THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS.
1837-1861.
With few exceptions, the men who have made American literature what it
is have been college graduates. And yet our colleges have not commonly
been, in themselves, literary centers. Most of them have been small
and poor, and situated in little towns or provincial cities. Their
alumni scatter far and wide immediately after graduation, and even
those of them who may feel drawn to a life of scholarship or letters
find little to attract them at the home of their _alma mater_, and seek
by preference the larger cities, where periodicals and publishing
houses offer some hope of support in a literary career. Even in the
older and better equipped universities the faculty is usually a corps
of working scholars, each man intent upon his specialty and rather
inclined to undervalue merely "literary" performance. In many cases
the fastidious and hypercritical turn of mind which besets the scholar,
the timid conservatism which naturally characterizes an ancient seat of
learning, and the spirit of theological conformity which suppresses
free discussion, have exerted their benumbing influence upon the
originality and creative impulse of their inmates. Hence it happens
that, while the contributions of American college teachers to the exact
sciences, to theology and philology, metaphysics, political philosophy,
and the severer branches of learning have been honorable and important,
they have as a class made little mark upon the general literature of
the country. The professors of literature in our colleges are usually
persons who have made no additions to literature, and the professors of
rhetoric seem ordinarily to have been selected to teach students how to
write for the reason that they themselves have never written any thing
that any one has ever read.
To these remarks the Harvard College of some fifty years ago offers
some striking exceptions. It was not the large and fashionable
university that it has lately grown to be, with its multiplied elective
courses, its numerous faculty, and its somewhat motley collection of
undergraduates; but a small school of the classics and mathematics,
with something of ethics, natural science, and the modern languages
added to its old-fashioned, scholastic curriculum, and with a very
homogeneous _clientèle_, drawn mainly from the Unitarian families of
eastern Massachusetts. Nevertheless a finer intellectual life, in many
respects, was lived at old Cambridge within the years covered by this
chapter than nowadays at the same place, or at any date in any other
American university town. The neighborhood of Boston, where the
commercial life has never so entirely overlain the intellectual as in
New York and Philadelphia, has been a standing advantage to Harvard
College. The recent upheaval in religious thought had secured
toleration and made possible that free and even audacious interchange
of ideas without which a literary atmosphere is impossible. From
these, or from whatever causes, it happened that the old Harvard
scholarship had an elegant and tasteful side to it, so that the dry
erudition of the schools blossomed into a generous culture, and there
were men in the professors' chairs who were no less efficient as
teachers because they were also poets, orators, wits, and men of the
world. In the seventeen years from 1821 to 1839 there were graduated
from Harvard College Emerson, Holmes, Sumner, Phillips, Motley,
Thoreau, Lowell, and Edward Everett Hale; some of whom took up their
residence at Cambridge, others at Boston, and others at Concord, which
was quite as much a spiritual suburb of Boston as Cambridge was. In
1836, when Longfellow became professor of modern languages at Harvard,
Sumner was lecturing in the Law School. The following year--in which
Thoreau took his bachelor's degree--witnessed the delivery of Emerson's
Phi Beta Kappa lecture on the _American Scholar_ in the college chapel,
and Wendell Phillips's speech on the _Murder of Lovejoy_ in Faneuil
Hall. Lowell, whose description of the impression produced by the
former of these famous addresses has been quoted in a previous chapter,
was an under-graduate at the time. He took his degree in 1838, and in
1855 succeeded Longfellow in the chair of modern languages. Holmes had
been chosen in 1847 professor of anatomy and physiology in the Medical
School--a position which he held until 1882. The historians, Prescott
and Bancroft, had been graduated in 1814 and 1817 respectively. The
former's first important publication, _Ferdinand and Isabella_,
appeared in 1837. Bancroft had been a tutor in the college in 1822-23,
and the initial volume of his _History of the United States_ was issued
in 1835. Another of the Massachusetts school of historical writers,
Francis Parkman, took his first degree at Harvard in 1844. Cambridge
was still hardly more than a village, a rural outskirt of Boston, such
as Lowell described it in his article, _Cambridge Thirty Years Ago_,
originally contributed to _Putnam's Monthly_ in 1853, and afterward
reprinted in his _Fireside Travels_, 1864. The situation of a
university scholar in old Cambridge was thus an almost ideal one.
Within easy reach of a great city, with its literary and social clubs,
its theaters, lecture courses, public meetings, dinner-parties, etc.,
he yet lived withdrawn in an academic retirement among elm-shaded
avenues and leafy gardens, the dome of the Boston Statehouse looming
distantly across the meadows where the Charles laid its "steel blue
sickle" upon the variegated, plush-like ground of the wide marsh.
