at New Haven and before the supreme court at Boston. The intervals
of legal business were given to poetry. Bryant’s father urged him
to contribute to the new ‘North American Review and Miscellaneous
Journal,’ the editor of which was an old friend. The young lawyer-poet
seeming indifferent to the suggestion, Doctor Bryant carried with
him to Boston two pieces he had unearthed among his son’s papers,
namely, ‘Thanatopsis’ in its first form, and ‘A Fragment’ now called
‘Inscription at the Entrance of a Wood.’ Both were printed in the
‘Review’ for September, 1817. Other poems followed, together with three
prose essays (on ‘American Poetry,’ on ‘The Happy Temperament,’ and on
the use of ‘Trisyllabic Feet in Iambic Verse’). He also contributed
poems to ‘The Idle Man,’ Richard Henry Dana’s magazine, and the ‘United
States Literary Gazette.’
In June, 1821, Bryant married Miss Frances Fairchild of Great
Barrington. In April of this year he had been invited to give ‘the
usual poetic address’ before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard.
‘The Ages’ was written for this occasion and publicly read on August
30. At the instance of his Boston friends, Bryant printed ‘The Ages’
with seven other pieces in a little pamphlet entitled _Poems_.
Never in love with the law, the poet began to regard it with aversion.
He was intellectually restless and took to play-writing. A farce,
‘The Heroes,’ in ridicule of duelling, was sent to his friends, the
Sedgwicks, in New York, who admitted its merits but doubted its chances
of success on the stage, Bryant, at the suggestion of Henry Sedgwick,
made two or three visits to the city in search of congenial work. He
thought he had found it when he undertook to edit ‘The New York Review
and Athenæum Magazine,’ a periodical made by amalgamating ‘The Atlantic
Magazine’ with the older ‘Literary Review.’ Bryant wrote to a friend
that it was a livelihood, ‘and a livelihood is all I got from the law.’
The editor of the ‘Review’ was active in various ways. He studied the
Romance languages, gave a course of lectures on poetry before the
Athenæum Society (1825), and annual courses on mythology before the
National Academy of the Arts of Design (1826–31). He was amused with
New York life; Great Barrington had not been amusing. He published
verse and prose in his own review and helped Sands and Verplanck edit
their annual, ‘The Talisman.’ Somewhat later he edited _Tales of the
Glauber Spa_ (1832), the joint work of Sands, Leggett, Paulding, Miss
Sedgwick, and himself.[1]
The ‘Review’ suffered from changes in the business management, and
Bryant’s prospects became gloomy. At this juncture (1826) he was
invited to act as assistant to William Coleman, editor of the ‘New
York Evening Post.’ In 1828 he became ‘a small proprietor in the
establishment,’ and when Coleman died (July, 1829) Bryant assumed the
post of editor-in-chief and engaged as his assistant William Leggett, a
young New Yorker who had shown a marked ability in conducting a weekly
journal called ‘The Critic.’ ‘I like politics no better than you do’
(Bryant had written to Dana), ‘but ... politics and a bellyfull are
better than poetry and starvation.’
His theory of the journalist’s function is well known. ‘He regarded
himself as a trustee for the public.’[2] Party was much, and Bryant was
a strong Democrat, but the people were greater than party.
Bryant’s handling of public questions belongs to political history. His
lifelong fight against a protective tariff, his defence of Jackson’s
policy respecting nullification and the United States Bank, his
maintenance of the right to discuss slavery as freely as any other
subject about which there is a difference of opinion, his insistence
that the question of giving the franchise to negroes in the state
of New York be settled on its merits and as a local matter with
which neither Abolitionist nor slave-holder had anything to do, his
determined stand against the annexation of Texas and enlargement of
the area of slavery, his position on a multitude of questions which
in his life as a public censor he found it necessary to defend or to
attack--are fully set forth in the two biographies by his coadjutors.
From 1856 Bryant acted with the Republican party, giving his cordial
support to Frémont and to Lincoln. He was a presidential elector in
1861. He advocated the election of Grant in 1868, and again in 1872,
the latter time reluctantly ‘as the best thing attainable in the
circumstances.’
