SOCIETY showed great interest in the statesmen or preachers who won
its favor, and earnestly discussed the value of political or religious
dogmas, without betraying a wish to subject itself ever again to the
rigor of a strict creed in politics or religion. In a similar spirit it
touched here and there, with a light hand, the wide circuit of what was
called _belles lettres_, without showing severity either in taste or
temper.
For the first four or five years of the century, Dennie’s “Portfolio”
contained almost everything that was produced in the United States
under the form of light literature. The volumes of the “Portfolio” for
that period had the merit of representing the literary efforts of the
time, for Philadelphia insisted on no standard of taste so exacting
as to exclude merit, or even dulness, in any literary form. Jacobins,
as Dennie called Democrats, were not admitted into the circle of the
“Portfolio;” but Jacobins rarely troubled themselves with _belles
lettres_.
The “Portfolio” reflected a small literary class scattered throughout
the country, remarkable chiefly for close adhesion to established
English ideas. The English standard was then extravagantly Tory, and
the American standard was the same. At first sight the impression was
strange. A few years later, no ordinary reader could remember that
ideas so illiberal had seriously prevailed among educated Americans.
By an effort, elderly men could, in the next generation, recall a
time when they had been taught that Oliver Cromwell was a monster
of wickedness and hypocrisy; but they could hardly believe that at
any period an American critic coldly qualified “Paradise Lost,” and
“Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints,” as good poetry, though
written by a Republican and an enemy of established order. This was
the tone of Dennie’s criticism, and so little was it confined to him
that even young Buckminster, in his Phi Beta Kappa Oration of 1809,
which was regarded as making almost an epoch in American literature,
spoke of Milton’s eyes as “quenched in the service of a vulgar and
usurping faction,” and of Milton’s life as “a memorable instance of the
temporary degradation of learning.” Buckminster was then remonstrating
against the influence of politics upon letters rather than expressing
a political sentiment, but his illustration was colored by the general
prejudices of British Toryism. Half a century before, Dr. Johnson had
taken the tone of Tory patronage toward Milton’s genius, and Johnson
and Burke were still received in America as final authorities for
correct opinion in morals, literature, and politics. The “Portfolio”
regarded Johnson not only as a “superlative” moralist and politician,
but also as a “sublime” critic and a “transcendent” poet. Burke and
Cicero stood on the same level, as masters before whose authority
criticism must silently bow.
Yet side by side with these conventional standards, the “Portfolio”
showed tendencies which seemed inconsistent with conservatism,--a
readiness to welcome literary innovations contradicting every
established canon. No one would have supposed that the critic who
accepted Johnson and Pope as transcendent poets, should also delight
in Burns and Wordsworth; yet Dennie was unstinted in praise of
poetry which, as literature, was hardly less revolutionary than the
writings of Godwin in politics. Dennie lost no opportunity of praising
Coleridge, and reprinted with enthusiasm the simplest ballads of
Wordsworth. Moore was his personal friend, and Moore’s verses his
models. Wherever his political prejudices were untouched, he loved
novelty. He seemed to respect classical authority only because it was
established, but his literary instincts were broader than those of
Jefferson.
The original matter of the “Portfolio” was naturally unequal, and
for the most part hardly better than that of a college magazine.
Dennie was apt to be commonplace, trivial, and dull. His humor was
heavy and commonly coarse; he allowed himself entire freedom, and no
little grossness of taste. Of scholarship, or scholarly criticism, his
paper showed great want. He tried to instruct as well as to amuse,
but society soon passed the stage to which his writing belonged.
The circulation of the “Portfolio” probably never exceeded fifteen
hundred copies, and Dennie constantly complained that the paper
barely supported itself. When the Bostonians, in the year 1805, began
to feel the spirit of literary ambition, they took at once a stride
beyond Dennie’s power, and established a monthly magazine called the
“Anthology and Boston Review,” which in 1806 numbered four hundred
and forty subscribers. The undertaking was doubly remarkable; for the
Anthology Society which supported the Review combined with it the
collection of a library, limited at first to periodical publications,
which expanded slowly into the large and useful library known as the
Boston Athenæum. The Review and Library quickly became the centre of
literary taste in Boston, and, in the words of Josiah Quincy many years
afterward, might be considered as a revival of polite learning in
America. The claim was not unreasonable, for the Review far surpassed
any literary standards then existing in the United States, and was not
much inferior to any in England; for the Edinburgh was established only
in 1802, and the Quarterly not till 1809.
