THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION.
1815-1837.
The attempt to preserve a strictly chronological order must here be
abandoned. About all the American literature in existence that is of
any value as _literature_ is the product of the past three quarters of
a century, and the men who produced it, though older or younger, were
still contemporaries. Irving's _Knickerbocker's History of New York_,
1809, was published within the recollection of some yet living, and the
venerable poet Richard H. Dana--Irving's junior by only four
years--survived to 1879, when the youngest of the generation of writers
that now occupy public attention had already won their spurs. Bryant,
whose _Thanatopsis_ was printed in 1816, lived down to 1878. He saw
the beginnings of our national literature, and he saw almost as much of
the latest phase of it as we see to-day in this year 1891. Still, even
within the limits of a single life-time, there have been progress and
change. And so, while it will happen that the consideration of
writers, a part of whose work falls between the dates at the head of
this chapter, may be postponed to subsequent chapters, we may in a
general way follow the sequence of time.
The period between the close of the second war with England, in 1815,
and the great financial crash of 1837, has been called, in language
attributed to President Monroe, "the era of good feeling." It was a
time of peace and prosperity, of rapid growth in population and rapid
extension of territory. The new nation was entering upon its vast
estates and beginning to realize its manifest destiny. The peace with
Great Britain, by calling off the Canadian Indians and the other tribes
in alliance with England, had opened up the North-west to settlement.
Ohio had been admitted as a State in 1802; but at the time of President
Monroe's tour, in 1817, Cincinnati had only seven thousand inhabitants,
and half of the State was unsettled. The Ohio River flowed for most of
its course through an unbroken wilderness. Chicago was merely a fort.
Hitherto the emigration to the West had been sporadic; now it took on
the dimensions of a general and almost a concerted exodus. This
movement was stimulated in New England by the cold summer of 1816 and
the late spring of 1817, which produced a scarcity of food that
amounted in parts of the interior to a veritable famine. All through
this period sounded the ax of the pioneer clearing the forest about his
log-cabin, and the rumble of the canvas-covered emigrant-wagon over the
primitive highways which crossed the Alleghanies or followed the valley
of the Mohawk. S. G. Goodrich, known in letters as "Peter Parley," in
his _Recollections of a Life-time_, 1856, describes the part of the
movement which he had witnessed as a boy in Fairfield County,
Connecticut: "I remember very well the tide of emigration through
Connecticut, on its way to the West, during the summer of 1817. Some
persons went in covered wagons--frequently a family consisting of
father, mother, and nine small children, with one at the breast--some
on foot, and some crowded together under the cover, with kettles,
gridirons, feather-beds, crockery, and the family Bible, Watts's Psalms
and Hymns, and Webster's Spelling-book--the lares and penates of the
household. Others started in ox-carts, and trudged on at the rate of
ten miles a day. . . . Many of these persons were in a state of
poverty, and begged their way as they went. Some died before they
reached the expected Canaan; many perished after their arrival from
fatigue and privation; and others from the fever and ague, which was
then certain to attack the new settlers. It was, I think, in 1818 that
I published a small tract entitled, _'Tother Side of Ohio_--that is,
the other view, in contrast to the popular notion that it was the
paradise of the world. It was written by Dr. Hand--a talented young
physician of Berlin--who had made a visit to the West about these days.
It consisted mainly of vivid but painful pictures of the accidents and
incidents attending this wholesale migration. The roads over the
Alleghanies, between Philadelphia and Pittsburg, were then rude, steep,
and dangerous, and some of the more precipitous slopes were
consequently strewn with the carcasses of wagons, carts, horses, oxen,
which had made shipwreck in their perilous descents."
But in spite of the hardships of the settler's life the spirit of that
time, as reflected in its writings, was a hopeful and a light-hearted
one.
"Westward the course of empire takes its way,"
runs the famous line from Berkeley's poem on America. The New
Englanders who removed to the Western Reserve went there to better
themselves; and their children found themselves the owners of broad
acres of virgin soil in place of the stony hill pastures of Berkshire
and Litchfield. There was an attraction, too, about the wild, free
life of the frontiersman, with all its perils and discomforts. The
life of Daniel Boone, the pioneer of Kentucky--that "dark and bloody
ground"--is a genuine romance. Hardly less picturesque was the old
river life of the Ohio boatmen, before the coming of steam banished
their queer craft from the water. Between 1810 and 1840 the center of
population in the United States had moved from the Potomac to the
neighborhood of Clarksburg, in West Virginia, and the population itself
had increased from seven to seventeen millions. The gain was made
partly in the East and South, but the general drift was westward.
During the years now under review the following new States were
admitted, in the order named: Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama,
Maine, Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan. Kentucky and Tennessee had been
made States in the last years of the eighteenth century, and
Louisiana--acquired by purchase from France--in 1812.
