough to Webster's auditors: the opening of +seemingly illimitable territory through the Louisiana Purchase, the +development of roads, canals, and manufactures; a rapid increase in +wealth and population; a shifting of political power due to the rise of +the new West--in a word, the evidences of irrepressible national energy. +But this energy was inadequately expressed by the national literature. +The more cultivated Americans were quite aware of this deficiency. It +was confessed by the pessimistic Fisher Ames and by the ardent young men +who in 1815 founded The North American Review. British critics in The +Edinburgh and The Quarterly, commenting upon recent works of travel in +America, pointed out the literary poverty of the American soil. Sydney +Smith, by no means the most offensive of these critics, declared in +1820: "During the thirty or forty years of their independence they have +done absolutely nothing for the sciences, for the arts, for +literature.... In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American +book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or +statue?" + +Sydney Smith's question "Who reads an American book?" has outlived all +of his own clever volumes. Even while he was asking it, London was +eagerly reading Irving's Sketch Book. In 1821 came Fenimore Cooper's Spy +and Bryant's Poems, and by 1826, when Webster was announcing in his +rolling orotund that Adams and Jefferson were no more, the London and +Paris booksellers were covering their stalls with Cooper's The Last of +the Mohicans. Irving, Cooper, and Bryant are thus the pioneers in a new +phase of American literary activity, often called, for convenience in +labeling, the Knickerbocker Group because of the identification of these +men with New York. And close behind these leaders come a younger +company, destined likewise, in the shy boyish words of Hawthorne, one of +the number, "to write books that would be read in England." For by 1826 +Hawthorne and Longfellow were out of college and were trying to learn to +write. Ticknor, Prescott, and Bancroft, somewhat older men, were +settling to their great tasks. Emerson was entering upon his duties as a +minister. Edgar Allan Poe, at that University of Virginia which +Jefferson had just founded, was doubtless revising Tamerlane and Other +Poems which he was to publish in Boston in the following year. Holmes +was a Harvard undergraduate. Garrison had just printed Whittier's first +published poem in the Newburyport Free Press. Walt Whitman was a +barefooted boy on Long Island, and Lowell, likewise seven years of age, +was watching the birds in the tree-tops of Elmwood. But it was +Washington Irving who showed all of these men that nineteenth century +England would be interested in American books. + +The very word Knickerbocker is one evidence of the vitality of Irving's +happy imaginings. In 1809 he had invented a mythical Dutch historian of +New York named Diedrich Knickerbocker and fathered upon him a witty +parody of Dr. Mitchill's grave Picture of New York. To read Irving's +chapters today is to witness one of the rarest and most agreeable of +phenomena, namely, the actual beginning of a legend which the world is +unwilling to let die. The book made Sir Walter Scott's sides ache with +laughter, and reminded him of the humor of Swift and Sterne. But certain +New Yorkers were slow to see the joke. + +Irving was himself a New Yorker, born just at the close of the +Revolution, of a Scotch father and English mother. His youth was +pleasantly idle, with a little random education, much theater-going, and +plentiful rambles with a gun along the Hudson River. In 1804 he went +abroad for his health, returned and helped to write the light social +satire of the Salmagundi Papers, and became, after the publication of +the Knickerbocker History, a local celebrity. Sailing for England in +1815 on business, he stayed until 1832 as a roving man of letters in +England and Spain and then as Secretary of the American Legation in +London. The Sketch Book, Bracebridge Hall, and Tales of a Traveler are +the best known productions of Irving's fruitful residence in England. +The Life of Columbus, the Conquest of Granada, and The Alhambra +represent his first sojourn in Spain. After his return to America he +became fascinated with the Great West, made the travels described in his +Tour of the Prairies, and told the story of roving trappers and the fur +trade in Captain Bonneville and Astoria. For four years he returned to +Spain as American Minister. In his last tranquil years at Sunnyside on +the Hudson, where he died in 1859, he wrote graceful lives of Goldsmith +and of Washington. + +Such a glance at the shelf containing Irving's books suggests but little +of that personal quality to which he owes his significance as an +interpreter of America to the Old World. This son of a narrow, hard, +Scotch dealer in cutlery, this drifter about town when New York was only +a big slovenly village, this light-hearted scribbler of satire and +sentiment, was a gentleman born. His boyhood and youth were passed in +that period of Post-Revolutionary reaction which exhibits the United +States in some of its most unlovely aspects. Historians like Henry Adams +and McMaster have painted in detail the low estate of education, +religion, and art as the new century began. The bitter feeling of the +nascent nation toward Great Britain was intensified by the War of 1812. +The Napoleonic Wars had threatened to break the last threads of our +friendship for France, and suspicion of the Holy Alliance led to an era +of national self-assertion of which the Monroe Doctrine was only one +expression. The raw Jacksonism of the West seemed to be gaining upon the +older civilizations represented by Virginia and Massachusetts. The +self-made type of man began to pose as the genuine American. And at this +moment came forward a man of natural lucidity and serenity of mind, of +perfect poise and good temper, who knew both Europe and America and felt +that they ought to know one another better and to like one another more. +That was Irving's service as an international mediator. He diffused +sweetness and light in an era marked by bitterness and obscuration. It +was a triumph of character as well as of literary skill. + +But the skill was very noticeable also. Irving's prose is not that of +the Defoe-Swift-Franklin-Paine type of plain talk to the crowd. It is +rather an inheritance from that other eighteenth century tradition, the +conversation of the select circle. Its accents were heard in Steele and +Addison and were continued in Goldsmith, Sterne, Cowper, and Charles +Lamb. Among Irving's successors, George William Curtis and Charles +Dudley Warner and William Dean Howells have been masters of it likewise. +It is mellow human talk, delicate, regardful, capable of exquisite +modulation. With instinctive artistic taste, Irving used this old and +sound style upon fresh American material. In Rip van Winkle and The +Legend of Sleepy Hollow he portrayed his native valley of the Hudson, +and for a hundred years connoisseurs of style have perceived the +exquisite fitness of the language to the images and ideas which Irving +desired to convey. To render the Far West of that epoch this style is +perhaps not "big" and broad enough, but when used as Irving uses it in +describing Stratford and Westminster Abbey and an Old English Christmas, +it becomes again a perfect medium. Hawthorne adopted it for Our Old +Home, and Englishmen recognized it at once as a part of their own +inheritance, enriched, like certain wines, by the voyage across the +Atlantic and home again. Irving wrote of England, Mr. Warner once said, +as Englishmen would have liked to write about it. When he described the +Alhambra and Granada and the Moors, it was the style, rich both in +physical sensation and in dreamlike reverie, which revealed to the world +the quick American appreciation of foreign scenes and characters. Its +key is sympathy. + +Irving's popularity has endured in England. It suffered during the +middle of the century in his own country, for the strongest New England +authors taught the public to demand more thought and passion than were +in Irving's nature. Possibly the nervous, journalistic style of the +twentieth century allows too scanty leisure of mind for the full +enjoyment of the Knickerbocker flavor. Yet such changes as these in +literary fashion scarcely affect the permanent service of Irving to our +literature. He immortalized a local type--the New York Dutchman--and +local legends, like that of Rip van Winkle; he used the framework of the +narrative essay to create something almost like the perfected short +story of Poe and Hawthorne; he wrote prose with unfailing charm in an +age when charm was lacking; and, if he had no message, it should be +remembered that some of the most useful ambassadors have had none save +to reveal, with delicacy and tact and humorous kindness, the truth that +foreign persons have feelings precisely like our own. + +Readers of Sir Walter Scott's Journal may remember his account of an +evening party in Paris in 1826 where he met Fenimore Cooper, then in the +height of his European reputation. "So the Scotch and American lions +took the field together," wrote Sir Walter, who loved to be generous. +The Last of the Mohicans, then just published, threatened to eclipse the +fame of Ivanhoe. Cooper, born in 1789, was eighteen years younger than +the Wizard of the North, and was more deeply indebted to him than he +knew. For it was Scott who had created the immense nineteenth century +audience for prose fiction, and who had evolved a kind of formula for +the novel, ready for Cooper's use. Both men were natural story-tellers. +Scott had the richer mind and the more fully developed historical +imagination. Both were out-of-doors men, lovers of manly adventure and +of natural beauty. But the American had the good fortune to be able to +utilize in his books his personal experiences of forest and sea and to +reveal to Europe the real romance of the American wilderness. + +That Cooper was the first to perceive the artistic possibilities of this +romance, no one would claim. Brockden Brown, a Quaker youth of +Philadelphia, a disciple of the English Godwin, had tried his hand at +the very end of the eighteenth century upon American variations of the +Gothic romance then popular in England. Brown had a keen eye for the +values of the American landscape and even of the American Indian. He had +a knack for passages of ghastly power, as his descriptions of maniacs, +murderers, sleep-walkers, and solitaries abundantly prove. But he had +read too much and lived too little to rival the masters of the art of +fiction. And there was a traveled Frenchman, Chateaubriand, surely an +expert in the art of eloquent prose, who had transferred to the pages of +his American Indian stories, Atala and René, the mystery and enchantment +of our dark forests and endless rivers. But Chateaubriand, like Brockden +Brown, is feverish. A taint of old-world eroticism and despair hovers +like a miasma over his magnificent panorama of the wilderness. Cooper, +like Scott, is masculine. + +He was a Knickerbocker only by adoption. Born in New Jersey, his +childhood was spent in the then remote settlement of Cooperstown in +Central New York. He had a little schooling at Albany, and a brief and +inglorious career at Yale with the class of 1806. He went to sea for two +years, and then served for three years in the United States Navy upon +Lakes Ontario and Champlain, the very scene of some of his best stories. +In 1811 he married, resigned from the Navy, and settled upon a little +estate in Westchester County, near New York. Until the age of thirty, he +was not in the least a bookman, but a healthy man of action. Then, as +the well-known anecdote goes, he exclaims to his wife, after reading a +stupid English novel, "I believe I could write a better story myself." +Precaution (1820) was the result, but whether it was better than the +unknown English book, no one can now say. It was bad enough. Yet the +next year Cooper published The Spy, one of the finest of his novels, +which was instantly welcomed in England and translated in France. Then +came, in swift succession, The Pioneers, the first Leather-Stocking tale +in order of composition, and The Pilot, to show that Scott's Pirate was +written by a landsman! Lionel Lincoln and The Last of the Mohicans +followed. The next seven years were spent in Europe, mainly in France, +where The Prairie and The Red Rover were written. Cooper now looked back +upon his countrymen with eyes of critical detachment, and made ready to +tell them some of their faults. He came home to Cooperstown in 1833, the +year after Irving's return to America. He had won, deservedly, a great +fame, which he proceeded to imperil by his combativeness with his +neighbors and his harsh strictures upon the national character, due +mainly to his lofty conception of the ideal America. He continued to +spin yarns of sea and shore, and to write naval history. The tide of +fashion set against him in the eighteen-forties when Bulwer and Dickens +rode into favor, but the stout-hearted old pioneer could afford to bide +his time. He died in 1851, just as Mrs. Stowe was writing Uncle Tom's +Cabin. + +Two generations have passed since then, and Cooper's place in our +literature remains secure. To have written our first historical novel, +The Spy, our first sea-story, The Pilot, and to have created the +Leather-Stocking series, is glory enough. In his perception of masculine +character, Cooper ranks with Fielding. His sailors, his scouts and +spies, his good and bad Indians, are as veritable human figures as +Squire Western. Long Tom Coffin, Harvey Birch, Hawk-Eye, and +Chingachgook are physically and morally true to life itself. Read the +Leather-Stocking books in the order of the events described, beginning +with The Deerslayer, then The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The +Pioneers, and ending with the vast darkening horizon of The Prairie and +the death of the trapper, and one will feel how natural and inevitable +are the fates of the personages and the alterations in the life of the +frontier. These books vary in their poetic quality and in the degree of +their realism, but to watch the evolution of the leading figure is to +see human life in its actual texture. + +Clever persons and pedantic persons have united to find fault with +certain elements of Cooper's art. Mark Twain, in one of his least +inspired moments, selected Cooper's novels for attack. Every grammar +school teacher is ready to point out that his style is often prolix and +his sentences are sometimes ungrammatical. Amateurs even criticize +Cooper's seamanship, although it seemed impeccable to Admiral Mahan. No +doubt one must admit the "helplessness, propriety, and incapacity" of +most of Cooper's women, and the dreadfulness of his bores, particularly +the Scotchmen, the doctors, and the naturalists. Like Sir Walter, Cooper +seems to have taken but little pains in the deliberate planning of his +plots. Frequently he accepts a ready-made formula of villain and hero, +predicament and escape, renewed crisis and rescue, mystification and +explanation, worthy of a third-rate novelist. His salvation lies in his +genius for action, the beauty and grandeur of his landscapes, the +primitive veracity of his children of nature. + +Cooper was an elemental man, and he comprehended, by means of something +deeper than mere artistic instinct, the feelings of elemental humanity +in the presence of the wide ocean or of the deep woods. He is as healthy +and sane as Fielding, and he possesses an additional quality which all +of the purely English novelists lack. It was the result of his youthful +sojourn in the wilderness. Let us call it the survival in him of an +aboriginal imagination. Cooper reminds one somehow of a moose--an +ungraceful creature perhaps, but indubitably big, as many a hunter has +suddenly realized when he has come unexpectedly upon a moose that +whirled to face him in the twilight silence of a northern wood. + +Something of this far-off and gigantic primitivism inheres also in the +poetry of William Cullen Bryant. His portrait, with the sweeping white +beard and the dark folds of the cloak, suggests the Bard as the Druids +might have known him. But in the eighteen-thirties and forties, Mr. +Bryant's alert, clean-shaven face, and energetic gait as he strode down +Broadway to the Evening Post office, suggested little more than a +vigorous and somewhat radical editor of an increasingly prosperous +Democratic newspaper. There was nothing of the Fringed Gentian or Yellow +Violet about him. Like so many of the Knickerbockers, Bryant was an +immigrant to New York; in fact, none of her adopted men of letters have +represented so perfectly the inherited traits of the New England +Puritan. To understand his long and honorable public life it is +necessary to know something of the city of his choice, but to enter into +the spirit of his poetry one must go back to the hills of western +Massachusetts. + +Bryant had a right to his cold-weather mind. He came from Mayflower +stock. His father, Dr. Peter Bryant of Cummington, was a sound country +physician, with liberal preferences in theology, Federalist views in +politics, and a library of seven hundred volumes, rich in poetry. The +poet's mother records his birth in her diary in terse words which have +the true Spartan tang: "Nov. 3, 1794. Stormy, wind N. E. Churned. Seven +in the evening a son born." Two days later the November wind shifted. +"Nov. 5, 1794. Clear, wind N. W. Made Austin a coat. Sat up all day. +Went into the kitchen." The baby, it appears, had an abnormally large +head and was dipped, day after day, in rude hydropathy, into an icy +spring. A precocious childhood was followed by a stern, somewhat +unhappy, but aspiring boyhood. The little fellow, lying prone with his +brothers before the firelight of the kitchen, reading English poetry +from his father's library, used to pray that he too might become a poet. +At thirteen he produced a satire on Jefferson, The Embargo, which his +proud Federalist father printed at Boston in 1808. The youth had nearly +one year at Williams College, over the mountain ranges to the west. He +wished to continue his education at Yale, but his father had no money +for this greater venture, and the son remained at home. There, in the +autumn of 1811, on the bleak hills, he composed the first draft of +Thanatopsis. He was seventeen, and he had been reading Blair's Grave and +the poems of the consumptive Henry Kirke White. He hid his verses in a +drawer, and five years later his father found them, shed tears over +them, and sent them to the North American Review, where they were +published in September, 1817. + +In the meantime the young man had studied law, though with dislike of +it, and with the confession that he sometimes read The Lyrical Ballads +when he might have been reading Blackstone. One December afternoon in +1815, he was walking from Cummington to Plainfield--aged twenty-one, and +looking for a place in which to settle as a lawyer. Across the vivid +sunset flew a black duck, as solitary and homeless as himself. The bird +seemed an image of his own soul, "lone wandering but not lost." Before +he slept that night he had composed the poem To a Waterfowl. No more +authentic inspiration ever visited a poet, and though Bryant wrote verse +for more than sixty years after that crimson sky had paled into chill +December twilight, his lines never again vibrated with such +communicative passion. + +Bryant's ensuing career revealed the steady purpose, the stoicism, the +reticence of the Puritan. It was highly successful, judged even by +material standards. Thanatopsis had been instantly regarded in 1817 as +the finest poem yet produced in America. The author was invited to +contribute to the North American Review an essay on American poetry, and +this, like all of Bryant's prose work, was admirably written. He +delivered his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem, The Ages, in 1821, the year +of Emerson's graduation. After a brief practice of the law in Great +Barrington, he entered in 1826 into the unpromising field of journalism +in New York. While other young Knickerbockers wasted their literary +strength on trifles and dissipated their moral energies, Bryant held +steadily to his daily task. His life in town was sternly ascetic, but he +allowed himself long walks in the country, and he continued to meditate +a somewhat thankless Muse. In 1832 he visited his brothers on the +Illinois prairies, and stopped one day to chat with a "tall awkward +uncouth lad" of racy conversational powers, who was leading his company +of volunteers into the Black Hawk War. The two men were destined to meet +again in 1860, when Bryant presided at that Cooper Union address of +Lincoln's which revealed to New York and to the country that the former +captain of volunteers was now a king of men. Lincoln was embarrassed on +that occasion, it is said, by Bryant's fastidious, dignified presence. +Not so Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had seen the poet in Rome, two years +before. "There was a weary look in his face," wrote Hawthorne, "as if he +were tired of seeing things and doing things.... He uttered neither +passion nor poetry, but excellent good sense, and accurate information, +on whatever subject transpired; a very pleasant man to associate with, +but rather cold, I should imagine, if one should seek to touch his heart +with one's own." Such was the impression Bryant made upon less gifted +men than Hawthorne, as he lived out his long and useful life in the +Knickerbocker city. Toward the close of it he was in great demand for +public occasions; and it was after delivering a speech dedicating a +statue to Mazzini in Central Park in 1878, when Bryant was eighty-four, +that a fit of dizziness caused a fall which proved fatal to the +venerable poet. It was just seventy years since Dr. Peter Bryant had +published his boy's verses on The Embargo. + +Although Bryant's poetry has never roused any vociferous excitement, it +has enduring qualities. The spiritual preoccupations of many a voiceless +generation of New England Puritans found a tongue at last in this +late-born son of theirs. The determining mood of his best poems, from +boyhood to old age, was precisely that thought of transiency, "the +eternal flow of things," which colored the imaginations of the first +colonists. This is the central motive of Thanatopsis, To a Waterfowl, +The Rivulet, A Forest Hymn, An Evening Revery, The Crowded Street, The +Flood of Years. All of these tell the same story of endless change and +of endless abiding, of varying eddies in the same mighty stream of human +existence. Bryant faced the thought as calmly, as majestically, at +seventeen as when he wrote The Flood of Years at eighty-two. He is a +master of description, though he has slight gift for narrative or drama, +and he rarely sounds the clear lyric note. But everywhere in his verse +there is that cold purity of the winter hills in Western Massachusetts, +something austere and elemental which reaches kindred spirits below the +surface on which intellect and passion have their play, something more +primitive, indeed, than human intellect or passion and belonging to +another mode of being, something "rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun." + +A picture of the Knickerbocker era is not complete without its portraits +of the minor figures in the literary life of New York up to the time of +the Civil War. But the scope of the present volume does not permit +sketches of Paulding and Verplanck, of Halleck and his friend Drake, of +N. P. Willis and Morris and Woodworth. Some of these are today only +"single-poem" men, like Payne, the author of Home Sweet Home, just as +Key, the author of The Star-Spangled Banner, is today a "single-poem" +man of an earlier generation. Their names will be found in such limbos +of the dead as Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America and Poe's +Literati. They knew "the town" in their day, and pleased its very easily +pleased taste. The short-lived literary magazines of the +eighteen-forties gave them their hour of glory. As representatives of +passing phases of the literary history of New York their careers are not +without sentimental interest, but few of them spoke to or for the +country as a whole. Two figures, indeed, stand out in sharp contrast +with those habitual strollers on Broadway and frequenters of literary +gatherings, though each of them was for a while a part of Knickerbocker +New York. To all appearances they were only two more Bohemians like the +rest, but the curiosity of the twentieth century sets them apart from +their forgotten contemporaries. They are two of the unluckiest--and yet +luckiest--authors who ever tried to sell a manuscript along Broadway. +One of them is Edgar Allan Poe and the other is Walt Whitman. They shall +have a chapter to themselves. + +But before turning to that chapter, we must look back to New England +once more and observe the blossoming-time of its ancient commonwealths. +During the thirty years preceding the Civil War New England awoke to a +new life of the spirit. So varied and rich was her literary +productiveness in this era that it still remains her greatest period, +and so completely did New England writers of this epoch voice the ideals +of the nation that the great majority of Americans, even today, regard +these New Englanders as the truest literary exponents of the mind and +soul of the United States. We must take a look at them. + + + + +CHAPTER VI. + +The Transcendentalists + +To understand the literary leadership of New England during the thirty +years immediately preceding the Civil War it is necessary to recall the +characteristics of a somewhat isolated and peculiar people. The mental +and moral traits of the New England colonists, already glanced at in an +earlier chapter, had suffered little essential modification in two +hundred years. The original racial stock was still dominant. As compared +with the middle and southern colonies, there was relatively little +immigration, and this was easily assimilated. The physical remoteness of +New England from other sections of the country, and the stubborn loyalty +with which its inhabitants maintained their own standards of life, alike +contributed to their sense of separateness. It is true, of course, that +their mode of thinking and feeling had undergone certain changes. They +were among the earliest theorists of political independence from Great +Britain, and had done their share, and more, in the Revolution. The +rigors of their early creed had somewhat relaxed, as we have seen, by +the end of the seventeenth century, and throughout the eighteenth there +was a gradual progress toward religious liberalism. The population +steadily increased, and New England's unremitting struggle with a not +too friendly soil, her hardihood upon the seas, and her keenness in +trade, became proverbial throughout the country. Her seaport towns were +wealthy. The general standards of living remained frugal, but extreme +poverty was rare. Her people still made, as in the earliest days of the +colonies, silent and unquestioned sacrifices for education, and her +chief seats of learning, Harvard and Yale, remained the foremost +educational centers of America. But there was still scant leisure for +the quest of beauty, and slender material reward for any practitioner of +the fine arts. Oratory alone, among the arts of expression, commanded +popular interest and applause. Daniel Webster's audiences at Plymouth in +1820 and at Bunker Hill in 1825 were not inferior to similar audiences +of today in intelligence and in responsiveness. Perhaps they were +superior. Appreciation of the spoken word was natural to men trained by +generations of thoughtful listening to "painful" preaching and by +participation in the discussions of town-meeting. Yet appreciation of +secular literature was rare, and interest in the other arts was almost +non-existent. + +Then, beginning in the eighteen-twenties, and developing rapidly after +1830, came a change, a change so startling as to warrant the term of +"the Renascence of New England." No single cause is sufficient to +account for this "new birth." It is a good illustration of that law of +"tension and release," which the late Professor Shaler liked to +demonstrate in all organic life. A long period of strain was followed by +an age of expansion, freedom, release of energy. As far as the mental +life of New England was concerned, something of the new stimulus was due +directly to the influence of Europe. Just as the wandering scholars from +Italy had brought the New Learning, which was a revival of the old +learning, into England in the sixteenth century, so now young New +England college men like Edward Everett and George Ticknor brought home +from the Continent the riches of German and French scholarship. +Emerson's description of the impression made by Everett's lectures in +1820, after his return from Germany, gives a vivid picture of the new +thirst for foreign culture. The North American Review and other +periodicals, while persistently urging the need of a distinctively +national literature, insisted also upon the value of a deeper knowledge +of the literature of the Continent. This was the burden of Channing's +once famous article on A National Literature in 1823: it was a plea for +an independent American school of writers, but these writers should know +the best that Europe had to teach. + +The purely literary movement was connected, as the great name of +Channing suggests, with a new sense of freedom in philosophy and +religion. Calvinism had mainly done its work in New England. It had bred +an extraordinary type of men and women, it had helped to lay some of +the permanent foundations of our democracy, and it was still destined to +have a long life in the new West and in the South. But in that stern +section of the country where its influence had been most marked there +was now an increasingly sharp reaction against its determinism and its +pessimism. Early in the nineteenth century the most ancient and +influential churches in Boston and the leading professors at Harvard had +accepted the new form of religious liberalism known as Unitarianism. The +movement spread throughout Eastern Massachusetts and made its way to +other States. Orthodox and liberal Congregational churches split apart, +and when Channing preached the ordination sermon for Jared Sparks in +Baltimore in 1819, the word Unitarian, accepted by the liberals with +some misgiving, became the recognized motto of the new creed. It is only +with its literary influence that we are here concerned, yet that +literary influence became so potent that there is scarcely a New England +writer of the first rank, from Bryant onward, who remained untouched by +it. + +The most interesting and peculiar phase of the new liberalism has little +directly to do with the specific tenets of theological Unitarianism, and +in fact marked a revolt against the more prosaic and conventional +pattern of English and American Unitarian thought. But this movement, +known as Transcendentalism, would have been impossible without a +preliminary and liberalizing stirring of the soil. It was a fascinating +moment of release for some of the most brilliant and radical minds of +New England. Its foremost representative in our literature was Ralph +Waldo Emerson, as its chief exponents in England were Coleridge and +Carlyle. We must understand its meaning if we would perceive the quality +of much of the most noble and beautiful writing produced in New England +during the Golden Age. + +What then is the significance of the word Transcendental? Disregarding +for the moment the technical development of this term as used by German +and English philosophers, it meant for Emerson and his friends simply +this: whatever transcends or goes beyond the experience of the senses. +It stressed intuition rather than sensation, direct perception of +ultimate truth rather than the processes of logic. It believed in man's +ability to apprehend the absolute ideas of Truth, Rectitude, Goodness. +It resembled the Inner Light of the Quaker, though the Quaker traced +this to a supernatural illumination of the Holy Spirit, while the +Transcendentalist believed that a vision of the eternal realities was a +natural endowment of the human mind. It had only to be trusted. Stated +in this form, it is evident that we have here a very ancient doctrine, +well known in the literature of India and of Greece. It has been held by +countless persons who have never heard of the word Transcendentalism. We +need go no further back than Alexander Pope, a Roman Catholic, whom we +find declaring: "I am so certain of the soul's being immortal that I +seem to feel it within me, as it were by intuition." Pope's friend +Swift, a dean of the Church of England and assuredly no +Transcendentalist, defined vision as seeing the things that are +invisible. + +Now turn to some of the New England men. Dr. C. A. Bartol, a disciple of +Emerson, maintained that "the mistake is to make the everlasting things +subjects of argument instead of sight." Theodore Parker declared to his +congregation: + +From the primitive facts of consciousness given by the power of +instinctive intuition, I endeavored to deduce the true notion of God, of +justice and futurity.... I found most help in the works of Immanuel +Kant, one of the profoundest thinkers of the world, though one of the +worst writers, even in Germany; if he did not always furnish conclusions +I could rest in, he yet gave me the true method, and put me on the right +road. I found certain great primal Intuitions of Human Nature, which +depend on no logical process of demonstration, but are rather facts of +consciousness given by the instinctive action of human nature itself. I +will mention only the three most important which pertain to Religion. 1. +The Instinctive Intuition of the Divine, the consciousness that there is +a God. 2. The Instinctive Intuition of the Just and Right, a +consciousness that there is a Moral Law, independent of our will, which +we ought to keep. 3. The Instinctive Intuition of the Immortal, a +consciousness that the Essential Element of man, the principle of +Individuality, never dies. + +This passage dates from 1859, and readers of Bergson may like to compare +it with the contemporary Frenchman's saying: "The analytical faculties +can give us no realities." + +Let us next hear Emerson himself, first in an early letter to his +brother Edward: "Do you draw the distinction of Milton, Coleridge, and +the Germans between Reason and Understanding? I think it a philosophy +itself, and, like all truth, very practical. Reason is the highest +faculty of the soul, what we mean often by the soul itself: it never +reasons, never proves, it simply perceives, it is vision. The +understanding toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues; +near-sighted, but strong-sighted, dwelling in the present, the +expedient, the customary." And in 1833, after he had left the Unitarian +pulpit, Emerson made in his diary this curious attempt to reconcile the +scriptural language of his ancestral profession to the new vocabulary of +Transcendentalism: "Jesus Christ was a minister of the pure Reason. The +beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount are all utterances of the mind +contemning the phenomenal world.... The understanding can make nothing +of it. 'Tis all nonsense. The Reason affirms its absolute verity.... St. +Paul marks the distinction by the terms natural man and spiritual man. +When Novalis says, 'It is the instinct of the Understanding to +contradict the Reason,' he only translates into a scientific formula the +doctrine of St. Paul, 'The Carnal Mind is enmity against God.'" + +One more quotation must suffice. It is from a poem by a forgotten +Transcendentalist, F. G. Tuckerman. + +No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead; +But, leaving straining thought and stammering word, +Across the barren azure pass to God; +Shooting the void in silence, like a bird-- +A bird that shuts his wings for better speed! + +It is obvious that this "contemning the phenomenal world," this +"revulsion against the intellect as the sole source of truth," is highly +dangerous to second-class minds. If one habitually prints the words +Insight, Instinct, Intuition, Consciousness with capitals, and relegates +equally useful words like senses, experience, fact, logic to lower-case +type, one may do it because he is a Carlyle or an Emerson, but the +chances are that he is neither. Transcendentalism, like all idealistic +movements, had its "lunatic fringe," its camp-followers of excitable, +unstable visionaries. The very name, like the name Methodist, was +probably bestowed upon it in mockery, and this whole perturbation of +staid New England had its humorous side. Witness the career of Bronson +Alcott. It is also true that the glorious affirmations of these seers +can be neither proved nor disproved. They made no examination and they +sought no validation of consciousness. An explorer in search of the +North Pole must bring back proofs of his journey, but when a +Transcendentalist affirms that he has reached the far heights of human +experience and even caught sight of the gods sitting on their thrones, +you and I are obliged to take his word for it. Sometimes we hear such a +man gladly, but it depends upon the man, not upon the trustworthiness of +the method. Finally it should be observed that the Transcendental +movement was an exceedingly complex one, being both literary, +philosophic, and religious; related also to the subtle thought of the +Orient, to mediæval mysticism, and to the English Platonists; touched +throughout by the French Revolutionary theories, by the Romantic spirit, +by the new zeal for science and pseudo-science, and by the unrest of a +fermenting age. + +Our present concern is with the impact of this cosmopolitan current upon +the mind and character of a few New England writers. Channing and +Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller and Alcott, Thoreau and Emerson, are +all representative of the best thought and the noblest ethical impulses +of their generation. Let us choose first the greatest name: a +sunward-gazing spirit, and, it may be, one of the very Sun-Gods. + +The pilgrim to Concord who stops for a moment in the village library to +study French's statue of Emerson will notice the asymmetrical face. On +one side it is the face of a keen Yankee farmer, but seen from the other +side it is the countenance of a seer, a world's man. This contrast +between the parochial Emerson and the greater Emerson interprets many a +puzzle in his career. Half a mile beyond the village green to the north, +close to the "rude bridge" of the famous Concord fight in 1775, is the +Old Manse, once tenanted and described by Hawthorne. It was built by +Emerson's grandfather, a patriot chaplain in the Revolution, who died of +camp-fever at Ticonderoga. His widow married Dr. Ezra Ripley, and here +Ralph Waldo Emerson and his brothers passed many a summer in their +childhood. Half a mile east of the village, on the Cambridge turnpike, +is Emerson's own house, still sheltered by the pines which Thoreau +helped him to plant in 1838. Within the house everything is unchanged: +here are the worn books, pen and inkstand, the favorite pictures upon +the wall. Over the ridge to the north lies the Sleepy Hollow cemetery +where the poet rests, with the gravestones of Hawthorne and the Alcotts, +Thoreau and William James close by. + +But although Concord is the Emerson shrine, he was born in Boston, in +1803. His father, named William like the grandfather, was also, like the +Emerson ancestors for many generations, a clergyman--eloquent, liberal, +fond of books and music, highly honored by his alma mater Harvard and by +the town of Boston, where he ministered to the First Church. His +premature death in 1811 left his widow with five sons--one of them +feebleminded--and a daughter to struggle hard with poverty. With her +husband's sister, the Calvinistic "Aunt Mary Moody" Emerson, she held, +however, that these orphaned boys had been "born to be educated." And +educated the "eager blushing boys" were, at the Boston Latin School and +at Harvard College, on a regimen of "toil and want and truth and mutual +faith." There are many worse systems of pedagogy than this. Ralph was +thought less persistent than his steady older brother William, and far +less brilliant than his gifted, short-lived younger brothers, Edward and +Charles. He had an undistinguished career at Harvard, where he was +graduated in 1821, ranking thirtieth in a class of fifty-nine. Lovers of +irony like to remember that he was the seventh choice of his classmates +for the position of class poet. After some desultory teaching to help +his brothers, he passed irregularly through the Divinity School, his +studies often interrupted by serious ill-health. "If they had examined +me," he said afterward of the kindly professors in the Divinity School, +"they never would have passed me." But approve him they did, in 1826, +and he entered decorously upon the profession of his ancestors, as +associate minister of the Second Church in Boston. His Journals, which +are a priceless record of his inner life, at this and later periods, +reveal the rigid self-scrutiny, the tender idealism, with which he began +his ministerial career. + +But as a scheme of life for Ralph Waldo Emerson this vocation would not +satisfy. The sexton of the Second Church thought that the young man was +not at his best at funerals. Father Taylor, the eccentric Methodist, +whom Emerson assisted at a sailor's Bethel near Long Wharf, considered +him "one of the sweetest souls God ever made," but as ignorant of the +principles of the New Testament as Balaam's ass was of Hebrew grammar. +By and by came an open difference with his congregation over the +question of administering the Communion. "I am not interested in it," +Emerson admitted, and he wrote in his Journal the noble words: "It is my +desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I +cannot do with my whole heart." His resignation was accepted in 1832. +His young wife had died of consumption in the same year. He now sailed +for Italy, France, and England, a memorable journey which gave him an +acquaintance with Landor, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle, but which +was even more significant in sending him, as he says, back to himself, +to the resources of his own nature. "When shows break up," wrote Whitman +afterward, "what but oneself is sure?" In 1834 and 1835 we find Emerson +occupying a room in the Old Manse at Concord, strolling in the quiet +fields, lecturing or preaching if he were invited to do so, but chiefly +absorbed in a little book which he was beginning to write--a new +utterance of a new man. + +This book, the now famous Nature of 1836, contains the essence of +Emerson's message to his generation. It is a prose essay, but written in +the ecstatic mood of a poet. The theme of its meditation is the soul as +related to Nature and to God. The soul is primal; Nature, in all its +bountiful and beautiful commodities, exists for the training of the +soul; it is the soul's shadow. And every soul has immediate access to +Deity. Thus the utility and beauty and discipline of Nature lift the +soul Godward. The typical sentence of the book is this: "The sun shines +today also"; that is to say: the world is still alive and fair; let us +lift up our hearts! Only a few Americans of 1836 bought this singular +volume, but Emerson went serenely forward. He had found his path. + +In 1837 he delivered the well-known Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard on +The American Scholar. Emerson was now thirty-four; he had married a +second time, had bought a house of his own in Concord, and purposed to +make a living by lecturing and writing. His address in Cambridge, though +it contained no reference to himself, was after all a justification of +the way of life he had chosen: a declaration of intellectual +independence for himself and his countrymen, an exhortation of +self-trust to the individual thinking man. "If the single man plant +himself indomitably on his instincts and there abide, the huge world +will come round to him." Such advice to cut loose from the moorings of +the past was not unknown in Phi Beta Kappa orations, though it had never +been so brilliantly phrased; but when Emerson applied precisely the same +doctrine, in 1838, to the graduating class at the Harvard Divinity +School, he roused a storm of disapproval. "A tempest in our washbowl," +he wrote coolly to Carlyle, but it was more than that. The great +sentence of the Divinity School address, "God is, not was; he speaketh, +not spake," was the emphasis of a superb rhetorician upon the immediacy +of the soul's access to God. It has been the burden of a thousand +prophets in all religions. The young priests of the Divinity School, +their eyes wearied with Hebrew and Greek, seem to have enjoyed Emerson's +injunction to turn away from past records and historical authorities and +to drink from the living fountain of the divine within themselves; but +to the professors, "the stern old war-gods," this relative belittlement +of historical Christianity seemed blasphemy. A generation passed before +Emerson was again welcomed by his alma mater. + +The reader who has mastered those three utterances by the Concord +Transcendentalist in 1836, 1837, and 1838 has the key to Emerson. He was +a seer, not a system-maker. The constitution of his mind forbade formal, +consecutive, logical thought. He was not a philosopher in the accepted +sense, though he was always philosophizing, nor a metaphysician in spite +of his curious searchings in the realm of metaphysics. He sauntered in +books as he sauntered by Walden Pond, in quest of what interested him; +he "fished in Montaigne," he said, as he fished in Plato and Goethe. He +basketed the day's luck, good or bad as it might be, into the pages of +his private Journal, which he called his savings-bank, because from this +source he drew most of the material for his books. The Journal has +recently been printed, in ten volumes. No American writing rewards the +reader more richly. It must be remembered that Emerson's Essays, the +first volume of which appeared in 1841, and the last volumes after his +death in 1882, represent practically three stages of composition: first +the detached thoughts of the Journal; second, the rearrangement of this +material for use upon the lecture platform; and finally, the essays in +their present form. The oral method thus predominates: a series of +oracular thoughts has been shaped for oratorical utterance, not +oratorical in the bombastic, popular American sense, but cunningly +designed, by a master of rhetoric, to capture the ear and then the mind +of the auditor. + +Emerson's work as a lecturer coincided with the rise of that Lyceum +system which brought most of the American authors, for more than a +generation, into intimate contact with the public, and which proved an +important factor in the æsthetic and moral cultivation of our people. No +lecturer could have had a more auspicious influence than Emerson, with +his quiet dignity, his serene spiritual presence, his tonic and often +electrifying force. But if he gave his audiences precious gifts, he also +learned much from them. For thirty years his lecturing trips to the West +brought him, more widely than any New England man of letters, into +contact with the new, virile America of the great Mississippi valley. +Unlike many of his friends, he was not repelled by the "Jacksonism of +the West"; he rated it a wholesome, vivifying force in our national +thought and life. The Journal reveals the essential soundness of his +Americanism. Though surrounded all his life by reformers, he was himself +scarcely a reformer, save upon the single issue of anti-slavery. Perhaps +he was at bottom too much of a radical to be swept off his feet by any +reform. + +To our generation, of course, Emerson presents himself as an author of +books, and primarily as an essayist, rather than as a winning, +entrancing speaker. His essays have a greater variety of tone than is +commonly recognized. Many of them, like Manners, Farming, Books, +Eloquence, Old Age, exhibit a shrewd prudential wisdom, a sort of Yankee +instinct for "the milk in the pan," that reminds one of Ben Franklin. +Like most of the greater New England writers, he could be, on occasion, +an admirable local historian. See his essays on Life and Letters in New +England, New England Reformers, Politics, and the successive entries in +his Journal relating to Daniel Webster. He had the happiest gift of +portraiture, as is witnessed by his sketches of Montaigne, of Napoleon, +of Socrates (in the essay on Plato), of his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, of +Thoreau, and of various types of Englishmen in his English Traits. But +the great essays, no doubt, are those like Self-Reliance, Compensation, +The Over-Soul, Fate, Power, Culture, Worship, and Illusions. These will +puzzle no one who has read carefully that first book on Nature. They all +preach the gospel of intuition, instinctive trust in the Universe, faith +in the ecstatic moment of vision into the things that are unseen by the +physical eye. Self-reliance, as Emerson's son has pointed out, means +really God-reliance; the Over-Soul--always a stumbling-block to +Philistines--means that high spiritual life into which all men may enter +and in which they share the life of Deity. Emerson is stern enough in +expounding the laws of compensation that run through the universe, but +to him the chief law is the law of the ever-ascending, victorious soul. + +This radiant optimism permeates his poems. By temperament a singer as +well as a seer and sayer, Emerson was nevertheless deficient in the +singing voice. He composed no one great poem, his verse presents no +ideas that are not found in his prose. In metre and rhyme he is harsh +and willful. Yet he has marvelous single phrases and cadences. He +ejaculates transports and ecstasies, and though he cannot organize and +construct in verse, he is capable here and there of the true miracle of +transforming fact and thought into true beauty. Aldrich used to say that +he would rather have written Emerson's Bacchus than any American poem. + +That the pure, high, and tonic mind of Emerson was universal in its +survey of human forces, no one would claim. Certain limitations in +interest and sympathy are obvious. "That horrid burden and impediment of +the soul which the churches call sin," to use John Morley's words, +occupied his attention but little. Like a mountain climber in a perilous +pass, he preferred to look up rather than down. He does not stress +particularly those old human words, service and sacrifice. +"Anti-scientific, anti-social, anti-Christian" are the terms applied to +him by one of his most penetrating critics. Yet I should prefer to say +"un-scientific," "un-social," and "non-Christian," in the sense in which +Plato and Isaiah are non-Christian. Perhaps it would be still nearer the +truth to say, as Mrs. Lincoln said of her husband, "He was not a +technical Christian." He tends to underestimate institutions of every +kind; history, except as a storehouse of anecdote, and culture as a +steady mental discipline. This is the price he pays for his +transcendental insistence upon the supreme value of the Now, the moment +of insight. But after all these limitations are properly set down, the +personality of Ralph Waldo Emerson remains a priceless possession to his +countrymen. The austere serenity of his life, and the perfection with +which he represents the highest type of his province and his era, will +ultimately become blended with the thought of his true Americanism. A +democrat and liberator, like Lincoln, he seems also destined like +Lincoln to become increasingly a world's figure, a friend and guide to +aspiring spirits everywhere. Differences of race and creed are +negligible in the presence of such superb confidence in God and the soul. + +Citizens of Concord in May, 1862, hearing that Henry Thoreau, the +eccentric bachelor, had just died of consumption in his mother's house +on Main Street, in his forty-fifth year, would have smiled cannily at +the notion that after fifty years their townsman's literary works would +be published in a sumptuous twenty-volume edition, and that critics in +his own country and in Europe would rank him with Ralph Waldo Emerson. +Yet that is precisely what has happened. Our literature has no more +curious story than the evolution of this local crank into his rightful +place of mastership. In his lifetime he printed only two books, A Week +on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers--which was even more completely +neglected by the public than Emerson's Nature--and Walden, now one of +the classics, but only beginning to be talked about when its shy, proud +author penned his last line and died with the words "moose" and "Indian" +on his lips. + +Thoreau, like all thinkers who reach below the surface of human life, +means many different things to men of various temperaments. Collectors +of human novelties, like Stevenson, rejoice in his uniqueness of flavor; +critics, like Lowell, place him, not without impatient rigor. To some +readers he is primarily a naturalist, an observer, of the White of +Selborne school; to others an elemental man, a lover of the wild, a +hermit of the woods. He has been called the poet-naturalist, to indicate +that his powers of observation were accompanied, like Wordsworth's, by a +gift of emotional interpretation of the meaning of phenomena. Lovers of +literature celebrate his sheer force and penetration of phrase. But to +the student of American thought Thoreau's prime value lies in the +courage and consistency with which he endeavored to realize the gospel +of Transcendentalism in his own inner life. + +Lovers of racial traits like to remember that Thoreau's grandfather was +an immigrant Frenchman from the island of Jersey, and that his +grandmother was Scotch and Quaker. His father made lead pencils and +ground plumbago in his own house in Concord. The mother was from New +Hampshire. It was a high-minded family. All the four children taught +school and were good talkers. Henry, born in 1817, was duly baptized by +good Dr. Ripley of the Old Manse, studied Greek and Latin, and was +graduated at Harvard in 1837, the year of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa +address. Even in college the young man was a trifle difficult. "Cold and +unimpressible," wrote a classmate. "The touch of his hand was moist and +indifferent. He did not care for people." "An unfavorable opinion has +been entertained of his disposition to exert himself," wrote President +Quincy confidentially to Emerson in 1837, although the kindly President, +a year later, in recommending Thoreau as a school-teacher, certified +that "his rank was high as a scholar in all the branches and his morals +and general conduct unexceptionable and exemplary." + +Ten years passed. The young man gave up school-keeping, thinking it a +loss of time. He learned pencil-making, surveying, and farm work, and +found that by manual labor for six weeks in the year he could meet all +the expenses of living. He haunted the woods and pastures, explored +rivers and ponds, built the famous hut on Emerson's wood-lot with the +famous axe borrowed from Alcott, was put in jail for refusal to pay his +poll-tax, and, to sum up much in little, "signed off" from social +obligations. "I, Henry D. Thoreau, have signed off, and do not hold +myself responsible to your multifarious uncivil chaos named Civil +Government." When his college class held its tenth reunion in 1847, and +each man was asked to send to the secretary a record of achievement, +Thoreau wrote: "My steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to +keep myself at the top of my condition and ready for whatever may turn +up in heaven or on earth." There is the motto of Transcendentalism, +stamped upon a single coin. + +For "to be ready for whatever may turn up" is Thoreau's racier, homelier +version of Emerson's "endless seeker"; and Thoreau, more easily than +Emerson, could venture to stake everything upon the quest. The elder man +had announced the programme, but by 1847 he was himself almost what +Thoreau would call a "committed man," with family and household +responsibilities, with a living to earn, and bound, like every +professional writer and speaker, to have some measure of regard for his +public. But Thoreau was ready to travel lightly and alone. If he should +fail in the great adventure for spiritual perfection, it was his own +affair. He had no intimates, no confidant save the multitudinous pages +of his Journal, from which--and here again he followed Emerson's +example--his future books were to be compiled. Many of his most loyal +admirers will admit that such a quest is bound, by the very conditions +of the problem, to be futile. Hawthorne allegorized it in Ethan Brand, +and his quaint illustration of the folly of romantic expansion of the +self apart from the common interests of human kind is the picture of a +dog chasing its own tail. "It is time now that I begin to live," notes +Thoreau in the Journal, and he continued to say it in a hundred +different ways until the end of all his journalizing, but he never quite +captured the fugitive felicity. The haunting pathos of his own allegory +has moved every reader of Walden: "I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, +and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail." Precisely what he meant +it is now impossible to say, but surely he betrays a doubt in the +ultimate efficacy of his own system of life. He bends doggedly to the +trail, for Henry Thoreau is no quitter, but the trail leads nowhere, and +in the latest volumes of the Journals he seems to realize that he has +been pursuing a phantom. He dived fearlessly and deep into himself, but +somehow he failed to grasp that pearl of great price which all the +transcendental prophets assured him was to be had at the cost of diving. + +This is not to say that this austere and strenuous athlete came up quite +empty-handed. Far from it. The by-products of his toil were enough to +have enriched many lesser men, and they have given Thoreau a secure +fame. From his boyhood he longed to make himself a writer, and an +admirable writer he became. "For along time," he says in Walden, "I was +reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has +never seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too +common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this +case my pains were their reward." Like so many solitaries, he +experienced the joy of intense, long-continued effort in composition, +and he was artist enough to know that his pages, carefully assembled +from his notebooks, had pungency, form, atmosphere. No man of his day, +not even Lowell the "last of the bookmen," abandoned himself more +unreservedly to the delight of reading. Thoreau was an accomplished +scholar in the Greek and Roman classics, as his translations attest. He +had some acquaintance with several modern languages, and at one time +possessed the best collection of books on Oriental literature to be +found in America. He was drenched in the English poetry of the +seventeenth century. His critical essays in the Dial, his letters and +the bookish allusions throughout his writings, are evidence of rich +harvesting in the records of the past. He left some three thousand +manuscript pages of notes on the American Indians, whose history and +character had fascinated him from boyhood. Even his antiquarian hobbies +gave him durable satisfaction. Then, too, he had deep delight in his +life-long studies in natural history, in his meticulous measurements of +river currents, in his notes upon the annual flowering of plants and the +migration of birds. The more thoroughly trained naturalists of our own +day detect him now and again in error as to his birds and plants, just +as specialists in Maine woodcraft discover that he made amusing, and for +him unaccountable, blunders when he climbed Katahdin. But if he was not +impeccable as a naturalist or woodsman, who has ever had more fun out of +his enthusiasm than Thoreau, and who has ever stimulated as many men and +women in the happy use of their eyes? He would have had slight patience +with much of the sentimental nature study of our generation, and +certainly an intellectual contempt for much that we read and write about +the call of the wild; but no reader of his books can escape his +infection for the freedom of the woods, for the stark and elemental in +nature. Thoreau's passion for this aspect of life may have been selfish, +wolf-like, but it is still communicative. + +Once, toward the close of his too brief life, Thoreau "signed on" again +to an American ideal, and no man could have signed more nobly. It was +the cause of Freedom, as represented by John Brown of Harper's Ferry. +The French and Scotch blood in the furtive hermit suddenly grew hot. +Instead of renouncing in disgust the "uncivil chaos called Civil +Government," Thoreau challenged it to a fight. Indeed he had already +thrown down the gauntlet in Slavery in Massachusetts, which Garrison had +published in the Liberator in 1854. And now the death upon the scaffold +of the old fanatic of Ossawatomie changed Thoreau into a complete +citizen, arguing the case and glorifying to his neighbors the dead hero. +"It seems as if no man had ever died in America before; for in order to +die you must first have lived.... I hear a good many pretend that they +are going to die.... Nonsense! I'll defy them to do it. They haven't got +life enough in them. They'll deliquesce like fungi, and keep a hundred +eulogists mopping the spot where they left off. Only half a dozen or so +have died since the world began." Such passages as this reveal a very +different Thoreau from the Thoreau who is supposed to have spent his +days in the company of swamp-blackbirds and woodchucks. He had, in fact, +one of the highest qualifications for human society, an absolute honesty +of mind. "We select granite," he says, "for the underpinning of our +houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest +on an underpinning of granite truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our +sills are rotten.... In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more +constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend upon it, +that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, +proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this +long time." + +This hard, basic individualism was for Thoreau the foundation of all +enduring social relations, and the dullest observer of twentieth century +America can see that Thoreau's doctrine is needed as much as ever. His +sharp-edged personality provokes curiosity and pricks the reader into +dissent or emulation as the case may be, but its chief ethical value to +our generation lies in the fact that here was a Transcendentalist who +stressed, not the life of the senses, though he was well aware of their +seductiveness, but the stubborn energy of the will. + +The scope of the present book prevents more than a glimpse at the other +members of the New England Transcendental group. They are a very mixed +company, noble, whimsical, queer, impossible. "The good Alcott," wrote +Carlyle, "with his long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn +temples and mild radiant eyes; all bent on saving the world by a return +to acorns and the golden age; he comes before one like a venerable Don +Quixote, whom nobody can laugh at without loving." These words paint a +whole company, as well as a single man. The good Alcott still awaits an +adequate biographer. Connecticut Yankee, peddler in the South, +school-teacher in Boston and elsewhere, he descended upon Concord, +flitted to the queer community of Fruitlands, was starved back to +Concord, inspired and bored the patient Emerson, talked endlessly, wrote +ineffective books, and had at last his apotheosis in the Concord School +of Philosophy, but was chiefly known for the twenty years before his +death in 1888 as the father of the Louisa Alcott who wrote Little Women. +"A tedious archangel," was Emerson's verdict, and it is likely to stand. + +Margaret Fuller, though sketched by Hawthorne, analyzed by Emerson, and +painted at full length by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, is now a fading +figure--a remarkable woman, no doubt, one of the first of American +feminists, suggesting George Eliot in her physical unattractiveness, her +clear brain, her touch of sensuousness. She was an early-ripe, +over-crammed scholar in the classics and in modern European languages. +She did loyal, unpaid work as the editor of the Dial, which from 1840 to +1844 was the organ of Transcendentalism. She joined the community at +Brook Farm, whose story has been so well told by Lindsay Swift. For a +while she served as literary editor of the New York Tribune under Horace +Greeley. Then she went abroad, touched Rousseau's manuscripts at Paris +with trembling, adoring fingers, made a secret marriage in Italy with +the young Marquis Ossoli, and perished by shipwreck, with her husband +and child, off Fire Island in 1850. + +Theodore Parker, like Alcott and "Margaret," an admirable Greek scholar, +an idealist and reformer, still lives in Chadwick's biography, in +Colonel Higginson's delightful essay, and in the memories of a few +liberal Bostonians who remember his tremendous sermons on the platform +of the old Music Hall. He was a Lexington farmer's son, with the +temperament of a blacksmith, with enormous, restless energy, a good +hater, a passionate lover of all excellent things save meekness. He died +at fifty, worn out, in Italy. + +But while these three figures were, after Emerson and Thoreau, the most +representative of the group, the student of the Transcendental period +will be equally interested in watching its influence upon many other +types of young men: upon future journalists and publicists like George +William Curtis, Charles A. Dana, and George Ripley; upon religionists +like Orestes Brownson, Father Hecker, and James Freeman Clarke; and upon +poets like Jones Very, Christopher P. Cranch, and Ellery Channing. There +was a sunny side of the whole movement, as T. W. Higginson and F. B. +Sanborn, two of the latest survivors of the ferment, loved to emphasize +in their talk and in their books; and it was shadowed also by tragedy +and the pathos of unfulfilled desires. But as one looks back at it, in +the perspective of three-quarters of a century, it seems chiefly +something touchingly fine. For all these men and women tried to hitch +their wagon to a star. + + + + +CHAPTER VII. + +Romance, Poetry, and History + +Moving in and out of the Transcendentalist circles, in that great +generation preceding the Civil War, were a company of other +men--romancers, poets, essayists, historians--who shared in the +intellectual liberalism of the age, but who were more purely artists in +prose and verse than they were seekers after the unattainable. +Hawthorne, for example, sojourned at Concord and at Brook Farm with some +of the most extreme types of transcendental extravagance. The movement +interested him artistically and he utilized it in his romances, but +personally he maintained an attitude of cool detachment from it. +Longfellow was too much of an artist to lose his head over philosophical +abstractions; Whittier, at his best, had a too genuine poetic instinct +for the concrete; and Lowell and Holmes had the saving gift of humor. +Cultivated Boston gentlemen like Prescott, Motley, and Parkman preferred +to keep their feet on the solid earth and write admirable histories. So +the mellow years went by. Most of the widely-read American books were +being produced within twenty miles of the Boston State House. The +slavery issue kept growling, far away, but it was only now and then, as +in the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, that it was +brought sharply home to the North. The "golden forties" were as truly +golden for New England as for idle California. There was wealth, +leisure, books, a glow of harvest-time in the air, though the spirit of +the writers is the spirit of youth. + +Nathaniel Hawthorne, our greatest writer of pure romance, was Puritan by +inheritance and temperament, though not in doctrine or in sympathy. His +literary affiliations were with the English and German Romanticists, and +he possessed, for professional use, the ideas and vocabulary of his +transcendental friends. Born in Salem in 1804, he was descended from +Judge Hawthorne of Salem Witchcraft fame, and from a long line of +sea-faring ancestors. He inherited a morbid solitariness, redeemed in +some measure by a physical endowment of rare strength and beauty. He +read Spenser, Rousseau, and the Newgate Calendar, was graduated at +Bowdoin, with Longfellow, in the class of 1825, and returned to Salem +for thirteen brooding lonely years in which he tried to teach himself +the art of story-writing. His earliest tales, like Irving's, are essays +in which characters emerge; he is absorbed in finding a setting for a +preconceived "moral"; he is in love with allegory and parable. His own +words about his first collection of stories, Twice-Told Tales, have +often been quoted: "They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in +too retired a shade." Yet they are for the most part exquisitely +written. After a couple of years in the Boston Custom-House, and a +residence at the socialistic community of Brook Farm, Hawthorne made the +happiest of marriages to Sophia Peabody, and for nearly four years dwelt +in the Old Manse at Concord. He described it in one of the ripest of his +essays, the Preface to Mosses from an Old Manse, his second collection +of stories. After three years in the Custom-House at Salem, his +dismissal in 1849 gave him leisure to produce his masterpiece, The +Scarlet Letter, published in 1850. He was now forty-six. In 1851, he +published The House of the Seven Gables, The Wonder-Book, and The +Snow-Image, and Other Tales. In 1852 came The Blithedale Romance, a rich +ironical story drawn from his Brook Farm experience. Four years in the +American Consulate at Liverpool and three subsequent years of residence +upon the Continent saw no literary harvest except carefully filled +notebooks and the deeply imaginative moral romance, The Marble Faun. +Hawthorne returned home in 1860 and settled in the Wayside at Concord, +busying himself with a new, and, as was destined, a never completed +story about the elixir of immortality. But his vitality was ebbing, and +in May, 1864, he passed away in his sleep. He rests under the pines in +Sleepy Hollow, near the Alcotts and the Emersons. + +It is difficult for contemporary Americans to assess the value of such a +man, who evidently did nothing except to write a few books. His rare, +delicate genius was scarcely touched by passing events. Not many of his +countrymen really love his writings, as they love, for instance the +writings of Dickens or Thackeray or Stevenson. Everyone reads, at some +time of his life, The Scarlet Letter, and trembles at its passionate +indictment of the sin of concealment, at its agonized admonition, "Be +true! Be true!" Perhaps the happiest memories of Hawthorne's readers, as +of Kipling's readers, hover about his charming stories for children; to +have missed The Wonder-Book is like having grown old without ever +catching the sweetness of the green world at dawn. But our public has +learned to enjoy a wholly different kind of style, taught by the daily +journals, a nervous, graphic, sensational, physical style, fit for +describing an automobile, a department store, a steamship, a lynching +party. It is the style of our day, and judged by it Hawthorne, who wrote +with severity, conscience, and good taste, seems somewhat old-fashioned, +like Irving or Addison. He is perhaps too completely a New Englander to +be understood by men of other stock, and has never, like Poe and +Whitman, excited strong interest among European minds. + +Yet no American is surer, generation after generation, of finding a fit +audience. Hawthorne's genius was meditative rather than dramatic. His +artistic material was moral rather than physical; he brooded over the +soul of man as affected by this and that condition and situation. The +child of a new analytical age, he thought out with rigid accuracy the +precise circumstances surrounding each one of his cases and modifying +it. Many of his sketches and short stories and most of his romances deal +with historical facts, moods, and atmospheres, and he knew the past of +New England as few men have ever known it. There is solid historical and +psychological stuff as the foundation of his air-castles. His latent +radicalism furnished him with a touchstone of criticism as he +interpreted the moral standards of ancient communities; no reader of The +Scarlet Letter can forget Hawthorne's implicit condemnation of the +unimaginative harshness of the Puritans. His own judgment upon the deep +matters of the human conscience was stern enough, but it was a +universalized judgment, and by no means the result of a Calvinism which +he hated. Over-fond as he was in his earlier tales of elaborate, +fanciful, decorative treatment of themes that promised to point a moral, +in his finest short stories, such as The Ambitious Guest, The Gentle +Boy, Young Goodman Brown, The Snow Image, The Great Stone Face, Drowne's +Wooden Image, Rappacini's Daughter, the moral, if there be one, is not +obtruded. He loves physical symbols for mental and moral states, and was +poet and Transcendentalist enough to retain his youthful affection for +parables; but his true field as a story-teller is the erring, questing, +aspiring, shadowed human heart. + +The Scarlet Letter, for instance, is a study of a universal theme, the +problem of concealed sin, punishment, redemption. Only the setting is +provincial. The story cannot be rightly estimated, it is true, without +remembering the Puritan reverence for physical purity, the Puritan +reverence for the magistrate-minister--differing so widely from the +respect of Latin countries for the priest--the Puritan preoccupation +with the life of the soul, or, as more narrowly construed by Calvinism, +the problem of evil. The word Adultery, although suggestively enough +present in one of the finest symbolical titles ever devised by a +romancer, does not once occur in the book. The sins dealt with are +hypocrisy and revenge. Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne, and Roger +Chillingworth are developing, suffering, living creatures, caught +inextricably in the toils of a moral situation. By an incomparable +succession of pictures Hawthorne exhibits the travail of their souls. In +the greatest scene of all, that between Hester and Arthur in the forest, +the Puritan framework of the story gives way beneath the weight of human +passion, and we seem on the verge of another and perhaps larger solution +than was actually worked out by the logic of succeeding events. But +though the book has been called Christless, prayerless, hopeless, no +mature person ever reads it without a deepened sense of the impotence of +all mechanistic theories of sin, and a new vision of the intense reality +of spiritual things. "The law we broke," in Dimmesdale's ghostly words, +was a more subtle law than can be graven on tables of stone and numbered +as the Seventh Commandment. + +The legacy of guilt is likewise the theme of The House of the Seven +Gables, which Hawthorne himself was inclined to think a better book than +The Scarlet Letter. Certainly this story of old Salem is impeccably +written and its subtle handling of tone and atmosphere is beyond +dispute. An ancestral curse, the visitation of the sins of the fathers +upon the children, the gradual decay of a once sound stock, are motives +that Ibsen might have developed. But the Norseman would have failed to +rival Hawthorne's delicate manipulation of his shadows, and the no less +masterly deftness of the ultimate mediation of a dark inheritance +through the love of the light-hearted Phœbe for the latest descendant of +the Maules. In The Blithedale Romance Hawthorne stood for once, perhaps, +too near his material to allow the rich atmospheric effects which he +prefers, and in spite of the unforgetable portrait of Zenobia and +powerful passages of realistic description, the book is not quite +focussed. In The Marble Faun Hawthorne comes into his own again. Its +central problem is one of those dark insoluble ones that he loves: the +influence of a crime upon the development of a soul. Donatello, the +Faun, is a charming young creature of the natural sunshine until his +love for the somber Miriam tempts him to the commission of murder: then +begins the growth of his mind and character. Perhaps the haunting power +of the main theme of the book has contributed less to its fame than the +felicity of its descriptions of Rome and Italy. For Hawthorne possessed, +like Byron, in spite of his defective training in the appreciation of +the arts, a gift of romantic discernment which makes The Marble Faun, +like Childe Harold, a glorified guide-book to the Eternal City. + +All of Hawthorne's books, in short, have a central core of psychological +romance, and a rich surface finish of description. His style, at its +best, has a subdued splendor of coloring which is only less wonderful +than the spiritual perceptions with which this magician was endowed. The +gloom which haunts many of his pages, as I have said elsewhere, is the +long shadow cast by our mortal destiny upon a sensitive soul. The +mystery is our mystery, perceived, and not created, by that finely +endowed mind and heart. The shadow is our shadow; the gleams of insight, +the soft radiance of truth and beauty, are his own. + +A college classmate of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow summed up the Portland +boy's character in one sentence: "It appeared easy for him to avoid the +unworthy." Born in 1807, of Mayflower stock that had distinguished +itself for bravery and uprightness, the youth was graduated from Bowdoin +at eighteen. Like his classmate Hawthorne, he had been a wide and +secretly ambitious reader, and had followed the successive numbers of +Irving's Sketch Book, he tells us, "with ever increasing wonder and +delight." His college offered him in 1826 a professorship of the modern +languages, and he spent three happy years in Europe in preparation. He +taught successfully at Bowdoin for five or six years, and for eighteen +years, 1836 to 1854, served as George Ticknor's successor at Harvard, +ultimately surrendering the chair to Lowell. He early published two +prose volumes, Hyperion and Outre-mer, Irvingesque romances of European +travel. Then came, after ten years of teaching and the death of his +young wife, the sudden impulse to write poetry, and he produced, "softly +excited, I know not why," The Reaper and the Flowers, a Psalm of Death. +From that December morning in 1838 until his death in 1882 he was +Longfellow the Poet. + +His outward life, like Hawthorne's, was barren of dramatic incident, +save the one tragic accident by which his second wife, the mother of his +children, perished before his eyes in 1861. He bore the calamity with +the quiet courage of his race and breeding. But otherwise his days ran +softly and gently, enriched with books and friendships, sheltered from +the storms of circumstance. He had leisure to grow ripe, to remember, +and to dream. But he never secluded himself, like Tennyson, from normal +contacts with his fellowmen. The owner of the Craigie House was a good +neighbor, approachable and deferential. He was even interested in local +Cambridge politics. On the larger political issues of his day his +Americanism was sound and loyal. "It is disheartening," he wrote in his +Cambridge journal for 1851, "to see how little sympathy there is in the +hearts of the young men here for freedom and great ideas." But his own +sympathy never wavered. His linguistic talent helped him to penetrate +the secrets of alien ways of thought and speech. He understood Italy and +Spain, Holland and France and Germany. He had studied them on the lips +of their living men and women and in the books where soldier and +historian, priest and poet, had inscribed the record of five hundred +years. From the Revival of Learning to the middle of the nineteenth +century, Longfellow knew the soul of Europe as few men have known it, +and he helped to translate Europe to America. His intellectual +receptivity, his quick eye for color and costume and landscape, his ear +for folk-lore and ballad, his own ripe mastery of words, made him the +most resourceful of international interpreters. And this lover of +children, walking in quiet ways, this refined and courteous host and +gentleman, scholar and poet, exemplified without self-advertisement the +richer qualities of his own people. When Couper's statue of Longfellow +was dedicated in Washington, Hamilton Mabie said: "His freedom from the +sophistication of a more experienced country; his simplicity, due in +large measure to the absence of social self-consciousness; his tranquil +and deep-seated optimism, which is the effluence of an unexhausted soil; +his happy and confident expectation, born of a sense of tremendous +national vitality; his love of simple things in normal relations to +world-wide interests of the mind; his courage in interpreting those +deeper experiences which craftsmen who know art but who do not know life +call commonplaces; the unaffected and beautiful democracy of his +spirit--these are the delicate flowers of our new world, and as much a +part of it as its stretches of wilderness and the continental roll of +its rivers." + +Longfellow's poetic service to his countrymen has thus become a national +asset, and not merely because in his three best known narrative poems, +Evangeline, Hiawatha, and The Courtship of Miles Standish, he selected +his themes from our own history. The Building of the Ship, written with +full faith in the troubled year of 1849, is a national anthem. "It is a +wonderful gift," said Lincoln, as he listened to it, his eyes filled +with tears, "to be able to stir men like that." The Skeleton in Armor, A +Ballad of the French Fleet, Paul Revere's Ride, The Wreck of the +Hesperus, are ballads that stir men still. For all of his skill in +story-telling in verse--witness the Tales of a Wayside Inn--Longfellow +was not by nature a dramatist, and his trilogy now published under the +title of Christus, made up of The Divine Tragedy, The Golden Legend, and +New England Tragedies, added little to a reputation won in other fields. +His sonnets, particularly those upon Chaucer, Milton, The Divina +Commedia, A Nameless Grave, Felton, Sumner, Nature, My Books, are among +the imperishable treasures of the English language. In descriptive +pieces like Keramos and The Hanging of the Crane, in such personal and +occasional verses as The Herons of Elmwood, The Fiftieth Birthday of +Agassiz, and the noble Morituri Salutamus written for his classmates in +1875, he exhibits his tenderness of affection and all the ripeness of +his technical skill. But it was as a lyric poet, after all, that he won +and held his immense audience throughout the English-speaking world. Two +of the most popular of all his early pieces, The Psalm of Life and +Excelsior, have paid the price of a too apt adjustment to the ethical +mood of an earnest moment in our national life. We have passed beyond +them. And many readers may have outgrown their youthful pleasure in +Maidenhood, The Rainy Day, The Bridge, The Day is Done, verses whose +simplicity lent themselves temptingly to parody. Yet such poems as The +Belfry of Bruges, Seaweed, The Fire of Driftwood, The Arsenal at +Springfield, My Lost Youth, The Children's Hour, and many another lyric, +lose nothing with the lapse of time. There is fortunately infinite room +for personal preference in this whole matter of poetry, but the +confession of a lack of regard for Longfellow's verse must often be +recognized as a confession of a lessening love for what is simple, +graceful, and refined. The current of contemporary American taste, +especially among consciously clever, half-trained persons, seems to be +running against Longfellow. How soon the tide may turn, no one can say. +Meanwhile he has his tranquil place in the Poet's Corner of Westminster +Abbey. The Abbey must be a pleasant spot to wait in, for the Portland +boy. + +Oddly enough, some of the over-sophisticated and under-experienced +people who affect to patronize Longfellow assume toward John Greenleaf +Whittier an air of deference. This attitude would amuse the Quaker poet. +One can almost see his dark eyes twinkle and the grim lips tighten in +that silent laughter in which the old man so much resembled Cooper's +Leather-Stocking. Whittier knew that his friend Longfellow was a better +artist than himself, and he also knew, by intimate experience as a maker +of public opinion, how variable are its judgments. + +Whittier represents a stock different from that of the Longfellows, but +equally American, equally thoroughbred: the Essex County Quaker farmer +of Massachusetts. The homestead in which he was born in 1807, at East +Haverhill, had been built by his great-great-grandfather in 1688. Mount +Vernon in Virginia and the Craigie House in Cambridge are newer than +this by two generations. The house has been restored to the precise +aspect it had in Whittier's boyhood: and the garden, lawn, and brook, +even the door-stone and bridle-post and the barn across the road are +witnesses to the fidelity of the descriptions in Snow-Bound. The +neighborhood is still a lonely one. The youth grew up in seclusion, yet +in contact with a few great ideas, chief among them Liberty. "My +father," he said, "was an old-fashioned Democrat, and really believed in +the Preamble of the Bill of Rights which reaffirmed the Declaration of +Independence." The taciturn father transmitted to his sons a hatred of +kingcraft and priestcraft, the inward moral freedom of the Quaker +touched with humanitarian passion. The spirit of a boyhood in this +homestead is veraciously told in The Barefoot Boy, School-Days, +Snow-Bound, Ramoth Hill, and Telling the Bees. It was a chance copy of +Burns that revealed to the farmer lad his own desire and capacity for +verse-writing. When he was nineteen, his sister sent his Exile's +Departure to William Lloyd Garrison, then twenty, and the editor of the +Newburyport Free Press. The neighbors liked it, and the tall frail +author was rewarded with a term at the Haverhill Academy, where he paid +his way, in old Essex County fashion, by making shoes. + +He had little more formal schooling than this, was too poor to enter +college, but had what he modestly called a "knack at rhyming," and much +facility in prose. He turned to journalism and politics, for which he +possessed a notable instinct. For a while he thought he had "done with +poetry and literature." Then in 1833, at twenty-six, came Garrison's +stirring letter bidding him enlist in the cause of Anti-Slavery. He +obeyed the call, not knowing that this new allegiance to the service of +humanity was to transform him from a facile local verse-writer into a +national poet. It was the ancient miracle of losing one's life and +finding it. For the immediate sacrifice was very real to a youth trained +in quietism and non-resistance, and well aware, as a Whig journalist, of +the ostracism visited upon the active Abolitionists. Whittier entered +the fight with absolute courage and with the shrewdest practical +judgment of weapons and tactics. He forgot himself. He turned aside from +those pleasant fields of New England legend and history to which he was +destined to return after his warfare was accomplished. He had read the +prose of Milton and of Burke. He perceived that negro emancipation in +the United States was only a single and immediate phase of a universal +movement of liberalism. The thought kindled his imagination. He wrote, +at white heat, political and social verse that glowed with humanitarian +passion: lyrics in praise of fellow-workers, salutes to the dead, +campaign songs, hymns, satires against the clergy and the capitalists, +superb sectional poems like Massachusetts to Virginia, and, more nobly +still, poems embodying what Wordsworth called "the sensation and image +of country and the human race." + +Whittier had now "found himself" as a poet. It is true that his style +remained diffuse and his ear faulty, but his countrymen, then as now +uncritical of artistic form, overlooked the blemishes of his verse, and +thought only of his vibrant emotion, his scorn of cowardice and evil, +his prophetic exaltation. In 1847 came the first general collection of +his poems, and here were to be found not merely controversial verses, +but spirited Songs of Labor, pictures of the lovely Merrimac +countryside, legends written in the mood of Hawthorne or Longfellow, and +bright bits of foreign lore and fancy. For though Whittier never went +abroad, his quiet life at Amesbury gave him leisure for varied reading, +and he followed contemporary European politics with the closest +interest. He emerged more and more from the atmosphere of faction and +section, and, though he retained to the last his Quaker creed, he held +its simple tenets in such undogmatic and winning fashion that his hymns +are sung today in all the churches. + +When The Atlantic Monthly was established in 1857, Whittier was fifty. +He took his place among the contributors to the new magazine not as a +controversialist but as a man of letters, with such poems as Tritemius, +and Skipper Ireson's Ride. Characteristic productions of this period are +My Psalm, Cobbler Keezar's Vision, Andrew Rykman's Prayer, The Eternal +Goodness--poems grave, sweet, and tender. But it was not until the +publication of Snow-Bound in 1866 that Whittier's work touched its +widest popularity. He had never married, and the deaths of his mother +and sister Elizabeth set him brooding, in the desolate Amesbury house, +over memories of his birthplace, six miles away in East Haverhill. The +homestead had gone out of the hands of the Whittiers, and the poet, +nearing sixty, set himself to compose an idyll descriptive of the +vanished past. No artist could have a theme more perfectly adapted to +his mood and to his powers. There are no novel ideas in Snow-Bound, nor +is there any need of them, but the thousands of annual pilgrims to the +old farmhouse can bear witness to the touching intimacy, the homely +charm, the unerring rightness of feeling with which Whittier's genius +recreated his own lost youth and painted for all time a true New England +hearthside. + +Whittier was still to write nearly two hundred more poems, for he lived +to be eighty-five, and he composed until the last. But his creative +period was now over. He rejoiced in the friendly recognition of his work +that came to him from every section of a reunited country. His personal +friends were loyal in their devotion. He followed the intricacies of +American politics with the keen zest of a veteran in that game, for in +his time he had made and unmade governors and senators. "The greatest +politician I have ever met," said James G. Blaine, who had certainly met +many. He had an income from his poems far in excess of his needs, but +retained the absolute simplicity of his earlier habits. When his +publishers first proposed the notable public dinner in honor of his +seventieth birthday he demurred, explaining to a member of his family +that he did not want the bother of "buying a new pair of pants"--a petty +anecdote, but somehow refreshing. So the rustic, shrewd, gentle old man +waited for the end. He had known what it means to toil, to fight, to +renounce, to eat his bread in tears, and to see some of his dreams come +true. We have had, and shall have, more accomplished craftsmen in verse, +but we have never bred a more genuine man than Whittier, nor one who had +more kinship with the saints. + +A few days before Whittier's death, he wrote an affectionate poem in +celebration of the eighty-third birthday of his old friend of the +Saturday Club, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. This was in 1892. The little +Doctor, rather lonely in his latest years, composed some tender obituary +verses at Whittier's passing. He had already performed the same office +for Lowell. He lingered himself until the autumn of 1894, in his +eighty-sixth year--The Last Leaf, in truth, of New England's richest +springtime. + +"No, my friends," he had said in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, "I +go (always, other things being equal) for the man who inherits family +traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five +generations." The Doctor came naturally by his preference for a "man of +family," being one himself. He was a descendant of Anne Bradstreet, the +poetess. "Dorothy Q.," whom he had made the most picturesque of the +Quincys, was his great-grandmother. Wendell Phillips was his cousin. His +father, the Rev. Abiel Holmes, a Yale graduate, was the minister of the +First Church in Cambridge, and it was in its "gambrel-roofed" parsonage +that Oliver Wendell was born in 1809. + + Know old Cambridge? Hope you do.-- + Born there? Don't say so! I was, too. + • • • • • • • • + Nicest place that was ever seen-- + Colleges red and Common green. + +So he wrote, in scores of passages of filial devotion, concerning the +village of his boyhood and the city of Boston. His best-known prose +sentence is: "Boston State House is the hub of the Solar System." It is +easy to smile, as indeed he did himself, at such fond provinciality, but +the fact remains that our literature as a whole sadly needs this +richness of local atmosphere. A nation of restless immigrants, here +today and "moved on" tomorrow, has the fibres of its imagination +uprooted, and its artists in their eager quest of "local color" purchase +brilliancy at the cost of thinness of tone, poverty of association. +Philadelphia and Boston, almost alone among the larger American cities, +yield the sense of intimacy, or what the Autocrat would call "the +cumulative humanities." + +Young Holmes became the pet and the glory of his class of 1829 at +Harvard. It was only in 1838 that their reunions began, but thereafter +they held fifty-six meetings, of which Holmes attended fifty and wrote +poems for forty-three. Many of "the Boys" whom he celebrated became +famous in their own right, but they remain "the Boys" to all lovers of +Holmes's verses. His own career as a poet had begun during his single +year in the Law School. His later years brought him some additional +skill in polishing his lines and a riper human wisdom, but his native +verse-making talent is as completely revealed in Old Ironsides, +published when he was twenty-one, and in The Last Leaf, composed a year +or two later, as in anything he was to write during the next +half-century. In many respects he was a curious survival of the +cumulative humanities of the eighteenth century. He might have been, +like good Dr. Arbuthnot, an ornament of the Augustan age. He shared with +the English Augustans a liking for the rhymed couplet, an instinctive +social sense, a feeling for the presence of an imaginary audience of +congenial listeners. One still catches the "Hear! Hear!" between his +clever lines. In many of the traits of his mind this "Yankee Frenchman" +resembled such a typical eighteenth century figure as Voltaire. Like +Voltaire, he was tolerant--except toward Calvinism and Homeopathy. In +some of the tricks of his prose style he is like a kindlier Sterne. His +knack for vers de société was caught from Horace, but he would not have +been a child of his own age without the additional gift of rhetoric and +eloquence which is to be seen in his patriotic poems and his hymns. For +Holmes possessed, in spite of all his limitations in poetic range, true +devotion, patriotism, humor, and pathos. + +His poetry was in the best sense of the word "occasional," and his prose +was only an incidental or accidental harvest of a long career in which +his chief duty was that of a professor of anatomy in the Harvard Medical +School. He had studied in Paris under sound teachers, and after some +years of private practice won the appointment which he held, as active +and emeritus professor, for forty-seven years. He was a faithful, clear, +and amusing lecturer, and printed two or three notable medical essays, +but his chief Boston reputation, in the eighteen-fifties, was that of a +wit and diner-out and writer of verses for occasions. Then came his +great hour of good luck in 1857, when Lowell, the editor of the +newly-established Atlantic Monthly, persuaded him to write The Autocrat +of the Breakfast Table. It was the public's luck also, for whoever had +been so unfortunate as not to be born in Boston could now listen--as if +across the table--to Boston's best talker. Few volumes of essays during +the last sixty years have given more pleasure to a greater variety of +readers than is yielded by The Autocrat. It gave the Doctor a reputation +in England which he naturally prized, and which contributed to his +triumphal English progress, many years later, recorded pleasantly in Our +Hundred Days. The Professor at the Breakfast Table and The Poet at the +Breakfast Table are less successful variations of The Autocrat. Neither +professors nor poets are at their best at this meal. Holmes wrote three +novels--of which Elsie Venner, a somewhat too medical story, is the best +remembered--memoirs of his friends Emerson and Motley, and many +miscellaneous essays. His life was exceptionally happy, and his cheery +good opinion of himself is still contagious. To pronounce the words +Doctor Holmes in any company of intelligent Americans is the prologue to +a smile of recognition, comprehension, sympathy. The word Goldsmith has +now lost, alas, this provocative quality; the word Stevenson still +possesses it. The little Doctor, who died in the same year as Stevenson, +belonged like him to the genial race of friends of mankind, and a few of +his poems, and some gay warm-hearted pages of his prose, will long +preserve his memory. But the Boston which he loved has vanished as +utterly as Sam Johnson's London. + +James Russell Lowell was ten years younger than Holmes, and though he +died three years before the Doctor, he seems, for other reasons than +those of chronology, to belong more nearly to the present. Although by +birth as much of a New England Brahmin as Holmes, and in his later years +as much of a Boston and Cambridge idol, he nevertheless touched our +universal American life on many sides, represented us worthily in +foreign diplomacy, argued the case of Democracy with convincing power, +and embodied, as more perfect artists like Hawthorne and Longfellow +could never have done, the subtleties and potencies of the national +temperament. He deserves and reveals the closest scrutiny, but his +personality is difficult to put on paper. Horace Scudder wrote his +biography with careful competence, and Ferris Greenslet has made him the +subject of a brilliant critical study. Yet readers differ widely in +their assessment of the value of his prose and verse, and in their +understanding of his personality. + +The external facts of his career are easy to trace and must be set down +here with brevity. A minister's son, and descended from a very old and +distinguished family, he was born at Elmwood in Cambridge in 1819. After +a somewhat turbulent course, he was graduated from Harvard in 1838, the +year of Emerson's Divinity School Address. He studied law, turned +Abolitionist, wrote poetry, married the beautiful and transcendental +Maria White, and did magazine work in Boston, New York, and +Philadelphia. He was thought by his friends in the eighteen-fifties to +be "the most Shakespearian" man in America. When he was ten years out of +college, in 1848, he published The Biglow Papers (First Series), A Fable +for Critics, and The Vision of Sir Launfal. After a long visit to Europe +and the death of his wife, he gave some brilliant Lowell Institute +lectures in Boston, and was appointed Longfellow's successor at Harvard. +He went to Europe again to prepare himself, and after entering upon his +work as a teacher made a happy second marriage, served for four years as +the first editor of The Atlantic, and helped his friend Charles Eliot +Norton edit The North American Review. The Civil War inspired a second +series of Biglow Papers and the magnificent Commemoration Ode of 1865. +Then came volume after volume of literary essays, such as Among My Books +and My Study Windows, and an occasional book of verse. Again he made a +long sojourn in Europe, resigned his Harvard professorship, and in 1877 +was appointed Minister to Spain. After three years he was transferred to +the most important post in our diplomatic service, London. He performed +his duties with extraordinary skill and success until 1885, when he was +relieved. His last years were spent in Elmwood, the Cambridge house +where he was born, and he was still writing, in almost as rich a vein as +ever, when the end came in 1891. + +Here was certainly a full and varied life, responsive to many personal +moods and many tides of public feeling. Lowell drew intellectual +stimulus from enormously wide reading in classical and modern +literatures. Puritanically earnest by inheritance, he seems also to have +inherited a strain of levity which he could not always control, and, +through his mother's family, a dash of mysticism sometimes resembling +second sight. His physical and mental powers were not always in the +happiest mutual adjustment: he became easily the prey of moods and +fancies, and knew the alternations from wild gaiety of spirits to black +despair. The firm moral consistency of Puritanism was always his, yet +his playful remark about belonging in a hospital for incurable children +had a measure of truth in it also. + +Both his poetry and his prose reveal a nature never quite integrated +into wholeness of structure, into harmony with itself. His writing, at +its best, is noble and delightful, full of human charm, but it is +difficult for him to master a certain waywardness and to sustain any +note steadily. This temperamental flaw does not affect the winsomeness +of his letters, unless to add to it. It is lost to view, often, in the +sincerity and pathos of his lyrics, but it is felt in most of his longer +efforts in prose, and accounts for a certain dissatisfaction which many +grateful and loyal readers nevertheless feel in his criticism. Lowell +was more richly endowed by nature and by breadth of reading than Matthew +Arnold, for instance, but in the actual performance of the critical +function he was surpassed in method by Arnold and perhaps in inerrant +perception, in a limited field, by Poe. + +It was as a poet, however, that he first won his place in our +literature, and it is by means of certain passages in the Biglow Papers +and the Commemoration Ode that he has most moved his countrymen. The +effectiveness of The Present Crisis and Sir Launfal, and of the Memorial +Odes, particularly the Ode to Agassiz, is likewise due to the passion, +sweetness, and splendor of certain strophes, rather than to the +perfection of these poems as artistic wholes. Lowell's personal lyrics +of sorrow, such as The Changeling, The First Snow-Fall, After the +Burial, have touched many hearts. His later lyrics are more subtle, +weighted with thought, tinged with autumnal melancholy. He was a most +fertile composer, and, like all the men of his time and group, produced +too much. Yet his patriotic verse was so admirable in feeling and is +still so inspiring to his readers that one cannot wish it less in +quantity; and in the field of political satire, such as the two series +of Biglow Papers, he had a theme and a method precisely suited to his +temperament. No American has approached Lowell's success in this +difficult genre: the swift transitions from rural Yankee humor to +splendid scorn of evil and to noblest idealism reveal the full powers of +one of our most gifted men. The preacher lurked in this Puritan from +first to last, and the war against Mexico and the Civil War stirred him +to the depths. + +His prose, likewise, is a school of loyalty. There was much of Europe in +his learning, as his memorable Dante essay shows, and the traditions of +great English literature were the daily companions of his mind. He was +bookish, as a bookman should be, and sometimes the very richness and +whimsicality of his bookish fancies marred the simplicity and good taste +of his pages. But the fundamental texture of his thought and feeling was +American, and his most characteristic style has the raciness of our +soil. Nature lovers like to point out the freshness and delicacy of his +reaction to the New England scene. Thoreau himself, whom Lowell did not +like, was not more veracious an observer than the author of Sunthin' in +the Pastoral Line, Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, and My Garden +Acquaintance. Yet he watched men as keenly as he did "laylocks" and +bobolinks, and no shrewder American essay has been written than his On a +Certain Condescension in Foreigners. Wit and humor and wisdom made him +one of the best talkers of his generation. These qualities pervade his +essays and his letters, and the latter in particular reveal those ardors +and fidelities of friendship which men like Emerson and Thoreau longed +after without ever quite experiencing. Lowell's cosmopolitan reputation, +which was greatly enhanced in the last decade of his life, seemed to his +old associates of the Saturday Club only a fit recognition of the +learning, wit, and fine imagination which had been familiar to them from +the first. To hold the old friends throughout his lifetime, and to win +fresh ones of a new generation through his books, is perhaps the +greatest of Lowell's personal felicities. + +While there are no other names in the literature of New England quite +comparable with those that have just been discussed, it should be +remembered that the immediate effectiveness and popularity of these +representative poets and prose writers were dependent upon the existence +of an intelligent and responsive reading public. The lectures of +Emerson, the speeches of Webster, the stories of Hawthorne, the +political verse of Whittier and Lowell, presupposed a keen, reflecting +audience, mentally and morally exigent. The spread of the Lyceum system +along the line of westward emigration from New England as far as the +Mississippi is one tangible evidence of the high level of popular +intelligence. That there was much of the superficial and the +spread-eagle in the American life of the eighteen-forties is apparent +enough without the amusing comments of such English travellers as +Dickens, Miss Martineau, and Captain Basil Hall. But there was also +genuine intellectual curiosity and a general reading habit which are +evidenced not only by a steady growth of newspapers and magazines but +also by the demand for substantial books. Biography and history began to +be widely read, and it was natural that the most notable productiveness +in historical writing should manifest itself in that section of the +country where there were libraries, wealth, leisure for the pursuits of +scholarship, a sense of intimate concern with the great issues of the +past, and a diffusion of intellectual tastes throughout the community. +It was no accident that Sparks and Ticknor, Bancroft and Prescott, +Motley and Parkman, were Massachusetts men. + +Jared Sparks, it is true, inherited neither wealth nor leisure. He was a +furious, unwearied toiler in the field of our national history. Born in +1789, by profession a Unitarian minister, he began collecting the papers +of George Washington by 1825. John Marshall, the great jurist, had +published his five-volume life of his fellow Virginian a score of years +earlier. But Sparks proceeded to write another biography of Washington +and to edit his writings. He also edited a Library of American +Biography, wrote lives of Franklin and Gouverneur Morris, was professor +of history and President of Harvard, and lived to be seventy-seven. As +editor of the writings of Franklin and Washington, he took what we now +consider unpardonable liberties in altering the text, and this error of +judgment has somewhat clouded his just reputation as a pioneer in +historical research. + +George Bancroft, who was born in 1800, and died, a horseback-riding +sage, at ninety-one, inherited from his clergyman father a taste for +history. He studied in Germany after leaving Harvard, turned +schoolmaster, Democratic politician and office-holder, served as +Secretary of the Navy, Minister to England and then to the German +Empire, and won distinction in each of his avocations, though the real +passion of his life was his History of the United States, which he +succeeded in bringing down to the adoption of the Constitution. The +first volume, which appeared in 1834, reads today like a stump speech by +a sturdy Democratic orator of the Jacksonian period. But there was solid +stuff in it, nevertheless, and as Bancroft proceeded, decade after +decade, he discarded some of his rhetoric and philosophy of democracy +and utilized increasingly the vast stores of documents which his energy +and his high political positions had made it possible for him to obtain. +Late in life he condensed his ten great volumes to six. Posterity will +doubtless condense these in turn, as posterity has a way of doing, but +Bancroft the historian realized his own youthful ambition with a +completeness rare in the history of human effort and performed a +monumental service to his country. + +He was less of an artist, however, than Prescott, the eldest and in some +ways the finest figure of the well-known Prescott-Motley-Parkman group +of Boston historians. All of these men, together with their friend +George Ticknor, who wrote the History of Spanish Literature and whose +own Life and Letters pictures a whole generation, had the professional +advantages of inherited wealth, and the opportunity to make deliberate +choice of a historical field which offered freshness and picturesqueness +of theme. All were tireless workers in spite of every physical handicap; +all enjoyed social security and the rich reward of full recognition by +their contemporaries. They had their world as in their time, as Chaucer +makes the Wife of Bath say of herself, and it was a pleasant world to +live in. + +Grandson of "Prescott the Brave" of Bunker Hill, and son of the rich +Judge Prescott of Salem, William Hickling Prescott was born in 1796, and +was graduated from Harvard in 1814. An accident in college destroyed the +sight of one eye, and left him but a precarious use of the other. +Nevertheless he resolved to emulate Gibbon, whose Autobiography had +impressed him, and to make himself "an historian in the best sense of +the term." He studied arduously in Europe, with the help of secretaries, +and by 1826, after a long hesitation, decided upon a History of the +Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. In ten years the three volumes were +finished. "Pursuing the work in this quiet, leisurely way, without +over-exertion or fatigue," wrote Prescott, "or any sense of obligation +to complete it in a given time, I have found it a continual source of +pleasure." It was published at his own expense on Christmas Day, 1837, +and met with instantaneous success. "My market and my reputation rest +principally with England," he wrote in 1838--a curious footnote, by the +way, to Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa Address of the year before. But America +joined with England, in praising the new book. Then Prescott turned to +the Conquest of Mexico, the Conquest of Peru, and finally to his +unfinished History of the Reign of Philip II. He had, as Dean Milman +wrote him, "the judgment to choose noble subjects." He wrote with +serenity and dignity, with fine balance and proportion. Some of the +Spanish documents upon which he relied have been proved less trustworthy +than he thought, but this unsuspected defect in his materials scarcely +impaired the skill with which this unhasting, unresting painter filled +his great canvases. They need retouching, perhaps, but the younger +historians are incompetent for the task. Prescott died in 1859, in the +same year as Irving, and he already seems quite as remote from the +present hour. + +His young friend Motley, of Dutch Republic fame, was another Boston +Brahmin, born in the year of Prescott's graduation from college. He +attended George Bancroft's school, went to Harvard in due course, where +he knew Holmes, Sumner, and Wendell Phillips, and at Göttingen became a +warm friend of a dog-lover and duelist named Bismarck. Young Motley +wrote a couple of unsuccessful novels, dabbled in diplomacy, politics, +and review-writing, and finally, encouraged by Prescott, settled down +upon Dutch history, went to Europe to work up his material in 1851, and, +after five years, scored an immense triumph with his Rise of the Dutch +Republic. He was a brilliant partisan, hating Spaniards and Calvinists, +and wrote all the better for this bias. He was an admirable sketcher of +historical portraits, and had Macaulay's skill in composing special +chapters devoted to the tendencies and qualities of an epoch or to the +characteristics of a dynasty. Between 1860 and 1868 he produced the four +volumes of the History of the United Netherlands. During the Civil War +he served usefully as American minister to Vienna, and in 1869 was +appointed minister to London. Both of these appointments ended unhappily +for him. Dr. Holmes, his loyal admirer and biographer, does not conceal +the fact that a steadier, less excitable type of public servant might +have handled both the Vienna situation and the London situation without +incurring a recall. Motley continued to live in England, where his +daughters had married, and where, in spite of his ardent Americanism, he +felt socially at home. His last book was The Life and Death of John of +Barneveld. His Letters, edited after his death in 1877 by George +William Curtis, give a fascinating picture of English life among the +cultivated and leisurely classes. The Boston merchant's son was a +high-hearted gentleman, and his cosmopolitan experiences used to make +his stay-at-home friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, feel rather dull and +provincial in comparison. Both were Sons of Liberty, but Motley had had +the luck to find in "brave little Holland" a subject which captivated +the interest of Europe and gave the historian international fame. He had +more eloquence than the Doctor, and a far more varied range of prose, +but there may be here and there a Yankee guesser about the taste of +future generations who will bet on The Autocrat, after all. + +The character and career of Francis Parkman afford curious material to +the student of New England's golden age. In the seventy years of his +heroic life, from 1823 to 1893, all the characteristic forces of the age +reached their culmination and decline, and his own personality indicates +some of the violent reactions produced by the over-strain of +Transcendentalism. For here was a descendant of John Cotton, and a +clergyman's son, who detested Puritanism and the clergy; who, coming to +manhood in the eighteen-forties, hated the very words Transcendentalism, +Philosophy, Religion, Reform; an inheritor of property, trained at +Harvard, and an Overseer and Fellow of his University, who disliked the +ideals of culture and refinement; a member of the Saturday Club who was +bored with literary talk and literary people; a staunch American who +despised democracy as thoroughly as Alexander Hamilton, and thought +suffrage a failure; a nineteenth century historian who cared nothing for +philosophy, science, or the larger lessons of history itself; a +fascinating realistic writer who admired Scott, Byron, and Cooper for +their tales of action, and despised Wordsworth and Thoreau as effeminate +sentimentalists who were preoccupied with themselves. In Parkman "the +wheel has come full circle," and a movement that began with expansion of +self ended in hard Spartan repression, even in inhibition of emotion. + +Becoming "enamoured of the woods" at sixteen, Parkman chose his life +work at eighteen, and he was a man who could say proudly: "I have not +yet abandoned any plan which I ever formed." "Before the end of the +sophomore year," he wrote in his autobiography, "my various schemes had +crystallized into a plan of writing the story of what was then known as +the Old French War, that is, the war that ended in the conquest of +Canada, for here, as it seemed to me, the forest drama was more stirring +and the forest stage more thronged with appropriate actors than in any +other passage of our history. It was not till some years later that I +enlarged the plan to include the whole course of the American conflict +between France and England, or, in other words, the history of the +American forest: for this was the light in which I regarded it. My theme +fascinated me, and I was haunted with wilderness images day and night." +To understand "the history of the American forest" young Parkman devoted +his college vacations to long trips in the wilderness, and in 1846, two +years after graduation, he made the epoch-making journey described in +his first book, The Oregon Trail. + +The Conspiracy of Pontiac, a highly-colored narrative in two volumes +appearing in 1851, marks the first stage of his historical writing. Then +came the tragedy of shattered health, and for fourteen years Parkman +fought for life and sanity, and produced practically nothing. He had had +to struggle from his college days with an obscure disorder of the brain, +aggravated by the hardships of his Oregon Trail journey, and by +ill-considered efforts to harden his bodily frame by over-exertion. His +disease took many forms--insomnia, arthritis, weakness of sight, +incapacity for sustained thought. His biographer Farnham says that "he +never saw a perfectly well day during his entire literary career." Even +when aided by secretaries and copyists, six lines a day was often the +limit of his production. His own Stoic words about the limitations of +his eyesight are characteristic: "By reading for one minute, and then +resting for an equal time, this alternate process may gradually be +continued for about half an hour. Then, after a sufficient interval, it +may be repeated, often three or four times in the course of the day. By +this means nearly the whole of the volume now offered has been +composed." There is no more piteous or inspiring story of a fight +against odds in the history of literature. + +For after his fortieth year the enemy gave way a little, and book after +book somehow got itself written. There they stand upon the shelves, a +dozen of them--The Pioneers of France, The Jesuits in North America, La +Salle, The Old Régime, Frontenac, Montcalm and Wolfe, A Half-Century of +Conflict--the boy's dream realized, the man's long warfare accomplished. +The history of the forest, as Parkman saw it, was a pageant with the +dark wilderness for a background, and, for the actors, taciturn savages, +black-robed Jesuits, intrepid explorers, soldiers of France--all +struggling for a vast prize, all changing, passing, with a pomp and +color unknown to wearied Europe. It was a superb theme, better after all +for an American than the themes chosen by Prescott and Ticknor and +Motley, and precisely adapted to the pictorial and narrative powers of +the soldier-minded, soldier-hearted author. + +The quality which Parkman admired most in men--though he never seems to +have loved men deeply, even his own heroes--was strength of will. That +was the secret of his own power, and the sign, it must be added, of the +limitations of this group of historians who came at the close of the +golden age. Whatever a New England will can accomplish was wrought +manfully by such admirable men as Prescott and Parkman. Trained +intelligence, deliberate selection of subject, skillful cultivation of +appropriate story-telling and picture-painting style, all these were +theirs. But the "wild ecstasy" that thrilled the young Emerson as he +crossed the bare Common at sunset, the "supernal beauty" of which Poe +dreamed in the Fordham cottage, the bay horse and hound and turtle-dove +which Thoreau lost long ago and could not find in his hut at Walden, +these were something which our later Greeks of the New England Athens +esteemed as foolishness. + + + + +CHAPTER VIII. + +Poe and Whitman + +Enter now two egotists, who have little in common save their egotism, +two outsiders who upset most of the conventional American rules for +winning the literary race, two men of genius, in short, about whom we +are still quarreling, and whose distinctive quality is more accurately +perceived in Europe than it has ever been in the United States. + +Both Poe and Whitman were Romanticists by temperament. Both shared in +the tradition and influence of European Romanticism. But they were also +late comers, and they were caught in the more morbid and extravagant +phases of the great European movement while its current was beginning to +ebb. Their acquaintance with its literature was mainly at second-hand +and through the medium of British and American periodicals. Poe, who was +older than Whitman by ten years, was fifteen when Byron died, in 1824. +He was untouched by the nobler mood of Byron, though his verse was +colored by the influence of Byron, Moore, and Shelley. His prose models +were De Quincey, Disraeli, and Bulwer. Yet he owed more to Coleridge +than to any of the Romantics. He was himself a sort of Coleridge without +the piety, with the same keen penetrating critical intelligence, the +same lovely opium-shadowed dreams, and, alas, with something of the same +reputation as a dead-beat. + +A child of strolling players, Poe happened to be born in Boston, but he +hated "Frog-Pondium"--his favorite name for the city of his nativity--as +much as Whistler hated his native town of Lowell. His father died early +of tuberculosis, and his mother, after a pitiful struggle with disease +and poverty, soon followed her husband to the grave. The boy, by +physical inheritance a neurasthenic, though with marked bodily activity +in youth, was adopted by the Allans, a kindly family in Richmond, +Virginia. Poe liked to think of himself as a Southerner. He was sent to +school in England, and in 1826, at seventeen, he attended for nearly a +year the newly founded University of Virginia. He was a dark, short, +bow-legged boy, with the face of his own Roderick Usher. He made a good +record in French and Latin, read, wrote and recited poetry, tramped on +the Ragged Mountains, and did not notably exceed his companions in +drinking and gambling. But his Scotch foster-father disapproved of his +conduct and withdrew him from the University. A period of wandering +followed. He enlisted in the army and was stationed in Boston in 1827, +when his first volume, Tamerlane, was published. In 1829 he was in +Fortress Monroe, and published Al Aaraf at Baltimore. He entered West +Point in 1830, and was surely, except Whistler, the strangest of all +possible cadets. When he was dismissed in 1831, he had written the +marvellous lines To Helen, Israfel, and The City in the Sea. That is +enough to have in one's knapsack at the age of twenty-two. + +In the eighteen years from 1831 to 1849, when Poe's unhappy life came to +an end in a Baltimore hospital, his literary activity was chiefly that +of a journalist, critic, and short story writer. He lived in Baltimore, +Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York. Authors who now exploit their fat +bargains with their publishers may have forgotten that letter which Poe +wrote back to Philadelphia the morning after he arrived with his +child-wife in New York: "We are both in excellent spirits.... We have +now got four dollars and a half left. To-morrow I am going to try and +borrow three dollars, so that I may have a fortnight to go upon." When +the child-wife died in the shabby cottage at Fordham, her wasted body +was covered with the old army overcoat which Poe had brought from West +Point. If Poe met some of the tests of practical life inadequately, it +must be remembered that his health failed at twenty-five, that he was +pitiably poor, and that the slightest indulgence in drink set his +over-wrought nerves jangling. Ferguson, the former office-boy of the +"Literary Messenger," judged this man of letters with an office-boy's +firm and experienced eye: "Mr. Poe was a fine gentleman when he was +sober. He was ever kind and courtly, and at such times everyone liked +him. But when he was drinking he was about one of the most disagreeable +men I have ever met." "I am sorry for him," wrote C. F. Briggs to +Lowell. "He has some good points, but taken altogether, he is badly made +up." "Badly made up," no doubt, both in body and mind, but all +respectable and prosperous Pharisees should be reminded that Poe did not +make himself; or rather, that he could not make himself over. Very few +men can. Given Poe's temperament, and the problem is insoluble. He wrote +to Lowell in 1844: "I have been