A New Nation
The changes that have come over the inner spirit and the outward
expression of American life since Lincoln's day are enough to startle
the curiosity of the dullest observer. Yet they have been accomplished
within the lifetime of a single man of letters. The author of one of the
many campaign biographies of Lincoln in 1860 was William Dean Howells,
then an Ohio journalist of twenty-three. In 1917, at the age of eighty,
Mr. Howells is still adding to his long row of charming and memorable
books. Every phase of American writing since the middle of the last
century has fallen under the keen and kindly scrutiny of this loyal
follower of the art of literature. As producer, editor, critic, and
friend of the foremost writers of his epoch, Mr. Howells has known the
books of our new national era as no one else could have known them. Some
future historian of the period may piece together, from no other sources
than Mr. Howells's writings, an unrivaled picture of our book-making
during more than sixty years. All that the present historian can attempt
is to sketch with bungling fingers a few men and a few tendencies which
seem to characterize the age.
One result of the Civil War was picturesquely set forth in Emerson's
Journal. The War had unrolled a map of the Union, he said, and hung it
in every man's house. There was a universal shifting of attention, if
not always from the province or section to the image of the nation
itself, at least a shift of focus from one section to another. The clash
of arms had meant many other things besides the triumph of Union and the
freedom of the slaves. It had brought men from every state into rude
jostling contact with one another and had developed a new social and
human curiosity. It may serve as another illustration of Professor
Shaler's law of tension and release. The one overshadowing issue which
had absorbed so much thought and imagination and energy had suddenly
disappeared. Other shadows were to gather, of course. Reconstruction of
the South was one of them, and the vast economic and industrial changes
that followed the opening of the New West were to bring fresh problems
almost as intricate as the question of slavery had been. But for the
moment no one thought of these things. The South accepted defeat as
superbly as she had fought, and began to plough once more. The jubilant
North went back to work--to build transcontinental railroads, to
organize great industries, and to create new states.
The significant American literature of the first decade after the close
of the War is not in the books dealing directly with themes involved in
the War itself. It is rather the literature of this new release of
energy, the new curiosity as to hitherto unknown sections, the new humor
and romance. Fred Lewis Pattee, the author of an admirable History of
American Literature since 1870, uses scarcely too strong a phrase when
he entitles this period "The Second Discovery of America"; and he quotes
effectively from Mark Twain, who was himself one of these discoverers:
"The eight years in America from 1860 to 1868 uprooted institutions that
were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the
social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the
entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of
two or three generations."
Let us begin with the West, and with that joyous stage-coach journey of
young Samuel L. Clemens across the plains to Nevada in 1861, which he
describes in Roughing It. Who was this Argonaut of the new era, and what
makes him representative of his countrymen in the epoch of release? Born
in Missouri in 1835, the son of an impractical emigrant from Virginia,
the youth had lived from his fourth until his eighteenth year on the
banks of the Mississippi. He had learned the printer's trade, had
wandered east and back again, had served for four years as a river-pilot
on the Mississippi, and had tried to enter the Confederate army. Then
came the six crowded years, chiefly as newspaper reporter, in the boom
times of Nevada and California. His fame began with the publication in
New York in 1867 of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. A
newspaper now sent him to Europe to record "what he sees with his own
eyes." He did so in Innocents Abroad, and his countrymen shouted with
laughter. This, then, was "Europe" after all--another "fake" until this
shrewd river-pilot who signed himself "Mark Twain" took its soundings!
Then came a series of far greater books--Roughing It, Life on the
Mississippi, The Gilded Age (in collaboration), and Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn--books that make our American Odyssey, rich in the
spirit of romance and revealing the magic of the great river as no other
pages can ever do again. Gradually Mark Twain became a public character;
he retrieved on the lecture platform the loss of a fortune earned by his
books; he enjoyed his honorary D. Litt. from Oxford University. Every
reader of American periodicals came to recognize the photographs of that
thick shock of hair, those heavy eyebrows, the gallant drooping little
figure, the striking clothes, the inevitable cigar: all these things
seemed to go with the part of professional humorist, to be like the
caressing drawl of Mark's voice. The force of advertisement could no
further go. But at bottom he was far other than a mere maker of
boisterous jokes for people with frontier preferences in humor. He was a
passionate, chivalric lover of things fair and good, although too honest
to pretend to see beauty and goodness where he could not personally
detect them--and an equally passionate hater of evil. Read The Man Who
Corrupted Hadleyburg and The Mysterious Stranger. In his last years,
torn by private sorrows, he turned as black a philosophical pessimist as
we have bred. He died at his new country seat in Connecticut in 1910.
Mr. Paine has written his life in three great volumes, and there is a
twenty-five volume edition of his Works.
All the evidence seems to be in. Yet the verdict of the public seems not
quite made up. It is clear that Mark Twain the writer of romance is
gaining upon Mark Twain the humorist. The inexhaustible American
appetite for frontier types of humor seizes upon each new variety,
crunches it with huge satisfaction, and then tosses it away. John
Phoenix, Josh Billings, Jack Downing, Bill Arp, Petroleum V. Nasby,
Artemus Ward, Bill Nye--these are already obsolescent names. If Clemens
lacked something of Artemus Ward's whimsical delicacy and of Josh
Billings's tested human wisdom, he surpassed all of his competitors in a
certain rude, healthy masculinity, the humor of river and mining-camp
and printing-office, where men speak without censorship. His country-men
liked exaggeration, and he exaggerated; they liked irreverence, and he
had turned iconoclast in Innocents Abroad. As a professional humorist,
he has paid the obligatory tax for his extravagance, over-emphasis, and
undisciplined taste, but such faults are swiftly forgotten when one
turns to Huckleberry Finn and the negro Jim and Pudd'nhead Wilson, when
one feels Mark Twain's power in sheer description and episode, his magic
in evoking landscape and atmosphere, his blazing scorn at injustice and
cruelty, his contempt for quacks.
Bret Harte, another discoverer of the West, wears less well than Mark
Twain as a personal figure, but has a sure place in the evolution of the
American short story, and he did for the mining-camps of California what
Clemens wrought for the Mississippi River: he became their profane poet.
Yet he was never really of them. He was the clever outsider, with a
prospector's eye, looking for literary material, and finding a whole
rich mine of it--a bigger and richer, in fact, than he was really
qualified to work. But he located a golden vein of it with an instinct
that did credit to his dash of Hebrew blood. Born in Albany, a teacher's
son, brought up on books and in many cities, Harte emigrated to
California in 1854 at the age of sixteen. He became in turn a
drug-clerk, teacher, type-setter, editor, and even Secretary of the
California Mint--his nearest approach, apparently, to the actual work of
the mines. In 1868, while editor of The Overland Monthly, he wrote the
short story which was destined to make him famous in the East and to
release him from California forever. It was The Luck of Roaring Camp. He
had been writing romantic sketches in prose and verse for years; he had
steeped himself in Dickens, like everybody else in the eighteen-sixties;
and now he saw his pay-gravel shining back into his own shining eyes. It
was a pocket, perhaps, rather than a lead, but Bret Harte worked to the
end of his career this material furnished by the camps, this method of
the short story. He never returned to California after his joyous exit
in 1871. For a few years he tried living in New York, but from 1878
until his death in 1902 Bret Harte lived in Europe, still turning out
California stories for an English and American public which insisted
upon that particular pattern.
That the pattern was arbitrary, theatrical, sentimental, somewhat
meretricious in design, in a word insincere like its inventor, has been
repeated at due intervals ever since 1868. The charge is true; yet it is
far from the whole truth concerning Bret Harte's artistry. In mastery of
the technique of the short story he is fairly comparable with Poe,
though less original, for it was Poe who formulated, when Bret Harte was
a child of six, the well-known theory of the unity of effect of the
brief tale. This unity Harte secured through a simplification, often an
insulation, of his theme, the omission of quarreling details, an
atmosphere none the less novel for its occasional theatricality, and
characters cunningly modulated to the one note they were intended to
strike. Tennessee's Partner, The Outcast of Poker Flat, and all the rest
are triumphs of selective skill--as bright nuggets as ever glistened in
the pan at the end of a hard day's labor. That they do not adequately
represent the actual California of the fifties, as old Californians
obstinately insist, is doubtless true, but it is beside the point. Here
is no Tolstoi painting the soul of his race in a few pages: Harte is
simply a disciple of Poe and Dickens, turning the Poe construction trick
gracefully, with Dickensy characters and consistently romantic action.
The West has been rediscovered many a time since that decade which
witnessed the first literary bonanza of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. It
will continue to be discovered, in its fresh sources of appeal to the
imagination, as long as Plains and Rockies and Coast endure, as long as
there is any glow upon a distant horizon. It is not places that lose
romantic interest: the immemorial English counties and the Bay of Naples
offer themselves freely to the artist, generation after generation. What
is lost is the glamour of youth, the specific atmosphere of a given
historical epoch. Colonel W. F. Cody ("Buffalo Bill") has typified to
millions of American boys the great period of the Plains, with its
Indian fighting, its slaughter of buffaloes, its robbing of
stage-coaches, its superb riders etched against the sky. But the Wild
West was retreating, even in the days of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett.
