striking exception. 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 _clientele_, 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 {474} 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 {475}
the former of these famous addresses has been quoted in a previous
chapter, was an undergraduate 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 State-house 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 {476} 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. Tellon, 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 (1807-1882) 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 {477} 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, {478} 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 interpretative, 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 Mueller, 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."
{479} 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 over-estimate 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 {480} 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 and gave 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 {481} pieces. They are by no means, however, among his best.
They are vigorously expressed commonplaces 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
_Occultation 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 {482} 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-weed 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 awhile 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; {483} beginning and ending in mist." In
Hawthorne an allegoric meaning 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 learned to look for the _haec 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 seemed 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, {484} 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-Pre 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
truthfully represent the quantitative hexameters of Homer and Vergil.
In 1855 appeared _Hiawatha_, Longfellow's most {485} aboriginal and
"American" book. The tripping trochaic measure he borrowed from the
Finnish epic _Kalevala_. The vague, childlike 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 a "dandy
Pindar." This is not true of his poetry, {486} 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, over flowery 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, {487} 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 a 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 {488} instance, of a dinner party of
Americans in the French capital, where one of the company brought tears
of home-sickness into the eyes of his _sodales_ by saying that the
tinkle of the ice in the champagne-glasses reminded him of the cowbells
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 Oysterman_--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, {489} 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 comite_--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 {490} 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. {491} 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 {492} 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
State House 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 thirty years. Its immediate success was assured by Dr.
Holmes's brilliant series of papers, the {493} _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 {494} 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 {495} 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. His fame has been of slower growth, 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
little 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 {496} 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 Britanny_,
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 slaveholders' 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 {497} 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 ez 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 wuz cussed fool
enuff to goe atrottin inter Miss Chiff arter a drum 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 {498} 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 conflict 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 {499} 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 {500} 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;"
{501} 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 noteworthy 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, {502} Emerson, Shakespere, 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 sure, 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 over fanciful, 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 Gaston _v_ for the _b_ in
binocular," which is certainly a puzzling and roundabout fashion of
telling us that he had drunk so much {503} 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.
{504}
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 over gorgeous 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 {505} 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- ) 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 Goettingen 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 (1814-1877), who, like Bancroft, was a student at Goettingen 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 {506} 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 {507} 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 Regime 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 (1811-1884), and Charles Sumner
(1811-1874), 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 {508} 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. {509} 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.
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 {510} Present Crisis. The
Dandelion. The Birch Tree. Beaver Brook. Essays on Chaucer:
Shakspere 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.
{511}
CHAPTER VI.
LITERATURE IN THE CITIES.
1837-1861.
Literature as a profession has hardly existed in the United States
until very recently. Even now the number of those who support
themselves by purely literary work is small, although the growth of the
reading public and the establishment of great magazines, such as
_Harper's_, the _Century_, and the _Atlantic_, have made a market for
intellectual wares which forty years ago would have seemed a godsend to
poorly paid Bohemians like Poe or obscure men of genius like Hawthorne.
About 1840 two Philadelphia magazines--_Godey's Lady's Book_ and
_Graham's Monthly_--began to pay their contributors twelve dollars a
page, a price then thought wildly munificent. But the first magazine
of the modern type was _Harper's Monthly_, founded in 1850. American
books have always suffered, and still continue to suffer, from the want
of an international copyright, which has flooded the country with cheap
reprints and translations of foreign works, with which the domestic
product has been unable to contend on such uneven terms. With the
first ocean steamers there {512} started up a class of large-paged
weeklies in New York and elsewhere, such as _Brother Jonathan_, the
_New World_, and the _Corsair_, which furnished their readers with the
freshest writings of Dickens and Bulwer and other British celebrities
within a fortnight after their appearance in London. This still
further restricted the profits of native authors and nearly drove them
from the field of periodical literature. By special arrangement the
novels of Thackeray and other English writers were printed in
_Harper's_ in installments simultaneously with their issue in English
periodicals. The _Atlantic_ was the first of our magazines which was
founded expressly for the encouragement of home talent, and which had a
purely Yankee flavor. Journalism was the profession which naturally
attracted men of letters, as having most in common with their chosen
work and as giving them a medium, under their own control, through
which they could address the public. A few favored scholars, like
Prescott, were made independent by the possession of private fortunes.
Others, like Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell, gave to literature such
leisure as they could get in the intervals of an active profession or
of college work. Still others, like Emerson and Thoreau, by living in
the country and making their modest competence--eked out in Emerson's
case by lecturing here and there--suffice for their simple needs,
secured themselves freedom from the restraints of any regular calling.
But in default of some such _pou sto_ our men of {513} letters have
usually sought the cities and allied themselves with the press. It
will be remembered that Lowell started a short-lived magazine on his
own account, and that he afterward edited the _Atlantic_ and the _North
American_. Also that Ripley and Charles A. Dana betook themselves to
journalism after the break up of the Brook Farm Community.
In the same way William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), the earliest
American poet of importance, whose impulses drew him to the solitudes
of nature, was compelled to gain a livelihood by conducting a daily
newspaper; or, as he himself puts it, was
"Forced to drudge for the dregs of men,
And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen."
Bryant was born at Cummington, in Berkshire, the westernmost county of
Massachusetts. After two years in Williams College he studied law, and
practiced for nine years as a country lawyer in Plainfield and Great
Barrington. Following the line of the Housatonic Valley, the social
and theological affiliations of Berkshire have always been closer with
Connecticut and New York than with Boston and Eastern Massachusetts.
Accordingly, when, in 1825, Bryant yielded to the attractions of a
literary career, he betook himself to New York city, where, after a
brief experiment in conducting a monthly magazine, the _New York Review
and Athenaeum_, he assumed the editorship of the {514} _Evening Post_,
a Democratic and Free-trade journal, with which he remained connected
till his death. He already had a reputation as a poet when he entered
the ranks of metropolitan journalism. In 1816 his _Thanatopsis_ had
been published in the _North American Review_, and had attracted
immediate and general admiration. It had been finished, indeed, two
years before, when the poet was only in his nineteenth year, and was a
wonderful instance of precocity. The thought in this stately hymn was
not that of a young man, but of a sage who has reflected long upon the
universality, the necessity, and the majesty of death. Bryant's blank
verse when at its best, as in _Thanatopsis_ and the _Forest Hymn_, is
extremely noble. In gravity and dignity it is surpassed by no English
blank verse of this century, though in rich and various modulation it
falls below Tennyson's _Ulysses_ and _Morte d'Arthur_. It was
characteristic of Bryant's limitations that he came thus early into
possession of his faculty. His range was always a narrow one, and
about his poetry, as a whole, there is a certain coldness, rigidity,
and solemnity. His fixed position among American poets is described in
his own _Hymn to the North Star_:
"And thou dost see them rise,
Star of the pole! and thou dost see them set.
Alone, in thy cold skies,
Thou keep'st thy old, unmoving station yet,
Nor join'st the dances of that glittering train,
Nor dipp'st thy virgin orb in the blue western main."