The settlers, in their westward march, left large tracts of wilderness
behind them. They took up first the rich bottomlands along the river
courses, the Ohio and Miami and Licking, and later the valleys of the
Mississippi and Missouri and the shores of the great lakes. But there
still remained backwoods in New York and Pennsylvania, though the
cities of New York and Philadelphia had each a population of more than
one hundred thousand in 1815. When the Erie Canal was opened, in 1825,
it ran through a primitive forest. N. P. Willis, who went by canal to
Buffalo and Niagara in 1827, describes the houses and stores at
Rochester as standing among the burnt stumps left by the first
settlers. In the same year that saw the opening of this great
water-way, the Indian tribes, numbering now about one hundred and
thirty thousand souls, were moved across the Mississippi. Their power
had been broken by General Hamson's victory over Tecumseh at the battle
of Tippecanoe, in 1811, and they were in fact mere remnants and
fragments of the race which had hung upon the skirts of civilization
and disputed the advance of the white man for two centuries. It was
not until some years later than this that railroads began to take an
important share in opening up new country.
The restless energy, the love of adventure, the sanguine anticipation
which characterized American thought at this time, the picturesque
contrasts to be seen in each mushroom town where civilization was
encroaching on the raw edge of the wilderness--all these found
expression, not only in such well-known books as Cooper's _Pioneers_,
1823, and Irving's _Tour on the Prairies_, 1835, but in the minor
literature which is read to-day, if at all, not for its own sake, but
for the light that it throws on the history of national development: in
such books as Paulding's story of _Westward-Ho!_ and his poem, _The
Backwoodsman_, 1818; or as Timothy Flint's _Recollections_, 1826, and
his _Geography and History of the Mississippi Valley_, 1827. It was
not an age of great books, but it was an age of large ideas and
expanding prospects. The new consciousness of empire uttered itself
hastily, crudely, ran into buncombe, "spread-eagleism," and other noisy
forms of patriotic exultation; but it was thoroughly democratic and
American. Though literature--or at least the best literature of the
time--was not yet emancipated from English models, thought and life, at
any rate, were no longer in bondage--no longer provincial. And it is
significant that the party in office during these years was the
Democratic, the party which had broken most completely with
conservative traditions. The famous "Monroe doctrine" was a
pronunciamento of this aggressive democracy, and though the Federalists
returned to power for a single term, under John Quincy Adams (1825-29),
Andrew Jackson received the largest number of electoral votes, and
Adams was only chosen by the House of Representatives in the absence of
a majority vote for any one candidate. At the close of his term "Old
Hickory," the hero of the people, the most characteristically
democratic of our presidents, and the first backwoodsman who entered
the White House, was borne into office on a wave of popular enthusiasm.
We have now arrived at the time when American literature, in the higher
and stricter sense of the term, really began to have an existence. S.
G. Goodrich, who settled at Hartford as a bookseller and publisher in
1818, says, in his _Recollections_: "About this time I began to think
of trying to bring out original American works. . . . The general
impression was that we had not, and could not have, a literature. It
was the precise point at which Sidney Smith had uttered that bitter
taunt in the _Edinburgh Review_, 'Who reads an American book?' . . .
It was positively injurious to the commercial credit of a bookseller to
undertake American works." Washington Irving (1783-1859) was the first
American author whose books, as _books_, obtained recognition abroad;
whose name was thought worthy of mention beside the names of English
contemporary authors, like Byron, Scott, and Coleridge. He was also
the first American writer whose writings are still read for their own
sake. We read Mather's _Magnalia_, and Franklin's _Autobiography_, and
Trumbull's _McFingal_--if we read them at all--as history, and to learn
about the times or the men. But we read the _Sketch Book_, and
_Knickerbocker's History of New York_, and the _Conquest of Granada_
for themselves and for the pleasure that they give as pieces of
literary art.
We have arrived, too, at a time when we may apply a more cosmopolitan
standard to the works of American writers, and may disregard many a
minor author whose productions would have cut some figure had they come
to light amid the poverty of our colonial age. Hundreds of these
forgotten names, with specimens of their unread writings, are consigned
to a limbo of immortality in the pages of Duyckinck's _Cyclopedia_ and
of Griswold's _Poets of America_ and _Prose Writers of America_. We
may select here for special mention, and as most representative of the
thought of their time, the names of Irving, Cooper, Webster, and
Channing.
A generation was now coming upon the stage who could recall no other
government in this country than the government of the United States,
and to whom the Revolutionary War was but a tradition. Born in the
very year of the peace, it was a part of Irving's mission, by the
sympathetic charm of his writings and by the cordial recognition which
he won in both countries, to allay the soreness which the second war,
of 1812-15, had left between England and America. He was well fitted
for the task of mediator. Conservative by nature, early drawn to the
venerable worship of the Episcopal Church, retrospective in his tastes,
with a preference for the past and its historic associations, which,
even in young America, led him to invest the Hudson and the region
about New York with a legendary interest, he wrote of American themes
in an English fashion, and interpreted to an American public the mellow
attractiveness that he found in the life and scenery of Old England.
He lived in both countries, and loved them both; and it is hard to say
whether Irving is more of an English or of an American writer. His
first visit to Europe, in 1804-6, occupied nearly two years. From 1815
to 1832 he was abroad continuously, and his "domicile," as the lawyers
say, during these seventeen years was really in England, though a
portion of his time was spent upon the Continent, and several
successive years in Spain, where he engaged upon the _Life of
Columbus_, the _Conquest of Granada_, the _Companions of Columbus_, and
the _Alhambra_, all published between 1828 and 1832. From 1842 to 1846
he was again in Spain as American minister at Madrid.