too deeply conscious of the mutability +and evanescence of temporal things to give any continuous effort to +anything--to be consistent in anything. My life has been +whim--impulse--passion--a longing for solitude--a scorn of all things +present in an earnest desire for the future." It is the pathetic +confession of a dreamer. Yet this dreamer was also a keen analyzer, a +tireless creator of beautiful things. In them he sought and found a +refuge from actuality. The marvel of his career is, as I have said +elsewhere, that this solitary, embittered craftsman, out of such +hopeless material as negations and abstractions, shadows and +superstitions, out of disordered fancies and dreams of physical horror +and strange crime, should have wrought structures of imperishable +beauty. + +Let us notice the critical instinct which he brought to the task of +creation. His theory of verse is simple, in fact too simple to account +for all of the facts. The aim of poetry, according to Poe, is not truth +but pleasure--the rhythmical creation of beauty. Poetry should be brief, +indefinite, and musical. Its chief instrument is sound. A certain +quaintness or grotesqueness of tone is a means for satisfying the thirst +for supernal beauty. Hence the musical lyric is to Poe the only true +type of poetry; a long poem does not exist. Readers who respond more +readily to auditory than to visual or motor stimulus are therefore Poe's +chosen audience. For them he executes, like Paganini, marvels upon his +single string. He has easily recognizable devices: the dominant note, +the refrain, the "repetend," that is to say the phrase which echoes, +with some variation, a phrase or line already used. In such poems as To +Helen, Israfel, The Haunted Palace, Annabel Lee, the theme, the tone, +the melody all weave their magic spell; it is like listening to a +lute-player in a dream. + +That the device often turns into a trick is equally true. In The Bells +and The Raven we detect the prestidigitator. It is jugglery, though such +juggling as only a master-musician can perform. In Ulalume and other +show-pieces the wires get crossed and the charm snaps, scattering tinsel +fragments of nonsense verse. Such are the dangers of the technical +temperament unenriched by wide and deep contact with human feeling. + +Poe's theory of the art of the short story is now familiar enough. The +power of a tale, he thought, turned chiefly if not solely upon its +unity, its harmony of effect. This is illustrated in all of his finest +stories. In The Fall of the House of Usher the theme is Fear; the +opening sentence strikes the key and the closing sentence contains the +climax. In the whole composition every sentence is modulated to the one +end in view. The autumn landscape tones with the melancholy house; the +somber chamber frames the cadaverous face of Roderick Usher; the face is +an index of the tumultuous agitation of a mind wrestling with the grim +phantom Fear and awaiting the cumulative horror of the final moment. In +Ligeia, which Poe sometimes thought the best of all his tales, the theme +is the ceaseless life of the will, the potency of the spirit of the +beloved and departed woman. The unity of effect is absolute, the +workmanship consummate. So with the theme of revenge in The Cask of +Amontillado, the theme of mysterious intrigue in The Assignation. In +Poe's detective stories, or tales of ratiocination as he preferred to +call them, he takes to pieces for our amusement a puzzle which he has +cunningly put together. The Gold Bug is the best known of these, The +Purloined Letter the most perfect, The Murders in the Rue Morgue the +most sensational. Then there are the tales upon scientific subjects or +displaying the pretence of scientific knowledge, where the narrator +loves to pose as a man without imagination and with "habits of rigid +thought." And there are tales of conscience, of which The Black Cat is +the most fearful and William Wilson the most subtle; and there are +landscape sketches and fantasies and extravaganzas, most of these poor +stuff. + +It is ungrateful and perhaps unnecessary to dwell upon Poe's +limitations. His scornful glance caught certain aspects of the human +drama with camera-like precision. Other aspects of life, and nobler, he +never seemed to perceive. The human comedy sometimes moved him to +laughter, but his humor is impish and his wit malign. His imagination +fled from the daylight; he dwelt in the twilight among the tombs. He +closed his eyes to dream, and could not see the green sunlit earth, +seed-time and harvest, man going forth to his toil and returning to his +hearthstone, the America that laughs as it labors. He wore upon his +finger the magic ring and the genii did his bidding. But we could wish +that the palaces they reared for him were not in such a somber land, +with such infernal lights gleaming in their windows, and crowded with +such horror-haunted forms. We could wish that his imagination dealt less +often with those primitive terrors that belong to the childhood of our +race. Yet when his spell is upon us we lapse back by a sort of atavism +into primal savagery and shudder with a recrudescence of long forgotten +fears. No doubt Poe was ignorant of life, in the highest sense. He was +caged in by his ignorance, Yet he had beautiful dusky wings that bruised +themselves against his prison. + +Poe was a tireless critic of his own work, and both his standards of +workmanship and his critical precepts have been of great service to his +careless countrymen. He turned out between four and five short stories a +year, was poorly paid for them, and indeed found difficulty in selling +them at all. Yet he was constantly correcting them for the better. His +best poems were likewise his latest. He was tantalized with the desire +for artistic perfection. He became the pathbreaker for a long file of +men in France, Italy, England, and America. He found the way and they +brought back the glory and the cash. + +I have sometimes imagined Poe, with four other men and one woman, seated +at a dinner-table laid for six, and talking of their art and of +themselves. What would the others think of Poe? I fancy that Thackeray +would chat with him courteously, but would not greatly care for him. +George Eliot, woman-like, would pity him. Hawthorne would watch him with +those inscrutable eyes and understand him better than the rest. But +Stevenson would be immensely interested; he would begin an essay on Poe +before he went to sleep. And Mr. Kipling would look sharply at him: he +has seen that man before, in The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows. All of them +would find in him something to praise, a great deal to marvel at, and +perhaps not much to love. And the sensitive, shabby, lonely Poe--what +would he think of them? He might not care much for the other guests, but +I think he would say to himself with a thrill of pride: "I belong at +this table." And he does. + +Walt Whitman, whom his friend O'Connor dubbed the "good gray poet," +offers a bizarre contrast to Edgar Allan Poe. There was nothing +distinctively American about Poe except his ingenuity; he had no +interest in American history or in American ideas; he was a timeless, +placeless embodiment of technical artistry. But Whitman had a passion +for his native soil; he was hypnotized by the word America; he spent +much of his mature life in brooding over the question, "What, after all, +is an American, and what should an American poet be in our age of +science and democracy?" It is true that he was as untypical as Poe of +the average citizen of "these states." His personality is unique. In +many respects he still baffles our curiosity. He repels many of his +countrymen without arousing the pity which adds to their romantic +interest in Poe. Whatever our literary students may feel, and whatever +foreign critics may assert, it must be acknowledged that to the vast +majority of American men and women "good old Walt" is still an outsider. + +Let us try to see first the type of mind with which we are dealing. It +is fundamentally religious, perceiving the unity and kinship and glory +of all created things. It is this passion of worship which inspired St. +Francis of Assisi's Canticle to the Sun. It cries, "Benedicite, Omnia +opera Domini: All ye Green Things upon the Earth, bless ye the Lord!" +That is the real motto for Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Like St. Francis, +and like his own immediate master, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman is a +mystic. He cannot argue the ultimate questions; he asserts them. Instead +of marshaling and sifting the proofs for immortality, he chants "I know +I am deathless." Like Emerson again, Whitman shares that peculiarly +American type of mysticism known as Transcendentalism, but he came at +the end of this movement instead of at the beginning of it. In his +Romanticism, likewise, he is an end of an era figure. His affiliations +with Victor Hugo are significant; and a volume of Scott's poems which he +owned at the age of sixteen became his "inexhaustible mine and treasury +for more than sixty years." Finally, and quite as uncompromisingly as +Emerson, Thoreau, and Poe, Whitman is an individualist. He represents +the assertive, Jacksonian period of our national existence. In a +thousand similes he makes a declaration of independence for the separate +person, the "single man" of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa address. "I wear my +hat as I please, indoors and out." Sometimes this is mere swagger. +Sometimes it is superb. + +So much for the type. Let us turn next to the story of Whitman's life. +It must here be told in the briefest fashion, for Whitman's own prose +and poetry relate the essentials of his biography. He was born on Long +Island, of New England and Dutch ancestry, in 1819. Lowell, W. W. Story, +and Charles A. Dana were born in that year, as was also George Eliot. +Whitman's father was a carpenter, who "leaned to the Quakers." There +were many children. When little "Walt"--as he was called, to distinguish +him from his father, Walter--was four, the family moved to Brooklyn. The +boy had scanty schooling, and by the time he was twenty had tried +type-setting, teaching, and editing a country newspaper on Long Island. +He was a big, dark-haired fellow, sensitive, emotional, extraordinarily +impressible. + +The next sixteen years were full of happy vagrancy. At twenty-two he was +editing a paper in New York, and furnishing short stories to the +Democratic Review, a literary journal which numbered Bryant, Longfellow, +Whittier, Poe, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among its contributors. He wrote a +novel on temperance, "mostly in the reading-room of Tammany Hall," and +tried here and there an experiment in free verse. He was in love with +the pavements of New York and the Brooklyn ferry-boats, in love with +Italian opera and with long tramps over Long Island. He left his +position on The Brooklyn Eagle and wandered south to New Orleans. By and +by he drifted back to New York, tried lecturing, worked at the +carpenter's trade with his father, and brooded over a book--"a book of +new things." + +This was the famous Leaves of Grass. He set the type himself, in a +Brooklyn printing-office, and printed about eight hundred copies. The +book had a portrait of the author--a meditative, gray-bearded poet in +workman's clothes--and a confused preface on America as a field for the +true poet. Then followed the new gospel, "I celebrate myself," chanted +in long lines of free verse, whose patterns perplexed contemporary +readers. For the most part it was passionate speech rather than song, a +rhapsodical declamation in hybrid rhythms. Very few people bought the +book or pretended to understand what it was all about. Some were +startled by the frank sexuality of certain poems. But Emerson wrote to +Whitman from Concord: "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and +wisdom that America has yet contributed." + +Until the Civil War was half over, Whitman remained in Brooklyn, +patiently composing new poems for successive printings of his book. Then +he went to the front to care for a wounded brother, and finally settled +down in a Washington garret to spend his strength as an army hospital +nurse. He wrote Drum Taps and other magnificent poems about the War, +culminating in his threnody on Lincoln's death, When Lilacs last in the +Dooryard Bloomed. Swinburne called this "the most sonorous nocturn ever +chanted in the church of the world." After the war had ended, Whitman +stayed on in Washington as a government clerk, and saw much of John +Burroughs and W. D. O'Connor. John Hay was a staunch friend. Some of the +best known poets and critics of England and the Continent now began to +recognize his genius. But his health had been permanently shattered by +his heroic service as a nurse, and in 1873 he suffered a paralytic +stroke which forced him to resign his position in Washington and remove +to his brother's home in Camden, New Jersey. + +He was only fifty-four, but his best work was already done, and his +remaining years, until his death in 1892, were those of patient and +serene invalidism. He wrote some fascinating prose in this final period, +and his cluttered chamber in Camden became the shrine of many a literary +pilgrim, among them some of the foremost men of letters of this country +and of Europe. He was cared for by loyal friends. Occasionally he +appeared in public, a magnificent gray figure of a man. And then, at +seventy-three, the "Dark mother always gliding near" enfolded him. + +There are puzzling things in the physical and moral constitution of Walt +Whitman, and the obstinate questions involved in his theory of poetry +and in his actual poetical performance are still far from solution. But +a few points concerning him are by this time fairly clear. They must be +swiftly summarized. + +The first obstacle to the popular acceptance of Walt Whitman is the +formlessness or alleged formlessness of Leaves of Grass. This is a +highly technical question, involving a more accurate notation than has +thus far been made of the patterns and tunes of free verse and of +emotional prose. Whitman's "new and national declamatory expression," as +he termed it, cannot receive a final technical valuation until we have +made more scientific progress in the analysis of rhythms. As regards the +contents of his verse, it is plain that he included much material +unfused and untransformed by emotion. These elements foreign to the +nature of poetry clog many of his lines. The enumerated objects in his +catalogue or inventory poems often remain inert objects only. Like many +mystics, he was hypnotized by external phenomena, and he often fails to +communicate to his reader the trance-like emotion which he himself +experienced. This imperfect transfusion of his material is a far more +significant defect in Whitman's poetry than the relatively few passages +of unashamed sexuality which shocked the American public in 1855. + +The gospel or burden of Leaves of Grass is no more difficult of +comprehension than the general drift of Emerson's essays, which helped +to inspire it. The starting-point of the book is a mystical illumination +regarding the unity and blessedness of the universe, an insight passing +understanding, but based upon the revelatory experience of love. In the +light of this experience, all created things are recognized as divine. +The starting-point and center of the Whitman world is the individual +man, the "strong person," imperturbable in mind, athletic in body, +unconquerable, and immortal. Such individuals meet in comradeship, and +pass together along the open roads of the world. No one is excluded +because of his poverty or his sins; there is room in the ideal America +for everybody except the doubter and sceptic. Whitman does not linger +over the smaller groups of human society, like the family. He is not a +fireside poet. He passes directly from his strong persons, meeting +freely on the open road, to his conception of "these States." One of his +typical visions of the breadth and depth and height of America will be +found in By Blue Ontario's Shore. In this and in many similar rhapsodies +Whitman holds obstinately to what may be termed the three points of his +national creed. The first is the newness of America, and its expression +is in his well-known chant of Pioneers, O Pioneers. Yet this new America +is subtly related to the past; and in Whitman's later poems, such as +Passage to India, the spiritual kinship of orient and occident is +emphasized. The second article of the creed is the unity of America. +Here he voices the conceptions of Hamilton, Clay, Webster, and Lincoln. +In spite of all diversity in external aspects the republic is "one and +indivisible." This unity, in Whitman's view, was cemented forever by the +issue of the Civil War. Lincoln, the "Captain," dies indeed on the deck +of the "victor ship," but the ship comes into the harbor "with object +won." Third and finally, Whitman insists upon the solidarity of America +with all countries of the globe. Particularly in his yearning and +thoughtful old age, the poet perceived that humanity has but one heart +and that it should have but one will. No American poet has ever +prophesied so directly and powerfully concerning the final issue +involved in that World War which he did not live to see. + +Whitman, like Poe, had defects of character and defects of art. His life +and work raise many problems which will long continue to fascinate and +to baffle the critics. But after all of them have had their say, it will +remain true that he was a seer and a prophet, far in advance of his own +time, like Lincoln, and like Lincoln, an inspired interpreter of the +soul of this republic. + + + + +CHAPTER IX. + +Union and Liberty + +"There is what I call the American idea," declared Theodore Parker in +the Anti-Slavery Convention of 1850. "This idea demands, as the +proximate organization thereof, a democracy--that is, a government of +all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a +government on the principle of eternal justice, the unchanging law of +God; for shortness' sake, I will call it the idea of Freedom." + +These are noble words, and they are thought to have suggested a familiar +phrase of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, thirteen years later. Yet +students of literature, no less than students of politics, recognize the +difficulty of summarizing in words a national "idea." Precisely what was +the Greek "idea"? What is today the French "idea"? No single formula is +adequate to express such a complex of fact, theories, moods--not even +the famous "Liberty, Fraternity, Equality." The existence of a truly +national life and literature presupposes a certain degree of unity, an +integration of race, language, political institutions, and social +ideals. It is obvious that this problem of national integration meets +peculiar obstacles in the United States. Divergencies of race, +tradition, and social theory, and clashing interests of different +sections have been felt from the beginning of the nation's life. There +was well-nigh complete solidarity in the single province of New England +during a portion of the seventeenth century, and under the leadership of +the great Virginians there was sufficient national fusion to make the +Revolution successful. But early in the nineteenth century, the opening +of the new West, and the increasing economic importance of Slavery as a +peculiar institution of the South, provoked again the ominous question +of the possibility of an enduring Union. From 1820 until the end of the +Civil War, it was the chief political issue of the United States. The +aim of the present chapter is to show how the theme of Union and Liberty +affected our literature. + +To appreciate the significance of this theme we must remind ourselves +again of what many persons have called the civic note in our national +writing. Franklin exemplified it in his day. It is far removed from the +pure literary art of a Poe, a Hawthorne, a Henry James. It aims at +action rather than beauty. It seeks to persuade, to convince, to bring +things to pass. We shall observe it in the oratory of Clay and Webster, +as they pleaded for compromise; in the editorials of Garrison, a foe to +compromise and like Calhoun an advocate, if necessary, of disunion; in +the epoch-making novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe; in the speeches of +Wendell Phillips, in verse white-hot with political passion, and sermons +blazing with the fury of attack and defense of principles dear to the +human heart. We must glance, at least, at the lyrics produced by the war +itself, and finally, we shall observe how Abraham Lincoln, the inheritor +of the ideas of Jefferson, Clay, and Webster, perceives and maintains, +in the noblest tones of our civic speech, the sole conditions of our +continuance as a nation. + +Let us begin with oratory, an American habit, and, as many besides +Dickens have thought, an American defect. We cannot argue that question +adequately here. It is sufficient to say that in the pioneer stages of +our existence oratory was necessary as a stimulus to communal thought +and feeling. The speeches of Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams were as +essential to our winning independence as the sessions of statesmen and +the armed conflicts in the field. And in that new West which came so +swiftly and dramatically into existence at the close of the Revolution, +the orator came to be regarded as the normal type of intellectual +leadership. The stump grew more potent than schoolhouse and church and +bench. + +The very pattern, and, if one likes, the tragic victim of this +glorification of oratory was Henry Clay, "Harry of the West," the +glamour of whose name and the wonderful tones of whose voice became for +a while a part of the political system of the United States. Union and +Liberty were the master-passions of Clay's life, but the greater of +these was Union. The half-educated young immigrant from Virginia +hazarded his career at the outset by championing Anti-Slavery in the +Kentucky Constitutional Convention; the last notable act of his life was +his successful management, at the age of seventy-three, of the futile +Compromise of 1850. All his life long he fought for national issues; for +the War of 1812, for a protective tariff and an "American system," for +the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as a measure for national safety; and he +had plead generously for the young South American republics and for +struggling Greece. He had become the perpetual candidate of his party +for the Presidency, and had gone down again and again in unforeseen and +heart-rending defeat. Yet he could say honorably: "If any one desires to +know the leading and paramount object of my public life, the +preservation of this union will furnish him the key." One could wish +that the speeches of this fascinating American were more readable today. +They seem thin, facile, full of phrases--such adroit phrases as would +catch the ear of a listening, applauding audience. Straight, hard +thinking was not the road to political preferment in Clay's day. Calhoun +had that power, as Lincoln had it. Webster had the capacity for it, +although he was too indolent to employ his great gifts steadily. Yet it +was Webster who analyzed kindly and a little sadly, for he was talking +during Clay's last illness and just before his own, his old rival's +defect in literary quality: "He was never a man of books.... I could +never imagine him sitting comfortably in his library and reading quietly +out of the great books of the past. He has been too fond of +excitement--he has lived upon it; he has been too fond of company, not +enough alone; and has had few resources within himself." Were the +limitations of a typical oratorical temperament ever touched more +unerringly than in these words? + +When Webster himself thundered, at the close of his reply to Hayne in +1830, "Union and Liberty, now and forever, one and inseparable," the +words sank deeper into the consciousness of the American people than any +similar sentiment uttered by Henry Clay. For Webster's was the richer, +fuller nature, nurtured by "the great books of the past," brooding, as +Lincoln was to brood later, over the seemingly insoluble problem of +preserving a union of States half slave, half free. On the fateful +seventh of March, 1850, Webster, like Clay, cast the immense weight of +his personality and prestige upon the side of compromise. It was the +ruin of his political fortune, for the mood of the North was changing, +and the South preferred other candidates for the Presidency. Yet the +worst that can fairly be said against that speech today is that it +lacked moral imagination to visualize, as Mrs. Stowe was soon to +visualize, the human results of slavery. As a plea for the transcendent +necessity of maintaining the old Union it was consistent with Webster's +whole development of political thought. + +What were the secrets of that power that held Webster's hearers +literally spellbound, and made the North think of him, after that +alienation of 1850, as a fallen angel? No one can say fully, for we +touch here the mysteries of personality and of the spoken word. But +enough survives from the Webster legend, from his correspondence and +political and legal oratory, to bring us into the presence of a +superman. The dark Titan face, painted by such masters as Carlyle, +Hawthorne, and Emerson; the magical voice, remembered now but by a few +old men; the bodily presence, with its leonine suggestion of sleepy +power only half put forth--these aided Webster to awe men or allure them +into personal idolatry. Yet outside of New England he was admired rather +than loved. There is still universal recognition of the mental capacity +of this foremost lawyer and foremost statesman of his time. He was +unsurpassed in his skill for direct, simple, limpid statement; but he +could rise at will to a high Roman stateliness of diction, a splendid +sonorousness of cadence. His greatest public appearances were in the +Dartmouth College Case before the Supreme Court, the Plymouth, Bunker +Hill, and Adams-Jefferson commemorative orations, the Reply to Hayne, +and the Seventh of March speeches in the Senate. Though he exhibited in +his private life something of the prodigal recklessness of the pioneer, +his mental operations were conservative, constructive. His lifelong +antagonist Calhoun declared that "The United States are not a nation." +Webster, in opposition to this theory of a confederation of states, +devoted his superb talents to the demonstration of the thesis that the +United States "is," not "are." Thus he came to be known as the typical +expounder of the Constitution. When he reached, in 1850, the +turning-point of his career, his countrymen knew by heart his personal +and political history, the New Hampshire boyhood and education, the rise +to mastery at the New England bar, the service in the House of +Representatives and the Senate and as Secretary of State. His speeches +were already in the schoolbooks, and for twenty years boys had been +declaiming his arguments against nullification. He had helped to teach +America to think and to feel. Indeed it was through his oratory that +many of his fellow-citizens had gained their highest conception of the +beauty, the potency, and the dignity of human speech. And in truth he +never exhibited his logical power and demonstrative skill more superbly +than in the plea of the seventh of March for the preservation of the +status quo, for the avoidance of mutual recrimination between North and +South, for obedience to the law of the land. It was his supreme effort +to reconcile an irreconcilable situation. + +It failed, as we know. Whittier, Emerson, Theodore Parker, and indeed +most of the voters of New England, believed that Webster had bartered +his private convictions in the hope of securing the Presidential +nomination in 1852. They assailed him savagely, and Webster died, a +broken man, in the autumn of the Presidential year. "I have given my +life to law and politics," he wrote to Professor Silliman. "Law is +uncertain and politics are utterly vain." The dispassionate judgment of +the present hour frees him from the charge of conscious treachery to +principle. He was rather a martyr to his own conception of the +obligations imposed by nationality. When these obligations run counter +to human realities, the theories of statesmen must give way. Emerson +could not refute that logic of Webster's argument for the Fugitive Slave +Law, but he could at least record in his private Journal: "I will not +obey it, by God!" So said hundreds of thousands of obscure men in the +North, but Webster did not or could not hear them. + +While no other orator of that period was so richly endowed as Daniel +Webster, the struggle for Union and Liberty enlisted on both sides many +eloquent men. John C. Calhoun's acute, ingenious, masterly political +theorizing can still be studied in speeches that have lost little of +their effectiveness through the lapse of time. The years have dealt +roughly with Edward Everett, once thought to be the pattern of +oratorical gifts and graces. In commemorative oratory, indeed, he ranked +with Webster, but the dust is settling upon his learned and ornate +pages. Rufus Choate, another conservative Whig in politics, and a +leader, like Wirt and Pinkney, at the bar, had an exotic, almost +Oriental fancy, a gorgeousness of diction, and an intensity of emotion +unrivaled among his contemporaries. His Dartmouth College eulogy of +Webster in 1853 shows him at his best. The Anti-Slavery orators, on the +other hand, had the advantage of a specific moral issue in which they +led the attack. Wendell Phillips was the most polished, the most +consummate in his air of informality, and his example did much to +puncture the American tradition of high-flown oratory. He was an expert +in virulent denunciation, passionately unfair beneath his mask of +conversational decorum, an aristocratic demagogue. He is still +distrusted and hated by the Brahmin class of his own city, still adored +by the children and grandchildren of slaves. Charles Sumner, like Edward +Everett, seems sinking into popular oblivion, in spite of the statues +and portraits and massive volumes of erudite and caustic and high-minded +orations. He may be seen at his best in such books as Longfellow's +Journal and Correspondence and the Life and Letters of George Ticknor. +There one has a pleasant picture of a booklover, traveler, and friend. +But in his public speech he was arrogant, unsympathetic, domineering. +"Sumner is my idea of a bishop," said Lincoln tentatively. There are +bishops and bishops, however, and if Henry Ward Beecher, whom Lincoln +and hosts of other Americans admired, had only belonged to the Church of +England, what an admirable Victorian bishop he might have made! Perhaps +his best service to the cause of union was rendered by his speeches in +England, where he fairly mobbed the mob and won them by his wit, +courage, and by his appeal to the instinct of fair play. Beecher's +oratory, in and out of the pulpit, was temperamental, sentimental in the +better sense, and admirably human in all its instincts. He had an +immense following, not only in political and humanitarian fields, but as +a lovable type of the everyday American who can say undisputed things +not only solemnly, if need be, but by preference with an infectious +smile. The people who loved Mr. Beecher are the people who understand +Mr. Bryan. + +Foremost among the journalists of the great debate were William Lloyd +Garrison and Horace Greeley. Garrison was a perfect example of the +successful journalist as described by Zola--the man who keeps on +pounding at a single idea until he has driven it into the head of the +public. Everyone knows at least the sentence from his salutatory +editorial in The Liberator on January 1, 1831: "I am in earnest--I will +not retreat a single inch--And I will be heard." He kept this vow, and +he also kept the accompanying and highly characteristic promise: "I will +be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, +I do not wish to think, or write, or speak, with moderation." But there +would be little political literature in the world if its production were +entrusted to the moderate type of man, and the files of The Liberator, +though certainly harsh and full of all uncharitableness towards +slave-owners, make excellent reading for the twentieth century American +who perceives that in spite of the triumph of emancipation, in which +Garrison had his fair share of glory, many aspects of our race-problem +remain unsolved. Horace Greeley, the founder and editor of the New York +Tribune, was a farmer's boy who learned early to speak and write the +vocabulary of the plain people. Always interested in new ideas, even in +Transcendentalism and Fourierism, his courage and energy and +journalistic vigor gave him leadership in the later phases of the +movement for enfranchisement. He did not hesitate to offer unasked +advice to Lincoln on many occasions, and Lincoln enriched our literature +by his replies. Greeley had his share of faults and fatuities, but in +his best days he had an impressively loyal following among both rural +and city-bred readers of his paper, and he remains one of the best +examples of that obsolescent personal journalism which is destined to +disappear under modern conditions of newspaper production. Readers +really used to care for "what Greeley said" and "Dana said" and "Sam +Bowles said," and all of these men, with scores of others, have left +their stamp upon the phrases and the tone of our political writing. + +In the concrete issue of Slavery, however, it must be admitted that the +most remarkable literary victory was scored, not by any orator or +journalist, but by an almost unknown little woman, the author of Uncle +Tom's Cabin. No American novel has had so curious a history and so great +or so immediate an influence in this country and in Europe. In spite of +all that has been written about it, its author's purpose is still widely +misunderstood, particularly in the South, and the controversy over this +one epoch-making novel has tended to obscure the literary reputation +which Mrs. Stowe won by her other books. + +Harriet Beecher, the daughter and the sister of famous clergymen, was +born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1811. For seventeen years, from 1832 +to 1849, she lived in the border city of Cincinnati, within sight of +slave territory, and in daily contact with victims of the slave system. +While her sympathies, like those of her father Lyman Beecher, were +anti-slavery, she was not an Abolitionist in the Garrisonian sense of +that word. At twenty-five she had married a widowed professor, Calvin +Stowe, to whom she bore many children. She had written a few sketches of +New England life, and her family thought her a woman of genius. Such was +the situation in the winter of 1849-1850, when the Stowes migrated to +Brunswick, Maine, where the husband had been appointed to a chair at +Bowdoin. Pitiably poor, and distracted by household cares which she had +to face single-handed--for the Professor was a "feckless body"--Mrs. +Stowe nevertheless could not be indifferent to the national crisis over +the Fugitive Slave Law. She had seen its working. When her sister-in-law +wrote to her: "If I could use a pen as you can, I would write something +that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery +is," Mrs. Stowe exclaimed: "God helping me, I will write something; I +will if I live." + +Uncle Tom's Cabin, begun in the spring of 1850, was a woman's answer to +Webster's seventh of March speech. Its object was plainly stated to be +"to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race; to show, their +wrongs and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as to +defeat and do away the good effects of all that can be attempted for +them, by their best friends under it." The book was permeated with what +we now call the 1848 anti-aristocratic sentiment, the direct heritage of +the French Revolution. "There is a dies irœ coming on, sooner or later," +admits St. Clare in the story. "The same thing is working, in Europe, in +England, and in this country." There was no sectional hostility in Mrs. +Stowe's heart. "The people of the free states have defended, encouraged, +and participated [in slavery]; and are more guilty for it, before God, +than the South, in that they have not the apology of education or +custom. If the mothers of the free states had all felt as they should in +times past, the sons of the free states would not have been the holders, +and proverbially the hardest masters, of slaves; the sons of the free +states would not have connived at the extension of slavery in our +national body." "Your book is going to be the great pacificator," wrote +a friend of Mrs. Stowe; "it will unite North and South." But the +distinctly Christian and fraternal intention of the book was swiftly +forgotten in the storm of controversy that followed its appearance. It +had been written hastily, fervidly, in the intervals of domestic toil at +Brunswick, had been printed as a serial in The National Era without +attracting much attention, and was issued in book form in March, 1852. +Its sudden and amazing success was not confined to this country. The +story ran in three Paris newspapers at once, was promptly dramatized, +and has held the stage in France ever since. It was placed upon the +Index in Italy, as being subversive of established authority. Millions +of copies were sold in Europe, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, more than any +other cause, held the English working men in sympathy with the North in +the English cotton crisis of our Civil War. + +It is easy to see the faults of this masterpiece and impossible not to +recognize its excellencies. "If our art has not scope enough to include +a book of this kind," said Madame George Sand, "we had better stretch +the terms of our art a little." For the book proved to be, as its author +had hoped, a "living dramatic reality." Topsy, Chloe, Sam and Andy, Miss +Ophelia and Legree are alive. Mrs. St. Clare might have been one of +Balzac's indolent, sensuous women. Uncle Tom himself is a bit too good +to be true, and readers no longer weep over the death of little +Eva--nor, for that matter, over the death of Dickens's little Nell. +There is some melodrama, some religiosity, and there are some absurd +recognition scenes at the close. Nevertheless with an instinctive genius +which Zola would have envied, Mrs. Stowe embodies in men and women the +vast and ominous system of slavery. All the tragic forces of necessity, +blindness, sacrifice, and retribution are here: neither Shelby, nor +Eliza, nor the tall Kentuckian who aids her, nor John Bird, nor Uncle +Tom himself in the final act of his drama, can help himself. For good or +evil they are the products and results of the system; and yet they have +and they give the illusion of volition. + +Mrs. Stowe lived to write many another novel and short story, among them +Dred, The Minister's Wooing, Oldtown Folks, Oldtown Fireside Stories. In +the local short story she deserves the honors due to one of the +pioneers, and her keen affectionate observation, her humor, and her +humanity, would have given her a literary reputation quite independent +of her masterpiece. But she is likely to pay the penalty of that +astounding success, and to go down to posterity as the author of a +single book. She would not mind this fate. + +The poetry of the idea of Freedom and of the sectional struggle which +was necessary before that idea could be realized in national policy is +on the whole not commensurate with the significance of the issue itself. +Any collection of American political verse produced during this period +exhibits spirited and sincere writing, but the combination of mature +literary art and impressive general ideas is comparatively rare. There +are single poems of Whittier, Lowell, and Whitman which meet every test +of effective political and social verse, but the main body of poetry, +both sectional and national, written during the thirty years ending with +1865 lacks breadth, power, imaginative daring. The continental +spaciousness and energy which foreign critics thought they discovered in +Whitman is not characteristic of our poetry as a whole. Victor Hugo and +Shelley and Swinburne have written far more magnificent republican +poetry than ours. The passion for freedom has been very real upon this +side of the Atlantic; it pulsed in the local loyalty of the men who sang +Dixie as well as in their antagonists who chanted John Brown's Body and +The Battle Hymn of the Republic; but this passion has not yet lifted and +ennobled any notable mass of American verse. Even the sentiment of union +was more adequately voiced in editorials and sermons and orations, even +in a short story--Edward Everett Hale's Man Without a Country--than by +most of the poets who attempted to glorify that theme. + +Nevertheless the verse of these thirty years is rich in provincial and +sectional loyalties. It has earnestness and pathos. We have, indeed, no +adequate national anthem, even yet, for neither the words nor the music +of The Star-Spangled Banner fully express what we feel while we are +trying to sing it, as the Marseillaise, for example, does express the +very spirit of revolutionary republicanism. But in true pioneer fashion +we get along with a makeshift until something better turns up. The lyric +and narrative verse of the Civil War itself was great in quantity, and +not more inferior in quality than the war verse of other nations has +often proved to be when read after the immediate occasion for it has +passed. Single lyrics by Timrod and Paul Hayne, Boker, H. H. Brownell, +Read, Stedman, and other men are still full of fire. Yet Mrs. Howe's +Battle Hymn, scribbled hastily in the gray dawn, interpreted, as no +other lyric of the war quite succeeded in interpreting, the mystical +glory of sacrifice for Freedom. Soldiers sang it in camp; women read it +with tears; children repeated it in school, vaguely but truly perceiving +in it, as their fathers had perceived in Webster's Reply to Hayne thirty +years before, the idea of union made "simple, sensuous, passionate." No +American poem has had a more dramatic and intense life in the quick +breathing imagination of men. + +More and more, however, the instinct of our people is turning to the +words of Abraham Lincoln as the truest embodiment in language, as his +life was the truest embodiment in action, of our national ideal. It is a +curious reversal of contemporary judgments that thus discovers in the +homely phrases of a frontier lawyer the most perfect literary expression +of the deeper spirit of his time. "How knoweth this man letters, having +never learned?" asked the critical East. The answer is that he had +learned in a better school than the East afforded. The story of +Lincoln's life is happily too familiar to need retelling here, but some +of the elements in his growth in the mastery of speech may at least be +summarized. + +Lincoln had a slow, tireless mind, capable of intense concentration. It +was characteristic of him that he rarely took notes when trying a law +case, saying that the notes distracted his attention. When his partner +Herndon was asked when Lincoln had found time to study out the +constitutional history of the United States, Herndon expressed the +opinion that it was when Lincoln was lying on his back on the office +sofa, apparently watching the flies upon the ceiling. This combination +of bodily repose with intense mental and spiritual activity is familiar +to those who have studied the biography of some of the great mystics. +Walter Pater pointed it out in the case of Wordsworth. + +In recalling the poverty and restriction of Lincoln's boyhood and his +infrequent contact with schoolhouses, it is well to remember that he +managed nevertheless to read every book within twenty miles of him. +These were not many, it is true, but they included The Bible, Æesop's +Fables, Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and, a little later, Burns +and Shakespeare. Better food than this for the mind of a boy has never +been found. Then he came to the history of his own country since the +Declaration of Independence and mastered it. "I am tolerably well +acquainted with the history of the country," he remarked in his Chicago +speech of 1858; and in the Cooper Union speech of 1860 he exhibited a +familiarity with the theory and history of the Constitution which amazed +the young lawyers who prepared an annotated edition of the address. "He +has wit, facts, dates," said Douglas, in extenuation of his own +disinclination to enter upon the famous joint debates, and, when Douglas +returned to Washington after the debates were over, he confessed to the +young Henry Watterson that "he is the greatest debater I have ever met, +either here or anywhere else." Douglas had won the senatorship and could +afford to be generous, but he knew well enough that his opponent's facts +and dates had been unanswerable. Lincoln's mental grip, indeed, was the +grip of a born wrestler. "I've got him," he had exclaimed toward the end +of the first debate, and the Protean Little Giant, as Douglas was +called, had turned and twisted in vain, caught by "that long-armed +creature from Illinois." He could indeed win the election of 1858, but +he had been forced into an interpretation of the Dred Scott decision +which cost him the Presidency in 1860. + +Lincoln's keen interest in words and definitions, his patience in +searching the dictionary, is known to every student of his life. Part of +his singular discrimination in the use of language is due to his legal +training, but his style was never professionalized. Neither did it have +anything of that frontier glibness and banality which was the curse of +popular oratory in the West and South. Words were weapons in the hands +of this self-taught fighter for ideas: he kept their edges sharp, and +could if necessary use them with deadly accuracy. He framed the +"Freeport dilemma" for the unwary feet of Douglas as cunningly as a +fox-hunter lays his trap. "Gentlemen," he had said of an earlier effort, +"Judge Douglas informed you that this speech of mine was probably +carefully prepared. I admit that it was." + +The story, too, was a weapon of attack and defense for this master +fabulist. Sometimes it was a readier mode of argument than any +syllogism; sometimes it gave him, like the traditional diplomatist's +pinch of snuff, an excuse for pausing while he studied his adversary or +made up his own mind; sometimes, with the instinct of a poetic soul, he +invented a parable and gravely gave it a historic setting "over in +Sangamon County." For although upon his intellectual side the man was a +subtle and severe logician, on his emotional side he was a lover of the +concrete and human. He was always, like John Bunyan, dreaming and seeing +"a man" who symbolized something apposite to the occasion. Thus even his +invented stories aided his marvelous capacity for statement, for +specific illustration of a general law. Lincoln's destiny was to be that +of an explainer, at first to a local audience in store or tavern or +courtroom, then to upturned serious faces of Illinois farmers who wished +to hear national issues made clear to them, then to a listening nation +in the agony of civil war, and ultimately to a world which looks to +Lincoln as an exponent and interpreter of the essence of democracy. + +As the audience increased, the style took on beauty and breadth, as if +the man's soul were looking through wider and wider windows at the +world. But it always remained the simplest of styles. In an offhand +reply to a serenade by an Indiana regiment, or in answering a visiting +deputation of clergymen at the White House, Lincoln could summarize and +clarify a complicated national situation with an ease and orderliness +and fascination that are the despair of professional historians. He +never wasted a word. "Go to work is the only cure for your case," he +wrote to John D. Johnston. There are ten words in that sentence and none +of over four letters. The Gettysburg Address contains but two hundred +and seventy words, in ten sentences. "It is a flat failure," said +Lincoln despondently; but Edward Everett, who had delivered "the" +oration of that day, wrote to the President: "I should be glad if I +could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the +occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes." Today the Address +reads as if Lincoln knew that it would ultimately be stamped in bronze. + +Yet the real test of Lincoln's supremacy in our distinctly civic +literature lies not so much in his skill in the manipulation of +language, consummate as that was, but rather in those large elements of +his nature which enabled him to perceive the true quality and ideal of +American citizenship and its significance to the world. There was +melancholy in that nature, else there had been a less rich humor; there +was mysticism and a sense of religion which steadily deepened as his +responsibilities increased. There was friendliness, magnanimity, pity +for the sorrowful, patience for the slow of brain and heart, and an +expectation for the future of humanity which may best be described in +the old phrase "waiting for the Kingdom of God." His recurrent dream of +the ship coming into port under full sail, which preluded many important +events in his own life--he had it the night before he was +assassinated--is significant not only of that triumph of a free nation +which he helped to make possible, but also of the victory of what he +loved to call "the whole family of man." "That is the real issue," he +had declared in closing the debates with Douglas; "that is the issue +that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge +Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between +these two principles--right and wrong--throughout the world. They are +the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of +time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of +humanity, and the other the divine right of kings." + +For this representative Anglo-Saxon man, developed under purely American +conditions, maturing slowly, keeping close to facts, dying, like the old +English saint, while he was "still learning," had none of the typical +hardness and selfishness of the Anglo-Saxon. A brooder and idealist, he +was one of those "prophetic souls of the wide world dreaming on things +to come," with sympathies and imagination that reached out beyond the +immediate urgencies of his race and nation to comprehend the universal +task and discipline of the sons of men. In true fraternity and democracy +this Westerner was not only far in advance of his own day, but he is +also far in advance of ours which raises statues to his memory. Yet he +was used to loneliness and to the long view, and even across the welter +of the World War of the twentieth century Lincoln would be tall enough +to see that ship coming into the harbor under full sail. + + + + +CHAPTER X. + +A New Nation + +The changes that have come over the inner spirit and the outward +expression of American life since Lincoln's day are enough to startle +the curiosity of the dullest observer. Yet they have been accomplished +within the lifetime of a single man of letters. The author of one of the +many campaign biographies of Lincoln in 1860 was William Dean Howells, +then an Ohio journalist of twenty-three. In 1917, at the age of eighty, +Mr. Howells is still adding to his long row of charming and memorable +books. Every phase of American writing since the middle of the last +century has fallen under the keen and kindly scrutiny of this loyal +follower of the art of literature. As producer, editor, critic, and +friend of the foremost writers of his epoch, Mr. Howells has known the +books of our new national era as no one else could have known them. Some +future historian of the period may piece together, from no other sources +than Mr. Howells's writings, an unrivaled picture of our book-making +during more than sixty years. All that the present historian can attempt +is to sketch with bungling fingers a few men and a few tendencies which +seem to characterize the age. + +One result of the Civil War was picturesquely set forth in Emerson's +Journal. The War had unrolled a map of the Union, he said, and hung it +in every man's house. There was a universal shifting of attention, if +not always from the province or section to the image of the nation +itself, at least a shift of focus from one section to another. The clash +of arms had meant many other things besides the triumph of Union and the +freedom of the slaves. It had brought men from every state into rude +jostling contact with one another and had developed a new social and +human curiosity. It may serve as another illustration of Professor +Shaler's law of tension and release. The one overshadowing issue which +had absorbed so much thought and imagination and energy had suddenly +disappeared. Other shadows were to gather, of course. Reconstruction of +the South was one of them, and the vast economic and industrial changes +that followed the opening of the New West were to bring fresh problems +almost as intricate as the question of slavery had been. But for the +moment no one thought of these things. The South accepted defeat as +superbly as she had fought, and began to plough once more. The jubilant +North went back to work--to build transcontinental railroads, to +organize great industries, and to create new states. + +The significant American literature of the first decade after the close +of the War is not in the books dealing directly with themes involved in +the War itself. It is rather the literature of this new release of +energy, the new curiosity as to hitherto unknown sections, the new humor +and romance. Fred Lewis Pattee, the author of an admirable History of +American Literature since 1870, uses scarcely too strong a phrase when +he entitles this period "The Second Discovery of America"; and he quotes +effectively from Mark Twain, who was himself one of these discoverers: +"The eight years in America from 1860 to 1868 uprooted institutions that +were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the +social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the +entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of +two or three generations." + +Let us begin with the West, and with that joyous stage-coach journey of +young Samuel L. Clemens across the plains to Nevada in 1861, which he +describes in Roughing It. Who was this Argonaut of the new era, and what +makes him representative of his countrymen in the epoch of release? Born +in Missouri in 1835, the son of an impractical emigrant from Virginia, +the youth had lived from his fourth until his eighteenth year on the +banks of the Mississippi. He had learned the printer's trade, had +wandered east and back again, had served for four years as a river-pilot +on the Mississippi, and had tried to enter the Confederate army. Then +came the six crowded years, chiefly as newspaper reporter, in the boom +times of Nevada and California. His fame began with the publication in +New York in 1867 of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. A +newspaper now sent him to Europe to record "what he sees with his own +eyes." He did so in Innocents Abroad, and his countrymen shouted with +laughter. This, then, was "Europe" after all--another "fake" until this +shrewd river-pilot who signed himself "Mark Twain" took its soundings! +Then came a series of far greater books--Roughing It, Life on the +Mississippi, The Gilded Age (in collaboration), and Tom Sawyer and +Huckleberry Finn--books that make our American Odyssey, rich in the +spirit of romance and revealing the magic of the great river as no other +pages can ever do again. Gradually Mark Twain became a public character; +he retrieved on the lecture platform the loss of a fortune earned by his +books; he enjoyed his honorary D. Litt. from Oxford University. Every +reader of American periodicals came to recognize the photographs of that +thick shock of hair, those heavy eyebrows, the gallant drooping little +figure, the striking clothes, the inevitable cigar: all these things +seemed to go with the part of professional humorist, to be like the +caressing drawl of Mark's voice. The force of advertisement could no +further go. But at bottom he was far other than a mere maker of +boisterous jokes for people with frontier preferences in humor. He was a +passionate, chivalric lover of things fair and good, although too honest +to pretend to see beauty and goodness where he could not personally +detect them--and an equally passionate hater of evil. Read The Man Who +Corrupted Hadleyburg and The Mysterious Stranger. In his last years, +torn by private sorrows, he turned as black a philosophical pessimist as +we have bred. He died at his new country seat in Connecticut in 1910. +Mr. Paine has written his life in three great volumes, and there is a +twenty-five volume edition of his Works. + +All the evidence seems to be in. Yet the verdict of the public seems not +quite made up. It is clear that Mark Twain the writer of romance is +gaining upon Mark Twain the humorist. The inexhaustible American +appetite for frontier types of humor seizes upon each new variety, +crunches it with huge satisfaction, and then tosses it away. John +Phoenix, Josh Billings, Jack Downing, Bill Arp, Petroleum V. Nasby, +Artemus Ward, Bill Nye--these are already obsolescent names. If Clemens +lacked something of Artemus Ward's whimsical delicacy and of Josh +Billings's tested human wisdom, he surpassed all of his competitors in a +certain rude, healthy masculinity, the humor of river and mining-camp +and printing-office, where men speak without censorship. His country-men +liked exaggeration, and he exaggerated; they liked irreverence, and he +had turned iconoclast in Innocents Abroad. As a professional humorist, +he has paid the obligatory tax for his extravagance, over-emphasis, and +undisciplined taste, but such faults are swiftly forgotten when one +turns to Huckleberry Finn and the negro Jim and Pudd'nhead Wilson, when +one feels Mark Twain's power in sheer description and episode, his magic +in evoking landscape and atmosphere, his blazing scorn at injustice and +cruelty, his contempt for quacks. + +Bret Harte, another discoverer of the West, wears less well than Mark +Twain as a personal figure, but has a sure place in the evolution of the +American short story, and he did for the mining-camps of California what +Clemens wrought for the Mississippi River: he became their profane poet. +Yet he was never really of them. He was the clever outsider, with a +prospector's eye, looking for literary material, and finding a whole +rich mine of it--a bigger and richer, in fact, than he was really +qualified to work. But he located a golden vein of it with an instinct +that did credit to his dash of Hebrew blood. Born in Albany, a teacher's +son, brought up on books and in many cities, Harte emigrated to +California in 1854 at the age of sixteen. He became in turn a +drug-clerk, teacher, type-setter, editor, and even Secretary of the +California Mint--his nearest approach, apparently, to the actual work of +the mines. In 1868, while editor of The Overland Monthly, he wrote the +short story which was destined to make him famous in the East and to +release him from California forever. It was The Luck of Roaring Camp. He +had been writing romantic sketches in prose and verse for years; he had +steeped himself in Dickens, like everybody else in the eighteen-sixties; +and now he saw his pay-gravel shining back into his own shining eyes. It +was a pocket, perhaps, rather than a lead, but Bret Harte worked to the +end of his career this material furnished by the camps, this method of +the short story. He never returned to California after his joyous exit +in 1871. For a few years he tried living in New York, but from 1878 +until his death in 1902 Bret Harte lived in Europe, still turning out +California stories for an English and American public which insisted +upon that particular pattern. + +That the pattern was arbitrary, theatrical, sentimental, somewhat +meretricious in design, in a word insincere like its inventor, has been +repeated at due intervals ever since 1868. The charge is true; yet it is +far from the whole truth concerning Bret Harte's artistry. In mastery of +the technique of the short story he is fairly comparable with Poe, +though less original, for it was Poe who formulated, when Bret Harte was +a child of six, the well-known theory of the unity of effect of the +brief tale. This unity Harte secured through a simplification, often an +insulation, of his theme, the omission of quarreling details, an +atmosphere none the less novel for its occasional theatricality, and +characters cunningly modulated to the one note they were intended to +strike. Tennessee's Partner, The Outcast of Poker Flat, and all the rest +are triumphs of selective skill--as bright nuggets as ever glistened in +the pan at the end of a hard day's labor. That they do not adequately +represent the actual California of the fifties, as old Californians +obstinately insist, is doubtless true, but it is beside the point. Here +is no Tolstoi painting the soul of his race in a few pages: Harte is +simply a disciple of Poe and Dickens, turning the Poe construction trick +gracefully, with Dickensy characters and consistently romantic action. + +The West has been rediscovered many a time since that decade which +witnessed the first literary bonanza of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. It +will continue to be discovered, in its fresh sources of appeal to the +imagination, as long as Plains and Rockies and Coast endure, as long as +there is any glow upon a distant horizon. It is not places that lose +romantic interest: the immemorial English counties and the Bay of Naples +offer themselves freely to the artist, generation after generation. What +is lost is the glamour of youth, the specific atmosphere of a given +historical epoch. Colonel W. F. Cody ("Buffalo Bill") has typified to +millions of American boys the great period of the Plains, with its +Indian fighting, its slaughter of buffaloes, its robbing of +stage-coaches, its superb riders etched against the sky. But the Wild +West was retreating, even in the days of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. +The West of the cowboys, as Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister knew it +and wrote of it in the eighties and nineties, has disappeared, though it +lives on in fiction and on the screen. + +Jack London, born in California in 1876, was forced to find his West in +Alaska--and in alcohol. He was what he and his followers liked to call +the virile or red-blooded type, responsive to the "Call of the Wild," +"living life naked and tensely." In his talk Jack London was simple and +boyish, with plenty of humor over his own literary and social foibles. +His books are very uneven, but he wrote many a hard-muscled, clean-cut +page. If the Bret Harte theory of the West was that each man is at +bottom a sentimentalist, Jack London's formula was that at bottom every +man is a brute. Each theory gave provender enough for a short-story +writer to carry on his back, but is hardly adequate, by itself, for a +very long voyage over human life. + +"Joaquin" (Cincinnatus Heine) Miller, who was born in 1841 and died in +1913, had even less of a formula for the West than Jack London. He was a +word-painter of its landscapes, a rider over its surfaces. Cradled "in a +covered wagon pointing West," mingling with wild frontier life from +Alaska to Nicaragua, miner, Indian fighter, hermit, poseur in London and +Washington, then hermit again in California, the author of Songs of the +Sierras at least knew his material. Byron, whom he adored and imitated, +could have invented nothing more romantic than Joaquin's life; but +though Joaquin inherited Scotch intensity, he had nothing of the close +mental grip of the true Scot and nothing of his humor. Vast stretches of +his poetry are empty; some of it is grandiose, elemental, and yet +somehow artificial, as even the Grand Canyon itself looks at certain +times. + +John Muir, another immigrant Scot who reached California in 1868, had +far more stuff in him than Joaquin Miller. He had studied geology, +botany, and chemistry at the new University of Wisconsin, and then for +years turned explorer of forests, peaks, and glaciers, not writing, at +first, except in his Journal, but forever absorbing and worshiping +sublimity and beauty with no thought of literary schemes. Yet his +every-day talk about his favorite trees and glaciers had more of the +glow of poetry in it than any talk I have ever heard from men of +letters, and his books and Journal will long perpetuate this thrilling +sense of personal contact with wild, clean, uplifted things--blossoms in +giant tree-tops and snow-eddies blowing round the shoulders of Alaskan +peaks. Here is a West as far above Jack London's and Frank Norris's as +the snow-line is higher than the jungle. + +The rediscovery of the South was not so much an exploration of fresh or +forgotten geographical territory, as it was a new perception of the +romantic human material offered by a peculiar civilization. Political +and social causes had long kept the South in isolation. A few writers +like Wirt, Kennedy, Longstreet, Simms, had described various aspects of +its life with grace or vivacity, but the best picture of colonial +Virginia had been drawn, after all, by Thackeray, who had merely read +about it in books. Visitors like Fanny Kemble and Frederick Law Olmsted +sketched the South of the mid-nineteenth century more vividly than did +the sons of the soil. There was no real literary public in the South for +a native writer like Simms. He was as dependent upon New York and the +Northern market as a Virginian tobacco-planter of 1740 had been upon +London. But within a dozen years after the close of the War and +culminating in the eighteen-nineties, there came a rich and varied +harvest of Southern writing, notably in the field of fiction. The public +for these stories, it is true, was still largely in the North and West, +and it was the magazines and publishing-houses of New York and Boston +that gave the Southern authors their chief stimulus and support. It was +one of the happy proofs of the solidarity of the new nation. + +The romance of the Spanish and French civilization of New Orleans, as +revealed in Mr. Cable's fascinating Old Creole Days, was recognized, not +as something merely provincial in its significance, but as contributing +to the infinitely variegated pattern of our national life. Irwin +Russell, Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas Nelson Page portrayed in verse +and prose the humorous, pathetic, unique traits of the Southern negro, a +type hitherto chiefly sketched in caricature or by strangers. Page, +Hopkinson Smith, Grace King, and a score of other artists began to draw +affectionate pictures of the vanished Southern mansion of plantation +days, when all the women were beautiful and all the men were brave, when +the very horses were more spirited and the dogs lazier and the +honeysuckles sweeter and the moonlight more entrancing than today. Miss +Murfree ("C. E. Craddock") charmed city-dwellers and country-folk alike +by her novels of the Tennessee mountains. James Lane Allen painted +lovingly the hemp-fields and pastures of Kentucky. American magazines of +the decade from 1880 to 1890 show the complete triumph of dialect and +local color, and this movement, so full of interest to students of the +immense divergence of American types, owed much of its vitality to the +talent of Southern writers. + +But the impulse spread far beyond the South. Early in the seventies +Edward Eggleston wrote The Hoosier Schoolmaster and The Circuit Rider, +faithful and moving presentations of genuine pioneer types which were +destined to pass with the frontier settlements. Soon James Whitcomb +Riley was to sing of the next generation of Hoosiers, who frequented The +Old Swimmin' Hole and rejoiced When the Frost is on the Punkin. It was +the era of Denman Thompson's plays, Joshua Whitcomb and The Old +Homestead. Both the homely and the exotic marched under this banner of +local color: Hamlin Garland presented Iowa barnyards and cornfields, +Helen Hunt Jackson dreamed the romance of the Mission Indian in Ramona, +and Lafcadio Hearn, Irish and Greek by blood, resident of New Orleans +and not yet an adopted citizen of Japan, tantalized American readers +with his Chinese Ghosts and Chita. A fascinating period it seems, as one +looks back upon it, and it lasted until about the end of the century, +when the suddenly discovered commercial value of the historical novel +and the ensuing competition in best sellers misled many a fine artistic +talent and coarsened the public taste. The New South then played the +literary market as recklessly as the New West. + +Let us glance back to "the abandoned farm of literature," as a witty New +Yorker once characterized New England. The last quarter of the +nineteenth century witnessed a decline in the direct influence of that +province over the country as a whole. Its strength sapped by the +emigration of its more vigorous sons, its typical institutions sagging +under the weight of immense immigrations from Europe, its political +importance growing more and more negligible, that ancient promontory of +ideas has continued to lose its relative literary significance. In one +field of literature only has New England maintained its rank since the +Civil War, and that is in the local short story. Here women have +distinguished themselves beyond the proved capacity of New England men. +Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke, women of democratic humor, were the +pioneers; then came Harriet Prescott Spofford and Elizabeth Stuart +Phelps, women with nerves; and finally the three artists who have +written, out of the material offered by a decadent New England, as +perfect short stories as France or Russia can produce--Sarah Orne +Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown. These gifted writers +portrayed, with varying technique and with singular differences in their +instinctive choice of material, the dominant qualities of an isolated, +in-bred race, still proud in its decline; still inquisitive and +acquisitive, versatile yet stubborn, with thrift passing over into +avarice, and mental power degenerating into smartness; cold and hard +under long repression of emotion, yet capable of passion and fanaticism; +at worst, a mere trader, a crank, a grim recluse; at best, endowed with +an austere physical and moral beauty. Miss Jewett preferred to touch +graciously the sunnier slopes of this provincial temperament, to linger +in its ancient dignities and serenities. Miss Brown has shown the pathos +of its thwarted desires, its hunger for a beauty and a happiness denied. +Mary Wilkins Freeman revealed its fundamental tragedies of will. + +Two of the best known writers of New England fiction in this period were +not natives of the soil, though they surpassed most native New +Englanders in their understanding of the type. They were William Dean +Howells and Henry James. Mr. Howells, who, in his own words, "can +reasonably suppose that it is because of the mixture of Welsh, German, +and Irish in me that I feel myself so typically American," came to "the +Holy Land at Boston" as a "passionate pilgrim from the West." A Boy's +Town, My Literary Passions, and Years of my Youth make clear the image +of the young poet-journalist who returned from his four years in Venice +and became assistant editor of The Atlantic Monthly in 1866. In 1871 +he succeeded Fields in the editorship, but it was not until after his +resignation in 1881 that he could put his full strength into those +realistic novels of contemporary New England which established his fame +as a writer. A Modern Instance and The Rise of Silas Lapham are perhaps +the finest stories of this group; and the latter novel may prove to be +Mr. Howells's chief "visiting-card to posterity." We cannot here follow +him to New York and to a new phase of novel writing, begun with A Hazard +of New Fortunes, nor can we discuss the now antiquated debate upon +realism which was waged in the eighteen-eighties over the books of +Howells and James. We must content ourselves with saying that a +knowledge of Mr. Howells's work is essential to the student of the +American provincial novel, as it is also to the student of our more +generalized types of story-writing, and that he has never in his long +career written an insincere, a slovenly, or an infelicitous page. My +Literary Friends and Acquaintance gives the most charming picture ever +drawn of the elder Cambridge, Concord, and Boston men who ruled over our +literature when young Howells came out of the West, and My Mark Twain is +his memorable portrait of another type of sovereign, perhaps the dynasty +that will rule the future. + +Although Henry James, like Mr. Howells, wrote at one time acute studies +of New England character, he was never, in his relations to that +section, or, for that matter, to any locality save possibly London, +anything more than a "visiting mind." His grandfather was an Irish +merchant in Albany. His father, Henry James, was a philosopher and wit, +a man of comfortable fortune, who lived at times in Newport, Concord, +and Boston, but who was residing in New York when his son Henry was born +in 1843. No child was ever made the subject of a more complete theory of +deracination. Transplanted from city to city, from country to country, +without a family or a voting-place, without college or church or creed +or profession or responsibility of any kind save to his own exigent +ideals of truth and beauty, Henry James came to be the very pattern of a +cosmopolitan. Avoiding his native country for nearly thirty years and +then returning for a few months to write some intricate pages about that +American Scene which he understood far less truly than the average +immigrant, he died in 1916 in London, having just renounced his American +citizenship and become a British subject in order to show his sympathy +with the Empire, then at war. It was the sole evidence of political +emotion in a lifetime of seventy-three years. + +American writing men are justly proud, nevertheless, of this expatriated +craftsman. The American is inclined to admire good workmanship of any +kind, as far as he can understand the mechanism of it. The task of +really understanding Henry James has been left chiefly to clever women +and to a few critics, but ever since A Passionate Pilgrim and Roderick +Hudson appeared in 1875, it has been recognized that here was a master, +in his own fashion. What that fashion is may now be known by anyone who +will take the pains to read the author's prefaces to the New York +edition of his revised works. Never, not even in the Paris which James +loved, has an artist put his intentions and his self-criticism more +definitively upon paper. The secret of Henry James is told plainly +enough here: a specially equipped intelligence, a freedom from normal +responsibilities, a consuming desire to create beautiful things, and, as +life unfolded its complexities and nuances before his vision, an +increasing passion to seek the beauty which lies entangled and betrayed, +a beauty often adumbrated rather than made plastic, stories that must be +hinted at rather than told, raptures that exist for the initiated only. +The much discussed early and middle and later manners of James are only +various campaigns of this one questing spirit, changing his procedure as +the elusive object of his search hid itself by this or that device of +protective coloration or swift escape. It is as if a collector of rare +butterflies had one method of capturing them in Madagascar, another for +the Orinoco, and still another for Japan--though Henry James found his +Japan and Orinoco and Madagascar all in London town! + +No one who ever had the pleasure of hearing him discourse about the art +of fiction can forget the absolute seriousness of his professional +devotion; it was as though a shy celebrant were to turn and explain, +with mystical intensity and a mystic's involution and reversal of all +the values of vulgar speech, the ceremonial of some strange, high altar. +His own power as a creative artist was not always commensurate with his +intellectual endowment or with his desire after beauty, and his frank +contempt for the masses of men made it difficult for him to write +English. He preferred, as did Browning, who would have liked to reach +the masses, a dialect of his own, and he used it increasingly after he +was fifty. It was a dialect capable of infinite gradations of tone, +endless refinements of expression. In his threescore books there are +delicious poignant moments where the spirit of life itself flutters like +a wild creature, half-caught, half-escaping. It is for the beauty and +thrill of these moments that the pages of Henry James will continue to +be cherished by a few thousand readers scattered throughout the Republic +to which he was ever an alien. + +No poet of the new era has won the national recognition enjoyed by the +veterans. It will be recalled that Bryant survived until 1878, +Longfellow and Emerson until 1882, Lowell until 1891, Whittier and +Whitman until 1892, and Holmes until 1894. Compared with these men the +younger writers of verse seemed overmatched. The National Ode for the +Centennial celebration in 1876 was intrusted to Bayard Taylor, a hearty +person, author of capital books of travel, plentiful verse, and a +skilful translation of Faust. But an adequate National Ode was not in +him. Sidney Lanier, who was writing in that year his Psalm of the West +and was soon to compose The Marshes of Glynn, had far more of the divine +fire. He was a bookish Georgia youth who had served with the Confederate +army, and afterward, with broken health and in dire poverty, gave his +brief life to music and poetry. He had rich capacities for both arts, +but suffered in both from the lack of discipline and from an impetuous, +restless imagination which drove him on to over-ambitious designs. +Whatever the flaws in his affluent verse, it has grown constantly in +popular favor, and he is, after Poe, the best known poet of the South. +The late Edmund Clarence Stedman, whose American Anthology and critical +articles upon American poets did so much to enhance the reputation of +other men, was himself a maker of ringing lyrics and spirited narrative +verse. His later days were given increasingly to criticism, and his Life +and Letters is a storehouse of material bearing upon the growth of New +York as a literary market-place during half a century. Richard Watson +Gilder was another admirably fine figure, poet, editor, and leader of +public opinion in many a noble cause. His Letters, likewise, give an +intimate picture of literary New York from the seventies to the present. +Through his editorship of Scribner's Monthly and The Century Magazine +his sound influence made itself felt upon writers in every section. His +own lyric vein had an opaline intensity of fire, but in spite of its +glow his verse sometimes refused to sing. + +The most perfect poetic craftsman of the period--and, many think, our +one faultless worker in verse--was Thomas Bailey Aldrich. His first +volume of juvenile verse had appeared in 1855, the year of Whittier's +Barefoot Boy and Whitman's Leaves of Grass. By 1865 his poems were +printed in the then well-known Blue and Gold edition, by Ticknor and +Fields. In 1881 he succeeded Howells in the editorship of the Atlantic. +Aldrich had a versatile talent that turned easily to adroit prose tales, +but his heart was in the filing of his verses. Nothing so daintily +perfect as his lighter pieces has been produced on this side of the +Atlantic, and the deeper notes and occasional darker questionings of his +later verse are embodied in lines of impeccable workmanship. Aloof from +the social and political conflicts of his day, he gave himself to the +fastidious creation of beautiful lines, believing that the beautiful +line is the surest road to Arcady, and that Herrick, whom he idolized, +had shown the way. + +To some readers of these pages it may seem like profanation to pass over +poets like Sill, George Woodberry, Edith Thomas, Richard Hovey, William +Vaughn Moody, Madison Cawein--to mention but half a dozen distinguished +names out of a larger company--and to suggest that James Whitcomb Riley, +more completely than any American poet since Longfellow, succeeded in +expressing the actual poetic feelings of the men and women who composed +his immense audience. Riley, like Aldrich, went to school to Herrick, +Keats, Tennyson, and Longfellow, but when he began writing newspaper +verse in his native Indiana he was guided by two impulses which gave +individuality to his work. "I was always trying to write of the kind of +people I knew, and especially to write verse that I could read just as +if it were spoken for the first time." The first impulse kept him close +to the wholesome Hoosier soil. The second is an anticipation of Robert +Frost's theory of speech tones as the basis of verse, as well as a +revival of the bardic practice of reciting one's own poems. For Riley +had much of the actor and platform-artist in him, and comprehended that +poetry might be made again a spoken art, directed to the ear rather than +to the eye. His vogue, which at his death in 1915 far surpassed that of +any living American poet, is inexplicable to those persons only who +forget the sentimental traditions of our American literature and its +frank appeal to the emotions of juvenility, actual and recollected. +Riley's best "holt" as a poet was his memory of his own boyhood and his +perception that the child-mind lingers in every adult reader. Genius has +often been called the gift of prolonged adolescence, and in this sense, +surely, there was genius in the warm and gentle heart of this fortunate +provincial who held that "old Indianapolis" was "high Heaven's sole and +only under-study." No one has ever had the audacity to say that of New +York. + +We have had American drama for one hundred and fifty years, ¹ but much +of it, like our popular fiction and poetry, has been subliterary, more +interesting to the student of social life and national character than to +literary criticism in the narrow sense of that term. Few of our best +known literary men have written for the stage. The public has preferred +melodrama to poetic tragedy, although perhaps the greatest successes +have been scored by plays which are comedies of manners rather than +melodrama, and character studies of various American types, built up +around the known capabilities of a particular actor. The twentieth +century has witnessed a marked activity in play-writing, in the +technical study of the drama, and in experiment with dramatic +production, particularly with motion pictures and the out-of-doors +pageant. At no time since The Prince of Parthia was first acted in +Philadelphia in 1767 has such a large percentage of Americans been +artistically and commercially interested in the drama, but as to the +literary results of the new movement it is too soon to speak. + +¹ Representative American Plays, edited by Arthur Hobson Quinn, N. Y., +1917. + +Nor is it possible to forecast the effect of a still more striking +movement of contemporary taste, the revival of interest in poetry and +the experimentation with new poetical forms. Such revival and experiment +have often, in the past, been the preludes of great epochs of poetical +production. Living Americans have certainly never seen such a widespread +demand for contemporary verse, such technical curiosity as to the +possible forms of poetry, or such variety of bold innovation. Imagism +itself is hardly as novel as its contemporary advocates appear to +maintain, and free verse goes back far in our English speech and song. +But the new generation believes that it has made a discovery in +reverting to sensations rather than thought, to the naïve reproduction +of retinal and muscular impressions, as if this were the end of the +matter. The self-conscious, self-defending side of the new poetic +impulse may soon pass, as it did in the case of Wordsworth and of Victor +Hugo. Whatever happens, we have already had fresh and exquisite +revelations of natural beauty, and, in volumes like North of Boston and +A Spoon River Anthology, judgments of life that run very deep. + +American fiction seems just now, on the contrary, to be marking time and +not to be getting noticeably forward. Few names unknown ten years ago +have won wide recognition in the domain of the novel. The short story +has made little technical advance since the first successes of "O. +Henry," though the talent of many observers has dealt with new material +offered by the racial characteristics of European immigrants and by new +phases of commerce and industry. The enormous commercial demand of the +five-cent weeklies for short stories of a few easily recognized patterns +has resulted too often in a substitution of stencil-plate generalized +types instead of delicately and powerfully imagined individual +characters. Short stories have been assembled, like Ford cars, with +amazing mechanical expertness, but with little artistic advance in +design. The same temporary arrest of progress has been noted in France +and England, however, where different causes have been at work. No one +can tell, in truth, what makes some plants in the literary garden wither +at the same moment that others are outgrowing their borders. + +There is one plant in our own garden, however, whose flourishing state +will be denied by nobody--namely, that kind of nature-writing identified +with Thoreau and practised by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Starr King, +John Burroughs, John Muir, Clarence King, Bradford Torrey, Theodore +Roosevelt, William J. Long, Thompson-Seton, Stewart Edward White, and +many others. Their books represent, Professor Canby ¹ believes, the +adventures of the American subconsciousness, the promptings of forgotten +memories, a racial tradition of contact with the wilderness, and hence +one of the most genuinely American traits of our literature. + +¹ "Back to Nature," by H. S. Canby, Yale Review, July, 1917. + +Other forms of essay writing, surely, have seemed in our own generation +less distinctive of our peculiar quality. While admirable biographical +and critical studies appear from time to time, and here and there a +whimsical or trenchant discursive essay like those of Miss Repplier or +Dr. Crothers, no one would claim that we approach France or even England +in the field of criticism, literary history, memoirs, the bookish essay, +and biography. We may have race-memories of a pine-tree which help us to +write vigorously and poetically about it, but we write less vitally as +soon as we enter the library door. A Frenchman does not, for he is +better trained to perceive the continuity and integrity of +race-consciousness, in the whole field of its manifestation. He does not +feel, as many Americans do, that they are turning their back on life +when they turn to books. + +Perhaps the truth is that although we are a reading people we are not +yet a book-loving people. The American newspaper and magazine have been +successful in making their readers fancy that newspaper and magazine are +an equivalent for books. Popular orators and popular preachers confirm +this impression, and colleges and universities have often emphasized a +vocational choice of books--in other words, books that are not books at +all, but treatises. It is not, of course, that American journalism, +whether of the daily or monthly sort, has consciously set itself to +supplant the habit of book-reading. A thousand social and economic +factors enter into such a problem. But few observers will question the +assertion that the influence of the American magazine, ever since its +great period of national literary service in the eighties and nineties, +has been more marked in the field of conduct and of artistic taste than +in the stimulation of a critical literary judgment. An American +schoolhouse of today owes its improvement in appearance over the +schoolhouse of fifty years ago largely to the popular diffusion, through +the illustrated magazines, of better standards of artistic taste. But +whether the judgment of school-teachers and school-children upon a piece +of literature is any better than it was in the red schoolhouse of fifty +years ago is a disputable question. + +But we must stop guessing, or we shall never have done. The fundamental +problem of our literature, as this book has attempted to trace it, has +been to obtain from a mixed population dwelling in sections as widely +separated as the peoples of Northern and Southern Europe, an integral +intellectual and spiritual activity which could express, in obedience to +the laws of beauty and truth, the emotions stimulated by our national +life. It has been assumed in the preceding chapters that American +literature is something different from English literature written in +America. Canadian and Australian literatures have indigenous qualities +of their own, but typically they belong to the colonial literature of +Great Britain. This can scarcely be said of the writings of Franklin and +Jefferson, and it certainly cannot be said of the writings of Cooper, +Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Lowell, Lincoln, Mark Twain, and +Mr. Howells. In the pages of these men and of hundreds of others less +distinguished, there is a revelation of a new national type. That the +full energies of this nation have been back of our books, giving them a +range and vitality and unity commensurate with the national existence, +no one would claim. There are other spheres of effort in which American +character has been more adequately expressed than in words. Nevertheless +the books are here, in spite of every defect in national discipline, +every flaw in national character; and they deserve the closest attention +from all those who are trying to understand the American mind. + +If the effort toward an expression of a peculiarly complex national +experience has been the problem of our literary past, the literary +problem of the future is the expression of the adjustment of American +ideals to the standards of civilization. "Patriotism," said the martyred +Edith Cavell just before her death, "is not enough." Nationality and the +instincts of national separatism now seem essential to the preservation +of the political units of the world-state, precisely as a healthy +individualism must be the basis of all enduring social fellowship. Yet +it is clear that civilization is a larger, more ultimate term than +nationality. Chauvinism is nowhere more repellent than in the things of +the mind. It is difficult for some Americans to think internationally +even in political affairs--to construe our national policy and duty in +terms of obligation to civilization. Nevertheless the task must be +faced, and we are slowly realizing it. + +In the field of literature, likewise, Americanism is not a final word +either of blame or praise. It is a word of useful characterization. Only +American books, and not books written in English in America, can +adequately represent our national contribution to the world's thinking +and feeling. So argued Emerson and Whitman, long ago. But the younger of +these two poets came to realize in his old age that the New World and +the Old World are fundamentally one. The literature of the New World +will inevitably have an accent of its own, but it must speak the +mother-language of civilization, share in its culture, accept its +discipline. + +It has been said disparagingly of Longfellow and his friends: "The +houses of the Brahmins had only eastern windows. The souls of the whole +school lived in the old lands of culture, and they visited these lands +as often as they could, and, returning, brought back whole libraries of +books which they eagerly translated." But even if Longfellow and his +friends had been nothing more than translators and diffusers of European +culture, their task would have been justified. They kept the ideals of +civilization from perishing in this new soil. Through those eastern +windows came in, and still comes in, the sunlight to illumine the +American spirit. To decry the literatures of the Orient and of Greece +and Rome as something now outgrown by America, is simply to close the +eastern windows, to narrow our conception of civilization to merely +national and contemporaneous terms. It is as provincial to attempt this +restriction in literature as it would be in world-politics. We must have +all the windows open in our American writing, free access to ideas, +knowledge of universal standards, perception of universal law. + + + + +BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE + +An authoritative account of American Literature to the close of the +Revolution is given in M. C. Tyler's History of American Literature +during the Colonial Time, 2 volumes (1878) and Literary History of the +American Revolution, 2 volumes (1897). For a general survey see Barrett +Wendell, A Literary History of America (1900), W. P. Trent, American +Literature (1903), G. E. Woodberry, America in Literature (1903), W. C. +Bronson, A Short History of American Literature (1903), with an +excellent bibliography, W. B. Cairns, History of American Literature +(1912), W. P. Trent and J. Erskine, Great American Writers (1912), and +W. Riley, American Thought (1915). The most recent and authoritative +account is to be found in The Cambridge History of American Literature, +3 volumes edited by Trent, Erskine, Sherman, and Van Doren. + +The best collection of American prose and verse is E. C. Stedman and E. +M. Hutchinson's Library of American Literature, 11 volumes (1888-1890). +For verse alone, see E. C. Stedman, An American Anthology (1900), and W. +C. Bronson, American Poems, 1625-1892 (1912). For criticism of leading +authors, note W. C. Brownell, American Prose Masters (1909), and +Stedman, Poets of America (1885). + +Chapters 1-3. Note W. Bradford, Journal (1898), J. Winthrop, Journal +(1825, 1826), also Life and Letters by R. C. Winthrop, 2 volumes (1863), +G. L. Walker, Thomas Hooker (1891), O. S. Straus, Roger Williams (1894), +Cotton Mather, Diary, 2 volumes (1911, 1912), also his Life by Barrett +Wendell (1891), Samuel Sewall, Diary, 3 volumes (1878). For Jonathan +Edwards, see Works, 4 volumes (1852), his Life by A. V. G. Allen (1889), +Selected Sermons edited by H. N. Gardiner (1904). The most recent +edition of Franklin's Works is edited by A. H. Smyth, 10 volumes (1907). + +Chapter 4. Samuel Adams, Works, 4 volumes (1904), John Adams, Works, 10 +volumes (1856), Thomas Paine, Life by M. D. Conway, 2 volumes (1892), +Works edited by Conway, 4 volumes (1895), Philip Freneau, Poems, 3 +volumes (Princeton edition, 1902), Thomas Jefferson, Works edited by +P. L. Ford, 10 volumes (1892-1898), J. Woolman, Journal (edited by +Whittier, 1871, and also in Everyman's Library), The Federalist (edited +by H. C. Lodge, 1888). + +Chapter 5. Washington Irving, Works, 40 volumes (1891-1897), also his +Life and Letters by P. M. Irving, 4 volumes (1862-1864). Fenimore +Cooper, Works, 32 volumes (1896), Life by T. R. Lounsbury (1883). +Brockden Brown, Works, 6 volumes, (1887). W. C. Bryant, Poems, 2 volumes +(1883), Prose, 2 volumes (1884), and his Life by John Bigelow (1890). + +Chapter 6. H. C. Goddard, Studies in New England Transcendentalism +(1908). R. W. Emerson, Works, 12 volumes (Centenary edition, 1903), +Journal, 10 volumes (1909-1914), his Life by J. E. Cabot, 2 volumes +(1887), by R. Garnett (1887), by G. E. Woodberry (1905); see also Ralph +Waldo Emerson, a critical study by O. W. Firkins (1915). H. D. Thoreau, +Works, 20 volumes (Walden edition including Journals, 1906), Life by F. +B. Sanborn (1917), also Thoreau, A Critical Study by Mark van Doren +(1916). Note also Lindsay Swift, Brook Farm (1900), and The Dial, +reprint by the Rowfant Club (1902). + +Chapter 7. Hawthorne, Works, 12 volumes (1882), Life by G. E. Woodberry +(1902). Longfellow, Works, 11 volumes (1886), Life by Samuel Longfellow, +3 volumes (1891). Whittier, Works, 7 volumes (1892), Life by S. T. +Pickard, 2 volumes (1894). Holmes, Works, 13 volumes (1892), Life by J. +T. Morse, Jr. (1896). Lowell, Works, 11 volumes (1890), Life by Ferris +Greenslet (1905), Letters edited by C. E. Norton, 2 volumes (1893). For +the historians, note H. B. Adams, Life and Writings of Jared Sparks, 2 +volumes (1893). M. A. DeW. Howe, Life and Letters of George Bancroft, 2 +volumes (1908), G. S. Hillard, Life, Letters, and Journals of George +Ticknor, 2 volumes (1876), George Ticknor, Life of Prescott (1863), also +Rollo Ogden, Life of Prescott (1904), G. W. Curtis, Correspondence of J. +L. Motley, 2 volumes (1889), Francis Parkman, Works, 12 volumes +(1865-1898), Life by C. H. Farnham (1900), J. F. Jameson, History of +Historical Writing in America (1891). + +Chapter 8. Poe, Works, 10 volumes (Stedman-Woodberry edition, +1894-1895), also 17 volumes (Virginia edition, J. A. Harrison, 1902), +Life by G. E. Woodberry, 2 volumes (1909). Whitman, Leaves of Grass and +Complete Prose Works (Small, Maynard and Co.) (1897, 1898), also John +Burroughs, A Study of Whitman (1896). + +Chapter 9. C. Schurz, Life of Henry Clay, 2 volumes (1887). Daniel +Webster, Works, 6 volumes (1851), Life by H. C. Lodge (1883). Rufus +Choate, Works, 2 volumes (1862). Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Lectures, +and Letters, 2 volumes (1892). W. L. Garrison, The Story of his Life +Told by his Children, 4 volumes (1885-1889). Harriet Beecher Stowe, +Works, 17 volumes (1897), Life by C. E. Stowe (1889). Abraham Lincoln, +Works, 2 volumes (edited by Nicolay and Hay, 1894). + +Chapter 10. For an excellent bibliography of the New National Period, +see F. L. Pattee, A History of American Literature since 1870 (1916). + +For further bibliographical information the reader is referred to the +articles on American authors in The Encyclopœdia Britannica and in The +Warner Library (volume 30, The Student's Course, N. Y., 1917). + + + + + + + + + +INDEX +A +Adams, C. F, 7. +Adams, John, opinion of American independence, 11-12; as a writer, 73. +Adams, Samuel, 73-74, 209. +After the Burial, Lowell, 172. +Agassiz, Fiftieth Birthday of, Longfellow, 156. +Age of Reason, Paine, 75. +Ages, The, Bryant, 104. +Alcott, Bronson, 118, 119, 139-140. +Aldrich, T. B., 256-257. +Alhambra, The, Irving, 91. +Allen, J. L., 247. +American Anthology, Stedman, 256. +American characteristics, 3-5. +American colonies, literature in the 17th century, 25-42; journalism, +60-62; education, 62-63; science, 63-64; bibliography of the literature, +269-270. +American colonists, predominantly English, 12-25; motives for +emigration, 16; moulded by pioneer life, 17-23; in 1760, 59-60. +"American idea," 206-207. +American life since the Civil War, 234 et seq. +American literature, the term, 6. +American Mercury, 61. +American Scholar, The, Emerson, 123. +Ames, Fisher, 88. +Among my Books, Lowell, 170. +Andrew Rykman's Prayer, Whittier, 161. +Annabel Lee, Poe, 192. +Anthologies, American, 269. +Arsenal at Springfield, The, Longfellow, 156. +Assignation, The, Poe, 193. +Astoria, Irving, 91. +Atala, Châteaubriand, 96. +Atlantic Monthly, 161, 167, 170, 250, 257. +Autobiography, Franklin, 58-59. +Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, The, Holmes, 164, 167. + + +B +Bacchus, Emerson, 129. +Ballad of the French Fleet, A, Longfellow, 155. +Bancroft, George, 89, 176, 177-178. +Barefoot Boy, The, Whittier, 158. +Bartol, C. A., 115. +Battle Hymn of the Republic, Howe, 224, 225. +Battle of the Kegs, The, Hopkinson, 69. +Bay Psalm Book, 35. +Beecher, H. W., 216-217. +Belfry of Bruges, The, Longfellow, 156. +Bells, The, Poe, 5-6, 192. +Biglow Papers, The, Lowell, 170, 172, 173. +Black Cat, The, Poe, 194. +Blaine, J. G., quoted, 163. +Blithedale Romance, The, Hawthorne, 145-146, 150-151. +Boston News-Letter, 60. +Boy's Town, A, Howells, 250. +Bracebridge Hall, Irving, 91. +Bradford, William, 28. +Bradstreet, Anne, 36-37. +Bridge, The, Longfellow, 156. +Briggs, C. F., quoted, 190. +Brook Farm, 140, 143. +Brooklyn Eagle, The, 199. +Brown, Alice, 249, 250. +Brown University, 62. +Brownell, H. H., 225. +Brownson, Orestes, 141. +Bryant, W. C., one of the Knickerbocker Group, 89; personal appearance, +101; life and, writings, 101-106; died (1878), 255. +"Buffalo Bill," see Cody, W. F. +Building of the Ship, The, Longfellow, 155. +Burroughs, John, 262. +By Blue Ontario's Shore, Whitman, 204. +Byrd, William, 44. + + +C +Cable, G. W., 246. +Calef, Robert, 43. +Calhoun, J. C., 215. +Calvinism in New England, 18-19. Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, Lowell, +174. +Captain Bonneville, Irving, 91. +Carlyle, Thomas, quoted, 139. +Cask of Amontillado, The, Poe, 193. +Cavell, Edith, quoted, 266. +Cawein, Madison, 257. +Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, The, Clemens, 237. +Century Magazine, 256. +Changeling, The, Lowell, 172. +Channing, Edward, 13. +Channing, W. E., 112, 113, 119, 142. +Châteaubriand, Vicomte de, 96-97. +Children's Hour, The, Longfellow, 157. +Chita, Hearn, 248. +Chinese Ghosts, Hearn, 248. +Choate, Rufus, 215. +Church, Captain, 39. +Circuit Rider, The, Eggleston, 247. +City in the Sea, The, Poe, 189. +Clark, Roger, 41. +Clarke, J. F., 141. +Clay, Henry, 208, 209-211. +Clemens, S. L. (Mark Twain), attacks Cooper's novels, 99; quoted, 236; +life and writings, 237-240; typically American, 265. +Cobbler Keezar's Vision, Whittier, 161. +Cody, W. F. (Buffalo Bill), 243. +Columbus, Life of, Irving, 91. +Commemoration Ode, Lowell, 170, 172. +Common Sense, Paine, 75. +Conquest of Granada, Irving, 91. +Conquest of Mexico, Prescott, 179. +Conquest of Peru, Prescott, 179. +Conspiracy of Pontiac, The, Parkman, 184. +Cooke, Rose Terry, 249. +Cooper, J. F., 95-101, 265. +Cotton, John, 18, 32. +Courtship of Miles Standish, Longfellow, 155. +"Craddock, C. E.," see Murfree, Mary N. +Cranch, C. P., 141. +Crisis, The, Paine, 75. +Cristus, Longfellow, 155-156. +Cromwell, Oliver, 10. +Crothers, S. M., 262-263. +Crowded Street, The, Bryant, 106. +Curtis, G. W., 93, 141, 181. + + +D +Dana, C. A., 141. +Day is Done, The, Longfellow, 156. +Day of Doom, The, Wigglesworth, 35-36. +Deerslayer, The, Cooper, 99. +Democratic Review, 199. +Dial, 136, 140. +Drake, J. R., 107. +Drama, American, in the 20th century, 259-260. +Dred, Stowe, 223. +Drum Taps, Whitman, 201. +Dwight, Timothy, 69. + + +E +Edict of the King of Prussia against England, Franklin, 58. +Edinburgh Review, The, 88. +Edwards, Jonathan, 32, 45, 48-52. +Eggleston, Edward, 247. +Eliot, John, 19, 38. +Elsie Venner, Holmes, 168. +Embargo, The, Bryant, 102. +Emerson, R. W., in 1826, 89; a Transcendentalist, 113-117; quoted, +116-117; life and writings, 119-130; died (1882), 255; typically +American, 265; argues for American books, 266. +England in the 17th century, 13. +English Traits, Emerson, 128. +Essay on Man, Pope, 55. +Essays, Emerson, 125-126, 127, 128. +Essays of the 20th century, 262-263. +Eternal Goodness, The, Whittier, 161. +Ethan Brand, Hawthorne, 134. +Evangeline, Longfellow, 155. +Evening Revery, An, Bryant, 106. +Everett, Edward, Oration at Cambridge (1826), 86; quoted, 87; lectures, +111-112; estimate of, 215; quoted, 230. +Excelsior, Longfellow, 5-6, 156. +Exiles' Departure, Whittier, 159. + + +F +Fable for Critics, Lowell, 170. +Fall of the House of Usher, The, Poe, 193. +Farewell Address, Washington, 66. +Farewell Sermon, Edwards, 51. +Farmer Refuted, The, Hamilton, 76. +Faust (translation), Taylor, 255. +Federalist, 65, 76, 77. +Ferdinand and Isabella, History of the Reign of, Prescott, 179. +Fiction of the 20th century, 261-262. +Fire of Driftwood, The, Longfellow, 156. +First Snowfall, The, Lowell, 172. +Flood of Years, The, Bryant, 106. +Forest Hymn, A, Bryant, 106. +Franklin, Benjamin, born (1706), 44; attitude toward church, 44; +exponent of New England life, 45; life and writings, 52-59; conducts +Courant, 61; activity in Philadelphia, 61-62. letter from Washington to, +78-79; typically American, 265. +Freeman, Mary Wilkins, 249, 250. +Freneau, Philip, 69, 70-72. +Frontenac, Parkman, 185. +Frost, Robert, 258. +Fugitive slave act, 144. +Fuller, Margaret, 119, 140-141. + + +G +Garrison, W. L., 89-90, 137, 159, 208, 217-218. +Gettysburg Address, Lincoln, 230-231. +Gilded Age, The, Clemens, 237-238. +God Glorified in Man's Dependence, Edwards, 50. +Gold Bug, The, Poe, 193. +Gookin, Daniel, 38. +Greeley, Horace, 217-218. +Greenslet, Ferris, 169. + + +H +Hale, E. E., 224. +Half-Century of Conflict, A, Parkman, 185. +Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 107. +Hamilton, Alexander, 76-77. +Hanging of the Crane, The, Longfellow, 156. +Harris, J. C., 246. +Harte, Bret, 240-242. +Harvard, John, 16. +Harvard College, 62. +Haunted Palace, The, Poe, 192. +Hawthorne, Nathaniel, in 1826, 89; opinion of Bryant, 105; opinion of +Transcendentalism, 143; life and writings, 144-152; typically American, +265. +Hayne, Paul, 225. +Hazard of New Fortunes, A, Howells, 251. +Hearn, Lafcadio, 248. +Hecker, Father, 141. +Henry, Patrick, 72, 209. +Herons of Elmwood, The, Longfellow, 156. +Hiawatha, Longfellow, 155. +Higginson, T. W., 142, 262. +Holmes, O. W., in 1826, 89; attitude toward Transcendentalism, 143; life +and writings, 163-168; died (1894), 255. +Home Sweet Home, Payne, 107. +Hooker, Thomas, 21-22, 30-31. +Hoosier Schoolmaster, The, Eggleston, 247. +House of the Seven Gables, The, Hawthorne, 145, 150. +Hovey, Richard, 257. +Howells, W. D., 93, 234-235, 250-251, 265. +Hubbard, William, 39. +Huckleberry Finn, Clemens, 238. +Humorists, American, 239. +Hutchinson, Anne, 32. +Hutchinson, Thomas, 12. +Hyperion, Longfellow, 152. + + +I +Indian Wars, Hubbard, 39. +Indians, in literature, 37-40; Thoreau's notes on, 136. +Innocents Abroad, Clemens, 237, 239. +Irving, Washington, 89, 90-95. +Israfel, Poe, 189, 192. + + +J +Jackson, Andrew, 5. +Jackson, Helen Hunt, 248. +James, Henry, 250, 251-255. +Jay, John, 65. +Jefferson, Thomas, 79-85, 265. +Jesuits in North America, The, Parkman, 185. +Jewett, Sarah Orne, 249, 250. +John of Barneveld, Life and Death of, Motley, 181. +Johnson, Edward, Captain, 38. +Joshua Whitcomb, Thompson, 248. +Journal, Emerson, 122, 125, 127, 235. +Journal, Thoreau, 134, 135. +Journal, Woolman, 69. +Journal and Correspondence, Longfellow, 216. +Journalism, in the colonies, 60-62; in 20th century, 263-264. + + +K +Kemble, Fanny, 245-246. +Kennedy, J. P., 245. +King, Grace, 247. +King, Starr, 262. +King Philip's War, 39-40. +King's College (Columbia), 62. +Knickerbocker group of writers, 89; works by, 270. + + +L +Languishing Commonwealth, Walley, 41. +Lanier, Sidney, 255-256. +La Salle, Parkman, 185. +Last Leaf, The, Holmes, 166. +Last of the Mohicans, The, Cooper, 89, 98, 99. +Leather-Stocking Tales, Cooper, 97-99. +Leaves of Grass, Whitman, 197, 200, 202-203. +Letters, Motley, 181. +Letters from an American Farmer, Crèvecœur, 60, 68. +Liberator, The, 137, 217, 218. +Library of American Biography, 176. +Life on the Mississippi, Clemens, 237. +Ligeia, Poe, 193. +Lincoln, Abraham, recognizes uncertainty in the nation, 2; would have +approved Winthrop, 29; address at Cooper Union (1860), 104-105; quoted, +155; as a writer of liberty, 208; character and writings, 226-233; +typically American, 265. +Lionel Lincoln, Cooper, 98. +Literati, Pope, 107. +Little Women, Alcott, 140. +London, Jack, 243-244. +London in 1724, 54-56. +Longfellow, H. W., in 1826, 89; attitude toward Transcendentalism, 143; +life and writings, 152-157; died (1882), 255; disparagement of, 267. +Longstreet, A. B., 245. +Louisiana Purchase, 88. +Lowell, J. R., in 1826, 90; attitude toward Transcendentalism, 143; life +and writings, 168-174; died (1891), 255; typically American, 265. +Luck of Roaring Camp, The, Harte, 241. +Lyceum system, 175. + + +M +McFingal, Trumbull, 69. +Magazines, in colonies, 60-61; in 20th century, 263-264. +Magnalia Christi Americana, Mather, 46, 47. +Maidenhood, Longfellow, 156. +Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, The, Clemens, 238. +Man Without a Country, Hale, 224. +Marble Faun, The, Hawthorne, 146, 151. +Marshes of Glynn, The, Lanier, 255. +Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens, 87. +Mason, John, Captain, 38. +Massachusetts to Virginia, Whittier, 160. +Mather, Cotton, 43, 45-48; diary, 46-47. +Mather, Increase, 43. +Maud Muller, Whittier, 5-6. +Memorial Odes, Lowell, 172. +Miller, C. H. (Joaquin), 244. +Minister's Black Veil, The, Hawthorne, 30. +Minister's Wooing, The, Stowe, 223. +Modern Instance, A, Howells, 251. +Montcalm and Wolfe, Parkman, 185. +Moody, W. V., 257. +Morituri Salutamus, Longfellow, 156. +Morris, G. P., 107. +Mosses from an Old Manse, Hawthorne, 145. +Motley, J. L., 143-144, 176, 180-182. +Muir, John, 244-245. +Murders in the Rue Morgue, The, Poe, 194. +Murfree, Mary N. (C. E. Craddock), 247. +My Garden Acquaintance, Lowell, 174. +My Literary Friends and Acquaintances, Howells, 251. +My Literary Passions, Howells, 250. +My Lost Youth, Longfellow, 156. +My Mark Twain, Howells, 251. +My Psalm, Whittier, 160. +My Study Windows, Lowell, 170. +Mysterious Stranger, The, Clemens, 238. + + +N +National Gazette, 71. +National Literature, Channing, 112. +National Ode, Taylor, 255. +Nature, Emerson, 123, 128, 131. +Nature-writing, 262. +Netherlands, History of the United, Motley, 181. +New England, a digression from English society, 14; at the beginning of +18th century, 43-44; characteristics of the people of, 109-111; in last +quarter of 19th century, 248 et seq. +New England, History of, Winthrop, 28-29. +New England Courant, 61. +New National period in American literature, 234 et seq.; bibliography, +272. +New York at beginning of 18th century, 44. +New York Tribune, 140, 218. +Newburyport Free Press, 90, 159. +Newspapers, in colonies, 60-61; in 20th century, 263-264. +North American Review, 88, 103, 104, 112, 170. +North Carolina in 1724, 44. +North of Boston, Frost, 261. +Norwood, Colonel, 27. + + +O +Oakes, Urian, 41. +Old Creole Days, Cable, 246. +Old Homestead, The, Thompson, 248. +Old Ironsides, Holmes, 166. +Old Manse, 119, 120, 145. +Old Régime, The, Parkman, 185. +Old Swimmin' Hole, The, Riley, 247. +Oldtown Fireside Stories, Stowe, 223. +Oldtown Folks, Stowe, 223. +Olmsted, F. L., 246. +On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners, Lowell, 174. +Oratory in America, 208 et seq. +Oregon Trail, The, Parkman, 184. +Otis, James, 72, 73. +Our Hundred Days, Holmes, 168. +Outcast of Poker Flat, The, Harte, 242. +Outre-mer, Longfellow, 152. +Overland Monthly, 240. + + +P +Page, T. N., 246, 247. +Paine, Thomas, 74-76. +Parker, Theodore, 115, 119, 141, 209. +Parkman, Francis, 143-144, 176, 182-186. +Passage to India, Whitman, 204. +Passionate Pilgrim, A, James, 253. +Pathfinder, The, Cooper, 99. +Pattee, F. L., 236. +Paul Revere's Ride, Longfellow, 155. +Paulding, J. K., 107. +Payne, J. H., 107. +Pennsylvania, University of, 62. +Pennsylvania Gazette, 62. +Pennsylvania Magazine, 74. +Pequot War (1637), 38-39. +Percy, George, 27, 38. +Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 249. +Philip II, History of the Reign of, Prescott, 179. +Phillips, Wendell, 208, 215-216. +Picture of New York, Mitchill, 90. +Pilot, The, Cooper, 98. +Pioneers, O Pioneers, Whitman, 204. +Pioneers, The, Cooper, 97-98, 99. +Pioneers of France, The, Parkman, 185. +Pirate, The, Scot, 98. +Plymouth Plantation, History of, Bradford, 28-29. +Poe, E. A., "literature of escape," 8; in 1826, 89; in New York, 108; +life and writings, 187-196. +Poet at the Breakfast Table, The, Holmes, 168. +Poetry, Revolutionary verse, 69-72; of freedom, 223 et seq.; of the 20th +century, 260-261. +Poets and Poetry of America, Griswold, 107. +Poor Richard, Franklin, 20, 57. +Pory, John, 27. +Prairie, The, Cooper, 98, 99. +Precaution, Cooper, 97. +Prescott, W. H., 89, 143-144, 176, 178-180. +Present Crisis, The, Lowell, 172. +Prince of Parthia, The, 260. +Professor at the Breakfast Table, The, Holmes, 168. +Psalm of Life, The, Longfellow, 156. +Psalm of the West, Lanier, 255. +Publick Occurrences, 60. +Puritans, The, 34-35. +Purloined Letter, The, Poe, 193. + + +Q +Quarterly, The, 88. + + +R +Rainy Day, The, Longfellow, 156. +Ramona, Jackson, 248. +Ramoth Hill, Whittier, 138. +Raven, The, Poe, 192. +Read, T. B., 225. +Reality of Spiritual Life, The, Edwards, 50. +Reaper and the Flowers, The, Longfellow, 153. +Red Rover, The, Cooper, 98. +Religious freedom in the colonies, 16. +René, Châteaubriand, 96. +Repplier, Agnes, 262. +Revolution, influence upon literature, 66 et seq.; bibliography, 270. +Rights of Man, The, Paine, 75. +Riley, J. W., 247, 257-259. +Ripley, George, 141. +Rise of Silas Lapham, The, Howells, 251. +Rise of the Dutch Republic, Motley, 180. +Rivulet, The, Bryant, 106. +Robinson, John, 11. +Roderick Hudson, James, 253. +Rolfe, John, 38. +Romanticism in American literature, 187 et seq. Roosevelt, Theodore, +243. +Roughing It, Clemens, 10, 237. +Rowlandson, Mary, 39. +Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One, Franklin, 58. +Russell, Irwin, 246. + + +S +Salem "witchcraft," 43. +Salmagundi Papers, Irving and Paulding, 91. +Sanborn, F. B., 142. +Sandys, George, 27. +Scarlet Letter, The, Hawthorne, 7, 30, 145, 146, 148, 149-150. +School-Days, Whittier, 158. +Scott, Sir Walter, 95. +Scribner's Monthly, 256. +Scudder, Horace, 169. +Seaweed, Longfellow, 156. +Sewell, Samuel, Judge, 47-48. +Shepard, Thomas, 16, 31-32. +Short story, the, 261-262. +Sill, E. R., 257. +Simms, W. G., 245, 246. +Simple Cobbler of Agawam, The, Ward, 37. +Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Edwards, 50. +Skeleton in Armor, The, Longfellow, 155. +Sketch Book, Irving, 89, 91. +Skipper Ireson's Ride, Whittier, 161. +Slavery, influence on literature, 207 et seq. Slavery in Massachusetts, +Thoreau, 137. +Smith, F. H., 247. +Smith, John, 8-10, 20, 38. +Smith, Sydney, quoted, 88-89. +Snow-Bound, Whittier, 158, 161-162. +Snow-Image and Other Tales, The, Hawthorne, 145. +Songs of Labor, Whittier, 161. +South Carolina in 1724, 44. +South, The, in American literature, 245 et seq. Sparks, Jared, 176. +Spofford, Harriet Prescott, 249. +Spoon River Anthology, Masters, 261. +Spy, The, Cooper, 89, 97, 98. +Stamp Act (1765), 59. +Star-Spangled Banner, The, Key, 107, 225. +Stedman, E. C., 225, 256. +Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 219-223, 249. +Strachey, William, 26, 38. +Summary View of the Rights of British America, A, Jefferson, 80. +Sumner, Charles, 216. +Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line, Lowell, 174. + + +T +Tales of a Traveler, Irving, 91. +Tales of a Wayside Inn, Longfellow, 155. +Tamerlane and Other Poems, Poe, 89. +Taylor, Bayard, 255. +Telling the Bees, Whittier, 158. +Tennessee's Partner, Harte, 242. +Thanatopsis, Bryant, 103, 104, 106. +Thomas, Edith, 257. +Thompson, Denman, 248. +Thoreau, H. D., representative of New England thought, 119; life and +writings, 130-139; nature-writing, 262; typically American, 265. +Ticknor, George, 89, 111, 178, 216. +Timrod, Henry, 225. +To Helen, Poe, 189, 192. +Tom Sawyer, Clemens, 238. +Tour of the Prairies, Irving, 91. +Transcendentalism, 111 et seq., 218; bibliography, 270-271. +Tritemius, Whittier, 161. +True Relation, Smith, 8-10, 25-26. +True Repertory of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt. vpon and from the +Islands of the Bermudas, Strachey, 26. +Tuckerman, F. G., quoted, 117. +Twain, Mark, see Clemens, S. L. +Twice-Told Tales, Hawthorne, 148. +Tyler, Professor, 64. + + +U +Ulalume, Poe, 192. +Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe, 98, 208, 219, 220-223. +Union of the Colonies, Franklin, 59. +Unitarianism, 112-113. + + +V +Verplanck, J. C., 107. +Very, Jones, 141. +Virginia, a continuation of English society, 14; in 1724, 44. +Virginia House of Burgesses, Address of the, Jefferson, 80. +Virginians, The, Thackeray, 45. +Vision of Sir Launfal, The, Lowell, 170, 172. + + +W +Walden, Thoreau, 131, 134, 135. +Walley, Thomas, 41. +Warner, C. D., 93. +Washington, George, 64-65, 66, 77-78. +Waterfowl, To a, Bryant, 103, 106. +Webster, Daniel, eulogy for Adams and Jefferson, 86-87; civic note in +oratory of, 208; criticism of Clay, 210; his oratory, 211-215. +Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, A, Thoreau, 131. +Wendell, Barrett, 6. +West, The, in American literature, 237 et seq. +Westchester Farmer, The, Seabury, 76. +When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloomed, Whitman, 201. +When the Frost is on the Punkin, Riley, 248. +Whitaker, Alexander, 26-27, 38. +Whitman, Walt, in 1826, 90; in New York, 108; life and writings, +196-205; died (1892), 255; typically American, 265; argues for American +books, 266. +Whittier, J. G., in 1826, 90; attitude towards Transcendentalism, 143; +life and writings, 157-164; died (1892), 255. +William and Mary College, 62. +William Wilson, Poe, 194. +Williams, Roger, 2, 16, 19, 32-34, 38, 40-41. +Willis, N. P., 107. +Winthrop, John, 17, 18, 28-29. +Wirt, William, 245. +Wister, Owen, 243. +Wonder-Book, The, Hawthorne, 145, 147. +Woodberry, George, 257. +Woodworth, Samuel, 107. +Woolman, John, 69. +Wreck of the Hesperus, The, Longfellow, 155. + + +Y +Yale University, 62. +Years of my Youth, Howells, 250. + + + + +The Chronicles of America Series + + 1. The Red Man's Continent + by Ellsworth Huntington + 2. The Spanish Conquerors + by Irving Berdine Richman + 3. Elizabethan Sea-Dogs + by William Charles Henry Wood + 4. The Crusaders of New France + by William Bennett Munro + 5. Pioneers of the Old South + by Mary Johnson + 6. The Fathers of New England + by Charles McLean Andrews + 7. Dutch and English on the Hudson + by Maud Wilder Goodwin + 8. The Quaker Colonies + by Sydney George Fisher + 9. Colonial Folkways + by Charles McLean Andrews +10. The Conquest of New France + by George McKinnon Wrong +11. The Eve of the Revolution + by Carl Lotus Becker +12. Washington and His Comrades in Arms + by George McKinnon Wrong +13. The Fathers of the Constitution + by Max Farrand +14. Washington and His Colleagues + by Henry Jones Ford +15. Jefferson and his Colleagues + by Allen Johnson +16. John Marshall and the Constitution + by Edward Samuel Corwin +17. The Fight for a Free Sea + by Ralph Delahaye Paine +18. Pioneers of the Old Southwest + by Constance Lindsay Skinner +19. The Old Northwest + by Frederic Austin Ogg +20. The Reign of Andrew Jackson + by Frederic Austin Ogg +21. The Paths of Inland Commerce + by Archer Butler Hulbert +22. Adventurers of Oregon + by Constance Lindsay Skinner +23. The Spanish Borderlands + by Herbert Eugene Bolton +24. Texas and the Mexican War + by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson +25. The Forty-Niners + by Stewart Edward White +26. The Passing of the Frontier + by Emerson Hough +27. The Cotton Kingdom + by William E. Dodd +28. The Anti-Slavery Crusade + by Jesse Macy +29. Abraham Lincoln and the Union + by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson +30. The Day of the Confederacy + by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson +31. Captains of the Civil War + by William Charles Henry Wood +32. The Sequel of Appomattox + by Walter Lynwood Fleming +33. The American Spirit in Education + by Edwin E. Slosson +34. The American Spirit in Literature + by Bliss Perry +35. Our Foreigners + by Samuel Peter Orth +36. The Old Merchant Marine + by Ralph Delahaye Paine +37. The Age of Invention + by Holland Thompson +38. The Railroad Builders + by John Moody +39. The Age of Big Business + by Burton Jesse Hendrick +40. The Armies of Labor + by Samuel Peter Orth +41. The Masters of Capital + by John Moody +42. The New South + by Holland Thompson +43. The Boss and the Machine + by Samuel Peter Orth +44. The Cleveland Era + by Henry Jones Ford +45. The Agrarian Crusade + by Solon Justus Buck +46. The Path of Empire + by Carl Russell Fish +47. Theodore Roosevelt and His Times + by Harold Howland +48. Woodrow Wilson and the World War + by Charles Seymour +49. The Canadian Dominion + by Oscar D. Skelton +50. The Hispanic Nations of the New World + by William R. Shepherd + + +Transcriber's Notes + + +Introduction: + +The Chronicles of America Series has two similar editions of each volume +in the series. One version is the Abraham Lincoln edition of the series, +a premium version which includes full-page pictures. A textbook edition +was also produced, which does not contain the pictures and captions +associated with the pictures, but is otherwise the same book. This book +was produced to match the textbook edition of the book. +We have retained the original punctuation and spelling in the book, but +there are a few exceptions. Obvious errors were corrected--and all of +these changes can be found in the Detailed Notes Section of these notes. +The spelling of some index entries were changed to match the spelling +used in the text. The Detailed Notes Section also includes issues that +have come up during transcription. One common issue is that words are +sometimes split into two lines for spacing purposes in the original +text. These words are hyphenated in the physical book, but there is a +question sometimes as to whether the hyphen should be retained in +transcription. The reasons behind some of these decisions are itemized. + +Detailed Notes Section: + + +A Note on Centuries +Throughout the Chronicles of America series, most authors have chosen to +hyphenate "seventeenth-century customs" but not hyphenate "customs in +the seventeenth century." In the latter case, seventeenth century is the +object of a preposition, while in the former case, seventeenth-century +is an adjective. This book somewhat adheres to that standard. Below is a +list of phrases in this text which ought to have the hyphen, but do not, +and hence, do not adhere to the standard previously outlined. None of +these clauses were changed in transcription. +• Page 55: England is weary of seventeenth century "enthusiasm," +• Page 85: the immense nineteenth century audience +• Page 90: nineteenth century England +• Page 93: other eighteenth century tradition, +• Page 138: twentieth century America can see +• Page 166: resembled such a typical eighteenth century figure +• Page 182: a nineteenth century historian + +Chapter II +• Page 36: +Under-estimate is hyphenated and split between two lines for spacing in +the sentence: "It is the present fashion to under-estimate the power of +Wigglesworth's verse." There is one other occurrence of underestimate +and there is one occurrence of underestimated, both spelled without the +hyphen. + +Chapter IV +• Page 72: +State-papers is hyphenated and split between two lines for spacing in +the clause: "orations and pamphlets and state-papers inspired by." On +page 67, state papers is written as two words and on page 82, state +paper is written as two words. While state-papers can only be +transcribed as "state-papers" or "statepapers," "state papers" is the +only option consistent with the author's other usage of the phrase. The +word was transcribed "state papers." + +Chapter V +• Page 90: +Tree-tops is hyphenated and split between two lines for spacing in the +clause "watching the birds in the treetops of Elmwood." On page 245, +tree-tops was spelled with a hyphen, so we kept the hyphen here. +• Page 98: +Stout-hearted is hyphenated and split between two lines in the clause: +"the stout-hearted old pioneer could afford to bide his time." On page +84, a variation of the word includes the hyphen: "his stout-heartedness +in disaster." Therefore, we retained the hyphen. + +Chapter VI +• Page 133: +Poll-tax is hyphenated and split between two lines for spacing. We kept +the hyphen. +• Page 137: +Wolf-like is hyphenated and split between two lines for spacing. We kept +the hyphen. +• Page 138: +Post-office is hyphenated and split between two lines for spacing. We +kept the hyphen. + +Chapter VII +• Page 145: +On Page 145, Hawthorne's The Snow-Image contained a hyphen, but the same +title on page 148 did not have a hyphen: The Snow Image. +• Page 153: +Fellow-men was hyphenated and split between two lines for spacing. There +was no other usage of the word in the book. We transcribed the word +without the hyphen, fellowmen. +• Page 172: +The First Snow-Fall was hyphenated and split between two lines for +spacing. There was no other usage of that title in the book. We +transcribed the word with the hyphen, The First Snow-Fall. + +Chapter IX +• Page 208: +Epoch-making is hyphenated and split between two lines for spacing. On +page 184, the hyphen was used, so we retained it here. + +Index +• Page 276: +Changed the acute accent to a grave accent in the spelling of Crèvecœur +to match the text in index entry: Letters from an American Farmer, +Crévecœur, 60, 68. +• Page 276: +Change Leatherstocking to Leather-Stocking in index entry +"Leather-Stocking Tales, Cooper," +• Page 278: +Change Oake to Oakes in index entry "Oake, Urian." +• Page 280: +Change Twicetold to Twice-Told in index entry "Twice-Told Tales, +Hawthorne." + + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN +LITERATURE *** + +***** This file should be named 3410-h.htm or 3410-h.zip ***** + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +https://www.gutenberg.org/3/4/1/3410/ + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be +renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one +owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and +you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission +and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or re-use it + under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this + eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + </p> + <p class="boilerplate"> + Title: The American Spirit in Literature, A Chronicle of Great + Interpreters, Volume 34 in The Chronicles Of America Series <br /> + Author: Bliss Perry<br /> Editor: Allen Johnson<br /> Release Date: + January 15, 2009 [EBook #3410]<br /> Last Updated: February 7, 2013<br /> + Language: English<br /> Character set encoding: UTF-8 + </p> + <p class="boilerplate"> + Produced by The James J. Kelly Library of St. Gregory's University, Alev + Akman, David Widger, and Robert Homa. + </p> + <p class="boilerplate bold quad-space-bottom"> + *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN + LITERATURE *** + </p> + </div> + <div class="titlepage"> + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i" id="Page_i">i</a></span> + <h1> + The American Spirit in Literature + </h1> + <p class="author"> + By Bliss Perry + </p> + <p class="book-subtitle"> + A Chronicle of Great Interpreters + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + Volume 34 of the<br /> Chronicles of America Series <br /> ∴<br /> + Allen Johnson, Editor<br /> Assistant Editors<br /> Gerhard R. Lomer <br /> + Charles W. Jefferys + </p> + <p class="tiny"> + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + <i>Abraham Lincoln Edition</i><br /><br /><br /><br /> + </p> + <p class="noindent small"> + New Haven: Yale University Press<br /> Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.