To secure the independence and detachment that would enable him to
judge measures fairly, Bryant avoided intercourse with public men, kept
away from Washington, took no office, and was otherwise singular. In
this way he at least secured a free pen. As to the tone of the comments
on men in public life, Bryant approved the theory of a brother
editor who maintained that nothing should be said which would make it
impossible for him who wrote and him who was written about to meet at
the same dinner-table the next day. It is not pretended, however, that
he was uniformly controlled by this theory. What was the prevailing
idea of his journalistic manner may be known from Felton’s review of
_The Fountain_, in which he marvels that these beautiful poems can
be the work of one ‘who deals with wrath, and dips his pen daily in
bitterness and hate....’
Since 1821 no collection of Bryant’s verse had been made. Then after
ten years he gathered together eighty-nine pieces, including the eight
which had appeared in the pamphlet of 1821, and issued them as _Poems_,
1832. Through the friendly offices of Irving the book was reprinted
in England with a dedicatory letter to Samuel Rogers. Notwithstanding
favorable notices, both English and American, Bryant was despondent.
‘Poetic wares,’ he said, ‘are not for the market of the present day ...
mankind are occupied with politics, railroads, and steamboats.’ But
he found it necessary to reprint the volume in 1834 (with additional
poems), and again in 1836.
His work in prose and verse after 1839 includes _The Fountain and
Other Poems_, 1842; _The White-Footed Deer and Other Poems_, 1844;
_Poems_, 1847; _Letters of a Traveller_, 1850; _Poems_, 1854; _Letters
from Spain_, 1859; _Thirty Poems_, 1864; _Letters from the East_,
1869; _The Iliad of Homer, translated into English blank verse_, 1870;
_The Odyssey_, 1871–72; _Orations and Addresses_, 1873; _The Flood of
Tears_, 1878.
The introduction to the _Library of Poetry and Song_ is from Bryant’s
pen, as is also the preface to E. A. Duyckinck’s (still unpublished)
edition of Shakespeare. His name appears as one of the authors of _A
Popular History of the United States_ (1876), together with that of
Sydney Howard Gay, on whom fell the burden of the actual writing. It is
unfortunate that no adequate reprint of Bryant’s political leaders has
been made. As much ought to be done for him as Sedgwick did for Leggett.
Bryant found relief from the strain of editorial work in foreign
travel. He was abroad with his family in 1834–36, visiting France,
Italy, and Germany. He did his sight-seeing deliberately, spending a
month in Rome, two months at Florence, three months in Munich, and
so on. He had been four months at Heidelberg, when, says one of his
biographers (in phrases which he never learned from Bryant), ‘His
studious sojourn at this renowned seat of learning was interrupted by
intelligence of the dangerous illness of his editorial colleague,’ and
he returned home. During a visit to England in 1845 Bryant met Rogers,
Moore, Herschel, Hallam, and Spedding, heard one of his own poems
quoted at a Corn Law meeting, where among the speakers were Cobden and
Bright, and carried a letter of introduction to Wordsworth from Henry
Crabb Robinson. He made yet other journeys to Europe and to the East.
Notable among Bryant’s public addresses were the orations on Cooper
(1852) and Irving (1860) delivered before the New York Historical
Society. He was a founder and the third president of the Century
Association, first president of the New York Homœopathic Society,
president of the American Free Trade League, and member of literary
and historical societies innumerable. He held no public office, but
as time went on it might almost be said that an office was created
for him--that of Representative American. He seemed the incarnation
of virtues popularly supposed to have survived from an older and
simpler time. He was a great public character. The word venerable
acquired a new meaning as one reflected on the career of this eminent
citizen who was born when Washington was president, who as a boy had
written satires on Jefferson, and who as a man had discussed political
questions from the administration of John Quincy Adams to that of
Hayes. Other men were as old as he, Bryant seemed to have lived longer.
‘And when at last he fell, he fell as the granite column falls, smitten
from without, but sound within.’[3] His death was the result of an
accident. He gave the address at the unveiling of the statue of
Mazzini in Central Park. Though wearied with the exertion and almost
overcome by the heat, he was able to walk to the house of a friend.
As he was about entering the door he fell backward, striking his head
violently against the stone step. He never recovered from the effects
of this fall, and died on June 12, 1878.