Irving was the last and greatest of the Addisonians. His boyish
letters, signed "Jonathan Oldstyle," contributed in 1802 to his
brother's newspaper, the _Morning Chronicle_, were, like Franklin's
_Busybody_, close imitations of the _Spectator_. To the same family
belonged his _Salmagundi_ papers, 1807, a series of town-satires on New
York society, written in conjunction with his brother William and with
James K. Paulding. The little tales, essays, and sketches which
compose the _Sketch Book_ were written in England, and published in
America, in periodical numbers, in 1819-20. In this, which is in some
respects his best book, he still maintained that attitude of
observation and spectatorship taught him by Addison. The volume had a
motto taken from Burton: "I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to
provide for--a mere spectator of other men's fortunes," etc.; and "The
Author's Account of Himself," began in true Addisonian fashion: "I was
always fond of visiting new scenes and observing strange characters and
manners."
But though never violently "American," like some later writers who have
consciously sought to throw off the trammels of English tradition,
Irving was in a real way original. His most distinct addition to our
national literature was in his creation of what has been called "the
Knickerbocker legend." He was the first to make use, for literary
purposes, of the old Dutch traditions which clustered about the
romantic scenery of the Hudson. Colonel T. W. Higginson, in his
_History of the United States_, tells how "Mrs. Josiah Quincy, sailing
up that river in 1786, when Irving was a child three years old, records
that the captain of the sloop had a legend, either supernatural or
traditional, for every scene, 'and not a mountain reared its head
unconnected with some marvelous story.'" The material thus at hand
Irving shaped into his _Knickerbocker's History of New York_, into the
immortal story of _Rip Van Winkle_ and the _Legend of Sleepy Hollow_
(both published in the _Sketch Book_), and into later additions to the
same realm of fiction, such as _Dolph Heyliger_ in _Bracebridge Hall_,
the _Money Diggers_, _Wolfert Webber_, and _Kidd the Pirate_, in the
_Tales of a Traveler_, and some of the miscellanies from the
_Knickerbocker Magazine_, collected into a volume, in 1855, under the
title of _Wolfert's Roost_.
The book which made Irving's reputation was his _Knickerbocker's
History of New York_, 1809, a burlesque chronicle, making fun of the
old Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, and attributed, by a familiar and
now somewhat threadbare device,[1] to a little old gentleman named
Diedrich Knickerbocker, whose manuscript had come into the editor's
hands. The book was gravely dedicated to the New York Historical
Society, and it is said to have been quoted, as authentic history, by a
certain German scholar named Goeller, in a note on a passage in
Thucydides. This story, though well vouched, is hard of belief; for
_Knickerbocker_, though excellent fooling, has nothing of the grave
irony of Swift in his _Modest Proposal_ or of Defoe in his _Short Way
with Dissenters_. Its mock-heroic intention is as transparent as in
Fielding's parodies of Homer, which it somewhat resembles, particularly
in the delightfully absurd description of the mustering of the clans
under Peter Stuyvesant and the attack on the Swedish Fort Christina.
_Knickerbocker's History of New York_ was a real addition to the comic
literature of the world, a work of genuine humor, original and vital.
Walter Scott said that it reminded him closely of Swift, and had
touches resembling Sterne. It is not necessary to claim for Irving's
little masterpiece a place beside _Gulliver's Travels_ and _Tristram
Shandy_. But it was, at least, the first American book in the lighter
departments of literature which needed no apology and stood squarely on
its own legs. It was written, too, at just the right time. Although
New Amsterdam had become New York as early as 1664, the impress of its
first settlers, with their quaint conservative ways, was still upon it
when Irving was a boy. The descendants of the Dutch families formed a
definite element not only in Manhattan, but all up along the kills of
the Hudson, at Albany, at Schenectady, in Westchester County, at
Hoboken, and Communipaw, localities made familiar to him in many a
ramble and excursion. He lived to see the little provincial town of
his birth grow into a great metropolis, in which all national
characteristics were blended together, and a tide of immigration from
Europe and New England flowed over the old landmarks and obliterated
them utterly.
Although Irving was the first to reveal to his countrymen the literary
possibilities of their early history it must be acknowledged that with
modern American life he had little sympathy. He hated politics, and in
the restless democratic movement of the time, as we have described it,
he found no inspiration. This moderate and placid gentleman, with his
distrust of all kinds of fanaticism, had no liking for the Puritans or
for their descendants, the New England Yankees, if we may judge from
his sketch of Ichabod Crane in the _Legend of Sleepy Hollow_. His
genius was reminiscent, and his imagination, like Scott's, was the
historic imagination. In crude America his fancy took refuge in the
picturesque aspects of the past, in "survivals" like the Knickerbocker
Dutch and the Acadian peasants, whose isolated communities on the lower
Mississippi he visited and described. He turned naturally to the ripe
civilization of the Old World, He was our first picturesque tourist,
the first "American in Europe." He rediscovered England, whose ancient
churches, quiet landscapes, memory-haunted cities, Christmas
celebrations, and rural festivals had for him an unfailing attraction.
