[Sidenote: English Literature.]
[Sidenote: Majority of Authors from New England.]
With English laws, customs, Protestantism, habits of thought, and
methods of culture, we also inherited the English literature. So rich
was already this inheritance when our colonies were settled, that there
was little need or incentive for the early Americans to strike out into
new literary paths, and create an original literature. Our ancestors
read Milton, Bunyan, Doddridge, Butler, Dryden, Pope, and Shakespeare.
It is a noteworthy fact that American literature not only took its start
from, but, up to within recent times, was mainly produced by the New
England and the Middle States. Even now, the noted writers in any
branch of letters born south of Virginia may almost be counted upon the
fingers. It is equally true that west of Ohio authors who have won
a general and permanent reputation are few. If we survey American
literature from the time of Cotton Mather (who may perhaps be called the
first author of the country whose works are still remembered and read)
to the present, we find that a majority of the best authors, both in
prose and verse, have been New Englanders.
[Sidenote: Ante-Revolutionary Writers.]
The rise of our literature having taken place in the colonies of
Puritan stock, and those most fully imbued with Puritan sobriety and
seriousness, it was natural that our earliest literary products should
be religious and philosophical. Cotton Mather, with his extravagant
"Magnolia"; Jonathan Edwards, with his stern treatise on the Will;
Franklin, with his shrewd maxims, and clear, strong, unadorned essays,
were about the only ante-revolutionary writers who are not by this
time forgotten. It was not surprising that the period of the Revolution
should develop a literature peculiarly political. There were, no doubt,
already poetasters, novelists, and essayists; but even their names are
strange to us of this age. Where are they and their works? What faint
traces are still left of them show us that they were mostly mere
imitators, and not brilliant ones, of the English authors of their day.
[Sidenote: Political Literature.]
But our political literature became, with the Revolution and its sequel,
most vigorous, philosophical, eloquent, and profound. The Declaration
itself was a masterpiece of political style, as well as of substance;
and Jefferson, its author, continuing for years after to discuss
political questions with a lucidity and vigor which were unrivalled
in America, took his place in literary history as perhaps our greatest
political writer. Close behind him came writers like Hamilton, Jay,
Madison, Ames, Freneau, and Tom Paine, all of them holding high rank in
this department of letters.
[Sidenote: Post-Revolutionary Writers.]
When we became an independent nation, literature naturally felt the
impulse and inspiration of the new national life. Poets and novelists
came up of a higher type than their ante-revolutionary predecessors;
writers like Dwight, Hopkinson, Trumbull, Barlow, Brockden Brown, and
Paine. But no one of these attained the rank of genius, nor did any of
them establish a great reputation; and if they are remembered at all,
it is rather by happy isolated pieces than by the general excellence of
their works. The American novels of the last century, unlike the English
novels of Swift, Fielding, and Goldsmith, have one and all passed into
oblivion.
[Sidenote: William Cullen Bryant.]
The position of American literature in 1886 may, especially in the
departments of history and poetry, fairly bear comparison with that of
England. Yet the first really great American authors, if we except
the theological and political writers of whom mention has been made,
published their first works at a period quite within the memory of
men still living. Our first great poet was William Cullen Bryant, who
survived to old age to observe to what vast proportions our literary
productions, both in quality and quantity, had grown. Our first great
biographer and essayist, Washington Irving, may be remembered as living
by the man of thirty-five. Our first eminent novelist, James Fenimore
Cooper, would only be ninety-seven if he were still among us. And our
first great historian, Prescott, died but twenty-seven years ago.
[Sidenote: Rise of American Poetry.]
The new career of American letters, indeed, may be said to have been
begun when William Cullen Bryant published "Thanatopsis," in the year
1816. Our writers then began to feel the influence of the vigorous
schools of English poetry of which Byron, Wordsworth, and Coleridge were
the shining lights. Like these, our own writers shook off the poetic
dominion of Pope, and declared form to be subordinate to the thought and
the feeling. Bryant, the enthusiastic disciple of Wordsworth, set the
bold example, and from that moment American literature received an
element of vitality which was given it its noble and rapid growth. It
is almost always the case that, in young nations, poetry is the first
branch of letters to be developed. The earliest masterpieces of Greek
and English literature are the "Iliad," the "Canterbury Tales," and
the "Faerie Queene." Perhaps the best German literature before Lessing,
worth remembering, was the songs of the Minnesinger.