II
BRYANT’S CHARACTER
We seldom think of Bryant other than as he appears in the Sarony
photograph of 1873. With the snowy beard, the furrowed brow, the sunken
but keen eyes, a cloak thrown about the shoulders, he is the ideal poet
of popular imagination. Thus must he have looked when he wrote ‘The
Flood of Years,’ and it is difficult to realize that he did not look
thus when he wrote ‘Thanatopsis.’ We do not readily picture Bryant as
young or even middle-aged.
Parke Godwin saw him first about 1837. He had a ‘wearied, almost
saturnine expression of countenance.’ He was spare in figure, of medium
height, clean shaven, and had an ‘unusually large head.’ He spoke with
decision, but could not be called a copious talker. His voice was
noticeably sweet, his choice of words and accuracy of pronunciation
remarkable. When anything was said to awaken mirth, his eyes gleamed
with ‘a singular radiance and a short, quick, staccato but hearty
laugh followed.’ He was more sociable when his wife and daughters were
present than at other times. Bryant’s reserve was always a conspicuous
trait.
Under that prim exterior lurked fire and passion. ‘In court he often
lost his self-control.’ It was thought that Bryant might keep a promise
he once made of thrashing a legal opponent within an inch of his life
(‘if he ever says that again’) though the man was twice his size. Not
long after he became editor-in-chief of the ‘Post’ Bryant cowhided a
journalistic adversary who had bestowed upon him by name, ‘the most
insulting epithet that can be applied to a human being.’[4] It was the
only time his well-schooled temper outwitted him.
His friendships were strong and abiding. He had an inflexible will and
a keen sense of justice, so keen that it drove him out of the law. No
thought of personal ease or advantage could turn him from a course he
had mapped out as right. He was generous. His benefactions were many
and judicious, and the manner of their bestowal as unpretending as
possible.
Bryant’s ‘unassailable dignity’ was a marked trait of character. He
refused an invitation to a dinner given Charles Dickens by a ‘prominent
citizen’ of New York. ‘That man,’ said Bryant, ‘has known me for
years without asking me to his house, and I am not going to be made a
stool-pigeon to attract birds of passage that may be flying about.’
He was perfectly simple-minded, incapable of assuming the air of famous
poet or successful man of the world. Doubtless he relished praise, but
he had an adroit way of putting compliments to one side, tempering the
gratitude he really felt with an ironical humor.
III
THE LITERARY CRAFTSMAN
Bryant was a deliberate and fastidious writer. His literary executors
could never have said of him that they found ‘neither blot nor erasure
among his papers.’ His copy, written on the backs of old letters
or rejected manuscripts, was a wilderness of interlineations and
corrections, and often hard to decipher.
Famous as he was for correctness, it seems a mere debauch of eulogy to
affirm that all of Bryant’s contributions to the ‘Evening Post’ do not
contain ‘as many erroneous or defective forms of expression’ as ‘can be
found in the first ten numbers of the _Spectator_.’ But there is little
danger of overestimating his influence on the English of journalism
during the forty years and more that he set the example of a high
standard of daily writing. He was sparing of advice, though in earlier
days he could not always conquer the temptation to amuse himself over
the English of his brother editors.[5] It has been denied that he had
any part in compiling the famous ‘index expurgatorius,’ but it is not
unreasonable to suppose that this list, embodying traditions of the
editorial office, had his approval. Bryant was for directness and
precision in writing. Ideas must stand on their merits, if they have
them, for such phrasing will define them perfectly.
His prose style may be studied in his books of travel and his
addresses. The literary characteristic of _Letters of a Traveller_ and
its companion volumes is excessive plainness, a homely quality like
that of a village pedagogue careful not to make mistakes. One is often
reminded of the honest home-spun prose of Henry Wansey’s _Excursion to
the United States_.
Turning to the volume of _Orations and Addresses_, the reader finds
himself in another world. Bryant’s memorial orations are among the
best of their kind, stately, uplifting, and at times even majestic.
They belong to a type of composition which lies midway between oratory
and literature and unites certain characteristics of each. Written
primarily to be heard, and adapted to public utterance, they are also
meant to be read. They must stand the test of the ear and then that of
the eye. The listener must find his account in them as they come from
the lips of the orator, and he who afterward turns at leisure the pages
of the printed report must be satisfied. Bryant’s speeches are markedly
‘literary;’ and though oratorical they are wholly free from bombast.
Poet though he was, he built no cloud-capped towers of rhetoric.
