There are many good reasons why we should celebrate the one hundredth
birthday of William Cullen Bryant.[34] Not the least of them is this,
that in bringing him our tribute we also commemorate the birthday
of American poetry. He was our earliest poet, and “Thanatopsis” our
earliest poem. Through him, therefore, we make festival to the Muse who
has taught many since him to sing.
[34] First printed in _The Review of Reviews_, New York, October, 1894.
Older than Bryant were three single-poem men,--Francis Scott Key,
Joseph Hopkinson, and John Howard Payne; yet, so far as I can learn,
their three poems were written later than “Thanatopsis,” and, after
all, neither “The Star Spangled Banner,” nor “Hail Columbia,” nor
“Home, Sweet Home,” would rank high as poetry. Likewise, though
Fitz-Greene Halleck was older than Bryant by four years, and once
enjoyed a considerable vogue, his verse is now obsolescent, if
not obsolete. In the anthologies--those presses of faded poetical
flowers--you will still find some of his pieces; but which of us now
regards “Marco Bozzaris” as the “finest martial poem in the language”?
Bryant’s priority among his immediate contemporaries is thus clearly
established; furthermore, a considerable interval separated him from
that group of American poets who rose to eminence in the two decades
before the civil war. Bryant was born in 1794, Emerson in 1803,
Longfellow and Whittier in 1807, Holmes and Poe in 1809, Lowell and
Whitman in 1819. An almost unexampled precocity also set Bryant’s
pioneership beyond dispute.
But when we call Bryant the earliest American poet, and “Thanatopsis”
the earliest American poem, we must not suppose that both had not had
many ineffectual predecessors. Versifiers, like milliners, flourish
from age to age, and their works are forgotten in favor of a later
fashion. Who the forgotten predecessors of Bryant were, he himself will
tell us. Being asked in February, 1818, to write an article on American
poetry for the _North American Review_ he replied:--
“Most of the American poets of much note, I believe, I have
read,--Dwight, Barlow, Trumbull, Humphreys, Honeywood, Clifton,
Paine. The works of Hopkins I have never met with. I have seen Philip
Freneau’s writings, and some things by Francis Hopkinson. There was a
Dr. Ladd, if I am not mistaken in the name, of Rhode Island, who, it
seems, was much celebrated in his time for his poetical talent, of whom
I have seen hardly anything; and another, Dr. Church, a Tory at the
beginning of the Revolution, who was compelled to leave the country,
and some of whose satirical verses which I have heard recited possess
considerable merit as specimens of forcible and glowing invective. I
have read most of Mrs. Morton’s poems, and turned over a volume of
stale and senseless rhymes by Mrs. Warren. Before the time of these
writers, some of whom are still alive, and the rest belong to the
generation which has just passed away, I imagine that we could hardly
be said to have any poetry of our own; and indeed it seems to me that
American poetry, such as it is, may justly enough be said to have had
its rise with that knot of Connecticut poets, Trumbull and others, most
of whose works appeared about the time of the Revolution.”[35]
[35] _A Biography of William Cullen Bryant_, by Parke Godwin, i, 154.
Bryant’s list contains the name of not one poet whose works are read
to-day. All these volumes belong to _fossil literature_,--literature,
that is, which may be dug up and studied for the light it may throw
on the customs of a time, or its intellectual development, but
which, so far as its own vitality is concerned, has passed away
beyond hope of resuscitation. The historical student of American
poetry may read Barlow’s “Columbiad” as a matter of duty; but those
of us to whom poetry is the breath of life will not seek it in that
literary graveyard. Reverently, rather, will we read the titles on the
tombstones and pass on.
Almost coeval with American independence itself was the notion that
there ought to be an independent American literature. The Revolution
had resulted in the formation of a republic new in pattern, in
opportunities, in ideals; a republic which, having broken forever with
the political system of Britain, would gladly have been freed from
all obligations--including intellectual and æsthetic obligations--to
her. We hardly realize how acute was the sensitiveness of our
great-grandfathers on this point. The satisfaction they took in
recalling the victories of Bennington and Yorktown vanished when they
were reminded--and there was always some candid foreigner at hand to
remind them--that a nation’s real greatness is measured, not by the
size of its crops, nor by its millions of square miles of surface,
nor by the rapidity with which its population doubles, nor even
by its ability to whip King George the Third’s armies, but by its
contributions to philosophy, to literature, to art, to religion. “What
have you to show in _these_ lines?” we imagine the candid foreigner
to have been perpetually asking; and the patriotic American to have
winced, as he had to reply, “Nothing;” unless, indeed, he happened
to have Thomas Jefferson’s philosophical poise. To the slur of Abbé
Raynal, that “America had not produced a single man of genius,”
Jefferson replied: “When we shall have existed as a people as long
as the Greeks did before they produced a Homer, the Romans a Virgil,
the French a Racine and Voltaire, the English a Shakespeare and
Milton, should this reproach be still true, we will inquire from what
unfriendly causes it has proceeded that the other countries of Europe
and other quarters of the earth shall not have inscribed any name of
ours on the roll of poets.”