With pictures of these, for the most part, he filled the pages of the
_Sketch Book_ and _Bracebridge Hall_, 1822. Delightful as are these
English sketches, in which the author conducts his reader to Windsor
Castle, or Stratford-on-Avon, or the Boar's Head Tavern, or sits beside
him on the box of the old English stage-coach, or shares with him the
Yule-tide cheer at the ancient English country-house, their interest
has somewhat faded. The pathos of the _Broken Heart_ and the _Pride of
the Village_, the mild satire of the _Art of Book-Making_, the rather
obvious reflections in _Westminster Abbey_ are not exactly to the taste
of this generation. They are the literature of leisure and
retrospection; and already Irving's gentle elaboration, the refined and
slightly artificial beauty of his style, and his persistently genial
and sympathetic attitude have begun to pall upon readers who demand a
more nervous and accentuated kind of writing. It is felt that a little
roughness, a little harshness, even, would give relief to his pictures
of life. There is, for instance, something a little irritating in the
old-fashioned courtliness of his manner toward women; and one reads
with a certain impatience smoothly punctuated passages like the
following: "As the vine, which has long twined its graceful foliage
about the oak, and been lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the
hardy plant is rifted by the thunder-bolt, cling round it with its
caressing tendrils, and bind up its shattered boughs, so is it
beautifully ordered by Providence that woman, who is the mere dependent
and ornament of man in his happier hours, should be his stay and solace
when smitten with sudden calamity, winding herself into the rugged
recesses of his nature, tenderly supporting the drooping head and
binding up the broken heart."
Irving's gifts were sentiment and humor, with an imagination
sufficiently fertile and an observation sufficiently acute to support
those two main qualities, but inadequate to the service of strong
passion or subtle thinking, though his pathos, indeed, sometimes
reached intensity. His humor was always delicate and kindly; his
sentiment never degenerated into sentimentality. His diction was
graceful and elegant--too elegant, perhaps; and, in his modesty, he
attributed the success of his books in England to the astonishment of
Englishmen that an American could write good English.
In Spanish history and legend Irving found a still newer and richer
field for his fancy to work upon. He had not the analytic and
philosophical mind of a great historian, and the merits of his
_Conquest of Granada_ and _Life of Columbus_ are rather
_belletristisch_ than scientific. But he brought to these undertakings
the same eager love of the romantic past which had determined the
character of his writings in America and England, and the
result--whether we call it history or romance--is at all events
charming as literature. His _Life of Washington_--completed in
1859--was his _magnum opus_, and is accepted as standard authority.
_Mahomet and His Successors_, 1850, was comparatively a failure. But
of all Irving's biographies his _Life of Oliver Goldsmith_, 1849, was
the most spontaneous and perhaps the best. He did not impose it upon
himself as a task, but wrote it from a native and loving sympathy with
his subject, and it is, therefore, one of the choicest literary memoirs
in the language.
When Irving returned to America, in 1832, he was the recipient of
almost national honors. He had received the medal of the Royal Society
of Literature and the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford University, and had
made American literature known and respected abroad. In his modest
home at Sunnyside, on the banks of the river over which he had been the
first to throw the witchery of poetry and romance, he was attended to
the last by the admiring affection of his countrymen. He had the love
and praises of the foremost English writers of his own generation and
the generation which followed--of Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Thackeray,
and Dickens, some of whom had been among his personal friends. He is
not the greatest of American authors, but the influence of his writings
is sweet and wholesome, and it is in many ways fortunate that the first
American man of letters who made himself heard in Europe should have
been in all particulars a gentleman.
Connected with Irving, at least by name and locality, were a number of
authors who resided in the city of New York, and who are known as the
Knickerbocker writers, perhaps because they were contributors to the
_Knickerbocker Magazine_. One of these was James K. Paulding, a
connection of Irving by marriage, and his partner in the _Salmagundi_
papers. Paulding became Secretary of the Navy under Van Buren, and
lived down to the year 1860. He was a voluminous author, but his
writings had no power of continuance, and are already obsolete, with
the possible exception of his novel, the _Dutchman's Fireside_, 1831.
A finer spirit than Paulding was Joseph Rodman Drake, a young poet of
great promise, who died in 1820, at the age of twenty-five. Drake's
patriotic lyric, the _American Flag_, is certainly the most spirited
thing of the kind in our poetic literature, and greatly superior to
such national anthems as _Hail Columbia_ and the _Star-Spangled
Banner_. His _Culprit Fay_, published in 1819, was the best poem that
had yet appeared in America, if we except Bryant's _Thanatopsis_, which
was three years the elder. The _Culprit Fay_ was a fairy story, in
which, following Irving's lead, Drake undertook to throw the glamour of
poetry about the Highlands of the Hudson. Edgar Poe said that the poem
was fanciful rather than imaginative; but it is prettily and even
brilliantly fanciful, and has maintained its popularity to the present
time. Such verse as the following--which seems to show that Drake had
been reading Coleridge's _Christabel_, published three years
before--was something new in American poetry:
"The winds are whist and the owl is still,
The bat in the shelvy rock is hid,
And naught is heard on the lonely hill
But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill
Of the gauze-winged katydid,
And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will,
Who moans unseen, and ceaseless sings
Ever a note of wail and woe,
Till morning spreads her rosy wings,
And earth and sky in her glances glow."