The West of the cowboys, as Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister knew it
and wrote of it in the eighties and nineties, has disappeared, though it
lives on in fiction and on the screen.
Jack London, born in California in 1876, was forced to find his West in
Alaska--and in alcohol. He was what he and his followers liked to call
the virile or red-blooded type, responsive to the "Call of the Wild,"
"living life naked and tensely." In his talk Jack London was simple and
boyish, with plenty of humor over his own literary and social foibles.
His books are very uneven, but he wrote many a hard-muscled, clean-cut
page. If the Bret Harte theory of the West was that each man is at
bottom a sentimentalist, Jack London's formula was that at bottom every
man is a brute. Each theory gave provender enough for a short-story
writer to carry on his back, but is hardly adequate, by itself, for a
very long voyage over human life.
"Joaquin" (Cincinnatus Heine) Miller, who was born in 1841 and died in
1913, had even less of a formula for the West than Jack London. He was a
word-painter of its landscapes, a rider over its surfaces. Cradled "in a
covered wagon pointing West," mingling with wild frontier life from
Alaska to Nicaragua, miner, Indian fighter, hermit, poseur in London and
Washington, then hermit again in California, the author of Songs of the
Sierras at least knew his material. Byron, whom he adored and imitated,
could have invented nothing more romantic than Joaquin's life; but
though Joaquin inherited Scotch intensity, he had nothing of the close
mental grip of the true Scot and nothing of his humor. Vast stretches of
his poetry are empty; some of it is grandiose, elemental, and yet
somehow artificial, as even the Grand Canyon itself looks at certain
times.
John Muir, another immigrant Scot who reached California in 1868, had
far more stuff in him than Joaquin Miller. He had studied geology,
botany, and chemistry at the new University of Wisconsin, and then for
years turned explorer of forests, peaks, and glaciers, not writing, at
first, except in his Journal, but forever absorbing and worshiping
sublimity and beauty with no thought of literary schemes. Yet his
every-day talk about his favorite trees and glaciers had more of the
glow of poetry in it than any talk I have ever heard from men of
letters, and his books and Journal will long perpetuate this thrilling
sense of personal contact with wild, clean, uplifted things--blossoms in
giant tree-tops and snow-eddies blowing round the shoulders of Alaskan
peaks. Here is a West as far above Jack London's and Frank Norris's as
the snow-line is higher than the jungle.
The rediscovery of the South was not so much an exploration of fresh or
forgotten geographical territory, as it was a new perception of the
romantic human material offered by a peculiar civilization. Political
and social causes had long kept the South in isolation. A few writers
like Wirt, Kennedy, Longstreet, Simms, had described various aspects of
its life with grace or vivacity, but the best picture of colonial
Virginia had been drawn, after all, by Thackeray, who had merely read
about it in books. Visitors like Fanny Kemble and Frederick Law Olmsted
sketched the South of the mid-nineteenth century more vividly than did
the sons of the soil. There was no real literary public in the South for
a native writer like Simms. He was as dependent upon New York and the
Northern market as a Virginian tobacco-planter of 1740 had been upon
London. But within a dozen years after the close of the War and
culminating in the eighteen-nineties, there came a rich and varied
harvest of Southern writing, notably in the field of fiction. The public
for these stories, it is true, was still largely in the North and West,
and it was the magazines and publishing-houses of New York and Boston
that gave the Southern authors their chief stimulus and support. It was
one of the happy proofs of the solidarity of the new nation.
The romance of the Spanish and French civilization of New Orleans, as
revealed in Mr. Cable's fascinating Old Creole Days, was recognized, not
as something merely provincial in its significance, but as contributing
to the infinitely variegated pattern of our national life. Irwin
Russell, Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas Nelson Page portrayed in verse
and prose the humorous, pathetic, unique traits of the Southern negro, a
type hitherto chiefly sketched in caricature or by strangers. Page,
Hopkinson Smith, Grace King, and a score of other artists began to draw
affectionate pictures of the vanished Southern mansion of plantation
days, when all the women were beautiful and all the men were brave, when
the very horses were more spirited and the dogs lazier and the
honeysuckles sweeter and the moonlight more entrancing than today. Miss
Murfree ("C. E. Craddock") charmed city-dwellers and country-folk alike
by her novels of the Tennessee mountains. James Lane Allen painted
lovingly the hemp-fields and pastures of Kentucky. American magazines of
the decade from 1880 to 1890 show the complete triumph of dialect and
local color, and this movement, so full of interest to students of the
immense divergence of American types, owed much of its vitality to the
talent of Southern writers.
But the impulse spread far beyond the South. Early in the seventies
Edward Eggleston wrote The Hoosier Schoolmaster and The Circuit Rider,
faithful and moving presentations of genuine pioneer types which were
destined to pass with the frontier settlements. Soon James Whitcomb
Riley was to sing of the next generation of Hoosiers, who frequented The
Old Swimmin' Hole and rejoiced When the Frost is on the Punkin. It was
the era of Denman Thompson's plays, Joshua Whitcomb and The Old
Homestead. Both the homely and the exotic marched under this banner of
local color: Hamlin Garland presented Iowa barnyards and cornfields,
Helen Hunt Jackson dreamed the romance of the Mission Indian in Ramona,
and Lafcadio Hearn, Irish and Greek by blood, resident of New Orleans
and not yet an adopted citizen of Japan, tantalized American readers
with his Chinese Ghosts and Chita. A fascinating period it seems, as one
looks back upon it, and it lasted until about the end of the century,
when the suddenly discovered commercial value of the historical novel
and the ensuing competition in best sellers misled many a fine artistic
talent and coarsened the public taste. The New South then played the
literary market as recklessly as the New West.
Let us glance back to "the abandoned farm of literature," as a witty New
Yorker once characterized New England. The last quarter of the
nineteenth century witnessed a decline in the direct influence of that
province over the country as a whole. Its strength sapped by the
emigration of its more vigorous sons, its typical institutions sagging
under the weight of immense immigrations from Europe, its political
importance growing more and more negligible, that ancient promontory of
ideas has continued to lose its relative literary significance. In one
field of literature only has New England maintained its rank since the
Civil War, and that is in the local short story. Here women have
distinguished themselves beyond the proved capacity of New England men.
Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke, women of democratic humor, were the
pioneers; then came Harriet Prescott Spofford and Elizabeth Stuart
Phelps, women with nerves; and finally the three artists who have
written, out of the material offered by a decadent New England, as
perfect short stories as France or Russia can produce--Sarah Orne
Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown. These gifted writers
portrayed, with varying technique and with singular differences in their
instinctive choice of material, the dominant qualities of an isolated,
in-bred race, still proud in its decline; still inquisitive and
acquisitive, versatile yet stubborn, with thrift passing over into
avarice, and mental power degenerating into smartness; cold and hard
under long repression of emotion, yet capable of passion and fanaticism;
at worst, a mere trader, a crank, a grim recluse; at best, endowed with
an austere physical and moral beauty. Miss Jewett preferred to touch
graciously the sunnier slopes of this provincial temperament, to linger
in its ancient dignities and serenities. Miss Brown has shown the pathos
of its thwarted desires, its hunger for a beauty and a happiness denied.
Mary Wilkins Freeman revealed its fundamental tragedies of will.
Two of the best known writers of New England fiction in this period were
not natives of the soil, though they surpassed most native New
Englanders in their understanding of the type. They were William Dean
Howells and Henry James. Mr. Howells, who, in his own words, "can
reasonably suppose that it is because of the mixture of Welsh, German,
and Irish in me that I feel myself so typically American," came to "the
Holy Land at Boston" as a "passionate pilgrim from the West." A Boy's
Town, My Literary Passions, and Years of my Youth make clear the image
of the young poet-journalist who returned from his four years in Venice
and became assistant editor of The Atlantic Monthly in 1866. In 1871
he succeeded Fields in the editorship, but it was not until after his
resignation in 1881 that he could put his full strength into those
realistic novels of contemporary New England which established his fame
as a writer. A Modern Instance and The Rise of Silas Lapham are perhaps
the finest stories of this group; and the latter novel may prove to be
Mr. Howells's chief "visiting-card to posterity." We cannot here follow
him to New York and to a new phase of novel writing, begun with A Hazard
of New Fortunes, nor can we discuss the now antiquated debate upon
realism which was waged in the eighteen-eighties over the books of
Howells and James. We must content ourselves with saying that a
knowledge of Mr. Howells's work is essential to the student of the
American provincial novel, as it is also to the student of our more
generalized types of story-writing, and that he has never in his long
career written an insincere, a slovenly, or an infelicitous page. My
Literary Friends and Acquaintance gives the most charming picture ever
drawn of the elder Cambridge, Concord, and Boston men who ruled over our
literature when young Howells came out of the West, and My Mark Twain is
his memorable portrait of another type of sovereign, perhaps the dynasty
that will rule the future.