Very few Americans, however, could bear with Jeffersonian equanimity
the imputation of inferiority. All were well aware that they had
just achieved a revolution without parallel in history; they were
honestly proud of it; and they could not help feeling touchy when
their critics, ignoring this stupendous achievement, censured them
for failure in fields they had never entered. A few, like Jefferson,
would respond, “Give us time;” the majority either masked their
irritation under pretended contempt for the opinion of foreigners,
or silently admitted the impeachment. There grew up, on the one hand,
“spread-eagleism,”--brag over our material and political bigness,--and,
on the other, an impatient desire to produce masterpieces which should
not fear comparison with the best the world could show. The Hebrew
patriarchs, whose faith Jehovah tested by denying them children till
the old age of their wives, were not less troubled at the postponement
of their dearest wishes than were those eager watchers for the advent
of American genius. Long before Bryant’s little volume was published,
in 1821, those watchers had begun to speculate as to the sort of work
in which that genius would manifest itself, and then was conjured up
that bogy, “The American Spirit,” which has flitted up and down through
our college lecture-rooms and fluttered the minds of immature critics
ever since. It was generally agreed that the question to be asked about
each new book should be, “Has it The American Spirit?” and not, “Is it
excellent?” Nobody knew how to define that spirit, but everybody had
a teasing conviction that, unless it were conspicuous, the offspring
of American genius could not prove their legitimacy. Foreigners,
especially the English, encouraged this conviction. They expected
something strange and uncouth; they would accept nothing else as
genuine. Hence, years afterward, when Whitman, with cowboy gait, came
swaggering up Parnassus, shouting nicknames at the Muses and ready to
slap Apollo on the back, our perspicacious English cousins exclaimed,
“There! there! that’s American! At last we’ve found a poet with The
American Spirit!” For quite other reasons Whitman deserves serious
attention; not for those extravagances which he deluded himself and his
unrestrained admirers into thinking were most precious manifestations
of The American Spirit. This bogy has now been pretty thoroughly
exorcised, its followers being chiefly the writers of bad grammar,
bad spelling, and slang,--which pass for dialect stories,--and an
occasional student of literature, who finds very little of the American
product that could not have been produced elsewhere. We may dismiss
The American Spirit, bidding it seek its spectral companion, The Great
American Novel, but we must remember that, even before Bryant began to
write, it was worrying the minds of our literary folk.
Bryant himself must have been subjected, consciously or unconsciously,
to the influences we have surveyed,--for who can escape breathing the
common atmosphere? But he had within him that which is more potent
than any external mould, and is the one trait hereditary in genius of
every kind,--he had sincerity. What he saw, he saw with his own eyes;
what he spake, he spake with his own lips; and inevitably it followed
that men proclaimed him original. His secret, his method, were no more
than this. “I saw some lines by you to the skylark,” he writes to his
brother in 1838. “Did you ever see such a bird? Let me counsel you to
draw your images, in describing Nature, from what you observe around
you, unless you are professedly composing a description of some foreign
country, when, of course, you will learn what you can from books. The
skylark is an English bird, and an American who has never visited
Europe has no right to be in raptures about it.” That last sentence
explains Bryant; it is worth a hundred essays on The American Spirit;
it should be the warning of every writer. The raptures of Americans
over English skylarks they had never seen were then, and have always
been, the bane of our literature. Eighty years ago the lowlands at
the foot of our Helicon had been turned into a slough by the tears of
rhymesters who did not feel the griefs they sang of, and the woods
howled with sighs which caused no pang to the sighers. Bryant, by
merely being natural and sincere, was instantly recognized as belonging
to that lineage every one of whose children is a king.