Coming now to his verse, we find that his poetic flights, though lofty,
were neither frequent nor long continued. Apparently he was incapable
of writing much or often. This seems true even after allowance is made
for his busy and exacting life as a journalist. For years together he
composed but a few lines in each year.
His theory fitted his own limitations. Bryant maintained that there is
no such thing as a long poem, that what are commonly called long poems
are in reality a succession of short poems united by poetical links.
The paradox grows out of the vagueness attaching to the words ‘length’
and ‘poem.’ Exactly what a poem is, we shall never know. That is a
shadowy line which divides poetry from verse. And there is no term so
unmeaning as length. When does a poem begin to be long--is it when the
poet has achieved a hundred verses or a thousand, when he has written
six cantos or twelve?
To say, as Bryant is reported to have said, that ‘a long poem is no
more conceivable than a long ecstasy,’ is to make all poetry dependent
on an ecstatic condition. And it reduces all poetic temperaments to the
same level. Why may not poetry be an outcome of ‘the true enthusiasm
that burns long’?
Bryant showed skill in handling a variety of metrical forms; it is
unsafe to say that he excelled only in blank verse. With declared
partisanship for the short poem, he nevertheless did not cultivate the
sonnet. Up to the time he was fifty-eight years of age he had written
but twelve, and for some of these he apologized, saying, ‘they are
rather poems in fourteen lines than sonnets.’
Comparing the length of his life with the slenderness of his poetical
product, we are tempted to bring against this eminent man the charge
of wilful unproductiveness. This reluctance, or inertia, or whatever
it may be called, has helped to give the impression of a lack of
spontaneity. We are aware of the effort through the very exactness
with which the thing has been done. Bryant resembled certain pianists
who plead as excuse for not playing, a lack of recent practice. When
after repeated urgings one of the reluctant brotherhood ‘consents to
favor us,’ he plays with precision enough but rarely with abandon. The
conscious and over-solicitous artist shows in every note.
If much writing has its drawbacks, it also has its value. And the poet
who sings frequently cannot offer as a reason for not performing, the
excuse that his lyre has not been out of the case for weeks, and that
in all probability a string is broken.
IV
THE POET
The fine stanzas entitled ‘The Poet’ contain Bryant’s theory of his
art. The framing of a deathless poem is not the pastime of a drowsy
summer’s day.
No smooth array of phrase,
Artfully sought and ordered though it be,
Which the cold rhymer lays
Upon his page with languid industry,
Can wake the listless pulse to livelier speed,
Or fill with sudden tears the eyes that read.
The secret wouldst thou know
To touch the heart or fire the blood at will?
Let thine own eyes o’erflow;
Let thy lips quiver with the passionate thrill;
Seize the great thought, ere yet its power be past,
And bind, in words, the fleet emotion fast.
* * * * *
Yet let no empty gust
Of passion find an utterance in thy lay,
A blast that whirls the dust
Along the howling street and dies away;
But feelings of calm power and mighty sweep,
Like currents journeying through the windless deep.
This is flat contradiction of the idea that entirely self-conscious and
self-controlled art can avail to move the reader. Bryant pleads for
deepest feeling in exercise of the poetic function; it is more than
important, it is indispensable. Of that striking poem ‘The Tides,’ he
said ‘it was written with a certain awe upon me which made me hope that
there might be something in it.’ The poem proved to be one of Bryant’s
noblest conceptions. Yet a lady of ‘judgment’ told one of Bryant’s
friends, who of course told him, that she did not think there was much
in it.
Nature appeals to Bryant in her broad and massive aspects. ‘The
Prairies’ is an illustration. Gazing on the ‘encircling vastness’ for
the first time, the heart swells and the eye dilates in an effort to
comprehend it:--
Lo! they stretch,
In airy undulations, far away,
As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell,
Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed,
And motionless forever.
As the poet looks abroad over the vast and glowing fields, there sweeps
by him a vision of the races that have peopled these solitudes and
perished to make room for races to come. It is magnificent even if
it is not scientific. In the sense it gives of the spaciousness of
the prairies with the myriad sounds of life projected on the great
elemental silence, it is a true American poem.
