literature was never more than a pastime, a fact much to be regretted.
Kennedy belonged to a prominent and wealthy family. He was born in
Baltimore, was graduated from Baltimore College in 1812, and studied
law. Entering political life, he employed his pen effectively in the
defence of his political principles, but occasionally amused himself
with ventures in lighter forms of literature. His first work of
importance, “Swallow Barn” (1832), was distinctly declared not to be a
novel; and indeed the action is of slight importance. His main purpose
in writing it was to give, in connection with a slender plot, a picture
of manners and customs in Virginia toward the end of the eighteenth
century. Here is no subtle characterisation; the persons of the
narrative are drawn broadly and naturally and the story moves easily,
if a little slowly, to its end. The local scenery and institutions are
delineated with the utmost fidelity. Frank Meriwether, the prosperous
country gentleman and magistrate, has been called a Virginia Sir Roger
de Coverley; and there is throughout observed the same quiet good
humour, the same cheerful atmosphere, the same genial optimism that
one finds in the pages of Addison. “Horse-Shoe Robinson, a Tale of
the Tory Ascendency” (1835), was a story of early Tory days in South
Carolina, and is now generally considered the best novel written in
the South before the Civil War. The action centres about the battle of
King’s Mountain (1780), which is vividly and accurately described. The
intrepid valour of the backwoods patriot, the bitterness and horror
of civil war, the relieving and characteristic humour of primitive
frontier life, are well portrayed. The blacksmith Galbraith Robinson
is a typical American, worthy to rank with Cooper’s Leatherstocking,
and possibly truer to nature than Cooper’s more famous creation.
In 1838 appeared Kennedy’s third novel, “Rob of the Bowl: a Legend
of St. Inigoes,” a story of Colonial Maryland and the struggles of
the Catholic settlers, with which are interwoven traditions of the
piratical “Brethren of the Coast.” Nor must we fail to mention the
humorous chronicle entitled “Quodlibet: Containing some Annals thereof,
by Solomon Secondthought, Schoolmaster” (1840), in which are described
the vagaries and absurdities of an early Presidential election. Had
Kennedy made literature the serious business of life he would have won
more lasting fame. As it is, he deserves to be more widely read than he
is.[10]
_William Gilmore Simms._--One of the most prolific of American
novelists was William Gilmore Simms. Born in Charleston, South
Carolina, April 17, 1806, he was early left, by the death of his
mother and the removal of his father to Tennessee, to the care of
his grandmother, from whom he learned many a weird tale of peril and
adventure. From the poor schools of his time he gained little, though
he became an omnivorous reader. Apprenticed to a druggist, at eighteen
he turned to the study of law. A long visit to his father in the
South-west gave him a good opportunity to study the primitive life
of the backwoodsmen, a life which he afterward described inimitably.
At twenty he married and in another year he was admitted to the bar.
Successful from the first, he resolutely turned, however, from the
practice of law to a literary life. He had become well known as a poet
when his first prose tale, “Martin Faber, the Story of a Criminal,”
appeared in 1833, revealing the influence of William Godwin and
Brockden Brown, but also independent skill in the construction of an
interesting narrative. In “Guy Rivers” (1834), a description of Georgia
in the turbulent days of the gold fever, Simms began a series of border
romances which, though marred by a slipshod style and by roughness
of construction, are nevertheless in the main readable on account of
the rapidity and energy of the narrative. In “The Yemassee” (1835), a
story of the strife between South Carolina and the Indians in 1715,
Simms is perhaps at his best, and his stirring narrative strongly
reminds one of, though it does not rival, the work of Cooper. Then
came a trilogy, “The Partisan” (1835), “Mellichampe: a Legend of the
Santee” (1836), and “Katharine Walton, or The Rebel of Dorchester”
(1851), in which he portrays every phase of social life in Charleston
during the Revolutionary War, and delineates the military careers of
Marion, Pickens, Moultrie, Sumter, and Hayne. Between 1836 and 1859 he
published some twenty-five other novels and stories, generally in two
volumes each, the best of which are “The Kinsmen” (1841), afterwards
known as “The Scout,” (1854), “The Sword and the Distaff,” now known
as “Woodcraft” (1852), “The Forayers, or The Raid of the Dog-Days”
(1855), its sequel, “Eutaw” (1856), and “The Cassique of Kiawah”
(1859). He also wrote numerous short stories for various periodicals;
one of these, “Grayling, or Murder Will Out,” published in _The Gift_
for 1842, was pronounced by Poe the best ghost story he had ever read.