Here we have, at last, the whip-poor-will, an American bird, and not
the conventional lark or nightingale, although the elves of the Old
World seem scarcely at home on the banks of the Hudson. Drake's memory
has been kept fresh not only by his own poetry, but by the beautiful
elegy written by his friend Fitz-Greene Halleck, the first stanza of
which is universally known;
"Green be the turf above thee,
Friend of my better days;
None knew thee but to love thee,
Nor named thee but to praise."
Halleck was born in Guilford, Connecticut, whither he retired in 1849,
and resided there till his death in 1867. But his literary career is
identified with New York. He was associated with Drake in writing the
_Croaker Papers_, a series of humorous and satirical verses contributed
in 1814 to the _Evening Post_. These were of a merely local and
temporary interest; but Halleck's fine ode, _Marco Bozzaris_--though
declaimed until it has become hackneyed--gives him a sure title to
remembrance; and his _Alnwick Castle_, a monody, half serious and half
playful on the contrast between feudal associations and modern life,
has much of that pensive lightness which characterizes Praed's best
_vers de societé_.
A friend of Drake and Halleck was James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851),
the first American novelist of distinction, and, if a popularity which
has endured for nearly three quarters of a century is any test, still
the most successful of all American novelists. Cooper was far more
intensely American than Irving, and his books reached an even wider
public. "They are published as soon as he produces them," said Morse,
the electrician, in 1833, "in thirty-four different places in Europe.
They have been seen by American travelers in the languages of Turkey
and Persia, in Constantinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan."
Cooper wrote altogether too much; he published, besides his fictions, a
_Naval History of the United States_, a series of naval biographies,
works of travel, and a great deal of controversial matter. He wrote
over thirty novels, the greater part of which are little better than
trash, and tedious trash at that. This is especially true of his
_tendenz_ novels and his novels of society. He was a man of strongly
marked individuality, fiery, pugnacious, sensitive to criticism, and
abounding in prejudices. He was embittered by the scurrilous attacks
made upon him by a portion of the American press, and spent a great
deal of time and energy in conducting libel suits against the
newspapers. In the same spirit he used fiction as a vehicle for attack
upon the abuses and follies of American life. Nearly all of his
novels, written with this design, are worthless. Nor was Cooper well
equipped by nature and temperament for depicting character and passion
in social life. Even in his best romances his heroines and his
"leading juveniles"--to borrow a term from the amateur stage--are
insipid and conventional. He was no satirist, and his humor was not of
a high order. He was a rapid and uneven writer, and, unlike Irving, he
had no style.
Where Cooper was great was in the story, in the invention of incidents
and plots, in a power of narrative and description in tales of wild
adventure which keeps the reader in breathless excitement to the end of
the book. He originated the novel of the sea and the novel of the
wilderness. He created the Indian of literature; and in this, his
peculiar field, although he has had countless imitators, he has had no
equals. Cooper's experiences had prepared him well for the kingship of
this new realm in the world of fiction. His childhood was passed on
the borders of Otsego Lake, when central New York was still a
wilderness, with boundless forests stretching westward, broken only
here and there by the clearings of the pioneers. He was taken from
college (Yale) when still a lad, and sent to sea in a merchant vessel,
before the mast. Afterward he entered the navy and did duty on the
high seas and upon Lake Ontario, then surrounded by virgin forests. He
married and resigned his commission in 1811, just before the outbreak
of the war with England, so that he missed the opportunity of seeing
active service in any of those engagements on the ocean and our great
lakes which were so glorious to American arms. But he always retained
an active interest in naval affairs.
His first successful novel was _The Spy_, 1821, a tale of the
Revolutionary War, the scene of which was laid in Westchester County,
N. Y., where the author was then residing. The hero of this story,
Harvey Birch, was one of the most skillfully drawn figures on his
canvas. In 1833 he published the _Pioneers_, a work somewhat overladen
with description, in which he drew for material upon his boyish
recollections of frontier life at Cooperstown. This was the first of
the series of five romances known as the _Leatherstocking Tales_. The
others were the _Last of the Mohicans_, 1826; the _Prairie_, 1827; the
_Pathfinder_, 1840; and the _Deerslayer_, 1841. The hero of this
series, Natty Bumpo, or "Leatherstocking," was Cooper's one great
creation in the sphere of character, his most original addition to the
literature of the world in the way of a new human type. This backwoods
philosopher--to the conception of whom the historic exploits of Daniel
Boone perhaps supplied some hints; unschooled, but moved by noble
impulses and a natural sense of piety and justice; passionately
attached to the wilderness, and following its westering edge even unto
the prairies--this man of the woods was the first real American in
fiction. Hardly less individual and vital were the various types of
Indian character, in Chingachgook, Uncas, Hist, and the Huron warriors.