<br /> + London: Humphrey Milford<br /> Oxford University Press<br /> 1918 + </p> + </div> + <p class="noindent center small"> + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ii" id="Page_ii">ii</a></span> + Copyright, 1918<br /> by Yale University Press + </p> + <p> + <br /><br /><br /> + </p> + <hr /> + <p> + <a name="Contents" id="Contents"></a> <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">iii</a></span> <br /><br /><br /> + </p> + <h2> + CONTENTS + </h2> + <p> + <br /><br /><br /> + </p> + <hr /> + <div class="start-of-book"> + <p class="center"> + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">1</a></span> <a + name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"></a> <a name="chap01" id="chap01"></a> + THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE + </p> + <p class="center single-space-top"> + <span class="xlarge">∴</span> + </p> + <h2> + <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER I.</a> + </h2> + </div> + <p class="chaptertitle"> + The Pioneers + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + <span class="smcap">The</span> United States of America has been from the + beginning in a perpetual change. The physical and mental restlessness of + the American and the temporary nature of many of his arrangements are + largely due to the experimental character of the exploration and + development of this continent. The new energies released by the settlement + of the colonies were indeed guided by stern determination, wise + forethought, and inventive skill; but no one has ever really known the + outcome of the experiment. It is a story of faith, of + </p> + <p class="poem"> + Effort, and expectation, and desire,<br /> And something evermore about to + be. + </p> + <p> + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">2</a></span> An + Alexander Hamilton may urge with passionate force the adoption of the + Constitution, without any firm conviction as to its permanence. The most + clear-sighted American of the Civil War period recognized this element of + uncertainty in our American adventure when he declared: "We are now + testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, + can long endure." More than fifty years have passed since that war + reaffirmed the binding force of the Constitution and apparently sealed the + perpetuity of the Union. Yet the gigantic economic and social changes now + in progress are serving to show that the United States has its full share + of the anxieties which beset all human institutions in this daily altering + world. + </p> + <p> + "We are but strangers in an inn, but passengers in a ship," said Roger + Williams. This sense of the transiency of human effort, the perishable + nature of human institutions, was quick in the consciousness of the + gentleman adventurers and sober Puritan citizens who emigrated from + England to the New World. It had been a familiar note in the poetry of + that Elizabethan period which had followed with such breathless interest + the exploration of America. It was a conception which could be shared + alike by a saint like John Cotton or a <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_3" id="Page_3">3</a></span> soldier of fortune like John Smith. + Men are tent-dwellers. Today they settle here, and tomorrow they have + struck camp and are gone. We are strangers and sojourners, as all our + fathers were. + </p> + <p> + This instinct of the camper has stamped itself upon American life and + thought. Venturesomeness, physical and moral daring, resourcefulness in + emergencies, indifference to negligible details, wastefulness of + materials, boundless hope and confidence in the morrow, are + characteristics of the American. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say + that the "good American" has been he who has most resembled a good camper. + He has had robust health—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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">4</a></span> + resources of his neighborhood, cutting the forests recklessly, exhausting + the soil, surrendering water power and minerals into a few far-clutching + fingers, he has done it because he expects, like Voltaire's Signor + Pococurante, "to have a new garden tomorrow, built on a nobler plan." When + New York State grew too crowded for Cooper's Leather-Stocking, he + shouldered his pack, whistled to his dog, glanced at the sun, and struck a + bee-line for the Mississippi. Nothing could be more typical of the first + three hundred years of American history. + </p> + <p> + The traits of the pioneer have thus been the characteristic traits of the + American in action. The memories of successive generations have tended to + stress these qualities to the neglect of others. Everyone who has enjoyed + the free life of the woods will confess that his own judgment upon his + casual summer associates turns, quite naturally and almost exclusively, + upon their characteristics as woodsmen. Out of the woods, these gentlemen + may be more or less admirable divines, pedants, men of affairs; but the + verdict of their companions in the forest is based chiefly upon the single + question of their adaptability to the environment of the camp. Are they + quick of eye and foot, skillful with rod and gun, cheerful on rainy days, + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">5</a></span> ready to + do a little more than their share of drudgery? If so, memory holds them. + </p> + <p> + Some such unconscious selection as this has been at work in the + classification of our representative men. The building of the nation and + the literary expression of its purpose and ideals are tasks which have + called forth the strength of a great variety of individuals. Some of these + men have proved to be peculiarly fitted for a specific service, + irrespective of the question of their general intellectual powers, or + their rank as judged by the standard of European performance in the same + field. Thus the battle of New Orleans, in European eyes a mere bit of + frontier fighting, made Andrew Jackson a "hero" as indubitably as if he + had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. It gave him the Presidency. + </p> + <p> + The analogy holds in literature. Certain expressions of American sentiment + or conviction have served to summarize or to clarify the spirit of the + nation. The authors of these productions have frequently won the + recognition and affection of their contemporaries by means of prose and + verse quite unsuited to sustain the test of severe critical standards. + Neither Longfellow's <i>Excelsior</i> nor Poe's <i>Bells</i> nor + Whittier's <i>Maud Muller</i> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" + id="Page_6">6</a></span> is among the best poems of the three writers in + question, yet there was something in each of these productions which + caught the fancy of a whole American generation. It expressed one phase of + the national mind in a given historical period. + </p> + <p> + The historian of literature is bound to take account of this question of + literary vogue, as it is highly significant of the temper of successive + generations in any country. But it is of peculiar interest to the student + of the literature produced in the United States. Is this literature + "American," or is it "English literature in America," as Professor Wendell + and other scholars have preferred to call it? I should be one of the last + to minimize the enormous influence of England upon the mind and the + writing of all the English-speaking countries of the globe. Yet it will be + one of the purposes of the present book to indicate the existence here, + even in colonial times, of a point of view differing from that of the + mother country, and destined to differ increasingly with the lapse of + time. Since the formation of our Federal Union, in particular, the books + produced in the United States have tended to exhibit certain + characteristics which differentiate them from the books produced in other + English-speaking countries. We <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" + id="Page_7">7</a></span> must beware, of course, of what the late Charles + Francis Adams once called the "filiopietistic" fallacy. The "American" + qualities of our literature must be judged in connection with its + conformity to universal standards of excellence. Tested by any universal + standard, <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> is a notable romance. It has won a + secure place among the literature written by men of English blood and + speech. Yet to overlook the peculiarly local or provincial characteristics + of this remarkable story is to miss the secret of its inspiration. It + could have been written only by a New Englander, in the atmosphere of a + certain epoch. + </p> + <p> + Our task, then, in this rapid review of the chief interpreters of the + American spirit in literature, is a twofold one. We are primarily + concerned with a procession of men, each of whom is interesting as an + individual and as a writer. But we cannot watch the individuals long + without perceiving the general direction of their march, the ideas that + animate them, the common hopes and loyalties that make up the life of + their spirit. To become aware of these general tendencies is to understand + the "American" note in our national writing. + </p> + <p> + Our historians have taught us that the history of the United States is an + evolution towards political <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" + id="Page_8">8</a></span> unity. The separatist, particularist movements + are gradually thrust to one side. In literary history, likewise, we best + remember those authors who fall into line with what we now perceive to + have been the course of our literary development. The erratic men and + women, the "sports" of the great experiment, are ultimately neglected by + the critics, unless, like the leaders of political insurrections, those + writing men and women have raised a notable standard of revolt. No doubt + the apparently unique literary specimens, if clearly understood in their + origins and surroundings, would be found rooted in the general laws of + literary evolution. But these laws are not easy to codify and we must + avoid the temptation to discover, in any particular period, more of unity + than there actually was. And we must always remember that there will be + beautiful prose and verse unrelated to the main national tendencies save + as "the literature of escape." We owe this lesson to the genius of Edgar + Allan Poe. + </p> + <p> + Let us test these principles by applying them to the earliest colonists. + The first book written on the soil of what is now the United States was + Captain John Smith's <i>True Relation</i> of the planting of the Virginia + colony in 1607. It was published in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" + id="Page_9">9</a></span> London in 1608. The Captain was a typical + Elizabethan adventurer, with a gift, like so many of his class, for + picturesque narrative. In what sense, if at all, may his writings on + American topics be classified as "American" literary productions? It is + clear that his experiences in the New World were only one phase of the + variegated life of this English soldier of fortune. But the American + imagination has persistently claimed him as representing something + peculiarly ours, namely, a kind of pioneer hardihood, resourcefulness, + leadership, which was essential to the exploration and conquest of the + wilderness. Most of Smith's companions were unfitted for the ordeal which + he survived. They perished miserably in the "starving time." But he was of + the stuff from which triumphant immigrants have ever been made, and it is + our recognition of the presence of these qualities in the Captain which + makes us think of his books dealing with America as if they were "American + books." There are other narratives by colonists temporarily residing in + the Virginia plantations which gratify our historical curiosity, but which + we no more consider a part of American literature than the books written + by Stevenson, Kipling, and Wells during their casual visits to this + country. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">10</a></span> + But Captain Smith's <i>True Relation</i> impresses us, like Mark Twain's + <i>Roughing It</i>, with being somehow true to type. In each of these + books the possible unveracities in detail are a confirmation of their + representative American character. + </p> + <p> + In other words, we have unconsciously formulated, in the course of + centuries, a general concept of "the pioneer." Novelists, poets, and + historians have elaborated this conception. Nothing is more inevitable + than our reaching back to the beginning of the seventeenth century and + endeavoring to select, among the thousands of Englishmen who emigrated or + even thought of emigrating to this country, those who possessed the + genuine heart and sinew of the permanent settler. + </p> + <p> + Oliver Cromwell, for instance, is said to have thought of emigrating + hither in 1637. If he had joined his friends John Cotton and Roger + Williams in New England, who can doubt that the personal characteristics + of "my brave Oliver" would today be identified with the "American" + qualities which we discover in 1637 on the shores of Massachusetts Bay? + And what an American settler Cromwell would have made! + </p> + <p> + If we turn from physical and moral daring to the <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_11" id="Page_11">11</a></span> field of theological and + political speculation, it is easy today to select, among the writings of + the earliest colonists, certain radical utterances which seem to presage + the very temper of the late eighteenth century. Pastor John Robinson's + farewell address to the Pilgrims at Leyden in 1620 contained the famous + words: "The Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His holy Word. I + cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the reformed churches, who are + come to a period in religion.… Luther and Calvin were great and + shining lights in their times, yet they penetrated not into the whole + counsel of God." Now John Robinson, like Oliver Cromwell, never set foot + on American soil, but he is identified, none the less, with the spirit of + American liberalism in religion. + </p> + <p> + In political discussion, the early emergence of that type of independence + familiar to the decade 1765-75 is equally striking. In a letter written in + 1818, John Adams insisted that "the principles and feelings which produced + the Revolution ought to be traced back for two hundred years, and sought + in the history of the country from the first plantations in America." "I + have always laughed," he declared in an earlier letter, "at the + affectation of representing American independence <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_12" id="Page_12">12</a></span> as a novel idea, as a modern + discovery, as a late invention. The idea of it as a possible thing, as a + probable event, nay as a necessary and unavoidable measure, in case Great + Britain should assume an unconstitutional authority over us, has been + familiar to Americans from the first settlement of the country." + </p> + <p> + There is, then, a predisposition, a latent or potential Americanism which + existed long before the United States came into being. Now that our + political unity has become a fact, the predisposition is certain to be + regarded by our own and by future generations as evidence of a state of + mind which made our separate national life inevitable. Yet to Thomas + Hutchinson, a sound historian and honest man, the last Royal Governor of + Massachusetts, a separate national life seemed in 1770 an unspeakable + error and calamity. + </p> + <p> + The seventeenth-century colonists were predominantly English, in blood, in + traditions, and in impulses. Whether we look at Virginia or Plymouth or at + the other colonies that were planted in swift succession along the + seaboard, it is clear that we are dealing primarily with men of the + English race. Most of them would have declared, with as much emphasis as + Francis Hopkinson a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">13</a></span> + century later, "We of America are in all respects Englishmen." Professor + Edward Channing thinks that it took a century of exposure to colonial + conditions to force the English in America away from the traditions and + ideals of those who continued to live in the old land. But the student of + literature must keep constantly in mind that these English colonizers + represented no single type of the national character. There were many men + of many minds even within the contracted cabin of the <i>Mayflower</i>. + The "sifted wheat" was by no means all of the same variety. + </p> + <p> + For Old England was never more torn by divergent thought and subversive + act than in the period between the death of Elizabeth in 1603 and the + Revolution of 1688. In this distracted time who could say what was really + "English"? Was it James the First or Raleigh? Archbishop Laud or John + Cotton? Charles the First or Cromwell? Charles the Second or William Penn? + Was it Churchman, Presbyterian, Independent, Separatist, Quaker? One is + tempted to say that the title of Ben Jonson's comedy <i>Every Man in his + Humour</i> became the standard of action for two whole generations of + Englishmen, and that there is no common denominator for emigrants of such + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">14</a></span> varied + pattern as Smith and Sandys of Virginia, Morton of Merrymount, John + Winthrop, "Sir" Christopher Gardiner and Anne Hutchinson of Boston, and + Roger Williams of Providence. They seem as miscellaneous as "Kitchener's + Army." + </p> + <p> + It is true that we can make certain distinctions. Virginia, as has often + been said, was more like a continuation of English society, while New + England represented a digression from English society. There were then, as + now, "stand-patters" and "progressives." It was the second class who, + while retaining very conservative notions about property, developed a + fearless intellectual radicalism which has written itself into the history + of the United States. But to the student of early American literature all + such generalizations are of limited value. He is dealing with individual + men, not with "Cavalier" or "Roundhead" as such. He has learned from + recent historians to distrust any such facile classification of the first + colonists. He knows by this time that there were aristocrats in + Massachusetts and commoners in Virginia; that the Pilgrims of Plymouth + were more tolerant than the Puritans of Boston, and that Rhode Island was + more tolerant than either. Yet useful as these general statements may be, + the interpreter <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">15</a></span> + of men of letters must always go back of the racial type or the social + system to the individual person. He recognizes, as a truth for him, that + theory of creative evolution which holds that in the ascending progress of + the race each thinking person becomes a species by himself. + </p> + <p> + While something is gained, then, by remembering that the racial instincts + and traditions of the first colonists were overwhelmingly English, and + that their political and ethical views were the product of a turbulent and + distraught time, it is even more important to note how the physical + situation of the colonists affected their intellectual and moral, as well + as their political problems. Among the emigrants from England, as we have + seen, there were great varieties of social status, religious opinion, + individual motive. But at least they all possessed the physical courage + and moral hardihood to risk the dangerous voyage, the fearful hardships, + and the vast uncertainties of the new life. To go out at all, under the + pressure of any motive, was to meet triumphantly a searching test. It was + in truth a "sifting," and though a few picturesque rascals had the courage + to go into exile while a few saints may have been deterred, it is a truism + to say that the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">16</a></span> + pioneers were made up of brave men and braver women. + </p> + <p> + It cannot be asserted that their courage was the result of any single, + dominating motive, equally operative in all of the colonies. Mrs. Hemans's + familiar line about seeking "freedom to worship God" was measurably true + of the Pilgrims of Plymouth, about whom she was writing. But the far more + important Puritan emigration to Massachusetts under Winthrop aimed not so + much at "freedom" as at the establishment of a theocracy according to the + Scriptures. These men straightway denied freedom of worship, not only to + newcomers who sought to join them, but to those members of their own + company who developed independent ways of thinking. The list of motives + for emigration ran the whole gamut, from missionary fervor for converting + the savages, down through a commendable desire for gain, to the perhaps no + less praiseworthy wish to escape a debtor's prison or the pillory. A few + of the colonists were rich. Some were beggars or indentured servants. Most + of them belonged to the middle class. John Harvard was the son of a + butcher; Thomas Shepard, the son of a grocer; Roger Williams, the son of a + tailor. But all three were <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" + id="Page_17">17</a></span> university bred and were natural leaders of + men. + </p> + <p> + Once arrived in the wilderness, the pioneer life common to all of the + colonists began instantly to exert its slow, irresistible pressure upon + their minds and to mould them into certain ways of thinking and feeling. + Without some perception of these modes of thought and emotion a knowledge + of the spirit of our literature is impossible. Take, for instance, the + mere physical situation of the first colonists, encamped on the very beach + of the wide ocean with an illimitable forest in their rear. Their + provisions were scanty. They grew watchful of the strange soil, of the new + skies, of the unknown climate. Even upon the voyage over, John Winthrop + thought that "the declination of the pole star was much, even to the view, + beneath that it is in England," and that "the new moon, when it first + appeared, was much smaller than at any time he had seen it in England." + Here was a man evidently using his eyes with a new interest in natural + phenomena. Under these changed skies the mind began gradually to change + also. + </p> + <p> + At first the colonists felt themselves an outpost of Europe, a forlorn + hope of the Protestant Reformation. "We shall be as a city upon a hill," + said <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">18</a></span> + Winthrop. "The eyes of all people are upon us." Their creed was Calvinism, + then in its third generation of dominion and a European doctrine which was + not merely theological but social and political. The emigrant Englishmen + were soon to discover that it contained a doctrine of human rights based + upon human needs. At the beginning of their novel experience they were + doubtless unaware of any alteration in their theories. But they were + facing a new situation, and that new situation became an immense factor in + their unconscious growth. Their intellectual and moral problems shifted, + as a boat shifts her ballast when the wind blows from a new quarter. The + John Cotton preaching in a shed in the new Boston had come to "suffer a + sea-change" from the John Cotton who had been rector of St. Botolph's + splendid church in Lincolnshire. The "church without a bishop" and the + "state without a king" became a different church and state from the old, + however loyally the ancient forms and phrases were retained. + </p> + <p> + If the political problems of equality which were latent in Calvinism now + began to take on a different meaning under the democratic conditions of + pioneer life, the inner, spiritual problems of that amazing creed were + intensified. "Fallen" human <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" + id="Page_19">19</a></span> nature remained the same, whether in the + crowded cosmopolitan streets of Holland and London, or upon the desolate + shores of Cape Cod. But the moral strain of the old insoluble conflict + between "fixed fate" and "free will" was heightened by the physical + loneliness of the colonists. Each soul must fight its own unaided, + unending battle. In that moral solitude, as in the physical solitude of + the settlers upon the far northwestern prairies of a later epoch, many a + mind snapped. Unnatural tension was succeeded by unnatural crimes. But for + the stronger intellects New England Calvinism became a potent spiritual + gymnastic, where, as in the Swedish system of bodily training, one lifts + imaginary and ever-increasing weights with imaginary and ever-increasing + effort, flexor and extensor muscles pulling against one another, driven by + the will. Calvinism bred athletes as well as maniacs. + </p> + <p> + The new situation, again, turned many of the theoretical speculations of + the colonists into practical issues. Here, for example, was the Indian. + Was he truly a child of God, possessing a soul, and, if so, had he + partaken of the sin of Adam? These questions perplexed the saintly Eliot + and the generous Roger Williams. But before many <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_20" id="Page_20">20</a></span> years the query as to whether a + Pequot warrior had a soul became suddenly less important than the + practical question as to whether the Pequot should be allowed any further + chances of taking the white man's scalp. On this last issue the colonists + were unanimous in the negative. + </p> + <p> + It would be easy to multiply such instances of a gradual change of view. + But beneath all the changes and all the varieties of individual behavior + in the various colonies that began to dot the seaboard, certain qualities + demanded by the new surroundings are felt in colonial life and in colonial + writings. One of these is the instinct for order, or at least that degree + of order essential to the existence of a camp. It was not in vain that + John Smith sought to correct the early laxness at Jamestown by the stern + edict: "He that will not work, neither shall he eat." Dutch and Quaker + colonies taught the same inexorable maxim of thrift. Soon there was work + enough for all, at good wages, but the lesson had been taught. It gave + Franklin's <i>Poor Richard</i> mottoes their flavor of homely, experienced + truth. + </p> + <p> + Order in daily life led straight to political order, just as the equality + and resourcefulness of the frontier, stimulated by isolation from Europe, + led <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">21</a></span> to + political independence. The pioneer learned to make things for himself + instead of sending to London for them, and by and by he grew as impatient + of waiting for a political edict from London as he would become in waiting + for a London plough. "This year," wrote one colonist, "ye will go to + complain to the Parliament, and the next year they will send to see how it + is, and the third year the government is changed." The time was coming + when no more complaints would be sent. + </p> + <p> + One of the most startling instances of this colonial instinct for + self-government is the case of Thomas Hooker. Trained in Emmanuel College + of the old Cambridge, he arrived in the new Cambridge in 1633. He grew + restless under its theocratic government, being, it was said, "a person + who when he was doing his Master's work would put a king into his pocket." + So he led the famous migration of 1636 from Massachusetts to Hartford, and + there helped to create a federation of independent towns which made their + own constitution without mentioning any king, and became one of the + corner-stones of American democracy. In May, 1638, Hooker declared in a + sermon before the General Court "that the choice of public magistrates + belongs unto the people by God's <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" + id="Page_22">22</a></span> own allowance," and "that they who have the + power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in their power, also, to + set the bounds and limitations of the power and place into which they call + them." The reason of this is: "<em>Because the foundation of authority is + laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people.</em>" This high + discourse antedates the famous pamphlets on liberty by Milton. It is a + half-century earlier than Locke's <i>Treatise on Government</i>, a century + and a quarter earlier than Rousseau's <i>Contrat Social</i>, and it + precedes by one hundred and thirty-eight years the American Declaration of + Independence. + </p> + <p> + But the slightest acquaintance with colonial writings will reveal the fact + that such political radicalism as Thomas Hooker's was accompanied by an + equally striking conservatism in other directions. One of these + conservative traits was the pioneer's respect for property, and + particularly for the land cleared by his own toil. Gladstone once spoke of + possession of the soil as the most important and most operative of all + social facts. Free-footed as the pioneer colonist was, he was disinclined + to part with his land without a substantial price for it. The land at his + disposal was practically illimitable, but he showed a very <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">23</a></span> English + tenacity in safeguarding his hold upon his own portion. + </p> + <p> + Very English, likewise, was his attachment to the old country as "home." + The lighter and the more serious writings of the colonists are alike in + their respect for the past. In the New England settlements, although not + at first in Virginia, there was respect for learning and for an educated + clergy. The colonists revered the Bible. They maintained a stubborn regard + for the Common Law of England. Even amid all the excitement of a + successful rebellion from the mother country, this Common Law still held + the Americans to the experience of the inescapable past. + </p> + <p> + Indeed, as the reader of today lifts his eyes from the pages of the books + written in America during the seventeenth century, and tries to meditate + upon the general difference between them and the English books written + during the same period, he will be aware of the firmness with which the + conservative forces held on this side of the Atlantic. It was only one + hundred years from the Great Armada of 1588 to the flight of James Second, + the last of the Stuart Kings. With that Revolution of 1688 the struggles + characteristic of the seventeenth century in England came to an end. A new + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">24</a></span> working + basis is found for thought, politics, society, literature. But while those + vast changes had been shaking England, two generations of American + colonists had cleared their forests, fought the savages, organized their + townships and their trade, put money in their purses, and lived, though as + yet hardly suspecting it, a life that was beginning to differentiate them + from the men of the Old World. We must now glance at the various aspects + of this isolated life of theirs, as it is revealed in their books. + </p> + <hr /> + <div class="chapterhead"> + <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"></a> <a name="chap02" id="chap02"></a> + <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">25</a></span> + <br /><br /><br /> + <h2> + <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER II.</a> + </h2> + </div> + <p class="chaptertitle"> + The First Colonial Literature + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + <span class="smcap">The</span> simplest and oldest group of colonial + writings is made up of records of exploration and adventure. They are like + the letters written from California in 1849 to the "folks back East." + Addressed to home-keeping Englishmen across the sea, they describe the new + world, explain the present situation of the colonists, and express their + hopes for the future. Captain John Smith's <i>True Relation</i>, already + alluded to, is the typical production of this class: a swift marching + book, full of eager energy, of bluff and breezy picturesqueness, and of + triumphant instinct for the main chance. Like most of the Elizabethans, he + cannot help poetizing in his prose. Cod-fishing is to him a "sport"; "and + what sport doth yeald a more pleasing content, and lesse hurt or charge + then angling with a hooke, and crossing the sweete ayre from Isle to Isle, + over the silent streams of a calme Sea?" But the <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_26" id="Page_26">26</a></span> gallant Captain is also capable + of very plain speech, Cromwellian in its simplicity, as when he writes + back to the London stockholders of the Virginia Company: "When you send + again, I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters, husbandmen, + gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of trees' roots, + well provided, than a thousand of such as we have." + </p> + <p> + America was but an episode in the wide wanderings of Captain Smith, but he + owes his place in human memory today to the physical and mental energy + with which he met the demands of a new situation, and to the vividness + with which he dashed down in words whatever his eyes had seen. Whether, in + that agreeable passage about Pocahontas, he was guilty of romancing a + little, no one really knows, but the Captain, as the first teller of this + peculiarly American type of story, will continue to have an indulgent + audience. + </p> + <p> + But other exiles in Virginia were skillful with the pen. William + Strachey's <i>True Reportory of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., vpon + and from the islands of the Bermudas</i> may or may not have given a hint + to Shakespeare for the storm-scene in <i>The Tempest</i>. In either case + it is admirable writing, flexible, sensitive, shrewdly observant. + Whitaker, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">27</a></span> + the apostle of Virginia, mingles, like many a missionary of the present + day, the style of an exhorter with a keen discernment of the traits of the + savage mind. George Percy, fresh from Northumberland, tells in a language + as simple as Defoe's the piteous tale of five months of illness and + starvation, watched by "those wild and cruel Pagans." John Pory, of "the + strong potations," who thinks that "good company is the soul of this + life," nevertheless comforts himself in his solitude among the "crystal + rivers and odoriferous woods" by reflecting that he is escaping envy and + expense. George Sandys, scholar and poet, finds his solace during a + Virginia exile in continuing his translation of Ovid's <i>Metamorphoses</i>. + Colonel Norwood, an adventurer who belongs to a somewhat later day, since + he speaks of having "read Mr. Smith's travels," draws the long bow of + narrative quite as powerfully as the redoubtable Smith, and far more + smoothly, as witness his accounts of starvation on shipboard and + cannibalism on shore. This Colonel is an artist who would have delighted + Stevenson. + </p> + <p> + All of these early tellers of Virginia tales were Englishmen, and most of + them returned to England, where their books were printed and their + remaining lives were passed. But far to the northeast <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_28" id="Page_28">28</a></span> of Virginia there were two + colonies of men who earned the right to say, in William Bradford's quiet + words, "It is not with us as with other men, whom small things can + discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish themselves at home + again." One was the colony of Pilgrims at Plymouth, headed by Bradford + himself. The other was the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay, with John + Winthrop as governor. + </p> + <p> + Bradford and Winthrop have left journals which are more than chronicles of + adventure. They record the growth and government of a commonwealth. Both + Bradford and Winthrop were natural leaders of men, grave, dignified, + solid, endowed with a spirit that bred confidence. Each was learned. + Winthrop, a lawyer and man of property, had a higher social standing than + Bradford, who was one of the Separatists of Robinson's flock at Leyden. + But the Pilgrim of the <i>Mayflower</i> and the well-to-do Puritan of the + Bay Colony both wrote their annals like gentlemen and scholars. Bradford's + <i>History of Plymouth Plantation</i> runs from 1620 to 1647. Winthrop's + diary, now printed as the <i>History of New England</i>, begins with his + voyage in 1630 and closes in the year of his death, 1649. As records of an + Anglo-Saxon <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">29</a></span> + experiment in self-government under pioneer conditions these books are + priceless; as human documents, they illuminate the Puritan character; as + for "literary" value in the narrow sense of that word, neither Bradford + nor Winthrop seems to have thought of literary effect. Yet the leader of + the Pilgrims has passages of grave sweetness and charm, and his sketch of + his associate, Elder Brewster, will bear comparison with the best English + biographical writing of that century. Winthrop is perhaps more varied in + tone, as he is in matter, but he writes throughout as a ruler of men + should write, with "decent plainness and manly freedom." His best known + pages, justly praised by Tyler and other historians of American thought, + contain his speech before the General Court in 1645 on the nature of true + liberty. No paragraphs written in America previous to the Revolution would + have given more pleasure to Abraham Lincoln, but it is to be feared that + Lincoln never saw Governor Winthrop's book, though his own ancestor, + Samuel Lincoln of Hingham, lived under Winthrop's jurisdiction. + </p> + <p> + The theory of government held by the dominant party of the first two + generations of New England pioneers has often been called a "theocracy," + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">30</a></span> that is + to say, a government according to the Word of God as expounded and + enforced by the clergy. The experiment was doomed to ultimate failure, for + it ran counter to some of the noblest instincts of human nature. But its + administration was in the hands of able men. The power of the clergy was + well-nigh absolute. The political organization of the township depended + upon the ecclesiastical organization as long as the right to vote was + confined to church members. How sacrosanct and awful was the position of + the clergyman may be perceived from Hawthorne's <i>The Minister's Black + Veil</i> and <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>. + </p> + <p> + Yet it must be said that men like Hooker and Cotton, Shepard and Norton, + had every instinct and capacity for leadership. With the notable exception + of Hooker, such men were aristocrats, holding John Winthrop's opinion that + "Democracy is, among most civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst + form of government." They were fiercely intolerant. The precise reason for + the Hooker migration from Cambridge to Hartford in 1636—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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" + id="Page_31">31</a></span> would today call Thomas Hooker a liberal in + religion, pioneer in political liberty though he proved to be. His extant + sermons have the steady stroke of a great hammer; smiting at the mind and + heart. "Others because they have felt the heavy hand of God … upon + these grounds they build their hopes: 'I have had my hell in this life, + and I hope to have heaven in the world to come; I hope the worst is + over.'" Not so, thunders the preacher in reply: "Sodom and Gomorrah they + burnt in brimstone and they shall burn in hell." One of Hooker's + successors has called him "a son of thunder and a son of consolation by + turns." The same may be said of Thomas Shepard, another graduate of + Emmanuel College in the old Cambridge, who became the "soul-melting + preacher" of the newer Cambridge by the Charles. Pure, ravishing notes of + spiritual devotion still sing themselves in his pages. He is wholly + Calvinist. He thinks "the truth is a poor mean thing in itself" and that + the human reason cannot be "the last resolution of all doubts," which must + be sought only in the written Word of God. He holds it "a tough work, a + wonderful hard matter to be saved." "Jesus Christ is not got with a wet + finger." Yet, like so many mystics, he yearns to be "covered <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">32</a></span> with God, as + with a cloud," to be "drowned, plunged, and swallowed up with God." One + hundred years later we shall find this same rhapsodic ecstasy in the + meditations of Jonathan Edwards. + </p> + <p> + John Cotton, the third of the mighty men in the early Colonial pulpit, + owes his fame more to his social and political influence than to his + literary power. Yet even that was thought commanding. Trained, like Hooker + and Shepard, at Emmanuel College, and fresh from the rectorship of St. + Botolph's in the Lincolnshire Boston, John Cotton dominated that new + Boston which was named in his honor. He became the Pope of the theocracy; + a clever Pope and not an unkindly one. He seems to have shared some of the + opinions of Anne Hutchinson, though he "pronounced the sentence of + admonition" against her, says Winthrop, with much zeal and detestation of + her errors. Hawthorne, in one of his ironic moods, might have done justice + to this scene. Cotton was at heart too liberal for his rôle of + Primate, and fate led him to persecute a man whose very name has become a + symbol of victorious tolerance, Roger Williams. + </p> + <p> + Williams, known today as a friend of Cromwell, Milton, and Sir Harry Vane, + had been exiled from <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">33</a></span> + Massachusetts for maintaining that the civil power had no jurisdiction + over conscience. This doctrine was fatal to the existence of a theocratic + state dominated by the church. John Cotton was perfectly logical in + "enlarging" Roger Williams into the wilderness, but he showed less than + his usual discretion in attacking the quick-tempered Welshman in + pamphlets. It was like asking Hotspur if he would kindly consent to fight. + Back and forth the books fly, for Williams loves this game. His <i>Bloody + Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience</i> calls forth Mr. Cotton's + <i>Bloody Tenet washed and made white in the Blood of the Lamb</i>; and + this in turn provokes the torrential flood of Williams's masterpiece, <i>The + Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, by Mr. Cotton's endeavor to wash it white in + the Blood of the Lamb</i>. There is glorious writing here, and its effect + cannot be suggested by quoting sentences. But there is one sentence in a + letter written by Williams in his old age to his fellow-townsmen of + Providence which points the whole moral of the terrible mistake made by + the men who sought spiritual liberty in America for themselves, only to + deny that same liberty to others. "I have only one motion and petition," + begs this veteran pioneer who had forded many a swollen stream and built + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">34</a></span> many a + rude bridge in the Plantations: "it is this, that after you have got over + the black brook of some soul bondage yourselves, you tear not down the + bridge after you." + </p> + <p> + It is for such wise and humane counsels as this that Roger Williams is + remembered. His opponents had mightier intellects than his, but the world + has long since decided against them. Colonial sermon literature is read + today chiefly by antiquarians who have no sympathy for the creed which + once gave it vitality. Its theology, like the theology of <i>Paradise Lost</i> + or the <i>Divine Comedy</i>, has sunk to the bottom of the black brook. + But we cannot judge fairly the contemporary effect of this pulpit + literature without remembering the passionate faith that made pulpit and + pews copartners in a supreme spiritual struggle. Historians properly + insist upon the æsthetic poverty of the New England Puritans; that + their rule of life cut them off from an enjoyment of the dramatic + literature of their race, then just closing its most splendid epoch; that + they had little poetry or music and no architecture and plastic art. But + we must never forget that to men of their creed the Sunday sermons and the + week-day "lectures" served as oratory, poetry, and drama. These <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">35</a></span> outpourings + of the mind and heart of their spiritual leaders were the very stuff of + human passion in its intensest forms. Puritan churchgoers, passing hours + upon hours every week in rapt absorption with the noblest of all poetry + and prose in the pages of their chief book, the Bible, were at least as + sensitive to the beauty of words and the sweep of emotions as our + contemporaries upon whose book-shelves Spenser and Milton stand unread. + </p> + <p> + It is only by entering into the psychology of the period that we can + estimate its attitude towards the poetry written by the pioneers + themselves. The <i>Bay Psalm Book</i> (1640), the first book printed in + the colonies, is a wretched doggerel arrangement of the magnificent King + James Version of the Psalms, designed to be sung in churches. Few of the + New England churches could sing more than half-a-dozen tunes, and a + pitch-pipe was for a long time the only musical instrument allowed. Judged + as hymnology or poetry, the <i>Bay Psalm Book</i> provokes a smile. But + the men and women who used it as a handbook of devotion sang it with their + hearts aflame. In judging such a popular seventeenth-century poem as + Wigglesworth's <i>Day of Doom</i> one must strip oneself quite free from + the twentieth century, and pretend to be sitting in the <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">36</a></span> + chimney-corner of a Puritan kitchen, reading aloud by that firelight + which, as Lowell once humorously suggested, may have added a "livelier + relish" to the poet's "premonitions of eternal combustion." Lowell could + afford to laugh about it, having crossed that particular black brook. But + for several generations the boys and girls of New England had read the <i>Day + of Doom</i> as if Mr. Wigglesworth, the gentle and somewhat sickly + minister of Malden, had veritably peeped into Hell. It is the present + fashion to underestimate the power of Wigglesworth's verse. At its best it + has a trampling, clattering shock like a charge of cavalry and a sound + like clanging steel. Mr. Kipling and other cunning ballad-makers have + imitated the peculiar rhyme structure chosen by the nervous little parson. + But no living poet can move his readers to the fascinated horror once felt + by the Puritans as they followed Wigglesworth's relentless gaze into the + future of the soul's destiny. + </p> + <p> + Historical curiosity may still linger, of course, over other verse-writers + of the period. Anne Bradstreet's poems, for instance, are not without + grace and womanly sweetness, in spite of their didactic themes and + portentous length. But this <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" + id="Page_37">37</a></span> lady, born in England, the daughter of Governor + Dudley and later the wife of Governor Bradstreet, chose to imitate the + more fantastic of the moralizing poets of England and France. There is + little in her hundreds of pages which seems today the inevitable outcome + of her own experience in the New World. For readers who like roughly + mischievous satire, of a type initiated in England by Bishop Hall and + Donne, there is <i>The Simple Cobbler of Agawam</i> written by the roving + clergyman Nathaniel Ward. But he lived only a dozen years in + Massachusetts, and his satirical pictures are scarcely more "American" + than the satire upon German professors in <i>Sartor Resartus</i> is + "German." Like Charles Dickens's <i>American Notes</i>, Ward's give the + reaction of a born Englishman in the presence of the sights and the talk + and the personages of the transatlantic world. + </p> + <p> + Of all the colonial writings of the seventeenth century, those that have + lost least of their interest through the lapse of years are narratives of + struggles with the Indians. The image of the "bloody savage" has always + hovered in the background of the American imagination. Our boys and girls + have "played Indian" from the beginning, and the actual Indian is still + found, as for three hundred years past, <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_38" id="Page_38">38</a></span> upon the frontier fringe of our + civilization. Novelists like Cooper, historians like Parkman, poets like + Longfellow, have dealt with the rich material offered by the life of the + aborigines, but the long series begins with the scribbled story of + colonists. Here are comedy and tragedy, plain narratives of trading and + travel, missionary zeal and triumphs; then the inevitable alienation of + the two races and the doom of the native. + </p> + <p> + The "noble savage" note may be found in John Rolfe, the husband of + Pocahontas, with whom, poor fellow, his "best thoughts are so intangled + and enthralled." Other Virginians, like Smith, Strachey, and Percy, show + close naturalistic observation, touched with the abounding Elizabethan + zest for novelties. To Alexander Whitaker, however, these "naked slaves of + the devil" were "not so simple as some have supposed." He yearned and + labored over their souls, as did John Eliot and Roger Williams and Daniel + Gookin of New England. In the Pequot War of 1637 the grim settlers + resolved to be rid of that tribe once for all, and the narratives of + Captain Edward Johnson and Captain John Mason, who led in the storming and + slaughter at the Indians' Mystic Fort, are as piously relentless as + anything in the Old Testament. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" + id="Page_39">39</a></span> Cromwell at Drogheda, not long after, had + soldiers no more merciless than these exterminating Puritans, who wished + to plough their fields henceforth in peace. A generation later the storm + broke again in King Philip's War. Its tales of massacre, captivity, and + single-handed fighting linger in the American imagination still. Typical + pamphlets are Mary Rowlandson's thrilling tale of the Lancaster massacre + and her subsequent captivity, and the loud-voiced Captain Church's + unvarnished description of King Philip's death. The King, shot down like a + wearied bull-moose in the deep swamp, "fell upon his face in the mud and + water, with his gun under him." They "drew him through the mud to the + upland; and a doleful, great, naked dirty beast he looked like." The head + brought only thirty shillings at Plymouth: "scanty reward and poor + encouragement," thought Captain Church. William Hubbard, the minister of + Ipswich, wrote a comprehensive <i>Narrative of the Troubles with the + Indians in New England</i>, bringing the history down to 1677. Under the + better known title of <i>Indian Wars</i>, this fervid and dramatic tale, + penned in a quiet parsonage, has stirred the pulses of every succeeding + generation. + </p> + <p> + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">40</a></span> The + close of King Philip's War, 1676, coinciding as it does with Bacon's + Rebellion in Virginia, marks an era in the development of our independent + life. The events of that year, in the words of Professor Tyler, + "established two very considerable facts, namely, that English colonists + in America could be so provoked as to make physical resistance to the + authority of England, and, second, that English colonists in America + could, in the last resort, put down any combination of Indians that might + be formed against them. In other words, it was then made evident that + English colonists would certainly be safe in the new world, and also that + they would not always be colonists." + </p> + <p> + While the end of an historical or literary era cannot always be thus + conveniently indicated by a date, there is no doubt that the final quarter + of the seventeenth century witnessed deep changes in the outward life and + the inner temper of the colonists. The "first fine careless rapture" was + over. Only a few aged men could recall the memory of the first + settlements. Between the founding of Jamestown and the rebellion under the + leadership of Nathaniel Bacon almost seventy years had intervened, an + interval corresponding to that which separates us from the Mexican War. + Roger Williams <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">41</a></span> + ended his much-enduring and beneficent life in the flourishing town of + Providence in 1684. He had already outlived Cotton and Hooker, Shepard and + Winthrop, by more than thirty years. Inevitably men began, toward the end + of the century, to take stock of the great venture of colonization, to + scrutinize their own history and present position, to ask searching + questions of themselves. "You have better food and raiment than was in + former times," wrote the aged Roger Clark, in 1676; "but have you better + hearts than your forefathers had?" Thomas Walley's <i>Languishing + Commonwealth</i> maintains that "Faith is dead, and Love is cold, and Zeal + is gone." Urian Oakes's election sermon of 1670 in Cambridge is a + condemnation of the prevalent worldliness and ostentation. This period of + critical inquiry and assessment, however, also gives grounds for just + pride. History, biography, eulogy, are flourishing. The reader is reminded + of that epoch, one hundred and fifty years later, when the deaths of John + Adams and of Thomas Jefferson, falling upon the same anniversary day, the + Fourth of July, 1826, stirred all Americans to a fresh recognition of the + services wrought by the Fathers of the Republic. So it was in the colonies + at the close of the seventeenth century. <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_42" id="Page_42">42</a></span> Old England, in one final + paroxysm of political disgust, cast out the last Stuart in 1688. That + Revolution marks, as we have seen, the close of a long and tragic struggle + which began in the autocratic theories of James the First and in the + absolutism of Charles. Almost every phase of that momentous conflict had + its reverberation across the Atlantic, as the history of the granting and + withdrawal of colonial charters witnesses abundantly. The American + pioneers were quite aware of what was going on in England, and they + praised God or grumbled, thriftily profited by the results or quietly + nullified them, as the case might be. But all the time, while England was + rocked to its foundations, the colonists struck steadily forward into + their own independent life. + </p> + <hr /> + <div class="chapterhead"> + <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"></a> <a name="chap03" id="chap03"></a> + <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">43</a></span> + <br /><br /><br /> + <h2> + <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER III.</a> + </h2> + </div> + <p class="chaptertitle"> + The Third and Fourth Generation + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + <span class="smcap">When</span> the eighteenth century opened, many signs + of change were in the air. The third generation of native-born Americans + was becoming secularized. The theocracy of New England had failed. In the + height of the tragic folly over the supposed "witchcraft" in Salem, + Increase Mather and his son Cotton had held up the hands of the judges in + their implacable work. But before five years had passed, Judge Sewall does + public penance in church for his share of the awful blunder, desiring "to + take the shame and blame of it." Robert Calef's cool pamphlet exposing the + weakness of the prosecutors' case is indeed burned by Increase Mather in + the Harvard Yard, but the liberal party are soon to force Mather from the + Presidency and to refuse that office to his son. In the town of Boston, + once hermetically sealed against heresy, there are Baptist and Episcopal + churches—and a dancing-master. <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_44" id="Page_44">44</a></span> Young Benjamin Franklin, born in + 1706, professes a high respect for the Mathers, but he does not go to + church, "Sunday being my studying day," and neither the clerical nor the + secular arm of Boston is long enough and strong enough to compel that + industrious apprentice into piety. + </p> + <p> + If such was the state of New England, the laxity of New York and Virginia + needs little evidence. Contemporary travelers found the New Yorkers + singularly attached to the things of this present world. Philadelphia was + prosperous and therewith content. Virginia was a paradise with no + forbidden fruit. Hugh Jones, writing of it in 1724, considers North + Carolina "the refuge of runaways," and South Carolina "the delight of + buccaneers and pirates," but Virginia "the happy retreat of true Britons + and true Churchmen." Unluckily these Virginians, well nourished "by the + plenty of the country," have "contemptible notions of England!" We shall + hear from them again. In the meantime the witty William Byrd of Westover + describes for us his amusing survey of the Dismal Swamp, and his + excursions into North Carolina and to Governor Spotswood's iron mines, + where he reads aloud to the Widow Fleming, on a rainy autumn day, three + acts of the <i>Beggars' Opera</i>, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" + id="Page_45">45</a></span> just over from London. So runs the world away, + south of the Potomac. Thackeray paints it once for all, no doubt, in the + opening chapters of <i>The Virginians</i>. + </p> + <p> + To discover any ambitious literary effort in this period, we must turn + northward again. In the middle colonies, and especially in Philadelphia, + which had now outgrown Boston in population, there was a quickened + interest in education and science. But the New Englanders were still the + chief makers of books. Three great names will sufficiently represent the + age: Cotton Mather, a prodigy of learning whose eyes turn back fondly to + the provincial past; Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the most consummate + intellect of the eighteenth century; and Benjamin Franklin, certainly the + most perfect exponent of its many-sided life. + </p> + <p> + When Cotton Mather was graduated from Harvard in 1678, in his sixteenth + year, he was publicly complimented by President Oakes, in fulsome Latin, + as the grandson of Richard Mather and John Cotton. This atmosphere of + flattery, this consciousness of continuing in his own person the famous + local dynasty, surrounded and sustained him to the end. He had a less + commanding personality than his father Increase. His nervous sensibility + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">46</a></span> was + excessive. His natural vanity was never subdued, though it was often + chastened by trial and bitter disappointment. But, like his father, he was + an omnivorous reader and a facile producer of books, carrying daily such + burdens of mental and spiritual excitement as would have crushed a normal + man. Increase Mather published some one hundred and fifty books and + pamphlets: Cotton Mather not less than four hundred. The Rev. John Norton, + in his sketch of John Cotton, remarks that "the hen, which brings not + forth without uncessant sitting night and day, is an apt emblem of + students." Certainly the hen is an apt emblem of the "uncessant" sitter, + the credulous scratcher, the fussy cackler who produced the <i>Magnalia</i>. + </p> + <p> + Yet he had certain elements of greatness. His tribal loyalty was perfect. + His ascetic devotion to his conception of religious truth was absolute. + His <i>Diary</i>, which has recently been published in full, records his + concern for the chief political events in Europe in his day, no less than + his brooding solicitude for the welfare of his townspeople, and his agony + of spirit over the lapses of his wayward eldest son. A "sincere" man, + then, as Carlyle would say, at bottom; but overlaid with such <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">47</a></span> "Jewish old + clothes," such professional robings and personal plumage as makes it + difficult, save in the revealing <i>Diary</i>, to see the man himself. + </p> + <p> + The <i>Magnalia Christi Americana</i>, treating the history of New England + from 1620 to 1698, was published in a tall London folio of nearly 800 + pages in 1702. It is divided into seven books, and proceeds, by methods + entirely unique, to tell of Pilgrim and Puritan divines and governors, of + Harvard College, of the churches of New England, of marvelous events, of + Indian wars; and in general to justify, as only a member of the Mather + dynasty could justify, the ways of God to Boston men. Hawthorne and + Whittier, Longfellow and Lowell knew this book well and found much honey + in the vast carcass. To have had four such readers and a biographer like + Barrett Wendell must be gratifying to Cotton Mather in Paradise. + </p> + <p> + The <i>Diary</i> of Mather's fellow-townsman Judge Samuel Sewall has been + read more generally in recent years than anything written by Mather + himself. It was begun in 1673, nine years earlier than the first entry in + Mather's <i>Diary</i>, and it ends in 1729, while Mather's closes in 1724. + As a picture of everyday happenings in New England, Sewall's <i>Diary</i> + is as far superior to Mather's as <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" + id="Page_48">48</a></span> Pepys's <i>Diary</i> is to George Fox's <i>Journal</i> + in painting the England of the Restoration. Samuel Sewall was an admirably + solid figure, keen, forceful, honest. Most readers of his <i>Diary</i> + believe that he really was in luck when he was rejected by the Widow + Winthrop on that fateful November day when his eye noted—in spite of + his infatuation—that "her dress was not so clean as sometime it had + been. Jehovah Jireh!" + </p> + <p> + One pictures Cotton Mather as looking instinctively backward to the Heroic + Age of New England with pious nervous exaltation, and Samuel Sewall as + doing the day's work uprightly without taking anxious thought of either + past or future. But Jonathan Edwards is set apart from these and other + men. He is a lonely seeker after spiritual perfection, in quest of that + city "far on the world's rim," as Masefield says of it, the city whose + builder and maker is God. + </p> + <p> + The story of Edwards's career has the simplicity and dignity of tragedy. + Born in a parsonage in the quiet Connecticut valley in 1703—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 <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_49" id="Page_49">49</a></span> precision and enthusiasm which + would have made him a great naturalist. At fourteen he begins his notes on + <i>The Mind</i> and on <i>Natural Science</i>. He is graduated from Yale + in 1720, studies theology, and at twenty-four becomes the colleague of his + famous grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in the church at Northampton. He + marries the beautiful Sarah Pierrepont, whom he describes in his journal + in a prose rhapsody which, like his mystical rhapsodies on religion in the + same youthful period, glows with a clear unearthly beauty unmatched in any + English prose of that century. For twenty-three years he serves the + Northampton church, and his sermons win him the rank of the foremost + preacher in New England. John Wesley reads at Oxford his account of the + great revival of 1735. Whitefield comes to visit him at Northampton. Then, + in 1750, the ascetic preacher alienates his church over issues pertaining + to discipline and to the administration of the sacrament. He is dismissed. + He preaches his "farewell sermon," like Wesley, like Emerson, like Newman, + and many another still unborn. He removes to Stockbridge, then a hamlet in + the wilderness, preaches to the Indians, and writes treatises on theology + and metaphysics, among them the world-famous <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_50" id="Page_50">50</a></span> <i>Freedom of the Will</i>. In + 1757, upon the death of his son-in-law, President Aaron Burr of Princeton, + Edwards is called to the vacant Presidency. He is reluctant to go, for + though he is only fifty-four, his health has never been robust, and he has + his great book on the <i>History of Redemption</i> still to write. But he + accepts, finds the smallpox raging in Princeton upon his arrival in + January, 1758, is inoculated, and dies of the disease in March—his + dreams unfulfilled, his life-work once more thwarted. Close by the tomb of + this saint is the tomb of his grandson, Aaron Burr, who killed Hamilton. + </p> + <p> + The literary reputation of Jonathan Edwards has turned, like the + vicissitudes of his life, upon factors that could not be foreseen. His + contemporary fame was chiefly as a preacher, and was due to sermons like + those upon <i>God Glorified in Man's Dependence</i> and <i>The Reality of + Spiritual Life</i>, rather than to such discourses as the Enfield sermon, + <i>Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God</i>, which in our own day is the + best known of his deliverances. Legends have grown up around this terrific + Enfield sermon. Its fearful power over its immediate hearers cannot be + gainsaid, and it will long continue to be quoted as an example of the + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">51</a></span> length + to which a Calvinistic logician of genius was compelled by his own scheme + to go. We still see the tall, sweet-faced man, worn by his daily twelve + hours of intense mental toil, leaning on one elbow in the pulpit and + reading from manuscript, without even raising his gentle voice, those + words which smote his congregation into spasms of terror and which seem to + us sheer blasphemy. + </p> + <p> + Yet the <i>Farewell Sermon</i> of 1750 gives a more characteristic view of + Edwards's mind and heart, and conveys an ineffaceable impression of his + nobility of soul. His diction, like Wordsworth's, is usually plain almost + to bareness; the formal framework of his discourses is obtruded; and he + hunts objections to their last hiding-place with wearisome pertinacity. + Yet his logic is incandescent. Steel sometimes burns to the touch like + this, in the bitter winters of New England, and one wonders whether + Edwards's brain was not of ice, so pitiless does it seem. His treatise + denying the freedom of the will has given him a European reputation + comparable with that enjoyed by Franklin in science and Jefferson in + political propaganda. It was really a polemic demonstrating the + sovereignty of God, rather than pure theology or metaphysics. Edwards goes + beyond <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">52</a></span> + Augustine and Calvin in asserting the arbitrary will of the Most High and + in "denying to the human will any self-determining power." He has been + refuted by events and tendencies, such as the growth of historical + criticism and the widespread acceptance of the doctrine of evolution, + rather than by the might of any single antagonist. So, too, the Dred Scott + decision of Chief Justice Taney, holding that the slave was not a citizen, + was not so much answered by opponents as it was superseded by the + arbitrament of war. But the idealism of this lonely thinker has entered + deeply and permanently into the spiritual life of his countrymen, and he + will continue to be read by a few of those who still read Plato and Dante. + </p> + <p> + "My mother grieves," wrote Benjamin Franklin to his father in 1738, "that + one of her sons is an Arian, another an Arminian. What an Arminian or an + Arian is, I cannot say that I very well know. The truth is I make such + distinctions very little my study." To understand Franklin's indifference + to such distinctions, we must realize how completely he represents the + secularizing tendencies of his age. What a drama of worldly adventure it + all was, this roving life of the tallow-chandler's son, who runs away from + home, walks the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">53</a></span> + streets of Philadelphia with the famous loaves of bread under his arm, is + diligent in business, slips over to London, where he gives lessons in + swimming and in total abstinence, slips back to Philadelphia and becomes + its leading citizen, fights the long battle of the American colonies in + London, sits in the Continental Congress, sails to Europe to arrange that + French Alliance which brought our Revolution to a successful issue, and + comes home at last, full of years and honors, to a bland and philosophical + exit from the stage! + </p> + <p> + He broke with every Puritan tradition. The Franklins were relatively late + comers to New England. They sprang from a long line of blacksmiths at + Ecton in Northamptonshire. The seat of the Washingtons was not far away, + and Franklin's latest biographer points out that the pink-coated huntsmen + of the Washington gentry may often have stopped at Ecton to have their + horses shod at the Franklin smithy. Benjamin's father came out in 1685, + more than fifty years after the most notable Puritan emigration. Young + Benjamin, born in 1706, was as untouched by the ardors of that elder + generation as he would have been by the visions of Dante—an author, + by the way, whom he never mentions, even as he never <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_54" id="Page_54">54</a></span> mentions Shakespeare. He had no + reverence for Puritan New England. To its moral beauty, its fine severity, + he was wholly blind. As a boy he thriftily sold his <i>Pilgrim's Progress</i>. + He became, in the new fashion of that day, a Deist. Like a true child of + the eighteenth century, his attitude toward the seventeenth was that of + amused or contemptuous superiority. Thackeray has somewhere a charming + phrase about his own love for the back seat of the stage-coach, the seat + which, in the old coaching days, gave one a view of the receding + landscape. Thackeray, like Burke before him, loved historical + associations, historical sentiment, the backward look over the long road + which humanity has traveled. But Franklin faced the other way. He would + have endorsed his friend Jefferson's scornful sentence, "The dead have no + rights." He joined himself wholly to that eighteenth century in which his + own lot was cast, and, alike in his qualities and in his defects, he + became one of its most perfect representatives. + </p> + <p> + To catch the full spirit of that age, turn for an instant to the London of + 1724—the year of Franklin's arrival. Thirty-six years have elapsed + since the glorious Revolution of 1688; the Whig principles, then + triumphant, have been tacitly <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" + id="Page_55">55</a></span> accepted by both political parties; the + Jacobite revolt of 1715 has proved a fiasco; the country has accepted the + House of Hanover and a government by party leadership of the House of + Commons, and it does not care whether Sir Robert Walpole buys a few rotten + boroughs, so long as he maintains peace with Europe and prosperity at + home. England is weary of seventeenth century "enthusiasm," weary of + conflict, sick of idealism. She has found in the accepted Whig principles + a satisfactory compromise, a working theory of society, a <i>modus vivendi</i> + which nobody supposes is perfect but which will answer the prayer + appointed to be read in all the churches, "Grant us peace in our time, O + Lord." The theories to which men gave their lives in the seventeenth + century seem ghostly in their unreality; but the prize turnips on Sir + Robert's Norfolk farm, and the wines in his cellar, and the offices at his + disposal—these are very real indeed. London merchants are making + money; the squire and the parson are tranquilly ruling the country + parishes; the philosophy of John Locke is everywhere triumphant. Mr. Pope + is the poet of the hour, and his <i>Essay on Man</i>, counseling + acceptance of our mortal situation, is considered to be the last word of + human wisdom and of poetical elegance. In <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_56" id="Page_56">56</a></span> prose, the style of the <i>Spectator</i> + rules—an admirable style, Franklin thought, and he imitated it + patiently until its ease and urbanity had become his own. And indeed, how + much of that London of the third decade of the century passed into the + mind of the inquisitive, roving, loose-living printer's apprentice from + Philadelphia! It taught him that the tangible world is the real world, and + that nothing succeeds like success; but it never even whispered to him + that sometimes nothing damns like success. + </p> + <p> + In his limitations, no less than in his power of assimilation, Franklin + was the representative man of his era. He had no artistic interests, no + liking for metaphysics after his brief devotion, in early manhood, to the + dialogues of Plato. He taught himself some Latin, but he came to believe + that the classics had little significance and that they should be + superseded by the modern languages. For the mediæval world he had no + patience or understanding. To these defects of his century we must add + some failings of his own. He was not always truthful. He had an indelible + streak of coarseness. His conception of the "art of virtue" was + mechanical. When Carlyle called Franklin the "father of all the Yankees," + we must <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">57</a></span> + remember that the Scotch prophet hated Yankees and believed that + Franklin's smooth, plausible, trader type of morality was only a broad way + to the everlasting bonfire. + </p> + <p> + But it is folly to linger over the limitations of the tallow-chandler's + son. The catalogue of his beneficent activity is a vast one. Balzac once + characterized him as the man who invented the lightning-rod, the hoax, and + the republic. His contributions to science have to do with electricity, + earthquakes, geology, meteorology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, + mathematics, navigation of air and water, agriculture, medicine, and + hygiene. In some of these fields he did pioneer work of lasting + significance. His teachings of thrift and prudence, as formulated in the + maxims of Poor Richard, gave him a world-wide reputation. He attacked war, + like Voltaire, not so much for its wickedness as for its folly, and + cheerfully gave up many years of a long life to the effort to promote a + better understanding among the nations of the world. + </p> + <p> + It is perhaps needless to add what all persons who love good writing know, + that Benjamin Franklin was a most delightful writer. His letters cover an + amusing and extraordinary variety of <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_58" id="Page_58">58</a></span> topics. He ranges from balloons + to summer hats, and from the advantages of deep ploughing to bifocal + glasses, which, by the way, he invented. He argues for sharp razors and + cold baths, and for fresh air in the sleeping-room. He discusses the + morals of the game of chess, the art of swimming, the evils of smoky + chimneys, the need of reformed spelling. Indeed, his passion for + improvement led him not only to try his hand upon an abridgment of the + Book of Common Prayer, but to go even so far as to propose seriously a new + rendering of the Lord's Prayer. His famous proposal for a new version of + the Bible, however, which Matthew Arnold solemnly held up to reprobation, + was only a joke which Matthew Arnold did not see—the new version of + Job being, in fact, a clever bit of political satire against party + leadership in England. Even more brilliant examples of his skill in + political satire are his imaginary <i>Edict of the King of Prussia against + England</i>, and his famous <i>Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a + Small One</i>. But I must not try to call the roll of all the good things + in Franklin's ten volumes. I will simply say that those who know Franklin + only in his <i>Autobiography</i>, charming as that classic production is, + have made but an imperfect acquaintance with <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_59" id="Page_59">59</a></span> the range, the vitality, the + vigor of this admirable craftsman who chose a style "smooth, clear, and + short," and made it serve every purpose of his versatile and beneficent + mind. + </p> + <p> + When the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 startled the American colonies + out of their provincial sense of security and made them aware of their + real attitude toward the mother country, Franklin was in London. Eleven + years earlier, in 1754, he had offered a plan for the <i>Union of the + Colonies</i>, but this had not contemplated separation from England. It + was rather what we should call a scheme for imperial federation under the + British Crown. We may use his word union, however, in a different field + from that of politics. How much union of sentiment, of mental and moral + life, of literary, educational, and scientific endeavor, was there in the + colonies when the hour of self-examination came? Only the briefest summary + may be attempted here. + </p> + <p> + As to race, these men of the third and fourth generation since the + planting of the colonies were by no means so purely English as the first + settlers. The 1,600,000 colonists in 1760 were mingled of many stocks, the + largest non-English elements being German and Scotch-Irish—that is, + Scotch <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">60</a></span> + who had settled for a while in Ulster before emigrating to America. "About + one-third of the colonists in 1760," says Professor Channing, "were born + outside of America." Crèvecœur's <i>Letters from an American + Farmer</i> thus defined the Americans: "They are a mixture of English, + Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous + breed that race now called Americans has arisen." The Atlantic seaboard, + with a narrow strip inland, was fairly well covered by local communities, + differing in blood, in religion, in political organization—a + congeries of separate experiments or young utopias, waiting for that most + utopian experiment of all, a federal union. But the dominant language of + the "promiscuous breed" was English, and in the few real centers of + intellectual life the English tradition was almost absolute. + </p> + <p> + The merest glance at colonial journalism will confirm this estimate. The + <i>Boston News-Letter</i>, begun in 1704, was the first of the journals, + if we omit the single issue of <i>Publick Occurrences</i> in the same town + in 1690. By 1765 there were nearly fifty colonial newspapers and several + magazines. Their influence made for union, in Franklin's sense of that + word, and their literary models, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" + id="Page_61">61</a></span> like their paper, type, and even ink, were + found in London. The <i>New England Courant</i>, established in Boston in + 1721 by James Franklin, is full of imitations of the <i>Tatler</i>, <i>Spectator</i>, + and <i>Guardian</i>. What is more, the <i>Courant</i> boasted of its + office collection of books, including Shakespeare, Milton, the <i>Spectator</i>, + and Swift's <i>Tale of a Tub</i>. ¹ This was in 1722. If we remember + that no allusion to Shakespeare has been discovered in the colonial + literature of the seventeenth century, and scarcely an allusion to the + Puritan poet Milton, and that the Harvard College Library in 1723 had + nothing of Addison, Steele, Bolingbroke, Dryden, Pope, and Swift, and had + only recently obtained copies of Milton and Shakespeare, we can appreciate + the value of James Franklin's apprenticeship in London. Perhaps we can + even forgive him for that attack upon the Mathers which threw the conduct + of the <i>Courant</i>, for a brief period, into the hands of his brother + Benjamin, whose turn at a London apprenticeship was soon to come. + </p> + <div class="footer"> + <p class="footer"> + <a id="footer_61-1" name="footer_61-1"></a> ¹ Cook, E. C. <i>Literary + Influences in Colonial Newspapers, 1704-1750</i>. N. Y., 1912. + </p> + </div> + <p> + If we follow this younger brother to Philadelphia and to Bradford's <i>American + Mercury</i> or <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">62</a></span> + to Franklin's own <i>Pennsylvania Gazette</i>, or if we study the <i>Gazettes</i> + of Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, the impression is still the + same. The literary news is still chiefly from London, from two months to a + year late. London books are imported and reprinted. Franklin reprints <i>Pamela</i>, + and his Library Company of Philadelphia has two copies of <i>Paradise Lost</i> + for circulation in 1741, whereas there had been no copy of that work in + the great library of Cotton Mather. American journalism then, as now, owed + its vitality to a secular spirit of curiosity about the actual world. It + followed England as its model, but it was beginning to develop a temper of + its own. + </p> + <p> + Colonial education and colonial science were likewise chiefly indebted to + London, but by 1751 Franklin's papers on electricity began to repay the + loan. A university club in New York in 1745 could have had but fifteen + members at most, for these were all the "academics" in town. Yet Harvard + had then been sending forth her graduates for more than a century. William + and Mary was founded in 1693, Yale in 1701, Princeton in 1746, King's (now + Columbia) in 1754, the University of Pennsylvania in 1755, and Brown in + 1764. These colonial colleges were mainly <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_63" id="Page_63">63</a></span> in the hands of clergymen. They + tended to reproduce a type of scholarship based upon the ancient + languages. The curriculum varied but little in the different colonies, and + this fact helped to produce a feeling of fellowship among all members of + the republic of letters. The men who debated the Stamp Act were, with a + few striking exceptions, men trained in Latin and Greek, familiar with the + great outlines of human history, accustomed to the discipline of academic + disputation. They knew the ideas and the vocabulary of cultivated Europe + and were conscious of no provincial inferiority. In the study of the + physical sciences, likewise, the colonials were but little behind the + mother country. The Royal Society had its distinguished members here. The + Mathers, the Dudleys, John Winthrop of Connecticut, John Bartram, James + Logan, James Godfrey, Cadwallader Colden, and above all, Franklin himself, + were winning the respect of European students, and were teaching Americans + to use their eyes and their minds not merely upon the records of the past + but in searching out the inexhaustible meanings of the present. There is + no more fascinating story than that of the beginnings of American science + in and outside of the colleges, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" + id="Page_64">64</a></span> and this movement, like the influence of + journalism and of the higher education, counted for colonial union. + </p> + <p> + Professor Tyler, our foremost literary student of the period, summarizes + the characteristics of colonial literature in these words: "Before the + year 1765, we find in this country, not one American people, but many + American peoples.… 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">65</a></span> of + independence." Nevertheless John Jay, writing the second number of the <i>Federalist</i> + in 1787, only twelve years later, could say: "Providence has been pleased + to give this one connected country to one united people; a people + descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing + the same religion, attached to the same principles of government." + </p> + <hr /> + <div class="chapterhead"> + <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"></a> <a name="chap04" id="chap04"></a> + <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">66</a></span> + <br /><br /><br /> + <h2> + <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER IV.</a> + </h2> + </div> + <p class="chaptertitle"> + The Revolution + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + <span class="smcap">If</span> we turn, however, to the literature produced + in America between the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 and the adoption + of the Constitution in 1787, we perceive that it is a literature of + discord and passion. Its spirit is not that of "one united people." + Washington could indeed declare in his <i>Farewell Address</i> of 1796, + "With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, + habits, and political principles"; yet no one knew better than Washington + upon what a slender thread this political unity had often hung, and how + impossible it had been to foresee the end from the beginning. + </p> + <p> + It is idle to look in the writings of the Revolutionary period for the + literature of beauty, for a quiet harmonious unfolding of the deeper + secrets of life. It was a time of swift and pitiless change, of action + rather than reflection, of the turning <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_67" id="Page_67">67</a></span> of many separate currents into + one headlong stream. "We must, indeed, all hang together," runs Franklin's + well-known witticism in Independence Hall, "or, most assuredly, we shall + all hang separately." Excellently spoken, Doctor! And that homely, cheery, + daring sentence gives the keynote of much of the Revolutionary writing + that has survived. It may be heard in the state papers of Samuel Adams, + the oratory of Patrick Henry, the pamphlets of Thomas Paine, the satires + of Freneau and Trumbull, and in the subtle, insinuating, thrilling + paragraphs of Thomas Jefferson. + </p> + <p> + We can only glance in passing at the literature of the Lost Cause, the + Loyalist or "Tory" pleadings for allegiance to Britain. It was written by + able and honest men, like Boucher and Odell, Seabury, Leonard and + Galloway. They distrusted what Seabury called "our sovereign Lord the + Mob." They represented, in John Adams's opinion, nearly one-third of the + people of the colonies, and recent students believe that this estimate was + too low. In some colonies the Loyalists were clearly in the majority. In + all they were a menacing element, made up of the conservative, the + prosperous, the well-educated, with a mixture, of course, of mere placemen + and tuft-hunters. They <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">68</a></span> + composed weighty pamphlets, eloquent sermons, and sparkling satire in + praise of the old order of things. When their cause was lost forever, they + wrote gossipy letters from their exile in London or pathetic verses in + their new home in Nova Scotia and Ontario. Their place in our national + life and literature has never been filled, and their talents and virtues + are never likely to receive adequate recognition. They took the wrong fork + of the road. + </p> + <p> + There were gentle spirits, too, in this period, endowed with delicate + literary gifts, but quite unsuited for the clash of controversy—members, + in Crèvecœur's touching words, of the "secret communion among + good men throughout the world." "I am a lover of peace, what must I do?" + asks Crèvecœur in his <i>Letters from an American Farmer</i>. + "I was happy before this unfortunate Revolution. I feel that I am no + longer so, therefore I regret the change. My heart sometimes seems tired + with beating, it wants rest like my eyelids, which feel oppressed with so + many watchings." Crèvecœur, an immigrant from Normandy, was + certainly no weakling, but he felt that the great idyllic American + adventure—which he described so captivatingly in his chapter + entitled <i>What is an American</i>—was <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_69" id="Page_69">69</a></span> ending tragically in civil war. + Another white-souled itinerant of that day was John Woolman of New Jersey, + whose <i>Journal</i>, praised by Charles Lamb and Channing and edited by + Whittier, is finding more readers in the twentieth century than it won in + the nineteenth. "A man unlettered," said Whittier, "but with natural + refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart enters + into his language." Woolman died at fifty-two in far-away York, England, + whither he had gone to attend a meeting of the Society of Friends. + </p> + <p> + The three tall volumes of the Princeton edition of the poems of Philip + Freneau bear the sub-title, "Poet of the American Revolution." But our + Revolution, in truth, never had an adequate poet. The prose-men, such as + Jefferson, rose nearer the height of the great argument than did the men + of rhyme. Here and there the struggle inspired a brisk ballad like Francis + Hopkinson's <i>Battle of the Kegs</i>, a Hudibrastic satire like + Trumbull's <i>McFingal</i>, or a patriotic song like Timothy Dwight's <i>Columbia</i>. + Freneau painted from his own experience the horrors of the British + prison-ship, and celebrated, in cadences learned from Gray and Collins, + the valor of the men who fell at Eutaw <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_70" id="Page_70">70</a></span> Springs. There was patriotic + verse in extraordinary profusion, but its literary value is slight, and it + reveals few moods of the American mind that are not more perfectly + conveyed through oratory, the pamphlet, and the political essay. The + immediate models of this Revolutionary verse were the minor British bards + of the eighteenth century, a century greatly given to verse-writing, but + endowed by Heaven with the "prose-reason" mainly. The reader of Burton E. + Stevenson's collection of <i>Poems of American History</i> can easily + compare the contemporary verse inspired by the events of the Revolution + with the modern verse upon the same historic themes. He will see how + slenderly equipped for song were most of the later eighteenth-century + Americans and how unfavorable to poetry was the tone of that hour. + </p> + <p> + Freneau himself suffered, throughout his long career, from the depressing + indifference of his public to the true spirit of poetry. "An old college + mate of mine," said James Madison—who was by tradition Freneau's + room-mate at Princeton in the class of 1771—"a poet and man of + literary and refined tastes, knowing nothing of the world." When but three + years out of college, the cautious Madison wrote to another friend: <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">71</a></span> "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 <i>National + Gazette</i> in Philadelphia, he becomes involved in the bitter quarrel + between his chief, Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. His attachment to + the cause of the French Revolution makes him publish baseless attacks upon + Washington. By and by he retires to a New Jersey farm, still toying with + journalism, still composing verses. He turns patriotic poet once more in + the War of 1812; but the public has now forgotten him. <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">72</a></span> He lives on + in poverty and seclusion, and in his eightieth year loses his way in a + snowstorm and perishes miserably—this in 1832, the year of the death + of the great Sir Walter Scott, who once had complimented Freneau by + borrowing one of his best lines of poetry. + </p> + <p> + It is in the orations and pamphlets and state papers inspired by the + Revolutionary agitation that we find the most satisfactory expression of + the thought and feeling of that generation. Its typical literature is + civic rather than æsthetic, a sort of writing which has been + incidental to the accomplishing of some political, social, or moral + purpose, and which scarcely regards itself as literature at all. James + Otis's argument against the Writs of Assistance in Massachusetts in 1761, + and Patrick Henry's speech in the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1765, + mark epochs in the emotional life of these communities. They were reported + imperfectly or not at all, but they can no more be ignored in an + assessment of our national experience than editorials, sermons, or + conversations which have expressed the deepest feelings of a day and then + have perished beyond resurrection. + </p> + <p> + Yet if natural orators like Otis and Henry be denied a strictly "literary" + rating because their <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">73</a></span> + surviving words are obviously inadequate to account for the popular effect + of their speeches, it is still possible to measure the efficiency of the + pamphleteer. When John Adams tells us that "James Otis was Isaiah and + Ezekiel united," we must take his word for the impression which Otis's + oratory left upon his mind. But John Adams's own writings fill ten stout + volumes which invite our judgment. The "truculent and sarcastic splendor" + of his hyperboles need not blind us to his real literary excellencies, + such as clearness, candor, vigor of phrase, freshness of idea. A testy, + rugged, "difficult" person was John Adams, but he grew mellower with age, + and his latest letters and journals are full of whimsical charm. + </p> + <p> + John Adams's cousin Samuel was not precisely a charming person. Bigoted, + tireless, secretive, this cunning manipulator of political passions + followed many tortuous paths. His ability for adroit misstatement of an + adversary's position has been equaled but once in our history. But to the + casual reader of his four volumes, Samuel Adams seems ever to be breathing + the liberal air of the town-meeting: everything is as plainly obvious as a + good citizen can make it. He has, too, the large utterance of the European + liberalism of his day. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">74</a></span> + "Resolved," read his Resolutions of the House of Representatives of + Massachusetts in 1765, "that there are certain essential rights of the + British constitution of government which are founded in the law of God and + nature and are the common rights of mankind." In his statement of the + Rights of the Colonists (1772) we are assured that "among the natural + rights of the colonists are these, First, a right to Life; secondly to + Liberty; thirdly to Property.… 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. + </p> + <p> + "Tom" Paine would have been no match for "Sam" Adams in a town-meeting, + but he was an even greater pamphleteer. He had arrived from England in + 1774, at the age of thirty-eight, having hitherto failed in most of his + endeavors for a livelihood. "Rebellious Staymaker; unkempt," says Carlyle; + but General Charles Lee noted that there was "genius in his eyes," and he + bore a letter of introduction from Franklin commending him as an + "ingenious, worthy young man," which obtained for him a position on the <i>Pennsylvania + Magazine</i>. Before he had been a year on American soil, Paine <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">75</a></span> was writing + the most famous pamphlet of our political literature, <i>Common Sense</i>, + which appeared in January, 1776. "A style hitherto unknown on this side of + the Atlantic," wrote Edmund Randolph. Yet this style of familiar talk to + the crowd had been used seventy years earlier by Defoe and Swift, and it + was to be employed again by a gaunt American frontiersman who was born in + 1809, the year of Thomas Paine's death. <i>The Crisis</i>, a series of + thirteen pamphlets, of which the first was issued in December, 1776, + seemed to justify the contemporary opinion that the "American cause owed + as much to the pen of Paine as to the sword of Washington." Paine, who was + now serving in the army, might have heard his own words, "These are the + times that try men's souls," read aloud, by Washington's orders, to the + ragged troops just before they crossed the Delaware to win the victory of + Trenton. The best known productions of Paine's subsequent career, <i>The + Rights of Man</i> and <i>The Age of Reason</i>, were written in Europe, + but they were read throughout America. The reputation of the "rebellious + Staymaker" has suffered from certain grimy habits and from the ridiculous + charge of atheism. He was no more an atheist than Franklin or Jefferson. + In no sense an original <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" + id="Page_76">76</a></span> thinker, he could impart to outworn shreds of + deistic controversy and to shallow generalizations about democracy a + personal fervor which transformed them and made his pages gay and bold and + clear as a trumpet. + </p> + <p> + Clear and bold and gay was Alexander Hamilton likewise; and his literary + services to the Revolution are less likely to be underestimated than + Thomas Paine's. They began with that boyish speech in "the Fields" of New + York City in 1774 and with <i>The Farmer Refuted</i>, a reply to Samuel + Seabury's <i>Westchester Farmer</i>. They were continued in extraordinary + letters, written during Hamilton's military career, upon the defects of + the Articles of Confederation and of the finances of the Confederation. + Hamilton contributed but little to the actual structure of the new + Constitution, but as a debater he fought magnificently and triumphantly + for its adoption by the Convention of the State of New York in 1788. + Together with Jay and Madison he defended the fundamental principles of + the Federal Union in the remarkable series of papers known as the <i>Federalist</i>. + These eighty-five papers, appearing over the signature "Publius" in two + New York newspapers between October, 1787, and April, 1788, owed their + conception <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">77</a></span> + largely to Hamilton, who wrote more than half of them himself. In manner + they are not unlike the substantial Whig literature of England, and in + political theory they have little in common with the Revolutionary + literature which we have been considering. The reasoning is close, the + style vigorous but neither warmed by passion nor colored by the individual + emotions of the author. The <i>Federalist</i> remains a classic example of + the civic quality of our post-Revolutionary American political writing, + broadly social in its outlook, well informed as to the past, confident—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. + </p> + <p> + In fact, our citizen literature cannot be understood aright if one fails + to observe that its effect has often turned, not upon mere verbal skill, + but upon the weight of character behind the words. Thus the grave and + reserved George Washington says of the Constitution of 1787: "Let us raise + a standard to which the wise and the honest can <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_78" id="Page_78">78</a></span> repair; the event is in the hand + of God." The whole personality of the great Virginian is back of that + simple, perfect sentence. It brings us to our feet, like a national + anthem. + </p> + <p> + One American, no doubt our most gifted man of letters of that century, + passed most of the Revolutionary period abroad, in the service of his + country. Benjamin Franklin was fifty-nine in the year of the Stamp Act. + When he returned from France in 1785 he was seventy-nine, but he was still + writing as admirably as ever when he died at eighty-four. We cannot + dismiss this singular, varied, and fascinating American better than by + quoting the letter which George Washington wrote to him in September, + 1789. It has the dignity and formality of the eighteenth century, but it + is warm with tested friendship and it glows with deep human feeling: "If + to be venerated for benevolence, if to be admired for talents, if to be + esteemed for patriotism, if to be beloved for philanthropy, can gratify + the human mind, you must have the pleasing consolation to know that you + have not lived in vain. And I flatter myself that it will not be ranked + among the least grateful occurrences of your life to be assured, that, so + long as I retain my memory, you will be recollected with respect, + veneration, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">79</a></span> + and affection by your sincere friend, George Washington." + </p> + <p> + There remains another Virginian, the symbol of the Revolutionary age, the + author of words more widely known around the globe than any other words + penned by an American. "Thomas Jefferson," writes the latest of his + successors in the Presidency, "was not a man of the people, but he was a + man of such singular insight that he saw that all the roots of generous + power come from the people." On his father's side Jefferson came from + sound yeoman stock, in which Welsh blood ran. His mother was a Virginia + Randolph. Born in Albemarle County, near the "little mountain"—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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">80</a></span> + was born, the principle of entailed property and that of church + establishment. + </p> + <p> + Such was the youth of twenty-two who was thrilled in 1765 by the Stamp + Act. In the ten years of passionate discussion which followed, two things + became clear: first, that there had long existed among the colonists very + radical theoretical notions of political freedom; and second, that there + was everywhere a spirit of practical conservatism. Jefferson illustrates + the union of these two tendencies. + </p> + <p> + He took his seat in the Continental Congress in June, 1775. He was only + thirty-two, but he had already written, in the summer of 1774, <i>A + Summary View of the Rights of British America</i> which had been published + in England by Burke, himself a judge of good writing and sound politics. + Jefferson had also prepared in 1775 the <i>Address of the Virginia House + of Burgesses</i>. For these reasons he was placed at the head of the + Committee for drafting the Declaration of Independence. We need not linger + over the familiar circumstances of its composition. Everybody knows how + Franklin and Adams made a few verbal alterations in the first draft, how + the committee of five then reported it to the Congress, which proceeded to + cut out <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">81</a></span> + about one-fourth of the matter, while Franklin tried to comfort the + writhing author with his cheerful story about the sign of John Thompson + the hatter. Forty-seven years afterwards, in reply to the charge of lack + of originality brought against the Declaration by Timothy Pickering and + John Adams—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. + </p> + <p> + Its method is the simplest. The preamble is <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_82" id="Page_82">82</a></span> philosophical, dealing with + "self-evident" truths. Today the men who dislike or doubt these truths + dismiss the preamble as "theoretical," or, to use another term of + derogation favored by reactionaries, "French." But if the preamble be + French and philosophical, the specific charges against the King are very + English and practical. Here are certain facts, presented no doubt with + consummate rhetorical skill, but facts, undeniably. The Anglo-Saxon in + Jefferson is basal, racial; the turn for academic philosophizing after the + French fashion is personal, acquired; but the range and sweep and enduring + vitality of this matchless state paper lie in its illumination of stubborn + facts by general principles, its decent respect to the opinions of + mankind, its stately and noble utterance of national sentiments and + national reasons to a "candid world." + </p> + <p> + It has long been the fashion, among a certain school of half-hearted + Americans—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 <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_83" id="Page_83">83</a></span> positions, have echoed the + sneer. The essence of the objection to Jefferson's platform lies of course + in his phrase, "all men are created equal," with the subsidiary phrase + about governments "deriving their just powers from the consent of the + governed." Editors and congressmen and even college professors have + proclaimed themselves unable to assent to these phrases of the + Declaration, and unable even to understand them. These objectors belong + partly, I think, in Jefferson's category of "nervous persons"—"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." + </p> + <p> + Nobody would claim today that Thomas Jefferson's statement of the + sentiments and reasons for the independence of the thirteen British + colonies in 1776 was an adequate handbook of political wisdom, fit for all + the exigencies of contemporary American democracy. It is not that. It is + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">84</a></span> simply, + in Lincoln's phrase, one of "the standard maxims of free society" which no + democracy can safely disregard. + </p> + <p> + Jefferson's long life, so varied, so flexible, so responsive to the touch + of popular forces, illustrates the process by which the Virginia mind of + 1743 became the nationalized, unionized mind of 1826. It is needless here + to dwell upon the traits of his personal character: his sweetness of + spirit, his stout-heartedness in disaster, his scorn of money, his love + for the intellectual life. "I have no ambition to govern men," he wrote to + Edward Rutledge. He was far happier talking about Greek and Anglo-Saxon + with Daniel Webster before the fire-place of Monticello than he ever was + in the presidential chair. His correspondence was enormous. His writings + fill twenty volumes. In his theories of education he was fifty years ahead + of his time; in his absolute trust in humanity he was generations ahead of + it. "I am not one of those who fear the people," he declared proudly. It + is because of this touching faith, this invincible and matchless ardor, + that Jefferson is today remembered. He foreshadowed Lincoln. His belief in + the inarticulate common people is rewarded by their obstinate fidelity to + his name as a type and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">85</a></span> + symbol. "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society + but the people themselves," wrote Jefferson, and with the people + themselves is the depository of his fame. + </p> + <hr /> + <div class="chapterhead"> + <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"></a> <a name="chap05" id="chap05"></a> + <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">86</a></span> + <br /><br /><br /> + <h2> + <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER V.</a> + </h2> + </div> + <p class="chaptertitle"> + The Knickerbocker Group + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + <span class="smcap">The</span> Fourth of July orator for 1826 in + Cambridge, Massachusetts, was Edward Everett. Although only thirty-two he + was already a distinguished speaker. In the course of his oration he + apostrophized John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as venerable survivors of + that momentous day, fifty years earlier, which had witnessed our + Declaration of Independence. But even as Everett was speaking, the aged + author of the Declaration breathed his last at Monticello, and in the + afternoon of that same day Adams died also, murmuring, it is said, with + his latest breath, and as if with the whimsical obstinacy of an old man + who hated to be beaten by his ancient rival, "Thomas Jefferson still + lives." But Jefferson was already gone. + </p> + <p> + On the first of August, Everett commemorated the career of the two + Revolutionary leaders, and on the following day a greater than Everett, + Daniel <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">87</a></span> + Webster, pronounced the famous eulogy in Faneuil Hall. Never were the + thoughts and emotions of a whole country more adequately voiced than in + this commemorative oratory. Its pulse was high with national pride over + the accomplishments of half a century. "I ask," Everett declared, "whether + more has not been done to extend the domain of civilization, in fifty + years, since the Declaration of Independence, than would have been done in + five centuries of continued colonial subjection?" Webster asserted in his + peroration: "It cannot be denied, but by those who would dispute against + the sun, that with America, and in America, a new era commences in human + affairs. This era is distinguished by free representative governments, by + entire religious liberty, by improved systems of national intercourse, by + a newly awakened and an unconquerable spirit of free enquiry, and by a + diffusion of knowledge through the community such as has been before + altogether unknown and unheard of." + </p> + <p> + Was this merely the "tall talk" then so characteristic of American oratory + and soon to be satirized in <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>? Or was it prompted + by a deep and true instinct for the significance of the vast changes that + had come over American life <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" + id="Page_88">88</a></span> since 1776? The external changes were familiar + enough to Webster's auditors: the opening of seemingly illimitable + territory through the Louisiana Purchase, the development of roads, + canals, and manufactures; a rapid increase in wealth and population; a + shifting of political power due to the rise of the new West—in a + word, the evidences of irrepressible national energy. But this energy was + inadequately expressed by the national literature. The more cultivated + Americans were quite aware of this deficiency. It was confessed by the + pessimistic Fisher Ames and by the ardent young men who in 1815 founded <i>The + North American Review</i>. British critics in <i>The Edinburgh</i> and <i>The + Quarterly</i>, commenting upon recent works of travel in America, pointed + out the literary poverty of the American soil. Sydney Smith, by no means + the most offensive of these critics, declared in 1820: "During the thirty + or forty years of their independence they have done absolutely nothing for + the sciences, for the arts, for literature.… In the four quarters + of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or + looks at an American picture or statue?" + </p> + <p> + Sydney Smith's question "Who reads an American book?" has outlived all of + his own clever <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">89</a></span> + volumes. Even while he was asking it, London was eagerly reading Irving's + <i>Sketch Book</i>. In 1821 came Fenimore Cooper's <i>Spy</i> and Bryant's + <i>Poems</i>, and by 1826, when Webster was announcing in his rolling + orotund that Adams and Jefferson were no more, the London and Paris + booksellers were covering their stalls with Cooper's <i>The Last of the + Mohicans</i>. Irving, Cooper, and Bryant are thus the pioneers in a new + phase of American literary activity, often called, for convenience in + labeling, the Knickerbocker Group because of the identification of these + men with New York. And close behind these leaders come a younger company, + destined likewise, in the shy boyish words of Hawthorne, one of the + number, "to write books that would be read in England." For by 1826 + Hawthorne and Longfellow were out of college and were trying to learn to + write. Ticknor, Prescott, and Bancroft, somewhat older men, were settling + to their great tasks. Emerson was entering upon his duties as a minister. + Edgar Allan Poe, at that University of Virginia which Jefferson had just + founded, was doubtless revising <i>Tamerlane and Other Poems</i> which he + was to publish in Boston in the following year. Holmes was a Harvard + undergraduate. Garrison had just printed <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_90" id="Page_90">90</a></span> Whittier's first published poem + in the Newburyport <i>Free Press</i>. Walt Whitman was a barefooted boy on + Long Island, and Lowell, likewise seven years of age, was watching the + birds in the tree-tops of Elmwood. But it was Washington Irving who showed + all of these men that nineteenth century England would be interested in + American books. + </p> + <p> + The very word Knickerbocker is one evidence of the vitality of Irving's + happy imaginings. In 1809 he had invented a mythical Dutch historian of + New York named Diedrich Knickerbocker and fathered upon him a witty parody + of Dr. Mitchill's grave <i>Picture of New York</i>. To read Irving's + chapters today is to witness one of the rarest and most agreeable of + phenomena, namely, the actual beginning of a legend which the world is + unwilling to let die. The book made Sir Walter Scott's sides ache with + laughter, and reminded him of the humor of Swift and Sterne. But certain + New Yorkers were slow to see the joke. + </p> + <p> + Irving was himself a New Yorker, born just at the close of the Revolution, + of a Scotch father and English mother. His youth was pleasantly idle, with + a little random education, much theater-going, and plentiful rambles with + a gun along the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">91</a></span> + Hudson River. In 1804 he went abroad for his health, returned and helped + to write the light social satire of the <i>Salmagundi Papers</i>, and + became, after the publication of the <i>Knickerbocker History</i>, a local + celebrity. Sailing for England in 1815 on business, he stayed until 1832 + as a roving man of letters in England and Spain and then as Secretary of + the American Legation in London. <i>The Sketch Book</i>, <i>Bracebridge + Hall</i>, and <i>Tales of a Traveler</i> are the best known productions of + Irving's fruitful residence in England. The <i>Life of Columbus</i>, the + <i>Conquest of Granada</i>, and <i>The Alhambra</i> represent his first + sojourn in Spain. After his return to America he became fascinated with + the Great West, made the travels described in his <i>Tour of the Prairies</i>, + and told the story of roving trappers and the fur trade in <i>Captain + Bonneville</i> and <i>Astoria</i>. For four years he returned to Spain as + American Minister. In his last tranquil years at Sunnyside on the Hudson, + where he died in 1859, he wrote graceful lives of Goldsmith and of + Washington. + </p> + <p> + Such a glance at the shelf containing Irving's books suggests but little + of that personal quality to which he owes his significance as an + interpreter of America to the Old World. This son of a narrow, hard, + Scotch dealer in cutlery, this drifter <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_92" id="Page_92">92</a></span> about town when New York was + only a big slovenly village, this light-hearted scribbler of satire and + sentiment, was a gentleman born. His boyhood and youth were passed in that + period of Post-Revolutionary reaction which exhibits the United States in + some of its most unlovely aspects. Historians like Henry Adams and + McMaster have painted in detail the low estate of education, religion, and + art as the new century began. The bitter feeling of the nascent nation + toward Great Britain was intensified by the War of 1812. The Napoleonic + Wars had threatened to break the last threads of our friendship for + France, and suspicion of the Holy Alliance led to an era of national + self-assertion of which the Monroe Doctrine was only one expression. The + raw Jacksonism of the West seemed to be gaining upon the older + civilizations represented by Virginia and Massachusetts. The self-made + type of man began to pose as the genuine American. And at this moment came + forward a man of natural lucidity and serenity of mind, of perfect poise + and good temper, who knew both Europe and America and felt that they ought + to know one another better and to like one another more. That was Irving's + service as an international mediator. He diffused sweetness and <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">93</a></span> light in an + era marked by bitterness and obscuration. It was a triumph of character as + well as of literary skill. + </p> + <p> + But the skill was very noticeable also. Irving's prose is not that of the + Defoe-Swift-Franklin-Paine type of plain talk to the crowd. It is rather + an inheritance from that other eighteenth century tradition, the + conversation of the select circle. Its accents were heard in Steele and + Addison and were continued in Goldsmith, Sterne, Cowper, and Charles Lamb. + Among Irving's successors, George William Curtis and Charles Dudley Warner + and William Dean Howells have been masters of it likewise. It is mellow + human talk, delicate, regardful, capable of exquisite modulation. With + instinctive artistic taste, Irving used this old and sound style upon + fresh American material. In <i>Rip van Winkle</i> and <i>The Legend of + Sleepy Hollow</i> he portrayed his native valley of the Hudson, and for a + hundred years connoisseurs of style have perceived the exquisite fitness + of the language to the images and ideas which Irving desired to convey. To + render the Far West of that epoch this style is perhaps not "big" and + broad enough, but when used as Irving uses it in describing Stratford and + Westminster Abbey and an Old English <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_94" id="Page_94">94</a></span> Christmas, it becomes again a + perfect medium. Hawthorne adopted it for <i>Our Old Home</i>, and + Englishmen recognized it at once as a part of their own inheritance, + enriched, like certain wines, by the voyage across the Atlantic and home + again. Irving wrote of England, Mr. Warner once said, as Englishmen would + have liked to write about it. When he described the Alhambra and Granada + and the Moors, it was the style, rich both in physical sensation and in + dreamlike reverie, which revealed to the world the quick American + appreciation of foreign scenes and characters. Its key is sympathy. + </p> + <p> + Irving's popularity has endured in England. It suffered during the middle + of the century in his own country, for the strongest New England authors + taught the public to demand more thought and passion than were in Irving's + nature. Possibly the nervous, journalistic style of the twentieth century + allows too scanty leisure of mind for the full enjoyment of the + Knickerbocker flavor. Yet such changes as these in literary fashion + scarcely affect the permanent service of Irving to our literature. He + immortalized a local type—the New York Dutchman—and local + legends, like that of Rip van Winkle; he used the framework of the <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">95</a></span> narrative + essay to create something almost like the perfected short story of Poe and + Hawthorne; he wrote prose with unfailing charm in an age when charm was + lacking; and, if he had no message, it should be remembered that some of + the most useful ambassadors have had none save to reveal, with delicacy + and tact and humorous kindness, the truth that foreign persons have + feelings precisely like our own. + </p> + <p> + Readers of Sir Walter Scott's <i>Journal</i> may remember his account of + an evening party in Paris in 1826 where he met Fenimore Cooper, then in + the height of his European reputation. "So the Scotch and American lions + took the field together," wrote Sir Walter, who loved to be generous. <i>The + Last of the Mohicans</i>, then just published, threatened to eclipse the + fame of <i>Ivanhoe</i>. Cooper, born in 1789, was eighteen years younger + than the Wizard of the North, and was more deeply indebted to him than he + knew. For it was Scott who had created the immense nineteenth century + audience for prose fiction, and who had evolved a kind of formula for the + novel, ready for Cooper's use. Both men were natural story-tellers. Scott + had the richer mind and the more fully developed historical imagination. + Both were out-of-doors <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">96</a></span> + men, lovers of manly adventure and of natural beauty. But the American had + the good fortune to be able to utilize in his books his personal + experiences of forest and sea and to reveal to Europe the real romance of + the American wilderness. + </p> + <p> + That Cooper was the first to perceive the artistic possibilities of this + romance, no one would claim. Brockden Brown, a Quaker youth of + Philadelphia, a disciple of the English Godwin, had tried his hand at the + very end of the eighteenth century upon American variations of the Gothic + romance then popular in England. Brown had a keen eye for the values of + the American landscape and even of the American Indian. He had a knack for + passages of ghastly power, as his descriptions of maniacs, murderers, + sleep-walkers, and solitaries abundantly prove. But he had read too much + and lived too little to rival the masters of the art of fiction. And there + was a traveled Frenchman, Chateaubriand, surely an expert in the art of + eloquent prose, who had transferred to the pages of his American Indian + stories, <i>Atala</i> and <i>René</i>, the mystery and enchantment + of our dark forests and endless rivers. But Chateaubriand, like Brockden + Brown, is feverish. A taint <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" + id="Page_97">97</a></span> of old-world eroticism and despair hovers like + a miasma over his magnificent panorama of the wilderness. Cooper, like + Scott, is masculine. + </p> + <p> + He was a Knickerbocker only by adoption. Born in New Jersey, his childhood + was spent in the then remote settlement of Cooperstown in Central New + York. He had a little schooling at Albany, and a brief and inglorious + career at Yale with the class of 1806. He went to sea for two years, and + then served for three years in the United States Navy upon Lakes Ontario + and Champlain, the very scene of some of his best stories. In 1811 he + married, resigned from the Navy, and settled upon a little estate in + Westchester County, near New York. Until the age of thirty, he was not in + the least a bookman, but a healthy man of action. Then, as the well-known + anecdote goes, he exclaims to his wife, after reading a stupid English + novel, "I believe I could write a better story myself." <i>Precaution</i> + (1820) was the result, but whether it was better than the unknown English + book, no one can now say. It was bad enough. Yet the next year Cooper + published <i>The Spy</i>, one of the finest of his novels, which was + instantly welcomed in England and translated in France. Then came, in + swift succession, <i>The Pioneers</i>, the first Leather-Stocking <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">98</a></span> tale in order + of composition, and <i>The Pilot</i>, to show that Scott's <i>Pirate</i> + was written by a landsman! <i>Lionel Lincoln</i> and <i>The Last of the + Mohicans</i> followed. The next seven years were spent in Europe, mainly + in France, where <i>The Prairie</i> and <i>The Red Rover</i> were written. + Cooper now looked back upon his countrymen with eyes of critical + detachment, and made ready to tell them some of their faults. He came home + to Cooperstown in 1833, the year after Irving's return to America. He had + won, deservedly, a great fame, which he proceeded to imperil by his + combativeness with his neighbors and his harsh strictures upon the + national character, due mainly to his lofty conception of the ideal + America. He continued to spin yarns of sea and shore, and to write naval + history. The tide of fashion set against him in the eighteen-forties when + Bulwer and Dickens rode into favor, but the stout-hearted old pioneer + could afford to bide his time. He died in 1851, just as Mrs. Stowe was + writing <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin.</i> + </p> + <p> + Two generations have passed since then, and Cooper's place in our + literature remains secure. To have written our first historical novel, <i>The + Spy</i>, our first sea-story, <i>The Pilot,</i> and to have created <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">99</a></span> the + Leather-Stocking series, is glory enough. In his perception of masculine + character, Cooper ranks with Fielding. His sailors, his scouts and spies, + his good and bad Indians, are as veritable human figures as Squire + Western. Long Tom Coffin, Harvey Birch, Hawk-Eye, and Chingachgook are + physically and morally true to life itself. Read the Leather-Stocking + books in the order of the events described, beginning with <i>The + Deerslayer</i>, then <i>The Last of the Mohicans</i>, <i>The Pathfinder</i>, + <i>The Pioneers</i>, and ending with the vast darkening horizon of <i>The + Prairie</i> and the death of the trapper, and one will feel how natural + and inevitable are the fates of the personages and the alterations in the + life of the frontier. These books vary in their poetic quality and in the + degree of their realism, but to watch the evolution of the leading figure + is to see human life in its actual texture. + </p> + <p> + Clever persons and pedantic persons have united to find fault with certain + elements of Cooper's art. Mark Twain, in one of his least inspired + moments, selected Cooper's novels for attack. Every grammar school teacher + is ready to point out that his style is often prolix and his sentences are + sometimes ungrammatical. Amateurs even criticize Cooper's seamanship, + although it seemed <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">100</a></span> + impeccable to Admiral Mahan. No doubt one must admit the "helplessness, + propriety, and incapacity" of most of Cooper's women, and the dreadfulness + of his bores, particularly the Scotchmen, the doctors, and the + naturalists. Like Sir Walter, Cooper seems to have taken but little pains + in the deliberate planning of his plots. Frequently he accepts a + ready-made formula of villain and hero, predicament and escape, renewed + crisis and rescue, mystification and explanation, worthy of a third-rate + novelist. His salvation lies in his genius for action, the beauty and + grandeur of his landscapes, the primitive veracity of his children of + nature. + </p> + <p> + Cooper was an elemental man, and he comprehended, by means of something + deeper than mere artistic instinct, the feelings of elemental humanity in + the presence of the wide ocean or of the deep woods. He is as healthy and + sane as Fielding, and he possesses an additional quality which all of the + purely English novelists lack. It was the result of his youthful sojourn + in the wilderness. Let us call it the survival in him of an aboriginal + imagination. Cooper reminds one somehow of a moose—an ungraceful + creature perhaps, but indubitably big, as many a hunter has suddenly <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">101</a></span> realized + when he has come unexpectedly upon a moose that whirled to face him in the + twilight silence of a northern wood. + </p> + <p> + Something of this far-off and gigantic primitivism inheres also in the + poetry of William Cullen Bryant. His portrait, with the sweeping white + beard and the dark folds of the cloak, suggests the Bard as the Druids + might have known him. But in the eighteen-thirties and forties, Mr. + Bryant's alert, clean-shaven face, and energetic gait as he strode down + Broadway to the <i>Evening Post</i> office, suggested little more than a + vigorous and somewhat radical editor of an increasingly prosperous + Democratic newspaper. There was nothing of the Fringed Gentian or Yellow + Violet about him. Like so many of the Knickerbockers, Bryant was an + immigrant to New York; in fact, none of her adopted men of letters have + represented so perfectly the inherited traits of the New England Puritan. + To understand his long and honorable public life it is necessary to know + something of the city of his choice, but to enter into the spirit of his + poetry one must go back to the hills of western Massachusetts. + </p> + <p> + Bryant had a right to his cold-weather mind. He came from Mayflower stock. + His father, Dr. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">102</a></span> + Peter Bryant of Cummington, was a sound country physician, with liberal + preferences in theology, Federalist views in politics, and a library of + seven hundred volumes, rich in poetry. The poet's mother records his birth + in her diary in terse words which have the true Spartan tang: "Nov. 3, + 1794. Stormy, wind N. 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, <i>The + Embargo</i>, which his proud Federalist father printed at Boston in 1808. + The youth had nearly one year at Williams College, over the mountain + ranges to the west. He wished to continue his education at Yale, but his + father had no money for this greater venture, and the son remained at + home. There, in the autumn of 1811, on the bleak hills, <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">103</a></span> he + composed the first draft of <i>Thanatopsis</i>. He was seventeen, and he + had been reading Blair's <i>Grave</i> and the poems of the consumptive + Henry Kirke White. He hid his verses in a drawer, and five years later his + father found them, shed tears over them, and sent them to the <i>North + American Review</i>, where they were published in September, 1817. + </p> + <p> + In the meantime the young man had studied law, though with dislike of it, + and with the confession that he sometimes read <i>The Lyrical Ballads</i> + when he might have been reading Blackstone. One December afternoon in + 1815, he was walking from Cummington to Plainfield—aged twenty-one, + and looking for a place in which to settle as a lawyer. Across the vivid + sunset flew a black duck, as solitary and homeless as himself. The bird + seemed an image of his own soul, "lone wandering but not lost." Before he + slept that night he had composed the poem <i>To a Waterfowl</i>. No more + authentic inspiration ever visited a poet, and though Bryant wrote verse + for more than sixty years after that crimson sky had paled into chill + December twilight, his lines never again vibrated with such communicative + passion. + </p> + <p> + Bryant's ensuing career revealed the steady purpose, <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_104" id="Page_104">104</a></span> the stoicism, the reticence + of the Puritan. It was highly successful, judged even by material + standards. <i>Thanatopsis</i> had been instantly regarded in 1817 as the + finest poem yet produced in America. The author was invited to contribute + to the <i>North American Review</i> an essay on American poetry, and this, + like all of Bryant's prose work, was admirably written. He delivered his + Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem, <i>The Ages</i>, in 1821, the year of + Emerson's graduation. After a brief practice of the law in Great + Barrington, he entered in 1826 into the unpromising field of journalism in + New York. While other young Knickerbockers wasted their literary strength + on trifles and dissipated their moral energies, Bryant held steadily to + his daily task. His life in town was sternly ascetic, but he allowed + himself long walks in the country, and he continued to meditate a somewhat + thankless Muse. In 1832 he visited his brothers on the Illinois prairies, + and stopped one day to chat with a "tall awkward uncouth lad" of racy + conversational powers, who was leading his company of volunteers into the + Black Hawk War. The two men were destined to meet again in 1860, when + Bryant presided at that Cooper Union address of Lincoln's which revealed + to New York and to the country that <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_105" id="Page_105">105</a></span> the former captain of + volunteers was now a king of men. Lincoln was embarrassed on that + occasion, it is said, by Bryant's fastidious, dignified presence. Not so + Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had seen the poet in Rome, two years before. + "There was a weary look in his face," wrote Hawthorne, "as if he were + tired of seeing things and doing things.… He uttered neither + passion nor poetry, but excellent good sense, and accurate information, on + whatever subject transpired; a very pleasant man to associate with, but + rather cold, I should imagine, if one should seek to touch his heart with + one's own." Such was the impression Bryant made upon less gifted men than + Hawthorne, as he lived out his long and useful life in the Knickerbocker + city. Toward the close of it he was in great demand for public occasions; + and it was after delivering a speech dedicating a statue to Mazzini in + Central Park in 1878, when Bryant was eighty-four, that a fit of dizziness + caused a fall which proved fatal to the venerable poet. It was just + seventy years since Dr. Peter Bryant had published his boy's verses on <i>The + Embargo</i>. + </p> + <p> + Although Bryant's poetry has never roused any vociferous excitement, it + has enduring qualities. The spiritual preoccupations of many a voiceless + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">106</a></span> + generation of New England Puritans found a tongue at last in this + late-born son of theirs. The determining mood of his best poems, from + boyhood to old age, was precisely that thought of transiency, "the eternal + flow of things," which colored the imaginations of the first colonists. + This is the central motive of <i>Thanatopsis</i>, <i>To a Waterfowl</i>, + <i>The Rivulet</i>, <i>A Forest Hymn</i>, <i>An Evening Revery</i>, <i>The + Crowded Street</i>, <i>The Flood of Years</i>. All of these tell the same + story of endless change and of endless abiding, of varying eddies in the + same mighty stream of human existence. Bryant faced the thought as calmly, + as majestically, at seventeen as when he wrote <i>The Flood of Years</i> + at eighty-two. He is a master of description, though he has slight gift + for narrative or drama, and he rarely sounds the clear lyric note. But + everywhere in his verse there is that cold purity of the winter hills in + Western Massachusetts, something austere and elemental which reaches + kindred spirits below the surface on which intellect and passion have + their play, something more primitive, indeed, than human intellect or + passion and belonging to another mode of being, something "rock-ribbed and + ancient as the sun." + </p> + <p> + A picture of the Knickerbocker era is not complete <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_107" id="Page_107">107</a></span> without its portraits of the + minor figures in the literary life of New York up to the time of the Civil + War. But the scope of the present volume does not permit sketches of + Paulding and Verplanck, of Halleck and his friend Drake, of N. P. + Willis and Morris and Woodworth. Some of these are today only + "single-poem" men, like Payne, the author of <i>Home Sweet Home</i>, just + as Key, the author of <i>The Star-Spangled Banner</i>, is today a + "single-poem" man of an earlier generation. Their names will be found in + such limbos of the dead as Griswold's <i>Poets and Poetry of America</i> + and Poe's <i>Literati</i>. They knew "the town" in their day, and pleased + its very easily pleased taste. The short-lived literary magazines of the + eighteen-forties gave them their hour of glory. As representatives of + passing phases of the literary history of New York their careers are not + without sentimental interest, but few of them spoke to or for the country + as a whole. Two figures, indeed, stand out in sharp contrast with those + habitual strollers on Broadway and frequenters of literary gatherings, + though each of them was for a while a part of Knickerbocker New York. To + all appearances they were only two more Bohemians like the rest, but the + curiosity of the twentieth <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" + id="Page_108">108</a></span> century sets them apart from their forgotten + contemporaries. They are two of the unluckiest—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. + </p> + <p> + But before turning to that chapter, we must look back to New England once + more and observe the blossoming-time of its ancient commonwealths. During + the thirty years preceding the Civil War New England awoke to a new life + of the spirit. So varied and rich was her literary productiveness in this + era that it still remains her greatest period, and so completely did New + England writers of this epoch voice the ideals of the nation that the + great majority of Americans, even today, regard these New Englanders as + the truest literary exponents of the mind and soul of the United States. + We must take a look at them. + </p> + <hr /> + <div class="chapterhead"> + <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"></a> <a name="chap06" id="chap06"></a> + <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">109</a></span> + <br /><br /><br /> + <h2> + <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER VI.</a> + </h2> + </div> + <p class="chaptertitle"> + The Transcendentalists + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + <span class="smcap">To</span> understand the literary leadership of New + England during the thirty years immediately preceding the Civil War it is + necessary to recall the characteristics of a somewhat isolated and + peculiar people. The mental and moral traits of the New England colonists, + already glanced at in an earlier chapter, had suffered little essential + modification in two hundred years. The original racial stock was still + dominant. As compared with the middle and southern colonies, there was + relatively little immigration, and this was easily assimilated. The + physical remoteness of New England from other sections of the country, and + the stubborn loyalty with which its inhabitants maintained their own + standards of life, alike contributed to their sense of separateness. It is + true, of course, that their mode of thinking and feeling had undergone + certain changes. They were among the <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_110" id="Page_110">110</a></span> earliest theorists of + political independence from Great Britain, and had done their share, and + more, in the Revolution. The rigors of their early creed had somewhat + relaxed, as we have seen, by the end of the seventeenth century, and + throughout the eighteenth there was a gradual progress toward religious + liberalism. The population steadily increased, and New England's + unremitting struggle with a not too friendly soil, her hardihood upon the + seas, and her keenness in trade, became proverbial throughout the country. + Her seaport towns were wealthy. The general standards of living remained + frugal, but extreme poverty was rare. Her people still made, as in the + earliest days of the colonies, silent and unquestioned sacrifices for + education, and her chief seats of learning, Harvard and Yale, remained the + foremost educational centers of America. But there was still scant leisure + for the quest of beauty, and slender material reward for any practitioner + of the fine arts. Oratory alone, among the arts of expression, commanded + popular interest and applause. Daniel Webster's audiences at Plymouth in + 1820 and at Bunker Hill in 1825 were not inferior to similar audiences of + today in intelligence and in responsiveness. Perhaps they were superior. + Appreciation <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">111</a></span> + of the spoken word was natural to men trained by generations of thoughtful + listening to "painful" preaching and by participation in the discussions + of town-meeting. Yet appreciation of secular literature was rare, and + interest in the other arts was almost non-existent. + </p> + <p> + Then, beginning in the eighteen-twenties, and developing rapidly after + 1830, came a change, a change so startling as to warrant the term of "the + Renascence of New England." No single cause is sufficient to account for + this "new birth." It is a good illustration of that law of "tension and + release," which the late Professor Shaler liked to demonstrate in all + organic life. A long period of strain was followed by an age of expansion, + freedom, release of energy. As far as the mental life of New England was + concerned, something of the new stimulus was due directly to the influence + of Europe. Just as the wandering scholars from Italy had brought the New + Learning, which was a revival of the old learning, into England in the + sixteenth century, so now young New England college men like Edward + Everett and George Ticknor brought home from the Continent the riches of + German and French scholarship. Emerson's description of the impression + made by Everett's <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">112</a></span> + lectures in 1820, after his return from Germany, gives a vivid picture of + the new thirst for foreign culture. <i>The North American Review</i> and + other periodicals, while persistently urging the need of a distinctively + national literature, insisted also upon the value of a deeper knowledge of + the literature of the Continent. This was the burden of Channing's once + famous article on <i>A National Literature</i> in 1823: it was a plea for + an independent American school of writers, but these writers should know + the best that Europe had to teach. + </p> + <p> + The purely literary movement was connected, as the great name of Channing + suggests, with a new sense of freedom in philosophy and religion. + Calvinism had mainly done its work in New England. It had bred an + extraordinary type of men and women, it had helped to lay some of the + permanent foundations of our democracy, and it was still destined to have + a long life in the new West and in the South. But in that stern section of + the country where its influence had been most marked there was now an + increasingly sharp reaction against its determinism and its pessimism. + Early in the nineteenth century the most ancient and influential churches + in Boston and the leading professors at Harvard had accepted the new form + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">113</a></span> of + religious liberalism known as Unitarianism. The movement spread throughout + Eastern Massachusetts and made its way to other States. Orthodox and + liberal Congregational churches split apart, and when Channing preached + the ordination sermon for Jared Sparks in Baltimore in 1819, the word + Unitarian, accepted by the liberals with some misgiving, became the + recognized motto of the new creed. It is only with its literary influence + that we are here concerned, yet that literary influence became so potent + that there is scarcely a New England writer of the first rank, from Bryant + onward, who remained untouched by it. + </p> + <p> + The most interesting and peculiar phase of the new liberalism has little + directly to do with the specific tenets of theological Unitarianism, and + in fact marked a revolt against the more prosaic and conventional pattern + of English and American Unitarian thought. But this movement, known as + Transcendentalism, would have been impossible without a preliminary and + liberalizing stirring of the soil. It was a fascinating moment of release + for some of the most brilliant and radical minds of New England. Its + foremost representative in our literature was Ralph Waldo Emerson, as its + chief <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">114</a></span> + exponents in England were Coleridge and Carlyle. We must understand its + meaning if we would perceive the quality of much of the most noble and + beautiful writing produced in New England during the Golden Age. + </p> + <p> + What then is the significance of the word Transcendental? Disregarding for + the moment the technical development of this term as used by German and + English philosophers, it meant for Emerson and his friends simply this: + whatever transcends or goes beyond the experience of the senses. It + stressed intuition rather than sensation, direct perception of ultimate + truth rather than the processes of logic. It believed in man's ability to + apprehend the absolute ideas of Truth, Rectitude, Goodness. It resembled + the Inner Light of the Quaker, though the Quaker traced this to a + supernatural illumination of the Holy Spirit, while the Transcendentalist + believed that a vision of the eternal realities was a natural endowment of + the human mind. It had only to be trusted. Stated in this form, it is + evident that we have here a very ancient doctrine, well known in the + literature of India and of Greece. It has been held by countless persons + who have never heard of the word Transcendentalism. We need <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">115</a></span> go no + further back than Alexander Pope, a Roman Catholic, whom we find + declaring: "I am so certain of the soul's being immortal that I seem to + feel it within me, as it were by intuition." Pope's friend Swift, a dean + of the Church of England and assuredly no Transcendentalist, defined + vision as seeing the things that are invisible. + </p> + <p> + Now turn to some of the New England men. Dr. C. A. Bartol, a disciple + of Emerson, maintained that "the mistake is to make the everlasting things + subjects of argument instead of sight." Theodore Parker declared to his + congregation: + </p> + <blockquote> + <p class="noindent"> + From the primitive facts of consciousness given by the power of + instinctive intuition, I endeavored to deduce the true notion of God, of + justice and futurity.… I found most help in the works of Immanuel + Kant, one of the profoundest thinkers of the world, though one of the + worst writers, even in Germany; if he did not always furnish conclusions + I could rest in, he yet gave me the true method, and put me on the right + road. I found certain great primal Intuitions of Human Nature, which + depend on no logical process of demonstration, but are rather facts of + consciousness given by the instinctive action of human nature itself. I + will mention only the three most important which pertain to Religion. 1. + The Instinctive Intuition of the Divine, the consciousness that there is + a God. 2. The Instinctive Intuition of the Just and Right, a + consciousness that there is a Moral Law, independent <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">116</a></span> of our + will, which we ought to keep. 3. The Instinctive Intuition of the + Immortal, a consciousness that the Essential Element of man, the + principle of Individuality, never dies. + </p> + </blockquote> + <p class="noindent"> + This passage dates from 1859, and readers of Bergson may like to compare + it with the contemporary Frenchman's saying: "The analytical faculties can + give us no realities." + </p> + <p> + Let us next hear Emerson himself, first in an early letter to his brother + Edward: "Do you draw the distinction of Milton, Coleridge, and the Germans + between Reason and Understanding? I think it a philosophy itself, and, + like all truth, very practical. Reason is the highest faculty of the soul, + what we mean often by the soul itself: it never reasons, never proves, it + simply perceives, it is vision. The understanding toils all the time, + compares, contrives, adds, argues; near-sighted, but strong-sighted, + dwelling in the present, the expedient, the customary." And in 1833, after + he had left the Unitarian pulpit, Emerson made in his diary this curious + attempt to reconcile the scriptural language of his ancestral profession + to the new vocabulary of Transcendentalism: "Jesus Christ was a minister + of the pure Reason. The beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount are all + utterances of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">117</a></span> + mind contemning the phenomenal world.… 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.'" + </p> + <p> + One more quotation must suffice. It is from a poem by a forgotten + Transcendentalist, F. G. Tuckerman. + </p> + <div class="poem1"> + <p class="poem1"> + No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead; + </p> + <p class="poem1"> + But, leaving straining thought and stammering word, + </p> + <p class="poem1"> + Across the barren azure pass to God; + </p> + <p class="poem1"> + Shooting the void in silence, like a bird— + </p> + <p class="poem1"> + A bird that shuts his wings for better speed! + </p> + </div> + <p> + It is obvious that this "contemning the phenomenal world," this "revulsion + against the intellect as the sole source of truth," is highly dangerous to + second-class minds. If one habitually prints the words Insight, Instinct, + Intuition, Consciousness with capitals, and relegates equally useful words + like senses, experience, fact, logic to lower-case type, one may do it + because he is <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">118</a></span> + a Carlyle or an Emerson, but the chances are that he is neither. + Transcendentalism, like all idealistic movements, had its "lunatic + fringe," its camp-followers of excitable, unstable visionaries. The very + name, like the name Methodist, was probably bestowed upon it in mockery, + and this whole perturbation of staid New England had its humorous side. + Witness the career of Bronson Alcott. It is also true that the glorious + affirmations of these seers can be neither proved nor disproved. They made + no examination and they sought no validation of consciousness. An explorer + in search of the North Pole must bring back proofs of his journey, but + when a Transcendentalist affirms that he has reached the far heights of + human experience and even caught sight of the gods sitting on their + thrones, you and I are obliged to take his word for it. Sometimes we hear + such a man gladly, but it depends upon the man, not upon the + trustworthiness of the method. Finally it should be observed that the + Transcendental movement was an exceedingly complex one, being both + literary, philosophic, and religious; related also to the subtle thought + of the Orient, to mediæval mysticism, and to the English Platonists; + touched throughout by the French Revolutionary <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_119" id="Page_119">119</a></span> theories, by the Romantic + spirit, by the new zeal for science and pseudo-science, and by the unrest + of a fermenting age. + </p> + <p> + Our present concern is with the impact of this cosmopolitan current upon + the mind and character of a few New England writers. Channing and Theodore + Parker, Margaret Fuller and Alcott, Thoreau and Emerson, are all + representative of the best thought and the noblest ethical impulses of + their generation. Let us choose first the greatest name: a sunward-gazing + spirit, and, it may be, one of the very Sun-Gods. + </p> + <p> + The pilgrim to Concord who stops for a moment in the village library to + study French's statue of Emerson will notice the asymmetrical face. On one + side it is the face of a keen Yankee farmer, but seen from the other side + it is the countenance of a seer, a world's man. This contrast between the + parochial Emerson and the greater Emerson interprets many a puzzle in his + career. Half a mile beyond the village green to the north, close to the + "rude bridge" of the famous Concord fight in 1775, is the Old Manse, once + tenanted and described by Hawthorne. It was built by Emerson's + grandfather, a patriot chaplain in the Revolution, who died of camp-fever + at Ticonderoga. His <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">120</a></span> + widow married Dr. Ezra Ripley, and here Ralph Waldo Emerson and his + brothers passed many a summer in their childhood. Half a mile east of the + village, on the Cambridge turnpike, is Emerson's own house, still + sheltered by the pines which Thoreau helped him to plant in 1838. Within + the house everything is unchanged: here are the worn books, pen and + inkstand, the favorite pictures upon the wall. Over the ridge to the north + lies the Sleepy Hollow cemetery where the poet rests, with the gravestones + of Hawthorne and the Alcotts, Thoreau and William James close by. + </p> + <p> + But although Concord is the Emerson shrine, he was born in Boston, in + 1803. His father, named William like the grandfather, was also, like the + Emerson ancestors for many generations, a clergyman—eloquent, + liberal, fond of books and music, highly honored by his <i>alma mater</i> + Harvard and by the town of Boston, where he ministered to the First + Church. His premature death in 1811 left his widow with five sons—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 <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_121" id="Page_121">121</a></span> "born to be educated." And + educated the "eager blushing boys" were, at the Boston Latin School and at + Harvard College, on a regimen of "toil and want and truth and mutual + faith." There are many worse systems of pedagogy than this. Ralph was + thought less persistent than his steady older brother William, and far + less brilliant than his gifted, short-lived younger brothers, Edward and + Charles. He had an undistinguished career at Harvard, where he was + graduated in 1821, ranking thirtieth in a class of fifty-nine. Lovers of + irony like to remember that he was the seventh choice of his classmates + for the position of class poet. After some desultory teaching to help his + brothers, he passed irregularly through the Divinity School, his studies + often interrupted by serious ill-health. "If they had examined me," he + said afterward of the kindly professors in the Divinity School, "they + never would have passed me." But approve him they did, in 1826, and he + entered decorously upon the profession of his ancestors, as associate + minister of the Second Church in Boston. His <i>Journals</i>, which are a + priceless record of his inner life, at this and later periods, reveal the + rigid self-scrutiny, the tender idealism, with which he began his + ministerial career. + </p> + <p> + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">122</a></span> But + as a scheme of life for Ralph Waldo Emerson this vocation would not + satisfy. The sexton of the Second Church thought that the young man was + not at his best at funerals. Father Taylor, the eccentric Methodist, whom + Emerson assisted at a sailor's Bethel near Long Wharf, considered him "one + of the sweetest souls God ever made," but as ignorant of the principles of + the New Testament as Balaam's ass was of Hebrew grammar. By and by came an + open difference with his congregation over the question of administering + the Communion. "I am not interested in it," Emerson admitted, and he wrote + in his <i>Journal</i> the noble words: "It is my desire, in the office of + a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole + heart." His resignation was accepted in 1832. His young wife had died of + consumption in the same year. He now sailed for Italy, France, and + England, a memorable journey which gave him an acquaintance with Landor, + Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle, but which was even more significant in + sending him, as he says, back to himself, to the resources of his own + nature. "When shows break up," wrote Whitman afterward, "what but oneself + is sure?" In 1834 and 1835 we find Emerson occupying a room <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">123</a></span> in the Old + Manse at Concord, strolling in the quiet fields, lecturing or preaching if + he were invited to do so, but chiefly absorbed in a little book which he + was beginning to write—a new utterance of a new man. + </p> + <p> + This book, the now famous <i>Nature</i> of 1836, contains the essence of + Emerson's message to his generation. It is a prose essay, but written in + the ecstatic mood of a poet. The theme of its meditation is the soul as + related to Nature and to God. The soul is primal; Nature, in all its + bountiful and beautiful commodities, exists for the training of the soul; + it is the soul's shadow. And every soul has immediate access to Deity. + Thus the utility and beauty and discipline of Nature lift the soul + Godward. The typical sentence of the book is this: "The sun shines today + also"; that is to say: the world is still alive and fair; let us lift up + our hearts! Only a few Americans of 1836 bought this singular volume, but + Emerson went serenely forward. He had found his path. + </p> + <p> + In 1837 he delivered the well-known Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard on + <i>The American Scholar</i>. Emerson was now thirty-four; he had married a + second time, had bought a house of his own in Concord, and purposed to + make a living by <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">124</a></span> + lecturing and writing. His address in Cambridge, though it contained no + reference to himself, was after all a justification of the way of life he + had chosen: a declaration of intellectual independence for himself and his + countrymen, an exhortation of self-trust to the individual thinking man. + "If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts and there + abide, the huge world will come round to him." Such advice to cut loose + from the moorings of the past was not unknown in Phi Beta Kappa orations, + though it had never been so brilliantly phrased; but when Emerson applied + precisely the same doctrine, in 1838, to the graduating class at the + Harvard Divinity School, he roused a storm of disapproval. "A tempest in + our washbowl," he wrote coolly to Carlyle, but it was more than that. The + great sentence of the Divinity School address, "God is, not was; he + speaketh, not spake," was the emphasis of a superb rhetorician upon the + immediacy of the soul's access to God. It has been the burden of a + thousand prophets in all religions. The young priests of the Divinity + School, their eyes wearied with Hebrew and Greek, seem to have enjoyed + Emerson's injunction to turn away from past records and historical + authorities and to drink from the living fountain <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_125" id="Page_125">125</a></span> of the divine within + themselves; but to the professors, "the stern old war-gods," this relative + belittlement of historical Christianity seemed blasphemy. A generation + passed before Emerson was again welcomed by his <i>alma mater</i>. + </p> + <p> + The reader who has mastered those three utterances by the Concord + Transcendentalist in 1836, 1837, and 1838 has the key to Emerson. He was a + seer, not a system-maker. The constitution of his mind forbade formal, + consecutive, logical thought. He was not a philosopher in the accepted + sense, though he was always philosophizing, nor a metaphysician in spite + of his curious searchings in the realm of metaphysics. He sauntered in + books as he sauntered by Walden Pond, in quest of what interested him; he + "fished in Montaigne," he said, as he fished in Plato and Goethe. He + basketed the day's luck, good or bad as it might be, into the pages of his + private <i>Journal</i>, which he called his savings-bank, because from + this source he drew most of the material for his books. The <i>Journal</i> + has recently been printed, in ten volumes. No American writing rewards the + reader more richly. It must be remembered that Emerson's <i>Essays</i>, + the first volume of which appeared in 1841, and the last volumes after his + death in 1882, represent <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" + id="Page_126">126</a></span> practically three stages of composition: + first the detached thoughts of the <i>Journal</i>; second, the + rearrangement of this material for use upon the lecture platform; and + finally, the essays in their present form. The oral method thus + predominates: a series of oracular thoughts has been shaped for oratorical + utterance, not oratorical in the bombastic, popular American sense, but + cunningly designed, by a master of rhetoric, to capture the ear and then + the mind of the auditor. + </p> + <p> + Emerson's work as a lecturer coincided with the rise of that Lyceum system + which brought most of the American authors, for more than a generation, + into intimate contact with the public, and which proved an important + factor in the æsthetic and moral cultivation of our people. No + lecturer could have had a more auspicious influence than Emerson, with his + quiet dignity, his serene spiritual presence, his tonic and often + electrifying force. But if he gave his audiences precious gifts, he also + learned much from them. For thirty years his lecturing trips to the West + brought him, more widely than any New England man of letters, into contact + with the new, virile America of the great Mississippi valley. Unlike many + of his friends, he was not repelled by the "Jacksonism of <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">127</a></span> the West"; + he rated it a wholesome, vivifying force in our national thought and life. + The <i>Journal</i> reveals the essential soundness of his Americanism. + Though surrounded all his life by reformers, he was himself scarcely a + reformer, save upon the single issue of anti-slavery. Perhaps he was at + bottom too much of a radical to be swept off his feet by any reform. + </p> + <p> + To our generation, of course, Emerson presents himself as an author of + books, and primarily as an essayist, rather than as a winning, entrancing + speaker. His essays have a greater variety of tone than is commonly + recognized. Many of them, like <i>Manners</i>, <i>Farming</i>, <i>Books</i>, + <i>Eloquence</i>, <i>Old Age</i>, exhibit a shrewd prudential wisdom, a + sort of Yankee instinct for "the milk in the pan," that reminds one of Ben + Franklin. Like most of the greater New England writers, he could be, on + occasion, an admirable local historian. See his essays on <i>Life and + Letters in New England</i>, <i>New England Reformers</i>, <i>Politics</i>, + and the successive entries in his <i>Journal</i> relating to Daniel + Webster. He had the happiest gift of portraiture, as is witnessed by his + sketches of Montaigne, of Napoleon, of Socrates (in the essay on Plato), + of his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, of Thoreau, and of various types of <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">128</a></span> Englishmen + in his <i>English Traits</i>. But the great essays, no doubt, are those + like <i>Self-Reliance</i>, <i>Compensation</i>, <i>The Over-Soul</i>, <i>Fate</i>, + <i>Power</i>, <i>Culture</i>, <i>Worship</i>, and <i>Illusions</i>. These + will puzzle no one who has read carefully that first book on <i>Nature</i>. + They all preach the gospel of intuition, instinctive trust in the + Universe, faith in the ecstatic moment of vision into the things that are + unseen by the physical eye. Self-reliance, as Emerson's son has pointed + out, means really God-reliance; the Over-Soul—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. + </p> + <p> + This radiant optimism permeates his poems. By temperament a singer as well + as a seer and sayer, Emerson was nevertheless deficient in the singing + voice. He composed no one great poem, his verse presents no ideas that are + not found in his prose. In metre and rhyme he is harsh and willful. Yet he + has marvelous single phrases and cadences. He ejaculates transports and + ecstasies, and though he cannot organize and construct in verse, he is + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">129</a></span> + capable here and there of the true miracle of transforming fact and + thought into true beauty. Aldrich used to say that he would rather have + written Emerson's <i>Bacchus</i> than any American poem. + </p> + <p> + That the pure, high, and tonic mind of Emerson was universal in its survey + of human forces, no one would claim. Certain limitations in interest and + sympathy are obvious. "That horrid burden and impediment of the soul which + the churches call sin," to use John Morley's words, occupied his attention + but little. Like a mountain climber in a perilous pass, he preferred to + look up rather than down. He does not stress particularly those old human + words, service and sacrifice. "Anti-scientific, anti-social, + anti-Christian" are the terms applied to him by one of his most + penetrating critics. Yet I should prefer to say "un-scientific," + "un-social," and "non-Christian," in the sense in which Plato and Isaiah + are non-Christian. Perhaps it would be still nearer the truth to say, as + Mrs. Lincoln said of her husband, "He was not a technical Christian." He + tends to underestimate institutions of every kind; history, except as a + storehouse of anecdote, and culture as a steady mental discipline. This is + the price he pays for his transcendental <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_130" id="Page_130">130</a></span> insistence upon the supreme + value of the Now, the moment of insight. But after all these limitations + are properly set down, the personality of Ralph Waldo Emerson remains a + priceless possession to his countrymen. The austere serenity of his life, + and the perfection with which he represents the highest type of his + province and his era, will ultimately become blended with the thought of + his true Americanism. A democrat and liberator, like Lincoln, he seems + also destined like Lincoln to become increasingly a world's figure, a + friend and guide to aspiring spirits everywhere. Differences of race and + creed are negligible in the presence of such superb confidence in God and + the soul. + </p> + <p> + Citizens of Concord in May, 1862, hearing that Henry Thoreau, the + eccentric bachelor, had just died of consumption in his mother's house on + Main Street, in his forty-fifth year, would have smiled cannily at the + notion that after fifty years their townsman's literary works would be + published in a sumptuous twenty-volume edition, and that critics in his + own country and in Europe would rank him with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet + that is precisely what has happened. Our literature has no more curious + story than the evolution of this local crank <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_131" id="Page_131">131</a></span> into his rightful place of + mastership. In his lifetime he printed only two books, <i>A Week on the + Concord and Merrimac Rivers</i>—which was even more completely + neglected by the public than Emerson's <i>Nature</i>—and <i>Walden</i>, + now one of the classics, but only beginning to be talked about when its + shy, proud author penned his last line and died with the words "moose" and + "Indian" on his lips. + </p> + <p> + Thoreau, like all thinkers who reach below the surface of human life, + means many different things to men of various temperaments. Collectors of + human novelties, like Stevenson, rejoice in his uniqueness of flavor; + critics, like Lowell, place him, not without impatient rigor. To some + readers he is primarily a naturalist, an observer, of the White of + Selborne school; to others an elemental man, a lover of the wild, a hermit + of the woods. He has been called the poet-naturalist, to indicate that his + powers of observation were accompanied, like Wordsworth's, by a gift of + emotional interpretation of the meaning of phenomena. Lovers of literature + celebrate his sheer force and penetration of phrase. But to the student of + American thought Thoreau's prime value lies in the courage and consistency + with which he endeavored to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" + id="Page_132">132</a></span> realize the gospel of Transcendentalism in + his own inner life. + </p> + <p> + Lovers of racial traits like to remember that Thoreau's grandfather was an + immigrant Frenchman from the island of Jersey, and that his grandmother + was Scotch and Quaker. His father made lead pencils and ground plumbago in + his own house in Concord. The mother was from New Hampshire. It was a + high-minded family. All the four children taught school and were good + talkers. Henry, born in 1817, was duly baptized by good Dr. Ripley of the + Old Manse, studied Greek and Latin, and was graduated at Harvard in 1837, + the year of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa address. Even in college the young + man was a trifle difficult. "Cold and unimpressible," wrote a classmate. + "The touch of his hand was moist and indifferent. He did not care for + people." "An unfavorable opinion has been entertained of his disposition + to exert himself," wrote President Quincy confidentially to Emerson in + 1837, although the kindly President, a year later, in recommending Thoreau + as a school-teacher, certified that "his rank was high as a scholar in all + the branches and his morals and general conduct unexceptionable and + exemplary." + </p> + <p> + Ten years passed. The young man gave up <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_133" id="Page_133">133</a></span> school-keeping, thinking it a + loss of time. He learned pencil-making, surveying, and farm work, and + found that by manual labor for six weeks in the year he could meet all the + expenses of living. He haunted the woods and pastures, explored rivers and + ponds, built the famous hut on Emerson's wood-lot with the famous axe + borrowed from Alcott, was put in jail for refusal to pay his poll-tax, + and, to sum up much in little, "signed off" from social obligations. "I, + Henry D. Thoreau, have signed off, and do not hold myself responsible to + your multifarious uncivil chaos named Civil Government." When his college + class held its tenth reunion in 1847, and each man was asked to send to + the secretary a record of achievement, Thoreau wrote: "My steadiest + employment, if such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top of my + condition and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven or on earth." There + is the motto of Transcendentalism, stamped upon a single coin. + </p> + <p> + For "to be ready for whatever may turn up" is Thoreau's racier, homelier + version of Emerson's "endless seeker"; and Thoreau, more easily than + Emerson, could venture to stake everything upon the quest. The elder man + had announced the programme, but by 1847 he was himself almost <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">134</a></span> what + Thoreau would call a "committed man," with family and household + responsibilities, with a living to earn, and bound, like every + professional writer and speaker, to have some measure of regard for his + public. But Thoreau was ready to travel lightly and alone. If he should + fail in the great adventure for spiritual perfection, it was his own + affair. He had no intimates, no confidant save the multitudinous pages of + his <i>Journal</i>, from which—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 <i>Ethan Brand</i>, + and his quaint illustration of the folly of romantic expansion of the self + apart from the common interests of human kind is the picture of a dog + chasing its own tail. "It is time now that I begin to live," notes Thoreau + in the <i>Journal</i>, and he continued to say it in a hundred different + ways until the end of all his journalizing, but he never quite captured + the fugitive felicity. The haunting pathos of his own allegory has moved + every reader of <i>Walden</i>: "I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and + a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail." Precisely what he meant it is + now impossible <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">135</a></span> + to say, but surely he betrays a doubt in the ultimate efficacy of his own + system of life. He bends doggedly to the trail, for Henry Thoreau is no + quitter, but the trail leads nowhere, and in the latest volumes of the <i>Journals</i> + he seems to realize that he has been pursuing a phantom. He dived + fearlessly and deep into himself, but somehow he failed to grasp that + pearl of great price which all the transcendental prophets assured him was + to be had at the cost of diving. + </p> + <p> + This is not to say that this austere and strenuous athlete came up quite + empty-handed. Far from it. The by-products of his toil were enough to have + enriched many lesser men, and they have given Thoreau a secure fame. From + his boyhood he longed to make himself a writer, and an admirable writer he + became. "For along time," he says in <i>Walden</i>, "I was reporter to a + journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never seen fit to + print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I + got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their + reward." Like so many solitaries, he experienced the joy of intense, + long-continued effort in composition, and he was artist enough to know + that his pages, carefully assembled from his notebooks, <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">136</a></span> had + pungency, form, atmosphere. No man of his day, not even Lowell the "last + of the bookmen," abandoned himself more unreservedly to the delight of + reading. Thoreau was an accomplished scholar in the Greek and Roman + classics, as his translations attest. He had some acquaintance with + several modern languages, and at one time possessed the best collection of + books on Oriental literature to be found in America. He was drenched in + the English poetry of the seventeenth century. His critical essays in the + <i>Dial</i>, his letters and the bookish allusions throughout his + writings, are evidence of rich harvesting in the records of the past. He + left some three thousand manuscript pages of notes on the American + Indians, whose history and character had fascinated him from boyhood. Even + his antiquarian hobbies gave him durable satisfaction. Then, too, he had + deep delight in his life-long studies in natural history, in his + meticulous measurements of river currents, in his notes upon the annual + flowering of plants and the migration of birds. The more thoroughly + trained naturalists of our own day detect him now and again in error as to + his birds and plants, just as specialists in Maine woodcraft discover that + he made amusing, and for him unaccountable, <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_137" id="Page_137">137</a></span> blunders when he climbed + Katahdin. But if he was not impeccable as a naturalist or woodsman, who + has ever had more fun out of his enthusiasm than Thoreau, and who has ever + stimulated as many men and women in the happy use of their eyes? He would + have had slight patience with much of the sentimental nature study of our + generation, and certainly an intellectual contempt for much that we read + and write about the call of the wild; but no reader of his books can + escape his infection for the freedom of the woods, for the stark and + elemental in nature. Thoreau's passion for this aspect of life may have + been selfish, wolf-like, but it is still communicative. + </p> + <p> + Once, toward the close of his too brief life, Thoreau "signed on" again to + an American ideal, and no man could have signed more nobly. It was the + cause of Freedom, as represented by John Brown of Harper's Ferry. The + French and Scotch blood in the furtive hermit suddenly grew hot. Instead + of renouncing in disgust the "uncivil chaos called Civil Government," + Thoreau challenged it to a fight. Indeed he had already thrown down the + gauntlet in <i>Slavery in Massachusetts</i>, which Garrison had published + in the <i>Liberator</i> in 1854. And now the death upon the scaffold of + the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">138</a></span> + old fanatic of Ossawatomie changed Thoreau into a complete citizen, + arguing the case and glorifying to his neighbors the dead hero. "It seems + as if no man had ever died in America before; for in order to die you must + first have lived.… I hear a good many pretend that they are going + to die.… Nonsense! I'll defy them to do it. They haven't got life + enough in them. They'll deliquesce like fungi, and keep a hundred + eulogists mopping the spot where they left off. Only half a dozen or so + have died since the world began." Such passages as this reveal a very + different Thoreau from the Thoreau who is supposed to have spent his days + in the company of swamp-blackbirds and woodchucks. He had, in fact, one of + the highest qualifications for human society, an absolute honesty of mind. + "We select granite," he says, "for the underpinning of our houses and + barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an + underpinning of granite truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our sills are + rotten.… In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more + constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend upon it, + that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, + proud of his extensive <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" + id="Page_139">139</a></span> correspondence, has not heard from himself + this long time." + </p> + <p> + This hard, basic individualism was for Thoreau the foundation of all + enduring social relations, and the dullest observer of twentieth century + America can see that Thoreau's doctrine is needed as much as ever. His + sharp-edged personality provokes curiosity and pricks the reader into + dissent or emulation as the case may be, but its chief ethical value to + our generation lies in the fact that here was a Transcendentalist who + stressed, not the life of the senses, though he was well aware of their + seductiveness, but the stubborn energy of the will. + </p> + <p> + The scope of the present book prevents more than a glimpse at the other + members of the New England Transcendental group. They are a very mixed + company, noble, whimsical, queer, impossible. "The good Alcott," wrote + Carlyle, "with his long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn temples + and mild radiant eyes; all bent on saving the world by a return to acorns + and the golden age; he comes before one like a venerable Don Quixote, whom + nobody can laugh at without loving." These words paint a whole company, as + well as a single man. The good Alcott still awaits an adequate biographer. + Connecticut Yankee, peddler <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" + id="Page_140">140</a></span> in the South, school-teacher in Boston and + elsewhere, he descended upon Concord, flitted to the queer community of + Fruitlands, was starved back to Concord, inspired and bored the patient + Emerson, talked endlessly, wrote ineffective books, and had at last his + apotheosis in the Concord School of Philosophy, but was chiefly known for + the twenty years before his death in 1888 as the father of the Louisa + Alcott who wrote <i>Little Women</i>. "A tedious archangel," was Emerson's + verdict, and it is likely to stand. + </p> + <p> + Margaret Fuller, though sketched by Hawthorne, analyzed by Emerson, and + painted at full length by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, is now a fading + figure—a remarkable woman, no doubt, one of the first of American + feminists, suggesting George Eliot in her physical unattractiveness, her + clear brain, her touch of sensuousness. She was an early-ripe, + over-crammed scholar in the classics and in modern European languages. She + did loyal, unpaid work as the editor of the <i>Dial</i>, which from 1840 + to 1844 was the organ of Transcendentalism. She joined the community at + Brook Farm, whose story has been so well told by Lindsay Swift. For a + while she served as literary editor of the <i>New York Tribune</i> under + Horace Greeley. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">141</a></span> + Then she went abroad, touched Rousseau's manuscripts at Paris with + trembling, adoring fingers, made a secret marriage in Italy with the young + Marquis Ossoli, and perished by shipwreck, with her husband and child, off + Fire Island in 1850. + </p> + <p> + Theodore Parker, like Alcott and "Margaret," an admirable Greek scholar, + an idealist and reformer, still lives in Chadwick's biography, in Colonel + Higginson's delightful essay, and in the memories of a few liberal + Bostonians who remember his tremendous sermons on the platform of the old + Music Hall. He was a Lexington farmer's son, with the temperament of a + blacksmith, with enormous, restless energy, a good hater, a passionate + lover of all excellent things save meekness. He died at fifty, worn out, + in Italy. + </p> + <p> + But while these three figures were, after Emerson and Thoreau, the most + representative of the group, the student of the Transcendental period will + be equally interested in watching its influence upon many other types of + young men: upon future journalists and publicists like George William + Curtis, Charles A. Dana, and George Ripley; upon religionists like Orestes + Brownson, Father Hecker, and James Freeman Clarke; and upon poets like + Jones Very, Christopher P. Cranch, and <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_142" id="Page_142">142</a></span> Ellery Channing. There was a + sunny side of the whole movement, as T. 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. + </p> + <hr /> + <div class="chapterhead"> + <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"></a> <a name="chap07" id="chap07"></a> + <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">143</a></span> + <br /><br /><br /> + <h2> + <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER VII.</a> + </h2> + </div> + <p class="chaptertitle"> + Romance, Poetry, and History + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + <span class="smcap">Moving</span> in and out of the Transcendentalist + circles, in that great generation preceding the Civil War, were a company + of other men—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 <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">144</a></span> Parkman + preferred to keep their feet on the solid earth and write admirable + histories. So the mellow years went by. Most of the widely-read American + books were being produced within twenty miles of the Boston State House. + The slavery issue kept growling, far away, but it was only now and then, + as in the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, that it was + brought sharply home to the North. The "golden forties" were as truly + golden for New England as for idle California. There was wealth, leisure, + books, a glow of harvest-time in the air, though the spirit of the writers + is the spirit of youth. + </p> + <p> + Nathaniel Hawthorne, our greatest writer of pure romance, was Puritan by + inheritance and temperament, though not in doctrine or in sympathy. His + literary affiliations were with the English and German Romanticists, and + he possessed, for professional use, the ideas and vocabulary of his + transcendental friends. Born in Salem in 1804, he was descended from Judge + Hawthorne of Salem Witchcraft fame, and from a long line of sea-faring + ancestors. He inherited a morbid solitariness, redeemed in some measure by + a physical endowment of rare strength and beauty. He read Spenser, + Rousseau, and the <i>Newgate Calendar</i>, <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_145" id="Page_145">145</a></span> was graduated at Bowdoin, + with Longfellow, in the class of 1825, and returned to Salem for thirteen + brooding lonely years in which he tried to teach himself the art of + story-writing. His earliest tales, like Irving's, are essays in which + characters emerge; he is absorbed in finding a setting for a preconceived + "moral"; he is in love with allegory and parable. His own words about his + first collection of stories, <i>Twice-Told Tales</i>, have often been + quoted: "They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired + a shade." Yet they are for the most part exquisitely written. After a + couple of years in the Boston Custom-House, and a residence at the + socialistic community of Brook Farm, Hawthorne made the happiest of + marriages to Sophia Peabody, and for nearly four years dwelt in the Old + Manse at Concord. He described it in one of the ripest of his essays, the + Preface to <i>Mosses from an Old Manse</i>, his second collection of + stories. After three years in the Custom-House at Salem, his dismissal in + 1849 gave him leisure to produce his masterpiece, <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, + published in 1850. He was now forty-six. In 1851, he published <i>The + House of the Seven Gables</i>, <i>The Wonder-Book</i>, and <i>The + Snow-Image, and Other Tales</i>. In 1852 came <i>The</i> <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">146</a></span> <i>Blithedale + Romance</i>, a rich ironical story drawn from his Brook Farm experience. + Four years in the American Consulate at Liverpool and three subsequent + years of residence upon the Continent saw no literary harvest except + carefully filled notebooks and the deeply imaginative moral romance, <i>The + Marble Faun</i>. Hawthorne returned home in 1860 and settled in the + Wayside at Concord, busying himself with a new, and, as was destined, a + never completed story about the elixir of immortality. But his vitality + was ebbing, and in May, 1864, he passed away in his sleep. He rests under + the pines in Sleepy Hollow, near the Alcotts and the Emersons. + </p> + <p> + It is difficult for contemporary Americans to assess the value of such a + man, who evidently did nothing except to write a few books. His rare, + delicate genius was scarcely touched by passing events. Not many of his + countrymen really love his writings, as they love, for instance the + writings of Dickens or Thackeray or Stevenson. Everyone reads, at some + time of his life, <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, and trembles at its + passionate indictment of the sin of concealment, at its agonized + admonition, "Be true! Be true!" Perhaps the happiest memories of + Hawthorne's readers, as of Kipling's <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_147" id="Page_147">147</a></span> readers, hover about his + charming stories for children; to have missed <i>The Wonder-Book</i> is + like having grown old without ever catching the sweetness of the green + world at dawn. But our public has learned to enjoy a wholly different kind + of style, taught by the daily journals, a nervous, graphic, sensational, + physical style, fit for describing an automobile, a department store, a + steamship, a lynching party. It is the style of our day, and judged by it + Hawthorne, who wrote with severity, conscience, and good taste, seems + somewhat old-fashioned, like Irving or Addison. He is perhaps too + completely a New Englander to be understood by men of other stock, and has + never, like Poe and Whitman, excited strong interest among European minds. + </p> + <p> + Yet no American is surer, generation after generation, of finding a fit + audience. Hawthorne's genius was meditative rather than dramatic. His + artistic material was moral rather than physical; he brooded over the soul + of man as affected by this and that condition and situation. The child of + a new analytical age, he thought out with rigid accuracy the precise + circumstances surrounding each one of his cases and modifying it. Many of + his sketches and short stories and most of his <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_148" id="Page_148">148</a></span> romances deal with historical + facts, moods, and atmospheres, and he knew the past of New England as few + men have ever known it. There is solid historical and psychological stuff + as the foundation of his air-castles. His latent radicalism furnished him + with a touchstone of criticism as he interpreted the moral standards of + ancient communities; no reader of <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> can forget + Hawthorne's implicit condemnation of the unimaginative harshness of the + Puritans. His own judgment upon the deep matters of the human conscience + was stern enough, but it was a universalized judgment, and by no means the + result of a Calvinism which he hated. Over-fond as he was in his earlier + tales of elaborate, fanciful, decorative treatment of themes that promised + to point a moral, in his finest short stories, such as <i>The Ambitious + Guest</i>, <i>The Gentle Boy</i>, <i>Young Goodman Brown</i>, <i>The Snow + Image</i>, <i>The Great Stone Face</i>, <i>Drowne's Wooden Image</i>, <i>Rappacini's + Daughter</i>, the moral, if there be one, is not obtruded. He loves + physical symbols for mental and moral states, and was poet and + Transcendentalist enough to retain his youthful affection for parables; + but his true field as a story-teller is the erring, questing, aspiring, + shadowed human heart. + </p> + <p> + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">149</a></span> <i>The + Scarlet Letter</i>, for instance, is a study of a universal theme, the + problem of concealed sin, punishment, redemption. Only the setting is + provincial. The story cannot be rightly estimated, it is true, without + remembering the Puritan reverence for physical purity, the Puritan + reverence for the magistrate-minister—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 <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_150" id="Page_150">150</a></span> book has been called + Christless, prayerless, hopeless, no mature person ever reads it without a + deepened sense of the impotence of all mechanistic theories of sin, and a + new vision of the intense reality of spiritual things. "The law we broke," + in Dimmesdale's ghostly words, was a more subtle law than can be graven on + tables of stone and numbered as the Seventh Commandment. + </p> + <p> + The legacy of guilt is likewise the theme of <i>The House of the Seven + Gables</i>, which Hawthorne himself was inclined to think a better book + than <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>. Certainly this story of old Salem is + impeccably written and its subtle handling of tone and atmosphere is + beyond dispute. An ancestral curse, the visitation of the sins of the + fathers upon the children, the gradual decay of a once sound stock, are + motives that Ibsen might have developed. But the Norseman would have + failed to rival Hawthorne's delicate manipulation of his shadows, and the + no less masterly deftness of the ultimate mediation of a dark inheritance + through the love of the light-hearted Phœbe for the latest + descendant of the Maules. In <i>The Blithedale Romance</i> Hawthorne stood + for once, perhaps, too near his material to allow the rich atmospheric + effects which he prefers, and in spite of the unforgetable <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">151</a></span> portrait + of Zenobia and powerful passages of realistic description, the book is not + quite focussed. In <i>The Marble Faun</i> Hawthorne comes into his own + again. Its central problem is one of those dark insoluble ones that he + loves: the influence of a crime upon the development of a soul. Donatello, + the Faun, is a charming young creature of the natural sunshine until his + love for the somber Miriam tempts him to the commission of murder: then + begins the growth of his mind and character. Perhaps the haunting power of + the main theme of the book has contributed less to its fame than the + felicity of its descriptions of Rome and Italy. For Hawthorne possessed, + like Byron, in spite of his defective training in the appreciation of the + arts, a gift of romantic discernment which makes <i>The Marble Faun</i>, + like <i>Childe Harold</i>, a glorified guide-book to the Eternal City. + </p> + <p> + All of Hawthorne's books, in short, have a central core of psychological + romance, and a rich surface finish of description. His style, at its best, + has a subdued splendor of coloring which is only less wonderful than the + spiritual perceptions with which this magician was endowed. The gloom + which haunts many of his pages, as I have said elsewhere, is the long + shadow cast by our mortal <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" + id="Page_152">152</a></span> destiny upon a sensitive soul. The mystery is + our mystery, perceived, and not created, by that finely endowed mind and + heart. The shadow is our shadow; the gleams of insight, the soft radiance + of truth and beauty, are his own. + </p> + <p> + A college classmate of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow summed up the Portland + boy's character in one sentence: "It appeared easy for him to avoid the + unworthy." Born in 1807, of <i>Mayflower</i> stock that had distinguished + itself for bravery and uprightness, the youth was graduated from Bowdoin + at eighteen. Like his classmate Hawthorne, he had been a wide and secretly + ambitious reader, and had followed the successive numbers of Irving's <i>Sketch + Book</i>, he tells us, "with ever increasing wonder and delight." His + college offered him in 1826 a professorship of the modern languages, and + he spent three happy years in Europe in preparation. He taught + successfully at Bowdoin for five or six years, and for eighteen years, + 1836 to 1854, served as George Ticknor's successor at Harvard, ultimately + surrendering the chair to Lowell. He early published two prose volumes, <i>Hyperion</i> + and <i>Outre-mer</i>, Irvingesque romances of European travel. Then came, + after ten years of teaching and the death <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_153" id="Page_153">153</a></span> of his young wife, the sudden + impulse to write poetry, and he produced, "softly excited, I know not + why," <i>The Reaper and the Flowers, a Psalm of Death</i>. From that + December morning in 1838 until his death in 1882 he was Longfellow the + Poet. + </p> + <p> + His outward life, like Hawthorne's, was barren of dramatic incident, save + the one tragic accident by which his second wife, the mother of his + children, perished before his eyes in 1861. He bore the calamity with the + quiet courage of his race and breeding. But otherwise his days ran softly + and gently, enriched with books and friendships, sheltered from the storms + of circumstance. He had leisure to grow ripe, to remember, and to dream. + But he never secluded himself, like Tennyson, from normal contacts with + his fellowmen. The owner of the Craigie House was a good neighbor, + approachable and deferential. He was even interested in local Cambridge + politics. On the larger political issues of his day his Americanism was + sound and loyal. "It is disheartening," he wrote in his Cambridge journal + for 1851, "to see how little sympathy there is in the hearts of the young + men here for freedom and great ideas." But his own sympathy never wavered. + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">154</a></span> His + linguistic talent helped him to penetrate the secrets of alien ways of + thought and speech. He understood Italy and Spain, Holland and France and + Germany. He had studied them on the lips of their living men and women and + in the books where soldier and historian, priest and poet, had inscribed + the record of five hundred years. From the Revival of Learning to the + middle of the nineteenth century, Longfellow knew the soul of Europe as + few men have known it, and he helped to translate Europe to America. His + intellectual receptivity, his quick eye for color and costume and + landscape, his ear for folk-lore and ballad, his own ripe mastery of + words, made him the most resourceful of international interpreters. And + this lover of children, walking in quiet ways, this refined and courteous + host and gentleman, scholar and poet, exemplified without + self-advertisement the richer qualities of his own people. When Couper's + statue of Longfellow was dedicated in Washington, Hamilton Mabie said: + "His freedom from the sophistication of a more experienced country; his + simplicity, due in large measure to the absence of social + self-consciousness; his tranquil and deep-seated optimism, which is the + effluence of an unexhausted soil; his <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_155" id="Page_155">155</a></span> happy and confident + expectation, born of a sense of tremendous national vitality; his love of + simple things in normal relations to world-wide interests of the mind; his + courage in interpreting those deeper experiences which craftsmen who know + art but who do not know life call commonplaces; the unaffected and + beautiful democracy of his spirit—these are the delicate flowers of + our new world, and as much a part of it as its stretches of wilderness and + the continental roll of its rivers." + </p> + <p> + Longfellow's poetic service to his countrymen has thus become a national + asset, and not merely because in his three best known narrative poems, <i>Evangeline</i>, + <i>Hiawatha</i>, and <i>The Courtship of Miles Standish</i>, he selected + his themes from our own history. <i>The Building of the Ship</i>, written + with full faith in the troubled year of 1849, is a national anthem. "It is + a wonderful gift," said Lincoln, as he listened to it, his eyes filled + with tears, "to be able to stir men like that." <i>The Skeleton in Armor</i>, + <i>A Ballad of the French Fleet</i>, <i>Paul Revere's Ride</i>, <i>The + Wreck of the Hesperus</i>, are ballads that stir men still. For all of his + skill in story-telling in verse—witness the <i>Tales of a Wayside + Inn</i>—Longfellow was not by nature a dramatist, and his trilogy + now published under the title of <i>Christus</i>, <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_156" id="Page_156">156</a></span> made up of <i>The Divine + Tragedy</i>, <i>The Golden Legend</i>, and <i>New England Tragedies</i>, + added little to a reputation won in other fields. His sonnets, + particularly those upon <i>Chaucer</i>, <i>Milton</i>, <i>The Divina + Commedia</i>, <i>A Nameless Grave</i>, <i>Felton</i>, <i>Sumner</i>, <i>Nature</i>, + <i>My Books</i>, are among the imperishable treasures of the English + language. In descriptive pieces like <i>Keramos</i> and <i>The Hanging of + the Crane</i>, in such personal and occasional verses as <i>The Herons of + Elmwood</i>, <i>The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz</i>, and the noble <i>Morituri + Salutamus</i> written for his classmates in 1875, he exhibits his + tenderness of affection and all the ripeness of his technical skill. But + it was as a lyric poet, after all, that he won and held his immense + audience throughout the English-speaking world. Two of the most popular of + all his early pieces, <i>The Psalm of Life</i> and <i>Excelsior</i>, have + paid the price of a too apt adjustment to the ethical mood of an earnest + moment in our national life. We have passed beyond them. And many readers + may have outgrown their youthful pleasure in <i>Maidenhood</i>, <i>The + Rainy Day</i>, <i>The Bridge</i>, <i>The Day is Done</i>, verses whose + simplicity lent themselves temptingly to parody. Yet such poems as <i>The + Belfry of Bruges</i>, <i>Seaweed</i>, <i>The Fire of Driftwood</i>, <i>The + Arsenal at Springfield</i>, <i>My Lost Youth</i>, <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_157" id="Page_157">157</a></span> <i>The Children's Hour</i>, + and many another lyric, lose nothing with the lapse of time. There is + fortunately infinite room for personal preference in this whole matter of + poetry, but the confession of a lack of regard for Longfellow's verse must + often be recognized as a confession of a lessening love for what is + simple, graceful, and refined. The current of contemporary American taste, + especially among consciously clever, half-trained persons, seems to be + running against Longfellow. How soon the tide may turn, no one can say. + Meanwhile he has his tranquil place in the Poet's Corner of Westminster + Abbey. The Abbey must be a pleasant spot to wait in, for the Portland boy. + </p> + <p> + Oddly enough, some of the over-sophisticated and under-experienced people + who affect to patronize Longfellow assume toward John Greenleaf Whittier + an air of deference. This attitude would amuse the Quaker poet. One can + almost see his dark eyes twinkle and the grim lips tighten in that silent + laughter in which the old man so much resembled Cooper's Leather-Stocking. + Whittier knew that his friend Longfellow was a better artist than himself, + and he also knew, by intimate experience as a maker of public opinion, how + variable are its judgments. + </p> + <p> + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">158</a></span> + Whittier represents a stock different from that of the Longfellows, but + equally American, equally thoroughbred: the Essex County Quaker farmer of + Massachusetts. The homestead in which he was born in 1807, at East + Haverhill, had been built by his great-great-grandfather in 1688. Mount + Vernon in Virginia and the Craigie House in Cambridge are newer than this + by two generations. The house has been restored to the precise aspect it + had in Whittier's boyhood: and the garden, lawn, and brook, even the + door-stone and bridle-post and the barn across the road are witnesses to + the fidelity of the descriptions in <i>Snow-Bound</i>. The neighborhood is + still a lonely one. The youth grew up in seclusion, yet in contact with a + few great ideas, chief among them Liberty. "My father," he said, "was an + old-fashioned Democrat, and really believed in the Preamble of the Bill of + Rights which reaffirmed the Declaration of Independence." The taciturn + father transmitted to his sons a hatred of kingcraft and priestcraft, the + inward moral freedom of the Quaker touched with humanitarian passion. The + spirit of a boyhood in this homestead is veraciously told in <i>The + Barefoot Boy</i>, <i>School-Days</i>, <i>Snow-Bound</i>, <i>Ramoth Hill</i>, + and <i>Telling the Bees</i>. It was a chance <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_159" id="Page_159">159</a></span> copy of Burns that revealed + to the farmer lad his own desire and capacity for verse-writing. When he + was nineteen, his sister sent his <i>Exile's Departure</i> to William + Lloyd Garrison, then twenty, and the editor of the <i>Newburyport Free + Press</i>. The neighbors liked it, and the tall frail author was rewarded + with a term at the Haverhill Academy, where he paid his way, in old Essex + County fashion, by making shoes. + </p> + <p> + He had little more formal schooling than this, was too poor to enter + college, but had what he modestly called a "knack at rhyming," and much + facility in prose. He turned to journalism and politics, for which he + possessed a notable instinct. For a while he thought he had "done with + poetry and literature." Then in 1833, at twenty-six, came Garrison's + stirring letter bidding him enlist in the cause of Anti-Slavery. He obeyed + the call, not knowing that this new allegiance to the service of humanity + was to transform him from a facile local verse-writer into a national + poet. It was the ancient miracle of losing one's life and finding it. For + the immediate sacrifice was very real to a youth trained in quietism and + non-resistance, and well aware, as a Whig journalist, of the ostracism + visited upon the active <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" + id="Page_160">160</a></span> Abolitionists. Whittier entered the fight + with absolute courage and with the shrewdest practical judgment of weapons + and tactics. He forgot himself. He turned aside from those pleasant fields + of New England legend and history to which he was destined to return after + his warfare was accomplished. He had read the prose of Milton and of + Burke. He perceived that negro emancipation in the United States was only + a single and immediate phase of a universal movement of liberalism. The + thought kindled his imagination. He wrote, at white heat, political and + social verse that glowed with humanitarian passion: lyrics in praise of + fellow-workers, salutes to the dead, campaign songs, hymns, satires + against the clergy and the capitalists, superb sectional poems like <i>Massachusetts + to Virginia</i>, and, more nobly still, poems embodying what Wordsworth + called "the sensation and image of country and the human race." + </p> + <p> + Whittier had now "found himself" as a poet. It is true that his style + remained diffuse and his ear faulty, but his countrymen, then as now + uncritical of artistic form, overlooked the blemishes of his verse, and + thought only of his vibrant emotion, his scorn of cowardice and evil, his + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">161</a></span> + prophetic exaltation. In 1847 came the first general collection of his + poems, and here were to be found not merely controversial verses, but + spirited <i>Songs of Labor</i>, pictures of the lovely Merrimac + countryside, legends written in the mood of Hawthorne or Longfellow, and + bright bits of foreign lore and fancy. For though Whittier never went + abroad, his quiet life at Amesbury gave him leisure for varied reading, + and he followed contemporary European politics with the closest interest. + He emerged more and more from the atmosphere of faction and section, and, + though he retained to the last his Quaker creed, he held its simple tenets + in such undogmatic and winning fashion that his hymns are sung today in + all the churches. + </p> + <p> + When <i>The Atlantic Monthly</i> was established in 1857, Whittier was + fifty. He took his place among the contributors to the new magazine not as + a controversialist but as a man of letters, with such poems as <i>Tritemius</i>, + and <i>Skipper Ireson's Ride</i>. Characteristic productions of this + period are <i>My Psalm</i>, <i>Cobbler Keezar's Vision</i>, <i>Andrew + Rykman's Prayer</i>, <i>The Eternal Goodness</i>—poems grave, sweet, + and tender. But it was not until the publication of <i>Snow-Bound</i> in + 1866 that Whittier's <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">162</a></span> + work touched its widest popularity. He had never married, and the deaths + of his mother and sister Elizabeth set him brooding, in the desolate + Amesbury house, over memories of his birthplace, six miles away in East + Haverhill. The homestead had gone out of the hands of the Whittiers, and + the poet, nearing sixty, set himself to compose an idyll descriptive of + the vanished past. No artist could have a theme more perfectly adapted to + his mood and to his powers. There are no novel ideas in <i>Snow-Bound</i>, + nor is there any need of them, but the thousands of annual pilgrims to the + old farmhouse can bear witness to the touching intimacy, the homely charm, + the unerring rightness of feeling with which Whittier's genius recreated + his own lost youth and painted for all time a true New England hearthside. + </p> + <p> + Whittier was still to write nearly two hundred more poems, for he lived to + be eighty-five, and he composed until the last. But his creative period + was now over. He rejoiced in the friendly recognition of his work that + came to him from every section of a reunited country. His personal friends + were loyal in their devotion. He followed the intricacies of American + politics with the keen <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" + id="Page_163">163</a></span> zest of a veteran in that game, for in his + time he had made and unmade governors and senators. "The greatest + politician I have ever met," said James G. Blaine, who had certainly met + many. He had an income from his poems far in excess of his needs, but + retained the absolute simplicity of his earlier habits. When his + publishers first proposed the notable public dinner in honor of his + seventieth birthday he demurred, explaining to a member of his family that + he did not want the bother of "buying a new pair of pants"—a petty + anecdote, but somehow refreshing. So the rustic, shrewd, gentle old man + waited for the end. He had known what it means to toil, to fight, to + renounce, to eat his bread in tears, and to see some of his dreams come + true. We have had, and shall have, more accomplished craftsmen in verse, + but we have never bred a more genuine man than Whittier, nor one who had + more kinship with the saints. + </p> + <p> + A few days before Whittier's death, he wrote an affectionate poem in + celebration of the eighty-third birthday of his old friend of the Saturday + Club, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. This was in 1892. The little Doctor, + rather lonely in his latest years, composed some tender obituary verses + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">164</a></span> at + Whittier's passing. He had already performed the same office for Lowell. + He lingered himself until the autumn of 1894, in his eighty-sixth year—<i>The + Last Leaf</i>, in truth, of New England's richest springtime. + </p> + <p> + "No, my friends," he had said in <i>The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table</i>, + "I go (always, other things being equal) for the man who inherits family + traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five + generations." The Doctor came naturally by his preference for a "man of + family," being one himself. He was a descendant of Anne Bradstreet, the + poetess. "Dorothy Q.," whom he had made the most picturesque of the + Quincys, was his great-grandmother. Wendell Phillips was his cousin. His + father, the Rev. Abiel Holmes, a Yale graduate, was the minister of the + First Church in Cambridge, and it was in its "gambrel-roofed" parsonage + that Oliver Wendell was born in 1809. + </p> + <p class="poem"> + Know old Cambridge? Hope you do.—<br /> Born there? Don't say so! I + was, too.<br /> <span class="big-word-space"> • • • • + • • • •</span><br /> Nicest place that was ever seen—<br /> + Colleges red and Common green. + </p> + <p> + So he wrote, in scores of passages of filial devotion, concerning the + village of his boyhood and the city of <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_165" id="Page_165">165</a></span> Boston. His best-known prose + sentence is: "Boston State House is the hub of the Solar System." It is + easy to smile, as indeed he did himself, at such fond provinciality, but + the fact remains that our literature as a whole sadly needs this richness + of local atmosphere. A nation of restless immigrants, here today and + "moved on" tomorrow, has the fibres of its imagination uprooted, and its + artists in their eager quest of "local color" purchase brilliancy at the + cost of thinness of tone, poverty of association. Philadelphia and Boston, + almost alone among the larger American cities, yield the sense of + intimacy, or what the Autocrat would call "the cumulative humanities." + </p> + <p> + Young Holmes became the pet and the glory of his class of 1829 at Harvard. + It was only in 1838 that their reunions began, but thereafter they held + fifty-six meetings, of which Holmes attended fifty and wrote poems for + forty-three. Many of "the Boys" whom he celebrated became famous in their + own right, but they remain "the Boys" to all lovers of Holmes's verses. + His own career as a poet had begun during his single year in the Law + School. His later years brought him some additional skill in polishing his + lines and a riper human <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" + id="Page_166">166</a></span> wisdom, but his native verse-making talent is + as completely revealed in <i>Old Ironsides</i>, published when he was + twenty-one, and in <i>The Last Leaf</i>, composed a year or two later, as + in anything he was to write during the next half-century. In many respects + he was a curious survival of the cumulative humanities of the eighteenth + century. He might have been, like good Dr. Arbuthnot, an ornament of the + Augustan age. He shared with the English Augustans a liking for the rhymed + couplet, an instinctive social sense, a feeling for the presence of an + imaginary audience of congenial listeners. One still catches the "Hear! + Hear!" between his clever lines. In many of the traits of his mind this + "Yankee Frenchman" resembled such a typical eighteenth century figure as + Voltaire. Like Voltaire, he was tolerant—except toward Calvinism and + Homeopathy. In some of the tricks of his prose style he is like a kindlier + Sterne. His knack for <i>vers de société</i> was caught from + Horace, but he would not have been a child of his own age without the + additional gift of rhetoric and eloquence which is to be seen in his + patriotic poems and his hymns. For Holmes possessed, in spite of all his + limitations in poetic range, true devotion, patriotism, humor, and pathos. + </p> + <p> + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">167</a></span> His + poetry was in the best sense of the word "occasional," and his prose was + only an incidental or accidental harvest of a long career in which his + chief duty was that of a professor of anatomy in the Harvard Medical + School. He had studied in Paris under sound teachers, and after some years + of private practice won the appointment which he held, as active and + emeritus professor, for forty-seven years. He was a faithful, clear, and + amusing lecturer, and printed two or three notable medical essays, but his + chief Boston reputation, in the eighteen-fifties, was that of a wit and + diner-out and writer of verses for occasions. Then came his great hour of + good luck in 1857, when Lowell, the editor of the newly-established <i>Atlantic + Monthly</i>, persuaded him to write <i>The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table</i>. + It was the public's luck also, for whoever had been so unfortunate as not + to be born in Boston could now listen—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 <i>The Autocrat</i>. It gave the Doctor a reputation in England which + he naturally prized, and which contributed to his triumphal English + progress, many years later, recorded pleasantly in <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_168" id="Page_168">168</a></span> <i>Our Hundred Days</i>. <i>The + Professor at the Breakfast Table</i> and <i>The Poet at the Breakfast + Table</i> are less successful variations of <i>The Autocrat</i>. Neither + professors nor poets are at their best at this meal. Holmes wrote three + novels—of which <i>Elsie Venner</i>, 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. + </p> + <p> + James Russell Lowell was ten years younger than Holmes, and though he died + three years before the Doctor, he seems, for other reasons than those of + chronology, to belong more nearly to the <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_169" id="Page_169">169</a></span> present. Although by birth as + much of a New England Brahmin as Holmes, and in his later years as much of + a Boston and Cambridge idol, he nevertheless touched our universal + American life on many sides, represented us worthily in foreign diplomacy, + argued the case of Democracy with convincing power, and embodied, as more + perfect artists like Hawthorne and Longfellow could never have done, the + subtleties and potencies of the national temperament. He deserves and + reveals the closest scrutiny, but his personality is difficult to put on + paper. Horace Scudder wrote his biography with careful competence, and + Ferris Greenslet has made him the subject of a brilliant critical study. + Yet readers differ widely in their assessment of the value of his prose + and verse, and in their understanding of his personality. + </p> + <p> + The external facts of his career are easy to trace and must be set down + here with brevity. A minister's son, and descended from a very old and + distinguished family, he was born at Elmwood in Cambridge in 1819. After a + somewhat turbulent course, he was graduated from Harvard in 1838, the year + of Emerson's <i>Divinity School Address</i>. He studied law, turned + Abolitionist, wrote poetry, married the beautiful and transcendental <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">170</a></span> Maria + White, and did magazine work in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He was + thought by his friends in the eighteen-fifties to be "the most + Shakespearian" man in America. When he was ten years out of college, in + 1848, he published <i>The Biglow Papers</i> (First Series), <i>A Fable for + Critics</i>, and <i>The Vision of Sir Launfal</i>. After a long visit to + Europe and the death of his wife, he gave some brilliant Lowell Institute + lectures in Boston, and was appointed Longfellow's successor at Harvard. + He went to Europe again to prepare himself, and after entering upon his + work as a teacher made a happy second marriage, served for four years as + the first editor of <i>The Atlantic</i>, and helped his friend Charles + Eliot Norton edit <i>The North American Review</i>. The Civil War inspired + a second series of <i>Biglow Papers</i> and the magnificent <i>Commemoration + Ode</i> of 1865. Then came volume after volume of literary essays, such as + <i>Among My Books</i> and <i>My Study Windows</i>, and an occasional book + of verse. Again he made a long sojourn in Europe, resigned his Harvard + professorship, and in 1877 was appointed Minister to Spain. After three + years he was transferred to the most important post in our diplomatic + service, London. He performed his duties with <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_171" id="Page_171">171</a></span> extraordinary skill and + success until 1885, when he was relieved. His last years were spent in + Elmwood, the Cambridge house where he was born, and he was still writing, + in almost as rich a vein as ever, when the end came in 1891. + </p> + <p> + Here was certainly a full and varied life, responsive to many personal + moods and many tides of public feeling. Lowell drew intellectual stimulus + from enormously wide reading in classical and modern literatures. + Puritanically earnest by inheritance, he seems also to have inherited a + strain of levity which he could not always control, and, through his + mother's family, a dash of mysticism sometimes resembling second sight. + His physical and mental powers were not always in the happiest mutual + adjustment: he became easily the prey of moods and fancies, and knew the + alternations from wild gaiety of spirits to black despair. The firm moral + consistency of Puritanism was always his, yet his playful remark about + belonging in a hospital for incurable children had a measure of truth in + it also. + </p> + <p> + Both his poetry and his prose reveal a nature never quite integrated into + wholeness of structure, into harmony with itself. His writing, at its + best, is noble and delightful, full of human charm, <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_172" id="Page_172">172</a></span> but it is difficult for him + to master a certain waywardness and to sustain any note steadily. This + temperamental flaw does not affect the winsomeness of his letters, unless + to add to it. It is lost to view, often, in the sincerity and pathos of + his lyrics, but it is felt in most of his longer efforts in prose, and + accounts for a certain dissatisfaction which many grateful and loyal + readers nevertheless feel in his criticism. Lowell was more richly endowed + by nature and by breadth of reading than Matthew Arnold, for instance, but + in the actual performance of the critical function he was surpassed in + method by Arnold and perhaps in inerrant perception, in a limited field, + by Poe. + </p> + <p> + It was as a poet, however, that he first won his place in our literature, + and it is by means of certain passages in the <i>Biglow Papers</i> and the + <i>Commemoration Ode</i> that he has most moved his countrymen. The + effectiveness of <i>The Present Crisis</i> and <i>Sir Launfal</i>, and of + the <i>Memorial Odes</i>, particularly the <i>Ode to Agassiz</i>, is + likewise due to the passion, sweetness, and splendor of certain strophes, + rather than to the perfection of these poems as artistic wholes. Lowell's + personal lyrics of sorrow, such as <i>The Changeling</i>, <i>The First + Snow-Fall</i>, <i>After the Burial</i>, have touched many hearts. <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">173</a></span> His later + lyrics are more subtle, weighted with thought, tinged with autumnal + melancholy. He was a most fertile composer, and, like all the men of his + time and group, produced too much. Yet his patriotic verse was so + admirable in feeling and is still so inspiring to his readers that one + cannot wish it less in quantity; and in the field of political satire, + such as the two series of <i>Biglow Papers</i>, he had a theme and a + method precisely suited to his temperament. No American has approached + Lowell's success in this difficult <i>genre</i>: the swift transitions + from rural Yankee humor to splendid scorn of evil and to noblest idealism + reveal the full powers of one of our most gifted men. The preacher lurked + in this Puritan from first to last, and the war against Mexico and the + Civil War stirred him to the depths. + </p> + <p> + His prose, likewise, is a school of loyalty. There was much of Europe in + his learning, as his memorable Dante essay shows, and the traditions of + great English literature were the daily companions of his mind. He was + bookish, as a bookman should be, and sometimes the very richness and + whimsicality of his bookish fancies marred the simplicity and good taste + of his pages. But the fundamental texture of his thought and feeling <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">174</a></span> was + American, and his most characteristic style has the raciness of our soil. + Nature lovers like to point out the freshness and delicacy of his reaction + to the New England scene. Thoreau himself, whom Lowell did not like, was + not more veracious an observer than the author of <i>Sunthin' in the + Pastoral Line</i>, <i>Cambridge Thirty Years Ago</i>, and <i>My Garden + Acquaintance</i>. Yet he watched men as keenly as he did "laylocks" and + bobolinks, and no shrewder American essay has been written than his <i>On + a Certain Condescension in Foreigners</i>. Wit and humor and wisdom made + him one of the best talkers of his generation. These qualities pervade his + essays and his letters, and the latter in particular reveal those ardors + and fidelities of friendship which men like Emerson and Thoreau longed + after without ever quite experiencing. Lowell's cosmopolitan reputation, + which was greatly enhanced in the last decade of his life, seemed to his + old associates of the Saturday Club only a fit recognition of the + learning, wit, and fine imagination which had been familiar to them from + the first. To hold the old friends throughout his lifetime, and to win + fresh ones of a new generation through his books, is perhaps the greatest + of Lowell's personal felicities. + </p> + <p> + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">175</a></span> + While there are no other names in the literature of New England quite + comparable with those that have just been discussed, it should be + remembered that the immediate effectiveness and popularity of these + representative poets and prose writers were dependent upon the existence + of an intelligent and responsive reading public. The lectures of Emerson, + the speeches of Webster, the stories of Hawthorne, the political verse of + Whittier and Lowell, presupposed a keen, reflecting audience, mentally and + morally exigent. The spread of the Lyceum system along the line of + westward emigration from New England as far as the Mississippi is one + tangible evidence of the high level of popular intelligence. That there + was much of the superficial and the spread-eagle in the American life of + the eighteen-forties is apparent enough without the amusing comments of + such English travellers as Dickens, Miss Martineau, and Captain Basil + Hall. But there was also genuine intellectual curiosity and a general + reading habit which are evidenced not only by a steady growth of + newspapers and magazines but also by the demand for substantial books. + Biography and history began to be widely read, and it was natural that the + most notable productiveness in historical <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_176" id="Page_176">176</a></span> writing should manifest + itself in that section of the country where there were libraries, wealth, + leisure for the pursuits of scholarship, a sense of intimate concern with + the great issues of the past, and a diffusion of intellectual tastes + throughout the community. It was no accident that Sparks and Ticknor, + Bancroft and Prescott, Motley and Parkman, were Massachusetts men. + </p> + <p> + Jared Sparks, it is true, inherited neither wealth nor leisure. He was a + furious, unwearied toiler in the field of our national history. Born in + 1789, by profession a Unitarian minister, he began collecting the papers + of George Washington by 1825. John Marshall, the great jurist, had + published his five-volume life of his fellow Virginian a score of years + earlier. But Sparks proceeded to write another biography of Washington and + to edit his writings. He also edited a <i>Library of American Biography</i>, + wrote lives of Franklin and Gouverneur Morris, was professor of history + and President of Harvard, and lived to be seventy-seven. As editor of the + writings of Franklin and Washington, he took what we now consider + unpardonable liberties in altering the text, and this error of judgment + has somewhat clouded his just reputation as a pioneer in historical + research. + </p> + <p> + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">177</a></span> + George Bancroft, who was born in 1800, and died, a horseback-riding sage, + at ninety-one, inherited from his clergyman father a taste for history. He + studied in Germany after leaving Harvard, turned schoolmaster, Democratic + politician and office-holder, served as Secretary of the Navy, Minister to + England and then to the German Empire, and won distinction in each of his + avocations, though the real passion of his life was his <i>History of the + United States</i>, which he succeeded in bringing down to the adoption of + the Constitution. The first volume, which appeared in 1834, reads today + like a stump speech by a sturdy Democratic orator of the Jacksonian + period. But there was solid stuff in it, nevertheless, and as Bancroft + proceeded, decade after decade, he discarded some of his rhetoric and + philosophy of democracy and utilized increasingly the vast stores of + documents which his energy and his high political positions had made it + possible for him to obtain. Late in life he condensed his ten great + volumes to six. Posterity will doubtless condense these in turn, as + posterity has a way of doing, but Bancroft the historian realized his own + youthful ambition with a completeness rare in the history of human effort + and performed a monumental service to his country. + </p> + <p> + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">178</a></span> He + was less of an artist, however, than Prescott, the eldest and in some ways + the finest figure of the well-known Prescott-Motley-Parkman group of + Boston historians. All of these men, together with their friend George + Ticknor, who wrote the <i>History of Spanish Literature</i> and whose own + <i>Life and Letters</i> pictures a whole generation, had the professional + advantages of inherited wealth, and the opportunity to make deliberate + choice of a historical field which offered freshness and picturesqueness + of theme. All were tireless workers in spite of every physical handicap; + all enjoyed social security and the rich reward of full recognition by + their contemporaries. They had their world as in their time, as Chaucer + makes the Wife of Bath say of herself, and it was a pleasant world to live + in. + </p> + <p> + Grandson of "Prescott the Brave" of Bunker Hill, and son of the rich Judge + Prescott of Salem, William Hickling Prescott was born in 1796, and was + graduated from Harvard in 1814. An accident in college destroyed the sight + of one eye, and left him but a precarious use of the other. Nevertheless + he resolved to emulate Gibbon, whose <i>Autobiography</i> had impressed + him, and to make himself "an historian in the best sense of the term." He + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">179</a></span> + studied arduously in Europe, with the help of secretaries, and by 1826, + after a long hesitation, decided upon a <i>History of the Reign of + Ferdinand and Isabella</i>. In ten years the three volumes were finished. + "Pursuing the work in this quiet, leisurely way, without over-exertion or + fatigue," wrote Prescott, "or any sense of obligation to complete it in a + given time, I have found it a continual source of pleasure." It was + published at his own expense on Christmas Day, 1837, and met with + instantaneous success. "My market and my reputation rest principally with + England," he wrote in 1838—a curious footnote, by the way, to + Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa Address of the year before. But America joined + with England, in praising the new book. Then Prescott turned to the <i>Conquest + of Mexico</i>, the <i>Conquest of Peru</i>, and finally to his unfinished + <i>History of the Reign of Philip II</i>. He had, as Dean Milman wrote + him, "the judgment to choose noble subjects." He wrote with serenity and + dignity, with fine balance and proportion. Some of the Spanish documents + upon which he relied have been proved less trustworthy than he thought, + but this unsuspected defect in his materials scarcely impaired the skill + with which this unhasting, unresting <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_180" id="Page_180">180</a></span> painter filled his great + canvases. They need retouching, perhaps, but the younger historians are + incompetent for the task. Prescott died in 1859, in the same year as + Irving, and he already seems quite as remote from the present hour. + </p> + <p> + His young friend Motley, of <i>Dutch Republic</i> fame, was another Boston + Brahmin, born in the year of Prescott's graduation from college. He + attended George Bancroft's school, went to Harvard in due course, where he + knew Holmes, Sumner, and Wendell Phillips, and at Göttingen became a + warm friend of a dog-lover and duelist named Bismarck. Young Motley wrote + a couple of unsuccessful novels, dabbled in diplomacy, politics, and + review-writing, and finally, encouraged by Prescott, settled down upon + Dutch history, went to Europe to work up his material in 1851, and, after + five years, scored an immense triumph with his <i>Rise of the Dutch + Republic</i>. He was a brilliant partisan, hating Spaniards and + Calvinists, and wrote all the better for this bias. He was an admirable + sketcher of historical portraits, and had Macaulay's skill in composing + special chapters devoted to the tendencies and qualities of an epoch or to + the characteristics of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" + id="Page_181">181</a></span> a dynasty. Between 1860 and 1868 he produced + the four volumes of the <i>History of the United Netherlands</i>. During + the Civil War he served usefully as American minister to Vienna, and in + 1869 was appointed minister to London. Both of these appointments ended + unhappily for him. Dr. Holmes, his loyal admirer and biographer, does not + conceal the fact that a steadier, less excitable type of public servant + might have handled both the Vienna situation and the London situation + without incurring a recall. Motley continued to live in England, where his + daughters had married, and where, in spite of his ardent Americanism, he + felt socially at home. His last book was <i>The Life and Death of John of + Barneveld</i>. His <i>Letters</i>, edited after his death in 1877 by + George William Curtis, give a fascinating picture of English life among + the cultivated and leisurely classes. The Boston merchant's son was a + high-hearted gentleman, and his cosmopolitan experiences used to make his + stay-at-home friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, feel rather dull and + provincial in comparison. Both were Sons of Liberty, but Motley had had + the luck to find in "brave little Holland" a subject which captivated the + interest of Europe and gave the historian international fame. He <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">182</a></span> had more + eloquence than the Doctor, and a far more varied range of prose, but there + may be here and there a Yankee guesser about the taste of future + generations who will bet on <i>The Autocrat</i>, after all. + </p> + <p> + The character and career of Francis Parkman afford curious material to the + student of New England's golden age. In the seventy years of his heroic + life, from 1823 to 1893, all the characteristic forces of the age reached + their culmination and decline, and his own personality indicates some of + the violent reactions produced by the over-strain of Transcendentalism. + For here was a descendant of John Cotton, and a clergyman's son, who + detested Puritanism and the clergy; who, coming to manhood in the + eighteen-forties, hated the very words Transcendentalism, Philosophy, + Religion, Reform; an inheritor of property, trained at Harvard, and an + Overseer and Fellow of his University, who disliked the ideals of culture + and refinement; a member of the Saturday Club who was bored with literary + talk and literary people; a staunch American who despised democracy as + thoroughly as Alexander Hamilton, and thought suffrage a failure; a + nineteenth century historian who cared nothing for philosophy, science, + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">183</a></span> or + the larger lessons of history itself; a fascinating realistic writer who + admired Scott, Byron, and Cooper for their tales of action, and despised + Wordsworth and Thoreau as effeminate sentimentalists who were preoccupied + with themselves. In Parkman "the wheel has come full circle," and a + movement that began with expansion of self ended in hard Spartan + repression, even in inhibition of emotion. + </p> + <p> + Becoming "enamoured of the woods" at sixteen, Parkman chose his life work + at eighteen, and he was a man who could say proudly: "I have not yet + abandoned any plan which I ever formed." "Before the end of the sophomore + year," he wrote in his autobiography, "my various schemes had crystallized + into a plan of writing the story of what was then known as the <i>Old + French War</i>, that is, the war that ended in the conquest of Canada, for + here, as it seemed to me, the forest drama was more stirring and the + forest stage more thronged with appropriate actors than in any other + passage of our history. It was not till some years later that I enlarged + the plan to include the whole course of the American conflict between + France and England, or, in other words, the history of the American + forest: for this <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">184</a></span> + was the light in which I regarded it. My theme fascinated me, and I was + haunted with wilderness images day and night." To understand "the history + of the American forest" young Parkman devoted his college vacations to + long trips in the wilderness, and in 1846, two years after graduation, he + made the epoch-making journey described in his first book, <i>The Oregon + Trail</i>. + </p> + <p> + <i>The Conspiracy of Pontiac</i>, a highly-colored narrative in two + volumes appearing in 1851, marks the first stage of his historical + writing. Then came the tragedy of shattered health, and for fourteen years + Parkman fought for life and sanity, and produced practically nothing. He + had had to struggle from his college days with an obscure disorder of the + brain, aggravated by the hardships of his Oregon Trail journey, and by + ill-considered efforts to harden his bodily frame by over-exertion. His + disease took many forms—insomnia, arthritis, weakness of sight, + incapacity for sustained thought. His biographer Farnham says that "he + never saw a perfectly well day during his entire literary career." Even + when aided by secretaries and copyists, six lines a day was often the + limit of his production. His own Stoic words about the limitations of his + eyesight are <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">185</a></span> + characteristic: "By reading for one minute, and then resting for an equal + time, this alternate process may gradually be continued for about half an + hour. Then, after a sufficient interval, it may be repeated, often three + or four times in the course of the day. By this means nearly the whole of + the volume now offered has been composed." There is no more piteous or + inspiring story of a fight against odds in the history of literature. + </p> + <p> + For after his fortieth year the enemy gave way a little, and book after + book somehow got itself written. There they stand upon the shelves, a + dozen of them—<i>The Pioneers of France</i>, <i>The Jesuits in North + America</i>, <i>La Salle</i>, <i>The Old Régime</i>, <i>Frontenac</i>, + <i>Montcalm and Wolfe</i>, <i>A Half-Century of Conflict</i>—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 <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_186" id="Page_186">186</a></span> and Motley, and precisely + adapted to the pictorial and narrative powers of the soldier-minded, + soldier-hearted author. + </p> + <p> + The quality which Parkman admired most in men—though he never seems + to have loved men deeply, even his own heroes—was strength of will. + That was the secret of his own power, and the sign, it must be added, of + the limitations of this group of historians who came at the close of the + golden age. Whatever a New England will can accomplish was wrought + manfully by such admirable men as Prescott and Parkman. Trained + intelligence, deliberate selection of subject, skillful cultivation of + appropriate story-telling and picture-painting style, all these were + theirs. But the "wild ecstasy" that thrilled the young Emerson as he + crossed the bare Common at sunset, the "supernal beauty" of which Poe + dreamed in the Fordham cottage, the bay horse and hound and turtle-dove + which Thoreau lost long ago and could not find in his hut at Walden, these + were something which our later Greeks of the New England Athens esteemed + as foolishness. + </p> + <hr /> + <div class="chapterhead"> + <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"></a> <a name="chap08" id="chap08"></a> + <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">187</a></span> + <br /><br /><br /> + <h2> + <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER VIII.</a> + </h2> + </div> + <p class="chaptertitle"> + Poe and Whitman + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + <span class="smcap">Enter</span> now two egotists, who have little in + common save their egotism, two outsiders who upset most of the + conventional American rules for winning the literary race, two men of + genius, in short, about whom we are still quarreling, and whose + distinctive quality is more accurately perceived in Europe than it has + ever been in the United States. + </p> + <p> + Both Poe and Whitman were Romanticists by temperament. Both shared in the + tradition and influence of European Romanticism. But they were also late + comers, and they were caught in the more morbid and extravagant phases of + the great European movement while its current was beginning to ebb. Their + acquaintance with its literature was mainly at second-hand and through the + medium of British and American periodicals. Poe, who was older than + Whitman by ten years, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" + id="Page_188">188</a></span> was fifteen when Byron died, in 1824. He was + untouched by the nobler mood of Byron, though his verse was colored by the + influence of Byron, Moore, and Shelley. His prose models were De Quincey, + Disraeli, and Bulwer. Yet he owed more to Coleridge than to any of the + Romantics. He was himself a sort of Coleridge without the piety, with the + same keen penetrating critical intelligence, the same lovely + opium-shadowed dreams, and, alas, with something of the same reputation as + a dead-beat. + </p> + <p> + A child of strolling players, Poe happened to be born in Boston, but he + hated "Frog-Pondium"—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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">189</a></span> + face of his own Roderick Usher. He made a good record in French and Latin, + read, wrote and recited poetry, tramped on the Ragged Mountains, and did + not notably exceed his companions in drinking and gambling. But his Scotch + foster-father disapproved of his conduct and withdrew him from the + University. A period of wandering followed. He enlisted in the army and + was stationed in Boston in 1827, when his first volume, <i>Tamerlane</i>, + was published. In 1829 he was in Fortress Monroe, and published <i>Al + Aaraf</i> at Baltimore. He entered West Point in 1830, and was surely, + except Whistler, the strangest of all possible cadets. When he was + dismissed in 1831, he had written the marvellous lines <i>To Helen</i>, <i>Israfel</i>, + and <i>The City in the Sea</i>. That is enough to have in one's knapsack + at the age of twenty-two. + </p> + <p> + In the eighteen years from 1831 to 1849, when Poe's unhappy life came to + an end in a Baltimore hospital, his literary activity was chiefly that of + a journalist, critic, and short story writer. He lived in Baltimore, + Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York. Authors who now exploit their fat + bargains with their publishers may have forgotten that letter which Poe + wrote back to Philadelphia the morning after he arrived with his + child-wife in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">190</a></span> + New York: "We are both in excellent spirits.