The story of his entry into literature, though well known, cannot
be too often told. Born at Cummington, a little village on the
Hampshire hills, Massachusetts, November 3, 1794, his father was a
genial, fairly cultivated country doctor; his mother, Sarah Snell, an
indefatigable housewife, with Yankee common-sense and deep-grained
Puritan principles. William Cullen, the second of several children,
was precocious; both parents encouraged his aptitude for verse-making,
and a satire which he wrote in 1807 on Jefferson and the Embargo his
father was proud to have printed in Boston. In 1810 young Bryant
entered the sophomore class of Williams College, and spent a year
there. He hoped to pass from Williams to Yale, where he looked for more
advanced instruction, but his father’s means did not permit, and the
son, instead of finishing his course at Williams, went into a country
lawyer’s office and fitted himself for the bar. Just at the moment
of indecision, in the autumn of 1811, Bryant wrote “Thanatopsis.”
Contrary to his custom, he did not show it to his father, but laid it
away with other papers in a drawer. Six years later Dr. Bryant, whose
duties as a member of the Massachusetts legislature took him often
to Boston, and whose bright parts and liberal views made him welcome
in the foremost circles there, was asked by his friends, who edited
the _North American Review_, for some contribution. On returning to
Cummington, he happened to find his son’s sequestered papers, and,
choosing “Thanatopsis”--of which, the original being covered with
many corrections, he made a copy--and “The Waterfowl,” he sent them
off to Boston, and they appeared in the _Review_ for September, 1817.
The young poet, having meanwhile completed his legal studies, was
practicing law at Great Barrington, unconscious of the fame about to
descend upon him. Owing to the handwriting of the copy of the poems
sent to the _Review_, however, Dr. Bryant had for a moment the credit
of being the author of “Thanatopsis.”
After duly allowing for the common tendency to make fame retroactive,
we cannot doubt that “Thanatopsis” secured immediate and, relatively,
immense recognition. The best judges agreed that at last a bit of
genuine American literature was before them; the uncritical but
appreciative, from ministers to school children, read, learned,
admired, and quoted the grave, sonorous lines.
Thanatopsis,--a Vision of Death! A strange corner-stone for the poetic
literature of the nation which had only recently sprung into life,--a
nation conscious as no other had been of its exuberant vitality, of
its boundless material resources, of its expansiveness and invincible
will. Yet neither the glory achieved nor the ambition cherished fired
the imagination of the youthful poet. He looked upon the earth, and
saw it but a vast grave; he looked upon men and beheld, not their high
ambitions nor the great deeds which blazon human story, but their
transience, their mortality. Nothing in life could so awe him as the
majestic mystery of death.
The mood, I believe, is not rare among sensitive and thoughtful youths,
who, just as their faculties have ripened sufficiently to enable them
to feel a little of the unspeakable delight of living, are staggered
at realizing for the first time that death is inevitable, and that the
days of the longest life are few. That this terrific discovery should
kindle thoughts full of sublimity need not surprise us; but we may well
be astonished that Bryant at seventeen should have had power to express
them in a poem which is neither morbid nor religiously commonplace.
In 1821 Bryant received what was then the blue ribbon of recognition
in being asked to deliver a poem before the Harvard Chapter of the
Phi Beta Kappa Society. He wrote “The Ages,” read it in Cambridge
and printed it, together with “Thanatopsis” and a few other pieces,
in a little volume. The previous conviction was confirmed; every
one spoke of Bryant as _the_ American poet. Even the professional
critics--those sapient fellows whose obtuseness is the wonder of
posterity, the clique which pooh-poohed Keats, and ha-hahed Wordsworth,
and bear-baited Carlyle--made in Bryant’s case no mistake. Although one
of them, indeed, declared that there was “no more poetry in Bryant’s
poems than in the Sermon on the Mount,” yet the opinions were generally
laudatory, and the critics were quick in defining the qualities of
the new poet. They found in him something of Cowper and something
of Wordsworth, but the resemblances did not imply imitation; Bryant
might speak their language, but it was his also. No one questioned the
genuineness of his inspiration, and not for a quarter of a century
after the publication of “Thanatopsis,” that is, not until the early
forties,--when Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, and Emerson began to have a
public for their poetry,--did any one question Bryant’s primacy. He had
been so long the _only_ American poet that it was naturally assumed
that he would always be the _best_. He had redeemed America from the
reproach of barrenness in poetry, as Irving and Cooper redeemed its
prose, and Americans could feel toward no others as they felt toward
him.
A hundred years have elapsed since his birth; three generations have
known his works: what is Bryant to us, who are posterity to him? Is
he, like Cimabue in painting, a mere name to date from,--a pioneer
whom we respect,--and nothing more? Far from it. Bryant’s poetry is not
only chronologically but absolutely interesting: it lives to-day, and
the qualities which have vitalized it for three quarters of a century
show no signs of decay. It would be incorrect, of course, to assert
that Bryant holds relatively so high a place in our literature as he
held fifty years ago; his estate then was the first poetic clearing
in the wilderness; its boundaries are still the same; but subsequent
poets have made other clearings all round his, and brought different
prospects into view and different talents under cultivation.