The Anthology Society, which accomplished the feat of giving to Boston
for the first time the lead of American literary effort, consisted
largely of clergymen, and represented, perhaps unintentionally, the
coming Unitarian movement. Its president and controlling spirit had no
sympathy with either division of the Congregational Church, but was a
clergyman of the Church of England. John Sylvester John Gardiner, the
rector of Trinity, occupied a peculiar position in Boston. Of American
descent, but English birth and education, he was not prevented by the
isolation of his clerical character from taking an active part in
affairs, and his activity was sometimes greater than his discretion.
His political sermons rivalled those of the Congregational ministers
Osgood and Parish, in their violence against Jefferson and the national
government; his Federalism was that of the Essex Junto, with a more
decided leaning to disunion; but he was also an active and useful
citizen, ready to take his share in every good work. When he became
president of the Anthology Society, he was associated with a clergyman
of Unitarian opinions as vice-president,--the Rev. William Emerson, a
man of high reputation in his day, but better known in after years as
the father of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The first editor was Samuel Cooper
Thacher, to whom, ten years afterward, Channing addressed his earliest
controversial letter. Young Buckminster and William Tudor, a Boston
man, who for the next twenty years was active in the literary life of
Massachusetts, were also original members. The staff of the “Anthology”
was greatly superior to ordinary editorial resources; and in a short
time the Review acquired a reputation for ability and sharpness of
temper never wholly forgiven. Its unpopularity was the greater because
its aggressiveness took the form of assaults on Calvinism, which
earned the ill-will of the Congregational clergy.
Buckminster and Channing were the editor’s closest friends, and their
liberality of thought was remarkable for the time and place; yet the
point from which the liberality of Boston started would have been
regarded in most parts of the Union as conservative. Channing’s fear of
France and attachment to England were superstitious.
“I will not say,” began his Fast Day Sermon in 1810, “that the
present age is as strongly marked or distinguished from all
other ages as that in which Jesus Christ appeared; but with
that single exception, perhaps the present age is the most
eventful the world has ever known. We live in times which have
no parallel in past ages; in times when the human character has
almost assumed a new form; in times of peculiar calamity, of
thick darkness, and almost of despair.... The danger is so vast,
so awful, and so obvious, that the blindness, the indifference,
which prevail argue infatuation, and give room for apprehension
that nothing can rouse us to those efforts by which alone the
danger can be averted. Am I asked what there is so peculiar and
so tremendous in the times in which we live?... I answer: In the
very heart of Europe, in the centre of the civilized world, a
new power has suddenly arisen on the ruins of old institutions,
peculiar in its character, and most ruinous in its influence.”
While Channing felt for France the full horror of his Federalist
principles, he regarded England with equivalent affection.
“I feel a peculiar interest in England,” he explained in a note
appended to the Fast Day Sermon; “for I believe that there
Christianity is exerting its best influences on the human
character; that there the perfections of human nature, wisdom,
virtue, and piety are fostered by excellent institutions, and
are producing the delightful fruits of domestic happiness,
social order, and general prosperity.”
The majority of Americans took a different view of the subject; but
even those who most strongly agreed with Channing would have been first
to avow that their prejudice was inveterate, and its consequences
sweeping. Such a conviction admitted little room for liberalism where
politics were, directly or remotely, involved. Literature bordered
closely on politics, and the liberalism of Unitarian Boston was bounded
even in literature by the limits of British sympathies. Buckminster’s
Phi Beta Kappa Oration of 1809 was as emphatic on this point as
Channing’s Fast Day Sermon of 1810 was outspoken in its political
antipathies.