{515}
In 1821 he read the _Ages_, a didactic poem in thirty-five stanzas,
before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, and in the same year
brought out his first volume of poems. A second collection appeared in
1832, which was printed in London under the auspices of Washington
Irving. Bryant was the first American poet who had much of an audience
in England, and Wordsworth is said to have learned _Thanatopsis_ by
heart. Bryant was, indeed, in a measure, a scholar of Wordsworth's
school, and his place among American poets corresponds roughly, though
not precisely, to Wordsworth's among English poets. With no humor,
with somewhat restricted sympathies, with little flexibility or
openness to new impressions, but gifted with a high, austere
imagination, Bryant became the meditative poet of nature. His best
poems are those in which he draws lessons from nature, or sings of its
calming, purifying, and bracing influences upon the human soul. His
office, in other words, is the same which Matthew Arnold asserts to be
the peculiar office of modern poetry, "the moral interpretation of
nature." Poems of this class are _Green River_, _To a Waterfowl_,
_June_, the _Death of the Flowers_, and the _Evening Wind_. The song,
"O fairest of the Rural Maids," which has more fancy than is common in
Bryant, and which Poe pronounced his best poem, has an obvious
resemblance to Wordsworth's "Three years she grew in sun and shade,"
and both of these nameless pieces might fitly be {516} entitled--as
Wordsworth's is in Mr. Palgrave's _Golden Treasury_--"The Education of
Nature."
Although Bryant's career is identified with New York, his poetry is all
of New England. His heart was always turning back fondly to the woods
and streams of the Berkshire hills. There was nothing of that urban
strain in him which appears in Holmes and Willis. He was, in especial,
the poet of autumn, of the American October and the New England Indian
Summer, that season of "dropping nuts" and "smoky light," to whose
subtle analogy with the decay of the young by the New England disease,
consumption, he gave such tender expression in the _Death of the
Flowers_; and amid whose "bright, late quiet," he wished himself to
pass away. Bryant is our poet of "the melancholy days," as Lowell is
of June. If, by chance, he touches upon June, it is not with the
exultant gladness of Lowell in meadows full of bobolinks, and in the
summer day that is
"--simply perfect from its own resource
As to the bee the new campanula's
Illuminate seclusion swung in air."
Rather, the stir of new life in the clod suggests to Bryant by contrast
the thought of death; and there is nowhere in his poetry a passage of
deeper feeling than the closing stanzas of _June_, in which he speaks
of himself, by anticipation, as of one
"Whose part in all the pomp that fills
The circuit of the summer hills
Is--that his grave is green."
{517} Bryant is, _par excellence_, the poet of New England wild
flowers, the yellow violet, the fringed gentian--to each of which he
dedicated an entire poem--the orchis and the golden rod, "the aster in
the wood and the yellow sunflower by the brook." With these his name
will be associated as Wordsworth's with the daffodil and the lesser
celandine, and Emerson's with the rhodora.
Except when writing of nature he was apt to be commonplace, and there
are not many such energetic lines in his purely reflective verse as
these famous ones from the _Battle Field_:
"Truth crushed to earth shall rise again;
The eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes in pain,
And dies among his worshipers."
He added but slowly to the number of his poems, publishing a new
collection in 1840, another in 1844, and _Thirty Poems_ in 1864. His
work at all ages was remarkably even. _Thanatopsis_ was as mature as
any thing that he wrote afterward, and among his later pieces, the
_Planting of the Apple Tree_ and the _Flood of Years_ were as fresh as
any thing that he had written in the first flush of youth. Bryant's
poetic style was always pure and correct, without any tincture of
affectation or extravagance. His prose writings are not important,
consisting mainly of papers of the _Salmagundi_ variety contributed to
the _Talisman_, an annual published in 1827-30; some rather sketchy
stories, _Tales of the {518} Glauber Spa_, 1832; and impressions of
Europe, entitled, _Letters of a Traveler_, issued in two series, in
1849 and 1858. In 1869 and 1871 appeared his blank-verse translations
of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, a remarkable achievement for a man of his
age, and not excelled, upon the whole, by any recent metrical version
of Homer in the English tongue. Bryant's half century of service as
the editor of a daily paper should not be overlooked. The _Evening
Post_, under his management, was always honest, gentlemanly, and
courageous, and did much to raise the tone of journalism in New York.
Another Massachusetts poet, who was outside the Boston coterie, like
Bryant, and, like him, tried his hand at journalism, was John Greenleaf
Whittier (1807- ). He was born in a solitary farmhouse near Haverhill,
in the valley of the Merrimack, and his life has been passed mostly at
his native place and at the neighboring town of Amesbury. The local
color, which is very pronounced in his poetry, is that of the Merrimack
from the vicinity of Haverhill to its mouth at Newburyport, a region of
hillside farms, opening out below into wide marshes--"the low, green
prairies of the sea," and the beaches of Hampton and Salisbury. The
scenery of the Merrimack is familiar to all readers of Whittier: the
cotton-spinning towns along its banks, with their factories and dams,
the sloping pastures and orchards of the back country, the sands of
Plum Island and the level reaches of water meadow between which glide
the broad-sailed "gundalows"--a {519} local corruption of
gondola--laden with hay. Whittier was a farmer lad, and had only such
education as the district school could supply, supplemented by two
years at the Haverhill Academy. In his _School Days_ he gives a
picture of the little old country school-house as it used to be, the
only _alma mater_ of so many distinguished Americans, and to which many
others who have afterward trodden the pavements of great universities
look back so fondly as to their first wicket gate into the land of
knowledge.
"Still sits the school-house by the road,
A ragged beggar sunning;
Around it still the sumachs grow
And blackberry vines are running.
"Within, the master's desk is seen,
Deep-scarred by raps official;
The warping floor, the battered seats,
The jack-knife's carved initial."
A copy of Burns awoke the slumbering instinct in the young poet, and he
began to contribute verses to Garrison's _Free Press_, published at
Newburyport, and to the _Haverhill Gazette_. Then he went to Boston,
and became editor for a short time of the _Manufacturer_. Next he
edited the _Essex Gazette_, at Haverhill, and in 1830 he took charge of
George D. Prentice's paper, the _New England Weekly Review_, at
Hartford, Conn. Here he fell in with a young Connecticut poet of much
promise, J. G. C. Brainard, editor of the {520} _Connecticut Mirror_,
whose "Remains" Whittier edited in 1832. At Hartford, too, he
published his first book, a volume of prose and verse, entitled
_Legends of New England_, 1831, which is not otherwise remarkable than
as showing his early interest in Indian colonial traditions--especially
those which had a touch of the supernatural--a mine which he afterward
worked to good purpose in the _Bridal of Pennacook_, the _Witch's
Daughter_, and similar poems. Some of the _Legends_ testify to
Brainard's influence and to the influence of Whittier's temporary
residence at Hartford. One of the prose pieces, for example, deals
with the famous "Moodus Noises" at Haddam, on the Connecticut River,
and one of the poems is the same in subject with Brainard's _Black Fox
of Salmon River_. After a year and a half at Hartford, Whittier
returned to Haverhill and to farming.
The antislavery agitation was now beginning, and into this he threw
himself with all the ardor of his nature. He became the poet of the
reform as Garrison was its apostle, and Sumner and Phillips its
speakers. In 1833 he published _Justice and Expediency_, a prose tract
against slavery, and in the same year he took part in the formation of
the American Antislavery Society at Philadelphia, sitting in the
convention as a delegate of the Boston Abolitionists. Whittier was a
Quaker, and that denomination, influenced by the preaching of John
Woolman and others, had long since quietly abolished slavery within its
own communion. The {521} Quakers of Philadelphia and elsewhere took an
earnest though peaceful part in the Garrisonian movement. But it was a
strange irony of fate that had made the fiery-hearted Whittier a
Friend. His poems against slavery and disunion have the martial ring
of a Tyrtaeus or a Koerner, added to the stern religious zeal of
Cromwell's Ironsides. They are like the sound of the trumpet blown
before the walls of Jericho, or the Psalms of David denouncing woe upon
the enemies of God's chosen people. If there is any purely Puritan
strain in American poetry it is in the war-hymns of the Quaker "Hermit
of Amesbury." Of these patriotic poems there were three principal
collections: _Voices of Freedom_, 1849; the _Panorama and Other Poems_,
1856; and _In War Time_, 1863; Whittier's work as the poet of freedom
was done when, on hearing the bells ring for the passage of the
constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, he wrote his splendid
_Laus Deo_, thrilling with the ancient Hebrew spirit:
"Loud and long
Lift the old exulting song,
Sing with Miriam by the sea--
He has cast the mighty down,
Horse and rider sink and drown,
He hath triumphed gloriously."