Although Henry James, like Mr. Howells, wrote at one time acute studies
of New England character, he was never, in his relations to that
section, or, for that matter, to any locality save possibly London,
anything more than a "visiting mind." His grandfather was an Irish
merchant in Albany. His father, Henry James, was a philosopher and wit,
a man of comfortable fortune, who lived at times in Newport, Concord,
and Boston, but who was residing in New York when his son Henry was born
in 1843. No child was ever made the subject of a more complete theory of
deracination. Transplanted from city to city, from country to country,
without a family or a voting-place, without college or church or creed
or profession or responsibility of any kind save to his own exigent
ideals of truth and beauty, Henry James came to be the very pattern of a
cosmopolitan. Avoiding his native country for nearly thirty years and
then returning for a few months to write some intricate pages about that
American Scene which he understood far less truly than the average
immigrant, he died in 1916 in London, having just renounced his American
citizenship and become a British subject in order to show his sympathy
with the Empire, then at war. It was the sole evidence of political
emotion in a lifetime of seventy-three years.
American writing men are justly proud, nevertheless, of this expatriated
craftsman. The American is inclined to admire good workmanship of any
kind, as far as he can understand the mechanism of it. The task of
really understanding Henry James has been left chiefly to clever women
and to a few critics, but ever since A Passionate Pilgrim and Roderick
Hudson appeared in 1875, it has been recognized that here was a master,
in his own fashion. What that fashion is may now be known by anyone who
will take the pains to read the author's prefaces to the New York
edition of his revised works. Never, not even in the Paris which James
loved, has an artist put his intentions and his self-criticism more
definitively upon paper. The secret of Henry James is told plainly
enough here: a specially equipped intelligence, a freedom from normal
responsibilities, a consuming desire to create beautiful things, and, as
life unfolded its complexities and nuances before his vision, an
increasing passion to seek the beauty which lies entangled and betrayed,
a beauty often adumbrated rather than made plastic, stories that must be
hinted at rather than told, raptures that exist for the initiated only.
The much discussed early and middle and later manners of James are only
various campaigns of this one questing spirit, changing his procedure as
the elusive object of his search hid itself by this or that device of
protective coloration or swift escape. It is as if a collector of rare
butterflies had one method of capturing them in Madagascar, another for
the Orinoco, and still another for Japan--though Henry James found his
Japan and Orinoco and Madagascar all in London town!
No one who ever had the pleasure of hearing him discourse about the art
of fiction can forget the absolute seriousness of his professional
devotion; it was as though a shy celebrant were to turn and explain,
with mystical intensity and a mystic's involution and reversal of all
the values of vulgar speech, the ceremonial of some strange, high altar.
His own power as a creative artist was not always commensurate with his
intellectual endowment or with his desire after beauty, and his frank
contempt for the masses of men made it difficult for him to write
English. He preferred, as did Browning, who would have liked to reach
the masses, a dialect of his own, and he used it increasingly after he
was fifty. It was a dialect capable of infinite gradations of tone,
endless refinements of expression. In his threescore books there are
delicious poignant moments where the spirit of life itself flutters like
a wild creature, half-caught, half-escaping. It is for the beauty and
thrill of these moments that the pages of Henry James will continue to
be cherished by a few thousand readers scattered throughout the Republic
to which he was ever an alien.
No poet of the new era has won the national recognition enjoyed by the
veterans. It will be recalled that Bryant survived until 1878,
Longfellow and Emerson until 1882, Lowell until 1891, Whittier and
Whitman until 1892, and Holmes until 1894. Compared with these men the
younger writers of verse seemed overmatched. The National Ode for the
Centennial celebration in 1876 was intrusted to Bayard Taylor, a hearty
person, author of capital books of travel, plentiful verse, and a
skilful translation of Faust. But an adequate National Ode was not in
him. Sidney Lanier, who was writing in that year his Psalm of the West
and was soon to compose The Marshes of Glynn, had far more of the divine
fire. He was a bookish Georgia youth who had served with the Confederate
army, and afterward, with broken health and in dire poverty, gave his
brief life to music and poetry. He had rich capacities for both arts,
but suffered in both from the lack of discipline and from an impetuous,
restless imagination which drove him on to over-ambitious designs.
Whatever the flaws in his affluent verse, it has grown constantly in
popular favor, and he is, after Poe, the best known poet of the South.
The late Edmund Clarence Stedman, whose American Anthology and critical
articles upon American poets did so much to enhance the reputation of
other men, was himself a maker of ringing lyrics and spirited narrative
verse. His later days were given increasingly to criticism, and his Life
and Letters is a storehouse of material bearing upon the growth of New
York as a literary market-place during half a century. Richard Watson
Gilder was another admirably fine figure, poet, editor, and leader of
public opinion in many a noble cause. His Letters, likewise, give an
intimate picture of literary New York from the seventies to the present.
Through his editorship of Scribner's Monthly and The Century Magazine
his sound influence made itself felt upon writers in every section. His
own lyric vein had an opaline intensity of fire, but in spite of its
glow his verse sometimes refused to sing.
The most perfect poetic craftsman of the period--and, many think, our
one faultless worker in verse--was Thomas Bailey Aldrich. His first
volume of juvenile verse had appeared in 1855, the year of Whittier's
Barefoot Boy and Whitman's Leaves of Grass. By 1865 his poems were
printed in the then well-known Blue and Gold edition, by Ticknor and
Fields. In 1881 he succeeded Howells in the editorship of the Atlantic.
Aldrich had a versatile talent that turned easily to adroit prose tales,
but his heart was in the filing of his verses. Nothing so daintily
perfect as his lighter pieces has been produced on this side of the
Atlantic, and the deeper notes and occasional darker questionings of his
later verse are embodied in lines of impeccable workmanship. Aloof from
the social and political conflicts of his day, he gave himself to the
fastidious creation of beautiful lines, believing that the beautiful
line is the surest road to Arcady, and that Herrick, whom he idolized,
had shown the way.
To some readers of these pages it may seem like profanation to pass over
poets like Sill, George Woodberry, Edith Thomas, Richard Hovey, William
Vaughn Moody, Madison Cawein--to mention but half a dozen distinguished
names out of a larger company--and to suggest that James Whitcomb Riley,
more completely than any American poet since Longfellow, succeeded in
expressing the actual poetic feelings of the men and women who composed
his immense audience. Riley, like Aldrich, went to school to Herrick,
Keats, Tennyson, and Longfellow, but when he began writing newspaper
verse in his native Indiana he was guided by two impulses which gave
individuality to his work. "I was always trying to write of the kind of
people I knew, and especially to write verse that I could read just as
if it were spoken for the first time." The first impulse kept him close
to the wholesome Hoosier soil. The second is an anticipation of Robert
Frost's theory of speech tones as the basis of verse, as well as a
revival of the bardic practice of reciting one's own poems. For Riley
had much of the actor and platform-artist in him, and comprehended that
poetry might be made again a spoken art, directed to the ear rather than
to the eye. His vogue, which at his death in 1915 far surpassed that of
any living American poet, is inexplicable to those persons only who
forget the sentimental traditions of our American literature and its
frank appeal to the emotions of juvenility, actual and recollected.
Riley's best "holt" as a poet was his memory of his own boyhood and his
perception that the child-mind lingers in every adult reader. Genius has
often been called the gift of prolonged adolescence, and in this sense,
surely, there was genius in the warm and gentle heart of this fortunate
provincial who held that "old Indianapolis" was "high Heaven's sole and
only under-study." No one has ever had the audacity to say that of New
York.
We have had American drama for one hundred and fifty years, ¹ but much
of it, like our popular fiction and poetry, has been subliterary, more
interesting to the student of social life and national character than to
literary criticism in the narrow sense of that term. Few of our best
known literary men have written for the stage. The public has preferred
melodrama to poetic tragedy, although perhaps the greatest successes
have been scored by plays which are comedies of manners rather than
melodrama, and character studies of various American types, built up
around the known capabilities of a particular actor. The twentieth
century has witnessed a marked activity in play-writing, in the
technical study of the drama, and in experiment with dramatic
production, particularly with motion pictures and the out-of-doors
pageant. At no time since The Prince of Parthia was first acted in
Philadelphia in 1767 has such a large percentage of Americans been
artistically and commercially interested in the drama, but as to the
literary results of the new movement it is too soon to speak.
¹ Representative American Plays, edited by Arthur Hobson Quinn, N. Y.,
1917.