There was thus, at all times during the quarter of a century embraced
between 1837 and 1861, a group of brilliant men resident in or about
Cambridge and Boston, meeting frequently and intimately, and exerting
upon one another a most stimulating influence. Some of the closer
circles--all concentric to the university--of which this group was
loosely composed were laughed at by outsiders as "Mutual Admiration
Societies." Such was, for instance, the "Five of Clubs," whose members
were Longfellow, Sumner, C. C. Felton, professor of Greek at Harvard,
and afterward president of the college; G. S. Hillard, a graceful
lecturer, essayist, and poet, of a somewhat amateurish kind; and Henry
R. Cleveland, of Jamaica Plain, a lover of books and a writer of them.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82), the most widely read and loved of
American poets--or, indeed, of all contemporary poets in England and
America--though identified with Cambridge for nearly fifty years, was a
native of Portland, Maine, and a graduate of Bowdoin College, in the
same class with Hawthorne. Since leaving college, in 1825, he had
studied and traveled for some years in Europe, and had held the
professorship of modern languages at Bowdoin. He had published several
text-books, a number of articles on the Romance languages and
literatures in the _North American Review_, a thin volume of metrical
translations from the Spanish, a few original poems in various
periodicals, and the pleasant sketches of European travel entitled
_Outre-Mer_. But Longfellow's fame began with the appearance in 1839
of his _Voices of the Night_. Excepting an earlier collection by
Bryant this was the first volume of real poetry published in New
England, and it had more warmth and sweetness, a greater richness and
variety, than Bryant's work ever possessed. Longfellow's genius was
almost feminine in its flexibility and its sympathetic quality. It
readily took the color of its surroundings and opened itself eagerly to
impressions of the beautiful from every quarter, but especially from
books. This first volume contained a few things written during his
student days at Bowdoin, one of which, a blank-verse piece on _Autumn_,
clearly shows the influence of Bryant's _Thanatopsis_. Most of these
juvenilia had nature for their theme, but they were not so sternly true
to the New England landscape as Thoreau or Bryant. The skylark and the
ivy appear among their scenic properties, and in the best of them,
_Woods in Winter_, it is the English "hawthorn" and not any American
tree, through which the gale is made to blow, just as later Longfellow
uses "rooks" instead of crows. The young poet's fancy was
instinctively putting out feelers toward the storied lands of the Old
World, and in his _Hymn of the Moravian Nuns of Bethlehem_ he
transformed the rude church of the Moravian sisters to a cathedral with
"glimmering tapers," swinging censers, chancel, altar, cowls, and "dim
mysterious aisle." After his visit to Europe Longfellow returned
deeply imbued with the spirit of romance. It was his mission to refine
our national taste by opening to American readers, in their own
vernacular, new springs of beauty in the literatures of foreign
tongues. The fact that this mission was interpretive, rather than
creative, hardly detracts from Longfellow's true originality. It
merely indicates that his inspiration came to him in the first instance
from other sources than the common life about him. He naturally began
as a translator, and this first volume contained, among other things,
exquisite renderings from the German of Uhland, Salis, and Müller, from
the Danish, French, Spanish, and Anglo-Saxon, and a few passages from
Dante. Longfellow remained all his life a translator, and in subtler
ways than by direct translation he infused the fine essence of European
poetry into his own. He loved
"Tales that have the rime of age
And chronicles of eld."
The golden light of romance is shed upon his page, and it is his habit
to borrow mediaeval and Catholic imagery from his favorite Middle Ages,
even when writing of American subjects. To him the clouds are hooded
friars, that "tell their beads in drops of rain;" the midnight winds
blowing through woods and mountain passes are chanting solemn masses
for the repose of the dying year, and the strain ends with the prayer--
"Kyrie, eleyson,
Christe, eleyson."
In his journal he wrote characteristically: "The black shadows lie upon
the grass like engravings in a book. Autumn has written his rubric on
the illuminated leaves, the wind turns them over and chants like a
friar." This in Cambridge, of a moonshiny night, on the first day of
the American October! But several of the pieces in _Voices of the
Night_ sprang more immediately from the poet's own inner experience.
The _Hymn to the Night_, the _Psalm of Life_, _The Reaper and the
Flowers_, _Footsteps of Angels_, _The Light of Stars_, and _The
Beleaguered City_ spoke of love, bereavement, comfort, patience, and
faith. In these lovely songs, and in many others of the same kind
which he afterward wrote, Longfellow touched the hearts of all his
countrymen. America is a country of homes, and Longfellow, as the poet
of sentiment and of the domestic affections, became and remains far
more general in his appeal than such a "cosmic" singer as Whitman, who
is still practically unknown to the "fierce democracy" to which he has
addressed himself. It would be hard to overestimate the influence for
good exerted by the tender feeling and the pure and sweet morality
which the hundreds of thousands of copies of Longfellow's writings,
that have been circulated among readers of all classes in America and
England, have brought with them.
Three later collections, _Ballads and Other Poems_, 1842, _The Belfry
of Bruges_, 1846; and _The Seaside and the Fireside_, 1850, comprise
most of what is noteworthy in Longfellow's minor poetry. The first of
these embraced, together with some renderings from the German and the
Scandinavian languages, specimens of stronger original work than the
author had yet put forth; namely, the two powerful ballads of _The
Skeleton in Armor_ and _The Wreck of the Hesperus_. The former of
these, written in the swift leaping meter of Drayton's _Ode to the
Cambro Britons on their Harp_, was suggested by the digging up of a
mail-clad skeleton at Fall River--a circumstance which the poet linked
with the traditions about the Round Tower at Newport, thus giving to
the whole the spirit of a Norse viking song of war and of the sea.
_The Wreck of the Hesperus_ was occasioned by the news of shipwrecks on
the coast near Gloucester and by the name of a reef--"Norman's
Woe"--where many of them took place. It was written one night between
twelve and three, and cost the poet, he said, "hardly an effort."
Indeed, it is the spontaneous ease and grace, the unfailing taste of
Longfellow's lines, which are their best technical quality. There is
nothing obscure or esoteric about his poetry. If there is little
passion or intellectual depth, there is always genuine poetic feeling,
often a very high order of imagination, and almost invariably the
choice of the right word. In this volume were also included _The
Village Blacksmith_ and _Excelsior_. The latter, and the _Psalm of
Life_, have had a "damnable iteration" which causes them to figure as
Longfellow's most popular pieces. They are by no means, however, among
his best. They are vigorously expressed common-places of that
hortatory kind which passes for poetry, but is, in reality, a vague
species of preaching.
In _The Belfry of Bruges_ and _The Seaside and the Fireside_ the
translations were still kept up, and among the original pieces were
_The Occupation of Orion_--the most imaginative of all Longfellow's
poems; _Seaweed_, which has very noble stanzas, the favorite _Old Clock
on the Stairs_, _The Building of the Ship_, with its magnificent
closing apostrophe to the Union, and _The Fire of Driftwood_, the
subtlest in feeling of any thing that the poet ever wrote. With these
were verses of a more familiar quality, such as _The Bridge_,
_Resignation_, and _The Day Is Done_, and many others, all reflecting
moods of gentle and pensive sentiment, and drawing from analogies in
nature or in legend lessons which, if somewhat obvious, were expressed
with perfect art. Like Keats, he apprehended every thing on its
beautiful side. Longfellow was all poet. Like Ophelia in Hamlet,
"Thought and affection, passion, hell itself,
_He_ turns to favor and to prettiness."