Of his poems distinctly relating to the events of the civil war, the
best, or at all events the most popular, is _Barbara Frietchie_.
_Ichabod_, expressing the indignation of the Free Soilers at Daniel
Webster's seventh of March speech in defense of the {522} Fugitive
Slave Law, is one of Whittier's best political poems, and not
altogether unworthy of comparison with Browning's _Lost Leader_. The
language of Whittier's warlike lyrics is biblical, and many of his
purely devotional pieces are religious poetry of a high order and have
been included in numerous collections of hymns. Of his songs of faith
and doubt, the best are perhaps _Our Master_, _Chapel of the Hermits_,
and _Eternal Goodness_; one stanza from the last of which is familiar:
"I know not where His islands lift
Their fronded palms in air,
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care."
But from politics and war Whittier turned gladly to sing the homely
life of the New England country side. His rural ballads and idyls are
as genuinely American as any thing that our poets have written, and
have been recommended, as such, to English working-men by Whittier's
co-religionist, John Bright. The most popular of these is probably
_Maud Muller_, whose closing couplet has passed into proverb. _Skipper
Ireson's Ride_ is also very current. Better than either of them, as
poetry, is _Telling the Bees_. But Whittier's masterpiece in work of a
descriptive and reminiscent kind is _Snow Bound_, 1866, a New England
fireside idyl which in its truthfulness recalls the _Winter Evening_ of
Cowper's _Task_ and Burns's _Cotter's Saturday Night_, but in sweetness
and animation is superior to either of them. Although in {523} some
things a Puritan of the Puritans, Whittier has never forgotten that he
is also a Friend, and several of his ballads and songs have been upon
the subject of the early Quaker persecutions in Massachusetts. The
most impressive of these is _Cassandra Southwick_. The latest of them,
the _King's Missive_, originally contributed to the _Memorial History
of Boston_ in 1880, and reprinted the next year in a volume with other
poems, has been the occasion of a rather lively controversy. The
_Bridal of Pennacook_, 1848, and the _Tent on the Beach_, 1867, which
contain some of his best work, were series of ballads told by different
narrators, after the fashion of Longfellow's _Tales of a Wayside Inn_.
As an artist in verse Whittier is strong and fervid, rather than
delicate or rich. He uses only a few metrical forms--by preference the
eight-syllabled rhyming couplet
--"Maud Muller on a summer's day
Raked the meadow sweet with hay," etc.--
and the emphatic tramp of this measure becomes very monotonous, as do
some of Whittier's mannerisms; which proceed, however, never from
affectation, but from a lack of study and variety, and so, no doubt, in
part from the want of that academic culture and thorough technical
equipment which Lowell and Longfellow enjoyed. Though his poems are
not in dialect, like Lowell's _Biglow Papers_, he knows how to make an
artistic use of homely provincial words, such as "chore," {524} which
give his idyls of the hearth and the barnyard a genuine Doric cast.
Whittier's prose is inferior to his verse. The fluency which was a
besetting sin of his poetry when released from the fetters of rhyme and
meter ran into wordiness. His prose writings were partly contributions
to the slavery controversy, partly biographical sketches of English and
American reformers, and partly studies of the scenery and folk-lore of
the Merrimack Valley. Those of most literary interest were the
_Supernaturalism of New England_, 1847, and some of the papers in
_Literary Recreations and Miscellanies_, 1854.
While Massachusetts was creating an American literature, other sections
of the Union were by no means idle. The West, indeed, was as yet too
raw to add any thing of importance to the artistic product of the
country. The South was hampered by circumstances which will presently
be described. But in and about the seaboard cities of New York,
Philadelphia, Baltimore and Richmond, many pens were busy filling the
columns of literary weeklies and monthlies; and there was a
considerable output, such as it was, of books of poetry, fiction,
travel, and miscellaneous light literature. Time has already relegated
most of these to the dusty top-shelves. To rehearse the names of the
numerous contributors to the old _Knickerbocker Magazine_, to
_Godey's_, and _Graham's_, and the _New Mirror_, and the _Southern
Literary Messenger_, or to run over the list of authorlings and
poetasters in Poe's papers on {525} the _Literati of New York_, would
be very much like reading the inscriptions on the head-stones of an old
grave-yard. In the columns of these prehistoric magazines and in the
book notices and reviews away back in the thirties and forties, one
encounters the handiwork and the names of Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow,
Hawthorne, and Lowell, embodied in this mass of forgotten literature.
It would have required a good deal of critical acumen, at the time, to
predict that these and a few others would soon be thrown out into bold
relief, as the significant and permanent names in the literature of
their generation, while Paulding, Hirst, Fay, Dawes, Mrs. Osgood, and
scores of others who figured beside them in the fashionable
periodicals, and filled quite as large a space in the public eye, would
sink into oblivion in less than thirty years. Some of these latter
were clever enough people; they entertained their contemporary public
sufficiently, but their work had no vitality or "power of continuance."
The great majority of the writings of any period are necessarily
ephemeral, and time by a slow process of natural selection is
constantly sifting out the few representative books which shall carry
on the memory of the period to posterity. Now and then it may be
predicted of some undoubted work of genius, even at the moment that it
sees the light, that it is destined to endure. But tastes and fashions
change, and few things are better calculated to inspire the literary
critic with humility than to read {526} the prophecies in old reviews
and see how the future, now become the present, has quietly given them
the lie.
From among the professional _litterateurs_ of his day emerges, with
ever sharper distinctness as time goes on, the name of Edgar Allan Poe
(1809-1849.) By the irony of fate Poe was born at Boston, and his
first volume, _Tamerlane and Other Poems_, 1827, was printed in that
city and bore upon its title page the words, "By a Bostonian." But his
parentage, so far as it was any thing, was southern. His father was a
Marylander who had gone upon the stage and married an actress, herself
the daughter of an actress and a native of England. Left an orphan by
the early death of both parents, Poe was adopted by a Mr. Allan, a
wealthy merchant of Richmond, Va. He was educated partly at an English
school, was student for a time in the University of Virginia and
afterward a cadet in the Military Academy at West Point. His youth was
wild and irregular: he gambled and drank, was proud, bitter and
perverse; finally quarreled with his guardian and adopted father--by
whom he was disowned--and then betook himself to the life of a literary
hack. His brilliant but underpaid work for various periodicals soon
brought him into notice, and he was given the editorship of the
_Southern Literary Messenger_, published at Richmond, and subsequently
of the _Gentlemen's_--afterward _Graham's_--_Magazine_ in Philadelphia.