Nor is it possible to forecast the effect of a still more striking
movement of contemporary taste, the revival of interest in poetry and
the experimentation with new poetical forms. Such revival and experiment
have often, in the past, been the preludes of great epochs of poetical
production. Living Americans have certainly never seen such a widespread
demand for contemporary verse, such technical curiosity as to the
possible forms of poetry, or such variety of bold innovation. Imagism
itself is hardly as novel as its contemporary advocates appear to
maintain, and free verse goes back far in our English speech and song.
But the new generation believes that it has made a discovery in
reverting to sensations rather than thought, to the naïve reproduction
of retinal and muscular impressions, as if this were the end of the
matter. The self-conscious, self-defending side of the new poetic
impulse may soon pass, as it did in the case of Wordsworth and of Victor
Hugo. Whatever happens, we have already had fresh and exquisite
revelations of natural beauty, and, in volumes like North of Boston and
A Spoon River Anthology, judgments of life that run very deep.
American fiction seems just now, on the contrary, to be marking time and
not to be getting noticeably forward. Few names unknown ten years ago
have won wide recognition in the domain of the novel. The short story
has made little technical advance since the first successes of "O.
Henry," though the talent of many observers has dealt with new material
offered by the racial characteristics of European immigrants and by new
phases of commerce and industry. The enormous commercial demand of the
five-cent weeklies for short stories of a few easily recognized patterns
has resulted too often in a substitution of stencil-plate generalized
types instead of delicately and powerfully imagined individual
characters. Short stories have been assembled, like Ford cars, with
amazing mechanical expertness, but with little artistic advance in
design. The same temporary arrest of progress has been noted in France
and England, however, where different causes have been at work. No one
can tell, in truth, what makes some plants in the literary garden wither
at the same moment that others are outgrowing their borders.
There is one plant in our own garden, however, whose flourishing state
will be denied by nobody--namely, that kind of nature-writing identified
with Thoreau and practised by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Starr King,
John Burroughs, John Muir, Clarence King, Bradford Torrey, Theodore
Roosevelt, William J. Long, Thompson-Seton, Stewart Edward White, and
many others. Their books represent, Professor Canby ¹ believes, the
adventures of the American subconsciousness, the promptings of forgotten
memories, a racial tradition of contact with the wilderness, and hence
one of the most genuinely American traits of our literature.
¹ "Back to Nature," by H. S. Canby, Yale Review, July, 1917.
Other forms of essay writing, surely, have seemed in our own generation
less distinctive of our peculiar quality. While admirable biographical
and critical studies appear from time to time, and here and there a
whimsical or trenchant discursive essay like those of Miss Repplier or
Dr. Crothers, no one would claim that we approach France or even England
in the field of criticism, literary history, memoirs, the bookish essay,
and biography. We may have race-memories of a pine-tree which help us to
write vigorously and poetically about it, but we write less vitally as
soon as we enter the library door. A Frenchman does not, for he is
better trained to perceive the continuity and integrity of
race-consciousness, in the whole field of its manifestation. He does not
feel, as many Americans do, that they are turning their back on life
when they turn to books.
Perhaps the truth is that although we are a reading people we are not
yet a book-loving people. The American newspaper and magazine have been
successful in making their readers fancy that newspaper and magazine are
an equivalent for books. Popular orators and popular preachers confirm
this impression, and colleges and universities have often emphasized a
vocational choice of books--in other words, books that are not books at
all, but treatises. It is not, of course, that American journalism,
whether of the daily or monthly sort, has consciously set itself to
supplant the habit of book-reading. A thousand social and economic
factors enter into such a problem. But few observers will question the
assertion that the influence of the American magazine, ever since its
great period of national literary service in the eighties and nineties,
has been more marked in the field of conduct and of artistic taste than
in the stimulation of a critical literary judgment. An American
schoolhouse of today owes its improvement in appearance over the
schoolhouse of fifty years ago largely to the popular diffusion, through
the illustrated magazines, of better standards of artistic taste. But
whether the judgment of school-teachers and school-children upon a piece
of literature is any better than it was in the red schoolhouse of fifty
years ago is a disputable question.
But we must stop guessing, or we shall never have done. The fundamental
problem of our literature, as this book has attempted to trace it, has
been to obtain from a mixed population dwelling in sections as widely
separated as the peoples of Northern and Southern Europe, an integral
intellectual and spiritual activity which could express, in obedience to
the laws of beauty and truth, the emotions stimulated by our national
life. It has been assumed in the preceding chapters that American
literature is something different from English literature written in
America. Canadian and Australian literatures have indigenous qualities
of their own, but typically they belong to the colonial literature of
Great Britain. This can scarcely be said of the writings of Franklin and
Jefferson, and it certainly cannot be said of the writings of Cooper,
Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Lowell, Lincoln, Mark Twain, and
Mr. Howells. In the pages of these men and of hundreds of others less
distinguished, there is a revelation of a new national type. That the
full energies of this nation have been back of our books, giving them a
range and vitality and unity commensurate with the national existence,
no one would claim. There are other spheres of effort in which American
character has been more adequately expressed than in words. Nevertheless
the books are here, in spite of every defect in national discipline,
every flaw in national character; and they deserve the closest attention
from all those who are trying to understand the American mind.
If the effort toward an expression of a peculiarly complex national
experience has been the problem of our literary past, the literary
problem of the future is the expression of the adjustment of American
ideals to the standards of civilization. "Patriotism," said the martyred
Edith Cavell just before her death, "is not enough." Nationality and the
instincts of national separatism now seem essential to the preservation
of the political units of the world-state, precisely as a healthy
individualism must be the basis of all enduring social fellowship. Yet
it is clear that civilization is a larger, more ultimate term than
nationality. Chauvinism is nowhere more repellent than in the things of
the mind. It is difficult for some Americans to think internationally
even in political affairs--to construe our national policy and duty in
terms of obligation to civilization. Nevertheless the task must be
faced, and we are slowly realizing it.
In the field of literature, likewise, Americanism is not a final word
either of blame or praise. It is a word of useful characterization. Only
American books, and not books written in English in America, can
adequately represent our national contribution to the world's thinking
and feeling. So argued Emerson and Whitman, long ago. But the younger of
these two poets came to realize in his old age that the New World and
the Old World are fundamentally one. The literature of the New World
will inevitably have an accent of its own, but it must speak the
mother-language of civilization, share in its culture, accept its
discipline.
It has been said disparagingly of Longfellow and his friends: "The
houses of the Brahmins had only eastern windows. The souls of the whole
school lived in the old lands of culture, and they visited these lands
as often as they could, and, returning, brought back whole libraries of
books which they eagerly translated." But even if Longfellow and his
friends had been nothing more than translators and diffusers of European
culture, their task would have been justified. They kept the ideals of
civilization from perishing in this new soil. Through those eastern
windows came in, and still comes in, the sunlight to illumine the
American spirit. To decry the literatures of the Orient and of Greece
and Rome as something now outgrown by America, is simply to close the
eastern windows, to narrow our conception of civilization to merely
national and contemporaneous terms. It is as provincial to attempt this
restriction in literature as it would be in world-politics. We must have
all the windows open in our American writing, free access to ideas,
knowledge of universal standards, perception of universal law.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
An authoritative account of American Literature to the close of the
Revolution is given in M. C. Tyler's History of American Literature
during the Colonial Time, 2 volumes (1878) and Literary History of the
American Revolution, 2 volumes (1897). For a general survey see Barrett
Wendell, A Literary History of America (1900), W. P. Trent, American
Literature (1903), G. E. Woodberry, America in Literature (1903), W. C.
Bronson, A Short History of American Literature (1903), with an
excellent bibliography, W. B. Cairns, History of American Literature
(1912), W. P. Trent and J. Erskine, Great American Writers (1912), and
W. Riley, American Thought (1915). The most recent and authoritative
account is to be found in The Cambridge History of American Literature,
3 volumes edited by Trent, Erskine, Sherman, and Van Doren.
The best collection of American prose and verse is E. C. Stedman and E.
M. Hutchinson's Library of American Literature, 11 volumes (1888-1890).
For verse alone, see E. C. Stedman, An American Anthology (1900), and W.
C. Bronson, American Poems, 1625-1892 (1912). For criticism of leading
authors, note W. C. Brownell, American Prose Masters (1909), and
Stedman, Poets of America (1885).
Chapters 1-3. Note W. Bradford, Journal (1898), J. Winthrop, Journal
(1825, 1826), also Life and Letters by R. C. Winthrop, 2 volumes (1863),
G. L. Walker, Thomas Hooker (1891), O. S. Straus, Roger Williams (1894),
Cotton Mather, Diary, 2 volumes (1911, 1912), also his Life by Barrett
Wendell (1891), Samuel Sewall, Diary, 3 volumes (1878). For Jonathan
Edwards, see Works, 4 volumes (1852), his Life by A. V. G. Allen (1889),
Selected Sermons edited by H. N. Gardiner (1904). The most recent
edition of Franklin's Works is edited by A. H. Smyth, 10 volumes (1907).