A collection of thirteen of Simms’ best stories was published in
1845-46 under the title of “The Wigwam and the Cabin.” Notwithstanding
his immense popularity before the Civil War, Simms is now well-nigh
forgotten. Although a conscientious workman, he wrote much too rapidly
to produce permanent literature, and his faulty style and his excessive
fondness for portraying in detail scenes of carnage and crime strongly
repel the reader of to-day. After the Civil War, which Simms did much
to bring on and from which he suffered severe losses, his popularity
rapidly waned, and he tried in vain to make good his losses. He died
in his native city on June 11, 1870, having composed this epitaph
for himself: “Here lies one who, after a reasonably long life,
distinguished chiefly by unceasing labours, has left all his better
works undone.”
His remarkable achievement in the pioneer days of American letters,
on the whole, entitles him to be remembered with gratitude; and the
verdict of Poe, who ranked Simms, as a novelist, just below Cooper and
Brockden Brown, has not been impugned.[11]
_Edgar Allan Poe._--No American writer is more difficult to judge
than Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), whether as a man or as a writer; and
perhaps no other writer has received more attention from critics,
not only in America but also in Europe. Poe was born in Boston of
Southern parents, in the year which saw the birth of Tennyson, Darwin,
Gladstone, and Holmes. His mother, Elizabeth Arnold Poe, was an
actress, who died in 1811 of consumption; his father, David Poe, Jr.,
for a time a strolling player, was a man of little force; tradition
represents him as dying young, a victim of consumption and alcoholism.
Adopted after his mother’s death by John Allan of Richmond, Virginia,
the boy Edgar Poe was wondered at and spoiled by his foster-parents,
who were people of means and position. When they went abroad in 1815,
Poe was entered at the Manor House School, Stoke Newington, near
London; here he remained five years, imbibing the influences of a
half-rural scene whose ancient buildings and historical associations
have since been swallowed up by the metropolis. From 1820 to 1825 he
was at school in Richmond. As a child, Poe was beautiful and clever; as
a youth he was superior rather than abnormal. He learned quickly though
not accurately; for the inaccuracy his teachers were in part to blame.
He was lithe, swift of foot, an excellent swimmer, and, though proud
and self-centred, could play the leader among his fellows. By the time
he was ready for college, he showed the effects of indulgence on the
part of the Allans, being imperious and wilful, unduly sensitive as to
his state of orphanage, and squandering his too abundant pocket-money.
During his brief residence at the University of Virginia (1826), Poe
maintained high scholarship in Latin and French, but lived the life
of his companions, drinking (though apparently not to excess) and
incurring gambling debts which his guardian repudiated. Set to work
in the counting-room of Mr. Allan, the young man rebelled and ran
away to Boston, probably under an assumed name, and without capital
save a sheaf of immature poems. He soon enlisted as a private in the
army, made his peace with his guardian, and was sent to West Point.
Here again he proved a clever student; but, purposely neglecting the
routine, in 1831 he was discharged.
Obliged henceforth to depend on his own resources, Poe now approached
almost to the point of starvation, when by his “Manuscript Found in
a Bottle” (1833) he gained a prize of one hundred dollars offered by
the Baltimore _Saturday Visiter_, and through John P. Kennedy, whom
Poe called “the first true friend I ever had,” obtained temporary
relief for his wants and help in getting literary work. He now became a
contributor to, and soon the literary editor of, _The Southern Literary
Messenger_. His numerous stories and criticisms did much to make the
magazine successful and famous. In 1836 Poe married his beautiful
cousin Virginia Clemm, who lacked three months of being fourteen years
of age; but family ties could not prevent his morally weak nature from
occasional indulgence in drugs and intoxicants, and his irregularities
in January, 1837, brought about his dismissal from the editorial chair
of the _Messenger_, for which, however, he continued to write. For a
time the Poes now lived in New York, practically supported by Mrs.
Clemm, who conducted a boarding-house. Here he completed and published
his longest story, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” (1838), a
tale of an Antarctic cruise as far south as the 84th parallel, based
on Benjamin Morell’s “Narrative of Four Voyages to the South Seas and
Pacific” (1832) with frequent dashes of Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner,”
but full of such situations of blood-curdling horror and such highly
imaginative landscape-painting as only the genius of Poe could produce.