Inferior to these, but still vigorously though somewhat roughly drawn,
were the waifs and strays of civilization, whom duty, or the hope of
gain, or the love of adventure, or the outlawry of crime had driven to
the wilderness--the solitary trapper, the reckless young frontiersman,
the officers and men of out-post garrisons. Whether Cooper's Indian
was the real being, or an idealized and rather melodramatic version of
the truth, has been a subject of dispute. However this be, he has
taken his place in the domain of art, and it is safe to say that his
standing there is secure. No boy will ever give him up.
Equally good with the _Leatherstocking_ novels, and equally national,
were Cooper's tales of the sea, or at least the best two of them--the
_Pilot_, 1833, founded upon the daring exploits of John Paul Jones, and
the _Red Rover_, 1828. But here, though Cooper still holds the sea, he
has had to admit competitors; and Britannia, who rules the waves in
song, has put in some claim to a share in the domain of nautical
fiction in the persons of Mr. W. Clark Russell and others. Though
Cooper's novels do not meet the deeper needs of the heart and the
imagination, their appeal to the universal love of a story is
perennial. We devour them when we are boys, and if we do not often
return to them when we are men, that is perhaps only because we have
read them before, and "know the ending." They are good yarns for the
forecastle and the camp-fire; and the scholar in his study, though he
may put the _Deerslayer_ or the _Last of the Mohicans_ away on the top
shelf, will take it down now and again, and sit up half the night over
it.
Before dismissing the _belles-lettres_ writings of this period, mention
should be made of a few poems of the fugitive kind which seem to have
taken a permanent place in popular regard. John Howard Payne, a native
of Long Island, a wandering actor and playwright, who died American
consul at Tunis in 1852, wrote about 1820 for Covent Garden Theater an
opera, entitled _Clari_, the libretto of which included the now famous
song of _Home, Sweet Home_. Its literary pretensions were of the
humblest kind, but it spoke a true word which touched the Anglo-Saxon
heart in its tenderest spot, and, being happily married to a plaintive
air, was sold by the hundred thousand, and is evidently destined to be
sung forever. A like success has attended the _Old Oaken Bucket_,
composed by Samuel Woodworth, a printer and journalist from
Massachusetts, whose other poems, of which two collections were issued
in 1818 and 1826, were soon forgotten. Richard Henry Wilde, an
Irishman by birth, a gentleman of scholarly tastes and accomplishments,
who wrote a great deal on Italian literature, and sat for several terms
in Congress as Representative of the State of Georgia, was the author
of the favorite song, _My Life is Like the Summer Rose_. Another
Southerner, and a member of a distinguished Southern family, was Edward
Coate Pinkney, who served nine years in the navy, and died in 1828, at
the age of twenty-six, having published in 1825 a small volume of
lyrical poems which had a fire and a grace uncommon at that time in
American verse. One of these, _A Health_, beginning,
"I fill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone."
though perhaps somewhat overpraised by Edgar Poe, has rare beauty of
thought and expression.
John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States (1825-29), was
a man of culture and literary tastes. He published his lectures on
rhetoric, delivered during his tenure of the Boylston Professorship at
Harvard in 1806-9; he left a voluminous diary, which has been edited
since his death in 1848; and among his experiments in poetry is one of
considerable merit, entitled _The Wants of Man_, an ironical sermon on
Goldsmith's text:
"Man wants but little here below,
Nor wants that little long."
As this poem is a curiously close anticipation of Dr. Holmes's
_Contentment_, so the very popular ballad, _Old Grimes_, written about
1818, by Albert Gorton Greene, an undergraduate of Brown University in
Rhode Island, is in some respects an anticipation of Holmes's quaintly
pathetic _Last Leaf_.
The political literature and public oratory of the United States during
this period, although not absolutely of less importance than that which
preceded and followed the Declaration of Independence and the adoption
of the Constitution, demands less relative attention in a history of
literature by reason of the growth of other departments of thought.
The age was a political one, but no longer exclusively political. The
debates of the time centered about the question of "State Rights," and
the main forum of discussion was the old Senate chamber, then made
illustrious by the presence of Clay, Webster, and Calhoun. The slavery
question, which had threatened trouble, was put off for a while by the
Missouri Compromise of 1820, only to break out more fiercely in the
debates on the Wilmot Proviso and the Kansas and Nebraska Bill.
Meanwhile the Abolition movement had been transferred to the press and
the platform. Garrison started his _Liberator_ in 1830, and the
Antislavery Society was founded in 1833. The Whig party, which had
inherited the constitutional principles of the old Federal party,
advocated internal improvements at national expense and a high
protective tariff. The State Rights party, which was strongest at the
South, opposed these views, and in 1832 South Carolina claimed the
right to "nullify" the tariff imposed by the general government. The
leader of this party was John Caldwell Calhoun, a South Carolinian, who
in his speech in the United States Senate, on February 13, 1832, on
Nullification and the Force Bill, set forth most authoritatively the
"Carolina doctrine." Calhoun was a great debater, but hardly a great
orator. His speeches are the arguments of a lawyer and a strict
constitutionalist, severely logical, and with a sincere conviction in
the soundness of his case. Their language is free from bad rhetoric;
the reasoning is cogent, but there is an absence of emotion and
imagination; they contain few quotable things, and no passages of
commanding eloquence, such as strew the orations of Webster and Burke.