Let us look briefly at Bryant’s domain. Intimate and faithful portrayal
of Nature is the product which first draws our attention; next we
perceive that the observer who makes the picture is a sober moralist.
He delights in Nature for her own sake, for her beauty and variety; and
then she suggests to him some rule of conduct, some parallel between
her laws and the laws of human life, by which he is comforted and
uplifted. Bryant, I have said elsewhere, interprets Nature morally,
Emerson spiritually, and Shelley emotionally. We need not stop to
inquire which of these methods of interpretation is the highest.
Suffice it for us to realize that all of them are valuable, and that
the poet who succeeds in identifying himself in a marked degree with
any one of them will not soon be forgotten.
That Wordsworth preceded Bryant in the moral interpretation of Nature
detracts nothing from Bryant’s merit. The latest prophet is no less
original than the earliest; for originality lies in being a prophet at
all. Young Bryant, wandering over the bleak Hampshire hills or in the
woods or along the brawling streams, had original impressions, which
he trustingly recorded; and to-day, if you go to Cummington, you will
marvel at the fidelity of his record. But his poetry is true not only
there; it is true in every region where Nature has similar aspects;
symbolically, it is true everywhere.
There being no doubt as to the veracity of his pictures, what shall we
say of that other quality, the moral tone which pervades them? That,
too, is of a kind men will not soon outgrow. It inculcates courage,
patience, fortitude, trust; it springs from the optimism of one who
believes in the ultimate triumph of good, not because he can prove it,
but because his whole being revolts at the thought of evil triumphant.
He has the stoic’s dread of flinching before any shock of misfortune,
the Christian’s dread of the taint of sin. Here are two ideals, each
the complement of the other, which the world cannot outgrow, and the
poet who--pondering on a fringed gentian or the flight of a waterfowl,
or on a rivulet bickering among its grasses--found new incitements to
courage and virtue, thereby associated himself with the eternal. To
interpret nature morally in this fashion, which is Bryant’s fashion, is
to rise far above the level of the common didacticism of our pulpits.
Professional moralists go to nature for figures of speech to furnish
forth their sermons and religious verse, as they go to their kitchen
garden for vegetables; but they do not enter Bryant’s world.
Moreover, in painting the scenery of the Hampshire hills, and in
saturating his descriptions with the moral tonic I have spoken of,
Bryant became the representative of a phase of New England life which
has had an incalculable influence on the development of this nation.
The mitigated Spartanism amid which his youth was passed bred those
colonists who carried New England standards with them to the shores of
the Pacific. A Puritan by derivation and environment, Bryant was by
training and conviction a Unitarian,--a combination which made him in
a sense the exemplar both of the austerity which had characterized New
England ideals in the past, and of the liberalism which during this
century has nowhere found more strenuous supporters than in New England.
On many positive grounds, therefore, Bryant’s title to fame rests; he
was one of Nature’s men, he shed moral health, he uttered the ideals of
a great race in a transitional epoch. His temperament, in making his
poetic product small, gave him yet another hostage against oblivion.
The poet who, having so many claims to the consideration of posterity,
can also plead brevity, need not worry himself about what is called
literary immortality. Bryant’s typical and best work is comprised in a
dozen poems, the longest not exceeding 140 lines. Read “Thanatopsis,”
“The Yellow Violet,” “Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood,” “To a
Waterfowl,” “Green River,” “A Winter Piece,” “The Rivulet,” “A Forest
Hymn,” “The Past,” “To a Fringed Gentian,” “The Death of the Flowers,”
and “The Battlefield,” and you have Bryant’s message; the rest of his
work either echoes the notes already sounded in these, or represents
uncharacteristic, and therefore transitory, moods.
Not less conspicuous than his excellences are Bryant’s limitations.
We may say of him that, like Wordsworth, he did not always overcome
a tendency to emphasize the obvious, and that, like almost all
contemplative poets, he sometimes made the didactic unnecessarily
obtrusive. We have all heard parsons who, after finishing their
sermon, sum it up in a valedictory prayer, with a hint as to its
application, for the benefit of the Lord; equally superfluous, even
for mortal readers, is the moral too often appended to a poem which
is well able to convey its meaning without it. In this respect Bryant
resembles most of our American poets, in whom didacticism has prevailed
to an extent that will lessen their repute with posterity; for each
generation manufactures more than enough of this commodity for its own
consumption, and cannot be induced to try stale moralities left over
from the fathers.