The years 1838-44 Poe spent in Philadelphia. In 1839 he collected
and published his “Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque.” He
wrote constantly for _Graham’s Magazine_, of which he was editor from
1840 till 1843; critiques, essays, and tales flowed from his pen. In
imaginative story-telling, this was the period of his best work. His
occasional lapses into intoxication are partly explained by the fits
of insanity brought on by anxiety over the precarious condition of
his wife, who in 1841 ruptured a blood-vessel while singing and who
hovered between life and death for six years. The year 1844 found him
back in New York, associated first with N. P. Willis on _The Evening
Mirror_ and later with Charles F. Briggs on _The Broadway Journal_.
The publication of “The Raven” in the _Mirror_ (January 29, 1845)
and of his “Tales” (1845) greatly increased his reputation; but with
curious and fatal perversity he proceeded to make enemies by trying to
palm off upon the Boston Lyceum (October 16, 1845) a juvenile poem,
“Al Aaraaf,” as a new work and by sharply castigating his literary
contemporaries in “The Literati of New York.” The next year he removed
his family to Fordham, a suburb of New York. Here his young wife died
in 1847, of consumption; and he never really recovered from the shock.
He conceived various literary enterprises; but he had become virtually
a physical and moral wreck, unable to work except at long intervals.
Toward the end of 1848 he proposed marriage to Mrs. Sarah Helen
Whitman, a Providence poet, and was accepted; but the match was broken
off in consequence of Poe’s drinking to excess. He now determined
to go South to lecture and procure funds with which to publish a
magazine to be called _The Stylus_. At Philadelphia he had an attack of
delirium tremens. Recovering, he went on to Richmond, where he spent
the summer of 1849. He proposed marriage to an old flame, Mrs. Sarah
Elmira Shelton, then a widow, who gave him some encouragement. About
this time he signed a pledge to abstain from all intoxicating drinks,
and made a new start in life. A lecture at the Exchange Hotel brought
him some $1500; and with this in his pocket he started for New York to
close up some business and take Mrs. Clemm back with him; but stopping
in Baltimore _en route_ he was induced to drink some wine, went on
a debauch, and a few days later (October 7th) died in a hospital of
brain fever. There is ground for believing that he had been drugged by
political toughs on election day (October 3d) and carried to various
polls to vote for the Whig candidates.
Such was the pathetic and tragic career of one of the most brilliant
of American literary men. Few lives have been the subjects of so much
controversy. In estimating his character, justice must be tempered
with mercy; and this is the easier now that it is seen that, during at
least the latter part of his life, his mental condition was abnormal if
not pathological.[12] He inherited tendencies which he was unable to
control, and with which his environment wholly unfitted him to cope.
When sober and sane, he was a quiet, well-bred, and refined gentleman,
who could talk fascinatingly and in whom women found “a peculiar and
irresistible charm”; he was capable, moreover, of working hard and
efficiently. When under the influence of opium or intoxicating liquors,
he was a wholly different man, with whom, fortunately, we are not here
concerned. With the two exceptions of his wife and mother-in-law,
he formed no close and lasting attachments. He was always deeply
self-centred and found it impossible to enter sympathetically into
the lives, sorrows, and aspirations of others. Thus his sensitive
temperament more and more withdrew into itself and found its kindred in
the phantasms of his powerful imagination.
Poe’s genius is probably best expressed in his tales. They are not
bulky in extent; in the Putnam edition they fill five octavo volumes.
Many of them are marred by journalistic looseness and mannerisms--too
much use of the parenthesis, the too constant recurrence of favourite
words and phrases. Occasionally he misses good opportunities for
telling dramatic effects and contrasts; and in general it may be
admitted that the element of human passion, “save in its minor chords
of sorrow and despair,” is notably absent from his works. A passionate
lover himself, his artistic genius was not concerned with the ordinary
love-story. His lack of a sense of humour, too, has been remarked.
His attempts to be humorous cannot be pronounced successful. Finally,
some of his tales, “Arthur Gordon Pym” for example, contain matter so
repulsive that the wonder is that any person could endure reading them,
much less writing them.
Yet the fact remains that on a large number of these tales is
the unmistakable stamp of genius. It may be well to recall the
classification of them adopted by Messrs. Stedman and Woodberry. We
have first the “Romances of Death,” of which the most famous are “The
Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia,” and “Eleonora”; then come the
“Old World Romances,” of which “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The
Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” are probably most
read. In the second volume we find three groups, “Tales of Conscience,
Natural Beauty, and Pseudo-Science,” the last including his “MS.