They are not, in short, literature. Again, the speeches of Henry Clay,
of Kentucky, the leader of the Whigs, whose persuasive oratory is a
matter of tradition, disappoint in the reading. The fire has gone out
of them.
Not so with Daniel Webster, the greatest of American forensic orators,
if, indeed, he be not the greatest of all orators who have used the
English tongue. Webster's speeches are of the kind that have power to
move after the voice of the speaker is still. The thought and the
passion in them lay hold on feelings of patriotism more lasting than
the issues of the moment. It is, indeed, true of Webster's speeches,
as of all speeches, that they are known to posterity more by single
brilliant passages than as wholes. In oratory the occasion is of the
essence of the thing, and only those parts of an address which are
permanent and universal in their appeal take their place in literature.
But of such detachable passages there are happily many in Webster's
orations. One great thought underlay all his public life, the thought
of the Union--of American nationality. What in Hamilton had been a
principle of political philosophy had become in Webster a passionate
conviction. The Union was his idol, and he was intolerant of any
faction which threatened it from any quarter, whether the Nullifiers of
South Carolina or the Abolitionists of the North. It is this thought
which gives grandeur and elevation to all his utterances, and
especially to the wonderful peroration of his _Reply to Hayne_, on Mr.
Foot's resolution touching the sale of the public lands, delivered in
the Senate on January 26, 1830, whose closing words, "Liberty and
union, now and forever, one and inseparable," became the rallying cry
of a great cause. Similar in sentiment was his famous speech of March
7, 1850, _On the Constitution and the Union_, which gave so much
offense to the extreme Antislavery party, who held with Garrison that a
Constitution which protected slavery "was a league with death and a
covenant with hell." It is not claiming too much for Webster to assert
that the sentences of these and other speeches, memorized and declaimed
by thousands of school-boys throughout the North, did as much as any
single influence to train up a generation in hatred of secession, and
to send into the fields of the civil war armies of men animated with
the stern resolution to fight till the last drop of blood was shed,
rather than allow the Union to be dissolved.
The figure of this great senator is one of the most imposing in
American annals. The masculine force of his personality impressed
itself upon men of a very different stamp--upon the unworldly Emerson,
and upon the captious Carlyle, whose respect was not willingly accorded
to any contemporary, much less to a representative of American
democracy. Webster's looks and manner were characteristic. His form
was massive; his skull and jaw solid, the under-lip projecting, and the
mouth firmly and grimly shut; his complexion was swarthy, and his
black, deep-set eyes, under shaggy brows, glowed with a smoldering
fire. He was rather silent in society; his delivery in debate was
grave and weighty, rather than fervid. His oratory was massive, and
sometimes even ponderous. It may be questioned whether an American
orator of to-day, with intellectual abilities equal to Webster's--if
such a one there were--would permit himself the use of sonorous and
elaborate pictures like the famous period which follows: "On this
question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they
raised their flag against a power to which, for purposes of foreign
conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to
be compared--a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole
globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat,
following the sun and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth
with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of
England." The secret of this kind of oratory has been lost. The
present generation distrusts rhetorical ornament and likes something
swifter, simpler, and more familiar in its speakers. But every thing,
in declamation of this sort, depends on the way in which it is done.
Webster did it supremely well; a smaller man would merely have made
buncombe of it.
Among the legal orators of the time the foremost was Rufus Choate, an
eloquent pleader, and, like Webster, a United States senator from
Massachusetts. Some of his speeches, though excessively rhetorical,
have literary quality, and are nearly as effective in print as
Webster's own. Another Massachusetts orator, Edward Everett, who in
his time was successively professor in Harvard College, Unitarian
minister in Boston, editor of the _North American Review_, member of
both houses of Congress, minister to England, governor of his State,
and President of Harvard, was a speaker of great finish and elegance.
His addresses were mainly of the memorial and anniversary kind, and
were rather lectures and Phi. B. K. prolusions than speeches. Everett
was an instance of careful culture bestowed on a soil of no very great
natural richness. It is doubtful whether his classical orations on
Washington, the Republic, Bunker Hill Monument, and kindred themes,
have enough of the breath of life in them to preserve them much longer
in recollection.
New England, during these years, did not take that leading part in the
purely literary development of the country which it afterward assumed.
It had no names to match against those of Irving and Cooper. Drake and
Halleck--slender as was their performance in point of quantity--were
better poets than the Boston bards, Charles Sprague, whose _Shakespeare
Ode_, delivered at the Boston theater in 1833, was locally famous; and
Richard Henry Dana, whose longish narrative poem, the _Buccaneer_,
1827, once had admirers. But Boston has at no time been without a
serious intellectual life of its own, nor without a circle of highly
educated men of literary pursuits, even in default of great geniuses.