… We have now got four + dollars and a half left. To-morrow I am going to try and borrow three + dollars, so that I may have a fortnight to go upon." When the child-wife + died in the shabby cottage at Fordham, her wasted body was covered with + the old army overcoat which Poe had brought from West Point. If Poe met + some of the tests of practical life inadequately, it must be remembered + that his health failed at twenty-five, that he was pitiably poor, and that + the slightest indulgence in drink set his over-wrought nerves jangling. + Ferguson, the former office-boy of the <i>Literary Messenger</i>, judged + this man of letters with an office-boy's firm and experienced eye: "Mr. + Poe was a fine gentleman when he was sober. He was ever kind and courtly, + and at such times everyone liked him. But when he was drinking he was + about one of the most disagreeable men I have ever met." "I am sorry for + him," wrote C. F. Briggs to Lowell. "He has some good points, but + taken altogether, he is badly made up." "Badly made up," no doubt, both in + body and mind, but all respectable and prosperous Pharisees should be + reminded that Poe did not make himself; or rather, that he could not make + himself <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">191</a></span> + over. Very few men can. Given Poe's temperament, and the problem is + insoluble. He wrote to Lowell in 1844: "I have been too deeply conscious + of the mutability and evanescence of temporal things to give any + continuous effort to anything—to be consistent in anything. My life + has been <i>whim</i>—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. + </p> + <p> + Let us notice the critical instinct which he brought to the task of + creation. His theory of verse is simple, in fact too simple to account for + all of the facts. The aim of poetry, according to Poe, is not truth but + pleasure—the rhythmical creation of beauty. Poetry should be brief, + indefinite, and musical. Its chief instrument is sound. <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">192</a></span> A certain + quaintness or grotesqueness of tone is a means for satisfying the thirst + for supernal beauty. Hence the musical lyric is to Poe the only true type + of poetry; a long poem does not exist. Readers who respond more readily to + auditory than to visual or motor stimulus are therefore Poe's chosen + audience. For them he executes, like Paganini, marvels upon his single + string. He has easily recognizable devices: the dominant note, the + refrain, the "repetend," that is to say the phrase which echoes, with some + variation, a phrase or line already used. In such poems as <i>To Helen</i>, + <i>Israfel</i>, <i>The Haunted Palace</i>, <i>Annabel Lee</i>, the theme, + the tone, the melody all weave their magic spell; it is like listening to + a lute-player in a dream. + </p> + <p> + That the device often turns into a trick is equally true. In <i>The Bells</i> + and <i>The Raven</i> we detect the prestidigitator. It is jugglery, though + such juggling as only a master-musician can perform. In <i>Ulalume</i> and + other show-pieces the wires get crossed and the charm snaps, scattering + tinsel fragments of nonsense verse. Such are the dangers of the technical + temperament unenriched by wide and deep contact with human feeling. + </p> + <p> + Poe's theory of the art of the short story is <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_193" id="Page_193">193</a></span> now familiar enough. The + power of a tale, he thought, turned chiefly if not solely upon its unity, + its harmony of effect. This is illustrated in all of his finest stories. + In <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> the theme is Fear; the opening + sentence strikes the key and the closing sentence contains the climax. In + the whole composition every sentence is modulated to the one end in view. + The autumn landscape tones with the melancholy house; the somber chamber + frames the cadaverous face of Roderick Usher; the face is an index of the + tumultuous agitation of a mind wrestling with the grim phantom Fear and + awaiting the cumulative horror of the final moment. In <i>Ligeia</i>, + which Poe sometimes thought the best of all his tales, the theme is the + ceaseless life of the will, the potency of the spirit of the beloved and + departed woman. The unity of effect is absolute, the workmanship + consummate. So with the theme of revenge in <i>The Cask of Amontillado</i>, + the theme of mysterious intrigue in <i>The Assignation</i>. In Poe's + detective stories, or tales of ratiocination as he preferred to call them, + he takes to pieces for our amusement a puzzle which he has cunningly put + together. <i>The Gold Bug</i> is the best known of these, <i>The Purloined + Letter</i> the most perfect, <i>The</i> <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_194" id="Page_194">194</a></span> <i>Murders in the Rue Morgue</i> + the most sensational. Then there are the tales upon scientific subjects or + displaying the pretence of scientific knowledge, where the narrator loves + to pose as a man without imagination and with "habits of rigid thought." + And there are tales of conscience, of which <i>The Black Cat</i> is the + most fearful and <i>William Wilson</i> the most subtle; and there are + landscape sketches and fantasies and extravaganzas, most of these poor + stuff. + </p> + <p> + It is ungrateful and perhaps unnecessary to dwell upon Poe's limitations. + His scornful glance caught certain aspects of the human drama with + camera-like precision. Other aspects of life, and nobler, he never seemed + to perceive. The human comedy sometimes moved him to laughter, but his + humor is impish and his wit malign. His imagination fled from the + daylight; he dwelt in the twilight among the tombs. He closed his eyes to + dream, and could not see the green sunlit earth, seed-time and harvest, + man going forth to his toil and returning to his hearthstone, the America + that laughs as it labors. He wore upon his finger the magic ring and the + genii did his bidding. But we could wish that the palaces they reared for + him were not in such a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" + id="Page_195">195</a></span> somber land, with such infernal lights + gleaming in their windows, and crowded with such horror-haunted forms. We + could wish that his imagination dealt less often with those primitive + terrors that belong to the childhood of our race. Yet when his spell is + upon us we lapse back by a sort of atavism into primal savagery and + shudder with a recrudescence of long forgotten fears. No doubt Poe was + ignorant of life, in the highest sense. He was caged in by his ignorance, + Yet he had beautiful dusky wings that bruised themselves against his + prison. + </p> + <p> + Poe was a tireless critic of his own work, and both his standards of + workmanship and his critical precepts have been of great service to his + careless countrymen. He turned out between four and five short stories a + year, was poorly paid for them, and indeed found difficulty in selling + them at all. Yet he was constantly correcting them for the better. His + best poems were likewise his latest. He was tantalized with the desire for + artistic perfection. He became the pathbreaker for a long file of men in + France, Italy, England, and America. He found the way and they brought + back the glory and the cash. + </p> + <p> + I have sometimes imagined Poe, with four other <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_196" id="Page_196">196</a></span> men and one woman, seated at + a dinner-table laid for six, and talking of their art and of themselves. + What would the others think of Poe? I fancy that Thackeray would chat with + him courteously, but would not greatly care for him. George Eliot, + woman-like, would pity him. Hawthorne would watch him with those + inscrutable eyes and understand him better than the rest. But Stevenson + would be immensely interested; he would begin an essay on Poe before he + went to sleep. And Mr. Kipling would look sharply at him: he has seen that + man before, in <i>The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows</i>. All of them would + find in him something to praise, a great deal to marvel at, and perhaps + not much to love. And the sensitive, shabby, lonely Poe—what would + he think of them? He might not care much for the other guests, but I think + he would say to himself with a thrill of pride: "I belong at this table." + And he does. + </p> + <p> + Walt Whitman, whom his friend O'Connor dubbed the "good gray poet," offers + a bizarre contrast to Edgar Allan Poe. There was nothing distinctively + American about Poe except his ingenuity; he had no interest in American + history or in American ideas; he was a timeless, placeless embodiment of + technical artistry. But Whitman <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" + id="Page_197">197</a></span> had a passion for his native soil; he was + hypnotized by the word America; he spent much of his mature life in + brooding over the question, "What, after all, is an American, and what + should an American poet be in our age of science and democracy?" It is + true that he was as untypical as Poe of the average citizen of "these + states." His personality is unique. In many respects he still baffles our + curiosity. He repels many of his countrymen without arousing the pity + which adds to their romantic interest in Poe. Whatever our literary + students may feel, and whatever foreign critics may assert, it must be + acknowledged that to the vast majority of American men and women "good old + Walt" is still an outsider. + </p> + <p> + Let us try to see first the type of mind with which we are dealing. It is + fundamentally religious, perceiving the unity and kinship and glory of all + created things. It is this passion of worship which inspired St. Francis + of Assisi's <i>Canticle to the Sun</i>. It cries, "Benedicite, Omnia opera + Domini: All ye Green Things upon the Earth, bless ye the Lord!" That is + the real motto for Whitman's <i>Leaves of Grass</i>. Like St. Francis, and + like his own immediate master, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman is a mystic. + He cannot argue the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">198</a></span> + ultimate questions; he asserts them. Instead of marshaling and sifting the + proofs for immortality, he chants "I know I am deathless." Like Emerson + again, Whitman shares that peculiarly American type of mysticism known as + Transcendentalism, but he came at the end of this movement instead of at + the beginning of it. In his Romanticism, likewise, he is an end of an era + figure. His affiliations with Victor Hugo are significant; and a volume of + Scott's poems which he owned at the age of sixteen became his + "inexhaustible mine and treasury for more than sixty years." Finally, and + quite as uncompromisingly as Emerson, Thoreau, and Poe, Whitman is an + individualist. He represents the assertive, Jacksonian period of our + national existence. In a thousand similes he makes a declaration of + independence for the separate person, the "single man" of Emerson's Phi + Beta Kappa address. "I wear my hat as I please, indoors and out." + Sometimes this is mere swagger. Sometimes it is superb. + </p> + <p> + So much for the type. Let us turn next to the story of Whitman's life. It + must here be told in the briefest fashion, for Whitman's own prose and + poetry relate the essentials of his biography. He was born on Long Island, + of New England and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">199</a></span> + Dutch ancestry, in 1819. Lowell, W. W. Story, and Charles A. Dana + were born in that year, as was also George Eliot. Whitman's father was a + carpenter, who "leaned to the Quakers." There were many children. When + little "Walt"—as he was called, to distinguish him from his father, + Walter—was four, the family moved to Brooklyn. The boy had scanty + schooling, and by the time he was twenty had tried type-setting, teaching, + and editing a country newspaper on Long Island. He was a big, dark-haired + fellow, sensitive, emotional, extraordinarily impressible. + </p> + <p> + The next sixteen years were full of happy vagrancy. At twenty-two he was + editing a paper in New York, and furnishing short stories to the <i>Democratic + Review</i>, a literary journal which numbered Bryant, Longfellow, + Whittier, Poe, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among its contributors. He wrote a + novel on temperance, "mostly in the reading-room of Tammany Hall," and + tried here and there an experiment in free verse. He was in love with the + pavements of New York and the Brooklyn ferry-boats, in love with Italian + opera and with long tramps over Long Island. He left his position on <i>The + Brooklyn Eagle</i> and wandered south to New Orleans. By and by he drifted + back <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">200</a></span> + to New York, tried lecturing, worked at the carpenter's trade with his + father, and brooded over a book—"a book of new things." + </p> + <p> + This was the famous <i>Leaves of Grass</i>. He set the type himself, in a + Brooklyn printing-office, and printed about eight hundred copies. The book + had a portrait of the author—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." + </p> + <p> + Until the Civil War was half over, Whitman remained in Brooklyn, patiently + composing new poems for successive printings of his book. Then he went to + the front to care for a wounded brother, and finally settled down in a + Washington garret <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">201</a></span> + to spend his strength as an army hospital nurse. He wrote <i>Drum Taps</i> + and other magnificent poems about the War, culminating in his threnody on + Lincoln's death, <i>When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloomed</i>. + Swinburne called this "the most sonorous nocturn ever chanted in the + church of the world." After the war had ended, Whitman stayed on in + Washington as a government clerk, and saw much of John Burroughs and W. D. + O'Connor. John Hay was a staunch friend. Some of the best known poets and + critics of England and the Continent now began to recognize his genius. + But his health had been permanently shattered by his heroic service as a + nurse, and in 1873 he suffered a paralytic stroke which forced him to + resign his position in Washington and remove to his brother's home in + Camden, New Jersey. + </p> + <p> + He was only fifty-four, but his best work was already done, and his + remaining years, until his death in 1892, were those of patient and serene + invalidism. He wrote some fascinating prose in this final period, and his + cluttered chamber in Camden became the shrine of many a literary pilgrim, + among them some of the foremost men of letters of this country and of + Europe. He was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">202</a></span> + cared for by loyal friends. Occasionally he appeared in public, a + magnificent gray figure of a man. And then, at seventy-three, the "Dark + mother always gliding near" enfolded him. + </p> + <p> + There are puzzling things in the physical and moral constitution of Walt + Whitman, and the obstinate questions involved in his theory of poetry and + in his actual poetical performance are still far from solution. But a few + points concerning him are by this time fairly clear. They must be swiftly + summarized. + </p> + <p> + The first obstacle to the popular acceptance of Walt Whitman is the + formlessness or alleged formlessness of <i>Leaves of Grass</i>. This is a + highly technical question, involving a more accurate notation than has + thus far been made of the patterns and tunes of free verse and of + emotional prose. Whitman's "new and national declamatory expression," as + he termed it, cannot receive a final technical valuation until we have + made more scientific progress in the analysis of rhythms. As regards the + contents of his verse, it is plain that he included much material unfused + and untransformed by emotion. These elements foreign to the nature of + poetry clog many of his lines. The enumerated objects in his catalogue or + inventory <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">203</a></span> + poems often remain inert objects only. Like many mystics, he was + hypnotized by external phenomena, and he often fails to communicate to his + reader the trance-like emotion which he himself experienced. This + imperfect transfusion of his material is a far more significant defect in + Whitman's poetry than the relatively few passages of unashamed sexuality + which shocked the American public in 1855. + </p> + <p> + The gospel or burden of <i>Leaves of Grass</i> is no more difficult of + comprehension than the general drift of Emerson's essays, which helped to + inspire it. The starting-point of the book is a mystical illumination + regarding the unity and blessedness of the universe, an insight passing + understanding, but based upon the revelatory experience of love. In the + light of this experience, all created things are recognized as divine. The + starting-point and center of the Whitman world is the individual man, the + "strong person," imperturbable in mind, athletic in body, unconquerable, + and immortal. Such individuals meet in comradeship, and pass together + along the open roads of the world. No one is excluded because of his + poverty or his sins; there is room in the ideal America for everybody + except the doubter and sceptic. Whitman does <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_204" id="Page_204">204</a></span> not linger over the smaller + groups of human society, like the family. He is not a fireside poet. He + passes directly from his strong persons, meeting freely on the open road, + to his conception of "these States." One of his typical visions of the + breadth and depth and height of America will be found in <i>By Blue + Ontario's Shore</i>. In this and in many similar rhapsodies Whitman holds + obstinately to what may be termed the three points of his national creed. + The first is the newness of America, and its expression is in his + well-known chant of <i>Pioneers, O Pioneers</i>. Yet this new America is + subtly related to the past; and in Whitman's later poems, such as <i>Passage + to India</i>, the spiritual kinship of orient and occident is emphasized. + The second article of the creed is the unity of America. Here he voices + the conceptions of Hamilton, Clay, Webster, and Lincoln. In spite of all + diversity in external aspects the republic is "one and indivisible." This + unity, in Whitman's view, was cemented forever by the issue of the Civil + War. Lincoln, the "Captain," dies indeed on the deck of the "victor ship," + but the ship comes into the harbor "with object won." Third and finally, + Whitman insists upon the solidarity of America with all countries of the + globe. Particularly in his <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" + id="Page_205">205</a></span> yearning and thoughtful old age, the poet + perceived that humanity has but one heart and that it should have but one + will. No American poet has ever prophesied so directly and powerfully + concerning the final issue involved in that World War which he did not + live to see. + </p> + <p> + Whitman, like Poe, had defects of character and defects of art. His life + and work raise many problems which will long continue to fascinate and to + baffle the critics. But after all of them have had their say, it will + remain true that he was a seer and a prophet, far in advance of his own + time, like Lincoln, and like Lincoln, an inspired interpreter of the soul + of this republic. + </p> + <hr /> + <div class="chapterhead"> + <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"></a> <a name="chap09" id="chap09"></a> + <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">206</a></span> + <br /><br /><br /> + <h2> + <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER IX.</a> + </h2> + </div> + <p class="chaptertitle"> + Union and Liberty + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + "<span class="smcap">There</span> is what I call the American idea," + declared Theodore Parker in the Anti-Slavery Convention of 1850. "This + idea demands, as the proximate organization thereof, a democracy—that + is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; + of course, a government on the principle of eternal justice, the + unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake, I will call it the idea of + Freedom." + </p> + <p> + These are noble words, and they are thought to have suggested a familiar + phrase of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, thirteen years later. Yet students + of literature, no less than students of politics, recognize the difficulty + of summarizing in words a national "idea." Precisely what was the Greek + "idea"? What is today the French "idea"? No single formula is adequate to + express such a complex of fact, theories, moods—not even <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">207</a></span> the famous + "Liberty, Fraternity, Equality." The existence of a truly national life + and literature presupposes a certain degree of unity, an integration of + race, language, political institutions, and social ideals. It is obvious + that this problem of national integration meets peculiar obstacles in the + United States. Divergencies of race, tradition, and social theory, and + clashing interests of different sections have been felt from the beginning + of the nation's life. There was well-nigh complete solidarity in the + single province of New England during a portion of the seventeenth + century, and under the leadership of the great Virginians there was + sufficient national fusion to make the Revolution successful. But early in + the nineteenth century, the opening of the new West, and the increasing + economic importance of Slavery as a peculiar institution of the South, + provoked again the ominous question of the possibility of an enduring + Union. From 1820 until the end of the Civil War, it was the chief + political issue of the United States. The aim of the present chapter is to + show how the theme of Union and Liberty affected our literature. + </p> + <p> + To appreciate the significance of this theme we must remind ourselves + again of what many persons <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" + id="Page_208">208</a></span> have called the civic note in our national + writing. Franklin exemplified it in his day. It is far removed from the + pure literary art of a Poe, a Hawthorne, a Henry James. It aims at action + rather than beauty. It seeks to persuade, to convince, to bring things to + pass. We shall observe it in the oratory of Clay and Webster, as they + pleaded for compromise; in the editorials of Garrison, a foe to compromise + and like Calhoun an advocate, if necessary, of disunion; in the + epoch-making novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe; in the speeches of Wendell + Phillips, in verse white-hot with political passion, and sermons blazing + with the fury of attack and defense of principles dear to the human heart. + We must glance, at least, at the lyrics produced by the war itself, and + finally, we shall observe how Abraham Lincoln, the inheritor of the ideas + of Jefferson, Clay, and Webster, perceives and maintains, in the noblest + tones of our civic speech, the sole conditions of our continuance as a + nation. + </p> + <p> + Let us begin with oratory, an American habit, and, as many besides Dickens + have thought, an American defect. We cannot argue that question adequately + here. It is sufficient to say that in the pioneer stages of our existence + oratory was necessary <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" + id="Page_209">209</a></span> as a stimulus to communal thought and + feeling. The speeches of Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams were as essential + to our winning independence as the sessions of statesmen and the armed + conflicts in the field. And in that new West which came so swiftly and + dramatically into existence at the close of the Revolution, the orator + came to be regarded as the normal type of intellectual leadership. The + stump grew more potent than schoolhouse and church and bench. + </p> + <p> + The very pattern, and, if one likes, the tragic victim of this + glorification of oratory was Henry Clay, "Harry of the West," the glamour + of whose name and the wonderful tones of whose voice became for a while a + part of the political system of the United States. Union and Liberty were + the master-passions of Clay's life, but the greater of these was Union. + The half-educated young immigrant from Virginia hazarded his career at the + outset by championing Anti-Slavery in the Kentucky Constitutional + Convention; the last notable act of his life was his successful + management, at the age of seventy-three, of the futile Compromise of 1850. + All his life long he fought for national issues; for the War of 1812, for + a protective tariff and an "American system," for the Missouri <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">210</a></span> Compromise + of 1820 as a measure for national safety; and he had plead generously for + the young South American republics and for struggling Greece. He had + become the perpetual candidate of his party for the Presidency, and had + gone down again and again in unforeseen and heart-rending defeat. Yet he + could say honorably: "If any one desires to know the leading and paramount + object of my public life, the preservation of this union will furnish him + the key." One could wish that the speeches of this fascinating American + were more readable today. They seem thin, facile, full of phrases—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; <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_211" id="Page_211">211</a></span> he has been too fond of + company, not enough alone; and has had few resources within himself." Were + the limitations of a typical oratorical temperament ever touched more + unerringly than in these words? + </p> + <p> + When Webster himself thundered, at the close of his reply to Hayne in + 1830, "Union <em>and</em> Liberty, now and forever, one and inseparable," + the words sank deeper into the consciousness of the American people than + any similar sentiment uttered by Henry Clay. For Webster's was the richer, + fuller nature, nurtured by "the great books of the past," brooding, as + Lincoln was to brood later, over the seemingly insoluble problem of + preserving a union of States half slave, half free. On the fateful seventh + of March, 1850, Webster, like Clay, cast the immense weight of his + personality and prestige upon the side of compromise. It was the ruin of + his political fortune, for the mood of the North was changing, and the + South preferred other candidates for the Presidency. Yet the worst that + can fairly be said against that speech today is that it lacked moral + imagination to visualize, as Mrs. Stowe was soon to visualize, the human + results of slavery. As a plea for the transcendent necessity of + maintaining the old Union it was consistent <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_212" id="Page_212">212</a></span> with Webster's whole + development of political thought. + </p> + <p> + What were the secrets of that power that held Webster's hearers literally + spellbound, and made the North think of him, after that alienation of + 1850, as a fallen angel? No one can say fully, for we touch here the + mysteries of personality and of the spoken word. But enough survives from + the Webster legend, from his correspondence and political and legal + oratory, to bring us into the presence of a superman. The dark Titan face, + painted by such masters as Carlyle, Hawthorne, and Emerson; the magical + voice, remembered now but by a few old men; the bodily presence, with its + leonine suggestion of sleepy power only half put forth—these aided + Webster to awe men or allure them into personal idolatry. Yet outside of + New England he was admired rather than loved. There is still universal + recognition of the mental capacity of this foremost lawyer and foremost + statesman of his time. He was unsurpassed in his skill for direct, simple, + limpid statement; but he could rise at will to a high Roman stateliness of + diction, a splendid sonorousness of cadence. His greatest public + appearances were in the Dartmouth College Case before the Supreme Court, + the Plymouth, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">213</a></span> + Bunker Hill, and Adams-Jefferson commemorative orations, the Reply to + Hayne, and the Seventh of March speeches in the Senate. Though he + exhibited in his private life something of the prodigal recklessness of + the pioneer, his mental operations were conservative, constructive. His + lifelong antagonist Calhoun declared that "The United States are not a + nation." Webster, in opposition to this theory of a confederation of + states, devoted his superb talents to the demonstration of the thesis that + the United States "<em>is</em>," not "are." Thus he came to be known as + the typical expounder of the Constitution. When he reached, in 1850, the + turning-point of his career, his countrymen knew by heart his personal and + political history, the New Hampshire boyhood and education, the rise to + mastery at the New England bar, the service in the House of + Representatives and the Senate and as Secretary of State. His speeches + were already in the schoolbooks, and for twenty years boys had been + declaiming his arguments against nullification. He had helped to teach + America to think and to feel. Indeed it was through his oratory that many + of his fellow-citizens had gained their highest conception of the beauty, + the potency, and the dignity of human <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_214" id="Page_214">214</a></span> speech. And in truth he never + exhibited his logical power and demonstrative skill more superbly than in + the plea of the seventh of March for the preservation of the <i>status quo</i>, + for the avoidance of mutual recrimination between North and South, for + obedience to the law of the land. It was his supreme effort to reconcile + an irreconcilable situation. + </p> + <p> + It failed, as we know. Whittier, Emerson, Theodore Parker, and indeed most + of the voters of New England, believed that Webster had bartered his + private convictions in the hope of securing the Presidential nomination in + 1852. They assailed him savagely, and Webster died, a broken man, in the + autumn of the Presidential year. "I have given my life to law and + politics," he wrote to Professor Silliman. "Law is uncertain and politics + are utterly vain." The dispassionate judgment of the present hour frees + him from the charge of conscious treachery to principle. He was rather a + martyr to his own conception of the obligations imposed by nationality. + When these obligations run counter to human realities, the theories of + statesmen must give way. Emerson could not refute that logic of Webster's + argument for the Fugitive Slave Law, but he could at least record <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">215</a></span> in his + private <i>Journal</i>: "<em>I will not obey it, by God!</em>" So said + hundreds of thousands of obscure men in the North, but Webster did not or + could not hear them. + </p> + <p> + While no other orator of that period was so richly endowed as Daniel + Webster, the struggle for Union and Liberty enlisted on both sides many + eloquent men. John C. Calhoun's acute, ingenious, masterly political + theorizing can still be studied in speeches that have lost little of their + effectiveness through the lapse of time. The years have dealt roughly with + Edward Everett, once thought to be the pattern of oratorical gifts and + graces. In commemorative oratory, indeed, he ranked with Webster, but the + dust is settling upon his learned and ornate pages. Rufus Choate, another + conservative Whig in politics, and a leader, like Wirt and Pinkney, at the + bar, had an exotic, almost Oriental fancy, a gorgeousness of diction, and + an intensity of emotion unrivaled among his contemporaries. His Dartmouth + College eulogy of Webster in 1853 shows him at his best. The Anti-Slavery + orators, on the other hand, had the advantage of a specific moral issue in + which they led the attack. Wendell Phillips was the most polished, the + most consummate in his air of informality, <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_216" id="Page_216">216</a></span> and his example did much to + puncture the American tradition of high-flown oratory. He was an expert in + virulent denunciation, passionately unfair beneath his mask of + conversational decorum, an aristocratic demagogue. He is still distrusted + and hated by the Brahmin class of his own city, still adored by the + children and grandchildren of slaves. Charles Sumner, like Edward Everett, + seems sinking into popular oblivion, in spite of the statues and portraits + and massive volumes of erudite and caustic and high-minded orations. He + may be seen at his best in such books as Longfellow's <i>Journal and + Correspondence</i> and the <i>Life and Letters</i> of George Ticknor. + There one has a pleasant picture of a booklover, traveler, and friend. But + in his public speech he was arrogant, unsympathetic, domineering. "Sumner + is my idea of a bishop," said Lincoln tentatively. There are bishops and + bishops, however, and if Henry Ward Beecher, whom Lincoln and hosts of + other Americans admired, had only belonged to the Church of England, what + an admirable Victorian bishop he might have made! Perhaps his best service + to the cause of union was rendered by his speeches in England, where he + fairly mobbed the mob and won them by his wit, courage, and by <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">217</a></span> his appeal + to the instinct of fair play. Beecher's oratory, in and out of the pulpit, + was temperamental, sentimental in the better sense, and admirably human in + all its instincts. He had an immense following, not only in political and + humanitarian fields, but as a lovable type of the everyday American who + can say undisputed things not only solemnly, if need be, but by preference + with an infectious smile. The people who loved Mr. Beecher are the people + who understand Mr. Bryan. + </p> + <p> + Foremost among the journalists of the great debate were William Lloyd + Garrison and Horace Greeley. Garrison was a perfect example of the + successful journalist as described by Zola—the man who keeps on + pounding at a single idea until he has driven it into the head of the + public. Everyone knows at least the sentence from his salutatory editorial + in <i>The Liberator</i> on January 1, 1831: "I am in earnest—I will + not retreat a single inch—<i>And I will be heard</i>." He kept this + vow, and he also kept the accompanying and highly characteristic promise: + "I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this + subject, I do not wish to think, or write, or speak, with moderation." But + there would be little political literature <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_218" id="Page_218">218</a></span> in the world if its + production were entrusted to the moderate type of man, and the files of <i>The + Liberator</i>, though certainly harsh and full of all uncharitableness + towards slave-owners, make excellent reading for the twentieth century + American who perceives that in spite of the triumph of emancipation, in + which Garrison had his fair share of glory, many aspects of our + race-problem remain unsolved. Horace Greeley, the founder and editor of + the <i>New York Tribune</i>, was a farmer's boy who learned early to speak + and write the vocabulary of the plain people. Always interested in new + ideas, even in Transcendentalism and Fourierism, his courage and energy + and journalistic vigor gave him leadership in the later phases of the + movement for enfranchisement. He did not hesitate to offer unasked advice + to Lincoln on many occasions, and Lincoln enriched our literature by his + replies. Greeley had his share of faults and fatuities, but in his best + days he had an impressively loyal following among both rural and city-bred + readers of his paper, and he remains one of the best examples of that + obsolescent personal journalism which is destined to disappear under + modern conditions of newspaper production. Readers really used to care for + "what Greeley said" and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" + id="Page_219">219</a></span> "Dana said" and "Sam Bowles said," and all of + these men, with scores of others, have left their stamp upon the phrases + and the tone of our political writing. + </p> + <p> + In the concrete issue of Slavery, however, it must be admitted that the + most remarkable literary victory was scored, not by any orator or + journalist, but by an almost unknown little woman, the author of <i>Uncle + Tom's Cabin</i>. No American novel has had so curious a history and so + great or so immediate an influence in this country and in Europe. In spite + of all that has been written about it, its author's purpose is still + widely misunderstood, particularly in the South, and the controversy over + this one epoch-making novel has tended to obscure the literary reputation + which Mrs. Stowe won by her other books. + </p> + <p> + Harriet Beecher, the daughter and the sister of famous clergymen, was born + in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1811. For seventeen years, from 1832 to + 1849, she lived in the border city of Cincinnati, within sight of slave + territory, and in daily contact with victims of the slave system. While + her sympathies, like those of her father Lyman Beecher, were anti-slavery, + she was not an Abolitionist in the Garrisonian sense of that word. At + twenty-five <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">220</a></span> + she had married a widowed professor, Calvin Stowe, to whom she bore many + children. She had written a few sketches of New England life, and her + family thought her a woman of genius. Such was the situation in the winter + of 1849-1850, when the Stowes migrated to Brunswick, Maine, where the + husband had been appointed to a chair at Bowdoin. Pitiably poor, and + distracted by household cares which she had to face single-handed—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." + </p> + <p> + <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i>, begun in the spring of 1850, was a woman's + answer to Webster's seventh of March speech. Its object was plainly stated + to be "to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race; to show, their + wrongs and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as to + defeat and do away the good effects of all that can be attempted for them, + by their best friends under <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" + id="Page_221">221</a></span> it." The book was permeated with what we now + call the 1848 anti-aristocratic sentiment, the direct heritage of the + French Revolution. "There is a <i>dies irœ</i> coming on, sooner or + later," admits St. Clare in the story. "The same thing is working, in + Europe, in England, and in this country." There was no sectional hostility + in Mrs. Stowe's heart. "The people of the free states have defended, + encouraged, and participated [in slavery]; and are more guilty for it, + before God, than the South, in that they have <em>not</em> the apology of + education or custom. If the mothers of the free states had all felt as + they should in times past, the sons of the free states would not have been + the holders, and proverbially the hardest masters, of slaves; the sons of + the free states would not have connived at the extension of slavery in our + national body." "Your book is going to be the great pacificator," wrote a + friend of Mrs. Stowe; "it will unite North and South." But the distinctly + Christian and fraternal intention of the book was swiftly forgotten in the + storm of controversy that followed its appearance. It had been written + hastily, fervidly, in the intervals of domestic toil at Brunswick, had + been printed as a serial in <i>The National Era</i> without attracting + much attention, and was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" + id="Page_222">222</a></span> issued in book form in March, 1852. Its + sudden and amazing success was not confined to this country. The story ran + in three Paris newspapers at once, was promptly dramatized, and has held + the stage in France ever since. It was placed upon the <i>Index</i> in + Italy, as being subversive of established authority. Millions of copies + were sold in Europe, and <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i>, more than any other + cause, held the English working men in sympathy with the North in the + English cotton crisis of our Civil War. + </p> + <p> + It is easy to see the faults of this masterpiece and impossible not to + recognize its excellencies. "If our art has not scope enough to include a + book of this kind," said Madame George Sand, "we had better stretch the + terms of our art a little." For the book proved to be, as its author had + hoped, a "living dramatic reality." Topsy, Chloe, Sam and Andy, Miss + Ophelia and Legree are alive. Mrs. St. Clare might have been one of + Balzac's indolent, sensuous women. Uncle Tom himself is a bit too good to + be true, and readers no longer weep over the death of little Eva—nor, + for that matter, over the death of Dickens's little Nell. There is some + melodrama, some religiosity, and there are some absurd recognition scenes + at the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">223</a></span> + close. Nevertheless with an instinctive genius which Zola would have + envied, Mrs. Stowe embodies in men and women the vast and ominous system + of slavery. All the tragic forces of necessity, blindness, sacrifice, and + retribution are here: neither Shelby, nor Eliza, nor the tall Kentuckian + who aids her, nor John Bird, nor Uncle Tom himself in the final act of his + drama, can help himself. For good or evil they are the products and + results of the system; and yet they have and they give the illusion of + volition. + </p> + <p> + Mrs. Stowe lived to write many another novel and short story, among them + <i>Dred</i>, <i>The Minister's Wooing</i>, <i>Oldtown Folks</i>, <i>Oldtown + Fireside Stories</i>. In the local short story she deserves the honors due + to one of the pioneers, and her keen affectionate observation, her humor, + and her humanity, would have given her a literary reputation quite + independent of her masterpiece. But she is likely to pay the penalty of + that astounding success, and to go down to posterity as the author of a + single book. She would not mind this fate. + </p> + <p> + The poetry of the idea of Freedom and of the sectional struggle which was + necessary before that idea could be realized in national policy is on the + whole not commensurate with the significance of <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_224" id="Page_224">224</a></span> the issue itself. Any + collection of American political verse produced during this period + exhibits spirited and sincere writing, but the combination of mature + literary art and impressive general ideas is comparatively rare. There are + single poems of Whittier, Lowell, and Whitman which meet every test of + effective political and social verse, but the main body of poetry, both + sectional and national, written during the thirty years ending with 1865 + lacks breadth, power, imaginative daring. The continental spaciousness and + energy which foreign critics thought they discovered in Whitman is not + characteristic of our poetry as a whole. Victor Hugo and Shelley and + Swinburne have written far more magnificent republican poetry than ours. + The passion for freedom has been very real upon this side of the Atlantic; + it pulsed in the local loyalty of the men who sang <i>Dixie</i> as well as + in their antagonists who chanted <i>John Brown's Body</i> and <i>The + Battle Hymn of the Republic</i>; but this passion has not yet lifted and + ennobled any notable mass of American verse. Even the sentiment of union + was more adequately voiced in editorials and sermons and orations, even in + a short story—Edward Everett Hale's <i>Man Without a Country</i>—than + by most of the poets who attempted to glorify that theme. + </p> + <p> + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">225</a></span> + Nevertheless the verse of these thirty years is rich in provincial and + sectional loyalties. It has earnestness and pathos. We have, indeed, no + adequate national anthem, even yet, for neither the words nor the music of + <i>The Star-Spangled Banner</i> fully express what we feel while we are + trying to sing it, as the <i>Marseillaise</i>, for example, does express + the very spirit of revolutionary republicanism. But in true pioneer + fashion we get along with a makeshift until something better turns up. The + lyric and narrative verse of the Civil War itself was great in quantity, + and not more inferior in quality than the war verse of other nations has + often proved to be when read after the immediate occasion for it has + passed. Single lyrics by Timrod and Paul Hayne, Boker, H. H. + Brownell, Read, Stedman, and other men are still full of fire. Yet Mrs. + Howe's <i>Battle Hymn</i>, scribbled hastily in the gray dawn, + interpreted, as no other lyric of the war quite succeeded in interpreting, + the mystical glory of sacrifice for Freedom. Soldiers sang it in camp; + women read it with tears; children repeated it in school, vaguely but + truly perceiving in it, as their fathers had perceived in Webster's <i>Reply + to Hayne</i> thirty years before, the idea of union made "simple, + sensuous, passionate." No American <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" + id="Page_226">226</a></span> poem has had a more dramatic and intense life + in the quick breathing imagination of men. + </p> + <p> + More and more, however, the instinct of our people is turning to the words + of Abraham Lincoln as the truest embodiment in language, as his life was + the truest embodiment in action, of our national ideal. It is a curious + reversal of contemporary judgments that thus discovers in the homely + phrases of a frontier lawyer the most perfect literary expression of the + deeper spirit of his time. "How knoweth this man letters, having never + learned?" asked the critical East. The answer is that he had learned in a + better school than the East afforded. The story of Lincoln's life is + happily too familiar to need retelling here, but some of the elements in + his growth in the mastery of speech may at least be summarized. + </p> + <p> + Lincoln had a slow, tireless mind, capable of intense concentration. It + was characteristic of him that he rarely took notes when trying a law + case, saying that the notes distracted his attention. When his partner + Herndon was asked when Lincoln had found time to study out the + constitutional history of the United States, Herndon expressed the opinion + that it was when Lincoln was lying on his back on the office sofa, + apparently <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">227</a></span> + watching the flies upon the ceiling. This combination of bodily repose + with intense mental and spiritual activity is familiar to those who have + studied the biography of some of the great mystics. Walter Pater pointed + it out in the case of Wordsworth. + </p> + <p> + In recalling the poverty and restriction of Lincoln's boyhood and his + infrequent contact with schoolhouses, it is well to remember that he + managed nevertheless to read every book within twenty miles of him. These + were not many, it is true, but they included <i>The Bible</i>, <i>Æesop's + Fables</i>, <i>Pilgrim's Progress</i>, <i>Robinson Crusoe</i>, and, a + little later, Burns and Shakespeare. Better food than this for the mind of + a boy has never been found. Then he came to the history of his own country + since the Declaration of Independence and mastered it. "I am tolerably + well acquainted with the history of the country," he remarked in his + Chicago speech of 1858; and in the Cooper Union speech of 1860 he + exhibited a familiarity with the theory and history of the Constitution + which amazed the young lawyers who prepared an annotated edition of the + address. "He has wit, facts, dates," said Douglas, in extenuation of his + own disinclination to enter upon the famous joint debates, and, when + Douglas <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">228</a></span> + returned to Washington after the debates were over, he confessed to the + young Henry Watterson that "he is the greatest debater I have ever met, + either here or anywhere else." Douglas had won the senatorship and could + afford to be generous, but he knew well enough that his opponent's facts + and dates had been unanswerable. Lincoln's mental grip, indeed, was the + grip of a born wrestler. "I've got him," he had exclaimed toward the end + of the first debate, and the Protean Little Giant, as Douglas was called, + had turned and twisted in vain, caught by "that long-armed creature from + Illinois." He could indeed win the election of 1858, but he had been + forced into an interpretation of the Dred Scott decision which cost him + the Presidency in 1860. + </p> + <p> + Lincoln's keen interest in words and definitions, his patience in + searching the dictionary, is known to every student of his life. Part of + his singular discrimination in the use of language is due to his legal + training, but his style was never professionalized. Neither did it have + anything of that frontier glibness and banality which was the curse of + popular oratory in the West and South. Words were weapons in the hands of + this self-taught fighter for ideas: he kept their edges sharp, and <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">229</a></span> could if + necessary use them with deadly accuracy. He framed the "Freeport dilemma" + for the unwary feet of Douglas as cunningly as a fox-hunter lays his trap. + "Gentlemen," he had said of an earlier effort, "Judge Douglas informed you + that this speech of mine was probably carefully prepared. <em>I admit that + it was.</em>" + </p> + <p> + The story, too, was a weapon of attack and defense for this master + fabulist. Sometimes it was a readier mode of argument than any syllogism; + sometimes it gave him, like the traditional diplomatist's pinch of snuff, + an excuse for pausing while he studied his adversary or made up his own + mind; sometimes, with the instinct of a poetic soul, he invented a parable + and gravely gave it a historic setting "over in Sangamon County." For + although upon his intellectual side the man was a subtle and severe + logician, on his emotional side he was a lover of the concrete and human. + He was always, like John Bunyan, dreaming and seeing "a man" who + symbolized something apposite to the occasion. Thus even his invented + stories aided his marvelous capacity for statement, for specific + illustration of a general law. Lincoln's destiny was to be that of an + explainer, at first to a local audience in store or tavern or courtroom, + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">230</a></span> then + to upturned serious faces of Illinois farmers who wished to hear national + issues made clear to them, then to a listening nation in the agony of + civil war, and ultimately to a world which looks to Lincoln as an exponent + and interpreter of the essence of democracy. + </p> + <p> + As the audience increased, the style took on beauty and breadth, as if the + man's soul were looking through wider and wider windows at the world. But + it always remained the simplest of styles. In an offhand reply to a + serenade by an Indiana regiment, or in answering a visiting deputation of + clergymen at the White House, Lincoln could summarize and clarify a + complicated national situation with an ease and orderliness and + fascination that are the despair of professional historians. He never + wasted a word. "Go to work is the only cure for your case," he wrote to + John D. Johnston. There are ten words in that sentence and none of over + four letters. The <i>Gettysburg Address</i> contains but two hundred and + seventy words, in ten sentences. "It is a flat failure," said Lincoln + despondently; but Edward Everett, who had delivered "the" oration of that + day, wrote to the President: "I should be glad if I could flatter myself + that I came as near to the central idea of <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_231" id="Page_231">231</a></span> the occasion in two hours as + you did in two minutes." Today the <i>Address</i> reads as if Lincoln knew + that it would ultimately be stamped in bronze. + </p> + <p> + Yet the real test of Lincoln's supremacy in our distinctly civic + literature lies not so much in his skill in the manipulation of language, + consummate as that was, but rather in those large elements of his nature + which enabled him to perceive the true quality and ideal of American + citizenship and its significance to the world. There was melancholy in + that nature, else there had been a less rich humor; there was mysticism + and a sense of religion which steadily deepened as his responsibilities + increased. There was friendliness, magnanimity, pity for the sorrowful, + patience for the slow of brain and heart, and an expectation for the + future of humanity which may best be described in the old phrase "waiting + for the Kingdom of God." His recurrent dream of the ship coming into port + under full sail, which preluded many important events in his own life—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." + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">232</a></span> + "That is the real issue," he had declared in closing the debates with + Douglas; "that is the issue that will continue in this country when these + poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the + eternal struggle between these two principles—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." + </p> + <p> + For this representative Anglo-Saxon man, developed under purely American + conditions, maturing slowly, keeping close to facts, dying, like the old + English saint, while he was "still learning," had none of the typical + hardness and selfishness of the Anglo-Saxon. A brooder and idealist, he + was one of those "prophetic souls of the wide world dreaming on things to + come," with sympathies and imagination that reached out beyond the + immediate urgencies of his race and nation to comprehend the universal + task and discipline of the sons of men. In true fraternity and democracy + this Westerner was not only far in advance of his own day, but he is also + far in advance of ours which raises statues to his memory. Yet he was used + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">233</a></span> to + loneliness and to the long view, and even across the welter of the World + War of the twentieth century Lincoln would be tall enough to see that ship + coming into the harbor under full sail. + </p> + <hr /> + <div class="chapterhead"> + <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"></a> <a name="chap10" id="chap10"></a> + <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">234</a></span> + <br /><br /><br /> + <h2> + <a href="#Contents">CHAPTER X.</a> + </h2> + </div> + <p class="chaptertitle"> + A New Nation + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + <span class="smcap">The</span> changes that have come over the inner + spirit and the outward expression of American life since Lincoln's day are + enough to startle the curiosity of the dullest observer. Yet they have + been accomplished within the lifetime of a single man of letters. The + author of one of the many campaign biographies of Lincoln in 1860 was + William Dean Howells, then an Ohio journalist of twenty-three. In 1917, at + the age of eighty, Mr. Howells is still adding to his long row of charming + and memorable books. Every phase of American writing since the middle of + the last century has fallen under the keen and kindly scrutiny of this + loyal follower of the art of literature. As producer, editor, critic, and + friend of the foremost writers of his epoch, Mr. Howells has known the + books of our new national era as no one else could have known them. Some + future historian of the period may <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" + id="Page_235">235</a></span> piece together, from no other sources than + Mr. Howells's writings, an unrivaled picture of our book-making during + more than sixty years. All that the present historian can attempt is to + sketch with bungling fingers a few men and a few tendencies which seem to + characterize the age. + </p> + <p> + One result of the Civil War was picturesquely set forth in Emerson's <i>Journal</i>. + The War had unrolled a map of the Union, he said, and hung it in every + man's house. There was a universal shifting of attention, if not always + from the province or section to the image of the nation itself, at least a + shift of focus from one section to another. The clash of arms had meant + many other things besides the triumph of Union and the freedom of the + slaves. It had brought men from every state into rude jostling contact + with one another and had developed a new social and human curiosity. It + may serve as another illustration of Professor Shaler's law of tension and + release. The one overshadowing issue which had absorbed so much thought + and imagination and energy had suddenly disappeared. Other shadows were to + gather, of course. Reconstruction of the South was one of them, and the + vast economic and industrial changes that followed the opening of the New + West were to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">236</a></span> + bring fresh problems almost as intricate as the question of slavery had + been. But for the moment no one thought of these things. The South + accepted defeat as superbly as she had fought, and began to plough once + more. The jubilant North went back to work—to build transcontinental + railroads, to organize great industries, and to create new states. + </p> + <p> + The significant American literature of the first decade after the close of + the War is not in the books dealing directly with themes involved in the + War itself. It is rather the literature of this new release of energy, the + new curiosity as to hitherto unknown sections, the new humor and romance. + Fred Lewis Pattee, the author of an admirable <i>History of American + Literature since 1870</i>, uses scarcely too strong a phrase when he + entitles this period "The Second Discovery of America"; and he quotes + effectively from Mark Twain, who was himself one of these discoverers: + "The eight years in America from 1860 to 1868 uprooted institutions that + were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the + social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire + national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or + three generations." + </p> + <p> + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">237</a></span> Let + us begin with the West, and with that joyous stage-coach journey of young + Samuel L. Clemens across the plains to Nevada in 1861, which he describes + in <i>Roughing It</i>. Who was this Argonaut of the new era, and what + makes him representative of his countrymen in the epoch of release? Born + in Missouri in 1835, the son of an impractical emigrant from Virginia, the + youth had lived from his fourth until his eighteenth year on the banks of + the Mississippi. He had learned the printer's trade, had wandered east and + back again, had served for four years as a river-pilot on the Mississippi, + and had tried to enter the Confederate army. Then came the six crowded + years, chiefly as newspaper reporter, in the boom times of Nevada and + California. His fame began with the publication in New York in 1867 of <i>The + Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County</i>. A newspaper now sent him + to Europe to record "what he sees with his own eyes." He did so in <i>Innocents + Abroad</i>, and his countrymen shouted with laughter. This, then, was + "Europe" after all—another "fake" until this shrewd river-pilot who + signed himself "Mark Twain" took its soundings! Then came a series of far + greater books—<i>Roughing It</i>, <i>Life on the Mississippi</i>, <i>The + Gilded Age</i> (in collaboration), <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" + id="Page_238">238</a></span> and <i>Tom Sawyer</i> and <i>Huckleberry Finn</i>—books + that make our American <i>Odyssey</i>, rich in the spirit of romance and + revealing the magic of the great river as no other pages can ever do + again. Gradually Mark Twain became a public character; he retrieved on the + lecture platform the loss of a fortune earned by his books; he enjoyed his + honorary D. Litt. from Oxford University. Every reader of American + periodicals came to recognize the photographs of that thick shock of hair, + those heavy eyebrows, the gallant drooping little figure, the striking + clothes, the inevitable cigar: all these things seemed to go with the part + of professional humorist, to be like the caressing drawl of Mark's voice. + The force of advertisement could no further go. But at bottom he was far + other than a mere maker of boisterous jokes for people with frontier + preferences in humor. He was a passionate, chivalric lover of things fair + and good, although too honest to pretend to see beauty and goodness where + he could not personally detect them—and an equally passionate hater + of evil. Read <i>The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg</i> and <i>The + Mysterious Stranger</i>. In his last years, torn by private sorrows, he + turned as black a philosophical pessimist as we have bred. He died at + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">239</a></span> his + new country seat in Connecticut in 1910. Mr. Paine has written his life in + three great volumes, and there is a twenty-five volume edition of his <i>Works</i>. + </p> + <p> + All the evidence seems to be in. Yet the verdict of the public seems not + quite made up. It is clear that Mark Twain the writer of romance is + gaining upon Mark Twain the humorist. The inexhaustible American appetite + for frontier types of humor seizes upon each new variety, crunches it with + huge satisfaction, and then tosses it away. John Phoenix, Josh Billings, + Jack Downing, Bill Arp, Petroleum V. Nasby, Artemus Ward, Bill Nye—these + are already obsolescent names. If Clemens lacked something of Artemus + Ward's whimsical delicacy and of Josh Billings's tested human wisdom, he + surpassed all of his competitors in a certain rude, healthy masculinity, + the humor of river and mining-camp and printing-office, where men speak + without censorship. His country-men liked exaggeration, and he + exaggerated; they liked irreverence, and he had turned iconoclast in <i>Innocents + Abroad</i>. As a professional humorist, he has paid the obligatory tax for + his extravagance, over-emphasis, and undisciplined taste, but such faults + are swiftly forgotten when one turns <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_240" id="Page_240">240</a></span> to Huckleberry Finn and the + negro Jim and Pudd'nhead Wilson, when one feels Mark Twain's power in + sheer description and episode, his magic in evoking landscape and + atmosphere, his blazing scorn at injustice and cruelty, his contempt for + quacks. + </p> + <p> + Bret Harte, another discoverer of the West, wears less well than Mark + Twain as a personal figure, but has a sure place in the evolution of the + American short story, and he did for the mining-camps of California what + Clemens wrought for the Mississippi River: he became their profane poet. + Yet he was never really of them. He was the clever outsider, with a + prospector's eye, looking for literary material, and finding a whole rich + mine of it—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 <i>The Overland Monthly</i>, he wrote the short <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">241</a></span> story + which was destined to make him famous in the East and to release him from + California forever. It was <i>The Luck of Roaring Camp</i>. He had been + writing romantic sketches in prose and verse for years; he had steeped + himself in Dickens, like everybody else in the eighteen-sixties; and now + he saw his pay-gravel shining back into his own shining eyes. It was a + pocket, perhaps, rather than a lead, but Bret Harte worked to the end of + his career this material furnished by the camps, this method of the short + story. He never returned to California after his joyous exit in 1871. For + a few years he tried living in New York, but from 1878 until his death in + 1902 Bret Harte lived in Europe, still turning out California stories for + an English and American public which insisted upon that particular + pattern. + </p> + <p> + That the pattern was arbitrary, theatrical, sentimental, somewhat + meretricious in design, in a word insincere like its inventor, has been + repeated at due intervals ever since 1868. The charge is true; yet it is + far from the whole truth concerning Bret Harte's artistry. In mastery of + the technique of the short story he is fairly comparable with Poe, though + less original, for it was Poe who formulated, when Bret Harte was a child + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">242</a></span> of + six, the well-known theory of the unity of effect of the brief tale. This + unity Harte secured through a simplification, often an insulation, of his + theme, the omission of quarreling details, an atmosphere none the less + novel for its occasional theatricality, and characters cunningly modulated + to the one note they were intended to strike. <i>Tennessee's Partner</i>, + <i>The Outcast of Poker Flat</i>, and all the rest are triumphs of + selective skill—as bright nuggets as ever glistened in the pan at + the end of a hard day's labor. That they do not adequately represent the + actual California of the fifties, as old Californians obstinately insist, + is doubtless true, but it is beside the point. Here is no Tolstoi painting + the soul of his race in a few pages: Harte is simply a disciple of Poe and + Dickens, turning the Poe construction trick gracefully, with Dickensy + characters and consistently romantic action. + </p> + <p> + The West has been rediscovered many a time since that decade which + witnessed the first literary bonanza of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. It will + continue to be discovered, in its fresh sources of appeal to the + imagination, as long as Plains and Rockies and Coast endure, as long as + there is any glow upon a distant horizon. It is <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_243" id="Page_243">243</a></span> not places that lose romantic + interest: the immemorial English counties and the Bay of Naples offer + themselves freely to the artist, generation after generation. What is lost + is the glamour of youth, the specific atmosphere of a given historical + epoch. Colonel W. F. Cody ("Buffalo Bill") has typified to millions + of American boys the great period of the Plains, with its Indian fighting, + its slaughter of buffaloes, its robbing of stage-coaches, its superb + riders etched against the sky. But the Wild West was retreating, even in + the days of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. The West of the cowboys, as + Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister knew it and wrote of it in the eighties + and nineties, has disappeared, though it lives on in fiction and on the + screen. + </p> + <p> + Jack London, born in California in 1876, was forced to find his West in + Alaska—and in alcohol. He was what he and his followers liked to + call the virile or red-blooded type, responsive to the "Call of the Wild," + "living life naked and tensely." In his talk Jack London was simple and + boyish, with plenty of humor over his own literary and social foibles. His + books are very uneven, but he wrote many a hard-muscled, clean-cut page. + If the Bret Harte theory of the West was that each man is at <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">244</a></span> bottom a + sentimentalist, Jack London's formula was that at bottom every man is a + brute. Each theory gave provender enough for a short-story writer to carry + on his back, but is hardly adequate, by itself, for a very long voyage + over human life. + </p> + <p> + "Joaquin" (Cincinnatus Heine) Miller, who was born in 1841 and died in + 1913, had even less of a formula for the West than Jack London. He was a + word-painter of its landscapes, a rider over its surfaces. Cradled "in a + covered wagon pointing West," mingling with wild frontier life from Alaska + to Nicaragua, miner, Indian fighter, hermit, poseur in London and + Washington, then hermit again in California, the author of <i>Songs of the + Sierras</i> at least knew his material. Byron, whom he adored and + imitated, could have invented nothing more romantic than Joaquin's life; + but though Joaquin inherited Scotch intensity, he had nothing of the close + mental grip of the true Scot and nothing of his humor. Vast stretches of + his poetry are empty; some of it is grandiose, elemental, and yet somehow + artificial, as even the Grand Canyon itself looks at certain times. + </p> + <p> + John Muir, another immigrant Scot who reached California in 1868, had far + more stuff in him than Joaquin Miller. He had studied geology, botany, + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">245</a></span> and + chemistry at the new University of Wisconsin, and then for years turned + explorer of forests, peaks, and glaciers, not writing, at first, except in + his <i>Journal</i>, but forever absorbing and worshiping sublimity and + beauty with no thought of literary schemes. Yet his every-day talk about + his favorite trees and glaciers had more of the glow of poetry in it than + any talk I have ever heard from men of letters, and his books and <i>Journal</i> + will long perpetuate this thrilling sense of personal contact with wild, + clean, uplifted things—blossoms in giant tree-tops and snow-eddies + blowing round the shoulders of Alaskan peaks. Here is a West as far above + Jack London's and Frank Norris's as the snow-line is higher than the + jungle. + </p> + <p> + The rediscovery of the South was not so much an exploration of fresh or + forgotten geographical territory, as it was a new perception of the + romantic human material offered by a peculiar civilization. Political and + social causes had long kept the South in isolation. A few writers like + Wirt, Kennedy, Longstreet, Simms, had described various aspects of its + life with grace or vivacity, but the best picture of colonial Virginia had + been drawn, after all, by Thackeray, who had merely read about it in + books. Visitors like Fanny Kemble and <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_246" id="Page_246">246</a></span> Frederick Law Olmsted + sketched the South of the mid-nineteenth century more vividly than did the + sons of the soil. There was no real literary public in the South for a + native writer like Simms. He was as dependent upon New York and the + Northern market as a Virginian tobacco-planter of 1740 had been upon + London. But within a dozen years after the close of the War and + culminating in the eighteen-nineties, there came a rich and varied harvest + of Southern writing, notably in the field of fiction. The public for these + stories, it is true, was still largely in the North and West, and it was + the magazines and publishing-houses of New York and Boston that gave the + Southern authors their chief stimulus and support. It was one of the happy + proofs of the solidarity of the new nation. + </p> + <p> + The romance of the Spanish and French civilization of New Orleans, as + revealed in Mr. Cable's fascinating <i>Old Creole Days</i>, was + recognized, not as something merely provincial in its significance, but as + contributing to the infinitely variegated pattern of our national life. + Irwin Russell, Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas Nelson Page portrayed in + verse and prose the humorous, pathetic, unique traits of the Southern + negro, a type hitherto <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" + id="Page_247">247</a></span> chiefly sketched in caricature or by + strangers. Page, Hopkinson Smith, Grace King, and a score of other artists + began to draw affectionate pictures of the vanished Southern mansion of + plantation days, when all the women were beautiful and all the men were + brave, when the very horses were more spirited and the dogs lazier and the + honeysuckles sweeter and the moonlight more entrancing than today. Miss + Murfree ("C. E. Craddock") charmed city-dwellers and country-folk + alike by her novels of the Tennessee mountains. James Lane Allen painted + lovingly the hemp-fields and pastures of Kentucky. American magazines of + the decade from 1880 to 1890 show the complete triumph of dialect and + local color, and this movement, so full of interest to students of the + immense divergence of American types, owed much of its vitality to the + talent of Southern writers. + </p> + <p> + But the impulse spread far beyond the South. Early in the seventies Edward + Eggleston wrote <i>The Hoosier Schoolmaster</i> and <i>The Circuit Rider</i>, + faithful and moving presentations of genuine pioneer types which were + destined to pass with the frontier settlements. Soon James Whitcomb Riley + was to sing of the next generation of Hoosiers, who frequented <i>The Old + Swimmin' Hole</i> and rejoiced <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" + id="Page_248">248</a></span> <i>When the Frost is on the Punkin</i>. It + was the era of Denman Thompson's plays, <i>Joshua Whitcomb</i> and <i>The + Old Homestead</i>. Both the homely and the exotic marched under this + banner of local color: Hamlin Garland presented Iowa barnyards and + cornfields, Helen Hunt Jackson dreamed the romance of the Mission Indian + in <i>Ramona</i>, and Lafcadio Hearn, Irish and Greek by blood, resident + of New Orleans and not yet an adopted citizen of Japan, tantalized + American readers with his <i>Chinese Ghosts</i> and <i>Chita</i>. A + fascinating period it seems, as one looks back upon it, and it lasted + until about the end of the century, when the suddenly discovered + commercial value of the historical novel and the ensuing competition in + best sellers misled many a fine artistic talent and coarsened the public + taste. The New South then played the literary market as recklessly as the + New West. + </p> + <p> + Let us glance back to "the abandoned farm of literature," as a witty New + Yorker once characterized New England. The last quarter of the nineteenth + century witnessed a decline in the direct influence of that province over + the country as a whole. Its strength sapped by the emigration of its more + vigorous sons, its typical institutions sagging under the weight of + immense immigrations <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">249</a></span> + from Europe, its political importance growing more and more negligible, + that ancient promontory of ideas has continued to lose its relative + literary significance. In one field of literature only has New England + maintained its rank since the Civil War, and that is in the local short + story. Here women have distinguished themselves beyond the proved capacity + of New England men. Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke, women of democratic + humor, were the pioneers; then came Harriet Prescott Spofford and + Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, women with nerves; and finally the three artists + who have written, out of the material offered by a decadent New England, + as perfect short stories as France or Russia can produce—Sarah Orne + Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown. These gifted writers + portrayed, with varying technique and with singular differences in their + instinctive choice of material, the dominant qualities of an isolated, + in-bred race, still proud in its decline; still inquisitive and + acquisitive, versatile yet stubborn, with thrift passing over into + avarice, and mental power degenerating into smartness; cold and hard under + long repression of emotion, yet capable of passion and fanaticism; at + worst, a mere trader, a crank, a grim recluse; at best, endowed <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">250</a></span> with an + austere physical and moral beauty. Miss Jewett preferred to touch + graciously the sunnier slopes of this provincial temperament, to linger in + its ancient dignities and serenities. Miss Brown has shown the pathos of + its thwarted desires, its hunger for a beauty and a happiness denied. Mary + Wilkins Freeman revealed its fundamental tragedies of will. + </p> + <p> + Two of the best known writers of New England fiction in this period were + not natives of the soil, though they surpassed most native New Englanders + in their understanding of the type. They were William Dean Howells and + Henry James. Mr. Howells, who, in his own words, "can reasonably suppose + that it is because of the mixture of Welsh, German, and Irish in me that I + feel myself so typically American," came to "the Holy Land at Boston" as a + "passionate pilgrim from the West." <i>A Boy's Town</i>, <i>My Literary + Passions</i>, and <i>Years of my Youth</i> make clear the image of the + young poet-journalist who returned from his four years in Venice and + became assistant editor of <i>The Atlantic Monthly</i> in 1866. In 1871 he + succeeded Fields in the editorship, but it was not until after his + resignation in 1881 that he could put his full strength into those <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">251</a></span> realistic + novels of contemporary New England which established his fame as a writer. + <i>A Modern Instance</i> and <i>The Rise of Silas Lapham</i> are perhaps + the finest stories of this group; and the latter novel may prove to be Mr. + Howells's chief "visiting-card to posterity." We cannot here follow him to + New York and to a new phase of novel writing, begun with <i>A Hazard of + New Fortunes</i>, nor can we discuss the now antiquated debate upon + realism which was waged in the eighteen-eighties over the books of Howells + and James. We must content ourselves with saying that a knowledge of Mr. + Howells's work is essential to the student of the American provincial + novel, as it is also to the student of our more generalized types of + story-writing, and that he has never in his long career written an + insincere, a slovenly, or an infelicitous page. <i>My Literary Friends and + Acquaintance</i> gives the most charming picture ever drawn of the elder + Cambridge, Concord, and Boston men who ruled over our literature when + young Howells came out of the West, and <i>My Mark Twain</i> is his + memorable portrait of another type of sovereign, perhaps the dynasty that + will rule the future. + </p> + <p> + Although Henry James, like Mr. Howells, wrote at one time acute studies of + New England character, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" + id="Page_252">252</a></span> he was never, in his relations to that + section, or, for that matter, to any locality save possibly London, + anything more than a "visiting mind." His grandfather was an Irish + merchant in Albany. His father, Henry James, was a philosopher and wit, a + man of comfortable fortune, who lived at times in Newport, Concord, and + Boston, but who was residing in New York when his son Henry was born in + 1843. No child was ever made the subject of a more complete theory of + deracination. Transplanted from city to city, from country to country, + without a family or a voting-place, without college or church or creed or + profession or responsibility of any kind save to his own exigent ideals of + truth and beauty, Henry James came to be the very pattern of a + cosmopolitan. Avoiding his native country for nearly thirty years and then + returning for a few months to write some intricate pages about that <i>American + Scene</i> which he understood far less truly than the average immigrant, + he died in 1916 in London, having just renounced his American citizenship + and become a British subject in order to show his sympathy with the + Empire, then at war. It was the sole evidence of political emotion in a + lifetime of seventy-three years. + </p> + <p> + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">253</a></span> + American writing men are justly proud, nevertheless, of this expatriated + craftsman. The American is inclined to admire good workmanship of any + kind, as far as he can understand the mechanism of it. The task of really + understanding Henry James has been left chiefly to clever women and to a + few critics, but ever since <i>A Passionate Pilgrim</i> and <i>Roderick + Hudson</i> appeared in 1875, it has been recognized that here was a + master, in his own fashion. What that fashion is may now be known by + anyone who will take the pains to read the author's prefaces to the New + York edition of his revised works. Never, not even in the Paris which + James loved, has an artist put his intentions and his self-criticism more + definitively upon paper. The secret of Henry James is told plainly enough + here: a specially equipped intelligence, a freedom from normal + responsibilities, a consuming desire to create beautiful things, and, as + life unfolded its complexities and <i>nuances</i> before his vision, an + increasing passion to seek the beauty which lies entangled and betrayed, a + beauty often adumbrated rather than made plastic, stories that must be + hinted at rather than told, raptures that exist for the initiated only. + The much discussed early and middle and later manners <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_254" id="Page_254">254</a></span> of James are only various + campaigns of this one questing spirit, changing his procedure as the + elusive object of his search hid itself by this or that device of + protective coloration or swift escape. It is as if a collector of rare + butterflies had one method of capturing them in Madagascar, another for + the Orinoco, and still another for Japan—though Henry James found + his Japan and Orinoco and Madagascar all in London town! + </p> + <p> + No one who ever had the pleasure of hearing him discourse about the art of + fiction can forget the absolute seriousness of his professional devotion; + it was as though a shy celebrant were to turn and explain, with mystical + intensity and a mystic's involution and reversal of all the values of + vulgar speech, the ceremonial of some strange, high altar. His own power + as a creative artist was not always commensurate with his intellectual + endowment or with his desire after beauty, and his frank contempt for the + masses of men made it difficult for him to write English. He preferred, as + did Browning, who would have liked to reach the masses, a dialect of his + own, and he used it increasingly after he was fifty. It was a dialect + capable of infinite gradations of tone, endless refinements of expression. + In his threescore books there are <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" + id="Page_255">255</a></span> delicious poignant moments where the spirit + of life itself flutters like a wild creature, half-caught, half-escaping. + It is for the beauty and thrill of these moments that the pages of Henry + James will continue to be cherished by a few thousand readers scattered + throughout the Republic to which he was ever an alien. + </p> + <p> + No poet of the new era has won the national recognition enjoyed by the + veterans. It will be recalled that Bryant survived until 1878, Longfellow + and Emerson until 1882, Lowell until 1891, Whittier and Whitman until + 1892, and Holmes until 1894. Compared with these men the younger writers + of verse seemed overmatched. The <i>National Ode</i> for the Centennial + celebration in 1876 was intrusted to Bayard Taylor, a hearty person, + author of capital books of travel, plentiful verse, and a skilful + translation of <i>Faust</i>. But an adequate <i>National Ode</i> was not + in him. Sidney Lanier, who was writing in that year his <i>Psalm of the + West</i> and was soon to compose <i>The Marshes of Glynn</i>, had far more + of the divine fire. He was a bookish Georgia youth who had served with the + Confederate army, and afterward, with broken health and in dire poverty, + gave his brief life to music and poetry. He had rich capacities for <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">256</a></span> both arts, + but suffered in both from the lack of discipline and from an impetuous, + restless imagination which drove him on to over-ambitious designs. + Whatever the flaws in his affluent verse, it has grown constantly in + popular favor, and he is, after Poe, the best known poet of the South. The + late Edmund Clarence Stedman, whose <i>American Anthology</i> and critical + articles upon American poets did so much to enhance the reputation of + other men, was himself a maker of ringing lyrics and spirited narrative + verse. His later days were given increasingly to criticism, and his <i>Life + and Letters</i> is a storehouse of material bearing upon the growth of New + York as a literary market-place during half a century. Richard Watson + Gilder was another admirably fine figure, poet, editor, and leader of + public opinion in many a noble cause. His <i>Letters</i>, likewise, give + an intimate picture of literary New York from the seventies to the + present. Through his editorship of <i>Scribner's Monthly</i> and <i>The + Century Magazine</i> his sound influence made itself felt upon writers in + every section. His own lyric vein had an opaline intensity of fire, but in + spite of its glow his verse sometimes refused to sing. + </p> + <p> + The most perfect poetic craftsman of the <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_257" id="Page_257">257</a></span> period—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 <i>Barefoot Boy</i> and Whitman's <i>Leaves of Grass</i>. By + 1865 his poems were printed in the then well-known Blue and Gold edition, + by Ticknor and Fields. In 1881 he succeeded Howells in the editorship of + the <i>Atlantic</i>. Aldrich had a versatile talent that turned easily to + adroit prose tales, but his heart was in the filing of his verses. Nothing + so daintily perfect as his lighter pieces has been produced on this side + of the Atlantic, and the deeper notes and occasional darker questionings + of his later verse are embodied in lines of impeccable workmanship. Aloof + from the social and political conflicts of his day, he gave himself to the + fastidious creation of beautiful lines, believing that the beautiful line + is the surest road to Arcady, and that Herrick, whom he idolized, had + shown the way. + </p> + <p> + To some readers of these pages it may seem like profanation to pass over + poets like Sill, George Woodberry, Edith Thomas, Richard Hovey, William + Vaughn Moody, Madison Cawein—to mention but half a dozen + distinguished names out of a larger company—and to suggest that + James Whitcomb <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">258</a></span> + Riley, more completely than any American poet since Longfellow, succeeded + in expressing the actual poetic feelings of the men and women who composed + his immense audience. Riley, like Aldrich, went to school to Herrick, + Keats, Tennyson, and Longfellow, but when he began writing newspaper verse + in his native Indiana he was guided by two impulses which gave + individuality to his work. "I was always trying to write of the kind of + people I knew, and especially to write verse that I could read just as if + it were spoken for the first time." The first impulse kept him close to + the wholesome Hoosier soil. The second is an anticipation of Robert + Frost's theory of speech tones as the basis of verse, as well as a revival + of the bardic practice of reciting one's own poems. For Riley had much of + the actor and platform-artist in him, and comprehended that poetry might + be made again a spoken art, directed to the ear rather than to the eye. + His vogue, which at his death in 1915 far surpassed that of any living + American poet, is inexplicable to those persons only who forget the + sentimental traditions of our American literature and its frank appeal to + the emotions of juvenility, actual and recollected. Riley's best "holt" as + a poet was his memory of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" + id="Page_259">259</a></span> his own boyhood and his perception that the + child-mind lingers in every adult reader. Genius has often been called the + gift of prolonged adolescence, and in this sense, surely, there was genius + in the warm and gentle heart of this fortunate provincial who held that + "old Indianapolis" was "high Heaven's sole and only under-study." No one + has ever had the audacity to say that of New York. + </p> + <p> + We have had American drama for one hundred and fifty years, ¹ but + much of it, like our popular fiction and poetry, has been subliterary, + more interesting to the student of social life and national character than + to literary criticism in the narrow sense of that term. Few of our best + known literary men have written for the stage. The public has preferred + melodrama to poetic tragedy, although perhaps the greatest successes have + been scored by plays which are comedies of manners rather than melodrama, + and character studies of various American types, built up around the known + capabilities of a particular actor. The twentieth century has witnessed a + marked activity in play-writing, in the technical study of the drama, + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">260</a></span> and + in experiment with dramatic production, particularly with motion pictures + and the out-of-doors pageant. At no time since <i>The Prince of Parthia</i> + was first acted in Philadelphia in 1767 has such a large percentage of + Americans been artistically and commercially interested in the drama, but + as to the literary results of the new movement it is too soon to speak. + </p> + <div class="footer"> + <p class="footer"> + <a id="footer_260-1" name="footer_260-1"></a> ¹ <i>Representative + American Plays</i>, edited by Arthur Hobson Quinn, N. Y., 1917. + </p> + </div> + <p> + Nor is it possible to forecast the effect of a still more striking + movement of contemporary taste, the revival of interest in poetry and the + experimentation with new poetical forms. Such revival and experiment have + often, in the past, been the preludes of great epochs of poetical + production. Living Americans have certainly never seen such a widespread + demand for contemporary verse, such technical curiosity as to the possible + forms of poetry, or such variety of bold innovation. Imagism itself is + hardly as novel as its contemporary advocates appear to maintain, and free + verse goes back far in our English speech and song. But the new generation + believes that it has made a discovery in reverting to sensations rather + than thought, to the naïve reproduction of retinal and muscular + impressions, as if this were the end of the matter. <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_261" id="Page_261">261</a></span> The self-conscious, + self-defending side of the new poetic impulse may soon pass, as it did in + the case of Wordsworth and of Victor Hugo. Whatever happens, we have + already had fresh and exquisite revelations of natural beauty, and, in + volumes like <i>North of Boston</i> and <i>A Spoon River Anthology</i>, + judgments of life that run very deep. + </p> + <p> + American fiction seems just now, on the contrary, to be marking time and + not to be getting noticeably forward. Few names unknown ten years ago have + won wide recognition in the domain of the novel. The short story has made + little technical advance since the first successes of "O. Henry," though + the talent of many observers has dealt with new material offered by the + racial characteristics of European immigrants and by new phases of + commerce and industry. The enormous commercial demand of the five-cent + weeklies for short stories of a few easily recognized patterns has + resulted too often in a substitution of stencil-plate generalized types + instead of delicately and powerfully imagined individual characters. Short + stories have been assembled, like Ford cars, with amazing mechanical + expertness, but with little artistic advance in design. The same temporary + arrest of progress has <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" + id="Page_262">262</a></span> been noted in France and England, however, + where different causes have been at work. No one can tell, in truth, what + makes some plants in the literary garden wither at the same moment that + others are outgrowing their borders. + </p> + <p> + There is one plant in our own garden, however, whose flourishing state + will be denied by nobody—namely, that kind of nature-writing + identified with Thoreau and practised by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Starr + King, John Burroughs, John Muir, Clarence King, Bradford Torrey, Theodore + Roosevelt, William J. Long, Thompson-Seton, Stewart Edward White, and many + others. Their books represent, Professor Canby ¹ believes, the + adventures of the American subconsciousness, the promptings of forgotten + memories, a racial tradition of contact with the wilderness, and hence one + of the most genuinely American traits of our literature. + </p> + <div class="footer"> + <p class="footer"> + <a id="footer_262-2" name="footer_262-2"></a> ¹ "Back to Nature," + by H. S. Canby, <i>Yale Review</i>, July, 1917. + </p> + </div> + <p> + Other forms of essay writing, surely, have seemed in our own generation + less distinctive of our peculiar quality. While admirable biographical and + critical studies appear from time to time, and here and there a whimsical + or trenchant discursive essay like those of Miss Repplier or Dr. <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">263</a></span> Crothers, + no one would claim that we approach France or even England in the field of + criticism, literary history, memoirs, the bookish essay, and biography. We + may have race-memories of a pine-tree which help us to write vigorously + and poetically about it, but we write less vitally as soon as we enter the + library door. A Frenchman does not, for he is better trained to perceive + the continuity and integrity of race-consciousness, in the whole field of + its manifestation. He does not feel, as many Americans do, that they are + turning their back on life when they turn to books. + </p> + <p> + Perhaps the truth is that although we are a reading people we are not yet + a book-loving people. The American newspaper and magazine have been + successful in making their readers fancy that newspaper and magazine are + an equivalent for books. Popular orators and popular preachers confirm + this impression, and colleges and universities have often emphasized a + vocational choice of books—in other words, books that are not books + at all, but treatises. It is not, of course, that American journalism, + whether of the daily or monthly sort, has consciously set itself to + supplant the habit of book-reading. A thousand social and economic factors + enter into such a problem. But <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" + id="Page_264">264</a></span> few observers will question the assertion + that the influence of the American magazine, ever since its great period + of national literary service in the eighties and nineties, has been more + marked in the field of conduct and of artistic taste than in the + stimulation of a critical literary judgment. An American schoolhouse of + today owes its improvement in appearance over the schoolhouse of fifty + years ago largely to the popular diffusion, through the illustrated + magazines, of better standards of artistic taste. But whether the judgment + of school-teachers and school-children upon a piece of literature is any + better than it was in the red schoolhouse of fifty years ago is a + disputable question. + </p> + <hr class="break" /> + <p> + But we must stop guessing, or we shall never have done. The fundamental + problem of our literature, as this book has attempted to trace it, has + been to obtain from a mixed population dwelling in sections as widely + separated as the peoples of Northern and Southern Europe, an integral + intellectual and spiritual activity which could express, in obedience to + the laws of beauty and truth, the emotions stimulated by our national + life. It has been assumed in the preceding chapters that <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">265</a></span> American + literature is something different from English literature written in + America. Canadian and Australian literatures have indigenous qualities of + their own, but typically they belong to the colonial literature of Great + Britain. This can scarcely be said of the writings of Franklin and + Jefferson, and it certainly cannot be said of the writings of Cooper, + Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Lowell, Lincoln, Mark Twain, and Mr. + Howells. In the pages of these men and of hundreds of others less + distinguished, there is a revelation of a new national type. That the full + energies of this nation have been back of our books, giving them a range + and vitality and unity commensurate with the national existence, no one + would claim. There are other spheres of effort in which American character + has been more adequately expressed than in words. Nevertheless the books + are here, in spite of every defect in national discipline, every flaw in + national character; and they deserve the closest attention from all those + who are trying to understand the American mind. + </p> + <p> + If the effort toward an expression of a peculiarly complex national + experience has been the problem of our literary past, the literary problem + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">266</a></span> of + the future is the expression of the adjustment of American ideals to the + standards of civilization. "Patriotism," said the martyred Edith Cavell + just before her death, "is not enough." Nationality and the instincts of + national separatism now seem essential to the preservation of the + political units of the world-state, precisely as a healthy individualism + must be the basis of all enduring social fellowship. Yet it is clear that + civilization is a larger, more ultimate term than nationality. Chauvinism + is nowhere more repellent than in the things of the mind. It is difficult + for some Americans to think internationally even in political affairs—to + construe our national policy and duty in terms of obligation to + civilization. Nevertheless the task must be faced, and we are slowly + realizing it. + </p> + <p> + In the field of literature, likewise, Americanism is not a final word + either of blame or praise. It is a word of useful characterization. Only + American books, and not books written in English in America, can + adequately represent our national contribution to the world's thinking and + feeling. So argued Emerson and Whitman, long ago. But the younger of these + two poets came to realize in his old age that <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_267" id="Page_267">267</a></span> the New World and the Old + World are fundamentally one. The literature of the New World will + inevitably have an accent of its own, but it must speak the + mother-language of civilization, share in its culture, accept its + discipline. + </p> + <p> + It has been said disparagingly of Longfellow and his friends: "The houses + of the Brahmins had only eastern windows. The souls of the whole school + lived in the old lands of culture, and they visited these lands as often + as they could, and, returning, brought back whole libraries of books which + they eagerly translated." But even if Longfellow and his friends had been + nothing more than translators and diffusers of European culture, their + task would have been justified. They kept the ideals of civilization from + perishing in this new soil. Through those eastern windows came in, and + still comes in, the sunlight to illumine the American spirit. To decry the + literatures of the Orient and of Greece and Rome as something now outgrown + by America, is simply to close the eastern windows, to narrow our + conception of civilization to merely national and contemporaneous terms. + It is as provincial to attempt this restriction in literature as it would + be in world-politics. We must have all the windows open in our American + writing, free access to ideas, knowledge of universal standards, + perception of universal law. + </p> + <hr /> + <div class="chapterhead"> + <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012"></a> <a name="bibliography" + id="bibliography"></a> <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" + id="Page_269">269</a></span> <br /><br /><br /> + <h2> + <a href="#Contents">BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE</a> + </h2> + </div> + <p class="noindent"> + <span class="smcap">An</span> authoritative account of American Literature + to the close of the Revolution is given in M. C. Tyler's <i>History + of American Literature during the Colonial Time</i>, 2 volumes (1878) and + <i>Literary History of the American Revolution</i>, 2 volumes (1897). For + a general survey see Barrett Wendell, <i>A Literary History of America</i> + (1900), W. P. Trent, <i>American Literature</i> (1903), G. E. + Woodberry, <i>America in Literature</i> (1903), W. C. Bronson, <i>A + Short History of American Literature</i> (1903), with an excellent + bibliography, W. B. Cairns, <i>History of American Literature</i> + (1912), W. P. Trent and J. Erskine, <i>Great American Writers</i> + (1912), and W. Riley, <i>American Thought</i> (1915). The most recent and + authoritative account is to be found in <i>The Cambridge History of + American Literature</i>, 3 volumes edited by Trent, Erskine, Sherman, and + Van Doren. + </p> + <p> + The best collection of American prose and verse is E. C. Stedman and + E. M. Hutchinson's <i>Library of American Literature</i>, 11 volumes + (1888-1890). For verse alone, see E. C. Stedman, <i>An American + Anthology</i> (1900), and W. C. Bronson, <i>American Poems, 1625-1892</i> + (1912). For criticism of leading authors, note W. C. Brownell, <i>American + Prose Masters</i> (1909), and Stedman, <i>Poets of America</i> (1885). + </p> + <p class="tiny"> + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">270</a></span> <i>Chapters + 1-3.</i> Note W. Bradford, <i>Journal</i> (1898), J. Winthrop, <i>Journal</i> + (1825, 1826), also <i>Life and Letters</i> by R. C. Winthrop, 2 + volumes (1863), G. L. Walker, <i>Thomas Hooker</i> (1891), O. S. + Straus, <i>Roger Williams</i> (1894), Cotton Mather, <i>Diary</i>, 2 + volumes (1911, 1912), also his <i>Life</i> by Barrett Wendell (1891), + Samuel Sewall, <i>Diary</i>, 3 volumes (1878). For Jonathan Edwards, see + <i>Works</i>, 4 volumes (1852), his <i>Life</i> by A. V. G. + Allen (1889), <i>Selected Sermons</i> edited by H. N. Gardiner + (1904). The most recent edition of Franklin's <i>Works</i> is edited by A. H. + Smyth, 10 volumes (1907). + </p> + <p class="tiny"> + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + <i>Chapter 4.</i> Samuel Adams, <i>Works</i>, 4 volumes (1904), John + Adams, <i>Works</i>, 10 volumes (1856), Thomas Paine, <i>Life</i> by M. D. + Conway, 2 volumes (1892), <i>Works</i> edited by Conway, 4 volumes (1895), + Philip Freneau, <i>Poems</i>, 3 volumes (Princeton edition, 1902), Thomas + Jefferson, <i>Works</i> edited by P. L. Ford, 10 volumes (1892-1898), + J. Woolman, <i>Journal</i> (edited by Whittier, 1871, and also in <i>Everyman's + Library</i>), <i>The Federalist</i> (edited by H. C. Lodge, 1888). + </p> + <p class="tiny"> + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + <i>Chapter 5.</i> Washington Irving, <i>Works</i>, 40 volumes (1891-1897), + also his <i>Life and Letters</i> by P. M. Irving, 4 volumes + (1862-1864). Fenimore Cooper, <i>Works</i>, 32 volumes (1896), <i>Life</i> + by T. R. Lounsbury (1883). Brockden Brown, <i>Works</i>, 6 volumes, + (1887). W. C. Bryant, <i>Poems</i>, 2 volumes (1883), <i>Prose</i>, 2 + volumes (1884), and his <i>Life</i> by John Bigelow (1890). + </p> + <p class="tiny"> + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + <i>Chapter 6.</i> H. C. Goddard, <i>Studies in New England + Transcendentalism</i> (1908). R. W. Emerson, <i>Works</i>, 12 <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">271</a></span> volumes + (Centenary edition, 1903), <i>Journal</i>, 10 volumes (1909-1914), his <i>Life</i> + by J. E. Cabot, 2 volumes (1887), by R. Garnett (1887), by G. E. + Woodberry (1905); see also <i>Ralph Waldo Emerson</i>, a critical study by + O. W. Firkins (1915). H. D. Thoreau, <i>Works</i>, 20 volumes + (Walden edition including <i>Journals</i>, 1906), <i>Life</i> by F. B. + Sanborn (1917), also <i>Thoreau, A Critical Study</i> by Mark van Doren + (1916). Note also Lindsay Swift, <i>Brook Farm</i> (1900), and <i>The Dial</i>, + reprint by the Rowfant Club (1902). + </p> + <p class="tiny"> + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + <i>Chapter 7.</i> Hawthorne, <i>Works</i>, 12 volumes (1882), <i>Life</i> + by G. E. Woodberry (1902). Longfellow, <i>Works</i>, 11 volumes + (1886), <i>Life</i> by Samuel Longfellow, 3 volumes (1891). Whittier, <i>Works</i>, + 7 volumes (1892), <i>Life</i> by S. T. Pickard, 2 volumes (1894). + Holmes, <i>Works</i>, 13 volumes (1892), <i>Life</i> by J. T. Morse, + Jr. (1896). Lowell, <i>Works</i>, 11 volumes (1890), <i>Life</i> by Ferris + Greenslet (1905), <i>Letters</i> edited by C. E. Norton, 2 volumes + (1893). For the historians, note H. B. Adams, <i>Life and Writings of + Jared Sparks</i>, 2 volumes (1893). M. A. DeW. Howe, <i>Life and + Letters of George Bancroft</i>, 2 volumes (1908), G. S. Hillard, <i>Life, + Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor</i>, 2 volumes (1876), George + Ticknor, <i>Life of Prescott</i> (1863), also Rollo Ogden, <i>Life of + Prescott</i> (1904), G. W. Curtis, <i>Correspondence of J. L. + Motley</i>, 2 volumes (1889), Francis Parkman, <i>Works</i>, 12 volumes + (1865-1898), <i>Life</i> by C. H. Farnham (1900), J. F. Jameson, + <i>History of Historical Writing in America</i> (1891). + </p> + <p class="tiny"> + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + <i>Chapter 8.</i> Poe, <i>Works</i>, 10 volumes (Stedman-Woodberry + edition, 1894-1895), also 17 volumes (Virginia <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_272" id="Page_272">272</a></span> edition, J. A. Harrison, + 1902), <i>Life</i> by G. E. Woodberry, 2 volumes (1909). Whitman, <i>Leaves + of Grass</i> and <i>Complete Prose Works</i> (Small, Maynard and Co.) + (1897, 1898), also John Burroughs, <i>A Study of Whitman</i> (1896). + </p> + <p class="tiny"> + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + <i>Chapter 9.</i> C. Schurz, <i>Life of Henry Clay</i>, 2 volumes (1887). + Daniel Webster, <i>Works</i>, 6 volumes (1851), <i>Life</i> by H. C. + Lodge (1883). Rufus Choate, <i>Works</i>, 2 volumes (1862). Wendell + Phillips, <i>Speeches, Lectures, and Letters</i>, 2 volumes (1892). W. L. + Garrison, <i>The Story of his Life Told by his Children</i>, 4 volumes + (1885-1889). Harriet Beecher Stowe, <i>Works</i>, 17 volumes (1897), <i>Life</i> + by C. E. Stowe (1889). Abraham Lincoln, <i>Works</i>, 2 volumes + (edited by Nicolay and Hay, 1894). + </p> + <p class="tiny"> + </p> + <p class="noindent"> + <i>Chapter 10</i>. For an excellent bibliography of the New National + Period, see F. L. Pattee, <i>A History of American Literature since + 1870</i> (1916). + </p> + <p> + For further bibliographical information the reader is referred to the + articles on American authors in <i>The Encyclopœdia Britannica</i> + and in <i>The Warner Library</i> (volume 30, <i>The Student's Course</i>, + N. Y., 1917). + </p> + <p> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </p> + <hr /> + <div class="chapterhead"> + <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014"></a> <a name="index" id="index"></a> + <br /><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">273</a></span> + <br /><br /><br /> + <h2> + <a href="#Contents">INDEX</a> + </h2> + </div> + <h3> + A + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + Adams, C. F, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.<br /> Adams, John, opinion of + American independence, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>-<a href="#Page_12">12</a>; + as a writer, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.<br /> Adams, Samuel, <a + href="#Page_73">73</a>-<a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>.<br /> + <i>After the Burial</i>, Lowell, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br /> <i>Agassiz, + Fiftieth Birthday of</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>Age + of Reason</i>, Paine, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.<br /> <i>Ages, The</i>, + Bryant, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.<br /> Alcott, Bronson, <a + href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>-<a + href="#Page_140">140</a>.<br /> Aldrich, T. B., <a href="#Page_256">256</a>-<a + href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br /> <i>Alhambra, The</i>, Irving, <a + href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br /> Allen, J. L., <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br /> + <i>American Anthology</i>, Stedman, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.<br /> + American characteristics, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>-<a href="#Page_5">5</a>.<br /> + American colonies, literature in the 17th century, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>-<a + href="#Page_42">42</a>; journalism, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>-<a + href="#Page_62">62</a>; education, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>-<a + href="#Page_63">63</a>; science, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>-<a + href="#Page_64">64</a>; bibliography of the literature, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>-<a + href="#Page_270">270</a>.<br /> American colonists, predominantly English, + <a href="#Page_12">12</a>-<a href="#Page_25">25</a>; motives for + emigration, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>; moulded by pioneer life, <a + href="#Page_17">17</a>-<a href="#Page_23">23</a>; in 1760, <a + href="#Page_59">59</a>-<a href="#Page_60">60</a>.<br /> "American idea," <a + href="#Page_206">206</a>-<a href="#Page_207">207</a>.<br /> American life + since the Civil War, <a href="#Page_234">234</a> <i>et seq</i>.<br /> + American literature, the term, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.<br /> <i>American + Mercury</i>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>.<br /> <i>American Scholar, The</i>, + Emerson, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>.<br /> Ames, Fisher, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.<br /> + <i>Among my Books</i>, Lowell, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.<br /> <i>Andrew + Rykman's Prayer</i>, Whittier, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br /> <i>Annabel + Lee</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br /> Anthologies, American, <a + href="#Page_269">269</a>.<br /> <i>Arsenal at Springfield, The</i>, + Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>Assignation, The</i>, + Poe, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.<br /> <i>Astoria</i>, Irving, <a + href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br /> <i>Atala</i>, Châteaubriand, <a + href="#Page_96">96</a>.<br /> <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, + <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a + href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br /> <i>Autobiography</i>, + Franklin, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>-<a href="#Page_59">59</a>.<br /> <i>Autocrat + of the Breakfast Table, The</i>, Holmes, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a + href="#Page_167">167</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + B + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + <i>Bacchus</i>, Emerson, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.<br /> <i>Ballad of + the French Fleet, A</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br /> + Bancroft, George, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, + <a href="#Page_177">177</a>-<a href="#Page_178">178</a>.<br /> <i>Barefoot + Boy, The</i>, Whittier, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.<br /> Bartol, C. A., + <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.<br /> <i>Battle Hymn of the Republic</i>, + Howe, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.<br /> <i>Battle + of the Kegs, The</i>, Hopkinson, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.<br /> <i>Bay + Psalm Book</i>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.<br /> Beecher, H. W., <a + href="#Page_216">216</a>-<a href="#Page_217">217</a>.<br /> <i>Belfry of + Bruges, The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>Bells, + The</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>-<a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a + href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br /> <i>Biglow Papers, The</i>, Lowell, <a + href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>.<br /> + <i>Black Cat, The</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.<br /> Blaine, J. G., + quoted, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.<br /> <i>Blithedale Romance, The</i>, + Hawthorne, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>-<a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a + href="#Page_150">150</a>-<a href="#Page_151">151</a>.<br /> <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">274</a></span> <i>Boston + News-Letter</i>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.<br /> <i>Boy's Town, A</i>, + Howells, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.<br /> <i>Bracebridge Hall</i>, + Irving, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br /> Bradford, William, <a + href="#Page_28">28</a>.<br /> Bradstreet, Anne, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>-<a + href="#Page_37">37</a>.<br /> <i>Bridge, The</i>, Longfellow, <a + href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> Briggs, C. F., quoted, <a + href="#Page_190">190</a>.<br /> Brook Farm, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a + href="#Page_143">143</a>.<br /> <i>Brooklyn Eagle, The</i>, <a + href="#Page_199">199</a>.<br /> Brown, Alice, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, + <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.<br /> Brown University, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br /> + Brownell, H. H., <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.<br /> Brownson, Orestes, + <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br /> Bryant, W. C., one of the + Knickerbocker Group, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>; personal appearance, <a + href="#Page_101">101</a>; life and, writings, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>-<a + href="#Page_106">106</a>; died (1878), <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br /> + "Buffalo Bill," <i>see</i> Cody, W. F. <br /> <i>Building of the Ship, + The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br /> Burroughs, John, <a + href="#Page_262">262</a>.<br /> <i>By Blue Ontario's Shore</i>, Whitman, <a + href="#Page_204">204</a>.<br /> Byrd, William, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + C + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + Cable, G. W., <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.<br /> Calef, Robert, <a + href="#Page_43">43</a>.<br /> Calhoun, J. C., <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.<br /> + Calvinism in New England, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>-<a href="#Page_19">19</a>.<br /> + <i>Cambridge Thirty Years Ago</i>, Lowell, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.<br /> + <i>Captain Bonneville</i>, Irving, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br /> + Carlyle, Thomas, quoted, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.<br /> <i>Cask of + Amontillado, The</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.<br /> Cavell, + Edith, quoted, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.<br /> Cawein, Madison, <a + href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br /> <i>Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras + County, The</i>, Clemens, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>.<br /> <i>Century + Magazine</i>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.<br /> <i>Changeling, The</i>, + Lowell, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br /> Channing, Edward, <a + href="#Page_13">13</a>.<br /> Channing, W. E., <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, + <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a + href="#Page_142">142</a>.<br /> Châteaubriand, Vicomte de, <a + href="#Page_96">96</a>-<a href="#Page_97">97</a>.<br /> <i>Children's Hour, + The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.<br /> <i>Chita, Hearn</i>, + <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br /> <i>Chinese Ghosts</i>, Hearn, <a + href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br /> Choate, Rufus, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.<br /> + Church, Captain, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.<br /> <i>Circuit Rider, The</i>, + Eggleston, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br /> <i>City in the Sea, The</i>, + Poe, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>.<br /> Clark, Roger, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>.<br /> + Clarke, J. F., <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br /> Clay, Henry, <a + href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>-<a href="#Page_211">211</a>.<br /> + Clemens, S. L. (Mark Twain), attacks Cooper's novels, <a + href="#Page_99">99</a>; quoted, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>; life and + writings, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>-<a href="#Page_240">240</a>; + typically American, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /> <i>Cobbler Keezar's + Vision</i>, Whittier, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br /> Cody, W. F. + (Buffalo Bill), <a href="#Page_243">243</a>.<br /> <i>Columbus, Life of</i>, + Irving, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br /> <i>Commemoration Ode</i>, Lowell, + <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br /> <i>Common + Sense</i>, Paine, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.<br /> <i>Conquest of Granada</i>, + Irving, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br /> <i>Conquest of Mexico</i>, + Prescott, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>.<br /> <i>Conquest of Peru</i>, + Prescott, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>.<br /> <i>Conspiracy of Pontiac, The</i>, + Parkman, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>.<br /> Cooke, Rose Terry, <a + href="#Page_249">249</a>.<br /> Cooper, J. F., <a href="#Page_95">95</a>-<a + href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /> Cotton, John, + <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.<br /> <i>Courtship of + Miles Standish</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br /> + "Craddock, C. E.," <i>see</i> Murfree, Mary N.<br /> Cranch, C. P., + <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br /> <i>Crisis, The</i>, Paine, <a + href="#Page_75">75</a>.<br /> <i>Cristus</i>, Longfellow, <a + href="#Page_155">155</a>-<a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> Cromwell, + Oliver, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.<br /> Crothers, S. M., <a + href="#Page_262">262</a>-<a href="#Page_263">263</a>.<br /> <i>Crowded + Street, The</i>, Bryant, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.<br /> Curtis, G. W., + <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + D + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + Dana, C. A., <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br /> <i>Day is Done, The</i>, + Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>Day of Doom, The</i>, + Wigglesworth, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>-<a href="#Page_36">36</a>.<br /> <i>Deerslayer, + The</i>, Cooper, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.<br /> <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_275" id="Page_275">275</a></span> <i>Democratic Review</i>, <a + href="#Page_199">199</a>.<br /> <i>Dial</i>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, + <a href="#Page_140">140</a>.<br /> Drake, J. R., <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br /> + Drama, American, in the 20th century, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>-<a + href="#Page_260">260</a>.<br /> <i>Dred</i>, Stowe, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.<br /> + <i>Drum Taps</i>, Whitman, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.<br /> Dwight, + Timothy, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + E + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + <i>Edict of the King of Prussia against England</i>, Franklin, <a + href="#Page_58">58</a>.<br /> <i>Edinburgh Review, The</i>, <a + href="#Page_88">88</a>.<br /> Edwards, Jonathan, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, + <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>-<a href="#Page_52">52</a>.<br /> + Eggleston, Edward, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br /> Eliot, John, <a + href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br /> <i>Elsie Venner</i>, + Holmes, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br /> <i>Embargo, The</i>, Bryant, <a + href="#Page_102">102</a>.<br /> Emerson, R. W., in 1826, <a + href="#Page_89">89</a>; a Transcendentalist, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>-<a + href="#Page_117">117</a>; quoted, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>-<a + href="#Page_117">117</a>; life and writings, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>-<a + href="#Page_130">130</a>; died (1882), <a href="#Page_255">255</a>; + typically American, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>; argues for American + books, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.<br /> England in the 17th century, <a + href="#Page_13">13</a>.<br /> <i>English Traits</i>, Emerson, <a + href="#Page_128">128</a>.<br /> <i>Essay on Man</i>, Pope, <a + href="#Page_55">55</a>.<br /> <i>Essays</i>, Emerson, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>-<a + href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.<br /> + Essays of the 20th century, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>-<a href="#Page_263">263</a>.<br /> + <i>Eternal Goodness, The</i>, Whittier, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br /> + <i>Ethan Brand</i>, Hawthorne, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>.<br /> <i>Evangeline</i>, + Longfellow, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br /> <i>Evening Revery, An</i>, + Bryant, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.<br /> Everett, Edward, Oration at + Cambridge (1826), <a href="#Page_86">86</a>; quoted, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>; + lectures, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>-<a href="#Page_112">112</a>; + estimate of, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>; quoted, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>.<br /> + <i>Excelsior</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>-<a href="#Page_6">6</a>, + <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>Exiles' Departure</i>, Whittier, <a + href="#Page_159">159</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + F + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + <i>Fable for Critics</i>, Lowell, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.<br /> <i>Fall + of the House of Usher, The</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.<br /> <i>Farewell + Address</i>, Washington, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>.<br /> <i>Farewell + Sermon</i>, Edwards, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.<br /> <i>Farmer Refuted, + The</i>, Hamilton, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>.<br /> Faust (translation), + Taylor, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br /> <i>Federalist</i>, <a + href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>.<br /> + <i>Ferdinand and Isabella, History of the Reign of</i>, Prescott, <a + href="#Page_179">179</a>.<br /> Fiction of the 20th century, <a + href="#Page_261">261</a>-<a href="#Page_262">262</a>.<br /> <i>Fire of + Driftwood, The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>First + Snowfall, The</i>, Lowell, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br /> <i>Flood of + Years, The</i>, Bryant, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.<br /> <i>Forest Hymn, + A</i>, Bryant, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.<br /> Franklin, Benjamin, born + (1706), <a href="#Page_44">44</a>; attitude toward church, <a + href="#Page_44">44</a>; exponent of New England life, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>; + life and writings, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>-<a href="#Page_59">59</a>; + conducts <i>Courant</i>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>; activity in + Philadelphia, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>-<a href="#Page_62">62</a>. letter + from Washington to, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>-<a href="#Page_79">79</a>; + typically American, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /> Freeman, Mary + Wilkins, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.<br /> + Freneau, Philip, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>-<a + href="#Page_72">72</a>.<br /> <i>Frontenac</i>, Parkman, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.<br /> + Frost, Robert, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>.<br /> Fugitive slave act, <a + href="#Page_144">144</a>.<br /> Fuller, Margaret, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, + <a href="#Page_140">140</a>-<a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + G + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + Garrison, W. L., <a href="#Page_89">89</a>-<a href="#Page_90">90</a>, + <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a + href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>-<a href="#Page_218">218</a>.<br /> + <i>Gettysburg Address</i>, Lincoln, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>-<a + href="#Page_231">231</a>.<br /> <i>Gilded Age, The</i>, Clemens, <a + href="#Page_237">237</a>-<a href="#Page_238">238</a>.<br /> <i>God + Glorified in Man's Dependence</i>, Edwards, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.<br /> + <i>Gold Bug, The</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.<br /> Gookin, + Daniel, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br /> Greeley, Horace, <a + href="#Page_217">217</a>-<a href="#Page_218">218</a>.<br /> Greenslet, + Ferris, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + H + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + Hale, E. E., <a href="#Page_224">224</a>.<br /> <i>Half-Century of + Conflict, A</i>, Parkman, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.<br /> Halleck, + Fitz-Greene, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br /> Hamilton, Alexander, <a + href="#Page_76">76</a>-<a href="#Page_77">77</a>.<br /> <i>Hanging of the + Crane, The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">276</a></span> Harris, J. C., + <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.<br /> Harte, Bret, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>-<a + href="#Page_242">242</a>.<br /> Harvard, John, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.<br /> + Harvard College, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br /> <i>Haunted Palace, The</i>, + Poe, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br /> Hawthorne, Nathaniel, in 1826, <a + href="#Page_89">89</a>; opinion of Bryant, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>; + opinion of Transcendentalism, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>; life and + writings, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>-<a href="#Page_152">152</a>; + typically American, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /> Hayne, Paul, <a + href="#Page_225">225</a>.<br /> <i>Hazard of New Fortunes, A</i>, Howells, + <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.<br /> Hearn, Lafcadio, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br /> + Hecker, Father, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br /> Henry, Patrick, <a + href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>.<br /> <i>Herons of + Elmwood, The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>Hiawatha</i>, + Longfellow, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br /> Higginson, T. W., <a + href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>.<br /> Holmes, O. W., + in 1826, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>; attitude toward Transcendentalism, <a + href="#Page_143">143</a>; life and writings, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>-<a + href="#Page_168">168</a>; died (1894), <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br /> + <i>Home Sweet Home</i>, Payne, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br /> Hooker, + Thomas, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>-<a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a + href="#Page_30">30</a>-<a href="#Page_31">31</a>.<br /> <i>Hoosier + Schoolmaster, The</i>, Eggleston, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br /> <i>House + of the Seven Gables, The</i>, Hawthorne, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a + href="#Page_150">150</a>.<br /> Hovey, Richard, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br /> + Howells, W. D., <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>-<a + href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>-<a href="#Page_251">251</a>, + <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /> Hubbard, William, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.<br /> + <i>Huckleberry Finn</i>, Clemens, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.<br /> + Humorists, American, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>.<br /> Hutchinson, Anne, + <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.<br /> Hutchinson, Thomas, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.<br /> + <i>Hyperion</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + I + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + <i>Indian Wars</i>, Hubbard, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.