These and all other positions Poe forfeited through his {527}
dissipated habits and wayward temper, and finally, in 1844, he drifted
to New York, where he found employment on the _Evening Mirror_ and then
on the _Broadway Journal_. He died of delirium tremens at the Marine
Hospital in Baltimore. His life was one of the most wretched in
literary history. He was an extreme instance of what used to be called
the "eccentricity of genius." He had the irritable vanity which is
popularly supposed to accompany the poetic temperament, and was so
insanely egotistic as to imagine that Longfellow and others were
constantly plagiarizing from him. The best side of Poe's character
came out in his domestic relations, in which he displayed great
tenderness, patience and fidelity. His instincts were gentlemanly, and
his manner and conversation were often winning. In the place of moral
feeling he had the artistic conscience. In his critical papers, except
where warped by passion or prejudice, he showed neither fear nor favor,
denouncing bad work by the most illustrious hands and commending
obscure merit. The "impudent literary cliques" who puffed each other's
books; the feeble chirrupings of the bardlings who manufactured verses
for the "Annuals;" and the twaddle of the "genial" incapables who
praised them in flabby reviews--all these Poe exposed with ferocious
honesty. Nor, though his writings are _un_moral, can they be called in
any sense _im_moral. His poetry is as pure in its unearthliness as
Bryant's in its austerity.
{528}
By 1831 Poe had published three thin books of verse, none of which had
attracted notice, although the latest contained the drafts of a few of
his most perfect poems, such as _Israfel_, the _Valley of Unrest_, the
_City in the Sea_, and one of the two pieces inscribed _To Helen_. It
was his habit to touch and retouch his work until it grew under his
more practiced hand into a shape that satisfied his fastidious taste.
Hence the same poem frequently reappears in different stages of
development in successive editions. Poe was a subtle artist in the
realm of the weird and the fantastic. In his intellectual nature there
was a strange conjunction; an imagination as spiritual as Shelley's,
though, unlike Shelley's, haunted perpetually with shapes of fear and
the imagery of ruin; with this, an analytic power, a scientific
exactness, and a mechanical ingenuity more usual in a chemist or a
mathematician than in a poet. He studied carefully the mechanism of
his verse and experimented endlessly with verbal and musical effects,
such as repetition, and monotone, and the selection of words in which
the consonants alliterated and the vowels varied. In his _Philosophy
of Composition_ he described how his best known poem, the _Raven_, was
systematically built up on a preconceived plan in which the number of
lines was first determined and the word "nevermore" selected as a
starting point. No one who knows the mood in which poetry is composed
will believe that this ingenious piece of dissection really describes
the way in {529} which the _Raven_ was conceived and written, or that
any such deliberate and self-conscious process could _originate_ the
associations from which a true poem springs. But it flattered Poe's
pride of intellect to assert that his cooler reason had control not
only over the execution of his poetry, but over the very well-head of
thought and emotion. Some of his most successful stories, like the
_Gold Bug_, the _Mystery of Marie Roget_, the _Purloined Letter_, and
the _Murders in the Rue Morgue_, were applications of this analytic
faculty to the solution of puzzles, such as the finding of buried
treasure or of a lost document, or the ferreting out of a mysterious
crime. After the publication of the _Gold Bug_ he received from all
parts of the country specimens of cipher writing, which he delighted to
work out. Others of his tales were clever pieces of mystification,
like _Hans Pfaall_, the story of a journey to the moon, or experiments
at giving verisimilitude to wild improbabilities by the skillful
introduction of scientific details, as in the _Facts in the Case of M.
Valdemar_ and _Von Kempelen's Discovery_. In his narratives of this
kind Poe anticipated the detective novels of Gaboriau and Wilkie
Collins, the scientific hoaxes of Jules Verne, and, though in a less
degree, the artfully worked up likeness to fact in Edward Everett
Hale's _Man Without a Country_, and similar fictions. While Dickens's
_Barnaby Rudge_ was publishing in parts, Poe showed his skill as a plot
hunter by publishing a paper in _Graham's Magazine_ in which the very
{530} tangled intrigue of the novel was correctly raveled and the
_finale_ predicted in advance.
In his union of imagination and analytic power Poe resembled Coleridge,
who, if any one, was his teacher in poetry and criticism. Poe's verse
often reminds one of _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_, still
oftener of _Kubla Khan_. Like Coleridge, too, he indulged at times in
the opium habit. But in Poe the artist predominated over every thing
else. He began not with sentiment or thought, but with technique, with
melody and color, tricks of language, and effects of verse. It is
curious to study the growth of his style in his successive volumes of
poetry. At first these are metrical experiments and vague images,
original, and with a fascinating suggestiveness, but with so little
meaning that some of his earlier pieces are hardly removed from
nonsense. Gradually, like distant music drawing nearer and nearer, his
poetry becomes fuller of imagination and of an inward significance,
without ever losing, however, its mysterious aloofness from the real
world of the senses. It was a part of Poe's literary creed--formed
upon his own practice and his own limitations, but set forth with a
great display of _a priori_ reasoning in his essay on the _Poetic
Principle_ and elsewhere--that pleasure and not instruction or moral
exhortation was the end of poetry; that beauty and not truth or
goodness was its means; and, furthermore, that the pleasure which it
gave should be _indefinite_. About his own poetry there was always
this {531} indefiniteness. His imagination dwelt in a strange country
of dream--a "ghoul-haunted region of Weir," "out of space, out of
time"--filled with unsubstantial landscapes, and peopled by spectral
shapes. And yet there is a wonderful, hidden significance in this
uncanny scenery. The reader feels that the wild, fantasmal imagery is
in itself a kind of language, and that it in some way expresses a
brooding thought or passion, the terror and despair of a lost soul.
Sometimes there is an obvious allegory, as in the _Haunted Palace_,
which is the parable of a ruined mind, or in the _Raven_, the most
popular of all Poe's poems, originally published in the _American Whig
Review_ for February, 1845. Sometimes the meaning is more obscure, as
in _Ulalume_, which, to most people, is quite incomprehensible, and yet
to all readers of poetic feeling is among the most characteristic, and,
therefore, the most fascinating, of its author's creations.
Now and then, as in the beautiful ballad, _Annabel Lee_, and _To One in
Paradise_, the poet emerges into the light of common human feeling and
speaks a more intelligible language. But in general his poetry is not
the poetry of the heart, and its passion is not the passion of flesh
and blood. In Poe the thought of death is always near, and of the
shadowy borderland between death and life.
"The play is the tragedy 'Man,'
And its hero the Conqueror Worm,"
{532}
The prose tale, _Ligeia_, in which these verses are inserted, is one of
the most powerful of all Poe's writings, and its theme is the power of
the will to overcome death. In that singularly impressive poem, the
_Sleeper_, the morbid horror which invests the tomb springs from the
same source, the materiality of Poe's imagination, which refuses to let
the soul go free from the body.
This quality explains why Poe's _Tales of the Grotesque_ and
_Arabesque_, 1840, are on a lower plane than Hawthorne's romances, to
which a few of them, like _William Wilson_ and the _Man of the Crowd_,
have some resemblance. The former of these, in particular, is in
Hawthorne's peculiar province, the allegory of the conscience. But in
general the tragedy in Hawthorne is a spiritual one, while Poe calls in
the aid of material forces. The passion of physical fear or of
superstitious horror is that which his writings most frequently excite.
These tales represent various grades of the frightful and the ghastly,
from the mere bug-a-boo story like the _Black Cat_, which makes
children afraid to go in the dark, up to the breathless terror of the
_Cask of Amontillado_, or the _Red Death_. Poe's masterpiece in this
kind is the fateful tale of the _Fall of the House of Usher_, with its
solemn and magnificent close. His prose, at its best, often recalls,
in its richly imaginative cast, the manner of De Quincey in such
passages as his _Dream Fugue_, or _Our Ladies of Sorrow_. In {533}
descriptive pieces like the _Domain of Arnheim_, and stories of
adventure like the _Descent into the Maelstrom_, and his long sea tale,
_The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym_, 1838, he displayed a realistic
inventiveness almost equal to Swift's or De Foe's. He was not without
a mocking irony, but he had no constructive humor, and his attempts at
the facetious were mostly failures.
