The two decades that brought the eighteenth century to a close were full
of exciting political events, but barren of literature. The fathers
could make a nation by adopting a constitution and abiding by it, but
the creation of a national literature was not so easy a matter. National
poetry did not come with national life. The efforts of Trumbull
(1750-1831), and Barlow (1754-1812), are as good as the ordinary
poetical work of the time in England, but they are not the expression of
the soul of the new nation.
The first real literature was in prose, arising from natural imitation
of past models under conditions of culture which led to appreciation of
such imitation.
Washington Irving, then twenty-four years old, living the pleasant life
of a clever young fellow in a small provincial city, joined with his
brother William and James Kirke Paulding in one of the periodicals
modeled after the Spectator common in the eighteenth century. Their
venture was called _Salmagundi_, and although not remarkable in itself,
its success gave confidence, so that two years afterward, feeling his
own power, Irving wrote _Knickerbocker’s History of New York_, one of
the first pieces of American _belles-lettres_ to become known in Europe
as well as America. These productions came naturally from the conditions
of Irving’s life; so did the _Sketch Book_, with which he became a
professed man of letters, the representative, we may say, of the first
period of our national literature.
Irving had pre-eminently the gift for literary expression; in his hands
everything became literature--history, biography, descriptive as well as
satire, story, essay. He showed the possibility of giving literary form
to American material.
The same thing was done in a special department of literature by James
Fenimore Cooper. Charles Brockden Brown had written novels, but they
have not survived. Cooper, on the other hand, so far saw the essential
quality of certain elements of American life, that the figures of
Leatherstocking, the American pioneer, Harvey Birch, the patriot, and
Long Tom Coffin, the sailor, are still living figures.
In fiction also two masters of equal power were shortly to develop a
form of literature in which America has produced much of the first
order. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe made of the short story a
means of artistic presentation, which has been more highly appreciated
in our day than it was in their own.
The first true poet was William Cullen Bryant. In the same year with
Cooper’s first American novel (1821) appeared a volume of Bryant’s
poems, of which one at least, _Thanatopsis_, had already excited
admiring attention. Bryant’s long and honorable life was devoted to many
interests beside poetry, but he maintained throughout the pure and
idealistic touch, and the intimate appreciation of nature that
characterized his first work.
The first quarter of the nineteenth century, then, saw a beginning,
slight indeed, but such as to endure, of a true literature in the
departments of poetry, fiction, _belles-lettres_. The fifty years
following saw more substantial production in each direction.
The American poets of the middle of the century are not of the very
first rank, but each is genuinely representative of some true poetic
quality or way of looking at things.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow presents the beauty and charm of American
life and history in melodious and figured verse; John Greenleaf Whittier
expresses the soul of our life and history in lyrics of most sincere
human quality; Edgar Allan Poe gives a few most intense emotions in
singularly perfect and individual form, while Walt Whitman expresses a
certain American ideality in a strange mode of utterance, which despite
its faults is characteristically strong.
As a poet Lowell is at his best in satire, Holmes in wit, Emerson in
sententious wisdom.
In the field of fiction there was not so much that was good. It was not
till he had written short stories for twenty years that Hawthorne found
time for the novel for which he had so long felt himself capable. He
wrote four, of which three at least are masterpieces. As a novelist he
had no rivals; but there were not a few who carried on the tradition of
the short story, of whom the most noteworthy were Fitz James O’Brien
(1828-1862), Harriet Prescott, 1835 (afterward Mrs. Spofford), and
Edward Everett Hale. _The Diamond Lens_, _The Amber Gods_, and _The Man
Without a Country_ of the latter are very typical works.
In history also there was first-rate expression. George Bancroft,
William H. Prescott, John Lothrop Motley, and Francis Parkman, were all
original workers and all men of literary power. The first two were
rather too much influenced by the literary ideals of the past, but
Motley and Parkman attain a perfection of literary history which seems
impossible in our day of development and division of labor.
More specifically American, though perhaps more temporary, is the
oratory of the period. Political conditions were still such as to
encourage eloquence. Three names stand together as representative of
American public life: Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun.
Their oratory has dignity, representative character and force. Three
other orators should be mentioned: Edward Everett, Wendell Phillips, and
Henry Ward Beecher, one eminent on great public occasions, one in public
discussion and agitation, and the third in the pulpit. And we must add
the name of a speaker whose simple sincerity gave him at times a greater
power of speech than that of any other man of his day, Abraham Lincoln.
Several other elements of the literature of this time are important. The
New England movement of idealistic thought, somewhat expressed by
Transcendentalism, is represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a figure more
thoroughly characteristic of American thinking than any other writer.
Singularly individual and different from any other man of his time, he
is yet typical of a combination of ideality and common sense thoroughly
American.
James Russell Lowell is another important figure of the period:
noteworthy as a poet, a critic, a scholar, an essayist, he is especially
interesting as the successor of Irving as the representative man of his
literary generation. He made literature an active factor in life and yet
never allowed it to lose its literary quality.
Oliver Wendell Holmes is best known as a humorist, and perhaps the most
American in that field in which America has a very special place. Humor
is more than most branches of literature a matter of taste. It must be
enough, therefore, to note, without attempting to discriminate or
describe, the achievements of Artemus Ward (1834-1867), of Mark Twain
and of Frank R. Stockton (1834-1902). In this second period of our
literature occurred the Civil war. Such an event could not have been
without its effect upon men of letters both South and North. In the
North especially do we perceive the strongest influence: the
anti-slavery element cannot be dissociated from the work of Lowell or
Whittier. Yet in literature the war produced little of permanence. It is
the backbone of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s title to remembrance; but
powerfully effective as was _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, it is probable that
there was more real genius in those presentations of that old New
England life of which she was herself a product.