Chapter 4. Samuel Adams, Works, 4 volumes (1904), John Adams, Works, 10
volumes (1856), Thomas Paine, Life by M. D. Conway, 2 volumes (1892),
Works edited by Conway, 4 volumes (1895), Philip Freneau, Poems, 3
volumes (Princeton edition, 1902), Thomas Jefferson, Works edited by
P. L. Ford, 10 volumes (1892-1898), J. Woolman, Journal (edited by
Whittier, 1871, and also in Everyman's Library), The Federalist (edited
by H. C. Lodge, 1888).
Chapter 5. Washington Irving, Works, 40 volumes (1891-1897), also his
Life and Letters by P. M. Irving, 4 volumes (1862-1864). Fenimore
Cooper, Works, 32 volumes (1896), Life by T. R. Lounsbury (1883).
Brockden Brown, Works, 6 volumes, (1887). W. C. Bryant, Poems, 2 volumes
(1883), Prose, 2 volumes (1884), and his Life by John Bigelow (1890).
Chapter 6. H. C. Goddard, Studies in New England Transcendentalism
(1908). R. W. Emerson, Works, 12 volumes (Centenary edition, 1903),
Journal, 10 volumes (1909-1914), his Life by J. E. Cabot, 2 volumes
(1887), by R. Garnett (1887), by G. E. Woodberry (1905); see also Ralph
Waldo Emerson, a critical study by O. W. Firkins (1915). H. D. Thoreau,
Works, 20 volumes (Walden edition including Journals, 1906), Life by F.
B. Sanborn (1917), also Thoreau, A Critical Study by Mark van Doren
(1916). Note also Lindsay Swift, Brook Farm (1900), and The Dial,
reprint by the Rowfant Club (1902).
Chapter 7. Hawthorne, Works, 12 volumes (1882), Life by G. E. Woodberry
(1902). Longfellow, Works, 11 volumes (1886), Life by Samuel Longfellow,
3 volumes (1891). Whittier, Works, 7 volumes (1892), Life by S. T.
Pickard, 2 volumes (1894). Holmes, Works, 13 volumes (1892), Life by J.
T. Morse, Jr. (1896). Lowell, Works, 11 volumes (1890), Life by Ferris
Greenslet (1905), Letters edited by C. E. Norton, 2 volumes (1893). For
the historians, note H. B. Adams, Life and Writings of Jared Sparks, 2
volumes (1893). M. A. DeW. Howe, Life and Letters of George Bancroft, 2
volumes (1908), G. S. Hillard, Life, Letters, and Journals of George
Ticknor, 2 volumes (1876), George Ticknor, Life of Prescott (1863), also
Rollo Ogden, Life of Prescott (1904), G. W. Curtis, Correspondence of J.
L. Motley, 2 volumes (1889), Francis Parkman, Works, 12 volumes
(1865-1898), Life by C. H. Farnham (1900), J. F. Jameson, History of
Historical Writing in America (1891).
Chapter 8. Poe, Works, 10 volumes (Stedman-Woodberry edition,
1894-1895), also 17 volumes (Virginia edition, J. A. Harrison, 1902),
Life by G. E. Woodberry, 2 volumes (1909). Whitman, Leaves of Grass and
Complete Prose Works (Small, Maynard and Co.) (1897, 1898), also John
Burroughs, A Study of Whitman (1896).
Chapter 9. C. Schurz, Life of Henry Clay, 2 volumes (1887). Daniel
Webster, Works, 6 volumes (1851), Life by H. C. Lodge (1883). Rufus
Choate, Works, 2 volumes (1862). Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Lectures,
and Letters, 2 volumes (1892). W. L. Garrison, The Story of his Life
Told by his Children, 4 volumes (1885-1889). Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Works, 17 volumes (1897), Life by C. E. Stowe (1889). Abraham Lincoln,
Works, 2 volumes (edited by Nicolay and Hay, 1894).
Chapter 10. For an excellent bibliography of the New National Period,
see F. L. Pattee, A History of American Literature since 1870 (1916).
For further bibliographical information the reader is referred to the
articles on American authors in The Encyclopœdia Britannica and in The
Warner Library (volume 30, The Student's Course, N. Y., 1917).
INDEX
A
Adams, C. F, 7.
Adams, John, opinion of American independence, 11-12; as a writer, 73.
Adams, Samuel, 73-74, 209.
After the Burial, Lowell, 172.
Agassiz, Fiftieth Birthday of, Longfellow, 156.
Age of Reason, Paine, 75.
Ages, The, Bryant, 104.
Alcott, Bronson, 118, 119, 139-140.
Aldrich, T. B., 256-257.
Alhambra, The, Irving, 91.
Allen, J. L., 247.
American Anthology, Stedman, 256.
American characteristics, 3-5.
American colonies, literature in the 17th century, 25-42; journalism,
60-62; education, 62-63; science, 63-64; bibliography of the literature,
269-270.
American colonists, predominantly English, 12-25; motives for
emigration, 16; moulded by pioneer life, 17-23; in 1760, 59-60.
"American idea," 206-207.
American life since the Civil War, 234 et seq.
American literature, the term, 6.
American Mercury, 61.
American Scholar, The, Emerson, 123.
Ames, Fisher, 88.
Among my Books, Lowell, 170.
Andrew Rykman's Prayer, Whittier, 161.
Annabel Lee, Poe, 192.
Anthologies, American, 269.
Arsenal at Springfield, The, Longfellow, 156.
Assignation, The, Poe, 193.
Astoria, Irving, 91.
Atala, Châteaubriand, 96.
Atlantic Monthly, 161, 167, 170, 250, 257.
Autobiography, Franklin, 58-59.
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, The, Holmes, 164, 167.
B
Bacchus, Emerson, 129.
Ballad of the French Fleet, A, Longfellow, 155.
Bancroft, George, 89, 176, 177-178.
Barefoot Boy, The, Whittier, 158.
Bartol, C. A., 115.
Battle Hymn of the Republic, Howe, 224, 225.
Battle of the Kegs, The, Hopkinson, 69.
Bay Psalm Book, 35.
Beecher, H. W., 216-217.
Belfry of Bruges, The, Longfellow, 156.
Bells, The, Poe, 5-6, 192.
Biglow Papers, The, Lowell, 170, 172, 173.
Black Cat, The, Poe, 194.
Blaine, J. G., quoted, 163.
Blithedale Romance, The, Hawthorne, 145-146, 150-151.
Boston News-Letter, 60.
Boy's Town, A, Howells, 250.
Bracebridge Hall, Irving, 91.
Bradford, William, 28.
Bradstreet, Anne, 36-37.
Bridge, The, Longfellow, 156.
Briggs, C. F., quoted, 190.
Brook Farm, 140, 143.
Brooklyn Eagle, The, 199.
Brown, Alice, 249, 250.
Brown University, 62.
Brownell, H. H., 225.
Brownson, Orestes, 141.
Bryant, W. C., one of the Knickerbocker Group, 89; personal appearance,
101; life and, writings, 101-106; died (1878), 255.
"Buffalo Bill," see Cody, W. F.
Building of the Ship, The, Longfellow, 155.
Burroughs, John, 262.
By Blue Ontario's Shore, Whitman, 204.
Byrd, William, 44.
C
Cable, G. W., 246.
Calef, Robert, 43.
Calhoun, J. C., 215.
Calvinism in New England, 18-19. Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, Lowell,
174.
Captain Bonneville, Irving, 91.
Carlyle, Thomas, quoted, 139.
Cask of Amontillado, The, Poe, 193.
Cavell, Edith, quoted, 266.
Cawein, Madison, 257.
Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, The, Clemens, 237.
Century Magazine, 256.
Changeling, The, Lowell, 172.
Channing, Edward, 13.
Channing, W. E., 112, 113, 119, 142.
Châteaubriand, Vicomte de, 96-97.
Children's Hour, The, Longfellow, 157.
Chita, Hearn, 248.
Chinese Ghosts, Hearn, 248.
Choate, Rufus, 215.
Church, Captain, 39.
Circuit Rider, The, Eggleston, 247.
City in the Sea, The, Poe, 189.
Clark, Roger, 41.
Clarke, J. F., 141.
Clay, Henry, 208, 209-211.
Clemens, S. L. (Mark Twain), attacks Cooper's novels, 99; quoted, 236;
life and writings, 237-240; typically American, 265.
Cobbler Keezar's Vision, Whittier, 161.
Cody, W. F. (Buffalo Bill), 243.
Columbus, Life of, Irving, 91.
Commemoration Ode, Lowell, 170, 172.
Common Sense, Paine, 75.