Poe's magical creations were rootless flowers. He took no hold upon
the life about him, and cared nothing for the public concerns of his
country. His poems and tales might have been written _in vacuo_ for
any thing American in them. Perhaps for this reason, in part, his fame
has been so cosmopolitan. In France especially his writings have been
favorites. Charles Baudelaire, the author of the _Fleurs du Mal_,
translated them into French, and his own impressive but unhealthy
poetry shows evidence of Poe's influence. The defect in Poe was in
character, a defect which will make itself felt in art as in life. If
he had had the sweet home feeling of Longfellow or the moral fervor of
Whittier he might have been a greater poet than either.
"If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky!"
{534}
Though Poe was a southerner, if not by birth, at least by race and
breeding, there was nothing distinctly southern about his peculiar
genius, and in his wandering life he was associated as much with
Philadelphia and New York as with Baltimore and Richmond. The
conditions which had made the southern colonies unfruitful in literary
and educational works before the Revolution continued to act down to
the time of the civil war. Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin
in the closing years of the last century gave extension to slavery,
making it profitable to cultivate the new staple by enormous gangs of
field hands working under the whip of the overseer in large
plantations. Slavery became henceforth a business speculation in the
States furthest south, and not, as in Old Virginia and Kentucky, a
comparatively mild domestic system. The necessity of defending its
peculiar institution against the attacks of a growing faction in the
North compelled the South to throw all its intellectual strength into
politics, which, for that matter, is the natural occupation and
excitement of a social aristocracy. Meanwhile immigration sought the
free States, and there was no middle class at the South. The "poor
whites" were ignorant and degraded. There were people of education in
the cities and on some of the plantations, but there was no great
educated class from which a literature could proceed. And the culture
of the South, such as it was, was becoming old-fashioned and local, as
the section was isolated {535} more and more from the rest of the Union
and from the enlightened public opinion of Europe by its reactionary
prejudices and its sensitiveness on the subject of slavery. Nothing
can be imagined more ridiculously provincial than the sophomorical
editorials in the southern press just before the outbreak of the war,
or than the backward and ill-informed articles which passed for reviews
in the poorly supported periodicals of the South.
In the general dearth of work of high and permanent value, one or two
southern authors may be mentioned whose writings have at least done
something to illustrate the life and scenery of their section. When in
1833 the Baltimore _Saturday Visitor_ offered a prize of a hundred
dollars for the best prose tale, one of the committee who awarded the
prize to Poe's first story, the MS. _Found in a Bottle_, was John P.
Kennedy, a Whig gentleman of Baltimore, who afterward became Secretary
of the Navy in Fillmore's administration. The year before he had
published _Swallow Barn_, a series of agreeable sketches of country
life in Virginia. In 1835 and 1838 he published his two novels,
_Horse-Shoe Robinson_ and _Rob of the Bowl_, the former a story of the
Revolutionary War in South Carolina; the latter an historical tale of
colonial Maryland. These had sufficient success to warrant reprinting
as late as 1852. But the most popular and voluminous of all Southern
writers of fiction was William Gilmore Simms, a South Carolinian, who
died in 1870. He wrote over thirty {536} novels, mostly romances of
Revolutionary history, southern life and wild adventure, among the best
of which were the _Partisan_, 1835, and the _Yemassee_. Simms was an
inferior Cooper, with a difference. His novels are good boys' books,
but are crude and hasty in composition. He was strongly southern in
his sympathies, though his newspaper, the _Charleston City Gazette_,
took part against the Nullifiers. His miscellaneous writings include
several histories and biographies, political tracts, addresses and
critical papers contributed to southern magazines. He also wrote
numerous poems, the most ambitious of which was _Atlantis, a Story of
the Sea_, 1832. His poems have little value except as here and there
illustrating local scenery and manners, as in _Southern Passages and
Pictures_, 1839. Mr. John Esten Cooke's pleasant but not very strong
_Virginia Comedians_ was, perhaps, in literary quality the best
southern novel produced before the civil war.
When Poe came to New York, the most conspicuous literary figure of the
metropolis, with the possible exception of Bryant and Halleck, was N.
P. Willis, one of the editors of the _Evening Mirror_, upon which
journal Poe was for a time engaged. Willis had made a literary
reputation, when a student at Yale, by his _Scripture Poems_, written
in smooth blank verse. Afterward he had edited the _American Monthly_
in his native city of Boston, and more recently he had published
_Pencillings by the Way_, 1835, a pleasant record of {537} European
saunterings; _Inklings of Adventure_, 1836, a collection of dashing
stories and sketches of American and foreign life; and _Letters from
Under a Bridge_, 1839, a series of charming rural letters from his
country place at Owego, on the Susquehanna. Willis's work, always
graceful and sparkling, sometimes even brilliant, though light in
substance and jaunty in style, had quickly raised him to the summit of
popularity. During the years from 1835 to 1850 he was the most
successful American magazinist, and even down to the day of his death,
in 1867, he retained his hold upon the attention of the fashionable
public by his easy paragraphing and correspondence in the _Mirror_ and
its successor, the _Home Journal_, which catered to the literary wants
of the _beau monde_. Much of Willis's work was ephemeral, though
clever of its kind, but a few of his best tales and sketches, such as
_F. Smith_, _The Ghost Ball at Congress Hall_, _Edith Linsey_, and the
_Lunatic's Skate_, together with some of the _Letters from Under a
Bridge_, are worthy of preservation, not only as readable stories, but
as society studies of life at American watering places like Nahant and
Saratoga and Ballston Spa half a century ago. A number of his simpler
poems, like _Unseen Spirits_, _Spring_, _To M---- from Abroad_, and
_Lines on Leaving Europe_, still retain a deserved place in collections
and anthologies.
The senior editor of the _Mirror_, George P. Morris, was once a very
popular song writer, and {538} his _Woodman, Spare that Tree_, still
survives. Other residents of New York City who have written single
famous pieces were Clement C. Moore, a professor in the General
Theological Seminary, whose _Visit from St. Nicholas_--"'Twas the Night
Before Christmas," etc.--is a favorite ballad in every nursery in the
land; Charles Fenno Hoffman, a novelist of reputation in his time, but
now remembered only as the author of the song, _Sparkling and Bright_,
and the patriotic ballad of _Monterey_; Robert H. Messinger, a native
of Boston, but long resident in New York, where he was a familiar
figure in fashionable society, who wrote _Give Me the Old_, a fine ode
with a choice Horatian flavor; and William Allen Butler, a lawyer and
occasional writer, whose capital satire of _Nothing to Wear_ was
published anonymously and had a great run. Of younger poets, like
Stoddard and Aldrich, who formerly wrote for the _Mirror_ and who are
still living and working in the maturity of their powers, it is not
within the limits and design of this sketch to speak. But one of their
contemporaries, Bayard Taylor, who died, American Minister at Berlin,
in 1878, though a Pennsylvanian by birth and rearing, may be reckoned
among the "literati of New York." A farmer lad from Chester County,
who had learned the printer's trade and printed a little volume of his
juvenile verses in 1844, he came to New York shortly after with
credentials from Dr. Griswold, the editor of _Graham's_, and obtaining
encouragement and aid {539} from Willis, Horace Greeley and others, he
set out to make the tour of Europe, walking from town to town in
Germany and getting employment now and then at his trade to help pay
the expenses of the trip. The story of these _Wanderjahre_ he told in
his _Views Afoot_, 1846. This was the first of eleven books of travel
written during the course of his life. He was an inveterate nomad, and
his journeyings carried him to the remotest regions--to California,
India, China, Japan and the isles of the sea, to Central Africa and the
Soudan, Palestine, Egypt, Iceland and the "by-ways of Europe." His
head-quarters at home were in New York, where he did literary work for
the _Tribune_. He was a rapid and incessant worker, throwing off many
volumes of verse and prose, fiction, essays, sketches, translations and
criticism, mainly contributed in the first instance to the magazines.