Found in a Bottle” and “Hans Pfaall.” In the third are “Tales of
Ratiocination,” including the famous “Gold-Bug,” the harrowing “Murders
in the Rue Morgue,” and the perfect detective story “The Purloined
Letter”; and “Tales of Illusion,” including the horrible “Oblong Box.”
Then come the “Extravaganzas and Caprices” and lastly the two “Tales
of Adventure and Exploration,” namely, “Arthur Gordon Pym” and “Julius
Rodman.” It will be evident that Poe achieved success in two markedly
distinct classes of tales: those in which a purely intellectual puzzle
is worked out, and those in which a definite emotional effect is
produced. The “Tales of Ratiocination” were the forerunners of a long
line of “detective stories”--by Gaboriau, De Boisgobey, Wilkie Collins,
Conan Doyle, and others,--in none of which does one find a keener
analytical mind than that of Monsieur Dupin. “The Gold-Bug” undoubtedly
suggested to Stevenson some features of “Treasure Island.” Likewise
in such stories as “Hans Pfaall,” Poe was the pioneer in compounding
flights of imagination with bits of popular science, being followed by
Jules Verne and others of his class. Of the tales charged with emotion,
the best are probably the three “Romances of Death” mentioned above.
In these, it has been said, we see the highest reach of the romantic
element in Poe’s genius. The lady Ligeia is pure spirit, without human
qualities, the maiden of a dream. The framework of the tale is slight;
it is merely a prose-rhapsody on the theme expressed in the words of
old Glanvill, “Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death
utterly, save only through the weakness of his own feeble will.” This
theme, the supremacy of mind over matter, was one over which Poe busied
himself much; but to scientific thought on the subject he contributed
little of value. It has been pointed out, however, that Poe was the
first to write this sort of tale, the “psychical story,” in which
Stevenson and others later outdid him. He was a subtle psychologist of
certain moods and qualities, and understood the fiercer passions of
terror and remorse as have few other men; of this, “William Wilson”
furnishes abundant proof. But his range is limited, and most readers,
tired, like the Lady of Shalott, of shadows, soon long to change his
world of mystery and madness and death for the real world of sane and
kindly, if commonplace, men and women.
According to the old maxim, however, we must take the artist for what
he is. Poe chose his material and his setting as his artistic genius
guided him; that he made skilful use of this material there can be
little doubt. Within his narrow range, he is absolute master. His
intensity, his eloquence, his skill in the choice and repetition of
words force the reader to yield to the spell and believe for the moment
even in the impossible. His limitations have been well set forth by
Professor Woodberry:
Being gifted with the dreaming instinct, the myth-making faculty,
the allegorising power, and with no other poetic element of high
genius, he exercised his art in a region of vague feeling, symbolic
ideas, and fantastic imagery, and wrought his spell largely through
sensuous effects of colour, sound, and gloom, heightened by lurking
but unshaped suggestions of mysterious meanings.
Symbolism is indeed evident throughout his imaginative works; in “The
Black Cat,” for example, remorse is indicated by the cat’s flaming
eye; in “William Wilson,” a guilty conscience is the man’s double. Of
ornamentation there is plenty; Poe revelled in a wealth of beautiful
images of Oriental and Gothic splendour.
In some of his tales, Poe reveals a certain kinship with Hawthorne.
Both are fond of dwelling in a remote world. Both depict states of the
soul; brief experiences; evanescent dreams. But Hawthorne’s is always
a moral world; Poe’s, while never immoral, is prevailingly unmoral. In
Hawthorne’s tales we are never long forgetful of the Puritan heritage
of conscience; Poe’s indifference to moral issues is a not surprising
result of his cavalier temperament. Both writers undoubtedly owe
something to the weird imagination of Ernst Hoffmann (1776-1822); Poe
also continues the literary tradition of Mrs. Radcliffe, “Monk” Lewis,
and the “Tales of Terror.” Comparison with these writers suggests
two other facts: first, that Poe was not a novelist, but a writer of
short stories; he knew little about ordinary life, and nothing of
human character, save through study of his own; he preferred a small
canvas whereon his picture should be painted with Pre-Raphaelite
fidelity and elaborate pains, and was unable or unwilling to undertake
a work on the scale of what we now call novels; secondly, that he was
always a romancer, with a bias for medievalism as pronounced as if
his characters wore armour and his pages were full of tournaments and
chivalry.