Conquest of Granada, Irving, 91.
Conquest of Mexico, Prescott, 179.
Conquest of Peru, Prescott, 179.
Conspiracy of Pontiac, The, Parkman, 184.
Cooke, Rose Terry, 249.
Cooper, J. F., 95-101, 265.
Cotton, John, 18, 32.
Courtship of Miles Standish, Longfellow, 155.
"Craddock, C. E.," see Murfree, Mary N.
Cranch, C. P., 141.
Crisis, The, Paine, 75.
Cristus, Longfellow, 155-156.
Cromwell, Oliver, 10.
Crothers, S. M., 262-263.
Crowded Street, The, Bryant, 106.
Curtis, G. W., 93, 141, 181.
D
Dana, C. A., 141.
Day is Done, The, Longfellow, 156.
Day of Doom, The, Wigglesworth, 35-36.
Deerslayer, The, Cooper, 99.
Democratic Review, 199.
Dial, 136, 140.
Drake, J. R., 107.
Drama, American, in the 20th century, 259-260.
Dred, Stowe, 223.
Drum Taps, Whitman, 201.
Dwight, Timothy, 69.
E
Edict of the King of Prussia against England, Franklin, 58.
Edinburgh Review, The, 88.
Edwards, Jonathan, 32, 45, 48-52.
Eggleston, Edward, 247.
Eliot, John, 19, 38.
Elsie Venner, Holmes, 168.
Embargo, The, Bryant, 102.
Emerson, R. W., in 1826, 89; a Transcendentalist, 113-117; quoted,
116-117; life and writings, 119-130; died (1882), 255; typically
American, 265; argues for American books, 266.
England in the 17th century, 13.
English Traits, Emerson, 128.
Essay on Man, Pope, 55.
Essays, Emerson, 125-126, 127, 128.
Essays of the 20th century, 262-263.
Eternal Goodness, The, Whittier, 161.
Ethan Brand, Hawthorne, 134.
Evangeline, Longfellow, 155.
Evening Revery, An, Bryant, 106.
Everett, Edward, Oration at Cambridge (1826), 86; quoted, 87; lectures,
111-112; estimate of, 215; quoted, 230.
Excelsior, Longfellow, 5-6, 156.
Exiles' Departure, Whittier, 159.
F
Fable for Critics, Lowell, 170.
Fall of the House of Usher, The, Poe, 193.
Farewell Address, Washington, 66.
Farewell Sermon, Edwards, 51.
Farmer Refuted, The, Hamilton, 76.
Faust (translation), Taylor, 255.
Federalist, 65, 76, 77.
Ferdinand and Isabella, History of the Reign of, Prescott, 179.
Fiction of the 20th century, 261-262.
Fire of Driftwood, The, Longfellow, 156.
First Snowfall, The, Lowell, 172.
Flood of Years, The, Bryant, 106.
Forest Hymn, A, Bryant, 106.
Franklin, Benjamin, born (1706), 44; attitude toward church, 44;
exponent of New England life, 45; life and writings, 52-59; conducts
Courant, 61; activity in Philadelphia, 61-62. letter from Washington to,
78-79; typically American, 265.
Freeman, Mary Wilkins, 249, 250.
Freneau, Philip, 69, 70-72.
Frontenac, Parkman, 185.
Frost, Robert, 258.
Fugitive slave act, 144.
Fuller, Margaret, 119, 140-141.
G
Garrison, W. L., 89-90, 137, 159, 208, 217-218.
Gettysburg Address, Lincoln, 230-231.
Gilded Age, The, Clemens, 237-238.
God Glorified in Man's Dependence, Edwards, 50.
Gold Bug, The, Poe, 193.
Gookin, Daniel, 38.
Greeley, Horace, 217-218.
Greenslet, Ferris, 169.
H
Hale, E. E., 224.
Half-Century of Conflict, A, Parkman, 185.
Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 107.
Hamilton, Alexander, 76-77.
Hanging of the Crane, The, Longfellow, 156.
Harris, J. C., 246.
Harte, Bret, 240-242.
Harvard, John, 16.
Harvard College, 62.
Haunted Palace, The, Poe, 192.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, in 1826, 89; opinion of Bryant, 105; opinion of
Transcendentalism, 143; life and writings, 144-152; typically American,
265.
Hayne, Paul, 225.
Hazard of New Fortunes, A, Howells, 251.
Hearn, Lafcadio, 248.
Hecker, Father, 141.
Henry, Patrick, 72, 209.
Herons of Elmwood, The, Longfellow, 156.
Hiawatha, Longfellow, 155.
Higginson, T. W., 142, 262.
Holmes, O. W., in 1826, 89; attitude toward Transcendentalism, 143; life
and writings, 163-168; died (1894), 255.
Home Sweet Home, Payne, 107.
Hooker, Thomas, 21-22, 30-31.
Hoosier Schoolmaster, The, Eggleston, 247.
House of the Seven Gables, The, Hawthorne, 145, 150.
Hovey, Richard, 257.
Howells, W. D., 93, 234-235, 250-251, 265.
Hubbard, William, 39.
Huckleberry Finn, Clemens, 238.
Humorists, American, 239.
Hutchinson, Anne, 32.
Hutchinson, Thomas, 12.
Hyperion, Longfellow, 152.
I
Indian Wars, Hubbard, 39.
Indians, in literature, 37-40; Thoreau's notes on, 136.
Innocents Abroad, Clemens, 237, 239.
Irving, Washington, 89, 90-95.
Israfel, Poe, 189, 192.
J
Jackson, Andrew, 5.
Jackson, Helen Hunt, 248.
James, Henry, 250, 251-255.
Jay, John, 65.
Jefferson, Thomas, 79-85, 265.
Jesuits in North America, The, Parkman, 185.
Jewett, Sarah Orne, 249, 250.
John of Barneveld, Life and Death of, Motley, 181.
Johnson, Edward, Captain, 38.
Joshua Whitcomb, Thompson, 248.
Journal, Emerson, 122, 125, 127, 235.
Journal, Thoreau, 134, 135.
Journal, Woolman, 69.
Journal and Correspondence, Longfellow, 216.
Journalism, in the colonies, 60-62; in 20th century, 263-264.
K
Kemble, Fanny, 245-246.
Kennedy, J. P., 245.
King, Grace, 247.
King, Starr, 262.
King Philip's War, 39-40.
King's College (Columbia), 62.
Knickerbocker group of writers, 89; works by, 270.
L
Languishing Commonwealth, Walley, 41.
Lanier, Sidney, 255-256.
La Salle, Parkman, 185.
Last Leaf, The, Holmes, 166.
Last of the Mohicans, The, Cooper, 89, 98, 99.
Leather-Stocking Tales, Cooper, 97-99.
Leaves of Grass, Whitman, 197, 200, 202-203.
Letters, Motley, 181.
Letters from an American Farmer, Crèvecœur, 60, 68.
Liberator, The, 137, 217, 218.
Library of American Biography, 176.
Life on the Mississippi, Clemens, 237.
Ligeia, Poe, 193.
Lincoln, Abraham, recognizes uncertainty in the nation, 2; would have
approved Winthrop, 29; address at Cooper Union (1860), 104-105; quoted,
155; as a writer of liberty, 208; character and writings, 226-233;
typically American, 265.
Lionel Lincoln, Cooper, 98.
Literati, Pope, 107.
Little Women, Alcott, 140.
London, Jack, 243-244.
London in 1724, 54-56.
Longfellow, H. W., in 1826, 89; attitude toward Transcendentalism, 143;
life and writings, 152-157; died (1882), 255; disparagement of, 267.
Longstreet, A. B., 245.
Louisiana Purchase, 88.
Lowell, J. R., in 1826, 90; attitude toward Transcendentalism, 143; life
and writings, 168-174; died (1891), 255; typically American, 265.
Luck of Roaring Camp, The, Harte, 241.
Lyceum system, 175.
M
McFingal, Trumbull, 69.
Magazines, in colonies, 60-61; in 20th century, 263-264.
Magnalia Christi Americana, Mather, 46, 47.
Maidenhood, Longfellow, 156.
Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, The, Clemens, 238.
Man Without a Country, Hale, 224.
Marble Faun, The, Hawthorne, 146, 151.
Marshes of Glynn, The, Lanier, 255.
Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens, 87.
Mason, John, Captain, 38.
Massachusetts to Virginia, Whittier, 160.
Mather, Cotton, 43, 45-48; diary, 46-47.
Mather, Increase, 43.
Maud Muller, Whittier, 5-6.
Memorial Odes, Lowell, 172.
Miller, C. H. (Joaquin), 244.
Minister's Black Veil, The, Hawthorne, 30.
Minister's Wooing, The, Stowe, 223.
Modern Instance, A, Howells, 251.
Montcalm and Wolfe, Parkman, 185.
Moody, W. V., 257.