Bryant’s self-control, the backbone of a character of high integrity,
prevented him from indulging in emotions which, if they be not the
substance of great poetry, are the color, the glow, which give great
poetry its charm. He addresses the intellect; he has, if not heat,
light; and he does not, as emotional poets sometimes do, play the
intellect false or lead it astray.
In his versification he is compact and stately, though occasionally
stiff. He came at the end of that metrical drought which lasted from
Milton’s death to Burns, when the instinct for writing musical iambics
was lost, and, instead, men wrote in measured thuds, by rule. That
phenomenon the psychologist should explain. How was it that a people
lost, during a century and a half, its ear for metrical music, as if
a violinist should suddenly prefer a tom-tom to a violin? Probably
the exorbitant use of hymn and psalm singing, that came in with the
Puritans, helped to degrade English poetry. The spirit which expelled
emotion from worship, and destroyed whatever it could of the beauty of
England’s churches, had no understanding for metrical harmony. Any poor
shred of morality, the tritest dogmatic platitude, if stretched thin,
chopped into the required number of feet, rhymed, and packed into six
or eight stanzas, with clumsy variations on the doxology at the end,
made a hymn, for the edification of persons whose object was worship
and not beauty. As a means to unction, mere doggerel, sung out of tune,
would serve as well as anything.
At any rate, the taste for rigid iambics would naturally be acquired
by Bryant at his church-going in childhood, and from the eighteenth
century poets whom he read earliest. The beautiful variety of
modulations which Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson have shown
this verse--the historic metre of our race--to be susceptible of, lay
beyond Bryant’s range. His verse is either simple, almost colloquial,
or dignified, as befits his theme; even in ornament he is sober. As
he never surpassed the grandeur of conception of “Thanatopsis,” so,
I think, he did not afterward equal the splendid metrical sweep of
certain passages in that wonderful poem.
And this fact points to another: Bryant is one of the few poets of
genuine power whose poetic career shows no advance. The first arrow
he drew from his quiver was the best, and with it he made his longest
shot; many others he sent in the same direction, but they all fell
behind the first. This accounts for the singleness and depth of the
impression he has left; he stands for two or three elementals, and
thereby keeps his force unscattered. He was not, indeed, wholly
insensible to the romanticist stirrings of his time, as such effusions
as “The Damsel of Peru,” “The Arctic Lover,” and “The Hunter’s
Serenade,” bear witness. He wrote several pieces about Indians,--not
the real red men, but those imaginary noble savages, possessors of
all the primitive virtues, with whom our grandfathers peopled the
American forests. He wrote strenuously in behalf of Greek emancipation
and against slavery; but even here, though the subject lay very near
his heart, he could not match the righteous vehemence of Whittier, or
Lowell’s alternate volleys of sarcasm and rebuke. Like Antaeus, Bryant
ceased to be powerful when he did not tread his native earth.
We have thus surveyed his poetical product and genius, for to these
first of all is due the celebration of his centennial, and we conclude
that his contemporaries were right and that we are right in holding
his work precious. But while it is through his poetry that Bryant
survives, let us not forget the worth of his personality. For sixty
years he was the dean of American letters. By his example he swept away
the old foolish idea that unwillingness to pay bills, addiction to the
bottle and women, and a preference for frowsy hair and dirty linen
are necessary attributes of genius, especially of poetic genius. He
disdained the proverbial backbiting and envy of authors. As the editor
of a newspaper which for half a century had no superior in the country,
he exercised an influence which cannot be computed. We who live under
the _régime_ of journalists who conceive it to be the mission of
newspapers to deposit at every doorstep from eight to eighty pages of
the moral and political garbage of the world every morning,--we may
well magnify Bryant, whose long editorial career bore witness that
being a journalist should not absolve a man from the common obligations
of moral cleanliness, of veracity, of scandal-hating, of delicacy, of
honor.
Finally, Bryant was a great citizen,--that last product which it is the
business of our education and our political and social life to bring
forth. In a monarchy the soldier is the type most highly prized; but
in a democracy, if democratic forms shall long endure, citizens of the
Bryant pattern, whose chief concern in public not less than in private
life is to “make reason and the will of God prevail,” must abound in
constantly increasing numbers. Happy and grateful should we be that, in
commemorating our earliest poet, we can discern no line of his which
has not an upward tendency, no trait of his character unfit to be used
in building a noble, strong, and righteous State.
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