He cared very little about the intellectual movement of the age. The
transcendental ideas of Emerson passed over his head and left him
undisturbed. For politics he had that gentlemanly distaste which the
cultivated class in America had already begun to entertain. In 1842 he
printed a small volume of _Poems on Slavery_, which drew commendation
from his friend Sumner, but had nothing of the fervor of Whittier's or
Lowell's utterances on the same subject. It is interesting to compare
his journals with Hawthorne's _American Note Books_, and to observe in
what very different ways the two writers made prey of their daily
experiences for literary material. A favorite haunt of Longfellow's
was the bridge between Boston and Cambridgeport, the same which he put
into verse in his poem, _The Bridge_. "I always stop on the bridge,"
he writes in his journal; "tide waters are beautiful. From the ocean
up into the land they go, like messengers, to ask why the tribute has
not been paid. The brooks and rivers answer that there has been little
harvest of snow and rain this year. Floating sea-wood and kelp is
carried up into the meadows, as returning sailors bring oranges in
bandanna handkerchiefs to friends in the country." And again: "We
leaned for a while on the wooden rail and enjoyed the silvery
reflection on the sea, making sundry comparisons. Among other thoughts
we had this cheering one, that the whole sea was flashing with this
heavenly light, though we saw it only in a single track; the dark waves
are the dark providences of God; luminous, though not to us; and even
to ourselves in another position." "Walk on the bridge, both ends of
which are lost in the fog, like human life midway between two
eternities; beginning and ending in mist." In Hawthorne an allegoric
moaning is usually something deeper and subtler than this, and seldom
so openly expressed. Many of Longfellow's poems--the _Beleaguered
City_, for example--may be definitely divided into two parts; in the
first, a story is told or a natural phenomenon described; in the
second, the spiritual application of the parable is formally set forth.
This method became with him almost a trick of style, and his readers
learn to look for the _hoec fabula docet_ at the end as a matter of
course. As for the prevailing optimism in Longfellow's view of
life--of which the above passage is an instance--it seems to be in him
an affair of temperament, and not, as in Emerson, the result of
philosophic insight. Perhaps, however, in the last analysis optimism
and pessimism are subjective--the expression of temperament or
individual experience, since the facts of life are the same, whether
seen through Schopenhauer's eyes or through Emerson's. If there is any
particular in which Longfellow's inspiration came to him at first hand
and not through books, it is in respect to the aspects of the sea. On
this theme no American poet has written more beautifully and with a
keener sympathy than the author of _The Wreck of the Hesperus_ and of
_Seaweed_.
In 1847 was published the long poem of _Evangeline_. The story of the
Acadian peasant girl, who was separated from her lover in the
dispersion of her people by the English troops, and after weary
wanderings and a life-long search, found him at last, an old man dying
in a Philadelphia hospital, was told to Longfellow by the Rev. H. L.
Conolly, who had previously suggested it to Hawthorne as a subject for
a story. Longfellow, characteristically enough, "got up" the local
color for his poem from Haliburton's account of the dispersion of the
Grand-Pré Acadians, from Darby's _Geographical Description of
Louisiana_ and Watson's _Annals of Philadelphia_. He never needed to
go much outside of his library for literary impulse and material.
Whatever may be held as to Longfellow's inventive powers as a creator
of characters or an interpreter of American life, his originality as an
artist is manifested by his successful domestication in _Evangeline_ of
the dactylic hexameter, which no English poet had yet used with effect.
The English poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, who lived for a time in
Cambridge, followed Longfellow's example in the use of hexameter in his
_Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich_, so that we have now arrived at the
time--a proud moment for American letters--when the works of our
writers began to react upon the literature of Europe. But the beauty
of the descriptions in _Evangeline_ and the pathos--somewhat too drawn
out--of the story made it dear to a multitude of readers who cared
nothing about the technical disputes of Poe and other critics as to
whether or not Longfellow's lines were sufficiently "spondaic" to
represent truthfully the quantitative hexameters of Homer and Vergil.
In 1855 appeared _Hiawatha_, Longfellow's most aboriginal and
"American" book. The tripping trochaic measure he borrowed from the
Finnish epic _Kalevala_. The vague, child-like mythology of the Indian
tribes, with its anthropomorphic sense of the brotherhood between men,
animals, and the forms of inanimate nature, he took from Schoolcraft's
_Algic Researches_, 1839. He fixed forever, in a skillfully chosen
poetic form, the more inward and imaginative part of Indian character,
as Cooper had given permanence to its external and active side. Of
Longfellow's dramatic experiments, the _Golden Legend_, 1851, alone
deserves mention here. This was in his chosen realm, a tale taken from
the ecclesiastical annals of the Middle Ages, precious with martyrs'
blood and bathed in the rich twilight of the cloister. It contains
some of his best work, but its merit is rather poetic than dramatic,
although Ruskin praised it for the closeness with which it entered into
the temper of the monk.
Longfellow has pleased the people more than the critics. He gave
freely what he had, and the gift was beautiful. Those who have looked
in his poetry for something else than poetry, or for poetry of some
other kind, have not been slow to assert that he was a lady's poet--one
who satisfied callow youths and school-girls by uttering commonplaces
in graceful and musical shape, but who offered no strong meat for men.
Miss Fuller called his poetry thin, and the poet himself--or, rather, a
portrait of the poet which frontispieced an illustrated edition of his
works--a "dandy Pindar." This is not true of his poetry, or of the
best of it. But he had a singing and not a talking voice, and in his
prose one becomes sensible of a certain weakness. _Hyperion_, for
example, published in 1839, a loitering fiction, interspersed with
descriptions of European travel, is, upon the whole, a weak book,
overflowery in diction and sentimental in tone.
The crown of Longfellow's achievements as a translator was his great
version of Dante's _Divina Commedia_, published between 1867 and 1870.