His versatility was very marked, and his poetry ranged from _Rhymes of
Travel_, 1848, and _Poems of the Orient_, 1854, to idyls and home
ballads of Pennsylvania life, like the _Quaker Widow_ and the _Old
Pennsylvania Farmer_, and, on the other side, to ambitious and somewhat
mystical poems, like the _Masque of the Gods_, 1872--written in four
days--and dramatic experiments like the _Prophet_, 1874, and _Prince
Deukalion_, 1878. He was a man of buoyant and eager nature, with a
great appetite for new experience, a remarkable memory, a talent for
learning languages, and a too great readiness to take the hue of his
favorite books. From {540} his facility, his openness to external
impressions of scenery and costume and his habit of turning these at
once into the service of his pen, it results that there is something
"newspapery" and superficial about most of his prose. It is reporter's
work, though reporting of a high order. His poetry, too, though full
of glow and picturesqueness, is largely imitative, suggesting Tennyson
not unfrequently, but more often Shelley. His spirited _Bedouin Song_,
for example, has an echo of Shelley's _Lines to an Indian Air_:
"From the desert I come to thee
On a stallion shod with fire;
And the winds are left behind
In the speed of my desire.
Under thy window I stand
And the midnight hears my cry;
I love thee, I love but thee
With a love that shall not die."
The dangerous quickness with which he caught the manner of other poets
made him an admirable parodist and translator. His _Echo Club_, 1876,
contains some of the best travesties in the tongue, and his great
translation of Goethe's _Faust_, 1870-71--with its wonderfully close
reproduction of the original meters--is one of the glories of American
literature. All in all, Taylor may unhesitatingly be put first among
our poets of the second generation--the generation succeeding that of
Longfellow and Lowell--although the lack in him of original genius
self-determined to a {541} peculiar sphere, or the want of an inward
fixity and concentration to resist the rich tumult of outward
impressions, has made him less significant in the history of our
literary thought than some other writers less generously endowed.
Taylor's novels had the qualities of his verse. They were profuse,
eloquent and faulty. _John Godfrey's Fortune_, 1864, gave a picture of
bohemian life in New York. _Hannah Thurston_, 1863, and the _Story of
Kennett_, 1866, introduced many incidents and persons from the old
Quaker life of rural Pennsylvania, as Taylor remembered it in his
boyhood. The former was like Hawthorne's _Blithedale Romance_, a
satire on fanatics and reformers, and its heroine is a nobly conceived
character, though drawn with some exaggeration. The _Story of
Kennett_, which is largely autobiographic, has a greater freshness and
reality than the others and is full of personal recollections. In
these novels, as in his short stories, Taylor's pictorial skill is
greater on the whole than his power of creating characters or inventing
plots.
Literature in the West now began to have an existence. Another young
poet from Chester County, Pa., namely, Thomas Buchanan Read, went to
Cincinnati, and not to New York, to study sculpture and painting, about
1837, and one of his best-known poems, _Pons Maximus_, was written on
the occasion of the opening of the suspension bridge across the Ohio.
Read came East, to be sure, in 1841, and spent many years in our {542}
seaboard cities and in Italy. He was distinctly a minor poet, but some
of his Pennsylvania pastorals, like the _Deserted Road_, have a natural
sweetness; and his luxurious _Drifting_, which combines the methods of
painting and poetry, is justly popular. _Sheridan's Ride_--perhaps his
most current piece--is a rather forced production and has been
over-praised. The two Ohio sister poets, Alice and Phoebe Cary, were
attracted to New York in 1850, as soon as their literary success seemed
assured. They made that city their home for the remainder of their
lives. Poe praised Alice Cary's _Pictures of Memory_, and Phoebe's
_Nearer Home_ has become a favorite hymn. There is nothing peculiarly
Western about the verse of the Cary sisters. It is the poetry of
sentiment, memory, and domestic affection, entirely feminine, rather
tame and diffuse as a whole, but tender and sweet, cherished by many
good women and dear to simple hearts.
A stronger smack of the soil is in the negro melodies like _Uncle Ned_,
_O Susanna_, _Old Folks at Home_, _Way Down South_, _Nelly was a Lady_,
_My Old Kentucky Home_, etc., which were the work not of any southern
poet, but of Stephen C. Foster, a native of Allegheny, Pa., and a
resident of Cincinnati and Pittsburg. He composed the words and music
of these, and many others of a similar kind, during the years 1847 to
1861. Taken together they form the most original and vital addition
which this country has made to the psalmody {543} of the world, and
entitle Foster to the first rank among American song writers.
As Foster's plaintive melodies carried the pathos and humor of the
plantation all over the land, so Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's _Uncle
Tom's Cabin_, 1852, brought home to millions of readers the sufferings
of the negroes in the "black belt" of the cotton-growing States. This
is the most popular novel ever written in America. Hundreds of
thousands of copies were sold in this country and in England, and some
forty translations were made into foreign tongues. In its dramatized
form it still keeps the stage, and the statistics of circulating
libraries show that even now it is in greater demand than any other
single book. It did more than any other literary agency to rouse the
public conscience to a sense of the shame and horror of slavery; more
even than Garrison's _Liberator_; more than the indignant poems of
Whittier and Lowell or the orations of Sumner and Phillips. It
presented the thing concretely and dramatically, and in particular it
made the odious Fugitive Slave Law forever impossible to enforce. It
was useless for the defenders of slavery to protest that the picture
was exaggerated and that overseers like Legree were the exception. The
system under which such brutalities could happen, and did sometimes
happen, was doomed. It is easy now to point out defects of taste and
art in this masterpiece, to show that the tone is occasionally
melodramatic, that some of the characters are {544} conventional, and
that the literary execution is in parts feeble and in others coarse.
In spite of all it remains true that _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is a great
book, the work of genius seizing instinctively upon its opportunity and
uttering the thought of the time with a power that thrilled the heart
of the nation and of the world. Mrs. Stowe never repeated her first
success. Some of her novels of New England life, such as the
_Minister's Wooing_, 1859, and the _Pearl of Orr's Island_, 1862, have
a mild kind of interest, and contain truthful portraiture of provincial
ways and traits; while later fictions of a domestic type, like _Pink
and White Tyranny_, and _My Wife and I_, are really beneath criticism.
There were other Connecticut writers contemporary with Mrs. Stowe: Mrs.
L. H. Sigourney, for example, a Hartford poetess, formerly known as
"the Hemans of America," but now quite obsolete; and J. G. Percival of
New Haven, a shy and eccentric scholar, whose geological work was of
value, and whose memory is preserved by one or two of his simpler
poems, still in circulation, such as _To Seneca Lake_ and the _Coral
Grove_. Another Hartford poet, Brainard--already spoken of as an early
friend of Whittier--died young, leaving a few pieces which show that
his lyrical gift was spontaneous and genuine but had received little
cultivation. A much younger writer than either of these, Donald G.