“It is our lot,” said Buckminster, “to have been born in an age
of tremendous revolution, and the world is yet covered with the
wrecks of its ancient glory, especially of its literary renown.
The fury of that storm which rose in France is passed and spent,
but its effects have been felt through the whole system of
liberal education. The foul spirit of innovation and sophistry
has been seen wandering in the very groves of the Lyceum, and is
not yet completely exorcised, though the spell is broken.”
The liberalism of Boston began in a protest against “the foul spirit
of innovation,” and could hardly begin at any point more advanced.
“Infidelity has had one triumph in our days, and we have seen learning
as well as virtue trampled under the hoofs of its infuriated steeds,
let loose by the hand of impiety.” From this attitude of antipathy to
innovation, the Unitarian movement began its attempts to innovate, and
with astonishing rapidity passed through phases which might well have
required ages of growth. In five years Channing began open attack upon
the foundation, or what had hitherto been believed the foundation, of
the Church; and from that moment innovation could no longer be regarded
as foul.
Of the intellectual movement in all its new directions, Harvard College
was the centre. Between 1805 and 1817 the college inspired the worn-out
Federalism of Boston with life till then unimagined. Not only did it
fill the pulpits with Buckminsters, Channings, and Thachers, whose
sermons were an unfailing interest, and whose society was a constant
stimulus, but it also maintained a rivalry between the pulpit and the
lecture-room. The choice of a new professor was as important and as
much discussed as the choice of a new minister. No ordinary political
event caused more social interest than the appointment of Henry Ware as
Professor of Theology in 1805. In the following year J. Q. Adams was
made Professor of Rhetoric, and delivered a course of lectures, which
created the school of oratory to which Edward Everett’s generation
adhered. Four younger men, whose influence was greatly felt in their
branches of instruction, received professorships in the next few
years,--Jacob Bigelow, who was appointed Professor of Medicine in
1813; Edward Everett, Greek Professor in 1815; John Collins Warren,
Professor of Anatomy in the same year; and George Ticknor, Professor
of _Belles Lettres_ in 1816. In the small society of Boston, a
city numbering hardly forty thousand persons, this activity of college
and church produced a new era. Where thirty-nine students a year had
entered the college before 1800, an average number of sixty-six entered
it during the war, and took degrees during the four or five subsequent
years. Among them were names familiar to the literature and politics of
the next half century. Besides Ticknor and Everett, in 1807 and 1811,
Henry Ware graduated in 1812, and his brother William, the author of
“Zenobia,” in 1816; William Hickling Prescott, in 1814; J. G. Palfrey,
in 1815; in 1817, George Bancroft and Caleb Cushing graduated, and
Ralph Waldo Emerson entered the college. Boston also drew resources
from other quarters, and perhaps showed no stronger proof of its vigor
than when, in 1816, it attracted Daniel Webster from New Hampshire to
identify himself with the intellect and interests of Massachusetts.
Even by reaction the Unitarians stimulated Boston,--as when, a few
years afterward, Lyman Beecher accepted the charge of a Boston church
in order to resist their encroachments.
The “Anthology,” which marked the birth of the new literary school,
came in a few years to a natural end, but was revived in 1815 under
the name of the “North American Review,” by the exertions of William
Tudor. The life of the new Review belonged to a later period, and was
shaped by other influences than those that surrounded the “Anthology.”
With the beginning of the next epoch, the provincial stage of the
Boston school was closed. More and more its influence tended to become
national, and even to affect other countries. Perhaps by a natural
consequence rather than by coincidence, the close of the old period
was marked by the appearance of a short original poem in the “North
American Review” for September, 1817:--
“... The hills,
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods; the floods that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That wind among the meads and make them green,--
Are but the solemn declarations all,
Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven
Are glowing on the sad abodes of death
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom. Take the wings
Of morning, and the Borean desert pierce;
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
That veil Oregan, where he hears no sound
Save his own dashings,--yet the dead are there;
And millions in these solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep: the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest: and what if thou shalt fall
Unnoticed by the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? Thousands more
Will share thy destiny. The tittering world
Dance to the grave. The busy brood of care
Plod on, and each one chases as before
His favorite phantom. Yet all these shall leave
Their mirth and their employments, and shall come
And make their bed with thee.”