It is a severely literal, almost a line for line, rendering. The meter
is preserved, but the rhyme sacrificed. If not the best English poem
constructed from Dante, it is at all events the most faithful and
scholarly paraphrase. The sonnets which accompanied it are among
Longfellow's best work. He seems to have been raised by daily
communion with the great Tuscan into a habit of deeper and more subtle
thought than is elsewhere common in his poetry.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809- ) is a native of Cambridge and a graduate
of Harvard in the class of '29; a class whose anniversary reunions he
has celebrated in something like forty distinct poems and songs. For
sheer cleverness and versatility Dr. Holmes is, perhaps, unrivaled
among American men of letters. He has been poet, wit, humorist,
novelist, essayist, and a college lecturer and writer on medical
topics. In all of these departments he has produced work which ranks
high, if not with the highest. His father, Dr. Abiel Holmes, was a
graduate of Yale and an orthodox minister of liberal temper, but the
son early threw in his lot with the Unitarians; and, as was natural to
a man of satiric turn and with a very human enjoyment of a fight, whose
youth was cast in an age of theological controversy, he has always had
his fling at Calvinism, and has prolonged the slogans of old battles
into a later generation; sometimes, perhaps, insisting upon them rather
wearisomely and beyond the limits of good taste. He had, even as an
undergraduate, a reputation for cleverness at writing comic verses, and
many of his good things in this kind, such as the _Dorchester Giant_
and the _Height of the Ridiculous_, were contributed to the
_Collegian_, a students' paper. But he first drew the attention of a
wider public by his spirited ballad of _Old Ironsides_--
"Ay! Tear her tattered ensign down!"--
composed about 1830, when it was proposed by the government to take to
pieces the unseaworthy hulk of the famous old man-of-war,
_Constitution_. Holmes's indignant protest--which has been a favorite
subject for school-boy declamation--had the effect of postponing the
vessel's fate for a great many years. From 1830-35 the young poet was
pursuing his medical studies in Boston and Paris, contributing now and
then some verses to the magazines. Of his life as a medical student in
Paris there are many pleasant reminiscences in his _Autocrat_ and other
writings, as where he tells, for instance, of a dinner-party of
Americans in the French capital, where one of the company brought tears
of homesickness into the eyes of his _sodales_ by saying that the
tinkle of the ice in the champagne-glasses reminded him of the
cow-bells in the rocky old pastures of New England. In 1836 he printed
his first collection of poems. The volume contained, among a number of
pieces broadly comic, like the _September Gale_, the _Music Grinders_,
and the _Ballad of the Oyster-man_--which at once became widely
popular--a few poems of a finer and quieter temper, in which there was
a quaint blending of the humorous and the pathetic. Such were _My
Aunt_ and the _Last Leaf_--which Abraham Lincoln found "inexpressibly
touching," and which it is difficult to read without the double tribute
of a smile and a tear. The volume contained also _Poetry: A Metrical
Essay_, read before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society,
which was the first of that long line of capital occasional poems which
Holmes has been spinning for half a century with no sign of fatigue and
with scarcely any falling off in freshness; poems read or spoken or
sung at all manner of gatherings, public and private, at Harvard
commencements, class days, and other academic anniversaries; at
inaugurations, centennials, dedications of cemeteries, meetings of
medical associations, mercantile libraries, Burns clubs, and New
England societies; at rural festivals and city fairs; openings of
theaters, layings of corner-stones, birthday celebrations, jubilees,
funerals, commemoration services, dinners of welcome or farewell to
Dickens, Bryant, Everett, Whittier, Longfellow, Grant, Farragut, the
Grand Duke Alexis, the Chinese embassy, and what not. Probably no poet
of any age or clime has written so much and so well to order. He has
been particularly happy in verses of a convivial kind, toasts for big
civic feasts, or post-prandial rhymes for the _petit comité_--the snug
little dinners of the chosen few; his
"The quaint trick to cram the pithy line
That cracks so crisply over bubbling wine."
And although he could write on occasion a _Song for a Temperance
Dinner_, he has preferred to chant the praise of the punch bowl and to
"feel the old convivial glow (unaided) o'er me stealing,
The warm, champagny, old-particular-brandy-punchy feeling."
It would be impossible to enumerate the many good things of this sort
which Holmes has written, full of wit and wisdom, and of humor lightly
dashed with sentiment and sparkling with droll analogies, sudden puns,
and unexpected turns of rhyme and phrase. Among the best of them are
_Nux Postcoenatica_, _A Modest Request_, _Ode for a Social Meeting_,
_The Boys_, and _Rip Van Winkle, M.D_. Holmes's favorite measure, in
his longer poems, is the heroic couplet which Pope's example seems to
have consecrated forever to satiric and didactic verse. He writes as
easily in this meter as if it were prose, and with much of Pope's
epigrammatic neatness. He also manages with facility the anapaestics
of Moore and the ballad stanza which Hood had made the vehicle for his
drolleries. It cannot be expected that verses manufactured to pop with
the corks and fizz with the champagne at academic banquets should much
outlive the occasion; or that the habit of producing such verses on
demand should foster in the producer that "high seriousness" which
Matthew Arnold asserts to be one mark of all great poetry. Holmes's
poetry is mostly on the colloquial level, excellent society-verse, but
even in its serious moments too smart and too pretty to be taken very
gravely; with a certain glitter, knowingness, and flippancy about it,
and an absence of that self-forgetfulness and intense absorption in its
theme which characterize the work of the higher imagination. This is
rather the product of fancy and wit. Wit, indeed, in the old sense of
quickness in the perception of analogies, is the staple of his mind.
His resources in the way of figure, illustration, allusion, and
anecdote are wonderful. Age cannot wither him nor custom stale his
infinite variety, and there is as much powder in his latest
pyrotechnics as in the rockets which he sent up half a century ago.
Yet, though the humorist in him rather outweighs the poet, he has
written a few things, like the _Chambered Nautilus_ and _Homesick in
Heaven_, which are as purely and deeply poetic as the _One-Hoss Shay_
and the _Prologue_ are funny. Dr. Holmes is not of the stuff of which
idealists and enthusiasts are made. As a physician and a student of
science, the facts of the material universe have counted for much with
him. His clear, positive, alert intellect was always impatient of
mysticism. He had the sharp eye of the satirist and the man of the
world for oddities of dress, dialect, and manners. Naturally the
transcendental movement struck him on its ludicrous side, and in his
_After-Dinner Poem_, read at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner at Cambridge in
1843, he had his laugh at the "Orphic odes" and "runes" of the
bedlamite seer and bard of mystery
"Who rides a beetle which he calls a 'sphinx.'
