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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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