The appearance of “Thanatopsis” and “Lines to a Waterfowl” in the early
numbers of the “North American Review,” while leaving no doubt that
a new national literature was close at hand, proved also that it was
not to be the product of a single source; for Bryant, though greatly
tempted to join the Emersons, Channing, Dana, Allston, and Tudor in
Boston, turned finally to New York, where influences of a different
kind surrounded him. The Unitarian school could not but take a sober
cast, and even its humor was sure to be tinged with sadness, sarcasm,
or irony, or some serious purpose or passion; but New York contained no
atmosphere in which such a society could thrive. Busy with the charge
of practical work,--the development of industries continually exceeding
their power of control,--the people of New York wanted amusement, and
shunned what in Boston was considered as intellectual. Their tastes
were gratified by the appearance of a writer whose first book created
a school of literature as distinctly marked as the Unitarian school
of Boston, and more decidedly original. “The History of New York, by
Diedrich Knickerbocker,” appeared in 1809, and stood alone. Other books
of the time seemed to recognize some literary parentage. Channing
and Buckminster were links in a chain of theologians and preachers.
“Thanatopsis” evidently drew inspiration from Wordsworth. Diedrich
Knickerbocker owed nothing to any living original.
The “History of New York” was worth more than passing notice. In the
development of a national character, as well as of the literature that
reflected it, humor was a trait of the utmost interest; and Washington
Irving was immediately recognized as a humorist whose name, if he
fulfilled the promise of his first attempt, would have a chance of
passing into the society of Rabelais, Cervantes, Butler, and Sterne.
Few literary tasks were more difficult than to burlesque without
vulgarizing, and to satirize without malignity; yet Irving in his first
effort succeeded in doing both. The old families, and serious students
of colonial history, never quite forgave Irving for throwing an
atmosphere of ridicule over the subject of their interest; but Diedrich
Knickerbocker’s History was so much more entertaining than ordinary
histories, that even historians could be excused for regretting that it
should not be true.
Yet the book reflected the political passions which marked the period
of the Embargo. Besides the burlesque, the “History” contained satire;
and perhaps its most marked trait was the good-nature which, at a time
when bitterness was universal in politics, saved Irving’s political
satire from malignity. Irving meant that no one should mistake the
character of the universal genius, Governor Wilhelmus Kieft, surnamed
the Testy, who as a youth had made many curious investigations into
the nature and operations of windmills, and who came well-nigh being
smothered in a slough of unintelligible learning,--“a fearful peril,
from the effects of which he never perfectly recovered.”
“No sooner had this bustling little man been blown by a whiff
of fortune into the seat of government, than he called together
his council and delivered a very animated speech on the affairs
of the government; ... and here he soon worked himself into a
fearful rage against the Yankees, whom he compared to the Gauls
who desolated Rome, and to the Goths and Vandals who overran
the fairest plains of Europe.... Having thus artfully wrought
up his tale of terror to a climax, he assumed a self-satisfied
look, and declared with a nod of knowing import that he had
taken measures to put a final stop to these encroachments,--that
he had been obliged to have recourse to a dreadful engine of
warfare, lately invented, awful in its effects but authorized
by direful necessity; in a word, he was resolved to conquer the
Yankees--by Proclamation.”
Washington Irving’s political relations were those commonly known as
Burrite, through his brother Peter, who edited in Burr’s interest the
“Morning Chronicle.” Antipathy to Jefferson was a natural result, and
Irving’s satire on the President was the more interesting because the
subject offered temptations for ill-tempered sarcasm such as spoiled
Federalist humor. The Knickerbocker sketch of Jefferson was worth
comparing with Federalist modes of expressing the same ideas:--
“The great defect of Wilhelmus Kieft’s policy was that though no
man could be more ready to stand forth in an hour of emergency,
yet he was so intent upon guarding the national pocket that
he suffered the enemy to break its head.... All this was a
remote consequence of his education at the Hague; where, having
acquired a smattering of knowledge, he was ever a great conner
of indexes, continually dipping into books without ever studying
to the bottom of any subject, so that he had the scum of all
kinds of authors fermenting in his pericranium. In some of
these titlepage researches he unluckily stumbled over a grand
political _cabalistic word_, which with his customary
facility he immediately incorporated into his great scheme of
government, to the irretrievable injury and delusion of the
honest province of Nieuw Nederlands, and the eternal misleading
of all experimental rulers.”