And O what questions asked in club-foot rhyme
Of Earth the tongueless, and the deaf-mute Time!
Here babbling 'Insight' shouts in Nature's ears
His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres;
There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb,
With 'Whence am I?' and 'Wherefore did I come?'"
Curiously enough, the author of these lines lived to write an
appreciative life of the poet who wrote the _Sphinx_. There was a good
deal of toryism or social conservatism in Holmes. He acknowledged a
preference for the man with a pedigree, the man who owned family
portraits, had been brought up in familiarity with books, and could
pronounce "view" correctly. Readers unhappily not of the "Brahmin
caste of New England" have sometimes resented as snobbishness Holmes's
harping on "family," and his perpetual application of certain favorite
shibboleths to other people's ways of speech. "The woman who
calc'lates is lost."
"Learning condemns beyond the reach of hope
The careless lips that speak of soap for soap. . . .
Do put your accents in the proper spot:
Don't, let me beg you, don't say 'How?' for 'What?'
The things named 'pants' in certain documents,
A word not made for gentlemen, but 'gents.'"
With the rest of "society" he was disposed to ridicule the abolition
movement as a crotchet of the eccentric and the long-haired. But when
the civil war broke out he lent his pen, his tongue, and his own flesh
and blood to the cause of the Union. The individuality of Holmes's
writings comes in part from their local and provincial bias. He has
been the laureate of Harvard College and the bard of Boston city, an
urban poet, with a cockneyish fondness for old Boston ways and
things--the Common and the Frog Pond, Faneuil Hall and King's Chapel
and the Old South, Bunker Hill, Long Wharf, the Tea Party, and the town
crier. It was Holmes who invented the playful saying that "Boston
Statehouse is the hub of the solar system."
In 1857 was started the _Atlantic Monthly_, a magazine which has
published a good share of the best work done by American writers within
the past generation. Its immediate success was assured by Dr. Holmes's
brilliant series of papers, the _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_,
1858, followed at once by the _Professor at the Breakfast Table_, 1859,
and later by the _Poet at the Breakfast Table_, 1873. The _Autocrat_
is its author's masterpiece, and holds the fine quintessence of his
humor, his scholarship, his satire, genial observation, and ripe
experience of men and cities. The form is as unique and original as
the contents, being something between an essay and a drama; a
succession of monologues or table-talks at a typical American
boarding-house, with a thread of story running through the whole. The
variety of mood and thought is so great that these conversations never
tire, and the prose is interspersed with some of the author's choicest
verse. The _Professor at the Breakfast Table_ followed too closely on
the heels of the _Autocrat_, and had less freshness. The third number
of the series was better, and was pleasantly reminiscent and slightly
garrulous, Dr. Holmes being now (1873) sixty-four years old, and
entitled to the gossiping privilege of age. The personnel of the
_Breakfast Table_ series, such as the landlady and the landlady's
daughter and her son, Benjamin Franklin; the schoolmistress, the young
man named John, the Divinity Student, the Kohinoor, the Sculpin, the
Scarabaeus, and the Old Gentleman who sits opposite, are not fully
drawn characters, but outlined figures, lightly sketched--as is the
Autocrat's wont--by means of some trick of speech, or dress, or
feature, but they are quite life-like enough for their purpose, which
is mainly to furnish listeners and foils to the eloquence and wit of
the chief talker.
In 1860 and 1867 Holmes entered the field of fiction with two
"medicated novels," _Elsie Venner_ and the _Guardian Angel_. The first
of these was a singular tale, whose heroine united with her very
fascinating human attributes something of the nature of a serpent; her
mother having been bitten by a rattlesnake a few months before the
birth of the girl, and kept alive meanwhile by the use of powerful
antidotes. The heroine of the _Guardian Angel_ inherited lawless
instincts from a vein of Indian blood in her ancestry. These two books
were studies of certain medico-psychological problems. They preached
Dr. Holmes's favorite doctrines of heredity and of the modified nature
of moral responsibility by reason of transmitted tendencies which limit
the freedom of the will. In _Elsie Venner_, in particular, the weirdly
imaginative and speculative character of the leading motive suggests
Hawthorne's method in fiction, but the background and the subsidiary
figures have a realism that is in abrupt contrast with this, and gives
a kind of doubleness and want of keeping to the whole. The Yankee
characters, in particular, and the satirical pictures of New England
country life are open to the charge of caricature. In the _Guardian
Angel_ the figure of Byles Gridley, the old scholar, is drawn with
thorough sympathy, and though some of his acts are improbable, he is,
on the whole, Holmes's most vital conception in the region of dramatic
creation.
James Russell Lowell (1819- ), the foremost of American critics and of
living American poets, is, like Holmes, a native of Cambridge, and,
like Emerson and Holmes, a clergyman's son. In 1855 he succeeded
Longfellow as professor of modern languages in Harvard College. Of
late years he has held important diplomatic posts, like Everett,
Irving, Bancroft, Motley, and other Americans distinguished in letters,
having been United States minister to Spain, and, under two
administrations, to the court of St. James. Lowell is not so
spontaneously and exclusively a poet as Longfellow, and his popularity
with the average reader has never been so great. His appeal has been
to the few rather than the many, to an audience of scholars and of the
judicious rather than to the "groundlings" of the general public.
Nevertheless his verse, though without the evenness, instinctive grace,
and unerring good taste of Longfellow's, has more energy and a stronger
intellectual fiber, while in prose he is very greatly the superior.
His first volume, _A Year's Life_, 1841, gave some promise. In 1843 he
started a magazine, the _Pioneer_, which only reached its third number,
though it counted among its contributors Hawthorne, Poe, Whittier, and
Miss Barrett (afterward Mrs. Browning). A second volume of poems,
printed in 1844, showed a distinct advance, in such pieces as the
_Shepherd of King Admetus_, _Rhoecus_, a classical myth, told in
excellent blank verse, and the same in subject with one of Landor's
polished intaglios; and the _Legend of Brittany_, a narrative poem,
which had fine passages, but no firmness in the management of the
story. As yet, it was evident, the young poet had not found his theme.