<br /> Indians, in + literature, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>-<a href="#Page_40">40</a>; Thoreau's + notes on, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.<br /> <i>Innocents Abroad</i>, + Clemens, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>.<br /> + Irving, Washington, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>-<a + href="#Page_95">95</a>.<br /> <i>Israfel</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, + <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + J + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + Jackson, Andrew, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.<br /> Jackson, Helen Hunt, <a + href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br /> James, Henry, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, + <a href="#Page_251">251</a>-<a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br /> Jay, John, + <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.<br /> Jefferson, Thomas, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>-<a + href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /> <i>Jesuits in + North America, The</i>, Parkman, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.<br /> Jewett, + Sarah Orne, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.<br /> + <i>John of Barneveld, Life and Death of</i>, Motley, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>.<br /> + Johnson, Edward, Captain, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br /> <i>Joshua + Whitcomb</i>, Thompson, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br /> <i>Journal</i>, + Emerson, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a + href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.<br /> <i>Journal</i>, + Thoreau, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.<br /> <i>Journal</i>, + Woolman, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.<br /> <i>Journal and Correspondence</i>, + Longfellow, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.<br /> Journalism, in the colonies, + <a href="#Page_60">60</a>-<a href="#Page_62">62</a>; in 20th century, <a + href="#Page_263">263</a>-<a href="#Page_264">264</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + K + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + Kemble, Fanny, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>-<a href="#Page_246">246</a>.<br /> + Kennedy, J. P., <a href="#Page_245">245</a>.<br /> King, Grace, <a + href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br /> King, Starr, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>.<br /> + King Philip's War, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>-<a href="#Page_40">40</a>.<br /> + King's College (Columbia), <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br /> Knickerbocker + group of writers, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>; works by, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + L + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + <i>Languishing Commonwealth</i>, Walley, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>.<br /> + Lanier, Sidney, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>-<a href="#Page_256">256</a>.<br /> + <i>La Salle</i>, Parkman, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.<br /> <i>Last Leaf, + The</i>, Holmes, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.<br /> <i>Last of the + Mohicans, The</i>, Cooper, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, + <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.<br /> <i>Leather-Stocking Tales</i>, Cooper, <a + href="#Page_97">97</a>-<a href="#Page_99">99</a>.<br /> <i>Leaves of Grass</i>, + Whitman, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a + href="#Page_202">202</a>-<a href="#Page_203">203</a>.<br /> <i>Letters</i>, + Motley, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>.<br /> <i>Letters from an American + Farmer</i>, Crèvecœur, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a + href="#Page_68">68</a>.<br /> <i>Liberator, The</i>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, + <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.<br /> <i>Library + of American Biography</i>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>.<br /> <i>Life on + the Mississippi</i>, Clemens, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>.<br /> <span + class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">277</a></span> <i>Ligeia</i>, + Poe, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.<br /> Lincoln, Abraham, recognizes + uncertainty in the nation, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>; would have approved + Winthrop, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>; address at Cooper Union (1860), <a + href="#Page_104">104</a>-<a href="#Page_105">105</a>; quoted, <a + href="#Page_155">155</a>; as a writer of liberty, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>; + character and writings, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>-<a href="#Page_233">233</a>; + typically American, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /> <i>Lionel Lincoln</i>, + Cooper, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.<br /> <i>Literati</i>, Pope, <a + href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br /> <i>Little Women</i>, Alcott, <a + href="#Page_140">140</a>.<br /> London, Jack, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>-<a + href="#Page_244">244</a>.<br /> London in 1724, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>-<a + href="#Page_56">56</a>.<br /> Longfellow, H. W., in 1826, <a + href="#Page_89">89</a>; attitude toward Transcendentalism, <a + href="#Page_143">143</a>; life and writings, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>-<a + href="#Page_157">157</a>; died (1882), <a href="#Page_255">255</a>; + disparagement of, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.<br /> Longstreet, A. B., + <a href="#Page_245">245</a>.<br /> Louisiana Purchase, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.<br /> + Lowell, J. R., in 1826, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>; attitude toward + Transcendentalism, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>; life and writings, <a + href="#Page_168">168</a>-<a href="#Page_174">174</a>; died (1891), <a + href="#Page_255">255</a>; typically American, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /> + <i>Luck of Roaring Camp, The</i>, Harte, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>.<br /> + Lyceum system, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + M + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + <i>McFingal</i>, Trumbull, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.<br /> Magazines, in + colonies, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>-<a href="#Page_61">61</a>; in 20th + century, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>-<a href="#Page_264">264</a>.<br /> <i>Magnalia + Christi Americana</i>, Mather, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a + href="#Page_47">47</a>.<br /> <i>Maidenhood</i>, Longfellow, <a + href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, The</i>, + Clemens, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.<br /> <i>Man Without a Country</i>, + Hale, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>.<br /> <i>Marble Faun, The</i>, + Hawthorne, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>.<br /> + <i>Marshes of Glynn, The</i>, Lanier, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br /> <i>Martin + Chuzzlewit</i>, Dickens, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.<br /> Mason, John, + Captain, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br /> <i>Massachusetts to Virginia</i>, + Whittier, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>.<br /> Mather, Cotton, <a + href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>-<a href="#Page_48">48</a>; + diary, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>-<a href="#Page_47">47</a>.<br /> Mather, + Increase, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.<br /> <i>Maud Muller</i>, Whittier, <a + href="#Page_5">5</a>-<a href="#Page_6">6</a>.<br /> <i>Memorial Odes</i>, + Lowell, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br /> Miller, C. H. (Joaquin), <a + href="#Page_244">244</a>.<br /> <i>Minister's Black Veil, The</i>, + Hawthorne, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.<br /> <i>Minister's Wooing, The</i>, + Stowe, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.<br /> <i>Modern Instance, A</i>, + Howells, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.<br /> <i>Montcalm and Wolfe</i>, + Parkman, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.<br /> Moody, W. V., <a + href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br /> <i>Morituri Salutamus</i>, Longfellow, <a + href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> Morris, G. P., <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br /> + <i>Mosses from an Old Manse</i>, Hawthorne, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br /> + Motley, J. L., <a href="#Page_143">143</a>-<a href="#Page_144">144</a>, + <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>-<a + href="#Page_182">182</a>.<br /> Muir, John, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>-<a + href="#Page_245">245</a>.<br /> <i>Murders in the Rue Morgue, The</i>, Poe, + <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.<br /> Murfree, Mary N. (C. E. Craddock), + <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br /> <i>My Garden Acquaintance</i>, Lowell, + <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.<br /> <i>My Literary Friends and Acquaintances</i>, + Howells, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.<br /> <i>My Literary Passions</i>, + Howells, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.<br /> <i>My Lost Youth</i>, + Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>My Mark Twain</i>, + Howells, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.<br /> <i>My Psalm, Whittier</i>, <a + href="#Page_160">160</a>.<br /> <i>My Study Windows</i>, Lowell, <a + href="#Page_170">170</a>.<br /> <i>Mysterious Stranger, The</i>, Clemens, + <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + N + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + <i>National Gazette</i>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.<br /> <i>National + Literature</i>, Channing, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>.<br /> <i>National + Ode</i>, Taylor, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br /> <i>Nature</i>, Emerson, + <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a + href="#Page_131">131</a>.<br /> Nature-writing, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>.<br /> + <i>Netherlands, History of the United</i>, Motley, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>.<br /> + New England, a digression from English society, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>; + at the beginning of 18th century, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>-<a + href="#Page_44">44</a>; characteristics of the people of, <a + href="#Page_109">109</a>-<a href="#Page_111">111</a>; <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_278" id="Page_278">278</a></span> in last quarter of 19th + century, <a href="#Page_248">248</a> <i>et seq</i>.<br /> <i>New England, + History of</i>, Winthrop, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>-<a href="#Page_29">29</a>.<br /> + <i>New England Courant</i>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>.<br /> New National + period in American literature, <a href="#Page_234">234</a> <i>et seq</i>.; + bibliography, <a href="#Page_272">272</a>.<br /> New York at beginning of + 18th century, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.<br /> <i>New York Tribune</i>, <a + href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.<br /> <i>Newburyport + Free Press</i>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>.<br /> + Newspapers, in colonies, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>-<a href="#Page_61">61</a>; + in 20th century, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>-<a href="#Page_264">264</a>.<br /> + <i>North American Review</i>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a + href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, + <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.<br /> North Carolina in 1724, <a + href="#Page_44">44</a>.<br /> <i>North of Boston</i>, Frost, <a + href="#Page_261">261</a>.<br /> Norwood, Colonel, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + O + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + Oakes, Urian, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>.<br /> <i>Old Creole Days</i>, + Cable, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.<br /> <i>Old Homestead, The</i>, + Thompson, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br /> <i>Old Ironsides</i>, Holmes, + <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.<br /> Old Manse, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, + <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_146">145</a>.<br /> <i>Old Régime, + The</i>, Parkman, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.<br /> <i>Old Swimmin' Hole, + The</i>, Riley, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br /> <i>Oldtown Fireside + Stories</i>, Stowe, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.<br /> <i>Oldtown Folks</i>, + Stowe, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.<br /> Olmsted, F. L., <a + href="#Page_246">246</a>.<br /> <i>On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners</i>, + Lowell, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.<br /> Oratory in America, <a + href="#Page_208">208</a> <i>et seq</i>.<br /> <i>Oregon Trail, The</i>, + Parkman, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>.<br /> Otis, James, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, + <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.<br /> <i>Our Hundred Days</i>, Holmes, <a + href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br /> <i>Outcast of Poker Flat, The</i>, Harte, + <a href="#Page_242">242</a>.<br /> <i>Outre-mer</i>, Longfellow, <a + href="#Page_152">152</a>.<br /> <i>Overland Monthly</i>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + P + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + Page, T. N., <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br /> + Paine, Thomas, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>-<a href="#Page_76">76</a>.<br /> + Parker, Theodore, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, + <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>.<br /> Parkman, + Francis, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>-<a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a + href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>-<a href="#Page_186">186</a>.<br /> + <i>Passage to India</i>, Whitman, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.<br /> <i>Passionate + Pilgrim, A</i>, James, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.<br /> <i>Pathfinder, + The</i>, Cooper, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.<br /> Pattee, F. L., <a + href="#Page_236">236</a>.<br /> <i>Paul Revere's Ride</i>, Longfellow, <a + href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br /> Paulding, J. K., <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br /> + Payne, J. H., <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br /> Pennsylvania, + University of, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br /> <i>Pennsylvania Gazette</i>, + <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br /> <i>Pennsylvania Magazine</i>, <a + href="#Page_74">74</a>.<br /> Pequot War (1637), <a href="#Page_38">38</a>-<a + href="#Page_39">39</a>.<br /> Percy, George, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a + href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br /> Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.<br /> + <i>Philip II, History of the Reign of</i>, Prescott, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>.<br /> + Phillips, Wendell, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>-<a + href="#Page_216">216</a>.<br /> <i>Picture of New York</i>, Mitchill, <a + href="#Page_90">90</a>.<br /> <i>Pilot, The</i>, Cooper, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.<br /> + <i>Pioneers, O Pioneers</i>, Whitman, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.<br /> <i>Pioneers, + The</i>, Cooper, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>-<a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a + href="#Page_99">99</a>.<br /> <i>Pioneers of France, The</i>, Parkman, <a + href="#Page_185">185</a>.<br /> <i>Pirate, The</i>, Scot, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.<br /> + <i>Plymouth Plantation, History of</i>, Bradford, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>-<a + href="#Page_29">29</a>.<br /> Poe, E. A., "literature of escape," <a + href="#Page_8">8</a>; in 1826, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>; in New York, <a + href="#Page_108">108</a>; life and writings, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>-<a + href="#Page_196">196</a>.<br /> <i>Poet at the Breakfast Table, The</i>, + Holmes, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br /> Poetry, Revolutionary verse, <a + href="#Page_69">69</a>-<a href="#Page_72">72</a>; of freedom, <a + href="#Page_223">223</a> <i>et seq</i>.; of the 20th century, <a + href="#Page_260">260</a>-<a href="#Page_261">261</a>.<br /> <i>Poets and + Poetry of America</i>, Griswold, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br /> <i>Poor + Richard</i>, Franklin, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.<br /> + Pory, John, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.<br /> <i>Prairie, The</i>, Cooper, + <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.<br /> <i>Precaution</i>, + Cooper, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>.<br /> Prescott, W. H., <a + href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>-<a href="#Page_144">144</a>, + <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>-<a + href="#Page_180">180</a>.<br /> <i>Present Crisis, The</i>, Lowell, <a + href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br /> <i>Prince of Parthia, The</i>, <a + href="#Page_260">260</a>.<br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" + id="Page_279">279</a></span> <i>Professor at the Breakfast Table, The</i>, + Holmes, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br /> <i>Psalm of Life, The</i>, + Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>Psalm of the West</i>, + Lanier, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br /> <i>Publick Occurrences</i>, <a + href="#Page_60">60</a>.<br /> Puritans, The, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>-<a + href="#Page_35">35</a>.<br /> <i>Purloined Letter, The</i>, Poe, <a + href="#Page_193">193</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + Q + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + <i>Quarterly, The</i>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + R + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + <i>Rainy Day, The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> <i>Ramona</i>, + Jackson, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br /> <i>Ramoth Hill</i>, Whittier, + <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.<br /> <i>Raven, The</i>, Poe, <a + href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br /> Read, T. B., <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.<br /> + <i>Reality of Spiritual Life, The</i>, Edwards, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.<br /> + <i>Reaper and the Flowers, The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.<br /> + <i>Red Rover, The</i>, Cooper, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.<br /> Religious + freedom in the colonies, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.<br /> <i>René</i>, + Châteaubriand, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>.<br /> Repplier, Agnes, <a + href="#Page_262">262</a>.<br /> Revolution, influence upon literature, <a + href="#Page_66">66</a> <i>et seq</i>.; bibliography, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>.<br /> + <i>Rights of Man, The</i>, Paine, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.<br /> Riley, + J. W., <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>-<a + href="#Page_259">259</a>.<br /> Ripley, George, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br /> + <i>Rise of Silas Lapham, The</i>, Howells, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.<br /> + <i>Rise of the Dutch Republic</i>, Motley, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>.<br /> + <i>Rivulet, The</i>, Bryant, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.<br /> Robinson, + John, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.<br /> <i>Roderick Hudson</i>, James, <a + href="#Page_253">253</a>.<br /> Rolfe, John, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br /> + Romanticism in American literature, <a href="#Page_187">187</a> <i>et seq</i>. + Roosevelt, Theodore, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>.<br /> <i>Roughing It</i>, + Clemens, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>.<br /> + Rowlandson, Mary, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.<br /> <i>Rules for Reducing a + Great Empire to a Small One</i>, Franklin, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>.<br /> + Russell, Irwin, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <div class="indexfont"> + <h3> + S + </h3> + Salem "witchcraft," <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.<br /> <i>Salmagundi Papers</i>, + Irving and Paulding, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br /> Sanborn, F. B., + <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.<br /> Sandys, George, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.<br /> + <i>Scarlet Letter, The</i>, Hawthorne, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a + href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, + <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>-<a + href="#Page_150">150</a>.<br /> <i>School-Days</i>, Whittier, <a + href="#Page_158">158</a>.<br /> Scott, Sir Walter, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.<br /> + <i>Scribner's Monthly</i>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.<br /> Scudder, + Horace, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.<br /> <i>Seaweed</i>, Longfellow, <a + href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br /> Sewell, Samuel, Judge, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>-<a + href="#Page_48">48</a>.<br /> Shepard, Thomas, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, + <a href="#Page_31">31</a>-<a href="#Page_32">32</a>.<br /> Short story, + the, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>-<a href="#Page_262">262</a>.<br /> Sill, + E. R., <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br /> Simms, W. G., <a + href="#Page_245">245</a>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.<br /> <i>Simple + Cobbler of Agawam, The</i>, Ward, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.<br /> <i>Sinners + in the Hands of an Angry God</i>, Edwards, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.<br /> + <i>Skeleton in Armor, The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br /> + <i>Sketch Book</i>, Irving, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br /> + <i>Skipper Ireson's Ride</i>, Whittier, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br /> + Slavery, influence on literature, <a href="#Page_207">207</a> <i>et seq</i>. + <i>Slavery in Massachusetts</i>, Thoreau, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.<br /> + Smith, F. H., <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br /> Smith, John, <a + href="#Page_8">8</a>-<a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, + <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br /> Smith, Sydney, quoted, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>-<a + href="#Page_89">89</a>.<br /> <i>Snow-Bound</i>, Whittier, <a + href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>-<a href="#Page_162">162</a>.<br /> + <i>Snow-Image and Other Tales, The</i>, Hawthorne, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br /> + <i>Songs of Labor</i>, Whittier, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br /> South + Carolina in 1724, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.<br /> South, The, in American + literature, 245 <i>et seq</i>. Sparks, Jared, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>.<br /> + Spofford, Harriet Prescott, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.<br /> <i>Spoon + River Anthology</i>, Masters, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>.<br /> <i>Spy, + The</i>, Cooper, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a + href="#Page_98">98</a>.<br /> Stamp Act (1765), <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.<br /> + <i>Star-Spangled Banner, The</i>, Key, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a + href="#Page_225">225</a>.<br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" + id="Page_280">280</a></span> Stedman, E. C., <a href="#Page_225">225</a>, + <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.<br /> Stowe, Harriet Beecher, <a + href="#Page_219">219</a>-<a href="#Page_223">223</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.<br /> + Strachey, William, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br /> + <i>Summary View of the Rights of British America, A</i>, Jefferson, <a + href="#Page_80">80</a>.<br /> Sumner, Charles, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.<br /> + <i>Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line</i>, Lowell, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + T + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + <i>Tales of a Traveler</i>, Irving, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br /> <i>Tales + of a Wayside Inn</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br /> <i>Tamerlane + and Other Poems</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.<br /> Taylor, Bayard, + <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br /> <i>Telling the Bees</i>, Whittier, <a + href="#Page_158">158</a>.<br /> <i>Tennessee's Partner</i>, Harte, <a + href="#Page_242">242</a>.<br /> <i>Thanatopsis</i>, Bryant, <a + href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.<br /> + Thomas, Edith, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br /> Thompson, Denman, <a + href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br /> Thoreau, H. D., representative of New + England thought, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>; life and writings, <a + href="#Page_130">130</a>-<a href="#Page_139">139</a>; nature-writing, <a + href="#Page_262">262</a>; typically American, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /> + Ticknor, George, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, + <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.<br /> Timrod, + Henry, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.<br /> <i>To Helen</i>, Poe, <a + href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br /> <i>Tom Sawyer</i>, + Clemens, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.<br /> <i>Tour of the Prairies</i>, + Irving, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br /> Transcendentalism, <a + href="#Page_111">111</a> <i>et seq.</i>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>; + bibliography, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>-<a href="#Page_271">271</a>.<br /> + <i>Tritemius</i>, Whittier, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br /> <i>True + Relation</i>, Smith, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>-<a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a + href="#Page_25">25</a>-<a href="#Page_26">26</a>.<br /> <i>True Repertory + of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt. vpon and from the Islands of the + Bermudas</i>, Strachey, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.<br /> Tuckerman, F. G., + quoted, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.<br /> Twain, Mark, <i>see</i> Clemens, + S. L.<br /> <i>Twice-Told Tales</i>, Hawthorne, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.<br /> + Tyler, Professor, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + U + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + <i>Ulalume</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br /> <i>Uncle Tom's + Cabin</i>, Stowe, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, + <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>-<a + href="#Page_223">223</a>.<br /> <i>Union of the Colonies</i>, Franklin, <a + href="#Page_59">59</a>.<br /> Unitarianism, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>-<a + href="#Page_113">113</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + V + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + Verplanck, J. C., <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br /> Very, Jones, <a + href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br /> Virginia, a continuation of English + society, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>; in 1724, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.<br /> + <i>Virginia House of Burgesses, Address of the</i>, Jefferson, <a + href="#Page_80">80</a>.<br /> <i>Virginians, The</i>, Thackeray, <a + href="#Page_45">45</a>.<br /> <i>Vision of Sir Launfal, The</i>, Lowell, <a + href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + W + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + <i>Walden</i>, Thoreau, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, + <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.<br /> Walley, Thomas, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>.<br /> + Warner, C. D., <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.<br /> Washington, George, <a + href="#Page_64">64</a>-<a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, + <a href="#Page_77">77</a>-<a href="#Page_78">78</a>.<br /> <i>Waterfowl, To + a</i>, Bryant, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.<br /> + Webster, Daniel, eulogy for Adams and Jefferson, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>-<a + href="#Page_87">87</a>; civic note in oratory of, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>; + criticism of Clay, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>; his oratory, <a + href="#Page_211">211</a>-<a href="#Page_215">215</a>.<br /> <i>Week on the + Concord and Merrimac Rivers, A</i>, Thoreau, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.<br /> + Wendell, Barrett, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.<br /> West, The, in American + literature, <a href="#Page_237">237</a> <i>et seq</i>.<br /> <i>Westchester + Farmer, The</i>, Seabury, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>.<br /> <i>When Lilacs + last in the Dooryard Bloomed</i>, Whitman, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.<br /> + <i>When the Frost is on the Punkin</i>, Riley, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br /> + Whitaker, Alexander, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>-<a href="#Page_27">27</a>, + <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br /> Whitman, Walt, in 1826, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>; + in New York, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>; life and writings, <a + href="#Page_196">196</a>-<a href="#Page_205">205</a>; died (1892), <a + href="#Page_255">255</a>; typically American, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>; + argues for American books, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.<br /> Whittier, J. G., + in 1826, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>; attitude towards Transcendentalism, <a + href="#Page_143">143</a>; life and writings, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>-<a + href="#Page_164">164</a>; died (1892), <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br /> + William and Mary College, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br /> <i>William + Wilson</i>, Poe, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.<br /> <span class="pagenum"><a + name="Page_281" id="Page_281">281</a></span> Williams, Roger, <a + href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, + <a href="#Page_32">32</a>-<a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, + <a href="#Page_40">40</a>-<a href="#Page_41">41</a>.<br /> Willis, N. P., + <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br /> Winthrop, John, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, + <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>-<a href="#Page_29">29</a>.<br /> + Wirt, William, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>.<br /> Wister, Owen, <a + href="#Page_243">243</a>.<br /> <i>Wonder-Book, The</i>, Hawthorne, <a + href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>.<br /> Woodberry, + George, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br /> Woodworth, Samuel, <a + href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br /> Woolman, John, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.<br /> + <i>Wreck of the Hesperus, The</i>, Longfellow, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br /> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <h3> + Y + </h3> + <div class="indexfont"> + Yale University, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br /> <i>Years of my Youth</i>, + Howells, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.<br /> + </div> + <hr /> + <div class="chapterhead"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + <a href="#Contents">The Chronicles of America Series</a> + </h2> + <ol> + <li> + The Red Man's Continent<br /> by Ellsworth Huntington + </li> + <li> + The Spanish Conquerors<br /> by Irving Berdine Richman + </li> + <li> + Elizabethan Sea-Dogs<br /> by William Charles Henry Wood + </li> + <li> + The Crusaders of New France<br /> by William Bennett Munro + </li> + <li> + Pioneers of the Old South<br /> by Mary Johnson + </li> + <li> + The Fathers of New England<br /> by Charles McLean Andrews + </li> + <li> + Dutch and English on the Hudson<br /> by Maud Wilder Goodwin + </li> + <li> + The Quaker Colonies<br /> by Sydney George Fisher + </li> + <li> + Colonial Folkways<br /> by Charles McLean Andrews + </li> + <li> + The Conquest of New France<br /> by George McKinnon Wrong + </li> + <li> + The Eve of the Revolution<br /> by Carl Lotus Becker + </li> + <li> + Washington and His Comrades in Arms<br /> by George McKinnon Wrong + </li> + <li> + The Fathers of the Constitution<br /> by Max Farrand + </li> + <li> + Washington and His Colleagues<br /> by Henry Jones Ford + </li> + <li> + Jefferson and his Colleagues<br /> by Allen Johnson + </li> + <li> + John Marshall and the Constitution<br /> by Edward Samuel Corwin + </li> + <li> + The Fight for a Free Sea<br /> by Ralph Delahaye Paine + </li> + <li> + Pioneers of the Old Southwest<br /> by Constance Lindsay Skinner + </li> + <li> + The Old Northwest<br /> by Frederic Austin Ogg + </li> + <li> + The Reign of Andrew Jackson<br /> by Frederic Austin Ogg + </li> + <li> + The Paths of Inland Commerce<br /> by Archer Butler Hulbert + </li> + <li> + Adventurers of Oregon<br /> by Constance Lindsay Skinner + </li> + <li> + The Spanish Borderlands<br /> by Herbert Eugene Bolton + </li> + <li> + Texas and the Mexican War<br /> by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson + </li> + <li> + The Forty-Niners<br /> by Stewart Edward White + </li> + <li> + The Passing of the Frontier<br /> by Emerson Hough + </li> + <li> + The Cotton Kingdom<br /> by William E. Dodd + </li> + <li> + The Anti-Slavery Crusade<br /> by Jesse Macy + </li> + <li> + Abraham Lincoln and the Union<br /> by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson + </li> + <li> + The Day of the Confederacy<br /> by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson + </li> + <li> + Captains of the Civil War<br /> by William Charles Henry Wood + </li> + <li> + The Sequel of Appomattox<br /> by Walter Lynwood Fleming + </li> + <li> + The American Spirit in Education<br /> by Edwin E. Slosson + </li> + <li> + <span class="smcap">The American Spirit in Literature<br /> by Bliss + Perry</span> + </li> + <li> + Our Foreigners<br /> by Samuel Peter Orth + </li> + <li> + The Old Merchant Marine<br /> by Ralph Delahaye Paine + </li> + <li> + The Age of Invention<br /> by Holland Thompson + </li> + <li> + The Railroad Builders<br /> by John Moody + </li> + <li> + The Age of Big Business<br /> by Burton Jesse Hendrick + </li> + <li> + The Armies of Labor<br /> by Samuel Peter Orth + </li> + <li> + The Masters of Capital<br /> by John Moody + </li> + <li> + The New South<br /> by Holland Thompson + </li> + <li> + The Boss and the Machine<br /> by Samuel Peter Orth + </li> + <li> + The Cleveland Era<br /> by Henry Jones Ford + </li> + <li> + The Agrarian Crusade<br /> by Solon Justus Buck + </li> + <li> + The Path of Empire<br /> by Carl Russell Fish + </li> + <li> + Theodore Roosevelt and His Times<br /> by Harold Howland + </li> + <li> + Woodrow Wilson and the World War<br /> by Charles Seymour + </li> + <li> + The Canadian Dominion<br /> by Oscar D. Skelton + </li> + <li> + The Hispanic Nations of the New World<br /> by William R. Shepherd + </li> + </ol> + <hr /> + <div class="chapterhead"> + <br /> <br /><br /><br /> + <h2> + Transcriber's Notes + </h2> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + <h3> + Introduction: + </h3> + </div> + <p> + The Chronicles of America Series has two similar editions of each volume + in the series. One version is the Abraham Lincoln edition of the series, a + premium version which includes full-page pictures. A textbook edition was + also produced, which does not contain the pictures and captions associated + with the pictures, but is otherwise the same book. This book was produced + to match the textbook edition of the book. + </p> + <p> + We have retained the original punctuation and spelling in the book, but + there are a few exceptions. Obvious errors were corrected--and all of + these changes can be found in the <i>Detailed Notes Section</i> of these + notes. The spelling of some index entries were changed to match the + spelling used in the text. The <i>Detailed Notes Section</i> also includes + issues that have come up during transcription. One common issue is that + words are sometimes split into two lines for spacing purposes in the + original text. These words are hyphenated in the physical book, but there + is a question sometimes as to whether the hyphen should be retained in + transcription. The reasons behind some of these decisions are itemized. + </p> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + <h3> + Detailed Notes Section: + </h3> + <div class="notes"> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + <h4> + A Note on Centuries + </h4> + <p class="noindent"> + Throughout the <i>Chronicles of America</i> series, most authors have + chosen to hyphenate "seventeenth-century customs" but not hyphenate + "customs in the seventeenth century." In the latter case, seventeenth + century is the object of a preposition, while in the former case, + seventeenth-century is an adjective. This book somewhat adheres to that + standard. Below is a list of phrases in this text which ought to have + the hyphen, but do not, and hence, do not adhere to the standard + previously outlined. None of these clauses were changed in + transcription. + </p> + <ul> + <li> + <a href="#Page_55">Page 55</a>: England is weary of seventeenth + century "enthusiasm," + </li> + <li> + <a href="#Page_85">Page 85</a>: the immense nineteenth century + audience + </li> + <li> + <a href="#Page_90">Page 90</a>: nineteenth century England + </li> + <li> + <a href="#Page_93">Page 93</a>: other eighteenth century tradition, + </li> + <li> + <a href="#Page_138">Page 138</a>: twentieth century America can see + </li> + <li> + <a href="#Page_166">Page 166</a>: resembled such a typical eighteenth + century figure + </li> + <li> + <a href="#Page_182">Page 182</a>: a nineteenth century historian + </li> + </ul> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + <h4> + Chapter II + </h4> + <p class="noindent"> + • <a href="#Page_36">Page 36</a>:<br /> Under-estimate is hyphenated + and split between two lines for spacing in the sentence: "It is the + present fashion to under-estimate the power of Wigglesworth's verse." + There is one other occurrence of underestimate and there is one + occurrence of underestimated, both spelled without the hyphen. + </p> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + <h4> + Chapter IV + </h4> + <p class="noindent"> + • <a href="#Page_72">Page 72</a>:<br /> State-papers is hyphenated + and split between two lines for spacing in the clause: "orations and + pamphlets and state-papers inspired by." On page 67, state papers is + written as two words and on page 82, state paper is written as two + words. While state-papers can only be transcribed as "state-papers" or + "statepapers," "state papers" is the only option consistent with the + author's other usage of the phrase. The word was transcribed "state + papers." + </p> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + <h4> + Chapter V + </h4> + <p class="noindent"> + • <a href="#Page_98">Page 90</a>:<br /> Tree-tops is hyphenated and + split between two lines for spacing in the clause "watching the birds in + the treetops of Elmwood." On page 245, tree-tops was spelled with a + hyphen, so we kept the hyphen here.<br /> • <a href="#Page_98">Page + 98</a>:<br /> Stout-hearted is hyphenated and split between two lines in + the clause: "the stout-hearted old pioneer could afford to bide his + time." On page 84, a variation of the word includes the hyphen: "his + stout-heartedness in disaster." Therefore, we retained the hyphen. + </p> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + <h4> + Chapter VI + </h4> + <p class="noindent"> + • <a href="#Page_133">Page 133</a>:<br /> Poll-tax is hyphenated and + split between two lines for spacing. We kept the hyphen.<br /> • <a + href="#Page_137">Page 137</a>:<br /> Wolf-like is hyphenated and split + between two lines for spacing. We kept the hyphen.<br /> • <a + href="#Page_138">Page 138</a>:<br /> Post-office is hyphenated and split + between two lines for spacing. We kept the hyphen. + </p> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + <h4> + Chapter VII + </h4> + <p class="noindent"> + • <a href="#Page_145">Page 145</a>:<br /> On Page 145, Hawthorne's + <i>The Snow-Image</i> contained a hyphen, but the same title on page 148 + did not have a hyphen: <i>The Snow Image.</i> <br /> • <a + href="#Page_153">Page 153</a>:<br /> Fellow-men was hyphenated and split + between two lines for spacing. There was no other usage of the word in + the book. We transcribed the word without the hyphen, fellowmen. <br /> + • <a href="#Page_172">Page 172</a>:<br /> <i>The First Snow-Fall</i> + was hyphenated and split between two lines for spacing. There was no + other usage of that title in the book. We transcribed the word with the + hyphen, <i>The First Snow-Fall</i>. <br /> + </p> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + <h4> + Chapter IX + </h4> + <p class="noindent"> + • <a href="#Page_208">Page 208</a>:<br /> Epoch-making is hyphenated + and split between two lines for spacing. On page 184, the hyphen was + used, so we retained it here. + </p> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + <h4> + Index + </h4> + <p class="noindent"> + • <a href="#Page_276">Page 276</a>:<br /> Changed the acute accent + to a grave accent in the spelling of Crèvecœur to match the + text in index entry: <i>Letters from an American Farmer</i>, Crévecœur, + 60, 68. <br /> • <a href="#Page_276">Page 276</a>:<br /> Change + Leatherstocking to Leather-Stocking in index entry "Leather-Stocking + Tales, Cooper,"<br /> • <a href="#Page_278">Page 278</a>:<br /> + Change Oake to Oakes in index entry "Oake, Urian."<br /> • <a + href="#Page_280">Page 280</a>:<br /> Change Twicetold to Twice-Told in + index entry "Twice-Told Tales, Hawthorne." + </p> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + </div> + <hr /> + <div class="boilerplate"> + <p class="boilerplate bold double-space-top"> + *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN + LITERATURE *** + </p> + <p class="boilerplate double=space-top"> + ***** This file should be named 3410-h.htm or 3410-h.zip ***** + </p> + <p class="boilerplate double-space-top"> + This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:<br /> + https://www.gutenberg.org/3/4/1/3410/ + </p> + <p class="boilerplate double-space-top"> + Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions + will be renamed. + </p> + <p class="boilerplate"> + Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one + owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and + you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission + and without paying copyright royalties. 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Thus, we do not necessarily keep eBooks + in compliance with any particular paper edition. + </p> + <p class="boilerplate"> + Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility: + </p> + <p class="boilerplate center"> + https://www.gutenberg.org + </p> + <p class="boilerplate"> + This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg™, + including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary + Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to + subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. + </p> + </div> + </body> +</html> diff --git a/3410-h/images/cover.jpg b/3410-h/images/cover.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..f2bde18 --- /dev/null +++ b/3410-h/images/cover.jpg diff --git a/3410.txt b/3410.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..26fc2a0 --- /dev/null +++ b/3410.txt @@ -0,0 +1,5530 @@ +Project Gutenberg's The American Spirit in Literature,, by Bliss Perry + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: The American Spirit in Literature, + A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The + Chronicles Of America Series + +Author: Bliss Perry + +Editor: Allen Johnson + +Posting Date: January 15, 2009 [EBook #3410] +Release Date: September, 2002 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE, *** + + + + +Produced by The James J. Kelly Library of St. Gregory's +University, and Alev Akman + + + + + + +THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE, + +A CHRONICLE OF GREAT INTERPRETERS + +By Bliss Perry + + + +CONTENTS + + I. THE PIONEERS + + II. THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE + + III. THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION + + IV. THE REVOLUTION + + V. THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP + + VI. THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS + + VII. ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY + + VIII. POE AND WHITMAN + + IX. UNION AND LIBERTY + + X. A NEW NATION + + BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE + + + + +THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE + + + +CHAPTER I. THE PIONEERS + +The United States of America has been from the beginning in a perpetual +change. The physical and mental restlessness of the American and the +temporary nature of many of his arrangements are largely due to the +experimental character of the exploration and development of this +continent. The new energies released by the settlement of the colonies +were indeed guided by stern determination, wise forethought, and +inventive skill; but no one has ever really known the outcome of the +experiment. It is a story of faith, of + + Effort, and expectation, and desire, + And something evermore about to be. + +An Alexander Hamilton may urge with passionate force the adoption of the +Constitution, without any firm conviction as to its permanence. The most +clear-sighted American of the Civil War period recognized this element +of uncertainty in our American adventure when he declared: "We are +now testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived and so +dedicated, can long endure." More than fifty years have passed since +that war rearmed the binding force of the Constitution and apparently +sealed the perpetuity of the Union. Yet the gigantic economic and social +changes now in progress are serving to show that the United States has +its full share of the anxieties which beset all human institutions in +this daily altering world. + +"We are but strangers in an inn, but passengers in a ship," said Roger +Williams. This sense of the transiency of human effort, the perishable +nature of human institutions, was quick in the consciousness of the +gentleman adventurers and sober Puritan citizens who emigrated from +England to the New World. It had been a familiar note in the poetry of +that Elizabethan period which had followed with such breathless interest +the exploration of America. It was a conception which could be shared +alike by a saint like John Cotton or a soldier of fortune like John +Smith. Men are tent-dwellers. Today they settle here, and tomorrow they +have struck camp and are gone. We are strangers and sojourners, as all +our fathers were. + +This instinct of the camper has stamped itself upon American life and +thought. Venturesomeness, physical and moral daring, resourcefulness +in emergencies, indifference to negligible details, wastefulness +of materials, boundless hope and confidence in the morrow, are +characteristics of the American. It is scarcely an exaggeration to +say that the "good American" has been he who has most resembled a good +camper. He has had robust health--unless or until he has abused it,--a +tolerant disposition, and an ability to apply his fingers or his brain +to many unrelated and unexpected tasks. He is disposed to blaze his own +trail. He has a touch of prodigality, and, withal, a knack of keeping +his tent or his affairs in better order than they seem. Above all, he +has been ever ready to break camp when he feels the impulse to wander. +He likes to be "foot-loose." If he does not build his roads as solidly +as the Roman roads were built, nor his houses like the English houses, +it is because he feels that he is here today and gone tomorrow. If he +has squandered the physical resources of his neighborhood, cutting the +forests recklessly, exhausting the soil, surrendering water power and +minerals into a few far-clutching fingers, he has done it because he +expects, like Voltaire's Signor Pococurante, "to have a new garden +tomorrow, built on a nobler plan." When New York State grew too crowded +for Cooper's Leather-Stocking, he shouldered his pack, whistled to his +dog, glanced at the sun, and struck a bee-line for the Mississippi. +Nothing could be more typical of the first three hundred years of +American history. + +The traits of the pioneer have thus been the characteristic traits of +the American in action. The memories of successive generations have +tended to stress these qualities to the neglect of others. Everyone +who has enjoyed the free life of the woods will confess that his own +judgment upon his casual summer associates turns, quite naturally and +almost exclusively, upon their characteristics as woodsmen. Out of the +woods, these gentlemen may be more or less admirable divines, pedants, +men of affairs; but the verdict of their companions in the forest is +based chiefly upon the single question of their adaptability to the +environment of the camp. Are they quick of eye and foot, skillful with +rod and gun, cheerful on rainy days, ready to do a little more than +their share of drudgery? If so, memory holds them. + +Some such unconscious selection as this has been at work in the +classification of our representative men. The building of the nation and +the literary expression of its purpose and ideals are tasks which have +called forth the strength of a great variety of individuals. Some of +these men have proved to be peculiarly fitted for a specific service, +irrespective of the question of their general intellectual powers, or +their rank as judged by the standard of European performance in the same +field. Thus the battle of New Orleans, in European eyes a mere bit of +frontier fighting, made Andrew Jackson a "hero" as indubitably as if he +had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. It gave him the Presidency. + +The analogy holds in literature. Certain expressions of American +sentiment or conviction have served to summarize or to clarify the +spirit of the nation. The authors of these productions have frequently +won the recognition and affection of their contemporaries by means of +prose and verse quite unsuited to sustain the test of severe critical +standards. Neither Longfellow's "Excelsior" nor Poe's "Bells" nor +Whittier's "Maud Muller" is among the best poems of the three writers +in question, yet there was something in each of these productions which +caught the fancy of a whole American generation. It expressed one phase +of the national mind in a given historical period. + +The historian of literature is bound to take account of this question of +literary vogue, as it is highly significant of the temper of successive +generations in any country. But it is of peculiar interest to the +student of the literature produced in the United States. Is this +literature "American," or is it "English literature in America," as +Professor Wendell and other scholars have preferred to call it? I should +be one of the last to minimize the enormous influence of England upon +the mind and the writing of all the English-speaking countries of +the globe. Yet it will be one of the purposes of the present book to +indicate the existence here, even in colonial times, of a point of +view differing from that of the mother country, and destined to differ +increasingly with the lapse of time. Since the formation of our Federal +Union, in particular, the books produced in the United States have +tended to exhibit certain characteristics which differentiate them from +the books produced in other English speaking countries. We must beware, +of course, of what the late Charles Francis Adams once called the +"filiopietistic" fallacy. The "American" qualities of our literature +must be judged in connection with its conformity to universal standards +of excellence. Tested by any universal standard, "The Scarlet Letter" +is a notable romance. It has won a secure place among the literature +written by men of English blood and speech. Yet to overlook the +peculiarly local or provincial characteristics of this remarkable story +is to miss the secret of its inspiration. It could have been written +only by a New Englander, in the atmosphere of a certain epoch. + +Our task, then, in this rapid review of the chief interpreters of +the American spirit in literature, is a twofold one. We are primarily +concerned with a procession of men, each of whom is interesting as an +individual and as a writer. But we cannot watch the individuals long +without perceiving the general direction of their march, the ideas that +animate them, the common hopes and loyalties that make up the life +of their spirit. To become aware of these general tendencies is to +understand the "American" note in our national writing. + +Our historians have taught us that the history of the United States +is an evolution towards political unity. The separatist, particularist +movements are gradually thrust to one side. In literary history, +likewise, we best remember those authors who fall into line with what +we now perceive to have been the course of our literary development. +The erratic men and women, the "sports" of the great experiment, +are ultimately neglected by the critics, unless, like the leaders of +political insurrections, those writing men and women have raised a +notable standard of revolt. No doubt the apparently unique literary +specimens, if clearly understood in their origins and surroundings, +would be found rooted in the general laws of literary evolution. But +these laws are not easy to codify and we must avoid the temptation to +discover, in any particular period, more of unity than there actually +was. And we must always remember that there will be beautiful prose and +verse unrelated to the main national tendencies save as "the literature +of escape." We owe this lesson to the genius of Edgar Allan Poe. + +Let us test these principles by applying them to the earliest colonists. +The first book written on the soil of what is now the United States was +Captain John Smith's "True Relation" of the planting of the Virginia +colony in 1607. It was published in London in 1608. The Captain was a +typical Elizabethan adventurer, with a gift, like so many of his class, +for picturesque narrative. In what sense, if at all, may his writings on +American topics be classified as "American" literary productions? It is +clear that his experiences in the New World were only one phase of the +variegated life of this English soldier of fortune. But the American +imagination has persistently claimed him as representing something +peculiarly ours, namely, a kind of pioneer hardihood, resourcefulness, +leadership, which was essential to the exploration and conquest of the +wilderness. Most of Smith's companions were unfitted for the ordeal +which he survived. They perished miserably in the "starving time." But +he was of the stuff from which triumphant immigrants have ever been +made, and it is our recognition of the presence of these qualities in +the Captain which makes us think of his books dealing with America as +if they were "American books." There are other narratives by colonists +temporarily residing in the Virginia plantations which gratify our +historical curiosity, but which we no more consider a part of American +literature than the books written by Stevenson, Kipling, and Wells +during their casual visits to this country. But Captain Smith's "True +Relation" impresses us, like Mark Twain's "Roughing It," with being +somehow true to type. In each of these books the possible unveracities +in detail are a confirmation of their representative American character. + +In other words, we have unconsciously formulated, in the course of +centuries, a general concept of "the pioneer." Novelists, poets, and +historians have elaborated this conception. Nothing is more inevitable +than our reaching back to the beginning of the seventeenth century and +endeavoring to select, among the thousands of Englishmen who emigrated +or even thought of emigrating to this country, those who possessed the +genuine heart and sinew of the permanent settler. + +Oliver Cromwell, for instance, is said to have thought of emigrating +hither in 1637. If he had joined his friends John Cotton and Roger +Williams in New England, who can doubt that the personal characteristics +of "my brave Oliver" would today be identified with the "American" +qualities which we discover in 1637 on the shores of Massachusetts Bay? +And what an American settler Cromwell would have made! + +If we turn from physical and moral daring to the field of theological +and political speculation, it is easy today to select, among the +writings of the earliest colonists, certain radical utterances which +seem to presage the very temper of the late eighteenth century. Pastor +John Robinson's farewell address to the Pilgrims at Leyden in 1620 +contained the famous words: "The Lord has more truth yet to break forth +out of His holy Word. I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the +reformed churches, who are come to a period in religion.... Luther and +Calvin were great and shining lights in their times, yet they penetrated +not into the whole counsel of God." Now John Robinson, like Oliver +Cromwell, never set foot on American soil, but he is identified, none +the less, with the spirit of American liberalism in religion. + +In political discussion, the early emergence of that type of +independence familiar to the decade 1765-75 is equally striking. In a +letter written in 1818, John Adams insisted that "the principles and +feelings which produced the Revolution ought to be traced back for two +hundred years, and sought in the history of the country from the first +plantations in America." "I have always laughed," he declared in +an earlier letter, "at the affectation of representing American +independence as a novel idea, as a modern discovery, as a late +invention. The idea of it as a possible thing, as a probable event, nay +as a necessary and unavoidable measure, in case Great Britain should +assume an unconstitutional authority over us, has been familiar to +Americans from the first settlement of the country." + +There is, then, a predisposition, a latent or potential Americanism +which existed long before the United States came into being. Now that +our political unity has become a fact, the predisposition is certain to +be regarded by our own and by future generations as evidence of a state +of mind which made our separate national life inevitable. Yet to Thomas +Hutchinson, a sound historian and honest man, the last Royal Governor +of Massachusetts, a separate national life seemed in 1770 an unspeakable +error and calamity. + +The seventeenth-century colonists were predominantly English, in blood, +in traditions, and in impulses. Whether we look at Virginia or Plymouth +or at the other colonies that were planted in swift succession along +the seaboard, it is clear that we are dealing primarily with men of the +English race. Most of them would have declared, with as much emphasis +as Francis Hopkinson a century later, "We of America are in all respects +Englishmen." Professor Edward Channing thinks that it took a century +of exposure to colonial conditions to force the English in America away +from the traditions and ideals of those who continued to live in the old +land. But the student of literature must keep constantly in mind that +these English colonizers represented no single type of the national +character. There were many men of many minds even within the contracted +cabin of the Mayflower. The "sifted wheat" was by no means all of the +same variety. + +For Old England was never more torn by divergent thought and subversive +act than in the period between the death of Elizabeth in 1603 and the +Revolution of 1688. In this distracted time who could say what was +really "English"? Was it James the First or Raleigh? Archbishop Laud +or John Cotton? Charles the First or Cromwell? Charles the Second or +William Penn? Was it Churchman, Presbyterian, Independent, Separatist, +Quaker? One is tempted to say that the title of Ben Jonson's comedy +"Every Man in his Humour" became the standard of action for two whole +generations of Englishmen, and that there is no common denominator for +emigrants of such varied pattern as Smith and Sandys of Virginia, +Morton of Merrymount, John Winthrop, "Sir" Christopher Gardiner and Anne +Hutchinson of Boston, and Roger Williams of Providence. They seem as +miscellaneous as "Kitchener's Army." + +It is true that we can make certain distinctions. Virginia, as has often +been said, was more like a continuation of English society, while New +England represented a digression from English society. There were then, +as now, "stand-patters" and "progressives." It was the second class who, +while retaining very conservative notions about property, developed +a fearless intellectual radicalism which has written itself into the +history of the United States. But to the student of early American +literature all such generalizations are of limited value. He is dealing +with individual men, not with "Cavalier" or "Roundhead" as such. He +has learned from recent historians to distrust any such facile +classification of the first colonists. He knows by this time that there +were aristocrats in Massachusetts and commoners in Virginia; that the +Pilgrims of Plymouth were more tolerant than the Puritans of Boston, +and that Rhode Island was more tolerant than either. Yet useful as these +general statements may be, the interpreter of men of letters must +always go back of the racial type or the social system to the individual +person. He recognizes, as a truth for him, that theory of creative +evolution which holds that in the ascending progress of the race each +thinking person becomes a species by himself. + +While something is gained, then, by remembering that the racial +instincts and traditions of the first colonists were overwhelmingly +English, and that their political and ethical views were the product of +a turbulent and distraught time, it is even more important to note how +the physical situation of the colonists affected their intellectual and +moral, as well as their political problems. Among the emigrants from +England, as we have seen, there were great varieties of social status, +religious opinion, individual motive. But at least they all possessed +the physical courage and moral hardihood to risk the dangerous voyage, +the fearful hardships, and the vast uncertainties of the new life. To go +out at all, under the pressure of any motive, was to meet triumphantly +a searching test. It was in truth a "sifting," and though a few +picturesque rascals had the courage to go into exile while a few saints +may have been deterred, it is a truism to say that the pioneers were +made up of brave men and braver women. + +It cannot be asserted that their courage was the result of any single, +dominating motive, equally operative in all of the colonies. Mrs. +Hemans's familiar line about seeking "freedom to worship God" was +measurably true of the Pilgrims of Plymouth, about whom she was writing. +But the far more important Puritan emigration to Massachusetts under +Winthrop aimed not so much at "freedom" as at the establishment of a +theocracy according to the Scriptures. These men straightway denied +freedom of worship, not only to newcomers who sought to join them, but +to those members of their own company who developed independent ways of +thinking. The list of motives for emigration ran the whole gamut, from +missionary fervor for converting the savages, down through a commendable +desire for gain, to the perhaps no less praiseworthy wish to escape a +debtor's prison or the pillory. A few of the colonists were rich. Some +were beggars or indentured servants. Most of them belonged to the middle +class. John Harvard was the son of a butcher; Thomas Shepard, the son +of a grocer; Roger Williams, the son of a tailor. But all three were +university bred and were natural leaders of men. + +Once arrived in the wilderness, the pioneer life common to all of the +colonists began instantly to exert its slow, irresistible pressure upon +their minds and to mould them into certain ways of thinking and +feeling. Without some perception of these modes of thought and emotion +a knowledge of the spirit of our literature is impossible. Take, for +instance, the mere physical situation of the first colonists, encamped +on the very beach of the wide ocean with an illimitable forest in their +rear. Their provisions were scanty. They grew watchful of the strange +soil, of the new skies, of the unknown climate. Even upon the voyage +over, John Winthrop thought that "the declination of the pole star was +much, even to the view, beneath that it is in England," and that "the +new moon, when it first appeared, was much smaller than at any time he +had seen it in England." Here was a man evidently using his eyes with +a new interest in natural phenomena. Under these changed skies the mind +began gradually to change also. + +At first the colonists felt themselves an outpost of Europe, a forlorn +hope of the Protestant Reformation. "We shall be as a city upon a hill," +said Winthrop. "The eyes of all people are upon us." Their creed was +Calvinism, then in its third generation of dominion and a European +doctrine which was not merely theological but social and political. The +emigrant Englishmen were soon to discover that it contained a doctrine +of human rights based upon human needs. At the beginning of their +novel experience they were doubtless unaware of any alteration in their +theories. But they were facing a new situation, and that new situation +became an immense factor in their unconscious growth. Their intellectual +and moral problems shifted, as a boat shifts her ballast when the wind +blows from a new quarter. The John Cotton preaching in a shed in the new +Boston had come to "suffer a sea-change" from the John Cotton who +had been rector of St. Botolph's splendid church in Lincolnshire. +The "church without a bishop" and the "state without a king" became a +different church and state from the old, however loyally the ancient +forms and phrases were retained. + +If the political problems of equality which were latent in Calvinism now +began to take on a different meaning under the democratic conditions of +pioneer life, the inner, spiritual problems of that amazing creed were +intensified. "Fallen" human nature remained the same, whether in the +crowded cosmopolitan streets of Holland and London, or upon the desolate +shores of Cape Cod. But the moral strain of the old insoluble conflict +between "fixed fate" and "free will" was heightened by the physical +loneliness of the colonists. Each soul must fight its own unaided, +unending battle. In that moral solitude, as in the physical solitude of +the settlers upon the far northwestern prairies of a later epoch, many +a mind snapped. Unnatural tension was succeeded by unnatural crimes. +But for the stronger intellects New England Calvinism became a potent +spiritual gymnastic, where, as in the Swedish system of bodily training, +one lifts imaginary and ever-increasing weights with imaginary and +ever-increasing effort, flexor and extensor muscles pulling against one +another, driven by the will. Calvinism bred athletes as well as maniacs. + +The new situation, again, turned many of the theoretical speculations of +the colonists into practical issues. Here, for example, was the Indian. +Was he truly a child of God, possessing a soul, and, if so, had he +partaken of the sin of Adam? These questions perplexed the saintly Eliot +and the generous Roger Williams. But before many years the query as to +whether a Pequot warrior had a soul became suddenly less important than +the practical question as to whether the Pequot should be allowed any +further chances of taking the white man's scalp. On this last issue the +colonists were unanimous in the negative. + +It would be easy to multiply such instances of a gradual change of view. +But beneath all the changes and all the varieties of individual +behavior in the various colonies that began to dot the seaboard, certain +qualities demanded by the new surroundings are felt in colonial life +and in colonial writings. One of these is the instinct for order, or at +least that degree of order essential to the existence of a camp. It +was not in vain that John Smith sought to correct the early laxness at +Jamestown by the stern edict: "He that will not work, neither shall +he eat." Dutch and Quaker colonies taught the same inexorable maxim +of thrift. Soon there was work enough for all, at good wages, but the +lesson had been taught. It gave Franklin's "Poor Richard" mottoes their +flavor of homely, experienced truth. + +Order in daily life led straight to political order, just as the +equality and resourcefulness of the frontier, stimulated by isolation +from Europe, led to political independence. The pioneer learned to make +things for himself instead of sending to London for them, and by and by +he grew as impatient of waiting for a political edict from London as +he would become in waiting for a London plough. "This year," wrote one +colonist, "ye will go to complain to the Parliament, and the next year +they will send to see how it is, and the third year the government is +changed." The time was coming when no more complaints would be sent. + +One of the most startling instances of this colonial instinct for +self-government is the case of Thomas Hooker. Trained in Emmanuel +College of the old Cambridge, he arrived in the new Cambridge in 1633. +He grew restless under its theocratic government, being, it was said, +"a person who when he was doing his Master's work, would put a king into +his pocket." So he led the famous migration of 1636 from Massachusetts +to Hartford, and there helped to create a federation of independent +towns which made their own constitution without mentioning any king, +and became one of the corner-stones of American democracy. In May, 1638, +Hooker declared in a sermon before the General Court "that the choice of +public magistrates belongs unto the people by God's own allowance," and +"that they who have the power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is +in their power, also, to set the bounds and limitations of the power and +place into which they call them." The reason of this is: "Because the +foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the +people." This high discourse antedates the famous pamphlets on liberty +by Milton. It is a half-century earlier than Locke's "Treatise on +Government," a century and a quarter earlier than Rousseau's "Contrat +Social," and it precedes by one hundred and thirty-eight years the +American Declaration of Independence. + +But the slightest acquaintance with colonial writings will reveal the +fact that such political radicalism as Thomas Hooker's was accompanied +by an equally striking conservatism in other directions. One of +these conservative traits was the pioneer's respect for property, and +particularly for the land cleared by his own toil. Gladstone once spoke +of possession of the soil as the most important and most operative +of all social facts. Free-footed as the pioneer colonist was, he was +disinclined to part with his land without a substantial price for it. +The land at his disposal was practically illimitable, but he showed a +very English tenacity in safeguarding his hold upon his own portion. + +Very English, likewise, was his attachment to the old country as "home." +The lighter and the more serious writings of the colonists are alike in +their respect for the past. In the New England settlements, although not +at first in Virginia, there was respect for learning and for an educated +clergy. The colonists revered the Bible. They maintained a stubborn +regard for the Common Law of England. Even amid all the excitement of a +successful rebellion from the mother country, this Common Law still held +the Americans to the experience of the inescapable past. + +Indeed, as the reader of today lifts his eyes from the pages of the +books written in America during the seventeenth century, and tries to +meditate upon the general difference between them and the English books +written during the same period, he will be aware of the firmness with +which the conservative forces held on this side of the Atlantic. It was +only one hundred years from the Great Armada of 1588 to the flight of +James Second, the last of the Stuart Kings. With that Revolution of 1688 +the struggles characteristic of the seventeenth century in England came +to an end. A new working basis is found for thought, politics, society, +literature. But while those vast changes had been shaking England, two +generations of American colonists had cleared their forests, fought the +savages, organized their townships and their trade, put money in their +purses, and lived, though as yet hardly suspecting it, a life that was +beginning to differentiate them from the men of the Old World. We must +now glance at the various aspects of this isolated life of theirs, as it +is revealed in their books. + + + +CHAPTER II. THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE + +The simplest and oldest group of colonial writings is made up of records +of exploration and adventure. They are like the letters written from +California in 1849 to the "folks back East." Addressed to home-keeping +Englishmen across the sea, they describe the new world, explain the +present situation of the colonists, and express their hopes for the +future. Captain John Smith's "True Relation," already alluded to, is the +typical production of this class: a swift marching book, full of eager +energy, of bluff and breezy picturesqueness, and of triumphant instinct +for the main chance. Like most of the Elizabethans, he cannot help +poetizing in his prose. Codfishing is to him a "sport"; "and what +sport doth yeald a more pleasing content, and lesse hurt or charge then +angling with a hooke, and crossing the sweete ayre from Isle to Isle, +over the silent streams of a calme Sea?" But the gallant Captain is also +capable of very plain speech, Cromwellian in its simplicity, as when he +writes back to the London stockholders of the Virginia Company: "When +you send again, I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters, +husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of +trees' roots, well provided, than a thousand of such as we have." + +America was but an episode in the wide wanderings of Captain Smith, +but he owes his place in human memory today to the physical and mental +energy with which he met the demands of a new situation, and to the +vividness with which he dashed down in words whatever his eyes had seen. +Whether, in that agreeable passage about Pocahontas, he was guilty of +romancing a little, no one really knows, but the Captain, as the first +teller of this peculiarly American type of story, will continue to have +an indulgent audience. + +But other exiles in Virginia were skillful with the pen. William +Strachey's "True Reportory of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., vpon +and from the islands of the Bermudas" may or may not have given a hint +to Shakespeare for the storm-scene in "The Tempest." In either case it +is admirable writing, flexible, sensitive, shrewdly observant. Whitaker, +the apostle of Virginia, mingles, like many a missionary of the present +day, the style of an exhorter with a keen discernment of the traits of +the savage mind. George Percy, fresh from Northumberland, tells in a +language as simple as Defoe's the piteous tale of five months of illness +and starvation, watched by "those wild and cruel Pagans." John Pory, +of "the strong potations," who thinks that "good company is the soul +of this life," nevertheless comforts himself in his solitude among the +"crystal rivers and odoriferous woods" by reflecting that he is escaping +envy and expense. George Sandys, scholar and poet, finds his solace +during a Virginia exile in continuing his translation of Ovid's +"Metamorphoses." Colonel Norwood, an adventurer who belongs to a +somewhat later day, since he speaks of having "read Mr. Smith's +travels," draws the long bow of narrative quite as powerfully as the +redoubtable Smith, and far more smoothly, as witness his accounts of +starvation on shipboard and cannibalism on shore. This Colonel is an +artist who would have delighted Stevenson. + +All of these early tellers of Virginia tales were Englishmen, and most +of them returned to England, where their books were printed and their +remaining lives were passed. But far to the north east of Virginia +there were two colonies of men who earned the right to say, in William +Bradford's quiet words, "It is not with us as with other men, whom small +things can discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish themselves +at home again." One was the colony of Pilgrims at Plymouth, headed by +Bradford himself. The other was the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay, +with John Winthrop as governor. + +Bradford and Winthrop have left journals which are more than chronicles +of adventure. They record the growth and government of a commonwealth. +Both Bradford and Winthrop were natural leaders of men, grave, +dignified, solid, endowed with a spirit that bred confidence. Each was +learned. Winthrop, a lawyer and man of property, had a higher social +standing than Bradford, who was one of the Separatists of Robinson's +flock at Leyden. But the Pilgrim of the Mayflower and the well-to-do +Puritan of the Bay Colony both wrote their annals like gentlemen and +scholars. Bradford's "History of Plymouth Plantation" runs from 1620 +to 1647. Winthrop's diary, now printed as the "History of New England," +begins with his voyage in 1630 and closes in the year of his death, +1649. As records of an Anglo-Saxon experiment in self-government under +pioneer conditions these books are priceless; as human documents, they +illuminate the Puritan character; as for "literary" value in the narrow +sense of that word, neither Bradford nor Winthrop seems to have thought +of literary effect. Yet the leader of the Pilgrims has passages of grave +sweetness and charm, and his sketch of his associate, Elder Brewster, +will bear comparison with the best English biographical writing of that +century. Winthrop is perhaps more varied in tone, as he is in matter, +but he writes throughout as a ruler of men should write, with "decent +plainness and manly freedom." His best known pages, justly praised +by Tyler and other historians of American thought, contain his speech +before the General Court in 1645 on the nature of true liberty. No +paragraphs written in America previous to the Revolution would have +given more pleasure to Abraham Lincoln, but it is to be feared that +Lincoln never saw Governor Winthrop's book, though his own ancestor, +Samuel Lincoln of Hingham, lived under Winthrop's jurisdiction. + +The theory of government held by the dominant party of the first two +generations of New England pioneers has often been called a "theocracy," +that is to say, a government according to the Word of God as expounded +and enforced by the clergy. The experiment was doomed to ultimate +failure, for it ran counter to some of the noblest instincts of human +nature. But its administration was in the hands of able men. The power +of the clergy was well-nigh absolute. The political organization of the +township depended upon the ecclesiastical organization as long as the +right to vote was confined to church members. How sacrosanct and awful +was the position of the clergyman may be perceived from Hawthorne's "The +Minister's Black Veil" and "The Scarlet Letter." + +Yet it must be said that men like Hooker and Cotton, Shepard and +Norton, had every instinct and capacity for leadership. With the notable +exception of Hooker, such men were aristocrats, holding John Winthrop's +opinion that "Democracy is, among most civil nations, accounted the +meanest and worst form of government." They were fiercely intolerant. +The precise reason for the Hooker migration from Cambridge to Hartford +in 1636--the very year of the founding of Harvard--was prudently +withheld, but it is now thought to be the instinct of escape from the +clerical architects of the Cambridge Platform. Yet no one would today +call Thomas Hooker a liberal in religion, pioneer in political liberty +though he proved to be. His extant sermons have the steady stroke of a +great hammer; smiting at the mind and heart. "Others because they have +felt the heavy hand of God... upon these grounds they build their hopes: +'I have had my hell in this life, and I hope to have heaven in the world +to come; I hope the worst is over.'" Not so, thunders the preacher in +reply: "Sodom and Gomorrah they burnt in brimstone and they shall burn +in hell." One of Hooker's successors has called him "a son of thunder +and a son of consolation by turns." The same may be said of Thomas +Shepard, another graduate of Emmanuel College in the old Cambridge, +who became the "soul-melting preacher" of the newer Cambridge by +the Charles. Pure, ravishing notes of spiritual devotion still sing +themselves in his pages. He is wholly Calvinist. He thinks "the truth +is a poor mean thing in itself" and that the human reason cannot be "the +last resolution of all doubts," which must be sought only in the written +Word of God. He holds it "a tough work, a wonderful hard matter to be +saved." "Jesus Christ is not got with a wet finger." Yet, like so many +mystics, he yearns to be "covered with God, as with a cloud," to be +"drowned, plunged, and swallowed up with God." One hundred years later +we shall find this same rhapsodic ecstasy in the meditations of Jonathan +Edwards. + +John Cotton, the third of the mighty men in the early Colonial pulpit, +owes his fame more to his social and political influence than to his +literary power. Yet even that was thought commanding. Trained, like +Hooker and Shepard, at Emmanuel College, and fresh from the rectorship +of St. Botolph's in the Lincolnshire Boston, John Cotton dominated +that new Boston which was named in his honor. He became the Pope of +the theocracy; a clever Pope and not an unkindly one. He seems to have +shared some of the opinions of Anne Hutchinson, though he "pronounced +the sentence of admonition" against her, says Winthrop, with much zeal +and detestation of her errors. Hawthorne, in one of his ironic moods, +might have done justice to this scene. Cotton was at heart too liberal +for his role of Primate, and fate led him to persecute a man whose very +name has become a symbol of victorious tolerance, Roger Williams. + +Williams, known today as a friend of Cromwell, Milton, and Sir Harry +Vane, had been exiled from Massachusetts for maintaining that the civil +power had no jurisdiction over conscience. This doctrine was fatal to +the existence of a theocratic state dominated by the church. John Cotton +was perfectly logical in "enlarging" Roger Williams into the wilderness, +but he showed less than his usual discretion in attacking the +quick-tempered Welshman in pamphlets. It was like asking Hotspur if +he would kindly consent to fight. Back and forth the books fly, for +Williams loves this game. His "Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of +Conscience" calls forth Mr. Cotton's "Bloody Tenet washed and made white +in the Blood of the Lamb;" and this in turn provokes the torrential +flood of Williams's masterpiece, "The Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, by +Mr. Cotton's endeavor to wash it white in the Blood of the Lamb." There +is glorious writing here, and its effect cannot be suggested by quoting +sentences. But there is one sentence in a letter written by Williams in +his old age to his fellow-townsmen of Providence which points the whole +moral of the terrible mistake made by the men who sought spiritual +liberty in America for themselves, only to deny that same liberty to +others. "I have only one motion and petition," begs this veteran pioneer +who had forded many a swollen stream and built many a rude bridge in the +Plantations: "it is this, that after you have got over the black brook +of some soul bondage yourselves, you tear not down the bridge after +you." + +It is for such wise and humane counsels as this that Roger Williams +is remembered. His opponents had mightier intellects than his, but the +world has long since decided against them. Colonial sermon literature +is read today chiefly by antiquarians who have no sympathy for the +creed which once gave it vitality. Its theology, like the theology of +"Paradise Lost or the Divine Comedy," has sunk to the bottom of the +black brook. But we cannot judge fairly the contemporary effect of this +pulpit literature without remembering the passionate faith that made +pulpit and pews copartners in a supreme spiritual struggle. Historians +properly insist upon the aesthetic poverty of the New England Puritans; +that their rule of life cut them off from an enjoyment of the dramatic +literature of their race, then just closing its most splendid epoch; +that they had little poetry or music and no architecture and plastic +art. But we must never forget that to men of their creed the Sunday +sermons and the week-day "lectures" served as oratory, poetry, and +drama. These outpourings of the mind and heart of their spiritual +leaders were the very stuff of human passion in its intensest forms. +Puritan churchgoers, passing hours upon hours every week in rapt +absorption with the noblest of all poetry and prose in the pages of +their chief book, the Bible, were at least as sensitive to the beauty +of words and the sweep of emotions as our contemporaries upon whose +book-shelves Spenser and Milton stand unread. + +It is only by entering into the psychology of the period that we +can estimate its attitude towards the poetry written by the pioneers +themselves. The "Bay Psalm Book" (1640), the first book printed in the +colonies, is a wretched doggerel arrangement of the magnificent King +James Version of the Psalms, designed to be sung in churches. Few of +the New England churches could sing more than half-a-dozen tunes, and +a pitch-pipe was for a long time the only musical instrument allowed. +Judged as hymnology or poetry, the Bay "Psalm Book" provokes a smile. +But the men and women who used it as a handbook of devotion sang it with +their hearts aflame. In judging such a popular seventeenth-century poem +as Wigglesworth's "Day of Doom" one must strip oneself quite free from +the twentieth century, and pretend to be sitting in the chimney-corner +of a Puritan kitchen, reading aloud by that firelight which, as Lowell +once humorously suggested, may have added a "livelier relish" to the +poet's "premonitions of eternal combustion." Lowell could afford to +laugh about it, having crossed that particular black brook. But for +several generations the boys and girls of New England had read the "Day +of Doom" as if Mr. Wigglesworth, the gentle and somewhat sickly minister +of Malden, had veritably peeped into Hell. It is the present fashion to +underestimate the power of Wigglesworth's verse. At its best it has a +trampling, clattering shock like a charge of cavalry and a sound +like clanging steel. Mr. Kipling and other cunning ballad-makers have +imitated the peculiar rhyme structure chosen by the nervous little +parson. But no living poet can move his readers to the fascinated horror +once felt by the Puritans as they followed Wigglesworth's relentless +gaze into the future of the soul's destiny. + +Historical curiosity may still linger, of course, over other +verse-writers of the period. Anne Bradstreet's poems, for instance, +are not without grace and womanly sweetness, in spite of their didactic +themes and portentous length. But this lady, born in England, the +daughter of Governor Dudley and later the wife of Governor Bradstreet, +chose to imitate the more fantastic of the moralizing poets of England +and France. There is little in her hundreds of pages which seems today +the inevitable outcome of her own experience in the New World. For +readers who like roughly mischievous satire, of a type initiated in +England by Bishop Hall and Donne, there is "The Simple Cobbler of +Agawam" written by the roving clergyman Nathaniel Ward. But he lived +only a dozen years in Massachusetts, and his satirical pictures are +scarcely more "American" than the satire upon German professors in +"Sartor Resartus" is "German." Like Charles Dickens's "American Notes," +Ward's give the reaction of a born Englishman in the presence of the +sights and the talk and the personages of the transatlantic world. + +Of all the colonial writings of the seventeenth century, those that have +lost least of their interest through the lapse of years are narratives +of struggles with the Indians. The image of the "bloody savage" has +always hovered in the background of the American imagination. Our boys +and girls have "played Indian" from the beginning, and the actual Indian +is still found, as for three hundred years past, upon the frontier +fringe of our civilization. Novelists like Cooper, historians like +Parkman, poets like Longfellow, have dealt with the rich material +offered by the life of the aborigines, but the long series begins with +the scribbled story of colonists. Here are comedy and tragedy, plain +narratives of trading and travel, missionary zeal and triumphs; then the +inevitable alienation of the two races and the doom of the native. + +The "noble savage" note may be found in John Rolfe, the husband of +Pocahontas, with whom, poor fellow, his "best thoughts are so intangled +and enthralled." Other Virginians, like Smith, Strachey, and Percy, show +close naturalistic observation, touched with the abounding Elizabethan +zest for novelties. To Alexander Whitaker, however, these "naked slaves +of the devil" were "not so simple as some have supposed." He yearned +and labored over their souls, as did John Eliot and Roger Williams +and Daniel Gookin of New England. In the Pequot War of 1637 the +grim settlers resolved to be rid of that tribe once for all, and the +narratives of Captain Edward Johnson and Captain John Mason, who led in +the storming and slaughter at the Indians' Mystic Fort, are as piously +relentless as anything in the Old Testament. Cromwell at Drogheda, not +long after, had soldiers no more merciless than these exterminating +Puritans, who wished to plough their fields henceforth in peace. A +generation later the storm broke again in King Philip's War. Its +tales of massacre, captivity, and single-handed fighting linger in the +American imagination still. Typical pamphlets are Mary Rowlandson's +thrilling tale of the Lancaster massacre and her subsequent captivity, +and the loud-voiced Captain Church's unvarnished description of King +Philip's death. The King, shot down like a wearied bull-moose in the +deep swamp, "fell upon his face in the mud and water, with his gun +under him." They "drew him through the mud to the upland; and a doleful, +great, naked dirty beast he looked like." The head brought only thirty +shillings at Plymouth: "scanty reward and poor encouragement," thought +Captain Church. William Hubbard, the minister of Ipswich, wrote a +comprehensive "Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New +England," bringing the history down to 1677. Under the better known +title of "Indian Wars," this fervid and dramatic tale, penned in a quiet +parsonage, has stirred the pulses of every succeeding generation. The +close of King Philip's War, 1676, coinciding as it does with Bacon's +Rebellion in Virginia, marks an era in the development of our +independent life. The events of that year, in the words of Professor +Tyler, "established two very considerable facts, namely, that English +colonists in America could be so provoked as to make physical resistance +to the authority of England, and, second, that English colonists in +America could, in the last resort, put down any combination of Indians +that might be formed against them. In other words, it was then made +evident that English colonists would certainly be safe in the new world, +and also that they would not always be colonists." + +While the end of an historical or literary era cannot always be thus +conveniently indicated by a date, there is no doubt that the final +quarter of the seventeenth century witnessed deep changes in the outward +life and the inner temper of the colonists. The "first fine careless +rapture" was over. Only a few aged men could recall the memory of the +first settlements. Between the founding of Jamestown and the rebellion +under the leadership of Nathaniel Bacon almost seventy years had +intervened, an interval corresponding to that which separates us from +the Mexican War. Roger Williams ended his much-enduring and beneficent +life in the flourishing town of Providence in 1684. He had already +outlived Cotton and Hooker, Shepard and Winthrop, by more than thirty +years. Inevitably men began, toward the end of the century, to take +stock of the great venture of colonization, to scrutinize their own +history and present position, to ask searching questions of themselves. +"You have better food and raiment than was in former times," wrote +the aged Roger Clark, in 1676; "but have you better hearts than your +forefathers had?" Thomas Walley's "Languishing Commonwealth" maintains +that "Faith is dead, and Love is cold, and Zeal is gone." Urian Oakes's +election sermon of 1670 in Cambridge is a condemnation of the prevalent +worldliness and ostentation. This period of critical inquiry and +assessment, however, also gives grounds for just pride. History, +biography, eulogy, are flourishing. The reader is reminded of that +epoch, one hundred and fifty years later, when the deaths of John Adams +and of Thomas Jefferson, falling upon the same anniversary day, the +Fourth of July, 1826, stirred all Americans to a fresh recognition of +the services wrought by the Fathers of the Republic. So it was in the +colonies at the close of the seventeenth century. Old England, in one +final paroxysm of political disgust, cast out the last Stuart in 1688. +That Revolution marks, as we have seen, the close of a long and tragic +struggle which began in the autocratic theories of James the First +and in the absolutism of Charles. Almost every phase of that momentous +conflict had its reverberation across the Atlantic, as the history of +the granting and withdrawal of colonial charters witnesses abundantly. +The American pioneers were quite aware of what was going on in England, +and they praised God or grumbled, thriftily profited by the results or +quietly nullified them, as the case might be. But all the time, while +England was rocked to its foundations, the colonists struck steadily +forward into their own independent life. + + + +CHAPTER III. THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION + +When the eighteenth century opened, many signs of change were in +the air. The third generation of native-born Americans was becoming +secularized. The theocracy of New England had failed. In the height +of the tragic folly over the supposed "witchcraft" in Salem, Increase +Mather and his son Cotton had held up the hands of the judges in their +implacable work. But before five years had passed, Judge Sewall does +public penance in church for his share of the awful blunder, desiring +"to take the shame and blame of it." Robert Calef's cool pamphlet +exposing the weakness of the prosecutors' case is indeed burned by +Increase Mather in the Harvard Yard, but the liberal party are soon to +force Mather from the Presidency and to refuse that office to his son. +In the town of Boston, once hermetically sealed against heresy, there +are Baptist and Episcopal churches--and a dancing-master. Young Benjamin +Franklin, born in 1706, professes a high respect for the Mathers, but he +does not go to church, "Sunday being my studying day," and neither the +clerical nor the secular arm of Boston is long enough and strong enough +to compel that industrious apprentice into piety. + +If such was the state of New England, the laxity of New York and +Virginia needs little evidence. Contemporary travelers found the +New Yorkers singularly attached to the things of this present world. +Philadelphia was prosperous and therewith content. Virginia was a +paradise with no forbidden fruit. Hugh Jones, writing of it in 1724, +considers North Carolina "the refuge of runaways," and South Carolina +"the delight of buccaneers and pirates," but Virginia "the happy retreat +of true Britons and true Churchmen." Unluckily these Virginians, well +nourished "by the plenty of the country," have "contemptible notions +of England!" We shall hear from them again. In the meantime the witty +William Byrd of Westover describes for us his amusing survey of the +Dismal Swamp, and his excursions into North Carolina and to Governor +Spotswood's iron mines, where he reads aloud to the Widow Fleming, on +a rainy autumn day, three acts of the "Beggars' Opera," just over from +London. So runs the world away, south of the Potomac. Thackeray paints +it once for all, no doubt, in the opening chapters of "The Virginians." + +To discover any ambitious literary effort in this period, we must turn +northward again. In the middle colonies, and especially in Philadelphia, +which had now outgrown Boston in population, there was a quickened +interest in education and science. But the New Englanders were still the +chief makers of books. Three great names will sufficiently represent the +age: Cotton Mather, a prodigy of learning whose eyes turn back fondly +to the provincial past; Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the most consummate +intellect of the eighteenth century; and Benjamin Franklin, certainly +the most perfect exponent of its many-sided life. + +When Cotton Mather was graduated from Harvard in 1678, in his sixteenth +year, he was publicly complimented by President Oakes, in fulsome Latin, +as the grandson of Richard Mather and John Cotton. This atmosphere of +flattery, this consciousness of continuing in his own person the famous +local dynasty, surrounded and sustained him to the end. He had a less +commanding personality than his father Increase. His nervous sensibility +was excessive. His natural vanity was never subdued, though it was often +chastened by trial and bitter disappointment. But, like his father, he +was an omnivorous reader and a facile producer of books, carrying daily +such burdens of mental and spiritual excitement as would have crushed a +normal man. Increase Mather published some one hundred and fifty books +and pamphlets: Cotton Mather not less than four hundred. The Rev. John +Norton, in his sketch of John Cotton, remarks that "the hen, which +brings not forth without uncessant sitting night and day, is an +apt emblem of students." Certainly the hen is an apt emblem of the +"uncessant" sitter, the credulous scratcher, the fussy cackler who +produced the "Magnalia." + +Yet he had certain elements of greatness. His tribal loyalty was +perfect. His ascetic devotion to his conception of religious truth was +absolute. His Diary, which has recently been published in full, records +his concern for the chief political events in Europe in his day, no less +than his brooding solicitude for the welfare of his townspeople, and his +agony of spirit over the lapses of his wayward eldest son. A "sincere" +man, then, as Carlyle would say, at bottom; but overlaid with such +"Jewish old clothes," such professional robings and personal plumage +as makes it difficult, save in the revealing "Diary," to see the man +himself. + +The "Magnalia Christi Americana," treating the history of New England +from 1620 to 1698, was published in a tall London folio of nearly 800 +pages in 1702. It is divided into seven books, and proceeds, by methods +entirely unique, to tell of Pilgrim and Puritan divines and governors, +of Harvard College, of the churches of New England, of marvelous events, +of Indian wars; and in general to justify, as only a member of the +Mather dynasty could justify, the ways of God to Boston men. Hawthorne +and Whittier, Longfellow and Lowell knew this book well and found +much honey in the vast carcass. To have had four such readers and a +biographer like Barrett Wendell must be gratifying to Cotton Mather in +Paradise. + +The "Diary" of Mather's fellow-townsman Judge Samuel Sewall has been +read more generally in recent years than anything written by Mather +himself. It was begun in 1673, nine years earlier than the first entry +in Mather's "Diary," and it ends in 1729, while Mather's closes in 1724. +As a picture of everyday happenings in New England, Sewall's "Diary" +is as far superior to Mather's as Pepys's "Diary" is to George Fox's +"Journal" in painting the England of the Restoration. Samuel Sewall was +an admirably solid figure, keen, forceful, honest. Most readers of his +"Diary" believe that he really was in luck when he was rejected by the +Widow Winthrop on that fateful November day when his eye noted--in spite +of his infatuation--that "her dress was not so clean as sometime it had +been. Jehovah Jireh!" + +One pictures Cotton Mather as looking instinctively backward to the +Heroic Age of New England with pious nervous exaltation, and Samuel +Sewall as doing the day's work uprightly without taking anxious thought +of either past or future. But Jonathan Edwards is set apart from these +and other men. He is a lonely seeker after spiritual perfection, in +quest of that city "far on the world's rim," as Masefield says of it, +the city whose builder and maker is God. + +The story of Edwards's career has the simplicity and dignity of tragedy. +Born in a parsonage in the quiet Connecticut valley in 1703--the year +of John Wesley's birth--he is writing at the age of ten to disprove the +doctrine of the materiality of the soul. At twelve he is studying +"the wondrous way of the working of the spider," with a precision and +enthusiasm which would have made him a great naturalist. At fourteen he +begins his notes on "The Mind" and on "Natural Science." He is graduated +from Yale in 1720, studies theology, and at twenty-four becomes the +colleague of his famous grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in the church +at Northampton. He marries the beautiful Sarah Pierrepont, whom he +describes in his journal in a prose rhapsody which, like his mystical +rhapsodies on religion in the same youthful period, glows with a clear +unearthly beauty unmatched in any English prose of that century. For +twenty-three years he serves the Northampton church, and his sermons win +him the rank of the foremost preacher in New England. John Wesley reads +at Oxford his account of the great revival of 1735. Whitefield comes to +visit him at Northampton. Then, in 1750, the ascetic preacher +alienates his church over issues pertaining to discipline and to the +administration of the sacrament. He is dismissed. He preaches his +"farewell sermon," like Wesley, like Emerson, like Newman, and many +another still unborn. He removes to Stockbridge, then a hamlet in the +wilderness, preaches to the Indians, and writes treatises on theology +and metaphysics, among them the world famous "Freedom of the Will." +In 1757, upon the death of his son-in-law, President Aaron Burr of +Princeton, Edwards is called to the vacant Presidency. He is reluctant +to go, for though he is only fifty-four, his health has never been +robust, and he has his great book on the "History of Redemption" still +to write. But he accepts, finds the smallpox raging in Princeton upon +his arrival in January, 1758, is inoculated, and dies of the disease in +March--his dreams unfulfilled, his life-work once more thwarted. Close +by the tomb of this saint is the tomb of his grandson, Aaron Burr, who +killed Hamilton. + +The literary reputation of Jonathan Edwards has turned, like the +vicissitudes of his life, upon factors that could not be foreseen. His +contemporary fame was chiefly as a preacher, and was due to sermons +like those upon "God Glorified in Man's Dependence" and "The Reality of +Spiritual Life," rather than to such discourses as the Enfield sermon, +"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which in our own day is the best +known of his deliverances. Legends have grown up around this terrific +Enfield sermon. Its fearful power over its immediate hearers cannot be +gainsaid, and it will long continue to be quoted as an example of the +length to which a Calvinistic logician of genius was compelled by his +own scheme to go. We still see the tall, sweet-faced man, worn by his +daily twelve hours of intense mental toil, leaning on one elbow in the +pulpit and reading from manuscript, without even raising his gentle +voice, those words which smote his congregation into spasms of terror +and which seem to us sheer blasphemy. + +Yet the "Farewell Sermon of 1750" gives a more characteristic view of +Edwards's mind and heart, and conveys an ineffaceable impression of +his nobility of soul. His diction, like Wordsworth's, is usually plain +almost to bareness; the formal framework of his discourses is obtruded; +and he hunts objections to their last hiding place with wearisome +pertinacity. Yet his logic is incandescent. Steel sometimes burns to the +touch like this, in the bitter winters of New England, and one wonders +whether Edwards's brain was not of ice, so pitiless does it seem. +His treatise denying the freedom of the will has given him a European +reputation comparable with that enjoyed by Franklin in science and +Jefferson in political propaganda. It was really a polemic demonstrating +the sovereignty of God, rather than pure theology or metaphysics. +Edwards goes beyond Augustine and Calvin in asserting the arbitrary will +of the Most High and in "denying to the human will any self-determining +power." He has been refuted by events and tendencies, such as the growth +of historical criticism and the widespread acceptance of the doctrine of +evolution, rather than by the might of any single antagonist. So, too, +the Dred Scott decision of Chief Justice Taney, holding that the slave +was not a citizen, was not so much answered by opponents as it was +superseded by the arbitrament of war. But the idealism of this lonely +thinker has entered deeply and permanently into the spiritual life of +his countrymen, and he will continue to be read by a few of those who +still read Plato and Dante. + +"My mother grieves," wrote Benjamin Franklin to his father in 1738, +"that one of her sons is an Arian, another an Arminian. What an Arminian +or an Arian is, I cannot say that I very well know. The truth is I +make such distinctions very little my study." To understand Franklin's +indifference to such distinctions, we must realize how completely he +represents the secularizing tendencies of his age. What a drama of +worldly adventure it all was, this roving life of the tallow-chandler's +son, who runs away from home, walks the streets of Philadelphia with +the famous loaves of bread under his arm, is diligent in business, +slips over to London, where he gives lessons in swimming and in total +abstinence, slips back to Philadelphia and becomes its leading citizen, +fights the long battle of the American colonies in London, sits in the +Continental Congress, sails to Europe to arrange that French Alliance +which brought our Revolution to a successful issue, and comes home at +last, full of years and honors, to a bland and philosophical exit from +the stage! + +He broke with every Puritan tradition. The Franklins were relatively +late comers to New England. They sprang from a long line of blacksmiths +at Ecton in Northamptonshire. The seat of the Washingtons was not far +away, and Franklin's latest biographer points out that the pink-coated +huntsmen of the Washington gentry may often have stopped at Ecton to +have their horses shod at the Franklin smithy. Benjamin's father came +out in 1685, more than fifty years after the most notable Puritan +emigration. Young Benjamin, born in 1706, was as untouched by the +ardors of that elder generation as he would have been by the visions of +Dante--an author, by the way, whom he never mentions, even as he never +mentions Shakespeare. He had no reverence for Puritan New England. To +its moral beauty, its fine severity, he was wholly blind. As a boy he +thriftily sold his Pilgrim's "Progress." He became, in the new fashion +of that day, a Deist. Like a true child of the eighteenth century, +his attitude toward the seventeenth was that of amused or contemptuous +superiority. Thackeray has somewhere a charming phrase about his own +love for the back seat of the stage-coach, the seat which, in the old +coaching days, gave one a view of the receding landscape. Thackeray, +like Burke before him, loved historical associations, historical +sentiment, the backward look over the long road which humanity has +traveled. But Franklin faced the other way. He would have endorsed his +friend Jefferson's scornful sentence, "The dead have no rights." He +joined himself wholly to that eighteenth century in which his own lot +was cast, and, alike in his qualities and in his defects, he became one +of its most perfect representatives. + +To catch the full spirit of that age, turn for an instant to the London +of 1724--the year of Franklin's arrival. Thirty-six years have elapsed +since the glorious Revolution of 1688; the Whig principles, then +triumphant, have been tacitly accepted by both political parties; the +Jacobite revolt of 1715 has proved a fiasco; the country has accepted +the House of Hanover and a government by party leadership of the House +of Commons, and it does not care whether Sir Robert Walpole buys a +few rotten boroughs, so long as he maintains peace with Europe +and prosperity at home. England is weary of seventeenth century +"enthusiasm," weary of conflict, sick of idealism. She has found in the +accepted Whig principles a satisfactory compromise, a working theory of +society, a modus vivendi which nobody supposes is perfect but which will +answer the prayer appointed to be read in all the churches, "Grant us +peace in our time, O Lord." The theories to which men gave their lives +in the seventeenth century seem ghostly in their unreality; but the +prize turnips on Sir Robert's Norfolk farm, and the wines in his cellar, +and the offices at his disposal--these are very real indeed. London +merchants are making money; the squire and the parson are tranquilly +ruling the country parishes; the philosophy of John Locke is everywhere +triumphant. Mr. Pope is the poet of the hour, and his "Essay on Man," +counseling acceptance of our mortal situation, is considered to be the +last word of human wisdom and of poetical elegance. In prose, the style +of the "Spectator" rules--an admirable style, Franklin thought, and he +imitated it patiently until its ease and urbanity had become his own. +And indeed, how much of that London of the third decade of the century +passed into the mind of the inquisitive, roving, loose-living printer's +apprentice from Philadelphia! It taught him that the tangible world is +the real world, and that nothing succeeds like success; but it never +even whispered to him that sometimes nothing damns like success. + +In his limitations, no less than in his power of assimilation, Franklin +was the representative man of his era. He had no artistic interests, no +liking for metaphysics after his brief devotion, in early manhood, to +the dialogues of Plato. He taught himself some Latin, but he came to +believe that the classics had little significance and that they should +be superseded by the modern languages. For the mediaeval world he had no +patience or understanding. To these defects of his century we must +add some failings of his own. He was not always truthful. He had an +indelible streak of coarseness. His conception of the "art of virtue" +was mechanical. When Carlyle called Franklin the "father of all the +Yankees," we must remember that the Scotch prophet hated Yankees and +believed that Franklin's smooth, plausible, trader type of morality was +only a broad way to the everlasting bonfire. + +But it is folly to linger over the limitations of the tallow-chandler's +son. The catalogue of his beneficent activity is a vast one. Balzac once +characterized him as the man who invented the lightning-rod, the +hoax, and the republic. His contributions to science have to do with +electricity, earthquakes, geology, meteorology, physics, chemistry, +astronomy, mathematics, navigation of air and water, agriculture, +medicine, and hygiene. In some of these fields he did pioneer work +of lasting significance. His teachings of thrift and prudence, as +formulated in the maxims of Poor Richard, gave him a world-wide +reputation. He attacked war, like Voltaire, not so much for its +wickedness as for its folly, and cheerfully gave up many years of a long +life to the effort to promote a better understanding among the nations +of the world. + +It is perhaps needless to add what all persons who love good writing +know, that Benjamin Franklin was a most delightful writer. His letters +cover an amusing and extraordinary variety of topics. He ranges from +balloons to summer hats, and from the advantages of deep ploughing to +bifocal glasses, which, by the way, he invented. He argues for sharp +razors and cold baths, and for fresh air in the sleeping-room. He +discusses the morals of the game of chess, the art of swimming, the +evils of smoky chimneys, the need of reformed spelling. Indeed, his +passion for improvement led him not only to try his hand upon an +abridgment of the Book of Common Prayer, but to go even so far as to +propose seriously a new rendering of the Lord's Prayer. His famous +proposal for a new version of the Bible, however, which Matthew Arnold +solemnly held up to reprobation, was only a joke which Matthew Arnold +did not see-the new version of Job being, in fact, a clever bit +of political satire against party leadership in England. Even more +brilliant examples of his skill in political satire are his imaginary +"Edict of the King of Prussia against England," and his famous "Rules +for Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One. "But I must not try to call +the roll of all the good things in Franklin's ten volumes. I will simply +say that those who know Franklin only in his "Autobiography," charming +as that classic production is, have made but an imperfect acquaintance +with the range, the vitality, the vigor of this admirable craftsman +who chose a style "smooth, clear, and short," and made it serve every +purpose of his versatile and beneficent mind. + +When the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 startled the American colonies +out of their provincial sense of security and made them aware of their +real attitude toward the mother country, Franklin was in London. Eleven +years earlier, in 1754, he had offered a plan for the "Union of the +Colonies," but this had not contemplated separation from England. It was +rather what we should call a scheme for imperial federation under the +British Crown. We may use his word union, however, in a different field +from that of politics. How much union of sentiment, of mental and moral +life, of literary, educational, and scientific endeavor, was there in +the colonies when the hour of self-examination came? Only the briefest +summary may be attempted here. As to race, these men of the third and +fourth generation since the planting of the colonies were by no means +so purely English as the first settlers. The 1,600,000 colonists in +1760 were mingled of many stocks, the largest non-English elements being +German and Scotch-Irish--that is, Scotch who had settled for a while in +Ulster before emigrating to America. "About one-third of the colonists +in 1760," says Professor Channing, "were born outside of America." +Crevecoeur's "Letters from an American Farmer" thus defined the +Americans: "They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, +Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed that race now called +Americans has arisen." The Atlantic seaboard, with a narrow strip +inland, was fairly well covered by local communities, differing in +blood, in religion, in political organization--a congeries of separate +experiments or young utopias, waiting for that most utopian experiment +of all, a federal union. But the dominant language of the "promiscuous +breed" was English, and in the few real centers of intellectual life the +English tradition was almost absolute. + +The merest glance at colonial journalism will confirm this estimate. The +"Boston News-Letter," begun in 1704, was the first of the journals, if +we omit the single issue of "Publick Occurrences" in the same town in +1690. By 1765 there were nearly fifty colonial newspapers and several +magazines. Their influence made for union, in Franklin's sense of that +word, and their literary models, like their paper, type, and even ink, +were found in London. The "New England Courant," established in Boston +in 1721 by James Franklin, is full of imitations of the "Tatler," +"Spectator," and "Guardian." What is more, the "Courant" boasted of +its office collection of books, including Shakespeare, Milton, the +"Spectator," and Swift's "Tale of a Tub." * This was in 1722. If we +remember that no allusion to Shakespeare has been discovered in the +colonial literature of the seventeenth century, and scarcely an allusion +to the Puritan poet Milton, and that the Harvard College Library in 1723 +had nothing of Addison, Steele, Bolingbroke, Dryden, Pope, and Swift, +and had only recently obtained copies of Milton and Shakespeare, we +can appreciate the value of James Franklin's apprenticeship in London. +Perhaps we can even forgive him for that attack upon the Mathers which +threw the conduct of the "Courant," for a brief period, into the hands +of his brother Benjamin, whose turn at a London apprenticeship was soon +to come. + + * Cook, E. C. "Literary Influences in Colonial Newspapers, + 1704-1750." N. Y., 1912. + +If we follow this younger brother to Philadelphia and to Bradford's +"American Mercury" or to Franklin's own "Pennsylvania Gazette," or if +we study the "Gazettes" of Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, the +impression is still the same. The literary news is still chiefly from +London, from two months to a year late. London books are imported +and reprinted. Franklin reprints Pamela, and his Library Company of +Philadelphia has two copies of "Paradise Lost" for circulation in 1741, +whereas there had been no copy of that work in the great library of +Cotton Mather. American journalism then, as now, owed its vitality to a +secular spirit of curiosity about the actual world. It followed England +as its model, but it was beginning to develop a temper of its own. + +Colonial education and colonial science were likewise chiefly indebted +to London, but by 1751 Franklin's papers on electricity began to repay +the loan. A university club in New York in 1745 could have had but +fifteen members at most, for these were all the "academics" in town. +Yet Harvard had then been sending forth her graduates for more than a +century. William and Mary was founded in 1693, Yale in 1701, Princeton +in 1746, King's (now Columbia) in 1754, the University of Pennsylvania +in 1755, and Brown in 1764. These colonial colleges were mainly in the +hands of clergymen. They tended to reproduce a type of scholarship based +upon the ancient languages. The curriculum varied but little in the +different colonies, and this fact helped to produce a feeling of +fellowship among all members of the republic of letters. The men who +debated the Stamp Act were, with a few striking exceptions, men trained +in Latin and Greek, familiar with the great outlines of human history, +accustomed to the discipline of academic disputation. They knew the +ideas and the vocabulary of cultivated Europe and were conscious of no +provincial inferiority. In the study of the physical sciences, likewise, +the colonials were but little behind the mother country. The Royal +Society had its distinguished members here. The Mathers, the Dudleys, +John Winthrop of Connecticut, John Bartram, James Logan, James Godfrey, +Cadwallader Colden, and above all, Franklin himself, were winning the +respect of European students, and were teaching Americans to use their +eyes and their minds not merely upon the records of the past but in +searching out the inexhaustible meanings of the present. There is no +more fascinating story than that of the beginnings of American science +in and outside of the colleges, and this movement, like the influence of +journalism and of the higher education, counted for colonial union. + +Professor Tyler, our foremost literary student of the period, summarizes +the characteristics of colonial literature in these words: "Before the +year 1765, we find in this country, not one American people, but many +American peoples.... No cohesive principle prevailed, no centralizing +life; each little nation was working out its own destiny in its own +fashion." But he adds that with that year the colonial isolation came to +an end, and that the student must thereafter "deal with the literature +of one multitudinous people, variegated, indeed, in personal traits, +but single in its commanding ideas and in its national destinies." It is +easy to be wise after the event. Yet there was living in London in 1765, +as the agent for Pennsylvania, a shrewd and bland Colonial--an honorary +M. A. from both Harvard and Yale, a D.C.L. of Oxford and an LL.D. of +St. Andrews who was by no means sure that the Stamp Act meant the end of +Colonialism. And Franklin's uncertainty was shared by Washington. When +the tall Virginian took command of the Continental Army as late as 1775, +he "abhorred the idea of independence." Nevertheless John Jay, writing +the second number of the "Federalist" in 1787, only twelve years later, +could say: "Providence has been pleased to give this one connected +country to one united people; a people descended from the same +ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, +attached to the same principles of government." + + + +CHAPTER IV. THE REVOLUTION + +If we turn, however, to the literature produced in America between the +passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 and the adoption of the Constitution +in 1787, we perceive that it is a literature of discord and passion. +Its spirit is not that of "one united people." Washington could indeed +declare in his "Farewell Address" of 1796, "With slight shades of +difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political +principles"; yet no one knew better than Washington upon what a slender +thread this political unity had often hung, and how impossible it had +been to foresee the end from the beginning. + +It is idle to look in the writings of the Revolutionary period for the +literature of beauty, for a quiet harmonious unfolding of the deeper +secrets of life. It was a time of swift and pitiless change, of action +rather than reflection, of the turning of many separate currents +into one headlong stream. "We must, indeed, all hang together," +runs Franklin's well-known witticism in Independence Hall, "or, most +assuredly, we shall all hang separately." Excellently spoken, Doctor! +And that homely, cheery, daring sentence gives the keynote of much of +the Revolutionary writing that has survived. It may be heard in +the state papers of Samuel Adams, the oratory of Patrick Henry, the +pamphlets of Thomas Paine, the satires of Freneau and Trumbull, and in +the subtle, insinuating, thrilling paragraphs of Thomas Jefferson. + +We can only glance in passing at the literature of the Lost Cause, the +Loyalist or "Tory" pleadings for allegiance to Britain. It was written +by able and honest men, like Boucher and Odell, Seabury, Leonard and +Galloway. They distrusted what Seabury called "our sovereign Lord the +Mob." They represented, in John Adams's opinion, nearly one-third of the +people of the colonies, and recent students believe that this estimate +was too low. In some colonies the Loyalists were clearly in the +majority. In all they were a menacing element, made up of the +conservative, the prosperous, the well-educated, with a mixture, +of course, of mere placemen and tuft-hunters. They composed weighty +pamphlets, eloquent sermons, and sparkling satire in praise of the old +order of things. When their cause was lost forever, they wrote gossipy +letters from their exile in London or pathetic verses in their new +home in Nova Scotia and Ontario. Their place in our national life and +literature has never been filled, and their talents and virtues are +never likely to receive adequate recognition. They took the wrong fork +of the road. + +There were gentle spirits, too, in this period, endowed with +delicate literary gifts, but quite unsuited for the clash of +controversy--members, in Crevecoeur's touching words, of the "secret +communion among good men throughout the world." "I am a lover of peace, +what must I do?" asks Crevecoeur in his "Letters from an American +Farmer." "I was happy before this unfortunate Revolution. I feel that I +am no longer so, therefore I regret the change. My heart sometimes seems +tired with beating, it wants rest like my eyelids, which feel oppressed +with so many watchings." Crevecoeur, an immigrant from Normandy, was +certainly no weakling, but he felt that the great idyllic American +adventure which he described so captivatingly in his chapter entitled +"What is an American"--was ending tragically in civil war. Another +whitesouled itinerant of that day was John Woolman of New Jersey, whose +"Journal," praised by Charles Lamb and Channing and edited by Whittier, +is finding more readers in the twentieth century than it won in the +nineteenth. "A man unlettered," said Whittier, "but with natural +refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart +enters into his language." Woolman died at fifty-two in far-away York, +England, whither he had gone to attend a meeting of the Society of +Friends. + +The three tall volumes of the Princeton edition of the poems of Philip +Freneau bear the sub-title, "Poet of the American Revolution." But our +Revolution, in truth, never had an adequate poet. The prose-men, such as +Jefferson, rose nearer the height of the great argument than did the +men of rhyme. Here and there the struggle inspired a brisk ballad like +Francis Hopkinson's "Battle of the Kegs," a Hudibrastic satire like +Trumbull's "McFingal," or a patriotic song like Timothy Dwight's +"Columbia." Freneau painted from his own experience the horrors of the +British prison-ship, and celebrated, in cadences learned from Gray +and Collins, the valor of the men who fell at Eutaw Springs. There was +patriotic verse in extraordinary profusion, but its literary value is +slight, and it reveals few moods of the American mind that are not more +perfectly conveyed through oratory, the pamphlet, and the political +essay. The immediate models of this Revolutionary verse were the minor +British bards of the eighteenth century, a century greatly given to +verse-writing, but endowed by Heaven with the "prose-reason" mainly. +The reader of Burton E. Stevenson's collection of "Poems of American +History" can easily compare the contemporary verse inspired by the +events of the Revolution with the modern verse upon the same historic +themes. He will see how slenderly equipped for song were most of the +later eighteenth-century Americans and how unfavorable to poetry was the +tone of that hour. + +Freneau himself suffered, throughout his long career, from the +depressing indifference of his public to the true spirit of poetry. +"An old college mate of mine," said James Madison--who was by tradition +Freneau's roommate at Princeton in the class of 1771--"a poet and man +of literary and refined tastes, knowing nothing of the world." When +but three years out of college, the cautious Madison wrote to another +friend: "Poetry wit and Criticism Romances Plays &c captivated me much: +but I begin to discover that they deserve but a moderate portion of +a mortal's Time and that something more substantial more durable more +profitable befits our riper age." Madison was then at the ripe age of +twenty-three! Professor Pattee, Freneau's editor, quotes these words to +illustrate the "common sense" atmosphere of the age which proved fatal +to Freneau's development. Yet the sturdy young New Yorker, of Huguenot +descent, is a charming figure, and his later malevolence was shown only +to his political foes. After leaving Princeton he tries teaching, +the law, the newspaper, the sea; he is aflame with patriotic zeal; he +writes, like most American poets, far too much for his own reputation. +As the editor of the "National Gazette" in Philadelphia, he becomes +involved in the bitter quarrel between his chief, Jefferson, and +Alexander Hamilton. His attachment to the cause of the French Revolution +makes him publish baseless attacks upon Washington. By and by he retires +to a New Jersey farm, still toying with journalism, still composing +verses. He turns patriotic poet once more in the War of 1812; but the +public has now forgotten him. He lives on in poverty and seclusion, +and in his eightieth year loses his way in a snowstorm and perishes +miserably--this in 1832, the year of the death of the great Sir Walter +Scott, who once had complimented Freneau by borrowing one of his best +lines of poetry. + +It is in the orations and pamphlets and state papers inspired by the +Revolutionary agitation that we find the most satisfactory expression +of the thought and feeling of that generation. Its typical literature is +civic rather than aesthetic, a sort of writing which has been incidental +to the accomplishing of some political, social, or moral purpose, +and which scarcely regards itself as literature at all. James Otis's +argument against the Writs of Assistance in Massachusetts in 1761, and +Patrick Henry's speech in the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1765, mark +epochs in the emotional life of these communities. They were reported +imperfectly or not at all, but they can no more be ignored in an +assessment of our national experience than editorials, sermons, or +conversations which have expressed the deepest feelings of a day and +then have perished beyond resurrection. + +Yet if natural orators like Otis and Henry be denied a strictly +"literary" rating because their surviving words are obviously inadequate +to account for the popular effect of their speeches, it is still +possible to measure the efficiency of the pamphleteer. When John Adams +tells us that "James Otis was Isaiah and Ezekiel united," we must take +his word for the impression which Otis's oratory left upon his mind. +But John Adams's own writings fill ten stout volumes which invite our +judgment. The "truculent and sarcastic splendor" of his hyperboles +need not blind us to his real literary excellencies, such as clearness, +candor, vigor of phrase, freshness of idea. A testy, rugged, "difficult" +person was John Adams, but he grew mellower with age, and his latest +letters and journals are full of whimsical charm. + +John Adams's cousin Samuel was not precisely a charming person. Bigoted, +tireless, secretive, this cunning manipulator of political passions +followed many tortuous paths. His ability for adroit misstatement of an +adversary's position has been equaled but once in our history. But to +the casual reader of his four volumes, Samuel Adams seems ever to be +breathing the liberal air of the town-meeting: everything is as plainly +obvious as a good citizen can make it. He has, too, the large utterance +of the European liberalism of his day. "Resolved," read his Resolutions +of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts in 1765, "that there +are certain essential rights of the British constitution of government +which are founded in the law of God and nature and are the common rights +of mankind." In his statement of the Rights of the Colonists (1772) we +are assured that "among the natural rights of the colonists are these, +First, a right to Life; secondly to Liberty; thirdly to Property.... +All men have a Right to remain in a State of Nature as long as they +please... . When Men enter into Society, it is by voluntary consent." +Jean-Jacques himself could not be more bland, nor at heart more fiercely +demagogic. + +"Tom" Paine would have been no match for "Sam" Adams in a town-meeting, +but he was an even greater pamphleteer. He had arrived from England in +1774, at the age of thirty-eight, having hitherto failed in most of +his endeavors for a livelihood. "Rebellious Staymaker; unkempt," says +Carlyle; but General Charles Lee noted that there was "genius in his +eyes," and he bore a letter of introduction from Franklin commending him +as an "ingenious, worthy young man," which obtained for him a position +on the "Pennsylvania Magazine." Before he had been a year on American +soil, Paine was writing the most famous pamphlet of our political +literature, "Common Sense," which appeared in January, 1776. "A style +hitherto unknown on this side of the Atlantic," wrote Edmund Randolph. +Yet this style of familiar talk to the crowd had been used seventy years +earlier by Defoe and Swift, and it was to be employed again by a gaunt +American frontiersman who was born in 1809, the year of Thomas Paine's +death. "The Crisis," a series of thirteen pamphlets, of which the first +was issued in December, 1776, seemed to justify the contemporary opinion +that the "American cause owed as much to the pen of Paine as to the +sword of Washington." Paine, who was now serving in the army, might have +heard his own words, "These are the times that try men's souls," read +aloud, by Washington's orders, to the ragged troops just before they +crossed the Delaware to win the victory of Trenton. The best known +productions of Paine's subsequent career, "The Rights of Man" and "The +Age of Reason," were written in Europe, but they were read throughout +America. The reputation of the "rebellious Staymaker" has suffered from +certain grimy habits and from the ridiculous charge of atheism. He was +no more an atheist than Franklin or Jefferson. In no sense an original +thinker, he could impart to outworn shreds of deistic controversy and +to shallow generalizations about democracy a personal fervor which +transformed them and made his pages gay and bold and clear as a trumpet. + +Clear and bold and gay was Alexander Hamilton likewise; and his literary +services to the Revolution are less likely to be underestimated than +Thomas Paine's. They began with that boyish speech in "the Fields" of +New York City in 1774 and with "The Farmer Refuted," a reply to Samuel +Seabury's "Westchester Farmer." They were continued in extraordinary +letters, written during Hamilton's military career, upon the defects of +the Articles of Confederation and of the finances of the Confederation. +Hamilton contributed but little to the actual structure of the new +Constitution, but as a debater he fought magnificently and triumphantly +for its adoption by the Convention of the State of New York in 1788. +Together with Jay and Madison he defended the fundamental principles +of the Federal Union in the remarkable series of papers known as the +"Federalist." These eighty-five papers, appearing over the signature +"Publius" in two New York newspapers between October, 1787, and April, +1788, owed their conception largely to Hamilton, who wrote more than +half of them himself. In manner they are not unlike the substantial +Whig literature of England, and in political theory they have little in +common with the Revolutionary literature which we have been considering. +The reasoning is close, the style vigorous but neither warmed by passion +nor colored by the individual emotions of the author. The "Federalist" +remains a classic example of the civic quality of our post-Revolutionary +American political writing, broadly social in its outlook, well informed +as to the past, confident--but not reckless--of the future. Many +Americans still read it who would be shocked by Tom Paine and bored +with Edmund Burke. It has none of the literary genius of either of those +writers, but its formative influence upon successive generations of +political thinking has been steadying and sound. + +In fact, our citizen literature cannot be understood aright if one fails +to observe that its effect has often turned, not upon mere verbal skill, +but upon the weight of character behind the words. Thus the grave and +reserved George Washington says of the Constitution of 1787: "Let us +raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair; the event +is in the hand of God." The whole personality of the great Virginian is +back of that simple, perfect sentence. It brings us to our feet, like a +national anthem. + +One American, no doubt our most gifted man of letters of that century, +passed most of the Revolutionary period abroad, in the service of his +country. Benjamin Franklin was fifty-nine in the year of the Stamp Act. +When he returned from France in 1785 he was seventy-nine, but he was +still writing as admirably as ever when he died at eighty-four. We +cannot dismiss this singular, varied, and fascinating American better +than by quoting the letter which George Washington wrote to him in +September, 1789. It has the dignity and formality of the eighteenth +century, but it is warm with tested friendship and it glows with deep +human feeling: "If to be venerated for benevolence, if to be admired +for talents, if to be esteemed for patriotism, if to be beloved for +philanthropy, can gratify the human mind, you must have the pleasing +consolation to know that you have not lived in vain. And I flatter +myself that it will not be ranked among the least grateful occurrences +of your life to be assured, that, so long as I retain my memory, you +will be recollected with respect, veneration, and affection by your +sincere friend, George Washington." + +There remains another Virginian, the symbol of the Revolutionary age, +the author of words more widely known around the globe than any other +words penned by an American. "Thomas Jefferson," writes the latest of +his successors in the Presidency, "was not a man of the people, but he +was a man of such singular insight that he saw that all the roots of +generous power come from the people." On his father's side Jefferson +came from sound yeoman stock, in which Welsh blood ran. His mother was +a Virginia Randolph. Born in Albemarle County, near the "little +mountain"--Monticello--where he built a mansion for his bride and where +he lies buried, the tall, strong, red-haired, gray-eyed, gifted boy was +reputed the best shot, the best rider, the best fiddle-player in the +county. He studied hard at William and Mary over his Greek, Latin, +French, Italian, and Spanish, but he also frequented the best society of +the little capital. He learned to call himself a Deist and to theorize +about ideal commonwealths. There was already in him that latent +radicalism which made him strike down, as soon as he had the power, two +of the fundamental principles of the society into which he was born, the +principle of entailed property and that of church establishment. + +Such was the youth of twenty-two who was thrilled in 1765 by the Stamp +Act. In the ten years of passionate discussion which followed, two +things became clear: first, that there had long existed among the +colonists very radical theoretical notions of political freedom; and +second, that there was everywhere a spirit of practical conservatism. +Jefferson illustrates the union of these two tendencies. + +He took his seat in the Continental Congress in June, 1775. He was +only thirty-two, but he had already written, in the summer of 1774, "A +Summary View of the Rights of British America" which had been published +in England by Burke, himself a judge of good writing and sound politics. +Jefferson had also prepared in 1775 the "Address of the Virginia House +of Burgesses." For these reasons he was placed at the head of the +Committee for drafting the Declaration of Independence. We need not +linger over the familiar circumstances of its composition. Everybody +knows how Franklin and Adams made a few verbal alterations in the first +draft, how the committee of five then reported it to the Congress, which +proceeded to cut out about one-fourth of the matter, while Franklin +tried to comfort the writhing author with his cheerful story about the +sign of John Thompson the hatter. Forty-seven years afterwards, in reply +to the charge of lack of originality brought against the Declaration by +Timothy Pickering and John Adams--charges which have been repeated at +intervals ever since--Jefferson replied philosophically: "Whether I +gathered my ideas from reading or reflection I do not know. I know only +that I turned neither to book nor pamphlet while writing it. I did not +consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether +and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before." O wise +young man, and fundamentally Anglo-Saxon young man, to turn his back, +in that crisis, to the devil of mere cleverness, and stick to recognized +facts and accepted sentiments! But his pen retains its cunning in spite +of him; and the drop of hot Welsh blood tells; and the cosmopolitan +reading and thinking tell; and they transform what Pickering called a +"commonplace compilation, its sentiments hackneyed in Congress for two +years before," into an immortal manifesto to mankind. + +Its method is the simplest. The preamble is philosophical, dealing with +"self-evident" truths. Today the men who dislike or doubt these truths +dismiss the preamble as "theoretical," or, to use another term of +derogation favored by reactionaries, "French." But if the preamble be +French and philosophical, the specific charges against the King are very +English and practical. Here are certain facts, presented no doubt with +consummate rhetorical skill, but facts, undeniably. The Anglo-Saxon in +Jefferson is basal, racial; the turn for academic philosophizing after +the French fashion is personal, acquired; but the range and sweep and +enduring vitality of this matchless state paper lie in its illumination +of stubborn facts by general principles, its decent respect to the +opinions of mankind, its stately and noble utterance of national +sentiments and national reasons to a "candid world." + +It has long been the fashion, among a certain school of half-hearted +Americans--and unless I am mistaken, the teaching has increased during +the last decades--to minimize the value of Jefferson's "self-evident +truths." Rufus Choate, himself a consummate rhetorician, sneered at +those "glittering generalities," and countless college-bred men, some of +them occupying the highest positions, have echoed the sneer. The essence +of the objection to Jefferson's platform lies of course in his +phrase, "all men are created equal," with the subsidiary phrase +about governments "deriving their just powers from the consent of the +governed." Editors and congressmen and even college professors +have proclaimed themselves unable to assent to these phrases of the +Declaration, and unable even to understand them. These objectors +belong partly, I think, in Jefferson's category of "nervous +persons"--"anti-republicans," as he goes on to define them--"whose +languid fibres have more analogy with a passive than an active state of +things." Other objectors to the phrase "all men are created equal" have +had an obvious personal or political motive for refusing assent to +the proposition. But "no intelligent man," says one of Jefferson's +biographers, "has ever misconstrued it [the Declaration] except +intentionally." + +Nobody would claim today that Thomas Jefferson's statement of the +sentiments and reasons for the independence of the thirteen British +colonies in 1776 was an adequate handbook of political wisdom, fit for +all the exigencies of contemporary American democracy. It is not that. +It is simply, in Lincoln's phrase, one of "the standard maxims of free +society" which no democracy can safely disregard. + +Jefferson's long life, so varied, so flexible, so responsive to the +touch of popular forces, illustrates the process by which the Virginia +mind of 1743 became the nationalized, unionized mind of 1826. It is +needless here to dwell upon the traits of his personal character: his +sweetness of spirit, his stout-heartedness in disaster, his scorn of +money, his love for the intellectual life. "I have no ambition to govern +men," he wrote to Edward Rutledge. He was far happier talking about +Greek and Anglo-Saxon with Daniel Webster before the fire-place +of Monticello than he ever was in the presidential chair. His +correspondence was enormous. His writings fill twenty volumes. In his +theories of education he was fifty years ahead of his time; in his +absolute trust in humanity he was generations ahead of it. "I am not +one of those who fear the people," he declared proudly. It is because of +this touching faith, this invincible and matchless ardor, that Jefferson +is today remembered. He foreshadowed Lincoln. His belief in the +inarticulate common people is rewarded by their obstinate fidelity to +his name as a type and symbol. "I know of no safe depository of the +ultimate powers of society but the people themselves," wrote Jefferson, +and with the people themselves is the depository of his fame. + + + +CHAPTER V. THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP + +The Fourth of July orator for 1826 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was +Edward Everett. Although only thirty-two he was already a distinguished +speaker. In the course of his oration he apostrophized John Adams and +Thomas Jefferson as venerable survivors of that momentous day, fifty +years earlier, which had witnessed our Declaration of Independence. +But even as Everett was speaking, the aged author of the Declaration +breathed his last at Monticello, and in the afternoon of that same day +Adams died also, murmuring, it is said, with his latest breath, and as +if with the whimsical obstinacy of an old man who hated to be beaten +by his ancient rival, "Thomas Jefferson still lives." But Jefferson was +already gone. + +On the first of August, Everett commemorated the career of the two +Revolutionary leaders, and on the following day a greater than Everett, +Daniel Webster, pronounced the famous eulogy in Faneuil Hall. Never were +the thoughts and emotions of a whole country more adequately voiced than +in this commemorative oratory. Its pulse was high with national pride +over the accomplishments of half a century. "I ask," Everett declared, +"whether more has not been done to extend the domain of civilization, in +fifty years, since the Declaration of Independence, than would have +been done in five centuries of continued colonial subjection?" Webster +asserted in his peroration: "It cannot be denied, but by those who would +dispute against the sun, that with America, and in America, a new +era commences in human affairs. This era is distinguished by free +representative governments, by entire religious liberty, by +improved systems of national intercourse, by a newly awakened and an +unconquerable spirit of free enquiry, and by a diffusion of knowledge +through the community such as has been before altogether unknown and +unheard of." + +Was this merely the "tall talk" then so characteristic of American +oratory and soon to be satirized in "Martin Chuzzlewit"? Or was it +prompted by a deep and true instinct for the significance of the vast +changes that had come over American life since 1776? The external +changes were familiar enough to Webster's auditors: the opening of +seemingly illimitable territory through the Louisiana Purchase, the +development of roads, canals, and manufactures; a rapid increase in +wealth and population; a shifting of political power due to the rise of +the new West--in a word, the evidences of irrepressible national energy. +But this energy was inadequately expressed by the national literature. +The more cultivated Americans were quite aware of this deficiency. It +was confessed by the pessimistic Fisher Ames and by the ardent young men +who in 1815 founded "The North American Review." British critics in "The +Edinburgh" and "The Quarterly," commenting upon recent works of travel +in America, pointed out the literary poverty of the American soil. +Sydney Smith, by no means the most offensive of these critics, declared +in 1820: "During the thirty or forty years of their independence +they have done absolutely nothing for the sciences, for the arts, for +literature.... In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American +book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or +statue?" + +Sydney Smith's question "Who reads an American book?" has outlived +all of his own clever volumes. Even while he was asking it, London was +eagerly reading Irving's "Sketch Book." In 1821 came Fenimore Cooper's +Spy and Bryant's "Poems," and by 1826, when Webster was announcing in +his rolling orotund that Adams and Jefferson were no more, the London +and Paris booksellers were covering their stalls with Cooper's "The Last +of the Mohicans." Irving, Cooper, and Bryant are thus the pioneers in a +new phase of American literary activity, often called, for convenience +in labeling, the Knickerbocker Group because of the identification of +these men with New York. And close behind these leaders come a younger +company, destined likewise, in the shy boyish words of Hawthorne, one of +the number, "to write books that would be read in England." For by 1826 +Hawthorne and Longfellow were out of college and were trying to learn +to write. Ticknor, Prescott, and Bancroft, somewhat older men, were +settling to their great tasks. Emerson was entering upon his duties as +a minister. Edgar Allan Poe, at that University of Virginia which +Jefferson had just founded, was doubtless revising "Tamerlane and Other +Poems" which he was to publish in Boston in the following year. Holmes +was a Harvard undergraduate. Garrison had just printed Whittier's first +published poem in the Newburyport "Free Press." Walt Whitman was a +barefooted boy on Long Island, and Lowell, likewise seven years of age, +was watching the birds in the treetops of Elmwood. But it was Washington +Irving who showed all of these men that nineteenth century England would +be interested in American books. + +The very word Knickerbocker is one evidence of the vitality of Irving's +happy imaginings. In 1809 he had invented a mythical Dutch historian +of New York named Diedrich Knickerbocker and fathered upon him a witty +parody of Dr. Mitchill's grave "Picture of New York." To read Irving's +chapters today is to witness one of the rarest and most agreeable of +phenomena, namely, the actual beginning of a legend which the world is +unwilling to let die. The book made Sir Walter Scott's sides ache with +laughter, and reminded him of the humor of Swift and Sterne. But certain +New Yorkers were slow to see the joke. + +Irving was himself a New Yorker, born just at the close of the +Revolution, of a Scotch father and English mother. His youth was +pleasantly idle, with a little random education, much theater-going, +and plentiful rambles with a gun along the Hudson River. In 1804 he went +abroad for his health, returned and helped to write the light social +satire of the "Salmagundi Papers," and became, after the publication of +the "Knickerbocker History," a local celebrity. Sailing for England in +1815 on business, he stayed until 1832 as a roving man of letters in +England and Spain and then as Secretary of the American Legation in +London. "The Sketch Book," "Bracebridge Hall," and "Tales of a Traveler" +are the best known productions of Irving's fruitful residence in +England. The "Life of Columbus," the "Conquest of Granada," and "The +Alhambra" represent his first sojourn in Spain. After his return to +America he became fascinated with the Great West, made the travels +described in his "Tour of the Prairies," and told the story of roving +trappers and the fur trade in "Captain Bonneville" and "Astoria." +For four years he returned to Spain as American Minister. In his last +tranquil years at Sunnyside on the Hudson, where he died in 1859, he +wrote graceful lives of Goldsmith and of Washington. + +Such a glance at the shelf containing Irving's books suggests but +little of that personal quality to which he owes his significance as +an interpreter of America to the Old World. This son of a narrow, hard, +Scotch dealer in cutlery, this drifter about town when New York was +only a big slovenly village, this light-hearted scribbler of satire and +sentiment, was a gentleman born. His boyhood and youth were passed in +that period of Post-Revolutionary reaction which exhibits the United +States in some of its most unlovely aspects. Historians like Henry +Adams and McMaster have painted in detail the low estate of education, +religion, and art as the new century began. The bitter feeling of the +nascent nation toward Great Britain was intensified by the War of 1812. +The Napoleonic Wars had threatened to break the last threads of our +friendship for France, and suspicion of the Holy Alliance led to an era +of national self-assertion of which the Monroe Doctrine was only one +expression. The raw Jacksonism of the West seemed to be gaining upon +the older civilizations represented by Virginia and Massachusetts. The +self-made type of man began to pose as the genuine American. And at this +moment came forward a man of natural lucidity and serenity of mind, of +perfect poise and good temper, who knew both Europe and America and felt +that they ought to know one another better and to like one another more. +That was Irving's service as an international mediator. He diffused +sweetness and light in an era marked by bitterness and obscuration. It +was a triumph of character as well as of literary skill. + +But the skill was very noticeable also. Irving's prose is not that of +the Defoe-Swift-Franklin-Paine type of plain talk to the crowd. It is +rather an inheritance from that other eighteenth century tradition, the +conversation of the select circle. Its accents were heard in Steele and +Addison and were continued in Goldsmith, Sterne, Cowper, and Charles +Lamb. Among Irving's successors, George William Curtis and Charles +Dudley Warner and William Dean Howells have been masters of it likewise. +It is mellow human talk, delicate, regardful, capable of exquisite +modulation. With instinctive artistic taste, Irving used this old and +sound style upon fresh American material. In "Rip van Winkle" and "The +Legend of Sleepy Hollow" he portrayed his native valley of the Hudson, +and for a hundred years connoisseurs of style have perceived the +exquisite fitness of the language to the images and ideas which Irving +desired to convey. To render the Far West of that epoch this style is +perhaps not "big" and broad enough, but when used as Irving uses it in +describing Stratford and Westminster Abbey and an Old English Christmas, +it becomes again a perfect medium. Hawthorne adopted it for "Our Old +Home," and Englishmen recognized it at once as a part of their own +inheritance, enriched, like certain wines, by the voyage across the +Atlantic and home again. Irving wrote of England, Mr. Warner once said, +as Englishmen would have liked to write about it. When he described +the Alhambra and Granada and the Moors, it was the style, rich both in +physical sensation and in dreamlike reverie, which revealed to the world +the quick American appreciation of foreign scenes and characters. Its +key is sympathy. + +Irving's popularity has endured in England. It suffered during the +middle of the century in his own country, for the strongest New England +authors taught the public to demand more thought and passion than were +in Irving's nature. Possibly the nervous, journalistic style of the +twentieth century allows too scanty leisure of mind for the full +enjoyment of the Knickerbocker flavor. Yet such changes as these in +literary fashion scarcely affect the permanent service of Irving to our +literature. He immortalized a local type--the New York Dutchman--and +local legends, like that of Rip van Winkle; he used the framework of +the narrative essay to create something almost like the perfected short +story of Poe and Hawthorne; he wrote prose with unfailing charm in an +age when charm was lacking; and, if he had no message, it should be +remembered that some of the most useful ambassadors have had none save +to reveal, with delicacy and tact and humorous kindness, the truth that +foreign persons have feelings precisely like our own. + +Readers of Sir Walter Scott's "Journal" may remember his account of an +evening party in Paris in 1826 where he met Fenimore Cooper, then in +the height of his European reputation. "So the Scotch and American lions +took the field together," wrote Sir Walter, who loved to be generous. +"The Last of the Mohicans," then just published, threatened to eclipse +the fame of "Ivanhoe." Cooper, born in 1789, was eighteen years younger +than the Wizard of the North, and was more deeply indebted to him than +he knew. For it was Scott who had created the immense nineteenth century +audience for prose fiction, and who had evolved a kind of formula for +the novel, ready for Cooper's use. Both men were natural story-tellers. +Scott had the richer mind and the more fully developed historical +imagination. Both were out-of-doors men, lovers of manly adventure and +of natural beauty. But the American had the good fortune to be able to +utilize in his books his personal experiences of forest and sea and to +reveal to Europe the real romance of the American wilderness. + +That Cooper was the first to perceive the artistic possibilities of +this romance, no one would claim. Brockden Brown, a Quaker youth of +Philadelphia, a disciple of the English Godwin, had tried his hand at +the very end of the eighteenth century upon American variations of the +Gothic romance then popular in England. Brown had a keen eye for the +values of the American landscape and even of the American Indian. He had +a knack for passages of ghastly power, as his descriptions of maniacs, +murderers, sleep-walkers, and solitaries abundantly prove. But he had +read too much and lived too little to rival the masters of the art of +fiction. And there was a traveled Frenchman, Chateaubriand, surely an +expert in the art of eloquent prose, who had transferred to the pages +of his American Indian stories, "Atala" and "Rene," the mystery and +enchantment of our dark forests and endless rivers. But Chateaubriand, +like Brockden Brown, is feverish. A taint of old-world eroticism and +despair hovers like a miasma over his magnificent panorama of the +wilderness. Cooper, like Scott, is masculine. + +He was a Knickerbocker only by adoption. Born in New Jersey, his +childhood was spent in the then remote settlement of Cooperstown in +Central New York. He had a little schooling at Albany, and a brief and +inglorious career at Yale with the class of 1806. He went to sea for two +years, and then served for three years in the United States Navy upon +Lakes Ontario and Champlain, the very scene of some of his best stories. +In 1811 he married, resigned from the Navy, and settled upon a little +estate in Westchester County, near New York. Until the age of thirty, he +was not in the least a bookman, but a healthy, man of action. Then, as +the well-known anecdote goes, he exclaims to his wife, after reading a +stupid English novel, "I believe I could write a better story myself." +"Precaution" (1820) was the result, but whether it was better than the +unknown English book, no one can now say. It was bad enough. Yet the +next year Cooper published "The Spy," one of the finest of his novels, +which was instantly welcomed in England and translated in France. Then +came, in swift succession, "The Pioneers," the first Leather-Stocking +tale in order of composition, and "The Pilot," to show that Scott's +"Pirate" was written by a landsman! "Lionel Lincoln" and "The Last +of the Mohicans" followed. The next seven years were spent in Europe, +mainly in France, where "The Prairie" and "The Red Rover" were written. +Cooper now looked back upon his countrymen with eyes of critical +detachment, and made ready to tell them some of their faults. He came +home to Cooperstown in 1833, the year after Irving's return to America. +He had won, deservedly, a great fame, which he proceeded to imperil by +his combativeness with his neighbors and his harsh strictures upon the +national character, due mainly to his lofty conception of the ideal +America. He continued to spin yarns of sea and shore, and to write naval +history. The tide of fashion set against him in the eighteen-forties +when Bulwer and Dickens rode into favor, but the stouthearted old +pioneer could afford to bide his time. He died in 1851, just as Mrs. +Stowe was writing "Uncle Tom's Cabin." + +Two generations have passed since then, and Cooper's place in our +literature remains secure. To have written our first historical novel, +"The Spy," our first sea-story, "The Pilot," and to have created the +Leather-Stocking series, is glory enough. In his perception of masculine +character, Cooper ranks with Fielding. His sailors, his scouts and +spies, his good and bad Indians, are as veritable human figures +as Squire Western. Long Tom Coffin, Harvey Birch, Hawk-Eye, and +Chingachgook are physically and morally true to life itself. Read the +Leather-Stocking books in the order of the events described, +beginning with "The Deerslayer," then "The Last of the Mohicans," "The +Pathfinder," "The Pioneers", and ending with the vast darkening horizon +of "The Prairie" and the death of the trapper, and one will feel +how natural and inevitable are the fates of the personages and the +alterations in the life of the frontier. These books vary in their +poetic quality and in the degree of their realism, but to watch the +evolution of the leading figure is to see human life in its actual +texture. + +Clever persons and pedantic persons have united to find fault with +certain elements of Cooper's art. Mark Twain, in one of his least +inspired moments, selected Cooper's novels for attack. Every grammar +school teacher is ready to point out that his style is often prolix +and his sentences are sometimes ungrammatical. Amateurs even criticize +Cooper's seamanship, although it seemed impeccable to Admiral Mahan. No +doubt one must admit the "helplessness, propriety, and incapacity" of +most of Cooper's women, and the dreadfulness of his bores, particularly +the Scotchmen, the doctors, and the naturalists. Like Sir Walter, Cooper +seems to have taken but little pains in the deliberate planning of his +plots. Frequently he accepts a ready-made formula of villain and hero, +predicament and escape, renewed crisis and rescue, mystification and +explanation, worthy of a third-rate novelist. His salvation lies in +his genius for action, the beauty and grandeur of his landscapes, the +primitive veracity of his children of nature. Cooper was an elemental +man, and he comprehended, by means of something deeper than mere +artistic instinct, the feelings of elemental humanity in the presence +of the wide ocean or of the deep woods. He is as healthy and sane as +Fielding, and he possesses an additional quality which all of the purely +English novelists lack. It was the result of his youthful sojourn in +the wilderness. Let us call it the survival in him of an aboriginal +imagination. Cooper reminds one somehow of a moose--an ungraceful +creature perhaps, but indubitably big, as many a hunter has suddenly +realized when he has come unexpectedly upon a moose that whirled to face +him in the twilight silence of a northern wood. + +Something of this far-off and gigantic primitivism inheres also in the +poetry of William Cullen Bryant. His portrait, with the sweeping white +beard and the dark folds of the cloak, suggests the Bard as the Druids +might have known him. But in the eighteen-thirties and forties, Mr. +Bryant's alert, clean-shaven face, and energetic gait as he strode down +Broadway to the "Evening Post" office, suggested little more than a +vigorous and somewhat radical editor of an increasingly prosperous +Democratic newspaper. There was nothing of the Fringed Gentian or Yellow +Violet about him. Like so many of the Knickerbockers, Bryant was an +immigrant to New York; in fact, none of her adopted men of letters +have represented so perfectly the inherited traits of the New England +Puritan. To understand his long, and honorable public life it is +necessary to know something of the city of his choice, but to enter +into the spirit of his poetry one must go back to the hills of western +Massachusetts. + +Bryant had a right to his cold-weather mind. He came from Mayflower +stock. His father, Dr. Peter Bryant of Cummington, was a sound country +physician, with liberal preferences in theology, Federalist views in +politics, and a library of seven hundred volumes, rich in poetry. The +poet's mother records his birth in her diary in terse words which have +the true Spartan tang: "Nov. 3, 1794. Stormy, wind N. E. Churned. Seven +in the evening a son born." Two days later the November wind shifted. +"Nov. 5, 1794. Clear, wind N. W. Made Austin a coat. Sat up all day. +Went into the kitchen." The baby, it appears, had an abnormally large +head and was dipped, day after day, in rude hydropathy, into an icy +spring. A precocious childhood was followed by a stern, somewhat +unhappy, but aspiring boyhood. The little fellow, lying prone with his +brothers before the firelight of the kitchen, reading English poetry +from his father's library, used to pray that he too might become a poet. +At thirteen he produced a satire on Jefferson, "The Embargo," which his +proud Federalist father printed at Boston in 1808. The youth had nearly +one year at Williams College, over the mountain ranges to the west. He +wished to continue his education at Yale, but his father had no money +for this greater venture, and the son remained at home. There, in the +autumn of 1811, on the bleak hills, he composed the first draft of +"Thanatopsis." He was seventeen, and he had been reading Blair's "Grave" +and the poems of the consumptive Henry Kirke White. He hid his verses +in a drawer, and five years later his father found them, shed tears +over them, and sent them to the "North American Review," where they were +published in September, 1817. + +In the meantime the young man had studied law, though with dislike of +it, and with the confession that he sometimes read "The Lyrical Ballads" +when he might have been reading Blackstone. One December afternoon in +1815, he was walking from Cummington to Plainfield--aged twenty-one, +and looking for a place in which to settle as a lawyer. Across the vivid +sunset flew a black duck, as solitary and homeless as himself. The bird +seemed an image of his own soul, "lone wandering but not lost." Before +he slept that night he had composed the poem "To a Waterfowl." No more +authentic inspiration ever visited a poet, and though Bryant wrote verse +for more than sixty years after that crimson sky had paled into +chill December twilight, his lines never again vibrated with such +communicative passion. + +Bryant's ensuing career revealed the steady purpose, the stoicism, +the reticence of the Puritan. It was highly successful, judged even by +material standards. "Thanatopsis" had been instantly regarded in 1817 +as the finest poem yet produced in America. The author was invited to +contribute to the "North American Review" an essay on American poetry, +and this, like all of Bryant's prose work, was admirably written. He +delivered his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem, "The Ages," in 1821, the +year of Emerson's graduation. After a brief practice of the law in Great +Barrington, he entered in 1826 into the unpromising field of journalism +in New York. While other young Knickerbockers wasted their literary +strength on trifles and dissipated their moral energies, Bryant held +steadily to his daily task. His life in town was sternly ascetic, but he +allowed himself long walks in the country, and he continued to meditate +a somewhat thankless Muse. In 1832 he visited his brothers on the +Illinois prairies, and stopped one day to chat with a "tall awkward +uncouth lad" of racy conversational powers, who was leading his company +of volunteers into the Black Hawk War. The two men were destined to +meet again in 1860, when Bryant presided at that Cooper Union address of +Lincoln's which revealed to New York and to the country that the former +captain of volunteers was now a king of men. Lincoln was embarrassed on +that occasion, it is said, by Bryant's fastidious, dignified presence. +Not so Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had seen the poet in Rome, two years +before. "There was a weary look in his face," wrote Hawthorne, "as if +he were tired of seeing things and doing things....He uttered neither +passion nor poetry, but excellent good sense, and accurate information, +on whatever subject transpired; a very pleasant man to associate with, +but rather cold, I should imagine, if one should seek to touch his heart +with one's own." Such was the impression Bryant made upon less gifted +men than Hawthorne, as he lived out his long and useful life in the +Knickerbocker city. Toward the close of it he was in great demand for +public occasions; and it was after delivering a speech dedicating a +statue to Mazzini in Central Park in 1878, when Bryant was eighty-four, +that a fit of dizziness caused a fall which proved fatal to the +venerable poet. It was just seventy years since Dr. Peter Bryant had +published his boy's verses on "The Embargo." + +Although Bryant's poetry has never roused any vociferous excitement, it +has enduring qualities. The spiritual preoccupations of many a voiceless +generation of New England Puritans found a tongue at last in this +late-born son of theirs. The determining mood of his best poems, from +boyhood to old age, was precisely that thought of transiency, "the +eternal flow of things," which colored the imaginations of the +first colonists. This is the central motive of "Thanatopsis," "To a +Waterfowl," "The Rivulet," "A Forest Hymn," "An Evening Revery," "The +Crowded Street," "The Flood of Years." All of these tell the same story +of endless change and of endless abiding, of varying eddies in the same +mighty stream of human existence. Bryant faced the thought as calmly, +as majestically, at seventeen as when he wrote "The Flood of Years" at +eighty-two. He is a master of description, though he has slight gift +for narrative or drama, and he rarely sounds the clear lyric note. But +everywhere in his verse there is that cold purity of the winter hills +in Western Massachusetts, something austere and elemental which reaches +kindred spirits below the surface on which intellect and passion have +their play, something more primitive, indeed, than human intellect or +passion and belonging to another mode of being, something "rock-ribbed +and ancient as the sun." + +A picture of the Knickerbocker era is not complete without its portraits +of the minor figures in the literary life of New York up to the time +of the Civil War. But the scope of the present volume does not permit +sketches of Paulding and Verplanck, of Halleck and his friend Drake, +of N. P. Willis and Morris and Woodworth. Some of these are today only +"single-poem" men, like Payne, the author of "Home Sweet Home," just as +Key, the author of "The Star-Spangled Banner," is today a "single-poem" +man of an earlier generation. Their names will be found in such limbos +of the dead as Griswold's "Poets and Poetry of America" and Poe's +"Literati." They knew "the town" in their day, and pleased its very +easily pleased taste. The short-lived literary magazines of the +eighteen-forties gave them their hour of glory. As representatives of +passing phases of the literary history of New York their careers are +not without sentimental interest, but few of them spoke to or for the +country as a whole. Two figures, indeed, stand out in sharp contrast +with those habitual strollers on Broadway and frequenters of literary +gatherings, though each of them was for a while a part of Knickerbocker +New York. To all appearances they were only two more Bohemians like the +rest, but the curiosity of the twentieth century sets them apart from +their forgotten contemporaries. They are two of the unluckiest--and yet +luckiest--authors who ever tried to sell a manuscript along Broadway. +One of them is Edgar Allan Poe and the other is Walt Whitman. They shall +have a chapter to themselves. + +But before turning to that chapter, we must look back to New England +once more and observe the blossoming-time of its ancient commonwealths. +During the thirty years preceding the Civil War New England awoke to +a new life of the spirit. So varied and rich was her literary +productiveness in this era that it still remains her greatest period, +and so completely did New England writers of this epoch voice the ideals +of the nation that the great majority of Americans, even today, regard +these New Englanders as the truest literary exponents of the mind and +soul of the United States. We must take a look at them. + + + +CHAPTER VI. THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS + +To understand the literary leadership of New England during the thirty +years immediately preceding the Civil War it is necessary to recall the +characteristics of a somewhat isolated and peculiar people. The mental +and moral traits of the New England colonists, already glanced at in +an earlier chapter, had suffered little essential modification in two +hundred years. The original racial stock was still dominant. As compared +with the middle and southern colonies, there was relatively little +immigration, and this was easily assimilated. The physical remoteness of +New England from other sections of the country, and the stubborn loyalty +with which its inhabitants maintained their own standards of life, alike +contributed to their sense of separateness. It is true, of course, that +their mode of thinking and feeling had undergone certain changes. They +were among the earliest theorists of political independence from Great +Britain, and had done their share, and more, in the Revolution. The +rigors of their early creed had somewhat relaxed, as we have seen, by +the end of the seventeenth century, and throughout the eighteenth there +was a gradual progress toward religious liberalism. The population +steadily increased, and New England's unremitting struggle with a not +too friendly soil, her hardihood upon the seas, and her keenness in +trade, became proverbial throughout the country. Her seaport towns were +wealthy. The general standards of living remained frugal, but extreme +poverty was rare. Her people still made, as in the earliest days of +the colonies, silent and unquestioned sacrifices for education, and +her chief seats of learning, Harvard and Yale, remained the foremost +educational centers of America. But there was still scant leisure for +the quest of beauty, and slender material reward for any practitioner +of the fine arts. Oratory alone, among the arts of expression, commanded +popular interest and applause. Daniel Webster's audiences at Plymouth in +1820 and at Bunker Hill in 1825 were not inferior to similar audiences +of today in intelligence and in responsiveness. Perhaps they were +superior. Appreciation of the spoken word was natural to men trained +by generations of thoughtful listening to "painful" preaching and by +participation in the discussions of town-meeting. Yet appreciation of +secular literature was rare, and interest in the other arts was almost +non-existent. + +Then, beginning in the eighteen-twenties, and developing rapidly after +1830, came a change, a change so startling as to warrant the term +of "the Renascence of New England." No single cause is sufficient to +account for this "new birth." It is a good illustration of that law +of "tension and release," which the late Professor Shaler liked to +demonstrate in all organic life. A long period of strain was followed +by an age of expansion, freedom, release of energy. As far as the mental +life of New England was concerned, something of the new stimulus was due +directly to the influence of Europe. Just as the wandering scholars +from Italy had brought the New Learning, which was a revival of the +old learning, into England in the sixteenth century, so now young New +England college men like Edward Everett and George Ticknor brought +home from the Continent the riches of German and French scholarship. +Emerson's description of the impression made by Everett's lectures in +1820, after his return from Germany, gives a vivid picture of the +new thirst for foreign culture. "The North American Review" and other +periodicals, while persistently urging the need of a distinctively +national literature, insisted also upon the value of a deeper knowledge +of the literature of the Continent. This was the burden of Channing's +once famous article on "A National Literature" in 1823: it was a plea +for an independent American school of writers, but these writers should +know the best that Europe had to teach. + +The purely literary movement was connected, as the great name of +Channing suggests, with a new sense of freedom in philosophy and +religion. Calvinism had mainly done its work in New England. It had bred +an extraordinary type of men and women, it had, helped to lay some of +the permanent foundations of our democracy, and it was still destined +to have a long life in the new West and in the South. But in that stern +section of the country where its influence had been most marked there +was now an increasingly sharp reaction against its determinism and +its pessimism. Early in the nineteenth century the most ancient and +influential churches in Boston and the leading professors at Harvard had +accepted the new form of religious liberalism known as Unitarianism. +The movement spread throughout Eastern Massachusetts and made its way to +other States. Orthodox and liberal Congregational churches split apart, +and when Channing preached the ordination sermon for Jared Sparks in +Baltimore in 1819, the word Unitarian, accepted by the liberals with +some misgiving, became the recognized motto of the new creed. It is +only with its literary influence that we are here concerned, yet that +literary influence became so potent that there is scarcely a New England +writer of the first rank, from Bryant onward, who remained untouched by +it. + +The most interesting and peculiar phase of the new liberalism has little +directly to do with the specific tenets of theological Unitarianism, +and in fact marked a revolt against the more prosaic and conventional +pattern of English and American Unitarian thought. But this movement, +known as Transcendentalism, would have been impossible without a +preliminary and liberalizing stirring of the soil. It was a fascinating +moment of release for some of the most brilliant and radical minds of +New England. Its foremost representative in our literature was Ralph +Waldo Emerson, as its chief exponents in England were Coleridge and +Carlyle. We must understand its meaning if we would perceive the quality +of much of the most noble and beautiful writing produced in New England +during the Golden Age. + +What then is the significance of the word Transcendental? Disregarding +for the moment the technical development of this term as used by German +and English philosophers, it meant for Emerson and his friends simply +this: whatever transcends or goes beyond the experience of the senses. +It stressed intuition rather than sensation, direct perception of +ultimate truth rather than the processes of logic. It believed in man's +ability to apprehend the absolute ideas of Truth, Rectitude, Goodness. +It resembled the Inner Light of the Quaker, though the Quaker traced +this to a supernatural illumination of the Holy Spirit, while the +Transcendentalist believed that a vision of the eternal realities was a +natural endowment of the human mind. It had only to be trusted. Stated +in this form, it is evident that we have here a very ancient doctrine, +well known in the literature of India and of Greece. It has been held by +countless persons who have never heard of the word Transcendentalism. We +need go no further back than Alexander Pope, a Roman Catholic, whom we +find declaring: "I am so certain of the soul's being immortal that +I seem to feel it within me, as it were by intuition." Pope's +friend Swift, a dean of the Church of England and assuredly no +Transcendentalist, defined vision as seeing the things that are +invisible. + +Now turn to some of the New England men. Dr. C. A. Bartol, a disciple of +Emerson, maintained that "the mistake is to make the everlasting things +subjects of argument instead of sight." Theodore Parker declared to his +congregation: + +"From the primitive facts of consciousness given by the power of +instinctive intuition, I endeavored to deduce the true notion of God, +of justice and futurity.... I found most help in the works of Immanuel +Kant, one of the profoundest thinkers of the world, though one of the +worst writers, even in Germany; if he did not always furnish conclusions +I could rest in, he yet gave me the true method, and put me on the right +road. I found certain great primal Intuitions of Human Nature, which +depend on no logical process of demonstration, but are rather facts of +consciousness given by the instinctive action of human nature itself. I +will mention only the three most important which pertain to Religion. +1. The Instinctive Intuition of the Divine, the consciousness that there +is a God. 2. The Instinctive Intuition of the Just and Right, a +consciousness that there is a Moral Law, independent of our will, +which we ought to keep. 3. The Instinctive Intuition of the Immortal, +a consciousness that the Essential Element of man, the principle of +Individuality, never dies." + +This passage dates from 1859, and readers of Bergson may like to compare +it with the contemporary Frenchman's saying: "The analytical faculties +can give us no realities." + +Let us next hear Emerson himself, first in an early letter to his +brother Edward: "Do you draw the distinction of Milton, Coleridge, and +the Germans between Reason and Understanding? I think it a philosophy +itself, and, like all truth, very practical. Reason is the highest +faculty of the soul, what we mean often by the soul itself: it +never reasons, never proves, it simply perceives, it is vision. The +understanding toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues; +near-sighted, but strong-sighted, dwelling in the present, the +expedient, the customary." And in 1833, after he had left the Unitarian +pulpit, Emerson made in his diary this curious attempt to reconcile the +scriptural language of his ancestral profession to the new vocabulary of +Transcendentalism: "Jesus Christ was a minister of the pure Reason. The +beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount are all utterances of the mind +contemning the phenomenal world... . The understanding can make nothing +of it. 'Tis all nonsense. The Reason affirms its absolute verity.... St. +Paul marks the distinction by the terms natural man and spiritual +man. When Novalis says, 'It is the instinct of the Understanding to +contradict the Reason,' he only translates into a scientific formula the +doctrine of St. Paul, 'The Carnal Mind is enmity against God.'" + +One more quotation must suffice. It is from a poem by a forgotten +Transcendentalist, F. G. Tuckerman. + + "No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead; + But, leaving straining thought and stammering word, + Across the barren azure pass to God; + Shooting the void in silence, like a bird-- + A bird that shuts his wings for better speed!" + +It is obvious that this "contemning the phenomenal world," this +"revulsion against the intellect as the sole source of truth," is highly +dangerous to second-class minds. If one habitually prints the words +Insight, Instinct, Intuition, Consciousness with capitals, and relegates +equally useful words like senses, experience, fact, logic to lower-case +type, one may do it because he is a Carlyle or an Emerson, but the +chances are that he is neither. Transcendentalism, like all idealistic +movements, had its "lunatic fringe," its camp-followers of excitable, +unstable visionaries. The very name, like the name Methodist, was +probably bestowed upon it in mockery, and this whole perturbation of +staid New England had its humorous side. Witness the career of Bronson +Alcott. It is also true that the glorious affirmations of these seers +can be neither proved nor disproved. They made no examination and they +sought no validation of consciousness. An explorer in search of +the North Pole must bring back proofs of his journey, but when a +Transcendentalist affirms that he has reached the far heights of human +experience and even caught sight of the gods sitting on their thrones, +you and I are obliged to take his word for it. Sometimes we hear such a +man gladly, but it depends upon the man, not upon the trustworthiness +of the method. Finally it should be observed that the Transcendental +movement was an exceedingly complex one, being both literary, +philosophic, and religious; related also to the subtle thought of the +Orient, to mediaeval mysticism, and to the English Platonists; touched +throughout by the French Revolutionary theories, by the Romantic spirit, +by the new zeal for science and pseudo-science, and by the unrest of a +fermenting age. + +Our present concern is with the impact of this cosmopolitan current +upon the mind and character of a few New England writers. Channing and +Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller and Alcott, Thoreau and Emerson, are +all representative of the best thought and the noblest ethical +impulses of their generation. Let us choose first the greatest name: a +sunward-gazing spirit, and, it may be, one of the very Sun-Gods. + +The pilgrim to Concord who stops for a moment in the village library to +study French's statue of Emerson will notice the asymmetrical face. On +one side it is the face of a keen Yankee farmer, but seen from the +other side it is the countenance of a seer, a world's man. This contrast +between the parochial Emerson and the greater Emerson interprets many a +puzzle in his career. Half a mile beyond the village green to the north, +close to the "rude bridge" of the famous Concord fight in 1775, is the +Old Manse, once tenanted and described by Hawthorne. It was built by +Emerson's grandfather, a patriot chaplain in the Revolution, who died of +camp-fever at Ticonderoga. His widow married Dr. Ezra Ripley, and here +Ralph Waldo Emerson and his brothers passed many a summer in their +childhood. Half a mile east of the village, on the Cambridge turnpike, +is Emerson's own house, still sheltered by the pines which Thoreau +helped him to plant in 1838. Within the house everything is unchanged: +here are the worn books, pen and inkstand, the favorite pictures upon +the wall. Over the ridge to the north lies the Sleepy Hollow cemetery +where the poet rests, with the gravestones of Hawthorne and the Alcotts, +Thoreau and William James close by. + +But although Concord is the Emerson shrine, he was born in Boston, in +1803. His father, named William like the grandfather, was also, like the +Emerson ancestors for many generations, a clergyman--eloquent, liberal, +fond of books and music, highly honored by his alma mater Harvard and +by the town of Boston, where he ministered to the First Church. His +premature death in 1811 left his widow with five sons--one of them +feebleminded--and a daughter to struggle hard with poverty. With her +husband's sister, the Calvinistic "Aunt Mary Moody" Emerson, she held, +however, that these orphaned boys had been "born to be educated." And +educated the "eager blushing boys" were, at the Boston Latin School and +at Harvard College, on a regimen of "toil and want and truth and mutual +faith." There are many worse systems of pedagogy than this. Ralph was +thought less persistent than his steady older brother William, and far +less brilliant than his gifted, short-lived younger brothers, Edward +and Charles. He had an undistinguished career at Harvard, where he was +graduated in 1821, ranking thirtieth in a class of fifty-nine. Lovers of +irony like to remember that he was the seventh choice of his classmates +for the position of class poet. After some desultory teaching to help +his brothers, he passed irregularly through the Divinity School, his +studies often interrupted by serious ill-health. "If they had examined +me," he said afterward of the kindly professors in the Divinity School, +"they never would have passed me." But approve him they did, in 1826, +and he entered decorously upon the profession of his ancestors, as +associate minister of the Second Church in Boston. His "Journals," which +are a priceless record of his inner life, at this and later periods, +reveal the rigid self-scrutiny, the tender idealism, with which he began +his ministerial career. + +But as a scheme of life for Ralph Waldo Emerson this vocation would not +satisfy. The sexton of the Second Church thought that the young man was +not at his best at funerals. Father Taylor, the eccentric Methodist, +whom Emerson assisted at a sailor's Bethel near Long Wharf, considered +him "one of the sweetest souls God ever made," but as ignorant of the +principles of the New Testament as Balaam's ass was of Hebrew grammar. +By and by came an open difference with his congregation over the +question of administering the Communion. "I am not interested in it," +Emerson admitted, and he wrote in his "Journal" the noble words: "It is +my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which +I cannot do with my whole heart." His resignation was accepted in 1832. +His young wife had died of consumption in the same year. He now sailed +for Italy, France, and England, a memorable journey which gave him an +acquaintance with Landor, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle, but which +was even more significant in sending him, as he says, back to himself, +to the resources of his own nature. "When shows break up," wrote Whitman +afterward, "what but oneself is sure?" In 1834 and 1835 we find Emerson +occupying a room in the Old Manse at Concord, strolling in the quiet +fields, lecturing or preaching if he were invited to do so, but chiefly +absorbed in a little book which he was beginning to write--a new +utterance of a new man. + +This book, the now famous "Nature" of 1836, contains the essence of +Emerson's message to his generation. It is a prose essay, but written in +the ecstatic mood of a poet. The theme of its meditation is the soul +as related to Nature and to God. The soul is primal; Nature, in all +its bountiful and beautiful commodities, exists for the training of the +soul; it is the soul's shadow. And every soul has immediate access to +Deity. Thus the utility and beauty and discipline of Nature lift the +soul Godward. The typical sentence of the book is this: "The sun shines +today also"; that is to say: the world is still alive and fair; let us +lift up our hearts! Only a few Americans of 1836 bought this singular +volume, but Emerson went serenely forward. He had found his path. + +In 1837 he delivered the well-known Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard +on "The American Scholar." Emerson was now thirty-four; he had married +a second time, had bought a house of his own in Concord, and purposed to +make a living by lecturing and writing. His address in Cambridge, though +it contained no reference to himself, was after all a justification +of the way of life he had chosen: a declaration of intellectual +independence for himself and his countrymen, an exhortation of +self-trust to the individual thinking man. "If the single man plant +himself indomitably on his instincts and there abide, the huge world +will come round to him." Such advice to cut loose from the moorings of +the past was not unknown in Phi Beta Kappa orations, though it had never +been so brilliantly phrased; but when Emerson applied precisely the +same doctrine, in 1838, to the graduating class at the Harvard Divinity +School, he roused a storm of disapproval. "A tempest in our washbowl," +he wrote coolly to Carlyle, but it was more than that. The great +sentence of the Divinity School address, "God is, not was; he speaketh, +not spake," was the emphasis of a superb rhetorician upon the immediacy +of the soul's access to God. It has been the burden of a thousand +prophets in all religions. The young priests of the Divinity School, +their eyes wearied with Hebrew and Greek, seem to have enjoyed Emerson's +injunction to turn away from past records and historical authorities and +to drink from the living fountain of the divine within themselves; but +to the professors, "the stern old war-gods," this relative belittlement +of historical Christianity seemed blasphemy. A generation passed before +Emerson was again welcomed by his alma mater. + +The reader who has mastered those three utterances by the Concord +Transcendentalist in 1836, 1837, and 1838 has the key to Emerson. He was +a seer, not a system-maker. The constitution of his mind forbade formal, +consecutive, logical thought. He was not a philosopher in the accepted +sense, though he was always philosophizing, nor a metaphysician in spite +of his curious searchings in the realm of metaphysics. He sauntered in +books as he sauntered by Walden Pond, in quest of what interested him; +he "fished in Montaigne," he said, as he fished in Plato and Goethe. He +basketed the day's luck, good or bad as it might be, into the pages of +his private "Journal," which he called his savings-bank, because from +this source he drew most of the material for his books. The "Journal" +has recently been printed, in ten volumes. No American writing rewards +the reader more richly. It must be remembered that Emerson's "Essays," +the first volume of which appeared in 1841, and the last volumes after +his death in 1882, represent practically three stages of composition: +first the detached thoughts of the "Journal;" second, the rearrangement +of this material for use upon the lecture platform; and finally, the +essays in their present form. The oral method thus predominates: a +series of oracular thoughts has been shaped for oratorical utterance, +not oratorical in the bombastic, popular American sense, but cunningly +designed, by a master of rhetoric, to capture the ear and then the mind +of the auditor. + +Emerson's work as a lecturer coincided with the rise of that Lyceum +system which brought most of the American authors, for more than a +generation, into intimate contact with the public, and which proved an +important factor in the aesthetic and moral cultivation of our people. +No lecturer could have had a more auspicious influence than Emerson, +with his quiet dignity, his serene spiritual presence, his tonic and +often electrifying force. But if he gave his audiences precious gifts, +he also learned much from them. For thirty years his lecturing trips to +the West brought him, more widely than any New England man of letters, +into contact with the new, virile America of the great Mississippi +valley. Unlike many of his friends, he was not repelled by the +"Jacksonism of the West"; he rated it a wholesome, vivifying force +in our national thought and life. The "Journal" reveals the essential +soundness of his Americanism. Though surrounded all his life by +reformers, he was himself scarcely a reformer, save upon the single +issue of anti-slavery. Perhaps he was at bottom too much of a radical to +be swept off his feet by any reform. + +To our generation, of course, Emerson presents himself as an author +of books, and primarily as an essayist, rather than as a winning, +entrancing speaker. His essays have a greater variety of tone than is +commonly recognized. Many of them, like "Manners," "Farming," "Books," +"Eloquence," "Old Age," exhibit a shrewd prudential wisdom, a sort +of Yankee instinct for "the milk in the pan," that reminds one of Ben +Franklin. Like most of the greater New England writers, he could be, +on occasion, an admirable local historian. See his essays on "Life and +Letters in New England," "New England Reformers," "Politics," and the +successive entries in his "Journal" relating to Daniel Webster. He had +the happiest gift of portraiture, as is witnessed by his sketches of +Montaigne, of Napoleon, of Socrates (in the essay on Plato), of his aunt +Mary Moody Emerson, of Thoreau, and of various types of Englishmen in +his "English Traits." But the great essays, no doubt, are those like +"Self-Reliance," "Compensation," "The Over-Soul," "Fate," "Power," +"Culture," "Worship," and "Illusions." These will puzzle no one who has +read carefully that first book on "Nature." They all preach the gospel +of intuition, instinctive trust in the Universe, faith in the ecstatic +moment of vision into the things that are unseen by the physical +eye. Self-reliance, as Emerson's son has pointed out, means +really God-reliance; the Over-Soul--always a stumbling-block to +Philistines--means that high spiritual life into which all men may enter +and in which they share the life of Deity. Emerson is stern enough in +expounding the laws of compensation that run through the universe, but +to him the chief law is the law of the ever-ascending, victorious soul. + +This radiant optimism permeates his poems. By temperament a singer as +well as a seer and sayer, Emerson was nevertheless deficient in the +singing voice. He composed no one great poem, his verse presents no +ideas that are not found in his prose. In metre and rhyme he is harsh +and willful. Yet he has marvelous single phrases and cadences. He +ejaculates transports and ecstasies, and though he cannot organize and +construct in verse, he is capable here and there of the true miracle of +transforming fact and thought into true beauty. Aldrich used to say that +he would rather have written Emerson's "Bacchus" than any American poem. + +That the pure, high, and tonic mind of Emerson was universal in its +survey of human forces, no one would claim. Certain limitations in +interest and sympathy are obvious. "That horrid burden and impediment +of the soul which the churches call sin," to use John Morley's words, +occupied his attention but little. Like a mountain climber in a perilous +pass, he preferred to look up rather than down. He does not +stress particularly those old human words, service and sacrifice. +"Anti-scientific, antisocial, anti-Christian" are the terms applied to +him by one of his most penetrating critics. Yet I should prefer to say +"un-scientific," "unsocial," and "non-Christian," in the sense in which +Plato and Isaiah are non-Christian. Perhaps it would be still nearer +the truth to say, as Mrs. Lincoln said of her husband, "He was not a +technical Christian." He tends to underestimate institutions of every +kind; history, except as a storehouse of anecdote, and culture as +a steady mental discipline. This is the price he pays for his +transcendental insistence upon the supreme value of the Now, the moment +of insight. But after all these limitations are properly set down, the +personality of Ralph Waldo Emerson remains a priceless possession to his +countrymen. The austere serenity of his life, and the perfection with +which he represents the highest type of his province and his era, will +ultimately become blended with the thought of his true Americanism. +A democrat and liberator, like Lincoln, he seems also destined like +Lincoln to become increasingly a world's figure, a friend and guide +to aspiring spirits everywhere. Differences of race and creed are +negligible in the presence of such superb confidence in God and the +soul. + +Citizens of Concord in May, 1862, hearing that Henry Thoreau, the +eccentric bachelor, had just died of consumption in his mother's house +on Main Street, in his forty-fifth year, would have smiled cannily at +the notion that after fifty years their townsman's literary works would +be published in a sumptuous twenty-volume edition, and that critics in +his own country and in Europe would rank him with Ralph Waldo Emerson. +Yet that is precisely what has happened. Our literature has no more +curious story than the evolution of this local crank into his rightful +place of mastership. In his lifetime he printed only two books, "A Week +on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers"--which was even more completely +neglected by the public than Emerson's "Nature"--and "Walden," now one +of the classics, but only beginning to be talked about when its shy, +proud author penned his last line and died with the words "moose" and +"Indian" on his lips. + +Thoreau, like all thinkers who reach below the surface of human life, +means many different things to men of various temperaments. Collectors +of human novelties, like Stevenson, rejoice in his uniqueness of flavor; +critics, like Lowell, place him, not without impatient rigor. To some +readers he is primarily a naturalist, an observer, of the White of +Selborne school; to others an elemental man, a lover of the wild, a +hermit of the woods. He has been called the poet-naturalist, to indicate +that his powers of observation were accompanied, like Wordsworth's, by a +gift of emotional interpretation of the meaning of phenomena. Lovers of +literature celebrate his sheer force and penetration of phrase. But +to the student of American thought Thoreau's prime value lies in the +courage and consistency with which he endeavored to realize the gospel +of Transcendentalism in his own inner life. + +Lovers of racial traits like to remember that Thoreau's grandfather +was an immigrant Frenchman from the island of Jersey, and that his +grandmother was Scotch and Quaker. His father made lead pencils and +ground plumbago in his own house in Concord. The mother was from New +Hampshire. It was a high-minded family. All the four children taught +school and were good talkers. Henry, born in 1817, was duly baptized +by good Dr. Ripley of the Old Manse, studied Greek and Latin, and was +graduated at Harvard in 1837, the year of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa +address. Even in college the young man was a trifle difficult. "Cold and +unimpressible," wrote a classmate. "The touch of his hand was moist and +indifferent. He did not care for people." "An unfavorable opinion has +been entertained of his disposition to exert himself," wrote President +Quincy confidentially to Emerson in 1837, although the kindly President, +a year later, in recommending Thoreau as a school-teacher, certified +that "his rank was high as a scholar in all the branches and his morals +and general conduct unexceptionable and exemplary." + +Ten years passed. The young man gave up school-keeping, thinking it a +loss of time. He learned pencil-making, surveying, and farm work, and +found that by manual labor for six weeks in the year he could meet all +the expenses of living. He haunted the woods and pastures, explored +rivers and ponds, built the famous hut on Emerson's wood-lot with the +famous axe borrowed from Alcott, was put in jail for refusal to pay +his polltax, and, to sum up much in little, "signed off" from social +obligations. "I, Henry D. Thoreau, have signed off, and do not hold +myself responsible to your multifarious uncivil chaos named Civil +Government." When his college class held its tenth reunion in 1847, and +each man was asked to send to the secretary a record of achievement, +Thoreau wrote: "My steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to +keep myself at the top of my condition and ready for whatever may turn +up in heaven or on earth." There is the motto of Transcendentalism, +stamped upon a single coin. + +For "to be ready for whatever may turn up" is Thoreau's racier, homelier +version of Emerson's "endless seeker"; and Thoreau, more easily than +Emerson, could venture to stake everything upon the quest. The elder +man had announced the programme, but by 1847 he was himself almost +what Thoreau would call a "committed man," with family and household +responsibilities, with a living to earn, and bound, like every +professional writer and speaker, to have some measure of regard for his +public. But Thoreau was ready to travel lightly and alone. If he should +fail in the great adventure for spiritual perfection, it was his own +affair. He had no intimates, no confidant save the multitudinous pages +of his "Journal," from which--and here again he followed Emerson's +example--his future books were to be compiled. Many of his most loyal +admirers will admit that such a quest is bound, by the very conditions +of the problem, to be futile. Hawthorne allegorized it in "Ethan Brand," +and his quaint illustration of the folly of romantic expansion of the +self apart from the common interests of human kind is the picture of a +dog chasing its own tail. "It is time now that I begin to live," notes +Thoreau in the "Journal," and he continued to say it in a hundred +different ways until the end of all his journalizing, but he never quite +captured the fugitive felicity. The haunting pathos of his own allegory +has moved every reader of "Walden:" "I long ago lost a hound, a bay +horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail." Precisely what +he meant it is now impossible to say, but surely he betrays a doubt in +the ultimate efficacy of his own system of life. He bends doggedly to +the trail, for Henry Thoreau is no quitter, but the trail leads nowhere, +and in the latest volumes of the "Journals" he seems to realize that he +has been pursuing a phantom. He dived fearlessly and deep into himself, +but somehow he failed to grasp that pearl of great price which all the +transcendental prophets assured him was to be had at the cost of diving. + +This is not to say that this austere and strenuous athlete came up quite +empty-handed. Far from it. The byproducts of his toil were enough to +have enriched many lesser men, and they have given Thoreau a secure +fame. From his boyhood he longed to make himself a writer, and an +admirable writer he became. "For along time," he says in "Walden," "I +was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor +has never seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too +common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in +this case my pains were their reward." Like so many solitaries, he +experienced the joy of intense, long-continued effort in composition, +and he was artist enough to know that his pages, carefully assembled +from his note books, had pungency, form, atmosphere. No man of his +day, not even Lowell the "last of the bookmen," abandoned himself more +unreservedly to the delight of reading. Thoreau was an accomplished +scholar in the Greek and Roman classics, as his translations attest. +He had some acquaintance with several modern languages, and at one time +possessed the best collection of books on Oriental literature to +be found in America. He was drenched in the English poetry of the +seventeenth century. His critical essays in the "Dial," his letters +and the bookish allusions throughout his writings, are evidence of +rich harvesting in the records of the past. He left some three thousand +manuscript pages of notes on the American Indians, whose history and +character had fascinated him from boyhood. Even his antiquarian hobbies +gave him durable satisfaction. Then, too, he had deep delight in his +life-long studies in natural history, in his meticulous measurements of +river currents, in his notes upon the annual flowering of plants and the +migration of birds. The more thoroughly trained naturalists of our own +day detect him now and again in error as to his birds and plants, just +as specialists in Maine woodcraft discover that he made amusing, and for +him unaccountable, blunders when he climbed Katahdin. But if he was not +impeccable as a naturalist or woodsman, who has ever had more fun out of +his enthusiasm than Thoreau, and who has ever stimulated as many men and +women in the happy use of their eyes? He would have had slight patience +with much of the sentimental nature study of our generation, and +certainly an intellectual contempt for much that we read and write +about the call of the wild; but no reader of his books can escape his +infection for the freedom of the woods, for the stark and elemental in +nature. Thoreau's passion for this aspect of life may have been selfish, +wolflike, but it is still communicative. + +Once, toward the close of his too brief life, Thoreau "signed on" again +to an American ideal, and no man could have signed more nobly. It was +the cause of Freedom, as represented by John Brown of Harper's Ferry. +The French and Scotch blood in the furtive hermit suddenly grew hot. +Instead of renouncing in disgust the "uncivil chaos called Civil +Government," Thoreau challenged it to a fight. Indeed he had already +thrown down the gauntlet in "Slavery in Massachusetts," which Garrison +had published in the "Liberator" in 1854. And now the death upon the +scaffold of the old fanatic of Ossawatomie changed Thoreau into a +complete citizen, arguing the case and glorifying to his neighbors the +dead hero. "It seems as if no man had ever died in America before; for +in order to die you must first have lived.... I hear a good many pretend +that they are going to die.... Nonsense! I'll defy them to do it. They +haven't got life enough in them. They'll deliquesce like fungi, and keep +a hundred eulogists mopping the spot where they left off. Only half +a dozen or so have died since the world began." Such passages as this +reveal a very different Thoreau from the Thoreau who is supposed to have +spent his days in the company of swamp-blackbirds and woodchucks. He +had, in fact, one of the highest qualifications for human society, +an absolute honesty of mind. "We select granite," he says, "for the +underpinning of our houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we +do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granite truth, the lowest +primitive rock. Our sills are rotten.... In proportion as our inward +life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the postoffice. +You may depend upon it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the +greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has +not heard from himself this long time." + +This hard, basic individualism was for Thoreau the foundation of all +enduring social relations, and the dullest observer of twentieth century +America can see that Thoreau's doctrine is needed as much as ever. His +sharp-edged personality provokes curiosity and pricks the reader into +dissent or emulation as the case may be, but its chief ethical value to +our generation lies in the fact that here was a Transcendentalist who +stressed, not the life of the senses, though he was well aware of their +seductiveness, but the stubborn energy of the will. + +The scope of the present book prevents more than a glimpse at the other +members of the New England Transcendental group. They are a very mixed +company, noble, whimsical, queer, impossible. "The good Alcott," wrote +Carlyle, "with his long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn +temples and mild radiant eyes; all bent on saving the world by a return +to acorns and the golden age; he comes before one like a venerable Don +Quixote, whom nobody can laugh at without loving." These words paint a +whole company, as well as a single man. The good Alcott still awaits +an adequate biographer. Connecticut Yankee, peddler in the South, +school-teacher in Boston and elsewhere, he descended upon Concord, +flitted to the queer community of Fruitlands, was starved back to +Concord, inspired and bored the patient Emerson, talked endlessly, wrote +ineffective books, and had at last his apotheosis in the Concord School +of Philosophy, but was chiefly known for the twenty years before his +death in 1888 as the father of the Louisa Alcott who wrote "Little +Women." "A tedious archangel," was Emerson's verdict, and it is likely +to stand. + +Margaret Fuller, though sketched by Hawthorne, analyzed by Emerson, and +painted at full length by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, is now a fading +figure--a remarkable woman, no doubt, one of the first of American +feminists, suggesting George Eliot in her physical unattractiveness, +her clear brain, her touch of sensuousness. She was an early-ripe, +over-crammed scholar in the classics and in modern European languages. +She did loyal, unpaid work as the editor of the "Dial," which from 1840 +to 1844 was the organ of Transcendentalism. She joined the community at +Brook Farm, whose story has been so well told by Lindsay Swift. For +a while she served as literary editor of the "New York Tribune" under +Horace Greeley. Then she went abroad, touched Rousseau's manuscripts at +Paris with trembling, adoring fingers, made a secret marriage in Italy +with the young Marquis Ossoli, and perished by shipwreck, with her +husband and child, off Fire Island in 1850. + +Theodore Parker, like Alcott and "Margaret," an admirable Greek scholar, +an idealist and reformer, still lives in Chadwick's biography, in +Colonel Higginson's delightful essay, and in the memories of a few +liberal Bostonians who remember his tremendous sermons on the platform +of the old Music Hall. He was a Lexington farmer's son, with the +temperament of a blacksmith, with enormous, restless energy, a good +hater, a passionate lover of all excellent things save meekness. He died +at fifty, worn out, in Italy. + +But while these three figures were, after Emerson and Thoreau, the most +representative of the group, the student of the Transcendental period +will be equally interested in watching its influence upon many other +types of young men: upon future journalists and publicists like George +William Curtis, Charles A. Dana, and George Ripley; upon religionists +like Orestes Brownson, Father Hecker, and James Freeman Clarke; and +upon poets like Jones Very, Christopher. P. Cranch, and Ellery Channing. +There was a sunny side of the whole movement, as T. W. Higginson and +F. B. Sanborn, two of the latest survivors of the ferment, loved to +emphasize in their talk and in their books; and it was shadowed also by +tragedy and the pathos of unfulfilled desires. But as one looks back at +it, in the perspective of three-quarters of a century, it seems chiefly +something touchingly fine. For all these men and women tried to hitch +their wagon to a star. + + + +CHAPTER VII. ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY + +Moving in and out of the Transcendentalist circles, in that +great generation preceding the Civil War, were a company of other +men--romancers, poets, essayists, historians--who shared in the +intellectual liberalism of the age, but who were more purely artists +in prose and verse than they were seekers after the unattainable. +Hawthorne, for example, sojourned at Concord and at Brook Farm with some +of the most extreme types of transcendental extravagance. The movement +interested him artistically and he utilized it in his romances, but +personally he maintained an attitude of cool detachment from it. +Longfellow was too much of an artist to lose his head over philosophical +abstractions; Whittier, at his best, had a too genuine poetic instinct +for the concrete; and Lowell and Holmes had the saving gift of humor. +Cultivated Boston gentlemen like Prescott, Motley, and Parkman preferred +to keep their feet on the solid earth and write admirable histories. So +the mellow years went by. Most of the widely-read American books were +being produced within twenty miles of the Boston State House. The +slavery issue kept growling, far away, but it was only now and then, +as in the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, that it was +brought sharply home to the North. The "golden forties" were as truly +golden for New England as for idle California. There was wealth, +leisure, books, a glow of harvest-time in the air, though the spirit of +the writers is the spirit of youth. + +Nathaniel Hawthorne, our greatest writer of pure romance, was Puritan by +inheritance and temperament, though not in doctrine or in sympathy. His +literary affiliations were with the English and German Romanticists, +and he possessed, for professional use, the ideas and vocabulary of his +transcendental friends. Born in Salem in 1804, he was descended from +Judge Hawthorne of Salem Witchcraft fame, and from a long line of +sea-faring ancestors. He inherited a morbid solitariness, redeemed in +some measure by a physical endowment of rare strength and beauty. He +read Spenser, Rousseau, and the "Newgate Calendar," was graduated at +Bowdoin, with Longfellow, in the class of 1825, and returned to Salem +for thirteen brooding lonely years in which he tried to teach himself +the art of story-writing. His earliest tales, like Irving's, are essays +in which characters emerge; he is absorbed in finding a setting for a +preconceived "moral"; he is in love with allegory and parable. His own +words about his first collection of stories, "Twice-Told Tales," have +often been quoted: "They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed +in too retired a shade." Yet they are for the most part exquisitely +written. After a couple of years in the Boston Custom-House, and a +residence at the socialistic community of Brook Farm, Hawthorne made the +happiest of marriages to Sophia Peabody, and for nearly four years dwelt +in the Old Manse at Concord. He described it in one of the ripest of his +essays, the Preface to "Mosses from an Old Manse," his second collection +of stories. After three years in the Custom-House at Salem, his +dismissal in 1849 gave him leisure to produce his masterpiece, "The +Scarlet Letter," published in 1850. He was now forty-six. In 1851, he +published "The House of the Seven Gables," "The Wonder-Book," and "The +Snow Image, and Other Tales." In 1852 came "The Blithedale Romance," a +rich ironical story drawn from his Brook Farm experience. Four years +in the American Consulate at Liverpool and three subsequent years of +residence upon the Continent saw no literary harvest except carefully +filled notebooks and the deeply imaginative moral romance, "The Marble +Faun." Hawthorne returned home in 1860 and settled in the Wayside at +Concord, busying himself with a new, and, as was destined, a never +completed story about the elixir of immortality. But his vitality was +ebbing, and in May, 1864, he passed away in his sleep. He rests under +the pines in Sleepy Hollow, near the Alcotts and the Emersons. + +It is difficult for contemporary Americans to assess the value of such +a man, who evidently did nothing except to write a few books. His rare, +delicate genius was scarcely touched by passing events. Not many of +his countrymen really love his writings, as they love, for instance the +writings of Dickens or Thackeray or Stevenson. Everyone reads, at some +time of his life, "The Scarlet Letter," and trembles at its passionate +indictment of the sin of concealment, at its agonized admonition, "Be +true! Be true!" Perhaps the happiest memories of Hawthorne's readers, as +of Kipling's readers, hover about his charming stories for children; +to have missed "The Wonder-Book" is like having grown old without ever +catching the sweetness of the green world at dawn. But our public has +learned to enjoy a wholly different kind of style, taught by the daily +journals, a nervous, graphic, sensational, physical style fit for +describing an automobile, a department store, a steamship, a lynching +party. It is the style of our day, and judged by it Hawthorne, who wrote +with severity, conscience, and good taste, seems somewhat old-fashioned, +like Irving or Addison. He is perhaps too completely a New Englander +to be understood by men of other stock, and has never, like Poe and +Whitman, excited strong interest among European minds. + +Yet no American is surer, generation after generation, of finding a fit +audience. Hawthorne's genius was meditative rather than dramatic. His +artistic material was moral rather than physical; he brooded over the +soul of man as affected by this and that condition and situation. The +child of a new analytical age, he thought out with rigid accuracy the +precise circumstances surrounding each one of his cases and modifying +it. Many of his sketches and short stories and most of his romances deal +with historical facts, moods, and atmospheres, and he knew the past of +New England as few men have ever known it. There is solid historical +and psychological stuff as the foundation of his air-castles. His +latent radicalism furnished him with a touchstone of criticism as he +interpreted the moral standards of ancient communities; no reader of +"The Scarlet Letter" can forget Hawthorne's implicit condemnation of the +unimaginative harshness of the Puritans. His own judgment upon the +deep matters of the human conscience was stern enough, but it was a +universalized judgment, and by no means the result of a Calvinism +which he hated. Over-fond as he was in his earlier tales of elaborate, +fanciful, decorative treatment of themes that promised to point a moral, +in his finest short stories, such as "The Ambitious Guest," "The Gentle +Boy," "Young Goodman Brown," "The Snow Image," "The Great Stone Face," +"Drowne's Wooden Image," "Rappacini's Daughter," the moral, if there +be one, is not obtruded. He loves physical symbols for mental and moral +states, and was poet and Transcendentalist enough to retain his youthful +affection for parables; but his true field as a story-teller is the +erring, questing, aspiring, shadowed human heart. + +"The Scarlet Letter," for instance, is a study of a universal theme, the +problem of concealed sin, punishment, redemption. Only the setting is +provincial. The story cannot be rightly estimated, it is true, without +remembering the Puritan reverence for physical purity, the Puritan +reverence for the magistrate-minister--differing so widely from the +respect of Latin countries for the priest--the Puritan preoccupation +with the life of the soul, or, as more narrowly construed by Calvinism, +the problem of evil. The word Adultery, although suggestively enough +present in one of the finest symbolical titles ever devised by a +romancer, does not once occur in the book. The sins dealt with are +hypocrisy and revenge. Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne, and Roger +Chillingworth are developing, suffering, living creatures, caught +inextricably in the toils of a moral situation. By an incomparable +succession of pictures Hawthorne exhibits the travail of their souls. In +the greatest scene of all, that between Hester and Arthur in the forest, +the Puritan framework of the story gives way beneath the weight of human +passion, and we seem on the verge of another and perhaps larger solution +than was actually worked out by the logic of succeeding events. But +though the book has been called Christless, prayerless, hopeless, no +mature person ever reads it without a deepened sense of the impotence of +all mechanistic theories of sin, and a new vision of the intense reality +of spiritual things. "The law we broke," in Dimmesdale's ghostly words, +was a more subtle law than can be graven on tables of stone and numbered +as the Seventh Commandment. + +The legacy of guilt is likewise the theme of "The House of the Seven +Gables," which Hawthorne himself was inclined to think a better +book than "The Scarlet Letter." Certainly this story of old Salem is +impeccably written and its subtle handling of tone and atmosphere is +beyond dispute. An ancestral curse, the visitation of the sins of the +fathers upon the children, the gradual decay of a once sound stock, are +motives that Ibsen might have developed. But the Norseman would have +failed to rival Hawthorne's delicate manipulation of his shadows, +and the no less masterly deftness of the ultimate mediation of a dark +inheritance through the love of the light-hearted Phoebe for the latest +descendant of the Maules. In "The Blithedale Romance" Hawthorne stood +for once, perhaps, too near his material to allow the rich atmospheric +effects which he prefers, and in spite of the unforgetable portrait of +Zenobia and powerful passages of realistic description, the book is not +quite focussed. In "The Marble Faun" Hawthorne comes into his own again. +Its central problem is one of those dark insoluble ones that he loves: +the influence of a crime upon the development of a soul. Donatello, the +Faun, is a charming young creature of the natural sunshine until his +love for the somber Miriam tempts him to the commission of murder: then +begins the growth of his mind and character. Perhaps the haunting power +of the main theme of the book has contributed less to its fame than the +felicity of its descriptions of Rome and Italy. For Hawthorne possessed, +like Byron, in spite of his defective training in the appreciation of +the arts, a gift of romantic discernment which makes "The Marble Faun," +like "Childe Harold," a glorified guide-book to the Eternal City. + +All of Hawthorne's books, in short, have a central core of psychological +romance, and a rich surface finish of description. His style, at its +best, has a subdued splendor of coloring which is only less wonderful +than the spiritual perceptions with which this magician was endowed. The +gloom which haunts many of his pages, as I have said elsewhere, is +the long shadow cast by our mortal destiny upon a sensitive soul. The +mystery is our mystery, perceived, and not created, by that finely +endowed mind and heart. The shadow is our shadow; the gleams of insight, +the soft radiance of truth and beauty, are his own. + +A college classmate of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow summed up the Portland +boy's character in one sentence: "It appeared easy for him to avoid +the unworthy." Born in 1807, of Mayflower stock that had distinguished +itself for bravery and uprightness, the youth was graduated from Bowdoin +at eighteen. Like his classmate Hawthorne, he had been a wide and +secretly ambitious reader, and had followed the successive numbers of +Irving's "Sketch Book," he tells us, "with ever increasing wonder and +delight." His college offered him in 1826 a professorship of the modern +languages, and he spent three happy years in Europe in preparation. He +taught successfully at Bowdoin for five or six years, and for eighteen +years, 1836 to 1854, served as George Ticknor's successor at Harvard, +ultimately surrendering the chair to Lowell. He early published two +prose volumes, "Hyperion" and "Outre-mer," Irvingesque romances of +European travel. Then came, after ten years of teaching and the death +of his young wife, the sudden impulse to write poetry, and he produced, +"softly excited, I know not why," "The Reaper and the Flowers, a Psalm +of Death." From that December morning in 1838 until his death in 1882 he +was Longfellow the Poet. + +His outward life, like Hawthorne's, was barren of dramatic incident, +save the one tragic accident by which his second wife, the mother of his +children, perished before his eyes in 1861. He bore the calamity with +the quiet courage of his race and breeding. But otherwise his days ran +softly and gently, enriched with books and friendships, sheltered from +the storms of circumstance. He had leisure to grow ripe, to remember, +and to dream. But he never secluded himself, like Tennyson, from normal +contacts with his fellowmen. The owner of the Craigie House was a good +neighbor, approachable and deferential. He was even interested in +local Cambridge politics. On the larger political issues of his day his +Americanism was sound and loyal. "It is disheartening," he wrote in his +Cambridge journal for 1851, "to see how little sympathy there is in the +hearts of the young men here for freedom and great ideas." But his own +sympathy never wavered. His linguistic talent helped him to penetrate +the secrets of alien ways of thought and speech. He understood Italy and +Spain, Holland and France and Germany. He had studied them on the +lips of their living men and women and in the books where soldier and +historian, priest and poet, had inscribed the record of five hundred +years. From the Revival of Learning to the middle of the nineteenth +century, Longfellow knew the soul of Europe as few men have known +it, and he helped to translate Europe to America. His intellectual +receptivity, his quick eye for color and costume and landscape, his ear +for folklore and ballad, his own ripe mastery of words, made him the +most resourceful of international interpreters. And this lover of +children, walking in quiet ways, this refined and courteous host and +gentleman, scholar and poet, exemplified without self-advertisement the +richer qualities of his own people. When Couper's statue of Longfellow +was dedicated in Washington, Hamilton Mabie said: "His freedom from the +sophistication of a more experienced country; his simplicity, due in +large measure to the absence of social self-consciousness; his tranquil +and deep-seated optimism, which is the effluence of an unexhausted +soil; his happy and confident expectation, born of a sense of tremendous +national vitality; his love of simple things in normal relations to +world-wide interests of the mind; his courage in interpreting those +deeper experiences which craftsmen who know art but who do not know +life call commonplaces; the unaffected and beautiful democracy of his +spirit--these are the delicate flowers of our new world, and as much a +part of it as its stretches of wilderness and the continental roll of +its rivers." + +Longfellow's poetic service to his countrymen has thus become a national +asset, and not merely because in his three best known narrative poems, +"Evangeline," "Hiawatha," and "The Courtship of Miles Standish," he +selected his themes from our own history. "The Building of the Ship," +written with full faith in the troubled year of 1849, is a national +anthem. "It is a wonderful gift," said Lincoln, as he listened to it, +his eyes filled with tears, "to be able to stir men like that." "The +Skeleton in Armor," "A Ballad of the French Fleet," "Paul Revere's +Ride," "The Wreck of the Hesperus," are ballads that stir men still. +For all of his skill in story-telling in verse--witness the "Tales of a +Wayside Inn"--Longfellow was not by nature a dramatist, and his trilogy +now published under the title of "Christus," made up of "The Divine +Tragedy," "The Golden Legend," and "New England Tragedies," added little +to a reputation won in other fields. His sonnets, particularly those +upon "Chaucer," "Milton," "The Divina Commedia," "A Nameless Grave," +"Felton," "Sumner," "Nature," "My Books," are among the imperishable +treasures of the English language. In descriptive pieces like "Keramos" +and "The Hanging of the Crane," in such personal and occasional verses +as "The Herons of Elmwood," "The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz," and +the noble "Morituri Salutamus" written for his classmates in 1875, +he exhibits his tenderness of affection and all the ripeness of his +technical skill. But it was as a lyric poet, after all, that he won and +held his immense audience throughout the English-speaking world. Two +of the most popular of all his early pieces, "The Psalm of Life" and +"Excelsior," have paid the price of a too apt adjustment to the ethical +mood of an earnest moment in our national life. We have passed beyond +them. And many readers may have outgrown their youthful pleasure in +"Maidenhood," "The Rainy Day," "The Bridge," "The Day is Done," verses +whose simplicity lent themselves temptingly to parody. Yet such poems as +"The Belfry of Bruges," "Seaweed," "The Fire of Driftwood," "The Arsenal +at Springfield," "My Lost Youth," "The Children's Hour," and many +another lyric, lose nothing with the lapse of time. There is fortunately +infinite room for personal preference in this whole matter of poetry, +but the confession of a lack of regard for Longfellow's verse must often +be recognized as a confession of a lessening love for what is simple, +graceful, and refined. The current of contemporary American taste, +especially among consciously clever, half-trained persons, seems to be +running against Longfellow. How soon the tide may turn, no one can say. +Meanwhile he has his tranquil place in the Poet's Corner of Westminster +Abbey. The Abbey must be a pleasant spot to wait in, for the Portland +boy. + +Oddly enough, some of the over-sophisticated and under-experienced +people who affect to patronize Longfellow assume toward John Greenleaf +Whittier an air of deference. This attitude would amuse the Quaker poet. +One can almost see his dark eyes twinkle and the grim lips tighten in +that silent laughter in which the old man so much resembled Cooper's +Leather-Stocking. Whittier knew that his friend Longfellow was a better +artist than himself, and he also knew, by intimate experience as a maker +of public opinion, how variable are its judgments. Whittier represents +a stock different from that of the Longfellows, but equally American, +equally thoroughbred: the Essex County Quaker farmer of Massachusetts. +The homestead in which he was born in 1807, at East Haverhill, had been +built by his great-great-grandfather in 1688. Mount Vernon in +Virginia and the Craigie House in Cambridge are newer than this by two +generations. The house has been restored to the precise aspect it had in +Whittier's boyhood: and the garden, lawn, and brook, even the door-stone +and bridle-post and the barn across the road are witnesses to the +fidelity of the descriptions in "Snow-Bound." The neighborhood is still +a lonely one. The youth grew up in seclusion, yet in contact with a few +great ideas, chief among them Liberty. "My father," he said, "was an +old-fashioned Democrat, and really believed in the Preamble of the +Bill of Rights which reaffirmed the Declaration of Independence." +The taciturn father transmitted to his sons a hatred of kingcraft +and priestcraft, the inward moral freedom of the Quaker touched with +humanitarian passion. The spirit of a boyhood in this homestead is +veraciously told in "The Barefoot Boy," "School-Days," "Snow-Bound," +"Ramoth Hill," and "Telling the Bees." It was a chance copy of Burns +that revealed to the farmer lad his own desire and capacity for +verse-writing. When he was nineteen, his sister sent his "Exile's +Departure" to William Lloyd Garrison, then twenty, and the editor of +the "Newburyport Free Press." The neighbors liked it, and the tall frail +author was rewarded with a term at the Haverhill Academy, where he paid +his way, in old Essex County fashion, by making shoes. + +He had little more formal schooling than this, was too poor to enter +college, but had what he modestly called a "knack at rhyming," and much +facility in prose. He turned to journalism and politics, for which he +possessed a notable instinct. For a while he thought he had "done with +poetry and literature." Then in 1833, at twenty-six, came Garrison's +stirring letter bidding him enlist in the cause of Anti-Slavery. He +obeyed the call, not knowing that this new allegiance to the service of +humanity was to transform him from a facile local verse-writer into +a national poet. It was the ancient miracle of losing one's life and +finding it. For the immediate sacrifice was very real to a youth trained +in quietism and non-resistance, and well aware, as a Whig journalist, +of the ostracism visited upon the active Abolitionists. Whittier +entered the fight with absolute courage and with the shrewdest practical +judgment of weapons and tactics. He forgot himself. He turned aside from +those pleasant fields of New England legend and history to which he was +destined to return after his warfare was accomplished. He had read the +prose of Milton and of Burke. He perceived that negro emancipation in +the United States was only a single and immediate phase of a universal +movement of liberalism. The thought kindled his imagination. He wrote, +at white heat, political and social verse that glowed with humanitarian +passion: lyrics in praise of fellow-workers, salutes to the dead, +campaign songs, hymns, satires against the clergy and the capitalists, +superb sectional poems like "Massachusetts to Virginia," and, more nobly +still, poems embodying what Wordsworth called "the sensation and image +of country and the human race." + +Whittier had now "found himself" as a poet. It is true that his style +remained diffuse and his ear faulty, but his countrymen, then as now +uncritical of artistic form, overlooked the blemishes of his verse, and +thought only of his vibrant emotion, his scorn of cowardice and evil, +his prophetic exaltation. In 1847 came the first general collection of +his poems, and here were to be found not merely controversial verses, +but spirited "Songs of Labor," pictures of the lovely Merrimac +countryside, legends written in the mood of Hawthorne or Longfellow, and +bright bits of foreign lore and fancy. For though Whittier never went +abroad, his quiet life at Amesbury gave him leisure for varied reading, +and he followed contemporary European politics with the closest +interest. He emerged more and more from the atmosphere of faction and +section, and, though he retained to the last his Quaker creed, he held +its simple tenets in such undogmatic and winning fashion that his hymns +are sung today in all the churches. + +When "The Atlantic Monthly" was established in 1857, Whittier was fifty. +He took his place among the contributors to the new magazine not as +a controversialist but as a man of letters, with such poems as +"Tritemius," and "Skipper Ireson's Ride." Characteristic productions of +this period are "My Psalm," "Cobbler Keezar's Vision," "Andrew Rykman's +Prayer," "The Eternal Goodness"--poems grave, sweet, and tender. But it +was not until the publication of "Snow-Bound" in 1866 that Whittier's +work touched its widest popularity. He had never married, and the deaths +of his mother and sister Elizabeth set him brooding, in the desolate +Amesbury house, over memories of his birthplace, six miles away in East +Haverhill. The homestead had gone out of the hands of the Whittiers, and +the poet, nearing sixty, set himself to compose an idyll descriptive of +the vanished past. No artist could have a theme more perfectly adapted +to his mood and to his powers. There are no novel ideas in "Snow-Bound," +nor is there any need of them, but the thousands of annual pilgrims to +the old farmhouse can bear witness to the touching intimacy, the homely +charm, the unerring rightness of feeling with which Whittier's genius +recreated his own lost youth and painted for all time a true New England +hearthside. + +Whittier was still to write nearly two hundred more poems, for he lived +to be eighty-five, and he composed until the last. But his creative +period was now over. He rejoiced in the friendly recognition of his work +that came to him from every section of a reunited country. His personal +friends were loyal in their devotion. He followed the intricacies of +American politics with the keen zest of a veteran in that game, for in +his time he had made and unmade governors and senators. "The greatest +politician I have ever met," said James G. Blaine, who had certainly met +many. He had an income from his poems far in excess of his needs, +but retained the absolute simplicity of his earlier habits. When his +publishers first proposed the notable public dinner in honor of his +seventieth birthday he demurred, explaining to a member of his family +that he did not want the bother of "buying a new pair of pants"--a petty +anecdote, but somehow refreshing. So the rustic, shrewd, gentle old man +waited for the end. He had known what it means to toil, to fight, to +renounce, to eat his bread in tears, and to see some of his dreams come +true. We have had, and shall have, more accomplished craftsmen in verse, +but we have never bred a more genuine man than Whittier, nor one who had +more kinship with the saints. + +A few days before Whittier's death, he wrote an affectionate poem +in celebration of the eighty-third birthday of his old friend of the +Saturday Club, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. This was in 1892. The little +Doctor, rather lonely in his latest years, composed some tender obituary +verses at Whittier's passing. He had already performed the same office +for Lowell. He lingered himself until the autumn of 1894, in his +eighty-sixth year--"The Last Leaf," in truth, of New England's richest +springtime. + +"No, my friends," he had said in "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," +"I go (always, other things being equal) for the man who inherits +family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five +generations." The Doctor came naturally by his preference for a "man of +family," being one himself. He was a descendant of Anne Bradstreet, +the poetess. "Dorothy Q.," whom he had made the most picturesque of the +Quincys, was his great-grandmother. Wendell Phillips was his cousin. His +father, the Rev. Abiel Holmes, a Yale graduate, was the minister of the +First Church in Cambridge, and it was in its "gambrel-roofed" parsonage +that Oliver Wendell was born in 1809. + + "Know old Cambridge? Hope you do-- + Born there? Don't say so! I was, too. + Nicest place that was ever seen-- + Colleges red and Common green." + +So he wrote, in scores of passages of filial devotion, concerning the +village of his boyhood and the city of Boston. His best-known prose +sentence is: "Boston State House is the hub of the Solar System." It is +easy to smile, as indeed he did himself, at such fond provinciality, +but the fact remains that our literature as a whole sadly needs this +richness of local atmosphere. A nation of restless immigrants, here +today and "moved on" tomorrow, has the fibres of its imagination +uprooted, and its artists in their eager quest of "local color" purchase +brilliancy at the cost of thinness of tone, poverty of association. +Philadelphia and Boston, almost alone among the larger American cities, +yield the sense of intimacy, or what the Autocrat would call "the +cumulative humanities." + +Young Holmes became the pet and the glory of his class of 1829 at +Harvard. It was only in 1838 that their reunions began, but thereafter +they held fifty-six meetings, of which Holmes attended fifty and wrote +poems for forty-three. Many of "the Boys" whom he celebrated became +famous in their own right, but they remain "the Boys" to all lovers of +Holmes's verses. His own career as a poet had begun during his single +year in the Law School. His later years brought him some additional +skill in polishing his lines and a riper human wisdom, but his native +verse-making talent is as completely revealed in "Old Ironsides," +published when he was twenty-one, and in "The Last Leaf," composed +a year or two later, as in anything he was to write during the next +half-century. In many respects he was a curious survival of the +cumulative humanities of the eighteenth century. He might have been, +like good Dr. Arbuthnot, an ornament of the Augustan age. He shared with +the English Augustans a liking for the rhymed couplet, an instinctive +social sense, a feeling for the presence of an imaginary audience of +congenial listeners. One still catches the "Hear! Hear!" between his +clever lines. In many of the traits of his mind this "Yankee Frenchman" +resembled such a typical eighteenth century figure as Voltaire. Like +Voltaire, he was tolerant--except toward Calvinism and Homeopathy. In +some of the tricks of his prose style he is like a kindlier Sterne. His +knack for vers de societe was caught from Horace, but he would not have +been a child of his own age without the additional gift of rhetoric and +eloquence which is to be seen in his patriotic poems and his hymns. For +Holmes possessed, in spite of all his limitations in poetic range, true +devotion, patriotism, humor, and pathos. + +His poetry was in the best sense of the word "occasional," and his prose +was only an incidental or accidental harvest of a long career in which +his chief duty was that of a professor of anatomy in the Harvard Medical +School. He had studied in Paris under sound teachers, and after some +years of private practice won the appointment which he held, as active +and emeritus professor, for forty-seven years. He was a faithful, clear, +and amusing lecturer, and printed two or three notable medical essays, +but his chief Boston reputation, in the eighteen-fifties, was that of +a wit and diner-out and writer of verses for occasions. Then came +his great hour of good luck in 1857, when Lowell, the editor of the +newly-established "Atlantic Monthly," persuaded him to write "The +Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." It was the public's luck also, for +whoever had been so unfortunate as not to be born in Boston could now +listen--as if across the table--to Boston's best talker. Few volumes of +essays during the last sixty years have given more pleasure to a greater +variety of readers than is yielded by "The Autocrat." It gave the Doctor +a reputation in England which he naturally prized, and which contributed +to his triumphal English progress, many years later, recorded pleasantly +in "Our Hundred Days." "The Professor at the Breakfast Table" and "The +Poet at the Breakfast Table" are less successful variations of "The +Autocrat." Neither professors nor poets are at their best at this meal. +Holmes wrote three novels--of which "Elsie Venner," a somewhat too +medical story, is the best remembered--memoirs of his friends Emerson +and Motley, and many miscellaneous essays. His life was exceptionally +happy, and his cheery good opinion of himself is still contagious. +To pronounce the words Doctor Holmes in any company of intelligent +Americans is the prologue to a smile of recognition, comprehension, +sympathy. The word Goldsmith has now lost, alas, this provocative +quality; the word Stevenson still possesses it. The little Doctor, who +died in the same year as Stevenson, belonged like him to the genial race +of friends of mankind, and a few of his poems, and some gay warm-hearted +pages of his prose, will long preserve his memory. But the Boston which +he loved has vanished as utterly as Sam Johnson's London. + +James Russell Lowell was ten years younger than Holmes, and though he +died three years before the Doctor, he seems, for other reasons than +those of chronology, to belong more nearly to the present. Although by +birth as much of a New England Brahmin as Holmes, and in his later years +as much of a Boston and Cambridge idol, he nevertheless touched our +universal American life on many sides, represented us worthily in +foreign diplomacy, argued the case of Democracy with convincing power, +and embodied, as more perfect artists like Hawthorne and Longfellow +could never have done, the subtleties and potencies of the national +temperament. He deserves and reveals the closest scrutiny, but his +personality is difficult to put on paper. Horace Scudder wrote his +biography with careful competence, and Ferris Greenslet has made him +the subject of a brilliant critical study. Yet readers differ widely +in their assessment of the value of his prose and verse, and in their +understanding of his personality. + +The external facts of his career are easy to trace and must be set down +here with brevity. A minister's son, and descended from a very old and +distinguished family, he was born at Elmwood in Cambridge in 1819. After +a somewhat turbulent course, he was graduated from Harvard in 1838, +the year of Emerson's "Divinity School Address." He studied law, turned +Abolitionist, wrote poetry, married the beautiful