If Poe has often been without honour in his own country and in England,
he has been enthusiastically received on the Continent. In France he
early became known through the magnificent translation of Charles
Baudelaire, and his influence has never waned.[13] In Spain, Italy,
and Germany he continues to be widely read and is generally regarded as
the foremost man of letters hitherto produced by America. Time, that
relentless and perverse critic, has given him a place of honour among
the makers of world-literature, and his fame is secure.
=Some Minor Writers.=--At the novel-writing contemporaries of
Kennedy, Simms, and Poe we can take but a passing glance. James
Lawson (1799-1880), a Scotchman who, graduating from the University
of Glasgow, came to America in 1815 and engaged in the mercantile and
insurance business, is remembered for his “Tales and Sketches by a
Cosmopolite” (1830), mainly relating to Scottish domestic life and
romance. He was a friend of Edwin Forrest and Gilmore Simms. Richard
Penn Smith (1799-1854) was the author of “The Forsaken” (1831), a novel
of the American Revolution still worth reading. Henry William Herbert
(1807-58), eldest son of the Rev. William Herbert, dean of Manchester,
was graduated from the University of Cambridge with distinction in
1829 and in 1830 came to America, engaging in teaching Greek and
writing for magazines. In 1834 he published a historical novel, “The
Brothers, a Tale of the Fronde,” which he had begun in _The American
Monthly Magazine_; following it up with “Cromwell” (1837), “Marmaduke
Wyvil” (1843), and “The Roman Traitor” (1848), a romance founded on
the conspiracy of Catiline. He also wrote many tales and sketches of
romantic incidents in European history. As a writer on sports, under
the name of “Frank Forester,” he became a popular authority, and may
be said to have been the first writer who introduced field sports into
American fiction.
Robert Montgomery Bird (1805-54), a native of Delaware, began his
literary career by writing tragedies; one of these, “The Gladiator,”
was frequently played by Edwin Forrest. His first two novels, “Calavar”
(1834) and “The Infidel” (1835), were descriptions of life in Mexico
during the Spanish conquest; while “Nick of the Woods, or The
Jibbenainosay” (1837), powerfully portrayed the thirst for vengeance
aroused in American backwoodsmen, and thus sharply contrasted the
real Indians with the somewhat idealised types in Cooper’s stories.
He also wrote “Sheppard Lee” (1836), “The Hawks of Hawk Hollow”
(1835), and “The Adventures of Robin Day” (1839), a romantic novel
of adventure. Although conscientious, he was not a skillful writer,
and his extravagant and exciting tales are no longer read. Theodore
Sedgwick Fay (1807-98), a New York lawyer and journalist, was the
author of “Norman Leslie” (1835), a somewhat tame and highly moralised
picture of life in New York City at the beginning of the century; its
poverty of artistic merit excited the wrath of Poe, who helped to
consign it to a merciful oblivion. Fay also wrote two novels directed
against the practice of duelling: “The Countess Ida” (1840), the scene
of which is laid in Europe, and “Hoboken, a Romance of New York”
(1843), the action of which takes place in a locality notorious for the
duels fought there. In 1835 appeared “Grace Seymour” by Hannah F. Lee
(1780-1865), a story for the young, and, like the stories of Fay, with
a moral purpose. In “Clinton Bradshaw” (1835), Frederick William Thomas
(1811-66) painted with moderate success the social life of New York
in the early years of the century. Like Fay, however, Thomas was too
easily led from the path of artistic virtue by his desire to improve
the minds of his readers. Thomas also wrote “East and West” (1836),
in which he ably described a Mississippi steamboat race, and “Howard
Pinckney” (1840), a novel of contemporary life in which both plot and
character are handled not without skill.
_Daniel Pierce Thompson._--The moral and educational improvement of
the reader is likewise an evident purpose in the work of Daniel Pierce
Thompson (1793-1868), a Vermont jurist, whose “May Martin, or The
Money-Digger” appeared in 1835. His most famous work, which is still
widely read, was “The Green Mountain Boys, a Romance of the Revolution”
(1840), in which are described the early methods of fighting the
Indians. Other stories of New England life from his pen were “Locke
Amsden, or The Schoolmaster” (1845), in which he evidently drew upon
his own experience, “Lucy Hosmer” (1848), “The Rangers, or The Tory’s
Daughter” (1851), a story dealing with the Revolutionary campaigns of
1777 in Vermont, “Tales of the Green Mountains” (1852), “Gaut Gurley,
or The Trappers of Lake Umbagog” (1857), and “The Doomed Chief” (1860).