This came with the outbreak of the Mexican War, which was unpopular in
New England, and which the Free Soil party regarded as a slave-holders'
war waged without provocation against a sister republic, and simply for
the purpose of extending the area of slavery.
In 1846, accordingly, the _Biglow Papers_ began to appear in the
_Boston Courier_, and were collected and published in book form in
1848. These were a series of rhymed satires upon the government and
the war party, written in the Yankee dialect, and supposed to be the
work of Hosea Biglow, a home-spun genius in a down-east country town,
whose letters to the editor were indorsed and accompanied by the
comments of the Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., pastor of the First Church in
Jaalam, and (prospective) member of many learned societies. The first
paper was a derisive address to a recruiting sergeant, with a
denunciation of the "nigger-drivin' States" and the "Northern
dough-faces;" a plain hint that the North would do better to secede
than to continue doing dirty work for the South; and an expression of
those universal peace doctrines which were then in the air, and to
which Longfellow gave serious utterance in his _Occultation of Orion_.
"Ez for war, I call it murder--
There you hev it plain an' flat;
I don't want to go no furder
Than my Testyment for that;
God hez said so plump an' fairly,
It's as long as it is broad,
An' you've gut to git up airly
Ef you want to take in God."
The second number was a versified paraphrase of a letter received from
Mr. Birdofredom Sawin, "a yung feller of our town that was cussed fool
enuff to goe atrottin inter Miss Chiff arter a dram and fife," and who
finds when he gets to Mexico that
"This kind o' sogerin' aint a mite like our October trainin'."
Of the subsequent papers the best was, perhaps, _What Mr. Robinson
Thinks_, an election ballad, which caused universal laughter, and was
on every body's tongue.
The _Biglow Papers_ remain Lowell's most original contribution to
American literature. They are, all in all, the best political satires
in the language, and unequaled as portraitures of the Yankee character,
with its cuteness, its homely wit, and its latent poetry. Under the
racy humor of the dialect--which became in Lowell's hands a medium of
literary expression almost as effective as Burns's Ayrshire
Scotch--burned that moral enthusiasm and that hatred of wrong and
deification of duty--"Stern daughter of the voice of God"--which, in
the tough New England stock, stands instead of the passion in the blood
of southern races. Lowell's serious poems on political questions, such
as the _Present Crisis_, _Ode to Freedom_, and the _Capture of Fugitive
Slaves_, have the old Puritan fervor, and such lines as
"They are slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three,"
and the passage beginning
"Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,"
became watchwords in the struggle against slavery and disunion. Some
of these were published in his volume of 1848 and the collected edition
of his poems, in two volumes, issued in 1850. These also included his
most ambitious narrative poem, the _Vision of Sir Launfal_, an
allegorical and spiritual treatment of one of the legends of the Holy
Grail. Lowell's genius was not epical, but lyric and didactic. The
merit of _Sir Launfal_ is not in the telling of the story, but in the
beautiful descriptive episodes, one of which, commencing,
"And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then if ever come perfect days,"
is as current as any thing that he has written. It is significant of
the lack of a natural impulse toward narrative invention in Lowell
that, unlike Longfellow and Holmes, he never tried his hand at a novel.
One of the most important parts of a novelist's equipment he certainly
possesses, namely, an insight into character and an ability to
delineate it. This gift is seen especially in his sketch of Parson
Wilbur, who edited the _Biglow Papers_ with a delightfully pedantic
introduction, glossary, and notes; in the prose essay _On a Certain
Condescension in Foreigners_, and in the uncompleted poem, _Fitz Adam's
Story_. See also the sketch of Captain Underhill in the essay on _New
England Two Centuries Ago_.
The _Biglow Papers_ when brought out in a volume were prefaced by
imaginary notices of the press, including a capital parody of Carlyle,
and a reprint from the "Jaalam Independent Blunderbuss," of the first
sketch--afterward amplified and enriched--of that perfect Yankee idyl,
_The Courtin'_. Between 1862 and 1865 a second series of _Biglow
Papers_ appeared, called out by the events of the civil war. Some of
these, as, for instance, _Jonathan to John_, a remonstrance with
England for her unfriendly attitude toward the North, were not inferior
to any thing in the earlier series; and others were even superior as
poems, equal, indeed, in pathos and intensity to any thing that Lowell
has written in his professedly serious verse. In such passages the
dialect wears rather thin, and there is a certain incongruity between
the rustic spelling and the vivid beauty and power and the figurative
cast of the phrase in stanzas like the following:
"Wut's words to them whose faith an' truth
On war's red techstone rang true metal,
Who ventered life an' love an' youth
For the gret prize o' death in battle?
To him who, deadly hurt, agen
Flashed on afore the charge's thunder,
Tippin' with fire the bolt of men
That rived the rebel line asunder?"
Charles Sumner, a somewhat heavy person, with little sense of humor,
wished that the author of the _Biglow Papers_ "could have used good
English." In the lines just quoted, indeed, the bad English adds
nothing to the effect. In 1848 Lowell wrote _A Fable for Critics_,
something after the style of Sir John Suckling's _Session of the
Poets_; a piece of rollicking doggerel in which he surveyed the
American Parnassus, scattering about headlong fun, sharp satire, and
sound criticism in equal proportion. Never an industrious workman,
like Longfellow, at the poetic craft, but preferring to wait for the
mood to seize him, he allowed eighteen years to go by, from 1850 to
1868, before publishing another volume of verse. In the latter year
appeared _Under the Willows_, which contains some of his ripest and
most perfect work, notably _A Winter Evening Hymn to my Fire_, with its
noble and touching close--suggested by, perhaps, at any rate recalling,
the dedication of Goethe's _Faust_,
"Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten;"
the subtle _Footpath_ and _In the Twilight_, the lovely little poems
_Auf Wiedersehen_ and _After the Funeral_, and a number of spirited
political pieces, such as _Villa Franca_ and the _Washers of the
Shroud_. This volume contained also his _Ode Recited at the Harvard
Commemoration_ in 1865. This, although uneven, is one of the finest
occasional poems in the language, and the most important contribution
which our civil war has made to song. It was charged with the grave
emotion of one who not only shared the patriotic grief and exultation
of his _alma mater_ in the sacrifice of her sons, but who felt a more
personal sorrow in the loss of kindred of his own, fallen in the front
of battle. Particularly note-worthy in this memorial ode are the
tribute to Abraham Lincoln, the third strophe beginning, "Many loved
Truth;" the exordium, "O Beautiful! my Country! ours once more!" and
the close of the eighth strophe, where the poet chants of the youthful
heroes who
"Come transfigured back,
Secure from change in their high-hearted ways,
Beautiful evermore and with the rays
Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation."