and transcendental +Maria White, and did magazine work in Boston, New York, and +Philadelphia. He was thought by his friends in the eighteen-fifties to +be "the most Shakespearian" man in America. When he was ten years out +of college, in 1848, he published "The Biglow Papers" (First Series), "A +Fable for Critics," and "The Vision of Sir Launfal." After a long visit +to Europe and the death of his wife, he gave some brilliant Lowell +Institute lectures in Boston, and was appointed Longfellow's successor +at Harvard. He went to Europe again to prepare himself, and after +entering upon his work as a teacher made a happy second marriage, served +for four years as the first editor of "The Atlantic," and helped his +friend Charles Eliot Norton edit "The North American Review." The Civil +War inspired a second series of "Biglow Papers" and the magnificent +"Commemoration Ode" of 1865. Then came volume after volume of literary +essays, such as "Among My Books" and "My Study Windows," and an +occasional book of verse. Again he made a long sojourn in Europe, +resigned his Harvard professorship, and in 1877 was appointed Minister +to Spain. After three years he was transferred to the most important +post in our diplomatic service, London. He performed his duties with +extraordinary skill and success until 1885, when he was relieved. His +last years were spent in Elmwood, the Cambridge house where he was born, +and he was still writing, in almost as rich a vein as ever, when the end +came in 1891. + +Here was certainly a full and varied life, responsive to many personal +moods and many tides of public feeling. Lowell drew intellectual +stimulus from enormously wide reading in classical and modern +literatures. Puritanically earnest by inheritance, he seems also to have +inherited a strain of levity which he could not always control, and, +through his mother's family, a dash of mysticism sometimes resembling +second sight. His physical and mental powers were not always in the +happiest mutual adjustment: he became easily the prey of moods and +fancies, and knew the alternations from wild gaiety of spirits to black +despair. The firm moral consistency of Puritanism was always his, yet +his playful remark about belonging in a hospital for incurable children +had a measure of truth in it also. + +Both his poetry and his prose reveal a nature never quite integrated +into wholeness of structure, into harmony with itself. His writing, +at its best, is noble and delightful, full of human charm, but it is +difficult for him to master a certain waywardness and to sustain any +note steadily. This temperamental flaw does not affect the winsomeness +of his letters, unless to add to it. It is lost to view, often, in the +sincerity and pathos of his lyrics, but it is felt in most of his longer +efforts in prose, and accounts for a certain dissatisfaction which many +grateful and loyal readers nevertheless feel in his criticism. Lowell +was more richly endowed by nature and by breadth of reading than Matthew +Arnold, for instance, but in the actual performance of the critical +function he was surpassed in method by Arnold and perhaps in inerrant +perception, in a limited field, by Poe. + +It was as a poet, however, that he first won his place in our +literature, and it is by means of certain passages in the "Biglow +Papers" and the "Commemoration Ode" that he has most moved his +countrymen. The effectiveness of The "Present Crisis" and "Sir Launfal," +and of the "Memorial Odes," particularly the "Ode to Agassiz," is +likewise due to the passion, sweetness, and splendor of certain +strophes, rather than to the perfection of these poems as artistic +wholes. Lowell's personal lyrics of sorrow, such as "The Changeling," +"The First SnowFall," "After the Burial," have touched many hearts. + +His later lyrics are more subtle, weighted with thought, tinged with +autumnal melancholy. He was a most fertile composer, and, like all the +men of his time and group, produced too much. Yet his patriotic verse +was so admirable in feeling and is still so inspiring to his readers +that one cannot wish it less in quantity; and in the field of political +satire, such as the two series of "Biglow Papers," he had a theme and a +method precisely suited to his temperament. No American has approached +Lowell's success in this difficult genre: the swift transitions from +rural Yankee humor to splendid scorn of evil and to noblest idealism +reveal the full powers of one of our most gifted men. The preacher +lurked in this Puritan from first to last, and the war against Mexico +and the Civil War stirred him to the depths. + +His prose, likewise, is a school of loyalty. There was much of Europe in +his learning, as his memorable Dante essay shows, and the traditions of +great English literature were the daily companions of his mind. He was +bookish, as a bookman should be, and sometimes the very richness and +whimsicality of his bookish fancies marred the simplicity and good taste +of his pages. But the fundamental texture of his thought and feeling +was American, and his most characteristic style has the raciness of our +soil. Nature lovers like to point out the freshness and delicacy of his +reaction to the New England scene. Thoreau himself, whom Lowell did not +like, was not more veracious an observer than the author of "Sunthin' +in the Pastoral Line," "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago," and "My Garden +Acquaintance." Yet he watched men as keenly as he did "laylocks" and +bobolinks, and no shrewder American essay has been written than his "On +a Certain Condescension in Foreigners." Wit and humor and wisdom made +him one of the best talkers of his generation. These qualities pervade +his essays and his letters, and the latter in particular reveal those +ardors and fidelities of friendship which men like Emerson and Thoreau +longed after without ever quite experiencing. Lowell's cosmopolitan +reputation, which was greatly enhanced in the last decade of his life, +seemed to his old associates of the Saturday Club only a fit recognition +of the learning, wit, and fine imagination which had been familiar to +them from the first. To hold the old friends throughout his lifetime, +and to win fresh ones of a new generation through his books, is perhaps +the greatest of Lowell's personal felicities. + +While there are no other names in the literature of New England quite +comparable with those that have just been discussed, it should be +remembered that the immediate effectiveness and popularity of these +representative poets and prose writers were dependent upon the existence +of an intelligent and responsive reading public. The lectures of +Emerson, the speeches of Webster, the stories of Hawthorne, the +political verse of Whittier and Lowell, presupposed a keen, reflecting +audience, mentally and morally exigent. The spread of the Lyceum system +along the line of westward emigration from New England as far as the +Mississippi is one tangible evidence of the high level of popular +intelligence. That there was much of the superficial and the +spread-eagle in the American life of the eighteen-forties is apparent +enough without the amusing comments of such English travellers as +Dickens, Miss Martineau, and Captain Basil Hall. But there was also +genuine intellectual curiosity and a general reading habit which are +evidenced not only by a steady growth of newspapers and magazines but +also by the demand for substantial books. Biography and history began to +be widely read, and it was natural that the most notable productiveness +in historical writing should manifest itself in that section of the +country where there were libraries, wealth, leisure for the pursuits of +scholarship, a sense of intimate concern with the great issues of the +past, and a diffusion of intellectual tastes throughout the community. +It was no accident that Sparks and Ticknor, Bancroft and Prescott, +Motley and Parkman, were Massachusetts men. + +Jared Sparks, it is true, inherited neither wealth nor leisure. He was a +furious, unwearied toiler in the field of our national history. Born in +1789, by profession a Unitarian minister, he began collecting the papers +of George Washington by 1825. John Marshall, the great jurist, had +published his five-volume life of his fellow Virginian a score of years +earlier. But Sparks proceeded to write another biography of Washington +and to edit his writings. He also edited a "Library of American +Biography," wrote lives of Franklin and Gouverneur Morris, was professor +of history and President of Harvard, and lived to be seventy-seven. As +editor of the writings of Franklin and Washington, he took what we now +consider unpardonable liberties in altering the text, and this error +of judgment has somewhat clouded his just reputation as a pioneer in +historical research. + +George Bancroft, who was born in 1800, and died, a horseback-riding +sage, at ninety-one, inherited from his clergyman father a taste +for history. He studied in Germany after leaving Harvard, turned +schoolmaster, Democratic politician and office-holder, served as +Secretary of the Navy, Minister to England and then to the German +Empire, and won distinction in each of his avocations, though the real +passion of his life was his "History of the United States," which he +succeeded in bringing down to the adoption of the Constitution. The +first volume, which appeared in 1834, reads today like a stump speech by +a sturdy Democratic orator of the Jacksonian period. But there was +solid stuff in it, nevertheless, and as Bancroft proceeded, decade after +decade, he discarded some of his rhetoric and philosophy of democracy +and utilized increasingly the vast stores of documents which his energy +and his high political positions had made it possible for him to obtain. +Late in life he condensed his ten great volumes to six. Posterity will +doubtless condense these in turn, as posterity has a way of doing, +but Bancroft the historian realized his own youthful ambition with +a completeness rare in the history of human effort and performed a +monumental service to his country. He was less of an artist, however, +than Prescott, the eldest and in some ways the finest figure of the +well-known Prescott-Motley-Parkman group of Boston historians. All of +these men, together with their friend George Ticknor, who wrote the +"History of Spanish Literature" and whose own "Life and Letters" +pictures a whole generation, had the professional advantages of +inherited wealth, and the opportunity to make deliberate choice of a +historical field which offered freshness and picturesqueness of theme. +All were tireless workers in spite of every physical handicap; all +enjoyed social security and the rich reward of full recognition by their +contemporaries. They had their world as in their time, as Chaucer makes +the Wife of Bath say of herself, and it was a pleasant world to live in. + +Grandson of "Prescott the Brave" of Bunker Hill, and son of the rich +Judge Prescott of Salem, William Hickling Prescott was born in 1796, and +was graduated from Harvard in 1814. An accident in college destroyed +the sight of one eye, and left him but a precarious use of the other. +Nevertheless he resolved to emulate Gibbon, whose "Autobiography" had +impressed him, and to make himself "an historian in the best sense of +the term." He studied arduously in Europe, with the help of secretaries, +and by 1826, after a long hesitation, decided upon a "History of the +Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella." In ten years the three volumes were +finished. "Pursuing the work in this quiet, leisurely way, without +over-exertion or fatigue," wrote Prescott, "or any sense of obligation +to complete it in a given time, I have found it a continual source of +pleasure." It was published at his own expense on Christmas Day, 1837, +and met with instantaneous success. "My market and my reputation rest +principally with England," he wrote in 1838--a curious footnote, by the +way, to Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa Address of the year before. But America +joined with England, in praising the new book. Then Prescott turned to +the "Conquest of Mexico," the "Conquest of Peru," and finally to his +unfinished "History of the Reign of Philip II." He had, as Dean Milman +wrote him, "the judgment to choose noble subjects." He wrote with +serenity and dignity, with fine balance and proportion. Some of the +Spanish documents upon which he relied have been proved less trustworthy +than he thought, but this unsuspected defect in his materials scarcely +impaired the skill with which this unhasting, unresting painter filled +his great canvases. They need retouching, perhaps, but the younger +historians are incompetent for the task. Prescott died in 1859, in +the same year as Irving, and he already seems quite as remote from the +present hour. + +His young friend Motley, of "Dutch Republic" fame, was another Boston +Brahmin, born in the year of Prescott's graduation from college. He +attended George Bancroft's school, went to Harvard in due course, where +he knew Holmes, Sumner, and Wendell Phillips, and at Gottingen became +a warm friend of a dog-lover and duelist named Bismarck. Young Motley +wrote a couple of unsuccessful novels, dabbled in diplomacy, politics, +and review-writing, and finally, encouraged by Prescott, settled down +upon Dutch history, went to Europe to work up his material in 1851, and, +after five years, scored an immense triumph with his "Rise of the Dutch +Republic." He was a brilliant partisan, hating Spaniards and Calvinists; +and wrote all the better for this bias. He was an admirable sketcher +of historical portraits, and had Macaulay's skill in composing special +chapters devoted to the tendencies and qualities of an epoch or to the +characteristics of a dynasty. Between 1860 and 1868 he produced the four +volumes of the "History of the United Netherlands." During the Civil +War he served usefully as American minister to Vienna, and in 1869 was +appointed minister to London. Both of these appointments ended unhappily +for him. Dr. Holmes, his loyal admirer and biographer, does not conceal +the fact that a steadier, less excitable type of public servant might +have handled both the Vienna situation and the London situation without +incurring a recall. Motley continued to live in England, where his +daughters had married, and where, in spite of his ardent Americanism, he +felt socially at home. His last book was "The Life and Death of John +of Barneveld." His "Letters," edited after his death in 1877 by George +William Curtis, give a fascinating picture of English life among the +cultivated and leisurely classes. The Boston merchant's son was a +high-hearted gentleman, and his cosmopolitan experiences used to make +his stay-at-home friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, feel rather dull and +provincial in comparison. Both were Sons of Liberty, but Motley had had +the luck to find in "brave little Holland" a subject which captivated +the interest of Europe and gave the historian international fame. He had +more eloquence than the Doctor, and a far more varied range of prose, +but there may be here and there a Yankee guesser about the taste of +future generations who will bet on "The Autocrat," after all. + +The character and career of Francis Parkman afford curious material to +the student of New England's golden age. In the seventy years of his +heroic life, from 1823 to 1893, all the characteristic forces of the age +reached their culmination and decline, and his own personality +indicates some of the violent reactions produced by the over-strain +of Transcendentalism. For here was a descendant of John Cotton, and a +clergyman's son, who detested Puritanism and the clergy; who, coming to +manhood in the eighteen-forties, hated the very words Transcendentalism, +Philosophy, Religion, Reform; an inheritor of property, trained at +Harvard, and an Overseer and Fellow of his University, who disliked the +ideals of culture and refinement; a member of the Saturday Club who was +bored with literary talk and literary people; a staunch American who +despised democracy as thoroughly as Alexander Hamilton, and thought +suffrage a failure; a nineteenth century historian who cared nothing +for philosophy, science, or the larger lessons of history itself; a +fascinating realistic writer who admired Scott, Byron, and Cooper for +their tales of action, and despised Wordsworth and Thoreau as effeminate +sentimentalists who were preoccupied with themselves. In Parkman "the +wheel has come full circle," and a movement that began with expansion of +self ended in hard Spartan repression, even in inhibition of emotion. + +Becoming "enamoured of the woods" at sixteen, Parkman chose his life +work at eighteen, and he was a man who could say proudly: "I have not +yet abandoned any plan which I ever formed." "Before the end of the +sophomore year," he wrote in his autobiography, "my various schemes had +crystallized into a plan of writing the story of what was then known +as the 'Old French War,' that is, the war that ended in the conquest of +Canada, for here, as it seemed to me, the forest drama was more stirring +and the forest stage more thronged with appropriate actors than in any +other passage of our history. It was not till some years later that I +enlarged the plan to include the whole course of the American conflict +between France and England, or, in other words, the history of the +American forest: for this was the light in which I regarded it. My theme +fascinated me, and I was haunted with wilderness images day and night." +To understand "the history of the American forest" young Parkman devoted +his college vacations to long trips in the wilderness, and in 1846, two +years after graduation, he made the epoch-making journey described in +his first book, "The Oregon Trail." + +"The Conspiracy of Pontiac," a highly-colored narrative in two volumes +appearing in 1851, marks the first stage of his historical writing. Then +came the tragedy of shattered health, and for fourteen years Parkman +fought for life and sanity, and produced practically nothing. He had had +to struggle from his college days with an obscure disorder of the +brain, aggravated by the hardships of his Oregon Trail journey, and by +ill-considered efforts to harden his bodily frame by over-exertion. +His disease took many forms--insomnia, arthritis, weakness of sight, +incapacity for sustained thought. His biographer Farnham says that "he +never saw a perfectly well day during his entire literary career." Even +when aided by secretaries and copyists, six lines a day was often the +limit of his production. His own Stoic words about the limitations of +his eyesight are characteristic: "By reading for one minute, and then +resting for an equal time, this alternate process may gradually be +continued for about half an hour. Then, after a sufficient interval, it +may be repeated, often three or four times in the course of the day. +By this means nearly the whole of the volume now offered has been +composed." There is no more piteous or inspiring story of a fight +against odds in the history of literature. + +For after his fortieth year the enemy gave way a little, and book after +book somehow got itself written. There they stand upon the shelves, a +dozen of them--"The Pioneers of France," "The Jesuits in North America," +"La Salle," "The Old Regime," "Frontenac," "Montcalm and Wolfe," "A +Half-Century of Conflict"--the boy's dream realized, the man's long +warfare accomplished. The history of the forest, as Parkman saw it, +was a pageant with the dark wilderness for a background, and, for the +actors, taciturn savages, black-robed Jesuits, intrepid explorers, +soldiers of France--all struggling for a vast prize, all changing, +passing, with a pomp and color unknown to wearied Europe. It was a +superb theme, better after all for an American than the themes chosen by +Prescott and Ticknor and Motley, and precisely adapted to the pictorial +and narrative powers of the soldier-minded, soldier-hearted author. + +The quality which Parkman admired most in men--though he never seems to +have loved men deeply, even his own heroes--was strength of will. That +was the secret of his own power, and the sign, it must be added, of the +limitations of this group of historians who came at the close of the +golden age. Whatever a New England will can accomplish was wrought +manfully by such admirable men as Prescott and Parkman. Trained +intelligence, deliberate selection of subject, skillful cultivation of +appropriate story-telling and picture-painting style, all these were +theirs. But the "wild ecstasy" that thrilled the young Emerson as he +crossed the bare Common at sunset, the "supernal beauty" of which Poe +dreamed in the Fordham cottage, the bay horse and hound and turtle-dove +which Thoreau lost long ago and could not find in his but at Walden, +these were something which our later Greeks of the New England Athens +esteemed as foolishness. + + + +CHAPTER VIII. POE AND WHITMAN + +Enter now two egotists, who have little in common save their egotism, +two outsiders who upset most of the conventional American rules for +winning the literary race, two men of genius, in short, about whom we +are still quarreling, and whose distinctive quality is more accurately +perceived in Europe than it has ever been in the United States. + +Both Poe and Whitman were Romanticists by temperament. Both shared in +the tradition and influence of European Romanticism. But they were also +late comers, and they were caught in the more morbid and extravagant +phases of the great European movement while its current was beginning +to ebb. Their acquaintance with its literature was mainly at second-hand +and through the medium of British and American periodicals. Poe, who was +older than Whitman by ten years, was fifteen when Byron died, in 1824. +He was untouched by the nobler mood of Byron, though his verse was +colored by the influence of Byron, Moore, and Shelley. His prose models +were De Quincey, Disraeli, and Bulwer. Yet he owed more to Coleridge +than to any of the Romantics. He was himself a sort of Coleridge without +the piety, with the same keen penetrating critical intelligence, the +same lovely opium-shadowed dreams, and, alas, with something of the same +reputation as a deadbeat. + +A child of strolling players, Poe happened to be born in Boston, but he +hated "Frog-Pondium"--his favorite name for the city of his nativity--as +much as Whistler hated his native town of Lowell. His father died early +of tuberculosis, and his mother, after a pitiful struggle with disease +and poverty, soon followed her husband to the grave. The boy, by +physical inheritance a neurasthenic, though with marked bodily activity +in youth, was adopted by the Allans, a kindly family in Richmond, +Virginia. Poe liked to think of himself as a Southerner. He was sent to +school in England, and in 1826, at seventeen, he attended for nearly +a year the newly founded University of Virginia. He was a dark, short, +bow-legged boy, with the face of his own Roderick Usher. He made a good +record in French and Latin, read, wrote and recited poetry, tramped +on the Ragged Mountains, and did not notably exceed his companions in +drinking and gambling. But his Scotch foster-father disapproved of his +conduct and withdrew him from the University. A period of wandering +followed. He enlisted in the army and was stationed in Boston in 1827, +when his first volume, "Tamerlane," was published. In 1829 he was in +Fortress Monroe, and published "Al Aaraf" at Baltimore. He entered West +Point in 1830, and was surely, except Whistler, the strangest of all +possible cadets. When he was dismissed in 1831, he had written the +marvellous lines "To Helen," "Israfel," and "The City in the Sea." That +is enough to have in one's knapsack at the age of twenty-two. + +In the eighteen years from 1831 to 1849, when Poe's unhappy life came to +an end in a Baltimore hospital, his literary activity was chiefly that +of a journalist, critic, and short story writer. He lived in Baltimore, +Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York. Authors who now exploit their fat +bargains with their publishers may have forgotten that letter which +Poe wrote back to Philadelphia the morning after he arrived with his +child-wife in New York: "We are both in excellent spirits.... We have +now got four dollars and a half left. To-morrow I am going to try and +borrow three dollars, so that I may have a fortnight to go upon." When +the child-wife died in the shabby cottage at Fordham, her wasted body +was covered with the old army overcoat which Poe had brought from West +Point. If Poe met some of the tests of practical life inadequately, it +must be remembered that his health failed at twenty-five, that he +was pitiably poor, and that the slightest indulgence in drink set his +overwrought nerves jangling. Ferguson, the former office-boy of the +"Literary Messenger," judged this man of letters with an office-boy's +firm and experienced eye: "Mr. Poe was a fine gentleman when he was +sober. He was ever kind and courtly, and at such times everyone liked +him. But when he was drinking he was about one of the most disagreeable +men I have ever met." "I am sorry for him," wrote C. F. Briggs to +Lowell. "He has some good points, but taken altogether, he is badly +made up." "Badly made up," no doubt, both in body and mind, but all +respectable and prosperous Pharisees should be reminded that Poe did not +make himself; or rather, that he could not make himself over. Very few +men can. Given Poe's temperament, and the problem is insoluble. He wrote +to Lowell in 1844: "I have been too deeply conscious of the mutability +and evanescence of temporal things to give any continuous effort +to anything--to be consistent in anything. My life has been +WHIM--impulse--passion--a longing for solitude--a scorn of all things +present in an earnest desire for the future." It is the pathetic +confession of a dreamer. Yet this dreamer was also a keen analyzer, +a tireless creator of beautiful things. In them he sought and found +a refuge from actuality. The marvel of his career is, as I have said +elsewhere, that this solitary, embittered craftsman, out of such +hopeless material as negations and abstractions, shadows and +superstitions, out of disordered fancies and dreams of physical horror +and strange crime, should have wrought structures of imperishable +beauty. + +Let us notice the critical instinct which he brought to the task of +creation. His theory of verse is simple, in fact too simple to account +for all of the facts. The aim of poetry, according to Poe, is not truth +but pleasure--the rhythmical creation of beauty. Poetry should be +brief, indefinite, and musical. Its chief instrument is sound. A certain +quaintness or grotesqueness of tone is a means for satisfying the thirst +for supernal beauty. Hence the musical lyric is to Poe the only true +type of poetry; a long poem does not exist. Readers who respond more +readily to auditory than to visual or motor stimulus are therefore Poe's +chosen audience. For them he executes, like Paganini, marvels upon his +single string. He has easily recognizable devices: the dominant note, +the refrain, the "repetend," that is to say the phrase which echoes, +with some variation, a phrase or line already used. In such poems as "To +Helen," "Israfel," "The Haunted Palace," "Annabel Lee," the theme, the +tone, the melody all weave their magic spell; it is like listening to a +lute-player in a dream. + +That the device often turns into a trick is equally true. In "The Bells" +and "The Raven" we detect the prestidigitator. It is jugglery, though +such juggling as only a master-musician can perform. In "Ulalume" and +other showpieces the wires get crossed and the charm snaps, scattering +tinsel fragments of nonsense verse. Such are the dangers of the +technical temperament unenriched by wide and deep contact with human +feeling. + +Poe's theory of the art of the short story is now familiar enough. +The power of a tale, he thought, turned chiefly if not solely upon its +unity, its harmony of effect. This is illustrated in all of his finest +stories. In "The Fall of the House of Usher" the theme is Fear; the +opening sentence strikes the key and the closing sentence contains the +climax. In the whole composition every sentence is modulated to the one +end in view. The autumn landscape tones with the melancholy house; the +somber chamber frames the cadaverous face of Roderick Usher; the face is +an index of the tumultuous agitation of a mind wrestling with the grim +phantom Fear and awaiting the cumulative horror of the final moment. +In "Ligeia," which Poe sometimes thought the best of all his tales, the +theme is the ceaseless life of the will, the potency of the spirit of +the beloved and departed woman. The unity of effect is absolute, the +workmanship consummate. So with the theme of revenge in "The Cask of +Amontillado," the theme of mysterious intrigue in "The Assignation." In +Poe's detective stories, or tales of ratiocination as he preferred to +call them, he takes to pieces for our amusement a puzzle which he has +cunningly put together. "The Gold Bug" is the best known of these, "The +Purloined Letter" the most perfect, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" the +most sensational. Then there are the tales upon scientific subjects +or displaying the pretence of scientific knowledge, where the narrator +loves to pose as a man without imagination and with "habits of rigid +thought." And there are tales of conscience, of which "The Black Cat" +is the most fearful and "William Wilson" the most subtle; and there are +landscape sketches and fantasies and extravaganzas, most of these poor +stuff. + +It is ungrateful and perhaps unnecessary to dwell upon Poe's +limitations. His scornful glance caught certain aspects of the human +drama with camera-like precision. Other aspects of life, and nobler, +he never seemed to perceive. The human comedy sometimes moved him to +laughter, but his humor is impish and his wit malign. His imagination +fled from the daylight; he dwelt in the twilight among the tombs. He +closed his eyes to dream, and could not see the green sunlit earth, +seed-time and harvest, man going forth to his toil and returning to +his hearthstone, the America that laughs as it labors. He wore upon his +finger the magic ring and the genii did his bidding. But we could wish +that the palaces they reared for him were not in such a somber land, +with such infernal lights gleaming in their windows, and crowded with +such horror-haunted forms. We could wish that his imagination dealt less +often with those primitive terrors that belong to the childhood of our +race. Yet when his spell is upon us we lapse back by a sort of atavism +into primal savagery and shudder with a recrudescence of long forgotten +fears. No doubt Poe was ignorant of life, in the highest sense. He was +caged in by his ignorance, Yet he had beautiful dusky wings that bruised +themselves against his prison. + +Poe was a tireless critic of his own work, and both his standards of +workmanship and his critical precepts have been of great service to his +careless countrymen. He turned out between four and five short stories +a year, was poorly paid for them, and indeed found difficulty in selling +them at all. Yet he was constantly correcting them for the better. His +best poems were likewise his latest. He was tantalized with the desire +for artistic perfection. He became the pathbreaker for a long file of +men in France, Italy, England, and America. He found the way and they +brought back the glory and the cash. + +I have sometimes imagined Poe, with four other men and one woman, +seated at a dinner-table laid for six, and talking of their art and of +themselves. What would the others think of Poe? I fancy that Thackeray +would chat with him courteously, but would not greatly care for him. +George Eliot, woman-like, would pity him. Hawthorne would watch him +with those inscrutable eyes and understand him better than the rest. But +Stevenson would be immensely interested; he would begin an essay on Poe +before he went to sleep. And Mr. Kipling would look sharply at him: he +has seen that man before, in "The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows." All of +them would find in him something to praise, a great deal to marvel +at, and perhaps not much to love. And the sensitive, shabby, lonely +Poe--what would he think of them? He might not care much for the other +guests, but I think he would say to himself with a thrill of pride: "I +belong at this table." And he does. + +Walt Whitman, whom his friend O'Connor dubbed the "good gray poet," +offers a bizarre contrast to Edgar Allan Poe. There was nothing +distinctively American about Poe except his ingenuity; he had no +interest in American history or in American ideas; he was a timeless, +placeless embodiment of technical artistry. But Whitman had a passion +for his native soil; he was hypnotized by the word America; he spent +much of his mature life in brooding over the question, "What, after +all, is an American, and what should an American poet be in our age of +science and democracy?" It is true that he was as untypical as Poe of +the average citizen of "these states." His personality is unique. In +many respects he still baffles our curiosity. He repels many of his +countrymen without arousing the pity which adds to their romantic +interest in Poe. Whatever our literary students may feel, and whatever +foreign critics may assert, it must be acknowledged that to the vast +majority of American men and women "good old Walt" is still an outsider. + +Let us try to see first the type of mind with which we are dealing. It +is fundamentally religious, perceiving the unity and kinship and glory +of all created things. It is this passion of worship which inspired St. +Francis of Assisi's "Canticle to the Sun." It cries, "Benedicite, Omnia +opera Domini: All ye Green Things upon the Earth, bless ye the Lord!" +That is the real motto for Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." Like St. +Francis, and like his own immediate master, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman +is a mystic. He cannot argue the ultimate questions; he asserts them. +Instead of marshaling and sifting the proofs for immortality, he +chants "I know I am deathless." Like Emerson again, Whitman shares that +peculiarly American type of mysticism known as Transcendentalism, but he +came at the end of this movement instead of at the beginning of it. +In his Romanticism, likewise, he is an end of an era figure. His +affiliations with Victor Hugo are significant; and a volume of Scott's +poems which he owned at the age of sixteen became his "inexhaustible +mine and treasury for more than sixty years." Finally, and quite +as uncompromisingly as Emerson, Thoreau, and Poe, Whitman is an +individualist. He represents the assertive, Jacksonian period of our +national existence. In a thousand similes he makes a declaration of +independence for the separate person, the "single man" of Emerson's +Phi Beta Kappa address. "I wear my hat as I please, indoors and out." +Sometimes this is mere swagger. Sometimes it is superb. + +So much for the type. Let us turn next to the story of Whitman's life. +It must here be told in the briefest fashion, for Whitman's own prose +and poetry relate the essentials of his biography. He was born on Long +Island, of New England and Dutch ancestry, in 1819. Lowell, W. W. Story, +and Charles A. Dana were born in that year, as was also George Eliot. +Whitman's father was a carpenter, who "leaned to the Quakers." There +were many children. When little "Walt"--as he was called, to distinguish +him from his father, Walter--was four, the family moved to Brooklyn. +The boy had scanty schooling, and by the time he was twenty had tried +typesetting, teaching, and editing a country newspaper on Long Island. +He was a big, dark-haired fellow, sensitive, emotional, extraordinarily +impressible. + +The next sixteen years were full of happy vagrancy. At twenty-two he +was editing a paper in New York, and furnishing short stories to +the "Democratic Review," a literary journal which numbered Bryant, +Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among its +contributors. He wrote a novel on temperance, "mostly in the +reading-room of Tammany Hall," and tried here and there an experiment +in free verse. He was in love with the pavements of New York and the +Brooklyn ferryboats, in love with Italian opera and with long tramps +over Long Island. He left his position on "The Brooklyn Eagle" and +wandered south to New Orleans. By and by he drifted back to New York, +tried lecturing, worked at the carpenter's trade with his father, and +brooded over a book--"a book of new things." + +This was the famous "Leaves of Grass." He set the type himself, in a +Brooklyn printing-office, and printed about eight hundred copies. The +book had a portrait of the author--a meditative, gray-bearded poet in +workman's clothes--and a confused preface on America as a field for the +true poet. Then followed the new gospel, "I celebrate myself," chanted +in long lines of free verse, whose patterns perplexed contemporary +readers. For the most part it was passionate speech rather than song, +a rhapsodical declamation in hybrid rhythms. Very few people bought +the book or pretended to understand what it was all about. Some were +startled by the frank sexuality of certain poems. But Emerson wrote to +Whitman from Concord: "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and +wisdom that America has yet contributed." + +Until the Civil War was half over, Whitman remained in Brooklyn, +patiently composing new poems for successive printings of his book. Then +he went to the front to care for a wounded brother, and finally settled +down in a Washington garret to spend his strength as an army hospital +nurse. He wrote "Drum Taps" and other magnificent poems about the War, +culminating in his threnody on Lincoln's death, "When Lilacs last in the +Dooryard Bloomed." Swinburne called this "the most sonorous nocturn ever +chanted in the church of the world." After the war had ended, Whitman +stayed on in Washington as a government clerk, and saw much of John +Burroughs and W. D. O'Connor. John Hay was a staunch friend. Some of the +best known poets and critics of England and the Continent now began to +recognize his genius. But his health had been permanently shattered +by his heroic service as a nurse, and in 1873 he suffered a paralytic +stroke which forced him to resign his position in Washington and remove +to his brother's home in Camden, New Jersey. + +He was only fifty-four, but his best work was already done, and his +remaining years, until his death in 1892, were those of patient and +serene invalidism. He wrote some fascinating prose in this final period, +and his cluttered chamber in Camden became the shrine of many a literary +pilgrim, among them some of the foremost men of letters of this country +and of Europe. He was cared for by loyal friends. Occasionally he +appeared in public, a magnificent gray figure of a man. And then, at +seventy-three, the "Dark mother always gliding near" enfolded him. + +There are puzzling things in the physical and moral constitution of Walt +Whitman, and the obstinate questions involved in his theory of poetry +and in his actual poetical performance are still far from solution. But +a few points concerning him are by this time fairly clear. They must be +swiftly summarized. + +The first obstacle to the popular acceptance of Walt Whitman is the +formlessness or alleged formlessness of "Leaves of Grass." This is a +highly technical question, involving a more accurate notation than +has thus far been made of the patterns and tunes of free verse and of +emotional prose. Whitman's "new and national declamatory expression," as +he termed it, cannot receive a final technical valuation until we have +made more scientific progress in the analysis of rhythms. As regards +the contents of his verse, it is plain that he included much material +unfused and untransformed by emotion. These elements foreign to the +nature of poetry clog many of his lines. The enumerated objects in his +catalogue or inventory poems often remain inert objects only. Like many +mystics, he was hypnotized by external phenomena, and he often fails +to communicate to his reader the trancelike emotion which he himself +experienced. This imperfect transfusion of his material is a far more +significant defect in Whitman's poetry than the relatively few passages +of unashamed sexuality which shocked the American public in 1855. + +The gospel or burden of "Leaves of Grass" is no more difficult of +comprehension than the general drift of Emerson's essays, which helped +to inspire it. The starting point of the book is a mystical illumination +regarding the unity and blessedness of the universe, an insight passing +understanding, but based upon the revelatory experience of love. In the +light of this experience, all created things are recognized as divine. +The starting-point and center of the Whitman world is the individual +man, the "strong person," imperturbable in mind, athletic in body, +unconquerable, and immortal. Such individuals meet in comradeship, and +pass together along the open roads of the world. No one is excluded +because of his poverty or his sins; there is room in the ideal America +for everybody except the doubter and sceptic. Whitman does not linger +over the smaller groups of human society, like the family. He is not +a fireside poet. He passes directly from his strong persons, meeting +freely on the open road, to his conception of "these States." One of his +typical visions of the breadth and depth and height of America will +be found in "By Blue Ontario's Shore." In this and in many similar +rhapsodies Whitman holds obstinately to what may be termed the three +points of his national creed. The first is the newness of America, and +its expression is in his well-known chant of "Pioneers, O Pioneers." Yet +this new America is subtly related to the past; and in Whitman's later +poems, such as "Passage to India," the spiritual kinship of orient and +occident is emphasized. The second article of the creed is the unity of +America. Here he voices the conceptions of Hamilton, Clay, Webster, and +Lincoln. In spite of all diversity in external aspects the republic +is "one and indivisible." This unity, in Whitman's view, was cemented +forever by the issue of the Civil War. Lincoln, the "Captain," dies +indeed on the deck of the "victor ship," but the ship comes into the +harbor "with object won." Third and finally, Whitman insists upon the +solidarity of America with all countries of the globe. Particularly in +his yearning and thoughtful old age, the poet perceived that humanity +has but one heart and that it should have but one will. No American +poet has ever prophesied so directly and powerfully concerning the final +issue involved in that World War which he did not live to see. + +Whitman, like Poe, had defects of character and defects of art. His life +and work raise many problems which will long continue to fascinate and +to baffle the critics. But after all of them have had their say, it will +remain true that he was a seer and a prophet, far in advance of his own +time, like Lincoln, and like Lincoln, an inspired interpreter of the +soul of this republic. + + + +CHAPTER IX. UNION AND LIBERTY + +"There is what I call the American idea," declared Theodore Parker +in the Anti-Slavery Convention of 1850. "This idea demands, as the +proximate organization thereof, a democracy--that is, a government of +all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a +government on the principle of eternal justice, the unchanging law of +God; for shortness' sake, I will call it the idea of Freedom." + +These are noble words, and they are thought to have suggested a familiar +phrase of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, thirteen years later. Yet +students of literature, no less than students of politics, recognize the +difficulty of summarizing in words a national "idea." Precisely what was +the Greek "idea"? What is today the French "idea"? No single formula is +adequate to express such a complex of fact, theories, moods--not even +the famous "Liberty, Fraternity, Equality." The existence of a truly +national life and literature presupposes a certain degree of unity, +an integration of race, language, political institutions, and social +ideals. It is obvious that this problem of national integration +meets peculiar obstacles in the United States. Divergencies of race, +tradition, and social theory, and clashing interests of different +sections have been felt from the beginning of the nation's life. There +was well-nigh complete solidarity in the single province of New England +during a portion of the seventeenth century, and under the leadership +of the great Virginians there was sufficient national fusion to make the +Revolution successful. But early in the nineteenth century, the opening +of the new West, and the increasing economic importance of Slavery as a +peculiar institution of the South, provoked again the ominous question +of the possibility of an enduring Union. From 1820 until the end of the +Civil War, it was the chief political issue of the United States. The +aim of the present chapter is to show how the theme of Union and Liberty +affected our literature. + +To appreciate the significance of this theme we must remind ourselves +again of what many persons have called the civic note in our national +writing. Franklin exemplified it in his day. It is far removed from +the pure literary art of a Poe, a Hawthorne, a Henry James. It aims at +action rather than beauty. It seeks to persuade, to convince, to bring +things to pass. We shall observe it in the oratory of Clay and Webster, +as they pleaded for compromise; in the editorials of Garrison, a foe to +compromise and like Calhoun an advocate, if necessary, of disunion; +in the epochmaking novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe; in the speeches of +Wendell Phillips, in verse white-hot with political passion, and sermons +blazing with the fury of attack and defense of principles dear to the +human heart. We must glance, at least, at the lyrics produced by the war +itself, and finally, we shall observe how Abraham Lincoln, the inheritor +of the ideas of Jefferson, Clay, and Webster, perceives and maintains, +in the noblest tones of our civic speech, the sole conditions of our +continuance as a nation. + +Let us begin with oratory, an American habit, and, as many besides +Dickens have thought, an American defect. We cannot argue that question +adequately here. It is sufficient to say that in the pioneer stages of +our existence oratory was necessary as a stimulus to communal thought +and feeling. The speeches of Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams were as +essential to our winning independence as the sessions of statesmen and +the armed conflicts in the field. And in that new West which came so +swiftly and dramatically into existence at the close of the Revolution, +the orator came to be regarded as the normal type of intellectual +leadership. The stump grew more potent than schoolhouse and church and +bench. + +The very pattern, and, if one likes, the tragic victim of this +glorification of oratory was Henry Clay, "Harry of the West," the +glamour of whose name and the wonderful tones of whose voice became for +a while a part of the political system of the United States. Union and +Liberty were the master-passions of Clay's life, but the greater +of these was Union. The half-educated young immigrant from Virginia +hazarded his career at the outset by championing Anti-Slavery in the +Kentucky Constitutional Convention; the last notable act of his life was +his successful management, at the age of seventy-three, of the futile +Compromise of 1850. All his life long he fought for national issues; for +the War of 1812, for a protective tariff and an "American system," for +the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as a measure for national safety; and +he had plead generously for the young South American republics and for +struggling Greece. He had become the perpetual candidate of his party +for the Presidency, and had gone down again and again in unforeseen and +heart-rending defeat. Yet he could say honorably: "If any one desires +to know the leading and paramount object of my public life, the +preservation of this union will furnish him the key." One could wish +that the speeches of this fascinating American were more readable today. +They seem thin, facile, full of phrases--such adroit phrases as would +catch the ear of a listening, applauding audience. Straight, hard +thinking was not the road to political preferment in Clay's day. Calhoun +had that power, as Lincoln had it. Webster had the capacity for it, +although he was too indolent to employ his great gifts steadily. Yet it +was Webster who analyzed kindly and a little sadly, for he was talking +during Clay's last illness and just before his own, his old rival's +defect in literary quality: "He was never a man of books.... I could +never imagine him sitting comfortably in his library and reading +quietly out of the great books of the past. He has been too fond of +excitement--he has lived upon it; he has been too fond of company, +not enough alone; and has had few resources within himself." Were +the limitations of a typical oratorical temperament ever touched more +unerringly than in these words? + +When Webster himself thundered, at the close of his reply to Hayne in +1830, "Union AND Liberty, now and forever, one and inseparable," the +words sank deeper into the consciousness of the American people than any +similar sentiment uttered by Henry Clay. For Webster's was the richer, +fuller nature, nurtured by "the great books of the past," brooding, +as Lincoln was to brood later, over the seemingly insoluble problem +of preserving a union of States half slave, half free. On the fateful +seventh of March, 1850, Webster, like Clay, cast the immense weight of +his personality and prestige upon the side of compromise. It was the +ruin of his political fortune, for the mood of the North was changing, +and the South preferred other candidates for the Presidency. Yet the +worst that can fairly be said against that speech today is that it +lacked moral imagination to visualize, as Mrs. Stowe was soon to +visualize, the human results of slavery. As a plea for the transcendent +necessity of maintaining the old Union it was consistent with Webster's +whole development of political thought. + +What were the secrets of that power that held Webster's hearers +literally spellbound, and made the North think of him, after that +alienation of 1850, as a fallen angel? No one can say fully, for we +touch here the mysteries of personality and of the spoken word. But +enough survives from the Webster legend, from his correspondence +and political and legal oratory, to bring us into the presence of a +superman. The dark Titan face, painted by such masters as Carlyle, +Hawthorne, and Emerson; the magical voice, remembered now but by a few +old men; the bodily presence, with its leonine suggestion of sleepy +power only half put forth--these aided Webster to awe men or allure them +into personal idolatry. Yet outside of New England he was admired rather +than loved. There is still universal recognition of the mental capacity +of this foremost lawyer and foremost statesman of his time. He was +unsurpassed in his skill for direct, simple, limpid statement; but he +could rise at will to a high Roman stateliness of diction, a splendid +sonorousness of cadence. His greatest public appearances were in the +Dartmouth College Case before the Supreme Court, the Plymouth, Bunker +Hill, and Adams-Jefferson commemorative orations, the Reply to Hayne, +and the Seventh of March speeches in the Senate. Though he exhibited in +his private life something of the prodigal recklessness of the pioneer, +his mental operations were conservative, constructive. His lifelong +antagonist Calhoun declared that "The United States are not a nation." +Webster, in opposition to this theory of a confederation of states, +devoted his superb talents to the demonstration of the thesis that the +United States "IS," not "are." Thus he came to be known as the typical +expounder of the Constitution. When he reached, in 1850, the turning +point of his career, his countrymen knew by heart his personal and +political history, the New Hampshire boyhood and education, the rise +to mastery at the New England bar, the service in the House of +Representatives and the Senate and as Secretary of State. His speeches +were already in the schoolbooks, and for twenty years boys had been +declaiming his arguments against nullification. He had helped to teach +America to think and to feel. Indeed it was through his oratory that +many of his fellow-citizens had gained their highest conception of the +beauty, the potency, and the dignity of human speech. And in truth he +never exhibited his logical power and demonstrative skill more superbly +than in the plea of the seventh of March for the preservation of the +status quo, for the avoidance of mutual recrimination between North and +South, for obedience to the law of the land. It was his supreme effort +to reconcile an irreconcilable situation. + +It failed, as we know. Whittier, Emerson, Theodore Parker, and indeed +most of the voters of New England, believed that Webster had bartered +his private convictions in the hope of securing the Presidential +nomination in 1852. They assailed him savagely, and Webster died, a +broken man, in the autumn of the Presidential year. "I have given my +life to law and politics," he wrote to Professor Silliman. "Law is +uncertain and politics are utterly vain." The dispassionate judgment +of the present hour frees him from the charge of conscious treachery +to principle. He was rather a martyr to his own conception of the +obligations imposed by nationality. When these obligations run counter +to human realities, the theories of statesmen must give way. Emerson +could not refute that logic of Webster's argument for the Fugitive Slave +Law, but he could at least record in his private Journal: "I WILL NOT +OBEY IT, BY GOD!" So said hundreds of thousands of obscure men in the +North, but Webster did not or could not hear them. + +While no other orator of that period was so richly endowed as Daniel +Webster, the struggle for Union and Liberty enlisted on both sides many +eloquent men. John C. Calhoun's acute, ingenious, masterly political +theorizing can still be studied in speeches that have lost little of +their effectiveness through the lapse of time. The years have dealt +roughly with Edward Everett, once thought to be the pattern of +oratorical gifts and graces. In commemorative oratory, indeed, he ranked +with Webster, but the dust is settling upon his learned and ornate +pages. Rufus Choate, another conservative Whig in politics, and a +leader, like Wirt and Pinkney, at the bar, had an exotic, almost +Oriental fancy, a gorgeousness of diction, and an intensity of emotion +unrivaled among his contemporaries. His Dartmouth College eulogy of +Webster in 1853 shows him at his best. The Anti-Slavery orators, on the +other hand, had the advantage of a specific moral issue in which +they led the attack. Wendell Phillips was the most polished, the most +consummate in his air of informality, and his example did much to +puncture the American tradition of high-flown oratory. He was an expert +in virulent denunciation, passionately unfair beneath his mask +of conversational decorum, an aristocratic demagogue. He is still +distrusted and hated by the Brahmin class of his own city, still adored +by the children and grandchildren of slaves. Charles Sumner, like Edward +Everett, seems sinking into popular oblivion, in spite of the statues +and portraits and massive volumes of erudite and caustic and high-minded +orations. He may be seen at his best in such books as Longfellow's +"Journal and Correspondence" and the "Life and Letters" of George +Ticknor. There one has a pleasant picture of a booklover, traveler, +and friend. But in his public speech he was arrogant, unsympathetic, +domineering. "Sumner is my idea of a bishop," said Lincoln tentatively. +There are bishops and bishops, however, and if Henry Ward Beecher, whom +Lincoln and hosts of other Americans admired, had only belonged to the +Church of England, what an admirable Victorian bishop he might have +made! Perhaps his best service to the cause of union was rendered by his +speeches in England, where he fairly mobbed the mob and won them by his +wit, courage, and by his appeal to the instinct of fair play. Beecher's +oratory, in and out of the pulpit, was temperamental, sentimental in +the better sense, and admirably human in all its instincts. He had an +immense following, not only in political and humanitarian fields, but +as a lovable type of the everyday American who can say undisputed things +not only solemnly, if need be, but by preference with an infectious +smile. The people who loved Mr. Beecher are the people who understand +Mr. Bryan. + +Foremost among the journalists of the great debate were William Lloyd +Garrison and Horace Greeley. Garrison was a perfect example of the +successful journalist as described by Zola--the man who keeps on +pounding at a single idea until he has driven it into the head of +the public. Everyone knows at least the sentence from his salutatory +editorial in "The Liberator" on January 1, 1831: "I am in earnest--I +will not retreat a single inch--AND I WILL BE HEARD." He kept this vow, +and he also kept the accompanying and highly characteristic promise: +"I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this +subject, I do not wish to think, or write, or speak, with moderation." +But there would be little political literature in the world if its +production were entrusted to the moderate type of man, and the files of +"The Liberator," though certainly harsh and full of all uncharitableness +towards slave-owners, make excellent reading for the twentieth century +American who perceives that in spite of the triumph of emancipation, +in which Garrison had his fair share of glory, many aspects of our +race-problem remain unsolved. Horace Greeley, the founder and editor of +the "New York Tribune" was a farmer's boy who learned early to speak +and write the vocabulary of the plain people. Always interested in new +ideas, even in Transcendentalism and Fourierism, his courage and energy +and journalistic vigor gave him leadership in the later phases of the +movement for enfranchisement. He did not hesitate to offer unasked +advice to Lincoln on many occasions, and Lincoln enriched our literature +by his replies. Greeley had his share of faults and fatuities, but in +his best days he had an impressively loyal following among both rural +and city-bred readers of his paper, and he remains one of the best +examples of that obsolescent personal journalism which is destined +to disappear under modern conditions of newspaper production. Readers +really used to care for "what Greeley said" and "Dana said" and "Sam +Bowles said," and all of these men, with scores of others, have left +their stamp upon the phrases and the tone of our political writing. + +In the concrete issue of Slavery, however, it must be admitted that +the most remarkable literary victory was scored, not by any orator or +journalist, but by an almost unknown little woman, the author of "Uncle +Tom's Cabin." No American novel has had so curious a history and so +great or so immediate an influence in this country and in Europe. In +spite of all that has been written about it, its author's purpose +is still widely misunderstood, particularly in the South, and the +controversy over this one epoch-making novel has tended to obscure the +literary reputation which Mrs. Stowe won by her other books. + +Harriet Beecher, the daughter and the sister of famous clergymen, was +born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1811. For seventeen years, from 1832 +to 1849, she lived in the border city of Cincinnati, within sight of +slave territory, and in daily contact with victims of the slave system. +While her sympathies, like those of her father Lyman Beecher, were +anti-slavery, she was not an Abolitionist in the Garrisonian sense of +that word. At twenty five she had married a widowed professor, Calvin +Stowe, to whom she bore many children. She had written a few sketches of +New England life, and her family thought her a woman of genius. Such was +the situation in the winter of 1849-1850, when the Stowes migrated to +Brunswick, Maine, where the husband had been appointed to a chair at +Bowdoin. Pitiably poor, and distracted by household cares which she had +to face single-handed--for the Professor was a "feckless body"--Mrs. +Stowe nevertheless could not be indifferent to the national crisis over +the Fugitive Slave Law. She had seen its working. When her sister-in-law +wrote to her: "If I could use a pen as you can, I would write something +that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery +is," Mrs. Stowe exclaimed: "God helping me, I will write something; I +will if I live." + +"Uncle Tom's Cabin," begun in the spring of 1850, was a woman's answer +to Webster's seventh of March speech. Its object was plainly stated to +be "to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race; to show, their +wrongs and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as +to defeat and do away the good effects of all that can be attempted for +them, by their best friends under it." The book was permeated with what +we now call the 1848 anti-aristocratic sentiment, the direct heritage +of the French Revolution. "There is a dies irae coming on, sooner or +later," admits St. Clare in the story. "The same thing is working, +in Europe, in England, and in this country." There was no sectional +hostility in Mrs. Stowe's heart. "The people of the free states have +defended, encouraged, and participated [in slavery]; and are more guilty +for it, before God, than the South, in that they have NOT the apology of +education or custom. If the mothers of the free states had all felt as +they should in times past, the sons of the free states would not have +been the holders, and proverbially the hardest masters, of slaves; the +sons of the free states would not have connived at the extension of +slavery in our national body." "Your book is going to be the great +pacificator," wrote a friend of Mrs. Stowe; "it will unite North and +South." But the distinctly Christian and fraternal intention of the +book was swiftly forgotten in the storm of controversy that followed its +appearance. It had been written hastily, fervidly, in the intervals +of domestic toil at Brunswick, had been printed as a serial in "The +National Era" without attracting much attention, and was issued in book +form in March, 1852. Its sudden and amazing success was not confined +to this country. The story ran in three Paris newspapers at once, was +promptly dramatized, and has held the stage in France ever since. It +was placed upon the "Index" in Italy, as being subversive of established +authority. Millions of copies were sold in Europe, and "Uncle Tom's +Cabin," more than any other cause, held the English working men in +sympathy with the North in the English cotton crisis of our Civil War. + +It is easy to see the faults of this masterpiece and impossible not to +recognize its excellencies. "If our art has not scope enough to include +a book of this kind," said Madame George Sand, "we had better stretch +the terms of our art a little." For the book proved to be, as its author +had hoped, a "living dramatic reality." Topsy, Chloe, Sam and Andy, +Miss Ophelia and Legree are alive. Mrs. St. Clare might have been one of +Balzac's indolent, sensuous women. Uncle Tom himself is a bit too +good to be true, and readers no longer weep over the death of little +Eva--nor, for that matter, over the death of Dickens's little Nell. +There is some melodrama, some religiosity, and there are some absurd +recognition scenes at the close. Nevertheless with an instinctive genius +which Zola would have envied, Mrs. Stowe embodies in men and women the +vast and ominous system of slavery. All the tragic forces of necessity, +blindness, sacrifice, and retribution are here: neither Shelby, nor +Eliza, nor the tall Kentuckian who aids her, nor John Bird, nor Uncle +Tom himself in the final act of his drama, can help himself. For good or +evil they are the products and results of the system; and yet they have +and they give the illusion of volition. + +Mrs. Stowe lived to write many another novel and short story, among +them "Dred," "The Minister's Wooing," "Oldtown Folks," "Oldtown Fireside +Stories." In the local short story she deserves the honors due to one of +the pioneers, and her keen affectionate observation, her humor, and her +humanity, would have given her a literary reputation quite independent +of her masterpiece. But she is likely to pay the penalty of that +astounding success, and to go down to posterity as the author of a +single book. She would not mind this fate. + +The poetry of the idea of Freedom and of the sectional struggle which +was necessary before that idea could be realized in national policy is +on the whole not commensurate with the significance of the issue itself. +Any collection of American political verse produced during this period +exhibits spirited and sincere writing, but the combination of mature +literary art and impressive general ideas is comparatively rare. There +are single poems of Whittier, Lowell, and Whitman which meet every test +of effective political and social verse, but the main body of poetry, +both sectional and national, written during the thirty years ending +with 1865 lacks breadth, power, imaginative daring. The continental +spaciousness and energy which foreign critics thought they discovered in +Whitman is not characteristic of our poetry as a whole. Victor Hugo +and Shelley and Swinburne have written far more magnificent republican +poetry than ours. The passion for freedom has been very real upon this +side of the Atlantic; it pulsed in the local loyalty of the men who sang +"Dixie" as well as in their antagonists who chanted "John Brown's Body" +and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic;" but this passion has not yet +lifted and ennobled any notable mass of American verse. Even the +sentiment of union was more adequately voiced in editorials and sermons +and orations, even in a short story--Edward Everett Hale's "Man Without +a Country"--than by most of the poets who attempted to glorify that +theme. + +Nevertheless the verse of these thirty years is rich in provincial and +sectional loyalties. It has earnestness and pathos. We have, indeed, no +adequate national anthem, even yet, for neither the words nor the music +of "The Star-Spangled Banner" fully express what we feel while we are +trying to sing it, as the "Marseillaise," for example, does express the +very spirit of revolutionary republicanism. But in true pioneer fashion +we get along with a makeshift until something better turns up. The lyric +and narrative verse of the Civil War itself was great in quantity, and +not more inferior in quality than the war verse of other nations has +often proved to be when read after the immediate occasion for it has +passed. Single lyrics by Timrod and Paul Hayne, Boker, H. H. Brownell, +Read, Stedman, and other men are still full of fire. Yet Mrs. Howe's +"Battle Hymn," scribbled hastily in the gray dawn, interpreted, as no +other lyric of the war quite succeeded in interpreting, the mystical +glory of sacrifice for Freedom. Soldiers sang it in camp; women read it +with tears; children repeated it in school, vaguely but truly perceiving +in it, as their fathers had perceived in Webster's "Reply to Hayne" +thirty years before, the idea of union made "simple, sensuous, +passionate." No American poem has had a more dramatic and intense life +in the quick breathing imagination of men. + +More and more, however, the instinct of our people is turning to the +words of Abraham Lincoln as the truest embodiment in language, as his +life was the truest embodiment in action, of our national ideal. It is +a curious reversal of contemporary judgments that thus discovers in the +homely phrases of a frontier lawyer the most perfect literary expression +of the deeper spirit of his time. "How knoweth this man letters, having +never learned?" asked the critical East. The answer is that he had +learned in a better school than the East afforded. The story of +Lincoln's life is happily too familiar to need retelling here, but some +of the elements in his growth in the mastery of speech may at least be +summarized. + +Lincoln had a slow, tireless mind, capable of intense concentration. It +was characteristic of him that he rarely took notes when trying a law +case, saying that the notes distracted his attention. When his +partner Herndon was asked when Lincoln had found time to study out +the constitutional history of the United States, Herndon expressed the +opinion that it was when Lincoln was lying on his back on the office +sofa, apparently watching the flies upon the ceiling. This combination +of bodily repose with intense mental and spiritual activity is familiar +to those who have studied the biography of some of the great mystics. +Walter Pater pointed it out in the case of Wordsworth. + +In recalling the poverty and restriction of Lincoln's boyhood and his +infrequent contact with schoolhouses, it is well to remember that he +managed nevertheless to read every book within twenty miles of him. +These were not many, it is true, but they included "The Bible," "Aesop's +Fables," "Pilgrim's Progress," "Robinson Crusoe," and, a little later, +Burns and Shakespeare. Better food than this for the mind of a boy has +never been found. Then he came to the history of his own country since +the Declaration of Independence and mastered it. "I am tolerably well +acquainted with the history of the country," he remarked in his Chicago +speech of 1858; and in the Cooper Union speech of 1860 he exhibited a +familiarity with the theory and history of the Constitution which amazed +the young lawyers who prepared an annotated edition of the address. +"He has wit, facts, dates," said Douglas, in extenuation of his own +disinclination to enter upon the famous joint debates, and, when Douglas +returned to Washington after the debates were over, he confessed to the +young Henry Watterson that "he is the greatest debater I have ever met, +either here or anywhere else." Douglas had won the senatorship and could +afford to be generous, but he knew well enough that his opponent's facts +and dates had been unanswerable. Lincoln's mental grip, indeed, was the +grip of a born wrestler. "I've got him," he had exclaimed toward the +end of the first debate, and the Protean Little Giant, as Douglas was +called, had turned and twisted in vain, caught by "that long-armed +creature from Illinois." He would indeed win the election of 1858, but +he had been forced into an interpretation of the Dred Scott decision +which cost him the Presidency in 1860. + +Lincoln's keen interest in words and definitions, his patience in +searching the dictionary, is known to every student of his life. Part of +his singular discrimination in the use of language is due to his legal +training, but his style was never professionalized. Neither did it have +anything of that frontier glibness and banality which was the curse of +popular oratory in the West and South. Words were weapons in the hands +of this self-taught fighter for ideas: he kept their edges sharp, +and could if necessary use them with deadly accuracy. He framed the +"Freeport dilemma" for the unwary feet of Douglas as cunningly as a +fox-hunter lays his trap. "Gentlemen," he had said of an earlier effort, +"Judge Douglas informed you that this speech of mine was probably +carefully prepared. I ADMIT THAT IT WAS." + +The story, too, was a weapon of attack and defense for this master +fabulist. Sometimes it was a readier mode of argument than any +syllogism; sometimes it gave him, like the traditional diplomatist's +pinch of snuff, an excuse for pausing while he studied his adversary or +made up his own mind; sometimes, with the instinct of a poetic soul, +he invented a parable and gravely gave it a historic setting "over in +Sangamon County." For although upon his intellectual side the man was a +subtle and severe logician, on his emotional side he was a lover of the +concrete and human. He was always, like John Bunyan, dreaming and seeing +"a man" who symbolized something apposite to the occasion. Thus even +his invented stories aided his marvelous capacity for statement, for +specific illustration of a general law. Lincoln's destiny was to be +that of an explainer, at first to a local audience in store or tavern or +courtroom, then to upturned serious faces of Illinois farmers who wished +to hear national issues made clear to them, then to a listening nation +in the agony of civil war, and ultimately to a world which looks to +Lincoln as an exponent and interpreter of the essence of democracy. + +As the audience increased, the style took on beauty and breadth, as +if the man's soul were looking through wider and wider windows at the +world. But it always remained the simplest of styles. In an offhand +reply to a serenade by an Indiana regiment, or in answering a visiting +deputation of clergymen at the White House, Lincoln could summarize and +clarify a complicated national situation with an ease and orderliness +and fascination that are the despair of professional historians. He +never wasted a word. "Go to work is the only cure for your case," he +wrote to John D. Johnston. There are ten words in that sentence and none +of over four letters. The "Gettysburg Address" contains but two hundred +and seventy words, in ten sentences. "It is a flat failure," said +Lincoln despondently; but Edward Everett, who had delivered "the" +oration of that day, wrote to the President: "I should be glad if I +could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the +occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes." Today the "Address" +reads as if Lincoln knew that it would ultimately be stamped in bronze. + +Yet the real test of Lincoln's supremacy in our distinctly civic +literature lies not so much in his skill in the manipulation of +language, consummate as that was, but rather in those large elements of +his nature which enabled him to perceive the true quality and ideal +of American citizenship and its significance to the world. There was +melancholy in that nature, else there had been a less rich humor; there +was mysticism and a sense of religion which steadily deepened as his +responsibilities increased. There was friendliness, magnanimity, pity +for the sorrowful, patience for the slow of brain and heart, and an +expectation for the future of humanity which may best be described in +the old phrase "waiting for the Kingdom of God." His recurrent dream of +the ship coming into port under full sail, which preluded many +important events in his own life--he had it the night before he was +assassinated--is significant not only of that triumph of a free nation +which he helped to make possible, but also of the victory of what he +loved to call "the whole family of man." "That is the real issue," he +had declared in closing the debates with Douglas; "that is the issue +that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge +Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between +these two principles--right and wrong--throughout the world. They are +the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of +time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of +humanity, and the other the divine right of kings." + +For this representative Anglo-Saxon man, developed under purely American +conditions, maturing slowly, keeping close to facts, dying, like the old +English saint, while he was "still learning," had none of the typical +hardness and selfishness of the Anglo-Saxon. A brooder and idealist, he +was one of those "prophetic souls of the wide world dreaming on things +to come," with sympathies and imagination that reached out beyond the +immediate urgencies of his race and nation to comprehend the universal +task and discipline of the sons of men. In true fraternity and democracy +this Westerner was not only far in advance of his own day, but he is +also far in advance of ours which raises statues to his memory. Yet he +was used to loneliness and to the long view, and even across the welter +of the World War of the twentieth century Lincoln would be tall enough +to see that ship coming into the harbor under full sail. + + + +CHAPTER X. A NEW NATION + +The changes that have come over the inner spirit and the outward +expression of American life since Lincoln's day are enough to startle +the curiosity of the dullest observer. Yet they have been accomplished +within the lifetime of a single man of letters. The author of one of the +many campaign biographies of Lincoln in 1860 was William Dean Howells, +then an Ohio journalist of twenty-three. In 1917, at the age of eighty, +Mr. Howells is still adding to his long row of charming and memorable +books. Every phase of American writing since the middle of the last +century has fallen under the keen and kindly scrutiny of this loyal +follower of the art of literature. As producer, editor, critic, and +friend of the foremost writers of his epoch, Mr. Howells has known the +books of our new national era as no one else could have known them. Some +future historian of the period may piece together, from no other sources +than Mr. Howells's writings, an unrivaled picture of our book-making +during more than sixty years. All that the present historian can attempt +is to sketch with bungling fingers a few men and a few tendencies which +seem to characterize the age. + +One result of the Civil War was picturesquely set forth in Emerson's +"Journal." The War had unrolled a map of the Union, he said, and hung +it in every man's house. There was a universal shifting of attention, +if not always from the province or section to the image of the nation +itself, at least a shift of focus from one section to another. The clash +of arms had meant many other things besides the triumph of Union and +the freedom of the slaves. It had brought men from every state into rude +jostling contact with one another and had developed a new social and +human curiosity. It may serve as another illustration of Professor +Shaler's law of tension and release. The one overshadowing issue which +had absorbed so much thought and imagination and energy had suddenly +disappeared. Other shadows were to gather, of course. Reconstruction of +the South was one of them, and the vast economic and industrial changes +that followed the opening of the New West were to bring fresh problems +almost as intricate as the question of slavery had been. But for the +moment no one thought of these things. The South accepted defeat as +superbly as she had fought, and began to plough once more. The jubilant +North went back to work--to build transcontinental railroads, to +organize great industries, and to create new states. + +The significant American literature of the first decade after the close +of the War is not in the books dealing directly with themes involved +in the War itself. It is rather the literature of this new release of +energy, the new curiosity as to hitherto unknown sections, the new humor +and romance. Fred Lewis Pattee, the author of an admirable "History of +American Literature since 1870," uses scarcely too strong a phrase when +he entitles this period "The Second Discovery of America"; and he quotes +effectively from Mark Twain, who was himself one of these discoverers: +"The eight years in America from 1860 to 1868 uprooted institutions that +were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the +social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the +entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of +two or three generations." + +Let us begin with the West, and with that joyous stage-coach journey of +young Samuel L. Clemens across the plains to Nevada in 1861, which he +describes in "Roughing It." Who was this Argonaut of the new era, and +what makes him representative of his countrymen in the epoch of release? +Born in Missouri in 1835, the son of an impractical emigrant from +Virginia, the youth had lived from his fourth until his eighteenth year +on the banks of the Mississippi. He had learned the printer's trade, had +wandered east and back again, had served for four years as a river-pilot +on the Mississippi, and had tried to enter the Confederate army. Then +came the six crowded years, chiefly as newspaper reporter, in the boom +times of Nevada and California. His fame began with the publication in +New York in 1867 of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." +A newspaper now sent him to Europe to record "what he sees with his own +eyes." He did so in "Innocents Abroad," and his countrymen shouted with +laughter. This, then, was "Europe" after all--another "fake" until this +shrewd river pilot who signed himself "Mark Twain" took its soundings! +Then came a series of far greater books--"Roughing It," "Life on the +Mississippi," "The Gilded Age" (in collaboration ), and "Tom Sawyer" and +"Huckleberry Finn"--books that make our American "Odyssey", rich in the +spirit of romance and revealing the magic of the great river as no other +pages can ever do again. Gradually Mark Twain became a public character; +he retrieved on the lecture platform the loss of a fortune earned by his +books; he enjoyed his honorary D. Litt. from Oxford University. Every +reader of American periodicals came to recognize the photographs of that +thick shock of hair, those heavy eyebrows, the gallant drooping little +figure, the striking clothes, the inevitable cigar: all these things +seemed to go with the part of professional humorist, to be like the +caressing drawl of Mark's voice. The force of advertisement could +no further go. But at bottom he was far other than a mere maker of +boisterous jokes for people with frontier preferences in humor. He was a +passionate, chivalric lover of things fair and good, although too honest +to pretend to see beauty and goodness where he could not personally +detect them--and an equally passionate hater of evil. Read "The Man Who +Corrupted Hadleyburg" and "The Mysterious Stranger." In his last years, +torn by private sorrows, he turned as black a philosophical pessimist +as we have bred. He died at his new country seat in Connecticut in 1910. +Mr. Paine has written his life in three great volumes, and there is a +twenty-five volume edition of his "Works." + +All the evidence seems to be in. Yet the verdict of the public seems +not quite made up. It is clear that Mark Twain the writer of romance +is gaining upon Mark Twain the humorist. The inexhaustible American +appetite for frontier types of humor seizes upon each new variety, +crunches it with huge satisfaction, and then tosses it away. John +Phoenix, Josh Billings, Jack Downing, Bill Arp, Petroleum V. Nasby, +Artemus Ward, Bill Nye--these are already obsolescent names. If Clemens +lacked something of Artemus Ward's whimsical delicacy and of Josh +Billings's tested human wisdom, he surpassed all of his competitors in +a certain rude, healthy masculinity, the humor of river and mining-camp +and printing-office, where men speak without censorship. His country-men +liked exaggeration, and he exaggerated; they liked irreverence, and he +had turned iconoclast in "Innocents Abroad." As a professional humorist, +he has paid the obligatory tax for his extravagance, over-emphasis, +and undisciplined taste, but such faults are swiftly forgotten when one +turns to Huckleberry Finn and the negro Jim and Pudd'nhead Wilson, when +one feels Mark Twain's power in sheer description and episode, his magic +in evoking landscape and atmosphere, his blazing scorn at injustice and +cruelty, his contempt for quacks. + +Bret Harte, another discoverer of the West, wears less well than Mark +Twain as a personal figure, but has a sure place in the evolution of the +American short story, and he did for the mining-camps of California what +Clemens wrought for the Mississippi River: he became their profane poet. +Yet he was never really of them. He was the clever outsider, with a +prospector's eye, looking for literary material, and finding a whole +rich mine of it--a bigger and richer, in fact, than he was really +qualified to work. But he located a golden vein of it with an instinct +that did credit to his dash of Hebrew blood. Born in Albany, a teacher's +son, brought up on books and in many cities, Harte emigrated to +California in 1854 at the age of sixteen. He became in turn a +drug-clerk, teacher, type-setter, editor, and even Secretary of the +California Mint--his nearest approach, apparently, to the actual work of +the mines. In 1868, while editor of "The Overland Monthly," he wrote +the short story which was destined to make him famous in the East and to +release him from California forever. It was "The Luck of Roaring Camp." +He had been writing romantic sketches in prose and verse for years; +he had steeped himself in Dickens, like everybody else in the +eighteen-sixties; and now he saw his pay-gravel shining back into his +own shining eyes. It was a pocket, perhaps, rather than a lead, but Bret +Harte worked to the end of his career this material furnished by the +camps, this method of the short story. He never returned to California +after his joyous exit in 1871. For a few years he tried living in New +York, but from 1878 until his death in 1902 Bret Harte lived in Europe, +still turning out California stories for an English and American public +which insisted upon that particular pattern. + +That the pattern was arbitrary, theatrical, sentimental, somewhat +meretricious in design, in a word insincere like its inventor, has been +repeated at due intervals ever since 1868. The charge is true; yet it is +far from the whole truth concerning Bret Harte's artistry. In mastery +of the technique of the short story he is fairly comparable with Poe, +though less original, for it was Poe who formulated, when Bret Harte +was a child of six, the well-known theory of the unity of effect of the +brief tale. This unity Harte secured through a simplification, often +an insulation, of his theme, the omission of quarreling details, an +atmosphere none the less novel for its occasional theatricality, and +characters cunningly modulated to the one note they were intended to +strike. "Tennessee's Partner," "The Outcast of Poker Flat," and all +the rest are triumphs of selective skill--as bright nuggets as ever +glistened in the pan at the end of a hard day's labor. That they do +not adequately represent the actual California of the fifties, as old +Californians obstinately insist, is doubtless true, but it is beside the +point. Here is no Tolstoi painting the soul of his race in a few +pages: Harte is simply a disciple of Poe and Dickens, turning the Poe +construction trick gracefully, with Dickensy characters and consistently +romantic action. + +The West has been rediscovered many a time since that decade which +witnessed the first literary bonanza of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. It +will continue to be discovered, in its fresh sources of appeal to the +imagination, as long as Plains and Rockies and Coast endure, as long +as there is any glow upon a distant horizon. It is not places that lose +romantic interest: the immemorial English counties and the Bay of Naples +offer themselves freely to the artist, generation after generation. +What is lost is the glamour of youth, the specific atmosphere of a given +historical epoch. Colonel W. F. Cody ("Buffalo Bill") has typified +to millions of American boys the great period of the Plains, with +its Indian fighting, its slaughter of buffaloes, its robbing of +stage-coaches, its superb riders etched against the sky. But the Wild +West was retreating, even in the days of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. +The West of the cowboys, as Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister knew it +and wrote of it in the eighties and nineties, has disappeared, though it +lives on in fiction and on the screen. + +Jack London, born in California in 1876, was forced to find his West in +Alaska--and in alcohol. He was what he and his followers liked to call +the virile or red-blooded type, responsive to the "Call of the Wild," +"living life naked and tensely." In his talk Jack London was simple and +boyish, with plenty of humor over his own literary and social foibles. +His books are very uneven, but he wrote many a hard-muscled, clean-cut +page. If the Bret Harte theory of the West was that each man is at +bottom, a sentimentalist, Jack London's formula was that at bottom every +man is a brute. Each theory gave provender enough for a short-story +writer to carry on his back, but is hardly adequate, by itself, for a +very long voyage over human life. + +"Joaquin" (Cincinnatus Heine) Miller, who was born in 1841 and died in +1918, had even less of a formula for the West than Jack London. He was a +word-painter of its landscapes, a rider over its surfaces. Cradled "in +a covered wagon pointing West," mingling with wild frontier life from +Alaska to Nicaragua, miner, Indian fighter, hermit, poseur in London and +Washington, then hermit again in California, the author of "Songs of the +Sierras" at least knew his material. Byron, whom he adored and imitated, +could have invented nothing more romantic than Joaquin's life; but +though Joaquin inherited Scotch intensity, he had nothing of the close +mental grip of the true Scot and nothing of his humor. Vast stretches +of his poetry are empty; some of it is grandiose, elemental, and yet +somehow artificial, as even the Grand Canyon itself looks at certain +times. + +John Muir, another immigrant Scot who reached California in 1868, had +far more stuff in him than Joaquin Miller. He had studied geology, +botany, and chemistry at the new University of Wisconsin, and then for +years turned explorer of forests, peaks, and glaciers, not writing, at +first, except in his "Journal," but forever absorbing and worshiping +sublimity and beauty with no thought of literary schemes. Yet his +every-day talk about his favorite trees and glaciers had more of +the glow of poetry in it than any talk I have ever heard from men of +letters, and his books and "Journal" will long perpetuate this thrilling +sense of personal contact with wild, clean, uplifted things--blossoms in +giant tree-tops and snow-eddies blowing round the shoulders of Alaskan +peaks. Here is a West as far above Jack London's and Frank Norris's as +the snow-line is higher than the jungle. + +The rediscovery of the South was not so much an exploration of fresh +or forgotten geographical territory, as it was a new perception of the +romantic human material offered by a peculiar civilization. Political +and social causes had long kept the South in isolation. A few writers +like Wirt, Kennedy, Longstreet, Simms, had described various aspects +of its life with grace or vivacity, but the best picture of colonial +Virginia had been drawn, after all, by Thackeray, who had merely read +about it in books. Visitors like Fanny Kemble and Frederick Law Olmsted +sketched the South of the mid-nineteenth century more vividly than did +the sons of the soil. There was no real literary public in the South for +a native writer like Simms. He was as dependent upon New York and the +Northern market as a Virginian tobacco-planter of 1740 had been +upon London. But within a dozen years after the close of the War and +culminating in the eighteen-nineties, there came a rich and varied +harvest of Southern writing, notably in the field of fiction. The public +for these stories, it is true, was still largely in the North and West, +and it was the magazines and publishing-houses of New York and Boston +that gave the Southern authors their chief stimulus and support. It was +one of the happy proofs of the solidarity of the new nation. + +The romance of the Spanish and French civilization of New Orleans, as +revealed in Mr. Cable's fascinating "Old Creole Days," was recognized, +not as something merely provincial in its significance, but as +contributing to the infinitely variegated pattern of our national life. +Irwin Russell, Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas Nelson Page portrayed +in verse and prose the humorous, pathetic, unique traits of the Southern +negro, a type hitherto chiefly sketched in caricature or by strangers. +Page, Hopkinson Smith, Grace King, and a score of other artists began +to draw affectionate pictures of the vanished Southern mansion of +plantation days, when all the women were beautiful and all the men were +brave, when the very horses were more spirited and the dogs lazier and +the honeysuckles sweeter and the moonlight more entrancing than today. +Miss Murfree ("C. E. Craddock") charmed city-dwellers and country-folk +alike by her novels of the Tennessee mountains. James Lane Allen painted +lovingly the hemp-fields and pastures of Kentucky. American magazines +of the decade from 1880 to 1890 show the complete triumph of dialect and +local color, and this movement, so full of interest to students of the +immense divergence of American types, owed much of its vitality to the +talent of Southern writers. + +But the impulse spread far beyond the South. Early in the seventies +Edward Eggleston wrote "The Hoosier Schoolmaster" and "The Circuit +Rider," faithful and moving presentations of genuine pioneer types which +were destined to pass with the frontier settlements. Soon James Whitcomb +Riley was to sing of the next generation of Hoosiers, who frequented +"The Old Swimmin' Hole" and rejoiced "When the Frost is on the Punkin." +It was the era of Denman Thompson's plays, "Joshua Whitcomb" and "The +Old Homestead." Both the homely and the exotic marched under this banner +of local color: Hamlin Garland presented Iowa barnyards and cornfields, +Helen Hunt Jackson dreamed the romance of the Mission Indian in +"Ramona," and Lafcadio Hearn, Irish and Greek by blood, resident of New +Orleans and not yet an adopted citizen of Japan, tantalized American +readers with his "Chinese Ghosts" and "Chita." A fascinating period it +seems, as one looks back upon it, and it lasted until about the end +of the century, when the suddenly discovered commercial value of the +historical novel and the ensuing competition in best sellers misled many +a fine artistic talent and coarsened the public taste. The New South +then played the literary market as recklessly as the New West. + +Let us glance back to "the abandoned farm of literature," as a witty +New Yorker once characterized New England. The last quarter of the +nineteenth century witnessed a decline in the direct influence of +that province over the country as a whole. Its strength sapped by the +emigration of its more vigorous sons, its typical institutions sagging +under the weight of immense immigrations from Europe, its political +importance growing more and more negligible, that ancient promontory of +ideas has continued to lose its relative literary significance. In one +field of literature only has New England maintained its rank since +the Civil War, and that is in the local short story. Here women have +distinguished themselves beyond the proved capacity of New England men. +Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke, women of democratic humor, were the +pioneers; then came Harriet Prescott Spofford and Elizabeth Stuart +Phelps, women with nerves; and finally the three artists who have +written, out of the material offered by a decadent New England, as +perfect short stories as France or Russia can produce--Sarah Orne +Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown. These gifted writers +portrayed, with varying technique and with singular differences in their +instinctive choice of material, the dominant qualities of an isolated, +in-bred race, still proud in its decline; still inquisitive and +acquisitive, versatile yet stubborn, with thrift passing over into +avarice, and mental power degenerating into smartness; cold and hard +under long repression of emotion, yet capable of passion and fanaticism; +at worst, a mere trader, a crank, a grim recluse; at best, endowed with +an austere physical and moral beauty. Miss Jewett preferred to touch +graciously the sunnier slopes of this provincial temperament, to linger +in its ancient dignities and serenities. Miss Brown has shown the pathos +of its thwarted desires, its hunger for a beauty and a happiness denied. +Mary Wilkins Freeman revealed its fundamental tragedies of will. + +Two of the best known writers of New England fiction in this period +were not natives of the soil, though they surpassed most native New +Englanders in their understanding of the type. They were William Dean +Howells and Henry James. Mr. Howells, who, in his own words, "can +reasonably suppose that it is because of the mixture of Welsh, German, +and Irish in me that I feel myself so typically American," came to "the +Holy Land at Boston" as a "passionate pilgrim from the West." "A Boy's +Town," "My Literary Passions," and "Years of my Youth" make clear the +image of the young poet-journalist who returned from his four years in +Venice and became assistant editor of "The Atlantic Monthly" in 1866. In +1871 he succeeded Fields in the editorship, but it was not until after +his resignation in 1881 that he could put his full strength into those +realistic novels of contemporary New England which established his fame +as a writer. "A Modern Instance" and "The Rise of Silas Lapham" are +perhaps the finest stories of this group; and the latter novel may prove +to be Mr. Howells's chief "visiting-card to posterity." We cannot here +follow him to New York and to a new phase of novel writing, begun with +"A Hazard of New Fortunes," nor can we discuss the now antiquated debate +upon realism which was waged in the eighteen-eighties over the books +of Howells and James. We must content ourselves with saying that a +knowledge of Mr. Howells's work is essential to the student of the +American provincial novel, as it is also to the student of our more +generalized types of story-writing, and that he has never in his long +career written an insincere, a slovenly, or an infelicitous page. "My +Literary Friends and Acquaintance" gives the most charming picture ever +drawn of the elder Cambridge, Concord, and Boston men who ruled over our +literature when young Howells came out of the West, and "My Mark Twain" +is his memorable portrait of another type of sovereign, perhaps the +dynasty that will rule the future. + +Although Henry James, like Mr. Howells, wrote at one time acute studies +of New England character, he was never, in his relations to that +section, or, for that matter, to any locality save possibly London, +anything more than a "visiting mind." His grandfather was an Irish +merchant in Albany. His father, Henry James, was a philosopher and wit, +a man of comfortable fortune, who lived at times in Newport, Concord, +and Boston, but who was residing in New York when his son Henry was born +in 1843. No child was ever made the subject of a more complete theory of +deracination. Transplanted from city to city, from country to country, +without a family or a voting-place, without college or church or creed +or profession or responsibility of any kind save to his own exigent +ideals of truth and beauty, Henry James came to be the very pattern of +a cosmopolitan. Avoiding his native country for nearly thirty years and +then returning for a few months to write some intricate pages about that +"American Scene" which he understood far less truly than the average +immigrant, he died in 1916 in London, having just renounced his American +citizenship and become a British subject in order to show his sympathy +with the Empire, then at war. It was the sole evidence of political +emotion in a lifetime of seventy-three years. American writing men are +justly proud, nevertheless, of this expatriated craftsman. The American +is inclined to admire good workmanship of any kind, as far as he can +understand the mechanism of it. The task of really understanding Henry +James has been left chiefly to clever women and to a few critics, but +ever since "A Passionate Pilgrim" and "Roderick Hudson" appeared in, +1875, it has been recognized that here was a master, in his own fashion. +What that fashion is may now be known by anyone who will take the pains +to read the author's prefaces to the New York edition of his revised +works. Never, not even in the Paris which James loved, has an artist put +his intentions and his self-criticism more definitively upon paper. The +secret of Henry James is told plainly enough here: a specially equipped +intelligence, a freedom from normal responsibilities, a consuming desire +to create beautiful things, and, as life unfolded its complexities and +nuances before his vision, an increasing passion to seek the beauty +which lies entangled and betrayed, a beauty often adumbrated rather than +made plastic, stories that must be hinted at rather than told, raptures +that exist for the initiated only. The much discussed early and middle +and later manners of James are only various campaigns of this one +questing spirit, changing his procedure as the elusive object of his +search hid itself by this or that device of protective coloration or +swift escape. It is as if a collector of rare butterflies had one method +of capturing them in Madagascar, another for the Orinoco, and still +another for Japan--though Henry James found his Japan--and Orinoco and +Madagascar all in London town! + +No one who ever had the pleasure of hearing him discourse about the +art of fiction can forget the absolute seriousness of his professional +devotion; it was as though a shy celebrant were to turn and explain, +with mystical intensity and a mystic's involution and reversal of all +the values of vulgar speech, the ceremonial of some strange, high altar. +His own power as a creative artist was not always commensurate with his +intellectual endowment or with his desire after beauty, and his frank +contempt for the masses of men made it difficult for him to write +English. He preferred, as did Browning, who would have liked to reach +the masses, a dialect of his own, and he used it increasingly after +he was fifty. It was a dialect capable of infinite gradations of tone, +endless refinements of expression. In his threescore books there are +delicious poignant moments where the spirit of life itself flutters like +a wild creature, half-caught, half-escaping. It is for the beauty and +thrill of these moments that the pages of Henry James will continue to +be cherished by a few thousand readers scattered throughout the Republic +to which he was ever an alien. + +No poet of the new era has won the national recognition enjoyed by +the veterans. It will be recalled that Bryant survived until 1878, +Longfellow and Emerson until 1882, Lowell until 1891, Whittier and +Whitman until 1892, and Holmes until 1894. Compared with these men the +younger writers of verse seemed overmatched. The "National Ode" for the +Centennial celebration in 1876 was intrusted to Bayard Taylor, a hearty +person, author of capital books of travel, plentiful verse, and a +skilful translation of "Faust." But an adequate "National Ode" was not +in him. Sidney Lanier, who was writing in that year his "Psalm of the +West" and was soon to compose "The Marshes of Glynn," had far more of +the divine fire. He was a bookish Georgia youth who had served with the +Confederate army, and afterward, with broken health and in dire poverty, +gave his brief life to music and poetry. He had rich capacities for +both arts, but suffered in both from the lack of discipline and from +an impetuous, restless imagination which drove him on to over-ambitious +designs. Whatever the flaws in his affluent verse, it has grown +constantly in popular favor, and he is, after Poe, the best known +poet of the South. The late Edmund Clarence Stedman, whose "American +Anthology" and critical articles upon American poets did so much to +enhance the reputation of other men, was himself a maker of ringing +lyrics and spirited narrative verse. His later days were given +increasingly to criticism, and his "Life and Letters" is a storehouse of +material bearing upon the growth of New York as a literary market-place +during half a century. Richard Watson Gilder was another admirably +fine figure, poet, editor, and leader of public opinion in many a noble +cause. His "Letters," likewise, give an intimate picture of literary +New York from the seventies to the present. Through his editorship of +"Scribner's Monthly" and "The Century Magazine" his sound influence made +itself felt upon writers in every section. His own lyric vein had an +opaline intensity of fire, but in spite of its glow his verse sometimes +refused to sing. + +The most perfect poetic craftsman of the period--and, many think, our +one faultless worker in verse--was Thomas Bailey Aldrich. His first +volume of juvenile verse had appeared in 1855, the year of Whittier's +"Barefoot Boy" and Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." By 1865 his poems were +printed in the then well-known Blue and Gold edition, by Ticknor +and Fields. In 1881 he succeeded Howells in the editorship of the +"Atlantic." Aldrich had a versatile talent that turned easily to adroit +prose tales, but his heart was in the filing of his verses. Nothing so +daintily perfect as his lighter pieces has been produced on this side of +the Atlantic, and the deeper notes and occasional darker questionings of +his later verse are embodied in lines of impeccable workmanship. Aloof +from the social and political conflicts of his day, he gave himself to +the fastidious creation of beautiful lines, believing that the beautiful +line is the surest road to Arcady, and that Herrick, whom he idolized, +had shown the way. + +To some readers of these pages it may seem like profanation to pass over +poets like Sill, George Woodberry, Edith Thomas, Richard Hovey, William +Vaughn Moody, Madison Cawein--to mention but half a dozen distinguished +names out of a larger company--and to suggest that James Whitcomb Riley, +more completely than any American poet since Longfellow, succeeded in +expressing the actual poetic feelings of the men and women who composed +his immense audience. Riley, like Aldrich, went to school to Herrick, +Keats, Tennyson, and Longfellow, but when he began writing newspaper +verse in his native Indiana he was guided by two impulses which gave +individuality to his work. "I was always trying to write of the kind of +people I knew, and especially to write verse that I could read just as +if it were spoken for the first time." The first impulse kept him close +to the wholesome Hoosier soil. The second is an anticipation of Robert +Frost's theory of speech tones as the basis of verse, as well as a +revival of the bardic practice of reciting one's own poems. For Riley +had much of the actor and platform-artist in him, and comprehended that +poetry might be made again a spoken art, directed to the ear rather than +to the eye. His vogue, which at his death in 1915 far surpassed that +of any living American poet, is inexplicable to those persons only who +forget the sentimental traditions of our American literature and its +frank appeal to the emotions of juvenility, actual and recollected. +Riley's best "holt" as a poet was his memory of his own boyhood and his +perception that the child-mind lingers in every adult reader. Genius has +often been called the gift of prolonged adolescence, and in this sense, +surely, there was genius in the warm and gentle heart of this fortunate +provincial who held that "old Indianapolis" was "high Heaven's sole and +only understudy." No one has ever had the audacity to say that of New +York. + +We have had American drama for one hundred and fifty years, * but much +of it, like our popular fiction and poetry, has been subliterary, more +interesting to the student of social life and national character than +to literary criticism in the narrow sense of that term. Few of our best +known literary men have written for the stage. The public has preferred +melodrama to poetic tragedy, although perhaps the greatest successes +have been scored by plays which are comedies of manners rather than +melodrama, and character studies of various American types, built up +around the known capabilities of a particular actor. The twentieth +century has witnessed a marked activity in play-writing, in the +technical study of the drama, and in experiment with dramatic +production, particularly with motion pictures and the out-of-doors +pageant. At no time since "The Prince of Parthia" was first acted in +Philadelphia in 1767 has such a large percentage of Americans been +artistically and commercially interested in the drama, but as to the +literary results of the new movement it is too soon to speak. + + * "Representative American Plays," edited by Arthur Hobson + Quinn, N. Y., 1917. + +Nor is it possible to forecast the effect of a still more striking +movement of contemporary taste, the revival of interest in poetry and +the experimentation with new poetical forms. Such revival and experiment +have often, in the past, been the preludes of great epochs of poetical +production. Living Americans have certainly never seen such a widespread +demand for contemporary verse, such technical curiosity as to the +possible forms of poetry, or such variety of bold innovation. Imagism +itself is hardly as novel as its contemporary advocates appear to +maintain; and free verse goes back far in our English speech and +song. But the new generation believes that it has made a discovery in +reverting to sensations rather than thought, to the naive reproduction +of retinal and muscular impressions, as if this were the end of the +matter. + +The self-conscious, self-defending side of the new poetic impulse may +soon pass, as it did in the case of Wordsworth and of Victor Hugo. +Whatever happens, we have already had fresh and exquisite revelations +of natural beauty, and, in volumes like "North of Boston" and "A Spoon +River Anthology," judgments of life that run very deep. + +American fiction seems just now, on the contrary, to be marking time and +not to be getting noticeably forward. Few names unknown ten years ago +have won wide recognition in the domain of the novel. The short story +has made little technical advance since the first successes of "O. +Henry," though the talent of many observers has dealt with new material +offered by the racial characteristics of European immigrants and by new +phases of commerce and industry. The enormous commercial demand of the +five-cent weeklies for short stories of a few easily recognized patterns +has resulted too often in a substitution of stencil-plate generalized +types instead of delicately and powerfully imagined individual +characters. Short stories have been assembled, like Ford cars, with +amazing mechanical expertness, but with little artistic advance in +design. The same temporary arrest of progress has been noted in France +and England, however, where different causes have been at work. No one +can tell, in truth, what makes some plants in the literary garden wither +at the same moment that others are outgrowing their borders. + +There is one plant in our own garden, however, whose flourishing state +will be denied by nobody--namely, that kind of nature-writing identified +with Thoreau and practised by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Starr King, +John Burroughs, John Muir, Clarence King, Bradford Torrey, Theodore +Roosevelt, William J. Long, Thompson-Seton, Stewart Edward White, and +many others. Their books represent, Professor Canby * believes, the +adventures of the American subconsciousness, the promptings of forgotten +memories, a racial tradition of contact with the wilderness, and hence +one of the most genuinely American traits of our literature. + + * "Back to Nature," by H. S. Canby, "Yale Review," July, + 1917. + +Other forms of essay writing, surely, have seemed in our own generation +less distinctive of our peculiar quality. While admirable biographical +and critical studies appear from time to time, and here and there a +whimsical or trenchant discursive essay like those of Miss Repplier or +Dr. Crothers, no one would claim that we approach France or even England +in the field of criticism, literary history, memoirs, the bookish essay, +and biography. We may have race-memories of a pine-tree which help us to +write vigorously and poetically about it, but we write less vitally +as soon as we enter the library door. A Frenchman does not, for he +is better trained to perceive the continuity and integrity of +race-consciousness, in the whole field of its manifestation. He does +not feel, as many Americans do, that they are turning their back on life +when they turn to books. + +Perhaps the truth is that although we are a reading people we are not +yet a book-loving people. The American newspaper and magazine have been +successful in making their readers fancy that newspaper and magazine are +an equivalent for books. Popular orators and popular preachers confirm +this impression, and colleges and universities have often emphasized a +vocational choice of books--in other words, books that are not books +at all, but treatises. It is not, of course, that American journalism, +whether of the daily or monthly sort, has consciously set itself to +supplant the habit of book-reading. A thousand social and economic +factors enter into such a problem. But few observers will question the +assertion that the influence of the American magazine, ever since its +great period of national literary service in the eighties and nineties, +has been more marked in the field of conduct and of artistic taste +than in the stimulation of a critical literary judgment: An American +schoolhouse of today owes its improvement in appearance over the +schoolhouse of fifty years ago largely to the popular diffusion, through +the illustrated magazines, of better standards of artistic taste. +But--whether the judgment of school-teachers and schoolchildren upon a +piece of literature is any better than it was in the red schoolhouse of +fifty years ago is a disputable question. + +But we must stop guessing, or we shall never have done. The fundamental +problem of our literature, as this book has attempted to trace it, has +been to obtain from a mixed population dwelling in sections as widely +separated as the peoples of Northern and Southern Europe, an integral +intellectual and spiritual activity which could express, in obedience +to the laws of beauty and truth, the motions stimulated by our national +life. It has been assumed in the preceding chapters that American +literature is something different from English literature written in +America. Canadian and Australian literatures have indigenous qualities +of their own, but typically they belong to the colonial literature of +Great Britain. This can scarcely be said of the writings of Franklin and +Jefferson, and it certainly cannot be said of the writings of Cooper, +Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Lowell, Lincoln, Mark Twain, and +Mr. Howells. In the pages of these men and of hundreds of others less +distinguished, there is a revelation of a new national type. That the +full energies of this nation have been back of our books, giving them a +range and vitality and unity commensurate with the national existence, +no one would claim. There are other spheres of effort in which American +character has been more adequately expressed than in words. Nevertheless +the books are here, in spite of every defect in national discipline, +every flaw in national character; and they deserve the closest attention +from all those who are trying to understand the American mind. + +If the effort toward an expression of a peculiarly complex national +experience has been the problem of our literary past, the literary +problem of the future is the expression of the adjustment of American +ideals to the standards of civilization. "Patriotism," said the martyred +Edith Cavell just before her death, "is not enough." Nationality and the +instincts of national separatism now seem essential to the preservation +of the political units of the world-state, precisely as a healthy +individualism must be the basis of all enduring social fellowship. +Yet it is clear that civilization is a larger, more ultimate term than +nationality. Chauvinism is nowhere more repellent than in the things of +the mind. It is difficult for some Americans to think internationally +even in political affairs--to construe our national policy and duty +in terms of obligation to civilization. Nevertheless the task must be +faced, and we are slowly realizing it. + +In the field of literature, likewise, Americanism is not a final word +either of blame or praise. It is a word of useful characterization. +Only American books, and not books written in English in America, can +adequately represent our national contribution to the world's thinking +and feeling. So argued Emerson and Whitman, long ago. But the younger +of these two poets came to realize in his old age that the New World +and the Old World are fundamentally one. The literature of the New +World will inevitably have an accent of its own, but it must speak +the mother-language of civilization, share in its culture, accept its +discipline. + +It has been said disparagingly of Longfellow and his friends: "The +houses of the Brahmins had only eastern windows. The souls of the whole +school lived in the old lands of culture, and they visited these lands +as often as they could, and, returning, brought back whole libraries +of books which they eagerly translated." But even if Longfellow and his +friends had been nothing more than translators and diffusers of European +culture, their task would have been justified. They kept the ideals +of civilization from perishing in this new soil. Through those eastern +windows came in, and still comes in, the sunlight to illumine the +American spirit. To decry the literatures of the Orient and of Greece +and Rome as something now outgrown by America, is simply to close the +eastern windows, to narrow our conception of civilization to merely +national and contemporaneous terms. It is as provincial to attempt this +restriction in literature as it would be in world-politics. We must +have all the windows open in our American writing, free access to ideas, +knowledge of universal standards, perception of universal law. + + + + +BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE + +An authoritative account of American Literature to the close of the +Revolution is given in M. C. Tyler's "History of American Literature +during the Colonial Time," 2 volumes (1878) and "Literary History of the +American Revolution," 2 volumes (1897). For a general survey see Barrett +Wendell, "A Literary History of America" (1900), W. P. Trent, "American +Literature" (1903), G. E. Woodberry, "America in Literature" (1903), +W. C. Bronson, "A Short History of American Literature" (1903), with an +excellent bibliography, W. B. Cairns, "History of American Literature" +(1912), W. P. Trent and J. Erskine, "Great American Writers" (1912), and +W. Riley, "American Thought" (1915). The most recent and authoritative +account is to be found in "The Cambridge History of American +Literature," 3 volumes edited by Trent, Erskine, Sherman, and Van Doren. + +The best collection of American prose and verse is E. C. Stedman and +E. M. Hutchinson's "Library of American Literature," 11 volumes +(1888-1890). For verse alone, see E. C. Stedman, "An American Anthology" +(1900), and W. C. Bronson, "American Poems," 1625-1892 (1912). For +criticism of leading authors, note W. C. Brownell, "American Prose +Masters" (1909), and Stedman, "Poets of America" (1885). Chapters 1-3. +Note W. Bradford, "Journal" (1898), J. Winthrop, "Journal" (1825, 1826), +also "Life and Letters" by R. C. Winthrop, 2 volumes (1863), G. L. +Walker, "Thomas Hooker" (1891), O. S. Straus, "Roger Williams" (1894), +Cotton Mather, "Diary," 2 volumes (1911, 1912), also his "Life" by +Barrett Wendell (1891), Samuel Sewall, "Diary," 3 volumes (1878). For +Jonathan Edwards, see "Works," 4 volumes (1852), his "Life" by A. V. G. +Allen (1889), "Selected Sermons" edited by H. N. Gardiner (1904). The +most recent edition of Franklin's "Works" is edited by A. H. Smyth, 10 +volumes (1907). + +Chapter 4. Samuel Adams, "Works," 4 volumes (1904), John Adams, "Works," +10 volumes (1856), Thomas Paine, "Life" by M. D. Conway, 2 volumes +(1892), "Works" edited by Conway, 4 volumes (1895), Philip Freneau, +"Poems," 3 volumes (Princeton edition, 1900, Thomas Jefferson, "Works" +edited by P. L. Ford, 10 volumes (1892-1898), J. Woolman, "Journal" +(edited by Whittier, 1871, and also in "Everyman's Library", "The +Federalist" (edited by H. C. Lodge, 1888). + +Chapter 5. Washington Irving, "Works," 40 volumes (1891-1897), also +his "Life and Letters" by P. M. Irving, 4 volumes (1862-1864). Fenimore +Cooper, "Works," 32 volumes (1896), "Life" by T. R. Lounsbury (1883). +Brockden Brown, "Works," 6 volumes, (1887). W. C. Bryant, "Poems," +2 volumes (1883), "Prose," 2 volumes (1884), and his "Life" by John +Bigelow (1890). + +Chapter 6. H. C. Goddard, "Studies in New England Transcendentalism" +(1908). R. W. Emerson, "Works," 12 volumes (Centenary edition, 1903), +"Journal," 10 volumes (1909-1914), his "Life" by J. E. Cabot, 2 volumes +(1887), by R. Garnett (1887), by G. E. Woodberry (1905); see also "Ralph +Waldo Emerson," a critical study by O. W. Firkins (1915). H. D. Thoreau, +"Works," 20 volumes (Walden edition including "Journals," 1906), "Life" +by F. B. Sanborn (1917), also "Thoreau, A Critical Study" by Mark van +Doren (1916). Note also Lindsay Swift, "Brook Farm" (1900), and "The +Dial," reprint by the Rowfant Club (1902). + +Chapter 7. Hawthorne, "Works," 12 volumes (1882), "Life" by G. E. +Woodberry (1902). Longfellow, "Works," 11 volumes (1886), "Life" by +Samuel Longfellow, 3 volumes (1891). Whittier, "Works," 7 volumes +(1892), "Life" by S. T. Pickard, 2 volumes (1894). Holmes, "Works" 13 +volumes (1892), "Life" by J. T. Morse, Jr. (1896). Lowell, "Works," 11 +volumes (1890), "Life" by Ferris Greenslet (1905), "Letters" edited by +C. E. Norton, 2 volumes (1893). For the historians, note H. B. Adams, +"Life and Writings of Jared Sparks," 2 volumes (1893). M. A. DeW. Howe, +"Life and Letters of George Bancroft," 2 volumes (1908), G. S. Hillard, +"Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor," 2 volumes (1876), +George Ticknor, "Life of Prescott" (1863), also Rollo Ogden, "Life +of Prescott"(1904), G. W. Curtis, "Correspondence of J. L. Motley," 2 +volumes (1889), Francis Parkman, "Works," 12 volumes (1865-1898), "Life" +by C. H. Farnham (1900), J. F. Jameson, "History of Historical Writing +in America" (1891). + +Chapter 8. Poe, "Works," 10 volumes (Stedman-Woodberry edition, +1894-1895), also 17 volumes (Virginia edition, J. A. Harrison, 1900,) +"Life" by G. E. Woodberry, 2 volumes (1909). Whitman, "Leaves of Grass" +and "Complete Prose Works" (Small, Maynard and Co.) (1897, 1898), also +John Burroughs, "A Study of Whitman" (1896). + +Chapter 9. C. Schurz, "Life of Henry Clay," 2 volumes (1887). Daniel +Webster, "Works," 6 volumes (1851), "Life" by H. C. Lodge (1883). Rufus +Choate, "Works," volumes (1862). Wendell Phillips, "Speeches, Lectures, +and Letters," 2 volumes (1892). W. L. Garrison, "The Story of his Life +Told by his Children," 4 volumes (1885-1889). Harriet Beecher Stowe, +"Works," 17 volumes (1897), "Life" by C. E. Stowe (1889). Abraham +Lincoln, "Works," 2 volumes (edited by Nicolay and Hay, 1894). + +Chapter 10. For an excellent bibliography of the New National Period, +see F. L. Pattee, "A History of American Literature since 1870" (1916). + +For further bibliographical information the reader is referred to the +articles on American authors in "The Encyclopaedia Britannica" and in +"The Warner Library" (volume 30, "The Student's Course," N. Y., 1917). + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's The American Spirit in Literature,, by Bliss Perry + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE, *** + +***** This file should be named 3410.txt or 3410.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/3/4/1/3410/ + +Produced by The James J. 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FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.08.01*END** +[Portions of this header are copyright (C) 2001 by Michael S. Hart +and may be reprinted only when these Etexts are free of all fees.] +[Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be used in any sales +of Project Gutenberg Etexts or other materials be they hardware or +software or any other related product without express permission.] + + + + + +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 + diff --git a/old/aslit10.zip b/old/aslit10.zip Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..b15971a --- /dev/null +++ b/old/aslit10.zip |