Little was wanting to make such a sketch bitter; but Irving seemed to
have the power of deadening venom by a mere trick of hand. Readers of
the “History,” after a few years had passed, rarely remembered the
satire, or supposed that the story contained it. The humor and the
style remained to characterize a school.
The originality of the Knickerbocker humor was the more remarkable
because it was allowed to stand alone. Irving published nothing else of
consequence until 1819, and then, abandoning his early style, inclined
to imitate Addison and Steele, although his work was hardly the less
original. Irving preceded Walter Scott, whose “Waverley” appeared in
1814, and “Guy Mannering” in 1815; and if either author could be said
to influence the other, the influence of Diedrich Knickerbocker on
Scott was more evident than that of “Waverley” on Irving.
In the face of the spontaneous burst of genius which at that moment
gave to English literature and art a character distinct even in its
own experience, Americans might have been excused for making no figure
at all. Other periods produced one poet at a time, and measured
originality by single poems; or satisfied their ambition by prose or
painting of occasional merit. The nineteenth century began in England
with genius as plenty as it was usually rare. To Beattie, Cowper,
and Burns, succeeded Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Crabbe,
Campbell, Charles Lamb, Moore, Shelley, and Keats. The splendor of
this combination threw American and even French talent into the
shade, and defied hope of rivalry; but the American mind, as far as
it went, showed both freshness and originality. The divergence of
American from English standards seemed insignificant to critics who
required, as they commonly did, a national literature founded on some
new conception,--such as the Shawanee or Aztecs could be supposed
to suggest; but to those who expected only a slow variation from
European types, the difference was well marked. Channing and Irving
were American in literature, as Calhoun and Webster were American
in politics. They were the product of influences as peculiar to the
country as those which produced Fulton and his steamboat.
While Bryant published “Thanatopsis” and Irving made his studies for
the “Sketch-Book,” another American of genius perhaps superior to
theirs--Washington Allston--was painting in London, before returning
to pass the remainder of his life in the neighborhood of Boston and
Harvard College. Between thirty and forty years of age, Allston was
then in the prime of his powers; and even in a circle of artists which
included Turner, Wilkie, Mulready, Constable, Callcott, Crome, Cotman,
and a swarm of others equally famous, Allston was distinguished. Other
Americans took rank in the same society. Leslie and Stuart Newton were
adopted into it, and Copley died only in 1815, while Trumbull painted
in London till 1816; but remarkable though they were for the quality of
their art, they belonged to a British school, and could be claimed as
American only by blood. Allston stood in a relation somewhat different.
In part, his apparent Americanism was due to his later return, and to
his identification with American society; but the return itself was
probably caused by a peculiar bent of character. His mind was not
wholly English.
Allston’s art and his originality were not such as might have been
expected from an American, or such as Americans were likely to admire;
and the same might be said of Leslie and Stuart Newton. Perhaps the
strongest instance of all was Edward Malbone, whose grace of execution
was not more remarkable than his talent for elevating the subject of
his exquisite work. So far from sharing the imagination of Shawanee
Indians or even of Democrats, these men instinctively reverted to the
most refined and elevated schools of art. Not only did Allston show
from the beginning of his career a passion for the nobler standards of
his profession, but also for technical quality,--a taste less usual.
Washington Irving met him in Rome in 1805, when both were unknown; and
they became warm friends.