From 1857 to 1862 Lowell edited the _Atlantic Monthly_, and from 1863
to 1872 the _North American Review_. His prose, beginning with an
early volume of _Conversations on Some of the Old Poets_, 1844, has
consisted mainly of critical essays on individual writers, such as
Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Emerson, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Pope, Carlyle,
etc., together with papers of a more miscellaneous kind, like
_Witchcraft_, _New England Two Centuries Ago_, _My Garden
Acquaintance_, _A Good Word for Winter_, _Abraham Lincoln_, etc., etc.
Two volumes of these were published in 1870 and 1876, under the title
_Among My Books_, and another, _My Study Windows_, in 1871. As a
literary critic Lowell ranks easily among the first of living writers.
His scholarship is thorough, his judgment keen, and he pours out upon
his page an unwithholding wealth of knowledge, humor, wit, and
imagination from the fullness of an overflowing mind. His prose has
not the chastened correctness and "low tone" of Matthew Arnold's. It
is rich, exuberant, and, sometimes overfanciful, running away into
excesses of allusion or following the lead of a chance pun so as
sometimes to lay itself open to the charge of pedantry and bad taste.
Lowell's resources in the way of illustration and comparison are
endless, and the readiness of his wit and his delight in using it put
many temptations in his way. Purists in style accordingly take offense
at his saying that "Milton is the only man who ever got much poetry out
of a cataract, and that was a cataract in his eye," or of his speaking
of "a gentleman for whom the bottle before him reversed the wonder of
the stereoscope and substituted the Gascon _v_ for the _b_ in
binocular," which is certainly a puzzling and roundabout fashion of
telling us that he had drunk so much that he saw double. The critics
also find fault with his coining such words as "undisprivacied," and
with his writing such lines as the famous one--from _The Cathedral_,
1870--
"Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman."
It must be acknowledged that his style lacks the crowning grace of
simplicity, but it is precisely by reason of its allusive quality that
scholarly readers take pleasure in it. They like a diction that has
stuff in it and is woven thick, and where a thing is said in such a way
as to recall many other things.
Mention should be made, in connection with this Cambridge circle, of
one writer who touched its circumference briefly. This was Sylvester
Judd, a graduate of Yale, who entered the Harvard Divinity School in
1837, and in 1840 became minister of a Unitarian church in Augusta,
Maine. Judd published several books, but the only one of them at all
rememberable was _Margaret_, 1845, a novel of which, Lowell said, in _A
Fable for Critics_, that it was "the first Yankee book with the soul of
Down East in it." It was very imperfect in point of art, and its
second part--a rhapsodical description of a sort of Unitarian
Utopia--is quite unreadable. But in the delineation of the few chief
characters and of the rude, wild life of an outlying New England
township just after the close of the Revolutionary War, as well as in
the tragic power of the catastrophe, there was genius of a high order.
As the country has grown older and more populous, and works in all
departments of thought have multiplied, it becomes necessary to draw
more strictly the line between the literature of knowledge and the
literature of power. Political history, in and of itself, scarcely
falls within the limits of this sketch, and yet it cannot be altogether
dismissed, for the historian's art, at its highest, demands
imagination, narrative skill, and a sense of unity and proportion in
the selection and arrangement of his facts, all of which are literary
qualities. It is significant that many of our best historians have
begun authorship in the domain of imaginative literature: Bancroft with
an early volume of poems; Motley with his historical romances, _Merry
Mount_ and _Morton's Hope_; and Parkman with a novel, _Vassall Morton_.
The oldest of that modern group of writers that have given America an
honorable position in the historical literature of the world was
William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859). Prescott chose for his theme
the history of the Spanish conquests in the New World, a subject full
of romantic incident and susceptible of that glowing and perhaps
slightly overgorgeous coloring which he laid on with a liberal hand.
His completed histories, in their order, are the _Reign of Ferdinand
and Isabella_, 1837; the _Conquest of Mexico_, 1843--a topic which
Irving had relinquished to him; and the _Conquest of Peru_, 1847.
Prescott was fortunate in being born to leisure and fortune, but he had
difficulties of another kind to overcome. He was nearly blind, and had
to teach himself Spanish and look up authorities through the help of
others, and to write with a noctograph or by amanuenses.
George Bancroft (1800-91) issued the first volume of his great _History
of the United States_ in 1834, and exactly half a century later the
final volume of the work, bringing the subject down to 1789. Bancroft
had studied at Göttingen, and imbibed from the German historian Heeren
the scientific method of historical study. He had access to original
sources, in the nature of collections and state papers in the
governmental archives of Europe, of which no American had hitherto been
able to avail himself. His history, in thoroughness of treatment,
leaves nothing to be desired, and has become the standard authority on
the subject. As a literary performance merely, it is somewhat wanting
in flavor, Bancroft's manner being heavy and stiff when compared with
Motley's or Parkman's. The historian's services to his country have
been publicly recognized by his successive appointments as secretary of
the navy, minister to England, and minister to Germany.