Mitchell, of New Haven, has a more lasting place in our literature, by
virtue of his charmingly written _Reveries of a Bachelor_, {545} 1850,
and _Dream Life_, 1852, stories which sketch themselves out in a series
of reminiscences and lightly connected scenes, and which always appeal
freshly to young men because they have that dreamy outlook upon life
which is characteristic of youth. But, upon the whole, the most
important contribution made by Connecticut in that generation to the
literary stock of America was the Beecher family. Lyman Beecher had
been an influential preacher and theologian, and a sturdy defender of
orthodoxy against Boston Unitarianism. Of his numerous sons and
daughters, all more or less noted for intellectual vigor and
independence, the most eminent were Mrs. Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher,
the great pulpit orator of Brooklyn. Mr. Beecher was too busy a man to
give more than his spare moments to general literature. His sermons,
lectures, and addresses were reported for the daily papers and printed
in part in book form; but these lose greatly when divorced from the
large, warm, and benignant personality of the man. His volumes made up
of articles in the _Independent_ and the _Ledger_, such as _Star
Papers_, 1855, and _Eyes and Ears_, 1862, contain many delightful
_morceaux_ upon country life and similar topics, though they are hardly
wrought with sufficient closeness and care to take a permanent place in
letters. Like Willis's _Ephemerae_, they are excellent literary
journalism, but hardly literature.
We may close our retrospect of American {546} literature before 1861
with a brief notice of one of the most striking literary phenomena of
the time--the _Leaves of Grass_ of Walt Whitman, published at Brooklyn
in 1855. The author, born at West Hills, Long Island, in 1819, had
been printer, school-teacher, editor, and builder. He had scribbled a
good deal of poetry of the ordinary kind, which attracted little
attention, but finding conventional rhymes and meters too cramping a
vehicle for his need of expression, he discarded them for a kind of
rhythmic chant, of which the following is a fair specimen:
"Press close, bare bosom'd night! Press close, magnetic,
nourishing night!
Night of south winds! night of the few large stars!
Still, nodding night! mad, naked, summer night!"
The invention was not altogether a new one. The English translation of
the Psalms of David and of some of the Prophets, the _Poems of Ossian_,
and some of Matthew Arnold's unrhymed pieces, especially the _Strayed
Reveller_, have an irregular rhythm of this kind, to say nothing of the
old Anglo-Saxon poems, like _Beowulf_, and the Scripture paraphrases
attributed to Caedmon. But this species of _oratio soluta_, carried to
the lengths to which Whitman carried it, had an air of novelty which
was displeasing to some, while to others, weary of familiar measures
and jingling rhymes, it was refreshing in its boldness and freedom.
There is no consenting estimate of this poet. {547} Many think that
his so-called poems are not poems at all, but simply a bad variety of
prose; that there is nothing to him beyond a combination of affectation
and indecency; and that the Whitman _culte_ is a passing "fad" of a few
literary men, and especially of a number of English critics like
Rossetti, Swinburne, Buchanan, etc., who, being determined to have
something unmistakably American--that is, different from any thing
else--in writings from this side of the water before they will
acknowledge any originality in them, have been misled into discovering
in Whitman "the poet of Democracy." Others maintain that he is the
greatest of American poets, or, indeed, of all modern poets; that he is
"cosmic," or universal, and that he has put an end forever to puling
rhymes and lines chopped up into metrical feet. Whether Whitman's
poetry is formally poetry at all or merely the raw material of poetry,
the chaotic and amorphous impression which it makes on readers of
conservative tastes results from his effort to take up into his verse
elements which poetry has usually left out--the ugly, the earthy, and
even the disgusting; the "under side of things," which he holds not to
be prosaic when apprehended with a strong, masculine joy in life and
nature seen in all their aspects. The lack of these elements in the
conventional poets seems to him and his disciples like leaving out the
salt from the ocean, making poetry merely pretty and blinking whole
classes of facts. Hence the naturalism and animalism of some of the
{548} divisions in _Leaves of Grass_, particularly that entitled
_Children of Adam_, which gave great offense by its immodesty, or its
outspokenness. Whitman holds that nakedness is chaste; that all the
functions of the body in healthy exercise are equally clean; that all,
in fact, are divine; and that matter is as divine as spirit. The
effort to get every thing into his poetry, to speak out his thought
just as it comes to him, accounts, too, for his way of cataloguing
objects without selection. His single expressions are often
unsurpassed for descriptive beauty and truth. He speaks of "the
vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue," of the "lisp"
of the plane, of the prairies, "where herds of buffalo make a crawling
spread of the square miles." But if there is any eternal distinction
between poetry and prose the most liberal canons of the poetic art will
never agree to accept lines like these:
"And [I] remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck
and ankles;
He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated, and
passed north."
Whitman is the spokesman of Democracy and of the future; full of
brotherliness and hope, loving the warm, gregarious pressure of the
crowd and the touch of his comrade's elbow in the ranks. He liked the
people--multitudes of people; the swarm of life beheld from a Broadway
omnibus or a Brooklyn ferry-boat. The rowdy and the Negro {549}
truck-driver were closer to his sympathy than the gentleman and the
scholar. "I loafe and invite my soul," he writes: "I sound my barbaric
yawp over the roofs of the world." His poem _Walt Whitman_, frankly
egotistic, simply describes himself as a typical, average man--the same
as any other man, and therefore not individual but universal. He has
great tenderness and heartiness--"the good gray poet;" and during the
civil war he devoted himself unreservedly to the wounded soldiers in
the Washington hospitals--an experience which he has related in the
_Dresser_ and elsewhere. It is characteristic of his rough and ready
_camaraderie_ to use slang and newspaper English in his poetry, to call
himself Walt instead of Walter, and to have his picture taken in a
slouch hat and with a flannel shirt open at the throat. His decriers
allege that he poses for effect; that he is simply a backward eddy in
the tide, and significant only as a temporary reaction against ultra
civilization--like Thoreau, though in a different way. But with all
his mistakes in art there is a healthy, virile, tumultuous pulse of
life in his lyric utterance and a great sweep of imagination in his
panoramic view of times and countries. One likes to read him because
he feels so good, enjoys so fully the play of his senses, and has such
a lusty confidence in his own immortality and in the prospects of the
human race. Stripped of verbiage and repetition, his ideas are not
many. His indebtedness to Emerson--who wrote an introduction to {550}
the _Leaves of Grass_--is manifest. He sings of man and not men, and
the individual differences of character, sentiment, and passion, the
_dramatic_ elements of life, find small place in his system. It is too
early to say what will be his final position in literary history. But
it is noteworthy that the democratic masses have not accepted him yet
as their poet. Whittier and Longfellow, the poets of conscience and
feeling, are the darlings of the American people. The admiration, and
even the knowledge of Whitman, are mostly esoteric, confined to the
literary class. It is also not without significance as to the ultimate
reception of his innovations in verse that he has numerous parodists,
but no imitators. The tendency among our younger poets is not toward
the abandonment of rhyme and meter, but toward the introduction of new
stanza forms and an increasing carefulness and finish in the
_technique_ of their art. It is observable, too, that in his most
inspired passages Whitman reverts to the old forms of verse; to blank
verse, for example, in the _Man-o'-War-Bird_:
"Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm,
Waking renewed on thy prodigious pinions," etc.,
and elsewhere not infrequently to dactylic hexameters and pentameters:
"Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river! . . .
Far-swooping, elbowed earth! rich, apple-blossomed earth."
{551} Indeed, Whitman's most popular poem, _My Captain_, written after
the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, differs little in form from
ordinary verse, as a stanza of it will show:
"My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won.
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck, my captain lies
Fallen, cold and dead."