The _North American Review_, established in 1815, though it has been
wittily described as "ponderously revolving through space" for a few
years after its foundation, did not exist in an absolute vacuum, but
was scholarly, if somewhat heavy. Webster, to be sure, was a
Massachusetts man--as were Everett and Choate--but his triumphs were
won in the wider field of national politics. There was, however, a
movement at this time, in the intellectual life of Boston and eastern
Massachusetts, which, though not immediately contributory to the finer
kinds of literature, prepared the way, by its clarifying and
stimulating influences, for the eminent writers of the next generation.
This was the Unitarian revolt against Puritan orthodoxy, in which
William Ellery Channing was the principal leader. In a community so
intensely theological as New England, it was natural that any new
movement in thought should find its point of departure in the churches.
Accordingly, the progressive and democratic spirit of the age, which in
other parts of the country took other shapes, assumed in Massachusetts
the form of "liberal Christianity." Arminianism, Socinianism, and
other phases of anti-Trinitarian doctrine, had been latent in some of
the Congregational churches of Massachusetts for a number of years.
But about 1812 the heresy broke out openly, and within a few years from
that date most of the oldest and wealthiest church societies of Boston
and its vicinity had gone over to Unitarianism, and Harvard College had
been captured too. In the controversy that ensued, and which was
carried on in numerous books, pamphlets, sermons, and periodicals,
there were eminent disputants on both sides. So far as this
controversy was concerned with the theological doctrine of the Trinity
it has no place in a history of literature. But the issue went far
beyond that. Channing asserted the dignity of human nature against the
Calvinistic doctrine of innate depravity, and affirmed the rights of
human reason and man's capacity to judge of God. "We must start in
religion from our own souls," he said. And in his _Moral Argument
against Calvinism_, 1820, he wrote: "Nothing is gained to piety by
degrading human nature, for in the competency of this nature to know
and judge of God all piety has its foundation." In opposition to
Edwards's doctrine of necessity he emphasized the freedom of the will.
He maintained that the Calvinistic dogmas of original sin,
fore-ordination, election by grace, and eternal punishment were
inconsistent with the divine perfection, and made God a monster. In
Channing's view the great sanction of religious truth is the moral
sanction, is its agreement with the laws of conscience. He was a
passionate vindicator of the liberty of the individual, not only as
against political oppression, but against the tyranny of public opinion
over thought and conscience: "We were made for free action. This alone
is life, and enters into all that is good and great." This jealous
love of freedom inspired all that he did and wrote. It led him to join
the Antislavery party. It expressed itself in his elaborate
arraignment of Napoleon in the Unitarian organ, the _Christian
Examiner_, for 1827-28; in his _Remarks on Associations_, and his paper
_On the Character and Writings of John Milton_, 1826. This was his
most considerable contribution to literary criticism. It took for a
text Milton's recently discovered _Treatise on Christian Doctrine_--the
tendency of which was anti-Trinitarian--but it began with a general
defense of poetry against "those who are accustomed to speak of poetry
as light reading." This would now seem a somewhat superfluous
introduction to an article in any American review. But it shows the
nature of the _milieu_ through which the liberal movement in Boston had
to make its way. To re-assert the dignity and usefulness of the
beautiful arts was, perhaps, the chief service which the Massachusetts
Unitarians rendered to humanism. The traditional prejudice of the
Puritans against the ornamental side of life had to be softened before
polite literature could find a congenial atmosphere in New England. In
Channing's _Remarks on National Literature_, reviewing a work published
in 1823, he asks the question, "Do we possess what may be called a
national literature?" and answers it, by implication at least, in the
negative. That we do now possess a national literature is in great
part due to the influence of Channing and his associates, although his
own writings, being in the main controversial, and, therefore, of
temporary interest, may not themselves take rank among the permanent
treasures of that literature.
1. Washington Irving. _Knickerbocker's History of New York_. _The
Sketch Book_. _Bracebridge Hall_. _Tales of a Traveler_. _The
Alhambra_. _Life of Oliver Goldsmith_.
2. James Fenimore Cooper. _The Spy_. _The Pilot_. _The Red Rover_.
_The Leather-stocking Tales_.
3. Daniel Webster. _Great Speeches and Orations_. Boston: Little,
Brown & Co. 1879.
4. William Ellery Channing. _The Character and Writings of John
Milton_. _The Life and Character of Napoleon Bonaparte_. _Slavery_.
[Vols. I and II of the _Works of William E. Channing_. Boston: James
Munroe & Co. 1841.]
5. Joseph Rodman Drake. _The Culprit Fay_. _The American Flag_.
[_Selected Poems_. New York. 1835.]
6. Fitz-Greene Halleck. _Marco Bozzaris_. _Alnwick Castle_. _On the
Death of Drake_. [Poems. New York. 1827.]
[1]Compare Carlyle's Herr Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, in _Sartor Resartus_,
the author of the famous "Clothes Philosophy."
[Transcriber's Note: Earlier in this chapter is the abbreviation "Phi.
B. K.". The "Phi" replaces the actual Greek character that was in the
original text.]