The greatest, on the whole, of American historians was John Lothrop
Motley (1814-77), who, like Bancroft, was a student at Göttingen and
United States minister to England. His _Rise of the Dutch Republic_,
1856, and _History of the United Netherlands_, published in
installments from 1861 to 1868, equaled Bancroft's work in scientific
thoroughness and philosophic grasp, and Prescott's in the picturesque
brilliancy of the narrative, while it excelled them both in its
masterly analysis of great historic characters, reminding the reader,
in this particular, of Macaulay's figure-painting. The episodes of the
siege of Antwerp and the sack of the cathedral, and of the defeat and
wreck of the Spanish Armada, are as graphic as Prescott's famous
description of Cortez's capture of the city of Mexico; while the elder
historian has nothing to compare with Motley's vivid personal sketches
of Queen Elizabeth, Philip the Second, Henry of Navarre, and William
the Silent. The _Life of John of Barneveld_, 1874, completed this
series of studies upon the history of the Netherlands, a theme to which
Motley was attracted because the heroic struggle of the Dutch for
liberty offered, in some respects, a parallel to the growth of
political independence in Anglo-Saxon communities, and especially in
his own America.
The last of these Massachusetts historical writers whom we shall
mention is Francis Parkman (1823- ), whose subject has the advantage
of being thoroughly American. His _Oregon Trail_, 1847, a series of
sketches of prairie and Rocky Mountain life, originally contributed to
the _Knickerbocker Magazine_, displays his early interest in the
American Indians. In 1851 appeared his first historical work, the
_Conspiracy of Pontiac_. This has been followed by the series entitled
_France and England in North America_, the six successive parts of
which are as follows: the _Pioneers of France in the New World_, the
_Jesuits in North America_; _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great
West_; the _Old Régime in Canada_; _Count Frontenac and New France_;
and _Montcalm and Wolfe_. These narratives have a wonderful vividness,
and a romantic interest not inferior to Cooper's novels. Parkman made
himself personally familiar with the scenes which he described, and
some of the best descriptions of American woods and waters are to be
found in his histories. If any fault is to be found with his books,
indeed, it is that their picturesqueness and "fine writing" are a
little in excess.
The political literature of the years from 1837 to 1861 hinged upon the
antislavery struggle. In this "irrepressible conflict" Massachusetts
led the van. Garrison had written in his _Liberator_, in 1830, "I will
be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. I am in
earnest; I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a
single inch; and I will be heard." But the Garrisonian abolitionists
remained for a long time, even in the North, a small and despised
faction. It was a great point gained when men of education and social
standing, like Wendell Phillips (1811-84) and Charles Sumner (1811-74),
joined themselves to the cause. Both of these were graduates of
Harvard and men of scholarly pursuits. They became the representative
orators of the antislavery party, Phillips on the platform and Sumner
in the Senate. The former first came before the public in his fiery
speech, delivered in Faneuil Hall December 8, 1837, before a meeting
called to denounce the murder of Lovejoy, who had been killed at Alton,
Ill., while defending his press against a pro-slavery mob. Thenceforth
Phillips's voice was never idle in behalf of the slave. His eloquence
was impassioned and direct, and his English singularly pure, simple,
and nervous. He is perhaps nearer to Demosthenes than any other
American orator. He was a most fascinating platform speaker on themes
outside of politics, and his lecture on the _Lost Arts_ was a favorite
with audiences of all sorts.
Sumner was a man of intellectual tastes, who entered politics
reluctantly and only in obedience to the resistless leading of his
conscience. He was a student of literature and art; a connoisseur of
engravings, for example, of which he made a valuable collection. He
was fond of books, conversation, and foreign travel, and in Europe,
while still a young man, had made a remarkable impression in society.
But he left all this for public life, and in 1851 was elected as
Webster's successor to the Senate of the United States. Thereafter he
remained the leader of the abolitionists in Congress until slavery was
abolished. His influence throughout the North was greatly increased by
the brutal attack upon him in the Senate chamber in 1856 by "Bully
Brooks" of South Carolina. Sumner's oratory was stately and somewhat
labored. While speaking he always seemed, as has been wittily said, to
be surveying a "broad landscape of his own convictions." His most
impressive qualities as a speaker were his intense moral earnestness
and his thorough knowledge of his subject. The most telling of his
parliamentary speeches are perhaps his speech _On the Kansas-Nebraska
Bill_, of February 3, 1854, and _On the Crime against Kansas_, May 19
and 20, 1856; of his platform addresses, the oration on the _True
Grandeur of Nations_.
1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. _Voices of the Night_. _The Skeleton
in Armor_. _The Wreck of the Hesperus_. _The Village Blacksmith_.
_The Belfry of Bruges, and Other Poems_ (1846). _By the Seaside_.
_Hiawatha_. _Tales of a Wayside Inn_.
2. Oliver Wendell Holmes. _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_. _Elsie
Venner_. _Old Ironsides_. _The Last Leaf_. _My Aunt_. _The Music
Grinders_. _On Lending a Punch-Bowl_. _Nux Postcoenatica_. _A Modest
Request_. _The Living Temple_. _Meeting of the Alumni of Harvard
College_. _Homesick in Heaven_. _Epilogue to the Breakfast Table
Series_. _The Boys_. _Dorothy Q_. _The Iron Gate_.
3. James Russell Lowell. _The Biglow Papers_ (two series). _Under the
Willows, and Other Poems_ (1868). _Rhoecus_. _The Shepherd of King
Admetus_. _The Vision of Sir Launfal_. _The Present Crisis_. _The
Dandelion_. _The Birch Tree_. _Beaver Brook_. _Essays on Chaucer_.
_Shakespeare Once More_. _Dryden_. _Emerson, the Lecturer_.
_Thoreau_. _My Garden Acquaintance_. _A Good Word for Winter_. _A
Certain Condescension in Foreigners_.
4. William Hickling Prescott. _The Conquest of Mexico_.
5. John Lothrop Motley. _The United Netherlands_.
6. Francis Parkman. _The Oregon Trail_. _The Jesuits in North
America_.
7. _Representative American Orations_, volume v. Edited by Alexander
Johnston. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1884.
[Transcriber's note: In the poem fragment "soap for soap" the o's in
each "soap" must be rendered with Unicode to appear correctly--in the
first "soap", o-breve (Ux014F); in the second, o-macron (Ux014D).]