‘A Hymn of the Sea’ is another illustration of that largeness of view
characteristic of Bryant. Each thought is lofty and far-reaching. The
cloud that rises from the ‘realm of rain’ shadows whole countries, the
tornado wrecks a fleet, whirling the vast hulks ‘like chaff upon the
waves:’--
These restless surges eat away the shores
Of earth’s old continents; the fertile plain
Welters in shallows, headlands crumble down,
And the tide drifts the sea-sand in the streets
Of the drowned city.
He conveys the idea not only of spaciousness but of endless duration in
the lines describing the coral worm laying his ‘mighty reefs,’ toiling
from ‘age to age’ until
His bulwarks overtop the brine, and check
The long wave rolling from the southern pole
To break upon Japan.
Certain lines in ‘A Forest Hymn’ are also remarkable for the sense they
give of vast reaches of time, stretching not forward but backward into
eternity:--
These lofty trees
Wave not less proudly that their ancestors
Moulder beneath them. Oh, there is not lost
One of earth’s charms: upon her bosom yet,
After the flight of untold centuries,
The freshness of her far beginning lies
And yet shall lie.
The ‘Song of the Stars,’ though not one of Bryant’s happiest
poems,--the hypercritical reader feeling that the ‘orbs of beauty’ and
‘spheres of flame’ might have made a more appropriate metrical choice
for their song,--shows none the less the poet’s strength in dealing
with nature in the large. The lines ‘To a Waterfowl’ are magical in
part by virtue of the impression they make of immense distance. With
the poet’s penetrating vision we can see the solitary way through the
rosy depths, the pathless coast, and the one bit of life in
The desert and illimitable air.
Bryant’s mind readily lifts itself from the minute to the massive, as
in the poem ‘Summer Wind,’ a fine example of the crescendo effects he
knew so well how to produce. In a few lines he gives the sensation
of heat, closeness, exhaustion, and pictures the plants drooping in
a stillness broken only by the ‘faint and interrupted murmur of the
bee.’ His thought then sweeps upward to the wooded hills towering in
scorching heat and dazzling light, and then still higher to the bright
clouds,
Motionless pillars of the brazen heaven--
Their bases on the mountains--their white tops
Shining in the far ether....
The poet never wearies of this majestic pageantry of the natural world.
In ‘The Firmament,’ in ‘The Hurricane’ (imitated from Heredia), in
‘Monument Mountain,’ his chief thought is to translate the reader to
his own lofty vantage-ground.
But Nature is not merely a spectacle, it has a power to heal and
invigorate. Life loses its pettiness when one leaves the city and
seeks the forest. The holy men who hid themselves ‘deep in the woody
wilderness’ perhaps did not well--
But let me often to these solitudes
Retire, and in thy presence reassure
My feeble virtue. Here its enemies,
The passions, at thy plainer footsteps shrink
And tremble and are still.
The poet finds inspiration not alone in the terror of the storm, the
majesty of the forest, the gray waste of ocean, the mystery of the
night of stars, but in the humbler things, the rivulet by which he
played as a child, the violet growing on its bank, the hum of bees,
the notes of hang-bird and wren, the gossip of swallows, and the gay
chirp of the ground squirrel. ‘The Yellow Violet’ and the lines ‘To the
Fringed Gentian’ spring from this love of the unobtrusive charms of
Nature. Less familiar than these, but a faultless example of Bryant’s
art, is ‘The Painted Cup:’--
... tell me not
That these bright chalices were tinted thus
To hold the dew for fairies, when they meet
On moonlight evenings in the hazel bowers,
And dance till they are thirsty.
The poet will not call up ‘faded fancies of an ‘elder world.’ If the
fresh savannahs must be peopled with creatures of imagination, it may
be done without borrowing European elves:--
Let then the gentle Manitou of flowers,
Lingering among the bloomy waste he loves,
Though all his swarthy worshippers are gone--
Slender and small, his rounded cheek all brown
And ruddy with the sunshine; let him come
On summer mornings, when the blossoms wake,
And part with little hands the spiky grass,
And touching, with his cherry lips, the edge
Of these bright beakers, drain the gathered dew.
Bryant wrote poems of freedom. The earlier of these, ‘The Song of
the Greek Amazon,’ the ‘Massacre at Scio,’ the ‘Greek Partisan,’ and
‘Italy,’ voice his sympathy with the oppressed nations of the Old
World, the ‘struggling multitude of states,’ that ‘writhe in shackles.’