Morituri Salutamus, Longfellow, 156.
Morris, G. P., 107.
Mosses from an Old Manse, Hawthorne, 145.
Motley, J. L., 143-144, 176, 180-182.
Muir, John, 244-245.
Murders in the Rue Morgue, The, Poe, 194.
Murfree, Mary N. (C. E. Craddock), 247.
My Garden Acquaintance, Lowell, 174.
My Literary Friends and Acquaintances, Howells, 251.
My Literary Passions, Howells, 250.
My Lost Youth, Longfellow, 156.
My Mark Twain, Howells, 251.
My Psalm, Whittier, 160.
My Study Windows, Lowell, 170.
Mysterious Stranger, The, Clemens, 238.
N
National Gazette, 71.
National Literature, Channing, 112.
National Ode, Taylor, 255.
Nature, Emerson, 123, 128, 131.
Nature-writing, 262.
Netherlands, History of the United, Motley, 181.
New England, a digression from English society, 14; at the beginning of
18th century, 43-44; characteristics of the people of, 109-111; in last
quarter of 19th century, 248 et seq.
New England, History of, Winthrop, 28-29.
New England Courant, 61.
New National period in American literature, 234 et seq.; bibliography,
272.
New York at beginning of 18th century, 44.
New York Tribune, 140, 218.
Newburyport Free Press, 90, 159.
Newspapers, in colonies, 60-61; in 20th century, 263-264.
North American Review, 88, 103, 104, 112, 170.
North Carolina in 1724, 44.
North of Boston, Frost, 261.
Norwood, Colonel, 27.
O
Oakes, Urian, 41.
Old Creole Days, Cable, 246.
Old Homestead, The, Thompson, 248.
Old Ironsides, Holmes, 166.
Old Manse, 119, 120, 145.
Old Régime, The, Parkman, 185.
Old Swimmin' Hole, The, Riley, 247.
Oldtown Fireside Stories, Stowe, 223.
Oldtown Folks, Stowe, 223.
Olmsted, F. L., 246.
On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners, Lowell, 174.
Oratory in America, 208 et seq.
Oregon Trail, The, Parkman, 184.
Otis, James, 72, 73.
Our Hundred Days, Holmes, 168.
Outcast of Poker Flat, The, Harte, 242.
Outre-mer, Longfellow, 152.
Overland Monthly, 240.
P
Page, T. N., 246, 247.
Paine, Thomas, 74-76.
Parker, Theodore, 115, 119, 141, 209.
Parkman, Francis, 143-144, 176, 182-186.
Passage to India, Whitman, 204.
Passionate Pilgrim, A, James, 253.
Pathfinder, The, Cooper, 99.
Pattee, F. L., 236.
Paul Revere's Ride, Longfellow, 155.
Paulding, J. K., 107.
Payne, J. H., 107.
Pennsylvania, University of, 62.
Pennsylvania Gazette, 62.
Pennsylvania Magazine, 74.
Pequot War (1637), 38-39.
Percy, George, 27, 38.
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 249.
Philip II, History of the Reign of, Prescott, 179.
Phillips, Wendell, 208, 215-216.
Picture of New York, Mitchill, 90.
Pilot, The, Cooper, 98.
Pioneers, O Pioneers, Whitman, 204.
Pioneers, The, Cooper, 97-98, 99.
Pioneers of France, The, Parkman, 185.
Pirate, The, Scot, 98.
Plymouth Plantation, History of, Bradford, 28-29.
Poe, E. A., "literature of escape," 8; in 1826, 89; in New York, 108;
life and writings, 187-196.
Poet at the Breakfast Table, The, Holmes, 168.
Poetry, Revolutionary verse, 69-72; of freedom, 223 et seq.; of the 20th
century, 260-261.
Poets and Poetry of America, Griswold, 107.
Poor Richard, Franklin, 20, 57.
Pory, John, 27.
Prairie, The, Cooper, 98, 99.
Precaution, Cooper, 97.
Prescott, W. H., 89, 143-144, 176, 178-180.
Present Crisis, The, Lowell, 172.
Prince of Parthia, The, 260.
Professor at the Breakfast Table, The, Holmes, 168.
Psalm of Life, The, Longfellow, 156.
Psalm of the West, Lanier, 255.
Publick Occurrences, 60.
Puritans, The, 34-35.
Purloined Letter, The, Poe, 193.
Q
Quarterly, The, 88.
R
Rainy Day, The, Longfellow, 156.
Ramona, Jackson, 248.
Ramoth Hill, Whittier, 138.
Raven, The, Poe, 192.
Read, T. B., 225.
Reality of Spiritual Life, The, Edwards, 50.
Reaper and the Flowers, The, Longfellow, 153.
Red Rover, The, Cooper, 98.
Religious freedom in the colonies, 16.
René, Châteaubriand, 96.
Repplier, Agnes, 262.
Revolution, influence upon literature, 66 et seq.; bibliography, 270.
Rights of Man, The, Paine, 75.
Riley, J. W., 247, 257-259.
Ripley, George, 141.
Rise of Silas Lapham, The, Howells, 251.
Rise of the Dutch Republic, Motley, 180.
Rivulet, The, Bryant, 106.
Robinson, John, 11.
Roderick Hudson, James, 253.
Rolfe, John, 38.
Romanticism in American literature, 187 et seq. Roosevelt, Theodore,
243.
Roughing It, Clemens, 10, 237.
Rowlandson, Mary, 39.
Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One, Franklin, 58.
Russell, Irwin, 246.
S
Salem "witchcraft," 43.
Salmagundi Papers, Irving and Paulding, 91.
Sanborn, F. B., 142.
Sandys, George, 27.
Scarlet Letter, The, Hawthorne, 7, 30, 145, 146, 148, 149-150.
School-Days, Whittier, 158.
Scott, Sir Walter, 95.
Scribner's Monthly, 256.
Scudder, Horace, 169.
Seaweed, Longfellow, 156.
Sewell, Samuel, Judge, 47-48.
Shepard, Thomas, 16, 31-32.
Short story, the, 261-262.
Sill, E. R., 257.
Simms, W. G., 245, 246.
Simple Cobbler of Agawam, The, Ward, 37.
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Edwards, 50.
Skeleton in Armor, The, Longfellow, 155.
Sketch Book, Irving, 89, 91.
Skipper Ireson's Ride, Whittier, 161.
Slavery, influence on literature, 207 et seq. Slavery in Massachusetts,
Thoreau, 137.
Smith, F. H., 247.
Smith, John, 8-10, 20, 38.
Smith, Sydney, quoted, 88-89.
Snow-Bound, Whittier, 158, 161-162.
Snow-Image and Other Tales, The, Hawthorne, 145.
Songs of Labor, Whittier, 161.
South Carolina in 1724, 44.
South, The, in American literature, 245 et seq. Sparks, Jared, 176.
Spofford, Harriet Prescott, 249.
Spoon River Anthology, Masters, 261.
Spy, The, Cooper, 89, 97, 98.
Stamp Act (1765), 59.
Star-Spangled Banner, The, Key, 107, 225.
Stedman, E. C., 225, 256.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 219-223, 249.
Strachey, William, 26, 38.
Summary View of the Rights of British America, A, Jefferson, 80.
Sumner, Charles, 216.
Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line, Lowell, 174.
T
Tales of a Traveler, Irving, 91.
Tales of a Wayside Inn, Longfellow, 155.
Tamerlane and Other Poems, Poe, 89.
Taylor, Bayard, 255.
Telling the Bees, Whittier, 158.
Tennessee's Partner, Harte, 242.
Thanatopsis, Bryant, 103, 104, 106.
Thomas, Edith, 257.
Thompson, Denman, 248.
Thoreau, H. D., representative of New England thought, 119; life and
writings, 130-139; nature-writing, 262; typically American, 265.
Ticknor, George, 89, 111, 178, 216.
Timrod, Henry, 225.
To Helen, Poe, 189, 192.
Tom Sawyer, Clemens, 238.
Tour of the Prairies, Irving, 91.
Transcendentalism, 111 et seq., 218; bibliography, 270-271.
Tritemius, Whittier, 161.
True Relation, Smith, 8-10, 25-26.
True Repertory of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt. vpon and from the
Islands of the Bermudas, Strachey, 26.
Tuckerman, F. G., quoted, 117.
Twain, Mark, see Clemens, S. L.
Twice-Told Tales, Hawthorne, 148.
Tyler, Professor, 64.
U
Ulalume, Poe, 192.
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe, 98, 208, 219, 220-223.
Union of the Colonies, Franklin, 59.
Unitarianism, 112-113.
V
Verplanck, J. C., 107.
Very, Jones, 141.
Virginia, a continuation of English society, 14; in 1724, 44.
Virginia House of Burgesses, Address of the, Jefferson, 80.
Virginians, The, Thackeray, 45.