“I do not think I have ever been more captivated on a first
acquaintance,” wrote Irving long afterward. “He was of a light
and graceful form, with large blue eyes and black silken
hair. Everything about him bespoke the man of intellect and
refinement.... He was exquisitely sensitive to the graceful
and the beautiful, and took great delight in paintings which
excelled in color; yet he was strongly moved and aroused by
objects of grandeur. I well recollect the admiration with which
he contemplated the sublime statue of Moses, by Michael Angelo.”
The same tastes characterized his life, and gave to his work a
distinction that might be Italian, but was certainly not English or
usual.
“It was Allston,” said Leslie, “who first awakened what little
sensibility I may possess to the beauties of color. For long time I
took the merit of the Venetians on trust, and if left to myself should
have preferred works which I now feel to be comparatively worthless.
I remember when the picture of ‘The Ages’ by Titian was first pointed
out to me by Allston as an exquisite work, I thought he was laughing
at me.” Leslie, if not a great colorist, was seldom incorrect; Stuart
Newton had a fine eye for color, and Malbone was emphatically a
colorist; but Allston’s sensibility to color was rare among artists,
and the refinement of his mind was as unusual as the delicacy of his
eye.
Allston was also singular in the liberality of his sympathies. “I am
by nature, as it respects the arts, a wide liker,” he said. In Rome he
became acquainted with Coleridge; and the remark of Coleridge which
seemed to make most impression on him in their walks “under the pines
of the Villa Borghese” was evidently agreeable because it expressed
his own feelings. “It was there he taught me this golden rule: never
to judge of any work of art by its defects.” His admiration for the
classics did not prevent him from admiring his contemporaries; his
journey through Switzerland not only showed him a new world of Nature,
but also “the truth of Turner’s Swiss scenes,--the poetic truth,--which
none before or since have given.” For a young American art-student in
1804, such sympathies were remarkable; not so much because they were
correct, as because they were neither American nor English. Neither in
America nor in Europe at that day could art-schools give to every young
man, at the age of twenty-five, eyes to see the color of Titian, or
imagination to feel the “poetic truth” of Turner.
Other painters, besides those whose names have been mentioned, were
American or worked in America, as other writers besides Bryant and
Irving, and other preachers besides Buckminster and Channing, were
active in their professions; but for national comparisons, types
alone serve. In the course of sixteen years certain Americans became
distinguished. Among these, suitable for types, were Calhoun and Clay
in Congress, Pinkney and Webster at the bar, Buckminster and Channing
in the pulpit, Bryant and Irving in literature, Allston and Malbone in
painting. These men varied greatly in character and qualities. Some
possessed strength, and some showed more delicacy than vigor; some were
humorists, and some were incapable of a thought that was not serious;
but all were marked by a keen sense of form and style. So little was
this quality expected, that the world inclined to regard them as
un-American because of their refinement. Frenchmen and Italians, and
even Englishmen who knew nothing of America but its wildness, were
disappointed that American oratory should be only a variation from
Fox and Burke; that American literature should reproduce Steele and
Wordsworth; and that American art should, at its first bound, go back
to the ideals of Raphael and Titian. The incongruity was evident. The
Americans themselves called persistently for a statesmanship, religion,
literature, and art which should be American; and they made a number
of experiments to produce what they thought their ideals. In substance
they continued to approve nothing which was not marked by style as
its chief merit. The oratory of Webster and Calhoun, and even of John
Randolph, bore the same general and common character of style. The
poetry of Bryant, the humor of Irving, the sermons of Channing, and
the painting of Allston were the objects of permanent approval to the
national mind. Style remained its admiration, even when every newspaper
protested against the imitation of outworn forms. Dennie and Jefferson,
agreeing in nothing else, agreed in this; the South Carolinian Allston
saw color as naturally as the New Englander Bryant heard rhythm; and a
people which seemed devoid of sense or standards of beauty, showed more
ambition than older societies to acquire both.
Nothing seemed more certain than that the Americans were not artistic,
that they had as a people little instinct of beauty; but their
intelligence in its higher as in its lower forms was both quick and
refined. Such literature and art as they produced, showed qualities
akin to those which produced the swift-sailing schooner, the triumph of
naval architecture. If the artistic instinct weakened, the quickness of
intelligence increased.