[Sidenote: Earlier Poets.]
[Sidenote: Later Posts.]
In the United States, Bryant was soon followed by a succession of poets
whose productions clearly revealed the magnetism of the English revival,
and gave promise of the rise of that poetic art which we have seen reach
its culmination in our own day. Richard H. Dana wrote the "Buccaneer";
Fitz-Greene Halleck, "Marco Bozarris"; Edgar A. Poe "The Raven"; the
painter Allston turned easily from brush to pen, and added more than
one fine poem to our literature; Emerson rose to found a school of
transcendental poetry as well as philosophy; N.P. Willis became the
lyrical likeness of Moore on this side of the Atlantic; Percival reached
a brief popularity, and wrote some things well worthy of remembrance;
and the banker-poet Sprague filled a worthy place in our group of bards.
In the next generation came the poets of the highest culture and most
widely extended popularity: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf
Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
[Sidenote: Historians.]
The United States have produced a race of historians whose works and
names may not unfairly be ranked with those of Hume, Macaulay, Hallam,
and Froude. Prescott and Irving have been followed by Bancroft, Motley,
Parkman, Adams, Kirk, Goodwin, Young, and Ticknor. Sydney Smith, were
he now living, would find his question, "Who reads an American
book?" speedily answered; for in English drawing-rooms and on English
book-stalls "Evangeline" and "The Wayside Inn" are to be found quite
as often as "In Memoriam" and "Idyls of the King"; and "Ferdinand
and Isabella" and the "Rise of the Dutch Republic," as often as the
histories of Macaulay and Froude.
[Sidenote: Theological Literature.]
Our theologians have kept pace, in the amount and intellectual force of
their writings, with those of the older continent. It is not astonishing
that, in a nation established by a sect for the purpose of doing God
honor, a race of great theological authors should arise. The names
of Hopkins and Emmons, of Dwight, Channing, Norton, Theodore Parker,
Wayland, Bacon, Park, Bushnell, and many others, will recur, to remind
us how active religious philosophy and speculation have been from the
time of Jonathan Edwards to the present.
[Sidenote: Political and Legal Writers.]
In other departments of letters our progress during the century, though
less marked, has been very distinct. Webster, Everett, Sumner, Winthrop,
and, it may well be added, Lincoln, have made a literary art, as well as
a practical career, of politics. American legal writers, like Greenleaf,
Kent, Story, and Parsons, are quoted in the English as in the American
courts, as authorities worthy of respect and trust. In the domain of
searching literary criticism, England has perhaps produced no author
since the days of Gifford and Jeffrey superior in learning, acuteness,
and grace to Edwin P. Whipple.
[Sidenote: Humorists.]
[Sidenote: Writers of Fiction.]
Humorists have been many; in this field we count not only Lowell, Neal,
and Holmes, but the younger band, which includes Artemas Ward, Mark
Twain, Nasby, Bret Harte, Warner, and Leland. In the department of
essays and miscellaneous belles-lettres, the names of George William
Curtis, Thoreau, Tuckerman, Higginson, Marsh, and many more, crowd upon
the mind. Foremost among writers of fiction may be classed Cooper and
Nathaniel Hawthorne; and though in this field America can scarcely
contest the palm with the mother country, and the great purely national
novel has not yet appeared, the fertility of our novelists affords
promise that in time great and national romances will come. Meanwhile,
Mrs. Stowe, Donald G. Mitchell, T.B. Aldrich, William D. Howells (poet
as well as novelist), Henry James, Julian Hawthorne, Stockton, Miss
Phelps, E.E. Hale, and others, have delighted thousands by their
imaginative works.
[Sidenote: American Dictionaries.]
To present even a list, indeed, of American writers who may be called
noted, would much more than occupy the limits assigned to this chapter.
The multitude that crowds upon the memory, even in a cursory glance over
our history, is so large that even in mentioning any names at all one
runs the risk of some unjust omission. Suffice it to say that no field
of letters has remained wholly uncultivated in this country, and that
literary invention in the United States, though sometimes at a pause,
on the whole advances with their population and civilization. We have
philosophers, men of science, poets, critics, essayists, art writers,
theologians, fully able to cope with their literary brethren in the old
world. Let it be added that America has produced the two dictionaries
which are to-day paramount authority in every English school, college,
and university; and that in the science of language George P. Marsh and
William D. Whitney have carried their studies to depths as profound,
and have given the world results as valuable, as have any old-world
philologists.