Vision of Sir Launfal, The, Lowell, 170, 172.
W
Walden, Thoreau, 131, 134, 135.
Walley, Thomas, 41.
Warner, C. D., 93.
Washington, George, 64-65, 66, 77-78.
Waterfowl, To a, Bryant, 103, 106.
Webster, Daniel, eulogy for Adams and Jefferson, 86-87; civic note in
oratory of, 208; criticism of Clay, 210; his oratory, 211-215.
Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, A, Thoreau, 131.
Wendell, Barrett, 6.
West, The, in American literature, 237 et seq.
Westchester Farmer, The, Seabury, 76.
When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloomed, Whitman, 201.
When the Frost is on the Punkin, Riley, 248.
Whitaker, Alexander, 26-27, 38.
Whitman, Walt, in 1826, 90; in New York, 108; life and writings,
196-205; died (1892), 255; typically American, 265; argues for American
books, 266.
Whittier, J. G., in 1826, 90; attitude towards Transcendentalism, 143;
life and writings, 157-164; died (1892), 255.
William and Mary College, 62.
William Wilson, Poe, 194.
Williams, Roger, 2, 16, 19, 32-34, 38, 40-41.
Willis, N. P., 107.
Winthrop, John, 17, 18, 28-29.
Wirt, William, 245.
Wister, Owen, 243.
Wonder-Book, The, Hawthorne, 145, 147.
Woodberry, George, 257.
Woodworth, Samuel, 107.
Woolman, John, 69.
Wreck of the Hesperus, The, Longfellow, 155.
Y
Yale University, 62.
Years of my Youth, Howells, 250.
The Chronicles of America Series
1. The Red Man's Continent
by Ellsworth Huntington
2. The Spanish Conquerors
by Irving Berdine Richman
3. Elizabethan Sea-Dogs
by William Charles Henry Wood
4. The Crusaders of New France
by William Bennett Munro
5. Pioneers of the Old South
by Mary Johnson
6. The Fathers of New England
by Charles McLean Andrews
7. Dutch and English on the Hudson
by Maud Wilder Goodwin
8. The Quaker Colonies
by Sydney George Fisher
9. Colonial Folkways
by Charles McLean Andrews
10. The Conquest of New France
by George McKinnon Wrong
11. The Eve of the Revolution
by Carl Lotus Becker
12. Washington and His Comrades in Arms
by George McKinnon Wrong
13. The Fathers of the Constitution
by Max Farrand
14. Washington and His Colleagues
by Henry Jones Ford
15. Jefferson and his Colleagues
by Allen Johnson
16. John Marshall and the Constitution
by Edward Samuel Corwin
17. The Fight for a Free Sea
by Ralph Delahaye Paine
18. Pioneers of the Old Southwest
by Constance Lindsay Skinner
19. The Old Northwest
by Frederic Austin Ogg
20. The Reign of Andrew Jackson
by Frederic Austin Ogg
21. The Paths of Inland Commerce
by Archer Butler Hulbert
22. Adventurers of Oregon
by Constance Lindsay Skinner
23. The Spanish Borderlands
by Herbert Eugene Bolton
24. Texas and the Mexican War
by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
25. The Forty-Niners
by Stewart Edward White
26. The Passing of the Frontier
by Emerson Hough
27. The Cotton Kingdom
by William E. Dodd
28. The Anti-Slavery Crusade
by Jesse Macy
29. Abraham Lincoln and the Union
by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
30. The Day of the Confederacy
by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
31. Captains of the Civil War
by William Charles Henry Wood
32. The Sequel of Appomattox
by Walter Lynwood Fleming
33. The American Spirit in Education
by Edwin E. Slosson
34. The American Spirit in Literature
by Bliss Perry
35. Our Foreigners
by Samuel Peter Orth
36. The Old Merchant Marine
by Ralph Delahaye Paine
37. The Age of Invention
by Holland Thompson
38. The Railroad Builders
by John Moody
39. The Age of Big Business
by Burton Jesse Hendrick
40. The Armies of Labor
by Samuel Peter Orth
41. The Masters of Capital
by John Moody
42. The New South
by Holland Thompson
43. The Boss and the Machine
by Samuel Peter Orth
44. The Cleveland Era
by Henry Jones Ford
45. The Agrarian Crusade
by Solon Justus Buck
46. The Path of Empire
by Carl Russell Fish
47. Theodore Roosevelt and His Times
by Harold Howland
48. Woodrow Wilson and the World War
by Charles Seymour
49. The Canadian Dominion
by Oscar D. Skelton
50. The Hispanic Nations of the New World
by William R. Shepherd
Transcriber's Notes
Introduction:
The Chronicles of America Series has two similar editions of each volume
in the series. One version is the Abraham Lincoln edition of the series,
a premium version which includes full-page pictures. A textbook edition
was also produced, which does not contain the pictures and captions
associated with the pictures, but is otherwise the same book. This book
was produced to match the textbook edition of the book.
We have retained the original punctuation and spelling in the book, but
there are a few exceptions. Obvious errors were corrected--and all of
these changes can be found in the Detailed Notes Section of these notes.
The spelling of some index entries were changed to match the spelling
used in the text. The Detailed Notes Section also includes issues that
have come up during transcription. One common issue is that words are
sometimes split into two lines for spacing purposes in the original
text. These words are hyphenated in the physical book, but there is a
question sometimes as to whether the hyphen should be retained in
transcription. The reasons behind some of these decisions are itemized.
Detailed Notes Section:
A Note on Centuries
Throughout the Chronicles of America series, most authors have chosen to
hyphenate "seventeenth-century customs" but not hyphenate "customs in
the seventeenth century." In the latter case, seventeenth century is the
object of a preposition, while in the former case, seventeenth-century
is an adjective. This book somewhat adheres to that standard. Below is a
list of phrases in this text which ought to have the hyphen, but do not,
and hence, do not adhere to the standard previously outlined. None of
these clauses were changed in transcription.
• Page 55: England is weary of seventeenth century "enthusiasm,"
• Page 85: the immense nineteenth century audience
• Page 90: nineteenth century England
• Page 93: other eighteenth century tradition,
• Page 138: twentieth century America can see
• Page 166: resembled such a typical eighteenth century figure
• Page 182: a nineteenth century historian
Chapter II
• Page 36:
Under-estimate is hyphenated and split between two lines for spacing in
the sentence: "It is the present fashion to under-estimate the power of
Wigglesworth's verse." There is one other occurrence of underestimate
and there is one occurrence of underestimated, both spelled without the
hyphen.
Chapter IV
• Page 72:
State-papers is hyphenated and split between two lines for spacing in
the clause: "orations and pamphlets and state-papers inspired by." On
page 67, state papers is written as two words and on page 82, state
paper is written as two words. While state-papers can only be
transcribed as "state-papers" or "statepapers," "state papers" is the
only option consistent with the author's other usage of the phrase. The
word was transcribed "state papers."
Chapter V
• Page 90:
Tree-tops is hyphenated and split between two lines for spacing in the
clause "watching the birds in the treetops of Elmwood." On page 245,
tree-tops was spelled with a hyphen, so we kept the hyphen here.
• Page 98:
Stout-hearted is hyphenated and split between two lines in the clause:
"the stout-hearted old pioneer could afford to bide his time." On page
84, a variation of the word includes the hyphen: "his stout-heartedness
in disaster." Therefore, we retained the hyphen.
Chapter VI
• Page 133:
Poll-tax is hyphenated and split between two lines for spacing. We kept
the hyphen.
• Page 137:
Wolf-like is hyphenated and split between two lines for spacing. We kept
the hyphen.
• Page 138:
Post-office is hyphenated and split between two lines for spacing. We
kept the hyphen.
Chapter VII
• Page 145:
On Page 145, Hawthorne's The Snow-Image contained a hyphen, but the same
title on page 148 did not have a hyphen: The Snow Image.
• Page 153:
Fellow-men was hyphenated and split between two lines for spacing. There
was no other usage of the word in the book. We transcribed the word
without the hyphen, fellowmen.
• Page 172:
The First Snow-Fall was hyphenated and split between two lines for
spacing. There was no other usage of that title in the book. We
transcribed the word with the hyphen, The First Snow-Fall.
Chapter IX
• Page 208:
Epoch-making is hyphenated and split between two lines for spacing. On
page 184, the hyphen was used, so we retained it here.
Index
• Page 276:
Changed the acute accent to a grave accent in the spelling of Crèvecœur
to match the text in index entry: Letters from an American Farmer,
Crévecœur, 60, 68.
• Page 276:
Change Leatherstocking to Leather-Stocking in index entry
"Leather-Stocking Tales, Cooper,"
• Page 278:
Change Oake to Oakes in index entry "Oake, Urian."
• Page 280:
Change Twicetold to Twice-Told in index entry "Twice-Told Tales,
Hawthorne."