This is from _Drum Taps_, a volume of poems of the civil war. Whitman
has also written prose having much the same quality as his poetry:
_Democratic Vistas_, _Memoranda of the Civil War_, and more recently,
_Specimen Days_. His residence of late years has been at Camden, New
Jersey, where a centennial edition of his writings was published in
1876.
1. William Cullen Bryant. Thanatopsis. To a Waterfowl. Green River.
Hymn to the North Star. A Forest Hymn. "O Fairest of the Rural
Maids." June. The Death of the Flowers. The Evening Wind. The
Battle Field. The Planting of the Apple-tree. The Flood of Years.
2. John Greenleaf Whittier. Cassandra {552} Southwick. The New Wife
and the Old. The Virginia Slave Mother. Randolph of Roanoke. Barclay
of Ary. The Witch of Wenham. Skipper Ireson's Ride. Marguerite.
Maud Muller. Telling the Bees. My Playmate. Barbara Frietchie.
Ichabod. Laus Deo. Snow Bound.
3. Edgar Allan Poe. The Raven. The Bells. Israfel. Ulalume. To
Helen. The City in the Sea. Annabel Lee. To One in Paradise. The
Sleeper. The Valley of Unrest. The Fall of the House of Usher.
Ligeia. William Wilson. The Cask of Amontillado. The Assignation.
The Masque of the Red Death. Narrative of A. Gordon Pym.
4. N. P. Willis. Select Prose Writings. New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons. 1886.
5. Mrs. H. B. Stowe. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Oldtown Folks.
6. W. G. Simms. The Partisan. The Yemassee.
7. Bayard Taylor. A Bacchic Ode. Hylas. Kubleh. The Soldier and the
Pard. Sicilian Wine. Taurus. Serapion. The Metempsychosis of the
Pine. The Temptation of Hassan Ben Khaled. Bedouin Song. Euphorion.
The Quaker Widow. John Reid. Lars. Views Afoot. By-ways of Europe.
The Story of Kennett. The Echo Club.
8. Walt Whitman. My Captain. "When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard
Bloomed." "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." Pioneers, {553} O
Pioneers. The Mystic Trumpeter. A Woman at Auction. Sea-shore
Memoirs. Passage to India. Mannahatta. The Wound Dresser. Longings
for Home.
9. Poets of America. By E. C. Stedman. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin &
Co. 1885.
{554}
CHAPTER VII.
LITERATURE SINCE 1861.
A generation has nearly passed since the outbreak of the civil war, and
although public affairs are still mainly in the hands of men who had
reached manhood before the conflict opened, or who were old enough at
that time to remember clearly its stirring events, the younger men who
are daily coming forward to take their places know it only by tradition.
It makes a definite break in the history of our literature, and a number
of new literary schools and tendencies have appeared since its close. As
to the literature of the war itself, it was largely the work of writers
who had already reached or passed middle age. All of the more important
authors described in the last three chapters survived the Rebellion,
except Poe, who died in 1849, Prescott, who died in 1859, and Thoreau and
Hawthorne, who died in the second and fourth years of the war,
respectively. The final and authoritative history of the struggle has
not yet been written, and cannot be written for many years to come. Many
partial and tentative accounts have, however, appeared, among which may
be mentioned, on the northern side, {555} Horace Greeley's _American
Conflict_, 1864-66; Vice-president Wilson's _Rise and Fall of the Slave
Power in America_, and J. W. Draper's _American Civil War_, 1868-70; on
the southern side Alexander H. Stephens's _Confederate States of
America_, Jefferson Davis's _Rise and Fall of the Confederate States of
America_, and E. A. Pollard's _Lost Cause_. These, with the exception of
Dr. Draper's philosophical narrative, have the advantage of being the
work of actors in the political or military events which they describe,
and the disadvantage of being, therefore, partisan--in some instances
passionately partisan. A storehouse of materials for the coming
historian is also at hand in Frank Moore's great collection, the
_Rebellion Record_; in numerous regimental histories and histories of
special armies, departments, and battles, like W. Swinton's _Army of the
Potomac_; in the autobiographies and recollections of Grant and Sherman
and other military leaders; in the "war papers," now publishing in the
_Century_ magazine, and in innumerable sketches and reminiscences by
officers and privates on both sides.
The war had its poetry, its humors and its general literature, some of
which have been mentioned in connection with Whittier, Lowell, Holmes,
Whitman, and others; and some of which remain to be mentioned, as the
work of new writers, or of writers who had previously made little mark.
There were war songs on both sides, few of which had much literary value
excepting, perhaps, James {556} R. Randall's southern ballad, _Maryland,
My Maryland_, sung to the old college air of _Lauriger Horatius_, and the
grand martial chorus of _John Brown's Body_, an old Methodist hymn, to
which the northern armies beat time as they went "marching on."
Randall's song, though spirited, was marred by its fire-eating
absurdities about "vandals" and "minions" and "northern scum," the cheap
insults of the southern newspaper press. To furnish the _John Brown_
chorus with words worthy of the music, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe wrote her
_Battle Hymn of the Republic_, a noble poem, but rather too fine and
literary for a song, and so never fully accepted by the soldiers. Among
the many verses which voiced the anguish and the patriotism of that stern
time, which told of partings and homecomings, of women waiting by
desolate hearths, in country homes, for tidings of husbands and sons who
had gone to the war, or which celebrated individual deeds of heroism or
sang the thousand private tragedies and heart-breaks of the great
conflict, by far the greater number were of too humble a grade to survive
the feeling of the hour. Among the best or the most popular of them were
Kate Putnam Osgood's _Driving Home the Cows_, Mrs. Ethel Lynn Beers's
_All Quiet Along the Potomac_, Forceythe Willson's _Old Sergeant_, and
John James Piatt's _Riding to Vote_. Of the poets whom the war brought
out, or developed, the most noteworthy were Henry Timrod, of South
Carolina, and Henry Howard Brownell, of Connecticut. During the {557}
war Timrod was with the Confederate Army of the West, as correspondent
for the _Charleston Mercury_, and in 1864 he became assistant editor of
the _South Carolinian_, at Columbia. Sherman's "march to the sea" broke
up his business, and he returned to Charleston. A complete edition of
his poems was published in 1873, six years after his death. The
prettiest of all Timrod's poems is _Katie_, but more to our present
purpose are _Charleston_--written in the time of blockade--and the
_Unknown Dead_, which tells
"Of nameless graves on battle plains,
Wash'd by a single winter's rains,
Where, some beneath Virginian hills,
And some by green Atlantic rills,
Some by the waters of the West,
A myriad unknown heroes rest."
When the war was over a poet of New York State, F. M. Finch, sang of
these and of other graves in his beautiful Decoration Day lyric, _The
Blue and the Gray_, which spoke the word of reconciliation and
consecration for North and South alike.
Brownell, whose _Lyrics of a Day_ and _War Lyrics_ were published
respectively in 1864 and 1866, was private secretary to Farragut, on
whose flag-ship, the _Hartford_, he was present at several great naval
engagements, such as the "Passage of the Forts" below New Orleans, and
the action off Mobile, described in his poem, the _Bay Fight_. {558}
With some roughness and unevenness of execution, Brownell's poetry had a
fire which places him next to Whittier as the Koerner of the civil war.
In him, especially, as in Whittier, is that Puritan sense of the
righteousness of his cause which made the battle for the Union a holy war
to the crusaders against slavery:
"Full red the furnace fires must glow
That melt the ore of mortal kind:
The mills of God are grinding slow,
But ah, how close they grind!
"To-day the Dahlgren and the drum
Are dread apostles of his name;
His kingdom here can only come
By chrism of blood and flame."